Chapter Text
I
Going insane is a process, Obi-Wan Kenobi thought to himself. He had recognized this. Internalized it. Several questions remained, however. Now that he had recognized this, could he prevent it? Or, if it had already progressed, could he arrest that progress?
And should he?
He nodded pleasantly to Anakin as he performed his morning check of the moisture vaporator he maintained a safe distance from his new home. The safe distance was defined as two hundred meters. He didn’t actually know what the distance was supposed to keep him safe from – what was it going to do, suck the moisture out of him? – but it had said in the operator’s manual that this was a safe distance, and so he maintained it there.
“Good morning, Anakin,” he said. He popped the seal on the vaporator’s condensation chamber. A solid half-liter of water today, he saw. A fair harvest, especially for only one person. It wouldn’t be enough, of course; more was required to maintain body weight, especially in an environment like Tatooine’s. He was currently piecing together enough spare parts, refuse, and oddments to cobble together a second vaporator, and felt fairly confident he would be able to accomplish the task before he died a slow, dry death.
Anakin didn’t reply. He never did. It wasn’t that surprising, Obi-Wan reflected as he withdrew the water from the condensation chamber. Anakin was made from some of those spare parts and oddments that had not passed quality controls for making the new vaporator. He did have something resembling a face, and arms, but Obi-Wan had yet to find anything that would give Anakin a voice.
“Half-liter today,” Obi-Wan observed aloud to Anakin. “You think that’ll be sufficient to tide us over? The Jawas don’t pass by for another three days.”
Anakin apparently had no opinion on the subject.
“Well, keep an eye on it for me,” Obi-Wan said cheerfully to him. “I’ll be back tomorrow as usual, my friend.”
Padmé waited in mute anticipation for him as he approached his cistern. Shorted-out power cables passed for her hair, though he felt the diodes he had scrounged failed to effectively capture the ineffable power which had lived in her eyes. “Good morning,” he said. “How’s it looking today?” Checking, he saw what little reserve he had managed to accumulate had not changed since he had checked it yesterday. This was good, since it was not unheard of for womp rats and other desert creatures to be able to detect free-standing moisture from kilometers away, even when put in a supposedly sealed cistern like this. “Do continue keeping an eye on it for me, would you?”
He would go out looking for more salvage today, he decided. If he found enough, he might be able to assemble the second vaporator without having to parley with the Jawas. Failing that, he might find something valuable to them, such that he wouldn’t have to give up any more water to them in exchange for the parts he needed.
Moving around the side of his house, he nodded gravely to Master Yoda and Commander Cody, the latter of whom swayed gently at the breeze of Obi-Wan’s passage. When he had first assembled Cody, Obi-Wan had thought using wrecked compensator springs for his knees had been a real stroke of something approaching genius – lending the commander a certain verisimilitude, the imitation of actual life. The actual effect had been simply to make him bob a little when Obi-Wan walked past him, and the springs made an unpleasant creaking noise as they did. Still, it was something to listen to that wasn’t his own breath and heartbeat.
He had grabbed his traveler’s pack and started off toward his speeder when he heard the creaking noises stop. Far too abruptly for it to have happened on its own.
Deciding on caution rather than explosive action, Obi-Wan turned around slowly, hand on his lightsaber but not drawing it. There was indeed a person standing there, a hand on Cody to keep him from bobbing.
“Today you were thinking about whether it might be a good thing to go insane,” the other person said. “That you might take some refuge in it.”
Obi-Wan nodded. “I was thinking that, yes.”
The other person was him.
“As a follow-up to that thought,” the other Obi-Wan said, “right now you’re wondering if you really have gone truly, properly insane. If you didn’t build a little homunculus of yourself out of bits of scrap, and now you’re so far gone you’re hallucinating a conversation with it.”
“I am at that,” Obi-Wan admitted. “Do you know all of this because you’re reading my mind? I can’t detect your probe if so.”
“No,” the other said. “It’s because I experienced these events, and so I recall what I was thinking when they first happened to me. I’m you from some point in the future.”
Obi-Wan cocked his head for a moment, then nodded. “All right. I suspect I would have more trouble with this if I hadn’t already been considering insanity today. What point in the future are you from?”
“Far enough forward to know that you need to follow me.”
“Where to?”
“An old Sith temple. They used to have an enclave here on Tatooine, millennia ago. I suspect even Palpatine has forgotten it existed, or perhaps never even learned about it.”
Obi-Wan wrinkled his nose. “You of all people ought to know that I – we – have not had a good track record when it comes to Sith temples.”
“I can’t tell you much, but I can promise you this will be nothing like Zigoola.”
“Well, that’s some small comfort, I suppose.”
The other Obi-Wan smiled thinly. “I promise you that no, it is in fact no comfort at all.”
The Sith Temple was apparently less than a day’s speeder ride from Obi-Wan’s home, which he found not at all reassuring. The other Obi-Wan had not brought a speeder, and indeed had little to say about how he had managed to make such a journey in the absence of such a machine. He insisted on taking the controls himself. “But pay attention,” he had said, at the start of the journey. “You’re going to have to do this yourself at some point.”
He generally resisted attempts at questioning, returning again and again to a cryptic insistence on how Obi-Wan needed to discover these things for himself. “If I tell you too much, it might change how things will play out.”
“And if I change how things will play out, that’s a bad thing?”
“Precisely. If things do not go as they did for me, you might not make this journey yourself.”
“And if I didn’t do that?”
The other Obi-Wan grew very quiet, at that point, for a long time. “That would be unfortunate,” he finally said, and left it at that.
Despite his apparently-future-self’s insistence on not discussing more than strictly necessary, Obi-Wan was able to piece two things together. He had taken the required Temple classes on temporal physics, for one, and recognized that he was currently in the middle of a stable time loop. He would go to this temple, and some events would transpire – events, in all probability, which would prove to be beyond his control – that would send him, at some point in his future, back to this present point. Then he would find his then-past-self and take him to the Temple so the loop could continue.
He didn’t remember what the classes had said, if they had indeed said anything, about what might happen if such a loop were to be broken. He suspected that the consequences would be dire, especially to himself.
The other thing he was able to intuit was that his future self was grimly determined. He knew that he was bearing Obi-Wan to some great trial or pain, and that it had to be passed through. But he also knew the contents of those trials, and he was empathizing with what his, to his perspective, past self was about to go through. Which, of course, made Obi-Wan more than a little nervous despite his best efforts to meditate and calm his mind.
The Sith Temple was just a large crack in the ground. A basalt plateau thrust angrily out of the dunes, and down its center line stretched a seemingly innocuous crevasse. It was only as they approached its precipice that Obi-Wan saw it went much farther down than the height of the plateau itself suggested, far enough that even in the light of the twin suns he could not make out the bottom. The Dark Side rose from it like an invisible miasma.
“Down there, then?” Obi-Wan asked.
“Yes,” his future self replied. “I’ll leave you here. You’ll be able to find your own way back once you’ve seen what there is to see.”
“Will you leave me the speeder?”
“In point of fact, no. I’ll be returning it. So, you’ll have it when you get back.”
Obi-Wan raised an eyebrow as he gamely dismounted from the vehicle. “So whatever happens down there will transport me through space as well as time.”
“I can’t speak to that, not safely. But I suppose, in fitting with the theme of the occasion, you’d like a cryptic warning?”
“Oh, absolutely.”
His future self gave another thin smile. “Learn what there is to be taught. You’ll need it. But don’t expect it to change anything in the end.”
“That was indeed delightfully cryptic. My thanks.”
With a nod, his future self engaged the speeder again and roared off into the distance.
“Well,” Obi-Wan said aloud to the emptiness. He turned to regard the climb down into the crevasse. “The sooner I start, the sooner I’ll be done, I suppose.”
The emptiness had nothing to say to that. He started to descend.
It was not, all things considered, a difficult journey down. Not for a Jedi Master, at any rate. The Dark Side made tapping his abilities more difficult, but compared to facing down Grievous this was nothing.
He found himself thinking about that final battle with Grievous more and more, lately. That had been the last battle he’d fought which had made sense. Clear lines of engagement. Right, and wrong. A foe he’d been able to safely and comfortably fight without feeling as though he were cutting away pieces of himself with every swing of his saber.
The Temple was an ugly, intensely unaesthetic piece of architecture assembled from huge blocks of some kind of hewn black stone, clearly not native to this planet. Statues of figures he tentatively identified as Naga Sadow and Marka Ragnos, ancient Sith Lords, leered down at him from either side of the entrance as he approached. He had the distinct impression of their eyes following him as he moved.
The interior was mostly empty, whatever artifacts of value long ago plundered and pillaged. He moved through vast, unlit halls, using his lightsaber to provide illumination, listening to the echoes of his footfalls. The Dark Side was here, but it was diffuse, soaked into the stones and the memories of this place, not concentrated into artifacts like it had been on Zigoola. The Temple itself had no will or malevolence per se; it simply was.
After an hour of searching with no signs of success, Obi-Wan decided to let himself rest for a while. He returned to the central chamber of the temple, which he had thought he had already thoroughly explored. When he arrived, however, there was an opening in the wall where there previously had been only smooth, blank stone.
Beyond the opening was a huge mural of three very familiar figures. He found himself experiencing sudden and vivid flashbacks to Mortis. He recognized them: the Father, the Daughter, and the Son, rendered in larger-than-life glory. Power – not necessarily Dark Side power, but raw Force power unlike any he had experienced before – seeped passively from the mural. It hinted at untapped potential.
“Well,” he said aloud, not really expecting an answer. “Why wasn’t this here before?”
“I assume it’s because it wasn’t time yet,” came the reply.
Obi-Wan started a little and snapped his head around to see the dark-robed figure standing in a corner of the hidden room. The power emanating from the mural had blinded him to the other’s presence. The black robe gave Obi-Wan pause, made him reach for his saber without thinking.
“There won’t be any need for that,” the other said. “I think we’re here for the same goal.”
“What makes you think that?” Obi-Wan asked.
He tensed a little as the other man raised his arms, but it was only to throw back the cowl of his hood. Weather-beaten skin, sandy hair, blue eyes, the hint of a beard coming in around his jaw. And the Force – the Force was strong with him.
“Because I know you,” he said. “I guess I have you at a disadvantage. Hello, Obi-Wan. I’m Luke Skywalker.”