Anakin Falls on the battlefield, on a small dusty planet in the Mid Rim that's largely unimportant in the grand scale of the war. His men are dying in scores around him, screaming, spilling their guts onto the pockmarked ground, and something that has been pulling tighter and tighter over the course of the war, over the course of his whole life—between one decapitated droid and the next, something snaps in his chest.
All of a sudden, the Force is accessible to him in ways that were never truly obvious before, and instinct and adrenaline instantly seize upon them. All of a sudden, he's moving faster and more fluidly than ever, cutting through the opposing forces like air instead of butter. A downed GAR tank shudders and rights itself behind him. Half a klick away, the rubble of a collapsing cliffside becomes light as a feather and drifts to the ground around the cohort it was about to bury under five tons of rock. A shiny reaches up and gently bats a boulder aside, watching in wonder as it floats out of reach.
Yes, Anakin Falls for the first time on a relatively insignificant battlefield in the middle of the war, more than a year earlier than Sidious was planning. And he doesn't notice.
Well, why should he? He has a number of other things to focus on. He has to stay alive, for one thing, sunk so deep in the Force that he barely remembers his own name in order to feel blaster bolts coming before they're fired. He's equally high on adrenaline. He's currently decimating an enemy detachment from within while his men engage it from the front, so he has to stab that droid, and roll left to avoid Fives' fire, and come up under this one with a sweeping underhand slash, and switch his grip to backhand to stab the one behind him through the processor, and then use that movement to propel him into a rightward spin so he can charge the next before it can turn back to him. In one corner of his brain, as always, he's worried about Ahsoka back at the Temple, and Obi-Wan currently en route to a tough campaign near Hoth. He has a pebble in one boot and a pain in his back where he's pulled a muscle, he has a small, persistent headache from lack of sleep and dehydration, and he can still feel troopers' lives winking out in the Force (although, for some reason, much slower than they were a minute ago).
So yes, Anakin doesn't notice that he's Fallen, just that X and Y and Z need doing and he's multitasking a bit better than usual. The 501st notices, as all over the battlefield small emergencies are invisibly handled with more power and at greater distances than they're used to. Not enough that anyone can relax, but enough that it compounds over the next few standard hours and the battle turns in their favor much faster than it otherwise might have. The 501st, on the whole, is glad for the change, but they don't think it all that unusual. The eyes thing is a bit more out of the ordinary, but shocking as it may seem, one doesn't spend a lot of time staring deeply into one's commanders' eyes mid-fight. Of the small unit fighting with the General on the north flank, a handful notice the glowing yellow eyes and take a nanosecond to reflect, "That's new," but they all just kind of assume it's a Jedi thing and move on with their day. The sun is hot, this armor is heavy, what I wouldn't give for a shower right now.
Before dusk falls completely, there are no droids left operational on this barren flood plain on this tiny planet. The first of a series of half-built airbases meant to disrupt key Republic supply lines is now smoldering rubble. It's another two grueling hours before Anakin has finished with cleanup, helping securely float the wounded back to the triage unit (they feel lighter today—he's not so tired, he supposes—so he lifts a few more than usual and misses the med team's curious stares). Purely by chance, he manages to dodge Rex and the other few troopers who've been up close and personal with a Sith until the glow has faded significantly. It's another hour and a half before he's done enough organizing and ordering and delegating to Rex that he can finally head to the refresher to wash the dirt-encrusted blood off his hands. By then, darkness has fallen and the yellow has faded completely, not that it matters—the makeshift refresher tent doesn't have mirrors.
In this manner, Anakin Skywalker makes it full 52 hours without even suspecting he's a Sith.
"Hey, General," one of the guys tosses out the next planetary evening, when Anakin actually gets a free moment to join a group of ten or eleven troopers around the campfire for end-of-day rations. (Usually he just sprays his paperwork with crumbs for a few hours before rolling onto his bedroll when his brain shuts down.) The sky is purple in the east but still tinged orange in the north, across the wide, shadowy flood plain. Their group is sheltered against a convenient little eruption of boulders that glitters where the firelight catches it, with a nice view of forty or fifty other campfires ringed with silhouetted clones, dotting the barren landscape. "What's with the eyes thing?"
"Eyesh fhing?" Anakin swallows his dry, gritty mouthful and gives the guy half his attention. "What do you mean?"
"You know, the—" The trooper puts his wrists against his eyes and wiggles his fingers in a way that's probably meant to illustrate something. Anakin, who's been searching his memory for this guy's name, has a flash of inspiration—Comms, known for his communication skills.
"No one knows what you mean, Comms," Redeye sighs.
"No, I saw it too," one of the no-longer-rookies-but-not-quite-vets pipes up from the next campfire over, tuning out of his own conversation. "Begging your pardon, General, but your eyes went, um. All weird. Like, pale. Is that a Jedi thing?"
Anakin goes still. His heartbeat wavers in a way he has come to associate with the aftermath of electrocution.
"Um. Haha. Did they look like they were an, uh. A certain color?"
"What…color, sir?"
"Oh, just any color."
The trooper thinks for a minute, tapping the helmet on his lap. "Maybe yellow? Yes, yellowish, sir."
Jessie, sitting on Anakin's left, looks closely at his rapidly paling face. "Is that like, an important Jetiise thing, General?"
Anakin laughs; it's extremely stilted. "Uh, no. I don't think so. Maybe it was a trick of the light?" Doubtful expressions resolve into blandness around him, and Anakin realizes this is not going to fly. "Or maybe it's something I don't know about. I'll check with someone at the Temple on leave. I'm sure it's not a big deal."
Silence.
"So, heading back to Coruscant in three weeks standard. Anyone got any plans?"
They humor him by changing the subject, which is why his legion is the best legion. He waits just long enough to not seem incredibly suspicious and then fast-walks back to his personal tent.
He misses the comfort of a ship. Nice, thick walls between him and everyone who depends on him. Anakin retires to his tent that night and has a very, very quiet breakdown.
/
Morning breaks in spectacular fashion on this planet: the sky goes from pinkish to pure, glowing white over the course of an hour before resolving to a cloudless light yellow, owing to the unusual way the atmosphere scatters radiation from two suns. The white glow reflects off of the rocks that stick up in small, low patches across the plain, creating a glittering mirage at the horizon where the distances between patches seem negligible.
By the time the sky is showing a yellowish tint, Anakin has had time to get past the panic stage and think about some things. One of these thoughts, above all, has been extremely helpful in his efforts to regain his equanimity: Namely, that there's simply no way this is what it looks like. Sure, he was able to fish a shaving mirror out of the bottom of his pack and confirm that his eyes were, in fact, looking pretty…well, Sithly. Sure, it was extremely disturbing. However, after thoroughly and objectively examining his emotions (yeah, Obi-Wan, laugh it up), he has come to the unquestionable conclusion that he doesn't feel any different than he did the day before yesterday.
He's never been an ideal Jedi on the internal side of things, of course. He tends to manifest success more in terms of external results, and he's come to terms with that. (Really, he has.) He's always been prone to blundering anger, childish jealousy, and irrational anxieties. He's done terrible things. When his mother—well. He showed restraint then, though, he only killed the adults by the tent and those who tried to prevent him from carrying—well. Anyways. He wanted to do much more, but he didn't, and that was the closest he ever came to Fa—to truly Sithlike behavior.
No, he's searched his heart thoroughly, and can say with absolute certainty that he feels no desire to maim, murder, or monologue more than usual this morning. He would rather not assemble children's lost sabers into a ghoulish display. He hasn't been filled with contempt for the huddling masses (please, his mother would never have allowed it), and the prospect of manipulating any of his important people to their doom remains repulsive to him. Surely, if he had gone bad, he would have recklessly murdered at least one subordinate between his tent and the refresher this morning. He hasn't even felt the urge to kick a grok-puppy.
So Anakin can't be a Sith. There's just no possibility. Zilch. Nada.
But will anyone else see it that way?
That's the thing. Anakin has always been the fuck-up Jedi, ever since he joined at the ripe old age of nine. They know he's too emotional. They know he's far too comfortable with killing. They know violence is the only thing he's really good at, and they wield him accordingly. In some ways he's even grateful for it, the way the Council stands in for his self-control, throwing him onto battlegrounds where he can vent his negative emotions (into the Force) on the right people rather than bring them home to Ahsoka, Obi-Wan, and Padme. In other ways, it makes him uncomfortable that they're treating him like a child. Like a tool.
Anyways.
If Obi-Wan showed up at the Temple with glowing yellow eyes and a red lightsaber, they would certainly give him the benefit of the doubt. They would assume it was a trick, accuse him of being a changeling in disguise. If it proved true, they would bemoan this most unexpected and devastating of tragedies. But if Anakin gets caught looking a little yellowy around the iris? Acting a little moodier than usual? Why, that's practically a self-fulfilling prophecy right there.
So his first priority, really, should be concealment.
Or rather, his first priority should be the 18 more grueling days of fighting they face before they can even think about leave. Thank the Force for the war, he supposes. Ha.
He leans further into the Force to wake himself up (and is a bit surprised by the jolt of energy he feels), eyes himself distrustfully in his shaving mirror once more, and shoulders past his tent flap into the crisp yellow morning. Somehow, life goes on.
/
The next 18 days are comparatively uninteresting. Mostly transport around the planet, plus two skirmishes and one three-day battle during which only a risky-but-successful night attack yields significant casualties. The troublemakers in the infantry get rowdier as leave approaches, leading to an escalating prank war that almost gives their position away during an air raid risk window in a fabulous burst of glitter; this ultimately forces Rex to deliver a series of fierce public reprimands. (Public as in the 501st, anyway; they of course won't make it into Rex's or Anakin's reports.)
Anakin checks his eyes in puddles, metal instruments, and his shaving mirror whenever he gets a chance, enough that the men start joking that he's gone vain. If Ahsoka were here, she'd be loudly amazed that they think this is a new development.
Anakin's reputation notwithstanding, he does manage to learn some things. The yellow doesn't necessarily happen when he uses the Force, which makes sense because he's drawing on the Force to some degree pretty much all the time. Instead, they seem to light up whenever he's experiencing strong emotion, and particularly desire of any kind. The desire to protect his men, the desire to go to sleep, the desire to crush his datapad into tiny splinters and scatter them on the wind—it doesn't matter how fleeting, it'll set them off about half the time, as far as he can tell. He can't control them, either to prevent them from lighting up or force them to shut down.
By now, many of his men have seen it, and Rex has warily checked in to make sure there's no way it's what he thinks it could be, leaving reassured by Anakin's word that he'll get it checked out. (Utapau hasn't happened yet. Actually, it never will). So from a certain perspective, Anakin's secret is common knowledge at this point. However, no clone of the 501st is ever going to spread private information on his general's health to a different Jedi, and he has Kix's confirmation that he won't include this Jetiise stuff in his medical reports. The clones just don't know enough about the Force to deal with esoteric medical problems or connect the dots between "yellow eyes" and "very, very bad." So from that angle, at least, he's covered.
However, a few days from now, he won't just be surrounded by clones anymore. He'll need to either sink very deep into the calmness of the Force and not feel a single desire for the entire duration of his Temple-bound leave—yeah, not likely—or find some way to keep everyone from seeing his eyes at all during that time.
On the last day before they decamp back to Coruscant, Anakin finds his salvation at a flea market in the planetary capital. It's a pair of dark-tinted glasses, really closer to goggles, the kind rich people on Tatooine wore over a thin veil to protect against the suns. Only these ones have broad lenses that continue past the eyes, wrapping outward around the head almost to where they would hook over a humanoid's ears. They're not particularly comfortable, and they're horrifically ugly, but it's not like he has a lot of options.
Twenty-eight hours of interstellar travel later, his landing transport, the first of many, thumps onto its platform and sends up a puff of dust. The hatch that opens before its occupants sets them squinting in the bright Coruscant sunlight. Anakin grimly slides on his unfashionable eyewear and prepares to face his fate.
/
The first few hours at the Temple go surprisingly well. He surprises himself with the wave of homesickness that hits him at the first sight of its soaring architecture, blocking the sun with a serene majesty that stands out starkly from the bustling streets around it. He's never really felt like he belonged here, but he's come close, many times. When he was 15 and the normally forbidding Jocasta Nu had stayed up five hours past the library's closing time to help him with the research paper he was frantically trying to finish by morning. When he was 13 and Aayla Secura stayed with him in the Halls of Healing because Obi-Wan couldn't, cracking deceptively straight-faced jokes to distract from the pain and stealing a mouse droid so he could show her some mods. When he was 10 or 11 and things with Obi-Wan were the best they would ever get, because he'd figured out moving meditation and they had dinner at Dex's once a month, and he had finally started to feel like all of this could last.
Of course, his view of the Temple is somewhat spoiled by the greenish-brown tint it acquires through his cheap glasses, and by the dread that accompanies the reason he's wearing them.
He gets a few odd looks as he trudges up the Temple steps. They multiply in the halls, where one Padawan even points subtly and giggles something to their friend. Anakin's face heats. He sets his jaw more firmly and increases the pace of his strides toward his quarters, looking straight ahead.
His quarters are a blessing, mostly because the glasses have started to hurt his ears. Plus, these rooms are kept warmer than the rest of the Temple, the curtains are open to let in a cheerful glow, and Ahsoka has taken the liberty of strewing her stuff everywhere in his absence. He makes a fragrant cup of tea and distracts himself by folding some of the spare clothes she's strewn across the couch arms and building a passive-aggressive pile in the corner. He only gets a few minutes' respite here, though, because he has to go report to the Council for debrief and logistics. Mercifully, Obi-Wan won't be there; he gets in early tomorrow morning for a week's short leave after the grueling defensive campaign near Hoth. (Anakin has avoided thinking thus far about what Obi-Wan might think of his ocular predicament, thanks to a process he calls "preemptively releasing worries to the Force" and another Jedi might call "denial.") He makes it several steps into the tiled hall before his heart jumps to his throat and he remembers to put the sunglasses back on.
His heart is still thumping when he makes it to the Council's meeting room. However, the two-hour debrief actually goes fairly well. They have their criticisms, as always, but he met all objectives with a relative dearth of casualties on this last campaign, and they only ran out of rations for one four-day stretch, so the supply chain issues are clearly beginning to resolve themselves. It creates a marginally festive air in the Force, belying the gravity on the faces of the participants.
The Council members also seem rather confused by his new eyewear, but they're used to considering him an eccentric. Mace Windu makes a dry comment about "bold choices" as Anakin leaves that brings back his blush but doesn't necessarily require a response. If anyone does ask, he'll just say it's a Tatooine thing, like the black robes, and they'll make some gleeful comment about attachment and let it slide. He knows how these things go. He practically runs back to his quarters through the winding halls of the Temple, and then he is finally, finally at liberty to collapse on the newly clothing-less couch for a well-deserved nap.
/
Three hours later Ahsoka blows in, datapad under her arm and clearly still caught up in all the make-up classes she's enrolled in based on the absentminded greeting she tosses at him where he stands in the kitchen, contemplating dinner. Then she freezes, clearly registering that she hasn't seen him in person in a month, and tosses her datapad on her bed so she can sprint over and give him a hug. "Skyguy!"
"Heya, Snips! How are your classes?"
"You know, same old. How's Rex, how are the men?!"
"Rex is fine. Fives picked up this wind instrument thing in the planetary capital and has been loudly teaching himself to play it, so that's pretty much the biggest problem in Rex's life right now. The men are good." He'll give her the casualty report tonight, when she doesn't have any more work to do; he knows that's not what she's asking for right now. They have a system, nowadays.
"Am I shipping out with you when you leave, do you know? Please say yes, I've been dying of boredom here."
He'd rather she be dying of boredom than blaster fire, he doesn't say. It wouldn't matter, because he knows the answer to her question. "Yep! Two and a half weeks, we're headed to the Mid Rim. Not sure which front yet, if any."
"Wizard!"
He has no idea where she picked up that expression. He suspects Obi-Wan.
Concluding that he lacks the energy to cook a real meal tonight, Anakin grabs the dehydrated moskrat rolls from the top shelf where he pseudo-hides them from Ahsoka and tips nine of them into a pan. Ahsoka chatters happily at him about her classes, her holodramas, Barriss, and Master Piell's latest effort to bring his mischievous padawan in line; apparently even Windu got involved this time. Anakin finds it oddly soothing to hear about people getting in trouble who aren't him. The rolls sizzle and sputter in the pan, filling the small set of rooms with a delicious meaty smell as the last rays of sunlight, refracted back over the planet's edge, follow their origin point beneath the horizon. It's as dark as Coruscant gets outside the window now, but inside is warmth and light. And Ahsoka's pile of clothes in the corner, which she is studiously ignoring in an act of passive-aggression just as practiced as his own.
He seasons his own four rolls heavily as they finish swelling up to their intended volume, expertly drains the excess water using the pan lid, and tips the golden-brown cylinders onto a plate, presenting them to Ahsoka at the table with a flourish. She rolls her eyes at him and finishes texting someone on her datapad. "So, did you get any videos of Fives' efforts with the oboe?"
"Better: Someone got a video of Rex's reaction and uploaded it anonymously to the servers. I think he's going to pop a blood vessel one of these days."
She winces, rather hypocritically; they both know they collectively cause half of his headaches. The conversation continues in this vein as they slowly crunch their way to the bottom of the pile.
Ahsoka dips over to refill her glass at the sink.
There's one last moskrat roll on the plate, and Anakin's going to let Ahsoka have it, like a good master. Really, he is. That doesn't stop him from staring hungrily at it from his seat at the table, mournfully contemplating the sacrifices we make for our ungrateful younglings.
He senses it when Ahsoka goes completely still.
"…Master?" She sounds…afraid. He's on his feet immediately, searching for the threat, whirling when she jolts back against the counter at his movement. How would someone get in—on the ground, or—? She's—she's looking at him.
"Ahsoka? Ahsoka, what's wrong?"
"Umm…." She points a shaking hand at his face. Slowly, it dawns on him that he took off his glasses earlier in the comfort and safety of his quarters.
Oh, kriff.
"It's not what it looks like. I mean. Kind of." He starts to step forward, then flinches when her fear spikes and backs away with slow, measured steps instead. He puts his hands out at waist level and shows his empty palms, trying to keep his movements as non-threatening as possible. "I'm still me, I'm still loyal to the Republic and the Order and the ideal of not being all—all murdery, and everything—" He can feel her fear over their training bond, fear of him, and it makes him sick to his stomach. She should never be afraid of him. There's not much room in their quarters, so he ends up awkwardly standing in the curtained doorway of his own bedroom.
"It just kind of happened," he finishes, keeping his voice quiet and soothing, willing her to feel his earnestness and not his panic through the bond. "A couple weeks ago. I don't know why it did, but—I would never deliberately hurt you, Ahsoka. Ever. I would rather die."
The last bit, the dead seriousness of his tone—and perhaps the way he has to push a loose fold of the curtain off of his head right after, it's hard to picture Dooku looking so ungraceful—breaks her out of panic mode, and she narrows her eyes, hand still on her lightsaber but relaxing away from the wall a bit. "Just me? What about other Jedi?"
"No, not them either! I don't want to hurt anybody!" Besides the obvious people, anyway.
She seems reassured. "Are you—I mean. And you have no idea what caused this?"
"No? Uh, from what I can tell from the guys it happened in the middle of a fight, but like, a fairly normal fight? I didn't do anything particularly, uh…. So like, maybe it's not even a Si—a you-know-what thing! Maybe it's just a weird genetics thing! I mean, my genetic makeup is really weird, anything's possible, right?"
"So your eyes just started like…doing that? And nothing else, it's just random color change?"
"Yeah, it's freaky." He'll mention the part where he's maybe a little stronger in the Force later, when she's not so alarmed; that part's still fairly ambiguous anyways.
She's still very still, but some of the tension is starting to go out of her shoulders. He can feel her uncertainty, her reaction teetering weightlessly in midair like a perfectly balanced scale. "Well, I guess if you haven't…done anything…that's just…." She trails off, takes a deep breath. "Kark. What do we even do about this?"
The question of the month. "I wish I knew. Besides, uh, these." He unhooks the glasses from a fold in his robe and waves them halfheartedly.
Here's the hard part, though. He musters his best pleading face. "Please don't tell anyone, Ahsoka. I don't know what they'll—" Pause, rephrase. "I just don't want the Council to…overreact."
He sees her mouth twist as she struggles not to acknowledge the validity of that concern. She's not as cynical as he is about the Order, not yet. He's done his best not to burden her with his attitude all that much in that area. It's the only home she's ever known. But she's also been to the wars now, literally.
The scale tips. "Okay, Master, I can hold off on telling anyone. For now, until we know more." She takes a steadying breath.
"But we need to tell Obi-Wan."
"No!" The scale tips rapidly back the other way and then falls off the metaphorical table. Anakin's heart stutters; his stomach goes the way of the scale. Obi-Wan is the last person who needs to know, Obi-Wan will—well, honestly, Anakin has no idea what he'll do in this situation, but he'll be horrified, there's no question of that. Obi-Wan will look at him, look right through him, look down on him and sure, Obi-Wan already knows his former padawan isn't exactly a Jedi success story, but there's a big difference between knowing that and knowing that your padawan has Fall—
Nope. Not that, because that's not what happened, but it's what Obi-Wan will think happened, and he'll be looking down on Anakin in shock and disappointment and Anakin won't have any clue how to fix it, doesn't even really know what he did wrong, and the thought makes him want to curl up and die a little, gently, somewhere deep inside his chest—
"Master?"
Calm down, Ahsoka's here. Ahsoka's watching, and her alarm is starting to mount again and feed into his own, so he needs to be a capable gods-damned Jedi for once in his life and calm down. He breathes out slowly. "Sorry, Snips, I just. I sort of don't want to go to him until I know for sure what's going on."
Ahsoka bites her lip nervously, flashing a sharp canine. "I get that, I do, but…I'd really rather not be the only Jedi who knows about this."
It takes him a moment to understand her meaning, and then a fresh wave of guilt and shame practically takes him out at the knees where he's still standing under the stupid curtain. Ahsoka must register it, he must not be shielding enough, because she actually steps forward and hurries to reassure him: "Not that I don't trust you, Master, I do! I just—I mean, crazy stuff happens out there, at war and all, and this is pretty crazy, and I just don't really feel qualified to help you deal with this if it's just me—"
The overhead lights flicker. He holds up a tired hand and she subsides, pulling at her fingertips and eyeing him anxiously. She looks so young—like she always does, really—and Anakin knows he can't be selfish here. This is Ahsoka; he'd throw himself into a thousand sarlacc pits to make her feel safe. As safe as he can; as safe as he's in a position to make her feel on the frontlines of a war that never seems to end.
"Okay," he says, and in spite of all his noble intentions he's still trying to convince himself as he says it. It's like someone tied a knot in his intestines. But he knows his duty.
"You're right. We'll talk to Obi-Wan about it."
/
Ahsoka agrees that it can wait until morning. She opts to stay the intervening night in Barriss' and Luminara's quarters, which Anakin understands and even applauds as the kind of wise, cautious decision he wants her to make, even if it makes him want to gouge his eyes out a little bit.
He knows himself well enough to gather that he won't be getting any sleep tonight, much less the luxurious five or six hours he strives for whenever he's on leave in the Temple. After about three hours of staring dully at the floor, he decides that if he'll be awake anyways, he might as well do it somewhere nicer smelling, with more expensive sheets. Plus, if he really is informing all his important people about his newest medical…? Development? Then he should probably give his beloved wife a heads-up too.
After comm-ing to make sure she's free and he won't wake her (senators keep odd hours), he requisitions a speeder from the Temple garage and heads out through the Coruscant night. Neon flashes past on both sides, too quickly even to identify the many languages represented on the sides of Coruscant's skyscrapers and mobile signboards. It gets darker as he enters the senate district, if only because night disguises the kind of opulence that doesn't announce itself with glowing letters. He flashes his false credentials and dips down a discreet tunnel entrance, emerging into a dimly lit basement garage packed with flashy speeders, silent and empty. No one is there to give him a second glance as he locks his borrowed speeder and dips into the servants' entrance half-hidden behind a pillar.
He wonders as the elevator rumbles up to her floor whether he'll be able to muster up yellow eyes to demonstrate, because otherwise this will be a much more confusing conversation, but he needn't have worried—when he ducks into Padme's refresher after letting himself into her rooms, they're going strong. He supposes he shouldn't be surprised; maybe it's residue from the conversation with Ahsoka, or dread at the prospect of telling Obi-Wan. Or maybe it's just that seeing Padme always makes him feel things. If it's the latter, that's actually more evidence that the eyes can't be a Sith thing, really—Jedi Code be damned, he just can't imagine how what he feels for Padme could be a bad thing.
"Ani?" she calls, probably just now hearing him from the main recreation room. Padme's apartment is huge.
"Here, Angel," he calls, trying to inject some cheer into his voice and missing the vein entirely.
"Good, I've been worried. What's this medical thing you wanted to talk about, is it serious? You said the day before yesterday that you hadn't been wounded…."
"It's, um—" It's easier to show than tell. Anakin indicates his eyes with one hesitant hand, feeling his shoulders hunch as he prepares for her disgust.
"Oh, your—? Oh, kriff. I…yes, I see why you're concerned." Padme is surprised, cautious perhaps, but not horrified and certainly not judgmental. She comes right up to him, puts a hand on his shoulder and stretches onto tiptoes to examine them more closely. He looks back into her wide eyes and feels some of his shame ebb away, finds himself staring at the tiny wrinkle that forms between her brows when she concentrates. "You're right, it's definitely odd. Hmm, the color is rather pretty."
That causes him to blink against his wishes, drawing back a bit. "Pretty? No, it's an awful color. It's all wrong and like. Sickly."
She leans in a little closer, tilts his chin down slightly with one hand for a better angle; he holds himself very still and marvels at this amazing person who wants to spend her life with him. Her breath puffs lightly on his neck. "You're just saying that because you're biased, dear one. I've never seen Dooku or anyone like that go all glow-y on me, and I think it's pretty." She hesitates. "It suits you."
Anakin's not sure how he should feel about that, honestly, but he loves his wife rather a lot, so he decides that just going with it should be okay.
So Anakin catches up on logistics forms while Padme leans up against him on the couch and drafts a proposal for one of her many Senate subcommittees, and it's warm and quiet, and when he asks if she wants tea she doesn't hesitate to look him in the eye and smile in thanks. A few hours before dawn she goes to sleep, and he lays on his side of her bed and alternates between quietly drafting a strategy review and watching her breathe. It's a good night, all things considered. Being with her makes it easier not to think.
But he still has to tell Obi-Wan the next day.
/
Anakin meets Ahsoka just outside the Temple dining hall in the morning. He knows he won't be able to keep anything down, but a growing Togruta can't afford to skip meals when she doesn't have to. She looks haggard, but she quickly hides the lost look in her eyes behind bravado when she first catches sight of him. "You look like hell, Skyguy!"
They walk in together, heading for the line at the order kiosk. "Yeah, yeah, laugh at your master. Maybe I should trade you out for Rex, just to get some respect around here."
"What, tape a rolled-up towel on his head and hope nobody notices the difference?"
"You leave enough of your spare clothes lying around if we really want to complete the illusion."
She snorts, tapping at the touch screen. "I'd pay good credits to see that." She gets the recommended carnivore breakfast this morning, essentially just a pile of meat on a bed of egg whites; he orders a muffin.
The dining hall is abuzz with quiet conversations and the swishing of robes, as about half of the tables in the huge room are occupied by master-padawan duos and small groups of friends at this hour. No space in the Temple can really be called loud, but the vaulted stone ceiling does multiply their voices to a cheerful hum. He sees some bandages, some splinted limbs. When their meals are ready, Anakin and Ahsoka carry their trays to a table and chat through breakfast as if nothing is wrong. It's an effort, on his part as well as hers, but it gets easier as her pile of steaks slowly diminishes over the course of an hour and his muffin wanes to gibbous.
She scrapes her plate for the last of the juices. He stands when she stands, feeling a bit like a man on the way to his execution, and tosses his ultimately half-eaten muffin in the waste disposal chute. Together, they amble through the dining hall's high back archway into the wide, dimly lit hall outside, its hanging lanterns turned off for the day.
"Okay, now let's go find Obi-Wan?" Ahsoka looks up at him with big eyes. He feels the weight of her gaze, of the moment.
He takes a deep breath, lets it out. "Yeah, let's."
She checks around to make sure the hall is empty before surprising him with a hug from the side that drives the breath out of him in a startled "Whoomf!" Then she's striding off down the hallway ahead of him with her hands behind her back, the picture of nonchalance.
He stares after her for a moment in wonder. What did he do to deserve such faith?
Then, of course, he has to jog to keep up, because even in her finest moments she's a terror. He wouldn't have it any other way.
/
They find Obi-Wan in one of the Temple's empty study rooms, reclining in a legless chair in a way that probably looks gracefully insouciant to anyone who hasn't learned to recognize his exhaustion. He has a datapad on his lap, but it doesn't look like much paperwork is getting done; he might actually be taking a nap in the sunlight, if Anakin is any judge. Still, he opens his eyes and turns expectantly when they enter.
"Ah, my grand-padawan and my less grand padawan. To what do I owe the pleasure?"
Ahsoka laughs, because she's a suck-up when it comes to Obi-Wan. "How goes the war, old man?" Anakin responds, because he's genuinely happy to see Obi-Wan, not because he's stalling.
They manage a few minutes of catching up before Ahsoka elbows Anakin in the side, a clear signal that she sees right through him. He winces. "Actually, Obi-Wan, there's something important I…could use your opinion on."
Obi-Wan raises an eyebrow and gestures as if to say the floor is yours.
"No, Obi-Wan, it's—" He catches himself fiddling with the arm of his glasses and hurriedly lowers his hand. "Not here."
Obi-Wan looks at him, really looks, for the first time. He looks terrible, he knows, and not just because the glasses do not flatter his bone structure. He's sweaty and his heartbeat still feels odd, and he didn't sleep at all the night before and very little before that. Beside him, Ahsoka is giving Obi-Wan distressed grok-puppy eyes.
"I have a minute, I suppose," Obi-Wan says mildly, setting down the tablet.
The long corridor they walk through on the way to the Room of a Thousand Fountains is beautiful, which almost makes it worse somehow. The windows lining the beige stone corridor are wide and numerous, cheerfully splashing bright afternoon sunlight across the opposite wall and throwing everything into such sharp relief that he can see the porous texture of the walls and hairline cracks in the tile floor. Their footsteps echo loudly in the silence, Anakin's clacking clear and distinct while Obi-Wan and Ahsoka tap-shuffle along more softly in the background; due to their different stride lengths, the sounds continually merge and disentangle.
At length, they come into view of the first grand fountain on this level and beeline for a reasonably close but also exceedingly private section: There's a secluded grotto accessed by ducking behind a seemingly solid rock wall, containing about eight yards square of soft white sand with a small pond fed by a trickling waterfall on one edge. The dark rocky walls are smooth inside and tilt outward, ending about fifteen yards up but below the roof, so the grotto is actually open at the top. Because of this, you can hear the great rushing noise generated by a thousand fountains, some splashing, some trickling, all inhabiting one winding, seemingly segmented but actually continuous space. However, something about the structure of this grotto and the porous stone prevents sound from escaping. Anakin should know—he's comm-ed his wife from here enough times, and swept for bugs every time he did it.
"So Anakin has a problem," Ahsoka kicks things off mercilessly, clearly seeing on his face that he would procrastinate forever if he could.
This is for her, he reminds himself in his mind. It turns into a mantra: Thisisforher, thisisforher, thisisforher.
"Yeah, so." He swallows, clears his throat. "Toward the end of my last campaign, this weird thing started happening. With, uh. My eyes. It's, um."
"Your eyes?" Obi-Wan says slowly, dawning suspicion and something like fear on his face. "Anakin—"
"I don't feel any different!" Anakin rushes to get out before Obi-Wan can put his suspicions together. E chu ta, he's gonna hurl right here, that half of a muffin is going to end up in the fountain. "It's, literally, it's a cosmetic problem, it's just—" Rip off the bandage, his mother's voice advises in the back of his mind. Before he can wimp out, Anakin tears off the glasses.
Obi-Wan is, for once, speechless. He just freezes in place.
"I don't even feel any different than usual," Anakin repeats like a malfunctioning droid.
"I…Anakin, you…." The thing Obi-Wan's face is doing under the beard looks somewhere between heartbroken, terrified, and deeply confused. He stumbles back a step.
"It really can't be what it looks like!" Anakin gets out in a cracked voice. This doesn't feel real. He feels like he's choking.
Ahsoka has latched onto his elbow. He can feel her leaning into his right side, fingers digging a little too deep. It grounds him. "It could just be a species thing!" she jumps in to defend him. "Plenty of species naturally have yellow eyes, right? And Skyguy's dad's not really, like, a thing"—interesting way to phrase that—"and hybrids do happen, sometimes, and maybe this is just, like, a natural biological age thing, you know?"
"I don't really know my ancestry on either side," Anakin adds with only a slight pang of discomfort, warming to her theme and trying to get his thoughts in order. Obi-Wan's not—he's not doing anything. Just frozen in place, looking at Anakin with wide, searching eyes. "Could be some changeling in there, maybe?"
"Some—what?"
"We said it might be because he has some non-human ancestry." Ahsoka is the first to catch on to the fact that Obi-Wan has not processed anything they've said for the past few seconds.
Obi-Wan blinks, shakes his head a little bit. Stops looking quite so much like a man experiencing his worst nightmare, and more like a man who's just not sure if he's having a really weird dream. "You're…so you think it might not be…."
"No, Master, I mean, if it was…I mean, I would know, right? If it got that far?"
"He hasn't done anything evil, I confirmed with Rex. He's still Anakin," Ahsoka chimes in, leaning more of her weight onto him so that he has to reposition his feet to support her. "He's still our Skyguy, Master."
A long, tense moment passes in silence.
Abruptly, something flickers back to life in Obi-Wan's vacant eyes, and he frowns more deliberately, the hand that had been resting on his lightsaber drifting up to stroke his beard. His body language is still defensive in a way that sets Anakin's teeth on edge and he's not meeting his eyes, but that last part's probably not a bad thing right now anyway. "That's…I'd have to do some research," he muses. "Not in the Temple archives, that's out of the question"—Anakin feels a pulse of shock that nearly takes him out at the knees—"so we'll have to go to the Grand Library at Coruscant, maybe through a contact. Maybe—"
"Master," Anakin interrupts. He licks cracked lips. "You mean you're…not going to tell the Council?"
At this, Obi-Wan finally meets his eyes. The expression in them is wary, searching; Obi-Wan scrutinizes him for a full four uncomfortable seconds before slowly shaking his head.
"No," he says lightly. "No, I don't think that would be wise."
All the energy drains out of Anakin's body like water through a sieve. But in a good way.
"I'm going to go, um. Think about this. We'll come up with a plan," Obi-Wan corrects himself, almost recovering his usual confident tone but not quite getting there. "I assume you have, well, yes, you've got concealment covered. I was wondering about…those." Obi-Wan indicates the glasses in Anakin's hand with distaste in the curl of his lip. "Was there truly nothing better?"
"Kriff's sake, Master, I didn't have a lot of options!"
"Hmm. Well, we'll figure it out. Please don't forget to put those back on."
Anakin probably doesn't have a right to feel offended, since that's how he ended up revealing himself to Ahsoka on literally the first day. He feels offended regardless.
"I'll leave first, in case someone is watching," Obi-Wan adds, still somewhat absently.
"Force be with you, Master!" Ahsoka calls after him as he heads out. Obi-Wan, surprised, turns back to look at them with something like a very disturbed wry smile.
"Ha. Indeed."
He disappears around the corner.
They stand there in silence for a few more moments as it really sinks in how well that went. That actually—that was probably the best possible outcome. (He didn't look disgusted.) "If that's settled, I'm going to go sleep for a week," Anakin laughs weakly, leaning his pounding head back against the cold stone wall. He feels dizzy from relief.
Eyes closed, he hears but doesn't see Ahsoka gasp dramatically. "Succumbing to the darkness already?!"
Anakin winces. "Too soon, Snips."
She grins, a little shamefacedly. "Yeah. Yeah, I know."
/
That night on Coruscant, Sheev twitches and grumbles in his sleep, and wakes up tired and irritated enough to consider a shot of Sith chemicals in his caf as a pick-me-up. Something has come out of alignment in his web of darkness, but for all his power he can't tell what. Something is beginning to shift.