Chapter Text
“Sorry,” Anakin answers the phone after six rings. Obi-Wan, who thinks every phone should be answered after two rings or less, turns a page pointedly in his book. He’s flipped through two chapters now, and he doesn’t know what fucking book he’s even reading. “We can’t make it to dinner, Obi-Wan is being a bitch.”
Obi-Wan barely restrains throwing his book at him.
When Anakin falls onto the couch next to him, arm automatically coming up to wrap around his shoulders, he leans into the familiar pressure. “Who was that?” he asks, resting his cheek on Anakin’s bicep so he can easily look up at him.
“Rex,” Anakin replies, drawing him closer and turning on the television with his free hand.
He’s such a dick. It’s the channel that only seems to play the antique road shows, the ones Obi-Wan hates.
“Darling, isn’t your car show on?” Obi-Wan asks, because while he finds that whole sport obnoxious, it's better than this drivel.
“If you mean Formula 1, then yes,” Anakin replies. “But I know you hate watching that, so I’ve taped it.”
“How considerate,” he says through gritted teeth, shifting himself until he can find his own phone. He flicks it on and scrolls through his contacts. Rex picks up after only three rings.
“I don’t want to know,” Rex says immediately. “And I don’t want to be involved.”
“Fine,” Obi-Wan says and hangs up. He scrolls further.
Cody picks up within seconds, so clearly someone's taught him phone etiquette. “Cody Fett speaking.”
“Hi Cody,” Obi-Wan says. “Please let Rex know that Anakin is being a raging, stubborn asshole, and we can’t make it to Rex’s dinner.”
“Couldn’t you just have called him?” Cody asks, sounding incredibly pained as Anakin tenses next to him, fingers tightening on his shoulders.
“He didn’t want to be involved,” Obi-Wan admits.
“And you thought I did?”
“I thought you’d pick up,” he corrects.
Cody blows a long exhale out of his nose. “Look, Obi-Wan. I’m saying this as your friend. Just choose a damn date for your wedding,” he says before hanging up.
“Who was that?” Anakin’s eyes are fixated on the television screen.
“Cody sends his love,” he replies.
His fiancé snorts unattractively. “I bet he does,” he mutters, before saying in a much louder voice, “you could still go to the dinner if you wanted.”
Then, for the first time since they started this fight a week and a half ago, he actually sounds earnest. “I know you were looking forward to the squid ink pasta. I can stay here.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Obi-Wan replies. “Even if my asshole of a fiancé is ignoring what I want for our wedding, down to the colors—”
“A Christmas wedding is the worst idea you’ve ever had—”
“Not to mention the season—”
“ — and you broke up with me when we were kids!”
Obi-Wan’s mouth clicks shut. In all fairness, Anakin’s does too as if he knows he’s gone too far, prodded at a scar so tender that it’ll always cause a twinge.
“Oh, Obi-Wan, I’m—”
“As I was saying. Even if my fiancé is an absolute asshole, I’d rather be arguing with him than be anywhere else without him.”
He turns his face and body to press up against Anakin’s chest for several seconds, kissing him gently over the heart. No harm’s been done, he means. He hadn’t even said anything that wasn’t true. It had been Obi-Wan’s idea to break up with Anakin when they’d both been teenages. They’d spent fifteen years paying that price.
If Anakin wants to bring it up now, three years into their new relationship, their reunion, he should. It’s his right.
All is forgiven if Anakin has in turn managed by some miracle to forgive Obi-Wan’s all as well.
“We could get delivery from the restaurant,” Anakin suggests, curling his arm around Obi-Wan and re-situating their bodies so that he’s almost completely on top of him, head slumped in the dip of his neck. “You could still get your weird, inky pasta.”
“You have no taste,” Obi-Wan sniffs, trying for uppity, for pretentious, for joking. It comes out weak. Strange.
Anakin combs his hair back from his forehead and places a kiss there, just above his eyes. “I’m in love with you, aren’t I?” He says. “And you want a goddamn Christmas wedding of all things.”
“Do you know where you’re going this year?” Anakin asks, leaning against the locker next to Obi-Wan’s and holding his math binder to his chest. “Fuck, it’s so cool that your dad just takes you places for the breaks!”
Anakin is the only thirteen year old that Obi-Wan has ever heard cuss, and he definitely cusses like he knows it. The other day, Obi-Wan had stood in front of his tiny bathroom mirror and tried to practice the words he heard Anakin say so easily. Fuck. Asshole. Bitch. Bastard. Damn. He hadn’t managed to say one without blushing, and each iteration felt more and more clunky and awkward on his tongue.
“Dad doesn’t know what I want for Christmas,” Obi-Wan points out, handing Anakin another one of his binders. They’re supposed to be cleaning out their lockers because it’s the end of the semester. Christmas break starts in about an hour. Anakin’s finished clean-up early, a garbage bag of school things Obi-Wan hopes he’ll sort through later (but knows he won’t) laying at his feet. “So he takes us somewhere else for a bit, so he doesn’t have to try and figure it out.”
“You want one of those do-it-at-home chemistry sets,” Anakin says immediately. “And a water bottle that doesn’t have a dent in the bottom so you can put it on your desk without worrying it’ll fall over. And a basketball hoop outside your garage, so when I’m over but you want to study you can let me out and I can run off energy and you can crack a window to make sure I’m enjoying myself.”
Obi-Wan grins despite himself, pushing his glasses up his nose. There’s a mess of loose-leafed papers at the bottom of his locker. Surely none of them are important?
He hands a stack to Anakin. “Look, if these say anything about the—the PSATs or high school or anything you think they’ll cover next semester, leave them out, okay?”
“Yes, sir,” Anakin replies, sinking down to sit on the tiled floor next to his locker. Obi-Wan makes the mistake of looking at him, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, basketball shorts riding up because even though it’s nearly Christmas, it’s still goddamn Tatooine, and Obi-Wan is sweating too because the school air conditioner broke.
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan says, though he doesn’t mean to. He really doesn’t, and he regrets it as soon as the name leaves his mouth, because now the boy is looking up at him, blue eyes narrowed slightly from the studying of the pages, hair curly and blond and short. “You should grow your hair out. For my Christmas present,” he blurts out, before he thinks about shoving his head in the locker and staying there until at least the new year. Maybe the rest of his life.
But Anakin just blinks at him. “You think?” he asks, dropping one of the papers from the stack so he can fiddle with the short end of his har. “But this is how you wear it too.”
As if how Obi-Wan does things is the end-all, be-all of doing things. “Maybe,” he says, flushing. “But…it would look good on you. Your hair could be really curly if you let it.”
“Is curly good?” Anakin asks, and Obi-Wan really does shove his head into his locker so he doesn’t have to look at him.
“Girls like curly,” he mutters, looking through the contents of his English workbook, even though he’s definitely going to be keeping it because they’ll definitely need it in the new year. The door to the locker hides his face from Anakin’s view and that’s all that matters.
He’s had this…awful crush on his best friend for a year now, maybe longer, and he keeps slipping up and saying these things he knows will give him away in an instant, if Anakin even thought about how they sounded, if he could not think about sports and math and food for one—second—
“Anyway,” Obi-Wan says, maybe a bit too brightly. “I think it’s Naboo this year, Dad mentioned something back in July about going to see Feemor, and he just moved out there, and that’s when he would have had to buy the tickets to avoid the holiday price gouging, so.”
“What’s in Naboo then, other than your weird half-brother cousin?”
“I don’t know,” Obi-Wan replies. “A bridge I think?”
“Huh,” Anakin says, “that’ll be wasted on you.”
“Maybe you can come next time,” his voice only wavers a little bit on the suggestion. He knows it shouldn’t. It’s so stupid. Anakin is his best friend. Inviting him on a trip—wanting to spend time with him—it’s natural. It’s not…not gross. It’s not suspicious.
But Anakin doesn’t reply. He doesn’t even move.
“I mean,” Obi-Wan stammers out after a beat of silence so long it feels awful. The entire last minute before the end-of-day school bell. “You—obviously, I just meant. Because we’re fr—”
“Who’s A.S?” Anakin interrupts him. His voice is strange. Obi-Wan has never heard it sound like that before.
It takes a lot of courage, an embarrassing amount really, to peer around his locker door and down at the ground where Anakin is sitting. He isn’t even looking at him. He’s studying one of the papers in his lap with frightening intensity.
When he looks up, it’s with the harshest glare he’s ever directed at Obi-Wan, so accusatory that Obi-Wan automatically starts running through everything he’s done and said ever in his life that could deserve that level of betrayal.
“A.S.?” Anakin says again when Obi-Wan is silent.
And then he brings the paper up from his lap into Obi-Wan’s line of sight.
It’s an old page of his math notes, torn out of his binder to study for some test. And on the edge of the margins, stuffed between pre-algebra notes, is a heart. And in that heart, bolded and damning: O.W.K + A.S.
Fuck.
He remembers that heart, the press of his pen against his notes as he wrote out those initials. Obi-Wan’d been meaning to study, is the thing. It had been during a study hall, and the test had been next period.
But Anakin had fallen asleep across the table from him. He’d never needed to study any sort of math. It came so easily to him. He was so smart. He’d taken a nap, using his bundled up jacket as a pillow, and the sunlight had fallen through the library window, lighting the ends of his hair bright gold.
And Obi-Wan—he’d just—just the once, he hadn’t even really meant anything by it, he’d just needed to get the feeling out of his chest—staring at his friend in the library and knowing he—he really liked him. He was so beautiful. He was his best friend, and it was an easy sort of realization to have while he was sleeping.
The heart practically drew itself. The A.S. followed the O.W.K. as if it knew that was the proper order of things.
But it feels…it feels wrong now. To look at it in Anakin’s hand. To see him glaring. It feels wrong and gross and awful, that Obi-Wan had ever let himself look. Had ever let himself feel more than friendship for Anakin.
“I—Ani, I—” he doesn’t mean for his voice to be so small, but it comes out like a fucking mouse facing down a tiger.
“I didn’t even know you liked anyone!” Anakin’s voice, in contrast, has shot straight up. It breaks on the second syllable of liked. “But—”
“I’m sorry,” Obi-Wan feels like he’s going to do something awful like burst into tears because he was never supposed to know. Anakin was never supposed to know.
Anakin knows and it feels like the end of the world.
And—
“Hey, Obi-Wan,” someone taps him on the shoulder, and Obi-Wan blinks at Aayla’s face. “Happy holidays,” she says with a grin. Obi-Wan tries to respond on instinct, but his muscles feel just outside his realm of control. “Are you taking Ms. Yaddle’s class in January?”
“Uh,” Obi-Wan says. January? Anakin Skywalker has found out that Obi-Wan, his best friend, has a crush on him, and Aayla thinks January is still going to happen? “The Tatooine history track?”
She nods. “I am! I don’t know if many others in our year are. But I think it’ll be a really nice addition to the World History course next year, right?”
“Um,” Obi-Wan can feel Anakin glaring at him. His voice comes out as a squeak when he replies. “Yeah, me too. Can’t wait.”
Aayla beams at him. “See you in January then!” she says with a wave, glancing down at Anakin as she leaves. “Happy holidays, Ani!”
“Yeah, whatever,” Anakin snaps back, standing abruptly. Aayla’s barely out of earshot when Anakin rounds the metal divide of the locker door to stare at him. In September, he had a growth spurt, all of half an inch that never felt like much—no matter how much he tried to insist it was—but now it does.
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan tries, “look, we can talk…I mean if you wanna talk about this at all, we can do it when we’re not in school, please—”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were in love with Aayla Secura?” Anakin’s voice is forceful and low and somehow bordering on a whine.
Obi-Wan almost drops the binders he’s been holding to his chest in shock. “What?”
“A.S.!” Anakin insists, sounding stubborn. “Aayla! Secura!”
“Would you keep your voice down?” Obi-Wan says, embarrassment outweighing his own shock, confusion, and hope. Maybe…maybe Anakin doesn’t know. Maybe he doesn’t have to confess, not now. Not to this. Maybe they can keep being best friends and Obi-Wan can keep being…being in love with Anakin Skywalker, and he just won’t ever write it down again.
He’ll just—he’ll keep it tight around his heart. Just to keep it safe.
“I…I don’t know,” he says out loud, when all Anakin does is look at him like he’s just killed his cat or something. “Look, it…it just really happened fast, okay—”
“We learned about linear equations in October,” Anakin says, brandishing the math notes at him. “You’ve apparently been—been putting hearts around her name since October.”
“That’s not true!” The evidence points to it being true, but Obi-Wan is also technically correct. He hasn’t been thinking about Aayla Secura like that. He’s never thought about anyone else but Anakin like that.
Thank fucking god Anakin doesn’t know that.
He’s not ready for Anakin to know that yet. He—he may never be ready.
“Okay,” he says and he hates himself, but not as much as Anakin would hate him if he found out. “Okay, maybe it’s been a bit. But I just…I was nervous.”
“Why?” Anakin moves back, crosses his arms over his chest. “Aayla Secura is the prettiest girl in the grade, why were you nervous?”
Obi-Wan huffs. It’s good to know where Anakin stands on the Aayla Secura question. “I mean. Because she’s so pretty. And I’m—”
“She’s not thatpretty,” Anakin throws himself down on the ground again, as if he never got up in the first place. “I mean. She’s got that—I mean, her…her, um.” Anakin shuts up because Aayla Secura is beautiful and flawless and he knows it.
“I know…she’s definitely out of my league,” Obi-Wan frowns at the remaining binder in his locker before taking it out and dumping it in the trash pile. “It’s just a stupid name in a heart, Anakin. It doesn’t mean anything. Okay?”
“You wrote it—”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” he repeats, slamming his locker closed and looking down at Anakin with his arms crossed. “Let it go, okay?”
“Fine,” Anakin bites back, and he does let it go.
He lets it go so much that he doesn’t even text Obi-Wan once over break, and when he gets back to Tatooine, Anakin seems to have developed the worst obsession possible while he was away: girls.
Anakin throws his fork down onto the plate and his hands up into the air. The morning light through the diner’s window glints off his engagement ring. “I can’t marry you in a month, Obi-Wan!”
There isn’t a lot one can say to that, of course, so Obi-Wan does his level best to maintain eye contact, to carefully put his own silverware down on the plate and fold his hands in his lap, fingers finding his own familiar ring and playing with it carefully.
“Can I have your bacon?” Leia asks him seriously, tugging on his sleeve. “Obi, are you going to eat your bacon?”
“If you can’t marry me in a month, why do you think you’ll be able to marry me in the summer?” Obi-Wan asks finally, careful to moderate his tone. Careful to turn and smile at Leia, cut his remaining slice of bacon in half so that he keeps the fatty half that shouldn’t be eaten anyway, and she gets the crispy bits she likes the most. “Is six months enough to build up to the task?”
Anakin exhales hard through his nose and leans across the table, reaching out for his wrist.
Obi-Wan almost snatches it away, but Luke is right there, watching them both, sucking on the tongs of his fork.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Anakin says. The pads of his fingers are rough. Anakin’s body still isn’t used to the cold of Naboo in the winter. His skin dries out so easily here. Obi-Wan wonders how he’d fare back in Tatooine. It hasn’t been so long since he left, not compared to how long he stayed.
“I know,” he replies.
Luke is making a mess of his scrambled eggs. He has egg in his hair and egg in his syrup and egg down his front. The only thing he’s eaten completely is his bacon, which he must have known Leia would try to swipe even if it meant launching herself across the table to get to him. He’s going to smell like egg the entire car ride home, but next time they go out for breakfast, Obi-Wan is still going to order him the scrambled eggs.
He hopes there will be a next time. He thinks there probably will be, even if Anakin doesn’t think a winter wedding is a good idea, that he can’t marry him in a month. That doesn’t mean Anakin won’t marry him at all. It just means that Anakin needs a bit longer to think about it. Weigh his options perhaps. Make sure. He’s alright with Anakin making sure.
But he wants, too. He wants to be married to Anakin within the month. By the Christmas holiday. But maybe he’s alone in that regard. Perhaps after everything, Anakin needs more time.
“Sometimes I think you think the worst of everything I say,” Anakin says, flipping Obi-Wan’s hand over and holding it loosely in his.
“I know,” he replies.
I’m sorry.
“Mhmph, Ani,” Obi-Wan pushes himself back and turning his head away even though he really doesn’t want to. “Anakin, you have to stop—I need to go.”
“No,” and Obi-Wan can feel his pout against his skin.
“You’re supposed to be driving me to the airport,” he tries to bite back a moan that slips out anyway. His awful, terrible boyfriend has started pressing kisses up and down the column of his neck, and he knowsObi-Wan’s sensitive there.
He can even feel his grin against his skin. “Yeah, I know,” Anakin says. “But what if I didn’t and we stayed here instead?”
“You’d be condemning my father to a very lonesome Christmas indeed,” Obi-Wan mumbles in between letting himself get pulled into sweet, soft kisses that make his toes feel like curling.
“God,” Anakin pulls back to laugh as if he weren’t incredibly close to winning Obi-Wan over. “Who taught you how to speak? Condemning my father to a very lonesome Christmas,” he rolls onto his back, off Obi-Wan so he can laugh brightly at the ceiling. “God, I love you. You’re the only seventeen year old who talks like that in the entire world.”
Obi-Wan collapses onto his chest so he can hit him gently on the shoulder. “Well now I’m definitely going to go.”
“And condemn me to an entire Christmas holiday without your touch? I’ll waste away! I’ll simply perish!”
Obi-Wan pushes him off the bed.
“I deserve that,” Anakin agrees when he pops back up. “But I still think you should stay in Tatooine with me.”
“You always think that,” Obi-Wan points out, even as he helps Anakin back up on the bed, back into his arms. “Maybe you should come with me.”
“And spend two weeks in Scarif with you? Sounds like Heaven,” his hair is falling into his eyes. He’s let it get so long, and Obi-Wan adores it.
He pushes his hand through the curls, tugs at it a little. “And my father,” he says.
“I love your father,” Anakin tells him solemnly. “He’s like a father to me.”
“Haha,” Obi-Wan replies, ignoring the very tiny part of him who wants to say that yes, he could be. If you married me, he would be your father.
They’re too young to talk about marriage. They’re not even eighteen years old.
It’s just hard to believe anything will feel as right as Anakin resting his head on his chest, their legs tangled together and their hands the same.
“He actually mentioned you the other day,” Obi-Wan says, and Anakin props himself up on his elbow.
“I’ve been here for dinner every night for the last two weeks. I would hopehe mentions me.”
“Yes, he asked if Shmi wasn’t feeding you—”
“My mom feeds me fine! But someone is leaving the country soon for a terribly long time, so I need to get a surplus of time with him in to sustain me in his absence, so that I may go on until my love returns from the awful clutches of Scarif—”
“You’re ridiculous,” Obi-Wan laughs. “Absolutely absurd.”
Anakin grins at him, preening. “It’s true though,” he says even as he smiles. “All of it.”
“That’s what my father was saying. He was wondering if he should feel guilty for taking me away for the holidays and vacations. You always look, in his words, like some terribly pathetic kitten at the departures gate.”
Anakin pouts like a terribly pathetic kitten. “Maybe he should stop taking you away then,” he points out. “I get so sad watching you leave, I can’t even enjoy the sight of your ass as you go.”
Obi-Wan laughs again, shaking his head. “Joint family vacations,” he proposes, running his fingers through Anakin’s hair. “You, me, your mom, my dad. That way we can sneak off and have a bit of fun, and the adults can pretend they don’t see what we’re doing.”
“You could kiss me in Coruscant,” Anakin says, resting his chin on Obi-Wan’s chest. “We could fuck in the hot springs in Yavin.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” he admits, in a slightly breathless way that has nothing to do with Anakin’s weight on his chest and everything to do with the heaviness of the confession. “Seeing the world with you.”
Anakin rises back up over him so he can lean down and brush a kiss against his lips. “Baby, I only want to see the world if I’m with you,” he replies, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. “And one day, we’re gonna.”
Obi-Wan smiles into his next kiss. “Well, you’ll definitely kiss me in Coruscant,” he says. “I have a good feeling about our applications. They’ll have to let us in.”
“Obi, baby, I have one more hour before I have to take you to the airport, where I will then watch you leave on a trip for the entirety of the Christmas holiday and go home cold and Obi-Wanless. The last thing I want to do is talk about our damn college applications.”
“What do you want to talk about?” Obi-Wan is breathless again. It’s so hard to control himself around his boyfriend. Anakin undoes him so easily. So wonderfully.
“Nothing at all,” Anakin grins and kisses him again.
The car is silent, save for the Christmas music coming from the radio which is quickly tipping the mood in the car from mildly annoyed to downright murderous.
“Have a holly jolly Christmas, it’s the best time of the year. I don’t know if there’ll be snow—”
“I chatted with Mace yesterday,” Obi-Wan says. He takes a sip of the coffee in his hands. He wishes the kids were in the car with them, but they’ve already been dropped off at Padmé’s. They’re decorating her Christmas tree today, and tomorrow they’ll decorate Anakin and Obi-Wan’s.
Today, Anakin and Obi-Wan have to choose a tree.
And also a date for their wedding.
“That’s great,” Anakin replies in a tone that implies he absolutely does not think it’s great in the slightest. “How’s Tatooine?”
“That’s actually what we chatted about,” Obi-Wan replies, taking another sip. “Well. He floated the idea of me returning. Just for a few days. Nothing longer than a week, of course. But you know that book tour is coming up in the new year, and I thought about perhaps going a week earlier.”
Anakin looks straight ahead, but the car has slowed down even though they’ve fully merged onto the interstate. “Do you want to leave because we’ve been fighting?” He asks.
“No,” Obi-Wan shakes his head, perhaps a tad too quickly if Anakin’s disbelieving scoff is any indication. “No, it’s not because we've been fighting.”
But, well. He hates fighting with Anakin, but he’s extremely good at it.
“But, well,” he adds. “It’s not like I have anything else to do instead. Over the holidays.”
Anakin snaps his head around to look at him furiously. “Nothing else— Obi-Wan, you have kids! We have kids! I know leaving around Christmas time is sort of your thing, but you can’t anymore. Not without taking us with you! And not because we’re having a disagreement!”
“It’s not a disagreement,” Obi-Wan snaps back, because while he is extremely good at fighting with Anakin, Anakin is just as good at fighting with him. “And I’m not going to—to abandon the children! It’s a short trip! I’m an adult, I’m allowed to take those!”
“Ho, ho, the mistletoe is hung where you can see. Somebody waits for you, kiss her once for —”
“Obi-Wan, this is insane!” Anakin’s hand tightens on the wheel and then relaxes. “You can’t go running off because—”
“Mace brought it up, I didn’t!” He hadn’t, but to be fair he’d complained about Anakin for forty-five minutes before Mace had suggested he come back to Tatooine for a few days.
Distance might do you both some good, he’d said. Even though Skywalker will never admit it .
“But you want to go!”
“Why don’t you want me to go?” Obi-Wan puts his coffee back in the cupholder so that he can throw his hands up in exasperation. “We’ve barely spoken without bitching at each other for weeks. It’d be a better Christmas if I weren’t around.”
Anakin’s jaw clenches and he runs one hand over his mouth and chin before putting it back on the wheel. “No,” he replies. “No, it wouldn’t. And I’ve never wanted you to go anywhere without me in my entire fucking life. Why would I start at thirty-six?”
“Have a holly, jolly Christmas. It’s the best time of the ye—”
Obi-Wan and Anakin reach out at the same time to flick the radio off rather forcefully.
Obi-Wan doesn’t want to eat his peas. He knows he should because his dad cooked them for him, but they’re weird. And round. And he’s not hungry anyway, he’s sort of sad.
“Is everything okay, Obi-Wan?” His dad asks, and Obi-Wan looks up from his plate.
“Maybe,” Obi-Wan says, which is what he says when he really means no.
His dad knows that though, because he puts down his fork and looks at him.
“I’m sad,” Obi-Wan says. “Really quite sad.”
His dad raises an eyebrow. “Oh? And what are you sad about? You’re seven years old and on Christmas break. In fact, in two days, it’ll be Christmas. This is the best time of the year for little boys.”
“I’m sad because I miss Ani,” Obi-Wan says and eats a whole spoonful of peas so he doesn’t have to say anything else for a bit.
“Ani?” His dad looks at him, sort of like he’s thinking about something.
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan explains in case his dad forgot. Sometimes parents are like that and they forget things. Even the really important things, like making sure Obi-Wan has all his school supplies a month before school starts just in case something goes wrong. And who his best friend is. It never hurts to remind adults of these things. “My best friend.”
“Right, yes,” his dad nods seriously. “But didn’t you just see him a few days ago?”
Obi-Wan sighs. “It is simply not enough,” he says. “I want to see him more. I miss seeing him. Can school start again soon so I can see him?”
“What do you like about seeing him?” His dad smiles, and he still looks like he’s thinking about something else.
“I like…” Obi-Wan swings his feet as he thinks. “I like his hair,” he decides. “And I like when we play House. And I like looking at him! He’s my best friend," he says again in case his father has forgotten already.
“Hm,” his dad says. “Well, why don’t we go see him then? He lives in Tatooine as well, yes? Why don’t you eat a few more peas while I go look up his address in the school directory, and we can pop over for a quick visit?”
“Really?” Obi-Wan can barely breathe around the excitement that’s starting to take up room in his chest. “We can go see Ani even when he’s not in school?”
“He does exist outside of school, yes,” his dad smiles at him and Obi-Wan grins back.
“This is the best Christmas present ever!” he exclaims as he starts eating his peas. His dad is going to give him Anakin for Christmas! He’ll get to play with Anakin and see him! It’s been so awful since Christmas vacation started, but now he’ll get to see and play with Anakin!
“Alright,” his dad says, sounding like he’s laughing a bit. “I wish you’d said something sooner then before I bought all those presents under the tree for you. Could have just slapped a bow on your best friend.”
But Obi-Wan doesn’t hear him. He’s too busy eating his peas.
The twins are at Padmé’s house for Christmas Eve. Her parents had insisted, but that just means that Obi-Wan and Anakin get them for Christmas Day.
And that they get the house to themselves for Christmas Eve.
Anakin hands him a glass of wine and sits next to him on the couch.
“I think we should talk,” he says, and Obi-Wan takes a sip of the wine, which really demonstrates an amazing level of self-control on his part.
“I’m not going to Tatooine if that’s what you want to talk about,” Obi-Wan states.
Anakin sighs and rubs his free hand over his face. “Obi-Wan, if you want to go to Tatooine, you should. I want you to, alright? I want you to do what you want to do, what you need to do. Whatever will make you the most happy, and if that’s Tatooine—for some ungodly reason that I will never understand—”
“You make me happy, Anakin. I thought maybe…giving you space…I mean, I can have…a difficult personality—”
“You drive me around the bend sometimes,” Anakin agrees. “But I don’t care as long as I’m in the car with you. Okay?”
Obi-Wan blinks at him. “What?”
“I want to be with you. In the car. No matter where you’re driving.” At Obi-Wan’s raised eyebrow, Anakin huffs and waves his hand. “Oh, forget it. The point is I don’t want you to ever think that the solution for us is you going away. No matter what we’re fighting about. Especially when what we’re fighting about is so fucking stupid.”
“It is a bit, isn’t it?” Obi-Wan cracks a smile, setting down his wine and running a hand over his own face. “Okay. Let’s talk about it. You first.”
Anakin gives him a short glare before sighing and sipping his wine before setting it down on the table as well. He stands, stretches, and then swings himself down to sit on Obi-Wan’s lap.
Obi-Wan lets out an oomph at the added weight but helps him get settled, hands falling on his hips to keep him still and secure.
“I’ve been thinking about marrying you for more than half my life,” Anakin tells him seriously, wrapping one arm around his neck and letting his other hand play with the buttons of Obi-Wan’s shirt. “Seriously too. I think I picked out the color scheme when we were still in grade school. Before I even knew I was in love with you. Way before you ever got drunk and threw up all over my bedroom floor while trying to tell me you loved me.”
“That’s not how I remember i—”
“You don’t remember anything about that night, you were wasted, Obi,” Anakin grins at Obi-Wan’s expression—probably one of great offense—and leans in to rub their noses together. “But I always knew I wanted to marry you in the summer. A summer sunset wedding, your hair would look like it’s made of fire, and there’d be a cool breeze, and we could wear light suits. Breathable fabric. I don’t want to give up the wedding I spent years planning in my head, Obi. Not even if it means marrying you sooner. I want to marry you right.”
Obi-Wan opens and closes his mouth, struck speechless by Anakin’s fervor. “But—” he finally gets out. “But we’re already not going to—it’ll already be a different wedding than what you pictured. I know you thought we’d be eighteen, not thirty-six. We’re already—”
“Even when I was twenty-five and trying to hate you, I thought about marrying you.” Obi-Wan raises his eyebrows disbelievingly. It’s something he will always know: Anakin had hated him. He hadn’t been trying. For fifteen years, there was probably nothing Anakin hated more in the entire world than Obi-Wan.
“Okay,” Anakin admits, “mostly I was thinking about torching the ceremony and throwing the cake at you, but…I still thought about you. About it. Even when I had no way of knowing what you looked like anymore. I’ve spent my whole life knowing that if I were going to marry anyone, it was probably going to be you I would think about, even if you weren’t the one at the end of the aisle.”
“Oh,” Obi-Wan says, and his hands tighten on Anakin’s waist without his permission, like it’s a reassurance. He’s here. They’re together. Despite it all, despite the years like a canyon deep and wide resting between them that they’ll never get back, they’re together. Anakin is sitting in his lap like nothing has ever felt more natural, and Obi-Wan’s hands know the perfect place to linger on Anakin’s body.
It’s almost too easy to open his mouth, to respond in kind. But honesty is what Anakin deserves from him, and after years of lying to him, he deserves it now in its most undiluted form.
“Christmas…it’s just been. They’ve been…difficult,” he says. “Since…you left for university. And since my father passed away. I had…seven Christmases where I was…alone. Friends would invite me over for dinners or Christmas mornings or—or tree decorating and ice skating and holiday cookie making, but—they weren’t family.”
Anakin’s hands cradle his face, tilt his head up as if to try and force eye contact. Obi-Wan closes his eyes instead.
“So every Christmas for seven years was just a month-long reminder that the two people who had loved me the most in the world…didn’t anymore. One had died, and the other—well. I suppose I didn’t think you thought of me at all.”
Anakin cuts him off with a kiss that feels like a sigh, and Obi-Wan sinks into it as he would sink into sleep.
He tries to convey in the kiss everything he doesn’t want to have to say.
I don’t want a big ceremony. I don’t need a wedding. I just want you. I just want you the way you wanted to promise yourself to me back when we were kids. Do you remember when we’d stand under the only tree that grew in the elementary school playground and we married each other with rings we’d fashioned out of grass so parched it was like straw? That’s all I want. Your hand in mine again, in the darkest time of the year, promising you will never leave me alone again, no matter how I try to destroy us.
Anakin doesn’t make him say anything else, so he thinks maybe he understands.
A single jar of spaghetti sauce is placed on the conveyor belt with so much force that Obi-Wan knows immediately who he will be ringing up, before he even raises his head and his eyes land on Shmi Skywalker’s cold, indifferent face.
“Did you find everything you were looking for, ma’am?” Obi-Wan asks by rote. He’s had this conversation with her so many times it almost doesn’t hurt anymore, to be on the receiving end of that glare. To know the woman he used to look up to like his own stand-in mother hates him for breaking her actual son’s heart a year and a half ago.
“Oh yes,” Shmi says. “I’m an easy customer, I imagine.”
She’s the worst customer Obi-Wan can encounter, and she comes into the grocery store far too often for how little he knows she cooks.
“Around the holiday season at least,” she adds with a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “I don’t need to cook a big meal, buy all those groceries for it, make a mess of the kitchen and my budget.”
“That’ll be three even,” Obi-Wan says.
Shmi pulls out her wallet, handing him a twenty.
She’s so much like Anakin that he can’t look at her anymore. Whenever they had arguments, Anakin would find as many reasons as he could to stick around, keep arguing until he had tired himself out or won.
Shmi could have paid with a card, but now she’s expecting him to make change from the twenty. To hand it back.
“I don’t spend the holidays in Tatooine anymore,” she tells him as she watches him count out the change. “My son refuses to come back, so if I want to see him I have to go to Naboo.”
Obi-Wan is nineteen years old and he will not cry just because his once and future-now-never mother-in-law is looking at him like she doesn’t understand why her son ever loved him in the first place.
“That’s nice,” he forces out between his teeth. “And here is seventeen back. Have fun in Naboo. Happy holidays.”
He looks around for his manager. It’s past time for his lunchbreak, and he feels a bit sick. Maybe she’ll let him go home early.
But his father is gone, one last tour of the world. They’d given him two years, and the deadline is approaching faster and faster, and Qui-Gon Jinn has never met a deadline he hadn’t wanted to run from.
And Anakin—Anakin is somewhere even farther away. Anakin is unreachable.
Obi-Wan wakes in the morning to very soft kisses being pressed along his face. “Mm, darling?” he murmurs, rolling over onto his back.
Anakin follows, leaning up and over him as his lips trail gently over his jaw, across the plane of his face. “Good morning,” he whispers. “Happy Christmas.”
“Is it time to pick up the kids?” Obi-Wan opens his eyes into slits to peer up at his fiancé. Maybe he can sleep more in the car. They’d stayed up far too late last night, first in order to talk and then in order to make love by the fireplace, Anakin pressed down on the rug, Christmas tree lights shimmering in his hair as he’d wrapped his legs around Obi-Wan, keeping him close.
Anakin shakes his head and kisses him once sweetly before sitting up. “It’s time to get married,” he says.
Obi-Wan has never woken up faster in his life, and Anakin looks like he knows it from the grin he throws him.
“What?” he asks around a mouth that’s suddenly incredibly dry. “Are you being serious?”
Anakin nods, taking one of his hands in both of his. “Last night after you fell asleep, I found a place that’s open today. And then I called this morning to make an appointment. Rex and Cody are going to slip out of their family’s celebration to be our witnesses.” He shakes his head quickly when Obi-Wan opens his mouth. “And don’t feel bad about that, I think we’d be doing them a favor, just choosing a date.”
“Anakin—”
“I don’t have rings yet,” Anakin says. “But we’ve married each other with little grass ones before, do you remember? I think I could braid something together again, and then tomorrow when the stores open, we can get proper rings.”
“Anakin—”
“But we have to hurry,” Anakin stands from the bed. “I got the first appointment slot so we could still pick up the twins after lunch. Padmé understood. She said to pass on her congratulations. So. Congratulations.”
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan stands, reaches out and hooks his fingers into the edge of Anakin’s shirt pocket. “Anakin, are you sure? What about—your ceremony, your summer wedding? I—those are important too, to me, if they’re important to you.”
Anakin closes the space between them, hands cupping his face gently, thumb stroking his cheekbone. “They are important to me. I want everyone we know to be forced to celebrate our love for a few hours, maybe a whole day. But that’s not more important than making sure you never feel alone again, and I’m sure as hell not waiting another year to marry you next Christmas. We can do the party in the summer, at sunset. At the lip of Beggar’s Canyon in Tatooine, just like I've always pictured it. But the actual wedding, I want it to happen today. Now. In an hour and forty-five minutes to be exact.”
Obi-Wan can feel his eyes prick with tears and he offers Anakin a tremulous sort of half-smile. His heart is beating so loud in his chest, he’s surprised he can hear anything Anakin says at all.
“Okay, dearest,” he says. “I love you.”
“I love you too,” Anakin replies, easy as anything. But when Obi-Wan leans forward to kiss him, he stops him with a hand over his lips. “Whoa now, baby,” he grins. “Save it for the wedding.”