Chapter Text
A man sits alone in the desert.
It’s an old image, time-worn and unoriginal, yet not an image he had ever expected to make himself. He squints up at the merciless suns, feeling salt crusting in the lines engraved in his face. He licks his parched lips and tastes sand in his overgrown beard. His fingers twitch toward the flask resting in the shade of a nearby boulder, but he only has two sips left. He joins his free hand to the one already holding his blaster so that there’s only one task to focus on, one goal to achieve. There is nothing in the galaxy except the blaster in his hands and the profogg that could leap out of the sand at any moment.
He doesn’t sense the creature coming. He doesn’t sense anything. He doesn’t try.
But he does kill it. Easily. The blast echoes for miles through the desert.
He’s almost disappointed to hit the small target with such an accurate shot, disturbed by the possibility that he had unconsciously connected to some awareness deeper than his physical surroundings. But it’s easy enough to believe that he just got lucky, or that the physical instincts of a war-battered general would take longer than ten days to shake.
As the shadow of the nearest cliff drags quickly across the ravine, he drags the carcass back to the mouth of a cave. Sweat drips down his skin, pooling in crevices he never realized he had. There’s a spot on his side between two ribs where he can feel drips of sweat collecting, and he doesn’t remember ever noticing that happen before. Perhaps he had always been too distracted.
His fingers would twitch for the flask if they weren’t tangled in the soft brown cloak he has the creature wrapped in for easier transport.
When he gets to the mouth of the cave at the back of the ravine, deep in the cliff’s protective shadow, he looks around for something to skin and gut the animal with. He has something that would work, of course, tucked under a pile of rocks with all the items he had felt were too suspicious to sell and too dangerous to keep at his side. But he doesn’t think he will ever use that to cut through flesh again.
So he uses the sharpest rock he can find, for some of it. For most of it, he uses his bare hands. After, he scrubs them clean in the sand. There’s a strange sense of satisfaction in brushing off the last of the green blood-stained sand back onto the earth, leaving his hands and arms their usual sun-burned pink. There’s a strange sense of satisfaction in the abrasive sting.
His blaster lights the cloak on fire easily enough, but it burns to ash much too quickly. He looks around for anything to build a flame sustainable enough to cook meat on, but vegetation is almost nonexistent. It strikes him as strange that in all his almost forty years of life, he has never had to puzzle through how to make a fire without wood.
In the end, he returns to the pile of rocks where he had buried the past, and he digs. When he returns to the flat rock he’d laid the meat out on, he sits, legs crossed, a man in the desert. Without looking at anything in particular, without feeling anything at all, he activates a bright, straight blue beam of light. Steadily, he moves it over the surface of the meat, keeping it an even half-inch from the surface until the flesh turns from green to brown.
HIs mouth waters at the smell. He tries not to think of anything at all.
The suns disappeared behind the cliff long ago, but their light remains long enough for him to finish the whole carcass. He should bury the bones, hide, and the organs he’s not sure about, but he’s so tired and he disintegrated his transporting cloak, so he settles for flinging the pieces as far as he can throw them.
There’s a strange sense of satisfaction in the burn in his throwing arm.
He hopes any scavengers in the area eat well tonight. He will have to toss them whatever meat doesn’t get eaten tonight, as well, since it would likely spoil by morning. He will have to see about getting some salt to preserve food for longer, but that’s a problem for another day.
He puts the lightsaber back where he had exhumed it, far from the mouth of the cave.
And then he returns to the mouth of the cave, nothing to show for his day but a sweat-stained shirt gathered at the ends to hold the swinging weight of a few fistfuls of fatty meat. The last of the suns’ light disappears, and the darkness pushes him into the cave.
“No,” says the figure writhing in a bed of soaked, rumpled clothes at the back of the shallow cave, eyes crimped shut, face twisted in agony, illuminated only by the haunting blue glow of the force-suppressing collar locked tight around his straining neck.
He’s not speaking to anyone present, of course. It’s just more of the fever talking. The same fever that’s been talking for ten days, now.
The man comes out of the desert and into the depths of the cave, kneeling at the side of the boy, ignoring the sight of amputated limbs grinding into dirt, cauterized flesh catching in fever-drenched fabric.
He slides a sand-scrubbed hand into curls, skull filling the shape of his palm, and lifts. He fits the mouth of his flask against dream-twitching lips. He watches the last of the blue milk spill into the boy’s mouth and licks his parched lips.
Golden light seeps through cracked eyelids, a rare sign of consciousness.
“I brought you something to eat,” says Obi-Wan Kenobi, feeling nothing at all.
With a flash of gold and a sneer, Darth Vader whispers, “I hate you.”