Obi-Wan "Ben" Kenobi (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
a_wider_world) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
eswareinmal2011-09-03 05:19 pm
a_wider_world) wrote in eswareinmal2011-09-03 05:19 pm
Entry tags:
Log: Arrival
Characters: Obi-Wan Kenobi, that greeter guy, and whoever else
Open? YES
Where: Ye Receiving Room
When: RIGHT NOW
Warnings: nnnno :V
It had been a long year.
Days on Tattooine were harsh and lonely, punctuated only once in a while by short glimpses of the infant Luke slung across Beru's back at the market. The heat was unbearable and the silence worse. When he could steal a HoloNet signal--which was not often, and not without danger--the news showed the government's swift slide into prejudice and rigid policy.
And everywhere, at the Emperor's left hand, that black-armored creature who had once been his brother.
It was a painful year, one that seemed to stretch on forever like the harsh colors of a binary sunset. Every so often he would wake from a dream, feeling as if he had been a changed man while he slept: someone happier, someone younger, someone who soaked up the light of the Force. But he could never remember the details, only vague shapes.
Sometimes he thought he could recall children. Sometimes he imagined, in the moment before waking, that he could feel a warm body curled around his own. Sometimes he thought he heard the startled, happy laughter of young people. It never lasted long, and he doubted it meant anything. He was lonely. He would be for a long time. It was natural to dream about a respite from the suffering he had brought on himself and the galaxy.
He was sure it would pass in time.
On the way back from a moderately successful market day--trading stolen credits, skimmed off a Hutt transaction, for the few things he needed--he stumbled over something and the corner of his cloak saved him from a bad fall. A long tear opened up in the sturdy fabric, one he knew he would have to repair as soon as he got back to his little hovel.
As the first of the suns started to set, he sat down wearily to assess the damage. The tear was larger than he'd first thought; he would probably need to patch it. With a sigh he hauled the cloak into his lap--
--and heard a soft thud as something fell out of his sleeve, onto the floor.
Blinking, he bent over. He was sure he hadn't sewn anything into the hems--he hadn't had the time before he left Coruscant. Yet there it was on the floor: slim and rectangular, bound in some sort of animal leather dyed blue. A silver pattern, much like a tangle of thorns, had been embossed onto the leather, and... was it binding together flimsi pages?
An ancient book. He hadn't seen one in years.
Obi-Wan picked it up gingerly, tilting it to try and make out a title. But as he turned it in his hand the pages fell open straight to the middle... to an illustration, obviously rendered by the hand of a dedicated artist.
He felt himself smile sadly. Anakin had been slow learning to read, and had preferred to sketch things to get his point across. Some of his drawings had turned out to be remarkably expressive, much like this one.
Well. No. Not quite. The level of detail here was far more intricate than his former apprentice's work.
It was like something out of a children's tale, really. The entire background was a morass of thorns. And in front of it stood a man wearing what looked like armor of some sort--clunky, impractical armor, either painted gray or made of some kind of metal. To his left stood a shortish, misty white silhouette; to his right stood a darker one of the same height. The shadow the man himself cast loomed behind him, tall and lean, but not sinister. He held a long, slim sword… about the same length as his own lightsaber, come to think of it.
And come to think of it--
Obi-Wan's eyes widened. The man in the illustration had his face.
His stomach lurched. A strange fuzz began to creep into the edges of his vision. Dimly he realized he'd fallen to his knees; his lungs ached as if he had been underwater for too long. He glanced down at the floor, and there was nothing but whiteness between his hands, stretching out forever in front of him...
He fell into it, and awareness left him.
* * *
There were no dreams here. Only softness, and warmth, and a sense that somehow he was safe. Obi-Wan stirred and reached into the Force, checking his own body for injury; aside from joints and muscles strained by the harsh life of a desert dweller, nothing was wrong.
"Ah, Sir Kenobi. You're awake."
He opened his eyes.
He was in a bed, in some sort of well-lit room with what looked like stone walls. When he moved his head to look for the source of the voice, he was confronted by the sight of a smiling human male--older than he himself was, by the looks of it, with a considerable mass of gray hair. Behind him stood a wide-eyed child, who stared at him as if he were something much larger and more dangerous.
"So glad to see everyone is coming through unharmed."
"How," Obi-Wan managed. There was a strange pressure in his temples. "How did you know my name?"
"Oh, all in good time." The man gestured vaguely, his expression bizarrely happy. "But I expect you'll have other questions. They all do, you know. Let me explain..."
The pressure was beginning to resolve itself now, as if a lock on his brain were springing open. Images poured in, memories somehow buried in fuzzy indistinct dreams bursting into full and brilliant life...
The City. The strange, enormous City, so primitive in its technology and yet brimming with a life and diversity he could barely absorb. The friends, the acquaintances, the constant threats to its safety; the vanishings and reappearances. The fights that challenged his every skill.
And the family that had formed, slowly, that had endured death and disaster and had filled him up with the light of the living Force...
He sat up, eyes wide.
"--so when you need to use--" The man stopped mid-sentence, blinking, and the child behind him leaped back with a gasp that sounded half like a giggle.
"Ryou. Fakir," Obi-Wan breathed. Without any thought for what he might be wearing underneath them, he threw the covers off his bed. "I have to find them."
Open? YES
Where: Ye Receiving Room
When: RIGHT NOW
Warnings: nnnno :V
It had been a long year.
Days on Tattooine were harsh and lonely, punctuated only once in a while by short glimpses of the infant Luke slung across Beru's back at the market. The heat was unbearable and the silence worse. When he could steal a HoloNet signal--which was not often, and not without danger--the news showed the government's swift slide into prejudice and rigid policy.
And everywhere, at the Emperor's left hand, that black-armored creature who had once been his brother.
It was a painful year, one that seemed to stretch on forever like the harsh colors of a binary sunset. Every so often he would wake from a dream, feeling as if he had been a changed man while he slept: someone happier, someone younger, someone who soaked up the light of the Force. But he could never remember the details, only vague shapes.
Sometimes he thought he could recall children. Sometimes he imagined, in the moment before waking, that he could feel a warm body curled around his own. Sometimes he thought he heard the startled, happy laughter of young people. It never lasted long, and he doubted it meant anything. He was lonely. He would be for a long time. It was natural to dream about a respite from the suffering he had brought on himself and the galaxy.
He was sure it would pass in time.
On the way back from a moderately successful market day--trading stolen credits, skimmed off a Hutt transaction, for the few things he needed--he stumbled over something and the corner of his cloak saved him from a bad fall. A long tear opened up in the sturdy fabric, one he knew he would have to repair as soon as he got back to his little hovel.
As the first of the suns started to set, he sat down wearily to assess the damage. The tear was larger than he'd first thought; he would probably need to patch it. With a sigh he hauled the cloak into his lap--
--and heard a soft thud as something fell out of his sleeve, onto the floor.
Blinking, he bent over. He was sure he hadn't sewn anything into the hems--he hadn't had the time before he left Coruscant. Yet there it was on the floor: slim and rectangular, bound in some sort of animal leather dyed blue. A silver pattern, much like a tangle of thorns, had been embossed onto the leather, and... was it binding together flimsi pages?
An ancient book. He hadn't seen one in years.
Obi-Wan picked it up gingerly, tilting it to try and make out a title. But as he turned it in his hand the pages fell open straight to the middle... to an illustration, obviously rendered by the hand of a dedicated artist.
He felt himself smile sadly. Anakin had been slow learning to read, and had preferred to sketch things to get his point across. Some of his drawings had turned out to be remarkably expressive, much like this one.
Well. No. Not quite. The level of detail here was far more intricate than his former apprentice's work.
It was like something out of a children's tale, really. The entire background was a morass of thorns. And in front of it stood a man wearing what looked like armor of some sort--clunky, impractical armor, either painted gray or made of some kind of metal. To his left stood a shortish, misty white silhouette; to his right stood a darker one of the same height. The shadow the man himself cast loomed behind him, tall and lean, but not sinister. He held a long, slim sword… about the same length as his own lightsaber, come to think of it.
And come to think of it--
Obi-Wan's eyes widened. The man in the illustration had his face.
His stomach lurched. A strange fuzz began to creep into the edges of his vision. Dimly he realized he'd fallen to his knees; his lungs ached as if he had been underwater for too long. He glanced down at the floor, and there was nothing but whiteness between his hands, stretching out forever in front of him...
He fell into it, and awareness left him.
* * *
There were no dreams here. Only softness, and warmth, and a sense that somehow he was safe. Obi-Wan stirred and reached into the Force, checking his own body for injury; aside from joints and muscles strained by the harsh life of a desert dweller, nothing was wrong.
"Ah, Sir Kenobi. You're awake."
He opened his eyes.
He was in a bed, in some sort of well-lit room with what looked like stone walls. When he moved his head to look for the source of the voice, he was confronted by the sight of a smiling human male--older than he himself was, by the looks of it, with a considerable mass of gray hair. Behind him stood a wide-eyed child, who stared at him as if he were something much larger and more dangerous.
"So glad to see everyone is coming through unharmed."
"How," Obi-Wan managed. There was a strange pressure in his temples. "How did you know my name?"
"Oh, all in good time." The man gestured vaguely, his expression bizarrely happy. "But I expect you'll have other questions. They all do, you know. Let me explain..."
The pressure was beginning to resolve itself now, as if a lock on his brain were springing open. Images poured in, memories somehow buried in fuzzy indistinct dreams bursting into full and brilliant life...
The City. The strange, enormous City, so primitive in its technology and yet brimming with a life and diversity he could barely absorb. The friends, the acquaintances, the constant threats to its safety; the vanishings and reappearances. The fights that challenged his every skill.
And the family that had formed, slowly, that had endured death and disaster and had filled him up with the light of the living Force...
He sat up, eyes wide.
"--so when you need to use--" The man stopped mid-sentence, blinking, and the child behind him leaped back with a gasp that sounded half like a giggle.
"Ryou. Fakir," Obi-Wan breathed. Without any thought for what he might be wearing underneath them, he threw the covers off his bed. "I have to find them."
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He had never expected to loathe solitude so utterly.
He walked alone and rode the train alone, more often than not with his face half-buried in whatever book he'd brought along. Sometimes he would scratch something into his journal, but even though he tried to keep it on hand wherever he went he seldom felt comfortable writing in public.
One particularly hectic morning, he had forgotten a book entirely. Oh, nothing else, no. Just the one thing that could sufficiently distract him during the inevitable delays and give him an excuse not to talk to whatever weirdo settled beside him. He supposed he could make due with closing his eyes and pretending to sleep in the stiff plastic seat, his bag clutched against his chest to support his head.
Just as he started to doze, a harsh thunk at his feet startled him awake and he looked down to find a rather expensive-looking book resting between his feet. He blinked, gingerly picked it up, and turned it over in his hands. The binding was leather, surely, dyed and embossed but bearing no title. A diary, maybe.
Seeing as none of the other passengers appeared to be searching for it and he wasn't feeling particularly polite that morning, he let it fall open in his hand. It easily opened to the very middle, to an illustration beside text his eyes passed over in favor of the image.
It was a familiar image, comfortingly so. A knight, sword in hand, facing down a massive wall of thorns barring his path. Like the forest of thorns around the castle in Sleeping Beauty, he thought. It drew him in, stole his attention away. Before he could realize that something was amiss, that his head was swimming and that he was tipping forward, his vision faded to white and he knew nothing else until his body stirred under a heavy blanket to the sound of nearby voices.
He awoke with a start in a room pulled out of a storybook, beside a man who called him 'sir' and handed him a sword that must have been his. He couldn't tell how it was, but it had to be.
He listened with moderate interest to the explanation of the little sphere that now hung around his neck beside the thin chain he'd worn for weeks. He nodded along to the words of welcome and thanks, to the story of the book and how it came to him.
He felt very little drive to commit the words to memory. The dream would fade as soon as his stop was announced or someone jostled him to ask for his seat. He slipped out of the bed, fastened the sword to his belt, and walked out the heavy oaken doors into the deepening twilight.
This truly was the most detailed, coherent dream he'd ever had. The town beyond looked remarkably like his own and bore the same achingly familiar charm as the illustration from the book. As he wandered the narrow streets, he could almost allow himself to forget that he wasn't back again, to believe that he could turn at the next corner to head back home where someone, anyone, would be waiting for him.
When he turned the next corner, another wandering form caught his eye. His heart stilled and settled as a frigid lump in his stomach, not out of fear or disgust, but out of shock. Still guarded in his enthusiasm - after all, this was a dream and even then he might be mistaken - he called out.
"Hey! Old man!"
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He would have known that voice anywhere, he was certain: even without his memory, even in the middle of the desert, he would have known.
Obi-Wan turned.
Even without reaching out through the Force to confirm it, he knew, somehow, that his physical senses weren't deceiving him. The body language, the slightly cocky tone of voice were too familiar to mistake. And the little braid that fell over the boy's shoulder--impeccably maintained as ever--made Obi-Wan's heart leap with sudden, unexpected joy.
A father always knows his child.
"Fakir?" he ventured, his voice cracking slightly.
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He nodded slowly, guardedly. He wanted to be angry, to unload the pain left behind in Ben's absence, in the absence of everyone, but he couldn't.
"It's me."
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For once, the shadow of sorrow and grief and guilt was gone. This was a moment of pure, brilliant happiness.
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"Didn't expect to see you again," he said, utterly failing to affect the conversational tone he'd been trying for.
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I'm so sorry. I never meant to abandon you. I'll never abandon you again, even if I have to drag you back to my own world through who knows what kinds of mysteries--you, and your brother, and any scraps of this life I can bring with me.
What came out was, "It's all right. I'm here."
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"It's... been a hard month," he managed to say.
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"Are you all right?" he asked, reaching up to smooth Fakir's hair paternally.
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"I missed you too, son."
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"No, you don't understand, I have to go back! I can't just leave everyone there, Oniichan-- Oniichan and Jonah-kun and-- You have to send me back!"
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"Ryou," he called out, no longer caring whether his voice cracked. "Ryou, we're in here."
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For a moment, all Bakura could do was stare, mouth moving without sound.
Ben... Ben was---
His eyes started to sting with tears before he all but ran for his adoptive father, arms outstretched.
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The illustration in the book that had brought him here had shown him, not only himself, but the ones he loved most. His bright son, his dark son, without whom any strength or wisdom he might possess was meaningless.
"Ryou. Oh, it's so good to see you."
Music: Hans Zimmer - It's a Boy
He had his father with him again. There were no words he could speak that the near desperate hug couldn't convey.
aw awwwww <3
He had thought he'd never get that back, after Anakin fell. Ryou and Fakir had proved him wrong.
"I missed you too," he said softly.
It chose itself too :D
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It was a selfish thing to ask because like before, there was no way Ben could promise that sort of thing. No one could make that promise when in a place like this... but...
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He might still have long years left to live out in the desert. He knew he would die in his own world, that Luke would survive him and take his lessons to heart. But whether this was a dream or a temporary bubble in time, he was here, and he would make the most of it no matter what else happened.
"I promise."
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He was 20 years old, but he still very much needed a father.
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He might still doubt his abilities as a teacher, might harbor those doubts forever, but at the very least, he had love and support to give.
And that was enough for now.