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Mortars fizzle and scatter golden starlight against the binary sunrise of flame. In another world their glimmering brilliance could be mistaken for fireworks; on this world they shriek in their descent and blast open the soil as if fallen meteors. The rumbling explosions ache in the marrow of the earth, fissures of pain in the life force beneath their boots. They ring as a throb in the hinge of his jaw and behind his eye sockets.
“Anakin!” Obi-Wan calls above the screams of artillery.
The force echoes his master’s pulse of alarm. It is a simple thing to bow his shoulders and duck the jagged heat of a blaster bolt. It is a simple thing to answer Obi-Wan’s every breath here on the field of battle, amidst the violence of the galaxy and beneath the morning’s first kiss of a twin sunrise.
“Master,” he laughs in answer.
Under their throats’ tender skin, their pulses thrum to the same beat, the same melody and reverberation of atoms as the dual columns of blue flame they hold. Tha-thump—tha-thump, two lungs for a single warrior, so perfectly attuned they fight, move, pull the atmosphere’s thin oxygen into their veins.
Obi-Wan rolls his eyes and twists his vambrace, arcing his blade in a showy spin of humming light. He is a thing of brilliance, copper hair and white pauldrons gilded by the sunrise; labradorite eyes lit luminously sapphire by his saber. Blood oozes from a thin cut above his eyebrow and that always errant cowlick falls across his forehead.
“You look like a propaganda holo,” says Anakin. He cannot help the way his mouth twists in an awe-struck smile around the words.
Obi-Wan grins in that way only Anakin truly sees, rakishly charming for his sole benefit. “You haven’t seen what you look like today than, darling.”
The caterwaul of an incoming mortar cuts through the smoke and ambient voices of their men yelling through the static of their helmets. They spin as one to throw their backs together, shoulder blades pressed flush, and sabers raised so that their elbows knock. The mortar erupts nearest Obi-Wan, close enough Anakin feels the spray of soil and the impact’s rippling heat wave.
Black smoke billows around them, rolling across fallen soldiers and the mangled wreckage of tanks and downed ships. It washes the world to coal in a great, dark wave only cut through by two cerulean pillars of light. Anakin glances over his shoulder to catch a glimpse of Obi-Wan’s profile cast ghostly by the absence of the morning’s suns. They glimmer, pale and silver in the black, two twinkling blue stars caught in the same orbit.
White-hot blaster bolts slice the darkness in zips of green and orange that shatter against their sabers in fizzling rainfalls of sparks. The starbursts of light sizzle and scream in a swelling staccato of noise. Flashes of battle droids blip through the smoke and the force ripples, a warning.
All at once Obi-Wan’s shoulders, the familiar lock and grate of his master’s pauldrons to his fall away. Anakin whirls in an arc of blue but Obi-Wan is already gone in the black.
“Obi-Wan!” He screams. His throat catches with panic and his voice pitches higher as something just as dark and choked as the smoke claws its way up his chest. “Obi-Wan!” He screams louder.
The smoke roils, thick as tar and eye watering, but even through its choking intensity he catches the hum of a saber and its desperate brilliance twinkling in the black. Anakin throws himself into the darkness and gags on the acrid burn of the air. He whirls as the force whispers just there and ricochets the heat of a blaster bolt from his blade, though stumbles from the seismic rumbles of a mortar erupting ahead in the black. He cannot see its detonation nor the fallout, but he feels its heat, feels the spray of earth, and smells the stench of melted durasteel above the burn of smoke.
Something colder than panic digs its icy talons in the cavity of his heart even as he plunges through the miasma and chases starlight. The crackling hum of his master’s saber carries above the pops of fire and the static calls of battle droids and Republic soldiers. And above even that as a high melody the kyber of a familiar blade sings to him, the harmony to the golden brass of Obi-Wan’s force light.
“Master,” he calls-entreaties to the void.
In answer they crash in the darkness, armor clacking and lightsabers crooning with the familiar dance they fall to, backs pressed flush and force signatures rapped twine.
“There you are, darling,” Obi-Wan breathes as a gusty laugh.
They spin on their heels, boots kicking earth and steps matched in synchronous rhythm. This is the dance of Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi, two stars caught in the other’s gravity, an eternal binary orbit. Or as eternal as anything can be in a universe of impermanence.
In the Tatoo system there are two blue dwarf stars said to have split from their origin, a red dwarf burnt through its hydrogen. As a boy they glimmered in the Tatooine night sky, dim after trillions of years, older than most anything in the universe. Even stars must die, though some take near forever.
Here in the black their lightsabers twinkle dim in the blinding smoke. He likes to think their light burns just as cold and near eternal as blue stars.
“Don’t leave like that,” he snarls over his shoulder.
Obi-Wan clacks the plastoid of their vambraces together and threads their fingers before they whirl with their sabers raised against a downpour of hissing blaster bolts.
Hands still clasped, Obi-Wan squeezes his palm. “I knew you would follow.”
“And now we’re surrounded, any suggestions?”
He can feel Obi-Wan grin behind him, probably flashing all teeth in the gloom. “I thought you were the one always full of bright ideas?”
“Me,” he accuses on a huff, “what happened to Anakin no and Anakin that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard?”
“I have never said that!”
They part for half a second and divert the dual barrage of blaster cannons, sabers whirling and spitting. Obi-Wan moves first, pressing his shoulders flush to his and shoving them from the line of fire. So their dance goes.
“You told me on Felucia it was a good thing I’m pretty!”
Obi-Wan offers no denial and laughs as they duck another ion cannon’s detonation. “You are, distractingly and damnably so.”
He whines, kicking his boot back to scuff Obi-Wan’s calf with his heel. “Stop distracting me!”
“If I were trying to distract you, darling, I would say much worse.”
Obi-Wan threads an arm through his and they twirl to the clattering wail of blasters. Their feet know the steps to the beat of their sabers, this lover’s dance of theirs practiced more times than either could count.
“Distract me then,” he insists—implores with barbed edges.
“My padawan,” his master laughs, voice caught on his own barbed edges, “begging on the battlefield. You sound like you do when you’re on your knees for me.”
He flushes and then laughs at the absurdity, that even here Obi-Wan catches him off guard, flusters him under mortars and blaster fire. Obi-Wan returns his laughter, even with the synchronous snap of their mirroring arms to eye level, one blocking fire with saber light, the other calling the force to fingertips.
Anakin risks a glance over his shoulder and meets blazing blue eyes. “You like me on my knees,” he breathes.
Obi-Wan grins, candescent as sea fire in the saber light. “You are resplendent there, though you look even better—”
The ground convulses and shudders and they tip sideways, boots sliding through the soil. Rumbles of a pitted mortar too close for comfort rocket a billowing crest of heat and earth around them, spitting dirt and debris.
Smoke surges across the field, so oppressive and tantamount the darkness itself is as physical a thing as the nothingness of space. He cannot even make out the shadows of battle droids or the brief flickering of blaster bolts in the black. In the force all is blinding and he knows they are pinned by the tightening circle of Separatist forces.
Obi-Wan once told him, whispered to the shell of his ear in a trench at the end of the galaxy, that he always assumed they would die side by side. Unspoken, unthinking, he has always felt the same.
And here, now, two blue stars alone in the near eternal ink, he wonders if the force decided their light had burned long enough.
His head lolls back, skull pressed against Obi-Wan’s. “Master—” he breathes, “when this is all over, what will we do?”
The tenderness of the force light he knows better than his own startles.
“You’ve never spoken of the end of the war—what future do you wish for?”
His master’s saber hums and crackles beyond his line of sight, catching the ricochet of fire.
“Just you, master. I can barely imagine anything past the war—but any fate beyond this with you—any possibility by your side is what I dream of.”
Obi-Wan makes a wounded noise and for one moment, with ice slithering down his spine, he fears the worst, he fears no future at all.
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan chokes out, fond and pained. “When the smoke clears and the war is done, you can dream a thousand futures and I will spend them each and every single one at your side.”
He steals a ragged breath, and it burns hotter than flame and brimstone in his lungs. The force crackles, jumping in his veins and eager to call. “I can buy us some time,” he says in answer.
Obi-Wan snarls, Anakin thuds to his knees, presses fingertips to earth, the ground shakes, and the force sings.
Hungry fissures open beneath their boots, swallowing down smoke and shrieking droids. Obi-Wan springs to action, the force itself given to human movement, to the swing of his saber and the shine of his light in the dark expanse. In the confusion the battle droids scramble for safety, though they find little respite pinned between two sapphire lightsabers and the jagged crevices pulled open on the field.
Back to back, always in orbit, they dance their lover’s dance of a single warrior, single star, single force light, cracked in two halves, two wholes, two orbiting stars.
Somewhere in their waltz through the wreckage the artillery fire stops, the sign at long last their men found victory in the assault. What battle droids remain fall back with their electronic calls of ‘retreat! retreat!’ The ground, fissured and spilled with blood and the wire guts of droids and downed fighters, opens before them a clear path of freedom.
The smoke breaks away to a gray haze and through the smog, the morning’s brilliant light warms their faces at long last.
Sabers disengaged, Obi-Wan yanks him into a grappling hug that knocks their gorgets and pauldrons. “One step closer to the end of the war,” he murmurs against Anakin’s cheek.
He clutches at his master’s nape and presses their sweat slicked foreheads together. Though they are soot stained near charcoal from the smoke, the suns gild Obi-Wan’s silhouette.
“My fate is yours, master,” he admits. “When this is done, where you go, I will follow. I—I will fall in your orbit as long as you let me.”
Knuckles drag against his cheek, glancing just below his scar. “Anakin,” Obi-Wan murmurs, “my friend, my brother, my darling. You are my sun.”
“And you are mine, master.”
They are golden beneath the twin sunrise, soaked in sweat and errant blood, greased with oil from the shellfire. Binary systems are a rare occurrence in the galaxy, the equilibrium required of two stars to sustain life such a tenuous and exact thing. Two suns most often result in planets too hot and barren for survival. Or—two blue dwarves too cold and burned out for any warmth, their worlds frozen and dim.
“Two suns then,” Obi-Wan laughs, glancing a thumb against Anakin’s cheekbone, their foreheads still held flush. “How fitting.”
Anakin lifts his cheek to his master’s hand and closes his eyes to bask in the flame of the binary sunrise. “It makes me think of home.”
Damp breath sighs against his jaw and lips flutter against his in a fleeting kiss, gone before he opens his eyes.
Obi-Wan’s eyes crease at the corners, an expression more intimate and known far longer than any press of lips. “Back to the ship then, I think. The Council need to be informed of the Separatist retreat.”
Anakin hesitates, heart stuttering a frenetic rhythm against his ribs, and Obi-Wan sees him pause, sees the flickering of his panicked force signature. His master stills and squeezes a hand to his shoulder in question.
“I love you,” he confesses. They are words never spoken, more lived and enacted in ways better recognized than language might ever express. And yet they still shiver on his lips, a benediction beneath the sunrise of flame.
Obi-Wan’s face softens to something so fond it nearly hurts to look at, and in the force, he is more brilliant than any star. “And I love you, more than you could ever know.”
Perhaps their starlight is not blue and cold, burned through to the end of their eternity. Perhaps they are a young sunrise, new in their orbit and at the beginning of their long years.
Perhaps they are golden, two stars glimmering in the black.