Cover 19/27, PG-13 (Anakin, Obi-Wan, Ziro, Others)

[wyncatastrophe]

Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. I'm just being irresponsible.

CHAPTER NINETEEN:

All the “belowstairs” slaves were bunked together in a long, open room: no privacy. That bothered Anakin more than it did Ryn; at her home in the mountains, it had been the usual thing for young warriors to make beds by the fire in the hall; and though, as the daughter and then the sister of the lord she’d had her own bedroom, at least when she was home, the idea itself didn’t trouble her. She’d slept cheek-and-jowl with others plenty of times on campaign.

It was hard to tell whether any of the slaves were irked by the lack of privacy, but Ryn was certain they were all upset by the general lack of comfort. It was every being for himself, scrabbling for whatever blanket thy could beg, borrow or steal. There weren’t anything like enough to go around, but Ryn soon learned that there were ways to circumvent the problem.

The only way to get a blanket of one’s own was to grab one -- usually from someone else -- and be strong enough to hold it against all comers. Ryn could tell Anakin was ready to try it; he had that determined look, but Ryn grabbed his arm as he started forward, into the fray. “Don’t!” she hissed.

Anakin glared at her distractedly. “I have to!” he hissed back. “We can’t be seen to be weak. The time to establish ourselves is now.”

Anakin Skywalker, Survivor of Tatooine. “We’re supposed to be inconspicuous,” she reminded him, keeping her voice down with an effort. “Taking a blanket by main force is definitely conspicuous. Besides, we’ll be fine without it.”

Anakin subsided. She could feel the effort it cost him to set aside the training of his childhood, the instincts that had kept him alive. Standing this close, actually touching him, Ryn could feel those instincts screaming at him: Fight now, stand your ground, never let them think you’re weak ... Despite the logic of their situation, it felt to Anakin as though grabbing that blanket and holding on would make the difference between life and death. As though going back to sit against the wall was resigning himself to a slow and painful death.

He did it anyway.

If you weren’t strong enough or vicious enough to get a blanket of your own, you could still get warm by sharing with someone who was, usually in exchange for the kind of favors most beings preferred to trade under a blanket. Ryn saw the pairing off -- sometimes threeing off -- but she didn’t quite grasp the situation until someone made her an offer.

A determined-looking young man about Ferus’s age approached the corner they’d staked out. (Corners were prime spots, but having won the blanket debate, Ryn conceded on the desire to pick a defensible corner and helped Anakin keep a watchful eye on the rest of the room.) The newcomer refused to look at Anakin, but he gave Ryn a careful once-over.

“I have a blanket,” he informed her.

Ryn wasn’t sure what she was supposed to say to that: congratulations? She glanced around the room and settled on: “Not easy to do that, here.”

The young man drew himself up. “I manage to get one almost every night.” He was lying, but it didn’t seem to be worth contesting. “My name is Revin,” he added, almost as an afterthought.

“Areth,” Ryn said, because they had agreed that the name Ryn was too likely to be in Ziro’s mind already.

Revin fidgeted. “Aren’t you cold?”

If she wasn’t now, she would be soon enough. “I’m all right.”

“Well, fine!” Revin spat, and Ryn jumped at the vehemence in his tone. “If you change your mind, let me know. But don’t think too long, because I may be busy.” He stalked off, radiating wounded pride.

Ryn watched him go, still not quite understanding what had happened. “Charming fellow.”

“Well,” Anakin said, “I think he was trying to be polite about it.”

“Polite about what?” Ryn asked, still watching as Revin picked a spot of floor and wrapped himself in his lonely blanket.

She sensed Anakin’s amusement a half-second before he said, “Offering to share his blanket with you.”

Wha -- “Oh,” Ryn said, as the pieces fell into place. She looked back at Revin, who met her eyes briefly with an odd mixture of regret and resentment. “I’m guessing that his motives wren’t entirely altruistic.”

Anakin stifled laughter. “Guess not.”

Ryn mulled it over for a minute. Anakin must have known she wasn’t all that happy with her thoughts; he kept stroking his fingertips up and down her arm, and Ryn suspected he was putting some Force-comfort into the touch.

“At home it’s the women who make an invitation,” she said at last, starting at the least dangerous place her thoughts had taken her.

Anakin turned her left hand palm-up on his upraised knee and began stroking the inside of her arm, from the heel of her hand to her rolled-up sleeve. “Why is that?”

Ryn hadn’t thought about why before. It seemed natural, because it was all she really knew. But if there had to be a why ... “I’m not sure, exactly. Maybe because of our anti-trespassing laws.”

“Trespassing laws.” Anakin sounded doubtful.

“Well, you can’t enter someone’s home without an invitations, so by analogy ...”

Anakin snorted. “I get the picture.” He tugged her a little closer. “So how does this invitation thing work?”

It seemed like an odd thing for Anakin to be interested in. Ryn pulled back a little, frowning as she tried to figure it out ... and immediately was assaulted by myriad notes of misery, like a sordid symphony in the room around them.

Anakin tugged at her hand again, regaining her attention. “The invitations?”

And suddenly Ryn understood what he was doing: keeping her distracted, drowning out her senses with his presence so she wouldn’t have to suffer empathically along with every being in the slave quarters.

“Anakin, you don’t have --”

Anakin cut her off with a teasing grin. “I think you’re just embarrassed to tell me.”

Ryn looked back at the room, full of little sounds of fear and suffering, and suddenly she felt Anakin’s hand at her chin, turning her back to face him, cradling her face in dirty fingers. “Don’t,” he whispered. “Please don’t.”

Ryn didn’t really understand his urgent need to shelter her from the obvious, as though that would somehow make her safer. But the anguish in his eyes was something she couldn’t ignore. So she shifted slightly, to lean into his shoulder, and deliberately stared up at the ceiling as she spoke.

“Well, there are ways to let a woman know you’re hoping for an invitation, of course.”

Anakin eased his arm around her shoulders, pulling her more snugly against him. She could feel the heat radiating from his skin, through their layers of clothing. “How?” His warm breath tickled her ear.

What you’re doing now would be a good start, Ryn thought. But she said, “Oh, you could try to impress her with your combat skills, for instance. Or bring her food, that’s always good.”

Anakin’s fingers were trailing along her arm again. “What sort of food?”

“Nubian vegetables,” Ryn teased him, remembering the first time he’d shown up at her quarters with food. She felt his breath of laughter, and a little of the tension eased from his body. “All right,” she admitted, “maybe not Nubian vegetables. Something you’ve killed yourself is best. Makes you look all manly.”

“Okay,” Anakin said. “So I show up with a dead animal, proving my ability to slaughter some poor, defenseless beast --”

“Not defenseless,” Ryn said.

“-- and then what happens?”

“When the blankets are spread at night, the woman comes up to the man who has caught her eye and says, ‘The night is cold’.”

“The night is cold?” Anakin repeated. “That’s the worst line I’ve ever heard.”

“Like you’d know,” Ryn said, although he probably would. “Anyway, if the man is interested in sharing her bed, he agrees with her that yes, it’s cold.”

“Even if it’s not?” Anakin asked her, not quite laughing.

“Especially if it’s not. And then the woman says, ‘my bed is warm’.”

“Oh, brother,” said Anakin.

“Do you want to hear this or not?”

“Force, yes. This is better than nerf porn.”

Ryn stifled a laugh. “Okay. So if the guy is still interested, he can say, ‘Lucky is the man who shares your bed’.”

Anakin laughed in her ear. “What happens next?”

“Well, by that point they’re usually pretty distracted, so the eloquence starts to break down,” Ryn said. She was feeling a little distracted herself, feeling her pulse in new and exciting places. She dragged herself back to the topic at hand. “But I think my favorite line so far is ‘Come and see for yourself’.”

Anakin bent over, shaking with hushed laughter. “So no room for misunderstanding, then.”

His breath was tickling her ear again, and the back of her neck, and this time Ryn couldn’t repress a shiver. “No, we’re pretty direct.”

But Anakin had noticed her shiver. “You’re cold,” he whispered. “I can still go and --”

“No. I’m not cold.”

Anakin paused. “But you’re shivering.”

“It’s --” Ryn almost couldn’t say it. Her voice sank to a whisper. “I have very sensitive ears.” Not that I knew that until just now.

“Wha -- Oh.” Anakin mulled that over for a minute. Then he leaned close and deliberately breathed hot, very softly, all over the tingling whorl of her outer ear.

Ryn couldn’t help it. She gasped and arched against him.

For an instant Anakin was startled by her reaction; then she felt him smile. “Wow,” he murmured. ‘You weren’t kidding.”

Ryn’s face was flaming. “No.”

Anakin did it again, apparently just to make her shudder. “Are you ticklish anywhere else?”

Ryn didn’t think she could take it if he began an exploration of her ticklish spots. She was sure she’d lose whatever fragile claim to dignity she had left and throw herself at him, right there on the floor.

That might not be so bad, really -- Ryn thought her pride might be a small price to pay for Anakin, writhing hot against her -- except that it had been less than twelve hours since Anakin had made it clear that he wasn’t comfortable exploring that kind of intimacy at this point. Whatever else they might be together, they were friends: first, last, and always. And you didn’t push a friend to do something he didn’t feel right about.

Even if he’d just inadvertently taught you what was meant by the phrase getting wet.

All this flashed through Ryn’s mind in a burst of panic and Ryn gasped “No!” with a lot more force than she’d intended.

“I think you protest a little too much,” Anakin teased. When Ryn didn’t answer, he shifted, trying to see her face. “Ry -- Areth. What is it?”

Ryn shook her head, burning with humiliation, unable to speak.

Anakin lifted his arm from her shoulders and swept the hair back from her face so that he could look down at her profile. “Tell me,” he murmured, obviously sensing her distress. “You can always tell me.”

Ryn bit her lip. She didn’t want to tell him. Couldn’t bear the thought, in fact. But she’d never been less than honest with Anakin. Trust had to go both ways.

Somehow she made herself look up and meet his blue eyes, soft with concern in the darkness. That was harder, in its own way, than rushing headlong into battle.

“I’m a little more than ticklish,” she whispered, eyes searching his face.

There was an awful moment when he didn’t get it and Ryn just couldn’t imagine how she could bring herself to explain more fully. Then suddenly Anakin’s eyes widened. “Oh. Wow. Oh.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what to say ... uh ... Sorry?”

“You don’t have to say anything,” Ryn said. She eased back against him, trying to release her shame into the Force the way a Jedi would do. It seemed like a good time to try the technique.

Obediently, Anakin’s arm tightened around her again. Into her hair, he murmured, “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather I went out to give you some privacy and got myself kidnapped?”

Ryn snorted relieved laughter. “Maybe later.”

Anakin rested his chin on her hair. “Spoilsport.”

Ryn laid her palm against his and flattened their fingers together. “Tell me about ruby bliels.”

And huddled together in a corner of the darkened slave quarters, Anakin told her about the gloriously sweet, fizzy drinks, cold under Tatooine’s hot suns. Such little things, so hard for a slave to come by. He told her about the spacer who’d bought him and Kitser one each and told them stories of angels on the Moons of Iego. About Jira, and pallies, and the air conditioner he’d tried to fix for the old woman.

That was leading dangerously close to the story of leaving his mother, Ryn cold tell, and this didn’t seem like a good time for him to be distracted by grief and guilt, so Ryn tightened her fingers in his and introduced the one topic she was pretty sure she didn’t want to know any more about. “You thought of Padmé when you were telling me about the space angels. Why is that?”

Silence. Then: “I asked her if she was an angel the first time I met her.”

“You smooth talker.”

Anakin breathed laughter into her hair. “Well, maybe not. She told me I was a funny little boy.”

Ryn had to grin at that. “So far, you’re smoother than her.” It took her a minute to get up the nerve to say what had to be said next. “Tell me.”

Anakin didn’t have to ask what she meant. But she felt him probing her a little, gently, to see if she was sure.

And then he told her: about meeting Padmé, and the strength he sensed in her, and her astonishing kindness. Her courage and generosity. The friendship she’d given to a small slave boy.

At this point in the story, Ryn felt obliged to point out that perhaps his saving of her and her people -- twice -- might have had something to do with that.

But: “Not for Padmé,” Anakin said, his voice certain. “She would have treated me just the same anyway.”

Ryn thought that seemed unlikely. But it wasn’t like she’d known Padmé herself, so she let it go. “Tell me about Padawan Kenobi,” she said instead, mischievously, and Anakin grinned and told her about his first meeting with Obi-Wan, who’d regarded him first as a stray and then as a threat, and now as something of a personal challenge.

“I’m not really sure what he thinks of me, sometimes,” Anakin confessed. He spoke lightly, but Ryn knew him better than that and heard the echoes of a child’s uncertainty, longing for love and not sure if he were really wanted. Anakin had learned to live with the uncertainty, because he had no choice; but he’d never fully come to terms with it. “I mean, I know he looks after me ... but sometimes I wonder if he regrets the decision to take me as an apprentice. He only did it because of Qui-Gon, after all.”

And there it was, the bantha in the room: the inevitable and ugly fact that the Kenobi-Skywalker team could never quite get around. Unlike every other Master-Padawan team Ryn had ever heard of, Obi-Wan hadn’t chosen Anakin. He’d agreed to train him, to honor his own dying master’s last wish. So Anakin could never be sure that Obi-Wan really wanted him, and he was always driven to prove himself, to excel, to win his master over. And, paradoxically, to test him, to gauge the limits of his devotion. To se if Obi-Wan would get fed up and shed the Padawan he’d never wanted in the first place. These two contrary impulses pushed and pulled at their relationship in ways that Ryn found exhausting, and she wasn’t sure that Obi-Wan even knew. But unless Master Kenobi decided to accept pointers on his child-rearing technique from a girl younger than Anakin himself -- unlikely -- there wasn’t much she could do to help.

She did her best. “I don’t sense regret from Obi-Wan,” she offered now. “It’s more like ... uncertainty. Like maybe he’s not sure what you need.”

“I need him to understand,” Anakin retorted, and Ryn leaned her head on his shoulder for a minute and thought about it.

“I don’t think that’s possible,” she said finally. “You had such different upbringings. You’ve at least seen what his must have been like, but he can’t really imagine yours, and it makes him uncomfortable to try.”

“Because of slavery?” Anakin asked dangerously, and Ryn repressed a sigh. Oh, yeah, this is going so well ...

“Because of your mother,” she said. “Family is something you can’t understand until you’ve experienced it. Obi-Wan will never really comprehend what you gave up. But I’m not convinced that understanding is really what’s at stake here.”

“What is it, then?” Anakin’s voice was almost a growl.

Ryn refused to be intimidated. “Acceptance. For both of you. You’re always comparing Obi-Wan to Qui-Gon or your mother and finding him lacking. And Obi-Wan is always trying to interpret you by analogy to other Padawans he’s known and finding you a mystery.”

Anakin was silent for a minute. “I’d never thought of it like that before,” he said at last.

Ryn shrugged. “Saying it is the easy part. Applying it -- that’s hard.”

“So you’ll tell me what’s wrong, but not how to fix it.”

“Helpful, aren’t I?” Ryn shifted against him, feeling his tension. “But I’ll always be here for you.”

“I know.” He gave her a little squeeze. “We should really get some sleep.”

“You want to take turns?”

“There’s no need. I’m a very light sleeper.”

And if she hadn’t felt his nightmares so many times, she might have thought his tone was casual.

“Okay. Wake me if you need me.”