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The situation is this: there are presently clones and civilians of the Republic dying across the galaxy, gunned down by separatist droids that weren’t programmed to care about the flickers snuffed out each moment, and Anakin has just gotten out of dinner. A soiree, practically. He knows that these people—the politicians, the ones who make laws out of words and ink and loose coinpurses on a whim—are important to the Republic, that getting as many planets on their side early on is better if they want to end the whole affair before it really ramps up its production of blood and death.
But he just doesn’t understand why the Council would send him here. Can’t Obi-Wan—perfect, poised, persnickety Obi-Wan, whom Anakin has scarcely seen since his knighting—do this on his own?
Apparently not, since Obi-Wan Kenobi, recently-official Master Jedi and unofficially a master negotiator, is currently hanging off of Anakin like Anakin’s the only thing that makes gravity work. He’s drunk, unequivocally. The local custom, apparently, is to share a glass of an alcohol made of the native plants, and because they’re meant to play nice, they partook—or rather, Obi-Wan did, and he drank for Anakin as well.
Anakin frowns. Obi-Wan asking for his cup had made something strange happen to his heart at the time, like the dull thud of a droid hitting the ground, but now that he thinks about it… Obi-Wan hadn’t even asked. He wondered if Obi-Wan still thought it was his responsibility to keep his irascible former Padawan in line, if that had been why he did it.
He doesn’t know where he stands with Obi-Wan, anymore, the link between them severed the same way his Padawan braid had been. Attachment is not the Jedi way, though Anakin has always struggled with internalizing that part (and many other parts, too, but he doesn’t like to think about the ways he innately clashes with the Code). Though Anakin’s spending an increasing amount of time in muddy trenches and reflecting blaster bolts away from a regiment he’s suddenly responsible for, he still spends long hours in his head staring at the ceiling of his bunk, wondering. Wondering if, now that Anakin is not Obi-Wan’s Padawan, he means anything at all to his former Master?
Anything other than a crutch, anyway, because right now he is very much serving as one.
“Stronger than I expected,” Obi-Wan comments when they are about a quarter of the way through the labyrinthine halls that lead them back to their guest quarters. He sounds unbearably put-together, still, for how much he’s drunk. The two cups sounds insignificant, but Anakin watched one of the politicians of lesser importance drink just one and pass out afterwards. “And I must admit I hold no fondness for the… lingering aftertaste.”
“Should’ve let me drink mine, then,” Anakin snipes, irritation still lancing through him for his worry that Obi-Wan still sees him as a child even though he’s a knight.
Obi-Wan laughs, and when he looks back at Anakin, Anakin thinks that perhaps he can feel a tendril of… fondness, in the Force. Obi-Wan’s shields are less airtight than normal, probably because he’s so drunk he can barely walk straight.
“And have you start a fistfight with the Prime Minister in the middle of dinner? I think not, though the entertainment would have been better if you had.”
The words rankle, but Anakin has to admit that Obi-Wan is probably right. The Prime Minister made several comments about gloves at dinner and shaggy haircuts and Anakin was already struggling to be good and not make a mess for Obi-Wan to clean up later, to prove that he could be the mature and level-headed knight he was supposed to be. He hums neutrally—he is not brooding, thank you very much.
Obi-Wan slips, and his grip on Anakin’s shoulder accordingly pulls before Anakin can right him again. The movement jostles his arm, the right one, and Anakin tries not to flinch. The flesh is still tender where it joins the mechanical arm that now substitutes for his original one.
“Padawan—” Obi-Wan says, at random, and Anakin opens his mouth to correct him snappishly but Obi-Wan beats him to it—“I’m so proud of you. It’s been—hic—so hard adjusting to your absence, and I’ve never had such trouble letting go of something in my life, but watching you stand on your own feet brings me its own kind of joy.”
Anakin’s mouth clicks back shut again, audibly.
“Did you know? Quinlan told me he thought it would never happen, that we were too attached at the hip, but I always knew… you’ll be one of the best of us. You’ve always been destined for greater things; I can feel it in the Force.”
Anakin huffs out a laugh. “Do you believe that old Chosen One myth, Master? I thought you were more sensible than that.”
Never mind that Anakin is still unsure if he believes it or not. Master Qui-Gon had with all his heart, and Anakin knows that, but Obi-Wan has always seemed to have reserved his judgment on the matter.
Obi-Wan’s head lolls a little, and he gives Anakin a small smile. “Would it be so surprising? The way the Force cradles you, how you took so well to your ‘saber once you’d made it ...your hair.”
Anakin should be a little less surprised at the sudden seeming change of topic, given that Obi-Wan is clinging to him like he’ll drop like a stone if he doesn’t. “What about my hair?”
“It’s a little—it curls now, at the ends. It wasn’t that way when you were a child, but it’s pretty.” Obi-Wan’s hand—the one not clutched in Anakin’s own and slung around his shoulders—touches the back of his neck, where his hair nearly reaches the collar of his robes. Those deft fingers twine with and tug at the little curls, the tenderness unbearable. The touch—the likes of which Anakin is sure he hasn’t gotten from Obi-Wan since he was twelve—overwhelms him, in an equal and opposite way from how he might feel upon being dunked in an icy ocean. He hardly even notices that his feet stop moving, and with them Obi-Wan’s feet also. He barely even remembers how close they are to their room, where their room even is.
The sound he makes is embarrassing, but in his inebriated state Obi-Wan doesn’t even seem to register it.
“Very pretty,” Obi-Wan muses, and then his hand trails up, caressing Anakin’s ear for a moment before taking a moment to trace fingertips callused by ‘saber use along his jaw. “My handsome boy, all grown up.”
“Master,” Anakin whines, and then curses himself for how easy it is to call Obi-Wan that. To keep calling him that, to pull on a thread that bound them and no longer does—except perhaps it still does, a little, perhaps there is still one fraying strand that remains hanging between them.
It’s got to be the way that Obi-Wan keeps… praising him. Praise had been an easy thing to acquire, when Anakin was young and training with his lightsaber and everything (except for meditation, never meditation) had come easily to him. And then… it had stopped, one day, and never really come back as it had once been. For a long time, Anakin has genuinely believed that his Master was… disappointed in him, perhaps even regretted taking him on. To find out to the contrary, even the opposite… it nearly drowned Anakin in emotion swirling thick in his chest.
Obi-Wan catches it, so Anakin must have been a bit careless with keeping everything inside again. His fingers fall from Anakin’s face, and Anakin finally finds the strength in himself to keep moving, pulling Obi-Wan along in a strange reversal of their roles when he was growing up.
“Hm? What is it, Anakin?”
“I’m not a little kid anymore,” Anakin says, trying not to choke on the words. They mean so much more than the sum of their parts, disbelief and trepidation and that strange unnameable thing all rolled up into one and blooming into something bigger.
“A child would not have the body that you do,” Obi-Wan replies sagely, a strange tumultuous mixture of emotion leaking into the Force before it dissipates like mist in the morning. “Nor would he be able to lift an entire dropship onto its side, even if that child had been you.”
Anakin’s cheeks burn, and he feels almost like he has whiplash—caught between the fatherly praise he’s always craved and wanted to deserve and needed, and Obi-Wan commenting on his body, his hair, his—
“You heard about that?” he asks weakly, because the idea of Anakin asking Obi-Wan Kenobi what specifically, he means by the body that he has makes something in Anakin seize up worse than a protocol droid in a sand pit.
“It isn’t difficult to find your mission reports,” Obi-Wan declares blithely, running a hand through his hair and mussing it until it’s far from the neatness Anakin is used to seeing. He cut it, recently.
Anakin still misses it, a little. It feels, somehow, ridiculously, like the last nail in the coffin for them—that Obi-Wan has changed his hair from how he had it for the last five or so years of Anakin’s apprenticeship.
“You read my reports?”
“Well, it’s hardly any trouble for you—and I enjoy reading about your recent exploits.” Obi-Wan’s hand tightens around Anakin’s shoulder. “You know I’m prone to—”
And then he cuts himself off, suddenly, and Anakin realizes they’ve made it to their door. He’s too wrung out and scraped empty from all of… this, from the banquet hall until now, so he can’t be bothered to search his and Obi-Wan’s pockets for the key to the room. The irritation from the Prime Minister’s words, from having to sit in on a stupid and frivolous dinner while there are more important things to be done, and his Master practically stealing his cup of wine have all faded away in the face of the infinitely confusing and pleasing praise he’s received from Obi-Wan tonight.
He’s still a little miffed about Obi-Wan admitting to reading all his mission reports—there’s a reason Anakin doesn’t tell him everything, because it’s embarrassing having to admit that he got food poisoning from trying to spruce up his own rations with local flora—but he’s willing to be magnanimous mostly because Obi-Wan is not actually in a state to be prodded about the subject.
Anakin sighs and barely even has to concentrate before the Force leaps to his aid, turning the locking mechanism from the inside and pushing their door inward in one fell swoop.
“I shouldn’t encourage you,” Obi-Wan sighs, pulling himself as tight to Anakin as he can, “but you’re not my Padawan anymore, so I might tell you how… how… oddly appealing I find it when you do things like that. It’s still—I know it’s irresponsible, but—”
Anakin shivers as he pulls Obi-Wan into their room, dragging him out of the ostensibly public space of the hallway, where Obi-Wan’s been talking about… all of that. Does he really think this way? The local politicians didn’t give Obi-Wan some sort of drug along with the wine, did they?
Because if this was truly how Obi-Wan felt about Anakin, and the wine was what let the words out by lowering the floodgates—that Obi-Wan was proud of Anakin even with all of his failures, that Obi-Wan didn’t want to let him go, that Obi-Wan thought he was handsome and—well, Anakin can hardly believe it. His thoughts are a confusing, jumbled mess, churning with want and hope and resentment. Why couldn’t Obi-Wan have just said something, anything?
“What’s wrong?” Obi-Wan asks, again pegging the exact moment that Anakin’s thoughts take a turn for the worse.
Anakin tries to shake him off onto his bed, but to no avail—Obi-Wan clings to him like a barnacle, like how Anakin wishes he could still cling to Obi-Wan (though he is loath to admit it, when his relationship with his former Master is still so… filled with unspeakable and unknowable tension).
“Nothing’s wrong,” Anakin shoots back, when it becomes evident that Obi-Wan will not go into the bed. The two of them stand there, Obi-Wan leaning on Anakin heavily and Anakin a tempest inside himself, barely contained. “You’re just very drunk, Master.”
Anakin winces, again, as the title falls easier from his lips than anything else. A sensory memory flashes through him, Obi-Wan tugging at the braid he no longer wears and reminding him of the importance of his lightsaber after he’d lost it. And now, just milliseconds later, Obi-Wan’s free hand is curled around the front of Anakin this time, looping around his neck and playing with the curls near his opposite ear.
“I might be,” Obi-Wan sing-songs, and it’s unbearable, the way he sounds—it will be seared into Anakin’s memory forever. “I cannot recall the last time I’ve had so much to drink.”
Anakin can’t either, especially not with Obi-Wan crowding in on him as he is. Anakin can feel Obi-Wan’s breath on his skin where it’s not covered by his robes, hot and damp. He can hear the slight catch of bristle against fabric as Obi-Wan’s beard rubs gently on Anakin’s shoulder.
He cannot stop himself from imagining how that same rasp might feel on bare skin.
“How terrible it must be, to deal with your drunk old Master,” Obi-Wan murmurs, and the worst part is that Anakin can’t even tell if he’s being serious or joking. He’s passed the point of being able to tell a long time ago.
“You’re very honest when you’re like this.”
Anakin hoists Obi-Wan up again by the waist, because he’s as relaxed as a Tooka kitten that has just received a bath from its mother.
“Honest? No.”
And Anakin is about to interject, to ask for clarification, ask if Obi-Wan had been lying when he said that he was proud, and that he thought Anakin was handsome, and that he was having trouble letting go, except for when he opens his mouth Obi-Wan beats him to it again, twice in one night.
“Honesty would be more like this, Anakin.”
And then Anakin cannot think anymore, because he feels the rasp of Obi-Wan’s beard against his neck and then the soft press of lips. In absence of his mind, his body shivers as Obi-Wan hangs off of him and kisses his neck, as feather-light touches drive him insane. He never—he never knew—
The silver-woven spell is broken when a deep gasp claws its way out of Anakin’s lungs, when his chest heaves with the confusion spiraling in him. Obi-Wan breaks away, and in the moonlight he almost looks afraid.
“Let’s get you to bed, Master.” He doesn’t even notice his slip, really, in his haste to deposit Obi-Wan in his bed. “You really are too drunk to be up and about.”
Obi-Wan is strangely pliant, when Anakin takes his boots off, tucks him under his covers. He doesn’t dare try to change his clothes, but Obi-Wan will scold in the morning about dirt in the bed if he doesn’t remove his boots.
Or, maybe he wouldn’t. Anakin is a lot less sure in what he thought he knew about how his Master feels about things than he was just several hours ago.
Anakin ends up in his own bed, eventually—staring up at the ceiling again, his mind spinning and spinning and catching over and over on Obi-Wan Kenobi, on where they stand in relation to each other, in relation to the Council, the Code. His hand—the flesh one, the one that was still fully real—covers the spot where he’d been so suddenly kissed, so precipitously caressed.
He finds no real answers, only impossible hopes and dreams that coalesce in his imagination mere moments before he thinks them.