A Cold Start - Anakin x Reader

The Obiwan dilemma

I jumped when I heard Anakin call out my name. Although I had sworn to keep a safe distance between Anakin and myself for the rest of the time that we were going to be trapped on this ship, the mentioning of Obiwan made me forget about my initial plans.
So, without hesitating, I got up from the floor (my knees feeling kind of weak from the coldness) and headed for the cockpit.

There he was, hunched over the panel in front of him and fiddling with a regulator to receive a signal.

But something seemed extremely off about Anakin. It was his presence, I quickly realized. Usually, whenever he was in a room with me, or he entered it without me seeing who was coming in, I would still know it was him, based on his intense energy. You could say he had a signature presence that radiated a mix of authority, strength, passion, intrepidity, and not to forget: arrogance.

But right now it seemed as though all these intense energies were slightly muted. They were still there, but what undeniably added to the mix was exhaustion, having him appear much weaker than I had seen him in a long time. And that was kind of alarming, to be honest.

I didn't have to wait long to see what was causing the exhaustion or at least what contributed to it: Anakin clearly tried to conceal that his muscles were trying to contract to make him shiver. He tried to hide and suppress it. Every now and then though, his back twitched, which I assumed was whenever a chill ran down his spine that he just couldn't suppress. Adding onto the coldth, Anakin, unlike me, hadn't had any sleep in days.

As I stepped forward to finally ask him about Obiwan, I almost fell over the cloak that was still lying on the floor.

Huh. So he hadn't picked that up.

Before I got to speak though, Anakin beat me to it and said:

"Five minutes ago Obiwan appeared on the holograph field but the connection broke off before he could say anything. I've been trying to reach him but I can't seem to stabilise the frequency." He was only saying this very half heartedly. Just like me he didn't seem too keen to speak to me.

"Let me see." I walked over to him and pressed a combination of buttons that I hoped would work. But of course it didn't.

"Have you tried reprogramming the communication system?", I then asked. We were clearly running out of options.

"Yup."

"Using the right operators?"

"Yeah?", he replied as if that was obvious.
I swallowed when I saw just how blue his lips were. Damn.

"But you have a go if you don't trust me.", Anakin added and pointed towards the left wall where the on board computer was. His finger visibly shaking as he did, so quickly, he put both his hands behind his back.

"Actually, I don't.", I fake smiled at him and made my way over to the computer. I tried to summon all the knowledge from the programming class I took a few years ago and put the commands into the system. Then I saw it: Anakin had forgotten to loop the cascade of commands! No wonder that no connection could be made.

"Anakin, you forgot the loops!", I let him know. How could he have forgotten? He has been programming droids and ships since he was a little kid, I was told!

"Oh. I must have been...", Anakin cleared his throat, "distracted."

Distracted of coldth maybe? Something you made fun of when it was me who couldn't focus because I was (and still am) freezing like crazy?, I thought.

"Distracted. I see.", I raised an eyebrow. "Well, I think we've got a chance that it might work now, so let's try to reach out to Obiwan."

And that's exactly what we did next.