Warnings: Ignores a major character death. Suicide.

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four for death

Obi-Wan's lightsaber is the death stick incarnate. All those that fall before its path die.

Beware the man with a cloak of stars, a black stone with veins of blood, and death in his hands. He simply devours his obstacles. Endlessly hungry.

Only those who seek Death seek him willingly. There are those he meets believe they are free from him, but if they cannot pay his price - they all eventually die in the most horrific of ways.

Even stranger still was his former apprentice.

Anakin Skywalker, whose flesh gave life and whose blood granted eternity. Someone never ever to be crossed.

He is cruel in the ways Death cannot be. Even those who do not readily greet Death would rather have their lives taken by Kenobi, instead of living the rest of it in misery.

They circle through the galaxy as Master and Apprentice, Generals and Knights, as allies, as enemies. Even in their deaths, their legacies live through the marks they left on the galaxy.

It was not until that the galaxy died, that they were forgotten. What was left were only murmurs of familiarity, of legends long gone of a time long past. Nothing more but half-remembered stories of brothersloversfriendssoulmates.

Then, the legends begin again.

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Anakin is a strange child.

The boy never stopped moving. He is in constant motion, weaving through the days from one moment to the other. Even when he is asleep, he still moved and would not stop. Could not stop. His breaths never stop or even out into rhythmic stillness. Anakin tosses and turns, murmuring lowly in his dreams.

It seemed that even in rest, Anakin has some semblance of wakeness.

To Anakin, Obi-Wan is a strange teenager on the cusp of manhood.

Obi-Wan moves along with the world as if he was in a dream. Even awake, his breaths still into silence, into the cessation of motion. His movements are stilted and doll-like, with mechanised precision of a dancer in a box. Like a puppet on strings. Obi-Wan went through the waking world as an imitation of life. An imitation of reality.

It seemed that even in Obi-Wan's wakefulness, he slept.

It was in a Nubian ship on its way to Coruscant after serving a Queen in a handmaiden's dress to take her kingdom back - when Obi-Wan and Anakin both end up with something like an understanding.

"Do you ever wake up?" Anakin asks one day, head tilted to the side. His blue eyes are sharp and old. The dead leaf in his hand comes to life.

Obi-Wan looks at him and traces the pattern on the wilted flower.

"Do you ever sleep?" Obi-Wan asks instead.

Anakin purses his lips, and Obi-Wan could feel the tiniest bit of warmth suffuse the ice in his chest. Anakin is sunshine and desert heat. He is fire and and rushing rapids, lightning storms and the birth of stars. Obi-Wan thought this must be what love is like.

"I can't sleep," Anakin says slowly, testing the waters. His eyes shine with endless nebulae and galaxies coming to life.

Obi-Wan's lips stretch into something like a smile, with blue lips and milky eyes. "I can't wake either."

Anakin is nine with too old eyes and knowing glances. He is nine years alive, but lived thousands more. His hand is small and rough with the hardships if slavery, but he shines bright with endless hope and the promise of new beginnings.

Here they are, in the endless expanse of space, never to use the same path as the galaxy spins forward into the void until all the suns and stars burn out and entropy claims each and every planet. A star dies.

"That's okay," Anakin starts, "being awake is noisy. It's like a rusty engine that has something stuck between the gears. Like Coruscanti traffic. Like podracing that never ends. Like talking."

"I see…." Obi-Wan pats Anakin's hand, but it was more of a comfort to him than to the boy. "Being asleep is quiet. Like a droid decommissioned and permanently powered down. Like the Sand Dunes at night. Like meditating in the tallest spire in the temple. Like the intrusive silence between the words."

"Oh…" Anakin looks at Obi-Wan like he saw the once-Padawan-now-a-Knight like they just met for the first time ever. Something like sorrow flashes in his eyes. There is familiarity there.

Anakin hugs Obi-Wan.

The world blurs in and out of existence, roses and poppies and spider lilies and dahlias are in the air, church bells toll for a wedding - a funeral. There is incense for mourning, for a birth, for living life. Obi-Wan's smile is a dichotomy of grief and acceptance, Anakin's frown is contemplative and calculating.

Obi-Wan is the end.

Anakin is the beginning.

"Gellert."

"Albus."

They are darkness and light, circling each other in an endless cycle of war and peace. Yet when stripped bare by the trappings of humanity, they are simply the constants that bore and will end the universe.

"Chaos. Michael. Chronos. Tatiana. Idunn. Dante. Revan. Tom."

"Cosmos. Lucifer. Gaia. Mab. Hel. Virgil. Carth. Harry."

Names were simply another epithet. They have and will always be what was and will always be. Two sides of the same coin. Dualities, dichotomies, and polarities. Heat and the absence of heat. They are the birth and death of the universe.

This galaxy will die, each and every solar system will burn out into nothingness, exploding into light and heat before gravity will implode inwards into itself. Then they will live and dance again into the next life, Big Bang and Entropy. They are Life and Death. Anakin is the beginning. Obi-Wan is the end.

"Until this life and the next?" Obi-Wan smiles the smile of an Angel of Light and holds out the hand of a Fae Queen.

"Of course," Anakin speaks with rhe voice of a primodial Titan with the surety of a Dark Lord.

It was something of an understanding, what they have, as they live out this life.

As Anakin slaughtered the living by the thousands, as some courting gift to Death… Obi-Wan will nurture and protect Anakin's children from the moment of their births until they live out the rest of their lives travelling through a sea of stars that only spins forward and never back as his answer. This is a game they play. A love story they eternally enact. A path to walk.

Then, they will cease to live in this life and will begin in the next.

Then start again.

In Palpatine's office, four magpies knock on the window.

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Notes: Ugh, finally finished this. I had many variations of how I wanna go with this fic. I wrote aboutthree versions. Had to rewrite everything from scratch as well. I, too, was supposed to write a meta about Anakin being the chosen one. Basically, kinda like Space Jesus with plenty of gore and blood. 'cause he would have literally let someone get a nibble off of him to give life. Another interpretarion would have been sex. Consuming the flesh and all that. What it basically boiled down to was that Anakin inadvertantly caused an early onset of Entropy/Heat Death that wiped out the whole universe except himself and Obi-Wan. Except…. This happened. Might write an AU or something with the Sith Order being some underground organisation that did all those nasty dirty work that are just too… dark for Jedi to handle. They'd probably be a different incarnation of Sith than Bane's Lineage.