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Anakin said the worst thing he had ever said to anyone in a cramped staging bay forty minutes before they shipped out, and he said it because Obi-Wan had been right.
That was the part he would not be able to forgive himself for, later. Obi-Wan had been right. Anakin's plan for the orbital insertion had been reckless — Anakin knew it had been reckless even as he'd argued for it, knew that the angle he wanted would have put half a company in a crossfire — and Obi-Wan had overruled him, calmly, in front of the clone captains, the way a master overrules an apprentice who is about to get people killed. And Anakin, who was tired, and frightened in the way the war kept him frightened, and sick to death of being corrected and contained and watched, had felt the old wound tear open, and he had turned on his master with everything he had.
It had started ordinary enough. You always do this. You never trust me. You treat me like I'm still a child. Obi-Wan had absorbed it the way he absorbed everything, patient, even, Anakin, this isn't the place — and the patience was what did it, the calm reasonable patience that always made Anakin feel like a tantruming boy, and something in him had simply slipped its chain.
"At least Qui-Gon believed in me," he'd snarled. "You know that? At least he would have trusted me. He found me. He saw what I was. And he got you instead of getting to train me, and you've spent every day since punishing me for it, like it's my fault he died, like — " and he should have stopped there, he should have stopped, but the thing was out of him now and it wanted blood, "—you know what, he was twice the Jedi you'll ever be, and twice the master, and if the Force had any sense at all it would have been you on Naboo. Not him. It should have been you who died. Qui-Gon should be standing here. Not you. Never you."
The staging bay had gone very quiet.
And Obi-Wan — Anakin watched it happen and could not take it back — Obi-Wan's face did something Anakin had almost never seen it do. It broke. Just for a moment, just a flicker, before the discipline came down over it like a blast door: but in that flicker Anakin saw the words land, saw them go all the way in, saw them strike some deep and unguarded and already-wounded place that Anakin had aimed for precisely because he knew it was there. His master's grief for Qui-Gon. His master's quiet, lifelong, never-spoken fear that he had never been enough — not enough for Qui-Gon, who had cast him aside for the boy; not enough for the boy, who had never let him forget it. Anakin had reached directly into that wound, and twisted, and he had watched it work.
Obi-Wan did not shout. He did not retaliate. He did not say a single one of the thousand things he could have said. He simply looked at Anakin for a long, terrible moment, and then he said, very quietly, in a voice with all the warmth gone out of it:
"We deploy in forty minutes. See that your men are ready."
And he turned and walked away, and his shoulders were straight, and Anakin told himself he didn't care, and the lie lasted about as long as it took the blast doors to close behind his master.
They did not speak again before the drop. They did not speak in the gunship. Obi-Wan gave his orders in clipped tactical fragments and did not look at Anakin once, and Anakin sat across from him with his jaw set and his arms crossed and his stomach in a knot he refused to examine, and the planet came up red and burning beneath them, and they went down into it the way they always did, side by side, two halves of the same blade, even now.
The battle was a bad one from the first minute. They were outnumbered and the terrain was wrong and the droids had the high ground, and it dissolved quickly into the kind of close, chaotic, shifting fight where a man could lose track of everything but the few meters in front of his own blade. Anakin lost himself in it gratefully. It was easier than thinking. He cut his way forward, and his men followed, and somewhere off to his left Obi-Wan was doing the same, and for a while the war was simple and there was no room in it for what he had done.
He didn't see the gun that found him.
He was overextended — of course he was overextended, he was always overextended, it was the thing Obi-Wan had warned him about an hour ago and the thing Anakin had called him a coward for — and he had pushed too far ahead, past his cover, and somewhere in the rocks above a droid had him dead in its sights and Anakin never even saw it. He felt the Force scream a half-second too late. He turned toward a threat he had no time to stop.
And Obi-Wan was there.
Anakin would replay it for the rest of his life and never quite be able to hold all of it at once. The blue blade, already moving — but not to deflect, there was no angle to deflect, the shot was already fired — moving to interpose, Obi-Wan throwing his whole body across the space between the gun and Anakin, putting himself bodily into the path of a bolt meant for his apprentice. The man Anakin had told, an hour before, that he should have died. Spending himself, without an instant's hesitation, without a flicker of calculation, to make sure that he didn't.
The bolt took Obi-Wan low in the side, through the midsection, and Anakin heard the sound it made, and he heard his master's breath leave him, and he watched Obi-Wan fold and drop to the red ground, and the entire war stopped existing.
"NO—"
He didn't remember crossing the distance. One moment he was meters away and the next he was on his knees in the dirt with his master in his arms, and there was so much blood, already, far too much, blooming dark and fast across the cream of Obi-Wan's tunics and out over Anakin's hands. Obi-Wan's eyes were half-open and unfocused. His face had gone grey. He was trying to say something — Anakin saw his lips move — and no sound came, and then his eyes rolled back and the consciousness went out of him entirely, and his head fell against Anakin's chest, and he was a dead weight in his apprentice's arms.
"No. No no no — Master. Master. Stay with me. Stay with me, you hear me—" Anakin's voice was coming apart. He pressed one hand hard against the wound and felt the blood pulse up between his fingers anyway, hot and relentless, and the panic was a white roar in his ears. He had to get him up. He had to get him out. He got an arm under his master's knees and one behind his back and he stood, hauling the limp body up against his chest, and Obi-Wan's head lolled against his shoulder, and Anakin staggered toward the rear with his master in his arms and screamed across the battlefield in a voice that did not sound like his own:
"HEALERS! Get me the healers — somebody — it's General Kenobi! It's GENERAL KENOBI — I need a medic NOW—"
And the men came running, because it was the General, and Anakin carried him through the smoke and the fire toward the ships, cradling against his chest the same body that had just put itself between Anakin and death an hour after Anakin had told it that it should already be in the ground.
They got him stable enough to fly. Barely. The field medics worked on him in the back of the gunship with their hands slick to the wrists, packing the wound, pushing fluids, keeping the heart going, and Anakin knelt beside him through all of it and held his master's grey, slack hand and would not let go and would not, despite the medics' looks, leave.
The wound was beyond them. That was the verdict, shouted over the engines — too much damage, too much blood, beyond what a field unit could do. He needed a full bacta immersion, and he needed it fast, and the nearest facility that could give it to him was Coruscant. So they ran for Coruscant, the gunship screaming up out of the atmosphere and the cruiser jumping the instant they were aboard, and Anakin sat on the floor of the medbay with his master's hand in both of his and watched the bacta line drip and the monitors stutter and stayed there, hour after hour, through the whole long dark of hyperspace.
And because there was nothing else he could do — because he could not heal him, could not undo the bolt, could not unsay the words — Anakin did the only thing left to him.
He remembered.
He remembered being nine years old and new to the Temple and so frightened that he could not sleep, lying awake in a strange bed on a strange world, his mother a galaxy away, surrounded by children who'd been raised there since infancy and looked at him like he didn't belong — which he didn't. He remembered the nightmares, the ones where he was back in the shop, the ones where his mother was calling for him and he couldn't reach her, and how he would wake up choking on his own crying in the dark. And he remembered that Obi-Wan would come.
Every time. Obi-Wan, who had been twenty-five years old and freshly Knighted and gutted with grief for his own dead master, who had been handed the burden of the Chosen One on the worst day of his life and had no idea what he was doing — Obi-Wan would come into the dark and sit on the edge of Anakin's bed and stay. He never made Anakin feel ashamed of the crying. He would talk, low and even, about nothing, until the shaking stopped. And on the nights when Anakin had cried himself out and fallen asleep somewhere he shouldn't — slumped over a datapad, curled in the corner of the common room, fallen asleep waiting up for a master who was off doing the thousand things a master does — Anakin would half-wake to find himself being lifted. Gathered up in his master's arms, carried through the quiet halls of the Temple, and laid down gently in his own bed, and the blanket pulled up, and a hand resting for a moment against his hair before the footsteps moved away.
He'd pretended to be asleep, those times. He hadn't wanted Obi-Wan to know he was awake. But he'd been awake for every one of them, every time his master carried him to bed, and he had never once said thank you, and somewhere in the long dark of that hyperspace run, holding Obi-Wan's slack hand against his face, Anakin understood with a force that doubled him over that he had spent thirteen years being carried by this man and had never carried him anywhere until today, until he had to, until it was nearly too late.
The memories came and came. Every wound Obi-Wan had patched. Every time he had stood up to the Council for Anakin, defended him, made excuses for his recklessness, taken the blame himself. Every plate of food set quietly in front of a boy too upset to ask for it. Every patient repetition of a lesson Anakin was too proud to admit he hadn't understood. Every single day of a decade and more, Obi-Wan had chosen him, over and over, in a hundred small unglamorous ways that Anakin had never noticed because he'd been too busy resenting the man for not being someone else.
At least Qui-Gon believed in me, he had said.
Anakin pressed his master's cold hand against his mouth and shook, and the cruiser ran for Coruscant, and Obi-Wan did not wake.
Yoda was waiting on the landing platform when they came in.
That alone told Anakin how bad it was. The Grand Master of the Jedi Order did not meet incoming medical transports; he had a galaxy to run and a war to lose by inches. But he was there when the ramp came down, small and ancient and leaning on his stick, and his great green eyes found the stretcher the instant it appeared, and something moved across that old face that Anakin had never seen there before.
"Felt it, I did," Yoda said quietly, falling in step beside the stretcher as the healers rushed it toward the halls. He had to trot to keep pace, and he did not seem to care. "A disturbance. Hours ago. Across the stars, I felt him fall." His eyes did not leave Obi-Wan. "Hoped I was wrong, I did."
The healers took him then — took him through the doors Anakin wasn't allowed past, and Anakin stood in the corridor with his master's blood dried brown to his elbows and watched them disappear, and for a long while he could not make himself move at all.
They put Obi-Wan in a bacta tank. Anakin was there to see it, once they let him in — his master suspended in the pale glowing fluid, naked but for his undertunics and the wrap around the wound, a breathing mask over his face, his hair drifting, his eyes closed. Floating. Suspended out of time and out of pain, blissfully, mercifully unaware of any of it — the battle, the blood, the words his apprentice had thrown at him an hour before he'd died to save him. He looked, in there, almost peaceful. He looked like he was resting, finally, for the first time in years.
The healers said three days. Maybe four. The damage was severe but the bacta would hold him, would knit what the bolt had torn, would bring him back — probably, they said, and Anakin heard the word probably and felt his knees go weak. But he would float there, unconscious, for days. And there was nothing for anyone to do but wait.
So Anakin waited. He sat down on the cold floor in front of the tank, where he could see his master's face through the glass, and he prepared to stay there for three days if that was what it took.
And after a while, a small shape came and lowered itself onto a bench beside him, and waited with him.
They sat in silence for a long time, Anakin and the oldest Jedi alive, watching Obi-Wan drift.
It was Yoda who finally spoke. "Tell me," he said. "What happened, tell me."
And Anakin — because he was hollowed out, because he had no defenses left, because the guilt had been building in him for two days with nowhere to go — told him. All of it. The reckless plan and the fair correction and the way he'd turned on his master in the staging bay. The things he'd said. He made himself say the words again, out loud, to Yoda, every single ugly one of them — Qui-Gon would have been twice the master, it should have been you who died — and his voice cracked and broke as he said them and he did not look away from his master's floating face. And then the battle, and the gun he never saw, and Obi-Wan throwing himself into the bolt without a heartbeat's hesitation. To save the apprentice who had just wished him dead.
"He didn't even stop," Anakin whispered. "He didn't even — there was no moment where he decided. He just did it. After everything I said. He just put himself in front of it like it was nothing, like I was worth—" He couldn't finish. "I don't understand how he could do that. After what I said to him."
Yoda was quiet for a moment.
"Do you not?" he said softly. "Then listen, young Skywalker. For there is much about Obi-Wan Kenobi you do not understand. And much about Qui-Gon Jinn."
Anakin looked at him.
"You believe a better master Qui-Gon would have been," Yoda said. It was not a question, and there was no anger in it, only a deep and tired sadness. "You believe, when he died robbed, you were. That you were given a lesser man." He shook his head slowly. "Loved Qui-Gon, I did. A great Jedi, he was. Brave. True to the Force as he understood it. But a good master to Obi-Wan?" The old eyes closed briefly. "No. That, he was not. Not always. And know it, you should."
"What do you mean?" Anakin's voice was barely there.
"I mean that Qui-Gon Jinn nearly broke that boy's heart, and never knew he did it." Yoda gestured a small clawed hand toward the tank, toward the floating man. "Thirteen years, Obi-Wan was his padawan. Loyal. Devoted. Cleaned up after his master's defiances, again and again — for Qui-Gon defied the Council as he breathed, and it was Obi-Wan who paid the cost of it, Obi-Wan who was caught always between his master and his duty, Obi-Wan who held them both together while Qui-Gon followed his every instinct wherever it led." Yoda's voice was very low. "And then, on Naboo. A boy, Qui-Gon found. A slave child, full of the Force. And before the whole Council, without warning, without a private word to the apprentice who had given him thirteen years — Qui-Gon stood, and named you his chosen student, and declared Obi-Wan ready for the Trials. Cast him aside. In a single breath. For a boy he had known three days."
Anakin felt something turn over in his chest.
"Saw his face, I did, when Qui-Gon said it," Yoda murmured. "Saw what it did to him. Thirteen years, and to be set down like a thing outgrown, the moment something brighter came along. That, Anakin, is what Qui-Gon Jinn did to the man floating in that tank. That was his master. The one you wish you'd had."
"I didn't know," Anakin whispered. "He never — Obi-Wan never said—"
"No," Yoda agreed. "He would not. Carries his wounds quietly, Obi-Wan does. Always has." He let out a slow breath. "And Qui-Gon died. And with his last strength, Bind Obi-Wan to you, he did. Made him promise, a grieving Knight of twenty-five, barely trained himself, to take the Chosen One and raise him. A thing no master should ask. Did not ask if Obi-Wan was ready. Did not ask if he was able. Did not ask at all. Only — promise me. And Obi-Wan, who loved him still, despite everything — promised."
The bacta tank hummed softly. Obi-Wan drifted, unaware, his face slack and peaceful in the pale light.
"Think on it now," Yoda said. "The master you mourn cast Obi-Wan aside for you the moment he laid eyes on you — and would have done the same again, I do not doubt it, the next time the Force showed him something shinier. Brilliant, Qui-Gon was. But loved more than people he did, and the present moment more than the patient years, and he would have given you everything except the one thing a frightened child most needs." Yoda turned his great eyes on Anakin. "Someone who stays. Someone who comes in the dark every single time. Someone who carries you to bed and is there in the morning and the next morning and the one after that, year upon year upon year, asking nothing, leaving never." He paused. "Qui-Gon Jinn would not have stayed. It was not in him. He would have followed the Force off to the next horizon and left you behind to grow as you could. And a boy like you, full of fear, full of love with nowhere to put it — destroyed, you might have been, by such a master. Not from cruelty. From absence."
Anakin was crying now, silently, and not bothering to hide it.
"But that," Yoda said, and his voice gentled, "is not the master you were given. The Force did not give you Qui-Gon. Gave you the boy Qui-Gon abandoned, the force did. A young man, who knew, better than any soul alive, exactly what it felt like to be set aside by the one who was supposed to keep you. And so he swore he would never do it to you. And he never has. Not once. Not in thirteen years. Not in that staging bay, when you wished him dead. Not on that battlefield, when the bolt came." Yoda looked at the tank. "He stays, Anakin. Whatever you give him, he stays. It is the whole of what he is. It is everything Qui-Gon never gave to him — and he turned it around, and he gave all of it to you." Yoda spoke, and the longer he spoke, Anakin realized the more normally paced Yoda's speech became, as if this conversation mattered so much to the grandmaster, that confusion was not an option. Only clarity.
Anakin sat with that for a long time, there on the cold floor, while his master floated above him in the glowing fluid, healing, unaware, and the truth of it settled into him and rearranged everything it touched.
He had spent thirteen years grieving the wrong loss. He had mourned Qui-Gon as the master who would have understood him, believed in him, set him free — and Qui-Gon would have done none of those things, not really, not in the ways that mattered when you were small and afraid in the dark. He had resented Obi-Wan for being the consolation prize, the dutiful replacement, the man stuck with him out of a deathbed promise. And the truth was the exact and total inverse of everything he had believed: that he had been given, by some grace he had done nothing to deserve, the single most devoted master in the entire Order. A man who knew abandonment from the inside and had built his whole life around making sure Anakin never tasted it. A man who had taken a frightened slave boy and stayed, and stayed, and stayed — through the nightmares and the tantrums and the recklessness and the resentment, through every cruel thing Anakin had ever thrown at him, all the way to a battlefield where he gave his own body to a bolt rather than let his ungrateful apprentice die.
I was lucky, Anakin thought, and the simplicity of it broke him open. All this time. I was so lucky, and I never knew it, and I spent it telling him he wasn't enough.
He got up off the floor. He crossed to the tank and laid his hand flat against the cool glass, level with his master's face, the way he'd once laid his hand against a child's hair without knowing he was awake to feel it.
"I'm sorry," he said to the glass, to the floating man who couldn't hear him. "I'm sorry, Master. For all of it. For what I said. For thirteen years of it. You should have had someone who said thank you. You should have had someone who carried you sometimes." His voice broke. "I didn't know. I swear I didn't know what you were doing for me. I do now. And I'm going to spend the rest of my life being worth it. I promise you. I promise."
Behind him, Yoda watched, and said nothing, and there was grief in the old eyes and something else as well — something almost like satisfaction, the quiet satisfaction of a teacher who has waited a very long time to see a hard lesson finally land.
For Yoda had not told Anakin everything. He had not told him that of all his line — of all the long chain of his students and his students' students, stretching back across the centuries — it was this one, this quiet, wounded, endlessly faithful man floating in the bacta tank, that the Grand Master loved the best, and always had. That he had felt Obi-Wan fall from halfway across the galaxy and dropped everything to be here. That he could not, in his eight hundred years, remember being so afraid of losing anyone.
Some things, Yoda thought, watching the boy keep his vigil at the glass, did not need to be said aloud to be true. Obi-Wan had taught them all that, hadn't he. Had spent his whole life proving it.
He stayed. That was the lesson. Whatever it cost him, he stayed.
And now, at last, so would Anakin — there at the tank, hour after hour, refusing every offer to rest, waiting for his master to wake so that he could finally, finally say the thank you he owed, and begin to carry, in whatever way he could, even a fraction of the weight that Obi-Wan Kenobi had carried for him, without complaint, without reward, and without ever once setting it down, for thirteen years.
Now I shall carry you, Anakin thought, his hand on the glass, his master drifting safe and healing beneath it.
As you once carried me.
