Obi-Wan knelt beside Padme's unconscious body, where she lay limp and broken in the smoky dusk. He felt for a pulse. It was thin, and erratic. "Anakin- Anakin, what have you done?"
In the Force, Anakin burned like a fusion torch. "You turned her against me."
Obi-Wan looked at the best friend he ever had. "You did that yourself," he said sadly.
"I'll give you a chance, Obi-Wan. For old times' sake. Walk away."
"If only I could."
"Go some place out of the way. Retire. Meditate. That's what you like, isn't it? You don't have to fight for peace anymore. Peace is here. My Empire is peace."
"Your Empire? It will never have peace. It was founded on treachery and innocent blood."
"Don't make me kill you, Obi-Wan. If you are not with me, then you are against me."
"Only Sith deal in absolutes, Anakin. The truth is never black and white." He rose, spreading empty hands.
"Let me take Padme to a medcenter. She needs medical attention."
"She stays."
"Anakin-"
"You don't get to take her anywhere. You don't get to touch her. She's mine, do you understand? It's your fault, all of it- you made her betray me!"
"Anakin-"
Anakin's hand sprouted a bar of blue plasma.
Obi-Wan sighed.
He brought his own lightsaber and angled it before him. "Then I will do what I must."
"You'll try," Anakin said, and leapt.
Obi-Wan met him in the air. Blue blades crossed, and the volcano above echoed their lightning with a shout of fire.
(And after some pages..)
Blade-to-blade, they were identical. After thousands of hours in lightsaber sparring, they knew each other better than brothers, more intimately than lovers; they were complementary halves of a single warrior.
In every exchange, Obi-Wan gave ground. It was his way. And he knew to strike Anakin down would burn his own heart to ash.
Exchanges flashed. Leaps were sideslipped or met with flying kicks; ankle sweeps skipped over and punches parried. The door of the control center fell in pieces, and then they were inside among the bodies. Consoles exploded in fountains of white-hot sparks as they ripped free of their moorings and hurtled through the air. Dead hands spasmed on triggers and blaster bolts sizzled through imposibbly intricate lattices of ricochet.
Obi-Wan barely caught some hand flipped them at Anakin: a desperation move. Anything to distract him; anything to slow him down. Easily, contemptously, Anakin sent them back, and the bolts flared between their blades until their galvening faded and the particles of the packeted beams dispersed into radioactive fog.
"Don't make me destroy you, Obi-Wan." Anakin's voice had gone deeper than a well and bleak as the obsidian cliffs. "You're no match for the power of the dark side."
"I've heard that before," Obi-Wan said through his teeth, parrying madly, "but I never thought I'd hear it from you."
A roar of the Force blasted Obi-Wan back into a wall, smashing breath from his lungs, leaving him swaying, half-stunned. Anakin stepped over bodies and lifted his blades for the kill.
Obi-Wan had only one trick left, one that wouldn't work twice-
But it was a very good trick.
It had, after all, worked rather splendidly on Grievous..
He twitched one finger, reaching through the Force to reverse the polarity of the electrodrivers in Anakin's mechanical hand.
Durasteel fingers sprang open, and a lightsaber tumbled free. Obi-Wan reached. Anakin's lightsaber twisted in the air and flipped into his hand. He poised both blades in a cross before him. "The flaw of power is arrogance."
"You hesitate," Anakin said. "The flaw of compassion-"
"It's not compassion," Obi-Wan said sadly. It's reverence for life. Even yours. It's respect for the man you were."
He sighed. "It's regret for the man you should have been."
Anakin roared and flew at him, using both the Force and his body to crash Obi-Wan back into the wall once more. His hands seized Obi-Wan's wrists with imposibble strength, forcing his arms wide. "I am so sick of your lectures!"
Dark power bore down with his grip.
Obi-Wan felt the bones of his forearms bending, beginning to feather towards the greenstick fractures that would come before the final breaks.
Oh, he thought. Oh, this is bad.
(After after the conclusion of the duel between everyone's favourite lil' green freak and Darth Sidious (The man known as Chancellor Palpatine to the galaxy, Dark Lord of the Sith to the Jedi, and the first Emperor.), in which Yoda lost, this is what happens to the duel on Mustafar..)
With Anakin's grip on his wrists bending his arms near to breaking, forcing both their lightsabers down in a slow but unstoppable arc, Obi-Wan let go.
Of everything.
His hopes. His fears. His obligation to the Jedi, his promise to Qui-Gon (Kenobi's Jedi Master) his failure with Anakin.
And their lightsabers.
Startled, Anakin instinctively shifted his Force grip, releasing one wrist to reach for his blade; in that instant Obi-Wan twisted free of his other hand and with the Force caught up his own blade, reversing it along his forearm so that his swift parry of Anakin's thundering overhand not only blocked the strike but directed both blades to slice through the wall against which he stood. He slid Anakin's following thrust through the wall on the opposite side, guiding both blades again up and over his head in a circular sweep so that he could use the power of Anakin's next chop to drive himself backward through the wall, outside into the smoke and the falling cinders.
Anakin followed, constantly attacking; Obi-Wan again gave ground, retreating along a narrow balcony high above the black-sand shoreline of a lake of fire.
Mustafar hummed with death behind his back, only a moment away, somewhere out there among the rivers of molten rock. Obi-Wan let Anakin drive him toward it.
It was a place, he decided, they should reach together.
Anakin forced him back and back, slamming his balde down with strength that seemed to flow from the volcano overhead. He spun and whirled and sliced razor sharp shards of steel from the wall and shot them at Obi-Wan with the full heat of his fury. He slashed through a control panel along the walkway, and the ray shield that had held back the lava storm vanished.
Fire rained around them.
Obi-Wan backed to the end of the balcony; behind him was only a power conduit no thicker than his arm, connecting to the main collection plant of the old lava mine, onto a riverbed that flowed with white hot molten stone. Obi-Wan stepped backward onto the conduit without hesitation, his balance flawless as he parried chop after chop.
Anakin came on.
Out on the tightrope of power conduit, their blades blurred even faster than before. They chopped and slashed and parried and blocked. Lava bombs thundered to the ground below, shedding drops of bruning stone that scorched their robes. Smoke shrouded the panet's star, and now the only light came from the hell-glow of the lava below them and from their blades themselves.
Flares of energy crackled and spat.
This was not Sith against Jedi. This was not light against dark or good against evil; it had nothing to do with duty or philosophy, religion or morals.
It was Anakin against Obi-Wan.
Personally.
Just the two of them, and the damage they had done to each other.
Obi-Wan backflipped from the conduit to a coupling nexus of the main collection plant; when Anakin flew in pursuit, Obi-Wan leapt again. They spun and whirled throughout its levels, up its stairs, and across its platforms; they battled out onto the collection panels over which the cascades of lava poured, and Obi-Wan, out on the edge of the collection panel, hunching under a curve of durasteel that splashed aside gouts of lava, deflecting Force blasts and countering strikes from this creature of rage that had been his best friend, suddenly comprehended an unexpectedly profound truth.
The man he faced was everything Obi-Wan had devoted his life to destroying: Murderer. Traitor. Fallen Jedi. Lord of the Sith. And here, and now, despite it all..
Obi-Wan still loved him.
Yoda had said it, flat-out: Allow such attachments to pass out of one's life, a Jedi must, but Obi-Wan had never let himself understand. He had argued for Anakin, made excuses, covered for him again and again and again; all the while this attachment he denied even feeling had blinded him to the dark path his best friend walked.
Obi-Wan knew there was, in the end, only one answer for attachment...
He let it go.
The lake of fire, no longer held back by the ray shield, chewed away the shore on which the plant stood, and the whole massive structure broke loose, sending both warriors skidding, scrabbling desperately for handholds down tilting durasteel slopes that were rapidly becoming cliffs; they hung from scraps of cable as the plant's superstructure floated out into the lava, sinking slowly as its lower levels melted and burned away.
Anakin kicked off from the toppling superstructure, swinging through a wide arc over the lava's boil. Obi-Wan shoved out and met him there, holding the cable with one hand and the Force, angling his blade high. Anakin flicked a Shien whipcrack at his knees. Obi-Wan yanked his legs high and slashed through the cable above Anakin's hand, and Anakin fell.
Pockets of gas boiled to the surface of the lava, gouting flame like arms reaching to gather him in.
But Anakin's momentum had already swung back towards the dissolving wreck of the collection plant, and the Force carried him within reach of another cable. Obi-Wan whipped his legs around his cable, altering his arc to bring him within reach of the one from which Anakin now dangled, but Ankaing was on to this game now, and he swung cable-to-cable ahead of Obi-Wan's advance, using the Force to carry him himself higher and higher, forcing Obi-Wan to counter by doing the same; on this terrain, altitude was everything.
Simultaneous surges of the Force carried them both spinning of the cables to the slant of the toppling superstructure's crane deck. Obi-Wan barely got his feet on the metal before Anakin pounced on him and they stood almost toe-to-toe, blades whirling and crashing on all sides, while around them the collection plant's maintenenance droids still tinkered mindlessly away at the doomed machinery, as they would continue to do until lava closed over them and they melted to their constituent molecules and dissolved into the flow.
A roar louder even than the volcano's eruption came from the river ahead; metal began to shriek and stretch. The river dropped away in a vertical sheet of fire that banished into boiling clouds of smoke and gases.
The whole collection plant was being carried, inexorably, over a vast lava fall.
Obi-Wan decied he didn't really want to see what was at the bottom.
He turned Anakin's blade aside with a two-handed block and landed a solid kick that knocked the two apart. Before Anakin could recover his balance, Obi-Wan took a running leap than became a graceful dive headlong off the crane deck. He hurtled down past level after level, and only a few tens of meters above the lava itself the Force called a dangling cable to his hand, turning his dive into a swing that carried him high and far, to the very limit of the cable.
And he let it go.
As though jumping from a swing in the Temple playrooms, his velocity sent him flying up and out over a catenary arc that shot him toward the river's shore.
Toward. Not quite to.
But the Force had led him here, and once again it had not betrayed him: below humming along a few meters above the lava river, came a big, slow old repulsorlift platform, carrying droids and equipment out toward a collection plant that its programming was not sophisticated enough to realize was about to be destroyed.
Obi-Wan flipped in the air and let the Force bring him to a catfooted landing. An adder-quick stab of his lightsaber disabled the platform's guidance system, and Obi-Wan was able to direct it back towards the shore with a simple shift of his weight.
He turned to watch as the collection plant shrieked like the damned in a Corellian hell, crumbling over the brink of the falls until it vanished into invisible destruction.
Obi-Wan lowered his head. "Good-bye, old friend."
But the Force whispered a warning, and Obi-Wan lifted his head in time to see Anakin come hurtling toward him out from the boil of smoke above the falls, perched on a tiny repulsorlift droid. The little droid was vastly swifter than Obi-Wan's logy old cargo platform, and cut him off from the shore. Obi-Wan shifted weight one way, then another, but Anakin's droid was nimble as a sand panther; there was no way around, and this close to the lava, the heat was intense enough to crisp Obi-Wan's hair.
"This is the end for you, Master," he said. "I wish it were otherwise."
" Yes Anakin, so do I." Obi-Wan said as he sprinted into a leaping dive, making a spear of his blade.
Anakin leaned aside and deflected the thrust almost contemptously; he missed a cut at Obi-Wan's legs as the Jedi Master flew past him.
Obi-Wan turned his dive into a forward roll that left him barely teetering on the rim of a low cliff, just above the soft black sand of a riverbank. Anakin snarled a curse as he realized he'd been suckered, and leapt off his droid at Obi Wan's back-
Half a second too slow.
Obi-Wan whirl to parry didn't meet Anakin's blade. It met his knee. Then his other knee.
And while Anakin was still in the air, burned off lower legs only starting their topple down the cliff, Obi-Wan recovery to guard brought his blade through Anakin's left arm above the elbow. He stepped back as Anakin fell.
Anakin dropped his lightsaber, clawing at the edge of the cliff with his powerful mechanical hand, but his grip was too powerful for the lava bank and it crumbled, and he slid down onto the black sand. His severed limbs rolled into the lava below him and burned to ash in sudden bursts of scarlet flame.
The same colour, Obi-Wan observed distantly, as a Sith blade.
Anakin scrabbled at the soft black sand, but struggling only made him slip further. The sand itself was hot enough that dugging his durasteel fingers into it burned off his glove, and his robes began to smolder.
Obi-Wan picked up Anakin's lightsaber. He lifted his own as well, weighing them in his hands. Anakin has based his design upon Obi-Wan's. So similar they were.
So differently they had been used.
"Obi-Wan...?"
He looked down. Flame licked the fringes of Anakin's robe, and his long hair had blackened, and was beginning to char.
"You were the chosen one! It was said you would destroy the Sith, not join them! It was you who would bring balance to the Force, not leave it in darkness! You were my brother, Anakin," said Obi-Wan Kenobi. "I loved you, but I could not save you."
A flash of metal through the sky, and Obi-Wan felt the darkness closing in around them both. He knew that ship: the Chancellor's shuttle. Now, he supposed, the Emperor's shuttle.
Yoda might have failed. He might have died.
He might have left Obi-Wan alone: the last Jedi.
Below his feet, Darth Vader burst into flame.
"I hate you," he screamed.
Obi-Wan looked down. It would be a mercy to kill him.
He was not feeling merciful.
He was feeling calm, and clear, and he knew that to climb down to that black beach might cost him more time that he had.
Another Sith Lord approached.
In the end, there was only one choice. It was a choice he had made many years before, when he had passed his trials of Jedi Knighthood, and sworn himself to the Jedi forever. In the end, he was still Obi-Wan Kenobi, and he was still a Jedi, and he would not murder a helpless man.
He would leave it to the will of the Force.
He turned and walked away.
After a moment, he began to run.
He began to run because he realized, if he was fast enough, there was still one thing he could do for Anakin. He could still do honor to the memory of the man he had loved, and to the vanished Order they both had served.
At the landing deck, C-3PO stood on the skiff's landing ramp, waving frantically. "Master Kenobi! Please hurry!"
"Where's Padme?"
"Already inside, sir, but she is badly hurt."
Obi-Wan ran up the ramp to the skiff's cockpit and fired the engines. As the Chancellor's shuttle curved in toward the landing ramp, the sleek mirror-finished skiff streaked for the stars.
Obi-Wan never looked back.
As for those who prefer a visual look to my post, here's the video of the duel:
In the Force, Anakin burned like a fusion torch. "You turned her against me."
Obi-Wan looked at the best friend he ever had. "You did that yourself," he said sadly.
"I'll give you a chance, Obi-Wan. For old times' sake. Walk away."
"If only I could."
"Go some place out of the way. Retire. Meditate. That's what you like, isn't it? You don't have to fight for peace anymore. Peace is here. My Empire is peace."
"Your Empire? It will never have peace. It was founded on treachery and innocent blood."
"Don't make me kill you, Obi-Wan. If you are not with me, then you are against me."
"Only Sith deal in absolutes, Anakin. The truth is never black and white." He rose, spreading empty hands.
"Let me take Padme to a medcenter. She needs medical attention."
"She stays."
"Anakin-"
"You don't get to take her anywhere. You don't get to touch her. She's mine, do you understand? It's your fault, all of it- you made her betray me!"
"Anakin-"
Anakin's hand sprouted a bar of blue plasma.
Obi-Wan sighed.
He brought his own lightsaber and angled it before him. "Then I will do what I must."
"You'll try," Anakin said, and leapt.
Obi-Wan met him in the air. Blue blades crossed, and the volcano above echoed their lightning with a shout of fire.
(And after some pages..)
Blade-to-blade, they were identical. After thousands of hours in lightsaber sparring, they knew each other better than brothers, more intimately than lovers; they were complementary halves of a single warrior.
In every exchange, Obi-Wan gave ground. It was his way. And he knew to strike Anakin down would burn his own heart to ash.
Exchanges flashed. Leaps were sideslipped or met with flying kicks; ankle sweeps skipped over and punches parried. The door of the control center fell in pieces, and then they were inside among the bodies. Consoles exploded in fountains of white-hot sparks as they ripped free of their moorings and hurtled through the air. Dead hands spasmed on triggers and blaster bolts sizzled through imposibbly intricate lattices of ricochet.
Obi-Wan barely caught some hand flipped them at Anakin: a desperation move. Anything to distract him; anything to slow him down. Easily, contemptously, Anakin sent them back, and the bolts flared between their blades until their galvening faded and the particles of the packeted beams dispersed into radioactive fog.
"Don't make me destroy you, Obi-Wan." Anakin's voice had gone deeper than a well and bleak as the obsidian cliffs. "You're no match for the power of the dark side."
"I've heard that before," Obi-Wan said through his teeth, parrying madly, "but I never thought I'd hear it from you."
A roar of the Force blasted Obi-Wan back into a wall, smashing breath from his lungs, leaving him swaying, half-stunned. Anakin stepped over bodies and lifted his blades for the kill.
Obi-Wan had only one trick left, one that wouldn't work twice-
But it was a very good trick.
It had, after all, worked rather splendidly on Grievous..
He twitched one finger, reaching through the Force to reverse the polarity of the electrodrivers in Anakin's mechanical hand.
Durasteel fingers sprang open, and a lightsaber tumbled free. Obi-Wan reached. Anakin's lightsaber twisted in the air and flipped into his hand. He poised both blades in a cross before him. "The flaw of power is arrogance."
"You hesitate," Anakin said. "The flaw of compassion-"
"It's not compassion," Obi-Wan said sadly. It's reverence for life. Even yours. It's respect for the man you were."
He sighed. "It's regret for the man you should have been."
Anakin roared and flew at him, using both the Force and his body to crash Obi-Wan back into the wall once more. His hands seized Obi-Wan's wrists with imposibble strength, forcing his arms wide. "I am so sick of your lectures!"
Dark power bore down with his grip.
Obi-Wan felt the bones of his forearms bending, beginning to feather towards the greenstick fractures that would come before the final breaks.
Oh, he thought. Oh, this is bad.
(After after the conclusion of the duel between everyone's favourite lil' green freak and Darth Sidious (The man known as Chancellor Palpatine to the galaxy, Dark Lord of the Sith to the Jedi, and the first Emperor.), in which Yoda lost, this is what happens to the duel on Mustafar..)
With Anakin's grip on his wrists bending his arms near to breaking, forcing both their lightsabers down in a slow but unstoppable arc, Obi-Wan let go.
Of everything.
His hopes. His fears. His obligation to the Jedi, his promise to Qui-Gon (Kenobi's Jedi Master) his failure with Anakin.
And their lightsabers.
Startled, Anakin instinctively shifted his Force grip, releasing one wrist to reach for his blade; in that instant Obi-Wan twisted free of his other hand and with the Force caught up his own blade, reversing it along his forearm so that his swift parry of Anakin's thundering overhand not only blocked the strike but directed both blades to slice through the wall against which he stood. He slid Anakin's following thrust through the wall on the opposite side, guiding both blades again up and over his head in a circular sweep so that he could use the power of Anakin's next chop to drive himself backward through the wall, outside into the smoke and the falling cinders.
Anakin followed, constantly attacking; Obi-Wan again gave ground, retreating along a narrow balcony high above the black-sand shoreline of a lake of fire.
Mustafar hummed with death behind his back, only a moment away, somewhere out there among the rivers of molten rock. Obi-Wan let Anakin drive him toward it.
It was a place, he decided, they should reach together.
Anakin forced him back and back, slamming his balde down with strength that seemed to flow from the volcano overhead. He spun and whirled and sliced razor sharp shards of steel from the wall and shot them at Obi-Wan with the full heat of his fury. He slashed through a control panel along the walkway, and the ray shield that had held back the lava storm vanished.
Fire rained around them.
Obi-Wan backed to the end of the balcony; behind him was only a power conduit no thicker than his arm, connecting to the main collection plant of the old lava mine, onto a riverbed that flowed with white hot molten stone. Obi-Wan stepped backward onto the conduit without hesitation, his balance flawless as he parried chop after chop.
Anakin came on.
Out on the tightrope of power conduit, their blades blurred even faster than before. They chopped and slashed and parried and blocked. Lava bombs thundered to the ground below, shedding drops of bruning stone that scorched their robes. Smoke shrouded the panet's star, and now the only light came from the hell-glow of the lava below them and from their blades themselves.
Flares of energy crackled and spat.
This was not Sith against Jedi. This was not light against dark or good against evil; it had nothing to do with duty or philosophy, religion or morals.
It was Anakin against Obi-Wan.
Personally.
Just the two of them, and the damage they had done to each other.
Obi-Wan backflipped from the conduit to a coupling nexus of the main collection plant; when Anakin flew in pursuit, Obi-Wan leapt again. They spun and whirled throughout its levels, up its stairs, and across its platforms; they battled out onto the collection panels over which the cascades of lava poured, and Obi-Wan, out on the edge of the collection panel, hunching under a curve of durasteel that splashed aside gouts of lava, deflecting Force blasts and countering strikes from this creature of rage that had been his best friend, suddenly comprehended an unexpectedly profound truth.
The man he faced was everything Obi-Wan had devoted his life to destroying: Murderer. Traitor. Fallen Jedi. Lord of the Sith. And here, and now, despite it all..
Obi-Wan still loved him.
Yoda had said it, flat-out: Allow such attachments to pass out of one's life, a Jedi must, but Obi-Wan had never let himself understand. He had argued for Anakin, made excuses, covered for him again and again and again; all the while this attachment he denied even feeling had blinded him to the dark path his best friend walked.
Obi-Wan knew there was, in the end, only one answer for attachment...
He let it go.
The lake of fire, no longer held back by the ray shield, chewed away the shore on which the plant stood, and the whole massive structure broke loose, sending both warriors skidding, scrabbling desperately for handholds down tilting durasteel slopes that were rapidly becoming cliffs; they hung from scraps of cable as the plant's superstructure floated out into the lava, sinking slowly as its lower levels melted and burned away.
Anakin kicked off from the toppling superstructure, swinging through a wide arc over the lava's boil. Obi-Wan shoved out and met him there, holding the cable with one hand and the Force, angling his blade high. Anakin flicked a Shien whipcrack at his knees. Obi-Wan yanked his legs high and slashed through the cable above Anakin's hand, and Anakin fell.
Pockets of gas boiled to the surface of the lava, gouting flame like arms reaching to gather him in.
But Anakin's momentum had already swung back towards the dissolving wreck of the collection plant, and the Force carried him within reach of another cable. Obi-Wan whipped his legs around his cable, altering his arc to bring him within reach of the one from which Anakin now dangled, but Ankaing was on to this game now, and he swung cable-to-cable ahead of Obi-Wan's advance, using the Force to carry him himself higher and higher, forcing Obi-Wan to counter by doing the same; on this terrain, altitude was everything.
Simultaneous surges of the Force carried them both spinning of the cables to the slant of the toppling superstructure's crane deck. Obi-Wan barely got his feet on the metal before Anakin pounced on him and they stood almost toe-to-toe, blades whirling and crashing on all sides, while around them the collection plant's maintenenance droids still tinkered mindlessly away at the doomed machinery, as they would continue to do until lava closed over them and they melted to their constituent molecules and dissolved into the flow.
A roar louder even than the volcano's eruption came from the river ahead; metal began to shriek and stretch. The river dropped away in a vertical sheet of fire that banished into boiling clouds of smoke and gases.
The whole collection plant was being carried, inexorably, over a vast lava fall.
Obi-Wan decied he didn't really want to see what was at the bottom.
He turned Anakin's blade aside with a two-handed block and landed a solid kick that knocked the two apart. Before Anakin could recover his balance, Obi-Wan took a running leap than became a graceful dive headlong off the crane deck. He hurtled down past level after level, and only a few tens of meters above the lava itself the Force called a dangling cable to his hand, turning his dive into a swing that carried him high and far, to the very limit of the cable.
And he let it go.
As though jumping from a swing in the Temple playrooms, his velocity sent him flying up and out over a catenary arc that shot him toward the river's shore.
Toward. Not quite to.
But the Force had led him here, and once again it had not betrayed him: below humming along a few meters above the lava river, came a big, slow old repulsorlift platform, carrying droids and equipment out toward a collection plant that its programming was not sophisticated enough to realize was about to be destroyed.
Obi-Wan flipped in the air and let the Force bring him to a catfooted landing. An adder-quick stab of his lightsaber disabled the platform's guidance system, and Obi-Wan was able to direct it back towards the shore with a simple shift of his weight.
He turned to watch as the collection plant shrieked like the damned in a Corellian hell, crumbling over the brink of the falls until it vanished into invisible destruction.
Obi-Wan lowered his head. "Good-bye, old friend."
But the Force whispered a warning, and Obi-Wan lifted his head in time to see Anakin come hurtling toward him out from the boil of smoke above the falls, perched on a tiny repulsorlift droid. The little droid was vastly swifter than Obi-Wan's logy old cargo platform, and cut him off from the shore. Obi-Wan shifted weight one way, then another, but Anakin's droid was nimble as a sand panther; there was no way around, and this close to the lava, the heat was intense enough to crisp Obi-Wan's hair.
"This is the end for you, Master," he said. "I wish it were otherwise."
" Yes Anakin, so do I." Obi-Wan said as he sprinted into a leaping dive, making a spear of his blade.
Anakin leaned aside and deflected the thrust almost contemptously; he missed a cut at Obi-Wan's legs as the Jedi Master flew past him.
Obi-Wan turned his dive into a forward roll that left him barely teetering on the rim of a low cliff, just above the soft black sand of a riverbank. Anakin snarled a curse as he realized he'd been suckered, and leapt off his droid at Obi Wan's back-
Half a second too slow.
Obi-Wan whirl to parry didn't meet Anakin's blade. It met his knee. Then his other knee.
And while Anakin was still in the air, burned off lower legs only starting their topple down the cliff, Obi-Wan recovery to guard brought his blade through Anakin's left arm above the elbow. He stepped back as Anakin fell.
Anakin dropped his lightsaber, clawing at the edge of the cliff with his powerful mechanical hand, but his grip was too powerful for the lava bank and it crumbled, and he slid down onto the black sand. His severed limbs rolled into the lava below him and burned to ash in sudden bursts of scarlet flame.
The same colour, Obi-Wan observed distantly, as a Sith blade.
Anakin scrabbled at the soft black sand, but struggling only made him slip further. The sand itself was hot enough that dugging his durasteel fingers into it burned off his glove, and his robes began to smolder.
Obi-Wan picked up Anakin's lightsaber. He lifted his own as well, weighing them in his hands. Anakin has based his design upon Obi-Wan's. So similar they were.
So differently they had been used.
"Obi-Wan...?"
He looked down. Flame licked the fringes of Anakin's robe, and his long hair had blackened, and was beginning to char.
"You were the chosen one! It was said you would destroy the Sith, not join them! It was you who would bring balance to the Force, not leave it in darkness! You were my brother, Anakin," said Obi-Wan Kenobi. "I loved you, but I could not save you."
A flash of metal through the sky, and Obi-Wan felt the darkness closing in around them both. He knew that ship: the Chancellor's shuttle. Now, he supposed, the Emperor's shuttle.
Yoda might have failed. He might have died.
He might have left Obi-Wan alone: the last Jedi.
Below his feet, Darth Vader burst into flame.
"I hate you," he screamed.
Obi-Wan looked down. It would be a mercy to kill him.
He was not feeling merciful.
He was feeling calm, and clear, and he knew that to climb down to that black beach might cost him more time that he had.
Another Sith Lord approached.
In the end, there was only one choice. It was a choice he had made many years before, when he had passed his trials of Jedi Knighthood, and sworn himself to the Jedi forever. In the end, he was still Obi-Wan Kenobi, and he was still a Jedi, and he would not murder a helpless man.
He would leave it to the will of the Force.
He turned and walked away.
After a moment, he began to run.
He began to run because he realized, if he was fast enough, there was still one thing he could do for Anakin. He could still do honor to the memory of the man he had loved, and to the vanished Order they both had served.
At the landing deck, C-3PO stood on the skiff's landing ramp, waving frantically. "Master Kenobi! Please hurry!"
"Where's Padme?"
"Already inside, sir, but she is badly hurt."
Obi-Wan ran up the ramp to the skiff's cockpit and fired the engines. As the Chancellor's shuttle curved in toward the landing ramp, the sleek mirror-finished skiff streaked for the stars.
Obi-Wan never looked back.
As for those who prefer a visual look to my post, here's the video of the duel:
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