Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Padmé and Anakin make their goodbyes to Coruscant one teary and emotional morning at the start of the year, holding two babies and each other’s hands, barely splitting apart even to offer hugs, like their new ability to show their love for each other in public—or, to be fair and honest, slightly more in public than before—had physically welded them together. “You must visit,” Padmé had told Obi-Wan.

“I’m not sure Obi-Wan can find the time away from all this negotiating he’s busy with,” Anakin had said, his teasing falling a little flat in the face of the fact that he looked a little like he wanted to cry.

“Oh, I’ll be sure to tell system leaders they’re keeping me from visiting my dear friends,” he’d said, and they’d all laughed with the knowledge that there was nothing they could really do about their divergent responsibilities, and that with them on Naboo and Obi-Wan anywhere in the galaxy at any given moment, they would, necessarily, grow further and further apart, until one day he would say to himself, “Oh, my old friends, Anakin and Padmé. I wonder how they are?” and not even think to comm.

So naturally, a month later, Obi-Wan walks into his suite to find Anakin sitting on his couch, holding a bottle of extremely fine Corellian Rum and looking a little sheepish.

“Does Padmé know you’re here?” is the first thing he thinks to ask.

Anakin has the gall to look affronted about it, like he isn’t in the Jedi Temple only weeks after leaving with loud proclamations that he wouldn’t miss Coruscant one bit. “Of course! Why wouldn’t Padmé know?”

Obi-Wan raises an eyebrow. “So you aren’t hiding away from domestic bliss half a galaxy away from your wife?”

Anakin laughs. “No! I’m not hiding, Padmé and I were just in Coruscant for—something official. Senator business. I thought I’d come say hi… and invite you to dinner tomorrow.”

Briefly, fleetingly, it strikes Obi-Wan as odd that they had chosen to go to Naboo and then return for this Senator business, but he knows well enough the unreliability of bureaucratic procedure, so he lets it go. They have a lovely afternoon as Anakin tells him all about the trials and tribulations of finding a house, something he’s never considered that he might one day have to do, and also the joys and sorrows of having infant children.

As he leaves, he says, lightly, “Is this strange? Me being here?”

Obi-Wan has spent the majority of his adult life with Anakin living in his pocket, first in their shared suite, and then in various bunks and conference rooms and bridges and tents across the galaxy. The strange part has only ever been being alone. He can’t say that, though, not when Anakin’s life has moved so crucially on, so he says, “The Temple will always have a place for you, Anakin.”

Anakin laughs and says, “I don’t think Master Windu agrees.”

It’s where the moment should end, where Obi-Wan should dam his rampant nostalgia and tease Anakin about that old grudge or say something about Mace having a point. He does not. Obi-Wan holds onto it until it’s flimsi thin and tearing away, and says, “Well, you are always welcome to my home.”

Anakin smiles that bashful smile of his, maybe a little embarrassed by his old master’s blatant display of emotion, and says, “You’re going to regret saying that, old man.”

They both know it’s a joke.

Dinner is, unfortunately, cancelled because of an emergency that has Obi-Wan shipping out of Coruscant overnight. The holo he gets from Padmé when he exits hyperspace sixteen hours later has her trying and failing to look stern. “Master Kenobi, I’ll forgive you missing the first dinner party I’ve been able to host with Anakin if you promise to visit us the next time you’re in the Mid Rim,” she says.

“Assuming we’ve found a house by then,” Anakin echoes in the background, warbly because he’s outside of the recorder’s range, and Padmé turns her brilliant smile away from the ‘cam right as it fades.

Padmé’s “Senator business" brings her, just her this time, back to Coruscant in another five weeks, with her handpicked senatorial replacement in tow.

Naboo’s rules for public servants are very strict, he learns that afternoon, sitting in a sun-drenched corner of the room Padmé is staying in—her senatorial apartments now no longer hers—because they cannot risk a senator growing distracted or ‘emotionally compromised’ (this punctuated by an eye-roll). That, and Padmé had made a number of people in the upper echelons of Naboo politics very unhappy by having a secret unregistered wedding with a Jedi knight and telling nobody about it for three years.

He can’t quite make out if it’s the choice of partner they object to or the secrecy. For some definition of secrecy, anyway.

“Your replacement certainly has very large shoes to fill,” he says, and Padmé laughs and raises one very dainty, very small foot. “Figuratively.”

“I’m sure Senator Namun will do admirably. He was our delegate in the Kira sector for eleven years. And of course, he’ll have Jar Jar.”

Obi-Wan raises a brow. Junior Senator Binks’ position is of course nothing to do with hers, but somehow he’d assumed...

“Has anyone ever told you you’re quite diabolical?”

Padmé grins. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Master Jedi,” she says, and then, “And I’m in no hurry to return to politics. We’ve just found a house, if you’ll believe it. It’s why Ani couldn’t come.”

Obi-Wan feels his smile turn just a hint brittle. “Oh?” he asks, polite.

Padmé is as eager to talk about marital bliss as Anakin was. “We have an estate in the Lake County, but Sola—my sister—has just moved there from Theed, and we wanted something that was just ours. It’s a beautiful place for children, close to a lake, with water all around...”

Obi-Wan decides to keep a remark on Anakin’s opinions on water, especially in bodies so large you needed apparatus to breathe, to himself. “It sounds like a beautiful place,” he says, and it does. He can just imagine the two of them on some balcony overlooking Naboo’s shining blue waters, with two children with Anakin’s eyes and Padmé’s hair, the very picture of family. They could be on a brochure.

Padmé seems to get lost in this picturesque image just as he does. It’s not quite the look she gets when she’s talking about Anakin, something a little dreamy, a little like she’s won a game no one else knows they were playing, a little like she has a secret, and just a little bit lost. Obi-Wan has had a lot of time to study that expression, because Anakin has the same one.

This isn’t that: it’s reserved, in comparison. Thoughtful. He only has a moment to wonder what it is she’s seeing before she snaps back to herself with a shake of the head. 

The rest of their lunch is mostly Senate gossip—despite having been away for most of the last few months, she knows more than he does. Padmé solves a problem Master Ti has been having with GAR command, gives him a suggestion to pass onto Bail to give Mace, and generally proves what he’d said about her successor’s shoes, regardless of relative foot size.

“You must visit us when you can,” she says again later. “Stars only know when I’ll be on Coruscant again, and... I’ve missed having our teas and lunches.”

“As have I,” he says, pleased. He had spent little time on Coruscant during the war, but it had always been a source of comfort, a kind of sheltered space away, to visit Padmé for an hour, even if all they talked about was the war one way or another. “Though I must admit, I didn’t always leave them feeling as if I’d been caught in a tornado. A helpful one, to be sure, but—"

Padmé flushes. “Being back on Coruscant is strange that way. I feel like I have to be ...Senator Amidala. Solve every problem in the Senate.” She laughs. “It’s so different on Naboo. So peaceful.”

He wonders what she’s like on Naboo as he takes the shuttle back to the Temple, if somehow the clear air and slow spin and the sight of real mountains and grass clear this buzz of her thoughts, pull them away from the galactic concerns she bears on her shoulders on Coruscant. What do they replace them with, he wonders, watching the spires of her hotel fade into the horizon. He can’t quite imagine Padmé standing any taller than she does now.

But, after all, all he’s seen of her is Amidala, as she puts it; the part of her that she gives to her planet, to the galaxy, to the Republic. It strikes him, abruptly, that perhaps he simply doesn’t know what true ease and happiness looks like on her.

The thought is an unjustifiably saddening one. He lets it go before he returns to the Temple.

It isn’t that he never speaks to them. Obi-Wan lives in a galaxy where wartime has made even the most distant of holonet communications deeply secure and high quality. Data premiums are at an all-time low, and he’s on Coruscant enough that they can almost set up a schedule.

Anakin comms him just about every tenday, usually with at least one twin latched onto him. Often Padmé is somewhere around, passing on greetings or demanding news or teasing Anakin. Sometimes they miss each other—Obi-Wan still spends almost as much time in hyperspace as he does in realspace. Anakin likes to joke he’s chasing eternal youth—and Obi-Wan tries to comm back as soon as he can, though he suspects his responses leave a little to be desired.

Anakin tells him to leave his general voice behind and try to be less sparse. Obi-Wan refuses to tell him it’s not militarist need for quick and sharp comms that are stealing his words. They get by—in a manner of speaking.

Every tenday only feels like a rarity because of how much time they spent together before. He knows that. Even so...

Even so, he’s surprised when he runs into Anakin (and R2) on Pax.

Anakin looks... less surprised. “Did you think I’d hear you were just a gridsquare over and not come say hi?” he asks, right after they escape a group of angry Dugs Obi-Wan is technically there to help.

Obi-Wan doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know how to say that it had never occurred to him Anakin might.

Two months of strict supervised recovery and four months of being a homesteader haven’t made a dent in his years of training. Anakin is quick on his feet and with his saber as he helps Obi-Wan out of the quickly escalating situation and onto his ship—Obi-Wan’s fighter already destroyed—which is a gleaming chrome Naboo yacht.

Obi-Wan’s never seen one of Anakin’s shine that way, with that perfect mirror finish and not a hint of a scratch or a fingerprint on it. It’s the reminder he needs, the thing that makes him turn around, grit his teeth, and say, “What were you thinking?"

Anakin looks surprised. It’s fair: maybe yell is a more accurate term for what he’s done than say, and Obi-Wan hasn’t actually done that in a very long time. When he was actually Anakin’s master, it had felt necessary to maintain his always-fragile authority, like a Force-ordained obligation he had to fulfil both for his promise and Anakin’s fate, no matter how little everyone involved liked it. That sense of responsibility had faded away as their roles redefined, and perhaps he should feel guilty to fall back on that old forgotten dynamic…

But Obi-Wan hasn’t been this angry with Anakin in quite some time.

“Why in the Force would you fly into a potentially dangerous situation like that?”

“I’d say it was pretty good I did, Master, or you’d be Dug spread right now—" Anakin snaps back, sounding so much like a petulant eighteen-year-old for a moment that Obi-Wan is thrown, facefirst, from the present and into a pit on Geonosis or something else as removed.

The whiplash makes him say “don’t call me that.”

Anakin glares at him. Obi-Wan glares back. Of the two of them, he can go longer without blinking, though Anakin’s stares are a sight more intense. As expected, Anakin blinks away first, jaw clenched.

“You could’ve been seriously hurt, Anakin,” Obi-Wan says. Calmly, all considered (which is to say: not actually that calmly).

“I wasn’t,” Anakin says. “I had my saber, and I knew you’d have my back if things went south. Just because I’m not a Jedi anymore—"

"Yes,” Obi-Wan says, feeling a little hysterical, “You are not a Jedi anymore!”

Anakin stops talking abruptly, looking stung. It’s so out of place here, that look, in this sparkling clean interior of this ship, with Anakin dressed in Naboo finery—still frugal, at least by Naboo standards, but far from Jedi fare—which is singed at the sleeves.

“Anakin,” Obi-Wan says, sitting down heavily, “There is a reason the Jedi do what we do. It is dangerous, and we accept that danger so nobody else has to. You know this.” Anakin nods, hesitant, but listening—probably because Obi-Wan is no longer yelling. “If you were hurt now, I could never forgive myself. You have other responsibilities now, people who depend on you! You cannot risk yourself this way.”

It is silent for a long, long moment, as Anakin purses his lips and looks down.

“You’re right,” he says. That is, of course, the strangest thing Obi-Wan has ever heard, and he was the Padawan of Qui-Gon Jinn. He stares, perplexed, until Anakin starts to bluster. “What?”

“Who are you and what have you done with my old friend?” he asks.

Anakin rolls his eyes. “Look, I didn’t think it’d actually be dangerous. Ahsoka told me you were just here to oversee union negotiations.”

There’s nothing he can say to that. It’s an unsteady time to be a Jedi—an unsteady time to be any kind of diplomat at all. The war may be over, but hundreds of systems have been left in disarray, and the chaos has birthed a thousand smaller conflicts. Even so: for once, even he hadn’t expected there to be any violence.

It feels wrong to actually send Anakin away—and, he tells himself, he can’t, seeing as his own ship has been destroyed, and he will need a getaway if things go further south, and also it would be impossible to convince Anakin that wasn’t true—but he does convince him to stay out of the fighting, for the most part. By the time the negotiations are through, fortunately with no further casualties, Anakin has only lit his saber one more time, and has restrained himself from any unnecessary stunts.

“Next time,” Obi-Wan tells him just before he leaves for Coruscant, “Comm first.”

Anakin grins, but doesn’t agree or disagree.

He runs into Padmé on Enarc just over a month after that, at a sectoral governing bodies’ conference where Obi-Wan is playing mediator to a disagreement about two systems’ territorial rights of a small uninhabited moon.

“I don’t care for this system,” she confesses. It’s where the Trade Federation had made its base during the invasion of Naboo, and Padmé’s memory goes back far. “I wouldn’t be here if the Queen hadn’t asked. Senator Namun couldn’t leave Coruscant.”

Obi-Wan gives her a disbelieving look. They both know she’s there as a reminder of the events of thirteen years ago. It’s the sort of excuse somebody less familiar with the way that works—Anakin, say—might buy, but Obi-Wan has spent enough time in the Senate. “If you say so,” he says.

Padmé shrugs. “It’s politics,” she says. “Reminds me why I’m glad this isn’t my life anymore.”

Obi-Wan politely says nothing about that either.

The three days aren’t as bad as they could be, not with the company he has. In between listening to endless debates—

Half a day into the process, Padmé begins to pick everyone’s arguments apart for tautology on her datapad.

They make a game of it. Obi-Wan will have it known he attempts to resist, on account of the serious matter being discussed. “Mr. Negotiator,” she says, “Are you scared?”

After that, it’s a matter of honour, isn’t it?

Padmé wins, but this is entirely unsurprising. “I used to do this on school debate teams, and as a junior legislator,” she tells him later, laughing. He can picture it quite clearly, he finds.

—in between listening to endless debates and winding speeches, Padmé shows him holos of the twins and asks after what he’s been up to. It sounds tedious even to him, the slow process of setting the galaxy to rights, but Padmé seems to enjoy hearing about it. She asks demonstrably interested questions, at least, and occasionally punctuates them with remarks that have him laughing and also wishing he could have her permanently on-comm for Senate sessions as some sort of advisor-slash-friendly-helpline. They have dinner together two evenings of three, and on the last night of the conference, even crack open a complimentary bottle of Nubian wine that they both proclaim is terrible.

“I wish I was home,” Padmé confesses, when she’s knee-deep in wine and a little red with it. The few times he’s seen her inebriated in the past, she’s been a playful drunk, or a righteously angry one. This evening, she is all philosophy. “I never used to miss anything, but now I miss being home all the time.”

“You’ll be home tomorrow,” he says.

Padmé’s eyes flash to him. “But you won’t, will you?” For a moment that lasts much longer in the Force and in his abrupt panic, he wonders if she knows, if all this is only some kind of terrible consolatory prize, an insider’s look for pity’s sake. Then Padmé sighs, propping a hand up on her head. “Coruscant is so far away.”

Obi-Wan abruptly remembers the Jedi Temple, his home. “It is,” he says.

“Naboo is only hours away,” she says meaningfully, and when he says nothing, she changes the topic.

In the morning, Obi-Wan cheats and Force-wills his wine hangover away. Padmé greets him at breakfast with a headpiece that blocks out any light that might reach her eyes and a queasy smile.

“Are you sure you don’t want to join me?” she asks, surprising him; he hadn’t realised she remembered that part. “Naboo is very close. You could take a day or two to recover. Or longer, if you like.”

That, he thinks to himself for the first time, is the problem. “I really must get back to the Temple this time,” he says. It’s even true. And yet he cannot help the distinct sensation that he’s lied, and Padmé’s seen right through him.

Chapter Text

Happy coincidence. That is what Obi-Wan tells himself, as the days pass without sight of Anakin or Padmé. Happy coincidence is all it can be, and he cannot expect that to come around often, not when the galaxy is so large and they are all so very far away. That they have had opportunity to meet so often now is significant in itself.

He shouldn’t raise his hopes—at least, not until he collects the courage to go visit them in turn.

So it’s not quite six weeks later that he walks into his room to find Anakin and Ahsoka there, setting up the holoprojector, with dishes of what looks like his favourite sandwiches from Dex’s on the table that is not meant for food.

“The Temple gets the best access to podracing, and Snips needs the best first experience,” Anakin says, and Ahsoka nods solemnly.

“The holoprojector at Padmé’s new place (—“hey, it’s my place too!” “The holoprojector at Padmé’s new place”—) is nice, but nothing beats Temple reception,” she says seriously.

Obi-Wan can hardly object to that.

He runs into Padmé at a small private party on Alderaan, where Breha remarks that she’s seen Padmé so rarely since she relocated halfway across the galaxy. “We offered her a home on Alderaan, not far from the Antilles estate,” she tells Obi-Wan conversationally.

“And every day we are disappointed she did not accept it. But I do understand why she chose to go home,” Bail says, eyes only for Breha. It’s intimate enough that Obi-Wan has to look away. His eyes catch on Padmé watching them with something fond and nostalgic and a little bit lost, and he has to look away from her, too.

“It’s a beautiful place, and there is no overstating the importance of family,” Bail continues after a moment, smiling back at them.

Wonderful, Obi-Wan thinks, with a twist of bitterness inappropriate for the gathering. The Chancellor of the Galactic Republic has the time to visit Naboo, and Obi-Wan—ostensibly—doesn’t.

Padmé returns with them to Coruscant, but only as a stopover—it’s a more direct route back to Naboo, she says. Even so, they spend most of the journey speaking lightly of things that have nothing to do with either of them. Padmé brings up a handful of recent motions in the senate, then stops abruptly. He wants to ask why she’s biting her tongue, but doesn’t. In turn, she doesn’t ask when he makes only cursory mention of his missions.

This time, Padmé doesn’t ask him to visit. He doesn’t know if that makes it better or worse.

Neither does Anakin the next time they comm, or the time after that. Their frequency has increased since Anakin began mending matters with Ahsoka; it seems to be every third day he finds Ahsoka in his suite, regaling Anakin with stories of her missions as a knight, or recounting stories from happier times in the before. Obi-Wan tries not to get lost in his nostalgia, which has grown pitifully excessive even to his own mind, but what is he to do when Anakin wants to reminisce?

On one of these comms, Obi-Wan spots Rex, a small infant-sized handprint in bright white across his face, catching himself every time he calls Ahsoka commander.

“Rex has promoted Leia to General already,” Anakin says the next time they speak directly.

“Oh, she’ll be the terror of the galaxy, I’m sure,” Obi-Wan says, smiling, and Anakin laughs.

“Don’t start that,” he hears, and realises abruptly that Padmé is in the room too. It almost takes his breath away. For all that he speaks to the both of them, they are rarely in the same space together, and if they are, they tend to be in view, not just outside. He wonders what she thinks of this frequency. He wonders if she doesn’t find it strange at all.

He puts the thought away and glances at the galactic chrono. It tells him it’s near midnight on Naboo; when he looks back at the holo, he realises Anakin is dressed for it.

“You know he doesn’t mean anything by it,” Anakin says softly, looking away from the recorder.

Silence, for a moment, as Anakin continues to look her way, serious and a little bit somber. If Padmé says anything, it’s too light for the recorder to catch. Then she appears—first, her hand, as she presses it to his cheek, and then the rest of her as the recorder struggles to catch up. Anakin whispers something, painfully amplified by the holo, and Padmé smiles, and they just look at each other in the same way they always do.

Like they could never stop.

Obi-Wan wants to clear his throat, remind them that he’s here, too, that they aren’t alone. He wants them to never remember again.

Then Padmé pats his cheek, sighs, and takes her leave. Anakin turns back, clearing his throat, with a light flush around the ears the holoprojector translates into a slightly more livid blue.

“Sorry,” he says, and then, before Obi-Wan can tell him he’s sorry, or not to be, or something else as atrocious, continues, “Padmé doesn’t like it when we talk about the war.”

That, at least, doesn’t surprise him. “For good reason,” he says.

Anakin sighs, but nods. “I know, but... it’s so different here, Obi-Wan. So peaceful. Almost like none of it ever happened.”

Ah, Obi-Wan thinks. But it did. “Ah,” he says, out loud, a little blander than even he means to. Anakin quirks half a smile.

“Padmé and—we’re so happy here,” he mutters, half to himself. The holorecorder, which has no care for such things, broadcasts it to Obi-Wan as clear as the whisper from earlier. “I never thought I could have any of this. But it feels like I’m in a different galaxy sometimes.”

Obi-Wan hasn’t been asked outright why he hasn’t visited. Padmé and Anakin seem to sense his hesitation or are willing to wait him out or perhaps are simply unaffected by whether he goes or doesn’t. Except that’s a lie, and he feels it when Anakin looks up at him, smiling, and tells him about the joys of his home, or Padmé sends him holos of the lake waters, or when everyone else is clearly perplexed to learn that he’s never been there.

But that, he thinks, is why. One day, Obi-Wan would have to return to his own galaxy, war-torn and in terrible need of the slow embroidering path he and a hundred others are taking to patch it into something whole. Something lesser, without Anakin and Padmé in it. But he doesn’t know what could make him leave this—other, beautiful, peaceful place. He cannot go there, taste its food, and return unchanged. He doesn’t know what could make him do it. He doesn’t know how much time would be enough.

The answer he needs is something concrete, a countable sum like three weeks or half a month, or half a year—which of course is impossible. He doesn’t have that kind of time. The answer he suspects and fears is eternity.

Even the Force doesn’t have that kind of time.

He breaks, finally, eight months to the day after he first said their goodbyes to them.

Obi-Wan has been to the Mid-Rim, even Naboo’s quadrant, half a dozen times in the last months, each time with the sort of growing dread that one might associate with flying too close to a black hole. But Obi-Wan is eleven thousand parsecs and more than two days away from Naboo when, on a tightly scheduled call, Padmé says something careless about how Obi-Wan would love the view from the guest room, and Obi-Wan says, “I suppose I’ll find out.”

It’s easy to laugh it off in the face of Padmé’s stunned—but pleased, he thinks—response, but Obi-Wan feels worryingly serious when, half a day later, he comms the Temple his mission report along with a notice for a brief request of leave. He doesn’t specify how long it will be, mainly because he doesn’t know, but also because he can’t quite bear to give himself a time limit before he’s even arrived. In a rare demonstration of magnanimous silence—as opposed to his usual fare of ambivalently altruistic questioning—Master Yoda doesn’t ask.

Then, checking the chrono to make certain it is the middle of the night on Naboo and he is in absolutely no risk of having his comm received, Obi-Wan comms Anakin, informs him that he should be on-planet in about 2 days’ time, apologises for the lack of notice, and slings himself into hyperspace.

He emerges to a message with coordinates and nothing else.

Objectively, Naboo is beautiful as it ever was. Anakin, in a fighter that looks like it’s been reassembled from space junk, nothing at all like the sleek chrome ship he’d last seen him in, takes them on a picturesque route, past the wide southern sea and over the crystal fields before they make it to the lakes and waterfalls that they’ve made their home. They land in a small hangar by the riverside near the regional capital, and Anakin grins at him as he descends, pulling him into a hug that almost drives the latent fears from his mind entirely.

Almost.

“For a moment I thought I was in the wrong place,” Obi-Wan says as they make their way out of the hangar and to the ferries. When Anakin looks nonplussed, he clarifies, “That’s hardly the vessel you rescued me in last time.”

“Oh.” Anakin rubs the back of his neck, looking awkward. “The yacht doesn’t do great in atmo,” he says. Obi-Wan wouldn’t have thought it from all the flying Anakin did over Pax. He hums mildly—Anakin truly has never emerged from his need to show off—and lets it go. They make it to Anakin and Padmé’s home just after noon, where Padmé greets him with a beam and a hug, warmer than the others they’ve exchanged the last times they’ve met.

The home is as beautiful as advertised, all traditional Naboo architecture, marble and wood, large windows and warm honey accents. It sits not quite atop a lake, but close enough that they can take their lunch with a clear view of it from the balcony, and Padmé tells him over the meal of all the passing celebrations that happen on this lakefront.

The children are bigger than holo can convey. Leia has grown a shock of thick, dark hair, and Luke’s eyes, watery and pale when he was born, are the same blue as Anakin’s.

They have a nanny droid—the latest model to be found on Naboo, Padmé tells him—but it seems to be Artoo and Threepio who watch them most. Leia, he learns, makes noises that sound suspiciously close to binary. “She’s become a dangerous partner in crime to Artoo,” Padmé informs him, which Obi-Wan finds completely unsurprising even for somebody not yet mobile, given exactly who her parents are. Anakin encourages him to hover some toys in the air, and they both reach out, eyes wide with unhindered wonder. Luke clenches one small fist, and one of the toys in the air gives a tiny wobble in place.

Obi-Wan says nothing. There is no one from Coruscant to Naboo who’s met Anakin who would imagine that his children wouldn’t be Force sensitive. But Obi-Wan’s here as a friend, not a Jedi, and he cannot imagine either of them would want to talk about that.

Dinner is more finery he’s unused to. Anakin makes a shuura fruit hover over his dish, which makes Padmé laugh and Anakin turn unexpectedly red. Obi-Wan, for his part, only rolls his eyes and mutters frivolous under his breath, making Padmé’s giggles a touch wilder, and Anakin, still red, shoot him a betrayed look. He looks pleased, though, beneath the pout, and between that and the way Padmé is looking between them, not a hint of offense at his chiding her husband like he was still a Jedi or still his Padawan, that has Obi-Wan batting away the nagging thought that this is a right he’s lost.

As the night grows long and late with reminiscence, he turns to Padmé. “About that guest room I will apparently love?”

Padmé looks caught out for a moment, her smile a little awkward. “You will,” she says, and then, “but you won’t be staying there.” Obi-Wan frowns. He cannot imagine they had somehow understood that he was staying elsewhere, but—Padmé says, “You have your own room, Obi-Wan.”

“What?” he asks, intelligently. Afterwards, the moment will haunt him. In his defence, it’s about all he can manage just at the moment.

“Of course you do,” Padmé says, like this is a foregone conclusion.

He manages very little sleep that night.

At about five, he gives up, rising from his bed (perfectly firm, just the way he likes i) and turns away from his window (which offers a beautiful view that faces away from the sun so he isn’t woken at dawn, just like his suite in the Temple) and past the deep blue flowers (he has no idea when he’d told Padmé about his fondness for them).

When he gets to the kitchen, Padmé is already there, hunched on a stool with her head in her hands.

Something in the air around her makes him still. “Padmé?”

She looks up, tear-stricken, and says, “I don’t think I can do this.”

He coaxes her out from the kitchen into the sitting room near the balcony, where they can have some fresh air to help for the suffocation he isn’t, apparently, alone in feeling. Padmé makes an attempt at drying her tears, but when he sits her down on the sofa, she falls directly into his shoulder, eyes squeezed shut.

He pats her back, a little awkward, a great deal concerned. Even with her hair forming a curtain between them, she looks miserable, her shoulders shaking lightly, the sense of her in the Force like curdled blue milk. He cannot even begin to think why, and yet it cannot be more clear that something is tearing her apart.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, as gently as he is able.

His hand falls away from her shoulder when Padmé pulls away to shake her head, looking a little desperate, her eyes welling up again. “Everything,” she says, voice breaking. “All of this. I’ve been telling myself it’s alright, but now you’re here, and—I can’t—”

Obi-Wan frowns, more than a little lost. “This? Your home? Padmé, this place, what you’ve created here, it’s perfect.”

She catches a sob on her palm, shooting a wild look towards the bedrooms. “I know,” she whispers. “It’s everything I thought I wanted, everything I’ve imagined, and I—I don’t want any of it.”

And just like that, Obi-Wan understands.

“I thought you were happy here?” he asks softly, placing a hand on her shoulder when she looks liable to cry again. It doesn’t seem to help: her face only falls further. He can understand that, though—too often recently has he felt that he will fall apart at the first indication from somebody else that he may not be as well as he insists on appearing.

“I should be,” Padmé says, voice hoarse. “I want to be. I’ve been—dreaming of a place just like this, just me and Anakin and our child—children—ever since I found out I was pregnant. And now I’m here and I... I can’t stand it.”

That, he has to say, isn’t what he expected. “Including Anakin and the twins?”

“No!” she says quickly. “No. They’re all that makes it bearable.” She swallows, then, looking grave. “But sometimes, Obi-Wan, I just want them to go away. I just want to… oh stars, I’m an awful mother.” “You aren’t, Padmé,” he says softly. “I can’t imagine there’s ever been a parent who doesn’t occasionally want a little freedom, a little peace. You love your children, and they are two of the happiest, most incredible younglings I’ve seen. You should be proud.”

She laughs, far more bitter than suits her voice. He’s known Padmé since she was a queen, fourteen, with enough experience of the galaxy to leave her bitterness crystallising around her… and yet she’s always been one of the least jaded people he knows. It’s a coward’s move to give up just because things can be terrible, she’d once told him, in the middle of the war, grappling with politicians who’d given up on the right thing, if they’d ever believed in it. If everything was fine, why would you need to do the right thing?

“And what if sometimes I wish all of this would go away so I could just be who I used to?” she asks, tears overflowing again. “I miss—everything. I didn’t think I would, I thought I’d be grateful to come home, even if it was because of these kriffing archaic laws… but I’m not. There’s only one thing I know how to be, Obi-Wan, and it’s not this.”

“I’ve never seen you so defeated,” he says honestly.

Padmé laughs again. “You think too highly of me. I used to tell Ani that I wanted to run away, just the two of us, to somewhere there was no war and no politics, and—now I’m here, and I just want to run away again.” She looks up miserably at him. “I don’t know what to do. I can’t keep pretending everything’s perfect—I’ve been telling myself I just need to get used to it, but—” she breaks off abruptly and buries her head in her hands.

“What is it?” he asks.

“Obi-Wan,” she says, apology twisting her mouth into something small. He tenses, then forces himself to relax. This is not about him—it cannot be. “I’m very glad you’re here. Ani is too, though he probably doesn’t know how to say it. He thought maybe you disapproved, that’s why...”

“Anakin doesn’t need my approval,” he says, mostly because Anakin has never restrained himself to doing only what Obi-Wan would approve of—out loud, anyway. And, in some other way that Obi-Wan can barely bear to voice to himself, Obi-Wan can never truly disapprove of what might bring Anakin any degree of joy and contentment.

“Maybe not, but he always wants it,” Padmé says. “But now you’re here, and he’s so... happy here. Tonight proved it. And he’s so—he’s so good with the children and he knows how to do all these things that people should know that I... I don’t think I can ever be that. I was worried this wouldn’t be enough for him, and look at us now.” She laughs again, a little hysterical, so deeply at odds from the way she’d shown her amusement earlier that night. This suits her far less, this pitiful parody of joy.

Padmé, like Anakin, is made for broad grins and teasing smiles and genuine unabashed joy.

“I’m sorry,” she says, finally, head propped on her chin.

Obi-Wan considers, for a moment, not saying anything. He considers telling her to tell Anakin about this, to really ask him what he wants; or maybe that he’s sure she can find happiness here in time; or perhaps—just perhaps—that she might be able to find a compromise that would let her have this life she’s dreamed of and the one she’s left behind.

Then he thinks of Padmé is—we’re so happy here and Anakin’s beautiful chrome ship and the piece of junk he apparently uses when he really wants to fly, and the endless comms filled with fond reminiscences of having his life be routinely in grave danger, and discards the notion.

Padmé hasn’t told Anakin a thing in the past eight months—and neither has Anakin. He loves them—oh, Force help him, he does—but he has at least the capacity to see when they’re being incalculably foolish.

So instead, he says, “Padmé, why did you tell me this?”

Padmé gives him a small, watery smile. “Who else would I tell?”

Something warm blooms in his chest, followed by a burst of irritation at the obvious answer she’s missed completely. “As you trusted me with this... please trust that I would do nothing to hurt either of you,” he says, serious. When she nods, looking unsure, he rises from his seat, and says, “Good. Then I’m going to wake Anakin.”

For once, Anakin’s tendency to wake up at any time of day and immediately be present and of mostly sound mind, or at least as sound as his ever can be, works in Obi-Wan’s favour. He lets him pull on a robe and drags him outside, ignores his alarmed what’s wrong both at Padmé’s being awake before the sun and at the obvious tear streaks on her face, and sits him down on the opposing armchair.

“Padmé has something to tell you,” Obi-Wan says, when Padmé stays quiet.

Anakin’s eyes widen with more than a little panic. “Padmé?” he asks, voice nervous. She clamps her lips shut, and Anakin bursts out with, “Are you—are we—having another—”

Obi-Wan considers that Padmé’s “No!” would be amusing in some other circumstances. As is, Anakin visibly sags back into the chair, relief clear about him. Even Padmé looks horrified at the thought. “What is it, then?” he asks.

Padmé continues to say nothing. Anakin’s leg is now visibly jumping in place.

Obi-Wan clears his throat. “Have I ever told you, Padmé, of how Anakin learned to swim?”

Padmé looks nonplussed and a little intrigued. Anakin looks a little red. “Obi-Wan?” he asks.

Obi-Wan ignores him. “One of the junior Padawan classes at the Temple involves learning a distinct form of meditation called floating meditation. Most younglings at the Temple are taught to swim well before they reach the Padawan stage, but Anakin, of course, had not. At the time, it simply hadn’t occurred to me that he—or anybody—might not know how to swim, so every morning I’d send him off to the pools for his lesson, and Anakin would get into the shallowest part of the pool, refuse to float, and told nobody that he didn’t know how.

“After a time, the Master who taught that lesson approached me to say that Anakin didn’t seem to want to get into the pool. I knew by then of his, ah, difficulties with meditating—”

“Obi-Wan,”

“So I assumed that was the problem, and gave him something of a dressing down. Naturally, my young Padawan decided he must take this into his own hands. Surely learning to swim couldn’t be beyond him? He had no time to do it, of course, but very very early in the morning—so I wake up, hours later, to a very angry Healer asking me what in the Force I was thinking letting a nine-year-old who didn’t know how to swim into the deep pools.”

Anakin, ears red, grumbles, “Is there a point to this?”

“The point, my friend, is that as hard-working and dedicated you are, you’re also as stubborn as a wild bantha and not very good at telling people important things.”

Both Anakin and Padmé open their mouths as if to complain about this, and Obi-Wan smiles. “You wanted to be a good Padawan without being asked—and you were. But you cannot do everything singlehandedly, and there is nothing wrong with admitting when there is something you cannot do. Such as swim.”

Anakin stares at him for a long moment, eyes wide. Obi-Wan merely raises his eyebrows, and looks over at Padmé pointedly. Anakin’s face falls abruptly. He looks at Padmé, mouth twisting with worry, and says, “I’m sorry,”

She frowns. “Why are you—”

“Obi-Wan’s right, I can’t—I don’t know how to do this. I love it here, Padmé. It’s all we’ve ever wanted. But it’s like we’re in another world and... I don’t know how to be so still all the time.” He swallows. “I didn’t want to hurt you, because you’ve been so—”

He cuts off as Padmé takes a sharp, shocked breath... and starts to laugh.

They come together, breathless with joy, or at least with the knowledge that their misery is shared, and Obi-Wan slips, silently, away.

He doesn’t, admittedly, make it far unobserved. Only to his room, where he can just about see the horizon turning a slow burnished orange. There are no sunrays that might wake him: Anakin knows him too well for that. It’s what he’s pondering when there is a knock at the door to his room, and then Anakin is pushing it open before Obi-Wan can reach it.

Obi-Wan looks between them and their light, pleased glows, far more real today than they had been yesterday as they played house for his benefit. “Good morning,” he says lightly.

“Where did you disappear to?” Padmé asks, arm around Anakin.

He shrugs. “I thought to give you some privacy. I imagine you have much to speak about.”

“We do,” Padmé says, giving Anakin a pointed look, and he nods. “But—we have something to say to you, too.”

“You don’t have to thank me—” he begins, and Anakin smirks and cuts him off with,

“We weren’t going to.”

How unexpected.

“You’ve been avoiding us,” Anakin says. When Obi-Wan opens his mouth to protest, Anakin shakes his head, and says, “You know what I’m talking about. I thought you were mad at me, or disappointed I’d left the Jedi, but Padmé says you aren’t. And we’re apparently talking about things now, so I want to know.” He clears his throat, looking down for a burst of strength as Padmé squeezes his hand, and finishes, “Why?”

Obi-Wan finds, abruptly, that his mouth is dry. “Why do I have a room here?” he asks.

Anakin starts, “This isn’t one of your negotiations.”

Padmé elbows him in the gut and says, “Why would you ever think you wouldn’t?”

And that, frankly, is far too much. Padmé’s crisis had felt in the moment far more important to his own, and so mostly overtaken it, but standing in his room with the two of them there brings it all rushing back, until he’s claustrophobic with it and itching for fresh air or freedom, or whatever the opposite of that is, as long as they’re with him.

Obi-Wan sits down on the end of his bed. The weight of a truth he’s never said bears him down until his shoulders are falling. “This is not something I ever wished to burden you with,” he says.

Their smiles fade as abruptly as if he’d confessed something much more true to the core of him.

“You won’t,” Padmé says, quiet but sure.

Anakin only nods, looking steadily at him.

Obi-Wan swallows. He knows, for all their stubbornness, that they would leave if he asked, let him keep this to himself, and swallow their hurt—or at least keep it mostly to themselves. Only, just in this moment, in the face of their hopeful demands, he doesn’t know that he can ask. “Your responsibilities,” he says finally, “are to your family. Mine remain to the galaxy. And the truth is I could not imagine being here in your home as a mere guest, when you are—both—”

Padmé sits down on one side of him, hand on his shoulder now. Anakin, for his part, kneels at his feet—mostly, Obi-Wan thinks, so he can’t look down to hide. “You’d never be a guest here,” he says.

Obi-Wan cannot imagine spelling it out any further than he already has. This, he thinks, is bad enough. “That is very generous, Anakin,” he says, “But why? This is your home—your family, and I—”

“Are a part of it,” Anakin says. “Obi-Wan, you are—”

What Obi-Wan is, he doesn’t find out, because Padmé turns his head to the side with some force, and kisses him, a closed press of lips to lips, her hand holding his cheek in place so he can’t escape. Obi-Wan squeezes his eyes shut, calls upon the Force for restraint and strength, and pulls away.

Anakin looks a little dazed, but he’s smiling. “Well,” he says, “That’s not how I was going to say it.” Padmé swats at his head, but doesn’t move away, clinging still to Obi-Wan’s arm.

The closeness is irrelevant: it is the thought behind it, the way that they both are looking at him, all that determination in them turned towards him, that stops him short. “You can’t mean that,” Obi-Wan says.

“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t mean,” Padmé says. “I’ve had enough of pretending not to want the things I want—” and then, with a blink “—but even if that’s not how you feel… you’ll always be family, Obi-Wan. You’ll always have a home with us.” She looks at Anakin. “Wherever we are.”

Anakin smiles up at her and nods, pressing a light kiss to the top of Obi-Wan’s knee.

The very thought of words sticks in his throat, fear and hope mingling into something too large to name. Obi-Wan is who he is: he cannot pretend to be otherwise, has never quite learned how not to centre his anxieties, never really managed to stay unattached. His responsibilities will never not tug at him.

But—wherever we are, he thinks. His home has been with them for a long time now, and the thought of leaving stops him short now just as it has every other time he’s considered the possibility.

Obi-Wan sends a silent plea to the Force for the fortitude not to give up just because he’s afraid. Anakin, at his knees, catches it.

“You don’t have to be afraid of this,” he says softly.

Obi-Wan finds himself shaking his head. “And what if I want to be?”

“In that case,” Anakin says, because of all the things he has struggled with, courage has never been one of them, “I love you, Obi-Wan, and get used to hearing it because I hate not saying it.”

Obi-Wan laughs, a little wetly, and the both of them beam at him.

“Welcome home.”