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There’s a child curled up in the corner of the Archives.
Normally, it wouldn’t be unusual, but— Jocasta did not earn her post without listening, and from where she stands in the aisle, gaze fixed upon the back of the young child’s shaking shoulders, she can hear a sniffle reverberate around the space.
There’s a child curled up in the corner of the Archives— and they’re crying.
From where she stands, if she looks closely, Jocasta can pick out the shape of a blonde ponytail at the back of the child’s head, the shadow of a Padawan braid at their right shoulder, and—
Jocasta is not given to gossip, but it would have been hard not to hear the story of the young Knight who killed a Sith on Naboo three months ago, and upon his knighting, took a Padawan.
A young Padawan, recently rescued from slavery, judged by the Council as too old to be an Initiate, but who Master Jinn and Knight Kenobi had refused to give up on.
The shape in the corner, facing out of the window, surrounded in the Force by a cloud of loss and homesickness so strong that it could well be its own weather pattern. The feeling of abandonment a great swirl of clouds across Coruscant stretching from the lowest levels imaginable to the sky—
Jocasta knows at once that this must be the young Anakin Skywalker, escaped from some lesson or another when it all became too much. And perhaps she should mind her own business, perhaps it isn’t her place—
But even though it has been many years since last she taught a Padawan of her own, Jocasta Nu is a Jedi.
No Jedi would leave a child to cry alone.
She steps quietly out, making just enough noise to alert the young Padawan to her presence. He stills, quiet as a mouse, and gives one last hiccuping sob.
“Master?”
Jocasta can see the way he wipes at his eyes quickly, furiously, as if ashamed of his tears, and something in her chest clenches at the sight. Here is a child, worried and sad and homesick, and yet when his gaze rests upon his elders, his own emotions make him feel shame.
The child is still wiping his sleeves over his eyelids harshly, linen now damp and scratchy, in a way that will surely leave his face red and irritated. Jocasta moves closer, catching his wrist ever-so-gently. “None of that, please, child,” she says, softly. “You will hurt yourself, Padawan.”
He stills, arms taut in her grip, and looks up with something half-curious, half-accusing in his eyes. “You’re not my Master.”
“That I am not,” Jocasta says, and then, “What is your name, Padawan?”
He looks at her suspiciously, blue eyes big and inquisitive in a face far too angular for a child. The past months at the Temple have only just begun to build baby fat that was never there in the first place, just one more vestige of childhood stolen by a life of malnutrition and slavery.
Jocasta knows this child’s name, but such things have power, a meaning far more potent to those who grow up with nothing.
She will ask, and she will wait, and she will use whichever name the Padawan wishes to give her.
After a pause, he looks away from her face, and opens his mouth.
“Anakin Skywalker,” he says. “My Master is Obi-Wan Kenobi.”
“I have heard of you both,” Jocasta says, and then because it would be rude not to reciprocate, and the child is looking up at her with expectant eyes, “My name is Jocasta Nu. I am the Keeper of the Archives here at the Temple.”
“Now, you don’t have to tell me,” Jocasta soothes. “But if it is okay, could you tell me why you were crying? It would be good to know, so that I may do what I can to help.”
Mouth twisted into something quite melancholy and not entirely trusting, Anakin’s lower lip begins to tremble. “It’s stupid,” he begins, breath hitching.
When Jocasta looks at this child, she wants to do nothing more than to wrap him in her arms and solve whatever problems have him so desolate in the Force. But she can’t, and regardless, she can’t help but think Anakin would not appreciate such a gesture. So instead, she kneels down to meet his eyes, and looks him squarely in the face.
“If it is upsetting you, Padawan, then I would hesitate to call it stupid,” Jocasta says. “However, if you truly do not wish to speak of it, I will happily leave, or stay here and talk about something else with you.”
Anakin looks at her again, eyes wide. He thinks for a second, mouth twisting in thought, before he decides. “Could we talk about something else?” He asks. “I don’t want to be sad, but it’s difficult not to think about it. Is there anything else we could do?”
“Of course,” Jocasta says, and then, “Come with me.”
Not many people know it, or can be bothered to learn, but the Archive isn’t just for books.
Jocasta isn’t the only one who works here. She’s the Master of the Archives, knows all that can be found, but at the end of the day, that means that she can no longer take part in the exploration, the gathering of information across the galaxy and beyond.
It bothers her little. She has had a long life, filled with adventure— these days, her knees creak, her joints ache, and though she is far from a slouch when it comes to fighting, it is no longer her wish to travel through the furthest reaches of space in search of knowledge.
After all, it is on Coruscant and Coruscant only that the Jedi Temple stands and her family resides.
And as the Master of the Archives, Jocasta now has the privilege of teaching her family’s younglings, where before she saw very few sentients at all.
“Have you been to the Archives before?” She asks carefully, and allows herself a wry smile as Anakin’s face screws up in displeasure from where he follows behind her. He’s falling behind; she slows her steps from the normal stride past endless rows of bookcases and desks, and continues.
“A couple of times, with Master Obi-Wan,” he says. “But we didn’t go past the first room. And he always tells me to sit and wait,” he scrunches his nose, boredom curdled to disgust in his voice.
“I can imagine that would be boring,” Jocasta allows. “Perhaps next time, if you wish, you can ask Knight Kenobi to leave you with me, and I can show you the section we have for younglings.”
“‘M not a youngling,” Anakin says, eyebrows furrowed as he stops in his tracks, Jocasta turning to face him. “I don’t want to go to the children’s section.”
“Why ever not?” She crouches down to his height, ignoring the click of her knees as she does so. “Even if we can’t find anything you’re interested in there, the Coruscant Planetary Library is open to the public, and we can easily request a few books to see if there’s anything you like.”
“I don’t want to.”
“That’s okay,” Jocasta says. “Would you like me to take you back to where we were before? Or call your Master to come and pick you up?”
“No!” Anakin’s voice cracks, his yell sharp and tinged with tearfulness as the Force roils with unnamed emotion around them. “No, I don’t want you to call him!”
“But why not?” Jocasta talks quietly, gently, reaching out with one weathered hand to wipe away the tears that brim in his eyes. “Is your Master unkind to you, Padawan?”
She doesn’t want to believe the possibility. If it is true— if Knight Kenobi has mistreated the Padawan he fought so hard to teach— well.
It would be a surprising thing, indeed— but there would be a reckoning nonetheless.
“No!” Anakin shouts again, less loud this time but more distressed, the storm in the Force taking on a sense of worry, of guilt over the misunderstanding.
“No, Master Obi-Wan is really kind,” he says, bottom lip trembling. “He’s the best Master ever, he’s really nice to me.”
“Then why do you not wish to see him?” Jocasta asks gently. “Padawan, I wish only to help— but I cannot aid you if I do not know your struggle.”
The boy looks towards his feet.
“I—“ he says. His bottom lip begins to tremble, his voice wobbling slightly with a mixture of anger and suppressed tears, and he takes a shaky breath. “I—“
“It’s okay,” Jocasta tries to soothe him. “Every Jedi faces these struggles from time to time. It does not matter that we stumble— only that we continue, Padawan.”
She does not expect the way that his head snaps up, some strange sort of fire blazing in his eyes as fresh tears fall, bright and angry on his face. “That’s it, though,” he hisses, his voice rising from a trembling murmur to an angry, shaking cry. ‘I’m not a Jedi!”
The force of his words makes her flinch slightly, shocked, as Anakin continues, shoulders shaking, the exclamation seemingly having dealt the last blow to a dam already crumbling.
“I’m a terrible Padawan!” His voice echoes around the bookshelves, tortured and miserable. “Master Obi-Wan won’t let me use a lightsaber, because he says I need to control my emotions, but I can’t even meditate! And my classes are so boring, and I don’t understand the books because they’re all in Basic. And I want to be a Jedi but I’m so bad at it, Master Nu. It’s been months and I’m still bad at it.”
“I can’t even read Basic that well,” he sniffles, anger well and truly spent. “How can I be a Jedi when I can’t read Basic well?” The Force has settled from the storm around him into a still-surfaced sea, quiet and despairing.
No wonder he’s homesick. And what a feeling it must be, to be homesick for a place such as Tatooine, where all you had ever known was a life of slavery.
Jocasta sighs, a small thing. She places a hand on Anakin’s shoulder, and once again wipes the tears streaming down his face. “It’s okay to be upset,” she says at the whirl of shame that rises in the Force. “You are human, so you feel. There is no shame in emotion.”
“I can’t control it though,” he says with a sniffle. “Master Obi-Wan says I need to.”
“Knight Kenobi is a talented Jedi, but perhaps he has erred in his explanation of our principles,” Jocasta says. “Anakin, you are young, and you have been at the Temple for mere months— it would never be expected of you to learn so fast to fully control your emotions. Even Senior Padawans may slip from time to time, and there is no judgement for doing so.”
“One day you will master control. But that does not mean to attain an absence of emotion, Padawan.”
“It merely means,” Jocasta says softly, “that when the time comes, you will not act spurred by your negative feelings. You will merely allow them to exist, and control your response to them.”
Anakin sniffles. “I don’t know if I can do that either, though.”
Jocasta smiles. “You can still try, though. No person is good by nature. We try, every day, to be good people— and that is all we are capable of.”
“All we can do is try to be good people, to be good Jedi,” she says again.
He sniffles again, trying for a brave smile. “Okay.”
“As for meditation, that will come with time and control,” Jocasta says. “It may be difficult right now to clear your mind, but remember: to meditate, you don’t necessarily need to reach for the Force. When I was your age, I struggled in my meditation. My Master taught me to first reach for inner peace first, then reach for the Force. Perhaps her advice would benefit you, too.”
“I’ll try,” Anakin says. She smiles, and reaches out to wipe a stray tear.
“That’s all you need to do. And as for reading,” she says, “I know something that will definitely help. Do you remember that I mentioned the Coruscant Planetary Library?”
“Yes, but what about it?”
Jocasta gives the boy a smile once again. It feels like the most she has since the last time Jin-Lo left for Wild Space. “I have an agreement with the Senior Librarian,” she says, “regarding the Jedi and the library. Our collection is shared with the Library and thus with the general public in the way of free knowledge, and in return, we have access to theirs.”
“Now,” she says, “you said that you struggle to read Aurebesh. I know that at the Library, they stock their children’s section in several languages, so that any books may be accessible to those not versed in Basic specifically. Since you grew up on Tatooine, your first language was Huttese, I assume?”
“Yes,” Anakin says.
She nods. “Then we can find you reading material written in that alongside Aurebesh. Now,” she looks at Anakin slowly, taking care to meet his eyes. “One of the Planetary Library’s more recent initiatives is a course for children recently moved to Coruscant and are unable to attend intersystem schools that offer teaching in several languages. The mission of it is to teach young people different languages, specifically Galactic Basic, but also others such as Huttese and Togruti. Now, you clearly won’t need any help with Huttese,” she says to a slightly tearful giggle from the boy, “but it could help you to expand your skills with language beyond the basics. What do you think?”
“I want to do it,” the words seem to burst out of him, eagerness like a ray of sunlight in the Force. “I want to be able to properly read Basic. And, Master Nu…”
“Yes, Padawan?”
“Do you think I could learn some of the other languages as well?” He looks to his feet, clearly shy. “If it’s not too much trouble, of course.”
Jocasta smiles again, something warm blooming in her chest. “Of course,” she says. “It wouldn’t be any trouble at all. Now, if you want, I can sign you up for lessons beginning about a week from now— or, if you’d rather wait a little while, it would be a month or so. What do you think?”
Anakin looks at her for a few seconds, fiddling with his sleeve. “A week from now, please,” he says. “And, Master Nu—“
“Yes, Padawan?”
“Would it be alright for Master Obi-Wan to come with me to the lesson, the first time? I haven’t been away from the Temple before.”
“Of course. He’ll travel with you to the Library every time for your own safety, but I’m sure he’d be more than happy to accompany you for the first session, Padawan,” Jocasta says.
“Master Nu?”
“Yes?”
“I should probably get back to my lessons,” he says. “But, you could call me Anakin if you’d like, Master.” Then, all in a rush, “Oh, and— could I come back tomorrow? I know I can’t read Aurebesh well yet, but— would you be able to show me the section you told about me, with the stories? It would be good to know what to read when I visit the Library.”
Jocasta smiles at the boy. “Of course, Anakin,” she says. “I would be happy to have you back tomorrow.”
At that, Anakin beams. And, well—
Jocasta hasn’t had a Padawan in a while. But if Kenobi wasn’t already teaching Anakin, well.
She would have gladly taught this one.