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He awakes to an aching body.
Time is fluid, his head is a haze. Memory escapes his grasp like smoke, and the fragmented pieces of himself that he does cling onto cuts into him like glass, and he is an open wound, ragged and torn and festering. There is no end to the rust that suffocates him, drowning him beneath its waves, as the world tilts and drops away like sand beneath him.
Reality envelopes the visions that plagues him, and memory drowns them both.
He aches. It gnaws at his bones, grinds his skull to dust. It’s so different and familiar to the sort that he is familiar with; a fact that has him shoving child-sized fists into his mouth and subsequently almost strangling himself on the noise that bursts and dies within the cavity of his chest in the span of a heartbeat.
He doesn’t cry.
He doesn’t cry.
Obi-Wan does not cry when he awakes in the Halls of Healing. The sights, scents and touch as it brushes against the calcified stone of his shields are the breath of a warmth whisper that calls him home. But he is afraid. Oh, how very afraid.
Obi-Wan does not cry when he is lowered into the caring arms of a Creche Master that had been the closest thing to a mother that he’d had in his earlier years. He buries his head in the garbs of her cloak. He feels his chest shudder with every breath that welcomes the memory of a time where he had been truly happy, wrapped in the same presence that had wiped his tears away once, and cradled him when the nights had stretched too long for a restless child.
But her name, her name continues to elude him.
He does not cry when he peers into the mirror of the shared quarters, hearing the rise and fall of Bant’s-Garen’s-Reeft’s breath and so many others huff into the quiet stillness of the next night. It’s deafening compared to the emptiness of the desert. Stifling. Dimly, he thinks about how he has lived through all of their deaths.
A ghost stares back at him from the reflection. Pale, almost sickly skin, a wild shock of fiery hair curling past the ears.
Quinlan used to say that his eyes were an open book. That when the rest of him was stone shuttered down on itself, it was the cracks in his eyes that were the wounds that bled and gave away far more than he had ever intended it to. Far more than he had ever wanted. Far more than he could ever afford to give.
Obi-Wan thinks he might be right.
His fingers are trembling when he reaches up. He limply claws at the air where his Padawan braid had once hung. The ghost does too.
I’m sorry, Obi-Wan mouths, and turns away.
That night, he dreams that he suffocates under the weight of the blankets, warmth so bright that it turns to fire licking his skin once more, and the terrible burden of knowing that laces itself around his throat like a noose.
-_-_-_-
Bant knows something is off. Quinlan knows. Garen and Reeft know.
Force, even Bruck does.
Even if they don’t know the details - even if they can never understand that it is memory that haunts him, not fear, not visions - they know that there is something wrong with him. Obi-Wan knows it himself. This young, and all of their worlds had been each other, flickers of warmth of stars in orbit, always spinning entwined, and there is an intrinsic fracture that carves a chasm even if none of them want to admit it.
Irrevocable truths.
Of the safety of the Temple.
Of the warmth of belonging.
Of the bedrock of knowing the person next to the other in a way that went beyond sight and instead buoyed on the gut-feeling of connection. Like a river in the Force, flowing and comforting in its assurity.
Obi-Wan does not belong.
He cannot.
For how incredibly adept he’d become dealing in deceit during the war and after it during his years of fearful exile, he finds that his defenses are quick to crumple and drown in the light. Cut-off from the Force, he’s been blind for so long that it hurts . He feigns smiles that never reach his eyes. He talks in a voice that is too soft, verging on a whisper, and backtracks when he sees the concerned glances of his crechmates.
He forces himself to relearn. How to walk, how to go through the motions, sitting through classes with a neutral-enough deference for the various assorted instructors to allow slip by. It would be easier if his gait does not belong to a man over triple his age, bent and calloused over desert sands, if, if, if only it does not belong to a general leading his men through a charge into a hail of death and destruction, running, always fleeing. The internal mantra of ‘go, go, go’ that had beat alongside his heart for as long as he can remember, from the moment he was thirteen and stepped out of the Temple and into a transport ship bound for a future that he did not want .
He thinks very carefully. Past and present oscillate behind his eyelids and quietly, Obi-Wan withdraws.
The lull in the space between classes is the worst. Too much time to reflect and remember, to think and mourn and grieve, only to awake into reality and repeat the process all over again. There are so many strings that have puppeteered the future, far too many outcomes and possibilities to grasp onto that he is forced to let go lest he is driven mad. The futility of it tugs at his throat, doubt and nausea spinning within his chest, and for a moment, he wonders if this was what Anakin had felt, right before he had broken beneath the weight of it all.
Fear is a terrible thing.
He feels it, tangled with his heart. He tastes it, rotting in his mouth.
The training salles are bright and airy rooms. Every snap-hiss of the lightsaber - set on the lowest settings, even as they were - made him feel sick, if only for the sudden flashes of memory - the smell of charred flesh that pressed into his lungs, bodies still warm, and the slide of singed fabric against the ground. It makes him think of the crackle of glass, hungry fire burning the horizon, and the agony of once being raked against the flames.
He is shaken out of his thoughts, when Bant touches him gently on the arm.
“Obi,” She says, eyes large and concerned.
“Bant.” Obi-Wan says, helplessly. It is the name of a ghost upon his lips, one among many, he’d watched her pyre burn. He swallows against the sharp acidic burn. He breathes against the stirrings of panic that wedge themself between his ribs. “It’s okay, Bant.” He tells her. “I’ll be alright.”
This... this he knows to be a lie.
Cin Drallig - and Obi-Wan studiously ignores the sudden clench of grief as he is inadvertently reminded of the Jedi's crumpled form on the Temple floor, sightless eyes and burnt fingers reaching futilely for the Padawan, throat burned and discarded close by - instructs them to pair up.
Garen catches his eye, and widens his own meaningfully.
Obi-Wan does his best to mirror the smile that his friend flashes him.
Turns out that his saving grace is that the training ‘saber is the wrong weight in his hands, and the fact that his sense of balance is completely off. Reaching for muscle memory is like struggling through gravel. The currents of the Force are an eddy, swirling and heavy, it is so close that he has to tamper down the instinct of reaching out for it. He already knows through experience that his grip on it is tremulous and slippery.
The mat is soft beneath his feet. He angles in a way that leaves his defenses laughably open, and when Garen’s strike lands too quick and heavy to combat, he lets himself fall.
-_-_-_-
It doesn't take long before he succumbs to the temptation and once more, slips out of his bed.
The training salles is empty. As he had known it would be.
It’s dark. Shadows shroud every inch of the room, the lights long since off. The ceiling stretches. Obi-Wan’s footsteps are virtually silent against the padded mats, feeling every inch the ghost that he once was after Mustafar, after the Temple burned, just… being dust and ash and sand drifting in the stretching horizon of endlessness.
He goes through the motions of the katas.
He practices the katas of the last class, body moving on default, the repetition a soothing balm as the familiar tension soothes his limbs. The pleasant burn of exertion settles in. He relaxes into the starting pose once more.
The first time he’d done this, his form clumsy and inexperienced, it was until his thighs had given out and his palm had scabbed over from where he had pressed it too hard into the groove and notches of the lightsaber hilt. Then, he had sought the distraction. The pain. Anything better than the silence of his and Qui-Gon’s shared quarters after New Apsolon.
Now it was clarity he sought.
His eyes remained closed. His feet knew the steps even before he found them. The steps of his childhood - each motion engraved in his mind and etched in his skin, he breathes, the currents of the Force brush on either side of him and he can almost trick himself into believing that the subtle displacement of the airflow belongs to a tangible memory bleeding into reality, his crechmates beside him or his Master’s firm grip correcting his stance or a young Anakin’s wide eyes as he too was once eager to learn the same.
Then his years as a Padawan. His feet never wavered even as his mind tersed for just a second before he locked his stance. Setting his jaw, he swept through the first few motions before launching a sweeping attack against enemies only he could see. The lightsaber cut through air, the Ataru that was once second nature to him stilted and hesitant. He lingers on the precipice of a leap, but he’s afraid, afraid to lose himself.
Sweat pours down the side of his neck. He loses sensation in the soles of his feet.
The world falls away, his grasp of it, and Obi-Wan Kenobi reverts to Soresu. With it, he remembers war, a hail of blaster fire raining from darkened skies, flashes of white armour and mechanical whirrs and voices, the blue of Anakin’s eyes, the blue of Anakin’s lightsaber haloed in the red glow of Mustafar. He is one half of a whole and there is a fracture, there is something missing from within him. It is as if his soul cries out, keening, and it is a wound he knows has festered for decades now but the pain has never learnt to cease.
His eyes are unseeing by the time he slides into Shii-Cho. His fingers are weak, bent and broken, buckled under the force of Vader’s hold. Grey corridors and blank walls saturate his thoughts, the cold of the Death Star, that awful twisting cry of the kyber crystals used to hurt and destroy, its purpose warped and perverse.
Alderaan becomes a grave.
Bail and Breha, dead.
Billions more killed in a single instance.
Vader is more machine than man. Obi-Wan has once shattered his mask, ripped the air from his former Padawan’s lungs twice over, and wept in the wake of it. Because, even now, he cannot bring himself to kill Anakin. Fire haunts their shared past and present, and Obi-Wan grieves and hates himself for it.
He’s thirteen and breaking, twenty and breaking, then thirty and shattered.
His fingernails scrape the names of the dead into his skin, it sinks and scars, he falls and drowns, but his head is brought gasping and spluttering into the surface. He is a speck in the vastness of infinity. And yet reality never stops depending on hinges and linchpins.
History repeats, he repeats, and his final stance before his knees give out entirely is that of acceptance, falling back on the roots of Shii-Cho. The phantom burn of a lightsaber sinks across his torso and throat. But he is glad that Luke will never see his body hit the ground, that Luke will never know his last memory of Obi-Wan to be the smell of charred flesh and a body bisected neatly in two.
History repeats, Obi-Wan crumples to his knees, and reaches up to wipe away the tears that slide down his cheeks.
It takes him a long moment to collect himself and steel himself to return the way he came. He breathes, settles himself, and thinks he might have gotten what he was looking for in that split second of reprieve. He doesn't look back as he leaves, his silhouette woven in the shadows.
But here’s the thing -
He never realizes that he has unwittingly gathered an audience, that night.