The Corridor
"I have spent far too much time here," Obi-Wan said. Ahsoka didn't laugh. "It feels like yesterday when I sat here for the first time, waiting for Anakin to return to me."
"When?" she asked.
"I had recently told the counsel that I would take Anakin on as my Padawan. I had taken Anakin out for a walk around the gardens when some sort of trap had been sprung. There was an explosion, and we were caught on the edge of it. I was hardly harmed, but Anakin had broken his arm in four different places. He was delirious with pain."
"Nevertheless, Anakin first made sure that I was fine before he passed out. I was scared, truly, I was. I had lost my Master, and I thought for sure that I was to lose my Padawan as well. Master Che came and took him away. I had shouted at her, stormed the Halls of Healing and ordered the staff to take me to Anakin's room. They would not let me near him. Instead, they dragged me here. I sat for an hour, then two. No one came to get me to say he was awake. I was in this very chair when I thought that I learned to let go. I had convinced myself that I was willing to let the Force take Anakin from me. Now here I am, how many years later, still unable to do so?"
Anakin Skywalker walked behind him, two paces behind and to the left, the traditional position of a Padawan learner. Obi-Wan's cloak fit right, which was strange; he had become so used to wearing Qui-Gon's articles of clothing after his mysteriously disappeared. His Padawan—his Padawan, oh Force, what had he gotten himself into?—burbled with Light, spilling forth every emotion that flitted through his bright mind. He was anxious, excited, mesmerized, with a tone of sadness layering his joyful first week as an apprentice.
Obi-Wan's apprentice.
"Will you walk with me?" Obi-Wan asked, turning his head only slightly.
"Sure!"
"Yes, Master, would be an appropriate response, my very young Padawan."
"Yes, Master." Anakin screwed his eyebrows together, as if admonishing, reprimanding himself silently.
They moved farther into the Temple, to the arboretum, following its shallow artificial river. Obi-Wan saw their shadows in the moving water. Two of them, walking in tandem, their footsteps masked by the garden's pulsing of the Living Force. They passed the main garden path in favor of the shale-strewn bank where the current slowed to breathing pace, and drooping yarbanna fronds and aoli bushes embraced each other to create a quilt along the ground and sky. He would sit the young boy down on one of the large, welcoming rocks. They would talk, perhaps try at meditation together.
"Master?" Anakin started hesitantly.
"Anakin, I…" But where to start?
Obi-Wan took another step—the Force jerked, spinning his awareness upward—
"Master!"
An explosion, so sudden and powerful that it blew Obi-Wan into the air, threw him against the wall, his head cracking. His ears rang, the world turning to the high-pitched whine of a central processing unit gone bad. The smoke and residue of burning gardens fluttered around him as he worked to blink the galaxies gathering just outside the corner of his eyes away.
Anakin was in front of him, a ghost covered in soot and debris. His large, worried eyes were red and raw-looking, his mouth moving, without any of his words reaching Obi-Wan's ears.
"Anakin," Obi-Wan tried. He could not hear his own voice.
He watched. Anakin's mouth continued to move. Are you hurt?
The words washed through his mind. And he lied. No.
The boy seemed to hear him. And believe him.
Because the moment after, his eyes rolled back into his head, and he collapsed onto the mossy floor in a heap.
Obi-Wan was strapped onto a stretcher, a light shone in his eyes, more mouths moving with no sound attached. He was cocooned in sedatives and shoddy senses, the world of consciousness getting harder and harder to navigate. The healers surrounding him jangled with cold, clinical prods. Someone was at his lip with a liquid that was not tea.
Yet, the drugs seemed an act of kindness.
A chorus of needles, hot, exposed wires writhing in his hip ate away at his lucidity. He wished to vomit, no, to scream. Maybe both.
He wanted Qui-Gon.
Someone offered him water, and his senses argued whether or not it was unadulterated, coming up just short from an answer. His lips didn't work well enough to make use of the gift other than letting it stream down his chin, and soak his bare chest.
His Master, his master—where was he? Obi-Wan searched for the familiar aura in the Force and found emptiness. He called out, his voice cracking under the strain of pain.
"Master—"
"Do not try and speak." The voice of Vokara Che met his ears, muffled, almost underwater. Obi-Wan had to reassess whether or not he had been dunked in bacta.
"Qui-Gon, please," Obi-Wan tried despite the warning, finding his own voice just as foreign. His ear drums ache and pull in his head.
"Your Master is with the Force, Kenobi."
Oh, Force. He's falling. He's falling, and it is his own fault, and he's been cut in two just like his Master was in front of his very eyes, and he can't do a kriffing thing about it because he's so out of sorts. Limbs dead weight, boulders for hands, head a magma factory. The hands on him, they're grinding down through his abdominal muscles and deep into his flesh. Spiking, stabbing, shearing in his skin, in his senses.
Qui-Gon.
Anakin.
A fresh wave of panic flooded him, one more thing he wanted to control but can't. Wants to breathe through but can't. Wants to wake up from but can't. Everything he has ever been taught how to do, he can't.
More meds course through him in a wave of nausea as relentless and cold as ice.
"My Padawan," Obi-Wan croaked. "The-the explosion…"
But he was slipping under, under. He hadn't known rest in so long, that he couldn't recognize it when it greeted him.
Too soon, much too soon to be awake. Obi-Wan wore sweat like a second layer of skin, thick and sticky and awful, reeking of debris and ozone.
Thoughts came back quicker this time. He saw the explosion behind his eyelids, felt the momentum of him being launched backwards, his Padawan's face, his Padawan's collapse.
The next thing Obi-Wan knew was he was moving. Up, over the side of the bed. Icy tile floors stabbed through his bare feet, a small patch of skin on his forearm screamed. He tugged at it, tastes copper, along with a muffled chant of "No, no, no, Kenobi." Fingers clamped protectively around his wrist. "That stays."
Obi-Wan's vision swayed, blinking in and out. He grabbed the wall for support, hand slick and slipping, too weak an axis for his head to revolve around. His ears made him perform somersaults to nowhere.
Then his hip joined the conversation of aches and pains by building from a scratch to a roar inside of him. Obi-Wan leaned against the wall, reaching toward the fresh bandages covering his left hip as pain nipped at his nerve endings.
"You were not cleared to move, Master," an unfamiliar voice said. Obi-Wan's ears strained through the din. "Please, lets get you back into bed."
"I'm…its fine. Thank you. I'm…I'm fine here," Obi-Wan managed.
Then he was crumpling to the floor, joining it, becoming one with the frozen tile.
Someone stopped him before he could melt away for good.
"Kenobi. Can you hear me?"
A hand on his shoulder. Obi-Wan could just get his eyes focused enough to follow the hand to Healer Che's face.
"I…yes." He winced through the next few breaths. "Almost."
"Good. Then I need you to listen to me. Back to bed."
"I have to go, my Padawan—"
"Enough, Kenobi. I'm headed to him next."
"I can't stay. Not here." Not here, not in the Halls of Healing. "Please, I need to…"
"You need to rest, to gain your strength back. You tore a hole through your hip, you've blown your right ear drum, and I just got you back together again with the mechosutures and an ample dose of the Force and sedatives. So enough of your cowardly antics, and your barely repressed trauma. To bed. Now. No, don't pull out your IV."
"Anywhere," Obi-Wan said, aiming his blurry gaze at Vokara's eyes. "I'll rest. I'll….I'll meditate. I'll take the antibiotics, won't rip the stitches."
A beat.
"Say I allow you to recuperate elsewhere against my medical expertise and experience's advice. In exchange for what, exactly?"
"My complete cooperation."
Vokara hummed. "I see." Another beat, longer this time. "Fine."
He found himself sitting in a wheelchair, the Halls moving fast around him as he was pushed out of his recovery room and into the white, brightly lit corridors of the Temple.
A semi-circle of chairs, white and clean. The healers helped him into one, parked the IV next to him, and with a load of warnings Obi-Wan only half-heard, they left.
Obi-Wan counted to ten after their forms disappeared before he took a centering breath, called upon the Unifying Force, and took off toward the dwindling signature of his Padawan learner.
"Anakin?"
Obi-Wan stood outside the boy's room, hip screaming, head swimming. His ears still were making the galaxy sound far away, but he could feel his pulse speeding ahead in his temple, in his wrists.
Anakin didn't look up from where he was laying, IV pole slowly dripping liquid into his veins. His face was pale, his forehead covered in a thin layer of sweat. He was shaking. He blinked slowly, and his mouth moved uncertainly.
"I-I can't hear you," Obi-Wan said, closing the gap between them, using his own IV pole for support. "Speak up, Padawan."
Before he could, the room was swarmed. There was a low rumble that itched across his skin, a righteous anger directed straight at him.
"Kenobi!" Ah. That was loud enough for him to hear.
In the precious moments he had, he knelt unsteadily, put a careful hand over his Padawan's. "It'll be all right. I didn't get to tell you before. It'll be all right."
Two healers were at his arms, and Obi-Wan pulled himself free.
In Anakin's eyes, he saw ghosts.
"Master!" he heard the boy this time, just before there was a sharp pain in the side of his neck. A hypospray, excellently place, really. In a place that would hurt.
His body failed him slowly, and he kept eye contact for as long as he could with Anakin. With Qui-Gon's dying words. With a future Obi-Wan knew he wasn't prepared for.
If the Force deigned to give him one with the boy from Tatooine.
He was dragged limply out of the room.
Obi-Wan woke to be sitting in the brightly lit corridor once again, a sensor chip attached to his right boot. Someone had dressed him, his robes replacing the medical-grade gown. The IV port still happily chugged sedatives and pain medication into his forearm, his senses dulled enough that he could tell he was on a potent concoction.
His tongue felt thick in his skull, but his sight had mostly cleared. He tested his weight against his heels, finding them quite useless. His arms functioned in the same condition. He thought briefly of tearing the culprit from the port on his arm, but found his fingers not coordinated to do so. He was imprisoned. In his own body.
He had no sense of how much time had passed.
His Padawan. Force, had he already undergone surgery? Obi-Wan hadn't even the time to ask him where he was hurt, nor search it out with his senses. The bright signature he had slowly gotten used to—a solar's presence, hot to almost scorching—had disappeared.
Obi-Wan shuddered, trying to blink away a corpse he had no proof of.
Time seemed to stretch and pull, the drugs continued to rule his bloodstream, and no one came for him. He plucked at the sensor to no avail, his fingers still numb past usefulness. The sun had begun to set.
And still he waited. Nightmares began to accompany him.
The Sith, rising from pits to crawl his way up a thousand-foot drop that should have killed him. Looking into Obi-Wan's eyes. Turning, running, too fast for Obi-Wan to keep up with, the Sith takes his double-bladed saber and lazily, carelessly, cuts Anakin in two.
"You didn't want him," the Sith says over Obi-Wan's screams. "You didn't even believe in him. I'm doing you a favor."
"I made promises," Obi-Wan says defiantly. The Sith laughs.
"That is not the same."
"I will train him, just as my Master trained me!"
"You don't love him."
"Love is not—"
"Then you will never be enough."
Obi-Wan jolted out of the scene. Still, he was alone.
"Blast it," Obi-Wan said, hearing his voice far away, yet closer this time than the last. He needed to meditate.
In a couple awkward movements, he found his way into a more formal seated position. He closed his eyes.
He saw his Master's face, the wrinkles around his eyes when he laughed, the face he made at Obi-Wan when he was being ridiculous. There was a gentleness to it even then, though. A gentleness Obi-Wan couldn't have understood the source to, until now. This well of Light-soaked protectiveness, the yearning to bring the boy up in the ways of the Force. To keep him safe, to not let harm befall him. How many lectures had he endured where the moral had been for him to not put himself in harm's way so purposefully?
A gentleness was what it was, coming from knowing the fragility of goodness.
He let the smile imprint onto his own lips on his inhale, and then exhaled. He was with the Force.
There is no death.
A poor comfort most days, but at that moment, Obi-Wan understood.
He inhaled, exhaled again. Saw his Padawan's haunted gaze.
He would survive. But if he did not…
Inhale, exhale.
Obi-Wan returned to the hallway when it was dark. The lamps had flickered on. The plastic bag that fed into his bloodstream was more than half empty.
Carefully, Obi-Wan plucked the sensor off his boot with the Force, gently placing it on one of the chairs in the semi-circle. He twisted the IV port away from the line, then wincing, pulled the port out altogether, placing two fingers over the welling blood to staunch it. After wobbling a bit on his feet, he checked the bandages on his hip, found them relatively clean, and set off down the corridor, staying in the shadows, feet not making a sound.
"It wasn't the explosion," Obi-Wan said in disbelief. "It was you, who threw me away from the mine."
Master and Padawan sat side by side, the young one propped up by pillows, arm in a thick cast and sling tightened around his thin neck, while Obi-Wan reclined slightly on the neighboring bio-bed, injured hip carefully positioned to avoid the spikes of agony it reverberated outwards when bumped. While Obi-Wan spoke, his eardrums had still not yet recovered, and it was easier for Anakin's abused throat for him to write.
"I saw the device spring. I couldn't let you just get blown to bits," the boy wrote.
How touching, Obi-Wan thought wryly. The blunt mind of a growing boy.
No one had come storming in to find them there reunited yet, but they would soon, most likely Vokara Che and her hypos expertly placed for optimal pain to match the pain he was in her arse.
"You could have been hurt much worse, my very young Padawan. I look forward to a long and prosperous apprenticeship with you. I won't have you be cutting it short with heroics such as the feat you performed earlier today."
"Your voice sounds funny."
"Focus Padawan, this is a learning opportunity."
Though Obi-Wan doubted even he would remember much of this with the sheer amount of drugs flowing freely through his bloodstream.
Anakin thought about his supposed learning opportunity for a minute, and Obi-Wan allowed himself to look the boy over. He still wore the Halls of Healing's breezy wardrobe staple, the faded blue accentuating the level of paleness Anakin had now achieved. His hair stuck up in the odd angles pillows created on their inhabitants. His injured arm was hugged in close to his ribs, small fingers flexing in their new constraints. It could have been worse, Obi-Wan thought grimly. But so soon, in this Order, one must learn the pain that comes with obedience and servitude.
And meaningless traps in otherwise peaceful gardens, set for an unknown audience, only to be set off by an untested partnership, student and teacher, both equally crawling up from their mourning only to risk having to begin once again for each other.
Anakin still had his stylus poised over the padd.
"I don't know what the lesson is. I just know…" That he crossed out with a slash. "I couldn't lose you, Master," he finally wrote, slow, deliberate.
Obi-Wan felt a puff of air escape his lips.
They sat, each on their own bed, each nursing their own wounds. Independence reeking of stubborn wills and a past full of being burnt by those let in too close.
Obi-Wan bit at the inside of his cheek, tested his healing hip. Then slowly got up from his bed, one aching bone adjusting at a time, before he dragged himself over to Anakin's bed, and sat down on it. His calloused fingers closed around the stylus, and with bomb-squad's precision, replaced it with his hand.
"My Padawan, we have encountered the hardest lesson of all."
Comment any stories you'd like to see written here in the collection! Thanks for reading everyone.
Cheers,
-the crooked typewriter