Two Halfs of One Warrior • Obikin/Vaderwan One-Shots

"Date: me"

• Summary: Obi-Wan is a patient teacher –he tries to be– even though all his students suck at his class.

All of them except one who is the best student he had ever had just as much as he is the worst one he had ever had: Anakin Skywalker.

There is a little habit Anakin has that drives Obi-Wan insane: each single time, on each homework, each exam paper, there is “Date: me” written on it.

There is no way Obi-Wan would give in.

Or so he tells himself.

💙💚💙💚💙💚💙💚💙💚💙💚💙💚

Obi-Wan sighed another time as he wrote another red F on a paper. Sometimes, he wondered if it wasn’t his fault, if he wasn’t a bad teacher. At least, it would explain why more than half of his students were unable to have better than a D. He wasn’t severe –students who had Mace Windu as a teacher knew what severe exactly stood for– but his class was demanding and, apparently, none of his students wanted to make the effort. If at the beginning he had tried to find solutions to motivate them, after thirteen years in the same university, he had given up: it was their future; if they didn’t want to bother, he was not going to do it for them. This line of thought wasn’t something he liked, but he hated even more grading five papers in a row with a bright F; he hated that the best class he ever had had an average of D and that his greatest student finished his last year with an average C.

Actually, this last point wasn’t true, not anymore. He was so surprised the first time he was about to put an A on a paper that he had to check he was not mistaken about four times. The more he looked at it, the more he saw it was simply perfect. Obi-Wan had finally found one student who had enough interest in his class to study, to give all his homeworks in time, to answer each question during the exams. For the first semester this student sat in his class, Obi-Wan learnt to love his job again. This lasted until he finally noticed.

He tried to be fair as much as he could, but there were moments –especially after the fifth F in a row– when he was looking for anything good just to increase the grade. Each time, there was a student ending up with an E because he had put the right date on his paper. Following this line, on an awfully rainy Monday, after grading twenty papers out of thirty with an average of E, he had made the decision to put at least a D to whoever put the right date. So he noticed, in the top right corner of a paper, two words that made so little sense he stared at them for a solid fifteen minutes.

“Date: me”

Obi-Wan had no idea which of his students was stupid enough to write this on an exam paper and he almost fell from his chair when he checked the name: Anakin Skywalker, aka the only student who cared enough about his class to study, aka the only student who had As on his papers, aka the only student who managed to get the date wrong each time.

Five years. Nine semesters. Thirty homewords. Twenty exams. Fifty red grades. Fifty As. Probably just as many “Date: me”.

The first time, he tried to pretend he hadn’t noticed anything about this little game. For almost an entire year, he refused to acknowledge what was written on the top right corner of Anakin’s papers. During the middle of the second year, he was forced to confront him about this after one of his coworkers noticed it.

“Anakin, can I talk with you about your paper?”

“It’s perfect, isn’t it?”

“Well… yes, but it’s not what I wanted to discuss. Do you know what you wrote on it? Instead of the date?”