Chapter Text
Owen waited until the suns were high enough that no one would really question where he was going.
Beru watched him pull on his boots in the front room, hands on her hips, the way she always did when she thought he was being stupid but also thought maybe he needed to be stupid for a bit.
“You don’t have to go,” she said.
He grunted, because saying I do felt too much like admitting he cared. “Somebody’s got to see if there’s anything to those stories.”
“Stories from bored kids and drunk men,” Beru said. “And a few old women who remember the war and don’t like the look of him because it reminds them of things they’d rather forget.” She stepped closer and straightened the collar of his shirt. “You’ll be kind?”
He pulled away. “I’ll be honest.”
“Owen.”
He met her eyes for a heartbeat, then looked past her, through the doorway, where Luke’s laughter floated in from the yard. The boy was chasing one of the farmhands’ kids, wooden model of a skyhopper clutched in one hand, dust kicking up around his ankles.
“If he’s… if it’s getting worse,” Owen muttered, “I need to know. I won’t have him scaring Luke. Or worse, putting him in danger.”
Beru’s hand caught his wrist. Her touch was warm. “If it’s worse, that means he needs help. Not that he needs to be thrown away.”
“Help?” Owen snorted, and for an instant flashed a joyless half-smile. “From who? Me?”
But he didn’t shake her off, not at first. Only when he turned to go did he gently pull his arm free.
The walk out into the Dune Sea was longer than Owen remembered, or maybe he was just older. The sand dragged at his boots and worked its way in around the seams. The suns pressed down on the back of his neck. The horizon warped in the distance.
As he walked, the rumors replayed themselves, the way they’d been muttered in the cantina, at the moisture vaporator repair stand, in the little general store in Anchorhead.
”Saw him talking to himself again. Right in the middle of the street, like there was someone there. Kept saying a name over and over; Annie? Ani?”
”M’boy said he woke up in the night and heard ‘im howling. Like an animal. A dyin’ one.”
”He was just standing there outside the Lars place, staring at the homestead like he’d forgotten where he was. I shouted at him and he didn’t even flinch.”
”It’s not natural, a man like that living alone out there. Not after what he’s seen. War ruins people, you know.”
Owen had always answered the same: He stays away from the boy, that’s what matters. He’d told himself that as long as Ben…Obi-Wan, whatever his name really is—kept his distance, it wasn’t his problem.
But last week he’d come out at dawn and found footprints in the sand by the outer fence. Bare feet. The prints had looped and staggered, circling, doubling back, as if whoever made them had forgotten what they were doing halfway through.
There’d been a place where the prints had stopped, heels dug in, like someone had stood very still for a very long time and then turned away.
That was what finally brought him out here.
Ben’s hut was half-swallowed by the sand, as if the desert had decided it was tired of waiting and had started to reclaim him in small, patient handfuls. The walls were baked and cracked. One corner of the roof had caved in; someone had tried to brace it with scavenged metal beams, but the work looked rushed and crooked.
There was no noise. No movement. For a moment Owen thought the rumors had been wrong in a different way. That the old fool had just died, quietly, alone, and no one had noticed.
He stepped up to the door and knocked anyway.
Nothing.
“Kenobi!” he called, the old name tasting sour on his tongue. “It’s Owen Lars. Open up.”
Silence.
He waited, throat tight, hand still on the rough stone.
Then, faintly, he heard it: a voice from inside, low and hoarse and frayed with disuse.
“…no, no, he’s safe, he’s safe, he’s safe, I can see him - I can see him…”
Owen’s jaw clenched. He pushed the door. It scraped over mounds of sand and stuck halfway. He shoved his shoulder against it until it finally gave.
The smell hit him first.
Not just sweat and old cloth and the sour tang of someone who’d gone too long without washing. There was dust thick enough to taste, burned something-or-other from the small cooking pit that hadn’t been cleaned properly, and underneath it all the stale, heavy scent of a room where the air never really changed.
“Ben?” he called, because that was easier than the other name.
The hut was dim. A blanket had been tacked over the small window, leaving only thin lines of light where it didn’t quite meet the edges. Those shafts caught the dust in the air, making it look like the whole place was underwater.
There were books and datapads everywhere; piled on the floor, stacked on crates, open on the narrow sleeping pallet. Some had slid down into drifts of sand that had blown in under the door and never been swept out again. A cup sat overturned in the corner, whatever it had held long since dried into a sticky ring.
He nearly stepped on a cylindrical metallic object, before he realized what it was. A broken lightsaber hilt. The sight made his stomach twist.
He found Obi-Wan in the far corner, on the floor.
For a moment he didn’t recognize him.
The man he remembered had always seemed… composed. Even during the war, when he’d shown up with that baby boy in his arms and eyes that looked older than his face, there’d been something tidy about him. His beard trimmed, robes straight, posture like a rod had been set down his spine in childhood and never removed.
The person on the floor looked like the desert had sanded him down to the essentials and then kept going, not knowing where to stop.
His hair was longer, unkempt, matted in places where sweat had dried and dried again. The beard had gone wild and uneven. His face was thinner, the lines around his mouth carved deep. Dirt streaked the skin at his throat and along his jaw, as if he’d wiped at his face with the back of a dusty hand and then forgotten to finish the job.
His robes were stained and threadbare, the color blended with the sand. The outer tunic hung crooked, one side tucked into his belt, the other half-dragging. His hands were dirt-stained, nails rimmed dark, knuckles raw as if he’d been scraping them against stone.
He was kneeling, but not like a man at prayer. More like someone who’d started to fall and never made up his mind about whether to hit the ground. His weight listed uneasily to one side, fingers dug into a crack in the floor.
The man was muttering to himself.
Owen stood in the doorway, breath caught high in his chest, and listened.
“…no, no, no, I did what I had to, I did, I did, Master, please, don’t—don’t look at me like that, I had to…”
His eyes were open, but he wasn’t looking at Owen. They fixed on a spot a little to one side, tracking something that wasn’t there.
“Ben,” Owen said again, softer now.
The muttering didn’t stop. If anything it sped up, words tripping over each other.
“…you said I’d do great things, you did, you did, you said, you said, you said- Obi-Wan Kenobi, you will—no, please, I can’t…Cody, no!”
The last word tore out of him sharp and high, like something had been ripped loose from his chest.
Owen flinched.
He took two strides across the room and dropped into a crouch, the ache in his knees forgotten. He grabbed Obi-Wan’s shoulder, half to steady him, half to prove to the man that he was real.
“Ben.” His voice came out harsher than he meant. “Ben, look at me.”
For a second there was nothing. The muttering rolled on, words dissolving into half-syllables, broken bits of names. His eyes - too-bright, too-wide - kept following invisible ghosts.
Then, slow as dawn, they shifted. Focused.
“Owen,” he whispered.
Owen had braced for anger. For some sign of the sharp-tongued Jedi who’d argued with him years ago about training and destiny and what was best for the boy.
What he got instead was something worse.
Recognition, yes. But underneath it; relief so raw it was almost painful, like a man who’d been drowning and had finally broken the surface. Relief, and then shame, curling in on itself.
“Owen,” Obi-Wan said again, his voice trembling. “I didn’t… I didn’t expect…”
His gaze flickered past Owen’s shoulder, toward the open door, toward the stretch of desert that led back to the homestead. Something hungry and terrified flashed across his face.
“The boy,” he choked. “Luke. Is he-?”
“He’s fine,” Owen cut in, too quickly. “He’s home. He’s safe.”
The tension went out of Obi-Wan so fast it was as if he was a marionette whose strings had been cut. He sagged, head drooping forward. Owen caught him by instinct, hands under his arms, and nearly recoiled at the feel of him. Too light, all bone under the rough fabric, heat radiating from his skin like a fever.
Maker, when had he last eaten properly? When had he last slept?
“You shouldn’t be here,” Obi-Wan mumbled, though he didn’t try to pull away. His fingers twitched, an aborted attempt at straightening his tunic. “If they see you-if they see you with me…”
“If who sees?” Owen demanded. “The kids in town? The Jawas? The krayt dragons?”
Obi-Wan’s laugh was a small, broken thing. “They’re everywhere,” he said. “Eyes. In the sand. In the sky. I thought there was nowhere left that wasn’t watching. But they haven’t found him. They mustn’t. I… I won’t let them.”
His eyes darted, unfocused again, following something behind Owen’s shoulder. His mouth moved soundlessly for a moment, like he was answering a question only he could hear.
“I did my duty,” he whispered. “I did. I did. I killed him. I killed…”
His throat closed up on the rest. His hands clawed at his own sleeves, dragging the cloth down over his wrists as if to hide something that wasn’t there.
Owen swallowed hard.
He saw, suddenly, not the filthy, muttering wreck in front of him, but flashes of the man he must have been. The one who’d walked into their home with a war at his back. The one who’d left with the infant Luke in his arms, grief crowding his shoulders like another cloak.
He’d thought…what? That time and the desert would sand the edges off that, smooth him into something quiet and forgettable?
He hadn’t expected… this.
“Have you got water?” Owen asked gruffly, because practicality was safer than pity.
Obi-Wan blinked at him. “Hm?”
“Water,” Owen repeated. “You look like you’re about two steps from keeling over. When was the last time you ate? …Or washed?” He glanced around at the scattered cups, the untouched ration packs shoved under a crate, still sealed. “What in the nine Corellian hells are you doing out here, Kenobi? Trying to become one with the sand?”
Obi-Wan’s lips twitched, an involuntary echo of humor that died before it could properly form. “It gets away from me,” he said, almost apologetic. “Time. Days. Nights. They blur. I… lose my place.”
He lifted one hand, as if to gesture at the mess, and Owen saw the tremor in his fingers. The raw skin on his knuckles. The faint lines of healed cuts along his forearm, like someone had been clawing at themselves in the dark.
It hit him then, like a fist to the gut, that this wasn’t just a man who’d gone odd from solitude. This was someone drowning in his own head, pulled under by things Owen couldn’t see.
For a moment, a terrible thought crossed his mind: If this is what the war did to their generals, what did it do to everyone else?
He shook it off. He couldn’t afford that kind of thinking. Not out here.
“Sit up,” Owen said. “Properly, before you fold in half. I’m not hauling you back to the homestead in a sack.”
Obi-Wan obeyed with the automatic reflex of someone who’d taken orders his whole life. He tried to brace himself against the wall, then seemed to think better of it when his hand met grime. His nose wrinkled, faintly embarrassed, as if he were noticing the state of the place for the first time.
“I meant to tidy,” he murmured. “It just… got away from me.”
Owen snorted. “Looks like it packed its bags and fled in the night.”
He pushed himself to his feet and went hunting for water. The small refresher alcove off the main room was a disaster; towels thrown in a heap, a basin crusted with dust. There was a cracked mirror on the wall, a spiderweb of fractures running out from a fist-sized impact. Owen stared at it for a moment, imagining the scene that had put it there, then turned away.
He found the water in a half-buried storage unit, the lid left askew. Sand had gotten in, of course. He cursed under his breath and brushed it aside, then carried a jug back to the main room.
Obi-Wan hadn’t moved.
He sat where Owen had left him, hands limp in his lap, eyes fixed on some middle distance. His lips were moving again, soundless. The only sign he was aware of the present at all was the way his shoulders flinched when Owen set the jug down with a thump.
“Here,” Owen said. He poured water into a cup and thrust it toward him. “Drink.”
Obi-Wan took it with both hands, fingers closing too tight around the rim. For a moment he just stared at the water, as if he’d forgotten what it was for. Then he raised it to his mouth and drank in small, careful sips, trembling with the effort.
Water dribbled down his chin. He didn’t seem to notice.
Owen watched him, jaw working.
This was worse than the rumors. Worse than the kids’ cruel imitations of “Crazy Old Ben” muttering on street corners. They’d made it sound funny, exaggerated for effect, the way children did.
There was nothing funny about this.
“Owen,” Obi-Wan said suddenly, lowering the cup. His eyes were clearer for the moment, pinned on Owen’s face with desperate intensity. “Do they… do they talk about me? In town?”
Owen hesitated.
“Yes,” he said finally.
“What do they say?”
“That you’re mad,” Owen answered bluntly. If there was one thing he could offer this man, it was honesty. “That you talk to yourself. That you shout in your sleep. That you stand out in the desert and stare at nothing for hours.”
Obi-Wan flinched as if each word were a physical blow. His fingers tightened around the cup.
“I try to be quiet,” he whispered. “I try. I… I don’t always know when I’m… loud. They hear them, you see. Or they hear me hearing them. I can’t…” He pressed his free hand to his temple, digging his fingertips into the skin. “If I could just be still, just—just empty, perhaps…”
Owen grabbed his wrist. Not gently this time.
“Stop that.”
Obi-Wan stared at him, startled.
“You’re hurting yourself. More importantly, you’re scaring my boy,” Owen said, voice low, shaking with anger that wasn’t entirely his. “He hears about you. ‘Crazy old Ben.’ ‘The mad hermit in the dunes.’ He asks why a man like that comes around our homestead in the middle of the night. He asks if it’s true you were a general in the war, and if the war broke your brain.”
Something like horror rippled across Obi-Wan’s face. “I never meant-”
“Yeah. I know you didn’t.” Owen dropped his hand. “Maker help me, I know. But intention doesn’t change what’s in front of me.”
They sat there in a tense silence, the only sound the faint hiss of sand against the outer walls, the distant ringing of the wind across the dunes.
“What do you want from me, Owen?” Obi-Wan asked at last, so quiet Owen almost missed it. “If you’ve come to tell me to stay away, I…I can go further. I can move deeper into the wastes. There are places even the Jawas don’t go.”
“You’d die out there,” Owen snapped. “You’d be a bleached skeleton in a week, and some scavenger would use your skull as a bowl.”
“Then the problem would be solved, wouldn’t it?” Obi-Wan’s smile was thin and terrible. “No more mad hermit to frighten your boy.”
Something hot flared in Owen’s chest.
“Don’t you dare,” he said, voice rough. “Don’t you dare talk about yourself like you’re trash to be thrown out with yesterday’s sand. You think Luke hasn’t lost enough already? You think he…” His voice cracked. He dropped it to a harsh whisper. “He deserves to know there were people who fought for him before he was even born. Even if those people are broken. Especially if they are.”
Obi-Wan blinked at him, confusion knitting his brow, as if the idea that he might matter to anyone was foreign.
“I’m not… fit to be around him,” he said. “You can see that.”
“I can see you’re falling apart,” Owen said. “Doesn’t mean I’m going to stand here and watch you finish the job.”
He stood abruptly, the motion more violent than he intended. “I’ll send Beru out tomorrow,” he said. “With food. With proper cleaning supplies. Maybe some clothes that don’t smell like the inside of a bantha.”
Obi-Wan’s eyes went wide. “You don’t need to-”
“I know I don’t need to. I’m choosing to.” Owen glared down at him, daring him to argue. “Consider it… an investment. Can’t have the great General Kenobi dropping dead half a kilometer from my moisture farm. What would the neighbors think?”
A flicker of something like the old Obi-Wan crossed the man’s face; a faint, exhausted amusement. “I’m hardly great anything anymore,” he murmured.
“Tell that to the Empire,” Owen said. “Far as they’re concerned, you’re still dangerous enough to merit hunting across half the galaxy. Might be they know something you don’t.”
Obi-Wan looked away, shoulders curling inward.
“They know I failed,” he said. “They know I couldn’t save him. Or… anyone.”
The room seemed to tilt for a moment, the weight of that grief pressing down so hard Owen had to steady himself on the doorframe.
He could have said a lot of things then. Could have told him it wasn’t his fault. That no one man could have stopped what happened. That if anyone was to blame, it was the Emperor, the war, a thousand years of Jedi foolishness.
He said none of it.
Instead, he reached down and put a hand on Obi-Wan’s shoulder. It was an awkward gesture, stiff and clumsy, but he meant it.
“For what it’s worth,” Owen said gruffly, “you didn’t fail my boy.”
Obi-Wan’s breath hitched.
“You got him here,” Owen went on. “You put him in my arms and you walked away. Maybe you broke in the process. Maybe you’re breaking still. But you did what needed doing.”
Obi-Wan’s hands came up, clutching at Owen’s sleeve for a heartbeat like a man grabbing a lifeline. Then he seemed to remember himself and let go, fingers falling back to his lap.
“Thank you,” he said, barely audible.
Owen squeezed his shoulder once, then stepped back before the moment could turn into something he didn’t know how to handle.
“I’ll come back,” he said. “In a few days. Make sure you haven’t turned into a sand sculpture.”
“You don’t have to…”
“Obi-Wan.” Owen said his full name deliberately, tasting the shape of it for the first time without bitterness. “I’m not asking.”
For the first time since he’d walked in, he saw something other than despair in the older man’s eyes. It wasn’t hope. Not yet. But it was… a pause. A small, faltering step back from the edge.
“All right,” Obi-Wan whispered.
Owen nodded once, brusque, and turned toward the door.
On his way out, he paused. The blanket over the window hung crooked, sagging. On impulse, he reached up and yanked it down. Harsh light flooded the room, making both of them wince.
“World’s still out there,” Owen said, half to himself.
Then he left, pulling the door shut behind him.
The suns were lower now, the air shimmering with heat. The walk back to the homestead would be long and tiring.
As he trudged through the sand, he couldn’t stop seeing Obi-Wan the way he’d left him: blinking in the sudden light, filthy and frayed, surrounded by ghosts only he could see.
The rumors, he thought grimly, didn’t come close.
But when he pictured “Crazy Old Ben” now, he didn’t just see a danger to Luke. He saw a man who had been asked to carry more than anyone should, and had shattered under the weight, and still, somehow, kept crawling forward because a baby had been placed in his arms and he was told, This one. Keep this one safe.
Owen looked toward the distant shape of the homestead, where a small boy would be waiting, impatient and curious and bright as one of Tatooine’s twin suns.
“I’ll watch him,” he muttered into the wind. “You… you just try not to fall apart completely before he’s old enough to decide what he thinks of you himself.”
The desert didn’t answer.
But behind him, in a half-buried hut, a broken man sat in a shaft of harsh light with dust in his hair and water on his chin and, for the first time in a long time, the faintest sense that someone might still be watching him back.