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“Anakin, use your words.”
The statement is phrased like demand daring him to defy the speaker, but his Guardian’s voice is gentle and Obi-Wan has never even asked for more than Anakin was capable of giving.
Anakin had been taught how to speak, selected for his sharpened senses and ability to articulate the dark pit within his mind. When his Master had been sufficiently pleased with Anakin’s progress, he had been tricked into thinking that the words weighting his tongue down were his own. Obi-Wan disentangled all the cruel lies his Master had forced him to learn with the hands of a well-practiced weaver, binding new braids with his hope into Anakin’s hair. The only bead attached to it was blue and Anakin cares for it more than the crying crystal he bled red.
It troubled Obi-Wan, and despite the eloquence of his Master’s words on his tongue, Anakin lacked the expressions to elaborate why earning this one precious pearl meant more to him than the kyber cut and carefully healed to white wonders.
“I— I need a word for pain,” Anakin confesses, struggling for breath and quiet. Obi-Wan guides him in the Force, but Anakin still clings to the torment that subdued the sun within him. “And for in the morning, we will try again.”
“What kind of pain?” Obi-Wan asks, patient and willing to wait for Anakin to gather his wits and wisdom.
Anakin is bleeding exhaustion, but he’s long since forgotten what it means to live in moderation, his life having been one of extremes, exhilaration next to earthbound suffering, chains pushing him to the ground, deeper until it pressed all the air out of his lungs. There is no freedom in enslavement and the dark side is poison, punishing your every transgression with acidic addiction, acrimonious speech, and iron burning your skin as if you belonged to the fair folk.
The pain Anakin feels is not that of mortal wounds, skin opening up to reveal red oceans, endless until they dry up like greed turning mothers to ashes, Tatooine to desert. He has tired of the training, and even that admission is the work of many hallowed hours of heuristic auspices. Obi-Wan taught him of lines and boundaries not only within his own mind but that of his body as well. There is no need for lightning cracks on Anakin’s skin for all that he is already a Lichtenburg figure, his missing arm a testament to orders refused and pain endured.
Anakin doesn’t have to train until he’s too weak to stand.
The ache of his heart, the sickness in his throat, are not a product of overworking himself. He knows that Obi-Wan will turn off his blade and take away the fictive enemy if he thinks Anakin shouldered too much. It is a matter of trust that Anakin allows himself to follow Obi-Wan’s lead to do the same, that he doesn’t mistake kindness for pernicious patronization.
“I feel like my mind is being torn in half, the gravity of the entire planet bearing down on me, burying me. I am the fixed point of pressure and I can hear every child in the lower levels crying out.”
Obi-Wan has wanted to leave Coruscant for a while, let Anakin learn on a kinder planet, somewhere he doesn’t have to think of his Master, but neither Council nor Senate could allow it. The former because of the latter and all the places Vader was still synonym with catastrophe and carnage. Coruscant is louder to a Jedi than it ever was to a Sith. Anakin used to absorb the misery surrounding him, soak in it as if it were a bath and then built his armor around him. If he worse another’s suffering, then he did not have to feel his own, let it penetrate his mind and face the consequences of his choices and manipulations.
Sith have so few emotions to experience and the Jedi have so many, too many, that Anakin struggles to name them all, each and every sensation schooling him in empathy.
“Ehnoct,” Obi-Wan vocalizes slowly, lets Anakin hear how the air carries each vowel and consonant. “You are looking for ehnoct. It is the pain of your mind, hearing a thousand voices scream in anguish until they drown out your own.”
“Ehnoct,” Anakin repeats, the word foreign on his tongue and yet already heavy and familiar in a way suggesting he’d speak it with forthright frequency. The thought alone tires him tremendously, summons images of nights awake, staring at the starless sky, throat hoarse from screams that never left his mouth and tears never shed.
“Orhma bika.” Obi-Wan reminds him of welcoming warmth. The deciding difference between anbe anohrah and kitobo kesh, arms wrapped around you to reassure you and those holding you back.
There is a word for this turbulence and torture. Anakin is not alone in desperate grasps for steadiness. His Master taught him how to speak, but it is Anakin who teaches his genuine Guardian what he means and what matters.
Ehnoct, Anakin thinks, his mind an open doorway instead of a lethal labyrinth, leading everything but his heart, an obstacle his Master tore through until Anakin learned to entrap him, lose all lingering presence and run.
Obi-Wan knocks on the fragile frame still, not forcing himself inside, but waiting for Anakin to pick him up and present his splinters of stained glass, the knives sinking into his skin. His Guardian runs over scars old and new with loving hands, like an artist examining a painting, acknowledging all the damage inflicted and burdened.
He doesn’t judge, he merely soothes, rebuilds Anakin’s shields with fragments of his own, twice as strong as Anakin’s fortress because it was born out of love. It will take many repetitions of this cycle, but Obi-Wan hasn’t faltered once and so Anakin continues to believe in him.
“And the other sentence?” he asks.
“Sahrhiiru ibli denik nev netana,” is Obi-Wan’s answer, delivered with a smile and a sense of finality.
“The day traveled little eternally?” Anakin translates slowly, lets every word melt in his mouth until he is confident and no longer casting lines, looking for fish. His Guardian’s language has many expressions like that, saying one thing, meaning another and where they confuse him, they delight him too.
As long as he still studies, he stays at Obi-Wan’s side.
“We worked a lot today,” Obi-Wan says, pride glowing like the morning sun. “And learning is not restricted to one day, no matter how long it stretches. You’ve done well, Padawan. Tarii’ah foh keelak.”
Tarii’ah, Anakin wants to return, display his adoration as acutely and accurately as he could, but glass digs into the soles of his feet and he knows it would be a lie.
“Komlah foh keelak,” he says instead, which is better than bexlah and everything else he’s said before.
Obi-Wan holds out his hand, his heart, and Anakin treasures both and accepts.