#but yeah i see them living on naboo and healing together from their traumas

[tennessoui]

FeralObi anon here. How do you come up with these so fast?? Are you an infinite number of ideas and worlds in human-shaped form? I love both of those ideas. The first one kills me tho, Obi gets his first kind touch in years from lil Anakin. Also you can have lil Anakin coming home one day with a skulking, snarling nonverbal murder puppy and saying brightly, "He followed me home, can I keep him?" Schmi thinks this is definitely worse than the time he brought a krayt dragon home.

ah! hello! yes this is the first idea of a feral obi-wan who meets anakin when he's still on tatooine. i will also still do the second idea because like. i liked them equally as much rip me

but i told myself these were going to both be very short snippets and instead this one is uh 2k so i'll post the second one tomorrow instead of tonight!

(ficlet where obi-wan is captured by pirates/unspecified forces at a young age and then tortured for a decade before he escapes to tatooine when anakin is like 6. obi-wan, after a decade of torture is....not alright in this fic though he's only here at the end) (2k)

Shmi had known that when she sent her little Anakin away to follow after the stern-faced, warm-eyed Jedi Master, that this would not be the last time she ever saw her boy. She couldn’t explain how she knew, just as she had not been able to explain how she became pregnant, but she knew beyond a doubt that one day, she would see her little boy back in her arms.

She just hadn’t known it would be so soon.

“He died, Master Jinn died,” Anakin mumbles into the front of her dress, unwilling to move his head far back enough from her hug that he could talk clearly. “On Naboo. And the stupid Jedi council refused to train me even after I was so amazing in the air. Mom, I destroyed a blockade! Entirely! And they wouldn’t--they didn’t--” his little face scrunches up and then he’s bawling into his hands.

A slave, a born slave, knows intrinsically the injustice of the galaxy. It is not often they know hope.

“Oh my boy,” she whispers, smoothing a hand over the top of his head. She has questions. She has so many questions about everything he’s just said and what those strangers have put her son through, but the most important thing is a question she cannot wait until he has cried himself out to ask. “Is your chip gone, Ani? Did they remove your transmitter?”

Because she had sent him away from her so that he could be free. And that had been her own twisted version of hope, that her son could know a life she never would again. If the Jedi masters had proven to be just like every other master in the world, she would find herself sobbing into her own hands.

“Yeah,” Anakin sniffles and wipes at his ruddy cheeks, pulling back a few steps. “They removed it and everything. And--”

He pauses and drops his satchel to the ground in front of her. “They gave me credits. To buy you. For my trouble.”

He spits out the last three words like they’re the most disgusting thing in the entire world. As if Shmi’s freedom isn’t laying at their feet, mere centimeters away.

“Republic credits are no good here,” she hears herself say faintly.

“Padme, the handmaiden you met, she talked to the queen about me I guess,” Anakin mumbles, kicking his feet. “And when the queen learned that the Jedi didn’t want me even after all that, Padme says the queen says I’ll always have a place on Naboo. Me and my family. And then she took the Jedi credits and gave me these instead. It should be enough, Mom.”

Shmi sits down on the floor. With shaking hands, she opens the bag and looks inside. Yes. Yes.

There’s more than enough.

There’s enough to buy her freedom and take her boy away from Mos Espa. There’s enough to take her boy away from Tatooine completely.

“I…” she says. “Ani, I…”

“Padme said she’d send a ship for us,” Ani reports as if their lives are not changing right in front of their eyes. “In two days ‘cause I told her it might take a little bit of time to get Ben to come with us. But we can’t leave without him.”

This is said fiercely and with his arms crossed tightly over his little chest.

Shmi stares at him.

“I’ve already left him once!” Anakin says, stomping his foot. “But that was okay, because I knew you would bring him food and water and stuff. But if we’re both gone, no one’s going to be there for him.”

Shmi bites at her lip. There’s a lot of things happening very quickly right now, and she doesn’t know how to process half of them.

Her son has come back, after only being gone for a week and a half.

He has apparently either endeared himself so much to the queen of Naboo that she was willing to give him the money necessary to buy his mother from slavery and also promise him sanctuary on her planet. He says he’s done this by single-handedly ending a blockade, which is something she just cannot even think about right now.

He has told this queen--queen--that he will gladly live on Naboo with his family. Yes. Alright.

His family seems to include his imaginary friend, Ben.

Anakin has been talking about Ben for years now, ever since he was six and a half years old and sent by Watto to retrieve any scraps he could from what looked to be a crashed pod in the Wastelands. She’d let him ramble on about the ghost of a friend, because she’d known it to be something all children go through and experience. She hadn’t thought Anakin a lonely child, not with the friends he made in Mos Espa, but she’d always known that Anakin had a wandering spirit, ill-suited for Tatooine. If he liked to imagine an older man from a strange world hiding in the caves of the Wastes, then she wasn’t going to say anything.

“You have been leaving him food, haven’t you, Mom?” Anakin asks, almost accusatory. “I told him to expect you and everything.”

No. Shmi has not been traveling to the edge of the Wastelands every day during her precious few hours of free time in order to leave food to be picked apart by womp rats and desert critters and not her boy’s imaginary friend.

“Ani,” she says cautiously, quietly, “we cannot...we won’t be able to bring Ben with us when we go.”

Anakin, predictably, does not react well. “Why not!” he yells, backing away from her even further and looking as if she is the enemy. “Padme’s fine with it!”

“Aren’t you a little old for imaginary friends?” Shmi asks desperately, feeling cold suddenly even though the heat of the mid-morning sun has not abated at all.

If anything, her son looks more offended. “He’s not imaginary! Saying...saying that he’s not coming with us...is...is a bunch of poodoo!”

“Anakin!” Shmi gasps.

“Come on,” her boy says forcefully, grabbing at her hand and tugging her towards the door. She gets on her feet reluctantly and has half a mind to pull back just because he needs to learn that this sort of behavior is not okay, war hero or not. “We’re going to buy you from Watto. And then we’re going to go visit Ben!”

---

Buying her freedom takes less time than Shmi Skywalker ever thought it would. It feels distant as well, as if it’s happening to someone else.

It doesn’t help that her Ani is impatient and surly by turn, spilling the coin out onto Watto’s counter and barely waiting for him to finish counting it before he’s looking at the price of renting a four-person speeder parked outside.

“You won’t survive out there on your own,” Watto sneers, even as he’s passing her the kill-switch of her own slave chip. “Days. It’ll be days until the Hutts find out there’s a newly freed slave with no connections out there in the open. Ripe for the pickin’.”

Watto doesn’t have to tell her any of this. She knows. Gods, does she know.

But Anakin seems so sure about possessing the favor of the Queen of Naboo, or at least her handmaiden, which might be close enough to the same thing. She thanks Watto--she thanks him and then doesn’t even know why--and meets Anakin outside.

He’s bouncing around the speeder, little hands clutching his satchel to his chest. “Good!” he says when he sees her, hopping onto the machine and putting the parcel between his feet. “I got Ben something called a fig on Naboo, but I don’t know how long it’ll take for it to go bad. Apparently they’re sweet.”

Shmi goes along with it. Shmi doesn’t know why she goes along with it, but she does. She can see this is important to her boy, and though she’d rather spend the afternoon and early evening saying goodbye to her friends, she will allow Ani to say goodbye to his imaginary friend. Maybe she’ll even talk to it. “Hi, hello, I’m so glad you’ve enjoyed the imaginary blue milk and delicacies I’ve left out for you this past week and half. Oh no, it was no bother. My son insisted.”

The ride is quick--Anakin has always been a driver to push the limits of any engine he comes across--and before she knows it, he’s dismounting on a piece of desert and rock that look exactly the same as the last four pieces of rocky terrain they’ve past.

“Ben!” Ani calls, satchel clutched firmly in his hands as he makes his way deeper into the crevices of the landscape. “Ben, it’s Ani! I’m really sorry that I left! Ben? Ben! I’m back now! Ani’s back!”

It’s actually...quite pathetic, to watch her boy speak so pleadingly to the cold stone faces of the rocks around them, but if this is what he needs to do to say goodbye to his life on Tatooine, Shmi won’t say a word.

“Ben--” Anakin draws in a breath to call again, but then there’s movement out of the corner of Shmi’s eyes, and something jumps from the rock down to land on her boy.

She screams and darts forward, but the thing on top of her son snarls at her in guttural warning.

“No, Ben,” Ani coos, stroking at the face that yes, is human, now that it’s not in unnaturally fast motion. “That’s my mom, Ben.”

Ben--Ben??--growls anyway, pinning the boy--her boy--beneath him with his legs and arms.

“She’s fine,” Ani murmurs gently, one hand reaching up to stoke over the beginnings of a beard on Obi-Wan’s face “Oh Ben, I’m sorry.”

The man on top of Shmi’s child finally looks away from her and at her boy, which is both better and worse.

“Ani,” Ben drawls out, as if the word--or perhaps forming the word--hurts him.

Anakin is happy. Shmi can tell he’s happy without even being able to see much of him. It’s like the very air vibrates with his joy. “Yes!” her son says. “Ani. Ben.” He taps the man’s chest. “Ben. Ani.”

The man buries his head into Anakin’s hair, hands rubbing up and down his sides and his arms and his face.

Shmi needs to say something, wants to say something about this strange man touching boy like he owns him, but the memory of his growl and the flash of his golden eyes stops her from stepping forward.

“Anakin, get away from him,” she hisses instead of stepping forward and tearing the stranger off of her son. She has the distinct feeling Anakin wouldn’t let Ben go anywhere, not with the way his little hands are holding so tight to the man’s shoulders. The man’s shoulders that are covered with one of her old tunics that Anakin had told her became unsalvageable after its last wash.

“No,” Anakin says, tightening his hold on his...friend. “He says you didn’t give him food the entire time I was gone! He’s hungry.”

Shmi thinks there’s a very good possibility that this Ben is going to eat her, but she knows not to say anything of the sort. Not when it’s two against one.

“He hasn’t said anything!” She cries instead.

Anakin huffs at this and pats at the feral’s head. “Maybe not to you, but he talks to me.”

Shmi stares at him and wonders if there’s something she’s supposed to be doing or saying here. The man won’t allow her to tear him off her child, she knows that automatically. But she can’t--she doesn’t know--

“Anakin,” she tries, desperately.

But Anakin doesn’t even look at her, too busy petting over the man, who has at least allowed him to sit up. “Hey, I’m sorry, I thought she would,” he tells him in an undertone. “I really thought she would, but I’m back now. I’m not going anywhere without you again--”

He extends his hand and Ben presses his cheek against it with enough force that it pushes him back slightly.

“You’re coming to Naboo with us, Ben,” Anakin promises, clutching at the ends of the man’s long hair. “Or I’m not going at all.”

To Shmi, it sounds like a threat.

The way her son’s eyes flash an unfamiliar golden color makes her feel cold as a Tatooine night. She shivers, but no one notices.