Work Text:
“What’s wrong with Aayla?” Anakin asks, age twelve and still somewhat in awe of the older padawan he’d been introduced to almost immediately upon arriving at the temple. He cranes his head, but he’s still too short to catch more than a glimpse across the caf. “I thought we were going to Dex’s when she got back so you and Mister Quin could, you know, get nasty.”
“Mission gone wrong.” Obi-Wan’s voice is terse and clipped, stiffer than Anakin has ever wanted to hear him. “I don’t think Dex’s is going to be on the schedule until she and Quinlan have had some time to relax.”
“Oh. That sucks,” Anakin says, and leaves it at that.
--
Anakin sees the bruises on Aayla’s neck, too familiar by half. He sees the chafed-raw, still-healing rashes at her wrists. He sees the pain behind her smile, haunted and flinching whenever someone moves too fast.
“Was she a prisoner, or…?” Anakin trails off, looking up at Obi-Wan, pleading in a way he doesn’t quite understand.
“I don’t think it’s my place to say,” Obi-Wan hedges, which is as good as confirmation.
“Slavers,” Anakin mutters, and he knows the injuries well enough to guess that it was at least a week. “Does… does that happen often?”
Obi-Wan is quiet, for far too long, and then says, “Not to padawans. Not usually for more than a day or two, when it does happen. Sometimes knights go undercover, or senior padawans in training to become Shadows—a friend of mine had such a mission—but no, it’s not often that it happens unexpectedly, or lasts for very long before a person can escape.”
Anakin is quiet, trying to hear all the unsaid things, trying to dig through to what might have happened to Aayla, a blue, female twi'lek in early adulthood, and then Obi-Wan says, “we have mind healers for these incidents. It doesn’t fix everything, but it should help her.”
“Does Mister Quin know how to help?”
Obi-Wan grimaces. “He’s… one of the people who went on such undercover missions as I mentioned. He’s very well-positioned to help, I think.”
“So he knows about the healers,” Anakin says. They hadn’t helped him, much, but he thinks it’ll be better for Aayla, who did at least grow up among the Jedi. They know where she started, and how her brain works. “Does everyone?”
Obi-Wan shrugs. “Anyone who’s ever had a mission go so poorly that a mind healer is needed is directed that way. Crechemasters know, and teachers. I think anyone who’s made it to knighthood is aware, and has visited at least once. I had to attend from the earliest days of my own apprenticeship, for… well, a situation on Bandomeer.”
Anakin hadn’t known that. He hasn’t heard that story. “What happened on Bandomeer?”
The silence is… painful, almost. Anakin almost takes the question back.
“Forced labor,” Obi-Wan finally says, not meeting Anakin’s eyes. “There was an explosive collar. It was only about a week, but it was enough to require mind healer involvement, since I wasn’t much older than you.”
Obi-Wan was a slave.
Not for long, but… oh.
Anakin steps up closer to his Master and hugs him from the side. Obi-Wan’s hand lands, tentative, on his head, patting him. “Padawan?”
“You could have told me,” Anakin said. “It would have… I mean… I get it.”
“As a point of connection, it would have been a weak one,” Obi-Wan defends. “It was a long time ago, and for such a short period that I felt it would be cruel and presumptive to even mention it.”
Obi-Wan is an utterly baffling creature. Anakin tells him this.
The man himself just sighs and ruffles his hair again.
--
Anakin leverages himself up onto the slightly-too-high couch next to Aayla, makes himself small, and waits. Her eyes are fixed on Obi-Wan and Quinlan, and Anakin matches her. He tries to match his breathing to hers, too.
The two older Jedi disappear behind the little wall that cuts off the kitchenette from the living room, bickering.
Anakin waits, and nothing happens, and so he waits some more. There’s a sudden muffling to the noise from the kitchen, the hum of the little energy shield that keeps scents and smoke trapped in the one room, along with sound and whatever tastes may carry on the air.
Aayla shifts, just enough to press her upper arm to his shoulder.
She still doesn’t speak, so Anakin decides to go first. “I was owned by Gardulla the Hutt until she gambled me and my mom away when I was three.”
He feels the stiffening next to him, because Aayla knows what he’s getting at when he mentions the Hutts.
“I don’t remember much of it, but she had a… a pleasure garden,” Anakin says, and licks his lips as he keeps his eyes fixed on the table ahead of them. “Mom was just a maid, but I knew a few of the pleasure slaves. Some of the younger ones would babysit me, I think. I still get nightmares, sometimes, if I smell certain perfumes, because I could feel how scared and angry they were, when they wore Gardulla’s favorites, even if I didn’t know why.”
Aayla’s breath hitches. “It wasn’t like that.”
She doesn’t elaborate for a few long moments, and Anakin takes the initiative to wrap his arms around one of hers, hugging her bicep. He leans in, and is careful to keep his grip loose enough that she doesn’t feel trapped. She’s better than him, older and stronger and more trained, and could get out without trouble anyway. Anakin knows the illusion is more important.
“They didn’t—they didn’t touch me, not like that,” Aayla finally manages. “Kept saying I’d sell for more if I wasn’t… I mean, they beat me, kept me in Force Suppressants until Master Vos caught up, but…”
“They threatened it?” Anakin guesses.
She nods, utterly silent. He looks up, and sees her eyes shining. He thinks it might help to say more. “Mom and I were useful to Watto as mechanics. She was really good at bookkeeping, and keeping the place clean and all that, and I raced, sometimes. He was too lazy to really beat us, and making us tired or hurt with other stuff usually wasn’t worth the loss in credits from our usual duties, so he just took away food, but sometimes he, um, threatened to rent out my mom for the night.”
Aayla flinches.
“She had to explain what that meant when I was seven,” Anakin continues. “It’s how I learned I don’t have a dad, um, like in blood. She had to do that sort of thing at Gardulla’s, sometimes, but none of the timing matches.”
He trails off, realizing he’s gotten well away from the main topic now, and says, “I guess I just want you to know that I’ve already heard the worst stuff slavers do, and I lived with enough of it that I won’t judge you about whatever happened.”
“You’re twelve,” Aayla says, voice rough. “You’re too young to be playing confidante for an adult’s trauma’s.”
“Nineteen isn’t really an adult,” Anakin mutters. “I’m just, you know, I understand it. Some of it. I grew up with all this. Some of the girls on Slave’s Row got pregnant at, like, fourteen because of it.”
Aayla turns to look at him, finally, and her eyes are full of horror. “Please tell me they didn’t have to carry to term. Or–or an older family member could handle the—”
“Miscarriages,” Anakin says. “Um, really common. Sometimes fatal for the mom, too. Tatooine didn’t really have… medical care.”
Eyes squeezing shut, Aayla falls back against the couch. “Kriff.”
“That’s a bad word.”
“You know worse.”
Anakin grins at her, and moves to loop her arm around his neck. He leans in, head on her shoulder, and closes his eyes. She doesn’t push him away.
They sit in silence, and then finally, she says, “They didn’t rape me, but they… grabbed. A lot. And if I tried to fight back, they… there was this electrocution thing, in the cuffs. My entire body seized, and I felt like I was on fire. They figured out it would be easier to control me if they threatened other people for my disobedience, and I just… I had to just stand there and take it.”
“Do you want me to move away?” Anakin asks.
“No,” she says, nearly a whisper. “You’re safe. You’re… young, and small, and familiar.”
All good things, all important. Anakin knows this.
It’s why he’s better at this than Quinlan might be. Anakin’s very nonthreatening, even with his power in the Force. He’s huggable.
And Aayla might be older than him, but this kind of pain is something Anakin knows. Not the sexual part, obviously, but ‘just stand there and take it’ applied to plenty of things in a slave’s life. The dirty looks. The beatings. The heat.
Aayla’s experience was completely different from Anakin’s, for a million reasons, but he still knows that life better than anyone else here. It doesn’t matter that she was harassed in ways he wasn’t, that she was a prisoner instead of being put to work, that they kept her pretty instead of marring her with bruises before auction.
It doesn’t matter that she was an adult looking at a lifetime of sexual slavery and true torture before Master Vos came through, while Anakin had been a child in abject poverty working on droids for scraps, and had always had his mother. It didn’t matter that Aayla had only been in physical chains for a week, and Anakin had lived nearly a decade with a bomb nestled under skin and muscle, so fused to the bone that, even with the actual explosive removed, the healers hadn’t risked trying to pull out the casing.
Because Anakin understands the helplessness, the rage, the bitterness. He knows the survivor’s guilt, as Obi-Wan had once described it, for when others got hurt and one could only be thankful it wasn’t them. He knows the way a slave can’t just work through the feelings to peace, meditate the putrid hate away, because there is no safety in which to do so. He knows those dark, ugly feelings that pulled a person to the Dark, because he spent all his time having to deal with them.
“It sucks,” Anakin says, instead of telling her any of that. “No matter what it looks like.”
“Yeah,” Aayla says. The tip of her lek wraps around Anakin’s wrist, friendly and a touch desperate. “It does.”