Chapter Text
This was his fifth home that year. As July roared in, bringing with it blazing heats and the harsh sting of sand blowing across his face, Anakin Skywalker carried his last box up the steps to his attic bedroom. Up on the third floor of the rowhouse, the heat was stifling. Anakin sat down heavily on his bed, running his hands over his face to push sweaty hair back from his forehead.
His newest set of foster parents were downstairs, preparing lunch and no doubt discussing him in hushed voices. They were an older couple, and their dark hair was heavily streaked with gray. They had wrinkles setting in around their eyes and smiles. Most of the foster parents that he had previously had were young and they had plenty of other children. This was the first time in a while that Anakin had lived in a quiet house.
Ever since his mother had died when he was seven, Anakin had collected dozens of foster parents. He had never won any trophies as a child, but he stored memories of his different homes in his mind like he would trophies on a high shelf in his bedroom. Most of them he couldn’t remember clearly. His brain stored more places and faces than any seventeen year old’s should hold.
The only home that remained in vivid color in his memory was his mother’s home. They lived out on the desert and sometimes they slept on the roof and stared up at the stars. The night air was cool, but the tiles were warm against his bare feet and small hands. His mother made him love the desert. She loved the sand and the stars and the sand dunes that towered up around their small home. And Anakin loved them all too. She would hold his hand as they laid back against the roof and her other hand would trace the constellations. He followed her finger with his eyes, enraptured by the ebb and flow of her soft voice as she explained.
Sometimes a plane would pass overhead and Anakin would gaze up in amazement. He always thought of the people on board passing over his home in the desert and wondered if they could see the glow leaking through their musty windows and spilling lights across the sand.
His mother’s brow was always creased with worry in those days. There was never enough money, and Anakin was always getting in fights at school. When she died, he worried as well. He thought that he had let her down. He thought that maybe she was happier to be gone. They soon made him leave his home on the desert. He feared that if he tried to return, he would find that it had been torn down. Deep down, he feared that he wouldn’t be able to find it.
Anakin wanted to escape the desert, but every home they plopped him into was stuck in some dead-end sand town. As far as the eye could see, there was the irritating sand. Without his mother’s loving touch, he realized that he hated it.
In some of the homes that he ended up in, he felt content, an infinitesimal fraction of the happiness that he had felt with his mother. In some of them, he was distant and moody. In some of them, he was hit. Those homes flared white hot within him the instinct to run. Now he flinched whenever someone raised a hand to him.
No matter what the home was like, they did not last long.
He could hear his new foster parents calling him from downstairs. He hated that he was in such a reflective mood. Moving into a new house made him feel that way. Anakin knew he wouldn’t stay in this house for long, but he needed to make a good impression. His melancholy and frequent mood swings would be sure to turn his new parents off.
He turned on the fan in the corner of the room before descending the attic steps.
The setting of the sun quelled the heat of the desert. Anakin set out at around nine, with a few dollars shoved in the pockets of his shorts. He walked on the side of the street, as this small town lacked sidewalks in most places. Occasionally cars would zoom by, their lights casting his shadow long across the sand. This was just another small desert town like all the others, so seeing other people wandering around was rare. Earlier that day, his foster parents had taken him to see the school he would be attending in the fall. It was eerily empty during the summer months, and the heat hung thick in the long hallways full of metal lockers. Some of them had peeling labels on them, but most of them were bare. He had met with the president of the senior class, and she told him all about the school. She was friendly and chirpy, while Anakin’s eyes alternated between stared down at the floor to studying the clock. She told him that the school was a small one and that classes were tiny. He didn’t care much. He didn’t expect to be around in the fall anyways.
He passed the school in his trek. The parking lot was deserted. He looked away from it, towards the open road. His sneakers kicked up clouds of dust. Overhead, he could see every star. That small fondness for the desert, instilled in him by his mother, always prevailed on nights like this. Ever since he had been put into the system, he had loved to take walks. He could get away for a few hours. He told his foster parents that he liked the chance to think, but the reason he wanted to walk was because he didn’t have to think. He just had to keep moving.
Dinner at the house had been painfully awkward. His foster parents asked him about what activities he enjoyed at school and what his old friends were like. His answers were short and mostly consisted of lies. How could he tell them that they had just taken in the kid who had trouble getting along with anyone and couldn’t bring himself to get invested in anything? While it was a good tactic to make his inevitable move easier, it did not endear him to anyone.
Up ahead, he could see neon lights, bright against the dark sky. He hadn’t realized until now how thirsty he had gotten through the exertion of walking, but the lights up ahead promised something to drink. He hurried towards it. The parking lot in front of the convenience store was empty, but the ‘open’ sign glowed red in the window. Fluorescent lights lit up the inside and Anakin stumbled through the door, temporarily blinded. The desert night was dark and quiet, isolated from the rest of the world, but the inside of the store returned him to the 21st century. He blinked as his eyes adjusted.
No one was at the counter, but Anakin could hear faint music playing in the back of the store, behind the door marked “Employees Only.” He immediately walked to the slushee machine against the back wall. For such a small store, there were two bigs slushee machines with over ten flavors in total. In every town he ended up in, he took it upon himself to test all of the slushee flavors. Most had the same flavors, but sometimes he found wild cards. In one town he found honeydew. He had only been in that town for a short time. That had been the only flavor he’d tried.
He grabbed a clear plastic cup marked as “medium” and filled it up with the blue raspberry icy treat. Coca-Cola was his favorite, but he always started from the left and worked his way to the end. It was a good way to mark how long he spent in one place.
It was rare for him to reach the end.
As he clicked the lid into place and grabbed a straw, a voice said, “You know, most people like to mix flavors.”
Anakin jumped and nearly dropped his drink as he spun around. The previous vacancy behind the counter was filled by a boy who looked to be about his age. He had red hair and a rosy complexion to match. The desert sun had done his fair skin no favors. His blue eyes stood out, glimmering with humor as he smiled broadly at Anakin.
“Oh… yeah, I guess so,” he answered, caught off guard. He hadn’t expected the boy to appear so suddenly, nor did he expect to find himself engaged in conversation. “Just a weird habit I have. I go one at a time.” He carried his drink over to the register, setting it down. He dug in his pocket for money.
The other boy punched a few numbers into the cash register. “That’ll be $1.98.” As Anakin handed over the money, the boy looked up at him, eyebrows furrowed as if trying to assign a name to his face. “You must not be from around here…”
“Do I really stick out that much?” Anakin asked as he pocketed the change. The drink was cold in his hands and he felt his fingers growing numb around it.
“It’s a small town. It’s pretty difficult not to know everyone.”
Anakin supposed that was true, but he had never stayed long enough in one place that he knew every name. “I guess you’re right,” he shrugged. “I’ve always had trouble keeping track of people.”
“When did you move to town?” he asked. Anakin couldn’t believe that this boy was still talking to him.
“Just got here today. I’ve lived in the desert all my life, though. These towns aren’t all that different,” he answered. “I unpacked, went to see the school, and then I decided I had to get out of the house.” He didn’t mention his burning desire to get out on the open road. Anakin couldn’t bear to sit still.
“Welcome to town then,” the boy beamed at him. “I’m Obi-Wan.”
“Anakin,” he answered shortly. Condensation dripped down the sides of the cup and formed a ring on the counter.
“It’s really great to meet you, Anakin,” Obi-Wan said. He was still smiling widely at him. “And I guess I’ll be seeing you again, when you come in to try the rest of our flavors.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Anakin agreed, lifting up his cup as he headed towards the door. As he left into the cool night and the door swung shut behind him, he vowed to return at a different time to avoid Obi-Wan.
Summer days stretched on long and the sun did not set until late. Anakin sat on the back porch as the sun set in a brilliant blaze of orange and purple. He was engulfed in long shadows.
His foster parents sat inside, watching the small TV in the living room. He could hear the staticky hum of voices from the porch. They sat in patched up armchairs, doing crosswords during commercial breaks. He couldn’t see them now, but he could paint the picture in his mind. He had been living with them for over a week, and that is what they did every night. They had their routine, and Anakin did his best to stay out of it.
His foster parents had done the dishes immediately after dinner while we came out to sit on the porch swing, his feet dragging across the planks of wood. He knew that soon they would expect him to pull his weight and help out around the house, but they were lenient with him while he was settling in. Soon that excuse would no longer be valid.
He hadn’t left the house on his own since his first night there. His foster parents had taken him to the grocery store to pick out his favorite foods, and that had been his first foray into life in this small town. The grocery store had been tiny, as he had expected. Most of the fridges either didn’t work or worked badly, so the fruits and vegetables were questionable at best. Despite faulty machines, the desert sun beat on relentlessly and Anakin baked in the store. His foster mother had to settle for wilted lettuce.
Most of the people were old. They had lived in the desert their whole life and the dust seemed to cling to them as they went about their everyday activities. They noticed Anakin. They had been living their lives the same way for years, and he was an outsider. His foster parents made hasty introductions as they shopped.
Anakin didn’t remember their names. He had no need to. He had been in far too many homes to think that this one would be different.
That night he set out again, his hands buried deep in his pockets and his shadow before him as the sun sunk below the horizon behind him. His shadow was dark, brooding, and that’s how Anakin felt.
He remembered going to the grocery store with his mother. She would push the cart up and down the aisles and he would tag along behind, occasionally asking for a new kind of cereal or candy. His mother would oblige, her browned, careworn face lighting up with a smile. The cart was always piled with good things to eat. As time went on and money grew tight, the mountain of food dwindled to just a few essentials. Anakin never felt hungry, but his mother was shrinking.
Up ahead he saw the lights of the convenience store. They beamed against the darkening desert sky. He hated that this place was already growing familiar to him. He would rather keep walking, stay stormy and wrapped up in himself. But in a desert town like this there was nowhere to go, and he really wanted a slushee.
His brown sneakers tread against the black asphalt of the parking lot and soon he was at the door. As he stepped inside he saw the redheaded boy behind the counter and remembered why he hadn’t wanted to come back. The boy was looking at him, cheeks rosy and smile blinding. “Welcome back, Anakin,” he said and Anakin was taken aback. He remembered his name.
“Hey, Obi-Wan,” he answered. That surprised him even more. Anakin had remembered his name.
“You want another slushee? I just refilled the blue raspberry,” Obi-Wan told him, smile not diminishing as he watched Anakin move to the back of the store.
“No thanks. Just had that one.” Anakin caught the redheaded boy staring at him in confusion. “In a new town, I test all the flavors. From left to right. Way to pass the time.” He kept his sentences short, uncomfortable under Obi-Wan’s scrutinous gaze. It reminded him of a therapist he used to go to for a little while after one of the bad houses. The boy’s blue-green gaze held him fixed, trying to pick him apart. “I’m a foster kid,” he finally said. “I move around a lot.”
“Oh,” Obi-Wan mumbled, looking like that wasn’t what he was expecting. “The other flavors are good, too.”
Anakin nodded absentmindedly as he filled a cup up with dark purple grape slushee. His hand stung from the cold as he put on the lid. “Do you, uh, want to share this with me?” he asked, surprising himself once again. Obi-Wan’s lips quirked up in a smile once again, and Anakin found himself returning the gesture.
“Sure thing,” he nodded and Anakin hurried over to the counter, not before grabbing two bright yellow straws. For a few moments afterwards, all that could be heard was the tearing of paper as they unwrapped their straws and plunged them into the icy liquid. After taking a sip, Obi-Wan screwed up his face. “Grape? This stuff is nasty! Tastes like cough syrup.”
Anakin pulled away in distaste, shaking his head in vigorous agreement. “I guess flavor #2 is a bust. Really setting the tone for my time here.”
Obi-Wan smiled at him again, this time softer. He laid his hand on the counter. Anakin stared at it, wondering if it was an invitation. “I hope it gets better for you.” Then Anakin felt the ghost of a hand on his arm, and he stood there, warmth pooling in his stomach and tingling the tips of his fingers.
Even hours later as he stood outside the dimmed store, the giddiness had not left him. He knew he had to come back.
Very soon, Anakin stopped by the store nearly every night. The small inside, lit by fluorescent lights that shone down on the aisles of junk food, became as familiar to Anakin as his foster parents’ home. Anakin even saw back behind the counter and the break room beyond that, where there was a small TV, a few chairs, a fridge, and a bathroom. The store didn’t have much to it and there was little to do except for trying new flavors and talking, but Anakin kept coming back.
Something about Obi-Wan made it hard to stay away. Maybe his bright smile and glittering eyes. Maybe the quiet fascination with which he watched Anakin move about the store. Maybe the way his lips changed to match the color of whatever slushee they were sharing, stained by the sugary drink.
With Obi-Wan, his constant tempestuous moodiness evaporated, if only for a few hours.
He knew this was a mistake. Every time he made Obi-Wan laugh, every time their hands touched, Anakin knew he was making a grave mistake. He realized he actually liked Obi-Wan, and that would only make it harder to leave.
And Anakin always had to leave.