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

Only Poetry Or Madness

• Summary: Obi-Wan wakes up to a storm, but it is not the storm that wakes him.

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Obi-Wan wakes up suddenly and incompletely, his dreams clinging to him like grasping tentacles ready to pull him back under. It’s late, his body tells him, not a time to be awake, but a crack of thunder rocks the canvas tent and Obi-Wan feels it through his bones.

And in the answering spike of terror across the bond.

“Anakin,” Obi-Wan says, his voice rough with disuse. “Are you awake?”

Obi-Wan thinks he hears movement across the tent but it’s hard to tell beneath the roar of the rain. Lightning flashes and Obi-Wan sees Anakin’s silhouette, the messy tuft of his braid, much closer than Obi-Wan left him when they collapsed into their cots for the night.

Anakin says nothing for a long moment, just lurks a foot away from Obi-Wan, a dark, inscrutable shape beside him. “Yes,” he finally says. “The storm.”

Ah. “This planet is prone to storms. We’ve been lucky thus far.” Obi-Wan sighs. “I’m sorry, Padawan. I know you don’t like them.”

He never has, not in all the time Obi-Wan has known him. Obi-Wan remembers Anakin at nine, his desert-born Padawan, his tiny hand pressed against the transparisteel as the storm shook their quarters and Obi-Wan tried inadequately to soothe him. Anakin didn’t seem to see him at first, looking out across the cityscape with eyes far too old for his face, a pain far too deep for Obi-Wan to understand.

Obi-Wan had shut the blinds, coaxed Anakin further into the apartment and distracted him with games that day, feeling totally out of his depth but resolute in his commitment to this unexpected boy. And over time their relationship grew, their bond strengthened and Obi-Wan felt as overwhelmed as Anakin must have that first day, tethered to a storm.

Anakin might now be fully grown, lanky and severe and awkwardly intense all at once but Obi-Wan still sees flashes of that little boy, the lost child Qui-Gon left him with, too smart and too strange for the Jedi. Anakin had seen so much more than any other initiate, so much more than Obi-Wan, even.

“It’s too loud,” Anakin says, whisper quiet, but somehow Obi-Wan can hear him beneath the din. “Everything, I can’t—I need—”

“What do you need?” Obi-Wan asks, the same way he must have asked all those years ago.

In the next flash of lightning Obi-Wan meets Anakin’s eyes, deep and fathomless and old as space before they’re plunged into darkness once again. “Can I sleep with you, Master?”

This too hits Obi-Wan with a wave of nostalgia so hard that Obi-Wan swears he hears his Padawan’s high, childish voice mingling with his deeper, adult register. Anakin had been such a tiny thing, curled up under the covers like a frightened tooka. Nothing like the tall, fierce creature now, except— “Are you afraid?”

A flash of irritation in the bond, across the sky. “No.”

Obi-Wan sits up fully and reaches for Anakin’s hand, slightly clammy in the humidity, cool to the touch. He can feel Anakin’s fear bleeding into the Force, cold and coppery against his tongue. They’ve been through this, time and time again. “There’s no shame in being afraid, Padawan.”

Anakin’s fingers close around Obi-Wan’s wrist, a manacle. “Not of the storm.”

On the face of it, Anakin’s request is insane. The cot is small enough as it is without trying to fit Anakin and his pile of limbs in alongside him. Anakin is grown now, or near enough to it that the geometry of sharing simply doesn’t add up.