#theyes | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

tennessoui · 2 years

Text

wherein anakin leaves the order

for @kana7o who requested anakin leaving the order when he’s 14 or so and obi-wan leaving with him which catches anakin completely by surprise.

(2.7k)

It’s the balino pasta that does it.

Sort of.

Well, okay, it’s a lot of things if Anakin is being honest.

But it’s the balino pasta that really, actually, finally does it.

Anakin stares down at the bowl in front of him, feeling the excitement curdling in his chest as Briyel digs her fork into a red noodle and raises it to her mouth with alacrity.

“Oh stars,” Vun says from beside him, breaking a chunk of bread and dipping it into the still-bubbling yellow sauce. “Oh stars, thank the Force Master Renwal let us go early for lunch.”

“They put souan bird in it!” Lana reports, sounding so kriffing excited.

“Oh that’s bantha shit then,” Rangok says, pushing the bowl away. “Souan’s the worst.”

Anakin can’t tear his eyes away from the pasta in his bowl the same way he can’t escape the sinking feeling in his gut, the one that tells him what he already knows:

He doesn’t belong here.

Just from the smell, he can tell it’s bland, that even though the colors in his bowl are reminiscent of fire, it will taste like nothing when it slides down his throat.

“Chin up, Skywalker,” Briyel nudges at him underneath the table with her fin. “I thought you liked Souan bird.”

“I do,” Anakin says and forces a smile onto his face. “Yeah definitely.”

He reaches for the excitement that he’d felt two hours ago when the first whispers of the lunch menu circulated through his age mates. Balino pasta.

He hadn’t known what it was, but he’s gotten very good at pretending he does with this sort of thing. He’s found it’s much easier to fake excitement than it is to face his peers’ incredulity when they remember again and again that he is different from the rest of them, raised speaking a different language, on a different planet, with a different understanding of—of everything.

Even something as simple as food.

“Yeah, it’s good,” Anakin nods and tries to make it look happy, spearing a noodle on his fork and lifting it to his mouth. “Oh, wow,” he says. “That’s wizard.”

“Oh, what?” Vun looks up from his fourth forkful. “Wait, do you actually like balino pasta?”

Anakin freezes mid-chew. The question feels like a trap, but he can’t understand how. They’re all eating it, they were all so excited about it. Surely that means they like it. And surely that means that Anakin should as well.

“Yeah,” he swallows. Frankly, he thinks, the ration bars he ate with his master while they took cover under a shipwreck tasted better than this. Kark, if Anakin’s being honest, the bugs he’d eaten roasted over the smallest fire imaginable on Tatooine tasted better than this.

But just a few months ago, he’d overheard his master talking with Master Vos in their quarters. Anakin was meant to be asleep, but he’d been so thirsty, still recovering from a sickness that had left him bedridden for two weeks. He’d just needed water, but then his master had been talking to Vos and it had taken Anakin all of two seconds to realize he was talking about him.

So of course he’d stayed. Of course he’d crouched in the shadows of the hallway leading to the living area and listened to his master’s words.

“It is like he does not want to be accepted by his age mates,” Obi-Wan had muttered, and Anakin could see the way he scrubbed his hand over his face. “Like he does not care nor desire the community they can bring him. That the Jedi can bring him.”

“From where I’m sitting, he wants to be accepted by you,” Quinlan Vos had replied, and Anakin had felt mortification deep down to his bones. “Maybe he doesn’t need agemates if he has you.”

“He won’t always have me,” Obi-Wan had said. “Not to mention that that way of thinking leads to dangerous attachment. He needs—kriff, Quinlan, I want him to feel as if he belongs here at the Temple, but he—he never wants to attend activities with his agemates, he never wakes in time for morning meditation, he hid the fact that he was sick until he almost collapsed in Mid Rim Contextual Histories class! I don’t know if—if he truly does not need the connection with his peers or if he doesn’t want to try or if he still does not trust the Jedi enough to seek his agemates out, but—” his master had cut himself off with a frustrated groan and gone quiet.

His friend hadn’t. “Obi-Wan, you’ve been given a difficult task, one that’s not been done in living memory for very good reason. Your padawan’s rough adjustment to Temple life is not a reflection of you as a master, nor of how much you care for the boy.”

“How could it not be?” Anakin’s master had said, and Anakin had gone back to his bed with a dry throat and a pit in his stomach which solidified into a resolution overnight: he would try. For that wavering note of dismay in his master’s voice, he would try harder than ever before to belong here in the Temple.

But then—but now—-

“I’ve never met someone who likes the balino pasta,” Vun says.

Anakin looks to Briyel, because nothing makes sense, but she’s smiling slightly too.

“But then—” he stutters out, setting down his fork in his still full bowl of food. “I don’t—”

Lana takes pity on him. “Everyone in the entire Temple thinks balino pasta is disgusting,” she tells him after she swallows her mouthful. “And so the cooks always give us the best dessert after to make up for it. Balino pasta means Bavaugan cream puffs, and if you eat really fast, Chef Faj gives you extra cream puffs.”

“Since you like the pasta so much, can I have your cream puffs?” Rangok asks, and Anakin’s chest feels tight, like all the pasta he’s just forced himself to swallow has gummed up his lungs.

He stands and walks out of the refectory without another word.

—----------

So it’s a lot of things, but it’s the balino pasta that really does it, really makes him understand that he can learn the rules and he can play nice as anything, he can join the outings his agemates schedule and he can stay silent during morning meditation, but he doesn’t belong. He doesn’t know how to, will never be able to learn every hidden rule and tacit understanding that binds the Jedi together.

He can recite the Code in four different languages, but he’ll never know about the balino pastas of the Jedi Temple, the silent rituals that bind all Jedi together.

And he can’t think of one reason why he should keep trying.

—------------

Anakin wouldn’t say he’s an expert at leaving homes behind, but he’s done it once already, so he understands the basics.

He understands that it’s important to go fast and to not look back. He has a bit of credits, a lot more than any fourteen year old should have. He has a bit of credits and a loose plan. He’s going to leave the Jedi Order one night, and he’s not going to come back. He won all the credits he has by podracing in the lower levels, so he’ll go there first, bet on himself under a fake name, and collect his winnings. Then he’ll get off of Coruscant for good.

Out of necessity, he waits one week between the day balino pasta was served in the refectory and the night he leaves. He tells himself it’s because of the podracing schedule, but he knows it’s not.

His master is gone. He’d been sent on a solo mission a few weeks ago, and Anakin wants to say goodbye to him. He doesn’t want to just leave.

But Obi-Wan is nowhere to be found, even when Anakin thinks he should be back, and Anakin can feel the resolve in his stomach wavering.

More importantly, he can feel his disquiet slowly harden into resentment—of his agemates, of the Order, of his master.

He doesn’t want to hate anything, especially not the Jedi. Especially not his master.

So when the night of his self-imposed departure rolls around, Anakin walks to his master’s room. It’s empty still, the bed carefully made and every surface clean and devoid of personality.

He leaves his padawan braid on the blanket. His master should have that at least. It’s always been his more than it’s been Anakin’s.

It’s incredibly difficult not to linger as he walks through their quarters. He spent five years of his life here. There, the third caf table that Master had had to request because Anakin had destroyed the first two. The kitchen where Master had taught him how to make an omelet.

It doesn’t get any easier as he moves through the Jedi Temple, quiet as a mouse-droid and leaving half-hearted goodbyes in his wake even as he tries not to linger.

He knows what he should do because this is not his first time leaving a home.

But he doesn’t think he can do it, leave and not look back. He isn’t sure he has it in him.

It tears at his heart, standing in the hangar bay, hugging the shadows of the room as he waits for the last worker to leave.

He wonders when his bond with his master will fade, when his master will get another padawan. He thinks about some strange boy sleeping in his bed, and his heart falters. Maybe he can try harder. Maybe there’s still time to turn back, run back to their quarters, and unpack his bag.

He can explain away the shorn padawan braid as a training accident, he can—he can stuff this hurt deep down into his chest and try to be the padawan his master deserves. The Jedi Order can be his family, they can, he can just—he just has to pretend a little more and then he—

A hand, rough and familiar, falls onto his shoulder and it’s only when Anakin raises his head to blink tear-filled eyes at his master that he realizes he’s sunk down against the wall, hugging his knees to his chest as his mind tears into his heart.

“Hello there,” his master murmurs, kneeling in front of him. “What are you doing on the floor, padawan?”

Anakin promptly bursts into tears.

When his master sucks in a startled breath and guides him into his chest, Anakin feels rotten. He’s leaving but his master is still being so nice to him. And in a few years—a few months—his master will find a new padawan, and he won’t be his master anymore and this is what Anakin wants because he doesn’t belong at the Temple, this is what he needs.

But it hurts. It hurts so much.

“Hush, padawan,” his master murmurs, and Anakin buries his face in the tunic of Obi-Wan’s robe.

“Not your padawan,” he mumbles, gripping tighter to the fabric. “‘M leaving.”

Obi-Wan huffs something that could be a laugh or could be scoff. “Oh, Anakin,” he says, free hand rubbing his back. “I know. But you must give me a few weeks to get used to the idea. You have been my padawan for five years. I’ll probably slip up and call you so for five more.”

Anakin sniffles and pulls back, wiping at his eyes. “You mean you’re not mad?” he asks, far more timidly than he means to. “You’re still going to want to talk to me even though I’m not gonna be a Jedi? And probably do a lot of illegal things to make a living?”

His master’s eyes are twinkling. “I hope we can meet in the middle when it comes to those criminal tendencies,” he says. “But as for talking to you…as your legal guardian in the eyes of the Coruscanti and Stewjoni governments, I would like to see you try to ignore me until you come of age.”

“What?”

“Ah, but please do not take that as a challenge, dear one. I imagine your teenage years will be hard enough as it is.”

“What?”

“Not to say that I’m dreading them,” his master says distractedly. “Though I suppose the accommodations I secured for us on Stewjon are modest compared to having a whole Temple that you can put between us when you’re feeling stroppy. But dreading feels much too harsh, even though I can already hear the doors slamming hard enough to shake the walls—”

“Master, what!” Anakin pushes himself fully away from Obi-Wan’s arms, frowning at his master’s face. “What are you talking about?”

Obi-Wan looks at him for a moment, as if debating something very serious before he sighs and stands, offering a hand to Anakin who takes it automatically.

“Anakin, when you stopped attending your classes a week ago, your masters let me know. It didn’t come as a shock, not to any of us, and I had several long talks with Master Yoda and the Jedi Council. We…decided that if you were to indicate that you believed you wanted to leave the Order, my resignation would be effective immediately as well.

“What they didn’t quite understand and I knew intrinsically is that you would never indicate your intentions. You would simply act upon them. Master Yoda agreed to allow me a sort of…soft exit from the Jedi Order. Enough time to find lodgings for us, to complete the paperwork necessary to make me your legal guardian so that I may take you off-world, to say my own goodbyes.”

Anakin doesn’t know when he starts shaking his head, but he can’t seem to stop. “Master, no, you’re a Jedi, you can’t just leave for me—”

“Nonsense,” his master says. “The Jedi Order is not a prison, nor is it a cult. I can leave whenever I want for whatever reason I choose. And besides, I’ve already found myself a rather good entry-level job near our lodgings in Stewjon. I’m quite excited, if I’m being honest. I’ve never paid taxes before.”

Anakin blinks and tries once more with a furious shake of his head. “I don’t—master, I never asked for this—I can do it myself, I don’t need you to—”

“Yes, I wager you probably could find your own way,” Obi-Wan nods thoughtfully. “And I know you’ve never asked this of me and that you probably never even thought to. But the truth of the matter is this, dear one: you never had to.”

Tears bead at Anakin’s eyes again as fear and guilt and relief war within him. “Master,” he mutters.

Obi-Wan’s hand lands on his head in a friendly pat before his fingers slide down to rub at the shorn end of his hair where his braid used to be. “I believe you can call me Obi-Wan, Anakin. I’m hardly your master anymore.”

Anakin sucks in a breath and lets the relief win out and flood his chest. “Obi-Wan,” he murmurs, testing the syllables on his tongue. Just Obi-Wan. His face breaks out into a smile at the way they sound, the gentle hold Obi-Wan has on his shoulder. “Obi-Wan,” he says again, and Obi-Wan laughs.

“I have a ship fueled,” Obi-Wan tells him, and Anakin looks at him in wonder.

He could have done this all alone. He knows that. But it’s an amazing feeling, knowing that he doesn’t have to, that he has someone with him to think about the little things like fueling the ship and paying taxes.

He probably has a dozen ration bars tucked away in his bag as well.

“Unless you would rather walk to Stewjon,” Obi-Wan’s eyebrow raises in an expression that’s painfully and giddly familiar. “Which would be rather hard to do as it’s several planets away.”

Anakin doesn’t say that right now he feels as if he could do it, could walk all the way to Stewjon and back. He doesn’t think he has to. It feels written all over his face.

“No, Obi-Wan,” he says instead, the same way he used to say master. But it feels better somehow.

Even more perfect now that they’re not master and padawan anymore, that they’re just Obi-Wan and Anakin and the galaxy is spread out before them.

#prompt fill #anakin leaves the order au #gen fic #i mean i imagine in like 10 years they get together but this is purely platonic #they go to stewjon and live in the capital city and obi-wan gets involved in stwejoni politics #and anakin becomes a mechanic/engineer #and eventually theye have enough money to free his mom #and obi-wan works with the jedi all the time #and everything is good and nothing hurts #and eventually yoda visits and gives anakin the braid he left in obi-wan's bedroom #and obi-wan tears up when anakin gives it to him #obi-wan & anakin #kit's fics

272 notes · View notes