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The first thing Anakin hears is a half-remembered voice laughing.
“Wow,” the voice says, “Father, you were something else.”
With a jolt, the voice finally registers. Anakin bolts up with a start.
“Luke?”
A tired old man stares back at him.
“Hello, Father.”
They’re in what looks to be some sort of ship, traveling through hyperspace. They’re sitting in the passenger area, and Anakin has the vague thought of wondering who’s flying. It’s behind his shields, like everything is these days, but Luke still manages to pick up on it, somehow.
“Nobody, I just didn’t want the journey to be like floating through space.”
Anakin nods like that makes sense, before asking what he really wants to know.
“How am I here?” He asks, “And what are you reading?”
Luke lifts up the data pad to show the title. For the Republic.
“Research,” he says, “You appeared out of nowhere with this open next to you. I assumed that I was supposed to read it, and I think that I figured out why you’re here?”
Anakin was wondering that himself, as well as how this old man could be Luke when Vader let his Master kill him.
“And…”
“You didn’t let me die.”
“...What?”
Luke laughed.
“Actually, you threw Sidious down the reactor shaft and got yourself killed in the process.”
Again, what?
“I spoke to you, later, and-“
“You just told me that I died with Sidious, and with the Sith,” Anakin interrupts. Luke just… pauses, stares, and lets out a humorless laugh.
“Oh Force, is that how I sounded to Rey?”
“Who-“
“No one.”
( The future lays itself out to Anakin. His son, dead. His grandson, Fallen. His daughter… oh how he failed her. A scavenger. A pilot. A defector…
Their faces merge with the ones he know well, and Anakin just can’t take it anymore. )
“Oh.”
Silence fills the room. Luke, eventually, breaks it.
“Apparently, those who don’t trap themselves in the Dark Side can show up as, basically, semi-solid holograms and voices in our head. It takes training, or a best friend with training and an important destiny, apparently,” they scoff simultaneously, but… then it dawns on Anakin that he wouldn’t have had time to learn this technique…
And Obi-Wan is his best friend.
Even in a world where he got everything wrong, Obi-Wan forgave him. How could even Obi-Wan do such a thing?
“Because I was the only one who gave up on you… and I had already failed you once,” a voice says.
Anakin turns around, and the rest of the world falls away.
“Obi-Wan,” he says, voice cracking. Obi-Wan… he looks so old . He’d known that he would, of course, but…
“I’m sorry.”
Obi-Wan just laughs.
“Anakin, if I wanted apologies then I would join you in your endless crusade to get through to Kylo Ren.”
At this, a wave of regret runs through the Force, and Anakin finds his attention returned to his son.
“Luke, it was not your fault that Ben was lost,” he hears Obi-Wan say, and because he’s not stupid and he understands what it’s like to hear false platitudes from ancient Jedi, Anakin decides to add his own thoughts.
“Any more than my Fall was Obi-Wan’s, despite what he’s probably told you.”
Obi-Wan sighs.
“Anakin… I did, eventually, accept that it was not entirely my fault that you Fell, but… Padme died believing in you, Luke almost did, Ahsoka… she broke you free as well, if only for a moment… I decided that you were lost from the moment that I discovered that you’d…”
“Slaughtered a bunch of younglings?” Anakin says, voice sarcastic, but, really, he deserves the right to joke about his evils as his body is, possibly-but-he’s-not-entirely-sure-why-would-the-Force-show-him-this-if-this-was-the-case, dying.
Luke looks surprised, (which, okay, had Luke somehow made it to fifty-something with even a shred of parental hero worship intact? That was kriffing impressive .) but Obi-Wan just sighs.
“Anakin… If I thought it would succeed, then I… you told me more than you yourself know, and… I cannot say that I would not have done the same.”
“Obi-Wan…”
Anakin’s standing now, and the world is slowly fading away around him, narrowing down to only Obi-Wan Kenobi of 34 BBY, and the only chance to understand why he had, most likely, survived.
Obi-Wan sighs.
“I don’t entirely know where your knowledge ends, but I do know this. Anakin you were and still are one of the greatest Jedi known, and you will never be Darth Vader anymore than my own would return to it.”
“But I have already done such terrible things.”
Obi-Wan laughs.
“So has Luke, and so have I. You aren’t Vader, Anakin.”
Anakin sighs.
“I know.”
“Don’t let your guilt over things that you have never done rule you.”
“Just because it wasn’t me who did it doesn’t change the fact that I am capable of such things.”
Obi-Wan laughs once again.
“Yes, but you know that, now… would you ever choose the same path, now that you know?”
“No. Never !”
“Then that is that.”
Suddenly, Luke finally chimes in.
“And you didn’t kill Ahsoka, either, you told me where she was and Leia and Rex ran off to find her after the destruction of the second Death Star.”
Oh. Huh.
Rex had survived Order 66. He wondered how he’d done that when his own Captain’s chip had been active.
Another mystery, and not pertinent.
“Thank you,” he says instead.
Suddenly, above them, the ship makes a noise to indicate their coming exit from “hyperspace.”
And, as tired smiles are exchanged, the world fades to white.
(This was merely Anakin’s stop, however. Obi-Wan still has things to discuss with Luke… they know their own mistakes, and there are some things that Rey must, unquestionably, learn.
It’s funny, really. He’d trained his nephew and lost him to evil, but now he’s training a girl he’s slowly beginning to suspect may be his aunt, (from a certain point of view) and he’s, somehow, positive in her ability to finally defeat the Dark, where he and his father had failed.
“So,” he says with a grin, “You never did tell me… how do I turn myself into a cryptic, blue version of myself? We both know that I’m going there to die.”
Obi-Wan laughs.
“Well, first you have to…”)