#and padmé going omg!! you left the conference!!! what about the stewjoni agenda??

[tennessoui]

Miss Kit updates from you never fail to cheer me up, and that was a tall order this week when I spent my birthday alone because of covid and had to cancel my party because I'm still testing positive, so thank you! If you're taking Prompts I'd love to see something where Anakin is ill or injured as misery loves company, maybe the bit in cheating au where he's hospitalised and Obi-Wan finds out/is in waiting room? No pressure though, just wanted to drop in and say your updates always make me happy

hey!!!! it's been uh. a month. maybe two months. so like. i hope you're no longer testing positive :D here is a 2k snippet set in the cheating au when obi-wan rushes to anakin's side after he loses an arm fighting. also when padmé may start thinking that there's something rotten in the state of stewjon.......

(2k) (cw: i wrote this on my laptop when the i key was sticking so who knows how many i's i've missed)

(also cw: cheating)

(this snippet is sorta mentioned, might be important to read for understanding of the verse)

Obi-Wan’s hands are shaking. They have been since the missive came in for Padmé and Obi-Wan had leaned over to read it when she’d gasped in horror.

Her husband had been wounded. There’d been an attack of some sorts, a robbery or a premeditated attack or something else all together, and Padmé’s husband had heard the noise from his gallery and gone to investigate. He’d decided to break up the fight with nothing more than his voice and his own hands, and he’d lost one in the process.

He’d lost a lot of blood as well, Padmé’s husband had. A lot of blood and an arm. Padmé had been right to be so horrified, so frantic in calling for a recess in the conference, just one long enough to gather her things from her Republic-funded room, brief the secondary senator from Naboo on the state of negotiations, and then hail a shuttle to the nearest space port. She was allowed to go with little fuss.

After all, it was her husband who had been hurt so drastically he had been airlifted to the best trauma center in Coruscant. She had children to comfort and hold and feed sweet words of reassurance to.

Obi-Wan logically knows that he must stay. He’d been told as much by Padmé herself—not outright, of course, she probably wouldn’t have thought to do so, but she’d squeezed his shoulder as she left the Hall and promised to comm him as soon as she could with updates on Anakin’s condition.

It was, after all, the duties of a wife.

But what of the duties of the lover? The affair? The man who knows for certain he has managed to slip his way into Anakin’s heart, wrap himself around it until its every piece belongs to him alone, nothing left over for the wife who has rushed to his side?

His hands ache with the need to hold, to feel at Anakin’s skin, his pulse.

He makes it ten more hours into the conference before he follows Padmé’s example. He does not stop to collect his things, nor does he brief the secondary senator of Naboo, parting with a “you best have been listening, mate, or our failure’s on your head”; he flew to this planet in his own ship, and he flies it now.

He utilizes every trick that Anakin has ever shown him about how to fly fast and how to fly well. Under the guise of Obi-Wan being the worst pilot in the history of Stewjon and Anakin being unable to be cordial with someone who signaled before they changed vertical lanes, they’d spent years sneaking out to the stars for activities that had nothing to do with flying.

But perhaps against his will or perhaps because his love for Anakin had to better him in some way in order to be endured, he had also learned how to pilot the way Anakin piloted.

His hands shake the entire time. It’s the one concession he will give himself to the roar of emotions that feel like they’re tearing his insides to shreds.

His comm buzzes and when he checks it, an hour out from Coruscant, it’s a message from Satine. He doesn’t read it. He has long since stopped caring what his wife has to say about any matter, and the matter of this affair in particular. 

They had never particularly loved each other, though he thinks they both were convinced they did upon their marriage. But what he feels when he thinks of Anakin Skywalker dooms every other love he’s ever felt in his life to pale imitations.

They had never particularly loved each other, but it’s only been in the last year that Obi-Wan has felt resentment bubble up in his soul. His wife is one more thing that makes Anakin leave his bed early in the morning. Obi-Wan’s wife and, well.

Obi-Wan has been arguing with the health droids for ten minutes before Padmé appears from around the corner. She’s still wearing her Naboo regalia, though it looks much more worn. She must have arrived hours ago, yet she’s not left at all yet. This observation makes Obi-Wan’s heart seize up in fear. Has Anakin taken a turn so nonsensically towards the worst? 

Padmé looks startled to see him. She looks relieved though, too.

If Obi-Wan were a better person, he’d let the guilt of it all eat him alive. As it is, he’s not a better person. He’s a politician, and he wants something.

“Padmé!” He says upon seeing her. “How is he? Please, tell DR-023 that I should be allowed to see him.”

Padmé blinks, as if she can’t understand the stimuli her brain is showing her. “Obi-Wan, you came.” 

“Of course I came, Padmé,” Obi-Wan replies and knows he should say something else, but the words are tricky. He wants to say, because I love him. Because it’s Anakin. Because I know he would want me there. Because if it were me in that medical bed, I would want him beside me.

All of this is too incriminating. Padmé, though she still does not know about her husband’s infidelity, is not an unintelligent woman.

So he says, “I view you all as my family.”

This is uttered with a pointed look at the medical droid, barring Obi-Wan’s passage to the rooms of the hospital. Though heavy-handed, it seems to shake Padmé into action, and she swoops forward to key in the Skywalker room code into the droid’s bank, allowing Obi-Wan passage.

“Thank you,” he tells Anakin’s wife, and then when he cannot wait a second longer, “how is he doing?”

Padmé guides him back to Anakin’s room, and Obi-Wan lets himself be guided. “He’s—he’s going to be alright,” she says. “They—they won’t fit him with a prosthetic, not while he is unconscious and cannot consent, but they’ve taken him out of bacta and done several blood transfusions. Mine took, thank the stars.”

Obi-Wan swallows and stares forward so as not to give into the monster inside of him that roars in jealousy at the idea that Anakin and Padmé’s bloodtype match. That once more, Obi-Wan is made an interloper.

“Quite,” he replies faintly, for they’ve entered the room. There on the bed, looking much too still and ashen, is the love of his life. It takes all of his training in politics and appearance to stop himself from running to his side, grasping at his one hand, and raising it to his lips. The japor snippet around his neck burns with his need to touch and feel and heal.

Padmé, unaware of his agony, walks to the other side of Anakin’s bed, ghosting her fingers over his missing forearm with a haunted sort of expression.

“I was just going to leave to relieve the nanny,” she confesses, brushing a piece of hair away from Anakin’s face. Obi-Wan stiffens and forces himself to relax. “The twins haven’t seen him yet. I thought about getting them when I arrived, but….”

The twins live a charmed life, five years old and untouched by every great unfairness in the galaxy. Obi-Wan would hesitate to retrieve them as well, not when it would mean they would have to—at least for a moment—confront the senseless violence of their world.

“They should see him,” he tells her gently. Anakin would want that. “Please, I—I can get them if you do not wish to leave him.”

“I’m perfectly capable of parenting my own children,” she snaps. When she looks up, her gaze is hard.

Interloper.

“Of course,” Obi-Wan gentles his tone, his mannerisms, and steps back from the bed though that distance kills him. “Whatever you want, Padmé, I am only trying to support you.”

Anakin’s wife stares at him for several seconds, before glancing down at her husband. “You’ll call me if he awakens?”

“In an instant,” Obi-Wan promises, and she nods once, slowly and then with a fast upward tilt of her head. She navigates around the bed, and Obi-Wan moves closer to the very bounds of what is allowed.

He doesn’t watch her leave. He cannot tear his gaze away from Anakin’s slack face. There will be scars on it, wounds so deep that the bacta could not heal them perfectly in time to save him from the blemish.

Obi-Wan already finds them beautiful, because it is Anakin and he finds Anakin beautiful always.

He doesn’t watch Anakin’s wife leave, so he is startled to hear her speak. Startled and deeply grateful he hadn’t given into the impulse to touch her husband’s cheekbone. Stewjoni are affectionate, but not that affectionate.

“I am glad you’re here, Obi-Wan,” she tells him. Her tone is unreadable and when he turns around, her face is the same. 

“Oh?” Obi-Wan asks when she does not immediately continue. 

And then for a moment his heart freezes in his chest as he follows the descent of her eyes. Sometime between leaving the conference and arriving at the hospital, he’d taken his heavy, ceremonial Stewjoni cloaks off. His shirt is unlaced most of the way, his chest almost on display.

But she’s not looking at his skin.

The japor snippet lays lower than the shirt cuts, thank the gods, but there’s something in her eyes that looks like a denial. A rationalization. She’d seen the same leather cord around her husband’s neck for two years before he’d lost that pendant.

Before he’d given it in secret to its intended recipient and told his wife it must have fallen off in some restaurant on some planet.

He tries not to move, to hold his posture exactly as it is. Any sudden movements would read as guilt.

He has nothing to feel guilty about.

He has a whole galaxy’s worth of wrongdoings to feel guilty about.

“Why’s that?” he asks, prompts her towards speech in a voice that he prays is not shaking.

Her eyes snap up to his face. They’re unreadable. She is unreadable. She is the last thing that stands in the way of Obi-Wan being able to cradle Anakin’s head in public, kiss him in broad daylight, and if he loved Anakin less, he would tear off the necklace and throw it to the ground in  front of her feet, dare her to rationalize that coincidence away, the same way she’s rationalized all the touches she’s seen, all the heavy looks, lovers’ feuds, piloting lessons.

But he loves Anakin.

And if a team of droids refuse to operate on him without his consent, he can’t just go and reveal their affair to his wife without the same.

“Why’s that?” he asks again, when she doesn’t say anything. He crosses his arms, higher than he usually would, in case the japor snippet is peaking out from the edge of his shirt collar.

“They said he was calling for someone,” Padmé Amidala-Skywalker says, soft as rain and bells and lace. “They thought it must have been his wife. When I told them I was his wife, they called me Mrs. Obi-Wan.”

Obi-Wan’s shoulders tense with the effort not to look at Anakin. He wants to see him suddenly so bad that it hurts, but he forces himself to hold eye contact. “How strange,” he murmurs instead of the myriad of things he wishes to say. “I’ve always thought the name Obi-Wan to be quite masculine.”

Padmé says nothing, but she does leave.

It feels less like a surrender, more like a retreat.