FLAWED 34/43 (Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Others) PG-13
Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. I am not making any profit from this work of fanfiction.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Ryn stood back and let Tachi brief Obi-Wan -- who had returned, tired and dusty, with an out-of-sorts Anakin a quarter of an hour ago. Ryn had a feeling that meant: we didn’t find anything, and the bad feeling is getting worse. Like that was news. She tried to scan the area for any sign of intruders, but her gaze kept coming back to Anakin, which only meant that she blushed deep with humiliation and looked away again.
How could you? she asked herself furiously, distracted again. After weeks of saying nothing, after swearing up and down that you wouldn’t push him!
But she knew how: she could feel herself trembling, unnerved by this hopeless mission as she had not been by hordes of Gamorrean mercenaries, by well-trained Chiss squadrons, by torture and imminent death. This was something new: a world in which nothing she could do would be the right thing, except maybe leaving, and that would mean leaving Anakin and Obi-Wan and Tachi and Ferus and clueless, fumbling Imram alone in the middle of this mess, and even if she could get off-planet by herself, she couldn’t make herself just leave them here ...
So now, right now, she was standing in the middle of a white-on-white hotel room, listening to the Jedi plan an operation that, if successful, would keep a horribly corrupt and repressive government in power. A plan she was, evidently, going to help execute. And even though she knew all this to be real, it didn’t seem possible ...
It was real, but she couldn’t quite believe it.
And the only thing about the whole mess that she could really wrap her mind around, the thing that was solid and knowable and that she could actually understand, was that she had hurt Anakin. She had been hiding this pain for weeks, living with it as best she could, determined not to let it trouble anyone else. She had accepted it as the price of her often complicated relationship with Anakin Skywalker. But then finally she had been just too weak, and something inside her had snapped under the pressure, and all her hurt and confusion had come spilling out, and it had hurt him, though he had tried to hide it. Because he had never meant to do this to her; he had never asked for her to feel this way. He did really love her, after all: just not in the desperate, aching way she loved him. Ryn couldn’t argue with that; one of the strangest things about their odd little dance was the way she knew Anakin’s feelings for her intimately; she couldn’t not. She felt him all the time. He had a healthy appreciation for her face and figure, and his loyalty and respect for her as a person knew no bounds. He would die for her without blinking.
But he did not feel her all-consuming passion, this desire so hot it burned like fury.
Sometimes Ryn wondered if time would let that passion burn out, if this was a sort of purification by fire for their friendship.
If this was her trial by fire, she was determined to meet it.
Except today, just for a minute, she had failed.
Ferus touched her arm and Ryn jumped, startled even though he’d been standing right there.
“Hey,” he said softly. “Are you okay?”
Ryn flinched away from his gentle touch, then felt instantly guilty. Ferus was only trying to help. “I’m fine,” she said.
Ferus didn’t look convinced -- of course, Ryn couldn’t imagine that anyone who wasn’t blind, deaf, and stupid would have been fooled by her performance. “You feel ... upset.”
No, do I? Ryn thought savagely. But Ferus didn’t deserve her ire; the only one she was really angry with was herself, although she was painfully aware that Anakin sensed her anger and thought it was directed at him. It wasn’t safe to try and explain the truth in front of the other Jedi; there was no way they could have that conversation without revealing not only their feelings, but also their sense of intimacy, which the Jedi would never approve.
Ryn said, “I have a bad feeling about this mission. We shouldn’t be here.”
That at least was true.
Ferus frowned, drawing her a couple of meters away from the others. “Are you sure?” he asked softly, radiating concern. “It feels -- I mean, if this has anything to do with what Evinne said ...”
Oh, kriff. Ryn had almost managed to forget that disaster amongst the horde of others, both present and impending. “Ah ... no,” she said to Ferus. “It’s not that.”
Ferus hesitated. He reached out, almost touching her arm again, and then drew back uncertainly, plainly trying to figure out what a non-Jedi would find appropriate comfort in this situation. Awkward, but sweet.
Ryn knew an instant’s sharp pang of regret: why couldn’t it have been Ferus -- steady, responsible, undemanding Ferus -- who swept her away? Forbidden love for Ferus would have been quietly bittersweet, no question of either of them ever giving into the feeling, because he was the consummate young Jedi and she was the dutiful hostage of the Jedi Council. It would have tasted of the sweet pang of might-have-been, and not of the sharp tang of unrequited love. There was a fraction of a second when Ryn could almost taste it, could see how everything might have been different, as though remembering a life she had never lived. And then she was back in the present, grounding again in the reality of verdans -- she’d tried, once, to translate that to Master Yoda, but the best she could come up with was that-which-is, which lacked the poetry and certainty, the groundedness of the Lorethan original -- with her wounded snarl of feelings. Life, becoming real as it happened.
Ferus was still watching her, his eyes warm with compassion, as close to worry as he would ever let himself come.
Ryn shook her head at him. “I’m fine.”
She wasn’t fine, and they both knew it.
She could feel Ferus, grappling with that, unable to accept the polite lie but now knowing how to defeat it, either.
Ryn relented in the face of his earnest confusion. “It’s nothing you can help with.”
Ferus’s face worked; he glanced back at the others, absorbed still in planning. Ryn had no doubt he meant it to look as though he were merely checking to see how the discussion was progressing; but his gaze flicked instantly, furtively, to Anakin, and Ryn knew where he thought the blame for her distress lay. He returned his eyes to hers, searching. “Sometimes it helps to talk.”
That didn’t sound like a Jedi philosophy. It also didn’t sound particularly likely. Ryn lifted one eyebrow at him. “Really?”
Ferus had the grace to blush and duck his head. But there was a smile pulling at the edges of his mouth when he said, “Well, so I’ve heard.”
And that earned a smile when she hadn’t thought she had any to spare.
Ryn said, “I’ve done a lot of talking lately. I need a break.”
Ferus was abruptly mortified. “Okay --”
Ryn stopped him with a nudge of her elbow against his. “But if you really want to make me feel better, you can promise not to laugh when you see my dress tonight.”
Now he was just confused. “Huh?”
“You’ll see what I mean.”
[]
Ryn took her assignment from Obi-Wan -- watch Imram and the Prime Minister, protect the cabinet at all costs -- without argument and submitted all over again to the gross indignity of being prodded into that nightmare of a dress that had turned out to be an insult not merely to her fair complexion, but also to her character.
She couldn’t find the strength to care; she was too busy caring about everything else.
I’m fresh out of give-a-damn, Kit would have said.
There was something wrong there, too: a sense of unease, that all was not right with her brother. That he was ... anxious. Unhappy. Even across all these lightyears, she could feel it, their bond stretching thin, wearing on both of them, but not snapped. It didn’t work that way.
Maybe.
Anakin tried to tease her out of her funk, tried to pretend everything was fine, as though that would make it true. It was a brave effort, and in his defense, it was a tactic that had been working reasonably well on his fellow Jedi for years now: he pretended not to have attachments, pretended to believe in the Code, pretended to have forgotten Padmé and his mother, pretended very very hard that he didn’t notice the way the Jedi were, more and more often, pulled into ethically untenable situations at the behest of the Senate, and pretended hardest of all to himself. But Ryn was fairly certain that couldn’t go anywhere good, and she was finding it hard to play along this time. She had never been much of an actress, and she could feel how every smile came out a little bit wrong. She hated it, because she knew she was hurting Anakin -- not to mention causing Obi-Wan’s growing bafflement -- but the harder she tried, the less real her smiles became. And it wasn’t like the Jedi couldn’t sense her misery. She never had a chance of fooling them, not really.
When she was all strapped into the dress, with her lightsaber and hold-out blaster tied into the panniers using garters and Anakin’s ingenuity, Obi-Wan peremptorily ordered his Padawan out of the room.
Closing the door on Anakin’s baffled hurt, he turned to face her. “All right. Let’s hear it, young one.”
Ryn refused to scowl at him. “I already told you. I have a bad feeling about this mission.” Feeling waspish, she added, “And I am ‘Commander Orun’, not ‘young one’.” It came out petulant instead of haughty, but Obi-Wan didn’t seem to notice.
“You are,” he agreed. An unexpected warmth touched his light eyes. “You are also a very unhappy thirteen-year-old girl. I confess I’ve no experience with girls, but I have had a thirteen underfoot in the not-so-distant past. I can read the signs. So what is troubling you?”
“The miss--”
“Yes, I know, the mission. I can’t say I like it much myself. But I sense a more personal distress.” He folded his arms and regarded her with gentle amusement. “At a guess, something to do with my heedless Padawan.”
Oh, no, please don’t blame Anakin for this mess ...
Obi-Wan must have taken the horror on her face for confirmation, because he said gently, “Did the two of you have a fight?”
“No.” Ryn could see Obi-Wan’s doubt; she said, “Not a fight. Anakin wouldn’t ... but I said some things better left unsaid.” She looked away, struggling to breathe against the corset and the press of her own unruly emotions. “I’ve never been so on edge, so lost, in my life, but that’s no excuse.” Another unsteady breath, not meeting Obi-Wan’s eyes. “I took it out on Anakin, and his devastating comeback was to tell me that I deserved better.”
Obi-Wan smiled faintly. “Debate has never been Anakin’s strong suit.”
Ryn almost smiled back at that. “No.”
Obi-Wan studied her for a while. “So there was something that had been bothering you for a while. Can you tell me what it was?”
“I’d rather not.”
“I am a negotiator,” Obi-Wan said. “I might be able to help.” When Ryn didn’t answer, he pressed her: “If I promise Anakin won’t be disciplined for whatever it is?”
Ryn snorted a laugh at the absurdity of that, startling her interlocutor. “You’ve got it all wrong, Obi-Wan,” she said. “Have you forgotten how we all got to know one another in the first place? You wanted to study my adolescent hormones. Well, here they are, in all their chaotic glory!” She flung her arms wide. “And your Padawan is proof against the temptation.”
It took Obi-Wan a moment to process that. “Oh,” he said. “So ... you’re not ... sleeping together, then?”
Ryn stared. Where did he ...? “No. Obi-Wan, we are not sleeping together.”
“Oh,” Obi-Wan said again. He wasn’t quite Jedi enough to mask his relief. “And that’s what you were arguing about?”
Ryn hesitated, then nodded. It was part of the truth, anyway.
Obi-Wan frowned. “I see.” He ran a hand through his silky hair. “I’m afraid I may have mismanaged Anakin’s education in that regard. I never really thought he’d -- that is --”
Ryn cocked her head at him. “Anakin had Humanoid Anatomy and Reproduction,” she pointed out, fairly certain she didn’t like where this was headed. “Two years ago. Vokara Che taught the class.”
Obi-Wan was turning an unbecoming shade of red. “I -- that is -- Vokara Che does not teach technique ...”
Ryn stared again. I can’t be hearing this. “I’m sure he’ll figure it out,” she said, sounding rather strangled, “if he ever wants to try.” Anakin is going to kill me.
“I can, ah --”
Ryn gave up on salvaging this conversation and decided to focus on just surviving it. She looked up at the ceiling. “What did I do to deserve this?”
“There’s no need to be embarrassed --”
Ryn took her eyes off the ceiling and gave him her best “oh, really?” look.
Obi-Wan sighed in resignation. “Another time, then. Tonight I need to know whether your head is in the right place. Can you handle it?”
“I don’t like the mission,” Ryn said. She was starting to sound like a broken holorecording. “But I can do it.”
“I need you focused --”
“Obi-Wan. Who else have you got?”
For a second he looked as though he might argue; then he relented and gave her a slight nod. “After the mission. We’ll get all this sorted out. Just ... we have to get through tonight.”
“I know,” Ryn said.
[]
Anakin was waiting when Obi-Wan opened the door, and he followed the echoes of Ryn’s misery through it into the little bedroom to find her leaning awkwardly on the bedpost, her face buried in her hands.
He crossed the floor in one stride and reached up to pull her hands down. “Ryn? What’s wrong? What’s happened? Did Obi-Wan --”
He wasn’t sure what it was that his master might have done, but Ryn cut him off, shaking her head.
“If you find yourself having a really awkward conversation with Obi-Wan later, try to remember that I really tried to stop him.”
A really awkward ... “What did you tell him?” Anakin asked warily.
“That we weren’t sleeping together.”
Anakin blinked in confusion. How did that even come up? “And that was good news ... right?”
“Apparently not,” Ryn answered dolefully. “He seemed to feel your education had been lacking.”
“He feels my -- what?” Ryn only looked at him, her eyes as bewildered as he felt. “I am going to kill you for this, later.”
“Can’t you kill me before I have to wear the dress?” Ryn said.
“No, now we have a world to save,” he reminded her.
“Again?” Ryn asked, remembering their back-and-forth on the run from Ziro’s thugs.
Anakin shrugged. “It’s what we do.” He pushed a look of hair behind her ear. “Besides. You’ll knock them dead. Even in prostitute-orange.”
Ryn didn’t quite manage to answer his smile. She reached up and took his hand in hers, pulling it away from her face.
She swallowed convulsively. “Anakin, I ... it doesn’t fix anything, but I want you to know how sorry I am, for the things I said earlier.”
Why should you be sorry? “Don’t worry about it,” Anakin told her cautiously. “You were upset. You had a right to be.”
“No, I -- we only had one rule, and I broke it.”
Anakin blinked at her again. “Rule? What rule?”
Ryn wouldn’t meet his eyes; staring distractedly at the Padawan braid brushing his right shoulder, she mumbled, “You know. That I would never ask you for -- for anything,” she finished, inarticulate but sincere.
Anakin did know; he remembered the conversation, and Ryn’s promise, but he had thought of it more as a dazzling, unexpected -- and wholly undeserved -- gift than a rule.
He supposed that could explain the wild, trapped-animal look in Ryn’s eyes now.
What am I supposed to do with this? She can’t go on thinking like this. It’s not right.
He could feel Ryn’s hand, shaking on his; he pulled free and reached out to take her by the shoulders, bravely ignoring what the corset was doing for her cleavage. “Well,” he said slowly, drawing the word out to get her attention, “you know how I feel about rules.”
And that startled a breath of anxious laughter out of her, because of course Ryn did know how he felt about rules, almost as well as Obi-Wan did.
“Yeah, exactly. And who died and put you in charge, anyway?” Anakin squeezed her shoulders gently and waited for her to look up at him. “So no more rules,” he finished decisively, putting a lot of effort into not thinking about the feel of her smooth cool skin under his fingers. “It’s like ... freestyle friendship.” Ryn snorted at that. “Yeah, okay, it sounds terrible, but the thing is ... we just have to figure it out as we go. Together. No more making up rules when I’m not looking.” He gave her a quick little shake, and it jarred loose a rueful smile from the corner of her mouth. “And besides ... I think you had every right to yell at me, but if it makes you feel better, we can call it even now, for the things I said on the transport. That way we’re both off the hook. Okay?”
Ryn gave him an embarrassed little grin. “Only if you don’t kill me when Obi-Wan tries to give you the talk.”
“I make no promises,” Anakin said.
That earned a shaky little laugh, which was all he’d wanted anyway. “I better go see what Tachi wants.”
“She’s going to instruct you in the use of your feminine wiles,” Anakin said over his shoulder as he palmed open the door. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Ryn stood back and let Tachi brief Obi-Wan -- who had returned, tired and dusty, with an out-of-sorts Anakin a quarter of an hour ago. Ryn had a feeling that meant: we didn’t find anything, and the bad feeling is getting worse. Like that was news. She tried to scan the area for any sign of intruders, but her gaze kept coming back to Anakin, which only meant that she blushed deep with humiliation and looked away again.
How could you? she asked herself furiously, distracted again. After weeks of saying nothing, after swearing up and down that you wouldn’t push him!
But she knew how: she could feel herself trembling, unnerved by this hopeless mission as she had not been by hordes of Gamorrean mercenaries, by well-trained Chiss squadrons, by torture and imminent death. This was something new: a world in which nothing she could do would be the right thing, except maybe leaving, and that would mean leaving Anakin and Obi-Wan and Tachi and Ferus and clueless, fumbling Imram alone in the middle of this mess, and even if she could get off-planet by herself, she couldn’t make herself just leave them here ...
So now, right now, she was standing in the middle of a white-on-white hotel room, listening to the Jedi plan an operation that, if successful, would keep a horribly corrupt and repressive government in power. A plan she was, evidently, going to help execute. And even though she knew all this to be real, it didn’t seem possible ...
It was real, but she couldn’t quite believe it.
And the only thing about the whole mess that she could really wrap her mind around, the thing that was solid and knowable and that she could actually understand, was that she had hurt Anakin. She had been hiding this pain for weeks, living with it as best she could, determined not to let it trouble anyone else. She had accepted it as the price of her often complicated relationship with Anakin Skywalker. But then finally she had been just too weak, and something inside her had snapped under the pressure, and all her hurt and confusion had come spilling out, and it had hurt him, though he had tried to hide it. Because he had never meant to do this to her; he had never asked for her to feel this way. He did really love her, after all: just not in the desperate, aching way she loved him. Ryn couldn’t argue with that; one of the strangest things about their odd little dance was the way she knew Anakin’s feelings for her intimately; she couldn’t not. She felt him all the time. He had a healthy appreciation for her face and figure, and his loyalty and respect for her as a person knew no bounds. He would die for her without blinking.
But he did not feel her all-consuming passion, this desire so hot it burned like fury.
Sometimes Ryn wondered if time would let that passion burn out, if this was a sort of purification by fire for their friendship.
If this was her trial by fire, she was determined to meet it.
Except today, just for a minute, she had failed.
Ferus touched her arm and Ryn jumped, startled even though he’d been standing right there.
“Hey,” he said softly. “Are you okay?”
Ryn flinched away from his gentle touch, then felt instantly guilty. Ferus was only trying to help. “I’m fine,” she said.
Ferus didn’t look convinced -- of course, Ryn couldn’t imagine that anyone who wasn’t blind, deaf, and stupid would have been fooled by her performance. “You feel ... upset.”
No, do I? Ryn thought savagely. But Ferus didn’t deserve her ire; the only one she was really angry with was herself, although she was painfully aware that Anakin sensed her anger and thought it was directed at him. It wasn’t safe to try and explain the truth in front of the other Jedi; there was no way they could have that conversation without revealing not only their feelings, but also their sense of intimacy, which the Jedi would never approve.
Ryn said, “I have a bad feeling about this mission. We shouldn’t be here.”
That at least was true.
Ferus frowned, drawing her a couple of meters away from the others. “Are you sure?” he asked softly, radiating concern. “It feels -- I mean, if this has anything to do with what Evinne said ...”
Oh, kriff. Ryn had almost managed to forget that disaster amongst the horde of others, both present and impending. “Ah ... no,” she said to Ferus. “It’s not that.”
Ferus hesitated. He reached out, almost touching her arm again, and then drew back uncertainly, plainly trying to figure out what a non-Jedi would find appropriate comfort in this situation. Awkward, but sweet.
Ryn knew an instant’s sharp pang of regret: why couldn’t it have been Ferus -- steady, responsible, undemanding Ferus -- who swept her away? Forbidden love for Ferus would have been quietly bittersweet, no question of either of them ever giving into the feeling, because he was the consummate young Jedi and she was the dutiful hostage of the Jedi Council. It would have tasted of the sweet pang of might-have-been, and not of the sharp tang of unrequited love. There was a fraction of a second when Ryn could almost taste it, could see how everything might have been different, as though remembering a life she had never lived. And then she was back in the present, grounding again in the reality of verdans -- she’d tried, once, to translate that to Master Yoda, but the best she could come up with was that-which-is, which lacked the poetry and certainty, the groundedness of the Lorethan original -- with her wounded snarl of feelings. Life, becoming real as it happened.
Ferus was still watching her, his eyes warm with compassion, as close to worry as he would ever let himself come.
Ryn shook her head at him. “I’m fine.”
She wasn’t fine, and they both knew it.
She could feel Ferus, grappling with that, unable to accept the polite lie but now knowing how to defeat it, either.
Ryn relented in the face of his earnest confusion. “It’s nothing you can help with.”
Ferus’s face worked; he glanced back at the others, absorbed still in planning. Ryn had no doubt he meant it to look as though he were merely checking to see how the discussion was progressing; but his gaze flicked instantly, furtively, to Anakin, and Ryn knew where he thought the blame for her distress lay. He returned his eyes to hers, searching. “Sometimes it helps to talk.”
That didn’t sound like a Jedi philosophy. It also didn’t sound particularly likely. Ryn lifted one eyebrow at him. “Really?”
Ferus had the grace to blush and duck his head. But there was a smile pulling at the edges of his mouth when he said, “Well, so I’ve heard.”
And that earned a smile when she hadn’t thought she had any to spare.
Ryn said, “I’ve done a lot of talking lately. I need a break.”
Ferus was abruptly mortified. “Okay --”
Ryn stopped him with a nudge of her elbow against his. “But if you really want to make me feel better, you can promise not to laugh when you see my dress tonight.”
Now he was just confused. “Huh?”
“You’ll see what I mean.”
[]
Ryn took her assignment from Obi-Wan -- watch Imram and the Prime Minister, protect the cabinet at all costs -- without argument and submitted all over again to the gross indignity of being prodded into that nightmare of a dress that had turned out to be an insult not merely to her fair complexion, but also to her character.
She couldn’t find the strength to care; she was too busy caring about everything else.
I’m fresh out of give-a-damn, Kit would have said.
There was something wrong there, too: a sense of unease, that all was not right with her brother. That he was ... anxious. Unhappy. Even across all these lightyears, she could feel it, their bond stretching thin, wearing on both of them, but not snapped. It didn’t work that way.
Maybe.
Anakin tried to tease her out of her funk, tried to pretend everything was fine, as though that would make it true. It was a brave effort, and in his defense, it was a tactic that had been working reasonably well on his fellow Jedi for years now: he pretended not to have attachments, pretended to believe in the Code, pretended to have forgotten Padmé and his mother, pretended very very hard that he didn’t notice the way the Jedi were, more and more often, pulled into ethically untenable situations at the behest of the Senate, and pretended hardest of all to himself. But Ryn was fairly certain that couldn’t go anywhere good, and she was finding it hard to play along this time. She had never been much of an actress, and she could feel how every smile came out a little bit wrong. She hated it, because she knew she was hurting Anakin -- not to mention causing Obi-Wan’s growing bafflement -- but the harder she tried, the less real her smiles became. And it wasn’t like the Jedi couldn’t sense her misery. She never had a chance of fooling them, not really.
When she was all strapped into the dress, with her lightsaber and hold-out blaster tied into the panniers using garters and Anakin’s ingenuity, Obi-Wan peremptorily ordered his Padawan out of the room.
Closing the door on Anakin’s baffled hurt, he turned to face her. “All right. Let’s hear it, young one.”
Ryn refused to scowl at him. “I already told you. I have a bad feeling about this mission.” Feeling waspish, she added, “And I am ‘Commander Orun’, not ‘young one’.” It came out petulant instead of haughty, but Obi-Wan didn’t seem to notice.
“You are,” he agreed. An unexpected warmth touched his light eyes. “You are also a very unhappy thirteen-year-old girl. I confess I’ve no experience with girls, but I have had a thirteen underfoot in the not-so-distant past. I can read the signs. So what is troubling you?”
“The miss--”
“Yes, I know, the mission. I can’t say I like it much myself. But I sense a more personal distress.” He folded his arms and regarded her with gentle amusement. “At a guess, something to do with my heedless Padawan.”
Oh, no, please don’t blame Anakin for this mess ...
Obi-Wan must have taken the horror on her face for confirmation, because he said gently, “Did the two of you have a fight?”
“No.” Ryn could see Obi-Wan’s doubt; she said, “Not a fight. Anakin wouldn’t ... but I said some things better left unsaid.” She looked away, struggling to breathe against the corset and the press of her own unruly emotions. “I’ve never been so on edge, so lost, in my life, but that’s no excuse.” Another unsteady breath, not meeting Obi-Wan’s eyes. “I took it out on Anakin, and his devastating comeback was to tell me that I deserved better.”
Obi-Wan smiled faintly. “Debate has never been Anakin’s strong suit.”
Ryn almost smiled back at that. “No.”
Obi-Wan studied her for a while. “So there was something that had been bothering you for a while. Can you tell me what it was?”
“I’d rather not.”
“I am a negotiator,” Obi-Wan said. “I might be able to help.” When Ryn didn’t answer, he pressed her: “If I promise Anakin won’t be disciplined for whatever it is?”
Ryn snorted a laugh at the absurdity of that, startling her interlocutor. “You’ve got it all wrong, Obi-Wan,” she said. “Have you forgotten how we all got to know one another in the first place? You wanted to study my adolescent hormones. Well, here they are, in all their chaotic glory!” She flung her arms wide. “And your Padawan is proof against the temptation.”
It took Obi-Wan a moment to process that. “Oh,” he said. “So ... you’re not ... sleeping together, then?”
Ryn stared. Where did he ...? “No. Obi-Wan, we are not sleeping together.”
“Oh,” Obi-Wan said again. He wasn’t quite Jedi enough to mask his relief. “And that’s what you were arguing about?”
Ryn hesitated, then nodded. It was part of the truth, anyway.
Obi-Wan frowned. “I see.” He ran a hand through his silky hair. “I’m afraid I may have mismanaged Anakin’s education in that regard. I never really thought he’d -- that is --”
Ryn cocked her head at him. “Anakin had Humanoid Anatomy and Reproduction,” she pointed out, fairly certain she didn’t like where this was headed. “Two years ago. Vokara Che taught the class.”
Obi-Wan was turning an unbecoming shade of red. “I -- that is -- Vokara Che does not teach technique ...”
Ryn stared again. I can’t be hearing this. “I’m sure he’ll figure it out,” she said, sounding rather strangled, “if he ever wants to try.” Anakin is going to kill me.
“I can, ah --”
Ryn gave up on salvaging this conversation and decided to focus on just surviving it. She looked up at the ceiling. “What did I do to deserve this?”
“There’s no need to be embarrassed --”
Ryn took her eyes off the ceiling and gave him her best “oh, really?” look.
Obi-Wan sighed in resignation. “Another time, then. Tonight I need to know whether your head is in the right place. Can you handle it?”
“I don’t like the mission,” Ryn said. She was starting to sound like a broken holorecording. “But I can do it.”
“I need you focused --”
“Obi-Wan. Who else have you got?”
For a second he looked as though he might argue; then he relented and gave her a slight nod. “After the mission. We’ll get all this sorted out. Just ... we have to get through tonight.”
“I know,” Ryn said.
[]
Anakin was waiting when Obi-Wan opened the door, and he followed the echoes of Ryn’s misery through it into the little bedroom to find her leaning awkwardly on the bedpost, her face buried in her hands.
He crossed the floor in one stride and reached up to pull her hands down. “Ryn? What’s wrong? What’s happened? Did Obi-Wan --”
He wasn’t sure what it was that his master might have done, but Ryn cut him off, shaking her head.
“If you find yourself having a really awkward conversation with Obi-Wan later, try to remember that I really tried to stop him.”
A really awkward ... “What did you tell him?” Anakin asked warily.
“That we weren’t sleeping together.”
Anakin blinked in confusion. How did that even come up? “And that was good news ... right?”
“Apparently not,” Ryn answered dolefully. “He seemed to feel your education had been lacking.”
“He feels my -- what?” Ryn only looked at him, her eyes as bewildered as he felt. “I am going to kill you for this, later.”
“Can’t you kill me before I have to wear the dress?” Ryn said.
“No, now we have a world to save,” he reminded her.
“Again?” Ryn asked, remembering their back-and-forth on the run from Ziro’s thugs.
Anakin shrugged. “It’s what we do.” He pushed a look of hair behind her ear. “Besides. You’ll knock them dead. Even in prostitute-orange.”
Ryn didn’t quite manage to answer his smile. She reached up and took his hand in hers, pulling it away from her face.
She swallowed convulsively. “Anakin, I ... it doesn’t fix anything, but I want you to know how sorry I am, for the things I said earlier.”
Why should you be sorry? “Don’t worry about it,” Anakin told her cautiously. “You were upset. You had a right to be.”
“No, I -- we only had one rule, and I broke it.”
Anakin blinked at her again. “Rule? What rule?”
Ryn wouldn’t meet his eyes; staring distractedly at the Padawan braid brushing his right shoulder, she mumbled, “You know. That I would never ask you for -- for anything,” she finished, inarticulate but sincere.
Anakin did know; he remembered the conversation, and Ryn’s promise, but he had thought of it more as a dazzling, unexpected -- and wholly undeserved -- gift than a rule.
He supposed that could explain the wild, trapped-animal look in Ryn’s eyes now.
What am I supposed to do with this? She can’t go on thinking like this. It’s not right.
He could feel Ryn’s hand, shaking on his; he pulled free and reached out to take her by the shoulders, bravely ignoring what the corset was doing for her cleavage. “Well,” he said slowly, drawing the word out to get her attention, “you know how I feel about rules.”
And that startled a breath of anxious laughter out of her, because of course Ryn did know how he felt about rules, almost as well as Obi-Wan did.
“Yeah, exactly. And who died and put you in charge, anyway?” Anakin squeezed her shoulders gently and waited for her to look up at him. “So no more rules,” he finished decisively, putting a lot of effort into not thinking about the feel of her smooth cool skin under his fingers. “It’s like ... freestyle friendship.” Ryn snorted at that. “Yeah, okay, it sounds terrible, but the thing is ... we just have to figure it out as we go. Together. No more making up rules when I’m not looking.” He gave her a quick little shake, and it jarred loose a rueful smile from the corner of her mouth. “And besides ... I think you had every right to yell at me, but if it makes you feel better, we can call it even now, for the things I said on the transport. That way we’re both off the hook. Okay?”
Ryn gave him an embarrassed little grin. “Only if you don’t kill me when Obi-Wan tries to give you the talk.”
“I make no promises,” Anakin said.
That earned a shaky little laugh, which was all he’d wanted anyway. “I better go see what Tachi wants.”
“She’s going to instruct you in the use of your feminine wiles,” Anakin said over his shoulder as he palmed open the door. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”