While everyone else crowded into the tents waiting for the storm to pass, Anakin stood outside letting the rain drench him to the bone and the wind whip his hair. and as Ahsoka came to stand next to him, he asked in a voice of Air and Water, "do you hear the wind and rain".
Ahsoka looked out onto the expanse before her which the rain poured down upon and the wind swept through and watched how the trees threatened to uproot and topple over, and how air was eerily silent from the absence of bird song, and how the water was running with unstoppable energy. Yes, she thought to herself, I can hear the wind and rain.
"Master, why do you like the rain?"
Both were silent as and then Anakin began to tell her a story.
Until I came to the Temple I had never seen the rain, on Tatooine it never rained, not in all the nine years I lived there. My mother had once said it had rained for a short while when she was a child and when it did all the people, freemen, masters and slaves alike, all came out of the buildings to stand in the rain. She said that people remained there until the storm had passed and the rain no longer flooded down the streets.
When I had my first bath in the Temple I could not understand why we were wasting all this hot water, when on Tatooine people were dying of thirst, and when it first rained on Corusant I ran out of the Temple and stood there with my arms outstretched like my mother had on Tatooine all those years before. When Kenobi finally found me I was soaked to the bone and my hair was dripping but I just remember that was one of the happiest moments of my life. I still love the feeling of the cool water on my skin and the rain so thick it drips off my eyelashes.
It is said that Tatooine once looked like Alderaan or Naboo for the are cave paintings in which people are swimming. But one day people from a strange planet with strange names started to enslave the people, tear up and cultivate the land with little knowledge and forethought, and so slowly the planet started to die until only endless sand remained. The strange people left leaving their dark gift of slavery and erasing from their minds the planet and how they had destroyed it.
When I was younger a old woman used to tell me of this legend of how a Child of the Desert with sun bleached hair and ocean blue eyes would, by his death, bring life back into planet and once more people would dance in the rain and swim in the rivers like they had done all those years previously when the planet was not yet reigned by the Desert.
"Master, do you think that day will come, when he Child of the Desert is dead it will rain again like it did before?"
Anakin was quiet for a moment, his eyes looking far into he distance. "Yes", he replied finally, "I think that day will come".
"Master?", asked Ahsoka, "what is the real name of the Child of the Desert?".
"What do you mean?".
"Well, surely he has a name like you or I have one?".
"Oh". Anakin replied. "She said that he his name was "Mutano, which means the 'The One who Changes'".
For this story I was inspired by the cave paintings of people swimming in the Sahara desert that people have found (read The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje) and the Dust Bowl in America in the 1930s were people didnt farm the land properly and as a result for about ten years the land was infertile.
Reviews welcomed :)