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Chapter Text

Anakin flicks his hood up further over his head with his new metal arm to hide his padawan braid, his flesh hand tucked loosely with Padmé’s as she drags him down the cobblestone street. She, too, is wearing a cloak, though hers is silk and bright green, embroidered with gold blossoms, her hair completely pulled back so that no strands escape past the brimmed hood. The red cloak he’s wearing is ill-fitting on him, too tight across the shoulders, loose around the waist, and cut off an inch or two above his ankles. “It’s Darred’s,” Padmé explained when she handed it to him before they’d set off to the market. “Your Jedi robe will draw too much attention to us.” 

This market is one of the smaller ones. It’s outdoors; the wares and products display are similar, but markedly different to those more familiar to him on Tatooine. There are stalls set up with rods and propping metal holding up waterproof canopies, vendors hawking to customers next to baskets laden with fruits and vegetables, tanks with variously small and middling sized mollusks, fish, and decapods, while butchers line up at the furthest ends of the market, their large cleavers and hunks of meat hanging from hooks and wires next to their stalls. Kids play along the edge of the market, which is set in a grassy knoll next to the end of the cobblestone road. Kites fly by the edge of the bank of the river, along with various droids holding fishing hooks and nets, hard at work for fresh catches of the day. There are herb and food spice stalls, an entire machine sputtering out free fruit smoothie samples for the consumers, and, at the farthest reaches across from the butchers, the largest tent with a rounded table like an outdoors, makeshift cantina. Next to the bar, a large woman with big hair belts out a high-pitched, warbling song in a dialect of Naboo that ends words in many vowels, and rolls various sounds into a sweet murmur. 

 He’s rarely been to markets like this outside of Tatooine and Coruscant. The missions he and Obi-Wan had been on in the past generally centered more on diplomacy and peacekeeping, less on the local grub. 

“Are you sure we’ll get what I need here?” he asks her, as she leads them past a stall full of ribbons, shiny powders, and gill-goat cashmere dining cloths dyed vibrant oranges, reds, and purples etched in lined patterns. Padmé reaches to touch one of them, running her fingers through the frayed edges, a contemplative look on her face. She looks at him, then to the bag he’s got strapped to his back, empty for now, before she sighs. 

“It’s the biggest market near the Lake Country,” she replies, and reaches a hand up to adjust her hood. It covers the pearled, white headpiece she’d weaved into her hair before they’d left the estate over an hour ago. “The markets in Theed would be better, but—well…” 

She lingers on that unspoken thought, then shrugs. They’d walked here, cutting through the trails that went deep into the mountainside behind Varykino, uphill then downhill, and over a bridge, to a remote island village of no more than three hundred or so inhabitants. Padmé’s long hemmed dress, flowy and bright sunshine yellow, had caught on the branches and vines of fallen tree branches and long, sharp bladed grass. At one point, Anakin had to cut her out of a thicket of thorns attached to a thick-trunked tree with needle point red leaves. Laughing, Anakin had pointed out the impracticality of his new wife’s dress, remarking that “pants wouldn’t catch on anything, angel” to no avail as they were too far out from Varykino at the point for it to matter in the grand scheme of events. Pouting, Padmé had answered, “It’s our wedding day. I want to look nice.” 

Anakin estimates they could have made it to this village in approximately fifteen minutes, with some time to spare and some mud, too, in one of those Gondola Speeders, and thinks he can even remember spotting the lights reflecting off the lake at night from one of the many balconies. A boat may have cut down the time considerably. 

But Padmé’s point about the need to be inconspicuous was a salient one. If the Jedi Council found out that he had married—

Anakin shook his head. He couldn’t think of that today. 

Not on his wedding day. 

He smiles at Padmé, and holds out his hand—not the new, mechanical one, which is still stiff, tending towards freezing when he wants it to grip something and pulling at his healing, burned tendons and nerves at the crook of his elbow—but his real hand. He’s got gloves on, both against the cold and to decrease the oddness of wearing one glove, but he can still feel the weight of her palm as she wraps her fingers around his with an answering smile. 

“I’ll manage,” he tells her, as they head towards a stall filled near to bursting over the seams with fruit. “I once cooked Obi-Wan a stew out of groceries we got from a remote starship repository in the Mid-Rim. Think it was only a few parsecs from here. Anyway, it was close to the real thing.” 

As he takes in the fruit sellers’ wares, he bites his lip. There are round, orange fruits that when sliced bleed red juice out onto the checkered cloth, their smell citrusy and sharp. Next to them, a bumpy, oblong yellow fruit with splotches of green fill two baskets. A small, rounder version with two knobbed edges and a smoother skin— lemons , he remembers from the few times he’d had them on Coruscant—take up three extra baskets. Strings of jogan fruit hang from hooks, and bushels of grapes and cranberries are tied to the posts bracketing the stall. There are small, brown fruits that remind Anakin of pallies—perhaps they are pallies, just not dried by the desert—he hopes, pointing them out to Padmé. She tosses them into a carrier bag, alongside some jogan, muja, and spiny meiloorun fruit. Then, she heads towards the shuuras, testing their ripeness. Before they leave, the owner tosses in a small, prickly fruit Anakin recalls eating with her at Varykino before—the juice had been acidic and felt like it was stripping the skin off his mouth the slower he consumed it. He wrinkles his nose as Padmé accepts it. 

“These will make a lovely tart,” she informs him. He shrugs the bag off his shoulders and holds it open for her. The accumulated produce takes up a full quarter of the bottom. 

“They better,” he jokes. “Not much room in here for much else.” 

She rolls her eyes. “Fruit is a vital part of healthy living.” 

Anakin thinks that fruit might be eighty percent of his wife’s diet, but wisely keeps his mouth shut. They move on to a stall hosting vegetables, where he spends ten minutes looking at pointed, shriveled red and green chilies, mourning the rounded, brighter orange and red ones his mother used to cook into stews and sauces, before he grabs about fifteen or so. The quantity might make up for the flavour, he decides. He adds some red skinned potatoes, and long, skinny orange tubers, a large Alderanian courgette that vaguely reminds him of the white and green vegetable that his mother was given once a year when Watto was in a benign mood, before he makes a final grab for some purple onions and tomatoes.  

After throwing in parsley, garlic leaves, and tezierett seeds, Anakin leaves Padmé to search through the abundance of herbs and spices and sets off to look for h’kak beans and flour. He finds a light brown powder that looks similar to the ground legume flour common in the Slave Quarters of Mos Espa, and though he doesn’t find the orange h’kak beans, he finds indented beige beans the vendor calls Nuna Peas and some green lentils. Then he gets a litre of blue milk and a jar of yogurt, before he heads back to Padmé. 

“Pad—Ver—” Anakin sighs, momentarily forgetting the fake name Padmé gave to the holy man who officiated their ceremony. She may not respond to it, anyway. He calls out “angel” instead.

“Yes, A—Set,” she says, emerging from a crowd of Gungans. Her small stature is dwarfed among them. “Got everything you need?” 

She holds out her hand again with a smile, and he takes it. It’s nice, he thinks, to be able to touch her freely. Freedom is rare for him, and he shifts with no small modicum of guilt as he thinks about how very not free he truly is. Again, he shakes it away. He’s just not used to the openness of her love quite yet, though it is warm and pleasant; physical affection is rare in the Jedi Temple. Obi-Wan, on occasion, gave him pats on the shoulder or ruffled his hair, but the physical aspects of Jedi training were more about fighting styles and maneuvers, or the bows, the ones that always caused the lurch in the pit of his stomach. Padmé, though, ran her hands through his hair and playful tugged on it, and curled into his side on the transport couch of the luxury cruiser that had brought them back to Naboo from the MedBay on Coruscant.  

“I do,” he replies with a smile. “Ready to head back?”

She confirms, and they set off back towards the mountain trail that leads to Varykino. 

A few hours later, Anakin stands at the edge of the lake, frowning at the sand. He can see Padmé making her way down the steep, sloping path that cuts in a zigzag from the back of the estate to the private, alcoved beach, balancing a tray tightly in her hands. He motions, lifting the tray from her to float it down, so that she can gather the scuffed ends of her dress up to avoid tears. She laughs, a tiny “Ani” floating out into the breeze, as he lays down the platter of snacking grapes and blossom wine next to the burning circle of sand he’d set. There are carved stone chairs shaped like roses, and a canopy above them, a few feet to the right, and a fussy Threepio scolding an indigent R2, who’s rightfully complaining about sand in his thrusters. 

Anakin bends down, knees locked, and uses the Force to slowly kill the flame he’d set, until there was nothing but charcoal and ash left behind. Then, he grabs the long stick he’d carried down from the mountains on their way back, some sort of elm, and flicks the charcoal over to the side. He motions for Padmé to stay by the edge where the sand drifts precariously onto the sculpted path, her mouth turned down into a confused frown, as he picks the dough he’d made, the flour grittier and less sticky than he’s used to, up from the blanket he’d grabbed off the back of one of the couches with a million pillows, and tosses it onto the hot, burning sand. Then, he flicks his hand, sweeping the charcoal from the side to cover the dough and leaving it to cook. 

“I still can’t believe you’re making bread with sand ,” Padmé says, her tone perplexed. Though she’s wearing the same gown, the sleeves are inexplicably gone, and the sun shines on her bare arms. “Is this really going to work?” she asks, a teasing grin on her face. She sits on one of the chairs, her legs crossed and elbows on her knees. 

Anakin’s eyes narrow, but he smirks and moves to join her, sitting down and kicking away the sand that gathers on the top of his boot. “Wait and see.” 

They nibble on fruit while a fussing Threepio chases R2 around the beach, Padmé’s foot curled around Anakin’s ankle. They’ve pushed the chairs closer together than the two foot gap from before, so that Padmé can rest her head against his shoulder, as the sun begins to set over the reflective lake. In the distance, even through the bright haze of the setting light, Anakin sees the island Padmé used to swim to as a child, and listens to her ruminate on Naboo campfire ghost stories about sea monsters who lured unsuspecting sailors into the deep. In return, he tells her a legend of a slave who escaped into the desert after cutting out their chip, only to perish in the Jundland Wastes, but not before their last act: “—and they set a fire, dancing around it with almost no strength, fueled by their desire for revenge. The story goes that they died out there in the desert, but their family was freed, and their community rose up to kill all the masters,” he finishes, trying to remember all the minute details his mother used to whisper to him on their cramped sleeping pad in the wee hours of the long night. 

 The smell of warm, slightly crisped bread begins to carry on the breeze. Anakin moves his hand, not bothering to rise from his seat. In a flash, the sand is up, the bread lifts in the air, round and bubbled and browned, before he spins it, then flops it back into the pit for a couple more minutes on the other side. 

Padmé laughs. “Is that not a frivolous use of the Force, Ani?” she teases. 

“I’m too comfortable to move.” 

Once the bread is done, and the sun has set completely in the sky, they head back inside. Anakin promises the kvetching R2 that he will get to cleaning out his thrusters tomorrow before a biohazard of sand, mud, and refuse from at least four different planets forms. Threepio inquires whether he should serve “Mistress Padmé” and “Master Ani” the evening meal, but they both shoo him away. “Do you think we should bring him back to the Lars?” Padmé asks, as two pouting droids glide off to another room. 

“When will we even get the time?” Anakin asks. “The Jedi are being drawn into the war. There’s talk of hurrying along padawan trials. And I doubt the Senate will be any less busy.” 

He feels a bit guilty for taking the droid, thinking of the lack of hands at the Lars’ moisture farm, but it will be difficult enough to keep one secret from the Order. And he doesn’t have free reign to just keep going off wherever he wants to deliver back accidentally acquired droids. 

“Maybe next time I see Sabé, I’ll send him off with her,” Padmé remarks, and then draws him over to the villa’s rotunda, the ‘Room of Morning Mists’ she’d told him once. The curtains have been changed to a brilliant gold, and she’s strung up twinkling pink fairy lights alongside the open arched windows, creating additional stars with the nighttime sky. There’s a vase of elaborate orange and red and yellow flowers in the middle of the table, shaped, somehow, like a flickering flame. Dotted around the room, too, are lanterns lit with real fire, not synthetic, and the room smells deeply of smoke and warmth. On each side of the silver bowls are obsidian carvings of the Naboo Flower of Life, while the crimson fished shaped platter that Anakin placed his mother’s Tatooine flatbread down onto was garnished with thin sticks of green and four-petaled purple flowers. 

“I’m going to go check on the stew,” he told her, then gives her a quick kiss before popping off to the kitchen to check on the stew that he’s been working on for the last four hours. He’d searched the entire estate for an old pot made of clay, before giving up and using a new, metal one. He’d tried the chili oil in the pantry, which was mild, at best, but he’d added that in along with the crackling tezierett seeds, ‘mum seeds and peppercorns, and an orange powder in the spice cabinet that seemed close to the flavour he remembered from childhood. He dips a spoon in it to taste—the potatoes are soft and browned, and the tubers are just the right side of intermingled with the chilis and herbs. It’s not that hot, Anakin thinks, but he remembers the last time he’d attempted to make a proper Tatooinian dish for Obi-Wan which sent the man onto an immediate quest for milk and a few hours lost in the ‘fresher. 

Anakin grabs a separate bowl for the boiled barley pearl grains he’d picked out of Padmé’s pantry to go alongside the stew. On his way out, he barely resists the urge to look inside the conservator to see the dessert Padmé’s got setting in there. He bites his lip, suddenly nervous, as he makes his way down the halls back to the veranda. What if she doesn’t like it , he wonders, and then almost doubles back to grab more yogurt to tone it down, before he hears her call, “Ani? Do you need help?” 

He clears his throat, fingers tightening around the crockery. “No,” he replies. “I’m good. Be there in a second.” 

He sighs, steels himself, then begins heading to the veranda again. Padmé’s sitting with her knees crossed and an indulgent smile on her face. She’s wearing the necklace he’d carved for her ten years before, the simple, white japor snippet a stark contrast to the beaded pearl headpiece she’s wearing that drapes in a v over her forehead and gathers around some of her brown curls towards the back of her head.  “I was beginning to think I’d lost you,” she teases. “And it’s only been nine hours.” 

“Never,” Anakin tells her, knowing that he meant the words as more than just a quip back to her light teasing. Hopefully, she’d never know about his lack of fr—no, she would never know about that, he decides resolutely, pushing down the squirming guilt. He sets the food down to the left of the centerpiece, and then sits. 

Awkwardly, he says, “So, our first dinner. Married. We’re married.” 

He still can’t quite believe the whirlwind of the last week. 

Padmé blinks, nods, and picks up the third spoon from the left side of her plate. “We are. You don’t—regret it, do you?” 

He startles. A lump grows in his throat, and for a long moment, he wonders if she regrets it. She’s a senator, a former queen, she’d grown up free on this wonderful, green world with flowers and so much water and he’s just Anakin , a child from a desert nowhere who’d still be there if Master Qui-Gon hadn’t won him in that pod race. He bites his lip, and his thoughts must have shown on his face, because Padmé reaches across the table, grabs his hand and squeezes it. 

“I don’t regret anything. I want this, Ani. I love you,” she says, and he grips her hand, too, and says it back. She scoots her chair around the edge of the table, and, in practiced seconds, she has moved her placement so that they are next to each other, rather than across, looking at one another over a stacked centerpiece arrangement. 

The aroma of the stew is smokey and pungent, the fragrance of the hot chilis sharp, hitting the back of the throat long before they taste it. Anakin shows Padmé how to dip the bread into the stew of mixed vegetables like his mom did, and though her eyes widen, at first, she doesn’t cough and sputter like Obi-Wan, and they eat, exchanging childhood food mishaps about stolen bits of cake and Padmé’s sixth birthday biscuit heist with her sister, Sola, during a long, boring party with relatives so old, she jokes, they might have been around when Master Yoda was young. 

It’s the first time in a long time Anakin feels home . The fires create shadows that dance along the column of the wall, their shadows large in the glow of the illuminating stars, twinkling fairy lights and flickering flames. At some point, their conversation drifts and they realize their bowls have been long empty, the food gone some time ago. Padmé bites her lip, and says, “I should go get dessert.” 

“Yeah,” he replies, and swallows, hard, past the nervous lump in his throat as he watches her walk away. His fingers, his real fingers, trace circular patterns on the table, and he fiddles with the utensils, lifting them up in the air, up and down, up and down, with the Force, practicing channeling it through the mechanical wires and bits of his cyber hand. 

The air is charged, tense. He thinks back to when he was fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen, and Obi-Wan would disappear some nights, emerging in the morning for meditation with mussed hair and a grin. He thinks of the datapoint display with diagrams and instructions he was forced to sit through, mortified and blushing, as Obi Wan confidently explained “the growing body” to Anakin, who was too scared to reply that “I really don’t need to hear this, Master.” 

He doesn’t know what to expect tonight—doesn’t know what Padmé wants. 

She emerges back into the veranda platter first. With growing amusement, Anakin watches as she tries to maneuver the large, oblong serving platform which dwarfs the width of her entire torso around the columned doorway without scraping it. He goes to help her, but she waves him off, and it’s only then that he notices, well, it : the tart is round, true, but around the edges were browned, shaped bits of pastry that resemble millaflowers, dusted with sugared pearls and glittering gold. On the top of the tart, a mix of jellied fruit set in a layered arrangement of colors, the oranges, the greens, and the red, trifected into a pattern, with bits of spun sugar draped from the tops of the pastry to fall, like a canopy, over the tart. On the side, there’s the paste of pallie—no, date , she’d told him—fruit he’d made in a crystalline jar, next to it a glob of whipped cream moulded into a funnel, and in another bowl, rounds of muja fruit ice cream.  

“How does it look?” she asks, placing it precariously on the edge of the table. Anakin grabs the side so that it doesn’t tip and upend all its contents on the floor, and she groans, then sweeps the bowls over to the other side of the centrepiece so that they can straighten the strangely aesthetic dessert display. “It’s a typical Naboo wedding design. My mother made this for my father, and her parents, too.” 

“It’s—” he starts to say, attempting to choose the right word. He’s never seen food as elaborate, as ostentatious, as pretty , even, as this, and for a maddening second, he wonders if he’s supposed to eat it or admire it. “Lovely,” he settles on, which isn’t a lie. He thinks that several members of the Jedi Council would keel over at the sight of this dessert and its extravagance. The slaves on Tatooine would never even imagine such a sight—at least, not for them and their tables. 

She smiles brightly, her eyes lighting up. “Thank you.” She quickly grabs the triangular, edged knife meant simply for tarts and pies, and cuts out a slice of pie, the fruit dripping, shiny and sweet-smelling, and then dollops the paste and the creams onto their plates, manipulating the spoons until they dot the plate like scattered hazelwood nuts. 

“All Naboo spouses make something on their first night together,” she’d told him, after the vows had been said and the holy man she’d plucked from some obscure religious order in Naboo’s mountains had left, not even heavy with credits to keep their secret, since Naboo prized privacy in all family matters. “It’s a sign of love. Devotion. Partnership.” 

The slaves of Tatooine did that, as much as they could. Unlike Naboo, Anakin remembers, from the one time he watched two slaves with different masters whisper promises to each other under the light of the three moons in a narrow space between two slave huts, it wasn’t always food. Sometimes it was water. Sometimes, it was snippets, like the japor snippet he’d carved her. Other times, it was just the act of giving each other that moment , away from the masters and reality that their lives were not in their control. 

That nothing they truly wanted could be public.

Expectant, her fork hovers over her dessert, waiting for him to eat. He picks up the delicate fork, smaller than usual, thinner, and sets it to the crisp pastry he thinks she made from burrmillet. 

The fruit is tart and sharp and sweet and acidic. A million different flavours burst on his tongue, and leave a stringent aftertaste. The sprinkled gold feels like he’s eating flimsy, but quickly melts down to nothing. It’s good , but different. He smiles, and she grins, and then they are eating the dessert. 

At the end of the night, Threepio shuffles in with a resigned “oh, dear me” as he sweeps away the artistic tart, and the empty plates and bowls. Padmé rests her head on his shoulder again, and he holds her close, but he’s tense , too, and though he hopes she doesn’t notice, he can see the wrinkle growing between her eyebrows as a frown forms. 

“Are you...alright?” she asks, her voice soft. She pulls back, her neck craned to gaze at him, and her hand sweeps back some errant locks of hair from his forehead. 

He nods, tightly, and too fast. 

“Anakin, it’s fine to be nervous,” she tells him. “We don’t have to do anything right now.” 

He opens his mouth to reply, to tell her that it's not that I’m nervous, really, angel, just that — well — and I really just want to hold you and be here with you. He doesn’t know how to place the complicated tumult of emotions and thoughts swirling around in his head into words. 

The silence sits there, heavy, and Anakin says nothing. 

Padmé, though, is competent enough at reading emotions, even without the Force. “Come on,” she says, and slides off the chair. “I’ve got a holodrama I want to show you. It’s my mother’s favorite.” 

She brings him into the same sitting room with the plush and overly comfortable couches and fireplace from the night, only mere weeks ago, he’d told her how he’d felt. In the distance, the waves splash heavily, a crash in the silence of the dark, and he waits, watching the flickering sparks in the fireplace, while Padmé goes to fetch R2. She’s changed into something more comfortable when she returns, a dress that hugs her upper body, bright blue and made of a thin, satiny material, and lace patterns of swirls that circle into one another, the skirt billowing out and falling to her knees. 

R2 bleeps a question, roughly translating to did you screw up, H-1 ? Human-One, and he doesn’t know how he’s become one , now, and Padmé two . 

“No,” he tells the nosy droid. “Of course not.” 

Padmé raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t ask. Instead, she places the datapad on the port that allows it to project above the fireplace like a screen, and then curls up into his side, her feet resting on a pillow, and searches through old reruns of holodramas and other various channels Anakin has little familiarity with. The most that Obi-Wan watches is the news, always with a disapproving comment for various politicians and random celebrities.

“My mother watches this zealously,” Padmé tells him, as the title of the show, The Great Galactic Bake Off , flashes dramatically in technicolor across the projected screen. “It’s her comfort show. It’s on season ten.”  

“It’s a show about dessert?” Anakin asks, confused, as he watches a Twi’Lek woman called Tru Kin Per quip puns about the Naboo countryside and shaak grazing, while her cohost, a bald-headed Zabrak the Twi’Lek calls Lan, acts scandalised for three seconds before she announces, with a flourish and a bow, that it is “pastry week.”  

The next hour is spent watching ten harried contestants rush around a plastent set out in the middle of a sprawling field of grass on Stewjon, peppered with round, bleating sheep, breaking ovens, two hosts, one with silver hair and a harsh face that hovers, like a Correlian fruit bat, to sneer at the amateur bakers as they attempt to produce bakes, while the other, a human woman called Mara Perry, is nicer, shriveled with age but peppy, asks the hopefuls whether they “think those flavour combinations will be something that really works?”  Padmé waves her fist angrily and snipes that “he knows nothing, sweeter than Corellia? What nonsense!” as the snooty judge, Z’Les Mol-Wood, scornfully remarks that, “Naboo pastries are known for being sickeningly sweet, much sweeter than a nice Corellia tart” to a woman who hails from the same remote village as the Naberries. 

Z’Les Mol-Wood rates the participant’s muja and translucent lime tart with a “bland, and sickeningly sweet” verdict, which makes no sense , not one bit, and Anakin finds himself joining Padmé with heatedly reprimanding the man through the holovid as if the strength and vigor of their disapproval can change his mind. R2 joins in, too, with a series of bleeps that are some of the worst curses Anakin’s heard this side of a smuggler ring, and Threepio tries to interject with a well-meaning, but wrong , excuse of “well, he’s just doing his job. Not all the contestants can win Top Baker.” 

A Rodian woman who makes a tart that resembles a khardax, drenched with poola blossom syrup that makes the pastry glow from the bioluminescent effect, wins Top Baker for her show of creativity, while the poor Naboo woman is sent packing by the surly Z’Les Mol-Wood. 

As the credits roll, Anakin turns to Padmé. “Can we watch more?” 

She smiles, laughs, and somehow, after six episodes and, entirely without meaning to, Anakin Skywalker, padawan learner of Jedi Knight Obi Wan Kenobi, newly married man to Senator Padmé Amidala, finds himself addicted to The Great Galactic Bake Off . 

Chapter Text

The chrono on the opposite wall from the entrance hits 16:01 just as Ahsoka enters the kitchen. Obi-Wan sits, one elbow propped on the durasteel countertop just across from the cooking appliances, and his chin in his hands. The glowpanel’s bright, fluorescent light emphasises his pale complexion, washing him out almost to the point of colourless. There’s still a bit of dirt smudged underneath his left eye, like a bruise, and an actual bruise just underneath the left corner of his mouth, which tilts upward in a seemingly half-amused, half-bemused smile. As she rounds past the long, rectangular regulation table pushed to the far side of one wall, in the corner next to the equally long, rectangular window in this sterile room, to sit next to Obi-Wan, she takes in the ingredients piled all askew towards the left side of the gray preparation countertop. On its far right side, a stack of empty pans and three small soup bowls precariously balance, threatening to tip and slide right into the cast-plast red tray of cracked eggs of unknown origin. 

Anakin’s face is set in a frown, and when she pulls her left leg up to rest her chin on her knee, she catches his eyes, and feels the wave of disgust, befuddlement, suspicion, and phantom physical nausea he’s rapidly cycling through echo across their training bond. Irritated, she narrows her eyes, and mutters, “It’s not that easy to find ingredients in a warzone, you know. I’d like to see you do any better.” 

There’s a building set for food storage three streets down. After the initial battle, once they’d taken Murkhana City and the leftover ash from downed ships and detonated explosives started to settle, the troopers went out en masse out to the shops and empty homes to salvage perishables, cans, and other foodstuffs to feed their soon-to-be-starving army. Relief from the Republic, in terms of aid and restocking of necessary provisions, was long in coming, and in the meantime, they stocked for the long wait out of the remnants of a once bustling hub. 

“So you’ve proven,” Anakin says, and delicately picks up a bottle filled with a thick, viscous liquid, black and clinging to the transparisteel edges. “I have no idea what this even is.” 

As Obi-Wan leans over the countertop, his shirt threatens to dip its fabric into the pre-whisked, pre-cracked, procured egg mess. “Engine oil?” he answers, studying the fluid—or juice, or excretion, Ahsoka’s not quite sure which—with the same expression he gives gross flora, scary bug creatures, and Dex’s five-nuna-egg omelette special with Haruunian-avonel sauce. “Or ink? Primitive ink from a bygone era in Murkhana’s history?”  

“It’s cooking oil,” Ahsoka says, indignant. Afterall, Obi-Wan’s not the one who spent seven hours looking through all of Murkhana City’s meagre resources trying to find birthday cake ingredients. Under the circumstances, which include the fact that she’s never had a human or omnivorous cake, and that she needed to consult a recipe-blog that began its explanation with the ten-page life story of ‘Lana M’lia’ to settle on the usual parts of cake making: flour, rising agents, and binding foodstuffs, she thinks she did sufficiently well. She’d only had the help of Captain Rex and Commander Cody, both of whom were never offered a birthday wish from the Kamonioans, let alone a cake. Her eyes flitter over the assortment, taking stock of their findings and borrowed fare. 

There’s a cloth bag plopped at the edge of the lineup, cinched tightly shut with rough, beige twine. Flour, it turned out, was hard to come by and nowhere to be found in the piles of borrowed loot three streets away. Rex found this bag in an abandoned home on the edge of the city, which smelled like a Coruscanti lower-level sewage plant. However, the translator droid interpreted the print on one side of the bag to mean “flour,” and when they opened it up, they saw a powdered, dark brown and odorless mixture that appeared to be as it claimed. Ahsoka can’t name what plant it’d been harvested from, since many of the farms within sixty miles of the city have been left fallow as refugees fled their homes and left the city to hide in the mountains while the Republic and the Separatists continue this endless war. Rodents and insects must have gotten to most of the flour, or the inhabitants of the homes and city took the foodstuffs with them, since this was the only bag spotted within city limits. 

“It’s mould,” Anakin retorts, but she ignores his naysaying. He’d promised to make this cake in their group chat earlier, as payment for her helping polish all the starships in the hangar, and after all her effort, he’d better make the best damn birthday cake of his life. 

Instead, she continues to study the bounty. Several other procured-without-credits items loom behind the bag. There’s the flavouring agents, all lined next to one another. The spice she hopes is ground van’il rests in a tiny durasteel box. Flavouring, Ahsoka found, was variable and complex. She gathers it’s dependant on taste preferences and type of cake from the dozen or so blogs she’d shuffled through four nights before, bundled under the thin blanket and squinting from the holoscreen’s dulled light, mindful not to wake Anakin, who was still recovering from his newest brush with death via-crashed starship. The preferences, however, were a mystery to her. She’d sent around a questionnaire to the 501st, listing common flavours she’d logged watching rerunning holovids of The Great Galactic Bake Off , in an attempt to get a workable sample of optimal combinations for the human palette. Chocolate, the only human dessert she’d tasted, was number one on the poll, closely followed by almond, van’il pod seeds, cynnamon, nut peas, and various fruit sauces, none of which appeared to have been left in the abandoned shops and domiciles. 

Glistening like newly drawn blood, the vial of essence of tomato lay flat on its side, the lid bumping against the ribbed spine of the oblong, mottled green vegetable she’d seen one prolific blogger make bread with: the courgette. The day before, Cody’d sifted through the reject pile of produce left at the food base, the ones that were suspiciously chewed. Most had been found under upturned retail stalls. The chipped wood acted as covers from the wind and battle pollution which left dust all along the buildings and lined the street with chalky sediment. When the rains came, the leftovers caked and hardened on benches and fountains, steps and columns, and solidified into the cracks of the sidewalks. 

Ahsoka shakes away the memories of the abandoned city centre, and focuses on the reflective obsidian squares of salt mined from a saltwater lake somewhere on the planet. Or so she assumes. 

A ding alerts her to a flurry of movement, briefly drawing her gaze away from her city-trekking treasure. Anakin rubs his flesh wrist with his robotic hand, face set into a grimace as he works the still healing injury, before he grabs a whisk and starts to re-whisk the separating egg in the tray. “What’s the point of that?” Obi-Wan asks. He leans back on his stool, but there’s nowhere to rest his back, so instead he’d stuck half-balanced like a stringed puppet. “They may be stale.” 

“Well, if this gives all of us a new relationship with the ‘fresher, you can thank yourself for that,” Anakin says, using his entire upper body to speed the movement of the utensil. As he does so, the tray tips on the counter, and a puddle of thick, spongy membrane slimes its way towards Ahsoka and Obi-Wan. Anakin curses, then grabs one of the small soup bowls, dumps the sloggy green mess into it, and hugs it to his chest as he begins anew with a wince. His movements are slow and sluggish, but determined to see results. “Don’t know why you even bothered. When was the last time I had a cake for this?” 

Ahsoka scowled, while Obi-Wan bit at his bottom lip, probably contemplating, then said, “You were fourteen. The Baby Yoda waited outside our rooms with two bogberry muffins. The Creche Master was beside herself when we brought him back that afternoon. Didn’t even say thank you, just grabbed him and slammed the door in our faces.”

“Is a muffin cake?” Ahsoka asks, confused more by that than the Baby Yoda. She, too, had seen him once or twice, as the little bugaboo loved to scamper and hide in unsuspecting padawan and knight’s rooms. He’d shown up once outside Anakin’s door early on in her padawanship, ears folded downward and head slumped, soft snores muffled in his youngling robe. Ahsoka didn’t know how long he’d been there, but she hadn’t really thought to ask, before a creche attendant had promptly picked him up and carried him off.  

“No,” Anakin responds, at the same time Obi-Wan says, “From a certain point-of-view.” 

Ahsoka doesn’t think that the perspective of one random Jedi Master in the Outer Rim Sieges is shared by the judges of The Great Galactic Bake Off , but she’d hardly been taking notes on pastry type, just the complicated alchemic mix of ingredients meant to dazzle tastebuds of omnivores. Really, Ahsoka’s dietary requirements are simplistic in comparison. 

 After several minutes, with a pained grunt, Anakin sets down the bowl of fluffy, bright green eggs. Near the edge, one of the stiff peaks dangles dangerously over the side and threatens to become a floating mountain amidst the sticky goo from earlier. Then, he flicks the long, freckled vegetable towards Obi-Wan and says, “Surely, I can trust you to grate?” 

“Why not? It can’t be harder than flying,” Obi-Wan responds, picking up the courgette with a studious expression, flipping it and turning it over in his hands, pressing down the pads of his thumbs into its green flesh with a hmmm , before he says, “Peeled?” 

Anakin shrugs, and grabs the flour and the boxes, moving gingerly after his shoulders straighten. “Will it make a difference?” he says, voice raspier than before. Ahsoka feels a squirm of guilt build in her gut as she watches Skyguy work, remembering the recent crash and the numerous injuries not even bacta could fully heal. 

“Depends. How well was it washed?” Obi-Wan responds, tone sardonic as he grabs a small, dull knife and begins to maneuver it around the edges from the knobbly top towards the bottom in long strips. He makes quick work of it, scraps dropping onto the durasteel below his elbows, while Anakin pinches and measures and wrinkles his nose on the other side of the counter, both verbally bantering about the merits of various cooking methods. 

Not wanting to be too left out, Ahsoka says, “Didn’t you once burn a pot of water, Master Obi-Wan?” He shoots her a glare, while Anakin huffs a laugh that turns into a wheeze as he places all the dry ingredients into another small bowl next to the first. Obi-Wan shoots off his classic excuse that “an assassin droid came through my window at the wrong moment! Was I supposed to let it kill me rather than let the water boil a little over?” 

“We had to toss the pot,” Anakin teases back, as Obi-Wan begins to grate furiously. The massacred green veg emits a rough, acidic smell as he does, and Ahsoka wrinkles her nose and scoots her chair back from the counter. Anakin shakes his head as Obi-Wan squeezes gray, bubbling liquid from the remains of the courgette in a piece of flimsi advertising “Big Fen’s Sauna: The Local Flavour.” He grabs the desiccated black fruit that seems, to Ahsoka, to resemble a shriveled husk of its former self—she’d hoped for Nubian dates imported to the planet, but feared she’d been too ambitious when Rex had returned with bright yellow bag decorated with three suns and the label “Sunset Kissed” that falsely promised nice, purple fruit, instead of the hard dimpled pucks that toppled out onto the counter in front of Anakin. 

“Are these prunes? Geez, Snips, do you think we’re as old as Master Yoda?” Anakin says, and flicks one towards her. She dodges before it hits the tip of her left lek, then flings one back. Before it can dissolve into a miniature food fight, Obi-Wan asks whether they can incorporate the courgette water into their birthday masterpiece, to which Anakin responds with a firm no. 

“Not the vegetable either,” Anakin says, and asks Ahsoka to grab a bin. She pouts, more embarrassed at herself for getting them a completely gone off courgette than anything else. She sighs, and thinks that Anakin’s birthday cake she’d hoped would give him a spark of amusement after endless repetition of war and sieges and violence was already a failure before it was even in the gasser. “It’s fine, Snips,” Anakin says, and holds his fingers up to inspect the fine grain of sharp-smelling yellow powder dusting his skin from the spice box Ahsoka’d spotted in the far back shelf of a corner shop. “Really,” he continues, “This is a nice gesture.” At Obi-Wan’s huff , which Ahsoka’s not entirely sure is aimed at the cake batter or Anakin, Skyguy sighs. After a moment, he says, “I’m just not big into this day. It’s not actually my birthday.” 

Ahsoka blinks, and Obi-Wan gets up to turn a dial on the gasser to an appropriate temperature, and Anakin starts folding the eggs’ green albumen into the yellow-spotted brown flour in a small bowl. It’s a delicate endeavour, and it would be almost funny to watch him try to work the mixture together without adding more to the mess on the counter, if Ahsoka’s mind wasn’t stuck on the last words she’d heard. 

In the hall, the sounds of trooper activity threaten to drown it out. She hears one man accuse another of stealing his blaster polish, R2’s beeps and whistles as he tries to corral the men in the barracks to some semblance of order, and Rex’s command for silence. 

It doesn’t shake the new feeling of horrorguiltsadnessshameatiredness that washes over Ahsoka, and with the Force, she’s not sure where she ends and Anakin begins. 

“I’ve been your padawan for three years . Almost four,” she says, and scoots her chair back towards the fermented, brisk, acidic amalgamation of human consumption assaulting her heightened olfactory senses. “Why haven’t you mentioned this?” 

The first year, they’d been doing damage control after a large beast tried to make the Chancellor of the Republic his late night snack. A year later, they’d been stuck on the planet she’d died on then brought back in Wild Space. This was the first one where they’d even been in a position to celebrate. 

Obi-Wan grabs a tray and starts spritzing it with non-sticking agent, while Anakin shrugs. “Didn’t think about it? It’s not like anyone’s ever mentioned celebrating before ,” he tells her, tone ambivalent while shooting a sideways look at Obi-Wan. “Well, except Baby Yoda. It’s his birthday. Or so Obi-Wan told me.” 

Obi-Wan sighs, and holds two fingers up to the bridge of his nose. “Anakin’s birthday wasn’t recorded,” he tells her. Dumbfounded, she looks back and forth between them, catching glimpses of Anakin’s struggle to incorporate the humiliated former fruit, and Obi-Wan’s near-accidental elbowing of other cookware dangerously close to the edge of the counter and onto the floor. “He knew the month and the year, so the Council thought it easiest to give him a birthday of someone already at the temple. That turned out to be Baby Yoda’s. Or so a creche attendant told me.” 

Ahsoka bites her lip, and feels a sharp sting of sadness run through her, the same that hits every time she’s reminded of just how awful Anakin’s past truly is. She knows she’s projecting it through the Force, cause Anakin’s eyes suddenly meet hers as he plops the revoltingly coloured black mixture onto the tray and smooths it with the back of the spoon towards the corners. “Mom tried to keep track,” he says, “but she wasn’t exactly looking at a calendar when she had me. She’d try to make something during the month, but it was only once or twice she actually was able. Watto wasn’t exactly generous with food rations.” If that’s to make her feel better , it’s not working. The guilt sharpens and turns sour. As sour as the batter smells. 

Obi-Wan grabs the tray and shoves it into the gasser. “It will need frosting,” he points out, but it's a weak attempt to bring the mood back to some semblance of a jovial celebration. The outside sunlight’s turned overcast, no longer streaming yellow but cloudy gray, through the only transparisteel window in this kitchen. This kitchen is in an abandoned building large enough, and with enough technological and comms abilities, to serve as a barracks for the 501st and 212th. She can’t help but see it as a pall cast over them. Even the cake’s noisome odour reminds her of the battlefield, the sharp scent of blood on the beach and the way Anakin’d looked following the wreckage. 

They’re leaving Murkhana soon, or so they’d been told. Not for home, though. Desargorr, some Outer Rim mining planet. Soon, they wouldn’t be on this planet with its black beaches or its abandoned cities with refugees squatting up in the mountains, scared out of their homes and scattered with no warning by the invading Separatists. She thinks of Lux, suddenly, and Onderon, and Steela’s death. She’s lost so many people since this war began, and only days before, she’d thought, not for the first time, that she would lose Anakin, when their bond weakened during the crash.  

Numb, Ahsoka gestures to a cast-plast bottle of thick, lumpy blue milk that Rex had secured from the bantha’s udders himself. “That’s what you can make it from, right? Or, something like it? I couldn’t find cream.” Then, with a stuttered breath on the edges of those emotions she still can’t suppress, can’t push away into the Force like Master Luminara or her friend, Barriss, Ahsoka says, “I’m sorry. I was just trying to, I don’t know, give you something. It’s been such a long time since we had anything to feel nice about or to relax with. And with the accident, and the bombing at the Temple, and the sieges, I just—I wanted to just celebrate, I guess.” 

She bites her lip, again, and then shudders, and brings her palms up to cradle her face, back bent over the counter. She thinks she feels more than she sees the impression of Obi-Wan, hand outstretched to place on her shoulder, but she hears the steps round the counter, and then—

“Snips,” Anakin says, in the voice he used after her first command, when she’d screwed up badly enough she’d thought she’d never be trusted with anything ever again. “I understand. We’ve all been through so much. It’s not bad to just want to be a kid. Just for a little bit.” 

Ahsoka shakes her head, and thinks, a bit sardonically, that he’s not much more than a kid himself. He’d been near her age when they’d met; when he’d been tasked as a General, a Knight, and an instructor with a padawan he hadn’t asked for. The training bond sparks again, and then there’s a wave of something like comfort, and affection sent across, and Ahsoka drags her hands away from her eyes to settle on Anakin, not kneeling, not with his still healing lungs and ribs, but looking at her gently. “Plus,” he pretends to whisper, but it’s loud enough that people in the hall might hear, let alone Obi-Wan. “We’ll have the joy of watching Obi-Wan eat cake. And that will be a sight to be captured on a holoimage.” Then, he steps back, while Obi-Wan, once again, huffs, and mutters about the audacity of former padawans. The baking cake’s taking a turn for smoky and acidic, like Alderaanian firesticks tossed into a pool of Corellian topato vinegar. Rubbing his side with his flesh hand, he continues, “And didn’t Rex and Cody help? We should get them in here. There’s enough for all of us.” 

Scared at his sudden turn towards mounting enthusiasm, and still reeling from the past five minutes, Ahsoka shares a look with Obi-Wan as Anakin heads to the door, calling for Rex and Cody. When he heads back, he shoves the green-crusted whisk to her, which she takes with confusion. “You should help too. Surely, I can trust you to whip some frosting?” he asks, and then sits back on the stool, watching the chrono to count down the remaining minutes before the blackened monstrosity is removed from the gasser. 

“Never know till I try,” Ahsoka says. 

Trying, she finds, does not magically make the lumpy blue liquid into a smooth cream. After several minutes of ineffective whisking, she searches for a power spinner to do the task, which manages a frothy bubble state that enhances the floating lumps of unfiltered milk characteristic of those uninitiated to the rigours and intimate details of farm living. Anakin proclaims they’ll simply “use it as a glaze,” while Obi-Wan pulls the cake, steam shooting up from its crackling top to shroud his face. He places it onto a cooling rack, and though it's not burnt, it's as black as squid ink, onto a cooling rack. As Rex and Cody come into the room with their hands over their noses and wide, terrified eyes, Obi-Wan wipes the clinging droplets of evaporated moisture off his beard.

It looks like the worst concoction any of them will ever put in their mouths. It's certainly not sweet , which she knew most desserts were meant to be. After its been cut and served on more cast-plast trays, Rex declares it “dinner, if dinner was made by a five-year-old Rodian who couldn’t reach the top of the counter,” though Obi-Wan, who’d been handed the largest and thickest slice, spitefully announces that it was “the best cake he’d ever eaten” as he visibly fights to swallow each morsel. Three minutes after Rex took his first bite, Cody takes one, then fakes an allergic reaction, excusing himself to “the medbay” which really means the ‘fresher for a round with toothpaste. Anakin simply gulps his thin sliver in three bites with a half-nauseous, half-gleeful expression, before looking to her expectantly. 

“It’s got protein,” he says, with a cajoling tone. 

“Ugh,” Ahsoka sighs, and concedes that since this was all her bright idea, gives in. The cake wiggles, somehow, on the fork when she raises it to her mouth. It tastes like salty, putrid ash with a hint of hard rocks masquerading as sweet fruit. It tastes like Anakin'd cooked the black beaches outside. 

It was absolutely, one-hundred percent, in the words of The Great Galactic Bake Off , a nice gesture, but extremely poor execution. 

Chapter Text

The suns of Tatooine hang above them, high in the midday sky and streaming light through the transparisteel on the ceiling, casting a shadow of heat and light in a ring around the sparse furnishings in the living space. On a handwoven bantha fur rug, the newest addition to the Lars’ homestead, rescued from underneath a vaporator, licks one outstretched paw in smooth, repetitive motions, body curlicued into a spiral. Didi, the small, but growing, dune marten is tube stretched and slim, more tail and pointed ears than body. He’s smaller than Luke’s old stuffed bantha, Tusky, that’s slept next to Luke for nigh on four years now and recently lost a jaborvine-rope horn to a fatal accident with the gasser and a spurt of flame. Padmé remembers Luke’s wide eyes and grasping, chubby baby fists when Anakin brought it home from his first trip out to Anchorhead with fondness, yet, sadly, sometimes she thinks of the other one, left to sit on a dresser, upright and untouched, except by sand and longing.  

The toy lays in a circle of steady sunbeam, abandoned, next to Didi. The light brightens the softer, tawny shades in Didi’s beige fur, the shots of silver jetting out from around his button nose to curl, like a heart, around the lower half of his face, and completely over his triangular ears, at the same time that it shadows the rings of dark, russet browns intermittent around his fluffy tail and paws. Almost like an effort, his mouth opens in a sniffling yawn, disrupting his whiskers with the displaced air, before he lays his head back down. 

He’s the only member of the Lars’ homestead currently content with the day. 

On the wind, the sound of pots and pans and Beru’s singing mix with R2’s increasingly loud trills and drift upwards. More distantly, she hears through the pourstone’s thin insulation the whirling, resounding efforts of Owen’s water extraction from a rapidly cycling vaporator as a rumbling drum beat, like the procession of celebration after the Battle of Naboo, Gungans and Nubians celebrating their victory together as one through the streets of Theed. In the courtyard, Ahsoka and Obi-Wan’s vibrating lightsabers cross, training, still training, for a war not yet won, and clatter up the stairs towards the open doorway.  

The living space is no more silent than the rest of the farm. 

“It itches,” Luke says, tone threatening to turn towards a high-pitched whine. He wriggles in Padmé’s grasp, head near to completing another escape from the confines of the layered orange bantha-fur tunic she attempts to wrestle him into. He’s got brown leggings underneath, the same ones he’s been wearing for the past few months, too big around the waist, and rolled up at the ankles. Tufts of blonde hair spike out from above the collar, the rest of his head hidden as he tries to duck out from underneath the fabric and make a run for it. 

With growing frustration from six failed tries, Padmé sighs, and shifts her knees across the floor, tugging at the shirt more firmly. “Luke, nunalino , it wouldn’t if you stopped moving.” Her pleas fall on deaf ears. Her son continues to wiggle, now more of a temperamental shaaklet than a little boy, as he next tries to curl up into a ball and roll outward with his knees. 

“No!” he answers, his voice high-pitched, and bouncing back to ring shrilly in her eardrums. No babysitting duty for Ryoo and Pooja had ever prepared Padmé for the realities of youngling rearing, especially when it came to their ability to careen sharp vocalisations through the peace of any silent, tranquil room. Once again, she sighs, deeply, and feels the tension like a stretched cord tighten in her stomach and across her upper chest and shoulder blades. She pulls back to cross her arms over her middle, while Anakin chuckles from his place lounging on the couch, one knee drawn up to rest his left foot underneath his right thigh, the other propped over the side of the furniture, avoiding the floor. His hair’s a mess of windswept curls from his early morning shift of moisture duty, and fans out against the hard, dark cushion of the worn couch, face turned towards them, while the japor wood legs creak ominously with every shift and movement. 

Padmé cranes her neck, her own hair tied back with a thin, brown headscarf into a messy bun of sprawling curls that brush against the top of her forehead as she slides her knees across the floor. Her eyes meet her husband’s with a fierce, tired glare. Luke’s cries become an increasing litany of nos and not gonna, you can’t make me , interspersed with papa papa papa , plaintive cries to turn his father to his side of the battle. He’s all elbows and knees as he sits up, knees crooked and drawn into a ball of drama and petulance, toes banging against the pourstone floor. Sand particles that no amount of technology can ever manage to sweep up brush over the floor to gather in a hazy line underneath the light flow through the sole window. 

She closes her eyes, and brings her right hand up to rub her tired temples. “Do you want to get your son into his costume, Ani?” she asks, and opens one eye to watch her husband’s own grow wide. He’s nervous, no doubt remembering the incident from three weeks ago when Anakin tried to get Luke to wear his protective, antiburn lotion, but which began and ended with their son’s claim that it was  “greasy, stinky, and bad,” and a heat rash of raised bumps caused by his premature and ill chosen act of rolling around in the sand just outside the homestead’s main entrance to rub the expensive cream away. The ingredients list was 60 percent woosha plant, 10 percent water, and 30 percent ver’aloo that grew in tropical climates. The woosha grew on Naboo, and glowed in the dark, and cost four credits at the florist there. 

She’s gilded her own homespun brown tunic with old, colourful bits of red cloth from clothes outgrown and too frayed to be useful. She’s attached them with tiny stitches to her back, but they flop limply, rather than stand upright like the petals of the millaflower that grew in the pastures near her nonna’s home in a bordering village outside Keren’s city limits. She’s got a light green scarf trailing down from the attached fabric, curled up like a stem and tied with a thin band of brown rope. As a child, Padmé loved to dress up in ostentatious, flowing gowns specially tailored to resemble the horticulture of Naboo (and, one time, a year before her term as queen, a sparkling waterfall) during the Festival of Nature. She’d taken significant joy in muddying the hems and holding up the skirts to gather berries and nuts with her family and agemates, that would decorate the elaborate rose petaled bread made together by each member of the family or community. After the main meal, Sola would get the two of them in trouble, more familiar with their father’s falsely shocked frown and their mother’s put out hands on hips flourish, when she liberated the specially roasted chastané nuts from their place in the cambylictus-shaped crystal—handed down from mother to daughter for six Naberrie generations. They’d smooshed them with sugared, flambeed duck egg fluff, chocolate ganache and ani’see biscuits underneath the garden’s temporary fire spirit tiny glowpanels, strung up to hang aloft like stars in the night. As Padmé got older, she’d joined her parents, sister, and nonna in the communal bread bake, accepted the tokens of food from laughing children, and wove crowns of yellow leaves from the wine broom tree, dangling cones of stone pine and blossomed blue and yellow petals from her nonna’s garden of ryoo flowers through her hair, singing off tune as she worked her piece of dough over the floured surface counter in the village’s community kitchen. 

“Luke, listen to your Mama,” Anakin says, as he moves off the couch to grasp their son around the waist, fingers tickling into his sides. Luke giggles, and claims that he smells like mould, which isn’t far from the truth. It’s the same now familiar smell that clings to Owen and Beru, to all of them, saturated permanently into their clothes from the methods of water processing and the unfragranced use of sonic laundry units that function for peak performance but not for nasal comfort. Anakin’s currently seeped in the dewdrop stench from this morning, not yet having taken the opportunity to sonic his skin of the sweat, sand, and remnants of stagnant scum from cleaning out the working parts of the machines keeping them all alive and solvent. “You loved it last year.” 

“Mama cried last year,” Luke says softly, as he settles back into Anakin’s arms with a pout, the tunic fully pulled down. “She cried and cried and cried forever . All night! I felt it!”

They share a look over their son’s head; Anakin’s eyes are sympathetic, for he, too, had felt and heard and seen her cry until her eyes were sore, rubbed raw and dry when she could bare no more effort to waste moisture, but the longing for Leia, her daughter, still there. She’d stared at the wall all night, no more rested than Anakin, who’d held her hand and rubbed circles over her back, both of them silent, while Luke slept in a loose-limbed sprawl between them, lost in their own thoughts about Leia’s childhood on Alderaan. The mountains there shine, snowcapped spires and peaks in the bright sun, while here the dunes and endless sand and heat paint fake murals of lakes that evaporate the closer you draw near. 

There are trees here, small ones, appearing every so often in small clusters. It’s the same japor wood as her necklace Ani gave to her when she was fourteen. It could be whittled down to the ivory white underbelly to make furniture, trinkets, tokens, and tools for slaves and farmers and the poor of Tatooine. There’s fights with the Tuskens, or so she hears, but has never seen; angry moisture farmers and slaves, and equally angry nomads, all clashing for scant resources on a planet so tightly controlled by the malignant Hutt crime families the Empire can’t manage to  get a foothold on the planet. 

Flowers are an even rarer sight here. Padmé’s not seen a bushel or a bouquet or elegant arrangement of buds since her flat in 500 Republica, and she often dwells wistfully on the Royal Gardens of Theed and the sweet fragrance of rominaria flowers, or the tangled obsidian eel weeds caught in the crevices of rock in the Gallo Mountains. They’d caught on her fingers and stained her skin a dull pitch, the day she went rock climbing, resting at the end of the day with a glass of blossom juice clutched in stinging, cracked palms, underneath the peaked roof of the Summit Farm Blossom Winery and listening to local folk tales of the Crystal Caves. 

Luke’s never seen a flower or wine or blossom juice. He’s never seen mountains or lakes, outside of the picture book Obi-Wan had acquired off-world. Once, Owen and Beru had paid an exorbitant amount of credits for three stems of limp orange desert suncups on their wedding day. Padmé looks at them almost every day, held tight in Beru’s left fist in the holograph above the mantle of the fireplace in the living space, that’s used when the nights dropped to a chill or to ward off bugs and scavengers desperate for food. 

Padme reaches out to rest her hand on her son’s. “Mama won’t cry this year, nunalino ,” she tells him. “I pinky promise.” 

That’s a lie, too. 

By Luke’s age, Padmé had cast off her training floats to swim in the lake bordering Varykino. Her toes had curled in the wet sand, the grit sloshing and scraping through the spaces between each one, hearing her mother call her out of the water with the promise of Yoboshrimp Noodle Salad and shuura tarts drizzled with sapflower infused honey. By Luke’s age, Padmé’s baby fat still rounded her tummy like a blubbery shaak, hidden underneath newly bought clothes whenever she outgrew them. Her shoes filled shelves in her closet, shoes of all types, for all activities, broken in quickly and discarded without thought. By Luke’s age, Padmé’d seen two different planets in the core, tagging along on her father’s refugee missions. 

As Anakin assures their son that Mama’s fine, she’s just full to bursting with excitement for the Festival of Nature, and that they’ll both be fine , and they’ll tuck him in with a bedtime story tonight, the one about the ghost voices in the wind, right in the space between them on the two beds forced together to make one big sleeping spot, Padmé nods along, only half-attuned to the gentle bargaining and biscuit promises. She feels her smile tremble, and she thinks about the dough rising downstairs, made from wheat painstakingly grown in Beru’s hydroponic garden, kept aside and untouched for the occasion, and the fruits Anakin and Obi-Wan had brought back, dried, from the last trip off planet. 

The meal will be more, this year, but still not the same. Not the one from her childhood. The childhood she still wishes, bitterly and not-so-secretly, that her children could have had. Though she's long come to terms with their life on Tatooine, out of necessity and love for her husband and family, and gotten used to its unique rigours and hardships, she hasn't shaken the loss of her daughter.

Right now, at Luke’s age, Leia might be swimming, hiking trails and picking wild berries in the mountains, and running through the palace gardens. Leia may have a rounded tummy, her cheeks chubby with baby fat, not gaunt with hunger. Padmé’s wrists have grown thinner than ever, her collar bones prominent, and her ankles and hip bones sharp, skin thinned like plastiwrap and tanner than before but still prone to sunburn, stretched over her bones. There’s a few more freckles on her cheeks and neck and hands, left from bouts of tan days that fade with the coming winter spell of slightly less heat exposure, which flares again, hot and oppressive, every year. Her gilded tunic hangs on her, a bit like a gown on a mannequin, without form until it's tied, cinched with bantha hide, around her thin waist. 

“Mama?” She startles, her son’s voice breaking her from her forlorn musings. He twirls, and the newly placed hat shaped like a stem, brown as his pants, flop about with the motion. Next to him, Anakin looks at her, soft and steady, knowingly, always attuned to the ways their family’s emotions swirl in the Force. “How do I look?” 

Her smile straightens, her back, too, and she bops him on the nose. “Like a perfect string noodle gourd!” 

“Yay!” he says, mood now turned to enthusiasm in the way only younglings manage. He bounces off to grasp Tusky, and carelessly wakes Didi from his midday nap, before he runs down the stairs calling out for Nonno, and Auntie ‘Soka and Auntie Beru, eager to show off his new costume. 

As soon as he’s out of sight, Padme’s entire body goes numb, and Anakin’s arms wrap around her, holding her close, as both of them stand in the same moment of loss, over and over again. The room’s hot, open to the air so that the cooling units battle with the outside. Beads of sweat run from her hairline and into his tunic. She breathes out a trembling sigh, nose pressed against his chest, before the moment passes and she pulls away, and brushes a curl away from his forehead. “You should shower,” she tells him. “Don’t think you’re getting out of wearing a costume, Ani.” 

He smiles, and kisses her forehead. “Wouldn’t dream of it, angel.” Then, he follows their son down the stairs to make his way to the ‘fresher, and Padmé goes to sit on the couch, to breathe in and out, steady and with purpose, as she composes herself. Then, she leaves the room to rejoin her sister-in-law and prepare the festival meal. 

Inside the kitchen, Beru emerges out of a thick cloud of accumulated steam from the small pot of boiling water they've put away to cook noodles made from a ground down mix of tuber flour and vaschean rye. The gray-streaked blonde waves her arms, brushing the steam up towards the evaporating filter Anakin installed on the overhead durasteel panel above the gasser, which will filter down and accumulate in the plasticast bottle attached to it over time. Later, they'll use this same pot of water to soak the soil in the hydroponic garden, or what is left of it. After all, they need to drink, and root infused water is better than no water. 

She’s dressed in her own costume, an old homespun dress a few sizes too big, so that it sits on her oddly as it pulls downwards from her collar bones and shoulders. It’s green, now, dyed with an illegal substance acquired by Ani's pirate acquaintance in a heist Padmé knows involved an old exploding landmine left behind after a Seperatist retreat during the Clone Wars. Beru’s tied white ribbons around her neck, wrists, and the sides of the gown. It’s a sad attempt at a water lily, but they’ve done their best with the meagre resources, and the other woman looks lovely, her hair bobbing just underneath her ears, cut short to reduce maintenance time, and to keep it from getting caught in the inner workings of the dangerous vaporators. There’s the beginnings of laugh lines around her mouth, skin made brittle from persistent exposure to the twin suns, and around the corners of her eyes, which turn to greet hers as Padmé goes to inspect the main attraction for the Festival of Nature. 

“Luke dressed?” Beru asks, stirring the mixture of tezirett seeds, lentils, whole dried chilies, mushrooms and sidi gourd stew that’s been bubbling in blue milk yogurt for the past five hours. There’s dark circles underneath her eyes, and Padmé knows she’s had another disappointment this morning. The thin walls of the homestead hide little from its inhabitants, and the bedrooms are right next to one another. For all her in-laws efforts, their hopes grow smaller each year, and, equally, Beru dotes on her nephew, to Padmé’s suppressed irritation, but also gratitude. “He was screaming like a night ghostie about it.” 

Padmé hums, and then says, “Luke is. Dressed and ready for his debut as the cutest gourd this side of Tatooine.” The dough is in two bowls, puffed up and golden, enriched with nuna eggs bartered from a neighbour, and rising like a soft, malleable pillow. It bounces back when she pokes it with one finger. 

“Or any side,” Beru jokes back, and offers her a taste of the stew. It’s slightly too spicy, but the sourness of the yogurt evens it out. On Coruscant, Beru would have been snatched as a private chef by any number of senators and aristocrats.

Padmé laughs, and for a second, it's like she’s back on Naboo, with Sola and her daughters, Mama and Papa, her Nonna, and Sabé and all her handmaidens. Back home, the noodles are always green, touched with spinach and seaweed and edible kelps, flavoured with shots of scalefish sauce and olive oil, dusted with sprinkles of hard, sharp shaak cheese and drowning in peppery tomato sauce. There’s cubes of shaak and nerf cheese, piles of grapes and olives, and bountiful rows of amphoras filled with luscious wines. Back home, Luke and Leia could run through the thorny grapevines of a nearby vineyard, like Ryoo and Pooja. 

With Ryoo and Pooja.

 Here, though, there’s ardees and tuber noodles and a sauce of chilies and brown, but the bread—that’s what truly matters. Playfully, Padmé flicks a bit of dough, scraps that cling to the side of one of the bowls, towards her sister-in-law, who sweeps it back towards her. 

“Ahsoka and Obi-Wan have agreed to be trees. Again. So they don’t have to try coordinating new costumes with Ani,” Padmé says, and lifts up a bowl to take it upstairs. Anakin’s showers never take more than five minutes or so, sonic efficient and not nearly as luxurious as water. Briefly, she once again longs for a bath, but shakes it off as soon as the nagging thought comes. 

“The spotty ones?” Beru asks, and lowers the flame on the gasser to help her transport the crockery. Padme nods in response. They emerge into the shadowed, but still well-lit, dining area, looking outwards to the circular courtyard. “Well, as long as Ahsoka doesn’t try to help with the bread,” Beru says, in the same joking tone they all use whenever the concept of Ahsoka, human cooking, and help come together into one sentence. 

Mid-swing, Ahsoka stops, lightsaber just short of an arch, and turns to glare at them, but Beru and Padmé shamelessly wave and smile back at her. They’ve all heard tales of the cake. Obi-Wan, taking advantage of her moment of inattentiveness, slides across the sand in a twirl, his own vibroblade meeting hers. She growls, and curses, returning to their mock fight. Behind them, Anakin comes up from the underground ‘fresher, hair fluffy and sand free, dressed in his own outfit. 

It’s his standard, simple tunic, but he’s attached spotted, washed-out white fabric that resembles, at a squint, the same type of spots that grow on the bark of the whipasp trees, that cluster with their roots in a tangle, three-by-three. He holds a yellow hat in his right fist, the same colour as the leaves of the tree. In the living area, two more hats sit in wait for Obi-Wan and Ahsoka, two more trees for the small, metaphorical colony of whipasp. In the height of summer, she and Sola would go wild cherry picking in the groves, looking for the smaller fruit trees within the crowd of looming, sprawling trunks. 

“All ready?” Anakin asks. He places the hat down on the chair next to him, careful to keep it away from the work surface. Then, he grabs the folded screen, translucent, but meant to keep away specks and drifts of wayward sand, and arranges it between the curves of the open doorway so that a minimal amount mixes with the flour as Padmé sprinkles it onto the table. In the corner, R2 bleeps out a question, and Anakin tells him that of course no flour would end up in his servos. 

“Where’s Luke?” Padmé and Beru ask at the same time. Beru looks down at the table, beginning to portion out the dough into equal parts until there are ten portions, all waiting to be shaped. At the end of the table, the bowl of dried pallies, cherries, and prunes rests. Usually, there are ten fruits, but here there are three. Usually, the portions of dough are coloured by gourds or fruits or spices, but here there’s only a precious, small amount of root ginger and cynnamon kneaded into the mixture earlier in the day. Usually, the bread is a rose, but here Padmé’s changed the design to accommodate the lack of available ingredients and resources. 

Anakin sits, and frowns. “Bothering Owen, I think.” Counting out the dough portions, he asks R2 to go outside and retrieve their son, and Owen, too, if the droid can pry the man away from his vaporators. From the courtyard, the sound of lightsabers retreating into their hilts add a chorus to R2’s litany of bleeps and beeps, complaints, Padmé thinks, or demands. She can never quite tell with the tenacious astromech. 

“Do you need help?” Obi-Wan asks, as he sticks his head through the cracks of the screen to look at them all. His beard is damp with sweat, and sand threatens to become a coat over his tunic. 

Anakin eyes him warily and shakes his head. “Go shower, old man,” he teases. “Tell Snips to, too. We’ll do the hard work.” In the background, Ahsoka protests, but Obi-Wan rolls his eyes, and leaves them with a wave.

As they wait for Luke, Padmé plays with the edges of her sleeves, rolling them up and down her arms, folding them into the crooks of her elbows to keep them away from the dough and flour, then back down again, impatient. Anakin plays with the glove on his mechno hand, always attentive to the dangers of foodstuffs near the gears. Beru bites her lip, and then the sound of a bouncing, gleeful child hits them all, as Owen warns him to watch his feet on the way down the stairs. R2 follows, because Padmé hears Ahsoka say “Artooie.” Quickly, she embroils the droid in a complex conversation and Padmé watches the Torgruta's outline through the translucent screen meander about in the courtyard while Obi-Wan showers.

Within seconds, Luke zips seamlessly into the dining area, cries of “Mama, Papa, Auntie!” on his lips. Owen follows after him, and his heavy boots thunk even into the sand, and then onto the pourstone floor as he siddles, awkwardly, through the crack between the screen and the outside. 

“Your costume’s on the bed,” Beru says, as she reminds her husband of his lackluster participation in the festival thus far, since the costume’s sat in the bedside chest for the past three years. “You promised Luke, remember?” 

Though Obi-Wan and Ahsoka and Anakin find her Naboo traditions of masks and costumes and adornments quaint and interesting—Beru, too, in that sweet, accommodating way of hers—Owen’s torn between disapproval for extraneous extravagance and mild confusion as to the number of festivals and specific costumes attached to each one. He’s a bit of a grump, but always drawn in by the promise of food and a Tatooinian sense of familial duty. Luke, too, who’s quick to provide the wibble face; his big eyes and pout are so effective, even the most dangerous bounty hunters oddly nicknamed Nonna are helpless to resist. 

Luke turns the wibble face to his Uncle now, looking over Anakin’s shoulder from his new place on her husband’s lap. Around their wiggling son, Anakin begins to tap at the dough, to push out any air bubbles and, quickly, matches pace with Beru. 

With a wavering frown, Owen says, “Did I?” 

“That you did,” Anakin responds, an amused smirk on his lips, but Luke’s loud cry of Uncle Owen, please please please drowns out his contribution to peer pressure.  

“Alright, womp rat, I’m going,” he answers, reluctantly capitulating to childish demands. He ruffles the top of Luke’s head as he moves to leave, and his index and middle fingers manage to displace the hat. Anakin catches it with the Force before it can connect with the floor, and floats it back to its original spot. 

“Do you want to help?” Padmé asks, surprising herself with eagerness to include him. He’s family, too, and this is a family ritual, though Obi-Wan can’t shape dough to save a life and is best left to sampling the results, while Ahsoka’s expressly banned. 

Owen lingers, and Padmé waits expectantly, then he sighs. “I—” 

“He can’t shape anymore than Obi-Wan can,” Beru says. 

Owen scowls. “I can shape better than Benobi.” 

“No, you can’t!” someone else responds. It’s Obi-Wan, coming up from the ‘fresher. He sagely informs Ahsoka it's her turn, to which the girl sarcastically responds that she couldn’t tell that on her own, thank you, before she disappears, just as Owen retorts that he’ll prove he’s the better sculptor of the two. Padmé meets her husband’s gaze, mutually rolling their eyes as the men descend into another petty argument. 

Beru shakes her head with exasperation, then asks, “So, how does this go again?” 

For the next hour, Padmé sings in the dialect of home about the Tree of Life, the spirits in the water, and the fruits of the earth. Luke sings along, stumbling off-key, and so does Anakin, his voice low and smooth, fluent in the sounds of her native tongue. Beru, after a while, hums along to the melody, the words foreign to her still, harsh consonants at the start with rolling vowels at the end. They roll and craft and piece together the ten portions, different petals and shrubbery shapes embedded with the fruits, until it resembles a sprouting berry bush. Luke leans over the table, delicately placing dried fruit into dimples of dough, and Padmé feels the space between her and the table is like an empty void. She pictures Leia, brunette like her, nose like Ani's, across from her brother, thumbprint imprints left behind from imported haz’ nuts pressed into curled sides. 

At some point, Owen and Obi-Wan come in to join them. They’re donning their respective costumes, and sit as far from each other as possible in the small space. Contrary to earlier claims, they watch the three of them fashion the bread, and provide vocal support, if not helping hands. Luke’s got a huge smile, itchy wool apparently forgotten, as he takes in all the costumes. He points, proudly, at the jarronto toadstool atop Owen’s head, which covers his greying hair, the blue spotted hat as much as he was willing to concede to the masquerade. 

Anakin takes the finished dough down to the gasser to cook, and once it's in, they allow Ahsoka to join them. “You’d think I burned down the kitchen,” she complains. “All I did was give you stuff for a cake.” 

“That wasn’t stuff,” Anakin answers, as Luke jumps from his lap to Ahsoka’s, then decides he’s not content there, and ends up with Padmé. She wraps her arms around him and rests her head on the top of his hat, while he sifts through the mostly empty bowls of dried fruit and nuts, and shoves the last bits into his mouth. “That was random stuff in a tray. Did you learn nothing from The Great Galactic Bake Off , Snips?” 

Ahsoka groans, and in an exaggerated movement, grabs the tips of her montrals. “Of course. You made us watch it enough. Not my fault all your foodstuffs seem the same.” 

“The what?” Owen asks, no doubt having never seen the show. She doesn’t even know if it aired this far out into the Outer Rim. Still, Padmé’s surprised it's taken this long to come up, given her husband’s obsession with the holoseries after she’d shown it to him on their wedding night. 

Another thing lost to the Clone Wars, she thinks, with a twinge of nostalgia. Anakin turns wide eyes to his stepbrother, and promises solemnly he’ll figure out how to hatchrun quality holo entertainment for them all. 

“I’m sure there are better uses of your time,” Obi-Wan responds, but it sounds reluctant. She knows he was just as obsessed with the show as her husband, though he continues to claim it’s simply for the purposes of study and gastronomic science. 

Ahsoka chimes in to add the discourse of the best in holoseries dramas and competition series, while Beru and Owen look to the trio with familiar expressions of confusion. Luke wiggles, and tugs on her ear, then asks her what they’re fighting about. 

“Drama, nunolino ,” she tells him. “Your Papa and Nonno are the most dramatic men in the galaxy.” 

“Oh,” Luke answers, nodding seriously, bottom lip caught between his top teeth. From downstairs, the smell of bursting fruit and baking bread begins to filter up the stairs. Across the galaxy, Leia might be asking Breha a question, just like Luke. The pangs grow again, but Padmé pushes them down, determined to make this a happy occasion for her son. In their small corner of the galaxy, the Festival of Nature ends late that night the same as any other time-honoured family party: with bickering, empty plates and full bellies (a rare treat out in the desert), a crashed youngling, complaints about the overwhelming smell of incense sticks in lieu of scented candles, and tired adults crowded around half-full mugs of the finest of alcoholic beverages Tatooine has to offer. 

Eventually, Owen and Beru head off to bed, stumbling drunkenly to the main quarters of the moisture farm. Obi-Wan drifts, too, after the third mug or so, and falls asleep with his head in his palm against the table. Ahsoka pokes him with her foot, while Anakin takes their son to bed. Padmé pats Ahsoka’s shoulder, then follows her husband to the guest bedroom that’s not quite theirs . In the corner, Didi sleeps on his back on top of R2's domed head. Luke’s in a ball at the far right side of the bed, and Anakin sits, upright, in the middle, waiting for her. His eyes are red-rimmed, more alert and sober than Padmé feels, and she curls into him, shudders, and limply hangs her head against his shoulder, both prepared for another long, sleepless night.