Chapter Text
The lights flickered again and Anakin sank further down towards the back of his tank. Nobody was paying him any attention, the few people still there too busy running around gathering whatever they deemed important. There were no openings, no window to give him a glimpse of the world outside, but the howling winds and battering rain on the metal roof made the raging storm obvious, even all the way through the water and the glass of his tank.
He didn’t move as the last person finally left in an anxious hurry, waiting to see if anyone would come back. When minutes came and went with no sign of movement, he slowly made his way towards the edge of his tank. He eyed the door right across from him. He had made enough escape attempts when he first got captured that he knew exactly how to get out. And how hard it was. He was far from being an expert on human technology but he wasn’t stupid and it had always fascinated him. He knew of their “electricity”, and he was fairly sure that both the lights and the lock on the door depended on it. If the lights were struggling, would the door…?
Suddenly the lights went fully out and he didn’t give himself time to think. He grabbed the edge of the tank and threw himself over it, landing heavily on the tiled floor. He groaned in pain as he landed on his shoulder but clenched his jaw and kept moving. Crawling forward inch by inch, he made his way to the door, extending his hand up to reach the handle. The door opened easily and he let out a trill of victory then— stopped.
He bit his lip. Glanced back toward the smaller tank in the room. Hesitated.
He threw another look at the hallway open in front of him, his path to freedom.
He sighed and turned back, painstakingly crawling back towards the tanks. When he reached the smaller one, two small faces were already watching him with matching wide, scared eyes.
Luke and Leia. They had arrived there a few weeks —or months perhaps, after a while his grasp on time had gotten weaker and weaker— after him. Two small merchildren, very young though he wasn't sure of their age, but they were clearly twins. He couldn't leave them there. It wasn't a place for children. It wasn't a place for anyone really, but without his meager protection —which mostly consisted in making a nuisance of himself to distract their captors whenever they seemed too interested in the twins— he didn't want to think about what could happen to them.
He grabbed the top edge of their tank, luckily much lower than his own had been, pulling himself up and half draping himself over the edge, then reached down into the water with one arm, the other trying to keep his precarious balance. He wrapped it around Luke —who luckily let himself get manhandled without fuss— and awkwardly lifted him up and out of the tank. He pressed him to his chest as soon as he could and half flopped back down, doing a sort of one handed reverse pull-up to try to soften the landing, twisting himself so that Luke was at no risk of hitting the ground. He gently put him down on the freezing tiles and did the same manoeuvre a second time for Leia, with much more wriggling on her part but successfully nonetheless. He then put them both on his back, their tiny arms wrapping instinctively around his neck in a replica of the way merpeople would often play with their children in the sea, swimming around at much higher speed than the little speed demons could achieve on their own.
He crawled again, towards the doors and through them, along the hallway, through another set of doors and then they were in a smaller room filled with an inch of water. One of the doors seemed to be leaking and he crawled towards it. As soon as he opened it, more water came flooding in and they were assaulted by pelting rain.
They were outside.
They were outside!
There was a lot more water than there had been in his vague, drugged memory of his arrival there. Good. He did not want to crawl his way on solid ground all the way to the ocean. Who even knew how far that was…
But all water went naturally down to the sea, right? Not entirely confident in this but with no other plan, he dragged the three of them into the rushing water.
He was immediately overwhelmed, dragged down helplessly. The current was much stronger than he had anticipated, and he realised with a muted sense of horror that he was much, much weaker than he had been before- before. Before he was captured. Before he spent months stuck in a tiny tank, fed the bare minimum. The water felt and tasted disgusting as it went through his gills and into his nose and mouth. The unease of breathing in freshwater, the slimy thickness of the mud, the undefined metallic tang that made him want to both gag and sneeze, all contributing to disorient him. A sudden flash of lighting almost immediately followed by booming thunder made him flinch hard and almost dislodged the twins from his back. Reaching around, he pulled all his focus on carefully but quickly moving them both to his front so that he could hold on to them with both hands. Once both of them were more secured, his head breached the water again and he craned his neck around, but the building they had just left was nowhere to be seen and each second they were dragged further away.
Before he could feel any relief at that, the water suddenly dropped, throwing them further down and churning them around. He tightened his grip on the twins as he tried to reorient himself, but his efforts were cut short as his back slammed painfully into something big and solid. He was sent tail over head around the obstacle, banging his head on it as well, dazing him. He felt his grip slip on the twins and fumbled for them in a panicked fog but the water was too strong and his body too sluggish, and suddenly his arms were empty. He cried out for them, twisting around, hoping against all hope for a glimpse of them but all he could see was muddy water all around, almost constantly lit up by bursts of lightning that he couldn’t manage to figure out the direction of. He didn’t know if he was trying to swim up or down, against the current or with it, if he was even moving forward at all. More debris slammed into him, and the dizziness got worse and worse, shadows dancing at the edge of his vision, until everything went black.