The Curious Feeling of Falling

Eirian Erisdar

There is a common misconception about Obi-Wan Kenobi.

It is there, even among the members of his own Order; and even more so within the ranks of the child-soldiers he commands, whispering among the multitudes of the galaxy.

They say Obi-Wan Kenobi could never fall.

Fall, of course, has two very different meanings; but on this particular application, the Jedi and the multitudes do not differ.

There are initiates who whisper that Master Kenobi has never felt the pull of the murmuring Dark. There are knights who wonder if Obi-Wan ever felt the tug of attachment on his heartstrings. And there are children on Coruscant playing at their mock-battles who turn away their toy starfighters at the last moment because General Kenobi won't kill unless he has to!

The Jedi are mistaken - a misunderstanding spread so deep that it warps even the basic meaning of the tenets of their Order. And the children, of course, simply do not understand the meaning of war.

Jedi, soldiers, and citizens.

In the end, even Anakin.

None understand that to call Obi-Wan's perfection effortless is to diminish the ceaseless war in his heart to the absence of challenge in the first place.

Obi-Wan has been fighting to overcome himself from the moment he first saw the Force.

It begins, as you might expect, before he even enters the Order.

It begins in a nursery-room on Stewjon.

Obi-Wan drops his rattle.

It makes a horrid clanging noise as it hits the edge of his crib on the way to the floor. The faintest flicker echoes across Obi-Wan's mind - the beginning of what he would learn years later to be annoyance.

He wants his rattle.

He wants it.

The warm afternoon light filters into the nursery through the gossamer curtains, and seems to flow to him on a breeze of his own making. The rattle makes a perfect sha-sha noise as it tumbles back into his crib, seemingly on its own will.

"Sha-sha," Obi-Wan gurgles as he crawls after it.

He gives it a shake, to confirm it is undamaged. It seems to be so.

Pulling himself upright with a tremulous grip on the crib edge, Obi-Wan carefully drops the rattle to the floor again.

The light seems to grow in intensity as it pours in through the window, bright and incandescent and filling. Obi-Wan reaches out to it, and it to him, and the rattle slaps into his chubby hand like the hilt of a-

-a something. Something pure and firelit and plasma-bright, seen only in the haziest of infant dreams.

"Obi-Wan?"

He looks up from his examination of the rattle. He has never heard his mother sound like that before.

"Mama."

She crouches by the crib. He will look back on this in meditation, years and decades into the future, but no matter how he tries to look through the intervening space with the Force, he can never remember her face.

Her voice he does remember. Low and quietly terrified.

"Obi-Wan? Can you...can you do that again?"

Obi-Wan makes a startled cry as the rattle is tugged out of his fingers and held out of reach. An infant growl rises into the air as it promptly twists itself out of the adult's grasp and into his hands again. He sticks the rattle in his mouth and gnaws on it with vengeance. He figures the extra force of his gums will prevent it from being taken any time soon.

His mother does not speak. Her hand is still frozen there, halfway between herself and the crib.

She takes it from him again.

Obi-Wan's small pink mouth curves in a sharp bow of displeasure. The light in the air dims as the rattle is snatched violently away, knocking sharply against his mother's jaw in the process.

Obi-Wan pauses, one hand securely grasping the rattle handle, and watches his mother's face crumple.

The pleased yell in his chest crumples, too.

He drops the rattle onto his blankets and reaches for his mother.

"Mama," he says, plaintively.

She does not meet his tiny hands, waving an arm-span from her face. Her hands are too busy trying to wipe away her tears.

The crystalline tracks on her cheeks suddenly waver and smooth away. She jerks back, startled. Her hands fly to her face again.

Obi-Wan lowers an arm, staring up at her.

The light carries droplets of moisture away from her eyes, just as he told it to.

She snatches him up and buries her face in his hair. Delightedly, Obi-Wan feels the light flow through her too, though it seems rather dim compared to the fire within him now.

The light never flows back out of that nursery window. It is like a floodgate has opened, and nothing stops the current of starfire that rushes into his mind; the universe takes a breath and coalesces into a world of eternal clarity.

His mother rarely puts him down in the three days afterwards.

And then he is placed in the arms of another, leaving only the rattle murmuring sha, sha in her trembling hands.

In the early days at the Temple, the Dark only murmurs to him from a far-off place, in meaningless nightmares and mischievous whispers.

He dreams of strange things. Things inexplicable. Once he even dreamed of a sphere, azure and emerald and ochre, and an unstoppable lance of green fire that shattered the sphere into nothing.

Obi-Wan sits cross-legged in the bright classroom and learns the precepts of the Order.

He comes across an unfamiliar word, and asks what attachment means.

His creche-master is happy to explain. "Attachment is the desire to own something for one's self, above duty, others, and anything else."

Obi-Wan frowns at his stylus. It was given to him on the first day of classes, and unequivocally his.

"It is not that you can't own anything, Obi-Wan," his crechemaster says gently. "But is your stylus more important than, say, your friendship with Garen?"

Obi-Wan shakes his head.

"And is Garen the most important thing in your life?"

Obi-Wan catches himself, halfway though a nod, because the answer would be no.

The most important thing in both their lives is the Force. He knows he could not live without it, and neither can Garen.

And so his first understanding of the meaning of attachment is paired with that of sacrifice.

Obi-Wan is twelve, and too close to thirteen - to the empty failure of the Service Corps - when the darkness finally breaks out of its fledgling shell.

"Is that all you can do, Oafy-Wan?"

The taunt is ridiculous. Childish. Of no consequence.

The lightsaber in his hand has always been a brush of stardust, but facing Bruck Chun, in an arena ringed by expectant masters, the stardust collapses and compresses into an impossibly heavy neutron star.

He feels as though he cannot help it, though deep within the Force he knows he can; he simply does not want to do anything about it. His simmering anger at seven years of cruelty at the other boy's words boils over into fury. It gives him strength, for a moment; intoxicating power from the war-drums of his heart down to his fingertips, washing his blade with the wild roar of the unleashed animal-

-Obi-Wan throws himself back into the light, horrified, as Cin Drallig calls his disqualification.

For loss of control.

Obi-Wan Kenobi, disqualified for loss of control.

The assembled masters murmur, disappointed.

It does not matter. There is no-one more disappointed in Obi-Wan than himself.

The Force works in mysterious ways.

It gives Obi-Wan a master.

The days of his apprenticeship are filled with joy, struggle, and grief. The first time that last emotion truly registers - on Melida/Daan, with Cerasi's still-warm body tucked into his frozen arms - he is surprised at the sheer quantity of it. Grief is not an emotion present in amounts; it overwhelms and erases everything else simply by being present.

He struggles past the selfish desire to turn grief into hate, hate against the civil war that brought about so much death, hate for Qui-Gon, who left him there, and worst of all, hatred of himself.

For allowing this.

For not being quick or wily or wise or strong enough.

The Light swirls in warning. Obi-Wan pulls himself out of the mire of his self-rumination before the darkness creeping at the edges of his vision can pounce.

The darkness retreats a few paces, and waits.

Two years later, on New Apsolon, Tahl Uvain passes into the Force in a glimmer of celestial music, backlit against Qui-Gon's tears.

Obi-Wan rushes at the shadows flicking at his master's heels, and plunges into it, wrist-deep, clawing at the obsidian tendrils with mental hands bleeding from effort.

No, he says to it, firmly. You will not take him.

The darkness snarls and writhes and gouges scars into his mind, but he does not loosen his grasp.

Tahl's voice whispers across the Force, from a place bright and warm and eternally waiting. Qui-Gon throws off the darkness with the horrified agony of a man who knows just how far he has reached over the precipice.

Later, Obi-Wan runs up to his master and throws his arms around Qui-Gon's chest. He is far too old now to be doing such things, but Qui-Gon does not seem to care, either.

He holds his master a decade later, on the warm durasteel floor of a reactor chamber, and offers up the rest of his life to fulfil what Qui-Gon could not.

There had been a moment there, hanging with trembling hands just below the lip of the reactor shaft, where he had thought about letting go - not physically, into death, but letting go of the tenuous thread of light that connected him to his dying master, and falling into the roiling reservoir of power that bubbled under his feet.

He had glimpsed his master's Force-signature, turned to the darkness, and said, No.

And then suddenly the shadows fled from him as the light rushed in, clean, ever-pure.

And then Maul was a rag doll, nothing more.

Obi-Wan cradles his surrogate father now, close, and opens his mouth to say I'm sorry I'm sorry I almost fell I-

"Train the boy," Qui-Gon murmurs. But even as those words are voiced, those once-strong hands flutter upwards, flickering at Obi-Wan's forehead.

It is enough. Obi-Wan understands.

Qui-Gon does not need to voice how proud he is.

Inexplicably, the air around Obi-Wan grows lighter with the darkening of the galaxy.

The darkness slithers, and hovers, and tries to slip between him and Anakin; but he stands firm in the crystalline towers of the Force, and does not let the ink splash even across his boot-tips.

Mandalore.

Satine suspended before him, and the darksaber in Maul's hand.

The darkness batters Obi-Wan from all sides, wells up from within; bleeds through his bones until he feels it shudder at his fingertips, whispering that all he needs to do is to curl a finger. Curl a finger and the Sith would be slashed in half, turned inside out, hung, drawn, quartered and eviscerated at his merest whim.

He wants to fall.

He wants to stretch out a hand and push the roiling hatred in his veins into Maul's wrist, and shatter the Sith into crimson mist.

Obi-Wan wants it so much he feels as though he might scream with wanting.

Satine.

But the light had fluttered by his ear, whispering to him that want was not need; and desire need not lead to action.

He can curl a finger, fall, and break free of his restraints.

But he will not.

In his grief afterwards, he finds peace in the smallest of things. The light shines down on him until he is filled to the brim twice over, with surety and calm and quiet joy in the midst of so much suffering. He tries to give some of this assurance to Anakin, hoping that his friend can share in this peace with him.

Anakin brushes him away, but Obi-Wan is calmly relentless. He is rewarded at times by a flash of a rakish grin, and that laughing gaze with a single scar curving over the right eye.

And then comes the time when he realises while he had kept his end of the bridge clean, bright, and shadow-free, Anakin had not.

It is with crushing agony that Obi-Wan realises a bridge blown apart at the opposite end is still a broken bridge, no matter the strength of the stone on the intact side.

Grief howls around him, but he has never felt less of an urge to fall.

Mustafar is lit with the celestial brightness of a single, enduring flame. The newborn Sith cannot see it, shrouded as he is. Obi-Wan dances in starlight wrought of an Order ten thousand years in the making, and waits for his moment.

The light carries him to higher ground, and plants his feet into the lifeless ground like stubborn roots of Spring. He has never been further from falling.

The Force is enough.

Anakin's falls out of his reach, and he cannot follow.

Anakin's screams echo though his dreams every night for the next twenty years.

The darkness tries to filter in through those screams, sometimes. Obi-Wan stands on the edge of his mindscape, hand on his lightsaber, and stares it down.

"Do not dare to use his voice," he says, calmly. "Do not dare."

You want this, the darkness whispers, hissing at the edge of the penumbra of light his lightsaber scatters on the sandy ground. You want this power we offer.

"Yes. Yes I do," Obi-Wan says, silhouetted in the cerulean glow of his blade. "I want to. But I will not."

The feeling of falling would be exhilarating, no doubt. But every pit has its utter end.

Luke listens to him when he speaks of the dark and the light. Better than Anakin ever did.

Obi-Wan has to fight the urge to smirk at when the darkness makes one last attempt at ensnaring him as he duels Vader on the death star.

As the red blade slices towards his shoulder, Obi-Wan looks past Darth Vader's eyes, through the shadow of Anakin Skywalker, and into the darkness itself.

You have failed, he tells it, with triumph. You have lost the war.

And then he is light. There is no longer anywhere to fall; he can only fly.

FINIS

A/N: Written in response to a prompt on tumblr (same url as my penname here). It's always chafed me slightly that Obi-Wan is sometimes portrayed as having never felt the pull of the dark at all, when he spends every minute of his life fighting against it. His endurance against the temptation to fall is exactly what makes him Obi-Wan. Thank you for reading, as always; for readers of The Silent Song, I've recently posted a rather lengthy explanation of the way the AU works at the end of chapter 16, Masks of Grey and Navy. I haven't found time recently to write more of TSS, but thank you all so much for continuing to follow my other stories.