Chapter Text
It was almost funny in retrospect. For all the pain and misery that he had endured under the burning heat of those suns for the past years, this one moment slipped effortlessly past his defences. More akin to a single drop of water trailing through his very soul than the harsh cuts of sand that whipped into a frenzy around him.
Between one moment and the next Obi-Wan Kenobi, who still struggled to think of himself as Ben, found himself pulled gently from a light meditation beneath the twin suns into a world of inky blackness.
Despite the simple fact he was no longer where he’d quite reasonably expected to be, Obi-Wan did not feel the usual rush of anxiety and adrenaline that heralded even the slightest deviation from the routine he’d curated for himself over the years. It was with an unnatural tranquillity that Obi-Wan finally opened his eyes to look into the shadowy depths of his new location.
“Oh,” he said. His voice also came out smoother than he expected. It took a second to realise that what he was missing was the newfound scratch that had developed from the desert. Tatooine was not particularly amenable to the upkeep of a healthy body as he’d noted quite quickly.
“Hello there,” he said.
“Hello there indeed,” the Daughter replied. It was hard not to look at her, and not only because she did in fact supply the only source of light in this darkened void he found himself in. Her impossibly soft skin and gently flowing hair that disobeyed all kinds of laws of reality emitted the same gentle glow he remembered from neigh on a decade earlier.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” Obi-Wan ventured carefully, once it was clear she was waiting for him, “But I seem to recall you died.”
She smiled. “An astute observation.”
Obi-Wan waited now, hoping for some further explanation. She shifted ever so slightly. Her eyes never leaving him though, as if she were still in the process of measuring him up. Though for what he couldn’t tell.
“Thank you,” he ventured. By all rights Obi-Wan thought that he should be freaking out. Just a little. Or maybe a whole lot. Either one would work, but he found himself still eerily at peace. Admittedly, he’d gotten quite used to rolling with the punches more often than not - a galactic war and a lifetime of Force nonsense would do that for you - but for now it simply seemed he couldn’t dredge up the energy to splutter or suffer. Not here. Not in her presence.
The Daughter’s smile tightened, a hint of sadness clouding her perfect features.
“I have brought you here,” she said, her hand sweeping through the darkness with ease.
“Yes, I assumed as much,” he agreed rather amiably. Though his attention was quickly grabbed by the near imperceptible hint of lights erupting quietly around him. As if summoned by her movement thousands of miniscule pinpricks of light emerged from the darkness. Obi-Wan had spent countless hours of his life looking out of starship windows glimpsing the vastness of the galaxy around him which now seemed to be brought back to him all at once under the Daughter’s heavy gaze.
“Might I ask why?”
Why me. Why here. Why now.
Each of those questions and more were packed into his words and he had no doubt she understood exactly what he was asking, even if he himself hardly could. Considering his recent occupation in the meat packaging plant out in the Dune Sea, he felt rather qualified to say he definitely wasn’t getting paid enough to understand what was happening around him now. This was a scale of Force intervention he couldn’t remember in his lifetime. The first inkling of discomfort entered his mind now, because while he stood there basking in the unflinching Light of the Daughter, he could hardly help that his closest point of reference to this intimacy of the Force came from the day of the Purge. Never before had he so keenly felt the severity of the Force’s weight in his life until it was being torn from him all at once.
“You were told once,” she said serenely, “That my family and I are the Past, the Present, and the Future of the Force.”
He nodded. It seemed like the polite thing to do.
“I died.” It was a statement. A matter of fact that Obi-Wan certainly wasn’t about to try and counter her on. “I died and our last hope for balance failed this galaxy.”
Obi-Wan flinches. How could he not?
She carried on regardless, sparing him a compassionate glance but unwilling to hinder her words for his comfort. “My family was destroyed when we brought you three to our home. I hoped, when my brother killed me, that your time on our planet would have been enough to prevent the darkness my brother so craved from encompassing the galaxy.”
Her words halted, the first hint of hesitation she had shown in whatever uncategorizable passage of time had occurred since he had… arrived? Been summoned? Entered?
Since he had lain eyes on her in this space.
“I was wrong.” Then she moved. Her delicate, powerful hand reached forward and found its purchase on his shoulder. Obi-Wan felt electric. He hadn’t even noticed before then, but until the Daughter had made contact Obi-Wan hadn’t properly felt his own body. He had been disconnected from this new reality. What he now recognised as his own limbs and chest and head had been little more than a fabrication of his mind. Yet under her touch the Force pulled him into place, piecing him together all at once until he couldn’t remember what he had felt like before. Now he was supercharged with the thrumming energy he had felt so detached from in his desert exile.
He felt whole.
“Obi-Wan Kenobi,” her voice shook him from whatever quiet, overwhelming revelation he was having. “This cannot go on.”
“My Lady,” and oh. It wasn’t just his voice that seemed to have come back to this place free of Tatooine’s ravages, his every joint and muscle felt refreshed and renewed under the Force’s kind attentions. “It has already happened. I wish it weren’t true, but there is little more I can do than keep my vigil. I am watching over the boy.” Tears he has stubbornly refused to shed for years once again try to surface. He pushes them away with practised ease. “The girl is safe too. I have ensured they are far from his mind and all I can do now is wait.”
All at once Obi-Wan feels the desperate urge to prove to her that he is doing his best considering the circumstances. He didn’t want to even think of what it would do to him if she so much as suggested his efforts here had all been for naught.
“I am willing to train him when he is older. But they deserve a childhood not lived in total fear. I could not keep them with me, not when that would ensure they grew up hunted. At least now, I am watching over. From a safe distance.”
It was an argument she no doubt was well aware of. But in his defence Obi-Wan hadn’t ever had the chance to say it aloud. Not once in five years had he been in a position for anyone to listen to him. For anyone to approve of the desperate plan he and Yoda and Bail had had to concoct in mere moments when all they had wanted to do was mourn. In the years since Obi-Wan had made his pitch over and over to himself in the quiet coldness of night. A mantra that proved to himself that one day all this pain would be worth it and the empire would crumble at the hands of its harbinger's own children.
The Daughter’s smile finally left her face.
“I understand, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You made your choices. You have kindled the hopes on which you believe can return balance.” He nodded mutely. “I am not here to admonish you.”
“Then why, my Lady, why are we here?”
“I am the Past, the Present, the Future of the Light.” She reiterated, as if that would clear everything up for it. “This Present is untenable. Yet time is… not as effective upon me as it is you.”
Her brow furrowed minutely, as if she was busy trying to turn the limitations of the Common vernacular into something that would articulate her sheer Otherness.
“It has taken me millenia… no. Centuries? No. Days? No. Years? Yes. It has taken me some years to gather my strength in this time, my Present is clouded and my Past is corrupted by my death. I am nothing more than my Future.”
Obi-Wan nodded. It still seemed polite. That didn’t stop him from still being terribly confused of course, but he could at least uphold some semblance of manners in her presence.
“Your path forward may work,” Obi-Wan desperately controls his instinct to shudder at her lack of conviction, “Yet it comes at too great a cost.”
“If my path forward is not correct,” he said tentatively, “What would you suggest instead?”
At this she smiled again. Her lips stretch further and wider than before. A true smile, not just the gentle lift of lips he now understood to have been her attempt to keep him calm and collected when brought here so suddenly. This was a smile of joy, of anticipation.
“I intend to send you back.”
“Back?”
“Back.”
No matter how frankly ludicrous this whole situation was, Obi-Wan was no idiot. He knew exactly what she was suggesting even if the mechanisms of it were nothing but an obfuscated mystery of the Force on a scale so vast he couldn’t comprehend it in its fullness if he had tried.
“When?”
The Daughter shifted once again and Obi-Wan noted that those pinpricks of light he’d seen earlier had crept closer to him throughout this conversation. Now the inky darkness of the void was being quickly surpassed by the bright fullness of a million stars drawing closer and closer to him. He spared them a glance only to turn away at once, their encroaching brightness beginning to fill each empty space of blackness with their purity.
The Daughter’s hand that had first touched his shoulder in an offer of comfort drew up, scalding his neck with the power brimming beneath her skin until her palm rested against his cheek. He tried not to shudder at the sudden intimacy of another being so close to him. It had been years since he felt a touch this tender and compassionate. The Daughter brought his face up until he was looking into the fathomless depths of her eyes.
Around them the stars dutifully pulled further in, all hints of shadow were being chased from his periphery but Obi-Wan couldn’t give them a moment's notice. Not when the Daughter was looking at him so knowingly.
“Tell me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, when do you wish to go?”
Later, he would question whether there should have been more than a mere second of hesitation before his answer. Before he condemned himself to a life re-lived.
Yet in that moment, in the perfect, brilliant, blinding Light of the Force, in a time that didn’t truly make sense to him, he found the words slip past his lips with unhesitating ease.
“To the beginning.”
The last image he saw, as the gently burning light began to flood his vision was the Daughter as she pulled back from him. Her eyes never left his, and her joyful smile settled back into a serene look of more than confidence. He felt his consciousness slip, a single drop of water succumbing to the encouraging pull of the Force, and he understood her expression. It wasn’t happiness, not yet.
It was hope.