Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Obi-Wan tells Anakin sooner than he planned because he’s tempted to whisper it to the body surrounded by ceremonial flames, a dead Master of the Living Force, and he swore twelve years ago he wouldn’t ever again bare himself to wait for an approval that would never arrive. Anakin feels only joy at the announcement—he’s going to be a Jedi!—which means Obi-Wan must be doing a better job than he feels he is at keeping his exhaustion tethered close to his soul. 

He is a Knight, brother-parent to a child, and shaking apart at every joint in his body. How has every Jedi before him been able to take a Padawan without wanting to fold themselves around the child and buffer every onslaught of the world, much less form an attachment to them? He knows this is the weakness that repelled and repulsed Master Jinn at the beginning, his capacity to fear and fear for, the anger gnawing at his ribs whenever he thinks for a moment of what Anakin has been through in just nine short years, the way it sinks its teeth into his throat when he remembers Master Jinn leaving Anakin’s mother in chains without a backwards glance. 

Obi-Wan sleeps with the child clasped close to his chest, Anakin’s back to the wall and Obi-Wan’s shoulders curving to shield his head. The little boy squirms periodically, his breath loud and hot on Obi-Wan’s neck, and each time, Obi-Wan feels his heart lunge for his fingertips, checking for his saber at his side. 

When he does sleep, he dreams of a womp rat running in desperate circles in the desert, chasing and gnawing its own tail, dripping blood into the sand. He stares at it in uncertain horror, at first, petrified and unsure how to intervene, but he remembers the stories Shmi Skywalker told him at the kitchen table that would never truly be her own, and he reaches for his hip, knowing what he must do. He raises his lightsaber and slices through its flesh, right where the appendage joins to its hindquarters. He sets it free.

The Temple, in all its bustle and bursting life, takes Obi-Wan into its arms and soothes his anguish at the root. The Hall of Healing opens its doors to him with the same scolding concern it always does, mixed now with a soft and cautious curiosity that wraps around Anakin’s tiny body like a blanket. Most of the healers who aren’t occupied with various bruises and scrapes from missions and training sessions are talking in tight clusters, all their voices going silent at once when Obi-Wan walks in. 

“I need a children’s healer,” he says, careful not to let his voice shake or leap from him too loudly. Several healers shoot him pitying glances while one Sullustan busies themself with readying a bed. It’s not the kind he remembers from when he was sent into the AgriCorps, constantly mixed with disapproval or disappointment from adults and relief at not being in his place from his peers; it doesn’t sit heavy in his stomach but rather surrounds him, and he resists the urge to brush it off. They didn’t know Master Jinn the way he did, they don’t know of the knot of perverse relief in his chest surrounded by a calcified guilt, and their grief does nothing for him or for the child—his child, brother-son, chattering contentedly to the healer at his bedside.

“He needs a general check-up,” Obi-Wan says, clearing his throat as subtly as he can. “Probably intravenous nutrients.” Anakin is desperately malnourished, though not as severely as his mother was. “And, ah—”

“You’re gonna take out the thing that’ll make me ‘splode,” Anakin says, tiny legs swinging, and Obi-Wan bites back his wince. He will not make this child ashamed of where he comes from or who he has been, or the ways in which he copes with this.

“A detonator,” Obi-Wan explains. “For threatening the lives of enslaved persons. We don’t know where in his body it was implanted.” 

The Sullustan nods, reassuringly unfazed, and explains to Anakin what they’re doing before each step, asks his permission each time before putting their hands on him. Obi-Wan wonders where they served their required field work during their apprenticeship, if they ever took one of the unspecified “medical leaves” common among the abolitionist healers—something Obi-Wan is not supposed to know about the existence of, but Qui-Gon enjoyed showcasing how much he knew about the secret goings-on within the Temple. They insert a needle into the vein on Anakin’s tiny wrist, setting the liquid nutrients to flow slowly into his body, and Obi-Wan holds the boy’s other hand. It may be more for his comfort than the child’s, considering how Anakin doesn’t even flinch.

The healer’s handheld metal detector locates the detonator in Anakin’s upper thigh, near his hip, too high to have allowed a successful amputation even if Shmi’d had the necessary skills and equipment available to her. The healer applies a topical painkiller, and Obi-Wan averts his eyes and distracts Anakin with questions about what he hopes is served for lunch while they perform the procedure. 

“All done,” the healer says finally, tying off the final of three small stitches. “The medication will help your body heal quickly, but keep this bandage on for at least two days just in case, okay?”

Anakin nods seriously. “Okay. Can I have it now?” He holds out his hand palm-up beside the tray where the Sullustan has carefully placed the bloody detonator, and the healer blinks. 

They glance uncertainly at Obi-Wan. “I’m not sure that that’s—”

Jedi are not supposed to have possessions, but rather hold everything in common, even that which is considered personal property among other communal societies. “He can,” Obi-Wan says, sending Anakin a wan smile. “We’ll pick it up later, after they’ve cleaned and disarmed it, okay?” 

“Okay,” Anakin says, staring after the piece of metal as the healer carries the tray away. 

“I’m planning to go to the Archives soon,” Obi-Wan says, trying to keep Anakin occupied until he’s been cleared to have the IV removed. “Do some reading. They have audio stories, too, if you want to listen to some.”

“Do they have ones about pod racing?” Anakin asks, and Obi-Wan tilts his head.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “I was interested in very different things when I was your age. But we can ask the archivist, and she can find something you’ll like.”

Anakin nods, satisfied by this. “Okay. What did you like?”

Obi-Wan blinks, bringing his thoughts back from the ever-growing list of research he needs to complete in order to feel remotely prepared to handle this situation. “Hm?”

“When you were my age.” Anakin is looking at him openly, curiously, and Obi-Wan reminds himself to wrap his feelings up tight and stash the bundle between his ribs. The child doesn’t need Obi-Wan’s stress and panic and weariness and begrudging, thorny grief on top of his own pain and trauma. 

“Oh.” Obi-Wan strokes his chin thoughtfully. “Um… I was interested in different planets, and their cultures, what their people were like. And I liked learning about different ways to use a lightsaber, other combat styles.” 

“Huh,” Anakin says, and Obi-Wan is hit with an overwhelming wave of need for this child to like him, in the way Obi-Wan never did his own Master. He seems comfortable enough, at least, his little shoulders not holding the same tension they had at Watto’s, the set of his jaw less intense. 

“Could you tell me about pod racing?” Obi-Wan attempts, catching himself just before he can bite nervously at the inside of his mouth, and as Anakin launches into an adorably serious monologue, Obi-Wan feels like maybe he’s passed his first hurdle, even if it’s likely to be his smallest. 

The next afternoon, Obi-Wan and Anakin venture into the Archives. An apprentice eagerly sets Anakin up with headphones playing a collection of stories about famous races throughout the galaxy, then shows him how to fold a piece of flimsi into an approximation of a spaceship. Obi-Wan lets himself watch Anakin move the toy in circles and loops for as long as he can justify before turning his focus to the screen in front of him. How to not kriff a kid up for life, he thinks, and types instead, parenting. The holonet mostly suggests articles geared towards keeping an infant alive, so after skimming a few pages of unhelpful results, he adds another keyword: adoption. 

This time, his search eventually turns up some pieces relevant to Anakin’s age and development level, and filtering by species offers even better results. “Freeing the brain, not just the body: Trauma recovery in formerly enslaved adoptees” reads one title, and Obi-Wan closes his eyes for a long second to thank the Force and hold down a surge of fury at the circumstances of Anakin’s life thus far before sending the article to his holopad. Buoyed by this discovery, he decides to try his next topic on the holonet before moving to the archival search in case any universities have conducted research about it recently, too. Raising young padawan, he types, and what he gets in return is not what he expected.

There are a few writings on helping young Force-sensitive children cope with their abilities apart from the Jedi, which isn’t too surprising; he sends them to himself even though he doubts they’ll be very applicable to a child of Anakin’s sheer power. After those, though, are writings he could not have imagined, impassioned criticisms of the Jedi-Padawan relationship as a restrictive reimagining of the most damaging aspects of the nuclear family. He dismisses them at first as the ranting of people too far removed from the Jedi culture to understand it, but then—well, hadn’t he been harmed by Master Jinn’s expectations and paranoia? Wouldn’t he have benefited from other truly close adults in his life to balance his perception of himself, to modulate his reactions so his first instinct would not still be to reach for an inherited terror?

“Individual mentorship is valuable and important, but it should not be provided at the expense of communal life or access to multiple sources of instruction, guidance, and support,” the essay argues. “Where is the Jedi child to go with their secrets? To say nothing of the danger of a single role model in further normalizing the perfectionism and repression which are already rampant among the sect.” Obi-Wan is not so much of a hypocrite as to argue that he is neither a perfectionist nor repressed, so he continues reading.

The truly shocking perspective, however, comes halfway through the piece. “By presenting the absence of attachments as the only solution, the Jedi Order cements its refusal to teach its members to respond to difficult problems such as managing one’s unimaginable power during periods of grief or prioritizing the safety of the many even to the detriment of one’s loved ones. This practice does not prevent Jedi from responding dangerously due to an attachment, as the Order suggests; rather, it guarantees that these Jedi will form attachments but do so in secret, preventing them from accessing the support necessary to process those emotions which might lead to inappropriate uses of f/Force.”

Obi-Wan closes out of the article faster than jerking a hand back from a hot pan. He wants to dismiss the passage, but it resonates with some secret and guilty instrument within himself that then rings out its truthfulness. He would distrust that sensation, too, but it’s at the same place from which the Force wells up bright and clear within him, the same soul-spot that allows him to be tethered to every other being. So how would he dare to silence it? 

But how could he bear to live with it?

A sound to his right pulls him out of his circuitous thoughts, accompanied by a familiar presence in the Force. “Hey, Quin,” Obi-Wan half-whispers, not trying to hide his tiredness. At his feet, Anakin looks up from the playmat on which he’s been tracing the embroidered streets of Aldera and squints at the stranger. 

“Who are you?” he asks in his normal voice, which is honestly too loud for any indoor room, much less the Archives.

“We use quiet voices in the Archives,” Obi-Wan reminds him in a whisper. “Other people are studying, and we don’t want to disturb them.”

“Who are you?” Anakin demands again, this time in his loud child’s whisper.

“Quinlan Vos,” Quin says seriously, holding out his hand for Anakin to shake. 

“Anakin Skywalker,” Anakin says, equally serious. 

“You don’t mean to tell me you’re Obi-Wan’s padawan learner? The one I had to learn about from the ever-churning Temple rumor mill rather than the man himself?” Anakin giggles, and Quin shakes his head in mock disbelief. “That can’t be! I heard the boy was nine years old, and you must be at least twelve!” Anakin laughs again, and Obi-Wan wonders if Shmi Skywalker didn’t imbue him with some of her own parental perspective, the way he wants to bend worlds to ensure that this child will live a life that allows him to laugh.

That’s what she thought she was giving him, Obi-Wan knows, when a strange man bet on his freedom without asking and she let him leave with them anyway. She thought her son would be raised by an experienced Master in a life of relative peace interspersed by humanitarian efforts, not by a barely-Knighted twenty-something in a time of reemergent Sith while the Force roils apprehensively around them. Obi-Wan knows that to be raised in the Temple is considered by turns a necessity and an honor, but there have been times—feeling isolated from his crèchemates as a child due to some unidentifiable difference; preparing to leave the only home he’d ever known, all his friends, and the only dream he’d been raised to have at twelve simply because no one wanted him, no one thought him worthy; wishing he had remained doomed to the AgriCorps at various moments as a padawan when Master Jinn was particularly harsh, or particularly distant—when he thought it may have been better to be raised in a family.

Quin elbows him lightly, calling him back from the trail of thoughts he’d been steadily climbing. “I thought I’d help you get resettled in the rooms,” he says, and Obi-Wan nods, knowing there’d be no use rejecting his presence even if he wanted to. He and Anakin have spent the past two nights in one of the rooms used most frequently for quarantining after a return from far-off areas of space; Obi-Wan hadn’t wanted to be there while Master Jinn’s items were removed, and he’s none too certain now that he wants to move his own handful of borrowed possessions over from the adjoining padawan room to the bed that used to be Master Jinn’s. 

But Quin arrives with his padawan Aaylas’ecura, and the two of them bring bowls of soup from the cafeteria and laugh as Obi-Wan tries valiantly to get Anakin to eat the unfamiliar vegetables. Quin makes the bed that used to be Master Jinn’s with brand new sheets, the kind Obi-Wan never would’ve dared go for, a deep blue with scattered white and yellow marks. It’ll be like he is sleeping among the stars. Quin touches the braid Obi-Wan is still wearing with one gloved hand and offers softly to cut it for him, and then does, the heat of his lightsaber humming by Obi-Wan’s right ear, where it mingles with the rush of blood through his veins and Aayla’s muffled explanation of the ritual to Anakin. Quin, eventually, after Aayla has left for her room and Anakin has fallen asleep marveling at the novelty of his own bed, stays the night, arms tight around Obi-Wan as his grief eats him alive. 

In the morning, Obi-Wan meditates while Quin snores. Then he makes breakfast, lets the predictable ritual and the comfort of having a task calm him. Tea for him, caf for Quin, water for Anakin, who is still awed at its easy availability. Toasted breads and nut butter and jams. One of the vitamins the healer had given him for Anakin, shaped like a little gundark, which Obi-Wan can’t decide whether to be endeared or disturbed by. 

Anakin, jam around his mouth, animatedly explains the plot of his dreams to Quin while Obi-Wan tries to figure out… something. Anything. How to instruct a child who’s obviously powerful beyond his comprehension. What it means that the Jedi, supposedly a model of peaceful and informed decisions, never taught him about their own detractors. His own dreams last night were of Shmi Skywalker, face gaunt and voice haunted, asking him if her son is free, if he is loved. Yes, he’d tried to tell her, yes, but he’d choked on a mouthful of hair before he could get the words out. On his knees in the sand, coughing helplessly, he’d realized he was wearing Master Jinn’s robes. 

Now, the Council has “requested” (demanded) to speak with Anakin alone, and Obi-Wan can’t shake the memory of how calmly his Master explained that it wasn’t the Jedi’s job to get involved in intraplanetary affairs, including the institution of slavery. He wonders what kind of peace it is that they’re keeping—surely not a peace that includes Shmi Skywalker, or the Twi’leks with whom Aaylas’ecura was raised, or any of the other countless oppressed people throughout the galaxy. 

Obi-Wan paces for the duration of the afternoon, growing more and more angry at himself for not insisting on remaining with Anakin, walking into that room of Masters whether they wanted him there or not, even with the freshly shorn section of hair behind his right ear. Karking hells, he’s supposed to guide and protect this child, not bend to the first ill-intentioned use of authority. He eventually sets his datapad to play the articles he’s downloaded rather than let himself fester in his guilt; maybe he can learn a thing or two to prevent the situation from reoccurring. As he walks the length of the bedroom, the electronic voice lays out for him a rough history of slavery on Tatooine, then the planet’s culture more broadly (what little has been documented in writing), then the introductory lessons on raising a child who has experienced horrors beyond his grasp. By the time Anakin is returned to their rooms, Obi-Wan is exhausted, and he does not let himself overthink it, just strokes the boy’s hair and tells him he’s sorry he let him go alone and he did a good job, and holds one arm around him as they promptly collapse into a nap on that starry expanse of fabric.

When Obi-Wan awakes, it’s to knocking on the door, a soothing yet chaotic rhythm that belies the man behind it. Sure enough, Quin is there, brandishing savory pies from the just-closed cafeteria. Obi-Wan lets his gratitude show in his eyes before letting him in and setting the table.

“What’s got you so tuckered out?” Quin asks a slumped Anakin over dinner, teasing. 

“The Council’s ‘fraid of me,” Anakin says matter-of-factly, and that’s answer enough.

Obi-Wan’s first instinct is to say no, that isn’t true, but he stops the words before they can form; he wants Anakin to trust him more than he wants to comfort him, and the child, perceptive as he is, would recognize the lie and not the intent. Before he can figure out what he should say instead, though, Quinlan nods. “You’re probably right, kiddo, and I’m sorry. That’s gotta be really confusing, maybe kind of scary.” 

Anakin shrugs. “‘M not scared of them,” he says, face set stubbornly, though it’s not exactly convincing.

Quin nods again. “That’s okay. It’s not wrong to feel however you feel about it, okay? They’re afraid of what they don’t understand, but listen, Anakin, them not understanding you doesn’t make you wrong. You’re not bad, you’re just different, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It makes them nervous, but that’s their fault, not yours.”

Anakin’s face is scrunched up in concentration as he processes this. “How do you know?” he asks finally, and Quin’s face does something sharp and brittle.

“Because they’re scared of me, too.”

“Me, too,” Obi-Wan says, finally feeling like he has something useful to contribute. “Not—I don’t claim to have had the same experiences as both of you, but.” He thinks of the firm set of Master Jinn’s face as he told a desperate twelve-year-old that he had too much anger to be a Jedi, the way his unmoved expression was betrayed by the way his presence in the Force was shot through with an icy fear.

“And we aren’t bad,” Quin says, gesturing between himself and Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan feels more reassured than he probably should by such a statement, lets it soak deep into his tired muscles like a salve. 

“No, you’re not!” Anakin says, affronted by the possibility, and Quin ruffles his hair. Obi-Wan is both touched and terrified by his rapid certainty in their character.

“So you’ll be okay, too,” Quinlan says, “even if it’s hard sometimes.” Anakin nods thoughtfully at this and seems to sink into his own reflection for a moment before turning to ask Obi-Wan if he can have some dessert.

Later, after Obi-Wan has forced a rag into the fist of a less-than-thrilled Anakin to wipe the chocolate from his mouth and told him that they’ll talk more about the meeting tomorrow, the child has finally gone to sleep, leaving Obi-Wan struck again by the smallness of his body. How were the crèchemasters not constantly bowled over in fear and wonder at their charges? How did any Knight bear the weight of watching another person grow?

Obi-Wan sinks into the couch with a very undignified—albeit quiet; Anakin’s a light sleeper—groan. 

“Thank you for earlier,” he says, glancing up at Quinlan from between his fingers while his head remains in his hands. “You handled that incredibly well.”

Quin shrugs. “I told him what I needed someone to tell me.” 

And Obi-Wan knows he means a Knight or a Master when they were young, knows he can’t change twenty-five years of Quin fearing his own hands any more than he can do the same for himself, but. He still needs him to know, needs to have said it to him. “You’re a good man, Quinlan Vos. I’m sorry you experienced so much fear and isolation, though I’ll admit I’m glad you could use it to help him.” 

Obi-Wan stops, self-conscious at the depth of the next sentiment—Jedi just didn’t say such things—but. Quinlan had been so good with Anakin, gentle but unwavering in his confidence in the child’s inherent goodness, had told him exactly what he needed to hear by reaching into that needy and aching place inside himself, so Obi-Wan could look that part of his own self dead in the eye to do this. “You didn’t deserve to be treated like that. You still don’t. I… I hope you know that.”

“More every day,” Quin says, squeezing Obi-Wan’s shoulder, and Obi-Wan leans into the steady weight of him. “Master Windu saw me practicing Vaapad while you were away,” he says after a moment, and Obi-Wan can tell from the cadence of the words how this connects to the conversation they’ve been having.

“What happened?” he asks, shifting so his forehead brushes Quinlan’s neck, and he can feel it when Quin sighs.

“He said the form was too dangerous for me to practice because I walk too close to the dark already.”

“Kriff,” Obi-Wan says. “That’s harsh.” 

“You don’t agree?” Quin asks, and it’s mild, unaffected, which is worse. Obi-Wan sits up to look at him.

“No. If slipping into the violence of the form is his fear, it’s irrelevant; any form can lead to butchery. The seventh in particular being taboo only weakens us all.” He pauses for a moment, knowing what he wants to say next will shred the official story that’s being distributed to explain how in the karking hells Obi-Wan Kenobi returned from a mission minus a Master and plus a padawan. He says it anyway. “A Sith attacked us on Naboo. He was using Juyo, and even the two of us together weren’t strong enough to counter it. Maybe Master Jinn would’ve survived if he’d been more familiar with the style.”

Quin is silent for a long moment, and when he finally makes a sound, it’s an exhale that extends long into the night. “Hells, Obi.”

“That pretty much covers it, yes.”

“When were you planning on telling me?” he asks, though Obi-Wan can tell he doesn’t expect him to have been. 

He shrugs weakly. “The Council is trying to keep it quiet for now.”

“No shit. A legendary, infamously fatal enemy re-emerges from the mist, and they’re more concerned with preventing panic than people being informed and prepared.”

“Pretty much,” Obi-Wan affirms, and Quinlan thunks his head backwards into the wall.

“They think I’m more of a threat than the karking Sith,” he breathes, voice full of a threadbare awe. 

“Well, don’t go getting a big head about it,” Obi-Wan says dryly. “They thought the same thing of the nine-year-old.”

Then, of course, they both have to sit with that. 

“Dank farrik,” Quin says finally, and then, “Kriff, we’ve both got kids, we really shouldn’t drink.” He’s right; they’ll have an early morning whether they like it or not. Obi-Wan makes tea instead.

“Master Jinn thought Anakin was the Chosen One,” Obi-Wan says, staring into his cup. Quin chokes.

“Please tell me he didn’t tell the kid that.”

Obi-Wan snorts. “Oh, you know him. Master diplomat, subtle as a herd of banthas.”

“Kriff,” Quin mutters, dragging a hand over his face. “Remember when we were kids, and we thought we’d change the whole thing? Apprenticeships for everyone who wanted them; no more twelve-and-three-quarter-year-olds crying into their pillows and questioning their self-worth. And now I’m somehow supposed to teach a teenager everything she needs to know about teamwork, isolation, fear, anger, betrayal, focus, instinct, forgiveness, and protection. Except everything I can teach her about fear and anger comes from being afraid and angry, things the Code says I’m not supposed to feel for any longer than it takes to let go of them.”

“I think you’re doing a rather good job so far,” Obi-Wan says. “She certainly seems more secure than I was at her age.”

“Thank the stars for that. You at sixteen was a freight-ship wreck.”

“Thanks,” Obi-Wan says, rolling his eyes.

“You know,” Quin says after a minute, gloved fingers fiddling with the fabric of his tunic, “if you hate this thought, I didn’t say it, but. No one said he had to restore balance from within the Order.”

“You’re saying… you think Anakin really is the Chosen One,” Obi-Wan says carefully, and Quinlan shrugs. 

“Beats me. But whatever he is, he was right: he scares the shit out of the Council. And as someone who only scared, like, a moderate gasp out of them, I can still say that’s no way for a kid to grow up, especially one that powerful. They’ve got a tendency to make self-fulfilling prophecies, but only the really awful kind.” 

Those words, and the bruising truth of them, echo in Obi-Wan’s mind long after the end of the night.

Chapter Text

Anakin has nightmares more often than most children, but something’s different about tonight’s. He slept completely still, not thrashing or even shifting his weight on the bed, and he did not cry out, but when Obi-Wan checks on him before going to sleep at an incredibly late hour, he is sitting upright, staring into the dark.

“Anakin?” Obi-Wan asks, dread filling his chest. “Anakin!”

Finally, he blinks, and Obi-Wan can breathe. Immediately, he begins to sob, and Obi-Wan wraps him in his arms, pressing his prickly padawan hair into the source of his own heartbeat. “I killed them,” Anakin says, muffled and wet and desperate. “I killed them, ‘n I didn’t care. Why didn’t I care?” 

“It’s okay,” Obi-Wan soothes, scrambling frantically for every grounding technique he’s read about. “You didn’t hurt anyone, Anakin, I promise. You’re with me in the temple, just back from our mission, and you’re doing so well. You’re safe, it’s okay. Can you name the senses for me?”

Anakin sniffles and shifts enough to squint at the room, still pressed to Obi-Wan’s chest. “I see my bed, and my tool bench, and my sleep robes, and my chest-of-drawers, and you. I feel my sheets, and your sleep robes, and the cool wall against my side, and… and your hair tickling my ear. I hear, uh, your heart, I guess, and my heart, in my eardrums. And the atmosphere machine. I smell… sweat,” he says, wrinkling his nose, “and your tea. I don’t taste anything but my own spit.”

Obi-Wan chuckles. “Good job. Do you want a mint leaf, or maybe a mug?”

“Tea, please,” Anakin agrees, and Obi-Wan, not wanting to leave him alone, scoops him up in his arms the way he used to when he was almost two years younger and significantly more underfed, carrying him to the adjoining room. 

“There we are,” he says, pouring two mugs of the herbal tea and passing Anakin a handkerchief. “How are you feeling?”

“Bad,” Anakin says, and Obi-Wan nods even as his heart aches like it’s been scraped along all the streets of Coruscant. 

“That’s okay. I’m sorry.”

Anakin blows on his drink for a bit and doesn’t speak again until he’s sipped it. “It was real,” he says at last. “Like it hadn’t happened, but it was gonna, and there’s nothing I can do.” 

Obi-Wan thinks sometimes that all the feelings he’s stacked inside himself are going to force themselves into visibility one day, and right now, it’s a miracle his ears aren’t suddenly weeping blood. “I’m so sorry,” he repeats. “Some people have dreams that show them things that will happen. But just because you dream it doesn’t mean it’s true, alright? That doesn’t mean it isn’t scary, but nothing is guaranteed except the Force, and the Force will give you strength. There is always a choice.”

“I don’t think I’m a very good Jedi,” Anakin says, and Obi-Wan tamps down his first response, That’s certainly news to me. Thinking on it longer casts Anakin’s overconfidence in a new light: he’s faking, much the same way Obi-Wan was at his age every time he pulled a practiced calm over his raucous heart like slipping on a set of robes.

Obi-Wan clears his throat. “Why do you think that?” he asks, as gently as he can. Hundreds of days as a Knight and he still feels as out of his depth at these conversations as he did the first time, like he’s reaching for a figment of some patience he doesn’t feel. Wanting is still its own truth, Obi, Quinlan had said once, on a late night less than a year into Anakin’s training. It’s the action that matters, not the intention, right? So if your first thought is ‘hells, kid, I just wanna go to bed,’ but what you say is, ‘oh, what’s bothering you? Is there anything I can do?’ —how is that not a holy practice? Compassion doesn’t have to be instinctive to be real.

Damn you for being wise sometimes, Obi-Wan had replied, if he remembers correctly, and Quinlan had beamed in a way that showed his teeth.

“I’m emotional,” Anakin says. “Everybody says so, and I feel it, burning me from the inside out like I’m a collapsing sun. I try to practice serenity, I really do, but I don’t do it, so it doesn’t matter.” 

“Oh, my dear child,” Obi-Wan says, raw and earnest in the way he only really is around Anakin. “Remember the Code, the original one? ‘Emotion, yet peace… Passion, yet serenity.’ Holding these two things, which are seemingly at odds, in tandem with one another, watching the ways the Force flickers through them in complementary colors, that is what it means to be a Jedi. You have more opportunity to engage in this practice than most, which I understand is painful, but it will in time become its own strength; when you are emotional, and yet at peace, you reflect a nature of the Force which too many of us have ignored.”

It’s taken every moment of his time as Anakin’s mentor to learn this lesson, and he fears who he becomes in the moments he fails to practice it fully—then makes his peace with that fear, its thorny presence, through more discipline and meditation than he ever needed to dismiss it. Aaylas’ecura taught this to him over the course of many evenings early in Anakin’s training and late in her own, and he knows who taught it to her; where Obi-Wan sees the firm division between concepts, the alternating stratagem with which one can rearrange them into patterns and zones, Quinlan sits cross-legged on the line and reveals its complexity through the way the light dapples his face: not all one thing or the other, but both in balance.

Her choice of words had struck Obi-Wan to his core in a way she could not understand, Quin having kept Qui-Gon’s, and therefore Obi-Wan’s, secret even from the person he held most dear. Still, if Anakin was to be responsible for bringing balance to the Force, then Obi-Wan would pour his body and mind into facilitating that however he could. Him being Anakin’s only option for a teacher was more of a reason, not less, to be a good one. So he listened with deference to her skill as the sixteen-year-old explained to him how to hold one reality, and then another, in his mind like two opposing ends of magnets and not let them fly apart, to recognize how the f/Force between them was a testament to the existence of both rather than the triumph of one or the other. 

Stars, but it makes his head hurt. 

He wishes Aayla were here now, sure she’d do a better job at explaining this, but Anakin seems moderately reassured, which assures Obi-Wan in turn. “You’re a good Jedi,” he whispers into the child’s hair. “And more importantly, you’re a good person.” 

He holds Anakin for longer than he can measure, rocking their combined bodies late into the night.

“I need your help,” he tells Quinlan once he and Aayla have been back in the Temple from their most recent mission for a couple of days. “Anakin had… a nightmare, or a vision, or something, and I’ve done the best I can, but—”

“Coping with some psychic horrors remains out of your reach,” Quin finishes for him, which is accurate enough. 

“I’m not asking you to tell him about yourself or anything, just, some ways to cope. How not to lose his sense of self to them.” 

But Quin has never done anything by halves in his life, so of course the first thing he asks once seated on Obi-Wan’s couch is, “You know why I wear these gloves, kiddo?”

Anakin glances at him mischievously, the kind of look that makes Obi-Wan wonder if the child would be half so exasperating were it not for his close relationship with Quinlan. “Skin condition?”

Quin laughs. “Good guess. No, I’ve got this ability, and not many people know about it, okay, so I’d appreciate you not telling anyone.”

“I won’t,” Anakin promises, his little face now set in complete seriousness.

“Thank you,” Quin says. “So, when I touch objects, I relive the experiences they’ve witnessed—sometimes it’s something innocuous, like knowing who’s drunk from a cup, and sometimes it’s really upsetting. At my worst moments, it makes it hard to distinguish who I am from all the mental noise around me.”

Anakin nods. “Like how I dreamed about killing people as a grown-up, but it still felt like I’d done it.”

Quinlan, bless him, does none of the unsubtle things Obi-Wan would’ve, like wince or bawl. He just pulls his gloves off one finger at a time and nods. “Yeah, a lot like that, unfortunately.” He holds the gloves in his clasped bare hands. “But these, they help prevent me from constantly dealing with memories crashing in, and I can still take them off when I want to use my ability.”

“That’s cool,” Anakin says, bouncing a little on the couch. Quinlan passes the gloves to him and Anakin examines the fabric, asking questions about thermal insulation and electrical conductivity. 

“I’m thinking,” Quin says during a lull in the conversation, “that we can maybe do something similar for your mind. A layer of buffer, but something you can take off and on as you see fit. It’s up to you, though, kid. I’m not gonna mess with your head any way you don’t want me to.” 

“I want to,” Anakin says immediately, and maintains it even after Quin says he can wait as long as he wants. Obi-Wan is overwhelmingly, crushingly relieved, even though he understands the importance of Anakin having agency in the process. 

“I’m gonna reach out to you in the Force,” Quin explains, “and knit a layer around you, between you and the place the visions come from. This’ll probably tire you out, but tomorrow, I’ll help you figure out how to lift it off if you want to foretell possibilities of the future or make more intensive connections with other Force users.” He takes Anakin’s small hands in his own, broad and calloused and kind, and closes his eyes. Most Jedi meditate in silence, but Quin hums a winding rhythm deep in his throat, something rocking and ancient, and begins to sing.

Obi-Wan doesn’t recognize the words; they could be Kiffar, or something older, something from within the vastness of the Force that Quinlan himself might not recognize if he heard them with his conscious mind. The song takes on the cadence of the fiber work the Coruscanti elders practice around the city fountains, long needles clacking in time with their gossip and parables. Obi-Wan has seen variations of the art across the galaxy: fingers and needles and branches used to make the blankets that keep an infant warm and safe, the sweaters that announce clan affiliations, the scarves whose patterns tell the stories their mouths are not allowed to speak. Quin, now, speaks it all, spinning an image of freedom and making it the yarn with which he knits Anakin a Rakatan band, a filter to hold back the ever-shifting mirages of the future and leave him with only the current reality. Chaos, yet harmony, Obi-Wan thinks, listening to more vocalizations than could come from only Quinlan’s mouth, echoes from every corner of the room. He closes his eyes and lets the colorful lights and textured shadows dance across his mind. 

Quin is panting when he finishes, sweat shimmering along his forehead and upper lip. Obi-Wan reaches for the handkerchief within his robes and, without thinking, kneels at Quinlan’s side, brushes the fabric over his face in smooth motions. He flushes down his neck when he realizes what he’s done, turns away to help Anakin to bed. 

Once Anakin is sleeping with a glass of water waiting by his bedside, Obi-Wan fixes Quin some tea. They drink it on the floor, leaning back against the seat of the couch. 

“I can never thank you enough,” Obi-Wan says. Quin stretches his arms. Something in his neck cracks. 

“Do you remember when Aayla was about his age?” he asks. “I was nineteen, you know, in even more over my head than I am now. And she—she came to me in tears, right, just absolutely torn up, because she’d realized she had feelings for this girl her age in the crèche. I had no idea what to do. And you—you sat down next to her, and you said, ‘The Force flows through all equally, but it does not flow through all in the same way. We feel differently about those who understand us, or confuse us, or complement some part of ourselves. If we didn’t feel differently about different people, they wouldn’t be unique, and neither would we.’”

“Ah, yes,” Obi-Wan says, trying not to let his embarrassment make itself evident. “I was reading a lot of Garbi at the time.”

Quin shakes his head fondly. “And then you said, ‘Aayla, if it comes from the Force-spring inside you, which allows your connection to others, it is good. Treat everyone around you the way you would this girl, and you will always be following the Code.’ And I thought… Is this the Obi-Wan Kenobi that didn’t let himself wince when he broke his kriffing femur, telling my padawan to embrace her emotions rather than try to get rid of them? It was unbelievable.”

“I’ve never been adept at following my own advice,” he admits wryly, and Quin snorts.

“No shit,” he says. “But I just remember thinking, damn, I never could’ve done that. Anything I tried to tell her in that moment would’ve been too full of anger and bitterness to serve her well at that point in her life, to keep her from condemning herself. But you—shockingly, may I reiterate—gave her exactly what she needed, and I was more grateful than I’d ever been in my life.” 

“It’s almost like the children would benefit from the perspective of multiple adults raising them,” Obi-Wan drawls with all the bitterness Quin just mentioned in himself. 

“Yeah,” Quin says, pressing the side of his face into the couch cushion. “Yeah.”

Obi-Wan rubs at the seam of his robe. “I do try to follow what I told Aayla,” he admits. “I know I’m… not known for being unconventional, to put it mildly, but I do believe it, though I may hold it close to my chest. But… I can’t help but want, to my own shame, to act in a way that is not ever turning to the collective, redirecting love away from its intended object. To be… Selfish, even as I give generously.”

“To look at someone and say how you feel for them, specifically, as an individual, not just as a result of their inherent value,” Quin says softly, looking at him, their bodies turned to each other like two opposite crescent moons. Obi-Wan cannot meet his eyes, so his gaze lands somewhere on Quinlan’s stubbled jaw. 

“To act on that love, not just refuse to strangle it,” he says, and Quin makes a noise somewhere deep in his chest, so unlike his earlier humming. It’s an old sound, too, choked off and mournful, the kind of wound-keen that only exits the body out of sheer necessity, an inability to hold it back. 

Obi-Wan’s seam is frayed, and he’s not sure if it’s due to the firm pressure of his blunt fingernails or an automatic response to Quin’s briefly-voiced grief.

Chapter Text

Anakin sleeps easier after that, his nightmares restricted to drawing inspiration from the pain of his past. Aaylas’ecura passes her Trials at the early age of eighteen, and Obi-Wan doesn’t doubt that she’s more prepared for Knighthood than he was at twenty-five. The pride on Quin’s face is bright enough to illuminate the whole Temple, beaming like a thousand suns as he twirls her in his arms. Himself now a Master, though he treats that accomplishment with barely an acknowledgement, he cuts her silka beads with a careful slice of his lightsaber, and the skin behind Obi-Wan’s right ear tingles. 

Anakin continues to have difficulty connecting with his peers, partly due to his unconventional past—the combination of no shared history as younglings and his memory of life and connections outside the Order—partly due to his intimidating level of power, and partly due to him just being plain odd, off-putting to them in a way no one dares articulate but which permeates their interactions with discomfort nonetheless. Obi-Wan, familiar only with this last barrier from his own childhood, finds his reassurances repeatedly falling short. Still, he does his best to encourage the friendships Anakin does develop, even when they challenge some aspects of his own comfort. 

Master Cho Leem certainly takes continued pride in doing just that, frequently and with abandon. She and Anakin first met in the Tatooinean garden in the Room of a Thousand Fountains; as Obi-Wan shifted his weight, unsure of the answer to his padawan’s question of why the space looked nothing like his home planet, she had risen from a bench amid the fog, her robes flowing around her. 

“It is a depiction of what once was,” she had said, trailing her fingers through the stream beside them. “Or what will be, or both of these at once.”

From there, Master Cho Leem—“Call me Thracia,” she insists, a request which Anakin honors eagerly and Obi-Wan resolutely resists—and Anakin form a closer relationship than he has with anyone other than Quinlan, Aayla, and Obi-Wan himself. The first time she told Anakin that he reminded her of one of her sons, Obi-Wan half-expected his jawbone to clatter to the floor, teeth and all. 

“Pardon me, Master,” he had asked, swallowing hard, “but—how can that be? The Code forbids—”

Master Cho Leem had waved an elegant hand as if the summation of Jedi beliefs was nothing but t’bac smoke in the Coruscanti marketplace. “Oh, I have many children with many spouses,” she had said, “and more partners and lovers besides. The Council may try to take my saber for it if they wish; I’d like to see them try.” 

From there, she has continued to split Obi-Wan’s world open with casual ease, dropping anecdotes and opinions that make him yearn for that kind of courage as much as they make him flinch away from it. She—she loves, deeply and without reservation, forms the word in her mouth and sets it free into the air like it’s natural, and it is not the kind of surface-skimming compassion Obi-Wan was raised to stop at and be satisfied by. Master Cho Leem sinks into the depths of her love the way she does the Force itself, and when she says she holds her now-Knighted padawan as dearly as a daughter, Obi-Wan’s chest feels pinched and smothered, and his right hand flickers with the memory of Anakin’s own first shaking it in a Tatooine dwelling that felt hotter than the surface of the sun.

(When Obi-Wan and Anakin tell Master Cho Leem they could not find any trace of her sister-child on the planet to which the Council sent her, but rather a trail adding only to evidence of her being taken beyond the limits of the galaxy, she dives headfirst into a grief that shakes every pillar in the place. She mourns, not just in the deepest parts of her where the action might be distant from its own sacrilege, but in her teeth and her eyelashes and her fingernails, forward-facing, unwieldy and immovable, and when they pass her in the halls, every Jedi in the Temple averts their eyes.)

Not every adult interested in Anakin challenges Obi-Wan’s beliefs in a way that treads firmly and unrelentingly along the line between painful and necessary, though; sometimes they just skeeve him out. Just over three years after the Council begrudgingly allowed Anakin to become Obi-Wan’s padawan, the child builds another droid, one that moves so similarly to the Naboo Sith that it makes the hairs on Obi-Wan’s arms stand on end. Equally unnerving is the presence of Chancellor Palpatine in the gallery, watching Anakin practice from above with an eye that tracks his movements too keenly, is never fooled by a feint or a work of agility that should surprise someone unfamiliar with the Force. Obi-Wan sets his shoulders and does not let himself waver about his age nor his short years since reaching Knighthood; he will lean into the Force, and he will let it hold his weight and guide him, and he will not falter.

Anakin defeats the training droid. “Very impressive,” the Chancellor says, and at his left, Master Windu hums. “You say he programmed it himself?” he asks, fixing his gaze on Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan nods. “I should like to speak with him about it. I’ve long been interested in the subject, but I must confess I’ve never had the head for such things,” he says, with a self-deprecating laugh that doesn’t quite land right, echoing oddly in his throat.

“I will pass along your invitation,” Obi-Wan says, inclining his head in farewell as he exits the observation area. When he returns with Anakin, Master Windu has left.

“Good afternoon, Chancellor,” Anakin says with a small bow. Obi-Wan is filled with a warm pride at his relentless composure; he would have been a shadow shot through with nerves at that age, something crackling and fragile. 

“And to you, Master Skywalker,” Chancellor Palpatine says with a smile that unsettles Obi-Wan somewhere deep inside, like his ribs have been rearranged.

Anakin laughs. “I’m not a Jedi Master,” he says. “I’m a padawan.”

“My apologies,” the Chancellor says, still smiling. “Your own Master received his Knighthood from defeating that very warrior, though, did he not?”

“Teacher Kenobi did,” Anakin affirms, and if Palpatine is perplexed by the change in title, it doesn’t show. Obi-Wan knows he’s hardly been one to stray far from tradition in his teachings, no matter the flight show his own thoughts have been performing over the past years, but he certainly wasn’t about to ask the child to refer to him as his Master, no matter the difference in meaning from how Anakin was once forced to use it. It’s gotten them both more than one odd look from other Jedi, and occasionally more direct criticism, but Obi-Wan has remained unmoved, and eventually most of them learned that his reputation for stubbornness is not without good reason. 

When Obi-Wan focuses fully on the conversation once more, the Chancellor is inviting Anakin to dine with him. “Of course, I’m sure your Master has more pressing matters to attend to,” he adds. “How about just the two of us, then?”

Anakin, for once in his life, looks at Obi-Wan before answering. That more than anything solidifies the icy grip of fear around his heart. Obi-Wan remembers the last time he felt like this, pacing their rooms in wait for his new padawan to return from being called before the Council, and he has no plans to undo the vow he made then. “I am not in the habit of permitting my padawan to attend meetings with state representatives in my absence,” Obi-Wan says, inclining his head respectfully. Stars, he hates diplomacy; he hears nothing but Qui-Gon in his voice. 

“A wise decision,” Palpatine agrees with a slow nod. “This will not be as a dignitary, I assure you, but as a friend.” 

Obi-Wan knows with a heavy certainty in his gut that he will not under any circumstances leave Anakin alone with this man, especially not with his blessing, but he’s equally aware that he cannot afford a diplomatic incident to arise from the bruised feelings of some nosy creep, especially one whose significance is so looming. As if that weren’t enough, the child is fiddling subtly with the defused detonator he wears on a cord around his neck, a habit he only indulges when he’s feeling particularly powerless; the act of dismantling and reassembling the first tangible threat to his life, the one he carried from infancy to nine years of age, gives him a solidity and assuredness that Obi-Wan cannot describe—but not without first indicating a bone-deep distress.

Help me, he thinks, rooting desperately for some clue in the Force, I can’t do this alone.

Just as his silence has stretched past the far border of politeness and he’s about to give up on external intervention, Force-sent or not, the door opens. 

“Ani!” Quinlan says, a miracle and an embrocation, scooping the boy up and spinning him in a circle. “You kicked ass out there!” 

Obi-Wan clears his throat, glancing unsubtly at the Chancellor. Quin sets Anakin down. 

“Always a pleasure to have you visit, Chancellor,” he says, holding out a hand to shake. There’s something strange about it that Obi-Wan can’t place amid the clatter of his panic and his futile attempts to calm himself, but he chalks it up to Quin’s refusal to so much as flush at his earlier verbal misstep, a trait no less surprising for all that Obi-Wan should be long since accustomed to it. “That was the last training session for today, but I’m sure you’re welcome back any time, right, Master Windu?” 

Behind Quinlan, Mace Windu clears his throat. “Yes, of course. We can schedule something on the way to your ship; this place is a maze to newcomers.” With that, he opens the door, gesturing the Chancellor through in the perfect model of courtesy. As they leave, Obi-Wan realizes what had seemed off about Quin’s hands: they’re bare, his gloves shoved into a pocket at the side of his tunic. 

Quin bites out a choice word in Kiffar once the echoes of their steps are no longer audible. “Bastard,” he adds for good measure, and Anakin grins, recognizing this one.

“Thanks for saving me,” he says, his tone holding a half-joke that Obi-Wan’s certainly would not if he could bring himself to speak right now. “He wanted me to eat dinner with him, which would’ve been so boring. And… weird. Not like the other ones,” he adds. Ever since Obi-Wan planted his feet in a fighting stance over the Council’s “requests” to meet with his padawan alone, its members have periodically dined with the two of them, asking questions that are just innocent-sounding enough to prevent Obi-Wan from bodily removing them from the restaurant or his home. Anakin, in turn, has developed a competition with himself to see how greatly he can unnerve the Council member before they leave early without actually giving them any information that could serve as ammunition against his character or his training. The whole thing gives Obi-Wan a regular monthly migraine, but it’s nothing compared to the way each of his veins feel frozen now.

“Any time,” Quin says, warm and genuine, then suggests Anakin hit the ‘fresher and wash off the sweat of his practice before getting something to eat. “Don’t wait up for us in the caf,” he adds. “I’ve gotta enlist Obi-Wan’s brainpower in some research for a political mission.” 

“Must you,” Obi-Wan deadpans, dredging the words up from his stiff lungs for the sake of preserving Anakin’s impression of, if not normalcy, at least an absence of any dire threat. Quin is giving him a look that could not more clearly say We need to talk. Alone. Obi-Wan could not agree more.

Back in Quin’s room, his now-gloved hands clasped around a mug of tea, he tells Obi-Wan what had shaken him so deeply. Any memory of specific actions in the Chancellor’s robes from before that afternoon had been clouded, and even the past few hours were murky and faint; there was just a single-minded focus on the child, woven through with a deep, sickening intent. 

“Fuck me in each of the seven karking hells,” Obi-Wan swears, dropping his head into his hands. “What in the galaxy do I do?” Then, “I’ve got to tell the Council, mustn’t I?”

“Unless you want to leap immediately to unauthorized drastic measures,” Quinlan agrees. “Which, by the way, I’m not opposed to.” Obi-Wan isn’t, either, though he won’t admit it; he’s suffused with a brittle rage surpassed only by his suffocating terror, something cloudy and dense in his chest that makes him gasp for breath.

“Hey,” Quinlan says, rubbing his bowed back with one broad, gentle hand. “It’s going to be okay, Obi. It is.”

“What if they don’t—” he begins, and chokes on an unvoiced sob before he can finish. What if they don’t listen. What if they don’t believe me. What if they don’t care.

“They will,” Quin says, steady despite—or maybe because of—the usual rumble in his soul. “They will. And if they don’t, fuck them, okay, Obi? Fuck them all if they don’t. You know, and I know, and we’ll figure it out. We’ll keep him safe.”

“Okay,” Obi-Wan says, and he means it, with a conviction that would scare him if he had any space left in his spirit for secondary fears, for anything other than the all-consuming dread that has struck him like a wound from which he is bleeding out beneath the skin. 

He does not meditate before calling upon the Council. He does not want to still himself. He walks in with all the rattle of his heart bare and blaring, and he sees them wince, and he tells them why.

They are silent for a long moment, and then Grand Master Yoda nods, and he speaks.

“Meet with the Chancellor, your padawan should,” he says, and Obi-Wan does not feel himself break so much as go numb, starting in his chest and radiating to the far periphery of his fingers like a cresting wave. “Useful, such a relationship could prove.” 

Master Windu’s brow is wrinkled, but he strokes his chin, and he considers this, and he sighs. “I understand your concern, Obi-Wan,” he says, and Obi-Wan wants to scream that if he understood, he wouldn’t call it concern, but his vocal cords remain obstinately still. “Still, Grand Master Yoda has a point. We’ve wanted to have greater… insight into the Chancellor’s decisions ever since he was granted emergency powers, and this could be the best way to do it.”

“He is a child,” Obi-Wan forces out, and his teeth ache where he grits them. “You would risk his safety, his life, to spy for you?” For he knows that if even half of the blurred, amorphous aim Quinlan had glimpsed comes to pass, Anakin’s life could very well be shattered, altered in a way that would be long and agonizing to recover from, if he ever could.

“He is a padawan,” Master Ki-Adi-Mundi corrects. “He has pledged his allegiance and his life to this Order, Knight Kenobi, as have you.” 

“Even if Padawan Skywalker does not accept the Chancellor’s invitation,” Master Tiin says, “the Council cannot take action against the leader of the Republic, and certainly not based on the testimony of one man.” 

“Of this man, you mean,” Obi-Wan bites out, and Master Windu glances at Master Mundi. 

“Earned his rank, Master Vos has,” Yoda says placidly. “In doubt, his skills are not.”

“Earned his rank, but not this Council’s trust,” Obi-Wan shoots back. “You do not doubt his abilities, but you do question his character.”

“Master Vos hovers closer to the Dark than you know,” Master Windu says, and Obi-Wan does not do something as foolish as tell him he knows Quinlan, the sturdy and pebbled banks of his goodness, better than any of them could ever hope to, but it’s a near thing. “It’s not an indictment of him as a person, Obi-Wan, but it’s a fact the Council must consider.” 

“What could he possibly gain from fabricating such a thing?” Obi-Wan asks in one desperate loss of composure, and then, gathering himself, “No, it doesn’t matter. I trust Master Vos with my own life as well as that of my padawan, and I will do whatever is necessary to keep Anakin safe even if this Council will not.”

His blood rushes so loudly in his ears that he has to strain to hear Yoda’s response. “Be careful, you must, that you do not form an attachment to the child,” he cautions, frowning. “Skeptical about the decision, this Council was, but his Master, you are.” 

“No,” Obi-Wan says, and his voice is soft, but it fills every inch of the room. “I’m his Teacher.” 

He turns his back on the Jedi, and he leaves. 

“You’re taking this shockingly well,” Obi-Wan says when he looks up from his pacing, and Quin cracks a smile.

“Oh, you know me,” he says, “I thrive in a crisis,” and he’s right; there’s never been anything that could gather all his broad, scattered energy into a single point of blistering focus like high stakes. 

“What was that about unauthorized drastic measures?” Obi-Wan asks, and Quin summons a tired smirk. 

“You could openly defy them,” he says. “You could fight to the death of every cell in your body, and you could burn yourself to the ground shielding him, and maybe he’d be spared. Maybe he’d bring the Force into balance in a way they could bear without being lost to himself in the process,” and Obi-Wan can hear in his words the strain of every moment Quin spent a stranger in his body, by turns shrinking from and careening towards the power coursing beneath his palms. “Or maybe,” he continues, “the pressure and the resentment every way he turned would decimate his soul. Maybe he isn’t the Chosen One and is just a child. Either way, he’s just a child.”

Obi-Wan stares at his fingers, laced together on his lap. He swallows. “Remember when you said I didn’t have to raise him in the Order?” 

“Yeah,” Quin says, looking at him gently, and Obi-Wan sighs. 

“I didn’t want you to be right. I still don’t,” he admits.

They part in the late evening with promises to meditate on it and revisit it the next night, hopefully with clearer heads. Two events between these conversations, though, shorten the latter by far. The first is that Anakin returns home from his morning sparring session and asks Obi-Wan if he can ask him a question. 

Obi-Wan barely tugs back his frown before Anakin can see it; it’s unlike the child to ask permission for, well, anything, especially something as common as expressing a curiosity. His concern isn’t assuaged when Anakin speaks. “What happens when somebody leaves the Order?”

Obi-Wan blinks, wondering if the child’s perception extends leagues further than he thought, enough for Anakin to pick up on the whispers of a dangerous fantasy at the edges of a nervous mind. “Well, they must forsake their lightsaber, but after that, it’s really up to them; some return to their planet of origin, others settle elsewhere on Coruscant, and some pursue… less savory activities elsewhere in the galaxy. Why do you ask?” 

Anakin frowns, contemplating this answer. Obi-Wan wants to kiss the wrinkle on his forehead and rock him to sleep as if he were a much smaller child. “Chancellor Palpatine was at my practice today,” he says, and Obi-Wan’s knees lock, his eyes race each other to check the exits. “He asked me how I knew I wanted to be a Jedi forever, and I was thinking how I never really thought I could be anything else, because before, it wasn’t an option.”

Obi-Wan bites the inside of his mouth and tries actively to relax the line of his shoulders, to not look stern or regretful or terrified but rather mildly, unfrighteningly supportive. “That makes sense,” he says slowly. “Do you think there’s something else you’d like to do with your life?” 

“I dunno,” Anakin says, swinging his legs, and Obi-Wan’s heart aches at how relieved he seems. “Maybe something with ships,” he says after a minute. “A pilot, or a mechanic. Or both.”

“I think you’d be very good at that,” Obi-Wan says, intentionally light. “And—Anakin, if you decide you do not want to be a Jedi, I will still be your Teacher in the ways of the Force, within the Order or outside of it. I wouldn’t leave you.” 

“Thanks,” Anakin says, his flippant tone contrasting with his watery eyes. He swipes at them with the back of a hand, and Obi-Wan pretends not to notice. “Is it okay that I told the Chancellor I was busy for lunch today?” he asks after a minute. “I figured you could make something up that was vital to my education or whatever.”

If Obi-Wan’s mind had not been set before, it was now. “Yes,” he says, carding his fingers through Anakin’s hair and pulling the child’s head to his chest. He’s here, he tells himself. He’s here and he’s safe, and I won’t let anything change that. “Yes, that’s perfectly alright.” 

The second event is that Master Cho Leem knocks on the door to their rooms just before sunset. “I wanted to say goodbye,” she says, tears gathering at the corners of her eyes, but her head is held high as always. She’s leaving the Order, she explains, to honor her padawan’s memory without constraint but mainly to serve the Force as she feels fit. 

“I already told Mace,” she says, swiping at her eyes in an echo of Anakin’s gesture earlier that day, but she is not dismissing the feeling, only preparing for what is to come. “But the two of you are dear to me, you understand, and I didn’t want it to come as a surprise tomorrow. You know how the rumor mill gets around these parts.”

“Thank you, Master,” Obi-Wan says, and she laughs at his persistent formality. 

“You still have your lightsaber,” Anakin says, and Obi-Wan glances at her belt. It’s true; the hilt of her pale yellow blade remains firmly fastened to her tunic. 

“Dear one,” she says, looking at Anakin, “this weapon is your life. You need not surrender it until you so choose.” He nods solemnly, and Obi-Wan can’t help but notice how she presented Anakin leaving the Order as not only a possibility but an eventuality. 

“Thracia,” he says, and the use of her first name communicates his urgency as effectively as he’d hoped. She turns to him, eyebrows raised. “Anakin and I were about to discuss an urgent matter with Master Vos. If I may ask of you one final request, would you be willing to accompany us?”

“We were?” Anakin asks, even as Master Cho Leem nods. 

“Certainly,” she says, voice grave, and so they go. 

It’s Obi-Wan’s first instinct to want to keep Anakin as far from this conversation as possible, but he knows that would only be a different version of control; no matter how badly he wants to protect Anakin from his own life, he ultimately believes that the child deserves a say in his own fate, enough for this conviction to have driven a wedge between himself and the Council, if not the rest of the Order entirely.

Well, not all of the rest of the Order—Quinlan and Master Cho Leem listen as he explains to Anakin that he and Quin have reason to believe the Chancellor plans to hurt him, recounts the Council’s infuriating response, and concludes with a sentence he never could’ve imagined saying, even at the worst moments of the past three years: he thinks it may be best for them to leave. 

Making the decision to do so turns out to not be the most difficult part of the night.

It doesn’t feel real, for one thing; the conversation takes on the feel of Obi-Wan’s first undercover missions, where everything was so far outside his realm of experience that consequences seemed unfathomable, weren’t something he was equipped to predict or weigh. “You’ll need identification papers,” Master Cho Leem says. “I have a contact elsewhere on the planet who can help you, an activist who works with people escaping abusive homes. Ze should be able to set you up with transportation, as well. It’s the packing that’s going to be the hard part.” In order to avoid word reaching Palpatine of their departure, intentionally or not, they’ve decided it is best to leave without warning. This poses a problem, however, given the Jedi policy against personal ownership; taking sufficient supplies for their journey from the communal stock would draw attention from anyone who knew they don’t have an upcoming mission off-world.

Quin clears his throat. “I think I can help with that.” He shimmies on his stomach and slides a box out from under the bed, tugging one glove off with his teeth and scanning his palm to unlock it. The lid of the durasteel trunk lifts, revealing a stash of ration bars, Republic credits, and simple tunics, cloaks, and scarves, not in the style of Jedi robes but rather the nondescript clothing used for undercover assignments or other missions where blending in would be beneficial. There’s a simple canvas pack at the bottom, which Quin unfolds to inspect its size. “Should work well enough in a pinch,” he says, and Obi-Wan stares. 

“Quin…” he says, washed over in grief and awe, and Quin glances at him. They’ll talk about it later, his expression says. 

“If there’s nothing else I can do to help, I’m afraid I must depart,” Master Cho Leem says, embracing Anakin when he throws his arms around her waist. She holds each of their gazes for a beat. “May the Living Force hold you and your emotions in its peace,” she says, bowing her head, and Obi-Wan closes his eyes and tries to hope. 

Chapter Text

“You’d prepared for this sort of thing,” Obi-Wan says once Anakin has gone to sleep and he and Quinlan are alone. Quin looks at the floor in front of the trunk and shrugs.

“Not this specifically,” he says, “but something, yeah. Ever since—” he sighs, a sharp and pained breath. “You should’ve heard them, Obi, when Aayla and I got back from that clusterfuck on Ryloth. I didn’t know who I was more often than not, I couldn’t keep a stable connection to the Force or else I was so deep in it I about lost my sense of self all over again, and everyone was more worried about whether I would Fall than how I would live.” 

Not everyone, Obi-Wan doesn’t say, but Quin hears him anyway. “You don’t know what it meant to me, to have you there. I disagree with Master Windu on a lot, you know, but I really respect him, especially for how he helped me back then, but—he could teach me about the Force, about what I could do, but not about who I was. You did that. Even when I started getting some memories back organically, there’s some shit I don’t think I ever would’ve figured out without you, and definitely not without it being even more draining than the process already was.” 

Obi-Wan remembers those days, long hours at Quinlan’s bed in the Halls of Healing and, much later, Quin and Aayla’s rooms, dragging up and airing out every story from their shared youth. When we were six, you told fortunes in the marketplace for spare change to buy snacks. You’d show up just before the crèchemaster had achieved a full breakdown searching for you, your mouth sticky with liwi fruit juice, and you’d slip slices into my palm when he wasn’t looking. The day I turned sixteen, you snuck a bottle of nikta into my room, and I was so scared of getting caught I didn’t drink any until long after we were certain Master Jinn had gone to bed. When we were twelve, you told me I was worth something, whether or not anyone ever took me as their padawan, and I walked away without responding because I didn’t want you to see me cry.

Quinlan takes a deep breath. “If you’ll have me, I want to go with you.”

“You’re sure?” Obi-Wan asks immediately, stunned. Despite all he knows of Quin’s rocky relationship with the Order, it’s impossible to imagine them without him, his bright and urgent presence nudging them out of stagnation at all the most necessary moments. 

Selfishly, though, it’s even harder for Obi-Wan to imagine his own life without him.

“We’ve talked a ton about how kids need more than one close adult in their lives,” Quin points out. “And… Look, I’ve had a go bag packed for the past four years. Everyone around here thinks I’m half-Dark already anyway. Aayla—” here he falters, but presses on, “she’s grown up. I’ve done right by her, as much as I can, in part thanks to you. I want to help you do right by him, too.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Obi-Wan admits, full of so much fragile joy he fears he’ll crush it with the force of his feelings. “This is—it’s a huge decision, Quinlan, it’s okay if you need more time—”

“Obi-Wan,” Quin says, steady and firm. “Half the clothes are in your size.”

“It’s a Coruscanti name,” Obi-Wan says, looking down at the holographic projection from the ID card Quinlan has tossed to him. Master Cho Leem’s contact worked fast; it’s been barely two days of determinedly not talking about the fact that Quin had been prepared for the off chance they would need to run away together. 

(Or—even more unthinkable, bordering on a greater treason than the one they’re actively planning—would choose to do so because they wanted to.)

“You have a Coruscanti accent,” Quin points out, and Obi-Wan swallows. Seeing his face above the unfamiliar syllables makes it so much more real.

“Fair enough,” he acquiesces, and fits his mouth around the words. Ben Vocorro. Quin, at least, keeps the root of his name; “Because my expertise is going undercover, and you can’t lie well enough to fool a bantha,” Quin had said, which is unfortunately true. It’ll be hard enough for Obi-Wan—Ben—not to call himself by the wrong name; no need to complicate things further by bringing other people’s into it. 

To distance himself from the prominent Clan Vos, Quin’s new background is that of a member of the Kiffar diaspora, born to immigrant parents on Coruscant. His name now is Quinneth Sieve. His qukuuf will distinguish him as Kiffar to anyone who knows enough about his people to recognize them, but facial tattoos are not uncommon among some planets of the Outer Rim. Quin’s is a minimalist enough design to be passed off as one of these if necessary, and the tattoo on his shoulder is universal enough as to be unnoticeable by anyone who isn’t used to having their eye snagged by the curve of his biceps, the shimmer of gold across his skin. 

Anakin alone keeps his true name and planet of origin, the documentation of such things being practically nonexistent in that sector of the Outer Rim, particularly for formerly enslaved people. His new ID projects simply his face, digitally edited to have a longer haircut and no distinctive Padawan braid, and a fabricated birthday half a Tatooinean year or so from when he was actually born. He’s understandably grumpy about being barely twelve rather than halfway to thirteen, but ever since they established that traveling to Tatooine would be no more risky than any other planet in that sector, his thrill at the thought of seeing his mother again has been singing a steady pulse of longing through their rooms.

When Aayla enters, her eyes are already brimming with tears. “I don’t ask to try to change your mind,” Quin assures her from her shoulder as she envelops him, “but—you’re sure?”

“Yes,” she affirms, sniffling and pulling back far enough to cup his face in her hands. “You raised me to be a good Jedi,” she says, her voice calm and smooth as one of the pools of still water in the Room of a Thousand Fountains, unrippled by the wind. “Maybe you did too good of a job.”

Quin rests a hand on the back of her lekku and holds her head to his chest. His joy in her, proud and unrestrained, radiates outward and fills the room to bursting. “Never.”

After she and Quin part, Aayla gives Obi-Wan a firm nod and a short embrace, as tight as it is unexpected. “I entrust you with him,” she says, and Obi-Wan’s throat threatens to close up.

“An honor and responsibility I do not take lightly,” he responds, and then it is time for his final act with this name, a warped mirror of years before: as Aayla and Quin watch with respectful gravitas, Obi-Wan raises his lightsaber and slices through his former-padawan and forever-brother-son’s hair, right where the braid joins to Anakin’s scalp. He sets him free.

The Temple does not go silent under the cover of darkness, but she is quiet, and for most of their journey through her halls, huddled and grieving and feeling their way forward with the Force to avoid people they would once have greeted with fondness, she seems to cradle them to her heart, not emitting so much as a creak. But then, they round a corner, just one hall away from the exterior door where they will leave the building for the last time, and collide directly with an unsuspecting Weequay.

Upon regaining his balance, Master Bulq surveys them without speaking, taking in their nondescript and distinctly non-Jedi clothing, the overstuffed, practical pack on Ben’s back, and the conspicuous absence of Anakin’s braid. Ben was never close with the man, but he knows from Quin’s stories, exuberant and comforted by turns, that Master Bulq is discerning and private, as gentle with a friend as he is formidable in a fight. Now, he lets that same grace settle across his features, and he does not question them, just meets Quinlan’s steady gaze. 

“If you do this thing,” he cautions, “some will say you have Fallen to the Dark Side.”

Quinlan reaches out and clasps tightly the hand of one of the few men whose faith in him has never wavered. “There is no Dark or Light Side, Master,” he says, and his voice, quiet as it is, emanates a strength Ben cannot help but marvel at. “There is only the Force and what you do with it.”

Master Bulq continues to take in Quinlan, the tension in his shoulders and the undisguised fear in his eyes that’s lived there long before this collision, and nods once. “What can I do?”

Quinlan closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, their dark warmth glints with tears. “They will say that I Fell,” he echoes, splintering and raw. “The best thing you can do for us is be the first to do so. Say—say I tried to pull the child down with me, like a man drowning and shoving another’s body underwater to propel his mouth up to the air, and Obi-Wan fought back. Theorize that Obi-Wan and Anakin must have fled elsewhere in the city to regroup, uncertain whether others in the Temple were under the same Dark influence, and that I may have returned to Ryloth, to the place which so changed me. Grieve, and rage, and then offer to lead the search.”

Ben is disturbed by the speed with which he unfurls the tale, by how ready Quin is to take the blame and the f/Fall. Still, he must admit, though it makes something sick and seething uncoil in his gut, that to the rest of the Order, it will be believable. And if Quin insists on martyring his reputation without warning, Ben can at least ensure it’s not in vain; working the mending kit out of a pocket of the backpack, he extracts a needle and pierces the pad of his finger with exacting precision, depositing drops of blood on the Temple floor in calculated arrangements and flinging some into the walls from midair. He lets his consuming, animalistic terror permeate each drop, easily sensed but nonspecific, a loud rush of Anakin-Quinlan-danger-away. Satisfied with his work, Ben looks up to see Quin studying him with the same mix of horror and respect he’d felt at the conclusion of a cover story which had clearly not been thought of on the spot, so. Quid pro self-sacrificing quo.

Master Bulq gathers Quinlan in a crushing hug, promising to do as asked, and then they are off. “May the Force be with you,” the remaining Jedi murmurs behind them into the dark. 

They’re traveling to Tatooine by way of what feels like half the Outer Rim, hopping from one planet to another like gerrids darting across the surface of the water. Master Cho Leem’s contact, a tall, middle-aged Espirion with hir dark hair worn in a long braid down hir back, greets them warmly at the address they were given and leads them in a slow, winding walk through the marketplace to hir small ship, looking to all passerby like old friends catching up during their errands. Ze haggles good-naturedly over a few packages of dehydrated fruit at one stall, fabric at the next, and purchases a small model spaceship that grabbed Anakin’s fascination. When ze presses the toy into his palm, he looks at it with a dizzying reverence before glancing to Ben for confirmation. Ben nods to him, but inside he’s mourning Anakin’s childhood spent without being able to own such things—not that Ben had, either. He understands the looming pitfalls of overt materialism, but holding all objects in common had, in retrospect, left him feeling untethered, separate from the world—which may have been the point, but right now, aching and bitter, he can call it a bad one. 

At last, the Espirion unlocks hir ship, a small, personal craft intended only for intraplanetary travel that glints in the same bright, solid green as hir sclerae. Ze answers Anakin’s eager questions about hir work as they fly, the child’s energy undampened by their circumstances. If anything, it’s heightened, his curiosity tangible and buoyant between them, a welcome alternative to his nerves. 

“Many refugees, I send to live on my planet,” ze explains. “I am one stop on their path, for some who must obscure their route to Espirion, but most are Coruscanti, flying direct. A few, though, are like yourselves—not looking for a place to go, but a way to leave.”

“We aren’t refugees,” Ben corrects mildly, and their host hums, readjusting hir grip on the ship’s controls.

“But you flee,” ze says simply. Ben blinks, and turns to look out the window. He wants to remember this, the cityscape without end, the way the sunlight glints off the packed architecture. He will likely never set foot on this planet again, never let himself slip away into its comforting chaos.

They reach the squat, unassuming skyscraper that houses, among countless family residences and small businesses, the beating heart of the Coruscanti branch of a sprawling roadmap to freedom. Their host debarks first, entering a complicated series of codes into the elevator keypad that takes them to an unmarked landing with a single, bright red door. “A tradition, this color,” the Espirion says, producing a key for each of its three locks. “The paint matched to our skin tone, to say, ‘When I welcome you here, you become a part of myself.’ This way,” ze says, gesturing down a short hall to a lounge. “Please, help yourselves. Your pilot will be here soon—twenty minutes, I think, until that ship is due in.”

The waiting room is welcoming, homey in a way that makes Ben almost long for the stark blankness of a medical facility. He doesn’t know where to put his knees or how to make himself swallow the pastries and juice set out for them. Flimsiplast is stacked on one corner of the low table, a neat pile of pens on top of it, and a few datapads sit on a low shelf on the opposite wall, stuffed toys on the level below them. Ben is sure the efforts at providing a comfortable space are appreciated by most of its visitors, but to him, it only accentuates his distress through contrast. 

“Pretty impressive space they have here,” Quin comments. “The other hall looked like it had, what, at least five doors? I’m assuming for anyone who needs to stay overnight. Maybe for pilots, too. Then the kitchen in the main room, with the more casual living area—it just looks like someone’s apartment with spare rooms they rent out to vacationers and businesspeople, a way to make a few extra credits. Smart.” Ben listens to him continue to talk about the organization, musings about the level of overarching structure and relative independent operation of different branches, theories that they’re at least adjacent to some of the more well-organized intragalactic abolition efforts; his voice is calming, and Ben finds himself leaning his head far onto Quin’s shoulder, his ear resting almost at the hollow of his throat, which rumbles with Quin’s affectionate amusement. Ben waits like that, half-meditative, until the Espirion enters to tell them their pilot has arrived. 

The flight to Galloa II is long but uneventful, and they barely have time to stare open-mouthed at the dwellings floating on air, swaths of fabric in every shade of blue imaginable billowing around them, before a small, rusty ship touches down on the docks beside them and the pilot flicks xyr lights in the pattern they were told to look for. That flight is almost unbearably cramped but blessedly brief, and they’re on Lorardia long enough to eat ration bars and realize how unbearably boring running away is in the moments when one isn’t losing one’s mind in panic. 

The next ship is sleek, nearly new, scrubbed thoroughly of all identification, and over two hours late. When it touches down and flashes the password through its overpowered lighting system, Ben is more annoyed than he is relieved, now that all the disastrous scenarios he’d been imagining won’t come to fruition. It’s less than a fraction of an hour to Ord Cestus, and their pilot leaves them with a joking comment about mushrooms that makes Ben roll his eyes and an unexpectedly earnest blessing for safety on their journey. 

The red deserts stretch languidly around them, deceitfully calm, and Ben can already feel his skin protesting the heat. He briefly and vehemently internally curses the fact that his child had to be from Tatooine, and then he packs his distaste at the current sweat and impending sunburn up with his sore muscles and throbbing head and drops the whole bundle into the pit of himself, so deep he can’t hear it echo.

Anakin has been complaining of thirst for at least forty standard minutes by the time their final ship of this stretch of the journey arrives. There are canteens on board, though, and a bubbly Twi’lek pilot who chats animatedly with them as other passengers board and debark at each of the six stops. Finally, Serenno appears in front of them, or the other way around; the landing is smooth and fast, and Ben wants to kiss the ground, wants to sleep for the entirety of the week they will spend here. The galaxy, of course, has other plans.

The first hint that something is amiss scratches up his spine as they debark, and Ben glances to Quin for confirmation that he feels it, too. To call it a disturbance in the Force would be too strong; it’s just sharper than a tickle, persistent like the unmet need to sneeze, nagging at the edges of his mind like the humidity that weighs down their limbs and is sure to leave him with a migraine. Quin’s normally bright face is subdued, a wrinkle in his brow. Ben wants, suddenly and with concerning clarity, to smooth it away with the pads of his fingers. He turns away before the thought can project itself any louder.

They leave the spaceport to meander through Carannia’s open-air markets, their last pilot having made good time and deposited them a couple of hours before when they are due to meet their host for the week. Ben has to remind himself repeatedly to keep up the guise of a wide-eyed tourist; he is stiff and weary, and even the glimpses of the majestic Belsallian Sea at the city’s edge do little to revive him. The crashing of its waves echoes the surging energy underlying the market—beneath the veneer of ordinary shopping and loitering, something powerful swells, and all at once, the tide turns.

“You Core Worlders always want the karking red carpet rolled out, as if your credits aren’t the same as everyone else’s!” a stall owner yells. In front of her, the accused customer, clad in an outfit that easily cost more than the Serennian woman would make in a year, lowers his pointed finger in shock. “Well, I say shove your damn credits—and you can tell the senators you’ve got in your back pocket to shove their damn tariffs, too!” 

Ben reaches to his hip before he remembers: he is Ben Vocorro, not Obi-Wan Kenobi, and an immigrant, not a Jedi. A refugee, according to the Espirion, and perhaps ze would know. Regardless, if this confrontation once could’ve been solved with a lightsaber—which he isn’t sure would have been feasible, or so much as fathomable—it certainly won’t be now. Ben, Quinneth, and Anakin are just three more civilians in a market quickly becoming overwhelmed with shouts—jeers from the local shopkeepers and shoppers alike, sneers and slurs from the pompous tourists scattered throughout the plaza, a general thrum of discontent rumbling through the ground itself. 

“Perhaps we should pay for the higher costs with your cloaks!” a Chiss teenager hollers from a stall that looks one too-heavy breath away from collapse. “Or your second and third homes, built facing away from your own planet’s slums!” One of the nearby youth bends down and grabs a stone, washed smooth by waters that have long since receded, and Ben locks eyes with Quin and sees his own thoughts mirrored back: they need to get out of here, and fast. 

The boy pulls back his arm and aims. By the time the rock collides with the wealthy Core Worlder’s shoulder, the one who’d been hurling obscenities at the elderly Twi’lek stall owner, the three former Jedi are already hurrying to the nearest edge of the market, Anakin’s hand clasped tightly in Ben’s.

Almost a teenager, and his hands are still so much smaller than Ben’s own. The thought threatens to trip him up far more easily than the surrounding cacophony.

To the far left, a cluster of Serrenians scramble to grab a rich tourist’s purse, erupting in cheers when they finally succeed. A human woman, face wrinkled and tunic tattered at the hem, roots through it, pressing credits into the palms of the people around her. Much closer, a Twi’lek who cannot be older than three standard years stumbles, landing on her knees and bursting into tears. Quin scoops her up and passes her to her frantic father without falling out of step with Ben. Around them, the crowd swarms like a tempest, as many people trying to flee the chaos as trying to dive deeper into it. 

Above them, the clouds fall to pieces, and the rain is as swift as it is loud. 

Anakin slips on the ground, which is quickly turning to mud, and as Ben steadies him at the elbow, he begs the Force that the child won’t turn an ankle or get trampled by the throng. Quin has already shifted to Anakin’s front, the two of them blocking his smaller body the best they can, clearing a moment’s breath in the flood of people. Ben’s hair falls wet and heavy on his forehead, blocking a large chunk of his vision. He doesn’t dare move his arm away from Anakin to brush it aside. At his right, a man in a long cloak elbows his way further into the throng, water cascading off his back, determined and unyielding—until he and Ben’s eyes connect, and the Force surges and flares around them like the eruption of a long-dormant volcano. 

There is no time to pause without being crushed, but the man doesn’t need to; he spins smoothly on one heel, cape fluttering behind him even beneath the downpour, and walks rapidly back in the direction from which he came, but not without calling to Ben over his shoulder first.

“Follow me,” Dooku yells over the clamor, and Ben does.

Chapter Text

Even in the storm, the palace of House Dooku embodies a splendor that can only be compared to the most striking of natural phenomena, a glimmering nebula or the swirling atmosphere of a gas giant or the unnerving totality of darkness in the depths of a cavern. There is nothing natural, however, about the expertly manicured grounds, the ornate architecture, the sense that the whole place is holding its breath, tugging its cards ever closer to its chest. Dooku opens a side gate for their entry, and Ben thinks it must be like looking at the sun: safer to approach from an angle, less likely to strike you down. Once they’ve entered the palace itself, they stand in the side wing for several long minutes, dripping in silence. 

“Well, this certainly explains it,” the Count mutters finally, as if to himself. He continues more clearly, “I wasn’t planning to visit the market today, but I haven’t felt that strong a pull in the Force in fifteen years. I didn’t dare ignore it this time.”

“The Battle of Galidraan,” Ben says, realizing. Two years before Dooku left the Order, and the beginning of the end. “I wasn’t even a padawan at the time.” And suns, isn’t that hard to believe, how short the totality of his experience is in the face of even the most recent history. He feels ancient. And exhausted. 

Something deep-seated and clawed gnarls Dooku’s face into a grimace. “That was no battle,” he says, practically spitting the words. “It was a massacre.” He strips off his cloak, hanging it on a gilded rack. Not a detail in this place is without its share of gold. “You must forgive the lack of service,” he says, placid to the point of aloofness once more, whatever burning emotion that had arisen in him having been quickly buried back within himself. “The east wing is currently housing persons displaced by the political unrest, many of whom have recently returned to Serenno from the Core, and most of my staff are occupied with their care.” 

Ben blinks, fighting to keep his surprise from showing on his face; it would be, he feels, not only a rudeness but a failure of strategy in this inscrutable fortress. “Of course,” he says. The slant of Dooku’s mouth gives off a slight air of amusement.

“It is the tradition of my people, as with most, to care for our own. No matter the distance or degree of separation.” He removes his boots, somehow managing to continue to look dignified during the act and in his sock feet. “I’ll show you to a room and let the cooks know we’ll dine in my suite. I do not wish to presume, but since there is really only a single reason one leaves the Order, would I be remiss in assuming you’ll only require one?” 

His tone is a mix of gentleness and dry wit that should probably be unsettling but comforts Ben better than pity ever could. He wonders what gave away that they have deserted, not merely encountered a mission gone awry; can Dooku feel the bleeding wound of all their loss in the Force? Does he see in Ben’s expression something of his own eyes, his own years of questioning and begging and the final breaking point? The thought is so charged it almost distracts Ben from Dooku’s other assumption, the love he somehow managed to read from the slope of Ben’s shoulders and the squint of his brow. 

“That’s fine, thank you,” Quin says, and Ben barely stops himself from turning to his voice, half in startlement and half from sheer want. It’s a good call, though, he tells himself, a smart call; better to stay together, to stay awake in shifts, to protect Anakin more effectively if the need arises. Dooku may be doing them a kindness—may be like them in a way few people share, or even comprehend—but that does not mean they should trust him. 

Ben loses track of the turns almost immediately as Dooku leads them through the palace, but a servant will show them to the Count’s rooms when the time comes, and the room they arrive at has two floor-to-ceiling windows, easy enough to crash through backwards, Anakin shielded in his arms, so. His hopelessly mangled sense of direction isn’t as much of a concern as it could be. 

Dooku leaves them with a promise that dry clothes will be sent over soon. “Oh, and please have the good sense not to tell me who you are,” he adds, looking to Anakin and Quin. Obi-Wan, of course, is a lost cause. “Former or adopted names. I do not wish to know.” 

“Interesting guy,” Quin says once he’s out of earshot, and Ben snorts. 

“Yes, he’s certainly a character.” He turns to Anakin. “How are you holding up?”

The child shrugs, but he’s disassembling the toy spaceship, not the deactivated detonator, so Ben doesn’t push it. “Okay, I guess. What happened at Galidraan?”

Maybe it’s because they’re in Dooku’s domain, but the word itself bears so much pain, that of a wound that’s long since given up on scabbing over, that it’s all Ben can do not to flinch. “I don’t know all the details,” he admits; he read what he could of Dooku’s account, years ago when he first went down the rabac hole of the Order’s failures, but it was highly redacted. “Just that the Jedi killed a great many innocent people, and in doing so doomed many more.” 

Anakin slots a piece of metal into place and doesn’t respond. 

The Count’s suite, when they arrive, is even more ostentatious than the rest of the building, something Ben would not have thought possible moments ago. Velvet drapery, glistening tile, china so thin and delicate Ben worries he—much less Anakin—will break it with his cutlery. “Makes me wish one of us had a family palace to reclaim,” Quin says, eyes wide. In the interest of maintaining his anonymity, Ben doesn’t ask if he is okay—he was, of course, the closest of them to inheriting such a thing. 

“My father was furious when he discovered I was sensitive to the Force,” Dooku comments mildly. “The inbreeding was supposed to prevent it.”

Quin winces. “Ah.”

“I would inquire about the quality of your journey, but I don’t believe I would enjoy the answer,” Dooku says, cutting a piece of thick meat as smoothly as if it was bantha butter. 

“Probably not,” Anakin agrees, mouth half full, and Dooku’s eyes glint with more genuine amusement than Ben would’ve expected. 

“Well then,” Dooku says, spearing a vegetable, “I suppose I shall forgo my manners and inquire as to the details of the inciting incident.” 

Ben meets Quin’s eyes nervously; they hadn’t had time to establish a story, or to decide if they need one. “You first,” Quin mutters, and Dooku, surprisingly, indulges them. He sets his utensil down, takes a sip of wine from a jewel-encrusted goblet, and folds his fingers together.

“What those who remain in the Order seem unwilling to understand,” Dooku begins, “is that leaving rarely comes down to a single event; it’s not as simple as that. If they were to ask me why, I would say the atrocities at Galidraan, and it would be the truth, but it took me three more years to actually depart. And I had already resigned myself to forsaking part of the Code long before that.” Ben looks at him curiously over the edge of his cup, but he tries to keep his eyes gentle, unweighted, the way he does when Anakin struggles to tell him something he clearly needs to get off his chest. Dooku sighs, and it is a sound Ben has heard exit his own lungs more times than he could ever count. 

“I was in love with my best friend,” he says, and it is not a confession but a fact; Dooku seeks neither understanding nor absolution. “A troublemaker and a prophet by the name of Sifo-Dyas. And when the time came, the man who had always adhered to the every mandate of the Order made the decision to leave, and the man who couldn’t have cared less about the letter of the law, or at times even its spirit, he—he stayed behind.” 

Dooku twists a signet ring around one long finger. “He has since died, if that particular Mayla vine is to be believed.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Quin says quietly, and Dooku inclines his head in acknowledgment.

“And yet, the Force,” Dooku says, quirking one corner of his mouth wryly before resuming his meal. The four of them sigh simultaneously, ache recognizing ache. 

“Somebody wanted to hurt me,” Anakin offers, and Ben has neither the energy nor the heart to reprimand him for talking with food in his mouth.

“Indeed?” Dooku asks, his brow doing something severe and complicated, and Anakin hums in confirmation. “May I inquire as to whom?”

Anakin, Quin, and Ben exchange a complicated series of looks, around and around like a dust devil, until Ben sets his fork down and leans back in his seat, crossing his arms loosely. “The Supreme Chancellor, if you’d believe it.”

Dooku’s face flashes with something too sharp and layered to read in the microsecond of its appearance, and then he is once again shuttered, refined. Ben has half a mind to ask after his meditation tactics. “You know,” the Count says slowly, “I think I would.” They eat in silence for a moment. “The reason is always the same, in the end,” he says, and closes his eyes. In rest, his face conveys so much grief that it’s all Ben can do not to avert his eyes in some roiling mixture of respect and horror and recognition. “Against all logic, you love something enough to revoke your very life,” he continues. “Justice, or romance, or abolition, or a child.” 

Ben can feel how soft his face has grown, and he clears his throat, but he does not fight it. 

“I have no children,” Dooku says, looking at Anakin with a gaze the polar opposite of the Chancellor’s predatory stare; it’s brimming with awe that bleeds into fear. It’s the way Ben looks at him. “It’s pure heresy to say so, but you are the last of my line.”

He turns to Ben. “I offer you my aid, if you’ll receive it, and you had better, because it’s the best option you’re going to get.” 

Ben bites down on the tip of his tongue, and then he bows his head. “We would be honored.”

The Count’s eyes, when Ben meets them, are shadowed beneath the weight of the past; he, too, feels Qui-Gon in the act. “Thank you,” he says, and then he turns to the child. “I would offer you a blessing, if you will have it,” he says, almost imperceptibly softer. Ben notes that he does not pressure this request the way he had the first, and he understands something that solidifies enough trust in the Count to make it through this situation. 

Anakin studies Dooku, frowning, and then shrugs. “Yeah, okay.” 

Dooku rises, fetches a box from his desk, and returns to kneel at Anakin’s feet. From the intricately carved box he produces a vial of oil, which he uncorks and spreads over his hands. He breathes deeply, eyes closed, hands cupped loosely in his lap.

“May you grow far from the tree by whose seed you were formed,” Dooku says at last, brushing a thumb over Anakin’s forehead in a V-shape, then his chin. A tear falls down the Count’s cheek, incongruous and raw. “May your roots find a home in the earth, and may you never know more of death than of life.”

Well, Ben thinks. He certainly could have done worse.

Chapter Text

It’s not the first time the three of them have shared a bed, for a given definition of the word. Occasionally in the long, hard months of Anakin’s adjustment to the Temple, or on the single anniversary of Quin’s ordeal at Ryloth where the Council had not cruelly assigned him to a mission off-planet, they would drag Quin and Aayla’s mattresses to the only section of floor in the suite that would barely fit them all, and the four of them would pile upon a nest of blankets and fall asleep in a tangle of limbs and poetry. Now, Quin sings a melody in Kiffar that Ben has last heard from him soothing Ben himself to sleep after a particularly distressing day of research. After Anakin has drifted to sleep between them, they gaze at each other over his small head for an indeterminate amount of time. 

When it’s his turn to rest, Ben dreams of sunlight as golden as Quinneth’s qukuuf, and the sound of Anakin’s laughter just over his shoulder.

Dooku begins his unenviable work with enviable speed; maybe he’d even done so before they’d officially accepted his assistance. Regardless, Ben is scrolling through the news on a holopad in the library (massive, and one of several) when he recognizes their own descriptions among the list of casualties of the riot. It’s unsettling, and it gives him a flash of anger at first, reading a rough outline of Anakin’s body under Deceased unprepared, but he has to admit it’s a good idea; even if their presence in the Force precludes the Order from being convinced of their deaths, their trail will go solidly cold. 

There are a few witness corroboration for each officially-tallied death, and Ben reads his with a strangely detached interest. He doesn’t click on the short reports for the Unidentified Humans matching Anakin and Quinlan. The quotes are short but graphic, and he finds himself wondering whether it was money or mind control—or both—that led to such eyewitness accounts. Probably safer to have anyone who could be tracked down be fully convinced of the story they gave, he knows, no unknown variables or potentials for betrayal. Still, it sits on his heart at an uncomfortable angle, and he files it among the many griefs this whole ordeal has wrought. 

The issue of their death is raised by Dooku after dinner that evening: “There is one thread which remains to be tied,” he says, after summarizing the flimsi trail which has led to the official declaration of their anonymous bodies as deceased by the Sevarran government—a decision Dooku could have enacted himself, Ben is sure, but better to have it coming from the appropriate secretary. “That of your presence in the Force.”

“But—that’s unalterable,” Quin says, frowning. Ben has the sudden, powerful urge to lay his hand upon the wrinkles on his forehead. 

“It is not the sort of thing they would teach you in the Order,” Dooku says, not casting his gaze down for a moment, empty of any shame, and they each feel what he imbues within the words: the nurturing sunless depths of soil, the safety found beneath a heavy blanket, the peaceful and ancient stretches of space beyond the reach of stars. Ben can tell the exact moment when Quinlan’s mouth goes dry. 

“It is a reshaping of that which is already there,” Dooku explains, and Ben pictures hands gently but firmly sculpting dark clay into a new object; the same material in a different form. Nothing is ever created or destroyed, for all is in the Force.

“I have been lost to myself before,” Quinlan says, and his stony expression cannot mask from Ben the fault lines of his grief. “Never again.”

Dooku does not dismiss him, and he does not question him, and he does not cajole or berate him. “I give you my word,” he says, looking Quinneth in the eyes, “it will not be like that.”

Quin is silent for a long moment. “With no offense meant to your word and its weight, I cannot do it. Nothing of me would remain.”

Dooku nods. Rubs at his chin, the first indication of unsurety Ben has seen in him. “There is a way to erase your presence in the Force from the detection of others, but it’s dangerous—not the process, but the state of being. Everyone even the least bit sensitive to the Force who meets you will notice the lack, and be disturbed by it. It will buy you time, but it will not keep you safe.”

Quin’s gaze flicks to Ben, and Ben simply knows, without it being communicated to him, that it would be different if it was him. If Quin could lay his hands on someone who knew him to his core and be anchored. Better Aaylas’ecura, to be honest, but—but Ben knows he will do. He’s walked with Quin out from the abyss of nonidentity before, and he can do so once more.

(Not only once more, he also knows; as many times as ever he needs.)

“I can do it,” Ben says, and it occurs to him even as he is saying it how much Anakin is, how Dooku, upon witnessing the vastness of his power, might be tempted to shape it in the exact way they’ve been trying to escape, or at the very least be at risk of telling someone else that the one who was prophesied has arrived unto the galaxy. No unknown variables, Ben reminds himself. “For both of them. I can do it, if you would teach me.”

No surprise shows on Dooku’s face, but Ben senses it all the same. And yes, he is unspeakably distant now from Qui-Gon Jinn’s padawan who never dipped so much as a toe into the Dark, never skimmed his fingers across its surface, no matter how hotly the rejections of his young life burned. Well. No time like the present, and all.

“Would that be acceptable?” Dooku asks, looking back at Quin, and he nods.

“Yeah. Obi can do it.”

Dooku teaches first through experience: that very evening, he strips Ben of his selfhood, physical and spiritual, and painstakingly rebuilds it upon the sanded-down remains. A signature in reverse, undoing each curve and then retracing it in a different alphabet. It’s a strange feeling, as if all his organs and memories have been pulsed to smoothness in a matter catalyst and poured back into his body—still him, but a different and unnatural form.

“You take to it well,” Dooku says. Thanks, I’ve been molding myself my whole life.

The next several days are marked by study—texts, at first, then sculpting and resculpting the Count’s presence in the Force, a corner then a half then the whole brilliant expanse of it, unpicking a stitch and sewing a new pattern with the same thread until Ben is more familiar with Dooku’s relationship with the Force than anyone save for Anakin and Quin, more even than Qui-Gon.

Maybe if we had not been separated by a generation in this way, he thinks once, things would have been different. It is the first time he sees Dooku smile.

The Count pronounces him ready. He starts with Anakin.

The child’s power makes him the more technically challenging of the two, but his is also the less mentally draining process, and Ben hopes that watching Anakin chatter excitedly about the strange feeling—“‘S like getting a brain freeze from a bantha milkshake, but it doesn’t hurt”—and ask a dozen questions about how it works will calm Quin’s nerves. The process is more time-consuming than his last trial run with Dooku, but not as much as expected; it’s like Anakin’s Force presence is preemptively shaping itself, and Ben has only to make the necessary moves to bring it into being, like a carver who swears the wood tells him what figure it wants to become. 

Quinlan is different. He doesn’t want anyone else there, so it’s just them sitting on the floor by the fireplace, Dooku in the adjacent room in case he’s needed at any point. Quin closes his eyes, looking braced for impact, but they open in a slow question when Ben reaches for his wrists. Ben unbuckles each glove slowly, then tugs gently at the fabric until they entrust the bare skin of Quin’s palms to him. He sets them at Quin’s sides. When Ben touches the soft veined surface of his wrist, Quin gasps. 

Ben begins the work: double-stranded, as he’s pushing certainty of Quinlan’s self into his skin while reconfiguring the bruise-purple silhouette of him in the Force. When we were five, he remembers, a stop cut and then a push stroke, and you convinced the crèchemaster to get me a pair of gloves for my birthday, even though we were meant to hold everything in common, because you’d read about the tradition of presents in a holocron and you wanted us to match. Annealing with a fire that exists only in his mind. Or how you’d always bring Anakin back a trinket from missions, some mechanical contraption far beyond my interest or understanding, but he loved them. Smoothing seams with the pad of his thumb, and sintering, and feeling the warmth to his bones. When we were 14, and you got Siri to hack two holopads so we could video call when one of us was away on a mission. After Ryloth, when I’d find a new obscure disease to tell the Council you were laid up with when you had days when you couldn’t get out of bed, and no matter how much you felt like bantha shit, you’d always laugh.

Ben swallows. It’s done. He doesn’t need to, knows Quin has known it from the second Ben touched him, but he says it anyway, while he can. “I love you, Quinlan.”

Then, while Anakin and Quin rest, it’s time for Ben to pack.

Chapter Text

It takes less than three Sevarran days for Dooku to arrange a direct flight to Tatooine with an abolitionist he knows. “A different network than those with whom you were originally traveling,” he tells them, “but similar enough in concept. Their passengers are typically traveling away from the planet, of course, but it’s not as if they don’t have to make return trips.”

“I feel bad that our former hosts and pilots will think we’ve died,” Ben muses aloud, and Dooku gives the severe frown they’ve become accustomed to over the course of their stay.

“If their operation is remotely worth its munka, each link won’t have that kind of connection with the others,” he says. “The nature of the work is to never know whether it succeeds.” 

That makes sense, but nonetheless it makes Ben ache.

Their final evening on Sevarro, Dooku stops Ben before he can retire to their guest room after dinner. “For the child,” he says, holding a holobook out with a stiff arm. “Set to disconnect from the HoloNet in a matter of hours, so download whatever he would like now.” With that, he departs without saying goodnight.

The holobook’s storage capacity is large, more than most people on Coruscant would have for an entire home, and certainly a rarity for anyone on Tatooine. Ben searches for every article he can remember appreciating over the past three years about Jedi history and criticism. He downloads books of Kiffar history and poetry and art, maps of the planet and of Coruscant. He adds the storybook Aaylas’ecura demanded Quin read her every night for months when he first brought her to the Temple, and, on impulse, a book of Stewjoni love poetry. He doesn’t understand much of the mechanical books and manuals he locates, but he adds them, too, as well as anything he can find with a Tatooinean author, which isn’t much. Still, it adds up to… maybe not a well-rounded education, precisely, but a passable one. Besides, he’s sure Shmi Skywalker is smarter than all the Jedi Order combined; they’ll manage. 

When they descend the stairs the next morning, Dooku is clicking his holopad off with a huff. “Political machinations,” he says drily in explanation, and then narrows his eyes, contemplative.

“Is there anyone in the Order that you trust?” he asks. “Who could bring sensitive information before the Council in a way they might not immediately dismiss? A tall order, I’m aware.”

“Yes,” Quin says immediately, and Dooku raises an eyebrow. “Knight Aaylas’ecura. I would trust her with my life.”

“Hopefully that extends to the lives of all the galaxy,” Dooku mutters, but he keys the information in. “I don’t suppose you know of anything that might convince her of the veracity of my urgent information?”

“Without knowing what it is?” Quin asks, and snorts when Dooku continues gazing at him impassively. “Fine. Tell her—tell her it did not end where it began. She’ll know.”

“Very well,” Dooku says, looking no less skeptical. “Your ship has arrived; through those doors,” he says, gesturing with his free hand. “Obi-Wan, a final word, if you will.”

Quin shoots him a look, but Ben nods and waves them on. Dooku waits until the door has shut behind them to speak. 

“You must erase from me the memory of the child,” he says, steady, and Ben blinks. “Of all of you, ideally, but him most urgently.” And Ben, once his surprise has settled, understands the very real possibility of torture, the circumstances in which one’s character, dubious and complicated though it may be on all other subjects, is wholly irrelevant.

“May the Force bring about a time when I can return these memories to you,” Ben says, bold in his gratitude, and Dooku blinks.

“I will turn around,” he says, “and stay that way until it is done and you are gone.” Ben nods, and Dooku searches his face for a quick moment, eyes flicking rapidly, before pressing his thin mouth to Obi-Wan’s forehead. “Thank you,” he says, almost a whisper, and before Ben can process the interaction at all, much less respond to any of it, Dooku has turned smoothly on a heel and faces the opposite wall, hands at his sides.

“Alright then,” Ben mutters to himself, and does it: with a flash of light that burns and blisters in his brain, to his Master’s Master, they were never here.

Ben is not fully present for much of the long flight to Tatooine. Not quite meditating, but not in his body either, just sitting in some third place and gazing at all the tragedy they’ve experienced, witnessed, caused. The third standard day, he stands, dusts himself off, and begins eating his full share of rations. Begins worrying, too.

He does not know what they will do if Shmi Skywalker is dead. Has no certainty in whether the Force would have revealed this information to them had it come to pass. 

Here is what he does know: his body will be burned on Tatooine unless Anakin one day wishes to live elsewhere. 

“Who should we say I am to you, if someone asks?” he questions, looking up from his clasped hands at where Anakin fiddles with his toy ship. “Your father, or your brother…?”

“My uncle,” Anakin says after a moment. “It means—sometimes, at least—that, like, you’re not biologically related to me, but you’re the one who’s taking care of me when no one else can.”

Ben forgets to nod until long after Anakin has looked away. Selfishly, he hopes Shmi does not blame him for what has become of her son’s life. Selfishly, he hopes that she does. 

Each night of the journey, as they glide steadfastly through the stars, Ben watches the child sleep and feels the dizzying collapse of time, the distance since departing the planet to which they fly which has brought them back around to the inception. Teeth chasing their own tail. He wonders if their arrival will end a cycle or just start it anew. 

He catches Quin’s eye, often, and considers—

He does not know how to live as Ben, is the thing. What that life would look like, and how to fill its footprints, much less how to share it. He wonders if Shmi, or aunts or uncles or elders she knows, could show him—if he could walk in someone’s shadow and feel sheltered from the wind, not afraid they do not wish to see his face. 

Quin is always already looking at him, and Ben, facing the dawning light of the twin suns to which they hurdle and terrified, lets the small and fragile smile within his chest settle upon his mouth.

Quin sips his caf and studies the horizon, leg bouncing, and grins.