Title: From the Core
Prompt: chain
Summary: The Jedi are meant to free slaves, not perpetuate the systems that keep them in chains.
Another peak into Fialleril's Tatooine Slave Culture 'verse. Anakin's pov this time. If you enjoy, Shmi's can be found in The Right of Movement. It's its own fic, written about two years ago, before all this.
It takes Anakin a long while to accept that Jedi - even Jedi who buy slaves and promise him his freedom once he is trained as they are - are not saviors but help from the core. He has much to distract him from that realisation - classes and assignments, and more clothes than he's seen in his life, left alone worn. And once he has grown accustomed to life in the core, he must learn Basic, reading and letters, and how to be educated like a rich freeborn child when he can hardly see use in any of the lessons.
To be sure, their punishments are gentle, and they use a whole lot of words of say all the reasons why they can't stop the Hutts, or the Zygarrians, or any of the smaller rings that feed them. But having excuses not to use their power doesn't change the fact that it isn't being used. They can read minds, and see the future - Anakin can see the future, but he'd never been able to do anything, not with his chip and detonator as an iron chain - and they know how to fight. One lightsaber might not stop all slavers in the galaxy, but the depur that it kills can hurt no more. That's basic numbers.
And then, when they grow tired of defending their inaction, they say that his questioning is due to his attachment his mother and he is in danger of straying from his path. That he must master his fear. He must talk to his master and meditate to find the sentiment that drives him and control and purge it if he is ever to be Jedi. That he is worth nothing if he does not prove worthy of his late entry to their Temple.
Anakin has not taken to meditation well. It drives Master Obi-wan to distraction, but for all he blocks out the hour after latemeal, and all the hidden spots he shares in the Room of a Thousand Fountains, the universe is too vast and grasping for Anakin to ever willingly open himself to it. But there is nothing to be done but try harder. His master is generous in his understanding of Anakin's failure. Sometimes, he wishes -
He wants the power of a Jedi, and the ability to use it. Not sure he wants to be Jedi, but there is no other path set before his feet. Not in the Temple. Not in the Core.
And he bows his head and says Yes, Master for each correction as he has so often done before.
