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“What now?” Anakin asks, as they watch the Temple burn.
Obi-Wan breathes out once, and then he weeps.
*
Anakin looks out to the west, where dark clouds are cresting over craggy peaks in the distance. He can sense it, too, a storm building up on the charged air.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you?”
“Thank you, but no. I believe it’s something I must do on my own. Besides, you seem to have your hands full.”
Anakin stares down at the mess of the starboard engine compartment. “Right.”
“I’ll be back soon,” Obi-Wan adds, tightening down the straps of his pack in jerky movements. He is crouched at Anakin’s feet, but he already sounds very far away.
“Right,” Anakin says again, watching him. “It’s going to rain soon, you know.”
Obi-Wan rolls a shoulder. “I know.”
Anakin tugs a rag from his pocket to wipe down his greasy hands, then says, “Wait here.”
He climbs up into the darkened ship. There’s no power, not yet, but he can just make out the shape of things in the pale morning light. His bag is where he’d left it in the hold, containing all that he owns. He grabs up the cloak by feel alone and takes it back outside.
“Here,” Anakin says. “For the rain.”
Obi-Wan frowns, though he takes the cloak from Anakin’s outstretched hand. It’s an old, worn thing, a bit tattered and faded black, but it’s got a hood and it’s warmer than anything Obi-Wan has on.
He kneads at the fabric a little, and Anakin considers it, how he’s heard omegas like soft things. How that can possibly be true, Anakin doesn’t know, not when the war had reduced them all to such sharp edges.
“I should go,” Obi-Wan says after a long moment.
Night falls long before he returns.
Anakin waits on the ramp, legs swinging off the edge, and listens to the pitter-patter of light rain against the hull, the roll of thunder far off and growing closer.
His eyes have grown heavy when he finally feels Obi-Wan drawn back into his orbit. He makes room for him at his side and Obi-Wan sits, the storm clinging to him cold and wet.
“It’s done,” Obi-Wan says. He shrugs off his pack, emptied now of cremains. The cloak is next, and he shakes the rain from it before he holds it out to Anakin.
Anakin eyes the damp cloak. It had been comforting, he thinks, knowing some part of him had gone with Obi-Wan to the ancient temple ruins, that Obi-Wan had carried with him his scent even when Anakin could not be there for him.
“Keep it,” he says. “I have others.”
*
They’re out of the core now, spiraling out and out.
It’s an ocean world of sorts, just a tiny blip on the starmap Anakin spots by chance one day, the kind of planet that rich folks like to blow through in their big yachts.
They sit on an empty stretch of beach on the edge of town, a lunch pail nestled in the space between them.
Anakin isn’t especially thrilled by the sand, but it feels good to be off the ship, to experience the weight of actual gravity pressing down on their bodies.
He lets Obi-Wan divvy up their meal. It’s not much, just a couple bony fish wrapped in green leaves, some strange fruit cut in two halves, a single canteen of ice water, but it is their first meal not out of a rations kit in a long time. The fish is flaky and salty and hot, and Anakin burrows his feet into the earth as he eats.
After he’s sucked the fat from his fingers, he picks up the fruit. Its insides are dark, and it smells sticky sweet. He looks over at Obi-Wan, who’s digging into the soft, pudding flesh of the fruit.
“How does it taste?” he asks.
“Odd,” Obi-Wan says, “but good.”
“Take mine, then,” Anakin says. He puts on a bit of shudder. “It’s a texture thing.”
Obi-Wan covers his mouth with his wrist as he swallows another bite and says, “If you’re sure.”
Anakin passes his half over. “I’m sure.”
He settles back on the sand, propped up on his elbows while he watches Obi-Wan finish eating. Pink is blooming across his cheeks when he meets Anakin’s gaze, the high noon sun unkind after too many weeks spent in the lightless void of space.
Anakin turns back to the water, staring out at a spot where the blue ocean meets a bluer sky, distantly pleased by the color spreading across Obi-Wan’s pallid skin.
*
Sometimes, it is as if he and Obi-Wan are the only people left in existence. Within the confines of their tiny ship, far out in the black, they are. And because they are the last two beings in existence, they mostly get along. But sometimes they do not.
This time, it is Anakin who starts it.
He wakes up angry and superheated, feeling trapped beneath the endless, swirling smear of stars in lightspeed. His skin hurts and his blood burns and his bones ache, and it is easy to hurl that all away from himself.
This time, it is Obi-Wan who finishes it.
He steps away from Anakin’s viciousness, curls up his fist and drives it through the side of a nearby crate. His knuckles split on impact, splintering with the wood. And then he stands there, blood streaming hot and bright over his hand, and asks him if he’s done.
Anakin deflates, rattled by the rare burst of violence, by the blood pooling on the floor. “I’m done,” he says.
“Alright,” Obi-Wan says.
He does not allow Anakin to help tend to his hand, although he does let him haunt him from the ‘fresher doorway while he cleanses the wound and wraps it with tested efficiency.
“I think,” Obi-Wan starts, tucking the last of the muslin bandage in under itself, “that some time apart would be wise. Just until you are no longer…indisposed.”
In rut, he means.
“Alright,” Anakin says.
They go to the Dagobah system. He doesn’t understand why Obi-Wan would choose to spend his time away from him in a stinking swamp, not until they land and Anakin senses it, the effervescence of Yoda’s Force signature.
He prods at the ancient master’s presence in the Force, getting a quiet kind of nudge in return.
Knight Skywalker. Yoda’s words spread like warm water across his mental shields, pouring in through the tiny cracks. Fine, Master Kenobi will be.
So Anakin leaves Obi-Wan on the soggy bank of a marshy inlet. It falls away as he climbs through the atmosphere, and the strange, unfamiliar warmth of Yoda’s touch soothes the churn in his gut urging him to turn the ship around.
He finds a small planet not far away and drops into a high orbit. And for several long days, he is the only person left in all of existence.
Once he’s sweated out the rage and the tremors up his spine, he spins out into the galaxy. He pockets credits hand over fist, payment for a job with Hondo he is not very proud of. But the windfall will last them a standard year, maybe, for fuel and supplies and other things of value.
Weeks have passed by the time Anakin touches back down on Dagobah.
There’s a little hut, now, that hadn’t been there before, set back from the edge of the bog. Firelight flickers in its tiny windows, spills out the door when Obi-Wan crawls through it and makes his way back to him. Anakin shifts around as Obi-Wan enters the cockpit, caked in muck and layers of sour sweat.
“Obi-Wan,” Anakin says.
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan says. He picks up the slim package Anakin’s tossed onto the co-pilot chair. “What is this?”
“Something I picked up at a fueling station.”
Obi-Wan’s brow quirks, but he tears carefully through the heavy paper. Then he stills.
“It might not even be real,” Anakin says. The man he had bought it from had been incredibly shifty, after all, a little too eager to rid himself of the supposedly priceless collectors’ item.
Still, Obi-Wan draws the Jedi text out of the paper wrapping like it’s the dearest thing in the universe. From the corner of his eye, Anakin watches his fingers draw down the length of the worn spine, the leather soft from years of use. Or years on someone’s shelf, somewhere.
He smooths his palm across the cover. “I’m not sure what to say, Anakin. It’s -- thank you.”
Anakin shrugs. “Don’t loan it out to Yoda. He’ll just use it as a drink coaster.”
“Master Yoda would never,” Obi-Wan argues, though his mouth twists into a ghost of a grin. It is something Anakin has not seen in a very long time, he realizes in that moment, and it is something he would like to see again.
“Well, you’re welcome,” Anakin says, and then, “You smell like bantha ass, by the way.”
Obi-Wan’s laughter fills the cockpit, drowning out the rattle of escape velocity.
*
They have largely stayed out of trouble, but trouble does find them occasionally. On a small forest moon off the Corellian run, Anakin and Obi-Wan step off the ship into a full-blown skirmish.
“Told you we should have kept going!” Anakin shouts.
If Obi-Wan says anything, Anakin can’t hear it over the wild mess of blaster fire. He feels him, though, as they engage their lightsabers, back to back.
It seems to only embolden the gangsters running amok in the fueling depot, and blaster bolts rain down on them from every direction. Whoever these guys are, they’ve got terrible aim. Anakin parries the bolts without thought, and the gangsters go down one by one as their own shots are deflected back at them.
His blood is singing when he feels it, the faintest ripple in the Force behind him. He hardly gets a word out in warning when the fuel line explosion rocks the tarmac, the sheer magnitude of it knocking him down flat.
Obi-Wan.
Anakin spins on his knees, dread coursing through his veins.
Obi-Wan is standing over him, hand outstretched, holding in place a roiling, angry mass of shrapnel and fire. With an easy flick of the wrist, he sends it upwards and outwards, and Anakin might have been the hero with no fear once, long ago, but Obi-Wan is the man who had ended the war.
He hauls Anakin to his feet, and together they make short work of the remaining gangsters too senseless not to flee in the face of Obi-Wan’s display of controlled power.
The township’s mayor is a slip of a woman, an alpha if Anakin has her figured right, and especially gracious to Obi-Wan in particular. Anakin hangs back in the periphery, biting back a grin as Obi-Wan grows increasingly flustered, though not visibly so, under her attentions.
She and the townspeople throw them a large feast in thanks. It’s a simple affair, but the food and drink flow readily, and Anakin is drowsy with it all soon, sitting on the cool earth beside the crackling bonfire, out there beneath the wide swathes of stars.
“I think she likes you,” Anakin says, as the mayor flits away from them the third or fourth time that night. Obi-Wan elbows him in the ribs, sharply, and Anakin snickers into his sloshing cup. “She’s very grateful.”
Obi-Wan sighs. “I’m glad to see you’re enjoying yourself.”
“Sure am.”
Obi-Wan nudges him again. Anakin nudges back, a little warm when Obi-Wan doesn’t move away, pressed up to his side while the party winds down around them.
The mayor comes by a final time, more than tipsy on sweetened wine. She’s got a couple kids with her this time, younger ones with a fond sort of embarrassment written all over their faces.
She plops a big, fat, boozy kiss on each of Obi-Wan’s cheeks before her kids drag her off into the night. Obi-Wan shakes a little at her staggered retreat, then starts to wipe at his cheeks with the sleeve of his cloak. Anakin’s old cloak.
“Obi-Wan,” Anakin says.
Obi-Wan hums, distracted, still swiping at his face.
Anakin wraps his hand around his wrist, stilling his movement. Even in the dying firelight, Anakin can see ruddy pink spreading across Obi-Wan’s skin.
“Obi-Wan,” he says again.
And Obi-Wan looks up at him, limned half by fire and shadowed by night. “Yes, Anakin.”
Warmth, low and deep and ever present, is unfurling Anakin’s stomach when he presses a soft kiss to Obi-Wan’s cheek, and then to the other, to his brow, the cool tip of his nose. A warm hand curls over Anakin’s hip, steady fingers pushing in.
“Alright?” he asks into the scant distance between them, close enough to feel the sweet damp of his breath on Anakin’s skin, close enough to watch something dark and sure flood Obi-Wan’s eyes.
“Yes, Anakin.”
*
It’s late summer when Anakin starts to feel it prickle under his skin. It burns him a little once he noses into Obi-Wan’s hair in the cool, gray hours of early morning.
Obi-Wan’s been off balance for days now. Uneasy, possibly, though he’s far too controlled for such outward displays of emotion. Ghosts around their ship, shifting things and moving things.
Long before dawn, Anakin slips from their cot and takes the compact speeder down to the village in the valley below.
It’s a bartering society, like most of the townships on this world, so Anakin brings with him only items he can trade: a spool of copper wire, battery packs, an old blaster pistol. What he wants costs him everything he has.
When he returns, the sun has risen high over the mountain range and Obi-Wan is meditating under the shade of a pine at the edge of the clearing. Anakin looks at him for a quiet moment, then moves past him into the ship, parcel in hand.
He sets it just inside their cabin and waits for Obi-Wan to join him. He doesn’t have to wait long. There is a light touch down his back as Obi-Wan moves past him in the entryway and crouches by the parcel, pulls at the twine holding it together.
Its contents expand, spilling out over the sides. Blankets and quilts and feathery comforters, the softest and warmest Anakin could find in the small trading market. He watches from the door while Obi-Wan shifts their doubled mattresses to the floor, unfold and spread and refold the blankets in a strange way that seems to make sense to him.
After a long while, he seems satisfied at last. Toes off his boots and kneels easily in the center of the nest he’s made, closes his eyes and rests his palms on his thighs. In the Force, he feels balanced again.
Anakin shifts to go, though he won’t go far. The ramp, maybe, or that large pine Obi-Wan’s grown so fond of –
“You’re leaving,” Obi-Wan says.
“Yes,” he says. “I didn’t want to presume.”
Obi-Wan frowns. “Anakin. I already share myself with you. Why wouldn’t I share this with you, as well?”
Anakin presses his fingers into his other wrist, gathering himself. He looks at Obi-Wan, there in the center of things Anakin had provided him, and something wide and hopeful blossoms around his heart. “I guess,” he starts, “I guess it feels different.”
Obi-Wan’s expression softens. He holds out his hands. Anakin takes them.
*
She’s a beautiful, angry little thing. Red-faced and wailing, tiny hands clenched into tiny fists. Her hair is dark and wispy, downy-soft beneath Anakin’s fingers. She quiets some at the touch, eventually, and quiets more when he eases the bottle to her mouth.
She’s not even an hour old, and Anakin has never felt such love. He stares up at Obi-Wan, sweaty and stunning and entirely wrecked, the mother to their child.
Obi-Wan breathes out once, and then he smiles.