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I wish I had never given you a chance.
Obi-Wan rolled his eyes at the voice of his former master. He refused to lift his gaze and meet Qui-Gon's, either out of fear or sanity, for it was nothing but a hallucination. Instead, he readjusted his footing in the endless sand of Tatooine and stared off in the distance of the flat horizon line.
Qui-Gon didn't even have the guts to physically appear in front of him, Obi-Wan realized when he finally looked towards where he thought the voice had originated. There was nothing there but more pale sand, the two suns making his frail body into a long shadow as they sunk lower and lower.
Even if this Qui-Gon and his words ever truly existed, it didn't mean it was necessarily a false statement. Obi-Wan regretted it himself sometimes.
Maybe if he had just accepted his life in the Agricorps, Order 66 would've never happened. He wouldn't have become padawan to a broken man and never would've ended up following the same path of despair. That Obi-Wan Kenobi would have never seen war on Melida/Daan, fought as a child solider hell-bent on saving everyone only to learn that he couldn't. That Obi-Wan Kenobi would have never witnessed the death of his master, as he didn't have one. He would have never stepped in to train the so-called Chosen One. He wouldn't have commanded a battalion in a galactic war a thousand times worse than the last one.
Or maybe if Obi-Wan had just been a better master. Maybe he - Anakin - would never had Fallen into darkness.
Qui-Gon had given him a second choice all those years ago, right after the decades-long civil war on Melida/Daan had been resolved in a matter of seconds. Peace had been negotiated, but it didn't feel won.
Obi-Wan remembered how he had cleared his emotions and anger into the Force before entering the same room as Qui-Gon, already knowing it was empty except for him. Weeks of silence and tension bled into their weakened Force Bond, it being barely alive beneath all the turmoil and amidst the fraction that had divided the pair so severely.
Qui-Gon hadn't even wanted a padawan at first. Not after Xanatos. But then, somewhere on Bandomeer, he had managed to pick up some scrappy failure of a Jedi Initiate. Later he had done the same thing with the failure of a Jedi Padawan.
Maybe Melida/Daan had been Obi-Wan's third chance. He had come back to the Order and tried his hardest to make things right again. They never were "right", per say, but he could still ignorantly pretend that they were.
Hypocrite, a voice whispered in his ear along side the harsh wind.
Obi-Wan had left the Jedi Order. And then Ahsoka had too, but he hadn't fought so hard for her return that he had his own.
He wouldn't be able to fix that mistake either. Ahsoka along with all the Jedi had been hunted into extinction with the command of Order 66. Younglings, padawans, knights, masters... Everyone was dead just for misplacing their belief in a failed and corrupt religion; nowadays, the Force was overwhelming in darkness and the sheer lack of anything besides it.
Choices were what got him here - in exile on the planet where it had all started. He was Ben Kenobi, aged hermit living in the barren wastelands, barely showing up in the local town unless he was in desperate need for supplies. Not every choice Obi-Wan had made was a mistake, but a lot of them were, he realized.
He didn't realize he had sat down until he lowered his head into his shaking hands and felt the grain of sand on his palms.
Obi-Wan had wasted his first, second, and third choice. And now, if he ever had a fourth, it was slowly waning away like all his hopes and dreams.