#berryfic

Obi-Wan’s spine stiffens. He takes stock of the man sitting across from him in the solarium, choosing to be analytical rather than maudlin. Excluding the last few months, life outside the Temple has been kind to Anakin—he’s grown into the width of his shoulders, no longer resembling the ungainly silhouette he made on training mats, long-limbed into slenderness, muscles struggling to catch up to the sudden stretch, his balance shot by his altered center of gravity, by the seemingly endless growing reserves of power at his command. 

The skin under his eyes is bruised mauve. Tension has thinned out the corners of his mouth and while his hair—long enough that curls brush the collar of his dark green fineweave robe—is clean, it’s unstyled, messy. Typical parent of a new child. 

Children, Obi-Wan corrects mentally. There are two. 

“Do you have proof?” is all Obi-Wan responds, which is a mercy. He’s agonized over what he could, should say to Anakin if the Force willed their paths to cross again. By his thigh his fingers curl together, servos whirring under the pressure of synthetic joints grinding. This may not be preferable, but it’s less personally fraught. 

Clink. Anakin has withdrawn a datapad from his robe and set it on the table. The screen gleams black under the sunlight coming through the open windows. A steady breeze eddies in along with it, billowing the tied-off curtains. Naboo is as picturesque as ever, unperturbed as though war doesn’t rage across the galaxy, decimating everything it touches. 

“They were clever,” Anakin says. “But not clever enough.”

And it’s the utter lack of emotion that keeps Obi-Wan in his seat, stilling him from dissuading Anakin from this outlandish declaration, from dismissing it as the result of a grief that’s beyond anything he can comprehend. He’s lost a master and he’s lost friends, but no one he sacrificed everything for. 

Anakin sounds tired. Beyond the weariness of a widower with infants to take care of. 

Obi-Wan reaches for the datapad.

That is the thing about the passage of time; essential truths do not change. Surrender is not in Anakin’s nature. He refuses to accept a loss. Anger is his wheelhouse, a trait that had marked him unfit as a Jedi. Though now that Obi-Wan has lived through war, he recognizes that it’s what makes Anakin a survivor.

He swipes his fingers over the blank screen. It fills with code, schematics, logs cross-referenced against medical records and inventory. Someone has been meticulous. Has been at this for weeks. Obi-Wan parses the information with an ease that he would have been incapable of as a Jedi Knight, but now logistics and recordkeeping are what he spends his days wrestling into submission when there’s no weapon in his hand. 

On reaching the end he cannot make heads or tails of it other than discerning its compiled data from medical droids operating in the same unit. “What is this?” he asks, since the answer doesn’t reveal itself no matter how many times he skims over the lines. 

“I had nightmares that the birth would go wrong. Premonitions. We made plans. Went to a different hospital while deploying decoys to the one we were meant to be at. Only the few required to set this into motion had an inkling of what we were up to.” Anakin’s head jerks up; he turns to face the closed doors, at attention. 

Is it Obi-Wan’s imagination or does he hear wailing?

A beat passes. Anakin’s shoulders slump. He massages his temples with his palms. “Sorry, they’re attuned to my emotions. It takes little to set them off.”

His children. Are they Force sensitive?

Of course they are, Obi-Wan chastises himself. How could they not be? What’s salient is that they’re able to sense their father’s emotions from a different room already. Do three-month-olds even lift their heads yet?

“Do you not want to attend to them?” Obi-Wan asks. Children are not his forte. Once out of the crèche, he had no reason to interact with the youngest of their Order. And even then, none would have been that small. That vulnerable. 

“I already did. They’ll sleep for another hour,” Anakin dismisses. How he can say so with such certainty is impressive. On this subject his padawan has far outpaced him. 

Anakin gestures to the datapad. “Go to the next file.” The humanity that had entered his voice vacates it abruptly, that strained flatness creeping back in. Because that’s what that is, a thread wound too tight, garrote-thin and sharp. 

The next file is Padmé’s autopsy. 

Instinctively Obi-Wan averts his gaze, flushing in discomfited guilt. He had considered Padmé not a friend, exactly, but someone worthy of his respect. A rare breed of politician who played the game to aid the Republic, not to line her pockets or stroke her ego. 

This is an intimacy that is not for him to claim. She deserves better. Which is why he forces himself to read. If Anakin, loving, protective Anakin who would rather step into the fire than let someone he cared about burn, is giving this to him, then there is reason.

My wife was murdered. Anakin wholly believes that. The least Obi-Wan can do, that he owes him and Padmé, is to confront the proof.

“... I’m sorry, I’m still not seeing—” Obi-Wan’s throat thickens with sorrow. Dying in childbirth is a rarity on an Inner Core planet but not unheard of. Padmé had hemorrhaged in the afterbirth and the bleeding could not be stopped in time. What else is there to be said? The autopsy confirms what the holonet had reported. 

“Look at the date,” Anakin says.

Obi-Wan does. Blanches. This is from last month. Someone went into the tomb of the former Nabooian Queen and…? Anakin allowed it? Ordered it? 

Briefly, he considers the possibility that Anakin has been driven mad by grief.