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Obi-Wan was never late.
It had been only a few weeks since he started his Jedi training, but Obi-Wan was always waiting by the door, ready to reflect Anakin’s excitement or reassure him after a hard lesson, even when he wished the Jedi was anywhere else. He’d grown used to feeling the calming presence just outside each classroom, like a guiding light, ready to follow him to the next place — whether that be the library to work on reading, the gardens to learn a meditation technique, or somewhere new to explore.
But today, he was not waiting nearby. As far as Anakin could tell, he wasn’t in the academic wing at all.
The Jedi at the front of the room was still enthusiastically listing the geographical features of multiple Mid Rim planets, even as the time for the lesson came to a close. He couldn’t see outside the classroom visually, but he’d been practicing reaching out with the Force. There were a few presences hovering in the hallway outside, but none were familiar. Maybe he forgot, Anakin reasoned. Or maybe he has something more important to do.
The first time he’d accidentally voiced that thought, Obi-Wan’s face had fallen so quickly that Anakin thought he was about to cry, something he hadn’t really seen. Instead, Obi-Wan knelt in front of him and promised Anakin that he was very important, and that he would not leave him to struggle through new experiences by himself. And in the time since, he hadn’t strayed from his promise; he had been there for all of it — showing him the training arena, helping him learn to read with books “borrowed” from the creche, even holding his hand as Healer Che brought him up to date on his necessary vaccinations.
On any other day, Anakin might have assumed that his absence meant they’d be doing something familiar for the afternoon, like following a map around the Temple or practicing his Basic. But today was special — they were going to Dex’s Diner, a place run by a friend of Obi-Wan’s (who seemed to have a lot of friends), and Obi-Wan said he’d buy him a milkshake.
He wasn’t really sure what a milkshake was, but he was ready to find out.
So when their class was dismissed, he joined the cluster of his classmates on their way out the door, and tried not to run within eyesight of the older Jedi milling about. The second he turned the corner, though, he broke into a jog, skipping every once in a while until he reached their hallway. There was only one Knight passing through, and despite their neutral expression and the polite nod in acknowledgement as they walked by each other, Anakin felt a gleam of amusement emanating from their presence.
When he reached their quarters and slid the door open, he found the kitchen light on, but no Obi-Wan waiting for him from his normal spot on the couch. As he walked further in, he passed their table, which held a glass of water with a few inches left, along with a bottle of what seemed to be painkillers with the lid left ajar.
He didn’t forget about me , Anakin thought with an awful relief, he got one of his headaches. He poked out in his head like they’d been practicing. Sure enough, Obi-Wan’s presence was in the direction of his bedroom. He felt vaguely asleep, and Anakin felt a silly wave of jealousy — Obi-Wan had been very insistent on his new routine, which did not include sleeping in — but the second pulse Anakin sent through their bond was oddly muffled.
He nudged him a little harder through the Force, waiting for the already familiar groan of him waking up to carry through the wall between them.
Nothing.
Obi-Wan was there, he was sure, but he pushed the bedroom door open with trepidation. Across their bond, there were no flickers of emotion, not one glimmer of a dream or restless thought, not even the pain that Anakin now associated with Obi-Wan’s migraine his first week at the Temple.
He rushed through the doorway in a panic, and stopped short. Obi-Wan was laying on the bed, fully dressed in his day clothes, outer robe and all. His head lay on the pillow, but his skin was deathly pale; even in the dim light coming from the common space, Anakin could see the thin sheen of sweat that covered his face. “Obi-Wan?” he said, reaching out in the Force once more before walking cautiously forward and placing a hand on his shoulder. He shook his shoulder next, grabbing the other after the lack of response on the first try. “Obi-Wan!”
Obi-Wan didn’t wake up.
Anakin pressed his fingertips to his neck and choked on a breath of relief at the heartbeat fluttering through his veins. His skin radiated heat like they were back under the Tatooine suns, but he was breathing. He had a pulse. Anakin knew some healing, but it had been taught under the pragmatic eye of other slaves; he knew how to bandage cuts and lashes and how to splint a bone broken under heavy machines. But people who looked like this—
Obi-Wan’s comm was on the small bedside table, and he grabbed for it, hastily punching in one of the only codes he knew, one of the codes Obi-Wan had taught him his first real day in the Temple — the Halls of Healing. Someone answered, but the voice on the other end of the line was calm, too calm for this, and Anakin stammered their room number into the device.
People who looked like this on Tatooine never woke up.
The comm slipped numbly from his fingers, tumbling under the bed, and Anakin leaned against the mattress and watched Obi-Wan’s chest rise and fall in a shallow pattern, barely blinking to make sure he wasn’t imagining it. The muffled voice assured him that they was on their way and then kept speaking, smoothing out his name and other things that he’d heard before, reassuring lies that his mom whispered to a child while their father lay still in the next room, all while directing Anakin to bring the others together for a remembrance ceremony with what little resources they had. It was surely an attempt to calm him, to expand the gasps of air in his lungs into full breaths, but Anakin knew better, Anakin knew that everything was not okay, everything would not be alright, not when the only thing marking Obi-Wan’s life was the slow heartbeat beneath his hands.
When three healers burst into the room, two carrying a stretcher between them, he screamed. One, a salmon-skinned Mon Calamari, broke off from the others and pulled him away from the bed, away from Obi-Wan and his paper-white skin, and enveloped his hands in her own. The other Jedi blocked his view of the bed and he fought, but her grip was unyielding.
When he successfully wrestled one arm out of her hold, Obi-Wan had been placed on the stretcher, limp and unresponsive, one arm dangling over the side with skin so colorless that for one horrible, awful second, he thought Obi-Wan had died.
But he hadn’t. Not yet. The light at his end of the bond was dim, but it was there. For how much longer, he didn’t know.
The stretcher carrying Obi-Wan left the room, and the remaining healer led him into their common space. As she pressed him down into a seat, her touch was muffled, so far away as he followed the faint Force signature through the Temple, before the doors of the Halls slammed shut and he found himself spinning inside his own mind once more.
“Anakin,” someone was saying. “Deep breaths, you need to breathe.”
One of the other slaves, a woman his mother’s age, hadn’t met them at the door before their walk into town. Anakin had run in to fetch her, only to find her motionless on the outcropping that served as a bed. He’d screamed. She hadn’t woken up.
What if Obi-Wan never woke up?
“You can do it, Anakin. Take a deep breath for me, okay?”
What would he do without Obi-Wan? No one else wanted to keep him at the Temple, they would send him back, back to Tatooine, back to Watto, back to Gardulla—
“Let’s do one together.” Anakin looked up and found kind eyes on a familiar face. “That’s right, can you breathe with me?”
When he was younger, he’d gotten caught in the beginnings of a sandstorm just a few feet outside of the door to their room. He had to fight to make it in, his mother standing with one hand outstretched, and with every step, air was ripped from his lungs and replaced with swirling sand. Once the door slammed shut and he collapsed on the floor, hacking up grit with tears in his eyes, his mom held him, one hand on his back.
“Hey, no,” Bant shushed him, and traced soothing circles between his shoulder blades. “Obi-Wan’s okay.”
Anakin blinked back tears. “I don’t believe you.” The breath that followed rattled in his chest. When had he started crying?
Bant looked at him, all care and warmth wrapped in her arms and the Force. “He will be okay,” she amended. “You’ll see, they’ll fix him up, good as new. I promise.”
“But…” He let himself lean into her arms, head tilted up. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Your Ma– Obi-Wan has been dealing with a lot, lately,” Bant said, and the shame must have shown on Anakin’s face, because she quickly backtracked. “Not because of you, Padawan. He lost his Master. And many things have changed, very quickly.”
It didn’t seem like many things had changed. Obi-Wan felt the same as he did when they first met on the ship. He still frowned in the same way, he still crossed his arms with his hands tucked into the ends of his sleeves. Maybe he felt a little sadder, because of Qui-Gon, but mostly the same. Maybe he was always sad.
“What do you have planned for this afternoon?” Bant’s gentle voice brought him back, and he stood, extracting himself from her arms and wiping his face on the sleeves of his robes, something that Obi-Wan might have scolded him for. But Bant only smiled, and waited.
“Oh, um.” He sniffled, willing the wetness on his face to evaporate. “We were going to go to Dex’s? To get milkshakes?” So many things had changed since he skipped down the hallway earlier. But Obi-Wan was okay; Bant promised. Promises here seemed to be kept more than the ones back home.
Bant stood and guided him to the door with one hand on his shoulder. “Well, luckily for us, we can still do that. Dex doesn’t do delivery, but I think we can send Quinlan out to pick up for us, just this once?” He wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but imagining Bant ordering around the intimidating Kiffar Jedi Obi-Wan had introduced last week made him giggle. “Sounds like a plan, then.” She pulled a comm from her robes and raised it to her face, grinning all the while. “Quin, need you to run to Dex’s and pick up a few things for dinner. I’ll send you a list.”
“Bant, I just got in, why can’t you—”
“Quinlan,” she said, smile falling flat, and the talking on the other end ceased. “It’s Obi-Wan. I’ll fill you in later, but Anakin here could use some food.”
Anakin could have spent all day reading into that — why Bant made sure to tell him that he was listening, why she didn’t say anything more about Obi-Wan — but the groan that crackled from the comm made him laugh. “Fine, Bantling, send me your list. I’ll meet you—”
“We can eat in my quarters,” Bant said quickly. “There’s room, and it’s closer to the Halls.”
“Sounds like a plan.” The comm disconnected, and Bant looked back down at him.
“I know you don’t have allergies, but is there any food you don’t like?”
Anakin shrugged. “How did you know I don’t have allergies?”
She waved the door open, and they started down the hallway. “Obi-Wan sent us some basic stuff in case we’re ever here with you and he’s…” She trailed off, then cleared her throat. “For when he’s not here.”
“For times like today?”
Bant looked away. “Kind of like today, yes.”
There was an air of sadness around her similar to Obi-Wan, in the moments when he stopped answering Anakin and retreated inwards for a few minutes, but he soon discovered that Bant seemed to be the opposite. As they waited in her quarters, she asked him all sorts of questions about what he had been doing since he arrived on Coruscant. She seemed particularly displeased that Obi-Wan hadn’t taken him swimming yet, and decided that she would take charge of his aquatic education.
Anakin was in the middle of trying to imagine what a pool looked like when Bant stood up suddenly, eyes glued to a message on her comm. She read it for several seconds, scrolling through the lines, and when she looked down at him, she was smiling.
“Good news,” Bant said. “Obi-Wan’s awake!”
His breath caught in his throat and he slid off his chair, pulling up the robe that kept falling off one shoulder. “Can we go see him?”
“Of course,” she smiled, and lead him toward the door. “I’ll just tell Quin to—”
“Tell me what?” The door opened to reveal a tall Jedi holding several bags, many different smells drifting from what Anakin’s stomach really hoped was their food. “Come on, take some of this. My arms are about to fall off.”
As Bant reached to take a few things, Anakin grinned at the Jedi. “Obi-Wan’s awake!” he said, and Knight Vos frowned over his head, looking toward his friend.
“Was he not awake before?”
Anakin wasn’t stupid — he could tell when people were having a wordless conversation that didn’t include him. Grown-ups never wanted him to know what they were talking about. He could usually piece them together from facial expressions and vague emotions, but the Jedi didn’t seem to have the same tells as people on Tatooine. They just looked at each other until Knight Vos rolled his eyes with the faintest trace of concern, and remembered that Anakin was still standing between them.
“Quin got a bunch of flavors, so we’ll have to try them all out and see which one’s your favorite!” Bant stooped down next to him and let him peek into one of the bags, where he found brightly colored straws and an assortment of drinks.
“Can we try them with Obi-Wan?” He asked, carefully stepping back from the bag so as not to spill anything.
“That’s where we’re headed,” she agreed, a grin nearly obscuring the worry that still lingered about her. “I think he could use a milkshake.”
This time, they made it out the door with no inturruptions.
Obi-Wan was sitting up on his bunk when they found his room, and Anakin threw himself forward into his arms, letting himself be wrapped in the warmth and life that had been missing from them earlier.
“Padawan.” Obi-Wan breathed, and leaned out of the hug, holding him by the shoulders and looking him over, and while his skin hadn't quite returned to its normal color, Obi-Wan was awake and sitting up and their bond was clear once more.
“How was your class, Anakin?” There was a loud scoff somewhere behind him, and he felt the heat of the glare Obi-Wan sent to Knight Vos.
“It was fine,” Anakin replied, and his eyes filled with tears, more than he would have ever allowed back home. “Why weren’t you there? Why wouldn’t you wake up?”
“I—” His Jedi looked at the other two in the room. Knight Vos had his arms crossed over his chest, a complement to the frown adorning his face. “Well, you see—” Anakin clambered up onto the end of the bed, careful not to sit on Obi-Wan’s legs, and watched as his Jedi faltered a second time. “I was feeling a bit under the weather—”
“I think what Obi-Wan is trying to say,” Bant interrupted, moving toward the bed and ignoring how Obi-Wan’s eyebrows narrowed, “is that he didn’t do a good job of taking care of himself, but now he will ask for help when he needs it.”
“...Right.” Obi-Wan squinted in her direction.
“Right,” she said, looking right back.
“While I’m sure this will be a fascinating conversation,” Knight Vos drawled, looking annoyed yet utterly sincere. “These bags are full of food and milkshakes, and Dex is great but he isn’t a miracle worker, so we should probably come back to it.”
“Oh, Dex’s, I’m sorry, Padawan,” Obi-Wan said, squeezing his shoulder once before letting go. “We’ll have to meet him some other time, but the food is delicious. Have you tried a milkshake yet?”
Anakin shook his head as Knight Vos gasped theatrically. “He hasn’t even had a milkshake yet? I’m going to have to take over his cultural education. You clearly can’t be trusted if he’s skipping this most crucial step.” He ruffled Obi-Wan’s hair even as the other glared at him and attempted to slap his hand out of the way.
“He’s barely been here a month, Quinlan,” said Obi-Wan, looking uncharacteristically nervous. “We’ve had other priorities.”
“Well I seem to remember milkshakes being number two or three on the list of most important things to do on Coruscant, so unless you’ve made edits without me—”
“Don’t listen to them,” Bant smiled, pulling him off the bed and toward the takeout bags that were sitting on a table. “They’ve been bickering like this since they were your age.” She pulled the colorful array of drinks from one of the bags and pushed them toward him. “Try one?”
Anakin tentatively wrapped his fingers around a cup with blue inside, and tried to suppress a shiver at the chill that spread through his palm. “Are they supposed to be so cold?”
Bant grinned and took a pink one for herself. “That’s when they’re the best.” She unwrapped two straws and stuck one in each of their lids, and gestured towards his. “Take a sip, but not too fast. You don’t want brain freeze.”
He didn't want to find out what brain freeze was, so he tried it slowly, and the burst of sweetness in his mouth was the most incredible thing he’d tasted since stepping foot into the Temple.
“Good, right kid?” Anakin looked over to where the other two still sat, Knight Vos perched on the edge of the bunk and Obi-Wan sitting with a pillow wedged behind his back, wearing almost identical smiles. His Jedi looked more relaxed than he’d ever seen him before, if still a bit pale.
“I imagine there’s food in those bags as well,” he said wryly, and Bant separated from her own milkshake to drag the table and a few chairs towards the bunk.
As he took a bite of something called a nerfburger, Anakin decided that maybe everything would be okay.