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Barriss Offee wakes with a start.

It is the middle of the ship"s night and at first the Padawan cannot identify what disturbs her. Their mission to Anison had been successful without significant loss of life, Master Unduli had hinted in their after-dinner meditation that she was thinking of recommending Barriss for the Trials—

A surge of worry-anxiety interrupts her self reflection, bringing with it a flash of insight. The mirialan isn’t awake because of her own musings. Anakin Skywalker is awake. And afraid.

Without further thought, Barris slides her feet into the warm slippers she always ensures are packed when long hours of space travel loom in her future and goes to seek him out.

He is not difficult to find. True, the ship is small, but Anakin always seemed to be so much…more…than the rest of them. Faster. More powerful. The best duelist of their generation. More prone to severe emotional storms that flooded the Force around him even if he limited his facial expressions to scowls and rolling eyes.

She had heard the whispers, of course. All their cohort had. The Chosen One. The Bringer of Balance. But what she had most noticed as they all turned twelve and then thirteen together was how uncomfortable those titles made him. He could talk enthusiastically for hours about piloting speeders, pods, swoop bikes and fighters (all of which he’d flown by the age of ten), but any mention of his incredible presence in the Force and the rumored prophecy and he shut down, stripped of any pleasure gained by his success in the salles or classrooms.

He is sitting cross-legged on a galley bench, dressed only in his loose sleeping trousers and shirt, breathing deeply. Barriss recognizes his desperate attempt to release whatever is troubling him into the Force. As fear-pain-panic lashes around him, she also recognizes that he is failing. Gently pushing the thrashing tendrils away from herself, she sits at the far end of the bench and initiates her own deep breathing sequence, hesitantly trying to lend him her calm, to bolster his connection to the Light as their masters did in joint meditation.

“I did not mean to wake you,” he says hoarsely, eyes still closed.

“It is no bother,” she replies, and she means it. Her heart contracts at the clear anguish squirming around them, underpinned by an odd sense of guilt. “Can I help you?”

“I don’t think so. I’m supposed to release my anxieties to the Force. That’s what Master Obi-Wan keeps telling me.” At this he opens his eyes and the blue gaze that had been charming and ice-cold by turns during their mission met hers, lost and frightened as any pre-teen child.

“What is making you anxious?” Barriss asks, setting aside the remark about Obi-Wan and the many things about their master-padawan relationship it revealed.

His eyes flick down, and shame joins the cacophonous Force around them. “Dreams.”

The mirialan blinks. “That is no small thing. Many Jedi have true dreams.”

“That’s what I said, the first time I dreamed,” Anakin replies passionately. As swiftly as his eagerness comes, it cools, as if he is shoving it into a box. “But Obi-Wan told me that most dreams don’t come to pass and it’s better to set them aside.”

Barriss frowns slightly at that thought. It is true that many dreams, even for Jedi, are just dreams. Imprints of people and events that have touched their lives and left impressions. But it is equally true that some Jedi have vivid dreams of past, present and future. Surely it is better to at least ensure that Anakin’s dreams are not the latter?

“What kind of dreams?”

He winces, but answers. “Dreams about my mother.”

Ah. That was the other truth, not a rumor but verifiable fact: Anakin Skywalker had skipped both the creche and the Initiate clans, having been already nine when he was brought to the Temple, and instantly been given a master. He remembered the life he’d had before the Jedi, the people in it. He had attachments to it. Obi-Wan’s advice made a great deal more sense.

“Bad dreams?” she guesses gently. They wouldn’t be sitting here if they were good ones.

“The worst. She’s dying. In tremendous pain, and I can’t reach her in time to save her,” Anakin whispers. “She dies in my arms.” Misery paints the Force and Barriss swallows back her own reactive urge to tears.

“Is that likely?” Logic will be the best application for her fellow padawan’s distress, to walk him through how unlikely such a fear is—

“Of course. She’s still a slave. It could happen at any time.”

Barriss stares at him, thoughts completely stalled. What? Even unspoken, the demanding question rings between them, and Anakin ducks his head. “Sorry,” he mutters. “That’s…I shouldn’t have said–”

“Were you a slave?” she demands roughly, ignoring his attempt to hide.

He sighs, twists his mouth and shoots her a pointed glare. “I’m a person, and my name is Anakin.”

“Of course you are. That wasn’t my question. Were you a slave?”

“Why does it matter?” he counters.

“Why—?” she sputters, and the normally placid apprentice has to remind herself that she is a Jedi when what she wants to do is fist her hands in his thin sleep shirt, push his forehead back with her own and force him to meet her eyes. “Because it does. Because that kind of trauma doesn’t just disappear like stars in a hyperlane!”

“Wrong,” he says, and the torque of his mouth is ugly now with an old pain that has never been resolved. “That is exactly what happens. My master hasn’t mentioned it in ten years. Why start now?”

“Because of your dreams, Anakin. And because it is unconscionable that the Jedi have left your mother in slavery for a decade while you trained at the Temple.”

Anakin sighs, slumps back. “That’s…I had hoped that I would be able to free her. But the Jedi don’t…” he swallows, forces himself to meet her eyes. “Don’t make a big deal out of it,” he whispers. “Please, Barriss, it just…it is what it is. We can’t change it.”

The hell I can’t, she thinks savagely. What has Master Obi-Wan been thinking?

Anakin eventually stumbles back to his berth, though Barriss can feel him toss and turn and fail to meditate for several hours as the clock ticks by towards artificial morning. His signature finally drifts into the peace of sleep only a half hour before both masters start stirring.

While her own master wakes slightly earlier, Master Kenobi is the first to emerge from his bunk.

“You’re up early, Padawan Offee,” he offers with one of his kind smiles, noting the cold, empty tea mug in front of her. She tilts her head at him, wondering at the genuine ease she feels in his presence, his utter calm in the Force.

Is he so good a liar? She finds the thought repulsive.

“I was wondering if you would be willing to work through Soresu with me this morning, Master Kenobi? Before we begin our day?”

He halts himself halfway to the kettle, turns to her with a faintly puzzled expression. Through the entire mission to Anison, she has made no requests on his personal time, which was unusual. Senior Padawans were encouraged to take advantage of the knowledge of their friends’ masters – or any knighted Jedi – when given the opportunity. It broadened their training, and often solidified their own masters’ lessons.

“Padawan Offee, I would be delighted. However, I will admit my confusion as to why you’re asking now.” Anison is, after all, less than a handful of days from the Temple. She hasn’t left herself much time to learn.

She holds his blue-grey gaze steadily. “I have recently learned something that I would like to…work out.”

“Ah. Soresu katas can be very meditative,” he allows. He glances at the kettle. “I am sensing that you’d like to start before tea.”

“If you are willing, Master,” she replies demurely, knowing that he will set aside the comfort of his own routine to train her. Master Kenobi is often held aloft as the pinnacle of the Jedi: selfless, disciplined, patient.

The whole Temple knows that Anakin Skywalker vacillates wildly between pride in his master’s skills and skin-shaking frustration for the older Jedi’s expectations.

“I suppose my tea can wait,” he allows on cue, and she rises with murmured thanks to lead him to the small cargo hold that is the only place on the ship spacious enough to permit the practice of lightsaber forms.

Obi-Wan watches his friend’s padawan out of the corner of his eye as she settles herself into the opening guard of a Soresu kata. He mimics her, standing a few feet away, the hold granting them just enough space that the sweep of their blades won’t singe one another.

Barriss Offee is graceful as she steps through the opening sequence of strikes and parries. While he is practicing alongside her, waking his muscles with the half-speed exercise, he wonders what she really wants. Luminara is a skilled duelist, but her Padawan moves through lightsaber katas as if she just happens to be dancing with the galaxy’s most dangerous weapon.

A warrior Padawan Offee is not.

She is also not wholly focused on the exercise, though she is skilled enough now that her distraction is not obvious to the casual observer.

The knight wonders what his friend’s Padawan really wants. He has a feeling she’ll let him know in her own time. And since he’s already interrupted his morning tea routine…he sinks into the kata, closing his eyes and feeling the Force humming around them, aware less of their blades’ resonance as a sound and more in the way they cut through the fabric of the galaxy—

“Did you know that Anakin’s mother is still a slave?”

Had she struck him with her lightsaber, it would have been less shocking. Obi-Wan barely realizes he’s dropped his blade, nerveless as any unblooded initiate as he turns to meet Barriss Offee’s cool, dark-blue gaze.

“What?” he manages hoarsely.

Barriss returns to the ship’s galley to find her master drinking tea serenely while Anakin quietly pours himself a cup of caf. His pallor is still wretched, and she wonders if he dreamed again after attempting to return to sleep.

He turns, meets her eyes and offers her a charmingly shy half-smile, sheepish gratitude lacing the Force between them. “Have you seen my master?”

She winces at the word, knowing what it has meant to him in his life, what it still must mean to his mother. He catches her reaction and his shoulders heave in a silent sigh, but doesn’t rephrase his question.

“I believe the last thing he said was that he ‘required immediate meditation’,” she replies.

“Huh.” A puzzled look crosses his face, but he says nothing more as he spoons a truly obscene amount of sweetener into his caf and takes a sip.

Barriss is happy to leave him to it as she pours herself a cup of tea, reflecting on the shock that had shattered the Force at her question.

“What do you mean, his mother is still a slave?” the master demanded. Gone was the gentle taskmaster, the wise teacher, the expert negotiator. His voice was raw with the same pain Barriss could feel undercutting the Force like walking on heated glass.

She has touched on something personal, far from the general morass of disgust-distaste-pity most Jedi exuded when confronted with the subject. What was Master Kenobi’s relationship to slavery? She began to wonder: did he truly not know?

Nothing to do now but press forward. “Anakin was a slave. Before Master Jinn found him. His mother still lives in servitude on Tatooine.”

Master Kenobi drops to his knees on the deck abruptly, grief raging from him like a tide.

“You didn’t know?”

“I didn’t know.”

How could I not have known? Obi-Wan feels the damp trickling into his beard, the memory of the weight of his slave collar on Bandomeer so vivid he can feel it cutting his flesh anew.

How could you never have mentioned it, Master? In the ten years since Qui-Gon’s death, Obi-Wan had raged at the unfairness of his loss. Had grieved. Had fervently wished for the older Jedi every single day. Had practiced and practiced his katas well after his exhausted Padawan had collapsed in bed, determined that no Sith would ever deprive Anakin the way Maul had callously sliced through the pillar of Obi-Wan’s life.

In all that time, Obi-Wan has not been angry with his former master.

Now he is furious.

Qui-Gon had been so vague about describing Anakin’s origins, so wrapt in his excitement of finding the living embodiment of the Chosen One of the Force, that Obi-Wan had been left struggling with resentment and anger…and then the crushing agony of grief in the wake of feeling his master’s life bleed into the Force until their bond snapped, leaving his psyche aching and empty, the words of his final promise still echoing in the sterile reactor core.

And then…then he had not thought to pry. He and Anakin had both been grieving, and by the time they pulled themselves out of it, a gulf had opened into which all deeply personal subjects fell, unexplored. They’d spent ten years steadily toiling to bridge their divide, and many days now he counted himself lucky to feel like they had succeeded, but this…

How long have I been kidding myself? There can be no bridge between a master and a slave. Depur does not allow for equals.

Every time I made him call me ‘master’, he thinks, curling in on himself, call others ‘master’... was it any wonder his Padawan had grown secretive, moody and withdrawn? To be promised freedom, and then delivered to a world where he was expected to obey not one master but dozens?

He feels Anakin gently tapping at their connection, wondering at his master’s—

—another word, I must find another word—

—abrupt and total disconnection. Worry trickles from his student to bead like water drops on the walls of his mind. Obi-Wan takes a deep breath, yanks his tabards straight, hastily dashes water from his cheeks, and rises.

He has been unintentionally traumatizing his Padawan for the past decade. It’s time to start making amends.

“Master, there you—” Anakin halts halfway through his relieved greeting when Obi-Wan flinches, their bond spiking with guilt. At the title. A title he had insisted Anakin use on him and every other one of his teachers at the Temple.

Betrayal rears, cold and ugly, and Anakin glares at Barriss. “Keeping secrets is obviously not your forte,” he snarls. Master Unduli’s eyes snap open, surprised by the viciousness in the other apprentice’s voice.

Barriss does not back down, her voice cuttingly cool. “All sentients deserve a life of dignity and liberty. That truth is the foundation of my faith as a Jedi. I want to save your mother, Anakin. Do you?”

Her response throws him, and he blinks for a moment at the fierce corona of Barriss’ conviction. “Of course,” he whispers. For a moment, he can almost grasp the world illumined by her blazing assurance. Then reality settles like cold sand snakes in his stomach. Obi-Wan will not agree. Obi-Wan will tell him to release his fears. His master will expect him to let go—

“Anakin, I would like a word in the cockpit please,” Master Obi-Wan says softly, and their bond is layered through with a deep compassion, a richly-tapestried love-caring-warmth like he used to send when Anakin was much younger and having nightmares.

Concern spikes from Barriss, curiosity from Master Unduli, but neither say anything as Anakin puts his head down and trudges after his master into the cockpit, the door swishing closed behind them to grant them privacy.

His teacher has taken the navigator’s chair, so Anakin slumps into the pilot’s seat, staring at the white-blue whirl of hyperspace rather than meet what is sure to be a disappointed-judgmental gaze.

“Please look at me,” Master Obi-Wan says softly.

He reluctantly turns to face the older man, already reaching for his deep breathing, to try to release his fears as his master wants—

“I…Anakin, Te masu Amavikkas?”

He stops breathing altogether, staring at his master, at a man who should have no knowledge of that language, of those syllables, even if he did know of Anakin’s origins.

“Te masu Amavikkas?” Obi-Wan repeats gently.

“How…?” he manages to wheeze out.

“I was enslaved on Bandomeer at thirteen. Only for some weeks, but you know me and languages.” Master Obi-Wan tries for a sheepish smile. Anakin would snort if he could catch his breath. His…master?...was fluent in nearly forty, not including a few computer languages. At times he was nearly as adept as a protocol droid at picking up vocabulary and grammar.

“There were so many of the newly-enslaved, the grandfathers worked hard to ensure we were welcomed, and taught the things—”

“—a slave must know,” Anakin finishes, finally forcing air back into his lungs.

“Indeed. I don’t speak much, and of course, there was no one to speak it with once I returned to the Temple. And I am obviously not Amavikka…I learned much of value in my time in Bandomeer’s mines, but my time there was brief.”

Enslaved. His own teacher. The closest thing he had to a father and a brother. Clearly, Anakin wasn’t the only one who hadn’t shared everything.

“Ek masa Amavikka,” Anakin confirms quietly. “From birth. That’s where Master Qui-Gon found me.” He meets his teacher’s blue-grey eyes. “I thought…my chip was removed the first time I was at the Temple, before going back to Naboo. He never said anything?”

“Not a single word.” Anger spears the Force around them. Anakin flinches away on instinct only to be flooded with sorry-reassurance, not at you, dear one, this anger is not at you. “About your mother. About how he’d found you,” Obi-Wan closes his eyes, and Anakin can feel soul-shredding guilt-shame overtake rage in their bond. “You know, now, that Jedi are often called on Search to meet with the families of Force sensitives. I assumed our landing on Tatooine was fortuitous, the will of the Force, and that he’d found you in a similar fashion.”

“That isn’t…entirely wrong. He walked into the parts-and-repair shop where we worked. Our owner was Watto, a Toydarian. As Depur goes, he wasn’t the worst.”

“But he is still Depur. And your mother is still there. I can’t believe I—” he cuts himself off, takes a deep breath to release his own cacophony of emotion. “I cannot undo the past ten years, Anakin, though I wish to all the gods I could. But I can change what happens from here. What did Padawan Offee mean about saving her?” Certitude-righteousness is replacing Obi-Wan’s shame in the cockpit, and Anakin feels the hesitant spread of hope in his own heart. His teacher is so seldom this…open. This honest.

“I…my dreams,” Anakin admits. “I’ve been dreaming about her death. It’s…vivid. And awful. And I can’t seem to let it go.”

Obi-Wan bites down on his immediate instinct to offer a parable or pithy phrase on attachment. Despite having had a desperate primer-by-fire in Amatakka for a few weeks at thirteen, there is so much of his Padawan that he does not know, does not understand. And he needs to.

“Then we’ll go to Tatooine. We’ll find your mother, and free her.”

Anakin stares at him. “What? But…the Council…we’re expected back to report on the Anison situation and—”

“Some things are more important than Council reports,” Obi-Wan answers firmly.

“Are you sure, Master?”

Obi-Wan flinches again. “Quite sure. And please don’t call me that. I don’t wish to share a name with Depur. What’s the Amatakkan word for teacher?”

“We’ll drop you off at the Temple, of course,” Obi-Wan finishes calmly alerting Luminara to their change in plans.

“What? No! We’re coming with you,” Padawan Offee blurts. Obi-Wan raises an amused eyebrow. Until his apprentice’s admittedly shocking revelation, the Jedi could count on one hand the number of times he’d witnessed or heard about Barriss Offee – as a youngling, Initiate or Padawan – interrupting or contradicting her teachers.

“Anakin has said that he does not mind if you join us,” Obi-Wan allows. “But I did not think it courteous to upset your schedule without your permission.”

“Hmm. And if you drop us at the Temple, we’ll have to make the Anison report, sparing you a long and tedious Council meeting,” Luminara replies, dark eyes sparkling with amusement. “I think…” she tilts her head and slides her gaze towards her student. “I think you can decide, Padawan.”

Padawan Offee draws a breath, only to pause as Luminara lifts a graceful finger. “Take into account what we know, the duty we have been asked to perform by the Council, and, above all, the will of the Force. Do not answer hastily. Our own desires are not always what the Force wills for us.”

Thus warned, the younger mirialan closes her mouth, heaves a sigh, and shuts her eyes. Obi-Wan shoots Luminara a smile, which she returns mischievously as they both feel the padawan delve into the Force, stilling themselves to mute any background noise as she sifts the currents around them, seeking direction.

Luminara has done well with her. She will be ready for knighthood in the next few years, Obi-Wan thinks wistfully as he feels the Padawan releasing her own desires, making space to listen.

When she opens her eyes five minutes later, her expression is resolute. “We need to go to Tatooine.”

“Late, are Obi-Wan and Luminara,” Yoda murmurs, frowning. “Finished, are the negotiations on Anison. Successful, they were.”

“They should have arrived back this morning,” Ki Adi Mundi agrees, shifting in his chair. While they have been covering other business, the members of the High Council have been lingering in expectation of the team’s arrival.

Mace Windu winces, and Yoda focuses on him. “What do you see?”

“Not so much see. Feel. They’re—”

“—exactly where they belong,” Plo Koon rumbles, serenity pooling from him.

“I think you might be right,” the Harun Kal agrees slowly after a long pause.

“Hmph. In that case, adjourned, this Council is.”

They emerge from hyperspace over the swirling sand-and-grit ball that Anakin had once childishly wished to leave behind forever. Before he’d understood the true nature of all that he was abandoning in his haste for freedom.

“Will I ever see you again?”

“What does your heart tell you?”

“I will come back and free you, Mom. I promise.”

“Now. Be brave. And don’t look back.”

It has taken him ten years, but he is here. And, best of all, he is not alone.

Tatooine is…interesting.

It is Luminara Unduli’s first visit to the planet, and, like all planets, it graces the galaxy with a unique touch in the Force.

Her first impression is that Tatooine is old. Her second is that it is tired, as if the eons have worn away any potential beauty in an immense struggle for existence that leaves nothing in its wake but a core-deep exhaustion.

Her third is of the people, the flickering lights of life who have that same worn quality wrapped around a dense, generations-long endurance. A sense of hold on, just a little while longer… that the whole population exhales into the Force with every breath.

Layered over these deeper, defining sentiments is the newer, greasy feeling of spicers, slavers, smugglers, who cake the Force in murky greys, an evil no less than the Sith Empires of old, but more…spread out. An evil that drowns the unwary rather than dismembering them.

She swallows her disgust and reaches for the Light that is her constant companion. It comes at her gentle beckoning, wrapping her in tranquility.

This is a dangerous place, where even a Jedi is worth no more than what the highest bidder will pay. No wonder Padawan Skywalker insisted on the ponchos of desert homespun he’d emerged with several hours ago. They hide not just their too-identifiable clothing, but their sabers, and much of anything else they might carry that could give them away.

The Tatooine native halts the speeder on the outskirts of Mos Espa, Tatooine’s largest city and the place he’d lived as a child. The sense of grey murkiness intensified, almost tangibly grating against her skin now, and she feels Barriss shift uncomfortably next to her.

Obi-Wan’s student turns to them, his eyes a relentless blue like the sky overhead as he scours them with a gaze both judgemental and clarifying. The doubts that shadow his eyes at the Temple are gone. This is his world, and he has slid back into it like stepping into an old pair of boots.

“You both speak Mirial?” he asks quietly. Luminara nods. “Good. Don’t speak Basic here. A Core accent is obvious, and makes you an easy mark. Mirial is likely to be unusual enough that most won’t understand you, and it will give people pause.” He turns that too-much look on his master. “Ryl and Huttese are fine.” He swings himself out of the speeder, landing soundlessly on the sand.

“And don’t use the word master in any tongue. No matter the language, we all know what it means.”

We. Luminara glances at Obi-Wan’s face to see furrows lining his forehead, concern obvious in his grey-blue eyes as the depths of his Padawan’s untreated, unacknowledged, trauma takes shape.

This is going to be interesting.

“Little Ani?” Watto stares at him as if he can’t believe his eyes. “It is you!” he chuckles his rough laugh. “You sure sprouted! A Jedi, what do you know!” His yellowed eyes turn cunning, and Anakin nearly walks away, anticipating his next words. “Maybe you could help me out with some deadbeats who owe me a lot of money.”

The viper never sheds its stripes. “My mother.” Anakin clips out. Watto had never been the worst that Depur had to offer, but a master is a master.

“Uh yeah…Shmi. She’s not mine no more. I sold her.”

Barriss, Master Unduli and Obi-Wan are pretending to browse and standing close enough that Anakin can feel each of them flinch individually in the Force at Watto’s casual pronouncement. The former slave ignores their Core sensibilities as he struggles to control his fear. This was his precise worry. Watto had never been a real danger to either of them. A new master could easily be worse.

“You sold her?”

“Years ago. Sorry, Ani, but you know, business is business. Yeah. I sold her to a moisture farmer named…Lars. At least I think it was Lars. Believe it or not, I heard he freed her. And married her. Can you beat that, eh?” Watto chuckles, expecting Anakin to share in his amusement.

Another wince from his three eavesdropping companions, and this time Anakin has to bite down on his lip to keep from seizing his former owner around his scrawny neck. Freed and married? he thinks bitterly. Not kriffing likely.

There were, after all, a thousand ways to be enslaved. The chip was only one of them.

Breathe, dear one, Obi-Wan’s gentle reminder threaded the rage leftover from a childhood of walking past Gardulla’s brothels and the empty-eyed slaves of all genders faking their smiles. It clears his vision enough to force a calm he cannot feel through the storm within.

“Where are they now?”

“Anakin?” Shmi’s expression is raw happiness and it spills into the Force, intense and giddy, and all four Jedi are smiling in response as Anakin engulfs her in a hug.

“Mom,” he breathes into her hair. “I was…” he swallows, steps back, and Barriss can see him putting away his first rush of delight at seeing her as he searches his mother’s face in the same penetrative way he’d studied theirs upon arrival.

Barriss takes a discreet look around as they are introduced. Shmi is alone in the underground kitchen of the rounded dwelling. She looks…healthy. There are old breaks and scars, especially on her arms and back, that Barriss can sense with a brush of Force healing, but nothing fresh or throbbing with insistent pain.

“This farmer, Lars…Mom…Watto said you’re married?” Anakin is asking gently, and Barriss can feel her master thinking the same thing she is, what Anakin had told them, grim-faced after speaking with Watto.

There are a thousand ways to be enslaved. Marriage could be and often was one of them. Had Shmi had a real choice?

Shmi laughs, and there is a quiet river of affection-love-understanding that embraces each of them, pouring from her to ease their collective fears.

“Sit,” she bids them, “and I will tell you a story. But it is not only mine to tell.”

She disappears out the door, and Anakin takes a step like he’s going to follow when Master Kenobi places a gentle hand on his shoulder. “We should hear her story as she wants to tell it, should we not?” His touch is light, and Anakin can easily brush him off and follow his mother, but her fellow Padawan merely sighs and slumps at the table, gaze anxiously fixed on the door, as if his mother might not walk back through it.

Barriss can’t blame him.

Obi-Wan sits next to his Padawan, gently feeding him a fine strand of soothing reassurance. Though Anakin is staring fixedly at the door, Obi-Wan can feel the younger Jedi’s faint gratitude, snarled together with fear and affection and relief.

When Shmi returns, it is with three more people in tow. She introduces her husband, Cliegg, a muscular man whose face is deeply lined by the suns. Obi-Wan fixes his best Negotiator smile to his face as he rises and introduces himself, as both Anakin and Barriss are eyeing the man with enough suspicion a Force Null could feel it.

Next is Owen, Cliegg’s son, who looks to be the same age as the Padawans and smiles politely at Padawan Offee before turning his genuine interest on Anakin. “I’m so glad to finally meet you. Mother talks about you all the time. She’s amazing. She’s been…a true gift of the Mother.” At that, Obi-Wan felt Anakin’s double-take.

“And this is Beru Whitesun,” Shmi waves a young woman forward who grins up at Anakin as Shmi switches to Amatakka. “Your—” Obi-Wan can’t translate the second word.

Anakin stares down at Beru for a moment, and a smile shatters his face. “I am honoured—” Obi-Wan sighs internally as more words pour forth he can’t understand.

Little sister, Anakin pushes the thought down their bond. The brilliance of Anakin’s happiness surges like sunlight, soaking the Force, and Obi-Wan is smiling too.

He is pulled to himself by a weather-roughened hand clasping his own. “You are Anakin’s Jedi—”

“Teacher,” Obi-Wan interrupts the next word from Cliegg swiftly. “I am Anakin’s teacher.” He shoots the tall teenager a proud smile, “and I am lucky to call myself such.”

Anakin, Shmi and Beru all seem to hear what he means rather than what he says, their quiet smiles radiating acceptance. “They’ve come looking for me,” Shmi explains gently, waving them back into their seats.

“A good thing they’ve found you, then,” Owen pitches in cheerfully.

“We hope so,” Obi-Wan replies pleasantly before Anakin can issue a far more challenging “Is it?” . Beru is an obviously welcome presence. Cliegg and Owen…are not obviously what Anakin feared, but he can tell his student is reserving judgment.

But it seems Cliegg is as sharp as any other who lives in the desert, for he meets Anakin’s eyes without either offense or anger. “I suspect you’ll want to hear the whole story.”

“I do believe that’s what Shmi mentioned,” Luminara murmurs gently, spreading a wave of contentment-safety-warmth in the Force. Anakin shoots her a glance, sensitive as always to the projections of his fellow Jedi, but Obi-Wan smiles as his Padawan consciously allows himself to relax into Luminara’s gentle encouragement.

They sit at the smooth rectangular table, Anakin next to his mother, Beru on her other side while Obi-Wan claims the remaining spot next to Anakin and Owen settles between his father and Beru, leaving the two mirialan Jedi to settle across from Shmi.

“I suppose the story really starts not long after you left with the Jedi, Ani,” Shmi starts quietly. “I was not overmuch involved in the Desert Runners after you were born…the risk of discovery, and the consequences for you were too high to justify directly taking those kinds of chances. But I wasn’t lying when I told you my place was here.” She clears her throat and smiles fondly at Beru. “I had been volunteering our place as a safe house for a few months when there was a knock on my door.”

Ten Years Prior

The gentle whisper of the chimes outside her door could be mistaken for the wind, but, like any Amavikkan dedicated to the Desert Run, Shmi knows better. She’d hung them, their undersides painted in swirling patterns that looked like a sandstorm – save for the one with a lovingly detailed red bird – for exactly one purpose.

She opens the door, unbothered by the darkness that greets her, and in steps an oddly-lumped woman. The instant the door is closed, the lump shifts, and Shmi realizes that it is not one person, but two, that she has granted entry.

“Who does the Mother gift me with today?” she asks quietly.

“Ebra, bringing one who needs succor, Ekkreth’s child,” the woman’s gravelly voice rasps under her hood. Ebra. Ebra is both the One Who Named Themselves and the Unnamed. Many of the Desert Runners are Ebra.

“Step forward, little one,” the one calling herself Ebra encourages gently. The girl has swung herself down from her guardian’s back, but she stands in the shadow of the cloak, eyeing Shmi suspiciously in the dim light.

She’s not much younger than Ani, the slave mother realizes, dismissing the familiar clench of pained longing that still accompanies thoughts of her son. She bears her pain with an intense, silent pride. She will not regret releasing him from this life, no matter how she might miss him.

“I am Shmi Ekkreth,” she says softly, dropping to her knees. “She-Who-Walks-the-Stars. It is a blessing to meet a child of Ar-Amu. Will you honor me with your name?”

The child considers her for a long moment, light eyes travelling over Shmi’s face with the well-worn anxiety of the life-long enslaved. “Beru Whitesun,” she finally whispers, “She-Whose-Radiance-Purifies.”

Shmi’s gaze snaps to where Ebra’s face is still obscured by her cloak. Whitesun. They were leaders on the Run, fiercely dedicated to the freedom of Ar-Amu’s children. If one needed a Singer, or smuggling offworld, or parts for a homemade weapon…the Whitesuns could provide.

Or rather, the most recent, urgent whispers said, had been able to. A bomb had gone off at the primary processing centre in Mos Espa a handful of days ago, allowing hundreds of new-caught slaves to escape, and the Whitesuns had been implicated. Gardulla had publicly executed their hapless Depur for his carelessness…and then taken the Whitesuns to the Pit of Carkoon.

For the last five days, no one had had any word of their daughter. It was known only that she had not been present to see her master disposed of, nor had she been on the sail barge that took her parents to their fate.

Now she is standing in Shmi’s house.

“Have you had a Singer, little one?” she asks.

Beru shakes her head, fine hair escaping a tightly-wound braid. “No. But Depur is…” she pauses, swallows. “Gardulla executed him.”

That, in itself, is not what causes the pain Shmi feels in the girl’s gaze. But her parents’ death will forever be braided with her master’s in her mind and heart.

“You are safe, here, Beru Whitesun, Child of our Mother. I will keep you until it is time to make the Run,” she offers, still kneeling in front of the child, careful to keep her hands folded at her sides, “if you will allow me.”

Beru glances up at Ebra, whose expression Shmi cannot make out. But whatever she sees, it relaxes the child, and with tentative trust in her pale blue eyes, the girl turns back to the kneeling mother. She presses her right hand to her chest over her heart, then her lips, and reaches out to graze Shmi’s forehead with her fingertips.

When she speaks, she sounds older than her paltry eight years, her voice dignified despite its childish register. “Thank you, Shmi Ekkreth, She-Who-Walks-the-Stars. I will stay.”

It is not many days later that Beru wakes to Shmi’s gentle hand on her shoulder and silently follows her into the chilly desert night at Chenini’s rising. Shmi is little more than a wraith of twisted moonlit sand before her, and Beru pads behind her perfectly silent feet. Sneaking after her parents and their contacts has honed her art of sliding through shadow as if she is not there, with no more noise than a passing breath. She swallows grief at the reminder of her loss, one more memory bitter with the sorrow that invaded her life with the loss of her blood family.

Even as a child, she has seen enough to know that she has had Ar-Amu’s own luck. She is not dead, or sold, or frantically avoiding Depur dashing from alley to alley until hunger or thirst or slave-catchers seize her. She is in the hands of a Skywalker, and though a bomb is still buried in her flesh, she is not technically, at present, any Depur’s property.

Shmi Ekkreth will ensure that state of affairs remains true.

They glide past the overseers who stand guard over the slave quarters, enforcing curfew and the masters’ whims. But all slaves know that Chenini-rise is darkest of all the moons, as she is small and blue, her shadows long and deep, luring the guards to sleep at their posts. Getting past them is a game most slave children play. Beru played until she was good enough to guide Runners, and then it was no longer a game.

They walk until the dunes obscure the city, and there they kneel. Shmi pulls a mat woven of tinpur grass from her wrap, and Beru gasps as it unrolls to reveal a brilliant white sun set against a blazing blue-purple the color of the sky at first sunrise. She reaches out a hand to hover over the woven mat, not-quite-touching.

“My family’s…” her voice catches and she can’t make herself continue. Whitesun colors. My parents’ colors.

“Each of us has a story to write. Where we come from is the beginning, Children of the Mother, given to the world. Who we chose to be, what fate we carve for ourselves, only Ar-Amu knows. You were born Beru Whitesun, She-Whose-Radiance-Purifies, to champions of our people, lukkan and dep-prak.” Shmi takes a deep breath and re-rolls the tinpur mat, handing it reverently to Beru. She receives it a little clumsily in surprise.

“The name of Whitesun is an honorable one among our people, the name of the fearless who issue warning to Depur that he will not hold us forever. But it is also now a dangerous one. If you permit it, I, Shmi Ekkreth, would rename you my child for a season, that you might live to reclaim your birthright when you wish to rise and break your chains.”

Beru allows the mat to unroll again, taking in the fresh scent of paint on the old weaving. It is rude to the point of being culturally forbidden for any slave to duplicate the mat of another family, but Beru recognizes a frayed corner and knows that this mat was the one her amu wove her, rescued from her home by an unknown Amavikka. Shmi has merely touched up the original, a gift giving Beru back to herself.

The girl stares at the moon-washed colors for a long time, mindless of the cold settling around them. Shmi does not rush her, but sits back and waits with infinite patience in her dark eyes.

To set aside her name is not done lightly. “A name is the only part of yourself that you own, Beru Whitesun,” Amu says softly as she braids Beru’s hair. “The one piece that Depur cannot take.”

But here she is, and though it burns at the back of her throat to admit it, Amu is wrong. They have succeeded even in taking this. She can not continue to be Whitesun now, not publicly or privately.

Even the Amavikka suffered keekta-du, slaves who turned on their own to curry favor with the masters.

Summoning a deep breath, she banishes the tears pooling in her eyelids—

Crying is a waste of water.

—and rolls up the mat tightly. Without a word, she scoops her fingers into the sand, digging. Shmi does not move to help her. Some decisions have to be made and followed through on alone.

Beru scoops aside the soft surface sand, digs her fingers into the harder sand beneath, uses her nails to pry at the chunks of clay and rock under that.

As she shifts handfuls of earth, she thinks of her mother’s sly smile, her father’s deep laugh, the way their eyes crinkled at the corners in secret amusement when Depur opened his shop, complaining of another slave lost.

She remembers the steady reassurance of her father’s broad shoulders as he carried her around the Quarters in a dance, the coarsely gentle dry lips her mother pressed against her forehead every night before sleeping. “One for the Mother’s wisdom,” she would whisper.

When she has dug a hole deep enough that the sand will not take her tinpur mat with its constant shifting, she carefully places the roll in it. She sits with one hand still on it for many minutes, quietly reciting prayers to Ar-Amu, to Ekkreth, to Ley-ah, to Lukka.

Guide us. Protect us. The faint waft of japor incense reaches her nose. Aid us to arise. Grant us your strength, your fury, your justice.

“I will bear your name for a season, Shmi Ekkreth,” she assents. After all, what better name to bear, than that of the Trickster themself?

Shmi pinches the incense sticks out and moves to scoop a handful of Tatooine’s ever-dry earth. Together, they bury the Whitesun mat.

Cliegg Lars and his son Owen enter their lives four years later.

They are freeborn and farmers, but there is a difference to how they move through Mos Espa, a keenness in their gaze that does not scrape over the slaves hurrying to and fro at their masters’ bidding. A sharpness in their expressions as they look hard at the casual violence displayed by Depur and their overseers.

Shmi observes them as they slowly make their way towards Ma Jira’s fruit stall. They are not familiar to her, but that is hardly surprising. Farmers are regular customers of Watto’s wares, and Shmi and Anakin had made him a reputation as the best provider of second-hand parts in any of Tatooine’s major cities. It is more difficult alone, but Shmi’s talents are equal to her son’s - at least in the realm of mechanics - and the shop has continued to flourish in his absence.

Beru, of course, had been kept far from Watto and any other that might wear Depur’s face. She wore veils that obscured all but her eyes and worked in a shipping facility owned by a Freeborn who was friendly with the Banais. The money trickled in slowly, and out again on the Run.

The farmer and his son slowly make their way towards her. Shmi guesses at a glance that the son is around thirteen, making him Anakin’s age, his face thin in the way of growing teenagers. He moves with the confidence in his gait afforded only to those born free, but his manner is gentle as he buys several pallies from Ma Jira, and Shmi spies something pressed into her friend’s aging hand other than the wuipipi exchanged for the boy’s purchase.

The father turns and meets her gaze. She drops her eyes automatically, folding herself in with not-here-not-seen-no-one as she readjusts the outside display Watto has been insisting on to lure in more customers. She is not-quite-surprised that the man makes his way over to her anyway.

“Cliegg Lars,” he introduces himself. His voice is low, gruff, but he stands well back from her, respecting her space. “I hear this shop is an excellent place to get parts.”

“Indeed, sir,” Shmi allows in her mildest, softest, talking-to-customers voice. “My master’s selection of second-hand parts is the best in Mos Eisley.”

“I have heard your work is better than any other on planet,” Cliegg counters, and the firmness in his voice pulls at her. She lifts her head to catch his eyes. They are sharp and clear and present. He is looking at her as a person, not as someone else’s property.

“You are kind to say so,” she replies, her voice slightly more solid, wary of his regard.

“Not a kindness to speak the truth. I would like spare parts for vaporators, please, if you carry them.” He lifts a hand towards an assembled rack of repaired vaporator parts and as he does so, the pale sleeve of his shirt slides up to reveal a woven band around his wrist.

Stitched on it in tiny, perfect miniature, is a red bird.

Shmi does not let herself stop her turn towards the parts in question, does not meet his eyes again as they hammer out a price, as he drops an extra wuipipi in her hand. He does not wink, or make loud exclamations. He picks up his parts, tilts his head at her as one would to an equal and says: “Thank you for the parts, ma’am,” before collecting his son from a vegetable vendor and disappearing back out into the desert.

When the day ends, Shmi stops at Ma Jira’s stall and the older woman shows her a carved japor snippet, given to her by Lars" son.

The design etched on it is amarattu, the symbol of the Mother’s protection.

A few weeks later, a young Gran who had escaped her master during a bounty-hunter shootout near the water exchange ducked through Shmi’s door, eyes wide and proud and pleading.

Cliegg Lars drives her out of town, buried under blankets and scrap metal in his speeder.

“I think this needs a bit of a better repair than I can provide,” he says a tenday on, heaving a compact motor onto the counter. Shmi takes in the damage at a glance, her quick eyes assessing. There is little wrong with it a clean or an oil soak won’t solve. She nerves herself to meet his gaze, and he quirks an eyebrow at her, humor glittering in his pale blue eyes.

“I’ll let you work your magic. Be back in a few hours.”

The cho-mar left when he removes his hand and strides out the door is a frankly ridiculous sum - too much by three or four times what the easy oil soak would cost.

But it is near precisely the right amount for what she would have to charge for a real repair.

She stands for a long time, eyes sightlessly locked on the door before placing the practically fine motor in the oil rub and entering the cost of an immersion in Watto’s tatty ledger.

The rest of the cho-mar finances the last of Kitster Banai’s freedom.

“...never going to get anywhere if you don’t tell her how you feel, Pa,” Owen’s voice floats through the open door as Shmi sorts the part for yet one more machine Cliegg Lars ‘happened to have lying around’. Their ruse had been surprisingly successful over the past almost-year. He brought her too much money, and occasionally left with sentient cargo in his speeder, hurried away beneath piles of scrap to one of the many moisture farms that served as stops on the Run.

“Owen…she’s not got the gift of owning herself. Until she does, there is nothing to say. I would be worse than a master, to speak to her of such things.” Cliegg’s gruff baritone cuts off his son’s fancy.

Shmi stills, part in hand, tucked just out of sight in a long shadow.

“...how you feel…” Owen’s innocent words grind in her brain like gears with too much sand in them. She blinks slowly, forcing herself to process what she’s heard.

Shmi Skywalker has never once had the luxury of loving for choice. She loves Anakin fiercely, with a quiet passion that rivals Le-yah’s strength when riled, but that had not been a decision she made. Ar-Amu had given, and as her child, Shmi could only receive the gift and pray for the Mother’s blessing.

Love as a slave is dangerous. She had watched Aro’a fall and fall hard…and break when her lover fed the rancor. Her friend’s anguish had amused Gardulla for weeks. After that, Shmi has taken every care never to fall in love.

Cliegg is loyal, and intelligent, and willing to risk much in the name of what is right.

Could she love such a man? Could she choose to love at all?

When he darkens her door again, he has been absent for longer than any period since he entered her life. Shmi is surprised by the strength of her relief, the quiet lift of her heart as his strong, solid shape fills the doorframe.

She does not forget herself enough to speak his name, but it is a near thing. “What services might our shop offer today, Farmer Lars?”

His next words slice her heart, his tone hard and lifeless. “I would speak with your master.”

In all his visits, he has never once mentioned Watto, or treated her as if she were anything other than an equal, the true owner of the shop. Now he throws it between them, and after…

“...how you feel…”

Her breathing is too loud, her heart sluggish. She must have misunderstood. On the scale of all that she has obviously mis-read, her flickering heart is hardly the important part. He is waiting for her to move, to fetch Watto. “Of course, sir,” she says woodenly, and does not look at him again as she summons her master.

“Shmi!” Watto’s rasp calls her back to the shop.

She steps inside dutifully. “Yes, Master?”

“Turns out this fellow has use for you out at his place. Offered a handsome price – I couldn’t refuse!” he chuckles, and Shmi stares at the floor.

She has been purchased. By the same man who gave her enough money to allow others to buy their freedom. She cannot fathom the depth of Depur’s games.

Fear seizes her. Those she has sent with him over the past months…have they been freed? Or simply transported to new Depur with easy lies from this man’s lips? Her heart chills, then hardens. If he and his son have played them false, they will taste Lukka’s vengeance. Shmi is willing to be the vessel, even if it costs her life.

“What do you need to bring with you?” Lars is asking her.

“Nothing, Master,” she replies quietly, and feels the air twist strangely between them.

“In that case, let’s go,” he says coolly, and turns to stride out of the shop.

She follows him down the twisting, dusty streets without paying attention. She knows all of Mos Espa like the veins in her own hands. It leaves her mind free to cartwheel through possible revenges.

They reach the edge of the city, and Cliegg bids her sit on his speeder with a jerk of his chin. Shmi does not wonder where the warm man of her acquaintance has gone. She, too, is cold, like the desert at third moonrise.

Without speaking, he fires up the speeder. Its engine - the same one she soaked, she recognizes the rumble (this engine had purchased Kitster his life) - purring under his touch as they shoot away. He does not speak. She does not look at him.

Her one comfort is that Beru is not here to share her debasement. Shmi pays attention to the landmarks speeding past them, fixing them in her mind for when she sends a messenger to tell her daughter where she has gone.

Recognizing the Seven Sisters thrusting into the midday sky, Shmi stiffens. Where are they going? Vague allusions to his farm over the past year made it sound as if Lars lives across the extensive wastes, closer to Mos Eisley. Why are they wrapping around the cliffs that led to Ley-ah’s Weyr?

They pass into the shadow of the massive canyon, shade relieving the suns’ unrelenting stare. A few hundred meters into the Weyr, directly beneath the tallest of the Sisters, Lars cuts the engine and jumps out of the speeder. Once his feet hit the red dirt, she feels his eyes on her face. Gone is his hardness, the cool mask he wore for Watto. The warmth she has always known leeches from him, streaking the air around them.

“Shmi. Please look at me.”

She obeys her new master, turning her head just far enough to meet his eyes. His hand is extended, her detonator lying on his palm.

“Take it,” he says softly.

She does not hesitate, snatching it from his hand and cradling it to her chest, allowing herself to tuck aside her suspicions and fears as she seeks the truth in his gruff face.

“I apologize. I never wanted to treat you like…” A slave. The word falls into the space between them and Cliegg runs his hand through his silvering hair like a nervous teenager. “If Watto had any idea how…invested I was in your freedom, he would have named a price that could never be matched.”

Shmi knows this, her crystalline memory of a long-haired Jedi Knight standing in front of Watto, a sizable sum in hand as he tried to buy her freedom to match her son’s. “No pod is worth two slaves!” Watto had snarled, setting aside that he had already lost Anakin in the bet. She could guess the sum the Jedi had offered. Had Watto’s pride not been so stung, she might have been freed then.

Cliegg clears his throat as Shmi continues to gaze at him steadily.

“I wanted to bring you here. I know Beggar’s Canyon has significance for your people, a place of birth and re-birh, and I wanted you to have the chance to restart your life here. It is yours, Shmi Skywalker, not mine.” He takes a deep breath and says the words her heart is waiting to hear, words one of her people must have taught him, for he says them now with the solemnity of a ritual only half-understood:

“Drukka ba drukka, Shmi Ekkreth. I give you to yourself.”

His short speech finished, he drops his light blue eyes to the dirt at their feet, as if he no longer has the right to look at her.

Shmi holds herself very still as she considers the man who has bought her and freed her, who has learned enough of her people to bring her here, to Le-yah’s Weyr, where Ekkreth’s eldest daughter first burst fully grown from the sand to shield the Unfettered from Depur’s blasters.

Sinking to the warm earth, she folds her legs beneath her and begins to pray, water seeping freely from her closed eyes for the first time in her life.

Present Day

“After that,” Shmi finishes quietly, “it was only a matter of time. We had to leave Mos Espa, of course, to maintain Depur’s illusion, and I was certainly not going to leave Beru behind…but it was no difficulty finding mechanics’ work in Mos Eisley. We married…perhaps three years ago?” Cliegg’s answering smile is warm, and Obi-Wan can feel the gradual release of tension in his Padawan, his fears eased not only by his mother’s story, but her clear, peaceful presence in the Force.

“We are lucky that Beru is here to meet you at all,” Owen says, shooting the young woman a shyly proud glance. “She still lives in Mos Eisley, and is so active on the Run, we don’t have the chance to see her that much.”

His admiration is obvious, as is the blush staining her cheeks. Like father, like son, Obi-Wan thinks whimsically.

“Thank you,” Anakin directs this to Cliegg, and the solemnity of his gratitude sinks through the Force around them, warping the mood at the table to pensive-thankful-solemn.

“After such a tale, one needs tzai,” Shmi says into the weighted stillness.

“I’ll help you,” Anakin bounds to his feet with all the graceless enthusiasm of a loth-kitten, desert-blue eyes fixed on his mother eagerly.

“Come on, then,” Shmi laughs and they make their way into the kitchen.

Obi-Wan meets Beru’s frankly curious gaze and she does not look away as he returns her mildly intense inspection. “You are Anakin’s pashar. What is he like? For all that Shmi loves him, she does not speak of him often.”

And when she does, it is with the cadence of the night wind over the desert that very occasionally stirs with hints of rain, nostalgic and longing and so very rare.

What is Anakin like? Obi-Wan wonders how to answer that question.

He is impatient and compassionate. Arrogant and deferential. He is the suns and the moons, the desert and the ocean. He is the glory of a star condensed to the frame of a human being, light leaking through all his edges, brilliant and scorching. He is my brother, my son, my best friend, my greatest trial…and my deepest pride.

He is my Padawan, and I love him in a way I have never loved anyone else.

“He loves to race,” is what comes out the Jedi’s mouth. “Anything and everything. When he was thirteen, I caught him remote controlling half a dozen mouse droids racing down the Temple’s main hall…”

Shmi returns to the table as Barriss is sharing a rather flattering story of Anakin’s prowess in the salle. Obi-Wan pulses gratitude gently to the mirialan Padawan. So many parts of any apprentice’s life are a struggle: understanding the Force, keeping up with their changing body, learning to be at home with one’s self. Anakin’s difficulties are more pronounced than most, given his late start and his enormous latent power. But Barriss is choosing stories that paint Anakin in the best light for his family, emphasizing his skills, his compassion, his goofy humor, his selfless sense of justice.

Obi-Wan slides into the kitchen to offer help as Anakin is pouring their refreshment into mismatched mugs with a practiced hand.

“So. Pashar, is it?”

Anakin shoots him a look, continuing to pour flawless streams of tzai without looking. “No, Obi-Wan, you’re not pashar, ” he says with a gentle, teasing smile.

Obi-Wan swiftly strangles his hurt aborning. Anakin has the right to choose what he will call Obi-Wan, has earned that right with a decade of bowing to the older Jedi’s will and calling him ‘master’. Obi-Wan is determined to accept whatever name Anakin bestows upon him with grace—

“The Amatakkan word for older sibling is reku,” Anakin continues blithely, ignoring his teacher’s churning emotions. He turns, a full home-fired mug in hand, and presses it into Obi-Wan’s fingers. “You are reku, Obi-Wan.”

The tzai is sweetly-spicy in his nose, his Padawan blazes Light and love like the twin suns overhead and his heart is so full that Obi-Wan could nearly step out of his body right there. “Big brother?” he manages to whisper through the forbidden emotion closing his throat.

“Yep. The best one ever,” Anakin says, and though their bond means that he has to know the state he’s put Obi-Wan in, he merely offers one of his daringly reckless Skywalker grins and walks out of the small kitchen with his laden tray of tzai.

Obi-Wan does not realize he’s crying until he takes his first sip of the sweet-smoky-spicy tea and tastes cold salt with the hot drink.

Reku. Big brother.

He surreptitiously wipes his eyes (that’s twice in five days, he hasn’t cried so often since he cast aside his Initiate whites) and follows his little brother back into the main room.

Barriss is awake in the middle of the night. Again. Restlessness eats at her, some sense in the Force compelling her to rise and seek. She reaches for the shawl Shmi provided—

“I know the heat of the suns is unbearable for off worlders, but desert nights are cold.”

—and slips out of her room, using the Force to navigate her unknown surroundings.

She happens on Beru, who is just stepping back from the holo comm. It is a piece of cutting-edge technology, out of place in the home of simple farmers.

“Apologies. Did I wake you?” Beru asks her, and though the question is polite, Barriss can feel the fine itch of concern layered under the query: had the Padawan overheard Beru’s conversation?

“You did not. I did not even realize anyone else was awake,” Barriss reassures her. The Tatooinian smiles hesitantly. “But I think…” Barriss hesitates, reaching into the Force. They had come for a reason, and, pleasant as they were, it wasn’t just to play happy families with Anakin’s mother and adopted sister. If the intention were so simple, Obi-Wan and Anakin could have come alone. There was some deeper purpose to their presence here, a profound turning point for Barriss herself. She can feel it revolving just in front of her, not quite within reach.

This planet…disturbs her. Its presence in the Force is vast and ancient, patient. But merciless. Scoured by the harsh realities that make up Tatooine’s existence. The misery of slavery is imprinted on the sand in a way that footsteps never can be.

It throbs in her blood and her bones and she knows, knows, that her purpose is to help do something to alleviate it.

“How long have there been slaves on Tatooine?” she asks quietly.

Beru breathes out a long sigh. “The Stories tell us since before the Dry. Eons ago, our people lived in peace and prosperity on a vibrant, lush world. Then Depur came, and when Ar-Amu saw his greed in claiming all of her children and building chains to hold them, She gave birth to the desert and its blowing sands, that Depur’s hands might come up empty no matter how hard he grasped for riches. After, she sent Ekkreth, that we might free ourselves with their help. But many of her children remain enslaved.”

“What happens to those you help escape on the Run?”

“We don’t know. It is not for another to understand one’s own path to freedom. We each must make the climb ourselves, else it is not ours.”

“So once they are free—?”

“Some will journey offworld. Some are fortunate enough to reunite with family. Some stay, and become Runners themselves.”

“Surely the risk of re-capture is great?”

Beru’s expression darkens. “It is. Resettlement is difficult, especially for those generationally enslaved, like Shmi.”

Barriss frowns. “Has anyone spoken to the Galactic Senate?”

The girl shoots her a deeply unimpressed look. “This is Hutt Space. And even if it weren’t…the Core is heedless of the plight of the Rim, and they have no wish to learn of it.”

The Force chimes gently against her senses, and Barriss grasps the larger picture forming in front of her, her purpose in coming, the Force’s guidance singing rightness against her skin.

“The Jedi cannot continue to turn a blind eye. We will help you establish a network. I will help you.”

Beru’s light eyes glitter in the faint light from the single lamp. “How?”

“Come with us. Back to Coruscant,” Anakin says, smiling at his mother the following morning. He is already counting the places he will take her, the people he will introduce her to—

“Ani, I can’t. My place is still here. So is Cliegg’s, and Owen’s and Beru’s. We cannot give up the work we do.”

He blinks at her, slowly, having forgotten that she cannot feel the rawness still scrapping his insides, the warning tingling in his skin. “You can’t stay, Amu. The danger you’re in…it’s still here. We haven’t averted it by coming.” He can feel it stirring just beyond his reach in the Force, almost as nameless as an accident or natural disaster, but stained by the faintest tinge of malice. His mother has not been targeted. It is not Shmi Skywalker specifically that her killers will come for. But she will die all the same.

Shmi gives him a gentle smile, and he can tell she doesn’t quite understand the urgency of what he’s saying. “The desert has always been dangerous, dear heart.”

“No. Amu. If you stay, you will die. Within the year.” He hadn’t known that until it spills out his mouth, and dread ices his spine. “Please,” he whispers, “please come with us.”

“Actually, he might be right,” Beru sweeps in and settles on the couch. “It may be time for you to consider relocating, Amu-mor. We need Runners on Coruscant.”

Shmi blinks at her adopted daughter. “What?”

“Coruscant,” Obi-Wan announces unnecessarily to their two guests as they exit hyperspace and Anakin eases them closer to the planet, transmitting their signal to the Temple. His Padawan was in favor of landing in the Temple hangar and marching straight in as if his mother and her husband weren’t aboard the craft. Obi-Wan agrees with him. The sooner the Council knows, the sooner they can object.

Not that they won’t be objecting anyway. They’d left Luminara and Barriss on Tatooine, the Padawan already up to her elbows in planning Runs, routes and allies with Beru Whitesun. There had been a life to her, over the last few days, a vivid passion that Obi-Wan had never seen before. Judging by Luminara’s cautious delight, he guessed his friend had never previously seen this side of her apprentice either.

However…explaining all of this to the Council is sure to lead to an interesting session.

Or not.

As Anakin eases them into the hangar, Obi-Wan can see and sense Masters Yoda and Windu, their attention flawlessly directed toward the incoming craft. It looks like they will not even be getting far as the Council chamber.

As the ramp lowers, he strides out, making straight for the two older Jedi to buy Anakin time for hurried explanations to Shmi and Cliegg.

“Late, are you, Obi-Wan,” Yoda is saying before he’s even halted in front of them.

“And you have returned without Knight Unduli and her Padawan.” Mace is keeping his face blank in deference to the mechanics, pilots and trainees who are slanting glances their way, but his frown is visible in the Force.

“They are perfectly well, I assure you, masters,” Obi-Wan replied placidly, making a perfunctory bow. “They elected to remain on Tatooine for awhile.”

“Oh? And permission, they need, no? Act independently of the Order, do they?” Yoda allows a frown now.

“Not at all, Master Yoda. Luminara and Barriss have stayed to secure an underground network on the planet that frees slaves. Anakin and I have returned to Coruscant with two of the underground’s representatives to establish a resettlement and repatriation center here, where they can have direct access to the Senate and the resources of the Order.”

That stumps them both. Obi-Wan feels their initial irritation at being left uninformed - stemming from concern, which in turn bred from fear - morphing into thoughtfulness as they consider this new information. Obi-Wan allows that thoughtfulness to mellow and tune between them, and as he feels Mace prepare to launch into what is surely a polite interrogation, he quickly circumvents them:

“Perhaps it would be most expedient for you to meet these representatives and consult with them yourselves about what is to be done to disrupt the trafficking of sentient lives?” He pulses a come on! command to his Padawan, and feels Anakin duck from their transport, the much dimmer signatures of his mother and Cliegg following.

“Jedi Councilors,” he says. “It is my pleasure to introduce two organizers of the Desert Run: Cliegg Lars and Shmi Skywalker.”

He feels the suspicious disbelief of both masters ping against that last name, but keeps his own face bland as Yoda and Mace greet their guests with warm, if subdued, smiles.

“Padawan Skywalker’s mother, you are,” Yoda states, pale green eyes searching her kind, suns-worn face.

“I am. I cannot thank you enough, for bringing him here and offering him…so very much that I could not.”

“And now it appears that we have the opportunity to ally with you in a worthy cause,” Mace cuts in, and for all his disapproval of being surprised, Obi-Wan can feel his genuine interest in their visitors and their mission. “Slavery is a bane on this galaxy, and it has been too long since the Order was involved in meaningful action against it.” He looks from Shmi to Obi-Wan, and while Obi-Wan can sense the promise of questions later, his ever-practical friend is setting aside his personal curiosity to attend to the business at hand.

“You are a few days later than expected, but we have another mission for you both. There was an attempt on Senator Amidala’s life eight days ago.” Obi-Wan feels Anakin’s interest sharpen at the mention of the senator. “Garen Muln has been serving as her bodyguard, but we need a team to investigate who and why. It was felt that you two make ideal candidates, as you have previously been involved in Nubian affairs and she trusts you from her time as queen. Report to the Nubian office in the Senate immediately.”

Obi-Wan tilts his head in acknowledgement and Mace instantly turns his attention back to the Runners. “If you two would be so kind as to follow us, we can provide refreshment while you fill us in on how we can assist you.”

“Just like that?” Anakin blinks as his mother shoots a smile at him over her shoulder before following the Councilors into the Temple.

“Apparently, just like that,” Obi-Wan smiles, and around them, the Force spirals Light and contentment.