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Keeping a fire going in the daytime was still a novelty, but Annileen dutifully tended to it, the heat of it a familiar comfort. Intellectually, of course, she’d known that Tatooine had a hot climate, but it had still been a surprise to find out what the rest of the galaxy seemed to consider a comfortable temperature. The university covered lodging expenses, but that just meant they felt they could stick their nose into how Annileen set the thermal controls in her apartment, and she’d gotten several notices already about “reasonable usage”.
She’d considered telling them where they could stick those notices, but as tempting as it was, she didn’t actually want to jeopardize her place in this course, so she kept her mouth shut and turned the thermo to the maximum “acceptable” temperature, and turned to the fireplace for the rest.
With the fire taken care of for the moment, she then turned her attention to dinner prep, and once that was done, she could finally get back to her coursework.
Even without the store, she was still just as busy as ever, always juggling all the work that needed to be done. There were still people to feed, rooms to keep clean, finances to manage, and of course, kids to wrangle.
Speaking of her kids, she could hear voices outside the front door. The words were indistinct, but she didn’t need to make those out to know it was an argument between Jabe and Kallie. As usual.
She turned back to her work, hoping to get just a tiny bit further before noise and chaos filled the space.
The door opened.
“...let me see,” Kallie said. “She only gave it to you because she ran into you first, if I’d been there…”
“And you weren’t,” Jabe said. “Besides, even I haven’t looked at it yet; I’m not that stupid to just open it where anyone can see.”
That caught Annileen’s attention.
“You’d better not have brought any contraband in this house again,” she said, looking up from her coursework. “Haven’t I got enough to worry about without you getting in trouble with the law?”
“It’s just old news printouts,” Jabe said, pulling out a folder. He went to set it down on the table, but Kallie snatched it out of his hands. Jabe scowled at her.
“Oldest first,” Kallie said, and pulled at the clasp to open it.
Annileen sighed.
“Of course,” she said. “Just old news printouts, that for some reason you aren’t just reading on a datapad like a normal person. Oh wait! They’re printouts because you can’t find them on the holonet. Because they’re contraband.”
“It’ll be fine, mom,” Jabe said, trying to get some of the flimsi printouts away from Kallie without damaging them.
“What if I’d had company over?” Annileen said, standing up to go check on the cooking. “And then you two barged in here with your printouts, and I’d have to explain that my children are a couple of smugglers?”
Kallie rolled her eyes this time. “I don’t think they’d care,” she said, not even glancing up as Annileen walked by, “none of your friends like the Empire much.”
“No one likes the Hutts, either, but antagonizing them just lands you dead or worse,” Annileen said.
On Tatooine, there hadn’t been much cause to pay attention to the Republic or Empire or what have you. Now that Annileen and her children were out and about in the galaxy, it was a little more relevant, but it was relevant in the way that the Hutts were – they set the rules, and you just hoped to escape their notice.
Kallie and especially Jabe didn’t quite see it that way, though. They’d fallen in with friends who were a little more ambitious, and more trouble than Annileen wanted to find. Figures that even after leaving Tatooine, her children still seemed determined to find ways to get themselves killed.
There was only so much Annileen could do about it, though. She’d hoped that this exobiology program, hopping from planet to planet, would deter them getting too caught up in any local trouble, but it didn’t do much good when a lot of the dissidents were among Annileen’s own classmates. Most of the students being closer to Kallie and Jabe’s age than Annileen’s, it was natural that they’d make friends. Annileen just wished it didn’t bring her so many worries. For now, it was contraband, hiding and passing around things and information that the Empire didn’t want people to have. But she doubted it would stay that way, and even if it did, there was still risk. The Calwells were storekeepers, not smugglers. They didn’t have experience in those kinds of goods.
But Kallie was quickly approaching adulthood, and Jabe only a year behind her. Annileen had come to realize she couldn’t keep them safe forever. At some point, they were going to have to be responsible for themselves.
She just hoped they managed it without getting themselves killed.
Annileen continued cooking, just listening to her kids continuing to go through the illicit news articles behind her, and hoping that their roughhousing didn’t end up with her datapad as a causality. She probably shouldn’t have left it at the table, but it was too late now.
She heard the occasional comment on a news story, speculation of why the Empire removed it, and vague noises of interest – after all, they’d never had much reliable access to outside news on Tatooine. There was a lot to catch up on.
Annileen heard Kallie draw a sharp intake of breath, and what was probably the folder hit the floor. She rolled her eyes, wondering what Jabe had done to get it away from her now, but not too concerned about it.
“Is that…?” Jabe said, his tone strange. Annileen mentally revised her assessment of the situation as she continued to stir the food.
Kallie just made a wordless noise in response.
“It’s got to be, right?” Jabe continued. “There, the name...Mom, you’ve got to come see this!”
“Don’t you bring me into your smuggling operations,” Annileen said. “I don’t want any part of it! I’m cooking dinner.”
“Mom,” Kallie said, her voice strained. “It’s Ben.”
What?
Dinner forgotten, Annileen went to go see. Kallie handed her the piece of flimsi without another word.
It was a news article, of course. Annileen barely took in any of the words, as her attention was immediately drawn to the picture.
It really did look like Ben, his same plain-robed appearance clashing against the armored soldiers that surrounded him. And there, under the photo, was the caption:
Jedi Master and High General Obi-Wan Kenobi and his troops, the 212 th Attack Battalion.
Kenobi was a common enough name. But that face, and clothes, and demeanor, as much as it came through the picture – that was unmistakably Ben Kenobi.
Annileen sank into her chair, still gripping the flimsi.
She’d heard of Jedi. In two ways, really. The first was in the occasional stories from travelers passing through. It was hard to connect the man she knew with those – he’d been strange, and evasive, and compelling, but still...just a man. Hardly the fearsome sorcerer or supernatural mystic of those travelers’ tales. Then again, hadn’t Kallie exaggerated plenty in her stories of how Ben had saved her? It was only too likely that the tall tales of wanderers had done the same.
The second way that she’d heard of Jedi, was the Empire’s bounty on their heads.
Now that, she had no issue connecting with Ben in her mind. She’d suspected he was running from something; she knew he was deeply sad about something, too. That he was a fugitive from the Empire explained a lot about his secrecy and discomfort with attention, and why he would come to Tatooine. Why he couldn’t leave with Annileen.
She took one more look at the picture on the flimsi.
And then threw it into the fire.
“Mom!”
“Listen to me,” Annileen said. “Ben did us a great favor. Did us a lot of favors. And we aren’t gonna repay that by bringing attention to him that he doesn’t want. You hear me?”
Kallie nodded, slowly. Jabe just stared at Annileen.
“We don’t talk about Ben,” Annileen continued. “We don’t say anything about him at all. Even to your friends, got it? You see any more pictures of him, you don’t react. You don’t know him. You’ve never seen him. Certainly not on Tatooine.”
Her children reluctantly agreed.
Annileen turned back to the fire, and watched as the last pieces of the flimsi crumbled and fell apart into ashes.
It was another goodbye.