darkforcerising | OPEN POST

"Crashed a jet," Anakin said. "Not the worst thing I've endured, but at the time, my brain decided it was... It was also career limiting where I was. I couldn't fly anything anymore."

He let a smile chase the seriousness off his face.

"Maybe I can get some flying in before I go back. I'll even take a spice freighter at this point."

"We're near a Space Port. We'll find you something more exciting than a freighter."

Anakin had worried about Obi-Wan's reaction to Anakin being close? Unnecessarily, apparently, because while he's listened, heard, understood and felt bad about the crash - enough to wince, even - he was also falling asleep.

"I promise."

That is an absolute vow, by god, even if it comes with absolute exhaustion catching up to him and him dozing off.

Edited (fixing word salad good grief) 2020-01-06 01:42 (UTC)

"Ooh, smuggle a smuggler's ship," Anakin remarked. But he could see where Obi-Wan was headed, not being filled with exhaustion himself.

He touched Obi-Wan's shoulder gently to make sure he was awake enough to move.

"Hey, Old Man, time for your nap. I highly recommend you sleep in your very uncomfortable looking bed and not here."

He... made some noise or another of acknowledgement that was honestly a growl, and took himself to bed where he properly went to sleep.

Sort of. He didn't sleep without dreams - they stayed vague more impressions and emotions, snippets of sound or sight, than a full recounting of events, or clear memory - but he was too exhausted not to sleep pretty deeply all the same.

He woke up to the feel of Anakin nearby, and disoriented. "Protect Luke" was far beyond the need for conscious thoughts, though his vague, restless, dreams reinforced that. That there was another Anakin, and he was here, was something he'd need to be far more oriented than he was in the instant of waking, to remember.

He startled, the chair flew off the trap door, the trap door flew up, his lightsaber went flying toward him as he sat up.

And, honestly, everything smaller than a person in the house levitated about 6 feet off the ground, and then slammed into the walls and floor.

Anakin had his air pods in, music turned up as loud as he could stand - the louder the music the more he could focus - and was engrossed in a game on his PS4. And very much ignoring the Force. He was also thinking about what he’d need to do if this visit turned into an extended stay.

But all that was thrown out the window when he was slammed back into the hard stone wall. His ears rung, but not from the music, he’d lost his air pods along the way from where he was sit to where he was now pinned against the wall. His vision blurred and turned double. And it took him a moment to breathe again.

The Force has his focus now. He cursed to himself, stretching out to find the source of the attack. But he was looking outside the hut, not inside.

There was nothing outside the hut, and inside it-

Well, at least Obi-Wan didn't stay disoriented -at least not that disoriented - for long. Once he was upright and the hilt of his lightsaber slapped into his palm, and he ignited it, he started to come back enough.

Enough to immediately quench the blade and see the wreckage and process-

This was bad.

He went to find Anakin, his own heart racing with both worry and lingering dream/memory/protect Luke adrenaline. "Anakin!"

Anakin dropped to his feet, and then his knees. He'd kept up training with his lightsaber back 'home', kept to a good regimented program of exercise and activity, but he wasn't training to fight anyone specifically. Not exactly ready for an attack.

He started to realize what was going on.

Well, he had only asked not to be stabbed, and Obi-Wan had kept that promise.

"Over here," he said, and then coughed. He pushed himself back so at least he was sitting up.

"You okay?"

"Are you out of your mind?" He looked down at his own hand, holding his lightsaber, and made a noise of disgust and dropped it before continuing on toward Anakin.

Then got hesitant and stopped just a bit away.

"I'm fine. I wasn't the one who-" He realized he didn't know. "I just woke up. Are you all right?"

Anakin winced, his head would be sore. And his shoulder. And arms. But that would pass, because if there ever was a good reason to rely on the Force, it was for fast healing. This wasn't the worst thing he'd experienced.

"Slammed into a wall." He finished for Obi-Wan. His friend might as well know the truth.

"I am fine. Just figure sitting here for a moment is the right thing to do." He pat the ground with his metal hand, it made a nice thudding sound. "Stop hanging back and join me over here. The sitting is fine."

"Absolutely not." Because he was still worried. Worried in part because he did it ( large part ) but now that he's awake he knows that Anakin-

This Anakin -

probably has neither the training nor experience to handle that sort of thing, and even if he did he'd been caught off guard.

He did, however, crouch down in front of Anakin, look carefully into his eyes without touching and then sort of... checked him over with Force sense gone oddly tentative to find out what the deal with and make sure, at least, nothing was outright broken.

"Is it the dust?" he asked, smiling. "You're on Tatooine, dust is going to get into everything. You should probably get over your Core-world snobbery and sit down, Obi-Wan. I've done this-" he gestured at the general area. "Before. Woke up and blew out all my windows. Do you know how expensive windows are to replace? I'm still working on replacing them- or I was. Now I'm here, just sitting on the floor- The dream was about Watto, not you."

For a moment he wasn't sure if he wanted to protest the remark about his Core World snobbery or accept the truth of it. Not that the dust bothered him, but he did hate being dirty with a passion that was well beyond logical, and the dust on Tatooine did irritate him.

He shook his head, but sat down beside Anakin. At a respectful difference.

"I hope you at least dreamed you threw Watto out one of the windows."

Anakin noticed the distance, but chose to take this as a win. He stayed where he was.

"I'm not mad," he said. "You want to tell me what happened?"

No, he did not want to talk about it.

However his guilt, both for slamming this Anakin into a wall and for everything Anakin remembered him doing, basic honesty, and sense of justice meant he did it, anyway.

"I slept more deeply than was wise. I woke up fairly disoriented, and aware that you were here but not which you, and remembering that I was supposed to be protecting Luke."

"This wasn't your fault," Anakin said.

"Just a few days ago... I... threw the galaxy into complete chaos, got my wife killed, endangered the life of my children, and destroyed every part of your life and forced you into hiding on the worst planet in the galaxy... and, I'm still out there... doing all that... One conversation with an interdimensional interloper isn't going to make that all okay or change your brain's knee-jerk reaction to sensing me."

"Cool motive. I still threw you into a wall." He used Anakin's own phrasing on purpose (no chance of the word 'cool' coming out of him, otherwise), but there was a flicker of a smile. He leaned his head against the wall behind him, and his breathing slowed down and physical tension eased. His emotions also, on the surface began to smooth out, some. "For the record, I would not overly mind Tatooine if everything, including me, were not continually filthy."

The rest of it's just isolation and danger.

For the moment, Anakin let Obi-Wan hide behind humor.

“Obi-Wan,” he said, with affected pity. “But you are so wrong. Tatooine is objectivity terrible in every way.”

He was not-

Yes, actually he was hiding behind humor.

He looked for an argument to refute Anakin with. Tatooine was blisteringly hot and bitingly cold in turns, dirty, rough, beyond dry, and nearly living thing, including (most) people, was hostile in the extreme, but-

"In most ways," he agreed. "But it does have some of the most glorious sunsets I've seen anywhere."

“You need to get out more,” he said dryly. Obi-Wan was not going to convince him Tatooine had admirable qualities.

Taking his own steadying breath, he reached into the Force and used it to summon his phone to him. He needed to see if it was okay, but not for the reason one might think.

“We need to figure out how I can control how I feel in the Force, so I don’t upset you again.”

He most certainly does not need to get out more.

Yet.

He leaned back to make sure he wasn't in the way of Anakin's flying... whatever that was, to him basically some sort of data pad, and watched him curiously.

"The fact that you aren't crawling with fear and hate really should have been enough. It just... wasn't." Should have been, though.

Anakin wasn’t sure if right now was the time to point out he was dealing with fear and hate, but just also along with a thousand other emotions. He’d just learned to control them so for the most part they didn’t overwhelm him and take control. That could be a later conversation.

“Brains are unkind like that. When something triggers certain memories, brains just kind of fall back on basic responses. I should have known this would happen.”

He fiddled with the phone some more and then said, “Good news, only the screen is broken. Everything else works.”

He won't be surprised when that later conversation happens, probably. If only because feeling a thing being quite literally consumed by them are different and -

He was sitting with Anakin and missed Anakin.

It was a very strange thing.

"Why is that good news?"

“Because screens are replaceable. The stuff I need is still there. Like my alarms, this is how I keep an approximate perception of the passage of time.”

He had noticed that Obi-Wan avoided the other thing he said completely. But he wasn’t outwardly denying anything he’d said. Small steps.

“We should check your other things, see if you broke anything necessary for living on this trash heap.”

He would like to deny it, but he truly couldn't. Especially not when he'd been deeply enough asleep that he was acting without any truly conscious input.

What he needed to do was figure out how to stop it happening again.

"I'll check the cellar. There's nothing up here that's truly necessary." The cellar's his source of water and, to a large degree, power. "And I'd like to argue with you about the sate of this place, but it is terrible." It had been abandoned for a long time before he'd moved in, and it hadn't been good to start with.

He sighs, stands, and heads toward the cellar. "You should eat."

The admission about this place being terrible made Anakin smile. This was a trash heap.

He almost offered to follow Obi-Wan down to the cellar, but held back when Obi-Wan told him to eat, catching the instruction for what it was - an excuse for some space.

So he let Obi-Wan have it. He was surprised to find that it stung a little, but he couldn’t blame the older man. Obi-Wan was expecting peace and quiet on Tatooine, and instead got another version of that kid Qui-Gon had left him.

Anakin found a meal pack in the kitchen, but instead of sitting idly while he ate, he walked around picking up the things that had been shoved around. He sorted them into three piles: the things unbroken, the things that could be fixed, and the unfixable. It was a good way to pass the time while he waited or Obi-Wan to come back up.

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