Choose Your Words || A Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker Story

Chapter 18: Burn For Him

All Padawans dream of becoming Jedi Knights – glorious and shining in the Force.

Correction: all Padawans but one.

Anakin Skywalker doesn’t want to become a Jedi Knight. In fact, he fears it. Fears it so much that he pushes towards it twice as hard to cover up for his unwillingness and simultaneously wanting it to be done and over with so that his torture will finally end.

His fear is obvious – painfully so: he is afraid that when he is a Knight and not a Padawan anymore, his Bond with his Master will be broken and he will be left alone. All alone in the Dark.

He never speaks to his Master about his fears, of course. He never tells him he doesn’t want to go through with the Initiation, so when the time comes, he passes his Trials, and the day he is to attain Knighthood, he follows his Master into the Council Chamber like a lamb to the slaughter. Or maybe not exactly: the proverbial lamb at least is blissfully unaware of what is awaiting it – Anakin doesn’t have such luxury. He knows he is going to his own execution.

🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️

“An honor,” they state. “The highest of rewards.”

The one you don’t deserve, hangs in the air, unsaid.

The Council members don’t even need to speak – their faces scrutinizing him like some curious bug tell Anakin everything without words. They are looking at him exactly like they did almost ten years ago. They don’t even bother to hide how much they despise and fear him and yet, there is also something greedy in their eyes. They hope to possess his power. Still. After all these years. They think they have the right to it. They think they own him. But Anakin is his Master’s and nobody else’s. All his power, all his devotion is not to the Order – it is to Obi-Wan Kenobi, to the only person in the room who is looking at him with that unbearable fondness.

He is so proud of me, Anakin suddenly realizes, and it cuts the ground from under his feet.

How can he let his Master down now?

How dare he even think of asking – begging – him to stop now and not to cut his Padawan braid?

No, he can’t do that. He can’t be a coward. Can’t be a failure. Can’t…

Anakin doesn’t even kneel when the ceremony demands it – he just falls to the ground gracelessly because his legs refuse to hold him anymore. He looks up at his Master, his eyes red-rimmed and glassy with unshed tears, and his lips quiver pathetically, trying to hold the words in.

Don’t do it, Master! Please don’t cut my braid! Don’t break our Bond! Please!

He isn’t actually begging aloud, not in the room full of Council members, but the Force around him must be screaming in agony of his despair because in the next moment, his Master suddenly lowers his blade and staggers back, as if slapped.         

“Anakin…” he whispers, shaken and dismayed, and Anakin’s terror finally bursts through the surface too.

“No, I don’t want it!” he shouts, toppling over onto his back and scrambling to crawl backward, away from the blade threatening to cut his braid. “Don’t let them do this to us, Master!”

The Jedi freezes, his face mirroring Anakin’s own horrified expression. His lightsaber falls to the floor, extinguished. Master raises his palms in a pacifying manner, offering them to Anakin as a sign that he is safe.

It’s okay, dear one, the warm gold of his presence in the Force reassures Anakin with the softest of touches. I won’t hurt you.

“I know you won’t, Master,” Anakin whispers with a weak smile, but the shadow of desperation freezes in his eyes when he looks past his Master and behind his back. “But they will.”