Whatever else time has emblazoned upon my mind, I know I will never forget when I killed him.

It had been so long, twenty years, since I last saw him—indeed, I had supposed him dead. He had changed, grown lean and hard and old, but I could never have forgotten his face. And who was I to talk about change in others, anyway?

I don't know what it was that made me rise from my seat and walk the halls of the Death Star, just near the tractor beam's generator. Consciously, I sensed nothing, but I must have felt some slight tremor in the Force, the Light side of the Force, that called me to him, whispering his name. The Dark Side would never have allowed me to see him.

He was calmly alone, moving with an obvious stealth toward the docking bay. I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw him, but he betrayed no surprise.

Perhaps he knew all along what was to happen.

The boundless, furious hatred I had felt toward him when I first threw off my Jedi identity had long since faded into a dull permanence, an ever-present and familiar weight hanging over my head. 'Obi-Wan Kenobi is evil and I hate him' had become as much an ordinary and overlooked fact as 'space is dark' or 'the grass is green'. To maintain such hatred as I had first experienced would have eventually killed me, so powerful was it, and I did not have the energy for it, in any case.

But that same hatred flared up again when first I saw his face, after so many years, and the truth that had become so commonplace suddenly regained new fervor: He had betrayed me.

It was this thought, burning in my head as I activated my lightsaber and swung it toward him with weakened arms, that made me kill him. I had never, in all my fantasies, thought it would be that easy. I had imagined a long and difficult battle—perhaps he would even gain the upper hand a time or two—but eventually, of course, I would knock his weapon from his hands, force him to his knees, and hear his stammering apologies and pleas for mercy before I severed his head from his body.

Neither had I imagined that I would feel anything but joy when he finally died. But that too was not as I had planned.

He paused, lifted his lightsaber in a parallel to his face, giving me a perfect opening. I was not fool enough to let it go, and he crumpled to the ground—or so it should have been. But I attacked, and to my shock, there was nothing there. Nothing but his Jedi cloak, now empty, and his lightsaber. How he must have cherished those two things over the years, I think—the last two remnants of when the Jedi were all-powerful, and thus so was he.

How was that possible? I thought, bewildered, kicking vainly at the rough brown material. And I realized suddenly how angry I was, that there was nothing left of his earthly self. I did not even know why, for what on Avon would I have done with his corpse, anyway? Thrown it into the incinerator like the trash it was? Had it sadistically carved into pieces, to be fed to some wild beast?

Common sense told me these things—but the part of my mind that never fully turned knew otherwise. I wanted there to be a body, so I could make my peace with it and speak words I never could have said to the living Obi-Wan. Forbidden words, I love you, I was waiting for you, I have missed you for so long, and now all you can do is leave me again… I wanted to kneel beside it, to gently close its eyes and hold it near, and pray that somehow Obi-Wan knew all that I wanted him to.

If I could not have loved him again—if I could not have been his brother for just one more day—all I could have done was to show him in death what I could not in life.

And he denied me even that.