Stang this chapter was hard to write, and I have NO idea why. I think it being Anakin's PoV had something to do with it, but… it was so weird. I knew what I wanted to happen, I just couldn't get it to come out in words, and even now I'm honestly not entirely pleased with it. But I owe you guys a chapter – and it's overdue. I apologize for the long wait, this one just did not want to be written, but here it is. Hopefully the next one will come easier, because I really hate writer's block.
Oh, real quick, to milkduds100. Nope, not a crossover; I made it up. Terrania IS based on Earth, as some people have guessed, but there are some marked differences… you'll see. And, just to clear the waters now, YES, this WILL eventually be Ansoka romance. But, no fear – 1) I am not a mushy romance writer, nor do I think I get 'too detailed' with it – I try to write relationships realistically; and 2) honestly, I don't anticipate any real 'romance' to even BEGIN until the sequel (yep, there's one planned; a series, even, if you all like this one enough to want more!).
Anyways, long author's note, apologies. If you read, please review – come on, people, feedback! For the number of hits I've gotten, I don't have that many reviews, and I really do like to know what you all think. And with that and no further ado (finally, right?), onto the chapter.
Chapter Eight
To say Anakin found this entire situation a little annoying was an understatement worthy of his Padawan's habitual optimism. He must have had Ahsoka explain everything to him ten times in the past three days, and it didn't make much more sense than it had the first time she'd told him about it. A planet he'd never heard of before? One that knew nothing of the workings of the Galaxy, nothing of the War, despite being positioned in the middle of it all? One that was so technologically backwards, and yet had been somehow guarded by those fancy ships? These were only a couple of the reasons he didn't like it.
And these people they'd wound up with. Okay, so maybe he couldn't really say much against Keida and Manarin directly. They'd been nice to Ahsoka, certainly, and she seemed fond of them… although, with her, it was hard to find the person she didn't like. Even if he still felt irritated that they hadn't had better medical supplies – he didn't like seeing her limping, or the knowledge that she was going to more than likely come away from this with scars – he couldn't really blame them for that. They were friendly enough, he supposed, and hospitable, but… well, he wasn't sure what the 'but' was. They seemed sincere, even trustworthy. All he knew was that Ahsoka felt the 'but' too – she'd proven that.
He'd been… 'angry' wasn't quite the right word, but it was a good enough description of how he'd felt, when she'd told him they thought she was his slave girl. He wasn't sure who he'd been angry at, but he had known for sure that the first order of business would be to march right to them and clear up this confusion right away. He still wasn't sure how she'd kept him from doing so – perhaps it was her statement that they probably didn't know what a Jedi was so they wouldn't really understand anyway; or maybe it was her admitting that she herself didn't want to entrust the information to them, she who trusted everyone who was presented to her as an ally. Whatever it was, it had still taken her a lot of work to get him to begrudgingly agree not to argue their conceptions, at least not yet. "Servant, then, if we've got to. I will not act like you're a slave." He knew she hadn't quite understood – they'd acted it before, hadn't they, and besides wasn't it basically the same thing? – but she'd agreed. However, it was still a bit of a tense issue between them, and both knew it.
Of course the next order of business to him had been to pick out that something was missing. "Where's Artoo?" And she'd blinked, and looked surprised, and seemed to remember for the first time that he had been in the pod with her, hadn't he?
"Well, they don't have any droids here, and Keida said they didn't see anything else at the pod… maybe he… wandered off? Looking for me or something, after they found me?" Anakin hadn't quite liked the idea, but neither of them could think of anything else – he wasn't here with Ahsoka, and he hadn't been on the pod when Anakin got there. It hadn't taken a long time at all for him to decide they would go look for the little droid – once Ahsoka was fit to. He couldn't really be mad at her for not thinking of Artoo, all things considered, but there was no way he was going to just 'forget' the droid.
Ahsoka had been stuck to him like a mynock to a power coupling ever since he'd shown up. Anakin couldn't say he minded much – after feeling like he'd nearly lost her, he was more comfortable when he could see her, keep an eye on her. Especially with what he'd heard, with these 'Agent' people after her. He'd given her back her lightsaber, so it wasn't like she was defenseless if something did happen, but… better safe than sorry, right? And with that farmhand wandering around, shoving himself into their business whenever he could, he felt even more need to be 'safe' instead of 'sorry'.
That goes to the matter of Garvan. The man… had not endeared himself to Anakin at all. He found the farmhand irritating, to say the least. Although he claimed he had not told anyone else the 'little secret', and Keida and Manny assured Anakin he wouldn't lie, Garvan seemed to take his position as 'head farmhand' quite seriously – which meant, in essence, he felt it was his right to know everything that was going on, whether it involved him or not. He seemed to be rather affronted that he hadn't been told the entire situation from the start, and thus was trying rather hard to compensate for this by making sure he didn't 'miss anything' now. Irritatingly enough, that seemed to mean he was determined to invite himself into the house to 'keep an eye on the aliens', and to follow Anakin and Ahsoka everywhere when they were able to leave the house, to make sure they 'didn't mess with anything'.
Anakin was glad they were able to leave the house, if only at certain times – in the evenings, after the farmhands had left. He didn't like feeling imprisoned, trapped in the building. Although, truthfully, he could come and go as he pleased, but he didn't feel right leaving Ahsoka cooped up while he wandered, so he tended to stay in with her much of the day. It had only been three days and he was beginning to feel a bit trapped, but if he let himself stop and think about it, he imagined Ahsoka probably felt it even more; after all, she'd been here for over a week, and she was always one to get a little stir-crazy when forced to stay in one place for too long without doing anything. So when Manny suggested an evening 'tour' around the farm as a way to get them out of the house, it was difficult to discern who was more eager about it – Anakin, who wanted to get a good look around this new place in the hopes of figuring out more about their situation; or Ahsoka, who just wanted to do something that wasn't sitting around waiting for something to happen.
The farm was a pretty simple place. Not too much that Anakin wouldn't expect from… well, a farm. The main house, a large garden, an orchard, fields… they had a lot of land, but then as he'd discovered, the Plains provided a lot of it. Stables, pastures, a house for the farmhands – "Most of 'em go home nights, but some stay… an' all of 'em go home weekends, 'cept Garvan, he dang near lives here. Lets him be on-hand in case anythin' ever goes on where he's needed." This was as close as Manny had come to explaining Garvan's constant presence, and he sounded as if he himself wasn't sure if it was a good thing or not.
The most interesting thing for Anakin, though, was looking around inside the barn. It wasn't the barn itself that was so interesting, but what it contained – not the food stores, but the vehicles and equipment. He'd never dealt with this sort of technology exactly; the vehicles were primitive, compared to what he was used to, but they were innovative and different, and he wanted to examine them, take them apart and put them back together and figure out how they worked and what they did – especially the strange cloud-harvester, a sort of hovercraft combined with some sort of plow and a strange vacuum-like apparatus that altogether intrigued him and had him asking Manny a string of questions while circling the thing and examining it from all angles, trying to learn as much as he could without actually working on the vehicle himself.
He was only distracted from the harvester when Manny, apparently picking up on his technological interests, directed him over to the Kirotin-refining equipment. If their technology was backwards in most everything else, at least here it was up to speed. Anakin knew little about Kirotin except that it was the weird, tasteless yellow powder that Keida added to all the food and claimed was healthy, but he would learn more. He peered into a container filled with an orange-ish liquid while Manny explained how liquid Kirotin was more potent than the powder and used by medical facilities and the military, and how it was possible to get crystal Kirotin but it was so strong as to be considered a stimulant drug and was illegal. As interesting as this might be, Anakin was more intrigued by all the gears and tubes and chambers and equipment that was required to turn gas into liquid and then into powder and manage both at the same time without messing up the delicate process and making the result worthless.
Ahsoka, on the other hand, wasn't quite so intrigued by the technology. She'd stuck around for the beginnings of the discussion, but at some point she'd grown bored with the tech-speak between the two men and wandered off to some other corner of the barn. Anakin had vaguely noticed, but as long as she didn't leave the building it didn't concern him much, and he was admittedly distracted – until he heard her exclamation from the far corner.
"Artooie!" Anakin's head snapped up and he had turned and headed in her direction in a moment, cutting Manny off midsentence, locating her behind some crates. "What are you doing to him? Stop!" And she moved towards the table and half-pushed a startled Garvan out of the way and looked worriedly at the little droid that sat among the tools and gadgets scattered across the wooden surface. Anakin whirled on the surprised farmhand.
"What'd you do to my droid?" He snapped at Garvan, who held an oddly-shaped wrench in one hand and something that looked like a small, pointed crowbar in the other and wore a pair of what he could only guess were magnifying goggles; the overall picture might have been funny under any other circumstances, but he was in no mood to be amused. Artoo was deactivated, and Anakin scanned him for any signs of damage – he'd better not be damaged, or… he wasn't sure what the 'or' was.
"'Droid'? What's that, a brand? If you mean that thing," he pointed at the droid, "nothing, unfortunately. I was trying to figure out where you put the records, before I was so rudely interrupted." Garvan spoke with an infuriating casualness, and looked over at Manny, who had followed Anakin and now stood looking rather confused. "Don't know where you got this thing, but it's the most inefficient record player I've ever seen; can't even figure out how to turn the thing on… hey, hey, don't touch that, you'll break it!" He interrupted himself, turning to Ahsoka who had shifted Artoo on the table and was reaching to reactivate him; Garvan grabbed her shoulder and tugged her away. "Little aliens shouldn't mess with things they don't understand," he said to her, speaking slowly as if he were scolding a very young child; she looked immediately and deeply insulted.
"Look who's talking!" she exclaimed, pulling away from him and moving back to Artoo, but he grabbed hold of her arm to pull her away again, and Anakin felt a jolt of anger only adding to what was already present.
"Don't touch her!" Anakin ordered fiercely, a bit surprised at the amount of threat that made it into his tone – but it did the job; Garvan let go of her quickly. He noticed a flicker of something like surprise in Ahsoka's expression as she glanced at him, and it was enough to convince him to let the anger ebb a bit. He moved to place himself between Ahsoka and Garvan, while she turned her attention back to Artoo. A few seconds later there was a drowsy-sounding beep as Artoo was activated, followed by a chirp of greeting. Ahsoka sighed in relief.
"Hi, Artooie."
Anakin shot one more glare at Garvan before turning his attention to Artoo as well. The droid chirped another greeting and he couldn't help but smile. "Hey there, buddy. You okay?" An affirmative beep, but that wasn't quite enough; he gave the droid a once-over, searching for any damage that the farmhand might have caused.
"Weird little noisemaker, isn't it? Good thing the kid didn't mess it up. Well now that it's on, where do you put the records anyways?"
"It's not a record player, you idiot," Manny stated, sounding exasperated, "S'their… robot… thing, that they been missin'. Where the hell'd you get it?"
"I don't know, it was just sitting in that corner over there behind the crates," Garvan answered, still infuriatingly casual. "I figured it was a new piece of equipment, and it's my responsibility to know how to use all the equipment, of course."
"You're lucky you didn't break him," Anakin snapped, still angry but soothed a bit by the fact that except for one missing panel and a few dents and scratches, Artoo seemed relatively unscathed. He located said panel lying on the table among the tools, and turned to snatch the wrench out of Garvan's hand and went about re-attaching the metal plate.
"Well of course I didn't break it," the man retorted, as if the very idea was ludicrous. "You'd think I didn't know how to do my job, the way you all carry on… you're lucky the child didn't break it, that's what I think."
Anakin had expected a retort from Ahsoka, so he was a bit surprised when she didn't say anything right away. He looked over at her; she was gazing between Artoo and Garvan with a thoughtful expression on her face. "How'd you not know how to turn him on, if you managed to turn him off?"
"What?"
"He was deactivated," she repeated, "it's the same thing both ways. If you deactivated him to try and… whatever you were trying to do," she stated, half-glaring at him, "then how to turn him back on should have been obvious. If you're so good at these sort of things like you say." And there was that snippy tone that Anakin was used to; he grinned slightly.
"I didn't turn the thing off," Garvan argued, resuming his 'speaking-to-a-small-child' tone that he always seemed to use when addressing Ahsoka. "I found the little gadget sitting over there," and he pointed, "in the corner of the barn, see, and I brought it over here, just as it was, to examine. Understand?"
She frowned, and Anakin could tell she was doing her very best not to snap at him. "Well, then, how'd he get here?" But she was done talking to Garvan, she looked over at Manny, and then at Anakin.
"I dunno, Red. Didn't see the thing when I was in here yesterday… or anytime before, for that matter. Was even in here earlier today and didn't spot it. An' I think I woulda noticed somethin' like that," Manny admitted.
Three pairs of eyes turned back to Garvan, and he shook his head again. "Don't blame me. Said it once, not going to say it again."
Manny frowned, then sighed slightly. "What'd you call him, 'Artooie'? S'that his brand or his name?"
"Well, both, sort of. His name's Artoo-Detoo; he's an R2 unit. We call him Artoo for short… well, I call him Artooie," she explained, looking over at the droid fondly, and he gave a happy whistle in response, returning the sentiment. She tilted her head to look up at Anakin. "Well, that's one problem down, then, right Master? We found Artoo."
Anakin looked at her, nodding slowly, but wasn't quite able to keep himself from frowning. He glared at Garvan, who stood with his arms crossed and looking rather irritated at having his new 'gadget' claimed; and glanced with new suspicion at Manny, who was looking at Artoo with interest; and then turned to lift Artoo down from the table carefully, exchanging a quick sideways glance with his Padawan and noting, with a bit of relief, that despite her words she shared his feelings. Droids didn't just appear, deactivated, in barn corners. He'd gotten here – and turned off – somehow, which meant… well, it meant one of these two was lying. Anakin had his suspicions as to which one, but with the Force so hazy he had little to go on but suspicion.
But this wasn't the time or place for an interrogation, and besides, it would be better to get somewhere relatively private – somewhere they could discuss openly, and find out what Artoo could tell them. Ahsoka seemed to decide this at about the same time he did. "My leg hurts," she announced, "is it alright if I head back to the house?"
"'Course, Red, I told ya you shoulda brought the crutch; you're still healin'," Manny sounded worried, like he always did, but now Anakin found himself wondering in the back of his mind if maybe he wasn't just acting concerned. "Get on back, I gotta wrap up some stuff in here and shut the equipment down." He shot a look at Garvan, who had gone back to the table and was tinkering with one of the other myriad devices as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
"Right, Snips, sooner you heal the better. C'mon, Artoo." Ignoring Garvan, who was muttering something about 'why'd they let the kid out anyways', he turned to head out of the barn. A part of him wanted to stay, circle back around and find a window and listen in on whatever conversation might happen, but a quick glance told him the windows were all closed for the night, and he decided that chances are he'd get more information from Artoo than from Manny and Garvan – the two didn't seem to get along terribly well, or to talk much to each other. But maybe that's an act, too. He glanced behind him to where Ahsoka was following, one hand resting lightly on Artoo's domed top; meeting her gaze for a moment, he saw his own confusion and uncertainty reflected in her eyes. He sighed. It seemed these people weren't as trustworthy as he'd thought.