Distance & dial tones (Star Wars modern!AU, Obikin, M)

[Nebula]

The door of the hotel room shut behind Obi-Wan with a resounding click, and honestly it couldn’t have come even a moment too soon.

Yes, he enjoyed meeting up with colleagues that he rarely got to see as much as the next cosily tenured and domesticated academic, exchanging thoughts about each others’ research in their respective fields, hearing about the latest with their spouses, kids and pets they had running around, and having his mind ‘broadened’ in between persistent bouts of boredom as the conference rolled on and on and on.

Just for today however, day three of the whole get-together, if he had to shake one more hand or rehash the same conversation yet again, he may just consider jumping out the window if it hadn’t been rather ominously nailed shut.

Catching himself and his own crabbiness, Obi-Wan mentally chastised himself. With a deep yawn he switched on the lamp, the soft yellow glow filling the darkness, and settled into the armchair by the dressing table, pulling out his phone. There was only one remedy really for listening to other people talk about their families and the lingering ache it accentuated.

He lingered on that feeling for a moment, turning it over in his hand and considering it. As curious as he was about the world, he’d always been a homebody in between bouts of adventurism.

After a few sets of long, anticipatory rings, the line finally connected and his voice emerged on the other side.

“Hello?” Anakin answered, sounding mostly there but… not quite all the way? Eager, but definitely distracted. They exchanged pleasantries and Obi-Wan listened intently as Anakin gave him the general rundown of his day.

“The usual. Classes, coffee date with Ahsoka, eating instant ramen alone on your couch since you’re not here to cook dinner for me…”.

Obi-Wan couldn’t help but roll his eyes at that last part. You couldn’t let the facade fool you, Anakin was actually extremely proficient in the kitchen when he could be bothered. He was a much more intuitive cook than Obi-Wan himself who had to follow along exactly as one of his many numbers of cook books instructed him in order to make anything half decent.

Listening a little closer however, Obi-Wan could identify the relatively unobtrusive but persistent featherlight sound of click-clacking on a keyboard as Anakin spoke. Without interrupting Anakin’s report about this girl in Ahsoka’s poli-sci class that she oh so totally doesn’t have a crush on, Obi-Wan glanced at the time on the alarm clock across the room on his nightstand.

“First of all,” he started as soon as Anakin was finished. “We all know she does, but that’s also none of your business so leave her alone. Secondly, it’s nearly half past 11 where you are, what are you still doing working?”.

There was a beat of silence, followed by a heaving sigh. The clacking came to an abrupt stop. “Nothing…” he said, edged with a ready defensiveness, before softening a little as he continued, sensing his partner’s dissatisfaction with that answer. “My next dissertation draft is due with my advisor soon and I thought what we were discussing today in seminar would help get past this part I’ve been stuck on but the pieces still aren’t damn well coming together…”.

Obi-Wan’s eyebrows pinched together at the affected pitch of his voice, worrying bubbling up in his chest at just how exhausted and stressed out he sounded. He supposed it came with the territory, mere months out from finishing up his masters degree in a subject as challenging as aerospace engineering as Anakin was, but knowing that didn’t help how helpless Obi-Wan felt when situations like this arose; when things seemed to all pile in on top of him. His own field of study being classic literature, he had little scope to help Anakin in any meaningful way other than the basics - making sure he ate, slept, and took proper care of himself. Sometimes, in relation to the latter, that meant taking the burden upon himself to do it for him.

Could it also be the quality of the reception in his hotel room making him sound strange? Although, even if the cell reception had been out of whack, the sound hadn’t been tinny or muffled or anything vaguely technical like that. Just… heavy. And rough; in an organic sort of way that felt like more than just bone-weariness. His scepticism peaked as a moment from their text exchange a couple of days ago suddenly resurfaced in his mind; the day that Obi-Wan had left for the conference.

Anakin (09:34am): the next person that sneezes in this class is getting drop-kicked out the window

Anakin (09:35am): everyone on this campus is sick right now, istg

You (09:38am): Oh dear.

You (09:38am): Regardless, is it not a bit early for threatening cold-blooded homicide, dearest?

Anakin (09:40am): not when i'm being provoked

Oh dear, indeed.

Being a professor himself, Obi-Wan knew all too well the horrors of college campuses throughout the duration of cold and flu season. Incessant coughs, sniffles and sneezes were a persistent backing track across every lecture hall, lab, seminar classroom, library, and coffee shop from around mid-autumn through to late winter/early spring. Not to mention the extra added element of stress around the time of midterms just before Christmas break. You were one of the lucky ones (faculty unfortunately included) if you didn’t end up with at least one dose of stress-lurgy during that time.

Waiting on his response on the other end of the line, Anakin took the opportunity to attempt to clear the accumulating thickness from his throat, a telling sniffle tacked on just for good measure, both of which managing to be caught by the receiver.

However, regardless of any not so latent inclination of Obi-Wan’s to want to fuss a bit over it, Anakin was a complex being. Forcing care and attention upon him before he was ready to give into the realisation of needing it, of wanting it, despite how much he clearly liked it, rarely went over well and would only serve to worsen his potentially already dour mood.

Obi-Wan resigned himself to letting the issue go, opting instead to move the conversation on. It had been a strange couple of days without Anakin, and Obi-Wan had missed the other man’s presence, as well as just the simple conversation they'd share throughout the day. His sarcastic barbs that still caught Obi-Wan by surprise with their dry wit and wry delivery, his droll but affection-laced complaints about Obi-Wan’s fastidiousness and particular quirks and habits, even his quick temper and admittedly amusing little outbursts.

Obi-Wan missed the cup of his favourite tea that Anakin knew how to brew and would bring to him on the mornings they were blissfully able to actually sleep in together. The odd shoes and miscellaneous deconstructed machinery parts left scattered around Obi-Wan’s apartment. It went without saying, obviously, that he also missed his dear Anakin’s beauty and the perpetual furnace-fire heat of his body in bed next to him (arms or legs or body just in general often half on top of him); warm, loving, deeply knowing touches and intense, unflinchingly longing looks, silky soft golden curls between Obi-Wan’s fingers…

They spoke for a while longer about this and that between Anakin’s increasingly periodic sniffles. In the midst of some of Obi-Wan’s considerations, shame on him for letting his mind wander, he hadn’t immediately heard how Anakin’s speech had caught in his throat, voice giving away one, two near silent hitches, before tumbling into one near-silently stifled expulsion.

“h’GHT’x”.

Near, being the operative word.

“Bless you-” he hazarded after a moment of hesitation, before cutting himself off as he heard Anakin’s breath catch yet again.

“huh’UHGXT’sh” A little more insistent, and a little less expertly held back.

“Ble-”

“hiH’EH’DTZ’ssh!” he sneezed again, still pinched curtailed, but marked with an evidently sickly damp squish, bookended by a quiet groan that echoed through the phone’s speaker and a condensed snuffle that betrayed descending congestion.

“Bless you, darling…” and because now he can’t help himself, “Are you alright?”.

“Fi’dne” Anakin had quipped back quickly, sounding slightly distant, as if having stepped away for a brief moment, his return marked by another encumbered, but singularly determined sdnfff. “Sorry. What were you sayidg about S’hhah…”.

He was stubborn in his efforts to hold back the oncoming and, frankly, inevitable tide; to ignore the developing cold he so clearly was coming down with and continue their conversation about something one of Obi-Wan’s colleagues had discussed with him about a rogue first edition he was trying to hunt down.

Something that, honestly at this point, Obi-Wan couldn’t care less about.

Anakin had seemingly managed to head off the tickle, even if the heaviness of his careful, strategic, breaths in and out gave away that the need had not fully abated, not even close, and that the urge was itching and lingering away in the background, never too far away.

God, Obi-Wan shifted uncomfortably in his seat, suddenly feeling the urge to cross one leg over the other even in the privacy of the very much empty hotel room. He wasn’t going to stop until he’d let himself sneeze properly, and they both knew that.

“Anakin” Obi-Wan said, voice suddenly serious, but gentle. A question, a request, a command, and a plea somehow all melded into one word. A few beats of silence followed.

Suddenly aware of his position between a rock and a very hard place however, with no real alternative, Anakin gave in, his frantic gulp of an inhale breaking the silence.

“hhUH’EHDJSSHeu’oo…. hh’eH…. h’EHDSSSHh’uh!”.

The third one teased him for a tortuous few seconds, before coming on the cusp of a sharp, watery inhale “heH’EHDJSSSZ’yue!”.

They left him in a hurry and scraped his throat up on the way out, full, guttural, and unmistakably viral, echoing with encroaching misery. From the sounds of it he’d clearly pulled the receiver away from his face and angled the sneezes away from it, though such considerations hadn’t stretched to making any effort to cover or muffle the messy shower each evidently resulted in. Why would he bother, when he was alone? In their place, likely laid up sick in their bed all by himself stuck now with tending to himself until Obi-Wan got home.

Who very much wished he was there already.

However, regardless of whatever more ardent (but unuseful) feelings he may have felt under the surface, or bemused annoyance at the need Anakin felt to try and hide that he was taking ill in the first place, in that moment as he listened to his partner still trying to snuffle away any evidence of actually being sick, Obi-Wan couldn’t find it in himself to be anything other than kind.

“Oh, Anakin…” he breathed, his tongue clucking against his teeth in genuine sympathy “You’re not well at all, are you?”.

All he got in response was a pitiful, thoroughly stuffed up, wet little hum in seeming concession, a crackling cough catching in his throat. Despite his needling, the last of the fight leaving him made Obi-Wan’s chest ache a little in sympathy.

“You sound like you really need to blow your nose, dear one.”

The smooth, honey-like warmth in Obi-Wan’s voice, though cautious in its approach, seemed to erode whatever rock-like facade Anakin had been holding, the sound of him letting go of the last of his fortitude audible in his tired sigh.

“You wouldn’t thidk so with the amount I already have done today,” he griped, clearly leaning into self-pity, testing its waters. Obi-Wan tilted his head, shifting himself into a slightly more comfortable position in the armchair. “Hmm, really? Oh dear.”

Emboldened now by the chance to finally complain a little about how he felt in the company of a kind ear, Anakin continued, voice edging on a whine. “I feel like I’ve done nothing but sdneeze, feel like I’m about to sdneeze, or blow my nose all. Day. Haven't been able to concentrate on anything.” Sdnff.

And oh, wasn’t that a pretty picture to paint.

For a fraction of a selfishly indulgent, yearnfully lonely moment, Obi-Wan can see it in his mind. He can imagine the sweetly rounded curves of his partner’s soft button nose caught all pink around the edges and twitching, shiny with a hint of sheen and unendingly drippy in an omen for what was to come when the cold fully settled in. His stormy blue eyes teary and a little swollen with illness as they flutter and twitch with the incessant urge to sneeze.

“Torture.”

“Right?” Anakin said. He left the sentence hanging though and Obi-Wan heard the phone being set down, the mutter of a congested curse uttered under his breath followed by a clipped apology. It seemed even he’d ran out of patience with his own worsening state, having weighed up the value of sounding gross for a brief moment and properly clearing himself out versus continuing to actively sound gross for longer, coming out on the side of the former.

He emptied the contents of his nose in a long, productively gurgling blow, before rather impressively continuing on in nearly the very same breath as he’d finished. To his credit his voice did come out sounding marginally clearer; something closer to how he sounded when he first answered the call, like he could almost deny he was even ill at all (if you’d not just heard such a display).

“Oh! And just to top it all off, M’bace actually kicked me out of kickboxing earlier, can you believe it?”

Obi-Wan did a double-take, his mind stuttering as it approached the hurdle of the other man’s audacity. “What?”

“I know! Sent home for a bit of what was just starting to be a cold? Like c’mon.”

Obi-Wan let out a long-suffering sigh. Honestly, why was he surprised? Genuinely, what was shocking about Anakin disregarding A) his own health, and the health of others for the sake of his beloved kickboxing class? Not a single thing. He was about to tell him so too, only-

“L…l’iH’ke…you cad’t ju’hH just st’ohp.…. hUH’IHDZSSSCH’hue! heh’H? …. h’uH’IHDSSZ’hue!”

The sneezes wrenched out of him with an impressive force, thoroughly and undeniably cold-laden, and the resulting sniffle afterward made it clear that every ounce of previously purged congestion had all come flooding back in, and then some. Although, in a strange, masochistic way, after all the forceful holding back Anakin was likely to have been doing ‘all day’ (in his own words), he’d kind of sounded like he’d needed them.

“Ow”.

The little, likely involuntary, groan of pain however melted away whatever was left of Obi-Wan’s exasperation, leaving only warm, bubbling sympathy and a gnawing sense of longing to be there with him now.

“Bless you,” he answered emphatically. “You sound so awfully bunged up now, poor thing.”

Anakin gave what sounded like an attempt at an unimpressed, little hmph sound, followed by a mild utterance of thanks as Obi-Wan heard him moving around - into bed properly, he was hoping, with laptop and textbooks set firmly aside for the night. The noise might have put Obi-Wan off delivering more affectionate fussing of a similar kind, if he did not know the other man as well as he did, and how he could preen under the weight of the praise and attention.

“I mbiss you.”

The words emerge from the pregnant pause on the other end of the call, small and ringing with a vulnerable honesty that made Obi-Wan ache down to his bones. It almost acted involuntarily to pull his body into action, even though there was nothing really he could physically do to help where he was.

A swell of affection flooded his chest like a tidal wave at the image of Anakin in his mind, alone in their bed, and of the desire to be there with him, before the tide quickly retreated back from the shore in resignation. Yes, he wouldn’t be home until tomorrow evening, but he was capable of taking care of him, even if it was just a bit, all the way from here. Take him firmly in hand like he so needed every now and again.

“You’re in bed properly now, yes?” Obi-Wan asked, calling upon what was referred to as his ‘teacher voice’, every ounce of it emitting “I’m going to say this once and only once”.

It wasn’t all that much different to his normal voice, truth be told, just… firmer. Edged with discipline and left little room to be argued with, despite how Anakin liked to, shall we say, test his boundaries. The recognisable tone of it sent pleasant shivers up Anakin’s spine in an instant, and he simply hummed an affirmative response.

“Laptop, books, study materials and the like away for the night? You need to rest, darling. This is probably how you’ve ended up with this awful cold in the first place.”

“hiH’AEHDSSSZ’chuh!”

“See, listen to that. Mace Windu’s a smart man and knew what he was doing, sending you home, didn’t he?”.

Anakin’s cheeks burned at the hint of disparagement in the perfect mix of Obi-Wan’s chiding but affected tone, his blood beginning to boil under his skin.

He lay back and let his entire body relax as the shroud of Obi-Wan’s care washed over him, even from afar. His muscles loosened, and it was just then he realised how tense and rigid he'd been holding them since the beginning of the day.

“And no more of this business of holding in sneezes, hm? That sounded so terribly painful before I’m surprised you didn’t burst a blood vessel.”

Anakin’s lips ticked up into a knowing, bleary-eyed smile, his hand coming to rest on his chest, fingers absently stroking himself. “As a favour to mbyself, or to you?”.

There was a beat of stillness between them, where Obi-Wan could’ve chosen to be embarrassed for Anakin’s recollection of that little… thing. Well, quirk. But with both so far away from each other, craving comfort, what was the point, really?

“I guarantee it’ll make us both feel a great deal better.”

------------------------------------------------------------

A/N: ...the SW brainrot continues. More parts to come 🫠

[solitaire-au]

Ok, I think I just melted into a puddle of warm goo after reading this. 🥰 

[RemedyBane]

Amazing! Perfect! Adorable! Ugh I love them!

[DullSpike]

This is amazing! I’ve read it about four times now lol. Are you planning on adding another part?