Chapter Text
You smell him long before you see him. With a disgruntled sound of annoyance, you look up to see Anakin Skywalker staring at you, a cigarette hanging from his lips as he leans against the dormitory outside wall. With a brief sigh, you move closer to him, feeling yourself growing tired of his constant habits.
Grabbing the cigarette from his mouth, you put it out under your foot, crossing your arms and staring at him in anger. He raises a brow, hand fumbling in the pocket of his grease-stained t-shirt, flannel falling open awkwardly at his sides. Why he wore that ratty thing you didn’t know, but you supposed a part of him was trying to keep that “I’m a mechanics assistant” look going.
“Anakin, why are you here? And didn’t you know that you’re supposed to smoke fifty feet away from the buildings? Being this close can be a fire hazard,” you state.
He shrugs in response, shaking out another cigarette from the box and placing it between his lips. As he reaches for his lighter, you grab the stick in his mouth and throw it to the ground. By this point, he’s pissed, and you can see the frustration growing behind his eyes. Anakin was good about hiding his emotions and pretending he didn’t care, but when it came to you, he wasn’t as strong.
Turning on his heel, he starts towards the science building, you hiking up your backpack and chasing after him. The two of you had been friends since your freshman year on campus, which doesn’t seem so long ago when you realize that you two are only sophomores. It feels like ages though when so much happened in the summer between those years. Struggling to keep up with Anakin’s long strides, you find yourself breathing heavily, hand coming to cover your heart. Anakin doesn’t let up until he glances behind him to see you keeled over, gasping for air with your hands on your knees.
He rolls his eyes, turning around and walking back over to you, not helping any by standing there.
After catching your breath, you rub your neck, glancing at the tall man before you. “Why the hell are you acting like this Skywalker?”
His eyes darken instantly at the question, and he takes a step back, growling as he pulls a cigarette from his shirt pocket. Stuffing it in his mouth, he lights it and then runs a hand through his hair. Without saying a word, he turns in the opposite direction of the science building, leaving you staring at his retreating back in confusion.
“Where are you going?!” you scream, hands cupped around your mouth so he’ll hear you.
You see him pull the cigarette from his mouth, his head tilting back as he responds, “Skipping. Have fun in science without me.”
A part of you wants to chase after him and drag him back to class, but the bigger part of you doesn’t want to be late. While Anakin was your friend, it wasn’t your education on the line, and you were tired of trying to make him see that. Fixing your hair, you continue on to the science building, a weird knot forming in your stomach. What had happened to him?
To fully understand this story, you have to go back; to the year prior, where everything had seemed fine, but was actually going to hell.
Anakin and you were in the same dormitory when you moved in freshman year, and while you weren’t the first friend he made on campus, you were one of the few he actually considered a friend. While he had delved into his Human Rights major and his small cluster of acquaintances, you had diverted to your own interests, finding few times where the two of you were together and talking or hanging out.
Sure, there were the times where you would find each other in the dorms common room; eyes glued to the television as you watched some news story about the wars happening around the world, but outside of that, there really wasn’t much you had done together. Anakin had made friends with a biochemistry TA – Obi-Wan – and a senior who was studying political science – Padmé, and seemed to like their company well enough to stay out of the dormitory. While you talked occasionally with them, you knew very little outside of these facts, and that Anakin had a growing crush on Padmé.
You weren’t jealous, that’s to be noted here and now. You’d barely known Anakin more than two months by this point, and while he had only known Padmé as long, something had clicked between them. When the first semester ended, it seemed that everything was going fine between them, and you weren’t about to tread upon that with the small crush you had started to harbor for Skywalker at the point of Christmas break.
Spring came and went without a hitch, seemingly as if nothing could go wrong. It seemed like everyone had already been prepared for their summer after college, and while you were heading out West to see some family, Anakin was going home to his mother, who was starting to show signs of an illness that seemed fatal. Padmé had offered to return home with him to help, which he readily agreed to. At this point, they were an “item” – as Obi-Wan called it – and were steadily becoming the sort of couple that was not only inseparable, but disgustingly in love.
It’s during those two or three months between freshman bliss and sophomore ignorance that everything you all know goes to shit. Padmé told Anakin that she had cancer, and by that point, she was just a week from the point where they had told her she would die. To her credit, she lasted another month before passing, which did nothing for Anakin, who had felt betrayed by her. He felt even more so when he found out that Obi-Wan had known, though you kept it silent you had also known of this.
Nothing got better from there. His mother had grown so sick that she herself had died just before that, which meant that Anakin, a boy who was barely twenty at the time, was going to two funerals in the span of a month. At Padmé’s funeral he seemed sullen, and you and Obi-Wan had attempted to speak with him, which had ended poorly to say the least.
By the time you all returned for the fall semester of your second year, Anakin had started numbing himself with drugs and alcohol, something that drove a wedge so deeply between him and Obi-Wan that you had had to pull the two apart when a fight had broken out. After that, Obi-Wan had refused to talk with Anakin, who seemed just as keen not to speak with his former friend.
You were there still only because you felt something more for Anakin. Not a crush, and certainly not love at this point, but it was something, and you couldn’t just give up on him. A few weeks ago, the two of you had gotten into a fight over the fact that he believed you had known about Padmé being ill, and it had ended just as you had expected. Telling him was the hardest part, because you know Padmé had feared this reaction would come from him. Rather than her dealing with it, you had to, and it was breaking your heart to see the man you had grown close to being torn to pieces by the world.
Blinking, you sit up suddenly, eyes taking in the darkness of the library. You look at your phone screen, groaning as you shove all your notes and paperwork into your backpack. It was nearing eight o’clock, and while you weren’t anywhere near the time of the library’s closing, you had things to get to back at your dormitory. Along with that, you needed to eat at some point, which meant that you had to get to the food hall.
On your way there, you feel your stomach still knotted in that feeling of discomfort from before. It felt wrong to be without Anakin, and to have let him wander off earlier this morning alone didn’t feel right either. He was grieving, but the way he was going about it was all wrong. While on your way back to your dorm, food stuffed into a to-go box, you notice someone out of the corner of your eye, making you stop and turn in their direction.
Anakin’s face is illuminated by the flickering flame of his lighter, the stars above no match for his features, which seem to put them to shame. Rather than continuing your trek to the dormitory, you head towards him, sitting down and placing your box of food between the two of you. Opening it, you grab half of the grilled-cheese sandwich you had made, nudging the box with the other half towards him.
The clicking of his lighter closing, along with the instant lack of light directly in front of you, is all you need to know that he’s taking the other half. Eating in silence, you don’t look at him, staring up at the sky and exhaling after a moment.
“Sometimes I wonder what it would be like, ya know? To be out there among the stars. I bet it must be beautiful, seeing all of that up close and personal,” you whisper.
Anakin keeps quiet, but you carry on, wanting to make him understand; make him understand that you were still here for him, even when everyone else had left. Even when he had pushed them all away.
Once you’ve finished another bite of your sandwich, you set it back in the box, drawing your knees up to your chest and wrapping your arms around them. Your eyes gaze out at the darkness in front of you, unseeing. “My dad used to tell my siblings and I a story about this man who spent his whole life looking at the stars. His parents had passed away, but no one ever saw him cry, because his head was turned to the sky, and his tears had dried long before they hit the ground. Years later, his wife grew worried about him, as she had become pregnant with their child and yet he hadn’t looked at her or her body since she had announced it.”
Anakin didn’t speak still, but something told you he was listening, so you carried on.
“That was because he had long since seen in the stars that the child was not his, even though that was untrue. He believed so deeply in the stars that he refused to accept his child. When his wife passed from an illness that they couldn’t cure, he would hold his child, but never look at them. Not because he was staring at the stars, but because he couldn’t imagine that this child in his arms was his. He couldn’t look at them because he knew he would see his poor wife, whom he had been unable to do anything for, whom he had never truly looked at,”
“Then, when he was old and dying, he finally looked at his child. His child was happily married with kids, but the old man was seeing signs of himself in them already. At that point, he realized he had spent his entire life looking at the stars, dreaming of things he could never have, and he had pushed all those he loved far away. He’d spent so long staring at the sky in wonder, that he did not grace the beauty of the life he had in front of him with his eyes once. All his feelings and memories were of the sky, and what did the sky give him in return? Nothing.”
Exhaling into the darkness, you watch the white swirl around for a bit, much like the smoke that had left Anakin’s mouth all those times. In your own way, you’d been smoking; by never telling Anakin any of the things you’d known, and by not exhaling all the things you held secret.
Chewing on your bottom lip, you stand and turn to him. “I love you, and I know that you’re grieving, but you need to know. I’ve tried my damn hardest to make you see that I’ll always be here for you, but I just can’t do it anymore Anakin. You’re screwing yourself over physically and emotionally and mentally, and I can’t stand around and watch it anymore. I told you that story because you’ve become that man with his head towards the sky. You push everyone away, and you’ve numbed yourself to emotions so long that you can’t feel anything anymore,”
“All that will ever bring you is sadness. I love you, and Obi-Wan loves you, and we’re trying so hard to make you see that, but you don’t or won’t. I lost someone that day too Anakin. We all did, but unlike you, we can’t just numb ourselves to the pain. Padmé wouldn’t want this of you, and you’re not the only one suffering.”
Tears well up in your eyes, and you wonder for a moment if he’ll even see them before shaking your head fiercely. It doesn’t matter. You had to get it all out, here and now.
“I lost my best friend! Not just when Padmé died, but when you died too! You’re not the same anymore, and you’re not the only one who’s grieving!”
At this point you’re sobbing, hands running through your hair as you pace back and forth. Turning to face him in the darkness, you feel your heart shattering into pieces. “I lost two people that day, and I can’t handle losing anymore. Don’t kill yourself twice. Please.”
His lighter flicks open, the flame bringing his face back into focus as you stand there in front of him. He has something in his other hand, but he offers it to you, and when you take it in your hands, you realize it’s his cigarette box.
“Get rid of it for me, will you? And thanks for the grilled cheese.”
The lighter snaps shut, his face gone from view. He stands and stretches, walking off towards his dormitory, leaving you standing in the darkness with the cigarettes in hand.
Nothing felt right anymore, even when you were with Anakin.