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He wakes up with a lightsaber to his throat.
Anakin’s first thought is that the shade of blue seems rather familiar. His second thought is that it hurts, hurts, hurts —there’s an intense pain in his right leg—his right side really is his unlucky side, isn’t it—he tries to sneak a glance at it, but his vision is blurry and movements sluggish in a way that usually means blood loss. He can tell, however, that it’s definitely bent in a way it really shouldn’t be . There’s also a jagged ache in his chest, making his breaths come in shaky rasps that uncomfortably remind him of Vader. Probably some broken or at the very least cracked ribs there.
His shoddy replacement prosthetic’s been mangled beyond recognition, too. He must have gotten it caught in the wiring while trying desperately to keep the ship aloft. Now he’ll have to start from scratch again.
Unlucky right side, indeed.
What had happened? He tries to remember, but he only gets flashes. They had found a lead on—on the chips, something to do with deactivation, maybe Rex’s whereabouts, and then someone had caught sight of him—an Imperial? Had it been an Imperial? Yes, he thinks so, and then there was that desperate chase—
A wave of nauseous pain and dizziness overtakes him, and he blacks out. He doesn’t know for how long. A few seconds? Minutes?
Okay, maybe it hadn’t been the smartest thing to do, causing a diversion like that, and maybe most of the moves he’d pulled off during the ensuing battle had been reckless and straight up foolhardy. And damn, maybe jumping to hyperspace with a damaged reactor had been plain stupid . This crash was on him. But he remembers the desperation, the sick fear, the resolve that he’d rather die than go back there, rather obliterate himself on this miserable hellhole of a planet’s surface then let Sidious ever touch him again—
A low humming interrupts his thoughts. Right, the lightsaber’s still there. Where on earth had that come from?
A few more blinks and attempts to clear his hazy mind, and he realizes he’s not where he was when the ship crashed. In fact, he doesn’t think he’s on the ship at all . He’s surrounded by beige, sloping walls that remind him of a typical moisture farmer’s hut, though they’re slightly rougher and falling into disrepair. And there’s—ugh—sand. As if his prosthetic hadn’t already been damaged enough. So someone had. . . rescued him?
Or maybe he’d just died in the crash and gone to hell.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he tells his ever-present hallucination of Obi-wan Kenobi. “It wasn’t my fault the ship crashed.”
Wouldn’t that be a wonderful way for Anakin Skywalker to go out, after all these years hanging on to survival by barely a thread. A ship crash. On Tatooine.
For half a second he can almost convince himself he hears Ahsoka’s snicker in the distance, making some comment about him “always blaming the ship”. But he knows better. Ahsoka’s dead. Obi-wan is dead. All that’s left of the Jedi is him and some old ghosts.
The hallucination is still there. Anakin blinks a few more times and his vision clears further; yes, that’s Obi-wan’s lightsaber he’s hallucinating pointed at his face, reminiscent of that time the two had run into Dooku by way of Hondo’s ridiculous scheming.
The hallucination looks. . . older. Usually when Obi-wan pops up in the corner of his vision it’s his Clone Wars self, or sometimes even his Padawan self if Anakin’s feeling particularly guilty. And he looks angry. Suspicious. Shuttered.
“Who are you?” The hallucination says, and Anakin’s world stutters to a halt.
He’s heard voices before.
Lots of them.
Obi-wan. Padme. Ahsoka. Rex. His mom’s even, when he’s particularly out of it. For all that they were signs of his sanity siphoning away throughout the years, they had also probably been the only thing keeping him sane in the miserable cell, in between ‘visits’ from Sidious that he can’t—he can’t let himself think about, even now.
And they’d followed him, the voices, later hallucinations, comforting him, taunting him, lecturing him, calming him, throughout his escape from Sidious’s grasp and subsequent careening throughout the edges of the galaxy. But this voice is different.
It sounds. . . real. Present. It resonates in the force with truth.
But that’s impossible. He felt Obi-wan die. He had heard Cody’s report—not Cody, it hadn’t been Cody, it had been the chip, not Obi-wan’s loyal commander, his friend—Sidious had set aside a copy for Anakin, just to see him break.
The Force has been muddled for years. But he reaches and—yes, that’s Obi-wan’s presence in front of him, pulsing bright and steady. It couldn’t have been anyone else.
“That’s—that’s impossible,” he can barely recognize his own voice, it comes out so shaky, “you’re dead. ”
“Funny,” says the figure of one Obi-wan Kenobi, very much alive and very much not a ghost, “I could say the same thing to you.”