Two Halfs of One Warrior • Obikin/Vaderwan One-Shots

Dreams Of Old

• Summary: Obi-Wan surrenders to Vader on Jabiim in exchange for everyone else's freedom.

Or, Obi-Wan and Vader try to out-fantasize each other.

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The cell where Obi-Wan has been confined is empty, barren, nothing but invisible walls and sleek floors and air that glides too smoothly in his lungs. It's a far cry from Jabiim, with its crowd of people, its craggy rock faces with their symbols of hope and the heavy, water-rich atmosphere that caught on every breath.

It hardly matters. Obi-Wan barely notices. Vader is all there is, tall and unmoving through the force field barrier, shoulders an obsidian screen. There is everything between them and nothing at all-a lifetime of love and ten years of hate and a mere handful of inches.

Obi-Wan doesn't speak into the heavy rise and fall of Vader's breathing. There are no words for the things he needs to say, not in any language he knows.

They claw at him from the inside, threaten to tear through his chest and his lungs and his throat.

Vader watches him for a long moment where he stands. Obi-Wan can feel the weight of Vader's eyes through the thick lenses of his mask, through the regulated air of the ship and the thin barrier between them. It feels so much like the cold, terrible fire of his rage at Mapuzo, and so unlike at the same time.

There is something devastating about looking back at him in the artificiality of the ship's lighting, without the darkness of night and the heat of fire to help shroud the truth.

"I knew it would be so simple," Vader finally says, and the words are mechanical, inflectionless, but Obi-Wan's traitorous mind is all too quick to lend it the cadence of Anakin's voice, to reach fingers into memory and dredge forth the precise beat of it. "You sell yourself too easily."

Obi-Wan can almost hear the outrage, the offended scorn-on Vader's own behalf, and on Obi-Wan's. He forces himself to breathe through the memory of that voice, and when he catches himself automatically matching the hiss of Vader's lungs, makes himself breathe slower, makes himself cast off the rhythm.

"I consider it more than a fair trade, as you well know," Obi-Wan replies evenly, his gaze unwavering from Vader's, and firmly puts thoughts of Leia, of Tala and Roken and Haja and all the others from his mind. There is little he can do for them now, except to play his cards right and live long enough to keep Vader from tracking them down before they reach safety.

"One ship with a handful of refugees," Vader says dismissively, and then continues on as if the lives Obi-Wan has traded his own freedom for are of no further significance. "This time you must concede my victory. I have truly backed you into a corner now. I have finally won...Master."

Something twists in Obi-Wan's stomach at the words, at the title he hasn't borne for so long, at the twist of mockery and triumph in it. He'd known, somehow, that it wasn't his imagination. Vader's attack on Jabiim had felt so familiar, every move like a ghost-the heedless onslaught, the desire to overwhelm, the determination to keep Obi-Wan on the defensive. Every strike, every counterstrike, had pulled him back to Coruscant, to the Temple, to a day and a string of moments that should have been just another contest, another bout, another match.

In the end, it had been so much more than that. It had been the last time they'd trained together before the galaxy had gone to pieces and the Clone Wars had begun. He'd thought to have months in which to complete Anakin's training. He'd thought to have years.

But the truth is, there had been no time at all. The truth is, this man before him fights as aggressively as Anakin had more than a decade ago, fights just as hard for recognition of his skill.