Chapter Text
Obi-Wan would kill to be back in the wind tunnel, hunched over his time trial bike, making minute adjustments to his posture for hours on end until he emerges deaf and a bit wobbly. He’d kill to be riding endless laps of the velodrome, round and round, keeping pace in his skinsuit and aero helmet, and pretending to understand what all the numbers his Garmin spits out at the end mean.
(It’s someone else’s job to understand those numbers - Obi-Wan just wants to know if they’re good.)
Hell, he’d even settle for a custom fitting day, where they push and pull him around on bikes that are too short, too tall, a just-right handlebar width with the seat comfort all wrong. He doesn’t even know how 3D printing works, but he does know it means he has to stay incredibly still while they measure his forearms.
(He didn’t even know he could be self-conscious about his forearms.)
But here he is, miserably riding around Coruscant in the rain, trying to psych himself up for a KOM.
He’s never been much of a climber - he’s a time triallist and a flatlands man, a big diesel engine of a man on the front of the pack who swings off before the gradient hits three per cent. It wears him out fast, and it makes his body hurt in new and interesting and overall bad ways.
But, well, his team’s scraped together enough points in the yearly leaderboard to take part in the Tour of Alderaan (the biggest race on the calendar! Their little wildcard team!), and Obi-Wan really, really wants to be chosen for the squad. The Temple Racing Team knows he’s a good domestique, strong, reliable, and enough of a patron of the peloton for people to actually fucking listen to him on the road - but they also know he can’t climb for shit, and with the release of the race profile, Obi-Wan’s chances of being picked suddenly become very slim.
So here he is, actively avoiding the Central Coruscant KOM marked on Strava and hoping that by simply being in its vicinity, he’ll magically gain some sort of climbing prowess.
It’s his local KOM, one he sees his teammates and acquaintances post times for a lot, with an average gradient of four per cent and a fifty metre pinch of about six and a half percent halfway up. It shouldn’t be hard.
Key word: shouldn’t.
Obi-Wan sighs, swears, and clicks into a smaller gear.
The early stages of the climb aren’t too bad, his Garmin telling him the gradient is dallying somewhere between three and five per cent, and he starts to think that maybe he could actually do this whole climbing thing, and then the six and a half per cent section hits him like a freight train.
It hurts all over, it burns, this is stupid, he wants to go home and take a hot shower and pulverise his leg muscles with his massage gun, his lungs are about to give up on him-
And then he crests the climb, and there’s quite a lovely view through the drizzle down to the city below him, and a little picnic spot and a lookout with a helpful little information panel - and Obi-Wan does love a helpful little information panel.
Maybe it’s time to call it quits for today’s ride.
There are only a couple of other people around - a couple setting up for lunch, pulling sandwiches out of a backpack and effectively claiming the picnic setup for themselves, and a lone young man in hodgepodge lycra thoroughly examining a beat-up looking Bianchi, celeste paint rusted away in places.
Obi-Wan looks down at his shiny new-ish Canyon, and is grateful for sponsors. He does like a Bianchi, though - he rode on their frames for half a season, before his old team very messily fell apart.
“Nice bike,” he’s saying before he can stop himself.
The young man pulls an earbud out and smiles politely under his cycling glasses. “Sorry, what? Can I help you?”
“Just, ah, just wanted to say you have a nice bike. It’s a vintage Bianchi?”
The man shakes his head and huffs in a sort of annoyance. “Not vintage, just very unloved. I wanted to see how she rides before I fix her up.”
“You’re a mechanic?”
“Just a very invested hobbyist.” The man dips his head to the side slightly. “Would be nice to be a mechanic, but I don’t have that sort of discipline. I have, like, three frames that I rescued off eBay that are just sitting around in my garage, and enough spare parts to build another bike but I keep buying more because, like, they’re shiny and they look cool. I’ve finished maybe one rebuild ever, and that’s because I was threatened with violence if I didn’t get the bike out of my sister’s bathroom, and the only way to do that was to finish it.”
Obi-Wan blinks. "I see."
The man shuffles in his cleats, and glances down at his watch. No gloves, Obi-Wan notices. "I'd better get on with my ride. Wasting daylight and all that. Enjoy your ride, man!"
He pushes his bike along for a few steps before jumping on, one long leg swung over the top of the rusty frame and cleats clicking into place. He's got great legs, Obi-Wan thinks, lithe and toned, but not the legs of a cyclist - not enough muscle packed on for that.
Obi-Wan should stop thinking about the man's legs, because there is not much lycra between himself and the world.
He goes and reads the helpful little information panel to calm himself down.
Before he sets off again, he checks his phone, sees that his ride data has synched up between his Garmin and his phone, and opens Strava to see how his KOM stacks up, titling the ride as Tour of Alderaan practice. Maybe a bit optimistic, but transparent at least.
The KOM is pretty tight, a handful of seconds between second and fifth. Obi-Wan is seventh, ten seconds behind his old teammate Quinlan Vos, which is embarrassing for Quinlan, because he was a mountains man in his racing days. Obi-Wan screenshots the leaderboard for bullying purposes later.
The leader of the KOM must have flown up there, a full five seconds ahead of second place - either that, or they've somehow tricked Strava into recording a downhill ride. Obi-Wan wonders who he rides for, whether he's some batshit good neopro he simply hasn't heard of yet, or if this is simply what the future of doping looks like. Their profile picture gives nothing away, a heavily-filtered artsy photo of a Colnago in front of a lush green hedge.
Whoever A. Skywalker is, their Central Coruscant KOM is practically unbeatable.
In total honesty, Anakin rides the same route with every bike he rebuilds, just for consistency. A long flat stretch just outside of the main drag of the city, far enough out that he's less likely to be hit by a car, followed by a series of narrow corners through some backstreets, before rejoining the busier road and beginning the climb up the sector marked on Strava as the Central Coruscant KOM. He’s a scientist at heart, controlling as many variables as possible, with all the de rigueur that his supervisor wishes he used in the lab.
He also rides it because it's close to his house.
Most days, he remembers to bring two bottles of water. Some days, he remembers to bring a muesli bar. He fucking hates them, but his friend Padmé insists they're a good source of complex carbs, something to do with slow energy release, and Padmé always sounds like she knows what she's talking about.
(Plus, the ones she keeps insisting on buying him have chocolate chips in them.)
His bike computer is old and fussy, a 3PO that he regrets salvaging off a guy in Tatooine, that actually requires him to plug it into his laptop and export all the data via a horrendous micro-USB cable, before he can shove it into Strava. The Strava account is really just for him, because if he doesn't have a stupid app containing everything in one place, he'll never know how his new builds compare.
Anakin takes the KOM for the first time on an absolute Frankenstein's monster of a bike - he could barely tell it was a Ridley when he'd picked up the frame, the wheels had been scavenged off two different bikes, and he had spent a whole weekend trying to figure out how to put wireless disc brakes in a bike that had spent its past life with wired rim brakes - but it goes like a bat out of hell, or maybe Anakin's just having a good day out.
He sits at the top and chews morosely at his muesli bar, and wonders if anything more interesting than chocolate chips will come his way up here. Maybe he should take up birdwatching.
The next week, Obi-Wan rides up to the Central Coruscant lookout for the first time.
The KOM is practically unbeatable, that is, until Obi-Wan somehow does the unthinkable and beats it.
He's hammered out the climb an uncountable number of times in the last fortnight, factoring it into every ride, until the six per cent pinch doesn't feel like so much of a pinch anymore, and he's able to sit at the top without feeling like he's going to pass out.
The weird mechanically-inclined guy, who Obi-Wan now knows as Anakin, is there a few times as well, and if Obi-Wan said he wasn't thrashing his bike up the last few metres of the climb every day just in case he's there, then he'd be lying.
("Why are you riding this climb so much, anyway?" Anakin had asked one day, when the picnic table is free and they sit opposite each other, helmets and glasses on the table, Obi-Wan chugging electrolytes and Anakin chewing uncomfortably on a muesli bar with his golden curls pressed flat against his head from the sweat in his helmet.
"Training," Obi-Wan had answered between gulps. "Trying to get on a squad for a race in a few months. Hilly, though, and I’m a flatlands domestique, so hence-" He waves his hand at himself. "This."
"Oh. I just thought you were, like, a Temple Racing superfan," Anakin had said. "It would've been a weird choice of team, I guess, but I've seen people out in all sorts of kit. I like to jersey-spot when I'm out on the bike, see who's riding in what." He'd leaned in conspiratorially. "My real white whale, the one I've never seen in the wild before, is- you remember the old Grandmaster kits? The ones that were, like, the ugliest shade of green imaginable with fucking beige bibs? I really wanna see someone out for a Sunday ride in that ."
"Have you ever considered that there's a reason you've never seen anyone in that kit, Anakin?")
Anakin is there again on the day Obi-Wan beats the KOM, fingers covered in grease as he pokes around his gears with a multi-tool. He's back on the Bianchi, which is looking much better off now, save for whatever is stuck in the chainring.
"Fucking SRAM!" he curses loudly, before forgetting he's not in his garage and looking around, embarrassed.
"Sorry, man," he says apologetically to Obi-Wan. "This stupid system, I thought it'd be better with this but apparently some people don't like to make components that work." He stands up and kicks the derailleur for good measure.
"Most of the pro teams switched over to Shimano ages ago, because they seem to work," Obi-Wan says as he fiddles with his Garmin, then his phone, then, "Holy shit."
"Don't tell me your derailleur's gone, too."
"Remind me what the KOM up here is?" Obi-Wan looks at it enough, he really should know by now-
"One fifty-two. Average speed, like, 40.6 klicks."
It's all Obi-Wan can do to stop himself lifting his bike in the air, like he would've back in his junior days when he was actually allowed to win races. "I believe that's no longer the case, my dear friend."
Anakin leans over to look at the computer perched on the stem of Obi-Wan's bike, then at his phone, letting out a whistle of approval.
One fifty-one. A new record, thank you very much.
"Not bad for a flatlands guy," Anakin says, and Obi-Wan feels heat rise up the back of his neck at the impressed tone in his voice. “Now what?”
Obi-Wan takes a big mouthful of water. He hasn’t really thought that far. “I suppose I find a new hill to practice climbing on. Probably one that’s a bit steeper. Alderaan isn’t exactly the most forgiving of climbing regions, I don’t think this climb would even be categorised if something similar was in the route.”
“Oh, that’s what this is for,” Anakin says, like the realisation’s just dawned on him. “I didn’t think Temple Racing got invited to that sort of thing.”
Like Obi-Wan doesn’t already know he’s riding on a second-rate team. “We got a wildcard invite this year, thank you.”
“Huh. Well, I guess it’s time for you to find another hill then. Alderaan’s a bit different to here.”
Obi-Wan looks around - he’s become quite familiar with this place. He’s read the helpful little information panel about five times on days when Anakin hasn’t been there, sat at the picnic table and watched the birds cartwheel through the sky, and quietly observed Anakin fight with five different bikes.
He might miss it.
“I suppose I should,” he replies, stepping onto his bike and clicking one cleat into place. “I’ll see you around on the road, Anakin.”
“Good luck on the next KOM.”
Anakin reaches out a grease-blackened hand, and Obi-Wan shakes it. His hand is warm and calloused, probably from handlebars and tools, and he leaves a small smear of black on the white palm of Obi-Wan’s glove.
Obi-Wan can feel Anakin’s gaze following him as he rolls off, clicking into his other pedal, and tucking into the descent.
His KOM stands for all of two days.
Obi-Wan’s phone pings as he’s carrying out a low-effort reconnaissance of the climb up to the old senate museum, set on a hill in the former city centre, a leg-burning ten per cent in the final stretch up to the car park. He’s thankful for all the practice up the Central Coruscant climb, because it doesn’t feel as awful as he thought it would when he drove up it yesterday.
He sits outside the museum cafe with a latte in a takeaway cup and his bike resting against the wall behind him, and unlocks his phone.
Uh oh! You just lost your KOM on Central Coruscant to A. Skywalker by 1s.
Oh, Skywalker’s like that, is he?
Obi-Wan has never really understood the Strava users who fight tooth and nail to hang onto their KOMs - it’s just an arbitrary thing, a little bit of validation for something inconsequential.
But now, having whoever this Skywalker bastard is steal his KOM…he’s starting to understand it now.
What does the A even stand for? Obi-Wan muses as he finishes his coffee. Adam, Aidan, Anthony…
“Asshole,” Obi-Wan mutters aloud, and throws his cup away with a bit more violence than necessary.
If competition is what Skywalker wants, then competition is what he’ll get.
Back and forth, one second at a time.
Obi-Wan adds the Central Coruscant climb to his route as a warm-up for the old senate hill.
“Back again for more?” Anakin asks - he’s got a Factor bike this time, a time trial bike with a beautiful carbon frame, but it’s got two road wheels.
“Making the most of the time,” Obi-Wan answers, not wanting to admit to Anakin that he’s actually just trying to claw back his KOM for the third time. “What have you done to that poor bike this time?”
“You’re frustrated,” Anakin says the next week. “You were messier coming up this time. Something on your mind?”
“Nothing really. Team issues, nothing I can control. All part of the job,” Obi-Wan lies smoothly.
With all the strife that Skywalker’s seemingly boundless gains are causing him, Obi-Wan has to admit he looks forward to seeing Anakin at the top of the climb, a different bike every day.
“The brakes on this one gave up last week. Had to brake with my shoe the whole way down. Still, I think it’s fixed now.”
“I’ve been trying to find a replacement dropper post, but this bike is so fucking old, I think it’s older than you- no offence, of course.”
“The problem with disc brakes - and I know you’ve got opinions on this, but hear me out-”
And Anakin’s lovely, talkative and smart, with pretty hair and a charming smile and eyes that Obi-Wan rarely sees through the reflective lenses of his Oakleys, but it’s a real treat to see them, brilliant blue and big and expressive like the rest of his face.
And he’s got great legs.
It’s just appreciation, Obi-Wan tells himself. He’s appreciative of Anakin’s talent for making things work, and of how much he knows about bikes and cycling history, and his love of short bibs and horrendous team jerseys from thirty years ago, and of the form-perfect way Obi-Wan had watched him descend, long, strong legs braced in a deep tuck-
Obi-Wan does not need to appreciate Anakin’s legs.
“You could ride professionally, you know,” he says to Anakin one day. It had rained as soon as he’d left home, and the climb up had been dangerously slick. Obi-Wan is delaying riding back down, hiding under a tree with Anakin while rain spits down intermittently.
Anakin shrugs. “I’m a bit old to be scouted now. I had a degree that I liked more than the idea of riding a bike every day, which led to a Masters that I like more than riding a bike every day.”
“What’s your dissertation on?” Obi-Wan unclips his helmet and shakes out the water, slotting his glasses into the vents.
“It’s a thesis,” Anakin corrects him, “on the collateral effects on drag caused by mixed materials, specifically for optimising sporting equipment performance.”
“Sounds like it’s essentially about riding a bike every day.”
“Yeah, basically.”
Water drips through the tree, and Anakin shifts a little closer to Obi-Wan.
“Sorry,” he says, “there was water dripping down my neck.”
Anakin is warm in the new proximity, even though he’d been up the top of the hill tinkering with his Ridley’s new dropper post since before Obi-Wan made it up, even though there’s still some space between them. His blondish hair is darker, almost brown with the wet, curls defined and framing his face.
“What about you?”
“Hm?” Obi-Wan isn’t expecting a follow-up question.
“Is this professional cycling thing… it, for you?”
Obi-Wan wipes a raindrop out of his eye. “I suppose so. I was scouted quite young, I started out on the track circuits. I never really had the time to consider another career option, but I’m happy that way. I suppose at this point I wouldn’t have the brains for any of it.”
“My research supervisor began his bachelor’s when he was thirty, and now he’s a leading biomechanical engineer,” Anakin says. “I think you’d be fine.”
“And the man who won the Tour of Alderaan last year was scouted at age twenty-six,” Obi-Wan retorts. “You’re not too old.”
Anakin looks at him, and Obi-Wan can’t tell what he’s thinking. The silence is good, it’s comfortable, it lets Obi-Wan search the contours of his face as if they’ll hold the answers to the universe - or if not the universe, then the answers to the inevitability of retirement.
“I think I’m happier building bikes than racing them,” Anakin says.
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan says before he can stop himself, catching himself before the thought can go anywhere.
“Yeah?”
Obi-Wan thinks, about all the things he could possibly say, about how learning how to climb a hill has been one of the nicest experiences of his life, about how he’s looking forward to seeing Anakin at the top more than anything, about how he’d like to ride for hours with him to nowhere in particular, as long as there’s a coffee stop at the end. About how he’d like to sit in Anakin’s garage and watch him tinker. About how he’d like Anakin to tell him what all the numbers that come out of his aero testing mean.
But instead, he asks, somewhat stupidly, “How exactly do you build a bike?”
Anakin huffs out a laugh. “I’m not a good person to ask about that. I rode a fucking Franken-bike up here today.”
He gestures to the Ridley and its mishmash of parts, and Obi-Wan can’t help but smile.
“Well then, Doctor Frankenstein, how did you bring life to your creation?”
Obi-Wan lets Anakin talk, lets him compare the Ridley to Obi-Wan’s Canyon, lets him fawn over the commercially-unreleased components that are there to keep the sponsor-team partnership happy, and just listens.
He’s beautiful. Obi-Wan has the urge to wrap his gloved hands around Anakin’s bare hands, hold them close to his chest, kiss him - and wouldn’t that look silly? Two guys, neck to knee in lycra, cycling gloves tangled in golden curls, cleats clinking on the road as they try for closeness. Obi-Wan would love it.
“If you ever change sponsors,” Anakin asks as the rain stops, “can I strip this bike for parts?”
“Well, I won’t be using it. Don’t steal my Garmin, though. I’m quite attached to it.”
Anakin pouts, and ducks out from under the tree branches.
They descend together, working in tandem, Obi-Wan following Anakin’s lines through the corners and pedalling them both through the faux plat towards the base, until they return to the main road.
Anakin swings off, one arm raised in a wave behind him as he heads home.
Obi-Wan continues along to the base of the old senate hill, and it begins to rain again.
Are all professional cyclists this wonderful?
Anakin wouldn’t know - he’s only met one, and he’s hopelessly in love with him.
When Obi-Wan comes back up the climb after Anakin takes back the KOM, he breathes a sigh of relief. Of course he’s competitive - he’s professional. He literally gets paid to be competitive.
It takes Anakin a lot of effort to keep stealing it back, the ache in his legs agonising, and he looks forward to sinking into a hot bath almost as much as he looks forward to seeing Obi-Wan.
(He tries analysing his data in the bath a couple of times, but he gets…distracted. It’s not his fault Obi-Wan goes around looking like that.)
He asks Padmé for advice on a day when the weather cuts his ride short, dragging her out of her office for lunch. They’re quite a pair, Anakin in his black lycra with his rain cape shoved in his back pocket, Padmé bundled up in her red woollen coat.
“Have you told him that you think he’s…wonderful?” Padmé asks, taking half of one of Anakin’s toasted sandwiches.
“I’ve been breaking his records on Strava?”
“You’ve been doing what?”
Anakin takes a bite of his sandwich, chewing through crisp bread and melted cheese, before repeating himself. “I’ve been breaking his records on Strava, which means he comes back to where I ride, which means I get to see him more often! Foolproof, right?”
Padmé sighs. “Ani, you’re using your workout app to hang out with this guy?”
“Not a workout app,” Anakin corrects. “Fitness-oriented social network.”
Padmé closes her eyes, inhales, and exhales. “Anakin.”
“Padmé.”
“Ask him out for coffee like a normal person.”
“Huh.” Anakin hadn’t thought of that. “Yeah, he’s a cyclist, they’re all, like, horrendous caffeine addicts!”
“Or, it’s just a good way for you to talk about something that isn’t cycling,” Padmé says, and she sounds as lovingly exasperated with him as she always does. “Besides, you’re a postgrad student. You’re also a horrendous caffeine addict.”
Overall, a productive discussion.
In a final fit of desperation, Anakin pushes the Bianchi and himself to the limit, scraping another three seconds off Obi-Wan’s time. He’s basically unconscious by the time he reaches the top, causing a bit of a scene as he folds like a lawn chair and dumps one of his water bottles over his head, gasping for air.
He shares the ride to Strava, titling it stealing back the cute pro rider’s kom so i can take him out for coffee, and for good measure, changes his display name to Anakin Skywalker.
How much more obvious can he be?
Obi-Wan’s had a glass and a half of wine, and he’s curious. He sits on his couch, legs crossed, TV turned down low, and opens Strava.
The search bar helpfully supplies A. Skywalker’s profile before he can even begin typing, which is really infuriating, because it’s not like he’s been trying to find out about the guy - he’s just glanced at his profile every so often.
He scrolls through the post history. All the same loop around Coruscant, different times, wildly different titles.
dumpster bianchi - new brakes edition
factor tt but my new carbon wheel STILL hasn’t arrived
ridley frankenbike x-fusion post descent
dumpster bianchi and the worst derailleur
Obi-Wan frowns slightly. There’s something that he can’t put his finger on - he blames the wine.
His phone buzzes with a new email from Strava.
Uh oh! You just lost your KOM on Central Coruscant to Anakin Skywalker by 3s.
Wait, Anakin Skywalker?
And it all falls into place - Anakin has a horrifyingly old Ridley that he calls the Frankenbike, made more of spare parts than anything else. Anakin complains to him about the carbon wheel that’s been lost in the post between here and Naboo for a month now. Anakin yells at the SRAM derailleur on the beaten-up old Bianchi, swears when he gets his fingers in it wrong and the gears bite him.
Obi-Wan refreshes Skywalker’s profile, and there it is.
Anakin Skywalker.
A new KOM up the Central Coruscant climb.
A new ride.
A…coffee invite?
But the most important bit: Anakin thinks he’s cute.
It makes him feel all warm in his chest and fuzzy in the head.
Or maybe that’s just the wine.
“It’s been you,” Obi-Wan says accusingly, breathless from the effort up the climb. He doesn’t even bother switching his Garmin on - he doesn’t need to track this ride.
Anakin is beaming at him. “What’s been me, Obi-Wan?”
“You’ve been stealing my KOM up here for weeks !”
Anakin’s brilliant smile doesn’t shift, and Obi-Wan has half a mind to kiss it off his face.
“Perhaps.”
“I- you-” Obi-Wan tries to find the words. “You’ve ruined my training schedule for the last month!”
“I’ll be totally honest, Obi-Wan,” Anakin says, “I didn’t mean to mess you up, but I just…I really wanted to keep seeing you? And, and I didn’t know if it would be weird? If I, like, asked for your number or if you wanted to get a coffee or a beer when you’d only really met me, I dunno, once or twice or maybe three times, but, uh, it’s been a few more times than that now, so I was wondering? If you wanted to get a coffee? Like, now? If you’re-”
“Yes, alright, Anakin,” Obi-Wan says, far too quickly, “but only if you promise to stop stealing my KOM.”
“Well, I can’t promise that, sometimes I just build really good bikes and I can’t really help it if they go uphill really fast-”
Obi-Wan cuts him off with a kiss that’s less of a kiss and more of him just kind of pressing his mouth against Anakin’s. Anakin shuts up compliantly, and the little mouth-press becomes a real kiss, and Obi-Wan feels all warm in his chest again, feels his heart rate rise.
And yes, they do probably look silly - neck to knee in lycra, Obi-Wan’s gloves resting in Anakin’s golden curls, their cleats clinking on the road as they try to navigate the height difference between them. Obi-Wan’s glasses press into his nose, and Anakin fumbles for the clip of Obi-Wan’s helmet so that it doesn’t bump between their foreheads.
But Obi-Wan wouldn’t have it any other way.
They part for air, and Anakin giggles, and his laugh is infectious, and Obi-Wan starts laughing too, and the birds shrill above them in the crisp winter air.
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan says.
“Obi-Wan,” Anakin murmurs, grinning like a fool.
“Coffee?”
“Fuck yeah, coffee,” Anakin agrees.