Work Text:
The problem with Dr. Anakin Skywalker was that he was brilliant. Not just the wow-that-guy-is-really-smart kind of brilliant, but the kind of brilliant that puts him in his own bracket of smart that just about annoys the shit out of everyone else.
The problem with Dr. Anakin Skywalker was that he was so smart, knew so much, that the hospital he worked at had to make a brand-new department for him. He didn’t fit in just one space, but many, which ironically meant he fit nowhere. He was given his own department, his own team, and his own space.
Diagnostics, was his department. Which meant everything and absolutely nothing.
Padmé would have thought that he’d do something with all of that, but months later, she found him sitting in his office with his feet kicked up, staring at his phone. His team, three of the smartest doctors in the country, were sitting in the joint room around a desk doing absolutely nothing.
Obi-Wan was reading, Ahsoka had headphones in, watching a movie on her phone, and Sabé had happened to see Padmé walk up to Anakin’s door like a woman on a warpath. She was watching the interaction through the glass door.
“What are you doing?” Padmé demanded, pushing open the door to Anakin’s office without knocking. Blue eyes glanced up at her briefly, before looking back at his phone. Was he playing a game on his phone? His thumbs were aggressively mashing the screen.
“Working.”
“It doesn’t look like you’re working,” Padmé took a deep breath to resist the urge of pulling her hair out. Or maybe strangling him.
“Oh, I am,” Anakin’s thumbs pause as he continued to watch the screen. “I’m preventing a pandemic.”
“You’re what,” Padmé deadpanned, already exhausted with the conversation.
“Preventing a pandemic. So far, it’s spread through the Olympics, and Greenland is the only country not affected, but I think I can make a comeback.”
“Anakin,” the click of Padmé’s heels on the ground should have alerted Anakin to what she was about to do, but he was too engrossed in his game. She walked around his desk to pluck the phone out of his hands. Anakin aimed a harsh glare at her.
“Listen to me,” she continued, walking back to the other side of his desk, his phone in her hand. “You have done nothing since you were given this post. You hired your team and let them sit around. The hospital pays you, and them, an exorbitant amount of money to do your job. Your name was enough to bring in donors to get the upgrades we desperately needed, but now I need you to do something.”
“There’s no cases for me here. Nothing interesting happens—”
“We work in the middle of the biggest city in this country. Either you find something that interests you or I put you in clinic duty until you manage to do enough work to make your paycheck worth it.”
And that made Anakin’s mouth snap shut. Clinic duty was for the residents that needed to fill their hours or for practicing doctors like Anakin who were being punished. Padmé and Anakin stared at each other. Padmé would win this, as she always did, as she always had in everything they’d done together.
“Fine,” Anakin snapped.
“Thank you,” Padmé’s voice was saccharine sweet, making Anakin scrunch up his nose. She slapped his phone on his desk and turned to leave. She could feel his eyes drop down to her ass to watch as she left. If Anakin wasn’t so… Anakin she might have turned back to scold him like the child he apparently wanted to act like.
But, that’d only make it worse, and she really, really needed him to get some work done.
Obi-Wan was reading a novel. A fictional novel. At work. At his high paying job, wearing scrubs, while his two other coworkers sat around him doing whatever they did to pass time. He wasn’t sure why the three of them had been hired for this job just to sit around, but far be it for him to complain when he was finally getting through his TBR list.
And spending all day in scrubs was more comfortable than jeans so Obi-Wan couldn’t complain, though it was all highly unusual.
He’d just started a new chapter in his book when he heard,
“Any cases today?”
The three of them all looked up in sync. Dr. Skywalker stood in the doorway that connected his office to the joint room where they all sat. It was supposed to be a common room with a small kitchenette and lots of windows to the outside, but it’s where the three doctors had an unspoken rule that they’d spend their time in.
“Cases?” Ahsoka asked. It was a valid question, because they hadn’t done anything since they were hired, but it made Obi-Wan cringe internally.
“We haven’t been looking since the last time you told us all to, what was it exactly you said? Obi-Wan, help me remember,” Sabé waved her hand in the air and looked over her shoulder to Obi-Wan, lazily.
“I’m not getting involved,” Obi-Wan looked back down at his book to pretend like he was reading.
“What I said was for you to stop trying to make me work boring cases. So, anything interesting?” Anakin walked in, past them, and to the coffee maker in the kitchenette.
Obi-Wan glanced up from his book to see Ahsoka and Sabé exchange looks.
“There’s…” Ahsoka began, tentatively. “There’s a woman that came in the other day complaining of the sun burning her skin.”
“She’s already been seen by a hematologist,” Sabé retorted. “She was complaining of being a vampire.”
“Vaguely interesting,” Anakin droned as he worked on making his coffee.
“Probably porphyria,” Obi-Wan muttered at his book.
“If it’s not, it might be more interesting,” Ahsoka defended herself.
“I’ll keep it in mind. Anything else?” Anakin turned to face them, mug in his hand, intense blue eyes watching them.
“I saw someone check in with butterfly shaped rashes, mouth sores, swollen ankles—” Sabé began to suggest when Ahsoka cut her off.
“Lupis,” Ahsoka tapped a finger on the table.
“Yeah, lupis,” Anakin nodded.
“Paramedics brought in someone suffering from tachycardia and respiratory problems,” Ahsoka proposed. Obi-Wan perked up because he knew of this case. He put his book down again.
Both Anakin and Sabé were staring at her blankly. It made sense; that was about half of the people admitted in the emergency room. Ahsoka hadn’t led with the interesting bit.
“Both of those paramedics became sick,” Obi-Wan backed up her suggestion. Anakin’s weighty attention fell on him.
“Go on,” Anakin leaned against the counter behind him. He reached into his pocket to pull out his pill bottle, knocking out a couple pills to take them dry. Anakin flexed his right hand, then balled it into a fist.
Obi-Wan waited for Ahsoka to continue talking, but she seemed to want Obi-Wan to pick up where she left off. He sat up a little straighter in his chair.
“The patient collapsed in her home and the only other symptom is chronic pain,” Obi-Wan finished. Anakin frowned, but he seemed to be considering. “The nurse who admitted the patient fainted, as did the one who drew their blood.”
“Mass hysteria,” Anakin muttered.
“The patient is dead,” supplied Sabé.
“Oh, a postmortem diagnosis… I’m in,” Anakin sounded too delighted by that. “Don’t need to talk to the patient this way.”
“You’re horrible,” Sabé told him.
“I’m realistic,” Anakin rolled his eyes. “Ahsoka, Obi-Wan, go get the files for this patient and ask around for any eyewitness testimonies. Sabé, stay here. I need your help.”
Obi-Wan and Ahsoka stood, ready to do something of worth. Obi-Wan went to grab his white coat, pocket already full of pens and small notebooks. Ahsoka was gathering her things she had spread out over the table.
“What?” Sabé demanded.
“I need you to get Padmé off my back,” Anakin said.
“What! You’re the one that was married to her. You have more sway than I do.”
“You’re friends with her. She’d listen to you.”
“Oh, and what do you want me to say? Dr. Skywalker sits on his ass every day doing nothing at all—”
Obi-Wan held open the door for Ahsoka, closing it quickly to drown out their bickering.
“They’re weird, huh?” Ahsoka muttered. Obi-Wan snorted but had to agree. Still, he didn’t like to participate in workplace drama, so he changed the subject.
“This was a good suggestion,” he said as they walked the halls to the elevators.
“You know, I took this job because Anakin would be such a good mentor. It’s going to look great on my resume and, well, it pays really well,” Ahsoka told him. “But he isn’t really… mentoring.”
“Maybe this is the start of it,” Obi-Wan shrugged.
“I hope so,” Ahsoka didn’t sound convinced.
“Okay, what’d you two learn?” Anakin asked, marker tapping a whiteboard in their joint office. The trio were sat around the main table again, this time files and reports about the patient were spread over the top of it instead of their own paraphernalia.
“There’s a nurse still in the ICU getting treatment. We weren’t allowed to talk to her, but we can in a couple days,” Obi-Wan began.
“I call dibs talking to her,” Sabé interrupted. “Since I haven’t done anything yet.” She shot a glare at Anakin, who shrugged at her.
“Five people who came into direct contact with the patient, not including the paramedics, had to be hospitalized, but twenty-three people became sick in all,” Ahsoka continued, looking at the notes. “They all had similar symptoms. Nausea, shortness of breath, fainting.”
Anakin turned to quickly write on the whiteboard in his curly handwriting.
“And the patient’s symptoms?” Anakin prompted, drawing a line in the middle of the white board. One side had symptoms of the hospital staff, the other had symptoms of the patient. “Besides tachycardia and shortness of breath.”
“Chronic pain,” Ahsoka said, reminding him from earlier. “It was reported that the patient had an oily sheen on their skin. All over.” Anakin’s excitement was palpable in the room.
“One of the nurses said they noticed a fruity, garlic odor on the patient’s breath,” Obi-Wan said. Anakin made a face but wrote it.
“Maybe self-medicating?” Sabé suggested. Anakin nodded.
“It was the nurse who drew the patient’s blood that’s in the ICU still,” Ahsoka turned to Sabé. “I think she’ll have the most details about what she saw, especially if this patient’s blood put her in the ICU.”
The scribbling on the board stopped. Anakin turned to Ahsoka.
“Are you suggesting that the patient had some sort of airborne toxicity about her?” Anakin’s eyes were alight. Obi-Wan wondered if there was an illness that caused a man to be manic about someone’s death.
“Shouldn’t this be a case for medical examiners?” Obi-Wan asked.
“I’m sure they’ll do a mediocre job of it, sure,” Anakin dismissed easily. “If we can diagnose the patient before them, it’ll save a lot of people work. Or… something.”
“It sounds a little bit like, maybe, the patient was radioactive,” Ahsoka’s voice was small. Sabé hummed, but sounded like she was considering it.
“But the patient didn’t have the same symptoms as everyone else,” Sabé thought out loud.
“Maybe the patient is almost radioactive,” Obi-Wan mused. Everyone turned to look at him, including Anakin, which made his heart give a hard pound in his chest. For someone sixteen years his junior, he had an intimidating aura. “Maybe radiation and whatever the patient’s self-medicating with is reacting badly together.”
“What, you’re saying the patient had cancer?” Anakin sounded immediately bored.
“Yes.”
“No, next idea,” Anakin dismissed. Sabé piped up with something equally as ridiculous sounding, but Anakin wrote that on the board.
Obi-Wan stared at him. His mouth would have been hanging open in surprise that he’d been so readily looked over. His idea had credibility, he thought, and a lot more than what Sabé and Ahsoka came up with next. It was hard to focus when he sank into his own spiraling thoughts. What was the point of him being there if his ideas – which were just as absurd and crazy as what all three of them were coming up with – weren’t even given a passing thought?
“Obi-Wan, see if you can figure out what the patient was self-medicating with,” Anakin began delegating, cutting through Obi-Wan’s despair. “Sabé, check on the nurse. Hover around her door until they let you in. Ahsoka, good job on finding this case. Stay here with me and we can go over the files together. I’ll be right back; I need to go report to Padmé.” He emphasized the last bit, pitching his voice higher like he was trying to match Padmé’s tone.
Sabé stood, happy to get out of the room and left in a hurry. Obi-Wan watched Anakin as he left as well, feeling unease. He felt itchy under his skin, annoyed. Without much thought, Obi-Wan stood and followed Anakin.
“Hey,” Obi-Wan called. Anakin ignored him, or he didn’t hear him, but either way Obi-Wan tried again, louder, “Hey.”
Anakin paused, looked over his shoulder and raised his eyebrows.
“Why did you hire me if you refuse to listen to me?” Obi-Wan demanded. He was uncomfortable pushing the boundaries like this. He hated confrontation and he hated it more with his employer. Anakin gave him a look like he didn’t quite understand the question.
“You’re the smartest one here,” Anakin said, pausing by the elevator and pressing the button down. “You don’t have anything else to learn, especially not from me.” Obi-Wan couldn’t even be happy about the backhanded compliment because the answer was far too confusing.
“Then why hire me?!” He shouldn’t be raising his voice, but he was, and Obi-Wan couldn’t figure out how to lower it again.
“…maybe I like how you look and I wanted something nice to stare at during the day,” Anakin gave Obi-Wan a smirk, eyes shining with mischief. This time Obi-Wan’s mouth did fall open in shock. Anakin barked out a laugh, the elevator door dinged open, and he was gone. Just like that.
He’d said the most insane thing Obi-Wan had heard all day, then disappeared, leaving him reeling.
Anakin liked how Obi-Wan looked?
Obi-Wan sat in the lab late at night, running test on the patient’s blood. Sabé had managed to bully her way into the nurse’s room a day sooner than she was allowed to have visitors. Everything Sabé learned was written on the whiteboard: blood smelled like ammonia, there was yellow-brown particles floating in the blood.
They didn’t have an answer yet, but they were operating on Ahsoka’s theory of some sort of airborne illness, so when Anakin asked for a volunteer to work with the patient’s blood, Obi-Wan’s answer was immediate. Of course, he would do it and spare Ahsoka and Sabé the potential side effects.
By the time Obi-Wan got to the blood, it’d been stabilized and he’d had no symptoms in the hours he was exposed to it. Maybe something else to add to the board.
He was running basic tests, tests that had already been done but that Anakin thought needed ran again. They’d need the autopsy report, which was weeks from being done, but the results from the bloodwork proved and disproved several of their theories.
Obi-Wan was annoyed that he should be focusing on a patient, but was really consumed by thoughts of what Anakin had said.
What kind of answer was ‘maybe I like how you look’?
Obi-Wan frowned at his microscope. A slide was already in place, but it felt impossible to work.
“It’s late,” came a voice from the doorway to the lab. Obi-Wan’s heart sank and skipped in his chest all at the same time. It was possibly the worst timing for Anakin to come snooping around.
“Yes, well, you wanted infinite tests done,” Obi-Wan snipped, not looking away from the microscope. He leaned forward to try and look through the scope but was too distracted by Anakin’s footsteps coming closer instead of leaving.
“What are you doing here?” Obi-Wan tried instead, making his voice level.
“I came to check on you,” Anakin said, voice so, so close. Obi-Wan pulled away from the scope and looked at Anakin. He was much closer than he expected.
“Why?”
“Seeing if you’d run off yet,” Anakin muttered, averting his eyes, almost like he was ashamed. Obi-Wan knew better though.
“You think you’d scared me off by saying something vaguely… flirty,” Obi-Wan struggled to describe what exactly it was that Anakin had said. And it had almost scared him off, but he was loathe to admit that. Anakin’s intense blue eyes searched Obi-Wan’s.
“You shouldn’t be on my team,” Anakin began, making Obi-Wan’s head reel. He took a step closer. “You’re far too overqualified. You’re smarter than me and I’m supposed to be the head of this department. But you applied for the job and I can’t figure out why. I thought when I interviewed you, I could solve it, but I still couldn’t. In fact, I saw you, and I couldn’t think of a single reason why I shouldn’t hire you.”
“W-wha—Anakin, we are—professionals,” Obi-Wan stuttered, but Anakin was closer and Obi-Wan wasn’t pulling away. He should pull away, should tell Anakin to stop, but he couldn’t deny the pull. The interview had been less than typical and he’d had the thought that there was a tension in the room, but he hadn’t been able to place it. Besides, he knew he could put aside the looks of the handsome young doctor in favor of his job.
Then Anakin had all but ignored his team.
“You know what Padmé said when she saw you?” Anakin kept going, leaning forward slowly. Obi-Wan only blinked in response. “If you were twenty years younger then you’d be just my type. So yeah, I was seeing if you’d run off yet. I’m not subtle, and I’m not one to care about arbitrary rules of fraternization. Padmé is my ex-wife and boss, after all.”
“Oh…” Obi-Wan’s voice was gone, his head completely blank. His eyes dropped down to Anakin’s lips; they were so close. Obi-Wan was supposed to be the flirty one, though he tended to keep it outside of the workplace, and he was supposed to be immune to this kind of thing. What Anakin was doing was something just beyond flirting. It was too sincere and it was—
An alarm began going off nearby. Obi-Wan jumped; Anakin pulled away, sighing.
“One of the tests is done,” Obi-Wan croaked, but Anakin was already leaving. Obi-Wan suddenly felt twenty years younger with how hot his face felt and how hard his heart was pounding.
Surely… surely Anakin wasn’t serious.
“The patient didn’t die from what was causing the airborne toxicity,” Anakin announced, standing by his whiteboard, looking far more put together than Obi-Wan felt. Obi-Wan was tired, eyes feeling heavy from the long night running tests. He wanted to lay his head down and take a power nap, but Anakin’s proximity to him made his body run hot. They hadn’t done anything, but this new development in their professional relationship had rocked Obi-Wan’s world.
The more time he spent thinking about it, the more confused he felt about it.
“From the tests we can do from the patient’s initial admission, Obi-Wan was right about why the patient died,” Anakin almost sounded pouty about that. When Obi-Wan looked at him, he was staring intensely at Obi-Wan already.
“Cancer?” Sabé asked, just as disbelieving.
“Late stage, from what I can tell,” Anakin nodded. “But that’s not what we’re trying to find out. This case shifted from diagnosing the patient to diagnosing what our hospital staff had.”
Ahsoka leaned forward in her chair, completely enraptured by Anakin’s speech. Sabé scoffed, but seemed to agree in her own way.
“The patient was self-medicating with DMSO,” Obi-Wan told the room. Anakin pointed at the whiteboard where he’d added ‘DMSO’. “Dimethyl sulfoxide, sometimes marketed as a cancer cure – fake, to be sure – and—”
“DMSO is non-toxic,” Sabé cut in.
“Yeah, and it’s been approved for use for medical treatments,” Ahsoka added.
“Sure, if it was approved by a doctor. The kind the patient was using was a degreaser,” Obi-Wan frowned at both of them, annoyed at the interruption. Ahsoka made an ‘oh’ face while Sabé cringed.
“If the patient bought the degreaser from a hardware store, it would explain the oily look,” Anakin supported. “From here, it gets down to the chemical level. The dimethyl sulfoxide was all over the patient’s skin, in the blood, no telling how long they’d been self-medicating.”
Anakin pointed to where the symptoms started with the paramedic, “Oxygen administered by the paramedics would have combined with the dimethyl sulfoxide to add an extra oxygen molecule, making DMSO2, dimethyl sulfone, which crystallizes at room temperature.”
“Oh, the weird yellow particles in the patient’s blood,” Ahsoka blurted out, but Anakin only nodded.
“The patient was admitted to the emergency room with severe confusion and was given a cocktail of sedatives to combat it,” Anakin continued, moving his hand to the symptoms listed when the nurses became ill. “We had to administer emergency defibrillation, and the electric shocks—”
“Added two more oxygen molecules, making dimethyl sulfate, which is a highly toxic sulfuric acid,” Sabé finished for Anakin. Anakin shot her a glare.
“Thank you, Sabé,” he snarked. “And the fact that our staff could smell the garlicky smell meant there was a lot of exposure. It should be odorless if it was at non-fatal levels.”
“So…” Ahsoka trailed off. “The patient died from late stages of cancer, but what we did caused the patient to become… toxic.”
“Seems like it,” Anakin agreed. “An airborne toxicity, like you thought. Maybe even an airborne carcinogen.”
A silence fell between the four of them. It was their first case together and it felt like this should be some monumental moment. Obi-Wan caught Anakin’s eye, and he was surprised to see the corners of Anakin’s mouth curve up.
“Well done, team,” Anakin praised. “Find me more cases like this and we can stay in business.”
“Wait,” Sabé narrowed her eyes at Anakin at the odd turn of phrase. “Were our jobs in danger if we didn’t work a case?”
“Oh, uhh,” Anakin paused, deciding if he was going to tell the truth or not. “Yeah. So, better get to finding more cases I want to do!”
“Oh my god,” Ahsoka groaned, letting her head fall into her hands.
“Skywalker!” Sabé scolded, standing from her chair and following him into his office, a string of expletives on her lips from the audacity of the man.
Obi-Wan only watched Anakin sit down in his chair, ignoring Sabé to pull his phone out and probably play that game he was always playing. Anakin lifted his eyes from his phone’s screen to look at Obi-Wan again.
He was rather handsome, wasn’t he? Handsome in a roguish way with his messy brown hair, scar over his eye, frown lines already forming in his face. Obi-Wan knew he could ignore someone’s looks when it came to avoiding workplace romances, but somehow this felt unavoidable. He wasn’t sure what made him feel like Anakin was an unstoppable force, but Obi-Wan found he missed the weight of Anakin’s stare when the young man went back to looking down at his phone.
Anything with Anakin Skywalker would lead to disaster, surely, but Obi-Wan’s face burned as he stood to go find another case so they could all keep their jobs.