Chapter Text
After years of mostly intelligence gathering, with only a smattering of assassinations once Anakin had turned 17, of never staying in one place for more than a month or two at a time, Anakin and Obi-Wan are assigned a long-term mission. A mission that they haven’t been briefed on, yet, despite the small handful of short-term missions they’ve done since landing on Coruscant. It’s to get used to the new dynamic, Anakin suspects, since the Council has sent a Togrutan teen, Ahsoka to join them. It makes Anakin a little sad to see how young she is and part of the Jedi Order, but he knows that only those who don’t exist are part of it, and the implications come with that.
It’s been half a year since they moved into their new base of operations, a quaint little shop where Obi-Wan sells his special blended tea. They use the excuse that Obi-Wan grows most of the flowers and herbs himself to ensure they are both organic and high quality to explain why quantity is low and why Obi-Wan requires both Anakin and Ahsoka’s assistance in the shop. Obi-Wan decorates the shop with plenty of plants, little bursts of color in the sea of green.
It looks like a flower shop from the outside with the amount of greenery, and Anakin knows The Council had meant it to be before Obi-Wan got his hands on the actual shop. In the end, it didn’t quite matter whether their front was a tea shop or a flower shop, so The Council allowed Obi-Wan to indulge in his hobby of mixing specialty tea while Anakin cried over the endless cups of hot leaf juice he was forced to suffer every time Obi-Wan was considering a new flavor for the shop. (Obi-Wan often points out, quite primly, that it isn’t like caf isn’t just hot bean juice, which Anakin swears to all the little gods is blasphemy, so he should stop throwing rocks in little glass houses.)
Anakin and Ahsoka are kind enough to pretend that Obi-Wan isn’t just indulging in his fondness for expensive tea or that he isn’t bribing members of The Council with highly customized blends. The turnover from the shop supplements their allowance from The Council nicely and allows Anakin to tinker with more than just scraps he scrounges here and there and Ahsoka to amass a truly impressive array of daggers.
The problem with the entire operation isn’t even that they had to relocate and invent new identities for themselves after finding out Dooku didn’t just leave the Jedi Order but defected for an aristocratic title of all things, but that Obi-Wan had chosen “Ben Gonn” as his new alias.
Obi-Wan claims it’s in remembrance of Qui-Gonn Jinn, his mentor and coincidentally, the man who had carried 9 year old Anakin away from his mother’s cooling body and a life of slavery. But the truth is that Obi-Wan is a bigger troll than anyone Anakin knows and Anakin had seen the smug little smile when Anakin had indignantly shrieked that he was desecrating a good man’s name for the sake of a pun. (Obi-Wan proceeding to name the new shop “Memories” was truly the final straw that broke the bantha’s back and caused Anakin to devolve into wordless righteous fury that made Ahsoka dissolve into tearful peals of laughter, finger pointing and all. It was, Anakin considers in hindsight, at least kind of Obi-Wan to hide his own amusement behind a cup of tea.)
Everything is aggravated by the fact that Vos, who gives them their missions under the guise as their tea leaf supplier, enjoys blasting “Since You’ve Been Gone” on full volume from his landspeeder as he unloads Obi-Wan’s extortionately expensively dried leaves.
So maybe the man who has essentially raised him is shameless and apparently thinks dad jokes are great super secret assassin cover names, but Anakin believes in keeping things simple —and Dooku had never met Anakin and the Order in general tends to keep to code names unless the agents in question are required to work together for prolonged periods of time —so he just changed his last name from a last name that some might recognize as a slave last name to Walker and leaves it at that despite Ahsoka’s protests that Nightwalker would be so much cooler.
Honestly, Obi-Wan is a terrible influence and Anakin has no idea why they thought allowing Obi-Wan to raise another youngling was a great idea. Don’t they see how scarred Anakin is from all the flirting the man does? How many times has Anakin wanted to throw himself off high ledges and towers willed into existence by his own desire each time Obi-Wan had cheerfully informed him, “I’ll be the distraction,” only to lean into a target’s personal space and say carefully with the soft curls of his high Coruscanti accent around the words, “Hello there,” which inevitably leads to the target irresistibly leaning forward as well?
Ahsoka finds it all hilarious and delights in all the ways Anakin makes disgusted faces each time Obi-Wan opens his mouth and yet another poor soul is helplessly charmed.
Then again, Ahsoka is a new enough addition to their team that she hasn’t had to suffer the failed murder-suicide attempts some of Obi-Wan’s admirers have tried on a few memorable missions. One of them had a Rodian shouting the eternal words, “If I can’t have you, no one can!” moments before attempting to stab Obi-Wan with a fruit knife.
It had all been very Shakespearen and dramatic.
Obi-Wan had left it out of the mission debriefing while they were en route to their next mission. Anakin had repeatedly brought it up, being 10 years old and clearly traumatized by the whole affair.
It had been the first time Anakin regretted insisting he joined the Order after Qui-Gonn and Obi-Wan had saved him from slavery. Some days, usually days when Obi-Wan’s excessive flirting causes some kind of catastrophe (or more often, causes Anakin to experience something very reminiscent of heartburn), he briefly forgets how eager he was to smash slave rings and bring justice to the world. He would be saving people like himself and his mother, 9-year-old him had thought, feeling empowered and free, riding on the high of having his slave chip removed. And exploded. (It was a tiny, controlled explosion, in Anakin’s defense.)
The Council had deliberated for weeks. It was, Obi-Wan had admitted kindly, because it was their mandate to protect the innocent and the young. He did not mention that Anakin himself was young, which had made Anakin’s approximation of Obi-Wan increase by leaps and bounds. At that time, it had already been rather high, since Obi-Wan had been the one to avenge Qui-Gon’s death.
In the end, they had allowed Anakin to join the Order at the tender age of 9, which had relegated Obi-Wan, temporarily, from his previous position of assassination to intelligence.
Those first few months with Obi-Wan, Anakin would’ve sworn Obi-Wan was the best there was. He was kind, brave, and dutiful. He saved people and brought justice to people like slavers and other sleemos. He taught Anakin to read, write, and arithmetic. He taught Anakin how to fly a ship and co-pilot as long as it wasn’t take-off or landing.
The illusion died quickly after the first undercover mission instead of breaking and entering and The First Incident. It quickly snowballed into an untold number of Incidents. Anakin stopped counting by the time he turned 12.
All of this brings Anakin back to the issue at hand which is the fact that Anakin returned from his class (Anakin is unspeakably pleased he was allowed to choose what major his cover enrolled in and The Council hadn’t given Obi-Wan free reign to choose —what if, horror of all horrors, the man had chosen something like Literature as his major and he was forced to read poetry?) to find Obi-Wan leaning over his counter, flashing white, straight teeth at the man across from him.
A man with a very well-known face.
It is, in all likelihood, not actually Jango Fett that Obi-Wan is flirting with, but all the clones are trained bounty hunters or mercenaries. Which means they have intelligence networks. Flirting with civvies is one thing, flirting with someone who is almost definitely a mercenary or bounty hunter is a whole different, messier matter.
Does Obi-Wan remember all the lessons in “avoiding the wrong kind of attention” the older man had constantly lectured Anakin on? Surely this is the epitome of “wrong kind of attention”!
Instead, all Obi-Wan does is blink slowly at Anakin, a soft smile on his face.
“Anakin!” The bane of Anakin’s blood pressure says, “This is Cody. I’ve been meaning to introduce the two of you, but usually you’ve got classes or projects keeping you busy.”
“Projects” is code for Anakin doing research on their targets and doing highly illegal things like hacking into a sovereign planet’s or private company’s various highly confidential databases and downloading terabytes worth of information for R2D2 to collate and organize for Obi-Wan to read.
Hopefully Jango-Fucking-Fett’s DNA which somehow guarantees all clones are super humanly efficient warriors doesn’t include the ability to read minds.
Anakin tries to tell Obi-Wan to shut up and not even tangentially mention their highly illegal operations they conduct in the name of Justice and The Greater Good with just his eyebrows.
Obi-Wan either purposely ignores his desperate messages or Anakin hasn’t learned Obi-Wan’s fine art of Significant Eyebrow Raising.
Cody just nods prefunctually and extends a hand. Anakin stares at the hand. Obi-Wan raises a pointed eyebrow. Don’t be rude, the eyebrow says.
“Uh, hi. Anakin. I’m Anakin,” he says awkwardly as he shakes Cody’s hand.
“Cody,” the man says simply, raising an eyebrow as well. An amused eyebrow. Anakin shifts on his feet feeling embarrassed to the tips of his toes.
“Cody is kind enough to help me test my limited time flavors,” Obi-Wan says warmly, eyes crinkling as he smiles at the other man. Cody gives a small smile back. Anakin doesn’t think he’s the type of man to smile often. With very real terror, Anakin considers the fallout that might ensue if Cody decides to commit murder-suicide. He thinks he might have a stroke.
“Wait,” Anakin realizes as Obi-Wan’s words sink in. “If you have Cody testing your new blends, why are you forcing Ahsoka and me to try your shriveled leaf water?” How many cups of tea has he had to drink that could’ve been avoided?
“Don’t be silly, Anakin,” the single most evil person to ever grace Coruscant responds serenely, “It is best to canvass multiple people’s opinions when it comes to testing new products. I obviously cannot just rely on you and Ahsoka.”
Why Obi-Wan insists Anakin needs to be one of the testers is beyond him. He only takes his caf with more milk and sugar than Ahsoka, a 16 year old teen who already requests for two extra shots of caramel with every caf order she makes at the cafe two stores over. Every time Anakin attempts to add more than a teaspoon of milk or honey to any cup of test tea Obi-Wan makes, he gets a judgmental look from the older man.
It’s not even like milk and honey do enough to hide the taste of mummified flower-or-leaf water.
Cody turns back to Obi-Wan, still smiling. Anakin checks his own pulse, idly wondering if Obi-Wan related stress will be the cause of his first heart attack at the tender age of 19.
“Speaking of test batches, the shig was well-received,” Cody says. “In fact, he said it reminded him of a blend he had in his childhood.”
Obi-Wan looks unspeakably pleased. “I did spend a year in Mandalorian space when I was young. I spent a few months in Keldabe, and there was this tiny little shop next to my favorite restaurant that served the best tiingilar that sold this lovely blend of shig. I used to buy a new batch every week after treating myself to a bowl of tiingilar.” He leans in, as if sharing a secret just for Cody, “I tried to recreate that taste. It brings back lovely memories.”
The look Cody gives Obi-Wan is unspeakably fond. Anakin is trying to set up contingencies for when Cody inevitably kidnaps Obi-Wan and tries to brainwash him into loving him back like that one desperate Pantoran admirer did when Anakin was 15 and forced to sneak into a diplomat’s chambers to rescue his mentor, furious that their extraction was delayed because Obi-Wan couldn’t stop seducing people into insanity. Accidentally.
Anakin is still imagining the various ways he will have to introduce Ahsoka to the complicated art of rescuing Obi-Wan from overzealous admirers when Obi-Wan slides three tin containers to Cody and winks.
“Your usual blend,” he says pointing to the larger orange colored container. “And a bonus batch of shig for you to try yourself and a new test batch. Herbal, this time, and the main flavors are rooibos and muja fruit, but there are hints of Roonan lemon and some behot root. On the house. Thank you for continuing to lend your assistance, dearest one.”
Anakin blanches. Cody lets out an amused chuckle.
“I am easily bribed, it seems.” He tucks the containers into a rather large pouch on his belt, nods at Obi-Wan and Anakin in turn, and leaves the shop.
Anakin is surprised to hear the bell over the shop door ring again before he can even reach the back of the store to put on his apron and grab the watering pot. It’s usually slow enough this time of day that Anakin takes over the front of the shop and waters the plants while Obi-Wan retreats into the back of the store to prepare more blends for the next day. He turns to find Vos giving a two-fingered salute and a cheeky grin on his face.
“Anyone going to help me lug in the new shipment?”
With a sigh, Anakin finishes knotting his apron string. “On it.”
“I’ll prep the storage room,” Obi-Wan states, one hand on the briefing room doorknob and dialing Ahsoka’s number with the other. “I’ll let Ahsoka know we’ll need her help.”
Time for their real job, Anakin thinks as he flips the sign over to “Closed” and follows Vos outside.