For random Obikin things… consider Obi-Wan helping Anakin shave his face after he starts to get facial hair on T? (I’m sorry about the family thing, whatever it is I’m sending hugs 🫂)
thanks for such a delightful prompt. this was the first one i got in my inbox and it ahh. got away from me a little. it was a lovely distraction and a joy to write. i hope y’all like it :o) this is the most fic i’ve written since maybe 2021
obikin, 2.4k, rated T mostly for romance and some language. trans anakin, cis obi-wan, quinlan makes an appearance in the first half
— — —
“— and only after waking up hungover to a very disgruntled message from Master Windu did we discover that the man we were actually supposed to meet was three entire levels above us at a different club — operating under the very same name!”
Anakin did his best to absorb the story. It wasn’t exactly his first choice to have Quinlan Vos of all people practically shouting it at him from across the table across the din of the refectory at this early of an hour, but he would take these scraps of Obi-Wan’s life from his time before Anakin was foisted upon him where he could get them.
The man in question folded his arms across his chest and sunk further into his seat, brows twitching in a comical expression of displeasure. “We were not hungover.”
“Right, no, of course,” Quinlan said, rolling his eyes before leaning in towards Anakin conspiratorially. He shielded his mouth with his hand in a stage whisper. “He was still completely drunk when we were called in to give our report.”
An offended gasp sounded from across the table. “Quinlan!”
Anakin bit his tongue and hid his grin behind his spoon as he shoveled more cereal into his mouth, his eyes flickering to Obi-Wan, to Quinlan, then back again. The blush beginning to color his master’s cheeks filled him with a secret giddiness. Obi-Wan had gotten so used to Anakin’s goading over the years. It was no easy task to get the man quite so riled up. He would be jealous if he weren’t so delighted.
Vos waved off his friend, ignoring his protest. “Obi-Wan threw up in a planter before the meeting even started. I don’t think I’d ever seen Master Qui-Gon laugh so hard in my life!”
Obi-Wan scoffed fondly at the memory of his own late master, that frustrated flush still pinking high on his cheeks as he pushed around the last of the fruit on his breakfast plate. “Yes, well. That was how many years ago now?”
“Oh, I dunno, only like—“
Obi-Wan ignored him. “So I don’t suppose it’d be too great of an ask for you to let me live that down then, hm?”
Anakin eagerly watched the two’s brief but tense staring contest.
Quinlan blinked, then cocked his head as a dangerous smile broke across his face.
“Oh, sure. I’ve got plenty of others I can tell instead.” He pretended to think for a moment, then turned back to Anakin, certain that he still had Obi-Wan’s attention. “For example, remember that time during the equinox on Hosnian Prime when we—“
“That won’t be necessary, thank you,” Obi-Wan said all too quickly.
Now this was a tale from Obi-Wan’s youth that Anakin just had to hear. He dropped his bowl to the table with a clatter. “I want to know!”
The pair of masters turned to him and seemed to each fix him with a quizzical expression before deciding against it. Obi-Wan’s face shuttered entirely while Vos bit his lip as if to hold back laughter.
Heat crawled up Anakin’s neck as he looked around the refectory to see if anyone else was looking. He hadn’t been that loud, right? It’d been harder to control his volume recently, but if anything, Obi-Wan chided him for being too quiet. Not the other way around.
Quiet chatter and the scrape of dining ware continued uninterrupted across the great room. Nobody was looking his way except the two masters sitting across from him.
“Why are you both looking at me like that?” Anakin whispered, looking down to check that he hadn’t spilled something on his tabards.
“Here, kid,” Vos snickered, tossing something at Anakin that he couldn’t quite see. He caught it and looked down at his prize: a napkin. “You’ve got a little something.”
Anakin’s face burned. He scrubbed at his mouth furiously. How long had they let him look like that? Did anyone else see?
“Did I get it?”
Vos smiled wider. Obi-Wan smacked his friend across the back of his neck and stood up, walking right over to Anakin’s side. He plucked the napkin from Anakin’s hand and folded it into a neat triangle.
“Here, young one,” Obi-Wan said quietly as he dabbed just above the corner of his mouth. The warmth of his body so close, the tenderness of the gesture, his master’s kind and placating face over him… it was too much. “Better.”
Anakin could just die. His face couldn’t possibly get any warmer. The sound of Vos choking back laughter did nothing to stave off his utter humiliation. Maybe if Anakin hid his face in his hands for the rest of eternity the man would just… go away. So much for letting Obi-Wan be the butt of the joke for once in his karking perfect pristine existence.
As Obi-Wan sat down again, he reached across the table and rapped his fingers on the surface to get Anakin’s attention. “Anakin. I don’t understand why you’re so worked up. This happens to all of us.”
“Especially those of us who hide their— oh, how did she say it?— boyishly handsome face behind a full beard,” Vos supplied unhelpfully.
The faint but identifiable noise of a leather boot meeting someone’s shin sounded from beneath the table.
“I think what Quinlan is trying to say,” Obi-Wan continued, “is that you won’t have to deal with that sort of thing at all if you would simply shave every once in a while.”
Anakin proceeded to bury his mortification even more deeply in his hands. “I dunno how…”
“Come again?” Obi-Wan leaned in and tried to pry one of Anakin’s hands from where it was plastered to his face to no avail.
“I don’t know how!” he cried, throwing his hands up, visibly startling both of his table mates. People must definitely be looking now, but Anakin had no mind for them. “How would I?”
After a moment, Vos turned to Obi-Wan and tsked. “He's, what, eighteen years old now? And you haven’t taught the boy to shave?”
Obi-Wan became flustered all over again, but it was much less satisfying this way. “Well, no, I— it’s only recently—“
His master stopped himself mid-sentence, visibly distressed, but thankfully censoring himself from telling Quinlan fucking Vos that Anakin hadn’t started growing the first wisps of facial hair until he’d finally started his full T dose a few months ago.
“It’s fine,” Anakin said, trying to save both of them the embarrassment. “I can figure it out. Thanks for uh— for inviting me to breakfast, Masters.”
Before either of them could say anything else, Anakin grabbed his tray of half-eaten food and quickly left.
— — —
“Ow, fucking sithspit!”
Anakin threw the razor into the sink basin with enough force to send it rebounding onto the countertop and without a care for further injury. He leaned in close to the mirror to watch an unflattering drop of crimson tear up from the cut on his jaw and streak lazily down his face.
For all his half-cocked insistence in the refectory, teaching himself to shave was going pretty poorly. He’d already cut himself twice and he’d barely started. It was pretty much impossible to see the fine hairs on his jaw and above his mouth beneath the foamy layer of shaving cream that claimed in bold neon text on its packaging to prevent cuts. Trying to rinse any of it away left his tabards half soaked down the neckline like a child learning how to drink.
The clothing that had covered his upper half now sat in a damp heap on the floor of his dorm’s ‘fresher, leaving Anakin wet, cold, and covered in a frustrated flush from his face to his chest. His stupid nipples wouldn’t even pebble in the chill anymore above the tiny knots of scar tissue. He wouldn’t change it for anything, but at this point in his terrible morning, everything in the mirror was pissing him off.
So caught was he in his own vitriolic spiral that Anakin nearly jumped out of his skin when a series of quick knocks came to his door.
He didn’t have to guess who it was. He could only hope the quick stinging splash he gave his face was enough to serviceably clean the cuts and leftover shaving cream before he rushed to open the door.
As Anakin went to let him in, his master cast his furrowed expression over Anakin’s shoulder and out into his dorm with a perceptible air of judgment as if he were going to comment on the state of his room, but seemed to think better of it.
“Master. Hi,” Anakin said, leaning against the doorframe like his body was doing anything to block the view of his room. It wasn’t messy, really. It was lived-in. And studied in. And worked in. “I thought we weren’t meeting at the salles ‘til noon.”
Obi-Wan fidgeted slightly where his arms were tucked into his sleeves, his eyes casting down to Anakin’s chest before quickly returning to his face. “You’re bleeding a little.”
“Huh? Oh.” Anakin slapped his hand to the cut on his jaw, unthinking, hissing at the sting. The pad of his finger came away tinged pink. “Sorry.”
Obi-Wan untucked his hands and rolled his eyes as he pushed past Anakin, letting the door snick shut behind him. Anakin couldn’t remember the last time his master had been inside. He made an odd sight standing amongst his Padawan’s piles of half-folded laundry and stacks of novels and poetry.
What did Obi-Wan’s dorm look like when he was a Padawan? Did he hang up posters of his favorite holostars, too? He probably cleared his floor and made his bed to give his countless friends places to sit when they came over, or he at least made his bed for… for…
“Anakin,” present Obi-Wan said, pinching the bridge of his nose, “I’d appreciate an answer when I ask you a question.”
“Huh?”
Back in the very same present world where he was standing shirtless and dumb and a little sliced up, Anakin began to feel the beginnings of self consciousness and shame well back up.
“I’m offering to teach you,” Obi-Wan said, and when Anakin didn’t immediately respond, he shifted his weight awkwardly and continued. “To shave.”
“You don’t think I can do it?” Anakin fired back, folding his arms over his chest. At Obi-Wan’s grimace, he immediately regretted his kneejerk defensive response. “I’m– I’m sorry, Master. I didn’t mean that. I.. I would like that. Please.”
Obi-Wan nodded and shucked off his cloak, laying it gingerly over the back of Anakin’s desk chair. On top of Anakin’s own cloak, it almost looked like it belonged there. “Alright then. Come on.”
The refresher was small but sufficient for a Padawan dorm’s single occupant. With two adult men inside, it was downright cramped. After kneeing one another once each, Anakin hopped up on the counter so Obi-Wan would have room to stand. He ended up right between Anakin’s legs anyway, rolling his sleeves up as he gingerly inspected Anakin’s hack job number he’d done on his face thus far.
With the soft touch of a single finger, Obi-Wan tipped Anakin’s chin back to better see. “You’ve cut yourself in a few places.”
They were close enough that his master’s breath tickled the downy hairs that remained on Anakin’s chin, the warmth and proximity making him squirm. “I didn’t mean to.”
“It’s alright,” Obi-Wan said, eyes crinkling with a look so tender Anakin had to look away. “Let’s get started, hm?”
And so Anakin sat, more still and breathless than he can remember ever sitting in all his life, as his master leaned in close and taught him to shave by demonstrating.
The wet cloth was warm and soothing, and the pull of the razor across the tender skin of his neck and face left him feeling scraped raw and clean. All the while, Obi-Wan described each step of what he was doing, guiding Anakin’s head this way and that as he sleepily murmured his agreement back.
A quiet and indescribable peace, like meditation or floating, overcame Anakin as Obi-Wan finished up, rinsing the razor before tenderly wiping Anakin’s face dry. He almost didn’t rouse when Obi-Wan broke the silence.
“I should apologize,” the man said quietly as he wrung out the washcloth into the basin a final time, “for not teaching you earlier. I didn’t consider it at all, and that was thoughtless of me. So much of your training, of your growth and change, has been unconventional. And still, there’s no excuse for it. Any embarrassment I’ve caused you, I…”
There must have been some other moments in their time together that Obi-Wan had sounded so solemn and sincere, but for the life of him, Anakin couldn’t remember any. His master’s eyes were so dark with unnamed emotion that before he knew it, Anakin had reached for him, grasping his wrist as if to convey something more than words.
“It’s alright, Master,” Anakin said, feeling crazed as he searched his master’s eyes, suddenly desperate to be understood. “Obi-Wan,” he amended. “It’s okay. Thank you.”
And before Obi-Wan could do something stupid like apologize again, or pull away, Anakin did something stupider.
Within the span of a breath, he leaned in and caught Obi-Wan’s mouth in a soft kiss.
Anakin expected rejection, or at least resistance. Shock, maybe. Then a sharp push at his chest, chastising. Shouting, even. A dramatic exit.
There was none of that.
Instead, almost imperceptibly, Obi-Wan exhaled. He slid his wrist from Anakin’s hand, brought their fingers together, interlocking them with the tiniest squeeze, and let himself be kissed.
There was the smallest sound, a soft groan, and it took Anakin one brief moment of shaky bliss to realize it was him.
With all the encouragement he could need in the form of no resistance, Anakin moved his mouth against Obi-Wan’s. His breath shook as he worked his mouth gently against Obi-Wan’s lower lip. He’d only done this a few times before, and he wanted to be good. But all too soon, he became dizzy with both want and lack of air, and pulled away.
Still, Obi-Wan did not leave him. He did not chide him. He pressed his forehead to Anakin’s, so close his eyelashes tickled his skin, and panted against his cheek.
Anakin let his heartbeat settle to a more comfortable staccato and gave Obi-Wan’s hand a squeeze of his own.
“Okay?” Anakin asked, for lack of anything more intelligent to say.
Obi-Wan barked a disbelieving laugh into the warm crook of his neck.
“Yes. Okay,” he said, and dove back in to kiss Anakin absolutely breathlessly stupid.
