Chapter Text
Anakin doesn’t recognize the jedi who comes to rescue him.
He doesn’t recognize his Force signature, either, but he feels it before he even hears the sounds of the fighting, from clear across the underground compound. It’s not that the signature is that strong – whoever it is, they’ve got stellar shields, and even then the presence behind them is tightly controlled, unassuming – but Anakin’s always had a stronger, more long-range sense for these sorts of things than the average jedi, and there’s a power coiled up in this signature that intrigues him the second he brushes up against it. Anakin doesn’t recognize it at all, but it’s impressive. And that’s before he even hears the fighting.
Dirt rains from the low ceiling of his cell. Anakin can’t get off the mat on the floor, down with the crawlies and the flies – his leg’s fucked, they cracked at least three of his ribs judging by how much it hurts to breathe, and they bricked his arm in a way he can’t fix without tools – but he shoves himself upright as much as he can, looking up at the trapdoor. He can’t see anything through it, but he can see the light flickering as people run back and forth above it, and he can hear their feet pounding. It sounds like every damn slaver in the place is heading to deal with their intruder.
And it sounds like it doesn’t matter.
Anakin hears the familiar humming of a lightsaber blade, slavers screaming, and he can’t help but smile. There’s a heavy whump as a body lands on the trapdoor, and a moment later the sound of someone dragging it away.
The trap door opens.
The jedi peers down into the dark pit of Anakin’s cell, backlit by dusty sun. His eyes take a moment to adjust, but when they do, they land on Anakin, sitting half-upright on his mat, and he smiles.
“Hello there,” he says.
Anakin suddenly wishes he weren’t half-dead and covered in a week’s worth of sweat and dirt, and not only because it sucks – because this jedi is fucking gorgeous – young enough that he could still be a padawan, with thick auburn hair down to his shoulders, sharp blue eyes and freckles, like some Sith invented him for the purposes of exquisite torture.
And Anakin’s a lot more charming when he hasn’t been locked up and beaten for a week, but right now the best he can manage is a sort of wondering, “Who are you?”
The jedi opens his mouth to answer, but before he can there are more shouts and the sound of pounding feet. He shoots Anakin an apologetic look and says, “One moment, please,” then darts off.
There’s the sound of more fighting. A Trandoshan flies across the room and lands half-in the trapdoor. When he spots Anakin, he starts squirming around for his blaster, but Anakin’s not totally defenseless – he grabs hold of the Force and heaves the fucker straight up to the ceiling, then back to the floor when he looks like he’s still alive, then back to the ceiling one last time for good measure. It takes it out of him so much that he's a little embarrassed by the time the strange jedi comes back, speckled with blood but not even breathing hard.
“Right, where were we?” he asks, like they’re having a polite conversation over tea, and not meeting in the middle of a rescue from a slaver’s den.
“Your name,” Anakin says, a little winded.
“Ah, of course,” the jedi says, in his posh accent. “Obi-Wan Kenobi, at your service. Do you think you can climb up on your own, or shall I be of assistance?”
“You know,” Anakin says, after a beat, “I feel like you’ve phrased that question so there’s no dignified answer.”
Obi-Wan smiles brightly – a bit devilishly – and gives Anakin a boost with the Force before Anakin can suck up his pride enough to ask for one.
The hallway is littered with bodies. Some of them are still smoking from lightsaber wounds, missing limbs with charred stumps, and some are still groaning, half-alive, and they are each and every one of them the scum of the galaxy, the sort of people that treated Anakin and his mother like property back on Tatooine, and he doesn’t have a single scrap of sympathy for any of them.
Obi-Wan sees him looking and makes an embarrassed face, like he thinks Anakin is judging him for all the carnage. “I promise I’m not a Sith,” he says, in a tone like he’s only joking a little, like the concern has come up before. “But you were too deep in the compound to phase all the way, and I wasn’t sure how long I had until they killed you.”
Phase? Anakin thinks, but he figures that’s a question for later, when there aren’t more slavers pouring down the stairs, shouting to each other and running down the hallway towards them.
“You might need this,” Obi-Wan says, and hands Anakin his lightsaber.
Anakin’s still down one arm, but he can fight one handed, and he feels immediately better with his own weapon in his hand. “Where the hell did you find this old thing?”
“Oh, just lying about,” Obi-Wan quips back, igniting his own blade – and then the slavers are on them.
And if Anakin thought Obi-Wan was cooked up in a lab for him before, that only gets worse when he sees the kid fight.
He’s like a dream.
Anakin’s fought all the best duellists in the Order – Mace, Yoda, Aayla Secura, his old master Qui-Gon Jinn – and he thinks, watching Obi-Wan, that he could give any one of them a run for their money. Anakin’s no slouch himself, normally – it would probably come down to him and Yoda, if it was a scrap for best fighter – but with one arm and a fucked-up leg, it’s the least he can do to clean up what Obi-Wan misses.
It’s an easy job, since he doesn’t miss much – which means Anakin gets to hang back and enjoy the view. And man, what a view it is.
Obi-Wan doesn’t fight with any set saber style – instead, it’s a glorious, unholy mix of at least three, from what Anakin can tell – Soresu, and Ataru, and Djem So. There’s a full minute where Obi-Wan’s feet barely touch the ground, flying from shun to jung ma to backflip like gravity doesn’t matter to him. Before Anakin can even make his limping way down the hall, the whole thing is over, and the stairs are strewn with a dozen more bodies. Obi-Wan’s Force signature hums with satisfaction.
He turns off his blade and clips his saber on his belt as Anakin approaches. “Sorry,” he says, not sounding sorry at all. “I have a thing about slavers.”
Anakin laughs. A thing about slavers, honestly. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “How’d the Order even know to send a rescue? I’ve got a week until I would’ve missed a check-in.”
“Ah,” Obi-Wan says. “Well, they didn’t send me.”
Anakin stares.
Obi-Wan either doesn’t notice his bewilderment, or pretends not to. “I saw a few more occupied cells on the next level,” he says. “I thought we might drop by on our way out and see if anyone else was in need of rescuing.”
“I wasn’t in need of rescuing,” Anakin gripes. “I would’ve figured a way out eventually.”
“Well, you didn’t have much time left,” Obi-Wan says.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Obi-Wan dismisses. “A vision I had, that’s all. Shall we?”
Vision, Anakin thinks dumbly, but he follows Obi-Wan up the stairs – slowly, huffing and puffing with his cracked ribs and the dead weight of his leg.
They bust a Twi’lek family out of three cells on the next level, and Anakin gets to take a slaver’s head off with his saber, so he leaves happy. He left his ship back in the planet’s largest urban center, where he’s supposed to be carrying out a milk run for the Order, and anyway it would be too small to carry all of them even if it were here – so they avail themselves of a transport from the slavers’ shipyard, and fly the Twi’leks where they want to go – to the commercial spaceport, where they were meant to board an interplanetary liner a month ago, before they got grabbed.
Anakin would prefer to pilot the thing, obviously, but as Snips is always telling him, You wanna drive, you need two hands and no concussion, so he graciously steps aside and lets Obi-Wan fly them back to the spaceport.
“Hey, you’re not a bad pilot,” Anakin tells him, as they sail over sun-baked mud flats.
Obi-Wan shoots him an amused look. “Is that supposed to be a compliment?” he asks.
Anakin grins and decides not to answer that. “I’m gonna find a toolbox,” he says instead, shoving out of his seat. “You just keep doing what you’re doing.”
Obi-Wan raises an eyebrow and says nothing.
Anakin ducks into to the back, stops to make silly faces so he doesn’t scare the little Twi’lek girl who startles at the sight of him, then roots around in one of the cabinets until he comes up with a few tools held together with a rubber band. Back in the cockpit, he pops his arm open with a pair of needle-nose pliers and starts fucking around with the wiring until something sends a jolt of pain up his nerve endings and he knows where to start.
Obi-Wan eyes him from the pilot’s chair. Anakin’s bracing for the usual question when Obi-Wan asks instead, “Would you like a hand with that hand?”
“Most people tell me I should let a med droid do it,” Anakin says, amused.
“A med droid?”
It’s Anakin’s turn to raise his eyebrows. “Is there a joke here?”
Obi-Wan just looks blank.
Anakin laughs. “Come on, you can’t be serious. You’ve never seen a med droid before?”
“Well, I can infer from the name,” Obi-Wan says, and not like he’s sharing the joke, “but I can’t say I’ve had occasion to meet one, no.”
Anakin stares. “You said the Order didn’t send you,” he says, remembering. “I’ve never seen you around the Temple. I would’ve remembered.”
“I’ve never been to the Temple,” Obi-Wan says.
Never met a med droid, never been to the Temple. This just keeps getting worse. “I’ve never heard of a jedi operating independent of the Order.”
“We try not to be heard of, too much,” Obi-Wan says. “The autopilot on this ship seems quite good, if you’d like that hand.”
“I’m fine,” Anakin says, a second before he hits the wrong thing and spasms his arm so bad he knocks his tools all over the floor. “Aw, kark.”
Obi-Wan ends up helping him with the arm, and Anakin isn’t even that weird about it. Normally the only other people he can stand to have touch it are Artoo and – under extreme circumstances – his padawan, but he minds his manners, since Obi-Wan did, after all, just haul his ass out of a slaver’s den, and he discovers after a minute that he doesn’t actually mind. Obi-Wan’s hands are capable and steady, and he doesn’t let the fact that he’s working on an arm instead of some other piece of machinery make him overly gentle or timid.
“Now,” Anakin says, when he’s got enough functionality restored that he can curl up his fingers and bend at the elbow, at least – as good as he’s going to get without some specialized equipment – “tell me how you knew where to find me, or who I was, or that I even existed, if you’re not with the Order.”
“I am with the Order, technically,” Obi-Wan hedges. “I’m not against them, at least.”
Anakin gives him a flat look.
“People aren’t usually so interested,” Obi-Wan says, like an apology, then tells him, “I told you, I have visions. Dreams. The Force shows me where I’m needed. You had less than a day before they were going to execute you.”
“Oh, they were welcome to try and execute me,” Anakin says.
“They waited so long to move you because they were sourcing a Force collar,” Obi-Wan says. “I saw that in my dreams, as well.”
“Kark,” Anakin mutters. He hates those damn things.
“A thank you wouldn’t be out of order,” Obi-Wan prods, smiling.
Anakin looks at those freckles, and those long sunkissed eyelashes, and he thinks he’d like to thank him a way that might alarm the members of more civilized society.
“I’m Anakin,” he says instead, realizing like a slap in that moment that he hasn’t said it. “Anakin Skywalker.”
“Hello, Anakin,” Obi-Wan says, smiling a little. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
Before Anakin can do anything ill-advised like grab him and kiss him, the autopilot chimes to let them know they’ll need to take back over manual control for landing. Obi-Wan clears his throat and swings back around, keying off the autopilot and taking the yoke. Anakin watches the red light play off his face as they descend into the bustle of the spacesport, the chaos of traffic – back into the world.
##
Obi-Wan is a very strange jedi, Anakin thinks, as he watches him escort the Twi’lek family through the chaos of the commercial spaceport. Anakin’s volunteered to watch their rented speeder, mostly because walking is not his favorite activity at the moment, and from a distance he gets a good look at how Obi-Wan carries himself, how he moves through space.
He doesn’t dress like a jedi – not different enough that a casual viewer would notice, but his pants are too short, so Anakin can see his ankles, and his sleeves are too long, and his shoes look like something he made himself out of two scraps of leather. His gray robe is patched in a dozen places, with all different fabrics, and the only thing he’s carrying on his belt is his lightsaber, no comms, no chit purse, nothing. He looks, to put it bluntly, like a vagrant.
And he moves like he’s trying not to be seen. Not just trying not to draw attention, but trying to be invisible, to disappear into the scenery. It’s effective, and he’s not even using any Force suggestion to do it – Anakin can tell.
In short, he’s a fucking enigma.
Once the Twi’lek family are safely ensconced on the commercial liner – rattled, but whole, and glad to be on the other side of their ordeal – Obi-Wan comes back across the concourse and joins Anakin in the speeder. Anakin had whined to be allowed to drive, this time, because he could pilot a speeder with nothing but his little toe and one good eye, and Obi-Wan had let him – largely, Anakin thought, out of pity. It didn’t bother him as much as it should’ve.
“So?” he says, when Obi-Wan’s situated. “Where to?”
“Wherever you’re going,” Obi-Wan says. Anakin has a brief moment of thinking he’s about to get extremely, improbably lucky, before Obi-Wan adds, “I’ll take the speeder back, after you’re delivered.”
“Delivered,” Anakin echoes, in disbelief. “I don’t need to be delivered.”
“Ah,” Obi-Wan tuts, “never let it be said that I am not a full-service rescue operation.”
“Oh, full-service, are you?” Anakin asks, as he pulls the speeder out into traffic. “I can think of a few more services you could add,” and realizes as the words are coming out of his mouth that maybe he shouldn’t be tossing out sexual innuendos with a guy he met a few hours ago, a guy who was nice enough to kill a bunch of slavers for him. But Obi-Wan only laughs.
“Malfunctioning down there as well, are we?” he asks, like butter wouldn’t melt. “I suppose I could see my way to giving you a hand with another prosthetic. After all, the first one was quite impressive.”
Anakin’s face heats. “It’s not – “
“Not impressive?” Obi-Wan says, grinning.
“Not a prosthetic,” Anakin grits out, but he’s laughing too.
Obi-Wan makes him stop for street meat and fried rice balls, which he pays for with a few credit chits the Twi’lek family slipped him, and which they both eat ravenously. Anakin knows why he’s so hungry – all he’s ingested for the past week is dirty water and a few scraps of dried seaweed he had to hold in his mouth for an hour to generate enough saliva to swallow – but as he watches Obi-Wan put away three enormous rice balls in what seems like as many seconds, he can’t help but wonder why he eats like he’s starving. Anakin, even back on Tatooine, never had to wonder where his next meal would come from – his mother never let him think about it – but he knows what that looks like. Suddenly he wonders if Obi-Wan’s baggy shirt is concealing a figure that’s a lot thinner than it should be.
He doesn’t ask. Hey, why the hell aren’t you eating enough? isn't exactly something you ask on the first date.
But it is acceptable, on a first date, to angle for a second one, so Anakin says, when he’s done licking meat juice off his fingers – “You should come back to the Temple with me.”
Obi-Wan shoots him a look like he’s just made a weird joke.
“I’m serious,” Anakin says. “Come back with me. Restock. Requisition a new cloak – you definitely need one.”
“I trust that’s not a dig against my sewing skills,” Obi-Wan says dangerously.
“Oh, it definitely is,” Anakin says. “It’s one hundred percent a dig against your sewing skills. Are you kidding? There’s a hole here that I could stick my leg through.”
As he says it, he realizes that the hole has singed edges, that it’s a blaster hole and possibly fresh, and he has a moment to worry, retroactively, about Obi-Wan being hurt, but he can’t see any wounds now, so it must have happened a while ago, on some other world, when Anakin wasn’t there to see. Wasn’t there to look after him.
Obi-Wan doesn’t rise to the bait again, like he’s suddenly too tired for it. “I go where the Force wills me,” he says. Earlier, when he’d talked about it – The Force shows me where I’m needed – he’d sounded serene, holier-than-thou, like Anakin’s old master when he was trying to teach Anakin, age nine, fidgety and inattentive beyond belief, to meditate. Now he sounds resigned, like it’s a weight he’s taken on that he can’t put down, that he’s not allowed to put down. Anakin wants to shake him.
“You know, I have been called the living embodiment of the Force,” he says, instead. He tries to make it come out as a brag, cocksure and charming, but it comes out a little like he’s begging. “I have no father. The Force got me on my mother.”
Obi-Wan raises a skeptical eyebrow, which doesn’t bode well for Anakin’s chances that he’s going to capitulate and follow him home, but it’s at least better than the look he was wearing before. “I’m sure she told you that, yes,” he says.
Anakin smiles a little. “Obi-Wan,” he tries again.
“I go where the Force wills me,” Obi-Wan says again, like a mantra. Like it’s all he has.
He stares off into the middle distance for a minute, into the bustle of the spaceport, clouds of red dirt and low dried-mud buildings the blinding sun, and then he seems to come back into himself all at once. He gives Anakin a tight smile, like that’s going to make it better somehow. Like that’s going to make Anakin think it’s all okay. It really fucking doesn’t.
Anakin can’t push, though – he has the sense that it would be like pushing against water, that his hands would go right through. So he says, “Maybe someday the Force will steer you back my way.”
Obi-Wan’s smile becomes something more genuine. “I’d like that, Master Skywalker,” he says.
Hearing that out of Obi-Wan’s mouth – Master Skywalker – does something violent to Anakin’s heart. He tries not to think about it.
He drives them back to the spaceport where he parked his ship, and Artoo wheels out to meet him, swearing up a storm about where the fuck has he been and who the fuck does he think he is running off on some unsanctioned side mission without Artoo there for backup. Anakin pats his dome affectionately and bends over – awkwardly with his bad leg – to rest his forehead against it, then when his droid is mollified turns back to Obi-Wan with a sudden burst of inspiration. “Wait here a minute,” he says, pointing at him, “just – hold on, alright?” and when he gets a bewildered nod from Obi-Wan, leans on Artoo like a crutch to limp back to his ship.
He returns a minute later with his extra traveling cloak, the one he always keeps in his ship because his padawan dresses like every day is a beach party and sometimes they crash-land on ice planets. “Here,” he says, holding it out to Obi-Wan. “If you won’t come back to the Temple, at least take this.”
Obi-Wan’s face does something complicated, like he thinks he should demur, but he wants the fresh cloak too badly to do it. In the end Anakin has to put it in his hands, but once he does Obi-Wan’s fingers curl around it, holding it tightly. “Thank you,” he says, with undue solemnity.
“It’s just a cloak,” Anakin protests.
Obi-Wan looks, for a brief moment, like he’s about to cry. Over being given a cloak – what any jedi can get for free, back at the Temple, as many times as they want. Within reason, the quartermaster would say, giving him an arch look, but Anakin’s lost more cloaks than he can count and she’s never stopped giving him new ones. He sees Obi-Wan’s fingers shake for a second before he gets it under control, while he unclasps his old, ratty cloak and puts on Anakin’s. Anakin wants to kill something. He wants to burn something down. He wants to go get everything else he’s got stashed on his ship and give that all to Obi-Wan, too.
Instead he just stands rooted to the spot, his throat tight, unable to think of a single useful thing to say.
“Thank you,” Obi-Wan says again, when he’s got the cloak on. He clears his throat. “It was – kind of you to notice.”
“Hey,” Anakin says, and his voice is raspy, like he hasn’t used it for months. “We’ll call it fair trade. You rescue me, I rescue your fashion choices.”
Obi-Wan still looks shaky, but his eyebrows go up again. “A life for a cloak,” he teases. “I’d hardly call that an equal swap.”
“A life?” Anakin echoes. “I told you, I had it handled. At most, that was an assist.”
Obi-Wan huffs in amusement. “Considering the body count, I’d say it was rather a large assist.”
Anakin grins stupidly. “Well, I’ll just have to owe you one, then.”
Artoo beeps at him that he’s fucking embarrassing himself, and Anakin gives him a swift kick in the chassis. “If the Force ever wills you to Coruscant…” he says, then trails off, unsure how to land that sentence gracefully.
“I’ll look you up,” Obi-Wan promises.
That’s better than what Anakin was planning to say, which was: Come home to me.
Before he can say anything else, Obi-Wan starts the speeder again – the vehicle lifts off the ground, hovering, kicking up dust – then eases out back into traffic, swallowed up almost at once by the bustle of the city.
##
So that’s the first time Anakin meets Obi-Wan Kenobi.
##
The second time he meets Obi-Wan Kenobi, he’s got Ahsoka tagging along on a diplomatic mission to the planet Mokk, and it’s been raining for a fucking month.
Their directive is to negotiate the peaceful resolution of a coup – following a democratic election, the deposed Speaker refused to relinquish her seat in the Grand Mokk Palace, and it’s turned into a weeks-long siege, with half the military holed up with her and half the military rioting with the people in the streets. The issue is that the Palace is karking impenetrable, and just as much as they can’t get in to talk to the Incumbent, they can’t get her to come out and talk to them, so mostly what the other side’s negotiating team has been doing is sending increasingly irritated comms, and then – when those stopped going through – increasingly irritated messenger birds, informing her that the new Speaker didn’t exactly need the building to run the planet, and that this was rather a lot of trouble to go to just to keep some dusty old tapestries and ceremonial diplomatic orbs, or whatever those things were.
Peaceful resolutions aren’t exactly Anakin’s strong suit, but the Council’s marked this mission low-priority – the negotiating team requested a jedi representative since it’s just sort of how things are done, but they haven’t asked for much input so far and they don’t seem likely to in the future – and also Anakin’s being punished for running off to take down a ring of slavers on his last solo op, so here he is. He would’ve spared Ahsoka the endless days of tedium and damp socks, except she’s even madder than the Council that he ran off “half-cocked” (her words) and got himself beat up and taken captive, and she’s decided he needs a babysitter. It’s maybe the most undignified set-up for a mission that Anakin’s ever been subject to, and that’s including the time when he was eleven and Qui-Gon made him pretend to be six so they could get their tickets discounted on a commercial cruise.
The city is strangely festive, for all that there’s a civil war going on – the initial riots have since turned into parties in the streets, people dancing in puddles to mandolin music played by four-handed Dug musicians, painting each other’s bare skin, faces and chests and hands with fluorescent green paint in celebration of whatever the fuck. Rainwater rushes through the storm drains like an underground river surging below their feet, but the city is built for it, buildings and roads raised off the ground, perched on sturdy rock pillars on the side of a mountain, and the planet’s foliage, which apparently likes being drenched out of existence, is in full bloom, the hills around them and above them as green as the revelers’ paint.
Anakin’s allergic to something that his Temple-issued antihistamines can’t kick, and he hasn’t slept in three days because for those entire three days someone’s been setting off fireworks, continuously, on the rooftop across the street from their rented rooms.
“This is hell,” he declares to Ahsoka, slumped over a table at the tavern down the street. It’s still noisy as hell here – the Mokkish people have a capacity for continuous partying unlike anything Anakin has ever encountered, even from notorious party animal Quinlan Vos – but at least it’s a different kind of noise, chanting instead of loud periodic booms. “This is my hell.”
“I thought Tatooinians believed hell was cold?” Ahsoka says brightly. She hasn’t been having any trouble sleeping, the harpy. Snips can sleep through fucking anything.
“Yeah, well, they’re wrong,” Anakin grouses, draining his ale. “They’re all wrong. When we get done here I’ll go back and tell them. Hell’s not cold, it’s wet and fucking loud.”
Ahsoka tears into her raw elk leg with sharp teeth, unbothered by his sour mood. “You don’t like sand, you don’t like rain,” she sing-songs, innocent. “You’re just impossible to please, Master, you know that?”
“Bite me,” Anakin tells her.
She smiles, projecting mirth over their training bond.
Anakin projects back how much his fucking nose itches.
Ahsoka shoves it right back at him, twice as strong, and Anakin sneezes so hard he rocks his chair.
“Oh, jeez,” Ahsoka says, faux-sympathetic. “You need a tissue, Master?”
Anakin puts his head on the table and contemplates death.
Ahsoka keeps munching along happily, tearing bloody strips off her elk leg, and a few minutes later Anakin feels a familiar Force-presence at the edge of his awareness. It’s so faint at first that he thinks he’s imagined it, like catching a waft of something on the wind for a split second, but then it comes back stronger, and Anakin sits up so fast his head spins, just in time to see Obi-Wan Kenobi pass by outside.
He's up and out of his seat before he can think, racing out the door while Ahsoka calls out Master? in alarm behind him.
“Come on!” he calls back to her, but doesn’t wait as he ducks into the street.
The rain is coming down in sheets, cool and soaking, and Anakin is drenched the second he steps foot out from under the covered walkway that lines the shopfronts, into the street. Revelers jostle past him, dancing and singing, leaving fluorescent green hand prints on his cloak, but Anakin stands like a pillar at the center of the human flow, eyes scanning the crowded street, reaching out in the Force, trying to find him again.
Ahsoka catches up with him a second later, covered in green paint herself. “Are we dining and dashing?” she asks, breathless. “Did you forget your chit bag again?”
And when he doesn’t respond to the joke the way he normally does, she asks again, concerned, “Master?”
Anakin thinks – guiltily, with a rush of want – of another voice, calling him Master. He guards the thought away from Ahsoka in the Force, though, and instead sends her an image of Obi-Wan, his face in profile under the hood of his cloak, there and then gone, like a specter in the crowd.
Ahsoka picks up on Anakin’s attached emotion. “The guy who rescued you from those slavers?” she intuits. “He’s here? Why?”
“I’d love to ask him,” Anakin says, biting down on his sense of urgency, heart pounding in his chest. “If we can karking find him.”
“Master,” Ahsoka says, with a note of warning in her voice.
He knows what she’s feeling – way too much emotion pouring off him after catching a glimpse of some jedi he only met once, briefly, in wildly unromantic circumstances. But he’s never been good at controlling his shields when he’s feeling this much, much to Qui-Gon’s chagrin (That, my dear padawan, he used to say, sounding like an ancient man who had been kept awake for a thousand or so years, is precisely when you most need to control your shields), so all he does is say back to her, “Padawan,” with his own note of warning. “Split up. Find him.”
Ahsoka looks like she’s thinking mutinous thoughts while she does it, but she listens.
##
The first thing Anakin did when he got back to the Temple, after the slavers – once he’d been looked over by Healer Che, put on bedrest for forty-eight hours, escaped bedrest, gotten tackled by Ahsoka and dragged back to bedrest, then escaped bedrest again, this time the boring way, with medical authorization – was go see Jocasta Nu, in the Archives.
Jocasta Nu has hated Anakin’s guts since he climbed one of her shelves at age ten to retrieve a lost flimsi-copter and accidentally dominoed fourteen of them into a mess of splintered wood and crushed data spheres, but it’s her job to guide other jedi looking for questions, so when he arrived on his crutches with one – and an interesting one at that, he could see from her face – she grudgingly helped him.
“We call them the Wandering Jedi,” she told him, as she pulled the data sphere he needed from the shelves, floating it with the Force into her wizened old hands. “There are four of them, or six of them, or one of them, depending on who you ask and when. They eschew the directives of the Order, and follow the will of the Force exclusively.”
I go where the Force wills me, Anakin remembered.
“Do they recruit out of the Temple?” he asked, while Master Nu set his data sphere in the cradle on a table and called up his homework – he expected extensive reading material to roll out across the table’s holo-workspace, which was usually how these things went; Anakin hated research, and whenever he came here he always ended up doing a lot of it. But instead, there were only a few pages, sparsely written.
“If they take padawans, they aren’t taking them from here,” Master Nu answered, then waved him into the seat. “They’re rarely sighted – whenever a jedi missionary is lucky enough to have an encounter, I make them write down every detail, but as you can see it’s not much.” She eyed him. “I expect you to do the same, Skywalker.”
There was something about her disapproving gaze that always made Anakin feel like a misbehaving padawan. “Understood, Master,” he said, and she nodded and went away.
Anakin sat down, and he read.
Like Master Nu had warned him, there wasn’t much to read, but what was there was plenty to worry him, all the same. Not that he’d ever really stopped worrying about Obi-Wan, since he’d let him go.
The Wandering Jedi, the data sphere informed him, had been encountered less than a dozen times since the Order had started recording their history – five thousand or so years ago.
There was one, a Master Fay, who showed up sporadically every few hundred years – it was the same woman, the jedi who had written this account 1,287 years ago assured him; she had a unique connection to the Living Force which allowed her to, allegedly, stay young forever. A few early accounts credited her, in sparing language, with feats that seemed more like miracles than works of the Force: bringing dead planets back to life, single-handedly ending wars that had been waged for centuries, and in one instance – recorded early on in the Order’s history, so long ago that reading it Anakin had the sense that it was more legend than truth – redirecting a moon whose orbit had been decaying above a populous planet.
There was mention of a master who could manipulate fire with the Force, who had once, allegedly, contained the eruption of an entire volcano; one who could teleport across vast distances, between planets; and one who had arrived on a backwater moon infested by plague – the recounting jedi a healer himself, on a mission to do what he could to ease the pain of a dying people, overwhelmed by the scale of the suffering and by his own helplessness – and dropped into meditation, and stayed there, day and night, for a year, until every last infected person was healed, until their duty was over and they could return to the Force.
Leaving naught but a cloak and a saber behind, the chronicler had written. No body, no trace. I buried the cloak and the saber, in the earth of the planet they died to save.
Anakin swallowed hard, and kept reading.
One of the entries, he was surprised to find, was signed by a Jedi Knight Qui-Gon Jinn, dated a few years after his knighting – before he’d taken on his first padawan, before Anakin was even born.
He went to see his master that night, armed with a copy of the entry and a bottle of Qui-Gon’s favorite Corellian brandy, in the quarters they had once shared.
Qui-Gon blinked and then reached for his spectacles when Anakin handed him the padd with the entry pulled up, like an old man who’d been handed a holo-photo taken so long ago he’d almost forgotten it happened. “Force,” he said. “This mission report is older than you are. Where did you dig this up?”
“The Archives,” Anakin said.
“The Archives,” Qui-Gon echoed, wondering. “Jocasta throw any shoes at you this time?”
“That was one time,” Anakin shot back, rote. Get one shoe thrown at you mid-illegal-lightsaber-skirmish in the library and no one ever let you forget it. Him and Aayla had set their blades to training strength; Anakin’s swipe hadn’t even singed the shoe, just batted it back the way it came. “Come on, Master – tell me about the mission.”
“My, my,” Qui-Gon said, in that tone that meant he was going to be difficult for no reason other than his own perverse enjoyment. “I’m getting a strong sense of déjà-vu, my young padawan. Not wanting to read your own textbooks, whining at me for hours until I agreed to read them aloud – ”
“Master,” Anakin grumbled, but there was no rancor in it, and no malice in the way Qui-Gon was teasing him. He knew, just like Anakin knew he knew, that he’d wanted Qui-Gon to read to him because his mother used to read to him, on Tatooine. Because his life had suddenly become enormous and unfamiliar to him, empty of the things that he knew, and he wanted Qui-Gon to give him something he recognized.
Qui-Gon’s eyes softened, but he still didn’t give Anakin the answers he wanted. “Why do you want to know?” he asked, instead.
“I ran into one of them on my last mission,” Anakin said, stilted. He didn’t know why, but Obi-Wan was something he didn’t want to talk about with other people. He didn’t think they’d understand. “He saved my life.”
“Ah,” Qui-Gon said, and poured them both another round of Corellian brandy. “I know that look, padawan. I’d advise against falling in hopeless love with a Wandering Jedi; chances are you’ll never see him again.”
“Hopeless love,” Anakin echoed indignantly – he was sitting on his master’s couch, in his master’s apartments, getting chided for ill-advised crushes; it all felt very fourteen.
“Yes,” Qui-Gon said, shameless, “this is an even worse idea than when you decided to ask out Senator Amidala – do you remember that?”
Did Anakin remember the most mortifying rejection of his life. Honestly. “Master,” he said, exhausted, desperate to get this conversation back on track. “Could you just tell me about the mission? Please?”
Qui-Gon held out for another moment, eyes crinkling with poorly-concealed amusement, and then he took pity.
The jedi he’d met, he said, was a Master known only as Dark Woman, who – judging by the quelling look Qui-Gon shot Anakin when he snorted at the name – had more than earned her moniker.
Qui-Gon had been sent into a warzone to extract a neutral team of negotiators who’d been trapped, caught in the crossfire when war broke out anew. The fighting had been so intense, he remembered – with a note in his voice like he wasn’t all there, in the room with Anakin, like part of him was back on that battlefield – that Qui-Gon had only barely made it to them before he was trapped as well, caught between two opposing forces, both of which were shooting anything that moved, even a jedi knight waving a white flag.
“We were there for twenty days,” Qui-Gon said grimly. “Twenty days – eight of us, in a mud hole in the ground. It was the best I could do. We had no food, no provisions, no cover, nothing. We had to lie as flat as we could to keep from getting shot, and at night we could see the artillery firing over us, and the ships fighting in the atmosphere. I still have dreams, sometimes, about that light show. It was only my second solo mission as a knight, and I thought I was going to die there.”
Anakin stayed quiet. He never liked when Qui-Gon talked about being afraid, about being unsure. It always reminded him of when he used to hear his mom crying in the other room late at night, trying to hide it from him.
Qui-Gon took a long, bracing drink of brandy. “It was on the twenty-first day,” he said, “that Dark Woman arrived.”
And then he told Anakin a story he could barely believe.
##
##
##
Pain, the Dark Woman used to tell Obi-Wan, when he was still her padawan, is not real. Pain is in the body. Hunger is in the body. Exhaustion is in the body. Desire is in the body. And the body is not real. Only the Force is real. You will learn this, and then – only then – will you be a true jedi.
Obi-Wan is in a hell of a lot of pain by the time he makes it to where the Force wants him to go, a narrow back alley in Mokk’s capital city, but he reminds himself that pain is in the body, that it is only the result of his own failure, that the will of the Force is more important – that whatever purpose the Force has brought him here for is more important – and he releases his resistance to that pain into the Force. He’s been shot twice, and he’s fairly certain his right ankle is fractured if not broken, but he no longer has any quarrel with this. If his body wants to hurt, it will hurt, and he can deal with it later, when he has time to lick his wounds and curl up in shame – for now, he has to find the bio-bomb the Incumbent has planted beneath her own city.
The noise of the constant revelry is distant enough that he knows he won’t be interrupted, at least not by accident, or by a civilian. Obi-Wan crouches in the alley’s puddles, getting ready to phase down into the storm drains below – it will take most of his strength, he realizes as he begins, to get through the rock, and then even more of his strength to swim once he’s in the raging river, and for a moment he’s afraid that he won’t come back from this, that this, here, will be where he dies – alone, underwater, in an unfamiliar city – but he releases the fear as swiftly as it comes and focuses on the task at hand.
His fingertips are just starting to sink through the stone when there’s a shout at the end of the alley, and he looks up to see that the Incumbent’s commandos have found him.
He draws his saber and stands in one fluid motion, ready for battle –
Then hears two more sabers ignite, and watches the commandos fall before they can get off a single shot.
The Force-presence at the end of the alley is familiar. A welcome familiar.
Obi-Wan douses his lightsaber and puts it back on his belt as Anakin Skywalker steps over the two dead bodies, his Force-signature radiating violence and concern. “Obi-Wan?” he calls, and then he spots him.
A grin breaks out over his face, and Obi-Wan’s heart gives a hard sideways beat before he can help it. Anakin covers the length of the alleyway in three quick strides and clasps Obi-Wan’s shoulders, still grinning like he’s happy to see him, and Obi-Wan wants – nonsensically, since he’s never had much occasion for physical affection – to seize him in a hug, to bury his face against the man’s shoulder, to let Anakin take some of his weight. The desire comes out of nowhere, and makes no sense. There is no one who has ever taken Obi-Wan’s weight.
So instead of any of that, he clasps Anakin’s shoulders in return and says, “Master Skywalker. I suppose this makes us even.”
“Even,” Anakin echoes, incredulous. “Two guys who weren’t even looking the right way does not make us even. How many slavers did you kill for me?”
“It’s impolite to keep count,” Obi-Wan returns.
“Uh, Skyguy?” says the other jedi, who’s keeping watch at the end of the alley – a Togruta girl with an unimpressed expression who Obi-Wan can feel at once, from the training bond stretched between them, is Anakin’s padawan. “We’re about to have company. Lotta company.”
“Copy that, Snips,” Anakin says, and then to Obi-Wan: “We should get out of here.”
“Can’t,” Obi-Wan tells him, apologetically. “The Force brought me here – there’s a bomb.”
“A bomb,” Anakin repeats, like he doesn’t know what that means.
Obi-Wan’s wounded, freezing, and soaked to the bone, but he still raises an eyebrow. “Yes, a bomb,” he says. “You know what those are. They’re very dangerous. They go ‘boom.’ This one happens to be loaded with enough aerosolized Candorian plague to kill the entire planet, so I think it’s best if we disarm it.”
Anakin gives him a look like, You can’t fucking be serious.
“Master?” the Togrutan girl calls, bouncing on her heels, getting urgent.
“Yeah, Ahsoka, I hear you,” Anakin calls back. He takes his lightsaber out again, asks Obi-Wan, “So where is this bomb we’re supposed to disarm?”
Obi-Wan nods to the ground beneath their feet.
Anakin looks down, then looks back up at him. “If your plan is to slash your way through three meters of solid rock with your saber, I have to warn you – I’ve tried that, and it definitely didn’t work last time.”
“You’ve tried that,” Obi-Wan says fondly. “Why am I not surprised?”
Anakin opens his mouth to defend himself, but before he can, Obi-Wan cuts in, “No, that’s not my plan. Obviously. If you would be so kind as to hold off that company we’re about to have, I will get to my plan, and then we can all get the hell out of here.”
Well – likely Obi-Wan will be dead in the storm drain, but the planet will be saved and Anakin and Ahsoka will be able to get the hell out of here. Now doesn’t seem like the best time to mince words, though, so he doesn’t say that.
“MASTER!” Ahsoka yells, with real irritation.
There are enough commandos swarming towards the alley that they’re shoving all the fluorescent-green revelers out of the sloped streets, a wall of plain black moving through the colorful orgy of the festival.
“After this,” Anakin tells Obi-Wan, as he ignites his saber, “we’ll be even.”
Then he goes to stand with his padawan against the onslaught.
Obi-Wan lingers for a moment, watching them as the first commandos reach them and they begin to fight. He already knew Anakin was an impressive swordsman – he saw that much in the slavers’ den, even if Anakin was half-dead and working with one arm at the time – but there’s something about watching him now that strikes a deep chord in Obi-Wan, and he doesn’t realize why until Anakin steps forward to block a commando who would’ve overwhelmed Ahsoka before she was ready. He’s not coddling her, he’s not treating her like he doesn’t trust her to hold her own, and it’s subtle enough that Ahsoka herself probably doesn’t even realize it, but Obi-Wan was raised by a master who threw him to the wolves with bloodless, unemotional regularity, who believed that pain and fear were important teachers, who never once stopped a blow from landing on her padawan.
He knows a protective fighting stance when he sees it. And it feels like a betrayal of his master’s teachings even to think it – a failure even to think it, an unimaginable weakness – but for a moment, standing in that alley, Obi-Wan wishes he knew what it was like, to have someone defend him.
Then he kneels, and phases through the ground.
##
##
##
“Did he just…?” Ahsoka asks breathlessly, in the lull between attacks.
Anakin stares at the spot where Obi-Wan just full-on disappeared, trying and failing to pick his jaw up off the floor. Ahsoka rests her fingers under his chin and not-so-gently closes it for him, his teeth connecting with a snap. It’s a good thing his tongue was out of the way or she’d have chopped it off.
Anakin swallows, and manages to recover. “I don’t fucking know, Snips,” he says tiredly, when he does. “I never fucking know with this guy, he’s a goddamned enigma,” and then the next wave of commandos are on them, blasters whining, and they have to turn their attention back to the fight.
##
##
##
Obi-Wan doesn’t expect to survive.
By the time he makes it to the bomb, there is very little strength left in him – he has to reach deep to find it, down the dry, desiccated well of his empty reserves, into the mud, the bedrock of his very existence.
The bomb is fixed to the underside of the street, the ceiling of the storm drain. Obi-Wan hauls himself out of the raging river with a combination of the Force and upper arm strength, then jams his shoulder into a crevice and wedges his feet into the stonework to keep himself up, ignoring every nerve-ending in his body screaming at once. He can ignore the blaster wounds, but his fractured ankle is going to give out on him if he takes too long – so he hurries, as much as one can hurry when defusing a highly sensitive weapon of mass destruction.
It’s a complicated firing mechanism, a complicated detonator. Obi-Wan’s never had any formal training in disarming explosives – Dark Woman believed in learning by doing when it came to these sorts of skills, lock picking and piloting and the like, so he mostly taught himself – and he quickly realizes that he’s in over his head. He has less than a minute, he’s not more than halfway through defusing the blasted thing, and the next step is a triple-redundancy that he doesn’t know how to bypass, hooked into a failsafe.
“Kark,” he mutters to himself – voice silent under the roar of water in the storm drain – and does the only thing he can think to do: he closes his eyes, and lets the Force rush into him and through him, trusting it to show him the way.
And it does. But instead of what he’s expecting, which is for the Force to guide his hand – instead, he feels a touch against his mind, like a training bond except not forceful, not an intrusion the way it always was with Dark Woman.
Anakin, he realizes – somehow, without guidance, without the formal establishment of a bond, their minds are linked, at least enough that Obi-Wan can show Anakin what he’s dealing with. And he does, holding the image in his mind as steadily as he can, and he gets back almost at once a sharp jab of panic like oh, fuck, and then a second later – as Anakin processes what he’s seeing and works through it in (Obi-Wan can feel, through the temporary bond) the middle of a three-way fight, unarmed, with men who have managed not to drop their own weapons – he shows Obi-Wan what to do.
Obi-Wan cuts the yellow wire.
Before he can see whether the bomb deactivates, his ankle gives out, and he drops into the raging current. Something bumps against him, something metal caught up in the flow, and he recognizes it even without seeing it and without really touching it, and grabs it, and holds onto it even as the storm drain carries him down towards the sea.
For a moment, stuck underwater, without the strength to get himself back to the surface, Obi-Wan gives in to fear, to loneliness, and reaches out to Anakin again.
Obi-Wan? he hears Anakin ask, in his mind, and it sounds very far away, like Anakin’s talking to him from another room, another building, but he thinks he hears a note of alarm. Where are you? What’s happening?
I’m sorry, Obi-Wan manages to send back. I’m sorry. I don’t want to die alone.
Kark that, Anakin sends back, already running, scanning the streets for a manhole.
Obi-Wan’s vision goes dark. He surrenders to the current.
A moment later, something plunges into the water ahead of him.
There are hands on him, pulling at him as the current rips them along through the stone drainage tunnels, and for a moment Obi-Wan thinks he should fight – there’s a dull flash of panic at the back of his mind, muffled by his complete inability to do anything about it – and then he feels Anakin’s mind against his again, warming him like that first touch of sunlight after a long night outside, wrapping around him like a clean, dry blanket, and he stops fighting. Those hands tighten, and he feels Anakin’s legs kicking under the water, and then they break the surface – Anakin hauling Obi-Wan bodily above the raging water, spluttering and shouting, “Breathe, Obi-Wan, don’t fucking do this to me – breathe!” and Obi-Wan coughs up a mouthful of water, limp in his hands, and does.
Ahsoka’s waiting for them a few manholes down with a rope – Anakin grabs it as they float by, holding onto Obi-Wan with his metal hand like he’s more worried about losing his grip on him than losing his grip on rope, and with a combination of the Force and Ahsoka leaning her whole body weight against the rope, she and Anakin manage to haul Obi-Wan’s useless carcass out of the drain.
Obi-Wan lands flat on his back and stays there, staring up at the sky, the rain still spiraling down towards him. A raindrop lands in his eye, but he hasn’t even got the energy to blink it out.
Anakin pushes up from where he’s sprawled on top of him, drenched and breathing hard.
Obi-Wan dredges up enough strength to turn his eyes to look at him.
Anakin’s weight is on him, but he’s up on his elbows to make sure he’s not crushing him, and his hands are in Obi-Wan’s hair, fingers combing it out of his face, over and over like, even though he doesn’t have the breath to ask, he needs to make sure Obi-Wan is okay. This is the man whose cloak Obi-Wan’s been wearing for months now, the first person in his life who’s ever invited him home.
It’s probably good, Obi-Wan thinks, that he’s dying. At least this way, if the only thing he ever does in Anakin’s arms is die in them, he keeps his dubious record as a good – not perfect, but at least passable – jedi.
“Obi-Wan,” he realizes Anakin’s saying, as the rushing in his ears dies down – he’s petting his wet hair more frantically now, setting his warm palm on the side of Obi-Wan’s face. “Obi-Wan – hey, baby, talk to me. Are you alright? Are you hurt anywhere else?”
“Baby?” he hears someone echo, incredulous.
Obi-Wan realizes that he’s still clutching something tightly in his hand – the metal thing he fished out of the water, that he recognized by touch alone. With the uttermost ends of his strength, he manages to raise his arm, showing Anakin his own lightsaber.
“You really should hold onto this,” he says, slurring.
Then he’s gone.
##
##
##
Over the past few weeks – when there isn’t a twenty-four hour rave going on outside, when he’s actually able to sleep – Anakin’s been having a lot of nightmares about Obi-Wan dying. About nothing but a cloak and a lightsaber, sitting on the ground. No body, no trace.
Mostly he wakes up from those nightmares angry, so angry he has to prowl down to the training salles and throw around whoever’s unlucky enough to be awake and sparring at that hour – because he’s karked up, and when he’s really fucking afraid it just translates to rage, and the scariest thing in the world to him after one of those nightmares is that their subject could be anywhere in the karking galaxy and Anakin has no way of finding him.
And now Obi-Wan is here, in his arms, under his hands, and Anakin’s losing him anyway.
So his first and strongest thought, when Obi-Wan’s eyes slip closed, when Anakin feels his heart stop, is a furious, vehement, No.
He shoves that No at Obi-Wan as hard as he can, an injection of pure, raging Force energy.
For a moment nothing happens. The rain thunders around them, and the river of runoff in the storm drain thunders underneath, and the city goes on singing and dancing in celebration, with no idea that the man who saved it just died in Anakin’s arms.
“No,” Anakin says again, out loud this time, and draws back a fist.
“Master – ” Ahsoka says, jolting forward.
Anakin pounds Obi-Wan as hard as he can in the chest.
And Obi-Wan gasps back to life.
Eyes that were blank a second ago are lucid now, as blue and sharp as the day Anakin first saw him. Obi-Wan's gaze darts around like he doesn’t know where he is, like he really did just come back from somewhere else, frantic and afraid, and Anakin holds his face again and says, “Hey, hey, there you are. Look at me, baby, right at me – there you go. Right at me. And breathe, all right? Just breathe,” and Obi-Wan's airless mouth closes, and he sucks in a breath through his nose, terrified and unsure, like the first breath a baby takes out of the womb.
“There you go,” Anakin says again, smiling, really smiling, air on his teeth and a trembling rush of joy in his chest, “there you go, there you are. Come on, come back to me,” and after a few uncertain breaths, he feels – thank the Force, he thinks, thank the fucking Force – Obi-Wan’s hands gripping his cloak.
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan says. “Master.”
Anakin feels a stab of alarm over his and Ahsoka’s training bond, irritation that another jedi would call him that, but he ignores it, too overwhelmed to do anything but lean his forehead against Obi-Wan’s and feel him breathe.
Obi-Wan, he learns in short order, after Obi-Wan drifts off again – just unconscious this time, not dead – has two blaster wounds he didn’t bother mentioning, one in the shoulder and one in his side, a few inches shy of being a fatal gut shot. Anakin doesn’t see any more wounds just looking at him, but he assumes there are probably more – and Obi-Wan’s nearly hypothermic besides, his lips blue, skin pale as wax, shivering in Anakin’s cloak, which Anakin realizes is his cloak, still, only when he’s hefting Obi-Wan into his arms to carry him back to their rooms.
Ahsoka’s sullen, not talking to him as they tromp back the way they came, but she’s uninjured, alive, which makes her anger a secondary priority. Right now, what Anakin has to take care of is Obi-Wan.
Luckily Obi-Wan stirs again once they’re inside, because Anakin doesn’t actually draw the line at changing another man’s clothes while he’s unconscious – desperate times, and anyways he feels as if, with Obi-Wan, he has the right – but he thinks that he probably should. Obi-Wan still isn’t talking much, not his usual charming self, but he sits on the edge of Anakin’s bed and manages to get out of his soggy clothes, while Anakin brings him dry ones. He doesn’t have any that are strictly clean – laundry on this world involves taking your clothes down to the river and scrubbing them out manually, and he hasn’t had the energy, or the desire – but he’s sort of glad now, perversely, animalistically, that Obi-Wan will smell like him. That he’ll smell like he sleeps in Anakin’s bed.
Anakin comes back with bacta Snips dug out of their med kit while Obi-Wan’s still changing, hunched over shirtless, like it’s taken all the wind out of him just getting that far. His arms are in Anakin’s shirt, and he seems to be working himself up to lifting it over his head.
“Here,” Anakin says softly, and comes across the room to kneel in front of him. “Let me, alright? But let me get some bacta on you first.”
Obi-Wan nods, then stares at the tin of bacta as Anakin unscrews the lid.
Anakin hesitates, heart lurching abruptly. “What,” he says, trying and, he thinks, probably failing to affect a light tone, “don’t tell me you’ve never seen bacta before, either.”
Please don’t tell me that, he thinks, and he can tell from Obi-Wan’s sharp look that he must get some of that – at least an echo – over what’s left of their earlier bond.
“I’ve seen bacta,” Obi-Wan says. His voice is still rough. “Used it, even. But it’s – very expensive. And…I’m not often in a position to acquire it.” He must see the stricken look on Anakin’s face – Anakin, who’s thinking of the Halls of Healing, with their endless rows of bacta tanks, their stores full of unopened tins – because he adds, a second later, “It’s alright.”
“That’s not alright,” Anakin says, and his own voice is as rough as Obi-Wan’s. “Kark, Obi-Wan, in what world is that possibly alright?”
“There are other ways,” Obi-Wan says, “for a jedi to heal. Faster ways, even.”
“Faster ways?” Anakin echoes.
Obi-Wan takes one of Anakin’s hands – the flesh one – and places it over the blaster wound on his side. Anakin is too preoccupied with the feeling of Obi-Wan’s side under his hands – skin cold still, too cold, and his ribs are too skinny, Anakin can see them – to wonder what he’s doing, until Obi-Wan closes his eyes, and Anakin feels the Force draw inward around him suddenly, like something’s sucked all the air out of the room. And slowly – nauseatingly – the burnt flesh under Anakin’s palm starts to knit back together, twisting, tickling, healing itself.
Obi-Wan’s face is serene, but through their bond, Anakin can feel his pain. It’s excruciating.
“Obi-Wan,” he says, and shakes him – it’s probably not wise, he doesn’t know what will happen if Obi-Wan stops mid-wound healing, but he has to make him stop and the only way he can think is to shock him out of it. “Obi-Wan, you karking idiot, stop.”
Obi-Wan stops, blinking up at him. His eyelashes are so long. Anakin wants to kiss him, very badly, but his gut is still roiling with the memory of that pain, so instead he says, “That’s a fucking battlefield tactic, speeding up weeks of healing like that. You’re only supposed to use it if you really karking need to. When you can’t afford to spend a week laid up in bed.”
Obi-Wan gives him a look that’s slightly condescending. “Anakin,” he says gently, “you’re very kind, but this bed is the first one I’ve been in for a very, very long time.”
Anakin’s brain short-circuits. It just refuses to accept what he’s hearing.
After a second he manages to ask, “Then where the kark do you sleep?”
Obi-Wan shrugs, and because he’s a demon who doesn’t give a shit about the state of Anakin’s heart, he says – casually, like it’s no concern at all, “Wherever I can find a place. In trees, sometimes. A bench, if there’s a clear one. Some religious temples will take in wanderers, let me sleep on an extra mat, give me a hot meal. These last few nights, I slept under the Statue of the Speaker, in the town square.”
“You slept under a statue,” Anakin echoes dully. All he can hear is white noise, thundering in his ears. All he can think about is himself, on those same nights Obi-Wan is talking about - nights when he slept rough, when Anakin was here, tossing and turning in bed, thinking dark thoughts about fireworks and taking his dry, warm bed for granted.
“It’s alright, truly,” Obi-Wan says again, cautiously, like he thinks Anakin’s the one in need of reassurance here. “Pain is not real. Exhaustion is not real. There is no body – there is the Force.”
“Who taught you that?” Anakin demands, even though he can guess – the same karked-up master who told him he can’t go back to the Temple, can’t ask for help, can’t requisition new cloaks. “Who the fuck taught you that?”
Obi-Wan looks at him uncertainly.
Anakin gets his anger under control. He gets a leash on it, so Obi-Wan can’t see it any more, even if it’s still raging under the surface, a black tempest pinned behind the threadbare restraints of his shields.
In the other room, he can feel Ahsoka shielding against their bond, trying to stop that roiling storm from washing over into her, and he can hear her busying herself in the kitchen, trying not to let herself get dragged into what’s happening in the bedroom. Anakin can’t decide for a moment whether he’s angry with her for not helping or grateful to her for staying out of things, for leaving him alone in here with Obi-Wan – because Obi-Wan, he’s beginning more and more to believe, is his. Obi-Wan’s master had their chance, and they fucked it up spectacularly. He’s Anakin’s now.
“Lie down,” he says to Obi-Wan, when the anger has passed. “You’ve got a bed this time, so we’ll do things my way. Bacta, and sleep.”
The flicker of a smile touches Obi-Wan’s lips. “Well,” he says, “if those are the doctor’s orders.”
Anakin’s so relieved to hear a quip out of him, even if it’s a piss-poor one, that he could shout.
Instead, he dips his fingers in bacta and smears it over the half-healed blaster wound on Obi-Wan’s side. Obi-Wan’s shoulder is in shadow, Anakin can’t see well enough to apply the bacta there, so he opens the curtains to let more light in, the gray light of a perpetually rainy day, and as it touches Obi-Wan’s skin, that anger comes back in an instant, tenfold, choking.
There are lightning scars on Obi-Wan’s chest.
Anakin can’t even say anything. His throat’s closed up. There are tears in his eyes.
Obi-Wan frowns at him like he doesn’t understand. Like he doesn’t even think about the scars anymore, like they don’t even matter. But Anakin knows a few jedi who’ve fallen afoul of dark Force powers like that, and he knows what the aftermath is like – nerve damage, spasms, and chronic pain forever, which is not to mention the psychological effects – and here Obi-Wan is, asking, “Anakin?” blankly, like it’s nothing.
“Force, Obi-Wan,” Anakin breathes, the tears overspilling. “Who did that to you?”
For a second Obi-Wan doesn’t understand. “The same men you just fought and killed,” he says, lightly, smiling, like he thinks they can move past this with a fucking joke. “Surely you remember? Just now, in the drains. There was a bomb, I heroically defused it – ”
“You defused it,” Anakin scoffs, automatic.
“Alright, we defused it,” Obi-Wan amends gracefully. “So you do remember – ”
“Obi-Wan,” Anakin says again, interrupting him. This time Obi-Wan must sense that he’s serious, that the blaster wounds weren’t what Anakin was talking about, because the smile drops. “Who did that to you? Please tell me.”
“It was my own fault,” Obi-Wan says, instead of answering. “I wasn’t fast enough. Pain is an excellent teacher.”
“Your master did this to you,” Anakin infers numbly.
And Obi-Wan – doesn’t deny it.
Anakin remembers sitting in Qui-Gon’s quarters, listening to that story about Dark Woman, the Wandering Jedi. When she’d arrived, she’d felled the first hundred ranks of each army in an unholy hail of Force lightning. It was a power I had believed, until then, was reserved only for the Sith, Qui-Gon had told him, brandy in hand, with a faraway look in his eyes. I’m still not entirely convinced it isn’t.
Obi-Wan’s still staring up at him, waiting, propped on his elbows in Anakin’s bed. Anakin pulls himself together enough to smear bacta on the other blaster wound, on Obi-Wan’s shoulder, then wipes his fingers clean on his pants and puts the lid back on the tin.
When he’s finished he sits on the edge of the bed with his back to Obi-Wan, staring at the wall, not thinking anything but also thinking a million things at once. The Order can’t know that this is happening in their name. They can’t know that there are jedi who live like this, who raise padawans like this – or they’d do something to stop it. Anakin’s had his quarrels with the Council, but he has to believe that much, at least – that they wouldn’t let a jedi Master, no matter who she is, torture her own padawan and call it teaching. He thinks of Snips, even as mad at him as she is right now – Snips, who’s been his responsibility since she was karking eleven, who even if she whines about him sometimes, calls him an idiot, looks up to him and trusts him to take care of her and relies on him to guide her. He thinks about Obi-Wan looking at someone the same way, and that person turning around and hurting him, and how long it went on, and why Obi-Wan never did anything to stop it, if maybe he thought it was the only way, the normal way. Or worse, if he knew it wasn’t, and thought that he didn’t deserve anything better. That it was the only way for him.
“I’m taking you home with me,” he says, without turning around. “Back to the Temple. If you want, we can fight about it, but I’m taking you whether you come willingly or not.”
Obi-Wan’s quiet for a moment, then tries, “I go where the Force – ”
“Yeah, well, even slaves get a few days off every now and then,” Anakin says, meanly. “You’re taking a vacation. If the Force has a problem with that, it can take it up with me.”
He can feel Obi-Wan’s presence behind him, hesitant, and wills him not to protest again. If it really does come down to a fight – if Anakin has to hold him down and sedate him – he’ll do it, but he’s not sure he’ll be able to forgive himself after. If Obi-Wan will be able to forgive him.
Although, from the looks of things, Obi-Wan is capable of forgiving a hell of a lot worse.
But finally Obi-Wan sighs, almost exasperated, and says, “You’re very difficult, Anakin, you know that?”
Anakin turns to look at him. He’s smiling faintly, like someone whose fever’s just broken, someone tentatively coming back to life after a long illness. “I’ve always been curious to see the Temple, anyway,” Obi-Wan offers.
Anakin takes Obi-Wan’s head in his hands and kisses his forehead before he can stop himself.
Obi-Wan accepts this indignity gracefully, though he tenses, and when Anakin murmurs against his skin, “Thank you, thank you,” rubbing his thumbs over Obi-Wan’s cheekbones – he accepts that indignity gracefully as well.
Out in the other room, the front door slams.
##
Ahsoka comes back a few hours later, while Obi-Wan is sleeping, with dinner. She finds Anakin sitting next to his bed in the dark – the rain pounding outside, drowning out the rest of the world – and stands in the door for a long minute, a faceless shadow, before she says, “You need to eat.”
Anakin’s loath to leave Obi-Wan alone, even if he’s only one room away – he feels like a flight risk, still, and that’s not even to mention the protective monster that’s come to life in Anakin’s chest – but Ahsoka’s right, he does need to eat, so he goes.
At the table, silently and resentfully working her way through a carton of something that’s still wriggling, Ahsoka won’t meet his eyes. She’s bought him the same, probably because she’s still pissed at him, but also a carton of noodles that means she’s not so pissed she’s not willing to let him apologize. And he knows there’s an apology he should make, not about some strange kid calling him Master but about the way he must have felt to her, over their bond, when Obi-Wan did.
But tonight he can’t. So tonight they eat in silence, and then Anakin goes back into his room, into the stuffy warmth and the blanketing, cradling noise of the rain. They’ve stopped with the fireworks, and the revelry, and the street outside is dark and silent. In bed Obi-Wan is asleep.
Anakin wants to crawl in with him.
Instead, he sits back in his chair, takes back up his vigil. Ahsoka lingers in the doorway for another minute, and he can feel her hurt and her irritation in the Force, over their bond, but he doesn’t follow her when she goes.
Something wafts in through the open window and catches his nose wrong, and he sneezes.
Obi-Wan sits up in bed, abruptly awake.
For a moment he just stares at Anakin in the dark. Not like he’s remembering where he is, or who he’s with, just – looking, like he likes the shape of him. Like he wants to look.
When he lies back down, he holds the blankets open, a clear invitation.
Anakin hesitates for a moment, in his chair. He knows that he shouldn’t. He knows that Obi-Wan isn’t in a place right now to make those decisions, that he’s been through a lot, that Anakin’s put himself in a position of care, of power over him. Obi-Wan’s first instinct, when he came back from the dead, was to call Anakin Master.
“Come on,” Obi-Wan prods after a minute, lips quirking – voice tinged with just a hint of uncertainty, like he thinks there’s a chance he might be rejected. Like Anakin could ever reject him. “You swore to me you weren’t malfunctioning down there.”
Anakin huffs. He has, he thinks, been utterly outmaneuvered, by the very fact of this man’s existence.
“Just to sleep,” he hedges, standing to close the door. “You’re injured, and you’re out of your goddamn mind, and I don’t take people to bed who don’t know what they’re getting into.”
“Alright,” Obi-Wan agrees peacably, eyes tracking Anakin in the dark. “Just to sleep.”
He’s gorgeous. He’s alive. He is, without a doubt, the most dangerous thing that has ever happened to Anakin.
But Anakin slips off his robe, and goes to him.
##