THERE IS ALWAYS ANOTHER

Mackenzi Lee

I had hoped that dying would be enough to untangle me from the Skywalker family ’s Issues.

And yet here I am again, Obi-Wan Kenobi, one with the Force and still the only thing standing between a Skywalker and an impulse decision that could have galactic consequences.

Tatooine had, by no means, been a glamorous locale for exile, though I had no choice but to settle myself near Luke’s new guardians. Yoda, however, with an entire galaxy at his fingertips, had been so determined to make a meal of his martyrdom that he chose Dagobah as his refuge, the only planet that smells worse than the Jedi Temple training rooms after a combat class with fourteen-year-olds. The Jedi Order may have died out, but their dedication to posturing theatrics is alive and well in Master Yoda. I had never questioned any of it when I lived in the Temple—the robes and the ceremony and the rituals and the endless rules that had been carved into me so deeply and at such a young age that I sometimes couldn’t discern what I actually believed in and what had simply been told to me over and over before I was old enough to understand what any of it meant. I had only had to think about touching Siri Tachi’s hand under the table at midday meal to feel as though I deserved a punishment handed down from the Council. Qui-Gon had tried to nudge me off that straight and narrow, encouraging an embrace of the spirit of the Code rather than the literal interpretation of it, but his relaxed attitude had only made me more determined to be the Good Jedi, the one keeping his Master in line, though I knew it should have been the other way around. I’d never had a real chance to figure out what sort of Jedi—let alone what sort of Master—I wanted to be without him before this nine-year-old prodigy no one wanted was thrust upon me, an entire other life suddenly and totally dependent on me, and my life recalibrated around being the man this scrappy hothead needed so he could fulfill his destiny.

No time to decide what kind of man I was when I was entirely occupied trying to keep a child alive and trained and convinced that, yes, everyone was thrilled to have him among us, no matter the rough start he’d had with the Council, and, yes, Mace Windu scowled at everyone like that, though he did seem to have a particular frown he reserved just for Anakin. My insomniac nights fretting over my trials and whether Qui-Gon would somehow get himself kicked out of the Order before he could finish teaching me were replaced by my jolting awake in the middle of the night thinking, Anakin probably doesn’t know how to swim; I have to teach him how to swim. How do you teach someone to swim?

That’s what almost twenty years in the desert will do to a man—it gives you too much time for agonizing self-reflection, dismantling the systemic rituals and ingrained thought patterns that led you to playing an inadvertent yet critical role in the establishment of the Galactic Empire, and the painful task of forgiving yourself and everyone else, releasing all hope for a better past.

Death is good for that, too—it gives you perspective. And far too much time to think.

But death is better than Dagobah, I think, as the swamp world crystallizes around me. I’m shocked Luke stayed this long. If it were Anakin sent here, with minimal instructions delivered to him by a ghost, only to see his ship swallowed by a sinkhole, Yoda cracking his droid on the dome, then deeming him unteachable before they’d had a chance to talk about anything beyond Yoda’s terrible cooking, he would have been grinding his teeth in that way that used to drive me mad. All that plus the low ceilings, the perpetual damp, and snakes in places they had no business being—the moment the rain started, Anakin would have stormed out of the hut loudly reciting an itemized list of frustrations to no one in particular. If he’d been unable to get his X-wing out of the swamp, I have no doubt Anakin would have found a way to walk off the planet.

But Luke had stayed. And Master Yoda had taught him. And I had only to appear to Yoda in half a dozen of his dreams to convince him that Luke was not Anakin, and this time would be different. We are all better than we had been then. Or, not better, but at least we knew what not to do when it comes to training Chosen Ones.

Speaking of Chosen Ones.

Through the swampy mist rising off the soil, I see Luke throwing supplies into the cargo bay of his X-wing, hasty and disorganized, shouting over his shoulder at Yoda. I seem to have arrived mid-rant, and though Luke has yet to notice me, I doubt my presence would have done much to quell his passion. Anakin never held his tongue around his elders. The Skywalkers are wildfires, their passions scorching the dirt as soon as they’re given a spark. Even Leia was already well known for her ability to set the Empire on fire with nothing but a wet match. Relentless was the word Bail had most often used when he had sent me reports about her. Her mother would have been proud.

“They’re my friends!” Luke darts nimbly along the edge of his X-wing to fiddle with the control panel in the cockpit. His orange flight suit looks garish amid the greens and browns of the swamp, a smudge of flame in the gloom. From his perch atop the ship, R2-D2 whistles his assent. Ever the instigator. “I’ve got to help them.”

“You must not go!” Yoda replies. He’s huddled on the ground beneath the nose of the X-wing, and though I have only ever known a stooped, slow-moving Yoda, somehow he seems even shakier on his feet than the last time I was here. He’s leaning heavily on his gnarled cane, as it sinks into the mud, his posture the curled crook of a being who has become too accustomed to living in darkness.

“But Han and Leia will die if I don’t!” Luke replies ferociously, dropping off the ladder of his starfighter. His boots squelch in a patch of oily ground, and a family of swamp slugs wriggle up from the soil and scatter as fast as slugs can hope to.

Since no one is pointing out the obvious flaw in that logic, I feel the need to finally intervene. “You don’t know that,” I say drily.

Luke doesn’t look surprised as he turns to me—this isn’t the first time I’ve had to make an appearance here to facilitate a group therapy session with him and Yoda. His hair has gotten longer since last I saw him, and it falls over the scars that have rearranged one side of his face since the wampa attack. I had hoped that death and time and oneness with the Force might take the edge off the strangeness of seeing Anakin’s eyes in his son’s face, but now, as they blaze with the same determination I saw so many times in life, it overwhelms me. I had spent years and years in that tiny sand cell on Tatooine, sweating and perpetually dehydrated and with nothing to do but relive everything I could have done differently and then slowly let each one go, trying to make peace with losing Anakin. But the shades of him in his son’s face catapult me back in time, and all the years I spent by Anakin’s side—fighting and teaching and laughing and arguing and nearly dying and saving each other over and over again—spill out across my mind. His stupid jokes. His bad posture. The way he never folded his tunics and forgot to put on socks. The wonder in his eyes the first time he saw the rain. His sideways smile, refusal to comb his hair or wake up on time, the way he picked the vegetables out of his meals, his aggravating habit of losing his lightsaber and staying up too late and the flush that crept up his neck when he was worked up, his mood betrayed by the high color in his cheeks.

And now here is his son looking at me with those same flushed cheeks, caring too much about everything, and both my life and death would be so much easier if the Skywalkers didn’t care so damn much.

How different this galaxy would be if the Skywalkers didn’t care so much.

It isn’t about Anakin anymore, I remind myself, struggling to return to the present moment. It’s about Luke, and not letting him make the same mistakes his father and I did. Why even in death must I chide myself to focus on now and here, like I’m a Padawan struggling to sit still for an entire meditation session, rather than losing myself in memories of Anakin?

“Even Yoda cannot see their fate,” I say.

“But I can help them!” Luke protests. “I feel the Force!”

“But you cannot control it.”

In his early days of training, Anakin had always been so tentative in speaking about the Force, like it was a word in a foreign language whose meaning he still wasn’t entirely sure of. With Luke, there’s no hesitation. Even though the concept was only introduced to him a few years earlier by a stranger he had previously believed to be a hermit gone half mad from sun exposure. Now, when he needs a reason to go, the Force is telling him exactly what to do, like it’s a guidebook I’d been recommending to him for years but he’s pretending he found all on his own. That’s not how the Force works, I think, and resist the urge to rub my temples, a habit Anakin had always teased me about.

You’re doing that thing again.

What thing?

The Anakin’s-making-me-crazy thing. I can see him, twelve years old and sitting across from me in the cockpit of a ship, mimicking the gesture with a crooked smile, the picture of youth in rebellion, while I wondered if other Padawans got as much of a kick out of seeing their Masters get worked up as he did. Surely I had never annoyed Qui-Gon this much.

Luke turns away, shoving a hand through his hair. I look to Yoda with a silent plea to back me up, but he seems to have taken my arrival as an invitation to move into the backseat of this teaching moment. He’s staring absently at Luke’s X-wing, his eyes glassy. I sigh. It’s hard to blame him. Nine hundred years is too long. It’s enough time to see all the ways this galaxy is rotten, and Yoda has had to witness more than his share.

“This is a dangerous time for you,” I say to Luke. “When you will be tempted by the dark side of the Force.”

Yoda suddenly seems to remember that he’s the only living authority figure here, and he pipes up, “Yes, yes. To Obi-Wan you listen. The cave! Remember your failure at the cave!”

I don’t know what the cave refers to, but I don’t ask. I don’t need another reason to doubt Luke. I had always doubted Anakin, and he had felt that wobble in our foundation from the start. Add it to the list of mistakes I was trying not to make again.

“But I’ve learned so much since then!” Luke protests, and I resist the urge to snort. As though carrying Yoda on your shoulders and eating his terrible cooking for a few weeks makes you a Jedi. I had to do that for years before they let me hold a real lightsaber, and even then, they kept the safety on. “Master Yoda, I promise to return and finish what I’ve begun. You have my word.”

Why did I come? I lost this fight before it even began. Anakin never learned how to back down from an argument, even if he had been definitively proved wrong. Why did I think Luke should be any different? And, on that subject, why couldn’t Luke have taken after his mother? Better yet, why couldn’t Padmé have been the Chosen One and Anakin a boy king on Naboo? That probably would have worked out better for the galaxy in the end. Padmé had the work ethic and focus that would have made her an excellent fulfillment of an age-old prophecy, not to mention she had likely never slept through a wake-up call. And then Anakin could have indulged in a fondness for strong drinks and the types of liaisons that the Jedi Order had overshot on repressing.

You can’t keep a promise if you’re dead, Luke, I want to say. And you’ll be dead if you go because it is clear to everyone here but you that this is a trap, which I can’t say because you’re your father’s stubborn son, and it will only make you want to argue more and, why is mentorship still so kriffing hard?

The Skywalkers don’t listen. Every argument I ever had with Anakin, it felt like he was fighting with a version of me in his head rather than actually confronting the things I was saying, and, in turn, I was yelling at a wall. The Skywalkers could level planets with their obstinancy. Though Padmé was like that, too. I suppose this boy was doomed from the start, a stubborn streak in him running deep and true as the kyber heart of a star.

Instead, I say, “It is you and your abilities the Emperor wants,” which is as close to the truth as I can creep without telling him who passed those abilities on to him. “That is why your friends are made to suffer.”

“And that is why I have to go,” Luke replies.

I blink several times, waiting for him to realize how little sense that argument makes.

He doesn’t.

They never do.

Luke turns back to his X-wing, swinging the door to the cargo bay shut, and frustration wells inside me. It’s a struggle to tamp it down. I am still a Jedi. I am still in control of myself, and my feelings, and my heart.

But I’d never had a hold on my own heart when it came to Anakin. That was part of his undoing.

“Luke,” I call as he mounts the ladder leading to the cockpit of his X-wing. Desperation splits my voice. How is it I have dealt with this family for generations and still haven’t figured out how to get through to them? “I don’t want to lose you to the Emperor the way I lost…” I fumble. What I want to say is Anakin. What I want to say is my best friend. What I want to say is your father. The way we both lost him, I want to say. To a needless war. To a wild heart. To a doomed prophecy. Instead, I finish, “Vader.”

Luke turns back to me, and there it is again, that wild glint in his eyes. There is Anakin. “You won’t.”

“Stopped they must be.” Yoda is starting to sound frustrated, which is a testament to just how infuriating Luke is. Even Anakin rarely cracked Master Yoda—the only time I can remember is the incident with Tru Veld and the fireworks in the reflecting pond. “On this all depends. Only a fully trained Jedi Knight with the Force as his ally will conquer Vader and his Emperor. If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.”

I glance down at Yoda, resisting the urge to argue. A divided front won’t do us any good in persuading Luke to listen, but I want to point out that Anakin’s path was never easy. He’d been plopped at the bottom of an impossible mountain the day Qui-Gon brought him to Coruscant and asked him to climb it in the dark with his boots laced together. Yoda and the Council tried to force him into a mold he would never fit, and you can only be pushed and pulled and re-formed so much before you break. Anakin had never asked for special treatment—almost never—maybe sometimes—usually when there was food involved—but the Council had refused to take their Chosen One as he was rather than try to make him into the Jedi that fit their prophecy. You never gave Anakin an easy path, I want to snap at him, you gave him obstacles no one else had to overcome. Any Jedi would have fallen.

I don’t know why I am defending Anakin—even in my own head—especially after he killed me. Old habits.

Luke looks between us, his eyes suddenly pleading. He wants to go but, more than that, he wants us to tell him he’s right. He’s doing the right thing. The Skywalkers always want to do the right thing. It’s what gets them every time.

All I say is, “Patience.”

“And sacrifice Han and Leia?” Luke shoots back.

“If you honor what they fight for,” Yoda replies. “Yes!”

Luke’s face sets, and then he turns away from us. His hand is strangling the struts of the ladder leading up to the cockpit of his X-wing.

“If you choose to face Vader,” I say, “you will do it alone. I cannot interfere.”

I say it mostly in the hope it will scare him into staying. He’s never truly fought alone before. He’s never been alone before. He hardly knows Han and Leia—doesn’t yet know who Leia is to him—and already his heart has put down deep roots. Just like his father. With Anakin, it was his mother, then Qui-Gon and me and Ahsoka and Padmé, childhood abandonment resulting in him clinging with white knuckles to whoever was nearest him. It had been him and Shmi against the galaxy for so long, then she was taken from him. Then he had Qui-Gon and me, the only familiar stars in the constellation of his new life.

And then just me.

The first year he was my Padawan, I would sometimes wake in the night and find him asleep on the floor next to my bed, afraid he’d wake and find me gone, too.

What kind of choice had that been for him, Qui-Gon? Leave your mother for a prophecy you’ve never heard of, to join an Order of legendary peacekeepers who arrive on your planet only to tell you that they aren’t there to free you from the barbaric system you’re part of? That the legendary justice of the Jedi is for others. There is no justice on Tatooine. He was the Chosen One without any choices of his own.

When, I think, will this inner peace I was promised in death finally show up?

Luke presses his forehead against the ladder, and I think for a moment I’ve scared him enough that he’ll stay. But then he says quietly, “I understand.” He turns back to us for just a moment, and there he is again, the dumb, beautiful son of my dumb, beautiful friend who could never be talked out of anything he set his mind to. Those last days on Coruscant rise in my mind, the memories I have sieved over and over again, searching for what I could have done to stop it all, and knowing the answer didn’t lie in those final hours together. It was years in the making.

“Artoo,” Luke calls as he mounts the ladder. “Fire up the converters.”

R2 whistles a jaunty reply. I shoot him a look that says, Don’t you dare fire up those converters. I’m not sure if the old droid can see me, but he gives another chirp that I swear means Kriff off!

“Luke,” I call, one last attempt, but when he turns back to me, the words die in my throat. Everything I want to say to him suddenly feels hollow and untrue. The language of the Jedi that I had spouted for years, first to Anakin, now to his son. Where has it ever led me but down volcanic embankments and barren dunes? For every way the Council had broken Anakin down, I had stood by and let them. I had been their arbiter of justice, repeating the language they had given me.

Why didn’t I fight for you? I think.

So instead, I offer the only advice I have. “Don’t give in to hate. That leads to the dark side.”

“Strong is Vader,” Yoda adds. “Mind what you have learned. Save you it can.”

Luke tugs the strap of his helmet into place. “I will,” he says. “And I’ll return. I promise.”

If only those were the sort of promises we could keep, I think. The cockpit of the X-wing closes with a pneumatic hiss, and the swamp debris beneath it is blown aside as the engines fire. The starfighter lifts off, casting Yoda and me into darkness. The engines flare, and their red light bathes us.

“Told you, I did,” Yoda murmurs, his face to the sky, and I wonder if he resents ghosts like me arriving without warning, or if the ghosts are what he lives for.

“Reckless is he. Now matters are worse.”

“That boy is our last hope,” I say, and in my voice I hear Mace Windu. I hear Qui-Gon. I hear Yoda. I hear every Jedi before me who brought us here, dead and desperate and up to our knees in a swamp.

But Yoda shakes his head. “No. There is another.”

And it’s a long, quiet moment between us before I remind myself it isn’t Anakin. He’s not here anymore. And neither am I.