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Even though his Master keeps his promise and provides Anakin with comforting embraces when he needs them, he never ever initiates them himself. He always remains distant. Detached. All that beauty, and kindness, and grace, and power – absolutely unattainable, covered with a shield of his damnable aloof serenity.
And Anakin watches him with some kind of reverence, like a poor child clinging to a window of a candy store, knowing full well that he will never get what he wants.
His Master will never love him the way Anakin loves him. There is no place for such extreme attachment in his heart. In fact, there is no place for any attachment at all. For him there is only duty. All of his devotion is to the Order. He remains true and loyal to the Code. He clings to his Jedi ideals so desperately, as though he can feel them slipping away from him somehow. And in his desire to hold on to the only thing he knows in his life, he is completely oblivious of how toxic those ideals are, how they restrain him, how they make him unnaturally uptight. Even his Jedi attire starts to reflect on how more and more constricted by his beliefs he is gradually becoming. His undertunic creeps higher and higher up his neck – stifling and suffocating – binding so tightly around his throat, as though it wanted to actually choke him. He is almost swallowed up by the insane amount of heavy, harsh fabric – not an inch of uncovered skin aside from his face and hands. And it is so kriffing infuriating!
He couldn’t touch before, but now he can’t even look! Anakin is almost on the point of actually crying with frustration. He is so desperate he almost passes out every time his Master (on a rare occasion) removes his vambraces and Anakin gets a glimpse of his naked wrists. And Anakin knows he doesn’t deserve even that. After all, he’s just a stupid former slave boy who was unimaginably lucky to end up with the most desirable Jedi Master in the Galaxy. He knows all that, but he still can’t tame his feelings. He wants to tear at his Master’s damned robes of chastity and rip them apart. He wants to batter and smash through the walls of his Master’s Jedi calm. He wants to break them down. He wants to burst into his inner Temple of Tranquility like a savage heathen, grab his revered serenity from its altar and shatter it. Break it into a million pieces! He wants to sprawl out on the altar in its place, shameless and desperate in his desire to be his Master’s sole focus.
“Look at me, Master!” he wants to cry. “Pay attention to me! I want all of it! I want you to think only about me!”
But he is afraid, terrified that his Master will turn him away, that one day he might reach out in the Force to where his Master’s halo is shining – the Light streaming out from its center, bright and solemn, nothing at all like the Darkness that emanates from Anakin’s own core – he might want to wrap his aura around it in a gentle hug, but instead of being welcomed as usual, he would feel his Master’s radiant essence rejecting his Darkness.
In fact, that could happen at any moment: all he has to do is merely cause his Master to lose his patience with him – and that would be it…
The very thought makes Anakin hyperventilate on the verge of hysteria. That’s why he never tests to which extent his Master is ready to be lenient with him. Well, not really anyway…
