Archive of Our Own

The Coruscant Jedi Temple does not house behind its walls anything resembling a detention center, or a holding jail, or even a single cell. It is, ultimately, the one thing still concrete, crystallized since its time of creation amidst the reformation: the old Order was deeply wounded, and only too eager to shed their armor, to distance themselves from the bloodbath that was the last Sith-Jedi war, to do anything but be soldiers. That meant forfeiting even a suggestion of prosecutorial power, including an inner carceral system, no matter how slight, no matter how vague. Grandmaster Yoda of the modern Order's High Council, despite coming into his Jedi life after the reformation's taken hold, has always held onto this specification dearly. The Council's gotten to hear any manner of justification from him to the Senate, from "younglings, there are, in this Temple, gentlebeings," to "resources, where'd we find, for such extensive renovation?", to even "the vibes, this will disturb greatly. A brain stroke, I may suffer, at my advanced age…"

The most recent time a proposal for some kind of holding facility to be built inside the Temple was pushed from the Senate's side was… a year ago. During the war. By the Chancellor– the, well, former Chancellor. As much as the man has fucked with the power hierarchy in the Senate, he still hasn't managed to pass something that'd let him keep his power in death. Though, if Obi-Wan knows anything about Sith, there's a good chance he would never have a passing thought in that direction, even if he survived last night– Force, last night. Last night.

Sith, all the ones Obi-Wan's had the displeasure to meet, enjoy telling themselves they'd personally live forever. It doesn't philosophically compute with anything Obi-Wan's ever lived for - finite, precious, fragile things, in the flow of the Force and in his lived reality. Still, he's spent more time than he can quantify properly in the last decade or so wondering in the back of his head if some part of the Force likes to slap things out of his hands, and for what reason; if not for the fact that most of the Temple seem to suffer the same fate, and with good humour (as is the Jedi wont, in the end), he fears he would've become someone very unpleasant. The war, in hindsight, feels like the culmination of that: a clawed thing perching on his shoulder, on everyone's shoulder, speaking directly into the ear, you will keep nothing. You will have nothing, not even the pleasure of the Force's company, not even your own mind. Whatever you fight for will be nothing but dust.

And, well. Turns out.

At two in the morning, earlier this same day, GAR Jedi General Anakin Skywalker was recorded by multiple security cameras to enter the then-Republic Chancellor Sheev Palpatine's office with practically no preamble. Five Jedi Generals - three of them High Generals - and three Clone Commanders arrived five minutes later, with the same level of urgency and decorum. After twenty minutes the Senate Guard was summoned, and for a long, long day after, none of the initially involved parties left that office.

Sheev Palpatine was found dead by the Senate Guard upon entering. For how long by the point of that entrance, is an entirely different question. By whose hand, yet another.

It is probably the shittiest, most convoluted murder mystery Obi-Wan's ever participated in. All of them have sucked majorly, obviously, but the answer at least has always been rather straightforward; usually the motives point out the culprit, the rest is about evidence, and then what to do with the conclusion. Not that many people in the wide galaxy have the means or the mind to make a puzzle out of a murder - most often it happens in a moment of heightened emotions, breaking open a conflict that already exists. The people who make a game of killing… well. They have the mind and the means. Usually ample means. The question of who is always obvious in those cases, it's just that there isn't much most individuals can do about the answer.

Here it's a weird remix of the principles. The corpse here was - still is, really - the who of their big case for the last three years. With the well-lived benefit of hindsight that Obi-Wan's gained for the last three weeks it really has become almost embarrassingly obvious: of course the Chancellor is Sith, just because the Chancellor's seat is the Force-damned stillwater puddle where unimaginable power over trillions of beings pools. Just because that chair is so insulated from any real consequence the war brings that it's practically cosy. Just because this war is a bloody, blistering game, and the toll of it would obvi-fucking-ously correspond with how utterly fucking unfamiliar with the concept of consequence the mastermind is.

Was. Sheev Palpatine, Obi-Wan has to remind himself every ten minutes or so, is dead. The fact is taking its sweet time to settle itself in his mind, even though he was there to watch the bastard's head roll on the floor. Maybe because it happened so sudden, or that it was– unplanned for. That he is, despite everything, unprepared for it to actually happen.

So, in a way, their current case is both bolstered and overshadowed by the case they just solved, while at the same time every thread about it has become exceedingly tangled. There are, on the Senate Guard's table, six Jedi Generals, three Clone Commanders, and one dead ex-Chancellor. The Clone Commanders' helmet feed was tampered with, also in that twenty-minute duration, cutting off any recording with no warning. The Chancellor office has always been exempt from the security holocam feed - a revered Republic tradition, really, by modern time - and there was no-one else inside the office with the suspects. And the suspects, including the Clone Commanders, have resolutely stayed silent about the hand that dealt the final blow.

The only blow. Obi-Wan knows this. There was never even a second strike of a saber in that office, last night. The Senate Guards should know this, too, by now - he can't imagine the autopsy being too complicated, there. All in all Palpatine's was a pretty whole corpse. Hale and hearty, except for that curious gap between two very neatly light-sabered halves of his C4 vertebrae. 

It's not glee that Obi-Wan feels about this death. He can't lie to himself, not now, not after everything; what he feels is pure, unadulterated anger. It's a directionless rage, a cumulation of too many things, a spool of thread just as tangled as every other fucking matter in the galaxy right now. Entirely unearned - because it's his fault. Always has been. 

It's just, maybe, a little bit funny. To be a suspect and also a witness and, also, in a sense, the murderer. To know exactly what happened in that office, and then have none of it cohere with anything else that came up afterward. To be horrified not by the dead body of the fucking Chancellor - former - at their feet, but by the way they all sat down afterward and agreed to fudge the investigation to buy time. 

Marshall Commander Fox was among the three Clone Commanders present (not suspected, stars, Obi-Wan can't even bring himself to talk in that formal tone about them anymore, even in his head. Everybody knows they're not the suspects. It's a level of dishonesty even he can't maintain.) at the office. Obi-Wan thinks that might really be the only reason everyone's grounded at the Temple instead of in a jail cell by now - the Commander has an almost scary mastery of conversational languages. If someone has even half an ear open to him then they're already practically under his command; he can talk circles around the most seasoned politician in the Senate building. He's argued for basically house arrest and guard for the Jedi Generals involved, presenting the case that a Jedi would have better chance of stopping another Jedi from breaking out than any average Guard. 

Nobody, of course, happened to mention that the Temple has no holding facility. The house arrest part was implied among parties in the know, and glossed over by the rest. It's a risky manoeuver, especially for someone already in a very precarious position like Commander Fox, but he executed it with an ease that transcends practice or lived experience. It's remarkable. 

Almost gross. Transgressive in a way that every action they've taken in this war has been. Murky, comfortable in its nest of a truly atrocious mess. Nauseatingly evident with its core understanding that they're in a rotten framework that makes for rotten people. 

Marshall Commander Fox is a better man than Obi-Wan will ever be. He's come back to his quarter, seen Anakin on the couch with a half-finished project from his padawan day still lingering on their low table, and suddenly he's almost incandescent with rage.

"No," he tells himself, decisively, "no, no. I'm not doing this. I'll–"

"Hello, Master mine," Anakin drones. He'd sound bored if Obi-Wan doesn't know him so well; to his ear his old padawan sounds about as angry as he himself feels right now. "I am well, thank you for asking. I never got the chance to move out, because we were fighting a f—Force-damned war, so they sent me back here,"

"I know this," Obi-Wan cuts in, but Anakin isn't to be stopped.

"so we'll be in each other's company for the next little eternity, so can you please tell me what the–"

"Me? You're asking me, right now? Am I hearing this correctly?"

"—fuck that was. Please and thank you? All of the polite stuff?"

"I was not the one that–" Obi-Wan stops himself. They are being monitored, facetiously or not, and. He doesn't think he can ever actually bring himself to make matters worse for whoever on the legal end who'll have to defend them. A bunch of– just the most incomprehensibly neglectful, blind, idiotic– "Nevermind, no. Actually, no, Anakin, I will not be here to be interrogated, I will remove myself and calm myself down so I don't strangle–" 

"Oh? Oh? You're angry?" Anakin stands up from the couch. Obi-Wan's honestly so angry that he doesn't even remember to flinch, despite what happened earlier in the day. The way Anakin's blue eyes blaze under their quarter's dusty light only makes him madder somehow. "You 're angry. Did all that knowledge not save you from that? Is that a surprise for you? Or were you keeping all of that from me for fun?"

"Think me cruel all you want, I don't care, I am going into my room and I am staying there–"

"Who gives a fuck what I think! Right! Because every day you find out that the one person who's been kind to you all these years was using you, that's just a normal thing to learn, just average stuff–"

"The one person ?" Obi-Wan can almost not help himself. He does not want to find out he's not better than all this today. Tomorrow, perhaps, he'd clear the schedule, sure. Not today. "The– I'm not doing this. No."

"--and then everyone else was going behind your back about it, your family, that's all cool and dandy too, that's–"

"And why is that!"

Obi-Wan's raised his voice. His first thought, comically, is Wow, I sound like garbage - the word garbage spoken in a dented, amorphous manifestation of how he's heard Cody say it, countless times. This is definitely not the voice of the Negotiator. What has he been doing? What has he been doing for the last decade? For his whole life?

Their flat's gone dead quiet. Anakin stands where he's been standing - Obi-Wan realises he hasn't moved at all, to stop him from going to his room or to get closer. Other than his words, his padawan's nigh catatonic. Blue eyes, so blue, seeking - Obi-Wan has half the thought it was once endearing. Reassuring, that Anakin still looked to him, seeked him out for answers, even though the best he had then often was only to seek along with his padawan. 

Now– at this moment, drowning in the boiling something that's been rising for years to eventually meet his throat, Obi-Wan just learns, finally, that there are so many ways to be cruel without being Dark. 

"Look at yourself for one second, Anakin," he says, his voice broken into rough silt, a quiet rasp. "Write what you did down, maybe you'll get it. Maybe you'll get what I was trying to avoid by not telling you. Think about the things you did, the moment you knew."

Anakin swallows roughly. "You're angry. Don't tell me you're not."

"And I'm trying to solve that." Obi-Wan is so close to his room door now. Just another step. 

"Don't tell me you wouldn't have– if you're angry enough–"

"Maybe I would have!" He can't raise his voice again today. Stars, he's so tired. He– anger is exhausting. It never stays long, even when it simmers; the peak passes, and it throws itself against the shore of his skull, shattering into frustration, into helplessness, into fear. "So can you excuse me going to deal with that before it becomes a problem, because as you may have noticed, there are only you and I in this flat right now."

Anakin looks like a little prey animal caught in a hunting light when Obi-Wan glances at him. An ugly kind of humour rises in the confine of his ribs - so that was his padawan's (his ex-padawan's? his old padawan's) plan for the evening. It's truly comical, how Obi-Wan knows the well-trodden trails in the mind of this– stranger, confined in this quarter with him for the next few days. He can predict what this man will say, but he can't weave that into someone coherent. Into someone he recognises.

He enters his room and closes the door behind him. He sheds his outer robe, his personal comm link still in its pocket, and goes see if he can keep his face against the water in the 'fresher sink forever (he can't). When he gets out, clean and reluctantly freshened, Anakin's there on the floor right outside his room, back against the door. Without anger, nowadays the weight of his existence is almost undetectable.

Obi-Wan manages to hold out for almost half a day. It can be considered a record, especially since he and Anakin are confined to the same square meters for the foreseeable future, and he's never been able to close a door on Anakin for any longer than an hour or so. Not before the war, and even less so into– 

It's not true, he thinks, staring at his datapad instead of hitting himself over the head with a heavy object like he dearly wants to. It's not true, it's not true, it's not true. Obi-Wan lies. He lies all the fucking time, and softly, with every oath he takes, he cheats. It's a time-honored Jedi tradition, to rule-lawyer around the overlap of their physical existence and the thousand-ton weight knowledge that is the Force. To be students for life, and for that life, to learn the places to push, limits to succumb to. He lies, and he tries, as they all do, to figure out what's important. To negotiate between the truth and the light. 

But - and so - Obi-Wan'd like to think, he acknowledges his lies to be lies. He lies his heart out, but he doesn't grift. He's trained to be a consular, a diplomat, before the tides of his story changed and he was given someone he needed to protect; he's taught of the truth it is what it is what it is and what to do about it. And, ultimately, that's what he's always done.

The language of war has a very succinct word for it: operational security. In the confine of his bedroom that he refuses to get out of, as Coruscant's artificial night shifts to day and more minutes than the war's ever afforded him fall unhurried and empty to the floor, Obi-Wan finally notices how close they've always been to soldiers, in the end.

Three weeks ago, at the shape of relevant intel, Obi-Wan has, as softly as always, elected to operational security his former padawan and current subordinate out of the plan he then spent the whole night trying to hash out. It's not the first door he's closed in Anakin's face, not even the first without Anakin in the immediate vicinity, but– he thinks, and he hopes dearly that he's correct, this is the first time he's done so without himself noticing. In the earthquake of the world shattering and being reshaped in his mind, the idea that Anakin'd be hurt by the omission has slipped. Surely he's learned, was what Obi-Wan's thought. Surely he's learned, that they're all chomping at the bits to end the war as soon as possible, that the kind of discussions happening at the High General level of clearance would inevitably - and do generally, so far - exclude him from the circle of knowing. That they're all muddied and black and blue, that Obi-Wan's dragged himself kicking and screaming into the Rako Hardeen mission, that–

That he's not to be trusted. No, not really, Obi-Wan can only shake his head. That his words are not to be taken at face value, between them, Jedi-to-Jedi, that they sound pretty and fade like smoke while their hands still stay warm when they clasp. Jedi, seeking wisdom in words passed down through thousands of years, often say one thing and mean another. It's always clashed with Anakin's way, his padawan's frustration in being wholely unable to express himself how he ardently wants to, to people who are supposed to understand him, still sharp after all these years.

He's paced his bedroom enough this morning, arguing with himself about it. He's– he's hurt Anakin, deeply, no matter how he looks at it. He's hoped when the news break his padawan'd still have his people, his friends, to rely on for support, since the Chancellor - former - was… the man's had his claws so deep in Anakin's life. Stars… He's set himself up as practically a pillar of Anakin's daily life, and then the others have been knocked out on the way to taking him out, and now.

Anakin was in that office with nine people, not a single one he thought he could trust.

He didn't have to fucking cut a man's head off about it, but, still. Obi-Wan drags a hand up his face, and then through his hair. It's why Anakin isn't a consular knight, he thinks, almost hysterically. It's simply impossible for the boy to understand that allies needn't be trusted friends. 

Obi-Wan doesn't know what he is to Anakin, right now. He almost doesn't want to find out.

When the door chimes for their first meal, Obi-Wan definitely takes too long to go get it. He's maybe hoped Anakin'd do it, as he used to whenever someone came by in his padawan years, but a second chime dashed his hopes soundly. Anakin's on the couch, staring at their low table with the layer of dust on it from disuse, when he gets out, instead of– he doesn't know where he thought Anakin's ended up. At Padmé's Senate apartment, as if they aren't grounded here practically by choice? In his old padawan bedroom, on a bed that's been a bit too small for him for years now? 

Their meal's been brought over from the mess hall by a Core Guard member. Their presence confirms the official communications coming by Obi-Wan datapad last night, that Commander Fox has successfully taken over the sham investigation. Obi-Wan's fully not surprised; given his repertoire, Palpatine's of course thoroughly disgraced Coruscant's extant - and indeed exceptionally ineffective, by design - security force before replacing them slowly with the new troops, that he has engineered to suffer unimaginable tortures at a single command from him (given the relief flowing like wave from the Guard soldier at his door, the fucker may very possible have done something of the likes already), and now, when it's time to investigate his death, there's simply no other agency available for the job.

"Sir," the soldier greets Obi-Wan. They're definitely happy Palpatine's dead as a doornail. Obi-Wan appreciates that someone involved still has the wherewithal to feel that happiness in all their stead.

Where he is now, he can only sigh. "None of that, trooper. Even if the war won't end soon, there's no way I'll be allowed back in command again, after this."

 "Last time a Jedi General was removed from position outside of battle he was executed on the spot by another General." The trooper puts the boxes in Obi-Wan's hands, not giving a single shit that they were insulting him to his face. "This machine's real forgiving towards people it can squeeze a few more dollops out of. Sir."

They leave without a parting word after that. Obi-Wan can't begrudge them the pleasure of it.

He watches their back disappear at the end of the hallway. There should be two guards there, and then a patrol through the floor, and then a common tab between the Core Guards and the Temple Guards. It's truly a masterclass in organisation and obfuscation from Commander Fox; he's even managed to make it seem like the involved Jedi's lightsabers are so intrinsic a part of them that nobody ever figured to remove them. Obi-Wan's seen him debate that point when he glanced over Anakin - he himself's had the same debate, internally, right beforehand - but he imagines the conclusion the commander's come to was the same as his, as least in colors. 

Commander Fox's upper estimation of what troopers refer to as "Force bullshit" most possibly came from Palpatine. Obi-Wan knows how Anakin can beat that ceiling by the span of a sky. It's easier to let them all keep their sabers, and keep Anakin in the saber-using mindset. Obi-Wan can win a duel. He can not predict succinctly what Anakin'd do with the Force alone. 

It's a disgusting thing to keep in mind, as he puts their first meal on the kitchen table. "Gutgrain and nuna jerky," he reads the scribbled label out loud, "or kanjan with flatbread."

Anakin doesn't make a pick.

"Well, what we can manage that can pass for kanjan now, anyway. Hope the Guards are eating at the mess hall too. Someone should make use of the space."

His padawan stays silent. 

"I'm taking the gutgrain."

"So you're not angry anymore."

Obi-Wan sits down at the kitchen table, his back at Anakin. "You can see it how you want," he says. "There's a world of ways to react to any given event outside of anger."

He hears the rustles of Anakin's robes - he can almost see the way his padawan conceals a sigh behind a hand - before the couch shifts audibly and Anakin sits down next to him. "You were angry," his voice is rough, still hoarse with the way he screamed the day before, and then stifled for the following hours.

Obi-Wan wants to reply in a thousand ways, but. He's not a teacher, right now. He's not fit to teach a strill to sit, let alone a sentient being to understand the immense cruelties of a war. "Furious," he only says. 

Anakin drags the meal box over. Obi-Wan opens his. The gutgrain, despite the world it grew in, shines with daylight. The wedge of lemon is withered, from a fruit plucked too early and then stored for too long. It still gives plenty of juice, and it'll be much sourer than it is bitter. 

Anakin eats. Obi-Wan just stares at his first meal.

"How d'you think this is gonna go," Anakin says more than asks between bites. He's hedging for something, Obi-Wan can tell. He can even tell what he's hedging for.

Obi-Wan picks up a bit of the gutgrain to work into a piece. "Given that Padmé's playing liaison between the Senate and the Core Guards during the investigation, we're forbidden from communication with her for the duration."

Anakin seems to hiccup, but his hands stay deft as they tear the flatbread up. "You know. Knew."

A bantha in a crystal stall'd be subtler than you two, Obi-Wan almost says, except the teasing words taste like ash in his own mind. He settles with, "No matter what you think, I did spend a decade of my life living next to you, padawan."

"Who," Anakin starts, and then stops and reconsiders his words. "How many people know?"

About the entirety of the Order, plus the GAR, and given you dead Sith friend, probably the whole of Senate too. That's not really what Anakin's asking, Obi-Wan knows. "Enough people. You know Master Mundi's married?"

"Isn't that on a biological imperative technicality or something?

Obi-Wan gives in to his worse instincts for a second and glares blatantly at Anakin's machine hand. Anakin catches his eyes with nothing but confusion. "Little gods," Obi-Wan groans, and eats the ball of gutgrain he's worked into a paste. It sticks like tar to the roof of his mouth. "Anakin, Master Mundi could figure out how to peel off his whole body and remake it if he judges it necessary. None of us succumb quietly to the rule of our physicality. I had mine altered the day I turned fifteen." Well, a day around the week they were mostly sure his light day fell in. Records were spotty on that. "It's legalese. How do you even come by the notion that we've done anything without having a hundred arguments about it front and back?"

Anakin blinks. "Wh- What about attachment, then? What was– all that for?"

I've failed, Obi-Wan thinks. Utterly and miserably. "Remind me, padawan," he says into his first meal, "what happened yesterday."

"That's not–" He hears Anakin take a breath. "That's not my fucking fault."

"You did– "

"He used me!" The machine hand they were just making eye at slams onto the table. Obi-Wan hears the wood crack. Anakin heaves a breath, his airway seemingly constricted by invisible force. "All this time, he said all the nice things and all those– gestures, and just so he can– own me–"

"That's what you had with him," Obi-Wan says, before he loses his nerves, before the meaning of his own words can stoke that fire he felt yesterday again. "What he actively cultivated with you. Attachment. When his place in your world changed, it destabilized you."

Anakin curls up in his chair. "It was– an accident."

"An accident. An accident. A single moment, Anakin, one single slip, and– someone's fucking head got cut off."

"I didn't mean it! "

"And is your friend any less dead for it!"

Anakin's hand is on his saber. Obi-Wan's, in reaction, has fallen on his as well. Their current arrangement, tactically sound, is also the cruelest punishment this war's brought yet. That Obi-Wan's given himself, yet.

He makes himself let go of his saber hilt. "I don't know where I went wrong," he grounds out, then corrects himself. "No, I know exactly where we went wrong. I should've never let that creature cough even a thank-you in your direction. But I've run out of ways to explain to you how easily a lightsaber can cut through most things, by now. I don't know what else to do, Anakin."

He closes the box in front of him, stands up to go put it in their freezebox. When he turns to go back to his room, Anakin's hands are both on the table, one curled over the crack he's made. His padawan doesn't meet his eyes.

"I'm sorry," Obi-Wan offers, selfishly. And then, hopefully more selflessly, "You two've waited a whole war. You can wait an investigation."

He leaves their kitchen before Anakin can throw that back in his face.

Obi-Wan's avoided thinking too much about Cody since they got grounded (it feels increasingly distasteful to refer to their situation with any term even approaching the actual severity of incarceration, even just in his own mind); they've dashed the idea of faking a fatal shot after the fact. It's very hard to mask a lightsaber wound of that caliber, and even harder to trump it with any other kind of injury in a "cause of death" box. Given how all four Jedi present in that office came out of it fully awake and cognisant, it'd be mocking the public to their face to even try and put the death on a Clone Commander. And, as well: none of the Jedi even dared to consider the move.

They couldn't let the war take that last bit of– Obi-Wan doesn't know what it is, really, that they individually decided to hold onto so tightly. Heart? Moral? Good will toward a number of people they've already condemned to a terrible fate, a decade ago? Maybe, just love. Obi-Wan knew he wasn't really saving Cody, there in the Chancellor office, by making this investigation the theatre experience of a lifetime; they've done barely anything but holding onto each other tightly to maybe slow the fall a little bit for both of them. He holds no illusion of being Cody's dashing saviour, not while they were both fighting a war, and not when they're now mired in something absurd. Not when he's told the Marshall Commander he's relied on for the last three years to help keep him a man instead of a beast that he's my padawan, Cody. I can't. I can't, I can't.

Cody's not a suspect. Obi-Wan's spotty on what the scenario the investigation's drawn for that twenty-five minutes void they were in together has come to now, but he knows Commander Fox's competency, and he can see the shape of it: Anakin was the one to confront his trusted friend, and he was the one to summon the other Jedi Generals to the office as support. The Commanders were knocked out by Palpatine using his Darkside powers, which was when the helmet feeds were cut, and then the former Chancellor has shown off the opportunities the Darkside provided to Anakin, who he's wanted for years to turn into an apprentice, by restraining the five very powerful High Generals with his mind alone. Anakin, his loyalty to the Jedi winning out, killed the person who betrayed him and used him and hurt his family with a single swing of his lightsaber, the Sith's arrogance rendering him blind to the incoming attack. It's something that fits best in the range of probability that'd let Fox work his prowess and coordinate the release of information, and, of course, it's something that'd keep his siblings firmly out of harm's way. Cody's not a suspect, and he never would be, even if he really did kill the Chancellor.

So Cody's moving mostly freely outside this flat Obi-Wan's found himself in. His own flat, that he hasn't returned to for months, that he's seen maybe five times in total in the last three years. With himself as suspect and Cody as witness, the 212th's also grounded to Coruscant along with three other battalions. Cody's free, or at least freer than he's been at any previous points in the war, and he, like Padmé and Bly, is firmly forbidden from contact with any of the Jedi who were in that office for the time being. Obi-Wan wants to see him very, very badly. He's been opting to simply not even glance in the direction of that desire ever since he's arrived at his flat. He's started practicing the moment he got out of the crime scene, even. 

It's gotten very hard, a mere day and a half in. Obi-Wan sits at the desk in his bedroom, datapad scrolling through the investigation's official communication feed (Commander Bly's turned out to possess some neat tricks to mask one's presence in such a space, as long as no-one's looking too closely. It's so close to an electric see-me-not that it's gotten Obi-Wan very curious, even neck deep in the mess they were dealing with), staring at the serial attached to every missive. Commander Bly somehow has curated a way of speaking officially that's startlingly similar to how Jedi consulars negotiate with the stories involved, while Commander Fox's written words are just as precise and perfectly woven as his professional speech. Cody… Cody still says nothing but the truth. Cody always presents the state of any matter this way, cradling that brittle and bare skeleton with an almost ritualistic air, letting the audience dress it up with any amount of pomp and confetti they desire. 

Cody thinks himself the worst man in the known galaxy for having to dictate the way his siblings die, and he lives like he's futilely making up for the fact. For once he's not doomed to hold that position anymore. Obi-Wan does not want Cody confined in this flat with him.

He's just– Obi-Wan scrubs his face again with a hand. He feels ancient, rotten and bereft of even the moss that should feed on his ruins. From the moment Obi-Wan coordinated a battle with Cody he's started relying on the Commander to steer him right. Cody, and his bare truths, and his resignation to being alive, wielding that state of being itself like a well-worn tool. He's let Obi-Wan feel like he can still be kind and actually change something, let Obi-Wan get a death grip around what being a Jedi still means to him. He's liked the herb garden on board the Negotiator, and then the Vigilance, and he's let Obi-Wan perform the rites for Krell in solitude, and he's looked at Obi-Wan, really looked at him, after Rako Hardeen's finally been shed and properly thrown aside. He hasn't saved Obi-Wan - they haven't saved each other, in that grand romantic way. Obi-Wan can't make Cody responsible for whatever the fuck's become of him. But, still.

I don't know what to do with Anakin anymore, Obi-Wan taps out in dadita on his desk, next to the datapad. In the relatively secured privacy of his mind, now that the Sith on Coruscant's properly dead and gone, he can admit to himself that he's… talking to Cody, still. Obi-Wan sorely lacks that talent Cody has in spades, the ability to not fucking talk in circles around any problems he runs into. He wants, badly, to hear what Cody has to say about the matter, how Cody would break it down, what the skeleton they're burying would look like. Anakin killed a man by accident in a moment of heightened emotions. Anakin also killed the Sith who orchestrated the whole war starting a decade ago, most possibly even earlier, and practically ended the war without even meaning to. With the most probable official story they're going with, not only none of them will face prosecution, but Anakin'll also be hailed as a war hero, the catalyst to the Galactic Republic's decisive and righteous victory. He'll be greeted with cheers and gratitude and maybe even reverence on the streets, then return to the Temple he's grown up in to bear a terrible secret. 

He can't imagine what Cody'd say about all of it. War suits no-one well, but Anakin wears it perhaps the worst of them all; he reacts so harshly to injustice, every emotion he feels already stronger than most. He bucks and thrashes against the miseries of warfare. Obi-Wan has an awful, corrosive thought that if Palpatine's head's left his neck any later the wretch might've been able to sway Anakin to his side, just by promising that he'd end the war. Just by lying that it'd all hurt less. 

It's all Obi-Wan's ever wanted to teach his padawan: to hurt less. He's failed thoroughly at it. He wants, terribly, awfully, for Cody to unearth from that failure a pretty skeleton to bury. He wants to hear Cody take a deep breath and say we go from here.

He will not even wish for Cody to be grounded the way he and Anakin are.

The comm feed scrolls up with a new missive from Padmé. She's filtering the nonsense chatters going on at the Senate very heavily, and her words sound dictated for it. Scripted. She's a dear friend to a number of Jedi, Obi-Wan himself included; if she lets any kind of affection for the suspects bleed into her official words it'd make Commander Fox's job much more difficult. It may even endanger everyone involved. It's, honestly, already a very risky gambit from her end, to instate herself in the investigation this way - Obi-Wan imagines Anakin being the main character in the story they're drafting has something to do with it. She is, afterall, just as brash as Anakin, and equally gifted at the things she enjoys doing. 

She seems to have more of a handle on her public appearance, however. The way she sounds in the official missives is righteous and impersonal to an almost nauseating level. Obi-Wan is… glad, perhaps, is what he feels. That Anakin doesn't have to read this. His padawan trusts so few people now.

He taps all of it out onto the table, the sound dull on top of old, softened wood. He was thinking about putting a new plastoid tabletop on it and reinforcing the legs, before the assassination threat against Padmé and the war. Anakin probably won't hear the sound, now, through the plastisteel of the door. Neither will Cody, away from this room, from this flat, maybe from this Temple. Free to stop squaring his shoulders and take a few naps and catch up with his batchmates. Obi-Wan still talks to him in droning taps. He exhausts everything he can say, everything he's now sure he won't actually tell Cody, on the desk's surface. 

He doesn't come out of his room, comes midmeal time. He hears the front door open after the first chime, and his appetite's poured itself into the Force along with the anger he can't hold onto, so in his bedroom he stays. He reads communications from other battalions in the 7th Sky Corps, checks the forms still going to his supposedly-locked inbox in absence of an incoming replacement High General. He cleans out his barren closet and scrubs the 'fresher sink. He picks up and sets down holonovels he couldn't find the time to read during the war. Inbetween everything he does to busy himself, he listens to Anakin pace in their common room.

At some time around mid-afternoon, he hears Anakin sit himself against his bedroom door.

"Has," his padawan starts, and then stops again so he can restart. "What d'you imagine they're talking about, with the investigation?"

Obi-Wan puts the empty coat hanger he's holding back into its rack in the closet. He turns for the bed, then rethinks the position and sets for the desk chair instead. The Temple always seems to swallow any outside noise coming through its walls; he can't even pretend not to hear Anakin's voice in the quiet. 

"If none of us admit to it this'll drag out for weeks," Anakin continues, almost succeeding at passing it off as thinking out loud, "and the war's still happening, even with– the Sith. With him dead. They'll– they'll try to pin it on someone again. Have someone easy to arrest, like– what they did with. Ahsoka." Obi-Wan hears him swallow.

He knows Anakin wants him to disprove his fear. He knows Anakin's thinking that it'll get pinned on Aayla, the one among them who isn't a High General or the poster boy of the war effort. This he can do for Anakin at least. "I trust Commander Fox to stand with justice."

Anakin laughs, the sound bitter and choked. "Yeah, yeah," he mumbles, almost inaudible through the door. "Justice."

There are a thousand ways to read those words, but Obi-Wan still knows his padawan, for the moment. He's known his padawan enough to pull the operational security card, for– all the good it's done, in the end. Anakin's still found his way into possession of the knowledge of the chips dormant in every clone trooper's brain, of the commands being linked to the Chancellor position, and he's still reacted exactly how Obi-Wan's predicted. He's taken that reaction to its logical end, that Obi-Wan's refused to even acknowledge until the moment it happened. 

Maybe he was angrier at himself than at anything else, when he first saw Anakin in their new shared confinement yesterday. "The act of killing the Chancellor does virtually end the war, Anakin. Given that he's turned out to be the Sith master."

"Right." Anakin's machine hand falls onto the floor on the other side of the door with a clack. "Right."

Obi-Wan knows he's not squaring well with that fact. Anakin's rage wants to bury the disbelief under the conclusion he knows to be real, but eventually, in the confinement of this flat and with nothing else to feed the anger, the dissonance resurfaces. 

"It's– okay to mourn him, Anakin."

"No it's fucking not? He used me." The anger makes its way back into Anakin's voice. Obi-Wan aches with realising how comfortable he's grown in its presence.

He offers what he can, like in a time long past. "I prepared the rites for Krell, you know."

Anakin's silent at that for a long moment. And then, "Kinda always wondered what came of his corpse."

"I couldn't make the troops deal with him, absolutely not. But… I remember him before the war. He'd never been personable, but he was always– proactive. He abhorred inaction. His late teacher remarked often on how personally he took every bit of suffering he came across."

"So he was a Jedi once, yeah, I was there too," Anakin says, his voice shaking ever so slightly. "He wasn't plotting the death of every Jedi ever and bioengineering a special slave army about it. He wasn't– calling me away for the fucks of it while people I've known my whole life slaughtered my troops. "

Obi-Wan taps on the desk again. Just a rhythm, this time. Tap-tap-tap-tap. "He wasn't just a Jedi once," he corrects his padawan, as if he's still worth anything as a teacher. "He was a Jedi when he died. He never renounced us, and we never renounced him."

Anakin doesn't have anything to say to this, yet. 

Obi-Wan swallows roughly. "He didn't stop being the senior padawan I've met in passing when I was just taken on by Grandmaster Qui-Gon when he tortured and killed his troops. I didn't– stop having obligations as his peers, and his superior commanding officer in the army, when he pitted our soldiers against each others. Sometimes someone in our vicinity does unimaginably horrible things, Anakin, and it still can't reach back and undo what our mind experienced in their presence."

"Everything– I don't. I don't know if anything he's done for me has ever been genuine."

None of it was. Obi-Wan's only barely more exhausted than what emotional might it'd take of him to feel really fucking happy that Palpatine's dead. "Then don't mourn him. Mourn the happiness that time gave you."

I'm sorry, he doesn't say again. I have nothing else to give, he doesn't excuse himself. Anakin, really, only seeks him out now because they're both shut inside this flat with each other. Because Padmé is properly out of his reach for the time being, and the other person he'd go to– the trusted friend he'd share everything with–

Obi-Wan suddenly can't stay this far away from the door anymore. Like a child he only remembers in passing, he pushes away from the desk he was practically stuck to just before and drops down to sit up against the door. He fancies being able to hear Anakin's heart beating through plastisteel, but it's only his, the beats tightening against an aimless panic.

Everything I've done for you, he thinks, the words already saccharine and deeply unpalatable in his own mind, every bit of that was genuine. Even– the decision to let his padawan meet with and learn from the fucking Sith master. Even that, was genuine. Whatever that fucking means. 

"I was fooled, too," he spins that truth, in the way that's etched deep into his entire being, into something passable. "I, and our friends, and our elders. I've thought you were getting surer of mind, solidifying all you've been and all you've had to bear into someone steadier and– happier. With how you arrived, you've had to catch up on so much. We asked so much of you. We thought with that added outside perspective you were–" He swallows the rest of the excuses. He can't even entertain the thought. "When I found out, I knew it'd–"

"What do you think," Anakin cuts him off. Anakin's probably had enough of every bit of that bullshit. "Padmé's doing with the investigation."

Obi-Wan wants, very dearly, to bawl his eyes out. He hasn't the strength for it. He takes a deep breath, and squeezes everything he feels from his lungs into the Force.

"She's probably doing an exemplary job," he says. "She knows when to force away the biases and commit to the truth."

Anakin's head taps the door gently.

"Yeah," his padawan says. His voice has filled itself with gravels while they talk. "She really does, doesn't she."

Obi-Wan sleeps very poorly that night. Anakin's been the one to get their late meal, and when Obi-Wan gathered enough resolve to get to the kitchen for some tea, he's already put away what excess there was of his dinner alone and left the common room vacant. Obi-Wan's stared at the old padawan room, that used to be his a decade ago, while he cradled the tiny clay cup of burning Chandrillan rootgrate. The padawan room that used to be Anakin's, as well. They've knighted his padawan in service of a sham war no-one wanted to fight. Not the soldiers who died and broke for it, and not the coordinators who stayed as far away from it as possible. Not the central mastermind, behind his blaster-proof desk surrounded by blaster-proof walls, bloodlessly slain. By accident.

He can't keep thinking in that direction, but. Obi-Wan's found himself bereft of strength ever since he watched Anakin's saber not as much cutting through as merely swinging past the space occupied by Palpatine's neck. No– rather, he's found himself bereft of momentum. Everything's halted, the gears fallen a millimeter off the side, killing the entire machine. He's found himself frozen, up against a wall between himself and the day after, with no other way to tread but backward, to everything that could've made this how it is. To what-ifs and shoulds. He's watched the door to their padawan room, still closed, as impermeable as they've both built it up to be in Anakin's padawan time, as how Obi-Wan's made it during his own padawan time, and thought, maybe. Maybe if he could've stayed Anakin's teacher for even a year longer, maybe if they could've stayed on the same ship during the war, maybe. Maybe if they could've been offworld more before the war, maybe if Obi-Wan's stayed on the consular track, maybe if he could've taught Anakin how to negotiate the way they all do. A thousand maybes, spanning back a decade.

He's reheated some of the gutgrain and eaten it to keep the tea from curdling in his stomach. An empty envelope lay discarded under the common room's low table when he took his tea set there. He could tell from the flimsy stock that it came from Padmé. He let himself sigh, and put it in his sleeve to go dissolve in the sink later.

He couldn't manage more than two or so hours of sleep after. For a moment he's found the fact shameful - he's started sleeping better after Cody's interference. Even in the three weeks addled with bone-deep anger and paranoia and a whole war's worth of accumulated grief before– the Chancellor office– even in those weeks he's found a way to get himself and Cody some four hours every day. To be bad at sleeping, now, in his own flat in the Temple, feels like another failure. 

He's taken a deep breath, and let the thought go find solace in the Force. And now he's at the desk again, datapad bright in the room's dark.

Anakin probably knows their verdict better than Obi-Wan right now. Padmé's seen fit to send a personal update for him along with one of their meals, afterall. Obi-Wan can only guess how much she's told him, but– he wants to believe she desires before all to keep Anakin's trust. To not add to everything that's happened to him, so far. Obi-Wan wants to spring off of that faith to guess she's told Anakin that he's the best choice to take the blame, not because it's the truth, but because he's the most sympathetic face, and that she and the Guards are working their wonders to turn blame to accolade. That he won't face trial, nor will Aayla, or Kit or Mace or Quinlan or Obi-Wan himself. That she… thinks he was right to do it.

He was– Obi-Wan's hand curls itself up on his thigh. Anakin killed the Sith master. He destroyed a large clot that held up the flows of the world for a galactic war. Anakin did, ultimately, what Obi-Wan's prepared himself to do anyway. He's done it with less blood and injuries to his surroundings than Obi-Wan's accepted he'd have to– sacrifice, in the plan he and Quinlan and Cody and Rex and Fox have hashed out. Anakin's killed his personal friend by accident, enraged and bleeding into the Force as he cut off the only source of the answers he'd… spend the next little eternity seeking. 

Palpatine died in the middle of a sentence he was speaking to placate Anakin. Palpatine's head rolled before Anakin could hear him admit to his intentions. Anakin's destroyed his own closure before he could have it, in a rage. Now he'll only have words from people he no longer trusts to pave over the holes littering his padawan years. Now he'll have no choice but to take Obi-Wan's and their elders' judgements as his as well, because otherwise he'd have just. Killed his friend in a fit of rage. 

Obi-Wan drops his head onto the desk, next to his datapad. All he's ever wanted. All he's ever wanted for Anakin, was for him to hurt less. 

There's no use retreading all of it. Obi-Wan closes his eyes, takes a deep breath. His exhale fuses its movements to the roiling thoughts in his mind, drags them out with it. He puts his mind back onto the official communication feed. 

The investigation's movements have slowed hours ago, lulling itself along with the planet's general daily rhythm. Despite that Obi-Wan can see it's moved quickly, a lot quicker than the ideal pace. He swaps over to Senate news - Mas Amedda's trying to force his way into emergency power, and the Guards are preparing in response to release the details of Palpatine's war dealings early. He can only hope Commander Fox's had enough time to weave that story together. It'll be a lot of numbers and thirdhand or fourthhand deals, a lot of vague connections that'd take delicate wrangling to paint over the image of good intentions and kindly faces Palpatine's curated for himself. 

(All that scheming, all that acting, all that casual cruelty cold as death– all that time spent stringing hundreds of threads across the galaxy-wide board– and his head still drops to Anakin's feet by the same force of gravity that governs the rest of the planet. Already a day out from the moment it happened, but Obi-Wan still can't find it in himself to feel glad the man's dead. All he gets to have is futile weariness.)

Obi-Wan tabs back to the investigation's feed. With Mas Amedda's bid, he imagines they're now going to try and incriminate both him and Palpatine in one go. Pull Amedda into an investigation as well, to suspend his place in the line of succession. This means a Senator'd have to raise the charge in a session soon, and the Order will have to send a representative. 

It ought to be absurd how little a devastating galactic war affects the running of the Republic Senate. Obi-Wan finds, instead, that the notion comes more naturally than fucking anything else in this mess. 

He allows himself one sigh (he can almost hear Qui-Gon's words chiding him, I'm two scores your senior and I don't sigh, what business do you have sighing every other minute? ) before turning his datapad off and wandering out into the kitchen again. He chooses the Alderaan thornbrush tin Bail sent him - sent to this flat, rather, trying to send physical goods to any of the starcruisers outside of scheduled requisitions has become very difficult this last year - endeavouring to use up the water he boiled earlier, just the right temperature for this tea. The insulation canteen left in the flat came from Yoda, though Obi-Wan remembers Qui-Gon's already had it when he was taken on. He digs out one of the mugs too, an indelicate thing made of thick clay that's just shown up one day, and rinses the dust off it before tipping in barely a pinch of leaves.

It's, really, just so he has a warm thing to cradle in his hands while he sits at the low table again. Anakin's long-abandoned work-in-progress is still there. Obi-Wan's not been able to guess what it was supposed to be before the war; he can tell from the components, now, that it's a signal disperser. Or– would have been, if it were finished. 

He cannot let himself sigh again. There's… this flat's never felt this empty before. What has Obi-Wan busied himself with, in those early days back from Theed, his insomnia the worst it's ever been? What else has been ruined in the decade inbetween? He looks away from the thought to the scattered bits of machinery in front of him, the glint of metal and shine of duraplast wire coverings dulled under the dust. The way the thing's half-pieced together is undeniably Anakin. 

He sets the cup down and reaches for the biggest assembled piece of the project. The wires are mostly installed, there's no need to solder anything. The casing doesn't seem custom made, but the pieces do fit together with some coherence. It takes Obi-Wan around a quarter of an hour to finish the device. It would've taken Anakin maybe a minute. 

The thing goes back to where its components were scattered before, while Obi-Wan goes wet a rag to wipe down both the kitchen table and the low table. It stays there, alone in the common room, as Obi-Wan returns to his bedroom to stare at the official communication feed on his datapad. He lets Anakin get their first meal comes morning, lets Anakin get whatever letter Padmé's sent along again. Lets Anakin throw something that breaks apart with an awful cacophony of cracks, then pace around the common room before coming back to sit against the door.

"She voided it," his padawan says. "She–" His words cut away to a hiccup. "I know it wasn't a formal ceremony, I was– we were saving it for after the war, I thought–" 

And then he just cries. He just sits and cries silently, curled up against the door between him and Obi-Wan, as if he hasn't shattered everything Obi-Wan's known of the world again.

Three years ago, after a threat against Naboo's then - and still current - Galactic Senator Padmé Amidala proved itself credible, Jedi knight Obi-Wan Kenobi and his padawan Anakin Skywalker were sent to Theed to assess the situation and provide the security team additional support. When another assassination attempt happened during their stay, Obi-Wan Kenobi chased after the culprit, then the clue left behind along with the weapon that killed the culprit, all the way to Kamino, where he revealed himself as Jedi to the Kaminiise cloners and successfully tying the Order, as well as the Republic government, to a standing army for the first time in a millenia. Then he followed the true culprit of the threads against Senator Amidala's life to Geonosis, where he was captured by his own Grandmaster - now Darth Tyranus - and learned of the droid army that was already manufactured to oppose the one he just found. He woke up a short time after, chained to the same pole as his padawan and the person they were supposed to protect, in an arena surrounded by bugs.

The following battle was brutal in a way he still hasn't managed to properly come to terms with, three years after the fact. The Jedi sent to rescue them and uncover the looming spectre of war were a millenia out from when this last happened. Their panic still rang discordant in the Force there, a year later when Obi-Wan came back. It might be the last place where the sentiment's entrenched, now, when every surviving Jedi's had the cling of the war's muds and apathy seared into their fabrics.

Months after that first battle, Obi-Wan returned to the Temple to hear that he was to knight Anakin as soon as possible. He hasn't found an adequate reason to refuse - Anakin was already pretty much commanding the 212th in his absence while he and Alpha were stuck on Rattatak, and with– his proximity to the Chancellor– assignments he and his battalion'd get independent from Obi-Wan's would be much safer. Or so it's seemed. At the time. At any rate he and Anakin've subjected themselves to it, and then they've spent the majority of the time since on different ships, talking in official missives and the comforting routine snarks more than in real words. 

It's just now, in their Temple flat, sitting on the edge of his old bed staring at his old bedroom door, that he's noticed the day-long void between him leaving Theed and Anakin and Padmé showing up in the arena next to him.

Surely Padmé wouldn't, Obi-Wan wants to say. And he wouldn't even be lying, either, not with this: he knows Padmé to be a seasoned, trained politician. He knows - has known - Padmé, since a decade ago, to be righteous impulses well-woven in with hard-earned skills, sharp eyes and sharp words serving a sharp understanding of her station. She will push; it just wouldn't be Padmé if she didn't, if she stayed content with what she's afforded. She will fill any seat she gets in, spin it for all it's worth, driving sharply and repeatedly for the most ideal outcome.

It's her weapon– rather, it's the entirety of her mobility. It's how she gets things done.

So the surely she wouldn't part isn't about the, well, divorce. It makes sense. It makes sense that she's cutting that link now to the Order, in preparation to support their statement publicly in a Senate session. Everything about it coheres: Padmé's a good candidate to go after Palpatine, because they share the same home planet. Her and Anakin's– marriage, Force fucking damn it– would destroy this advantage, given that Anakin's suspect of the former Chancellor's murder and padawan to a Council member. Who is also suspect of the same murder. It would also, coincidentally, destroy her effort to advocate for an end to the war or any legal matters concerning the clone troopers, so of course she's had the politically-minded caution to keep it secret and unofficial. And, of course. Of course she's said the words, and of course she's now voiding them so she can see to it herself that Anakin'll never face trial. It's who Padmé is. It's who Obi-Wan knows Padmé to be. 

It's also, in that moment, so unimaginably cruel. Surely she wouldn't, Obi-Wan thinks, and forces himself to finish the thought, hurt Anakin in this way. 

He's found himself face-to-face with Anakin before he knows it, standing over his old padawan while the man curls up against the stretch of wall between the two bedroom doors. He just– it's like he's forcing the idea to the membranes of his lungs without it ever piercing through. Every part of this makes sense, except for the fact that Anakin's sitting there in front of him with red-rimmed eyes and arms hung limp over his knees. It's who– it's how Obi-Wan knows Padmé to be. She's brutally good at what she does, and she makes Anakin happy.

"You two," is what comes out of Obi-Wan's mouth from that mess.

Anakin clenches a fist.

Everything Obi-Wan says right now will suck fucking shit, but he's probably going to explode if he doesn't get to the bottom of this. Wherever that turns out to be. "Why would you," he says, and then turns and walks all the way to the shoe rack, then all the way back. "She's a senator."

"She loved–" Anakin catches himself before he finishes the sentence. Convenient for being monitored, but it also seems almost instinctive to him now, to pull back at the last moment on proclaiming that sentiment. Obi-Wan hasn't talked to him enough during the war to notice. "I've felt it. I saw it in– the Force."

Obi-Wan walks a lap around the low table. He goes find the old tiny broom under a sink to sweep up the pieces of the signal disperser scattered against the common room wall. He puts away the day's first meal boxes, entirely untouched. Then he sets himself down in front of Anakin again. His old padawan's gone so very quiet.

"She writes kindly," is what Obi-Wan manages.

Anakin scrubs his face roughly with his gloved hand. "How else'd she do it," he says, deeply miserable. "'s Padmé."

That much is true. Padmé's been brusque to her acquaintances and friends when her mind's overly focused on a specific goal, but Obi-Wan's never seen her be anything but unfailingly kind to Anakin. She's always chosen to love his padawan, whether the sentiment's there or not. Everything coheres. It's all so very linear.

"You have what's in the Force," he offers. "Words are just words, in the end."

The laugh Anakin huffs out is not kind. "Of course you'd say that," he says, low under his breath.

Obi-Wan takes a deep breath. He stands up. He walks to the window, then back. He doesn't sit back down again.

"I don't have to entertain this," he says. "We are not crying in front of my door and adopting that tone of conversation back-to-back. I'm sorry things came to be the way they are–"

"That's all you're gonna be, right? Sorry?" One of Anakin's knees falls over to a side. He's looking at Obi-Wan now, through the fringes just fallen over his face with the movement. "It's like talking to a fucking autoresponse machine. You just say that, and then that's it, nothing else, time to move on–"

"What," Obi-Wan's voice is rising again. He grits his teeth and swallows it down. "What do you want me to do, Anakin? I can't rewind time, and lest you forget, I'm none of the parties involved–"

"Oh, yeah, that's all there is to it, it's on me, obviously–"

"You did not happen to mention–"

"Now you know! Great, you know, and whoa, what's happening? What's going on now? What the fuck are you doing now?"

Obi-Wan's hands are clawed into the weave of his robe. "I'm sorry you feel– I'm sorry you can't trust me. I still haven't suddenly gained the ability to change decisions you made–"

"You can start feeling something about it sometimes soon maybe!"

Obi-Wan turns around. Then he turns back again.

"What part of any of this," he says, voice barely making it to a whisper, "seems unfeeling to you."

Anakin's outright staring at him. 

"I am angry, Anakin," Obi-Wan spells it out for him. "I am incensed."

He sees Anakin's jaw clench. "You say that. You spent weeks knowing who– knowing what he 's been– all of that knowledge, and you did nothing–"

Obi-Wan is above this. He isn't, he really isn't, but he is. "Whichever Jedi it was that decapitated the former Galactic Republic Chancellor in a fit of passion, the proceeding and requirements of the investigation wouldn't have changed. You know this. I'm sure it's been explained to you."

"It's all you fucking see! The big picture, the great plan, whatever, are you alive or are you a predictive algorithm–"

"Some of us have to bear the displeasure, given how some other behave–"

"Who am I even talking to anymore!"

"You tell me !"

Obi-Wan's throat has dried to a rasp, despite all the tea in the night. Anakin's hands, when he looks, are clawed into the fabrics of his robes and leggings as well. His right hand's fallen right next to his lightsaber clip, clinging to a robe hem as if trying to escape the weapon's gravity field.

"You tell me, Anakin." His voice clicks inbetween words. "You'd know more than me about who you're angry at right now. I'm just very conveniently also here."

Anakin brings a hand - the one not right next to his lightsaber - to his face. It drags across an eye, but doesn't leave his face after. 

Obi-Wan leaves to a kitchen cupboard. He excavates a box of sapir tea from behind a stack of spare bowls. He puts the kettle on. He gets the cups out. 

When he releases whatever it is his anger's broken into to the Force's care, he almost doesn't notice the buzz of Anakin's own. It rings so similar to his, in this space. He closes his eyes against the grief the thought brings, and gives that to the Force too.

He goes get the kettle a minute or so after it boils. When he brings it to the kitchen table and the two cups he's set out, Anakin's left for their old padawan room. He doesn't linger in the kitchen either, when the tea's done steeping; he can't make Anakin go hungry just because he's killed a man by accident and it's become a contentious subject between them. The boy's going through a fucking divorce afterall.

Anakin gets their midmeal when the door chimes. Obi-Wan doesn't hear the flat door close until a good while after. Then he feels the radiation of what was Anakin's anger just that morning, on the other side of his bedroom door, for a minute or so. For a moment, sitting on his desk chair with a datapad in his lap in his own room with someone right outside, he feels like a padawan again. Like what's hovering over him in the Force were his own grief, not the padawan he's raised to knighthood's, and the presence waiting for him were that of a teacher. Someone who knows more than him, someone who has the answers to all the questions he's never been able to ask adequately. Someone better he can leave the affair to and go scream into a bush for a few hours.

Someone who doesn't exist. The best man Obi-Wan's ever known has already drowned under the weight of that responsibility, too early in the choppy Kaminiise waves. Obi-Wan can absolutely not hurt him like that, not after these last three years. And besides, he's not here. Every decision maker involved in the process including both him and Obi-Wan has, individually and collectively, moved to keep him out of where Obi-Wan is. Obi-Wan hasn't regretted it. He knows Cody hasn't, either. That's the kind of people they are.

None of this means Obi-Wan doesn't tap out his thoughts, again and again and again, onto a crumbling desk in the privacy of his half-abandoned room, and mean for them to address Cody. It's as much longing as it's just how he thinks now; things make more sense when he tells them to Cody, either unspooled and hung up in traceable, continuous strings, or stripped bare to the ridiculous practical jokes they are at heart. A long time ago he's done something similar with Quinlan, thinking things through by mock-arguing with his friend in his own head. He's lost the habit for half his lifetime.

With the matter of Palpatine's death it's military and political manoeuvering. Obi-Wan's trained for the latter and cursed with the first - it's the kind of cruelty he's well acquainted with, by this point, the kind of things he's dearly hoped he could spare his padawan from, and then apparently spent the following decade thoroughly failing at it. With Padmé's no doubt very gentle and loving annulment of her and Anakin's union - that's existed through the whole war, turns out - Obi-Wan finds himself stranded half a planet away from his waters. He doesn't have the first clue about what to do.

This is the most intimately he's ever contemplated how much of a joke he's living.

I don't know what the fuck I'm supposed to do, Cody, he taps. He's said that to this same slab of wood more times than he can remember, these last two days, but the meaning of the words cut sharper than ever right then and there. I know we're different people. Of course I do. But I know him. I know how he feels these things, I know how strong his every emotion washes over him, I know they come crashing in undeniable and then fizzle away with barely a trace, I know he still feels the only way to make them mean something is to stake them to the flesh of himself and force them to stay. He struggles to know who he is, when these pieces keep fitting themselves in and breaking off at a breakneck pace. He craves badly for something to be permanent in his life, and I never managed to break it to him that there's never any standstill. 

This war has been brutal to Anakin. Of course it has. It's practically engineered to methodically take away any ground Anakin stands on, to force him into Palpatine's snare. It defaces and degrades anything of Anakin's that it doesn't destroy outright. It gives Anakin things it's geared to snatch away later. Even now, disrupted, it's broken yet another of Anakin's treasures. And. And Obi-Wan has not a single fucking clue how to–

He doesn't trust me, he taps, and even if he does. I know– his fingers falter, but he's probably going to do something much more embarrassing than talking in dadita to someone who isn't even there if he doesn't finish his thoughts. –he thinks I've lied about the people I love. Words were exchanged about that, and we've both elected to forget about it, but. Would he. His hand curls up, a cramp close to making itself known between the bones of his fingers. Would Anakin acknowledge it, if Obi-Wan talks to him about Cody? Anakin feels things so strongly. How could he have ever managed to hide his love for Padmé, when it sings like that in the Force? Compared to the torrent that he is in the Force, Obi-Wan's sentiments really aren't much, easy to wrap up and keep under his shields. If it's just about the feelings, Obi-Wan's never felt the hardship of not declaring them. He'd still be doing this, talking to Cody in muted taps when he's alone, even if they've never sat down and hashed the situation out. Like he was arguing with Quinlan in his mind before they were even properly entangled.

It's as untranslatable from Obi-Wan to Anakin as Anakin's wounds are to Obi-Wan. He can't even– the core reason for why this happened is already dead. Anakin cut his head off by accident. It's just the world's costliest and shittiest flea circus they're all stuck in now, and in this specific matter everyone bears the same amount of blame as everyone else. Anakin knows this. He knows Padmé did what she needed to do; he knows Padmé. As angry as he was that morning, every emotion he was feeling chucked in to fuel that fire, he still didn't say a word to accuse Padmé. He's antagonised Obi-Wan rather than letting his anger aim anywhere near her.

Obi-Wan wants so badly to take that as a sign of a returning trust, but Anakin is not him anymore than he is Anakin. His padawan didn't take it out on him because he knows Obi-Wan can take it and make something useful of it. It's frankly a level of stupid self-inflicted anxiety-induced mind game Obi-Wan doesn't think anyone but him is capable of. No, their current arrangement just encourages the convenience.

The latemeal door chime halfway echoes in the flat. It takes longer than usual for a second chime to follow it, but Obi-Wan's quick to get the door after. Anakin's indeed in his room, door closed, when he looks around. As much the Core Guard trooper at their door's noticed as well; their wearied relief meets his tired Force sense, layered on top of the ambient Chancellor's-death-related emotions.

"Ah," he starts before the trooper can greet him with another Sir, "I've hoped Anakin would be polite to the Guards. I'm sorry that wasn't the case." 

He can practically feel them squint their eyes at him inside their bucket, but outwardly they just shrug. He mentally takes a breath through his teeth; he's forgotten the Core Guards didn't work closely with Jedi during the war. "...It's fine, sir," they say. "It's a stressful situation."

Obi-Wan wants to laugh. He filters it down to a smile so he doesn't appear insane. "You'd think we can do better, with a millenia to learn how to deal with it," he leans lightly on the door frame. "I'm sorry regardless. I hope the Guards are making use of Temple facilities now that you have duties here as well as at the Senate?"

The trooper considers a few things silently. "We are on duty," they say, in the end. "Sir."

It's a fair answer. Obi-Wan closes his eyes and nods. "I shan't take more of your time, then," he says, keeping his voice gentle. The trooper, on cue, hands him the boxes. "Thank you for the meals. I do mean it."

They return his nod before walking away. He keeps his eyes on the spot they just left, instead of their back. He's barely looked at the boxes that went practically from their door straight to their freezebox so far. It, more than anything else he's done these last few days, these last years, feels like an actual crime rather than just failure.

He comes back in, sets the boxes onto their kitchen table to read the labels. Then he goes knock on Anakin's door.

"Shredded mushroom jerky and salted nuna egg porridge, or mudprawn cake and glass noodle soup," he reads out loud from memory.

Anakin doesn't answer. Obi-Wan puts a hand on the door before he can stop himself, as though he can catch a wave of the Force inside the room through the gaps between his fingers. The gesture doesn't help. He gets nothing more than the thing already there that's been calling itself anger.

He takes his hand back. "I pick the glass noodle," he says. He remembers Anakin likes salted egg. It's something they've jokingly fought over, years ago. "I'll take mine to my room. Eat before the porridge gets cold."

He gets a pair of chopsticks from the utensil rack and goes back to his room with the box he chose.

The noodle's a gentle deep blue, fading to purple in the sour soup. Obi-Wan knows the flour'd have to come from a Corps field, but the dye's made of the flowers in one of the Temple's gardens. The drakeplums flavouring the broth, too, should be from here; he remembers being sent to pick some while on kitchen duty, in his padawan years. They must be littering the ground where their tree grows, rotting back into dark earth, with barely anyone around to make use of them every day. 

Obi-Wan thinks, errantly as he twirls the noodle around the chopsticks, maybe kitchen duty for both him and Anakin in the near future sounds good. Anakin hasn't exactly liked his time there when he was a padawan, but it's succeeded in teaching him more delicate Force assistance. And… they're years and a war out now, from that part of their lives. Helping out with feeding Temple dwellers seems so unimaginably peaceful a task. Even if they'd be doing it under the scrutiny of kitchen masters.

He finishes everything in his box.

Anakin comes kneel in front of his door before he can bring the meal box out to the recycle chute. The sounds of his knees touching the floor, of robes shifting around the new position, are suddenly worlds apart from those he's made sitting up against this same door for the last few days.

Obi-Wan puts his datapad down, next to the empty box.

The other meal box, or maybe one of the ones they've put away, taps onto the floor, closer than Anakin's knees are. Between Anakin and the door. 

His padawan takes a breath. Then, voice still rough, "I need to tell you something."

Once upon a time, Anakin starts his tale like that, there was a worthless, terrible planet made of nothing but sand named Tatooine. Its proximity to the star it orbits, as well as the presence of four satellite celestial bodies of particular makes, should've actually vaporized every drop of water on its surface and rendered it completely uninhabitable, but that isn't the case. Tatooine, instead, as it spins ever incrementally toward a deserved heat death with its star, fosters gross, tortured lifeforms, existences so cruel even the Sith would flinch away from them. Giant predators lying in lethargic slumber under the sand, feeding on any animals that fall inside their mouths by accident for years, burning layer after layer of their flesh and then bones down to nothing. Hulking cold-blooded things that'd explode into gore the moment they leave the gravity field they've adapted to, guarding their eggs that they fertilize themselves jealously, a scattered clan of the exact same specimen spanning back the length of the planet's history. Large pests under the shadow of endless sand dunes that do nothing but wait, slowly, to die, devouring the ones among their own pack that succumb to the environment before the rest. The rare tufts of flora, true body buried deep in the red sand, hoarding water and then ruining it in their subterranean fruit, making it unpalatable to any other lifeforms but themselves and a few animals wretched enough to get used to it.

It's a despicable place worth nothing more than the space it occupies, so of course the monsters not tolerated in the rest of the galaxy come there to escape judgement. And to do business. Hundreds of years ago small slave driving operations started temporarily keeping their victims out there while they waited for the transactions to conclude, and then, eventually, the Hutt family came in and swallowed up the whole place. If Tatooine carried with it any grace at all, it would've roasted those slugs to a crisp on the hot sand, but no. The land let itself be shifted, the palace was built, and freemen followed the demand of service down to the surface with the new power. The slaves were chained to that hell, survived every day of their lives in spite of the environment.

This was where Shmi Skywalker was born, and it was where she was freed as well. She was– a beautiful woman, sharp and enduring even when she was in chains, and nothing less than radiant after. Anakin… didn't know her that well. It's the case with Jedi, generally; few want to know much about the children they're scared or ashamed of. He doesn't seem to know her any better, really, in this moment as he tells the story. She was kind, Anakin says, she was kind even when nothing around her was kind to her in return. She managed to be kind and keep her spine straight and her hands gentle, while scumbags sold and traded her like a piece of fucking furniture. So, of course, someone fell in love with her, because how could someone like her go unloved? and she was bought out of the slave quarter and freed.

But she didn't leave Tatooine. No, she was too kind for that, Anakin says in all but words. She could've left all of this behind, could've found a place that'd actually treat her well, that didn't hate everything it carried on it with a cosmic, celestial fire. But she's known of the runaway tunnels for years by that point, and she could not, in her good conscience that she's somehow kept after a lifetime in chains, just stand by without lending aid. Even if it meant she had to stay on Tatooine. Even if it meant she had to return to the same places that tortured her, deemed her less than a common piece of machinery, to smuggle out as many other victims as she could. Even if it meant she had to make a life for herself out in wild, hostile territory.

In the end, that planet managed to take her like it's taken countless others before it. Even though she didn't deserve that death, because she was a good person. 

Obi-Wan can make an educated guess, but he– he has to confirm. He has to know for sure. "You came back," he says and doesn't quite manage to make it a question, "to Tatooine."

Anakin probably nods, before he realises the door's still between him and Obi-Wan and confirms out loud. "Yeah."

"You were there when she–"

"Yeah." It's about fair for Anakin to cut him off. This, somehow, manages to feel like the cruelest set of question Obi-Wan'd be asking yet. "I was– barely too late."

This has to have happened during the war. Anakin wouldn't have been able to sneak off without Obi-Wan knowing beforehand, when they were still actually sharing this flat and people actually frequented the hangars. Though– how could Anakin have dealt with that - witnessing the death of his own family - unnoticed? He confronted his proclaimed dearest friend with a lightsaber immediately at the knowledge of betrayal. The strain of the war would've done him no favour in letting such a– an event go. 

"Right before Geonosis." The pieces finally click in place. Anakin and Padmé arrived long before the rest of the rescue team. They were coming from Tatooine. "You–"

"Yeah, that was then, too." Words hurry out of Anakin as if hunted by something ravenous. "She– it was only for her that I could leave. I know that now. If she weren't there I would've stayed and. Taken care of the rest."

The– passing rites? No, that– Anakin could've returned later for that. Shmi had family in the dunes, he's said. They would've either honored his wish to be present for the rites or denied him outright. It wouldn't be a what-if for him.

Obi-Wan leaves the desk chair to stand in front of the door. 

"Take care of what, Anakin?" 

Anakin swallows a mouthful of discarded words before replying.

"There's," he says, his voice barely a rasp, "these animals on Tatooine."

The flat is dead quiet around them both. It's like a spell binding everything in place, stilling all motions to a glacial silence. Obi-Wan doesn't hear his or Anakin's breaths, doesn't hear their robes move, doesn't feel the waves of the Force.

"They hunt in packs," Anakin says, faceless, formless but quiet, deafening words. "They snatch anyone who strays out from settlements too far, or if someone sets up shop in their territory, they come tear everything down. They cover themselves in rags. They hate moisture farmers. Her family– they had a few vaporators out back. The things saw."

Obi-Wan doesn't even know if the words he speaks become sounds. "What– did they do?"

"They dragged her back to their ground. They bled her."

They didn't– eat her. Or feed her to something.

"Anakin," Obi-Wan says. 

Anakin doesn't answer.

"Anakin, they were people. "

The door opens.

Oh, Obi-Wan thinks as he looks upon the same eyes he's seen next to him for the last decade of his life, I know nothing about this person, do I.

He knows Anakin. Anakin hates Tatooine, hates the desert, hates slavers. Anakin clicks with the working of machines and droids, as well as their general company. Anakin feels most competent, and thus most daring, at the helm of a flying vessel. Anakin will eat anything and is allergic to nothing. Anakin has no sabacc face. Anakin feels everything so strongly it often overwhelms him, when he doesn't let it go into the hands of the Force. Anakin can't sing to save his life, but he can keep a steady beat. Anakin gets cold just as easily as Obi-Wan himself. Anakin was his padawan for ten years.

Who are you, his mouth works to ask, but what comes out instead is, "What have you done?"

The man kneeling before him continues to stare at the meal box between them. Obi-Wan drops himself to his knees as well. His hands hang open in front of him, witless and useless.

This can't be true, he thinks. Surely there has to be a mistake in translation somewhere. They're so different, the gap between him and– maybe something's been lost in that endless void inbetween them, in transition from personal reality to personal reality. "Padmé– she was there, wasn't she?" It's a deeply selfish question. "Wouldn't she have–"

"I chased them alone," the man says.

He wouldn't have hidden it from her, anyway. Would he have? Would he have? "She never–"

"She said I was right to do it."

That almost shocked a laugh out of Obi-Wan. Huh. He really, really doesn't know any-fucking-thing, it turns out.

He doesn't even notice his hands dropping down into his lap. "I've failed," he says, no louder than a breath. It's the first time he's said it out loud. "I've– you really–" Does this man– does Anakin really think that, about a community that seems to have been there on Tatooine longer than any other sapient presence? Does his padawan go about every fucking day of his life referring to a people as animals in his head and meaning it ? Does this– come before or after the violence, however many people he's cut down, on that day–

"I killed everything in that hovel," Anakin says, as if actually hearing his thoughts. He doesn't even bother modulating his voice, word follows word follows word out in single, unfeeling file. "I had my lightsaber on me. None of them even bled."

"Anakin," Obi-Wan says, futilely.

"The Force agreed with me. I haven't Fallen. My kyber didn't bleed. I'm still–"

"Anakin. "

"–a Jedi, and Padmé said no court'd even prosecute me, 'cause we were on fucking Tatooine–"

"What are you doing ?"

Anakin finally looks up to meet Obi-Wan's eyes.

It starts making sense then, when Obi-Wan looks back and what is Anakin in his mind finally breaks away from the dam of his thoughts for good. He doesn't know this person. He doesn't know Anakin, and any of the other pillars of Anakin's life, at all. He thought Anakin wouldn't intentionally do this, but. But, but.

"Why aren't you angry," Anakin says.

 Obi-Wan can't hold back a laugh anymore. "I am fucking livid," he says. "I have half a mind to–"

"Then why do you never show it! "

The meal box flies to a side with the sweep of an arm. Obi-Wan finds a hand on his shoulder, clawing in, desperate for a lifeline.

"How do you contain it, how do you feel this– this fucking rage–" Anakin's eyes are so, so wide, the blue crystalline and fragile, "and just– leave? Why am I the only fucking one–"

"I am not a fucking judge, Anakin–"

"Who? Who can be the fucking judge anymore!" A sob falls into the turbulent waves of words. "Everything breaks, everything disappears, I'm given this fucking power and I still can't save even a single one of them, no court'll take it from me, not a single one of you 'll do anything– Why is the only thing I'm good for killing !"

The last syllable drops like a stone into a frozen lake. Then it, and the Force, shatters.

Obi-Wan can feel it - clearer than anything else he's felt in the Force recently. The hand on his shoulder shakes, but doesn't leave, and through the contact he can almost hear in the physical space something clattering. Spilling. It's horrifying, that cacophony; the force of it alone is something like an avalanche, an unfathomable amount of invisible snowdrops forcing their way out through a small opening, ripping it larger and larger. The heat of the reaction scorches. If not for that he's already so used to that exact heat, by living alongside it and helping - failing, failing, failing - to tame it, he would've flinched away. 

He reaches towards it, instead. "Anakin," he says again. What for, he can't even imagine.

Those same eyes look at him, still so wide. Anakin looks so young like that. "I don't want this anymore," his padawan– his student says, quiet under the phantom noises that tearing the Force from himself makes.

Obi-Wan, of course, throws himself around the separation. He's closed his eyes to do it - Anakin's grown so tall since his late teens, no longer someone he can gather up in his arms, but he needs to remember it right now, he needs to remember how to loop his entire existence around Anakin's, forcing the two slowly fracturing halves of him back together. He's so immense; it feels like he's spilling out of Obi-Wan's feeble hold anyway. A stranger. His student. His student.

"What are you doing," it's Anakin's turn to ask. The anger is long gone, crashed to shore and broken itself into frustration, into shame, into grief.

As much Obi-Wan's tried to teach him for a decade. He's failed, like he's failed at teaching Anakin everything else, at keeping Anakin safe, at making Anakin happy, at raising Anakin to be a good person. But– here they are, grounded in the same flat neither of them's moved out of.

Anakin was still Obi-Wan's student. Neither of them can reach back and change that.

Obi-Wan holds onto the fire. "You will not leave," he says, as if he can give orders to reality itself.

Anakin sobs.

"I will not let you leave, Anakin Skywalker," Obi-Wan says.

"Please–"

"You are a Jedi. I am– neither your parent nor your sibling, but your teacher. And I bear my failures as you will bear yours."

The Force hasn't wanted to leave Anakin. When the seams are pressed together, they stitch themselves up as if the work has never been ruined at all. Obi-Wan's eyes have been open for a minute before the storm clears, unseeing until he feels Anakin's head against his shoulder and the span of his padawan's back in his vision.

His hands come to clutch at the fabrics of the dark robes. He marvels, for a moment, that he can feel the grains of them, the stitches slightly bulky but secure and durable, the warmth from being worn. He can't imagine how it'd have looked if Anakin– if he's succeeded at what he was–

He didn't know Anakin's come to resent the Force so much. He didn't know– maybe that's why Anakin keeps refusing to release his emotions into the Force. Maybe he's done– all of that killing, all of that slaughtering– without calling onto the Force at all. Maybe that's why his kyber hasn't bled. He hasn't used the Dark. He's just cut down lives he didn't respect with a weapon conveniently on hand.

That is the first fucking thing they're removing from his possession, Obi-Wan thinks. He doesn't even notice his eyes blurring.

Anakin's brought his other arm around Obi-Wan as well. 

His sobs aren't as quiet as the ones he's heaved that morning. "I'm sorry," he says, into the weave of Obi-Wan's robes, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I don't– I can't– I'm sorry."

Obi-Wan thinks, errantly, that it's so easy to be cruel. It's so, so easy to be callous and uncaring and hurt and hurt unendingly, on the roadside somewhere on one's way to where the Light should be.

He curls himself around his padawan that he's relearning.

The Senate session's called in the morning, and by the evening every suspect but Anakin's officially released from Temple ground. Commanders Fox and Bly's combined might, with the insane stat work from Commander Ponds, have built an impenetrable case against Palpatine as well as a number of Senate staff, Mas Amedda included. Padmé– Senator Amidala drove it home in a spectacular manner, and the Core Guard was sanctioned to open investigation on the war dealings going on under the table in the Senate. With the work already in place and Senator Amidala at the helm, a pardon for Anakin won't arrive any later than in a day.

Meanwhile votes are being rallied for an emergency succession. The Guards' investigation will sweep the votes towards one of the few more reliable Senate presences, with Mon Mothma standing the highest chance of being elected. The projected outcome will only gather more votes to her, as long as she does the legwork.

On the part of the newly-released Jedi Generals: they're going back to war. 

Cody's at the door in fatigues when Obi-Wan opens it the next morning. Despite all that longing that his wish to be a better person about couldn't kill, Obi-Wan's still surprised to see the Commander in person. Has he really managed to trick himself into believing he won't have to take up command again?

"Cody," he says, frankly embarrassingly faint. He holds out an arm, maybe for a Mandalorian handshake, which Cody takes a hold of firmly to pull him into an all-encompassing hug.

Anakin's asleep on the couch behind them. He, like Obi-Wan, hasn't slept much since the former Chancellor got his head cut off by accident. His lightsaber's in Obi-Wan's sleeve right now. Obi-Wan will report to the Council and remove him from the war the first moment he gets. Many of them have taken wounds deep enough to step down from a leader position, through these last three years. Most of them never deserved it happening to them in the first place.

He hopes against hope that Darth Tyranus will soon get tired of holding up that tangled mess of cruelty and mistrust by himself and sue for peace. He turns his face to press his lips against the hair cropped short behind Cody's ear. "I don't know how you do it," he says, maybe to Cody, maybe to himself.

Cody's hugging him. Cody's tugged him into a hug. Cody doesn't seem to want to let go much, at that moment. The pressure soothes something raw and disgusting on the lining of his lungs.

"I'm not in the habit of overcomplicating things," Cody says, accepting the vague question at face value.

Obi-Wan laughs, tired. He pours the rest of his strength into the clutch of his arms around Cody's waist.

"We go from here," he says.

Against his shoulder where Anakin's tears have fallen Cody nods. "We go from here," he echoes, voice firm, words uncomplicated, truth bare. Obi-Wan takes it and learns it by heart.