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Chapter Text

Anakin found Obi-Wan Kenobi in a random corridor in the Theed Palace after a good hour of looking. After all the time spent looking – and avoiding all the celebrations and political debates and search parties and whatever else was happening in the palace – the Jedi was just sitting there, on the polished stone floor.

There was a very fancy looking bench not four feet away, and Obi-Wan was instead on his knees on the floor, in the shadows of a pillar, and Anakin didn't even need to see him all hooded and covered up to figure out what the Jedi was doing.

The boy hesitated for a moment, watching him from the distance.

The Jedi, what little he'd seen of them so far, were different when it came to your basic interactions. Qui-Gon had been warm and stiff and Obi-Wan was demure and stiff. The weird distant rigidity in them was as practiced and ingrained as the casually sensual loitering of the girls in the red light district back at Mos Espa – and as fake, in a way. It was how they kept people apart from themselves, Anakin figured. It had to do with that attachment-detachment stuff that Qui-Gon had told him, to try and get him to forget his mother.

Obi-Wan had, since the beginning, been even worse with it than Qui-Gon. Qui-Gon, Anakin figured, was more of a people person – he'd smiled a lot and talked a lot and just been… a lot. All that time, though, Obi-Wan had usually stood a little to the side – a little behind Qui-Gon, like a servant waiting at his master's elbow. Which he probably kind of was.

Obi-Wan had taken that polite rigid distance and unlike Qui-Gon, he never once dropped it. In that flight from Tatooine to Coruscant, and then from Coruscant to Naboo, Anakin had learned precisely nothing about Obi-Wan that Qui-Gon hadn't explained first – and what he'd explained amounted to two things. Obi-Wan was Qui-Gon's student, and had been for many years.

And Anakin was supposed to become something like him, or… something like that.

All that was done and over with though. Qui-Gon was dead – Anakin had seen the body, when they'd carried him to the morgue to wait in the cool, frigid place for his funeral. He hadn't seen what killed him, and no one had answered him, but everyone said it was the assassin they'd seen back on Tatooine. The Zabrak that had attacked them then had followed them and attacked them again and now Qui-Gon was gone and Anakin would never be his student after all – and Obi-Wan was his student no more.

Not knowing what else to do after that – and feeling a bit like he was getting in everyone's way with all the important stuff happening – Anakin had decided to go to Obi-Wan to ask him…. Ask him what would happen now. Except it had taken him a long while and now that he had, he wasn't sure what to do. Because Obi-Wan…

He was just sitting there, not moving. Qui-Gon's student was still as a statue, not quite huddling down, but not exactly sitting straight up either. He reminded Anakin of…

Of the clinic back in Mos Espa and that one time he'd seen another slave, a sickly old one, being brought in. The doctor had pronounced the slave beyond help and the owner had just left him there to die. The slave had sat in the shadows of the clinic, kept there by the locator chip's new perimeter. He'd died of thirst, still sitting there, a day later. He'd never spoken a word, never asked for help, never did anything and never moved – he just sat there and eventually died.

Anakin steeled himself and stepped forward – stepping heavier this time, so that even though his shoes had soft cloth soles, they still made a sound. Obi-Wan jerked a little, the hood shifting – he looked up, but the light of Naboo's single sun was on the window behind him, and Anakin couldn't see his face, couldn't see his expression.

He didn't need to, though.

Quiet, Anakin stepped in front of Obi-Wan and then, when the Jedi didn't say anything or move further, he sat down in front of him. Obi-Wan's eyes might've been hidden, but Anakin could feel his gaze following him down, staying on him as he crossed his feet in his lap.

Obi-Wan didn't say anything and Anakin didn't either for a long time. The sun set behind the pavilion outside in the garden, and slowly, as the light dimmed, Anakin saw Obi-Wan's face. It was pale, the skin around his eyes red – his eyes were dry, though, so dry that looking him made Anakin's own eyes burn.

The worst thing was how Obi-Wan's eyes looked, though.

"Are you going to die?" Anakin asked quietly.

That made Obi-Wan finally blink – though it didn't make the burning hurt look go away. "Why would I die?"

"Last time I saw anyone looking like you, they died," Anakin said, shrugging his shoulders awkwardly. "I don't know much about Jedi, but… I heard there was a bond and stuff. And that it can… hurt. When it breaks."

Obi-Wan stared at him expressionlessly for a long while, until Anakin himself had to look away. After a while, Obi-Wan inhaled slowly – it rattled in his throat horribly. "I don't intend to die," he said finally.

"I don't think that guy I saw did either," Anakin said.

There was another silence, even worse than the one before – and Anakin kind of wanted to tell Obi-Wan to stop looking at him, because it felt a bit like noon on Tatooine, burning and oppressive and heavy. He didn't, though. Obi-Wan looking at him was probably better than Obi-Wan looking at nothing.

"Qui-Gon asked me to train you," the Jedi said finally. "Before he… He told me to…" he trailed away with a frown and the horrible feel of his eyes just felt worse.

Anakin shifted a bit, lifting his knees up and hugging his bent legs. It helped a bit – gave space to the ball of hurt in his chest. "Will you?" he asked.

"Probably not," Obi-Wan said. "I promised but… it won't be up to me anymore."

"Because you're… just a student?" Anakin prodded carefully. "The… the Council people, I don't think they liked me much," he added. "They said I was too afraid and too old, and that fear leads to the Dark Side. If… if you don't have a say and Qui-Gon's not here and…"

Obi-Wan winced physically at that, and Anakin tried really hard not to droop. He had nothing to droop about. He was a free man now, he wasn't a slave. Jedi or not, he was free. He could do anything he wanted, anything he was able to, now. He could become a pilot, probably. He'd be good at it, too.

And it wasn't he who had lost a teacher who'd been teaching him many, many years. He'd only known Qui-Gon for a handful of days. Obi-Wan had known him since he'd been a boy, probably. Whatever hurt or loss Anakin felt, it probably couldn't compare.

Obi-Wan sighed and finally, finally something loosened up in him. He shifted, his shoulders lowering – he didn't quite relax, but it was still so, so much better than the death-stillness from before. "I don't know about that," he said, his voice rough. "But… it won't be up to me, anymore. I'm sorry."

Anakin nodded, resting his chin on his knees and staring at the front of Obi-Wan's robes for a moment, trying not to feel like the future, so hopeful before, had suddenly turned into a yawning monster, about to gobble him up. "If the Council says no…" he started and then stopped. Obi-Wan had already said it wasn't up to him – so he probably couldn't say what would happen to Anakin now.

"I don't know, Anakin," Obi-Wan said and withdrew back into the shadows of his hood. "I don't know anything anymore. But… I'll do what I can. You might wish I didn't, though," he murmured, almost too quiet to hear. "After this, it might hurt more than help."

"Why would it hurt?" Anakin asked, confused.

Obi-Wan sighed and bowed his head and didn't answer. Anakin waited for a while, but the death-stillness had returned and Obi-Wan was looking at nothing again.

"I don't want you to die," Anakin offered after a while. "Please don't die."

He left the Jedi a little after that, leaving him to his… whatever he was doing. Mourning, regretting, being bitter, whatever. Anakin had seen that too many times to butt into it – had seen too many people in that state turn violent. He'd also seen some of what the Jedi were capable of and he had no intention of making Obi-Wan lash out at him. So he left him.

Maybe the time alone in… contemplation, or whatever it was that Jedi did, would help Obi-Wan.

Probably not.

Anakin eventually made himself busy around the palace, doing what little he could to help. There were a lot of droid bits around, and the palace servants were busy with other stuff – like feeding people, a lot of whom had been starving during the occupation. So Anakin picket the bits up, collecting them on the pallets the servants brought for the purpose.

If he spent some time taking the broken droids apart, well. No one told him not to. So long as he didn't touch the blasters – which he couldn't anyway, the palace guards collected all those and locked them up first things – no one minded what he did with the droids.

They were really high tech. Tatooine had never had anything near as nice as the Trade Federation's battle droids. They were slender and quick – and regardless, so functional! The balance modulators on them were amazing. They lacked a lot on the actual computing side, they barely had any sort of internal operation system to speak of. Part of the reason why they'd all broken down when the control ship had blown up was because they didn't have the actual brain power by themselves to function.

Whoever had made them should probably fix that for the next model, Anakin mused. It was a pretty damn big design flaw, having an entire army share the exact same weak point.

Eventually, though, all the droids had been collected up and taken away. Some of them would be used as evidence in the ensuing trials. The rest would be repurposed by the Naboo, who recycled pretty much everything – something Anakin very much approved of. The droid army with its weapons, vehicles and everything else would go far in funding the restoration of Theed and repairing the damage the very same army had caused

Still, with that done, there was little else to do. The Naboo and the Gungans were busy in negotiations and even with the droids gone, there was a lot to do. Most of the pilots were busy clearing up the space above Naboo, which was now cluttered with the remains of the battle station. With Padmé and her people busy with the Gungans – and with the Viceroy - Anakin wasn't sure what to do.

 They were all now waiting for the Senate's representatives to arrive, to finish fixing the mess of the occupation, to pick up the Viceroy and his people, and to begin the hearings and whatnot. It was all the sort of important stuff that Anakin couldn't help anyone with, the sort of stuff no one invited a former slave to.

So, eventually, he went to find Obi-Wan again.

It took much longer than just an hour this time. It'd been a couple of days and after a while the Jedi had just seemed to disappear – a lot of people though he'd taken ship off Naboo entirely, that he'd gone to fetch the Senate's representatives, or something like that. Anakin knew he hadn't.

The burnhurtgriefanger of Obi-Wan was still around, so the man had to be too.

It was by following it that Anakin eventually found the Jedi. No one else could point him in the man's direction, and Padmé was too busy to be bothered, so Anakin tried to sense it out, like Qui-Gon had told him to. Trust in the Force. It led him, eventually, the right way.

Obi-Wan had almost left the castle – almost, but not quite. He lingered hanging around the fringes of the palace gardens like he wanted to leave, but couldn't. And he probably couldn't either, because of duty or whatever. He was still, probably, assigned as the Queen's bodyguard.

"You look horrible," Anakin commented when saw him.

And he really did too. Sitting now in the grass by the artificial pond, Obi-Wan had sort of… collapsed in on himself. His shoulders, previously so straight and powerful, were hunched, and his face had grown even paler than before. Anakin was also pretty sure the man probably hadn't visited a fresher since he'd last seen him. He definitely hadn't shaved in days.

Obi-Wan looked up at him past the edge of his hood – and the skin around his eyes was still red. How he could look feverish and ice cold at the same time, Anakin wasn't sure, but he managed it. It was not a flattering look. Neither was the hollowness of his eyes in general.

"Have you…" Anakin started and then stopped. "You haven't eaten anything, have you? They have a sort of open buffet in one of the big rooms – a ballroom or something like that they called it, though it's more an oval really. It's really good stuff too – there's even fresh fruit and stuff. And this berry juice – it's really good. You should… get something to eat."

His babbled faded and Obi-Wan didn't answer. For a moment Anakin wasn't sure if the man even saw him. When Obi-Wan finally reacted, it was only to turn away, to stare at the pond again.

It was… so uncomfortable. The feel of Obi-Wan was so much worse up close – there was a strange heat to his presence that had never been there before, and it turned Anakin's stomach. It was obvious that the Jedi was sick – some sort of mind sickness that affected the Jedi, maybe. Something to do with the Force. Whatever it was, it felt horrible. Like a dehydration headache and heatstroke and a stomach bug, all at once.

"You said you weren't going to die," Anakin said quietly.

Obi-Wan didn't answer, just stared away, eyes hollow and burning in his feverish face.

After a while, Anakin went away – but just for a while. He didn't know what to do, but he had to do something – Qui-Gon would've wanted him to do something, his mother would've done something. So, Anakin went to the ballroom which wasn't a ball, and got himself a tray from one of the tables. Then, after consideration, he took a bit of all the things he thought were extra juicy.

Naboo food wasn't at all like the stuff on Tatooine – a lot of it was wet inside, so wet that if you bit just so, it could run down your chin. There were these berries that, if you bit just right, would burst with juice. They were Anakin's favourites. He didn't know if Obi-Wan would like them, but he took a bunch anyway. In the end, most of the food he picked was basically fresh fruits, though he took some of the boring digestive crackers too, just in case Obi-Wan really did have a stomach bug. A lot of the people in Theed had upset stomachs, because they hadn't gotten enough food during the occupation.

Then, with an enormous jug of water under his arm, Anakin returned to Obi-Wan.

He'd feared that getting the man to eat would be hard – that Obi-Wan would refuse the food. Anakin had seen that too, he'd seen it a lot. There were dozens and dozens of slaves who tried to starve themselves to death rather than live in servitude. Most of them failed - intravenous feeding and gastric tubes were cheaper than new slaves after all. It was never pretty though.

Anakin himself had never tried, he'd been born a slave so he was… sort of better adjusted to it than a lot of other people were. But his mother admitted she had tried it once, in the beginning. She hadn't tried it twice, though.

Obi-Wan didn't refuse the food though. He didn't take it, made no motion to get any of it – but when Anakin in frustration placed a fruit in his hand, Obi-Wan reacted to that, at least. And he didn't even throw the food away, like Anakin had feared he might in his madness. No, Obi-Wan ate – mechanically like a droid running on automatic, perhaps, but he ate. The first fruit, the next, and all the rest after that – he even ate the bland crackers Anakin handed him, one after another. And when he slowed down a bit, after several fruits and a lot of berries, Anakin handed him the water jug instead.

It was such a huge relief, to see the man drink. Obi-Wan didn't just sip it either, he chugged it down without restraint and Anakin sighed. Only people desperately hanging onto life drank like that. It didn't make Obi-Wan look much less feverish, and the water wasn't enough to get rid of the burnhurt. But Obi-Wan would live anyway.

"You need a wash, really badly," Anakin said when Obi-Wan finally lowered the jug. He waited for a moment for the man to answer – which he didn't. Anakin sighed and then, making a decision, he stood up. "Right," he said, collecting the now empty tray and jug, tucking both of them under his arm.

Then he took Obi-Wan's stiff, tense hand into his and collected him too.

And, thankfully, Obi-Wan followed. He stumbled and almost fell flat on his face at first – how long had he been sitting on his knees? – but he followed. Silent, his hand icy cold and hard in Anakin's, he followed the boy inside, to the ballroom where Anakin deposited the tray and the jug and then out again, never noticing the way people stared.

It probably said nothing good about whatever was going on in the man's head, but Anakin didn't care right now. Obi-Wan needed… something. Anakin had managed to get food and water in him. It was a good start and if he'd managed to do that, then he could do more.

He would do more. It was what his mother would do and it was what Qui-Gon would've wanted him to do, he was sure of it. Obi-Wan was sick and needed help and Anakin seemed to be the only one who cared. So he would damn well care.

Getting Obi-Wan out of his by now pretty rank clothes and into the fresher was a task and a half, but Anakin managed it. Getting him to actually use the fresher was much easier, though. All Anakin had to do was to push the unresisting man under the shower and turn it on, and Obi-Wan move in that same horrible mechanical way to wash himself. Anakin left him to it, and instead tended to Obi-Wan's clothing.

Naboo sonic washers were amazing though, so that wasn't hard. It didn't hurt that Obi-Wan's clothes weren't that different from his own, as far as the material went. It was a bit weird to think that the Jedi wore robes of that same rough synthwool that was favoured by the slaves of Tatooine, but on the other hand, maybe it made sense. It was that humility no possessions no attachment thing that Jedi seemed to be all about. Plus, it was pretty hardy stuff.

After cleaning the man's clothes and even chucking his boots in the sonic cleaner just in case, Anakin peeked in on the fresher. Obi-Wan had finished and he looked… better. Not good, but a little less dead.

"You have any sense of modesty?" Obi-Wan asked roughly, running a hand over his short wet hair.

"Slave," Anakin shrugged. "They sell us naked, you know. You should shave."

Obi-Wan blinked at that and then turned to the mirror, to look at himself. He almost recoiled and then made a strange jerking motion, winding his arm back like he wanted to smash the mirror.

Anakin hissed a bit, sort of a verbal wince. "Please don't punch the mirror, it's built into the wall and you'll probably just break your knuckles," he said. "Also, it's… I promised not to break anything when they gave me the room."

"Tch," Obi-Wan answered, his shoulder shaking as he let his arm drop. He looked down and frowned. "My clothes?"

"In the other room – I cleaned them. I'll get 'em," Anakin said and popped back into the bedroom to fetch the clothes from the sonic cleaner. When he returned, Obi-Wan was running a hand over his chin, considering the couple days' worth of beard growth.

"Shave," he muttered, not looking anywhere near the mirror.

"If you're not gonna do it, I can do it for you," Anakin offered. "Watto rented me to a barber shop once. They chased me out after I shaved this one karking sleemo bald, but I know how to use a razor."

Obi-Wan glanced at him and then sighed. "Yes, alright," he said and then just knelt down on the floor in front of Anakin – still naked but the boy wasn't about to say anything about that. It was cold in the fresher – freezing in Anakin's opinion. It was probably doing a lot of good to the burnhurt in Obi-Wan, to cool down a bit.

So, setting the folded pile of Obi-Wan's clothing aside, Anakin reached for the cupboard to fetch the laser razor and activated it. He took a moment to admire it – it was much nicer than one at the barber shop had been. It worked much smoother too, gliding over Obi-Wan's skin easily and smoothly. It even had a bit of a vacuum function, and actually sucked the hair away.

"Much better," Anakin pronounced the man, once he was done. Obi-Wan still looked like he was really, really sick, but he looked a little less like a homeless abandoned person who was sick, so that was saying something.

He was also staring at Anakin and, for the first time, there was actually something in his eyes that wasn't emptiness. "What are you doing?" the man asked, confused.

Anakin could've misinterpreted that, but decided not to. As much as he wanted to make a joke just because a bit of humour would make things better, it… probably wouldn't make things better for Obi-Wan. "Taking care of you," he said instead.

"Why?" Obi-Wan asked, narrowing his eyes and frowning. It was… an oddly harsh look, and it made the burnhurt look so much worse.

Anakin shrugged and looked away – to the pile of Obi-Wan's clothes. "Because I want to," he said and reached for the pile. He dropped it on the man's folded legs. "Put on some clothes. You're naked you know."

Obi-Wan scowled, looking down. He rested a hand on the pile of rough synthwool and bowed his head. "Anakin," he said after a moment, not looking up. "Doing this won't help you. I… can't help you, no matter what you do."

"Yeah, I sort of figured that out a while ago," Anakin snorted and shrugged again. "Which is why I am helping you."

The Jedi frowned and looked up at him. Anakin looked back and after a moment folded his arms, the exact same way his mother did whenever she wanted Anakin to do something Anakin himself resolutely did not want to do. He wasn't sure what he wanted Obi-Wan to do right now, though. Straighten up a bit, maybe. Stop looking like death warmed over – literally warmed over, over heated even. Something like that.

"Put your clothes on," Anakin ordered.

And Obi-Wan did.

Chapter Text

When the Senate representatives arrived, Obi-Wan didn't go to meet them – so Anakin didn't either. Padmé asked them – outside her queen persona even, coming to Anakin's room in the handmaiden's uniform to tell them that the Jedi Council was sending two representatives as well. The suggestion that Obi-Wan should meet them was clear.

"No," Obi-Wan said, not looking at her. He was on his knees – again – on the floor, but Anakin had managed to shove a blanket under him this time so for once, it didn't look terribly painful. "It wouldn't… be a good idea."

"But surely –" Padmé said, almost wringing her hands and hesitating. Obi-Wan's body language had closed off again and Anakin figured she was even better at reading it than he was – she winced at it, glancing at Anakin almost helplessly.

"I'll meet them later," Obi-Wan said. "If… if my presence is inquired after, I… am still in mourning."

"Of course," Padmé murmured, looking like she wanted to object, but Obi-Wan bowed his head, closed his eyes, and pretty much shut down. Padmé looked at him for a moment ad then her shoulders slumped, and she backed away with a little bow.

Anakin followed her outside. "You knew," he said. "I'm not sure what you knew, but about him – you knew?"

The young queen hesitated, fiddling with the vivid orange cloth of her sleeve. Then she shook her head and smiled almost painfully down at him. "He… was very broken up, when we found him at the generator complex. He'd been there for a couple hours at that point – with… with Master Qui-Gon. His body, that is. It was very bad," she admitted. "He asked to be left alone after and we did. I figured he'd meditate on it, centre himself – it's what Jedi do, in these sorts of cases, I think. I had hoped that it would not be…"

She trailed off and sighed, straightening her shoulders.

Anakin squirmed a bit. "It's not just that he's broken up, or in mourning – though he is, I guess," he said. "Something… happened down there. If he was a droid I'd say he had a program failure. A virus even."

Padmé let out a sound that was almost a laugh at that. "Oh, if people were that simple," she sighed and shook her head. "I don't know much about Jedi, or what moves them – or what can… do something like this. But I suppose he and his Master were close."

"Yeah," Anakin murmured, glancing back at his room, where Obi-Wan was probably still on the floor – and probably would be for hours. "So, um. When are the representatives gonna be here?"

"It'll be couple of hours," Padmé said.

"Shouldn't you be in, I dunno… fancier clothing?"

Padmé laughed. "I will be, once the time comes. I just wanted to take a moment to walk around the palace unhindered, to make sure everything was okay – I won't get that chance for days once the representatives get here," she said and then gave him a thoughtful look. "Would you like to join me, Anakin?"

"I would love to," Anakin said but hesitated, glancing at the room. "But Obi-Wan…"

She considered him, and the closed door and then frowned. "How bad is it, actually?" she then asked, perceptive as always.

Anakin shifted uncomfortably. "I uh… well, I'm pretty sure he'd starve himself to death if I didn't put food in his hands," he said with a grimace. There was more to it – all these little things Obi-Wan did, like for example, sitting on the floor and doing nothing. But the eating thing was the worst of it.

"Really?" she asked, frowning.

"Yeah. With the Jedi Council people coming, I'm just…" Anakin sighed. "I dunno. I just don't think he should be left alone right now."

Padmé nodded slowly, looking at the door. Then she turned to him and smiled, resting a hand on his shoulder for a moment. "You are a good kid, Ani," she said, squeezing gently; her smile was a little less painful this time. "I'm glad he has you."

Anakin nodded, frowning at the door. Whether he had Obi-Wan, he wasn't so sure. "I don't know what will happen, with him or… or with me," he said then. "Obi-Wan keeps saying nothing's up to him and… I just don't know." He shook his head and looked at her. "If I don't see you again, Padmé, then… well, I'm really glad I got to meet you. You're probably the best person I know," he said and then amended. "After mom that is."

She grinned. "A high praise indeed," she said, looking honestly pleased. Then, she swiftly hugged him, tight and strong. "I'm so glad I got to meet you too, Ani. I owe you so much. My people owe you so much. Thank you."

"Hey," he laughed and hugged her back. "I got freed in the process. So thank you, too."

Padmé left after that, squeezing his shoulder one more time before leaving. Anakin looked after her, regretting a bit not going – this might be the last time he saw her, really saw her rather than the Queen of Naboo. Padmé was just so different when she was the queen – expressionless and stern and even a bit cold. Padmé, in disguise, was much warmer.

Going with her and enjoying himself would've been easy. But it wouldn't have been right.

So, he went back into his room, where Obi-Wan sat like a statue again, and instead he went to work trying to fix a tear in his tunic.

Obi-Wan was watching him, face a little downcast but eyes burning – he looked a bit suspicious. "Why didn't you go?" the Jedi asked.

Anakin shrugged, frowning at the tear. It had taken a lot of hunting to find a needle and thread in the Theed palace – people here just didn't sew tears up, it seemed, they recycled their damaged clothes and got new ones. He was kind of worried that the needle had actually been fabricated for him – he had had to actually describe what a sowing needle was before it had been miraculously found.

"Anakin," Obi-Wan said, frown turning to a scowl.

"It's because you get worse when you're left alone," Anakin said, and shrugged again. "You need to have someone around you to…" to what? To help him hang onto sanity? Probably best not to say that aloud.

Obi-Wan looked away, closing his eyes and fighting the scowl away, smoothing out his face with effort. "You should've gone."

"Pfft," Anakin answered, and stretched out the fabric straight and started sowing the tear shut. Free man or not, he still had only one set of clothing – better take care of it.

At some point the representatives arrived – Anakin wasn't precisely sure when, but he'd bet it was around the time Obi-Wan stiffened up completely and when the empty look in his eyes was replaced by paranoid flickering. Obi-Wan didn't move or leave or say anything, though, so Anakin didn't either – they just waited in a silence that grew tenser by the moment.

He didn't get why Obi-Wan was so worried. He'd killed the Zabrak that had killed Qui-Gon, hadn't he? Wasn't that a good thing? Or was it that Qui-Gon had died in the first place? Or… or the weird sickness Obi-Wan had?

Anakin had fixed his tunic and moved onto flicking through Naboo's local holonet, when a knock sounded in the room. It was one of the palace servants – there to inform them that the people from the Jedi Council were requesting Obi-Wan's presence.

"Right," Anakin said and stood up. Obi-Wan hesitated a brief, painful moment and Anakin could've almost sworn he looked terrified. But the Jedi stood up, and followed the servant and Anakin out of the room, through the long polished corridors with their high vaulted ceilings and, eventually, into a room where two Jedi – the ones Anakin had met at the Temple – were waiting for them.

The green troll one – Yoda, Qui-Gon had called him – took one look at Obi-Wan and his face crumbled as if with pain, his ears drooping down. The human stood up straighter his eyes wide and he actually made a move as if to reach for his lightsaber. And Obi-Wan…

Obi-Wan took a hesitant step forward – and then he knelt on the floor in front of the two Jedi. He shifted his cloak, took out first one lightsaber, then another, and placed both of them silently on the floor in front of him. And then he just sat there on folded legs, resting his hands on his knees, waiting. And abruptly, Anakin realised what it was – what he looked like.

A man waiting for his own execution.

"Leave us, young Skywalker, you should," Yoda said, squeezing the handle of his stick with both hands. "Talk with Obi-Wan in private, we must."

"But…" Anakin said in alarm, looking between Obi-Wan who was staring at the floor like a man doomed. He was still pale and feverish and the burnhurt had amped up by a dozen, adding into it fearfearfear. Obi-Wan was freaking terrified – how was he so still? Hell, was he even breathing?

Yoda looked at him grimly. "Talk we only will. Hurt him we will not?"

Anakin barely kept from sputtering at that because, because… was that seriously a concern?! That the Jedi would hurt one of their own? Would hurt Obi-Wan? He looked at the two serious Jedi and then at Obi-Wan and then back, his own alarm almost drowning out the burnhurtfear. "But –"

"Just go," Obi-Wan said and closed his eyes.

Anakin went, his eyes wide and his knees shaking a bit. The door closed after him the moment he left the chamber and he stumbled a bit, taking quick support from the doorframe. Obi-Wan's burnhurtfear wallowed up behind him and added into it anquishpainregret before turning way too murky to for Anakin to decipher, a chaotic noise of emotion that very nearly swept him off his feet.

In an unconscious reflection of Obi-Wan, Anakin sank to his knees by the door, and with his heart pounding heavily in his chest, he waited.

And waited.

Though the corridor was pretty much silent aside from the sound of the wind drifting from an open window and the distant sound of speeders, it felt like Anakin was surrounded by a cacophony. Obi-Wan's emotions battered at him, ranging wildly from side to side whenever he could make them out. There was a moment, a horrible heavy moment, when all he got out of the room was ragefuryhateRIGHTEOUSNESS which made Anakin's vision almost white out for a moment before it dwindled into a whimper of regretpainhurtsorrow.

How long it took, Anakin wasn't sure – he completely lost track of time, trying to stand the barrage of emotions. By the time the door opened, his knees were aching and his feet were numb. Only Yoda stepped out, his small form drooped and his ears hanging low.

"Walk with me you should," the Jedi said. "Talk I wish to."

"But Obi-Wan –" Anakin said, his voice a little sore.

"Speak with Master Windu he will, a moment longer," Yoda said and waved at Anakin to follow. "Hear, I wish to, what you know, and your interpretation of that knowledge."

Anakin hesitated and then winced as iresuspicionanger lashed out from the room followed by interestdoubtdistrust. Whatever Obi-Wan was talking about, it felt… nasty.

Anakin stood up, wobbling a bit as he followed Yoda down the corridor. Yoda walked slowly, thankfully, each step laborious and short. "What do you want to know?" Anakin asked.

"Everything," Yoda said and looked at him. "Seen footage we have, and the body of the assailant. Obi-Wan's accounting of events we also have heard. What think you, of it all?"

"Well… I haven't seen the footage or the body and I don't really know what happened. Obi-Wan… didn't say anything, just that he promised Master Qui-Gon to train me and that he probably couldn't keep the promise," Anakin admitted, and then relayed what little he knew. It was really that – very little.

Yoda listened to all of it intently, though, as if it was important. "And since then, been with Obi-Wan you have?"

"Yeah, sorta," Anakin said, scratching at the back of his neck awkwardly, not sure how to put it without making it sound bad. But then, judging by what happened, Yoda already knew it was bad. Everyone with eyes could see it was bad. "I, uh. I've been sort of looking after him. He… won't eat or anything, unless he's forced to."

"Why?" Yoda asked, staring at him with narrowed eyes. "Why help Obi-Wan, when help you he cannot?"

"Because… it's the right thing to do?" Anakin asked somewhat defensively and folded his arms. "No one else was. The Naboo just left him alone, figuring he'd sort it out himself – and he didn't. I don't think he even can. I don't know what happened or how or what it really did to Obi-Wan but he's… he's not okay right now. He can't… take care of himself. So… I did…"

He trailed off awkwardly as the Jedi just stared at him. Finally Yoda sighed, heavy and weary, and turned away.

"Master Yoda?" Anakin asked tentatively. "What happened to Obi-Wan?"

"Speak to you I did, in the Council Chambers, of fear and anger and suffering, did I not?" the Jedi asked. "Happened that to Obi-Wan did. Close to Qui-Gon he's always been, tight the bond between them was. Severing it great pain caused. Facing the assassin fear caused…" he shook his head and looked up to Anakin. "Fallen to the Dark Side Obi-Wan Kenobi has."

Anakin frowned. The words were spoken with heavy finality and he sort of understood – they'd made the Dark Side seem like a seriously bad thing, back on Coruscant. But… "I don't really get it," he admitted slowly. "What does it mean?"

Yoda sighed and looked away. "If even once you give in, forever the Dark Side will rule you," he said quietly. "Anger the path to it is. Powerful it is and powerful make you it can. But corrupt you it does – corrupt Obi-Wan Kenobi has become. Some of this you know, I think. Feel it you have."

"I'm not sure I have," Anakin said.

"Feel it you have," Yoda said with certainty, giving him a look. "Sense Obi-Wan's emotions, you do."

"Yeah, but…"

"His pain you feel."

Anakin paused at that. "You mean the burnhurt?" he murmured, frowning. It was ever-present in Obi-Wan now, no matter what. It was there even when Obi-Wan slept – though that had happened only once, and it wasn't as much sleeping as it was Obi-Wan passing out after three days of no sleep.

Yoda considered him seriously. "Rampant his emotions run, control them he cannot," he said then. "Angry he is, grieving and suspicious and worse it will get. Each moment deeper he falls. Lost control he has. Lost his centre he has." He old Jedi sighed and shook his head. "Lost his way, he has."

"But… he can find it again, can't he?" Anakin asked worriedly.

Yoda shook his head sadly. "Once you give in, forever the Dark Side rule you will," he said. "And rule you it does. At a price the power it gives comes. The goodness of your soul, that price is." He looked away and sighed heavily. "Lost two good Jedi we did here."

Anakin stared at him, uncomprehending. "But Obi-Wan is a Jedi… isn't he?"

"Followers of the Light Side the Jedi are," Yoda said and shook his head. "Lost the Light, Obi-Wan has. Never again a Jedi will he be."

Anakin opened his mouth to argue, to rebuke, to, to, to something. Nothing came out and slowly it dawned on him – Obi-Wan's behaviour, his constant claim that nothing was up to him, the way he just… sat around. On his knees. Waiting for the end. Obi-Wan had known. Of course he had known.

"Are you going to execute him?" Anakin asked, his voice very small, his throat constricted.

Yoda said nothing for a moment and then tilted his head. "Sad would that make you?"

"Well, yes. He's my friend," Anakin said.

"No one's friend he is now. Dark he is," the Jedi rebuked.

"He is my friend," the boy said, frowning. "He only became my friend after… after all this, whatever this is – I didn't really even talk to him before. He is my friend and your Dark Side or whatever won't change that. Not ever."

That made Yoda's ears perk up a little. The old Jedi stared at him for a moment longer, eyes narrowing. Then he shook his head. "Execute him we will not. No ill yet has he done, and the Jedi way that is not," he said. "But exiled from the Order he has been. On a watch list he will always be. Should he fall further, should he act out in anger and hate, then swift our retaliation will be."

Anakin allowed himself to relax a bit. "That's still a bit harsh, but I'll take it," he murmured with a relieved sigh.

Yoda tapped the floor with his stick, considering him. "And what of you, young Skywalker?" he asked. "Your plans what are, now?"

"My plans? I dunno," Anakin shrugged. "You won't make me a Jedi, will you? I won't be trained."

"Too old you are," Yoda said, looking worried.

"Yeah, you said that," the boy muttered and looked away.

What would he do now? He was a free man, at least, even if he wouldn't be a Jedi. He could actually decide for himself – though his age was probably a bit of problem there. And the general lack of money and all that. "I… I dunno. I guess I'll… do something."

"What your desires are?" Yoda asked.

Anakin thought about it. "I want to free my mother from slavery," he then said. He wanted a lot of other things besides, but that was the biggest thing. "I… guess I'll go back to Tatooine. Or, I dunno. Try and get money, somehow, and then go back to Tatooine…"

No he wouldn't. Or maybe he would – but as big a concern as that was, and as much as it hurt him to be so close and yet so far from it, there was something more pressing here, nearby. Something that needed his attention more. Anakin slumped his shoulders and sighed.

"I'm gonna stay with Obi-Wan," he muttered, grimacing. "If he's free to go and whatever, then… someone has to keep him from killing himself."

Yoda's ears lifted a tiny bit further. "Care for him you really do?"

Anakin scowled but nodded.

"Much work that is, for a young boy," Yoda warned.

"So what? Nothing right is ever easy," Anakin said, and shook his head. "I'll figure something out. He's not completely useless, some of the time. I'll… figure it out."

"Then perhaps some hope for Obi-Wan there still is," Yoda said and glanced away. "Finished Master Windu is. To Obi-Wan you should go."

"Right," Anakin said and turned.

"One more thing, I have," Yoda said and Anakin paused. The Jedi looked at him seriously. "Stay in the Light, you must," he said. "Obi-Wan's very soul on that depends. If fall you do… then destroyed he will be. And help him no one ever can again."

Anakin considered the words and then nodded and turned again. He walked back resolutely, holding his head up and completely ignoring the suspicious look the human Jedi gave him, as he walked past him. All his attention was on Obi-Wan and the disbeliefgriefdissapointment radiating from him.

Obi-Wan was still on his knees on the floor, but he was unhurt. The two lightsabers were both gone, though. When he looked up and at Anakin, the boy paused for a moment. In the half light of the room, Obi-Wan's eyes glowed with unshed tears… and with the ever present burnhurt which, apparently, had to do with the Dark Side.

Obi-Wan's eyes were almost yellow with it.

"They took your lightsabers?" Anakin asked, approaching him carefully.

"The other one was Qui-Gon's," Obi-Wan said, his voice rough. "I… couldn't keep them."

The lightsaber was a Jedi weapon. "Yeah, I guess not," Anakin murmured.

They were quiet for a moment, just looking at each other – it was almost like all the awkward tense silences from before, except worse. The anticipation that had been ever present before had been replaced by a heavy shroud of disappointment.

"You… wanted them to kill you, didn't you?" Anakin asked quietly and Obi-Wan flinched, looking away quickly. The boy sighed and looked away, pretending not to see how Obi-Wan wiped at his eyes almost violently. He didn't know what to do, or what to say. It was just so… bad. All of it was absolutely horrible.

"This is messed up," he said finally and fell to sit beside Obi-Wan, hugging his knees. "A proper sandstorm of bantha poodoo."

"Language," Obi-Wan said, rubbing at his face.

"My language is fine, thanks," Anakin said and then, hesitantly, nudged at Obi-Wan's side. "The green troll told me something but… What happened?" he asked quietly. "You… fell?"

The Jedi - former-Jedi – hesitated and then nodded tiredly. "I Fell," he murmured. "That Zabrak, he was so strong. We fought so long and he was just playing with us. My… my Master was one of the best duellist in the Order, and that Zabrak just toyed with him, with us both – leading us by the nose around the generator complex. He kept separating us, pushing me off the ledges…"

It was like sand pouring out of a broken bag – the way Obi-Wan talked. His voice was choked and dry and it broke at every turn as he described the long fight. It had lasted almost the entirety of the retaking of the palace – Qui-Gon had been fighting almost non stop for twenty minutes, and Obi-Wan hadn't been able to help him much, not in the generator complex where the walkways were thin and the falls were long.

Qui-Gon had tired.

"It was his fighting style," Obi-Wan murmured almost desperately, hands squeezed into tight white knuckled fists at his knees. "Ataru is an intensive combat form, it's not designed for duration. The very concept behind it is fast paced battle – taking down the opponent as quick as possible. And… and it… it doesn't have any defence…"

His voice broke and he bowed his head. Anakin looked away, swallowing around the knot in his throat as Obi-Wan's breath hitched, as he tried not to cry. There was a terrible shivering moment, with every sound Obi-Wan made echoing in the room.

"T-then it was just me," Obi-Wan said. "Qui-Gon fell, the Zabrak ran him through and then it was… it was just me. It hurt so much, to see him fall. I wanted to…" he broke off again and drew a ragged breath. "B-but I couldn't. I wasn't strong enough, I wasn't fast enough. He was so well trained, that Zabrak, and in a form I've never fought before. I tried so hard but I couldn't… he was just playing with me!"

Anakin flinched a bit as Obi-Wan suddenly launched to his feet, his movements a bit jerky and furious as he paced along the length of the room, restless and desperate. "He toyed with me! Like he'd done with Qui-Gon – but worse!" Obi-Wan almost shouted as he paced. "He was just leering at me and blocking my every attack like they were nothing – everything I tried, every trick I knew, they didn't… nothing worked! I did everything I could and nothing I tried worked!"

The shout echoed in the room for a moment, and Obi-Wan panted for breath for a moment. He forcibly slowed it down and stopped his pacing and as Anakin watched, he closed his eyes and just forced himself still again. Was this what Obi-Wan had been trying to hold back, all those times he'd been so damn still?

"Then I felt it," Obi-Wan whispered, his eyes opening just a hint, glinting yellow and fiery in the half light. "The anger. The frustration. The pain. And the power that came with them."

For a moment Obi-Wan just stood there, breathing slowly in and out, lost in the memory. Anakin didn't dare to say anything – it was just too intense. He feared that if he said something, it would set the man off again – make him blow up like he was a bomb.

"I picked up Qui-Gon's lightsaber, used it along with my own," Obi-Wan murmured. "I felt so powerful. I'd never been so fast. It surprised him, the Zabrak – he backed off for a moment. And when he recovered, I'd already… given myself up to it. To the feeling. To the power. And it felt so good…"

Anakin swallowed dryly, turning his eyes away from Obi-Wan and staring at the floor instead.

He could hear Obi-Wan's smile in his voice. "I could tell he was controlling himself. His emotions. He wasn't giving himself up to it – and that made him weak. I didn't restrain myself like that – I let go, I let everything go. It was just me and the lightsabers and him and I wanted him dead. I wanted it like I never wanted anything before…"

Obi-Wan chuckled – and it was perhaps the most terrifying thing Anakin had ever heard. Dark and low and so satisfied.

"And then he was dead," the former Jedi said. "I cut him in two, I avenged my Master and it felt good."

The satisfactionpleasuredelight coming off of Obi-Wan in waves was horrible – Anakin very nearly gagged at it. But then, as quick as it had welled up, it was gone and the burnhurt was back.

"And then it was just me. Just me and the Dark Side of the Force," Obi-Wan said, looking at him. "I had given myself to it. I had Fallen."

Anakin nodded, not looking up from the floor. He was shivering, and for once it wasn't because of how damn cold it was everywhere. The boy took a deep breath and let it out before looking up. Up and at Obi-Wan and his blazing yellow eyes. Obi-Wan stared back, the passion he'd shown already fading and the realisation returning.

And with it, the misery.

Anakin still didn't quite get it. Why the Dark Side was so bad, he didn't get it – but he could feel some of it. Obi-Wan was… different now. Not just in comparison to how he'd been before, but in comparison to every other living thing. Something in Obi-Wan was very wrong. That, he supposed, was the corruption of the Dark Side. And Anakin had a bad feeling it would only get worse.

That Obi-Wan's surety of his own upcoming execution – now averted – had kept it in check. Now only his own horror over what had happened was keeping the Dark contained.

"So," Anakin said. "Now what?"

The former Jedi shook his head. "I don't know," he said, and looked away. "I really don't know."

Anakin nodded and looked down for a moment. That he'd figured. Obi-Wan no longer had… anything. His Master was dead and his Order had exiled him and the rest… the rest was just bad. The sort of bad that ruined people and made other people hate them.

"Come back to Tatooine with me?" Anakin said after a moment. "I want to free my mom from slavery. Will you help me?"

Obi-Wan frowned and turned to look at him. "You're asking for my help?" he asked with disbelief. "My help? Anakin, I've Fallen. I can't help anyone anymore."

"Why not?" Anakin asked, frowning and defiant. "You've Fallen – so what? It doesn't mean you're a bad guy."

"It… rather does, actually," Obi-Wan said slowly.

"Well, I haven't seen it yet. So you… got mad and did something and got a bit turned about – so what?" Anakin said, standing up. "You're still… you. Mostly. You're still Qui-Gon's student, aren't you? Or… do you want to be a bad guy now?"

Obi-Wan blinked at that and he looked almost bewildered. He opened his mouth to argue and then stopped, scowling.

"Come to Tatooine with me," Anakin said, stepping to the man's side. Very tentatively, he took Obi-Wan's hand tight in his. "Help me free my mom. Or, I don't know, just sit around and be miserable. Just come with me. Alright?"

The former Jedi glanced down at their hands and frowned. When he looked up again, there was suspicion and doubt and distrust on his face and in the air between them. But there was also a tiny sliver of hope, amidst all of it – and that, Anakin decided, that couldn't be Dark.

"Tatooine," Obi-Wan said slowly.

"Tatooine," Anakin nodded, and like that, it was decided.

Chapter Text

Of course it wasn't as easy as that. Nothing was. Leaving Tatooine hadn't been that easy – it had been hard and taxing and almost gotten people killed. Anakin could already see that leaving Naboo would be the same – though hopefully with fewer life threatening situations.

For one, neither he nor Obi-Wan had any money. He didn't because, well, slave, he'd never had any money and he'd left the money they'd got selling the pod to his Mom who needed it a whole lot more than he did. And Obi-Wan had been a Jedi – Jedi didn't really use money. As far as Anakin could tell, they were assigned money when necessary to be used on their missions, but personally? They didn't have much.

Again with that humility no-possessions no-attachments thing. Anakin was really starting to be irritated about it.

"We could ask Padmé?" he said somewhat dubiously. "I… don't like asking for stuff for free, but… I can't really figure out anything else. I guess we could work for money, but…" but he couldn't really see how, or what they could do. A nine year old former slave probably didn't have much he could do around a place like Theed, and… he wasn't sure if Obi-Wan even knew how to do stuff, other than lightsaber fighting.

He wasn't actually all that sure what the Jedi did, aside from peacekeeping and lightsaber fighting and being generally mysterious. And maybe protecting the queens of distant near-Outer Rim worlds.

"Hmm," Obi-Wan hummed with a frown, running his little braid over his fingers as he thought about it. "You did… a great service for the Naboo people," he then said. "The only reason the queen and her people took Theed back as quick as they did is because the droid's ceased to function. And the Gungans… you undoubtedly saved their entire army."

"You did stuff too," Anakin said, frowning.

"As a Jedi," Obi-Wan murmured with a slight scowl and shook his head. "I have no claim to a reward. I wouldn't even wish to ask."

Anakin folded his arms and frowned at him. Obi-Wan glanced at him and frowned back. "You killed the Zabrak. And the Zabrak was after the queen," Anakin said.

"And I did it as a Jedi," Obi-Wan said, looking away. "Jedi don't take rewards."

"Technically you weren't a Jedi anymore when you did it, were you?"

Wrong thing to say. Obi-Wan stiffened and jerked slightly away from Anakin – he even made a move as if to pull his hood up yet again, to hide in its shadows. Anakin sighed and nudged at him before he could. "Sorry, sorry," he murmured. "I didn't mean to… You just, you deserve some credit."

"Not really," Obi-Wan muttered but he stilled, all awkward and stiff maybe but at least he didn't run away. Or close up, which was basically the same thing.

"So, I guess… we'll ask Padmé," Anakin said, quickly changing the subject back and away from the pit fall he'd almost thrown them both in. "Can't hurt to ask, right? Worst thing she can do is say no."

"I suppose," the former Jedi said, frowning. "She will be busy with the representatives, however. I don't think she will have time for… requests."

"Yeah. And I heard there's gonna be a big celebration with the Gungans. And, uh…" Anakin hesitated. "There's Master Qui-Gon's funeral."

"So there is," Obi-Wan whispered, closing his burning eyes.

The funeral was to be held two days after the representatives arrived – in that time Obi-Wan left the shelter of Anakin's room precisely once, when the High Chancellor himself asked to meet with the Jedi that had aided in the retake of Theed – and who'd taken down the assassin. It was a very weird meeting – and it made Anakin so mad to see it.

Obi-Wan attended the meeting in that same spirit of subservience he'd met with the Jedi Council members. All cloaked up and head bent, he was just one drop to the floor away from kneeling and prostrating himself again.

"I understand you've done our people a great service, Obi-Wan Kenobi," the now High Chancellor Palpatine said with a proud smile, though with a hint of concern. "I had hoped to see you earlier but… Master Qui-Gon Jinn's loss is very great. You have my most sincere condolences."

"Thank you, High Chancellor," Obi-Wan said, never looking up, hiding in his hood. "Please forgive my absence. I am still coming to terms with… with what happened, and I have not been able to present myself in a dignified manner."

"No, no, I understand completely. No one could expect one to immediately bounce back from such a loss," the High Chancellor said sympathetically. "Of course you should take some time in contemplation before returning to your duties."

Anakin frowned a bit at that, looking up at Obi-Wan and then glancing at the two Jedi from the Council who were keeping a watchful eye over Obi-Wan. The words surprised the former Jedi too – Anakin could just barely feel his astonishment, though it didn't show on his face.

"I am afraid I won't be returning to duty, my Lord Chancellor," Obi-Wan said slowly, still not looking up, and Anakin could tell his every word was carefully measured. "I have… resigned my commission with the Jedi Order."

"Resigned?" the Chancellor asked, taken aback while Anakin quickly looked away, his mind churning. "After such a feat of – whatever should you need to resign for?"

"I feel I cannot find equilibrium after my Master's death and as such I cannot conceive of myself completing the duties of a Jedi in a manner suited for them," Obi-Wan said. "Please forgive any confusion caused, but I have already given up the title of a Jedi Padawan."

"Well," the High Chancellor said, clearly confused. "Of course that would be your right, but… no, I am sure your reasons are serious and personal."

While Anakin tried to figure it out, Chancellor Palpatine suddenly turned to look at him. "And what of you, young Skywalker? I understand the late Master Jinn intended to bring you into the Jedi Order."

"I won't be trained – I'm too old," Anakin said awkwardly, trying not to glance at Obi-Wan for guidance. The former Jedi was still staring at the polished stone floor, not looking up.

"Oh? But I understand it was largely thanks to your efforts that the invasion was halted – surely…" Palpatine began and then trailed off, looking concernedly between Anakin and Obi-Wan. He glanced at the two Jedi Masters, Yoda and Windu, who stood just near enough to overhear and shook his head. "Well," he said. "I cannot say I understand the intricacies of the Jedi Code. I'm sure there is a reason. What are your plans now, then?"

"We're gonna –" Anakin started and stopped when Obi-Wan lashed out suspicionworryreservation at him.

"I promised my Master I would look after Anakin," Obi-Wan said. "I will take him with me, when I leave."

"And where will you go?" the Chancellor asked.

"There was a time when I was nearly assigned to the Jedi Service Corps, the Agricultural Branch. I… feel now the advice I then got was sound. Not all Force Sensitives are meant to become Jedi Knights," Obi-Wan said, quietly, reservedly. "Anakin will join me."

Anakin just barely managed to keep himself from gawking at him.

"Surely that is a waste of your talents!" the High Chancellor said.

"It is not a matter of talents, my lord Chancellor," Obi-Wan said with finality and stepped slightly back, the line of his shoulders uncomfortable, and though the High Chancellor looked like he would've wanted to ask more, he didn't. After that Obi-Wan took the first opportunity he got to escape – probably more to get away from the Jedi Masters, than from the politicians.

"What was that?" Anakin hissed, the moment he and Obi-Wan were safely out of anyone's hearing range. "What was – what – you didn't resign! You were kicked out by the Jedi! Why'd you make it sound like it was your idea? And what was that about the Service Corps?"

Obi-Wan grimaced. "I don't… like politicians," he muttered.

"That doesn't explain anything!"

The former Jedi rolled his shoulders uncomfortably. "It would… reflect badly on the Jedi Order, if it came out that they exiled me. They obviously didn't tell the High Chancellor the truth, so –"

"So what?!" Anakin asked, incredulous. "You made it sound like – like… like it was your fault, or something! Why would it matter that it reflected badly on them or whatever – they kicked you out!"

"Anakin…" Obi-Wan sighed in frustration, rubbing at his forehead. "Can you not?"

"I really can't!" the boy answered. "Can't you just explain?"

Obi-Wan glanced at him, his eyes burning. He grimaced and shook his head. "The Order has been all I've known," he then said. "They might not care for me, but I still… I betrayed them, Anakin. Not the other way around."

"No – just, no, that is not what happened," Anakin said, tugging at his sleeve. "They kicked you out, remember?"

"I Fell first," Obi-Wan answered roughly, frustrationanger lashing out. "I went against all the teachings and I Fell –"

"And they won't help you up again!" Anakin objected, shaking his head with disbelief. "They kicked you out – they abandoned you, pretty much. Why are you defending them?"

"Because there are still people in the Order that I… care for," Obi-Wan growled. "It was my home, Anakin. You could even call it my family. I know it seems just like any old organisation to you, but it's… it's not. It's… it's…" he looked for a word desperately. "It's home," he then just repeated, lamely, sounding frustrated.

Anakin stared at him and then looked down. "Oh," he murmured, and frowned. "Wait. Does that mean – they keep saying I'm too old," he said and looked up again. "How long were you in the Order?"

"Ever since I was an infant," Obi-Wan muttered, looking away.

"Oh. Oh, wow," Anakin murmured. "And they just kicked you out? Those guys are assholes!"

"Will you just stop, please?" Obi-Wan growled, furyannoyance raging somewhere behind his eyes. "Not now."

"Fine. But I reserve the right to hate them a little," Anakin muttered, kicking the floor angrily. Then he looked up at Obi-Wan, who was trying to calm himself down again. "So, what was the agricultural stuff about?"

"I'd… rather people not know where we go, when we leave," Obi-Wan admitted, frowning. "I… my senses are all askew, but I feel it would be for the best if we managed to not leave too many trails."

"So you lied to the Chancellor. The High Chancellor," Anakin said, snorting.

"Actually, I didn't," Obi-Wan said, a small smile curling at the corner of his lip. "I insinuated."

It was, Anakin thought, almost an improvement. As weird as it was, the suspicion and paranoia Obi-Wan suddenly had about what had happened and what would happen and how that would be viewed from the outside kept him… well, active. With the goal of leaving Naboo and now the need to do it discreetly, Obi-Wan spent most of his time thinking, rather than being depressed. He still sat on the floor and didn't really move much, but the silence in Anakin's room was a thoughtful one.

Paranoid Obi-Wan was definitely progress from a miserable Obi-Wan.

Except then, of course, it got worse bit by bit. Obi-Wan's emotional states were… erratic at best. Aside from the ever present burnhurt that was, well, ever present, everything else went from side to side and got blown out of proportion. What started out as mild paranoia soon welled up into overwhelming suspicion and obsessive distrust and Obi-Wan actually tried to argue against Anakin, the next time he mentioned asking Padmé for help.

"We shouldn't need anyone's help," Obi-Wan muttered, shifting uneasily where he sat. "Everybody has an agenda – a political leader has the greatest agenda of them all. The queen might –"

"Padmé might what?" Anakin asked, incredulous. "Say no? Maybe be a bit confused? Possibly offer some advice?"

The former Jedi scowled. "Do you know what an advantage a Fallen at the side of a politician could be?" he asked. "Do you have any idea what sort of assassin I'd make? Or how easy it would be to make me – to break me – right now?"

"Are you actually hearing what you're saying?" Anakin asked, staring at him. "You're talking about Padmé here! What's going on in your head this time? Are you – you're thinking about the Zabrak, aren't you?"

Obi-Wan almost managed not to flinch.

"You're not like him," Anakin said, slowly and clearly, pronouncing every word as carefully as he could.

"I could be," Obi-Wan growled.

"You could be sane too, but that's not about to happen, is it?" Anakin asked and threw his bed pillow at him. "You're ridiculous, you know that?"

Obi-Wan subsided a bit after that, but the paranoiasuspiciondistrust stuck around, welling and rolling around Obi-Wan like a dark cloud. Still, he didn't say anything again and Anakin could tell he was trying to hold it down – trying to meditate it away the way he'd tried to meditate the other things away too. Like all those other times, he failed… but at least he was trying.

And then there was Qui-Gon's funeral. Anakin had known it would be bad for Obi-Wan. The man was in some in-between state of denial and furious acceptance when it came to Master Qui-Gon's death – he was either avoiding thinking about it, or he was pretending that he was already over it. At the sight of the actual funeral pyre that delusion collapsed like a sand castle that was kicked over, and with it so did Obi-Wan.

Anakin couldn't say he didn't feel like something collapsed in him too. Of course he'd known and accepted that Qui-Gon was dead – people died all the time, Anakin was no stranger to it. He'd lost so many neighbours and friends back in Mos Espa, slave mortality being what it was. But as long as he didn't see, as long as Qui-Gon was out of view, he could almost… almost imagine that maybe…

What? That as long as he didn't have proof, maybe Qui-Gon was alive after all? No, he never thought that – Obi-Wan's despair never let him. But with the proof of the destruction of both of their dreams so far out of view, he could pretend that maybe it would be alright. Somehow, they would be alright.

But Qui-Gon was dead and no, they wouldn't be alright.

They barely stood there for five minutes as the flames started to eat away at Qui-Gon's clothing before Anakin decided that watching the whole thing would probably kill Obi-Wan. The former Jedi withered at the sight of it, turning so far inward that even the burnhurt faded and all he could feel was a terrible void of life in Obi-Wan. It was probably rude or something, but Anakin couldn't let it continue.

While the funeral dirge sounded in the chamber and people murmured under their breath to each other, Anakin took Obi-Wan's hand and forcibly hauled him away from the sight of his dead Master. Obi-Wan dragged his feet and stumbled and very nearly fell over, but Anakin didn't let up, not before they were in his room – where they could…

Obi-Wan collapsed the moment the door closed and didn't make a sound, just sat on the floor slumped over, shell-shocked, wide eyed and empty.

Anakin should've tried to do something, he knew that. He just didn't know what – when Obi-Wan got like this he couldn't be comforted. Hell, he couldn't be comforted at all, ever, period. But Anakin still should've tried to do… something. To draw Obi-Wan out of his dark head-space. To make him move, breathe, live. But he couldn't. He didn't have the strength.

Anakin felt too young and all alone and helpless and he wanted Qui-Gon to be there and smile at him, he wanted his mother to hug him, he wanted… something. Something nice and warm to cling to, something that would make it seem like it might be okay. He wanted to feel like it would be alright. He wanted to feel safe again.

And he didn't.

What little safety he'd ever had in his life was on Tatooine, in that little room where he'd built C-3PO, where he'd tinkered and toyed with gadgets and trash, where he'd been… home. He'd been a slave, yes, and he wouldn't give his freedom up even to have that feeling of home back, but there, in that space, with his mother just outside the door and the life predictable and easy… he'd been safe. He'd been secure.

There was nothing safe here, not anymore.

Anakin sat down in front of Obi-Wan and began to sob. He couldn't help it, couldn't stop it – it just burst through. All the sorrow and frustration. Qui-Gon's death and what happened to Obi-Wan and the Jedi Council's decision, both over him and over Obi-Wan, all of it just burst through and he bawled like he never had before – like you shouldn't because it was just a waste of precious moisture. But he couldn't stop. His breathing hitched and his chest hurt and he couldn't inhale right and he was just crying.

He didn't notice Obi-Wan startling back to awareness at the sound of it, didn't see the former Jedi looking at him in bewildered astonishment. He only noticed when Obi-Wan very hesitantly touched his shoulder. It was awkward, too hard and too heavy but it was real and Anakin took it gladly and followed it.

He crawled into Obi-Wan's lap and cried long and hard and eventually all the way into sleep.

When he woke up it was the next day and Obi-Wan wasn't there. Anakin's head hurt and his throat was sore and he felt a bit sick, but he pushed himself up and felt at Obi-Wan haphazardly. Frustrationdetermination echoed back to him along with the usual burning feeling, and he got the impression that Obi-Wan was speaking with someone.

With a squint, Anakin tried to concentrate, tried to feel who Obi-Wan was taking to.

'Nosy,' a voice in his head spoke, annoyed and suddenly Anakin could see an image of Padmé in his mind. He couldn't make out her face – for some reason he was focussed on the hem of Padmé's elaborate dress. But it was definitely Padmé – he knew it, felt it, was absolutely sure of it.

Except… no, he wasn't. Obi-Wan was – because it was Padmé Obi-Wan was talking to. And the image… was coming from Obi-Wan, and not from his own memory.

 "What the…?" Anakin said aloud, standing up and staring – in his head – at the image.

'Shush,' Obi-Wan answered and the image vanished.

"Did you just shush me in my own head?" the boy asked, bewildered and weirdly outraged. Obi-Wan didn't answer, though – he wasn't quite there anymore, leaving Anakin alone in his head, the feel of the former Jedi's emotions gone. 

For a moment Anakin stood by the bed, trying desperately figure out what had just happened – what Obi-Wan was doing in his head and how he had gotten there and what exactly the man was doing with Padmé. For days now Obi-Wan had never left the room without him practically forcing him to do it – Anakin always had to prod him or drag him to get him to move, and Obi-Wan as obstinate as an eopie when he wanted to be.

Was it a good sign or a bad sign that Obi-Wan had not just left, on his own volition, but that he'd gone to talk to Padmé? Anakin hesitated, not sure if he should go and… do something. But for once, Obi-Wan didn't feel insecure, didn't feel hesitant. He felt sure. He felt like he actually knew what he was doing. It was new and strange and maybe even positive.

So Anakin went into the fresher instead and had a hot shower that washed away the crying and hurt of the previous day and almost made him feel warm again. There'd probably be consequences for what they'd done – running away from Master Qui-Gon's funeral like that. It was probably bad. It had been easier but it was… well, disrespectful.

The Jedi Masters probably didn't approve. Not that Anakin particularly cared if they didn't approve.

When he came out of the shower, Obi-Wan was back and he had a strange metal case with him – with an electromagnetic lock on it and everything.

"Compliments of Her Majesty Queen Amidala of Naboo, and His Grace High Chancellor Palpatine," Obi-Wan said with a mirthless smile, and opened the case.

It was full of shiny metal chips of a sort of silvery colour that Anakin had never seen before. They almost looked like Corellian Credits, but… didn't have any symbols on them. They were just flat smooth metal chips.

"What?" Anakin asked, confused.

"It's platinum," Obi-Wan explained. "Thirty kilograms of pure platinum."

Anakin's eyes widened and he stepped forward, suddenly spellbound by the amount of wealth sitting on his bed. "Platinum. T-thirty kilograms of…" he swallowed and looked up, his eyes wide. "Padmé gave us this?"

"And Palpatine – he gave most of it, actually. For services rendered," Obi-Wan said and closed the case, hiding the enormous wealth inside. "For them its pocket change, really."

"B-but it's... do you even know –" Anakin sputtered and made numbers in his head fast. "T-that's at least seven hundred thousand credits worth of platinum!"

"Bit more than, I think," Obi-Wan said, resting his hand on the case and smiling bitterly. He glanced at Anakin. "You've made some very wealthy people very happy, you know. It's not a bad position to be in when you're short on change," he said and tapped the case holding the platinum. He looked disgusted. "At this point staying on Naboo would probably set you up for life, if you decided to do it. The Chancellor would probably even adopt you."

Anakin blinked, still trying to catch up with the idea that they had thirty kilograms of platinum. "Why aren't you happy?" he asked, bewildered.

Obi-Wan smiled – a horrible twisted thing that made him look almost spiteful. "It's nothing," he said and pulled his hand away from the case. "Anyway," he murmured, pushing his hands into his sleeves. "We have money now. Money to travel and to buy your mother's freedom."

"And about… a hundred others' too," Anakin murmured, his mind whirling.

Obi-Wan frowned. "How much is a slave worth in Tatooine?" he asked slowly.

Anakin considered. "Well, it depends on skills and looks and age and stuff. Mom's last evaluation was eight thousand, I think, because she's pretty good with mechanics – it's why Watto kept us, even when I was too young to work for him. I was worth five thousand last time Watto insured me with the Hutts, because I'm – I was too young to really work. But after the pod race I probably would've been worth twelve thousand, easily. Winning racer slaves are worth a lot."

"Twelve thousand credits is… a lot?" Obi-Wan asked faintly.

Anakin shrugged a bit embarrassedly, looking down at his toes and only then realising that he was standing there in a towel. "I once heard that there was this Twi'lek dancer that sold for over thirty thousand, but I don't know if it's true," he mumbled.

Obi-Wan didn't say anything for a long while – but his emotions were noisy. Indignation and fury and dismay and horror battled for highest note and simple and pure anger won. Anakin glanced up worriedly, to see Obi-Wan with his eyes shut, trying to rein it in – and as always, failing horribly.

"Shall we make travel plans, then?" the former Jedi asked, his eyes blazing with feeling when he opened them.

"Y-yeah," Anakin said, staring at him. Obi-Wan was angry on the behalf of the slaves, he knew. On his behalf, and on his mother's behalf. He was absolutely furious about it.

It probably shouldn't have made Anakin happy, what with the Dark Side and the corruption and all. Obi-Wan's emotions were a bad thing, their power was a bad thing – the whole thing was bad. It was getting worse too – Obi-Wan swung more and more to the darker emotions which even an idiot could've known was just, well, bad. Obi-Wan was losing control more and more. It shouldn't have made anyone happy to see the former Jedi like this.

But it did.

Chapter Text

The day Anakin and Obi-Wan left Naboo was just as beautiful as all of the rest. Naboo, as far as Anakin could tell, was always beautiful, the weather stuck on some improbable loop of sunny and half cloudy that offered just enough light and just enough shadow to enhance the details of everything. From the impossibly green and verdant plants to the intricate, fancy architecture, to the art that lined every facet of everything he could see…

The Naboo were artistic people, and it shone out from every corner of their city, and he was kind of sad he only really noticed it the very day they left. He'd been so worried over Obi-Wan that he hadn't taken much time to really explore – not outside the Theed palace anyway. Not that the palace was anything to sneer at, it was just… he kind of wished he had taken a closer look at the rest of the city too.

"Do you think we'll ever see this place again?" Anakin asked Obi-Wan, who was considering the metal case holding all the platinum.

"Who knows," Obi-Wan said and tapped the case thoughtfully. "We have enough money to go to and fro dozens of times if we want to. If we're smart about it."

Anakin glanced at the case – it still made his mind whirl, to think of it. "So… how are we gonna carry it?" he asked. "I mean, we can't carry it out in the open, can we? Someone might steal it."

"If they knew what was in it, they'd steal it in a heartbeat," Obi-Wan agreed. "For now I can carry it and hide it under my cloak. I don't know about when we get to Tatooine, though."

Anakin considered it. "Transfer it to Corellian Credits," he said then. "Or some of it anyway. Probably a lot safer than carrying seven hundred thousand credits worth of platinum around. Why'd they give us platinum instead of credits anyway?"

"I asked for universal currency," Obi-Wan said, folding his arms. "Since Watto refused Republic Credits, and I wasn't entirely sure what was applicable on Tatooine… platinum seemed like safe bet. Also, it's untraceable which is what I want to be for a while."

"Why?" Anakin asked, looking up at him. He was actually honestly curious about that. It was easy to chalk it up as Obi-Wan's general paranoia, but ever since getting the platinum Obi-Wan had been struggling to maintain a sort of… determined, rather than paranoid, mind-set. He still failed every now and then and collapsed into one negative emotion or another, but generally he had managed to find some sort of midline where determination kept him grounded.

And still he wanted to keep their plans a secret.

"It's…" Obi-Wan scowled for a moment, thinking about it. He glanced at Anakin. "We're vulnerable right now. I'm… what I am, and you are…" he trailed off and just made a haphazard wave at Anakin. "And there are Sith out there. It's just better to be careful right now."

"Sith?" Anakin frowned. He'd heard Qui-Gon use that word once or twice, on Coruscant and while talking to Obi-Wan about the Zabrak. "What's Sith?"

Obi-Wan's discomfort at the subject was obvious, even without the disgustloathinganger that flashed momentarily. "Simplest way to put it would be to call them the opposite of the Jedi. It's not that simple, though. There's a long and very bloody history to the organisation of Sith Lords, I… won't pretend I know that much about it. They're Force users who use the Dark Side of the Force for selfish purposes. For… evil. The Zabrak was a Sith, I think. A trained, practiced Sith Lord."

Anakin opened his mouth to ask – and closed it when Obi-Wan glared at him. "I am not a Sith," the former Jedi growled. "I'll never be Sith. It's a very different thing to Fall to the Dark Side, and to actually consciously train to use it for malevolent purposes. The Sith crave power for power's sake, they manipulate and murder and cause destruction. They are always vying for power and control – the entire galactic history is blood splattered thanks to this or that Sith Empire. There have been many, many wars. The Sith are organised. I am just…"

"Just Fallen," Anakin finished slowly.

"Yes," Obi-Wan muttered, burnhurt flashing as he turned away. "Just that."

Anakin nodded thoughtfully. "I still don't get it, the Dark Side, you know," he said. "But… if the Sith use the Dark Side, and you're… well, you know. Why are they a threat to us?"

"Because as I am now… It would be very easy to take me and use me for their purposes," Obi-Wan muttered bitterly. "I'm still… reeling from it, I'm out of control, I'm… weak," he admitted with a frustrated growl. "Manipulating me as I am now would be ridiculously easy. And you – you're the strongest Force Sensitive I've ever felt. I can't even imagine what a Sith could do with you."

"…Oh," Anakin murmured and shivered.

"And the Sith were here," Obi-Wan added mirthlessly. "On this very planet. So you see why I'm in a hurry to get away from here?"

"Yeah, I guess I'm starting to," Anakin muttered.

Their transport off of the planet was a cargo hauler that had brought in aid from another Chommel Sector planet to the Naboo, and which would take some of the droid landing ships with it when it went. Obi-Wan had purchased tickets on board, which would take them to some space station Anakin had never heard of – from where they could take another transport to Tatooine.

Anakin was both eager to go and a bit reluctant. He was going to miss Naboo. It was just… so regretable, all of it. All the things he could've been – all the things Obi-Wan could've been – had died on Naboo, sure, but there'd been so many bright moments too. Qui-Gon and Padmé and captain Panaka and the rest – he was going to miss them. Miss all the could've beens and should've beens that didn't exist anymore.

But he couldn't wait to get back home and free his mother either. And after that… well, he wasn't sure at all what they'd do after that. But they had money to spare and there were so many things they could do. Tatooine was Tatooine, of course, it wasn't exactly the bright centre of the galaxy full of hope and potential but still. Even on Tatooine you could do lot of things with money.

"Kinda sad we're going to miss the peace parade," Anakin murmured, his things packed and ready to go.

Obi-Wan glanced at him, frowning. "It's too risky to stay," he said darkly. "With that many people coming in off world… anyone could slip in. You know we can't stay."

"I don't know we can't," Anakin objected, echoing something his mother had said long ago. "But I know we shouldn't. Should we get to the ship now?"

"Might as well," Obi-Wan said. "Nothing keeping us here."

How very true, Anakin thought sadly, and together they left the room that had been both their sanctuary for days now. As they headed out of the residential wing and towards one of the many side exits, Anakin thought about Padmé. He hadn't really gotten to say goodbye – she was so busy. He'd written a thank-you note to her with Obi-Wan's help – and to Chancellor Palpatine – but… it wasn't the same.

They were almost out of the palace when in one of the last corridors to cross a dark clad figure shifted out of the shadows of a pillar and stood in front of them. Anakin could feel the way Obi-Wan tensed up, physically and mentally both, even before the former Jedi stopped walking.

"Leaving?" Master Windu asked.

"Our transport is waiting," Obi-Wan answered, his hand coming to Anakin's shoulder and gripping it hard, pushing him back and behind Obi-Wan. "I was under the impression I was free to go."

The dark skinned human Jedi smiled grimly. "You are," he said, stepping aside a bit and motioning them to continue on their way. "I'm not here to stop you. I thought I'd walk you for a while – unless you mind."

Anakin looked up at Obi-Wan with concern, already feeling the bruises forming on his shoulder but not saying anything. Obi-Wan stared searchingly at the Jedi Master for a moment before, slowly, releasing Anakin's shoulder. "It would be an honour," the former Jedi said slowly, suspiciously.

Master Windu bowed his head ever so slightly and waited. It took a moment for Obi-Wan to move, and Anakin quickly moved to keep up with him. The air between the Jedi Master and Obi-Wan was so tense that a lightsaber would've had trouble cutting it, he thought with dismay.

It certainly wasn't how he had hoped to spend his last moments on Naboo.

"You're very quick to leave," Master Windu said as they walked. "Do you have any actual plans, or are you just running away, Kenobi?"

Obi-Wan didn't answer, staring resolutely forward and Anakin swallowed.

"Hm. Well keep your secrets, then," Windu said. "I'm not here to interrogate you. I just want to make sure you know what you're doing – and the dangers that wait you. Falling is just the first step down a very dark path, and it can go many ways, most of them unkind to you first and those around you only after."

"I don't intend to go down further," Obi-Wan growled.

"With your level of corruption? You let the Dark Side run rampant through you, Kenobi," the Jedi snorted and shook his head. "You threw yourself at it. There is no way for you to go, except down."

Anakin winced at the hatefury that radiated from Obi-Wan, blazing hot with its intensity. Master Windu obviously felt it too, and the look on his face spoke loudly of how unimpressed he was.

"You have so much of it in you now that it's bursting through the seams," the Jedi said, shaking his head. "Try and contain it, and it will destroy you without mercy. You're fighting it, and that's why it hurts – because it's eating away at you. Keep it up and it will devour you completely. Death or descent – those are you two options now. But if you choose to descend further, other alternatives become available."

"Like?" Obi-Wan growled, low and furious.

"There is such a thing as a controlled Fall, you know," Windu said, turning to look ahead. He took a deep breath and released it slowly, shifting his hands into his sleeves. "How much do you really know about the Dark Side, Kenobi?"

"What little the Temple taught me and what brush in with Xanatos revealed," Obi-Wan answered, shaking his head.

"Nothing at all, then," the Jedi nodded. "I suspected as much. We don't teach about the Dark Side because even the very knowledge can be dangerous. It's not just the temptation of power but the familiarity, the awareness that comes with knowing. It's a door that's susceptibly secure and yet so easy to open."

Obi-Wan scowled at that and then turned to look at the Jedi. "Speaking from experience?" he asked suspiciously.

"Yes, I am," Windu said with a scowl of his own, lifting his chin slightly. "I was a practitioner of Juyo before Vaapad, after all. And Juyo… has its roots in the Dark Side. Very deep roots."

"What's Juyo?" Anakin asked, unable to help himself. "Or Vaapad?"

"It's a form of lightsaber combat – a style," Windu answered, glancing down at him. "Juyo is a very ferocious form of combat with an intense internal focus and to practice it one risks certain… habits forming.  Vaapad is a more advanced version of it, one could call it the perfected form of it, which is not particularly important now. What is important is that Juyo's chaotic and aggressive in nature and its demand for certain viciousness from the user can and has led Jedi practicing it to the Dark Side."

"Master Windu is one of its undisputed masters," Obi-Wan murmured, eying the Jedi doubtfully.

"Your Zabrak opponent was well versed in it too," Windu asked.

Anakin could feel how Obi-Wan very nearly stopped moving at that. "That was Juyo?" he asked. "The form he used was the seventh?"

Windu nodded and stopped there. They were at the end of the corridor, in front of lavish double doors leading to the gardens. "In order to perfect Vaapad, I studied the Dark Side extensively," he admitted. "With special permission from the Council, of course, and a very tight watch on my person at all times. A side effect of it is that I am perhaps one of the most knowledgeable Masters when it comes to the Dark Side. And you, Kenobi. You need my help."

"Do I?" Obi-Wan asked, eyes narrowed and blazing furiously. "And why is that?"

"Because of him," Windu said, and looked down at Anakin who took a nervous step back. "Because if you Fall wrong, you will end up destroying him. And right now, your descent is chaotic and uncontrolled. You need to make your decision now on what you will become once you hit the bottom."

Obi-Wan struggled with annoyance and fury for a moment, radiating both like a supernova made of hate. When he managed to rein it in, it was only barely. "Is it really something I can control?" he demanded.

"I don't know," Windu admitted. "If anyone's ever managed it, we've never heard of it. But then, we wouldn't have. If there was such a thing as a Darksider not bent on chaos and destruction, well, they wouldn't have come up, would they?"

He pulled his hands from his sleeves, and in one of them he was holding something. A sort of complex crystalline cube that glimmered in the light. Obi-Wan stared at it, his astonishment almost overriding the rest of his emotions, and Anakin looked between him and Windu in confusion.

"What is it?" he asked nervously.

"A holocron. It's how the Jedi store knowledge. And this… has all I know of the Dark Side in it," Windu said, and held the cube out to Obi-Wan. "I'm taking a risk I shouldn't, Kenobi. With this you can either learn how to control your descent or how to destroy everything around you. And honestly, I don't hold much hope for the former."

"Then why give it to me?" Obi-Wan demanded.

"Because Qui-Gon was a friend," Windu said, and deposited the cube in Obi-Wan's hand. "He was a defiant fool and always fighting the Council but he was a friend. And he loved you."

Obi-Wan flinched at that, his emotions withering into a chaotic, miserable blur, and he stared at the holocron in shock. Anakin shifted closer to him, touching his sleeve as he wavered, worried that the man would collapse again. Windu stared at Obi-Wan impassively, glancing down at Anakin with an inscrutable expression before shaking his head.

"Don't waste it," the Jedi Master said, before turning around and walking away.

Anakin looked after the Jedi and then up at Obi-Wan, not at all certain what just happened. Obi-Wan was still staring at the holocron in shock, feeling almost apprehensive.

"Obi-Wan," Anakin said, quiet.

The former Jedi drew a shuddering breath and straightened up. His emotions were still a mess that welled and spun around him like a sand storm, but he seemed to come back to himself. After a last look at the holocron, he shifted his cloak and hid the cube under it.

"Come on," he said, his voice rough and sore. "We have a ship to catch."

The ship they did catch was the Effervescent, and it was huge. At least four hundred meters across and twice that in length, it dwarfed every other ship in the space port easily. Anakin had heard that the galactic cargo haulers could be big, and he knew yeah, space ships could get huge. But he'd never thought something this big could land on a planet.

And yet, their cabin in it was absolutely minuscule, with two tiny bunks and barely enough room to turn around.

"Most of the space's taken by the cargo hold," Obi-Wan explained as he sat on one of the bunks, gripping his knees with a white knuckled grip. "These ships aren't really designed for passengers."

"Y-yeah," Anakin answered, looking at him. Obi-Wan was still raging internally. "You… didn't know, did you? Or you didn't believe it."

Obi-Wan glanced up, looking irritated. "Believe what?"

"That Qui-Gon loved you," Anakin murmured, wincing at Obi-Wan recoiled mentally. He pushed forward though because this – this was really important. "You loved him though. I mean, obviously you did, and a lot, too. How could you not know he loved you too?"

Obi-Wan almost squirmed, intensely uncomfortable and full of burnhurt and regretdoubt. "It's not something… it's not… Jedi must be detached," he said, running a hand over his face. "He never showed it. I never showed it. It just wasn't done. Besides, he certainly had no hesitations about throwing me aside for you," he added with a growl.

Anakin shifted from one foot to another. "But he was so proud of you," he said, confused.

"Was he?" Obi-Wan muttered with a grimace, clasping his hands together so tight it looked like he wanted to tear his fingers off. "I'm not so sure."

"He was. I felt it," Anakin said quietly and Obi-Wan looked up, his face twisted in grief. "He was," the boy said. "I… I think that was why he was… why he thought he could train me, even though I was old. Because he'd done so well with you. Because you… you were so good."

That made Obi-Wan laugh, bitter and dry and horrible. "Yeah, that's me. Poster child of Jedi success," he muttered, shaking his head and looking down at his hands which he was wringing together. The raging storm inside him was calming down though, at least a little.

"So, about that holocron thing," Anakin said carefully. "It's pretty important, huh?"

"Tch, yes," Obi-Wan said, digging the crystal cube from under his cloak and turning it in his hand. "At least it's not from the Archives," he murmured and glanced up at Anakin. "Master Windu just betrayed the Jedi Order," he said. "Even if he inserted the knowledge into this himself and didn't just copy it from the Archives, he still just relinquished Jedi secrets to an exile. To a Darksider. If I went with this to the Council now, he'd be in serious trouble."

"But you won't," Anakin said, though he could tell the thought certainly amused Obi-Wan in a terrible dark way.

"Of course I won't," the former Jedi – the Darksider – said and looked at the cube. "I need to open this and then I need the equipment to access the information in it," he said, turning the cube again. "And then… I suppose I need to study."

Anakin nodded, sitting down on the bunk beside him and watching the cube glimmer in the faint light of the cabin. "Do you think it will make you… better?" he asked worriedly.

"I have no idea," Obi-Wan admitted ruefully. "Chances are it will make me worse. But… I have to try. As much as I hate it, he was right. I have to do something and I need this."

"Can I help?" Anakin asked.

Obi-Wan paused at that and turned to frown at him. "No," he said. "No you can't. At least you can't study what's in this – not unless you want to Fall too, and… you… shouldn't," he said, grimacing.

"I… don't want to Fall," Anakin said, looking away. Not that he really understood what it meant to Fall or what really the danger of it was. As much as Obi-Wan spoke of the dangers, Anakin hadn't really seen them yet. Obi-Wan was erratic and bipolar and could be a bit mean, but he wasn't… really mean. Or dangerous, or violent, or anything, really. He was just a bit messed up. That didn't make him evil.

But he was also in constant pain and being torn apart from the inside by the emotions he couldn't control. Anakin didn't want to go through that, at least.

"Obi-Wan?" Anakin said. "What is it like?"

Obi-Wan eyed him silently for a moment and looked away. "I don't know how to put it into words. To understand you'd have to know what is like to exist in the Force. Not merely as a sensitive, but as one in close contact with it, constantly open to it. The Force is… many things and it has many effects on the user. And it reacts to emotion."

Anakin nodded slowly, watching him attentively and Obi-Wan cleared his throat awkwardly. "You conduct the Force through your will and… through your emotions," he said, looking away. "And the Force, it… conducts your emotions. Unrestrained, they can echo back to you, they can even be amplified by the Force.  The Light Side is aligned with what people call positive emotions. Joy, compassion, benevolence and so on. The Dark Side does it through negative emotions, anger, hate…"

He trailed away for a moment, frowning. "The Jedi strive to release their emotions, especially the darker emotions but all the rest as well because even the positive emotions can become too much. They strive for equilibrium. For all my life I've been… meditating and releasing my emotions to the Force. That's why it seems to people that the Jedi are sometimes emotionless – because it is the ideal state… for a Jedi."

"That kind of seems impossible," Anakin commented quietly. "No one is emotionless."

"No one is," Obi-Wan agreed. "The Jedi try and maintain a balance, an emotional equilibrium. I doubt anyone ever achieved a state where they were always at a balance. It's just… not how sapience works. But it was a goal. It's… what it's like to be a Jedi."

Anakin nodded slowly. "And now?" he asked quietly.

Obi-Wan closed his eyes and frowned, his emotions roiling. "I can't… release my emotions anymore. I've tried so hard, but I can't… find that equilibrium. They just won't go away," he hissed. "I try but they just stay, bouncing around in my head, getting worse and worse and worse. The Dark Side, it won't… accept them. It just magnifies them."

"But…" Anakin blinked, staring at him. "What do you mean they won't go away?"

"I mean that they won't go away," Obi-Wan said, rubbing at his forehead. "My mind is an echo chamber of emotion and it's getting increasingly hard to just think."

"But that's… not how emotions work?" Anakin said, confused. The Darksider glanced at him, annoyed and Anakin shook his head. "It isn't, though, is it? Emotions don't just stick around – they come and go, don't they? They fade. I mean… You make it sound like every emotion you've had lately is still there, just sticking around. That's not how it works."

Obi-Wan snorted. "You think of emotion as mere intangible sensation," he said. "For a Force user, emotion is more than just a mental state – it's energy. Sometimes very corporeal energy," he said and rubbed at his temple with a grimace. "When you're strong in the Force, your emotions become very nearly physical things. If they're not used or released, then they do stick around. So yes. Every emotion I've felt since Qui-Gon's death is still in my head. And I can't get rid of them."

"Really?" Anakin asked, morbidly fascinated. "That's… wow. How do you think?"

"With increasing difficulty," the Darksider muttered, closing his eyes.

Anakin shook his head, amazed. "Well, if using them is another way of getting rid of them… why haven't you?"

Obi-Wan scowled. "What do you suppose the effect of using the amount of anger that I have in my head would be?" he asked, looking at him with burning eyes. "Among other things, anger translates to destruction. Suppose I had used it in the palace."

"Ah. I see your point," Anakin said, wincing.

"And it's not just that," Obi-Wan muttered, closing his eyes again, his shoulders slumping. "The Dark Side is in me now. I'm not sure if I even want to know what effect that will have on my Force abilities."

"But… I thought the Dark Side were negative emotions?" the boy asked, frowning.

"No. They're just a gate way," Obi-Wan said darkly. "The Dark Side itself is something else altogether. A howling storm of malevolence and power and pain. And a promise of so much more."

Anakin swallowed as Obi-Wan trailed off. He almost didn't want to ask more, and in the end was spared from the need to. As Obi-Wan tried to wrestle his chaotic mind back into control, the Effervescent thrummed to life around them as the engines were fired up and the ship prepared for launch. Anakin leaned his head back against the metal wall and let the vibrations run through him, pretending that it was them that made him shiver, and not Obi-Wan.

He wished their cabin had a window so that he could just… concentrate on something else for a moment. But it didn't – they were in an enclosed metal box inside the ship, and it was just the two of them.

"Obi-Wan?" he asked after a while. "Will you teach me how to use the Force?"

"I really shouldn't," the man answered, his voice hoarse. "Chances are I'll just corrupt you. You'd Fall. I can't let that happen."

"I won't," Anakin said and opened his eyes, meeting Obi-Wan's burning gaze with his own, steadier one. "I won't. And I can't help you if I don't know… anything. I need to know this stuff. Teach me what they taught you in the Jedi Order. Or, I dunno, just tell me about it. I'm not an idiot; I can figure the rest out on my own if I have to. So please teach me."

"You might Fall," Obi-Wan said, half despairing.

"I won't," Anakin said again, with as much determination as he could muster. "I won't Fall."

For Obi-Wan's sake, he couldn't.

Chapter Text

The Effervescent arrived at the Medailla Space Station two standard days after leaving Naboo, and after Obi-Wan had paid the Effervescent's distracted captain his thanks, he and Anakin left the cargo hauler and entered the station itself.

"Stay close," Obi-Wan grunted, pulling up his hood as they entered he busy landing platform of the station. "Medailla is one of the busiest stations in this sector and it's bigger than any city in Tatooine. I don't want you to get lost."

Anakin nodded, looking around wide eyed. On Tatooine you could see people of all sorts, anything from Humans to Hutts. Despite that, there were lots and lots and lots of people all around him that he'd never seen. Tall aliens with impossibly long necks, heavy set aliens with heavy armour plating, aliens that moved on four legs, ones that had multiple arms or heads or neither as far as he could tell. He could only see flashes of them as they moved about the busy intersection of the space station, but even those flashes caught his interest.

Obi-Wan looked down at him and then sighed irritably before taking Anakin's hand and holding it in an iron grip. "Come on," he said, and led the boy into the throng of aliens.

Medailla was divided into four sections, all of them with different commercial purposes. One was for trade – that was the section they'd embarked on, as it was where the Effervescent was selling and buying its cargo. The next was industrial, where various businesses ran small ship yards, manufacturing facilities and things like that, creating items to order or to sell. The second was a residential section, with permanent, semi permanent and rental housing available – as well as about a hundred different night clubs and cantinas. The last sector was a mixture of corporate, political and financial with the space station's control centre located at the heart of it.

It was the financial sector that was their next stop. While Anakin stared with increasingly wide eyes at the sheer size of the place, Obi-Wan scoured through the banking options available until he found one that was to his liking. A Corellian Bank Anakin could vaguely remember having offices in Mos Espa too, albeit much smaller and much less lavish than these ones.

"We're going to exchange the… stuff," Anakin asked, looking up at him.

"I figured it was best to do it now, rather than take it as it is to Tatooine," Obi-Wan said and looked down at him. "Tell me, how do you feel about this bank?"

"Feel about it?" Anakin blinked, glancing at the bank's front entrance. It had sign lit in neon blue letters and decorative pillars in front of it that almost looked like they were made of gold. "I… guess it looks good?"

"No, how do you feel about it," Obi-Wan said, looking up at the bank and frowning. "Is it a good choice?"

"How would I know? I've never been in," Anakin answered, confused – and Obi-Wan gave him a flat, unimpressed look. "Oh. You mean feel," the boy said with realisation and then considered it. "Is that something we can do? Sense out if a bank is good?"

"Well… I wouldn't call that a specific talent, no, but most Force sensitive can at least in some small way sense the intentions and characteristics of others. It's easily enough to sense a trustworthy establishment, if they need to," the Darksider said, glancing at him and then up again. He looked – and felt – troubled and annoyed. "My senses aren't working right now. So. How does this one feel to you?"

Anakin blinked at that and then looked down at the bank again. "Um. How do I feel it out?" he then asked. "I have no idea how to do that."

Obi-Wan scowled and his annoyanceirritation spiked for a moment before he wrestled it down with determinationanger. Then he suddenly went on one knee beside Anakin, still holding his hand. He squeezed it in a way he probably thought was reassuring.

"The Force is everywhere and everything has a presence in the Force," he said, quiet to avoid being heard by the random passers-by that were staring at them curiously. "People unwittingly influence it with their thoughts and feelings and energy. Trained – and a lot of untrained – Force sensitives can sense that influence, the way people bend the Force around their thoughts. It's very slight, but everyone has an aura made of their…" he looked for a word, "qualities, I suppose. And that aura is especially vivid in places where they spend a lot of time. Like at a work place."

As Anakin digested that, Obi-Wan motioned at the bank. "If the people here are habitual swindlers and crooks, it will have left a mark in the Force. And if they're trustworthy and confidential, that will also have left a mark."

"And how do I figure out which is it?" Anakin asked, frowning.

Obi-Wan smiled crookedly in the shadows of his hood. "Let your feelings guide you," he said. "The Force is strong in you, and it has probably been talking to you subtly all your life. Your actions with the droid control ship proves that. So just look at the bank, think about it, and tell me… would you take your only money there?"

Anakin swallowed but did as ordered. Qui-Gon had told him to trust his feelings and instincts to guide him, and they had won him a pod race. They had also won him a war, sort of, on Naboo. At this point, he was more than willing to believe it actually worked – even if some part of him wanted to scoff and say that it was impossible. That part, the cynical boy from Tatooine who'd been beaten too many times by people and life, was changing these days though.

"I think its okay," he offered after a moment.

"You think?" Obi-Wan demanded, irritated.

"I doesn't feel like it's a Hutt's den, so yeah," Anakin said, squirming a little. He squinted at the bank, concentrating and didn't get any sort of warning from it. "It's okay."

The Darksider stared at him for a moment, glancing at the bank. Then he nodded and stood up. "Alright, then," he said, and pulled Anakin into the bank.

As a slave Anakin was used to people treating him in certain ways. Mos Espa was heavily populated by slaves with a large slave quarters – at least in comparison to the other space ports of Tatooine – but even there free men stared down their noses at slaves, sneering and pushing them around. It was had been so commonplace to him all his life, that the respect and care he'd gotten from the Jedi and from the Naboo had been absolutely bizarre at times.

So, the reception he and Obi-Wan got in bank almost reminded him of home. The security guards – two hulking Trandoshans, both of whom were not so nonchalantly carrying plasma pistols and vibroknives – stepped closer with suspicious looks about their faces, and the bankers behind their fancy booths with their plasma shields exchanged dismayed looks.

The customers – of whom there were about ten of varying species – were even worse. A couple took a quick few steps away from Obi-Wan and Anakin, and a lot of them sneered or sniffed with disgust.

Obi-Wan ignored the looks they got, staying hidden in the hood of his cloak and Anakin didn't even notice it as something strange until he remembered that he wasn't a slave and that Obi-Wan had been a Jedi.

"Do we smell or something?" he asked under his breath.

"Most likely," Obi-Wan answered, irritationannoyance lurking in his voice. "Ignore it."

Anakin shrugged – not really caring one way or the other. As they waited for a teller to open up, he examined the customers in their fancy clothes curiously. He'd gotten used to Padmé and her incredibly elaborate wardrobe, and no one here got anywhere near the queen of Naboo when it came to fancy clothing. But in comparison he and Obi-Wan – both in rough and worn synthwool – definitely stood out.

"Oh," he said with realisation. "They think we're poor."

Obi-Wan snorted quietly at that, and said nothing.

The bank teller that finally opened up probably thought the same, if her expression was anything to go by. She was a Togruta with gracefully curving head horns and jewellery around her neck that shone in the artificial lighting of the bank.

"We do not give loans to first time customers," was her greeting.

"I'm here to make an exchange," Obi-Wan answered and shifted his hands out of his sleeves. On his fingers, he had one of the platinum chips which he laid down on the table next to the plasma shield – into a cup the Togruta could draw through the shield. She did so with a suspicious look and examined the platinum chip before reaching out and pressing a button that brought a sleek looking analyser out from the table in front of her.

Her expression didn't change much, but some of the suspicion cleared. "The Corellian Trust is not a pawn shop," she said.

In answer, Obi-Wan took out a stack of the platinum chips from somewhere in his person, and neatly deposited it onto the table. There were about twenty of them, and the sight of them made the teller twitch and then narrow her eyes.

"I'm going to have to see a sales bill for these," she said. "And any others you have. Failure to present one will require the involvement of the station security."

Obi-Wan took out the chip that had been part of the platinum case, and deposited it into a reader. The teller read out the file from her screen on the other side of the plasma shield, her eyes widening minutely as she did, and Obi-Wan radiated smugannoyance.

"Well, this seems to be in order," she said and Obi-Wan retrieved the chip. "Do you wish to discuss account options or…" the teller trailed away, looking at Obi-Wan. "A standard credit reader and standard exchange account. Anything else, sir? Very well. Please wait as I get the necessary forms and equipment."

Anakin watched the exchange with interest. The Darksider didn't say a word during the entire thing. "Are you using the… thing?" Anakin asked quietly.

"No, I'm using annoyance," Obi-Wan muttered. "I don't like bankers."

"Bankers and politicians," Anakin said, shaking his head. "How about corporate people?"

"Not overly fond of them either."

Anakin turned away to hide his grin, ignoring the flash of irritationannoyance Obi-Wan very deliberately flashed in his direction. He wasn't sure why it was amusing that Obi-Wan had such a select group of people he didn't like, but it was.

The teller, now that she had her credentials and an actual paying customer, was swift about her work. Five minutes of very one sided negotiating, and she was happy to hand Obi-Wan his credit chip along with her hearty welcome to the Corellian Trust Bank, the most widely used and best trusted bank in the Corellian sector.

"You didn't exchange all of them. Or even most of them," Anakin commented when they stepped out of the bank.

"No," Obi-Wan agreed, examining the chip before hiding it under his cloak. "Chances are we will have to wait until we find a transport to take us the rest of the way. While we wait, I will open accounts on some other banks and exchange most of the rest. This was mostly for our stay here. We need to rent rooms and buy equipment and doing that with only hundred gram platinum chips for currency…"

"Equipment? Like a reader for the holo-thingy?" Anakin hummed. "Right. Where do we start?"

They started by renting rooms in the residential section of the station. They got them from a crowded looking inn that boasted meals for two thousand species and shifting beds that would form fit to five thousand – as well as various other accommodation forms with lists of gasses and liquids available. Obi-Wan got a standard Human room with extra security and full meals.

They had one of the meals right away, delivered to their room by a somewhat beat up service droid that happily chattered about the local theatres and concerts assuring them that "Diva Avalavna is quite an extraordinarily good singer," and that they could get tickets to the show right from the inn if they were interested.

"I don't know much about Tatooine," Obi-Wan admitted while Anakin poked at the food with his fork, wondering suspiciously about what it was made of. The Darksider glanced at him, arching an eyebrow. "Depending on how long we stay, this might be our last chance to get things that aren't available there. Only I don't know what is and isn't available."

"Well," Anakin said, frowning at the food. The mashed something was a very weird colour of green and the meat, if it was meat, was green. "You can get pretty much anything you want on Tatooine, so as long as you have the money. If it isn't there, then there's a hundred smugglers happy to take coin to get it for you. What is this stuff?"

"Fake for the most part – it's made from general purpose plant material, I think," Obi-Wan said, amused, cutting into his fake green steak. "It tastes better than it looks."

Anakin squinted and, very suspiciously, took a bite of the mashed stuff. It looked weird but the taste was… more or less alright. "So, what do we need?" he asked, taking some more. "I can probably tell you if you can get it on Tatooine or not."

Obi-Wan nodded, considering it. "If I'm going to train you in the Jedi arts, we're going to need a variety of equipment – it'll make it easier," he said and almost visibly gritted his teeth against the burst of regretsorrowlonging. "A practice droid or two would be good, some practice weapons, some protective gear…"

Anakin listened to the litany of things Obi-Wan thought they needed, considering the shops of Mos Espa and what was usually available in the markets. Droids would be easy – if not easier – to get there, and if they couldn't be gotten to the right specifications, Anakin could probably throw something together himself. Protective gear he wasn't so sure about – though there were your usual environmental suits and your usual armour available everywhere.

"What sort of practice weapons?" he asked, unable to contain his excitement. "You mean for lightsaber practice, don't you?"

Obi-Wan considered him and then turned to his food. "We'll need something that will simulate a training saber. Strong enough to take hits and not break, with a current running through the blade to replicate the usual effect."

Anakin barely managed to keep himself from jumping with excitement – instead he tried to concentrate on the matter at hand. "Current through the blade. Why a current?"

The Darksider gave him a look. "Because the first thing you need to learn is how not to kill yourself," he said dryly. "A lightsaber is deadly to you first and your opponent next. You need to know, instinctively, how to use it safely. And to do that, you need to learn the hard way. Everybody does. To that end training sabers burn and bruise without mercy. Learning how to avoid that will keep you from dismembering yourself with the actual thing."

"Ah," Anakin said, nodding as seriously as he could manage because – because the actual thing implied that one day he might have an actual lightsaber! "Hm… well, I guess a bantha prod would work," he said. "It would have to be modified a bit to be the right shape, but they're pretty sturdy and give mean burns."

"Speaking of experience?" Obi-Wan asked darkly.

Anakin shifted on his seat. "Watto was late on a loan payment. Jabba sent some people. It's… the only time Watto got me bacta," he muttered.

Obi-Wan's furyanger spiked high and almost familiar. Anakin looked down to his plate and with a swallow went back to eating. "So," the Darksider said. "Bantha prods. How would we go about modifying them?"

"I can do that, easy," Anakin said quickly. "I'd just need the prods and some extra shafts."

The Darksider nodded, his fury still welling and swarming around him. He was staring at Anakin darkly, fork hanging idly from his fingers. "Is there anything you want, Anakin?" he asked.

"Huh?" the boy asked.

"Anything you want," Obi-Wan repeated. "To buy. Things you couldn't get on Tatooine, things you wanted."

Anakin blinked, surprised. "Uh… well, yeah. Lots of things," he said, a bit bewildered. "I mean, my and mom's freedom, mostly," he said and frowned, thinking about it. Lot of his other wishes had been small and minute and passing. Parts to finish C-3PO, to fix up his pod, to fix up some of the machinery around the house, things like that.

Obi-Wan watched him for a moment. "Well, think about it. Once we're finished eating, we're going shopping," he said.

Anakin thought about it and then shook his head. "I don't really want anything," he said. "And we… should save the money. I mean… we might need it later. For more important things."

"Like?" Obi-Wan asked.

Anakin squirmed a bit at the dark look the man gave him. "Well… it's a lot of money. We could help a lot of people with it," he said, quiet. "On Tatooine you can… do a lot with that sort of money."

For a long while the Darksider just watched him silently. In the end he didn't either agree or disagree – he just went back to his food. And after dinner…

They went shopping.

It was perhaps the most bewildering experience Anakin had ever had. There were so many shops on the Medailla station, selling so many things. There were rows upon rows of clothing shops for various species, all of them more expensive than anything on Tatooine, selling things so fancy that Anakin couldn't imagine anyone – except perhaps someone like Padmé – wearing them. There were stores full of food, restaurants speckled between them and beckoning people in with inviting signs and mouth-watering smells.

And then there were the tech stores – which were mostly what they'd came out to see in the first place. There was what felt like a small town's worth of stores there, selling everything from data pads to ship parts with a variety of high tech gadgets strung between. Anakin's heart almost stopped at the sight of one store selling nothing but what seemed like an endless amount of droids and droid parts, shiny and pristine on the shelves.

Obi-Wan brought a pair of datapads, some comlinks, an analyser and after consulting with one of the store keepers, a miniature data terminal which, Anakin mused, was probably for the holocron. He gave one of the comlinks to Anakin along with one of the datapads, inserting a huge amount of credits into it for Anakin to use on the station's Holonet to download whatever he wanted into it.

"I suggest you get something useful," Obi-Wan said, as they stood on the street that ran along the section with stores lining both sides. He was staring at a weapons store with an indecisive look.

Anakin looked where he was looking. "You're gonna get a blaster?"

Obi-Wan grimaced with distainannoyance. "Being reduced to using a blaster," he muttered, shaking his head. "So uncivilised."

"On Tatooine you'll probably need one," Anakin said. "You'll probably need several."

Obi-Wan sighed with irritation and then headed into the store, Anakin following him curiously. After some perusing, Obi-Wan bought a pair of blaster pistols – a heavy DC-09 hand blaster and a smaller DV-3R blaster pistol. Not that the names meant much to Anakin, but the sales person couldn't stop gushing about them, the firing rate of the DC-09 and it's efficient cooling and power and how the DV-3R had reduced size but increased firing capability in comparison to previous models and so on and so on.

They both cost more than Anakin had ever owned – prior to the platinum, of course.

Almost reluctantly, Obi-Wan equipped the DC-09 in a hip holster. The DV-3R he packed up after paying, and once they were out of the store he said, "You can have it once we've gotten to Tatooine and I've seen you shoot."

"Wait – that's for me?!" Anakin asked, half horrified and half excited.

The Darksider gave him a look. "You need to be able to defend yourself," he said. "Now is there anything else we need?"

They perused some more and Obi-Wan bought Anakin some clothing he wasn't so sure he actually needed but accepted anyway. By the time they headed back to the inn, Anakin was feeling vaguely guilty about all the money spent. It wasn't that much, considering that they'd started around seven hundred thousand, but still… they'd spend over four thousand credits in less than a couple of hours. Sure, Obi-Wan's Corellian credit chip still had about fifty thousand in it, but still. For Anakin it was a mind blowing sum of money to use so quickly.

He was more than a little relieved once they were back in the inn and no longer spending.

"Are you gonna open the holocron now?" Anakin asked, while Obi-Wan examined the data terminal he'd bought.

"No," the Darksider said. "Opening a holocron requires using the Force and I can't right now. I need to…" he took a breath and released it, irritation spiking. "I need to figure out how to get rid of the excess first."

"Right," Anakin said, plopping down to sit beside the man. "Well, on Tatooine there's a lot less to trash, so you can probably let loose there safely."

"Hm," Obi-Wan answered, rubbing at his neck and grimacing, his emotions welling and flexing for a moment. "I'm going to have a wash," he said then. "I suppose there won't be a chance to have a water shower on Tatooine."

"Ha, yeah, those don't happen on Tatooine much," Anakin snorted. "It's all sonics."

"I thought as much," Obi-Wan said, and stopped, his fingers tangling around the little braid that hung from behind his right ear. He frowned and pulled it forward, eying it, running his thumb over the bead that was set near the middle of it.

Anakin had been wondering about the little braid, on and off. He'd never asked about it, figuring it was some weird style choice, like the tiny little pony tail Obi-Wan had even though the rest of his hair was short. Some Humans on Tatooine had strange hair styles, and that's without even mentioning the Naboo people – Padmé's hair-do's could be… very nearly gravity defying. So he'd figured in the end that it probably didn't matter that much.

Now he knew it probably did – a lot. A near explosion of regretsorrowlonging suddenly flashed out of the Darksider, which was followed by loathingregretfuryANGER. Before Anakin could even try and ask what was it this time, Obi-Wan had already wrenched his head to the side and then, wrapping the braid around his fingers…

He tore it off.

"What the –" Anakin said and then lunged forward as something ignited at Obi-Wan's fingers. Not entirely sure what he was doing or why, Anakin bounced up and grabbed the torn off braid from Obi-Wan's hands before the something that was flickering at the man's fingers could burn it.

"Anakin!" Obi-Wan growled, his fingers actually smoking. "Give me that!"

"No way!" Anakin said, jumping back and hiding he braid behind his back. "I don't know what it even is but I know it's important and I know you'll regret the hell out of it if you burn it!"

"Give - me - that!" Obi-Wan's shouted, face twisted as he reached his hand forward. Anakin could almost feel him trying to use the Force, despite all of the Darksider's previous worries about using it. He opened his mouth to tell the man to stop before he did something he'd really regret – but before he could, the welling of power and anger came to a screeching halt.

And then there was pure, raw horror.

Obi-Wan looked at him, then at his own hand, his fingertips actually blistering with the heat he'd somehow managed to generate from nothing. His eyes were wide, the yellow in them almost iridescent. "Oh. Oh no," he murmured, stumbling back and squeezing his blistering fingers into a fist. "No, no, no, I almost…"

Anakin watched the man warily as he collapsed to sit on one of the beds his face draining of all colour. "You didn't, though," he said.

Obi-Wan just sat there frozen, staring at him like he'd never seen him before. There was a bit of blood tricking down the man's neck, and a droplet falling made him startle and touch the place where he'd torn the braid off. His face twisted again – this time with regret.

"Told you," Anakin said, and relaxed with a sigh. He brought out the braid from behind his back, looking at it. The three strands of it were coming loose from the root end and, ignoring the bits of skin still stuck to the hair, Anakin pinched it shut to keep it from unravelling. "Here," he said, holding it out to Obi-Wan.

"No. I… I can't," the man said and crumbled, running his bloodstained fingers shakily over his face. "I can't."

The boy swallowed, his throat dry. Obi-Wan had been getting… well, not precisely better, but a bit more stable in the last couple of days, the goal of Tatooine giving him something to concentrate on. Anakin supposed it was stupid to think they'd get off so easy – that it would be so easy for the man to recover.

Stupid to think that there wouldn't be further breakdowns.

Sighing, Anakin stared at the braid. "What is this?" he asked, running his fingers over the hair gently.

"My Padawan braid," Obi-Wan choked. "I-it's a symbol. And a marker of the years I spent as… as apprentice under my Master. Qui-Gon braided it."

"Right," Anakin said, nodding. Well, that explained it. "Obi-Wan…" he started and stopped, looking at the man. "You're bleeding all over your clothing. You should… fix that. And have that shower."

The Darksider grasped the suggestion like a lifeline and stumbled to the room's meagre little fresher to get himself something to stop the bleeding with. As he did, Anakin gently smoothed out the braid, picking out the bits of skin and re-braiding the unravelling end.

"I'll keep it safe for you," he murmured, and pretended not to hear or feel Obi-Wan's choked sobbing.

Chapter Text

Tatooine. As much as Anakin was looking forward to it and to seeing – and freeing – his mother, he… wasn't really looking forward to it. He'd been so happy to leave the place. Even though it had been his home for most of his life, and he and his mother had found a semi-decent owner in Watto, there was too much misery there too, too much bitterness. Even the rich folk of Tatooine lived miserable lives, he thought, and he'd been so lucky, so damn lucky, to get out.

And now he was going back in. Back into the heat and the sand, back into the misery. Even if he was doing it with money – Obi-Wan had gotten him his own credit chip with so much money in it that Anakin was frankly scared to even look at the thing – it was still… Tatooine.

"I hate this place," he muttered to Obi-Wan, as they watched the planet approach in the view screen. The transport they'd managed to catch from Medailla was much smaller and more rugged than the Effervescent, but it was actually a transport, and not a cargo hauler – so the cabins were much better equipped. It still had no window, but there was a view screen – a datapad really – that was hooked to some external cameras so that the people inside could watch the space of they wanted to.

"Hate it?" Obi-Wan asked mildly. "You don't. You don't have the capability to hate."

"Well, I severely dislike it then," Anakin said, kicking the side of his bunk with irritation and glanced at the man. Obi-Wan was, again, trying to meditate. And failing, naturally. Still, the attempt – which had been going on for the last sixteen hours or so – kept him pre-occupied so much that for once his emotions weren't roiling up as much as usual, kept at a steady thrum of frustrationdetermination instead. Which was probably what the man wanted. Ever since the incident with the braid…

Well. As short as it had been, the last breakdown had spooked Obi-Wan worse than any other before. Probably because he'd almost used the Force on Anakin to do… something. Anakin didn't know what, but the fact that he almost had terrified Obi-Wan.

"We'll be staying on Tatooine, won't we?" Anakin asked dismally.

"We don't have to," Obi-Wan said. "We can get your mother and go pretty much anywhere we want."

"No, we'll stay," Anakin said, frowning at the view screen and Obi-Wan opened his eyes, looking up at him past the edge of his hood. Anakin shrugged. "I've a feeling," he just said.

"Ah," the Darksider said, interestdismay peaking. "Does your feeling tell you why we'll stay?"

Anakin shrugged and pulled his legs up, resting the datapad on his knees. "No. I just get the feeling we will stay. And I don't like it."

Obi-Wan stared at him for a moment before closing his eyes again and returning to the previous frustrationdetermination. "Trust the Force. If we're staying and you can feel it, then there's a reason."

Anakin scoffed. How could he trust the Force, with what it was doing to Obi-Wan?

"The Light Side of the Force, Anakin," Obi-Wan clarified, snorting softly.

"Yeah, sure," Anakin said and sighed. On the datapad the view outside panned as the ship – the Reimburse began its landing sequence. He put the datapad away with dismay and hugged his knees, watching Obi-Wan trying to meditate. Well, if nothing else, it'd be warm once they got to Tatooine. For all the things he'd seen and done since leaving, Anakin felt like he'd never once been truly warm – not outside a hot shower anyway.

"How will we get from Mos Eisley to Mos Espa?" he asked. "It's almost two hundred kilometres."

"A landspeeder," Obi-Wan answered.

"We're going to buy one?" Anakin asked, frowning. "That'll… be expensive."

"We can buy a cheap used one and sell it once we get to Mos Espa if you think it's necessary," Obi-Wan said, glancing up. "We're not exactly short on cash, you know."

"I know, but… I don't like using it for things like…" Anakin squirmed, not sure what to say. "I think it's for a different purpose, is all."

"For buying slaves, you mean," Obi-Wan said, his voice flat and humourless.

Anakin frowned at him. "And freeing them," he said. "I thought it was what you wanted to do, too. That you didn't like it either, the slavery. It made you really mad on Naboo. It's the right thing to do, isn't it?" he asked, shifting where he sat. "Isn't it?"

Obi-Wan shook his head. "Let's find and free your mother first," he said, frowning and annoyancedismay peaked for a moment before being smothered under the frustration. "And think about the rest later."

Anakin stared at him. "Don't you want to help people?" he then asked, his voice small.

"Not before I'm sure I won't accidentally kill them," the Darksider growled.

Well, that did make sense. Still, Anakin couldn't help but worry that Obi-Wan was losing what good nature remained – losing his ability to care about other people. That the Dark Side was… eating away at the better parts of his character. It probably was too – it… just sounded like something the Dark Side would do.

Anakin leaned his chin against his bent knee, watching the man with some apprehension, before turning his eyes back to the datapad. The ship was shaking now and the camera outside had been blacked out – probably to preserve it during the descent. Which meant that they were already pushing through the atmosphere.

Soon they'd land on the stupid ball of sand and then they'd be stuck there for who knew how long. Anakin was not looking forward to it.

Anakin had seen Mos Eisley precisely once – when he'd been three and recently acquired by Gardulla the Hutt. Gardulla had brought them to Tatooine and she'd been… horrible. Honestly, Anakin didn't remember much of it and he was damn glad he didn't – he still had scars because, unlike Watto, Gardulla had never given her slaves medical aid. From what he remembered, though, Mos Eisley was pretty much like Mos Espa. Sandy, rocky and hot.

It wasn't. Granted it was sandy, rocky and hot, but it wasn't much like Mos Espa in one sense. Mos Espa was largely empty most of the year – it was only during the pod races that the city was really full of people. Mos Eisley was full of people all the time, absolutely crowded by them with knots of them scattered around the shadows of the port. There were shops upon shops in Mos Eisley and they were almost all of them busy.

The difference between a city that was basically one big junk yard, and a trade port.

"Anything we need from here?" Obi-Wan asked.

"We should buy some water and mineral supplements," Anakin said, frowning. "If we're going to head to Mos Espa today, we'll need them. It's a long way and it's not double noon yet, so the heat will just get worse."

Obi-Wan nodded, and glance down at him. "You need a hat," he then said.

"Yeah," Anakin agreed with a sigh, and looked up. "Or something with a hood. And we probably should get some eye-gear. At double noon, the wastes can blind you – that's how bright it gets."

Obi-wan frowned at that. "In that case maybe we should wait until evening before setting out."

"Tuskens come out at night."

Anakin then had to explain what the Tuskens were – the last time he'd been on Tatooine, Obi-Wan hadn't left the Naboo Cruiser, so he hadn't really learned much of Tatooine. Obi-Wan listened to the description of the sandpeople with increasing irritation, rubbing at his forehead as the annoyance welled up and churned.

"Let's just… get the damn speeder and then whatever else we need," he said finally.

They asked around for a speeder dealer that sold second hand speeders and after some rude dismissals and one drunkard who tried to start a fist fight for some reason – probably because it was Tatooine and that was just what people did when they were stuck on a place like that – they found their way to a shop that sold more junk than actual products.

"Oonly the best oon Edva's stoor," the dealer, an also drunken Near-Human with faint Togruta markings on his face, said with an expansive wave at the rows and rows of busted up speeders that filled his lot. He was trying for a sophisticated accent for some reason and failing horribly at it. "Tested and true speeders oonly – very rugged, will stand all the deserts can ooffer."

"Tested, sure," Obi-Wan muttered, eying suspiciously one speeder with a rusting hood that looked like it had rammed into a cliff wall. Probably had, too.

"Maybe I should pick?" Anakin offered. "I know junk."

"Feel free," Obi-Wan said, shaking his head. He then wandered aimlessly among the rows of increasingly broken speeders while Anakin hopped in and out of them, checking them over quickly and deeming the grand majority of them absolutely worthless. The dealer in meanwhile was torn between trying to entice Obi-Wan to buy this piece of trash or that, and barking at Anakin to stop touching things.

"Can't yoou coontrool yoour slave?" the dealer asked with apprehension. "He is toouching everywhere."

Anakin froze at that behind one almost promising looking red and blue USV. Obi-Wan stopped as well and turned to look at the dealer for the first time. Anakin couldn't see his face, but whatever the dealer saw made the Near-Human go completely white and hurriedly back away.

"Shut up," Obi-Wan said, his voice low and deadly, and meekly the dealer backed away further, bowing his head several times as he did. Obi-Wan motioned at Anakin who hopped from behind the USV and while the dealer scurried further back, Obi-Wan turned to look at the boy.

And no wonder the dealer had been quick to put distance between himself and the Darksider. If there was an expression for murder, it was the one on Obi-Wan's face.

"Well?" the Darksider asked.

"The USV, though I want to switch its cooling unit and some of the throttle plugs first," Anakin said. "And maybe the rear repulsor, it looks pretty busted."

"Can we get parts here?" Obi-Wan asked, as he looked over the price tag on the USV.

"Yes, oof coourse," the dealer said, bowing again several times. "I will get them foor yoou."

He scurried away hurriedly, never once asking if they had money to pay which, for a Tatooine merchant, was showing pretty bad business sense. But then again, it was also showing a very well developed survival instincts. Anakin snorted after the man and then touched Obi-Wan's sleeve.

"It's pretty much expected, you know," he said. "I look like a slave."

Obi-Wan harrumphed and closed his eyes, frustrationdetermination crawling over the pure white furyhate. "Should we do something about that?" he asked.

Anakin scratched at his neck. "Haircut and a different tunic would probably do it," he admitted. "But it's fine. Might help us blend in at Mos Espa for now."

"Fine," Obi-Wan said. "How long will it take for you to change the parts?"

"Half an hour at most," Anakin said, shrugging his backpack off his shoulders and digging out his tools. "Less if you give me a hand."

The dealer managed to resurrect some of his business sense and did ask for payment for the speeder and its parts before letting them have at it – but a lot of his greed just flat out fled at the sight of Obi-Wan's burning stare. Anakin was almost impressed by it. Whether it was the expression or just the aura that churned around the Darksider, it very nearly made the dealer piss his pants and the man actually ended up somehow giving them a discount.

"So that's the power of the Dark Side, huh?" Anakin asked, snickering as the speeder dealer practically ran away with his credit reader, payment made and confirmed. "Handy."

Obi-Wan turned his glare at him instead and wincing a bit Anakin quickly grabbed the parts and his tools, and got to work. Together they fitted the new parts to the USV, Obi-Wan moving to tighten this screw and hold this part this way at Anakin's direction. Then, while the boy tinkered with and fine-tuned the engine and the computer settings, Obi-Wan considered the speeder as a whole.

"Can you drive it?" the Darksider asked. "I haven't used this model before."

"In my sleep yeah," Anakin snorted. "I can drive anything."

That was good enough for Obi-Wan, who let him take the wheel when their repairs were finally done, and the speeder was tested and proven functional. It was a relief to be in control of something mechanical for a change, Anakin decided, as the speeder came to life under him and at his touch, and with something like happiness, he drove it out of the dealership.

They made a pit stop at a rough looking shop that boasted to sell everything you needed on Tatooine. There Obi-Wan bought Anakin a vest with a hood, a canister of water and standard mineral supplements before getting both of them goggles.

"Now," the Darksider said, dangling his goggles around his neck while Anakin squirmed into the vest and tugged the hood up. "Can we make it to Mos Espa?"

"As long as the speeder can actually stay in one piece and we don't… run into anybody, yeah, probably," Anakin said. "It's just two hundred kilometres."

"Two hundred kilometres is a long way on foot in a desert without the right equipment," Obi-Wan said. "Anakin. Can we make it?"

Anakin paused at that and then let out a breath. Then, like with the bank on Medailla, he tried to feel it. He thought of the distance and all the things they had to cross over, tinkering idly with the navigation computer as he did, bringing out the map and punching in the route.

SlauceCanyon would be the safest route west, from where they could either go to Carnthout or just head straight to Bestine. That was the easy part and even if they broke down mid-way, they could probably make it, and there were a lot of random settlers and farmers in between Mos Eisley and Bestine. It was the crossing from Bestine to the MospicHighRange that would be the trouble – there was nothing but wastelands in between. There was Pika Oasis maybe, but he wasn't sure if there were any dealerships or shops there, and if they broke down…

"We can make it," Anakin said after a moment.

Obi-Wan nodded and tugged his goggles on, fitting them over his face and looking just flat out strange with them. "Let's get going then."

It felt good to be steering something again. Ever since the pod race – which felt like it had been life times ago and not just a few weeks – Anakin had felt like he'd been just thrown from one thing to another, no control whatsoever over what happened to him. Even when piloting the Naboo fighter and destroying the droid control ship, Anakin hadn't really been in control – sure, he'd piloted the fighter out of the wreckage himself, but after that it had been all on autopilot. And somewhere along the way, he'd decided he didn't like being on moving vehicles he himself wasn't in control of.

The speeder was just a speeder – it barely got a meter of the ground even at a best of times. But it was definitely preferable to being stationary. He was a free man steering a speeder, and it was good.

Obi-Wan didn't think so. The moment they made it to the SlauceCanyon, the Darksider started twisting the hand rests of his seat with increasing alarm. "Anakin, do you have to go this fast?!" he demanded, wincing as they narrowly avoided a pillar of sandstone.

"I don't have to. I just want to," Anakin grinned. "Trust me – I won't crash. This thing is a bit of a bantha when it comes to weight, but she steers true."

"I don't care if it steers true – I care that it doesn't crash. Can't you slow down?"

"Can. Won't."

He eventually did, though, when Obi-Wan's alarmdread turned into nervousangerire. It was one thing enjoying a nice ride – riling up Obi-Wan was another thing. So Anakin pulled the throttle back a bit while they were in the canyon and didn't go that close to the walls as he normally would've. Obi-Wan didn't quite relax, but after a while the man fell into determinationfrustration which was more or less his calm state now.

Anakin definitely held nothing back once they were out on the plains, though. He punched the throttle forward with glee and sped over the rocky expanse of nothing that made most of Tatooine without restraint. This time Obi-Wan didn't object – Anakin got the impression he was very pointedly not paying attention to Anakin's driving anymore.

They got over the wastes fairly easily, and when Bestine came into view they decided not to bother with stopping, and continued onwards to Pika Oasis instead. While Anakin drove, Obi-Wan got out the water and what easily edible rations he'd gotten from the store, and Anakin ate one-handed, not slowing down a bit as he did.

"So, what do you think of my oh-so-glorious home planet?" Anakin asked, glancing at the Darksider. "Pretty boring, huh?

"It's desolate," Obi-Wan said, idly fingering the space behind his right ear, where his braid had been. "And it's like this – or worse – all-around the planet?"

"Yeah. Only the northern hemisphere is liveable – the other places are too hot, nothing lives there," Anakin said, shrugging. "And the pole's pretty much nothing but sand – Mos Espa is as north as settlements get, really, and that's because the Mospic holds the DuneSea back."

Obi-Wan shook his head. "Why do people live here?" he asked, staring outside. It was double noon, now, and the wastes were blazing with the reflected light of the two suns.

"It's because nobody cares about this place," Anakin said with another shrug. "It's just close enough to be considered a Republic planet, so the Hutt's don't do much infighting here, but it's far enough that the Republic doesn't get nosy about stuff happening here either. It's just in between enough to allow all sorts of messed up stuff. Nobody cares what people do on Tatooine."

"So it's a den for criminals and wastrels," Obi-Wan said darkly.

"A cesspool of the galactic waste," Anakin agreed. "And then there's people who don't have a choice. Either they don't have the money or just… don't have the ability."

Obi-Wan hummed darkly.

They reached the heart of Pika Oasis just a little after the double noon, and sped right past it. There were some settlements there and what looked like maybe a shop, but they didn't really have any need to stop, and Anakin had a good feeling about the rest of the way. So, they kept going, up towards MospicHighRange and then into the valley between the highs and towards Mos Espa.

The closer they got, the faster Anakin wanted to get there. Soon, he thought. Soon he'd see his mother again. Soon they'd free her too. Soon they'd be together again, free men, both of them. Free to do whatever they wished.

"Ease up," Obi-Wan said in irritation. "There's a limit to how fast these things can go."

Anakin really didn't want to – but breaking down this close to Mos Espa wasn't an option, so he did. "What are we going to do when we get there? Head straight to Watto's?"

"I think your mother should be forewarned," Obi-Wan said dryly. "Where would she be around this time?"

"No idea. Watto rents her out as a mechanic to the moisture farmers, so most days she's out in the wastes, servicing vaporators and stuff," Anakin shrugged. "She could be anywhere this time of the day."

"Your mother's a mechanic too?" Obi-Wan asked with some surprise.

The boy nodded. "She's the one I learned from. I'm a bit better than her when it comes to things that move, but mom can do miracles to busted up vaporators and cooling units and stuff like that."

Obi-Wan hummed. "So, how can we find her?"

"Either we wait until evening, when she might or might not be home, or we go to Watto's. He keeps track of her all the time, so he'll know where she is," Anakin said and frowned. "If he gets warned that we want to buy her, though, he'll up the price. Especially if I'm doing any part of the buying, just out of spite."

Obi-Wan frowned. "So the best thing to do would be for me to go in and… buy her, no warning given?"

"Probably yeah," Anakin admitted and when Obi-Wan eyed him dubiously he shrugged. "I doubt she'd mind, really. She's been bought and sold dozens of times, and she's never gotten a say in it – she's used to it. Besides, it's not like you're going to keep her as a slave, so even if it's rude or something, it's… a good sort of rude."

It was sort of nice to see Obi-Wan hesitating over something, even if it was as trivial as this.

"It's pretty much what Qui-Gon did with me, and trust me, I was really happy about it too," Anakin said.

Obi-Wan scowled and turned away. "Well… fine," he said. "How should I go about it?"

"Well…" Anakin considered it. The last time he and his mother had exchanged owners, it had been because of a bet. He couldn't remember ever being sold… but he had seen other people being sold. "She's known for fixing vaporators, so go with that. You could pretend to be a moisture farmer who wants someone to service your machinery."

"I know precisely nothing about moisture farming, or vaporators," Obi-Wan said flatly.

"All the better for you," Anakin grinned. "You'll be in a need of an expert, then. Mind you, you shouldn't seem like you're in need though – Watto will capitalise on it, up the price. You need to be stingy – like you have limited funds. Ask to see her insurance records, and don't let him go over the Hutts' price. That's probably the best bet."

Obi-Wan took a breath and released it slowly. "Fine," he said. "Anything else I should know?"

As they got closer and closer to Mos Espa, Anakin filled the Darksider in on what he needed to know about slavery and the slave trade – what forms he needed to remand, what sort of questions he should ask about Anakin's mother, things like that. Obi-Wan listened with uncomfortable intensity, obviously memorising all of it and not liking a bit of it.

"If you really want to get on Watto's nerve, ask him for his credit score. That'll make him want to get rid of you fast," Anakin grinned.

"In dept?"

"After the Boonta Eve Classic? Swimming in it."

"Right," Obi-Wan said and looked ahead. Mos Espa was just coming into view, the first dome roofs showing over the craggy rocks of the canyon leading to the city. "If we're going to stay on Tatooine, we will need a place to stay," he said. "Is Mos Espa viable?"

"I guess," Anakin said, squeezing his hands tighter against the steering wheel. "I'd rather become a moisture farmer than stay there, though. And I bet mom's the same."

"Hm," Obi-Wan hummed and did him the favour of not asking. "I guess it's something to consider once we have secured your mother, then."

And then they were speeding into the city. Anakin slowed down as much as he could and at Obi-Wan's suggestion meandered about a bit. Making a beeline for Watto's store was too noticeable, he said, which Anakin mused was probably right. As it was, Watto's store was in that part of Mos Espa where you couldn't really use speeders anyway – the streets were too narrow.

In the end, Anakin had to park some ways from the store.

"It's the one with parts scattered all around it – you can't really miss it," Anakin said when Obi-Wan got ready to leave. "You think you can find it?"

"If not, I'll comm and ask you for directions," Obi-Wan said, checking his blaster as he pushed the speeder's door up. He stood up from the speeder, sending it rocking a bit as the speeder rebalanced itself. "You'll be fine waiting here?"

"It's a pretty good part of the city – no one should bother me," Anakin shrugged. "Besides the USV is pretty busted up even with new parts so I doubt anyone would anyway – it's not worth enough for anyone to really care."

"Right," Obi-Wan said, eying him doubtfully for a moment. "Comm me if anything happens," he then said, and closed the door after him leaving Anakin in the relative coolness of the speeder's interior.

And then there was nothing to do than wait and see how it would go. It was, Anakin decided, the worst half an hour of his life.

Chapter Text

Anakin almost left the speeder several times. First when Obi-Wan's emotions began churning again, easily distinct even at a distance. Then when those emotions crested at revulsion so powerful Anakin almost gagged at it – it was one of the clearer emotions he'd gotten from Obi-Wan since the times of abject misery, and it worried him. Then there was a lull of disgustanger that went up and down in waves, on and on.

Anakin very nearly tried to push at Obi-Wan's thoughts several times to see if he could do what he'd done in Naboo, to see what Obi-Wan was seeing, maybe even hear what he was hearing. But something kept him back.

He didn't want to hear the sale of his mother, even if it was for the last time – even if it was for a good cause. To hear Watto and Obi-Wan haggle over her like she was a piece of meat… no. He didn't want to hear it. He didn't want to know.

Finally Obi-Wan's emotions settled into annoyancesatisfaction and Anakin surmised that the sale was done – Obi-Wan had done it. In the speeder Anakin squeezed the steering wheel tightly in sweaty hands, gritted his teeth and waited through the pounding of his heart and very nearly panicked hope. Finally, finally they'd both be free…

Obi-Wan took his sweet time returning, but Anakin forgave him the instant he saw the Darksider – because trailing after Obi-Wan came his dejected looking mother. At the sight of her all thought of staying in the speeder fled and so did Anakin, lunging out as soon as he got the door open.

"Mom!" he shouted as Obi-Wan smoothly stepped aside and as she looked up with shock, Anakin collided against her stomach, his arms winding tightly around her waist. It had been only days, barely weeks, and yet… it felt like it had been ages. Days' worth of confusion and fear and uncertainty and now she was here, now he was here, in her familiar hold, surrounded by her scent, home.

"A-Ani?" She asked, her voice wavering as she touched his shoulder and he realised that he still had the vest's hood and the goggles on. He quickly tugged the hood down and the goggles up and stared up at her.

"Hi, mom!" he said, grinning – and if there were tears in his eyes, they were nothing compared to the water welling up in hers as she stared at him.

"Ani," she whispered, touching his cheeks, staring at him like she'd never seen him before – and he didn't blame her. He felt exactly the same. "Oh, it's you. But… y-you were freed – Qui-Gon freed you – w-what are you –"

"You're gonna be free, too," Anakin said, turning to Obi-Wan who was watching them with an inscrutable expression. "Obi-Wan's my friend."

"Your friend?" she asked, looking between him and Obi-Wan, frown creasing her forehead. "But he's…"

Obi-Wan's smile was mirthless. "Somewhat less… nice than Qui-Gon," he said, low. "But Anakin's right. I bought you to free you."

"Oh," she said, her voice wavering. Anakin could feel the tension in her slowly easing, and she swallowed dryly, looking bewildered and thrown but a little less terrified. Terrified? Why had she been terrified?

"What did you do?" Anakin asked, looking at Obi-Wan.

The Darksider cleared his throat, smugembarrasment practically radiating off him.  "We're making a scene," he said, turning towards the speeder.

"Obi-Wan," Anakin said, demanding.

His mother let out a breathless, confused laugh. "Oh, it's alright Ani. He… haggled," she said, shaking her head and looking down at him. "Your new friend has quite the way with… with haggling," she said and smiled down at him. "All so very worth it to see you again, and so well too. I've missed you so much, Ani."

Anakin cast a suspicious glance at Obi-Wan. "I've missed you too, mom. I've got so much to tell you," he said, squeezing his arms around her tightly for a moment before stepping back. "I don't even know where to begin. But first – did Obi-Wan get all the things? Controller, forms, everything? He's new to Tatooine, he might've missed something."

"He got it all," Shmi promised. "Watto wouldn't have dared to… well. He got it all."

"Right," Anakin said, making a mental note to get answers out of Obi-Wan later. Right now it wasn't important because she was here, she was going to be free, everything was going to be amazing. "Come on. Check out our speeder – it's a piece of junk but it runs."

They followed Obi-Wan in, Anakin taking the driver's seat while Obi-Wan sat in the back and Shmi took the seat beside her son somewhat meekly. "Where to now?" Obi-Wan asked.

"Home. Mom needs to clear out the house before word gets out – the landlords will try and steal her stuff if they hear she's changed owners," Anakin said, firing the speeder's engine and smoothly turning it around.

"Really?" Obi-Wan asked darkly.

"Technically what I own belonged to Watto," Shmi said awkwardly, glancing behind her at Obi-Wan. "And now it belongs to you. But there's always a chance a new owner doesn't know what comes with the slave, so… the landlords will try and get what they can, at the chance that the personal belongings weren't detailed in the sale. Not that there's much there to steal."

"Still, it's our stuff," Anakin said with determination. "No one gets to have it but us."

Obi-Wan hummed with interest. "So your home is a rental," he said thoughtfully.

"Watto paid me a… small salary so that I could manage my own day to day life without him having to worry about it," Shmi said. "I've still a week until next rent, but…" she glanced between Anakin and Obi-Wan. "I suppose that won't be necessary now."

"Damn right," Anakin grinned.

They made it to the slave quarters row in record time – and gladly, the word hadn't gotten out yet. Anakin parked the speeder in the nearest space large enough to hold it, and they filed out of it, following Shmi up and to the house. Nothing had changed there – everything was exactly where it had been the last time he had been there, including C-3PO that bumbled around his room which his mother had yet to empty.

While Obi-Wan looked around with badly smothered angerdisgust flickering like embers both in his head and in his yellow eyes, Shmi looked around nervously. "So," she said, looking at Anakin and then at Obi-Wan. "What happened? I… thought Anakin was to be a Jedi."

"Ah…" Anakin said, looking up at Obi-Wan who shook his head and turned away. "Qui-Gon was killed," the boy said, turning to his mother. "And the Jedi Council said I was too old. Without Qui-Gon…" he shrugged awkwardly, staring at his feet. "Well, it just wasn't possible anymore."

"Oh," Shmi murmured, and there was an awkward tense moment while Obi-Wan wrestled with his emotions and Shmi tried to come up with something to say. "That's… that's very sad, he was so nice. How did he die?"

"In a battle. There was this huge… thing," Anakin said and abruptly realised that his mother had no idea that he'd been in a war – Qui-Gon had never told them what was going on, why they'd been on Tatooine in the first place. All they'd known, back then, was that Qui-Gon was a Jedi travelling for… some reason and at first Anakin had thought Padmé was Qui-Gon's servant or maybe his daughter or something. It wasn't until he got on the cruiser – after the Zabrak attack – that he'd realised there was a whole lot more going on.

"It's not important," Anakin said quickly, deciding that his mother really didn't need to know that he'd played a key part in an invasion – in a war. "It just… things happened and then the plans we had, the ones Qui-Gon made for me, they just weren't gonna happen. So we, uh, made other plans. Obi-Wan and me, that is."

"And Obi-Wan is…?" Shmi asked, looking at the man searchingly.

"I was Qui-Gon's student," the Darksider said. "One of the many unimportant things that happened is that I promised my Master to take care of Anakin."

Anakin winced at the tone, and the emotions it only barely managed to contain. They were on very unsteady ground, here. "We did some favours for some pretty important people – luck really. They rewarded us with some money and… Well. Here we are," he said, grinning at his mother. "And you're gonna be free too!"

Shmi looked at him and then at Obi-Wan and then frowned. "I think I'm going to need the whole story," she said slowly. "From the beginning. No, Anakin, I know that face. You had that face every single time Watto made you pod race – you're keeping something from me again."

Obi-Wan chuckled darkly at Anakin's dismay, and the boy sent a glare to the man. Obi-Wan shook his head. "Might as well," he said. "She'll need to know anyway."

Anakin squirmed. "She doesn't need to know all of it," he muttered, thinking of accidentally piloting a fighter into an enemy ship and then accidentally blowing it up. No, she didn't need to know that, did she?

"She actually does need to know all of it," his mother said, frowning worriedly. She motioned at the kitchen table. "Please. Tell me everything."

As much as Anakin didn't want to… they did. Whatever he tried not to say, Obi-Wan took dark pleasure in filling in for him, and so his mother got the whole story. The Zabrak, Coruscant and both the Senate Vote which, really didn't matter, and the Jedi Council decision, which did. Then the journey to Naboo and the war council with the Gungans, Jar Jar's people. And then the retaking of Theed, the Zabrak again, Qui-Gon's death, Obi-Wan's Fall, the battle over the planet…

"You flew into space?!" Shmi asked, horrified.

"It was an accident!" Anakin said, wincing.

"How is that going to make it any better?! Into space, Ani – into a space battle!"

"Hey, I came out alright," he said quickly. "I even destroyed the droid control ship and everything – I mean, I did it accidentally, I sorta flew into their hangar and – well it doesn't matter, because I came back alive, not a scratch on me, so it doesn't really matter at all, does it?"

"The fact that you avoided danger doesn't make it any less dangerous," she said in, what Anakin thought, was a rather dangerous sort of voice.

Obi-Wan chuckled low and amused. "The war wouldn't have been over as quickly without him," he commented. "He, accidentally, destroyed the entire Trade Federation Army. It was quite the feat."

"A nine year old boy, in a space battle," Shmi bemoaned. "I thought Qui-Gon was going to keep him safe!"

"Qui-Gon was going to do many things he in the end couldn't," the Darksider said, narrowing his eyes and shaking his head.

Shmi let out an explosive sigh and ran a hand over her face. "And then what?"

"Well… Obi-Wan was kicked out of the Jedi Order," Anakin said, wincing a bit at his own words before braving on. "And we sort of made plans to get off of Naboo together and then Padmé – I mean, Queen Amidala – and the High Chancellor gave us some money as a reward for what we did during the battle and… we left. And came here."

"It's that usually done?" Shmi asked, confused.

"No, but Anakin saved a lot of lives by destroying the control ship," Obi-Wan said, a shadowed look about his face. "There were other reasons for their… gratitude but that is the main one. The battle was only won because of him."

Anakin grinned sheepishly and then ducked his head when Shmi glared at him.

"So," she said after a moment. "Now what? What is the plan now?"

Anakin shared a look with Obi-Wan who didn't really seem to know any better than he did. "Well," Anakin said. "Freeing you was sort of… as far as our plans go. I mean, we've got lot of options on what we can do now, but we haven't actually figured much. Obi-Wan needs some time to do some… stuff though. And he's going to train me in the Jedi arts, even though I'm not really gonna be a Jedi. So I guess that's a plan."

"And we're going to stay on Tatooine," Obi-Wan said, glancing at him.

"Yeah," Anakin grimaced. "I think we are."

Shmi looked between them incredulously before shaking her head and letting out a soft chuckle. "Well. I can't say much for your planning skills, but I'm grateful," she said and stood up. "I suppose you've just come back? Are you two hungry? There's not much around the house but there should be enough for a meal for all of us," she said and then trailed off hesitantly. "I don't… want to ask, but how much money were you rewarded? How much is there left after the trip back and… my purchase?"

Anakin grinned. "They have us platinum, mom. Lots of it!"

"Your purchase or the trip barely made a dent in our funds," Obi-Wan said, smiling wryly. "Depending on local exchange rates, it's likely we're still well over seven hundred thousand credits."

Shmi fell back on her seat in shock. "S-seven hundred thousand –"

"That's what I said," Anakin nodded sympathetically. "The Naboo, it turns out, are really, really rich."

"Tch. In the galactic scheme, they're moderately wealthy," Obi-Wan said and shook his head. "And as the High Chancellor Palpatine is about to become one of the wealthiest beings in the galaxy. For them it was nothing."

Shmi sputtered for a moment before composing herself. "Well…" she said, taking a deep breath and letting out even deeper sigh. "Well then. I guess… oh good lord, I don't even know… That's more money that I've ever known anyone having. Except maybe the Hutts."

"We're rich now, mom," Anakin grinned. "We can do anything we want."

"Terrifying thought," she said, shaking her head. "I'll… I'll get started on dinner, I think."

It took her some time to wrap her mind around the whole thing – not that Anakin could blame her, it had taken him time too. While she cooked, Anakin took Obi-Wan to his room, to show him C-3PO and all the other things he'd done and, more importantly, to ask if they could give her mother a credit chip too.

"I mean I know it was given to you – but –" he stopped, when Obi-Wan rolled his eyes and took out a credit reader, handing it to him. "Oh," Anakin said. "You… got one made at the space station."

"I got several, you might recall," Obi-Wan said. "It has fifty thousand Corellian credits on it. There's still some of the platinum left, your mother can have some of them as well if she wants."

"Right," Anakin said, taking the chip and staring at it for a moment. Then hugged the man tightly. Obi-Wan absolutely froze in his hold, going as stiff as sand stone. Anakin didn't care, he just squeezed tighter. They were on Tatooine and his mother was going to be free and they were all of them free and the future might be uncertain but it was still bright. After all that had happened… they were going to be alright.

"I don't care what's happening to you," he murmured against Obi-Wan's synthwool tunics. "You are nice. Thank you, Obi-Wan."

"It's your money, really," the Darksider murmured awkwardly and then rested a hand over Anakin's shoulder very hesitantly. They stood like that for a moment before Obi-Wan cleared his throat. "Speaking of what's happening to me – you should… clue your mother in on that. She needs to be warned that I might… that control is an issue."

Anakin nodded against his stomach and then, after another squeeze, released him. "We're gonna be alright," he said determinately and then went to shock his mother further by giving her a sizeable fortune's worth of credits.

They decided to stay in the slave quarters row at least for that night, with Obi-Wan sleeping on the same pallet where Qui-Gon had slept, all those lifetimes ago. The idea was that the next day, with clear heads, they'd figure out what they'd do next. Aside from a trip to the clinic to remove Shmi's tracker chip, nothing had really been decided and the whole thing about "giving Obi-Wan some time to gather himself" was vague at best. They needed… a plan.

It was kind of sad that none of them had real goals. Anakin wanted to help Obi-Wan, help the slaves of Tatooine – free as many of them as he could with the money they had. But aside from that…? He didn't really have anything he wanted to do, not with the Jedi Order out of reach. Obi-Wan had for his whole life prepared for a future that no longer existed and he didn't even know which way was up, never mind anything as complicated as his own future. And Shmi… had never expected to get a choice, so she'd never let herself even dream.

They were three surprisingly wealthy directionless vagabonds, with barely any desires to speak off. It made making decisions somewhat difficult. The only thing all three of them agreed on was that they needed to be sparing with the money they had, never mind how much of it they had – and Shmi even said that if they could figure out a means of making money, that would be ideal. Seven hundred thousand or not, their funds weren't actually limitless. There'd be an end to them eventually.

So, whatever they decided, it should be reasonable. No mansions in Mos Eisley and no state of the art speeders, even if they could've afford it. Which was just fine – none of them would've know what to even do with things like that.

That night, Obi-Wan had a nightmare. Anakin could feel it all the way into his own dreams, which were twisted away from a pleasant vision of flying his own fighter into crashing and burning, being captured by slave traders and re-chipped. And then, before he could even register that he was having a nightmare – he was drawn into Obi-Wan's.

It was a strange dream, so strange that it sort of woke him up without actually waking him up. He knew, suddenly, that he was having a dream – and then, just as suddenly, he knew he wasn't. The texture of it was too alien and strange, and his mind rejected it as foreign.

Then there was Qui-Gon. Not as Anakin had known him, though. A younger Qui-Gon, his face lacking some of the laugh lines he'd seen, his hair little less grey. They were in a strange room and there was a boy there, few years older than Anakin was – and by the cleft of his chin and the shape of his eyes, Anakin recognized him. Obi-Wan.

"I knew you would turn," Qui-Gon said, shaking his head. "You've always been to aggressive, right from the start. So emotional. The temple really failed with you and I wasted so many years on you, just for you to Fall."

Obi-Wan shook where he was standing, small and young against the taller, stronger Jedi. "Master, I –"

"Shut up," Qui-Gon said, and he didn't sound angry, didn't sound mean. He sounded tired and disappointed and that was somehow so much worse than if he'd been angry. "You've done and said enough. So many years of lying, too many years. I don't have the patience for any more."

"But I –" Obi-Wan whimpered. "I didn't mean to –"

"Didn't you?" Qui-Gon asked, shaking his head. "I think you did. I think you were desperate and that you welcomed it. You enjoyed it, too. Now only your pathetic guilt is keeping you from embracing it again. But whatever would you feel guilty for? It is not as if you didn't already betray all of my teachings, and make all of those years so utterly wasted."

Obi-Wan collapsed onto his knees. "Master, please."

"You should've gone with Xanatos. He could've helped you Fall so much earlier," Qui-Gon said and turned away. "Would've spared me all the years I spent with you."

"Master –"

"I really wish I'd never taken you for my Padawan. I really do," Qui-Gon said and walked away, leaving Obi-Wan behind.

Obi-Wan stared after him, his face twisted in unspeakable grief. Qui-Gon's retreating steps seemed to echo into eternity, and Obi-Wan murmured, over and over, "Master, please, Master, please…" his voice growing fainter and fainter with every desperate repetition.

And around them, the room twisted. As Anakin watched, frozen and unable to do anything, the shadows in the weird room grew darker and darker, leaning in on Obi-Wan's small form until there was nothing but blackness around him. A formless, withering darkness that breathed and flexed with unknown wickedness.

Then the noise began.

A howling storm of malevolence and power and pain. That was how Obi-Wan had described it. It was exactly what was around them now, screaming with thousands and millions of voices at Obi-Wan, pouring hatred and red hot malice down on him. A living thing of evil that promised power, so much power, and all his wishes come true if only he gave in.

Give in to the Dark Side and unlimited power will be yours. Just give in. Give in. GIVE IN.

Anakin woke up for real when the bed under him shook, and he found himself panting heavily, his limbs cold and numb, his face glazed with icy cold sweat. He let out a shocked sob of pure terror and then realised that the bed was still shaking under him. The random bits of machinery on his desk were rattling against each other. The whole house was shuddering.

Groundquake?

Obi-Wan.

Anakin sucked a breath and forced his numb body to move, to get out of his shaking bed and to the kitchen where Obi-Wan lay on the pallet. The Darksider was deathly still on it and around him everything trembled – and not just that. The objects nearest to him were actually floating in the air in jerky, violent starts and jolts, crashing into each other. Even the table was a couple of inches from the floor.

Anakin stared at him and then made a hurried decision. Even as his mother stumbled out of her room, Anakin grabbed the water canister he and Obi-Wan had bought from Mos Eisley and then, as his mother gasped with horror at the scene, Anakin dumped all of its contents all over the sleeping Darksider.

Obi-Wan woke up with a gasp and everything that was floating was violently thrown away from him – cups, pans, cutlery, chairs and even the table, all crashed into walls. A plate caught Anakin on the shoulder and he could hear his mother letting out a small shriek even as she ducked to avoid being brained by a pan. Then everything was crashing down in a clatter of dozens of things falling all at once and in the silence that followed Obi-Wan's harsh panting was eerily loud.

"W-what was –" Shmi asked, looking around them in horror. "W-was that – Anakin, stop!"

Anakin didn't stop. He launched himself at Obi-Wan and, even as the man made a violent jerk back, he threw his arms around his neck. "You're okay, you're okay," Anakin said, quick and desperate, trying to draw the man into reality as quickly as possible to avoid further… things happening. "You're okay, Obi-Wan, you're okay."

"A-Anakin," Obi-Wan gasped, breathless and choking, growing tense as his mind churned. Realisationhorror and then pure distress. "G-get away, I don't, I'm not – I can't --"

"It's okay, you're okay, everything's okay," Anakin spoke right over his stuttered warnings, hugging him tighter. "It's okay, it's okay, it's okay…"

Obi-Wan struggled for a moment and then, slowly, gave in. He let out a wretched little sob and his hand tangled in the back of Anakin's tunic in a desperate grip. Anakin held him through it, rocking him slightly and glancing back at his mother who was staring at them with a mixture of fear and uncertainty.

"Anakin," she said, quiet and scared. "Anakin, what… Is he…?"

"He's gonna be fine," Anakin said with determination – the alternative was not an option. "Just give it a moment."

She swallowed, looking around at the disarray. There was not a single item in the entire house that was where it had been and most of the things in the kitchen were in pieces. Shmi eyed the table – now in five pieces – and then looked at Anakin, her eyes afraid. "Is this… usual?"

"First time," Anakin murmured, tightening his arms around Obi-Wan's tense neck as the man drew in desperate, hitching breaths. Anakin grimaced. Obi-Wan was getting worse. He had a bad feeling the recent attempts the man had made to control himself hadn't really helped either.

"We should probably get out of the city and somewhere… with less people," he said, wincing. He had a feeling most of the quarter row had felt the whole thing. There’d probably be very loud, very pointed questions soon, if they stayed.

Shmi let out a breath and nodded slowly. "I'll… figure something out. You…" she stopped, her face twisting with indecision. "Anakin?"

"I'm fine, Mom," he promised. His shoulder was going to be black and blue by the end of the day, but that didn't matter. "It's gonna be okay. I swear."

Chapter Text

The next morning, before the sun even started rising, they packed up Shmi's things into the landspeeder. It wasn't really that much and they only took the more important, usable things. Shmi's sonic welder and tools, some of Anakin's tools – C-3PO of course – some of the cutlery and whatnot that hadn't been destroyed when Obi-Wan had lashed out, the bedding… The tools and C-3PO took most of the space.

Obi-Wan fetched and carried for them passively, wincing ever so slightly when he saw the remains of the table. Neither Anakin nor Shmi said anything about it – they just emptied the house as quick and efficiently as they could until, finally, they were ready to go. And they did – without as much as warning the landlord or anyone else. Let them deal with the rest of the things – the useless stuff they left behind.

"Now what?" Anakin asked.

"Pika Oasis," Shmi said, Anakin's datapad in hand. She brought out the local map and then held it out for him to see. "There. You see it?" She'd marked a part of the empty flatlands south east of the main oasis. 

"Yeah, what's there?" Anakin asked, even as he punched the coordinates into the navigation computer.

"Empty farmstead," She said, taking the datapad back. "The former owners did poorly with their vaporators – their models were old and they never got enough out of them to get any of the newer models. They eventually got a new farm closer to the oasis, and put the old one up for sale. I… got it for pretty cheap."

"You bought it?" Anakin asked, amazed.

"Over the holonet, yes," Shmi admitted and smiled somewhat painfully. "It… seemed remote enough to…" she glanced back at Obi-Wan, who was trying to meditate in the back of the speeder. "Anyway, I got it for almost nothing. There's nothing but the house and the land, and without vaporators the land's worthless. The house probably needs a lot of work too."

"Right," Anakin said, determined. He fired up the speeder's engine and quickly turned it around and then, without a second glance back, they left the slave quarters row behind.

It… was an even less joyous parting than the last one. The last time Anakin had left the place, he had been leaving people behind – leaving his mom and friends behind. Now he was leaving a lot less, but the reason they had to get away… that made it somehow worse. It would've been so much nicer to be able to leave with their heads held high. This felt more like fleeing into the night.

They hadn't even gotten the time to have his mother's chip removed.

"There will be time later," Shmi said, though she looked nervous. "For now, let's just find… some peace and quiet."

So they did. The drive to the house she'd just gone and bought was short, in comparison to the drive from Mos Eisley to Mos Espa, but it still took about an hour, and it was tense all through out. And there wasn't much relief to be found at the end of it. Because the house, well. It was definitely a moisture farmer's house.

Built mostly underground, with the ground hard packed and mercilessly scorched by the suns all around it, it didn't look like much from the outside – and inside it was even worse. There was no furniture, no house hold machinery, and just a glance told Anakin that the cooler unit was busted beyond help. His mother got to work on it straight away, while Anakin and a subdued Obi-Wan carried their things from the speeder into the mostly buried house, and it's very relative shelter.

As they did, Anakin chattered aimlessly to try and keep Obi-Wan distracted. "We'll probably need to get a vaporator if not for any reason then just for ourselves," he said. "A used unit will do fine, my mom and I can fix it, easy. We'll need to check the grounds, see if there's a hangar here for the speeder – and if there isn't, then… we need to do something about that. Even if it's a piece of junk, the thing's all we've got and the sun can bust up a speeder faster than a crash, if it's left out during double noon. Geez there's little space here. If we're gonna stay, maybe we can rent some construction droids, expand the place a bit…"

The farm had been a tiny thing. There was barely space for one person in the house, and Anakin doubted very much that it had had that many vaporators – maybe twenty of them, which even he knew wasn't anywhere near enough for someone to actually manage a farm.

"How big is the land?" He asked his mother, coming to check on her.

Shmi had an oil streak on her chin and a sonic wrench in hand – and, miraculously enough, the cooler was churning away, breathing sweet chilled air into the tiny house. "It's about fifteen square kilometres, mostly towards the east," she said, wiping a hand over her forehead. "How does it look?"

"The place?" Anakin made a face. "It's pretty tiny – and there's nothing here. The people who sold this place to you, they stripped the place pretty bare before they left. If we're gonna stay we need to buy… everything."

"Hmm," she said and stood up. "Watch the cooler for a moment, will you, Ani? I'm going to have a look around."

Anakin nodded with a sigh and turned to look at Obi-Wan. "So. What do you think?" he asked, sitting down on the pourstone floor beside the cooler unit.

The Darksider looked around. His face was pale and his eyes were bloodshot – he hadn't gotten any rest the previous night and Anakin wasn't entirely sure when the last time he'd slept without actually passing out from exhaustion first was. "It's…" Obi-Wan said and shook his head.

"Yeah, it is," Anakin said and looked him up and down. "Do you think you can do… your thing, here?"

Obi-Wan let out a sigh. "It's as good a place as any," he said. "I should… probably have a separate place for… for it," he added. "If I try it here I might… damage the house."

Anakin nodded, looking at the cooler as it chugged along. "It's getting worse," he then said. "You're not losing control of your emotions – you're losing control of your actions, now."

Obi-Wan said nothing for a moment, just standing there, slightly hunched up under the shadow of his hood. Then he slowly knelt down on the floor next to Anakin. "I'm going to need… solitude," he then said. "Days of it, probably. I need to get away from everything. You too, or I might hurt you," he said. "I need to find a way to get myself into some sort of balance, and chances are it's… going to be violent."

"Yeah, I figured," Anakin murmured, looking at him worriedly. "Around here that sort of thing can be dangerous though. The suns are deadly. Can you wait a bit, until we find a place where you can do it safely?"

Obi-Wan met his eyes and he looked utterly exhausted under the constant whirlpool of emotions. "It's going to be worse with every day," he then said. "There isn't much time left."

Anakin nodded. "Give it a day," he then said. "We'll… figure something out in a day."

His mother's inspection of the farm wasn't much more optimistic than Anakin's own had been. "I knew it would be bad, but… it's an old-fashioned farm, they didn't have much of the newer things here when they left the place, and they never bothered to make a proper farmstead at all, by the looks of it. It's just a house," she said, running a hand over her face and thinking about it hard. "Anakin, how long are we going to stay here?" she then asked.

Anakin almost answered the first answer that came to mind – a couple of months at least, until Obi-Wan got himself under control. But then, instead of that, he felt at the answer with that sense Obi-Wan had been somewhat haphazard teaching him how to use. "Years, mom," he then said, dismal and disappointed. He'd really hoped they wouldn't, but… "It's gonna be years."

Shmi took a breath and released it. "Well, I suppose being a moisture farmer is about the best life you can have around here, if you want to stay legal," she said, running a hand over her chin. "Alright. Anakin, the money you gave me – is it –?"

"Yours, all of it – and there's more of it. You can do whatever you want with it," Anakin promised.

She swallowed, looking somewhat unsure but after a moment she nodded. "Alright. Years," she said and then nodded again. "Do you think Obi-Wan is good to travel to the Oasis?" she then asked. "If we're going to… If the chip is going to be removed, it should be done now, before I start working on the farm."

Anakin grimaced but stood up. "I'll check."

Whether Obi-Wan was good to travel or not was somewhat debateable, but travel they did, Anakin driving the speeder post-haste towards the heart of the Pika Oasis. His mother knew her way around the place better than he did – she had been in and out of the place for the past five years as she serviced the local farms and their vaporators and whatever else needed a cheap mechanic's touch. At her guidance, Anakin parked in the shadows of what turned out to be a small clinic. It was run by a Mon Calamari, of all things.

"Well, I see we have some new faces around here," the Mon Calamari said, even as his mister sprayed him with a thin sheen of moisture. He looked them up and down – all three of them in rough, cheap synthwool. "What can I do for you?"

"She has a slave chip," Obi-Wan said roughly, his hood firmly in place and not meeting the Mon Calamari's eyes as he took out the controller and a datapad, to show the ownership forms. "I want it removed. I can pay for it."

The Mon Calamari stared at him in astonishment and then looked over the controller and the datapad. Then he nodded brusquely. "Well then," he said and motioned at Shmi. "Come right this way, ma'am and we'll have you scanned," he said and as Shmi headed towards the back of the clinic, the Mon Calamari paused, looking at Anakin. "And the boy?"

"Mine was taken out in Mos Espa," Anakin shrugged, staring after his mother worriedly. "I'm good."

"Glad to hear it," the doctor said, taking the chip controller. "This won't take long."

It didn't – it hadn't with Anakin either. His chip had been on his side, in his waist – had it ever blow up, it would've pretty much turned his guts into mush. After the doctor back at Mos Espa had the location down, it hadn't taken longer than ten minutes to cut it out with a laser scalpel. It was probably like that with his mom too – though judging by the bacta patch on her neck, hers had been in a worse location.

"Here we have it," the doctor said, bringing out a metal cup with the chip sitting in it, clean and shiny and not even a bit bloody. "Free of charge," he added when Obi-Wan took out a credit chip. "It's always a pleasure to help people with cases like these. Anything else I can do for you?"

Obi-Wan glanced at Shmi. "Have you had a health check-up lately?"

"It's been about a year since my last insurance check-up," she said awkwardly, fingering the bacta patch with her eyes wide and shining with disbelief and relief. "Anakin should have one too."

Obi-Wan nodded and the Mon Calamari doctor checked them over happily, asking them questions about illnesses and injuries and giving the bruising on Anakin's shoulder a check over. It was red and had started to purple near the centre. "This looks recent," he commented idly.

"Last night. There was a… thing," Anakin shrugged, peering at it and wincing as the doctor poked at the bruise. "Is it bad?"

"Hm. Should heal alright. I would like you to have a cold pack over it, but I'm going to have to ask for payment for it," The Mon Calamari said worriedly.

"Obi-Wan's good for it," Anakin promised, and was given a pack of gel to hold over the bruise while the doctor finished checking him over, taking his blood and analysing it for whatever doctors analysed stuff like that for. With a hum of concern the doctor peeked back in on the front of the clinic, probably to ask Obi-Wan something – when he came back, it was with an injector.

"You're missing some vaccinations," the doctor explained. "This won't hurt a bit," he added, before injecting the stuff into Anakin's arm.

In the end they were pronounced healthy, though Shmi too had to get some vaccinations. Obi-Wan paid without a word, never taking his hood off as he did.

"You folks going to be sticking around here?" the doctor asked thoughtfully, after checking that the transfer was made properly.

"Yes," Shmi said, glancing at Obi-Wan who'd already turned away. "We bought a farmstead south west of here – the previous owner was called Addle."

The Mon Calamari let out a thoughtful sound. "That old place, hmm…" he hummed worriedly. "It hasn't had the best of luck, that place. And I recall it being a bit small."

"It is," Shmi agreed with a smile. "We'll make do. Thank you, Doctor Mell."

"Welcome to Pika Oasis, ma'am."

As they stepped out of the clinic, Anakin quickly shifted to his mother's side and hugged her tightly. "You're free, mom," he whispered against her side, bursting with relief and happiness. "We're free."

"Yes, we are," she agreed with a whisper and kissed his hair. "We're free, Ani."

Obi-Wan watched them darkly from the shadows of his hood, his yellow eyes almost glowing against the reddened skin around them. "Now what?" he asked, turning away.

"We need some general supplies, food, water… some other equipment," Shmi said, taking a deep breath and quickly wiping a hand over her eyes. "I-I can get some of them here."

"We need construction droids," Anakin added. "Obi-Wan needs… a place. Aside from the house. Is there a droid rental around here?"

Shmi frowned thoughtfully. "No, but I think one of the farmers around here owns a couple he rents out to the people here about," she said. "We should go to Dannar's Claim and ask around. The people there will know where we can get what we need."

"I'll wait in the speeder," Obi-Wan said, and entered the speeder without another word.

Shmi blinked after him and then looked at Anakin with worry. "We should let him be. He's… having a hard time controlling himself right now," Anakin murmured, frowning worriedly. "We really need to get him a place where he can… figure this out. It's seriously important, mom."

"Yeah, I know," she said and let out a breath, probably thinking about what happened at the quarter row. "Anakin… he's… dangerous, isn't he?" she then asked, looking down at him with a worried look. "Really dangerous."

"It's the Force stuff. It's… messed him up pretty good," Anakin said, shaking his head. "It's not his fault, mom, and he's really trying to keep it under control, but… well. It's hard. The stuff he knows how to do, it doesn't work for him now because… because the Dark Side stuff, it's just so different. That's why he needs a place and solitude – he needs somewhere where he can… do things safely to figure it out."

"Dangerous things," she said slowly.

"Yeah, probably," Anakin agreed ruefully. "He's really not a bad person, mom. He's just… he's kind of sick, right now. He needs our help."

She took a deep breath, still looking worried. "Alright," she said and squeezed his shoulder. "Come on. Let's try and be quick about this."

Dannar's Claim was the only store in Pika Oasis – and judging by the looks of it, it sold pretty much everything from water to vaporator parts and everything in between. Intel it gave out for free – though not without getting some in return. It didn't take much to figure out that their arrival in the area would be the source of a lot of gossip for a while.

"Well, Ulbreck probably has everything you need to do a bit of expanding – he has his own droids and can probably even hire out some of his farm hands to help you folks out, if you need it," the owner of the shop, Dannar Calwell, said thoughtfully. "I don't know about your chances with the old Adder farm, Shmi – it's never been very good. But then, no one's actually seriously tried with it. And if anyone can get vaporators working there, it'll be you."

"For now it's just good to have a place of our own," Anakin's mother said, sighing. "Can you call Ulbreck about renting out his droids? We can pay for it. And we need them as soon as possible."

"Sure I can – I will, I'll call him right away," Dannar promised, giving her a warm smile. "And congratulations, Shmi. I'm really happy for you. It's not right, what they do in Mos Espa. It's not civilised."

"No, it isn't," she agreed.

Shmi then set out to get everything they needed around the house to get started. It was much more than they could carry on their speeder, so Dannar promised that he could – for a small fee – have someone bring the rest out to the farm for them. Shmi paid the price and then, very cautiously, placed some requests and trade offers to be spread around the Oasis – mainly for vaporators.

"I know some people here are changing theirs for the newer GX-9s," Shmi said. "And some still have 7's they're looking to get rid of. We need something to start out with the farm and…"

Dannar hummed, eying her – still in her slave garb. "I'll put the word around. You can probably talk to Ulbreck about it too – he's looking to replace most of his with newer models and he has a lot to replace. If you can give him a better price than the dealership…"

Eventually they were done and while Shmi paid for the goods, Anakin carried what they were taking with them to the speeder. Most of it was the immediately necessary stuff – food, water, a refrigeration unit to keep them in, and so on. Some of it had to be stacked in the passenger area, beside Obi-Wan who looked up from his failing attempt at meditation.

"Mom's trying to rent some construction droids from some farmer around here," Anakin said. "With luck we might even get them today. And if not, then mom bought a tent so if you really wanna head out today… you can."

Obi-Wan let out a breath and ran a hand over his eyes. "I should be helping," he murmured.

"You need to help yourself, first," Anakin said. "Let mom handle it. She knows her stuff."

Obi-Wan did head out that day. The man Ulbreck, whoever he was, was too busy with something and couldn't bring the construction droids around that day – he promised he'd bring them over first thing the next morning though. It wasn't soon enough for the Darksider who, after a moment of painful uncertainty, started packing.

"Can you manage out there?" Shmi asked, as Obi-Wan took the tent she'd bought along with enough food and water to manage.

"Tatooine isn't a safe place to be just walking around, you know," Anakin agreed.

"It's not the first time I've been out on a desert planet," the Darksider answered roughly and swallowed, trying to stamp down the irritationfury that tried to bubble up. "I can manage," he grunted through clenched teeth. "And the longer I stay here, the… the worse danger you two are in. I need to deal with this now – I needed to deal with it days ago."

Shmi watched him worriedly. "How far are you going to go?"

"To the edge of the land you bought – it should be far enough," Obi-Wan said and paused. "I'll take the comlink with me, so if anything happens you can get a hold of me. I don't know how long this will take, but… it'll be days, probably."

"And you'll be… fine?" Anakin asked, shifting from one foot to another. He didn't like Obi-Wan being alone, even if it was necessary. Obi-Wan didn't do too well alone, he'd found. "You won't get worse, will you?"

That made the man look away. "I'll try not to," he muttered, and he didn't sound very hopeful of his chances of success. He looked at Anakin and offered a very poor imitation of a smile. "I won't get worse," he said. "Getting worse is… not an option."

Anakin looked at him seriously and nodded. Whatever was happening to his mind, at least Obi-Wan was still lucid enough to know that much. It wasn't enough but it was probably as good as it was going to get, and he'd take it. "I trust you," he said – though sometimes he didn't really. "Take care of yourself. And if anything happens to you, call. Don't get yourself killed. And remember to drink – and eat. Properly too, several times a day, like an actual sane human being."

Obi-Wan let a sound that was almost a laugh. "I promise I won't starve myself," he said.

"I'll believe that when I see it," Anakin muttered but nodded.

Obi-Wan headed out a little after that, carrying with him a satchel of dry goods, canister of water and the tent, and very little else. Anakin watched him go from the shadows of the farmhouse, getting a little more worried with every step Obi-Wan took.

"That is a very troubled young man," Shmi commented from behind him. "What happened to him, really?"

"I don't really understand it, mom," Anakin sighed, his shoulders slumping a little. "Qui-Gon died and Obi-Wan just lost it, I guess. And when a Jedi loses it like that, it… it makes them go wrong. It has to do with the Force and how it affects them and the Dark Side and all of that."

Shmi listened to him explain the emotion thing Jedi had to deal with, her face growing more worried and serious the longer he went on. "If he teaches you how to use the Force… will that happen to you?"

"Not that, no," Anakin said, scowling. "I won't let it. But… I'm going to have the Jedi issues with emotions, I guess. I'm gonna have to learn how to meditate and release my emotions into the Force and stuff. Not really looking forward to it at all, but it's probably really necessary."

She sighed and wrapped an arm around his shoulders, looking over the expanse of dry, hard packed earth scorched by the suns. It was going to be double noon soon. "If it's so hard and risky, maybe you shouldn't learn," she said quietly.

"I need to. I need to help Obi-Wan," Anakin said. "Besides… If I don't then I might go wrong because I didn't get the right training," he added and looked up. "Besides, I really want to learn. I really do. I have to."

Shmi looked down at him with a worried frown. "Have to, Ani?" she asked sadly.

"Yeah. Have to," he agreed and hugged her waist tightly, pressing his nose against her side. He breathed in her comforting, familiar scent and let his shoulders relax. "I really missed you mom."

"I missed you too," she whispered, hugging him and pressing a kiss against his hair. Then she straightened up a bit. "Alright. Come on. It's time we plan how we're going to expand the house. And what we do then – and what sort of… place we're going to make for Obi-Wan."

Anakin nodded and together they got to work.

Chapter Text

It was almost two weeks before Obi-Wan came back. Well, he came back before, sneaking in at the late hours of the night when neither Anakin nor Shmi was awake to get himself some more supplies and to fetch the data terminal and the holocron which he'd left behind, but he didn't come back until he was good and ready, and that took days on end.

In that time, Shmi completely transformed the farmstead. Anakin had a hand in it too, of course, but he didn't really know that much about moisture farming or living out in the wastes where you had to manage most everything by yourself. She knew, though, and once the thought settled that they had the time and the money – and definitely the need – to figure it all out, she definitely did.

The house was expanded, from a simple one person underground hovel into a full complex, with several rooms and a large kitchen-dining area, a proper hangar for the landspeeder – and any other future vehicles too, Shmi took the time and effort to make it large enough to house several.

All of it was done mostly underground, with only the domed roofs peeking out from under it. In the cases of some of the rooms – most of the smaller rooms like the bedrooms, storage rooms and whatnot – they didn't show above ground at all, with several feet of hard packed earth between them and the surface above. They were the coolest, most pleasant rooms during the day – and during the night, the captured heat from the rest of the rooms kept them warm.

Then there was Obi-Wan's… well, Anakin ended up calling it a temple. It sort of was. It was build two kilometres east from the main house and, since it was probably going to be fairly important, they spent some effort in making it nice. It was still very much Tatooine outlands housing – build underground from pourstone and rock, with only a domed roof peeking out from underneath. It consisted of three spherical chambers, the largest of them being bigger than most of the farmhouse put together, and the other two being only slightly smaller, intended to be easily converted into whatever Obi-Wan needed them to be.

They put no machinery there, and no furniture, though – it was just three smooth rocky chambers in a chain, with plenty of room for expansion. Whatever Obi-Wan wanted to do with the place, he could decide for himself.

"I think he should be able to do whatever he needs to here without worrying about… destroying things," Shmi said, once the construction was done and the droids were returning back to the farmhouse, to finish digging out the courtyard that connected the residential part of the farmhouse to the hangar and the various store rooms that had been constructed.

"I think he'll probably live here most of the time," Anakin mused, looking around in the main chamber. It was five meters high and ten meters across and, lacking a cooling unit, it was a bit warm though not as warm as it was outside in the suns' light. Anakin could easily imagine learning how to fight with a lightsaber there.

Along with the construction droids, they'd gotten three Gx-8 water vaporators, one of them a bit busted up and the other two still fairly functional, just somewhat old. Once the farmhouse was more or less finished, Anakin and Shmi spent most of their time in setting the vaporators up and getting them working. One of them they set in the middle of the courtyard, where it was easily accessible and could be used for water that they used around the house. The other two were still pretty close by, but they were put to stand on the surface instead, where there was more space.

"Are we really going to start farming water, though?" Anakin asked worriedly.

"Around here it's the best source of income," Shmi said thoughtfully, wiping at her forehead as she worked at the broken vaporator, trying to get the cooling bar to work again. It had broken sometime lately and though it had been fixed, its previous owner hadn't gotten the right temperatures out of it since. "Also… people ask less questions about those who seem to have a purpose for sticking around."

Anakin nodded thoughtfully. "There's a link up that's severed a little higher up on the bar – the fluid's not passing through properly," he then said.

She didn't bother to ask him how he knew even though he hadn't really even looked – she just got to work, balancing somewhat precariously on the vaporator as she reached for the severed link up.

For those two weeks that Obi-Wan wasn't there, Anakin was still keenly aware of him. Distance didn't mean much, it turned out, when it came to sensing Obi-Wan's emotions. Even when Anakin make a conscious effort not to feel them, he still did. He also felt them slowly, painfully exhaust themselves out, one by one.

Whatever Obi-Wan was doing to regain his balance, it hurt. There'd be an intense burst of feeling, often times a messy blend of everything the man was feeling all at once, and then it withered out into a burning agony. The first time it happened Anakin almost went out to find the man, absolutely sure he was actually physically hurting himself. But then it stopped, the pain and the emotion bled out and Obi-Wan's mind teetered on the edge of silence, almost calm, almost harmonious. There was still an echo of that pain, echo of a burn, but the man's mind was quiet, almost at peace.

It happened again and again, and with each time the pain was a little less. The burn remained, but Obi-Wan was figuring it out, bit by bit, he was coming up with a way to do it, whatever he was doing, without hurting himself in the process.

It was the third night after that when the data terminal and the holocron vanished in the middle of the night.

Anakin was a bit miffed about that. He'd thought they'd at least open the thing together – he'd really wanted to see how it worked, what was so special about it. But, on the other hand… Windu had said that just the knowledge was dangerous. Could lead to a Fall. It still felt a bit like Obi-Wan was being selfish, but in a way the man was also protecting him. Which was annoying and gratifying and just… bothersome.

Because with Obi-Wan protecting him, he couldn't protect Obi-Wan. And judging by the burst of frustrationanger and hatedisgust, Obi-Wan needed help.

"What do you think he's doing right now?" Shmi asked one morning, as they watched with some relief how water trickled down to the canister from the previously broken vaporator.

Hating himself was the first answer that came to mind and Anakin winced. "He's studying," he said awkwardly. "I guess he needs to do it now, before we do anything else."

If only it didn't take so damn long. The days stretched on and on. Shmi tried to distract him with work, with various things he could fix – with C-3PO, for whom she actually bought coverings so that Anakin could finish him. Sometimes they visited the Claim and, slowly, the locals welcomed them to the area, marvelling about Shmi's and Anakin's good fortune.

They thought it was the podrace that had done it. And yes, they knew about the podrace – oh, did they ever know about the podrace. The moment they'd realised that Anakin was that Anakin Skywalker, the "Local Boy" from the Boonta Eve Classic that had knocked Sebulba from first place, they wouldn't shut up about it. A lot of the people from Pika Oasis had been there to watch, they even showed him snapcaps from the close up feeds they'd recorded.

"And with the odds so against you, I bet you made it big."

That explained the money, Shmi's and Anakin's sudden freedom, everything. Anakin and Shmi let them believe it – though from Doc Mell people had heard that there was also a "man in the picture" and that he was the one whose name it had been on the forms. In Pika Oasis confidentiality was apparently just not a thing that happened.

"So where is he, this man of yours?" Leelee Pace, a Zeltron that frequented Dannar's Claim so often that it seemed like she was always there, asked Shmi more than once.

"Obi-Wan's busy," Shmi answered evasively. "And a bit of a hermit."

Anakin managed to avoid the gossip mostly – aside from the podrace talk, which he was forced and frankly delighted to take part in every time he and his mother ventured into the Claim. It was kind of hilarious that everyone asked about Obi-Wan from Shmi, though. Not so hilarious was the implication that Obi-Wan and Anakin's mother were a thing. But then, they'd have to be, wouldn't they? Why else would he buy and free her?

Why indeed.

While Obi-Wan's absence kept the gossip afloat, on the farm Anakin and Shmi almost got used to their new lives. They bought more used, busted up vaporators from the locals and though they weren't even sure yet if they'd start selling water – they needed a couple dozen more vaporators to even think of making money with them – they still got them all up and running, they even started storing the water away. It was… not the life Anakin had wanted, but compared to being a slave, to Watto's store?

Moisture farming wasn't easy by a long shot. But it was something to be doing it of their own free will, rather than because they had no choice. That made the work somehow easier, and to be able to enjoy all the fruits of it themselves, without having to give the krayt's proportion to Watto made them all the more sweet. Granted the fruit of their labour was water, but on Tatooine water was worth its weight in platinum at times.

It was, Anakin eventually decided, a life he could learn to tolerate. It might not be as grand as being a Jedi Knight venturing about saving queens and fighting wars, but… he could bear it. Life was full of little disappointments, and really, his mother loved the life.

She outshone the suns when she was out there, checking on the vaporators. That was worth everything to Anakin, even the disappointment.

 And then, finally, Obi-Wan returned from his self-imposed exile.

He did it in the middle of the night, like the creeper he was, and Anakin wasn't even aware of it until the smell of smoke drifted into his dreams, disturbing them. Anakin came alert on his bed to the sense of someone being there and for a moment he lay completely still, uncertain and alert, wondering if they had thieves in the house.

Then he saw Obi-Wan, sitting on the floor beside his bed with his back against the bed frame. He was leaning his head back, resting it on Anakin's bedspread, and even with his eyes shut and face almost calm, he looked exhausted.

"You stink of smoke," Anakin commented, his voice hushed.

Obi-Wan smiled. "I accidentally burned the tent," he admitted quietly. And it wasn't the only thing he had burned, judging by the burn marks all over his clothes. The sleeves of his tunic were completely gone, ripped off at the shoulder, so Anakin supposed he'd burned those too.

"How?" he asked, shifting so that he could see the man's face better. "You okay?"

"Fine. Scorch marked," Obi-Wan said and, with obvious effort, straightened his neck. When he opened his eyes, they… were different.

Anakin sat up in alarm and reached to tug the man's face towards him, so that he could see them. The yellow of Obi-Wan's irises had been surrounded by a band of violent orange. His eyes had looked… heated before, but now they looked a bit like hot embers. In the dark of Anakin's room, they really did glow with a faint inner light.

"What did you do?" Anakin whispered with horror and then jumped off the bed to check Obi-Wan over. The man let him with a tired sort of indulgence, letting Anakin tug him this way and that, let him examine his hands. They were completely covered in burn marks and barely healing blisters.

"You idiot," Anakin hissed. "What the hell did you do to yourself?!"

"I figured out how to get rid of the noise," Obi-Wan answered and then closed his scarred hands around Anakin's when the boy went to get up and fetch the medpac. "No, don't. I… need them to heal the natural way. I need to get used to it - adjusted to it, actually. My skin will learn, it will get tougher, and I won't get burned in the future."

"You mean you're going to do it again?!" Anakin asked furiously.

"I'm going to have to, if I want to stay in balance," Obi-Wan answered, clenching his fingers in and out, wincing a bit as one of the blisters split. "I found a way to release my emotions. It's not… quite how I did it before, but it works. It's not important either."

"Not important?!"

"No," Obi-Wan said and rasped out a laugh. "It really isn't."

Anakin stared at him in a sort of mix of fury and alarm and panic. The man had lost it. And yet… he did seem a little less insane than before. "So, you… okay, you got rid of the emotions," he said, reaching out and touching Obi-Wan's cheek, turning his head again so that he could look at his eyes – this time looking for the hint of the previous chaos. It was gone. There was still the, well… the embers of it there, and Obi-Wan still felt oddly strongly. His emotions were still those of a trained Force Sensitive, and as he had them, they bounced around his head as trapped energy. But the old ones, from weeks ago, were gone.

"That's… good," Anakin said finally. "How did you do it?"

"I burned them," Obi-Wan grinned, the expression somewhat manic. "I burned them. Pyrokinesis isn't really a talent I've ever had before, but back on Medailla… it got me thinking. So I figured it out and then I used the noise to fuel a fire. Hence the…" he waved his burned fingers. "Bit painful, but very effective."

"You mean… you literally burned them. With a fire made of – you're a madman," Anakin said flatly, running a shaky hand over his hair. "I didn't even know you could do that."

"I couldn't before," the Darksider admitted. "It's normally a talent that requires more control over the Force than I ever had. Turns out intensity can work, too."

"Madman," Anakin repeated, shaking his head. He took a slow breath and let it out just as slowly and felt a bit calmer after wards. "And then? You got the holocron. I imagine you opened it."

That made Obi-Wan's manic grin fade instantly. He looked away. "I did," he murmured and said nothing more about that.

Anakin sighed. Figures. "Are you okay now?" he asked slowly because that really was the most important thing, wasn't it?

Obi-Wan turned to look at him. "No," he then said, and smiled with his eyes flashing with increased fire. "I'll never be. But I'm… handling it. I'm figuring this out."

"You're controlling your Fall, now," the boy said, recalling with Windu had said.

"I'm trying anyway," the Darksider muttered, staring at him. "There are things I'm going to need, and the further along this goes… I'll lose things on the way. More of them the further I go and I won't get them back. I've already lost a lot of myself, and I can't regret it because I'm losing the capacity to," he said and shifted, crossing his feet in his lap. "Anakin, I'm going need you to… steer me."

"What?" the boy asked, leaning back. "Steer you, how?"

"I Fell too far, too fast," Obi-Wan said, grimacing. "I sacrificed things even the Sith don't. My judgement is… not what it used to be and it will never be quite clear again. I can't trust myself to make decisions. Do you understand?"

Anakin stared at him, wide eyed. That was… new and absolutely terrifying. "I… I think I do," he then said because… well, Obi-Wan hadn't really been that good at making decisions since the Fall, had he? In the beginning Anakin had had to make them for him, and even after what little choices Obi-Wan had made had all been made for Anakin. Even those he'd made for himself had really been for Anakin.

"But…" Anakin grimaced, shaking his head. "Wouldn't that make me your…?"

"Only with the things that matter," Obi-Wan said and looked down. "You promised me you wouldn't Fall," he said quietly.

"And I'm going to keep that too, but this. This is different," Anakin said urgently, shaking his head. "This so very, very different."

The Darksider tilted his head and almost smiled in agreement. "I can't trust myself, Anakin," he then said, quiet, tired. "I can't trust myself to do the right thing anymore."

The boy swallowed. "Does this have to do with what's on that holocron?" he asked.

"Partially," Obi-Wan said and took a breath. "A Darksider needs a focus to keep themselves on the right path. For most of them – all of them, really – it was their goals. The things they want to achieve, whatever that is. Galactic control seems to be a popular focus in history. Or power, getting more of it. I don't have that, though. I don't want that."

"You want me to be your focus," Anakin said quietly.

Obi-Wan looked down. "You already are," he admitted.

There was a period of strange, awkward silence after that, as Obi-Wan waited for… something. His judgement maybe. Anakin didn't know – he didn't know anything, and he definitely didn't know how to handle this. Obi-Wan wanted him to be… what? The one who made his decisions for him? Anakin had already done that, and he didn't like doing it one bit, and yet…

Anakin took a breath and then stood up, pacing a bit from left to right, trying to think about it more clearly. Tried to feel it. And he did.

He could almost see it.

Obi-Wan was… different didn't quite cover it anymore. He wasn't even really Falling anymore. He was, simply, purely, a Darksider now. He was Fallen, he was Lost, he was Turned – he was a thing in the Darkness, made from it. And he was quite possibly powerful, and probably would only grow more so as he learned more, as he mastered his condition.

Set loose and he'd be Lost. He'd go mad with it and run rampant. There'd be a lot of destruction, a lot of death – or there'd be just one death, Obi-Wan's own. Either way, it would be a waste, Anakin could feel it. A waste of opportunity and potential, spent for no gain, for nobody's good.

And there was potential. Anakin could feel that too, the potential in what Obi-Wan was suggesting. He didn't yet understand it, didn't know the implications, but he could feel it.

"I don't like it," he said, stopping and squeezing his hands into fists. "You'd basically be a tool for me to use. I don't like that – people aren't supposed to be like that!"

Obi-Wan smiled up at him, hollow expression full of fire. "And that's why I want you to do it," he said. "Because you don't. Because you know what it is, and you don't want it."

Anakin stood still for a moment, trying to swallow his anger. He closed his eyes for a moment and then turned to look at the Darksider, still sitting on the floor. "It's not fair, you pushing this on me," he said, half despairing. "Obi-Wan, it's not fair."

Obi-Wan's expression fell and he looked away. His shoulder slumped a bit and for a moment he was silent. Then he took a breath and made to get up. "I'm sorry. I… didn't think."

Anakin stopped him with a hand, pushing him back down. Then he followed the motion down and threw his arms around the man's neck. "Of course I'll do it, but I don't like it – I hate this and I hate that it's necessary, and I hate that this happened to you and that you can't even control it right," he said against the man's scorch marked tunic. "It's just not fair, none of this is fair!"

"The Dark Side rarely is," Obi-Wan murmured, his arms very hesitantly coming around the boy. "I'm sorry, Anakin. I'm so sorry."

Anakin drew a ragged breath and forcibly kept himself from tearing up. He released the breath and took another and another, until he felt a bit steadier. Once he was finally sure he wouldn't break down, he pulled back and looked at the Darksider. "You're still going to have to teach me," he said. "I need to know all the stuff."

"I'm going to teach you," Obi-Wan answered, watching him with serious, burning eyes. "But a lot of the things I knew, I can't do right anymore. You're going to have to do a lot of it by yourself. And you can't hate, Anakin. You can't."

The boy drew another shuddering breath and nodded. "I'll learn not to," he said. "I'll learn to accept this and not to hate it. Not right now, but I'll learn to." He took another calming breath and then released it slowly, feeling a bit steadier. "We made a place for you, two kilometres east. I mean there's a room for you here, but for the Force stuff. I don't know if it's right, but… there's space for all sorts of stuff. You're probably going to need a vaporator and machinery and whatnot, but it's still probably better than a tent…"

Obi-Wan listened to him babble silently, just watching him and slowly, slowly settling. It might've not been the peace and serenity of a Jedi, but Obi-Wan had found his balance and even if it rode on Anakin's shoulders, it was better than nothing.

Obi-Wan trusted him, trusted him to do the right thing. So Anakin would do his damndest to be worthy of that trust.

Chapter Text

Breakfast the next morning was somewhat awkward. Obi-Wan, still stinking of smoke and covered in soot and burn marks, couldn't meet Shmi's eyes without wincing, and she just stared at him with a sort of disbelieving weariness while Anakin sat nervously between them, looking from one to the other and hoping really badly that his mother wouldn't say anything about the whole thing.

She didn't, in the end. She just sighed and put some more food on Obi-Wan's plate and said, "I'll see about getting you some new clothing."

Obi-Wan's relief was as awkward as it was obvious and Anakin relaxed a bit too. The rest of breakfast was still somewhat tense, but at least no explosions happened and when Anakin suggested that he could show Obi-Wan the place they'd made, Shmi just shook her head and told them to take the speeder – it would be faster.

Obi-Wan explored the little underground temple quietly, walking from one chamber to another and nodding absently once he'd walked around the entire space. "It'll do," he said, stopping in the centre of the bigger chamber and staring up at the dark dome ceiling. "We'll need equipment."

"Lights and a cooler and stuff," Anakin nodded.

"No," Obi-Wan said, shaking his head. "I meant the practice droids, protective gear for you, the modified bantha prods… there's no hurry, though," he said and then sat in the near centre of the room. "First thing you need to learn is how to meditate and release your emotions into the Force. Come here, Anakin."

With mingled trepidation and anticipation, Anakin went, sitting across from Obi-Wan with his feet crossed in his lap. For the next several hours, Obi-Wan quietly talked him through meditation, it's history, it's techniques and it's goals and what it was supposed to feel like – and how to, finally, feel the Force during it.

He spoke it all awkwardly, like a man trying to remember a video he saw years ago, and Anakin felt a twinge of sympathy when Obi-Wan spoke about how the Light Side of the Force felt – a cool, soothing river flowing through you and around you, easing away the hurts you felt and soothing down your aches. He said it all with a note of bitter, desperate longing.

"It's not like that for you, anymore," Anakin guessed.

"The Dark Side is a roaring fire in the blackness of nothing," Obi-Wan said and shook his head. "It doesn't calm you, it doesn't soothe you. It's has the opposite effect, really. Now, try and clear your mind."

Anakin did try – he tried over and over, but every time he did, a thought would pop out. His mind kept working without his conscious approval – thinking about vaporators and what his mother was doing and wondering what meditation felt like for Obi-Wan, what it had felt like for him before… he thought about Dannar's Claim and the gossips there, he thought about pod races – would he take part in the next one?

Every time a thought popped out, the bit of calm Anakin had managed to gather around himself would shatter like salt glass, and he'd startle into reality. He had to settle down again, try and relax his limbs and muscles again, try and clear his mind again. Over and over and over. Who knew sitting around was so exhausting.

In front of him, Obi-Wan watched for a while, a hint of a painful, nostalgic smile on his face. When Anakin finally groused at him to stop staring, the man shifted back a little – a lot, nearly to the end of the chamber – and then he did something… very interesting.

Obi-Wan settled, his feet crossed in his lap, his hands held up in the air, elbows slightly bent and palms held loosely next to each other, forming a sort of cup in front of him. There was a surge of something that brought Anakin out of the latest attempt of clearing his mind, and fascinated he stared.

First it was just a flicker, over Obi-Wan's hands, like heat haze over the desert during double noon. Then there was a spark of light and the heat haze was ignited, bursting into a red and gold flame that just hovered there, in the air above Obi-Wan's palms. And Anakin could feel it. It wasn't a real flame; it was something else, something very different. He could feel Obi-Wan in it.

And he could feel how Obi-Wan sacrificed his emotions to it, fuelling the flame with his anger and frustration, his longing and nostalgia, his pain, bitterness, sorrow – everything and anything he felt was one by one fed into the flame. It flickered as Obi-Wan fed it, hints of different colours flashing in its heart, the tongues thrashing about whenever a particularly violent emotion was sacrificed.

 It hurt, too. Obi-Wan's blisters opened and new formed, the heat of the flame eating away at his hands. It hurt somewhere else too, somewhere deeper. It wasn't how you were supposed to do it. Obi-Wan was neither using nor releasing his emotions – he wasn't really even transforming them. He was destroying them, one by one burning them away.

"This isn't how you want to do it, Anakin," Obi-Wan said, his eyes shut and flame still alive atop his hands. "So please…"

Anakin swallowed, and went back to trying to meditate – because no, he didn't want to do what Obi-Wan was doing.

It took him days to figure it out, though, how to sink into himself and then how to reach out from there – how to feel the Force in him and around him and how to give up the unnecessary things to it. In that time, a lot of other things happened.

Shmi got Obi-Wan some new clothing. Anakin had a feeling she'd spied Obi-Wan during his bastard way of meditation at some point, because the clothes he got were all sleeveless – and for some reason, red. Red trousers, boots, vests in varying shades – most of them so dark they were almost black. Obi-Wan stared all of them with indecision for a long while before giving up his torn and burned Jedi tunics, and accepting the new clothes.

There was still a hint of Obi-Wan's previous style there, in the lapels of the vests and how they overlapped, and in how he tucked his trousers into his boots… he even had a red cloth belt to wear under his utility belt. And it was all made of synthwool too, though dyed, so it was all familiar for all of them. Obi-Wan didn't look like a slave, though, or a Jedi – Anakin wasn't sure what he looked like. But it was something.

"Why red?" he asked his mother later, while Obi-Wan sat outside in the courtyard, safely apart from the vaporator, meditating.

"It seemed right," she said with a defeated sort of sigh and looked at him. "Do you want me to get clothing for you too?"

There was something about the way she said it, something special – and for the first time during the whole Force and Jedi ordeal, Anakin wondered. Was she Force Sensitive too? Did it run in the family?

"Yeah, mom," he said slowly. "Get me new clothing."

She did. The style of the clothing was similar to Obi-Wan's, but instead of vests, Anakin had proper tunics with over lapping lapels, with sleeves that reached the tips of his fingers when he held his hands down. His clothing wasn't red, though.

It was yellow.

"Why yellow?" Anakin asked, confused. Not that he had anything against the colour – anything was better than the beige default colour that synthwool always came in. It wasn't very eye-catching either. It was a very light, sort of earthy, almost sandy shade of yellow. It didn't look bad, precisely. It was just that next to Obi-Wan's dark red…

Shmi just smiled sadly, running a hand over his hair. "You need a haircut."

Anakin swallowed, running a hand over the utility belt she'd also bought for him and then looked up. "Yeah… yeah, okay."

She cut his hair short and spiky while Obi-Wan watched with an unreadable expression. It was almost like Obi-Wan's haircut, except without the little ponytail – which Obi-Wan had cut off anyway back on Medailla – and without the little braid. It was strange and foreign after what felt like a lifetime of having his hair flopping around, and it certainly took some getting adjusted to.

But it made things easier, later.

While the people of Pika Oasis tried to figure out what was going on on that strange Kenobi Farm – because apparently it was a Kenobi Farm, the whole place was in Obi-Wan's name - Anakin, Obi-Wan and Shmi readied the temple for Anakin's training. Shmi ordered the right parts for Anakin to make the practice and targeting droids to Obi-Wan's specifications, while Obi-Wan eventually made the right protective gear himself, including a strange helmet and a sort of padded jacket and trousers for Anakin to wear.

"You'll be tumbling down and falling all over yourself a lot," the man said, while checking that the padding sat in the right places on Anakin. "And falls of the sort you'll be taking can crack bones. Let's try and avoid that."

And then, finally, they got the bantha prods. Shmi bought them, Anakin spent a whole afternoon modifying them and then Obi-Wan tested them – very roughly – to see if they'd handle the punishment they needed to.

"They'll do," he said, whirling the make shift practice sabers in his hands, trying to get a feel for them while Anakin watched the casual display of skill with amazement. Obi-Wan whirled and twisted them this way and that with nearly offensive ease, making it look weightless and effortless even though Anakin knew the things weren't exactly light. Never mind that they had a hefty voltage running through the blades.

"Now pick a saber," Obi-Wan said. "We'll start with Shii-Cho – the first form. Also known as the Way of the Sarlacc."

"That's a horrible name," Anakin said, even as he hopped to his feet and grabbed the nearest of the several practice sabers he'd made, eager to get started.

There were, Anakin soon learned, seven forms of lightsaber combat – two of which Anakin now knew by name, the first and then the seventh which Windu had talked about. Aside from them, there was the second form Makashi, the third form Soresu, the fourth form Ataru – which was the one Obi-Wan was most proficient in – the fifth form Shien and Dhem So, the sixth form Nima and finally Juyo or Vaapad, the seventh. With the seven forms there were certain styles and specialisations, they could be modified to suit the user in terms of range, basic movement, footwork and so on. What made them forms was the intent and how the lightsaber was actually used and for what purpose – the rest was changeable peripherals.

"Shii-Cho is what every lightsaber user learns first," Obi-Wan said when Anakin asked why they couldn't start with Ataru instead – the Aggression form. "It's the one that teaches you how to use your lightsaber without chopping your limbs off. You're learning it."

So, Anakin learned. Learned how to hold the saber without giving himself an electrical shock from the blade, learned how to move it without endangering himself. Slowly, so damn slowly, Obi-Wan forced him to master each stance, each movement, all the footwork.

It took weeks. And that was before Obi-Wan actually joined the practice and turned the drudgery of katas into duels. And of course, Obi-Wan kicked Anakin's ass without mercy.

"Sadist," Anakin complained more than once, jumping away from another electric shock as Obi-Wan made to lash at him.

"I'm just helping you learn faster," the Darksider grinned and Anakin was damn certain the man was getting some sort of enjoyment out of the whole thing.

Of course, it wasn't just about meditation and lightsaber combat. It was about so much more. In the midst of it all, Obi-Wan pushed Anakin to master his senses – in using the feel of the Force to guide him. Anakin, Obi-Wan admitted, had an enormous natural skill at it.

"I was decent, as Jedi go," Obi-Wan admitted. "A little more attuned to the Unifying Force than… than my Master – he was the undisputed master of the Living Force. But I was nothing like you, Anakin. The Force speaks to you as if you were born knowing its language."

Now Obi-Wan had no senses to speak of. Those little threads of knowledge that the Force imparted to its users, Obi-Wan didn't get them anymore. Even as his balance somewhat returned and the man started rebuilding his shields, whatever that meant, Obi-Wan still couldn't sense things out. He could barely sense Anakin when the boy was standing right behind him.

And in the meantime, Anakin could sense Jabba in his palace if he tried hard enough. He could sense out what his mother would make for breakfast the next morning. He could sense how good a harvest they'd get that day, that week, that month. He could sense how a sick settler, one of their neighbours, would soon die.

He could sense a yawning pit of darkness, somewhere in the future.

"I sense these… knots of void," Anakin tried to describe it. "Like tears in a fabric. They're not there yet, but they might be. Very soon too."

Obi-Wan couldn't help him with that, sadly – the farthest into the future the man had ever seen had been some months only, and even then his visions had been changeable. And Anakin's sense of it wasn't even a vision. It was just a feel that something bad would happen, somewhere, someday, to a lot of people.

"My Master would say that you need to concentrate on here and now," Obi-Wan admitted darkly. "That was what he always said to me, when I let the sense of the future to carry me away. But… we're not Jedi. Follow it Anakin. Follow the feeling, see what the Force is trying to tell you. See what you get out of it."

What Anakin got was a warning he didn't understand and which he was vaguely certain wasn't actually made for him specifically. Problem was, he wasn't sure who it was for.

Meanwhile, he learned other things. He learned that everything had a presence in the Force – and he learned to feel that presence. Everything from grains of sand to mountains, from bacteria to people, everything had an aura. The fabric of the Force was laid over all things, living or otherwise.

"And now that you can sense it, you can learn to manipulate it," Obi-Wan said, a mix of jealousy and pride in his voice.

"Can I make fire like you can?" Anakin asked eagerly.

"Probably, if you wanted to," the Darksider said and there was definitely jealousy in his voice now. "But let's start with something easier."

That said, he levitated a pebble from the ground into his hand and held it out to Anakin. "Telekinesis. The most commonly used of all Force abilities," he explained. "Figure it out, and the rest will be a bit easier."

Anakin figured it out in less than a week, and Obi-Wan had to actually walk into the desert to burn out his emotions for a while after he did. Anakin could see the flames of his meditation easily even at a distance. It turned out it had taken the man years to achieve the same goal.

"Well, you were younger then?" Anakin offered weakly, wincing a bit at the fresh burnmarks on Obi-Wan's hands. The old ones had finally healed too.

"I wasn't, actually," the man growled, flexing his fingers curled and open.

Anakin shrugged awkwardly, not sure what to say. He was starting to realise the limitations Obi-Wan was under – he refused to use the Dark Side abilities and was incapable using a lot of those abilities he'd known before, so he was restraining himself left right and centre. And in the meantime… Anakin was the strongest Force Sensitive of the century, probably of the millennium. And he had an innate sense of the Force too, one that was growing stronger every day.

 It was enough to make him feel guilty, really. Anakin took a breath and released the guilt into the Force, and was in balance again.

"Tell me about healing," he said then.

"It's not a skill I was ever particularly talented in," Obi-Wan grumbled. "All I knew was the healing trance and I can't do that anymore."

"Tell me anyway."

Obi-Wan's problem, Anakin soon decided, was that for all his anger and frustration, he was actually oddly meek about the Dark Side. He'd managed to find a stalemate with his Fall by focusing on Anakin, and now he didn't dare to go either way anymore. On one hand it was probably good because it kept Obi-Wan from losing any more of himself to the Dark Side… but it made him weak too.

And with the warnings Anakin was still getting from the Force, weakness wasn't a safe option for Obi-Wan.

"I just can't figure out how to help him, mom," Anakin admitted to his mother one afternoon, while he was helping her with a vaporator and Obi-Wan was meditating – burning his emotions – in the temple. "He's balancing so carefully in-between but he's… already Fallen. He can't reach back to the Light Side anymore, so he's lost a lot of abilities, and at the same time he refuses to use the Dark Side. And I guess he shouldn't, but…"

"From what I gathered, using the Dark Side is bad," Shmi commented, as she checked over the ion field generator.

"I don't know," Anakin mused. "There's something about it I'm just not getting. The Light Side is just… the Light Side. It's not so much a thing as it is just using positive emotions to connect with the Force, using those positive emotions to empower the Force usage. The Dark Side, it…"

She turned to look at him. "Have you touched it?" she asked worriedly.

"No. But I can feel it through Obi-Wan, sometimes," Anakin shrugged awkwardly. "It feels… it feels sentient. Like it has a mind. Lots of minds, even. I don't know. It's like there's multiple parts of it. The Light Side is just one thing, but the Dark Side is both the way to connect to it, and the thing… there. In it," he trailed off and sighed. "I'm not explaining this right."

"No, I think you are," Shmi said, straightening her back and considering. "Whenever you speak of the Force as Light or Dark, I keep thinking of the electromagnetic spectrum. The light visible to us humans is so little, you know, a fraction of the whole. Near ultraviolet, near infra-red… and then there is a whole spectrum out reaching on both sides, things we don't see or sense, from gamma rays to long waves, from high frequencies to the low ones. I think your Force is like that. It's a spectrum."

Anakin considered it. "Huh," he said. "That actually makes a lot of sense. You can't get micro waves out of machinery tuned to pick up ultraviolet."

Shmi nodded. "Yeah," she agreed. "Precisely. Though I think you got it the wrong way around. The Dark Side is the higher frequency one, I think," she said, turning back to the machinery.

Not that it would do Obi-Wan much good. The Dark Side might be a tightly packed frequency full of dangerous radiation or whatever, but it didn't really matter. Anakin still didn't know how to help Obi-Wan with it, and Obi-Wan himself was far from figuring it out for himself. All Anakin could do was to figure out what he could do, what he was actually capable of accomplishing, and then doing that.

Healing, he decided, was a priority – because Obi-Wan kept burning himself and Anakin could fix some of that, at least. It was much harder to learn that, than it was to learn how to float pebbles around because cells and their auras were a whole lot more complicated than bits of rocks.

It took a lot of practice and even more self-study – Anakin even wormed his way into Doc Mell's clinic eventually, and made himself a nuisance until the Mon Calamari relented and taught him what he knew. The doctor thought Anakin was aiming to become a medical professional himself. Anakin let him believe that, and soaked up all the anatomy lessons the Mon Calamari had to offer – and then some. He spent almost all of the credits on his datapad to medical texts and he devoured them – and when Obi-Wan came back with burned hands, Anakin demanded to examine them for study as well as aid.

It was Obi-Wan's hands that taught him the art of healing eventually. He examined them with the Force and grew to know them so well that one day, the wrongness of their injuries showed him the way. Life, it turned out, knew how it should be, and it knew when it wasn't right, and all Anakin had to do was to follow the suggestions of those living cells and their make up to figure out how to fix the wrongness in them. The building blocks were all here, and they only fit in their appropriate places. When applied correctly the Force just sped the process up.

Obi-Wan stared at him wordlessly once he was done, and the fresh blisters had smoothed out into new calluses on already tough palms and fingers. "You would've made a magnificent Jedi," he murmured, voice full of bitterness.

Anakin looked at him and then down at the hands still in his, their skin whole and only slightly red splotched here and there. He squeezed Obi-Wan's hands. "It's just a name, you know," he said. "Do I actually need the name, to know the teachings? To have the abilities and the skills? To believe in the philosophies? Do I?"

The Darksider looked down at his hands and closed his fingers slowly around Anakin's smaller ones. "No, you don't," he said and smiled. "You're a Lightsider, Anakin. And you're going to be one of the best there ever was."

Anakin nodded, and got up. "Come on. I want you to show me that kata again. I'm getting it down today."

"Sure you are," Obi-Wan answered, and followed him into their little sandy temple.

There was still a lot of work to do. Anakin had a lot of studying to do, a lot of things he needed to figure out and master before he was ready for… for whatever was coming. Obi-Wan had even more left to do; he needed to forge his path in the Darkness, which would be infinitely harder than Anakin's own mastery over Light. There was a lot to do and a long way to go and they'd only started. But that was alright.

Together they'd get there.