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remixredux08Title: Desert Glass (Ordinary Time remix)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
penknife
Summary: In his years on Tatooine, Obi-Wan finds he has a lot to learn.
Fandom: Star Wars
Character(s): Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn, Luke Skywalker
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I don't own them; the copyright holders do.
Original story: From a Certain Point of View by Jaxmari (imadra_blue)
Notes: Thanks tonestra for beta reading.
Desert Glass
Obi-Wan has held plenty of babies before. He can even remember a few of them, the ones he took from their mother's arms, with calming words for their mother's tears. He has fed a baby before, soothing its unreasoning fear until it was willing to suck on the bottle held in his unfamiliar hands.
This is different, if only because he's never traveled alone with a baby before. He doesn't sleep more than a few hours on the way to Tatooine, and he learns that he can fly with a sleeping baby in the crook of his arm. The baby does not seem to like being put down, still hungry for the warm contact of skin on skin.
It is much harder to fly with a crying baby, and Obi-Wan finds himself grateful for astromech droids and wondering if it would really be all that harmful simply to make the baby sleep for the duration of the trip. He can only imagine the look the crèche attendants would have given him if he had handed them a baby he'd hypnotized to sleep.
Instead he lets the astromech droid monitor their path through hyperspace and feeds the baby and then sings it a children's song he remembers from the crèche. It was a counting song for bouncing balls, and he can remember the beat of the ball on the stone floors. The baby eventually quiets and squints up at him through hazy blue eyes.
They're not the exact color of Anakin's eyes, not this early, but he thinks he can see something of Anakin in baby Luke's suspicious expression.
"Don't be afraid," he says, cupping his hand over the baby's head like it's delicate glass. "Hush, little one. There's nothing to fear."
He's always been an excellent liar.
When they set down on Tatooine, Obi-Wan finds a spaceport bar where he can sell the ship. It's a rough place, and he feels naked without his lightsaber at his hip, but he's aware that would make him memorable. He's not sure what it will be like trying never to be memorable again.
He holds the baby like a parcel wrapped in a spare dropcloth and makes sure that it sleeps through his negotiations. He doesn't think anyone will remember what he was carrying after he leaves. He hires the use of some sort of large reptile saddled for riding, and turns it toward the edge of town and out into the desert.
It's easy to fit the little he's brought with him into the beast's saddlebags. Jedi knights aren't supposed to own much more than their clothing and a few necessary items, and he's left most of that behind him in whatever's left of the Temple. He is traveling light, he tells himself; he feels light, as if scoured out by the dry wind that makes his lips taste of sand.
The baby opens its eyes, and perhaps it is something in the light that makes them look exactly like Anakin's eyes. He squints up at the sky in the orange-gold light, and his expression is nothing like Anakin's. The baby likes the pretty colors of the sky after the harsh whiteness of shipboard lights, and it hits Obi-Wan like a fist clenching in his chest that as much as he wants to think of it as "the baby," it is Anakin's child that he holds in his arms.
It doesn't change anything to admit it except that it makes it harder to put the child into Beru Lars' arms and then turn and walk away. He tells himself that it is only that he doesn't entirely trust them to know what to do with a Force-sensitive child, but he knows better than that. It's not that you must not love, Qui-Gon says in his memory. It's that you must love and let go.
Obi-Wan has never been good at that. He still remembers the months after Qui-Gon died, trying not to flinch at every casual mention of Qui-Gon's name. Now he rides away without a backward look, and when he thinks about Anakin he is in no danger of flinching or tears. His face is dry, and everything feels like paper in his hands.
He spends a moderate amount of money on an abandoned farmstead, which he buys sight unseen, unable to imagine that it matters where he stays as long as it's close enough to the Lars farm and far enough out of town. The trader who sells it to him is honest enough to warn him that he can't expect to make a living from moisture farming there; the cliffs break the wind and leave little moisture for the vaporators.
"As long as there's enough water for me to drink," Obi-Wan says. "I've no intention of farming. Only of spending some time in solitary contemplation."
The trader pushes the papers toward him, probably not wanting to give Obi-Wan a chance to try to convert him to whatever religion might lead a man to live alone in the desert. "There might be some Tusken Raiders in those parts," the man says. "I wouldn't go out alone after dark."
"I think I'll manage," Obi-Wan says. He signs Ben Kenobi after a moment's thought. Kenobi is a common enough name, but he thinks Obi-Wan would be pushing his luck. This may be the Rim, but there are still those who trade in useful information. He'll have to find some of them himself.
"Kenobi," the trader says. "I saw a Jedi named Kenobi on the holos once."
"Really?" Obi-Wan asks lightly. "I don't pay much attention to the holonets."
The man nods as if that's what he expects of a religious crackpot. "You're not missing much lately," he says. "Can't even get the news in Mos Eisley, let alone out at Anchorhead. Some relays down or something."
"I'll do all right without the news," Obi-Wan says, and tries not to worry about it.
He walks through town afterwards and stops to buy a few clothes, including a heavy wool cloak for cold desert nights, letting the familiar game of bargaining take up his attention. It's more uncomfortable to realize he will need blankets and cooking pots and plates to eat off, furniture or at least the materials to make furniture, and various other household commonplaces.
It's not exactly forbidden for him to own such things, not when they will no longer be available courtesy of the Jedi Temple or an obliging host. All the same, he buys only the barest essentials, remembering every lecture he ever gave to Anakin about inappropriate luxuries. He holds a glass bowl up to the light; it is made from the native sand, a beautiful thing for a practical purpose.
The last present Anakin tried to give him as a child was a glass bowl, which he had probably also chosen because it had a practical purpose and was a subtle green on blue, like light filtering through sea water, rather than the flashy colors he would have chosen for himself. Obi-Wan said mildly that it was very pretty, and that he was sure it would be very useful for the dining hall, where perhaps Anakin would like to take it.
"Later," Anakin said, and put the bowl down hard on the edge of a table in preparation for stalking out, where it teetered and then smashed to the floor. Anakin stopped, flinching at the sound and looking down at the shattered glass. "I didn't mean to break it."
"It doesn't matter," Obi-Wan said gently. "It's just a thing."
Anakin's eyes were still stormy, although he was already reaching for a broom to clean up the mess he'd made. "Then why can't I give it to you, if it's so unimportant?"
"Because then it would matter to me if it broke," Obi-Wan said. He can't remember Anakin trying to give him any presents after that, but he's still not sure whether Anakin understood what he meant.
Now he puts the glass bowl down and buys a rough pottery one instead, sturdy and dull and impossible to be sentimental about. He winds up with too many packages to carry, but one of the farmers is willing to take him out to the farmstead from Anchorage, out of some sense of obligation to a prospective neighbor that Obi-Wan doesn't entirely understand.
"You're sure you want to stay out here without a speeder?" the man asks, his own landspeeder hovering over the sand that wavers like water underneath it. "I don't know how long before anybody'll be back this way."
"I can walk into town if I need anything," Obi-Wan says. He has the credits to buy a speeder, but they'll have to last him some time, and besides he thinks owning a speeder will contribute to the temptation to run about trying to do things when there is really nothing for him to do right now but wait.
The first night he lies down on the floor of the small bedroom, wrapped in a blanket with his cloak for a pillow. It is more comfortable than many beds he has had over the years, and his dinner at least edible, although he has never experimented much with cooking beyond heating packaged camping supplies.
The sound of the wind is a constant unfamiliar drone in the darkness, and sleep eludes him. Finally he gets up and goes outside barefoot and without his cloak. The sand is cold and harder than he expected, more like walking across stone than walking on the beach.
Looking out across the desert in the silver moonlight he could almost believe he is at the edge of a great ocean. He was born near the sea, Qui-Gon told him once, though he had always brushed aside most questions about Obi-Wan's life before the Jedi. Now he finds himself expecting the cry of a seabird swooping down over the silver sand. Instead there is only the endless wind and the cold dry air that seems to feed on the moisture of his skin.
You know better than that, he thinks, and finds himself turning, because he can almost believe the words weren't his own. He sees only the empty house in the moonlight and the sand swirling around itself, slowly wearing down the stone.
He breathes in the dry air and lets his mind quiet until he can feel the shape of small minds in the darkness. There are small furred things awake now, scuttling across the sand, and reptilian hunters stalking their prey. There are creatures alive under the sand and winging their way through the canyon.
He reaches farther still, and catches fleeting impressions of thinking beings, riding out in the darkness to check their deep wells for water. They are not human, and they are far at the edge of his range. He cannot sense the nearest humans, but he knows they are there somewhere across that flat expanse of sand. The desert is not empty, and he is not alone.
He waits two weeks before he goes into Anchorhead and finds a bar that provides access to the holonet. It is nothing like the spaceport bars in Mos Eisley, serving more stew and ale than hard liquor and with small children running between the tables. Obi-Wan pays the access fee and settles down in front of the dusty screen at a corner table, though the owner warns him there's little new programming available.
"Some kind of problem with the nets," he says. "I hear it's going on all over."
Obi-Wan isn't all that surprised. The last thing Palpatine can want at the moment is easy communication about whatever political and military moves he's making. He can't put the pieces together himself, especially not without anyone to talk to. He's always thought better with an audience to react.
He confines himself to the simpler question of whether he's the object of any sort of widespread manhunt. The most recent news shows don't mention him, or indeed mention politics much at all, and Obi-Wan tries to watch patiently as the news anchors discuss a famine on an obscure Rim planet and the results of a sports tournament. A data search provides no biography, which is a little more alarming.
On the other hand, when he thinks about it, ceasing to exist on record suits him well enough. He has pushed his chair back and is about to flick the screen off when the set finally flashes success in its search for Obi-Wan Kenobi, in a locally stored copy of a news program years old. There's fifteen seconds of footage, which plays obligingly in a loop when he freezes the page.
Team Kenobi and Skywalker reads the caption, while above it Anakin wrestles a protesting Obi-Wan into the frame. Anakin is flashing the holographer his usual photogenic smile, while Obi-Wan is looking exasperated. He can't remember what they'd just done. Won some battle, probably, or saved a planet, that sort of thing.
There's a text record that would probably tell him, but he can't seem to focus properly on the screen.
"Bad news?" the proprietor asks, his hands full of crockery. This is not an anonymous holonet lounge full of other people's impersonal business, he realizes, but the place where people hear of distant deaths and wars and other ripples spreading toward this remote planet. Refusing to answer such questions will make him an object of suspicion.
"An old friend who died," Obi-Wan says.
"Sorry to hear it."
Obi-Wan nods absently, requesting a copy of the record for download to the data chip he carries. It's mainly in order to create a connection to the local holonet that makes it easier for him to destroy the copy of the news program. He might as well complete Anakin's task of erasing the existence of Obi-Wan Kenobi.
He hesitates, his fingers on the controls, ready to delete the hologram from the data chip as well. He can't remember that day, though he knows it happened, preserved in fragile energy patterns on the sliver of silicon in his hand. He can't bring himself to snuff it out.
It's three more months before Qui-Gon comes to him. He's never sure if it's a coincidence that it's the day after he knocks the pottery bowl from the table with an incautious movement and stands staring at its fragments on the floor until finally he sits down among them and lets himself cry until his head aches, resting his forehead on his dusty knees.
He feels better the next day, enough so that when Qui-Gon appears in the house, a glowing blue phantom who casts no shadow in the afternoon sunlight, Obi-Wan can turn to him and say lightly, "Hello, Master. What kept you?"
"I'm not your master anymore," Qui-Gon says, and then, "What do you mean, what kept me? Does this look easy to you?"
"I wouldn't know," Obi-Wan says, and then closes his eyes for a moment, because he feels perilously close to tears again. "I thought you were gone forever," he says.
"You know better than that." Qui-Gon seems to sit down against the wall, his hands on his knees. They could be waiting for a transport ship or for the dining hall to begin serving breakfast. "So, how's the baby?"
"I'm sure he's fine," Obi-Wan says. "His aunt and uncle are looking after him."
"You haven't even been to see him?"
"I don't particularly want to give them a chance to have second thoughts," Obi-Wan says.
Qui-Gon raises his eyebrows at him. "And you can't sneak past a couple of farmers?"
"Well, obviously I ..." Obi-Wan trails off in frustration. This reminds him all too sharply of various frustrating conversations with Qui-Gon when Qui-Gon was alive. "I thought I was supposed to be learning how to let go."
"Why don't you trust yourself to do it?"
"You know why," Obi-Wan says.
"Assume I've been dead for fifteen years, here."
Obi-Wan runs a hand through his hair. "You came back from the dead to tell me to visit the baby?"
"I came back from the dead to teach you how to master death," Qui-Gon says. "You can visit the baby on your own time." Qui-Gon stretches out his ghostly legs and crosses them. "So, why don't you trust yourself to let go?"
Obi-Wan takes a moment to construct a reply. He's aware that it's unfair to continue dodging the question with someone who's gone to so much trouble to be here.
"I missed you," he says simply. "And Anakin ... I always cared too much."
"Were you afraid of losing him? Or me?"
Obi-Wan considers that. Before Qui-Gon died, he can't remember ever having been afraid of much at all. "I was afraid of what he might do," he says. "He had too much power and too little control, always. But of losing him ...."
He thinks of the time he came closest to it, pushing Anakin past him and tearing the tiles from the wall with the Force to fling them at their pursuers in a lethal hailstorm, pushing himself harder than he ever had. He did what was necessary to save them both, entirely in the moment.
"I don't know," he says.
"Love can be a strength as well as a weakness," Qui-Gon says.
Obi-Wan raises an eyebrow at him. "Is that what Master Yoda would say?"
"You know it's not. But I'm the one you've got for gratuitous advice."
"It's not gratuitous," Obi-Wan says. "I'm meant to be learning from you."
"And I'm here to teach you," Qui-Gon says. "But I'm not your master anymore."
Obi-Wan does visit the baby, walking quietly into the Lars farmhouse when everyone inside is sleeping, unseen by sensors and droids. There is a cradle made from half of an old metal tank filed carefully smooth by someone's hands, and in it a baby. The baby opens blue eyes and reaches for him with a laugh like water over rocks.
"Shh," Obi-Wan says, and draws up his hood, stepping back into the shadows as Beru stirs and then sits up. She does not see him in the doorway, not even when she bends over the cradle and picks up Luke, bouncing him on her shoulder. He is not there for her to see, he tells himself; he is the ghost.
He walks home through the desert night, a shadow among shadows. The chill pierces to the bone. When he is in sight of his own house, he picks up a handful of sand and lets it run through his fingers.
The tiny grains tumble over each other, making complex patterns that he can sense more easily than control. He lets them fall naturally, blowing away on the wind, and then pockets another handful of sand.
There are long hours in the days, even with many of them spent in meditation, and he spends some of them learning to make useful things. The winds sometimes bring him useable scraps of plastic or scrap metal, or, even more rarely, branches worn like driftwood by sand and wind. He slowly shapes them into furnishings to ease his days, though he has never had a gift for working with his hands.
His neighbors understand little of what Obi-Wan does, but they understand that. No one seems surprised when he begins asking what tools he'd need for making glass. He buys a furnace and the minerals he will need to add to the desert sand.
The first time he heats the furnace until it is limned in a red glow, he has to pause, aware of his body's reactions to the blast of heat and the red molten sand. The adrenaline will only make it more difficult for him to master this craft, which has nothing to do with his dreams of burning in molten rock, his lungs filling with burning gas. His fear is the greatest danger here.
He has no doubt that he can master it, despite his lack of a teacher. If primitive civilizations managed to make glass without even the benefit of instructional books, surely he can manage it. It takes him quite a few failed efforts to begin to feel that perhaps he would have been better off with someone from a primitive civilization to tell him where he was going wrong.
The first few vessels of glass that he manages to form into reasonably useful shapes shatter hours later. Without the steady cooling of an annealing kiln, their own internal stresses tear them apart. If the vessel does not break within the first weeks, it is likely to survive, one of his books tells him.
He learns to anneal the glass in the flames, lowering the flame slowly while the glass cools from molten heat to merely burning hot, bathed in fire. He learns to sense the tension within the glass, feeling it pulling itself to pieces as it cools. The first three glass cups that survive are not beautiful, but when he lifts one of them to the sun the light filters through sea-green onto the dry, sandy floor.
He visits the boy a few times over the next few years, more often than not without his aunt and uncle knowing he's there. It's four years before he tells Owen Lars that it's time for Luke's training to begin.
"Out of the question," Owen says. "The last thing he needs is for you to fill his head with mystic nonsense."
"It's not nonsense," Obi-Wan says patiently. "He has a great deal of potential, and he needs training to use it wisely."
Owen glances out the door at Luke, who is playing in the courtyard. "He's a good boy. He doesn't need you to teach him to behave."
"He has you to teach him that, and I'm sure you're doing a fine job. But he needs me to teach him to be a Jedi."
Owen's eyes are hard. "Like you taught his father?"
Obi-Wan can't find an answer.
"We've had enough of you around here," Owen says, and Obi-Wan isn't sure if he means him or the Jedi or the inner systems in general. Possibly all three. "You're not taking my boy off to get killed fighting some war that doesn't matter to us."
"It will matter," Obi-Wan says, but Owen has already turned toward the doorway.
"Luke!" Beru calls from across the courtyard. "Come and wash up before lunch!"
Obi-Wan watches as Luke runs to her. He could take the boy from them, he thinks. It's not the ideal situation, but at least then he could begin Luke's training. Owen is too stubborn for Obi-Wan to force him to accept Jedi training in his own house, but there's nothing the man could do to prevent Obi-Wan from taking Luke away.
And yet he remembers another little boy with the same eyes, crying as his mother told him to be brave. Anakin had already learned to fear losing the people he loved. Luke hasn't learned that lesson yet, but it would be so easy to teach it. Obi-Wan can't begin by shattering the boy's trust. It's such a fragile thing for all their hopes to rest on.
Time passes, and years slip by. He is walking through Anchorhead with a satchel of food bought at the general store when he catches his reflection in a sliver of dusty glass. He looks old. He supposes after all this time he shouldn't be surprised.
There are children clambering over the tables outside the bar, playing an involved game of chase, pointing their fingers at each other and making blaster noises and collapsing in the dust. He recognizes Luke and forces himself to only smile tolerantly, like any man amused at the antics of children.
As he watches, Luke flings his arms wide and makes a drama of having been shot, diving off the table and sprawling in the sand. "You got me, Biggs!" he calls.
"You can't talk, you're dead!" a dark-haired boy yells back.
Luke groans theatrically and collapses to the ground for all of thirty seconds before lifting his head to see if anyone is paying attention to him. Obi-Wan smiles a little, and Luke looks embarrassed.
"Hey, Ben," he says. "Are you looking for Uncle Owen? He's over looking at irrigators."
"Just passing through," Obi-Wan says. He pats the boy on the shoulder and walks on.
He wakes from troubled dreams that night to see Qui-Gon, apparently sitting at the foot of his bed as he used to sometimes when Obi-Wan was a small child. He sits up in bed, suddenly amused by the situation.
"Did you know you look younger than I do now?" he says.
"Appearances can be deceiving," Qui-Gon says.
"And Luke looks like Anakin when I first met him." Obi-Wan tries not to think of Luke that way, to remind himself that Luke is a separate person.
"Are you still determined not to love him?" Qui-Gon asks, as if he's merely curious.
"I didn't succeed very well at that with Anakin." It was always a temptation to let Anakin hold onto him as tightly as he wanted to, and give him every generous and entangling gift he could come up with. Resisting that temptation was one of his few victories with Anakin, but in retrospect he's not sure it made much difference.
"It wouldn't have made you more likely to reach him," Qui-Gon says. "Or made it hurt less when you failed."
It is perversely a relief to hear someone else agree that he failed Anakin in such a matter-of-fact voice. If it is speakable, it is bearable.
"It would have hurt less when I lost him," Obi-Wan says. It's a small consideration, in the grand scheme of things, but it still looms large in the restricted compass of his life.
"You haven't been listening," Qui-Gon says. "Nothing is lost." He points out a water glass on the table by the bed. "Suppose I smash that."
"I'd like to see you try," Obi-Wan says.
"All right, for the sake of argument, suppose you smash that."
"That would be wasteful," Obi-Wan points out.
Qui-Gon doesn't seem displeased with his answer. "So it would. But what would you have lost?"
"The glass, presumably."
"One future of the glass," Qui-Gon says. "As every moment of every day you lose thousands of possible futures. But the glass still exists, in the past, in the present, in the future as a hundred broken pieces. One object moving in time."
"I still can't drink from it," Obi-Wan says.
"Not in its future. But its past still exists. It still exists."
"And you ..." Obi-Wan says slowly.
"Exist in the Force," Qui-Gon says. "Think of it as seeing me as I am, rather than as I am at this moment."
"Except that I can't touch you," Obi-Wan says. He picks up the glass instead and turns it around in his hands.
"You can't have everything."
"So we're back to loving and letting go."
"It's time you learned how," Qui-Gon says. "Besides, he'll love you. Don't you think it's only fair for you to take some risks in return?"
Obi-Wan gets up and goes outside barefoot, standing on the cool flagstones outside his house. He's greeted the same view every morning for the last ten years. He knows the canyon through every season, the brief bloom that comes with the infrequent rains and the parched thirst of the long dry season. He knows the habits of the small hunters that make their dens in the shade of his vaporators and the imperceptible trails that the sand people follow on their long patrols.
He's never thought he would come to love this place, and yet he does. He's never thought he would find peace here, and yet he thinks that he has. The beauty of the landscape is stark and uncompromising, but it is still beautiful. It is shaping Luke as he grows, as his aunt and uncle are shaping him, making him into something entirely different than what the Temple would have made of him.
There's still time, he thinks, to let the wind and the weather make what it will of Luke. He has grown patient, and he can wait for Luke to come to him. He trusts that in time he will.
It's ten more years before he holds up a piece of glass he has made and can truly say to himself that there is no flaw. The piece is the same sea-blue, but clear and perfectly shaped, with precisely the curve he had in his mind when he began. When filled with water, it throws off shifting shadows in the sunlight. He tips it over a bowl, and the water pours in a steady stream.
He thinks Luke will thank him without appreciating the gift, knowing the boy will be far more interested in weapons than such homely things. But Obi-Wan thinks that Luke may in time be grateful for a piece of his home to remind him of it when he is far away. And if it also serves as a reminder of Obi-Wan, well, he does not intend to be easily forgotten.
When Luke comes to him at last, though, there is no time for anything but the most practical of gifts. Obi-Wan leaves the pitcher behind, along with everything he has made these twenty years; if they are to escape with their lives, they must travel light. He gets into the speeder with Luke as if he is only leaving for a day, and lets the boy drive them away without a backward look.
Luke's eyes are the blue of desert glass, and Obi-Wan is reminded of the first time he drove with Anakin, clinging to the armrest of the speeder as Anakin made an impossible turn at breakneck speed and smiled. Obi-Wan smiles a little too at the memory, though he knows that where they are going they will find nothing to smile about. Both are true, and he is on a journey from one to the other and past both to his future that is growing shorter by the moment.
He will not have much time with the boy. He sees that, now, but there's no pain in it, only the sense of doing what is necessary, entirely in the moment. "It's all right," he murmurs, to himself more than to anyone else; he knows there's nothing to fear.
Author:
penknifeSummary: In his years on Tatooine, Obi-Wan finds he has a lot to learn.
Fandom: Star Wars
Character(s): Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn, Luke Skywalker
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I don't own them; the copyright holders do.
Original story: From a Certain Point of View by Jaxmari (
imadra_blue)Notes: Thanks to
nestra for beta reading.Desert Glass
Obi-Wan has held plenty of babies before. He can even remember a few of them, the ones he took from their mother's arms, with calming words for their mother's tears. He has fed a baby before, soothing its unreasoning fear until it was willing to suck on the bottle held in his unfamiliar hands.
This is different, if only because he's never traveled alone with a baby before. He doesn't sleep more than a few hours on the way to Tatooine, and he learns that he can fly with a sleeping baby in the crook of his arm. The baby does not seem to like being put down, still hungry for the warm contact of skin on skin.
It is much harder to fly with a crying baby, and Obi-Wan finds himself grateful for astromech droids and wondering if it would really be all that harmful simply to make the baby sleep for the duration of the trip. He can only imagine the look the crèche attendants would have given him if he had handed them a baby he'd hypnotized to sleep.
Instead he lets the astromech droid monitor their path through hyperspace and feeds the baby and then sings it a children's song he remembers from the crèche. It was a counting song for bouncing balls, and he can remember the beat of the ball on the stone floors. The baby eventually quiets and squints up at him through hazy blue eyes.
They're not the exact color of Anakin's eyes, not this early, but he thinks he can see something of Anakin in baby Luke's suspicious expression.
"Don't be afraid," he says, cupping his hand over the baby's head like it's delicate glass. "Hush, little one. There's nothing to fear."
He's always been an excellent liar.
When they set down on Tatooine, Obi-Wan finds a spaceport bar where he can sell the ship. It's a rough place, and he feels naked without his lightsaber at his hip, but he's aware that would make him memorable. He's not sure what it will be like trying never to be memorable again.
He holds the baby like a parcel wrapped in a spare dropcloth and makes sure that it sleeps through his negotiations. He doesn't think anyone will remember what he was carrying after he leaves. He hires the use of some sort of large reptile saddled for riding, and turns it toward the edge of town and out into the desert.
It's easy to fit the little he's brought with him into the beast's saddlebags. Jedi knights aren't supposed to own much more than their clothing and a few necessary items, and he's left most of that behind him in whatever's left of the Temple. He is traveling light, he tells himself; he feels light, as if scoured out by the dry wind that makes his lips taste of sand.
The baby opens its eyes, and perhaps it is something in the light that makes them look exactly like Anakin's eyes. He squints up at the sky in the orange-gold light, and his expression is nothing like Anakin's. The baby likes the pretty colors of the sky after the harsh whiteness of shipboard lights, and it hits Obi-Wan like a fist clenching in his chest that as much as he wants to think of it as "the baby," it is Anakin's child that he holds in his arms.
It doesn't change anything to admit it except that it makes it harder to put the child into Beru Lars' arms and then turn and walk away. He tells himself that it is only that he doesn't entirely trust them to know what to do with a Force-sensitive child, but he knows better than that. It's not that you must not love, Qui-Gon says in his memory. It's that you must love and let go.
Obi-Wan has never been good at that. He still remembers the months after Qui-Gon died, trying not to flinch at every casual mention of Qui-Gon's name. Now he rides away without a backward look, and when he thinks about Anakin he is in no danger of flinching or tears. His face is dry, and everything feels like paper in his hands.
He spends a moderate amount of money on an abandoned farmstead, which he buys sight unseen, unable to imagine that it matters where he stays as long as it's close enough to the Lars farm and far enough out of town. The trader who sells it to him is honest enough to warn him that he can't expect to make a living from moisture farming there; the cliffs break the wind and leave little moisture for the vaporators.
"As long as there's enough water for me to drink," Obi-Wan says. "I've no intention of farming. Only of spending some time in solitary contemplation."
The trader pushes the papers toward him, probably not wanting to give Obi-Wan a chance to try to convert him to whatever religion might lead a man to live alone in the desert. "There might be some Tusken Raiders in those parts," the man says. "I wouldn't go out alone after dark."
"I think I'll manage," Obi-Wan says. He signs Ben Kenobi after a moment's thought. Kenobi is a common enough name, but he thinks Obi-Wan would be pushing his luck. This may be the Rim, but there are still those who trade in useful information. He'll have to find some of them himself.
"Kenobi," the trader says. "I saw a Jedi named Kenobi on the holos once."
"Really?" Obi-Wan asks lightly. "I don't pay much attention to the holonets."
The man nods as if that's what he expects of a religious crackpot. "You're not missing much lately," he says. "Can't even get the news in Mos Eisley, let alone out at Anchorhead. Some relays down or something."
"I'll do all right without the news," Obi-Wan says, and tries not to worry about it.
He walks through town afterwards and stops to buy a few clothes, including a heavy wool cloak for cold desert nights, letting the familiar game of bargaining take up his attention. It's more uncomfortable to realize he will need blankets and cooking pots and plates to eat off, furniture or at least the materials to make furniture, and various other household commonplaces.
It's not exactly forbidden for him to own such things, not when they will no longer be available courtesy of the Jedi Temple or an obliging host. All the same, he buys only the barest essentials, remembering every lecture he ever gave to Anakin about inappropriate luxuries. He holds a glass bowl up to the light; it is made from the native sand, a beautiful thing for a practical purpose.
The last present Anakin tried to give him as a child was a glass bowl, which he had probably also chosen because it had a practical purpose and was a subtle green on blue, like light filtering through sea water, rather than the flashy colors he would have chosen for himself. Obi-Wan said mildly that it was very pretty, and that he was sure it would be very useful for the dining hall, where perhaps Anakin would like to take it.
"Later," Anakin said, and put the bowl down hard on the edge of a table in preparation for stalking out, where it teetered and then smashed to the floor. Anakin stopped, flinching at the sound and looking down at the shattered glass. "I didn't mean to break it."
"It doesn't matter," Obi-Wan said gently. "It's just a thing."
Anakin's eyes were still stormy, although he was already reaching for a broom to clean up the mess he'd made. "Then why can't I give it to you, if it's so unimportant?"
"Because then it would matter to me if it broke," Obi-Wan said. He can't remember Anakin trying to give him any presents after that, but he's still not sure whether Anakin understood what he meant.
Now he puts the glass bowl down and buys a rough pottery one instead, sturdy and dull and impossible to be sentimental about. He winds up with too many packages to carry, but one of the farmers is willing to take him out to the farmstead from Anchorage, out of some sense of obligation to a prospective neighbor that Obi-Wan doesn't entirely understand.
"You're sure you want to stay out here without a speeder?" the man asks, his own landspeeder hovering over the sand that wavers like water underneath it. "I don't know how long before anybody'll be back this way."
"I can walk into town if I need anything," Obi-Wan says. He has the credits to buy a speeder, but they'll have to last him some time, and besides he thinks owning a speeder will contribute to the temptation to run about trying to do things when there is really nothing for him to do right now but wait.
The first night he lies down on the floor of the small bedroom, wrapped in a blanket with his cloak for a pillow. It is more comfortable than many beds he has had over the years, and his dinner at least edible, although he has never experimented much with cooking beyond heating packaged camping supplies.
The sound of the wind is a constant unfamiliar drone in the darkness, and sleep eludes him. Finally he gets up and goes outside barefoot and without his cloak. The sand is cold and harder than he expected, more like walking across stone than walking on the beach.
Looking out across the desert in the silver moonlight he could almost believe he is at the edge of a great ocean. He was born near the sea, Qui-Gon told him once, though he had always brushed aside most questions about Obi-Wan's life before the Jedi. Now he finds himself expecting the cry of a seabird swooping down over the silver sand. Instead there is only the endless wind and the cold dry air that seems to feed on the moisture of his skin.
You know better than that, he thinks, and finds himself turning, because he can almost believe the words weren't his own. He sees only the empty house in the moonlight and the sand swirling around itself, slowly wearing down the stone.
He breathes in the dry air and lets his mind quiet until he can feel the shape of small minds in the darkness. There are small furred things awake now, scuttling across the sand, and reptilian hunters stalking their prey. There are creatures alive under the sand and winging their way through the canyon.
He reaches farther still, and catches fleeting impressions of thinking beings, riding out in the darkness to check their deep wells for water. They are not human, and they are far at the edge of his range. He cannot sense the nearest humans, but he knows they are there somewhere across that flat expanse of sand. The desert is not empty, and he is not alone.
He waits two weeks before he goes into Anchorhead and finds a bar that provides access to the holonet. It is nothing like the spaceport bars in Mos Eisley, serving more stew and ale than hard liquor and with small children running between the tables. Obi-Wan pays the access fee and settles down in front of the dusty screen at a corner table, though the owner warns him there's little new programming available.
"Some kind of problem with the nets," he says. "I hear it's going on all over."
Obi-Wan isn't all that surprised. The last thing Palpatine can want at the moment is easy communication about whatever political and military moves he's making. He can't put the pieces together himself, especially not without anyone to talk to. He's always thought better with an audience to react.
He confines himself to the simpler question of whether he's the object of any sort of widespread manhunt. The most recent news shows don't mention him, or indeed mention politics much at all, and Obi-Wan tries to watch patiently as the news anchors discuss a famine on an obscure Rim planet and the results of a sports tournament. A data search provides no biography, which is a little more alarming.
On the other hand, when he thinks about it, ceasing to exist on record suits him well enough. He has pushed his chair back and is about to flick the screen off when the set finally flashes success in its search for Obi-Wan Kenobi, in a locally stored copy of a news program years old. There's fifteen seconds of footage, which plays obligingly in a loop when he freezes the page.
Team Kenobi and Skywalker reads the caption, while above it Anakin wrestles a protesting Obi-Wan into the frame. Anakin is flashing the holographer his usual photogenic smile, while Obi-Wan is looking exasperated. He can't remember what they'd just done. Won some battle, probably, or saved a planet, that sort of thing.
There's a text record that would probably tell him, but he can't seem to focus properly on the screen.
"Bad news?" the proprietor asks, his hands full of crockery. This is not an anonymous holonet lounge full of other people's impersonal business, he realizes, but the place where people hear of distant deaths and wars and other ripples spreading toward this remote planet. Refusing to answer such questions will make him an object of suspicion.
"An old friend who died," Obi-Wan says.
"Sorry to hear it."
Obi-Wan nods absently, requesting a copy of the record for download to the data chip he carries. It's mainly in order to create a connection to the local holonet that makes it easier for him to destroy the copy of the news program. He might as well complete Anakin's task of erasing the existence of Obi-Wan Kenobi.
He hesitates, his fingers on the controls, ready to delete the hologram from the data chip as well. He can't remember that day, though he knows it happened, preserved in fragile energy patterns on the sliver of silicon in his hand. He can't bring himself to snuff it out.
It's three more months before Qui-Gon comes to him. He's never sure if it's a coincidence that it's the day after he knocks the pottery bowl from the table with an incautious movement and stands staring at its fragments on the floor until finally he sits down among them and lets himself cry until his head aches, resting his forehead on his dusty knees.
He feels better the next day, enough so that when Qui-Gon appears in the house, a glowing blue phantom who casts no shadow in the afternoon sunlight, Obi-Wan can turn to him and say lightly, "Hello, Master. What kept you?"
"I'm not your master anymore," Qui-Gon says, and then, "What do you mean, what kept me? Does this look easy to you?"
"I wouldn't know," Obi-Wan says, and then closes his eyes for a moment, because he feels perilously close to tears again. "I thought you were gone forever," he says.
"You know better than that." Qui-Gon seems to sit down against the wall, his hands on his knees. They could be waiting for a transport ship or for the dining hall to begin serving breakfast. "So, how's the baby?"
"I'm sure he's fine," Obi-Wan says. "His aunt and uncle are looking after him."
"You haven't even been to see him?"
"I don't particularly want to give them a chance to have second thoughts," Obi-Wan says.
Qui-Gon raises his eyebrows at him. "And you can't sneak past a couple of farmers?"
"Well, obviously I ..." Obi-Wan trails off in frustration. This reminds him all too sharply of various frustrating conversations with Qui-Gon when Qui-Gon was alive. "I thought I was supposed to be learning how to let go."
"Why don't you trust yourself to do it?"
"You know why," Obi-Wan says.
"Assume I've been dead for fifteen years, here."
Obi-Wan runs a hand through his hair. "You came back from the dead to tell me to visit the baby?"
"I came back from the dead to teach you how to master death," Qui-Gon says. "You can visit the baby on your own time." Qui-Gon stretches out his ghostly legs and crosses them. "So, why don't you trust yourself to let go?"
Obi-Wan takes a moment to construct a reply. He's aware that it's unfair to continue dodging the question with someone who's gone to so much trouble to be here.
"I missed you," he says simply. "And Anakin ... I always cared too much."
"Were you afraid of losing him? Or me?"
Obi-Wan considers that. Before Qui-Gon died, he can't remember ever having been afraid of much at all. "I was afraid of what he might do," he says. "He had too much power and too little control, always. But of losing him ...."
He thinks of the time he came closest to it, pushing Anakin past him and tearing the tiles from the wall with the Force to fling them at their pursuers in a lethal hailstorm, pushing himself harder than he ever had. He did what was necessary to save them both, entirely in the moment.
"I don't know," he says.
"Love can be a strength as well as a weakness," Qui-Gon says.
Obi-Wan raises an eyebrow at him. "Is that what Master Yoda would say?"
"You know it's not. But I'm the one you've got for gratuitous advice."
"It's not gratuitous," Obi-Wan says. "I'm meant to be learning from you."
"And I'm here to teach you," Qui-Gon says. "But I'm not your master anymore."
Obi-Wan does visit the baby, walking quietly into the Lars farmhouse when everyone inside is sleeping, unseen by sensors and droids. There is a cradle made from half of an old metal tank filed carefully smooth by someone's hands, and in it a baby. The baby opens blue eyes and reaches for him with a laugh like water over rocks.
"Shh," Obi-Wan says, and draws up his hood, stepping back into the shadows as Beru stirs and then sits up. She does not see him in the doorway, not even when she bends over the cradle and picks up Luke, bouncing him on her shoulder. He is not there for her to see, he tells himself; he is the ghost.
He walks home through the desert night, a shadow among shadows. The chill pierces to the bone. When he is in sight of his own house, he picks up a handful of sand and lets it run through his fingers.
The tiny grains tumble over each other, making complex patterns that he can sense more easily than control. He lets them fall naturally, blowing away on the wind, and then pockets another handful of sand.
There are long hours in the days, even with many of them spent in meditation, and he spends some of them learning to make useful things. The winds sometimes bring him useable scraps of plastic or scrap metal, or, even more rarely, branches worn like driftwood by sand and wind. He slowly shapes them into furnishings to ease his days, though he has never had a gift for working with his hands.
His neighbors understand little of what Obi-Wan does, but they understand that. No one seems surprised when he begins asking what tools he'd need for making glass. He buys a furnace and the minerals he will need to add to the desert sand.
The first time he heats the furnace until it is limned in a red glow, he has to pause, aware of his body's reactions to the blast of heat and the red molten sand. The adrenaline will only make it more difficult for him to master this craft, which has nothing to do with his dreams of burning in molten rock, his lungs filling with burning gas. His fear is the greatest danger here.
He has no doubt that he can master it, despite his lack of a teacher. If primitive civilizations managed to make glass without even the benefit of instructional books, surely he can manage it. It takes him quite a few failed efforts to begin to feel that perhaps he would have been better off with someone from a primitive civilization to tell him where he was going wrong.
The first few vessels of glass that he manages to form into reasonably useful shapes shatter hours later. Without the steady cooling of an annealing kiln, their own internal stresses tear them apart. If the vessel does not break within the first weeks, it is likely to survive, one of his books tells him.
He learns to anneal the glass in the flames, lowering the flame slowly while the glass cools from molten heat to merely burning hot, bathed in fire. He learns to sense the tension within the glass, feeling it pulling itself to pieces as it cools. The first three glass cups that survive are not beautiful, but when he lifts one of them to the sun the light filters through sea-green onto the dry, sandy floor.
He visits the boy a few times over the next few years, more often than not without his aunt and uncle knowing he's there. It's four years before he tells Owen Lars that it's time for Luke's training to begin.
"Out of the question," Owen says. "The last thing he needs is for you to fill his head with mystic nonsense."
"It's not nonsense," Obi-Wan says patiently. "He has a great deal of potential, and he needs training to use it wisely."
Owen glances out the door at Luke, who is playing in the courtyard. "He's a good boy. He doesn't need you to teach him to behave."
"He has you to teach him that, and I'm sure you're doing a fine job. But he needs me to teach him to be a Jedi."
Owen's eyes are hard. "Like you taught his father?"
Obi-Wan can't find an answer.
"We've had enough of you around here," Owen says, and Obi-Wan isn't sure if he means him or the Jedi or the inner systems in general. Possibly all three. "You're not taking my boy off to get killed fighting some war that doesn't matter to us."
"It will matter," Obi-Wan says, but Owen has already turned toward the doorway.
"Luke!" Beru calls from across the courtyard. "Come and wash up before lunch!"
Obi-Wan watches as Luke runs to her. He could take the boy from them, he thinks. It's not the ideal situation, but at least then he could begin Luke's training. Owen is too stubborn for Obi-Wan to force him to accept Jedi training in his own house, but there's nothing the man could do to prevent Obi-Wan from taking Luke away.
And yet he remembers another little boy with the same eyes, crying as his mother told him to be brave. Anakin had already learned to fear losing the people he loved. Luke hasn't learned that lesson yet, but it would be so easy to teach it. Obi-Wan can't begin by shattering the boy's trust. It's such a fragile thing for all their hopes to rest on.
Time passes, and years slip by. He is walking through Anchorhead with a satchel of food bought at the general store when he catches his reflection in a sliver of dusty glass. He looks old. He supposes after all this time he shouldn't be surprised.
There are children clambering over the tables outside the bar, playing an involved game of chase, pointing their fingers at each other and making blaster noises and collapsing in the dust. He recognizes Luke and forces himself to only smile tolerantly, like any man amused at the antics of children.
As he watches, Luke flings his arms wide and makes a drama of having been shot, diving off the table and sprawling in the sand. "You got me, Biggs!" he calls.
"You can't talk, you're dead!" a dark-haired boy yells back.
Luke groans theatrically and collapses to the ground for all of thirty seconds before lifting his head to see if anyone is paying attention to him. Obi-Wan smiles a little, and Luke looks embarrassed.
"Hey, Ben," he says. "Are you looking for Uncle Owen? He's over looking at irrigators."
"Just passing through," Obi-Wan says. He pats the boy on the shoulder and walks on.
He wakes from troubled dreams that night to see Qui-Gon, apparently sitting at the foot of his bed as he used to sometimes when Obi-Wan was a small child. He sits up in bed, suddenly amused by the situation.
"Did you know you look younger than I do now?" he says.
"Appearances can be deceiving," Qui-Gon says.
"And Luke looks like Anakin when I first met him." Obi-Wan tries not to think of Luke that way, to remind himself that Luke is a separate person.
"Are you still determined not to love him?" Qui-Gon asks, as if he's merely curious.
"I didn't succeed very well at that with Anakin." It was always a temptation to let Anakin hold onto him as tightly as he wanted to, and give him every generous and entangling gift he could come up with. Resisting that temptation was one of his few victories with Anakin, but in retrospect he's not sure it made much difference.
"It wouldn't have made you more likely to reach him," Qui-Gon says. "Or made it hurt less when you failed."
It is perversely a relief to hear someone else agree that he failed Anakin in such a matter-of-fact voice. If it is speakable, it is bearable.
"It would have hurt less when I lost him," Obi-Wan says. It's a small consideration, in the grand scheme of things, but it still looms large in the restricted compass of his life.
"You haven't been listening," Qui-Gon says. "Nothing is lost." He points out a water glass on the table by the bed. "Suppose I smash that."
"I'd like to see you try," Obi-Wan says.
"All right, for the sake of argument, suppose you smash that."
"That would be wasteful," Obi-Wan points out.
Qui-Gon doesn't seem displeased with his answer. "So it would. But what would you have lost?"
"The glass, presumably."
"One future of the glass," Qui-Gon says. "As every moment of every day you lose thousands of possible futures. But the glass still exists, in the past, in the present, in the future as a hundred broken pieces. One object moving in time."
"I still can't drink from it," Obi-Wan says.
"Not in its future. But its past still exists. It still exists."
"And you ..." Obi-Wan says slowly.
"Exist in the Force," Qui-Gon says. "Think of it as seeing me as I am, rather than as I am at this moment."
"Except that I can't touch you," Obi-Wan says. He picks up the glass instead and turns it around in his hands.
"You can't have everything."
"So we're back to loving and letting go."
"It's time you learned how," Qui-Gon says. "Besides, he'll love you. Don't you think it's only fair for you to take some risks in return?"
Obi-Wan gets up and goes outside barefoot, standing on the cool flagstones outside his house. He's greeted the same view every morning for the last ten years. He knows the canyon through every season, the brief bloom that comes with the infrequent rains and the parched thirst of the long dry season. He knows the habits of the small hunters that make their dens in the shade of his vaporators and the imperceptible trails that the sand people follow on their long patrols.
He's never thought he would come to love this place, and yet he does. He's never thought he would find peace here, and yet he thinks that he has. The beauty of the landscape is stark and uncompromising, but it is still beautiful. It is shaping Luke as he grows, as his aunt and uncle are shaping him, making him into something entirely different than what the Temple would have made of him.
There's still time, he thinks, to let the wind and the weather make what it will of Luke. He has grown patient, and he can wait for Luke to come to him. He trusts that in time he will.
It's ten more years before he holds up a piece of glass he has made and can truly say to himself that there is no flaw. The piece is the same sea-blue, but clear and perfectly shaped, with precisely the curve he had in his mind when he began. When filled with water, it throws off shifting shadows in the sunlight. He tips it over a bowl, and the water pours in a steady stream.
He thinks Luke will thank him without appreciating the gift, knowing the boy will be far more interested in weapons than such homely things. But Obi-Wan thinks that Luke may in time be grateful for a piece of his home to remind him of it when he is far away. And if it also serves as a reminder of Obi-Wan, well, he does not intend to be easily forgotten.
When Luke comes to him at last, though, there is no time for anything but the most practical of gifts. Obi-Wan leaves the pitcher behind, along with everything he has made these twenty years; if they are to escape with their lives, they must travel light. He gets into the speeder with Luke as if he is only leaving for a day, and lets the boy drive them away without a backward look.
Luke's eyes are the blue of desert glass, and Obi-Wan is reminded of the first time he drove with Anakin, clinging to the armrest of the speeder as Anakin made an impossible turn at breakneck speed and smiled. Obi-Wan smiles a little too at the memory, though he knows that where they are going they will find nothing to smile about. Both are true, and he is on a journey from one to the other and past both to his future that is growing shorter by the moment.
He will not have much time with the boy. He sees that, now, but there's no pain in it, only the sense of doing what is necessary, entirely in the moment. "It's all right," he murmurs, to himself more than to anyone else; he knows there's nothing to fear.