clone wars one shots

─ ruptured healing in tatooine wastelands

thank you ash for betaing, lyy
cross-posted to ao3

―

He had no reason to move. No emotion needed to traverse through his entire system. His eyebrows were depressed into a pitiful curve and his eyes resembled that of a grey thundercloud. Within every cranny of his body, grains of the finest sugars infested like rodents squirming for cheese, their gold exterior scratchy and irritating to his skin. Melancholy fueled Obi-Wan to do nothing about it.

He could classify his emotions, acknowledge them, but the numbness and aching headaches wouldn't go away. This torpefying, demanding existence was a constant; physical reminders of his Padawan would never go away. The pair were brothers in everything but blood, their comradery unmatched and he had missed everything; all the signals that Anakin was growing dimmer and moodier. The arguments, the pressure... at the very end, Anakin couldn't look at his Master without narrowing his eyebrows and lighting blue eyes with a powerful blaze; crushing the air between them until Obi-Wan felt like he was suffocating.

Stuck onto his skin is the blood, the i hate you! echoing on his tunic and the blisters where there used to be a hilt. The age of infinite sadness was upon him, and there was no escape. He was stuck in a jail cell that he made himself, built from the past to hold the future at bay. He can hear the sobbed gasps as Padmé took her last breath, the way her eyes lost their spark and her head fell limp. Every single time he blinks. Screaming. It is one thing to hear of such undeserving misery, another to experience it.

The nights are long and cold and dull, filled with heavy eyelids and moping nightmares. The force is in shambles, balancing nothing but a former hope told to children of the past. He can still feel some bonds, laid over brick walls and ingrained into a part of him that he vows never to touch again. But that part is only disconnected by one sense, and four more are there through every passing breath. Although everyone may be gone, his eyes still remember them being there. 

Obi-Wan opened his mouth to speak, but there was nothing to say. Everlasting time, bewitched sand chapping his lips and leaving behind crinkly cuts and scars. The last bruise of before, when the Jedi was fighting Grievous; now just about faded and left to rot underneath his mental injuries.

Thoughts in the deepest, most broody way, were so drifty, like jellyfish floating through a sea, soft emotions dwindling between chaining bullets and ocean-currents of his irises. He could still remember the last message on the holocrons. In-fact, he had a copy. Two copies, if you count the one permanently ringing in his ears. ...Do not return to the temple. That time has past, and our future is uncertain. We will each be challenged. Our trust, our faith, our friendships... but we must persevere. And in time, a new hope will emerge.

His acrimonious thoughts could dissect every word for hours. The way his voice had cracked, and he had to choke back gutters of tears. That day was the worst of his life, muted screams like hurricanes through the force as his family was cut down and executed. And at the pits of it all was his Padawan. Responsible for all the deaths. Slashing each Jedi without remorse, slaughtering force-users who could do nothing but beg for mercy under his persecution.

"Oh, Anakin, why did you do it?" He whispered under his breath, a heart-clenching sigh escaping the lips of the one left behind.

It was so hard to smile now, to feel his creases in his mouth form the motion that would have once been created because of Anakin. A plagued desolation would do him no good, he declared to himself. He was drowning and he wanted to drain the water instead of escaping it, smashing the waves numbly though he were a toddler.

Hands clutched his chest as he breathed slowly. Muttering under his breath, he quoted, "focus on what you can do, instead of what you can't." The mantra was one of his favorites, passed down from his lineage. He had first learnt it as a young Padawan, with a glass of tea in his hands and glass naïveté extensively alive. Now, its remains a mug to hold Obi-Wan late at night.