Cover 22/27, PG-13 (Anakin, Others)
disclaimer: i do not own star wars. i am not making any profit from this work of fanfiction.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
In the slave quarters, Anakin had managed to save her a sandwich of sorts, dry bread and meat. He wouldn’t admit it, but Ryn suspected it came from his own meager plate. In fact, she suspected it was most of his supper. But he was bound and determined that she eat, and with a sigh Ryn gave in and let it go.
“I was getting worried about you,” he said as she licked the last of the crumbs from her fingers.
“The Malastaran senator barfed all over the east staircase,” Ryn said. “And then I ran into Revin.”
She felt Anakin’s hackles rise. “What did he want?”
“More of what he didn’t get last night, I think,” Ryn said, wiping her hands on her pants because there was no napkin. “But we ended up having a decent chat.”
“Really.” Anakin sounded skeptical.
“Yes.” Ryn studied his face in the half-light. “What is it?”
“Nothing. Are you all right?”
“Tired. I took a lot of poodoo from my fellow slaves. You?”
“I’m fine. I meant the thing with Revin. He didn’t hurt you?”
Ryn thought about pointing out that the chances of a boy like Revin being able to afflict any serious damage on a Lorethan ex-military officer were about the same as her chances of owning the Arkanis sector. Decided it wouldn’t help. Sometimes Anakin’s enthusiasm for fixing things extended to things that didn’t really need to be fixed. Like that memorable incident with the shower in Ry-Gaul’s quarters. “No, he didn’t hurt me.” And then, to needle Anakin out of his present gloomy mood, she held a grin in check and said, “He’s actually a very good kisser. He’ll make a good lover someday, for some lucky woman.”
Anakin’s eyes widened and his full mouth set in a line. “Some woman.”
“Yes. I’m thinking once we get out of here, he could stand to spend some time with Banora.”
“Banora,” Anakin repeated. “Evinne’s friend?”
“The one who was so eager to improve your evening? Yes.”
“But not you.”
“Of course not me!”
“Then why were you kissing him?”
“I wasn’t!” Ryn saw Anakin’s protest forming and explained, “He was kissing me. Here.” She touched her fingertips to the line of kisses Revin had trailed down the side of her neck.
“Areth, that’s -- that’s intimate. You shouldn’t be letting guys kiss you like that. They could get the wrong idea. You shouldn’t -- you shouldn’t allow liberties.”
Ryn wasn’t sure whether to laugh or smack him. “Liberties? Are you serious? What century are you living in, anyway?”
“This one! I’m trying to take care of you.”
Baffled, Ryn sat back against the wall and tried to work through this new and unexpected tangle.
“Okay,” she said slowly, “what have you got against kissing?”
“Nothing!” Anakin protested. “Not if it’s done right.”
“What do you mean, done right?”
“You know,” Anakin said, frustrated. “It should be ... between two beings who love each other. An expression of love, not a pastime.”
Ryn opened her mouth to object and then realized she couldn’t think of a reason to. Anakin might not be realistic, but he wasn’t entirely wrong, either. Wasn’t kissing for love immeasurably better than kissing for any other reason? Except ...
“What if you can’t have that?” Ryn asked, reluctantly voicing the fear that haunted her nights. She looked up and met Anakin’s eyes. “Does that mean you should have nothing?” She felt her lower lip tremble and stilled it with her teeth.
Anakin was kneeling in front of her, his face in shadow. But Ryn didn’t need to see her friend to sense his odd mixture of guilt and compassion. He reached out and gripped her shoulder. “Maybe it means you should wait for the right person to come along.”
He meant it to be gentle, comforting, Ryn knew. He was trying to offer her hope. But at the moment it seemed the cruelest thing he could have said. Something snapped inside Ryn.
“LIke you’re waiting for someone who isn’t Padmé?” she flung at him, her words like darts.
Anakin flinched at her tone, but he didn’t lose his temper. Instead Ryn felt an awful sadness well up inside him, and she knew she’d hurt him. He dropped his hand from her shoulder and leaned closer, his expression sorrowful and earnest while Ryn sat speechless with guilt and misery. “What do you want me to say?” he asked softly, his eyes searching her face. “I’m more sorry than you’ll ever know. You want me to love you? I do. But I loved Padmé first. The first time I saw her, I knew it’d be forever. I can’t change that.” She saw the spasm of pain that clenched his heart in his eyes. “Can you forgive me?”
“Forgive you what?” Ryn said. “Falling in love before you ever met me? That’s not wrong. Just ... don’t belittle my feelings.”
“I would never --”
“You do it all the time! You natter on about how you took one look at Padmé and knew you’d love her forever, and then you turn around and preach to me about how someone else is bound to come along? What, you think being the Chosen One gives you some kind of monopoly on being in love? Or only on knowing your own mind?”
“Force.” Anakin sat back on his heels. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Really, really sorry.” He rubbed his face with his hands. “You must hate me.”
Well. There was Anakin, rushing to extremes again. Ryn reflected that she shouldn’t be surprised. “No,” she said, “I don’t hate you. In fact, I think we’ve pretty well covered the fact that I love you. Or haven’t you been paying attention?”
Anakin looked startled; then he dropped his hands in a burst of relieved laughter. “No, I have. I’ve been paying attention. I love you, too.”
“That’s settled, then.” Ryn pulled a wry face. “Now all we have to do is find Revin a date.”
“Um,” said Anakin. “Can we review? What about this conversation makes you think we’re equipped to handle our own love lives, much less anyone else’s?”
Ryn shoved her sadness down, swallowed her lingering tears, and grinned at him. “Don’t be a wet blanket. Come here and help me plot.”
*~*~*
*~*~*
The next night, someone -- well, several someones -- challenged them for the use of their chosen corner.
Anakin and Ryn were both exhausted, and Ryn was sporting some exciting new bruises that didn’t exactly testify to a day peacefully spent, but she hadn’t had a chance to tell him what had happened yet, so Anakin didn’t yet know who was destined for a punishment.
He definitely hadn’t mentioned the punishment plan to Ryn. He had a feeling she might not like it.
And it wasn’t going to matter or if they didn’t make it through the next five minutes, anyway.
Standing back-to-back with Ryn in front of the little area they had staked out as theirs -- still no blankets -- Anakin tried hard to approach the situation like a Jedi and not like a former slave.
“Look,” he told the Phlog looming over him, “we claimed this spot two nights ago. No one said anything about it then. I don’t see how you can claim we’re in your space now.”
But he did. The Phlog, just like everyone else, had taken a couple of days to size them up and concluded that they weren’t that dangerous. The Phlog just happened to be the first to act on his conclusion -- probably he’d made someone mad earlier in the day and needed the corner’s more defensible position -- but the rest of the group in the slave quarters was thinking pretty much the same thing.
If they didn’t deal with this threat efficiently, they’d be marking themselves as easy prey, and they’d be harassed constantly. Master Vos might even have to pull them out.
But it was the Jedi way to pursue a non-violent solution whenever possible.
The Phlog gave him some poodoo about generously letting the newcomers settle in comfortably. Anakin could practically feel Ryn’s eyes rolling.
“Perhaps if you had felt inclined to open the dialogue two days ago, I would find it easier to believe you,” Anakin said calmly. If the Phlog’s mind hadn’t reeked of lies, that might have helped, too.
The Phlog babbled something about not needing to draw attention to what everyone knew already.
Right. Anakin felt he wasn’t doing that well with the non-violent approach. Over his shoulder, he asked Ryn, “What do you think?”
Slender back pressed easily against his, Ryn didn’t look around. “I think he’s got friends.”
Anakin saw her point. Backed by at least four companions, the Phlog wasn’t going to see the need to negotiate, regardless of how reasonable Anakin’s argument might sound.
He scanned the room without moving as the Phlog grinned, evidently thinking he had them. “How many can you handle?”
“What, you got somewhere to be?”
“Smartass.”
“As many as I have to,” Ryn amended. He couldn’t sense anything from her except calm confidence, and a sort of hyperalertness: the clarity of Ryn’s battle mind.
Anakin gave the Phlog a deliberate once-over. “Should we let them make the first move, you think?”
Ryn shrugged; he could her shoulder brushing his back. “Why not? I’ve got time to kill.”
Anakin grinned, the Phlog charged, and the mayhem began.
The Phlog’s first strike met empty air as Anakin and Ryn dodged in opposite directions. Anakin heard an oof noise as he snapped back into position and knew that Ryn had landed a hit on the Gamorrean who was attacking her and then the Phlog stepped in again, so Anakin met him with a sharp kick to the knee that failed to crack the bone but forced him to sway back, anyway.
The Phlog rushed him this time, and Anakin felt the impact shudder through him to Ryn, who staggered once and then held her ground.
“Incoming,” she said, and Anakin glanced to the side to see another Gamorrean and a Dug, closing in. The Gamorean wasn’t worth worrying about, unless he was a lot faster than the rest of his species, but the Dug ... Anakin was going to have to even the odds, and soon.
There was a sense of movement behind him, a rush of air, and Gamorrean One howled and staggered into Anakin’s peripheral vision, clutching an arm that bent in the wrong place. On second thought, looks like Ryn has it covered. He didn’t dare look away from the Phlog, who was prowling around him in a half-circle, looking for a weakness.
The Phlog plunged in as the Dug rushed Ryn, and Anakin’s fear for her -- as the memory of Sebulba and childhood violence soured his mouth like dreams of monsters under the bed -- slowed his reactions just enough and the Phlog picked him up and threw him bodily across the room.
"Anakin! You all right?" Ryn didn’t look at him, too busy dodging, both the Dug and Gamorrean Two.
"I’m fine." The Phlog was moving in him, though. Anakin surged to his feet in time to dodge the first blow, just as Gamorrean Two grabbed Ryn and lifted her over his head for a body slam that never happened, because she caught herself on her hands and twisted and Anakin missed what she did next because he was too busy driving the Phlog’s nose backward into his skull, but then the Gamorrean was down and Ryn was going head-to-head with the Dug and the fight, suddenly, was even numbers.
Anakin dodged another blow and used an Ataro flip to land next to Ryn again. “Sorry about that.”
“‘S okay.” He felt a jar against his shoulder as Ryn was thrown against him, and then the Dug snarled in pain.
The Phlog swung, but time spun out and Anakin saw the blow coming in slow-motion and ducked under his massive fist to launch a kick at the Phlog’s midsection that made the breath leave his lungs in a rush.
He glanced over his shoulder to see what Ryn was doing, and found that she was holding her own against her larger, stronger opponent, largely because she moved like lightning.
So Anakin turned back to the Phlog, and when he struck this time, he called on the Force, and his open-handed smack didn’t just knock the larger being breathless, it blew him halfway across the room.
He repeated the maneuver twice before the Phlog turned wary and backed off, still prowling but unwilling to engage. Anakin saw his attention flick to the Dug’s progress -- or lack thereof -- with Ryn, and followed his gaze cautiously, aware that it could a tactic for distracting him.
If that was the plan, it was working. Ryn wasn’t drawing on the Force, at least not in any way Anakin could recognize, but she still burned bright in it, almost as though she were generating energy, rather than channeling it. That didn’t sound possible ... but then, what did he know about Lorethan training? He didn’t really know anything about Ryn’s life before he met her, except that she’d lost her family and fought in a war. And spent a month on Malastare. Where she took up cage-fighting.
The Dug landed a kick to Ryn’s cheek that knocked her sideways, and Anakin tensed, ready to step in, but then he realized that Ryn had taken the blow as a way of changing positions without alerting the Dug to her true intent. Which was ... what, exactly?
Ryn moved suddenly, a lot faster than her opponent had been expecting, and the Dug flew through the air to hit his Phlog companion square in the belly.
Anakin felt his eyes widen “Impressive.”
“Well, I try.” Ryn stepped up beside him, lightly winded.
Anakin eyed the Phlog. He hated bullies, and this one deserved a much bigger beating than he’d gotten, but ... Revenge is not the Jedi way. “I think we’re willing to accept that this was all just misunderstanding.”
The Phlog and the Dug and Gamorrean Two, who'd picked himself off the floor, started at the two humans standing shoulder-to-shoulder in front of their corner, confused because they shouldn’t have been able to do what they’d just done. They hesitated, considering a rematch. And then someone hissed, “Foreman coming!” and they melted away.
Ryn watched the scramble to look peaceful and murmured to Anakin, “I gather the foreman is someone we don’t want to meet?”
“Probably the guy who checked us in,” Anakin murmured. “And no, we don’t want his attention.”
The door opened. A burly humanoid male entered -- so not the Besalisk “Boss” who had checked them in, but an underling of some kind.
“Anakin Skywalker,” he said, stepping out of the path of light from the doorway and swinging his glow-rod around. “You’re wanted abovestairs by some gent with bad hair. Come peaceful-like and there won’t be no trouble.”
I've heard that before.
Ryn clutched his arm. “Anakin?” she whispered fearfully.
Anakin gently pried her fingers loose. “Don’t worry,” he whispered back. It’s probably just Master Vos, he sent, and Ryn subsided, only partially reassured.
Oh, Anakin ...
“Sh, I’ll be fine,” he murmured, and stood up.
“I’m Anakin Skywalker,” he announced, approaching the glow-rod wielding Foreman slowly. “What am I wanted for?”
The foreman huffed a laugh. “Ain’t my job to ask, now, is it? Don’t worry. You’re like to find out, soon enough.”
Anakin grimaced. How reassuring.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
In the slave quarters, Anakin had managed to save her a sandwich of sorts, dry bread and meat. He wouldn’t admit it, but Ryn suspected it came from his own meager plate. In fact, she suspected it was most of his supper. But he was bound and determined that she eat, and with a sigh Ryn gave in and let it go.
“I was getting worried about you,” he said as she licked the last of the crumbs from her fingers.
“The Malastaran senator barfed all over the east staircase,” Ryn said. “And then I ran into Revin.”
She felt Anakin’s hackles rise. “What did he want?”
“More of what he didn’t get last night, I think,” Ryn said, wiping her hands on her pants because there was no napkin. “But we ended up having a decent chat.”
“Really.” Anakin sounded skeptical.
“Yes.” Ryn studied his face in the half-light. “What is it?”
“Nothing. Are you all right?”
“Tired. I took a lot of poodoo from my fellow slaves. You?”
“I’m fine. I meant the thing with Revin. He didn’t hurt you?”
Ryn thought about pointing out that the chances of a boy like Revin being able to afflict any serious damage on a Lorethan ex-military officer were about the same as her chances of owning the Arkanis sector. Decided it wouldn’t help. Sometimes Anakin’s enthusiasm for fixing things extended to things that didn’t really need to be fixed. Like that memorable incident with the shower in Ry-Gaul’s quarters. “No, he didn’t hurt me.” And then, to needle Anakin out of his present gloomy mood, she held a grin in check and said, “He’s actually a very good kisser. He’ll make a good lover someday, for some lucky woman.”
Anakin’s eyes widened and his full mouth set in a line. “Some woman.”
“Yes. I’m thinking once we get out of here, he could stand to spend some time with Banora.”
“Banora,” Anakin repeated. “Evinne’s friend?”
“The one who was so eager to improve your evening? Yes.”
“But not you.”
“Of course not me!”
“Then why were you kissing him?”
“I wasn’t!” Ryn saw Anakin’s protest forming and explained, “He was kissing me. Here.” She touched her fingertips to the line of kisses Revin had trailed down the side of her neck.
“Areth, that’s -- that’s intimate. You shouldn’t be letting guys kiss you like that. They could get the wrong idea. You shouldn’t -- you shouldn’t allow liberties.”
Ryn wasn’t sure whether to laugh or smack him. “Liberties? Are you serious? What century are you living in, anyway?”
“This one! I’m trying to take care of you.”
Baffled, Ryn sat back against the wall and tried to work through this new and unexpected tangle.
“Okay,” she said slowly, “what have you got against kissing?”
“Nothing!” Anakin protested. “Not if it’s done right.”
“What do you mean, done right?”
“You know,” Anakin said, frustrated. “It should be ... between two beings who love each other. An expression of love, not a pastime.”
Ryn opened her mouth to object and then realized she couldn’t think of a reason to. Anakin might not be realistic, but he wasn’t entirely wrong, either. Wasn’t kissing for love immeasurably better than kissing for any other reason? Except ...
“What if you can’t have that?” Ryn asked, reluctantly voicing the fear that haunted her nights. She looked up and met Anakin’s eyes. “Does that mean you should have nothing?” She felt her lower lip tremble and stilled it with her teeth.
Anakin was kneeling in front of her, his face in shadow. But Ryn didn’t need to see her friend to sense his odd mixture of guilt and compassion. He reached out and gripped her shoulder. “Maybe it means you should wait for the right person to come along.”
He meant it to be gentle, comforting, Ryn knew. He was trying to offer her hope. But at the moment it seemed the cruelest thing he could have said. Something snapped inside Ryn.
“LIke you’re waiting for someone who isn’t Padmé?” she flung at him, her words like darts.
Anakin flinched at her tone, but he didn’t lose his temper. Instead Ryn felt an awful sadness well up inside him, and she knew she’d hurt him. He dropped his hand from her shoulder and leaned closer, his expression sorrowful and earnest while Ryn sat speechless with guilt and misery. “What do you want me to say?” he asked softly, his eyes searching her face. “I’m more sorry than you’ll ever know. You want me to love you? I do. But I loved Padmé first. The first time I saw her, I knew it’d be forever. I can’t change that.” She saw the spasm of pain that clenched his heart in his eyes. “Can you forgive me?”
“Forgive you what?” Ryn said. “Falling in love before you ever met me? That’s not wrong. Just ... don’t belittle my feelings.”
“I would never --”
“You do it all the time! You natter on about how you took one look at Padmé and knew you’d love her forever, and then you turn around and preach to me about how someone else is bound to come along? What, you think being the Chosen One gives you some kind of monopoly on being in love? Or only on knowing your own mind?”
“Force.” Anakin sat back on his heels. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Really, really sorry.” He rubbed his face with his hands. “You must hate me.”
Well. There was Anakin, rushing to extremes again. Ryn reflected that she shouldn’t be surprised. “No,” she said, “I don’t hate you. In fact, I think we’ve pretty well covered the fact that I love you. Or haven’t you been paying attention?”
Anakin looked startled; then he dropped his hands in a burst of relieved laughter. “No, I have. I’ve been paying attention. I love you, too.”
“That’s settled, then.” Ryn pulled a wry face. “Now all we have to do is find Revin a date.”
“Um,” said Anakin. “Can we review? What about this conversation makes you think we’re equipped to handle our own love lives, much less anyone else’s?”
Ryn shoved her sadness down, swallowed her lingering tears, and grinned at him. “Don’t be a wet blanket. Come here and help me plot.”
*~*~*
*~*~*
The next night, someone -- well, several someones -- challenged them for the use of their chosen corner.
Anakin and Ryn were both exhausted, and Ryn was sporting some exciting new bruises that didn’t exactly testify to a day peacefully spent, but she hadn’t had a chance to tell him what had happened yet, so Anakin didn’t yet know who was destined for a punishment.
He definitely hadn’t mentioned the punishment plan to Ryn. He had a feeling she might not like it.
And it wasn’t going to matter or if they didn’t make it through the next five minutes, anyway.
Standing back-to-back with Ryn in front of the little area they had staked out as theirs -- still no blankets -- Anakin tried hard to approach the situation like a Jedi and not like a former slave.
“Look,” he told the Phlog looming over him, “we claimed this spot two nights ago. No one said anything about it then. I don’t see how you can claim we’re in your space now.”
But he did. The Phlog, just like everyone else, had taken a couple of days to size them up and concluded that they weren’t that dangerous. The Phlog just happened to be the first to act on his conclusion -- probably he’d made someone mad earlier in the day and needed the corner’s more defensible position -- but the rest of the group in the slave quarters was thinking pretty much the same thing.
If they didn’t deal with this threat efficiently, they’d be marking themselves as easy prey, and they’d be harassed constantly. Master Vos might even have to pull them out.
But it was the Jedi way to pursue a non-violent solution whenever possible.
The Phlog gave him some poodoo about generously letting the newcomers settle in comfortably. Anakin could practically feel Ryn’s eyes rolling.
“Perhaps if you had felt inclined to open the dialogue two days ago, I would find it easier to believe you,” Anakin said calmly. If the Phlog’s mind hadn’t reeked of lies, that might have helped, too.
The Phlog babbled something about not needing to draw attention to what everyone knew already.
Right. Anakin felt he wasn’t doing that well with the non-violent approach. Over his shoulder, he asked Ryn, “What do you think?”
Slender back pressed easily against his, Ryn didn’t look around. “I think he’s got friends.”
Anakin saw her point. Backed by at least four companions, the Phlog wasn’t going to see the need to negotiate, regardless of how reasonable Anakin’s argument might sound.
He scanned the room without moving as the Phlog grinned, evidently thinking he had them. “How many can you handle?”
“What, you got somewhere to be?”
“Smartass.”
“As many as I have to,” Ryn amended. He couldn’t sense anything from her except calm confidence, and a sort of hyperalertness: the clarity of Ryn’s battle mind.
Anakin gave the Phlog a deliberate once-over. “Should we let them make the first move, you think?”
Ryn shrugged; he could her shoulder brushing his back. “Why not? I’ve got time to kill.”
Anakin grinned, the Phlog charged, and the mayhem began.
The Phlog’s first strike met empty air as Anakin and Ryn dodged in opposite directions. Anakin heard an oof noise as he snapped back into position and knew that Ryn had landed a hit on the Gamorrean who was attacking her and then the Phlog stepped in again, so Anakin met him with a sharp kick to the knee that failed to crack the bone but forced him to sway back, anyway.
The Phlog rushed him this time, and Anakin felt the impact shudder through him to Ryn, who staggered once and then held her ground.
“Incoming,” she said, and Anakin glanced to the side to see another Gamorrean and a Dug, closing in. The Gamorean wasn’t worth worrying about, unless he was a lot faster than the rest of his species, but the Dug ... Anakin was going to have to even the odds, and soon.
There was a sense of movement behind him, a rush of air, and Gamorrean One howled and staggered into Anakin’s peripheral vision, clutching an arm that bent in the wrong place. On second thought, looks like Ryn has it covered. He didn’t dare look away from the Phlog, who was prowling around him in a half-circle, looking for a weakness.
The Phlog plunged in as the Dug rushed Ryn, and Anakin’s fear for her -- as the memory of Sebulba and childhood violence soured his mouth like dreams of monsters under the bed -- slowed his reactions just enough and the Phlog picked him up and threw him bodily across the room.
"Anakin! You all right?" Ryn didn’t look at him, too busy dodging, both the Dug and Gamorrean Two.
"I’m fine." The Phlog was moving in him, though. Anakin surged to his feet in time to dodge the first blow, just as Gamorrean Two grabbed Ryn and lifted her over his head for a body slam that never happened, because she caught herself on her hands and twisted and Anakin missed what she did next because he was too busy driving the Phlog’s nose backward into his skull, but then the Gamorrean was down and Ryn was going head-to-head with the Dug and the fight, suddenly, was even numbers.
Anakin dodged another blow and used an Ataro flip to land next to Ryn again. “Sorry about that.”
“‘S okay.” He felt a jar against his shoulder as Ryn was thrown against him, and then the Dug snarled in pain.
The Phlog swung, but time spun out and Anakin saw the blow coming in slow-motion and ducked under his massive fist to launch a kick at the Phlog’s midsection that made the breath leave his lungs in a rush.
He glanced over his shoulder to see what Ryn was doing, and found that she was holding her own against her larger, stronger opponent, largely because she moved like lightning.
So Anakin turned back to the Phlog, and when he struck this time, he called on the Force, and his open-handed smack didn’t just knock the larger being breathless, it blew him halfway across the room.
He repeated the maneuver twice before the Phlog turned wary and backed off, still prowling but unwilling to engage. Anakin saw his attention flick to the Dug’s progress -- or lack thereof -- with Ryn, and followed his gaze cautiously, aware that it could a tactic for distracting him.
If that was the plan, it was working. Ryn wasn’t drawing on the Force, at least not in any way Anakin could recognize, but she still burned bright in it, almost as though she were generating energy, rather than channeling it. That didn’t sound possible ... but then, what did he know about Lorethan training? He didn’t really know anything about Ryn’s life before he met her, except that she’d lost her family and fought in a war. And spent a month on Malastare. Where she took up cage-fighting.
The Dug landed a kick to Ryn’s cheek that knocked her sideways, and Anakin tensed, ready to step in, but then he realized that Ryn had taken the blow as a way of changing positions without alerting the Dug to her true intent. Which was ... what, exactly?
Ryn moved suddenly, a lot faster than her opponent had been expecting, and the Dug flew through the air to hit his Phlog companion square in the belly.
Anakin felt his eyes widen “Impressive.”
“Well, I try.” Ryn stepped up beside him, lightly winded.
Anakin eyed the Phlog. He hated bullies, and this one deserved a much bigger beating than he’d gotten, but ... Revenge is not the Jedi way. “I think we’re willing to accept that this was all just misunderstanding.”
The Phlog and the Dug and Gamorrean Two, who'd picked himself off the floor, started at the two humans standing shoulder-to-shoulder in front of their corner, confused because they shouldn’t have been able to do what they’d just done. They hesitated, considering a rematch. And then someone hissed, “Foreman coming!” and they melted away.
Ryn watched the scramble to look peaceful and murmured to Anakin, “I gather the foreman is someone we don’t want to meet?”
“Probably the guy who checked us in,” Anakin murmured. “And no, we don’t want his attention.”
The door opened. A burly humanoid male entered -- so not the Besalisk “Boss” who had checked them in, but an underling of some kind.
“Anakin Skywalker,” he said, stepping out of the path of light from the doorway and swinging his glow-rod around. “You’re wanted abovestairs by some gent with bad hair. Come peaceful-like and there won’t be no trouble.”
I've heard that before.
Ryn clutched his arm. “Anakin?” she whispered fearfully.
Anakin gently pried her fingers loose. “Don’t worry,” he whispered back. It’s probably just Master Vos, he sent, and Ryn subsided, only partially reassured.
Oh, Anakin ...
“Sh, I’ll be fine,” he murmured, and stood up.
“I’m Anakin Skywalker,” he announced, approaching the glow-rod wielding Foreman slowly. “What am I wanted for?”
The foreman huffed a laugh. “Ain’t my job to ask, now, is it? Don’t worry. You’re like to find out, soon enough.”
Anakin grimaced. How reassuring.