Chapter Text
1.
First, a cold floods through the halls of the Jedi temple. Creeps in like frost, like poison. Obi-Wan is in the dormitories when it happens, on his back in his narrow bed like a narrow grave, staring up at the ceiling blinking back tears. It had been another day of trying his very hardest to be noticed, selected by a Master as an apprentice, and another day of bitter disappointment and seeming invisibility and the absolute certainty no one would ever choose him. He was too plain. Too unimpressive. Too rash. Too angry.
But then, the cold comes. It slices through the Force, reverberates like a heartbeat and Obi-Wan sits up suddenly, his mind fracturing around a sharp, searing pain as he clutches at his temples, vision whiting out. Someone is here, he thinks, even though it is nonsensical. Here beside me, here in this room, here in my head here, here, here.
If he could hear anything over the blood roaring in his ears, he would hear screams. He would head the dull, solid thuds of bodies being thrown against the temple walls as they tore at their throats, thrashing in the air held up by some invisible power. He would hear frantic shouting, voices high and tinny with panic.
It is not wartime, so the Jedi are caught off guard. No one is expecting an invasion. No one knows this stranger in black, no one recognizes the Force signature cleaving through them, the binding terror, the red-tinged darkness throbbing in pain. No one knows what is happening.
Obi-Wan falls to the ground beside his bed, doubled over and dry-heaving. He feels encompassed, like the Force (is it the Force? The Force has never felt like this, The Force has never been so inky, so vast, so fury soaked, so cold, so suffocating with its gaping obsidian mouth and glittering canines and endless, echoing screams,) is reaching for him with a massive hand, and curling around the whole of his body to crush. And just when he feels the pressure has reached an unbearable fever pitch and surely he will collapse and implode like a black hole in the terrible vice of it, it all stops.
The pain, the mental annexation. He looks up, blinking through a haze, and there, finally, he sees Him.
Obi-Wan knows it’s a Him, somehow, though the figure’s face is covered in a black, domed helmet with a triangular facial grating and anyone could be under there. But it’s not anyone, Obi-Wan knows this. It’s a man. It’s a man in terrible pain, possessing terrible power. And he should be afraid—but somehow—he’s not. “Who are you?” he manages to say, his voice hoarse as he rises on tremulous legs to sit on the edge of the bed.
The figure, who moves strangely and stiffly and gracefully all at once, strides closer, black cape sweeping along the marble floor in an elegant flourish. He does not answer the question. He does not speak at all, actually, but Obi-Wan can hear what he thinks are his breaths swooshing in and out of him, rhythmically like waves against a shore. Shhhh Ah, they say, one after the other, marching even as this man stands still, before Obi-Wan, bearing down upon him with his gloved hands balled into fists at his sides. “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” he says, like he has said it very many times before, and will say it very many times again. Like he has been waiting to say it like this, under these circumstances, for the whole of his lifetime. Something about it makes Obi-Wan’s stomach drop.
He does not know this man, but this Man knows Him. And maybe that means he does know this man. From his childhood. From his dreams. From another lifetime.
“Yes,” Obi-Wan says bravely, though he is not feeling particularly brave. His hands shake and he flexes them in the fabric of his tunic, bunched at his sides. “That’s who I am.”
“I know, who you are,” The man says, voice stilted and labored through his helmet, followed again by the repetition of Shhh Ah. “I have come here for you. There is not much time.”
“Much time for what?” Obi-Wan says, dread finally beginning to creep solidly into his body, freezing his limbs. Only now, he is beginning to hear the screams. The voices from outside. The calls for healers, for med-bay, for Master Yoda.
Again, the man does not answer. Instead, he holds out a hand for Obi-Wan to take. “Come with me,” he says.
“And what? Why? What are you—”
“To be my apprentice,” he says. Shhh Ah. “And learn the ways of the Force. I have come from a very long way away for You, Obi-Wan. Come with me.”
Like an answer to his prayers, like the substance of his deepest, most self-indulgent wishes. To be Chosen. To be trained as a Jedi, yes, but mostly—to be chosen.
There are more screams, there is that unspooling darkness extending out from this room and filling the temple, there are crushed larynxes and broken skulls and hollow eyes and boys Obi-Wan once knew cowering in terror beneath desks in classrooms, wondering if they will make it out alive. Beyond the dormitory door there is terror, but Obi-Wan cannot feel that, right now. He does not even know—all he can feel is this room, this singular scrutiny, this un-abating sigh of Shhh Ah. The Force ripples against him, laps at him, pushes through his hair like tender fingers.
The man sinks down to one knee, with some difficulty. His cape pools around his body on the floor, and he bows his helmeted head, which reflects Obi-Wan’s pale, stricken face as he gazes down into it. “Come with me,” he says again. “And be mine.”
Obi-Wan reaches out, and takes his hand.