Archive of Our Own

“To the groom,” Rex cries raising his glass, just this side of too tipsy. But it’s the afternoon before the wedding, not the day of the wedding itself, so Anakin lets it slide. Besides, he’s feeling rather light and bubbly himself, champagne coursing through his veins like pure sunshine.

In twenty-four hours, he’s going to be married to Obi-Wan Kenobi. He raises his own champagne flute to his lips and takes a disbelieving sip, eyes falling to the red-gold band wrapped around his finger. Honestly, thank the Force Obi-Wan had decided to follow Coruscant tradition and give him a ring when he asked Anakin to marry him. If he didn’t have the heavy proof of wrapped around his finger, he isn’t sure he’d believe it. Even if, this time tomorrow, he’s going to be married. To Obi-Wan.

To Obi-Wan.

Rex’s eyebrows knit together and he cocks his head at Anakin. “Or is it groomer if there’s two grooms?”

“It’s definitely not—” Anakin splutters, setting his glass down more roughly than he intended.

Ahsoka looks up from the comm unit in her lap, mouth curled up in a smirk wide enough to show off her fangs. “If anything,” she says, “Obi-Wan would be the groomer, considering he sort of raised Skygu—”

“Stop it, shut up, Snips, you’re not doing that on my wedding day—”

“Your wedding day isn’t until tomorrow,” his wayward and frankly disowned and uninvited former padawan points out, reaching out with the Force to steal his defenseless champagne flute. Anakin tries his best to glare at her, but he feels too full of the light to hold onto his annoyance for long. She’s here. She came to visit Coruscant. For his wedding day.

He’s getting married tomorrow. 

To Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Rex looks terribly contrite at least, eyes wide and brows tilted down, which makes Anakin reassess his tipsiness level. “Oh, General, I didn’t mean like that, sir! I like Obi-Wan. A lot! I voted for him for the Troopers’ GILF poll—ow—”

Jesse elbows him in the side hard enough for the retired captain to lurch forward, blue liquid spilling from his cup and onto Padmé’s pristine white rug.

“Ah, Force, Rex,” Ahsoka complains as she leaps to her feet. “Padmé is going to blame me for that, you know that—”

“What’s a GILF poll?” asks Anakin.

“That was Jesse, Commander, don’t look at me like that—” Rex splutters, even as he sets his cup down on the closest side table and begins patting around for stray napkins from their dinner.

“Oh, it’s not my fault Rex can’t handle his cups—literally,” Jesse protests almost on cue, throwing his half-crumbled napkin to the cause.

“Ugh,” says Ahsoka. “She’s letting me stay here for free and this is how you make me repay her! On Anakin’s wedding day! His second wedding day!”

“Okay, alright, there’s no need for that,” says Anakin sourly. “You bring up my marriage to Padmé more than she does, and she’s my ex-wife—”

“I don't bring it up more than Master Obi-Wan does,” Ahsoka mutters under her breath as she dabs at the stain on the rug.

Anakin opens his mouth and then closes it. She’s not technically wrong. Obi-Wan does bring up Anakin’s former marriage to Padmé Amidala quite frequently, but it’s different when Obi-Wan does it. Adorable and endearing, indicative of an emotion he hadn’t realized his former master was capable of. After all, until the months following the war, Anakin never thought his master had the capacity for jealousy. 

It was an incredible realization, one that directly led them to where they are now: Anakin lounging in Padmé’s quarters because Ahsoka had been too lazy to plan a proper bachelor’s party, and Obi-Wan somewhere in the Temple or the Lower Levels, depending on if he’s let Cody or Vos plan his.

And tomorrow, they’re getting married.

Forever.

“What’s a GILF poll?” Anakin asks Rex, snapping the question out like he did orders during the war. It’s a bit underhanded, sure, especially when Rex is so pliable and vulnerable due to the alcohol.

But he was the one that mentioned it.

Rex snaps to attention—or as much as he can. He wobbles to attention at least. “General I’d Like To Fuck,” he reports, and Jesse elbows him harder.

“Wait,” Anakin says, feeling as though he’s just taken an ion blast to the head. “The troopers took a vote on…which general was…the most….”

He trails off, feeling his face flush red. 

Ahsoka’s nose wrinkles up in disgust, but she offers him a shrug when he tries to send her a commiserating expression. “I mean, the senior padawans always ran a poll like that as well, Anakin. You have to remember that.”

Anakin splutters. He does remember those votes. When he was a senior padawan, his master had won the very first one he’d participated in, Master I'd Like to Fuck. The next year, he’d set out to campaign for Anyone But Obi-Wan because he couldn’t handle the idea of having the most fuckable master in the Temple.

Or, more precisely with the gift of hindsight, he couldn’t stand to have other padawans looking at his master and thinking that he was fuckable.

Obi-Wan had still won that year, which was infuriating enough that Anakin hadn’t been able to look at his master for three days straight.

“You voted for Obi-Wan?” Anakin asks Rex, who looks sort of red in the face. It clashes with his blond hair. Obi-Wan likes blondes.

But he likes Anakin more.

He’s going to marry Anakin.

Tomorrow.

“I voted for you, General,” Jesse declares loyally, and Anakin nods in agreement even as Ahsoka pretends to retch on the floor. 

Rex’s lip curls and he elbows Jesse back. “I based my vote on objective facts,” he mutters. “Not favoritism.”

Anakin narrows his eyes and considers this. He isn’t sure a bachelor’s party is supposed to feature so much talk about fucking his future husband, but it’s not as if he’s ever actually had a bachelor’s party before.

As Obi-Wan likes to point out in his most scathing tone, the night before Anakin’s first wedding, he’d been high on painkillers from the surgery to fit him with his mechno arm. 

Hardly in the right mindset to make important, life-altering decisions, Obi-Wan’s snotty voice murmurs in his head, and Anakin grins dopily at nothing. He’s such a bitch.

Anakin’s bitch.

Who he’s marrying. Tomorrow.

“He didn’t win,” Rex informs Anakin with wide eyes, as if that’s incredibly important for him to know. “Master Fisto stole the vote with a late-in-the-game swimming mission.”

Anakin deliberates on this for a moment before nodding in understanding. Master Fisto is quite fit. And he definitely had a habit of losing his clothes during the war more frequently than Obi-Wan ever did.

“All of the 212th voted for General Kenobi though,” Jesse says, and Anakin thinks about this as well and then nods again.

The champagne makes his tongue loose though, and he adds, “That’s not surprising,” he says. “I mean, if any troopers saw his back tattoo, then it was probably the 212th. I bet they kept that close to chest.”

Anakin had. Until this very moment, of course.

He’d been fourteen when he’d first seen it, Obi-Wan’s naked back in some river on some planet. Bare save for the dark black lines running up his spine from his lower back. He’d almost swallowed his tongue.

Now he gets to trace that ink with his mouth, pretty much whenever he wants to. For the rest of his life.

Because tomorrow, they’re getting married.

As Rex and Jesse splutter and absorb this knowledge, Anakin’s comm begins to vibrate where he’s left it on one of the side tables. He looks around, eyebrows furrowing. Most everyone he loves in the galaxy is here, lounging around Padmé’s living area in various states of drunken revelry. Aayla is asleep on one couch with her head pillowed on Bly’s thigh as he gestures animatedly in an argument with Kix. Ahsoka has been waylaid at the edge of the guests by Barriss, hands still holding the wad of dirty napkins she’d left with.

The only one missing, really, is—

Oh.

He stands on impressively steady feet—in his opinion—and walks out to one of the balconies of Padmé’s apartments. His eyes find the distant silhouette of the Jedi Temple like they’re magnetized. “Hi, Obi-Wan,” he murmurs as he accepts the call.

Voice only, of course. Apparently it’s bad luck to see your fiancé the day before the wedding, and Anakin doesn’t know if holo comm videos count or not.

“Darling,” Obi-Wan says, and Anakin smiles out at the Temple in the distance, as if he’s smiling directly at Obi-Wan.

“Hey,” Anakin says again, nonsensically. He takes another sip of his glass, delighted to find that either he’s accidentally taken someone else’s or someone has been kind enough to top his up for him. 

Probably the former.

“Yes, hello,” Obi-Wan says, and Anakin can hear the smile in his voice, even through the feigned annoyance. “We’ve done that part, Anakin.”

“Well, you called me,” Anakin points out, leaning his arms on the railing before him. “How am I supposed to know what to say?”

His master huffs a laugh. It’s beautiful. Anakin is so in love with him, it’s absolutely hideous. 

“Not knowing what to say has never once stopped you before,” his master points out, tone steeped in fond teasing. Anakin sets his champagne flute next to him. He doesn’t need it. Talking with Obi-Wan is enough to make him feel light and floaty and full of sunshine as it is.

“You’re being mean to me,” Anakin decides, “the day before my wedding?”

“Ah, well,” Obi-Wan murmurs back. “You see, it’s also the day before my wedding. So I’m free to do as I like, I believe.”

Anakin gives him his laughter—it is, after all, his already. “How is your party going, Master?”

He can’t hear his master wrinkling his nose through the comm link, but he recognizes the tone that usually precedes the expression. “It’s fine,” he tells him, and Anakin knows he’s lying. How he’d spent most of his life unable to see Obi-Wan’s lies for what they were, he doesn’t know. It seems so obvious now that he’s been allowed behind the curtain, through the heavily guarded door of his master’s heart.

“Obi-Wan,” he says.

“It’s shit,” Obi-Wan admits with a small sigh. “I don’t know why we let ourselves be convinced into doing this nonsense.”

“What, the wedding?” Anakin asks, reminding himself that he will not be hurt over anything his master says because no matter what, they’re getting married tomorrow. Obi-Wan promised. He promised and then even gave him a ring.

“What, no—of course not,” Obi-Wan snaps, and Anakin allows himself to preen. Of course not.

“What then?”

“They won’t let me leave to see you,” Obi-Wan complains, as if this is the greatest injustice he has ever faced in his very long life.

Anakin’s smile softens into something private, something just for Obi-Wan even though the man is not there. “Apparently it’s bad luck to see each other the day before the ceremony. That’s what everyone says.”

“Anakin, we’re Jedi. We do not believe in bad luck nor in marriage ceremonies. We’re hardly experts in the field.”

“We’re not Jedi anymore,” Anakin reminds him, because their paperwork to leave the Order was finalized a week ago. Even then, he knows that his master will always be a Jedi, that he left only because he wanted to marry Anakin more than he wanted to serve the Republic.

It’s harder to keep that from going to his head than it is the champagne.

“And also,” he rushes to add, just in case spending a day in the Temple with members of his family celebrating him has given Obi-Wan second thoughts about leaving, “the clones have done a lot of research on weddings. We should probably follow their lead.”

When Obi-Wan replies, his voice is noticeably lower, rougher, and just the way Anakin likes it best when he’s being bossed around. “When I gave you that ring,” he practically purrs down the line, “I was under the impression that it meant that I would never have to survive another day without seeing you. Why on the Force would that not apply to today of all days?”

“Oh,” Anakin says, feeling warm all over. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Obi-Wan repeats, and Anakin has the definite impression that he’s being rather ruthlessly mocked, but that doesn’t really, actually matter at the moment.

Obi-Wan can tease all he wants up until the day Anakin dies (first and peacefully, with Obi-Wan’s hand wrapped up in his). Especially if he keeps saying lovely stuff about wanting to see Anakin every day forever and ever in the meantime.

“Do you think you can sneak away, darling?” Obi-Wan asks, gently encouraging tone at odds with his frankly manipulative plan of action. “How ready are your brigade’s defensives against an attack from the inside?”

Anakin casts a look back into Padmé’s sitting room. “Somewhere in between severely lacking and already defeated,” he reports, grin curling up the edges of his mouth. “I think I could manage a bit of subterfuge.”

“Excellent,” Obi-Wan says. “We can rendezvous at the Outlander then. For old times’ sake.”

“Not Dex’s?”

Obi-Wan pauses, considering. “Dex’s then,” he says. “But if he sells us out to one of our minders, it’s your fault, dearest.”

“If we tell him we’re getting married tomorrow, he may comp our bill,” Anakin points out, and Obi-Wan lets out a short bark of laughter.

“He RSVP'ed that he'd be there tomorrow, Anakin, come now. I would hope he already knows.”

Anakin smiles out at the busy Coruscanti night. Those speeders flying by, they have no idea that tomorrow he’s going to marry the love of his life. They’re moving freely about their own lives without a single care in the world to Anakin’s impending, life-altering marriage ceremony. 

Suddenly, he’s filled to the brim with goodwill. For all those flyers, for the people he can just make out walking about the rooftop gardens closest to Padmé’s building, to everyone in the room behind him, to everyone in maybe the whole galaxy. 

Love, love. He loves Obi-Wan so kriffing much that he loves everything else as well. Everything else in the whole galaxy. 

“What about you though?” he remembers to ask as he glances back to his party guests. “How are you going to sneak away from the Jedi Order’s best Spymaster? Not to mention your commander.”

Obi-Wan huffs out something that’s half offense and half humor. “I’ve been sneaking away from Quinlan Vos since before you were born, padawan,” he says, and Anakin can tell that he’s rolling his eyes. 

Anakin rolls his eyes in turn. His age and thus their age difference is a sensitive subject that must be treaded with dignity and utmost care. Unless, of course, it can help Obi-Wan in an argument.

He’s such a dick.

Anakin can’t wait to marry him.

Tomorrow.

“And Cody has already made it clear that he’s susceptible to bribes now that he is no longer on the Republic’s payroll,” Obi-Wan adds before Anakin can muster up the will to even feign annoyance at his future husband.

“Alright,” Anakin says. “Yeah, I’ll meet you at Dex’s. I’ll probably beat you there.”

He’ll definitely beat him there, given that Padmé’s apartments are much closer to Dex’s Diner than the Jedi Temple.

But the age thing goes both ways. 

“Don’t blow out your back trying to rush there though, old man,” he adds with a smirk his master can’t see, and Obi-Wan lets out a displeased noise.

“I’ll strive not to,” Obi-Wan replies loftily. “After all, after tomorrow that will be your job, won’t it?”

His master hangs up on Anakin’s splutter, which is probably for the best. Anakin isn’t sure that what he wants to say in response should be communicated over unencrypted comm waves.

He finishes the drink in his glass and then tucks his comm link into his belt. A glance behind him shows that no one’s watching him through the transparisteel of Padmé’s balcony doors.

That sorted,  he swings himself over the railing and then allows himself to fall backward. 

The Force races up to catch him.

Dex gives him a warm smile when he bursts through the doors of his restaurant. “Ah, my second favorite Jedi,” he intones, clapping his shovel-wide hand against Anakin’s back, hard enough to make a weaker man buckle. As it is, Anakin’s been coming here for years. He knows to lock his knees.

“Don’t sound so disappointed,” Anakin tells him with a grin, carding a hand through his hair in an attempt to make it lie flat and look as if he hasn’t just spent the past ten minutes flying through the city clinging to the undercarriages of various speeders. “Obi-Wan should be here any minute.”

“Oh, he is already here,” Dex replies, gesturing with his bottom set of hands towards the right side of the restaurant. “He has requested that I do not tell anyone but you that he is here.” Dex’s face flickers in disapproval. “It is bad luck to see each other before the wedding, little Skywalker.”

Anakin scowls automatically. “The Jedi do not believe in bad luck,” he says, even as he cranes his head in the direction Dex has pointed. 

“I did not know the Jedi believed in marriage,” Dex says with the confidence of a restaurant owner who knows he is going to get a generous tip regardless of the service he gives them.

“An exception was made,” Anakin says, even though that’s almost more of a lie than it is the truth. The Jedi Order did not make an exception for their marriage. One Jedi just made one exception to his own personal code of ethics. And that was enough. That was everything. “Excuse me, I think I see him.”

Thankfully, Dex lets him go with another, harder pat on his shoulder. 

The booth Obi-Wan is sitting in is half cast in the shadows, towards the very back of the restaurant. He’s tucked up along the inside line of the table, pressed against the wall and leaving the perfect amount of space next to him for Anakin to slide into.

He looks up when Anakin approaches, and greets him with a smile, devoid of any edges or sharp points. It makes him look ten years younger, his eyes glittering blue stardust in the diner’s dim lights. 

“You were already on your way when you comm’ed me,” Anakin says in the closest thing to disgust that he can manage. It’s pretty kriffing far from disgust, but Obi-Wan’s hair looks so soft, and his teeth are so brightly white when his smile morphs from happy into smug. 

“Obviously,” he says, and Anakin falls into the booth next to him and leans over to kiss him. It’s been far too long since they’ve kissed, which is almost a crime against the galaxy, considering how much Anakin enjoys kissing Obi-Wan. 

His hand curls around the back of his master’s neck, thumb running along the edges of his hair. 

“Hey baby,” he mutters as they separate again, both intensely aware of the public nature of their current position. 

Obi-Wan gives him a private smile in return, the smile he wears just for Anakin. It’s, obviously, Anakin’s favorite. There’s a light flush high up on his cheeks, just high enough that his beard is useless to cover it.

Anakin loves him so much that he’s going to marry him. Tomorrow. 

“Hello, darling,” he murmurs back, turning to study the sticky menu on the table in front of him, as if they haven’t been here a thousand times before. He loves when Obi-Wan is his confident, dirty-minded, egotistical master, but he also loves him like this, when his Force signature goes slick with shy pleasure, as if he loves Anakin in all his iterations just as much as Anakin loves him.

It doesn’t feel possible, but then stranger things have been known to happen.

Anakin lets him retreat for now.

“How was your day?” Anakin asks, letting his hand fall on top of Obi-Wan’s thigh beneath the table; Obi-Wan casts him a suspicious look, but allows it to stay. 

“Alright,” Obi-Wan says with a small shrug. “I wrote my vows.”

Anakin whips his head around to look at him, aghast. “You wrote your vows today?”

Obi-Wan blinks. “Well I assumed tomorrow morning would be a tad too busy.” When all he gets is a frown in return, he relents with a sigh. “Anakin, they’re all things you’ve heard before. It’s not as if there will be any surprises. Of course I did not need months to write down how I feel about you in anticipation of our wedding day—I’ve already spent years agonizing over that very thing!”

Anakin can feel his eyebrows furrow. On one hand, he’s not quite sure he likes the use of the word agonizing in direct relation to Obi-Wan’s feelings for him, but on the other hand, his master tends to agonize over a great many things. Some to do with Anakin and some not. 

“The hardest part was memorizing them,” Obi-Wan adds in a disgruntled undertone, picking at the edge of the laminated menu.

Anakin gives him another narrow-eyed, assessing look. Obi-Wan’s rather old these days, but he hasn’t actually shown any signs of cognitive decline, though Anakin supposes he won’t until the day he does. Which could be—

“Oh, would you stop looking at me like that,” his fiancé snaps, flicking his hand and calling upon the Force to smack Anakin in the face with one of the menus, which by tomorrow will be classified as mariticide. 

“I wasn’t looking at you like anything,” Anakin protests as he rubs his nose pointedly. 

Obi-Wan gives him an unimpressed look, which Anakin is very familiar with and knows all versions of. “My mind is fine, padawan. I’ve just never been the sort of person who can memorize lines—”

“Oh, well, if you’re viewing your wedding vows as a script that needs to be memorized, then that's all well and—”

The eye roll that this elicits looks almost painful; Obi-Wan removes Anakin’s hand from his thigh. Before Anakin can issue a complaint, he turns in his seat to face him, propping one leg up over the other on the bench of the booth. 

He clears his throat. “Anakin Skywalker, I would hope that at this point in our relationship, you are as familiar with all the ways that I love you as I am, though I suppose it is too much to ask for, given my own propensity to catch myself unawares at times. I believe in the past four years alone, I have invented at least seventy new ways to love another person. To love you in specific. Through fear and strife, grief and joy, I have loved you. Through annoyance and frustration—”

“What are you doing,” Anakin says, even as his pulse picks up and his heart begins to jump furiously in his chest.

Obi-Wan rolls his eyes and continues, reaching out his hand and snagging Anakin’s. He holds it carefully in his own. “Through shame and deceit, I have loved you all the same,” he continues as if Anakin hasn’t spoken at all. “So I suppose what I really meant, for accuracy’s sake, is that I would hope that at this point in our relationship after all we have been and meant and become to each other, that my love in all its iterations feels so familiar to you that it has become both harbor and hearth that you know you may return to, always.”

“Stop it,” Anakin snaps, even as he feels tears well up in his eyes. “These are your vows, it’s definitely gotta bad luck to—”

“And I say that not least because I trained you and so I expect you to be smarter than to forget that, even though, since I did train you, I know that the possibility is still there. I hope that the fact that I have left behind everything I have ever known in the galaxy to be with you in the open and in the light the way you deserve, without secrecy or shadow—”

Anakin thinks distantly that it’s rather good that Padmé had written to say that she would not be able to attend the ceremony, tied up as she’s been with trade negotiations on Naboo. Obi-Wan is such an asshole.

“—will assuage any fears or doubts that may beseige your mind. There is no one in the galaxy, in any galaxy, that I would want by my side more than you, as we look into the coming unknown. And I—ah, thank you kindly, Dex, darling. Anakin, close your mouth. Our food’s arrived.”

Anakin blinks rapidly as his master turns from him to give Dex a charming smile as the restaurant owner sets two baskets of food in front of them, and one tall, cool glass of frozen, near liquid cream.

It’s rather sweet, actually. Someone in the kitchen has put two cherries on top of the milkshake, stems tied together in a knot.

But that doesn’t make Anakin any less annoyed that Obi-Wan has stopped saying really beautiful, nice-sounding stuff to him in favor of munching on one of the fried bits of potato as Dex regales him with some story or another.

Though on second thought, perhaps it’s for the better. Anakin needs a moment to compose himself and dry his eyes so he doesn’t blubber all over the fried vegetable sandwich Obi-Wan has ordered for him. It’s his absolute favorite on the menu—of course Obi-Wan knows that though.

“You’re an asshole,” he mutters to Obi-Wan as Dex takes his leave with both pairs of hands clutched close to his face at the beauty of their love story or whatever Obi-Wan’s just told him.

Obi-Wan hums. “Do my vows pass muster then, General Skywalker?”

“Shut up,” Anakin says. “Yeah,” he adds into his hot food, stuffing a fistful of potato into his mouth so he doesn’t have to look at the smug expression that he’s sure is stretched across his master’s face.

Someone obviously forgot to tell Obi-Wan that a wedding isn’t a competition, the absolute sleemo.

“Good,” Obi-Wan says primly, unwrapping one of the straws Dex has left them with and sticking it into the milkshake. “Because that was just the first draft version.”

It’s startlingly clear, now. Obi-Wan is trying to kill him. Maybe he thinks that he got some of Padmé’s assets in the divorce and he’s looking to inherit.

Still, if his master is going to treat their impending nuptials like a contest, Anakin is not going to sit quietly on the sidelines. “Good of you to catch up, old man,” he mutters, grabbing his own straw and sticking it into the other side of the drink. “I think I wrote my first draft of wedding vows for you when I was nine years old.”

Obi-Wan chokes on his latest bite of fried bird. It’s incredibly satisfying. “Oh?” he says, when he’s finished coughing.

“Yeah,” Anakin says without any hint of shame. After all, he ended up getting exactly what he wanted. Just several years later. “You were so pretty back then. This…beacon of light in the Force, though I didn’t really know what that was yet. I just knew you felt warm. And I was cold.”

“Oh,” Obi-Wan says in a different tone completely. 

“Oh,” Anakin mocks, and takes a sip of the milkshake. It’s chocolate, which Obi-Wan knows is also his favorite. He’s going to marry him. Tomorrow. “I even got Jocasta Nu to read over them, you know.”

He’s going to marry him tomorrow unless Obi-Wan chokes to death on his food tonight, at least. “Oh?” his poor master splutters, grabbing for his glass of water and swallowing half.

“Oh yes,” Anakin says seriously. “When we got back to the Temple after Naboo. I asked you who knew everything in the galaxy and you said Master Nu did. I asked you where I could find Master Nu and you said the Archives. And so I took my first draft of wedding vows down to the Archives and requested that she kindly read them over, as I wanted them to be perfect for you.”

“Oh Force,” Obi-Wan says in the closest thing to utter mortification that Anakin's ever heard from him, putting his hands over his flamingly red face. “Stars, and they still let me train you after that? They must have flagged that as suspicious activity. Force.”

Anakin grins at the side of his head for a moment and then decides to take pity on him as an early wedding gift. “Obi-Wan,” he says slowly, letting his hand fall to rest on Obi-Wan’s knee once more. “I didn’t know how to write in Galactic basic standard yet. Remember? You taught me. I’m pretty sure I presented Master Nu with a flimsi sheet full of scribbles and then got frustrated and ran away when she couldn’t decipher a single word.”

Obi-Wan’s head snaps up as he turns to glare at him. “Awful padawan,” he says, pulling the milkshake away from his free hand. His face is still a fetching, flushed red. “Horrible. You made me think that Jocasta Nu—” the words seem too terrible to even say, because he cuts himself off with a shake of his head.

“There, there, master,” Anakin says, rubbing his knee—and skirting his hand further up his leg with each circle. “I have it on good authority you love me and think I’m brilliant and then also something about the unknow—”

He’s cut off by the sound of Obi-Wan’s comm vibrating loudly on the tabletop. His master picks it up with a perplexed look which morphs into an expression best described as mischievous when he reads the display name.

He glances at Anakin and puts a finger to his lips meaningfully, waits to get his slightly bemused nod of agreement, before he answers the comm, flicking it to surround-speaker so that Anakin can hear as well. “Rex?” he asks, voice full of confusion. “Why are you calling?” And Anakin would almost believe him if he didn’t add, a moment later, “has something happened to Anakin?”

When Rex answers, his voice is shrill. “General! I lost him, I lost Anakin!”

Obi-Wan’s eyebrows knit together in concern. “You lost Anakin?” he repeats even as his legs spread wider beneath Anakin’s hand, courting his touch. “What do you mean you lost him? We’re supposed to be married tomorrow! Where could he have gone?”

Anakin’s poor retired captain lets out a moan of pure distress. “I don’t know,” he cries. “Jesse was supposed to be watching him—”

There’s the sound of brief chaos on the other end, most probably Jesse firmly protesting that he was most definitely not supposed to be watching him.

“—Maybe he got cold feet, I heard people do that before weddings!” Rex sounds heartbroken. “I shouldn’t have asked if you were the groomer—” Obi-Wan turns to look at Anakin with a confused expression; Anakin shakes his head. “—Maybe that gave him second thoughts, even though obviously, you know, you’re not and Anakin was talking about wanting to sleep with you during the war—” Obi-Wan raises his eyebrows with interest; Anakin shakes his head even harder. “—even when you were sleeping with—”

“Alright, that’s enough of that,” Obi-Wan says quickly, even while Anakin looks at him with his own pair of raised eyebrows. His master coughs and then, very obviously gets back into character. “Rex, are you saying…do you think Anakin has…left me?” Then, in a very small voice that would fool even Anakin if he were not sitting right next to his monster of a master who is also currently winking at him, Obi-Wan adds, “That he doesn’t love me anymore?”

And even though he knows it's all a game, Anakin’s mouth opens automatically, unable to resist the urge to reassure Obi-Wan that he loves him and will always love him and has always loved him. 

Obi-Wan puts a finger to Anakin’s lips this time, which, as far as incentives go, is fairly effective.

“No!” Rex says on the other end of the line, voice tinging with distress. “No, no, General! I’ll find him! We—we probably didn’t check all the freshers! Maybe he needed a pre-wedding shower! And, uh, the closets too! We haven’t checked all the closets!”

“Oh,” Obi-Wan says, mouth curling up into a smirk he keeps out of his voice. “I do so hope you find him, Captain. Please, keep me posted. I won’t be able to sleep tonight otherwise, knowing that he’s out there in the cold and dark of Coruscant…”

“Of course! No, yes, of course, General, of course—we’ll find him!” Rex trips over himself trying to assure Obi-Wan, voice sounding teary and wobbling. “I’m so sorry, but—we’ll find him, sir. I promise.”

The line disconnects, and Anakin immediately swats at Obi-Wan’s arm even as the man turns to grin at him. “You’re such an asshole,” Anakin says. The words carry no weight though, given how much he’s laughing at Obi-Wan in return. “Rex has been drinking champagne and caf since noon, he’s probably having a panic attack right now!” 

When Obi-Wan tips his head back to let out a guffaw of laughter, Anakin reaches out to hit him again. This time, though, his master catches his hand and brings it to his lips. He presses a kiss against his fingertips, and his eyes are suddenly dark and heavy when he peers up at Anakin from beneath his eyelashes.

This, too, is most definitely some sort of manipulation or game to Obi-Wan, but unfortunately, it is not one that Anakin has built any sort of immunity to yet.

“Darling,” Obi-Wan drawls, lips and the bristles of his beard rubbing against his skin with each syllable, “it’s hardly my fault Rex had the bad sense to lose you. After all, I never have.”

And that isn’t even true for a number of reasons, shaped like senator-wives and sith lords, but it’s also still sort of true anyway. And Obi-Wan’s a jerk, but he’s Anakin’s jerk, and he’s also his master and he’s also the love of his life and he’s also his best friend. 

And tomorrow, he’ll be his husband too. And then, they really will never lose each other. 

Not least because he’s pretty sure that they both custom-ordered their wedding rings to include a tracker chip tucked away inside the band of metal. 

Just as a precaution—since, if Anakin's honest, he's quietly confident that all their worst times are successfully and solidly behind them. No matter what the unknown that stretches before them now may hold.