Note: This series starts in 29 BBY and carries forward as an alternate ending for the Obi-Wan and Anakin comic. More vaguely, this initial section of the series takes place between "The Phantom Menace" and "Attack of the Clones" when Anakin is a padawan. Knowledge of the comic isn't needed.
Chapter 1
The Coruscant underworld flickered with false light, and Anakin Skywalker pulled his hood further down over his face. Beady eyes and shifty shadows peppered the hanger, as they so often did at this time of night. Anakin's hand hovered over where his lightsaber ought to be, but his hip was bare now. He felt naked without it, like a piece of him was missing, but he wasn't a padawan anymore.
'This weapon is your life, Anakin.'
Obi-Wan would find his blade and his braid on the pillow by the next day when Anakin missed the morning meditation. His master might be surprised, at first - maybe relieved, too, slipping free of Qui-Gon's dying wish... Anakin could bear his own burden now. There would be no 'chosen one' for Obi-Wan to wrangle if he wasn't here, and most of the Order didn't seem to believe he was anything special anyway. Anakin wasn't sure he believed it either.
No matter how hard he tried, Anakin couldn't be the perfect Jedi Obi-Wan wanted him to be, but maybe he could accomplish something else. Maybe he could help his mom, at least… and maybe that was a better use of his talents, anyway.
"Off-planet, is it?" Three pink, stubby eyestalks watched Anakin from a nearby booth - one of the three, at least.
"I haven't decided yet."
She had been watching Anakin as he wandered between transports, asking the pilots their conditions for transport. Credits were their price, and anyone who said otherwise tended to look like they might dump him back into the slave trade if he stepped on their ship. The gran within the booth would be facilitating official transports off-planet, but Anakin had no credits to his name for any of them. That was the sort of thing he knew he should have thought about before running off in the middle of the night, but he wouldn't have any credits the next day, or the day after that. Obi-Wan would not have any credits to spare either, even if Anakin could have worked up the courage ('or humility', Obi-Wan might say) to ask him for help. Jedi did not hoard worldly possessions or wealth. They were provided what they needed when they needed it, and now that Anakin was leaving, he no longer qualified as needing it.
Guilt gave him a little stab in the chest. The Jedi had sheltered him. He was grateful for that much, but Anakin could not shake the scorn and fear in his fellow padawan's faces.
'He's a slave to his emotions,' they whispered to each other. 'A slave.'
Anakin did not belong, and they knew it. They knew it, and he resented them for it, even if he knew he shouldn't.
"-Now that's an unfair accusation." Nearby, a human pilot was arguing with a quarren about something Anakin couldn't quite make out. The human had been one of the pilots Anakin had approached that night, but even an offer to work on the ship had been rejected.
"You would-"
The quarren's rebuttal was cut off by a flurry of blaster shots coming from the entrance. Again, Anakin grabbed for a lightsaber that wasn't there. The hanger had erupted into minor chaos - a chaos that rippled more than calmed when the telltale glow of a green lightsaber appeared through the parting crowd. Curiosity and the urge to help struck him full force, but in a scolding tone that almost sounded like Master Windu, he reminded himself it wasn't his place to interfere in a mission - especially now.
For a brief moment, the Jedi was scanning the area, but Anakin couldn't stop his pulse spiking when that Jedi first started bolting after what looked to be a rodian - a rodian who was running in Anakin's general direction.
Without much time for thinking, Anakin tugged open the top of the nearest crate, slipped inside, and pulled the lid over again, hoping that the scrambling crowd covered him enough to avoid further attention. The crate was cheaply made - wood, rather than metal, with ill-fitting planks that he could peer through. The slot wasn't very helpful when it reduced all movement to mottled color moving around, but he saw the green glow of the Jedi split off to the side, disappearing behind a ship.
The chatter and rustling outside had not yet calmed, and before Anakin could crawl back out of the crate, he felt the world upend beneath him, punctuated by the sound of wood scraping against the permacrete flooring.
Anakin had two choices. The first would be to push off the lid and apologize to whoever was dragging him away. The second would be to lay there and see where in the galaxy the crate would take him.
The first was probably the more correct choice, but when the floor dropped out from under him with a jostling thud, that second option became more and more appealing.
A clang sounded above him, and the world went black.
hr
Anakin had never spent much time thinking about what it would be like to lay in a crate for an indefinite period of time, but he was half-convinced he was about to lose his mind.
Sleeping was not an option for stowaways, so he had tried to meditate. Meditation should have brought peace in the Force, but it mostly made him think about how badly his foot itched and how sleepy he was becoming, so he took to feeling around the crate to guess at what he was laying on. All he felt were rough wooden cylinders and the prickly hay they were packaged in. It probably wasn't anything illegal if it had been sitting out in a hangar on Coruscant, but it had been a seedier port, so that might not mean anything at all.
Curiosity prickled at his fingertips, but he wouldn't be able to see inside, even if that curiosity was to get the best of him. He sniffed a cylinder, and it just smelled like wood.
He had counted 23 cylinders before finally pushing the lid off of the crate and lifting the steel ceiling - or rather, the steel flooring of the ship's corridor. There were some traces of grime on the wall plates, but for the most part, the area was clean. Closing his eyes, he reached out in the Force, sensing that there was only one organic being on the ship. That would not account for droids, but at least it minimized the number of eyes to avoid.
Down the narrow corridor, he saw two doors, one on each side with no viewports in sight. He was definitely in a hidden compartment right now, so smuggler made the most sense. Wood didn't seem like the normal means of transporting illegal contraband, but as he lifted the flooring a bit more to shed some light, it looked like someone had simply chopped a small tree into logs and stuck them in a box. Closer inspection revealed a thin line in the wood where it probably split open.
Letting the metal plate rest on his head, Anakin smacked the container against the edge of the floor, cracking it open. A cloud of fine, black dust poofed out, tickling Anakin's nose. Immediately, he sneezed, and as he blinked away the cloud, the container in his hand appeared to split in two with dizzying speed, even as he clamped it in his hand. Blinking again, he fumbled to fit the container back together, but he couldn't quite tell if it was fully clasped when he put it back in the crate. Hopefully it was.
"That was a bad idea," he muttered to himself as he closed the crate, then sat on top to rub his eyes.
'That is why we take caution when opening unidentified containers,' his master would have said, and Anakin could feel the burn of disapproval from across the expanses of space. No amount of eye-rubbing could shake that off, but after a few minutes, the dizzying double-vision was improving a little. There appeared to be four doors in the corridor now, but at least the extra doors were inching a little closer to the originals, compared to before.
Whatever that stuff was, Anakin didn't want to crawl back in with it. Hoisting himself up, he crawled the rest of the way out and slid the metal flooring back in place. On one end of the corridor were a set of (possibly) double doors, and at the other end, the floor disappeared in a way that suggested a ladder of some sort. Climbing down to an unknown area seemed like a risk, but strolling through a sliding door wasn't exactly better.
Slinking over to the ladder, he peered down into what looked to be dimly lit storage. With a little bit of extra care, he situated his feet on the rungs and crept downwards, turning his head to look in the direction he was going. No droids in sight - just more crates, ratty pieces of cloth, spare bits of metal that might be ship or droid parts (if he could focus a bit better), and what looked to be a food pack unit in the corner. This area, at least, had a sizable viewport at the back, and he went straight for it. Hyperspace was dragging the stars across the view in bright streaks, and there was no way to tell where they were. At this point, they could be almost anywhere.
Still no tripped alarms. No sentry droids. No traps.
"You aren't a very good smuggler, huh," Anakin said quietly to himself, toeing away a metal part. He was half tempted to see if there was anything he could repurpose, but stealing from his hitched ride was probably wrong, even if smuggling wasn't a very noble profession either. At least his vision was almost back to normal now. Picking up a metal plate with wires sticking out, he wondered aloud, "Do smugglers even have alarms?"
The stars were soothing streaks against the dark void of space, as beautiful and bright as always, but they did nothing to stop the sudden crash of loneliness. He wished Obi-Wan was with him, even if he knew it was stupid to think that just hours after he had left. Anakin was thirteen years old, not some weak youngling, and he was going to find a way to help his mother. Freeling slaves was something he knew Obi-Wan couldn't help with, even if he wanted to. His master would never leave the Jedi Order. That was his home, his identity, his purpose, and he was actually good at it. Obi-Wan would probably like his new padawan better anyway.
The thought did more to sour Anakin's mood than calm it. He tossed the wired plate back onto the table with more clanking gusto than he had intended, and he ducked down, holding his breath for a few stretching seconds.
When it seemed no one would be coming to check on the noise, Anakin exhaled, clenching his eyes for a moment. 'Calm down,' he reminded himself. Smugglers seemed like the sort of people who wouldn't hesitate to throw a stowaway out the airlock.
Opening his eyes again, Anakin exhaled, then looked around. There was a little button built into the outer wall, just under the line of the table's surface. That would be a weird place for a light switch to be, but his curiosity was cut short by a soft beep from above.
At the top of the ladder, he spotted a small droid with a single, horizontal sensor swishing its head around. For a moment, Anakin thought inching further under the table might be enough to avoid detection, but a garbled string of binary definitely sounded much more like an 'intruder identification'.
Anakin pursed his lips as the droid swung back around to roll away, and as if by impulse, Anakin thrust out his arm, feeling the familiar rush of the Force as he lifted the droid mid roll and carefully lowered it to where Anakin was still crouched. The little droid was screeching now - certain to alert the pilot eventually, at that volume, and Anakin sighed.
"I'm sorry, little guy. I can't get thrown out the airlock today. No hard feelings, okay? It's just for a little while," he said apologetically as he dropped the droid into one of the crates in a far corner, covering it with as many sound dampening fabrics and nicknacks as he could find in the room.
Covering the crate again, he could still hear angry beeps of protest. Cracking the lid open again, he corrected, "Girl - sorry. I'm not stealing anything, I'm just-" Bleep-boop! "Can you-"
She apparently couldn't quiet down, so Anakin sighed again and closed the lid, pushing the crate further into the corner. Hopefully the pilot wasn't expecting the little droid back too soon - and more importantly, he hoped the droid hadn't directly transmitted any alerts to the pilot. It would have happened by now, if it was going to. Probably.
Hiding amongst the crates would let Anakin see the area better, but it would also be a terrible hiding place if anyone took more than the barest glance around the room. Scanning the flooring and knocking lightly on the panels, it took only a minute to find another compartment - empty, this time.
Anakin hated the thought of cramming himself into another small space, but staying out in the open seemed worse. This was at least better than being crammed in with the contraband up top.
He could not have guessed how long he had been there before he again gave up on meditation and started feeling around the compartment. This one was admittedly more spacious but no less dark. Even after his eyes had adjusted, there were little more than slightly darker indentations around the edge, close to the top. Prodding his fingers along the ridge, it felt like there was something inside. A strange feeling stirred in his stomach as he felt the surface below him - the groove along the edges, how there was a subtle dip, like two tightly aligned surfaces jammed up together.
It felt suspiciously like what a small airlock might feel like from the inside - one that was good for dumping contraband if a smuggler was, say, apprehended by authorities.
The sinking feeling got worse, and Anakin pushed the panel up again, but before he could scramble out, he felt the ship jolt and a voice sound over the comm:
"KZ, get back in here, we're landing. Did you fall down the ladder again?"
The answer to that would of course depend on the definition of 'falling', but Anakin did not want to stick around to debate it. With a hoisting push, Anakin lifted the door of the unlocked compartment, then climbed out. Jogging over to the viewport, he pressed his face to the glass and with a flood of relief, Anakin saw that the ground was already in sight - a swath of bright lights and zipping ships had replaced the streaking stars. They were minutes away.
Minutes, he could manage.
When at last he felt the sudden jolt of a (somewhat rough) landing, Anakin set to action. Pulling the droid out of her crate came first - KZ, he would guess - and in response to her furied bloops, he offered another "sorry - KZ, is it?" as he set her on the floor with one hand and closed the crate with the other. She bumped moodily into his ankle but wasn't shrieking anymore.
Anakin heard footsteps above, and with a thudding chest, he bolted back towards the floor compartment, landing in a slide that ended with a very uncomfortable thud at the bottom. There would be no time for soothing bumps, so with a swipe of a hand, he pulled the flooring back over him, darkening the compartment again.
The pilot would be there at any moment, and Anakin could already hear the droid whirring in his direction, undoubtedly to draw attention to the intruder's hiding spot. Every nerve in his body felt charged, alert, jittery, and again, he clamped his eyes closed, trying to breathe - to think -
He pictured the button under the table: unobtrusive, difficult to spot on casual inspection…
There was no time to worry about whether it did what he hoped it would do, because if it didn't -
Anakin poured every bit of focus he could into picturing that button, feeling the Force energy surrounding it - surrounding him. With his breath held, he jabbed his thumb…
...as a whooshing sounded above him, followed by the floor dropping out from below.
Half-shocked to find he was actually falling, he barely flipped into a landing that caught his shins rather than his back, but it was not his most graceful. The door was dangling for just a few seconds before shutting itself again, as securely as ever.
If they were stopping for fuel, Anakin wouldn't have long to get out of sight. The fueling station was dark and quiet - and suspiciously abandoned. This place looked more like a storage yard than a hanger, cluttered with basins and containers in dense stacks. There was only half of a roof above them, looking like it had undergone recent damage - damage that had allowed them to slip in.
Anakin could see no signs of a security droid as he hopped onto a large fuel container, but he did see something - or someone - land on top of the smuggler's ship before disappearing down the side.
A niggling voice in his head whispered that whatever was going on was none of Anakin's business. Getting to the hanger would be the safest option, or at least the option that was least likely to tangle him up in something that really didn't have anything to do with him at all. Maybe if he got far away fast enough, he could convince the fuel overseers to hire him, temporarily… That shadow might even be a security droid.
(But it was not a security droid - Anakin knew from the shape of it - and when he looked upwards, the ship hovering above looked more than a little bit suspicious.)
Dropping to the floor, Anakin flattened himself against two upright containers and saw that someone was hanging from the underbelly of the ship, right where Anakin had dropped movement was definitely organic, though Anakin couldn't tell much about it, other than it looked to be stuck to the surface by its hands and knees.
Pirates, probably after what was inside.
As the ramp lowered for the smuggler to step out, droid in tow, Anakin saw the pirate unstick a hand to level a blaster. Zeroing in his focus, Anakin reached out through the Force, and with an invisible swipe, knocked the pirate's hand up to blast the bottom of the ship.
The smuggler sprung to action, drawing his own blaster. With a distraction set, Anakin leapt up onto the fuel container again and scanned for an exit. A dim glow was peeking over the top of the tall, steel wall surrounding them.
Anakin had hopped across two cylinders when a bright, focused light found him. Trying to block his eyes, Anakin squinted down to see that it was the smuggler's KZ droid, bleep-blooping and ratting him out.
Now the blasters were pointed at him.
"Great," Anakin muttered, jumping back down just as the pirate fired a shot.
Landing soft on his feet, Anakin thrust out both hands, this time yanking the blasters from both of them, catching them by the handle. The stunned stares wouldn't last long before they reached for back up, so Anakin pulled his hood back over his head and started weaving through the containers. He could hear the pirate saying something in another language, and from above, Anakin heard a distant mechanical sound.
From above, several more pirates were dropping down onto the smuggler's ship, blaster bolts already peppering the yard. A high-pitched whirring pulled Anakin's attention back down to the floor, where he saw the KZ droid extending her spindly arms from small hatches on her side.
With a few rapid beeps, she was demanding her pilot's blaster back - a demand that was punctuated with a little zap.
"Hey! Cut it out, you didn't even give me a chance to answer," Anakin objected, then tossed one of them at the droid's outstretched arm. "Here, take it. I don't need it anyway."
The barrage was getting louder, and with a sudden rush of impulse, Anakin ran back out into the fray. Several of the pirates were climbing on the ship now, and it looked like they were preparing to drill, though it didn't look like the hull had been punctured yet.
Anakin spotted the smuggler throwing some sort of gas grenade at a group of them, but just behind him, one of the pirates was drawing a blaster again. With another rush of the Force, Anakin pushed the smuggler to the ground just in time for the blaster bolt to strike one of the pirates in the chest.
As the blasters turned on him again, Anakin really wished for his lightsaber. Shooting them directly felt wrong, but bouncing around frantically to avoid the shots couldn't only go so far. When the smuggler had stood up again, Anakin was nearly to him and tossed over the blaster.
"Get back in the ship," Anakin said as he swiped a few pirates back onto the durasteel floor. "Unless you want them to kill you and steal your cargo." Red light flooded the yard, and a mechanical voice filled the space - the security must be kicking in. "It looked illegal."
"Who are you to-" The smuggler looked at the scrambling pirates and seemed to change his mind. "Fine! But you're coming with me," he said gruffly, already yanking Anakin onto the ramp again.
"Your droid is still out there," Anakin objected, just as KZ zipped out from the cluster of fuel containers, doing her best to avoid stray blaster bolts as they struck the floor.
"Hurry up!" the smuggler yelled at the frantic droid, even as he was starting to retract the ramp and turn back toward the cockpit. Several pirates had nearly reached them, wielding what looked like grappling hooks.
With another yank in the Force, Anakin brought the droid hurtling towards them, and she had narrowly slipped through the door when it locked shut. The clang of launched hooks clattered against the hull, but hopefully they wouldn't catch.
"You!" the smuggler said from the cockpit door, and he was pointing at Anakin, now. "You just - stay there. I'll get us out of here."
There weren't a lot of other places Anakin could realistically go at this point, even if he felt antsy, just standing there while someone he didn't know tried to maneuver them out of a pirate ambush.
The KZ droid was blooping at him, and Anakin looked down at her. "Remember how I just saved your life?"
That wasn't the sort of thing he was supposed to hold over anyone or anything, he knew, but KZ whirred a little more softly and stopped the objections.
"I just want to get home - or at least to Malastare, so I can get the credits to go home," Anakin continued, letting the little droid follow him inside the cockpit. "I'm not here to cause trouble for you."
The ship's lift off was jerky, nearly knocking Anakin into a wall as the door slid closed behind him.
"How's a kid like you plan to get credits on Malastare?" Yanking the controls, the smuggler looked back at Anakin for a quick beat before turning forward again. "You a stowaway and a gambler?"
"No, a pilot," Anakin replied, gripping the back of the co-pilot seat to keep from hitting the wall again.
"What, you expecting to get hired for piloting on a planet full of dugs? A human kid?"
"Stop calling me a kid!"
"You are a kid!"
"I'm a better pilot than you are!" Anakin huffed, a bit petulantly, and the ship jerked again as he was strapping himself to the seat.
"You sayin' something about my piloting?"
"Take me to Malastare, and I'll never insult your piloting again."
"Drop you out the airlock, and you'll never insult my piloting again!"
As the ship groaned beneath them, Anakin screwed up his face. "Your engine."
"Let me worry about my engine," the smuggler said gruffly, starting to type in hyperdrive coordinates with one hand, steering with the other. The ship shuddered as the pirates landed a ramming hit from the side.
"You won't last long in hyperspace - or out of it - if you don't-"
"Who even- What are you now, some kind of mechanical expert?"
"I am, actually," Anakin said with more than a little pride, then jabbed a finger at one of the flashing sensors. "And I don't want to explode. I bet I can fix it for you if you'll take me to Malastare." He paused. "Or Tatooine would be even better."
"There is no way I am flying all the way to Tatooine."
"Then Malastare's fine. One hop on the Hydian Way, and I'm out of your hair."
"'Malastare's fine,' he says." The smuggler looked down at his droid as they completed their leap into hyperspace. "I never even said-"
Anakin was already darting to the ladder just adjacent to the cockpit, where he thought the engine room probably was. He hadn't exactly taken the time to check, the last time he was on the ship, but Anakin's engine concern hadn't been bluster, and he couldn't wait for permission from the smuggler.
With one smooth leap, Anakin landed at the bottom of the ladder, feeling the Force as it padded what ought to have been a rough impact. A few helmets and other protective gear lined the floor in a heap. Maybe they had hung on the wall or sat on shelves before the chaotic escape, or maybe the smuggler was messy. Either was possible, and it really didn't matter. Grabbing a pair of thick but worn leather gloves, Anakin wandered past the small compartment and yanked open a door that led into the heart of the ship - the engine room.
The room was warmer than the rest of the ship, and immediately, Anakin felt a rush of confidence he hadn't felt since leaving the temple. His hands were most at home when they were fixing things, and if the reward for success was not dying, that was a very lucky bonus.
The part Anakin had bluffed about was some suggestion that he knew what part of the engine was screaming at them. Pulling on the gloves, his fingers couldn't reach the tips; curling his hand to a fist just made the leather fold out awkwardly where a man's finger joints might be. There would be no dexterity with these, so Anakin let out a disappointed huff and dropped them on the floor, just shy of the door.
From the first look, the engine appeared to be patched with older parts. The bulk was visible, and below the grate flooring, some of the finer bits were hard at work. Nothing looked visibly broken up top…
Approaching the gap in the grate floor, the heat floated up like an invisible wave, rolling out but never back in. There was a hatch door in the grating, and Anakin pulled it loose, revealing another ladder. This time, he climbed down more carefully.
To his right, Anakin noticed part of the hull was now dented inwards. There must not have been a breach, considering the air hadn't been sucked out into space, but it was crammed into the engine, pushing against the metal. That was probably responsible for the visible heat waves and that soft, high-pitched scream of machinery...
Bracing himself, Anakin inched closer, squinting, but he couldn't visibly pinpoint what was making the noise. What he could tell at first glance was that the design wasn't particularly great, but there was nothing he could do to fix that.
Anakin stuck out a hand toward the metal mess, but even before his hand made contact, he could tell that would only burn him. Twisting back around, he pulled the oversized gloves back over with a tug in the Force. A bad fit, but better than bare skin. Turning back to the engine, he felt around one of the pipes for the point of connection with the hull. Even through the gloves, heat built.
The press of the hull was building heat and blocking ventilation. He didn't have to tug on the metal to recognize he wasn't going to get far.
On his own, at least.
'Feel your surroundings, Anakin' is the sort of thing Obi-Wan usually said in times like this. 'Trust in the Force. The Force is alive around us.' It was the sort of thing Qui-Gon used to say, too. Maybe that was why.
Obi-Wan seemed to prefer organic life, but to Anakin, machines felt as alive as anything. When he closed his eyes and reached out, he felt the engine around him, his awareness opening up like a window flung outward. The Force was a storm raging inside, whirring around in his mind, and he felt the subtle moisture of air squeezing out from beneath the malformed hull.
The engine screamed, just as the alarm had in the cockpit.
Allowing the Force to wash over him, Anakin grasped the air, but it was the metal that creaked when he yanked. Vaguely, he heard a trill of beeps and whirrs, but he focused harder on the engine, felt as much as imagined the moving parts. This was not a mechanical problem that needed tinkering. This was not something he could strong-arm, no matter how frantically his own heart thumped. Too much force might make the problem worse, and it wouldn't matter if the smuggler would take him to Malastare…
'Much fear, I sense in you…' The grave echo clutched in his chest, and his fists balled tightly, punctuated with another shrill shriek from the engine.
"What are you doing down here?" A voice boomed from above the grating.
"Go away! I've got it!"
Sarcastically, the smuggler shouted back, "What are you planning to do, punch it?"
"I said I've got it!" This time, Anakin whipped around, arm flinging in an arc. Immediately, the man flew out of sight, and Anakin could hear the pile of gear scatter near the ladder - a sound that was followed by a thud.
Anakin's heart pounded more loudly in his ears, and he saw KZ whizzing around unhappily. She must have been the one beeping.
"Sorry, I- Check on him; make sure he's okay," Anakin said with a rush of guilt, but the hyperdrive was relying on this engine to work, and the sounds in the engine room were sounding angrier and angrier by the moment.
"Calm down." Anakin spoke to himself this time as he turned back to the engine, breathing deeply as his voice lowered to a mutter. "Do what Obi-Wan would do. Or Master Yoda. They could fix this. They would be calm. Just be calm. You can do this."
More gently this time, Anakin reached into the Force and felt the engine around him - reached out past his thudding heart and into the heart of the engine, choking on its own efforts. Sweat dripped down the side of his face, leaving an itchy trail. He was tempted to swipe it with a hand or a shoulder, but falling deeper into focus, he pushed that from his mind, too. Everything else could wait. Once again, he found the blocked ventilation doing its best to squeeze air past the intrusive hull, and with more care, he pulled through the Force.
Metal creaked its response, but more slowly, this time. Gradually, the high-pitched whirring and shrieking began to fade, and with each little tug, Anakin felt confidence building. He imagined his master's face, softening with approval - an encouraging pat on the back, maybe. The Force wasn't some peaceful stream like Obi-Wan always said it was, more like a beating gale or an electric storm tingling over Anakin's skin, but he had to be... calm. Tugging and tugging, but not too hard...
When Anakin felt the engine steady, a knot of tension in his own shoulders loosened. The room had grown quiet, leaving only soft clanking and gentle whirrs.
Anakin opened his eyes and scooted back, wiping his face with an exhale before climbing back up out of the grating and into the main engine room. By the ladder, the smuggler was still lying still, but KZ chirped a confirmation that he was fine, just unconscious. The chirp wasn't a very happy one, but at least it wasn't worse… With a Force lift up to one of the compartments above, getting him as comfortable as an unconscious person could be wouldn't be a challenge. KZ could surely help Anakin find a med kit… And if luck was on his side, maybe Anakin would be gone before having to explain...
Knocking out the smuggler hadn't been Anakin's intention, but as he climbed up toward the cockpit again, he realized that getting to Malastre might end up easier than he thought it would be, after all.