Anakin couldn't keep track of the days after he and Obi-Wan were brought to live (to live, as in, being wanted, to live there, for real) with Padmé—Queen Amidala, in Theed Royal Palace with the handmaidens and the royal guard on Naboo.

Everything seemed to blur together. So much was happening that had never been part of Anakin's life on Tatooine. Starting not least with the spectacle of the giant, thunderous parade in Theed Central Plaza, in celebration of the victory over the Trade Federation. The grand festival had made Anakin's head spin from the amount and intensity of performative splendor; even with Obi-Wan right there at Anakin's side the event had nearly made his brain overload with noise from within his head and without, to say nothing of the whirlwind shock of he and Obi-Wan actually coming to live inside the palace.

It was all so fast and new Anakin lost track of time to the point the world became just a series of profound moments happening loosely in sequence, too dizzying to really comprehend.

Well, that wasn't quite right. At least, not about when it had started. Things like time and knowing the days had become overwhelming for sure, but if he were to strain himself, the last thing Anakin did clearly remember happening in sequence–

(because it had happened the night after the ceremony at the funeral temple, and Anakin could never forget the dark sky and the smoke of the pyre where Master Qui-Gon was laid to rest, burned up and released to the Force, and it had hurt so bad and Anakin had bit inside of his mouth until it bled to keep from crying because that would ruin the ceremony)

–was the quiet, private ritual during which Anakin had had his hair shorn in the style of a Jedi Padawan.

In fact, that ceremony was what had given Anakin the tether he'd clung to for guidance since, in the maelstrom of joy and wonder and terror his new life had become after Obi-Wan Kenobi promised to train Anakin in the ways of the Jedi. Not in Coruscant, at the Jedi Temple, but on the very planet they helped to save.

Anakin didn't know if every Padawan got their braid done in the same manner of ritual he had. But he would never forget how Obi-Wan had done it, nor any of the little details of that night that made the whole event stand out so profoundly in Anakin's memory.

The first thing he vividly recalled was the feeling of Rabé's so-soft hands in his hair. Her hands smoothing the long strands around his face and trimming them short with an alien sort of care Anakin couldn't fathom. It was so hard to conceive it real that anyone would touch him so softly besides Mom, after a lifetime spent yelping out whenever Watto or other impatient adults or even fellow slaves would fist their hands in Anakin's sandy locks and yank.

But Rabé was achingly gentle as she clipped Anakin's hair into a style that mirrored the short crop of hair close to Obi-Wan's head, evidence of the sad reality his own time as a Padawan had been cut short too soon. Rabé cut to mirror the style of the apprentice that now was to be the Master, and silently, Padmé and Obi-Wan had watched. Both stood witness in solemn silence until Rabé was finished, and then Obi-Wan had taken her place at Anakin's shoulder, to begin the part of the ritual that only a Master could.

Anakin remembered the feel of Obi-Wan's touch as well. His hands had been so strange, too, in their gentleness, just as Rabé's had been. Obi-Wan's movements were slow and careful as he began winding the remaining hair on Anakin's right side that had gone untrimmed into the start of a Padawan braid.

And…something had happened then. Something Anakin would never forget if he lived to be as old as the old Jedi Master, Yoda.

As Obi-Wan's hands had worked to braid the strands of hair over Anakin's shoulder, the movements in slow measure were accompanied by the twisting of another, fainter thread in the Force that Anakin had almost not recognized until suddenly he felt it. A different kind of braid, one that seemed to tug outward from within Anakin's being as if also woven there by Obi-Wan's trembling fingers.

The faint connection was strange, incorporeal. A there-but-not-there-except-it-was glimmer, intangible to Anakin's material senses and yet Anakin had known with certainty it was no less real than the Padawan braid wound into being by Obi-Wan's imperceptibly trembling hands.

And no less, either, was it the product of those careful fingers at work.

Anakin didn't know how but he recalled the soft, profound realization of how the act of tying his braid had the dual consequence of forging a new and strange connection between himself and Obi-Wan, binding them up in the essence of the same power that let Anakin have strange dreams, move things without touching them, pilot with reflexes of someone that knew to avoid obstacles before they appeared. Anakin had been fascinated to feel in himself and in his Master the new, thin gossamer strands of a link that connected them as two beings within the Force itself, both Master and Padawan.

Was Obi-Wan doing it intentionally? he'd wondered, too awestruck to voice his questions aloud. Or, did Anakin have it wrong? Was he the one doing this, summoning that invisible thread that wound itself from Anakin's very being to Obi-Wan's Force signature as the older boy carefully completed the braid in his hair? It was impossible to separate out where one half of the strange bond started and where the other began.

And Obi-Wan—whose presence was still too new and wonderful and strange for Anakin to truly grasp through the silk-strand link coalescing between their selves in the Force surrounding them—had been inscrutable in his expression, as he spoke the part of the quiet ritual that came next:

"I, Obi-Wan Kenobi, henceforth take you, Anakin Skywalker, as my Padawan learner. And I vow to fulfill my responsibility to instruct you fully in the ways of the Jedi Order, and the Force, so that you might one day achieve the rank of Knight among the Jedi."

Those words from Obi-Wan's lips had filled every part of Anakin's being as he listened. His body, listening enraptured as he heard the vow spoken aloud; his mind, his soul, the surrounding Force itself. Obi-Wan's—no, Anakin's Master's promise, flowed like a current of something like water around Anakin. Through him. Swallowing him up, into the current of its weight. Around him and over him and within him, all but filling Anakin's lungs and pores with the words that hung between them in the air but also beyond the physical plane.

Anakin had felt Obi-Wan's promise reverberate in a way that could only be described as inside-without-apart of. The statement of devotion resonated from Anakin to his Master and back again by way of that thin, incorporeal strand between them in the Force that had finally solidified as a settled thing for good upon the conference of the oath.

"And…my Padawan—may the Force be with us both."

And Anakin had stared worshipfully up at the older boy whose fingers had brushed so tenderly against Anakin's finished braid. The younger left just feeling, overwhelmingly feeling, everything. Left in awe of his own awareness of that connection now flickering about them in the Force, carrying tendrils of his Master's thought-presence-mind to Anakin like the faintest, gentle, threadlike veins of a whisper of what Anakin knew instinctively to be the mind of Obi-Wan himself. Anakin's own, even shyer presence had begun creeping outward to his Master in kind without him even realizing it, so faint Obi-Wan would barely be able to feel the gentle grazes along the pull in the Force that was their infant bond.

But a bond it was. The first Force bond Anakin had ever known. And since that quiet ritual, he had clung to it like a lifeline in a world where he was suddenly treading water in a wash of the unfamiliar—

And would perhaps be surprised, to one day learn that Obi-Wan had been doing the same.