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It starts with a small ache in his right ankle and knee, and a muffled impact on the bottom of his foot.
It’s not until the fourth kick, a crescent kick with the left, that he lets himself be sure that it’s the soul dream again. By that time, his soul and the force connection decide the interaction is stable enough that he can tell he’s standing up.
The impact on his forearm, followed by twisting and grabbing what he’s pretty sure is a shoulder while punching with his other hand, followed by a headbutt that hurts enough to let him know it won’t be his idea, are much more potent sensations. He knows he goes backwards from the headbutt, and then eventually sideways, but it’s not because of direct contact with his soulmate, it’s too muted and vague and light to be that.
Odd senses of friction across his various parts of his body, followed by the vague sensation of tightening his muscles and standing up.
He can feel himself running, clearer and clearer before he jumps and lands another kick on his soulmate, nice and solid with a bit of force enhancement.
A jerking flip followed by an impact on his entire backside and more friction along his body, which he’s pretty sure means he’s sliding, and then a fall. He stops suddenly, a bit of pain on his wrists and shoulder sockets.
A few moments later, he falls again.
Obi-Wan wakes up suddenly at the sensation, as he often does. He quickly looks around the cockpit of his ship, checks in with Arfour that everything’s still fine as they continue through hyperspace.
It’s been close to twenty years since he started having that soul dream. His first, for his strongest bond, and it never changes and still confuses him.
Not about why his first physical contact with his soulmate is a fight, he’s lived life as a Jedi long enough to expect that. He’s had that as his first contact with people he’s never met again, people he continued to fight, and people who he ended up allied with many times.
As much as it’s a bit unfortunate that his first contact with this soulmate of his is so violent, that’s not much a cause of concern. What still concerns and confuses him is that it goes on for so long.
He’s memorized the sensations of the fight so well, he can near-perfectly replicate the crescent kick at the beginning and feel exactly what isn’t quite right. Why won’t he stop the fight sooner? Is it possible that he won’t realize that he’s fighting his soulmate when the time comes, despite how well he knows it? If so, why? How?
Obi-Wan sighs and leans back in the pilot’s chair, good at falling back asleep quickly at this point.
He lands on a rain-slicked platform on a watery, stormy planet, and puts aside any remaining thoughts of his soul dream. He has a bounty hunter to track.
And then all thoughts are thoroughly sidetracked as he follows the Kaminoans.
An army of cloned men, boys, really. Trained to be nothing but soldiers.
He cannot bring himself to believe that the Jedi would have ordered it. He can’t even fathom how they would pay for it without senate approval either. Which would bring notice to it, even if this were a classified project the council and senate defense committee were trying to keep secret. The whole idea reeks of manipulation and lies but he can’t sense anything but calm, this-is-normal, truth from Lama Su and Taun We.
He feels unsettled but can push past the feeling enough to keep going, even though what he really needs is a corner to meditate in if he wants to be able to actually think.
Jango Fett is a dangerous man. Obviously the bounty hunter that killed the assassin, obviously hating him. An anger so strong and controlled that it becomes an icy, creeping, predatory thing in the force. A Mandalorian that has obviously kept the warrior ways and has a child.
He’s also handsome, Obi-Wan has to admit, which makes letting the man prowl around him a bit easier. Obi-Wan is used to being prey in many senses, and he indulges in a few that let him feel in control by releasing control.
This is not any such case, and Obi-Wan spares half a thought for how much nicer it would have been for Fett to see him as prey in those circumstances before focusing on the here and now.
Because if Fett was not playing as many roles as he was at the moment, Obi-Wan was quite sure the man would be trying to kill him.
It takes quite a bit of time to finish talking with Lama Su and Taun We, get away from them, and send a message to the council. He has to run using the force to enhance his speed and he still isn’t sure he’ll make it to the right landing pad in time.
He can feel the Fetts easily as he starts getting close, turning around the last few corners at top speed and only slowing down as he opens the doors and comes out into the rain, needing the extra few seconds to take quick stock of the battlefield.
And it is going to be a battlefield. Obi-Wan can feel Fett’s anger rise and transform into deadly intent as soon as he sees him. Obi-Wan pulls out his lightsaber before Fett can draw his blasters. He’ll need every advantage he can to survive, let alone beat, a Mandalorian of Fett’s caliber.
The rain pounds down on him, soaking him quickly and then continuing to wet him. He can feel the physical sensation of the drops hitting him, even as his clothes and body refuse to soak in anymore.
As he deflects blaster shots, Obi-Wan can tell that he’s off-kilter. The cloned army weighs heavily in his mind, the implications of it in conjuction the recent bills in the Republic, Padmé’s assassination attempts, and the Seperatist movement. The idea that maybe he’s been kept out of the loop somehow and the Jedi did order millions of people to be made to die.
He fights with the goal to win in the hopes that it will at least let him survive.
He’s proven more right about being off-kilter when he can’t react to a rocket launched right at him. And then struggles to get up before the child, Boba, uses the ship’s guns on him.
He gathers himself as quickly as he can and takes note when Fett tries to drop in on him. Without a lightsaber, at that speed, blasters already being raised, most Jedi would die.
Obi-Wan is not most Jedi and he has trained to utilize the force in any type of fight he may find himself in.
The kick lands solid and true, a familiar move he’s done thousands of times before, Fett obviously not expecting his opponent to understand what he was doing enough to effectively counter.
Obi-Wan presses his advantage with another flying kick, but Fett manages to grab his legs and the only way out is down so Obi-Wan takes that out. His next kicks are from the ground, making sure that Fett can’t get another grip on him. A particularly good crescent kick finally sends Fett flying back.
They’re both up for the next set of blows, hands this time. Fett ends the exchange with a headbutt that Obi-Wan is sure he’ll feel in the morning, if he survives that long. He sees his lightsaber and instantly reaches for it with the force, hoping it will get to him before Fett as he hears the bounty hunter fire up his jetpack.
The rain continues to pour down on them, and Obi-Wan finds that he’s having trouble judging the speed and distance of his lightsaber as water drips into his eyes.
He feels a cable wrap around his wrists and tug just as the tip of his saber touches his fingertips. The tug is violent enough that he goes flying one way, his saber the other.
He’s dragged along the ground, everything so rain-slicked that he can hardly feel any friction from the platform despite it holding almost all of his weight.
He sees a few posts with landing beacons and decides he can use those, using what sight he has and the force to aim and time everything correctly. He presses the cable around a post as he rolls himself upright and tugs back, aiming to bring Fett down.
It works, and Fett’s jetpack goes flying on impact, exploding away from their fight. The reddest thing Obi-Wan’s seen on this blue world.
He sees Fett scramble for his blaster and knows that he can’t get his lightsaber fast enough, so he continues with his unorthodox fighting style. Unorthodox for a Jedi, at least.
He runs at Fett, each step more sure than the last, and jumps. He uses the force to drop quicker than should be possible, making the shot he expected Fett to fire go wide, and giving him extra power as he kicks Fett in the same place he did the first time.
It’s only after he lands and feels the cable tug down that he remembers that they’re connected, still too off-kilter to have thought through the adrenaline.
Fett’s weight tugs him into a flip, and it’s only as he’s sliding down the rounded edge of the landing pad that he understands why he lasted so long despite being so out of it.
His fall stops with a jerk that puts a bit of pain on his wrists and shoulder sockets as Obi-Wan thinks about how his soulmate hates him. He gives himself three seconds to let himself feel his stomach drop, not from vertigo, before he focuses on dealing with what he knows is about to happen.
Next is the second fall. The one that ends this interaction and wakes him up.
He’s almost disappointed as he looks down. He’s spent years training how to fall and land and climb back up from things because of the soul dream. The various walkways and domes and other structures make it almost seem like a waste of time.
Almost. He’s had to use those skills to stay alive in far worse circumstances.
Obi-Wan makes it back to the platform, determined to get answers from Jango Fett about everything on Coruscant, Kamino, the army, and talk about them, as his soulmate is about to step up the ramp.
He runs forward, making sure to call his lightsaber to him, which is much easier with his renewed determination and the lack of blasters being fired at him. Fett, to his credit, notices the approach by the time he gets halfway up the ramp, by which point Obi-Wan is halfway to the ship.
Fett freezes for a moment before dashing inside and Obi-Wan gives himself another burst of speed with the force, just barely making it into the ship before it closes.
He doesn’t have a plan, he just has a goal and guiding principles which include not letting Fett get away. If that means that Fett gets away from Kamino but not him, so be it.
He rolls to a stop in a small hallway, in a crouching position that he can easily move from, and sees Fett a few feet in front of him. He has almost no time before Fett yells “now!” and the ship lurches sideways, sending him careening into a wall.
Fett is on him before he can recover, pressing him harshly into the wall and pressing a hypo against his neck. Obi-Wan hadn’t expected that.
He quickly tries to start purging whatever drug it is through his system, but its difficult without knowing what sort of poison it is and while he’s trying to fight off Fett.
Fett’s hold gives for a moment, and Obi-Wan tries to surge forward away from the restraints, only to find Fett banging him up against the wall again, further disorienting him.
Another hypo is pressed against his neck and injected.
He tries to fight back against the man holding him and the drugs he’s been injected with, but Fett has managed to further cage him with his body and the drugs are ludicrously fast-acting. Obi-Wan realizes too late that they probably contain one of those few rare compounds that make force use backfire and speed up the drug.
As he sits pressed up against the ship’s wall, he realizes three things. That he has lost his communicator, and its tracker, sometime during their fight. That there is a True Mandalorian banner hung on the wall across from him. And that Fett's anger has fallen back into a more general anger, without any killing intent, accompanied by a desire, a want, so possessive that Obi-Wan almost misses it for how much it has wrapped around him.
The last thing he feels, as he falls unconscious, is those arms, which he’s barely dreamed about but memorized from the little they touch him in his soul dream. They pick him up and hold him, tight and steady and proprietorial.