Anakin stared at the innocuous words, and then stared some more. He blinked, rubbed durasteel fingers into his eye sockets, and blinked spots from his vision, but the words stayed.
Rex cleared his throat. “Something wrong, sir? General Kenobi said it wasn’t urgent.”
Anakin stared at the flimsiplast sheet death gripped in his sweaty, flesh hand. There was still mud and blood caked under his nails that needed trimmed. If Obi-Wan were here they would be cleaned already from the sheer amount of bitching he’d take if he didn’t. But Obi-Wan wasn’t here, he was halfway across the galaxy scraping blood from under his nails from his own planetary sieges. Halfway across the galaxy and sending flimsiplast letters addressed hello love like something out of a holofilm.
Vague and incredulous worry crept up the back of his mind. “Has something happened?” He demanded. “Is the General and the 212th alright?”
Rex shifted and adjusted the helmet balanced against his hip. “As best I know, sir.”
He could barely look at the familiar slant of Obi-Wan’s scrawl without pleased heat bubbling up in his chest like a bottle of uncorked champagne. The words didn’t make sense, bewildered him really, but that didn’t stop the euphoric, giddy blush from rising up his throat and burning his ears florid and red.
He wanted to gasp around the bright shock of it, how viscerally it suffused every atom of him with flustered happiness. But that didn’t make the flimsiplast make any more damn sense.
He called Obi-Wan on his comm, half expecting the sounds of blaster fire or screams to answer. But Obi-Wan merely answered with a smooth, “Hello Anakin.”
“Master,” he muttered unsurely, leaving Rex on the bridge. “What’s going on?”
“What’s wrong?” Obi-Wan clipped back, immediately on the alert.
“The flimsiplast you sent,” Anakin said helplessly.
“Oh did Rex deliver it? It’s something tech has been working on, works shockingly fast on an intergalactic scale, carries a signal where coms drop. Keep the sheet on you, it will transcribe handwritten notes between us in real time, even if radio signal cannot pass atmosphere.”
“Oh,” he answered faintly. “Wizard.” That didn’t really address his real question, but Obi-Wan quickly shifted the topic to more important matters at hand. More important than Anakin’s scrambled, flustered brain.
Days passed, then weeks, and while the flimsiplast note did not leave his thoughts, other worries pressed in, sieges, assaults, planet-side entrenchment. The war had lasted long enough that sometimes he found memories from before difficult to recall. Especially when assaults dragged weeks at a time, so that only the screams of dying men and the stench of ion fire kept his exhausted, frenetic thoughts company.
One such assault found him flat on his stomach in a trench full of orange water and empty trooper helmets. Ion cannons lit the violet sky vermillion overhead, a constant rumbling barrage that shook him to his bones. He dug gloved fingers into the mud and pressed his face to his forearm and felt that even the force had forsaken them here.
The Seps had been quick to cut their communications, and then their supplies. It was just a quarter of his regiment here, marooned on this force forsaken rock with no way to call for aid. Two days prior they managed to separate him from his men and at any movement in the trenches they rained blaster fire down that gouged the earth and left smoking holes in their wake.
So he crawled through the mud and rested where he could, searching for his men amongst the wreckage and artillery fire. Violet darkened to a wine dark stain and under the rumblings of ion only the sound of breathing filled the silence of his foxhole, until his belt beeped.
He startled and then scrambled for the sound, wondering how his comm had broken through the communications block. But it wasn’t his comm, he pulled the rolled up flimsi from his belt and it unfurled with a faint, backlit glow.
Anakin—hold fast—we are coming
He sobbed with relief and then snarled at his own weakness, angry at the burn of tears he fought.
Can’t hold long, he wrote. Badly outnumbered and caught in entrenchment under ion cannons. All comms & supplies blocked. Casualties High.
I know. He watched Obi-Wan jot out the words letter by letter, quick and unusually messy.
Just hold on, love, we’re coming.
He gripped the flimsi with whitened knuckles and felt as if he could tear an ion cannon in two with his bare hands. He had never—Obi-Wan had never—
Anakin knew he lit up like a sun when Obi-Wan called him his padawan—his friend—his anything. Obi-Wan wasn’t stupid, he knew how easily Anakin bloomed with embarrassing satisfaction at such simple address. But his master had never—
He shoved the flimsi under his surcoat and gritted his teeth under the flashes of cannon bolts and fought through the mud, fire crackling in his chest with renewed fight. Hours passed and lightning joined the vermillion bolts to flash across the darkened sky. Rain washed sideways through the trenches in icy sheets and he drug one of his unconscious men by the shoulder pauldron and yowled in frustration every time his boots slipped in the mud.
A beep trilled from under his surcoat and he flopped back in the mud with a squelch to take ragged gasps as he yanked out the flimsi.
He sobbed and pushed it back against his breastbone. Hours blurred by one after the other in nothing but a slow bleed of agony and terror and rain lit by ion and ozone. Only the steady beep of the flimsi carried him through, with Obi-Wan’s messy scrawl to remind of the fight still inside him.
Don’t give up, my love, the last one read. He could barely make out the words from the blur of rain in his eyes and the agonizing burn of his own exhaustion. He felt only half coherent dragging trooper’s passed out bodies to cover, one after the other, one foot in front of the other.
And finally, finally with the break of dawn a strong and familiar hand grabbed him by the back of the neck and pulled him to stand in the mud.
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan said, eyes wide and piercing. “I’m here—I’m here.”
Anakin sagged against his chest, every string of the force keeping him on his feet suddenly cut. “Master,” he slurred, “I didn’t give up—I kept—I kept fighting like you told me.”
Obi-Wan caught him and they both collapsed to the ground, grass here, wherever they were, finally beyond the mud of the trenches.
“I know,” Obi-Wan said, a sharp edge to his voice though Anakin felt too foggy headed to decipher it. “I know, love, I’m here.”
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