"I don't feel safe anymore," said Padmé. The heavy concern in her face was starkly visible to an old man, but well-hidden from an arrogant young one.
Obi-Wan Kenobi smiled wryly. "That is a common reaction," he said, "to one assassination attempt after another."
The closer Ben came to the netherworld of the Force—and there was no denying its closeness, now—the more powerful he became in dream, and the more his visions obeyed the command of his spirit. Still trapped in his desert-blasted body, still fighting the ravages of the sickness that would claim him, there was little he could do in these dreams. His spirit was still chained to his body, and he could go only forward and backward to where he had been. Qui-Gon spoke of the immense freedom of the netherworld of the Force, of leaping and bounding through the threads of space and time like current through wires, like a ship of unparalleled speed racing through a hyperspace lane, surging past and beyond a thousand light-years of blackness in the space of an hour.
For now, he was content in these moments to follow the threads of his life, and to let the seas of dream renew him in spirit. Dark things had come to trouble him; but always in the Force there was an inexhaustible fountain of light. He stretched out toward his happy memories, let them heal the black rupture in his spirit that had broken open in the cantina.
"Through the Force," said Master Yoda to someone, "things you will see. Other places. The future...the past. Old friends long gone."
But were those words themselves the past? No—they were from the future, he sensed. A possible future, at least. That meant Yoda had survived, somehow. That brought him comfort, too.
Ben was an old man, but he was still young to the boundless tapestry of the Force. It was all so vast, even to a Jedi master. With calm, he centered himself on those words, let them shape his thoughts.
"Old friends long gone."
Across time and space, he pulled away from Yoda's voice, from the blurred image of a mysterious swamp world, teeming with life. He returned in an instant to the round blue room on Coruscant where he had frequently traveled in his recent meditations. He arrived disoriented, still reeling from the vastness of the Force, and heard her speak again.
"I don't feel safe anymore," said Padmé. Obi-Wan's dismissive smile brought her only a little ease and comfort. Ben was sick to see it.
"That is a common reaction," said young Obi-Wan, "to one assassination attempt after another. Your continued work seems to be having an effect, then. You've become quite popular with the wrong sort of crowd." His flippancy was off-putting. But Ben remembered his own arrogance, his false humility. He could not have known, as that young man, what it really meant to feel unsafe. He sympathized with her fears, he remembered. But a young master in the bloom of his strength did not feel her fragility, could never fully understand it.
He understood now, and it hurt him sorely.
"Obi...it's not the Separatists," she said. "It's...it's Anakin."
Even as a young man, that unsettled Obi-Wan.
"You're right to be concerned," he said. "He's very strong, but he's become reckless. Impatient."
"There's some darkness in him," she said.
"I haven't felt it," said Obi-Wan. Ben could see, now, the weight of Palpatine's strength upon him—upon all of the Jedi. Looking back with the eyes of a master, he could now perceive the fog drawn over his own senses. It was the same fog that had driven Dooku away. The fog that had laid the Jedi low.
"I haven't felt anything," said Padmé. "But I've... seen it with my own eyes. He's troubled."
"That he is," said Obi-Wan. "We have discussed this matter. I thought it as well to let it go, but..."
YOU ARE READING
A Certain Point of View
Fanfiction"OBI-WAN NEVER TOLD YOU..." With those words, Darth Vader shook our faith in Obi-Wan as a reliable narrator, and told us there was more to his story than we ever knew. It's very rare that I write fanfiction, but this AU story (...or IS it?) takes p...
