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Despite what the other padawans made fun of him for, Anakin did have sexual interest. Just because, when they went out for drinks on the mid-levels, or when they laughed and gossiped after saber practice, he did not understand their easily given interest to anyone and everyone around them didn’t mean he was indifferent. Strangers had never caught his attention, and certainly not enough to fantasize to as some of the others talked about.

But despite what Aayla teased him for that one time over jawa juice, he did feel—want—longing. He was sixteen for kriff’s sake, he woke achingly hard and went to bed with his gut tight; fucked into his fist in every sonic and sometimes in the spare moments between saber practice and classes when Obi-Wan’s golden, sparkling light did not suffuse their apartment. His master had made it horribly and abundantly clear years previous it was natural while he wished to wither away and die during the conversation.

But he still didn’t understand the other’s interest in the holoporn they giggled over and sent between them on their pads. It was strangers, and nothing but close up cam shots of genitals with embarrassing and over the top moans in the background. But one night in spring, when the night air on Coruscant had finally warmed enough that they took to lounging in the gardens. A group of them sprawled in the grass and watched the evening sky wash vermillion and then golden with the glow of the power grid.

Anakin reclined his head against his outstretched arm and listened to Pax, Nahdar, and Rissa make incredulous noises over a pad.

“What are you all watching now?” He muttered.

“You wouldn’t be interested,” Pax laughed. “Not your kind of thing.”

He flushed up to his ears and sat up with a glare. Jax grinned wide and satisfied and handed him the pad while Nadhar choked a laugh into her sleeve at how easily he let himself be bated. He did not really want to see whatever bizarre filth Pax proffered to him, but he hated being laughed at far more.

He ignored them, ears hotter than a lightspeed engine, and looked to the pad clenched between his hands. It was a young male human, lithe and nothing but sinew and sweat slicked skin spread out on his stomach with his hand reached behind himself to curl three fingers inside his ass. Anakin’s flush bloomed across his cheeks, and he swallowed, stifling an audible breath.

He knew, objectively how men coupled, he wasn’t stupid. Knew that men liked other things besides a hand on themselves. He had never bothered to think on the mechanics past the cursory, had never much thought about the mechanics of anything past the cursory. But the man on the pad jerked his hips and rode his fingers, groaning into his forearm as if it were the best thing in the entire galaxy. The cam shifted and he rolled onto his back and arched his hips, still with his fingers curling, but now his cock was visible to the cam, jerking against his stomach and leaking—come?

“Please,” the man begged around a moan.

Something hot and shaky jangled loose in his gut and he clicked off the pad, flushed brighter than a star gone nova, and handed it back to Pax without a word.

“I toldja it would embarrass him,” Pax laughed.

Anakin left them in the gardens without saying a word and stormed back into the temple so flustered and embarrassed he left a miasma of heat in the force behind him.

That night in his bed he laid with his arms crossed and stared as his ceiling as his mind turned the image over, again and again like a droid part to be examined. Something…something about it intrigued him, snagged his attention where nothing had before. It was not the man himself, more the act, the…ardent desperation shown. His enthusiasm matched his own, the eagerness in his voice with that please ringing so similar to the way his mind wandered to mortified half imaginings of Obi-Wan pushing his tongue past his lips. He forced himself to flip onto his side and close his eyes in a poor attempt at sleep.

His tangled thoughts on the holovideo stayed with him through the week. Not constant and not crippling, but present and lingering so that every free moment they drifted, curious and intrigued. Between saber practice with the other padawans, which was tolerable, temple classes; and saber practice with his master, his favorite, over droid parts, and disassembled mechanics spread across his floor, his mind drifted.

“You seem distracted,” Obi-Wan said over dinner, smiling and stroking his beard.

Anakin fought to meet his eyes and rubbed the back of his neck. “Just been thinking a lot, master.”

Obi-Wan laughed. “Always dangerous for you my very young apprentice.”

He ducked his head and tried not to let his thoughts slant curious and questioning with his shields mediocre at best and his master sitting just across from him. Hiding…curious thoughts had become increasingly difficult, and he often worried slippery idle wants might slither past his shields and out his mortifying interest in the man he called master—brother—father.

But eventually he found his resolve to shatter like spun glass and when he rolled into his bed that night, he took his pad with him to search for answers on the holonet. What he found was…both more and less than he expected, more complicated in the mechanics with another living being and yet simple alone. He liked the descriptions, intense, consuming, drawn out. It all came down to cleaning himself in the fresher and pulling a vial of stashed bacta from his bedside table. The articles on the net instructed to go slow and careful and all warned that many sentients found they did not care for it, still none of this dissuaded his barbed and tangled thoughts.

Curiosity finally tipped to bravery, and he wormed his pants to his ankles and parted his legs to dig heels into the mattress. With uneven breaths and anticipation gasping past his lips, he slicked his fingers with clinical smelling bacta and skated them across the shivering line of his stomach and half hard cock that pressed against his thigh just from his up-ticked pulse. He followed the articles’ directions and circled idle fingers past the hot weight of his balls and around his rim, testing the heat of his own skin and the way his gut flipped in excitement.

He circled and circled, hissing shaking breath and relaxing against the feel of hesitant pressure and stimulation. He massaged deeper against his hole, some foreign yet squirming pleasure blooming open in his pelvis, until he couldn’t stand the wait any longer and dipped one bacta slicked fingertip inside himself and bit down on a gasp from the shock of how much he liked it. He eased that questing fingertip deeper and curled it as the man on the holovideo did and nearly clamped his knees together from the aching, toe-curling pleasure of it.

He felt impatient and greedy as he worked the finger in deeper, open mouthed and gasping damp and ragged intakes of wanton air. Before his mind stumbled to the instinctual conclusion of his own body, he wormed a second fingertip past his rim and then groaned from the stretch and feeling of too full too fast. He fumbled for the vial with his free hand and blindly dribbled more bacta over his knuckles and around the fingers curled inside himself. The extra lubricant helped, though he knew bacta was perhaps too sticky and not quite as slick as he needed.

The second fingertip eased its way to a second finger, and he paused, gasping around the ecstasy of feeling so full and tight from just his first two fingers to the knuckle. But he was curious…curious about the deeper press of fingers and the weep of come across that man’s stomach. The articles had described the curiosity of leaking precome from inner stimulation, and something about the inability to control it, to hold it back—hooked sharp and barbed into the base of his skull.

Anakin curled his fingers towards his belly button and felt—there, as the article described, a swollen bulb. He curled his hand tighter, circled his fingers and—

“Ahh!” Anakin clamped his left hand over his mouth to stifle the alarmingly loud whine. But muffling his open-mouthed gasp didn’t stop his feet from arching against his sheets or the way he found himself rocking against his own hand, more desperate than he could ever recall being in his life.

Thighs shaking, he ground his fingers into his prostate and whimpered against his knuckles as his cock jerked against the concave dip of his clenching stomach and leaked a trail of clear, sticky fluid against his skin. Force and stars and everything in between this felt kriffing incredible. His curled fingers pressed deeper, just a little harder and sith’s hells but it ached better than an orgasm inside, throbbing and desperate and undulating pleasure down his back and legs, all the way to his fingertips and feet.

Anakin’s mind swam with it, this sparkling molten ecstasy dripping down his spine and pulsing with the ache of his cock to bloom florid and gnawing in the pit of him. With curled fingers and his knees quaking at the jolts of pleasure, he tucked his chin to his chest and watched, utterly enthralled at the carnal pleasure of seeing his own cock leak rivulets of precome against his clenching abs.

In all things he lacked control, as Obi-Wan so often reminded him. And more often than not it shamed him, his own spiraling wants and inability to leash them as others did. He abounded with his own lack of self-restraint, and usually fought so hard against it. But in this, during his moments of solitude with his hand wrapped around his cock, he couldn’t help himself but leak sticky over his own fist, and revel, embarrassed but inundated by his own body’s wanton lack of discipline.

At some point in the past minutes, his own prerelease had thickened, dribbling thick and milky from his slit, startling white against his pink, swollen head. The base sight of it was the last he could stand and with fingers cramping and pressed tight inside himself he clamped his hand around his swollen, leaking cock and immediately slammed into orgasm. It knocked him breathless, the strength of it, blooming total and rolling through his body as he shot near violently hard up his chest with heavy pulses.

He laid there, sweat soaked and chest heaving; stunned with his head and the force whirling like water spun in a glass. Gods be damned that was the best feeling in the whole fucking galaxy.

***

Obi-Wan stared into their shared kitchen sink and white knuckled the counter until he thought his bones might fissure and crumble into dust. He pulled his shields tighter but to no avail.

Across their shared apartment and behind closed doors, Anakin pulsed writhing, euphoric ecstasy in the force, strong enough to ooze through the cracks of his mental walls that obviously shattered while distracted. There was…precise intent leaking through, oddly clear and defined in his mind’s eye.

He grimaced at the mental flash of fingers curled deep and the shock of pleasure that followed, so passionate and so full of ecstasy, in even this Anakin remained true to the strength of his nature.

Another pulse of throbbing pleasure and Obi-Wan desperately scrabbled at his mental shields, threading the force so tight around himself it might have groaned from the strain.

Stars. He knew the teenage years of apprenticeship were a difficult thing, always in close proximity with others while the body’s natural hormones made emotions and lustful impulses all the harder to ignore. The force only knew how Qui-Gon had endured him during the time, he remembered being particularly high spirited. And he tried to afford Anakin as much privacy as possible, truly. While his padawan’s shielding certainly improved through his training, it also lacked refinement and dedication under duress. He often assumed that the staggering strength of Anakin’s emotions only further made shielding within their training bond especially difficult.

So he gave as much privacy as possible when sharing an apartment and their lives together, and he certainly never teased or pried as Qui-Gon had. But this was not finding release in the fresher or in the early light of dawn after waking, and it certainly was not the norm. Anakin had discovered something…new yes, and far more exploratory than Obi-Wan would have given him credit for. He might be inclined to feel proud if he weren’t actively hunched over their sink and desperately trying to block out the visceral projection of his sixteen-year-old padawan adoring the feeling of his own fingers so viciously and with such wild abandon.

Another jagged, toe-curling lance of euphoria and Obi-Wan sighed and made for their apartment door. He needed a well-timed walk about the Room of a Thousand Fountains and a therapeutic meditation session. And with highest priority he needed to emphasize more thorough shielding techniques in Anakin’s training or neither of them were going to survive his padawan’s slow progression to knighthood.

He learned, not linearly and not even quickly, what he liked in the privacy of his bed and under the spray of steaming water in the fresher. Most of the time, between Obi-Wan’s hounding, classes, and training; and as the years progressed, they took on more missions, he did not truly have the long stretches of time to himself needed for the kind of torture he really liked.

But force did he love it, coming with his own fingers inside himself. Even when he was rushed and Obi-Wan pushed exasperation through the shining tether of their bond, to hurry up and get a move on to sparring or the ship, or a Council meeting. The urgency only made it better sometimes too, the fear of Obi-Wan realizing while he worked a finger into himself in the sonic, greased with nothing but shampoo that burned. He came so easily that way, slicking come over the loose ring of his hand just from the sear of a quick stretch when he shoved stinging fingers past his rim too fast and dry.

He liked most of all to sprawl out on his stomach late into the night, long after Obi-Wan’s force signature softened to amber with sleep. There he could ride his fingers for as long as he liked with bacta dripping down the insides of his thighs. He learned this way, if he worked himself long and steady enough, he could string spidersilk strands of prerelease down his own legs and up his stomach. He loved nothing more than to roll fingertips against his prostate for as long as he could take it, with pleasure throbbing up his spine and his balls drawn up so tight they ached like a bruise.

But best of all, no matter how much he helplessly pulsed precome all over himself or how much his gut burned from the ache of it, he could take it until he drooled into his own arm and dropped to the bed from exhaustion, all without actually coming. It was spiraling, wheeling abandon, to give himself to the irrepressible impulses of his own body. Under the high sun of Coruscant he worked diligently with his master to control himself in the force, to master his body with katas, and to discipline his mind and emotions. Control—control—control, all totally against his nature, but necessary for a Jedi with greater duties than themself. He understood the need for it, and that he often came up short, disappointing his master with his fractious undiscipline.

But at night and alone, he gave himself to his wild and irresistible lack of control. It was the way his cock leaked all over himself while he thrust knobby fingers past his rim, unstoppable as the way he breathed and his heart beat in his chest. It roiled, as mentally pleasing as physically, to let go and enjoy his inability to master himself and hold back, rather than fight it, as he did the force, as he did himself every day.

Only surrendered to the tide of his own pleasure did the screaming white noise of his own mind, did the deafening galactic chorus of the force, finally dull to mute calmness inside his skull. Here with the force crooning in his ears and his body and mind allowed its freedom, he found submission to the control he sought. He found it in the mind-numbing pleasure, in the milky prerelease he leaked and spilled to his own skin. And he found it in the way he trembled to his marrow from enduring the agony of being filled inside but never letting himself come no matter how much he ached to touch his cock.

In the years that followed, where the Republic felt to crumble around their very ears, filled with missions to Carnelion IV, the Outer Reaches, and then Ansion, he often felt a wild and passionately uncontrolled disappointment to his master. He felt it on their cruiser’s grated floor, wondering if he should even be a Jedi. He felt it while trying to steer clanspeople through evading the growing threat of Republic Separatists. And he felt in in the private moments of sparring before the Coruscant skyline, where Obi-Wan often told him he was blinded by his own need to prove himself.

The shame creeped in, soaking as water to stone, fed by throbbing embarrassment at those particular lectures. He dedicated his entire life to proving himself to Obi-Wan, to making him proud and being good enough to become the Jedi his master so wanted him to be. Of course his own private wants, his unquenchable and unending longing for more, only heightened the shame. He did so desperately want to prove himself to his master, wanted Obi-Wan to see him not as a child without control, but as a man. He saw glimmers of that approval, given in praising words of you are a great warrior, Anakin, always accompanied with a crinkle-eyed smile and a clap to his shoulder. The praise burned worst of all, like a coal in his stomach that always made him flush and fight fluttery, weak breaths. He burned for that praise, burned to be seen as a man, as worthy to be his master’s equal.

He oscillated, day and night, always at war with himself between giving in to the want to please with perfect, deferent obedience, and the urge to fight, to contest and push. There was strength and fire inside him and nothing written into the very atoms of his being surrendered easily, without violence and bared teeth. He liked victory, needed it and the sweet song of its freedom. But he liked not having to truly take control even more, the wild abandon of supplication, of being guided and led by a hand he knew would never harm him. He should have been ashamed of this deeply quelled want for it, a master to follow, but the black hole of eternal hunger inside him could never find the space to care.

He knew himself a tangled and barbed knot of contradictions. There was a war inside the screaming chaos of his own mind, made of longing and fear and hunger. The older he grew, his shoulders broadening and muscles hardening in their strength, the louder and harder the force pulled him in opposing directions.

And at night, laid out in his sheets and sobbing with his hand shoved up to his knuckles inside himself, he thought deliriously that here if his master could see him, he would be proud of his self-control and submission to the force. Here he would praise Anakin’s surrender.

***

Obi-Wan leaned against the wall of the training salle and watched, arms crossed, and a grin only half suppressed, as Anakin and Quinlan danced with each other in a clash of hissing sabers. They laughed and threw insults all the while they met in violent strikes and counterstrikes of cerulean and emerald. Anakin had shot up again in the last year so that he now stood almost even to Quin, perhaps a hair shorter, and only just taller than himself.

At eighteen he was all hot temper and sinew, nothing but rail thin muscle and boyish features hardening into adulthood. In the rare opportunities Obi-Wan found the time to simply watch Anakin interacting with others, he could not help but feel immensely proud. He still had much to learn, with too much unbridled passion and recklessness thrashing around inside him. But in the past nine years he watched his padawan bloom from a fearful and unsure child, to a hot-blooded young man full of strength and promise.

He fought down a laugh at the sight of Quin outright kicked Anakin in the flank of his backside and let the joy and contentment bubbling in his chest furl open in the golden tether of their training bond. He was not given to such open access of his emotions usually, but Anakin had voiced recently, not without agony lacing his jagged signature in the force, that Obi-Wan’s aloofness often incited anxiety of feeling unwanted.

It had surprised him. Anakin as he grew older, and understandably so, took to sheltering his own emotions and deeper thoughts away, protected by growing mental shields and the greater independence that came with age. In his first years at the temple, Obi-Wan often woke in the middle of the night, prodded awake by some ill feeling in the force, only to find his padawan sleeping on his bedroom floor. Anakin confessed, embarrassed and snot nosed, that he feared when Obi-Wan was out of sight, that he might disappear.

That dynamic had long faded away with the many hurts of the past. Now he considered himself lucky when Anakin actually returned to the temple before nightfall, cheeks red and wind burnt from podracing. Over the course of his maturing and development into a young man, while still master and padawan, he found their relationship deepening with better understanding. Anakin still fought him on everything, and whined petulantly at being told what to do, and still outright disobeyed him even more. But sometimes in the gentle moments between spats and their bond strung thin with contention and aggravation, he thought with great joy, that when Anakin was knighted, they might be very dear friends.

Anakin’s attention did not waver from his opponent, but he burst incandescent happiness back to him in the force, bright as sunlight and warm enough to burn down his throat like wine. He stroked his beard to cover a soft mouthed smile and let the golden happiness of the scene suffuse his soul and bleed into the very lifeforce of the room.

At some point in his training, Anakin had somehow managed to insert himself into every private facet of Obi-Wan’s life. Nearly every master and padawan shared a deep bond. It was a relationship and dynamic built of trust and mutual learning and respect. Some were naturally closer than others, his own relationship with Qui-Gon had been rife with both its joys and struggles. But Anakin—Anakin even when difficult and stressing him enough he worried about premature gray hair, Anakin he not only loved but liked so very damn much he seemed to suffuse the very pulse of his lifeline with easy contentment.

Some parts…were more difficult to deal with. Since Anakin turned sixteen, his penchant for blooming lust and searing want into the force had not wavered. His shielding, as his other skills, slowly improved, but Obi-Wan understood (with both amusement and horror) that control was more difficult when distracted and strained. He knew…horrifically and embarrassingly well how much Anakin loved fucking himself when allowed time and privacy.

In the last two years he had developed the uncanny skill of fleeing their apartment when he sensed fleeting images, slippery and escaping Anakin’s shields, of fingers buried deep and slick thighs parted wide. It was a healthy, and perfectly natural, both to want and to enact. And force forbid he mortify Anakin or make him ashamed of it. He had thought through the early teen years that perhaps Anakin was not inclined towards lust. And then the first accidental bleed of the shock of a first orgasm had startled him into stifled laughter one night. Of course, as was expected of a teenage boy learning themselves, it became a near constant after.

But the more…passionate development, the more advanced learnings of the body came later. And stars how the accidental, bleeding smear of images was passionate. Most of the time he could lend Anakin the privacy he needed. But sometimes late in the night in his own bed, prodded awake by a blistering brand against his mind, he could only barricade his shields as best he could and smolder in embarrassment at witnessing glimpses of such soul encompassing want and pleasure.

When Anakin grew older and it would not be inappropriate to bring up, he sometimes imagined a conversation held over Corellian brandy, of him curiously asking what about it Anakin obsessively loved so much.

It played like a holofilim in his mind, their lives entwined and happy together, running missions and negotiations and training new padawans in later years. His life as a Jedi was one of unending purpose and duty that he burned to fulfill. The tender choice of the light, sweet and wonderful, brought him endless meaning and aspiration. But somewhere along the force’s journey, Anakin’s presence, his blinding, mercurial existence, had become foundational to his very being.

He never blinded himself to the difficulties he knew laid in store for future training, and their paths in general. The force sang of coming darkness and the very Republic they sought to protect groaned in pain. But he let himself dream of a happy life laid before him, filled with the love of the force, the love of the order, and the love of Anakin.

Anakin flexed his hand and looked out the viewport of their cruiser. The mechanisms of the prosthesis whirred in the quiet of the cockpit, filled only with the white noise of the lightspeed engine and the stars bleeding past. In an incredibly rare moment of stillness since Geonosis, he allowed himself to flex durasteel and gold threaded fingers, submerging his present thoughts in the intake of sense information from the synth-net neural interface.

The prosthesis, imperfect and still in need of tinkering with, did not thrum with the force or his own heartbeat. While tech worked miracles it was still just metal and wires, not truly a part of himself, though in the months of constant war since its loss, he found little time to dwell on it. Now in the still and hollowed silences between war, his mind snagged on screams and his mother’s cold body in his arms.

Obi-Wan settled in the copilot seat beside him with a groan, making old man noises at his sore muscles from their successfully run mission. It was incredibly rare they saw one another like this anymore, just the two of them on reconnaissance work without dreadnought class star destroyers and thousands of men under their helm.

It felt as if they had lived three lifetimes in just a few months, filled with the bombings on Cato Neimoidia and the seizure of the Outer Rim by Separatist forces. His knighting ceremony had been a perfunctory thing except for the tremulous and achingly proud way Obi-Wan had smiled at him after.

“Do I still have to call you Master?” He had snarked and flushed in equal turn, more pleased to finally be on equal footing with Obi-Wan than he could ever verbally express.

Obi-Wan had merely grinned at him, in that way he did that bore all his teeth sharp and sharkish, so hard that he glowed with his own joy. “Only if you know your place.”

He still thought about it, the startled, horribly embarrassed jolt of heat those words incited in him. Newly knighted and finally on even ground and all it took was one teasing sentence to fluster him nearly to death.

“You’re very quiet,” Obi-Wan teased beside him. “Always makes me worry.”

“Just trying to let an old man rest, you sound ready to fall over and ask for help getting back up.”

Obi-Wan slanted him a very unimpressed expression that sparked an unbidden laugh in response. “Just wait until you’re older than thirty and see how your knees feel after crawling through air ducts.”

“When I’m older than thirty,” he lobbied back with a wicked grin, “you’ll be so old no one will hear me complain over the creaking of your brittle bones.”

Indignation bloomed ripe and expected across his master’s face and in the ever present, loving binds of them in the force. “I beg your pardon; I will be forty-six.”

Anakin giggled, pleased and breathy if he let himself admit it. “Maybe Master Yoda can lend you one of his canes. You’ll be bent over enough it shouldn’t be too short.”

Obi-Wan launched himself out of the copilot’s seat to grab him by the shoulders and lock Anakin’s head under his armpit. “I’ll tickle you, padawan of mine,” he warned with vicious glee in the force.

“No!” He squawked, nearly unintelligible around his giddy, hysterical laughter. “Don’t you dare!”

They half wrestled in the cockpit, Anakin thrashing around in a headlock while Obi-Wan dug fingers into his sides. Despite the way he shrieked and laughed, his pulse thumped high and steady in his throat and the force echoed the instinctual call, bubbling hot and answering in his veins.

“Okay! Okay!” He laughed, flushing, and shoving down the nervous roll of his stomach.

Obi-Wan released him with creased eyes and a wolfish grin. Since the battles started, he had taken to trimming his hair shorter, closer cropped to his neck and around his ears. Whatever it was about its new length caused his cowlick to always curl a lock of errant hair onto his forehead in moments like these. He hated how kriffing rakish and charming it was, hated it was just another thing to make his stomach tighten over as if hadn’t seen this man nearly every day for ten years.

They both panted heavy, trying to catch their breath around the helpless laughter bubbling up in their chests. Laughter didn’t come so easy nowadays. It was a stolen and precious thing in moments like these, sacred days of lightspeed travel just between them. No star destroyers, no legions of men, no sieges, or assaults to lead, just the lifeline of his master in the force and the stars.

Obi-Wan’s sharp grin softened to sparkling blue eyes and the gentleness of his fearsome light. “You should get some rest while you can. Word from the Council is immediate deployment to Christophsis when we land.”

“Yes, master,” he snarked, though stretched from the pilot seat obediently.

But in his bunk with his flesh arm tucked behind his head, he stared blankly at the durasteel bunkhead and fought the enclosing panic and fear and longing that loved nothing more than to clamor in his mind when he stopped moving long enough for it all to catch up.

He worried the inside of his mouth with indecision before leaning over the edge of his bunk to search through his lone bag for the vial of emergency bacta he always kept folded between his changes of pants and tunics. It had been months since he had the chance to truly take himself apart, rather than just the perfunctory release of jacking his cock until he came down the sonic drain. There was never time for it, or the space in his own mind to allow with the stress of command eating away at him like brain worms in his skull.

But here he could relax, could actually take his time with it and let it be the act of surrender he longed for. He wished…in the hecticness of the galaxy that someday he might find the time and courage to get actual lube for this. The bacta did its job too well, and he never felt the soreness after, the lingering ache inside from fucking himself open for hours.

He shucked his pants off and turned over on his stomach, already spreading his legs to brace his weight on one forearm and his stomach. He did not feel the bacta’s chill on his durasteel, gold plated fingers, but he knew its astringent, clinical scent better than anything. The mechno fingers he knew less well. They had taken…getting used to, the unyielding quality to them, their coldness and stiffness. He found it harder to reach his prostate as he liked with them, more difficult to apply the right amount of pressure.

In the few amount of times he had fingered himself open since losing his hand, the result was often tears of frustration. It wasn’t quite as good as it used to be, but he would make do. He couldn’t exactly carry anything around with him from ship to ship in karking active war zones. And perish the thought of something happening to him and one of his poor men having to gather his things. No—the fingers would do, just as they always had.

He worked himself open on them, bacta slipping from the metal more easily, transferring from durasteel to heated skin. Fumbling, wrist clicking and whirring, he rolled black and gold fingers past his rim and into his hole as best he could. There in his bunk with the force humming its mournful song, he fucked himself open and sobbed into his arm at the stimulation that wasn’t quite enough anymore.

He grazed his prostate, massaged it, and rolled his fingers the best he could. And stars it did feel good even if not enough. He ached deep and pulsing with it, pleasure burning down his spine and finding its release in the glistening strands of precome strung from his cockhead to his own thighs and bedsheets beneath him.

Here he road his fingers and imagined his master’s, made of flesh and blood instead. Just the thought, as always, was enough to flip his gut and make him clench down on his hand. He dribbled more precome down the underside of his cockhead and let his thoughts, strung tight with the thrumming power of the force, spiral into the forbidden imaginings he loved most.

Fucking himself open now, he only thought of Obi-Wan—wondered what his master’s cock would feel like, wondered what he could do to ever entice him to press him down and fuck inside him. He wondered if the way he had slowly mastered the ability to go on and on, dribbling prerelease and leaking slick strands of precome down his own skin till he was shiny and soaked with it but never letting himself come, would impress the man who fought so hard to teach him control.

***

Obi-Wan sat, still and statuesque with his arms crossed, and stared out the transparisteel of the viewport. He was not prone to the need for moving mediation as his padawan had been, and yet he wished for the space for it on their small cruiser. At the next pulse of heated, gut clenching pleasure in the force he closed his eyes and hissed a breath through his teeth.

This, he had not experienced in a long time now, not since before Anakin’s knighting, not since before the war. Somehow, he forgot just how visceral—how clear and crystalline the images leaked through the shields to imprint against his mind’s eye.

In his bunk Anakin fingered himself open and groaned into his flesh arm, clenching around durasteel fingers, and gritting his teeth in frustration. He knew this, felt the impression of it through the tether of the bond, despite Anakin’s shields and despite his own, such was the strength of the pleasure, the strength of whatever emotions Anakin associated with the act.

Ignoring it in the past had been…necessary, a part of their relationship and the tenuous truce of their bond during the training years. Anakin was just a boy then, tempestuous, and sullen and willful—he was those things now but that did not seem to mean anything anymore. Because Anakin shone brilliant too, and brave and passionate; and with the new responsibility of leadership, learned cunning and unending love too.

Obi-Wan had thought, naively that the next stage in their relationship would bring equal friendship and contentment. It did, though to his shame if also birthed unplanned and unseen longing in him. Anakin as he always had, snagged his attention and affections, and wound them tighter and tighter until one day in the middle of an infernal war he realized that the molten magma of love in his stomach had somehow taken on a wanting, romantic edge.

His former apprentice, once a lanky, sharp-eyed boy, stood before him a man. A beautiful, alluring, competent and unceasingly, brilliantly frustrating man. Boyish, softened features had seemingly overnight hardened to a jawline and cheekbones forged from durasteel, his gangly limbs given to broad shoulders and a narrow, muscled waist. Though even these new facets of adult masculinity stayed noticeably offset by his full, feminine mouth and pretty, long-lashed eyes. The overgrown curls certainly did not help.

Of course, he could admit to himself that none of that even really mattered, that however Anakin looked it was the scorching burn of him in the force that stirred wanting in his chest. Of course, if he was being even more honest, the lurid impression of him, wet lipped and moaning while he fucked himself on his own fingers sparked barely restrained insanity the most in him.

It was a terrible thing, to close his eyes and know the mental impression of Anakin’s cock leaking slick strands of precome from the wringing stimulation of his own hand inside himself. The older he became and the better he knew him, the more Anakin’s marrow deep love for fucking himself open both confused and arrested every firing synapse he possessed in his shellshocked, echoing mind.

Confusing most of all was how it went on, and on—and on. Anakin had never been a man of patience, not in the slightest. And though Obi-Wan loved him, he knew him greedy too. He found his restraint towards his own body’s pleasure and release the most…confusing yes…but riveting...arresting.

So he sat in the copilot’s seat with his hands clenched against his thighs as he forced his mind to calmness and poorly feigned meditation while his own chest rose and fell harsh enough to suggest he should have been running kata drills to beg for air so.

But the roiling, squirming pulses of Anakin’s pleasure in the force did not abate, they continued from minutes to past an hour, until he wanted to bash his head against the steering yoke if it meant he might escape it. Why didn’t he let himself come? Why did Anakin torture them both so?

“How are those canons looking, Rex?”

“Not good, sir. Artillery unit says two are done for, the other three will take until tomorrow to get running again.”

Anakin crossed his arms and glared across their encampment, watching the men lug crates of ammunitions amongst the tents and looming pines. “I figured as much. Tell the men to cycle out our standard watches through the night, but to catch as much sleep as they can before we make an assault up the canyon tomorrow.”

Rex saluted jauntily while holding his helmet against his hip. “Yessir, general.”

This entire campaign, though long and drawn out for weeks now, had been one of the easiest altercations in the past two years. Whatever Separatist leadership was responsible for the droid battalion’s here was a flighty thing prone to retreat and sneak attacks rather than full out frontal assault. This part of the planet, filled with nothing but deep gouged canyons, with steep red cliffs and tall pine trees that afforded good cover, offered them a tedious game of cat and mouse with the Separatist forces.

Unfortunately for them, long drawn-out altercations resulted in busted ion cannons and wrecked artillery. So while it had started to feel ridiculously boring and as if they were nothing more than stuck in the bottom of one such narrow canyon, he knew it was just a matter of biding their time for the final push.

“Making plans without me?” Obi-Wan asked lightly behind him, a smile evident in his voice.

Anakin rolled his eyes and glanced to his master. “If you think sitting here twiddling our thumbs counts as plans. Any word from the scouting party?”

“Nothing good, I’m afraid,” he said, stroking his beard and looking handsomely pensive. “Cody informed me that second battalion we assumed retreated, has in fact entrenched at the north entrance to the canyon. Only three working cannons will be incredibly dangerous to attempt an assault straight up the canyon walls.”

They frowned and the force thrummed between them, both pushing partial thoughts and half-baked tactical plans through their training bond, that after all these years, should really be called something different.

Rex quirked one blonde eyebrow. “Sirs?”

Obi-Wan nodded, “hmm Anakin is right, I think. We will both scale the canyon tomorrow and see what other options we have before we attempt something so dangerous.”

Pleasure bloomed rich and treacle sweet in his chest and he tried not to preen at the compliment. “I am right sometimes,” he teased.

Obi-Wan rolled his eyes even as he smiled and bumped their elbows to wrap an armored arm over the line of his shoulders. “Yes, Anakin, but so very rarely.”

Rex’s face spasmed oddly as he watched them, though as always all of Anakin’s attention fell to his master. Sometimes, since his knighting and the long years of the war dragged on, their playful banter rang just the same in his ears as the awful flirting Obi-Wan loved to lobby at their enemies so much. Often, he wanted to complain that when Obi-Wan teased him he sounded like he was ready to spar with Ventress, but he never quite found the bravery to do so.

“You sound like such an old man,” he lobbied, mouth crooked and wicked.

Obi-Wan’s answer was to reach up with the arm wrapped around Anakin’s shoulders and tug sharply at the nape of his curls. “Brat,” he answered fondly.

He heard him, but just barely past the roaring of blood in his ears and the scorching sear of his own blush up his throat and across his face. He shrugged Obi-Wan’s arm off and clamped his mental shields tight as durasteel bars between them.

“Ahh,” he stuttered, aware he was brighter red than a neutron star and probably throbbing just as hot in his pants. “I’m gona—gona go check on the watch.”

Obi-Wan watched him with a seemingly neutral expression, though his eyes tightened at the corners. “If you think it necessary. Do not forget to comm Ahsoka before nightfall, you know she wanted to hear from you.”

“Yes, master,” he breathed.

***

Obi-Wan, mind reeling worse than when Anakin loved to purposefully make his stomach turn when he flew especially reckless, watched Anakin nearly stumble away from the camp.

“Is…he alright, general?” Rex queried; one eyebrow still arched high.

Obi-Wan forced himself to swallow and reply. “Oh, perfectly alright, just something he felt in the force, I am sure. Do let me know if any changes occur, captain.”

“Of course, general.”

But his mind was already back to Anakin and the way he shrugged away his arm with an unmistakable lance of arousal before he slammed shields between them with a clang.

Obi-Wan mulled that over unsurely. Anakin’s physical reactions were of course his own and did not equate relation to himself. Obi-Wan had never disillusioned himself to think so, not as a mentor figure, and certainly not sixteen years his senior.

But he could not help dwell on that familiar, jagged pulse of want he knew better than some Jedi’s force signatures. He replayed the moment, a playful utterance of ‘brat’ and a teasing tug of hair. He dwelled a moment longer, flushing from any combination of implication, and then shook the thoughts away.

He could think about such things later and certainly not in the middle of a campaign.

***

He radiated flustered want through the evening, palpably and in waves, he just knew he was. So Anakin kept his distance from the camp and sat in the high branches of the pine trees above the canyon, keeping watch with the men stationed amongst the green needles. He tried not to think about it, tried to center his thoughts on the fact that they were in the middle of a campaign, in the middle of a kriffing war zone no less.

Somehow that didn’t disperse the shaky, tremulous want that had unfurled loose in his gut. He squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed, thinking of the sharp tug of hair and that word brat.

Stars.

Sitting high up in the branches of a tree and knowing they could be under blaster fire at any minute didn’t stop him from being thicker than he should in his pants. Stars, he thought again, and realized with a nauseous sort of jolt that he wanted to come, badly. He didn’t want to practice control or work himself slow, or lose himself to his own body, he just wanted to come so badly his balls throbbed with it.

He bade his men goodnight and hopped down from the branches, balancing boot against bark and swinging through the needles till he dropped to the canyon floor. He hoped with a fervent sort of desperation that Obi-Wan wasn’t in their tent, otherwise he knew he wasn’t going to have the self-control to keep himself from wandering back south in the canyon just to pull his cock out behind some rock for privacy.

Obi-Wan wasn’t in their tent, thank the force and the stars. It was just their cots on the ground and the dim, liquid gold light of a lantern swaying ever so slightly from a hook in the tent’s ceiling. Neither of them had even bothered to drag a crate inside. It should have been a depressing sight, but really just the presence of two cots meant the inside of this canvas was home.

With his gut tight and verging on desperate Anakin shuffled onto his cot and then paused with indecision. He could pull himself out and strip his cock, tight and fast to find the relief of orgasm as quick as possible, or he could at least come around the pressure of a finger. He shouldn’t take the time for it, but he could be quick with this too, quick enough to burn and make it parsecs better.

He tugged a transparisteel vial of bacta from his belt and yanked the cork out with his teeth. Obi-Wan would choke over the waste of medical supplies in a war zone but he could get karked right now, if he didn’t get something inside him, he was gona’ scream.

Anakin fell to his side on the cot and rucked his pants down just under the cleft of his ass and the weight of his balls. He didn’t even bother unclasping his belt, just shoved the press of linen tunic up, and slicked a metal finger with bacta and pressed it straight past his rim and into his hole.

It burned—too fast, and he didn’t care. His cock lay trapped between the divot of his hip and the cot, completely hard and aching. The only sound in the tent was his heavy, animal breathing and the more distant background noise of their men beyond. Somewhere in camp he felt the glimmer of Obi-Wan and made sure to tighten his shields when reminded of the proximity.

Anakin circled his finger, stretching his rim just enough to shove a second finger in beside it. It burned more and he still didn’t care, relishing in the aching pleasure of it and the quick squelch of bacta between his thighs. He curled durasteel fingers deeper and petted the inside of his walls, searching for his prostate in this odd position. His cock jerked and he chewed down a groan at the first grind of fingers, though the stifled noise broke past his lips minutes later, slanted with frustration when no matter how he circled or worked his fingers he could not find the right angle or pressure to truly touch his prostate as he liked.

He knew his faced was skewed up like a child’s as he probed spindly, metal fingers inside his own ass, trying to find the teeth grinding relief he was looking for. Precome wept from his slit, sluggish and just enough to leave a damp trail against his hipbone.

He bit down a noise of true frustration and crooked his wrist as far the durasteel and wiring allowed, aiming to reach inside himself better. Tears, mortifying, and unwilling gathered hot and itchy behind his lids, and he closed his eyes to trap them in.

Anakin chewed at his mouth, eyes closed, and fingers delved awkward and wrong inside him as he groaned frustration and desperation into the force itself.

The sound of the tent flap startled him, and he jerked his eyes open in horror, ripping his fingers from inside himself and flinging the blanket on the cot over his hips to pulse horrified shock into the force.

“M—master!” He stammered.

***

Though he had felt Anakin’s roiling frustration in the force, the gnashing and spitting of his turbid light in the bond, shielded and restrained, he somehow—had not quite realized why, despite the years of seeming experience for this exact moment.

Anakin jerked a blanket over a second’s glimpse of bare ass and durasteel tucked behind himself and stammered up at him, eyes wider than speeder headlights and a flush darker than wine stained across his face. “M—master!”

He tried not to let himself react, but brutal want shocked sharp and biting down his spine all the same.

“For fuck’s sake, Anakin,” he snarled, hurriedly closing the tent flap behind him. “We’re in an active war zone.”

Anakin looked anywhere but him, eyes huge and glassy and his face redder than a Nabooian sunrise. He throbbed such hysterical embarrassment into the force Obi-Wan reeled from it. “I—I—I can explain!”

He dragged a hand over his face to scrub at his eyelids and wished he could scrub away the flustered want turning over in his stomach just the same. “I don’t care—” he stammered back in turn, “it’s not—it’s just you go on for hours sometimes and there’s certainly not time or security for that here is there?” The words slipped from his tongue, and he instantly regretted the admittance.

Anakin somehow flushed darker and Obi-Wan worried he might go purple. “You knew?” The incandescent horror in Anakin’s voice made him wish he could back out of the tent and rewrite every moment of stolen want he had allowed himself since the war’s start.

“Well—” he flustered, “you’ve never hid it very well—”

“I haven’t?” Anakin cried, clutching the blanket tighter against his hips and looking like he might cry.

Obi-Wan paused and looked him over, stifling down his own body’s reaction to examine Anakin’s unbridled mortification and blooming horror. “Come now, Anakin” he said slowly, eyeing the bruised stain of terror on his cheeks, “this isn’t as horrifying as you’re making it out to be.”

“It isn’t?” He squawked, high and incredulous. “Obi-Wan, I think I’d rather you just kill me!”

“Look I know this is—embarrassing. I’m sorry for walking in on you I thought you were—distressed. But I assure you that I do not—”

Tears gathered in Anakin’s eyes, and he blinked up at the tent ceiling as one escaped to crawl down the scorched line of his cheek. “Master, I cannot bare you saying you do not care. I am begging you to leave.”

Obi-Wan froze. Everything, even the force stilled. “What is it,” he asked around a slow and oddly clumsy tongue, “do you think I saw?”

Anakin refused to drop his line of sight from the tent’s ceiling and the flickering lamplight overhead gilded him amber and glistening golden tears. “You told me I have never hidden my want well.”

“Your physical want,” he uttered softly. Some hesitant and tender hope threatened to spark alive beneath his breastbone. “Your shielding often slips when you are distracted, I sometimes felt your pleasure—what is it…that you thought I saw?”

Anakin’s mouth pursed and he took a sharp breath before finally dropping his eyes from the canvas to meet his own. “The way I’ve wanted you, master.”

He did not recall falling to the cot or wrenching Anakin’s head back with fingers entwined in his curls, but he found himself slanting his mouth over his all the same.

Anakin gasped into the heat of his parted lips as if he were shot, and then flesh fingers cupped the back of his own head to pull Obi-Wan’s mouth more firmly to his. They both groaned into the slick movement of the other’s lips, breathing damp and desperate against the slide of tongues.

“Master,” Anakin whined beneath him.

Obi-Wan realized like a slug to the gut, that Anakin had his fingers desperate inside himself just minutes before and sprawled under him with his pants shucked to his knees with only a blanket between them.

“Don’t say it like that,” he bit darkly against Anakin’s jaw.

Anakin threw his head back to bare the long line of his throat and sighed, lips slackened, bruised and damp. “I can’t help it,” he gasped.

Obi-Wan stilled and forced himself to calm, to lean heavy on the reliance of the force, and tilted Anakin’s jaw up to force blue eyes to his own. “You want me?”

Anakin’s eyes blew dark and earnest, shadowed by his long lashes and the wide eclipse of his pupils. “Yes master,” he breathed.

Force. He was only a man.

Obi-Wan shoved him back to lay flat on the cot and loomed over him, braced by one forearm as he cupped Anakin’s jaw and met their mouths in a kiss that was more parted lips and shared breath than anything.

“What do you want?” He asked frantically, holding himself back from yanking Anakin’s legs apart to fit himself in the space between.

Anakin clawed fingers down his back and parted his legs of his own accord, the blanket thrown over his hips falling to bare the stretch of stomach and hipbone.

“I want you inside me,” Anakin spat, words falling over themselves with how quickly he forced the words past his teeth. As if he thought if he said it fast enough, Obi-Wan might feel less inclined to saying no.

He yanked at Anakin through the tether of their bond much as he had yanked at his curls only hours before. Anakin bared his teeth and stifled an animal noise of pleasure from the feel of it, and Obi-Wan tossed the blanket aside and sat back to begin tugging Anakin’s boots from his feet.

“Alright,” he breathed, and pulled Anakin’s pants to his ankles.

Anakin blinked up at him, curls in disarray and legs a little spread, his cock hard and pressed up against his hip. “You’re going to fuck me?” He wondered incredulously.

Obi-Wan unclasped Anakin’s belt with a snap and wrenched his tabards and tunics aside, feeling like an unhinged madman.

“Anakin,” he said desperately, cock throbbing and want so brittle he felt he could crumble to ash with it. “I have felt you fingering yourself open and leaking pleasure into the force like a wound so many times I—I feel mad you would let me.”

“Let you?” Anakin parroted back, “Master it was for you.”

Obi-Wan did not remember pulling his own clothes off, perhaps Anakin did in the frantic grasping of limbs and biting kisses between his blind scrambling of a wayward hand for the bacta he knew Anakin must have in here.

He did finally find it, half jammed under Anakin’s back as he raked fingers down Obi-Wan’s shoulders and locked his legs around his hips to pull their cocks together.

“Please,” he begged against Obi-Wan’s throat, something especially scalding furling open in his force signature at the plea.

“Let me open you up,” he begged in return, catching fingers in Anakin’s curls to tug at the nape of his neck.

Anakin moaned like something out of a holofilm and Obi-Wan tried not pulse vibrant, feverish pleasure through the bond at the sound of him, the exquisite golden sight of him laid out on the cot and glistening with sweat.

Anakin caught a strand of something though, because he stilled beneath him and blinked up through his lashes, unintentionally coy and all the more enticing for when he was naked with his cock pressed to his.

“Master,” he said sweetly, something breathy and submissive in his tone. It felt like a sharp stake of arousal to Obi-Wan’s spine so deep he curled forward from the jagged hurt of it.

Obi-Wan slicked his fingers with bacta and knocked Anakin’s legs open to throw his calves over his shoulders. Anakin gasped with it and arched like a painting into the movement, head thrown back in a display of long throat and golden curls.

“Tell me if I hurt you,” he said, pressing fingertips to Anakin’s already slick and opened rim.

“You won’t,” he moaned, digging fingers into the meat of Obi-Wan’s shoulder to tug his hand closer.

Obi-Wan laughed incredulously—wondrously and pressed two bacta slick fingers inside him. Anakin sobbed and took them as if he were made for it, opening around him and gashing violent pleasure through their bond like a mental strike.

Obi-Wan gasped around it and curled his fingers, searching for what he knew very well what the man under him liked. Anakin’s eyes rolled back, spine arched as he trembled and begged around Obi-Wan’s fingers.

“Oh force, master—please—please!” He felt like a blazing star in his pleasure, near agony to feel in the force.

He muttered, “not yet,” feverish with sweat and working his fingers where the tissue was raised inside his hole.

Clear, sticky strands of precome oozed from Anakin’s cock and smeared across the clenching abs of his stomach. Obi-Wan watched, something base and carnal deep in his mind throbbing in answer. He circled his fingers against Anakin’s prostate, pressing deeper and watched, transfixed as if force stunned as Anakin’s stomach clenched and the slit of his cockhead drippled white and messy with every throb of internal pleasure.

“This is what you liked,” he wondered, massaging his fingers, and watching Anakin slick himself wet. “The way you leak and throb without the coming.”

Durasteel fingers squeezed at his shoulder and Anakin gasped up at him, wretchedly beautiful in his sweaty, flushed disarray. “I can be good—I—I can keep from coming. I can control myself, master.”

It felt like someone shoved the burn of a lightsaber blade down his spine and he choked out some undignified noise and poured bacta over his cock. Not daring to touch himself beyond a guiding hand, he pressed the swollen, aching head of his cock to Anakin’s entrance and braced his forearm just above his curls.

“You are so good for me,” Obi-Wan breathed, “darling, you’ll take it like you were made for me.”

Anakin moaned, loud and girlishly high as he pressed his cock into him.

It was so achingly good he stopped himself the moment his hips met Anakin’s flank with his legs still thrown over Obi-Wan’s shoulders. Their bond, pulled so taut it was like a spider’s web, thrummed like a live wire in the base of his skull.

Anakin stretched his hands, one flesh and one metal, above his own head and arched onto his cock, bearing down with a loud, roughened noise caught in his throat. “Oh fuck,” he sobbed, “master please.”

“Anakin,” he gasped to the sweat damped curve of his throat, fucking his hips forward so that Anakin’s legs shook against his arms, and he smeared hot lines precome up his chest.

“No—no—no,” Anakin chanted, suddenly scraping fingers down his forearms as he gaped, mouth a near bloody bruise. “Oh shit—stop I’m gona come—no no master I’m gona come!”

It was near agony to stall the roll of his hips and the fucking of his cock inside him. “Anakin,” he near whimpered, hanging his head between the arch of his shoulders. “You can come whenever you like, darling.”

Anakin shook his head and sucked his bottom lip between his teeth. “No,” he panted, “I can—I can hold on. I’ll be so good for you, master.”

Another jagged, violent lance of arousal jolted down his spine and Obi-Wan closed his eyes against it, shuddering an inhale between his clenched teeth. “If you keep talking like that, padawan, I will not.”

Anakin’s shuddered on his cock and quivered like he might break apart. In a blink he slung his legs off of Obi-Wan’s shoulders and slammed him to the cot, still with his cock buried deep. They both groaned as Anakin straddled his hips and rocked himself back, fucking himself open on Obi-Wan’s cock.

“Say it again,” he begged, eyes wide and glinting down at him.

Obi-Wan raised himself so that Anakin sat in his lap, stuffed full of him and leaking slick strands all over Obi-Wan’s stomach.

He clenched fingers to the jut of Anakin’s shoulder blade and pulled him down as Obi-Wan fucked his cock into him. Anakin keened like he was being knifed open as he slapped durasteel fingers to the side of his head and cupped Obi-Wan’s face.

“Say it,” Anakin snarled, head thrown back and thighs trembling. In the lamplight he was nothing but ecstasy and gold.

If he were looking down at him, Anakin would surely see something like heartbreak on his face. “You are so good for me, padawan.”

Anakin’s eyes shot wide, and he gaped at Obi-Wan as he trembled, gone tight as a vice around him, and came completely untouched in hot stripes up the lines of his stomach and chest.

***

Anakin quavered and came around the searing brand of his master’s cock inside him. It rolled through him, deep from the base of his spine so that he spilled in slick jolts of come and unfurled with it in the force like a star reborn.

“Master,” he choked out, half a pitiful whine and half a plea.

Obi-Wan dropped his hands to his hips and with a wild expression fucked up inside of him once before he threw his head back and gasped, coming in hot pulses with an expression bordering pain.

They both shook, careening stunned out pleasure in the force and reverberating with the aftershocks. Anakin’s thighs were starting to cramp but he stayed seated on his master’s softening cock and cupped his face back between his hands, flesh and durasteel.

Obi-Wan smiled at him, heavy lidded and fucked stupid enough he looked worse than when Dooku knocked him unconscious.

“You made me come untouched,” Anakin said incredulously.

“You’ve never come on just your fingers before?”

“No—never.”

Obi-Wan grinned up at him and then drew Anakin’s fingers to his mouth to kiss the palm of his clammy, flesh hand. “It’s a wonder with how much practice you’ve had.”

He flushed indignant and scandalized. “Obi-Wan!”

The laugh lines around Obi-Wan’s eyes only deepened before his expression sobered to something more tender.

“I love you—you know,” Obi-Wan said. “More than I think you could ever realize.”

There was no description within human language to articulate the way he felt in this moment.

“Oh I dunno,” he finally forced out, throat dry and unable to swallow. “I think I could love you more.”