Saga The Sun in Eclipse (Obi-Wan, Anakin, RotS spoilers)

Title: The Sun in Eclipse
Author: Luthe
Characters: Obi-Wan, Anakin, Luke
Summary: Looking at Anakin is like staring into the sun.

::waves sleepily:: Yes, I should be working on the AU. However, finals are eating my brain and my depression is yo-yoing toward worse, so you get ficlets instead. Can you tell I'm a physics major?


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He should have felt it. The only explaination he had for not sensing it was that he was fighting Grevious at the time. It's the only reason he could thing of for not feeling it, for not knowing that Anakin had fallen as far as he did.

To Obi-Wan's eyes, Anakin was a bright spot in the Force. In fact, he was almost blinding. Trying to look at him in the Force was, at times, like trying to stare into the heart of a sun: all heat and light and power, until the eye could not stand it anymore. Tendrils of the Force swirled around him, like solar flares, and even his mere presence kicked up eddies in the Force, like a solar wind across a star system.

Obi-Wan remembered taking him on for training, when Anakin had shone like a nebula, just beginning to form into a star. He remembered wondering how he was going to control such a powerful being, and whether, if Anakin was a nebula, if he was a strong enough pulsar to keep the forming star in orbit around him.

As Anakin grew, the realtionship between them changed. Anakin grew brighter and brighter, and Obi-Wan strove to keep up, even as he was unsure if he was a binary star with Anakin, or merely a red giant, pulled along in the wake of the younger and hotter-burning star at the center of his system. Anakin's Knighting was secretly a great relief to Obi-Wan, as it finally meant that instead of having to try and exert control over Anakin, he could be content to orbit at his own pace, instead of fighting the gravity that was Anakin and his destiny. He had a feeling that if he did keep trying to fight Anakin, he would eventually end up crashing into him, like a planet pulled too close to a sun.

Just because Anakin was a sun, however, it did not mean that he did not occasionally be obscured by darkness. Obi-Wan hoped that those were merely cosmic dust clouds, like the ones that filled certain areas of the galaxy, and that Anakin's orbit would take them far from them, but he did secretly fear what would occur if Anakin's light were to be permanently occluded by them. It was nearly unthinkable, and yet, the possibility gnawed at him.

So it was that Obi-Wan thought he should have felt the cold and the darkness that came when Anakin's sun finally went into eclipse. The light should have gone out of his galaxy. But it didn't, and he didn't know the true occlusion of Anakin's soul until he stepped out of Padme's skiff on Mustafar.

It was beyond what he had feared. Looking at Anakin standing over Padme, soul consumed with darkness was like staring at a sun, but one that had gone black. If stars could glow with light that was darkness, Anakin was one. The heat and the power still radiated off of him, but it was black-body radiation, with its source hidden away by layers of evil. Obi-Wan looked at the abomination Anakin had become, and touched the light inside himself, trying to get it to glow as strong as it could, so that it would burn through the darkness and help him defeat the dark star before him.

***

It was only fitting that he leave Anakin to burn. The dark power in him had gone nova, and tried to destroy Obi-Wan's star, and so now, Obi-Wan was leaving the nova to burn itself out, as novas do, and collapse into a small, cold ball, with ash and dust as the only signs that a star had ever blazed in the heavens.

Obi-Wan forgot that some novas become black holes.

***

Once again, gravity had pulled him into Anakin's orbit. He should have expected it, really, as he had spent the last eighteen years slowly becoming a white dwarf star in the orbit of Luke, light, Anakin's son, and an incredibly bright star in his own right. He had tried to cultivate the light in Luke, to steer him clear of the dust that had begun his fath

 

"Owen, who was the boring yellow star"
That part made me laugh. Otherwise, the rest was very poignant. I like they way you phrased the story.

 

::sneaks in and bumps up, as she has just seen RotS and realized that Mustafar's sun really is in eclipse during the whole duel scene::