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Chapter Text

“Read to him,” Vokara Che suggested to Obi-Wan after one of Anakin’s weekly checkups. 

The young boy had already run off to tinker with one project or another, finding these frequent exams after a month and a half of being at the temple tedious, but he certainly needed them.  He was still underweight, though he was catching up with a carefully planned diet, and his vaccination schedule was almost complete.  Furthermore, Master Che had just confirmed there was no lasting nerve or muscle damage from removing the transmitter chip that had been embedded dangerously close to his spine, to Obi-Wan’s great relief.  

Really, as Anakin’s physical challenges lessened, Obi-Wan felt more pressed to worry about the challenges he faced that were beyond the physical, and he had just been voicing his concerns about his padawan’s literacy in Basic when she’d offered her advice.

“Read to him?” He repeated.

“Yes.  Pick out a story and read to him.  Every night before bed if you can,” she explained.  “A consistent routine will aid young Skywalker’s transition into life here, and reading to him will help with his language acquisition and literacy.”

“But what should I read?”

Che smiled gently.  “Why not something you enjoyed when you were a youngling?”

Her advice slipped his mind for a few days as their consistently busy schedule distracted him, but he suddenly was reminded of it after Anakin threw a tantrum about his reading homework late one evening.  He’d stormed off to his room, frustrated tears pooling at the corners of his eyes after he’d declared the assignment “dumb” and that he “wasn’t going to do it".

As it was the weekend, Obi-Wan wasn’t concerned about the assignment.  However, he knew he had to do something to help Anakin, and luckily, thinking back on Che’s words, he knew exactly what that something was.

He knocked on Anakin’s door a few minutes later, waiting for an answering grumble before letting himself in.  The boy had already dressed in his pajamas earlier, finding his usual padawan attire uncomfortable in the evenings, and he had burrowed himself under his blankets to sulk.  He turned toward his Master with an obstinate look on his face.

“I’m not doing the homework,” he insisted.

“Don’t worry about that for now,” Obi-Wan said.  “I have something I want to share with you.”  He held up the datapad in his hand.

“What’s that?”

“A datapad ” Obi-Wan replied with a touch of humor as he sat on the edge of Anakin’s bed.  

Anakin rolled his eyes.  “I know that , Master.  You know what I mean!”

“It’s a story.  Can you read the title to me?” he asked carefully, hoping it wouldn’t set the boy off.  Luckily, he was intrigued enough to play along.

Anakin frowned a little as he slowly sounded out the Aurebesh on the cover.  “Tuh-lee the…Too-kah.  Tully the Tooka.  It sounds like a baby story.”

“It certainly isn’t,” Obi-Wan said with an affronted wrinkle of his nose.  “I enjoyed it when I was your age.”

“Well, maybe you just like baby stories.”

“Anakin,” he warned without much heat, tugging gently on his padawan’s braid.  “Qui-Gon enjoyed them too,” he added softly, feeling a familiar twinge of grief in his heart that he quickly released into the Force.  It wasn’t a lie—many of the temple’s younglings enjoyed reading about Tully’s adventures.  They were considered a childhood classic, though growing up as a slave on Tatooine, Anakin wouldn’t know that.

“I’d like to read it to you.  Would that be alright?”

Anakin shrugged.  Despite his initial attitude, the mention of the late Jedi Master had softened him somewhat.  “I guess.”

Obi-Wan nudged Anakin over until there was space for him to sit beside the boy at the head of his bed.  He propped his legs up on top of the covers and rested his back against the headboard, making sure Anakin would also be able to see the words as he read.  Despite the lingering frustration from earlier, Obi-Wan could feel tendrils of curiosity curling out from the boy in the Force.

“Tully the Tooka,” he began, swiping to the first page.  “Tully the Tooka was a mischievous beast—”

“Mischievous?”

“It means someone who likes to get into trouble,” Obi-Wan explained, secretly pleased that Anakin had asked for the meaning of a word without prompting.  “Much like a young padawan I know.”

Anakin’s face wrinkled in an expression that was probably supposed to display offense, but just ended up looking adorably young and innocent.  

“—and his biggest wish was to go on a great adventure…”

He continued to read, and as he neared the end of the first chapter, he felt a weight press against his arm.  Anakin had fallen fast asleep, his cheek pressed into the rough spun wool of Obi-Wan’s sleeve.  He was still save for the slow rise and fall of his chest, mind and body utterly at peace in a way he never managed to be during the day.

Obi-Wan tapped a placeholder into the story, then ever so gently settled Anakin’s head onto his pillow.  He stood to leave, but before doing so, acted on a sudden instinct to bend over and press his lips to his padawan’s forehead.

“Good night, Anakin.”

Thunder rattled the windows of his temple bedroom, and for a moment, as his eyes snapped open, Obi-Wan thought that was what had woken him.  Then, he saw the small form of his padawan at his bedside, and he sat up quickly, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

It had just passed two months since Anakin had arrived on Coruscant, and they had experienced a couple of thunderstorms since that time.  Anakin had been afraid of them at first, never having known of such things on a desert planet, but seemed to calm down after Obi-Wan assured him they were perfectly safe in the temple.  It appeared, though, that his brave face had been at least partially an act.  Anakin had never come to him in the middle of the night before, but this storm was more violent than the others had been, and he trembled where he stood.  With a wave of Obi-Wan’s hand, the lights turned on to half brightness.

“Anakin?”

“I’m sorry for waking you up, Master, I shouldn’t have…” he trailed off, and his cheeks flushed with embarrassment.  

“It’s quite alright, little one.  You can always come to me if you need, no matter what time.”

Another crack of thunder made Anakin visibly jump, and he thrust out his hand, a datapad clutched between white fingers.

“Could you…could you read to me some more?”

Obi-Wan took in his padawan: a small, frightened boy who saw his Master and a bedtime story as the bastions of safety that would protect him from his fears.

Fondness, sudden and intense, washed over him.

He pulled back the corner of his blankets, and Anakin scrambled up and nestled into his side.  Obi-Wan wrapped one arm around his shoulders, absent-mindedly stroking his padawan braid with one hand while he thumbed to where they had left off in the story with the other.  Just last week, they had started the second story of the series.  He knew that secretly, Anakin was enjoying them, but this was the first time he had asked to be read to instead of half-heartedly grumbling when Obi-Wan reminded him of their routine.

“Tully the Tooka and Vera the Vornskr were as unlikely a pair as anyone could imagine, but the day she saved him from a pack of rabid rorks, he knew they would be great friends…”

As he read, he could feel Anakin’s anxiety bleeding away naturally into the Force.  He, too, felt relaxed by the ritual, and it wasn’t long before his exhaustion overcame him once again, and he felt his eyelids drooping…

Obi-Wan woke up the next morning with the datapad on his chest and his arm full of pins and needles from being used as a pillow, and he didn’t mind it one bit.

“…and as the great totem fell lower and lower into the ravine, Tully felt his heart falling with it.  He couldn’t believe he’d let it slip from his grasp.

“‘Well,’ said Vera, joining him at his side to look down into the dark depths below, ‘I suppose we’d better start climbing.’”

Obi-Wan clicked off the datapad, to Anakin’s immediate protest.

“Come on!  One more chapter?”

Obi-Wan gave him a bemused look.  “I’ve already given you one more than planned.  You need to get to bed, and I need to catch a shuttle.”

Why the council had slated him to catch a red-eye to his mission, Obi-Wan would never know.  They were currently sitting on the couch in their quarters, though Obi-Wan would be dropping off Anakin to stay at the initiate dorms on his way out of the Temple.  He made to stand, but Anakin tugged roughly at his sleeve, pulling him back downward.

“Please just one more!” He begged, and the anxiety Obi-Wan could feel behind it made him frown.

“Anakin, I need to go.  What’s troubling you?”

“I have a bad feeling,” the boy admitted, fingers curling tighter into Obi-Wan’s sleeve.  “You shouldn’t go.”

“It’s just a routine trade negotiation.  I’ll be fine and back before you know it,” he soothed.  In all honesty, he didn’t want to leave Anakin without him at the Temple, but at nearly six months since he arrived, the council was out of patience.  They needed him back in the field.  

“Can’t someone else go?”

“I’m sorry, Anakin.  But I’ll only be gone a few days, and then we can read as much as you’d like.”

He didn’t seem convinced, but sighed in resignation.  “You promise?”

Obi-Wan ruffled his padawan’s close-cropped hair.  “I promise.  And maybe you could even read to me next time.”

It was something of a running joke between them.  Though Obi-Wan had always intended to get Anakin to start reading out loud, the boy refused to do so with Tully, insisting that only Obi-Wan could do the voices perfectly.  His reading and writing grades had increased significantly since starting the stories months earlier, so while Obi-Wan would occasionally insist on Anakin reading from his assignments or other stories, he indulged his request with Tully.

He’d managed to shift Anakin’s grip to his own hand, holding it the entire way to the initiate dorms.  With one last brush over the top of the boy’s head, he turned to go.

“May the Force be with you, Master.”

The blessing sounded like a plea.  Obi-Wan resolved himself to get these negotiations over with as quickly as possible.

They had lost contact with Obi-Wan eight days ago.

Negotiations on the planet he had traveled to had ended with an attack from a local terrorist cell, and he hadn’t been heard from since.

Anakin was so consumed with worry, he barely ate.  He had no appetite, and didn’t make much of an attempt to eat despite Master Che threatening to put him back on the gross nutritional supplements he’d been forced to drink when he’d first arrived at the Temple.  

He couldn’t sleep, either.  Even if the initiate dorms hadn’t felt weird and cold and not like home, his constant anxiety over his Master kept him insomniac.  No one would tell him anything except that they were doing their best to find Obi-Wan.  They wouldn’t even let him help.

He turned over in his bed for the hundredth time that night, listening to the snores of the other children.  And then, suddenly, he rocketed upwards as it felt like a jolt of electricity running through him.  The Force shouted , and Anakin knew:

Obi-Wan was back at the Temple.

He jumped out of bed, ignoring the complaints of the tired initiates he woke as he raced out of the room.  He let the Force guide him, further, further down the corridors until he reached the Halls of Healing, and he tore through the doors and ran until he was in front of a large transparisteel wall.

Just beyond it was Obi-Wan, stripped down to his shorts and being lifted up to a bacta tank.  Anakin froze, cold fear flooding him.

His Master’s body was a mottled canvas of bruises, burns, and cuts.  His arm hung at a funny angle, and brownish blood stained the coppery hair at his temple.

“Skywalker,” a deep voice called, but Anakin ignored it.  He pressed himself against the window, desperately wishing that this was all a trick, that his Master was fine—

“Skywalker, you shouldn’t be here,” Mace Windu said, pulling him back by the shoulders.  Anakin fought, thrashed, until the Jedi Master was nearly hugging him from behind to restrain him.

“No!” He screamed, tears streaming down his face, “He promised he would be back in a few days!  He promised!”

Other voices, presences, surrounded him, but he only had eyes for his Master helplessly floating in bacta.  His grief ran deep and broken in the Force, and he could hardly breathe as he sobbed.

Then, he felt a prick in his arm, and everything faded away into blackness.

When Anakin woke, he was on a bed in the  Halls of Healing.  He blinked slowly, then felt his heart speed up as he remembered everything that had happened.

His Master.  He had to—

“Hold it right there,” Vokara Che commanded as she entered the room, stopping him right as he was halfway out of bed.

“But Obi-Wan—!”

“Is right beside you,” she finished, and Anakin followed her pointed finger to the bed on the other side of the room.  His Master laid there, eyes closed, an oxygen cannula under his nose.  His injuries had faded significantly, and it was only then that Anakin noticed the faint, sickly sweet smell of bacta in the air.

“His injuries are healing nicely,” she began, coming to sit at the foot of Anakin’s bed.  “But Anakin, you need to know.  He had a very difficult time while he was away.  He’ll be in a coma for a while yet.”

Anakin looked up at her, eyes wide.  “C-coma?”

Her voice was exceedingly  gentle as she explained.  “It means he’s going to be asleep for a long time.  His brain was injured too, and this is how it heals itself.”

“When will he wake up?”

“It’s hard to say.  He’ll stay in the coma for as long as his body needs.  But you can keep visiting him every day.”

Anakin does.  They make him go to classes and meals, but every other waking moment he has, he’s by Obi-Wan’s bedside.  They try to make him return to the initiate dorms at night, but the first time he wakes up screaming from nightmares about Obi-Wan’s battered body, they relent and allow him to sleep in the cot next to his Master’s.  

He tries to do his homework, or watch holofilms, but a lot of the time, he just sits in silence, watching the rise and fall of Obi-Wan’s chest and praying to the Force that he’ll wake up.

“Good afternoon, Knight Kenobi,” Vokara Che said as she came in to do her rounds.  “Time for another dose of medicine.”

“Why do you talk to him?” Anakin asked, the question nagging at him for a couple of days now.

“Hmm?  Oh, well, even though he’s in a coma, he can still hear me.  He might not understand what I’m saying, but I think it’s important to talk to him all the same—you could too, you know.”

Anakin chewed on his lip “…do you think it would help?”

Master Che finished dispensing her medication into Obi-Wan’s drip, then rested a hand on Anakin’s shoulder.  “I do.”

As she left the room, Anakin looked down at his datapad.  At the corner of the screen, his copy of Tully the Tooka sat waiting.  He remembered their last night together before Obi-Wan’s mission.

“Maybe you could even read to me next time…”

Could he?  He’d never read Tully out loud before, and it almost felt wrong to even try.  But if Master Che said it would help him get better…

Anakin scooted his chair closer to Obi-Wan.  He would try to crawl into his bed, but he was afraid of disturbing all the tubes and wires, so he leaned against the bed rail instead.

“D-day had given way into night.  Tully and Vera had been climbing down for hours, but they weren’t even close to the bottom of the ravine.  The pair was just about ready to give up for the evening when a voice called out to them: ‘Hello, there!’…”

Several days passed.  Every night, right before he fell asleep, he’d read a little more in the story to his Master.  Obi-Wan never so much as twitched, but Anakin kept going in his desperation to do something to feel useful.

He was growing more and more hopeless by the day, but still, he kept reading.

“Night had fallen in the forest, and Tully was lost and frigh…ten…ed.  The darkness trans-formed the trees around him into scary monsters ready to eat him at any second.  He had the totem, but his friends were gone, and he was alone.”  

Anakin tried not to think of how frightened Obi-Wan must have been while hurt on his mission.  Tried not to think of how alone he must have felt, and how alone Anakin himself would feel if his Master never woke up.  It had been so long—what if he never got better?  An errant tear fell from his cheek and onto the screen, and he roughly rubbed it away with his sleeve.

“J-just when it felt like all was lost, he stepped into a clearing, and suddenly the sky opened above him.  The clouds had parted, and the stars shone with brilliant spuh…len…door.  Tully’s heart soared.  Over the course of his adventures, he had gotten to know the stars as well as he knew his own tail.  The c-con…con…consta…”

“Constellations.”

Anakin nearly dropped the datapad at the weak croak of his Master’s voice.  

“Master!” He yelped.  Obi-Wan's chapped lips tilted into a smile.

“Hello, dear one.”

He shuffled over on the mattress, then, pushing aside some wires and lifting the covers.  Anakin eyed the bed warily, but at Obi-Wan’s encouraging nod, he carefully settled in beside his Master.

“Keep going,” Obi-Wan said hoarsely, warm affection seeping across their bond and wrapping around Anakin like a blanket.  “This is the best part.”

He couldn’t refuse, so Anakin picked up the datapad again and read.  “The constellations formed a map in the sky, and he trusted them to guide him home.  Tully continued onward, his step sure and his  heart full with the knowledge that everything was going to be okay…”

Chapter Text

The battle was over.  It had been for several hours.

By tomorrow morning, Master Kenobi and the 212th would arrive with the extra fuel and parts they needed to get their ship up and running again, and they’d be patched up and on their way home.

First, though, they had to get through the night.

The planet they were on was so hot and unbearably humid that even with the sun down, the 501st hadn’t even bothered to set up their tents.  Most had instead chosen to sleep under the stars.  Ahsoka had set her own bedroll down on the outskirts of the clearing where the troops had settled, but though she had been laying down with her eyes closed for over an hour, she couldn’t sleep.

She had long ago gotten used to noise.  War necessitated that you slept whenever you got the chance regardless of the distractions going on around you.  Really, the buzzing of insects in the trees, crackling campfires, and soft rustlings of the men as they shifted in their sleep was a comfort to her.  She could sense the presence of every single one of them in the Force.

What kept her awake, however, was the crushing knowledge that there weren’t as many of those presences as there should have been.

It had been a hard battle.  They had lost too many men.  They had been victorious at the end, but the cost had been immense, and Ahsoka couldn’t help but feel responsible.  She was their Commander--she was supposed to keep them safe.  She knew that casualties were expected in war, but even after all this time, it wasn’t any easier to accept.  

The ghosts of her fallen brothers haunted her thoughts, and so, she stayed awake, the weight of the world like a physical ache in her chest.

Time passed.  Eventually, Ahsoka felt tired of pretending.  She quietly got up, not wanting to disturb anyone else, and she made her way over to their supplies.  She wasn’t really hungry, but she needed something to do, and digging through their stores to find a palatable ration bar would at least kill some time.

“Hey Snips,” a voice called out as she approached her target, stopping her in her tracks.  Anakin was sitting on the ground, back propped up against a crate of supplies.  His bedroll was nowhere in sight, but in the orange flicker of the nearby campfire, she could still see the dark bags under his eyes--as difficult as this mission had been for her, it must have been even worse for him.  “Can’t sleep?”

“No,” she admitted.  He patted the patch of dirt beside him, and she dropped to his side with a sigh.  He had rid himself of his pauldrons, and his shoulder was warm where it brushed against hers.

“I know the feeling.”

Ahsoka was suddenly very aware of how exhausted she felt, both physically and emotionally.  “Does it ever get better?”

Anakin looked down at her, a grim set to his lips.  “No,” he said, after a pause.  “But you learn to accept it.  Keep moving forward.  That’s all you can do.”

“I’m just...I’m just tired.” 

Of the war, of fighting, of running.  Of death.  Of nightmares.  

“Have you tried counting bantha?” he joked weakly.

It was a poor attempt at humor, and Ahsoka frowned at him, unimpressed.  Then she sighed, her body deflating as it slumped against the crate.  “Yeah.  I’ve tried everything, but I just can’t turn my mind off.  I can’t stop thinking about…”

She trailed off and felt Anakin send a tendril of support across their bond.  “I know.”

“What do you do?  To take your mind off everything?”

His gaze focused outward, over their troops that laid resting mere meters away, and she followed it.  “Tinkering on something helps.  Practicing my lightsaber forms, or sparring.  And reading, sometimes.”

Her head snapped back to him in an instant at the last admission, her brow raising.  “You?  Read?”

He gave her a look.  “Why do you sound so surprised?”

“Because I’ve never seen you read anything by choice, ever.  You act like you’re in pain every time I ask you to look over my essays.”

“Yeah, have you seen your essays?” He teased, and she shoved his arm lightly in response, eliciting a soft laugh from him.

“What do you read?  Books on mechanics?  Master Kenobi’s mission reports?  I bet those would put me to sleep.”

“No, nothing like that…” he trailed off, and there was a hesitancy there that piqued her curiosity further.

“What, then?”

To her surprise, he blushed.  Then, he reached into the pocket of his robe, pulled out a datapad, pressed a couple of buttons, and handed it to her.  She looked down at the screen, and her face split into a grin.

“Tully the Tooka?  I used to love those stories!”

“Shh!” he hushed, looking around the campsite frantically, but Ahsoka paid no mind to his embarrassment.

“I haven’t read these in forever!  I didn’t know you liked them.”

“Yeah,” he admitted gruffly.  “Obi-Wan and I read them together when I was little.  I’ve always found them...comforting, I guess.”

It was a big admission, coming from Anakin.  With it, Ahsoka felt waves of fondness and nostalgia emanating from him, and it sobered her a bit.  “That sounds nice,” she said, slightly wistfully.

“You could borrow it, if you want,” he offered.  “See if it helps you.”

She brushed her thumb across the cover graphic, the familiar drawing of Tully smiling brightly at her.  Then, she turned to him, eyes wide and pleading.  “Would you read it to me?”

She felt a jolt of surprise come from him, and his blush returned as he brushed a hand nervously through his hair.  “I don’t know…”

“Please?”

She was surprised at how desperately the word came out.  Anakin’s eyes immediately softened, and she knew she had him.  “Okay, hand it over…”

She leaned against his side as he started to read, his voice running smoothly over the words in a well-practiced manner.  Peace washed over her for the first time in what felt like forever.  She laughed when Anakin changed his voice to play the different characters, her heart feeling light, and he smiled wider every time he heard it.

“‘It is you!’ the wizened gundark said, pointing one crooked claw at Tully.  ‘You are the one destined to save us all!’” 

Chapter complete, Anakin made to tap the datapad off.  Ahsoka wasn’t quite asleep yet, but she was much more relaxed now, and they couldn’t just read all night…

“You can’t stop there, Sir!” 

Anakin jolted, the motion jerking Ahsoka into alertness as well.  They both looked up to see that almost the entire squad of clones had woken up at some point and circled around the pair, attention focused solely on them.  Fives grinned.  “It was just getting good!”

Bewildered, Anakin turned to see Rex sitting at the edge of the group, helmet between his feet and an arm propping him up from behind.  The captain shrugged at his look.  “He’s right, General.  It was getting good.”

Ahsoka broke out into a fit of giggles, and it snapped Anakin out of his shock.  He tugged on her beads playfully, then shoved the datapad into her lap.

“Okay.  But if this is a group activity now, you’re gonna have to read too, Snips.”

She grinned and snatched the datapad up.  “Okay.  You guys are gonna love this next chapter.”

For the first time since their heavy losses earlier that day, the shadow of grief didn’t sit quite so heavily over the men of the 501st.  They sat united in the act of storytelling, their souls comforted by the voices of their leaders and the adventures of a little tooka.

“General Kenobi?” Cody asked later that next afternoon as Obi-Wan and the 212th saw their brother legion off.  

“Yes, Cody?”

The commander shifted on his feet, seemingly unsure of himself.  “Rex told me I should ask you about someone...a heroic man by the name of Tully?”

Obi-Wan stared at him, surprise etched into every feature.  Then, he laughed, loud and joyous, an almost musical sound that Cody had never heard come from his general before.

“If Anakin has...then yes, I suppose I should sometime.” he said, clapping him on the shoulder before getting an urgent comm and being drawn away.  Cody watched him go, his confusion profound.