Chapter Text
The Great Discovery
Anakin isn’t entirely certain how you are supposed to act at a formal funeral, especially one where they were literally burning the body in front of you. Who does that? How do they deal with the weird meat-but-not-meat-don’t-think-like-that smell? Does no one notice his foot is sticking out of the fire? Are they going to take care of that?
He makes an effort to refocus, distracting himself by taking a peep at Padme, who is looking really pretty in the firelight.
Anakin’s never really been to a funeral before, much less a Jedi one that is attended by a bunch of Jedi Masters and high ranking officials, so he’s honestly just winging it. What’s appropriate? What isn’t? Are you allowed to tell people you’re hungry? Is that awkward with the weird meat smell?
At the very least, he’s fairly certain you’re not supposed to tell your new teacher that you saw the Chancellor of the Republic — who is currently standing just two people away from you — at the slave markets on Tatooine, having some of his underlings buy some people for him and subsequently using some kind of scary magic lightning to electrocute the one who tried to run away.
Amu says Anakin isn’t the best in social situations, but even he knows that would put a damper on the solemn, silent mood that defines the funeral at the moment.
But what is Anakin supposed to do? Wait? That seems like it would be dumb, and Obi-Wan already told him that he hated slavers, so he would care if Chancellor Palpatine was one. Right? He’d want Anakin to tell him.
Though this is his master’s funeral, so Obi-Wan is probably really sad. Anakin would be sad too, if he weren’t so distracted by Chancellor Palpatine.
He’s going to tell him. He has to. Shoring up his courage, Anakin reaches out and tugs on Obi-Wan’s sleeve. It seems to take a minute for the movement to register, but then he turns to look at Anakin, tipping his head down toward him. His hood shadows his face.
Oh boy. He really does look sad.
“Anakin?” He speaks in a whisper. “What’s the matter?”
“Um…” Anakin peers around Obi-Wan and Padme and sneaks another look at Chancellor Palpatine. “Um…”
Obi-Wan takes his hand. “Don’t be afraid, Anakin,” he says in a gentle, even voice. “You will be a Jedi. I promise.”
Anakin blinks at him. How does a Jedi so completely misread a situation? He always thought they could read minds. “No, no, it’s not that.”
“Then what is it?”
“I need to talk to you, please. Alone.”
Obi-Wan just stares at him for a long moment, like he can’t quite believe Anakin asked him to leave his own master’s funeral early. It’s not like Anakin doesn’t miss Mr. Qui-Gon too, but this seems more important.
“Please,” Anakin repeats, giving him his best tooka-kitten eyes and drawing his eyebrows together in the way Amu always said made him look sweet and naive. She laughed when she said it, because Anakin is neither.
Obi-Wan sighs heavily. His face cycles through several different expressions — the familiar progression of an adult deciding to humor Anakin and be the reassuring grownup in the situation. “All right.” He glances at the other bystanders, murmurs something in the dark skinned Jedi’s ear — Master Mace, Anakin thinks his name is — and slips into the shadows surrounding the covered pavilion where the funeral is taking place, tugging Anakin along with him.
In a moment, they’re walking across one of the moonlit lawns that surrounds the palace. Anakin is so enamored by the grass beneath his boots — actual grass! With little flowers shaped like stars! — that he forgets why he wanted to talk to Obi-Wan until they come to a halt in a secluded grotto with a fountain bubbling in the middle and drooping rose trees hiding them from view.
“What’s the matter, Anakin?” Obi-Wan asks, stopping in front of the fountain. “Did something frighten you? Did you have a question?”
Anakin tips his head back to look at Obi-Wan, deciding that this definitely could have waited until after his master’s funeral. “Um. Well, here’s the thing…”
“Oh, Force.” Obi-Wan pinches his nose. “What did you do?”
Outrage rises up in Anakin. “I didn’t do anything!”
“That’s what you said after you blew up the Trade Federation ship .”
“Artoo did that!”
“Ana kin .” He puts a special, Coruscanti-accented spin on the last syllable.
“Mast er .” Anakin puts his own special, Tatooian-accented twist on it.
They look at each other. Obi-Wan seems on the verge of tears.
Well. No time like the present. “I know Chancellor Palpatine from Tatooine because he came there once to buy slaves, and his hood fell back, and I saw his face, and yes, I am sure, and I do remember him because one of the slaves tried to run away, so the Chancellor zapped him with this scary lightning that came from his hands , and now Padme’s made him your leader, and I think that’s really bad, so I wanted you to know.” Anakin hauls in a deep breath, turning expectant eyes toward Obi-Wan.
Obi-Wan’s mouth is open. He looks much less like a Jedi when it’s like that. Right now he mostly just looks stupid and a bit blank. Anakin stretches up on tiptoe and pokes his chin until he closes his mouth.
The silence stretches uncomfortably long. Obi-Wan just keeps blinking, like he’s a droid with a malfunctioning logic unit. Anakin sticks his hands in his pockets and sways back and forth, scuffing the ground with one foot.
Obi-Wan still doesn’t say anything. Tilting his head back again, Anakin asks, “Are you… okay?”
Obi-Wan’s mouth opens and closes a few times. No sound comes out.
“Do I… Do I need to, like, call someone?” Anakin takes a half step back, looking over his shoulder. “I could get —”
Life surges back into Obi-Wan. He jerks forward and grabs Anakin by the shoulders. “ No. Don’t call someone. Don’t tell anyone, you can’t tell anyone about this. Do you understand me, Anakin?”
Anakin raises a skeptical eyebrow. “Of course I understand,” he says, shaking himself free. “What do you take me for? Secrets,” he adds as he sticks his nose in the air, “are in my blood. You’re the one who has to be careful. I don’t even know if Corries can keep a secret.” He squints at Obi-Wan, who is starting to look pale, even washed out as he is by the light of the moon. “Are you sure you’re okay, Master?”
Obi-Wan nods — a bit too quickly and cheerfully. “Oh, of course, Anakin,” he says and takes several unsteady steps backward. “I’m always —”
The back of his calves hit the edge of the fountain. Anakin opens his mouth to cry warning, but Obi-Wan has already lost his balance, arms pinwheeling, mouth opening into a strangled scream.
He topples back into the fountain with a tremendous splash.
# # #
“Okay.” A half hour after his unfortunate, unplanned swim, Obi-Wan is sitting on the edge of the fountain, shivering in his still drenched cloak, and trying to make sure his new padawan doesn’t get himself assassinated. “Repeat the plan back to me.”
Anakin gives him a hooded look. “But —”
“Just do it. Please.” There’s a headache building behind his eyes. Is this what having a padawan is like? Constant, soul-crushing worry combined with nerve-fraying annoyance? No wonder Qui-Gon aged so much in the eleven years of Obi-Wan’s apprenticeship.
Anakin wrinkles his nose and folds his arms, but he obeys. “I keep my mouth shut about this, except I can tell Padme because we need her help. You know she’s going to tell her handmaidens, right?”
Obi-Wan is already starting to suspect that Anakin’s natural perceptiveness is going to become a pain in the neck as much as it will probably also become an asset. “A foregone conclusion, yes. Keep going.”
Sighing dramatically through his nose, Anakin says, “So we tell Padme, and she does all the boring stuff to try to find evidence to prove that he’s really a Sith Lord. What’s a Sith Lord again?”
Obi-Wan buries his face in his hands. “Anakin.”
“Whatever. It’s like an evil magician — I remember that much. Anyway, she does all that , and we try to gather information on our end, which will be total wizard , and whatever we do, we don’t let Chancellor Palpatine know we know. We can’t even tell the Jedi Council because they’ll ‘kriff things up like they did on Naboo’.”
Not lifting his face from his hands, Obi-Wan says, “Language.”
“You said repeat back the plan!”
“I didn’t mean exactly .”
Anakin huffs. “Well, anyway, there. I did it.”
“You forgot the most important part, padawan mine.”
“Oh, yeah, right.” Anakin lifts a finger in clear imitation of the stance Obi-Wan took when he was giving the order. “Under no circumstances am I supposed to do anything stupid without you.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Fine, I added the stupid bit.”
“Ana kin .”
“Mast er .”
Obi-Wan considers crying. “All right. All right, we can handle this. It’s going to be quite all right, Anakin, don’t worry.”
“I wasn’t worried.”
Well, I was! And am. “We should rejoin the others,” he says. “I’ll tell them you were overcome with emotion and needed time alone.”
“Do you have to make me sound like a baby?” There’s a distinct whine to Anakin’s voice. “And wait, wait!” He grabs Obi-Wan’s hand as he tries to stand and tugs him back down onto the fountain’s edge. “We need to decide on codenames.”
“On what?” Obi-Wan uses his free hand to massage his temple.
“Codenames.” Anakin elongates the word, like he thinks Obi-Wan is either deaf or stupid. “For the mission, and for us.”
“Anakin, we don’t really need codenames. In fact, they’re likely to —”
“Of course we need codenames! How’re you supposed to keep something a secret if you’re not using secret names ?”
“But —”
“Please?” Anakin draws his brows together and makes his eyes big. “I really miss my amu, and we used to do stuff like this together, so it would really help to do it with you.”
Obi-Wan narrows his eyes. “That is absolute rubbish, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Anakin grins. “But I do miss my amu.”
“Oh Force.” Obi-Wan raises his eyes toward the starry sky. “What codenames were you thinking of?” He’s going to regret this. He’s definitely going to regret this. How is that he’s had Anakin for five minutes, and he’s already yielding to his ridiculous requests?
“Operative Ekkreth for me,” Anakin says, nodding as though he’s given this a lot of thought. Maybe he has. It seems like a nine year old sort of thing to do.
“Ekkreth? What does that mean?”
Anakin shakes his head. “No, that’s a secret. I can’t tell you, not for years yet. See, I can keep a secret.”
Obi-Wan presses his lips together. “Okay, and what’s my name?”
A split second after he realizes that he should definitely, definitely not let Anakin name him, he says, “Operative Mullet.”
“I —” Obi-Wan reaches behind him and clutches at his ponytail, scandalized. “It’s not even a mullet!”
Anakin’s grin flashes bright and white in the night. “It’s gonna be.” He slides off the edge of the fountain and dances away. “That’s your name now. No take backs!”
Is it too late to ask Mace to train him? Probably it is, now that they share a deadly secret. “Very well.” He lets out a sigh the size of the galaxy. “Is that all?”
“Nah, we gotta name the whole thing too.”
“And I assume you already have a name selected.”
“Yep.” Anakin’s smile stretches wider. “Operation Fountain.”
Obi-Wan doesn’t clearly remember the progression of events that ended with him tossing Anakin into the fountain, but he does know it involved a lot of undignified scrambling and a lot of strangled laughter from Anakin.
As Anakin surfaces, shaking his hair back from his face and hurling a lilypad at him, Obi-Wan doesn’t feel at all regretful. It’s not as though the fountain is deep enough for Anakin to be out of his depth. Even though he can’t swim, he’s perfectly safe.
Oh kriff. He’s going to have to teach Anakin to swim, on top of leading a conspiracy against the Chancellor.
Operative Mullet, he thinks to himself, you may have bitten off more than you can chew.