Chapter Text
Anakin and Obi-Wan both knew that spending three hours browsing at City Lights was really more of an Obi-Wan activity than an Anakin activity, but Anakin was being a good new husband and dutifully kept himself busy while Obi-Wan strolled quietly around the shop and flipped through book after book and had very quiet internal debates with himself about whether he should get this title or that one. At the moment, he had three paperbacks tucked under his arm, and another open in his hand. Anakin tried very hard to bump neither Obi-Wan’s glasses nor the books when he came up behind him and rested his chin on Obi-Wan’s shoulder and an arm around his waist.
“Can I read you something?” Anakin asked against his ear.
“Oh. Of course.” Obi-Wan kept his finger tucked in the page of the book he was reading and turned to kiss Anakin on the cheek. “Where have you been?”
“The travel section.”
“Proceed.”
“So, you know how San Francisco has a lot of gay bars.”
“I was aware of that fact when we chose to come here for our honeymoon, yes.”
“But did you know,” Anakin said excitedly, “that they also have a gay karaoke bar? A couple of them, actually, and this book has this map” –
“Anakin, darling,” Obi-Wan said patiently, while Anakin unwound himself from around his husband and started to unfold the pocket map that came attached to the back cover of the book, “have you been reading a travel book about San Francisco – while we are currently in San Francisco?”
“Yeah. Why?” Anakin frowned while fiddling with the map some more.
Obi-Wan looked like he was trying very hard to suppress a smile. “No reason.”
“This one is closest to our hotel. See, here?” Anakin put his arms over Obi-Wan’s shoulders again so he could hold the book out in front of them and point with his prosthetic finger.
“And you are telling me this because this is an activity you wish to partake in?”
Anakin dropped his voice in both pitch and volume. “Did you just say, ‘partake’?” he teased. The tips of Obi-Wan’s ears went red.
Anakin knew karaoke was far from Obi-Wan’s scene, but it was their last full night out before they flew back home the next day and Anakin wanted to try it at least once, before they needed to return to their real lives, jobs, three children, and an upcoming move. “I promise I won’t make you sing if you don’t want to,” Anakin offered. “I want to, but you don’t have to.”
Obi-Wan sighed. “You’re being kind enough to follow me around here all day, so I suppose turnaround is only fair play.” He hefted the books that had been tucked under his arm. “Here. Buy these for me and I’ll consider it.”
“We share a bank account, babe. We’re literally married.”
“It’s a symbolic gesture.”
“Symbolic gesture, my ass,” Anakin said, and at the same time squeezed Obi-Wan’s ass good-naturedly. But he did take the books up to the checkout counter at the front of the store.
*
Between the wedding ring on his finger and the soppy look on his face whenever he looked at Obi-Wan – not to mention the fact that he mentioned either his wedding, his husband, or both in conversation every other sentence – it was pretty damn obvious to everyone at the bar that Anakin was not interested in a hookup, but he was having a nice time chatting and meeting people nonetheless while he and Obi-Wan waited for Anakin’s karaoke number to come up. Obi-Wan, last Anakin had seen him, had been passing the time flagging down the bartender to get refills on their drinks – sodas for both of them, now, and Anakin had switched to non-alcoholic substances sooner than Obi-Wan had, but, also, he was on a lot heavier dosages of prescription medications than Obi-Wan was – but it had been a few minutes since they had crossed paths, which was unfortunate because just then a song started that Anakin knew Obi-Wan knew, and he turned to laugh about it with him, only Obi-Wan wasn’t there.
“Oh. Shit,” Anakin said, looking around. “Has anybody seen where my husband’s got off to?”
The people sitting at the bar on either side of Anakin looked around, too, but decided pretty quickly that no, they didn’t see Obi-Wan, either. (He wasn’t hard to miss. For some reason, he’d decided that tonight was the perfect time to wear the very brightly patterned floral Hawaiian shirt Ahsoka had gotten him last Father’s Day as what she’d intended to be a gag gift, only he’d taken it seriously, and looked absolutely delighted to have received something Anakin and Ahsoka privately thought made him look about ten years older than he actually was.)
“Shit,” Anakin said again. Obi-Wan liked this song, damnit, and it was probably the first time all night something had come on that he liked, and here he was, in the bathroom or something, missing it. Anakin wasn’t a particularly big Peter Gabriel fan, himself – certainly not as much as Obi-Wan was, but then, almost nobody their age was as big a Peter Gabriel fan as Obi-Wan was – but at least this particular song had a pretty good beat to it, and Anakin found himself bopping his head along as he looked around for his husband and waited for the flute solo to finish and the horn section to kick in.
“Doo doo doo doo doo doo,” Anakin hummed along to himself. “Doo doo doo.”
“Hey, hey!” sang a voice from the back room, where the karaoke stand was.
Anakin twisted on his barstool. That couldn’t – well it probably wasn’t – okay, no, it could not be – even though it did sound like -
“You could have a steam train,” Obi-Wan sang from the next room, in that perfect tenor of his that Anakin was sure he would never, ever get him to show off in public if he’d had a million years to convince him and a million dollars to bet the opposite way. “If you’d just lay down your tracks.”
Anakin did not remember getting up off his stool, or walking across the bar to the back room, or pushing open the curtains that separated the karaoke area from the rest of the bar. All he remembered was standing in the doorway, his mouth hanging open in astonishment, as Obi-Wan Kenobi, in his god-awful Hawaiian shirt, microphone in his hand, beamed down at him from the stage.
They just stood there, staring at one another, Obi-Wan grinning and Anakin halfway to collapsing on the ground in weak-kneed astonishment, waiting a few more seconds for the beat to kick in and then Obi-Wan, still looking at Anakin, raised the microphone to his lips and sang, “You could have an air-o-plane, flying.” There was a teleprompter built into the stage at his feet, but he clearly didn’t need it, as he hadn’t broken eye contact with Anakin once since he’d spotted him. “If you bring your blue sky back!”
The thing was – okay, maybe not the main thing, because the main thing was, Anakin’s husband might well have been possessed by a pod person, for all Anakin had expected his evening to take this particular turn of events – but the second thing was, Obi-Wan was singing Sledgehammer. And Sledgehammer was a song about sex. More specifically, it was a song about dicks. Even more specifically, it was about a guy boasting about how great his dick is, and how the person he’s trying to convince to have sex with him, should really just have sex with him, already, because it will be really great sex (because of the aforementioned great dick).
The first time Anakin had noticed this, Obi-Wan had been cleaning out the lint trap in one of the USC washing machines. Anakin, bored of doing homework alone in their room, had followed him to the laundry room, and the radio was on and Obi-Wan had said, “Oh, I like this song,” when Sledgehammer started playing, and began singing quietly to himself while balling up a pair of Anakin’s gym socks. They had been the only two people in there, and Anakin was looking for a distraction from conjugating verbs anyway, so he kept his eyes on his book but stopped writing and just listened to Obi-Wan sing, instead.
Generally, Anakin didn’t care much about lyrics. Songs were meant to be about how they made you feel; who cared what they were actually supposed to be about. And Obi-Wan’s music, especially when compared to what Anakin usually listened to, could be pretty dense. He talked about ‘narrative flow’ when they were in the car together, listening to some eight-minute track when Anakin had had his radio privileges revoked for some reason or another, like they were listening to somebody’s fucking English class assignment. So Anakin usually just tuned out whatever the words actually were, in any song Obi-Wan said he liked.
But it was a little hard to overlook the second time your usually very-reserved roommate did a pelvic thrust while saying, “I wanna be your sledgehammer,” even if he did have a pair of socks in his hands at the time.
“Obi-Wan,” Anakin had said slowly, aware he was risking both being told off for not doing his homework and that any indication that Anakin was actually listening to him would likely make Obi-Wan stop singing, “is ‘sledgehammer’ a metaphor for…?” He made the universally understood hand gesture for jacking off.
“Yes,” Obi-Wan had nodded.
“Oh. Okay.” Anakin had not expected to get an answer that quickly. He went back to pretending to do his homework.
Now, up on stage, Obi-Wan was crooking a finger at him, keeping in time with the music as he did so. “All you do is call me!” He’d tipped his chin down and was looking out at Anakin with an expression that could only be described as ‘sultry’ (despite that fucking stupid Hawaiian shirt). “I’ll be anything you need.”
The day Anakin Skywalker needed to be invited up on stage twice would be a rare day indeed (and especially when his husband was talking about giving him anything he needed). He all but sprinted toward Obi-Wan, dodging the low tables and couches that were set up around the room for people waiting for their turn at karaoke and/or making fun of their friends already doing it, and while he was doing that Obi-Wan paced from one end of the stage to the other and back again.
Who the hell taught that man stage presence? Anakin wondered as he skidded to a stop and braced himself against the cheap particleboard, pressing his palms against the stage on either side of the teleprompter and beaming up at his husband. Anakin loved Obi-Wan more than life itself but he was pretty sure he would have noticed if Obi-Wan had been spending a lot of time watching old Rolling Stones concert DVDs, but he also didn’t have any other explanation for how Obi-Wan had just stopped directly in front of him, legs spread and feet planted wide, so that when Anakin looked up, he was looking directly at Obi-Wan’s crotch. (And while Obi-Wan’s Hawaiian shirt might have been the dorkiest, grandpa-looking thing in his closet by a wide margin [which was impressive, because his closet also contained multiple cardigan sweaters], he had paired it with his tightest jeans, which from this and possibly every other angle left very little to the imagination.)
“You could have a big dipper,” Obi-Wan sang next, directly to Anakin below him, and Anakin near about choked on his own tongue. On the next line - “going up and down, all around the bends” – Obi-Wan did crouch down, bending his knees and balancing on his toes, and he held the microphone in one hand and extended his other hand to Anakin, preparing to help him up onto the stage.
Anakin may have been an amputee but he also had logged innumerable hours getting into and out of pools with nothing but his own body weight and momentum, and even losing half an arm had only made him compensate by bulking out his shoulders and chest more, so he didn’t actually need any help getting onto anything as paltry as a three-foot high stage that didn’t even come up to his waist. But when Obi-Wan offered to hold his hand, his natural instinct was to take it. They clasped each others’ forearms, Obi-Wan stood up, Anakin pushed off the ground, and suddenly they were standing right in front of each other, so close their chests were brushing. Anakin’s back was probably totally blocking Obi-Wan from the view of everyone in the audience right now, but what did he care? This whole performance was for him anyway.
Obi-Wan held his gaze as he brought the microphone up between them. “You could have a bumper car” – and before he could finish getting all the words out Anakin suddenly had a flashback to not just that day in the laundry room but another day, too, just after Anakin had been released from Bakersfield hospital, and Obi-Wan was driving him to physical therapy, probably, or maybe a doctor’s appointment, and the same song had come on the radio and Obi-Wan had sang it to him then, too, and his hair had looked so red, in that moment, with the way the sunlight was hitting it, and Anakin had been hot and sweaty and sticky in the summer heat but he hadn’t cared because Obi-Wan was happy enough to be singing along to the radio again and Anakin hadn’t thought he was ever going to get to hear that sound again in his lifetime, but there he was, in a car beside Obi-Wan, the windows down and Obi-Wan waiting for him to pick up the next line because he knew that Anakin knew it.
And Anakin still did. “Bumping!” he shouted back, and threw in his own pelvic thrust for good measure. Given how closely they were already standing, this move practically knocked Obi-Wan backwards and off his feet, but he kept his balance by grabbing on to Anakin’s waist with the hand that didn’t have a microphone in it, and he even laughed.
“This amusement never ends!” Obi-Wan shouted back, laughter still crinkling the corners of his eyes.
Anakin knew what came up next, too. He leaned even more into Obi-Wan’s space, close enough to kiss him, so that they were sharing the microphone. “I wanna be! Your sledgehammer!” they sang to each other. Anakin realized he was shaking his butt in time to the music and he didn’t care. “Why don’t you call my name?”
Obi-Wan used both his hand on Anakin’s hip and the fact that he and Anakin were literally sharing air to tip Anakin back a little – not by actually touching him but just by bending at his own waist and pressing his own torso forward, which made Anakin on instinct bend backwards so that they didn’t run into each other, which meant now he was bent at the waist toward the audience, his hair loose behind him and Obi-Wan’s grip on his hip keeping him upright, their chests almost brushing.
Anakin threw his head back and shouted in glee, at the same time that Obi-Wan offered him, “Why don’t you let me be your sledgehammer?” and shifted his hand so that now he had his whole arm around Anakin’s waist, taking some of the pressure of holding himself up off of Anakin’s abdominal muscles (not that they minded all that much; Anakin didn’t let the twins sit on his knees while he did boat-to-low-boats every night just for funsies).
Obi-Wan yanked Anakin back up to standing as he finished the line. “This will be my – testimony,” he sang, with only a slight grunt.
But, Obi-Wan had just said earlier that turnaround was fair play, had he not? Now that Anakin was vertical again, he turned the tables on him and pushed himself forward, so that now Obi-Wan was the one who had to lean back. “Yeah!” Anakin said.
Fortunately, the next line was call-and-response anyway. “Yeah!” Obi-Wan shot back.
Anakin didn’t make him stay like that too long; they stood up straight and faced one another. There was a little musical break that Obi-Wan used to replace the microphone in its stand at the center of the stage. He had only just finished screwing it in when it was time to sing, “Show me ‘round your fruit cage,” and he leaned forward to do it, now facing Anakin again, who was standing across from him on the other side of the microphone. “‘Cause I will be your honey bee.” And it was, for a dorky double entendre, actually incredibly sweet, and Anakin felt himself almost getting a little misty-eyed, at how obviously much Obi-Wan loved him, that he was willing to do this thing for Anakin. “Open up your fruit cage,” Obi-Wan sang again, practically serenading him at this point, “where the fruit is sweet as can be.”
That line led right into another refrain of, “I wanna be! Your sledgehammer!” but both Obi-Wan and Anakin missed it, because Anakin had pulled Obi-Wan to him by the waist and was making out with him right there on stage, in front of who cared how many witnesses, and by the time Peter Gabriel would have got to ‘You’d better call the sledgehammer,’ Anakin had moved on to grabbing his ass, too. (That was what marriage was for, right? Getting to grab your husband’s ass whenever you felt like it?)
Obi-Wan didn’t seem to mind all that terribly much, considering he was groaning into Anakin’s mouth, but he was the one to pull their faces apart just enough to sing, quite loudly since in their exuberance they’d moved a bit away from the microphone stand, “I get it right!”
Anakin had, until just then, actually momentarily forgotten that they were in the middle of a karaoke performance. “I kicked the habit,” Obi-Wan continued, and simultaneously Anakin’s muscle memory kicked in and he blurted out,
“Kicked the habit, kicked the habit!”
Obi-Wan nodded vigorously at him, encouraging him. “Shed my skin!” he prompted.
“Shed my skin!” Anakin echoed.
“This is the new stuff!” Obi-Wan was absolutely beaming at him, smiling so hard he almost wasn’t able to get the words out.
His exuberance was rubbing off; Anakin was having the time of his life. “This is the new stuff!”
“I go dancing in” -
“We go dancing in!”
“Won’t you show up for me?”
“Show up for me!”
“I will show up for you!” Like the showman Anakin (privately) knew he could be, on ‘you,’ Obi-Wan pointed at Anakin from across the microphone.
“Show up for you!”
“Please!” And, like it was something out of one of Anakin’s fantasies, Obi-Wan did the pelvic thrust again. Anakin was so shocked – albeit delighted – that he missed his next line, which was another ‘show up for me.’
Obi-Wan took the next one – “Show up for me” – and Anakin’s brain kicked back on line in time for,
“I will show up for you!” Now it was Anakin’s turn to point at Obi-Wan, and, now that the ball was in his court, he really went for broke. He was getting sweaty, up under the lights, and he didn’t care. “Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I do mean you!”
“Only you!” Obi-Wan told him, and he was getting sweaty too, because he had to push his hair back off his forehead. “You’ve been comin’ through!”
“Show up for you!”
After Obi-Wan practically shouted “I’m gonna build that power!” – for a man who had never wanted to do karaoke before he was getting more than a little into it now – he even crooked his fingers at Anakin again for “Come on, come on, help me through! Come on, come, help me through!”
Anakin readily agreed. “Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you!” he called again, shaking his head and not caring if his curls got messy.
“I’ve been feelin’ the rhythm!” Obi-Wan shouted happily.
“I been feelin’ the rhythm!” Anakin called back. The song kept going on a fade-out from there, but Anakin was delighted enough (and turned on enough) that he didn’t need anything more, and couldn’t keep his hands off of Obi-Wan long enough to get it even if he did. He rushed at him, picked him up behind the knees, and held Obi-Wan in his arms high enough that he was practically looming over Anakin.
“Love you so fucking much,” Anakin said, over the din of applause from the audience he’d practically forgotten they even had.
“I know,” Obi-Wan said, an unmistakable sparkle in his eye. He cupped Anakin’s jaw in both his hands. “Happy honeymoon, my darling.”
Anakin turned his head, squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, and pressed a firm kiss to the palm of Obi-Wan’s left hand. Then he put him down on the ground again, because carrying Obi-Wan was a lot more work than carrying the twins was. “Come on,” he said, and tugged Obi-Wan behind him. They used the stairs, this time, unlike when Obi-Wan had pulled Anakin onto the stage.
Anakin ignored the greetings and congratulations of the crowd and pulled Obi-Wan all the way to the back of the room, where the recording desk was. Anakin had seen a sign when they’d entered that you could, if you so chose, purchase yours or anyone else’s karaoke performance on a DVD, and he’d filed that fact away in his brain of an idea for a gag gift for Ahsoka – they’d already gotten her a real gift, from the gift shop at the base of the Golden Gate bridge, but Anakin had thought it might be funny to first present her with a DVD of Anakin, probably shirtless, doing truly terrible karaoke, and see if he could convince her that it was her only present before bringing out the real thing – but now he had something much, much better in mind.
“Hi!” Anakin told the man working the counter cheerily. He slung an arm around Obi-Wan’s waist and brought him with him, holding him firmly in place. “That song we just did, Sledgehammer? I’m going to need, oh, two – no, four” – he did some quick math in his head – “no, twelve” –
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan said.
“You’re right.” Anakin leaned even further forward on the counter. “Let me ask you this. You tell me how many blank DVDs you do have, and I’ll figure out if I need all of them or not.”
“Anakin, they’re ten dollars each,” Obi-Wan pointed out. “And no one is ever going to see this except me and you.”
Anakin looked at him, deeply offended. “Didn’t you have fun up there?”
“Yes, but” –
“Because you looked like you were having fun.”
“Fine, but, sweetheart, this was just for us. I don’t want crowds – I don’t want anyone seeing this except maybe you, in the privacy of our own bedroom. Hell, I don’t even ever want to see it again.” He shuddered beside Anakin.
“Twenty-five people saw you just now,” Anakin said, a little incredulously, indicating at the room at large behind them with his chin.
“That’s different. I don’t know them.”
“You mean you’re not going to let me show this to Ahsoka?”
Obi-Wan shuddered again. “Oh, God no.”
Anakin pouted. “But I want to. It’s not, like, a sex tape. We didn’t even take any clothes off. You sounded great, babe.”
The man behind the counter nodded. “I see a lot of bad karaoke, and you two were actually pretty good.”
“Thank you,” Obi-Wan said, without taking his eyes off of Anakin. “I’m afraid this is going to be a bit of a deal-breaker for me, darling.”
Anakin frowned. “I really feel like you could have mentioned that before we started, but fine.” He thought about the contents of his wallet as he turned back to the desk employee. “I will limit myself to four copies, please, because my husband is being a little bit of a stick-in-the-mud.”
“Four…Anakin, we do not need four of anything,” Obi-Wan protested. “One is plenty. What do you even need the other three for?”
“For if something happens to the first one,” Anakin said, he thought, quite reasonably. Obi-Wan opened his mouth to protest, but Anakin barreled on. “What if there’s a fire, hmm? What if the kids break one? What if I lose one? You know I lose things!” he protested hotly, and Obi-Wan finally shut his mouth and seemed to acquiesce. “This way,” Anakin continued, more calmly, “we have some spares. It’s not like a DVD of Sleeping Beauty or something, that I can just get another one if something happens to it. This is important.” To really make his point, he got further into Obi-Wan’s space, held him by the hips, and rested their foreheads together. “Please, love. Let me have this. I loved this so much, and I love that you did it for me, and I want to have it so I can remember this even when we’re a hundred years old and sitting in rocking chairs in the old folks’ home all day.”
Obi-Wan frowned, but Anakin knew he was giving in. “We can’t afford an old folks’ home. Ahsoka is going to have to take care of us.”
Anakin chuckled. “She’ll be so bad at that.”
“Terrible,” Obi-Wan agreed. He took Anakin’s elbows in his hands and squeezed. “It’s a good thing we can’t afford a life insurance policy, either, or she’d start poisoning us in our eighties to be rid of us.”
Anakin grinned. “She might do that anyway.” He shifted, so that he could have his hands free to take Obi-Wan in his arms and hold him against his chest for a very long hug. He ended up with his arms wrapped around Obi-Wan’s shoulders, and Obi-Wan’s arms loosely draped around Anakin’s waist. “I love you, very much.”
“Oh,” Obi-Wan said, starting to blush, “just get the fucking DVDs before I change my mind.”
“Thank you!” Anakin enthused happily, and pulled out his wallet one-handed so that he could continue to hold Obi-Wan with the other.