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You haven’t been back to Coruscant in six months. You haven’t seen your wife in four.
Both draw nearer, slanting edgewise on the horizon like shimmering mirages, like prizes to be won. Like outstretched arms beckoning, open mouths saying Anakin, we missed you. You’re home, now.
The thing is, you don’t feel like you’re coming home.
You try to will the sensation of relief into your body anyway, fists clenched resolutely at your sides. You try on excitement. You try on longing. But in the end, they all wheedle out into anxiety, sharp and nauseating in your gut.
The city gleams through the windows of the transport, whizzing by in glittering columns and turrets. The mess of lights blurs into something almost unrecognizable, and panic mounts in your chest as the temple materializes along the skyline. You are not staying there tonight. You are only stopping there to drop Obi-Wan off and then, you will be flying to meet Padme, as you always do whenever you return to Coruscant. Like you have been convincing yourself you want, whenever you return to Coruscant.
It’s maddening, how clear self-deceit becomes when the conditions you lied to survive change.
Obi-Wan sits to your left, stroking his beard in that way he does, which is meant to look idle but you know is calculated. His knees are crossed in the same way. Affectations, the mockery of nonchalance. You know better. You know he is tense, too. That he feels like a stranger here, too.
The truth shudders in the Force between you, unspeakable: You haven’t been back to Coruscant in six months. You haven’t seen your wife in four. And for the last one hundred and fifty two days, you have slept beside Obi-Wan Kenobi when battles and lodging permit, his spit on your tongue, your seed on his thighs. Making tonight the first night you will spend apart in as long.
It was a truth that felt different in the turmoil of the war. It felt like a reflex, something necessary, something you deserved. It could exist unnamed in liminal spaces, blood and adrenaline doused like everything else in your life. You were a general. You narrowly escaped death every day. You clung to Obi-Wan every night. These are the ways of the war. The ways of the world.
But now, it is all catching up to you. What you have been doing, and how little it fits into this version of your life, this city and the relationships you have in it. And you know Obi-Wan must be feeling it too: the terrible awkwardness of furtive, secret, ugly things drawn to light. They didn’t seem ugly, back on the Destroyer. But now, you are not so sure.
The transport lands at the temple’s docking bay and Obi-Wan rises, head bent, face carefully blank. “Are you getting off?” he asks you lightly, without meeting your eyes. He knows you are not, this is only a pleasantry, and your heart aches for things you cannot have. For the conditions you lied to survive.
“Not tonight,” you say, sucking your cheek so it hollows. He nods crisply.
“I see,” he says, voice weary like he is too tired to care where you sleep. And maybe he is. Obi-Wan certainly maintains that he does not need you the way you need him.
You swallow something bitter and turn away from him as the doors whisk open. The smell of the city pours in—hot frying oil, garbage, gasoline, silicone byproduct. It stings your eyes, the nostalgia of it a cloying, cruel reminder you are no longer the young and wide-eyed boy who was bowled over to the point of awed silence at such a place. You are jaded, now, and broken. You are a liar and a fake and Obi-Wan is a pathetic old man and there is no glory in war, only bad habits that cannot be reintegrated back into civilization. They are best left to darkness. To barracks, to bruised mouths on broken ribs, skinned knuckles on old scars.
“May the Force be with you, Anakin,” Obi-Wan says with a nod, before he disappears down the flight-stairs in a flourish of robes.
“May the Force be with you,” you manage back, though your throat is almost too thick to speak with. You swallow, and swallow, and try to think about your wife. Her soft clothes and softer hair and smile like moonlight reflecting back to you on the sea. Anakin, I missed you. You’re home, now.
—
“Ani!” she cries, and presses herself into your arms. She feels smaller than you remember, and you crush her body towards you, thinking of tiny caged birds, how they sometimes batter themselves to death on the bars of the gilded cages. “Oh, goodness. I thought you would be home after dark. I would have put something prettier on. I would have ordered us a meal.”
“We touched down early. I was eager to get back,” you lie, peeling back from her and squeezing her delicate shoulders in your palms, gaze sweeping her open, smiling face. Words stick in your throat, you cannot remember how to speak to her. To people who do not kill every day, who do not nearly die every other. To people who are not — “And nonsense. You look beautiful. You always do.”
She smiles, kisses you, and you kiss back. It’s like kissing petals: sweet, soft, an easy give. For a moment something inside you recoils, thinks wrong, thinks the scrape of a beard and a gasping mouth falling open like a crack in the ground after a vast tremor, and you shut it out, pull your wife close, drown, drown, drown. Let the coolness of moonlight capsize over your head, as you sink like a stone.
This is your real life, you tell yourself as you scoop her up and she laughs, head thrown back. This is what you chose.
—-
Two hours later, the sun has set. Sunk low and hot behind the jagged row of skyscrapers outside Padme’s window, cloaking your naked bodies in a disorienting sheet of darkness. You thought not being able to see would make it better, but it didn’t.
Now you lie on your back staring up at the ceiling of the bedroom, throat tight, pulse speeding in shame. Padme is silent and patient beside you, gently rubbing the skin drawn tight over your breastbone, directly atop the racing, infernal, two-beat thud of your heart. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, it says. You want to scream. You want to grab her wrist, crush the bird-bones there to dust, prove there's something strong left inside of you. You want to cry. You want—Obi-Wan flashes sudden and sure across your mind but you draw away from it lightning quick, like a child who has just touched a hot stove. Not that, you plead with yourself, like pleading has ever worked. Not him.
“Ani,” she says quietly. “Talk to me, please?”
“What is there to say besides sorry?” You grit out. Each word a bullet, a bit of rock, a chipped tooth for you to rub your tongue bloody upon. You don’t understand, you think of saying to her. I made it all up. I ruined everything. I am a liar, and a fake.
“You don’t need to be sorry,” she tells you, frowning. “I’m not angry at you.”
“Well I am,” you snap. “Angry at myself.”
She sighs, settles close against your body, small and soft like everything good in the galaxy, Everything you’d kill and die to protect. Everything you want, or, everything you should want. Those have gotten so muddied over the last year you can hardly parse them back in two.
You curl an arm around her shoulders in rote compliance to your former self, a sob stuck in your throat as she drums her fingers against your sternum in what is likely supposed to be a comforting fashion. It only feels patronizing. “You don’t need to be sorry,” she says eventually. “I don’t expect everything to be easy all the time—Ani, you’re at war. I can’t even fathom the things you must see out in the trenches every day, and how difficult it must be to come back, and live like you once did as if nothing is happening. I don’t want that from you. I would rather you be honest with me.”
Your eyes are hot and prickly, your mouth a wobbling shape. You don’t know how to tell her that it’s not just the war—it’s everything, the foundation your marriage is built on and the person you thought you were crumbling into some atrophied, pain-sick, desperate version of you. A version who can only get hard for a man who is supposed to be your father. A version who cannot fuck his wife. I’m not the person you married, you want to say. I made him up. He’s not me. I wanted to be him so badly, but I will always be exactly what I am. Instead you curl onto your side, bury your face in her sweet-smelling hair and inhale. “I don’t deserve you,” you murmur.
“I don’t care about ‘deserving.’ Our love is not transactional,” she says, petting the back of your neck, kissing your temple, doing everything right which only makes it all feel worse. “I’ll take you however you are, when I can have you, Ani. And if this is what it looks like tonight—then so be it.”
You take a ragged breath, thinking of the temple, of your bed there, how part of you wishes for that solitude but another part wishes for something else. Something unspeakable. “I just wish I was better for you.”
“And I wish I was better for you, too,” Padme says with a shrug, her body shifting in your arms. her smile watery, but resilient. “But we are who we are, and we’re in love. And that’s what matters, right?”
You shudder against her and nod, even though you are not so sure. Not so sure it’s what matters, or that you are in love.
—-
This is what happened: You were fourteen, and you fell in love with your Master. It was all you could think about. It was all you were. Sick at night, hard in the shower, propped up against the slick granite wall fisting your cock to finish while you sucked the heel of your hand thinking of him.
You told him, because you felt like you could not possibly survive such a vast secret without it gutting you, tearing you to pieces. You were a child, still, and those things feel like life or death, when you are a child. I’m in agony. The closer I get to you, the worse it gets. The thought of not being with you- I can't breathe.
Obi-Wan had looked at you with sad, shocked eyes, and said Anakin, you don’t know what you’re saying. You’re only a boy, it will pass. Please. Be sensible.
And you tried, you tried your fucking hardest. But a year passed, and nothing changed. Your want only grew more fever-hot and furious, reaching a humiliating boiling point over the summer when, in the middle of a sparring match, you lost your mind and craned your head up and pressed your mouth flush to Obi-Wan’s in a fierce, sweat-salty kiss.
Obi-Wan hadn’t pulled away as fast as he should have. He lingered, shaking, letting you hold him in place with a fist in his hair and lick him open, fuck his parted, gasping lips with your tongue for a few maddening seconds before finally, he twisted messily from your grip. Anakin, he’d said, voice shaking as he touched his lips before looking at his fingers, like he was checking for blood. Anakin I told you, we cannot. It’s forbidden.
You remember the stricken blue of his eyes, the tremor to his voice. You remember the way he said we. The way he tasted like sweat and spice and guilt and August.
Those remain. The fleeting seconds of surrender, Obi-Wan’s voice fraying over resistance. They gave you hope so you fought him on it for months, tried to wear him down like water droplets against sandstone, break him into admitting you were not alone in this. I'm haunted by the kiss that you should never have given me. My heart is beating, hoping that kiss will not become a scar. You are in my very soul, tormenting me, what can I do? I will do anything you ask.
Stop this foolishness at once, and never speak of it again, was what Obi-Wan had said, his voice sharp, pleading. Stop, Anakin. It must stop.
And he had looked so frightened, so uncharacteristically angry that you did, because it seemed a better fate than losing him. You gave up, allowed your love to grow bitter and resentful, your heart to blacken around the edges like a rotten fruit. You knew you could not cut your feelings for him out of your chest, so you decided to blot them out, erase his name, fill in another. Maybe it would make him jealous…or maybe it would work. Maybe it would save you. Fix you. Make you normal.
This is what happened: you were nineteen, and you decided to fall in love with Padme Amidala. You already possessed the script for what to say when you are in love, and so you told her, I’m in agony. The closer I get to you, the worse it gets. The thought of not being with you- I can't breathe. You stroked her arm and pressed your mouth to hers and recited, I'm haunted by the kiss that you should never have given me. My heart is beating, hoping that kiss will not become a scar. You are in my very soul, tormenting me, what can I do? I will do anything you ask.
She resisted too, at first. But then, like a miracle and unlike Obi-Wan, she decided to love you back.
This is what happened: You couldn't have the person you wanted, so you convinced yourself you wanted someone else. And it had felt real, back then. A cure. A salve, a solution. But then the war happened, and whatever absurd orthodoxy or loyalty to the code Obi-Wan had shackled himself to when you were a teenager burnt down in the blaster fire and wreckage. He fell into your arms. He fell into your bed.
And you still loved him, of course you still loved him, so you let it happen. Convinced yourself you loved them both. That your two loves could exist alongside each other, like trolley-tracks running parallel through the earth in rivers of silver. One in the stars, one here in the city.
But this is what happened: You were wrong. The sandcastle of lies you built to live in came down in high tide, and here you are in the place where it used to stand. Soft between your thighs, in the grave of your beautiful wife’s beautiful bed, staring at the ceiling and begging the night, What can I do? I will do anything you ask.
—-
Padme falls asleep, and you lie beside her stroking the sleek whorls of her hair. You tell yourself, this is love, this is love, all the while knowing full well it’s not. Or, it is a type of love. You do love Padme. You love her security, you love what she symbolizes, you love that she loves you. That she chose you in spite of the peril, in spite of the rules. You love being chosen. You love tangible evidence you are worth risking safety and repute for. You love how beautiful she is asleep amid mountains of silk sheets, glittering in the city light spilling in from the window like something precious and valuable up on a shelf. You love looking at her, and knowing she is safe behind the glass of your mental display case.
Before something cracked and Obi-Wan let you touch him, there were nights you lied side by side in dirty bed-rolls on hard packed earth in your generals tent together. You faced each other, nearly touching but not quite, heads on the same awful regulation pillow and eyes peeled wide, ears trained for the sound of enemy footsteps. It was nights you had not eaten, had not brushed your teeth. But still, when he exhaled, you inhaled. Sucked his breath into your lungs, hungry for even the fear-sour, exhausted version of it. You laid awake and kept watch as he slept, nodding close enough to smell his hair, for his soft, scraping snores to land humid on your open lips for you to lick up and savor. And when it was your turn to sleep and for him to keep watch, you slipped under easily. Eclipsed in blackness, the world fading away with a blink as Obi-Wan sat up and sighed and held his saber in a death clutch. You could dream on a battlefield, because he was there. Everything you needed and wanted was right beside you, it hardly even mattered if you died.
And you know you do not love Padme like that. You cannot love Padme or anyone else in this way—it’s a singular thing, too massive to replicate. It gnaws at you now like a hungry animal locked in the cage of your chest, pacing and clawing at your ribs. It wants out. It wants stale breath, untroubled sleep, sad eyes, a chapped mouth, the threat of death just beyond blood stained canvas.
Instead you lie awake, less able to sleep here amid softness than in the throes of war. You try. You plead with yourself as the hours march on, shut your eyes, count, stab at the idle hope of meditation, but—still, the animal snarls and whines until it becomes unbearable. Eventually, you stand up in defeat, and commit to feeding it.
—-
It is not difficult to find transport to the Jedi Temple at this hour. If it had been, you might have backed out, slunk shamefully up to that silk bed and the woman inside it with your tail tucked, but you hail a cab in moments, and before you can think better of it you are already whizzing through the meager traffic and on your way. You fist your hands in your cloak, you berate yourself, stare at your hollow reflection in the window with disdain but even then, relief spreads inside you, enough to drown out the self hatred. You’ll have him, soon. His breath in your lungs, his chest pressed flush to your back and his arm slung heavy around your waist. Or, if he will not hold you, then the reverse. Your nose in his hair, his shoulder digging into your throat as you crush him. Your heart pounds, and you count the beats.
Like a steady mount, your body carries you up the steps to the temple, in the door, through the hallways, past security who only nod with respect when they see you. Just another general in the Grand Army of the Republic, returning from duty. A hero, a Jedi knight. Not a philandering, heartbroken, cruel boy who cannot endure a single night alone.
You don’t bother to knock on Obi-Wan’s door. You only let yourself in quietly, thinking perhaps he will be sleeping, as it’s quite late.
But instead, you find the lights on in his quarters. He is seated at the table in the dead center of the room, face gaunt and grip white knuckled around an empty glass, a half-bottle of something amber beside him. Shoulders hunched, hair copper, the slope of his neck weary and you love him, you love him so, he is everything to you. He is your home.
He glances up with naked shock and his eyes are red-rimmed, very tired, old. He rights himself suddenly, cards a hand through his otherwise messy hair in a poor attempt at needless propriety. There, you think. The animal inside you sighs, before it finally, finally pauses to rest.
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan says, voice hoarse. “What are you—I thought you—“ but he has no further words beyond that. It seems even Obi-Wan cannot find his decorum this hour, not at the bottom of a bottle anyway, and his throat clicks around a pained swallow as he sits back down, raises a guarded hand to stroke his beard and you have always thought that was a measured, calculated gesture of his, but in this moment you realize it is a tic. The evidence of his vulnerability washes over you, makes you dizzy like adrenaline, like a drug.
“I couldn’t,” you say, and the words die in your throat, too. I couldn’t sleep without you. I couldn’t get it up long enough to fuck my wife. I couldn't go through with it. I couldn’t lie to myself a moment longer. I couldn’t keep pretending I love her the way I love you. In the silence Obi-Wan’s eyes are wide, helpless, stricken, too blue. You swim in them for a moment, treading water as he waits for something—a confession, maybe. An apology. Or else, bad news. Your stomach drops to be looked at like that, pinned by the sheer, raw, blood-shot truth that he could not sleep either.
“Do you want me to go?” you choke out, if only just to hear him beg for you to stay.
He shakes his head. “What are you doing here? We cannot—” and fuck, you don’t want that, you don’t want his rehearsed, canned, rote, meaningless vomit of what the two of you cannot do together. Because you are already doing it. You are married and he is attached and your vows and the code lay trodden upon beneath your boots. Forgotten in battlefields where you slept, lost in the spaces between your mouths, destroyed by the hundred of times you have bent Obi-Wan Kenobi in half and fucked him until you both wept.
There is nothing to say. You stride across the room and kiss him instead, his mouth a hot smear under yours, sharp with alcohol. He tries not to kiss back but then he does it anyway, hands trembling through your hair, cupping your face, snagging loose tangles. “I can smell her on you,” he says when you pull away to bite down the cords in his neck, making fists in his robe as you march him backwards and stumbling to his bed. “Her perfume.”
“Are you jealous?” you grit out, wanting him to say yes, wanting him to beg to be yours and yours alone. You could give it to him. You would give it to him, fold him up like origami and feed him to the beast in your chest. You would leave the order, you would leave your wife. You would do anything he asked, but he won’t ask. He will drink alone, touch his beard, sit atop his cold throne of still colder promises and pretend he is better than you.
“What are you doing here, Anakin?” he asks again, sharper this time, even as he lets you push him into his bed and cover his body with your own, fit yourself between his thighs. With a lick of shame-tinged bafflement, you realize that you’re hard, just from this. It’s so easy when it’s him. “Please. Answer me.”
You think of Padme in her glass case. Fine china, so easy to shatter if something were to jostle it from the shelf. Her porcelain skin, her pretty words, and just like that, the fight drains out of you. You melt onto him, face buried in his neck, breath strangled and tight until so suddenly, there are tears. His hand trembles as it pets down the back of your neck and tucks beneath your collar. “Anakin,” he says again, softer this time, wearied. “I only want to know what you’re thinking.”
I’m in agony. The closer I get to you, the worse it gets. The thought of not being with you- I can't breathe plays in your head on a loop like a broken holo-recording. Agony. Agony. Agony. You wonder what it would cost to tell the truth again, so many years later. If he would hear you. If he would deny you even now, spread-legged beneath your dragging, shifting body, drunk and tear-stained and lonely and lovely.
“I don’t love her,” is what you finally manage, the words thick, wooden. You suck in a ragged inhalation, and it smells like his salt, his liquor, his fear. “Not like I love you.”
Obi-Wan’s next breath snags, crushed under you. But he doesn't say stop. He doesn't say we can’t. He doesn’t say be sensible. He doesn’t lie, this time. He only shudders, fingers sifting through your hair to your scalp. “Anakin,” he whispers. Another tic, another compulsion simply to say the three syllables of your name in a line, as if it is a prayer. “You are not supposed to love either of us,” he murmurs. “But I—it would be dishonest for me to say I didn’t—that I’m not pleased to hear—”
“Fuck, fuck, Obi-Wan,” you growl, wounded past the point of dignity. You will beg. You will do anything. “Shut up, why can’t you just say it back, why can’t you just—”
He gets his nails in you, he grabs fiercely enough to bruise, sucks in a hissing breath through his teeth. “Of course I love you, Force, Anakin is that what—I love you only. I don’t have any pretty Senators I run off to at my leisure, I don’t split my time, or my heart, I—when you’re not with me I drink. That’s what I do. That’s how I love you.”
You cannot breathe. You cannot think. You just reel back to stare at him slack-jawed, heart going wild in your chest. You have never witnessed such skinned, bleeding vulnerability from him before and it shocks you. You almost think it’s a trick, for a moment, but he's too drunk for that, you can see the truth mired in the bloodshot whites of his eyes. He is this pitiful. After years of trying your damnedest, you have finally broken him. “Say it again,” you demand, squeezing his narrow hips between your knees. “Slowly.”
He swallows, twitches, relents. “I love you, Anakin,” he says very quietly. “I thought you knew.”
You cannot explain to him that you did know, but it wasn’t knowing you wanted. It was admitting, fracturing. It was him staying up waiting for you whether or not you came. It was proving, with certainty, he is just as fucking lost to this as you are.
You kiss him so hard your teeth click together, and he moans as you lick him apart, find his tongue, suck it like you’re hungry. You kiss him until your mouth stings, until you go lightheaded because you don’t want to pause and breathe. All the while, he kisses back. Surges up into you like a flood, laps at your shores, breaks against your most jagged cliffs until there is nothing but salt and foam. I love you you think, feeding the whole of it up into your Force bond instead of keeping fractions of it leashed, gagged. I love you like this. A natural disaster, a storm front. I love you fatally and absolutely.
There are tear tracks sticky on your cheeks as you pull back to suck in an inhalation, and you wipe them with a tremulous hand. Obi-Wan is reaching between your bodies to roll his pants down his hips, skin pale, cock hard and needy and pink in contrast. “Please,” he murmurs, tugging at your clothes. “Your skin.”
You understand. It’s what you want, too—though you spend most nights with Obi-Wan, you rarely have the unique luxury of being fully undressed together, in a familiar bed. There is nothing like being skin to skin, nothing like the illusion of becoming fused together, tangled, littered in sutures. You peel back to strip yourself layer by layer, and Obi-Wan does the same under you, clumsy with drink, his hair strewn bright as hammered metal across his pillow. And then, once you’ve kicked your way, cursing, from your boots, you climb back on top of him.
There is a smooth shifting as angles find planes. Joints soften, bodies notch, and yes, this is how people are supposed to fit together, you think. By some great design, like you and Obi-Wan were carved by the Force from the same piece of driftwood. He sighs, presses his face to your throat, tangles your legs. “I couldn’t stand it,” you admit, loving the way his scapula fills the curve of your palm so neatly. “I couldn’t stand even a night away from you.”
“There are many things I’m realizing I cannot stand, either,” he mumbles into you, cock burning against your thigh, dirty and perfect as you press into it.
You wonder if he means sharing. If he means your marriage. Or perhaps, if he means the code. The War. The order. You pray for them all, you pray for him to ask you to leave your duties so you feel less guilty about wanting to pry him from his own. You will pick the lock, you will jimmy the deadbolt, you will break down the door. You’ll do anything. Instead of digging, though, you take his cock in your hand, feel it out reverently and thumb through the slickness beading at the tip. In turn he seeks you out, making a choked, appreciative sound as he curls his fingers around the length of you. “Anakin,” he prays. You kiss him, swallowing each syllable, worrying them with your tongue.
It’s clumsy, human sex. Your arm is going numb but you don't want a different position, you want it just like this, the two of you tangled together messily, a snake-bolus of limbs and groans and chains and secrets. You want him rutting against you, as much skin touching as possible, your mouths sealed and kissing messily all the while. The lights stay on, and you never extricate yourself to take charge and put him where you want him how you usually do. You stay here, twined up as you rub against each other, touch each other, kiss each other until you come. And even after he spills in your palm shortly after you spill in his, you remain, plaited and knotted up. You don’t want to move. You want to stay right here, in his bed, covered in him. He is your home.
“I have always loved you,” he admits at some point, slurring where his mouth is pressed to your hairline, lips soft, beard bristly. “Even before I loved you like this—I loved you. And it has always been forbidden. Even when you were a little boy and I loved you as a brother might…or I tried to love you like that…even an innocent, pure love—it violated the code. You have always—I broke my vows long ago, is what I am trying to say,” he settles on. “But I am drunk.”
You kiss his hair, his temple, the moles on his forehead and cheek. You think about how you broke your vows long ago, too, before you made new ones and broke those, too. How he is the exception to every rule you tried to follow, and even every rule you already broke. “I married her,” he admits, “because I knew I couldn’t marry you. ”
He laughs then. It’s a hollow, sad laugh, more of a sob at its core. You try to kiss it to silence, to lick it up, but he pulls away and you get his cheek instead. “We’re fools,” he says then.
“I would rather be a fool in love than a wise man without it,” you tell him, and you mean it. You would leave everything else behind, for this. You would burn your old self, if you could lie with him eternally in the ashes. “What do we do, now?” you ask, thumbing over the dark shadow beneath his eye, bruise dark and crepe-paper fragile.
We leave, you imagine him saying. We leave the order, you leave your wife. She is better off anyway, alone or with someone who loves her for her, isn’t she? You are doing her a favor, by cutting her free. By leaving. Leaving a letter. Saying you are sorry, but you cannot stay, you cannot lie any longer.
We leave.
We leave.
That's not what Obi-Wan says, though. He runs his fingers through your hair, sweetly untangling it, expression mournful. “We sleep,” he says.
And you suppose you can only do that with him, anyway, and so he is right. You sleep. You lie here in his bed like you lie in the general's tent on the battlefield, like you lie in a shared soldier’s grave. You face one another. You suck in his breath, and he sucks in yours, and you turn off the lights and stare at one another, even in the dark. You try to accept without qualifiers or expectations, that you are home.