Fic: In the Shadows (4/?)
Title: In the Shadows (4/?)
Time period: Prequel (Set before RotS; Anakin is a full Knight)
Pairing: Obi-Wan/Anakin (pre-slash)
Rating: PG (PG-13 and R, later on)
Warnings: None.
Disclaimer: Not only do they not belong to me, George himself actually owns my soul. He has to share it, though. Hah, George.
Summary: Unexpectedly sent on a mission to prevent two powerful Houses from devastating a planet with their hostilities, Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi soon discover that stopping a war is only the beginning of their troubles, not the end.
Author's Notes: I am so sorry that it's been as long as it has between updates. These last couple of weeks got so bloody busy, with tests and papers and other stuff, that I just couldn't find time to sit myself down and write. I'm going to try to avoid that in the future by setting aside a specific day of the week to devote to the fic.
Chapter Four
“How about now?”
Artoo gave a low beep, signaling a negative, and unseen by the droid, Anakin sighed and cursed, wishing he dared beat out his frustrations on the guts of the computer he was currently tinkering with. But that would probably guarantee a catastrophic system failure, or something, and then he would have to listen to Obi-Wan lecture him, in great and excruciating detail, while they floated through space in one of the Firehawk’s escape pods.
He would do just about anything to avoid that particular level of hell.
Shifting his glowlamp a bit more to the left and gritting his teeth, Anakin re-routed a few more pathways while keeping an eye on the tiny, hovering display to his right. It showed every modification to the secondary computer that he had made in his attempt to access a subsystem that did not willingly show up in the main computer’s files. A subsystem about which he was very, very curious, as well as quite wary.
It was also a subsystem that possessed encryptions and safeguards the Intelligence Bureau would go wild over, if he ever managed to get into the blasted thing. Preferably without triggering anything unexpectedly lethal.
He had been at it for more than two hours, only half his body visible on the floor of the cockpit and the other half swallowed up by the access panel beneath the computer station to the right of the pilot’s chair. Artoo was manning the ship’s controls and simultaneously monitoring his progress, ignoring the various and sundry obscenities that burst out of Anakin every so often.
Obi-Wan would not have blithely ignored them. But Obi-Wan was getting some well-deserved sleep, so it did not matter. Which was just as well. He was frustrated enough without having to listen to Obi-Wan’s pointed comments on his use of coarse language.
“Du fierfek - hi chuba da naga?!” he demanded with a fit of pique a moment later then suddenly jerked back, dropping his tools and scrabbling to get out from under the console as the Force flickered in warning. “Artoo? Did you do something?”
The droid’s domed head swiveled around, a concerned note in his beeping.
“Well, I didn’t do anything.” On his hands and knees, Anakin peered into the vacated space. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary; the tiny, portable display showed green across the board.
He frowned and slowly scooted forward, reaching out with his senses. Something had alerted him through the Force. He wasn’t imagining that. And there - he could feel it: a kind of susurrous whisper in the confined air, vibrating in the circuitry. A trap, or a protection; he could not tell which. But he knew for certain that it was not something he should mess with on a mere whim.
Good thing this was not a mere whim.
“Artoo, I’m going to try to find out where the - the whatever it is - sprang up from and deactivate it,” he said confidently, digging into his tool kit for an energy cutter and a systems shunt. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to keep him out of this computer, and he was going to discover why. “If you detect anything, let me know immediately.”
Artoo whirred and bleeped at him.
“I can handle it, Artoo.”
Another series of noises as Anakin rolled over onto his back and cautiously wriggled beneath the console. “Obi-Wan doesn’t know a hydrospanner from an interechoic micrometer,” he muttered in response to the droid’s question. “Let him sleep. This won’t take long.”
One way or another, he added in the privacy of his own mind.
Several minutes crept by, and he hadn’t yet done more than poke a bit at the hovering display, convinced it was lying to him. He could feel an edge of the blasted unknown security measure, as he was calling it in his head, behind the section directly to his left, but there was no corresponding indication on the display when there should have been something.
He swore softly in Huttese and adjusted the direction of the beam from the glowlamp he was levitating in place. He felt he should open the section in question, but he also felt he should have a care with doing so; the Force echoed that sentiment.
Anakin removed his cybernetic hand from inside the console, idly tapping the end of his energy cutter against the thigh of his bent leg. As things stood now, he could either slice open the section and try to bypass the blasted unknown security measure from there, or he could leave everything alone and let Intelligence have a go later.
The latter was the safest option, the one he knew his Master would favor.
“Well, here goes nothing.” And he brought the energy cutter back inside, held his breath, and switched it on, paying no attention to Artoo’s fearful ‘wooo’.
“Anakin!”
“Krolp!” The cutter jumped in his hand, he slammed his head into the top of the console, and an ominous buzzing noise filled the interior of the opening; brow stinging, he froze. “Oh no. I’ve got a bad feel - ”
As Artoo squealed in warning, strong hands seized Anakin by his utility belt and dragged him out of harm’s way a split second before a sizzling electrical discharge fried the air where his head had just been. Dazed, breathing hard, he looked up to find Obi-Wan crouched over him, his fingers still clutching Anakin’s belt and his lips thinned almost to nothing.
After the ship failed to incinerate itself, and them along with it, Anakin sheepishly ventured, “Uh, thanks?” Then he winced at the disgusted glare Obi-Wan turned upon him. “It’s not my fault,” he added quickly. “I was just - ”
“Just doing as I expressly told you not to,” Obi-Wan finished for him, climbing off of the younger man and standing up. He folded his arms in the sleeves of his cloak and took advantage of their positions to glare down at Anakin. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
“That I wouldn’t have triggered anything if you hadn’t startled me, Master,” Anakin replied, rolling over onto his stomach and peeking into the hazy depths inside the open panel. He called his discarded tools to his hand with the Force and scowled at the pitiful remains that rattled across the ship’s metallic floor. The hovering display was a complete waste, still smoking and sparking faintly, as was his glowlamp and systems shunt.
His energy cutter looked to be the only thing salvageable, and he wasn’t entirely certain that it’d work properly again.
“Great, just great. I’m going to have to replace all of this now, you know,” he whinged, pushing himself to his feet.
“You’re lucky you’re alive to complain at all, Anakin,” Obi-Wan pointed out acidly, apparently feeling the need to reassure himself that his partner was indeed unharmed by then gripping Anakin’s shoulder and giving him a thorough once-over, which Anakin suffered easily enough. “Do you have any idea what you just put me through? I thought I was going to have a heart attack!”
“Yes, Master. No, Master. I’m sorry, Master,” Anakin intoned reflexively, raising his hands to his head and trying to get his unruly dark blonde hair to lie flat again, while all it wanted to do was stick up in every direction. He swore fluidly, pressing his hair against his skull without much success.
Obi-Wan’s blue eyes flicked up and then back down, a reluctant quirk forming at one corner of his mouth. “It serves you right,” he observed dryly, poking at a particularly recalcitrant strand that continued to escape Anakin’s best efforts to corral it. “You look like you stuck your finger in a power socket.”
Artoo’s mechanical sniggering underscored the amused, and relieved, expression on Obi-Wan’s face. Not that such relief soothed Anakin’s embarrassment.
“I’m going to dunk my head in the ‘fresher’s sink,” he muttered. “Don’t touch anything while I’m gone.”
“Yes, Anakin,” Obi-Wan said, seeming quite bemused by that order. And who could blame him, really?
Anakin stalked out of the cockpit after giving his Master a filthy look. He did not return until he had tamed his wild hair, slinking over to the pilot’s seat and crawling into it with wounded dignity. His hair was damp and sticking to the sides of his neck and to his face.
“Not a word,” he hissed as soon as he sensed Obi-Wan open his mouth. “We’re going to sit here in reflective silence for a while. All right?”
“Reflective silence, from you?” Obi-Wan snorted, bringing out his datapad and switching it on. “That’ll be a welcome change.” He paused a moment to look at the open panel quite warily, before adding, “Are you certain it’s wise to just leave that as it is?”
Anakin’s shoulders hunched defensively. “I’m running a diagnostic right now. And Artoo, I’ll take the controls. Why don’t you see what you can find out as well?”
The droid beeped and blooped then extended his third limb and wheeled over to the secondary console. He buzzed reproachfully at the mess Anakin had made of things; Obi-Wan nodded in agreement without realizing he was, in fact, doing so.
“Just don’t get electrocuted,” Anakin growled at Artoo, sounding put upon now that his droid had sided with Obi-Wan. The ungrateful little traitor.
“Now, there’s a novel idea, Anakin,” Obi-Wan quipped. “Don’t get electrocuted. Whyever didn’t you think of such a thing?”
Anakin wanted to reach over and smack him, but he restrained himself. “We’ll be on Iiyen in the next hour and a half, Master. And what part of reflective silence was unclear?”
Obi-Wan merely smiled tolerantly at him, and Anakin knew then that he would not be hearing the end of this any time in the foreseeable future.
Story of his life.
Time period: Prequel (Set before RotS; Anakin is a full Knight)
Pairing: Obi-Wan/Anakin (pre-slash)
Rating: PG (PG-13 and R, later on)
Warnings: None.
Disclaimer: Not only do they not belong to me, George himself actually owns my soul. He has to share it, though. Hah, George.
Summary: Unexpectedly sent on a mission to prevent two powerful Houses from devastating a planet with their hostilities, Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi soon discover that stopping a war is only the beginning of their troubles, not the end.
Author's Notes: I am so sorry that it's been as long as it has between updates. These last couple of weeks got so bloody busy, with tests and papers and other stuff, that I just couldn't find time to sit myself down and write. I'm going to try to avoid that in the future by setting aside a specific day of the week to devote to the fic.
Chapter Four
“How about now?”
Artoo gave a low beep, signaling a negative, and unseen by the droid, Anakin sighed and cursed, wishing he dared beat out his frustrations on the guts of the computer he was currently tinkering with. But that would probably guarantee a catastrophic system failure, or something, and then he would have to listen to Obi-Wan lecture him, in great and excruciating detail, while they floated through space in one of the Firehawk’s escape pods.
He would do just about anything to avoid that particular level of hell.
Shifting his glowlamp a bit more to the left and gritting his teeth, Anakin re-routed a few more pathways while keeping an eye on the tiny, hovering display to his right. It showed every modification to the secondary computer that he had made in his attempt to access a subsystem that did not willingly show up in the main computer’s files. A subsystem about which he was very, very curious, as well as quite wary.
It was also a subsystem that possessed encryptions and safeguards the Intelligence Bureau would go wild over, if he ever managed to get into the blasted thing. Preferably without triggering anything unexpectedly lethal.
He had been at it for more than two hours, only half his body visible on the floor of the cockpit and the other half swallowed up by the access panel beneath the computer station to the right of the pilot’s chair. Artoo was manning the ship’s controls and simultaneously monitoring his progress, ignoring the various and sundry obscenities that burst out of Anakin every so often.
Obi-Wan would not have blithely ignored them. But Obi-Wan was getting some well-deserved sleep, so it did not matter. Which was just as well. He was frustrated enough without having to listen to Obi-Wan’s pointed comments on his use of coarse language.
“Du fierfek - hi chuba da naga?!” he demanded with a fit of pique a moment later then suddenly jerked back, dropping his tools and scrabbling to get out from under the console as the Force flickered in warning. “Artoo? Did you do something?”
The droid’s domed head swiveled around, a concerned note in his beeping.
“Well, I didn’t do anything.” On his hands and knees, Anakin peered into the vacated space. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary; the tiny, portable display showed green across the board.
He frowned and slowly scooted forward, reaching out with his senses. Something had alerted him through the Force. He wasn’t imagining that. And there - he could feel it: a kind of susurrous whisper in the confined air, vibrating in the circuitry. A trap, or a protection; he could not tell which. But he knew for certain that it was not something he should mess with on a mere whim.
Good thing this was not a mere whim.
“Artoo, I’m going to try to find out where the - the whatever it is - sprang up from and deactivate it,” he said confidently, digging into his tool kit for an energy cutter and a systems shunt. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to keep him out of this computer, and he was going to discover why. “If you detect anything, let me know immediately.”
Artoo whirred and bleeped at him.
“I can handle it, Artoo.”
Another series of noises as Anakin rolled over onto his back and cautiously wriggled beneath the console. “Obi-Wan doesn’t know a hydrospanner from an interechoic micrometer,” he muttered in response to the droid’s question. “Let him sleep. This won’t take long.”
One way or another, he added in the privacy of his own mind.
Several minutes crept by, and he hadn’t yet done more than poke a bit at the hovering display, convinced it was lying to him. He could feel an edge of the blasted unknown security measure, as he was calling it in his head, behind the section directly to his left, but there was no corresponding indication on the display when there should have been something.
He swore softly in Huttese and adjusted the direction of the beam from the glowlamp he was levitating in place. He felt he should open the section in question, but he also felt he should have a care with doing so; the Force echoed that sentiment.
Anakin removed his cybernetic hand from inside the console, idly tapping the end of his energy cutter against the thigh of his bent leg. As things stood now, he could either slice open the section and try to bypass the blasted unknown security measure from there, or he could leave everything alone and let Intelligence have a go later.
The latter was the safest option, the one he knew his Master would favor.
“Well, here goes nothing.” And he brought the energy cutter back inside, held his breath, and switched it on, paying no attention to Artoo’s fearful ‘wooo’.
“Anakin!”
“Krolp!” The cutter jumped in his hand, he slammed his head into the top of the console, and an ominous buzzing noise filled the interior of the opening; brow stinging, he froze. “Oh no. I’ve got a bad feel - ”
As Artoo squealed in warning, strong hands seized Anakin by his utility belt and dragged him out of harm’s way a split second before a sizzling electrical discharge fried the air where his head had just been. Dazed, breathing hard, he looked up to find Obi-Wan crouched over him, his fingers still clutching Anakin’s belt and his lips thinned almost to nothing.
After the ship failed to incinerate itself, and them along with it, Anakin sheepishly ventured, “Uh, thanks?” Then he winced at the disgusted glare Obi-Wan turned upon him. “It’s not my fault,” he added quickly. “I was just - ”
“Just doing as I expressly told you not to,” Obi-Wan finished for him, climbing off of the younger man and standing up. He folded his arms in the sleeves of his cloak and took advantage of their positions to glare down at Anakin. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
“That I wouldn’t have triggered anything if you hadn’t startled me, Master,” Anakin replied, rolling over onto his stomach and peeking into the hazy depths inside the open panel. He called his discarded tools to his hand with the Force and scowled at the pitiful remains that rattled across the ship’s metallic floor. The hovering display was a complete waste, still smoking and sparking faintly, as was his glowlamp and systems shunt.
His energy cutter looked to be the only thing salvageable, and he wasn’t entirely certain that it’d work properly again.
“Great, just great. I’m going to have to replace all of this now, you know,” he whinged, pushing himself to his feet.
“You’re lucky you’re alive to complain at all, Anakin,” Obi-Wan pointed out acidly, apparently feeling the need to reassure himself that his partner was indeed unharmed by then gripping Anakin’s shoulder and giving him a thorough once-over, which Anakin suffered easily enough. “Do you have any idea what you just put me through? I thought I was going to have a heart attack!”
“Yes, Master. No, Master. I’m sorry, Master,” Anakin intoned reflexively, raising his hands to his head and trying to get his unruly dark blonde hair to lie flat again, while all it wanted to do was stick up in every direction. He swore fluidly, pressing his hair against his skull without much success.
Obi-Wan’s blue eyes flicked up and then back down, a reluctant quirk forming at one corner of his mouth. “It serves you right,” he observed dryly, poking at a particularly recalcitrant strand that continued to escape Anakin’s best efforts to corral it. “You look like you stuck your finger in a power socket.”
Artoo’s mechanical sniggering underscored the amused, and relieved, expression on Obi-Wan’s face. Not that such relief soothed Anakin’s embarrassment.
“I’m going to dunk my head in the ‘fresher’s sink,” he muttered. “Don’t touch anything while I’m gone.”
“Yes, Anakin,” Obi-Wan said, seeming quite bemused by that order. And who could blame him, really?
Anakin stalked out of the cockpit after giving his Master a filthy look. He did not return until he had tamed his wild hair, slinking over to the pilot’s seat and crawling into it with wounded dignity. His hair was damp and sticking to the sides of his neck and to his face.
“Not a word,” he hissed as soon as he sensed Obi-Wan open his mouth. “We’re going to sit here in reflective silence for a while. All right?”
“Reflective silence, from you?” Obi-Wan snorted, bringing out his datapad and switching it on. “That’ll be a welcome change.” He paused a moment to look at the open panel quite warily, before adding, “Are you certain it’s wise to just leave that as it is?”
Anakin’s shoulders hunched defensively. “I’m running a diagnostic right now. And Artoo, I’ll take the controls. Why don’t you see what you can find out as well?”
The droid beeped and blooped then extended his third limb and wheeled over to the secondary console. He buzzed reproachfully at the mess Anakin had made of things; Obi-Wan nodded in agreement without realizing he was, in fact, doing so.
“Just don’t get electrocuted,” Anakin growled at Artoo, sounding put upon now that his droid had sided with Obi-Wan. The ungrateful little traitor.
“Now, there’s a novel idea, Anakin,” Obi-Wan quipped. “Don’t get electrocuted. Whyever didn’t you think of such a thing?”
Anakin wanted to reach over and smack him, but he restrained himself. “We’ll be on Iiyen in the next hour and a half, Master. And what part of reflective silence was unclear?”
Obi-Wan merely smiled tolerantly at him, and Anakin knew then that he would not be hearing the end of this any time in the foreseeable future.
Story of his life.