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In the end, it played out like one of those low-budget, low-quality action Holo flicks that Anakin refused to admit he indulged in. Him, locked in combat, as a battle droid — a battle droid, of all enemies to take him off guard — pointed its blaster right at his heart. And emerging from seemingly nowhere, Obi-Wan, slow motion, diving dramatically in front of Anakin to intercept the bullet. And another. And then a stray, sharp-edged piece of debris, just to really make certain that Anakin would have the worst day possible.
Obi-Wan’s mouth had rounded, in a mildly surprised “O” — as if he hadn’t realized that jumping in front of a bullet would feel like jumping in front of a bullet — before he collapsed, cool as Ilum, into Anakin’s arms. And just as in any Holo flick, his master’s stupid, self-sacrificial hair blew heroically around his face before stilling. Anakin’s brain might have instinctively supplied the accompanying epic-yet-tender soundtrack if it weren’t already busy blaring alarm bells.
Then, in true Obi-Wan fashion, his master had offered him a strained, weak smile and promptly passed out.
The following few minutes — or hours, he couldn’t quite tell — had been a blurry, roaring-in-the-ears mess. It often was a disorienting and out-of-body experience to be in the heat of battle, but never quite as much so; Anakin was faintly aware of his limbs multitasking (lifting Obi-Wan, dragging Obi-Wan, dropping Obi-Wan, ducking, slashing, slashing, rinse and repeat) yet he could see and hear nothing except the Force and his heartbeat and Obi-Wan’s heartbeat. He was far too muddled from the panic coursing through his veins to be sure where one ended and the other began. Being out of control wasn’t a foreign feeling, but it usually followed a surge of power, a burst of energy — something overwhelmingly fierce and undeniably potent. It had been a long time since Anakin out of control meant Anakin powerless.
As a padawan, he had read about advanced Force techniques, the stuff that belonged to myth and legend and the Anakin that existed past his life at the Temple, past Obi-Wan’s teachings, past even his knighthood. One such power had stood out in particular to his fourteen-year-old self: similfuturus, the ability to create doppelgängers of oneself in battle. At the time, it seemed like the answer to a prayer; one Anakin clone to work on his mission reports, one to show up to his duller mandatory classes, one to keep Obi-Wan occupied should he fancy taking a Temple speeder out for a spin… and what wouldn’t he give to have a clone of himself to return to his mother, to live the life he never thought he’d leave?
When he’d begged his master to teach him simifulturus, as casually as he could (which was to say, not casually at all), Obi-Wan had smiled ruefully — “who wouldn’t want an army of Anakin Skywalkers running around Coruscant?” — and explained patiently that such a power took years, even decades to learn, and even longer to master. And indeed, no matter how many days Anakin spent secretly researching, practicing, pleading with the Force, he couldn’t so much as conjure a replica of his pinky finger.
That was how Obi-Wan found him one night — biting his lip hard enough to draw blood, willing and failing to use a power he never possessed.
“Padawan,” Obi-Wan had teased, after a long and serious discussion-slash-lecture on the necessity of recognizing one’s limits, “I must admit that I’m grateful simifulturus hasn’t worked out for you. I can barely handle having one Anakin in my life.”
“One is enough,” Anakin had reluctantly agreed.
But it hadn’t been, not for his mother, waiting for her son to come back to an empty hut in the desert. And in the weeks after Geonosis, he’d silently cursed Obi-Wan for letting him think that one Anakin was enough, could ever be enough. When he was particularly furious, he also cursed Qui-Gon, for planting the seeds of that faith in Obi-Wan in the first place. He cursed himself for foolishly believing his master and his master’s master, but most of all he cursed himself for not being enough. Obi-Wan had been wrong, Qui-Gon had been wrong, the prophecy had been wrong, but he, Anakin, was the only one to blame.
But one Anakin had to be enough now, when his master was unconscious and losing blood faster than his body could produce it, when they were surrounded by faceless enemies that would sooner die than relent, when Anakin was so unsteady it cost him precious effort to barely keep his hand wrapped around the base of his lightsaber. “Trust in the Force,” Obi-Wan would say. Feel. But he couldn’t — one of Tatooine’s suns winked in his mind’s eye, blinded him. A jagged rock. Endless cloth-wrapped faces. He needed out. He needed to stop. He needed Obi-Wan, warm and cool and all the comforting in-betweens. And he remembered — Obi-Wan needed Anakin, too, needed him to get them both to safety, needed him to snap out of it and feel and feel and think.
And so he thought of blood, wet and living; blood, dry and long dead. He thought of men and women and children made of blood, made of sand, made of the Force. He thought of the Force, unyielding and malleable, unknowable and guiding, nowhere and everything all at once. And by the time he reached the ship, felt the safety of familiarity wash over him, he thought of nothing at all.
When Anakin was a padawan, when he was Obi-Wan’s padawan, he had once programmed two droids to play each other in dejarik. He wasn’t certain why, now, with free time an ancient and luxurious memory; he just remembered that it had been one of the few projects he had never proudly shown his master, eyes bright and eager for approval.
Before pitting the droids against each other, he’d played each one individually. Anakin had never exactly been a dejarik master (Obi-Wan had likened his holochess strategies to his dueling form at the time: “too aggressive, Anakin,” with an infuriating twinkle in his master’s eye), but at least against Obi-Wan he had stood a chance. He averaged about a dozen lightning-speed moves with each droid before suffering a sound defeat.
Anakin only watched one match in total between the two droids, and one had been more than enough. Unlike in the matches against Anakin, each droid took its time computing its next move, as if to say, “finally, a worthy opponent.” He’d watched, with uncharacteristic patience, as the two droids inched their way across the board, methodically bartering pieces of equal value and setting traps that would not be sprung. At long last, the board became empty, save for one piece belonging to each droid; though it was impossible for either side to win, Anakin had not thought to code the possibility of a stalemate, and the droids aimlessly directed their pieces in random directions. Anakin had lost interest soon after that — and the droids were reassembled into cleaning ones after an unfortunate cooking mishap in his and his master’s quarters — but for a brief moment, he remembered feeling a strong, illogical rush of anger knowing that the game that would never, ever be resolved.
Arguing with Obi-Wan felt like watching the two droids play dejarik — predictable and irritating and endless. Only, Anakin had never accepted a stalemate in his life, and he sure wasn’t about to now.
“It was reckless, Anakin, and needlessly so,” Obi-Wan said, in poorly-concealed frustration. “A total flaunting of protocol,” he frowned, “although I suspect that wouldn’t bother you. This is precisely why the code, as you are well aware, warns us of distractions, attachments — they impair our decision-making in the field, blind us from the fuller picture.”
This was the subject they’d been dancing around from the moment Obi-Wan woke up, learned from a particularly traitorous medical droid that Anakin had Force-exhausted himself dragging them both to safety, and immediately launched into an impassioned lecture that Anakin was familiar with. All too familiar with.
“I care about protocol,” he lied, sullenly.
His master didn’t seem to deign that worthy of a response. “The point being, and as I am sure you are tired of hearing, my dear former padawan, how we conduct ourselves in battle is — should be — representative of our respect for the Force, repaying its guidance with clear judgment and self-preservation.”
Anakin frowned at the pointed tone. Sometimes, no matter how hard he tried, it was nearly impossible to imagine that anyone, even Obi-Wan, could practice what his master preached. Sure, Anakin could respect the Jedi code — he did respect the Jedi code, most of the time — he just respected the lives of those he cared about more.
“Are you listening to me, Anakin?” Obi-Wan said, impatience creeping into his voice.
Anakin briefly considered staying silent for a little longer just to annoy him. “I don’t see the problem here,” he said instead, because he wasn’t that childish. Yet. “I was totally being respectful to the Force. Perfectly clear judgment, and, um, tons of self-preservation. Heaps and heaps.”
“Is that so? Your behavior today — single-handedly wading through crowds of soldiers, expending precious energy on protecting my unconscious body, and fatiguing yourself to the point of Force exhaustion — was you demonstrating heaps and heaps of self-preservation.”
Anakin didn’t think a joke about his actions being single-handed, alright, would be well-received, so he just nodded.
Obi-Wan pinched the bridge of his nose, as though sporting a sudden headache. “I would rather not be having this conversation here,” he said, gesturing vaguely at the medical examiner’s beds they were both more-or-less strapped upright to. So let’s not, Anakin desperately thought. “But it appears we have no choice.”
His master’s long-suffering tone finally grated at him; Anakin hadn’t exactly expected Obi-Wan to sing his praises for saving his life, but he had, after all, saved both their lives — and wasn’t that grounds for a brief thank you, not this awful, drawn-out rehashing of his master’s disappointment in him?
“What would you have had me do instead?” he snapped. “Leave you to die, run the opposite direction with my tail tucked between my legs?”
He nearly flinched in surprise when Obi-Wan brought a hand down against his bed. “Yes, Anakin, that is precisely what you should have done. Were you really not listening to me earlier? You should have assessed the situation, realized that I was beyond saving — that you had a much better chance of getting out of there alive if you had left me behind — and retreated as quickly as you could.”
Immediately, Anakin shook his head in denial. “I would never—”
“And that is exactly the problem,” Obi-Wan interrupted, voice rising in volume. “You would let your loyalty to another outweigh your own safety, the safety of your men, the authority of the code, of your orders.” He took a deep breath, as if willing himself to stay calm, before continuing: “Despite what you might think, I don’t actually enjoy repeating myself, Anakin. The danger of attachm—”
But Anakin had had enough. “Don’t you get it? I don’t care. I don’t care about attachments, or breaking the rules, or— or feeling what the code tells me to feel,” he said, earnestly. “Do you understand? I would never let you die, not if I could help it, and I would never let you sacrifice yourself for me.”
He’d revealed more than he meant to and cringed, because there was no way Obi-Wan had missed the way Anakin’s voice cracked around the mention of attachments and feeling. His master, thankfully, or perhaps unfortunately, didn’t press the issue. Typical, Anakin thought, bitterly, unfairly. It was never feeling with Obi-Wan — it was duty and respect and everything that Anakin understood in concept and failed in practice.
“The importance of your life, in this war, compared to—”
“So you don’t understand,” he gritted out, enunciating each word as clearly as he could. “I’m not like you, okay? I don’t measure lives in how important they are to the war. Which, by the way, would make yours pretty kriffing valuable.”
“That is not—”
“Just let me— just let me say this, okay?” he implored. At Obi-Wan’s reluctant nod, he paused, and tried to think of the best way to explain himself without sounding even more hopelessly attached. “I’m… selfish, alright? I would never let you sacrifice yourself for me because I wouldn’t be able to live knowing you were dead. Died. For nothing.”
The heat in Obi-Wan’s eyes dimmed. “Anakin, you’re not nothing.” He said it seriously, studiously, as though he were giving a lecture on poisonous planetary gases. He said it the same way he’d said “Anakin, this weapon is your life.”
“I know that,” Anakin snapped, impatient. “I’m not— I’m not saying that. I’m not— I don’t have a death wish, okay? I just need you, if it really comes down to it, to not save my life before yours. I’d rather be dead than… you know. I’d rather be dead than wish I were dead, instead of you.”
A long, horrible moment of silence. He tried not to squirm under Obi-Wan’s disbelieving stare.
“Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding, Anakin — is that not exactly what a death wish is?”
Anakin shook his head, willing himself not to lose his temper. “No, I don’t currently have a death wish, no matter what you—”
“So you don’t have a death wish,” Obi-Wan said, slowly, “but if I died in an attempt to save your life, you’d wish you were dead instead.”
It was Anakin’s turn to stay silent. He closed his eyes. There it was — the pathetic, irrefutable evidence of his attachment, his unrequited neediness — and he couldn’t quite muster the strength to defend himself to his old master.
He’d known for a long time that this moment was bound to come, and he’d avoided it at all costs. It wasn’t that he didn’t think Obi-Wan liked, or even loved him back — he wasn’t that scared, desperately insecure padawan anymore. He’d learned to recognize that his master expressed his affection implicitly: non-verbally, in a warm nudge through the Force and a steady hand on his shoulder, or in rarer instances, a sincere word of praise accompanied by a subtle smile. He knew that Obi-Wan cared for him, cared about him; as the man himself had put it, he wouldn’t have put up with half of Anakin’s “nonsense” otherwise. Obi-Wan’s love felt like what the Force was supposed to feel like, always: gentle and nurturing and all-encompassing.
Anakin’s love felt rabid, like a dog that needed to be put down.
Though Jedi weren’t strictly forbidden to have pets, they were generally discouraged — few had the time to properly care for an animal, and fewer saw the need for one in the first place. (As a padawan, Anakin had given up asking his master for a pet before he’d even tried; Obi-Wan was strangely reluctant to take care of houseplants, so he’d assumed campaigning for a loth-cat companion was a lost cause.) On a mission to Toprawa, though, Anakin had caught his first glimpse of a feral dog — or perhaps it was some hound-variant — tied to an abandoned shipyard post. The dog was skinny enough that its bones showed through its skin; when it snarled and gnashed its teeth at Anakin, though, something told him it wasn’t just material hunger that drove the crazed, anguished look in the animal’s eye — it was something more sinister, more desperate, more dangerous. The dog hadn’t wanted to bite him; it’d wanted to destroy him, and everything that got in its way.
At the time, he’d barely had time to jump back in fright before Obi-Wan, grimly but determined, took out his lightsaber and, with one clean motion, put the dog out of its misery.
Anakin vowed that his eyes would never resemble those of a mad dog’s, but he sometimes thought that perhaps the same couldn’t be said for his heart. He wasn’t naïve enough to believe that Obi-Wan was fully blind to this — he caught the way his master’s eyebrows lifted whenever he slipped and said he had been with “Padmé” instead of “Senator Amidala,” and the way his frown deepened when Anakin spoke a touch too passionately about the Chancellor’s brilliance with handling one crisis or another. And he’d never forget, a few weeks after moving into the Temple, the look on his master’s face the first time he cried about missing his mother — mouth twisted in worry, but eyes bright with impossible empathy for a nine-year-old boy he barely knew and a mother he never met.
But his master hadn’t ever been forced into confronting how deeply Anakin’s attachment grew, certainly not Anakin’s attachment for him. And Anakin was frightened that Obi-Wan would be frightened, that he’d take his own advice and run the opposite direction, that he’d take pity and put Anakin’s love-dog down.
“How old are you, Anakin?”
His eyes shot open. “Huh?” he managed, throat suddenly dry.
Obi-Wan looked thoroughly unimpressed. “I said, how old are you.”
Anakin stared, blank-faced, then bristled a bit, not completely for show. “You know how old I am.”
“Answer the question, please,” Obi-Wan said, a hint of steel returning to his voice.
“I’m almost twenty,” he relented, only a bit petulantly. Leave it to Obi-Wan to snap him out of a spiral in the most condescending way possible. “And yes, I don’t think I’m being immature, and no, you being older doesn’t give you the right to die for me.”
Obi-Wan looked as though he simply longed to roll his eyes, or maybe slam his head down on the table. At Anakin’s narrowed gaze, he instead continued, “How old were you when I took you on as my padawan?”
The non-sequitur took Anakin off balance. “You know that too.”
“Refresh my memory, then,” his master requested.
Anakin sighed, rolling his non-mechno shoulder. He had woken up only a few hours before Obi-Wan, but he was already more than ready to lie down in a proper bed. “I was nine, I guess?”
“That’s right. How many years, then, have we known each other?”
Under his master’s expectant look, Anakin frowned. He wasn’t liking this part of the lecture already — it was the kind that Obi-Wan often structured to logically strong-arm Anakin into agreeing with him no matter what.
“Anakin? I knew you skipped a few of those arithmetic classes, but really…”
“Eleven! I’ve known you for eleven years, okay?” he grumbled, then added, under his breath: “Eleven too many.”
Obi-Wan steadfastly ignored that. “Eleven years,” he repeated.
“Yeah,” Anakin said, defensively. “Are you about to say something sarcastic about wasting a decade of your life, ‘cause I’m—”
“No one is being sarcastic, Anakin,” his master said, placating, leaving the “except you” pointedly unspoken. “I was just attempting to pose a question.”
“Pose it, then,” he groused.
Obi-Wan smiled briefly. “Many thanks for your permission, my dear former padawan,” he said, courteously. Anakin rolled his eyes. “My question pertains to the eleven years we have spent together,” he continued. “I would like to know when, at any point in time, I have led you under the impression that your life, Anakin Skywalker’s life, was less important than mine in any way.”
Barely a moment passed by before Anakin sat up straight again, properly riled up by his infuriating master who simply refused to understand. “Not this again.”
“I am genuinely curious,” Obi-Wan said, sliding elegantly back into irritating-lecture mode. “I would like to know, so I can apologize profusely for a serious error and clear up this misunderstanding once and for all.”
His master fixed him with another expectant look. Anakin stared back. He thought, suddenly and intensely, of the dejarik droids, going and going and going nowhere.
“Despite what Holonet gossip says, Anakin, I am not getting younger,” Obi-Wan said, lightly. “An answer would be much appreciated — perhaps you can schedule it some time in the next few minutes?”
“Master,” he complained.
“Yes?”
Anakin made a face, then mumbled, reluctantly: “Never.”
“Never, what?” Obi-Wan prompted, with the air of someone who knew that victory was inevitable.
“You’ve never made me feel like my life was less important than yours,” he snapped, quickly. “But,” he added, ignoring the pleased look on his master’s face, “that’s not the point. At all. I told you before — it’s not about whose life is more important. It’s about who would be able to keep being useful, to go on — move on — without the other.”
He wasn’t sure how he expected Obi-Wan to react to that — some well-constructed argument on why he was more deserving of death, no doubt — but he hadn’t, not in a hundred years, expected his master’s expression to crumple, to sink into a stark sadness that Anakin had never seen before.
“Wha— Master,” he started, “I didn't—”
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan said, quietly, and he fell silent at once. “I think, perhaps, an apology is in order after all.”
“You’re right,” Anakin said, immediately, relieved at a chance to fix this. “I’m sorry. I mean, I’m not sorry I saved you, but… I’m sorry I’m not sorry.”
He winced — he’d really botched that one up. He opened his mouth to try again, but stilled at Obi-Wan’s raised hand.
“I meant that I must apologize,” his master said, still in that alarmingly quiet voice. “I’d thought — wrongly, I now realize — that you knew.”
“Knew what?”
“Knew that I care for you,” Obi-Wan continued, steadfast. “So much so that I would never move on, if you were to be hurt.”
Anakin gaped, face growing uncomfortably warm. Never? “No— I mean, I know you’d be— sad. Really sad, even. I’d be pretty offended if you weren’t. But, it’s like you said. I’m no good at controlling my… attachments. You, on the other hand — I’m not saying you’d, like, throw a party if I died—” Obi-Wan made a despairing noise. “—but, you know, you’d function. Like a Jedi. Duty over emotion, ‘there is no death, there is the Force,’ et cetera. You— you see what I’m getting at?”
“No.”
“No?” Anakin repeated, wincing in anticipation of the verbal smack-down he was surely about to experience.
“No,” Obi-Wan confirmed.
“Okay…” he said, faintly, “so, no, you don’t see what I’m getting at? Or no, you disagree with— with what I said.”
“No, to all of it,” Obi-Wan said, firmly. “Anakin, I remind you of the code and of protocol so that you follow it to best protect yourself.”
Anakin stared. “Well, okay, but—”
“And,” his master continued, as if he hadn’t spoken, “I bring up attachments because you have become a far greater Jedi than I could ever hope to be. Where I have failed, I have faith that you will succeed.”
He shouldn’t. “Failed? What do you mean, failed?”
Anakin was vaguely aware of his heart beginning to pound. He studied Obi-Wan’s face, watched, transfixed, as his master’s eyes softened.
“Where my attachment to you is concerned, Anakin, I have always been — and will always be — completely and utterly compromised,” Obi-Wan said, simply, as if he weren’t completely crashing down every living thought in Anakin’s brain. “I thought you knew.”
“No I, uh— no,” he managed. Attachment. My attachment. To you.
“So you see, then, what I’ve been attempting to impress on you,” his master said, not missing a beat. Anakin could see Obi-Wan shift, attempt to guide the conversation back to familiar, not-worldview-destroying territory. “In the future, you will put your safety above all else. Are we agreed?”
Obi-Wan’s face had rearranged itself to its usual stern, steady, you-will-be-negotiated-with look, but Anakin wasn’t fooled. “Yeah,” he said, cheerfully. “Um, not about the putting my safety above yours thing. We aren’t agreed on that. Not at all. But I do see what you’ve been—”
“What? Anakin—”
And something about his master’s bemused, exasperatedly outraged expression sent a debilitating shock of fondness through Anakin. The little rabid dog in his chest yawned as it woke, and it wasted no time clawing its way up to his throat, closing it, taking over control of his body. Before he was aware of it, he was removing the straps on the medi-bed, standing up, and practically throwing himself at Obi-Wan. Ignoring his master’s mumbled “Anakin,” he carefully, avoiding the man’s injuries, rested his head into the crook of his neck. He couldn’t bear to see Obi-Wan’s face — couldn’t handle knowing whatever the man was thinking.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered like it was a secret, muffled by Obi-Wan’s shoulder. “I didn’t mean to worry you.”
He heard no response, but he felt a steady hand cup his neck, a familiar embrace from his younger padawan days. Casually, luxuriously, he reached into the remnants of their training bond and was rewarded by an intensely warm, almost tactile glow — one that promised enduring forgiveness and safety and resolution.
And somehow, in the quiet hum of nothing in particular, he heard I love you, whispered back a thousand times.