Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Then — the Jedi Temple

"Anakin, this is the fourth time—"

"I had it under control!"

"Evidently, but the lecture I've had to endure from Master Volx and the smoking pile of junk in the hangar says otherwise."

"I could have handled it, if you hadn't—"

"If I hadn't, you would have been part of that smoking pile of junk in the hangar!"

"You don't know that!"

"And you do?"

"I'm the Chosen One, I could've easily moved the speeder—"

"Oh yes, and send it crashing into the Temple spires? Forgive me, I didn't know the prophecy meant the Chosen One was to become our splattered wall decoration!"

Anakin let out a wordless scream, and Obi-Wan stood stock-still, shoulders heaving. Contrary to popular belief, he hated getting angry at Anakin. Hated the way his padawan's recklessness chipped away at the masterly control he strived to put up, exposing the fiery anger that Qui-Gon Jinn himself had sought to tamp down. 

Perhaps they were not so different after all. 

More than that, he hated when his padawan took the most needless risks, playing it off on the wings of a prophecy yet unproven, taken to mean an insulated power beyond contradiction, blanket permission to put his life at risk and make his master's hair go gray.

As master to the so-called Chosen One, Obi-Wan wasn't quite sure it worked that way. 

 “Everyone says I’m the Chosen One! Everyone says I’m powerful, more than any Jedi that has ever lived, and I’m still not enough for you!”

A teenage Anakin always railed against Obi-Wan’s many unpopular decisions: regarding his training, his readiness for the trials, or indeed, even the most mundane commands such as Obi-Wan practically begging him to sleep after one too many all-nighters. Or, as in this case, a joyride gone wrong. 

Anakin took a step backward until he hit their dining table, sinking down into a chair with his head in his hands—one flesh, one metal. “I’m never enough for you. I'll never be enough for you.”

A sinking feeling told Obi-Wan that this was no longer about the crashed speeder. 

He sat across from his padawan, anger receding as quickly as it came. He laid one hand on that mess of curls, his heart full to bursting with how much he loved this boy, how much he worried.

“Anakin,” he said softly. “Is that what you think?”

“It’s what I know,” the teenager snapped, still riding on the waves of his anger, raising his head. “Everything—nothing I do is good enough for you! Everyone else sees me as the Chosen One—why can’t you?!”

“That’s enough,” Obi-Wan said sharply, closing his eyes as he moved his hand down to his apprentice’s shoulder, keeping it there, swallowing thickly. “Why, padawan, why do you think a prophecy means you must continuously put your life at risk?"

"I can handle--!"

"Just because you can, does not mean you should," Obi-Wan admonished, reining in his irritation with much effort. The boy snorted derisively and turned away, shrugging off his master's hand. Obi-Wan tried to ignore the sharp stab of hurt that suddenly pierced his chest. 

Calm, breathe. Release to the Force.

 The anger in the room simmered down, the tense atmosphere gradually breaking as the Force surrounded them. It was several long minutes before Obi-Wan ventured to speak again.

"Anakin. Do you know why I have never put much stock in the prophecy?”

The boy almost rolled his eyes. “You don’t trust me. You don’t think I can do it.”

“On the contrary,” Obi-Wan smiled bitterly. “I think you are more than capable.”

Anakin snapped his head up at the affirmation, eyes unbelieving. “Then why—“

Because I will lose you, Obi-Wan doesn’t say.

Because you are dearly precious to me, Obi-Wan doesn’t say.

“Because it is too great for any one Jedi,” Obi-Wan said in a rush of breath, before he can stop himself. The terrible words written in the archives danced across his vision, echoed in his ears. “Because a prophecy of that magnitude will only swallow its bearer whole. Because it is a burden you should not bear. Because, padawan mine,” he shifts to hold the boy’s face gently, one hand under a trembling chin, thumb brushing away angry tears. Tender and fragile, here in the breaking of secrets. “Because you, my dearest one, deserve to live a life of unshackled happiness." 

He held the boy's gaze, begged him to understand, because if there was anything Anakin heard and remembered from him, let it be this. "Because you deserve to be free.”

Anakin’s breath hitched and he swallowed, disbelieving desperate eyes pinning Obi-Wan into place for a handful of silent seconds—

—and he surged forward to tuck his head under Obi-Wan’s chin. He was much too big for that now, Obi-Wan thought ruefully, as it ended with Anakin on his knees, head pressed against Obi-Wan’s treacherous heart. 

Obi-Wan exhaled, shifted out of the chair as he held him in turn, rearranging their positions on the floor. He would regret this later, his aching knee told him, but the weight of Anakin in his arms was a rare comfort that he could not give up—not for the moment, not for anything. 

“Qui-Gon meant well, when he brought you out from Tatooine to the Temple on the basis of a prophecy,” Obi-Wan said ruefully, because it was a long-ingrained fault of padawans to always defend their masters, “but he did not know everything.”

“And you do?” Anakin asked lightly, an invitation to banter, but an undercurrent of childish hope ran beneath it, an adoration of a student looking to their all-knowing teacher for answers. It had been a while since Obi-Wan was the object of that intense expectation, since Anakin had grown from a curious boy to a questioning teenager, when it seemed Obi-Wan's masterly sheen had worn off and he had become yet another curmudgeonly adult standing in the way of the vitality of a teenage life. 

Yet another reminder of how much he lacked to train this supernova of a boy. 

Obi-Wan flicked his temple, a muffled ‘ow’ echoing into his chest as Anakin shifted indignantly against his shoulder. Obi-Wan brought up a hand and absentmindedly rubbed the injured area with his thumb, Anakin’s head resettling into its place, nestled against his master. “Brat.” 

Anakin grinned, and Obi-wan felt the curve of cheeks against his tunic. 

“I spent so much time in the Archives, Master Nu thought I had evolved into a new species under its reading lights. I scoured datapads, flimsiplasts, anything I could find about the prophecy, and everything else.”

“Everything else?”

Obi-Wan smiled fondly. “Everything else about training a Padawan.” And raising a child, he thought privately, remembering the datapads on child development that Master Nu had plunked down in front of him with a wry raised eyebrow. “Stars and suns, child, you had more questions than your teachers or I could answer. Force, the time I spent in those halls—I could have bested Master Mundi in a debate and achieved several degrees besides.”

Anakin doesn’t stop grinning. “I thought you knew everything. I—I still do,” he admitted shyly, fingers tracing the weave of Obi-Wan’s tunic. 

“I was barely a Knight, Anakin,” Obi-Wan retorted, “I knew next to nothing. If you had gone to another master, perhaps—“

Arms tightened around Obi-Wan without warning, binding his chest for a brief moment. Their bond sparked suddenly, Obi-Wan wincing as Anakin tugged on it hard. “If I had another master—kriff, Obi-Wan, if it was anyone but you…I—I…"

“You would be perfectly fine, dear one,” Obi-Wan said wistfully, even as the thought scared him, made him remember all the what-ifs that tortured his younger self. “Made someone else’s hair go gray, I’m sure.”

Anakin made a pained noise that sounded terribly like a kicked loth cat, and Obi-Wan’s hand unconsciously ran through his hair, aiming to soothe.

“Should he have left me there instead then?"

Sullen, daring his master to answer. 

Obi-Wan took his time to speak, reaching into the muddied eddies of the Force that gave him no answers. He felt twenty-five again, twenty-five and knowing nothing, scouring the Temple archives for answers that he could never find. 

No, he wanted to say, no, because there you were a slave and here you are the closest thing I have to a son. 

Yes, he wanted to say, yes, because there you had your mother and no one here will ever compare. 

Someday, he thought, he would meet Shmi Skywalker in the Force (non-individuality aside) and ask for her forgiveness. He will grovel at her feet and beg for absolution — but the apologies he will utter will be meaningless and incomplete, because he will forever mourn that the boy was taken away from his mother, but he can never regret that the child ended up with him. 

Forgive me, he thought — and here he directed the apology to a mother left behind, not the millennia of teaching that he has sworn to uphold, not the life Force that flows in his veins, not the Council where his duty lies — forgive me for being more selfish than I ought to be, because I cannot give him back. 

"I think he did as the Force willed," Obi-Wan whispered finally, aching with the inadequacy of it. Such answers never satisfied Anakin, never filled that bottomless need for certainty and clarity. The Force-begotten son, always railing against the wellspring that breathed him into being. 

Anakin huffed, an impudent exhale that let Obi-Wan know the trite answer meant nothing, but he let it lie. 

"So what did you find—about…about the prophecy?”

Obi-Wan’s hand stilled in Anakin’s hair, the horror stirring in his gut as he remembered the ominous words, written in a language so archaic and arcane that Master Nu had all but shoved the materials back in the deepest darkest portions of the archives, warning Obi-Wan all the while.

The Chosen One...a child will be born...to bring balance to the Force...and thereafter, to be claimed by it.

For the first time, he understood the Council's reactions, understood the eyes of the other Jedi Knights with padawans when they heard that he would be training the Chosen One: looks and sideways glances that were always compassionate, but full to the brim with pity.

Pity not even for the handful of hardship that came with training power of that magnitude, but pity for what Obi-Wan had to train his apprentice to become: a figurative sacrifice on the altar of their monastery, for that unknown trial to one day bring balance, at the expense of his apprentice's life. 

Obi-Wan once loathed those sideways glances, formerly misunderstanding them as dismissal or even disavowal. But once he learned, he welcomed those glances with a sort of pained and cruel acceptance. 

Behold your salvation, he wanted to tell them bitterly — and weep. 

And yet, they would feel no guilt, he reflected. That burden was his alone to bear.

“Nothing definite,” he said slowly. 

“But nothing good,” Anakin guessed, and Obi-Wan closed his eyes, rested his head against the durasteel wall, couched his words in layers of vagueness—concealing, even now, the terrible truth. “The Chosen One—chosen by the Force itself to bring balance, whatever the cost.”

Anakin pulled back, looked up at Obi-Wan quizzically. “That—doesn’t sound too bad.” 

What he wanted to say, Obi-Wan thought, is that it doesn't sound wrong. In fact, as far as Temple tenets on selflessness go, it sounded right. 

“How different is that from the vow of service? The vow of protection of the vulnerable? The vow that we pledge to give of ourselves, so that others may live?” Anakin continued, years and years of Temple teaching and reluctantly-attended classes on Jedi philosophy somehow surfacing now, to Obi-Wan’s chagrin. “What if the prophecy is just the culmination of all these Jedi teachings?”

Obi-Wan rolled his eyes internally, because he is not too far gone down this unknown road of sudden sentimentality to not hear the tinge of youthful pride in Anakin’s voice as he practically pleads for Obi-Wan to accept something that will place him on a pedestal above his peers: the paragon Jedi of self-sacrifice. Quite contradictory, was his padawan.

Obi-Wan kept his gaze upwards, unsure of how to look down and meet those eyes, to tell the child he raised that he had raised him for slaughter, like carrion for vultures, like the unsuspecting livestock in Coruscant’s factories, bred for the sole purpose of consumption by the world’s population, to be killed and processed into foodstuffs for the porcelain plates of the elite or the scraps of the lowest levels’ scum.

Born for the benefit of the greater good and the galaxy—and nothing else. The Chosen One, born to one day bring balance to the Force — at the expense of their own life. An unavoidable and necessary sacrifice, willing and accepting, brimming with power yet wholly at the mercy of the very lifeblood of the universe.

By the time he and Master Nu finished translating that particular scroll, he had nearly thrown it across the room, shredded it with his lightsaber, burnt it to a crisp—thinking of the freed slave child sleeping fitfully in his quarters, only corridors away, still tossing and turning because his dreams would not let him sleep. Only the disapproving look of the Master Archivist had stopped him from ripping that scroll to bits. 

He doesn't know how to tell Anakin of this entirety now, of how Qui-Gon had saved him from slavery for another set of chains, from oppression for certain execution. Instead, his arms tightened reflexively around the child (no longer a child) in his arms, a hand resumed stroking the mass of curls, and he pressed a firm kiss to the crown of Anakin’s head. A small burst of surprise from the other end of the bond, but his padawan doesn’t push the matter, content to let it lie in the face of this rare affection from his Master. 

Obi-Wan held his padawan, felt the Force swirl around them, questioning, foreboding, demanding, and pleaded from his heart, not for the first time. 

Please, he begged, heart raw and desperate like never before. Please, do not take him from me. 

"It is a myth, padawan," he said finally, speaking to their durasteel ceiling. "Nothing but a myth."

"And you don't believe it."

"I believe we have already had this conversation."

Anakin fell silent, the kind of silence Obi-Wan knew preceded a particularly difficult question. "But what if I am the Chosen One? What if—what if the myth is true?"

Then may the Force take me, Obi-Wan wanted to say fiercely, because I will not let you be that which destroys you. "No myth controls your life, padawan," Obi-Wan replied quietly, tamping down the roaring fire within himself, even as he felt the erstwhile disapproval of Qui-Gon Jinn's prophetic beliefs. "We live by the ways of the Force."

Oh, but that answer has left himself wide open—and his sharp-tongued padawan, taught by the Temple's teachers of Rhetoric and sharpened further by Obi-Wan's own acerbic negotiations, took the opening.  

"And if the Force wills that I be its Chosen One?"

Obi-Wan closed his eyes. "Then the Force shall be with you." 

"Whatever the cost," Anakin repeated. 

Obi-Wan swallowed the dryness in his throat, tamped down the feeling of foreboding as he looked down to finally meet his padawan's intent gaze. "Whatever the cost."

Something compelled him to add a few more words, a brazen challenge, one last rebellion from an ordinary master against the whims of life itself—

"The Force will be with you, and so will I." 

Chapter Text

Now — Mortis

"Is it true that he is the Chosen One?"

Obi-Wan's eyes narrow in anger and alarm as he steps back, igniting his lightsaber as he sees Ahsoka ignite her second one out of the corner of his eye. "What do you know of such things?" he snarls. 

"What is about to happen shall occur whether you like it or not," the being before them intones, a dark aura in his presence, red eyes aglow with a sinister character so different from that of the woman earlier—the one he called "sister." 

Obi-Wan's hackles rise at his words, a variation of something that he has heard for over a decade of training Anakin.

It is inevitable, Obi-Wan.

Train the boy and let him go, you will.

This is his destiny, Obi-Wan.

The being shuts off their lightsabers with a flick of his wrist, and alarms go off in Obi-Wan's head. "You are Sith," he accuses.

The Chosen One...destroy the Sith...bring balance to the Force. 

The being chuckles and dismisses them, leaves them to the mercy of a lightning storm, and Obi-Wan's heart keeps time with the rolling thunder as he runs with Ahsoka to the cave. 

Silence meets him in his unsevered bond with Anakin, but it is not emptiness.

Be safe, he says through a wordless pulse of questioning care that Anakin receives and ricochets back, the answer almost absentminded. Something must have preoccupied his attention.

With nothing else to do, Obi-Wan makes sure Ahsoka is comfortable as they both settle down to weather the stormy night. 

He takes first watch. 

“Obi-Wan."

Obi-Wan shakes the sleepiness out of his head as he looks around warily. The cave glints with crystals not unlike kyber, the same Force-power pulsing through the stone. 

"Obi-Wan."

The voice is one that meets him in dreams and haunts him in nightmares. A blink, and the visage is there as well. 

Obi-Wan draws his lightsaber. 

"Master Qui-Gon? How are you here?"

A trick, surely. 

"I am here because you are here."

Obi-Wan blinks, and his lightsaber lowers a fraction. "I--I don't understand. What is this place?"

"Unlike any other another—a conduit through which the very Force of this universe flows."

Obi-Wan considers this. "Are we in danger?"

"This place is both an amplifier and a magnet. Three are here who seek Skywalker."

Anakin. Obi-Wan's heart thumps wildly as he feels down their bond, feeling an unmistakeable placid calm that only means his apprentice must be asleep. Force, please let him be somewhere safe. 

"They, like me, believe him to be the Chosen One."

Obi-Wan shuts off his lightsaber, heaviness in his chest. 

"You may be right," he says reluctantly. "The Force within him is stronger than any known Jedi."

Qui-Gon's voice seems to echo around the cave. "And have you done as I asked? Have you trained the boy?”

A long-ago instinct ingrained in Obi-Wan rears its head, and Obi-Wan straightens imperceptibly, the pose of a padawan reporting to their master. "I've trained him as well as I could, but—he's still willful. And balance still eludes him." The words are true, much as they haunt Obi-Wan in an entirely different way: an exposure of his own failures, his own inadequacies. 

And yet, if somehow the Force needed perfection in its Chosen One, perhaps there was hope for evading the prophecy after all. 

See his imperfections, he wants to scream, and choose another. Let it not be him. 

Force, please. Let it not be him.

"If he is the Chosen One, he will discover it here," Qui-Gon intones, and a small bitter part of Obi-Wan can't help but resent that his Master does not even look him in the eye. His ghostly back is turned away from Obi-Wan; and Obi-Wan is loath to admit to himself that it is a heartwrenchingly familiar sight. 

But finally–finally, Obi-Wan snorts–Qui-Gon turns to meet his eyes. "But you have done as I asked, padawan. It is enough."

“As you asked,” Obi-Wan says dully, the Force swirling in unsteady currents around him, mirroring his mind and heart. “You—Master, you might as well have cursed me to the nine Corellian hells.”

Qui-Gon crosses his arms. “Surely he isn’t as bad as all that.”

“He isn’t the problem,” Obi-Wan snaps. “Anakin is—was a dedicated student, is now a great fighter, a skilled pilot, a matchless Jedi. There is no one like him in the Order.”

“Then what is this turmoil I sense from you, padawan?”

“I am—was his master,” Obi-Wan says, mouth dry. “I was supposed to protect him, prepare him for a life as a Jedi, not for certain death.”

Qui-Gon seems to raise himself to his full ghostly height. “The prophecy—“

“Forgive me, Master,” Obi-Wan says bitterly, “if we will have to agree to disagree on that point. Did you know?”

Qui-Gon’s ghost stays silent, but even after years, Obi-Wan would like to think that he knows his old renegade master the best. “You did,” Obi-Wan states, crestfallen. Qui-Gon says nothing. “You did."

A saber seems to pierce through Obi-Wan's heart. “Master. How could you?”

Qui-Gon’s eyes seem to look through Obi-Wan, omniscient and stubborn as a bantha. “He is the Chosen One.”

“What does that even mean?” Obi-Wan scrubs at his eyes, even as the answer to his own question lurks in his mind. He has never accepted it—Obi-Wan does not think that he ever will. “Do enlighten me, Master, if the netherworlds of the Force have given you a wisdom we do not.”

“You are singularly lucky that I have no corporeal presence with which to flick you on the forehead, my very sarcastic apprentice.”

Obi-Wan laughs emptily, and blows out a breath. “Will you answer my question?”

“You have seen the power coursing through him, Obi-Wan. Even without the prophecy, there is no galaxy in which that boy is doomed to a normal existence."

Yes, and did greatness have to come at such a cost?

It was always the power, with Anakin, Obi-Wan thinks wildly. The raw power in his veins, his blood, his bones—a midichlorian count so astronomically high that even Master Yoda had taken a step back when Qui-Gon had first brought the boy to the Council chambers. Power was what people noticed first. 

Anger—pulsing, unbearable, uncontrollable, unbecoming of a Jedi—was what they noticed second. 

They never knew that Anakin, as a boy, had learned to make tea for the first time in his life so that Obi-Wan could pull himself out of his grief at losing his master. Or that as a teenager, side-eyed by everyone else at the Temple for his reputation of boundary-pushing, Anakin as a padawan had snuck out to the lower-level Coruscant races, betting his meager Temple allowance on himself, only to distribute his winnings to various Coruscant orphanages. Force, Obi-Wan himself wouldn’t even have known that if Dex hadn’t let it slip that he had helped with the donations. 

They never knew that on the battlefield, Anakin as a knight took every loss of a trooper as though they were his own family, always pushing the clones ahead of him, always putting himself at the maximum risk so that his squad would stay safe. He would draw the most fire, assign himself the most dangerous points, if it meant getting more of his men home. 

And later, when the damage was done, body broken and bruised, blaster shots riddling his body and his hands shaking from Force exhaustion, he would smile up at Obi-Wan from the medbay bed with that foolish, childish, devilish grin. 

I can handle it, Master. I’m the Chosen One, remember?

The terror Obi-Wan had always felt at those words, said flippantly on the heels of some other death-defying stunt, had never waned all these years. The Council and the Jedi saw their Chosen One, the Republic saw their General, and acclaimed him for those risks.

And Obi-Wan? 

Obi-Wan saw a boy, with the fate of the galaxy on his shoulders, eyes full of trust, a spirit that rebelled against expectation yet desperately sought acceptance, and a heart that ached for every injustice in the known galaxy — laying himself down on that wretched sanctified altar, over and over and over again.

Truly, the Force couldn't have chosen better; even if Obi-Wan (selfishly) wished that it had. 

I’m the Chosen One, remember?

Oh, Obi-Wan remembered. More than he would like to. 

“Doomed,” he chuckles bitterly. “What a choice of words, Master.”

Qui-Gon stays silent, and Obi-Wan isn’t sure if this is really his former master or some trick of this Force-cursed planet, but the words rush out of him all the same. 

“Obi-Wan—”

"Did you—did we ever stop to think, before we took that child away from all he's ever known and loved, and shoved him into a path of utmost danger?" 

"Obi-Wan—"

"No, we didn't," Obi-Wan laughs, a little bit crazed and yet uncaring. "We, the Jedi, peacekeepers of the galaxy, cared nothing for the boy and everything about fulfilling some bantha poodoo written eons ago by a doddering fool who was probably drunk on Corellian liquor!"

"OBI-WAN!"

“I did not raise that child to be a sacrifice!” Obi-wan spits, venom in his words, in his eyes, in his heart, every cell of his body pulsing with primal rage. 

Qui-Gon's ghost raises an eyebrow, unmoved. “Raise?”

“Train,” Obi-Wan whispers, belatedly, righteous anger deflating, falling back on what is proper, what is accepted, what is expected, what is—woefully inadequate, for all that he has done and will do for that boy. 

"Train." Shame weighs down his shoulders, his heart sinking into the floor. "I didn't—I couldn't train him to be a sacrifice. Just a sacrifice, and nothing more. He is—he deserves to be...so much more. Than that. Anything but that." 

“It is his destiny, Obi-Wan,” Qui-Gon continues. “You must let him go to fulfill it—“ and here his old master’s eyes soften, just a fraction, “—wherever that path may lead.”

Obi-Wan’s heart pounds against his ribs, and it sounds like a death knell. All these years, all those promises, teaching a young boy his first lightsaber stance, positioning small hands on a saber’s pommel, showing him the stars and planets, sitting beside him in cockpits and medical bays, patching up his wounds—only to release him to an uncontrollable and unforgiving maelstrom of forsaken purpose.

“I understand the Code, Master,” Obi-Wan says slowly, through gritted teeth. “I know—possession, attachment, the dangers these hold. I understand—how we live, as Jedi. Laying down our lives is our mandate and duty. But surely—surely the Force cannot be so cruel, surely the Light cannot ask for this much—“ 

Surely the all-powerful Force that was the very lifeblood of the universe would not need the sacrifice of one precious life in order for it to go on. What good was that omnipotence and omniscience if it called, bloodthirsty, to be satiated with the life of a child? Obi-Wan shakes his head, trying to will these heretical thoughts out of existence, but they had long burrowed under his skin and would not let him go. 

“Is it truly the Force asking too much, Obi-Wan?" Qui-Gon asks evenly. "Or do you mean it is asking too much from you?"

Obi-Wan clamps his mouth shut, slams down his shields.

"Let him go, Obi-Wan.” Qui-Gon's eyes shimmer, a sheen of mournful emotion peeking through, as Obi-Wan shakes his head mutely. 

“And if I cannot?” If I will not?

Qui-Gon’s gaze seems to deepen in sadness as he regards his former padawan. “Then the Force will find its way to take him. You cannot stop its currents, no matter how hard you try.”

“There has to be another way,” Obi-Wan grits out, head downcast in shame. Failure, failure, failure of  a Jedi. Look and see how your heart betrays you. “Master—“

When he looks up again, Qui-Gon fades. 

Elsewhere on Mortis

"When news reached me that the Chosen One had been found, I needed to see for myself."

Anakin is still reeling from the vision of his mother, but another vision—a memory—rises to his mind's eye. 

The floor of their quarters. His master's arms around him. "It is a myth, padawan. Nothing but a myth."

"But what if I am the Chosen One? What if the myth is true?" 

"Then the Force will be with you, and so will I."

"The Chosen One is a myth," he says to the Father, and the being's eyebrows crease in amusement. 

"Is it?" Anakin takes a step back as a knowing smirk ghosts over the being's features. "I should very much like to know."

Impulsively, Anakin clings onto his bond with Obi-Wan, a sudden squeeze through the Force that echoes down their connection. 

"Why don't we find out together?" The being takes a step forward, looming over him. "Pass one test, and I shall know the truth. Then, you and your friends may leave."

Anakin can feel Obi-Wan in the bond, probably only half-awake but sending back a calming pulse of his own. His bond with Ahsoka is likewise calm, her presence worried but stable. 

"I don't want to play your games," Anakin says defiantly, raising his chin. "No myth controls my life."

No myth controls your life, padawan. We live by the ways of the Force.

The Father's smirk grows as he seems to mock Anakin's ignorance. "Now, now, child," he taunts. "Whoever told you that?"