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Onions grow from inside out, their newest scales hidden deep below the surface. Unlike his peers, Obi-Wan never began to ripen into adulthood; his was a gradual change in shape, a shift from ovoid initiate to spherical knight, so slowly that few recognized the change at all. Those who did not know better underestimated him, thinking his near-unchanging surface was a reflection of a near-unchanging self. Those who did feared him, from the moment he came to the temple.
He could be hiding anything at all under that blank, auburn skin.
Deep inside Obi-Wan’s heart, rot began to grow. The first black spots came courtesy of Xanatos, anger and fear and helplessness. For a time, his body fought against them. There was a period of his apprenticeship where he carried a constant, low-grade fever and a twist of nausea in his belly.
Standing over what was left of Maul, smelling that same, so-familiar rot, Obi-Wan lets anger and grief curl together in his heart. Buried beneath his skin, a scale began to grow, black as fungus.
Obi-Wan trains Anakin as a Jedi. Perhaps it doesn’t occur to him to do otherwise; for all that the rot is eating him from the inside out, the skin of a Jedi is part of him, too. Or perhaps he looks at his padawan, a tiny cucumber, so young that the yellow petals of his flower still cap his head, and cannot bring himself to drag the boy into the dark.
When Obi-Wan receives an invitation from now-Chancellor Palpatine to visit the Senate Dome, so polite, so plausibly deniable, he brings his padawan. While Palpatine talks to Anakin, ignoring Obi-Wan completely, the smell of rot grows. Obi-Wan fakes an urgent comm message and drags Anakin back to the temple, despite his protests. He watches, listens, keeps Anakin close, hoping desperately that the rot has not yet set in.
Obi-Wan’s body no longer fights against the dark; his sickness is only a distant memory.
He doesn’t go to Palpatine for years, but Palpatine is patient. There is a decade, perhaps more, before his plans come to fruition. At first Obi-Wan makes excuses—politics, information, help with missions. Later, he does not. Tea with the Chancellor is simply part of his schedule, early morning on Centaxday, whenever the two of them are on Coruscant. Anakin does not come. Palpatine, who finally smelled the rot growing in Obi-Wan’s core, does not ask for him.
Obi-Wan thinks that Anakin and Padme would make a cute couple. This has nothing to do with the rot within him, and everything to do with the fact that he trusts his padawan, beyond a doubt, to have his priorities in the right order. Anakin has love in his heart and wisdom that the council will one day recognize, and Obi-Wan gives the marriage his tacit blessing.
Anakin is still impulsive, still reckless, still, perhaps, too violent, but he is not vengeful. His ear has not been filled with the idea that he knows best, that his life matters above others. He holds his mother, feels the wrinkles of her face, watches her die, and kills only those who would get in his way.
Trapped on Geonosis, Obi-Wan hangs inside a cloud of Dooku’s decay. Dooku taunts him with the ‘revelation’ of corruption in the Senate, and Obi-Wan, still wearing the skin of the perfect Jedi, does not laugh.
Obi-Wan does not kill Dooku just yet, though he knows that he could, if he just drew upon the darkness inside him. Dooku’s words and Dooku’s war are spreading rot in the Order and the Senate, and somewhere along the line Obi-Wan decided that this is what he wants. He is rotten, and no one sees it. Now the rot grows, spreads, speckles the skin of padawans and masters alike. Ironically, Obi-Wan is lauded for being untouched, even as, deep within his body, his core grows darker with each passing day.
When the corruption reaches its peak, Obi-Wan boards the Invisible Hand to finish the job. It is no more dramatic than it needs to be—there is no one to perform for but from Palpatine and Dooku himself. Anakin lies unconscious on the floor, unable to observe as Obi-Wan kills his second Sith. Then he kills his third, because without Dooku he has no use for Palpatine’s games.
Obi-Wan Kenobi, perfect Jedi, handpicks two dozen younglings and unmatched padawans, the ones touched by rot who seem to suffer least, who hold anger and pain and grief in their cores. He puts them on a slow ship to Mustafar, his new acolytes, and issues Order 66 himself. He marches through the temple with the rot-speckled 212th, and even now his facade does not crack.
He raised Anakin as a good Jedi, one of the best. Obi-Wan dances with him on Mustafar, and his light burns like the lava around them.
The bites of Anakin’s lightsaber hurt, but not as much as the look on his face as first one layer, then another, of Obi-Wan’s skin peels away. To Obi-Wan the rot is an old friend. Reflected in Anakin’s eyes, Obi-Wan sees just how foul he’s become, and for a moment the old sickness twists his gut. He is stained, darker than Xanatos or Maul or Dooku. Perhaps Sidious, too, for all that the Sith had let his darkness grow unchecked for longer.
Anakin is not a child any longer. The yellow cap of his flower long ago fell away, his skin is green and taut and healthy, untouched by the rot that had infected most of the Order. Obi-Wan looks up at him, kneeling, waiting for Anakin’s saber to peel away another layer of his flesh, or to strike and end the pain, and says “You were my brother, Anakin. I loved you.”
For all that he holds love in his heart, Anakin learned long ago that his is not the only love that matters. Obi-Wan reads the words “I love you too” on Anakin’s lips before his ties to life are severed.
In a back room of the mining station, scared and confused and alone, Anakin finds the children. Some are alliums, like Obi-Wan is—was—and for a moment, memories of his master’s rotting core flash before Anakin’s eyes. But Anakin will not blame them for Obi-Wan’s actions, and he cannot leave them, just hope that whatever rot has touched them will recede, over time.
He brings their rot back to his home, his family, his fragile, struggling attempt to rebuild the Republic. He even saves some of them.