Chapter Text
Flames crackled over the vaporator, dry heat licking into the smoking skies of Tatooine. The rest of the homestead was already a smouldering wreck, every instance of the Skywalker name scrubbed from existence. A charred body lay in a doorway, arms outstretched towards their escape.
The headstone nearby had also been desecrated, carved into uneven pieces and left in a crumbled heap. It was a violation and the Force rattled with fury. A home that had once been full of light and hope now lay submerged in its own ashes, choked with anger and rage.
Obi-Wan could feel it. The emotion was almost tangible. It was more suffocating than smoke and more violent than flame and it made his chest ache with something he didn’t think he could ever get used to. He held tightly to the bundle in his arms, shielding it from the eddies of dust and ash and sand that the arid evening air threw at him.
Once he could look no longer, once it felt like a disservice rather than respect, he turned away. His eyes gravitated back towards the swaddled child in his arms. Considering the violence and stink of death that permeated the land, Luke was peaceful in his sleep, tiny fists curled under his chin. His long lashes were blond and brushed the tops of his cheeks and Obi-Wan couldn’t stop looking.
Beru and Lars Owen would have raised him to be a wonderful young man. To be helpful and respectful, loving and independent, curious and safe. Safe. They would have given him everything they could possibly give to a child and Luke would have become their own. He would have been theirs, in every way that mattered, and he would have been safe.
But now the Skywalker name was buried under their corpses and Luke’s only home in the world was quite possibly where he would be in most danger.
What choice did Obi-Wan have?
He pulled the blanket up over Luke’s cheek, a knuckle brushing the soft skin.
The world was broken and yet here was a child, still soft from a Before that he’d never get to witness. He watched the infant sleep in his arms as the Lars homestead crumbled into obscurity, tiny lungs breathing in and out. If Luke could keep living, despite being torn from his mother moments after meeting her, then perhaps Obi-Wan could do so too, if only for the child’s sake.
Obi-Wan copied the baby. Breathed in and out.
Then he turned to his speeder and drove away, leaving the sand to claim the bodies of the people of Tatooine, just as it always did.
~
‘They seem happy,’ Bail said for what must have been the three-hundredth time since Obi-Wan had arrived on Alderaan.
As always, Obi-Wan said nothing and sipped his delicate Alderaanian tea, watching the pair of infants as they slept together in the ornate, carved wooden crib. It was an heirloom, Bail had told him, from Breha’s side of the family, the royal side. Every prince and princess of Alderaan had slept in the beautiful crib, painstakingly chiselled from a single tree using a technique long lost to antiquity.
The children curled towards one another, heads close, soft breaths puffing against each other’s cheeks. They positively glowed in the Force. Obi-Wan had to stop himself from basking in that glow more often than he cared to admit. Most other Force-sensitive beings were permeated with such loss that it hurt to feel them, a sharp pain in his chest. The twins, however, were nothing short of a miracle.
Luke and Leia were happiness incarnate. If he watched them for long enough (as he often did), Obi-Wan was sure he could see the light spilling from their skin, beams threading from their fingernails into the room around them.
It was beautiful and dangerous and Obi-Wan wasn’t fool enough to think that it could last much longer.
‘They seem happy,’ Bail said again, sipping his own tea. ‘We can’t separate them, surely?’
A sigh. Then a frown.
They were sat around a small table, almost as opulent as the crib and very much in line with the rest of the room. The guesthouse where Obi-Wan and Luke had been lucky enough to reside was far finer than anything a former Jedi was used to. Obi-Wan pretended like it was a hardship to sleep in the luxurious bed and drink the expensive tea, while also pretending he wasn’t constantly terrified for the world Luke was to grow up in.
They couldn’t stay there and everyone knew it. Time was the enemy now, and it seemed that the grace period was at its end.
Obi-Wan took a larger mouthful of his tea and tore his eyes from the babies to meet the deep brown stare of one of his most trusted friends. He sighed again, ‘They are happy. But if you could feel them the way that I do, Bail, you would know just how dangerous this is for them.’
‘Obi-Wan, I understand, but—’
‘I don’t think you do.’ Obi-Wan said bluntly. ‘They are so incredibly strong in the Force, much stronger together than they are apart. It’s shocking to me that we haven’t already been faced with the Empire.’
Bail swallowed the last dregs of his tea, throat bobbing. His gaze drifted from his cup to his daughter, like a current dragging a body out to sea. It was an inevitability. He always ended up watching Leia in the same way that Obi-Wan found himself watching Luke. It was the curse of a parent, Obi-Wan supposed, being caught in the orbit of the child you were responsible for. Although for Bail and Obi-Wan, there was something else there too.
It was in the curl of Leia’s lip when she frowned, the furrow in her brow as she squinted up at her father in the mornings, the way she babbled like she had something to prove. She was Padme’s daughter, and Bail couldn’t forget the woman he had called a friend. And Luke had a familiar look in his eyes when he was studying the plush tooka in his hands, a certain scrunching of the nose when he sneezed, a strand of hair that fell across his forehead in the same manner as someone Obi-Wan would never have the privilege of forgetting.
Bail pulled Obi-Wan from the sea of his own mind, ‘Then what do you suggest, Obi-Wan?’
‘The same thing I’ve been suggesting for months.’
Standing gracefully, Bail walked to the crib, cloak sweeping behind him. He brushed the dark hairs on his daughter’s head, a fond smile he was oblivious to turning up his lips. Bail’s brow furrowed, and Obi-Wan watched as he reached out and repeated the same action on Luke’s fairer head, smoothing down the wayward strands with palpable affection.
‘She loves him dearly.’
‘Yes.’
‘So does Breha.’
‘I know.’
‘So do I,’ Bail finished quietly, as if admitting he cared for his daughter’s twin was some kind of weakness. In this new Empire, perhaps it was.
‘I’m sorry.’
Bail’s eyes snapped to Obi-Wan’s and they were soft with understanding. He shook his head, ‘It’s hardly your fault, my friend. We must do what we can to protect them. Too many lives have been lost already. If that means keeping them apart then so be it.’ He paused and looked back at the slumbering children. ‘At least they have had these six months together. They won’t remember it, but we will.’
‘We will,’ Obi-Wan affirmed.
There was something unsettling about Bail’s expression. His eyes were glassy, dark and wet with unshed tears and it made Obi-Wan uncomfortable to his core. He had never seen his friend so rattled, so overcome. He wasn’t sure he could cope with it.
Apparently, his apprehension was evident as Bail cleared his throat and took on a senatorial tone of voice, one that meant business and actionable items of discussion. The Senator returned to his seat opposite Obi-Wan, hands resting on the round table between them. He inclined his head, ‘I assume you’d like a ship. Untraceable.’
‘Ideally,’ Obi-Wan said. ‘Better if there’s room to stay on it. It may be safer to live on board, at least until we’ve found somewhere… somewhere else.’
If Bail was saddened by that concept he didn’t show it. Just a slight nod of the head to show he was listening. His eyes drifted back to Leia. Her tiny face crumpled in her sleep and both men braced themselves for a sound larger than her infant lungs should have been capable of making.
Instead, her brother absently reached his dimpled hand out, resting it on her shoulder as if he were fully conscious and comforting a comrade in arms. Obi-Wan was very familiar with the shoulder pat technique during the war.
Good man.
The babies in the heirloom crib snuffled a little and then drifted back into the depths of sleep.
‘I’m going to miss that,’ Bail mumbled, half to himself.
Obi-Wan chuckled half-heartedly, ‘Me too, my friend. Me too.’
~
Life on the run from the Empire was just as stressful as it sounded.
Transience was hard for a Jedi like Obi-Wan, a man who had grown up in the shadow of high-rise buildings on Coruscant, surrounded by the comforting buzz of people he knew. The edge of the galaxy seemed so empty and lifeless in comparison. The people he met were not people he knew, and the buildings didn’t look or feel like the ones he missed.
It was particularly hard for Luke who just wanted to make friends with every being he met, stumbling onto their little ship with a stray something-or-other.
Luke was like a sun. He was bright in the Force and bright in his heart, open and honest and loving, a tiny star with a gravitational pull of his own. He drew people towards him without even trying, coaxing out the best in everyone he met whether that was a mercenary, a smuggler or a beggar. Luke was something bigger than Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan ached when he was reminded of another young boy with big eyes and a bright soul.
Months turned into years, and the pair flitted around the galaxy with little to no problems. They rarely stayed anywhere long enough to be recognised or remembered and when they did, Obi-Wan would manipulate the Force. Just enough to be forgotten.
During the war, there had been no place for mind tricks. It was all about ordering troops to turn their blasters in the right direction. There had been little in the way of subterfuge, not while directing the Third Systems Army. It was all too high stakes for a tiny twisting of the mind to take hold. Who could he have tricked in the end anyway? The emperor?
None of it mattered anymore.
By the time Luke’s third birthday had passed by, Obi-Wan had taken on the moniker of Ben Kenobi.
Bail had been adamant that they both needed new identities. Obi-Wan had been just as adamant that Obi-Wan Kenobi was hardly a unique name, until Bail fixed him with a look that said, name one other Obi-Wan and then we’ll talk. Instead, he had bartered his way into keeping Kenobi and offering it to Luke. Vader had gone to great pains to erase the Skywalker legacy from the galaxy and Obi-Wan didn’t want to be caught resurrecting it.
Ben Kenobi and his nephew, Luke Kenobi, had been born sometime during the rise of the great and terrible Empire. It was around the same time that Obi-Wan Kenobi and his nephew, Luke Skywalker had died.
After years of answering to a three syllable first name, Ben had found the simplicity of his new identity rather hard to swallow. Ben. Ben. It was rather boring, wasn’t it?
Although maybe that was the point. It was innocuous and common: something Obi-Wan Kenobi of the past would rather have been pushed out of an airlock than referred to as. It felt like a slap to the face, the final insult on top of his countless injuries.
But when Luke would call out to Uncle Ben, Ben’s heart would threaten to expand all the way through his chest, and he found it a lot easier to accept. It gave him purpose and drive. He found himself seeking out mercenary work that he would have thought beneath him in a previous life. It didn’t feel that way anymore, not if it was going to keep Luke fed and safe and happy.
The Mid and Outer Rim were their main haunts. The Empire’s grasp on society was looser, talons barely sinking into the surface, and it was easier to skirt around the fringes with a false chain code and a stolen child.
Ben would only take the jobs that happened at night and with minimal danger. Luke would be in bed for them, and he would be back before the child woke. That also meant that the earnings were lower, but it was worth it to know that he would make it back to the ship with all his important bits where they belonged.
With every job, the same series of events would precede it.
Ben would take Luke gently by the shoulders and crouch down to look him in the eye, keeping his smile light but his eyes serious. Luke would look straight back at him, wide-eyed but determined.
‘When I’m gone, what do you do?’
‘Go to bed, Uncle Ben.’
‘And if I’m not back in the morning?’
‘Wait ‘til night.’
‘And?’
‘Then use the ‘urgency comm. Oh, an’ never leave the ship.’
‘That’s right, Luke.’
Luke would then stare up at him with big eyes, lashes pale in the artificial lighting of their ship, ‘But you will come back, Uncle Ben?’
Ben would always forget the careful barrier he had constructed between them. He would smooth a hand over Luke’s hair, dropping a barely there kiss to the crown of his blonde head. It wasn’t right, treating Luke like he was his son. He wasn’t meant to have a son, but he was also family, and Ben was the only parent that Luke had ever known so who was he to deny him affection? Ben didn’t know what the right choice was.
Every job was the same and every time Ben struggled with guilt and conflict and fear. It was distinctly un-Jedi of him, but he wasn’t one of those anymore. He wasn’t sure he ever was a good one, not really. If he had been, then perhaps Anakin wouldn’t have—
Ben tucked Luke into his bed that was more plush tooka than blankets. Luke wasn’t a spoilt child, but Ben did have trouble saying no when Luke asked for something (like yet another stuffed tooka) because he very rarely did. Luke was easily pleased and needed very little in the way of material goods. He would have made an excellent Jedi, all things considered.
‘I’ll be back soon, my dear. This work is a nice easy one.’
‘What is the work?’ Luke asked, punctuating his question with a yawn.
Ben shrugged a little, absently brushing a strand of hair from Luke’s eyes. It needed a cut really. He thought about the wording before he spoke, ‘I must talk to a man. He has something that doesn’t belong to him, so I need to ask him to give it back.’
Luke frowned with all the morals of a toddler raised by an ex-Jedi Master on the run, ‘Tha’s bad of him.’
‘It is,’ Ben agreed. ‘So, I’m going to talk to him about it, and he’ll give the thing back to the person it belongs to. Rather simple, all things considered.’
‘Sipple,’ Luke nodded, eyes drifting closed.
Ben tucked the blanket’s closer to the child’s chin, watching as the vehement pout dissolved into something softer and sleepier. As usual, he hovered for a minute or two and then decided, screw it, he was attached enough already, and gently kissed the child on the temple.
‘See you in the morning,’ he whispered, pulling on a cloak and pulling a scarf around his chin and mouth. ‘May the Force be with you, young one.’
When the job was done, Ben always came back, and Luke was always thrilled to see him.
And then faster than Ben believed possible, two more years passed like they were nothing, and Luke still beamed like the sun.