InsaneJournal

OMFG! Anakin might do ~something~ *pearl clutch* (darkforcerising) wrote in makebelievelog,
@ 2012-10-09 10:45:00

Entry tags:

anakin skywalker, obi-wan kenobi

Who: Anakin and Obi-Wan
What: Running into each other after sharing a nightmare of epic proportions
When: Way early Tuesday morning – like between 12 and 1 am-ish
Where: Down by the lake because the roof has becomes soooo cliché
Rating/Warnings: High, because while they are just talking the dream will be referred to in flashbacks. Plus - Super Sadakins, and Mega Woebi-Wan
Status: In progress/Closed

“You were my brother, Anakin,” Obi-Wan was standing before him. The slope of the bank they were on making the Jedi Master appear the looming monolith Anakin’s mind always painted him. “I loved you!”

Everything was wrong, as if the spare parts Anakin was trying to fit into a mechanic were for a different droid entirely and yet he still tried, forcing them to work anyway. And the components, to their pitiful merit, were trying desperately to obey his command. But this wasn’t right! He shouldn’t be lying on the hot, black sand of a the interminable hell planet Mustafar, in more pain than had ever seared his short life as flames licked up his body like a hungry beast, missing three too many limbs and the culprit of that violation his closest, dearest, most trusted friend.

This wasn’t right, this should not be!

But it was wrong for all the incorrect reasons. As he felt the power that had fueled his attack against his friend wane to a mere shadow of what it had been just seconds before his rage increased tenfold. As if the latter drew life from the former, and the more it pulled in the less he became… him.

Until all that remained was…

“I HATE you!”

Anakin pushed open the castle door and accepted the slap to the face that was the bracing night autumn air. He’d known, the moment he’d woken from that nightmare with the blurring retribution of Obi-Wan’s downward swinging lightsaber branded into his memory, and the pain of severed limbs and burned flesh persisting as if he’d experienced each wound in the waking world, it had been a shared dream. He had wasted no time finding his way out of the castle just so he could think again. Padmé would have tried her best to sooth it all away, but he couldn’t help think he didn’t have the right to her comfort from this.

What had he done? He knew these dreams were random, but he couldn’t shake the feeling he’d somehow purposefully pulled Obi-Wan into one of his nightmares.

Why had it played out that way? Why had he said that?

His mind preoccupied on the horrible images it had conjured while sleeping his feet took charge and brought him to the lake. And, though he did not want to accept its reassurance, it was a calming place to be. The lake always reminded him of Varykino.

Only a split second before he rounded the bend along the shore did he realize his mistake. So lost in thought he’d failed to be mindful of his surroundings.

“Master, I-” Anakin’s voice caught, his mind betraying him yet again as the memory of his last words in the dream echoed in his ears. “I- I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

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do_what_i_must
2012-10-09 11:14 pm UTC (link)

He stood from where he was crouched beside Master Drallig's corpse and glanced into the room beyond. He did not need to go any further. The stench of cauterised flesh and the screaming in the Force told him all he needed to know, and yet...

His feet were moving without any conscious effort on his part. He had walked this path so many times, he no longer needed to think about where to tread to avoid standing on tiny nerveless fingers, and he should have known better than to make his way over to the largest pile of what seemed to be nothing more than rags. Still, that was where he found himself, lifting the bodies of almost an entire clan of younglings from the heap where they'd been left to rot, and laying them out so that they could have some small amount of dignity restored to them.

It sickened him when he realised that he was almost pleased to notice that they had been killed by blaster bolts, unlike Master Drallig. The battlemaster had been felled by a lightsaber, and that 'saber could only have been wielded by one person.

"Anakin..." he said, almost stupidly, as the sudden appearance of... of his Padawan, nobody else, caused him to wake up properly.

He'd been sitting on a tree stump that overlooked the water, wearing little more than his sleeping shorts. He had vague memories of ignoring the conventional wisdom of using doors and stairs and the like in his hurry to get down to the ground floor; he had simply jumped out of his bedroom window, absently nudging it shut with a gentle Force push once he was down so that Satine wouldn't catch a chill, and then he was at the tree stump, staring at the water. It wasn't quite meditation, but he wasn't properly focused on things either.

"You needn't worry. You weren't interrupting. Nothing of any great importance, anyway."

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darkforcerising
2012-10-10 03:53 am UTC (link)

From the impossibly far end of the room Anakin approached his former master busy at the pile of youngling bodies.

That room should be shorter, more compact, his memory declared it an unjustifiable rendering of what it had been in real life. But his memory of this place was silenced in the war of two voices in his head. The one, wisp-like and fragile, begging for the cessation of his progress towards his friend, pleading for this to not be, was being swallowed by that irrepressible rage uncoiling like a dragon with every step he took forward.

Stepping from the shadows he ignited his blade, red-white light unfurling with a serpent’s hiss to point down at his side.

Anakin stood almost motionless as he struggled with his next course of action.

He knew Obi-Wan had just lied to him. How could he not be thinking about what they’d just dreamed? The Jedi Master was sitting on a stump at the edge of a lake, in the middle of a cold autumn night, wearing absolutely nothing but a pair of shorts, for Kriff’s sake! Not that Anakin was more appropriately dressed for the elements, but at least his sleep-pants extended to his ankles and he’d had enough of his wits about him to don shoes, however unlaced they may be. The full impact of how affected his former master was by that dream struck deep.

Anakin wanted to stay and he wanted to go. He wanted both to make sure Obi-Wan was alright, and to find his own comfort, despite how little he felt he deserved it, in his former master’s presence. But he also wanted to run far away, as far as he could get from Obi-Wan. He was forever finding new ways to harm his friend and he just wanted to stop doing that.

The last three digits on his metal hand flexed an almost imperceptible amount to those who didn’t know what to look for, a tattle-tale of nervousness Anakin had never been able to work out of the hardware, nor restrain with his mind.

At last he moved to claim the ground next to the stump, making his choice based off his pledge from almost a month earlier that he wouldn’t leave Obi-Wan on his own anymore no matter how counter-intuitive staying might seem.

And it was cold out here, the night air a blissful assault against the memory of the furnace that had been his heart, and his flesh, in that dream. Each intake of breath was a sharp stab driving back that beast.

“I couldn’t-” he said after a long while, not daring to look at his friend. “I didn’t think I should go back to sleep. No one else should have to deal with… me like that.” Not once did it occur to him perhaps Obi-Wan didn’t know they had shared a dream.

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do_what_i_must
2012-10-10 12:46 pm UTC (link)

He paused where he was, bent over a tiny Rodian corpse as he straightened the little girl's tunics for her, and turned his head to look over his shoulder. None of this was right, his memories told him, this had not happened, but still, he stood and turned in one swift movement. His hilt was in his hand, but the blade stayed where it was for the moment.

"Anakin, what have you done?" he asked, his voice carrying clearly despite speaking barely louder than a whisper, "These are younglings. What harm did they ever do to anyone? How could you let this happen to them?"

The colour of Anakin's blade was not lost to him, but he didn't react until Anakin stepped fully out of the shadows and Obi-Wan could see the vile taint of corruption in his awful yellow eyes. That was when he lit his own blade, and blue light washed over the room. This was not how things had happened, and yet he could no more stop what was about to happen than he could stop the stars from shining. He stepped into the ready stance and waited for Ana- No. Vader. Obi-Wan waited for Vader's next move, even as he knew that this was not right.

"Deal with you like wh-" Obi-Wan asked, breaking off and looking round at Anakin when his fuddled mind made the connection and then instantly regretted doing so. He had shared a dream with Satine a few nights previously, it wasn't anything like what he'd just been through, but... "That... that was you?"

He got to his feet and stumbled back away from Anakin as it hit him. He hadn't just drifted through memories, altering bits here and there as one did in dreams. The whole fight, the entire thing, had been between him and his Padawan yet again. "But... but I... you... " he stammered as he ran his hands through his hair, tugging at it as he did so. The one thing he had clung to since Anakin had arrived at the castle was the fact that his Padawan had never gone through any of the things he had done as a Sith Lord, and now... now they had re-enacted the whole bloody thing (albeit in slightly different locations), the pair of them saying their lines in all the right places and he hadn't been able to keep it from Anakin. He couldn't even stop it from happening in a kriffing dream.

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darkforcerising
2012-10-10 02:15 pm UTC (link)

Anakin held his head high and stared back at his former master with a bold intensity that could only be born from the Dark Side. Obi-Wan’s words washed over him as if they held no meaning to him. And they didn’t, not now. There were still moments when that pathetic voice in his head, crying out with every swing of his blade and with every body that crumpled to the ground at his hand, broke through the thick, foggy morass clouding his judgment, and glimpses of his former self could be caught behind the hardened cast of his eyes. But like a heel crushing the head of a rodent, his hate ground that voice away to dust and ash that vanished in the coursing wind.

And when he opened his mouth to answer there was nothing left of his former self. “I’ve removed the treason from my new Empire!” His voice was loud, something similar to what he’d been before, but the fury and hatred were palpable. It wasn’t Anakin’s voice that spoke, but Vader’s.

“If you don’t stand with me,” he condemned, “then you are my enemy!” He didn’t wait for a response before he was rushing forward towards his former master, red blade held high.

For a few heart-wrenching seconds Anakin sat perplexed. Then panic set in, mixing with the residual anxiety from the dream, rendering him useless at anything but fragmented thoughts and even less connected sentences.

“Master, please. I thought you kne- I’m not-” he choked out as he scrambled back to his own feet and raised his hand towards Obi-Wan. He meant the gesture as a supplication for compassion, but he readily saw the shadow of Vader in that outstretched hand and clenched his fist and dropped it to his side. He cast his eyes down as he searched for the right thing to say.

How had he not known?! Hadn’t everyone been aware of what was going on?

This, seeing the abject disgust on Obi-Wan’s face, hearing it in his voice – That... that was you? – how he’d emphasized that identification! struck Anakin like a kick to the gut. It felt as if the wind had been knocked out of him.

No, he wanted to scream, that wasn’t me, I’m not that, I will never be that! That’s not me!

But he could not speak it, the words would not come, because he knew the truth that some part of him was that. In some part of his heart, guarded now by a cage of fear and frozen black space, resided that dragon, made of his hate and anger and all that darkness that was intrinsically woven into his very being. That burned like the scorching fury of the core of a star. And if he blinked for a moment or turned his back on it, that monster would break free and consume him. Like it had in the dream. Like it would when he returned home.

He couldn’t deny it was him, because, yes, that was him.

“I’m trying not to be that. I’m trying!” he begged, tears springing to his eyes. In Obi-Wan’s retreating steps he saw his friend recoiling away from him in revulsion. And he wanted that to stop. Just make it stop.

“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean- If I’d been aware during the dream I would have done everything I could to stop it. Please- I didn't mean to do that to you.”

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do_what_i_must
2012-10-18 09:43 pm UTC (link)

"Your new Empire?" he blurted, aghast at the nonsense his former Padawan was spouting and still clinging to increasingly fragile strands of hope that this time, this one time, he could somehow talk the man round, "Anakin, please, listen to what you're saying! These were children, how could they possibly have been considered traitors?"

And then Vader was running towards him. The sudden sharp crackle of plasma hitting against plasma echoed through the room, as the tang of ozone filled the air. "Only a Sith deals in absolutes," he forced out before they were in action, blades flickering round them almost faster than the eye could see and striking off each other again and again, over and over and over again. Unbeknownst to them both, the room cleared of bodies as they moved through their deadly dance, the familiar walls of the temple melting away into darkness until all that was left was the pair of them and their lightsabers.

Obi-Wan could only stare as Anakin spoke, and then it was his turn to be confused as to what he meant. Do that to him? "What? No... I..." he stammered, before shutting his eyes and doing his damnedest to release his frustration and uncertainty and, yes, fear into the Force. It was as effective as it usually was in this place. Still, he took a moment before standing straight, then folded his arms and looked up at his visibly-upset Padawan.

"I have... I have dreamt almost nothing but variants on that theme since I arrived in the castle, Anakin. I have walked through those rooms countless times, and nothing I do changes things. I have lit so many pyres in my dreams, I have flooded the Temple in my attempts to clean it, I have hid and I have done kriff-all and it changes nothing. Time and time again, we find each other and we fight," he said, his words becoming louder and more frantic as he went on, his posture and attitude rapidly going from calm and collected to something far more unstable, "and time and time again, I... I, I do what I must, because what else can I do? Why, Anakin? Why are you apologising to me? I see that, every single night, every time I close my kriffing eyes for more than a minute, and you're saying sorry because you got caught up in my, my nightmares? I would have spared you this if I could have, so why are you the one who's apologising?"

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darkforcerising
2012-10-19 11:17 am UTC (link)

The look on Anakin’s face was caught somewhere between a smirk and a sneer, as if he couldn’t decide if he were more supremely gratified with the way things had culminated in this moment or utterly disgusted. His hand of flesh gripped Obi-Wan’s wrist, twisting it and, by extension, the lightsaber in that hand so that the blade slowly angled towards its owner. His other hand, the one he’d built to replace the arm Dooku had taken from him, the one he had, with his skills with the Force, constructed to be more powerful than mere human flesh and bone could ever achieve, gripped Obi-Wan’s throat like a vice. A constricting snake wrapped tightly around his former Master’s airways.

Do what you must? Oh… you’ll try, Anakin thought as he started shoving Obi-Wan towards the durosteel floor grating.

There wasn’t anything left of his former self now, the entreating whisper beseeching him to recognize his friend and loved one silenced and as dead as the lightless expanse between the stars.

Anakin couldn’t hear the confession of what his friend’s mind forced him to endure every night, how Obi-Wan repeated every time he closed his eyes the same futile attempts to save him, without feeling the sharp stab of guilt. This was not a new disagreement between them. Both vied for responsibility for the massacre of the Temple, the fall of the Jedi, and their final confrontation on Mustafar, and while it was true Anakin had not yet committed those crimes he was simply too stubborn to let Obi-Wan bear culpability alone.

And the more of the burden Obi-Wan tried to claim for himself the more Anakin fought to maintain his hold on it, too.

“That wasn’t all you this time!” he tried to assert. Unfortunately Anakin’s intractability was, after all, honed by the best master there was, and his words didn’t slow Obi-Wan. Anakin opened his mouth to try again, as was his unfailing habit, but his throat seized and words failed for the sight before him.

There was something more this time; it wasn’t just a need to instruct his Padawan that was driving Obi-Wan on. The way his words trembled made Anakin’s hair stand on end, the way his friend’s body seemed to be rattling apart from some unseen inner vibration arrested Anakin’s mind. The Jedi Master was on the verge of something terrible and frightening unlike anything Anakin had seen before in Obi-Wan.

This wasn’t Anakin’s calm and steady former Master, this was his friend truly falling apart in front of him.

Anakin closed the distance between them and he placed his hands on Obi-Wan’s shoulders in an effort to steady him. “Master?” He was surprised to hear how unsteady his own voice was.

“Master- look at me.” The more Obi-Wan seemed to crumble apart the more Anakin did, too. Emotional breakdowns weren’t covered in Jedi training. He could carry his friend across a broken ship with a deteriorating gravity field that shifted at random, he could pull his friend from a nest of gundarks, he could shoot vulture droids off his wing, he could catch him free-falling through the traffic of Coruscant but Anakin didn’t know what to do for his friend now. He felt the twigs grinding into his knees before he realized they’d fallen down.

“Obi-Wan!” he tried again, hoping the use of Obi-Wan’s name instead of his title would break through.

[OOC: I hope this okay. If you want me to change anything at all let me know :D]

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