darkforcerising | OPEN POST

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.

What he expected on Tatooine was not peace and quiet. What he expected to find was the sort of absolute isolation that went far beyond a lack of company, and would have made him worry for his long term sanity if he were emotionally aware enough to do so.

Jedi may shun attachments, and certainly their communal upbringing prevents attaching deeply to individuals, but it was still communal living and it was very difficult to be truly alone when you're surrounded by other Force Sensitives. Not that he hasn't done solo missions, or paired ones, or traveled, but this wais none of those things.

This? Was the rest of his life.

For all his response to Anakin's presence in the force when he first woke, and all that he did need some space just to breathe, he was more comforted by the feel of Anakin upstairs than not.

He came back upstairs and found Anakin and the piles, once he'd finished putting things back to rights. "I forgot one very important thing here. The heater. Did you manage to find it?"

“Unfortunately,” Anakin said, and he reached into the ‘fixable’ pile and hauled it out.

“We can fix it, but some essential components were damaged that will need to be replaced. Gotta track down some Jawas.”

He is forty years old.

He is a Jedi. He is a Master. He is a General. He has sat upon the twice damned Council.

He has led his troops into battle after battle after battle. He has been captured. He has been tortured.

He has handled all of those things with an impressive amount of equanimity. He just about, almost, wants to pick the heater up and throw it through the nearest wall.

A deep breath and a moment of silence (and honestly glaring at the thing like it was doing this to him instead of the other way around).

"Right. Well, it could be worse, but we're in for an uncomfortable night." Tracking down some Jawas was doable. Doing it before dark? Less likely.

Anakin couldn’t help raising his eyebrows while watching - or feeling - the scene unfolding before him.

“Probably a bad time to point out the bottle of alcohol is also broken...”

"Bad idea to drink when we're likely to freeze, anyway. Worse idea for me to get into the habit of drinking every time I experience an emotion I don't like."

He had... some degree of self-awareness? Limited, but some.

He looked at the piles another moment, then rubbed his eyes again. "If you'll help me move what can't be fixed out, we can come up with a plan for the next several hours. Lighting a fire in here is probably a terrible plan." Mostly because he was frustrated enough to take some mild satisfaction in imagining burning the whole thing down.

He was recovering but the ... prickly irritation of frustration at himself was lingering and likely to continue to for a bit. "Did you at least manage to eat?"

"Ya," Anakin barked a laugh. "You'd be perpetually drunk." That was probably a thought he should have kept to himself.

He swiftly got to work moving out what couldn't be fixed. Though while he was doing that, he made a new pile of 'parts can be salvaged from these for later use,' also known as the 'Anakin needs to fiddle with something or he'll drive friends batty.'

"We're going to be fine," he said. "I once spent an entire night by myself out in the wastes before I left this rock." Meaning, back when he was a slave.

"I would not," he said, very precisely, "be perpetually drunk" A short pause as he picked up and started to work at moving things out of the hut and out of their way. "I would be drunk."

Briefly, probably, unless being drunk led to more emotions and then-

Anakin may have had a point.

"At one point during my conversation with Yoda, after watching the security feed from the temple, I told Yoda I should have died before I brought you to the Jedi. ...I still can't make myself believe that. Can't make myself wish you'd stayed in slavery."

Anakin cringed. That must not have been easy to watch. He almost said he was sorry again, but if he said sorry every time Obi-Wan relived everything, he'd be perpetually saying sorry. And Obi-Wan might as well stay perpetually drunk.

"It's not a dichotomy, you know," he said. "Those didn't have to be my only two options... You can also think taking me out of slavery was right, and that I failed..." Then he said more quietly, "That's how I think about it."

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