#and anakin has it at first but it disappears into a Coruscanti accent as he gets older cause he wants to be like everybody else

[tennessoui]

ok we knew it was coming here is 3k of this based on the tags where anakin leaves the college, eight years pass, and he writes a book about his time at jedi college and being with obi-wan specifically. sorta dark but mostly just allusions:

(3.2k) (only the italicized bits are in first person ok just trust me)

Everyone knows about the university on the outskirts of Jedha. Not because of its high academic standing or because of its beautiful campus or top-of-the-line staff, its sports teams or its student life.

Everyone knows about it because that’s where everyone wants to go, even if most people will never even step onto the campus. 

Even if most people know Jedi College is not for them. They want anyway, despite the tuition rates, despite the dreariness of the weather, despite the loneliness of the college, situated as it is in the hills miles away from the formal boundaries of Jedha.

The wealthiest echelon of society sends their children there with the knowledge that they’ll probably never open a single textbook and still pass with flying colors. 

That’s the best lesson Jedi ever taught me: a name carries more weight than anything else in the goddamn world, and you can’t hide behind anything if you can’t hide behind your name.

There are two kinds of people who attend Jedi College: those whose parents did—the wealthy, the greedy, the ones who have already inherited their parents’ ennui, and those schmucks who fought tooth and nail for their acceptance letter, who thought attending Jedi would be the first rung on the ladder out of wherever they came from.

Alright. Three kinds of people: the rich, the desperate, and me.

—----

Anakin’s new office is on the fifty-first floor of his company’s building, which doesn’t actually mean much about his job. Mostly it just goes to show how much bigger things are here in Coruscant.

Mostly it just means that Anakin has forty-three seconds exactly to lean his head back against the mirrored wall of the elevator and try to rest his aching eyes. There’s a full day of work in  front of him. And the day after that, there’ll be another one. And then another one.

Hitting the elevator emergency stop button has never been more temptying, but it would just be delaying the inevitable. Life would continue as it always did. People would probably even notice Anakin’s absence. 

After all, one does not simply write a Tell-All sort of book and then disappear without people asking some questions.

If he died in this elevator from lack of water or air or food or something, there’d probably be an investigation. There’d probably also be conspiracies on the internet that the headmaster of Jedi College had him assassinated. Or a malicious parent of one of the kids Anakin had gone to school with. Or one of the kids themselves, grown up and wearing borrowed power as unfitting as Anakin’s suit.

“Sir,” a voice says directly across from him and he opens his eyes. The elevator doors are open and his secretary is looking at him with the sort of blank gaze of professionals every person in Coruscant seems to have. “Are you going to get out?”

“Oh,” Anakin says.  “I suppose I must.”

This gets him a weird look from his assistant.

Anakin offers her a strained smile. He never talks like that, doesn’t know why the words had slipped out the way they did, except that he hadn’t slept well the night before and he’s just spent months thinking about someone who used such words all the time, said in the same manner. A lilting Upper Coruscanti accent.

“Coffee, then?” Blanche asks, which is why he’d hired her in the first place.

“Two shots of espresso in a drip,” Anakin confirms, exiting the elevator and running a hand through his hair. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” his assistant says, even though it isn’t really in her job description to get Anakin coffee. It’s one of those days already where if he leaves the building before five in the evening, he’s probably not going to come back. “Oh, and there’s someone in your office.”

Anakin, who had been about to turn the corner to his office, pauses. “It’s nine in the morning.”

“He insisted,” Blanche says. “He also slipped me two hundred credits to not say anything and get out of the building.”

“But since you don’t accept bribes, you promptly denied him entry to my personal office and alerted the authorities.”

“No,” Blanche says. “I’m going to get you coffee with the two hundred credits in my purse. His name is Ben.”

Anakin’s throat tightens and his stomach shrinks. “I—I don’t know a Ben.”

Blanche raises a severely unprofessional eyebrow, casting her eyes to look behind them both at the framed poster of Anakin’s book cover. Golden lettering on a gray and black landscape photo of the oldest building of Jedi College: Chasing the Dying Light.

“I don’t know a Ben,” he says again stiffly, jaw working. “And you work at a newspaper, you should pay more attention to what is reality and what is fictional.”

“Yes sir,” his assistant says. “Though the man in your office is very real, I assure you.”

Anakin flounders for a second before stuffing his hands into the pocket of his coat. “Three shots of espresso,” he tells her. “Now that you’re rich and all.”

“My nephew wanted to pass on his congratulations that Dying Light entered its ninth week at the top of the Bestselling Nonfiction Courscanti Times List,” Blanche replies blasely.

“Four shots,” Anakin says.  “One of them liquor.”

“You wrote the book, darling,” Blanche at least looks sympathetic as she wraps her knitted scarf around her neck. “You should have known you’d have to eventually face the music.”

“There’s more than one Ben in the world,” Anakin replies, mostly to himself.

Blanche looks unimpressed. “And you don’t know any.”

Anakin doesn’t. That’s why he’d chosen the name out of all the options. He couldn’t write his real name, so he’d given him a different one and made sure he wouldn’t write out their story and think of anyone else but the boy who haunted his mind even eight years later.

He doesn’t know any Bens, but he’s not as surprised as he should be when he opens his office door and sees Obi-Wan Kenobi sitting behind his desk, feet up on the oak wood. 

“Hello, darling,” Kenobi says. “Honestly, an email would have sufficed.”

—--------

Ben Lars pulls you in like a whirlpool’s current. There’s no escape, but you don’t even realize you’re drowning. And yet I would have given him my last breath of air had he asked, had I known he was drowning too.

I met Ben the way people often meet the love of their lives: in a shitty college dorm bathroom at two in the morning. 

Shitty is subjective, of course. Jedi probably had the nicest student bathrooms on the east coast, but there’s only so much one can do to make a bathroom not shitty. Especially one used by boys who have never cleaned after themselves who arre turning into men who will never clean up after themselves.

That’s what Ben was doing when I met him. Or Ben’s…friend, though I’ve been told over and over again that Ben didn’t have friends. What else could we call Quintas, who was cleaning off the vomit on Ben’s shirt as the boy himself sat on the edge of the sink and did nothing to help?

I hadn’t meant to be there, but it doesn’t really matter why I was there. It matters that he was there, that he rolled his head against where it rested against the mirror and locked eyes with me.

“Hello there,” he said, blinking at me as if trying to decide if I were real or a figment of his imagination. “I don’t think you’re supposed to be here,” he added. 

His voice caught me off guard. It wavered about a range of pitch, but every syllable was one of those pure Upper Coruscanti accents you only ever hear in films. Polished and perfect, if he hadn’t slurred his every other word.

The boy touching his shirt looked around, face tearing between fear and fury at a the interruption.

“Get out,” he snapped, rising up as if he were going to advance upon me. As if I posed a threat.

“What are you doing?” I asked. I wasn’t an idiot as much as I probably was. “He’s drunk. Why are you—what are you—”

“It’s my birthday,” Ben said, eyes earnest and wide as he looked at me. “Are you here because it’s my birthday?”

Quin turned around, back to me. “Ben, come on, I’m not getting this out without getting it off.”

“He’s drunk,” I repeated. “You’re not getting anything off him.”

“I didn’t think anyone would remember,” Ben said, picking uselessly at his shirt and then at his friend’s. “He’s in a different time zone though, Quin, he’ll call. It’s my birthday, he’ll call. He’ll—”

“You’re fucked to the wind, Ben,” Quintas replied. “If he calls, I’m not letting you answer it.”

“If,” Ben repeated, a drunken babble. “If, if, if—”

“Come on,” Quin offered his arms, and Ben slipped off the sink and into them easily. I shifted my weight, feeling as if I had to do something without knowing what.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Quintas snapped at me. “You couldn’t pay me to fuck him.”

Ben laughed, but I couldn’t figure out what was funny.

“I know him too well,” Quintas added. I’ve always wondered if that was a warning and I was too much of an idiot to understand it for what it was.

Or maybe I knew exactly what it was, but Ben eclipsed it—every damn thing—when he stumbled from his friend’s arms to mine, pulled at a piece of my hair to examine it, said, “Pretty,” and threw up all over my shoes.

I can never decide if he remembered that night, our first meeting, or if he did not. I only learned his name a few days later when it became very clear he hated me with a singular intensity. I thought at the time it was an intensity that came from a boy who had been made vulnerable against his will, but he always insisted he didn’t realize that was me. 

And when you’re in love with an accomplished liar, it’s hard to know if they love you enough to tell you the truth or if they love you enough to tell you what they think you want to be the truth.

—-------

“Obi-Wan,” Anakin says. The man before him looks nothing like the boy he remembers. His hair is much shorter now, pushed across his forehead in a careful way that looks effortless. He’s grown a beard, something sharp and short, that sticks to the lines of his jaw.

The Obi-Wan Anakin had known had had long hair, though the professors had all given him grief for it. He’d had dimples when he smirked. Smiled, too, but he smirked more often. He’d had soft lips that Anakin had taken pleasure in kissing raw and red.

“Your secretary is pleasant,” Obi-Wan says as if Anakin has not spoken at all. He stands from Anakin’s chair, taking each shiny leather shoe down from his desk slowly. He moves like some sleek feline predator, dressed in a tight black turtleneck and tighter pants. “Blanche. It’s like she was born to be a secretary.”

Anakin doesn’t take a step back, but he does step to the side under the guise of taking his coat and scarf off, hanging it on his coat rack. “She’s nice.”

She’s a dirty rotten traitor who’d probably known exactly who Obi-Wan was both to the world and to Anakin. Any secretary worth a damn would have left him in the lobby.

“I’ve always thought there was a lot of power to a name,” Obi-Wan murmurs. His hands are behind his back, and Anakin doesn’t trust him.

God, Anakin loves him. But he doesn’t trust him.

“You would think so,” Anakin mutters, pacing away from him to look out one of the windows in his office. His office is practically all window. It usually makes him feel scrutinized, trapped. Now it makes him feel safe.

Nothing can happen between them. The world is watching. 

“What does that mean?”

“You expect me to stand here and pretend as if your father isn’t one of the richest men in Coruscant? Obi-Wan Jinn?” 

“It’s Kenobi,” Obi-Wan says silkily. He stays on the other side of the office at least.

“It wasn’t when we were in that holding cell in the height of winter, sharing a scarf and three gloves between us!” Anakin snaps back.

“Who do you think got you out of there?” Obi-Wan rears back as if greatly offended by his accusation. “I couldn’t do anything for you when I was there with you, but as soon as they released me, I—”

“Who got me out? Who do you think got me in there in the first place?” Anakin’s heartrate is pounding, pulse skyrocketing as he looks across his suddenly very small office at the man who once was a boy who tried his level best to ruin Anakin’s life, all the while calling it love.

Obi-Wan’s face is twisted in a sneer as he brings his hands out from behind his back. “I believe I forgot. Let me check.” 

A flash of black, gray, gold as he opens the copy of Anakin’s book, flips to the correct page, and starts to read aloud.

“Ben could convince anyone of anything. He could convince a professor to give him a passing grade, a glowing recommendation. He could convince an athlete with a drug test in the morning to help him finish his line of snow. Hell, he could convince a blind man he needed glasses. And me, the scholarship kid they let in to fill their quota, who needed to study more than he needed to breathe, whose future and livelihood rested on graduating Jedi top of his class….It took very little effort on his part to convince me of anything.

All he had to do was find me, tilt his head—”

“Stop it,” Anakin says forcefully, a hair’s breadth away from a shout. “For the love of God, stop it.”

“But why should I? You’ve gone on for at least one hundred more pages.” When Obi-Wan looks up from the book, his eyes are dark, expression fierce. He looks—God, he looks—so, achingly familiar.

Anakin snaps his mouth shut, shaking his head wordlessly.

“I’ve always liked my name,” Obi-Wan tells him lightly, snapping the book shut as well. “Power and all that. But you’ve made quite a good case for Ben. Do you think it suits me?”

“What are you doing here, Obi-Wan?” Anakin asks, rubbing a hand over his mouth, blinking at him once before turning away. 

“I wanted a signed copy,” Obi-Wan says, tossing the book with just enough force that it lands on his desk and knocks over half Anakin’s mementos.

“No, you don’t.”

“No, I don’t,” Obi-Wan agrees. “Perhaps I just came to warn you that Quinlan Vos has declared his every intention to kill you, and I wouldn’t put it past him.”

Anakin swallows and shakes his head. “I thought I wrote him in a fairly flattering light, seeing as how he beat me half to death when we were twenty. He still trying to fight your battles for you?”

“That’s one way to put it,” Obi-Wan inclines his head. “If only I understood the concept of friends.”

“If only you understood the concept of a lot of things,” Anakin mutters, crossing to his desk and fishing a pen out of the mess of his desk. He grabs Obi-Wan’s book, and flips open to the cover page.

The tip of his pen hovers over the paper. To my biggest fan, he writes and then signs his name.

“Cute,” Obi-Wan murmurs from just beside him, and Anakin barely resists the urge to jump. To cry too, probably.

“There. You can go.” He shoves the book back at Obi-Wan, almost letting it drop in his hurry to not touch him. He doesn’t know what will happen if he touches Obi-Wan Kenobi again. He’s spent eight years dreading the very idea and eight years longing for it.

“So you really believe you’ve done nothing wrong,” Obi-Wan marvels, holding the book in his hands as if it were a particularly fascinating live grenade. “I wondered what your defense would be. What you would say. How you would rationalize this: disappearing three weeks into your last year at Jedi, ignoring my calls, dropping out of school, leaving Jedha, only to emerge eight years later with a trashy Tell-All that thinks it’s highbrow literature. But you don’t have a defense, do you? You didn’t think you’d have to prepare one.”

“I didn’t think you could read,” Anakin clenches and unclenches his jaw.

He can feel Obi-Wan’s eyes boring into the side of his face. “Fuck you, Anakin Skywalker,” he says simply. Finally. Anakin holds his stiff stance, but Obi-Wan turns away, grabbing his coat from where he’s abandoned it on one of Anakin’s chairs.

“I thought you wouldn’t mind,” Anakin hears himself saying before he realizes his mouth is moving. “I saw the interview your ex-wife gave about you.”

Obi-Wan stops from where he’s halfway through putting on his jacket. His face is unreadable, but his eyes dart everywhere across Anakin’s face before he shakes his head. “She’s not....She spent our whole marriage furious at me that she couldn’t be what I wanted and I didn’t know how to tell her it was useless to try. You’re an idiot if you think her little interview is the same as—as you doing--as your---as this.”

He grabs a scarf—Anakin’s scarf—and winds it around his neck, turning to open the door. 

Anakin is there before he can, placing one hand to the side of Obi-Wan’s head and slamming the door closed again. “What do you mean.”

He feels half mad, borderline insane. His heart is hammering. He’s so close that he can smell Obi-Wan, and the smell is addicting. Cedar, cardamom. Spice. 

Without his conscious permission, he’s pushing further, caging Obi-Wan against the door and turning him around by the shoulders until he can grab the scarf, his scarf, and fist his hand into it.

“What do you mean?”

Anakin is taller and stronger. He always has been. Everything Obi-Wan put into his system made him weaker, stunted his growth. 

But Obi-Wan has always known he’s smaller, and he’s always known exactly how much Anakin liked it. He looks up from beneath his eyelashes at Anakin, slumping slightly against the door like prey that’s been caught. 

It’s a trap, it’s always a fucking trap, a fucking game, but Anakin falls for it. He presses forward

“She wasn’t you,” Obi-Wan tells him, eyes dark in something that could be hatred or love but is probably both at the same time. “Nothing she said or did would ever matter because she never—she was never you.”

“Why did you marry her then?” Anakin whispers. “Barely out of college. Would you have made me be your best man?”

“I thought you would have hated her the most,” Obi-Wan breathes back. “I fucked her better when I thought about how much you would have wanted to claw her eyes out.”

Anakin makes a sound like he’s wounded. He feels wounded. He feels raw and open. He’d hated her, Ob-Wan’s right. He’d hated them both, how easily Obi-Wan had married someone his father approved of, how perfect they looked together. As if Anakin had never existed at all.

“What do you want?” Anakin asks--begs--dropping his hands to Obi-Wan’s waist purely from memory.

Obi-Wan leans forward, and for a second Anakin is worried that he’s going to kiss him. He’s elated at the very idea.

“Buy me lunch,” Obi-Wan whispers into his ear, nose finding the curve of it and nuzzling against it carefully. “With all the money you made from breaking my heart twice over now.”

Anakin knows he will not say no.

Obi-Wan Kenobi has always been a whirlpool. At least this time Anakin understands that he’s drowning. Surely that has to count for something. 

where’s my toxic dark academia au where the Jedi Order is a prestigious private university for rich kids who are all a different flavor of beautiful and fucked up, and Anakin is the kid they let in on scholarship once every a few years and he comes in scrappy and defensive and in love with the daughter of the family who is sponsoring him (and maybe half-adopted him when he was 10 so it’s a bit fucked up all around)

and he meets this pretentious dickbag of a student on his hall who is so cold and aloof that anakin can’t stand him, this guy obi-wan who’s so beautiful and untouchable and who sees right through him

I imagine they fuck in the most explosive way where they’re in the middle of a very loud fight in some bathroom in some rich kid’s house and neither is sober, and obi-wan says some awful shit about anakin being in love with Padmé and if his adoptive parents knew they probably would wish they hadn’t adopted him and anakin says some awful shit about how obi-wan’s been sent to boarding schools all his life cause his father never wanted him, and it starts as a fight but they’re just punching each other with their mouths and probably crying too

[nintenderniere]

By far the best headcannon I ever created was that everybody from Tatooine has a Russian accent