Chapter Text
Zena was apologetic as she dropped Obi-Wan off at the entrance to the medcenter. "I'd come in with you," she said. "But I'm still on duty and they'll be expecting me back..."
Obi-Wan waved her off without much thought, but it was a decision he soon found himself regretting. He'd never been to a Mandalorian healing center before and the whole place was very confusing. There didn't seem to be any sort of check-in system or central place of administration—Obi-Wan was able to walk right inside without anyone stopping him. He wandered until he got a general sense of the place, but his confusion only increased. There didn't seem to be separately delineated wards for different types of patients. Instead, there were dozens of identical hallways lined with rooms radiating out from a central courtyard.
Obi-Wan searched unsuccessfully for the trauma ward until he realized that the patients seemed to be grouped based on the first letter of their clan or family names. If you knew someone's name, you could find them by going down the hallway labeled with the proper letter and looking at the names written on the doors.
With this revelation at hand, he confidently went to the "S'' hallway and walked up and down looking for Anakin, but failed to find him anywhere. Had they transcribed his name wrong? That didn't seem likely; "sk" was a common enough combination in Mando'a and "Skywalker" shouldn't have been a hard name to understand even if it was an unusual one. Maybe there was a special area somewhere where "recruits" were kept under guard? He could sense Anakin in the Force now, but only in a vague way that meant he was somewhere nearby without any clear direction.
Obi-Wan was searching for someone to ask for help when he suddenly realized what must have happened. He left the "S" hallway behind and hurried over to the Mandalorian equivalent of "K." There, he shortly found a door labeled "Anakin Kenobi" because, naturally, a Mandalorian would assume Anakin would be using Obi-Wan's family name now. The Indoctrination Center had probably updated his data file without even thinking to ask.
Obi-Wan went inside and couldn't help a gasp when he finally set eyes on Anakin. He was stretched out on a medical bed surrounded by machines monitoring his vitals. Obi-Wan's relief at finally finding him was tempered by the shock of seeing him. Anakin's upper body was bare and there was a splash of dried blood staining his neck and part of his cheek. He looked terribly pale and there was a large bacta patch over his right abdomen.
Obi-Wan approached his bedside and reached out to touch Anakin's forehead. He closed his eyes as he assessed him through the Force. The wound felt awful, a gaping laceration that went deep into his stomach, but Obi-Wan could also sense the bacta doing its work to heal the damage.
Anakin was so deeply unconscious that there was no response at all to Obi-Wan's probing. His mind felt clouded and disoriented, and Obi-Wan wondered if he might have a concussion on top of the stab wound. Still, he was comforted by Anakin's strong presence in the Force. Even injured and unconscious, his mind glowed like a banked fire, his strength suppressed but still present.
Obi-Wan took a slow breath and kept his hand on Anakin's head as he tried to calm himself. He'd found him. Anakin was safe now. He was going to be fine. He should be relieved, yet his inner turmoil only seemed to increase. Now that he'd found Anakin, anger was bubbling up to take the place of fear.
Obi-Wan let himself focus for the moment on the indignation that had been building up inside of him. He'd known this was going to happen. He kept trying to tell everyone that Anakin was in danger, that he needed to be released from the Indoctrination Center, but no one had listened to him.
Obi-Wan's resentment was so strong that it felt like a physical weight lodged in his chest. He took a deep breath and let himself feel everything he'd been repressing since the day Anakin had arrived. Half-remembered moments came back to him—how he'd had to fight just to get access to Anakin, how there'd been surprise that Obi-Wan had still cared about his former student, how no one understood what having a padawan meant. Voices replayed in his head, moments that he'd thought he'd brushed off and let go of, but which came back to him now crystal clear and steeped in bitter frustration.
He's not your brother any longer.
Why didn't you tell us you were a parent?
Is that human hair? What are you supposed to do with it?
As a loveless orphan?
It was infuriating. Maddening. His anger was justified, righteous even. He had every reason to be furious.
Obi-Wan let the flush of emotion move through him, then reached out into the Force as he began to take a series of long, deep breaths. Each time he exhaled, he imagined his pain and resentment leaving his body along with his breath. The Force rippled around him as his disturbed feelings flooded outward and began to drain away like the taint of infection drawn from a wound. His anger wasn't helpful now. He needed to be calm and in control, for Anakin's sake as much as his own.
He had been right, but that was in the past and he needed to focus on the present. Anakin was injured, but he hadn't been killed and now he was in a safe place getting medical treatment. This wasn't how Obi-Wan had wanted it to happen, but Anakin was finally out of the Indoctrination Center and he was never going back in again if Obi-Wan had anything to say about it. He didn't know much about the Mandalorian court system, but he knew he had rights as a father. Surely any judge on Mandalore would be inclined to side with an irate parent over the government. Obi-Wan could find a way to make this very unpleasant for everyone involved.
Obi-Wan began to feel calm, or calmer at least, as he refocused. The fight over the Indoctrination Center was in the future. Instead of worrying about that, he needed to do what he could for Anakin now.
Opening his eyes, he took another breath and reassessed. Anakin's skin felt cold and clammy under his hand and his face was very pale. No doubt he'd lost a lot of blood earlier, but shouldn't he be looking better by now? Obi-Wan resolved to find a healer and get an update on his condition.
Looking around the room, Obi-Wan located a datascreen on the wall which seemed to contain Anakin's chart as well as a display of moving graphs and numbers that showed his heartbeat and other vital signs. At the bottom of the screen, there was a section with notes from the medical staff, but Obi-Wan struggled to make sense of them. All of the words seemed to be jargon he was unfamiliar with. He realized that he didn't know any medical vocabulary except the most basic terms that a soldier might need like "aaray'kyramud" for "painkiller."
There was a "call" button at the top of the datascreen and Obi-Wan hit it experimentally. A chime sounded and an alert flashed. Hopefully that would summon a healer to the room.
Obi-Wan looked out in the hallway, checking to see if anyone was coming, but there was no one in sight. The entire medcenter felt oddly quiet compared to Obi-Wan's experience of Jedi healing halls and Republic medical bays. There was barely any noise at all from the other rooms. The corridors were painted a muted orange color and decorated with abstract murals and mosaics. If it weren't for the occasional piece of medical equipment in the hallway, Obi-Wan would have assumed he was in a hotel or an apartment building instead of a place of healing.
One of those pieces of equipment, a small medical droid with a domed head and dozens of folded arms, approached Obi-Wan and beeped at him. He realized it was trying to get access to Anakin's room and moved back to let it roll inside. The droid went straight to the bed and extended a long, thin wand from its body, waving it over Anakin. It ran a series of scans, extending different arms and clicking and beeping to itself as it assessed him.
"Is he all right?" Obi-Wan asked, but frustratingly the droid only seemed to speak Binary. "Is there a healer somewhere I could talk to?"
The droid beeped some more in response and pointed to the datascreen on the wall. The display had changed to a set of numbers counting down slowly.
"Does that mean a healer is coming?" Obi-Wan asked.
The droid beeped affirmatively and rolled out of the room.
Obi-Wan tried to take the countdown as an opportunity to practice patience, but he was not especially successful. He went to look out the door and then paced around the room, constantly looking back at the datascreen to check how much longer he had to wait. The count proved accurate at least as shortly after it hit zero, footsteps sounded in the hallway.
Obi-Wan looked out the door to see four people approaching, all dressed in matching white uniforms.
"Uh, hello?" Obi-Wan said as they came inside. Two of them were holding medical scanners and went to stand over the bed while a third motioned Obi-Wan out of the way. "Are you the healers?"
"Uh, no?" the man said. "I mean, we're body workers."
Obi-Wan blinked and realized he'd been using the wrong noun. It wasn't jahaalan from the verb for "to heal," but baar'ur, a person who worked on the body. He should have realized that—the same word was used for medic. "Right, that's what I—can you give me an update on his condition?"
"You're family?" the man asked.
"Yes, I'm his father—" Obi-Wan stopped, distracted by the fact that the other healers had activated a repulsorlift in the base of Anakin's bed, causing it to rise several inches into the air. One of them pressed a button on the controls and it started moving toward the door while the others followed.
"Wait, what's happening?" Obi-Wan said. "Where are they taking him?"
The man raised his hands, blocking his path and preventing Obi-Wan from following. Obi-Wan momentarily considered Force pushing him out of the way before he got control over himself. The last thing he needed was to get thrown out for assaulting the medical staff.
"Everything is fine," the man was saying in a soothing tone. "We're taking him to—" and said a word or phrase that Obi-Wan didn't recognize.
Obi-Wan frowned, trying to puzzle out the meaning before giving up. "I need to go with him," he said, and made to go around the man, but he stopped him again.
"I'm afraid you can't go to the—" he said the same phrase again that Obi-Wan didn't understand. "But you can monitor his progress from here."
"Progress? With what, what's happening?"
The man made an impatient noise. "They're going to—" A series of sounds came out of his mouth, some of which Obi-Wan recognized as words but most of which he didn't, and none of which he could make sense of as a coherent sentence.
Obi-Wan's confusion must have been clear on his face because the man mimed something, touching his hand to his stomach, and repeated himself, speaking slower this time. Obi-Wan tried to concentrate and make sense of the jumble of unfamiliar words and phrases. Somewhere in there he heard the words epan—guts or intestines—and hokaani—cut. Surgery, that must be it, they were taking Anakin into surgery.
The man took the datascreen down off the wall and pressed it into Obi-Wan's hands. "You can watch here," he said before turning away for the door.
"Wait—" Obi-Wan raised a hand, but the man was already out the door, rushing after his colleagues.
Obi-Wan made an attempt to follow them, but the group had already vanished through a door further down the corridor. The lock flashed red and beeped disapprovingly at Obi-Wan when he attempted to open it. He might have disabled the lock and gone after them, but barging into a surgical facility probably wasn't going to help matters.
At a loss and frustrated with himself for not demanding more information from the healers before they took Anakin, Obi-Wan went back to the room to wait.