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Place me like a seal over your heart,
like a seal on your arm;
for love is as strong as death,
its ardor unyielding as the grave.
Song of Songs, 8:7
i.
Master Qui-Gon used to tell him that his mind was like a fortress when it should be more like a garden.
He had never understood his way of saying things. He always said one thing when he meant another. He was not a liar, but he was an almost impossible person to understand. Or, at least, he had always found him impossible to understand. It was as if the two of them spoke a totally different language and as if they had become accustomed to understanding each other that way, without making the effort to learn that unknown dialect.
When he closed his eyes to meditate, he always thought of gardens and fortresses. He remembered the castle of Theed and its towers; its golden domes reflecting the sun; the perpetual noise of the waterfalls, the towering walls that protected the entire city, the vegetation that overflowed from every corner. He saw himself in the center of a place like the royal square of Theed, there in the same country where he had lost his master. He sat in the center of that imaginary space and allowed the Force to deposit itself within him: he opened the door of his heart and let himself be filled with its weightless water, its weightless light.
He felt it enter from the center of his head. It opened space inside him like a river in a canyon, being created by it. It coursed through his whole body. It touched all the spaces inside him that he didn't even know could be touched: his bones, his viscera, under his fingernails, between each of his hairs.
For many years the only true communion he had had with anyone had been with the Force. Perhaps that was what Qui-Gon meant when he told him it was like a fortress. Untouched except by the wind.
It was something he thought about a lot, especially after his master’s death.
He knew that Qui-Gon had committed the transgression of attachment with Tahl, his former jedi companion. He had loved her and told him so, without his characteristic ambiguity. He knew that Qui-Gon could feel tenderness toward people and things, even though he had never felt himself the recipient of that special deference. So, he knew that his master would be the one person, of all those who might have dared, to tell him that he was closed to the Force. Yet it had never seemed that way to him.
He had always felt that there was a huge disconnect between what he knew he was and what others sensed. It was as if he couldn't match his heart to his face, and everyone believed an image he wasn’t. Everyone thought he was an unflappable, scrupulous, solemn jedi. Everyone thought he was inflexible, that he was afraid of nothing but breaking the rules, that all he wanted was to be the best jedi of the millennium.
Maybe it was because he had never been good at having friends. Qui-Gon knew that too. It terrified him to know that he was so close to a person that he would end up attaching himself to them. He was so afraid of a possibility that he preferred not to risk it at all. Eventually, his classmates became just colleagues. Neither Bant, Quinlan nor Siri had survived the severe sieving of his affection. They had all gone from being at the center of his heart to names he heard in the hallways and nothing more.
He also remembered the time Qui-Gon had sent him to créche for a whole week to help the masters with the care of the younglings. It had been a horrible week for him. He soon discovered that there was nothing he disliked more than the noise of the infants' screams, as well as the strange smell they had and their clammy little hands clutching at every part of his body, calling his name, asking him to hold them, to show them his lightsaber.
"You must get closer to the Living Force," his master reminded him when he came to his room to report to him what he had done during the day. "The one that flows through us all and unites us."
And he would tell him yes, master, I will, even though he knew he would never be good at taking care of another person.
But it would not be until Anakin arrived in his life that all his preconceptions —all the ideas he had sculpted of himself, based on his experiences, on his sufferings, on all the people he had lost— and all his beliefs would be completely overturned and Obi-Wan would have to start from scratch, having Anakin's gravitational force as his starting point.
He’d thought he had no friends until that little boy from Tatooine forced him to sit with him on the bathroom floor so he could tell him everything he needed to know about the temple and about himself before he began his jedi training. He had thought he didn't like taking care of children, until his little 10-year-old Padawan started waking up with him, in his bed, clinging to his back, his brow pearly with sweat, his gesture peaceful. He had believed that he was unflappable, scrupulous, and solemn until Anakin started wandering off into the lower levels of Coruscant to run illegal races and he realized he was nothing more than a bundle of nerves and apprehensions making excuses not to report him to the council.
With Anakin he realized that he didn’t want to be the best jedi of the millennium, but that he wanted to be loved, with the same intensity that his padawan asked to love him. With Anakin, he realized that he was not a fortress, as his own master had always believed. He realized he was a garden, which opened its gates every time Anakin knocked.
And Anakin knocked. He knocked and knocked on his door, ardently, without worrying if at some point it would come off its hinges.
ii.
Most of the battles on Anaxes had been in its atmosphere and Obi-Wan had believed they had been spared from ground combat, but if the war had shown him anything it was that there was never good luck and that, since Geonosis, none of them had been spared. Not really.
The entire Jedi Council knew that hostilities were coming to an end. Most of the blockades had been disintegrated, the Trade Federation's influence in the Senate had lost all of its initial vigor, and they had managed to eliminate the spies Dooku had placed within their ranks. Anaxes seemed to be the light at the end of the tunnel for most.
What they didn't expect was that the Separatists decided to use an army of radicalized anaxens, put them in golden armor, as the droids wore, and throw them into the middle of the battlefield. When he, Anakin and Mace entered the fray and realized that this was neither mud nor water, but blood, they had to order the clones to cease fire and retreat. But the damage had already been done. For the first few confused minutes, when Obi-Wan jumped out of the assault craft onto the muddy ground, with only the discernment that behind him was Anakin, he didn’t realize that he was defending himself against a person and not a droid. When he saw his former padawan raise his lightsaber and pierce one of the troopers and that neither sparks or wires shot out of his chest, but coagulated blood and the unmistakable scent of scorched flesh, everything around him had already become a slaughterhouse.
"Retreat! Ponds! Cease fire! They’re people!" shouted Mace, raising his hand and repelling with the Force the few Anaxen soldiers left standing. "Skywalker! Call Rex, tell him to come down with the infirmary ships. Come on Kenobi, let's see who's left alive."
Anakin switched off his saber and turned to look at him with apprehension. This had been an inconceivable cruelty. They had been forced to kill innocent people, civilians. The war had been halfway digestible for all those years because they had always fought against pieces of metal and digital brains. That had been the concession: that the Jedi would enter the fight, but they wouldn't kill a person.
Still dazed, Obi-Wan looked at his lightsaber. It was plasma, compacted light. It wasn’t possible for the mark of a murder to be etched on his blade. Whether or not he had killed anyone, he would never know, and that certainty caused his stomach to churn.
He felt a hand on his wrist and realized that Anakin had approached him. His face was dirty and his hair disheveled, but nothing else. The breastplate of his armor showed nothing more than the splash of the wet earth of that place. When he looked down to see Anakin pick up his lightsaber and turn it off, he realized that he was the one who, in his white armor, carried the evidence of the massacre.
"Are you alright, Obi-Wan?" whispered Anakin, still holding his hand, still looking into his eyes. Behind him, Mace shouted that he was waiting for him. In his nostrils, he could smell only iron and wet earth. Everything else was noise.
"Yes," he replied to the boy. "And you?"
"Come with me, master. You are not well. You're in shock," he insisted, interlacing his fingers with his, pressing hard on the tip of his index finger.
The pressure snapped him back to reality. He turned his head to where Mace was watching him impatiently and reluctantly let go of Anakin's hand and took his saber from his other hand.
"No, I'm fine. Really. Anakin, go. I'll stay with Mace."
"I'm looking at you, got it? I'm looking at you all the time."
Anakin stared at him for half a second longer before turning and leaving. He knew what that look meant: that he disagreed with his decision and that he would prefer that he listen and leave with him. And Obi-Wan would have done so, without complaint, hadn’t another jedi been so close to them, and not just any jedi, but Mace Windu, who had always been so critical of Anakin and his relationship with Obi-Wan.
He walked behind Mace, taking care not to step over the bodies of the fallen soldiers. He had told him to look for any survivors among the bodies, to take them to the medical clones to heal their wounds and hold them for questioning, but for long, agonizing minutes Obi-Wan found nothing under his feet but the dead.
Most of them had perfectly round holes in their chests and heads, indicating that it had been the work of the clone troopers. But some of them had long, thin, perpendicular marks that Obi-Wan knew were the product of the shots they had repelled with their lightsabers. One of those marks had hit the swarthy face of an Anaxen. On the ground, the only thing that remained intact was the rest of his body, open to the sky, like a gruesome flower, while his entire face was split in two, exposing bone and flesh, and the soft, slippery material of his brain.
All he could manage was run a couple of meters to one of the trenches the fighters had built and kneel there to vomit. He emptied his stomach for what seemed like an eternity. He felt his knees and hands sinking into the soil, as if the earth itself wanted to swallow him whole, as if it also wanted to drag him down to the impossibility of death.
Mace's hands held him by the shoulders, at the edge of the trench, while he tried to catch his breath and focus on the Force, to stop feeling his entire body struggle against the terror and revulsion.
"That's it, Kenobi. Breathe," the jedi master told him, without looking at him and with his face raised to the overcast sky. Obi-Wan put his hand to his stomach and felt it empty. "The Force is with you. Let it take you."
iii.
The clones and Mace found a couple of survivors. One of them knew the name of the general who had brought them together to fight the Jedi, so he and his platoon went deeper into the city in search of that link to Dooku, while Anakin and Obi-Wan would return to Coruscant and await orders from the rest of the council before returning to battle.
That way both the ships, and Obi-Wan, could get the repair and rest they so desperately needed. That was what Mace had said in front of Anakin, as if he was to blame for his master's sudden discomfort. Anakin just looked at him, his arms crossed in his chest.
It wasn't until the man left with his men, that Obi-Wan felt Anakin's durasteel hand bury itself in his elbow and lead him toward the cabins. He, still feeling dizzy and light, as if he had thrown up his bones as well, let himself be led by him.
"I told you you were sick. You looked bad," he complained, as Anakin ran his other hand around his waist and hugged him tightly to himself. Obi-Wan held onto his hand, which pressed easily into the soft flesh of his side. He felt incredibly drained. "I know it was horrible. They didn't even give us a chance to see them up close. If we had seen them, we would have known they were people. Dooku is getting more and more desperate. He knows we're about to beat him."
"I was fine," Obi-Wan insisted, as Anakin tapped his knuckles on the button in his room to let them in. The clones and the medical droids knew that any wounds he or Anakin suffered, they would heal each other. No one around them seemed surprised by the strange ritual of the two of them dragging each other into the privacy of their quarters. It had been that way for years. It had always been that way.
"You were fine until you threw up your whole stomach among the corpses. Sit down, let me–let me take everything off you."
As the days passed in the chaos of war, Obi-Wan grew accustomed to letting himself be done. It was Anakin's pleasure to take him and undress him and dress his wounds and, if there was time, kiss the rest of his body, stick his fingers in all his orifices, make him come and drink his moans right into his mouth. Obi-Wan allowed it because, in the chaos of war, nothing made more sense than the weight of the body of the man he loved most on top of his own.
And for him, such awe-inspiring devotion was a necessary pause. It was a place Anakin had built for the two of them, like a small house under the shade of a tree, like a pergola made of his intertwined fingers, with just enough space for Obi-Wan to enter, curl up and sleep without thinking of the faces of those he had lost, or the smell of molten metal and blood.
But at that moment, Obi-Wan wanted none of that. He didn't want Anakin to touch him, didn't want him to take off his clothes, didn't want him to help him bathe. He wanted to close his eyes for a couple of hours, just like that, with his muddy boots and blood-splattered armor, and he wanted to pretend he was neither a jedi, nor a general, nor a man.
My stomach continued to feel sore, as if it had nothing inside but acid and air. In his mouth, he still had the aftertaste of vomit and on his knees, the dampness of the blood of the Anaxens. He didn't feel sick, but he felt wrong, unsettled, as if a giant hand had grabbed him and thrown him to the other side of the Galaxy. He didn't feel like himself. He was outside himself, stuck in the ground, trapped by the bodies of people who had died for no reason.
But Anakin had already gone ahead: he had removed his boots, his breastplate, his shoulder pads, and the rest of his armor. He took his hands in his and checked them side up and upside down, then placed two kisses on each back. He removed his tabards and opened his tunic, just enough to expose his chest and, as with his hands, kissed him in the center, right where his ribs met.
He lifted his pant legs, to make sure he wasn't hurt, and finally settled between his legs, as he had done countless times, and took his face in his hands, to move it back and forth, running his eyes all over him, running his fingers through his beard, under his eyes, behind his ears.
The patience he adopted was unique to that activity. He did it as if still marveling that Obi-Wan would let him touch him, as if he would lose the opportunity to touch him again if he didn’t do it with the utmost care.
"You’re beautiful and perfectly fine, Obi-Wan," he assured him, his mouth close to his; his breath hitting his lips, the rest of his body clinging to his. "You have no visible wounds."
"I don't feel either beautiful or perfectly fine," he blurted out, resting his hands on Anakin's warm chest. He wanted to tell him that he didn't want any of what he knew was coming, but he couldn't find the words to refuse.
For so long "no" had been his default answer, that once he started saying "yes" he no longer knew how to go back to negative. Anakin had taken all his nos and pulverized them inside his hand.
"Do you want me to make you feel better?" Anakin insisted, beginning to remove his own armor, dropping it carelessly on the floor of his cabin. "I can't stop thinking about you, Master. I think we left something hanging the other day."
It had been more than two weeks since Obi-Wan had awakened with Anakin's hand on his cock and his mouth on his neck. Not even his voice had awakened him; it was the feeling of impossible pleasure that had come over him that caused him to open his eyes.
"You look so pretty when you're asleep," his former Padawan told him, moving from his neck to his collarbone, and from his collarbone to his nipple, to press against it, to suck and bite, while his hand did the same and his fingers found the familiar path inside him. "I've always loved you asleep. When I didn't have you it was the only time I could touch you."
And he had curved his back and spread his legs to give him free access to that place Anakin loved so much, and his body recognized that love perfectly, so much so that his fingers entered easily, without the need for lubricant or saliva. But the alarm had interrupted them again, as had the call from Mace Windu, asking them to land on Anaxes.
But that had been two weeks ago and now Obi-Wan felt imprisoned by a body that refused to feel anything but pain. He closed his eyes, trying to bring back to his memory the arousal on that day; how he had woken up absolutely surrounded by Anakin how that absurd confession had made him feel, that he had wanted him since he was a boy; how he had asked him to penetrate him fast, even with his fingers, because he needed to feel him inside, where no one had ever touched him but Anakin. But he found nothing.
It was as if something had been removed from inside his head, as if his skull had been split in two and the connection necessary to feel pleasure had been taken out and replaced with one that only produced nausea.
He lay back on the bed and rolled over, his back to Anakin, his eyes still closed and his former Padawan, taking a cue where there was none, moved in behind him. He kissed the back of his neck and, with a quick, learned movement, pulled his pants down below the curve of his ass and Obi-Wan could feel his erection, settling at his entrance. He cupped his durasteel hand under his body, to pull it even closer to him and with his flesh hand, he spread his buttocks apart to penetrate him in a fluid motion.
Anakin began to move, placing little kisses on his shoulder and neck, telling him how beautiful he was, how good it felt, how much he had missed him. Obi-Wan looked down and realized that on his chest there was still a small red spot, the length and width of Anakin's tooth; it was the bite he had given him so many days ago.
For some reason, realizing the mark of Anakin's teeth on his body, filled his eyes with tears. Even that mark had refused to leave his body. Even Anakin's bruises lived longer inside him than his flimsy resolve.
When with a grunt he felt that he had come inside him, Obi-Wan tried to get up, fully intending to lock himself in the bathroom and stay there until Anakin fell asleep, or until the sonic shower took away all sensation on his skin, but Anakin stopped him with one arm and kissed him hard on the mouth.
"Don't go yet. It's your turn," he said, while with his hands he finished pulling down his pants. However, he stopped abruptly when he saw that Obi-Wan was still flaccid. It was the first time in all their encounters that he had not been aroused. Anakin stood very still, confused, as if waiting for the man beneath him to explain himself, to tell him something that would justify that, but Obi-Wan remained silent. All he did was put his middle finger to the little mark on his chest.
When Anakin understood what was happening, he got up from the bunk and dressed silently. After what seemed like an hour, Obi-Wan dared to utter a word.
"Anakin...".
"Why didn't you tell me?" he demanded. His voice sounded impossibly cold, wounded. Obi-Wan didn't even know what to begin to say. Because I feel like death has sunk its icy hand inside my heart and because I'm afraid of being damaged forever. Because I feel that there is nothing in the world that can put me back together again, not even you.
"Because– I thought you–".
"Well, it's just fucking embarrassing, Obi-Wan. I'm not a fucking animal," he exclaimed, pulling on his boots and picking up the pieces of his armor, before walking out of the cabin and leaving him alone there. Alone and with the ship's automated voice announcing that they were a couple of hours away from reaching Coruscant.
Before leaving the ship, once it landed, Obi-Wan decided to go to the sickbay, to activate the emergency medical droid to give him a routine scan. He pressed the buttons, sat in the examination chair, and let the droid run its devices over his entire body.
All the noises it made sounded amplified, as he apparently was the last being inside the bowels of the ship. He hadn't even seen Anakin come out. He stared at the back of his right hand, thinking that he had kissed it, even after killing a dozen innocents. Why couldn't he grant himself the forgiveness Anakin offered so freely?
"Routine medical checkup: complete," the droid announced in its mechanical voice, snapping him out of his reverie. "Vital signs: normal. Blood pressure: normal. Blood levels: normal. Brain function: normal."
Obi-Wan sighed, relieved. But before he could get to his feet, the droid spoke again.
"Routine ultrasound shows an anomaly. The patient has an ectopic pregnancy in the peritoneal cavity. A medical procedure is recommended to remove the product, as these cases bring with them fatal complications," the droid pronounced, showing him on the datapad screen the hologram of a small fetus, like a chestnut, embedded between the curves of his intestines.
iv.
The problem was that Obi-Wan had always loved Anakin, even before he loved him like that. And maybe that had been the issue.
Disdain turned to affection and affection turned to commitment. The gap left by Qui-Gon had been filled and overflowed so quickly that it seemed to Obi-Wan that he had never missed his master. Sometimes he would wake up very early in the mornings, when Anakin was ten or eleven, and stand in front of the little bed they shared and just stare at him, as if trying to scrutinize where the feeling came from; as if trying to find out how it was that from his heart there kept flowing and flowing, like water from a rock. A love that seemed to flood everything, that had carved his soul to take the serpentine shape of a river trying to make its way to the sea.
He knew it was love, even when he had made himself believe it was not. Even when years later, 16 or 17-year-old Anakin had tried to kiss him in the dojo and he'd had to push him away, tell him it was improper, that he shouldn't feel that way, that he should ask the Force for strength and let it go. And a long time later –perhaps on his way to a mission, waiting for a commander in the lobby, perhaps inside a ship, locked in the blue of hyperspace– he would think those words weren't so much for Anakin as they were for him.
He hadn't spent that much time scrutinizing when the change had occurred: when a master's innocent love for his padawan had been transfigured into a thing that had no name and was forbidden. Perhaps if he did, he could find the exact moment, the precise minute when his heart decided that loving him like a father would love his son or an older brother to his younger brother was not enough.
Obi-Wan suspected that it had been after the dojo incident. Before and after.
Before because the signs had already been there, but Obi-Wan hadn't managed to interpret them until the kiss contextualized them. And after because, if he was honest one day in his life, he hadn't been able to stop thinking about his Padawan's lips since that occasion.
He remembered how he had even stopped eating for a couple of days because any touch on his mouth reminded him with a severe accuracy of the moist softness of Anakin's mouth. And if he touched them with the tip of a finger, if he felt again his tongue break the seal of his lips, he would remember again Anakin’s hands on the lapel of his training tunic, like two burning coals, and he would see again the tears in Anakin's eyes, asking him, begging him, to let himself be kissed.
Three years had to pass, the war had to start; Anakin had had to lose his arm, he had had to start a "friendship" with the senator of Naboo; he had had to destroy Obi-Wan and all that he was and he had had to put him back together again so that he, his master, the man who had raised him, would finally let himself be kissed.
He was sitting in one of the Jedi Archive's study units as he remembered it all. Their first kiss.
He had emerged from the destroyer like an apparition. Or at least that's how he had felt. He greeted a couple of masters who asked him, concerned, about his health. They had heard what had happened on Anaxes, they had all lamented the situation and, as in a script learned by heart, they had all agreed that the Force would eventually lead them to the light. Obi-Wan had only nodded a couple of times, fighting himself not to place his hands on his belly and touch the place where he knew it was.
In the bathroom of his room, he opened his robe and stood in front of the mirror to see the place where the droid had pointed out where the fetus was located. The reflection brought back his slender figure, his stomach almost concave. His ribs were visible beneath his very white skin and dark hair. If he didn't know better, he would think he looked normal; that he was tired and skinny from the war; that he had vomited because he wasn't used to the stench of death.
But the hologram wasn't lying. He forced the droid to do the ultrasound twice more and the result had been the same each time. The medical droid told him that it was 7 weeks along, that it was no bigger than a bean, and that he could perform the operation himself without further complications. The scar that would remain would be so small that he would soon forget about it.
Now, on the screen in front of him, the searches for the ectopic pregnancy file returned said nothing about cisgender men having an ectopic pregnancy. It was physically impossible, because, for one thing, he had no uterus for the fetus to grow. The creature inside himself had appeared in a place where it would never thrive, where its life meant Obi-Wan's death.
He stayed in front of the computer for a while longer. In the distance, he could hear the high-pitched voices of the little children who were doing their homework, immune to the terrors of war and hatred, and of love that was so great, and so terrible, so immeasurable, that it could change the bodies of men.
Because it was obvious that the thing inside his intestines was the product of the union between him and Anakin. That was the first thing he had intuited, even before he had asked the droid to take the second ultrasound.
Of course it was Anakin. Who else?
Obi-Wan had never been with another person in his life. The only body he knew was that of his former Padawan. The only mouth he had ever kissed was his. The only semen that had ever entered his body had been that of the Force's Chosen One. And seven weeks ago, they had been together, on Cato Neimoidia, and Anakin had ended up inside him, as he had on other occasions. They had met in the hallway on the way to his cabin. Obi-Wan had grabbed him by the belt to pull him close, to the corner where they both knew there was a blind spot and kissed him on the corner of the lips.
"This is the tenth time I've saved your skin, master," he had said, smiling so broadly that Obi-Wan would have believed him if he had told him, it was the end of the war.
He put his hands to his face, trying to remember what had happened, but he couldn't find anything strange. Or rather, the foundation of his relationship with Anakin was warped from the start and he no longer had any understanding of what was normal or what was acceptable. How many times had Anakin whispered to him that he was going to breed him? How many times had he forced him to wear women's underwear, to get down on his knees and say yes when he asked him if he was his wife?
He had said yes to all that and more because he loved him. That was his foundation. From there everything derived. That was the fertile soil in which everything grew. From Obi-Wan's love for Anakin: as a master, as a father, as a brother; as a believer, as a follower, as the creation of a God who knew no restraint, who knew only overflow. And he had stood there, in that open field, arms raised high, ready to die and kill for him. He had told him, unhinged with love, maddened with pleasure: Make of me what you will. The Force created you and you created me. I belong only to you. I am yours.
But now, when death had touched him so intimately, had deposited itself inside his body, and demonstrated to him the unmistakable consequences of surrender and attachment, Obi-Wan recoiled.
He tensed his stomach again. There, below his navel, on the left side, he felt the presence of something else. Something that shouldn't have taken hold inside his body, but had done so anyway, like a flower growing in the middle of a desert. There was Anakin. His massive, monstrous love. Like a giant wave, like a torrent of fire. The seed of his ardor taking root in the fertile soil of his devotion.
Obi-Wan was the space where Anakin commits his devastation; his body was a map of strategies, a field prepared for war. And Anakin, his Anakin, was a god fighting against Nature. The love of a god that is so much and so all-encompassing that it brings not only life but death.
No: he preferred to be a fortress. He preferred to be a tower.
It hurt less this way.
v.
He didn't see Anakin the rest of the day, neither at the urgent Council meeting, nor the next day. That meant only two things: he was either not on the planet or he was in the senatorial apartments.
He made the decision when he woke up, very early in the morning. When the only ones awake were the jedi who went out to meditate in the Room of a Thousand Fountains in the bluish, almost gray light of dawn. He walked out into the temple hangars, covered by his cloak and the shadows, and entered the one that housed The Resolute. There was no one but the small maintenance robots at ground level, cleaning. He walked into the destroyer, trying not to think about what he was about to do, counting his breaths, one out, one in; asking the Force for temperance, for light, for something, something else, except this.
But all he got back was silence.
Once inside the infirmary, the process didn't take long: he turned on the medical droid, activated the code for his operation, and settled on the operating table, without further ceremony. He unfastened his tunic, and the droid began to work with mechanical precision. All around him, only the whistling and whirring of the medical devices and his own exhalations could be heard, which seemed to reach his ears like the sound of the wind in the treetops.
It was a striking contrast, to be there, in the cold, clinical environment of the infirmary, as a pair of metal fingers opened his skin and inserted a suction tube, and to be with Anakin, beneath him, in the warm, familiar stupor of his embrace, as he made love to him and deposited in his loins what he was now removing in terror, staring into the surgical lamp, thinking of his Padawan's blue-green eyes; with his hands very still and folded at his sides, thinking that those hands had taken Anakin's face between them and that he had marveled at the softness of his skin.
What would his children be like, he thought, as the droid deposited something in a small metal bowl. Would they have the color of his eyes? Would they be blond like him? Would they grow as tall as Anakin? Would they suffer from the same boundless heart?
The droid closed his wound and stuck a small bacta patch on it. He told him that everything had come out in order and that the product would be disposed of under biological waste disposal protocol. Obi-Wan couldn't help but feel a pang of regret. After all, it was not the creature's fault that it had been conceived. If anything, it had been his fault for allowing it.
"Thank you," he whispered, as he closed his robe and stood up. He had been shivering and his back felt numb, but that was all. He felt no pain at all.
"It is recommended for the patient to rest for 2 to 3 days for a successful recovery. Please do not engage in significant physical activity during this time," the droid finished saying, as he cleaned the station where he had just operated on Obi-Wan.
Of course, there was no chance of that. The night before they had been warned to fly to Yerbana, to break the last blockade still standing on the Triella Trade Route. With the liberation of the planet, the Jedi Order and the Republic could say that they had freed the Outer Rim from the clutches of the Separatists.
The holograms of the jedi generals showed gestures of relief and hope that Obi-Wan had not shared. The only thing that remained standing within him was the sense of responsibility he had placed in Anakin. With the end of the war, they had both promised each other, they would be free. Now, with the bacta patch below his navel, he found it difficult to find a path to freedom. It was like stepping out of one war into another. One where what was being fought was his integrity, his soul.
So he preferred to stay inside the The Resolute. Anakin had set the security system in his quarters to recognize him as well and it was the only place he could hide while he gathered strength to go down to the temple and continue pretending he was a good jedi and a good man. He walked through the cruiser, walked through the darkened and hushed corridors, entered his padawan's cabin and lay down on his bunk, which didn't smell like him, which smelled like the detergent they used to wash the sheets and clean the inside of the cabins. He lay down and fell asleep, sinking fast into a dreamless sleep, dark and lonely.
Minutes later –or hours or days– what woke him up was the sensation of someone holding a knife to his back: an icy shiver ran down his spine, a feeling of terror, like the one that came when he knew that behind him was an enemy, a droid with a loaded blaster, a sith. But when he turned around, he found Anakin, who was sitting in the regulation chair in his room, facing the bed.
The lights were off, except for the small crimson emergency spotlight shining from the floor. The man in front of him had his gloved hand in front of his mouth and was looking him straight in the eye. They said nothing for a couple of seconds.
"I don't think you understand that there is no place in the Galaxy you can go where I can't find you," was what Anakin said, finally. His voice sounded low, but soft, with the peculiar cadence that characterized him. It was like dark velvet. Like the fur of a panther. "I told you, remember? I see you all the time. I close my eyes and I know where you are, why don't you ever believe me?"
"Anakin–".
"You really think this is all a sham. You think I'm a liar? That have I spent all this time lying to you?" he continued, not allowing Obi-Wan to talk. "I am not like you, master. I do not survive on half-truths and secrets. I don't settle for shadows and whispers. Can't you see I've done all this for you? We should have left the Order from day one, but I stayed here for you. I should have married you, I should have taken you off this filthy planet and I should have taken you away where only I know. But you love being a jedi, don't you? You love it more than me. You love the code more than you love me. You love the Council masters more than me. You are the liar.”
Obi-Wan instinctively covered his stomach. Anakin had said all that not as a complaint, but as a threat. The air in the cabin froze. It was as if every word he uttered was a dart of ice, and it was stabbing into Obi-Wan's heart.
"No, Anakin. I love you."
Anakin shook his head. His features, distorted by the red light, looked as if they had been carved from rock.
"Then why didn't you tell me?".
"Tell you what?"
"That you were carrying my son." Silence. Or maybe noise. Just noise. Obi-Wan could only feel Anakin's gaze on top of his and the edges of the bacta patch on his belly. Anakin let out an incredulous chuckle, as he stood up to approach the bunk, "You didn't wipe the droid's memory. And you killed a child. What a good jedi you are."
He sat up in bed, upset, angry. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He felt dizzy still and cold, freshly awake, talking to a shadow that didn't understand reason, that told him things that didn't make sense.
"Anakin, a child? What are you talking about? That–that thing inside me was not a child. It was an impossibility! An aberration! Why did you do that to me? You had no right to–".
He couldn't finish telling him that he had no right to do with his body what he wanted because Anakin connected his palm directly to his jaw. The blow was so sudden that Obi-Wan could do nothing to block it. It appeared as if from out of the darkness; an arrow of metal and leather, stunning him, knocking the air out of his body, and emptying his brain of all words.
Anakin grabbed him by the lapel of his tunic and hit him twice more in the same place, both times with the same force and with the same intention: to silence him, to make him hurt.
"That was my son! You were the one who had no right to do that!" shouted Anakin, as he began to fist and pull his tunic off. He felt tears begin to well up in his eyes, though this time not from grief, but from the impact of the slaps. "You’re mine, Obi-Wan! Mine. All of you. Every inch of your body. I wasn't lying to you when I told you that. But you were. You never believed it. You're a fucking liar. A disgrace. A murderer."
The Force around them vibrated sharply, as if it were made of metal, of pieces of broken glass, and was cutting him all over his body. He felt the inside of his body stinging, felt the wounded skin. And he couldn't move an inch. Anakin had him paralyzed underneath him with the Force, to let himself be examined.
The boy pulled down the waistband of his pants just enough to see the small patch of bacta, which he unceremoniously ripped off. His hair was all over his face, and he was breathing hard.
"Anakin, please– let me go. This is a mistake. This is all a mistake."
But Anakin wasn't listening to him. He ran two fingers across the small, red, tender scar the droid had left on him. It looked like nothing more than a scratch, a mark left by his teeth. It didn't show what had really happened there.
"This was mine, Master," he whispered, running his hand over the rest of his stomach in a soft, tender caress that caused Obi-Wan to shiver in fear. Then, he rose from on top of him and began to remove the buckles of his leather glove, so that he could pull it off. "You gave it to me. You told me you loved me. I'm a fool to have believed it, I guess."
"Please, please, Anakin," he insisted, watching as his former apprentice threw the gauntlet to the floor and proceeded to pull his pants down even further. He lay spread-eagled on the bunk, completely exposed, with no defense whatsoever. But even without the Force, what would he do? Would he hit him back? Would he run away from him?
He was right. He was a liar and a murderer. Maybe this was his punishment. Maybe this was what he deserved for letting himself be swept away by the dark sea that was Anakin. For believing he was immune to the forces of Nature, for believing he could breathe underwater.
"You're going to come on my cock, master. And I'm not leaving here until it happens. I'm not going to let you go until I come here," he told him, in a soft, tempered voice, pressing a hard, metallic finger into the wound in him belly. It felt like a stab, but it also felt like a kiss.
Everything around him was swirling with it: with pain and guilt and betrayal, but also with pleasure and passion and love. Everything is love, Obi-Wan thought, everything, even death, is love. This pain, this grief. The war, the destruction, the hatred. When it comes to Anakin, everything is love.
Anakin finished ripping off his pants and lifted his legs into position. With his metal fingers, he ran down his body: from his neck to his collarbone, to his stomach, to his pubic hair, and then underneath, to the entrance of his hole, which received his fingers with no trouble at all. But still, Obi-Wan swallowed air in desperation, frightened and in pain, when Anakin's two fingers became three and he began to insert them without consideration, without seeking his satisfaction, but with the express goal of opening him in two. And he screamed when, instead of three, he felt the tips of all his fingers begin to enter him, tearing him terribly.
"I'm going to make you hurt, Obi-Wan. But you're going to like it, got it? Tell me you understand," Anakin ordered him, his other hand pulling down his pants and pulling out his cock. Everything was dark and scarlet shadows. All that could be heard was the rustling of his ex-Padawan’s clothes and his fingers slipping in and out of him, hurting him, breaking sensitive skin.
"Yes," he exhaled, jerking his head back, unable to continue to watch what Anakin was doing to his body, to watch him tear it to pieces. "Yes, yes, yes."
"You should see yourself, master. I wish I could show you what you look like when you do that. Maybe you'd understand why I'm an addict. I can't live without this. I'm not going to let you take it away from me. And look, you do like it," he said, pulling his hand out of his hole and taking his half-erect, sensitive cock, running his warm metal thumb over its head, drawing a half-hearted moan from his lips. "You are as horrible as I am, Obi-Wan. I thought after all this time you'd come to terms with it."
He entered him after this. Anakin spread his legs with his hands clasped tightly on his thighs and penetrated him all at once, not pausing for a second for Obi-Wan to accept it, not caring either if he himself was hurt by his intrusion. It was a frontal assault, an all-out attack. Anakin was not looking for survivors: all he wanted was to leave his mark on Obi-Wan. The only thing he wanted was to prove to him what he had repeated since he dared to utter it: You’re mine, let me take you.
And as promised, Anakin didn't touch him anywhere else. He didn’t hold him lightly by the face as he kissed him, nor did he bite his nipples, nor did he run his hands all over him. His durasteel hand was deposited firmly on his neck as he moved violently in and out of him, not to choke him, but to keep him from turning his head, to hold it there, slightly forward, so that he would see what he was doing to his body and so that he wouldn’t lose detail of the response of his own sick satisfaction. The pain turned to pleasure, and the pleasure instead began to become something incalculable, like looking into the center of a galaxy, like approaching a black hole.
"Come on my cock, master. Please. You need this more than me. Come on my cock, while I fuck your cunt. You've always liked me to call you like this. You can't lie to me. Not to me. Give me your cum, my love. Come with me inside," and Obi-Wan could do nothing but let the orgasm come to him like torture, like atonement, a birth of something too terrible to name. So he came hard on himself, on his chest and neck, his hands still trapped under Anakin's invisible hands and full of it everywhere, like ice water around every corner of his body.
"Fuck. You always feel so good. Even like this. You're beautiful and you feel so good."
His padawan continued to fuck his abused body until, on the verge of his own orgasm, he pulled out and deposited his semen right on the wound of his operation and, as if to make it all very clear, climbed up on his chest and opened his jaw with two fingers, to squirt the last drops of lathered seed on his tongue. It had all been a demonstration, a staging. It was Anakin proving to him, over and over again, that he was in control and that he wouldn’t hesitate to let him know it.
He swallowed the drops of semen and closed his eyes, as the shackles of the Force faded into darkness and the boy dropped on top of him, exhausted as well, and sinking his face into the curve of his neck. His whole body was aching, throbbing, raw. His wrists, his face, his stomach, his legs. There didn't seem to be an inch of skin on his body that wasn't injured.
He didn't know how much time passed, but Anakin's breathing never slowed. He continued to inhale and exhale irregularly on his chest until Obi-Wan grabbed him by the hair and lifted his face, to see him. Anakin was crying. His eyes were red, and his face was streaked with tears.
"Forgive me, Obi-Wan," he said, between sobs. "But I love you so much. I love you so much it drives me crazy."
Obi-Wan hugged him, trying not to groan at his own pain. He wrapped his arms around him and laid him on his chest, as he had done so many times since he was a bright-eyed, warm-skinned boy.
"I love you too," he replied, stroking his head, whispering gently against the crown of his head. "But we can't keep doing this. I can't do this anymore."
He tried to think of gardens and castles. He tried to remember the special architecture of the royal square of Theed, of the sound its waterfalls made, of the scent of greenery, of sunlight, of flowing, nourishing, life-giving water. He tried to remember the face of his master, the face of the Anaxen he had killed; he tried to repeat the Jedi Code, but nothing came to him. The only thing that accompanied him was Anakin, his signature, his scent, his weight on his body. The only thing he had was him.
And he loved him, it was true—the truest thing he knew. But loving him, too, was like a death sentence.