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Obi-wan woke in darkness. Given that his last memory was of Dooku with his lightsabers out, he supposed that meant he had lost and was now… somewhere else. He felt altogether too corporeal to be dead, which was a bit of a surprise. Clearly, there was something else in store for him.
He wasn’t bound, which was also a surprise, and was able to get to his feet with relative ease. The floor was metal, and when he stomped on it, the sound radiated from a fairly small room. The Force felt… strange. Muffled. Not so muffled that he couldn’t feel Darkness soaking the area around him, but muffled enough that he wouldn’t really be able to use it. He wondered how that effect was achieved as he stretched his arms out in front of him and took slow, careful steps forward.
He hit a wall quickly, and began tracing around it with those same slow steps. The room was small, square, and empty. It appeared that he had simply been locked in a room with no lights and whatever that Force-inhibitor-but-not was.
“Well. I suppose I have had worse accommodations,” he said, moving to begin mapping out the middle of the room too.
He had space for about ten paces, and at five he hit something. It was about waist-height, and just as metallic as everything else. Obi-wan ran his hands over it, pausing when his questing fingers met something… smooth. Not metal-smooth, bone-smooth.
Obi-wan felt over it carefully. It was… a mask. A half-mask. Two eye-holes, a space for the nose that opened into the bottom of the mask that would follow the cheek bones of a human face, and a medallion on the forehead.
“...Odd,” he murmured, flipping it over in his hands a few times before setting it back down.
He stepped around the stand and kept moving toward the far wall.
At six paces he stopped, hands still extended.
The wall was missing.
Obi-wan took another hesitant step forward, and still, nothing. He stomped again, and heard it echo into a much larger space than was there previously.
There were no walls behind him either, from the sound of it.
“Hello?” he called into that darkness, “Is there a reason we’re playing this game?”
He was guessing that someone was doing this. Dooku, perhaps. They very well might be in some sort of mental projection, with Obi-wan drugged just enough to make him more susceptible.
The darkness around him grew… heavier. Colder. Obi-wan felt a shiver run through him and suspected that if he could see, he would be exhaling clouds into the icy air around him.
“Now this is just uncalled for,” he muttered, wrapping his arms around himself.
The cold nipped at him like a living thing, sapping heat from his body and leaving him shaking as it got harder and harder to breathe.
Obi-wan tried to draw the Force up around him, but it was a meager effort that only barely staved off the deepest chills. His shivering was increasing as the temperature dropped.
“Wh-wh-what-?” he stammered through chattering teeth.
Maybe he was thinking about it wrong. If he was in some sort of Force illusion, he needed shields, not warmth.
Obi-wan was good with shielding. He had to be, with Anakin as his padawan and the emotional mess that was the Clone Wars. So when his shields wove into place and the cold mostly disappeared, he wasn't shocked.
Or at least, he wasn’t shocked until the Dark pressed down on them until they (and Obi-wan) buckled under the weight of it.
“You’ll have to do better than that, Jedi,” a voice like a starship crash, all tearing metal and screams, murmured in his mind.
“W-w-well, if-f-f-f you insi-i-i-ist,” Obi-wan managed to force out, and gathered his strength as much as he could.
He’d faced more intrusive Sith tricks, and he knew how to handle them. Obi-wan began knitting his shields again, this time around only the deepest, most important parts of his being. Everything else could be lost and repaired, except for what he was protecting, and that made his shields stronger. If whatever this was wanted to tear them open, it would have to destroy him utterly; there would be no information to be gained from him.
The Dark pressed in on him again, gnawing through his outer shields and heading inwards, only to stop at his innermost ones. Its teeth skated off them, unable to find purchase.
“Clever.”
Obi-wan was incapable of responding.
“Very well. Remain here. I have business to attend to. I will return for you later.”
Obi-wan had no idea how long he was buried in his shielding, how long he spent actively reinforcing the shields around his most central self as the Dark around him scraped away at them, but he was aware when the Dark lifted.
Obi-wan snapped awake in a medbay. He was… in the medbay on his ship, the Negotiator. How had he gotten here? What had happened?
Anakin’s face suddenly appeared in his view, pale and terrified.
“Master?” he asked softly.
“I believe so,” Obi-wan answered with a trace of a grin, “What happened?”
“What do you remember?”
Anakin still looked terrified. Obi-wan cast his memory back, before he’d found himself in that little room.
“I encountered Dooku, and it went just as well as every other time I’ve faced him in single combat,” Obi-wan said.
Anakin nodded shakily, a relieved grin growing on his face.
“Well, actually, he cheated. You got hit with a dart from behind that knocked you out.”
“Ah. Rather unsportsmanlike.”
“Right? Luckily we found you on his ship, but we’re bringing you back to the Temple so they can make sure nothing’s… gone wrong,” Anakin explained.
Obi-wan wanted to ask why a simple kidnapping would require him to be brought all the way back to Coruscant to be examined, but the still-stressed look on Anakin’s face made him bite his tongue.
It was probably a good idea regardless; he swore he could still feel licks of that cold travelling up his muscles.