Chapter Text
The boots first. Always the boots.
He set them by the door the night before, the way he had set them every night for twelve years, and when he woke in the grey hour before dawn his hand found them without looking. The leather had gone soft and the seams had given out and been resewn twice, and the dust of Tatooine had worked itself so deeply into the grain that no oiling would lift it. He pulled them on. He stood. He did not stretch — stretching belonged to a younger body, to a man who had still expected to need it for something. He drank water from the cracked clay jar by the sleeping mat. He ate a piece of yesterday's bread standing up.
Outside, the desert was the colour of bone. The twin suns were not yet up and the sky was that particular pale that came only at this hour, washed and exhausted, as though the night had used everything it had and the day had not yet decided whether to bother. He could see his breath. On Tatooine. He had stopped being surprised by it years ago.
The eopie lifted her head from the trough as he approached, ears swivelling, and made the low soft sound she always made for him — half greeting, half complaint. He laid his palm against the long bone of her face.
"Good morning, Akkani."
He had named her that in the second year. He no longer remembered why. Some half-formed joke he had made to himself in the dark of the hut, some word that had drifted up from a language he had once been able to speak. The eopie had answered to it within a week and after that the name was hers and the reason for it was gone. This had happened often, in the early years. He had named things and then forgotten the naming. He had stopped wondering about it.
He filled her trough. He checked her hooves. He brushed the worst of the night's grit from her flank with the stiff little brush that lived on a peg by the lean-to. Then he saddled her — the saddle was older than the boots, and uglier — and led her out onto the path that wound down from the Jundland to the lower flats.
The ride to the transit station took an hour. It had taken an hour every day for twelve years. He could have done it asleep, and on some mornings he was fairly certain he had.
The station was a low slab of permacrete set into a cut of rock, with a sun-bleached schedule painted on one wall that no one consulted because the shuttle came when it came. He left Akkani in the shaded pen with the other working beasts — three eopies, a banth-calf someone was trying to break to harness, two of those bony nameless things the moisture farmers used — and joined the line of men and women who waited along the platform.
They did not greet each other. They had been waiting on this platform together for a decade, most of them, and they had long since exhausted what could be said. A nod, sometimes. A grunt. Mostly the small theatre of looking elsewhere, looking at the horizon, looking at the scuffed toes of one's own boots. He had loved them for this in the beginning, these people. Their incuriosity. The Outer Rim worked the way Coruscant could not have imagined: nobody asked your name and nobody offered theirs, and over years a man could disappear into the gap between those two silences and never be found.
The shuttle came. It was old — older than him, probably — a long low articulated thing that ran on a magnetic strip half-buried in the sand. He took his usual seat by the third window. The man across from him was the same man who had sat across from him for nine years, and they had still never spoken.
The shuttle hummed.
He watched the desert pass.
I'm not your —
He blinked. The thought arrived the way thoughts arrived now, mid-sentence, like a transmission picked up by mistake. He did not finish it. He turned his face slightly toward the window and the man across from him did not notice and the shuttle hummed on.
The meat factory sat at the eastern edge of Anchorhead, a long low building of corrugated permacrete with the sour-iron smell of slaughter pressed into its walls. He had worked there for eleven years. He had started on the killing floor, where his hands were steady and his Force-trained sense of when a thing was about to move had made him better at the work than men twice his size. He had asked, after the second year, to be moved off the killing floor. They had moved him to cutting. He had stayed there since.
The work was simple. A carcass came down the line on a hook. He took it down. He broke it into the cuts the buyers wanted, with the long curved knife that he kept sharper than anyone else on the floor. He laid the cuts on the tray. The tray went down the line. The next carcass came.
It was not work that asked anything of him. That was its great mercy.
He worked beside a Rodian named Veska who hummed continuously through her snout, and a heavyset human called Dorr who told the same three jokes on rotation, and a thin pale man whose name he had never learned and who never spoke. They were not friends. He could not have said what any of their lives outside the factory looked like. This too was the mercy.
The foreman walked the line at midday. He nodded at Ben — they all called him Ben here, had called him Ben for eleven years, and the name fit him now the way the boots did, worn into shape — and Ben nodded back, and the foreman moved on.
— failure, Obi-Wan.
The knife paused, just for an instant, above the joint.
He resumed the cut.
The shuttle back was emptier. He sat in his usual seat. The desert went past in the other direction, which always seemed strange to him, as though the world had been mildly rearranged in his absence. The man across from him was someone different now — the shifts staggered — and this one had a child on his lap, a small girl with her thumb in her mouth, who watched Ben with the unguarded curiosity that children had not yet learned to give up. He let her look. He did not smile at her. He had learned, long ago, not to smile at children he could not afford to know.
The shuttle let him off at the same station. He collected Akkani from the pen — she greeted him with the same low sound, as though he had been gone a year — and they began the ride back up into the Jundland.
The light was changing. The first sun was already low, the second was preparing to follow, and the dunes had begun to do the thing they did at this hour, which was to take on a colour that was not any colour exactly, a kind of gold-pink-grey that lasted perhaps twenty minutes and then was gone. He had once thought it beautiful. He still thought it beautiful, he supposed, in some abstract way, the way one might think a piece of music beautiful that one had heard too many times to feel. He rode through it without looking up.
At the hut, he unsaddled Akkani. He brushed her again — the wind had been up that afternoon and her coat was full of grit. He filled her trough. He laid his hand against her neck for a moment longer than was necessary, and she leaned her weight into him, the way she did, and he stood there with her for the count of perhaps fifteen breaths and then he went inside.
He lit the small stove. He took from the wrap at his belt the piece of meat he had brought back from the factory — they were allowed one cut a day, taken from the scraps, and most of the workers sold theirs in Anchorhead but he had never bothered — and he cooked it in the pan with a little of the dried tuber he kept in a tin. The smell filled the hut, which was small, and which had no other smells in it. He ate standing up, by the stove, because sitting down to eat alone had begun, somewhere in the fourth or fifth year, to feel like a cruelty he was performing on himself.
He washed the pan.
He went outside.
The ridge was a short walk from the hut. He had worn the path himself, over twelve years, and he could have found it in full dark. He took the small pair of macrobinoculars from inside his robe — old, Republic-issue, scratched — and he settled himself in the place he always settled, between two outcrops of rock that broke the wind.
The Lars farmstead was perhaps three kilometers distant, down on the flats. The moisture vaporators caught the last of the second sun and threw long, thin shadows across the sand. The dome of the homestead glowed faintly from within. He raised the binoculars.
There. The boy.
Luke was in the yard, doing something with a piece of machinery — a vaporator coupling, probably, Owen had him on those now — and even at this distance, even through the scratched glass, Ben could see the particular angle at which he held his shoulders when he was concentrating. He had inherited it. It was Anakin's. Of all the things he might have inherited, that was the one Ben could not look at without something happening in his chest that he did not have a word for.
He watched the boy for a long time.
Luke eventually straightened, wiped his hands on his trousers, and went inside. The dome glowed a little brighter as the door opened and closed.
Ben lowered the binoculars.
The cold was coming on, the way it did at this hour, the way it did only at this hour, when the second sun had finally gone, and the sand began to give back the day's heat to a sky that did not want it. He pulled his robe closer. He sat for a while longer, because he always sat for a while longer, because the walk back to the hut was the part of the day he had never learned to do quickly.
You didn't kill Anakin Skywalker. I did.
The sentence arrived whole this time. It had been arriving in pieces all day, the way it did most days, and now in the last grey light it came complete and sat in him the way a stone sits in a pocket, smooth and known and impossible to put down.
He turned it over.
He had been turning it over for two years.
He still could not tell, in any given hour, whether it was the cruellest thing Vader had ever said to him, or the kindest. It had the shape of an absolution and the weight of an accusation, and the longer he held it the less certain he became that those were different things.
Across the ridge, perhaps thirty meters off, between two of the larger rocks, there was a movement that was not the wind.
He did not look directly at it. He had learned, in the early years, not to look directly. To look directly was to invite the figure to resolve, and a resolved figure was harder to dismiss than a suggestion. He kept his eyes on the dark line of the Lars dome and he let the movement stay at the edge of his vision, where it belonged, where it could be almost-something and almost-nothing and he could keep his breathing even.
It did not, tonight, come closer.
It did not, tonight, speak.
But it was there longer than usual. It stayed past the moment when he would normally have stood and walked back to the hut, and he found himself sitting on, in the cold, for reasons he could not have named, as though he were waiting to see whether something was going to happen that had not happened in any of the twelve years before.
Nothing happened.
After a while — he could not have said how long — he became aware that he was alone again on the ridge in the ordinary way, the way a man is alone when there is no one there, which is different from the way a man is alone when something has just left.
He stood. His knees hurt. He started back down the path toward the hut.
Behind him, somewhere very far away — far enough that he could not have said whether he was feeling it or imagining it — the Force moved, the way water moves in a deep well when something has been dropped in at the surface, and the ripple has only just begun.
He did not feel it.
Not yet.
But Akkani, in her pen, lifted her head from the trough and turned it toward the eastern horizon, and stood very still, and looked at nothing, for a long time.