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Obi-Wan woke up in the loosest sense of the word. All his senses were fuzzy in the artificial way that meant that drugs were involved. Through the fuzziness he could feel pain, dulled but omnipresent. His entire body was aching, some spots more than others but whatever he had been medicated with blurred the lines. He tried reaching out with his Force sense before the others, and while he got a brief, reassuring flash of being surrounded by vod’e-Kix-Cody-Anakin-Ahsoka, he quickly retracted into his self, the usage leaving him unexpectedly drained. He was more than familiar with the feeling, and knew it had to mean that he had overused his Force abilities before, but he had trouble remembering what had happened.
He was extremely tired, and the pain level in his head would probably be a migraine powerful enough to cause him to black out if he could feel it entirely. But he also knew that whoever medic was in charge would want to do a checkup, and it was impossible to count out the case that even from a medbay bed someone would desperatedly need his input about something because the war never stopped.
His mental shields were shot to hell, undoubtedly a consequence of the Force exhaustion, so he could acutely feel it when Anakin was approaching the medbay, probably having been alerted via the Force before the vod’e medics.
Anakin in the Force was always… something to behold. The scale of his powers meant he left ripples in the Force, like a great beast in an ocean full of small fish. It wasn’t harmful to those around him, unless he wanted it to be, but it was hard to not get swept up in the rip currents his existence created.
The brief meandering of his thoughts was interrupted by someone touching his hand, and with a jolt he realised it was Anakin who was all of a sudden next to his bedside. Whatever cocktail the medics had given him was really messing with his perception.
He tried to open his eyes to see Anakin, managing only one after the other. The lights were blessedly dim in the infirmary, though he had no idea if it was for the benefits of the patients or because the ship was on night cycle. Anakin was little more than a darker blurry shade before a dark background, but then he didn’t necessarily need his eyes to see him.
“Hey,” Obi-Wan said, or tried to say as his voice failed him, so he ended up just mouthing the syllable. He coughed, and that seemed to help with getting the proverbial dust off his vocal chords. “Is everyone alright?”
His vision was slowly coming back into focus, enough that he could see the flash of incredulity on Anakin’s face at the question.
“Everyone-!?” he repeated back at him, his voice slightly too loud for Obi-Wan’s sensitive ears. “You’re the one in the hospital bed, Obi-Wan! What about you?”
Obi-Wan frowned. In his current state, it was probably Anakin who knew more about how he was faring than Obi-Wan himself, who was half numb, half indistinguishable aches. Kix usually was very thorough in writing his medical reports. Plus his had not been a rhetorical question – the uncertainty of who had been involved and what had happened that was so severe to land him in the medbay was really starting to gnaw at him.
“Well, all my limbs are still there, I think,” he tried to joke, but it didn’t seem to land with Anakin.
“Don’t make light of this, Obi-Wan!” Anakin exclaimed, seeming frustrated. “Half a building fell onto you!”
Obi-Wan felt a twinge of frustration himself, and it bit deeper than it usually would have hadn’t he been so off-balance. Yes, he was feeling absolutely terrible. But there wasn’t much either of them could do to help with that, he could just as well try to have some levity while he was feeling like shit.
His brain belatedly caught up to the ‘building’ part of Anakin’s outburst, and he momentarily forgot about the frustration.
“A building?” he asked. “What? Where?”
“In Fremwe?” Anakin asked like the question was ridiculous. “Stop trying to distract me, I’m trying to talk about your injuries!”
Obi-Wan’s emotions were starting to bubble up uncomfortably and he grit his teeth to keep himself from snapping.
“I have no memory of what last happened when I was conscious,” he careful enunciated. “I would appreciate it if you could tell me what occurred.”
“Well, it’s no wonder you don’t remember, since you managed to get a massive chunk of duracrete dropped onto your head!” Anakin said. Obi-Wan was less appreciative of Anakin twisting it like it was Obi-Wan’s fault already, but at least he kept talking: “We had broken through the Separatist’s siege defenses on Fremwe, and were advancing through the streets when they decided to detonate bombs they had hidden in the empty living towers of the citizens. One of them toppled onto your squad, and you used the Force to try to keep an entire half building suspended! What were you thinking??”
“Did I succeed?” Obi-Wan asked quickly. Anakin’s recounting was waking some disjointed memories, and he was dimly aware that he had been travelling with Cody and the Ghost Company. Cody he had felt alive in his brief Force sweep when he woke up, but he couldn’t be sure about the others.
“Did you-? You succeeded in nearly getting yourself killed!” Anakin all but yelled.
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan said, one of his hands gripping into the bed sheet, and he carefully measured each word to keep his emotions in check. “Are my men alive?”
“Yes, they are,” Anakin said with an eye roll, like it was some sort of unimportant detail and not something that made Obi-Wan slump in relief. “Still, what were you thinking? Trying to keep up all that debris just by yourself, you could have died!”
Obi-Wan frowned again, moving slightly so his upper body was at least slightly elevated, hissing at the pain but accepting it so he could see Anakin better. “We were in a battle zone, I constantly could die. It was a risk, but it was one I was willing to take to save my men.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have been taking the risk at all! Not if it means risking your life!”
“Anakin, I am a Jedi not a Coruscantian paper pusher, our duty means that we have to put our lives on the line!” Obi-Wan rebutted.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have risked your life this time then!”
“Are you saying I should have let my men die?” Obi-Wan asked incredulously.
“Of course not!” Anakin said vehemently. “How could you think that of me? I’m saying you should have found a different solution!”
“And what. different. solution would that have been?” Obi-Wan bit out.
“I don’t know!” Anakin threw up his hands in desperation. “Something, I guess; I wasn’t there!”
“Exactly. You weren’t there. Maybe there was some other way to get out of that situation or ways to prevent it, but discussing those hypotheticals is what debriefs are for! But in that moment, with only a second to decide, that was the best solution I saw, and I’m sorry if that isn’t good enough for you!”
Obi-Wan breathed heavily after finishing so loudly, his thoughts jumbled. The aftereffect of the drugs was making it difficult to think straight. He logically knew that unconstructively ruminating over already done things was bad, but having Anakin shove it into his face like that was making it hard to grabble with the inevitable self-doubt, his sharp mind coming up with a dozen what-if’s instantly. Less casualties with a Jedi present. There would have had to have been an escort to get him out of the battle zone when he was unconscious. The battle might have been shorter if he hadn’t been knocked out. How many had died while he was-
“I’d like for you to leave now,” Obi-Wan said, looking away from Anakin and fumbling over the bedsheets until he found the remote, where he pressed the button that would call the on-duty medic, as he should have done the moment he could move. Which he would have done hadn’t it been for Anakin.
Anakin who was not looking like he was going to leave. Anakin who was projecting more and more of his negative feelings into the room, and Obi-Wan did not have the shields to keep them out.
“Don’t you just push me away like this! I was worried sick about you!”
“I am sorry that you worried?” Obi-Wan tried, feeling increasingly exhausted. He would have felt bad for Anakin, but by now he was so drained physically and emotionally that it just wasn’t within his limited scope anymore.
“But you are not sorry for making me worry, are you?” Anakin demanded to know.
“I am not making you do anything, Anakin! I am trying to do my duty, and while I want you to be happy, I am not here to manage your fu- your emotions for you!”
“So me worrying is bad now again, is it?” Anakin asked. “It’s attachment all over again!”
Obi-Wan really wasn’t in any shape to debate the philosophical difference between sentient connection and attachment again with his former padawan. His heart was beating too fast, his head hurt, his entire body hurt, and he was stuck in bed without being able to move while Anakin towered over him.
“You know what?” he snapped. “Yes. Yes it is. It is if you come in here and start yelling at me while I’m frankly feeling like utter shit. It is bad if you use your emotions as an excuse to berate me and demand answers from me just so you can ignore them. You are just trying to find an outlet for your feelings because you do not want to deal with them by yourself and you are using me as one and I am done with it.”
“I am not using you as anything, it is your fault I am feeling like this!” Anakin yelled. “But I guess you’d just want me to suppress all of this, don’t you!?”
Obi-Wan opened his mouth to yell back, but all of sudden it was just too much. His hands were starting to shake from the adrenaline that his body was releasing as some haywire response to his high emotions, his head was a mess, everything hurt and everything was too loud and too much-
There were tears running down his face. He hadn’t cried in ages, but now it was the last outlet his poor body saw as it tried to keep up with all the emotions he was going through. They weren’t tears of rage or grief, but just an attempt to have anything to let out the pressure inside his head.
He couldn’t really see, his eyes open but unfocused, all his physical senses overwhelmed, but he could feel Anakin floundering at his side, off-kilter by the sudden shift.
“I-“ he started, before he seemed to come to some sort of conclusion. “See, this is what happens when you bottle up your emotions!”
Go away. Leave. Shut up. Stop. Go AWAY. LEAVE.
“I could help you if you would just tell me!”
You made me feel like this. I tell you and you don’t hear because you don’t want to listen.
A hand gripped his arm and he twisted away instinctively. The pain that had been dulled by the drugs flared up sharply by the sudden movement, hot and bright white and he curled in on himself, feebly raising his arms over his head to protect himself.
“Stop this, Obi-Wan-“
“Step away from my patient, now!”
The angry voice of Kix was like a saber slash through the room.
Obi-Wan was aware that there was scuffling, and that there was shouting, but he couldn’t see and his mind couldn’t keep track of all the words being thrown around, all of them overlapping into a garbled mess like multiple messages on the same frequency.
And then there was quiet.
Still, he didn’t dare move. His muscles were cramping from the tense, unnatural position he was holding himself in, but moving meant pain, moving meant being noticed and he didn’t want that.
A touch on his fingertips where his arm was curled around his head, the hand resting just above his shoulder.
He stopped breathing for a moment, and then picked up at double the pace he should be breathing at.
“General,” a voice said. He wouldn’t have wanted to look through the Force, but from the inflection he knew.
“Cody,” he tried to say, the first syllable aborted by the sudden urge to swallow against the dryness in his mouth.
“Skywalker is gone. Kix and I won’t let him back in.”
Obi-Wan probably shouldn’t feel glad about that, but in this moment he indulged in the short burst of relief.
“General, you need to calm your breathing,” Cody said somewhere above him.
Right. He tried to count the seconds of his breaths, to take deep breaths through the stutters of his chest that wanted to breathe out when he breathed in and vice-versa. Slowly but surely it worked, the pace becoming more measured, and his vision slowly returned.
He could see Cody by his bedside, just one arm reaching out to touch Obi-Wan’s hand, his stance carefully relaxed and distanced to avoid crowding him. A few steps behind was Kix, his face set in a deep frown.
“General,” he said, “I can give you something against the pain if you agree.”
Obi-Wan nodded, keeping the motion as small as possible. Kix stepped forward and administered a hyponeedle into his thigh with the efficiency of a professional.
It only took a few seconds for the drug to take effect, and at last Obi-Wan’s limbs relaxed, all of them slightly uncurling from the cramped mimick of a fetal position he had been in.
“For your injuries it would be best if you moved to lie on your back,” Kix said. “We can help you if you would like.”
Obi-Wan was already shaking his head before the medic had finished speaking. The light point of touch from Cody on his hand was the most he could endure right now of other people having their hands on him.
“Alright,” Kix said, taking a step back and motioning for Cody to withdraw his hand. “Take your time.”
It took longer than it would have with help, the rearranging of his limbs careful to avoid straining his injuries, especially now that it was hard to feel where they were through the painkiller, but he managed. Exhausted and tired he sunk his head back into the soft pillow.
Back in a normal position, he was suddenly aware how much of a mess he had to look, the skin of his face blotchy, everything wet and messy and his eyes red from the crying. He was a wreck in front of his own men, the same people that were relying on him to be strong.
“Hey, it’s alright,” Cody said when Obi-Wan made an attempt to hide his face in the pillow. “There is nothing to be ashamed of.”
“As medic, I outrank Skywalker when it concerns the medbay,” Kix said from further away. “He will only be let back in when you give the word. Cody and the other men from the 212th will be watching the entrance.”
Obi-Wan turned his head to look at Cody, who nodded in affirmation. In the Force he could feel the absolute certainty of the two men. There was an unwavering resolution to keep to their word and watch over him.
Safe.
“Thank you,” Obi-Wan whispered. It was getting harder and harder to keep his eyes open, the exhaustion from all that had transpired coupled with the fresh dose of drugs threatening to take him under. He turned the arm that was lying on the side Cody was on so that the palm of his hand faced upwards. Cody easily took the nonverbal cue, putting his own hand into the open one, their fingers interlinking.
The soft touch of another sentient with the solid, steady core beneath, the warmth of it suffusing his own, slightly too cold fingers.
The reminder of Cody’s presence accompanied Obi-Wan into blissful unconsciousness.