All the Colours of the Rainbow

Purple

"Look at this, Master," Anakin called back to Obi-Wan, leaning over something.

Obi-Wan didn't look up, his eyes glued to the scrap of paper in his hand. "What have you found, padawan?"

Having barely turned twenty, he hadn't outgrown his boyish curiosity and inquisitive nature about everything, often bringing home all kinds of exotic flora and fauna. Anakin's sentence was not an uncommon one, and right now, Obi-Wan was too busy trying to understand the directions scrawled on the paper to give Anakin his full attention. He held the scrap up against the sun, then lowered it, shaded it with his hand, then turned around completely, squinting at the bizarre symbols. Why couldn't the locals have written them in Basic?

"Come and look!" Anakin said in frustration, and Obi-Wan half-expected to hear the soft stomp of Anakin's boot against the dirt path.

"Patience, padawan," Obi-Wan said absently. "What is it?" Then he clicked his tongue in pleasure, having finally deciphered a pattern in the strange dialect. Under Qui-Gon's careful instruction, he had learned many a technique for navigating foreign languages and symbols. Even if one couldn't read the words exactly, Qui-Gon had taught him that most languages followed similar enough structures to be able to glean the meaning of almost anything.

"We have to go right, Anakin — not left!" Obi-Wan said triumphantly, smiling to himself. He was rather pleased with his discovery. It hadn't been easy reading the symbols, especially since the handwriting had been —

"Anakin, don't touch it!" The words left his mouth before he even registered having said them. He watched in mute horror as Anakin fingered the petals of the innocent purple flower sprouting from the ground.

The boy looked up in confusion, retracting his hand quickly. "What? It doesn't bite."

"It's poisonous!" Obi-Wan exclaimed, finally recovering himself enough to dash over to Anakin. He snatched Anakin's wrist as a wave of very un-Jedi-like panic washed over him. Then he let it go just as fast, retreating as though he had been burned. "Oh, Anakin, I'm sorry, I didn't mean —"

"It's okay," he responded quietly, flexing his prosthetic fingers stiffly. The gold metal gleamed in the sunlight, the multicoloured wires and tiny gears twisting as he pulled his sleeve down.

"Just don't touch the Lethilan Voilette," Obi-Wan stammered out, turning back to the dirt path and heading left. "It's poisonous; it'll kill you instantly. It has tiny sacs on the undersides of the petals, each filled with a particularly lethal neurotoxin that when in contact with your skin will —"

"Master," Anakin called from too far behind to have been keeping with him.

He stopped, biting back a snappish reply. Why wouldn't the boy keep up? Didn't he know they had a job to do and —?

"Weren't we going right, instead of left?" Anakin's voice was quiet, his gaze fixed to the ground just at Obi-Wan's feet.

Obi-Wan's cheeks flushed crimson, and that had nothing to do with the blazing sun overhead. He backtracked his steps, then headed down the path on the right, unable to meet Anakin's eye. "Yes, you're right, Anakin. Let's go this way."

This time, they traipsed the path together, Anakin keeping half a pace behind Obi-Wan. The silence stretched painfully between them, each step seeming to drag them farther apart. It had only been a few weeks since that terrible incident on Geonosis, and, though he couldn't speak for Anakin, he knew he himself was thoroughly shaken up. A swirling storm of emotions unbefitting of a Jedi still raged in his mind, and he hadn't quite decided what to do with them yet. All he could knew was that he was guilty. Oh, he was guilty. It was his fault Anakin had lost his arm. If he had been quicker, stronger, more aware ....