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Looking back, there were so many signs that Obi-Wan had ignored.
Granted, he had been a 26-year-old who suddenly found himself a father in all ways but name, and then he was trying to live up to that fatherhood for the next ten years. Then came Naboo, the war, Mustafar, everything that came after, so sue him if he ignored the odd wayward nudge from the Force that came out of nowhere. Besides, there hadn’t been a recorded dyad in centuries.
So when Obi-Wan feels the Force tug at him as he’s leaving the Lars’ farm on Tatooine, he can only laugh when he immediately recognises the smell, the presence that has materialised in his chest. He laughs and laughs and laughs, even though there hasn’t been anything funny in his life for some time now.
Dyads, he finds, emerging out of a three-week research frenzy, are only realised at times of great need.
Seeing as the first time Obi-Wan and Anakin met had been in the middle of a political crisis turned full scale battle, not to mention everything that happened in the subsequent fifteen years, Obi-Wan finds it difficult to give this notion any credit, despite it being the only thing that all his admittedly sparse sources have agreed on. What could have happened to Anakin— Vader, Vader, Obi-Wan reminds himself— what could have possibly happened to Vader now that amounted to a greater time of need than on kriffing Mustafar?
(Obi-Wan does not admit to himself that a small part of him is bitter. If he’d realised this earlier, if they’d just known, perhaps Anakin wouldn’t have fallen. Perhaps all of this could have been avoided.
He doesn’t admit to himself that he’s bitter because to feel such a way would be to admit that he’s lost faith in the Force. And, well.
The Force is all he has left.)
He keeps to himself on Tatooine. There’s nothing much else he can do. He stashes away his lightsaber, tends to the herd of banthas he found shuffling outside the hut he claimed as his own. Meditates as best he can in the sweltering heat. Keep his distance from Luke, as much as he desperately wants to go back to the farm and grab the boy and hold him against his chest; the last connection he has to his old life. His last connection to Anakin, the years they spent together.
The presence in his chest hasn’t gone away. Obi-Wan knows that if he really wanted to, he could empty the space, push Anakin out for good. He knows it’s what he should do. But every time he sits down to meditate, imagining putting the flat of his palms against a warmth he’s known for almost as long as he can remember, and pushing until they are separate again, he can’t bring himself to do it.
Instead, he builds a wall around it, circling the presence with his mind. All of the books indicate that dyads share some sort of emotional connection to one another, and although Obi-Wan has sensed nothing other than his own projected familiarity from the presence so far, he’s not willing to take the risk of Vader gleaning any information from him. No matter what Vader used to be, no matter this new and strange link between them, Obi-Wan knows that he would relive Mustafar a thousand times over before he let the Empire know anything about Luke. He blocks up a section of his heart, and tries to ignore it.
He figures that’s how he will live out the rest of his life: trying to keep Luke safe, trudging around until his time comes, a part of him always weighing heavy. For a long time, entertaining any other possibility feels like betrayal.
Obi-Wan remembers telling Anakin once, very drunk, that he wishes they’d left him on Tatooine with his mother. Or, well, he doesn’t remember so much telling him this as he does Anakin’s face after the words leave his mouth: stricken, for a second, before a wall goes up so fast and his face smooths out into blankness.
He’d meant that he wishes Anakin had never had to fight in this war, never had to get involved with the Jedi. He wishes Qui-Gon could have freed him and his mother and then let them be on Tatooine, and that as much as Obi-Wan would have lived the rest of his life feeling like he was missing something, at least Anakin would be safe. It would have spared them all so much pain.
Most of all, he remembers acutely how he’d wanted to reach out and hold Anakin’s face, clarify what he meant, reassure him that there wasn’t a world where Obi-Wan’s words meant that he wished Anakin would leave him.
But the words had refused to leave his tongue, and they were deployed again the next day.
He’s thinking about this when Artoo plays Leia’s message, while comforting Luke when he finds the remains of the farm, and all the way to Mos Eisley. He’s thinking about it even when they land with a jolt out of hyperspace into the remains of Alderaan, but it doesn’t fully sink in until the Millennium Falcon is captured. Han is cursing, frantically pushing buttons on the control panel, and he can feel Luke quietly panicking beside him, but for a moment, everything is peaceful and crystal clear in his mind.
He can feel the tugging just behind his breastbone, a little stronger, a little more urgent the closer they get to the Death Star’s flight deck. For the first time in nineteen years, he knows exactly what he’s doing. The Force flows serenely around him, coiled, lingering. Waiting for him to move. Waiting for two magnets to finally find one another again.
On the Death Star, Vader’s lightsaber catches him at the side, but more than that, the lack of recognition is what hurts the most. Obi-Wan can feel their bond tug on his end, worming its way past the walls he’s spent so long building up.
It’s me, he thinks desperately, parrying another strike. You know me.
For a second, they’re back in a lava-filled river, a planet of fire collapsing around them. But even then, Anakin had known him, countered his every strike and blow with the blocks Obi-Wan had taught him as a padawan. There’s no recognition now, only mechanical breathing, and as Luke drags him back up the ramp of the Millennium Falcon, he thinks of how Anakin used to use his careful blankness as shield, so much so that it became a dead giveaway when he was hiding something.
He thinks about all the times when they were still master and padawan when he berated Anakin for keeping his emotions on his sleeve, and how he should never go into diplomacy because of that.
Now, he would give anything for a flicker of emotion, just a tilt of the black mask.
He lets Luke patch up the wound, and then shoos them all out of healing bay— which is really just a storage room that Han keeps the first aid kit in. He sits cross-legged on the floor, trying his best to breathe through the pain, and slips into a healing trance. Dimly, he can feel the rocking of the ship, the shouts coming from above as they weave their escape from the TIE fighters, but more urgent for him is the ocean of misery looming in his stomach, present, unforgiving, suffocating him in the tiny room.
He didn’t know what he expected. Not for Vader to fall into his arms and suddenly this all be over, but there was a small part of him that hoped he would acknowledge this thing between them. That there would be some indication, however subtle, that would tell Obi-Wan Vader felt the same way as he did: that they meant something to each other, still, as they did all those years ago. That there was still a piece of him that he held close to his heart. That he thought of him still.
Yavin IV is a shock; Obi-Wan had forgotten what it was like to be on a military base— the constant rush of people going somewhere, alarms blaring at all times, laughter that’s always tinged with something darker, an acknowledgment that whatever happiness that happens is always set in the context of where they are.
He stands at the back of the briefing room as the pilots are told the plan about the Death Star, watching Leia command the operation with all the confidence of someone who has sat in similar briefing rooms since before she could walk. Her eyes as lined with grief as she talks, and it makes Obi-Wan want to sooth a hand over her tightly pressed braids, the way he stroked her soft hair as a baby.
Except she’s not just Anakin and Padmé’s child, she’s the daughter of Bail and Breha Organa, a leader, a politician, and Obi-Wan is just her father’s ally, a mysterious man called upon in times of crisis. In another life, perhaps Obi-Wan could have walked over, given a listening ear. Perhaps she might have called him Uncle. But any potential for that to happen was lost nineteen years ago, and he sees little use in mourning it now.
He does stand next to Leia in the control room, watching the squadrons battle off the TIE fighters and trying to take the shot at the Death Star. Somehow, he knows which one of the dark ships Vader is in, recognises the reckless way he flies, not much different than a boy he once knew who just wanted to be a podracer. Not much different from one of the thousand times Obi-Wan had sat in the passenger seat of a speeder gripping the armrests as Anakin had navigated them through the chaotic Coruscant traffic.
The Death Star is destroyed. Obi-Wan feels the victorious joy from the others at the base wash over him, warring with guilty relief as he watches one of the dark ships speed away.
At first, he tries to give advice to Leia. After all, he was a General in his own right, even though now it felt like all that had happened to a completely different person. He’s met with gentle, but firm words:
"With all due respect, General Kenobi, you fought in a war.” Leia’s chin is tilted up so she can look at him in the eye. It makes her look more powerful, rather than less. “This is a rebellion. They are two completely different beasts.”
He bows his head, too shaken by the gleam in Leia’s expression to protest. He knows it all too well from when he used to watch Anakin watch Padmé’s political holos.
After that, there’s nothing much else for him to do. He guides Luke as best he can, but the reality is that the Alliance is running on fumes, and they need all the manpower he can get. And Luke, filled with boundless energy, and an infallible eagerness to help people, is always going on scouting missions, and volunteering to help in the medical bay, and accompanying supply pickups. It leaves very little time for him to work on strengthening his skills in the Force.
Obi-Wan understands to a certain extent the reason why. Any armed conflict means you grab onto whatever weapons you can use right there and then; what will give you the most advantage that lets you keep fighting another day. It’s hardly a time to be trying to develop new skills, let alone skills that Obi-Wan has seen in practice from exactly two people in the last twenty years— one of those people being him, and the other being Darth Vader. Perhaps not the most glowing of examples.
Still, he can’t help but feel resentful that something that had once meant everything to him, and still means a great deal to him now is so easily dismissed. He catches himself more than once rubbing absentmindedly at his chest, feeling the hollow ache. The Force swirls around him like a comforting blanket, warm, but at the end of the day unable to fill the void.
He spends his days on the flight deck, watching ships come and go, and when summoned, using the Force to help move a particularly heavy object. He’s sure once upon a time the Jedi High Council would have been scandalised at how he’s simply using the Force like a mercenary strong man, and that he himself would have been scandalised too. Now, he knows better, or at least, he’s too tired to have these mental arguments with himself.
Members of the alliance— crew, pilots, staff alike all still give him a wide berth. This happens especially after he’s used the Force, whether it be to lift something, or catch something with reflexes that a man his age shouldn’t have anymore, or sense something that’s happening on the other side of the base. He doesn’t mind it. Between his quiet observation of a rebellion in action, and otherwise solitude existence in a frantically busy centre, he finds ample time to meditate.
The thrumming aliveness of the base reminds him of being on Coruscant again, the always jumbling movement of the city, its people and speeders always on the move. Tatooine had been quiet; besides being close to Luke, its one of the reasons he’d decided to stay. At the time, he hadn’t wanted the noise. But coming back to it now feels like slipping on a second skin, and he thinks its this familiarity that has Master Yoda appearing to him within a week.
“General Kenobi.”
“Master.” The sight of Yoda’s Force ghost brings a hot, prickling sensation to his eyes, and he has to blink back tears. Although he’d never been particularly fond of him in the last days of the Republic, seeing him again after so long raised an emotion in him that he’d forgotten he could feel.
Yoda gazes at Obi-Wan, his face more wizened than twenty years ago, but just as unreadable as ever. “Worry not. Alive, I am.”
Obi-Wan can only nod in return, still swallowing the lump at the back of his throat. Yoda tilts his head, just as Obi-Wan remembers he used to when considering new information presented to the Council.
“Vader. Bonded, you are.”
Obi-Wan closes his eyes. It’s the first time he’d heard somebody else say it. “Yes.”
“Hm.”
“Master.” He feels panic clogging his throat. Don’t ask me to kill him, he thinks desperately.
But Yoda knows, because Obi-Wan told him himself all those years ago, before Kashyyyk, in the Jedi Council Chambers. He’d admitted to Yoda and Windu Anakin’s flaws because at the time, it had been important for the Republic, but also because it had felt like he couldn’t keep those emotions inside of him any longer. Those had been the days, despite all the death, the fighting, when he’d felt so happy by Anakin’s side he thought you could see it from the Outer Rim. He will stop at nothing to save me, because he thinks I would do the same for him. Because he knows I would do the same for him.
I don’t think he will ever trust us again.
“Go, you must.” Yoda says finally.
The panic loosens itself slightly. “Go where?”
Yoda’s gaze sharpens, and Obi-Wan feels like a padawan being chastised. He knows, of course. He knows what he has to do, but he feels like if he verbalises it, suddenly it would all be real. Suddenly the intermittent pain he feels in his lungs wouldn’t be just something he’s imagining, but rather something that tied him to another person. Someone who once meant everything to him.
“What about Luke?” he asks.
“Come to me, Luke will. In time.”
It doesn’t fill Obi-Wan with a great deal of confidence, but the edges of Yoda’s form begin to lighten and fuzz, like a holo with a bad connection. He knows he only has moments before his master vanishes entirely, and he scrambles for something to say. It may be the last chance he has to do so.
“Obi-Wan.” Yoda says, and Obi- Wan’s eyes snap up to meet his. “In the Force, you must trust.”
Obi-Wan feels a laugh bubble up from his chest without humour. “A lot of good that’s done me.”
“Possible through the Force, all things are.” Yoda continues, undeterred. His body has completely vanished by now, just a floating head talking as if nothing were strange, as if he wasn’t spouting a lifetime of Jedi teachings at Obi-Wan, teachings that had amounted to all of nothing in the end.
The anger that fills him catches him off guard, but Yoda completely disappears before he can say anything, leaving him in alone in his quarters, Force swirling hot and dark around him.
He’s still reluctant to leave the Rebellion, even after Yoda’s message. He’s reluctant to leave Luke, and Leia, and even Han and Chewie, who, against his better judgment, he’s grown fond of.
But he had begun to dream the night after Yoda came to him, and the dreams were only getting louder and more vivid, more insistent. Eventually, he has to admit to himself that he can’t wait any longer.
He finds Luke in the landing bay, tinkering on his X-Wing. He looks up when Obi-Wan approaches, a smile immediately spreading across his face.
He’s so young. Obi-Wan aches just looking at him.
Luke looks at him searchingly, as Obi-Wan tries to find the right words to say, before smiling knowingly. “You’re leaving, aren’t you.”
Obi-Wan deflates, all of his anxiousness leaving him in a rush, to leave only regret. “I’m sorry, my boy.”
“It’s okay. I understand that there are things you need to do.” Luke’s eyes go distant for a moment. Obi-Wan recognises that look, saw it in members of the Service Corps, the ones who had failed their Trials but never lost the hunger to be part of something bigger than themselves. He remembers seeing it in Anakin’s eyes when he was nine years old, the first time he saw Padmé and asked her are you an angel?
He knows that look, and he knows that he’s done all he can already. The rest of the journey is for Luke to take.
“Ben.” Obi-Wan jolts out of his thoughts as Luke says his name.
“May the Force be with you.”
He’s grinning cheekily as he says it, and suddenly Obi-Wan is standing on the flight deck in Coruscant again, saying goodbye, old friend, when he didn’t know that it really would be goodbye. He manages a small smile for Luke before he briskly walks back to his quarters.
He waits until the door to his quarters close behind him before he lets the tears fall.
There are some nights Obi-Wan lies awake and thinks about the timing of the manifestation of the dyad bond, if the Force or some other destined power ordained that everything would become clear too late for him to change anything.
There are some nights he wonders whether this is penance; for the war, for failing Qui-Gon, for not helping Anakin when he must’ve felt so alone. It makes Obi-Wan ache, to think about how alone he must have felt, how wretched it would have been to hold so many secrets.
He doesn’t think about how perhaps, Anakin had to be Vader before the bond solidified. Maybe Anakin wasn’t the one he was bonded to at all. Maybe they only became a dyad after everything fell to pieces because Vader was the one all along. It makes bile rise in his throat, when he considers the disturbance he felt at the destruction of Alderaan in the same context as the cavity in his chest.
He swallows the bile back down, and shifts his ship into hyperspace, away from Yavin IV.
Tatooine is still as dry and as hot as ever, and Obi-Wan runs his fingers through the dust that has gathered at his old home. It feels like a lifetime ago when he sat here, quietly meditating and drinking tea, making his peace with nursing this heaviness forever. He sits down at the table to meditate as he waits.
He doesn’t have to wait long. He becomes aware of his presence as soon as he steps foot on the planet, bond going taut like something is tugging on the other end. Eventually, the shuffle of sand indicates someone at the front door, and he nudges the door open with the Force without opening his eyes.
“Are you going to kill me?” he says softly.
For a moment, there’s only the sound of mechanical breathing, the wind sweeping up sand in the desert beyond the door. Then, “No.”
Obi-Wan nudges the door open wider, and Darth Vader finally steps inside his house. Obi-Wan opens his eyes, letting himself look his full at the figure in front of him. He’s backlit in the doorway from the glow of the twin suns, and Obi-Wan can’t make out the details of his mask, only a dark expanse of black. All the better, he supposes. If he saw those yellow eyes again, he might not be able to have this conversation without breaking down.
The silence stretches out, and Obi-Wan, cautiously, foolishly, opens his heart a crack to probe at their bond. He’s immediately assaulted by a wave of emotions; conflict, confusion, denial, anger, and something, confusingly, that feels a lot like wonder.
Obi-Wan’s ego isn’t big enough to think that that particular feeling has anything to do with him. There’s only one thing that could elicit that kind of emotion.
“You know, then.”
“Yes.” A pause. “How could you keep this from me?”
Obi-Wan stares at him, letting his lack of response speak for itself.
Vader eventually seems to realise the ridiculousness of the question, and he ducks his head. The idea that Darth Vader, who had blown up a planet without remorse, and killed countless others just because he wanted to prove he could, was shy made Obi-Wan feel a little hysterical.
“I won’t let you take him.” Obi-Wan wills his voice not to shake.
This time Vader is the one that holds the silence. They know each other, still, Obi-Wan realises. They know that there’s nothing useful that could be said between them now.
“Don’t leave me.”
Obi-Wan stiffens. “I could never.”
But you did, Obi-Wan knows he wants to say. You did leave me. On the Death Star, and Mustafar, but before that too, in the Jedi Council Chambers and on the battlefield and on Naboo.
But I’ve always come back, Obi-Wan thinks back, feeling the strength of the thought pulse through their bond. I’ve never gone where you couldn’t follow.
“You’re not coming with me.” Vader’s voice doesn’t change, but Obi-Wan hears the hurt underneath it all just the same. At the end of the day, even with the mask, the cape, the red lightsaber and all of the blood he knows that has stained Vader’s hands, planets and planets of lives lost in a blink, this is still the man Obi-Wan once trusted with his life, who he raised from a boy to a Knight. Obi-Wan knows him like he knows little else.
He doesn’t reply, and he sits there for a long time, staring at the sunset after Vader leaves.
It’s true though; he doesn’t leave. Obi-Wan is there when the Alliance moves its base from Yavin IV to Reamma to Hoth, and he’s there on Nebulon-B when Luke ignores him for a week straight after he loses his hand. Obi-Wan sticks to the background, accepting the silence for what it is. He doesn’t know how to broach the topic with Luke either.
But he never leaves Anakin. He is acutely aware at all times of the presence in his chest now, heavier, more insistent. He wakes up with a jolt one day and knows in his bones that if he really tried, he could probably pinpoint the exact location where Vader is right now.
He doesn’t try, and he knows that Vader isn’t trying for him, either.
They dream together, once.
They’re in Padmé’s apartment on Coruscant, which Obi-Wan thinks is the Force playing a cruel joke. Anakin looks like he used to in the early days of the Clone Wars, and when Obi-Wan looks at himself in the reflection of the windows, he realises that all the white in his beard is gone, and he too, is his younger self again.
For a moment, he forgets himself, and rushes forward to clasp Anakin in his arms. But he turns around, and his eyes are still yellow, and instead Obi-Wan reaches for a lightsaber that’s not at his hip.
They hover at the far ends of the room for a bit, warily keeping distance, before eventually Anakin huffs and relaxes his stance.
“I’m almost certain that we can’t kill each other in a Force dream.”
Obi-Wan doesn’t relax, exactly, but he tilts his head in acknowledgement. “Seems we are at an impasse, then.”
And Anakin smiles, the way he used to with his entire face when he was truly delighted, eyes lighting up and shoulders coming down from his ears. Obi-Wan feels like his legs have been swept out from underneath him.
They end up sitting on the floor side by side facing the windows, watching Galactic City bustle about its everyday life. From up so high, they can see the Jedi Temple in the distance, glowing like a jewel.
Obi-Wan thinks that this detail, out of everything, is the cruellest of all.
“I want to know him.” Anakin asks abruptly. Demands, really, and maybe he’s forgotten how well Obi-Wan knows him, forgotten that he knows Anakin only gets rude when he thinks he won’t get something that’s important to him. “Will you tell me about him?”
Obi-Wan stares at the skyline, delaying his answer. It’s foolish, he knows, and he could be putting the entire Rebellion in danger. He had once sworn that he’d rather relive Mustafar a thousand times over before he gave up any information about Luke to the Empire. But now, with Anakin asking him so plainly, them sitting together just as they had before everything had changed, he finds himself being tempted.
He’s never been very good at saying no to Anakin.
“He’s brave,” Obi-Wan says finally. “A good flyer.” and Anakin chuckles at this, and Obi-Wan remembers that he already knows this, has had first-hand experience of it.
“He’s so good.” He drops into a whisper. “He sees the best in people.”
Anakin isn’t chuckling anymore, and when Obi-Wan dares to turn his head, the corners of his mouth are turned down. It’s jarring, seeing Anakin with his short haircut and yellow eyes so bright they’re almost luminescent.
“I gave up everything because I was afraid,” he says, after a beat of silence. “I thought I was going to lose Padmé, lose our child. I thought I had.”
“You still have me.” Obi-Wan looks back to the skyline. He feels as though if he keeps looking at Anakin with those yellow eyes, soft and young and distraught, he’ll cleave clean in two. “I’m not sure how much its worth anymore, but you’ve got me anyhow.”
“Obi-Wan,” Anakin sounds frustrated, but Obi-Wan keeps talking over him. He knows with a sudden certainty that if he stops now, the dream will disappear through his fingers.
“What do you want, Anakin?”
There’s a tense silence, the only sound the speeders whizzing by the windows of the apartment. Night is fast approaching on Coruscant, and the apartment has darkened so Obi-Wan can’t see his fingers anymore when he looks down.
“Anakin?” Obi-Wan can hardly breathe.
“I don’t know anymore.” He sounds so lost, and all Obi-Wan wants to do is hold him. “I don’t know.”
After Endor, Leia almost shoots on sight when Luke finally emerges from his X-Wing dragging the body of Darth Vader behind him. Obi-Wan thinks its only the pure shock that means she starts yelling instead.
Obi-Wan rushes to Anakin’s side, leaving Luke to defuse the situation. His knees creak as he falls into a crouch. Anakin looks terrible, to put it bluntly, the burns from Mustafar never having fully healed, decades behind the mask making him sickly pale, brow furrowed in pain. But his eyes are blue, bluer than Obi-Wan remembers, and that’s how he knows everything will be okay.
He takes Anakin’s face between his hands and presses their foreheads together, being careful not to jostle his breathing modulator.
Their bond sings, and Obi-Wan feels the Force swirling around them, finally having settled. He’s so busy bathing in the euphoric glow of having his dyad near him again, whole, alive, and fully him again, that he doesn’t notice the two of them are glowing, literally.
“Ben?” He hears Luke ask shakily, and then Anakin is changing before his eyes, his breathing evening out, face smoothing into rest, body losing some of its tension from the pain. His eyes close, and he exhales one last time before he slips into a deep sleep.
Force healing, Obi-Wan vaguely remembers from the books he read all those years ago about dyads, before he too passes out.
He wakes up to the sterile whiteness of the medbay, and for the moment, he’s still a General, the Clone Wars haven’t ended yet, and it’s just another battle he only just made it out of alive. His first thought, as always, is of Anakin, before a bolt of pain through his chest sends it all rushing back to him and leaves him scrabbling, trying to ease the pressure behind his breastbone. The figure who had been slouched in the bedside chair bolts upright and presses a soothing hand to Obi-Wan’s shoulder.
“You’re alright, you’re alright. Deep breaths, in, out, in out…”
Obi-Wan forces himself to breathe in time with the counting, and eventually the pain subsides. He carefully turns his head to meet Luke’s worried eyes.
“I’m okay, dear boy. Just healing.”
It doesn’t seem to reassure Luke much, but he lets go of Obi-Wan’s shoulder and sits back down.
“What happened?”
And Luke, with bags under his eyes, and soot still in his hair, who looks so much older than he did when they had left Tatooine together, smiles, eyes still lighting up despite his exhaustion. “We won.”
Obi-Wan allows himself to feel a moment of joy, in the midst of all the pain and loss. Your father, he wants to ask, but he doesn’t know how.
Luke reads his face. “He’s been asking for you.” His goes soft. “I didn’t know if you wanted me to let him in.”
Obi-Wan takes a shaky breath. He knows that if he doesn’t screw up his courage now, he will never do it, and he’ll regret that for the rest of his life. “Let him in.”
Luke stands and leaves the room, and Obi-Wan stares at the ceiling and focuses on his breathing.
Eventually, there are footsteps outside, and a second later, the door sweeps open.
Obi-Wan is slammed with the intensity of the Force, the brightness, cautious joy, but most of all, how close it is to him. How familiar it is, even after all this time. He crans his head up to see the newcomer.
It’s Anakin, his hair gone grey, and skin paler than Obi-Wan has ever seen it, but still unmistakably him. Older, but the same scar over his eye where his crow’s feet are. Still the same person Obi-Wan knows better than his own soul.
He moves slowly, and there’s a mechanical creak as he sits down beside Obi-Wan’s bed. It takes him a minute to realise that the creak is coming from Anakin’s entire body.
Anakin smiles wryly. “The Force healing fixed my injuries, but it couldn’t exactly grow back my limbs from twenty-something years ago. Luke got Lando to pull some strings.”
Obi-Wan smiles, greedily drinking in the sight of him: whole, not dying, not in danger of dying. Eyes blue. They lapse into silence, neither of them sure what to say. And because there’s no version of Anakin in the world where a part of him isn’t a brat, he speaks first:
“You’ve gotten old.”
Obi-Wan’s mouth drops open in shock. “Kriff off, so have you.”
And then they’re both laughing, so much that the machines around Obi-Wan begin to beep, and a medical droid rushes in, scolding both of them. And it’s the fact that this droid either doesn’t notice the former Darth Vader standing right there or notices and doesn’t care, that makes it all real. Something unclenches itself inside Obi-Wan’s chest, and then there are hot tears spilling down his cheeks. He tries to wipe them away surreptitiously in all the chaos, but a mechanical hand is right there brushing away the wetness for him, cold, but gentle.
“I’m here.” Anakin says quietly. “I’ve got you.”
Later, when Obi-Wan’s been dismissed from the medbay and they’re—finally, finally— lying in bed together, close but not touching, Anakin whispers, “How did you know? How did you know—”
“That it was you?”
He nods, exhaling a loud breath. Earlier, he’d told Obi-Wan that after so many years of needing assistance to breathe, being able to do so freely is odd.
“Anakin.” Obi-Wan puts a hand on the side of Anakin’s face, thumb sweeping over his cheekbone. “I’ve known you since you were a boy. I watched you grow for fifteen years. I would know you anywhere, even if I didn’t have the Force.”
Anakin turns his face into Obi-Wan’s hand, hiding a little. “But I had fallen.”
Obi-Wan feels the anger wash over him for a moment; the feelings he had tamped down since the moment he felt Anakin wrap around his heart on Tatooine, Yoda’s useless advice, and the vast expanse of loneliness that had always stretched out before him, an ocean with no end. “You betrayed me.” he agrees lowly. “You betrayed my trust, you betrayed our friendship.”
Anakin makes to shift away from him, but Obi-Wan grabs him by the wrist, not allowing him to move. “You betrayed everything I ever stood for.”
He closes his eyes, all of the emotions rising up around him, the Force vibrating with the intensity of it. “You let me down.”
“Then why did you save me?” Anakin whispers.
Obi-Wan opens his eyes, looking at the blue of his other half. “Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?”
Anakin lets out a half sob, and closes the distance between them to bury his face in Obi-Wan’s neck. Obi-Wan’s arms come up to clutch Anakin tightly, feeling tears well up in his own eyes. He presses his lips to Anakin’s forehead, their bond pulling them closer, closer.
They’re older now, years between them, so different to who they used to be. There are moments when Obi-Wan can feel that expanse of distance between them, all the lives lost, the hours they’d been alone. But still, there are other moments when he knows the answer Anakin will give to his question before he even opens his mouth, when they move together like two parts of one whole. The bond, Obi-Wan thinks drowsily, isn’t so much the reason why they know each other so intimately, but rather, the other way round. They are bonded because of that knowledge. Because they have chosen to know each other, again and again.
He chooses again now.
“Anakin?”
“Hmm?” He sounds already half asleep, but Obi-Wan has to know.
“The bond. It first manifested after…” He doesn’t finish the sentence, but he knows that Anakin knows what he means. He knows that Anakin knows him.
“What happened to you?” he asks. What happened to you, he leaves unspoken, that was worse than anything that had come before that?
Anakin’s grip on his back tightens for a second before he speaks. It sounds like he’s dragging a memory out by its teeth.
“It was the first time I’d realised I was completely, utterly alone.” He laughs a little, and now, that everything has passed, Obi-Wan can find the humour in it, no matter how ironic. “And there you were.”
“And there I was.” Obi-Wan shifts to hold Anakin closer to him, more firmly.
Anakin places an open mouth kiss on his neck, breathing in his scent, and the Force glows. “Here you are.”