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The first time is just an accident.
A twelve-hour day under two hot suns, even hotter because the area is filling with the oil-soaked steam of company stoves. He’s lost in thought, counting the minutes until tonight, tomorrow, blessed day off, when he brushes his knuckle against one of the grates of the grill.
Instinctively, he jerks his hand away. The raw meat he was cooking rolls to the ground, and the spatula he holds in his other hand clatters against the stove, ringing loud and shrill.
Eyes center on him, the workers and the supervisors. All the hustling and bustling in the kitchen halts on baited breath.
His hand stings. Such a minor wound, yet so excruciatingly palpable in the heat. He wants to use bacta cream. He wants to dip his hand in cool water and suck the pain out like poison. At the very least, he wants to clutch his wound and curse his withering heart out.
But there is no mercy in the desert, nor on Tatooine. He picks up the raw meat, returns it to the grill, and resumes his work. The steam sizzles. The supervisors lose interest. The workers carry on. He lets the pain pass over him for the seven more hours of the shift.
It is only on the ride home that he looks at the red swollen mark on his knuckle and thinks that this is barely a fraction of the misery Anakin suffered at his hand.
…
The second time is also an accident. The third time might be.
He welcomes the pain of accidents. It keeps the Force away, it keeps his thoughts away. No more flurries of does Luke yearn for his true parents or has Yoda found peace on Dagobah or is Leia safe with the Organas.
Instead, the gnawing, clawing pain centers his thoughts on one single moment. The sweat of the kitchen floods his nostrils with the remnant stench of charred flesh. The stifling rays of the suns bleed into red, angry rivers. The I-hate-you screams pelt him like rain. His days drown in the details.
He can admit the eleventh time is not an accident.
He chooses to leave his wrist against the grate of the grill. He chooses to let his skin smolder, the sound and smell masked by the hiss and spit of the stoves. He grips the force in a choke-hold, holding it an arm’s length away, resisting its urge to jerk his wrist free. Haunting words flutter and groan, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, and he loves until he can’t feel anything anymore.
The hoarse cry never crosses the barrier of his throat. The nerves in his wrist lose interest as they are seared away. The agony ceases. He is free, or maybe he is drowning—it all feels the same.
A timer rings. He removes his wrist from the grill and slides the cooked meat onto a ready pan.
When he looks up, another worker’s eyes are darting between him and his wrist. Pure pity flashes across the worker’s face. It’s a knowing pity. The kind that can dig between ribs and sink hilt-deep into the heart. Shame bleeds out of him—as if he has cut up his soul and left a murky, pale corpse.
Obi-Wan, good and noble warrior, looks away.
…
He doesn’t go back to the oil and grime of the kitchen.
He doesn’t go much of anywhere. Leia doesn’t know him. Luke doesn’t need him. Owen doesn’t want him. There is only Anakin. Anakin, who needs him so desperately, so agonizingly, so horrifyingly—but only in nightmares. Only in the past.
In his sleep, he begs Obi-Wan to kill him, just kill him, but even that thought is repulsive and rotting. The choice Obi-Wan makes in his dreams is not a lapse in judgment nor a foolish mistake—it is an entire identity. It is a man who cannot let go. It is a man who kneels in front of a slab of stone and pleads forgiveness to a master who died decades ago. It is a man who wanders the high-noon hours hoping that sunburned, blistered skin will provide just a bit of penance.
One day, he will grow tired of Obi-Wan.
For now, he prefers to cycle: to sleep and burn, to wake and burn, and then to rinse and repeat.
…
He can’t sleep and starve forever, so he gets up and goes by Ben.
Ben doesn’t use the Force nor does he believe in it. Ben is a working, quiet man who cares neither to pity nor to harm. Ben takes the morning city shuttle to the barren wastes of the desert, works for nine hours, and returns home in the evening. He makes exactly fifty-six credits which is enough to buy the food he eats, maintain the tech he needs, and save a little extra.
It is only at home, alone, when Obi-Wan pays him a visit.
Obi-Wan is angry. Obi-Wan is scared. Obi-Wan watches him cook his meager meals on the hot, hot stove and yearns.
Obi-Wan tries to resist the curiosity, but it feels right in a way that nothing ever has and that nothing ever will. Obi-Wan places his hand directly on the burner of his stove, and he lets his imagination rip through the layers of memory. He pretends as if the pain in his hand is spreading to the rest of him, enveloping him in a cocoon of shame that he can shed.
Anakin is screaming. Anakin is in flames, and Obi-Wan is there, right alongside him, suffering too. They were together, brothers for so long, and yet this is the closest they have ever been. And if he hangs on, just a little longer, it’s like Anakin is alive—heart drumming, lungs throbbing, skin pulsing. The heartbeat in Obi-Wan’s palm matches the crest and fall of Anakin’s waves, and it is pure agony, pure ecstasy. It is only then that Obi-Wan can let go.
He holds his palm up in the brisk breeze and examines the wound—to be sure it will not be permanent, to check that it will not be intense enough for others to notice while it heals.
When he is done, the shreds of his shame return— what would Yoda think, what would Qui-Gon think —but in the aftermath of release, those thoughts are easy to handle. Anakin’s ghost is warm now. The blanket of his presence shields him from little anxieties and hypotheticals. He can tuck himself in and sleep without nightmares, without dreams. He can breathe freely.
Tomorrow it will be worse. It always is. Every time he burns, he is feeding another inch of decaying flesh to the worms. It is a plague that grows with every indulgence.
Because Anakin is dead. Anakin—beloved, bright-eyed treasure of a boy, who had once, when Obi-Wan fell sick, stayed up all night just to care for him—is dead. Worse than dead. The dark side has cursed the past and present of Obi-Wan’s gravitational pull. The failures, Maul and Dooku and Anakin, oh Anakin, orbit one side, and on the other side orbit the dead. And at the center of it all, in the blinding yellow sun, Obi-Wan lives and he lives and he lives with the knowledge that Luke and Leia must survive.
At some point, it is too much.
He doesn’t take the morning shuttle. He doesn’t work for nine hours. He doesn’t return in the evening, and he doesn’t play with fire. Instead, he rides his Eopie out into the desert. He dismounts. He lies his body down on a dune and waits.
Obi-Wan is cursed. Obi-Wan must be slain.
It’s not fierce like the stoves and the fires. It’s a gentle sort of burning. The white-hot sheet of the sand cradles him in its arms as the breeze sings a goodnight lullaby. The strength in Obi-Wan surges at first—he is hot, he is thirsty, he is sweating, he is shivering—but the fear fades with time. The air dances and sways like it does in the periphery of a flame, mirages and ghosts lulling him into a meditative trance.
The Force freezes time in a single snapshot. The moment the llava of Mustafar lights Anakin’s tunic, his red-rimmed eyes wide in torment, and Obi-Wan’s lightsaber humming in his hand, and he could do it, he could do it. He could end the suffering of his dear friend, his beloved Padawan. If he just stepped forward and slashed down—it’s an unarmed opponent, but it’s also a boy who is going to die in utter agony—and if he just stepped forward and ended it, it would be over, it would be over.
Unfortunately, Ben is a coward.
His eyes open. He rolls onto his hands and knees and trembles with dry, aching sobs. The sun-baked sand grazes against his forehead, reminding him that this will never be enough, that he will never be forgiven.
He can’t do it. He can't land the fatal strike. Not then, not now, not ever.
“Qui-Gon,” he cries to the dunes, “please tell me what to do. What do I do?”
The wind whips through his hair, and fiery sand stings his eyes. There are no tears in the desert. There is no Qui-Gon. There is nothing to do.
Sick with heat, he gets up. He wipes his crusted hands over his eyes and shakes out his cloak.
Obi-Wan and Ben are the same. They are both cruel, they are both selfish, but they are not murderers. And if Obi-Wan can’t murder him, if Ben can’t murder him, then he must go home. He must purge himself of the urges—of the burning, of the sleeping, of the starving, of the hurting. The urges amount to nothing when he can't land a fatal strike.
“I’m sorry,” he says to Anakin, or to Qui-Gon, or maybe to himself. “I’m so sorry.”
He rides his Eopie back to their home and fills his belly with water. He rests and recovers from the exhaustion of the sun. He applies his meager supply of bacta to his reddened face and hands, and he eats what his body demands of him.
Never again does he let his hand brush against a grill, or a stray flame lick his limbs. Never again does he lie under the Tatooine suns and wait to die. It is not that he knows better or that he wishes to live—it is simply that it is just too hard to die. He is not worth the effort.
…
Months, or maybe years later, Anakin says, “You should have killed me when you had the chance.” It’s an identity. It’s an utter truth.
Tar rips through his arm as his body is dragged through the flame—bright yellow tendrils whipping like waves of sand in a storm, flickering, crippling, chiseling awfulness into his bones, so hot and somehow so cold. Icy numb fragments drive like knives into his skull, his throat is crackling, his limbs are rattling, and he is alive, so cold and so alive that he screams.
I hate you, the fire burns, but he is at peace. Anakin is not cruel. Anakin is not selfish. Anakin is just a murderer, and now, perhaps, they can finally put Obi-Wan to rest.