darkforcerising | OPEN POST

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."

He was not in a normal mental state, even by Jedi - or Obi-Wan - standards. Even so, there was not a chance in hell that he would reject Anakin now.

He'd failed and failed and failed Anakin.

He remembered Anakin's dreams about his mother dying and remembered very well not taking them seriously enough. He remembered not taking the time to find out more about the circumstances of her death, or to be supportive or even physically present in the aftermath.

He wasn't going to reject Anakin. He was going to feel guilty about it, though, deeply. His throat went tight and his eyes stung, but he kept his gaze down on finishing up bandaging Anakin's arm.

"I'm sorry." Which was of course useless. And, no, he was not missing that it wouldn't just go away or that was why Anakin was telling him now. He didn't know what to do about that part.

And it didn't change that he was really fucking sorry.

Edited 2020-03-09 02:36 (UTC)

Anakin felt that surge of guilt from across their bond, and thought for a moment it was his own before realizing it was from Obi-Wan.

"I don't blame you," he said. "I'm the one that didn't go to her sooner. And when I did, I'm the one that lost control of myself. And... I'm the one that never told you."

"You should." That was matter-of-fact, if quiet. He was still crying, but it wasn't reflecting in his voice at all. It was just... happening. "You were a child. You came to me for help and I dismissed you. You would have had a hard time going to her sooner at that state of your life without my cooperation and I didn't give it. You might even had told me if I'd been available for you to tell or had ever succeeded in making you feel safe with me, and I didn't manage to do that either."

"I was nineteen- that's an adult, that's only half your age right now," Anakin pointed out.

"I should have told you... I almost did so many times. But I thought I could handle it on my own. And... I thought if I told you, you would see everything the Council said about me was true."

"In some places, times and ways, yes, that's an adult. In the place and time you were in, it was not." He'd still been responsible for Anakin. He finished up the bandaging and then sat back and stopped touching him again. "You had no reason to believe I'd ever... protect you from the Council."

Edited 2020-03-09 03:14 (UTC)

Just a moment before, Obi-Wan had hit on why Anakin would believe what he had.

But that wasn't the point.

"The point is, I didn't tell you and I tried to handle it on my own for whatever reason. And I failed. Horribly."

Anakin wasn't ready to give up touch. He reached a hand for Obi-Wan's face.

"And I was eaten up inside by guilt and the idea that I was worthless and didn't deserve to even try for something better. I thought I had to fix it on my own because I made the choice on my own."

Oh, yes. He knew why. He also knew why this conversation was dragging back around to helping him rather than addressing the reality of the situation.

It had very much been his doing, on every single level from start to finish.

"Do you have something particular you would like to do, or for me to do, or for me to accept you doing?"

It wasn't sarcastic, but he couldn't think of a single thing that would help. He'd accept basically anything Anakin wanted. He also wanted to tear his own heart out, but recognized that wasn't useful and that Anakin had a point.

In theory.

In practice, though?

What in Hoth was there?

That Obi-Wan didn't pull away from Anakin's touch this time was heartening.

"Believe me when I say you're not worthless. That you deserve love, still. That you're not a failure. Let yourself heal from this- don't fight it. Don't try to do this alone. You deserve- have always deserved someone to be by your side."

Anakin wiped a tear away with his thumb, even if more still fell.

"Let me help you."

He... vaguely believed some scattered bits and pieces of various portions of that - an erratic, messy patchwork that was a long way from being complete.

If he could have flipped a switch and just believed it, he would have. Because he didn't want to frustrate or hurt Anakin anymore, and he was intelligent enough to recognize that... failing Anakin again wouldn't make up for failing him to begin with.

That wasn't really how belief worked, though, so it was more a matter of not arguing with the principals and not allowing himself to retreat from Anakin. To do the best he could to limit how much Anakin hurt, knowing that that involved not intentionally hurting himself more (and not letting what did show). Letting Anakin help.

...Yeah, he'd never felt more fundamentally worthless in his life, and he still didn't really regret it because Anakin was alive. He still couldn't let go of Anakin, either.

"Okay." He realized he was crying when Anakin touched him and after a couple of too-fast blinks managed to mostly stop himself. "We should get cleaned up and sleep. We're going to have to figure out what to do with this ship. Especially after that message you sent."

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