Where Petitions Mean Something

Anakin stood perfectly straight, feet spread more than shoulder-width apart, hands clasped behind his back. He stared out the view port, three meters of transparisteel to protect him from the void of outside. Streaks of light shifted beyond it, randomized and ever changing: white noise for the eyes.

It wasn't meditation, exactly. He wasn't kneeling or exploring the Force, or working the darkness out of him, but it was cathartic. Standing in this pseudo-military posture made him feel authoritative, which in turn made him feel powerful, which in turn made him feel confident, which in turn made him feel calm, which in turn made him feel mature, which in turn made him feel authoritative. He had discovered it when he was in his late teens, and used it on occasion - usually after a fight with Obi-Wan that inevitably made him feel like an utter youngling. Now he found it particularly useful because it filled him with the aura necessary to lead, it made him feel like he could do it. All from a simple posture.

He smiled. Palpatine often said half of the battle was looking the part - after that, one merely faked it until they made it.

There was little sense of time watching the streaks of hyperspace light. He was supposed to be meeting Obi-Wan for meditation, informing the Council of their recent conquest of a planet, searching for the Sith-Witch Asajj Ventress, inspecting the troops, really any number of things required his immediate attention. He thought he would enjoy commanding troops, of being trusted enough to manage battles and fight in the war. The responsibility thrilled him at first. Now it was a list of chores that kept him from doing the things he wanted to do: being with Padme, becoming a Knight. He enjoyed the rush of battle; the adrenaline in his veins when he was fighting that was so like the Podraces when he was a kid. It was the aftermath that hurt him, made him realize that clones - people - had died in that battle, and as commander, it was his responsibility to order squads to search for survivors, to call for medical evacuations, to tell troops to collect body parts in case they were useful to amputees. He never had time for graves, not even funeral pyres. It was becoming disturbingly common to just leave the dead on the field - to instead scavenge for weapons and ammo to recycle for the next fight. It was after the battle that his overwhelming confidence wavered, and so he would stand straight with his hands behind him, looking for the inner calm and resolve he would need for the next crisis he would avert.

"I thought I'd find you here."

Anakin sighed and turned to face his master.

"You'd better not be saying that I've become predictable," he quipped fighting two urges: relief and annoyance that his master was there. Where the two emotions came from, he couldn't place, and so he buried them in favor of banter.

Obi-Wan offered a wry grin - the only smile he would wear in public - but offered no comment, instead waiting for Anakin's imagination to make its own conclusions. The Padawan's mood wasn't quite good enough to rise to the bait, so he turned away from the view port and shifted his stance. The calm and confidence tried to linger, but quickly dissipated in the knowledge of what he was about to do. He wrestled with it until it was merely annoyance.

Obi-Wan, ever sensitive to changes in mood - especially his Padawan, raised an eyebrow. "You don't want to do this."

"I wouldn't say that," Anakin said softly, shifting his weight around. Space, would he ever not feel like a youngling around this man? "I just think there are better things we could be doing right now." Even inspecting the troops would be better.

Obi-Wan's gaze said a lot; not all of it Anakin could interpret, but he could definitely feel the assessment, the measuring of the gaze. He suddenly felt more irritated. The older man finally sighed through his nose, stroking his beard. "Anakin, you should do this because you want to, not because you feel forced to."

"I know, Master. It's just..." he trailed off, trying to articulate his feelings. He understood why the meditation to release darkness was important. He did. The idea that he'd touched the dark, touched what made people like Dooku or Ventress who they were, it sickened him because he didn't want to be anything like them. He hated them so much that he hated admitting that he was like them, that he had succumbed to the darkness in order to slaughter a village. It didn't matter how much they deserved it - and he hated admitting that they did deserve it because in his deepest core, he knew that was only justification - and he hated admitting even that. He also hated reliving the deaths, and he hated reliving watching his mother die in his arms. He hated... he just hated thinking about it, meditating on it, and admitting all those things at least to himself.

He hated that he hated so much.

He would much prefer pretending it never happened.

And how could he explain that to his master, the perfect Jedi?

Obi-Wan tugged at a ginger strand on his jaw, eyes still narrowed, before he sighed again and clasped his hands behind him in an eerie mimic of Anakin's posture from a few moments before. It didn't look powerful or confident on Obi-Wan. But there was an absolute authority to it that Anakin couldn't deny.

"I leave the decision to you, Anakin," he said with utter finality. "I can't force you, you have to want to do this. If you do decide to join me, you know where I'll be."

Obi-Wan left. No spinning on his heel, no final glare of disapproval, not even a sad sigh. He just left.

...

Anakin cursed. "Master, wait for me!"

They walked through the halls of the star destroyer in silence for several minutes before Obi-Wan asked a question. He seemed to know just how long before Anakin would explode from the tension - likely a carry over from his skills as a negotiator. "I thought you didn't want to do this?"

Anakin couldn't quite hide his sulk. "I don't want to, no. I never want to do this meditation, but I know I need to."

Obi-Wan cocked an eyebrow, glancing at his Padawan. "You know you need to?"

Anakin huffed out a long breath. "I'm always..." angry. "I don't..." understand how to handle how he felt about the whole thing. Understand even what he felt. "I'm not..." He frowned. Was there anything he could tell his master? Obi-Wan found out about the entire affair with the Tusken raiders, it was the ugliest secret he had, but even now there was still an instinct to be quiet - even a year after the fact. Something closed his mouth, and he couldn't pinpoint what it was. Was it shame in disappointing his master, shame in what he'd done? Fear of punishment, fear of rejection even now? Anger at how it all turned out?

He fought to grind out the next sentence.

"I'm not strong enough to do this myself."

Force, it hurt to admit that.

It hurt to admit that, left to his own devices, he'd ignore everything, take the easy way out, and let the darkness fester inside him. He avoided negative emotions like the plague, but they always snuck up on him and consumed him, and often he'd rather pretend those moments never happened.

In the end, he knew he needed Obi-Wan to poke him into doing what was necessary.

So much for being independent. So much for being a proper Jedi.

...if only he knew...

Anakin perked at the stray thought, giving a covert glance to his master. This had been happening more and more of late; and the Padawan wasn't sure what to make of it. He had been told on occasion that he and Obi-Wan shared a very deep bond: there were very few master/Padawan bonds that could reach the depths of direct communication of the mind and yet they managed it. What Anakin felt no one knew, or at least understood, was when they did it: when it was necessary. It happened when Obi-Wan was leading them through a meditation, or during battle when they were trying to coordinate, situations when it was necessary to lower shields enough to send out a simple sentence or impression from one that the other could interpret to words. When it wasn't necessary, they both worked on their shields - something Anakin at best was only ever passable at, while Obi-Wan was an adept master.

And so it was strange to Anakin that, over the last several months, he could catch stray thoughts from his master. Obi-Wan never let up on his shields. Anakin couldn't figure out how it was happening. If they already had the deepest of training bonds, then surely they wouldn't get any deeper. Besides which, Obi-Wan never mentioned anything about catching his stray thoughts, but then Anakin was never good at hiding things to begin with, given Obi-Wan had even discovered the Tusken Raiders - one thing he could have sworn he kept well hidden and buried. Perhaps Obi-Wan was doing it deliberately? A test of some sort for Anakin? He was always subtle about tests, granted, but Anakin doubted his master would test with just stray thoughts.

He glanced at his master again. If it was a test, then he should probably do something about it. And besides, he was curious.

"Only knew about what?" he asked softly.

There was a slight rouging of Obi-Wan's cheeks, the only tell he gave and would have been invisible if not for the iridescent lighting of the cruiser.

"I was wondering if you realized how difficult it is for a being - any being, even a Jedi - to admit that they need help. It takes a kind of strength to admit that. It also takes a kind of strength to know that a duty will be difficult, even painful, but do it anyway."

Wait. Was that...?

"Are you saying I'm strong?"

Obi-Wan's eyebrow raised again, the intent to let him draw conclusions again, but Anakin caught another stray thought: in ways that I will never be.

Anakin flushed himself, something that felt suspiciously like... pride. Honest, heartfelt pride; pride that his master thought so highly of him, that he thought he was strong.

The meditation didn't look too bad now.

After a year of meditating jointly, they had worked out all the kinks and sunk into the Force easily. The pair took a few moments to just enjoy the sensation, floating in the waves of power that gently lapped against them, before the two focused on Anakin's signature.

This time the focus was on his mother, Shmi. Obi-Wan gently coaxed out memories, those of happier times. There was the time when she held him over her head, spinning in a circle as fast as she could to make him laugh. There were the times he was stuck in the 'fresher when she would walk by the door, or crawl by the door, or dance by the door, all for the sake of his entertainment. There were the songs she sung to lull him to sleep. There were the bittersweet memories, her anxious face when she learned about the podracing, her multitude of attempts to get him to stop. There was the time he crashed, just before Qui-Gon and Padme arrived, when she hugged him at the crash site. Slowly, Anakin introduced his last memory of her: strung up on a rack, cuts and gashes and bruises everywhere, dried out and cracked lips, dull eyes that had always been full of life. Together, they tried to allow the positive emotions of his mother wash over the negative. The love and the happiness and the contentment washed over the anger and the pain and the loss.

Through this, small pieces of darkness broke off of Anakin's core. The first was the anger that there were beings out there that could perform such atrocities. Anakin had felt this several times in his early life because of his slavery. He accepted that there would always be people like that out there and resolved to fix it whenever he could. Knowing that, he let it go. There was the self-loathing that he had done what he did. He accepted it, and resolved that he would never do it again. He let it go.

Then came the harder emotions. The pain of his mother's actual death. Even now he could still feel the sharp snap, his mother was there and then she wasn't. There was a void in his mind, and emptiness that terrified him. She left him, he'd begged her to stay with him and she still left and it made him so angry. He could only ever accept it in infinitesimally small pieces. There was a core in those feelings that he didn't even want to admit in meditation.

That even stars died...

Obi-Wan was suddenly there, his presence a cool balm against his hot emotions. In the distant reaches of his physical body, he let out a hot huff of air. Perhaps he was sweating. Anakin curled up against Obi-Wan's presence in a way he never could in traditional meditation, reaching out to that other mind for relief against his own. He was running away again, he knew it, but he couldn't quite stop it because it always hurt so much and he was tired of hurting.

He was just numb at first, not wanting to think, to feel.

Then, one word caught his perception: ...petition...

When they finished the meditation, their breathing speeding up to normal rhythms, their eyes opened, Anakin asked a question.

"What petition?"

Obi-Wan blinked. "What do you mean, 'What petition'?"

Anakin shrugged his shoulder. "Just now, when I was finishing up... I thought I heard you think 'petition.' What does a petition have to do with my mother?"

Obi-Wan flushed again, and Anakin decided he just might like the terrible lighting of Republic star destroyers if it gave his master away like that.

Said master was quick to deflect. "And why were you looking into my mind when your job was to look into yours?"

"I was overheating, you were a coolant; and you're not going to let this slip, Master. I know you too well. Negotiator or not," Obi-Wan allowed himself to roll his eyes at the nickname he loathed, "I'm not going to let this drop. You of all people know I'm quite tenacious." Anakin gave his best disarming grin.

Obi-Wan leveled his best glare of annoyance, but Anakin only turned on the charm of his smile, cocking his head to one side.

"Anakin."

"Master."

The two could have played at this for hours if they wanted to; Obi-Wan the unyielding, annoyed, put-upon master and Anakin the persistent, annoying, seemingly-innocent Padawan. It was often a source of great entertainment, a way to lighten things when they had no energy for something else. The fun quickly wore off, however, because now Anakin was openly curious; he sensed, somehow, that this little nugget of information was very important - more so because Obi-Wan was the one giving that impression. The banter half of the act was thrown out, and Anakin fixed his master with a more serious gaze. "Master," he said again.

Obi-Wan sensed the losing battle and gave a deep, resigned sigh.

"When you were younger, I petitioned the Council to buy your mother's contract."

... What?

"... What?"

Obi-Wan just looked at him. He didn't repeat himself. He didn't need to.

Anakin wasn't sure what to feel first, all kinds of emotions flooded over him.

The first that got a voice, of course, was his anger.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he yelled, leaping to his feet. There was something satisfying in looking down on his master. "I was the one who promised to come back for her. It was my job! Why did you get in the way!"

Obi-Wan still said nothing, just looked up to his Padawan with a calm face. It only irritated Anakin all the more, he started pacing; back and forth and back and forth, trying to work through it.

That hurt. It hurt that his master didn't tell him that he'd tried to save his mother. There was jealousy that his master had even tried when it was his own personal crusade - it was like Obi-Wan going out on a date with Padme; it just wasn't supposed to happen. There was irrational hope that he might have succeeded if he'd only tried harder. There was an old worry and fear that he purposefully didn't try all that hard because he really didn't love Anakin at all; he never did. But most of all there was hurt that his master didn't trust him enough to tell him.

"Do you understand what it feels like to realize your Padawan doesn't even trust you enough to tell you?"

The memory flooded his mind of its own volition and his pacing started to slow. Who was he to complain when he kept his own secrets? There had always been a part of his mind that he kept private, to himself. Palpatine said that it was natural, that everyone had a secret part of him-or-herself that no one else could see. Even Obi-Wan had his own circle of privacy; who was Anakin to deny it?

...Except this was about his mother; that meant he was entitled to know about this. Why didn't Obi-Wan trust him? Why?

...Only couldn't the same logic be used on him? Mass murder reflected on his master, and so wouldn't Obi-Wan have been entitled to know about his slaughter of the Tusken raiders?

... But he didn't.

... He'd never intended to.

...

Anakin ran his hands through his hair, pulling at the lengths long enough to grab and yanking at his small tail. His pacing slowed more. If they were so close, if everyone praised the two for their deep bond, then why did neither of them trust the other? Not for the really important things. What was wrong with them?

He was standing still now, looking his master straight in the eye. "Why didn't you tell me?" he asked, not calm exactly, but no longer irate.

Obi-Wan signed again. "I didn't want to give you false hope," Obi-Wan said finally. "Every time I went to the Council they told me that doing so would encourage your 'very bad habit' of attachment."

"... Then why did you do it?" Anakin asked. He offered a weak smile, a shadow of the normal wry grin reserved for banter. "Why did the one Jedi obsessed with obeying the rules try to break one?"

"Oh, I had every rationale in the galaxy," Obi-Wan offered, rubbing his bearded cheek. His grin, too, was only a shade of the one he was supposed to wear. "We would be righting a wrong, that when we contacted her she would be given piece of mind that she made the right decision, we could have possibly hired her to the Temple, she could be given the opportunity to give back the galaxy, I was quite creative. The Council reminded me every time that I could not right every wrong, that there were simply not enough of us to perform gestures like this. But most important of all: I should do nothing to foster and encourage attachment in you." His grin changed slightly, something that might almost have looked bitter. "You were already struggling enough as it was to let her go, and they decided that it would be best that you maintained your clean break so that time could close the attachment."

Something deep in Anakin burned. Those sanctimonious bastards. They knew nothing.

Obi-Wan's gaze became sharp, his hand pulled away from his face and he stood to his full height - so much shorter than Anakin but always commanding so much more respect. "Your thoughts betray you, Anakin. They did the right thing. Their reasoning was more than justified."

"You can't believe that!" Anakin countered. "Or else you wouldn't have petitioned the Council to begin with!"

Obi-Wan's head tilted, considering something. Finally he closed his eyes and braced himself. "I suppose they also knew the real reason why I kept petitioning them."

That brought Anakin up short.

Obi-Wan continued: "Anakin, I've been raising you for over ten years. I heard you cry yourself to sleep when you first came to the Temple. I know about the nightmares that would send you to my room. I knew they were worry over your mother. I wanted to give you piece of mind."

... That...

... That was everything. Something blossomed in Anakin's heart that was hot, but not the burning smolder of his anger. It was gentler, warmer if that was possible, and soft. It bubbled up to his cheeks, flushing them, burning his ears and making him suddenly smile. Sincerely smile.

They didn't trust each other with everything.

But, for the first time, Anakin felt that maybe they could try.

Author's Notes: I really don't seem to have the ability to be "brief." The idea of this? "Anakin learns that Obi-Wan petitioned to free his mother." ... And how long did it take for me to get there? (sigh)

The more we write from Anakin's POV the more we understand his character, and this is probably one of the best iterations of him so far. Obi-Wan, too, turned out really well in this piece.

Anakin's ruminations about the bond will become very important later. Just saying. ^_^

Next week: "In Anakin's colorful and interesting life as a Jedi, there was only one time he ever went completely and utterly AWOL. And this was if you included his sneaking out of the Temple as a child, the many times he made his master insane with worry when he disappeared on a mission in order to do things his way, and the horrible time he deserted Naboo with Padme to check on his mother. Even if you included all of that, there was only one time he went AWOL."