Chapter Text
“Clouding your judgement, your fear is”, is what Yoda tells him, and it is almost exactly what Obi-Wan expected to hear. “Your apprentice young Skywalker no longer is. Let go of your attachment to him, you must.”
Obi-Wan frowns at the word, and Yoda holds his gaze, the calm in his green eyes a bemused challenge as if he wants to ask him what other word he would use. Drawing his arms around himself, he concedes the point. “It is one thing to allow him to stand on his own feet, and another to allow him to go over to the Dark Side.” There is an edge to his voice he does not like, and he cannot will it away, knows Yoda can hear it.
He feels like a padawan, uncomfortable to meet the council’s eyes, for the first time in years. The only thing differentiating him from the memory is that he choose this conversation and he is one of them now.
“There is nothing to suggest that Skywalker will turn to the Dark Side”, Mace says, although his brow make the sentence into half question.
Plo, in flickering blue next to him, seems to pick up on it. “Do you think he is danger of turning?”
Obi-Wan shifts in his seat, and he knows he is buying himself time. The seat that Anakin has been given is empty, and he is glad that Anakin found a reason to leave, even without him finding one. He does not want to have this conversation with Anakin present. He does not want Anakin to know of this conversation. It feels like a betrayal, but not bringing his concerns in front of the council would be a betrayal, too. The division between Anakin and the council is wide enough as it is. He does not want to place himself on the side of the council in Anakin’s eyes.
Turning to Plo, Obi-Wan sighs, reaches out into the force, reaches out into the centre of himself, tries to steady himself in its familiar calm. It was a centre of calm even in the storm of the war, even in the sands of Geonosis, the first time round, when he could feel more death in the force than he thought possible.
He finds it clouded, now, as if his fear is festering inside it, but the embrace of the force is still a comfort.
It is a dangerous question, not because he does not trust the council with the answer, because saying ‘yes’ would change the way they saw Anakin, but because the answer he can find in his heart, is still ‘no’. No, he does not believe that Anakin will turn, can turn, can be lost to the dark.
But saying that he does believe it – cannot believe it, even now, even when he wakes up, sweat staining his robes, breathless, his throat hurting from the crush of phantom fingers, what does that make of the fear? How can he ask them to believe him, to take this seriously, when he does not want to believe it himself?
“Do you have any sense of the direction of the danger?” Like Plo’s voice, Ki-Adi’s is distorted by the lightyears separating them, brought to them from faraway Mygeeto. But while his voice is unclear, his words are not, and maybe he should be glad that Ki-Adi has chosen not to use hypotheticals. He is believed, in his vision at least. He is not sure it a good thing.
But he does not have an answer.
“Clouded the dark side of the force is”, Yoda says, a reminder to tread cautiously, and Mace nods reluctantly – as if he wants to believe, wants to heed the warning of his dreams.
Even if they did, what are they supposed to do? Like all visions, it is too vague, it is feeling more than seeing. Loss more than gain. He can see all that he has lost in the images that cling to his mind as the force drags him from his dreams, but he cannot see an explanation. He can feel the loss of Anakin, the death of man he knows even as his corpse is unclipping its lightsaber, the movement, even the casual threat in it endlessly familiar, but he does not understand how he will lose him.
The soft but persistent tug of Yoda’s presence in the force against his mind pulls him back. It is comfort as much as a warning. He is losing his way, he is losing his calm, he is losing the bigger picture, and he cannot afford to.
Maybe this is all that his visions are. A game of the dark side of the force, sand in his eyes, in a moment when the order needs him to be focused, needs him to be at his best. Needs him to be calm and centred inside himself, one with the force.
He is none of those things.
“Trust it, you can not. Trust your fears, you cannot. Dangerous your fears are. More dangerous they will become, if to grow them you allow.”
Running a hand through his beard, Obi-Wan nods. He feels tired, more tired than he can remember being. Yoda’s words are an echo, a memory of childhood, and he can almost feel it’s comforting embrace.
Almost. When he closes his eyes, Anakin stares back at him with yellow eyes. When he closes his eyes, he can feel familiar hands, hands that have pulled him from danger, that pushed him out of harm’s way, that have reached out for him in concern, close around his throat.
“I shouldn’t leave him here”, he says, but it is a weak argument, a weakness laid bare, one that Obi-Wan himself knows the answer to, and the fact that nobody says the words betrays that the council knows, too. They know he knows. Does not need to hear the words. Anakin is no longer his Padawan, and if Anakin is the price of peace, if he must be lost, if he must be placed in danger, then it is a price he should be willing to pay.
They have no proof that he is in danger. If these visions are nothing but a ruse, an attempt to divert him, to weaken him, it is already working.
Mace leans forwards, elbows on his knees, and when he speaks his voice is steel, but there is something too close to compassion in his eyes. The war has asked much of all of them. “Killing Grievous is our best chance to end the war and to force Palpatine to give up his emergency powers.”
Again, Obi-Wan nods, agreeing even as everything inside him wants to protest, and he does not ask the question that lingers on his heart. There is nobody else to send, too many Jedi are spread out on battlefields across the galaxy already. Another reason why they need to end the war, and if the second Sith Lord is on Coruscant, they need strong masters here, to meet him.
He lowers his head into a affirmative nod, but it still feels like he is making a mistake.
*
“I’m very proud of you”, he says it a second time, puts more emphasis into the words, drags them out, and is not sure he succeeds. He would say them to the day he dies, if it could be enough to make Anakin believe them. He should have said them years before.
He wants to leave these words with him, in case they are the last he will ever speak to him.
This man, this wonderful man, who is fighting a war the galaxy expects him to win at an age when Obi-Wan was still a Padawan, he cannot fall, and Obi-Wan does not know where this fear is coming from, the images in his dreams, that show him a man with his face, capable of terrible things.
“Be here, when I come back, alright?”
Anakin frowns at that, a half-bemused smile. “You’re the one going into danger”, he still sounds unhappy about it, and Obi-Wan wants it to be true.
It should be the two of them, travelling to Utapau and taking on Grievous. A part of him still wants to ask the council, knows the answer he will get. Much more now. They wanted him here even before, wanted him here for his connection to Palpatine, but they would not let him go with Obi-Wan’s warning hanging over him.
“What’s wrong?”
Obi-Wan shakes his head, and he wonders when exactly his former apprentice got this perceptive. It used to be easier to hide things from him. “Nothing, I hope”, he says, but his heart wants to say something else. It feels like an ending, this conversation, the two of them, standing on this landing platform. It feels like he will never see him again. The heaviness of that thought clings to him as he embraces Anakin one last time, a gesture that surprises Anakin – him too, maybe, but he cannot help himself.
The feeling clings to him as he boards the ship, finding Cody waiting for him. It clings to him, as they take off and the towers of Coruscant’s cityscape grow smaller underneath them. It follows him out of the atmosphere and into hyperspace.
There is nothing he can do. All he can do is play his part and trust. Trust in Anakin, trust in the force.
It does not feel enough.