Ben did not know how their prisoner friend had managed to tear open the door, nor had he seen it happen. But when the wall came crashing down and the Force came rushing in, he'd felt it, oh, how he'd felt it.

The prisoners warring with the Jedi had felt it too, and had stopped fighting as soon as the door fell. Those who were still alive had gaped wide-eyed at freedom, dropped their makeshift weapons, and run crying for the light. Aola had tried to stop them; more than one had tripped over the threshold and tumbled down to fates unknown. But it happened so fast, the Jedi were still trying to take stock of what had happened while their opponents threw themselves at the mercy of whatever lay beyond their prison.

Ben had been blind to it all, so overwhelmed by the sudden return of the Force. The sensation was excruciating, like feeling returning to frostbitten fingers after too long in the snow, like blood flowing through a once-dead limb. It was heaven, but it burned like hell.

"Oh Force," Aola had brushed past him and her unintentional shove woke Ben from his shock. She'd knelt beside the body of the prisoner who'd saved both their lives, who'd just done what neither of them could do and torn the door open. He wasn't moving.

"Careful," Ben said, hoisting the unconscious man by his underarms as Aola lifted his feet. They carefully, clumsily climbed over the jagged remains of the thanatosine door and into the snow-capped slope of the mountainside. If the other prisoners had survived their manic leaps through the door, Ben could not see where they'd gone. There was a deadly drop just meters away, and he and Aola stayed close to the door, shuffling through snow on a precarious ledge as they laid out their comrade.

"Come on, now," Ben said, reliving the worst parts of the Clone Wars, of watching the life of his men fade from their eyes. He pressed his hand to the man's cheek. "Not like this, not after all that."

"Is he dead?" Aola asked frantically, scanning their surroundings for guns, or probe droids, or anything that might pose a threat.

"Not yet," Ben replied. There were no physical injuries that Ben could see, but he didn't need to remember his battlefield training to know that not all mortal wounds were visible to the naked eye. "Come on," he said, gripping the man's hand in his right and pressing his left to his bloodied temple. Closing his eyes, Ben searched the Force for signs of life. Beside him, Aola had dug out her commlink.

"Cody, come in," her voice shivered, from cold, from shock, from exhaustion. "We need a medevac at my position," she struggled to shout over a sudden blast of wind that whipped and howled around the mountainside. Her comm was silent. "Cody, do you copy?"

"Aola," a staticky voice broke through, and the Jedi could have cried. "Stay exactly where you are. They're on their way."

The prisoner's eyes had cracked open, just barely conscious and hazy with delirium. Tears leaked down his face and froze in the mountain air. His chest shuddered with emotion as he looked up at the florid dusk sky.

"Force," he croaked, voice thick with pain and emotion. He struggled over uneven gulps of air as he felt the Force pour over him for the first time in years. "Light," he breathed, "Force... we… we got out."

"Yes, you're free," Ben assured the man, gripping his bloodied hand tight within his own, to reassure and to keep warm. "You're safe now, I promise."

The man looked up at his rescuer, and his dark brows twitched in confusion. "Ob-Obi-Wan?" he said, sounding confused. He reached up with his free hand as if to touch the older man's face, but was too weak to manage it. "Force, Obi," he breathed, "are we really that old?"

Ben stared down at him, dumbstruck. The man drifted back into blissful unconsciousness, more tears freezing on his face. Ben looked to Aola, who looked back at him.

"What did he say?" she asked, having been occupied with her comms. Ben opened and closed his mouth, not sure what to tell her. He examined the man before him. He was utterly unfamiliar.

"I don't know," he said, at a complete loss.

Obi-Wan blinked hard, trying to fight the sting of sweat in his eyes. He could taste the salt from his lips, feel his shirt sticking to his skin. If his opponent was growing tired, she did not show it. As she advanced toward him, Obi-Wan adjusted his grip on his saber for perhaps the fourth time in as many minutes. He'd been trying—and failing—to guess her moves for more heart-stopping moments that he'd ever had to with any other opponent. Last time he'd fought a Sith, it had been like fighting a tsunami of rage. This, though was completely different. This was a chess match of astronomical stakes. The way she watched him, catlike and shrewd, was painfully familiar.

"You trained under Yan Dooku," he said, trying to hide his breathlessness and knowing she would hear it anyway. "You know him."

"Knew," she corrected. "I haven't spoken to the man in decades. I hoped to again, once." It was the first time he'd heard her betray any ounce of emotion, and it caught him off guard. She took the opportunity to strike, and landed a solid hit on his left side. He rolled away and came up in a solid Form III defense.

"I gave up any hope of reasoning with him a long time ago—you would have been little more than a child. And now look at you." she swiped at his feet, and the unconventional move made him leap away, ruining his defense. He spotted an uneven ledge carved into the wall at the head of the room, like a sill or an alter. He leapt up onto it to give himself higher ground. Iris—or whatever her name really was—looked up at him in judgement.

"Is this what they teach on Coruscant now, to run and hide?"

Obi-Wan leapt down in a falling Ataru move that Qui-Gon favored. It caught his opponent off guard only for a few seconds, but allowed him to reverse their positions so she could no longer drive him back into a corner. He glanced back across the hall to where he knew there was a door, but he could see nothing through the darkness.

"You were Dooku's padawan," Obi-Wan said again, knowing it would strike a nerve.

"I was his protege," the Sith snapped. "I was the best pupil he'd ever taken, the best in a generation, better than him." She advanced, and in her fury Obi-Wan found at least some familiarity of movement, at last back into the familiar trappings of the second form. He prayed her reverie would last, if only to give him a moment to breathe. "I outgrew him, and he knew it, so he turned me out, out of jealousy."

"He's never spoken about you," Obi-Wan goaded. She aborted her elegant riposte midair and transformed it into a sledgehammer blow that did not come from any lightsaber form that Obi-Wan knew.

"I outrank him in every way," she snarled. "And when he hears that it was Komari Vosa who brought the beloved KnightKenobi to his knees, he won't have to speak about me to anyone; I will let my power speak for itself."

Obi-Wan's moment of security within Mikashi was dashed as her assault exploded into a kaleidoscope of saberwork that defied anything he'd ever learned on Coruscant. Her movement bespoke a great deal of training and intention, but the form of her stance, the grip of her blade, the line of her arm constituted a form that Obi-Wan had never seen. He adjusted his own form to incorporate elements he'd learned from Yoda, Qui-Gon, Dooku, and Ben, and hoped it was enough.

The medical ship arrived and hurried them back to base, where the two Jedi and their unconscious friend were whisked to a medbay. Alderaanian personnel tended to Aola and Ben's bumps and bruises while their indisposed companion was put through a battery of tests. The two of them sat on adjacent benches as army nurses evaluated them for frostbite.

"Aola," Cody burst into the room and saw her first. She looked just as relieved to see him as he did to see her. The clone noticed Ben. "And Master Kenobi, thank the stars you're alright. What happened?" The two Jedi looked at each other.

"It was… I don't know where to begin," Aola said. "Our friend might be able to tell you more—has he woken up?"

"Your friend?" Cody frowned.

"A man helped us escape," Ben cut in. "He was unconscious when we got here, they've taken him away for scans."

"Wait," Cody put out a hand to interrupt, "You're saying the third evac was a civilian?" Ben and Aola glanced at each other once more.

"A prisoner," Ben clarified. "We don't know who he is." Cody looked distraught.

"A prisoner," he repeated. "Then where the hell is Skywalker?" Ben's heart lurched in his chest.

"What?" the master demanded.

Cody glanced at him, eyes worried and apologetic. "There was some kind of cataclysmic power surge on the mountain. Rex and Padme made it back soon after, but we've lost all contact with Kenobi and Skywalker. When you called in for a triple evac, I thought…" He met Ben's eyes, worry behind his own. "Rex tells us Obi-Wan was going after a Sith."

Ben stared back, a pit of dread opening in his gut.

Anakin stepped through the door he'd cut, entered the hangar bay, and felt his heart sink.

"Oh no," he said. It was freezing and blindingly white. The mountain's ray shields had gone dead, and the Alderaanian winds had already torn through the hangar, tossing parked starfighters off their moorings and piling snow up in drifts.

"Come on," he moaned, and sunk to the floor to bury his face in his knees. He breathed, in and out, in and out. At eighteen, he was practically a grown man, and didn't want to mope like a child. He knew that's what he must've looked like, but he was just so tired. His body hurt, and his mind hurt, and he'd been sure, he'd been sure this was the right way. Now, he had no bearings, no sense of where to go next, and no idea if his friends were safe or not.

He peaked over his knees. Panche's ship was gone, which meant that Rex and Padme must've succeeded in making it off the mountain. If they'd been followed, Anakin wasn't so sure. Judging by the scene they'd left behind, it must've been a close thing. There were dead droids everywhere, and the ground, ceiling, and walls were all scorched with blaster fire.

Sudden movement made the apprentice jump to his feet, lightsaber at the ready. A pile of droid corpses shifted. Anakin took cover behind the broken edge of the doorway, readying himself to deflect blasterfire. The droid that emerged, however, was not a battle droid or even a security probe. Anakin leaned further around the door to get a better look and watched as it grumbled something indistinct and shoved a heavily-armored battle droid out of its way so it could roll further into view.

"An astromech?" Anakin wondered aloud. He remembering seeing it, or at least one of a similar model, hovering near Panche's freighter not long before they departed. He stood fully out of the doorway and put away his saber.

"You're Panche's droid," he said, and the domed top of the droid's fuselodge swivelled toward him, all manner of sharp and sparking tools spiking out its body in porcupine-like preparation for danger. It stared at Anakin, unsure of what to make of him. The Jedi took a step forward.

"My name is Anakin. The people on Panche's ship, they're my friends," He reassured it. "You travelled here with four of them, and…" he realized rather late that the droid had a blaster trained on him. Since when were astromechs outfitted with blasters? He slowly put his hands up. "and I'm assuming helped two of them escape. I'm trying to find the others—they're all in danger, but I don't know where they went." He glanced at the pocket on his belt where he'd stashed RB-1's memory. "I think I have a map, but... do you have any way to read G.12-07 memory cards?" He asked, hoping against hope.

After a moment of hesitation, the droid slotted its armory neatly back into its hull and rolled over to the Jedi without comment. It came to a stop before him, photoreceptor whirring as it scanned him up and down. Seeming to come to a decision, it opened a slot in its hull and curtly retorted that it'd been reading maps longer than he, a lanky organic, had been alive. Anakin's heart soared.

It had been ages since Obi-Wan had seen Dooku in person, but he could hear his words as if they'd spoken only moments ago. "In another world - the world where Ben first knew me, I was a sith, Obi-Wan. Did you know that?" He tried to imagine the kinds of moves Dooku would use, if he got it into his mind to kill Obi-Wan. The mental exercise afforded him a hairsbreadth advantage for one, three, five volleys, but then his opponent landed a sizzling hit on his right knee, and he hissed in pain.

"Your fear blinds you," the Sith mocked him, focused and cruel. She'd begun to breathe heavily from their duel, as had Obi-Wan, but her breaths were firm and steady where Obi-Wan sounded as though he were drowning in air.

"Or perhaps it is only your blindness itself." She landed another hit to his right thigh, knowing he wouldn't see it coming. "For all the flattering stories and high praise from the Council… you are still just a boy found lucky in combat." She stood back and twirled her saber in dizzying circles. "If only Sevage hadn't been such a fool, you would have died on Kamino."

Is that what the last Apprentice had been called? Memories flooded Obi-Wan's mind, memories of a white room, and a rayshield, and absolute, blinding terror. He'd never been able to remember that day except for what Qui-Gon had told him. Now, he found himself reliving it in his mind's eye, the fear, the blood, the desperation to survive. Komari seemed to sense it, and he saw her smile.

This is what she wants, he realized, forcing the memories back and grounding himself in the here and now. The Force is my ally, he reminded himself, as he and his mentors had told him innumerable times throughout his life, even more so after his injury. I need neither eyes to see it, nor ears to hear it, nor hands to feel it.

That last bit nearly rang true when the Sith's saber fell blisteringly close to Obi-Wan's wrist. He darted his hand away at the last moment, but saving his hand spoiled his low guard, and the Sith followed through her saber strike with her bare hand, splayed wide and firm. She pushed out toward Obi-Wan, and a dark wave of power hit him like a tsunami. He flew across the hall and hit into the stone wall behind. Something in his body cracked, but through the flood of adrenaline could not tell what had broken. He hoped it was not something dreadfully important like a leg or a skull.

Dazed and winded on the floor, it took Obi-Wan a moment to gain his bearings. The room was dark as a cloudy night, and when he'd hit the wall, his saber had deactivated. He had only the livid red glow of his opponent's blade to tell him up from down. She advanced toward slowly, a predator playing with its prey.

Obi-Wan was exhausted, and it was no whisper of the Dark Side that told him he was going to lose this fight. Between increasingly labored breaths—maybe it was a rib that had broken after all—he glanced up at Komari and felt a wave of frustration towards her. It was he who his mentors had said was a once-in-a-generation talent, he who'd bested masters thrice his age, he who'd fought and killed a Sith before he was even a knight. Was it his own hubris that had brought him to this, lying on the floor, robes pockmarked with holes, his entire right side bleeding testament to his disability?

He recalled the confidence he'd felt when he stood defending his friends in the outer halls, the mettle of his own voice when he told Rex that he would handle it. Digging deep past the pain and fear, Obi-Wan searched himself to find the same courage again. He had no way to know where any of them were, if they were safe or if they would remain so, but he knew that the longer Komari remained fixated on him, the less time she would have to hunt down his friends. Mouth tasting of blood, Obi-Wan stood and took up a firm Soresu stance. It was not a form he favored, but one he knew from borrowed memories had seen the Obi-Wan of another world through battles far worse than this.

"You realize, of course," Komari told him, coming to a stop in front of him, "that you will lose."

"Me, lose to you?" Obi-Wan was beginning to feel dizzy, and smiled to disguise it. "Of course I will. But the Jedi won't. The Light won't. The Sith will lose this war, and nothing you or I do will ever change that."

She frowned at him, taken aback by such predictions, but her surprise took only a moment to transform into a snarl. She raised her saber, and he braced himself for the strike, but the explosive clash of the saber came too early. Sith and Jedi turned as one toward the door, where two blazing lightsabers, one blue, one red, pierced through the wall.

A hole a little larger than the door itself fell into the hall, and in the mingled purple light, Obi-Wan could make out the bloody, disheveled, and now quite surprised face of Anakin Skywalker.

"Anakin," he breathed, relief tempered by newfound fear.

Anakin had no time to respond, because between the Jedis' surprised looks of reunion, Komari seized her moment to strike. Obi-Wan took notice too late, and his guard slipped. Komari flicked his weapon from his grasp, grabbed his shoulder, and pulled him towards her. He saw the strike coming just before it hit him, but could not dodge out of the way. She drove her saber clean through his right side, searing just under his ribs. His body seized in shock, and she leaned over to whisper in his ear, "You should know better than to drop your defenses." Komari shoved him to the side and he crumpled to the dais floor, unmoving.

"Obi-Wan!" Anakin screamed, immobilized by shock, red and blue lightsabers held in a loose jar'kai grip. Komari turned to face the would-be rescuer with cold determination.

"If you intend on running," she said, ignoring Obi-Wan's sounds of distress behind her,

"I'd suggest you do it now."

Anakin looked at Obi-Wan, spun his sabers into a new grip, and charged.

Where Obi-Wan had fought with analytic grit and decades of training, Anakin fought with nothing more than a racing heart and the determination to not lose. Where Obi-Wan had shifted from one form to another as a strategist twists his own machinations to meet a master opponent, Anakin leaned on his own conviction and power in a bald-faced gamble. They fought in nameless sequences that Anakin invented as he went along, drawing on all the forms Ben had taught him and some moves no Jedi had ever tried.

The Sith struck at him from above, and he flung her off with a Force push. She retaliated with a vicious passata sotto, but before the blade could reach either of his ankles, Anakin pulled her up from the ground with a flick of his hand, and right into the path of his blade. She caught both of his sabers firmly on her own, and held him there under the weight of his own strike, daring him to be the first one to give up the pressure and risk her blade.

The Sith could feel sweat pouring down her face, from the heat of the blazing plasma between them, and from the exertion of the fight. This boy—for he was just a boy, bare cheeks and padawan braid marking him as green as any Jedi came—was pushing her to her limit. How, she did not know, but there was a raw, elemental edge to his power that made her heart race, desperate to learn more.

"You remind me of someone," she told him, turning in a bid to catch him off balance. He turned with her, their blades still snapping and hissing as they remained locked together. "A boy I knew of, years ago. A boy born on Tatooine. The most powerful Force-sensitive in ten thousand years, or so they say." She continued to turn, making neat footwork forward and back as she attempted to shake the boy off, but his sabers remained locked on hers. "I always wondered what happened to him, but…" she looked him up and down. "It looks like the Jedi got to you first.

"I'm not from Tatooine," Anakin snapped. "I was raised on Alderaan, on Coruscant."

"Raised, yes," said the Sith. "But born…?" She raised her eyebrows high, the rest of her sentence hanging in the air for Anakin to finish himself. Anakin said nothing, and pressed harder into both blades. She glanced at his hands, and did a double take on the hilt of his scarlet blade. She recognized it.

"You," she breathed, expression evolving from one of outrage, to surprise, to a bizarre, manic fixation that made Anakin feel both intrigued and terrified. She drove him backward. "You were the one. You destroyed my kyber, my brother. You are him, the boy from Tatooine."

"No I'm not," Anakin insisted, watching his feet as he slipped down the short stairwell from the dais to the ground below.

"No Jedi could hope to do what you've done," she was ranting, "not in ten millenium or more."

"I am a Jedi," Anakin shoved her away, but as he did, her blade slid down his blue lightsaber to its hilt and flicked it from his grasp, sending it skittering uselessly across the hall. Only the red light of their twin sabers remained.

"You could be so much more," she told him. "You don't even know your own power. They haven't told you, maybe they don't even know, but I do. How did it feel, the kyber?" she asked suddenly, now standing a respectful distance away, her lightsaber not angled to attack, but in a loose defensive grip. "How did it feel to hold such power?"

Taken aback by such a question, Anakin's mind strayed. Truth be told, it'd been easy, so ludicrously easy to slip into that power and grow drunk on it. He remembered Obi-Wan's gobsmacked expression at the door when Anakin had opened it by himself. It was not the first time Anakin had astonished himself with his own abilities. It was certainly not the first time he'd scared someone else witless. This was, however, the first time anyone had ever asked him how it felt, and he was surprised to find that he had no vocabulary to describe it.

"Come with me. We will find what else you can do," she said to him. "I will help you learn the true limits of your power."

Anakin frowned, trying desperately to focus on his opponent but dazed by the light. The red glow of their sabers cocooned them against the gauzy blackness of the hall, and it was easy for Anakin to forget where he was. Memories flashed in his mind, of being the first in his clan to learn to summon objects to himself, and seeing Master Zyrha's face when he told her he'd been doing it since he could remember. Of levitating an entire desk by accident when his teacher had only asked him to levitate the feather that sat on top of it. Of throwing his classmates across the dojo in the heat of a fight, and being reprimanded for it. Of seeing the initiates' looks of fear as Master Drallig escorted him from the arena. He'd always thought of the episodes as examples of gross miscommunication, bad luck, and lack of self-control.

But could it all just be a matter of power?

I didn't help you, Obi-Wan had looked utterly helpless when he'd said it just earlier that day. Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin's idol, the role model he'd heroized since his earliest days, helpless and begging for Anakin to do what he could not. Obi-Wan, who was now either dead or dying in a corner while Anakin stood here, transfixed by his own power, and… and listening to a bleeding Sith, of all people.

"Get away from me," he snapped, and lunged for her, using his left hand to take advantage of her open guard. The Sith responded with lightning-fast reflexes. Before Anakin could react, she switched hands and swung her saber in a neat arc that met Anakin's arm halfway between elbow and wrist. His lightsaber went dark, and he screamed.

In his pain, he did not realize what she'd done before he saw his own severed hand lying on the ground between them. Horror immobilized him. He gripped his left arm to his chest, and did not know what to do with the sizzling, half-cauterized stump that he found there. His right hand was coated in hot blood within moments and he stared at it dumbly. The growing stain appeared pitch black in the light of the Sith's blade, which had risen to hover dangerously by his neck.

"You will come with me, boy," she told him, tone transformed into one of dark intention. "Do it without a fuss, and you can keep the other one."

He looked up at her, but it was something behind her that caught her attention. With one less lightsaber to blind him in the dark, Anakin could see the shadowed figure of Obi-Wan up on the dais. He was on the floor, but he was moving. He was alive.

The Sith noticed the boy's eyes roam, and she followed his gaze back to where she'd left Obi-Wan bleeding at the end of the hall.

In that moment, when the Sith's head was turned, fear for Obi-Wan and a wall of adrenaline seized every fiber of Anakin's being. He threw out his right hand and summoned his lightsaber, the one he'd crafted from its crystal himself on Ilum, and brought it blazing blue to strike at his opponent. She turned just in time to block his blow, but the force of it knocked her to the floor. She held him off of her with both hands on her saber hilt, leveraging the blade vertically across herself as he bore down one-handed with all the power he could muster.

"You did not kill him," Anakin declared, voice shaking, cradling his severed arm against his robes and staining them all down the front. "You will not kill me," he told her. As he spoke, his saber's light seemed to shift, from blue, to deep indigo, to violet, to a bleeding, violent red. The hilt burned like a hot iron under his hand, but he held fast. "I will not go with you," he said, and the saber grew darker, darker, until the blade itself was black, leaving just a sliver of light to shine off the whites of Komari's eyes as she looked up at him, mystified and scared.

"He and I," Anakin said, struggling with the boiling heat of the saber in his hand, "are leaving here, both of us, together."

All at once, his blade changed from fathomless black to the brightest, purest white he'd ever seen. Blinded as if by a sun, the Sith winced and shrunk away. In so doing, her saber teetered off balance, and her defense buckled entirely. Anakin's blow fell with the weight of his entire body and power behind it, and it sliced neatly through the hilt of her saber as well as her neck. He collapsed to the ground and let go of his weapon, which sent the room into utter blackness.

Something rolled into his shoulder, and Anakin yelled in disgust and fear when he realized it was her head.

He crawled away, left arm feeling unnatural beneath him. He felt lightheaded, dizzy, like he was going to cry or be sick. He did both. Through the tears, he looked down at himself, wanting to know how much blood he'd lost, knowing that he needed to make a tourniquet but unable to see anything. He reached out his senses, searching for any sign of his master. Ben was beyond his grasp, but Obi-Wan was there.

"Obi," he tried to say, and was surprised by how sluggish his tongue felt in his mouth. Blue light split the air, and he saw the knight across the room, half standing, leaned up against the wall and holding his saber as a torch. The man appeared blurry, as if Anakin were seeing him through water. The lightsaber began to flicker. "Y're 'live," Anakin said, overcome with relief, even as Obi-Wan's lightsaber flickered to black.

Obi-Wan had just won his battle with consciousness moments ago, awoken by shouts and sounds of a saber fight. By the time he'd finally wrangled his eyes open, the hall had been drowned in darkness and silence. It'd taken him several long minutes to find his own saber, but when he ignited it, nothing could have prepared him for what he saw. Anakin was lying face-down on the floor, a broad trail of blood behind him, leading away from a decapitated body.

"Force," Obi-Wan breathed, heart leaping. "Anakin," he called, not sure at first if the apprentice were dead or alive. The boy looked up at him and said something, but it was too quiet for Obi-Wan to hear. "Anakin," he said again, limping along the wall and hissing in pain. The Sith had stabbed him through and through, and while she'd managed to miss most of the vital bits, Obi-Wan knew he was moving on borrowed time. If he could get his commlink to work, if he broadcast their location…

"Anakin," he fell beside the boy and brought his saber closer for the light. "Come on, padawan, don't die on me," he said, acutely aware of the spots dancing before his own eyes. He grabbed the teen's shoulder and rolled him over. "Come on, don't die on me, don't—holy chssk," he cursed when he saw the boy's arm, or rather, the lack of it. That explained the blood. He glanced back at the trail the boy had left. It was impossible to estimate how much he'd lost. He had no tourniquet. Even if he had, Obi-Wan doubted he'd have the strength to fasten it, or hold it in place. He felt for a pulse and found it, weak and fast. Anakin was unconscious, which might have been for the best.

"This is going to hurt," Obi-Wan said, hauling the stub of Anakin's arm over his body. Working as carefully as he could, he held his saber to the stump, finishing the cauterizing process that the Sith's blade had started. Some blood still seeped through, so Obi-Wan used his own tabards to wrap the apprentice's arm and, letting his lightsaber go dark, leaned his full weight on it to stop the bleeding. With his free hand, he fished around in the dark for his commlink and tried to open a channel.

"Cody, Bail, anyone, do you copy?" he said. Not even static greeted him, only silence. He reached across Anakin and felt around on the teen's belt for his commlink. He tried to open a channel again. "Anyone—kriffing—Aola, Rex, Padme, do you copy?" More silence.

Obi-Wan slumped down, breath coming in short, painful gulps. His arm fell across Anakin's body, the link slipping from his fingers. After a few moments alone with his own breathing, he wrapped his arm around the apprentice, trying to find a solid grip. There was no way Obi-Wan could stand on his own, let alone carry Anakin with him. But maybe, if they moved along the ground... he looked desperately back to where he knew the door was, trying to measure the distance through the dark. Careful of Anakin's arm, the knight pulled the boy's body tight against himself, digging his heels and right fist into the ground.

"I told you," he said, left arm secured around Anakin's middle while he used his right, saber still in hand, to help push them backwards across the ground. "I told you I don't want to have this conversation with your master. It's just…" he grunted in pain as he felt the skin on his knuckles tear against the stone ground, "terribly bad manners, you know, to die like this." They were moving toward the door, but only centimeters at a time. "Joke's on you, though." He could hear his own breathing begin to falter. The spots in front of his eyes were getting worse. "Cause I'm goin' t'die here too, and avoid all that... all that unpleasantness 'bout Ben." His voice shook, and then broke with a sudden sob. He could feel Anakin's face pressed up against his cheek. He could not see him, but he knew the boy was dying very quickly. Anakin would be the one to fade first, and Obi-Wan was helpless to stop him.

"Y' can't… y' can't go now, Anakin," he slurred, feeling like a fool after so many years of doubting. "You can't, you've s' much more to do." He pulled them a few more centimeters toward the door, and his knuckles met a sharp rock. He screamed in pain and fell flat on his back, Anakin's weight crushing the wind from his lungs. He could not move.

Consciousness came and went in flashes. Every time Obi-Wan awoke, he wondered if he was dead. Eventually, he awoke to the sound of something moving near him. He hoped against hope for a moment that it was Anakin, but the boy's weight was still pressing still and heavy on his side. The thing moved closer, right beside Obi-Wan's head. Through the dark, he could make out the binary blips and colored lights of a droid. Whether it was friend or foe, Obi-Wan could not tell.

"Help him, please," he said. "Please. Please help him." The droid said something in binary and rolled away, and Obi-Wan wanted to curse at it. He wanted to sleep, and knew he shouldn't, but the decision was already made for him. He did not see if the droid ever came back or not.

Light broke across the room where neither Jedi could see, and the room flooded with boots, blasters, and shouting.

Anakin had strange dreams of strange creatures in a strange land. Their shifting faces and haunting voices followed with him into the limbo between waking and sleeping. The one, they said, a chorus of voices, each one appearing near or far, to his left or his right, spinning and changing around him but always speaking as one. The chosen. The light. The dark. The balance. He opened his eyes, and found himself underwater—but the water was pink, tinged red and bubbling—blood? He closed his eyes again and saw the masked creatures coming towards him and away again, their faces shifting and changing before him. Faces like water took the place of their masks. People he knew, people he thought he'd seen before, and many people he did not recognize. He saw a beautiful woman with glowing eyes, a long-faced, pale man with dark robes, and an old, old, old man. Anger. Joy. Confusion. Sadness. Serenity. He inhaled, and felt as though he were drowning.

He jerked awake.

It was bright and quiet. Somewhere, something was beeping in a soft and rhythmic tempo.

"Anakin?" someone said. A woman's voice. For the barest fraction of a second, Anakin thought it was his mother, but then he turned and saw someone else entirely, someone he'd feared he'd never see again.

"Senator," he said, utter relief filling his voice. "You're alive." Padme Amidala seemed surprised to see him talking, and she chuckled at him, eyebrows twisting up in an expression of pity.

"I should be saying that about you, Padawan Skywalker," she told him. "You gave us all quite a scare. It's good to see you awake."

Anakin looked down at himself and realized that he was in a hospital bed. He saw his left arm, handless and attached to some sort of medical contraption full of pinkish, bubbling water. Bacta? All at once, the memories of their mission to the mountain flooded back.

"Obi-Wan," he burst, launching into movement, using his hand and his stump to shove aside the bed coverings, "Obi-Wan's hurt, he's dying, where's-"

"Hey, hey, hey," Padme grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back down to the bed. He was so surprised by how strong she was that he almost failed to register the fact that she was touching his bare shoulder, where the hospital gown didn't quite cover. That's not the only thing hospital gowns don't cover, his brain was snipping at him, and you were about to get up in front of her. His face went scarlet. Padme gave him a reassuring smile.

"Obi-Wan is fine," she told him. "Still in bacta, but he'll be alright."

"Bacta?" he said.

"Yes," she said, "he's been injured quite badly. Nothing permanent," she felt terrible when her eyes strayed to his arm, "some broken bones, a concussion."

"Right," Anakin said, sitting back, heart racing. He became achingly aware of Padme's hand, which was still on his shoulder. "Right," he said again, and glanced at her. "And you're alright. Is Rex alright?"

"Yes, Rex is fine." Padme smiled. "As are Ben and Aola."

"Master Ben?" Anakin was mortified when his voice cracked over the name, but it made Padme smile wider.

"He's no worse for wear, just a black eye and a few scratches. He's been worried sick over you, you know."

"Oh," Anakin said. "Sorry," he tacked on. When Padme at last drew her hand away from his shoulder, he began missing it instantaneously. He leaned fully back against his pillows, still not quite enough over the almost-got-out-of-bed-and-mooned-Padme-Amidala embarrassment to look the senator in the face. That was a brush with social death that his subconscious was sure to bring out on parade for the next few weeks or decades.

He distracted himself by looking down at his left arm, transfixed by the alien absence of his hand. The bacta device strapped to the stump beneath his elbow fascinated him. He wondered how it worked, and brought it up closer for inspection. It was heavy on his arm, far heavier than a hand. He wondered absently if a mechanical hand would be lighter.

Padme took his flesh hand in hers and his brain stopped functioning. Forgetting his embarrassment, he looked over at her and met her eyes.

"Thank you, Anakin, truly," she said, glancing at his left arm. "Rex and I are alive because of you. You're very brave. Had it not been for you, we'd still be stuck up there."

Anakin was fairly used to helping people, and even to saving lives, but he was utterly unused to being thanked for it. It was a rare experience for any Jedi, and no one had ever sprung such gratitude on him while he was alone without Ben by his side to say something diplomatic. He found himself blushing again.

"You would've been able to fight your way out without my help, I'm sure," he said awkwardly. "I know you're a good shot."

It made her chuckle. He watched her smile, her warm brown eyes as they crinked over her cheeks, the wavy tumbles of her hair over her shoulders. He'd never seen her hair outside of her many gravity-defying headdresses. She was always styled so perfectly for the Senate hall or a throne room, her natural hair was a novelty. He found himself entranced by its frizz, which caught the bright hospital lighting around her head like a halo.

"Your hair is beautiful, it looks like it's glowing." She laughed again, and his eyes went quietly wider. "Did I say that out loud?" he asked, afraid of the answer.

"Yes," she told him, voice merry and measured in her effort to not laugh. "But in your defense, you're on a good deal of drugs right now,'" she said magnanimously, working to defend his dignity as he could not do for himself. "You can't help what you say."

"Right, drugs," he took the explanation and internalized it, leaning back onto his pillows and wishing he were unconscious again so he would stop embarrassing himself. "I'm really sorry, Senator," he said earnestly, blushing from his collarbones all the way up to his ears. He glanced at her again, met her eyes, and found he could not look away.

"Please call me Padme," she said. Her hand remained on his, and he hoped he wouldn't give her a reason to move it.

"Alright," he agreed.

"And don't apologize," she said quietly, "it was a very sweet thing for you to say."

Pure white. Obi-Wan had never seen a room so white, save for maybe once, years ago, in a horrible time that he had trouble remembering. The smell, though, was far more familiar. He fought with the muscles in his neck for a while, and eventually wrestled his head around so his good eye could better see where he already knew he was: a hospital bed.

"Not dead, then," he croaked aloud.

"No," said a voice nearly identical to his own, only older and more weary. Obi-Wan turned his head to see his older self sitting in a chair near the bed. Ben's robes were clean and his greying beard trim, but he had a shining black eye, a few bandaged fingers, and looked exhausted. "Although," said the master, "as is your tendency, you made it a point to get as close as death as is possible before making up your mind about it."

"But… Anakin," Obi-Wan ignored the jibe and sat up as far as he could, which was not far. "Ben, Anakin is-"

"In a room down the hall, where he's been awake for quite a bit longer than you," Ben assured him.

Fou

"But his arm, Ben, he's-"

"Yes, I know. He got out of bacta two days ago and is already asking me when he'll get a new hand, and if I'll allow him to engineer one himself." Met with such news, Obi-Wan exhaled all his anxiety in a huff, and relaxed back into his bed, wincing in pain.

"You yourself only just got out of bacta this morning," Ben told him, sounding like a creche master reprimanding his wards. "Three broken ribs, a concussion, burns everywhere, and a fairly gaping hole in your side. It's a good thing human livers regenerate, or there's a chance you'd never recover." Obi-Wan absorbed this in silence, eyes fixated on some distant point.

"Two days ago?" he repeated, and looked to Ben with a measure of confusion. "How long have I been here?" Ben breathed in deeply and explained:

"You were found by a very scrappy astromech droid three days ago. It contacted us, using codes it apparently learned from the memory banks of Anakin's RB-1 droid. A dispatch from the Alderaanian Navy found a half-destroyed mountain fort and a path of doorways cut open by lightsaber. You and Anakin were found unconscious, along with a headless Sith acolyte, and were taken to the Alderra Royal Hospital, which is where we are now. You were both put immediately into bacta. Anakin responded faster than you."

Obi-Wan nodded slowly. He looked again at Ben. "You should be with your apprentice," he said. "Is he alright?"

Ben heaved a sigh that reeked of annoyance. "Anakin is rather busy at the moment talking to Padme Amidala." The master didn't seem too pleased about the fact. "Or rather, not so much talking to as flirting with." Obi-Wan laughed at this unexpected news, and immediately regretted it as pain shot through his right side. He winced and gingerly touched the pad of thick bandages, beneath which he supposed the 'gaping hole' Ben spoke of lay hidden.

"I suppose he's only human," Obi-Wan said. "Padme is… well, she's Padme," he said fondly.

"And Anakin is Anakin," Ben replied, far less fondly and far more paternal. "I commend her for putting up with his advances, he's incredibly bad at it." This made Obi-Wan laugh again, and it hurt worse.

"I'm sorry," Ben apologized, joining in with an apologetic chuckle.

"Don't be." The smile slowly faded from Obi-Wan's face. He glanced again at Ben. "I should be apologizing to you. I said I'd keep him safe."

"Obi-Wan," Ben rested a hand on the edge of the bed, catching the knight's attention with an earnest expression, "you could never have predicted anything that happened. It's not your fault."

"No," Obi-Wan agreed, "but it was still my mission, and it still went to hell in a handbasket," he took a moment to catch his breath. Talking was tiring. He thought a moment, and met Ben's eyes for several pensive heartbeats before asking quietly, "He really is the chosen one, isn't he?" Ben sucked in a breath and leaned back, surprised at the inquiry. He held Obi-Wan's gaze, letting the quiet grow between them so the air seemed to slip when he replied,

"Yes."

Obi-Wan nodded and let the information settle in his heart. It wasn't quite comfortable there, yet, but the doubts had left to make room for a new point of view.

"That's not why I'm here, though," Ben spoke up when he sensed it was right. "You're both in stable condition, and they'll be transferring you back to Coruscant as soon as the doctors approve you for travel."

"Coruscant?" Obi-Wan said. "You said I was just out of bacta this morning."

"Yes, but as I said, you are stable, and the Council wants to ask you both some questions in person. Aola and Rex have already gone ahead of us to give their respective reports, but I have no doubt they'll want to speak to Padme and myself as well." He looked Obi-Wan up and down. "I can only assume you'll pass your cognitive tests with flying colors, and we'll be underway tomorrow morning at the lastest. Before we do, I…" the master trailed off, looking uncomfortable. "I wanted to be the one to tell you, to prepare you for when we touch down on Coruscant."

"Tell me... what?" Obi-Wan asked warily, not liking Ben's tone. The Master blinked, not looking Obi-Wan in the eye.

"Lean back," he instructed.

"Why?"

"Just lean back, Obi-Wan," Ben said, sounding tired, "so you don't fall over." Obi-Wan did as he was told, but he could not have relaxed if he'd tried.

"Who's died?" Obi-Wan snapped, trying to read Ben's face.

"No one," Ben assured him. "In fact, that's just…" he huffed a breath and had to pause to swallow. "Obi-Wan," he began, and after a moment mustered the courage to look the knight in the face. Obi-Wan was surprised to see that the master's eyes were glassy with unshed tears. "Garen Muln is alive."

A/N: Kudos to whoever called it, I know there were a few of you who did!