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Anakin’s of the mind that if you’re having a shit day, you should just be allowed to teleport straight back to your bed whenever you like.
You shouldn’t have to clock out of work after a long, strenuous, shit shift and then also walk the entire shit way back to your shit apartment in shitty sleet at seven in the evening before you can actually, finally experience the joy and jubilation of shutting your door and falling back into your bed.
And you absolutely, definitely should not have to remember halfway to Lamont Ave and only a quarter way home that you don’t have any food in your shit apartment, that you’d planned to go to the store today and so all you have back at yours is some instant oatmeal packets and a half full container of rotten grapes.
At the reminder, Anakin grinds his teeth together so hard that he can feel his dentist wincing in phantom pain.
Shit days should never have to end with grocery runs. And they should also absolutely not have to end with quick and dirty mental calculations about how much money he could feasibly get away with wasting on take-out, just so he doesn’t have to go to the store.
It’s raining. He’s miserable already. Thai sounds great. He could get it from The Thai-tanic, right next to his place—it’s a bit more of a splurge, but he made a shit ton of tips tonight, it being the day before the Valentine’s holiday and all.
And he’d escape the delivery fee, which really is half the cost of take-out these days.
He could get groceries tomorrow. Or, honestly, the next day. He picked up Aayla’s shift at work tomorrow, so that she could go do stupid, romantic things with her partner, so it’s not like Anakin’ll be without food. Sure, if he ever sees another pink-frosted cupcake, it’s going to be too fucking soon, but he could probably trade a box of them for a plate of wings from the store adjacent to their bakery.
And hopefully by tomorrow, it won’t be so cold and the sky won’t be pissing sleet and he won’t be in such a shit mood because, hopefully by then, his socks will be dry in the confines of his boots and his back won’t hurt as much and he’ll be almost to the other side of the worst fucking holiday in the entire world.
He cuts left onto Lamont and swerves to avoid the water splash from a car whizzing through a deep puddle. Not fast enough though, and again: you should be able to teleport home the moment you’re obligation free after a shit day. Then you wouldn’t have—have dirty fucking water splashed up along your jeans, seeping into your already wet socks, and working its damned hardest to try and freeze your toes off.
You could just be home and in bed, lights dim and something mindless playing on the television. You could just be home and in bed, freshly showered, belly full of pad kee mao, tactfully ignoring the mountain of unfinished school work stacked on your wobbly, barely-holding-it-together-but-hey-you-have-that-in-common desk.
You shouldn’t have to bump into someone’s shoulder by accident and duck your head to avoid her angry glare as you move faster to outrun the outpour of words that follow that sort of look. You shouldn’t have to hunch your shoulders and tug your hood down against the rain because your umbrella broke fucking months ago and an umbrella’s one of those things that you only remember you need when you don’t have it, and you—
You shouldn’t have to stand, drenched and shivering and miserable on a street corner next to a subway entrance, waiting for the crosswalk to tick down to green, and deal with the world. The weather. Life.
Anakin closes his eyes and exhales through his nose, a quick burst of false-heat that warms his upper lip. He’d give pretty much everything in his bank account—not that that’s necessarily much at all—to just be home right now and not have to deal with…this. All of this.
“Excuse me, sir,” a man says, voice coming from beside his shoulder. Anakin keeps his eyes closed pointedly. If he just stays very quiet and very still, then maybe the man will go away.
It doesn’t seem to work because a moment later, the man continues as if Anakin has given him any sort of indication that that’s an option. “Your shoes are untied.”
Oh.
This again.
Anakin’s wrist, where the same words are written on his skin in dark blue soul ink, burns the way it always does when he hears that sentence.
He can never tell if the ache is real or psychosomatic, if the lurch in his heart is a normal response to a half-connection—-a moment where someone speaks your words and you haven’t yet replied to either complete the match or prove it to be a coincidence—or if it’s just because Anakin’s a die-hard romantic and he always has been.
Always has been—except for today, where he dropped a tray of Valentine’s cupcakes at the store, was held up in a robbery at his bank, received a polite but distant notification from his landlord that they would be raising the rent of his apartment building in ninety days to an astronomical amount, and received an even more polite, more distant notification from a graduate school on the west coast that his application had been unsuccessful, thank you for your interest.
But yes, usually Anakin is a die-hard romantic and he always has been. And since the very moment he was old enough to read the words scrawled gracefully along his wrist, he’s been leaving his shoes untied as if that will coax his soulmate out of hiding and into his arms.
It’s been nineteen years of hearing from every well-meaning stranger on the street, in an elevator, at the bakery, waiting in line at the store: excuse me, sir, your shoes are untied .
And every time his heart lurches and his wrist burns and he blurts out the first thing that comes to his mind, followed up with a question getting more desperate as the years plod on: so are you my soulmate?
The response is always a no, ranging from pitying to slightly relieved. And no matter how many times he hears the rejection, sees the proof that whichever well-meaning stranger it is this time does not have his words on their arm, he still hopes. And he still tries.
And he still leaves his shoes untied. Just in case.
But today—today has been such a shit day. Today has been just such a shit day and he has no patience left for any well-meaning stranger, any lurches of his heart. He should have tied his damn shoes just to avoid this whole mess of an unwanted social interaction, but after nineteen years of having his laces untied, he’d just forgotten all about them as he closed up shop.
And now, this.
When he opens his eyes and turns his head to face the stranger, he has a very terse thank you on his tongue.
And then he sees the other man, an older guy with a well-groomed, perfectly trimmed beard, holding a cheery yellow umbrella that’s keeping the rain off of an impeccable looking fucking pea-coat in one hand and a dog’s leash in the other. The corgi at the end of the leash has on a fucking yellow raincoat, same shade as the umbrella, and when Anakin looks back at his face, the man raises a skeptical eyebrow, clearly having just given him the same sort of once-over he’s given the man and looking less than impressed.
It's that smug, snobby raised eyebrow that has the words bursting out of Anakin's mouth before he can think to stop them.
“Mind your own fucking business, you fucking asshole,” he snarls, stuffing his hands in his pockets and swinging back around to glare out at the busy street. The cars still have not slowed, the crosswalk light staying a faithful red.
The man beside him is silent for a moment, two. He’s probably never had anyone speak to him like that in his entire life, Anakin thinks derisively. Fucking uppercrust accent. Fucker puts a dog in a raincoat, he should be called an asshole more often, he’s obviously a fucking dick—
“Well, that’s no way to speak to a stranger,” the man says primly, and Anakin’s body feels electric because he’s had a shit day and he’s not about to stand here on this cold, dirty street corner and be lectured by a man who puts raincoats on his dog.
He whips his head around, mouth already pulled back in a snarl, and the man pulls his hand out of his coat pocket and shakes the sleeves back. Where a normal rich snob may have a heavy watch, this man’s wrist is empty—save for the tail end of the word asshole.
“Or to your soulmate,” the man adds, pushing his shoulders back and his nose into the air.
The words and the sight of the man’s wrist, still exposed to the air, hit Anakin like a punch in the gut. It strikes him speechless, pushes all the words right out of his mouth even as his wrist carries on burning.
His soulmate.
His soulmate?
“Come along, Boga,” his soulmate says and then he just.
Anakin’s soulmate just—leaves.
Anakin blinks.
“What the fuck,” he says. And then, much louder, addressing the whole world and the entire sopping wet street corner, “What the fuck.”
Anakin’s soulmate is halfway across the street and Anakin needs to be there as well, needs to be beside him, needs to examine his wrist, his words, because apparently they’re Anakin’s words, so apparently the words Anakin has on his wrist, the Excuse me, sir, your shoes are untied, those are that man’s words.
His soulmate puts dogs in raincoats and he has auburn hair and a neat beard and Anakin thinks his eyes were blue but it was pretty hard to tell, he wasn’t focused on all the right parts, and now he’s—
“I think now’s the time where you go after him,” a woman says helpfully from his elbow. Anakin stares down at her and then back at his soulmate, whose back is getting smaller and smaller as he walks away. Who just meets their soulmate and walks away?
“But be careful not to trip on those shoelaces,” she adds with a pat on his shoulder. “That’s a hazard, right there.”
“Right,” Anakin says.
And then he goes.
Obi-Wan, as a general rule of thumb, doesn’t respect the idea of fate or destiny or any of that sort of thing. It’s a difficult stance to take in a world where everyone has a soulmate running about, but he thinks he makes a strong case against it.
After all, he’s forty-one and has yet to meet his soulmate. He’s rather tired of the entire concept in fact, and who wouldn’t be?
The words scrawled out across his forearm in big, blocky letters hardly indicate that any meeting between him and his soulmate is ever going to be amicable.
Because, well. It’s quite hard to see how a couple, even soulmates, can get to eternal love like in the films from the starting point of mind your own fucking business, you fucking asshole.
But even then, even when Obi-Wan doesn’t believe in fate, doesn’t care for destiny, the words on his forearm have, it has to be said, shaped his life. Which is really quite grating when he thinks about it, as he absolutely detests being told what to do.
As a child, he’d been rather…invasive. In his defense, he’d practically been given an invitation via soulmark to ask questions, to investigate, to stick his nose where it absolutely did not belong. It was only later, when he was in his twenties, that he really drew back, drew in, decided he did not want to ever really actually meet his soulmate. That they were not going to be a good match, that perhaps no such match existed for him.
And by then it was far too late to drop out of law school, to do something other than stick his nose professionally in other people’s businesses every day of his life.
He’s had some variation of the words on his arm snapped at him from across a courtroom by an antsy witness, by his client themself when he pushes too hard on a sensitive topic. By a fellow lawyer, casually over after-work drinks.
And now, by an angry boy on the street.
Only instead of some variation, instead of telling him to mind his business sans expletives, or by calling him different vulgar names, the boy beneath the fuchsia sweatshirt—which honestly should never have been allowed out in public and into Obi-Wan’s eyesight—says, verbatim, mind your own fucking business, you fucking asshole.
And a large part of Obi-Wan’s surety doesn’t even stem from the words themselves. No, the moment he hears them out of the boy’s mouth—and truthfully, he’s more of a man now that Obi-Wan has his face in his eyeline, can see his cheekbones and wrinkles by his eyes, can hear the deep growl of his voice—he knows.
But it’s not the words. It’s the feeling that shoots through him, cold like ice. Like the sleet falling all around them has somehow snuck through the lining of his coat, then his suit jacket, and into his skin.
That’s his soulmate.
Obi-Wan has been walking around for the last forty-one years with mind your own fucking business, you fucking asshole tattooed over his veins because he tells a stranger on the street—politely—that his shoelaces are untied. Once! The one time he looks up from his phone and down a bit to see the ratty ends of a shoelace and decides to tell the wearer about it—the one time—he gets landed with a soulmate.
Fine, Obi-Wan thinks as he tugs on Boga’s leash and guides them away. Fine. Perhaps fate is real. Obi-Wan can recognize when he’s been out-witted.
She may be real, but she is most definitely also a fucking asshole.
Anakin runs across the street through a cacophony of angry honking. It’s a good thing traffic is stop-and-go at this time of night in this city, or he’d really be running the risk of getting hit by a car and letting his soulmate slip through his fingers completely.
Which would only be at most 25% his fault—given that his soulmate walked away from him first.
Thank god the man’s offensively yellow umbrella stands out even on the crowded street because Anakin is not going to end his shit day by losing his soulmate.
It’s just—it’s not an option.
He doesn’t mean to grab onto the man’s upper arm and wrench him around to face him—not really. He just wants to catch him. Hold him. Keep him in place.
“Ow!” His soulmate says, though his eyes aren’t creased in pain and his tone doesn’t convey actual hurt—just offense, probably. Inherent bitchiness.
That’s Anakin’s soulmate.
“Hi,” Anakin says, breathless from the run and the way his soulmate’s eyes are light blue and pinned onto his face. He’s older than Anakin by a decade at least, gray at his temples and at the ends of his beard. He’s shorter than Anakin. His lips are thinner, nose narrower. His soulmark had looked bigger than Anakin’s in the quick glance Anakin had gotten of it.
“Hello,” Anakin’s soulmate says and pointedly pulls his arm back. Anakin, reluctant to relinquish his hold, takes a step forward with the motion, drawing them closer together.
“My name’s, I mean. Anakin—I’m Anakin. Your soulmate. You’re my soulmate,” Anakin says. He forces himself to lighten his touch, forces his eyes away from the man’s face to take in all of him.
His chest feels light, buoyant. His veins are electric. He’d sit through a thousand bank robberies and dropped cupcakes for this feeling. For this ending.
His soulmate’s lips quirk up slightly, as if he’s charmed despite himself. Anakin’s heart glows. Anakin is very good at being charming despite himself, that’s what everyone says.
“Look,” he adds quickly, cautiously letting go of the man’s arm to yank up his own sleeve. “Look, this is what—you said.”
Excuse me, sir, your shoelaces are untied wraps around his wrist the way it always has, but the sight seems suddenly new now that he’s looking at it for the first time with his soulmate at his side.
“It is what I said,” the man says with the smallest of sighs. He pushes his umbrella into Anakin’s spare hand, stepping closer in the process so as to avoid the rain—-has Anakin said lately how much he loves the rain? Because he loves cold, February rain. It’s the best sort of rain—and pulling his own coatsleeve up.
“It’s rather large, so I can’t show you all of it right now,” he says dryly, bending his arm so the words fucking asshole shine in the streetlight, and Anakin beams at the sight, the tone and because the words right now implies later.
“I’ll trade the first part for your name,” he bargains, and the man drops his coatsleeve to look at him in amused disbelief.
“Obi-Wan,” his soulmate finally allows. “My name is Obi-Wan Kenobi.”
Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan and Anakin. Anakin and Obi-Wan. Anakin likes it. He likes the way their names sound together. He likes the way that Obi-Wan is looking at him, and he especially likes the way that he’s staying in place now, beside Anakin, without a hand to keep him there.
“Why did you leave?” Anakin asks, and he doesn’t mean for the question to be accusatory, even though he also sort of does because who just finds their soulmate and then leaves? “What if I couldn’t find you again?”
Obi-Wan’s lips purse. “I don’t appreciate being told what to do.”
“Alright,” Anakin compromises swiftly. “You can boss me around, I don’t care. That sounds sort of fun, actually—”
“No,” Obi-Wan says, cutting him off with a roll of his eyes. “No, I don’t mean. That. Well, I suppose. That, as well, but what I really—I mean. What I was trying to say was….”
He trails off, but his eyes drop down to Anakin’s wrist, still exposed with his soulmark in full view.
Oh. Oh, his soulmate doesn’t like soulmates.
That’s…Anakin can work with that. He’s been the romantic one in relationships before. He can do it again if it means Obi-Wan stays.
“Well,” he says slowly, and he allows his hand to fall onto Obi-Wan’s arm, sliding it down until it encircles his wrist. “Do you take suggestions at least?”
His soulmate’s eyes narrow, and Anakin smiles winningly back at him. “Yes,” Obi-Wan finally just as slowly but twenty times as grudingly.
“Get over it,” Anakin suggests, squeezing his wrist and then leaving his touch there when Obi-Wan allows it. “And come get Thai with me.”
His answer seems to be surprising enough to shock a laugh out of Obi-Wan, and Anakin practically vibrates from the sound. He likes making Obi-Wan laugh, he discovers. He likes the sound of it and the way it lights up his eyes and the way he looks when he smiles. Especially when he smiles at Anakin.
“You know, I have been craving pad kee mao," Anakin’s soulmate says, and if Anakin hadn’t already known they were soulmates beyond a doubt—he’d know at this moment. “Alright,” Obi-Wan agrees a moment later, with a smile lingering on the edges of his lips. “You’ve won me over.”
If that had been a fight, it’s the easiest battle Anakin has ever won. Thank god.
“On one condition.”
Anakin’s agreeing before he can even think it through. “Yeah, of course. Anything.”
“You tie your shoes, Anakin,” the smile on Obi-Wan’s face stretches into something bigger and softer. “It really is a hazard, you know.”
“I’ll get right on it,” he promises immediately. It’ll be a hard habit to break after nineteen years leaving his laces to the wind, but at the same time, he’d gladly go the rest of his life without anyone else telling him to tie his shoes.
He’s already found the perfect person for the job.