Obi-Wan gets reincarnated into AtLA
There were few things worse, to Obi-Wan, than leaving something half-done. Thankfully, for Jedi, “unfinished business” was hardly a concern; after death they still had an eternity to keep working for the good of the galaxy.
When Vader’s saber cut through him, Obi-Wan was not afraid.
But then he opened his eyes and found himself in a pile of baby lemurs and began to get worried.
I have a bad feeling about this...
-
Obi-Wan spent the majority of his second childhood--baby lemurhood?--worrying about Luke.
He hadn’t been able to bring himself to take Luke on as a padawan learner. He’d wanted to give the galaxy’s last hope a long and peaceful childhood, and thankfully Luke had gotten it. He was a young adult by the time the empire came, still naive and wide-eyed when his father had lost a limb and gotten married at the same age.
Seeing Luke like that, so happy with the family his grandmother had been bought by, sometimes made Obi-Wan shamefully wish they’d left Vader on Tatooine the first time they met him. It was selfish and it was cruel, but then again, so was Vader.
Even so, Luke had gotten next to no training from him. He’d anticipated being around to guide the boy, even after death. He wanted, more than anything, to atone for his mistakes with the father by teaching the son to be better. That would not happen now.
He allowed himself to wallow until he was large enough, relatively speaking, to fend for himself. He hadn’t relished being carried about by a protective mother lemur and squashed by his... siblings, he supposed he should call them, and though he was grateful he wasn’t eager to adopt the typical lemur lifestyle.
Now that he could come and go as he wished, Obi-Wan set out to explore this new planet. His new wings quickly became essential, as his surroundings were built as though for an avian race, or at least one that could fly. He quickly came to the conclusion that it must have been a temple, though one long abandoned.
And then he found the first body, bones stripped bare but otherwise undisturbed, and reconsidered.
He thinks that, if Sidious had left the Jedi temple in ruins rather than making it into his palace, it might have become something like this.
The irony did not escape him.
-
Obi-Wan stayed in the ruins of another monastic order that had been eradicated, because he didn’t know where else to go.
The Force felt strange here, as if it had taken a different color or a different shape, but its embrace was as familiar and as comforting as ever, its commands just as clear. And it told him that he must stay there.
Obi-Wan set about learning about this lost culture, as he hoped Luke would with his own. He found murals and statues and even a moldering scroll or two. The sect here seemed to have made a martial art out of Force use itself, rather than relying on lightsabers. They could move things without touching them, float, even fly with the assistance of gliders. Obi-Wan tried as many of the techniques as he could, with allowances for his inconvenient size and physiology, and some of them worked well enough. Even here, on a far-flung planet he’d never heard of, the Force still provided.
One day, children’s voices shattered the silence, and for a moment Obi-Wan feared that he was hearing the echoes of the massacre they had endured, just as he had when he saw the footage of his former padawan slaughtering the younglings. But no--these were present and excited, and when he crept up on them to watch, only one of them looked to be a survivor of the massacre--the other two had hair.
After a bit of a mishap with the older boy chasing him around the ruins in an attempt to eat him, which had devolved into hysterical cries about “air bending monkeys” after Obi-Wan had sent his club flying with the Force, the younger boy picked him up and laughingly explained that he was a flying lemur and “don’t be silly, Sokka, lemurs can’t airbend!”
Was that what they called the Force here?
Well. Obi-Wan supposed he could keep that ability under wraps, for now. He would have also been a bit perturbed to see a tooka-sized animal using the Force like a Jedi master, especially when he was young.
And then the boy found the body of his old master, which looked far too old for that to make sense to Obi-Wan, and flew into a rage unlike anything Obi-Wan had seen before, even when training the Chosen One himself.
He hopped on the girl’s shoulders when she tried to comfort him, even so, and projected kindness and safety and understanding to the child until he sank back down to the ground. The boy fell into her arms, and Obi-Wan hopped into his lap and let him hug him as he cried.
The girl, in her kindness and her maturity, almost reminded him of Padme as a child queen--but there was old hurt and rage there, lingering under the surface, that felt like Anakin had whenever he spoke of his mother.
But the boy... despite clearly being another Chosen One, in some capacity, he reminded him of Luke. His innocence, his grief, his idealism--all brought to mind the boy he’d left behind too soon.
And maybe, Obi-Wan thought, as he heard the boy speak of being the last of his order, felt his loss and his guilt and his anguish in the Force as if it was his own, he reminds me a little of myself, too.