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Somewhere on Tatooine
Ben Kenobi, not quite old yet but no longer young, starts his day as he‘s begun the last great many days. He lights a fire, decants a scant liter of water from the moisture generator, sets the water to boil and slowly works his stiff joints through a meditation kata. When the tea has finished steeping, he sits heavily on his one stool and takes the first bitter, scalding sip as he considers how to keep the universe at least in balance, if not actually saved. He sighs.
“Oh come now Padawan! It’s not that bad!” The voice, one he hasn’t heard in twenty years, booms out. Ben startles, spills his tea and leaps to his feet, ‘saber out and ready. There’s no one there. Feeling like an idiot, he powers the lightsaber down and cleans the mess.
“Padawan…Obi-Wan…” The voice, gentler this time, returns as he is staring into his replacement tea. But this time it is accompanied by a hand, ephemeral and blue. As it strokes his arm, the nebulous almost-touch tingles with the Force. He looks up slowly, incredulously as the blue tingle of the Force continues to coalesce until he’s staring directly into a face he never thought he would see again in life. He reaches up to touch it and again feels the Force respond as his fingers slide against, and then through the beloved face of his once-master.
“Qui-Gon! But, how…?” Ben’s voice cracks and trails off. He’s engulfed in a Force hug that infuses him with love and warmth from his head to his toes.
“Shhh…it’s all right. It’s a long story, but we have all the time in the world now.”
For the first time in a long time, Ben, no, Obi-Wan Kenobi allows hope to renew him. If Qui-Gon can return to him from the dead and across the years, then the galaxy may not fall after all. The Force has not deserted them.
Somewhere on a large, partially completed planetary weapon
Darth Vader is not pleased. Tarkin’s folly was significantly over budget and years late. While its destructive promise was great, the build phase of the project with its endless design reviews and revisions siphoning off ever more resources and constant delays, made for a frustrating wait in his pursuit of ultimate power. His cloak sweeps behind him as he strides to his temporary quarters. He sets the kettle to boil, and moves his body through a meditation kata, the biological and mechanical parts meshing smoothly together into a seamless whole that no longer feels alien to him as it once did.
He steeps the tea carefully, drawn by the ritual with its comforting and familiar set of actions and results. He sits and lifts the cup to his visor, still at least able to smell the bitter brew if no longer able to set the cup against his lips and taste it. He sighs.
“Ani! Ani! Come play with us!” The voice, childish and insistent, carries the reminder of a time long ago, when hope and love were still emotions available to him. It startles him and he leaps to his feet, lightsaber ready. The table is upset by his movement and the tea spills, its fragrant odor momentarily overwhelming his senses. He looks around but can see, can sense, nothing out of the ordinary. He sits back down, leaving the mess for the cleaning crew to deal with later.
He pulls out the datapad with the latest budget numbers and design plans and focuses on the upcoming review. He is engrossed in the information, imagining the uses to which he can put the final creation, the Death Star, capable of killing a planet in one blow, when a tiny, translucent blue hand places itself directly in front of the information. He looks up, startled. The rest of a small, blue body materializes before his eyes, a familiar shape, down to the missing eye and gaping lightsaber wound, both caused by his own weapon.
The blue child doesn’t notice the ghoulish wounds at all and smiles broadly at him.
“Ani! Come play with us!” It - he - repeats. Vader feels the tingle of the Force as the small fingers try - and fail - to grasp his hand, passing through it instead.
Suddenly, with an audible pop, another tiny blue being appears beside the first. The new one is a girl, the wound that pierced her chest shedding tiny blue droplets of the Force as she jumps up and down beside the first.
“Knight Skywalker!” She turns to her companion and makes a face at him. “You can’t call him Ani! Don’t you know anything, Liam? He’s not a Padawan anymore.”
The first blue Force child - Liam - pushes the second, sending her stumbling backwards towards Vader. He tries to stop her momentum, but of course fails as she is propelled backwards through him. His whole body tingles uncomfortably from the non-contact. He turns to see where she landed and finds that another has materialized next to her, a miniature Togruta that makes him think briefly of Ashoka.
Now there are three and their combined Light Side energy causes an uncomfortable tingle through his limbs, an itch of wrongness. He wonders if he can increase the pain meds that constantly course through the remains of his living body.
He spins again, for the first time afraid of what he will see. It is as he feared. Several more are here now, the small chamber starting to fill with their tingly, itchy blue presence. Each is showing their wounds unselfconsciously, bringing that day and its horrific carnage to him with the same clarity that he spent years and countless nightmares trying to forget. The stench of charred flesh fills his nostrils. He remembers the feeling of the Dark Side strangling his senses, changing him immutably with every youngling that he murdered. He knows that he wasn’t Sith, not really, not entirely, until that moment. It had taken him barely ten minutes to slaughter them all, the first ones shouting in laughter as they thought he was coming to play a new game with them and then the screams of terror, panic, and pleading before he was finished.
The younglings are multiplying until there are more than twenty, and they are playing, laughing and shouting. He shrinks away from them, backing towards the door.
“Stop!” The very first one sounds far more assured and authoritative than he ought to for one so apparently young. Vader stops.
“I don’t think Ani likes seeing us like this,” he says. “Let’s be nice to him!” With that, the children dissolve momentarily in a cloud of Force energy and coalesce again, but as children only, not a wound in sight.
“Now will you play with us, Ani?” he asks Vader. This is worse, Vader thinks. This is the last moment of hope that he had before he fell. He turns away from them.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to play now. We have all the time in the world.” The youngling smiles at him and winks.