Disclaimer: I own nothing except my OCs and possibly some percentage of the plot.

Notes: For full disclosure, I have borrowed concepts from Mercedes Lackey's Arrow trilogy in this.


Anakin was happy that Cara had gone to see that Jedi she'd met. Mostly because she was less angry and scared and lessons with her were more fun when she was happy. She was never mean after that one time when he'd destroyed the Trade Federation ship, but it was just better now.

It was when they'd started working on the sorting meditation where he was supposed to go through his memories and look at them until he was able to separate out how he felt when it happened from remembering what had happened that he understood just how hard it had been for her to do it by herself and why she wanted the help. He could remember the horrible things that Gardulla the Hutt had done to him, and it made him sad and mad and he wanted to hurt people when he thought about it too much. Cara had worked with him on those memories until he could deal with it, then had taught him how to help her.

But not too much. She had him learn how to pull her out of memories of when she was his age and girls at her school on Corellia said mean things because her father was a freighter captain. That was confusing because back on Tatooine the kids who's parents were things like freighter captains were the ones who acted like the kids making fun of Cara.

Sometimes, though, he'd see a glimpse from Cara of slave restraints and pain. She had lots of bad stuff, slave stuff, that she remembered. But when he'd asked her to let him help with those, she'd explained, "Ani, I appreciate that you want to help, but you're ten. I know you know a lot of things about being in pain and being a slave, but you shouldn't. I can't protect you from what's already happened, but your mom and I can try to protect you from things now. Also, you're just learning. Think about how hard you have it when you're dealing with the stuff that happened with Gardulla. It's very hard to get someone out of a memory enough that they can look at it from a distance, but not so far that they break out of meditation."

Like always, Cara was a good explainer. Once in a while other Force users in the Association would visit, once or twice a couple Jedi who had left the Coruscant Temple and found their way to the loose association were the ones who did so. They were terrible explainers. They usually had good ideas, but Anakin had to memorise what they were saying and then ask Cara to explain it again in different words. "Why can't they just say it like that?" he asked, disgusted.

"I would guess there are two reasons," she said, "But it's only guesses. The first is that they were taught it that way and it doesn't occur to them that you could teach it differently, and the other is that it's . . . sometimes some things can be taught better by making a student figure it out themselves. A lot of stuff about knowing yourself can only be learned by thinking things over and over until you figure it out. And I think they see a lot of the Force stuff as being like that."

That made sense and Anakin said so. She also started teaching him what she called grounding and centring. "I find that this is really helpful for shielding, because my shields are sitting on a more solid base, which lets me make them stronger. But it's something I learned that was part of how I escaped from the darksider who taught me to begin with. It let me look like a darksider but not be one. I'll teach you how to do that, eventually, when you're a lot older. Right now though, grounding and centring is something I want you to learn how to do, and then start doing every time you do your morning meditation."

Well, that sounded super-important. One of the other things that Cara did differently from the couple of former Jedi that passed through was that she explained why the silly boring things they were doing now led up to the important or exciting things later. "What does ground and centre mean?" Anakin asked.

There was that flash from Cara that meant something about her time as a slave was coming up in her mind, but she pushed it away. "First, you should know that this is a bit of a secret. Y'see, I found a thing that Sith do-"

"Sith?" Anakin asked. "What's a Sith?"

"A really really bad darksider," Cara said. "Jedi have this set of rules that they follow and a . . . mantra, a sort of . . ." She frowned like she always did when she was thinking about how to explain things. "Okay, you know how here on Naboo many people believe in the Goddess and the holy text of the Goddess and how it has rules about how you're supposed to treat people and things like that?"

Anakin nodded. "But it's not the only religion on Naboo," he said. "The Gungans have The Swamp."

"They do," Cara said. "The Jedi have this thing they call The Code, and for them the Force is like The Goddess or The Swamp."

"Oh," Anakin said. That was odd. The Force was a field that was affected by all living things, but its connection to all things was what allowed you to use it to find out stuff like possible futures.

"Anyhow," Cara continued. "The Sith kinda see themselves as anti-Jedi. So where the Jedi talk about serenity, the Sith talk about passion. And where the Jedi are supposed to be all about submitting to the will of the Force, the Sith are about using the Force to achieve victory."

"Victory over who?" Anakin asked.

She shrugged. "Whoever they want victory over. Which is supposed to lead to freedom. I wonder sometimes if they were slaves or something, but they appeared literally thousands of years ago, long before the Republic even existed, so there's a lot we just don't know. Anyhow, evil anti-Jedi. They wrote some books about things they do, and in the book I read this was originally supposed to be something that would let a Sith use the dark side of the Force, hide from people and probably amplify their power. So, you wanted to know what grounding and centring are. Grounding is basically connecting a sort of line out to the Force. It's a little like grounding a wire, but instead of the electricity going down to the ground, you're setting up for the Force to go right up into you. It's a little tricky, though, because you have to reach for the Force without reaching outside of you."

"What?" Anakin asked, "But if you're reaching for the Force, it's . . ." he did what Cara always did and waved his hands in the air instead of using words.

Cara looked at him a moment. "I've taught you bad habits," she said. Then she continued. "The Force is everywhere. It's in everything and binds everything together. So, unless you're going to say you're not part of everything, it's inside of you too. So, light trance and start lookin', kid."

Anakin grinned, settled into a cross-legged seat on the floor and dropped easily into meditation. He preferred moving meditation if he was trying to do what Cara called communing with the infinite. She was also usually pretty sarcastic when she said it, though. For something like this where the meditation would naturally deepen as he worked with the Force, he just needed to kind of zone out. Once he was there, Anakin began concentrating. The first time he reached for the Force, he felt a sharp poke in the Force from Cara. It was enough to show him she was going to keep him from getting to the Force until he managed to find it internally.

A few more false starts and he decided to try visualisation. Cara had said that sometimes if helped if you imagined the Force as being something in particular. He imagined his actual body and the Force as a sort of gas everywhere. Then he found it. It was like there was this pool inside of his chest, and he could connect to it without reaching outside of himself.

A feeling of pride in his success came from outside. Now, you need to set up a line into the Force from there. Make it stable so that it's like an internal conduit. Not sucking it up or anything, but like a pipe from a lake, ready to use.

This time she gave him a mental picture and Anakin recreated it, feeling that link to the Force right there.

"Now come on out of there and see if you can keep this stable," Cara told him.

Anakin opened his eyes, blinking, and felt it start slipping away. He grabbed at it with his mind and hung on, but couldn't maintain the link without going back into a meditative state. "Oh," he said, surprised.

Cara smiled, wryly. "So, you'll be working on that for the next little while. The other thing I'm going to show you is centring. For the record, I'm going to make you do it so much that you'll be able maintain those all the time if you need to, without having to think about it. The same way that we're trying to get your basic lightsabre techniques to get to the point where you can do them perfectly without thinking about it."

He sighed. It was hard, and was kind of boring and he really wished Cara would teach him more cool lightsabre stuff rather than boring in-his-head stuff, but she was his teacher and that was that. "So, what's centring?"

"Centring is about looking at you, the you that you see when you're meditating in the Force, and sort of defining the stuff that is you, from all the stuff that isn't you. The thing about centring is that you want to be able to say, 'This is me. I am right here. The border between me and not-me is right there'."

"That makes no sense," Anakin objected, frowning.

Cara grinned. "Which is why you're going to go into the Force again, and you're going to watch me centre myself. It should be a little more clear than any words I can use."

So, he looked into the Force and looked at Cara. He watched for a moment as she settled, then came the now-familiar feeling of her concealing shield expanding out and right past him. For the first time, her second shield, the kind that she'd taught him to use, the one that was there to block out all the things he could see and hear once he'd started learning how to see the Force properly, her shield went outward, including him on the inside with her.

He'd never seen Cara's inside before, and it was so pretty and bright in most places. Here and there, though, Anakin could see dark patches. They were cold and when he looked a little closer, they felt squirmy and wrong. She tapped him gently. Pay attention. I know my darksider bits are interesting, but you really don't want to touch them. He winced, because it was also pretty rude what he'd just done. He looked at her again, letting the whole picture of brightly glowing Cara settle in his mind. And then she did something, and he could never have put into words what, but it created, not a barrier, but this definite sharp image that this was Cara and that was not. It was as though the floaty golden light was distilled into a contained pool. Now you try.

Anakin tried. He tried to grab all the bits of him and stuff them into a spot, he tried to make himself all melty like liquid glass that was glowing in a tub, he tried to imagine a border. It wasn't working. Then he felt her gentle hands through the Force. Showing him how to dive down into the deep middle of who he was and work outward, identifying everything that was him. She helped him slowly expand his mind back out until he had located the outmost points all around of him and not-him. That's when he saw it. It felt like a near-audible snap. Like the last part of an engine slotted into place or the last move in a kata completing the movements, he was all himself. He wasn't separated from the Force, but it was like he was more in his own mind that he'd ever been before, but not trapped in it, just aware of everything that made Anakin Skywalker into Anakin Skywalker.

"Wow," he said. When he came out of trance he could still feel it. It slipped away from him, just like the line to the Force, but it was easier to hold on to.

Cara had pulled all her shields back in while he'd been working on it, but that was okay. "So, that's grounding and centring," she said, "And the rest of the lesson is going to be trying to get better at doing them faster."

He made a face, because levitating things and finding hidden stuff was way more fun, but this wasn't too bad, he supposed.


Obi-Wan had begun going out of his way to visit Naboo at every opportunity, on any mission he could detour to Theed he would. At first it was the obligation he felt to help Cara with her troubles, along with the way she would help him as well. Later it was the fact that she was acerbic, cranky and amusing and would give him free tickets to the ballet.

They were at her home, the sister-in-law and nephew he had yet to meet gone on some trip, when found himself pulled towards a box hidden at the back of a chest of drawers in a closet. He shook himself as he realised he was snooping, but there was a soft tug of the Force nonetheless.

"Lookin' for somethin'?" she asked. Her accent slipping a little into Corellian as it did when she was skirting the edges of upset.

In this case, honesty seemed once again the best policy. "There's something back here, in that drawer," Obi-Wan told her.

She eyed him a moment, then pulled out two boxes. "This one?" She held out the longer and wider box. "Or this one?"

"The smaller one," Obi-Wan said. He glanced at the first. The Force moved around it, but it wasn't calling to him.

She turned her head and all the blinds at the windows snapped shut, blocking out the outside world. She carried both boxes to the kitchen table and sat down. Obi-Wan followed. What she pulled out of the smaller box was a pair of small devices that looked slightly like light sabres, but they were strangely shaped. Cara smiled sadly, flicking a switch on them that looked like the training setting for a lightsabre and then with a fluid movement snapped them open.

They looked like fans, but if the fan were made up of the plasma energy of a lightsabre. "May I?" Obi-Wan asked. She turned them off and passed one over to him. He turned it on, more clumsily than she had. "This is lovely, but where did you come by the crystals, and why would you even make them?"

"Moonslayer," they both shared an eyeroll, but since she had no idea of his actual name and Obi-Wan had found no useful records of the man that was what they were left with, "Had gotten ahold of a few lightsabres from actual Jedi. I don't know if he managed to kill them or bought them on the black market, but when I killed him I took the lightsabres with me. As far as the fans go, I can work with a lightsabre, but I hate it. I hate it because it's everything that got taken from me. I still have the one I made."

She shoved the larger box at him in distaste, and Obi-Wan opened it. From the memories he'd seen from her he already knew the blood red blade that would come out if he turned it on. Unlike other darksider weapons he'd come in contact with it didn't scream of the dark Force, but it was still an unhappy weapon. He looked at the fans and thought of what he knew of her. "You wanted something because you were still afraid he would come. Or that someone else would come."

"Of course I was afraid," she snapped. "I don't ever want to be defenceless like that again. I got here and I thought I would be safe, that Shmi and Ani would be safe and instead there was an invasion of killer droids."

"You can't blame the droids on the dark side of the Force," Obi-Wan told her.

She shot him a disbelieving look. "I absolutely can, and you know that perfectly well, 'Sith-Killer' Kenobi."

That was Jedi Temple talk and not something bandied around outside of it. "How do you know about that . . . trumped up nickname?"

"We had a performance trip to Coruscant a month ago," she said. "Two of your padawans snuck out and mind tricked their way into the balcony seats at the back. They're very impressed and very disappointed they were taught by Master Windu instead of the handsome and dashing Sith-Killer who is clearly so awesome he would be able to go toe to toe with Master Yoda." Cara grinned at the horrified look on his face. Her enjoyment of his discomfort was both malicious and uncivilised. "I was entertained enough that I hid them from everyone. I almost missed my cue listening in."

"Who?" Obi-Wan demanded. He was going to find those two and give their masters an earful.

"Not sayin' a word," she sing-songed.

In a fit of pique, Obi-Wan pressed about the fans instead. "So, why fans?"

"Don't you want to talk about how devilishly handsome and-"

"No. Fans. Please." If she wasn't telling him who, he didn't want to know about what terrifying rumours were going around the Temple about him.

Her face softened. "The fans are actually the only combat form I know other than what I learned on that ship. In Corellia's ancient history there was a fan dance which was taught to noblewomen. But it wasn't just a dance, it was a combat form disguised as a dance. In order to give the noblewomen some sort of defence against armed attackers, bladed fans were created that could be used as weapons and a fighting form originally meant for knife fighting was adapted. For centuries it was a secret, passed down from mothers to daughters and through special dance masters and nursemaids. It was illegal for women to be armed, of course, so a fan was the perfect weapon in plain sight. Centuries later it became a demonstration piece. Like slave dances that are combat forms." She blinked away tears. "It was the other serious and traditional form of dance I learned. I liked it a little less than ballet, but I love just about any dancing. These," the one in his hand flew to hers, opening a moment again and then snapping closed with that so-familiar snap-hiss-hum sound, "Remind me of happy times, and I can fight with them and not feel like I'm being dragged down."

Obi-Wan looked at her and thought of all this potential. Thought of how great a Jedi she could have been, thought about the joy in movement he could feel from her when she was on stage and his desperate curiosity. "Could we spar some time?"

"Maybe," she told him. She put the boxes back and then they settled in to meditate together on their memories. One of her confused lessons in lightsabre fighting, her graceful handling of the early forms without a single bit of recourse to the Force was what came to her, and when it was his turn, the horrible bullying and accusations of being too angry after lightsabre practice came to him.

He came back again a few months later, a slightly excessive detour getting him to Naboo, and they met up in the middle of the night in a closed up warehouse and sparred. It was glorious. The two green and yellow fans flashed in their graceful arcs, blocking his strikes, while she had the constant trouble of getting close enough to strike, but once she was in range he would have to leap away to use his lightsabre to effect again.

"You're going easy on me," she commented when they disengaged, standing apart from each other.

"I was enjoying watching you," he admitted, feeling a little flushed for some reason. "Your forms are beautiful."

Cara smiled and swept in again, and Obi-Wan rejoined the fight, this time pushing a little harder. Her fans were lovely and unique, and the challenge of her distinctive style was delightful. He pressed his attack, enjoying a friendly spar, something he saw less and less of over time at the Temple as he and his fellow knights spent so much time on missions.

Then it all fell apart. He felt the snap a millisecond before it happened. One moment they were sparring and the next a stab of panic from his opponent was swamped by the dark side of the Force and she was driving at him with deadly intent. Obi-Wan blocked her, leapt back and shouted, "Cara!"

It knocked her out of whatever headspace she'd fallen into. She dropped the fans and staggered backwards. She turned sharply away, wrapping her arms around herself tightly and Obi-Wan felt her frantically feeding the dark feelings into the Force. She gave a choked sob.

He had learned better since the first time her tried to help, and Obi-Wan approached her, walking around her to approach from the front so as not to surprise her. "Let me help. Please," he pleaded. Somehow, he knew this was his fault. He had to make it better. When he gently tapped at her mind, she let him in and he gently assisted her at siphoning away the excess until she was able to manage on her own again.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I know you were having fun, but I don't think we should do this again."

Obi-Wan couldn't let her give up. "I agree we pushed too fast, but Cara, you have so much potential-"

"As a Jedi?" her voice was a sudden whipcrack of anger. "Is that what you want, Obi-Wan? Is that the only thing that makes this alright? That makes our friendship alright?"

He wasn't sure where he had stepped wrongly, and he would be lying if he said that the thought of her as a Master of the Order hadn't occurred to him. "Of course not. You're intelligent and interesting and a very good friend. I just dislike seeing you waste . . ." Too late he recalled that she'd never even imagined being a Jedi. Too late he remembered that she had a dream of dancing, one that she was living despite the interference of dark Force users and invading droid armies.

"You Jedi," she told him with unbearable scorn. "You only see the Force as your ticket to working within the Order. To bodyguarding and peacekeeping. You're all just so much better than the rest of us who don't hide away from the world, teaching children to fear love, to fear feeling and to fear failure." Her eyes bored into him. "I've seen your memories Obi-Wan, they threw you away when you weren't serene enough for them. Why would I ever want that?"

She held out a hand and her fans flew into her grip. She turned away, radiating anger, but it wasn't out of control and there wasn't a hint of the dark side around her. When she stormed out, he let her leave because he knew he'd done something wrong here, but he wasn't sure what. He was sure that his dim hopes of bringing her to the Temple, of somehow showing her what she could be had been dashed.

Some tiny niggle at the back of his mind said that he shouldn't have been hoping that anyhow.


By Anakin's eleventh birthday he had changed to a new school. This one specialised in practical engineering sciences and had wonderful chances to take flying lessons. It was fun and interesting and Padmé had lent him her droid, Artoo, for use as his personal astromech. Artoo was fun and funny and unlike most droids of his base type didn't regularly have his memory wiped, which had allowed his programming to expand into having a solid personality.

His mom had put all the courses she'd taken to good use and was closely involved in the Tatooine slavery initiative. It wasn't so much that they were buying slaves away from the Hutts to free them, although some of that was happening, but the Nabooian presence on Tatooine created more and better opportunities for slaves to escape to freedom.

Two years of freedom, of seeing how the better half lived, had taught Anakin about what people really deserved to have at a base level. He wanted to free all the slaves. He wanted to stop the Hutts and stop the Zygerrians. When he said this to Padmé in one of those occasional holocalls they shared when she was finished talking to his mom, she tilted her head a moment, frowning thoughtfully. "Well, I think you're going to need to learn a lot of things to do that," she said. "Because you can't just walk onto Nal Hutta and just say, 'Let the slaves go because I tell you.' And even if you went in and managed somehow to imprison them, or even rout them with an army, you still have to stop people from trading slaves when it makes them so much money."

"So, what kind of stuff?" Anakin asked.

She shrugged. "Probably a lot about tactics, because if you're going to actually go up against the Hutts there's going to be fighting. I wish there weren't, but I've learned over time that even though people could talk through everything and avoid fighting, some people just won't. You'll have to learn about fighting and strategy. You'll also have to learn about diplomacy and negotiating, because deals will have to be made. Deals to enforce things, treaties with other people, deals to make it more profitable to do something instead of owning slaves, lots of deals."

Anakin eyed her. "So, you really mean politics."

Padmé smiled. "Politics is in everything, Anakin." Then she looked away a moment, clearly thinking hard. When she looked back at him, she looked sad. "The other thing you may have to learn is how to accept your limits. I'm not saying you shouldn't try to stop all the slavers. But you may wind up only being able to stop some of them and you'll have to learn how to . . . maybe not accept it, but cope with not being able to free all of them."

"You have trouble accepting it," Anakin said bluntly. They'd talked about it. Padmé got reports about the terrible things on Tatooine, and while her efforts were helping many people, it was never enough and she sometimes wept because there was so much she couldn't do, limited as she was by her role as a planetary leader.

She smiled sadly. "I do have trouble, but I have to step back from it sometimes, because I also have to take care of Naboo's interests and I have to deal with our people."

"And you have to visit Sola because she makes you laugh," Anakin said. He didn't know where words like that came from, but sometimes it was like the Force just told him what was the right thing.

Padmé stopped looking sad and rolled her eyes, which was better. "I do not have to visit my sister and listen to her tell me to get a boyfriend. Again."

Virtuously (and because Cara had said that he was too young for Padmé until he was at least twenty) Anakin said, "You're really beautiful, though. It can't be hard to find a boyfriend." Then he thought of hearing about Padmé having some boy kiss her and do gross grown-up stuff with her and walks on the beach or whatever romantic junk girls liked and added, "But I don't wanna hear about it."

The sixteen-year-old blinked at him a moment, then laughed. "Okay, Ani. If I get a boyfriend I won't talk about him."

They talked a while longer, but eventually Shmi made him get off the comm and go to bed.

Next morning, Cara was teaching him some really boring stuff that she called ethical philosophy which was basically all about when it was okay to use the Force to affect other people's minds or emotions. It was a lot of stuff that basically boiled down to, 'it's not nice and you shouldn't do it unless it's an emergency'. When he said as much, Cara put on that explaining stuff face of hers.

"The thing is, Anakin, that it kind of does boil down to that, but at the same time it doesn't. Part of what I'm trying to do here is to teach you how to look at a situation and think about all the different parts of it, so you have practice at doing that. I can't actually put you into a dangerous situation or a complex negotiation or whatever just for practice, so I'm trying to show you how complicated deciding the right thing can be."

He pouted. "But why can't you?"

"Because I'm a ballet dancer, not a Jedi," Cara said. There was something sharp in the way she said it, but it wasn't sharp at him, so Anakin made a mental note and then set the thought aside. "But even the Jedi have years of classes teaching them about the ethics of using mind tricks and when it's okay and when it isn't long before a master takes an apprentice out."

Remembering his conversation with Padmé, Anakin asked. "So, do Jedi learn stuff like negotiation and battle tactics?"

Cara's attention sharpened on him. "Yes," she said slowly. "Why do you ask?"

"Because . . . I was talking to Padmé and she said that if I wanted to try to free all the slaves I'd need to know that stuff. And politics," he said.

She dropped her face into her hands. "Of course you want that. Of course I'm going to have to find you a Jedi to teach you," mumbled his teacher into her palms.

"Why can't you teach me?" Anakin complained. "I like you and you know lots of Jedi stuff."

"Because I don't know most of the Jedi stuff, and I don't have the connections to teach you the important stuff once we're past the basics," she said. "Look. I'll do what I can and hopefully we'll figure something out by the time you're thirteen, which is usually the oldest a Jedi takes on an apprentice."

So after that Cara started making him read books about the history of the Outer Rim and books about tactics. She made him learn fancy social dances and how to walk and sit like rich people. "Why do I gotta know this?"

"Because if you know the history then you know how things wound up that way which means you might have a better idea of how to help people without messing things up more. Knowing how to talk to rich people is useful because rich people listen better to rich people, and that includes being able to do things like sit properly, dance and talk about absolutely nothing," Cara said.

That sounded like something his mom had once said about her work with the glassmakers and slaves. "Oh. But why wouldn't they listen if it was something important and they knew it was?"

"Because people don't trust people who are different from them. If someone is too different, it means that they may act in ways that you don't understand, like the way that Rodian don't laugh like humans when they think things are funny, but they make a sound like they're laughing when they're sad. So, if someone is different, a lot of people don't trust them because how would they know if that person agrees with them for sure or not?"

Now he got it, and sighed. "So, learning this is like having to learn Basic and Aurebesh to be on Naboo."

"Yup. I'm not too good at the talking-to-rich people things, but I can at least teach you what forks to use, and maybe we could get a protocol droid or teacher so you can learn that sort of stuff," Cara mused.

Anakin perked up. He had partially built a protocol droid, he just had to fix up the base programming and make sure everything was working right!

A few weeks later he was woken by a shriek and, "Anakin Skywalker! Why is there a protocol droid fighting with your astromech in my kitchen!"

"Oh, my goodness!"

Anakin bolted upstairs to find his mother with a hand over her mouth trying not to laugh while Cara was glaring at him the moment he entered the doorway. "Morning Threepio, Artoo!"

"Threepio?" repeated Cara.

"I am C3PO, human-cyborg relations," declared the droid. "I understand that Master Anakin has adapted my programming to assist with his education in protocol and Mistress Shmi with her work at the Glassmakers' Foundation on Tatooine." Then Artoo whistled and beeped and the protocol droid turned to him. "I think that is very rude of you to say. I'm certain I am far more useful day-to-day than your rusty interior!" Artoo beeped angrily at him and the two clearly started an argument.

Cara closed her eyes tightly, looking a little like she was in pain. "Why are you in my kitchen, C3PO?" she grated out.

"Ah." The droid somehow managed to look sheepish. "I believe Master Anakin indicated that the recharging plug was more convenient in this location." Artoo made a few beeps of agreement with the statement, then shoved the gold droid out of his way as he headed for the socket. Anakin made a mental note of all the words in binary that Artoo was using, because they were clearly swear words and he wanted to know them.

"I'll teach you to swear like a Corellian spacer," Cara whispered in his ear, having snuck up on him while he was distracted, "But only when your mom can't hear."

"I heard that," Shmi said, looking wholly unimpressed.

It took a cross-consulation of Cara, Shmi and Padmé to wangle information out the the droid that was useful in terms of teaching Anakin any sort of intergalactic protocol skills. Shmi actually got the most use out of the fluttering, frequently panicking droid, using him to his fullest extent when negotiating with other systems to help with resettling freed slaves, trade agreements for Tatooine glass and Tatooine sand and acting as a translator as Anakin had programmed in every single language he could find in every databank he could access including a decent collection of thoroughly dead languages.

Not surprisingly, Anakin was interested enough to pick up on actual cultural practices, but his capabilities for polite small talk remained abysmal.

The two droids entered a love-hate relationship that left them joined at the hip and constantly arguing.