Archive of Our Own

War, Obi-Wan knows, has a particular and violent way of rearranging a man to fit its purposes. The priority of function. The muffling of the psyche. The retraction of the self. He worries that his men have never had the time to arrange themselves in their own fashion, in accordance with their own desires, their own internal lives. And so when the Force calls him to leave, he leaves alone.

The homestead is quiet in the dark hours of the morning, the sort of quiet that lingers at the end of an exhale. The white domes of the hovels shine dully in starlight, pale moons half-buried in the earth. Nothing moves except the sand in the wind.

Obi-Wan stands beside the speeder for a long moment, staring out at the land, the tiny blinking lights of moisture harvesters in the distance, feeling the warm basket of Ghost Company’s sleeping minds ebbing and humming in the Force. He turns the shape of the place over in his mind, allows himself to think of it as home, allows himself to think of it as somewhere he may never return to – feeling a sharp pang of anticipatory grief – then releases comfort and fear both, almost a shove how forcefully he unhands them.

He climbs in the speeder, throws his pack on the seat beside him. The low vibration of the engine is more sensation than sound, like a tremor. Obi-Wan wonders if his men can feel it in their beds. If Cody is coming awake somewhere in the complex – thick and foggy with sleep, lifting his head from the pillow, the creases of it pressed into his face –  pushing up from his stomach to his elbows, not sure what’s disturbed him. Obi-Wan hopes that he isn’t. He hopes that they’re all peacefully asleep – as peacefully as they can be, with the lives they’ve lived. They deserve it. They deserve to land quietly here, to live quietly here. He’ll fight the war in their stead.

The speeder turns away from home, and he goes alone into the desert.

*

The difficulty of a Force ghost is that you cannot hear when they arrive. The quality of silence in the room changes, the way that silence is different between two people than it is wrapped around one, but unless you know to expect the arrival of a non-corporeal being, it’s hard to know what such a change signifies. And so it is the first time Qui-Gon comes to him – he is at his desk in his quarters on board the Negotiator, reviewing after-action reports for Umbara, and he feels the change – stiffens, half his mind splitting to danger and the other half paralyzed, confused, like an animal scenting an unfamiliar predator on the wind – and then Qui-Gon says, “Padawan,” and the danger disperses.

Obi-Wan turns to him. He has been reading reports for hours, men’s lives reduced to numbers and figures, and his mind and heart are both exhausted under the weight of terrors. He feels as if he has been pushing his way uphill through an avalanche, and now here is this beloved person, a faint blue glow in the room which has begun to feel like a mausoleum, and all Obi-Wan can think is that he had forgotten how large a man his master was. How much space he takes up, even sitting.

Obi-Wan joins him on the floor without thinking, legs folding beneath him in meditation pose. A long-dormant instinct in him wants for Qui-Gon to reach over and tug his padawan braid, teasing and fond, like he used to do. But he has no padawan braid, and whatever this vision of Qui-Gon is, he is not really here. If he were here, if he were alive, Obi-Wan would feel their bond.

And he doesn’t. But he wants to, with a sudden vehemence of longing that surprises him. “Master,” he says. “How are you – How is this possible?”

Qui-Gon smiles softly. It’s the same serene smile that he used to give his padawan in life – the one that signifies devious happenings behind the eyes. “Death is no excuse to cease learning,” he says. “The Force and I have been very busy.”

“Busy?” Obi-Wan echoes, bewildered but also charmed in a way that only Qui-Gon has ever been able to charm him. “Haven’t you heard you’re meant to rest in death, Master?”

Qui-Gon says, “Bosh.” It’s a word, Obi-Wan has always believed, that he picked up from Dooku, delivered always with the mischievous lilt of a youngling testing out a new swear. “There’s work to be done. The jedi have a war on, or so I’m told.”

Obi-Wan lowers his gaze, feeling chastised. “Master – ”

“Never mind my opinions on the matter.” Qui-Gon reaches out as if he wants to touch him, then seems to remember he can’t. “We can haggle over it when you are old and gray and join me in the afterlife. For now, we must focus our efforts, if lives are to be saved.”

Purpose zings back into Obi-Wan’s mind. “Lives? Whose lives?”

“I have visited the Whills,” Qui-Gon says. “I’ve wrestled with the departed shades of dark jedi, defeated them until they were willing to converse with me. I know the identity of the Sith you seek. But I know also that if we move too quickly, we will cause more destruction, more death and more suffering than if we move not at all.”

“Whose lives?” Obi-Wan asks again. He has the awful sense that Qui-Gon is speaking of persons very dear and very specific to the two of them.

Qui-Gon, as he always does when his padawan is truly desperate for an answer, does not give him one. “The dreams you’ve been having. The visions. Things are almost aligned, now, so that those visions are forced to come to pass.”

“Master,” Obi-Wan begs. “Who – ”

“All the jedi,” Qui-Gon tells him at last. “And all the clones.”

Obi-Wan holds his master’s hard blue gaze. He feels suddenly like a man at the center of a bombing raid, people screaming, the air thick with smoke and a city on fire around him, too afraid to take a step in any direction lest the new patch of ground be more perilous than the last. Qui-Gon’s eyes hold his like the open door to a shelter, a square of light far away through the rubble. He’ll be safe if he runs to it, if he makes it there, but first he has to be brave enough to try.

Ahsoka, he makes himself think, decisively. Anakin at fifteen, grumbling and dark, roused too early to meditate in the Room of a Thousand Fountains, beset upon by a herd of unruly younglings. Tiny voices reciting the Jedi Code and tiny hands on the hilts of training sabers. Waxer and Boil knocking helmets before a drop, green Twi’lek painted on white plastisteel. How Gearshift’s hands shook, shiny and mottled with burn scars, when Obi-Wan promised to keep his injuries a secret, promised he wouldn’t let him be decommissioned. Casualties: 1,084. Master Yoda bickering with Artoo. Longshot on the floor, one leg bent and one outstretched, how he always likes to lie down when everyone else is sitting. 718 dead, 366 wounded. One face and a million different men behind the eyes. Hands reaching down to him. Cody.

“Tell me,” he says to his master’s ghost. “Tell me everything.”

*

Love is a constant terror of loss, Obi-Wan instructs Anakin, once. This is why, when jedi love, we must do so without possession. To try to keep something is to be afraid, always, of losing it. To be more taken with the fear than with the love. We must accept that those we love belong no more to us than to the Force. When it is time to let them pass, we must do so. We must surrender to it. We must not fight it.

He's twenty-seven when he says this. He’s had vague nightmares of war but no real knowledge of it. He hasn’t yet taken charge of a quarter of a million lives, hasn’t locked eyes with Cody and heard him say General, say Obi-Wan. At that moment he has no idea what it’s like to love the way his padawan loves, greedily, with grasping hands, desperate to see the depth of his hunger reflected back at him. He has loved, Qui-Gon and Siri and Quinlan and Bant, but these have all been loves that he was able to make himself ignore.

He has no idea, yet, what it’s like to feel love that he cannot ignore.

And even still – in this moment, in the gentle air of the early morning, fountains burbling around them and the Temple lifting itself from sleep, his padawan frowning up at him with freshly-shorn hair and a child’s instinctive defiance – he feels like a hypocrite.

*

On Utapau, they run out of time.

Obi-Wan has just finished Grievous. The strange, earthy smell of Grievous’ burnt flesh is still thick in his nose, in his mouth, the air in the canyon too still to dissipate it, and he has just begun to turn his mind back to his men, to Ghost Company waiting somewhere in the cliffs above him, when his old master cries out in his mind, words unformed, no more than a sudden slap of alarm, and suddenly Obi-Wan knows. Through furtive and dedicated study they’ve learned of the inhibitor chips, learned of Order 66 and the plan to betray the jedi, but they have not yet found a solution. Obi-Wan hoped they’d have more time, to find a solution.

He knows now that they do not.

And so panting, lungs rough from the fight, Obi-Wan reaches out through the Force to find Cody just as he answers his comm. Just as he says, startled, Chancellor, and the Sith lord opens his mouth, and Obi-Wan reaches into Cody’s mind and grabs. And reaches into the minds of the rest of his men, all of them that he can reach, the 144 men of Ghost Company deployed here with him, and he does not have time to be elegant or gentle but he hopes he has time to apologize for it, later. He’s nearly empty of energy, but he forces what dregs he has left out of his body – knees buckling, collapsing to the dusty platform as if dropped. And with harpoons speared through each of their minds, he grabs tight to the wires and pulls, and holds them with him.

Execute Order 66, Palpatine demands, and Cody says, What?

*

Obi-Wan does not return to his body for quite some time. He remains aware of things only through his men, and even then the contained activity of their minds seems quiet in comparison to the screaming storm of Order 66, trying to batter through his shields.

…go, he hears in a whisper. the general…where…we gotta go…

Briefly, through the unfamiliar frame of a visor, he sees himself slumped on the platform, his arm tossed over his chest, mouth open slightly like he’s been knocked unconscious, sees Cody crouch beside him, ripping off his glove to put two fingers to his pulse. He can’t feel the fingers but he can feel the pliant hot skin of his throat, the fluttery stutter of his own heartbeat, exterior.

…alive! he hears, from a great distance, like a talking wind.

Later, he’ll realize that living inside the web of Ghost Company’s minds in these terrible hours spared him from the psychic blow, the deaths of thousands of jedi. That even as he was shielding his men from their inhibitor chips, they were shielding him from the loss of his sanity. The loss of his people. He’s no idea what he felt like to other survivors, in that state – to Ahsoka, to Yoda. To Anakin. If he seemed dead or alive or something else.

What he knows is the white noise of a hundred voices, words droning like rain. The kaleidoscopic troop cabin of a LAAT viewed through two dozen sets of eyes.

…where, someone saying.

…not back to the ship, someone saying.

…safe, someone saying.

…not safe, someone saying.

His own warm shoulder under someone else’s hand. Sawbones. Sawbones’ hand. The thin skin of his eyelid, himself peeling it back like a butterfly’s wing, himself shining a light in his own pupil, Obi-Wan’s pupil and Sawbones’ light, Sawbones saying, no idea, no karking idea, di’nila jetii, what the hell’s going on…

…bad, vod.

…something really really bad.

The hiss and chatter of comms. Their six LAATs drifting in and out of tight formation, not sure where to go, uncertainty in their flying. His mind stretched like when he’d been chained up in that arena on Geonosis, the tug on his shoulders, that same pull in his head. Sawbones swearing, shouting for medical equipment he doesn’t have, need a full karking medbay, commander, i’ve never seen brainwaves do this, Obi-Wan coming back into his body for a brief moment like a toe alighting on water and then yanking himself out again, too cold, too much pain.

General. Cody’s voice. Cody’s panic, a low discreet tug in his chest. General. Obi-Wan, please. You have to come back. This is not a good time to be out of commission.

For a moment, Obi-Wan uses Cody to find his center. He has never intruded in his men’s minds, outside of one mortally wounded shiny begging for peace on the battlefield. So much of them belongs to other people already, so much of themselves they are unable to keep, and he has always refused to take anything more. To invite himself into homes where he may not be wanted.

But this is a desperate moment, a moment which can barely draw air pressed as it is between horrible futures, and Obi-Wan needs Cody to understand.

So he turns his attention away from the shields, just for a moment – only a moment – and grabs onto Cody like a drowning man reaching blindly out of the water.

Cody grabs him in return, though he doesn’t know he’s doing it. And Obi-Wan only has an instant, barely time enough to communicate one image, one idea, so he draws up a dream he had a week ago – himself riding a great lizard on the edge of a cliff, Cody ordering guns aimed in his direction, the flash of heat lightning when he’s staring down the black mouth of the barrel and knows, the same way you know when there’s an intruder in your house, that his second in command is not himself. He pushes the dream-moment across the bridge between his mind and Cody’s, fumbling in his exhaustion, and he hopes that his commander understands.

He doesn’t hear Cody’s response, if there is one. He’s too far gone for hearing. But there is a touch – a hand on his cheek, heavy and comforting, like a tooka cat curled up on his lap. His cheek under a hand. The limp weight of his head in his own palm.

Love, declared like an oath, and he’s not sure who it’s coming from.

*

Days later, his men relate to him the story as they know it.

“You were right on the edge there for a while, sir,” Sawbones begins, expression chiding. It’s on his orders that Obi-Wan has been allowed out of bed, been allowed to hobble through the depressed trenches of the complex supported by Cody and Waxer, to join the rest of them in the courtyard where the bonfire burns. “What you did, taking on a neural load like that…it almost wiped you out, and there was nothing I could do. There’s nothing about it in any of the jetii books I’ve read.”

“It’s a very old skill,” Obi-Wan says. His voice comes out as a rasp, and a man at his left elbow – Flak, he thinks, one of the newer transfers – hands him a canteen. He takes it gratefully, takes a sip, aware of a hundred gazes on him. When he lowers the canteen Cody has a hand on his back, steadying him as he continues, “An ancient skill, lost to the Order. It used to be called battle meditation.”

“Battle meditation?” Sawbones echoes, but Cody orders gently, “Later, vod.”

Obi-Wan holds Sawbones’ eyes for a moment, assuring him without words that he’ll answer all his questions, and across from him Boil’s saying, fast, like ripping off a bandage, “From what we could figure in the LAAT, listening to comms chatter – we’re the only company in the GAR that didn’t turn around and kill our jedi. We heard some of them talking. Men we knew. Bly, Scythe. Rex. None of them…”

Waxer squeezes Boil’s arm with a swell of sympathy that Obi-Wan can feel, letting his riduur know it’s alright to fall silent. “None of them sounded like themselves,” he finishes for him. “None of them were acting like it was anything out of the ordinary.”

“That, plus what you showed me,” Cody says, behind him, “was enough for us to figure out about the chips. Bones did a scan on Longshot – ”

“I volunteered,” Longshot pipes in.

“ – and Crys rigged up a device to fry all our chips in one go, with a targeted EMP. So they’re still in there, but at least now they’re just hunks of metal.”

Vaguely, the way islands of clarity sometimes rise out of a fever, Obi-Wan remembers that moment. The sudden release of pressure, air rushing into his lungs like they’d been re-inflated after a collapse. He remembers sobbing, coolwater cloth on his face, his men closing ranks around him instinctively, protective, like on a battlefield except how they’d been turned inward, toward him, instead of out.

“I knew,” he admits. He cannot stand to lie to them now, not even by omission. “I’d found out a few weeks prior. I was working on a way to disable the chips, but I thought I’d have more time. I’m sorry that I…that I didn’t tell you. You deserved to know.”

Cody’s hand slides over his back to his shoulder, squeezes with an echo of the sympathy Waxer felt for Boil. “No sorrys, sir,” he says. “You saved us. You could’ve run back to Coruscant. You could’ve gone to try and save your people. But you saved us.”

From a certain point of view, Obi-Wan thinks, it’s an indictment. Maybe he should’ve run back to the Temple. Maybe he should’ve blown the whistle sooner and let the Order do what they would with the clones. Maybe that’s what a good jedi would’ve done. But if that’s the case, then Obi-Wan has no interest in being a good jedi.

I love you, he wants to tell them all, around that fire, ash swirling into the flat Tatooine sky. The darkness outside this circle of warmth is absolute, they’re going to have to find their way back to their hovels with touch alone, hands skating on the sandblasted walls. If any one of them leaned back they’d be out of the light, and Obi-Wan has the urgent sense that they would tumble forever out of his reach, that he needs to hold on tight. I love each of you, he wants to say. You are what holds me. I could not let go of you if I tried.

Nonetheless. Radically changed though their circumstances may be, Obi-Wan will not invite himself into a home where he is not wanted.

So he clears his throat, and says instead, “I will always save you. So long as it remains in my power to do so, I will do everything I can. I swear to you.”

For a long minute, it’s silent.

Then one of the men stands up. Gearshift.

He comes around the fire, past brothers who turn their eyes to watch him pass. They’re all in blacks, layered in rags they’ve scrounged from abandoned homesteads against the cold blue of the desert night, but Gearshift pushes his hood down and pushes his cloak off and pulls the collar of his blacks down, kneeling in front of Obi-Wan. “That oath’s a two-way street, General,” he says, and takes Obi-Wan’s hand, and presses it to his bare skin.

It's rough under Obi-Wan’s touch, slippery and rigid, almost like plastisteel. He recalls abruptly the sick droning exhaustion of sitting at Gearshift’s bedside for hours, for days, refusing to budge until the falsified bill of health went through and came back stamped, like if he turned his back for a second someone would show up and take him. Gearshift’s heart beats under his palm, like touching a hand through a sheet. Cody’s grip hasn’t left his shoulder. Crys sits down on his other side, blocking the breeze.

“I made a mistake,” Obi-Wan says, “when I made a web of your minds. I’d never tried it. Now there are…echoes.” His thumb traces the edge of Gearshift’s scar, where plastisteel turns to warm, sweat-sticky skin. “I’m afraid we’re still all tangled together. Our minds.”

“There are worse things to be,” Crys says easily.

“Yeah,” someone calls out, across the fire, “like mind-controlled!”

“Or Imperials!” someone else suggests, spitting at the end.

“Or dead!” is the last addition, and Obi-Wan feels their laughter like he feels the bonfire. A sudden flare of light in a vast field of dark. Gearshift’s chest shaking under his hand.

*

As soon as he’s able, Obi-Wan begins the painful work of closing his bond with Anakin.

Breaking it is not an option. Ki Adi Mundi explained to him, after he lost Qui-Gon, that there was nothing so traumatic as for a padawan to lose a master, or a master to lose a padawan, because bonds could not be broken by death. When a jedi you shared a bond with died, a part of you went with them – was torn from you, and would forever be torn from you until you passed into the Force to retrieve it.

A bond is like a feeling, Master Mundi said. It cannot be changed unless your feelings are changed. And this is not so easy as you might think.

They came to Tatooine, Cody tells him, because Anakin won’t think to look here. He won’t want to return. Obi-Wan knows he’s right, that his padawan will never set foot on this planet again even if he does learn that his old master is here, but he cannot help but feel his presence in the mornings, in the sunrise, when the twin suns are racing each other over the horizon and the light is so variegated that it seems to bleed in from another place entirely, another universe outside of their own. He takes himself swaying and weak up to the edge of the compound, where stairs carry him to the level of the ground, and exists in the shallow quiet until the clones on patrol find him and take him back to his sickbed, and in those minutes he can feel his padawan, through time and space, doing the same. Small and angry and too smart for his own good, a slave, gazing out over the rooftops of Mos Espa. Freckles on a child’s face, sharp blue eyes squinted in the sun and a grown man looming over battle plans, his own padawan at his shoulder, twisted up always with emotions that Obi-Wan didn’t understand well enough to help him untangle.

I should’ve been sooner, he wants to tell Anakin across the bond, but doesn’t. He knows it’s too late. Even if Anakin could hear him through the roaring noise of grief and hatred, he wouldn’t listen. And no matter how much Obi-Wan yearns to, he cannot reach through time. “I should’ve been sooner,” he says, only to himself.

“Sir?” Trapper says, behind him.

Obi-Wan turns. Trapper and Eyeball, on patrol, standing behind him with their DC-15s in their arms. “Nothing,” he says. “You’re here to return me to my prison cell, I assume?”

Eyeball looks alarmed, but Trapper rolls his eyes. Trapper’s always seen right through Obi-Wan’s bullpfassk. “It’s for your own good, sir,” he says, giving Obi-Wan a hand up. “You stop listening to Sawbones, he’ll knock you out.”

Obi-Wan smiles fleetingly. “You sound like you speak from experience.”

Trapper smiles back. Obi-Wan can actually see his smile, since none of them wear their buckets anymore, around the homestead. He’s been continually fascinated to discover all the tiny things he’d been missing, distracted by war – how Trapper’s smile is slightly off-center, shows just a sliver of his top teeth.

“I do,” he says.

*

They’ve figured out a system, now, for going into Tosche Station to get supplies. A few of them scrubbed their armor clean of paint, and it doesn’t matter that they can’t access their GAR credit accounts because the people here are terrified of the Imps, they’ll give a stormtrooper whatever they ask for. None of them like it, but until they figure out a better way it’s all they’ve got.

So Sawbones has a pretty well-stocked medbay going in his hovel now, but Obi-Wan knows that in the early days he didn’t. He had a medkit. Couldn’t even give you fluids, he says, harsh and dark, like he blames himself for it.

Obi-Wan remembers someone tipping water into his mouth, remembers coming awake in a shock just to choke on it. Drifting for days, here in this dry little room and at the same time in a vast gray space between sleeping and waking. Too weak to move his lips, too weak to move his throat to swallow. Cody had helped him, he thinks. Cody chewing wordlessly at his bedside, some sort of fruit, sour. Passing it into Obi-Wan’s mouth, his lips apologetic. Fingers stroking the outside of his throat, coaxing the muscles. What a strange thing to know. What an intimate thing. The taste of someone else’s saliva, mixed with food. Only the man himself is ever meant to know that.

“You did what you could,” Obi-Wan assures Sawbones, hand on the curve of his neck, on the nape of it. “You got me through. You always do.”

Sawbones nods, gripping Obi-Wan’s forearm. Then nods again, and pulls his hand away.

Obi-Wan suffers the loss of touch with a pang, but doesn’t let it show on his face, doesn’t let it bleed past his shields. Only tucks his hand back into his sleeve, accepting it.

*

There has always been an emptiness in Obi-Wan too big for any one person to fill. He used to think that was part of what it meant to be a jedi, to care for all things equally, to look upon the galaxy and its trillions of flawed unholy denizens with compassion – that it was a great signifier that he was where he was meant to be, doing what the Force intended. He understands now that his emptiness is not selfless, but greedy. He is greedy for love. He is ravenous for it, a glut. Meditate though he may, whiling away his days in the rocky hills to the east of the homestead, and keep their minds from touching his though he may, he cannot keep from touching theirs.

A constellation of lives interlinked, like a star map laid out below him. Waxer and Boil in the greenhouse, sticky with humidity, an easy familiar heat, both of them laughing even as Boil backs Waxer against a table and kicks between his legs, hands on his belt. Wooley fiddling with his hearing aid on his way from one hovel to another, tromping through the trenches, muttering swears he can’t hear under his breath. Cody returning from town, a low buzz of longterm frustration, tugging off armor that’s not his, that feels wrong, even as he’s hopping out of the speeder. Longshot and Eyeball coming up the stairs from the courtyard like emerging out of the earth, Eyeball tripping Longshot on the top step then reaching out to catch him by the back of his blacks, laughing, Longshot shoving him and grumbling as they trudge over to the speeder to unload. Wooley bumping into Trapper on his way out of the kitchen hut and letting Trapper coax him to bend his head, helping him with the hearing aid. Boil coming against the hard line of Waxer’s thigh, sooner than intended, hand still wrapped around his riduur in his pants, biting a curse against the salt-sweat curve of Waxer’s neck and squeezing too hard, an accident, but it’s enough to pull Waxer over the edge with him. Cody back in his hovel, tearing off his boots, throwing them against the door. Someone knocking. Sawbones. He ducks into the hovel already sighing Kote, tugs Cody forward to bury his face against his stomach – and Obi-Wan averts his gaze. Averts his mind. It’s the middle of the day, he doesn’t think Cody’s the sort to indulge in anything lurid while the suns are out, but this comforting sort of love feels almost worse to steal.

At night it’s harder to keep himself away from them. As he sleeps he passes from hovel to hovel, most of them packed tight with piles of clones, piles of blankets and bedding on the floor because the cots aren’t big enough to accommodate more than two. They’re like rabbits in warrens, nestled together, the cloud of their body heat. An odd foot resting flat on the floor. An elbow stuck at an uncomfortable angle. A face tucked into the hollow of an armpit, a hand fisted in thick curly hair. The gentle eddies of their dreams, the sudden snarl of a nightmare, a whirlpool grabbing him to drag him in. He watches battles through their eyes. Sees brothers die through their eyes. Spots the flash of his own lightsaber across a dark, raining battlefield, in the space between one droid and the next, and feels a stab of hope so pure it shocks him awake in his own bed. He knows he won’t sleep again after that, too unsettled, like his legs have been knocked out from under him. Instead he splashes water on his face, the same water he splashed on his face the night before still in the basin, lukewarm and fragrant with his own musk, and goes out into the desert.

His strength has almost all come back, now. He doesn’t sway on his feet, doesn’t wish for a supportive hand at his back. Well. Perhaps the latter, yet. But not because he feels he might fall. Only because he feels cold.

Far on the other side of the homestead, he can feel the two troopers on patrol checking on the LAATs, hidden under sand tarps in shallow graves. And below him in the complex, the grainy impressions of motion in the dark. Two troopers moving together, fast, furtive, like they had to when they were soldiers, in shared bunks, in communal showers. Teeth on his chin. Obi-Wan puts his fingers on his beard and closes his eyes, trying to detangle himself. A third trooper comes awake beside them – Crys, half-awake, grumbling, keep it down, you karking horndogs. A hand on his waist, tugging him into the heat of two other bodies, a laugh bubbling up in his chest, and it comes out Obi-Wan’s lips. He presses the back of his hand to his mouth, startled. Heart pounding.

Eventually, the sky begins to lighten. Dawn on Tatooine happens slowly and then all at once – Obi-Wan knows he has an hour of slowly before all at once catches up with him.

He takes his hand away from his mouth, where it’s been pressed for a long time, cracking his jaw, and straightens. Sand cascades away from the hem of his robes. Carefully, so as not to disturb him, he draws his mind back from the sanctuary of Cody asleep, out of bed, resisting the bodily urge to stop and press his face between Cody’s bare shoulders, across the bare stone floor, slipping through the door to the hovel.

Up on the mesa, moisture harvesters blinking on the edge of dawn, Obi-Wan takes a deep breath and lets it out. His lungs shudder like he’s been crying, though he hasn’t.

What he’s done, he realizes, is build an entire life on foundations which are not himself, but his purpose. He has removed himself from the equation. He’s constructed for himself a small habitat of small things, his lightsaber and his robes and a few friendly tomes he carries with him, the river stone Qui-Gon gave him as a boy, his most comfortable pair of boots. This habitat was enough to sustain him while his mind turned itself to purpose. To the Order. To his padawan, his missions. The war.

Now his purpose is gone, and his small world feels like a pittance. Even the Force cannot give him enough. What he wants, what he needs is to give himself over to his men. To let them be his purpose, loving them, caring for them, protecting them.

But he knows he’s not meant for that. He’s not meant for private joys, private triumphs. A jedi is meant to serve all, not only a few. And besides. Obi-Wan is not aliit, no matter how much he might want to be, and he’s not their general any longer. He cannot ask them to carry his burdens with him.

*

A coded comm is sent to Bail Organa two months after Order 66, apprising him of Obi-Wan’s survival. Ghost Company’s survival. Three days after they receive a coded comm in return. Obi-Wan is the only one who knows the cypher; he reads it back to the gathered men with a few lines omitted.

Urgent mission, the lines say. Donovia. Suspected padawan survivors. High priority, high risk. Yours if you want it. But you must leave now.

Obi-Wan knows that if he asked, Cody would accompany him. Any clone who it was put to would accompany him. But to ask them to return to a war which they’ve just escaped, which in some way claimed the lives of a million of their brothers, to act as if he’s still their commanding officer – it’s unconscionable. He refuses to even entertain the idea.

So he steals away in the night.

Though they’ve been imitating Imperials at Tosche Station for many months now, the real Empire has not yet extended its reach this far into Hutt space. There are no Imperial checkpoints while Obi-Wan boards his speeder in Mos Eisley, while he secures passage to Donovia on a Pyke spice freighter. He passes into their hold with a dozen other drifters, his lightsaber still concealed beneath his robes, unmolested.

In the deserts of Tatooine there is a kind of silence which is clean and wide, which seems to exist on a plane outside the rest of the universe. One can go days without hearing an engine, no ships pass overhead, no speeders zipping through the vista. Obi-Wan has gotten used to the quiet. The gentle pressure of his men’s minds gathered around his. Muffled thump of boots on the ground, twilit many-legged creature of the company running PT around the perimeter at dusk. Distant clank of tools on the moisture harvesters. Voices rising like a flock of birds bursting into the air, then falling again, laughter settling.

After two months in such an aural landscape, the constant noise of the spice freighter is nearly overwhelming. Obi-Wan finds a spot in the rear of the hold, near the rattling airlock ramp, where everyone else is nervous to sit – needing the space, the distance from unfamiliar beings – and leans himself against the hull wall. It’s too dangerous, even here, to fold himself into meditation pose, lest someone recognize it, but it’s safe enough to close his eyes, juddering along with the metal behind his back, and look inward.

Breathe as if you are in deep water, Qui-Gon used to tell him, when he was very young and still struggling with meditation. It doesn’t make any sense, from the outside, but Obi-Wan understands it. His master’s low voice, the comforting strength of it. Water cool and dark. The infinitesimal motions of the tide at the bottom of the ocean. A geologic breath.

When he reaches the seabed of his waking dreams, he is not alone. And it is not the Force, or his master, that’s with him.

*

“Never stops, here,” Bail says, when he catches Obi-Wan watching the rain.

It’s pouring so hard that water glances back up from the ground like mist. Donovians hurry through the streets outside the bar with their heads ducked under telescoping hoods, not stopping to talk, not lingering. There’s an air of secrecy to this whole place, like the weather is a curtain pulled down over it.

“The padawans,” he says to Bail, turning his back to the door. “Tell me.”

“You should know something first.” Bail searches his face for a moment, hesitating, then picks up his drink and drains it fast before he continues, “Padmé came to us, during the collapse. Pregnant with Anakin’s children.”

Obi-Wan had known, though he hadn’t wanted to. It had made him feel like a hypocrite to know – both because he should’ve said something to the Council, and because he knew what it was, at that point, to have your soul tether itself unbidden to another. His silence was a surrender. An admission of defeat. His padawan deserved better. “Is she alive,” he asks Bail. “Padmé. Is she alright.”

Bail gives him a long look that needs no translation.

“She had twins,” he says, when he looks away. “A boy and a girl. Luke and Leia. She told us that Anakin wouldn’t know. He thought it was only one. So we’re keeping them together. Breha and I will raise them.”

“Luke and Leia,” Obi-Wan echoes. Anakin’s children. His padawan’s children. He pushes down the urge to tug at the cat’s cradle of his bond with his men and says, “You and Breha will be wonderful parents.”

Bail smiles softly, sad around the eyes. “Thank you. Now. The padawans.”

*

Padawans, it turns out, is not an appropriate descriptor. When Obi-Wan arrives at the coordinates Bail provides, soaked to the bone, robes plastered heavy to his skin, he finds only one padawan – a red-haired boy he’s never seen before – and a familiar youngling.

“Grogu.” He’s unable to keep the fondness out of his voice when he sees him, but at this juncture it hardly matters. There are no other masters here to chide him.

An hour later, as Obi-Wan sits on the bed in the small drafty safehouse with Grogu sleeping soundly in the crook of his arm, Cal glares at him from the kitchen and demands, “You want to take us where?”

“Tatooine,” Obi-Wan repeats, with a shade of apology. “For now, it’s the safest place. It’s the only safe place I know.”

Cal glares some more. He feels like an open wound in the Force, tender and bloody. Every small motion Obi-Wan has made towards him has been rebuffed tenfold.

He’s not hurt by it. A master should never let themselves be hurt by the untrained actions of a padawan. And besides, he understands. “I can help you,” he offers, with a vague gesture towards his own head. “I know what it’s like, to lose a master. I can’t heal the wound, but I can show you how to dress it.”

Cal doesn’t say anything. His jaw is set so tightly it looks painful.

“You don’t trust me,” Obi-Wan realizes.

Cal’s gaze jolts away. Obi-Wan is reminded, abruptly, of Anakin.

After a minute, the padawan says, “There was a knight who found me on Bracca. Trilla. I’d met her before, so I trusted her. But she was working for the Empire. She took me captive.” He jerks his chin toward Grogu. “That’s where I found him. Locked up in the hold on her ship. She’d got him too.”

“You escaped.” Obi-Wan can sense the trapped feeling, still bottled up in Cal’s thin chest. The panic, unreleased. He’s like a time bomb. Like a can of fizz, shaken violently.

“Yeah,” Cal says, and doesn’t elaborate. “Jedi are falling left and right. Dying and going over to the other side.” He hesitates for a moment, then says defensively, daring Obi-Wan to prove him right, “I don’t trust anyone old enough to hide their mind from me.”

Obi-Wan lets the declaration hang for a moment, lets the words carry weight like Cal wants them to. Then he says, “If inviting you into my mind is what it takes to make you feel safe, then I’ll do it gladly. But I must warn you, it won’t be pleasant.”

Before he can list all the reasons it won’t be – his extant bond with Anakin, the ragged tear where his own master used to be, the prophetic dreams he’s been having since he was in the crèche and the raging attacks of Sith he has weathered since he was a padawan himself – there is a knock at the door.

It is not a friendly knock. It’s made even more unfriendly by the fact that neither of them sensed anyone approaching. Grogu is still asleep in Obi-Wan’s arms.

The visitor does not knock twice. Their second blow splinters the door.

A red lightsaber glows through the wreckage.

*

…general…

…where…

…safe…

…alive…

…general…

…obi-wan…

“Cyare,” Cody begs, and Obi-Wan wakes up.

His awareness goes first to Cody’s eyes, because they’re so close. Cody’s hands, because they’re pressed to the sides of his face, holding him tightly. Cody’s body, because he’s hunched over him on the floor of the hold. Cody, because he loves him.

Then his awareness goes to the mission. “Cal,” he croaks. “Grogu.”

HERE. Cal’s voice smashes across space from one of the other LAATs, driving like a wedge into Obi-Wan’s mind, and he flinches.

Above him, Cody flinches too.

Obi-Wan realizes with a swoop of dread that his shields are down.

All the way down.

“Oh, my dear,” he breathes. His hands go to Cody’s head, cradling it, thumbs pressing gently below Cody’s eyes like he’s trying to soothe a headache. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize.”

Now that he has, it’s impossible to ignore. He feels them with a clarity that he couldn’t before, as if sediment has settled down out of the water. It’s an insane sort of relief to be able to slip into their minds, to lose track of himself, like an open door after a long captivity. Like throwing open the windows in spring. He runs briefly through the corridors of their minds, though he knows he shouldn’t – Gearshift at the LAAT controls, the rapid circuitboard of deep space navigation; Longshot tense and focused and very internal like a knot of rope in the seat beside him; Eyeball a neat pile of children’s blocks and quick hands rearranging them constantly, decisively; Sawbones like a bandage torn in two directions, the frayed feathered gauze between; Waxer a wandering slip of thought beset on all sides by a maelstrom, shoulders hunched, cloak pulled tight around him, and Boil a golden light in a small well-lived-in room, a beacon buried deep in the shadows of night, welcoming him home.

Obi-Wan’s eyes sting. He smooths Cody’s curls out of his face, hands greedy for the shape of him. He wants to hold him better than this, tighter than this, with more of his body – wants to reach into him and grip his character, the shape of his soul. He has for a long time imagined an invented first meeting between them, a missed opportunity which gave their later meeting the aura of fate – his eyes traveling over faces in a mess hall on Kamino, traveling over windows in the driving rain, meeting Cody’s for a moment, unseen, before moving on. He knows that this is pure fantasy and has never let himself look at the inclination directly, but now he holds Cody’s head in his hands and he walks through Cody’s mind, and he sees himself soaked with rain as he is now soaked with rain and he realizes like a tumbler sinking into place inside a lock that he has never been alone in this. In his longing, his invention of a deeper history.

“Cody,” he says, choked.

Cody bends down to rest their foreheads together, solid. Steady. “Don’t put your shields back up,” he says, voice low. “Not with us, not ever with us.”

“I cannot ask – ” Obi-Wan starts. “You didn’t want this, none of you wanted this – ”

“You’re not asking,” Cody says. He presses a short kiss to Obi-Wan’s mouth, the curve of his lips and then the corner of them, his cheek, and oddly enough it doesn’t feel like their first. “I’m offering. We’re all offering. You took such good care of us, cyare. Now let us take care of you.”

Obi-Wan turns his mouth against Cody’s cheek. “Please,” he says. “Please.”

*

On Tatooine the cold of night makes bodies seem even warmer, and the dryness of the air makes all the mechanisms of sex seem wetter. More lurid, more animal. There’s a strange comfort to not having to put his feelings into words, sharp moans breaking radio silence in the dark, admitting covert locations. Their minds circling and brushing like a school of fish. Obi-Wan floats below the surface in a deep pool of touch, so much touch that it feels like an embarrassment of riches. Waxer pressed flush to the line of his back, miles of warm skin, arm strong around his waist, Boil raking his hair back carefully from his face, placing gentle kisses along the crown of his brow. A mouth on the inside of his knee, the taut tendon at the side, the knob of the bone – Gearshift, he thinks, and Sawbones skims a hand down his stomach, pressing into the supple hollow below his ribcage, murmuring, “need to eat more, general, you’re too karking thin,” and Obi-Wan catches him by the ears, buzzed hair bristling under the pads of his fingers, and responds nonsensically, “I’m fine, Bones, I’m fine,” and drags him down into a rough kiss. The medic’s desert scruff scrapes against his beard, the mouth from his knee moves to settle over his inner thigh, high near his cock, a hint of teeth, shoulders stretching open his legs, Waxer moves behind him and one of Obi-Wan’s hands flies back to catch him by the nape, fingers digging in alongside his spine, holding him in place, but Waxer just huffs and kisses his ear and says, “Not going anywhere, general, I promise.”

They can feel what he needs, he realizes at some point. They’re as much inside his mind as he’s inside theirs. It rises and falls, the tide of them, lifting them all with it. Their bodies in his mind move as a unit and he is now part of the unit – running PT around the perimeter, ranks close and precise, the soft fall of boots on sand, pum pum pum pum. Not one man out of step. Not one man left behind.

“Cody,” he thinks he says, or hears himself say, or wants to say. “Cody, dear – ” and of course Cody is there. Obi-Wan has been aware of him the whole time, like when he puts his comm down in a crowded room and never loses his cognizance of its location, but to feel his hands again is a relief. A landing. A coming-home sense.

“Tell me, cyare,” Cody murmurs. His body is close between Obi-Wan’s knees. He’s filled out some, since their exile began. Obi-Wan wraps arms and legs around him, the barrel-trunk of his body, and thinks that his men are all softer, here. Kinder to themselves. They have the time to be.

“You,” Obi-Wan says. But there are already fingers pressing into him, slick and obscene, as he says it, so they must know. “Cody,” he says, “Cody, love,” and Cody shushes him and says I’ve got you, I’ve got you, mouths cyare against his neck, head bowed over him, body bowed over him in a hot smothering line, Waxer still at his back and someone’s hand tight in his hair, grabbing a handful like they’ve seen how he likes it, because they have, and Cody pushes into him, Obi-Wan’s body parting to admit him, someone else’s legs tangled with Cody’s and his, skin everywhere he turns and finally, finally Obi-Wan feels full. He closes his eyes.

His orgasm, when it comes, rises from below like a swell of water. Cody’s scalp under his blunt fingernails. Cody’s stomach heavy against his cock, Cody moving roughly, imperfectly inside him, Cody’s mouth whose taste Obi-Wan knows so intimately open over the tired muscle of his shoulder. A sudden rush of light, of heat. The sun coming up in the middle of the night.

*

Obi-Wan does not sleep, after. He waits until the rest of them do – until all their minds are caught up in the strange narratives of their dreams, every light but the two troopers on patrol dimmed by a degree – then removes himself carefully from beneath Cody. Replacing himself for a moment with the Force. Cody settles back down between Waxer and Boil, stirring, only the small automatic movements of sleep. It’s too dark yet to see, but Obi-Wan can feel him in the black. The shape of him in body-warm air.

Out in the cold, he pulls his robes tight around himself, tucks away his mind in the same fashion, and heads to the rocky hills east of the homestead. He does not know specifically what guides him, only that he feels a sudden need for distance. As he climbs into the hills he realizes that what he needs is to walk away from this moment so that he’s far enough away to look back on it and understand what it is. What’s happened to him.

He worries, as he sinks to his knees in meditation, that he can no longer be a jedi. And yet there are two young jedi in his care. How, he wonders, can he possibly deny himself this, now that he has had it. The comfort of touch. Of love reciprocated.

“Do not deny yourself,” Qui-Gon says.

Obi-Wan opens his eyes. He hadn’t noticed the shift in the silence. Yet here his old master sits before him, his face easy, somehow benevolent in his very presence.

“I can’t,” Obi-Wan protests. “I can’t be attached. I can’t – love possessively.”

“Bosh,” Qui-Gon says, with a fond, quiet smile.

Obi-Wan ignores him. “The Order may be gone. But the padawan, the youngling – I must lead by example. I cannot be a hypocrite.”

“You would have them deny themselves comfort as well, then.” Qui-Gon doesn’t sound judgmental or disapproving, only curious, like he used to when he’d resolved to help his padawan reach his own answers. “After everything they’ve been through, everything they’ve seen, you would have them turn only to the Force, instead of other beings?”

I would have them follow the jedi way, Obi-Wan should say, but suddenly he cannot. He held Grogu sleeping in his arms. He looked at Cal and saw Anakin, and he can’t condemn them to live as he has lived.

“Do not forget that you are a man,” Qui-Gon continues when he’s been silent for a while, “before you are a jedi. You should not deny yourself that which a man needs to survive.”

Obi-Wan digs his fingernails into his knee. “I shouldn’t need it. I have the Force. I’m not supposed to need more.”

“You deserve more,” his master says. “You deserve to have more.”

Obi-Wan looks up at him.

“After everything that has happened to you,” Qui-Gon says, “you deserve to rest.”

Obi-Wan shakes his head, lost. Bewildered. “Nothing has happened to me. I’ve done my duty, nothing more. As any jedi would.”

“Any jedi,” Qui-Gon echoes. “Tell me, dear one. The life you’ve led – would you wish it on another? On anyone? On Anakin, on Cal, on Grogu – ”

“It wasn’t anyone,” Obi-Wan says. “It was me.”

“And because it was you, you think it does not matter.”

“I can bear it,” Obi-Wan insists. “I have borne it. The Force would not ask for more than I could give.”

“What is the Force asking for, now?”

Obi-Wan turns his mind, instinctively, to the place the answer should be. Then he falters.

“What is the Force asking for, dear one?” Qui-Gon prods again, gentle. Patient.

“Nothing,” Obi-Wan says.

He realizes his hands are shaking. He feels unmoored, and he has the powerful urge to grab onto something which is not himself, but there’s no one up here – no one corporeal, anyway – so he can only twist his fingers into the sand. “It’s not asking for anything.” He feels struck with it, as if he has been dealt a great blow, but – wildly merciful.

“That,” Qui-Gon tells him, “my dear, ridiculous padawan, is your permission to rest.”

Tears spring to Obi-Wan’s eyes. For a moment his vision is blurred blue with the glow of Qui-Gon’s ghost, then the color fades and he’s alone again with the flat gray dark.

Sandy hands scraping tears from his cheeks. He lets his gaze fall down to the homestead, the buried moons of the hovels. And he throws open his mind.

Below him, a hundred lights blink on at once.