Work Text:
Anakin hasn’t seen Obi-Wan look this stressed since the Chancellor-Elect, Bail Organa, tried to publicly give him a commemorative medal of valor for the actions he took to take down Darth Sidious. It’s not an expression he’s missed on his old master’s face.
Especially because he has the feeling that he is about to bear the brunt of all of Obi-Wan’s frustrations. Which is rather unfair given that only a quarter of the blame for their current situation can be laid directly at Anakin’s feet.
Maybe a half.
Alright, maybe three-fourths of the blame, but someone is going to have to remind Obi-Wan that he had a part to play in this whole thing because his face is turning an alarming shade of red as he stares at the smoldering wreck of their ship.
“Now, Master,” Anakin says, holding both hands out as if to calm a raging buni beast. Obi-Wan raises both eyebrows in response. One eyebrow is bad enough. Both is like a declaration of intent to murder.
“Sorry, Anakin, come closer, please. I can hardly hear you over the sounds of our ship—the only viable means we have of leaving this planet intact and on time—exploding.”
“Put down the lightsaber and maybe I will,” Anakin says, even though he’s pretty sure Obi-Wan would never actually hurt him. After all it’s only been eight months since they ended the war expressly because Obi-Wan took one look at Anakin, on the very edge of Falling and committing several atrocities at Sidious’ behest, and tossed away his weapon instead of lighting it.
But then again, it has been eight whole months since then. And Anakin maybe—just perhaps—crashed their ship into the depths of a jungle planet because he got a little too distracted staring at Obi-Wan’s sleeping profile in the seat next to him.
So, really—the blame should rest equally on both their shoulders. Yes, maybe Anakin shouldn’t have crashed the ship. But Obi-Wan should have warned him he planned to neaten out the lines of his beard at least a few days in advance. It’s hardly fair, springing something like that onto a guy.
Obi-Wan, for his part, gapes at Anakin and puts his hands on his hips. “I’m not going to attack you!” He squawks, sounding puffed up and furious and just a hair genuinely wounded, which makes Anakin feel even worse than he already had.
“I know that,” Anakin is quick to say, striding around a burning piece of ship so that he can place a comforting hand on Obi-Wan’s shoulder. They’ve started doing that more lately, touching each other. It’s nice, but sort of the way a drop of water is nice after you’ve spent three days in the Jundland Wastelands on Tatooine without anything; nice but not nearly enough.
Obi-Wan crosses his arms and turns to look back at the smoldering wreckage of their ship. “Not yet at least. I have a feeling we can scavenge for food in the surrounding areas. If there’s nothing suitable on the trees and you can’t catch an animal to roast over the fumes from my ship, then I’ll revisit the idea.”
Anakin is relatively sure Obi-Wan is joking, but he’s also relatively sure that jokes about survival cannibalism are a relatively slipperly slope. Still, there’s no place Obi-Wan will go that Anakin won’t follow, so he says, “Doesn’t sound too bad. What’s another arm for a good cause?” He waves his mech hand—ungloved for once—in Obi-Wan’s face. “Dooku didn’t even eat the first one. I’ve always said it, no appreciation for his craft.”
This earns him a delightfully sour side-eye from his master, paired with Obi-Wan turning his back on him in a way that means he’s trying to hide a smile. “Distasteful,” he sneers, because he’s in the sort of mood where he wants to argue to relieve his stress but finds himself once more incapable of actually arguing the way normal people argue.
Anakin for his part thinks he’s being quite mature and tasteful by not taking the opportunity to provide Obi-Wan with a long and detailed list of Anakin’s body parts he'd be welcome to eat first.
Still, as much as he loves his prickly master who has given into the urge to run his hands through his hair no less than four times already and looks quite disheveled as a result, he loves an Obi-Wan who appreciates him for saving the day a little bit more.
“I have my comm-unit on me, Obi-Wan,” he says, going for soothing and coming out a bit too smug. “Look, we’ll just send the Council a message and request immediate extraction. It’s not as if they’re doing much these days.”
Obi-Wan swings around to look at him incredulously. His hands have their way back to his hips. “Not doing much—”
Anakin holds up his hands again. He forgets, sometimes, that his old master is technically on the Jedi Council and knee-deep in whatever Jedi Council politics and such that they’re a part of. He shouldn’t, obviously, given the fact that he spent at least a year and a half wanting desperately to be on that Council as well. But that was mostly because Obi-Wan was there. And Palpatine convinced him he deserved to be there too.
“Compared to coordinating the Republic’s defenses against the Separatists,” Anakin says quickly, and Obi-Wan gives him a narrowed-eyed look, but he at least holds out his hand in askance for Anakin’s comm-unit.
“I can draft the message,” Anakin tells him, pulling his comm-unit from his belt. “It’s my comm unit.”
“It’s also your shipwreck,” Obi-Wan replies bitingly, and Anakin would be more upset if he hadn’t seen the broken-open look of pure fear and worry Obi-Wan had worn when Anakin had been coming to consciousness after the ship made impact.
His master’s sharp tongue is little more than an attempt to cover his genuine fear for Anakin’s life, and these petty insults are nothing like the vitriol Obi-Wan had spat at Sidious in the Chancellor’s office during the final hours of the war.
“I’ve got it,” Anakin says, standing firm though because it’s very important that Obi-Wan sees him as a fully-formed and capable individual who maybe he’d like to kiss one day. Preferably one day soon.
Except the entire universe does not seem to be on the same wavelength as him on this matter, because the moment he looks down at his comm device, his stomach drops. “Oh kriff.”
“What?”
“There’s no signal,” Anakin says, looking up at Obi-Wan with a grimace. “Something must have hit it on the way down, knocked a piece of its machinery loose within the device.”
Obi-Wan’s lips thin, but only one eyebrow raises, which means there’s a chance of Anakin still getting out of this alive. “Well then,” his former master says. “It’s a good thing I let you enroll in all those extracurricular mechanical classes even though I thought you should focus more on refining your diplomatic skills, hm?”
“Right, well,” Anakin says, wincing because he doesn’t need a class in diplomacy to understand a warning when he hears one, “I don’t exactly carry a small-tools set with me in my belt all the time, Obi-Wan. The one I had was on the ship, which—”
The remnants of the ship give a loud pop as the fire from the crash burns into some piece of machinery or another.
Obi-Wan pinches at the bridge of his nose for a moment. “So the comm-unit is dead.”
“It’s not dead, just—it’s not got a signal, so—”
“So effectively,” Obi-Wan interrupts, which is so rude that Anakin almost wants to tell him maybe he should take a refresher course on diplomacy once they make it back to the Temple, “the comm-unit is dead. And our ship’s tracking functions probably stopped the moment it hit the ground.”
“Probably,” Anakin agrees and decides that a winning smile can’t hurt the present situation, so he gives Obi-Wan his most charming and boyish grin that always worked on his ex-wife.
Not that Obi-Wan is in any way like his ex-wife, of course. Apart from all the ways that they’re startlingly similar.
And yet Obi-Wan doesn’t melt at the sight of his smile. Instead, his expression drops from annoyance to pure horror, which feels like a bit of an overreaction.
Anakin frowns, subtly running his tongue over his top and bottom teeth to make sure they’re all present and accounted for. “What?”
“Oh Force,” Obi-Wan says, as if he’s been hit in the chest. His hand comes up to press against his lips. He’d looked less panicked facing down Darth Sidious. Anakin tries not to feel offended. “They’re going to think we left the Order.”
The words take a moment to compute, and even when they do, Anakin’s sure he’s heard wrong. “What?”
“They’re going to think we left the Order!” Obi-Wan repeats, hands flying up to run through his hair. Anakin can’t even appreciate it though, for fear that his master has a heretofore undiscovered head injury.
“No one is going to think we left the Order,” Anakin says, catching one of Obi-Wan’s wrists and shaking it slightly. He tries for comforting: “They’ll probably think we died first.”
“Oh, I would hope so!” Obi-Wan snaps, but he doesn’t sound like he’s kidding at all. In fact, he sounds very serious. “But no, they won’t because someone joked to Kit Fisto two weeks ago that he’d never file the official paperwork to leave the Order when he could instead take a ship on a low-stakes mission, crash it and disappear forever so if he decided he made a mistake years later, he could return to the Temple without having to fill out more paperwork to request he be able to rejoin!”
Anakin blinks.
He hadn’t realized Obi-Wan could hear him. He hadn’t even realized Obi-Wan was in the room at the time, which is rather odd considering he’s usually hyperaware anytime he enters a room that Obi-Wan is already in or vice versa.
“I’m sure Master Fisto didn’t think anything of it,” Anakin says carefully.
Obi-Wan lets out a scoff that borders on hysterical. “Do you know how many people have approached me in the last several weeks to request that I remain with the Order for at least another month or two because they’ve made bets? On when we’ll depart?”
Now Anakin feels as if he’s becoming hysterical. And desperately like he needs to sit down. “Bets?”
Bets on when we will leave the Order?
We?
As in—them? As in—Obi-Wan and Anakin? As in—Obi-Wan with Anakin?
“Plo Koon has fifty credits riding on the both of us leaving by Life Day,” Obi-Wan tells him, rubbing at his forehead. “He’s promised to give us half his winnings if we send him our new address.”
Anakin sits down on the ground.
“People…in the Order…think that…you and me, that we’d…” he trails off and rubs at his head, afraid to blink and have Obi-Wan disappear from in front of him. Obi-Wan crosses his arms over his chest and stares at a point over his shoulder. His face is flushed pink, teasing into red. That more than anything forces a fully-formed question from his mouth. “I don’t understand, Master. Why would anyone think we’d leave the Order?”
“I don’t know,” Obi-Wan snaps in the way he does when he’s starting to feel cornered, all sharp syllables and staccato over-enunciation. “Perhaps because you routinely mention it with varying levels of seriousness, hm?”
“Well, yeah,” Anakin says. Because—well, yeah. He is sort of planning to leave the Order eventually, in some nebulous future where he can imagine having a life where Obi-Wan does not live just a short corridor away from him. He’s already fulfilled whatever prophecy may or may not have referred to him by bringing balance to the universe and killing Sidious with incredible violence. He deserves an early retirement. “But that’s me. Why would anyone think you’d ever leave the Order, Master?”
Obi-Wan drops his hands from his face and gives him an incredulous look. “Probably because even the newest youngling brought to the creche understands that I’ll go wherever you go, padawan.”
Anakin thinks he needs to sit down, which is rather unhelpful considering he’s already on the ground. “You can’t say nice things so condescendingly like that, Master,” he says reproachfully. “I get confused.”
Obi-Wan rolls his eyes, but the Force around them both is the opposite of hostile. If Anakin didn’t know any better, he’d think his master felt pleased.
“It was never meant to be a secret, Anakin,” Obi-Wan tells him, throwing himself down onto the ground next to Anakin. “I’ve been doing preparations. Rather obviously, to the rest of the Council.”
“Well,” Anakin says, feeling as though a starship has just crashed into his head. “I’m not on the Council.”
This at least makes Obi-Wan let out a bark of laughter that is no good for Anakin’s poor head. When Anakin looks sideways at him, his master’s face is bathed in the golden-red light of their shipwreck. He’s so kriffing beautiful. He’s apparently been planning all this time to leave the Order when Anakin does and he’d just decided not to say anything about it to Anakin himself. Because he’s beautiful but also fluent in selective mutism, apparently.
“What sort of preparations?” he asks, reaching over the few inches separating their bodies and threading his fingers through Obi-Wan’s. This takes approximately the same amount of bravery he’d shown in all the years of the Republic’s war.
And the reward he’s given—Obi-Wan squeezing his hand back gently—is worth far more than anything the Republic could ever give him for his service.
“I’ve been reading up on Alderaanian tax law,” Obi-Wan says, which is probably one of the most boring sentences anyone has ever uttered in the entire history of the galaxy.
Anakin can’t help but wrinkle his nose. “If we have to go to Alderaan,” which would not be his vote, by the way, “then there’s no way we’d have to pay taxes. You’re buddy-buddy with the royalty.”
Obi-Wan turns his head to the side and squints at him, eyebrows lowered. “Remind me to pass the book along after I’m finished,” he decides with a light chuckle. “I’m going to assume taxes on Tatooine work very differently than on most other planets.”
“Probably,” Anakin agrees, unwilling to push the matter further when he’s still got Obi-Wan’s hand captured within his own. Documenting every aspect of this new sensation feels far more important than any petty argument could.
“I want a house on the ground, just the one floor,” he announces a few minutes later, breaking the quiet they’ve descended into. “I want to be able to walk straight from the door to the grass, no flights of stairs required.”
“If I recall correctly, you frequently use the Force to jump over all those stairs in the Temple anyway,” Obi-Wan replies dryly, but his expression is amused, mouth quirked up in a small smile Anakin wonders if he can kiss now.
“Well, it’ll be nice in twenty years for when you’re all old and achey to not have to deal with steps,” Anakin points out, swaying closer, unable to help himself.
He’s stopped by the Force and the flare of Obi-Wan’s sudden scowl. “I won’t even be sixty in twenty years, Padawan. I think I’ll be able to manage a few stairs.”
Anakin sighs and leans back. Moment ruined. “Of course you can,” he says, rather morosely. Knowing his Master, there’s a pretty good chance that whenever they do leave the Order, he’ll have found them a house perched up in the mountains, with the bedroom at the very top of a long tower.
“I thank you for your faith in me,” Obi-Wan says, acerbic. “As I did not face down a daily legions of Separatist droids, three different Sith lords who all wanted me dead, and not to mention a mountain of paperwork at every turn during the war just for my padawan to think I could be defeated at the age of fifty-seven by a flight of stairs—”
Anakin looks down at the comm-unit in his free hand; Obi-Wan very rarely gets this indignant, but Anakin knows he can continue on in this manner for ages when he does—mostly because Anakin has been the cause of almost every incident that has made Obi-Wan go so red in the face like that.
“Oh,” Anakin says suddenly, blinking down at the comm-unit in his hand.
“Not to mention my joints have—oh? What oh?”
“Oh, the comm-signal is back,” Anakin says, showing his master the blinking screen of the unit. “That’s strange.”
“It’s back?” Obi-Wan’s eyes jump from the comm-unit to Anakin then back again. His tone completely changes as he gets to his feet and brushes his clothes free of any dust and ash. “We can send an alert to the Council?”
“Yes!” Anakin replies, grinning back up at his master. “I can request extraction for the both of us now!”
Obi-Wan’s relief in the Force is palpable and the smile he gives Anakin is tinged with both pride and happiness. “Well then, padawan, feel free to draft a message.”
Anakin beams at him for a moment longer before he glances back down at the comm-unit in his hand. “Or,” he says slyly, letting his mouth turn up into a smirk as he looks back at his master, “we could toss it in the fire and leave the Order right now, eh?”
Obi-Wan’s expression fades into a look of wary amusement, meaning that he knows that Anakin is joking—mostly, Anakin is pretty sure he’s mostly joking at least—but he hasn’t yet figured out the purpose. “Now why would we do that, Anakin?”
“Well, I’d hate to leave you and your joints to face another mountain of paperwork, old man,” Anakin says. He lets out a bark of laughter when Obi-Wan gives him an annoyed and exasperated noise of disgust.
He can admit he probably deserves the shove from the Force that puts him squarely on his back on the ground.
But it’s Obi-Wan’s fault really for being so incredibly fun to tease and so damned easy to fall in love with.
At least three-fourths of the blame is his master’s. Anakin will take the rest of it on his shoulders.