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Obi-Wan has gotten older. He is nearly unrecognizable as the famous General Kenobi of the Clone Wars, at least for someone who did not know him well.
Vader recognizes him. Obi-Wan had not aged well. He is no longer handsome. His movements are shockingly unpracticed, and slow with the strain of age. His hair has gone white. But his eyes are the same. Sharp and blue and full of deceit. It had not permitted a graceful sort of aging, whatever backwater world the old man had been hiding on, but it was more than Vader had been allowed.
Vader has changed too. His rage no longer burns as hot as it did at the end of the Clone Wars. He burns cold now. Nineteen years serving his Master have tempered him. At least, relatively speaking. He is more black hole than supernova now.
Still, he burns the moment he feels Obi-Wan’s presence. He burns when he sees him.
Vader wonders why he came back after all this time. Surely Obi-Wan knew that as soon as he stepped aboard this station, he would be able to find him. The bond between Master and apprentice is not so easily broken.
But Obi-Wan never gives him an answer, just a vague threat and a faint twinkle in his blue eyes as he looks over to the boy escaping with the rebel princess. Obi-Wan raises his saber, ceding any chance of attack or defense. He let Vader kill him with only a vague warning and a knowing look in his eyes.
It was a bathetic end. Though it had been years, and what had once been an obsession had long since faded into a nagging loose thread, Vader had still expected a real fight.
Why, Vader will think, later. What made that boy so special? Special enough for Obi-Wan to give his life to allow him and his companions escape. The boy was his replacement, presumably. He could feel his power in the Force, though raw and mostly untrained he was. Why had Obi-Wan left the boy so untrained? Had he only found a suitable candidate recently?
And what was that trick he pulled? His body had vanished; even the stormtroopers had seen it. Obi-Wan was thus spared any indignities that his fellow Jedi had suffered in death. How had he done it? The old man had always had a flair for the dramatic. But that had been something else entirely. Vader knew that Obi-Wan was truly dead. He had felt it in the Force, the final severance of anything that still lay between them, cut and gone with one last swing of his lightsaber.
There were many mysteries of the Force that Vader did not fully understand. He could ask his Master, but he had the feeling that Sidious would have no answers for him on this subject.
He takes Obi-Wan’s lightsaber with him. He clips it to his belt and keeps it, throughout the failed defense of the Death Star and Vader’s own close escape. He puts it in his rooms on the Executor, in the same place where he keeps Ahsoka’s lightsaber. They are in a hidden place; Vader would not want anyone to mistake them for trophies.
His mind returns to the boy. Obi-Wan’s new apprentice, barely trained yet still so powerful in the Force. The same one who made the shot that destroyed the Death Star, if he was correct in what he felt during that battle. And Vader knew that he was.
There was only one thing to do. Vader’s questions would be answered and his Master’s forgiveness for his failure to protect the Death Star won.
He needed to find the boy.