Archive of Our Own ^beta

You die. You’re not quite sure of the details of it – an accident, you think, nothing special. You remember pain and beeping and noises around you and then the moment of dying when everything goes warm and soft and blurred and-

You’re not sure after that. Sometimes you think you remember a dark warmth, a space to grow, a body beside your own – little fingers clasped around your ankle. Other times you think your first memory is the pressure of birth and the overwhelming shock of light and presence and life and- and-

The first breath hurt so much. The ones after, not so much.

Your mother tries to call you Natamar. She does call you that for the first year, while you try to work out how to move your mouth to say actual intelligible words. You have a brother and his name is Anakin.

(You had brothers and neither of them were called Anakin. You wonder if they miss you.)

Your mother and your brother are your life for… you don’t know how long. Certainly for as long as it takes you to learn how to crawl and how to say words that your mother thinks are childish babble. (They’re not, they’re your language but that’s not what your mother speaks). You don’t see – anyone else really. You’re kept on the floor of a sandy one room building and your mother tucks a blanket around you when the night comes and it gets bitterly cold.

When the words come a bit more smoothly, you correct your mother. Natamar is not your name, and you won’t respond to it. She struggles with your name though and in the end you compromise. Nata isn’t so bad really, close enough to your old name, and your mother’s too young to look so stressed around her eyes. (You think she’d be the prettiest woman you’ve ever seen if it wasn’t for the constant layer of tension).

Your brother is the easy child. You think he might be quicker than other children but you’re not a child and so he seems a burbling blob for most of your first year. You’re still fond of him. You don’t know why.

 You think you’re – eighteen months maybe? Maybe two years but really, all the days blur together when all you can do is learn snatches of words from when your mother is around and then toddle around a bare room with the rest of your time. You occupy yourself with teaching Anakin to speak your language. It may have been a bad idea – now he struggles with their mother’s language.

In any case, you’re young. You’re allowed outside for the first time and the world seems so big. There are two suns in the sky which – it’s not right, but you can’t put your finger on why. It’s so hot that it’s almost a struggle to breathe and you long for the cool darkness of your sub-terranean room.

Your mother is crying softly. You don’t know why. You try to reach out to her, but a- a thing, a creature with six arms and scales and wings slaps her and snatches you and your brother. All you can do is scream and you do that as loudly as you can. This isn’t right!

The thing slaps you too and you cry harder. Your mother has never touched you harshly and the only pains you’ve felt are those you’ve inflicted on yourself from trying to go too far, too fast.

You understand snatches of words here and there and you understand the enormous needle that’s jammed in your arm. You think for a second that’s it’s for your own good – a vaccine maybe – but you realise that that’s too hopeful. It’s a transmitter, a collar, and someone thinks they own you.

Someone thinks they own your brother and your mother.

That’s the first time you feel really angry. It only grows from there.

There’s something strange about the way Anakin grows. Your mother maybe doesn’t notice it because you’re stranger still, but at least you know why you’re different.

Anakin though –

He doesn’t have another set of memories. (You’d been so hopeful that you weren’t alone but Anakin had just stared at you when you’d tried to test him).

Things happen around him though. Your mother gives you an assembly kit to play with. It takes you a week of dedicated tinkering to work out how it’s supposed to fit together. (You weren’t bad with your hands before but it hadn’t been what you’d spent most of your time doing). Anakin though, Anakin had it fly together in the first few attempts. Within the week he’d disassembled his light kit and reassembled it into something that you suspect the kit wasn’t made to allow. It’s not normal, you’re pretty certain about that.

(Sometimes when your mother isn’t there, Anakin will reach out a chubby hand and the piece he wants will fly into it. You don’t know why it only happens when you’re alone.)

He can speak your mother’s language and yours and when there’s strange creatures clicking and growling around you, he can imitate the sounds they make too. You don’t think human vocal cords work that way, but apparently for Anakin they do.

You can’t just focus on Anakin though. You scream when you see your mother get hit for the first time and you know, beyond any kind of doubt, that if you could make things move the way Anakin does then that thing would be choking and dead because that’s your mother, and no one touches her.

The creature laughs at your noises the first few times and then he gets angry. You fall silent when your mother hushes you because that’s terror around her eyes and it makes you so angry. This isn’t right, this isn’t right, and no one gets to tell you to be silent.

If you were bigger, if you were bigger and stronger then-

Well, you can still dream and maybe your dreams involve a bit more death than they did before you were reborn.

(You hate them.)

You’re – sold.

The concept brings a sick feeling to you. The anger feels like it burns at your heart, chokes up your throat, quivers in your hands. Aren’t you lucky, the other people – the other slaves twitter. You’ve been sold as a family group, isn’t that kind of your new master to acquire you all?

(He won you in a card game and that- you don’t have the words for it in your new language. It burns nonetheless.)

The thing that acquired you is named Watto. Master, your mother says and it makes your lip curl. He’s a fat winged little thing and you think that with a few more inches on you, you could just reach out and choke his scrawny little neck. You wouldn’t even need one of those fancy laser blasting guns. (Although you’d definitely like one.)

There’s the transmitters to consider of course. There’s always the transmitters. You saw a little blue girl turned to vapour when she tried to run a few months ago. She’d have been pretty if her master hadn’t decided to dress her up in scraps of metal and cloth – instead she just looked broken and tawdry. Instead she’d ended up a mist of red blood in the hot, hot sands.

Anakin is wide-eyed and silent. Watto puts him to work with small, cheap electronics. It’s child labour and abuse and slavery and Watto doesn’t threaten with a whip but holding back water rations works just as well when the heat’s as much of a threat as a blaster.

(He’s not sure what to do with you. He points you at electronics too eventually, and you’re not as good as Anakin but you make do – and isn’t that a joke, that your brother, a child, is more useful than you?)

Anakin’s seven when Watto finds out that he might have some use beyond fixing things. It was – just a game, an arcade thing that a passing traveller had thought to flick a coin at the scavenging slaves and – and Anakin had won and the arcade owner had told Watto and then-

Podracing is for adults. Adults and slaves, it turns out. The first time you see an explosion that takes out not only the driver but the three competing pods around it-

Water’s too precious to cry. You feed it to your anger instead and the flames continue to grow inside of you.

Watto tests you on the pods as well. You do well – top few percentile for humans. Humans aren’t good enough for podracing though and Anakin is one of a kind. You wish he wasn’t.

(Your mother cries with dry sobs at home when Watto discovers a new talent from her children.)

Anakin has friends as a child. He’s – gregarious. You aren’t. Children all seem like too much effort. You can put up with your brother because he’s yours but the rest of them just annoy you, when the injustice of their transmitters doesn’t enrage you.

You coach him though. It’s in your own private language that Anakin speaks because he’s learnt from you but your mother doesn’t because she’s never been allowed the time with you. You tell him about influence and networks and being stronger together. You tell him to be wary of old powerful people because power makes people masters and masters are-

(Wrong you say. What you don’t say: they need to die and someday you’re going to kill them.)

You push him to make his friends and you push him with his weird levitation thing and his sense of when things are going right or wrong. (You think of what you could do if you had his talents and the anger feels like it could choke you. He’s your brother though and you can’t help but forgive him. You never felt this way about your other brothers).

Watto is – Watto. He holds back food and he holds back water and he shouts about how much you’re costing him. Sometimes he looks at you and you can see him calculating how much he could make off you, but then your mother does something that makes him happy and he forgets all over again.

You learn to write his ugly, blocky language so you can do his accounts and he doesn’t shout quite so much at you. You get Anakin to hack his accounts and you – you think about what needs to be done. You’re angry, yes, but you’ve seen too many people die in too many ways to be anything but patient.

You start to talk to people. They’re more adults than children and they look at you like they don’t know what to make of you but slowly they start to listen. You make plans – project plans and mission statements and five-year objectives all traced out into the sand.

(On one notable occasion you turned your entire floor into one massive Gantt chart. It was worth the scolding from your mother.)

You’ve always thought that your job wasn’t really practical, was just managing, but it turns out that managing has its place. Some revolutions start with inspiring speeches. Others start with tracing out the actions and the dependencies and what happens if this person dies.

Your mother looks worried whenever she sees you speaking to an adult now, but she doesn’t stop you. You love her for that.

Anakin doesn’t understand how it all fits together – he believes in heroes and being set free. You tell him that the only way you get freedom is if you take it. You don’t think your brother understands you, but you think he loves you anyway.

The love just makes the anger burn harder because it’s not just you that this is being done to but everyone you care about.

The Jedi come when you’re nine.

They’re about what you expect. Uninterested in slaves. Talking about queens and planets but never the individual. They’ve certainly not come to free the slaves. Anakin has hearts in his eyes for the fourteen-year-old queen (which: really? Who elects a teenager to represent them?) He invites them to your house where they take up your space and act like their problems are the only ones that count.

(Your people are in prison camps, you want to ask the little handmaiden. How does that differ from your people being enslaved? Why are her people worth more than yours, just because of where they were born?)

Anakin is boasting and generous and the Jedi takes him up on his offer. You want to shout at the man – do you know how many people die in podraces? Who thinks it’s okay to have a child risk their life to fix a ship? Anakin’s always been a better person than you though and he’s so happy at the chance to help.

Anakin wins, because of course he does. He’s never won before. He’s never finished before, but the Jedi needs something to happen and so it does.

The Jedi sold Anakin’s pod. He gambled and now Anakin belongs to him. (He’s free, the Jedi says, but – really? Are they supposed to believe that? Because he’s certainly not free to stay here.)

“Your son is powerful in the Force,” the Jedi tells your mother. Your mother asks about you and he shakes his head. You expected that. You’ve never been able to make things float or had that extra sense around you the way Anakin did. Besides that, you can’t leave. You’ve got a revolution to start.

“You’ve bought my brother,” you tell the Jedi when you get him alone. He looks down at you and you think you’re supposed to feel small; small and petty under his gaze. You think he can go to hell.

“I’ve set him free,” the Jedi corrects, and you snort. “You’re very angry,” he says. “This will only cause you harm.”

And that is - you’re so angry at him, in his robes and his serenity and his self-righteousness. You don’t know where you find the words, but you do and you spit-

“Serenity only serves the status quo.”

And, “Individual injustices are still injustices.”

He looks at you and you can’t help but sneer back. He’s a core worlder you think in contempt, with all the connotations of that.

(Isn’t it nice when you can just ignore all the injustices going on around you? You know you certainly did in your last life – because your day-to-day was just comfortable enough.)

“Your brother was born to be a Jedi,” he says and you can’t help the little mocking smile.

“A Master can always justify his purchase,” you say back. There’s nothing else you have to say to him. You leave and you ignore his condescending disapproval with ease. He’s not set your brother free, he’s bought him and the only thing that masters need to do is die.

(You find out later that he does die, and all you can think is good.)

So Anakin leaves with the Jedi. Watto gets angry and you get angrier. There’s not as much money coming into the shop without Anakin to perform his miracles and Watto thinks to short you and your mother on food. You make do. You still have all of his account codes.

His debts are slowly sinking into red and you realise he’s going to have to sell – you or your mother. Probably you, because your mother can still fix things in a way that you’re only vaguely competent at.

You hear rumours of the blockade being broken on Naboo, of changes in the Senate. You don’t hear anything from Anakin. You guess his new masters don’t want him communicating back – which isn’t unusual. You figured you wouldn’t be seeing Anakin again from the time he walked away with the Jedi and the prissy little handmaiden.

Whatever you do, you realise, is going to be from your decision. You’ve built a network with the adults. You think – maybe. You’re not at the point of overthrowing the Hutts, but you can see the way that you might do it in the future.

You fake Watto’s will and set you and your mother free in it.

He’s small, as a Toydarian. You might only be ten now and you make be scrawny and suffering from malnutrition but- turns out killing something isn’t that hard. Not really. A knife’s a good equaliser and a blaster’s a better one.

You’re lucky that there’s a big cantina fight not long after you’ve killed him. You get to dump his body there before the decomposition has really set in.

The Hutts are furious that slaves might be set free, but it’s all been filed correctly and the district attorney is new and thinks that he can keep the law. You and your mother walk free and – oh, wasn’t that kind of Watto, he left most of his shop to them as well. It’s not much but it gets you a start.

You still don’t hear from Anakin.

You’re busy. It causes your mother no end of stress but now that you’re free you’ve got no intention of stopping. The anger’s still there inside of you and you think as long as there’s slavery that you can see it’ll keep on burning.

A bounty hunter comes after you once. You get quicker with a blaster. You’re fortunate – no Mandalorian will take a bounty on you because you’re too young for their tastes. (Slave hunters with ethics. What a thought.) You still research how to get through beskar’gam because you’ve got every intention of taking this as far as you can.

You call your shop part of the underground railway. No one understand the joke, but you do and that’s enough. When you aren’t trying follow the Hutt politics and the various gangs spread across Tatooine you do research into economics. There has to be something of value that Tatooine can produce. You set up a firm online, doing market analytics. No one sees your face but you can cut everyone else’s prices in half because it turns out there’s a minor arbitrage rate between Tatooine and – well, pretty much any Republic world.

Every credit you have gets re-invested. Your mother thinks you’re crazy but she’s had over a decade to get used to it by now.

The first luxury you allow yourself is a message to Coruscant. It’s an expensive one because you don’t trust the Jedi temple to actually pass the message on. You have to send it through to one of the underground gangs who promise to actually deliver the message into your brother’s hands. You think it might be a waste of time but you can’t help but hope-

(He’s your brother and you’ve not got enough of this life to let anything go).

You end up having to hire someone else to support in your analytics. You’re both bewildered at the business you get through. It all seems so petty but people have always been willing to spend good money to figure out how to broaden the appeal of whatever stupid soap (or holodrama) they have going. There are big fancy firms but there’s also the idiots that want the cheapest option and you make very sure that you are the cheapest option.

You offer ‘genuine consultation’ on ‘Tatooine culture’ for a major holofilm. They’re very appreciative and they spread the word about the professionalism of your firm. You wonder what they’d say if you’d ever allowed them to see you in person.

The money’s useful. You own three moisture farms now and all of them have safe spaces underneath to operate on slave transmitters. It’s slow going but you think in time you won’t just have a network, you’ll have an army.

Anakin gets back to you. The Jedi let him in but they made it very clear that it was grudging and that he didn’t belong. The Chancellor - ?! – talks to him sometimes. You’re pretty sure that you warned your brother about old powerful people. Has he forgotten all common sense as soon as he left you? You pen a note back instructing him on what to ask the Chancellor for and what to avoid, and then spend even more money on setting up a transmission station. The Kshki tak is very appreciative of your patronage.

(You need to look into smuggling channels. If you can poach those off the Hutts then your campaign funds are going to grow much faster. You’re pretty sure that the Kshki tak would be more than happy to distribute spice on your behalf and… well, the fancy Core inhabitants are going to find some way of ruining their own lives, so you might as well help them along. It’s for a good cause after all.)

The wars erupt. It’s perfect for you. No one pays attention to tiny little civil wars when they’ve got millions of clones against quadrillions of droids. Anakin’s out there fighting which is frustrating (you’ve told him he should leave his precious Order) but…

You’ve been waiting for this. So have the people that you’ve spent the past decade freeing, slowly, one by one.

No more patience. No more serenity. It’s time for anger.

It’s time for change.

(Passion, you’ve told Anakin. Chaos is where you make change. Stop accepting things.)

You draw your blaster and for the first time in years you feel free.