With Questions Like These

Eirian Erisdar

Obi-Wan is surprisingly acquiescent when Anakin suggests getting a drink.

This in itself is rather unusual; Obi-Wan, being a paragon of Jedi virtues, tends not to indulge unless the mission requires it. But in this case, he simply nods and indicates that Anakin should lead the way with a wordless jerk of his chin.

For Anakin, this is downright weird.

It gets even weirder when Obi-Wan makes no comment at all, even when Anakin deliberately heads for a seedier establishment a couple hundred levels down beneath Coruscant's surface; The Corellian Belly certainly is a couple hundred microbial colonies dirtier than anything Obi-Wan might prefer, but Anakin hears no complaint except the steady, never-changing clack-clack of Obi-Wan's boots behind him.

Jedi are given an equal amount of respect and fear here; the two men are quickly ushered into a booth and find themselves in a little pocket of wary silence.

"What'll you have?" Anakin says, flipping over the menu to peer at its grime-smeared surface.

"Whatever you have, Anakin," Obi-Wan says, with no inflection whatsoever. He could be commenting on the weather, for all the expression that line holds.

Anakin risks a glance up at his former master and finds Obi-Wan's gaze twin pools of undisturbed blue. So undisturbed it is a little frightening, really.

"Uhhh," he mumbles, looking back at the menu in his hand. "I'm going for a Rodian Turboblast, if you...?"

"Fine."

"Okay." Anakin flags over a servitor droid, recites the order, and lets the menu fall back to the table.

Obi-Wan watches him wordlessly. Expectantly.

Blast. Somewhat regretting lowering his last line of defense so quickly, Anakin dry-swallows once, and opens his mouth.

And closes it again.

Obi-Wan's left eyebrow twitches. It could be the beginning of a raised eyebrow, if it hadn't smoothed back to serene expressionlessness so quickly after.

"Are you doing okay?" Anakin ventures. He winces internally immediately after the words leave his mouth, but then what is done is done.

Obi-Wan meets his gaze with a vaguely disinterested expression. "Yes," he says, simply.

Anakin's jaw very nearly drops at that - because he is no longer nine blasted years old and is Obi-Wan really playing this angle? Again? When it is obvious to anyone with a functioning frontal lobe that he is not anything close to fine?

"Right," Anakin says, slowly. "I was worried you weren't."

A small tilt of the head. "Thank you for your concern, Anakin, but it really wasn't necessary."

And if that isn't the greatest pile of poodoo Anakin has ever heard.

The servitor droid returns with their order right at that moment. Great. He could use the alcohol right now. He swipes one of the neon blue drinks, barely waits to clink it against Obi-Wan's (held motionlessly in a commlinked fist) and downs half of it in a single gulp.

Something flashes in Obi-Wan's eyes. "Anakin, I wouldn't-"

Pain.

It is like a fiery hand has taken hold of Anakin's diaphragm; he holds back the coughs with effort and forces the rest of the mouthful down. It sits like a coiled dragon somewhere behind his sternum.

Oh, his esophagus is so not liking him right now.

"Oh," he rasps, weakly.

"Anakin," Obi-Wan is saying, exasperatedly - but hey, exasperated is good! Anything other than the mask-like blankness of the past two days will do.

Anakin waves a hand in a sort of yeah-I'm-fine motion, to which Obi-Wan raises an eyebrow - for real, this time - and takes a measured sip of his own drink.

"Not bad," Obi-Wan comments as he lowers his glass, slightly less deadpan than before, and completely unaffected.

Anakin stares.

"My first drink was Huttese Moonshine," Obi-Wan says, taking another contemplative sip. "In comparison, anything else seems rather weak."

Huttese. Moonshine.

Anakin remembers, with the distinctly morbid fascination of a six-year-old, how a spice-trader keeled over after a single flagon of that stuff. Krayt Poison, they called it on Tatooine. Not for the soft of heart.

"That's...not what most people would choose for a first drink," he says, after a while. Obi-Wan had started him on Corellian brandy for his first drink at eighteen, after all, and that hadn't been bad at all.

Obi-Wan's drink swills gently around its tumbler, a perfect double-ellipse - a Soresu salute. "Qui-Gon Jinn was not most people," he says, very quietly, staring at his wrist.

Anakin nearly drops his drink. Oh.

The name is hushed, untouchable in its preciousness. Anakin finishes his drink, winces against the burn. He lets the silence settle a bit, squints at the menu out of the corner of his eye, and orders two of something called a Aqualish Gloo-glow. Probably not the best idea, but he's working on it.

Obi-Wan does not break the silence until their new drinks arrive. "I do apologise, by the way," he says, tonelessly.

"For what?" Anakin gapes.

Obi-Wan picks up his drink and regards the bubbling purple concoction within. "For not bringing back your ship. I did promise to return it."

"Twilight was a piece of junk, anyway." Anakin watches his former master down the drink in one long swallow, and chooses his next words carefully. "What happened to her, anyway?"

Obi-Wan's gaze snaps up to Anakin's with frightening intensity. "Who?" he says. Almost hisses, actually.

Anakin holds Obi-Wan's gaze for a long moment before replying. "My ship. She might not have been worth much, but I did put care into her."

"Ah." Obi-Wan's shoulders drop, minutely. "There was - a complication. We had to make an emergency landing. Got thrown off the ramp, actually."

"We?" Anakin comments, carefully.

Obi-Wan's mouth snaps shut so quickly Anakin hears his teeth click together.

Anakin decides this might be a good time to take a sip of Aqualish Gloo-glow. He does, and suppresses his gag reflex with some difficulty. "Oh, I'm not having any more of that," he says, pushing it aside with the hand not busy trying to hide his coughing.

Obi-Wan's deft-fingered hand appears in the corner of his vision, and snags the drink with fingers agile with 'saber work.

Before Anakin can protest, Obi-Wan has downed the whole thing. Anakin's stomach muscles contract in reflexive sympathy.

Obi-Wan looks at the empty glass dispassionately, places it on the table, and raises his gaze to meet Anakin's, expectantly.

Anakin orders another round.

It comes.

And then he orders another round.

It comes, too.

Anakin curls the fingers of his prosthetic hand around the glass of green-tinted gloop, and tries again. "We. You, and...?"

"I'm sure you already know," Obi-Wan says, sipping at his new drink experimentally and then downing it in one go, again. He isn't looking at anything in particular, at this point.

"So," Anakin says, wrapping both hands around his glass - partly to delay having to drink it and partly to stop Obi-Wan from taking it - "What happened after you - plural you, I mean - fell off the ramp of Twilight?"

Obi-Wan's fingers tighten minutely around his empty glass.

The Force twists sharply.

Anakin waits, and tries to remember to breathe. Sithspit, he feels like a padawan again.

Obi-Wan does not speak for a long, long moment. When he does, it is barely above a whisper. "The greatest trial of my lifetime," he murmurs. "And I had thought it already passed."

"Obi-Wan?"

Obi-Wan lowers his face into a hand. Rubs at the ridge above his eyes. "She didn't say the word, before," he mumbles, so quietly that Anakin barely catches it.

And there it is again - one of those moments where Anakin is here, and Obi-Wan is there, and Obi-Wan is speaking, but none of the words seem to make any sense.

"Master?" Anakin slips back into the title before he is aware of it, seeking understanding.

"I should have asked her the blasted question without her saying the word." The sentence is the barest susurration of air.

"What question?" Anakin asks, bewildered.

Obi-Wan reaches for Anakin's glass, pulls it from unresisting fingers, and swallows it in two gulps. The Force trembles around him, growing hazy.

"The question," Obi-Wan whispers, as he buries his face in his elbow, "of questions. The only question that mattered."

And then, even softer: "She'd have said yes."

An inkling of understanding blossoms in the back of Anakin's mind - of Varykino, in front of a marble balustrade far away on Naboo; of a question Padme had asked him, and that he had asked her in return.

But no.

This is Obi-Wan.

Impossible.

A chuckle breaks the silence.

Anakin notes with a detached sense of disquiet that Obi-Wan is laughing. And that had been Obi-Wan's seventh drink.

"Obi-Wan?"

Obi-Wan's mouth is just barely visible where his face is smushed into the elbow of the arm holding his last empty glass. "Who'd have thought-" the mumbled words come. "Who'd have thought that a blasted Sai Tok wouldn't be enough?" His lips are twisted into a grimace, now.

Anakin is suddenly very glad he cannot see Obi-Wan's face. He sits there, frozen, and thinks through the words.

Sai Tok.

A strike clean through the opponent's middle; a strike only reserved for the most desperate of moments.

Maul.

Maul. And Satine. And a question never asked, or answered?

Anakin is no closer to an answer.

"Obi-Wan," he says, reaching out and placing a hand on one shaking shoulder. "Obi-Wan."

The Force glimmers. Coalesces into mirrored shards. Reforms. Solidifies into a cracked crystal.

Obi-Wan's shoulder turns stiff under Anakin's hand - as hard as the metal within Anakin's glove. He raises his head, and his eyes are unreadable.

Anakin pulls back sharply.

"Anakin," Obi-Wan says, with nothing in his voice at all, "No more questions, if you please."

"...Okay," Anakin says, raising both hands. "Okay. I won't ask any more."

"Thank you," Obi-Wan says, with a smile as flimsy as a pieced-together mirror. He places the glass on the table, ignores the fine cracks that have spread across its surface. "Would you mind getting the bill, Anakin? There's something I need to do."

"Sure."

"Thank you," Obi-Wan repeats, and rises. "I'll see you back at the Temple later."

And then he is weaving between the other patrons, towards the exit.

Anakin stares after him. There is a moment, when the groups of patrons thin and give him a clear line of sight to the exit, that he catches a glimpse of a hooded figure in a brown cloak slumped against the doorframe, one hand grasping the wall for support.

And then Anakin blinks, and the figure is gone.

It must have been the drink.

The alternative is too impossible to contemplate.

Anakin pays the bill, and goes home, where his wife will be waiting for him - and he will smile, and return her embrace - but that figure in the hooded cloak will remain, always, at the back of his mind.

A crack in the mask of a perfect Jedi.

A/N: This was written for a Writing Wednesday prompt on my tumblr (just stick the two words in my penname together for the url) that I posted in advance. Thanks for reading, and review if you like! For more Obitine in less depressing contexts, you're welcome to read The Rain Curtain and The Question, Twenty Years Late.