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“What the hell,” Obi-Wan said. “What the hell.”
Anakin grunted as he slashed at the purge trooper, glowing blue plasma meeting dark armour. His lightsaber barely left a scratch, his weariness manifesting in the crease of his clammy forehead and the stiffness of his form.
Obi-Wan’s own weapon was out and blazing in an instant. He’d run all the way from where he’d landed his ship in a clearing, only needing to follow the sounds of plasma meeting an electrostaff and branches crudely falling to the ground. The comm had come through only a few hours prior—the first one Anakin had sent him in months—and he hadn’t missed the barely concealed nervousness in his former padawan’s voice, nor the unhealthy pallor of his face and the badly hidden strain behind each word.
It wasn’t the reunion he was hoping for, but it was a reunion nonetheless.
“How many have you taken out?” Obi-Wan yelled.
“Three!” Anakin yelled back. He was surviving on nothing but determination and adrenaline, his swings beginning to slow, stumbling more often than not over tree roots and scattered branches.
“How many more?”
“Two!”
Obi-Wan didn’t fail to notice how he was favouring his left side, which meant he was injured, which meant he was going to keep fighting until the purge trooper killed him—or until he collapsed, which would then of course allow the purge trooper to kill him.
The trooper, unfortunately, was not an easy opponent—it had been trained to fight Jedi, after all. Obi-Wan nearly missed a parry when the electrostaff fell too close to his side, almost falling when the trooper swung a leg under his feet in an attempt to trip him. The terrain didn’t help—rocks and raised roots roughening every foot of the ground, tree trunks inviting him to be cornered against. He wore no protection, not even the familiar clone-modelled shoulder guards or a chestplate, and did not fail to realise how vulnerable he was against a fully-equipped purge trooper with a complete arsenal of weapons built into its armor.
Obi-Wan hadn’t had to fight like this since the end of the war. He expected flashbacks, maybe. Memories of a bloodier time. Felucia, Geonosis, Naboo. But the only detrimental emotions he could pinpoint surged from the whirl of black and brown beside him, and he didn’t need to look to know Anakin was most certainly injured, probably bleeding heavily from some obscure injury if his bloodless complexion was anything to judge by, and definitely teetering on the edge of collapse.
He grunted when the trooper landed several well-placed blows to his cheek and lip, but blessedly caught a chink in its armour where its breastplate bent away from its torso. Or maybe it was because he could feel Anakin beside him, his presence in the Force brighter than it had been for months now, and to die here like this—mere minutes after seeing him again—would be an utter disgrace.
Obi-Wan reached into the Force, disconcertingly foreign after ignoring it for so long, and pried at the opening of the dark chestplate. His saber met no resistance when he stabbed it right through the trooper’s chest.
Then he was at Anakin’s side, blocking the opening in his stance where he’d watched an electrostaff nearly carve out a chunk of his arm one too many times, and Obi-Wan thanked the Force that this—save for the fallen bodies around him—was the last trooper in sight.
“Move out of the way,” Obi-Wan ordered, and Anakin really must have been suffering because he did so with no complaint. He stumbled back to lean against a tree, a hand pressed to his side, and watched with rasping breaths as Obi-Wan pushed his heavily-armoured opponent back with the Force, dodging a blow which would otherwise have caught him in his side, and swung his lightsaber horizontally across its shoulders.
The trooper fell, its head severed from its body.
Anakin had forgotten how enthralling it was to watch another Jedi fight untethered.
No—Anakin had forgotten how enthralling it was to watch Obi-Wan fight, no risk of damage to restrain him, no confines to stifle the power he’d been forced to dampen in training.
Obi-Wan breathed heavily, flicking the ignition on his lightsaber to power down the blade.
“I’m sorry,” Anakin said. Only now he let the pain crest over and over, allowed it to sink into his body like water into cotton, tried to release it to the Force and replace it with numbness before he could gracelessly pass out. His eyes slipped shut, but he didn't have to look to see the tiredness on Obi-Wan’s face turn into immediate concern.
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan said. “Get up. I am not carrying you back to my ship.”
Anakin’s eyes fluttered open. “I don’t think I can.”
Neither do I, Obi-Wan thought. “Get up,” he said, more gently this time.
“Can’t.”
Obi-Wan knelt beside him and pressed two fingers to his carotid, finding his pulse thready, even as his rapid breaths approached the threshold of hyperventilation.
“You’re going to bleed out here,” Obi-Wan warned.
Anakin croaked out a laugh, his chest heaving with the effort of breathing. “I expected as much.”
There was a forced lightheartedness to his tone, but his pain-glazed eyes betrayed him.
“Sorry about this,” Obi-Wan said. He slung Anakin’s arm over his shoulders and Anakin barked out a curse, but managed to stagger to his feet, his gloved hand never falling from where he’d been clasping his side.
“What happened to you?” Obi-Wan asked softly.
“Vibroblade,” Anakin said, the word shallow in his throat, and it wasn’t an answer but it explained enough.
The walk back to the ship must only have taken minutes, but it could have been measured in light years for how excruciatingly daunting each step was to take. Anakin was a dead weight over Obi-Wan’s shoulder, his hand never moving from where it was pressed tightly against his side.
They approached the landing ramp. “Few more steps,” Obi-Wan said gently, and a silver-lined memory floated to the surface of Anakin’s disorientated mind.
His padawan—fifteen looking twenty-five, cradling her arm. A torn muscle, it must have been—her body too fragile to withstand the brute strength of a clanker’s grip, twisted between durasteel machines, tendons and ligaments not built to hold taut under so much pressure. Almost there, Snips , he’d said to her, and she’d tried to be strong, keeping her expression composed, but the tendrils of agony seeping through her shields had given her away. He remembered the worry, the fear, the guilt.
Just a few more steps, he’d said. You’re gonna be alright.
Anakin collapsed into the co-pilot’s seat, a wonderfully hazy drowsiness tempting him away from the bright lights and beeping monitors of the cockpit.
“Stay awake, Anakin,” Obi-Wan said, flipping blinking switches that Anakin should have been able to identify but had now melded into blurry little blobs of light. Obi-Wan looked back at Anakin to find him already staring vacantly.
“Yes?” Obi-Wan implored, cocking an eyebrow.
Anakin frowned in discomfort, his eyes slipping shut for a second, before tapping his right bicep and saying, “Your shoulder.”
Obi-Wan looked at his shoulder. A fresh smear of blood trailed from behind his arm, bright red on beige. “Not mine,” he said softly.
Anakin hummed his assent, an apology waiting to fall from his lips, but another stab of pain had him groaning and doubling over as he tried not to heave up his guts.
“Hang on,” Obi-Wan said, his own brow furrowing. He pressed the buttons he needed to press, turned the dials he needed to turn, muscle memory taking him across the console. This should have been a two person job. These Republic ships did not account for incapacitated co-pilots.
“Trying,” Anakin gritted out. He tried to lean over the console to glance at the coordinate screen—a stupid idea, if the wave of pain ripping through his side had anything to prove. “Are we going to Coruscant?”
Obi-Wan didn’t reply, but he nodded.
“‘M’a better pilot than you,” Anakin slurred, and Obi-Wan wondered if he had hit his head too, if he thought he was in any state to fly a ship.
“Save your breath,” Obi-Wan said. “You crashed your last ship. Don’t want you to crash this one.”
“I was shot out of the sky,” Anakin mumbled, but shut up after that.
Obi-Wan punched the coordinates in, the three zeroes flashing on the screen, and leaned back in the pilot’s chair. He turned to Anakin, whose face was now scrunched up in pain as he pressed a hand to his side.
“Did you get hit in the head?” Obi-Wan asked, and it took Anakin a very, very long second to realise Obi-Wan was not teasing, but entirely serious.
“Can’t ‘member,” Anakin murmured, so quietly Obi-Wan barely heard him. Perhaps it was a good sign that he was not yet incoherent. He closed his eyes again, head lolling to the side, and Obi-Wan only barely had enough sense not to reach out and shake him awake.
“Not yet,” Obi-Wan said, hoping the apology made its way through to Anakin. “Not until I look at that.” If you go to sleep, I can’t say for certain if you’ll wake up.
All Obi-Wan felt was sympathy as Anakin groaned, rubbing his hand over his eyes, smearing blood on the side of his face.
“You could patch me up here,” Anakin said drowsily, as Obi-Wan reached for the medpack under his seat.
“I could make it worse,” Obi-Wan countered. He didn’t have enough medical supplies with him, which, retrospectively, should have been the first thing he remembered to bring. But the urgency of Anakin’s transmission hadn’t exactly given him a generous window of time for such commodities. “Stay awake for me. I have a stim shot in here.”
Anakin grimaced, but did not open his eyes. “You’ll kill me with that. I’ll bleed out. And if I don’t, I’ll die from shock when it wears off.”
He didn’t miss the way Obi-Wan had said for me, instead of for a moment, or for now, or just a little longer.
“You will die when I allow you to die,” Obi-Wan snapped.
Anakin choked out a laugh, pressing his hand to his side, but allowed Obi-Wan to stab the hypo into the side of his neck, a momentary wince as the only indication of his discomfort.
“Remember when you’d try and force me to sleep?” Anakin asked. The stimulant buzzed through his veins, setting unfamiliar nerve endings alight. It didn’t feel terrible, but the undercurrent of dread lingered—it felt so wrong, to be half asleep yet wide awake like this, the chemicals targeting his adrenal system while his body fought to shut down.
“I’d fail to force you to sleep,” Obi-Wan said ruefully.
During the war, there had been exactly three people who were truly able to get Anakin to sleep. Kix would simply give him an unnegotiable prescription for sleeping pills. Vokara Che would threaten him into submission or, Force forbid, give him a sleep suggestion. Ahsoka only had to bat her pretty blue eyes, or let a few tears slip from under her lashes, or curl up beside him on the couch, and that would be the end of his waking hours.
“Only because you wouldn’t sleep either,” Anakin retorted.
Obi-Wan shook his head, but couldn’t help his smile as he capped the needle and placed it back into the plastic container. “Any other injuries?” he asked, more sympathetic this time.
Anakin shrugged. The rush of adrenaline meant he was more alert now, so much so it was uncomfortable. He would probably—certainly—stay awake for the 6 hour flight back to Coruscant, hopefully not to bear witness to his own mildly—highly—concerning blood loss.
So yes. Adrenaline or no, he was still miserable.
“A bit of everything, I guess,” he said. “Nothing serious.”
What does that even mean? Obi-Wan almost yelled, but settled for “Just stay awake.” He glanced at Anakin’s hands where they were still clenched over the left side of his abdomen. His gloves were dark, but that slickness was definitely not water. “And try not to bleed all over my seat.”
Anakin nodded, eyes trained on the streaks of light outside the viewport as they cruised through hyperspace.
---
Anakin awoke to someone shaking his shoulder roughly. It wasn’t as if he had been asleep in the first place—the damned chemical stimulant coursing through his blood made sure of that—but he’d finally managed to slip into a state of mind which housed some semblance of relief, detaching his consciousness from his body in a way he would most likely regret later. Or now.
“Hey,” Obi-Wan said gently.
“Kriffing hell,” Anakin groaned.
“You okay?” Obi-Wan asked.
“I feel like I’ve been stabbed.” It was, frankly, as close to the truth as it could get.
Obi-Wan frowned in sympathy, helping Anakin up from his bloody, curled-up state. It felt like a violation of sorts, forcing him up when he was semi-conscious and finally quiet, but he had to admit there were moments during the flight that Anakin had been so quiet he wondered if he was still breathing, and it was only through a rather invasive poking of their bond that the reassurance of a steady pulse—though weak—had stopped him from rousing Anakin right then and there.
Obi-Wan all but dragged Anakin down the ramp and into the hangar, watching his eyes flick across the rows of neatly docked ships which all bore the Republic’s emblem on their wings. It had been easy to run in and borrow one, a quick flash of his lightsaber hilt enough to have the maintenance crew nodding and clearing a vessel for him.
“Where ‘re we going?” Anakin mumbled.
“My place,” Obi-Wan said, and wondered, with Anakin slung around his shoulders, if he would even make it to the speeder bay.
---
Another glass of water clinked down on the wooden table. Anakin looked up from where he had been picking at his fingernails to find Obi-Wan staring at him, studying his features like he was the most fascinating thing since the history of Mandalore, reading the words he wouldn’t say right off his cracked lips.
Obi-Wan had force-fed him a packet of dry crackers the moment he’d collapsed onto the couch, threatening him with further bodily harm if he didn’t finish the first glass of water he’d set out on the table. On the bright side, he now felt two steps from the doors of death instead of one.
“What?” Anakin said tiredly. The stim-shot was wearing off quickly, a tremble working its way into his limbs. All he wanted to do was drop onto the couch cushions, close his eyes and go to sleep. Preferably forever.
It had been a while since they’d seen each other, but not enough had changed to warrant a conversation. It wasn’t as if they'd both grown noticeably older, or had any remarkably interesting stories to exchange. The post-war grace period had been filled with discreet elections and casualty tallies and holonet reports about the ever-changing government as senate members desperately tried to pull together a working system, collecting the jagged shards of emergency powers left in the wake of the Chancellor’s death. So much damage had to be undone, so many wrongly-set bones needing to be re-broken, and the ignorant jubilance of the Clone Wars finally ending had really only lasted a week before the reality of a broken galaxy had set in.
Obi-Wan blinked, shaking his head quickly as if pulling himself out of a daze. Anakin remained stock-still, remnants of blood and grime still caked to his clothes. “Nothing. Take your tunic off.”
Anakin barked out a laugh, his ribs immediately protesting at the following stab of pain in his side. His laugh turned into a choke. “Excuse me?”
Obi-Wan didn’t respond, only held up a medpack.
Anakin curled into himself defensively. “I can—I can treat myself. I’ve been through worse.” Anakin’s injuries screamed bloody murder as he tried to reach for the medpack, but Obi-Wan snatched it away.
“No,” Obi-Wan said sternly. “Sit back. You’re in no state to treat yourself. And take your tunic off before you bleed all over my couch.”
“I’m not bleeding any—” Anakin glanced down at his side and immediately shut his mouth, because he wasn’t, in fact, not bleeding anymore. His tunic was dark, but a noticeable stain had spread into a patch larger than both his palms, and when he touched it experimentally his fingers came away bloody.
“Off,” Obi-Wan said simply.
Anakin fumbled for the back of his belt, his fingers clumsy with the ties, the pain in his side worsening with every second. The outer tunic came off in a mess of dirt and blood. The inner tunic was worse—he was wearing it when he’d been stabbed by some lowlife’s vibroblade, and hadn’t paid much attention to the torn fabric right over his hip, nor the warmth of his blood leaving his body to settle in decidedly less preferable areas.
He bit his lip as Obi-Wan helped peel the bloody garment from his side. “Really?” Obi-Wan said, raising his eyebrows in disdain, upon discovering the bacta patch Anakin had haphazardly slapped over the two-inch deep stab wound to his abdomen. It was completely soaked through, stuck to his skin more by blood than its intended adhesive, but even the mess of crimson couldn’t hide the unmistakable bruising around the mutilated flesh.
“I didn’t have anything else,” Anakin gritted out.
“When did this happen?”
“Two days ago.”
“You’ve been walking around—running around—with a hole in your stomach for two days? You didn’t think to seek proper medical attention before throwing yourself into another fight?”
“I had a job,” Anakin said blandly. “I did it.”
“I helped you do it. You can’t complete a job if you aren’t alive to do it.”
Anakin stayed silent after that, his laboured breaths and the hum of the building’s ventilation the only noise in the room.
Obi-Wan peeled the edge of the bloody bacta patch away from Anakin’s skin, relishing in the small mercy of the wound not being infected—as far as he could tell—then cursing silently when he realised it was still open and steadily bleeding.
Anakin seemed to realise this around the same time. “Might need stitches,” he said weakly.
Obi-Wan pressed a wad of gauze to the wound in an attempt to staunch the bleeding, and Anakin hissed in pain. “I know,” Obi-Wan said. Then, apologetically: “I don’t have anything for the pain.”
“Just get on with it,” Anakin said. He’d been through worse, making it through less sanitary and less ideal situations, but he wasn’t about to lie and claim Obi-Wan was wrong in saying he was in no state to treat himself. With how much his hands were shaking, the very thought of threading a suture needle and attempting to stitch shut a stab wound made him want to slam his head into a wall.
Obi-Wan handed him his tunic, folding it so the blood was out of the way, and Anakin grimaced, knowing what was coming—he brought it to his mouth, bit down on the cloth, steeling himself for the unpleasant ordeal he was about to sit through.
“I’m sorry I didn’t do this sooner,” Obi-Wan said. He soaked a pad of gauze in alcohol, didn’t say a word when Anakin flinched at the realisation of what he was going to do.
When Anakin spoke again, his voice was unsteady, but he shrugged nonetheless. “I would have bled out if you did.” The words were muffled by the cloth in his mouth. He tried not to focus on the way Obi-Wan swiped at his skin not-very-gently with more gauze, decided instead to wonder how much blood he had lost, then gave up upon realising basic math was a little too far beyond him at the moment.
“Don’t look,” Obi-Wan advised.
I know, Anakin wanted to snap.
The sting of the alcohol swab was nothing compared to the hell of the actual stab wound. Still, he fought to bite back his groan, his jaw locked on the tunic between his lips, and winced each time the suture needle pierced his skin. He knew—he knew Obi-Wan was trying to be gentle, knew Obi-Wan was just as deft with his hands as Anakin was with droids, knew there had been medics in the legion who couldn’t afford to spare the time or effort or medication to make their general comfortable on the field, but there was only so much gentleness one could embody when stitching human flesh back together with a needle and thread.
And suddenly he was not an accomplished Jedi Knight, the Chosen One, a war hero of the Republic—he was an injured padawan, sitting in his master’s quarters after a brutal training session, forcing himself to remain stoic and silent as cool fingers rubbed bacta over hairline fractures and skin-deep scrapes. Stoic expression, stiff upper lip, even when unwelcome tears slipped from his screwed-shut eyes.
It felt like forever, his resolve weakening each time he felt the suture needle stab through flesh. His eyes watered each time Obi-Wan tugged the knot tight, and he prayed for each stitch to be the last.
“Done,” Obi-Wan said softly.
Anakin exhaled. It had been a while since anyone else had taken the time to patch him up, and in the past few months he’d familiarised himself with his own body, learning how to put together broken pieces long enough for them not to crack apart again too soon. He would forever despise the tender pressure of the fresh stitches, but appreciated feeling less of the piercing agony which came with having his intestines a finger-length away from falling out. He glanced down at his side, at the neat row of sutures, and resisted the urge to run a finger over them.
Obi-Wan wiped away the remaining blood around the wound, setting a new bacta patch over the former escape route of half the blood in Anakin’s body. “You should still see a medic,” he said, smearing more bacta over the bruises scattered all over Anakin’s ribs. There was no command in his voice.
Anakin only shrugged again.
Perhaps they should have broached the topic glaring at them from all four corners, attempted to acknowledge the bantha in the room—how they hadn’t seen or heard from each other since the Chancellor’s assassination and consequent dissolution of the Separatist movement.
But Anakin couldn’t help but feel that somewhere along the way, deep in the inner workings, a gear had shifted between them. A random mutation in a genetic code, a single wire switched over in a circuit.
He considered it then, as he measured up the man before him—numbers and figures melting together in his head, probabilities and risks and how good might outweigh bad. He could break those rules right now. He had done so before, with Padme. The thrill of rebellion had almost become an addiction, the awareness that he could be caught and expelled fuelling the fire which had kept him going.
Even now, the Order remained, but many of its members did not. The Code had brought upon so much destruction, with its subtly encrypted pacifist messages and intolerance for brutality. What was an instance of negligence to an ancient religion going to change in a ravaged galaxy?
“I’ll get you some clothes,” Obi-Wan said, clearing his throat and breaking the silence. He gestured to a door with a tilt of his chin. “Fresher is through that door.”
Anakin nodded. “Thank you.”
Suddenly feeling out of place, he watched Obi-Wan cross the room to open the door beside the fresher—his bedroom, most likely—and wondered where he would be sleeping tonight. He took the glass of water, relieved to find his hands weren’t shaking as much as they were ten minutes ago, and downed it in one go.
“Where have you been staying?” Obi-Wan asked, returning with an armful of clean tunics and pants. He set them down on the table and Anakin reached for one of the darker tops.
“I haven’t,” Anakin said simply.
“That is not an answer.”
“I haven’t,” Anakin said again. “I stayed in the temple for a few days, after the war. I’ve been on a ship since then.”
Obi-Wan had the decency to look shocked. “You’ve been sleeping on a ship for—what, three months?”
“Yes,” Anakin said slowly. The way Obi-Wan had said it made it sound like a crime.
“Force, Anakin. You need to take a break.”
“I know,” Anakin said, too tired to mask the frustration bubbling into his voice. “There's just a lot of work to do.” And not enough people to do it.
The silence grew heavy. Anakin stood to go to the fresher.
Obi-Wan asked, albeit jokingly, “Need any help?”
“I can manage,” Anakin replied. Some help would not be unwelcome, he thought, but banished the thought before it could manifest physically, because that would be unwelcome. It had been a very long time since he had experienced that kind of intimacy—base needs and carnal pleasure and hotheaded desire. He almost felt Obi-Wan’s gaze burning into his back as he limped across the carpet.
Everything hurt. Anakin shucked off his filthy clothing, stumbled into the shower. The soap stung his cuts but the hot water soothed his aching muscles— pick your poison, he thought sardonically—and he tried to remember how long ago it was that he was given the luxury of clean water rather than a sonic. He marvelled at the fact that barely any blood came off on the towel he used to dry himself, and that the tunic and pants Obi-Wan lent him were made from soft, warm wool, instead of the rough-woven cotton and linen he’d grown accustomed to in the temple.
It still felt too much like a luxury. Too excessive. Too opulent.
Anakin caught himself in the mirror, realising his hair was getting long again. He almost laughed at the thought, so mundane among the rest. He ran his fingers through the mess of copper and brown, noting the rather pronounced shadows under his eyes, before emerging from the fresher, fighting a sudden wave of exhaustion.
Obi-Wan looked at him for a long, hard second, before shifting to one end of the couch and patting the seat beside him in a silent invitation.
Anakin missed this.
He missed not running, not chasing, not hiding or fighting or talking his way out of death.
He missed this mindless comfort, as close to normalcy as it would ever be for him. For them.
He missed being able to embrace these forbidden emotions for what they were, even as he told himself this was his master, and it was inappropriate, and it would only add to the mess he had already created. Emotions which had lain dormant in the months he’d not seen his former master, but had now returned with a vengeance, tormenting him mercilessly, reminding him that everything he wanted would always be beyond his reach.
“What have you been doing?” Anakin asked.
Obi-Wan shrugged. “Same as you. Cleaning out the last of the Seppies, sitting through pointless council meetings. Rebuilding, reorganising—”
“Politics?”
“Politics.”
“Why don’t you stay at the temple anymore?”
Obi-Wan fell silent.
Anakin wondered if he already knew the answer to that question— sentiment, memory, tragedy. Too many ghosts in the hallways of the temple. Some Jedi had not been as fortunate as them. The ones who were would forever bear the scar of crippling helplessness as their own troops turned on them, spilling blood to mark the beginning of the purge.
Why don’t you? Obi-Wan itched to say, so tired of hearing the question and never giving an answer.
Anakin seemed to understand. He looked around the room, the modest four walls, a bedroom, a kitchenette. “You bought it?”
Obi-Wan nodded. Republic funds. For his service to the Order and the Republic, and in sympathy of his part in a war he never signed up for. It should have been reluctance with which he accepted them—the Jedi in him should have turned them down. But many Jedi hadn’t turned them down, and the ones who wished it now lived scattered across the galaxy, some residing on Coruscant to be close to the heart of the rebuilding effort, but almost all settling far away from the temple.
Obi-Wan sighed. “I think,” he said carefully, “all we have learned from this war is how to survive.”
How to survive grief, when the silent wraith of regret came knocking each night, plaguing dreams and waking hours like an incurable disease.
How to survive loss, when the bone-crushing sorrow refused to relent, even when tears had run dry and throats had been screamed hoarse.
How to survive fear, moving limbs locked tight, opening doors to strangers who could have brought only harm.
To survive was one thing. To live was another.
Anakin's gaze flitted over Obi-Wan’s face. He drank in his former master’s weary gaze, the bags under his eyes, the fresh cut on his cheekbone. Before he knew what he was doing, he reached up to touch Obi-Wan’s cheek, brushing his thumb over the cut, then trailing his hand lower, to trace pale lips, feather-light over a split which would most certainly bruise come morning.
Something told him to be prepared for his master to recoil, or pull away abruptly, or push his hand back to where it belonged, but Obi-Wan didn’t—instead, he leaned into Anakin’s palm where it cupped his cheek, and Anakin felt his pulse start to race at the soft sigh which slipped almost voluntarily from Obi-Wan’s lips.
Later, he would blame it on delirium—delirium from the pain, delirium from the exhaustion, delirium from the insanity of the past few months.
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan murmured, bringing him back to reality. “What are you doing?”
“Master?” Anakin replied, and if the honorific didn’t give away his delusion then his actions should have.
What was he doing? He didn’t know. He was dazed and tired, his thoughts halfway to incoherent, and his neatly-stitched wound smarted to Sith-Hells, but Obi-Wan’s skin was warm against his palm and Obi-Wan’s lips were softer than the surface of a newly-healed cut and Obi-Wan’s eyes were so wise and so sad and so beautiful, and if he really wanted to, he could lose himself in them.
Anakin dropped his hand.
Without breaking his gaze, Obi-Wan took it right back. How long ago was it that Anakin’s hand could fit right into the palm of his own?
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan said again. It could have been wonder that Anakin unearthed in that precious, sacred utterance of his name. It could have been worship that Anakin dredged up from the low timbre of Obi-Wan’s voice. It could have been desire that Anakin found in trembling undertones and tremors too minute to pick up by ear.
So he did not respond. He did not have to, for his eyes spoke volumes more than he ever could. He watched as Obi-Wan closed the insurmountable distance between them, listened to the rustle of cloth on cloth, felt the warmth of an equal rove across his skin. He waited as the breath rushed out from between parted lips, counting down the seconds before the galaxy shattered apart around them—a single kyber crystal crashing upon weathered stone.
“Forgive me,” Obi-Wan whispered, and kissed him.
---
His first thought was oh.
He’d kissed, and he had been kissed before. But not like this.
Not with the burden of wasted years pressing so hard against his chest.
Obi-Wan’s lips were warm against his own, his hand so gentle against Anakin’s waist, and perhaps it was too soon but Anakin wanted more. He wanted the insistent pressure of a mouth on his skin, wanted to feel the ardent traces of mutual desire—more than this gentle, careful exploration, tiptoeing around him like he was going to break. But it would have been selfish, surely, to demand so much so soon.
How long? Anakin wondered. How much time could he have saved, if he’d known?
Obi-Wan pulled away suddenly, leaving Anakin reeling.
“Do you want this?” Obi-Wan asked, a whisper of uncertainty cutting into his voice, like a steel knife sharpened too long. No matter how much it would pain him, no matter how much it would change, Anakin only had to say the word and he would back off. He would back off, never broach the topic again, and slam his feelings back into the damned box they’d come out of.
Anakin nodded frantically. His fingers were anchored around the collar of Obi-Wan’s tunic as he tried to pull him closer, but Obi-Wan placed his hands on Anakin’s shoulders, pushing him back before he was near enough to kiss him again.
“Do you want this, Anakin?” Obi-Wan asked again, the gentle, tentative nudge turning urgent.
And Anakin realised Obi-Wan wouldn’t go any further until he heard it out loud.
“I do,” he said, trying to close the empty space between them. He must have been desperate, his insistent tugging cramping the fingers of his flesh hand.
Perhaps they were both not in the right state of mind. One injured, one lonely. If they woke up tomorrow regretting this, sleep having knocked some sense into both their unfathomably thick skulls, there would be no going back to fix what they had so recklessly broken.
But they had seen, done, heard enough to know risks like these were sometimes worth taking.
Obi-Wan gently batted Anakin’s hands away. “Slow down,” he said softly, calmly, like a sheet of transparisteel holding back a storm—he could feast his eyes on the clouds, the rain, the lightning, to venture out would be at his own expense.
Anakin yielded, chest falling with his exhale, and Obi-Wan leaned in unhurriedly to kiss his parted lips. He felt Anakin melt into his touch, felt Anakin’s hands move to his waist, felt the bruising grip of his prosthetic hand tighten when Obi-Wan deepened the kiss and pressed him back onto the couch.
Then Anakin groaned, sounding utterly out of it, and perhaps it was the sheer rawness of it that compelled Obi-Wan to face the gravity of what he had done—that he was either going to have to stop now or never.
“No,” Obi-Wan said firmly. He pulled away, hoping the hand lingering on Anakin’s nape would be enough to convey everything he couldn’t say. Though regret flooded his chest all the same at Anakin’s panicked expression.
“I’m sorry,” Anakin said quietly, turning his head to look somewhere that wasn’t Obi-Wan’s face. Shame burned across his skin, little towers of hopes and maybes and what-ifs crumbling like sandcastles.
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan said carefully. He pressed his fingers to Anakin’s chin, sliding his palm up against his cheek. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You won’t,” Anakin whispered. I trust you, his eyes pleaded. “I know you won’t.”
“We have time,” Obi-Wan soothed. He kissed Anakin again, and Anakin didn’t waste a second parting his lips, pressing forward hungrily.
But they didn’t—that was the thing. They didn’t. Where would they find something so valuable, irreplaceable, nearly impossible to come by? Perhaps they would have to shape it out of dust and ashes and in-betweens, nurture it like a rare currency. Hoard too much and it would slip away. There were so many questions which had lost their other halves, and there simply wasn’t enough time to find them.
Obi-Wan pulled away just enough to press a kiss to Anakin’s temple, shaping his lips over the steady thrum of Anakin’s pulse. He mapped out the tangled threads of their old bond, smoothing out frayed edges and meticulously picking apart dead knots. He charted the smattering of mottled black and blue across Anakin’s chest, the splash of red just below his ribs, the specks of aching nicks and scratches across the blank canvas of his body—constellations gracing the umbra of space.
A soft sigh which wasn’t his had him tightening his arms around Anakin’s shoulders.
“I promise,” Obi-Wan said, the words heavy and muffled. “When you no longer look like you jumped on a grenade. I promise.”
Anakin breathed out an exhale, huffed out a laugh, and turned his head to press his lips to the curve of Obi-Wan’s jaw. “Okay.”
---
“What do we do now?” Obi-Wan asked.
Anakin smiled and shifted closer. “We learn to live.”