darkforcerising | OPEN POST

Anakin resisted the urge to pull Obi-Wan into a tight hug and just hold him until... forever.

Instead, Anakin pulled his hand back and respected Obi-Wan's space.

"I can show you to the captain's quarters." The refresher would be bigger, and yet still feel enclosed, instead of a row of showers for troops.

"I'll take care of the bodies." In addition to moving them himself - the Force was good for this - he had a plan to override every droid he encountered. He'd have an army of droids scrubbing this place before they exited hyperspace. It would give him something to do.

"No." He was firm on that, even understanding the gist of what Anakin was doing and the kindness of it. He didn't... feel deserving enough of compassion to want anything to do with it. "Most of this is my mess. I won't ask you not to help, but I won't let you do it alone."

Even if it was just overriding droid commands, but especially if it was more than that. He wasn't going to be sheltered that way. It wasn't... just.

Anakin saw reason not to argue. He understood the need to be doing something. He nodded.

"We can take them down to the engines. Have them thrown into the sublights when we drop out of hyperspace." Crude, but effective for destroying bodies. Everything would burn up. And he was really hoping to use droids for that part because nothing about that was pleasant.

"But we go to the captain's quarters first."

He was so... not just glad but grateful for the lack of argument that even if he'd been able to use more words right now he would have struggled to find them.

"We can use the droids to help and multi-task by looking - and having the droids look - for your lightsaber." He rubbed his eyes a bit and then dropped his hand to look at Anakin with mild curiosity. "All right, but why?"

"Because... you asked where the refershers were," Anakin pointed out. "The Captain's quarters have private bathrooms. I'm assuming that's a pressing need if you asked about them?"

"I need to throw up and shower," he said, apologetically, "I'll probably need more of both after we've finished disposing of those bodies.... May as well wait?" Yes, yes including the vomiting violently thing. He'd been a Jedi after all.

"Obi-Wan," Anakin started to say, but stopped himself.

Patience did not come naturally to Anakin, but he reminded himself he needed to be patient with what Obi-Wan was now going through.

Even if Anakin thought that talking first would be better, it wouldn't hurt anyone if they tracked down a few droids to start the process of cleaning up the bodies.

He'd still find a way to fit talking in sooner rather than later, but for now, activity over standing still.

"Alright," he said gently. "Let's go find some droids."

Obi-Wan, of course, had no idea what the point of talking would be, how it could help or what he could say that would make any difference-

but he didn't intend to not try, either.

Even if he wasn't sure what he'd be trying to do.

He nodded in thanks and then went one direction to start looking for those droids so he could get this started. Body disposal and finding that lightsaber. He made a point of not avoiding looking at the mangled bodies he was responsible for along the way. He might have even looked a little extra hard.

He was definitely, direly, in need of that refresher by the time they were done though, at about the limit of putting things off. "Okay. Show me the Captain's quarters, please."

Anakin would have preferred Obi-Wan not pushing himself until the very last limit of his nerves, but he knew he shouldn't be so surprised. This was the man who had waited days after his arms were broken to finally treat them - and even then, it was Anakin who'd forced him to address the issue. Of course he wouldn't even acknowledge the concept of self-care.

But he obliged the man and took him to the captain's quarters.

The were bigger than the rooms on the ship Bail gave to them. There was the reception room. Off to the right would be the conference room. To the left the sleeping quarters, and in there, the refresher. The bed was not larger than the ones on the Maverick, but the room was.

"The bathroom is in there." He pointed to the door.

And then he paused, looking at Obi-Wan.

"We should talk, but," he remembered the most pressing reason Obi-Wan had asked for the refresher after started to speak, "I mean after you throw up. I don't mean to keep you from that."

He understood the concept of self-care just fine.

He understood it to mean taking enough care of himself to be functional enough to be useful (or at bare minimal not a liability) to other people or in pursuit of a larger goal or greater good.

When there was no belief in his ability to useful to a greater good, larger purpose, or another person, things got dicey, fast. When Anakin had first arrived on Tatooine was a good example of that. This... was probably an even better one.

He was quiet along the way to the Captain's quarters, and quickly honed in on the 'fresher.

His shoulders tensed just a bit at mention of talking, but he wasn't going to avoid, dammit, so he simply nodded. "Thank you. I'll be right back."

Then excused himself and threw up violently until his eyes watered, his stomach was sore and his hands were shaking. He rinsed his mouth and brushed his teeth (thanks to the Captain's supplies and he should have hesitation about that but didn't), then came back out.

"Do you want to talk in here, or would you prefer the other room?"

Anakin was sitting on the bed when Obi-Wan came back in, managing to lift his head up from his hands just before Obi-Wan came back out.

"Obi-Wan, sit." He touched the space on the bed next to him, conveniently to his left so he could reach him with his hand that could feel everything he wanted to feel.

"Let me have your hand."

He went to the bed and sat down to Anakin's left, but not too close. There was still that little bit of a buffer zone between them, and he wasn't even consciously doing it.

He turned his hand over, looked at it and then with palpable confusion offered it to Anakin.

As if Anakin didn't notice the space. He didn't move to correct it, yet.

But he take Obi-Wan's hand and threaded their fingers together.

"You injured yourself today. I want you to acknowledge that."

Probably not where Obi-Wan was expecting this to start. Anakin wasn't here to judge - and reality, he didn't come from a place where he could judge. Obi-Wan had turned to the Dark Side, but his actions afterwards weren't ... okay, the Empire would consider them criminal, but there was a morally just argument for taking out an enemy. Anakin never had the moral high ground with his falls.

He let Anakin do what he wanted with his hand, though he didn't become less perplexed at just having his hand held. He shouldn't have been confused at all, of course, but there was a moment where he felt like he was missing something --

then the feeling intensified because he wasn't injured at all, beyond minor scrapes and bruises that didn't count.

He was reminded, though -

"How badly are you hurt? Have you treated it and do we have bacta?" That was not intentional evasion, it honestly wasn't. His brain just kept snapping back to things he needed to do and shying away from what he'd already done as anything even remotely sympathetic.

"I'm fi-"

No, he stopped, Obi-Wan wasn't being elusive on purpose. Nothing in the 'Jedi Handbook' of their training ever prepared a Jedi for what to do if you actually turned to the Dark Side and then came back.

Even though they'd watched Ahsoka do it. Quinlin Vos do it. And to some extent, Ventress. The Order had never claimed her as a member, but she'd been trained by a Jedi at a point in her life, and she'd given her life to save Vos.

And there was himself, too. He almost didn't count himself.

Simply put, they had clear evidence it was not a death-sentence. They could could heal from this.

But he, and moreso Obi-Wan, had so little instruction about this part of continuing to live after coming back from the Dark Side.

No, Obi-Wan wasn't doing this on purpose.

"You can dress the cuts on my arm if you stay and talk and listen to me. There's probably a med kit in the bathroom," he said and reluctantly took his hand away from Obi-Wan so he could take his tunic off, easiest way to get at the cuts on his arm.

No, there was no shortage of evidence that he could continue to do what Anakin had told him to and survive. This wasn't something that was a death sentence. That didn't mean he didn't thoroughly hate himself - the standards to which he held himself were higher than he would have held anyone else, and he'd never felt like a particularly good Jedi, anyway - but he didn't expect to die.

Knowing how to live now was something else entirely.

"I'm not going to run away." He got up and went into the bathroom and grabbed the kit, came back and sat down beside Anakin on the edge of the bed and got the kit open so he could find some bacta in a tube and some basic, easy to apply, bandages to go with it.

Once he settled with that he added: "And I'm listening."

Anakin glanced down at the cuts and looked away, the sight of his own burned flesh really didn't sit well with him.

Speaking of...

He focused back on Obi-Wan's face while the man worked on his arm.

"You did injure yourself today. Metaphysically, mentally." And he figured he should just name it. "Turning to the Dark Side was a severely traumatic thing you experienced."

He was deft, efficient, and gentle in applying bacta to the cauterized cuts. He was pretending not to have memories of slicing through Anakin or how intensely the smell of burned flesh was imprinted into his mind -

and that imprinting by far predated today.

He shrugged slightly without looking up. "I made a choice." He had. He had consciously decided. "I don't regret the choice."

Obi-Wan wasn't getting it.

Anakin thought of something else.

"Obi-Wan, if I broke my arm, what would you tell me to do?" He almost asked 'if you broke your arm...' but that would not cut into it, considering the state of Obi-Wan's arms when Anakin had arrived in his hut on Tatooine.

"I've no idea. Treat it, presumably, but how and when and whether I called you an idiot first depends on the circumstances around how it got broken and what resources we had for treatment. Probably to stop complaining and let me heal it."

He actually did get it. He just didn't think it mattered much or have any clear idea about what to do with this sort of self-inflicted 'injury' - and Anakin had already pulled him back, which was the most important thing....

"Sounds like you have a pretty good idea what you'd tell me," Anakin pointed out. "And you'd know how to heal it, too." Obi-Wan could heal wounds of others, Anakin could not.

But he knew what it was like living on this side of coming back from the Dark Side.

"I'm not going to call you an idiot. Even if it was a choice you made. I'm going to tell you we need to understand what happened so you don't make the same choices I did."

It was probably nice that he could do something Anakin couldn't, but at the moment that Anakin couldn't also felt like some kind of failure in him.

Or would if he thought about it too much.

"All right." Tell him. Because that part he wasn't getting. He had made the same decision Anakin had, but he hadn't... continued to. That he knew of. Which meant he was missing something.

And he actually did want to hear it.

Anakin took a breath. Silently cursed the Jedi Order, and then told Obi-Wan something he'd never told him before.

"Joining Palpatine wasn't the first time I turned to the Dark Side."

He blinked a few times and paused in the process of wrapping bandaging material lightly over Anakin's upper arm.

"...What?"

"When my mom died."

For the same reason Obi-Wan was twisted up inside right now, Anakin was suddenly nervous. Sure, Obi-Wan had accepted him back after knowing he'd been Vader, but that didn't mean he wouldn't reject him now. Those old fears, the reason he'd never told Obi-Wan in the first place, were still there, apparently.

"I made it to her the night she died. I snuck into the tent where the tribe had been keeping her, torturing her. She lived just long enough after that to tell me she loved me."

He took a breath because he couldn't help the feelings of failure and loss and guilt from bubbling up to the surface as he talked about his mom's death.

Anakin took a breath and then pressed on because Obi-Wan needed to understand, even if he now rejected Anakin, that he needed to heal from this trauma so he didn't make Anakin's same mistakes. This wouldn't just go away without redress.

"I killed the whole tribe."

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