Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Obi-Wan breezed into Anakin's quarters at four past six in the evening, without so much as a knock—but that was Obi-Wan, always and uniquely capable of the one habit that annoyed Anakin the most, performed in the one fashion that would annoy Anakin the most. Always, and perpetually, irritating as hell, but that would be the way Obi-Wan was until the man keeled over and died, almost certainly.

“I don’t want to hear it,” Anakin mumbled. His face was still pressed into the arm of the couch—some hour and a half ago, he had collapsed on it, feeling incapable of being upright any longer but his head still throbbing too painfully to consider sleep. He spent so much time on the battlefield, the concussive sounds of war rolling through the screams of dying and terrified men, their lives ripping ragged holes in the Force as they died and died—he thought his headache might just be a constant thing, like a scar on his mind, left behind from the whiplash of it all. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d woken up without a searing heat behind his eyes, like there wasn’t a vice strangling his head. “Do not even start in on it, or I’ll kick you out.”

The Force about them fluttered with confusion, Obi-Wan’s puzzlement flowing easily into the Light. “Start in on what?”

“I know Ahsoka skived off her classes. I am aware. That is why she’s in a private room in the library, making up that work right now. You can crow about revenge as much as you like, whenever the fuck you decide a time that is not this moment. I'll even pretend to listen."

Obi-Wan’s puzzlement turned quickly to bafflement. “Is that the reason you’re irate this evening? Did you and her argue? You are always more disagreeable, then, when the two of you argue."

“Not much,” Anakin said. Disagreeable made him not the least bit cranky, but there, he managed to hold his tongue—his self-control wouldn’t hold out for long, not as tired as he was, and as deeply Obi-Wan Kenobi as Obi-Wan always was. He hoped Obi-Wan was prepared for it. “She’s not happy with me, definitely. But your bragging is unnecessary and unwelcome.”

There was a shuffle, and the rasping of the hem of a robe on smooth stone before it met thicker carpet, the click of datapads as they rattled together in a bag. Obi-Wan settled into one of the chairs adjacent from the couch, and, Anakin could see it as clearly as if his eyes were looking at it, perhaps even more clearly thanks to the Force—he settled in that melodramatic fashion he always did, with one ankle balanced on one knee and leaned all the way back in his chair, as if he were determined to take up as much space as he could. Determined to sprawl so loudly no one could look at him and think he was anyone other than Obi-Wan Kenobi. It always made Anakin’s heart squeeze with fondness, and then the simultaneous urge to cuff the back of Obi-Wan’s head and say you’re ridiculous, Master, you know that?

“It looks like you’re having some difficulties,” Obi-Wan said, lightly, but through the Force, Anakin could sense his delight—and an earnest eagerness, the same curious emotion Anakin felt from him routinely, whenever Anakin crawled towards him miserably for direction on how to train a child at all, much less the spitfire of a child the Grandmaster had given him. He loved Ahsoka—and the Code would not forgive him for the strength of that love, would never forgive him the strength of it—but she was headstrong. Always so headstrong. Always so—worry-inducing.

“I did not invite you to speak on my difficulties. If you’ll notice, I invited the exact opposite. It’s not physically possible for you to shut up, though, is it.”

Obi-Wan hummed. “Ah, but as I recall, you told me not to address the fact that this is revenge. Which it entirely, absolutely, and completely is, but I don’t have to tell you that, clearly you’re aware. Nowhere did you say I shouldn’t speak on your difficulties.”

Another throbbing pain stabbed at his head, and Anakin nearly growled against it—he would blame Obi-Wan for that one. He squeezed his eyes more tightly shut, and buried his face a bit deeper in his arms, in a futile attempt to block off all untoward light. “Speak all you like, then. I won’t be listening.”

“When do you ever,” Obi-Wan said, with a long, blown-out breath.

“Plenty,” Anakin bit out. If he calls me out on lying, I'll throw something at his head, he thought.

There was another low rustling noise. “I truly did not know of your—difficulties—Anakin. At least, until you told me—thank you for the update, by the way, quite useful information. We had previously organized to speak this morning, however, and some of us follow our words, and are, of course, punctual, and prepared.”

Anakin huffed. Pain rattled through his ribcage, refracted downwards by his nerves; clearly it was going to be the kind of headache that made all of him hurt, and blur, like an unfortunate smudge on an unfortunate painting. “I don’t remember it.”

He could practically hear Obi-Wan’s raised eyebrow, as suddenly choked as the Force was with Obi-Wan’s unimpressed disdain; because, of course, Obi-Wan didn’t believe him. But as hard as Anakin scoured his mind, he couldn’t remember when and where he’d spoken to Obi-Wan that morning. He couldn’t even recall most of the morning, simply the knowledge that there must have been one, because he was breathing in the night, having lived through it. The inability to recall it unsettled him.

“Don’t be difficult, or I’ll play the holocomm recording back to you, and then we’ll see which of us is correct.”

Anakin sat up, scrubbing his eyes against the dull lance in his skull that pounded once, twice, three times. “I was not trying to be—difficult,” he said. “I don’t actually remember it. If I did, I wouldn’t be on the couch. I would be—prepared, as you put it.”

Obi-Wan’s brows furrowed. “And here I thought you were trying to communicate some grievance or another by your state of laziness. Anyway, look at this.”

He tossed Anakin a datapad, and Anakin caught it, flicking it on. He squinted against the light, swallowing back the rush of bile in his throat—his stomach twisted, curling into a knot. Maybe his ever-present headache had been joined by a stomach bug of a kind, or it was just more of his nerves getting confused, lost in the tangle of ache. “What is—numbers?”

“Wrong file. Those are—our rather abysmal budget readouts.”

Anakin snorted as he scanned columns and rows of credit amounts that scaled well into the billions. “Have you told the Council that we’re over budget this much because we’ve got the most useless armadas the galaxy has ever seen? How many times have we had to use freighters as makeshift tugships to dock the Negotiator because the sublights are on the fritz? They’re poorly made rush orders, if they’d been right the first time the repairs wouldn’t be this costly."

The only thing that eased his annoyance, which seemed to throb in tune with his unshakable headache, was that Obi-Wan, for once, looked nearly as irritated as Anakin did. “Attempts were made,” Obi-Wan said. “Ki-Adi is supposed to convene with both a new budget committee and a group of outsourced engineers.”

“Ki-Adi is on Sullust, and has been on Sullust for three months, and is probably going to be on Sullust for three more months. I rather think he likes it there, given how long that campaign has lasted.”

Obi-Wan dipped his head, flicked one of his hands. “You know how it goes. It’s a convenient way to avoid straining the budget any further for the moment. Buying time, as it were.”

“Why not Master Tiin—I don’t understand. Master Tiin is here, in the Temple, and he’s far more knowledgeable here than Ki-Adi is—what is the point?” Anakin said.

“The Senate is going to drag its heels on this as well. I understand you’d prefer if no one dragged their heels, padawan, but no one else in the galaxy moves as fast as you do. At least this gives them time to form a committee without keeping a Jedi Master locked on Coruscant, instead of acting on the battlefield,” Obi-Wan said. “But that's enough of that. The other file is my actual delivery to you.”

Anakin switched to it, and was immediately greeted by lines and lines of sprawling code, and as he skimmed the file's full contents, pages of notes on cryptographic methods and encryption sequences, even device schematics further down. “What a delivery,” he murmured. “What am I looking at?”

“You know as well as I do how dangerous our intelligence breaches have gotten, Anakin. You’re looking at the proposed solutions.”

Anakin scrolled through it. “Something tells me this is a little above my clearance. At least an inch higher. Maybe two."

Obi-Wan snorted. “It is so far above your clearance I would be declared a traitor for showing it to you, if the Chancellor didn’t already favor you. I guarantee you the next time you speak to him, he’ll blather every sensitive detail like he’s complaining about Weather Control and not the most sensitive military intel the Republic has.”

Anakin scowled, first, at the way Obi-Wan spoke of His Excellency—he and Obi-Wan would never agree on the Chancellor, no matter how many times Anakin had tried to convince Obi-Wan of the man’s merits, both as a friend or a father and as a leader—but then he registered the word traitor, and stilled.

“This isn’t a betrayal of the Republic for me to look at,” he said, slowly, “is it? Obi-Wan, you can’t be serious.”

Obi-Wan rolled his eyes. “The day you betray the Republic is the day the galaxy ends, my friend. It’s—sensitive information, simply put. Six weeks ago, the Republic commissioned an independent team of security analysts to redesign the Republic’s comm systems, encryption methods, and ciphers. That file there is both an analysis of the weaknesses in our current systems, and then the proposed adjustments, purported to be the security that will save this Republic from losing the war.”

If possible, Anakin stilled even further. “That isn’t just high clearance, Obi-Wan, then, this would be the key to—”

Obi-Wan held up a hand. “I’m aware. I’m aware of how important the information is. There is a reason there were only four of us present in the Council chamber today. There is a reason we endeavored to broadcast as loudly as we could on every information stream that the real war councils would meet in three sessions in the coming days—it was a red herring, as it were. Look closely at the wrong moment. We’re trying to keep this as close to our chests as possible. That development team remains under the constant protection of the Coruscant Guard this very moment, their communications monitored closely round-the-clock. Those four were myself, Master Yoda, Master Windu, and the Chancellor. This is—the most sensitive information we have.”

Anakin swallowed. “And you’re handing it to me. Under the table. Illegally. Obi-Wan—”

“Oh, you suddenly care about laws now?” Obi-Wan asked, smirking beneath his beard. It did desperately need a trim—he looked about as fluffy as a bantha—and there was a twinkle in his eye that Anakin found particularly disturbing. “Why don’t I tell your dearest friend the Chancellor about the myriad of times you have broken criminal law by participating in all manner of illegal street racing and betting? Don’t think I don’t remember it vividly. Beautifully vividly. As it would happen, I have a memory like a steel trap, little one.”

Anakin shook his head, and attempted to keep the smugness that he felt out of his voice. “Jedi Operative Bill One-Thirteen, sub-section auresek, clause four. A Jedi with the official sanction of a recognized Republican legislative, executive or judicial power, as certified by the Republican Galactic Commission and therefore recognized by the Republic itself, of internal status rank padawan or higher, who has been ordained by the Jedi High Council to act as an operative of the Republic may violate Republican law to the end of—”

Obi-Wan stared at him, shocked, and then broke out into a deep belly laugh, the kind that made Anakin warm in the chest to listen to, the kind Anakin didn’t hear from so often anymore. “Of course you have clause four memorized, you absolute—brat, you absolute brat, there simply isn’t another word for what you are,” Obi-Wan said. “It does not change the fact that the High Council did not ordain your street racing career as a mission, and that the Republic—”

“That’s my point,” Anakin said, smugly now, unable to keep his voice neutral any longer. “The Chancellor knows. He thinks it means I have heart, you see. He’s given his official sanction, just in case anyone tries to drag it out of the mud, and the only office that can override the requirement for the High Council’s sanction is the Chancellor’s. Because he’s my friend, Obi-Wan, and not nearly as awful as you think.”

Obi-Wan’s mirth seemed to slip away from him. It flicked Anakin on the raw—Obi-Wan had no right to complain about the Chancellor as often as he did, when the Chancellor had done so much for Anakin. But he swallowed the irritation; their blowouts over the Chancellor never ended well. “That’s my point, however,” Obi-Wan said. “Chancellor Palpatine frequently disrupts our clearance levels when it comes to you. I’m simply beating him to the punch, so to speak, padawan mine.”

Anakin’s brows furrowed. “He can’t disrupt clearance levels, Master. He’s the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic, those are his clearance levels to disrupt. It is the law.”

Obi-Wan thumbed his beard. “I don’t have the strength to discuss the Chancellor with you at this moment, Anakin. Maybe not ever. One of these days we’ll have to lay that particular topic to rest. What I am attempting to say is, I do feel justified in making this move, regardless of the technical legality. No one is more loyal than you, and no one has the trust of the Chancellor more than you do. And if I can’t trust you with this information, then there would be no one I could, in this galaxy or the next. And I cannot shake the sense that there’s something deeply wrong, here, padawan.”

Anakin hid his gaze, flicking his eyes down to the Aurebesh, the numbers, to hide that—between how tired he was, and the throbbing in his head, Obi-Wan’s words made him simply want to weep. To run and hide somewhere, and hold them close to his chest, greedily, like a krayt dragon holds its kill. Or maybe even simply to bask in the words, one of Tatooine’s millions of heat-seeking cold-blooded beasts drawn to the belting heat of double noon. “Wrong?”

“There is something wrong here,” Obi-Wan said, seriously. “I can sense it. I’ve spent every hour since the conclusion of that conference meditating, and I’m certain there is something we’re missing, something that’s going to cost us everything. There are plans to begin covertly implementing these modifications at the end of the month, starting at the highest levels and then eventually trickling down to even adjusting the encryption in the comm connections in the troopers’ helmets. We don’t know where information is getting leaked, which is—what’s taken this so long to even be brought to the table. It is a complete overhaul. We can’t find anywhere else to start. I don’t know my cloak from my lightsaber when it comes to coding. But, fortunately, I have a padawan who is, by all reports, quite good at it. Simply put, I want you to review it, and either tell me I’m a delusional old man, or tell me I’m brilliant. That’s all.”

Anakin hummed. “This doesn’t make sense,” he said. “None of you have experience with coding, sure, but we have Jedi talented at it. Why didn’t the Grandmaster and Master Windu call upon any Jedi already associated with the war effort for this? Wouldn’t it be much simpler to keep it under wraps that way?”

“Take that up with your good friend,” Obi-Wan said, sourly. “With the information leaks, and—the reputation damage our dear Pong Krell did to the Order—the Chancellor reports to us that there are rumblings in the Senate of a coalition preparing to demand the Jedi Order be thoroughly investigated for Separatist spies, and, should they be discovered, prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Potentially, even, the Order itself as a body be held accountable for their presence. This is his compromise, in the efforts of keeping his image looking pristine—hedging his bets, playing both sides. It’s practically snake-like.”

“Or, he’s a man with an impossible job trying to keep a Senate and an Order of millions of beings babysat, not a mastermind playing the field like a snake,” Anakin snarled. His own voice was too loud, causing his headache to twist and slam into his skull with the force of a steel hammer, and he just barely avoided wincing.

“Your feelings cloud your judgment,” Obi-Wan said, and stood. “He’s like any other politician the galaxy has ever seen, a power-hungry desk jockey. Now, I am making tea.”

“You should make me a cup,” Anakin suggested, glancing back down at the datapad. “Do I still have to go to those war councils if I know they were planned just to hide the—whatever in the Sith hells this is?”

He still rankled from Obi-Wan’s comments, even as Anakin opted to ignore them. In his mind’s eye, he could still remember being so much younger, the Temple blindingly new, life at the heart of the galaxy still somehow so lonely, the Chancellor what felt like his only friend in all the universe. The color feeling sucked out of the world, without the twin suns to light it up, eleven years old, and looking for life’s loophole, the special lever he could pull that would make it all stop, even if Anakin couldn’t define really what it was. The grinding feeling in his chest, maybe. Or the way that his ribcage sometimes felt stiffer than steel. The other padawans hadn’t liked him much at all, opting either to avoid him, or to jeer is it true you’re a slave, is that why you’re too stupid to read, or whatever strangeness in Anakin they had chosen to pick out and tear at that day. He never could tell Obi-Wan—it was shameful, and it wasn’t supposed to tear him up on the inside the way it did, because he was a Jedi and he should be better than that—but he did tell the Chancellor, when he couldn’t figure out anywhere else to take it, and it wouldn’t leave him alone. Once, he’d cried, I’m always in their way, no matter where I go. He could still remember His Excellency’s warm hand on his shoulder, the sad cut of his mouth, as he murmured, it is all a matter of perspective, Anakin, you see. You are not in their way, they are in yours. The solution is to make them move. Wolves do not weep for the likes of sheep, and you, my boy, are the wolf. Take them down. Obi-Wan was wrong about the Chancellor. The Chancellor was one of the kindest men Anakin knew.

Obi-Wan stretched—something in his spine cracked loudly, which made Anakin snort—and started off to the kitchen, shuffling around for the three entire mugs Anakin and Ahsoka had between them. “Oh, you have that Wykrian tea,” he said. “I’ve heard it’s strong. Two bags or one?”

“Two, if you like your mouth to taste like menthol.”

“One it is,” Obi-Wan said. There was the flick of the sink knobs, the shudder of pipes and the hiss of water through the faucet—the sounds almost relaxed Anakin by force, after how many times he had heard them. The rasp of the cast iron teapot Obi-Wan had given him—a moving out gift, and one of Anakin’s favorites of his meager possessions. Familiar. All familiar.

“You do have to go,” Obi-Wan said, after several moments. Anakin hadn’t realized his eyes had drifted closed, just listening to the sound of Obi-Wan scuttling about his kitchen, but they had. They felt impossible to open. “Every unoccupied general has to attend, that’s the point. Except, of course, you know—the dear, treasured Master Mundi, still on Sullust.”

“Forever trapped on Sullust,” Anakin murmured.

Obi-Wan laughed, quietly. “I must say, I feel a bit disingenuous complaining about a fellow member of the High Council as such. What can I say, though. He makes it too easy.”

“I complain about everyone and everything. I don’t know why you feel bad.”

“Tch, you complain about nearly everything, do give yourself the one ounce of credit you deserve,” Obi-Wan said. “The one thing you don’t complain of, however—your health. Did you think I wasn’t going to notice that you look like death warmed over, little one, or at any point were you going to mention it?”

“Little one, he says,” Anakin sniped. “I’m taller than you are.”

“I recognize, entirely, that biology has made a decision. I don’t deny it. I just find it to be incorrect, and thusly ignore it. On with it, are you ill? I have some lemon tea stored in my quarters, it is ideal for a sore throat.”

“Headache,” Anakin grunted.

Obi-Wan hummed. “In that case I retract all sympathy.”

Anakin opened one eye, specifically to glare, half-lidded, at Obi-Wan. “What if it’s a deadly headache, how will you feel later.”

“The exact same,” Obi-Wan said. “You understand that over the years you have given me no less than one headache daily, I have exceedingly little sympathy for you finally receiving your dues. I am heartened that the Force would be so kind and fair, even.”

Anakin scrubbed his hands over his face. “I’ll end you.”

“Doubtlessly. And you’ll do it by giving me a headache. I’ll go out the way that I lived, dealing with my walking migraine of a padawan.”

Anakin drifted off, loosely, after that. He was aware of the world around him—Obi-Wan shuffling through his quarters, doing whatever it was that Obi-Wan sought to do when Anakin wasn’t looking. But he wasn’t aware enough to act, and even if he wanted to, he wasn’t entirely certain he could move at all—his limbs were like iron, pain curling dully through them, but it was distant from himself, somewhere else, somewhere far. He didn’t remember when his drifting turned into actual sleep, but at some point he registered the rattle of metal, and jolted—armor, what battlefield was he on—what scrap metal was—

When he jerked upright, twisting to look at the noise, Ahsoka stared at him from the dark kitchen. There was very faint light fading in from the lightpanels closer to the door, which dimmed, but never entirely turned off—and Togruta eyes reflected light rather sharply, so he could see the opaque discs of her eyes reflecting that dim light, eerie yet comforting because he’d woken up to those eyes in a hundred tents on a hundred battlefronts. The Force was choked with how very startled the both of them were. “I was just trying to make some frozen jukira rolls,” she whisper-hissed. “I’m sorry.”

“What time,” Anakin rasped, but his voice grew thin and gave out, and he had to swallow hard against the sand in his throat and try again, “what time is it?”

“If I answer that you might get mad,” Ahsoka said.

Anakin waved a hand. “I might be too tired to be mad,” he said, rubbing at his face. His head throbbed hard, and he winced, despite himself. Every time he fell asleep he hoped, blearily, that the headache would fade, but it never left him, joined by a grinding in his bones and a blunt pain in his chest a good portion of the time. His chest ached fiercely then, though it hadn’t so much earlier. And, for reasons he couldn’t identify, he was sweating like he had just run for miles.

“It’s about two standard,” she said.

Anakin stilled. “You’re kidding. I’ve been asleep that long?”

Ahsoka picked her baked jukira rolls off of the rack with a set of tongs, dropping them on a waiting plate. “I don’t know how long you’ve been asleep, I just got back.”

The sickening thing, he thought, was that he still wanted sleep—could still feel the desire for it gnawing through him, despite the fact that he’d lingered on or near this particular couch almost all day. There was something Anakin had meant to do, maybe somewhere he’d meant to go, but even if he scrabbled at his memory, searching—there was nothing. He could only remember thinking well, if I give it some rest, it may leave me alone. His gut vaulted.

“Give me a minute,” he choked out, “and then we’ll talk about—why you’re back at two standard.”

“Sure thing, Skyguy.”

Anakin twisted off the couch—his balance was wrong, and he landed on his hands and knees and had to pull himself upright while Ahsoka snickered at him—and then brushed past her through the doorway to the kitchen, and, theoretically, there was a refresher at the end of kitchen, and it wasn’t technically that far. But his gut twisted again, and he thought fuck it and then bent and vomited bile into the sink. Ahsoka had seen worse than regurgitated stomach acid. She’d seen worse from Anakin himself, on any one of the number of occasions where he’d gotten caught by shrapnel or blaster bolts and hit the mud, guts spooling out of him. He could remember grinning at her with bloodied teeth. Ahsoka would grin back—this was her life, and this was how she knew him.

“Maybe we should talk about how late I got back tomorrow,” Ahsoka said, biting into a jukira roll.

“You’re not—” Anakin broke off for a moment, to hack wetly into the sink a couple times, “getting out of this. Sit down.”

Around her mouthful, Ahsoka said, “I’m not trying to get out of it, I’m just saying that maybe you need to get out of it.”

“Which is as good as saying you are trying to get out of it. Sit down on the couch.”

Ahsoka scowled—she had, definitely, been trying to get out of a lecture, because as piss poor of a disciplinarian as Anakin could be, he at least tried to emulate his own Master’s particular brand of talk them to death about consequences punitive measures. Ahsoka hated it more than anything, and had called him a preachy hypocrite more than once. Anakin had no response to that—it was usually true, and already he was struggling, because there was not a Jedi padawan in the whole of the Temple who had snuck out more than Anakin had. He was usually decent at cobbling together his own half-learned lessons and filling the gaps in with words he thought Obi-Wan would impart. But, typically, he wasn’t vomiting his guts out while trying to think of a proper lecture.

Ahsoka sat cross-legged on the couch, tearing into jukira rolls somewhat like she tore into Separatist droids. Anakin coughed into the sink a couple more times, and, satisfied he wasn’t going to throw up again, flicked the water on and scrubbed it out. He only realized Ahsoka was asking for him when he turned it off, and he could hear the murmur of her voice.

He turned his head. “What?”

Ahsoka was squinting at him, on the last of her rolls. “I asked if you wanted the last one, maybe four times.”

“The sink was on. I couldn’t hear you.”

“You never hear me,” she said, with something like a grin, but sharper, with sharper teeth. “Remember, we were in the hangar, working on the Aethersprites? And you had your head in the hull and me and Rex had a bet on how long we could call your name, and you wouldn’t hear us—”

“I remember,” Anakin interrupted, somewhat crossly. That one, he did remember, because they had both lost; because he’d never heard them, the only reason he’d known they were there had been because of the Force. He’d thought they were talking to each other. It’d unsettled him, that he couldn’t hear it, and—maybe that was what he had planned on doing, earlier, to take that walk of shame to the Halls of Healing and say, people have to shout at me to talk to me, and sometimes all I hear is this ringing, like comm static. Fix it, my padawan is mocking me.

“It’s all that hot air in there, Skyguy, I swear,” she said, impishly.

Anakin’s head throbbed, and he rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “Do you have those—flimsi notes, still, that stick places.”

Ahsoka tilted her head. “Yeah, I use them for studying.”

“I need one. I forgot to do something today. I would not like to forget tomorrow.”

Ahsoka bobbed her head, her beads tinkling together as she did so. “I guess I can give you one, because I’m nice. Do you want the last roll?”

Anakin waved a hand. “No, go for it. That is your bonus for—receiving a lecture.”

“Oh, Force. You really are going to try it now.”

“I’m assuming you snuck out of the Temple both when you skived off classes and when you got back at—this time,” Anakin finished, lamely, because he’d forgotten what time she’d said it was. “You’re not supposed to do that.”

“I didn’t sneak out, so you’re wrong about that,” she said. “I was just—on the roof. Of the Temple. It’s a good view, actually, of the Senate district.”

Anakin shifted—but somewhere he’d miscalculated, and instead his hip cracked into the opposite counter, and he stumbled forward, until he braced his hand on the doorway and leaned there. “That was smooth,” he said.

He waited for Ahsoka’s snicker, but it didn’t come. She just stared at him, her eyes pinched in concern. “Are you—okay? Are you, uh—have you been drinking?”

“I do not really drink,” Anakin said, numbly. “That’s more Obi-Wan’s pastime. I think I’m just tired.”

Ahsoka tapped her fingers against the edge of her plate. “You were just complaining about sleeping too long.”

“Was I,” Anakin rasped. He squeezed his eyes shut—the shadows of the room seemed to dip and whorl, like smoke, blurring in ways that made him want to be sick again. “I don’t think I was. I would have to know what time it is.”

“I literally just told you,” Ahsoka said.

Anakin swallowed. “Then I’m a bad listener. Go to sleep. We can do this tomorrow.”

Ahsoka pushed past him, in the kitchen’s narrow archway, and then slid her plate into the sink. “Sounds exciting,” she said, sharply.

Anakin reached out and tapped her shoulder. “I’m not—truthfully angry, Snips. I understand needing space. And you were just in the Senate district, anyway.”

Ahsoka stared at him. “Skyguy. Anakin. I told you I was on the roof. I was only looking at the Senate district. I said that two whole seconds ago. You’re less half asleep, more ninety percent asleep.”

Anakin blinked, and then scrubbed at his face, like he could scrub off the film over his mind; he felt slow and stupid, and his face flushed with heat from the embarrassment, and it was then that he realized he was trembling all over, having not realized he was freezing until a new sensation grounded him to his body. He trembled a lot, recently, like a leaf in the wind, and sometimes he wasn’t entirely sure if he was actually cold or if his body was broken by war in strange ways. Anakin loathed it, because it made him feel fragile—like delicate, hand-blown glass, that would shatter on impact.

I’m sorry, Anakin wanted to say, but didn’t, because he made it a habit to swallow his apologies and hold them in his chest. He was nothing if not in possession of bad habits. “Tired, I guess,” he supplied.

Ahsoka looked at him, keenly, a moment longer, and then she was in his arms, squeezing him tightly around the middle. “Go to sleep,” she said, the words muffled by his robes.

Anakin cupped the back of her head, thumbing the leathery-smooth skin of her montrals. “You should sleep as well, little one,” he murmured.

Ahsoka lingered in the embrace for a few moments longer, and then slipped off to her room, leaving Anakin hanging against the wall, somehow feeling unbalanced—not only in his mind, but physically, like he was a strong gust of wind away from falling over. At some point, he managed to stumble back to the couch—his knees were stiff and knotted with pain, and it seemed more exhausting than it was worth to wander to his own room—and dropped back on it, slithering back into black unconsciousness. The next time he awoke, the lightpanels had brightened to simulate internal twilight and someone had pulled one of his own cloaks over him—and Anakin recognized it, immediately, as his own, because it smelled mostly like motor oil with a hint of the metallic taste of blood. There was shuffling, again, in the kitchen, and an annoyed huff, and Anakin immediately recognized that particular huff as Obi-Wan’s.

“I have been on leave,” Anakin said, voice dry and thick with sleep, “For a day and a half. And you have managed—to invade my territory no less than twice.”

“Oh, goodness me, you do seek to grace me with your presence after all,” Obi-Wan called. “I’d become convinced you were comatose. In all the time that I have known you, Anakin, you have never slept later than I have. I feel like I’ve won something. I should receive a congratulatory gift.”

“The right to be an ass, is what you would have won, if you had not been born an ass first.”

Obi-Wan laughed, nearly startled, a loud belly laugh that warmed something in Anakin’s chest. “You are such a thorny little creature. For once, I am the morning person, and you, beastling, are the sufferer. I am the most gracious of Masters, and as such, I brought you a little headache remedy, in that thermos on the table.”

Anakin pushed himself upright, shaking his head and rubbing at his face. He was startled, for a moment, at how thick and sticky his robes were—he hadn’t had a blanket most of the night, but had still managed to sweat clean through his robes. If he’d had any nightmares—and he usually did—he couldn’t remember them, but he must have, to have sweat so much. The stickiness was uncomfortable, and it wasn’t helped that he was freezing, now. Anakin squinted at the steel mug on the table. Beside it was a neon green sticky flimsi slip, there for reasons Anakin couldn’t recall. “This unnerves me. What’s in it?”

“Kashyyk flower tea, a spoonful of honey, ground abalmary and a shot of Corellian whiskey,” Obi-Wan said. “When you were a child, and you got those migraines? That is what I would give you. Without the whiskey, naturally.”

Anakin bolted upright and gulped a quarter of the mug down in one go. His heart raced in his chest as he did it—maybe, Anakin thought, from the suddenness of the movement. “You could have just come out and said it was your magic tea.”

Obi-Wan laughed again, another loud belly laugh—he was always deliriously happy when they reached the Temple, and though he hadn’t had a proper leave in a while, too, Anakin knew. Even spending a night or two on Coruscant bolstered his mood. It was good, to see the lines of tension melt off of his old Master, even if just for a moment. “My magic tea, yes, if that’s how you think of it. I felt bad offering it to you as a child. The whiskey is what does the wonders.”

Anakin took another long pull of it, pressing a hand to his chest in the hopes that he could soothe the twisting ache there. “That’s because you use this as a hangover remedy, not a migraine remedy,” he said. “I hope you are not attempting to cook in my kitchen. I like it not burnt down. In fact, get out of there, you standing next to the stove is going to convince it to set itself on fire.”

“Oh, blast you,” Obi-Wan said. “I am no homemaker, I am a Jedi Master, and there is nothing wrong with that. As it were, when I arrived you looked right pathetic just laying there, padawan, but I had a mind to solve the issue, and popped off to Dex’s for breakfast.”

Anakin’s eyes widened. His head pounded, but he shoved the urge to wince at it aside. His heart pounded again; now there was a strange pressure in his chest, like someone had filled it to bursting with water, but his heart slammed hard against his sternum over and over and over. “You have Dex’s in there?”

Obi-Wan leaned around the corner, his mustache lifted at the corners with the depth of his smile. “It is actual food, and not compressed nutrition bars. I have scarcely been able to remember actual food. This may be the best meal I have eaten to date, simply because I’ve forgotten such fine things as salt.”

“You think it’s been bad for you? You do not even use salt. I have to yell at you to salt anything enough,” Anakin said. “Bantha-brained arasali ba’at—”

Obi-Wan waved a hand, interrupting Anakin’s string of Huttese. Arasali ba’at technically meant pariah-fucker, a strong insult in Huttese’s strict social hierarchy; maybe pariah wasn’t quite the right Basic word for it, but there wasn’t really a Basic word for the arasali, a group loosely defined by all being too poor to own slaves. But it wasn’t as if Obi-Wan would ever know what it meant, and it wasn’t as if Anakin meant it literally—the insult was almost never used literally. It wasn’t as if Anakin could use it literally, as a Hutt slave, with the inactive bomb buried in his neck and the scars and the brand on one of his shoulders, faded and warped with age and the height he’d gained since it’d been burned there when he was five and old enough to be branded with Gardulla’s crest. “This is why I have demanded that you do the cooking. You’re welcome to cease your mockeries at any point you choose, but I would suggest the one where you remember that I ventured to get us this fine meal, and you have done precisely nothing but sleep in.”

Anakin’s mouth twisted, and guilt roiled through his heavy chest. Ahsoka had managed not to wake him, as she left early for her lessons—and Anakin felt dull, like an unsharpened blade, like the combat instincts he had honed for so many years crumpled and failed him. He was a light sleeper, and he always had been; and he also woke early, and always had, a pattern set into his bones by Tatooine’s twin sunrise. When he glanced at the chrono fixed on the wall, it read to him nine standard. Typically he would have already been awake for hours. The guilt at his own laziness choked him, and he resolved in that instant to spend a number of hours sparring, re-honing that blade, letting the thick guilt in his chest out in the burning swing of his weapon. He would spar until he could barely stand, and afterwards he would bask in that helpless exhaustion and the satisfaction of something accomplished. The work was done day by day and night by night, every day, and every night.

Anakin polished off the magic tea, and thunked the thermos on the table, forcing himself upright—immediately, the world spun like a top, but Anakin shook his head and fumbled his way through it to the kitchen. Sometimes he was inexplicably dizzy, without a real explanation as to why; usually it was attributable to exhaustion, but, today, Anakin had no excuses.

“I was going to bring it to you,” Obi-Wan said, amused, when Anakin materialized by his side. “I see you simply could not wait. Not that I can blame you. That bowl over there is yours.”

Anakin lifted the bowl into his hands, breathing in deep the smell of it. His flesh hand was trembling, and he braced it underneath with his durasteel mechanical hand. “Corellian whiskey, Corellian stir fry with deep-fried karetschi—today is a day I owe to Corellia.”

“Leave it to Corellians to know good food and good drink,” Obi-Wan said. “You know, you truly ought to go to Corellia, when this blasted war’s over. Sign up for the first Corellian delegation mission you can find. Qui-Gon and I once spent several weeks there, when I was a teenager. I possibly ate my bodyweight in gayesh noodles.”

Anakin took another deep inhale of the smell—beautiful, and the spice already burned his nose, just the way he liked it. “The smell’s going to get me more inebriated than the whiskey. You’re nearest the conservator, can you get me a glass of water?”

Obi-Wan flicked his hand to two transportable, lidded cups sitting beside each other on the counter. “I’m no animal, padawan, I purchased drinks.”

Anakin peered at them. “What in the world did you get?”

“Something I wanted and needed desperately—herbal Rylothian attai tea.”

Anakin stared at Obi-Wan, who was grinning broadly, now. “I may fucking weep at the thought of it,” he said.

Obi-Wan laughed. “You may weep all that you desire, as long as you drink your cup. It was not what I would call cheap, but certainly a worthy thing to spend a portion of my stipend on.”

“I may have to sit down to take this in.”

Obi-Wan gestured to the couch. “What gunship do you think this is? Does it look like we’re choking down grotesque ration bars before jumping face-first into the fray? Absolutely not. What in the galaxy, padawan, I had no intention of eating standing up like one of those beasts of burden they strap a bag to—absolutely not! Sit down. This is to be enjoyed.”

They shuttled over the bowls of takeout and the drinks and extra glasses of water—Obi-Wan fiddled with the lightpanels and brightened them further, the setting meant to simulate real morning sunlight, though Tatooine’s suns had burned themselves so thoroughly in Anakin’s mind that everything less than blinding seemed dusky, to him. And, true to form, the first bite did make Anakin nearly weep; it was a strict diet of cheap rations, on the warfront, even when they camped on a planet’s surface, because the shelling and noise spooked anything good to catch for miles, and on the far-flung worlds they fought over in the Outer Rim, there was a higher-than-average chance that the Republic’s universal allergy booster shots and the universal illness booster shots had missed something, for someone, and they had few enough medical supplies anyway. But shipments of ration packs were getting slower; the Separatists knew where to fix a bottleneck thanks to the information leaks, and what freighters to lay traps for. Booze and pour-over caf, though—at least they never ran out of those. On any given day Anakin would bet the exhausted soldiers of the 501^st were running on more acetate and caffeine than real nutrients. That was the major reason he was on Coruscant, anyway, following an agonizing defeat at Columex, a waystation on one of the most important trade routes in the galaxy that was now entirely Separatist-controlled; in the debriefing following, after four days spent fighting in a sweltering jungle watching people die and knowing they wouldn’t have if they’d been allowed just another hour of sleep, Anakin had snapped, I don’t know how the Council and the Senate expect me to win battles when my soldiers are exhausted and starving.

It had earned his legion leave, though. The 501^st would be grounded for two months in the military barracks near the Senate building, recovering, with Ahsoka; Anakin had been told he’d be deployed again after a month, but he couldn’t remember where Master Plo had said it would be and what Jedi General he’d be joining, as much as he scrambled for purchase on the memory. He wasn’t looking forward to being separated from Ahsoka, but he pushed it to the back of his mind, thinking instead about his empty stomach—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten anything. He could remember tearing into a ration bar, dizzy out of his brain from hunger on Columex, ducking beneath a fallen tree and shoving it down because the Separatists weren’t far off and he didn’t have much time. But he hadn’t had anything that didn’t taste like grit-gruel in—nine months, actually. Exactly nine months.

“It’s good, isn’t it,” Obi-Wan said.

“I had forgotten I had tastebuds,” Anakin said, shoveling another bite into his mouth. “Do you think—do you think we could get this for the soldiers? They deserve it. They’re the ones responsible for winning the battles.”

Obi-Wan hummed. “Dex does have a catering business. But, ah—I am not entirely sure it is robust enough for that many people. I could ask. That’d be expensive.”

“I have nine months of stipends I haven’t used a singular credit of,” Anakin said. And my wife is wealthy enough on her own that she could buy all of Tatooine, he thought.

“We can look into it. They do receive honorary hospitality from most places on Coruscant, at any rate.”

“I think they’ve earned a meal delivered to them, for once,” Anakin said, steeling himself against a jerking shiver. He was shivering, again—shivering already.

“Most certainly.”

Anakin tried to slow down, to enjoy it, he really did; but something in his stomach took over for his hands and he started scarfing it down like he didn’t know for sure when his next meal would be. He used to be better about it, before the war—he’d been awful about it as a child, new to the Temple and new to the concept of regular food, and would eat so fast he’d throw up, convinced there was a chance he wouldn’t be fed again. Obi-Wan had devised a clever little system that Anakin hadn’t recognized at the time, but later, when he was older, the knowledge slotted itself into place, in one of those realizations that had warmed his chest and made him nervous all at the same time. Whenever Anakin started eating too fast, Obi-Wan wrangled him into a conversation about mechanics—and then the talking took over, distracted from the meal by the urge to explain what it was, precisely, that flux capacitors did.

This time, Obi-Wan just balled up a napkin and threw it at Anakin’s nose, where it bounced off and fell into Anakin’s half-demolished bowl. “Slow down, you horrible little creature,” Obi-Wan said. “The first war council is scheduled for tonight—fairly late, actually, but it was the closest to an agreeable hour that the Council could find with so many of us in far-flung systems. But we have the whole day to ourselves. I’ve been planning on meditating in the Room of a Thousand Fountains. I’m quite excited to do so. You’re welcome to join.”

Anakin dipped his head. “I wanted to—the training salles. Duel, for a bit.”

Obi-Wan stared at him openly. “You get off a battlefront and the first thing you want to do is fight more?”

Anakin growled. “No, I mean—duel, Obi-Wan, not use my lightsaber like a glorified door opener. The art of the thing. I suppose I feel lazy.”

Obi-Wan snorted. “Only you, Anakin. Second day of leave and feeling lazy. You’re utterly mad. One day, padawan mine, I will teach you the value of slowing down, when you need it.”

Anakin huffed. “Don’t you miss dueling? Not fighting, but dueling, not blocking blaster bolts but—getting to actually use the damn thing.”

Obi-Wan’s eyes sharpened. Hungrily, even—it heartened Anakin that, as much as Obi-Wan pretended otherwise, he enjoyed the artful movement of a blade just as much as Anakin did. “Perhaps you’re right. If you meditate with me, I’ll join you in the salles. It has been too long since we had a real spar.”

Anakin grinned. “Sounds ideal, Master,” he said. “After that—I don’t know.”

“Sleep,” Obi-Wan said, immediately. “We’ll be up all night. And then in the morning—a review of the Council’s new orders, and perhaps a look at that lovely little present I got you, being the kind Master that I am.”

Anakin pinched the bridge of his nose. “My Master is a traitor to the Republic, and a fiend.”

“Only one of those is true. I am no fiend. You insult me.”

They finished off their food and drink with more idle commentary, and when it came time to bring the bowls to the kitchen Anakin stood and blackness gnawed at his vision, his mind vaulting somewhere high and away while he pitched forward, vision gone and the incessant ringing in his ears stabbing at his skull. Obi-Wan’s hand pressed against his shoulder, holding him up. He was speaking, but Anakin couldn’t hear him, so he shook his head and then moments later the blackness gnawed its way back, and Anakin could read Obi-Wan’s lips.

“—to your head, hasn’t it,” Obi-Wan was saying, with a grin. “All that spice. Imagine that, it tastes like something.”

Anakin’s head throbbed, violently, and there was an all-over hurt that occupied him thoroughly; deeper than the muscle soreness he knew so well, but not quite as deep as the stiff and painful joints he knew just as well, like someone had laid a cloak of dull ache across his shoulders and he couldn’t remember when. Distressingly, he wanted to lay back on the couch and go to sleep.

“I should take a shower,” Anakin mumbled. As he said it, he thought about it—the luxury that was scorching himself with blinding hot water, and how much he really, truly loved that luxury. The Temple’s water heaters, and the water pressure, were phenomenal, and after nine months of sonic showers he really, truly missed both of those things about the Jedi Temple. He wanted it greedily.

“No offense, but you do smell like sweat,” Obi-Wan said, his hand still holding Anakin up. The touch was kind—bracing, and it was helping him ignore the pins-and-needles sensation in his skin, how no breath seemed to give him enough oxygen.

“Offense not taken.”

Obi-Wan frowned at him. “I know you feel sick now, padawan, but it’s—exhaustion, you know. It’s happened to me, after a few months without a rest, like your body simply gives in at the first opportunity. And it’s been a direly long time, for you. No sparring today, I should think, my friend.”

Anakin shook his head. “I do not want to be lazy,” he said.

Obi-Wan stared at him, for a long moment; his hand seemed to burn its presence against Anakin’s chest. Obi-Wan had steel-gray eyes, and Anakin had always had the wild thought that they were windows to Obi-Wan’s spine—a steel-whet thing, stronger than he could ever imagine being, like the cold-pressed core of him was the raw image of the strength a Jedi should covet, quiet and strong and everlasting like stone. Anakin had looked it up, once, and found that most of Stewjon’s civilization was settled above the alpine level, in the frosty gray-cragged mountain peaks; and Anakin, privately, thought that Obi-Wan would have been right at home there, like the jonyaks that braved the curling snow and sheer cliff faces simply by ducking their horned heads down further and marching forward with all the more determination. Obi-Wan was a Soresu Master not simply because he learned the form; he was a gifted Master because his soul was like that, carved in endurance, like for all that Anakin had height and weight and strength on him, there was nothing he could do that could knock Obi-Wan aside.

Obi-Wan, in the annoying fashion he had, promptly chose to thwack Anakin on the back of the head. “Lazy?” he squawked. “What in your tiny mind do you think leave is for, my friend? That is the point, you baffling boy. And to think I taught you to read in Basic myself, and my efforts were wasted purely because you won’t sit down long enough to read a directive. The insolence astounds.”

Anakin scowled. “You’re awful, Master.”

Obi-Wan cuffed his head again. “How dare you say that to me. Go take your shower, I’ll be here when you get out. If you don’t want to meditate, I’d always be delighted to find Ahsoka at the commissary, later, when it’s lunch.”

“I wonder what they have,” Anakin murmured.

“You just ate practically two meals, and you’re hungry again?”

Anakin huffed. “You’re the one constantly reminding me that I have to go back to nutritional rations at some point. Yes, correct, I am fucking starving, for food that tastes like food.”

He’d spent most of Columex starving; the Separatists’ tactic of firing on their freighters had hit them hardest, then, though it’d been a thorn in his side for months. Ahsoka had specialized needs, compared to the rest of them, who were human—every time Anakin snuck her his rations, in an attempt to supplement what she wasn’t getting, he tried not to think about his mother doing the same for him. Anakin remembered, suddenly, vividly, the last time he had choked down a ration bar on Columex had been because Rex had split his own rations. Don’t start, General, he’d said. We should’ve been taking turns, giving the kid extra, anyway.

One day, my Captain, we’re going to take turns ripping Grievous’ guts out with our bare hands, Anakin had said. Rex’s only response had been a wry grin.

Some of what Anakin was thinking of must have shown on his face, because Obi-Wan’s expression turned grave. “Brutal, isn’t it,” he said. “Take a shower, Anakin.”

The fact that Obi-Wan had told him to do it almost made Anakin not want to, but his robes were stiff now and after weeks of spending most days soaked to the bone in pale gray mud and blood and rain, he was really enjoying the sudden luxury of clean robes on hand. The Republic fucking Navy doesn’t deal with this, he thought, bitterly, and set off to his rooms to drag out some clothes and start the shower. He flicked it on the hottest setting, naturally—at some point blackness consumed his vision, again, but instead of getting out he luxuriated a bit longer, sitting on the floor of the shower so he didn’t pass out. The heat give him a new excuse to be as light-headed and dizzy as he was. It occurred to him a long ways through that he ought to have taken off his prosthetic, cleaned the stump—it was habit, for Anakin, to simply leave it on at all times, even though that wasn’t the medical recommendation. It was better than getting caught one-handed—once he and Rex and a handful of other men had gotten outflanked and pinned to a hollowed-out former house by Separatists, and out of weapons and ammunition, Anakin had stripped his arm for parts and managed to get a couple pipe bombs out of it to thin out the horde. Dueling the droids that were left without both hands, though, had been taxing.

Anakin disconnected the nerve sensors—they were waterproof and pretty damn robust, otherwise his arm would’ve given out a long time ago—and then popped the arm off, scrubbing at the aching stump beneath, around the ports that rooted deeper into his arm and interfaced the prosthetic nerves with his real ones, and the main one at the center that rooted the prosthetic to his body. What was unfortunate about the prosthetic was that, despite the durability of durasteel, it acted like a lightning rod for electricity, and if there were two things Anakin did with any regularity it was either get blown up or get electrocuted; the stump of his arm already had pale, ropey scar tissue from the initial burn from the good Count’s lightsaber, but now after multiple doses of Sith Lightning and innumerable times at the end of electro-whips and electro-staffs and electro-anything, a lot of the scrawling, flowery pink-red scars seemed to center on the arm, though they crawled all over the rest of him, too, in weird formations.

He didn’t much care for looking at his severed arm. It reminded him of the embarrassment of his failure, and the burn that Obi-Wan had almost never acknowledged it since; privately, Anakin thought Obi-Wan was embarrassed, too, of how badly Anakin had failed on Geonosis. Embarrassed, too, to have three fourths of a Jedi for his lineage, rather than a whole one. He didn’t like the way the eyes of everyone at the Temple seemed to skitter down to it in what felt like disgust; at least the soldiers were fascinated by it, whenever he couldn’t stand to have the bulking glove on any longer and pulled it off. They liked to test what it could break. Just to startle them, Anakin had adjusted the grip strength for a night to crunch durasteel, to the crowing joy of a crowd. If I lose an arm, General, you owe me one of those, Rex had said, once, lit by the flickering light of a campfire on a frigid, rocky little world. Make it blue and white, though.

Captain, if you lose an arm, I’ll make you the best mechanical one the galaxy’s ever seen. And then I will put a flamethrower in it, because I know you.

Rex had liked that joke, and brayed a long laugh. Anakin had liked that a lot better than pretending the mechanical arm didn’t exist in the first place.

He flicked off the shower, when he was starting to remember the feeling of heat exhaustion—from his childhood, and worlds he’d fought battles on since. To give his arm the rare breather, he toweled off and got dressed one-handed and slowly, ran a hairbrush through his hair and brushed his teeth and deodorized and all of the things that had been foreign to him as a child, and were foreign again now; the cleanliness that made a person feel like a person, and the opportunity to wash the blood out from beneath their fingernails. The last technical leave he’d had—four days, after roughly five months at the front—Anakin had stumbled to Padmé’s apartment before anything else, numb and blind and sick to his stomach, more tired than he could explain. He never told her about the war, tried to wake up from his nightmares silently and choke on his own breath in her bathroom, tear out his hair curled up on the tile next to her sink—and it hadn’t been different, that night, but he couldn’t have hidden it even if he could avoid speaking of it. He was still wearing it, the mud and gore. When she realized that he could barely think long enough to speak—she’d spoken low words in albūl, the dead, ancient language of Naboo, disjointed lines from one of the epic poems of her homeworld that she had loved best, and led him off to the bathroom to undress him and tug him into her bathtub.

It was one of the most unspeakably intimate things Anakin had ever lived, and at some point he had stopped being unable to speak because of exhaustion and dread and horror and started being unable to speak because he was too fascinated by the closeness of her to even say a word. Her hands were deft and sure and she lathered soap through his hair—everything smelled like flowers, if Padmé had a say in it—and worked it in, rubbing his scalp, tracing shapes into it, her fingers trailing down his neck, gracing his spine and running over the lash scars that were still there, after all his life since. She’d used that lavender-colored body soap she had, and scrubbed the grime away, even over his hand, rubbing his knuckles—when he’d been able enough to croak out her name, she’d said, I kind of like this, you know. There’s a lot I can’t do, but I can do this. And you’re beautiful this way.

If Anakin closed his eyes, she was still touching him. He knew that if he went to her now he would never make it back for the war councils in the evening—he’d tried not thinking about her, but when she smiled it was divine, like a saccharine sort of happiness that was infectious. When Anakin smiled, there was just blood on his teeth. But she thought it was beautiful anyway.

When Anakin re-emerged, Obi-Wan was sat—again in that stupid sprawl, one ankle resting on his knee—tapping on a datapad.

“That Alderaanian author I like has released a new novel,” Obi-Wan said, by way of greeting, in that odd way he had of launching directly into conversations without preamble, “and—for one thing, she’s breaking her genre. I liked her thrillers, they were fairly good, but now she’s written a historical fantasy about the Jedi Lords, and I am at that divergent point where I cannot decide if I want to continue with the book or if I want to write her a strongly worded letter about how she’s bungled the entire tax system the Jedi Lords had in place. And included romance, which is an entire—other logistical nightmare.”

“You are cranky about—the tax system being incorrect?” Anakin asked, squinting.

Obi-Wan looked at him seriously. “Very much so. The taxes the Jedi Lords levied on their planets has historical significance, padawan, and theological significance. Those archaic laws are part of why you get a stipend from the Republic, and—”

“We went to the same history classes,” Anakin said. Once more, his heart pounded, hard and fast like some beast loping through his chest. “I do not want to hear this. I know this. It was agonizing the first time.”

Obi-Wan huffed. “If you simply must be difficult, I’ll stop. How are you feeling?”

Anakin shrugged deeper into his cloak, shuddering. The pins and needles feeling had returned, rippling over him, making his skin break out into gooseflesh. “Cold,” he said. “They do not make the Temple warm enough.”

Obi-Wan had cleared the table, and washed and put away the dishes—the couch had been resettled, the cloak Anakin had found tossed over him discarded into the laundry bin somewhere. Anakin crawled back onto the couch, shakily—trembling, again, to the point that his hand was nearly useless and he braced himself with his metal one—and laid his head into his folded arms, groaning as the sudden darkness alleviated the pressure and tension and ache in his skull. He sucked in a few breaths, trying to assuage how short of it he felt, and idly wondered how taking a shower had exhausted him to the point where he wanted to sleep for the next hour when three days ago he had ran four miles full-tilt through Columex’s jungle to get to the ridge where tanks had been positioned to shell them from up high. Almost as if the memory had caused it, a muscle spasm rocked through Anakin’s leg, twisting and painful and Anakin hissed soundlessly into the sleeve of his cloak against it. They kept occurring. It unsettled him and he didn’t know why.

“They make this Temple too warm, actually,” Obi-Wan groused.

“Liar,” Anakin grunted. The buzzing in his ears ratcheted up louder; it sounded like the buzzing of insects. His chest twisted hard, aching again. “Everything is exhausting,” he said, finally.

Obi-Wan hummed in sympathy. “I understand.”

“How long have you been—here?” Anakin asked, haltingly.

“A week,” Obi-Wan said. “I have two more. It is something of a hybrid between true leave and paperwork duties, as it were.”

Anakin swallowed back an unsatisfying breath—the 501^st and the 212^th had been separated for months, split between the different fires in the Outer Rim that needed them. He missed Obi-Wan like a part of him. He missed Obi-Wan so badly the lack of his old Master’s steadying presence was like a wound, tearing itself open further and further the less he saw of Obi-Wan, the more Anakin couldn’t turn his head and know that his Master had his back. Anakin couldn’t very well ask that the Council pair them together again—but he wanted to, desperately, even as pathetic as it was. And pathetic it was, to reach for Obi-Wan when Obi-Wan didn’t really desire to reach back. The new relief of being near Obi-Wan, of finally feeling somewhat safe, finally feeling like the pressure wasn’t his and his alone, was enough that he could’ve cried for it, then. But the preemptive grief he had of the day he’d have to part ways with Obi-Wan again, for suns knew only how long, stabbed at him and for a moment it was everything he could do to keep from crying into his folded arms. Two weeks would have to be enough, for that time with Obi-Wan to make him—sane, again. To maybe take away the blood-curdling misery he couldn’t shake anymore, the what’s the point that blended with I want this to end. He wanted Obi-Wan to press his hand to Anakin’s chest again. He wanted Obi-Wan to fix it, and couldn’t define what it was at all. I’m drowning, he wanted to say. Can you tell if it’s water or if it’s blood?

“Did Ahsoka make it to her lessons?” Obi-Wan asked.

Anakin swallowed hard against the ice in his throat. I don’t know, because I wasn’t awake to see her off, and I did not even hear her leave, because I am a horrible teacher, he thought. “I don’t know,” he said.

Obi-Wan tilted his head. “You were asleep, then?”

“I was supposed to speak to her in the morning about her skiving,” Anakin said. Simultaneously he didn’t want to address it—the thought of standing up alone made him sink deeper into the couch, much less trying to formulate a serious lecture—but he knew Ahsoka, and Ahsoka didn’t skirt responsibility because she simply wanted to. He hadn’t, either; Anakin had skipped his classes plenty, trying to bury the fear that poisoned his thoughts in something that moved faster, something that moved too fast for him to get a chance to think. Burying his loneliness and the way he flinched at shadows beneath full-throttle speed, in all manner of illegal racing circuits, taking turns too quickly half-hoping they’d have to pick the pieces of his charred corpse out of the wreck, just so he didn’t have to disappoint Obi-Wan again when he came back to the Temple at four in the morning, bruised and covered in engine grease with nothing to show for it but an empty little victory and the crushing knowledge that there was nothing he could pilot fast enough to outrun everything that he was.

Anakin wondered if Obi-Wan ever knew that, that it hadn’t been the responsibilities Anakin was trying to outrun all the time; it was the fact that he flinched when Obi-Wan moved too quickly, that there was a mottled brand on his shoulder of Gardulla’s crest beneath lashes a decade old, and those scars spewed poison into him, and as many times as he had flicked open a pocketknife and thought about it he’d never be able to reach to cut them off. That sometimes he woke up in the night, fear like a sick living thing curling around him, and scrubbed their quarters top to bottom until everything gleamed, until the sun was rising and he was scrubbing at imaginary stains and the cleaning chemicals had burned through his sinuses—and then Obi-Wan would drowsily ask him what he was doing, when he rose, and Anakin would choke out something like I couldn’t sleep, when the real answer was I left a mug on the center table, and for five hours I convinced myself that you would beat me blind in the morning if I did not make it up to you.

Obi-Wan never would, Anakin knew, because Obi-Wan Kenobi entirely lacked malevolence—if he had ever felt that baying desire for the most evil kind of justice, if he had ever wanted revenge so badly he would have cracked skulls and spines trying to carve his grief in bodies, Anakin never knew of it. Anakin would have bet his own freedom that Obi-Wan Kenobi had never wanted to carve how much he hated something into its skin, and never would—it had nothing to do with Anakin, and everything to do with Obi-Wan, that stubborn endurance that scaled cliffs horns first, shouldering the bitter wind with not even a flicker of complaint. But Anakin had learned to call the man his Master, and his masters, and his slavedrivers and his taskmasters had all wanted the sick joy of watching something bleed. Anakin was more like them, he thought, than he ever was Obi-Wan, even with over a decade away from the desert—but the sun had bleached him dry, somewhere along the line. The scars, and their poison. But they couldn’t be cut off, and they would just keep leaking poison, and then he would be nothing but a fiery hot burn scar from a fiery hot brand.

“And you were asleep,” Obi-Wan repeated.

“Tell me of my failures one more time and I’ll take it out on your neck. Your soon-to-be-broken neck, I mean.”

Obi-Wan snorted, like Anakin’s ire was beneath him. “It’s not me commenting on your failures, Anakin. Sometimes you are so very prickly. I’m merely trying to assess the situation.”

Anakin twisted his head so he was glaring at Obi-Wan from his folded arms, even though his headache protested violently. “Prickly?”

Obi-Wan gestured at him. “You are the very image of prickly at this precise moment, do not even try to deny it. You have been at the front practically nonstop for the better part of a year, do you think I am angry that you wanted rest? Please, by all means. What in the galaxy has made you think anyone is going to judge you for that?”

Anakin jolted, fire trickling low in his belly. He hid his face in his folded arms, again, half afraid he would start crying from frustration. “You act like—like it’s mad, of me. If I fell asleep when I was working as a child I got an electrified bantha prod held to my back until I remembered why I shouldn’t. I remembered quickly, but it was—it was left there, a while, for—good measure.”

Why did I say that, he thought, his heart pounding again like it was trying to tear out of Anakin’s chest. The ache in him twisted, shuddered, Anakin breathing hard against it, though he could never seem to get his lungs to fill quite enough.

It was a long moment after, when the couch at Anakin’s side dipped, and Obi-Wan’s back was warm next to him. “Let me see something,” Obi-Wan said, softly.

“If you want to see the fucking scars, Obi-Wan, I will hit you instead,” Anakin growled.

He could feel Obi-Wan’s flinch, the touch of shame that brushed the Force. “No,” Obi-Wan said. “Not—that is not what I was—no, Anakin. But you’re shivering again. On your side, please.”

“I hate you,” Anakin hissed, but he twisted anyway, trying to scowl when Obi-Wan’s cool hand cupped his forehead. Obi-Wan had checked him for a fever a hundred times, and every time he was right; he had an uncanny ability of predicting when Anakin was ill better than Anakin could.

Obi-Wan sighed, and dropped his head. “You do have a temperature,” he said. “I don’t think it’s serious, but—were you cleared for contagions after you left Columex?”

“Yes,” Anakin said, not because he remembered the process, but because he remembered Kix swearing something—something. He had seen Kix. He and Ahsoka both had, that much he knew.

“Sometimes exhaustion brings with it a fever,” Obi-Wan said, tiredly. “I can get you a fever reducer. You need to drink more water, certainly. But the primary answer is still rest.”

“Do I need more, truthfully.”

“If you think one day makes up for months of wear, you’re mad,” Obi-Wan said.

And as much as Anakin didn’t mean to, he slipped off into an uneasy sleep, and Obi-Wan’s hand never seemed to leave his shoulder, one warm and bright point in all the world.

Chapter Text

The first war council was particularly heinous, in Anakin’s opinion, but for once it wasn’t because everyone had the stupidest ideas he’d ever heard, which was usually the reason he hated war councils. It wasn’t that anyone had suddenly gained intelligence, either, because Anakin was certain that if he could hear what the majority of his fellow Jedi Generals were suggesting, his face would be nearly as stony as Obi-Wan’s was—but the majority of them had shaky transmission connections from the field, and Anakin could hardly make out the words they were saying, and it was difficult to read lips—his vision was fuzzy, either from the distance or the throbbing headache. Everyone else seemed able to hear the discussion quite easily, which Anakin found massively, massively irritating, so he kept his eyes on his lap like if he minimized external stimuli he just might manifest the ability to make out what was being said. Straining to listen worsened his ever-present headache, until it spread into a full migraine—vision fluttering and shimmering, half his body slackening into that pins-and-needles numbness he was so familiar with these days, and a few times over the hours the first session took, he had to excuse himself to vomit in the refresher. Migraines made him nauseous. He used to get them all the time, as a kid, before he was somewhat better at adjusting what he could sense in the overwhelming breadth of the Force—in the field, in the mire of war, he got them almost every night, like whiplash from the holes bulleted into his brain from the dying throes of everything around him. Obi-Wan caught him afterwards, sometimes, with a look caught between curiosity and exhaustion; you have to get better at tuning it out, Anakin. Can’t you?

Ahsoka didn’t judge him too harshly, though; he never admitted to his weakness in so many words, but he was quite a bit clingier with her when he had a migraine, like if he bundled her against him her presence alone could calm his burning nerves. It helped in some indescribable way, and Anakin told himself it wasn’t too selfish of him, because Ahsoka was naturally pretty touchy. She always leaned into it. She got cold, sleeping on the ground in those tents. Anakin ran hot—Padmé commented on it all the time, Padmé loved to burrow into his side and then stick her cold feet under his thigh, hide her cold nose against his shoulder, mumbling, how do you always feel like a blast furnace, Ani, it’s impossible. He could always help with the cold.

It wasn’t even just his head. His muscles twisted themselves in sharp knots, spasms strong enough Anakin thought they might crack his bones, coming and going in waves. He figured he wasn’t used to all the sitting, the laying about of leave—but more than once he thudded his thigh with a metal hand, trying to confuse the agony in his nerve endings, even if only for a moment. Obi-Wan slid him strange looks, for that. Anakin, for once, couldn’t bring himself to care about Obi-Wan’s strange looks and Obi-Wan’s strange judgments, when his focus kept sliding from the heated debate in front of him to anything else, and his mental shields were slippery like oil, but the thought he circled back to repeatedly was, I want to be asleep, and I want everyone to shut the fuck up so I can be asleep, can we get on with this. When he couldn’t focus on the words—he couldn’t even fucking hear them, anyway, he was going to have to read the transcripts sent after the session was adjourned—he entertained lucid daydreams, wondering if he could think hard enough about wanting sleep he could slip drowsiness into the minds of the generals around him and they’d all just let it go until tomorrow. He’d accidentally influenced a Jedi or two by brooding strongly enough on something before, it wasn’t entirely impossible.

The sessions didn’t become more bearable after the first. It was only three days of the official meetings, which would likely be followed by less formal, and maybe less tense, meetings after that, but Anakin’s constant, recursive bend of dread didn’t let up even when he tried to remind himself that it’d be over soon. He ended up sleeping through the days prior, and sleeping through the nights after—waking up a hazy hour before, falling asleep a miserable hour after. He hadn’t seen Ahsoka for more than a few moments since they touched down on Coruscant, and since the first day of the war councils, he’d only seen Obi-Wan during the events themselves. The lazy spell that had taken hold of him frustrated him more than anything else, more than the muscle spasms, more than his thundering heart or the sweat or the trembling and the roiling stomach or the pain, because he spent the rest of his time upright aching and nauseous and miserable without being able to define why. Three days of constant rest ought to have made some dent in how awful he felt, but instead he was starting to think it was only getting worse. It made him angry, it made him wordlessly anxious, anxious for reasons he still couldn’t define—anxious enough that he had to remember to breathe normally, because between the pressure in his chest and the oxygen he couldn’t suck down fast enough, he would pass out if he started hyperventilating. It was already hard to breathe around the jackhammer kicking in his chest, and sometimes he passed out anyway, blackness gnawing at his vision and coming to minutes later, thinking this floor is cold and again?

That was how Obi-Wan found him, during the last of the war councils—passed out.

“You are in the refresher, asleep on the blasted floor,” Obi-Wan said.

Anakin startled, jerking—he’d skittered off to vomit up what he’d tried to eat before the meeting, but afterwards was a blur. He found himself with his legs sprawled out, leaning back against the far wall, having drifted off somehow. His head ached in a new, sharper way—like he’d cracked it on something.

“I am,” Anakin said, blinking. He scrubbed at his eyes. “I—am?”

Obi-Wan turned and locked the door of the public refresher behind him, and then stood in front of the row of sinks, arms crossed over his chest and looking apoplectic. Or, as apoplectic as Obi-Wan could get, around the shell of the ascetic Jedi Master he was. “The level of disrespect,” he began, in a low, dangerous voice, but Anakin cut him off with a groan.

“If you lecture me for half of a nanosecond on disrespect I will throw up on your boots.”

Obi-Wan snorted, and gestured at Anakin. “You’re lucky I don’t throw up on yours for this—this display. All of these meetings, you have been—not paying attention, barely there, and it is all because I gave you pertinent information. I trusted you to be responsible, I told you that you still had to attend. Here I am, the king of all fools, having believed you actually would follow a direct order, show a modicum of respect for authority and this process and this Order, and you—”

Anakin’s head throbbed, and the pain fed into the sudden, charging burst of rage. He pushed himself upright, ignoring the screaming pain in his bones—and where was that coming from, anyway—and he had a sharp retort, something smart to say, but it quickly flew out of his mind, because his world tilted and he crashed his shoulder into the hinges of the stalls in front of him, managing to fall nearly a full body length sideways. The movement made the world spin, violently, and his vision bled black and his ears rung like there were klaxons in his ears.

“—drunk, I will kill you myself, and you will thank me for saving you from your own embarrassment,” Obi-Wan was saying, but his hands were the hands that were holding Anakin upright.

“Stood up too fast,” Anakin coughed out, and then he was listing sideways, and Obi-Wan was rapidly readjusting his grip.

“Sit back down, you are falling everywhere,” Obi-Wan barked, and then he was guiding Anakin back to the ground.

The distance between upright and sitting down was closed faster than Anakin could realize it was even there; faster than he could grasp what had just happened, or grasp anything other than how catastrophically all of him seemed to ache. He’d at least felt mildly functional before he’d apparently fainted, but now his energy was spent. He kept his eyes closed, because the light was now stabbing at his eyes, like knives scraping the backs of his eye sockets—metal on bone.

He ought to tell Obi-Wan leave me alone and do not return until this planet’s sun expands and consumes it. Anakin fumbled for the name of the planet; how had he lived here more than half his life, and now he was trying to fish for the name?

“You are not fond of drinking. I don’t think you’re drunk, are you?” Obi-Wan asked, softer, now. He was crouched in front of Anakin, now—Anakin didn’t remember when that had happened, but he could feel Obi-Wan’s nearness, even with his eyes closed. In the Force, Obi-Wan was a soft breeze; Anakin could nearly feel it, the cooling sweep of air on his sweaty, boiling hot skin, a balm, a relief.

“I do not like drinking,” Anakin snarled. “You are an ass.”

He opened his eyes to hopefully attempt some sort of glare, but Obi-Wan’s face was grim. “Then I apologize for my assumption, Anakin. When Ahsoka told me you were resting during the day, I was—nevermind. Perhaps I just snapped. Forgive me.”

“Ass,” Anakin repeated.

Obi-Wan’s smile was, like the rest of him, grim. “Fair enough. I’ll withstand your insults for now. It stands to reason that you would still be recovering, I suppose, but—this is the second time I’ve happened to catch you collapsing, young one, and I am… somewhat concerned.”

“I have had a migraine,” Anakin said, waving a hand. It was badly coordinated, and he nearly hit himself in the face.

Obi-Wan’s brows furrowed. “Have you still been having a lot of those, on the front?”

“Can neither confirm nor deny,” Anakin said, slipping his eyes closed. “They’re going to miss you at the meeting. Go. I’ll be back there in a minute.”

Obi-Wan’s hand, hovering over Anakin’s shoulder, stiffened, and Anakin could taste Obi-Wan’s alarm in the Force. The wind was whipping, now. “You haven’t had a migraine this bad since you were a child,” Obi-Wan said, quietly.

“What?”

“The council ended over an hour ago. I was waiting for you to re-emerge, so I could tell you off for hiding away then. You never did, so I sought you out, and—you’ve been here. On… the floor.”

Anakin huffed, the movement of his chest turning his ribcage to fire, and the huff turned into a wet cough into his fist. “Swallowed wrong,” he gasped out. “I suppose I—lost track. I came in here to—breathe, a minute.”

Anakin’s eyes slid open again, and Obi-Wan was watching him balefully, watching him gasp pathetically for air. “Seems like it was successful,” Obi-Wan said.

“Very,” Anakin rasped. If he could have shoved Obi-Wan off, he would have, just for that.

Obi-Wan’s hand retreated from Anakin’s shoulder. Anakin wanted to snatch his wrist and pull it back. “You haven’t lost track of time like that since you were young. This may be the length of time away from Coruscant—you have to readjust to all of that energy in the Force, all over again. I was concerned about such a thing, when you first mentioned headaches. Unless you feel otherwise ill, this may be—a rock re-entry, little one.”

I don’t feel ill, I feel half dead and actively dying faster, Anakin thought. “Makes sense.”

“Why don’t you stay in my quarters, for the night. It is closer,” Obi-Wan said.

Anakin nodded, coughing a bit again, wiping the white, foamy mucus against his robes. Mostly because he knew it would make Obi-Wan scowl, and it did, even if only for a moment. “Let Snips know. I do not want her to panic.”

“Of course. Up and at it, Anakin, that’s it.”

Obi-Wan, in a well-practiced motion, pulled Anakin’s left arm over his shoulders and hauled Anakin upright—Anakin misjudged the trajectory, and knocked his hip into Obi-Wan’s side full force. Obi-Wan managed to keep them both upright, with a push of the Force around them. Anakin almost made a noise about being half-carried, as they left the refresher, but he remembered they were in the Council’s wing of the Temple, where activity was restricted due to wartime security policies; the only ones around to see Obi-Wan all but dragging him were other members of the High Council. They had all likely retreated to their quarters; and, in fact, the hall was deserted, and Obi-Wan said something, but Anakin wasn’t looking at him to read his lips and his ears were ringing like high-pitched, rapid-fire alarms, or transponder static. He would have argued about Obi-Wan carrying him, but—it was nearly like a hug, and usually when this happened, Anakin was either bleeding or unconscious, and couldn’t really enjoy the closeness. At least, now, he was just aching and out of it, not really dying.

Obi-Wan punched in the numerical code that unlocked his door—Anakin had it memorized, because Obi-Wan had been using the same numerical code since Anakin was a child, but the idea of lifting his metal arm exhausted him, and his flesh hand was trembling with the rest of him—and pulled Anakin in, shuffling him to the couch and setting him down to sit upright. Anakin had intended to stay that way, but when he opened his eyes he was half crashed on his side, not entirely positive where the last handful of minutes had gone—Obi-Wan was across the room at his holotable, punching in what was likely Ahsoka’s comm number.

“You need to clean up your caff mugs,” Anakin mumbled, blinking at the table in front of him. There were eight separate beige, ceramic mugs, all occupying what little space there was around stacks and stacks of datapads. The lines of everything were soft, blurred. Why did Obi-Wan only ever keep the same kind of mug, anyway?

“I am perfectly neat when it suits me to be, which just happens to be not at this time,” Obi-Wan said, loudly. “Yes, Ahsoka, dear one, that’s your idiot Master. He has something of a migraine, as it were. Yes, you’re welcome to.”

Anakin didn’t hear anything Ahsoka said, even though he tried to pick out her voice. It cut him to the quick; cut him deeper than it should have, but it was rare these days that they didn’t see each other for more than a handful of hours, not when the war had them fighting back to back more often than not, sleeping in the same tent every night that they slept, taking the same watches and holding the same positions. The war had forged them together—Anakin could hardly remember what it was to lead the 501^st without Ahsoka saying something snippy behind his back, mocking the way he crossed his arms or pointed at people when he spoke to them. You’re so dramatic, Skyguy, she said, as justification. If you are then what am I, was Anakin’s intelligent counter.

Obi-Wan strode off from the holotable to the kitchen, flicked on the sink and filled a cup of water, and returned, gesturing for Anakin to sit up.

I will vomit all of that up, Anakin thought, but he didn’t shove it away, just balanced himself on his elbow and knocked it all back before crashing back down. “This is a good couch,” he said, finally. “Supple.”

Obi-Wan bellowed a laugh. “Certainly, yes. I do think they stuff the Council members’ couches with something special. It was quite nice, the four times, total, that I’ve gotten to sit on it.”

“Or maybe you’re lying, and you use it too much, old man. Soften it.”

“One day, I hope to,” Obi-Wan said, quietly.

His old Master bustled about, gathering spare pillows and then shoving them under Anakin’s head, tossing a throw blanket over him, and when Anakin groaned at the prospect of sitting up to pull off his boots, Obi-Wan did that, too, and arranged them neatly by the door. That made Anakin’s face heat up, embarrassed at his own weakness, embarrassed that Obi-Wan was fussing over him—but his heart skipped several beats, his chest nearly vibrating with pain like lightning in his nerves, and Anakin managed to shove the feeling away. If he lingered on it, he wouldn’t be focusing on not throwing up on Obi-Wan’s floor, which was surprisingly vacuumed. Obi-Wan could be messy, especially when he had a lot to do—but shoving all the shoes right next to the door was his most strict housekeeping habit. It charmed Anakin, to see how he kept to it. Then Obi-Wan dimmed most of the lightpanels down to black, save for a few to light the paths of the room, and by then the water Anakin had drank was churning in his stomach uncomfortably.

“You used to give me something,” Anakin said, roughly, “for nausea. Something. I do not know what it was.”

“Apoxamine,” Obi-Wan supplied. “Blast, Anakin, I should have given you something first. My apologies.”

Anakin rubbed his face into the pillows Obi-Wan had shoved under his head—the pressure helped, a bit, and he worked a hand underneath him to rub at his sternum, to try and ease his pounding heart, the frothing pain in his chest. All he managed to do was make himself cough into the fabric. “The blanket was a good choice.”

A few moments later, Obi-Wan tapped his shoulder, and Anakin sat up again to swallow back—three pills, whatever Obi-Wan had seen fit to give him—and then kept upright, willing his stomach to keep it down. If he didn’t move, he wouldn’t risk it. He felt Obi-Wan’s hand lay on his knee—the warmth of it soothed some of the stiffness there—and then Obi-Wan said, “It’s been a long-lasting migraine, then? Since you touched down?”

“Yes,” Anakin said.

“You haven’t had any seizures?” Obi-Wan asked, and, of course, that was what Obi-Wan had been working up to. Obi-Wan had always worried over the seizures.

As thoroughly as the Jedi Healers had ever been able to explain it, accessing the Force too intensely, too suddenly, was quite literally capable of breaking Anakin’s brain; the power disrupted the electrical pulses in his brain, causing seizures. It was the same reason he ran hot, the energy of the universe coiling through him at levels that, previously, had been thought physically impossible. They’d confirmed it wasn’t a typical seizure disorder, because the seizures themselves only ever occurred when Anakin pushed too hard with the Force, meditated too deeply when he was young, and without the training he needed to be able to control the infinitesimal movements of the Force through his own body. There was anti-seizure medication Anakin was supposed to take regularly—lanaoplin—but there wasn’t reliable access to food on the front, much less reliable access to anti-seizure medication. He didn’t remember the seizure itself, afterwards, and only barely remembered the foggy moments afterward. If he’d had a seizure while he was alone, there was no way Anakin would remember that he’d had it.

The side of Anakin’s head still throbbed, like it’d hit something. Throbbed like it had snapped against the floor when Anakin’s body collapsed beneath him. There was a more-than-nothing chance that he’d had a seizure in the refresher, and no longer remembered it. But he couldn’t admit that to Obi-Wan—Obi-Wan’s expression looked pinched and strained enough as it was.

“No,” Anakin said. “But I have not had the—lanaoplin. That. The that.”

Obi-Wan’s mustache twitched downwards. “Yes, I supposed that would be the case. You ought to go to the healers and ask for their whole inventory of it, keep it stocked on the Resolute. You haven’t been eating much, either, have you? Migraines always put out your appetite.”

Anakin scowled at him. “Now you’re lingering, and I am going to tell you to fuck off.”

Obi-Wan snorted. “Prickly as ever. I was wondering when your legendary manners would make a reappearance.”

“Oh, absolutely fuck yourself,” Anakin hissed.

“Like I said, legendary. I know the supply routes to Columex were disrupted. You—need nutrition, Anakin.”

Anakin wished he were less exhausted, because he would just love meeting Obi-Wan’s serene expression with a barrage of rage. “You know nothing about Columex,” he snarled.

Calling a retreat on Columex had been one of the hardest things he’d ever done; and perhaps he’d called it early, but all he’d done on Columex was send soldiers who were bone-tired and hungry in the field to die. All he’d done was carry men to their graves. And they died, they died in droves, died under Anakin’s hands, their blood hot and sticky around his fingers when he tried uselessly to put pressure on a wound that was fatal, they died in the medic tent while Kix tried to hold back tears and Anakin tried to access the Force in ways that were unknown to him in order to heal. I’m sorry, Kix, I am just not a healer, Anakin repeated, but he tried, because they had no other options, out of antibiotics to clear up infections and out of painkillers and out of everything that made injuries survivable. It was a matter of time before he and Kix ran out of the ability to drag bodies to shoddily-dug holes in the ground, stacking the corpses of soldiers up to their heads, one mass grave because they had to pack up and keep moving. No time for proper rites; they had to try to keep everyone else alive. Kix had wept, every time, and Anakin had turned his face away to try and give the man some privacy. Anakin knew calling a retreat was something of a morale blow to all of them—the 501^st took pride in its successes, took immense pride in its status as the unbeatable legion, the unstoppable boys in blue, the thundering horde famous clear from Columex to Belderone.

Anakin’s soldiers cracked more Separatist lines than any other legion, and damn if they didn’t puff up a bit when around their brother legions—they didn’t make soldiers more prideful than the 501^st, and damn if the boys hadn’t earned it. Anakin knew calling a retreat was going to embarrass them, shame them, and he felt it as keenly as they did—not the least of which because he could sense their shame, through the Force, the strangling, awful weight of it, the heaviness on his chest that was all of theirs. But Anakin would rather they live in shame than die for pride, even if meant a good portion of them thought he had given up. Worse, somehow, were those that were thankful—sometimes Anakin wondered how many of their lives could’ve been spared if he had called it earlier. How many less bodies he and Kix would’ve had to bury in the early hours of the morning, if Anakin had just done something earlier.

Anakin had hated making that call, nearly as much as he’d hated anything before; and he had lists of awful memories, enough awful memories to fill museums and galleries. Columex was unique because it was the first time Anakin had truly and absolutely failed in the field, and paid none of the price. It made him want to hit something without stopping, until his metal hand was cracked and fraying and his flesh one had been stripped of meat, whittled down to the bone, it made Anakin want someone or something to hit him without stopping; it made him want to dig up an old electric bantha prod, and press it to his own back until the skin around it blistered and he felt like screaming, but he would be awake, and he would be moving forward. He had fucking hated Columex, watching soldiers split rations between themselves and the injured, watching Rex wave off anything extra so it would go to someone else and the resulting hollows beneath his cheekbones, Anakin coming up with his hands empty because he had to come up with all new ways to slip what was given to him to Ahsoka, without her getting furious. The times when she did get furious, and Anakin had to pull rank, and demand that she accept it, because he was her Jedi Master, and it was his job to protect and nourish and teach—and blast it all, but how was he supposed to do that on the front? Anakin knew his mother now that she was dead better than he ever had. He knew her in the soul-sucking, right-at-home feeling that was delegating what supplies they had left, cutting their rations to half to a third a day just to try and stretch it—and that, he had learned in the desert, and that, he had watched his mother do. He had learned how to be hungry when he was young. He had watched his mother starve for him when he was young. The familiarity made him want to peel his skin off.

Then there had been the disaster of a debriefing after the Resolute dropped out of hyperspace to drag them off to the next hellish battlefield. Anakin had felt the knife of his soldiers’ embarrassment and the knife of their relief as one. He’d rattled off some spare words to Rex—tell everyone to eat small, bland meals, they will throw up if they eat anything else, they may give themselves stomach ulcers, I know they’re hungry, but it takes time—and then stalk to the war room near the bridge to tell the High Council that even though they’d assigned him to the campaign on Columex because it couldn’t fail, and he never failed, he’d failed. All he’d done since he set foot on Columex was fail. Anakin had felt the Council’s disappointment in him, as keenly as he’d felt any of the other knives, as keenly as he knew the familiar feeling of being shot with a blaster bolt or breaking a rib; everyone, even the Council, seemed to forget just how good Anakin was at picking up feelings through the Force, and everyone assumed that if they held their expressions carefully, Anakin couldn’t see right through them. But he could feel what they felt like he could fucking smell it. Saesee Tiin had suggested that Anakin had retreated preemptively, and had implied it had been driven by Anakin’s ego—that he just hadn’t wanted to lose badly, would have rather had a lighter loss on his record—and Anakin flew off the handle. When Master Windu had broken up the shouting match, finally barking, Skywalker, you are going to bust my ear drums and you’re halfway across the galaxy, spare a thought for your poor padawan standing next to you. But, later, Mace said, Master Tiin, that piece of commentary was out of line. It was rare enough, that Master Windu was on Anakin’s side.

He’d flown far enough off the handle that he’d even gotten leave, for himself, for Ahsoka, and all the boys in blue. Somehow it didn’t feel like a victory. Somehow it was just more misery, snaking thoughts of you can’t ever fail them again, you can’t, you can’t, if your old owner held a prod to your back, imagine what the Jedi would do, thoughts that weren’t rational, but haunted him all the same. Being slumped on Obi-Wan’s couch felt like failing again. Somehow he was still fucking starving, and he’d left Columex. He’d rather die than go back.

“I know it wasn’t good,” Obi-Wan said. “And I know—Anakin, you… padawan, you’re thin. You need to eat. You do not exactly have all the time in the world to gain that weight back.”

That was why Obi-Wan had brought him Dex’s, on his first day back, then. Anakin’s heart warmed, at the same time he wanted to snarl, I don’t need your help. Looking back, Anakin was certain it was only a few days of small meals on the Resolute on the return journey from Columex that allowed him to keep it down. That, and willpower—the jaw-locking excitement of an actual meal.

“You are lingering even worse now,” Anakin growled.

Obi-Wan’s brow rumpled in irritation. “Oh, yes. I am aware that trying to help you more than you’ll allow is a crime punishable by death. Your own death, precisely, because you would quite literally rather die than ask for more than the help you are willing to bear. Yes, Anakin, I know.”

Obi-Wan stood from his crouch, something in his back popping. “I’ll make soup,” he said, sharply. “Ahsoka said she would be here shortly.”

Anakin had hurt Obi-Wan, in some deep well of his Master that Anakin couldn’t recognize. But he knew what it looked like, when Obi-Wan was trying to pretend he hadn’t been hurt by something. For a moment he felt sickeningly selfish, and on top of feeling sickeningly useless, Anakin almost wanted to cry. He shoved that feeling aside ruthlessly, instead daydreaming of wrapping his metal hand around his neck and squeezing—the durasteel wouldn’t give a centimeter. The durasteel didn’t hesitate or shake. It would just get the work done. Anakin wasn’t the only one fighting a war, and he wasn’t the only one leading soldiers through brutal campaigns, but somehow, between himself and Obi-Wan, he was the only one who couldn’t handle it. He was the only one trying to force others to handle it for him.

Obi-Wan bustled around the kitchen until his door beeped, and then he flicked the button that would allow Ahsoka access. In moments, Ahsoka was folding in beside Anakin, as natural as day or night or the howl of wind—there was an inch or two of space between them, though, because Obi-Wan was there, because sometimes Anakin and Ahsoka were tactile in a way that wasn’t allowed for by the Jedi Code. Sometimes the sentiment was all too present. Ahsoka was a natural at hiding it, without even trying, maybe without even considering that she was hiding anything; it made Anakin wonder, sometimes, if Temple-raised kids knew something about living under the Code that he didn’t, by right of having been raised in sweeping, safe halls with the best food and medical care the galaxy had to offer and water on tap, no thoughts of blood, or heat, or bones and bodies. That, as hard as he’d tried to prove that he could play this game with the best of them, he was still always going to be that kid that was born in a cage, that kid on his knees kneeling so deep he had sand in his mouth. That pride, that self-respect, were convenient lies, that no one in the gutter was allowed either, and once someone cut that hole in themselves and let that pour out, there was no fixing it, no getting it back. There was no respecting yourself when you’d violated it, when you’d been forced to. Anakin was always going to be that kid with a deactivated bomb somewhere in him, and they were always going to be—free. That final thing that he was missing, that he couldn’t fake or build or train—freedom.

Anakin had always hated it when anyone or anything decided they were better than him. Mostly he hated it because it was true. In any given room, he was the only one who’d had a brand of ownership burned into his shoulder as a toddler, and in any given room, everyone could see it, plain as anything. He could train himself to walk with his chin up and it wouldn’t change the fact that he walked like he belonged to someone else. There was no outrunning everything he was, same as there was no leaving the desert.

Ahsoka elbowed him in the side. “I can feel you brooding,” she said.

“I can feel your,” Anakin paused, to cough again into his hand. “Snippiness.”

Ahsoka turned her head and thunked her montrals against Anakin’s shoulder, the Togrutan version of cuffing someone on the back of the head. “Idiot,” she said. “Is that what’s wrong? You’ve got a migraine? If so, they make you dumber.”

Anakin grimaced. “It is not serious.”

“That definitely explains why Master Obi-Wan looks like he’s about to have a heart attack.”

“That is entirely his own fault. He… lingers.”

Ahsoka snorted. “Got that right. But the soup smells good.”

Anakin smirked. “It’s probably canned.”

“Better than rations,” Ahsoka said, with a sharp-toothed grin. “I’ll get you some, when Obi-Wan’s not staring at it like it holds the secrets to the universe.”

“Ah. But tomato soup is good. Maybe, for once, he’s on to something.”

“I can hear you both,” Obi-Wan groused. “It’s heated up just fine, blast the both of you. Absolute beasts. I am so gracious to you, and what do I receive in return? Such hideous treatment.”

Ahsoka knocked her montrals against Anakin’s shoulder again, and stood. She returned balancing two bowls of soup in her hands, and shoved one at Anakin, who barely managed to keep half of it from slopping on his tabard. He almost said something sharp, and then he realized how tight her expression was, how taut her shoulders were—she was stressed. Something was needling her, crawling under her skin.

“Thanks,” Anakin said, while his stomach turned.

Ahsoka settled back, cross-legged, beside him. “No problem,” she said. “Thank you, Obi-Wan.”

“Cretins,” Obi-Wan huffed, wiping a dot of soup off the counter. “I am going to sleep, for the record. You are both welcome to my couch for as long as you like, but, Ahsoka, I do ask you allow your idiot Master to rest for at least a moment.”

Ahsoka patted Anakin’s hair. “I’ve got the idiot. Oh, jeeze, Skyguy, you need to wash your hair.”

“Shut up,” Anakin mumbled.

“You are also welcome to my shower,” Obi-Wan said, dryly.

Anakin wanted to hit the both of them with something. “Yes, yes, I understand, and will fully abuse your hospitality the moment you are out of sight. Now, kindly consider leaving me the hell alone.”

“I should have taught you better manners,” Obi-Wan said, despairingly, and then left down the hall, towards his own bedroom.

“You’re cranky,” Ahsoka said. She wrapped her hands around her bowl of soup and tipped it into her mouth, drinking it straight.

“I should have taught you better manners,” Anakin said.

“I’m perfect.”

Anakin waved a hand. “Fair enough.”

Ahsoka elbowed him. Her joints were somehow pointier now than when she’d been twelve, all knobby, awkward knees and elbows, on the tail end of a growth spurt that gave her height but none of the mass. She’d caught up, slowly, but at fifteen she was still in one of those awkward stages, somewhere between a kid and a young adult. Ahsoka might have grown into her joints, more, but they were still like little blades. “Eat, Master. Obi-Wan worked so hard on that soup. He grew the tomatoes himself.”

“It is canned.”

“He grew the tomatoes himself, and then also canned it himself,” Ahsoka insisted, with a grin. But the grin faded quickly, replaced with worry. “Please, Skyguy.”

Anakin sighed, and then cupped the bowl in his hands, and tipped it to his lips in the exact same way she did—they didn’t exactly have a surplus of spoons, on the front, and in some ways he’d sort of always eaten like a desert rat. He stopped and closed his eyes when his stomach vaulted.

“Just keep going slow,” Ahsoka said.

“This is supposed to be the other way around. I am supposed to be taking care of you.”

“You’ve done enough taking care of me,” Ahsoka said, harshly.

Anakin nearly flinched. Never enough, he wanted to say, because Ahsoka was his padawan—his girl, and a teenager, and she needed him. When she was ill, she needed him to be there to keep her fever down, and more than that, she trusted him to be, trusted that he wasn’t going to abandon her. He could see it. He could sense it, even, taste it. In his mind Ahsoka was still knobbly-kneed, a few inches shorter, a soft weight on his back because she’d fallen asleep on the plastoid chairs outside of the Resolute’s holocomm center, waiting up for him to get out of another strategy meetings. Her breath would tickle his neck, when he carried her back to their quarters to get proper rest. In Anakin’s mind his palm was against her socked foot, pushing her leg straight and up because her muscles had locked up, after a campaign where they crossed a hundred klicks of territory entirely on foot in a matter of days, or his palm was against her back, because she’d caught a stomach flu and was vomiting her guts out into a bin.

To be told he’d done enough—to be pushed away, not needed—it cut. It cut to the spine of him. In a short handful of years so much of Anakin had become what Ahsoka needed him to be, and it was startling, to remember that she might not always need him, that those parts of himself—and the parts of himself he liked the most—would have to wither and die someday, when Ahsoka moved on.

“If that’s what you wish,” Anakin said, softly.

Ahsoka groaned, and scrubbed at her face. “No, not like—I mean Columex, Anakin. You wouldn’t be this bad off if you hadn’t been giving me your rations, and you just—forced it. Forced me to go with it.”

“To protect you,” Anakin said, “I would do anything. End of. No further discussion. That is how it is, when you have a kid to protect.”

Ahsoka stared down into her half-empty bowl. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

“No, you don’t.”

Ahsoka glared at him. “Anakin—”

Anakin laid a hand on her knee. “You do not, Ahsoka. You do not. This was—this was the sort of thing my mother did for me, when I was a child. I hated that she had to, but she was my mother, and I was her responsibility. The worst thing a child can be is no one’s responsibility. I am sorry, Ahsoka. I know it feels—like it’s your fault. But this is because I—care about you. And you shouldn’t have to be alone, not yet. It is not the time.”

Be mine a little while longer, was what Anakin wanted to say.

Ahsoka blew out a breath. “From cranky to mushy,” she said. “Has anyone told you that you have the weirdest mood swings, Skyguy?”

Anakin snorted. “Yes, Snips. I get it about three times a day.”

“You deserve it,” Ahsoka said, and she stuck her tongue out at him, and he did it right back, maturity and technical status as an adult be damned.

She finished off her soup first, and waited while Anakin resolutely finished his; at some point, the apoxamine Obi-Wan had given him kicked in, and his stomach calmed down enough that he even had a second bowl, which was probably more calories than he’d been able to eat in the whole of the last two days. He laid back down on the couch, and then Ahsoka curled up beside him and a little on top of him, warm and buzzing with the contentedness that she always did, when she was hugging him.

“You’ll definitely finally give me that lecture for skiving in the morning, won’t you,” she said.

Anakin coughed a bit. “Oh, you know. Probably.”

She laughed, and something in the tense line of her shoulders seemed to ease. Anakin didn’t think it was entirely resolved, though—it couldn’t be, not with a war still on, hanging over their heads and in the distance. They’d keep having this conversation until they couldn’t.

Anakin twisted his head to press a kiss between her montrals. The skin was warm and dry, and for a moment he held his mouth there, breathing in the peppery smell of Ahsoka’s sweat and the scent of leather; she shuddered beneath him, likely because his breath tickled. “Don’t worry about me, little one.”

It was almost like being on the front again, a tangle of limbs, a brief respite; Ahsoka tossed an arm over his stomach, and rubbed her face into his shoulder. She always rubbed her face, when she was tired—rubbed it with the heels of her palms, rubbed it into his shoulder or Rex’s shoulder, looking for pressure and an excuse to close her eyes. Anakin wormed an arm under her, and then wrapped it around her waist, tapping a nonsensical pattern into the dip of her spine—she was in a ruddy red sleep tunic, but he could feel her relax, as she tapped. Her breathing slowed in snatches. Anakin pressed a cheek to the rounded tip of her montral, and both of her legs wrapped around one of his. There was something so exhilarating about knowing that moment didn’t have to end in the morning, if they really didn’t want it to. That there wasn’t a war so immediately on their doorstep; they had the rest of the month, to do this, and delight in this. If Anakin asked her to stay, he thought she just might—but, he couldn’t very well ask his padawan to skip her lessons, and her education from the Masters at the Temple was rare enough anyway. But he daydreamed about it, before he fell asleep. On one of her break days, maybe he’d gather the courage to say it out loud—spend a morning sleeping in.

He wasn’t surprised when he woke up alone—it gnawed at his chest, though, the loneliness. Anakin never woke up alone, not on the front. Ahsoka was always within arm’s reach.

But, with the war councils over, all he had to do was check what follow-up meetings he was going to be asked to attend, and then he could see Padmé. That thought was the one that pulled him off of the couch, when he roused at midday the day after, re-stocking Obi-Wan’s spare pillows and blankets and cleaning up after the makeshift soup dinner the night before—because clearly Obi-Wan himself was still sleeping the night off—and it was only every so often he had to stop for a muscle spasm, or lean against the wall to catch his breath, but even those moments of frailty strengthened his resolve to just get there. He wanted, more than anything, to run his hands through Padmé’s hair, to listen to her talk about her work in the Senate, talk about something Bail had said, some raunchy joke Eirtaé had made, all the things about her life that he missed when he was gone. One day, one day after the war, he might even get to participate, be part of her life with everyone else she loved. To call her his wife in public, and be giddy about it. To say it without an ounce of shame—that was the dream.

Anakin found another dose of apoxamine and the painkiller Obi-Wan had given him last night, and took it with a cup of water. He hunted down a legal pad and ripped a scrap of flimsi off, and then scribbled on it, thank you, at my quarters. Soup is in fridge, but it was left out overnight. Check it. He left for his own quarters then, keeping his pace painstakingly slow, and he only ducked in a bathroom to cough up spittle the once. It looked a bit pink, under the rose-tinted lights through that wing of the Temple—it gave him a bit of a start, at first, but he figured it was mostly all right. If the cough didn’t fade, he’d do something—something about it. He’d intended to go to the Halls of Healing for—something, one thing or another. If he couldn’t remember, it wasn’t important.

When he got back to his quarters, using the Force, he summoned the encrypted commlink he contacted Padmé with, and it flew out of a false drawer and hit the center of his gauntlet. Before he rang her, he checked the time, to make sure the Senate would be on lunch even if there was a meeting called for the day, and then sat on his couch, trying to catch his rattling breaths before he called her. Idly, he rubbed at his sternum—his heart was knocking around like it had been shaken entirely loose. His chest hurt. He told himself he was just excited, because his skin, too, was prickling, burning in the pins-and-needles sort of way. That had to mean excitement. He pinged her, first, just to make sure he didn’t demand her attention when she was already occupied.

The wait was agonizing. He kind of wished he’d followed through with the demanding.

Several minutes later, the commlink flashed with an incoming transmission, and Anakin answered it.

“Ani!” Padmé said. “I’ve been waiting for you to call, you know, you were starting to make me anxious—”

“Meetings,” Anakin said, waving his head. “Too many. They’re over, now. Is tonight a good night?”

He was supposed to check if there were meetings he was supposed to attend, follow-ups; but he hadn’t read the transcripts for the actual war councils he had already sat through, had he? He would have to, even if he already had, because he couldn’t remember them. Maybe reading those transcripts would be more possible, more achievable, if he was spread out on Padmé’s incredible mattress, beneath the sheets that probably cost more than he did once, the ones that felt like water on his skin. It smelled like her, too, like her flowery perfume and the lavender pillow spray she used to relax her nerves, and the honey candles she liked to burn for the same reason, and if she was next to him—warm and happy and her face relaxed with sleep, entirely and completely safe—he may not look at his datapad feeling like the concept of focusing hard enough to read Aurebesh characters might stop his heart, or break his mind. Anakin could apologize for missing meetings later; these were less formal, at any rate, and he had already disappointed the Council, after Columex. They already expected the worst of him.

Anakin thought, uncomfortably, at the scars left from an electric prod, old and faded and outgrown and barely there, but sometimes Padmé’s hands traced the rippling map of it. He wondered, sometimes, if she knew where they were from, or if she thought those scars were part of the larger network of flowering red-purple electrical scars from a few run-ins with Dooku’s Sith lightning. Anakin would never be able to tell her. Anakin would never be able to tell her that the warped mark on his shoulder had been a brand once.

“It’s a perfect night,” Padmé said, with that big, beaming grin he loved. She had a beautiful smile, he thought. It was a tragedy that she had to hide it so often. “Tonight?”

“It is going to take me a minute to get there,” Anakin said. “I was going to leave now, though, and wait for you. Maybe have dinner ready for you.”

Padmé’s eyes lit up. “Oh, please, that sounds—that sounds amazing. It’s been—to be honest, my love, it’s been kind of a long day. I won’t be able to get away for a few hours yet, but, yes, I’ll let the staff know that they’ve got some time off, and—alcaladai, I have missed you so much.”

Anakin closed his eyes. Alcaladai was the albūl word for beloved, and albūl was the traditional Nubian language—his heart skipped a beat, and then about three more. It hurt and he loved it anyway. “I missed you, too,” he said, thickly, hoping he could convey just how much he had missed her in four words. It felt like he would need four million, to communicate how badly he’d missed just sitting beside her, breathing near her, much less actually speaking with her.

Padmé paused. Her eyes were watering, he could see it, and Anakin sucked in a breath. “Alcaladai—” he said, but she interrupted him.

“To the deep with it,” she said. “I’m about to fake having a stomach bug, it’s not every day that I get to see you. Tell me something disgusting.”

“Eopies regurgitate and chew their own cud, and they do that four times before regurgitating it into the mouths of their calves,” Anakin said, immediately.

Padmé snickered. “Oh, stars, that’s gross. Stunning job, my one and only. I’ll see you soon.”

Anakin grinned. “Soon, my lady. On one condition.”

“Anything you ask.”

“I desperately want to lay in your astounding bed,” Anakin said. “I have had dreams about that bed. Please, I am begging you, my lady.”

“Alcaladai,” Padmé said, with a smirk, “I think we can do a bit more than lay.”

Anakin felt himself flush to the roots of his hair. “Oh—right. Yes, right. Oh, you are incredible. You are—you are incredible, angel.”

Padmé grinned. “Just for you, Ani.”

They ended the call after that, because, soon enough, they’d be with each other; no point in wasting time on the comm.

Anakin rubbed his knees before pulling himself up, trying to work out some of the stiffness, and then slouched off to his bedroom to pull on a new set of robes; he paused to hack into his elbow, and to suck down greedy breaths. He kept clothes at Padmé’s apartment—in addition to a lot of strange odds and ends, that Padmé loved to reorganize and misplace, find whole new corners of her closet to shove them into. Theoretically, all he needed to bring was himself—but he was struggling to remember what else he’d wanted to cart along, and there had been something, he was certain of it.

He couldn’t remember, but he was too anxious to leave to wait any longer. He fired a quick comm message to Ahsoka, telling her to call him later, when she was done with her lessons—the Chancellor had a small assignment for him, at his estate further to the north of the Governance district, so he wouldn’t be there. It wasn’t entirely a lie, because Anakin had been to the Chancellor’s estate a number of times, but he was usually there in his capacity as the Chancellor’s friend; to walk the walled gardens of Nubian flora, breathe the sweet air of the atmospheric shield that insulated the estate from the rest of Coruscant, to drink wine that cost more than Anakin himself had, once, and listen to the stresses of the most powerful man in the galaxy. It seemed absurd, felt absurd—he spent half his time neck deep in mud and guts, spent half his time popping his broken teeth out because he’d taken a hit from a commando droid’s staff right to the face. Anakin had been born on a planet where every plot of real estate could be bought by the Chancellor with pocket change, and maybe half the population, too. He wasn’t much—he’d fought to be even a Jedi, and yet the Chancellor liked him, wanted his attention, over any of the Temple-raised Jedi. The Chancellor was one of the kindest men Anakin knew, to make a sacrifice like that. If Anakin had been born free, the way the Chancellor was, and if Anakin had all the status of the Chancellor—he didn’t think he would be so kind. His Excellency was something special.

It wasn’t quite a lie, but it wasn’t entirely the truth. If anyone mentioned it to the Chancellor, and Anakin doubted they would, his friend—closer to his family, in all honesty—would follow the excuse.

He dug up the keys to a storage unit down a level and a block from the Jedi Temple; its presence in the Governance district meant that it was frequented by individual senators and even Jedi, and Anakin knew following the betrayal of Pong Krell that the Council had surreptitiously decided to move some of the Archives’ restricted collection pertaining to the Dark Side out of the Temple itself, after records were discovered of Krell using his status as a Jedi Master to access such material. Which Anakin wasn’t supposed to know about, didn’t have the clearance for it, but the Chancellor had mentioned it. It was a secure facility, but Anakin didn’t use it for anything that really needed such security; he used it for junk. As a teenager, before the war, he’d had a bit of a lucrative underground career as a street racer, and if he wanted to race, he needed the best vehicle to race—he had about four speeders shoved in an outsized unit, and even though swoop bikes were illegal on Coruscant, he had a swoop bike he’d won in a game of sabacc when he was fifteen.

It also meant he had speeders he didn’t have to check out of the Temple’s hangar, fake registration and all.

Anakin picked the Jetspeed 1977—a classic speeder, covered and sleek with a matte black paint job, and a number of somewhat illegal engine modifications that made it a demon in a race, including nitric lixolium and a twelve cylinder engine that was strictly prohibited outside of a racetrack—when he visited Padmé, because for one thing he’d tinted the windows, and of the handful of speeders he had, it was his favorite. He’d invested the most time into it, had bet on parts and traded entire race purses to get a twelve cylinder engine to tuck inside it, and then spent hours essentially re-working the speeder from scratch to create something that could handle it. He called her Mercy.

He missed flying that speeder, on the front. That engine could scream. It was saddening that the drive to the 501 Republica was so short, even—though his bones were screaming, and the swirl of traffic made him want to vomit—and idly he wondered if Padmé would ever want to ride in it. She had an adrenaline junkie streak, even if she tried to hide it—he’d ripped all of the other seats out of Mercy, anything to make it lighter, and he’d left out a roll cage. Anakin would have to add both, if he wanted Padmé to fly in it. Then it was landing in the 501 Republica’s guest garage, slithering with his hood up into the servants’ tunnels—narrow passageways that allowed access to pretty much every service hub needed in the building, and to every room with the right access codes, because the exorbitantly wealthy simply wanted their dry cleaning to be done, without having to watch their servants do it. No one ever thought about the servants’ tunnels; even Padmé had been baffled that they were there at all, when Anakin confessed how he actually snuck into her apartment so easily. That was how Anakin snuck out of the Temple, too—the servants’ tunnels, which were used mostly by droids, or the odd sentient contractor there for one thing or another. It was also how he used to hide from Obi-Wan, when they’d fought, and something in Anakin’s mind had blared danger and he’d gone to hide for hours, terrified of—something. Electro-whips, bantha prods, any number of things.

The Nubian delegation had an entire floor, like a lot of the other planets, unless they were especially wealthy Core World representatives—Alderaan, Anakin knew, had two floors. Rattatak, an out-of-the-way, mostly poor planet, split a floor with Roxisha, and so the process went. Anakin sometimes wondered how much living arrangements affected the process of the Senate, if anyone had ever vetoed a bill they would’ve otherwise agreed with simply because it was offered by their annoying neighbor. Anakin dipped down the pathway that led to the opening in Padmé’s foyer, and promptly startled the hell out of Sabé.

“Sorry,” he said.

Sabé pressed a hand to her chest, breathing hard. “Skywalker,” she hissed. “You couldn’t have picked a different door?”

Anakin shrugged. “I didn’t mean to—I didn’t know you’d be there.”

“Are you not psychic?” Sabé asked.

Anakin flushed. “Well, I was—you know, focused. On other things.”

Sabé flattened her hair, wiped at her mouth, and then immediately broke into a wolfish grin. “Other things?”

“I was rushing, do not do this,” Anakin whined. All his rushing was catching up with him—he was breathing hard, his chest was aching. His pulse pounded so hard he could feel it in his teeth. He couldn’t really hide the gasping, either. Sabé watched him, critically.

“You look like hell,” Sabé said. “Are you alright?”

Anakin sucked in a breath and waved a hand, stumbling a bit backwards and bumping into the wall. “I’ll be—fine. In a minute.”

Sabé was sharp. She felt like that, in the Force—like durasteel razorwire, like she could cut your hands if you tried to hold her without you knowing, not until your hands were pouring blood. Anakin respected that about her. He respected, especially, that Sabé used that sharp nature in defense of Padmé more often than not, respected that if Anakin ever hurt Padmé, Sabé would have the knife at his throat before he could blink. Anakin would let her do it, he thought. If it was Padmé. If it was his fault.

“You’re right on time,” Sabé continued. “I was just chasing out the cleaning and cooking staff. I gave them the week off, because I wasn’t sure how long your leave was. As it stands, Skywalker, if you’re not here to guard the stove from Padmé’s attempts to cook, I’ll hold you personally responsible for the damage.”

“I think I can do that,” Anakin rasped. “Is she—?”

“Brilliantly faking throwing up in the Senate refectory, yes,” Sabé said. “If she’s got the timing right, and she always does, Orn Free Taa is wailing about a new plague, and Bail is selling it by helping her to her speeder. Give it, oh, half an hour.”

“Lunch time traffic. I will give it an hour and a half.”

Sabé snorted. “Fair enough. Rabé and Yané are on Naboo, visiting their mother, by the way, but I’ll tell them you said hello.”

“Is their mother still ill?” Anakin asked. He desperately wanted to sit down, and was aware he was leaning hard against the marble wall, aware that he was trembling in a way Sabé could see—some part of him wanted to hide back in the tunnel, and another part of him snarled, let her look, let her look at what this war does to those who fight it. Even if Sabé wasn’t his enemy.

“On the mend,” Sabé said. “For all the stars in the galaxy, Skywalker, you can just sit down. I am not going to stab you if you sit on a couch. But if you collapse and then I have to drag you to a couch, I absolutely will stab you.”

“Padmé wouldn’t like that,” Anakin gasped out, because now his chest was rapidly filling with pressure.

“I’ll frame Eirtaé.”

Anakin stumbled forward, using a hand along the wall to guide him to the general area of the foyer’s sitting space—which was strictly formal, and somewhat uncomfortable, but Anakin spent most of his life either not sleeping or sleeping on the ground—and managed to collapse into one of the chairs, just before his vision threaded entirely with black.

A few moments and ragged gasps later, he said, “Eirtaé could not hurt a fly, and Padmé knows it.”

Sabé’s face was pinched. “You were cleared of contagions, correct?”

“I am not giving Orn Free Taa an actual plague to worry about,” Anakin groused. “Yes. I was. Just—recovering.”

Sabé hummed. “If you felt that bad, Eirtaé would have been happy to pick you up, you know.”

Anakin stared at her. “Do you know what she calls me?”

Eirtaé had a rather racy sense of humor, and had been calling him dick appointment for the better part of two and a half years. Anakin found how blunt she could be about it entirely terrifying.

Sabé snickered. “I live with it, Skywalker. Anyway, I chased everyone out. You have free run of the place until Padmé gets back. I would suggest that you shower first. I would especially suggest that you wash your hair.”

“Thanks,” Anakin said.

With that, Sabé, and her blue gown embroidered with white threading, padded out of the room and through the hallway that led to the adjacent quarters of the handmaidens. Anakin sagged into the chair for a longer moment, rubbing at his chest—he tried to press his palm hard into his sternum, like there was an infection in his chest and all he need to do was press the pus out. Finally he pulled himself upright and wandered to Padmé’s shower, sequestered in a bathroom the size of Anakin’s entire quarters at the Temple, flicked the shower on as hot as it would go in an attempt to burn out his shivers and then sat under the spray, because he was still dizzy just from a trip he’d made a hundred times. He’d never had a migraine that was awful on a such a level. It would have to fade, wouldn’t it?

He washed his hair—he liked using Padmé’s soap, because it smelled like her, and it meant she ran her fingers through his hair afterwards, obsessed with the softer texture—and then toweled off, forgoing the outer layers of his robes in favor of the under tunic, pants and the thick wool socks he’d stolen from Obi-Wan. He felt only marginally more alive—overly hot and so tired his eyes ached, and he hadn’t managed to burn out his shaking, and the heat hadn’t opened up his chest at all and instead sent his pulse going crazy.

But he could sense Padmé, and excitement propelled him forward. He left the bathroom and then arms wrapped around his waist, his wife hitting him like a missile and knocking him into the wall behind him. The sudden movement made his stomach flip, and he wormed out of her arms quickly, and ducked back into the bathroom to throw up bile in the sink.

“I’m sorry!” she yelped, from the doorway, eyes wide and terrified. “I didn’t mean to—did you hit your head? Oh, gods, I’m so sorry, Ani—”

Anakin raised a hand, and she stopped talking, just staring at him while he hacked a bit into the sink and then wiped his mouth with a hand towel. “Sorry,” he said. “I have—hard to explain. No fast movements.”

Padmé nodded, mutely. “I’m sorry. Oh, I am so sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay,” Anakin said. “No, I did not—warn you. I should have. Forgive me, my lady.”

“Can I try again?” she asked.

She was beautiful, but she was always beautiful; she must have undressed from the heavy gown she would’ve worn to the Senate, instead switching into a flowing white casual dress with navy threading, the precise inverse of the dress Sabé had just left in. Her hair was down, newly cut so her curls were in tight ringlets, and she’d wiped off the makeup, leaving a smudge of mascara under her eyes and her lips a brighter shade of pink where the lipstick had stained. Anakin wanted to kiss it off. He needed to brush his teeth first. Stars above, stars all around—she was always beautiful, planet-shatteringly, heart-stoppingly beautiful. If she walked out on a battlefield, the soldiers would drop their weapons and let her pass. He was certain of it.

Anakin reached forward, and lifted her chin—he’d pulled off the gauntlet on his arm, and she jumped a bit at the coldness of the metal. He rested his thumb right in the divot of her chin. “I missed you,” he said. “I missed you, angel.”

Padmé’s eyes shown. “I missed you,” she whispered, and then took his metal hand in both of hers—through the artificial nerves, he could feel her differently, feel the vibration of her pulse over the rasp of her skin on his—and then pressed her lips to his knuckles. “My beautiful husband.”

“My beautiful wife,” Anakin answered. “I want very badly to kiss you.”

“Do you, now?”

“More than anything I could ever want,” Anakin said, solemnly. “But I really should brush my teeth first, my lady. And wash the sink.”

Padmé chuckled. “You should. But do it fast. I don’t want to wait, not for this.”

Anakin had no intentions of waiting very long, either—Padmé left the toothbrush he used while he was here by the sink, and he scrubbed his mouth out quickly, and then wiped down the sink. Behind him, Padmé watched him; he understood the feeling, because he, too, didn’t want to take his eyes off her, wanted to drink in the sight of her as long as he could.

The second he lifted the rag, to toss it in the laundry chute, there were hands grabbing at his hips, pulling him back, a head leaning against one of his shoulders. Anakin left the rag on the counter and let himself be tugged—slowly, gently—to Padmé’s bedroom, and, in fact, they paused to press their lips together in the doorway, and Anakin couldn’t be sure if he was dizzy because everything hurt, or because no one had a right to kiss him like that, in that way that made him weak at the knee.

“You wanted this bed, my love, and I should think you deserve it,” she murmured.

Anakin made a low groan in the back of his throat, and all but collapsed on it—he could hear Padmé laughing at him, feel her amusement in the Force. “Softest thing ever invented,” he mumbled, into her silk bedcover.

She settled in beside him, giggling high and clear like a bell—she had kind of an adorable laugh, the laugh of a girl a lot younger than she was—and then Anakin, possessed by the mere presence of her, crawled forward and laid on her, face pressed against her stomach and his arms wrapped around her waist.

“Your hair’s wet, Ani, I’m going to be soaked,” she said. “For stars’ sake, alcaladai, do you even use a towel?”

“I shake it very fast,” he said. “Gets rid of the water.”

Padmé snorted. A decidedly ugly sound, but he loved it. “That’s why my bathroom looks like a monsoon hit it. Good to know. Tell me, what did you mean by hard to explain?”

Anakin huffed. Almost in response, Padmé’s thin fingers threaded through his hair, drawing swirls and circles and patterns on his scalp—it was like something in his spine had unlocked, and he relaxed in ways he’d never been able to when it wasn’t he and Padmé alone. He could almost feel some of the stress melting off of him, even as he tried to hold himself still, so he wouldn’t scare her off. He might’ve made some throaty, needy noise, because Padmé’s one hand was quickly joined by the other, and he could feel her chest bucking as she laughed.

“Desperate,” she said, softly. “You’re like a tooka. You love head rubs.”

“It is hard to explain,” he said. “It—the Force. So it’s… difficult. Stars above—that feels incredible. I love you.”

Padmé ducked her head to kiss his hair. “My turn, next,” she said.

“I am not kidding when I say that I have dreams about playing with your hair, my lady.”

He liked to daydream of it, on the front; the way she melted into him, how easy it was to protect her when Anakin could hold his whole world in his arms, and she fit perfectly like a missing piece. He would close his eyes and the carnage would go away, the pungent smell of infection and the moans of people in pain that no one could fix, no one could change, death that no one could stop—but his lady’s stress, he could melt away with a touch.

One day, he would make it a perfect galaxy; wipe the slate clean, rip out the infection and the moans and the pain, stop the death that left Kix crying silently over filled graves. His lady wouldn’t weep for fear of losing him, and he wouldn’t cling to her, desperate, because he spent his life watching how life could spill out of a body, become lost. He would make it—perfect. Until then, his hands on her shoulders, rubbing out the knots where stress had tied her muscles together, had to be enough.

“The Force?” she asked.

Anakin grunted. She wasn’t letting him escape it. “I am a little bit odd, for a Jedi. The Force is strong with me. I am—I can sense people, their minds, their feelings, better than a lot of Jedi. Maybe even every Jedi. Jedi are taught to shield their minds, but the average citizen… is not. When I came to Coruscant, the amount of—you cannot imagine it, how many people live on this planet, until you can hear them all. I had to learn how to sift through that—input, we’ll call it—quickly, but before I did, I got migraines.”

“You could have just said migraine, I have medicine for that.”

“I took some. But it won’t truly stop until I am used to Coruscant, again.”

Padmé thumbed his temples. “Eating something might help.”

Anakin growled, wordlessly. “Everyone keeps saying that.”

“You look—peaky, my love.”

“Everyone keeps saying that,” Anakin repeated. “I can cook. What do you want?”

“I am not making you cook, alcaladai,” Padmé said. “You just threw up because I bumped into you too quickly, I am going to tie you to this bed and lay on top of you.”

Anakin laughed. “I am glad that I may serve you as a pillow.”

“We can order something,” Padmé said. “Anything in particular in mind?”

Anakin thumbed her waist. “The only thing I have in mind to eat should be saved for after dinner.”

Padmé laughed, again, and curled around him. “Rest, love, should be on your mind. I want you to tell me everything. Tell me what I missed of my husband, and I’ll tell you what you missed of your wife.”

Anakin thought of the smell of corpses. “Of course,” he said, strangled.

He could invent a convenient lie; there had to be something he could turn into something Padmé would want to hear about, something not entirely miserable, something that didn’t make him feel like he was breaking out into a sweat just by thinking about it. There had to be something to say, other than, I failed I failed I failed I failed. His chest hurt. He wanted, for a moment, to close his eyes, and to keep them closed—never have to think about it, whatever it was, ever again. Padmé’s hands skated over his back, over the lash marks he wanted to cut off, the mottled brand that she would never know was a brand—he was too much of a coward to admit to her that he was never going to be the thing that she wanted, and it had been carved into him when he was born. No one ever left the desert. Anakin was still sinking into the sand, even then.

But that could wait. For the moment, he was content there, laying on Padmé’s lap, even if he had to swallow back how much he wanted to cry—he’d missed her, was all.

Chapter Text

Shmi Skywalker’s life had been ugly and painful; but she had shared those stories with her son, because she’d had nowhere else to share them. She thought her family—their family—were all long dead, or spread so far across the galaxy that they would never find each other again, could only ever offer weeping prayers to the stars, hoping that someone somewhere had gotten blessed with a luck they themselves would never know. I hope you got luckier than I did was a feeling, and it was bone-crushing. Anakin’s grandmother had been named Terra, and his grandfather had died when his mother was but a child, but his name had been Jovo. At that point in time his family had been in the Kessel spice mines; as a Jedi padawan, Anakin would learn that the mines on Kessel were supposed to be penitentiaries, reformation facilities for the criminals of the Republic. Free labor would fix what was wrong with the errant citizen, in the Republic’s estimation—it was just bad luck that the slave empires neighboring the Republic sometimes misplaced stock here and there. It was unrelated, and particularly good fortune, that the spice mines of Kessel were more productive than ever even as criminal indictments in that sector declined. Good fortune, since those courts were expensive, full of paid workers—and good fortune that slaves were cheap, and no one would question it, because who cared about the Republic’s lower class criminals? Who cared what the Republic made of itself, as long as it still made money? Anakin’s grandfather had died when his mother was a toddler, when a mining tunnel collapsed and crushed him beneath a thousand tons of rock and the spice ores that the private penitentiary wanted so badly. Everything picked up and moved along anyway—it was good fortune that the deaths in that tunnel collapse weren’t legally sentient, so the operation could thunder on further.

Because of that, his mother didn’t have much to say about her own father—he was nearly a non-entity, a memory of rough hands and warm lips pressed to her forehead, and it was strange how, when his mother whispered about those memories, Anakin could feel them. He could feel calloused fingertips—similar to his mother’s but not quite the same—cupping his chin, feel chapped lips murmur something lovingly against his forehead. If he closed his eyes and dreamed, he could touch it—the universe where his family had been born free. Later, he’d know it was the Force, the ability in his blood opening his mind to the powerful emotions of others; but as a kid, he’d thought his mother was a witch, and it was something he’d loved. Anakin would squeeze his eyes shut when he was bleeding, when a whip had caught his cheek and blood was pouring down his chest and front, and imagine that his mother could turn the blood to water and he could lap it up. It was the desert—his mouth was always dry, and he was always thirsty, always dizzy. His mother couldn’t, though, but she could show him her own father, to make up for the empty hole where Anakin’s would’ve been; and, because lives were collections of stories and these were the ones that had mattered to his mother, she could show him his grandmother. It made his mother cry, sometimes, to tell him about her. When I was little, she would sing to me—she couldn’t be loud, she could never be loud, but it was a lullaby from somewhere that was green. I don’t remember the song, but she sang about red flowers blooming, about trees growing tall. Because I can’t remember the song, my little one, I want to take you somewhere green, someday. Oh, baby, I want to—I want to take you away, please. One day, you and me, we are going to—walk somewhere, and be meant to be there. One day, my little love.

Sometimes it made Anakin cry, too, when his mother talked about her mother. Like he could feel the touch of his grandparents through her, he could feel her agony as if it was his own, and in some ways it was; the wound that would never close, the wound of having been ripped away from her mother when she was sixteen and sold to a durasteel refinery back in the Hutt Empire proper. Neither of them would ever know when Terra lived or died, just that she was probably dead by the time Anakin was hearing her stories. There would be no records kept for a slave that wasn’t supposed to exist. It was always going to be that infected, raw wound, that could never be sutured—because Terra would have no rest, neither would they. Suffering was a kind of haunting. Ghosts were real because pain was, and that was one of Anakin’s earliest lessons. His mother cried when she thought he was asleep and couldn’t hear her, and if Anakin could close the things in her heart that ached and bled that drove her to shake with sobs—Anakin was prized by Watto because he was small, could fit in tight spaces, burn his hands on the unreachable parts of a starship’s engine. Anakin wanted to fix his mother, if he could. If he could reach his hands in her chest and heal her, if the heart was like an engine—there had to be a way for it to end. There had to be a way to leave the desert. But, sometimes, Anakin cried when he thought Ahsoka was asleep, and couldn’t hear him, because he’d never really left. He knew his mother better after she was dead. He only knew his mother once he’d failed her.

His mother was sold to a durasteel refinery, and that, too, was another of the ironies that Anakin carried in his chest, rattling next to the slave family who lived in the Republic where slavery was illegal, so no one could prove they’d been there because slavery was illegal—when the Clone War started, Kuat Drive Yards sourced the durasteel that built the Republic cruisers from the eminent steel refinery of the Hutt Empire. Sometimes Anakin wondered, standing on the bridge of the Resolute, if he was standing on the steel his mother’s life had been taken to build, if he was standing on the last surviving sum of what the galaxy had thought his mother had been worth. Just how many lives had been given to the Resolute, before the soldiers of the Republic ever set foot on it? There was blood in their walls. And Anakin just stood there, pretending he didn’t know about the bodies in the basement, commanding men to die and digging mass graves all while living in the mausoleum he called a flagship—he made himself sick. He disgusted himself. If he thought about it for any serious length of time he would have to abandon the bridge entirely, hide himself in his quarters and try to ignore the urge to find the nearest piece of scrap metal and drive it through his jugular. Anything, for the relief of not being himself, of not being the operation that thundered along while people declared non-sentient by ownership suffered and died and haunted him.

There were stories Anakin only knew because his mother had nowhere else to put them; his magical, witchy mother, who he thought could turn blood into water, his gentle, beautiful mother, who stood between him and the world and everything else and all she’d gotten was to choke on her own blood. That was the rage at the bottom of him, the rage that Anakin could never get rid of, the ghost he couldn’t put to rest; everything his mother deserved and didn’t get, and his inheritance was how much he hated the universe for doing it, and himself for standing by. The rage that lived in him was for his mother, but he had no one to blame for his mother’s chains but himself, the son who’d failed to save her—no one to blame for her death but himself, the son who’d failed to save her—and no one to blame for the horrors he’d committed after but himself, some miserable, useless kid that kept fucking failing. The rage that lived in Anakin was for his mother, but the only thing that could sate it was justice, and the only justice would be if he tore himself apart.

Anakin kept those stories in his chest because there was no one else in the galaxy who would remotely care. When he learned to write, he wrote them down in Huttese, and kept them under his bed; it felt wrong that only he would have them, when his mother was kind, and selfless, and it felt like the whole galaxy should have loved her as much as he did. When his mother died, he couldn’t even think about touching them without his gut churning, without dipping into the refresher to vomit; he would think about her hands, calloused from years of labor, years of her life and heart ripped from her for someone else’s bottom line, and he would sit on the floor of the refresher and be glad that there wasn’t a sharp object near him, because it was Obi-Wan that would’ve had to find him in the morning. It was a near thing, sometimes, the shame of Obi-Wan having to scrub blood off the floor on his hands and knees like some mundane servant the line that stopped Anakin more often than not. Obi-Wan was—born a Jedi. Higher born. It would be wrong, for him to clean up, after. It was like being eaten, gnawed by the rats that lived in the slaves’ hovels, grotesque thick red chunks ripped out of his legs and ankles all the time—all of his power, all of the universe howling through him, blood like the corona of a star, and he had never saved his mother. He had never taken her somewhere green, so she could see the flowers bloom; when he was a kid, he had sworn over and over that they could write new songs, under the shade of the trees. They could write their own, because they would be free, and they would know how to write, and they would—they would know how to rest, and Anakin could lay his head on his mother’s stomach and know she wasn’t killing herself in the beating sun, that she could finally just go to sleep.

Anakin stopped sleeping, a lot of the time; he had nightmares about the war, but he also had nightmares about his mother, and they were harder to wake up from. They were harder to want to get up after. He came back to himself in snatches of feeling—the warmth underneath him, light hands, the drag of fingertips on skin. He shuddered against it, but found, like always, he was already sort of trembling; he kept drifting from his body, trying to shut it out. His nerves burned like fire all the time, all over him. For a moment, he thought, is this my mother? And then remembered that he would have to die, for that to happen, and if he was dead he wouldn’t mind, but there were people he would have failed to get there. It was like being cleaved in two, for a moment. In his dreams his mother finished her final words, no longer I lo—I lo—but I love you. He lived in two parts, the syllables she said, and the ones she didn’t.

“You’re awake,” Padmé said, her hot breath tickling his ear, running her hand down his chest. His tunic was loose, looser than it normally would have been, and her hand worked beneath it, smoothing down his sternum. His chest was violently painful, painful enough that his skin was hot and prickling and he would start sweating, soon. It hurt through his throat, down his spine. Anakin had rolled over on her lap, at some point—her knees were under his arms, his shoulders laid heavy on her hips and the back of his head nestled into her stomach. Anakin didn’t remember falling asleep at all, but the orange light of late afternoon slanted in through the windows, and—he always felt slow and stupid, recently, but it was like the sun could melt his mind like wax and fire, like between the warm light and Padmé’s reverent touch he was boneless and weak and wanted to cry for how much he enjoyed it. Wanted to cry simply because it felt nice, and it was so hard to feel nice.

Three floors above them, the Ryloth delegation held a space. Senator Orn Free Taa had been orbited by nameless, beautiful Twi’lek women for as long as Anakin had been on Coruscant; when he was young, he had assumed they were slaves, and blurted something about it once while he was sitting in on the Jedi ambassadors’ Senate pod. The Jedi Order had always kept ambassadors in the Senate, before the war, and on that day they’d been speaking to Orn Free Taa about an aid mission to Ryloth, sending Jedi healers to support the doctors trying valiantly to save a massive swath of Ryloth’s population from a far-spread plague, and Senator Taa had attempted to make small talk with Anakin—and Anakin had always thought he was angrier when he was younger, though no one believed him when he said it—had forcefully snubbed the senator’s attempts, and asked one of the beautiful, nameless Twi’lek women, how’d he buy you, if slavery is illegal in the Republic?

It had been a minor diplomatic incident. Anakin had been dragged back to the Temple and Obi-Wan had been a new level of irate, his voice low and growling as he’d forcefully explained that implicating the senator in such a violation of law without evidence was beyond the pale. Anakin had not only had to write a letter of apology—in his shoddy, scratchy handwriting, because he’d only learned to write a few years ago—he’d been taken to deliver it to Orn Free Taa himself, along with a separate, verbal apology. The women had still been orbiting Taa like planets around a sun. Anakin had no more the ability to explain that he knew the despair he felt from them, because it was his mother’s and it was his own, and he didn’t need evidence beyond the way that they looked at the senator when Taa was turned away. Fear, hate, shame—even now, Anakin thought he could feel their despair dripping down the walls. He wanted to enjoy feeling nice, under his wife’s touch. But it was hard. Nice was relative to what he was thinking about.

“How long,” he rasped, trying to think around the haunting nightmare of his mother’s corpse, still fatally warm under his hands, “how long was I—how long?”

“An hour or two. I made the executive decision to order something not too long ago. I hope you enjoy Rylothian green curry.”

Anakin groaned. He wanted to inhale a bowl of Rylothian green curry, even as his stomach threatened to turn and heave again. It twisted in a cramp at the same time his mouth watered. When he was a kid, Watto would spend the rations money on bets and parts; Anakin had gotten good at being hungry, it had long since been an old friend. The worst part was always when he knew he would eat soon, but couldn’t, not yet. That was when he understood the word frenzy.

“I do,” he said. “You are perfect. I will tell you every day—you are perfect.”

“You think too highly of me. I had Threepio make the call.”

Her hand was still rubbing against his sternum, and Anakin reached up and tapped her wrist, lightly. He wrapped his hand around it—her wrist fit in his hand gently, and he thumbed the knot of bone, more prominent where she’d broken this one. He’d been there, actually, when she’d broken it; a shoot out involving a Republic delegation on Calabria, and he’d dragged her to a closet for cover and while they waited for the Separatist ops team to slither past them, so they could get the advantage of surprise from behind, Anakin had set Padmé’s broken wrist. And then, with her good hand, the other splinted with a shard of wood and his cloak, she’d shoved him down and straddled his lap, taking his chin in her hand and pressing their mouths together like she would die that moment if she didn’t kiss him. She’d kissed him like it was breathing, she’d kissed him like it was wine—but her cheeks had been wet, because setting a broken wrist without painkillers was agony, and Anakin hadn’t known what he’d been thinking. Something about kissing Padmé melted his brain down his spine, made him almost dizzy. In the initial explosion, he’d cracked his head on the side of a table. Even concussed, he knew his wife’s kiss. That wrist bothered her, sometimes. He rubbed the soft inside of her arm, felt, in the Force, her sense of relief—that, too, melted his brain down his spine, made him dizzy. He liked to feel her relief. Relief, he thought, was a special thing, and very rare.

“Would you do me a favor,” he said.

Padmé’s hand paused immediately. “Of course,” she said.

“Press down hard,” he said. “As hard as you can, right where you are. My, ah, chest hurts.”

Padmé dug the heel of her palm into his chest, and pushed down like it was a washboard; the pain was beneath the bone, and there was nothing her lithe hands could do short of cracking him open and reaching inside, but Anakin had known all his conscious life that nerves were easy to confuse. Press on an ache, and the nerves registered pressure before the pain—even if only for a moment.

Anakin let out a breath. “Thank you, my lady.”

Her hand moved upwards, drawing little patterns on his collarbone, and then smooth lines up his neck, tickling his jaw. “Did you pull a muscle in your chest?” Padmé asked.

“I think,” Anakin answered. “It will go away. I have a month.”

“A whole month with you,” Padmé sighed, fantastically. “What I wouldn’t give.”

“After the war,” Anakin said, gruffly.

Padmé tapped his shoulder. “Alright, alcaladai, I love to hold you, but you are a bit bigger than me, and my hip is going numb, I need you to move up a bit.”

Maybe it was the lingering dream—the lingering sand, and wind, and dry heat, the lingering thoughts of what he couldn’t be and would never be for his lady, but Anakin’s cheeks flushed hot and he pulled himself upright too quickly, mumbling rapid apologies. The world tilted a bit to the side, and he leaned a hand on the mattress in an attempt to keep himself from pitching off of it, and cracking his already throbbing head on the ground. His apologies skittered from Galactic Basic to Huttese, and when Anakin caught it, he shut his mouth with a click. Don’t say anything, he begged her, silently, in his mind.

Padmé had shifted into a cross-legged position, before Anakin’s sight could even refocus. When they did, her eyes were pinched with concern. She still had mascara smeared under her eye. Her lips were still stained pink, from her lipstick, and Anakin hadn’t kissed it off yet—he desperately wanted to, but just sitting upright was starting to feel like dying. “Alcaladai,” she said, quietly. “Are you alright?”

“Yes,” Anakin rasped, though his rib cage burned like a fire, and his head was heavy and throbbing. A tickle crawled up his throat and he lifted a hand to cough into his elbow—he coughed up white foam, again.

Padmé worried her lip. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Anakin said, sharply. His other arm threatened to give out beneath him, a muscle spasm tearing through it—before he had a chance to collapse, Anakin turned and laid flat beside Padmé, trying to make it look more intentional than it was.

The communicator on Padmé’s nightstand illuminated green, and Padmé twisted to answer it, directing Threepio to pick up the delivery waiting at the door.

“Sabé may stab me,” Anakin hummed. “I was told that I was to guard your stove viciously. I was supposed to cook for you, so you didn’t burn down half of the Governance District trying to do so yourself.”

Padmé scowled at him. “I can cook just fine. I have a whole protocol droid for it.”

Anakin chuckled, low in his throat. “Yes. Cooking, you know, is for the droids. The servants, you know.”

Padmé thumped his shoulder with her hand. “And it’s for my beautiful husband.”

That was the last thing Anakin really remembered clearly—there was a blank and then, he was, again, thinking about his mother, thinking about a bantha prod held to his back while she was forced to watch, because if she didn’t take it she would kill them both. He was always thinking about his mother. He thought about the wind, and the cold places that Obi-Wan was born in, the watery ones Padmé was from, wondered how much a place could mold a person; nothing that happened to them in the place, but merely the place, which parts of Anakin were waiting for precipitation and which parts were waiting for freedom, the separation of them both. Here and then, there was a corpse turning its head at him, saying something in a leathery voice—it was loud and it wasn’t and the Force was humming but it was screaming, the eternal everything-and-nothing, the violent lives of the stars bearing down on them from lightyears away. Flesh was melting off of bone. He came to as he always did; slowly, and then all at once, bleak awareness and then he was—himself, in all its pains. They came back to him piece by piece, the chest that was on livid fire, the stiff joints, the aching in the stump of his arm—his throbbing head, how badly he wanted to vomit, how badly he wanted to be able to just breathe, his racing, pitching heart that couldn’t slow down.

Then there was a hand on his chest, and for a minute, Anakin was convinced he was living the day over. He would like that. He would love to live it over—idly he wondered if he could put it in a box, a morning where it hurt, but it hurt less.

“Seen this,” he said, and it was like his mouth was thick with cotton and tangy with blood, “seen this—seen this ‘fore. You?”

A hand brushed his cheek—there were two hands on him, and it occurred to Anakin that it was a lot of hands, and he didn’t always like having a lot of hands on him, tapping his body and touching his skin. Sometimes it reminded him of being younger. Didn’t everything? What was new? He was thinking in circles. The thing that was new—beneath him was comfortable, and soft. It smelled like lavender. It was easy to sink into, give into; what was uncomfortable he tucked into his stomach, and moved past.

“You had a seizure, Ani,” Padmé said, because it was Padmé, of course it was Padmé, he was glad it was Padmé. He would wriggle more closely to her, if he could, but his body seemed disconnected from his mind, two discordant, opposite objects—he was suddenly so absolutely exhausted he felt like he could have slept until he died, and if they tried to rouse him for the afterlife he’d sleep right through that.

Anakin tried to say I’m sorry but the sound came out blurry, just a guttural groan. His mouth, too, tasted like cotton.

Padmé chuckled, wetly. She was crying—why was she crying? Her fear was thick in the Force. He could run his fingers over it. Sharp, like glass. He would bleed if there were more fear in his hands. “We’ve been so stupid,” she said. “We’ve been so—so stupid, Anakin. You just had a seizure, and I had to get Threepio to slice into your commlink to get Obi-Wan’s personal comm number. I should have had that. I should have had that, for—for emergencies. Why didn’t I have that? Stars, above and all around. Blast it all, Ani, we’re stupid. I called Obi-Wan.”

“Master,” Anakin murmured. “Where—where?”

“Soon,” Padmé said, running her fingers through his hair, twirling it, tugging through the tangles. “Any moment now.”

“Sleep,” Anakin murmured, twisting until his face was pressed against her thigh. “Hurts.”

“I know, love, I know.”

Anakin drifted in snatches, half present, half absent—he was aware of Padmé, and her hands on him. There was something about hands on him when he was disoriented, nearly asleep that was—just on the edge of too much. His skin crawled and he pushed back into the touch, hungry, but at the same time it was almost too much, almost fell into the black hole that was his stomach. Then larger, rougher hands were shaking his shoulder, and there was a soft morning breeze curling about him, prodding him gently in the Force. It smelled clean and promised rain; it was a little cold, and Anakin shuddered, but Obi-Wan in the Force was the kind of day where it was blessedly warm in the sunshine, and chilly in the shadow, and then the wind brought with it goosebumps. The rustle of clothing and creak of leather as someone settled down beside him, and now—there were Padmé’s hands on him, and then his Master’s, and Anakin was thinking that there were too many hands, too many touches. Anakin shuddered. Something tipped in his chest, and there was the grit of sand in his mouth—but he liked the electric-spark feeling of being touched, would do anything to get it, desperately wanted to lean into it. It was lavender and it was rain; Padmé in the Force was all rushing water, from the stream to the white-capped river. Obi-Wan was the day it lived in. Somehow it fit, in its own way. He clenched his jaw and bore it.

“—know you are awake,” Obi-Wan was saying. “That’s it. I know you’re there, Anakin.”

Anakin groaned. “Yes,” he mumbled.

It occurred to him that he ought to have been terrified, that Obi-Wan knew, now, that at the very least, Anakin and Padmé were still involved; even after Obi-Wan had told them to break that connection after Geonosis, the inception of the war. But there was a state that was beyond terror, when a body was too exhausted to ramp up the heart rate, pump the adrenaline; Anakin just wanted to go back to sleep. Anakin wanted both of them, to fit together—he wanted Padmé, and he wanted Obi-Wan not to hate him for wanting Padmé, and then he wanted Obi-Wan and Ahsoka, too. He was buried to the neck in avarice. He wanted somewhere green, and he wanted to write a new song with his mother, and he wanted to know what her handwriting would have looked like, had she ever had the chance to learn.

“Anakin has a history,” Obi-Wan said, but not to him. “He is—unique, in the way he interacts with the Force. He senses it deeply. It can disturb the natural electrical function of the brain, causing seizures. It is helped, somewhat, by medication. Did you get that today, Anakin?”

“Get what,” Anakin said, thickly.

“The lanaoplin.”

Anakin shifted. “Is that what I was supposed to get,” he said. “I did not—I could not.”

“You could not?”

“Forgot,” Anakin finished, squeezing his eyes more tightly shut.

“Don’t look at him like that,” Padmé said, sharply. “He was ill when he got here.”

“He should not have been here in the first place,” Obi-Wan growled.

“I don’t think the time to discuss that is—”

“Ever,” Anakin interrupted. He threw a hand back, swatting at where he thought Obi-Wan was, connected with the side of Obi-Wan’s arm. Obi-Wan yelped. Anakin had used his metal hand—he ought to remember not to do that. “The time is not ever. The time never will be. Can I go to sleep.”

Obi-Wan huffed. “I do hate it when you’re ill. Your manners are awful.”

Padmé snorted, her hands tightening in Anakin’s hair almost possessively. “He’s the soul of courtesy to me.”

“You are a cradlerobber,” Obi-Wan said, fiercely, “and a temptress of the night. You cannot speak on courtesy. We need to go to the Halls, Anakin. You can sleep in the speeder.”

“I should drive,” Anakin mumbled. “I could drive.”

“Certainly, if you want us to both die a flaming, hateful death. Up, now. I will carry you if I must.”

Obi-Wan tapped his shoulder, insistently, and Anakin’s gut twisted—he didn’t like that, but couldn’t articulate why, and Padmé’s hands unwound from his hair, so Anakin knew he had to leave. He sat up—Obi-Wan’s hand moved to the center of his back, warm and steadying and it made Anakin want to peel his skin off—and Anakin crawled off the bed entirely with his eyes closed, and stood there, swaying, his one point of connection being Obi-Wan. He managed to swallow back bile purely because the idea of throwing up when his chest hurt that fiercely was repulsive.

“You do have to wake up all the way,” Obi-Wan said, lightly.

Anakin squinted at him. Obi-Wan’s face was tense and inscrutable; Anakin knew, with a sickening feeling, that Obi-Wan was furious, and Anakin felt himself cringe away, thinking, impossibly, that Obi-Wan was about to hit him. Maybe with the heavy vase on the bedside table—crack it over Anakin’s head, fracture his skull. If Anakin had actually remembered the lessons of his childhood, he would be on his knees, begging forgiveness. As it were, his body seemed to be made of lead. He could be a good Jedi or he could be a good son or he could be a good husband or he could be a good slave or he could be what he was, this floating, idle thing.

“Walk, padawan,” Obi-Wan said. His voice was soft. Was that more or less dangerous? Anakin had never known a difference as a kid, but then sometimes the people who spoke softly were—Anakin wanted to throw up.

Obi-Wan pushed him forward, and Anakin picked his way through the apartment, instinct drawing him to the false door that led to the servants’ hall. He pulled the latch, Obi-Wan’s surprise stabbing at his temples.

“You know your way through here?” Obi-Wan asked.

“Yes,” Anakin said. “Servants’ hall.”

“Take me through.”

They picked their way through—at this hour, no one was using this particular tunnel, and they were mostly used by droids—and ended at the Republica’s garage, and Anakin nearly wandered off to his speeder before Obi-Wan tugged him in the opposite direction. That was a bit of good luck; Obi-Wan had found out about enough of Anakin’s indiscretions, for the day. The illicit racing speeder funded by illicit winnings would, with any luck, remain undiscovered.

Anakin turned to vomit into one of the decorative flower pots before getting in the speeder.

“Is your migraine still that bad?” Obi-Wan asked. “Four days is long, even for you.”

“The migraine has been my lifetime,” Anakin growled. He turned away, but his balance was off, and Obi-Wan’s other hand bolted out to steady him.

“Stars, padawan, if you felt anything like this earlier, you ought to have just stayed with me,” Obi-Wan said. “I wouldn’t have minded.”

“Quiet, or I will hit you again.”

Obi-Wan herded him off to the speeder, and Anakin collapsed into the passenger seat gratefully, closing his eyes again. He drifted while Obi-Wan flew, little snatches of blankness—it seemed the flight was painfully short, but agonizingly long. Everything in Anakin’s head had begun to blur like smeared paint—he was in Mos Espa, he was in the Governance District, he was on Columex, he was skin and bones and he was strong and the Force was with him and the Force inflicted existence on him. Like a box of marbles, rattling away; he felt his body shivering, curled against the door harder. But his heart was thundering a mile a minute, twisting agony clean through to his shoulder that made him pant until his breath was loud in his own ears. Having a seizure had never felt that bad, and once, Anakin almost lifted an arm to reach for Obi-Wan and mutter that something was wrong, that he couldn’t breathe, his skin was hot and red and livid with pain. But he couldn’t imagine lifting his arm. The nerves seemed no longer to connect to his brain. In just a handful of minutes or several years, Obi-Wan was opening his door, tugging on Anakin’s tunic. Anakin knew it was the Temple because a million minds brushed against his at once, the effect so blinding when he opened his eyes he could barely see Obi-Wan, just the brisk-not-brisk dewy day that Obi-Wan was in the Force, the wind that promised rain.

It felt strange, to be in the Temple and not properly clad in his robes—as if Obi-Wan knew what he was feeling, a cloak landed in Anakin’s lap. Anakin squinted at it and blinked until he thought he could see it.

“Was it too hot?” Obi-Wan asked.

“Hm?” Anakin said.

“The system, did I have it on too high? You’re sweating.”

Anakin coughed into his fist. Again, the spittle was foaming. “No, I—I didn’t notice.”

Obi-Wan’s face softened a bit. Slowly, he knelt on the ground beside Anakin, one warm hand on Anakin’s knee. “Right. Onwards and upwards, little one. The Halls of Healing aren’t far from here.”

Anakin jerked. The black hole in the pit of his stomach yawned widely. “No. No—I do not want—no.”

“I know you dislike the Halls, Anakin, but the best way to make sure you don’t forget the lanaoplin is if I go with you—and they have to give you something for that migraine. This is the worst one I have ever seen, for you.”

“No,” Anakin said. “They—they are always touching. They are—it is constant. It is unstoppable.”

Obi-Wan frowned. “I can ask them not to touch you, if they can avoid it. Padawan, why—”

“Please,” Anakin said. “Please.”

“I can comm them,” Obi-Wan said, tightly. “Anakin—I really think you should go. To my knowledge, you’ve never had a migraine this bad. In fact—are you certain you only have the symptoms of a migraine? You are coughing, now, you could be seriously ill. Your breathing sounds awful.”

Anakin scowled. The truth was that he was no longer sure—everything he was seemed to be an extended bruise, one solidified, tangible ache, but his chest seemed to be the awful focal point of it. He was aware, suddenly, of his lack of awareness, of how badly he was still wheezing, the awful, wet sound of it. He coughed into his fist, and pinkish foam spattered the metal—he’d never put the gauntlet back on—and Obi-Wan’s hand wrapped around the wrist and pulled it closer.

“Is that blood,” Obi-Wan said, sharply. “Anakin!”

“It’s alright,” Anakin wheezed.

Obi-Wan stared at him. His mouth was slightly open—absolute, incredible shock. “I have raised a fool,” Obi-Wan said. He waved down a nearby attending droid, and called out something about an emergency medical transport to the Halls of Healing.

Anakin leaned forward, gasping for air—he pressed a hand to his chest, which felt like—he rubbed a hand against his sternum, but all the strength of his muscles seemed to have melted out of him, and Obi-Wan was still holding his metal hand.

Obi-Wan looked back at him, and released Anakin’s metal hand like it had burned him. “Tell me what’s happening,” he said, urgently.

“Chest hurts,” Anakin said. “It is like—once—you know—most people will not beat a slave they don’t own, because they get fined. Breakage fee. But some will. Getting kicked in the chest. I know that, I remember this. I am doing well.”

Obi-Wan’s hand, the one still on Anakin’s knee, thumbed the bone. “I am—sorry, little one. But you are not.”

Anakin coughed again, and Obi-Wan moved a hand to the side of his ribs—his mouth was moving, he was speaking, and that brisk-not-brisk day plummeted into something frigid, something desperate. Anakin shuddered, and even if the touch was somewhere too sensitive, he leaned into it, sucking down air like he was breathing through a straw. The Halls of Healing weren’t entirely too far from the hangar, but blackness gnawed at Anakin’s vision, and he passed out before they got there.

Anakin didn’t dream—or, if he did, he wasn’t aware of it. But Force sensitives—or at least, if not every Force sensitive, just Anakin—sensed the Force even in their sleep. Places ceased to be places, and instead became living, breathing things, with hearts and minds and guts; the Temple, with hundreds of years of Force sensitives carving themselves into its walls, was one of the most intricate places in all of the Force. There were hallways that Anakin walked through and felt three hundred years’ past animate in front of him; there were columns he could touch and then feel, like a spark of electricity through him, that a wookie youngling had stood exactly where he had stood five hundred years ago, rapidly turning multiplication tables over in his mind. Everything had its history, but the Jedi Temple was itself history, and it came to Anakin sometimes when he slept—the archaic original language of the Jedi, Jedu, in its lilting, singsong pronunciations, crawling into the back of Anakin’s head. Jedu was no longer taught beyond ceremonial phrases; being a language of the Force, to speak it frequently and fluently was to use the Force as you spoke, and the Force carved indelible patterns into a mind. The Grandmaster had been raised speaking Jedu, and now the Grandmaster’s syntax was flipped—Jedu was as much merely a language as it was a living thing, like the Temple was merely a place. But Anakin could hear Jedu a thousand years old in his sleep.

But when Anakin was awake, he knew that he had not been awake for a while, and there were hands in his hair; living the day again for a third time seemed odd, to him, but then the hands in his hair were smaller and stronger than Padmé’s.

“You’re awake!” Ahsoka yelped, jerking back. “Sorry! Sorry. Oh, no. I was hoping I could do this before you woke up.”

Anakin blinked at her, slowly, working his jaw. His mouth tasted stale, and maybe a little like saline, and his head felt stuffed with cotton instead of a mind.

Ahsoka’s eyes flicked between Anakin’s, and his hairline. “Do not be mad,” she said. “But you’re the one who almost got himself killed, so maybe I don’t care if you’re mad. I put little clips in your hair.”

Anakin squinted. He attempted to say something, but his throat was thick, and swollen, so he said what do you mean in the Force, in their training bond.

Ahsoka leaned forward and tapped her nail against—sure enough, a plastic clip nestled in his hair. Her nail clicked against it, once, twice. “I snuck out and bought a bunch for this. You look ridiculous. Some of them are sparkly and some of them have bows. I was going to take a picture and make sure Rex got it going around.”

Anakin coughed, and jerked—his body was sore, achingly sore—and his left arm jerked, pulling at an IV near his elbow. There were sticky patches on his chest from the residue left behind by adhesive. The sensation was irritating—and a blood pressure cuff on his left arm, and someone had taken his prosthetic. Something around his finger, to take his pulse, but—his arm was gone.

“My arm,” Anakin rasped, throaty. “Where—why did they take it? I want it back.”

“I, uh,” Ahsoka said. “I don’t know why they would—I’ll go ask. I should tell someone you’re awake, anyway.”

Ahsoka turned to leave—her hands were shaking. How had Anakin missed that, when her hands were just near him? The outlines of her were blurry. “Do not leave,” he murmured. “Make them—come here. What is here?”

“The Halls of Healing, Master,” Ahsoka said.

“Here,” Anakin mumbled. “Yes. Here. Why?”

Ahsoka’s anger flared hot and strong in the Force. “Because you nearly died,” she snapped. “You had whole organs shutting down. I don’t know everything about human biology, but I hear that’s bad.”

Anakin hummed. He fixed his eyes on her face—she was still blurry, the markings rumpled by her scowl blurring oddly. “Organs?”

“Heart and kidneys,” she said. “Both are failing. Vokara Che told me she’s going to talk to you about transplants. Obi-Wan tried to volunteer his kidney, you should’ve seen it. It was a little funny. He was so mad when Vokara said he wasn’t a match.”

But Ahsoka didn’t feel like she had found it very funny, in the Force; she felt desolate, and so terrified it was like novocaine flooding his mind, numbing his neurons. Anakin wasn’t sure how to fix that. He wasn’t sure how to fix much—always so out of place.

“My transmission is broken,” Anakin said.

“Your—what?”

“Transmission,” he said. “Like in a speeder. My gears are stuck.”

Ahsoka stared at him, for one long moment, and then there was a low snickering, that turned into giggling, high and loud and clear as a bell. “They have you on the good stuff, Skyguy,” she said.

Anakin scowled. “Fuck you. I need those—gears. Kidneys. Is a heart a transmission?”

Ahsoka laughed, louder, and then raised a small holoreel device, and clicked a button to snap a picture. Anakin wrinkled his nose at the implication. “I didn’t forget,” she said. “The heart’s the engine, idiot.”

“Broken crankshaft,” Anakin said. “I bet that is what it is. Toolbox. I have a speeder crankshaft. I can fix it.”

Ahsoka groaned. “I know. It’s on our kitchen counter. It’s been on our counter ever since I was apprenticed to you.”

“That is its place.”

“It is not!” Ahsoka said. “That’s the rice maker’s place. I have to go tell someone you’re awake, Obi-Wan would kill me if he knew I didn’t get him first thing.”

“I would kill him,” Anakin said. “If he tried to kill you. I would chop him in half. With a sword. Rudely, I would do it rudely.”

Ahsoka grinned. “He wouldn’t kill me. He just wouldn’t let me have a sip from his tea thermos.”

“That is a murder attempt,” Anakin said, seriously. “That is a murder attempt, because it’s—him. Denial of tea is one of ten ways Obi-Wan doesn’t like me on any given day. So are his boots.”

“His boots?”

“They make me angry,” Anakin said. “He keeps them too—too clean. It is disturbing.”

Ahsoka snorted, but before he could ask her not to—before he could realize how much he really didn’t want to be alone, in his muddled mind—she was gone, and Anakin was pushing himself into the starched medbay pillows against his back, trying to sink away. The room was dim; it must have been well into the night, on Coruscant, because Anakin could feel it floating through the Force, the drowsiness of the diurnal sentients in the Temple, the deepness of their rest. Flickering dreams that were not his own. He knew he was on fairly strong painkillers—or sedatives, or something like it—because it was always harder to control where his mind wandered, what pathway of the Force his mind followed. There were so many lives on Coruscant. It was hard to know all of them were there and still breathe under the weight. He also knew he was on something fairly strong because he couldn’t feel pain, just the distant twisting that indicated the place where his arm no longer was might have hurt, or the fissures and fractures in his bones where he’d broken them, or the twist of old scars or the all-over bruise-like feeling he’d known so well. He hadn’t realized, consciously, how long it had been since he’d breathed without it hurting, existed without his body aching, until suddenly the pain was no longer there.

It made Anakin want to cry. So he kept his eyes shut, and tried to think about anything else.

The doorway Ahsoka had left through slid open, and Obi-Wan, blanketed in deep blue shadow, stepped in—he had a caf cup in his hand from the refectory, which he set on the swivel table, and he hadn’t combed his hair or beard or trimmed it in a few days, at least, because he looked startlingly fluffy, like a bantha ambling through the streets of Mos Espa. It was almost adorable, and that, too, made Anakin want to cry, because it was so familiar, and so inherently, innately Obi-Wan Kenobi.

“She wasn’t kidding,” Obi-Wan said, eyes fixed on Anakin’s hairline. “You do look ridiculous. That one on the left is a nice touch. You can’t see it, but it’s blinking, it has a little light. What a treasure your padawan is.”

“Yes,” Anakin rasped, because it was all he could say, around the thickness of his throat.

“I sent her to get Vokara, and to get herself some food,” Obi-Wan said. “And told her I would keep you awake until she got back, and could see you off, before you drift off again. You probably will—you’re on quite a lot. Enough to kill a gundark.”

“What happened,” Anakin murmured.

“Vokara can summarize it better than I can, when she gets here. But you went into sudden cardiac arrest, likely caused by an underlying arrhythmia, which was likely caused from something in the reports Kix sent over—have you truly been electrocuted into unconsciousness eleven times in three years?”

Anakin squinted. “Why do you ask?”

“It’s a number so high it’s almost impressive. You could probably apply for an award for that.”

“In that case,” Anakin said, voice hoarse, “it was actually twelve. That list does not count Geonosis, the first round. So it should be a good award.”

Obi-Wan sucked in a breath. He laid a hand on one of the railings of Anakin’s cot, looking entirely like if he didn’t hold himself up, he’d fall to the floor. He looked like a devastated man. He looked like Anakin’s mother, exhausted and resolute. “This blasted war,” he said. He shook his head, and shook himself—the devastation seemed to melt away, under another layer of Obi-Wan’s profound endurance. “Vokara told me a lot of very technical things with a lot of technical names. Burned tissue might have killed your kidneys, electrical disruption might have killed your heart, the—patho-what-now-ology of your heart and kidneys essentially ensuring both would shut down. They stabilized your heart and performed an emergency dialysis, got you on fluids—did you know you’d lost twenty-five percent of your body weight, on Columex, because I certainly did not—and pumped you full of… receptor inhibitor blocker agents. Something. A lot of medicines to control your heart, as I understand.”

Anakin snorted. It was a feeble sound. “All I needed was a new crankshaft.”

Obi-Wan turned and stared at him. There was a long moment where he said nothing, his as good as a wall of stone. “You blasted boy,” he said, suddenly, awfully. “You blasted boy. You blasted—I no longer know if I am just angry, or incandescent, and I no longer know if it’s at myself or if it’s still at you. You blasted boy, you—half dead, and running off for a secret tryst. Half dead, dying more as I looked at you, and you insisted it was a migraine. Your last words before you slipped into unconsciousness because your brain was starved of oxygen were I am doing well. Anger is not becoming of a Jedi, but make no mistake, Anakin Skywalker, I could smash every object in this room and not satisfy that anger an ounce.”

Ordinarily, when Obi-Wan was angry enough that he actually admitted to being angry, it was one of the more terrifying situations Anakin lived. He would—and had—taken on entire Separatist battalions by himself rather than face Obi-Wan’s cold, quiet anger. But the drugs pumping through his system numbed him to fear, and the only thing Anakin wanted to do at all was cry.

“Did it not matter to you,” Obi-Wan snarled. “Did it not matter to you that you were barely functional? Did it not matter that it hurt, that you were ill, that it was miserable? Did it not matter to you enough that you would have had one ounce of the investment that I have had in you for yourself? What did you have to gain from not caring how much pain you were—did it not matter to you?”

Anakin shook his head. “No. No, not really.”

And he knew it was the truth, when he said it. He knew himself, in that moment, and he knew what he said, and he knew it to be true; it was an ugly little truth that made Anakin feel small, but he had never considered for anything longer than a moment that he might have been ill in a far more serious way. Not because it was impossible, but because it probably didn’t matter either way.

Obi-Wan froze. He could not have been stiller if he, himself, had been an icy, frozen peak. “Not really,” he repeated.

“I didn’t—think it was—that serious,” Anakin said, quietly. “It… did not cross my mind, that it could be. I am sorry. I didn’t try to avoid the Halls. But I did not think about it. I don’t know why. I am sorry.”

Obi-Wan cupped his face with his hands. “Oh, child,” he said, wearily. “Oh, stars. One day, Anakin, you are going to stand up, and you are going to leave that desert, and you’ll be a better man for it. One day, Anakin. I will walk with you, when you do.”

Anakin’s lips felt numb. He thought of Ahsoka, and the novocaine-like fear. “What do you mean,” he said.

“Exactly what I said.”

“A Jedi does not dwell on the past,” Anakin said, but his voice was hollow, spaces between the words so wide he could crawl through them like gaps in a fence, and if he crawled through them, he’d find the long horizon and lone stars of his childhood that promised there was better, somewhere farther away.

“A Jedi doesn’t lie, either,” Obi-Wan said, and he leaned against the cot, and stretched out a hand, cupping Anakin’s knee. Obi-Wan had a wicked, pale pink scar on that palm—his Master had always said he’d sliced it open running away from hired hitmen on Mandalore, when he was eighteen. Anakin had always liked hearing that story. It was easy to forget that for all of Obi-Wan’s coolness, the way he held himself firmly in hand, he had spent from eighteen to twenty-five at war on Mandalore, backing the New Mandalorians, the hand to rule Mandalore that the Republic found most useful. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that for all of Obi-Wan’s steadiness, his bulwark attitude, that Obi-Wan could be as much of a demon on a battlefield as Anakin was, and had a lot more experience.

There was something in the way Obi-Wan touched his leg, then, that bespoke of hard-earned skill, and years of it. Sweat and blood the fruits of labor, the muscle memory of a fighter that came from winning, again and again, reliably, religiously. The part of Anakin that ached from the loss on Columex came from the same part of him that wanted to be more like Obi-Wan than he was. A good padawan would honor a good Master.

Obi-Wan’s hand squeezed Anakin’s knee. “Nor does a Jedi love,” he said.

“Padmé—”

“Told me everything,” Obi-Wan said, “but that was not what I was referring to. We will talk about that, mind you, I just would prefer you be on less painkillers when we do. But that was not who I was referring to. I am still angry. I have to let that go, but that’s not what this is about, either. You said you needed a new crankshaft. Stars, above and all around, of all the things, you made a joke about needing a new crankshaft, and I stood there, thinking—if you had died, in the hangar, if you had died at the Republica, if you had died at those war councils, I’d never have heard so stupid a mechanical joke again.”

Anakin bristled, but Obi-Wan held up the hand that wasn’t cupping Anakin’s knee. “Let me finish. You will learn patience by the time I’m dead, padawan. If it is the last thing I do, you will learn it. I will just talk so slowly and irritate you into it. But if you had died, I’d have never stood there thinking, in all the blazes, did he just call it a crankshaft? And as angry as I was, all I wanted to do was laugh. It was not funny at all. But I wanted to laugh because it was you, and you are always you, and by the souls of all the Jedi past, nothing in this galaxy or the next will ever make you any different. The heat death of the universe could not change you. I mean, suns above, I joke about patience, but I could not make you more patient if I tried, like no one could ever make you slow down if you didn’t want it. You are always going to be Anakin Skywalker, for better or for worse, and I don’t think anything can ever really take that from you. And now I do not think anything—or anyone—should.”

Anakin ducked his head, and fixed his eyes resolutely on his lap, and squeezed his eyes shut, because if he left them open he’d certainly start weeping. “You don’t,” he said, quietly.

“I don’t,” Obi-Wan answered, in the softest voice Anakin had ever heard from him. “That is what I meant, about love. There is only one word for it, when someone says something that innocuous, and suddenly you feel like you could fall over, from affection alone. I am saying this because I need you to know why—stars and nebulas, but it’s hard—why I am going to ask you to do something that you will not like.”

“Anything you ask,” Anakin said, roughly.

Obi-Wan snapped his fingers. “That,” he said, roughly. “Never do that again. Never say that again. I am going to ask you to change yourself, Anakin, because nothing else can. The thing you will not like, it is that. I would—I would rather—I would rather you never listen to another word I say, than have to be sitting here, staring at my padawan who didn’t think to go seek medical treatment for multiple organ failures because he—he did not think about it at all. Because you, as a person, didn’t matter when you were younger, you don’t matter now—you don’t know how that feels to listen to. I have… I have never cared for anyone, or anything, like I care for you. Attachment be damned, but it’s true. You could not have hurt me more if you had—if you had brought your lightsaber against me. If you had set me on fire. I would rather you be the you that I—love—that ignores my directives and does as he pleases, than to be the one that said he was fine as he was dying. The universe itself could not change you, if you didn’t want it to, but—please—I cannot hear that again.”

“Obi-Wan,” Anakin said, helplessly.

Obi-Wan’s head was bowed and his shoulders were taut, and his voice had broken in a way that made it seem like he was about to cry—Anakin had never seen Obi-Wan cry, and he had held Obi-Wan’s intestines inside his body after he’d been gutted by shrapnel, but Obi-Wan had taken it like he’d taken everything before it. It had been one of those moments that put Anakin’s heart in his boots, because he himself had been the one screaming for a med evac, and Obi-Wan had been white-faced but otherwise seemingly entirely unbothered. He glared more angrily at the caf maker while he waited for it to finish a pot. He glared more angrily when Anakin woke him too early. But Obi-Wan’s voice had gone high and reedy, thin and worn—and he sounded like Anakin’s mother, helpless against a galaxy so much bigger than her.

“Forgive me,” Obi-Wan rasped, wiping at his eyes. “Forgive me. I have gone a little mad. It’s all the waiting, you know. It gets to you.”

“That I know,” Anakin murmured. “When I was—you would think, that what would stick out the most, it would be the beatings. Fantastical moments like that. And I do remember those. I will never not remember them, but the one thing I think about every day is waiting by the door.”

Obi-Wan looked at him with red-rimmed, deeply shadowed, but curious eyes. He had such light eyes—they were sharp, sharp in a way that Anakin thought he could cut his own palm on them, have a scar that matched Obi-Wan’s. “What do you mean?”

“Exactly what I said,” Anakin answered. “Waiting by the door. Standing by the door or standing in the sun and waiting for my taskmaster to come out. Standing and waiting until I could be sent to the slaves’ quarters. Standing around, like a shadow, waiting for the people who mattered to do something that mattered. Even that’s just degrading. Waiting that way like a dog.”

Obi-Wan’s face tightened. “I am sorry,” he said.

“I lived,” Anakin said, simply. “So there is no need.”

Obi-Wan’s face tightened even further, but he looked away, his eyes growing unfocused as he stared at an invisible point in the middle distance—and then, with a jolt, he stood, with all the determination that made him one of the Republic’s best generals and one of very few people Anakin trusted with his life, and he stood by Anakin’s side and then leaned forward and pressed a warm, dry kiss to Anakin’s forehead. It was so quick Anakin thought he might have imagined it, but when it was over Obi-Wan was still achingly close, and prodding at some of the clips in Anakin’s hair. Anakin nearly asked him to do it again, to prove to himself that Obi-Wan had done it at all.

“My, what a treasure she is,” Obi-Wan said, warmly. “You look hideous. Like the product of a children’s clothing outlet that contracted dysentery.”

Anakin swatted his hand. “Maza,” he snapped.

Obi-Wan sniffed. “What does that mean? You’ve said it to me before.”

“It is Huttese for a nanny goat,” Anakin said. He gestured under his chin. “You have the beard of one. What, has your face ever met a comb? Maza, maza.”

Obi-Wan flicked Anakin’s ear. “I still think you look worse. You look like you got hit by a speeder.”

Anakin huffed. “Fair point.”

“Speaking of,” Obi-Wan said, and there was a grin tugging at his mustache, “that blacked-out speeder in the Republica’s parking deck, was that—”

“Absolutely not. I behave. Such a thing would never be legal in a speeder lane.”

“Demonstrably not so,” Obi-Wan hummed. “Well, it looked nice. I bet it is one hell of a racer. Whoever owns it.”

“If it were mine, which it is not, I would agree with that,” Anakin said. “But I wouldn’t know, because it is not mine. Definitely.”

Obi-Wan opened his mouth to speak, but that was when Vokara entered with Ahsoka—who had brought a burrito from the refectory and was chewing on it mulishly—and launched into description of the medical procedures the Halls had undertaken to stabilize Anakin, and a speech that managed to somehow be equal parts sympathetic and a brutal dressing down. Vokara Che was a consummate professional and steadfastly ignored the array of hair clips in Anakin’s hair, but Ahsoka met Anakin’s eyes behind her back every other sentence, and had to muffle a round of snickers with another bite of her burrito every time. The upturn in Obi-Wan’s mood was swiftly killed by another in-depth explanation of the seemingly endless things that had gone wrong in Anakin’s body, and out of the corner of his eye, Anakin watched Obi-Wan’s complexion become steadily grayer; Anakin himself could only pay half attention, because if he considered in-depth how close he’d come to dying he did not trust himself to not feel a little sad that he hadn’t, and he was far too busy to think about it anyway, because he was busy staring at Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan’s words rattled around in his head, knocking down to his chest, finding places to roost and settle like goffbirds. When it felt like Vokara might be trailing off, through their training bond, Anakin whispered to Ahsoka, get him a chair and jerked his head to Obi-Wan, who looked a little faint.

It was unsettling. Obi-Wan had been stronger for a longer time than Anakin had even been alive. Anakin wanted to herd Obi-Wan off to a bed in some desperate attempt to regain some color in his face, but he also wanted to ask Obi-Wan to kiss his forehead again, like a small child asking for dessert. Anakin’s lips were numb and his mouth tasted like saline and he wanted to hold onto Obi-Wan the way Ahsoka held onto him, like a child.

Ahsoka dragged in two chairs, and Vokara seemed to take that as both a mild affront and an indication that she’d drawn out the emphasis on how Anakin was always welcome in the Halls of Healing the second he felt unwell a little too long, and abruptly the Healing Master changed tracks. “In the morning, we can discuss what your long-term care options are,” she said. “And I want to order further testing, after receiving those reports from Medic Kix—it’s likely this is not the extent of the damage, and we could be looking at nerve damage as well.”

“Hearing,” Anakin mumbled.

“I beg your pardon?” Vokara asked.

Anakin shifted, and coughed, a bit. “I—I hear worse, recently.”

Behind Vokara, Ahsoka’s eyes widened a bit, and she looked between Anakin and Vokara nearly nervously.

“It could be,” Vokara said. “The bones in the human ear are fragile, it’s entirely possible an electrical current could damage them. We’ll talk about that more tomorrow, I think. I’ll see you then, Knight Skywalker.”

“Thank you, Master Che,” Anakin said, dipping his head, and after Vokara left Ahsoka shoved a chair at Obi-Wan.

“For your old man knees,” she said.

Obi-Wan grunted. “You are too much like your Master,” he said, but he took the chair and dragged it close to Anakin’s side, and settled into it. Anakin found himself wanting to reach out and touch him, reassure himself that it was really Obi-Wan, that it was Obi-Wan who had said all of those things, and not some figment of his imagination. It could all be a dream, still.

Ahsoka pulled her own chair to Anakin’s other side, and then her eyes fell to Anakin’s arm—or the awkward place where it ended—and then she yelped, and ran back out into the hall, returning with Anakin’s prosthetic, with all it’s carbon scoring and scuff marks that Anakin hadn’t buffed out yet.

“Thank you, Snips,” Anakin said, quietly, taking it from her.

“I apologize for that,” Obi-Wan said, rousing a bit. He’d already crossed his arms, the way he always did when he slept in chairs. It made him look rather surly, especially because Obi-Wan tended to scowl in his sleep like the concept of rest itself annoyed him. “It was, ah—when they were restarting your heart, it—the pulses made it go haywire. You crushed a bed railing.”

“Nice,” Anakin said, looking at it appreciatively. He settled it beside his arm—it kind of felt nice, for the stump to breathe. He was supposed to take the prosthetic off more than he did, but it made him anxious not to have it attached, but in the Halls of Healing, he had to be about as secure as he could get. The chance he was going to get jumped by Separatist battledroids or militia soldiers had fallen drastically.

Obi-Wan settled in, kicking his boots up on the end of Anakin’s cot and balling up his cloak to stuff it under his head as a pillow. He clearly had no intentions of leaving, and even as his old Master’s breathing evened out, Anakin could hardly take his eyes off him—waiting, somehow, to see if Obi-Wan would wake up and say it all again—and then he felt Ahsoka’s gaze on him, like it had a tangible, physical weight. It was kind of amusing, that one padawan was staring at their Master, and so was the other. Something about generational cycles, wrapped in that neat little gesture.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” Ahsoka whispered. “Me and Master Obi-Wan both. He was—he was rattled.”

“I did not mean to scare you,” Anakin said.

Ahsoka knotted her fingers together. “But you did. Skyguy, I’m—”

“If that is an apology, you can eat it,” Anakin said, firmly. “What happens to me isn’t your fault, Ahsoka. I make my choices. Not you. You did nothing wrong, Snips.”

Ahsoka opened her mouth to answer, but what came out was a small squeak, and then she was covering her face, trying to muffle pathetic, little hiccuping sobs so Obi-Wan didn’t wake up. It was the same sort of thing Anakin did while she was asleep, biting his fist to keep from sobbing anything louder than a whispered scream. It twisted his heart.

Too much like your Master indeed.

“Lukkali, come here,” Anakin said, bunching over to invite Ahsoka onto the cot with him. He pulled out the blanket, flipped it over, shivered when cold air hit him. Ahsoka swiped at her face, and crawled against him, tucking herself into his side the way she did when they huddled together on cold nights at the front. They did this all the time, more than they should; but rarely did Anakin have his prosthetic off, but if Ahsoka thought it was strange to have the stump of his arm braced against her back, she said nothing at all. Anakin flicked the blanket over the other side of her shoulder, and then wrapped his other arm around her, pulling her close.

Anakin pressed a kiss between her montrals, and her whole body jerked in a sob.

“I was scared,” she mumbled. “Stars, I feel like—like such a baby, but—it’s different, when we’re out there, it’s like you can survive anything, but it was the Temple and it’s supposed to be safe and—”

“Breathe,” Anakin said, rubbing her shoulder. “It is alright. Just stay here. Stay—stay with me. You can even skive off your lessons, for tomorrow.”

Ahsoka laughed, wet and kind of miserable, but a laugh nonetheless. “You’re asking me to skip my lessons now?”

“Well,” Anakin said, “I have to have time to lecture you about skipping your lessons, you see. And I have been having a bad track record with speaking to you before them, and then being awake after.”

Ahsoka tucked the cold tip of her nose into Anakin’s side; she was nearly folded over, with how curled up she was. Both of her legs had wrapped around one of his, like she was trying to keep him from going anywhere. It occurred to Anakin for the first time that as much as he wanted Ahsoka to be his for a little longer, there had to be a matching part of Ahsoka that wanted to be his for a little longer, too, and mourned the war that forced her to grow up too fast and all at once. Maybe that was why she didn’t mind being held this way; because in all other places, she had to bear too much, but this was the one place where he could hold it for her.

Anakin was unable to keep himself from crying, then, and he’d thought he’d been silent, but a small, strong hand wormed out of the bundle that was Ahsoka and wiped at his face.

“I’ll stay,” she said. “It’s your fault, anyway. You make a good pillow.”

“Do I now.”

Ahsoka nodded her head against him. “Yeah. And now you come with a pretty view, right, with all those bows. The full package.”

Anakin laughed, but it turned into a choked-off sob. “My mother would have loved you,” he said, quietly. “Oh, she would have loved you, Snips.”

Ahsoka looked up at him. “Do you think?” she said. She almost sounded nervous. Anakin hated that she had to sound nervous, asking that.

Anakin squeezed her. “Yes,” he said, swallowing against his tight throat. “Yes, she would have. You are such a spitfire. My mother had a—an affection, for spitfires. She would’ve loved you. She would’ve—I wish you could have met her.”

Ahsoka wormed a little closer, though it was hard to understand how they could ever get closer. Her breathing was slowing, and when she spoke, her words were slurred with drowsiness. “I kind of did. Through you.”

“What does that mean,” Anakin asked, but by the time he’d managed to organize his throat and mouth and tongue into saying it, Ahsoka had slipped off into sleep, as exhausted as Obi-Wan was after all their waiting.

My, what a treasure she is, Anakin thought. His mother had felt the same about him, and his mother’s mother had felt the same way about her. They were such strange generational cycles, the way people loved, everything staying the same even as much as it changed. Anakin decided, then and there, that he would have to take Ahsoka somewhere green, and they would have to write that lullaby. Maybe it wouldn’t matter that she was too old for that sort of thing, and maybe a little of the rage Anakin held for his mother’s sake would rest, after that. That would mean he would have to stand up, and leave the desert—but he had someone to walk with him, to take him somewhere it rained. Always Obi-Wan, and it would be that way until either of them keeled over and died, almost certainly.