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When Yoda tells him that it’s his duty to confront the shade that Anakin has become and that Yoda himself will confront the Emperor, Obi-Wan reacts without thinking and says, “No.”
It’s not the whispered denial of one too heartsick to contemplate striking down the boy he’d raised like a son, and it’s not a shout of outrage at the thought of committing fratricide after everything they’d been through together in the past three years of war. He says it evenly, firmly, implacably. He startles himself—and startles Yoda, too, he can see—with how calm he sounds. Standing here amid the massacred bodies and culture of his people, after watching footage of a man who’d always been so proud of his Freedom willingly kneel to the worst slavemaster in recent history, Obi-Wan very calmly says, “No.”
Attachment has always been Obi-Wan’s greatest weakness. When he was a boy he’d been attached to his crèchemates, to the little toy starfighters he’d built, to the Temple, to the idea of being a Knight. It had fed the well of his fear at not being chosen, which, of course, had led to him not being chosen until he’d proven willing to let that dream die. As a padawan he’d been attached to the causes of the people he helped, even over the idea of being a Knight or of being Master Qui-Gon’s padawan. Having nearly given up any chance of becoming a Jedi at the tender age of thirteen, the idea was easier to let go of each time he was faced with that choice: on Melida/Daan, on Mandalore, during Naboo, almost, almost on Geonosis. No one but himself knew how close he’d come to agreeing with Dooku that day, of joining him and taking direct action against the corruption he’d always known was at the heart of the Republic (though at the time he’d had no idea how close to the heart the poison truly was). Obi-Wan had always been, still was, attached to Master Qui-Gon, and Dooku had offered one last tantalizing connection to the man who’d made his dream of being a Jedi a reality. Over the course of this seemingly never ending war he’d grown irrevocably attached to his men, the brave soldiers of the 212th Attack Battalion who had been never been given a choice not to fight, the incredible people that had been given into his care, and into Cody’s. And he had grown attached to Cody, to the idea that maybe one day… well. That’s gone now, too.
Attachment has always been Obi-Wan’s greatest weakness as a Jedi, which is why he’d cautioned Anakin so strongly against it when he’d been growing up, and why he had despaired every time his padawan would lie to him and sneak away to be with the wife he thought no one knew about. His attachment to his apprentice had blinded Obi-Wan to the growing darkness in Anakin’s soul, to the overwhelming fear of loss that Anakin, who’d grown up with nothing to call his own except his own name, had been struggling with for years. It is that same fear that the Sith master has taken advantage of.
Of course Obi-Wan is attached to Anakin, to the boy Qui-Gon had wanted to teach after he’d fought so hard against training Obi-Wan. Anakin, the boy who’d clung to him, someone he barely knew, after he’d been thrust into a new and frightening and overwhelming world. Anakin, the child who’d crawled into Obi-Wan’s bed after nightmares or visions or when he’d just been so lonely that he wanted to be held. Anakin, the child he had raised like his own, the man that boy had grown into. Powerful and loyal and flawed and clever and brilliant Anakin. His best friend, his son, his brother. Of course something visceral rebels inside him at the thought of killing Anakin.
So Obi-Wan says no to Yoda’s plan. He says it without thinking initially, but as he faces down Yoda’s judgmental stare and accusations of about attachment the more his abrupt declaration makes sense to him. He explains to Yoda that if they really want to be able to stop Anakin, or whatever it is that Anakin has now become, Obi-Wan quite simply cannot ensure that it happens. Obi-Wan is attached, he admits to Yoda, which is exactly why he shouldn’t be the one to confront him. He won’t be able to kill Anakin. Despite being surrounded by the abundant evidence of Anakin’s atrocities, the thought of killing Anakin quite literally makes him sick. He cannot do it, and so Yoda must. He asks Yoda quietly about when he’d been forced to fight Dooku on that long-ago day on Geonosis, how it had felt to come face to face with the shadow of the man his beloved apprentice had become. He asks if Yoda, too, had not given in to the alluring call of attachment when he’d chosen to save Obi-Wan and Anakin from being crushed over winning the duel against Dooku and ending the war before it began. Hadn’t Yoda taken the out that had been provided so that he could give his old padawan another chance to turn back? To let Dooku live, even in the face of all he knew his padawan had become? Can he really ask Obi-Wan to do what Yoda himself could not?
It’s a low blow, using the old master’s attachments against him, but one that Obi-Wan makes without remorse to get his point across. And moveover, he continues, in the past three years Yoda has lost more than any other Jedi and had lost Dooku for good not even a week prior. Yoda had once confided to him that his Force bonds with younger Jedi keep him from feeling the weight of his hundreds of years. They keep his mind and his memory and his sanity whole. Yoda’s bonds with all his former apprentices are gone. His bonds with fellow councilors, with the crèchelings… all gone. Yoda, more than any other Jedi yet living, has lost pieces of himself to this war and he is still feeling the mental backlash of so many of his Force bonds breaking at once. Obi-Wan has had bonds break before, but when compared with Yoda right now Obi-Wan has gotten through the past week relatively unscathed. The bond with his master had broken more than a decade ago. Reeft had been gone for years and Bant fell at the beginning of the war. He can tell that Garen still lives, although he is far away and their bond feels freezing cold, and it feels like Quinlan is actually somewhere on Coruscant right now. He had never developed a bond with his grandpadawan and Anakin… well. He can’t turn his attention to that bond right now without collapsing in pain. Obi-Wan’s mind and his connection to the Force are currently less bruised and damaged than are Yoda’s. Yoda is still powerful, but he is weakened mentally and physically right now, Obi-Wan argues. Yoda will undoubtedly recover in time but not quickly enough to confront the Emperor before the Sith’s power base solidifies. Now is the time to strike, and with Obi-Wan’s weakness and with Yoda’s, too, it’s for the best that Yoda confronts Anakin’s shadow and Obi-Wan faces the darkness at the heart of what had been the Republic.
When confronted with all that he has lost and all that he is asking the last member of his family to do, Yoda’s resolve crumbles. Obi-Wan sees the old master fold in on himself and he hadn’t thought that his heart could splinter any farther but it does. Yoda has never looked as small or as old as he does in that moment. Obi-Wan has always had a way with his words, had earned his title of Negotiator long before it had been advertised in the press, but the past week hasn’t left him unmarked. His words have been effective but blunt; all truth, but cutting nonetheless. He has nothing left within him to soften the blow, but seeing how frail Yoda looks now makes him want to weep. He folds his great-grandmaster into an embrace and presses his right temple just behind Yoda’s right ear. It has been years since he’s shared this traditional gesture with another Jedi—Anakin had never been fond of it and had passed that apathy down to Ahsoka—but right now the ancient tradition is a tie to their shared culture that both he and Yoda sorely need. The point of physical connection allows the weak Force bond between them to flare at their closeness, and Obi-Wan pours support and love and determination into Yoda as if it’s the last time he’ll be able to do so. For all he knows, it is. Yoda sags into his arms and presses his head firmly against Obi-Wan’s in a gesture of both weakness and gratitude, and from this close Obi-Wan can feel the tiniest of tremors shudder through Yoda’s small frame. It’s just for a moment, and then Yoda gathers himself back together and straightens up, adopting the mantle of Jedi Grandmaster once more. Yoda gives one nod and agrees in a gravelly voice that he will confront he-who-was-once-a-Skywalker and Obi-Wan will confront the would-be Emperor. Obi-Wan is relieved.
He hesitates for only a moment before suggesting that Yoda begin his search for Vader at a senatorial high-rise apartment in 500 Republica. Yoda briefly purses his mouth before agreeing, knowing exactly who Obi-Wan means. The old being exits the Temple through a long-forgotten passageway in the abandoned lower levels and Obi-Wan is, once again, alone. He lingers in the communications center only long enough to warn other Jedi away from the Temple before he makes his way as directly as he can to one of the empty residential wings to wait for his moment to strike. He knows that he could, instead, hide in the Force-shielded rooms in the Healers wing, or among the cacophony of the Living Force within the Temple gardens, or in the Archive’s holocron rooms, or in the cells reserved for darksiders deep below. Any of those places would hide his Force signature from the Emperor and any Force-trained lackeys he has working for him. He knows he could even hide in his actual quarters in the Temple, which would be saturated in his own signature even after three years at war and living mostly on his ship. He flinches almost violently away from idea of seeing the home he’d once shared with Anakin and he knows that if he is to gather himself for the fight to come, he cannot go to any of the sensible hiding places within the Temple. His shields had barely survived the walk from the entrance to the communications center. If he spends any significant period of time in a location where other Jedi had met a terrible end, he will find himself overwhelmed by the echoes of their pain and suffering.
With as much haste as he can spare while preserving his stealth, he locates a long-unused room along the outside wall of the residential wing and locks the door tightly behind him. The single room is dusty and bare and there is a small window that he can use to escape if he needs to. Most importantly, however, the room is blessedly free from the echoes of any living being—the passive droid-like sense of the troopers who’d swept through here not long ago has already faded away. He spares a brief moment to mourn the vivid individuality that this troopers had worked so hard to develop and preserve. All of it had been wiped away in an instant. This past week has seen the genocide of two peoples, not only one.
He reigns in his grief before it can overwhelm him. He knows that if he thinks too long about all that has been lost he will start screaming and he doesn’t know if he would be able to stop. So he shoves those feelings down where he doesn’t have to look at them until he’s ready. If he’ll ever be ready. Right now he has a job to prepare for and he’ll spare the time to fully mourn all his loses if he manages to live through the next few days. After he contains his sorrow he begins to draw his presence tighter and tighter within himself, pulling back from his instinctual connection to the Living Force around him, going slowly enough that he leaves no vacuum where his presence has been. When his Force signature is as small and as concentrated within himself as he can make it, he ever-so-carefully begins shoring up his mental shields with layer upon layer of blocks and misdirections and walls made of cortosis and durasteel. He’s making this up as he goes. He’s never had to disappear before.
He builds up a separate set of shields along his bond with Anakin and almost sighs in relief as some of the oppressive darkness that he has been feeling quiets down. The unsevered bond between them that had been a comfort all throughout the war has now become an inescapable weight. He takes care not to block the few other Force bonds that remain undamaged in his mind. He can’t bear to lose them right now. Yoda’s is as steady as ever, though its vividness has been muted by sorrow. To Quinlan he sends caution and care and love along their bond and receives disbelief and gratitude and love from his friend in return. His sending to Garen is weaker for the distance between them but he tries to project love and warmth and receives a pulse of dark humor and affection back. He knows that neither man is truly safe, but for now it’s enough that he knows that they’re alive.
He sinks into the Force inside himself as he waits for the signal to act. The mindset he reaches is part meditation, part reflection, part healing trance. He cannot, dares not, reach out to the Force around him, so he does his best with what he has within to strengthen himself for what’s to come. Palpatine, Darth Sidious, the Emperor—he had fooled them all so completely for so long and Obi-Wan would be an even bigger fool to underestimate him. The Sith has killed most of the Jedi High Council, some of the best lightsaber combatants and Force wielders and tacticians that the Order had produced. Obi-Wan is not so arrogant that he thinks he’s more powerful than Agen and Seasee had been, or more clever than Kit had been, or a more talented swordsman than Mace had been. He has never been a prodigy of the Force, but because of that he knows how to learn and persevere and adapt what skills he does have to endure the dire circumstances in which he typically finds himself. He takes the time he has to shore up his sense of self, to deal with his doubts and insecurities, to bolster his faith in the Force, and to lock down the overwhelming sadness that threatens to consume him. He cannot be more than he is, but he will use everything he has to try to live.
Roughly a day later, his bond with Yoda weakens in a way he knows means that the other master has travelled off planet. It’s the signal he needs to emerge from his meditation, stretch his limbs, and make his way to the Senate complex. He evades the few troopers that patrol the desecrated Temple and sneaks out of one of the entrances that had been reserved for Shadows. He ruthlessly suppresses the slew of memories of sneaking out of this door after hours with Quinlan as young knights looking for a break from their padawans and sneaking back in at the break of dawn. If he spares any thought for the good things he’ll never get back he knows it will break his resolve. He finds a covered speeder in the district beneath the Temple and manages to hotwire it—this skill, at least, doesn’t invoke memories that threaten to break his concentration. He’s known how to hotwire speeders since his padawan days and all the missions that had gone wrong and left him separated from Master Qui-Gon. He takes the speeder up into the air and flies at a normal speed through the traffic lanes. He does not want to draw attention to himself by rushing or flying erratically, and the traffic lanes are already more sparse than he’s used to seeing. Perhaps the citizens of Coruscant have started to recognize the danger they are in. He parks the speeder far enough away from the Senate district that no one questions him and he slips through the foot traffic into the lower levels, making his way ever closer. The clone patrols are much heavier this close to the Senate building than they had been where he’d stolen his speeder. He avoids the troopers when he can and uses mind tricks when he can’t to ensure that they don’t remember seeing him. He cannot afford to raise suspicions if a patrol goes missing and his heart cannot bear to cut down any more of the men who he’d spent the last few years fighting beside.
Obi-Wan follows the oppressive flood of darkness upstream to its source. Palpatine’s mask has undoubtedly fallen and with so many Jedi dead he is doing little to hide his presence in the Force. If this is what has been laying hidden beneath the man’s shields this whole time, it’s even more impressive that the Sith could hide himself so completely from their senses for so long. Impressive, and discouraging. Even with Obi-Wan hiding his presence as much as he is able and his shields as strong as he can make them, he feels the dark and the cold trying to make their way inside. The faint chill in the air that he feels is testament that his mental constructs are not as perfect as he wants them to be. With every step closer he can feel inky blackness crashing into his shields as if the angry seas of Kamino were sending waves of darkness to break against his defenses, dark oily tendrils seeping into any and every crack in his mental walls. He grits his teeth against the pain of it and takes another step forward, and another, and another until finally he steps into Palpatine’s office, into Sidious’s lair. He comes to a stop just inside the doorway and he knows that he now stands on the very spot where Agen, Seasee, and Kit had fallen. He can feel the echoes of their deaths at the hands of the dark creature across the room and holds back a groan of anguish behind his teeth before it can escape.
Sidious, the bastard, is smug with his victory as he sits in his throne-like chair in his too opulent red and black chambers—and really, how had none of them noticed before now? The Sith crows with delight that Obi-Wan has come to him and saved them the trouble of hunting him down like an animal. Palpatine brags about how Obi-Wan’s cherished padawan, his brother, his son, has so thoroughly renounced everything Obi-Wan had ever tried to teach him, had sworn his loyalty to Obi-Wan’s enemy and willingly shackled himself in chains once more. The Sith gloats, and Obi-Wan says nothing, because really, what can he say in the face of the truth? There is nothing the famed Negotiator can say, no clever quip or rebuttal to make, because nothing Palpatine says is a lie. All of those things did happen, but it is nothing that Obi-Wan hasn’t tried to acknowledge and put away during his meditations over the past day. He had made what peace he could with it in the time he'd had left. And it changes nothing about what Obi-Wan must do now. So he stands by the door and says nothing and eventually Sidious grows angry at his continued silence and loses patience and attacks first, just as Obi-Wan knew he would.
The first volley of lightning takes him by surprise—not the technique itself, because Force knows that he’s seen it and dealt with it plenty of times over the course of the war. But its intensity now is far greater than any he has ever been faced with. He would never try to do as Yoda has before and catch it, absorb it, or redirect it, but a lightsaber still works just fine to block it. Even so, the lightning carries with it a miasma of darkness that his lightsaber can’t dispel and when tiny forks of electricity branch off to singe the exposed flesh of his wrists and neck, he feels simultaneous strikes against his mental defenses. Palpatine takes advantage of his momentary distraction to summon his own blade and lunge at him with startling speed. Then the fight truly begins.
He falls into a Soresu defense half on instinct and half because it’s the only thing he can think of that can match the ferocious speed of Sidious’s strikes. Three years of protecting his front-line troops from maelstroms of blaster fire has made his Soresu defense nigh impenetrable. He knows that he can keep up this defense for hours but he realizes very quickly that it will also undoubtedly get him killed. The same reliability that had made it the perfect form for fighting on the front lines is a fatal flaw in a duel against the Sith master: it makes him predictable. Still, Soresu helps him survive the first few minutes of the fight, which is more than other Jedi Masters have managed, and it buys him enough time to think of something else he could do. The Chancellor’s office’s wide open floor plan on a planet where space is at a premium has always been an unsubtle demonstration of the power wielded by the head of the galactic government. But it is still far too small a space for a fast-paced lightsaber duel and it limits Obi-Wan’s options. For a brief moment he is actually grateful that they begin to exchange blows atop the Chancellor’s pod. It gives him the chance to use the Force to flick the switch to raise the podium into the Senate chamber above. The larger room will give him more options to work with.
His relief lasts only a moment because he finds himself trapped on the platform with Sidious as it slowly rises into place. The precariousness of his foothold loses him any advantage Soresu might have granted and so he switches to Makashi for the too-long duration of the ride between Palpatine’s office and the Senate floor. It is far from his preferred lightsaber form but a memory of his grandmaster flashes in his mind—of the one time when Obi-Wan was fourteen and freshly back from Melida/Daan. Dooku had come upon him in the training salles and talked him through Makashi katas, stern but gentle in his teachings. He draws upon the memory of the kind man his grandmaster had once been to survive the harrowing close-quarters combat with the Sith Master to whom Dooku had pledged himself.
As soon as he has the room to do so Palpatine jumps away from the central platform and starts Force-hurling senatorial pods at Obi-Wan. There is absolutely no way that Obi-Wan can directly counter the pod’s momentum when it is enhanced by the Sith’s telekinesis, so he is forced to jump away or be crushed. He spends the next several minutes dodging from pod to pod as Sidious literally shreds the governing body of the Republic to pieces in an attempt to kill him. The symbolism is almost choking in poignancy, and he tries not to read as much into it as he does when Sidious flings the Naboo pod at him, when it’s Melida/Daan, or Alderaan, Orto Plutonia, or Ryloth. So many places that have taken pieces of him over the years, and places where Obi-Wan has willingly given pieces of himself away. Places where he has loved and lost and fought and bled and almost died. He shoves aside the searing heartbreak of those memories to join all the others he’s refused to think about today and flips over another pod to deliver an overhanded strike toward Sidious’s head. The speed of the blow forces the Sith to actually counter with his own blade. After that flip it feels natural that Obi-Wan’s body slips right back into Ataru as if he has never left Qui-Gon’s side. And the fight continues.
Obi-Wan has never fought a duel as difficult as this one. The realization seems almost obvious—of course the Sith master would be stronger and more powerful than any of his underlings have been—but it’s true nonetheless that if Obi-Wan wavers in concentration for even a moment he will lose. The force behind every one of Palpatine’s strikes sends jolts of pain up Obi-Wan’s arm, every shriek of plasma against plasma is accompanied by an echoing spike of darkness hammering against his mind. Sidious snarls and taunts and jeers at him, sometimes flinging lies but mostly just speaking ugly uncomfortable truths from which Obi-Wan can’t escape. And the Sith is fast. Fast and slippery like an eel and underhanded in his tactics in a way that really comes as no surprise. There is no honor to be had in this fight, only survival.
The self-declared Emperor is a nearly unparalleled swordsman, but Obi-Wan has spent the past three years battling Sith and Acolytes and darksiders. Dooku and Ventress and Maul and Savage and, yes, even Grievous, too. As his duel with Sidious drags on he channels into his fighting all that he has learned over the years and all that he has taught to others. He’s spent his spare time teaching Ahsoka, bright and brilliant Ahsoka who could have been the best of them all, how to make the most of her unconventional grips and variations on Jar Kai. He uses one of the moves she taught him to land a backhanded slash on one of Palpatine’s legs. He expends some of his strength on a Djem So strike that he remembers a teenage Anakin drilling over and over as he sought to compensate for a recent growth spurt, and although Sidious counters the blow Obi-Wan sees the Sith’s arms quiver just the tiniest bit. He avoids using Makashi again because it’s clear that Sidious has trained himself against it—how could he not have, given that it had been Dooku’s preferred form and given the Sith tradition of killing one’s master? Of course Sidious would have trained himself to counter Makashi. He cannot afford to overwhelm himself with the hints of darkness Mace’s Vaapad would leave him exposed to. So instead Obi-Wan goes farther back in this training to the very foundations of what he has learned, to the memories of the very first time Yoda and Master Drallig had taught him to wield a lightsaber. Visions of Bant and Reeft float before his eyes as he weaves his blade in a Shii-Cho offensive and sees in his mind, unexpectedly, a teenaged Bruck Chun looking back at him with a compassion and understanding he’d never seen from the boy when he’d been alive. His bonds with Garen and Quinlan spark bright in his mind at the remembrance of their fallen crèchemates both beloved and not and at the memories of learning Shii-Cho at their sides. As his Force bonds settle down and the visions of Bant, Reeft, and Bruck fade away, Obi-Wan is distantly aware that he is crying.
Ultimately, what saves his life and what wins him the battle is not any lightsaber form or combat move taught by the Jedi, for Sidious has clearly spent his life preparing for the day he would kill Jedi. Obi-Wan’s tears flow freely as he remembers Cody. His dear, strong, loyal commander with his dry sense of humor and no-nonsense attitude and his willingness to share with his insomniac Jedi General the few precious scraps of Mandalorian culture he’d learned from the trainers on Kamino. His brilliant Cody, who had handed back his lightsaber, this same lightsaber, with a wry smile. Darling Cody, whose mind had gone blank an instant before Obi-Wan had been shot off of a cliff on Utapau. He imagines the hum of the Negotiator’s engines in the middle of the night cycle and the stale air of the clones’ training room, invokes the feeling of Cody’s hands clasped around his on the lightsaber hilt, Cody’s arms bracketing his, Cody’s front against his back as he guided Obi-Wan’s arms through warforms Obi-Wan had never heard of. There had been a quiet anticipation in the air, an understanding of in the future, of if we both survive, that Obi-Wan had clung to fiercely. All for naught.
In the here and now, he is crying as he beheads Palpatine with a traditional Mandalorian beskad strike that is blasphemously close to a sai cha. He follows through with the strike and stills, holding his blade at the exact angle Cody had taught him, and lets the sense-memory of his beloved commander go with a wistful sorrow. Like so many of the other people Obi-Wan has loved, Cody, too, is gone. Obi-Wan knows that he has succeeded in defeating the Sith not through the strength and fortitude of his own body and mind, but by becoming a conduit for every person who has fallen before him, by clinging to their memories when he, somehow and against all odds, keeps surviving. Attachment has always been Obi-Wan’s weakness and today it has saved his life.
When Sidious’s head tumbles out of sight into the depths below and the rest of the body crumples, Obi-Wan feels safe enough to shut off his lightsaber. The panting of his breath sounds overly loud in the sudden silence of the chamber and it takes a long time for awareness of his surroundings to seep back into his mind. As the echoes of battle fade away he distantly hears the sparking of loose wires and groaning of strained metal from the wreckage of the Senate chamber around him. He hears the clamor of armored boots approaching from what seems like very far away. He realizes that the fight ended with both him and Palpatine back on the central podium and it is suddenly too much for him. He is surrounded by the ruins and detritus of the Republic he had sworn to defend, that so many of those he has cared about have given their lives for, and here he stands, alone in the center of it. He has survived once more, but at what cost? Whatever the price, he knows that he will pay it when it comes due. Or maybe survival itself is the price.
Obi-Wan’s legs give out and he doesn’t fight it. Alone at the end of it all, he kneels amid the carnage and weeps.