Saga - PT Coruscant Sunset (Obi-Wan and Anakin Oneshot)

Title: Coruscant Sunset

Author: devilinthedetails

Timeframe: Saga-PT (Between TPM and AOTC)

Characters: Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi

Genre: General, Friendship

Summary: At the Jedi Temple, Anakin and Obi-Wan watch the sunset.

Coruscant Sunset

“It’s breathtaking.” Anakin felt his breath snag on an invisible hook in his throat as his Master steered him out onto one of the Temple’s innumerable balconies so they could watch the setting sun dance orange and red on the endless gray sea of durasteel that comprised Coruscant. Sunsets were beautiful enough to break his heart—to remind him of the mother he had left behind on a cruel desert world a year ago. To remind him of how she had stroked his cheek and held him tightly against her chest after she had said he couldn’t stop change any more than he could stop Tatooine’s blazing twin suns from setting.

Ever since then, he had thought of her at sunset. He might always think of her at sunset, an unfading memory of love and loss he could never forget because he didn’t want to lose her again in his mind or his heart…

“Yes, Anakin.” Obi-Wan’s reply cut into Anakin’s thoughts. “I find Coruscant most beautiful at sunset.”

“It makes me feel small.” It did, but it wasn’t a bad feeling. It was the same feeling he had once gotten from standing beside Qui-Gon and now sometimes got standing beside Obi-Wan.

Anakin wondered if he fell off the balcony how many hundreds of stories he would pass before hitting the hard, unforgiving permacrete of the dark, dangerous underlevels. Then he realized he would fall into one of Coruscant’s countless number of speeders before he ever crashed to the city-planet’s surface. The void he gazed into wasn’t a bottomless pit after all. It only appeared that way when he thought about falling.

“It used to make me feel small too.” Obi-Wan gave one of the faint, fleeting smiles that Anakin was learning often accompanied one of his confidences.

“How did you stop it making you feel small?” Anakin trailed a finger along the balcony’s railing.

“I grew.” His Master’s sense of humor was dry as the Tatooine desert, Anakin observed inwardly.

“How many levels are there on Coruscant, Master?” On their first trip together as Master and apprentice, leaving Naboo in the stardust behind them, Obi-Wan, voice still ragged with grief for Qui-Gon, had promised to answer any questions Anakin had, and Anakin was determined to take advantage of that.

“Five-thousand-one-hundred-and-twenty-seven.” Obi-Wan responded so swiftly that Anakin couldn’t be certain whether he had memorized this data from a galactic encyclopedia or invented it spontaneously to satisfy Anakin’s ceaseless curiosity.

“There are so many lights turning on.” Anakin gazed out at the glowing proof that millions of Coruscanti commuters were returning from their offices in the stratosphere-piercing super-skytowers to eat dinner with their families and watch assorted sports on their vidscreens. “Each light represents a person or a family. How many beings are there on Coruscant, Master?”

“A trillion at the last census.” Obi-Wan was quick with a factual answer when Anakin had wanted wild speculation on the seemingly infinite number of lights and beings on Coruscant. Qui-Gon would have understood, Anakin thought, and then condemned himself in the next second for comparing his Master to a man they both mourned.

“What’s a census?” Anakin’s nose wrinkled at the unfamiliar term.

“It’s when a government collects information about their citizens such as how many citizens live in a household, how many credits those citizens earn in a year, what species those citizens are, and what the ages of those citizens are.” Obi-Wan could rapidly recite a definition in the time it took Anakin to blink. “The citizens fill out a form with this information and return it to the planetary government, Padawan.”

“People really return this?” Anakin tilted his head dubiously. On Tatooine, such surveys would have been thrown in a trash compactor by resentful slavers, secondhand dealers, and moisture farmers. Of course, on Tatooine, the Hutts who ruled the planet cared as little for organizing a census as they did spearheading social welfare or emancipation programs.

“They do on Coruscant.” Obi-Wan’s chuckle suggested that he knew what Anakin was thinking. It was disconcerting how his Master was sometimes capable of reading his mind like a holobook without warning.

“They’d never on Tatooine.” Anakin shook his head in renewed wonder.

“You’ll learn about all this in your Galactic Politics class.” Obi-Wan’s words drew a soft groan from Anakin, who sensed he would soon be ordered back to completing his evening’s coursework. “Speaking of Galactic Politics, I believe you have assignments for that class to finish tonight before it’s time for you to sleep.”

“I can finish them quickly,” Anakin muttered, kicking at an empty snack wrapper that had somehow managed to land on the floor of the balcony. He was proud of how he had progressed from the bottom of his classes when he arrived at the Temple to the very top. “I’m very smart, Master.”

“And so modest too.” Obi-Wan’s gentle hand on his shoulder nudged him back inside the Temple to resume his studies after this all too brief respite. “It’s a marvel you don’t need more lessons in that.”

 

@WarmNyota_SweetAyesha, thank you so much for commenting! I'm glad that you enjoyed the moments of fun and companionship between Anakin and Obi-Wan in this story since I like to imagine that Obi-Wan and Anakin were able to have moments of fun and companionship between TPM and AOTC, so it was great fun for me to write this piece and delve into some of those fun moments.

In TPM, one quality about Anakin that I loved was his curiosity about things like stars and the Force, so I absolutely had to use that as inspiration for this story where he is so full of questions. In my head canon, I picture Obi-Wan as someone who loves to accumulate facts and memorize seemingly random information, so that is why he is ready with all the answers here, ha ha.

@divapilot, thanks so much for your comment! I'm so glad that you enjoyed this sweet moment between a young Anakin and Obi-Wan. It can be hard to remember how young Obi-Wan is at this point. I know that for me I first saw TPM when I was eight, so at that time a twenty-five-year-old Obi-Wan seemed so grown up, but now that I'm twenty-eight myself, I understand how hard it must have been for him to be so young but be responsible for the nine-year-old Chosen One. Both Anakin and Obi-Wan are really so young at the end of TPM that when I think about it, it becomes incredible.

I agree with you that Anakin is definitely very much uncentered in this piece with his thoughts flying everywhere from missing his mother to curiosity about how people live and even to dark reflections about what it would be like to fall from the balcony and resentment of the cruel Hutt government in place on Tatooine. In some ways, I picture Anakin as having a wild mind to match his free spirit. In contrast, I think of Obi-Wan as always being a very centered person with quite a good bit of wisdom to offer even at a young age as you point out. In that way, I found they played off one another in a neat way as I wrote this story. I'm so happy that you thought this was a nice character study that did a good job showing how they represented such different ends of the spectrum.

 

@Diersil, thank you so much for commenting! I'm so flattered you thought this was a beautiful vignette and that you appreciated the insights into little Anakin. One of the powerful things about TPM for me was how well George Lucas showed the pain Anakin wen through even as a young boy in terms of being a slave and being separated from his mother early in his life so I tried to draw on those experiences for this story.

 

@Cowgirl Jedi 1701, thank you so much for commenting! I really enjoyed writing the end so I'm happy to hear it was your favorite part of this story. I think you're right that while Anakin always knew how to sass, Obi-Wan's example helped him become even more of a sass master. Anakin gives Obi-Wan a lot of sass in AOTC, but I think he probably brought a lot of it on himself by teaching Anakin how to be so sassy and sarcastic.

 

@earlybird-obi-wan, thanks so much for commenting! I'm glad that you enjoyed this little story. One of my favorite tings about writing Anakin in this story was being able to showcase some of his quirks while he is still an adorable little boy stunned by the bright lights of Coruscant.

 

@CaraJinn, thanks so much for your kind comment! Yeah, little Anakin doesn't know that he's dealing with one of the most stubborn Jedi ever in Obi-Wan, but I think he'll learn that pretty quickly when their strong wills start to clash. I always felt it must have been hard for Obi-Wan, who was so young and newly knighted, to have the responsibility of taking on a Padawan (especially one as gifted and unique as Anakin) while also grieving the loss of Qui-Gon. For things like that, I definitely consider Obi-Wan to be among the strongest and most resilient characters we meet in the saga. Obi-Wan didn't have an easy life but he went through it with such quiet dignity that I have to admire him greatly.

 

Another wonderful Obi and Ani vignette—you really have a keen understanding of this quintessential SW master-apprentice duo! They do indeed represent two different ends of a spectrum, as @divapilot notes, and it shows in their very different reflections as they look out over the Coruscant sunset. Obi-Wan immediately sees it as beautiful—but Anakin, even as a youngster, is struck by the destructive, negative side of the cityscape: the danger of falling all those levels, the smallness of one being among the trillion. Even the setting sun itself reminds him of the loss of his mother and her last words in the light of Tatooine’s binary sunset. And that little difference in perception (that certain point of view...) says so much about the vast difference between these two, and somehow just harmonizes so well with the paths we know they both later take. Great work once again, do keep it up!

 

@Findswoman, as always, thank you so much for commenting! I'm so glad you thought this Obi-Wan and Anakin vignette was wonderful. Obi-Wan and Anakin's relationship is one of my favorite parts of Star Wars, so I really enjoy delving into their characters with these types of stories, and I'm so happy they're resonating with you. Anakin and Obi-Wan representing opposite ends of the spectrum is an awesome way to describe the differences in their personalities. As you said, Obi-Wan focuses on the beauty of the sunset while Anakin is attuned to the negatives even in this beautiful situation. He instinctively thinks of the dangers of falling and is aware of how small he is in comparison to this bug city before him and be reminded of the mother he had to say farewell to by the setting of the sun over Coruscant. It's a simple moment that can reveal big differences in perspective and personality, which makes it interesting for me to explore, and I'm so glad those differences rang true for you in light of their future paths

@starbuck_archer, once again, thanks so much for reading and commenting! You picked out two of my favorite lines so that makes me so happy. Obi-Wan and Anakin's relationship is one of my favorite parts of Star Wars, so I really enjoy being able to write about Obi-Wan's role as a sort of surrogate father to young Anakin. One day, Anakin might very well start asking Obi-Wan questions about girls, and that will be delightfully awkward, but I figured I'd let Obi-Wan off the hook for now.

 

@TIE Mechanic Thank you so much for commenting! I'm so glad that you thought this piece was well-written and a worthy scene. It just was one of those stories that I had to write when inspiration struck, so I'm happy to hear you enjoyed it

 

@DaenaBenjen42 Thank you so much for reading and commenting!I really appreciate it, no matter how old a story is. It can be really nice to get a comment on an older story and see that someone has read and enjoyed it and that the story didn't fade entirely into the void!

I'm so glad that you loved this look into the relationship between Obi-Wan and Anakin. I really do enjoy writing about the relationship between these two characters. I find it interesting to explore especially in those years between TPM and AOTC when I imagine that both Anakin and Obi-Wan would've grown a lot. So, it is truly rewarding for me to delve into that Master/Padawan journey whenever my time and inspiration allows. Thank you again for your kind words! That are definitely appreciated at any time on any story!

 

@Blue_Daddys_Girl Thank you so much for commenting! I'm so glad that you found this to be lovely and cute.

You picked out one of my favorite lines as well.

First year Anakin was sweet for me to write, because I like to imagine he would still have a great sense of innocence, wonder at new things, and sheer boyhood curiosity about everything. It can be kind of neat to explore how Anakin must have grown and changed between TPM and AOTC.

It's great to hear that you felt it was believable for Anakin to feel that Qui-Gon would've understood him better but for him to also know better than to say that. You're right that Anakin only really knew Qui-Gon for a couple of days (compared to the many years he would spend knowing Obi-Wan), but I did get the impression that he admired Qui-Gon a lot and identified with Qui-Gon as sort of a father figure in TPM. I also think that kids can come to idolize people very quickly, and I imagine that is a bit of what happened with Anakin and Qui-Gon. And with Qui-Gon being dead, it would become easy for Anakin to think of Qui-Gon as sort of a perfect figure and maybe sometimes wish he was Qui-Gon's Padawan instead. A sort of grass is always greener on the other side of the fence thing.

However, I think Anakin also has a sensitive, empathetic side to him. Especially young Anakin. So I don't really imagine him wanting to hurt Obi-Wan's feelings deliberately with his words or actions. I think if he did hurt Obi-Wan's feelings it would be more unintentional.

At least until he reaches rebellious teen years. Then all bets are off

 

@JediMaster_Jen Thank you so much for reading and commenting! I'm always so happy when someone stumbles across an old fic of mine, and I'm thrilled that you loved this look at the very early days of the relationship between Anakin and Obi-Wan. I absolutely picture a young Anakin as very curious and brimming with eager questions and Obi-Wan ever ready to provide answers so I'm super pleased that my portrayals of these characters during this time resonated with you! Thanks again for the super kind words that made my day