Chapter Text
As difficult as it’d been to admit even just to himself that his entire worldview and understanding of the galaxy was the root cause of his continuing sickness, it is a thousand times more difficult to enact the type of change that will, ideally, save his life.
That does not make it any less important.
And Obi-Wan is a Jedi Master and he was a war general and he is, now and always, Anakin’s in a myriad of sticky, unconventional, inconvenient ways. These things, together, make him disciplined and perhaps brave.
Or at least, in regards to the last one, a fool in love.
So in the aftermath of the conversation in their quarters, far later into the night when Anakin has fallen asleep on the mattress next to him with both arms wrapped around his torso and a leg thrown over his thighs, chin hooked over his shoulder and breath ghosting against the tip of his ear on every exhale, Obi-Wan stares at the corner of shadowy ceiling he can see in this position, and he thinks. He weighs and measures different possibilities, different plans of attack and of action.
How does one set about unlearning shame? Especially a shame so pervasive that it permeates his world order, his home, his bed? Anakin had said that those with hanahaki who found their love returned were cured because the shame of the love lessened over time—because they were not alone in it anymore.
Obi-Wan, apparently, has never for even a second been alone in his love for Anakin. But how does that make it better? He trained him. He raised him. Had he—would it be possible that he'd given Anakin some sort of sign, early on, courted his love in some way while he was a youngling in his care? The thought is horrible, made doubly so because he knows intrinsically that that would be how many people across the galaxy would see their relationship.
The flowers in his lungs rustle their petals together, make their presence known.
How does one set about unlearning shame?
A mind healer, perhaps. But Obi-Wan recoils at the very idea of talking through these darkest, most twisted feelings of his with a stranger, someone outside the Order. What if they didn’t understand the Jedi Code and its prominence in his life’s tapestry? Or, somehow even worse, what if they too thought Obi-Wan’s relationship with Anakin was shameful, wrong?
No. A mind healer would never have the context necessary to help him sort through his thorny emotions in this scenario. The Jedi Code. Former padawan. Wife.
How does one set about unlearning shame?
The early hours of dawn tick by in fading darkness. Through the gaps in the blinds of his room, by studying the fall of shadows on the corner of the ceiling, Obi-Wan watches the sky above Coruscant’s buildings lighten slowly into day, as if the very sun suddenly lacks conviction in its routine.
He turns his head to look out the window, squinting through the barriers and careful not to disturb Anakin, who has migrated almost fully on top of him, ear pressed unconsciously over his bare heart.
What had Anakin said those on Naboo call hanahaki?
Ah, right. The shadowed heart disease.
There are only so many things that beat back shadows, as far as Obi-Wan is aware. Light, and love.
Honesty.
Obi-Wan closes his eyes with a sigh. It is a thousand times more difficult to choose to live when the choice is made within the privacy of his own head—when Anakin’s sky-blue eyes are not staring at him as if he alone has the power to crush his heart—when Obi-Wan knows what living entails.
Or at least, what he must try first.
Master Yoda’s ears droop slightly as he observes Obi-Wan’s seated form from over the rim of his cup. “Better, do you feel, Master Kenobi?” he asks, though Obi-Wan is sure the question is at least half rhetoric.
Certainly he knows that he hardly looks any better.
“Yes,” Obi-Wan says anyway, instinctively straightening his posture and pasting on a demure sort of half-smile. “Thank you for asking, Master.”
“Hm,” Yoda says, putting his cup on the small table beside him and peering at him through the tranquil darkness of the meditation room. “Gladder to hear this news, I would be, if believed you, I did.”
Obi-Wan consciously relaxes his shoulders, eyes closing for a brief moment before he exhales and ducks his head in acknowledgement. “I apologize, Master Yoda—I suppose that was an automatic response, borne from one too many holonet interviews. But I can assure you that while I am still in early recovery, I do feel better than I did several weeks ago.”
When I was one foot in the grave with my padawan gripping tightly to my hand and begging me not to go.
This, of course, goes unsaid.
Yoda’s ears flick as if he’s heard it anyway. “Sought out my counsel, you have, Obi-Wan. To what end, I wonder, if speak in half-truths you wish to do for the duration of our time.”
Obi-Wan can feel his backteeth grind together, a childish urge to snap not to rush him sitting in the back of his throat beside Anakin's flowers.
“I…I would hear your guidance, Master, on a rather personal matter,” Obi-Wan tells him, picking his words carefully. “I have not been…entirely truthful with the Council on the topic of my recent absence from mission life.”
“Worried, many have been for you, young Kenobi,” Master Yoda says with an inclination of his head. “Worried, I have been.”
Obi-Wan lifts his hand to rub at the sudden tightness in his chest, though he thinks that it has little to do with the flowers growing there. “I am afraid that I have…that I am not the Jedi that I…should be.”
Master Yoda’s clawed hands wrap around the grip of his gimer stick, though it rests unused and leaning against his meditation platform. “Ah,” he says quietly. For a moment, Obi-Wan thinks that perhaps this is all that he will receive in reply. Then, the grandmaster continues. “An expert, you have become, on everything a Jedi may be? Studying our histories, you have been, in your convalescence? Thought, I did, that bedridden you were.”
“Then—rather that I am not the Jedi I once was,” Obi-Wan corrects himself, dropping his hand from his chest before he gives into the urge to raise it to his temple in childish, unsurpressed consternation. “Master,” he adds automatically.
“No,” Yoda agrees simply. “You are not.”
“I…” Should he apologize? Should he beg forgiveness? Should he repeat out loud his list of crimes, the ones he has only ever admitted in his head? Surely if there is a space for that sort of confession, it is here--it is now.
“Think you do, that change is avoidable? Perhaps that unique to you, it is?” Yoda asks, holding up one hand to halt him. “That stand, we all do, on the shores of time and yet only you feel the sand between your toes, hm? Soldiers, the Jedi are not. Politicians, the Jedi are not. But changed, we have, to face what we must. The Jedi that you were, gone he is. Footprints in the sand, once, perhaps, now no more than a memory. The Jedi we were once, gone they are. The Jedi we should be, we are now. Willed it, the Force has.”
“Hanahaki,” Obi-Wan says. The word, after so many months’ worth of denial and agony, slips from his lips with ease. “I have hanahaki disease. That is what I mean, when I say that I am not the Jedi I should be.”
It is a very rare thing, to feel as if one has surprised a sentient as old and wise as the Grandmaster of the Jedi Order. Obi-Wan was a general though; he knows to press an advantage when he has one. And, it is worth saying, he is half-convinced that should he stop speaking now, the unsaid words will solidify into kyber in his throat and kill him faster than the flowers ever could.
“I have broken the Code. Formed a romantic attachment that is killing me because I cannot sever it, because I do not know how. It is—inappropriate on a hundred different counts. It implicates me—runs afoul of the Order, my training, my master, our lineage.”
Yoda blinks at him, ears raised slightly—from surprise or ire, Obi-Wan cannot tell. “Hanahaki,” the old master finally says, repeating the word slowly, sounding out every syllable.
Obi-Wan nods once, quick and sharp. The flowers in his lungs have moved up his throat, at a steady creeping pace that means that soon Yoda may be able to see the proof of Obi-Wan’s disgrace. Of his love—and his shame.
“Ill, you have been,” Yoda murmurs, tapping one clawed hand along the gimer’s stick handle as he gazes into the Force around Obi-Wan. “Pushed you to tell us of your illness, we did not, even when worse, it grew. Trusted you, we did then, to know when external aid was needed. But months, it has been.”
“There was nothing you could have done, Master,” Obi-Wan replies, allowing his hand to form a fist within the safety of his robe’s sleeve. “Hanahaki is a private disease, one whose cure lies in—”
“In honesty,” Master Yoda says in the tone of one agreeing with an argument not yet made. “Know of it, I do, young Kenobi. Know as well, that helped we could have. But to suffer alone, you wanted.”
“I didn’t,” Obi-Wan argues, because he—
Yoda inclines his head. “But to suffer alone, you thought you deserved,” he corrects himself, and Obi-Wan’s mouth snaps shut with a click. “Realized, have you, that the only one who bears the punishment of your death, you will not be?”
Obi-Wan opens and closes his mouth. “I don’t…”
“Worried, we have been,” Yoda says, and this time his tone is laced with something reproachful. Scolding, as if Obi-Wan is some youngling he has caught sneaking around the Archives after curfew.
“I’m sorry,” he tells him automatically, as if he really is that youngling. “I didn’t…” The sentence is loose enough to fit a dozen different endings and meanings, but Obi-Wan is here because he needs counsel and he wants to tell the truth and once, in a different life, he was brave, so he says: “I didn’t want anyone to know of my…attachment. It is not a disease befitting a Jedi who has sworn his life to the Code, and I thought—the death sentence it implied was kinder.”
Across from him, Yoda’s eyes slip closed as his mouth tugs into a frown. “Tired, I am,” he informs him, and for one wild moment, Obi-Wan is sure that he is being dismissed so that the grandmaster can have a late afternoon nap. “Of Jedi dying, padawan of my grandpadawan.”
And—oh.
“Clouded, the Force is around you, young Obi-Wan,” Yoda says, opening his eyes to gaze back at him. “But Dark, it is not. Bruised, perhaps, but not bleeding. Know, you do, who you bloom for?”
Obi-Wan blinks; he can feel his cheeks begin to flush. “I—yes.”
“Know the dangers of attachment, you do? Understand why we warn our younglings and padawans against it, you do?”
“Yes, of course,” Obi-Wan says with a slight frown. “Attachment leads to fear, leads to seeking to push our limits of control. To place another’s life and happiness above others is dangerous for any sentient, but the Force’s gifts in our midichlorians make it doubly so for us. We must seek to treat the galaxy and those who inhabit it impartially or risk betraying ourselves and our calling.”
Yoda tilts his head, a soft nod. “Almost, young Kenobi. Almost.”
Obi-Wan, who has never appreciated being told he has almost said the correct answer, fights the urge to stiffen and argue against the Grandmaster of the Jedi Order. “Oh?”
“May lead to fear, attachment does. May lead to seeking out control and power for our own ends. Set in stone and inevitable, most all things in this galaxy are not. Free will, we possess. Exists in the Force, in the Order, in the Code, free will does--especially where exists, attachment also does.”
“If you mean to say that the Order allows attachment, Master, then I must issue my padawan some thirteen years’ worth of apologies on the topic,” Obi-Wan says, snappish enough that Yoda’s eyebrow wrinkles raise in response.
“Allow, no. Encourage, no. But acknowledge? Perhaps. Remember, you do, your grandpadawan’s trial? Sat on the Council, you did for it. Thought, I did at the time, that recuse yourself from it, you would. Attached you were not, but close enough to her, you were, to feel conflicted.”
“There was…much to feel conflicted about that day,” Obi-Wan points out carefully. Ahsoka’s trial, his part in it, however small, and her chilly silence to this day is still a rather raw wound despite the intervening months.
“Recused yourself, would you have, had it been your padawan instead, I wonder,” Yoda says. “Been able to feel conflicted and carry out your duty, would you have?”
Obi-Wan’s teeth grind together at the thought. Anakin on trial. Anakin framed. Could Obi-Wan have remained in his Council seat? Would he have recused himself from the trial or would he have attempted to help Anakin escape the prosecution?
He reminds himself that he has sought out Yoda’s counsel of his own volition and that he has committed himself to honesty, no matter how difficult. “I…No. If it were Anakin, no. I would have given up my seat on the Council before I’d be able to see him judged in a similar case.”
He carefully does not say that there exists a fairly large part of himself that is certain he would seek to free Anakin should a similar situation arise. That he’d take the blame, take his place, send him away in a heartbeat, no matter his crime.
Yoda hadn’t asked about that, after all.
“Know, you do then, the limits and boundaries of your attachment. Better, it is, to know. To plan around.” The Grandmaster’s tone turns sly, lips curling up slightly. “Ask you to judge Anakin Skywalker impartially, no one with half a mind and working vision would, young Kenobi,” he says. “Recused and perhaps detained yourself temporarily, you would have been.”
Obi-Wan stares.
“Avoid attachment, we strive as Jedi to do. Punish those who develop them, we do not. Guide them through understanding the risks, we must.
“Ask that you look inward and ascertain the lengths you would go to protect the one you bloom for, I would. Ask that you determine how you may continue to serve the Order and still heal yourself of your hanahaki, I would. Ask that you allow yourself to die because you have developed the flowers in the first place, I would not. No Jedi would.
“Tired, I am, grandpadawan of my padawan, of good men dying.”
“All things considered,” Quinlan Vos says, slipping into the seat across from Obi-Wan with two luminescently green drinks clutched in his hands, “I think you should be the one buying me a drink, not the other way around.”
Obi-Wan holds out his hand, and Vos pushes one of the glasses across the table with a put-upon, disgusted sigh.
“Your nose is crooked,” Obi-Wan murmurs as he raises the drink to his mouth immediately. Partially to hide the corners of his smirk and partially because, Force, he needs a drink. It’s been two days since his conversation with Yoda and he’s still reeling from the Grandmaster’s words.
Anakin has been full of questions, but Obi-Wan has spent much of his free time meditating, attempting to examine Master Yoda’s counsel and determine what was fact, what was hope, and what was meant.
This morning, when he’d sat up on his knees to roll up his meditation mat, he’d turned around to find Anakin watching him from the door to the hallway, a mug of tea in his hands.
“You know, Master,” his padawan had said, looking at him with an unreadable expression in his eyes, “I haven’t heard you cough once in the last day and a half. That's definitely some kind of new record. Now will you tell me what Yoda said?”
“Well, he didn’t confess his undying, reciprocal love for me, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Obi-Wan had said, and he’d almost definitely deserved it when Anakin had used the Force to smack him across the face with one of the couch’s pillows.
Deserved it and even welcomed the rough-housing. A year ago, their idea of rough treatment was sparring til first blood in one of the hangar bays on the Negotiator or the Resolute. But then with Obi-Wan’s sickness and general weakness, Anakin had been too terrified to do more than hold him steady with the lightest of touches possible. To be struck across the mouth by him, even with a pillow, felt like a true beginning to a return to normalcy.
He isn’t stupid enough to tell Vos about this morning’s exchange, of course. Not Vos, who’d apparently been struck by Anakin with far more than a pillow and far past first blood.
But he can tease him a bit. Gently.
After all, his nose is crooked now.
“Fuck you,” Vos says cheerfully, raising his drink to hit rather aggressively against Obi-Wan’s own cup's rim. “And fuck your padawan too. I should have let you die.” His smile is all teeth, but his eyes are crinkled with the force of it. Bright and relieved and alive. Alive. The both of them, against all odds, are meeting again. Alive.
“You did promise to,” Obi-Wan agrees, even though he can’t even pretend to be upset that Vos had, in the end, told Anakin who exactly Obi-Wan was dying for. Who he bloomed for. After all, it worked out.
Vos stares at him, eyes suddenly narrowed and expression outraged even as his Force signature continues to press against the edges of Obi-Wan’s own, so light and warm that he feels as if he’s sitting on the edge of a bonfire lit just for his comfort. “And I would have,” Vos says. “If your padawan hadn’t figured it out while taking interrogation breaks from trying to kill me.”
“He wouldn’t have killed you,” Obi-Wan replies, waving his hand and taking another sip of his drink. “He’s a sweet boy.”
Vos glowers back. “Your sweet boy broke my nose.”
“It looks rather dashing like that.”
“If he heard you call me dashing, he’d definitely try to kill me again.”
“I’ve left him at the Temple for the night, so there’s no need to be afraid of my padawan, Quin,” Obi-Wan replies, and Vos’ frown deepens.
His Force signature though, a reflection of his true emotional state, remains just as light as it had been the moment he’d clapped his arms around Obi-Wan’s shoulders earlier this evening and guided him to their current table.
This, too, feels like a return to normalcy that Obi-Wan can scarcely believe he deserves. A part of him had wondered how he’d be able to sit across from Vos tonight, look him in the eyes, and remember their last several conversations. The sadness, the grief, the inevitability and helplessness of it all.
“I’m sorry,” Obi-Wan says abruptly, the word bursting out of him like the flowers have in the past. Lke the flowers still could, he supposes. They’re not gone. They’re still there, underneath his skin, embedded in his lungs.
But they feel—different. Smaller, perhaps.
“What for?” Vos asks, taking a healthy swig of his own drink. “You didn’t break my nose. Or fracture my skull.” His eyebrows have crept up into his hairline pointedly. “Your worse half, on the other hand…”
“I’m sorry for what I asked you to do,” Obi-Wan says, feeling stubborn enough to push through and around the out being so clearly offered. Vos won’t force an apology from him. Force, Vos probably doesn’t even think he’s owed one, but then—they’ve never agreed on much.
Almost as if on cue, Vos’ hand comes up to wave away his words. “Kenobi, come—”
“And I’m sorry that I could not tell you why at the time,” Obi-Wan continues. “And I thought, or think, I think that you deserve to hear it. Deserved to then. And still do now. And I suppose, well. I suppose I rather want to tell someone the more I think about doing it.”
Vos’ eyebrows pull together and he sits back in his chair, tilting his head as he examines Obi-Wan’s face. “You’ve lost me,” he admits. “You made it perfectly clear at the time why exactly you felt the need to guilt me into secrecy—”
“Tell someone why I’m in love with him,” Obi-Wan says as placidly as he is able to, placing both hands on the table as if to show he has nothing to hide. He has so much to hide. But this—this is not one of those things, he reminds himself. “When I told you I was dying, I told you I loved him and that it was killing me. And I told you that he was married and that he did not love me in the same way, which was true at the time to my knowledge then.”
“Force, Kenobi—look, I’m glad it worked out—trust me, I’m incredibly relieved my skull wasn’t fractured just for you to die anyway, that would have been a bit of a damper on my healing journey, but I’m sorry if I’ve somehow given you the impression that I want to sit here and listen to you wax poetic about Anakin fucking Skywalker. Not now, not ev—”
“It didn’t work out,” Obi-Wan snaps, and then wants to hit his head against the table the moment he sees Vos tense and his Force signature flex opaque with worryangerfear.
“What do you mean it didn’t work out? Skywalker loves you back. You’re here. Alive. I haven’t heard you cough once since we sat down--and oh, Force, don’t tell me you found a last minute rebound because then I’ll have to hate you for it, fuck, Kenobi.”
Despite his best attempts, there is nothing more to do in the face of Vos' indignation than to pinch his lips together to hide the edges of his reluctant smile. “No, no. I assure you that your noble sacrifice was not in vain.”
His friend stares at him a moment, considering, calculating, every inch the fully realized Jedi Spymaster he has become since the first night Obi-Wan met him all those years ago. Finally, Vos shakes his head slowly. “I don’t think you have the slightest understanding what it is like to have Anakin Skywalker view you as an enemy,” he says. “But fine. That can wait. Perhaps even indefinitely. Explain what you mean.”
Obi-Wan frowns for a moment, before shrugging the words off. Vos is right--whatever warning or hesitation or worry is tucked inside that statement can wait. At least until Obi-Wan stops learning to garden every time he takes a deep breath. “Anakin...found a source that described hanahaki disease as being caused primarily by shame--instead of by unrequited love as we thought,” he says carefully. “We determined that that explained why I would have such a severe case. One that reciprocal love could not fix. I’m better now,” he adds quickly when Vos pitches forward, hand tensing against the glass shell of his drink. “Far better than I was the last time we saw each other. But the flowers are still there. Because…” he can feel the heat of his face betraying him, the flush of instant, knee-jerk mortification at the admittance. “Because I love him, to my detriment and my death, and I am ashamed of it. Of what it means.”
If he cannot say these words to Vos, who can he say them to? Vos has seen him at his very worst, at his very beginning. There is a reason after all, after all this time, that Vos remains his emergency contact on the Temple's medical forms. It's because there are very few aspects of himself that Quinlan Vos was not there for the creation of, the solidification of. Who then, outside of Anakin, can Obi-Wan talk to about Anakin? About loving him? About everything that comes with it--the hard and the soft and the easy and the terrible?
In real time, Vos blinks and then rubs a hand over his mouth, then the edge of his jaw, eyes locked onto Obi-Wan’s face all the while. It is a nervous gesture that Obi-Wan'd picked up years ago, back when he'd first started growing his beard. The touch of his fingers to his lips, his mustache, then over, to the bristles of his beard, never fails to ground him even to this day. It's almost unfair, then, that Vos rid himself of his beard thirteen missions ago, and yet the gesture has lingered in Obi-Wan's repertoire.
“It’s a lot to digest,” Obi-Wan says when Vos does not offer up an immediate reaction of any sort. “Take your time.”
“Shame, huh,” Vos says finally, roughly, testing the word out as if he’s never heard of it before. “Fuck, Kenobi.”
Obi-Wan shrugs and allows his eyes to drop down to his drink, a small reprieve.
“Ashamed of Skywalker?”
“No,” the word is instant, guttural, completely reactionary and not at all logical. He coughs, clears his throat. “No,” he says again. “Of…of everything else. He’s my former padawan. I trained him. I raised him. I spent much of his life in a position of authority over him, of influence. There’s no way I can discern that loving him as I do is above board. It may never be. And I almost—I almost let the shame of that kill me.”
“But you didn’t,” Vos says, watching him appraisingly from the other side of the table. “And you won’t.”
“No,” Obi-Wan admits, and it feels good to do so out loud. Anakin has not yet asked for a renewal of this vow, as if perhaps he’s taken Obi-Wan at his first word--yes, I'd say so--or as if he’s worried he’ll try to renege now that he has a better understanding of what it entails.
“Because?”
“Because there is very little I wouldn’t do for Anakin,” Obi-Wan says, the words simple and easy and true. “And he asked me to.”
“Oh, well,” Vos says, rolling his eyes and finishing off his drink with a long sip. His Force signature, still dimmer than it had been thirty minutes ago, begins to warm again slowly. “If Anakin Skywalker asks you to figure out a way to beat your flowers, sure. You’ll do anything for him. If I, your friend and Skywalker’s occasional, well-meaning punching bag, asks though….”
Obi-Wan shrugs and this time, he does not bother to hide his smile behind his glass. It is true. He is happy, for the most part. He is in love. He loves Anakin. He would rearrange his life and his worldview for Anakin. He has spent the better part of the last several days trying to do just that. Trying to convince himself that he is allowed. That this is okay.
“I suppose there are worse people,” Vos finally tells him as he waves down the serving droid for another round. His voice is deceptively light for how heavy his eyes feel on Obi-Wan’s face. “Than your former padawn.”
“Are we speaking in general terms that encompass the whole population of the galaxy or specifically for me to have developed feelings for?”
“Both, I guess, though it pains me to admit to the first one,” Vos snaps back immediately, fingers keying two more drinks into the serving paad presented to him. “But. For you. As far as wrong and inappropriate go. I’d never—not with Aayla, obviously, or anyone else I'll ever train, but…if you think about it, you didn’t truly raise him. It's a unique case. No one at the Temple raised him. He had a mother who did that for you. You didn’t do more than guide him through the trickier spots.”
“I don’t know whether I should feel offended or relieved that you think that,” Obi-Wan muses, watching the droid wheel away.
Vos waves a hand through the air. “You know what I mean. There were a thousand tricky spots, yes. His mother taught him how to be a decent sentient, but you had to teach him everything about Temple life from scratch, as if you were a crechemaster yourself, despite never attending those trainings. So, yes, yeah, there were many tricky spots, but it's not as if you were teaching him how to speak or how to dress himself. And—yes, he’s young, fine, but not criminally so.”
“I think we should wait to speak until the next round arrives,” Obi-Wan decides, face flushing. Not criminally so. It is hardly a rousing defense.
“And,” Vos adds, leaning forward once again whilst thoroughly ignoring him, “you’re forgetting about the war.”
Obi-Wan blinks. “Would that I could, Vos.”
His friend rolls his eyes. “No, listen. He grew up during the war. He became a general in his own right, with his own command, following his own orders from the Council that you were not the sole commissioner of. He saw things, experienced tragedies, shouldered a lot more than most his age have had to. And you were there for some of it, but you weren’t there for everything. He was a Knight by then. So he’s—he’s almost criminally young, but not actually, I would argue.”
“Oh,” Obi-Wan says, looking down at the floating pieces of ice in his drink as he turns this information over in his head. “I suppose….”
“And then there’s Sidious, if you really want to compar—”
“I don’t,” Obi-Wan snaps, firm and just this side of too harsh. “I do not wish to speak about Darth Sidious.”
Not in the same sentence as Anakin. Not when they already shared too much time together alone while Obi-Wan was oblivious to it all.
Vos is quiet, as if stunned into silence by the strength of Obi-Wan’s vitriol. Obi-Wan isn’t exactly sure what he expected, but a civil conversation about Sheev Palpatine should never have been even close to on the list.
“Alright,” Vos tells him eventually, after the droid has come with their drinks and taken away the empty glasses. “Alright. But everything else, yeah? Think about it. It’s…an outside perspective, at least.”
Obi-Wan gives him a nod in return, short and sharp and brimming with gratitude he doesn’t quite know how to vocalize.
“And,” Vos adds, grudging and fond and long-suffering in equal measure, “maybe after about four more of these, I'll let you tell me why you love him so kriffing much in the first place.”
“Oh?” Obi-Wan asks, sudden smile not so much as hiding in his voice as it is front and center. He tips his drink up and swirls the yellow contents around in the glass. “How kind of you to give me so long to prepare. Would you rather I start with his emotional competencies that I admire or an itemized list of his physical attributes that I find attractive?”
Vos gags on his drink and then makes a rather dramatic show of spluttering all over the table. It is rather enjoyable, Obi-Wan has to admit, to be on the other side of a coughing fit.
It has been so long since his lungs have felt this clear that he almost mistakes the feeling for an absence of something integral. But it is not.
The love, after all, is still there.
Padmé Amidala’s fingers are short, but her palms are narrow. The average lightsaber would look odd in her grasp, oversized and bulky, but Obi-Wan imagines she’s had little opportunity or reason to hold a grown man’s lightsaber in the last year or so. Not since the end of the war, at least. And certainly not since her divorce.
They are smooth, her hands. It is a different sort of fighting style that she is fluent in, one that calls for voice over violence. She has no calluses on her palms because she has not crafted her life around a tangible weapon, one that can be held in her hands.
Obi-Wan respects it; he respects her.
He used to like her as well, and he thinks that one day it’ll be possible to like her again. To call her friend and mean it. To see her face in a crowded room and not immediately search for Anakin’s, to not judge how close they are, to not wonder if this night will be the night that Anakin pulls him aside to inform him that he plans to leave the Order to be this senator's husband faithfully and completely.
Now that it’s over, now that he knows that Anakin never planned to leave the Order and never will again without Obi-Wan by his side, he thinks–-one day. He could very well call her friend again, one day, eventually.
Senator Amidala’s right hand curls around a cup and she crosses the sitting room to bring it to him. Tea. When he lifts it to his mouth in thanks, he freezes at the unexpected smell.
“Anakin’s favorite blend,” she tells him, defensive and tired all in one breath. “I haven’t had a chance to throw it out yet, and then—what a waste, isn’t it? I don’t care for it, but I’d just bought a new batch before we went to…before.”
Ah. Obi-Wan moves the cup far away from his mouth to stare at the murky red liquid. Despite what Anakin has told him, a woman does not buy a new satchel of her husband’s favorite tea if she believes a divorce is imminent.
He sets the small cup down onto the table in front of him and stands, feeling as if he should hide his hands. As if there is something incriminating on them, dark as blood.
“Then I thought that perhaps it was the Jedi Order’s favorite blend in general,” Padmé is saying as she pours herself a cup of caf from a small contraption resting on the counter. “And I wanted, I suppose in the future—if there were ever anything I could do for the Order in my position on a committee or in the Senate—I would be happy to host a delegation of Jedi here. So I thought—why throw it out? It would be a waste. Wouldn’t it? Master Kenobi? The tea—is it just his favorite, or a typical brew in the Temple?”
Obi-Wan hates himself for it, knows it is bitter and petty and far below the both of them, but he cannot stand the way her mouth shapes the word Temple. Her familiarity with the word, the name, Obi-Wan’s home. Of course most civilians on Coruscant probably call it the same thing, but then most civilians on Coruscant hadn’t married his padawan.
He tries to cast a net around the feeling in his chest and give it to the Force, but it feels too sticky and viscous for that. It slips through the cracks and despite his best efforts, he is left with it all the same. He clears his throat and says, “I could not speak for all the Jedi in the Temple, Senator. But, ah. It is my favorite blend.”
He had not meant for the words to wound—had he?—but he can see the moment they hit her in the slow slump of her shoulders, the way she drops her chin down, the way she lets out a breath.
“Oh,” she says. “Of course. I should have thought.”
No, she shouldn’t have. Why would she ever have thought to connect her husband’s favorite tea blend back to his old master? Obi-Wan may have been her friend at the start of the war, distantly, a casual, respectful acquaintance made important because he was important to Anakin in some nebulous way, but he was firmly on the peripherals of her life then. Anakin had meant many things to her, been made of hundreds of strange traditions and interesting routines. Of course she would not have thought to trace some of those back to Obi-Wan.
“Senator,” Obi-Wan says, taking a step towards her. He shouldn’t have said that—he hadn’t been thinking. He hadn’t meant to hurt. Hasn’t he hurt her enough already? After all, he has won. The loss must have been devastating for her. He can't imagine anything else. Not when the loss means losing Anakin.
“Of course, I didn’t realize I would be asked to host a Jedi so soon after the war,” Senator Amidala says, and when she locks eyes with Obi-Wan over the brim of her cup, her face is the cool mask of a former queen. “But I doubt you are on official business, Master Kenobi.”
Obi-Wan, who is usually Master Kenobi but is not anywhere close to Master Kenobi right now, stops and gives into the impulse to cross his hands behind his back. To hide them from her gaze. “No,” he agrees, quietly. “I am not.”
“Are you to be the go-between between myself and Anakin?” the senator asks, crossing her legs delicately beneath the skirt of her dress. “I thought our last conversation went well. But apparently if he is asking for your intervention, then perhaps not.”
For many, many months, Obi-Wan had been quite sure he’d been on the precipice of losing Anakin to his marriage, to this woman. It is a burden off of his heart to know that Anakin chose him before he even knew that Obi-Wan was dying for him.
It makes his lungs feel tight to look at Padmé Amidala now though, knowing how she must feel to have lost Anakin. It would have killed him. He knows that with solid surety.
“What?” The senator, Padmé, snaps, drawing her shoulders back as Obi-Wan carefully sits down at the other end of the couch she has occupied. “I promise you, Master Kenobi, I do not require a cease and desist order. The last conversation we had—he called me. I only reminded him that he needs to sign the papers and then—then we’ll be through it.”
If they were friends, if they were even casual acquaintances, Obi-Wan thinks he would gently call quiet attention to the catch in her voice. The waver and the fracture in the midst of her words. He would touch her wrist, her forearm, her shoulder. Fashion himself into a confidante for her.
But they are not friends.
Yet it makes something tightly wound in his chest loosen slightly, the truth that he looks at her and feels compassion. That he would try to lend an ear, a comforting touch, if he thought she’d accept it. It is reassuring to him now to recognize that as much as he loves Anakin and as much as he feels a stranger in his skin because of that love, he is still a Jedi.
He clears his throat and turns to face her, resting his hands palms up on his knees. He has come here—requested the appointment, confirmed it, and intruded upon her private quarters—to be honest. Strangely, beautifully, it is easier each time, to be honest. To let the words slip out of his mouth in lieu of the petals.
“That last conversation you had with him,” he says, weighing and measuring out each word. “He will never tell you, senator. But it saved my life.”
This is very clearly not the conversation opener she expects, as the senator’s face goes slack, mouth falling slightly open in surprise. “I’m sorry?”
Obi-Wan nods, mouth ticking up in a rueful smile. This is the hard part. This is the honesty, of which there is no give and no escape. “Ah—yes. Well. During the final months of the war, I developed a case of hanahaki disease. It was ignorable for a brief period of time, or perhaps I just proved to be incredibly stubborn. But in the end, it was…holistic. And, I suppose, terminal.”
The senator, Padmé, has placed a small hand over her mouth as she looks at Obi-Wan. Her eyes are wide. She looks like a woman for whom many things are starting to make a terrible amount of sense.
“I was not a candidate for the surgery,” Obi-Wan tells her, raising one hand and running it along his lips, smoothing over the edges of his beard. It is a nervous habit that he developed after watching Quinlan Vos do much the same. He'd been rather new to growing his facial hair then; it'd been shortly after Anakin fell into his care.
The senator’s face tightens as she watches the motion and suddenly Obi-Wan wonders for the first time if it is perhaps a nervous habit that his padawan has also adapted, despite the lack of a beard to stroke.
He coughs, a petal tickling at the back of his throat that remains loyally in its place. It has been six days since he got roaringly drunk with Quinlan Vos, eight days since he meditated with Master Yoda. It has been two days since one of his coughing fits has resulted in a full-blown flowerhead.
“Would you care for some water, Master Kenobi?” Senator Amidala asks, already moving to stand, but Obi-Wan waves her off.
If he does not say this now, he may not ever be able to bring himself here again. “No, that is alright, senator. It is just a slight tickle of the throat.”
She relaxes slightly back into the cushions of her couch, eyes narrowed in consideration as she observes him.
She is clever; she has probably already worked out the rest of the story, all of its sordid angles and discoveries. But there are details she deserves to know. Things he wishes to tell her.
Things like: “Anakin did not find out until he returned from Naboo,” he says, rubbing his hand along the line of his clavicle, down further to press against the ache in his chest. “I…I understand your marriage…functionally terminated during that visit. It had nothing to do with my diagnosis, I want to assure you of that. I hadn’t…told him I was sick. I hadn’t told him that…” he breathes out sharply. “That the flowers were his.”
The senator studies his face for a moment, before she shakes her head. “Master Kenobi, if you are here to tell me that my divorce had nothing to do with you, please—save your breath. My entire marriage revolved around you, whether you and I knew it or not. I should think the divorce did as well.”
The words are harsh, but the tone is tired, exhausted even. Obi-Wan drops her gaze first, turning to look around the sitting room. His eyes are drawn to the tea she’d given him, steam still rising from the cup.
Perhaps a woman who is a warrior in every way save for fists, who knows her divorce is imminent, buys her husband a new satchel of his favorite tea. Perhaps she learns to pronounce the name of his home, Temple, with the same familiarity that he does. Perhaps she hopes desperately that it means something, that any of it could mean something on the other side of the aftermath.
“I did not come here for that,” Obi-Wan tells the both of them softly. “I came to say thank you for what you told Anakin about the flowering disease. We could not identify a cure until he relayed what you said. About love. About shame.”
The room is quiet, save for the distant noise of Coruscanti air traffic outside the landing pad. Did Anakin miss the sound now, after spending so many nights here? Obi-Wan doesn’t know, may never know. Sitting here, among the luxurious furniture and surrounded by the ghosts of his padawan’s second life, he feels—there is not a name for it that is easy to conceptualize. Discomforted perhaps. Out of sorts.
Guilty.
He stands abruptly; a moment later, perhaps purely by rote, the senator stands as well, placing her cup of caf on a side table so that she may cross her hands in front of her.
“Thank you,” he murmurs quietly, suddenly desperate for her to believe him in this. That he is thankful and that he is— “And…and I am sorry.”
“Sorry,” she repeats. Her face has slipped back into the cool mask of a queen and a senator and a woman who has been hurt by a man she trusted with her heart and her life. “Why are you sorry, Master Kenobi?”
“I knew you were married,” he admits. Not carefully, not slowly. Instead like an avalanche. “I did not mean to know, and I did not want to. But I knew it. And I…I fell in love with him anyway when he was not mine to fall in love with. I apologize for that.”
As much as he is able, of course. Which is, truly, not that much at all. But there is guilt there, for having known Anakin was married and for loving him despite it. For kissing him, taking comfort from him when he thought the other man still had marriage vows to uphold.
The senator’s face fractures down the middle, eyebrows bunching together and painted lips pulling up into half a smile. Her hand rises from her waist, comes to rest on his forearm as she shakes her head. “Master Kenobi,” she says, not unkindly, “I fell in love with him when he was your padawan; I've come to realize that he was never truly mine to fall in love with either. But, I think you would agree—we cannot help who we love nor when we learn to love them. We can only hope it is their time as well to love us in turn.”
Anakin is almost asleep when Obi-Wan crawls into bed. He can tell instantly by the rise and fall of his naked chest.
And, of course, it helps matters immensely that the moment the mattress moves beneath his body, Anakin rolls over onto his back, arm extending up to beckon Obi-Wan closer.
“Master,” he mutters, nuzzling his face into Obi-Wan’s beard and then his neck and then the fabric of his tunic like a touch-starved loth-cat. “You’re late.”
“I’m not,” Obi-Wan argues back automatically, even though he really is. It is almost midnight and he’d been in the Archives since before supper, completing background research for Master Fisto’s upcoming mission to Moenetso, a Mid-rim desert planet with a thriving underground ocean biome. “Alright,” he admits after a moment, pushing himself onto his back and tugging Anakin into his arms. “I may be a little late.”
“‘S everything alright?” Anakin asks, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes with his mech hand before propping his chin up on Obi-Wan’s chest. His gaze is piercing, even sleep-dazed and seen through the relative lowlight of Obi-Wan’s bedroom. “How are the flowers?”
“What flowers?” Obi-Wan replies automatically, letting out a huff of faux-offense when Anakin swats him across the thigh with his free hand. “They’re fine, darling. It’s been almost three days since they’ve risen at all.”
A week since he met with Padmé Amidala in her private rooms. Almost two since he saw Quinlan last. A little more than two since he talked with Grandmaster Yoda.
Anakin’s eyebrows remain pinched together, but his Force signature relaxes at this news. He takes it as a grim accomplishment, every time he hears that the flowers are slowly dying. It is always a relief. And yet it will not be enough, not for Anakin, not until Healer Che scans Obi-Wan's lungs to find them free of everything but a set of new scars. It could be the war general in him. It could just be the relaxing desperation of a man in love, forced to watch his partner ache and hurt and mend so incredibly, painfully slowly.
Either way, Obi-Wan is almost positive that there’ll be some sort of public celebration on the fiftieth day that passes without a single flower petal leaving his lips.
He finds that he does not mind the idea too terribly, so long as there are no party hats involved and Anakin keeps that blasted R2 unit of his far from the celebratory location.
“I love you,” he hears himself say, and when he pushes a hand through Anakin’s hair, the man presses back into the touch.
Touch-starved loth-cat indeed.
“I—” Obi-Wan feels his forehead furrow as he stares at Anakin. Anakin. His beloved padawan. His beloved, well—his beloved.
After a moment of sudden, abrupt silence, Anakin pushes himself up, balancing on one forearm as he swings himself over Obi-Wan’s body like a comforting weighted blanket. Save, of course, for the frown on his face that’s only growing more pronounced the longer Obi-Wan searches for his words.
“Are you sick with something else?” Anakin demands almost immediately, teeth half-bared. “What is it?”
The idea is so ludicrous that Obi-Wan is laughing before he can stop himself. His beautiful, beloved padawan rears back, offended, but Obi-Wan hooks his arm around Anakin’s shoulders and tugs him back down, rolling them both onto their sides.
“No, I am not sick with anything else,” Obi-Wan tells him, because the mind healer Vokara Che has maneuvered him into seeing says that clear communication is the most solid foundation any relationship could hope for. “I just…”
Anakin blinks at him, sleep completely bled from his eyes now and bottom lip caught between his teeth.
“I love you,” Obi-Wan tells him, easy as breathing.
“I love you too,” Anakin replies. “Even when you wake me up in the dead of night just to be cryptic and secretive about something you know I’m just going to slice into your medical records to find out in the morning.”
“Don’t you dare slice int—” Obi-Wan closes his eyes and shakes his head, temporarily so overwhelmed by exasperated fondness for this man, for Anakin Skywalker, that he cannot finish the reprimand. “I just…I want to make sure you know.”
Now Anakin just looks wary. “That you love me?”
Obi-Wan catches one of Anakin’s hands, entwines their fingers together and raises the back of it to his mouth for a soft kiss. “That the shame I felt, the reason I developed the hanahaki…it never had anything to do with you."
“I think it had a lot to do with me,” Anakin points out, using his free hand to gesture between the scant inches separating their bodies.
“The love did,” Obi-Wan corrects, squeezing the fragile bones he's holding between his fingers gently. “But the shame…it was about me. It was about the circumstances, who I thought I was and what I thought I needed to do. I was never…ashamed to love you because of who you are. I love who you are. And I thought—I want you to know that because I told you that, not because you’re clever enough to figure it out by yourself. If I had not been a Jedi, if I had not thought you married, if I did not train you…I would have loved you without the flowers. It would have been so simple, and I’m sorry I have made it difficult, love.”
The Force flexes in the air around them as Anakin chews over the words, considers them at every angle. Obi-Wan stares up at the ceiling and waits him out. They have talked at length before about their relationship, about their love. But the thought, once outlined in his mind, had proven impossible to ignore. That brave, wonderful, kind, clever Anakin may think Obi-Wan felt ashamed of him? Preposterous. Horrible. Untenable.
Anakin pushes forward, eats up the distance between them and presses his face into Obi-Wan’s shoulder. “I know. Or, I figured. But thank you for saying, Master. And--I think you know as well, but in case you don't--I love you, for your difficulties as well as everything else. I don't...I don't wish that you weren't a Jedi or my Master. You are who I love and I love for you for who you are, and that's all that I know. So. Thanks, but I think I'm happy where we ended up.”
“Yes, of course,” Obi-Wan murmurs, brushing his free hand through Anakin’s curls. “But if you ever want to--hear it again. If you ever doubt it. Anytime, darling. Anytime.”
Moments pass in the quiet darkness, Anakin’s breathing leveling out to something close to sleep but not yet there. For his part, Obi-Wan’s fingers continue to card through Anakin’s hair, his eyes peering up at the ceiling as if he is inventing a new form of meditation.
Perhaps he is.
After all, after an indeterminable amount of time, Obi-Wan blinks back to himself and tugs gently at Anakin’s hair.
His chest feels heavy, but it is impossible to discern if the sensation stems from the flowers in his lungs or the weight of his padawan’s head against his heart.
“Anakin?” he murmurs through the darkness, and Anakin’s Force signature winds around his immediately as if he were only waiting to be asked.
“Yeah?”
Obi-Wan’s eyes follow the dapple of distant city light breaking through the protections of the room’s blinds and dancing across the ceiling. “I never told you,” he tells the ceiling now. “Why I was not a candidate for the removal surgery.”
A second trickles by; then, another. “I guess you didn’t,” Anakin says. “I just assumed it was because the flowers would come back. Or that you were too far along in the illness for it to be fully rooted out.”
“They would have,” Obi-Wan agrees, “and I was, eventually. But I was disqualified as a candidate before I reached that point.”
“Oh,” Anakin says. “What, did you smoke a bunch of death sticks when you were the type of youthful hooligan you would have had me arrested for being?”
The bark of laughter that bubbles up from his chest surprises the both of them. But there is relief there too, to be able to laugh about it. It means that for the most part the danger has passed. The healing process is ongoing and criminally slow more days than not.
But it has been three days since Obi-Wan has coughed up a pale purple petal. One day it may be fifty. It sounds as far-fetched as it sounds possible, that someday this will be a distant memory—terrible, except for the parts that are achingly tender and incredibly beautiful in hindsight.
“Healer Che said something similar,” he tells Anakin, who is his former padawan and a man sixteen years his junior and also, not without consequence and not without cautious and tenderhearted belief, the love of his life. “But I never smoked death sticks. Or, well, not frequently enough for what she saw in those holos of my lungs. I—
“I’d developed it before,” he confesses to the ceiling even though he knows Anakin is listening with every part of his body. It is easier like this, caught in some pantomime of performative distance while his arm tightens around Anakin's waist, begging him wordlessly not to shift and not to leave.
Thankfully, his padawan has grown into a man who understands these sorts of defensive measures, these idiosyncrasies of Obi-Wan's. He stays still; he waits.
“Hanahaki," Obi-Wan says, the name of the disease less like a curse word these days and more like a fact, especially applied in retrospect. "For others. Minor cases I didn’t notice at the time, that faded almost as soon as they took root but that stuck around just long enough to leave my lungs scarred and unfit for any sort of surgery."
The room is quiet, the ceiling unyielding.
Obi-Wan closes his eyes and says, "I’d…if you’d like, I would—I would like to tell you about them, one day.”
Anakin is still beside and on top of him, hand warm and alive and roughened with calluses and soft with love where it is still clasped in Obi-Wan’s.
Then, he tips his face against Obi-Wan’s robe, slides his lips across his chest and presses a kiss just to the right of his heart, over his lung. “I’d be honored, Obi-Wan,” he murmurs. “Whenever you’re ready. Whenever you'd like me to know. I'll be here to listen."