this is a disclaimer.
better place to play
"If you mean to become a Jedi, there are certain things you have to do away with," Master Obi-Wan says, and touches Anakin's forehead with his finger. "In here. Attachments. Certain attitudes. Ways of thinking. The others don't need to be told this, but you do. You have to unlearn what you've learned so far in your life, Padawan."
He tries. He really does. He says all the right things and he does the meditations and he nods at the Masters and goes on missions and squashes every thought of his mother to the point where he can barely remember what she looks like some days because he wants to be a Jedi, and he needs to be a Jedi. A Jedi will be able to free Mom; a Jedi can do good in the galaxy. There are three things Anakin could do with his life, and three only, but only one of them will do anyone, anywhere, any good.
After all, whoever heard of a podracer pilot helping people, let alone a slave?
So Anakin tries, and listens, and unlearns:
The taste of his mother's cooking.
The sound a podracer engine makes when it fires up perfectly, raring to go.
The touch of the cool filthy floor under his cheek, concentrating on it to the point where he can't see anything else because it hurts too much to get up and better the irritation of the sand in his mouth and eyes than another blow.
The sight of the desert, endless, wide-open cage of a place, false-promise-making and treacherous.
The smell of poverty, rank and strangely wet even when sunk so far in the sand dunes it's impossible to climb out, engine oil and unwashed bodies, tangy undercurrent of blood, sentient waste and sentient misery.
He unlearns the language of the Magh'ran, and how to tie a prosei to keep the sand out of his nose and mouth. He unlearns the call of a krayt dragon and the tracks of a bantha and the weight of the seifa that Feisal's father once let them hold and the stories he had told them of the battles it had seen and the men it had killed. He unlearns the whisper on the wind that is a sandstorm brewing in the distance and the dark smudge of it on the horizon. He unlearns the stories of the desert and the way the spacers would shift and look nervous when they heard of the city of Kyrithra and the eyes in the canyons of the Jundland Wastes. He unlearns how to bargain with Jawas and how to stare down a Dug and a thousand other things that no one desert-born should ever be foolish enough to forget, but Anakin does, because he needs to be a Jedi now, and there is no room in the Order for those who are both.
Anakin unlearns, in fact, so successfully that it takes him three weeks and more of nightmares before he decides that enough is enough and goes to Tatooine to search for his mother, and even then he carries with him the knowledge that if Master Obi-Wan had been there when he made the decision, he would not have done it.
It burns, that knowledge, after she dies. It burns to know that all his unlearning has been for nought, and all his trying will never become success, and most of all it burns that the Jedi are impotent fools and he still would have let them stop him had they been there just because they are Jedi.
He's unlearned so much for them, but it never once crossed their minds that perhaps some of the things he threw away at their behest might have had some value of their own.
But when Padmé kisses him, when she says I love you, when they marry in secret, when she lets her veil slide away and turns her back, hands holding up that mass of curls so that he can reach the lacings of her gown, Anakin finds that unlearnt does not necessarily mean lost.
The other half of what he threw away comes back to him during the war: the press of other people's misery against his mind, heavier now than before because he understands what's happening and he knows how to control it, the darkness and the bad food and the constant pain that's no excuse for not doing your job, and step by step these things become familiar to him again, the horror and the refuge side by side.
It's like he never left home in the first place.