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Anakin wakes up blearily. It’s like his eyelids don’t want to move, even though he knows he needs to turn his head, sit up, get up—
There had been something important, something he needed to do. It’s hard to remember, to fight past the blurriness of his own memories and force his eyes open, especially when the light is so blinding. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen light this bright before.
He’d been…not underground necessarily, but in a cell. He thinks. It’s hard to think. But the past moments slowly trickle back to him as he lays here—wherever here is—and fights with his own eyes. Yes. He’d been in a cell. For—for months.
They’d latched a collar around his neck, a Force suppression one so that they didn’t have to keep him in a special cell. It’d been months.
He’d been…so tired. So weak, especially at the end. Wearing the collar, cut off from the Force, cut off from his bonds with his padawan and his master, unable to even see if his men were alive or dead. It had been so easy to slip into a state of listlessness.
His eyes squeeze tightly shut at the memory of one of the prison guards, looking down at him with a sneer. Such a good captive, the uniformed officer had leered. So very quiet.
But it’s never been this light, not in his cell. Or any of the places he’d been taken. There’s the ghost of movement next to him, and he tries to open his eyes again, much more slowly this time.
They don’t feel like a threat. They feel—they feel—
Anakin feels them. Anakin hasn’t felt anything in so long. His mind reaches out before he can even really try to lift his hands. Out and out until they wrap around the warm-happy feeling of whoever is sitting—standing?—next to him.
“Master,” they breathe and they latch back onto him just as eagerly. Their bond, disjointed after so long out of use, clicks back into place.
“Ahsoka,” he exhales out, his lips stiff and uncooperative. His mouth is so dry. Why is his mouth so dry? “Wha—”
“You’re okay, Master,” his padawan rushes to assure him. “We found you. Master Obi-Wan found you.”
“Obi?” Anakin repeats because that had been the name he’d been missing in his mind, that’s the name of the absence in his mind. Where he can gently prod around the bond with Ahsoka, his bond with Obi-Wan is—is—
Gone.
“Obi-Wan,” he forces past his dry lips. His hands grip first at the bedspread over his legs before finding their way to the bed railings.
“Anakin,” Ahsoka starts to say, sounding worried. “You need—”
“Where is he? I can’t feel him, Ahsoka, why can’t I feel him?” It takes great effort to wrench his eyes open to stare at her, and for a second there are two Ahsoka Tanos leaning over him and everything around them is a blur of lights and movement. He pushes himself up in the bed because Obi-Wan isn’t here. And if Obi-Wan isn’t with Anakin, then that means….That means he’s….he’s not with Anakin. “I can always feel him, Ahsoka. Don’t tell me he’s on a mission, I’d know, I always know.”
Anakin’s always known that their bond was unnaturally strong. He’d latched onto Obi-Wan as a child and Obi-Wan, at twenty-five and reeling from the tragedy of his Knighthood as well as the responsibility of a boy, had latched onto him back. Anakin hadn’t known the first thing about Jedi propriety. Obi-Wan had, but Anakin had had more raw power than his master. He’d blown past all of Obi-Wan’s defenses until he’d been able to feel Obi-Wan’s very soul, hold it close to his own, even when his master went off-planet for a mission. Their strong bond had soothed ANakin’s fears of abandonment, of loneliness, and often when his master was gone, Anakin would find comfort in running his mind up and down their bond, strengthening it and entwining more and more of himself and his love for Obi-Wan around it.
Upon Anakin’s Knighting, Obi-Wan, shame-faced and newly elected to the Council, had admitted that he didn’t think it would be possible to break their bond.
After three hours of discussion and countless examinations of it in the Force, the Council had reluctantly agreed. The bond could not be broken in the moment, only weakened over distance and time. It would be detrimental to the both of them to break it immediately.
Anakin and Ahsoka’s bond was to his and his master’s like a candle to a bonfire. Oh, it was strong, and Anakin spent hours carefully making sure its connection was deeply rooted into his own mind, but he has no doubt that upon her Knighting, he’d be able to break it and live.
But Obi-Wan—he—not this one. Not this bond. It is too much a part of himself. “Where? ” He tries to make it come out firm, a master’s command to an unruly padawan, but it comes out hoarse and scared, a padawan’s plea for their master.
He’d spent months imprisoned, he remembers it now. They’d been on Diulyk, they’d been shoring up the defenses of the Republic-aligned planet, from the Separatists that wanted their precious metals and had stopped asking nicely six months ago.
Obi-Wan had been wounded saving Rex from a blaster shot to the gut. He’d taken it too close to his heart for Anakin’s comfort. So close. He’d fallen down to his knees from the pain, and Anakin had been there in an instant. They’d been fighting—fighting—Obi-Wan had needed care, he’d needed a medic. Anakin had let himself get captured, so the Separatists wouldn’t notice a small craft carrying Rex, Cody, and Obi-Wan up into atmo. He’d stayed to disarm the ion cannons, give them a chance to get away without being shot down.
Obi-Wan had gotten away. Why can’t Anakin feel him? Where is their bond?
“Anakin, Anakin, he’s here, he’s alright,” Ahsoka is telling him, pushing down on his shoulders, trying to get him to lay flat again, but he can’t, he can’t feel it, he can’t feel anything. He prods at the space in his mind where the bond was, where it’s always been, and there’s nothing there, not even a cut off end.
He leans over the side of the bed just in time to vomit bile onto the floor of the—Halls. They’re in the Halls of Healing.
“I can’t—I can’t—” He splutters out, mouth tasting horrible, head and eyes and chest and heart hurting. He’s hurting, he needs his master. There is no air in this room, no air in his lungs .
Ahsoka steps back from the bed, and healers rush in to surround him but none of them is Obi-Wan and no one will tell him anything. He fights like he hasn’t for months, kicking and clawing out—out of his bed, out of the Halls—to wherever they’re keeping Obi-Wan—did they break their bond? Have they taken his master from him while he was asleep?
No—the Jedi could never be so cruel. No— no.
He reaches out with his mind and all his power in the Force to find his master’s presence, first in the Halls around him and then in the Temple. There’s nothing. Nothing that feels like Obi-Wan, nothing, nothing, nothing—but Ahsoka had said, she’d said —
She’d said he was here, but then Anakin would be able to feel him, but he can’t so she must have been lying, but then where is he?
A healer to his right stumbles and falls from Anakin’s Force push, but as he turns to watch the descent, something jabs him in the neck and he freezes and then fades.
This time, when he comes awake, he blinks his eyes open to see Obi-Wan’s face next to his. His master has his own bed, where he’s attached to various apparati and loud machines. The image should have distressed him, but the relief numbed his mind to any other emotion.
His master is here. Anakin can see the rise and fall of his chest even from here. He’s breathing. He’s here. He turns his head back to the ceiling and releases his own breath. Cautiously, he ghosts his mind over the missing bond, but it seems that seeing Obi-Wan has not suddenly reinstated their connection.
It’s gone.
His heart seizes in his chest for a second, frozen with the fear that perhaps Obi-Wan is dead. He rolls his entire body over onto his side so he can see his master sleeping. Not dead. Here. Here.
It takes him hours to fall asleep. When he wakes up again, Obi-Wan is still asleep next to him, and Ahsoka has found her way back to sit between their two beds. She’s fiddling with a lightsaber in her lap, but it’s not hers.
Anakin would know that lightsaber anywhere. He’s modeled every version of his own off of it since he was a kid.
“Why d’ you have Obi’s ‘saber?” he asks as articulately as he knows how at the moment.
Ahsoka startles and then looks at him with wide, guilty eyes. “Anakin,” she yelps. “You’re awake! How are you feeling?”
He groans in answer and wrinkles his nose. “Why am I feeling so much like bantha shit?” he asks. “I can’t remember what—I was in the cell. And then….” He trails off and looks at Ahsoka and then back at Obi-Wan. “What’s wrong with Master?”
His padawan looks like she’s trying to figure out a way to dodge the question. “Ahsoka,” he says in his Master voice, the one he’d learned from Obi-Wan. The one that expects obedience and respect in all things.
“They’d been moving you,” Ahsoka finally admits quickly. “Planet-hopping. We couldn’t figure out where you were or where you’d be next. We found some of the places that…that you’d been kept….”
She breaks off and looks over at Obi-Wan’s still face, and Anakin follows her gaze, hoping that his master has stirred from his unnatural sleep. But he hasn’t.
“I’ve never seen him like that,” Ahsoka admits, turning back to him. “I don’t think he was Master Obi-Wan then.”
Anakin’s throat feels dry and it takes wetting his lips three whole times before he can finally get the words out. “Who else could he be?”
“Your master,” Ahsoka says, as if that makes any sense at all.
“Ahsoka….”
“He just…came out onto the bridge one day. And he said he’d found you. That he knew where you’d be. One of the moons of Zuylen. He knew. We didn’t even ask how . We just went. He didn’t look…like he wanted questions.
“They weren’t ready for us,” Ahsoka tells him quietly. “On the moon where you were. We cut through them all. Almost all. A guard had you by the throat. Cease and desist or he’d cut you in half. Master Obi-Wan—just—killed him. But the guy stabbed you first. With your own ‘saber, right through the middle.”
Anakin’s hands find their way to his stomach. It twinges slightly, the area right where his ribs end. He was stabbed. He repeats the words over and over in his head. Stabbed. He should have died then. He should have died.
He looks back up at Ahsoka silently.
“I don’t—” Ahsoka cuts herself off. “One minute you were dying, and then Master Obi-Wan was there and then you weren’t bleeding anymore, but he was done, he looked dead , he had your blood all over his hands and I couldn’t feel him anymore in the Force. It was scary, Master.” This last part is said so quietly that Anakin almost thinks he hasn’t heard it at all.
But his padawan, his war-worn, battle-forged padawan, rallies herself and shakes out her montrals. “We got both of you back onto the ship. And back to the Temple. It’s been a week and a half, Master.”
“He hasn’t….” Anakin starts to ask before trailing off. He isn’t sure he wants to know.
But Ahsoka shakes her head like she knows what he’s trying to ask. “Not yet.”
“What did he do?” Why can’t he feel him in his head anymore?
And then his padawan does the worst thing in the entire galaxy. She takes his hand. “I don’t know,” she says. “And until he wakes up, I don’t think anyone will.”
Vokara Che has at least a slightly better answer for him, several days later.
“We don’t know exactly how he did it,” she begins by warning him, “but from every scan and test we have been able to perform on the both of you, it appears as though Master Kenobi has…has donated his midichlorians to you.”
Anakin is lucky he’s entirely healed at this point, so that he can sit up in bed at this without internal bleeding being an immediate deterrent.
“I’m sorry?” He asks in a very high-pitched voice, befitting an initiate more than a Jedi knight. “What do you mean, he’s donated his midichlorians to me?”
Vokara Che levels him with a deeply unimpressed look. “If you would control yourself, I will explain, Knight Skywalker.”
When Anakin settles back into his bed dourly, the healer continues. “As I’m sure you know, life itself is only made possible through midichlorians. Every Jedi has a higher than average number of midichlorians in their cells, with an average human having around two thousand per cell. Yours, of course, is quite high.”
Anakin bites at his cheek so he doesn’t yell at her to tell him something he doesn’t already know.
“Master Kenobi’s midichlorian count is one of the lowest in the Order at ten thousand midichlorians,” Healer Che states, and Anakin fights the urge to defend his master. Obi-Wan can’t help that he had a low count or whatever. His master is one of the best Jedi in the Temple. Midichlorians have nothing to do with anything.
Some of his anger must flash across his face because Che holds up one of her hands. “It is not my intention to disparage your former master, Knight Skywalker. The midichlorian count tells us little about what sort of Jedi a youngling will be, as we are ruled foremost by our actions and choices. I say this, because upon his arrival back to the Temple, we ran our usual tests in search for his ailment. And his blood tests came back with a midichlorian count of one thousand.”
His fingers grip at the sheets in his lap as he stares at her speechlessly before tearing his gaze away to look at his master, still asleep on his own bed.
“That’s not possible,” he says flatly.
“Can you feel him in the force, Knight Skywalker?” Che asks him gently. “Can you feel the bond you share with him?”
Anakin exhales. He thinks, probably, being stabbed hurt less than having to admit out loud that he can’t feel his master anymore, not in his mind or in the Force.
“You were kept in a Force suppression collar for several standard months,” Che says, still weirdly, achingly gentle. “As far as I can surmise, your body was shutting down. A child of the Force, it reasons, would need to be in connection with it near constantly. For a few days, you’d have been fine. But after months, you were dying. Paired with the injury to your stomach, you almost certainly would have died, had Master Kenobi not refreshed your supply of midichlorians with his own.”
He had Obi-Wan’s midichlorians in his body. Anakin tries to make the idea make sense, but it’s impossible.
Vokara Che takes his silence as a request for more information. “Your body is healing itself now, adjusting to the…transfusion as well as the renewal of your connection with the Force. Master Kenobi’s body is healing also, as far as we can tell. To be frank, I’m surprised that the process has been so smooth for you. There isn’t a wealth of information on midichlorians to begin with, but I had assumed that accepting someone else’s into your own body—your very cells—would produce some side effects. But your cells seem to recognize these midichlorians as yours intrinsically.”
Anakin stares down at his lap and tries to banish the thought that of course his body accepted Obi-Wan’s midichlorians. They were Obi-Wan’s.
The healer is going on about sleep and rest and recovery, when Anakin will be able to leave, when he’ll be able to be cleared for duty. Anakin isn’t listening.
Obi-Wan had saved his life by giving up his connection with the Force. He’d—Anakin doesn’t—his master is a Jedi. His master is the best Jedi in the entire Order. His master loves being a Jedi, loves the Temple life, loves communing with the Force.
He…gave that up? For Anakin?
“Why? Why did he do it?” he whispers to himself, turning his face again to stare at Obi-Wan’s still form.
“That’s a question the healing arts cannot answer,” Vokara Che says gently, reaching out to touch the edge of his bed, with something like sympathy coloring her tone. “You must ask him this yourself.”
If he ever wakes up, Anakin can’t help but think as he watches the rise and fall of his master’s chest. But I won’t leave until he does.
Which, of course, means that Obi-Wan Kenobi, in true fashion, has the absolute gall to wake up the day after Anakin is cleared to leave the Halls of Healing, and three minutes after Anakin abandons his post at his bedside in order to go find food for himself.
He doesn’t even get to the doors of the Halls before there’s a high pitched frantic shout of his name in a voice more familiar to him than his own. He turns towards it automatically, a flower in the sun.
Obi-Wan is awake in his bed, head moving around wildly. Healers surround him the second he tries to move, tries to leave, but he pushes at them roughly. He’s weak, he’s so weak, but he’s loud and Anakin can hear his name repeated over and over again. Obi-Wan is looking for him. Anakin isn’t there.
He’s running before he knows it, back further into the halls, closing the gap between himself and his master. He may physically shove one of the healers blocking him from Obi-Wan into another bed. He doesn’t know, doesn’t look. Their eyes catch and hold and Obi-Wan freezes as he stares at Anakin before letting his eyes fall to his stomach. Right. Yes. The last time Obi-Wan saw Anakin, he was bleeding out in his arms. Had he awoken to the same feeling of wrongness that Anakin had when he couldn’t feel their bond anymore?
His master lets out the strangest noise he’s ever heard him make, a raw keen that cuts Anakin to the bone as he raises his shaking hands towards him.
A whole army of clankers and Darth Sidious himself wouldn’t be able to stop him from clambering into his master’s bed and touching his hands and face and arms and letting himself be touched in return.
Anakin hadn’t been able to banish the thought that Obi-Wan would never wake up. To see his master’s stormy blue eyes now looking at him like he can’t quite believe it, it’s more than he can handle.
“Master, I’m sorry, thank you, I’m okay, we’re okay, thank you, I’m sorry,” he babbles breathlessly, right up until the moment his master wraps his arms around him and crushes him to his chest.
“I thought—” Obi-Wan rasps out, voice rusty from disuse, “The worst.”
Anakin buries his head in his master’s neck and hugs him tightly in return, ignoring the sound of the healers moving around in the background and murmuring to themselves. Eventually, he’ll climb off the bed, settle into his chair at its side. But for now, he lets himself have this, lets himself breathe in the scent of Obi-Wan and thank the Force they’re both okay.
Obi-Wan Kenobi isn’t alright.
He tries to give himself slack, but it’s been proving very difficult as the days turn into weeks turn into months and he still hasn’t fully recovered.
“Perhaps we should stop looking at this like recovery,” Vokara Che had told him during his last exam. “And start thinking in terms of adjustment.” She says this in a compassionate voice, but Obi-Wan can’t even focus on the good will. He’s too stuck on her words. On what they could mean.
“But…the pain is lessening,” he had pointed out faintly, tucking his arms against his chest. “And it’s not constant. Surely that means….I was under the impression that that means….That you thought that would—”
Vokara had sighed and put down her datapaad to look at him fully. “Obi-Wan, there’s never been a single other documented case like this in our histories. We don’t know what is going to happen. What could happen. Perhaps, in a few months, your body will fully adjust to its new midichlorian count, and the pain will go away completely. Perhaps it will happen tomorrow. But there’s a chance that we should prepare for that this may just be around to stay. We are not meant to give away our midichlorians, Obi-Wan. Your body was born with a certain amount in each cell and you’ve cut it down instantly and drastically. Perhaps your body will never fully recover.”
They had ended the examination soon after, but her words had stuck with him, haunting his dreams and worst nightmares.
It’s been six standard months since Obi-Wan rescued Anakin, since Anakin almost died, since Obi-Wan had felt so desperate to save him—to not have another of his loved ones die in his arms—well. Since those events had happened. Life has gone on as stubbornly as it always has in the past. Three standard weeks after Obi-Wan had woken up, Anakin and Ahsoka had been sent out to the frontlines. Anakin’s come back to the Temple at every opportunity, bringing with him trinkets and tea and natural medicines from every planet he travels to, as if a healing salve from Gidalek would fix Obi-Wan.
Not to say, of course, that Obi-Wan is broken. He thinks, personally, that he has taken the loss of most of his midichlorians rather well. It is fairly easy to cope with the change when all he has to do is think of how he would have taken the loss of Anakin, and suddenly not being able to float objects is survivable.
And alright, his connection to the Force had been more than that. But his connection to Anakin, that’s more important than anything.
The pain is harder to deal with, though Obi-Wan is no stranger to pain.
It ebbs and flows like tidal currents, and though he can sometimes feel it coming, feel the way his body will try to warn him, he is mostly still taken by surprise when it hits at its most intense. The galaxy’s worst, private thunderstorm.
Today has started off with a particularly bad period of pain that started from his shoulder but radiated throughout his whole chest until each breath felt like his lungs were trying to expand into a space too small for them. He’d woken up and been incapable of doing anything more than staring at the ceiling with clenched teeth and wet eyes.
It’s almost late afternoon now. The most he’s been able to do is drag himself out of bed and into the kitchen unit of the rooms he still shares with Anakin. His padawan is absent, sent a week and a half ago to a planet in the Mid Rim to chase the rumors of a sighting of Darth Maul.
The knowledge that the war is going on still never really leaves Obi-Wan’s mind. Though he hasn’t been cleared for duty—and he believes that he never will—the Council has let him stay on in an advising capacity. It’s a blessing, of course. But it feels akin to torture sometimes as well, to know that his men are fighting under another general, that Anakin must face Maul alone, that Obi-Wan can no longer slash at a droid, change the course of a battle, protect his troops, his padawan—
He just has to hear about it and advise and strategize, if the pain in his body allows him to attend the Council sessions.
He collapses into a chair at the table and puts his head down onto the steel surface, taking full advantage of the fact that he’s alone.
Anakin is off fighting a war, potentially dying or having to survive seeing his men die.
And Obi-Wan’s biggest accomplishment today is that he got out of bed.
The thought drags a cough of wet laughter from his mouth. He thinks perhaps that if he were to run into Darth Maul, the zabrak wouldn’t even kill him. Surely this is a worse fate than instantaneous death.
He should shower. It sometimes helps, to feel the heated water on the muscles of his back. He should shower and get dressed and try to salvage the rest of the day. Anakin will be back soon, after all, and he’ll ask him how he spent his time. He’ll need to have something truthful to tell him.
Over the last six months, Anakin has become something of an expert on chronic pain and its treatments. He’ll scold Obi-Wan for being too idle, but he’ll get a furrow in his brows if he hears that Obi-Wan pushed himself into exercising in the training salles. He’s confiscated all of Obi-Wan’s stash of drink, as well as created a meal plan heaping with nutrient-rich foods.
He’d be annoyed, perhaps even furious, at his padawan, if he did not know that this was Anakin’s way of dealing with his guilt. Or perhaps, of coping with being confronted with a situation to which there was no solution and nothing substantial he can really do to help.
As if summoned by his thoughts alone, the door to their quarters slides open and Anakin strides through, traveling bag clutched casually in his mech hand. Obi-Wan tries to sit up and look presentable, but he knows it’s too late.
“Padawan!” He exclaims as cheerfully as he can manage. His enthusiasm at seeing Anakin is not fake. The pain is easier to manage with Anakin close, but it’s not like he could inform anyone of this fact. He turns his body towards him, like…like a flower to the sun, even as Anakin drops his bag on the couch and moves to close the distance between them, kneeling down at Obi-Wan’s side.
“How are you feeling, Master?” Anakin wastes no time in asking, his flesh hand coming to feel Obi-Wan’s forehead and then check his pulse. The motherhenning would make him chuckle on a better day, but now he barely has the energy for the slightest quirk of his lips.
“I wasn’t expecting you back so quickly,” he says instead of answering Anakin’s question. “You surprised me.”
There’s a momentary pause, as Anakin probably thinks the same thing as Obi-Wan: two years ago, Obi-Wan would have been able to feel Anakin entering atmo, let alone the Jedi Temple.
“Your pain, Master,” Anakin insists doggedly, looking up at him with narrowed eyes, even as his hands gently rub at Obi-Wan’s knees. That’s another thing that has changed as well, though quantifying it or even thinking of it is something Obi-Wan tries to avoid, lest the guilt kill him. Anakin…touches him more now. Near constantly. As if after his imprisonment and Obi-Wan’s sacrifice, he has forgotten that they are two separate bodies.
Anakin grabs at his wrist and turns it over, just…holding it in one of his hands. Obi-Wan blinks in the face of his padawan’s casual affection, still unused to Anakin wanting to touch him in such a way even after six months of it.
There’s a slightly far away look in Anakin’s eyes though, like he’s looking through him. Perhaps he’s searching in the Force for Obi-Wan’s absent signature, like a youngling running their tongue over a missing tooth’s empty cavity. Or…
“Are you checking my pulse?” He asks incredulously when he realizes where exactly Anakin’s fingers are positioned. Anakin flushes red, which just proves that he is. “Why?”
His padawan doesn’t let go, but he does drop his gaze to their joined hands. “Don’t like it,” he finally mutters, thumb starting to mindlessly stroke over Obi-Wan’s wrist. “Can’t feel you, don’t know if you’re alright when I’m…away. Helps after.”
“Sorry,” Obi-Wan says faintly. “Are you saying you always check my pulse after you return to the Temple?”
Anakin’s face somehow turns redder, but he still doesn’t stand back or put room between them. Obi-Wan thinks that if they were to have a similar conversation only a few years ago, Anakin would have stormed out of the room ten times over now. Perhaps without the bond, his padawan doesn’t want to leave him. The thought makes his chest tight with something that has nothing to do with pain.
“Master, how is your pain today?” His delightfully stubborn padawan asks again, much more insistently, though if it’s because he wants to know or wants to stop Obi-Wan’s line of questioning is unclear. “On the one to ten scale.”
Obi-Wan capitulates. He usually does in the face of Anakin’s slanted, worried eyebrows, at the sight of perhaps the strongest person in the galaxy on his knees before him. “A seven,” he says.
Anakin’s eyes get wider, and his hold tightens on his hand. A seven for Obi-Wan is really an eight, sometimes a nine, but they both let him pretend. Anakin knows after so long of hearing Obi-Wan downplay his injuries even before this…incident.
“Why are you out of bed then?” Anakin asks accusingly. “Master, you know Healer Che says to not push yourself on the bad days—”
“Padawan, I have not pushed myself,” Obi-Wan snaps back, suddenly feeling infinitely more exhausted. “I have walked seventeen steps from the bedroom to this table.”
Anakin’s frown most certainly conveys that he thinks seventeen steps is seventeen too many, but before he can say anything, Obi-Wan grabs his hand between both of his.
“I’ll take a shower and go back to bed,” he promises, letting his hands cradle Anakin’s like it’s something precious. He’s spent years doing the same thing with their bond, but Anakin looks down at their joined touch almost like it’s something to be worshipped.
“Tell me of your mission, Padawan,” he requests when the moment becomes too heavy to bear in silence any longer. “Were the rumors true? Did you see Maul?”
A guilty look Obi-Wan would recognize anywhere flashes through Anakin’s eyes, and he clears his throat and stands.
“A shower, Master? Surely that can wait until tomorrow.”
Obi-Wan narrows his eyes at his suddenly recalcitrant padawan. “I believe I’m starting to smell,” he says.
Anakin scoffs. “You must have lost your sense of smell then too, Master. You smell like you always do.”
“Oh?”
“Like…that tea from Bumil-Garo, the one with all the spices. And smoky and…warm. And…I don’t know…” His padawan trails off and colors. “It’s not bad.”
Obi-Wan blinks up at him. “Oh. Well. Ah. Thank you. I suppose.”
Anakin runs his hand through his hair, flustered more than a simple compliment should make him. But Obi-Wan supposes it’s a rather revealing compliment as far as these things go.
“It helps with the pain. The water.” He needs to give him honesty in return, but this one hurts leaving his throat. Before, he’d never considered himself especially prideful. Now every moment he has to admit to weakness feels like it will be the one to undo him.
Anakin gets a very strange gleam in his eyes. “I may know something to help more than a shower, Master,” he says, crouching down again until they’re at eye-level. “I learned of a technique, an old treatment from Kaltin VI; those who taught me said it was proven to help with ailments such as yours.”
Obi-Wan has been reliably informed many times over that there is no ailment such as his, but he stays quiet and looks at his padawan.
“Kaltin VI,” he repeats speculatively. “Isn’t that one of the moons of the planet Darth Maul was reported as being sighted on?”
Anakin looks away again, standing up and holding out a hand for Obi-Wan to grip. “Let me at least try , Master. Please. For me.”
Sometime in the last six months, perhaps the very moment that Anakin learned what Obi-Wan had given up in order to keep Anakin alive, his padawan realized just how much his old master would do for him, just how effective his pleading can be.
It’s absolutely the worst.
Mostly because Obi-Wan can’t help but give in.
“Alright, padawan,” he sighs, mentally preparing himself for the journey of getting up. “Where do you need me?”
“Where is your pain?”
Obi-Wan raises an eyebrow and gives him a humorless smile.
“Where is your pain most intense?” Anakin corrects himself.
“My shoulder and back,” Obi-Wan admits. “Chest.”
Some days it’s harder to tell than others. There’s no old injury that could be the focal point of his pain, nothing to focus treatment or attention on. Every cell of his body suffered a hard and sudden loss. The aches, the sharp shoots of pain that can feel like lightning over his skin—some days they come from everywhere.
“Your bed then, Master. If you could…take off your shirt and lay down. I’ll be there in a second. I promise it won’t take long.”
“How would you like me?” he asks absently, already counting down the steps in his mind. Raising himself from the chair will hurt, but it will be worth it to collapse into his bed. Seventeen steps. Doable. “On my stomach or on my back?”
Anakin chokes and turns into the kitchen hurriedly. “Whichever!” He says in a very high voice. “We can…start with your shoulder.”
“Alright,” he says, slowly and carefully getting up from the chair. For the sake of Anakin, who watches him more than he doesn’t these days, he tries to make his movements smooth. Seventeen steps. Sixteen. Fifteen.
A hand falls to rest on his lower back. “Don’t pretend, Obi-Wan,” Anakin murmurs into his ear, warm breath ghosting over his cheek. “You don’t have to pretend.”
Without his conscious decision to do so, he relaxes into the gentle pressure of Anakin’s hand as they move towards the bedroom. Ten more steps, then five. Then Anakin stops him from sitting on the bed. “Your shirt, Obi-Wan,” he commands and Obi-Wan releases a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.
“We’re quite lucky I didn’t manage to get dressed then, aren’t we?” He quips, grabbing at the hem of his sleep shirt and pulling it over his head carefully. His muscles protest the stretch, the bending, but he completes the task in one move. Thank the Force.
Anakin guides him into laying down on his stomach, centered in his bed.
He folds his arms and rests his chin on them, staring into the creases of his pillows as Anakin moves around him.
“I didn’t realize there was much time for learning of obscure healing practices while investigating a Sith sighting,” he says leadingly, thinking back to Anakin’s guilty look in the other room when he first mentioned Maul.
The bed shifts as Anakin climbs onto it, straddling his upper thighs and placing his hands against his skin. He’s so obviously trying to keep most of his weight off of Obi-Wan, but it’s certainly not the pain that makes Obi-Wan’s mouth go dry and his heart pick up its pace. He has the ridiculous thought that he’s glad that Anakin is no longer checking his pulse.
“It’s relatively easy to learn, Master,” Anakin mutters sounding a shade too resentful for his liking. “I don’t know why any of the kriffing healers in the Halls couldn’t find the texts that mention it, it’s like they barely looked.”
Ah. Of course. Anakin has taken to treating the healers to sullen silence and barely hidden resentment in the last six months. To him, the problem is clear: Obi-Wan has pain that affects his daily life. Obi-Wan is in near constant pain that becomes debilitating on some days. The healers should be able to fix it. The healers should not, as Anakin had called it when Obi-Wan reluctantly relayed Vokara Che’s assessment of the issue, give up.
It’s clear to see that Anakin certainly hasn’t.
“Perhaps you are simply more skilled in these things than we have given you credit for in the past,” he says blasely. “Or your immense power makes it easier to grasp hard techniques. You were proficient in the first two forms of the saber before anyone else in your age group, though you started much later.”
You also may have much more motivation to spend tending to this one patient than any of the healers in the Halls, he doesn’t say.
“Careful, Obi-Wan,” Anakin murmurs. “You almost sound proud.”
If Obi-Wan could have, he would have sat up at this in offense. “Im very proud of you, dear one,” he corrects. “You have grown into the finest Knight of the Jedi Order, and I believe there is no greater a padawan I could have wished for. And…and no greater a friend.”
Anakin’s hands, which have been carefully massaging the muscles of his back still. He clears his throat a few times before he eventually chokes out, “Thank you, Master.”
“I apologize for not saying something sooner. I had thought it obvious,” he murmurs, settling his head back onto his crossed arms.
Anakin stays quiet, and Obi-Wan aches for their old bond in a way he isn’t particularly proud of. When Obi-Wan had been Force sensitive, he’d been able to read Anakin’s silences as easy as if the feelings accompanying them had been his own. His padawan had a habit of falling quiet and still, contemplating something or another Obi-Wan had no idea how to even begin to tackle.
Now, he only has Anakin’s tone and facial expressions and the wealth of history between them lending itself to his ability to interpret his padawan. But he won’t ever again know him the way they’d known each other when bonded.
“So tell me about this treatment of yours, Anakin,” he requests, shifting under his padawan’s hands until Anakin squeezes his legs tighter around his thighs in silent reprimand.
“There’s a high number of Force-sensitives on Kaltin VI,” Anakin murmurs, hands lifting off and away from Obi-Wan’s back. “They don’t call it the Force, but their understanding of it parallels much of our own, though they are not as advanced as much of the Mid Rim planetary systems. But they know about midichlorians and they’ve invented several different techniques for Force Healing. I told them about you and your symptoms, and they taught me one of their methods for dealing with pain that lasts longer than the initial injury.”
“Mm,” Obi-Wan hums to show he’s listening even as he lets his eyes fall closed. He’s so tired. Perhaps Anakin can complete this treatment without Obi-Wan being awake.
That sounds nice.
“They see the Force as much more visual than we do,” Anakin continues. “We feel it around us, but they see it, running through the air and our bodies. Like golden lights. They taught me how, mostly. If you can see it, it’s easier to manipulate. It’s even easier if you can see and feel it, which I think might be why I got it so quick. They just took the Force from the world around them, ran it through their own bodies to purify it and concentrate it, and then pressed in into the patient’s body through direct contact to the localized affliction.”
“Purify it?” Obi-Wan repeats, wide awake now and curious at this new knowledge. “How do you…run it through your body?”
“I don’t know, Master,” Anakin replies dutifully. “I tried it a lot on Kaltin VI. The closest I can come to describing it is like….being pierced with a needle through the finger and it stretching down your hand, up your arm, to your chest and then down your other arm. You can’t just take it from around you. You have to take some from yourself too.”
“Take some from yourself ?” Obi-Wan repeats again, this time much louder. “Padawan! What is this really? What is it doing to you?”
“It only takes a few midichlorians,” Anakin defends, scrambling up Obi-Wan’s back and locking his thighs around him to keep him on the bed. “Master, you know I have them to spare. I lose more getting banged up on the field than I would doing this for you.”
The very thought of Anakin losing any of his midichlorians, for Obi-Wan, makes him feel as if he’s going to be sick. He knows firsthand how poorly a body can adjust to such a loss. Perhaps Anakin is telling the truth about the cost of such a treatment, that it’s minimal and nearly unnoticeable.
But what if he’s lying? Obi-Wan wouldn’t put it past him. He must have known Obi-Wan wouldn’t agree to this. He must have known Obi-Wan would argue.
Filled with despair and guilt and love and doubt, he pushes up just enough to dislodge Anakin and flip himself around so that he’s laying on his back beneath his padawan. “I don’t want your midichlorians, Anakin.”
Anakin, unsurprisingly, looks angry and obstinate. “It’s not about what you want, Obi-Wan. You need them. It’s not like what…what you did for me. They won’t stay in your body or anything, it’s not an actual transfusion. I haven’t found a way to give you back your connection to the Force,” the yet is unspoken but unbearably loud. “This is just to help with your pain.”
“My pain, padawan? Or your guilt?”
It is, Obi-Wan thinks, a strange conversation, to be having with Anakin on top of him, staring down at him with a frown of consternation marring the lines of his handsome face.
“Why can’t it be both?” Anakin mutters, breaking their eye contact to look down the lines of Obi-Wan’s body, as if he can’t help himself.
“You are not guilty of anything, Anakin,” he says for the six hundredth time since they were injured. “I made a choice—“
“You weren’t in your right mind, Master, I’ve seen the holos, I know—I know your old master was killed by a wound in nearly the same place as I was injured. You were operating half on trauma and the other on adrenaline and—“
“And if I had to go back and make that choice again, I wouldn’t hesitate, padawan. Even knowing how difficult adjusting to this new life has been. It’s worth it.”
“How can you say that, Obi-Wan? At least once a week you are bedridden from the pain, and even when you’re able to move around, it’s hardly for more than eight hours before you’re depleted! Maybe if we’re lucky, you’ll have three days out of a week where you feel normal, but even then you have to train carefully and eat perfectly or else the next day may be much worse! How can you say you’d make the same choice again? I wouldn’t! I’d rather have died—“
“Don’t say that,” Obi-Wan snaps fiercely. “Don’t you dare say something so foolish, Anakin.”
“It’s true!” Anakin argues mulishly.
“I’d do the same again and again in every iteration of the same scenario! No matter what it means afterwards for me. Because this—it’s survivable, Anakin. It hurts and at the very least it’s dreadfully inconvenient, but I am adjusting. I am learning my new limitations and low points, learning how to survive like this. But there would have been no learning to survive had you died in that corridor, Anakin. None.”
It’s important to not look away, to keep eye contact throughout his little speech so that his padawan can see how much he means it. He wants it to be enough. He doesn’t know what else he can do or say, but the thought that Anakin is going to carry grief and guilt over Obi-Wan’s actions for the rest of his life is almost as painful as his actual pain.
Anakin’s face crumbles slowly above him, the frown giving way to slanted eyebrows and his chin dimpling from the way his bottom lip begins to tremble.
“Oh, Anakin,” he whispers, reaching up to wipe at his cheek with all the same gentleness Anakin’s shown him.
Anakin nuzzles into his hand and then achingly slowly moves his head inward and brushes his lips against Obi-Wan’s palm. Obi-Wan’s breath catches in his throat. There is no mistaking that sort of gesture, the reverence in the movement as Anakin allows his mouth to linger. Or, perhaps, the reverence in Anakin’s eyes when Obi-Wan allows his mouth to linger on his skin.
Emboldened, Anakin trails his lips further down until they’re resting on Obi-Wan’s wrist.
“Did the Kaltinians also teach you a new method of checking someone’s pulse?” Obi-Wan forces out of his dry mouth. The words tremble in the air before falling in between them. An out. He is giving Anakin an out.
But Anakin doesn’t take it. “No, Obi-Wan,” he murmurs, shifting on the bed until he’s pinning Obi-Wan to it, arms on either side of his head and face hovering just above his. “I’m…I…that is, for a long time, before any of this, but after so much more too—but. I need to tell you…I—”
Obi-Wan cuts him off with a kiss. It feels inevitable. Of course this is what his love for Anakin would eventually become. He can’t imagine kissing another, wanting to kiss another now that he’s kissing Anakin and Anakin—through what must be a miracle of the Force—is kissing him back.
Perhaps he wouldn’t have ever realized, had Anakin not made the first overture. For many, many years now, Anakin has been the center of his world, though the nature of this has changed in recent months especially.
Yes, maybe he never would have realized. Having Anakin the way he’s had him since the transferral would have been enough. Having Anakin the way he had him before that would have been enough too. Obi-Wan had never felt there to be a lack of something between them. But the sweet kisses Anakin presses to his lips make him realize that there could be something more too.
He licks lightly at Anakin’s bottom lip, and the man’s mouth falls open immediately to grant him access, as if he’s just been waiting for Obi-Wan to ask. The kiss turns rougher, Anakin moving on top of him to better angle his head, bring their hips close together. One hand trails up and down his neck before it runs over the back of his neck and grips it tightly.
Obi-Wan gasps and Anakin moans in approval and then whines out when he’s pushed back. “I can’t,” Obi-Wan says, breathless and wanting and aching.
“Obi-Wan, of course you can, I promise I’m not doing this out of a sense of guilt and you’re not taking advantage of me. We—”
“No, Anakin, you don’t understand. I’m….” Obi-Wan hesitates, instinctual and damning. He watches as Anakin’s face closes off slowly but surely. “I’m in a great deal of pain, Anakin, there’s no way that I can…can continue this right now. I’m sorry —”
Because Anakin is a young, healthy, gorgeous man. He should be…sleeping with whoever catches his eye. That’s, after all, what Obi-Wan had done at his age. What Anakin shouldn’t be doing is hovering over a man sixteen years his senior, so in pain at the moment that he can’t even kiss him the way he so obviously deserves to be kissed.
“No, no,” Anakin says as he lifts himself off Obi-Wan. “I’m sorry. I…forgot.” He looks sheepish, rubbing at the back of his neck and darting his eyes from Obi-Wan’s messy hair to his kiss-red lips to his bare chest.
“I did, too,” Obi-Wan admits softly, smiling up at his padawan. “For a bit,” he adds on. “But I suppose I can see my way into trying your new healing method now. Just the once. And only if you promise it…it doesn’t hurt you.”
“I promise,” Anakin says solemnly. And then his face breaks into a grin. “I’m really glad you’re letting me try it though, I didn’t bribe Rex into dressing as a woman and reading aloud a prepared speech about how she saw a black and red zabrak on Riendul so that I could be sent to investigate, go to Kaltin VI instead, and spend a week and a half straight learning how to do this just so you could say no.”
Obi-Wan nods magnanimously. “I’m glad to be of—I’m sorry, you did what?”
Anakin laughs, not even bothering to look guilty. He takes advantage of Obi-Wan’s momentary distraction to press a chaste kiss to his mouth before pulling away.
Obi-Wan can’t even be angry. He has the funny notion that if he could still feel it, the Force would be singing around them, bright and loud with Anakin’s joy. In the face of that warmth, even some of Obi-Wan’s pain feels like it’s melting away.