The lava storm churned. Smoke skated across the sky, and the heat came in pulses like a living thing.
Padmé's skiff cut through it and settled on blackened durasteel. Inside, she stayed very still—hands white on the controls, breath too shallow, heart too loud. He was there on the platform, a shape against the fire: cloak tight, shoulders squared, standing like a verdict.
It didn't look like Anakin.
She closed her eyes. One breath. One more. She reached for the ramp controls—
—and felt movement behind her.
Obi-Wan had already slipped from the shadows.
He did not ask. He did not wait.
The ramp hissed. Light and heat flooded in, turning the interior into a furnace. Steam curled and vanished. Padmé flinched and lifted a hand against the glare as the ship opened itself to the red world.
By the time she found the words to stop him, Obi-Wan was gone, walking down the ramp with the steady weight of a man who had already grieved.
Anakin turned at the sound.
He had expected softness. A hand on his cheek, a voice that gentled the storm. Seeing Obi-Wan instead tightened his jaw until it trembled.
"You." It was almost a breath, almost a snarl.
Obi-Wan didn't draw. Not yet. "I'm here to talk, Anakin."
"Then you shouldn't have come."
Wind drove heat sideways. The glow from the lava split Anakin's face into fire and shadow.
"This ends," Obi-Wan said, voice low. "Now."
"It ended the moment the Jedi chose blindness," Anakin answered. His hand settled on his hilt. "You know why you're here. To drag me back. To make me kneel again."
"I came to see if there's still a way back."
"There isn't." Anakin stepped closer, the air around him tightening with danger. "I did what the Jedi never had the courage to do."
"What did you do?" Obi-Wan asked, though he knew.
Anakin's eyes flickered, bright and fevered. "I purged corruption. I ended weakness. I broke an order that let the galaxy burn while it quoted doctrine." His voice thinned. "I killed them. Masters. Knights." His throat worked. "Younglings."
Obi-Wan closed his eyes for the briefest instant. When they opened again they were wet and steady. "You can still stop."
"I am stopping it," Anakin shot back. "The wars. The rot. The slavery you told me to ignore. I will build something that doesn't look away while mothers die." For a heartbeat, something unspoken crossed his face—an unacknowledged vow in a distant palace, a future he had split in two. He shoved it down hard. "Come with me, Master. Or get out of the way."
"I won't join a tyrant." Obi-Wan's hand hovered near his hilt. "And I won't let you become one."
"You already let me become this," Anakin said, softer, deadlier. "You taught me restraint while everything I loved bled for it."
A whisper cut the heat.
"Then what do you want?"
Padmé stood in the light of the ramp, one hand bracing the swell of her belly. Fear lived in her eyes alongside the love that had never learned to leave.
"We were family," she said. "All of us. Don't you remember?"
Neither man looked at her.
"Anakin," Obi-Wan tried again, "you don't have to—"
There was no more talking.
Anakin moved. The Force screamed.
His saber snapped to life in a blaze of blue. The strike for Obi-Wan's throat was full and honest—no feint, no warning. Obi-Wan's blade answered with its own blue, the collision shrieking across metal and air. Sparking plasma spit in all directions. The deck bucked.
"Please—stop!" Padmé cried from the ramp. "Both of you!"
They didn't hear her.
Anakin advanced in a storm of lines: high, low, diagonal, each blow cut to break structure and will. Obi-Wan gave ground in controlled inches, parries stacked millimeter-tight, feet whispering across scorched steel. Anakin's style—Djem So made brutal by conviction—hammered forward. Obi-Wan's Soresu compressed, then opened, redirecting just enough, never more.
"You're not this," Obi-Wan called between impacts. "You're still the boy I raised—"
"I'm what you refused to become," Anakin snarled, driving him down with a two-handed overhead that forced Obi-Wan to a knee. "I'm ending the war you kept talking about."
"You started a slaughter," Obi-Wan said, rising on a pivot, blade flashing to turn aside a cut at his ribs. "Children, Anakin!"
"I had no choice!" The admission ripped out of him, raw and wild. "If I hesitated, everything would be lost. I've gone too far to crawl back now."
"Then don't crawl," Obi-Wan said. "Just stop."
Anakin's answer was a cut that could have split a star.
Padmé stumbled closer, hands out, voice breaking. "Anakin, please! This isn't who you are. Don't make me watch you kill each other—"
Sparks spat as sabers crossed inches from her. She flinched back, then pressed forward again, desperate and brave in a way that hurt to look at.
Anakin's footwork chewed the deck. Obi-Wan's robe snapped in the crosswind as he slid off the line, turned the blade, and changed levels. His heel flicked low for Anakin's knee—fast, disciplined, meant to break rhythm, not bone.
Anakin skipped back—too quick.
The kick flowed through into a roundhouse by pure momentum and form.
Padmé stepped in at the same instant.
There was no time.
Obi-Wan's boot struck her midsection.
No scream—just a hard, hollow sound, air crushed from lungs. Her body lifted, weightless for an instant, then snapped back. She hit the landing strut with a crack that echoed wrong in the heat. She folded and dropped to the deck. Her head rolled to the side. A single thread of blood drew a line at her hairline and went still.
Everything stopped.
Even the volcano seemed to hush.
Obi-Wan's leg landed. His arm fell. His saber hissed out of existence as if embarrassed to be there. "Padmé," he said, so soft the word could have been a thought.
Anakin didn't move.
His saber drifted toward the floor, humming, forgotten. He stared at her, not breathing, not blinking. Something inside him cinched shut until there was no air, no room, no light. Heat painted his face; no warmth reached it.
A tremor started in his hand and climbed through him. His teeth ground. His knuckles blanched around the hilt.
Obi-Wan turned toward him, horror dawning, apology already on his tongue. "Anakin, I—"
The sound that tore from Anakin wasn't language. It was a soul tearing loose.
His saber came up as if the Force itself dragged it.
"You—"
He launched.
The blade came in low and level—blue and brutal—forcing Obi‑Wan to meet it on reflex alone. Twin sabers crashed, blue on blue, the contact flaring to white and kicking both men apart. Anakin was already there again, closing the distance with no restraint, no measure, only hurt given shape.
His cuts were no longer precise; they were punishments. The Force roared with him, coiling around each motion until every swing landed like a verdict. The deck shuddered. Sparks shrieked.
Obi‑Wan fell into defense—not control, not now. Survival. His mind snagged on a single image: Padmé's body thrown, the dull sound of impact, the way she didn't move after.
I kicked her.
The thought kept looping, a fracture he couldn't step across.
"I didn't mean to," he managed, catching a high slash that still drove him two steps back. "Anakin—!"
Anakin didn't hear him, or chose not to. Every blow said what his voice could not: You took her from me. You always take everything.
A two‑handed overhead slammed down and missed Obi‑Wan's skull by a whisper, shearing a chunk from the platform. Ash lifted in a hiss. Behind them the skiff groaned, the landing strut buckled and scorched where Padmé lay unmoving.
The duel spilled into the refinery.
They ripped through a durasteel door without using the controls, cables tearing from the ceiling like nerves. Errant sparks found fuel; flames ran along conduits in skipping blue tongues. Warning klaxons overlaid the war of their sabers, a mechanical panic that felt small beside the storm of will and hatred tearing the place apart.
This wasn't about victory anymore.
Anakin didn't want to win.
He wanted to erase.
And Obi‑Wan? He didn't want to fight—but nothing else remained. Not after what he had done. Not after what Anakin had become. Not with Padmé broken between them.
Heat rose to a howl. Each clash collapsed air into shockwaves that dented panels outward. Chairs and consoles ripped free and cartwheeled like shrapnel. Doors warped off their tracks under stray bursts of telekinetic pressure. Pipes burst in their wake; jets of steam writhed and screamed.
They moved too fast to see, presence announced by strobing blades and the ruin they left behind. Sparks trailed their boots. Where they passed, walls cracked and catwalks quivered, every joint in the refinery suddenly too mortal for the gods fighting through it.
Anakin's onslaught was relentless. Not just fast—violent. He altered grips mid‑strike, reversed lines in the same breath, hammering vertical cuts that would have split blast doors. Each motion braided mastery and madness until they were indistinguishable.
Obi‑Wan met him with economy sharpened to a knife edge. He didn't retreat; he reframed. Blocks arrived at the last possible instant, blade angles shaved to degrees, every deflection buying the exact inch he needed to keep breathing. Still, the weight of Anakin's rage bled through each impact, numbing his forearms, rattling bone. His boots skidded; the metal screamed.
They didn't fight like men anymore.
They fought like the Force had put on bodies and decided to settle a grudge.
A control‑room door tore free and pinwheeled into consoles as they crashed through. Holoscreens shattered in static. Machinery meant to drink rivers of lava burst into flame under the electromagnetic tantrum of colliding plasma.
Anakin drove Obi‑Wan out onto the refinery spine—a skeletal bridge thrown across a chasm of molten metal. The river thundered below, light pulsing up from the depths. The bridge groaned but held.
"You made me this!" Anakin bellowed, a hammer‑blow landing with the words and shivering the girders.
Obi‑Wan caught it an inch from his face. The impact rattled his jaw. "No one made you, Anakin. You chose this."
"I chose her!" Left‑right‑left, battering at Obi‑Wan's guard. "I chose peace! Justice! To end the suffering you cowards ignored!"
"You slaughtered children!"
"I HAD TO!" It erupted like a venting faultline. "One moment of weakness and everything burns anyway. I had to do it. You never understood."
Their blades locked. Blue crossed blue; the contact burned white. The bridge trembled, sagging under energy that had no business being held in metal. Their foreheads nearly touched. Sweat sheeted, flashed to vapor. Neither blinked. Neither gave ground.
They weren't trying to kill each other.
They were trying to break each other.
"I do understand," Obi‑Wan said, voice torn open. "I failed you. I should have seen it. I should have helped when you started to fall."
Something flickered behind Anakin's eyes—grief, recognition, a boy in a temple who wanted to be good. It lasted a heartbeat.
Then his voice came back low and venomous. "You watched me drown."
The bridge answered for Obi‑Wan. Supports shrieked; metal buckled.
It collapsed.
Both men launched, bodies cutting arcs through ash. For a breath they hung there, robes snapping, heat turning the world to a wavering mirage.
They landed on a floating ore slab drifting the lava—an island on a river of fire sliding toward a roaring fall. The platform tilted, groaning. Heat boiled up in waves.
They met again without grace, without form. Just fury.
Obi‑Wan slid inside Anakin's line on a desperate timing cut. His blade dragged across Anakin's side.
Sizzle. A wet hiss.
Anakin screamed.
He dipped, grabbed at the wound, breath shredding—then gathered his hate around the pain and focused. His free hand snapped out.
The Force hit like a collapsed wall.
Obi‑Wan left the platform, slammed backward. Metal flexed under the pressure wave like water. He tumbled through steam and ash, struck rock hard enough to crack it. The world went double. Blood slicked his temple. Ribs spat pain at every breath.
Across the river, Anakin's slab tipped further, nose sliding toward the lavafall's lip. He dropped to a knee, swaying, robes torn and scorched, skin mottled with heat and soot. He pushed himself up again because there was no version of him that didn't rise.
"Anakin!" Obi‑Wan shouted across the churning light.
Anakin's head lifted. Their eyes met. For the first time since the ramp lowered, he looked almost human again—sweat in rivulets, breath shaking, fury leaking out of him like air from a pierced lung.
"I hate you," he said—not shouted. The words fractured as they left his mouth.
Obi‑Wan didn't move. His saber hung limp. "I loved you," he said, and the words were true enough to hurt the air. "You were my brother."
Anakin's face twisted. The darkness behind his eyes faltered. His shoulders sagged.
"I didn't mean to kick her…" Obi‑Wan's voice broke on the confession. "Padmé—I didn't—"
For the first time, Anakin looked past him. Back toward the ship. His hand lifted—not to crush or tear, but like a man reaching for a hand he couldn't hold anymore. A memory broke the surface—white stone corridors, a laughing crown, two lives he'd tried to fit inside one heart—and sank again.
The platform tipped.
It slid over the brink and vanished in a roar of fire.
Anakin fell.
His scream rose with the molten wind and was swallowed by it.
Obi‑Wan's body went cold despite the furnace. He knelt because his knees stopped listening. The cliff face pulsed red and gold; his heart did not.
He didn't know how long he stayed there. Long enough to feel something finish breaking.
"Padmé."
The name pulled him back.
He staggered up and ran. Across a sundered span, over a gap that almost took him, through smoke that clawed his throat. Alarms bled into one long tone; the refinery shed pieces of itself around him.
The landing pad came up under his feet. He dropped beside her.
She was where he'd left her. Still. Soot‑streaked. A thread of dried blood at her hairline. Lips drained of color. Eyes closed like she'd chosen not to see any of this.
"Padmé," he whispered. His hands shook as he brushed damp hair from her cheek. "Please…"
Two fingers found her neck.
A pulse.
Faint.
There.
He folded his forehead to hers and let a single breath steady itself between them. In the Force, the smallest flicker—fragile, insistent, new—answered him from within her like the echo of a bell. He closed his eyes.
"I'll get you out," he murmured. "I swear it."
He gathered her with a reverence he had never given a weapon, stood with a sound his ribs didn't forgive, and turned toward the ship.
Behind him, Mustafar raged and tore itself apart.
He didn't look back.
He didn't have to.
The shadow of what he'd lost would follow him for the rest of his life.