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It is, perhaps, the most normal thing Obi-Wan finds himself doing now that he's in Darrow. It's Sunday evening, he's dressed in clothes more fitting of a Darrow resident -- the denim trousers he's come to quite like and a plain sweatshirt under his long robe -- and he's wandering the aisles of a grocery store, one of the baskets from the front hooked over his arm as he fills it with food.

For so long they had been on the front lines of a war. Before that, the temple on Coruscant had supplied him with everything he would need, or those housing him and Qui-Gon if they had gone on a mission. Obi-Wan has never really needed to cook for himself, but he's a smart man, resourceful, and he's learned a fair bit in his time here.

That doesn't mean he doesn't also want a frozen pizza every now and again.

What he's not expecting is to turn down another aisle, reading the back of the frozen pizza box, and find himself standing mere feet from Anakin's grandson. He looks up when he senses him, then smiles and puts the pizza box in the basket.

"Ben," he says in greeting. "How are you?"

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If not for the robes, he might have been any other man in the grocery store, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and carrying a box of frozen pizza. But the presence of the robe only made the moment stranger, incongruous with the legacy of the great Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Ben, equally far from his own reputation, was a bit pale under the florescent lights, wearing all black and carrying a basket of shortbread cookies and feminine products, among other things.

"Master Kenobi," he said wryly. "I'm... alright, I suppose." It still struck him as a strange question. Before his arrival in Darrow, it wasn't something he'd been asked, or even considered asking of anyone else, in a very long time.

"You seem surprised to be asked," Obi-Wan says, looking amused beneath his mustache. "And, please, call me Obi-Wan. Or Ben, I suppose, if you prefer."

The last bit is a joke, really. He doesn't expect anyone to call him Ben, least of all someone who has been named for the alias he had used when he was working undercover and the time he apparently spent on Tatooine.

"I'm still not quite used to this," he admits, hefting his basket. "There wasn't much room for home cooking in the past three years."

Ben arched a brow.

"I'd rather not," he said, faintly amused by the idea. He wasn't sure he'd ever fully get used to knowing this man— his namesake who'd died before he was even born.

"I've never been very good at it. I have memories of cooking with my mother, now and then, but I'm not sure she as very good at it, either."

For most of his life, Leia had been busy with far more important things, something he'd both resented and admired.

"I suppose we all had other things that took most of our focus," Obi-Wan says, smiling ruefully down at his frozen pizza. "I can just imagine Master Yoda seeing me with this. He would either scold me or expect me to share, I'm not entirely sure which."

He doesn't often speak of those left behind or the way the world seemed when he ended up in Darrow. Most of the Jedi were dead, killed at the hands of the men he had spent the previous three years working with, trusting with his life. He knows in his heart he's meant to be able to let go of it all, leave it behind, but there is an ache there that won't leave.

"Are you nearly done?" he asks Ben, rather than allowing his mind to follow that path. "We can keep one another company on the way home if you like."

Lips curling into a smirk, Ben admitted, "It's difficult to imagine him in the flesh. I've only heard stories."

Giving his basket a quick once-over, he nodded, gesturing towards the check out.

"My uncle wasn't always forthcoming with details."

"Really?" Obi-Wan asks curiously as they move toward the checkout. "It seems strange. How else is one meant to pass along the stories and the teachings, if that was what he so desired?"

He can't imagine trying to teach anyone without speaking of Master Yoda or Qui-Gon Jinn. Even his friends, those he had learned alongside rather than at their knee, would feature in his stories. Anakin had known of Shaak Ti and Kit Fisto long before he'd ever met them, just as he had know of Rael Averross.

"Master Yoda was very funny," he says, smiling as he recalls. "And terribly stern, in turns. You could never be sure which version you might get."

"It might've been that he wasn't forthcoming with the details I wanted," Ben admitted, lips pressed into a thin line. Ben craved stories of his father, his mother, the adventures they'd had together and apart. He'd craved stories of Anakin, of the man he'd become, of the power he'd wielded. And then he'd craved no connection to any of them, clinging to the idea that he would not be his father's son. He'd wanted to know everything he could about Darth Vader, so that he could surpass him in every way.

Stories were the past, and the past was dead. Or, he'd wanted desperately to believe that it could be. But he couldn't kill it, couldn't bury it, no matter how hard he tried.

"He spoke more often of you than he did of his time on Dagobah."

As the cashier begins to scan Obi-Wan's items, he tries to imagine what sort of stories Luke would have told Ben. The Separatist War makes the most sense to Obi-Wan, but Luke hadn't been born until the end of it, hadn't experienced what the galaxy was like before the Republic fell.

And after, from what Obi-Wan has been told, he went into hiding to keep Luke safe. He wonders about the sort of man he'd become in doing so.

"I can't tell you much about what happened after the fall of the Republic," he says, reaching for the money he keeps in his pocket. "But if it's stories of the Separatist War you're looking for, I have plenty of those. Countless stories about the foolish things Anakin has done." He pauses, considering. "And you may be able to tell me some things, too, that I might find helpful."

"I suppose that you should know that Luke regretted taking me on as a pupil," Ben admitted, once they were out in the street, his hands occupied by grocery bags. "Last I heard, he believed that the Jedi should've died with Anakin."

Drawing in a breath, he said, "I hated hearing stories about my parents. Being defined by those who came before me."

His lips pressed into a thin smile. "Perhaps another time. But if you have any questions for me, I'll answer as best I can."

Those words -- the Jedi should have died -- they twist inside Obi-Wan, the simplest and most terrible summary of something he's been wrestling with for many months now. It feels like a physical blow in some ways, to think of anyone saying such a thing without having lived through what it was truly like to be wiped out all at once. To feel every friend, every loved one, so many thousands of souls screaming into the Force and then snuffed out, killed by the men they had trusted.

"The Jedi will never die," he answers. "There will always be those who can access the Force. You and Rey are proof enough of that. But perhaps the Order itself needed... oh, I don't know. The rules were interpreted over and over, difficult to follow for some, nearly impossible for others." Both he and Anakin are proof of that. While Obi-Wan hadn't married Satine, it's only because she had never asked. If she had said the words, he would have left the Order for her in a second.

"It needed some change, clearly. When Luke was training you, how much did he focus on keeping yourself from attachment?" he asks as they walk.

"Some," Ben said, adding, "I did enough of that on my own."

He'd closed himself off as a boy. Gradually, then with more conviction when Snoke's voice began whispering in his ear.

"How much of our story has Rey told you?"

"Some," Obi-Wan answers. "Most of what she's told me has had to do with the Chan- with Palpatine. What he tried to convince her was her birthright."

He has no patience for such ideas from men like Palpatine. Given everything he had done to Anakin, to Rey, Obi-Wan thinks his opinions on birthrights and power should be dismissed out of hand.

He also knows such things aren't so easy.

"Before Palpatine lured her to Exegol, I was there, trying to convince her of the same."

It was a bit more complicated than that, and he'd cared little for her bloodline, but their goals were ultimately the same: To see Rey on the sith throne. To see her rule the galaxy, in the name of the dark side.

"But you changed," Obi-Wan answers. He pauses, feeling Ben's presence in the Force. "She changed you?"

It isn't entirely a question, but he prefers not to make any assumptions without confirmation, even when he could reach out deeper into the Force and probably develop a bigger and clearer picture. This is Ben's story to tell if he wants, if he's willing to share. There's no reason for Obi-Wan to try to unlock more than he's allowed to know.

"She did," he answered simply, his jaw clenched tight. "Among other things."

He thought of his mother, of her light and warmth reaching out towards him, in his darkest moments. And his father's anguished face, and the forgiveness that had come so easily, even if it had only been within his own mind.

"When I was boy, around the time my mother sent me off to Skywalker's temple, I began to hear the voice of a man, who... Whom I believed saw something special in me. But it was Palpatine, all along, and I believe now that he was only using me to get to her."

Just as he had with Anakin, Obi-Wan thinks. Just as he had Ben's grandfather. There are times when Obi-Wan still considers the timelines tangled knots he's unable to pick apart, no matter how carefully he approaches them, but he also knows the picking apart of them doesn't really matter. They're all here now, all with their own experiences, their own loss and their own pain.

And no matter how tangled, he sees much of Anakin in Ben, in his experiences.

"Looking back now, knowing what I know, I can see the signs," Obi-Wan says. "Things I overlooked because I trusted him to be fair. He was an expert at manipulation and clever enough to watch and wait in order to find things he could exploit. Clever and patient."

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