Chapter Text
A gust of wind over the veranda brings with it a cream colored ball of fluff, which leaps over the railings and onto the windowsill. Upon closer inspection, the ball of fluff turns out to be a cat— an inordinately pretty cat, in fact, sitting serenely and peering up at Anakin with blue, blue eyes.
Anakin, who’s on the way back from the fresher, stops dead in his tracks, and stares at his visitor. He blinks, then blinks again. He stares at the cat until it yowls unceremoniously, which hastens him to the window to draw it open.
See, the thing is, Anakin isn’t… experienced, with animals like this. He’d never been the kind of youngling to coo over a tooka or a baby fathier. And in his memory, creatures (of Tatooine) are never gentle things, even when they aren’t big enough to eat you whole. So it’s only natural that Anakin has no idea what to do with the quiet animal, who examined him with eyes that penetrated to the bottom of his soul.
“Er, hello.” he tries.
The cat leans forward to sniff his shirt, wrinkles its nose, and twists away from him entirely. It instead leaps down from the windowsill and saunters right into the house, and Anakin is so stupefied by its audacity that he doesn’t recover until the cat is slipping through the gap of his doorway.
He lets out a yelp of panic.
“Wait. Wait, no no no where are you going?”
He runs to the workroom’s door, beyond which many a hazardous equipment could instantly kill a small animal like that. Besides, no one goes into Anakin’s workroom, not even his wife. It’s where he lives to exist alone with the other hopeless cases made of (at least part) steel plates and wiring. He had just been working on the tricky motivator circuit he brought back from the shop, and it is still lying on the work table, delicate innards all spilled out and absolutely not meant to be poked or sniffed at or swiped off onto the floor.
From the doorway, he frantically looks around for the fluffball, only to find that it has already leapt its way to the far side of the room, like it’s spent all its life navigating Anakin’s personal junk heaps. The cat gives him one look over its shoulder, and drops to the ground, curling up right at the foot of the work table.
“Oh no,” Anakin whimpers, and wades through the room towards the cat. “Buddy— you can’t be here. Come on, get up.”
The cat ignores him. It stares around, at once curious and unperturbed by the great mysteries of life, including the masses of unnatural conglomerations of machinery, and the human standing above it and gesturing helplessly.
“You’ve got to— leave—” Anakin reaches down, making an attempt to carry the cat up by the chest like you would a small child, but the cat yowls, and bites him right on the wrist.
“Ow!” Anakin immediately lets go. “Okay, I’m sorry!”
The cat glares, but Anakin does end up getting what he wants, because the creature then forsakes Anakin’s company as more trouble than it’s worth, and gracefully bounces its way back out of the workroom, into the hall, and out the window where it came in.
Anakin lets out a great sigh, and steps up to the spot where the cat had been, to continue his work. Not a few minutes later, however, Anakin drops his spanner in frustration, and something dangerously like disappointment rolls in his chest. He frowns. It’s like— it’s almost like he wanted the cat to have stayed longer, sit on a tall shelf and watch him work. It didn’t seem like the sort to go berserk at any small noise from the machines, maybe it would make a good companion. But— Anakin shakes himself out of it. He must be just feeling lonely.
He stares at his hands for another moment, then cranes his neck back and yells.
“R2! R2, where are you?”
There is a quiet whirring, and a moment later R2 poked his dome through Anakin’s back door, and beeped flatly at him.
“Hey buddy,” Anakin says with exaggerated brightness, “Do you want to hang around here with me? For a bit?”
R2 leans forward skeptically, holds his silence for about three whole seconds, and starts chattering up a storm.
Anakin gawps, bewildered. “Wait, why not? Of course there’s space! What do you mean we don’t go anywhere anymore? I’m not holing up! And I’m not— barely twenty five is not senile! No, why don’t you—”
R2 beeped something incredibly rude, and rolled back through the door again.
“Hey!” Anakin mutters. “That was completely uncalled for.”
R2 is wrong, of course. Anakin enjoys his quiet life on Naboo, after some twenty years of strife. His time roaming the galaxy is behind him as is the war. His life is with his wife now, and Anakin gave up the Jedi as Padmé gave up the Senate, so they get to live openly as a married couple, the way they always wanted. Padmé gets to continue doing some work on Naboo, while Anakin gets to spend all day with droids and vehicles for a living. He runs his own mechanic’s shop near their home, lives in a literal mansion, and gets to do whatever he wants at any time. There’s not a thing in his life to complain of. And yet…
He glances at the clock. It’s still a couple of hours before Padmé is back from parliamentary duty, and besides the shop Anakin has nowhere else to go.
He sighs, and gets back to work on the bad motivator.
His mind lingers on the cat, though he doesn’t want to admit it’s the most interesting thing to have happened to him recently. Still, nearly every day, he finds himself staring involuntarily at the windowpane where it first appeared.
Obi-Wan had always been good with animals, Anakin thinks absently. The two of them haven’t spoken since Anakin left the Order two years ago, and Anakin still isn’t sure if it’s too painful to look back upon all that had happened. Even if the temple hadn’t come down burning, the two of them did. Anakin came to his senses and killed Sidious before it was too late, but it wasn’t before he had kneeled, and raised his saber against Obi-Wan for the Sith.
No one can blame Anakin for not doing anything with his life, really, when the last time he tried had nearly been the end of the world. And so now he’ll— stay in lane, stay at home and be a good husband to his wife, and occasionally cater to the drab mechanical tastes of Nubian upper society.
He’s in the garage today, poking at yet another of some rich bastard’s flashy speeder, which turns out to be so badly designed it’s laughable. The man is insisting on more work be done on the engine, but Anakin would rather wire up a dozen standard streetcars, or ride a bantha to a Boonta Eve race than spend another minute with the monstrosity. Just as Anakin is despairing how to send him off, the cat reappears, and Anakin lets out a cry of delight.
“You came back!”
The client stops in the middle of a sentence, confused, and watches with restrained horror as the cat stalks towards his speeder. Then, the little creature crouches, gazing up intently, before it leaps onto the hood. The sound of its claws scratching on the hull gives the man a full-body wince.
Anakin smirks to himself, and he could swear the cat must be smirking back at him. It prowls around the roof, digs its claws into the canvas, and starts to stretch.
The man gulps.
“I didn’t know there are stray cats in areas like this,” he says faintly, clearly more scared than angry.
“Oh I mean, did you want to talk more about the fusion chamber?”
“No, I… fine, you know what, I’ll go.”
“Great,” Anakin doesn’t bother to hide his glee. He turns grinning to the cat, “alright now, come down, you.”
To his utter surprise, the cat obeys, It slides off the other side of the hull with another loud scratch, and lands on a crate by Anakin’s feet.
Anakin barely looks at the man while he scrambles into the stupid speeder and drives off. He watches the cat, instead, afraid that it’ll suddenly leave him again. Is it a good idea to look cats straight in the eye? Probably not, but it doesn’t look like it’s about to jump at Anakin in attack, instead sitting peaceably and returning Anakin’s gaze.
This time, Anakin takes in its appearance carefully: it really is a ridiculously pretty cat. Its beautiful coat of cream-colored fur is well-groomed and peppered with ginger and gray, and there are tawny markings around its nose, almost like a beard. Its eyes are a stunning pale blue, and seem to flicker when it blinks slowly into the light.
“You’re not a stray, are you?” Anakin murmurs.
The cat tilts its head, as if in agreement.
Inch by inch, Anakin tentatively reaches out a hand, and places it lightly at the back of the cat’s head. Miraculously, it leans back, and butts its head against Anakin’s palm.
Anakin feels a surge in his chest, and offers gentle, careful pets the back of its head. The cat remains docile, its eyes scrunching up adorably, and Anakin finds himself grinning wider than he remembers in days.
“I think you and I are going to be great friends, cat.”