TexasDreamer01

Title and Platform: Deepest Rivers (AO3) (tumblr)
Recipient: CourtesyTrefflin
Rating: Gen
Fandoms: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Characters: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker
Additional Tags: Canon Divergence - Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Anakin Skywalker Doesn't Turn to the Dark Side, Fix-It, Angst with a Happy Ending, Obi-Wan Kenobi Needs a Hug, Anakin Skywalker Needs a Hug, Obi-Wan Kenobi Gets a Hug, Anakin Skywalker Gets a Hug, The Force
Summary:
""The deepest rivers flow with the least sound." - Quintus Curtius Rufus"

They had missed Grievous. Again.

The failure was beginning to take a toll on him, if he were honest. He glances sideways at Anakin, seeing the mirroring fatigue at another pin-pointed extraction wafting out of reach like so much smoke in their hands.

Resettling his grip on his ’saber, he nods, acknowledging their need to rendezvous with their forces and put together yet another cobbled stratagem about what locations Grievous was – and wasn’t – to narrow down their list of possible attacks. Anakin nodded back, and they scrambled out of the maintenance shaft with due haste.

---

It wasn’t Grievous’ ship they had smuggled themselves onto, but it was CIS, and Obi-Wan considered that close enough. He was halfway curious to see if there was any information they could scavenge about the Siths’ plans for their breakaway army, though he doubted they were on a ship of enough importance to store critical information.

The Negotiator was in hot pursuit, firing upon the vessel with strategic ferocity. He knew Cody’s methods well, and Anakin shared a smirk with him. The Commander knew that they were aboard one of the ships in the flotilla, and it was a roulette of which one they would have chosen. The Force was with them – and just as equally the keen eyes of their second-in-commands enacting a classic pincer movement to divvy up the ships into more manageable parts.

“Ready when you are,” Anakin murmured, hand steady above his ’saber as they crouched in unison. Droid ships never ceased to fascinate him with their architecture so incongruous to a living being’s needs.

It was to their advantage, however, to stalk upon the criss-crossing catwalks that facilitated inter-level movement of droid troops. Obi-Wan hummed nearly silently, nodding.

They leapt as one to the lowest level, lightsabers lit and humming as they cut a swathe forward to extraction.

---

Reaching the command center, where they would be able to reach outward and communication to the Negotiator, was easier said than done.

They needed to weave their way in, and despite the wailing klaxons hailing their presence aboard the ship, it was difficult to thread such a needle with so little room for improvisation. Back to a desolate room they hid, out of breath and warily eyeing the bulkheads for any intrusion.

In the fluctuating warning lights, his brother looked withdrawn. Obi-Wan wasn’t certain he looked any better, but his fingers nevertheless ached with the compulsion to reach out and soothe the weariness encapsulated in Anakin’s eyes.

He sighed instead. It was echoed across from him, Anakin slumping forward against the metal wall, head thunking against it as he leans into the coolness Obi-Wan feels plastered against his own heaving back. They stole the moment to catch their breath, mutual in their silence.

“How long until they circle back?” Anakin asked, his tone indicating more to the air in general than to him in particular.

Shrugging, he frowned in concern at the fatigued figure across from him. “I don’t know,” He said quietly, wanting to brace his arms around himself but unable to lower his guard enough to do so, “We don’t exactly know how big this ship is.”

Anakin gave him a sardonic look, brow arched, “We can guess.”

Despite his feelings otherwise, a smirk pulled at his lips, “You’re a better guesser than I am in this subject.”

It was true, and he weathered the huff directed at him while Anakin stared a parsec out into his thoughts. They spent the lull collecting themselves, scraps pulled together that the war was doing its damnedest to shred apart, a breather that Obi-Wan hoped internally would last them longer than the exhale of this mission would last.

His eyes drifted shut as he listened to the slow rise and fall of Anakin’s breathing across from him. If he concentrated, noises of droids and looming battles were perceivable, but he let himself drift to the current moment.

The Force eddies around them, latently turbulent despite how still everything is. It rankles, like a sleeve that’s twisted around his arm, and Obi-Wan can’t help but voice the first thought that flies to his lips, “Are you alright?”

Because the Force and Anakin were one in the same – they had to be, so tightly entwined that sometimes Obi-Wan didn’t know what he was praying to, the unimaginably vast depth of the Force or the luminous bright star of his brother burning through all doubts. He had accepted that some days the Force was Anakin, and that some days Anakin was the Force; everyone was in orbit, and he himself teetered on the edge of nameless trepidation that it would all collapse around them.

It was with this in mind that he felt Anakin’s shudder before he heard it, an echo of the coolness of the bulkhead pressing against his own temple in a phantom touch when Anakin slumped with greater emotion. With it came a wave of fatigue, so like his own that it brought the crest of the emotion higher. He sighed, venting the excess, and watched as the action looped back to his brother. I am one with the Force, the Force is with me.

Such a truth seemed in extra alignment with their perspectives today, and he found himself wanting to reach out and brush his fingers along Anakin’s shoulder in a comforting gesture. Clearly, whatever was bothering him was deep-seated, and he was unsure how to disturb the tranquil waters of the problem.

“Anakin?”

“Yeah,” The other sighed, dipping his head briefly before winching himself into something more upright, “Yeah. I just… am thinking a lot.”

Ordinarily he would quirk a smile, rejoinder at the ready. He instead approached carefully, skating the surface, “Are they troubling thoughts?”

Anakin smirked faintly, frown overcoming it in a blink. He watched as Anakin borrowed his own gesture, arms wrapping around himself. It made his heart pang, more-so when he received an answer, “Plenty of them, yes. I… I do not know where to start.”

At the beginning? He wanted to ask, but bit the words back as they tipped forward on his tongue. It was an appeal to intuition to lean into another tack, “Which is troubling you the most?”

With another sigh, deep and thorny, Anakin scrubbed a hand over his weary face. “I’m not-” He began, started and stumbled as Obi-Wan sensed him wanting to re-do the path he had chosen, “I don’t know why I shouldn’t tell you this. Why shouldn’t I? I tell you everything.”

Obi-Wan’s fingers curled into his vambraces, digging into the gap underneath where familiar wool scratched back at his touch. His temple was pulsing with the beginning of a migraine, a pinprick of pain that he had to wade around to pay attention to his old padawan.

“Anakin?” He found himself voicing gently, slipping between the cracks of whatever this was that the Force was fracturing around, “I will never judge you, you must know that.”

You are my brother, and I love you.

The sentiment was lodged in his throat, nearly choking him. Obi-Wan swallowed, not tearing his eyes from Anakin.

A sigh shuddered out of Anakin, breaking and folding over him in a wave of foreboding. “Obi-Wan,” He murmured weakly, arms tightening around himself as his gaze lowered to the floor, “I- I fear Padmé will die.”

“What.”

Obi-Wan felt incredulous, not from lack of belief, but from the absolute and bone-deep certainty of the truth. He sucked in a breath, feeling like the rug had been pulled out from under his feet. There was clarity to the revelation despite the carved wound it brought to his heart.

This time he did reach out, both hands pulling Anakin toward him. They fell into each other, arms wrapped tight in an exchange of empathy. His shoulder felt rumpled with dampness, Anakin’s chest heaving as he struggled to contain the grief he could already foretell.

“It is such a burden to see what may come,” Obi-Wan murmured, rocking themselves in a gentle sway, heedless of the surroundings that might turn lethal any moment now, “Always try to focus on the present, Anakin, lest you lose yourself in what you fear.”

Maybe it was the combination of his earnestness alongside his words, for Anakin stiffened in reflexive affront but didn’t move away. He swallowed a sigh, fingers tightening in the other’s robes.

“I don’t know what to do,” Anakin said back, quieter than he himself had been. It was a fragile statement, especially coming from one so used to performing – to being – a miracle.

Obi-Wan’s heart cracked, just a little. “I don’t know, either, Anakin,” He confessed, firming his grip and feeling the tremble reverberate out between them, “But I do know one thing, and that is we can always traverse the difficult together.”

“You think so?” Beneath the fractured hurt, Anakin’s voice wavered with hope, and he could feel the strength of his brother clutching back.

He clucked a smile, faint though it was, “I know so, Anakin.”

Notes:

Altissima quæque flumina minimo sono labuntur.

The deepest rivers flow with the least sound.

VII, 4, 13.

- Book VII by Quintus Curtius Rufus.

"Quintus Curtius Rufus was a Roman historian, writing probably during the reign of the Emperor Claudius (41–54 AD) or Vespasian. His only surviving work, De Rebus Gestis Alexandri Magni, or Historiae Alexandri Magni, is a biography of Alexander the Great in Latin in ten books, of which the first two are lost, and the remaining eight are incomplete. His work is fluidly written, and while superficial study reveals the authors errors regarding geography, chronology and technical military knowledge, a detailed study reveals his focusing instead on character and protests against those Emperors of his times whom he considered tyrants."