Chapter Text
In the two years since they'd defeated Palpatine, since Anakin had been given a vision of the future and a second chance to fix it all, he'd learned to trust the Force like never before. He'd always relied on it innately, used it to perform impossible feats and become a skilled Jedi, but things were different now. He'd learned to trust it in a way that ran much deeper; learned to listen in a way he'd not even realised he needed to before.
These days, he was always listening. Whatever he was doing, wherever he was, he was always open to the Force, ready to be guided, even if he still struggled sometimes with what he might need to do.
It was a gentle sort of day. One day in a thousand; quiet, unremarkable. One of the days he got to measure in the growing height of his children, a boundless gift given to him by the Force - this life, this peace. He was sitting on the floor with his son, playing with a heap of toys, little hand-painted blocks that Luke had decided were spaceships. It was such a simple thing, an easy, bright afternoon, filled with his child's laughter. They were 'flying' the blocks, with all the appropriate sound effects, and then -
Anakin felt it like a battledroid punch to the ribs. Like a blaster shot to the heart.
Something in the Force shifted.
Cracked.
He had the sense that he was standing on the edge of an abyss, newly formed beneath his feet, just staring - staring down into the shapeless, formless dark.
It wasn't a vision. It wasn't the same as the warning the Force had given him two years ago, that decade's worth of memories of a terrible future. But it was just as destabilising.
It was agony. Terror that went beyond words. The ground was eroding under him, drawing the precipice of deadly peril closer by the second.
And it wasn't his peril.
Either Anakin trembled, or the whole planet did. Each breath ached as though the air was poison, and his heart rattled against his ribs. The world was blurring with tears.
The children.
But Luke was here, and he was fine -
Except that, when Anakin rubbed his fingertips over his eyes to clear them, Luke had dropped his toy. The look of focused enjoyment was gone, and as he turned to Anakin his sweet little face crumpled.
Not in pain, but devastation.
Anakin had never seen an expression like that on either of his children's faces before. In that moment, he knew he'd devote the rest of his life to ensuring they never had cause for that kind of hurt again.
"Daddy," Luke whimpered. Nothing could have prevented Anakin from seizing his son even as those small arms reached for him.
"Luke," he gasped, the word ripping strangely from his chest. He cradled the boy close. "What's wrong?"
"Tummy," came the small answer, buried into the curve of Anakin's neck. "Bad."
A sensation of numb cold was spreading through him, and it grew chiller still.
If he was as young as Luke, with such limited options for self-expression, how would he describe what he was feeling in the Force? His own stomach was certainly churning horribly enough.
It wasn't that there was something wrong with Luke.
It was that Luke had sensed the same thing that Anakin had, and didn't yet know the feeling of the Force well enough to realise it - too young to have words for this terrible feeling of a doom that had already begun to strike.
Leia.
Padmé.
Anakin ran.
Tucked as close to Anakin as he could get him, Luke was beginning to cry - terrible little hiccuping sobs that shook his body. Padmé had been in her office, and she'd had Leia in there, curled up asleep in an armchair, the last time Anakin had seen them. Padmé had smiled at him, that distracted smile where her mind was halfway across the galaxy fixing a thousand things, and he'd taken Luke upstairs to entertain him, and now he barely felt his feet hit the floor as he ran, a new horrifying scenario tormenting him with every step. He was so afraid he could hardly breathe as he leapt down staircases and sprinted through corridors, and the rich expanse of the house now felt like a curse.
And then he burst into the study to find Padmé kneeling before the armchair and trying to comfort Leia, who was screaming with the full might of her lungs, squirming and smacking away Padmé's every attempt to hold her.
Relief struck him, so potent that he felt light-headed, but he still couldn't draw a proper breath.
"Anakin!" Padmé looked almost as wild and afraid as he felt. She grew paler as she took in the sight of Luke, but her eyes flicked between the three of them and clearly understood. "What is it?"
"I don't know." He dropped to his knees beside her and reached one hand to Leia while Padmé stroked Luke's hair, but the twins continued to cry like the world was ending. "I felt something in the Force, but I thought it was one of you."
"They can sense it too?"
"I think so. But they don't understand..."
Not that understanding any part of it helped. The pit in his stomach yawned wider, because they were here, they were safe, but that terrible creeping dread remained. That warning in his head that screamed of danger, battering at his skull with the knowledge that he was almost too late, but he didn't know why.
"Someone..." Anakin searched the feeling, probing desperately for answers. "Someone I love is hurt."
"Who-"
"Dying."
The word came to his mouth unbidden, and it choked him. Anakin stared at Padmé without really seeing her. That was what this panic was - encroaching destruction, the obliteration of worlds. Someone was dying.
Someone he was close to, connected to in the Force. Someone that the twins loved too, enough that they could sense the same thing and that the threat of this loss was enough to devastate such young hearts.
It wasn't an extensive list.
And then, quite without warning, there was silence. Luke, no longer wailing, jerked his face out of Anakin's shoulder. Leia's screams cut off, and she stared, eyes huge and fearful.
In that silence, somehow more deafening than the noise, Anakin's comm went off.
Padmé took Luke from Anakin's arms before he could muster the thought to move. Anakin scrambled for the comm, nearly fumbling it as he answered the call with trembling fingers. He didn't spare a second to check the incoming code.
It was a holo call, but there was no image, just a blue light casting an empty projection. The caller must have been out of frame, and no one spoke. On the other side of his outstretched hand, Padmé and the kids stared back at him, their faces cast into unsettling planes of blue light and dark shadow.
"Hello?" Anakin prompted uneasily.
One beat, two, then -
"Anakin," came the reply.
A voice more familiar than the sound of his own heartbeat. More beloved than he'd ever had words for.
"Obi-Wan," Anakin breathed, and the dread crystallised into heartbreaking terror.
Of course. He should have known. Maybe he had known, but been too afraid to look it in the eye.
Not the kids, not Padmé, but someone as dear to him as they were. No wonder he'd been so sure his family was in danger.
"Anakin, where are you? I can't see your ship anywhere."
Obi-Wan's voice sounded wrong. Even over the call, which was oddly poor quality, there was a strange note in his voice. Strained. Slurred. Anakin wished he didn't so intimately know what it meant.
"What do you mean, where am I?" He hated the tremble in his own voice. "I'm at home, Obi-Wan, where are you?"
"Home?" Obi-Wan hesitated, and Anakin's grip on the comm tightened. "But - weren't you... The mission, the Separatists, aren't you..."
He sounded confused, lost, in a way Anakin had never heard from him before. Even beaten, wounded or against impossible odds, there was always a certainty about Obi-Wan, a solid foundation upon which Anakin had built his own strength. Panic gripped him then like he hadn't felt in two years, when he'd almost lost everything that mattered to the Dark Side.
"I'm not on the mission," he said, trying to keep his voice steady while his mind raced. Obi-Wan had left on a task for the Council, five days ago, but it had been a diplomatic one, a mediation between two disputing parties on some planet or other - the details had seemed so unimportant at the time. But it was months since they'd had any real activity from any Separatist remnants, and this mission was well within Republic space, he was sure of that much.
So had Obi-Wan really run into them, or was his mind caught somewhere in the midst of the war?
"I'm not taking missions any more, remember?" He was making a concerted effort to sound calm, but he wasn't sure it was working. "Obi-Wan, where are you?"
"Oh. I thought you were here. Why did I think you were here? But you're always here."
Anakin's face was wet. He only realised it when Leia's hand landed on his cheek. She'd climbed down out of the chair, and now her fingers pressed warm and damp against the tear tracks on his skin, while the other hand reached for the faceless blue glow.
You're always here.
There were a hundred good reasons why Anakin no longer went on missions, why he'd had to step down from his role as a Jedi Knight. One of them was standing unsteadily right beside him, staring at him in a silent, desperate plea.
But just then - just then he'd have given almost anything in the galaxy to be right where Obi-Wan needed him to be.
Padmé stood suddenly, hurrying to the table. Anakin watched dumbly as she found her own comm and began a call, but he couldn't focus on anything other than Obi-Wan.
"Where are you?" he said again, more to himself now than to his friend. "The mission - shit, I know you told me."
Obi-Wan had stopped over in Naboo on his way from Coruscant. The mission could take up to a week, which wasn't so long but he'd already been off-world for a fortnight, staying at the temple on Coruscant, so he'd visited simply because they missed each other. Naboo had been more or less en route to his mission, but they'd hardly talked about it at all, because it was such a milk run, the sort of thing Obi-Wan could do in his sleep. It had been far more interesting to play with the kids out on the balcony where Obi-Wan had made tiny lights like stars glow above their heads and shape themselves into the constellations of a dozen different planets. The important thing was that, although he was leaving, Obi-Wan would be back soon, and they had that moment right then, safe together under the moonlight-
"The Seven Moons of Riagon!" Anakin leaned in, like he could somehow will Obi-Wan into view. "You were complaining that even the name was a marketing ploy because only one of the moons is even habitable. They were having some stupid argument about the war impacting their tourist routes, right? Obi-Wan?"
"I'm cold," Obi-Wan said, soft and quiet.
Fragile.
Scared.
And Anakin needed to leave. Now. For two reasons.
First, he was running out of time to prevent the collapse of his world, if there was any time left at all.
Second, one way or another, he could not let his children hear what happened next.
"He checked in with the Council this morning," Padmé said. She'd been murmuring into her comm, he realised belatedly; nothing seemed real except Obi-Wan's voice. There was a projection of Yoda above her desk, his ears drooped, eyes wide and worried. "He was wrapping up the negotiations, he said it had gone well. They're sending a search party, but we're closer. There's a direct hyperspace lane from here."
Of course. There would be a temple on Naboo one day, but it existed only as a series of carefully constructed plans at the moment, with extensive security requirements still being worked out. There were no other Jedi on the planet right now, only - only whatever Anakin was, these days.
Anakin's ears were ringing and he felt strange as he pressed a kiss to Leia's head, gently removing her hand from his face as he stood up. Both kids clutched at his legs, tear stained faces turned up to him.
"Daddy, please," Luke said, as raw and pleading as Anakin felt himself.
Across the room, Padmé met his eyes. There was fear there, but fierce determination too, and she gave a sharp nod. "Go," she said, and Anakin untangled himself from the toddlers' grasping hands with terrible care.
"I love you," he said to all of them, because that was the only promise he could make that he knew was true, and then he ran.
"I'm coming, Obi-Wan," he said urgently, feeling like the half minute since he'd last heard his voice was far too long. "I'm on my way."
"Oh," Obi-Wan said, and Anakin could almost picture that confused frown. "No, don't - don't worry. I forgot. Silly of me. I don't know why... I shouldn't have bothered you."
"Don't you dare hang up!"
There was a heart-stopping moment of silence when Anakin was terrified Obi-Wan had ended the call. He almost tripped down the last staircase, only just catching himself with the Force and turning it into a leap that took him down to the ground floor.
"Anakin?" Something in that horribly vague tone sharpened. And wasn't that just Obi-Wan Kenobi summed up, that it was Anakin's distress that roused him, not his own. "Are you alright?"
He choked down a hysterical laugh, and thrust out his free hand. His lightsaber lived in a locked box beneath his and Padmé's bed, safe from the kids until they learned to sense kyber and pick locks (skills he hoped were far in the future). He'd wondered if he ought to hand it in to the Order, much as it felt like offering to cut off his remaining limbs (a feeling he was intimately familiar with, thanks to the vision), but Yoda had urged him to keep it, that it was his and he'd know when and why to pick it up again.
There had never been a better time than now. Regardless of every floor and wall between Anakin and his saber, the Force responded to him at a thought. The lock turned, the box opened, and the lightsaber flew through the house until it was in Anakin's hand where it belonged. The crystal seemed to thrum against his mechanical hand, and something in him settled back into place.
"I think the more relevant question," he said, flinging himself out of the house towards the ships parked out front, "is whether you're alright."
The choice of ship was easy. One of the first things they'd done when they decided to move to Naboo, month-old twins in tow, was buy a ship big enough for them and the kids to travel comfortably, but also well-shielded and perhaps kitted out with more guns than would be considered technically legal for its class. But it was fast, and had its own hyperspace engine, and it had been worth every credit they'd spent on it. Even now, they kept it stocked with non-perishable food, spare clothes, medical supplies - everything that seemed like paranoid overkill to a normal family, but was the bread and butter of Anakin's life.
"Nothing to worry about," Obi-Wan replied, still in a very worrying voice. "I think I ran into a tiny spot of bother."
"You think?" It was the work of seconds to leap aboard the ship, close the ramp behind him and swing into the cockpit.
"I don't..." A note of unease stole into Obi-Wan's voice. "I don't know. Anakin, why don't I know?"
Anakin's gut lurched horribly. "Hey, no, it's okay. Don't freak out. I'm going to be there soon, okay. Can you hear me?"
There was a pause that ran far too long. Anakin jammed the steering forward, taking off in a move far more jerkier than it should have been. The ship lurched upwards too quickly, careening towards the sky, and he made no move to slow its shaky course.
"I hear you. Anakin, I think I'm bleeding."
The air was too thin. Anakin felt like he was trying to breathe through a hull breach, because every breath was short and sharp and hurt, but there were no warning lights on the controls.
He swallowed past the lump in his throat. "Yeah. I thought you might be. Can you see where it's coming from?"
"I... It's dark. That's odd. I don't think it was dark before."
Fuck. Let it not be that his vision was going. Anakin needed more time.
"Is - is the power out? Are you in your ship?"
"I... I think I was? But it was... It was so hot. I had to get out."
"You're outside? Are you still on Riagon?"
Shit. He'd been going to head straight for the planet but if Obi-Wan had already left... It was still a good place to start, he could speak to the people Obi-Wan had been dealing with, but there wasn't time for that.
He punched in the hyperspace calculations anyway. He had to move, needed to at least not be lying when he said he was on his way; he plugged in the route towards Riagon and slammed the ship into hyperspeed, pulling up a map of the sector even as the stars blurred into white streaks around him.
And Obi-Wan just hummed, a distant, sleepy sound, and said, "I don't think I like it here."
"No, I don't think I would either," Anakin managed to croak out. "We need to sort those wounds. Where does it hurt?"
"Doesn't hurt," Obi-Wan said. His voice was getting quieter. "S'okay. Stomach's strange, though. Wet."
Anakin couldn't take this. It was too much, too awful, and he wasn't there, and what good was he, what was the point of any of the things he could do if he couldn't be by his brother's side right now? He had a search running trying to trace Obi-Wan's ship, his comm, anything, but there was nothing, and his brother was bleeding out somewhere who knew how far away from him.
"Have you got your outer robe on? Bundle some of it up and press it on your stomach for me, okay?"
"Mm. Yes. Probably right. Blood's not meant to be on this side."
There was a pause, and then a broken, gasping breath.
"Obi-Wan!"
"It - didn't - hurt - before," Obi-Wan said, words coming out like staccato blaster fire. "I'm blaming you for this."
"Yeah, fair enough," Anakin said, and gritted his teeth against the feeling that he was going to cry again. A light flashed on the console; he had a call incoming on the ship's comm. "Keep pressing down, hard as you can."
He recognised this comm code. Anakin accepted the call with the sudden feeling of heading to an executioner; his heart sunk lower, which he hadn't thought it still could.
"Skywalker." The Commander's face swum into view. He wasn't wearing his helmet, giving Anakin a wrenching view of the panic in his eyes, the tightness of his jaw even as he tried to hide his fear. "Padmé called me."
Padmé. Brilliant Padmé, always ten steps ahead of him, thinking of everything while he stayed fixed on a single point.
"Cody," he croaked. "Do you-"
"Cody?" Obi-Wan said suddenly, and his voice got a little louder as if he'd shifted towards his comm. "Cody's there?"
"Obi-Wan?"
Cody might have concealed his reaction on his face, but it was there in his voice. Something fragile, wrecked, terrified; something that broke on the syllables of that precious name.
"Are you out here too? Tell me they didn't get you. Are you hurt?"
Cody hesitated, frowning. "Anakin?"
"No, Cody's safe," Anakin said thickly, then leaned in closer to Cody's comm. "I'm pretty sure he's concussed. He thought I was out there with him, that we'd had a run in with the Separatists."
"Where is he?"
"I don't know." It felt like the worst thing in the world to admit. "It sounds like his ship might have caught fire, and his comm sounds damaged - I can't track him. Do you know if he left Riagon?"
"I was on a call with him two hours ago," Cody said, and it sounded like agony, like he was longing to go back to that moment before everything went wrong. "He'd just left, he said he was going to stop back at Naboo. Debrief the Council, see if he could stay with you a while. He said the mission had gone well, no problems, they were just a pain in the ass."
"So he was making straight for me," Anakin thought aloud, but it was a dagger to the heart, too much to bear, so he pushed it aside and went back to his map. "It's a direct lane, but if we assume he was forced out of hyperspace..."
He ran the numbers in his head lightning fast, tracking the distance and time along the hyperlane, then stabbed his finger at the screen.
"There's a planet just off course, about two hours from Riagon. Only one around. He's got to be there."
"You're sure?"
Was he sure? He only had one shot at this, while precious minutes slipped by. Anakin searched the feeling inside him, begging it for insight, but there was only hope.
Trust yourself. How many times had Obi-Wan told him that as he grew up - to trust himself, trust the Force?
"I'm sure."
Cody, he knew, had precious little trust for Anakin after all he'd done, after however much he knew of the vision future where Anakin had become a twisted and evil thing. He had a tendency to position himself between Anakin and Obi-Wan in subtle but definite ways whenever they were all together, and it seemed as much instinct as deliberate thought.
But Cody trusted Obi-Wan, who trusted Anakin, and for them that had always been enough.
"Okay," Cody said, with the weary acceptance of one who'd learned the hard way not to question the Force. "You'll be able to find him when you get there?"
"I might be able to pick up his comm signal when I'm closer. But either way, I think I'll know." He paused, then said, "Cody, can you get here?"
"I wish I could, kid, I really do," he said, and - and Anakin had never taken well to being called kid, and it was a far cry from the military titles that used to separate them, and he knew Cody didn't like him that much, but -
- but they were linked, he and Cody, as the two people in the galaxy who loved Obi-Wan most, bound by that affection and fear and loyalty, and he could hear in Cody's voice that he understood exactly what Anakin was going through. Here was the one other person who could understand what it was to contemplate a life that no longer contained Obi-Wan Kenobi.
"Cody," he said, and it was a gasp, a plea, something like the way his children had looked at him like it was a given that he would set the world to rights for them.
"I'm a day out, even in our fastest ship." The relief missions, Anakin thought numbly. Cody, Rex and a lot of the other commanding officers of the old GAR were still working on relief missions alongside Jedi - mostly infrastructure projects, now that the more urgent aftermath of the war was over. They were pressing ever further through the Middle Rim answering requests for help, while others went seeking homes for clones who wanted to become civilians. His friends were scattered across the galaxy, and he'd never felt that loss so strongly as he did now. "I can call some brothers, get backup out to you, they can be there..." He broke off into a low rumble of urgent voices, then returned to the call to say, "two hours."
He could hear all the words Cody wasn't saying.
Two hours might be too long.
A day definitely would be.
There wasn't anything Cody could do. No matter what he did, he'd arrive too late.
"Anakin." The voice came from the other comm. Obi-Wan sounded panicked, alarmed in a way that lurched his stomach again. "Anakin, are you there?"
"I'm here," he almost yelled, smacking a foot into the console as he scrambled to lean back over. Shit, he wasn't even wearing shoes. "Are you alright?"
"Anakin, where are you? Where's Cody?"
"We're here," Cody said, and - fuck, his face looked like it was carved from stone, but the hologram did not conceal the shine in his eyes. Anakin had never seen him cry before. "Anakin's going to be there soon, but I'm here. I'm here."
"Oh," Obi-Wan said, and the tension seemed to vanish in a blink. "That's good. I thought you'd left."
"Never," Cody said, fervent as an oath.
And Anakin felt, quite suddenly, that he shouldn't be here for this. This felt private. A quiet, endless devotion too precious for outside eyes.
"I feel wrong, Cody. Where are you?"
"I'll be with you soon. Before you know it."
"I love you, Cody. Love you so much."
Shitting fuck, Anakin definitely shouldn't be hearing this, he wasn't even sure he should know this. But he did, of course he did, even if they'd never really talked about it. There had been a day back when they'd still been sorting through the aftermath of Sidious and Anakin's near-fall when Anakin had brought up Padmé and Obi-Wan had shared a secret in turn, and since then he'd seen the closeness between Obi-Wan and Cody in a new light.
But this - this was something he hadn't been braced for. This was a heart laid entirely open. A vulnerability they were both trusting him with.
Maybe he ought to look away, but he couldn't help the way his gaze was drawn to Cody, whose eyes flickered closed.
"I love you too, Obi-Wan," he said unevenly. "You hold on, alright? Promise me you'll hold on."
"Promise," Obi-Wan said, and Anakin wondered if he even understood what he was promising, or if he could just never bring himself to deny Cody.
"Anakin?"
"Yeah?"
"Bring him home."
"If it kills me."
"It'd better not," Cody said, and he sounded like he was trying to rebuild himself. "I'll never hear the end of it."
And Anakin realised something then.
Cody would have made a good Jedi, in a way Anakin never had. It was selfless, the love between these two. If they had to, one day, they would be able to let each other go. That was something Anakin was working on, but he wasn't there yet and he suspected it would be the ongoing effort of an entire lifetime, to love without attachment, to give anything less than his entire soul into that love.
But selfless love did not mean a love without fear. Cody was afraid. And Anakin had seen Obi-Wan afraid before - he'd even seen Yoda afraid of what they stood to lose to Sidious. Fear wasn't the enemy in itself. Cody had accepted that he might lose the man he loved one day, but he was terrified that it might be today. That this might be the day he had to learn what it was to live without the other half of his heart.
It didn't matter that Anakin was afraid. What mattered was what he did next.What mattered was that he wasn't alone.
"Send me your co-ordinates. I'll get backup out to you."
"Yeah. Yeah, I will. I'm going to find him, Cody."
"I know you are. Keep him safe, Anakin. Please."
They ended the call, and the sudden silence ate at him. "Still keeping pressure on, Obi-Wan?" Heartbeats passed. "Obi-Wan!"
"Yes, Anakin?"
"Don't do that," he muttered, massaging his chest. "Shit. Keep pressing on the wound, alright?"
"Oh, yes, I am. It hurts quite a lot, now."
That definitely wasn't a good thing, but maybe it was better than the strange lack of awareness of the pain he'd at at first? Anakin was no healer, he didn't know one way or the other.
"I think I might be in a bit of trouble."
"Yeah, no shit," he said before he could think twice, but Obi-Wan gave a breathless chuckle and that was worth the potential rebuke.
"You talk like that around your children?"
Anakin found himself almost smiling as he plugged in the new calculations to drop out of hyperspace sooner, and messaged the co-ordinates to Cody. "Nah, I save it all up for you, gramps."
"Uncle," Obi-Wan corrected, expertly retreading an argument they'd been having for the last two years, mostly because Anakin kept starting it for his own entertainment. "I swear, Anakin-"
"You know your hair's started turning grey at the edges, right?"
"And whose fault do you think that is?"
Anakin grinned for real, and for a split second it was like everything was alright again, because Obi-Wan sounded almost normal and he remembered the twins and it was all okay.
And then Obi-Wan made a sound that was like a whimper, a noise so wrong that it cut through the illusion in a heartbeat, and Anakin's hands clenched reflexively around the controls.
"I'm coming," he said again. "Half an hour out, Obi-Wan, no more than that."
"That might be a little too long," Obi-Wan said, and for all that he sounded so soft he was managing to flay Anakin's soul apart.
"You're not dying," he said, and it was a vow and a threat to the whole damn universe if it had to be. "You can't die. You can't expect me to tell the kids their grandpa isn't coming home."
But Obi-Wan didn't take the bait this time. "They're toddlers, Anakin. In a little while they won't even remember me."
And maybe for human kids born without a sense of the Force that would be true - maybe, for all that they loved him, they would still forget him in the coming years. They were so young. But the way they'd screamed and cried, the way they'd felt the danger to Obi-Wan in the same instant that Anakin had...
"They're my toddlers, Obi-Wan. You can't think any of us would forget you."
"I'd never choose to leave you. Any of you."
Which was the most Jedi answer, because sometimes things were outside their choice. In his own gentle way, Obi-Wan was trying to tell him that there might not be anything he could do.
Screw that. Obi-Wan might have accepted that he'd leave Anakin one day, but Anakin wasn't ready to be left.
"Do you know where you are? What can you see around you?" It was worth asking again; Obi-Wan was sounding more coherent now.
"I think I'm in a forest." He could hear the frown in Obi-Wan's voice, and it conjured such a clear picture of that little crease between his eyebrows. If his hands weren't busy, surely one would be stroking his beard in thought. "It's night, but there's a little light. It's - it's really getting quite cold."
A forest at night, which meant the risk of wildlife attacks and hypothermia on top of everything else, knowing their luck. At least he'd know which hemisphere to search, that was a start.
"Do you remember what happened?"
"I... I was flying? I don't..." Doubt stole back into his voice, and Anakin's heart sank. "I don't know. I can't remember when I got here, I don't know what happened, I can't-"
"It's okay," he said, calmer than he felt. "It's alright. Hey, listen to this. You'll be proud of Leia, she jumped up onto the kitchen counter yesterday then floated herself right back down again, all to steal a couple cookies. Scared the shit out of me, but she gave one of the cookies to Luke, so I'm counting it as a win, right? Padmé's not totally convinced, but what're you gonna do, they're both geniuses."
He was rambling, he knew, the words pouring out, but he had to do something. Had to get rid of that note of fear he could hear, had to give Obi-Wan a lifeline to reach for.
"They're both brilliant. So very brilliant."
"Yeah. They really are."
"Anakin?"
"Yeah?"
"Keep talking. Please."
And so, with tears in his eyes and terror in his throat, Anakin talked. He talked about the kids, about Padmé, about Rex, about the war. He talked about his childhood, about his therapy sessions, about the way the sunrise always seemed more beautiful on Naboo than it had on Tatooine. He talked while he found some boots in a cupboard, while he set out a medical kit, while he retried the scanners for the tenth time.
And every few sentences he paused to listen to Obi-Wan breathing, or humming agreement, or giving a tiny breathless laugh, and fought against that ever-present feeling of dawning ruin.
At last - after way too long - the ship left hyperspace. It could be disorientating, that first moment of stillness, but Anakin gunned the ship forward.
"I'm here," he said, relief and adrenaline flooding through him. He tapped the scanner, then smacked it with his mechanical hand when it still failed to locate a signal. "Dammit."
The silence on the other end of the line didn't register at first, because Obi-Wan's voice had ebbed more and more over the last few stories he'd told.
But it was silence. It was far too quiet. Even that laboured breathing had gone.
"Obi-Wan?"
Anakin's voice sounded strange to his own ears. Young and lost, like he was searching for his mother in the sands, only she couldn't hear him no matter how much he called.
"Obi-Wan, are you there?"
Nothing.
There was nothing, and the world splintered apart.