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They’re tipsy and battle bruised but somehow, against all odds, alive. Some days that feels like a curse, but tonight Obi-Wan is giddy with it. He’s sharing a room on some commissioned freighter with Anakin, who’s eyes are lighter than he’s seen them in months. He needed a win—they all did. Obi-Wan sips his awful, bootleg liquor and watches him, watches the storm darkness of his eyes fade to something touched in sunshine, star glow, some cosmic body of light. And just like that, he realizes for the thousandth time that he is still, despite all attempts on the contrary, desperately in love with Anakin.
It’s a feeling buried deep inside of him. It grows quiet beneath the weight of war, perhaps, but always rearing up eventually, too bright and bleeding sunshine, star glow, doused to the point of saturation by some cosmic body of light. One day it will burn out and grow cold, die as all things in space do. But not tonight. Tonight he drinks, and traces the scar through Anakin’s brow with his eyes, and lets himself enjoy the thrum of sensation in his chest—it’s not allowed, but the war has made him selfish.
They’re reminiscing about Coruscant, about the Jedi temple, laughing until their guts ache because that’s an easier way to weep than dwelling on the men they've lost. “Do you remember,” Anakin coughs out between wheezes, his hair messy, cheeks flushed with stifled hysterics and drink. “Do you remember that time you found me in the supply closet hiding with Brena Avlar? You hit me with a stick,” he cackles, head thrown back and throat bobbing.
Obi-Wan rolls his eyes, wrist tilted so he very nearly spills his drink as he grins up at the ceiling, stomach warm and roiling. “It was a mop actually,” he says. “And ‘hiding with,’ is quite the euphemism. You had your tongue down her throat.”
Anakin coughs, makes a face. “Correction. She had her tongue down my throat, actually.”
“Logistics aside, it required mop intervention,” Obi-Wan clarifies, letting himself drift closer to Anakin where they’re sitting on the floor, shift so their knees brush ever so slightly. It won't go anywhere, it never will, it never has, he’s never even dreamed it could. But there are small things he can take without hurting anyone. Small things to keep him company on the nights Anakin leaves the temple to share Padme’s bed. He’s never told Obi-Wan thats what he’s doing, but he does not guard their Force bond as tightly as he should, and furthermore, Obi-Wan has made a habit of torturing himself where Anakin is concerned. Comparing himself to the girls he kissed in closets growing up, comforting himself with the knowledge he was nothing like them. He is so far outside Anakin’s preferences he does not have to worry about temptation, only self loathing born from inferiority, and in so many ways, that is a relief. He doesn’t think he could resist Anakin, if he ever stumbled into an opportunity where he had to. Luckily, he’s never had to test such theories, he only has to nurse his wounds in secret.
He groans, pushing a hand through his hair. “You were terrible, you know. Always sneaking off to broom closets and empty corridors to kiss. Kissing. What an absurd thing to peruse so doggedly.”
Anakin snorts. “Hey, don’t knock not till you try it, Master. Unless, of course, you have,” he says, sidling closer, blue eyes and their terrible light glinting like something semi-precious and half-buried. “Have you?”
He does not usually ask such things point blank, and it makes Obi-Wan choke on his drink, sputtering. “Certainly not with the frequency you did,” he shoots back, lifting a brow. Still do.
Anakin grins wickedly, like Obi-Wan has all but confessed. “So you have,” he says, levering up to his feet to refill his glass before collapsing back down onto the floor, closer this time, so the heat of him is a palpable thing. Obi Wan licks the roof of his mouth, chasing the ghost of Anakin’s sweat in the air, another small thing, another stolen detail he carries no matter how many times he’s tried to lose it in the vast empty of space. “Was it Satine?”
Obi-Wan shakes his head. The truth is, he hasn’t kissed anyone, not actually, not memorably. There had been attempts, with Satine, but they’d both been too frightened and young to ever do more than press nervous pecks to one another’s cheeks while passing in the halls. Much of Obi-Wan’s romance with Satine functioned because it was not physical, not actual. it was an idea, an experience he threw himself into so that he got to check off the box that he could, indeed, fall tragically for a woman he was fated to part from. It seemed like a rite of passage at the time, something his fellow padawans whispered about behind their Master’s backs: who they would marry, if they were not bound to the order, the code. In retrospect, Obi-Wan knows his stilted courtly romance with Satine happened only because he wanted it to happen, and because it could not really happen. It was safe, controlled. Nothing like a sun going supernova and destroying a whole system. Nothing like Anakin. “We were only children,” he mumbles, gesturing loosely with his glass. “If we kissed it wasn’t the real thing, but I hardly remember.”
Anakin doesn’t buy it. “No, you’re hiding something,” he says, narrowing his eyes as the corner of his already lopsided mouth quirks up. “You did more than kiss with her, didn’t you?”
“Anakin!” he scolds, reaching out and slapping his wrist. “I can promise I did less.”
“So, you haven’t really kissed anyone at all then, have you? How did you do that? Weren’t you…I don’t know, tempted? I refuse to believe you were so proper as a Padawan.”
Obi-Wan scoffs, because of course, he was not proper. He was angry, and lonely in his desire, which was an unspeakable thing amid already unspeakable desires. He was a wreck, a timebomb. If only Anakin knew he still was, beneath all the neat layers he fashions. “Of course I was tempted! But I—there were no opportunities, really. So I told myself it wasn’t worth the fuss.”
“No opportunities?” Anakin says, skepticism thick in his voice. “I don’t believe that for a second. You were the handsomest man I’d ever seen, first time I met you. I’m sure the girls were falling over themselves to try and sneak into a broom closet with you.”
Obi-Wan’s cheeks burn, and he sucks down the rest of his drink with near dangerous abandon. He doesn’t like to think about the way Anakin used to look at him when he was nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Like he hung the moon, like he was the ideal dream a Jedi Knight, like he wanted to be Obi-Wan. He's not sure it was a proper crush, but there was profound admiration back then, emulation, love. He hates himself for still longing for that—it seems obscene, to wish even for fractions of the dynamic they had when Anakin was a child. “If they were I hardly noticed,” he says. “Plus, my classmates had no maverick leader rebelling among their ranks. There was much talk, no action. There was only such dissent amid your fellow padawans because you were so very desperate for kisses. Imagine, if they had not all had such a terrible example.”
Anakin laughs, teeth white, tongue pink, every bit of him lovely in the way storybooks are. Nice before bed, but poor substitutes for dreams of the future. Obi-Wan stares and aches anyway. “I grew up on the outer rim! Me and my friends back on Tatooine were always sneaking off to mess around. I had my first kiss at six, probably. I don’t remember her name…she was twilek.”
“What is the big draw of pushing your mouth against another person’s?!” Obi-Wan exclaims, if only to detract from the fact he cannot stop staring at Anakin’s lips, and he feels like its getting obvious. This is a terrible conversation to have while drunk, it’s a terrible conversation to have with Anakin at all. “I just. I don’t see the appeal,” he lies.
“It’s fun,” Anakin says with a shrug, before cocking his head, really thinking about it. “It feels good,” he adds, in a softer voice.
Obi-Wan’s stomach drops, and he bristles defensively, wishing he did not have to get up to refill his glass. He wants more to drink, but he’s not sure he can stand without visibly shaking. “It can’t feel that good,” he says. “Good enough to risk your standing with the order?”
“Oh,” Anakin says, gaze losing focus, landing somewhere over Obi-Wan’s shoulder instead. “Better than that. It’s—well. I don’t know. I don’t know how to describe it to someone who’s never even done it before, but trust me. It’s good.” Then he narrows his eyes, tongue flashing out slick and terrible as he uses it to wet his mouth. “I could show you,” he says.
Obi-Wan doesn’t react immediately, because he’s certain he misheard Anakin. Instead he just stares, brows knit, eyes narrowed as he thinks that cannot be what he just said. But then Anakin makes a face at him like he is being ridiculous and adds, “Oh come on, don’t act like thats such a shocking offer. You said it yourself—I have a history. Some might even say a talent.”
“Are you offering—Anakin no!” he finally snaps, horrified at the way he’s flushing so violently, pink spreading from his cheeks down his neck, to the tops of his ears, sudden and incriminating. “Why would you even joke about such a thing?”
Anakin looks offended. “I’m not joking, Master,” he says, setting his glass down and shifting closer, hair a wreck, overgrown and framing his face in messy fly aways. Obi-Wan does everything in his power to not imagine smoothing through those loose curls with a careful hand, Anakin’s mouth liquor hot and spit-wet against his own. But the war has not only made him greedy, but powerless. Robbed him of his will, his strength, stripped him down to the barest and most survival-driven version of himself. Anakin must sense as much, because he’s not looking at Obi-Wan with anything but an open, resolute curiosity. You’re bluffing, his face says, and he’s right. “What’s wrong with it? The Jedi order doesn’t specifically forbid kissing. Or— do you find me repulsive?”
Obi-Wan barks out a laugh, and he cannot lie right now so instead he offers and unrelated truth that should not be unrelated but is all the same. “I’ve known you since you were nine,” he spits out, and it hits the air sharp, like a plea more than a denial.
“So? I’m not nine anymore,” Anakin deflects. “Listen, Master, you’re making it into a big deal when it’s not. It’s just a kiss. You should experience kissing before you die. Need I remind you we almost die every day, now?”
The blood is pounding deafeningly in Obi-Wan’s ears, and he stares at the ground between his own bent knees because looking at Anakin seems dangerous, in this moment. Like it might give him away, confess I am not making it into anything, Anakin, just because it’s not a big deal to you doesn’t mean it’s something massive, to me. He shakes his head, “I can’t,” he what comes out, clipped and tight and final.
But Anakin never leaves things alone, so it is apparently not final to him. He makes an impatient sound in his throat, them leans over, so close, too close, the smell of his breath mouthwateringly near as it huffs out sweetly against Obi’Wan’s open mouth. “Yes you can, look, watch,” he says quietly. And then he reaches out, cups Obi-Wan’s jaw in is palm, and kisses him.
It is nothing like Obi-Wan’s dreams of kissing. It is so soft, so warm, so brief. Whenever he let himself fantasize about kissing Anakin it was always after hours of meditation during which he tried his very hardest to think of anything but. Whenever he caves it follows tremendous resistance, so he imagines it coming like a flood, a rough, battering thing with bruising force, their lips open, tongues lashing, teeth clicking, everything desperate to the point of near violence. It’ Anakin, after all. A sun going supernova, destroying a whole system.
But this is all breath, all trembles. Obi-Wan kisses back easy as exhaling, and yes, there it is, this thing he already knew: that he cannot resist Anakin.
It’s over too soon. Anakin pulls away to study Obi-Wan, his eyes hooded, volleying between fixing upon his mouth and holding his gaze. Obi-Wan should say something, he should put an end to this, should explain that yes kissing is not expressly forbidden by the council but attachment is and he already has quite a problem with that regarding Anakin and this is not helping. The air in the room has changed, though, gotten thick and hot and humid, and he can barely breathe, let alone speak. “How was that?” Anakin asks, swallowing.
Obi-Wan shakes his head. “I have no idea,” he admits, because terrifying, wonderful are both far too damning to actually say aloud.
“Here,” Anakin whispers, reaching over and taking Obi-Wan’s empty drinking glass, which he was inadvertently white knuckling. He sets it on the ground with a click, and lays that hand on Obi-Wan’s knee instead. “Let me like, actually do it.”
And then, before Obi-Wan can even think of telling him no or turning his head, there his lips are again, so warm, parted slightly. He kisses him slow, once, twice, three times, and Obi-Wan cannot believe how tremendously and mortifyingly intimate this is. He thought kisses were for mouths, lips, tongues, but force there is so much else to overwhelm him, too. Anakin’s hand, sliding up his leg to his hip, then back up to his face where it pauses to hold him, guide him. Anakin’s breath, salt-bitter, mouth watering with the burn of alcohol. Anakin’s body, shifting closer, bearing down, radiating waves of heat. His heartbeat. Obi-Wan feels surrounded by him, drowned in him, and that’s even before he nods the slightest amount away and says, “I’m going to use my tongue,” before he does it. Dips in past Obi-Wan’s lips hot and slick and molten, licks him apart.
Then it feels like dying. Like being born. Like coming apart into bits, a sun going supernova and destroying a whole system. Obi-Wan doesn’t mean to, but he makes a terrible sound, something high and breathy and stuck sounding. Anakin smiles against his mouth, thumbs roughly at the corner of it. “There,” he says, sounding very pleased with himself. “I told you it was good, didn’t I?”
Obi-Wan’s hands, which were fisted in his own robes, flex open and reach mindlessly, grab for Anakin to drag him closer. It’s not even an intentional choice—logic says he should end this right now, allow it to dissolve into laughter and frivolity lest it ruin him forevermore, but his body has other ideas. Anakin goes willingly, presses into Obi-Wan and lays him out on his back on the floor, pinning him there and looking down at him with the most complacent smile. Obi-Wan only has the displeasure of witnessing it for a few moments, though, because then Anakin is kissing him again, wet and dirty this time as he slides his hands up into his hair to ruck it into disorder.
Obi-Wan lets his mouth open instinctively, lets his tongue flick out to touch Anakin’s, to brush slick and curious over his lips. It starts as a reflexive thing, a mimicry not unlike the way he’s inadvertently picked up Anakin’s favorite gambits in sparring. But then, the sensory drive takes over. Anakin tastes good. He tastes so maddeningly good, in fact, Obi-Wan he has to lick deeper.
Anakin groans, takes it, gives it back. “Master,” he murmurs at some point, pulling back just enough to fit his fingers between their lips, and feel greedily over the swollen seam of Obi-Wan’s. “Give me your tongue,” he says, grinding their brows together. “I want to suck on it.”
His eyes aren’t light anymore. They're midnight dark again, half-lidded and scalding in their heat as they climb over Obi-Wan’s face, taking him in. For the first time since they started kissing, Obi-Wan thinks of Padme—is this how Anakin kisses her? How he looks at her? Or is that something else entirely? He thinks about asking, about reminding Anakin he has someone to kiss and break the code by being attached to already, but he also knows that such honesty runs the risk of fracturing this moment, and he is weak, he’s compromised. He knows Anakin isn’t his, but he will pretend that he could be, in this moment. He surges forward, pushes his tongue into Anakin’s mouth, and Anakin holds him down, cups his face, sucks and sucks and sucks it in fierce, greedy pulses.
Time stops. Obi-Wan is achingly hard, he knows that much, there is spit on his chin and his heart is hammering but every other detail is lost. There is nothing but this transformed version of Anakin on top of him, straddling him, crushing him between his knees as he ruts against him in jerking, hungry bucks. Obi-Wan can hardly breathe and he doesn’t want to. He just skims his hands all over Anakin’s body, first above the loose gather of his robes and then, after a fit of logic-destroying madness, under them. He pushes them up, rubs over his hot, sweat-sticky skin, loving the ripple of muscle under smoothness, the way he’s tensing and flexing and tensing and flexing until—“Ah,” Anakin says suddenly, voice punched from his throat as be begins to shake, trembling all over for a moment before he goes still, face hidden and burning against Obi-Wan’s neck.
It takes a few moments of held breath for obi wan to realize what has just happened. Then the shock hits him like a drug, coils hot and desperate in his gut as his hands pause to grip Anakin’s waist. “Did you just—”
“I’m so sorry,” Anakin interrupts, breath hot against Obi-Wan’s thundering pulse, breath erratic. When he pulls away his cheeks are crimson, his eyes are bleary, watering, dazed. Their Force bond winks shut like a squinting eye and he adds with an awkward shrug, “I guess it’s been awhile.”
There’s shame in his voice, his expression pinched and mortified. He looks like the little boy Obi-Wan met all those years ago, fragile and defiant and touch starved and frightened and precocious and oh, he has loved him so long. Too long. It’s a fierce and dangerous thing and Obi-Wan needs Anakin to know, in this moment, how little he has to be embarassed by. Obi-Wan is the one who should be ashamed, Obi-Wan is the one who has crossed lines, muddied boundaries, dirtied every moment of their long history together by wanting. He could never tell Anakin, though, so instead he settles upon showing him—I love that you lost control, I have been on the brink of abandon for so much longer than you know, so much longer than you care to admit. “It’s alright,” he sputters, fumbling down from Anakin’s sides to his wrists, tugging him back down. “Come here.”
Their mouths slot together easily, and Anakin kisses him again, sloppy, hot, willing. Which makes it so much easier for Obi-Wan to take his hand, and guide it between his own legs. Show him.
Anakin freezes, moans as he feels Obi-Wan out through his pants. And just like that, everything shifts. Their force bond shudders back open again, hot and syrupy and obscene, sensation rocketing through Obi-Wan’s body in waves as Anakin touches him, squeezes him, rubs him with the flat, hot span of his palm. “Fuck,” Anakin curses, mouthing down his neck, slick with tongue, sharp with teeth. “Can I? Can I take care of you, Master?”
“Yes,” Obi-Wan says. There is no hope, now, at stopping this. He’s lost, dissolving under the shifting weight of Anakin’s body, drunk on the sharp, bitter smell of his come in the air, the liquor sweetness of his breath. “Yes, please.”
And he thinks this means Anakin will take him from his pants and stroke him to completion, as he has done to himself so many times. But that’s not what happens. Anakin chokes out a cut-off groan upon being granted permission, and then he climbs off of Obi-Wan, parts his thighs and clambers down between them, rolling his leggings down over his hips. Obi-Wan’s cock bobs against his stomach for a moment, achingly hard, slick and shining at the tip. And Anakin stares at it for a moment before curling his fingers around the base, fitting the crown into the slick of his mouth.
It’s searing hot and maddeningly wet. A forest fire, the whole of an ocean, and Obi-Wan does not mean to but he cries out, arching his back up off the ground and twisting his hips, lurching in shock. Anakin doesn’t pull away from the sudden buck, he just swallows him down, drooling into his pubic hair, and making a wordless, reflexive sound.
Time flickers, fades, and takes everything with it. Obi-Wan cannot believe that this is happening, so stuck in his astonishment he can’t even talk himself out of doing absolutely mad things with his hands—reaching down, smoothing them through Anakin’s sweaty hair, razing his nails over his scalp, down his neck to press hungry fingertips to the thrum of his pulse. “Anakin,” he says, all other words forgotten save for this one, the most important of all, so dear to his heart. “Anakin, Anakin.”
Anakin moans around him, pulls off to flick his tongue over the tip, breathing harsh and desperate through his nose before sinking back down as far as he can go, deep enough it gags him a bit, and Obi-Wan can feel the back of his throat flexing against him.
It’s too much. As much as he wishes he could live in this wild, impossible moment forever, his body is not accustomed to such pleasure and soon he seizes up, goes stiff, and trips over the edge. Anakin coughs at first, then slides off to stroke him through it, mouth open and wet and obscene and his eyes fixed on the pearlescent ropes of come Obi-Wan spills onto himself. Then he licks it up, takes Obi-Wan’s cock back into his mouth and sucks leisurely, languidly, lying there on his stomach until the overwhelm of orgasm fades to a dull ache. Obi-Wan blinks through tears at the ceiling, and waits for his heart to slow, his cock to soften, and everything between them to change.
Anakin sits up once Obi-Wan starts to fidget, body thrumming with a near ticklish oversensitivity. He wipes his messy, swollen mouth on his sleeve and stares down at Obi-Wan then, head cocked curiously. “Well,” he says eventually, voice so hoarse he has to clear his throat. Obi-Wan’s stomach drops at that, his cock twitching even though it is very spent. “How was it? Did you like it?”
Obi-Wan gazes back, wondering how on earth Anakin can’t see it all—or at least feel it though their Force Bond. The raw adoration, the guilt, the denial, the helplessness. All of it feels impossible to hide under these circumstances, Obi-Wan’s mouth soft and kissed. Anakin’s spit all over his soft cock. “Very much so,” he eventually says.
A grin splits over Anakin’s face, sharp and white like blaster fire to Obi-Wan’s chest. He wonders how people who are not Jedi manage to survive being in love. “Good,” Anakin says, palming over the twin juts of Obi-Wan’s hip bones up to his stomach, where he is soft and still come-sticky beneath the rucked up hem of his tunic. “You should thank me. Now you wont die unkissed.”
Obi-Wan tries to smile. “How very generous of you.”
Anakin must be able to tell there is something painful wrapped up in all of this, because his own expression falters, fades. He is very grave when he says, “You know, Obi-Wan. If you ever want to do other stuff, like this, we can. I don’t mind.”
“You don’t mind?!” Obi-Wan chokes out incredulously. He thinks of Anakin’s hungry kisses, the way he lost himself grinding into Obi-Wan’s thighs and came on top of him like a teenager. It felt like it was motivated from a place of want—but at the same time, Obi-Wan knows he isn’t the one Anakin truly wants. He is a cheap, convenient replacement. Of course Anakin thinks this can happen again. It’s only post-battle sex for him, free of attachment.
Anakin flushes, frowns. “What do you want me to say? That I liked it? If I say that you’ll just get mad, because apparently sex isn’t forbidden but liking it too much is.”
“Anakin,” he says, because there is nothing else to say, no other word, nothing. He cards a hand through his hair, lets his gaze skim to the ceiling because it’s far easier than looking at the bare scaffolding of things he cannot truly have. Even if Padme was not an issue, and code would remain. And even then, if there was no code and they were not both Jedi—then Anakin would have no war and no reason at all to meet him here on a dirty freighter floor, drunk on the folly and adrenaline of having escaped death one more day. “Thank you, for this. For tonight,” he murmurs. “But it cannot happen again.”
Anakin climbs off of him then, grabs his empty, forgotten glass and staggers to the table to refill it. “Fine,” he says, taking a measured sip and forcing his mouth to soften into something neutral. “You’re probably right.”
Obi-Wan sighs, closes his eyes, and takes a deep breath. Grief blooms in him, lush like sprouts after a day’s worth of rain, and this, at least, is a familiar feeling.
——
Obi-Wan does everything he can to forget.
He goes about his expected daily duties, debriefing the 501st and reporting back to the council by holo, spending hours with Rex and Anakin discussing tactics for their troops on the ground. He avoids Anakin’s eyes until he tells himself he must stop, because he’s giving himself away. He eats and he sleeps and he shaves and combs his hair into place in the mornings, staring at himself in the streaked mirror over his tiny standing sink in the general’s barracks trying to see if he looks as observably changed as he feels. Then, he tears his eyes away and reminds himself: forget.
But he cannot.
The memories cling to him like cobwebs, burrow into his skin like foxtails he cannot claw out. The guilt is a solid thing, and it shoves itself down his throat until he cannot breath. Together, they stalk him: what happened and his shame surrounding it, and he knows eventually they will catch up to him and take him down, strip his flesh from his bones.
He could have died never knowing what it was like to kiss Anakin Skywalkwer. To touch his sweat-tacky skin. To taste his spit, salty and burning. To hold him while he shuddered to finish on top of him, like Anakin as an earthquake and Obi-Wan was the earth. Parting, cracking. Opening to reveal a molten core. He could have died and never known, and maybe—maybe that was better. Because knowing is torture.
He is dizzy each time he remembers, and he does nothing but remember. Even as he moves through his duties with a stoic mask fitted tightly over his regret, he remembers. Anakin’s breath in his lungs, Anakin’s big hands sifting through his robes. Anakin’s mouth—his mouth, it’s still astounding, shocking, miraculous that this happened—wet and slick and sucking between Obi-Wan’s thighs. It haunts him. Lingers in the shadows of his room at night, slips into his sheets and touches him, so that he must touch himself instead.
He tries to resist the urge for a full 48 hours before it becomes too much to bear. He’ll dissolve into ruminating over what happened, replaying it in a feverish, choppy loop at inopportune moments if he doesn’t do something about it so, with a nauseating wave of guilt, he caves: curls his fingers around his cock (it was in Anakin’s mouth, Anakin moaned around it, he drooled on it), and strokes himself until he spills, gasping, into his dirty regulation sheets. It happens so fast. As fast as Anakin came, on him, two days ago.
That is the first and last time, he tells himself, mopping himself up, cheeks burning. Just like what you and Anakin did together, it cannot, it will not happen again.
But he is a different man, in the wake of that transgression. He’s been weakened, and his resolutions are meaningless. Getting himself off once to the store of sensory memories does little to dampen the need, and so, he begins to do it at every opportunity. In the fresher if they have time and luxury enough for a shower. In his bed, when he is lucky enough to sleep there.
He fears it must be obvious—that Anakin must know how obsessively he thinks about it. Standing beside him he spirals into anxiety—Does he remember it, too? Is he ashamed, too? Or did it mean nothing to him? Could the forget so easily, or is he haunted like I am haunted? But he must not be—he already has someone he loves, he already has weathered the storm of breaking his vows, breaking the rules, choosing folly over duty. He did it once, and not with Obi-Wan. This was just a single strange night, made possible by the world-altering container of the War.
If Anakin knows what he’s doing to Obi-Wan, he does not let on. He is somewhat surlier after it happens, brooding a bit and shooting Obi-Wan these hurt, hard-eyed looks across the room like he thinks Obi-Wan ought to apologize to him. It was your idea, Obi-Wan thinks crossly, chewing the inside of his cheek raw as Anakin’s gaze bores into him from behind as they stand around the tacticians table, arms crossed. If things are tense, Anakin, it’s because of you. Because you decided to go and change the universe. Because you decided to go and change me.
The war proves to be a worthy distraction, though, and despite all that transpired they fall back into an easy rhythm. Obi-Wan still replays it, and he still touches himself, and sometimes Anakin still studies him across the room like he knows. But life carries on and they do not speak of it again, until weeks later, on a transport from Umbara to Kiros.
Obi-Wan hasn’t seen Anakin in days, and his ears are ringing from a long, grueling battle he had been sure they would lose. He’s still half in shock they secured the base at all—but they had, and he was alive, even if his hands were shaking and he was covered in cuts and bruises and his left leg was not bearing weight well. It’s a several day voyage to their destination and he’s relieved to settle into the quiet, rhythmic hum of the ship around him after days of endless blaster fire and explosions, though not as relieved as he is to be back with Anakin. No matter how painful the regret is, that ache does not compare to the ache of absence. Anakin has been by his side so unrelentingly across the last twelve years their minds have grown twined, fence-posts held up by each other’s overgrown ivy. Obi-Wan feels the phantom ache of him even when he is not there, thinks of him constantly even when those thoughts are not laced in filth. His heart is eager to see him, to fall alongside his in their tandem beating. He thinks Anakin will be glad to see him, too. He was frustrated to be called away from Umbara, angry when he found out all he’d missed, and they have much to catch up on over caf, as they’ve been tacitly abstaining from sharing alcohol, ever since that night.
Standing gingerly in his quarters, Obi-Wan does his best to make his bed one-legged, wincing every time he puts weight on his swollen knee. He has plans to meet Anakin when they pick him up from Coruscant, but it takes him so long to move through the ship he misses him boarding. His com-link goes off when they’re docked, flashing with the message where are you??
My quarters. I apologize for the tardiness, I have a bit of a limp.
stay there. on my way now, Anakin sends back, and Obi-Wan is grateful for the excuse to sit down.
Moments later Anakin lets himself in. There is sweat on his temples, as he if he ran, and Obi-Wan opens his mouth in preparation for a warm greeting, but it gets abruptly lost to the crush of Anakin’s mouth.
His mouth. Warm, soft. rough all at once. Obi-Wan registers the scraps of Anakin’s stubble on his upper lip, his palms cupping his face and holding it roughly in place before so suddenly, it’s all over. He pulls away, presses their brows flush, gaze half lidded and skittering from Obi-Wan’s mouth to his eyes in tremulous intervals. “Don’t say anything, “ he grits out in a snagged whisper. “Don’t get angry with me, It’s just—we didn't hear from you for days and I thought—I tried not to think—you’re hurt,” he suddenly diverts with, twitching away to study Obi-Wan’s neck, where there is a long, stitched gash that stretches from collar-bone up to disappear in his beard. Anakin thumbs over it gently. “Fuck.”
Obi-Wan is shaking, mouth stinging, and still he has not pulled away. “It’s not serious,” he manages, though the words stick in his throat, tongue flicking out to lick his lips, chasing the taste of Anakin from them, however brief it had been there. “All things considered, we ended up alright. Screwball almost lost an arm and Cody—“
“I don’t care about them,” Anakin interrupts, and it is so shocking and unlike him Obi-Wan lurches a bit, gasping, astounded at the hooded darkness in Anakin’s eyes. “No, not like that, Obi-Wan, I—of course I do,” he says hurriedly then, brushing his knuckles over Obi-Wan’s visible bruises as he notices them, wincing. “I just meant. I care most about you. I thought—“ he says again, before shaking his head. “I’m done pretending,” he says then, sliding his palms down Obi-Wan’s arms and squeezing as he goes to feel him out.
Obi-Wan wavers, overwhelmed. Twice, now, he has let this happen, twice, now, he has not been able to resist. “Pretending, done pretending what?” he asks, unable to make sense of any of this, mouth still stuck on that brief, wayward, spit-wet press. Kissing is still so new to him and every time feels miraculous.
“That I—“ he swallows, shaking his head as his eyes roll helplessly to the ceiling for a moment. He looks like he is struggling to find the words, like there is too much he would like to say, or else, too much he fears saying. “That—that I can survive seeing you hurt by anyone but me,” is what comes out. “That I don’t love you. That I wouldn’t leave everything—Padme, this war, the Order—just to run away with you.”
The blood roars in Obi-Wan’s ears, like it’s trying to save him from hearing something so shocking. So wonderful. So terrible. He gasps, he lets himself be pushed into his narrow bed. He lets Anakin climb atop him. He lets Anakin slide his hands beneath his armor, he lets Anakin kiss him and kiss him, until his mouth is raw from the rasp of stubble, and he is not thinking of the War or Padme or the Order or anything else Anakin swore he would forsake. “We cannot do this,” he says, even as he does it. Cards his fingers through the soft, oily, unwashed whorls of Anakin’s hair. Thumbs over the obscene, kiss-wet pout of is mouth. Sweats into his palms, presses his bones and the planes of his body up into them, seeking heat. “Anakin, we—“
“I don’t care anymore,” he grits out, into Obi-Wan’s neck before opening his mouth and sucking the skin over his pulse past his teeth urgently. He lets it go with a wet smack, presses the curve of a snarl into his jaw. “I just don’t. I love you. I want you. That’s obvious, I can’t lie about it anymore. And you—you. I can feel it in the Force, you want me, too, Master. You have for a long time.”
It guts Obi-Wan, to have his darkest, most shameful interior laid bare like that, in so few words. You want me , too. You have for a long time. He shakes his head but he knows it’s true, knows there is nothing he can say to contest it if his hunger has bled out into the Force for Anakin to mop up. It is how he is and who he is: desperately in love with Anakin.
Instead of lying like he’s been lying for the last fourteen years, he caves in like a black hole. He takes Anakin with him. He lets himself be touched, lets Anakin rock their hips together, lets him sink to his knees at the foot of the bed and kiss down the length of his stiff leg so wetly he leaves marks in the fabric. “Yes. Yes, I love you,” Obi-Wan admits, his eyes shut tight so he does not have to witness the way Anakin’s face crumples, through he hears the sharp intake of breath and feels the press of his teeth to the inside of his thigh, inches away from where he’s throbbing, obvious. “Terribly, in fact. But. That doesn’t mean we can just do something about it.No matter how strongly one feels, it’s simply not done.”
“Yes it is,” Anakin says then, smoothing his hands up to Obi-Wan’s belt, which he undoes clumsily, greedily. “People fall in love all the time. They kiss and fuck and break rules because they're in love. Just because you don’t let yourself doesn't mean it’s not done,” then, with wet, pleading eyes he pins Obi-Wan down, bores into his flesh with such intensity Obi-Wan must face him. “You could let yourself,” he says, eyes so dark they nearly mimic the black of space. He puts his hands inside his pants, cups his cock, touches Obi-Wan like Obi-Wan has been touching himself. “You could let me.”
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan says again, a word like a reflex. Three syllables he loves the feel of in his mouth, loves to roll of his tongue or keep beneath it like a secret. Three syllables he presses back into Anakin’s mouth as Anakin cants up, covers Obi-Wan’s body with his own and kisses him. Kisses him like he kissed him the first time—a sun going supernova, destroying a whole system.
Obi-Wan’s body hurts and he’s very, very tired. He has done so much fighting that tonight, he cannot bring himself to do anymore. So instead, he lets himself be the system that is destroyed.