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What do you do after you have eliminated your sworn enemy, the person for whom you have spent the past twenty years searching?
Nothing. You do nothing.
That face still haunts your nightmares if you even dream at all. That name would still feel fit to burn your tongue with the sheer fury that it kindles. And the memory of that person still lurks in you, pulsing more organically than the blood-pump that pretends to be your heart.
For the first time in twenty years, you realize how much you have been rotting from the inside. It isn’t that you no longer have a purpose, rather that you never had one in the first place. The thought of him comes to you unbidden, unprompted. He would take you back, you see it now. At any moment in time, he would have taken you back. You know this more than anyone. And yet you never chose him. You never chose him while you still lived - lived, rather than barely surviving in a mobile metal coffin, obeying orders just to feel, paradoxically, some semblance of a free will. You never chose him in life, and you have no rights to choose him in death.
When he set foot on your premise, he and you both knew he was a dead man walking. He still did it, because that is the Obi-Wan Kenobi that you know. He did it not for himself, and he did not care to win, only to stall. He matched blades with you almost leisurely, and you remember how much it infuriated you. You thought he still underestimated you, after all these years, after all that he had caused you and all that you have done to surpass him. Now that it is too late, you realize that is not the case. It was because he would have never fought you, if circumstances were different. If you hadn’t forced his hands. But you only saw a world of red, even before your seared retina required these hideous glasses on the visor of your helmet, and it never occured to you how reluctant he had been. Then, or twenty years ago, it had always been that way. You hated him.
And he loved you.
There is no place for sentimentality anymore, in your petty, crippled body filled with wires and tubes and metal and medical-grade plastic. You hate how easily it was for you to recognize his signature; twenty years apart had got nothing on thirteen years of forging your souls into one, it seems. You hate how quickly you felt the differences, the mournful shadows that ate at his being, the wispy tremble in his light, despite how staunch it remained. You hate how you still remember it now, after he is gone. You hate how hollow you feel when you should feel triumphant. You hate how you hate yourself even more than you hated him. You hated him. Did you? Do you still?
If your tear ducts haven’t been scorched and scarred, you would have wet the burn scars on your face. If you still had lungs, you would breathe faster and faster and sob and scream until they burst. If you could stop your breathing right now, maybe you would. But there is no point in drowning in hypotheticals. You are already drowning and damned. In futilely trying to prevent death, you have offended death itself. Now even death will not take you. Nobody, nothing, ever will.
“You did this to me,” you say out loud, clinging to the embers of an anger you know you could not sustain. It’s easier to hate someone when you have the solitude to simmer, to play back in your mind over and over the offenses great and small, to dredge up old grudges and feed it to the fire. It’s hard to hate someone when you face them, even for you. You hate, you hate, you hate. This is alright, this is correct. Hate keeps you alive, and you will continue to hate. But the part of you that loves hasn’t died, no matter how many times you trample on it. It hurts you and not in the right way. It isn’t the kind of pain that can be erected into forts or made into cannons; it’s the kind of ache that festers and weakens you and makes you feel like a helpless child again. And make no mistake, you are little more than a helpless child outside of this suit. Without your prosthetic, you are about the size you were at the age of nine.
Is that how he sees you now?
I never said otherwise. Obi-Wan is nothing more than a drifting bout of consciousness now, and yet his presence is somehow so potent. You pointedly stare into the vast darkness beyond the viewport, even though you are damn near trembling with the urge to follow the pale glow in your peripherals. You expected him to say something else, something more. You wanted to feel something, anything , from him, other than these gentle waves of melancholy, and the boundless acceptance that makes you want to fall to your knees and take off your helmet and lay your forehead at his feet. You hate that he is so calm, although you must admit, you aren’t surprised.
“You should have hated me.” I wish you hated me. It would have made things that much easier for you. For so long you have told yourself he never loved you. He proved you wrong with nothing but a look, and he continues to prove you wrong even now that he is dead. The light of his ghost seems to shudder, but you prefer not to dwell on it. You prefer not to dwell on anything these days.
Astonishingly, there’s a sad little chuckle coming from the ghost’s direction. There is little we can do about that now, can we?
You’re silent. You have nothing to say. You wait until he takes it as a sign that you do not want him here, and fades away. You wait for it and then you regret it immediately. Because you have no way to know if he will ever, ever, ever appear to you again. His time-worn, life-worn face is still seared into your consciousness and the memories of days past will surely begin to torment you now. You remember how your name used to take shape in his mouth, and it doesn’t matter that it’s a name you have forfeited; it matters more that you don’t deserve it. Somehow, after all the lives you have taken and all the blood on your hands, the memory of your victory over him ends up being the most obscene, the most wretched patch of your mind. It shouldn’t. This isn’t how it should feel to be Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith and right hand of the Emperor.
But it is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker.
Forever.