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One moment, Obi-Wan stumbles up volcanic rubble that slips underfoot, gagging on sulfur and tears and far worse. The next step pitches him forward until he’s hanging half-out an open window.
The Temple stands. He comes to in an old room of his, littered with holonovels and flowerpots and all manner of other vaguely familiar clutter. In the mirror, his hair hangs long, a point of pride the war trained out of him.
Hours past midnight, the clock says. Days before Geonosis.
He sags once more, peering over the windowsill at the magma of Coruscant’s fault lines shimmering below. How longingly had he gazed on them in adolescence. He had flirted idly with thoughts of jumping, when his youthful melancholy was at its most ridiculous and self-indulgent.
Days before Geonosis. He can count the hours until the Council will order him and Anakin apart. He remembers resting well on this night, his last-ever brush with good sleep, because he could already sense the tectonic plates of the galaxy shifting underfoot. He had slumbered deeply for a solid nine hours, intent on facing the challenges as his best self.
There is no best self anymore. He ignores his pillows and qashmel comforter, instead pressing his head against the cold plaster of the wall and cataloging the coming threats. Palpatine. Dooku. Ventress. Fett. Kamino, and the clones’ inexplicable treachery. The Federation and the rest of its corporate allies. Maul, still skulking in the shadows. The crime syndicates and the slave empires and …
Nearby footfalls startle him. These are shared quarters, though he had forgotten.
Bang.
A cabinet door shuts.
Deliberately uncurling clenched fingers from his saber hilt, Obi-Wan edges out of his room. Anakin’s silhouette greets him, turned away, bent over by the kitchen counter. His pulse lurches as Anakin reaches for something out of sight, at approximately the level of his waist-
A glass. Anakin twists a tap. The water gurgles into the glass, and he rubs violently at his face, shoulders stiffening with a sharp inhale. He has been crying.
(You left him to burn.)
“The dream’s back.” Anakin does not turn. His voice is taut, obviously straining to cover the tears. “My mother. Again.”
Obi-Wan struggles to decode what Anakin might mean. He recalls, distantly, that Anakin had run off to Tatooine in this general period, but amidst the chaos after Geonosis, he had failed to ascertain just why.
“What did you see, exactly?” Obi-Wan asks. His own voice comes out hoarse, his trachea still sore from recent pressurization.
“She’s in trouble.”
“Do you know what sort?”
“No.”
“And she’s on Tatooine?” When Anakin responds with a tense nod, Obi-Wan hums. “I can slip by and look in on her, in the next few days. A natural opportunity should arise; I expect the Council to send us off-planet.”
Anakin jerks his head sharply, catching him out of the corner of his eye. Obi-Wan suppresses the recoil, eyes focused on the Padawan braid set swinging.
When he speaks, Anakin’s voice is small. “You’d do that?”
“I would,” he answers.
Kamino and its horrors will keep a few days. It makes little difference either way, yet Anakin gazes at him, radiating gratitude. Not affection, he corrects himself. He must not make that mistake again.
(He had no business attacking, once I had the high ground.)
“She’ll be okay then,” Anakin declares. “I should try to sleep.”
Perhaps Obi-Wan should concur. He should urge Anakin to clear his mind, or chide him for dwelling on upsetting thoughts at this hour.
The admonitions do not come; even he has limits to his hypocrisy. Anakin makes no move towards his own room.
“So.” Obi-Wan crosses to get water for his own throat, raw from screaming. “Padme.” He starts the sentence, and then realizes he has no end for it.
Anakin does not give way. Obi-Wan is careful not to touch him, reaching around his frame to the faucet. Still he passes close, close enough to be reminded of the stifling cologne Anakin wore at this age, convinced by dishonest holo-ads that it lent him sophistication. He breathes it in deeply, letting it settle and sting his nostrils. A whiff can almost clear away burnt flesh.
(What good was your high ground, if it kept you too far up to save him?)
“Padme,” Anakin repeats, warily.
“You should know she has been linked to other politicians. On and off.” This is the one counterargument that Obi-Wan could not deploy last time, because he had never paid Padme Amidala’s love life any attention until after Geonosis. It is desperate to imply that Padme might be unavailable, when she is in fact wholly available to marry Anakin, and carry his child, and nearly die by his hand.
Still Anakin tightens, a shift that sends a shiver through Obi-Wan. “Linked how?”
“Romantically, or so Senate gossip says. She’s had her own life, these past ten years.” With effort, he keeps his voice light, determined to remain both casual and forthright. “It can be painful, realizing that someone you find attractive has other, competing priorities. I understand all too well what that’s like.”
He speaks lightly, aiming to defuse the situation.
Yet Anakin’s anger floats, a palpable thing. A seismic charge dropped into a canyon, casting about for a collision. “What do you mean, ‘you understand’?” His glower is audible, dripping scorn. “You’ve never been in love.”
Obi-Wan blinks. While many Jedi choose a life without romance, his admission is not unthinkably scandalous. “Certainly I have.”
The charge detonates. Anakin’s fury floods the Force, raw and possessive. Obi-Wan would dodge, if his legs had not turned to stone beneath him.
“With who?” Anakin demands.
“A few people, arguably,” Obi-Wan says, tossed off-balance. He had not predicted Anakin would make him prove the statement, which serves him right for trying to predict Anakin at all. “Both in and out of the Order.”
“Who?”
“What, would you like a full list of names and dates?” Obi-Wan laughs, semi-hysterical.
“Yes.” Anakin sets down his glass with a rough clunk. Obi-Wan flinches, though it does not shatter. “Was there anyone recent?”
“It depends what you mean by ‘recent’-”
“Since me. Since you took me on as a Padawan,” Anakin snaps, as if it should be obvious. Perhaps it should be. “A master’s supposed to focus on their apprentice. You’re not allowed to get distracted.”
(You could have gone down to the lava’s edge, and reached out.)
The blast catches up to Obi-Wan. A concussive line, slicing straight to his core.
“You are angry,” he observes. “With me.”
A woefully late insight, when Anakin has been spitting fire at him for years. He has taken the brunt of Anakin’s moods since adolescence, dismissing them as fleeting swings in affect. He has taken the insults, the insinuations, the unreadable smoldering stares, and he has let them all go.
But now the imprint of Anakin’s sole lingers, stamped on his ribs. His arm still aches from where their off-hands, unoccupied by sabers, had momentarily twisted together.
“May I ask why?” Obi-Wan adds, nearly whispering. Too late. Too late to close the chasm, already bleeding lava.
“Are you serious?” Anakin shoots back, all jagged sarcasm.
(If I reached out, he would have only pulled me into the fire with him.)
“I am.”
Anakin hesitates for a moment more.
Then he launches into a litany of complaints like a ship into hyperspace, every point mapped out well in advance. “You never listen. You’re overly critical. You don’t understand. It’s not fair, I should be a Knight by now, but you keep hold of me like I’m a crecheling who can’t do anything right. You won’t let me move on.” His accusations gain speed and fury, like a blaze of Djem-So saber strikes, but Obi-Wan is far too weary for a defense. "But you’re too good of a Jedi to say what you think and drop me as a Padawan, even though everyone knows you don’t want me around. Like I’m not good enough for you. You’re ashamed of me, I feel it every time we’re in front of the Council, it’s so clear you never wanted me …”
“I love you, Anakin.” A quiet bloom of sound, like breathing. Anakin has accused him of shame, and indeed it seeps into him now: shame that, in another life, he had only voiced that thought in the past tense.
He expects Anakin to miss the words entirely, high on his own firestorm. Anakin surprises him instead, halting his tirade to stare at Obi-Wan. His expression morphs strangely.
“You love me.” Anakin sounds out the syllables, uncomprehending.
“Of course.” His failure must run even deeper than he thought, if Anakin can be thus shaken by three small words.
And suddenly Anakin turns once more. At last, he faces him head-on, boxing him into a corner, and then begins to inexplicably stroke Obi-Wan’s hand, curled around the glass. He cannot possibly miss the reflexive tremor, nor the hitch in Obi-Wan’s throat.
Yet Anakin does not question either.
“That’s why you’re so hard on me, isn’t it?” he murmurs instead, mostly to himself. He glows in the Force, somehow satisfied like he just snapped a stray droid part into place. “That’s why you act like I’m still a little kid you need to keep close.”
Anakin’s hand is warm. Gentle. Soothing, and Obi-Wan cannot make sense of it. He remains on edge, senses intimately attuned to this man, nerves electric from their battle not an hour back. When Anakin leans in closer, his whole body shifts instinctively in response.
Obi-Wan stumbles back to safe rhetorical ground. “It is possible you will see more of Padme on this mission-"
“Forget Padme.”
“What?”
“Forget her.” His brow furrows with mild irritation, as if Obi-Wan’s being slow. “I don’t care about her.”
Obi-Wan cannot make sense of anything at all.
“Did you know, even when I can’t hear it, I feel your heart beating? It’s going so fast right now.” Anakin’s voice drops, growing both urgent and earnest. His eyes bore into his, uncannily intense in the dim light, yet still comforting in their blessed lack of gold. “Same way I can sense how all the bones and all the sinews are fastened together in your body. Out of all the Jedi you are the brightest homing beacon in the Force, you know things even Master Yoda and Master Windu wouldn’t dream of. There should be temples for you …”
So the heresy commences three years early, but he cannot begin to guess what Anakin might mean by it, not until his hand moves.
The classic nightshirt of a male Jedi falls open at the front. This is a fact that Obi-Wan never considered until Anakin’s fingertips shift from his hand to his sternum, skimming over exposed skin.
“You’re like the energy binder keeping a pod’s engines together, I’d spin myself to pieces without you …”
This is impossible. Anakin is obsessed with Padme, enough that he choked her to unconsciousness at the first sign she might pull away.
But he had choked Obi-Wan too, hadn’t he? Not with an impersonal gesture of the Force but with his own hand, locking in his fingers as tight as he could.
“And it’s agony, when you’re unhappy with me. It tortures me, you leave wounds that I can only pray won’t scar …”
Anakin moves fast. His hand, initially tentative, now tucks inside the fabric to explore Obi-Wan’s chest.
“Anakin, we mustn’t.” Even that sentence is an achievement, for a mind mid-crack. He cannot think straight with the brand of Anakin’s glove still collaring his neck.
Anakin stills. He does not move away, his handprint resting casually on Obi-Wan’s heart.
“I’ll do anything you ask,” he rambles. “I won’t say a single extra word to Padme. I’ll stay away from power couplings. I’ll honor the Council’s mandate, I’ll do exactly what they tell me. I’ll stop talking to the Chancellor. I’ll-“
At that last offer, Obi-Wan’s eyes widen. Anakin might sense the opening, equally attuned to him.
Still, he tries to cover it. He improvises madly, while keeping his voice impeccably light and conversational. “I cannot control whom you associate with, Anakin, however I am obliged to point out that the Chancellor could be put in a difficult position, should you continue your special friendship. Imagine if he needed to choose between keeping open communication between the Senate and the Jedi Order and maintaining your confidence, if you were to trust him with some secret you felt we could not hear-“
“You’re jealous,” Anakin cuts him off, audibly torn between confusion and pleasure.
Obi-Wan goes to protest; his feelings towards Sideous are not so small or petty. Yet under the disgust and horror and the hatred he has yet to temper, there is a cold, coiled envy, bitterly affronted that Palpatine would be so daring in his choice of apprentice, when Anakin was already spoken for.
“You don’t need to be,” Anakin wheedles, prying into the vulnerability, slicing as deep as he can. “I’ll never see him again.”
Until he forgets. Until the first time Obi-Wan upsets him.
Two of Anakin’s fingers settle around a nipple and squeeze.
This is an inappropriate proposition, not befitting a Padawan. To entertain it is infinitely shameful for a Knight, more so one who was a Master and member of the Council not an hour back.
(What good is your high ground?)
“Please.” He reaches to pull Anakin’s hand free and succeeds only in tangling their fingers. “You cannot truly want this.”
“Why not?” Anakin demands.
“Because you are already sick of me, some days,” he says instantly. “I know you too well, Anakin, you will hate me before the end-"
“I love you.”
“And because I am much too old for you. Used-up, and burnt-out-"
“I love you."
“Because the power imbalance is utterly, utterly unsolvable.” Anyone would agree, though they would express alarm at the power Masters hold over their Padawans. They would not guess how Obi-Wan is eternally at a disadvantage, in matters of Anakin.
“Except you would never hurt me,” Anakin slips in, confident. Horribly trusting.
He preens, like this was a brilliant retort, and it is indeed effective at silencing Obi-Wan. He cannot get another word past the tears.
(You should have gone to him.)
“People say they want each other all the time though, but they just mean it for a moment.” Anakin dwindles. In the stretching silence, his certainty and insistence burn away, leaving naked vulnerability. “They just want something short, and. And small.”
He hears the question Anakin is too doubtful, too young to ask, and has no words for a reply. There are no words for the impossibility of his ever feeling anything small where Anakin is concerned. Obi-Wan cannot box him up or cut him out. He cannot make sense of himself, except in relation to Anakin.
Obi-Wan reaches out, looping one finger around the delicate thread of Anakin’s Padawan braid. Anakin extends his other hand and wraps it, firmly, around the side of Obi-Wan’s neck. The heel of his hand settles, inevitably, along the line of the trachea.
(So what if he dragged you in?)
Anakin pulls him close and kisses him, open-mouthed from the start. The messy, molten drag of his tongue leaves liquid fire in its wake.
We might deserve to burn as one.