Thank you reviewers! Your wish is my command. A big long chapter it is.
Lots to enjoy here :)
Anakin didn't quite understand why they were going to Mandalore. His reluctant Master had remarked that it would be, "Your fourth planet now, my well-travelled young friend," but had said nothing to explain why they should perform this task so urgently, and so soon after Master Qui Gon's funeral. All Anakin understood, from Obi Wan's brief explanation, was that the Old Guard were enemies of New Mandalore and had also had disputes with the Jedi long ago. Anakin didn't know who the Old Guard or the New Mandalorians were, exactly, but didn't want to ask too many questions. He had already asked Obi Wan why he was being sent, and why Master Nu couldn't go herself, and Obi Wan had explained that he had recently been on a mission to Mandalore, and that the Duchess was his friend, and it is always sensible to send on a mission a Jedi with whom the planetary leaders are already familiar, and that besides, Master Nu didn't like to travel.
"Does this mean we will be sent to see Padme again on Naboo the next time she needs help?" Anakin had asked. "Because we're her friends?"
But Obi Wan had rolled his eyes and not given him much of an answer.
All in all, it just didn't make that much sense. Especially when Anakin got looking at the galactic map to locate his fourth planet. It wasn't exactly en route back to Coruscant, as Obi Wan had told the Duchess.
"We're landing soon, Anakin," Obi Wan informed him, entering his cabin. "Did you sleep well?"
"Yep."
This was not quite truthful. Anakin had woken an hour previously from a hazy dream crowded with women – his mother, and Padme, and the strangely sad Duchess, all washing Master Jinn's body before the funeral – and had spent the intervening time playing with the holo-map. Obi Wan seemed to be too busy, kneeling before him and fussing with the folds of his tunic, to question the lie.
"Try to say 'yes', on Mandalore, will you?" the young man murmured distractedly, as he wiped some engine grease from Anakin's wrist with his thumb. "'Yep' sounds uneducated."
Anakin was uneducated. He wondered if Obi Wan knew he couldn't read.
"Yes, Obi Wan."
He didn't call him Master, because Obi Wan had told him not to. Obi Wan did not call him Padawan. Anakin wondered whether it was because he did not want to believe it.
It was all a little scary, if Anakin were honest. Soon he'd land on his fourth planet but for nine years of his life he'd only known one. He was travelling in the company of a man who was surely only caring for him because Master Qui Gon had asked him to. The man who had knelt beside him at Master Qui Gon's funeral, wiping his tears so clumsily, with calloused hands so much heavier than his mother's. The man who had vowed to train him, even though he mustn't have wanted to. Anakin knew in truth that Obi Wan thought he was just another pathetic lifeform, and the Council thought he was even worse – too dangerous to train.
But Obi Wan in that moment laid two hands on Anakin's shoulders and looked at him properly – he had eyes, Anakin realised, like the beautiful rivers on Naboo – and held him with a warm gaze that made him feel safe.
"I'm sorry, Anakin. That was unkind. Forget that. We needn't impress anyone on Mandalore," he muttered, with a faint chuckle. "I appreciate your company on this errand."
Obi Wan's smile was kind and true but Anakin could barely see past the exhaustion that was so heavy in the young man's face. Obi Wan was sad. And Anakin couldn't shake the worry that maybe he was making him even sadder.
"I don't want to be a bother, Obi Wan."
"You are not a bother, Anakin," Obi Wan informed him curtly, before offering another pained smile. "I only hope that all this archive business is not entirely boring for you."
He rose to his feet and cast his gaze through the porthole. A grey city was emerging beneath them. Obi Wan's eyes sparked with sudden enthusiasm as he turned back to Anakin.
"You know, young one, I've just realised – you will like Sundari, after all."
"Will I?" Anakin asked.
"You will," Obi Wan vowed. "The upside for you, Anakin, of all the war and destruction on Mandalore and in Sundari in particular, is that there are a great many droids in this city in dire need of repair."
Anakin smiled, to please the anxious Jedi before him if nothing else. He would, of course, enjoy fixing something, and appreciated that Obi Wan had recalled his hobby. But he knew when he was being asked politely to get out of the way, and wondered, once more, why they had come. There must have been something special in the Duchess of Mandalore's archives.
Obi Wan tried not to be disappointed by the solitary figure awaiting them in the landing bay.
"That's Prime Minister Jeren Almec," Obi Wan informed Anakin, fixing the child's collar for the last time. "Just call him Prime Minister. I can't remember the corresponding honorific."
"What's an honorific?" was the chirped response.
Obi Wan looked at the child at his side. Fatherless, untrained, ill-educated, and with his collar inexplicably skewed into asymmetry once more. All of Obi Wan's exasperation and all of his anxieties drained from him as he looked into those bright eyes.
"A sanctioned term of flattery corresponding to a title, Anakin. Your Highness for the Queen Amidala, your Grace for the Duchess Kryze, your Excellency for…"
Obi Wan trailed off in his teaching as they strode within earshot of Almec.
"Good morning, Prime Minister," he intoned, bowing formally. "We appreciate you accommodating our visit at such short notice."
"Prime Minister," Anakin echoed, bowing himself.
Obi Wan spoke again before the Prime Minister could ask.
"This is Anakin Skywalker. He is…"
My Padawan.
A slave from the Outer Rim.
My Master's obsession and deathbed preoccupation.
He is the Chosen One, and I the Unchosen.
"He is a future Jedi Knight."
Anakin beamed, his pride palpable in the Force. A task for another day.
"A pleasure to meet you, young Skywalker," Almec replied, with a bow of his own. "And it is good to see you again, Padawan Kenobi."
Obi Wan did not correct the mistaken title. Almec went on.
"I must offer my condolences for the passing of your Master. Qui Gon Jinn is remembered as a hero on Mandalore."
Obi Wan nodded and recited the words of gratitude that had become robotic. The strangeness of these past days – of the appearance of the Sith, and the impossible power Obi Wan had found in himself, and that horrible pain in his gut, and Anakin in his arms, and Satine on that holo-call with something enormous she could not say – had made comprehension of his Master's passing difficult. Obi Wan felt in part that he could be in some bizarre dream. And he felt in another part, deep in his chest, the heavy inevitability of the truth: the knowledge that everything had changed, and that the past was gone and could not be retrieved.
"It is a time of great sadness, Prime Minister. But there is a path forwards through the Force."
So he kept telling himself, at least. Through enough repetitions he would, Obi Wan knew, settle into his new reality. It would simply take time. If only the present weren't so demanding.
"The Duchess had hoped to meet you upon your landing but was delayed," Almec informed Obi Wan as they approached the palace. "She will meet you for breakfast before your visit to the archives."
Obi Wan raised a brow. It was not usually in Satine's nature to run late. Almec read his scepticism easily.
"I don't imagine she's told you, Padawan Kenobi," Almec confided in a low voice, "but her Grace has been unwell recently. Rather significantly so. She required emergency surgery for an ovarian torsion, as I understand it. Only five days ago now."
Obi Wan was hit by a lurch of surprise, followed by a spark of indignation.
"I struggle to believe that the Duchess Kryze would have consented for her medical information to be shared with her every political visitor, Prime Minister," he remarked.
A Jedi Knight should not insult a leader of state over a relatively minor transgression such as this, and Obi Wan in particular should not have done it because he was not, admittedly, a standard political visitor to the Duchess Kryze. Whether Almec knew this was uncertain. Obi Wan's time on Mandalore somehow seemed a lifetime ago – although in truth only five Mandalorian lunar cycles – and he could not clearly recall how subtle or otherwise they had been during their time in Sundari before mission's end.
"I tell you out of care for her Grace," Almec replied in his own defence. "She's returned to her duties far too early. You know she'll work herself to death if we let her, Padawan Kenobi, you travelled with her long enough."
The Prime Minister admittedly had a point. Satine had been particularly ferocious in what he'd labelled her suicide missions – and she had labelled acts of necessity – during their time together.
"All I mean to ask, Padawan Kenobi, is that you don't overexert her," Almec went on. "I'd rather not have a secondary haemorrhage to contend with. Her Grace would work through it."
Overexert her. Blast it. Perhaps the Prime Minister did know something. Obi Wan felt Anakin's curious eyes upon him.
"Our work in the archives will be brief," he reassured Almec curtly.
Obi Wan was not sure whether the politician was truly mocking him or whether perhaps he was simply being paranoid. His head wasn't quite right, this morning. There was something distracting in the Force, some strange pull that he'd felt ever since entering Sundari. He felt a youthful impatience as Almec began to speak about the recent happenings on Mandalore. He didn't know why he was here but he wasn't here for this.
And then Satine limped into view at the top of the stairs, and she smiled at him with a warmth that did not fully disguise her pain, and Obi Wan felt his own pain flare and throb deep in his gut. He still could not put words to why he had come but he knew with a strange certainty that the days of tumultuous change were not over yet.
Anakin couldn't quite seem to shake the feeling that the Duchess Kryze didn't really like him. She was almost as beautiful as Padme but she wasn't warm like Padme was; if Padme were the sun then the Duchess Kryze was like a distant moon. She wore a beautiful skirt that looked like water and she offered him lots of things to eat and told him to have as much as he'd like, because she imagined he had lots of growing to do, which was a kind thing to say. But she also said things to him like, "You must be very excited to be a Jedi Padawan", which Anakin didn't know how to answer, because technically speaking he'd never hoped to be a Jedi anything, he'd just hoped that he and his mother might be free one day. That was all. And now he was sitting in a palace on Mandalore and he was a Jedi Padawan but his mother wasn't even free yet.
"I don't want to be a bother."
Stupid. Repeating himself. But Anakin could not think of how else to say it. He saw Obi Wan grimace in the corner of his gaze.
"I'm sure you won't be, Anakin," the Duchess reassured him.
You don't know that, Anakin didn't say. Obi Wan was always polite to politicians.
"You must have made quite an impression upon Master Qui Gon," the Duchess went on. "A good impression."
Anakin didn't know how to answer that either, because she was right, he had made a good impression on Master Qui Gon. The problem now was that Master Qui Gon was gone, and Anakin didn't think he'd made quite the same good impression on the young man sitting beside him.
"I won a pod-race," he supplied, by way of clumsy explanation. "I'm the only human who can do it."
He assumed he'd said the wrong thing – Obi Wan was always so smoothly spoken, and he must have sounded an idiot in comparison, talking about a sport like pod-racing – but it was at this that the Duchess Kryze first smiled with a warmth that Anakin could feel in the Force.
"You're a keen young pilot, are you?"
Anakin nodded. The Duchess's sparking gaze lifted upwards to look at Obi Wan.
"I sense trouble ahead, Master Kenobi."
Anakin was at first jolted by a rush of worry at her words, but it was obvious through her smirk that the Duchess was making some sort of joke. Obi Wan's cheeks flushed slightly and he fought back a smile of his own. Anakin blinked bemusedly. The Duchess was teasing the Jedi.
"Obi Wan doesn't like flying," the Duchess explained flippantly, looking at Anakin once more. "You'll take care of him, young man, when performing dramatic piloting feats? We can't let his poor heart give out."
Anakin quickly revised his private opinions of the Duchess. It was hard to articulate the gift she had given him, in showing him that Obi Wan wasn't so perfectly calm all the time, and that there were things that he was afraid of, and that sometimes he laughed and blushed and rolled his eyes and said things like, "Stars, Satine, you are too kind." Anakin felt a rush of tenderness for his young Master who did not like flying.
"I'll take good care of him, your Highness," Anakin assured her with a vigorous nod.
He was pretty sure he had got the honorific wrong. But Anakin felt lighter than he had in days.
2000 words and Obi Wan hasn't met Korkie yet? You guys must be mad hahaha. But there's a lot to explore in the Master/Padawan relationship that I wanted to touch on. Our beloved Obi Wan has a few flaws (i.e. being at times a tad classist) that Anakin will help him work on. Plus, I couldn't resist the piloting banter.
I promise, next chapter is THE ONE.
Your reviews are stellar, I love hearing from you.
xx - S.