Work Text:
5.
As cold as the nights on Tatooine can get, it only takes a few hours past the rise of the suns for the planet to heat once more. All told, there are only a few hours on either side of the day that the old Obi-Wan would have considered livable.
Of course, definitions are subject to change. Once one experiences something truly unlivable, barely survivable, one tends to adjust all their previously held beliefs on the subject. Every memory, every past experience becomes separated from every future one. The Before and the After.
In the Before, the desert world of Tatooine was miserable for the scant few days Obi-Wan spent there. The dry heat and the sand had blistered his skin, and even on the ship, the night’s chill had bitten into his bones. He’d given his cloak and his blankets to the queen’s handmaidens before they could even shiver and had had nothing left to shield himself from the cold.
In the After, this is nothing. Minor inconvenience and the metaphorical bruises one must expect when slipping into a new style of life.
Though Tatooine is borderline uninhabitable, though Obi-Wan goes through most of their monthly allotment of bacta healing his body from the burn of the sun, though he shivers through the night regardless of the blankets, the space heater, the amount of clothing he could pile himself with, this is livable. This is the After.
This is not the unsurvivable, and all he needs to remember that is stretched out in a cold, solid line against his back the moment he blinks awake into the fading darkness of their homestead.
The jut of Anakin’s nose presses against the base of Obi-Wan’s neck; his arms tighten the moment Obi-Wan shifts, keeping him in place.
It is almost unsurvivable, the chill that sets into Obi-Wan’s bones at the cold touch against his bare skin. But Obi-Wan knows incredibly well, what’s unsurvivable and what isn’t.
“Do you miss it,” Obi-Wan wonders aloud into the stillness of their homestead. It’s still early enough in the morning that the temperature is cool; the animals tied up outside are quiet, the flames of their Force signatures steeped in sleep. Today, he will have to travel into Mos Espa, collect news from the Jedi Temple, collect foodstuffs for their stores.
“What,” Anakin replies, lips dragging along Obi-Wan’s skin. He pauses, thinks. “Probably not,” he adds and then presses a dirty kiss along the column of Obi-Wan’s throat, right against his pulse.
Obi-Wan closes his eyes, hand spasming in the singular sheet Anakin has allowed him. There are, of course, many things Anakin could miss. Many things he has lost.
He is cold now, all the time. He used to run hot, so warm even as a boy that Obi-Wan spent the first few months of his apprenticeship perpetually worried that Anakin was sick with fever and neither of them knew it.
He does not sleep. If Obi-Wan rolls over in the middle of the night, turns to look at him, there is a small chance his eyes will be closed, feigning sleep as if it were a practical joke they were both in on. More often than not though, the man is already staring at him, eyes unblinking, unnerving—hardly eyes at all, but two black holes in his face, pupil swallowing lovely blue, familiar white.
He does not eat; he does not need to. All their food storage is for Obi-Wan’s benefit alone, to keep Obi-Wan alive so that someone may pretend to hold onto the krayt dragon’s restraints. He does not experience hunger nor thirst. Not for food at least; he has shown a remarkable voracious sexual appetite, undampened despite the fact that the rest of his bodily functions has stopped.
It makes Obi-Wan wonder if Anakin could feel hunger, could fall asleep should he want to as much as he seems to want his old master on his hands and knees, on his back, against the furthest wall of their homestead.
“The bond,” is what he says instead of any of this. It’s the first thing that jumps past his lips because he knows he must say something before Anakin turns him over, gets him on his back and gets his fingers in him again.
It hadn’t been what he’d wanted to say at all, but it makes Anakin still. His lips leave Obi-Wan’s neck. His hands flex around his waist.
“The bond,” Anakin repeats. Obi-Wan cannot parse his tone. In the Before, he was so good at reading his padawan’s expressions, his voice, picking up on his every tell. Now, he feels as though he is lost in some great, unfathomable darkness every time he tries.
Obi-Wan opens his mouth to correct himself. He hadn’t meant their bond, not really. Or, he had, but he’d really meant the Force. Anakin’s connection with the Force.
“You took our bond away from me before the war even started, Master,” Anakin murmurs, rubbing his cold nose into Obi-Wan’s hairline. “A little late to be asking for my opinion now, isn’t it?”
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan says. It’s almost always the safest, easiest option, to just say his name. That has not changed despite it all. He is still Anakin.
“If you mean being able to use the Force, touching it and moving it, no,” Anakin says. He uses his grip on Obi-Wan to turn him over onto his back, pushing himself up to hover over him on his hands. Obi-Wan’s eyes fly open instinctively as his heart rate picks up, mind and soul used to Anakin’s touch yet body sensing a predator about to strike.
Anakin’s head is tilted as he stares down at him with his black eyes. Curls fall into his face, stray hairs that still shine golden in the morning light. His mouth is a singular pink slash across his pale face, grinning down at him as if he does not know how unnerving his smile has become, tainted as it is with this unfathomable eyes.
“If you mean being able to feel you in the Force,” he says, dropping down to his elbows so that their mouths almost touch. “Then yes.”
Obi-Wan feels his own lips part at the admission. “Yes?” he murmurs, eyes falling half-lidded as Anakin rocks his hips down, pushing the beginnings of his arousal against Obi-Wan’s.
“I had all of you once,” his padawan replies, voice unreadable. When his hand moves to latch onto Obi-Wan’s thigh to lift it up, to part his legs, Obi-Wan offers no resistance. “I did not know it then.”
His fingers tighten, punishingly. Obi-Wan’s eyes fall all the way closed, mouth twisting up.
“I will never have all of you again.”
Obi-Wan’s voice breaks in the middle of Anakin’s name, and Anakin smiles.
“You were warm,” he says like it’s a secret. “I was bright, but you were warm. Like a fire. A sun. I used to push across our bond, wrap myself around your Force signature, let it warm me up when I was cold.”
Obi-Wan’s hands rest on the dip of Anakin’s shoulders. His legs ache with the strain of holding himself wide enough for Anakin’s hips and torso to fit between them. His skin smarts with bruises, old and new, in the shape of Anakin’s palms, fingers.
“I’m so cold, Master,” Anakin murmurs. “Let me wrap myself in you.”
He does not even need to ask, though Obi-Wan thinks he likes to hear him give in.
“You were the first thing I reached for when I woke,” he whispers between them, even as he has already won, even though his fingers have already breached Obi-Wan’s entrance, wet and slick with bacta they keep specifically for moments like these. “Before I realized I could not sense the Force. That was secondary to my realization that I could not sense you.”
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan gasps out. His fingers are rough, his movements short and already impatient, and it feels so, unerringly good that Obi-Wan wants to sob from it, twitch away even though there is no world where Anakin would allow such a thing—and no world where Obi-Wan would be able to force himself to part from him anyway.
“I thought you’d died,” Anakin grunts, expression twisting into something frightful even as he removes his hand, slicking his cock up and pressing the head of it against his entrance. His lips are curled into a snarl, teeth bare. “And that she’d only brought me back. I would have killed them all.”
It’s easiest to turn his head away, to clench his eyes and pretend the wetness in them is because of the roughness of the stretch of Anakin filling him too fast to be comfortable, too intimate to be anything but beloved.
“I had my hands around her neck,” Anakin says, a confession spoken with no shame. He presses harder on the backs of Obi-Wan’s thighs, closer and closer to him. “Until Talzin told me you still lived.” The snarl becomes more pronounced on his face, even as he starts to fuck him roughly, nails biting crescent moons into Obi-Wan’s flushed skin.
“You still lived,” this is an accusation, and it makes Obi-Wan cry out, head thrown back as Anakin pounds in and out of his body, taking what he wants and what he needs and all Obi-Wan has to offer. “You did not pull me back,” Anakin snarls, and his hands turn punishing, pinching at Obi-Wan’s chest, wrapping too tight around his weeping cock, wrapping around the column of his throat. “Our fates were supposed to be the same!”
This, then. This, always.
The sin that Obi-Wan can never overcome: that somehow, he had survived the unsurvivable. He had survived Anakin’s death; he had not sought to rectify his boy’s fate, but accepted it as the end of his life as well, even as his body continued to move through the motions.
It was not enough for Anakin, the fact that Obi-Wan’s grief had crippled him and stripped him of his reason and his faith. That he breathed when Anakin did not was unacceptable. That he had marched on, that he had kept going without him, that he had condemned Anakin to an existence without him was unforgivable.
“I’m sorry,” Obi-Wan gasps out as Anakin’s hands tighten around his neck. The man on top of him squeezes harder, fucks into him roughly. “Dearest one,” he breathes out, and the pressure of Anakin’s hands relent. “Dearest one, I’m sorry.”
He’s sorry for it all. That this is what his sweetest padawan has become; that he was not there to stop it; that he did not try to pull him back himself; that he was absent the day he died, that he had not died with him and that Anakin had been pulled into some great beyond without his master to guide him forward.
Anakin sneers and snarls and kisses him, more teeth than tongue. His hands are claws as they latch onto Obi-Wan’s hips, keep him where he is. As if Obi-Wan has the strength of will to move away.
Not from Anakin, not from how good it feels to be taken like this, brought low and forced to feel this pleasure, forced to come apart on his padawan’s cock because he could never be anywhere else but where Anakin puts him. He’s abandoned him too much already.
The least he can do now is give in to this, all of it. The least he can do is clutch onto Anakin’s shoulders and allow him to bully the orgasm from his body with every press of his cock, every claiming kiss.
Afterwards, after Anakin has come across Obi-Wan’s chest and thighs, adding to Obi-Wan’s own mess, they lay in the confines of the bed, quiet save for Obi-Wan’s breaths.
The planet is hotter now, climbing quickly into the unbearable temperature range. Sweat beads at Obi-Wan’s hairline as the suns creep fully into the homestead, illuminating every shabby inch.
Like this, Anakin’s unnatural coolness is a blessing. A balm against a steady burn instead of something too cold to touch.
Obi-Wan looks up at the ceiling, head resting on one arm while the other curls around his padawan’s broad back as Anakin bites and licks at his chest, intent on replacing all the bruises that the bacta they’d applied to heal his burns had washed away.
“I didn’t want you like this before,” Anakin says, tone flat and conversational.
Obi-Wan closes his eyes, wishing for sleep to take him once more. “I know, Anakin,” he replies, barely moving his lips.
After all, it had been Anakin’s wife who had dragged his body to the Nightsisters, had paid the toll to revive him, half out of her mind with grief and rage.
Anakin, before, had been in love with her. Had married her. Had kept high shields around that tender part of himself. Before, he had not wanted Obi-Wan the way he craves him now.
Obi-Wan knows. Obi-Wan tries not to think of it, else he isn’t sure he would be able to live with himself at all.
“Do not mistake me, Master,” Anakin warns, voice low. He presses a singular kiss over his heart before looking up at him, resting his chin on his chest. “I have always wanted you in some way or another. But before, in the before, I dreamt of kissing you softly. Dancing with you on some launchpad overlooking the city, making love to you the way I touched her. Soft and gentle. I dreamt of kissing you like that.”
Obi-Wan’s mouth is dry. His eyes stay fixed to the ceiling. “And now?”
“I don’t dream,” Anakin’s voice has the ghost of a smile to it. The smile is made of knives. “But if I did, it would be of consuming you. Keeping you in me until I felt a fraction of your warmth again. There is nothing gentle about the way I want you anymore, Obi-Wan Kenobi. Whatever awaits us when we die, the Force, some nothingness, a hell of our wildest imaginations—it took all my softness first. Do you understand?”
Do you understand?
What he means is: Do you understand that the thing you let into your soul, your body, your bed is hardly your padawan at all? Do you understand that Anakin Skywalker will never again want to do anything but devour you? That this shadow of your padawan is not capable of tenderness, of romance, of love?
Obi-Wan closes his eyes. “Does it matter?” he asks.
What he means is: you have enough Anakin Skywalker in you still that I must love you because I love him. It is not a choice. It was never a choice. You could contain only a sliver of the boy I raised, and I would let you burn me to ashes and love you all the while.
“No,” Anakin decides, turning his head to press his smile into Obi-Wan’s skin. “No, I suppose it doesn’t.”
And it doesn’t.
1.
The Council chambers are quiet, frozen still.
The next person to speak will forever be the first person to say something after learning of Anakin Skywalker’s death, and it is a title they all instinctively shy away from.
But there is a war going on, and the moment must end so that other moments can take its place. There are other generals fighting for their lives out there amongst the stars, clone troopers falling victim to Separatist blaster fire even as eight Jedi masters sit here on Coruscant, trying to find the right words to stop the Force from shattering around them.
“Does he know?” Master Fisto asks, his holo image turning to look at Mace from across the ring of seats. His eyes flick tellingly, instinctively, to the one empty seat, unfilled by either holo or physical body.
But Mace would have known who Fisto meant without the flicker of his gaze. Everyone in the Temple, upon hearing of Skywalker’s death, will have the same first question.
What of Kenobi?
“No,” Mace says. “He does not.”
“We must tell him at once then,” Plo Koon says, straightening in his seat where his grief had made him slump. “Surely it will take only hours for the holonews to catch wind of it, and Kenobi does not deserve to hear such news from The Coruscant Star.”
Mace shakes his head, exhales. In truth, he agrees with Plo. It is unthinkably cruel to leave Kenobi to find out about Skywalker’s death through a tabloid running the story.
But.
But.
“Kenobi is currently breaking through a siege on the Mid Rim planet of Beesam,” Mace says.
“That is not out of range of our coms,” Plo replies, tone steeped in disapproval.
Mace’s lips press together for a moment before he relents. “It is not the comm distance in issue, Plo. Think.”
“Fighting, he is now,” Grandmaster Yoda says before anyone else can speak. His ears are low, his head bowed as he examines the handle of his gammer stick. “Lay down his saber, he may, if tell him, we do…that occurred, the unthinkable has.”
Mace closes his eyes. Skywalker’s death is a tragedy, one that the Order will feel—that perhaps the galaxy will feel.
But no one will feel his absence the way Obi-Wan Kenobi will.
“Obi-Wan is an exemplary Jedi,” Master Mundi states. “He will feel this loss acutely and then release his grief. He will understand that Anakin has become one with the Force—that he has not been lost but rather returned.”
“Obi-Wan is perhaps the best of us,” Mace says, curling his hands together in his lap so that he does not rub at his temples. “Except in matters concerning his padawan.”
“Lost much, he has,” Yoda murmurs, looking up from his gammer stick and out over Coruscant. “For one so young.”
It is Depa who speaks next, and Mace’s eyes flash to hers. What would he do, should reports reach him of her death? Nothing gruesome, nothing stretched out over days or weeks. Not tortured, not maimed. Just—killed. Just gone.
A shot in the heart in the moment of turning.
Skywalker had been distracted, had had his comm in one hand, eyes cast down to the device. That’s what his captain had said. He’d not seen it coming. It was a lucky shot. Over and done, and the man had fallen. He had been dead before he hit the ground.
A quick death with no prolonged suffering: in a war, it was one of the better outcomes, though he doubts Obi-Wan will ever see it that way.
Would Mace be able to, had it been Depa’s clone commander comming him with the news of her death?
He had been her Master, had counseled her through traumatic missions, had shared meals with her, medicine, rations. He trusted her, knew her first as a young girl and watched her, steadied her as she grew into a woman. Her death would be a hard loss, one that would wound him greatly in all of his most tender spots.
But he would be able to move on from it. He would be able to turn his attention to the war, the Jedi, the Order that still needed him.
He would find solace in the fact that she was one with the Force and that the Force flowed through all things. He would feel his grief at her death, and he would let it flow back into the Force as well.
But Kenobi and Skywalker…they were different than any other master and padawan pair. They always had been.
Skywalker, a youngling too old to be trained. Kenobi, just a boy then, too young to be a Master. They sunk into each other’s orbits like stars pulled into the other’s gravity. It was an attachment no one on the Council had wanted to admit to seeing. Admitting meant trying to find a solution to the problem at hand, and no one had the time. It was easier to ignore.
But they cannot ignore it anymore.
Someone has to tell Obi-Wan that his padawan has died. Someone will have to kill Obi-Wan too.
“His commander,” Kit suggests. “They trust each other, and he’ll be close to him anyway.”
“But he will not be able to offer counsel as a fellow Jedi would,” Depa says with a shake of her head.
“Is there anything that anyone could say that Kenobi would hear?” Someone points out, and it’s a valid statement. A Jedi could remind Obi-Wan about his vows, the Order, counsel him on his grief, but would the man listen? Would it help?
“It should be done in person,” Kit says, hand rubbing against his outer robes over his chest. “I can go. I know…how it feels to lose a former padawan.”
Mace thins his lips. He isn’t sure any of them really understand what Obi-Wan will feel upon hearing of Anakin’s death. They were closer than master and padawan. They were closer than peers. There is not a word in the Jedi culture for what they were.
“Beesam,” Plo says, shaking his head, “that is three days' travel away. The holonet will get to him before we can.”
“Tell the commander,” Shaak Ti murmurs. “Cody. He will tell Obi-Wan. They are friends. He will need a friend.”
“He will want to be here,” Plo adds consideringly, hands tapping at the arm rests of his chair. “For the funeral. Anakin’s—where is Anakin?”
“He died on Visanda,” Mace says. The words sound odd leaving his mouth, as if the air itself does not want to hold them. As if the air itself feels as though this is wrong. This is all wrong.
“Six days of travel out then,” Plo says. “Inform Master Kenobi—one of us, I can—take his place at the helm of Beesam. Immediate cessation of duties, to begin after the fune—”
“There will be no funeral,” Mace shakes his head, cutting through Plo’s words. If he had the strength for it, he’d rise from his seat to walk to the window, look out over the city-planet and take as much peace as he can from the view.
“What?”
“Captain Rex of the 501st contacted another. Before informing me of Skywalker’s death.”
“But you said Kenobi didn’t—”
“Senator Padmé Amidala has filed the flimsi-work with the Coruscanti city government and the Naboo Council of Administration in Theed. She is intent on taking Skywalker’s body and giving him a Naboo funeral worthy of a Nabierre.”
Absolute silence in the Chambers. Digestion of the information or disbelief, Mace cannot tell.
“He is a Jedi,” Depa finally says. “He died a Jedi. We would allow her to mourn with us as we bury him as a Jedi—”
“She is intent on burying him as her husband,” Mace tells them. “For that is what he was as well.”
“And this?” Master Mundi asks. “Does Kenobi know this?”
Mace sighs and finally gives into the urge to rub at his temples. The truth is that he isn’t sure if Obi-Wan knew of Anakin’s disregard for the Order and betrayal of the Code or not.
He thinks it may be kinder to leave him in the dark if he did not, but he knows the choice is out of his hands; the die has already been cast.
Padmé Amidala will bury her husband on Naboo as she wants to, and there is no one who will not know about their marriage by the time the holonet gets through with it.
Their love of a handful of years outweighed the years Anakin Skywalker lived in the Temple as a Jedi. Their bond in the eyes of galactic law was stronger than any ties he had to the Temple, to the Jedi. In the wake of his death, there would be two mourners who would feel his loss more acutely than anyone else, and only one of those people is legally positioned to do anything about it.
And it’s not Anakin’s former Jedi Master.
3.
“You stupid girl,” Obi-Wan snarls, striding into the Council chambers for the first time in over a year. His steps do not break pace as he passes through those sacred doors, passes by the Council seat that used to be his. His eyes are focused on the woman standing in the middle of the circle of seats.
“Obi-Wan,” A Council member snaps, standing from their seat as if they want to attempt to hold him back.
He’d like to see them kriffing try.
He has not felt a rage like this in years. In decades. The last time he felt this burning hatred in his chest, he’d cut another sentient in two for the crime of killing his master.
Now, his hands clench into fists so he cannot reach for the hilt of his saber.
What this woman, this foolish girl has done is worse. Is unthinkable.
“What did you do to him?” he demands; the sound leaving his mouth sounds more like the roar of some great beastly predator.
Padmé Amidala wilts before him, hand coming up as if the twenty-seven delicate bones in her hand could possibly deter him.
Obi-Wan wants to wrap his hands, all fifty-four bones in them, around her throat.
She took his padawan’s body from him. From all the Jedi. She buried him in stasis, features frozen perfectly as they were when he died. She stole his Jedi funeral from him—from Anakin, from Obi-Wan—
And then she did not bury him at all.
“I loved him,” she whispers. Her eyes are wet, her cheeks are red. “You have to understand, Obi-Wan, you out of everyone have to understand—”
“You violated his memory and his corpse,” Obi-Wan spits out. “Playing with things you do not understand! You may have married a Jedi but you have no understanding of the Force! Of life and death!”
“I had to try!” Her chin dimples and then the cries burst out of her. Grief has made a shadow of the Padmé Amidala that Obi-Wan remembers. It has stripped her of her elaborate outfits, her armor and make-up. She has aged twenty years since Obi-Wan has seen her last, and if he had any sense of shame left, he would avert his eyes; he would be afraid of what she could see on his own face.
How his own grief has crippled him.
“I loved him so much, I couldn’t—a world without him in it was horrible, unlivable, Obi-Wan, you can’t tell me you have not felt the same—thought the same!”
Obi-Wan cuts his head down and away in a sharp, jerky movement. No, he means to say. No, don’t you compare us together. Not you.
“You desecrated his body,” Obi-Wan hurls back instead. “You, who took it from us! When we were his family!”
He does not mean to say this. They should be kept separate in his head, in his heart. The issue is not that Padmé stepped forward and demanded Anakin’s body after his death. It is not.
That is not why he is here, a year after Anakin died. That Padmé denied them all a chance to mourn their friend in the Jedi fashion, by turning his body to ash and communing with the Force, is not the issue, is not the root of Obi-Wan’s tumultuous fury.
They should be separate issues in his head, that long torn open wound kept apart from what has brought him back here, to Coruscant and to the Temple, for the first time since his padawan died.
“I was his wife!” Padmé cries back in the tone of voice one uses when one has been biting back words for years and they have finally burst free. “We were married since that first battle, in love before it, his life and death were my right!”
Obi-Wan sneers and clenches his hands behind his back so he does not give into the temptation to strike her for no other reason than that she’s right. She’s right and he has been letting that knowledge claw away at his insides for the past year.
“Who told you of the Nightsisters?” Obi-Wan barks, abandoning the first line of question as if it will make that urge for violence disappear as well. “Not Anakin.”
She draws herself up, eyes flashing. “It is quite clear that you were never an expert on the things Anakin and I talked about, Master Jedi. One would question whether you knew him at a—”
“How do you bear it?” Obi-Wan’s voice lashes out like a lightning strike, cutting through her own offensive. “Being the thing that killed him”
The sting of her hand across his face is not unexpected; he sees it coming, the Force blares with its warning, and he stands still, taking the slap on his cheek.
“They told me he was checking his commlink,” Obi-Wan murmurs. “When he was shot. Was your message worth it, Senator?”
“Master Kenobi,” Master Mundi snaps from his Council seat. “That is enough!”
“I do not think it is!” Obi-Wan snarls, staring down into Padmé’s narrowed, wet eyes. “Not for what she’s done! She killed my padawan, stole his body from me, vowed to bury it, and dragged it before the Nightsisters a year later for some foolhardy resurrection attempt! As if she has any idea what the Force is, how it works— what price did they ask of you, Senator? What did you pay to try and bring Anakin back?”
“Master Kenobi, stand down,” Master Windu states. His voice is loud, as if he has stood from his seat, but Obi-Wan cannot tear his eyes away from the senator in front of him, Anakin’s wife, and the way her hand flies instinctively to her abdomen, as if trying to shield it from view.
The realization hits Obi-Wan with more force than its mother.
But it has been a year. A year and a month since Anakin Skywalker was killed. Obi-Wan has counted every day. She could not have been pregnant when she sought out the Nightsisters, not if it were Anakin’s child in her womb.
She must have had the child, a squirming infant, because it must have been Anakin’s child. Obi-Wan cannot fathom another alternative, that she had borne some other man’s child so soon after Anakin’s death, that she could find love or comfort in anyone else—so it must have been Anakin’s, so it must have been alive, in her arms—
“Was it worth it?” he whispers, so struck by horror that all of his fury has been stripped from his voice. “To watch a Nightsister pour dark magics into his body, to desecrate it for your own whims, to realize too late that there is nothing that can bring someone’s soul and life force back to their body once they’ve died? You foolish, stupid girl, they took your child and you let them and for what?”
You will have to bury him anyway. You will have to let him go. I will never let you near him again. You will not be allowed at his funeral, I will make sure of it, I will—
“You don’t know anything,” Padmé spits back at him, eyes flooded with tears that fall down her cheeks between one blink and the next. “You don’t know anything of what I’ve been through—what I’ve had to—” she swipes a hand over her face, rubbing the salt of her tears into her skin. Obi-Wan would pity her, would feel empathy, perhaps, for the weight of her grief and how much it has crushed her mind. Except that this is about Anakin. This is about his padawan, and he cannot feel anything past his own hurt, his own anger.
Two days ago, he’d received a comm from the Jedi Council, informing him that Padmé Amidala had attempted to resurrect Anakin Skywalker, using his perfectly preserved corpse, and soliciting the services of the Nightsisters.
He has been shaking with rage ever since, through the long flight he’d taken from the war front to Coruscant, from the Temple hangarbay to here, where his pulse is thrumming and his hands are quivering despite his best efforts to still them.
His padawan has been through enough. His padawan deserves to rest in peace, to be one with the Force. And Padmé Amidala had once been a friend, had once been someone Obi-Wan admired and respected.
But the moment he received that missive from the Council, she became the woman who would take his padawan’s rest from him, who would butcher his already dead body, who would twist and violate the Force itself to serve her own aims—aims that could never be achieved.
The moment she dragged his padawan’s corpse in front of the Nightsisters, she became an enemy, and Obi-Wan has been fighting enemies for going on four years now.
And this is Anakin. This is about Anakin, his Anakin. Ventress is dead nine months gone because she’d made the mistake of mentioning the boy to him. Legions of droids have been crushed to rubble because they’d reminded him of his padawan.
But, well. Most things did then.
Most things do now.
“Kenobi, sit down,” a member of the Council shouts, and Obi-Wan whirls to face them blindly, hand already pointing towards the senator in negation.
“She must answer for it! She must answer for—”
“ For the sake of the Force, Obi-Wan!” This is Mace. This is Mace, striding forward, Mace, placing his hand roughly on his forearm and jerking it away from the senator. “It worked!”
Obi-Wan stops breathing.
Obi-Wan stops thinking.
“It.” He says. “What?”
“It worked,” a new voice purrs from the direction of the doors to the Council room. He hadn’t even heard them open.
It is enough to throw the chambers into absolute silence. Mace’s hand becomes less of a restraint upon Obi-Wan and suddenly the only thing holding him up. Because he recognizes that voice. He knows it—intimately. He knows it like he knows his own. He thought he’d have to wait decades to hear it again; he’d spent the last year convincing himself he did not hear it in every rumble of an oncoming storm, every sigh of a tree’s leaves brushing together, every crash of waves against rocky beach.
His mind and his heart scream at him not to look, not to give into the delusion, the irresistible coaxing of it. His mind knows better. He had been tricked so often, those first few months.
“Master,” the voice turns reproachful. It moves, inexplicably, closer. “Did you not miss me, master?”
“Obi-Wan,” a smaller, softer hand clasps his wrist. Padmé’s voice is low, rushed, desperate. “I was wrong,” she whispers quickly, as if she is running out of time. “I thought they could give him back to me, he promised they could give him back to me, but he’s wrong, he’s not our Anakin, he’s—”
Obi-Wan wrenches himself away, not for any other reason than that he cannot bear to be touched by her, spoken to by her.
The movement twists his head; it changes his line of sight; it brings the other side of the room into focus.
It brings Anakin Skywalker, leaning against the empty Council chair, into focus. One arm is extended out across the top, the other resting carelessly on his hip where his lightsaber should hang. Where his lightsaber would hang if he were still alive, still a Jedi, still a soldier in the war.
Instead of gone.
“I thought—for a year, I thought he would heal completely, come back to me,” Padmé’s hand grabs at his shoulder, tries to pull him back around. “He didn’t, Obi-Wan!”
His eyes are different, solid black. Water at midnight, deep enough to drown in. His hair is the same though. Still golden, still curled, still hanging carelessly over his face, almost to his shoulders. Obi-Wan had offered to cut his for him when he’d cut his own the eve of the war, their first deployment, but Anakin had denied him, had let his hair grow.
Obi-Wan’s throat isn’t working. Neither are his lungs. Neither is his heart.
Neither are his eyes, because they’re telling him that this is Anakin.
But this cannot be Anakin. He cannot feel him in the Force. This cannot be Anakin.
Anakin Skywalker is dead.
“Master,” Anakin Skywalker says, and he lifts his hand into the air, gleaming mechno under the lights of the Council Chambers. “Come here, Master.”
He’d once been a little boy with the same request, standing in their dimly lit kitchen and requesting help reaching the top shelf of their cupboard. He’d wanted water in the middle of the night, and Obi-Wan hadn’t yet thought to move the cups down to a height appropriate for a youngling. He’d been such a bad master. He’d made Anakin reach for far too much, yearn for far too long.
He steps forward automatically. Padmé’s hand slips away. Mace’s hand does not register. “No,” Obi-Wan murmurs, half to himself, half because he needs to say it. Needs to know that he’s not losing his mind. “No,” he says again.
“You had guards, Skywalker,” Master Windu bites out, voice strange somehow. It is the closest to fear he has ever heard from the other Jedi. “Jedi and clone guards.”
This Not-Anakin Skywalker does not take his black eyes off of Obi-Wan. His head tilts slightly. His mouth splits open into a small smile as he crooks his fingers. “And if you want them back, Master Jedi,” he murmurs, and Obi-Wan takes another step forward and then another. And another and then he’s—
“Then you know what to offer the Nightsisters in trade. The Temple has a plethora of younglings last I checked,” the illusion replies lightly and then the smile on his face breaks out into a full-blown grin and before Obi-Wan can control himself, he is crossing the scant distance between them with speed gifted to him by the Force so that he can throw himself into Anakin’s arms. He is real, he is real, he is here.
He is cold to the touch.
2.
When Anakin Skywalker dies, Obi-Wan is half the galaxy away in the midst of a battle for his own life. He does not feel the loss, as a part of himself always thought he would when he let himself think of such impossible scenarios.
Surely, he’d always thought, he would know the moment Anakin died. He’d spent so long with the boy; though their training bond was severed upon Anakin’s Knighting, their Force signatures remained tighty woven together the way trees will grow with their trunks intertwined should their seeds be planted too close together. Even if he were not by Anakin’s side, he would be able to feel his absence. When he reached for the Force, it would feel different. The galaxy would shudder to a halt, if only for a brief second, and release a mournful sigh over its own loss.
Obi-Wan would know the second it happened. Parts of himself would not survive the knowing, but he would know.
But when Anakin Skywalker becomes one with the Force, Obi-Wan does not realize it. He does not feel anything, and the galaxy certainly does not stop moving.
He does not realize and he does not know until seven hours after Anakin Skywalker’s heart has stopped. Seven hours of time he spent fighting to survive, protecting his mens’ backs, pushing through the cracks in the Separatists’ defenses until they shatter their hold on the planet’s capital city.
The people of Beesam celebrate through the night, street vendors setting up their stalls not even an hour after the last droid has been carted away. Members of the 212th are banned from spending credits on anything—every vendor they walk past simply presses foodstuff and drinks into their hands to sample, to take with them.
I cannot wait to tell Anakin about what he’s missed, Obi-Wan catches himself thinking several times as he wanders through the spontaneous night market, Cody on his right side and his lightsaber hanging unlit off his left hip. He’s probably choking down half a ration bar on Visanda right now, poor boy.
This has become the way that he lives through the war: he may not be able to feel his padawan next to him, he may not know what he’s doing at any given moment, what he is thinking or feeling, how he is faring in his battles, what mischief he is getting up to in his spare time, but a shadow of him walks beside him always.
Half a thought is always turned in his direction, standing at his shoulder. He would like these, Obi-Wan thinks, biting into a piece of fhun meat, steeped in a sweet sauce and skewered on a wooden rod. He will be annoyed that he missed this. I will tell him about it in great detail, because it will make him even more annoyed in that way he gets where his mouth flattens out and his eyebrows furrow and his Force signature becomes so suffocatingly tight that it is hard to breathe, and he will—
The standard buzz of his comm startles him out of his thoughts, and he hands off his fhun meat stick to Cody so that he can check the device. Master Windu’s comm frequency flashes back at him, the sequence below it denoting urgent.
“One moment,” Obi-Wan tells his commander. “I’ll catch up.”
There is a quieter stretch of alleyway, on the opposite side of the vendors in the streets. He takes a corner, looking for privacy, and the narrow walkway opens up into a relatively small and quiet courtyard. A tiny fountain bubbles in the center of the stone. The sounds of the raucous celebration can be heard even from here.
“Kenobi,” Obi-Wan says as he flicks open the comm unit.
Silence greets him on the other end. For one beat, for another. “Obi-Wan,” Mace says. He looks serious. He looks sad. “Please. Sit down.”
4.
“It’s important that you know,” Anakin murmurs. His lips brush against Obi-Wan’s throat. Half of Obi-Wan tells himself to pull away, but it’s only been two weeks since the Council Chambers. Two weeks since Anakin was returned to him. He cannot pull away, even though Anakin’s touches border on inappropriate. Even when Obi-Wan does not know what to make of them, to what to make of how his body has begun to stir in reaction to the constant press of Anakin to his side, to his back.
“That I know what?” Obi-Wan asks. He lays down his stylus carefully, letting his eyes fall closed.
They ascended into hyperspace roughly one day ago, and he is up to his hairline in flimsi-work. Apparently there are many forms one must complete if one is to resign from the galactic army.
Resign from the galactic army, but stay a Jedi, if only in name alone. A Jedi, assigned one mission.
His mission hums into his skin and moves to rest his chin on his hair.
“I remember,” Anakin says. His hand falls to rest on Obi-Wan’s shoulder. With no armor in the way, it ghosts over his clavicles, pushes against the tendons of his neck.
Obi-Wan’s heart rabbits into a faster pace. At the touch, its coolness, the words, he doesn’t know.
They are four days of travel away from Tatooine. The Jedi Council has agreed to allow them to settle there, in the Outer Rim on a small inconsequential planet. They will be given a small monthly stipend, a meager amount of food, heavily encrypted news bites via one singular commlink. In exchange, Obi-Wan will update them on Anakin Skywalker. His revival. His deterioration, if one occurs. He will study what remains of Anakin Skywalker in a place far away from all others so that no one may be hurt save for himself.
He had begged for the opportunity. He would have gotten down on his knees and pleaded with the whole of the Jedi Council, there in front of Anakin’s wife, if it meant that he would be allowed to stay beside him once more.
The shadow of the man she’d loved had been too brutal for the senator. She had not been able to love him.
Loving Anakin was never a choice Obi-Wan had. It was never something he could opt out of. He had been placed in charge of the boy’s care fourteen years ago, and he still was. He still would always be now, especially after he’d failed him so unforgivably. So completely.
“I remember the moment I died,” Anakin murmurs as if he can hear Obi-Wan’s thoughts and he agrees. “The exact moment.”
Obi-Wan’s breath hitches without his permission. “Please, Anakin.”
Do not. Please do not do this to me.
“And it’s important you know that you were wrong, when you told Padmé she killed me.”
Please no, please do not, please stop—
“You did. I thought you had commed me. I would have not been so distracted had I heard her comm sound. But I thought I heard yours.”
Please, Force, please do not say this, please do not hurt me like this, please, please.
“I never made you wait, Obi-Wan,” Anakin’s lips brush against the shell of his ear. “I had to look. Even in the middle of a warzone. Even in the middle of a firefight. Even if it cost me my life.”
Obi-Wan knows he is shaking. He can feel the bead of tears fall from his clenched shut eyes, down the wrinkles of his cheeks and into the unkempt edges of his beard.
“Why are you telling me this?” he gets out between clenched teeth. “Why, Anakin?”
“It’s important you know that you killed me, Obi-Wan,” what’s left of his padawan says lightly. “Because Padmé paid the price to bring me back, not you. You need to know your own debt.”
Two fingers press against his chin and turn his head, tilt it up so that they’re face to face.
Obi-Wan refuses to open his eyes.
Please no, please stop. Please do not do this to me.
“You can’t leave me,” Anakin tells him, a statement of fact. “I’d kill everyone it takes to bring you back to me.”
Obi-Wan wonders what Anakin’s vows to his wife had sounded like. When he’d been younger. When he’d been in love. When he’d been alive.
“Life cannot be bartered and traded, padawan,” Obi-Wan murmurs. Exhausted and defeated and full of self-hatred because of how Force-damned happy a large part of him is, to sit here and be touched by Anakin. To sit here, surrounded by Anakin’s scent, his body, his voice. To have survived the unsurvivable and somehow, by some miracle, come out on the other side and be rewarded for it beyond his wildest imagination.
“You’re wrong, Master,” Anakin replies, lips curling into a smile made of knives. “Everything has a price.”
0.
No, please, no, stop, please not now. Please not this.
Not like this. Please do not do this. This will kill him.
This is going to hurt him so fucking much. No, do not do this.
Not to him, please. Not to Obi-Wan. Plea—