Chapter Text
Strangely, it feels both as if a great weight has been removed from his chest and as if he’s just run several parsecs at the same time: like he can breathe freely for the first time in years, but like he’s incredibly winded, each breath a short gasp.
The blue reflection of his master blinks back at him from the holo projector, mouth slightly open and eyebrows raised—so frozen in shock that Anakin is half-worried that the connection has been cut mid-confession and he’s going to be expected to do this whole thing again.
Like he would be able to. It took a solid day of practicing for him to say the words in the first place. And, so much pacing.
If he spends another day in Padmé’s quarters, pacing around and muttering to himself and sweating through all his clothing when the nerves become too much, he’s pretty sure that his secret won’t even be true anymore.
Padmé has always been an absolute angel, but even he’d leave him for what he’s put her through the last few days—ever since he came to the realization that he must tell the Jedi Council about his marriage. Their marriage. Their love.
Easier said than done, though for the first few hours after said realization had turned into a plan of action, he’d thought it would be easy. After all, his case was solid. He loved Padmé; he married her. He’s one of the best generals in the war; he saves lives and defies odds and rescues planets. He may be a Jedi of dubious worth, but he’s a damn good general.
And he would be being honest. He would be coming forward, confessing his secrets to the Council because he did not want there to be any secrets that the Sith could use against him or the Jedi. Padmé doesn't deserve to be a secret after all, and Anakin doesn't want to be backed into a position where he feels like he has to choose and no one else understands he's making a choice at all.
It's better for everyone if he comes clean about his marriage. Of his own volition.
He would never say he regretted it, he would never leave his wife because the Council demanded it of him.
But for the first few hours post-decision, he’d been rather confident that they wouldn’t. He had his reasons, good reasons. They were at war. They needed Anakin, and Anakin needed his wife. It was simple computation.
And then Padmé had said, sounding equal parts wary and optimistic, that at least Master Obi-Wan was on the Council. So that was one man they could count on their side out of the twelve, because Master Kenobi would surely support their love.
And Anakin had started pacing.
He hasn’t really stopped since.
It’s just that Obi-Wan is a perfect Jedi. Unflappable and infallible. Untouchable and indestructible. And Anakin knows that isn’t really, actually true. They’re at war. He’s seen Obi-Wan coughing up blood and breathing in black soot and cradling a broken arm and staring out into space with dead eyes. But a part of Anakin is always going to believe it anyway, that his master is the best Jedi in the Order, the same way he still looks at his wife and half-believes that she is an Angel from Iego.
And Anakin is, well.
Anakin isn’t a perfect Jedi. Nowhere close. He’s pretty sure that no one knows that more than his master, who had to practically pin him to the mat with the Force to get him to meditate, who had to drag him out of the training salles by his ear when he wouldn’t stop gloating over his wins, who had to speak to the Coruscant police in quiet, calming, Force-suggestive words to get them to release Anakin when he was busted for podracing in the Lower Levels.
But this is different. This is—this is taboo. Anakin married Padmé, who is the purest, sweetest, softest love of his entire life. He married her. This is not a situation where Anakin has broken curfew or behaved in an unsportsmanlike way. He has broken a basic tenet of the Jedi Code.
And this is not something Obi-Wan can fix for him, because he will not allow it. No mistakes have been made. Anakin will not leave his wife. Obi-Wan cannot make him.
Even if he is angry with him. Even if he is disappointed.
Padmé’s hope that he would be on their side—it is too optimistic. She doesn't know Obi-Wan, not really. They're cordial; his master treats her with a warm smile every time he sees her, but that’s how Anakin knows they’re not close enough for her opinion to be based on anything but her hope and her love for Anakin.
She’s never felt the sting of Obi-Wan’s fury or his disappointment. She’s never been on the other end of one of Obi-Wan’s disapproving silences.
Speaking of silence.
The holo image glitches for a moment, blue bars phasing out of order before righting themselves into a familiar approximation of his master once again.
Obi-Wan blinks. “I did not realize.” His voice is high, thready, and he coughs, starts over again. Anakin peers closer, finally tearing his eyes away from the pixels that make up his master’s face to look at his surroundings.
“Wait, are you in the medical bay?”
“—that you had married the senator.”
Their tones are, at the same time, incredibly different and frighteningly similar.
Anakin is suddenly flushed hot with rage, because he does recognize the background, can see now that his master is propped up against a few pillows, stiff and starched robes traded in for a simple tunic that leaves much too much of his master’s collarbones exposed to be normal.
Obi-Wan’s anger sounds cold as the ice storms on Ilum, and he enunciates the word marriage the way he would say Sidious after a particularly bad battle, as if it is the root of all evil.
“What happened, why are you in a healing bed?” Anakin demands, raising his voice preemptively because he knows Obi-Wan isn’t going to give him a chance to ask again.
“And where are you calling from?” Obi-Wan’s eyebrow shoots up, voice snide. “Your marriage bed?”
Anakin makes the mistake of casting his eyes away from the comm, looking behind the device. He has, actually, found himself barricaded in Padmé’s bedroom, which doesn’t factually contain his marriage bed, but it’s close enough that he feels rather caught out.
“Um,” he says, and Obi-Wan’s lip curls up for a moment before he seems to remember himself, face falling back into its weary lines.
Anakin is hit by a sudden thought, that he can’t remember the last time he saw Obi-Wan smile, really truly smile.
“I cannot do this right now,” his master decides, rubbing a hand over the edge of his beard. “After the day that I have h—”
And right. Obi-Wan has been injured. “What happened?” Anakin demands again, crossing his arms over his chest. “The Council said you were fine the last time I asked them for an update of your mission, and now you’re taking comm calls in your med bay!”
It feels oddly like a betrayal, the way it always does when Obi-Wan separates himself from Anakin for one mission or another and then goes and gets himself blown up, halfway to rejoining the Force while Anakin’s stuck planets away and unable to feel a thing through the remnants of their training bond.
“Yes, and the Council has requested that I tell you to stop hounding them for updates on missions you know I cannot talk about over un-encrypted comm waves!”
“Then why did you pick up today?”
“Perhaps the MagnaGuard addled my brain more than Kix thought. After all, I could have sworn you just told me that you married Senator Amidala.”
“Forget about that,” Anakin says, swiping a hand through the air. “There were MagnaGuards? Where were you where the Seppies had MagnaGuards stationed close enough to—”
Hurt you is what Anakin wants to say, but something about the words makes him pause. They sound too honest, too revealing. As a fellow General in the GAR, Anakin’s first question should not be about the proximity between Obi-Wan and a MagnaGuard. It should be about the position of the MagnaGuards, what they were protecting, why they were there at all. Obi-Wan’s location should be a secondary concern at most.
It isn’t though, because of course it isn’t.
“You cannot call me to tell me of your marriage and then request I forget about it, padawan,” Obi-Wan cries, expression twisting with pure frustration. “It doesn’t work that way!”
Anakin sets his jaw, crossing his arms once more. “It needed to be said,” he defends, uncrossing his arms and tucking his hands behind his back instead. “You needed to know.”
The tiny blue version of his master clenches his jaw in return. “I should not have to remind you of the myriad of ways you have just admitted to breaking the Jedi Code. To a member of the Jedi High Council.”
“Will you turn me in?” Anakin asks before he can stop himself, curiosity winning out over common sense. If Obi-Wan tells the Council about Anakin’s marriage, it wouldn’t be a betrayal. It would be a favor, an errand completed by his master so he wouldn’t have to.
His chest is all tight and twisted at the thought of it though, and he waits for Obi-Wan to reply.
Obi-Wan remains stubbornly quiet, eyebrows furrowed slightly, mouth tight. He doesn’t look frustrated anymore. He looks…
Anakin isn’t sure, but he shakes his head to forestall anything that may come out of his master’s mouth. Suddenly, he doesn’t want to know. “It doesn’t matter,” he lies. “I plan to tell them myself.”
Obi-Wan blinks; his throat bobs with the force of his swallow. The furrow between his eyebrows deepens and he looks as if Anakin is spouting nonsense. “You plan to tell the Council.”
“I do,” Anakin says, tugging his lips up at the irony of the phrase used now of all times. “I know I must.”
His master is silent, and so Anakin forges on. It is a good practice run, if nothing else. At least, if Obi-Wan cannot support him after hearing his reasons, then he can just forget the Council doing so.
Obi-Wan was supposed to support you even before hearing your reasons, a small part of Anakin mutters. He was supposed to support you because he was supposed to love you like you love him.
But it’s not like Obi-Wan has ever loved Anakin the way Anakin loves him, and for the most part Anakin understands this. He’s accepted it. He knows that he has as much affection and support and love as Obi-Wan is capable of giving anyone, and he doesn’t need a loose-lipped Quinlan Vos to tell him he’s basically cornered the market on Obi-Wan’s attention at any given time.
It’s enough. His unconditional support would have been nice, but that was Padmé’s optimism, not his.
“We married shortly after Geonosis,” he says instead of any of that. “It was—” he closes his eyes. “All that death, master. All that destruction.”
He isn’t remembering the Jedi who died. He is remembering the biting sand against his skin; the frail body clutched to his chest, fingers brushing his face and falling away; and then—screams. He is remembering the screams.
“I loved her before it all,” he says, mostly to himself. “Before I was even a Jedi. I loved her even when I knew it would make the path of the Jedi so much harder to walk. And after Geonosis, when she loved me as well, we married in secret.”
“That was four years ago, Anakin,” Obi-Wan says, tone and face wiped clean of any hint of his emotions.
Anakin raises his chin, refuses to duck his head—he is not ashamed. “And have I not spent the past four years being an exemplary general? I have fought and won against enemies that other Jedi would have fallen to. I–I have only grown in my powers, my abilities, despite my wife! She does not hold me back from the path of the Jedi, she—”
“She bars you from it entirely!” Obi-Wan interrupts. “The Jedi do not allow attachment, we do not allow marriage, war or no!”
“I love her!” Anakin cries, trying to make himself sound as immovable as he has always pictured his master to be in saber fights. “And the Jedi Council needs me. I know my worth to them as a body leading their troops. There is no one who can take my place at the helm of the 501st, and you know it as well. You trained me; you know my capabilities. They cannot make me divorce my wife and they cannot make me leave. Not now. We are at a critical juncture of the war. They need good generals to fight it.”
Obi-Wan’s lip curls. “Why tell anyone at all then?” he asks, sneering in an uncharacteristic show of distaste. “To parade your indiscretion in front of us? To flaunt the fact that you seemingly have no respect for the Jedi Order, its Code, and those who live by it?”
“No!” Anakin’s hands become fists at his sides. “No, no, of course I do—”
“You have not acted like it then,” Obi-Wan bites back, and Anakin shakes his head quickly, chest tightening because he never imagined he would have Obi-Wan’s approval, but he didn’t think he’d earn his hatred.
“No, I just—I was—Padmé had to complete mandatory wartime security training, alright, modules that all Senators are assigned, and I ended up listening to a bit of one, and—it was, I mean, it was obviously exaggerated, but they were saying that keeping parts of your life secret from the Republic could create vulnerabilities, and those vulnerabilities could be exploited by others who–who sought to harm the Republic. And I started thinking, you know, about what I was keeping secret, and it was Padmé. From yo—from the Council! And that it could–could lead to someone getting hurt.”
At the time, he’d pictured that someone being Padmé, because she was his wife and they loved each other. Seeing her in pain was an agony Anakin could not bear thinking about.
Now though, he says it could lead to someone getting hurt, and all the only thing he can picture is his master as he is now, lying in a healing bed after a battle with MagnaGuards, clearly favoring his right side and looking at Anakin as if–as if he’s wounded him.
“I need to tell the Council,” Anakin tells him quietly. “So that this isn’t a vulnerability. So no one can find out and use it against me, because I love the Republic and I love the Jedi and I want to make it that much harder for some enemy of the both of them to use me to hurt who--what I love.”
Obi-Wan blinks at him, and then his eyes cut away. His shoulders slump down suddenly, as if his strings have been cut.
Suddenly, he looks worn and old and tired. Anakin should end the comm call and let him rest. But Anakin’s never hung up on his master before, isn’t quite sure he can convince his body to do so.
And he doesn’t look angry anymore. His lips have softened into a slight frown, but his eyebrows have relaxed. “And you love her,” he says, a very strange note in his tone.
Anakin nods, studying his master’s face intently. He should end the comm call, but his master doesn’t look angry. He looks resigned, and that means—if Anakin pushes more, if Anakin does not relent, then he will get his way.
It’s suddenly the most important thing in the galaxy, that he walk away from this conversation with Obi-Wan’s support.
“You would leave the Order at the end of the war? To be with her.”
His master must think his hands are outside of the comm’s lens angle, because they fall to his lap as he begins to tug at every one of his fingers.
Anakin isn’t sure what leaving the Order has to do with anything, given that he’s fairly confident that if he wins the war for the Jedi, they’re not going to kick him out—wife or no wife. And there’s not really a future for him that involves being anything other than a Jedi by Obi-Wan’s side, lightsaber a calming weight on his hip.
But then he remembers the Duchess of Mandalore and Obi-Wan, their past. The way he watched his master watch her leave time and time again. He doesn’t often like thinking of these sorts of things, but he makes himself. He forces himself into Obi-Wan’s shoes. Obi-Wan, who never let a true romance blossom between himself and the Duchess because of the Jedi Code. Who would have left the Order to be with her, if she’d said the word. Who would look at his padawan, in love with a politician, married to her, and assume the same about him. That he would leave the Order.
It’s bantha-shit, is what it is. Anakin would never leave his master, war or no. But if that’s what his master needs to hear to forgive him for breaking the Code, if that’s what will make him support Anakin and Padmé and their love, then fine. “Yeah,” he says, like it’s the truth. “I would.”
“Ah,” Obi-Wan replies. He smiles slightly, something that stretches across his face more like a grimace than a smile. His mouth opens to say something else, but before he can, there’s noise disruption on his end of the line.
“General,” the familiar bark of Kix’s voice says, though the medic does not appear in image. “What are you doing? Your heart rate’s skyrocke—”
Obi-Wan’s hand flashes from his lap to his comm within a second, and the connection is cut.
Anakin stands there, staring off into nothing for several minutes more. Or perhaps hours.
That night, Padmé curls closer to him on their bed, datapadd turned off and tucked on her bedside table until morning. “You told Master Kenobi,” she murmurs, propping her chin up on his chest.
Anakin blinks away from the ceiling to look at her. “I did,” he agrees.
“And?” she asks, finely plucked eyebrows raised, a smile in her tone. She always teases him that extracting information from him is like pulling teeth. She says she spends half their marriage wheedling, carefully teasing facts and opinions from him.
“He was injured,” Anakin tells her.
Her eyebrows flick down, and she raises up, propping one hand on the mattress beneath them and the other on his chest. She is so light he hardly feels anything at all. “By our marriage?”
“What? No. By MagnaGuards. Don’t be silly,” he says. His hands are tucked behind his head, have been for the past hour or so, but suddenly the position makes him feel too exposed. “I should be out there.”
“You are on leave,” Padmé reminds him. “Even great Jedi war heroes need to take leave, Ani.”
“Yeah, but—” he breaks himself off. Not because the words aren’t there, but because he cannot make himself say them to someone he isn’t sure could possibly understand. He was granted two weeks of leave after close to a year without, and in that time half his men had rotated to temporary assignments. Kix to the 212th, Rex to the 97th. And Obi-Wan—Obi-Wan had wished him a relaxing break and gotten on a ship back out there again, trading the Coruscanti skyline for another battlefront, over and over again until he was so incredibly injured that he was still in his ship’s medbay when Anakin called.
It feels wrong. It feels like Anakin has shirked his duty, living as he is in the lap of luxury while his men are out there fighting on without him. When Obi-Wan is out there. Would he have even gotten injured if Anakin weren’t on leave? How many times has Anakin saved his life? Countless times. How many times has Anakin forced a ration bar into his hands, pushed on his shoulders until his master was seated for the first time in hours?
Who is taking care of him now?
Obviously it’s someone not as cut out for the task as Anakin is. Obviously it’s someone whose regard for his master pales in comparison to his own.
“Next time I’ll time it better,” he decides. He’ll only take leave if his master does. That way, he can spend his time at Padmé’s apartments and not have his mind half the galaxy away. It’s the perfect solution. “Next year, I’ll know.”
Padme’s head tilts and her lips turn down into a frown. “Do you really believe the war will stretch on for another year?”
Anakin doesn’t say anything. His first thought is that, well, it’s stretched out for four already. What’s another year? It feels endless. Maybe it doesn’t to Padmé, who spent five years as an adult before the war began, but Anakin practically came of age fighting in it.
What does it feel like to Obi-Wan? He had a whole life before the war, before even Anakin.
Coincidentally, that’s also not something Anakin spends a lot of time thinking about, old man jokes aside. It always leaves a bad taste in his mouth. Padmé’s only five years older than him, but Obi-Wan is sixteen. Obi-Wan had an entire life before he ever met Anakin, and some wary, jaded part of Anakin insists that it would be easy for him to have an entire life after Anakin. If he were to die. If he were to fall in battle. Padmé would mourn him, and he knows Obi-Wan would too, but—how much? How deeply? For how long?
“Yeah,” he says finally instead of any of that.
“I hope it doesn’t,” Padmé whispers. “I want us to be safe.”
“You are safe, angel,” Anakin replies immediately.
She is. She’s on Coruscant, kept away from the fighting except in the most outlandish of cases. It’s not as if she wakes in a trench, takes stock of her men, eats a ration bar, and fires across no man’s land every morning. It’s not as if she is constantly being fired upon in return.
“I want you to be safe,” she says, looking up at him beneath her eyelashes. “I want you here, with me. Always. Taking leave from the fighting…it doesn’t feel like enough, Ani. I look at you, and I know your mind is still on a battlefield.”
“I don’t know what else you want me to do, Padmé,” Anakin says, turning his face up to stare at the canopy over her bed. “We’re already fighting this war to win it. To come home.”
The sigh she lets out fans across his chest as she rests her forehead on his skin. “I know,” she finally whispers.
Anakin drops his hand onto her back, stroking his fingers down the naked line of her spine. Obi-Wan’s mission was supposed to be in the Mid-Rim, offering support to another General’s siege. He wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near Dooku’s last known movements, or Grievous’, but the two of them always travel with MagnaGuards. So Obi-Wan must have been lying.
The last time Obi-Wan had been given a classified mission and lied to Anakin about it, it really hadn’t gone over well with Anakin, and just the thought has embers of rage catching and lighting in his chest.
“So Master Kenobi…he approves?”
“Hm?” Anakin blinks back down at the crown of her head. If he were on a classified mission though, shouldn’t Anakin know about it? He’s been asking the Council every other day for information, and yes, sure, they’ve been a bit cagey about it, but he hasn’t gotten the sense that they’re lying to him.
Are they lying to him?
When Anakin is about to be vey honest and tell them about his marriage? That doesn’t seem fair. Did Obi-Wan tell them to lie to him? Did Obi-Wan not want him to worry while he was on his leave? That sounds like something Obi-Wan would do, even though the idea is setting Anakin’s teeth on edge.
“Did Obi-Wan approve of our marriage?” Padmé asks, propping herself up once more. “I know his opinion is very important to you, Anakin.”
Anakin furrows his eyebrows. “He…”
He hadn’t seemed happy, but he had seemed resigned, which is as close to supportive as Anakin’s going to get.
“He asked me if I planned to leave the Order after the war,” he tells his wife. “And I lied, and then I think he began to support me. That’s what he looked like, anyway.”
Padmé blinks at him, eyelashes falling slowly onto the jut of her cheek and then rising. “That’s good then,” she says, sounding hesitant. “That he supports us.”
“Yeah,” Anakin replies, raising his hand to tuck a tendril of hair behind her ear.
“Though…I’m sorry you had to lie,” she says, pressing forward until their faces are only a hand’s width apart. “Hopefully…” she trails off, biting her lip. Then she shakes her head slightly, and her mouth turns up into a smile as if she cannot help herself. “Hopefully he will not take the truth so hard.”
Anakin blinks, feeling a sudden strange disconnect blossom between his hands and his mind. Or perhaps his heart. Certainly between him and his wife.
“Yeah,” he says anyway, because it’s easier and quicker and he’s suddenly incredibly exhausted. And yet, when she ducks her head to kiss him, soft lips sliding against his own, he tightens his arm around her and flips them over on the bed.
It’s easier. It’s quicker. For some reason, he still feels like he’s lying.
Master Windu already looks incredibly put-upon, and Anakin hasn’t even worked up the courage to say anything yet.
It’s not the most auspicious start.
“Knight Skywalker, we do not have any more information on Master Kenobi’s whereabouts and mission that we can divulge at this time,” Master Windu says, holding up his hand to forestall the words Anakin was definitely about to say. “Once again, when we believe the information is relevant to Jedi outside of those who sit on this Council, we will share it with you.”
Anakin’s mouth tightens in distaste. All information pertaining to Obi-Wan Kenobi is, by its nature, relevant to Anakin Skywalker.
“Actually,” he says instead of that, “I’m not here to discuss Obi-Wan’s mission—which involves MagnaGuards apparently.”
This is obviously not new information to the Council, which makes Anakin feel just spiteful enough to throw out the truth despite his own nerves and the weird feeling he's getting from the Force.
“I’m here to discuss my marriage.”
Of all the things they expected him to say, this clearly was nowhere on the list. Master Windu’s mouth falls open; Shaak Ti makes a small noise of surprise; Plo Koon raises both his hands to cover his masked mouth; the holo of Kit Fisto bites into his own fist, but Anakin can see the way a smile is threatening to spread across his face.
“Marriage,” Master Mundi mouths mechanically. Then, much louder, “Marriage?”
Anakin coughs and decides that he really should start from the beginning here if he’s going to have any chance at all to convince them to let him remain in the Order. “I love the Republic,” he states, clearing his throat and putting his hands behind his back.
“So this is a metaphor?” Master Fisto asks, looking intrigued.
“Is this a cry for help?”
Anakin screws up his face. “No! This is—this is about vulnerabilities, alright?”
“Vulnerabilities,” Master Windu repeats. He’s brought one hand up to his temple as if his head is beginning to hurt.
“Yes,” Anakin says. “It’s—Masters. Masters, I love the Republic, and the Jedi, with all I am, but I—I’m committed to my marriage, body, mind, and soul. And I realized that I cannot continue hiding this from you. It leaves me open to manipulation, to coercion. You need to know that my loyalties are to both the Order. And my marriage.”
Master Windu’s nostrils flare. “Skywalker, do you understand exactly how many tenets of the Jedi Code that you are break—”
“Of course I do,” Anakin snaps, clenching his hands into tight fists behind his back. “Obi-Wan told me.”
“Not here, Obi-Wan is,” Master Yoda croaks, looking at him consideringly from his Council chair. “Requested we meet, you did. Requested the entire Council, you did. Save for Obi-Wan.”
“Yes, where is Master Kenobi?” Master Mundi says, looking suspiciously at Anakin, as if he’s hiding Master Kenobi under his robes.
Anakin barely bites back his first thought, which is, of course, I’ve been asking you that for weeks. You’d know better than I do.
“He already knows,” he says in a very calm and even and slow voice. “Obviously,” he can’t help but add, because does the Council really think that Anakin would tell his master at the same time he told them?
As much respect as he holds for the Council, Obi-Wan is different. Obviously. Obi-Wan’s the best. Of course Anakin wouldn’t have the courage to stand before them now and confess the secret of his marriage if he hadn’t already told Obi-Wan.
Please.
“Obviously,” Master Plo Koon repeats, a strange note in his voice. “And…he did not want to be here to support you? As you told us about your relationship?”
Anakin thinks they’re getting a bit distracted here, but at least no one’s yelling at him to pack up his quarters and depart by sunset. “I told him my intentions to tell you,” Anakin says. “He supported me then.”
Kind of. Sort of.
“He trusts me to stand alone in front of you,” Anakin adds, and the room bursts into chatter.
After several moments of this, Master Yoda hums, banging his gimer stick against the floor to call for quiet.
Does Anakin mention that he’s irreplaceable on the battlefield? Does he mention that Padmé is a trusted senator? They know that already though. Both things.
Force, he should have gotten Obi-Wan to comm into this meeting. He’d just—he’d been afraid at the last moment. That Obi-Wan would not actually support him in front of the Council. That he would look at Anakin with anger which had burnt its way into hatred somewhere between their first call and this one.
“Discuss this, we must,” Master Yoda decides, waving a claw towards the door. “Call you back in, we will. Answers questions, you will. And then, decide, we will.”
Anakin recognizes a dismissal when he hears one. “Masters,” he agrees, ducking his head. “I’ll–-I’ll wait outside then.”
Every pair of eyes in the room watch him as he leaves; he can feel them on his back the entire way to the door.
It really feels like full circle, Anakin thinks, letting his head fall back to rest against the wall as he slides down to sit on the floor. The Jedi Council is in a closed door room, ruminating on his future, his fate, and Anakin can’t do anything other than wait for them to decide if he’s worth keeping around. At least this time, he’s a decorated war hero and not some desert youngling scared shitless. At least this time, he knows breathing exercises to disperse the tightness in his chest.
Oh, Anakin, his master would say when he found him hiding away in dark cupboards around the Temple. Come here, padawan. We’ll breathe together.
Anakin raises his hand in front of his face now, dragging the tip of his left hand’s index finger up his thumb on the inhale, down the other side of his thumb on the exhale til he reaches the divot between his thumb and forefinger. Then up his forefinger again on the inhale, down the other side on the exhale.
Perhaps an exercise meant for a youngling, which Anakin had been the first time Obi-Wan taught it to him, but a useful tool nonetheless—it helped after losing his arm to Dooku’s blade, and it helps now, waiting on the floor outside the Council chambers as a circle of Jedi Masters discuss his marriage to his angel.
It takes an hour, almost, for the doors to open once more and for Anakin to be beckoned inside. He approaches the circle of seats warily, hands tucked neatly behind his back once more.
“Anakin,” Master Plo Koon says, using a very gentle voice that Anakin has only ever associated with the creche. “We would like to ask you some questions. About your...relationship.”
“My relationship is not under question right now,” Anakin snaps, shoulders rising and any and all calming meditation he’d done in the hallway going straight out the window. “Only my marriage.”
“That’s fine then,” Master Windu says. His voice is weird too. No trace of anger or frustration, just the same hint of gentleness. “Then we have some questions about your marriage.”
The word is stressed slightly, though Anakin can’t understand why. “Fine.”
“When did you two…get married?” Shaak Ti’s hands are folded into her lap; the markings over her eyes are furrowed up in a pantomime of concern.
Anakin clears his throat. “Shortly after the Battle of Geonosis,” he says, then adds, “The first battle.”
“A padawan, you were,” Master Yoda declares, his mouth turned down into an ugly frown. There’s a rumble of concerned, lowered voices around the room. “A youngling, practically.”
Anakin bristles immediately. “I was not,” he argues. “Or, I mean, technically, I suppose I was. But it was after my master told me that you had every intention of Knighting me! I had the braid, but I was a Knight. My first solo mission ended with the safe return of Senator Amidala to her planet, and then…” he cuts himself off with a sharp shrug. “Then we married.”
“We just…” This is Plo Koon again, in that same grating, concerned voice. “We find ourselves worried that you may have felt…taken advantage of.”
“Taken advantage of?” Anakin repeats incredulously.
“If you married under duress, or if your relationship began while you were still a padawan—”
“It didn’t!” Anakin turns to face Master Windu, unable to believe that they’re currently having this conversation. “I don’t know what you’re thinking, but you’ve got the wrong idea!”
He supposes he had been a padawan when he met Padmé again, but he certainly hadn’t felt like one. He’d been chomping at the bit to be Knighted, and he’d made sure everyone knew it, especially his master.
If anything, Padmé had been his mission. She had been vulnerable and had needed to rely on him for safety and protection. A much stronger case could probably be made for him taking advantage of her.
“I was not forced to marry,” Anakin folds his arms over his chest and spins in a circle, trying to make eye contact with every one of them. “If anything, I took advantage of the situation.”
Master Windu blinks and relaxes slightly, a strange tension releasing from his shoulders. “Oh?” he asks, like Anakin’s unprofessionalism is the best case scenario here.
“Yes,” Anakin says firmly, because he’d rather be kicked out of the Order for unprofessionalism than have anyone think anything negative about his beautiful angel. Especially when— “I practically begged for the marriage, alright? It was important to me, and it took so much kriffing negotiation to wear—”
Wear her down, he’s going to say, but before he can, the holo of Kit Fisto lets out a tinny laugh. “That does sound like him, doesn’t it?” he asks, turning his head to look at his other Council members. “I told you he wasn’t capable of it.”
Anakin swallows the rest of his words. It’s sort of rude for Master Fisto to be talking about him like he’s not standing right there in the middle of the Council chambers—something that Anakin is incredibly sensitive to, given the first time that had happened.
But it’s also sort of sweet that Master Fisto had advocated for him, apparently insisting to the Council that he wouldn’t be capable of allowing someone to take advantage of him. He hadn’t known Kit would be one of his staunchest defenders, but it’s…nice.
“Oh, of course there were negotiations,” Master Depa Billaba says, rolling her eyes. There’s a smile playing at the edge of her lips.
Anakin isn’t quite sure what’s happening, but he can feel the room grow warmer. The tide is turning, and his heart begins to beat faster. It’s turning in his favor. In Padmé’s.
“It was really embarrassing, but um. I got what I wanted in the end,” he says, only a touch too smugly.
“Also not a surprise,” Kit says, waving a hand in Anakin’s direction as he glances at Master Plo Koon. “Knight Skywalker asking politely and getting what he wanted from his ma—”
“I believe we are straying from the topic,” Master Windu says, holding up his hand to silence his fellow council members.
“Important, it is, to establish the beginning of this relationship,” Grandmaster Yoda says, frown still turning down the corners of his mouth and wrinkling his already wrinkled face. “How many years old, were you, young Skywalker, when first developed romantic feelings, you did?”
Anakin furrows his eyebrows. He’d been expecting a lot more questions about his ability to lead his troops as a married man. He’s not quite sure what to make of all these questions about the beginning of their relationship.
“I don’t know,” Anakin admits. “Probably since I was a youngling.”
The Council suddenly looks alarmed to varying degrees.
Anakin is very quick to continue, lest he accidentally gets his wife brought up on child abuse charges. “I mean, not in an inappropriate way!”
This does nothing to reassure the Council, who are now looking at him with a mix of horror and concern splashed across their faces.
“I mean—” he tries again, clearing his throat. “I mean obviously, I wasn’t in love when I was a youngling. But…the moment that ship landed on Tatooine, the moment I met them–-Master Jinn, Queen Amidala, Obi-Wan, I mean—I just knew. It felt right. The Force felt right. I didn’t have the words to describe it then. I guess—I’d always lived in this…raging sandstorm, day in and day out, and I never really knew differently, but the moment they landed on Tatooine, the moment I met them, it was just…calm. And it wasn’t love, and I guess it wasn’t even romantic, not really. It was just right. It just felt right. And it has every day since.”
He swallows and drags his voice to a halt. He thinks he should probably mention something about meeting Padmé again when he was nineteen, seeing that she had only grown more beautiful, more enchanting…how that kick-started his body into loving her as a woman more than a memory or a mirage, but. Well, he’s already admitted to being more than a little unprofessional. He probably shouldn’t—
“I think it is…important for us to understand when exactly your feelings…evolved, Anakin,” Master Plo Koon says carefully in that very gentle tone. “For me, at least, it is.”
Fine then.
“Shortly before the Clone Wars,” he admits. “When the Council assigned my master and me to the mission to guard Senator Amidala from her assassins.”
He hesitates, and then decides to be frank and honest. It is, after all, why he is here.
“It felt like an opportunity to prove that I had grown and matured from that little boy on Tatooine. I wanted to be Knighted, I was ready to be Knighted, but I was also ready to be treated as a…man. It was important to prove that I did not need my master to look out for me anymore. That I could look after someone. And after proving that I could, being around each other was…intoxicating and—”
Master Windu looks vaguely sick. “I think we have heard all of that that we need to, Knight Skywalker.”
Anakin raises his chin in surly defiance. They were the ones who asked.
“Affect your missions, does your marriage?” Master Yoda asks suddenly. His frown has lessened noticeably, the grip on his gimer stick loosening. “Affect your priorities?”
“No,” Anakin says immediately, even if he’s not sure if it’s entirely true. He'd expected this question at least. Had practiced its answer. “The war has made me a soldier, but I like to think I am not one naturally. My marriage just gives me another thing to fight for: someone to come home to once the fighting is over. Someone to keep safe.”
“Hm,” Master Yoda says.
“We have the same priorities,” Anakin adds quickly and then tempers his voice to try and put the correct amount of gravitas into his tone. “We both love the Republic, we both have tremendous respect for the Jedi Order, and we both would do anything to see this war won. That hasn’t changed, and it never would. We just want to continue what we have been doing, Masters. Serving the Republic and being by each other’s sides."
The Council is silent, each member mulling over his words carefully. For his part, Anakin feels as if his entire body is one live lightning rod. His heart is pounding and his hands keep flexing at his sides. He suddenly doesn’t know what he’ll do if they make him decide. How can he choose between his wife and the only home he’s ever known? Is this why his master had looked so wounded when he’d told him? Did he realize they would make Anakin leave? He wouldn’t. Anakin couldn’t.
“Strange, this is,” Yoda admits with a sigh. “My lineage, it is.”
One side of Master Windu’s mouth ticks up into a slight smile. “Are you about to admit to favoritism, Master Yoda?” he asks, and Anakin’s eyes fly between them. If Master Windu is making a joke, then surely they are not about to kick Anakin out of the Order.
Master Yoda’s ears flick down. “A wartime exception, I propose,” he suggests, side-stepping Master Windu’s question neatly. “Done much for the Republic, Knight Skywalker has. Done much, they both have. Force them apart, how could we? Reward honesty, we should—especially when granted freely, it has been.”
“Wartime exception?” Master Mundi repeats dubiously, eyebrows creating large wrinkles on his forehead. “We have never once made an exception to—”
“We have never been fighting in a war like this either,” Master Billaba points out, tone firm yet sad. “Our enemies have not been Sith, who feed off of hatred, despair, pain....All these things lead to the Dark, and to reject love during these bleak times….you cannot tell me that good could come from that.”
The last part is directed towards Master Windu, who rubs at his temples and dips his head in acknowledgement.
“The galaxy is dark enough already,” he finally says with a sigh. “The shatter-points I’ve seen create spider webs across the Rims. I vote to allow this...marriage to continue.”
Anakin’s mouth falls open in shock.
By the time the Council has all voted—eleven total votes, given, Master Fisto says with a smirk in Anakin’s direction, that Master Kenobi should be forced to abstain on this matter—it is clear that Anakin will be allowed to keep his wife. His wife and the Order. The Jedi. His master.
It takes all of his composure not to drag them each out of their chairs for a hug, but he manages to exit after only a few tears and about a dozen thank you’s.
No one had even mentioned asking him to leave the Order after the war has been won.
He can’t wait to tell Obi-Wan; it’ll be the first thing he says to the man the very moment he picks up his comm. All of his master’s worrying—for nothing! Anakin will be allowed to stay in the Order until they’re both old and gray and their padawans’ padawans are taking on padawans.
Anakin’s comm is already out and in his hand, the connection ringing valiantly as it waits for its partner somewhere out there in the stars to pick up. The smile on Anakin’s face is so wide that it almost hurts.
But then, he doubts that anything can hurt right now. Perhaps nothing will ever again.
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan murmurs the moment his ship enters atmo in Coruscanti airspace.
Anakin knows he can’t really hear him, knows he’s still too far away for that. He’s never bought into the more magical, whimsical stories about the Force, not since he was a youngling. But it feels like it’s the Force itself, whispering Anakin’s name in Obi-Wan’s voice—or perhaps carrying Obi-Wan’s voice to him across the shrinking space still between.
Anakin doesn’t know. What he does know is that by the time Obi-Wan’s ship is touching down in the hangar bay, he’s waiting at the doors, robes hastily thrown on and hair a mess. He’d broken thirty-seven speeder laws getting from Padmé’s to here in time to meet Obi-Wan, and he knows already he’s going to have to send a dozen apology messages to his wife, who he’d left quite—in the middle of something.
It’s all worth it though, Anakin knows. It’s worth it the moment the ramp descends and his master steps out, looking as put together and pristine as he always does.
It’s worth it the moment his master is in touching distance once more, and Anakin draws him into his arms without a second thought. If he’s allowed a marriage, surely he’s allowed this. Obi-Wan had been wounded in a battle, Anakin had wounded Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan had needed to recover in his medical bay because he had been wounded so badly, and—
Obi-Wan’s arms wrap tightly around him in return, one hand grasping his neck while the other winds around his waist as he pushes them closer together.
Tension that Anakin didn’t even know he was holding seeps out of him as his master’s scent envelops him.
You’re home, he tries to say, but his mouth is pressed against the fabric of Obi-Wan’s coat and he’s drowning in the smell of space and sweat and mech oil, and what he says instead is, “Home.”
It’s close enough.
The hand on his neck squeezes slightly, an intense sort of pressure that makes Anakin’s head feel heavy as if he’s suddenly desperately tired.
He pulls himself backwards, creating enough room between their bodies that he can knock their foreheads together gently. It’s something he’d seen the vode do and something he’s since embraced wholeheartedly.
This time, Obi-Wan holds him there for a half-second longer than he ever has before, hand firm on his neck, eyes closed. Their noses are a hair’s width away from brushing. Their lips, also.
Anakin’s mind feels completely static, and he doesn’t even know he’s exhaling until his chest moves with the force of his sigh. At the feeling of his breath against his face, Obi-Wan jerks backward, eyes flying open.
The air feels cool against his skin, and Anakin feels suddenly and strangely bereft.
His hands slip from Obi-Wan’s shoulders and drop to his sides at the same moment that Obi-Wan lets him go as well, stepping back with a small cough and folding his hands into his sleeves.
“Padawan,” Obi-Wan says, face near expressionless. His tone is light though, happiness bleeding through despite his best efforts. Anakin feels rather incandescent at that. He’s always loved the moments that genuine emotion shines through the cracks of Obi-Wan’s Jedi facade.
“Master,” he says in return, the next step in a familiar dance. He pushes a smirk onto his face, and it’s almost entirely real because Obi-Wan is healthy and hearty and, most importantly, in front of him right now with joy dancing behind his eyes. “Meet any MagnaGuards lately?”
The corner of Obi-Wan’s mouth ticks up. “Quite,” he says, and steps around Anakin, as if Anakin isn’t going to turn himself around as well and keep pace with him wherever they’re going. His master’s eyes take in the hangar bay around them, head tilted slightly. A loose piece of hair hangs in front of his forehead, and Anakin fights internally about whether or not he should fix it. On one hand, it’s out of place. On the other hand, it humanizes him. It makes him look soft.
“I need to report to the Council,” his master murmurs as they walk. “Do you happen to know who is on Coruscant?”
“Every member but Master Fisto and Master Shaak Ti,” Anakin replies instantly. “At least a few days ago.”
The Force wobbles around Obi-Wan for a moment. “Right,” he says, and his tone has changed. He’s standing straighter as well. “How was your meeting with the Council, by the way?”
At the question, Anakin shoots Obi-Wan a reproachful look. “You’d know if you picked up your comm,” he grumbles because they haven’t actually talked since Anakin first told Obi-Wan about his marriage. It’s been a week. He couldn’t even tell him about how the Council took the news because the kriffing nerfherder of a man refused to answer any of his calls.
When Obi-Wan just looks at him from the corner of his eye, Anakin relents. “They’ve accepted it,” he confides, tilting his head closer to Obi-Wan so he doesn’t have to speak too loudly. “I am allowed to stay married. And stay in the Order.”
He pauses with a grin because this is excellent news, and his master should treat it as such.
“They weren’t happy,” he adds, when it’s clear that Obi-Wan isn’t going to say anything else immediately. In fact, his master is studying the oncoming foreground with increasing intensity, as if he expects to be ambushed any second. “But they said they knew how much both me and Padmé did for the Republic, that we deserved some good, that they could tell our love was pure and bright and—”
“That is excellent news, Anakin,” Obi-Wan says shortly. He pulls himself to a stop, right there in the middle of the rather busy main hall, and Anakin automatically puts his hand against the small of Obi-Wan’s back to guide him out of the way of a scampering group of younglings.
“They did send me a rather long list of things I wasn’t allowed to do,” Anakin admits, rubbing the back of his neck. “Like take another padawan, given that I’ve shown that I don’t exactly…abide by the principles of the Jedi Order and they’d be concerned I wouldn’t be able to teach non-attachment to a youngling. Even though they assigned me the first youngling to teach, so it’s not like I’ve ever chosen a padawan anyway, so honestly they can take their criticism and shove it, you know?”
Obi-Wan offers him a sardonic eyebrow, paired with a quirk of his lips. “Assigned a padawan you did not choose during a moment in your life you did not think of yourself as capable of teaching? Yes, padawan, I may have some idea of what you’re talking about.”
Anakin sneers back at him. “Yeah, well,” he mutters, finally removing his hand from Obi-Wan’s lower back. “Point is, they took it well. Master Fisto was defending me even. Windu was the first to vote to allow me to keep the marriage and stay in the Order.”
Obi-Wan’s other eyebrow joins the first. “I don’t recall being asked to vote,” he says rather mildly.
“They said you had to abstain,” Anakin shrugs. “Probably because of favoritism. They know how much you like me. And Padmé.”
“Quite,” his master says shortly, muscle in his jaw jumping as he tears his eyes away from Anakin to look around them. His head tilts once more, eyebrows furrowed as he glances at a pair of Jedi opposite the length of the hall from them. “Padawan, do you happen to know why everyone is looking at us?” he asks, voice light and pleasant, as if he’s suddenly afraid that people are also eavesdropping.
“Maybe they were taking bets on how beat up you’d come back this time,” Anakin suggests with a shrug. Privately, he thinks too many people tend to go out of their way to look at his master at any given opportunity. Anakin’s mostly learned to ignore it as a survival mechanism.
His master’s eyebrow shoots up once more and he gifts Anakin with a long suffering look. “Exactly how many people have you told about the damned MagnaGuards, Anakin?”
This makes Anakin grin again. “None,” he swears, even though he’d definitely told his wife. But she didn’t really count, did she? “Your secret’s safe with me, master.”