R2-D2

I was aware of everything from the very beginning.

Maybe even before they knew there was anything to be aware of. Despite their advanced programming, it baffles me how often organics –particularly the human variety—can be surprisingly dense.

On that first trip to Naboo, it was very apparent that Master and Mistress clearly suffered from an intermittent malfunction in their connectivity. Sure, there were times when they laughed and seemed to transmit data effectively, but there were plenty of moments, in between, when they would just stare at each other in complete silence, their messaging systems caught in translation limbo. Especially after that one evening, when their transmissions shut down completely.

Later, after constantly rolling from room to room, Master assured me everything was fine, and Mistress thanked me for my concern in that sad way of hers saying more or less the same thing. But I knew something was out of sequence in their binary.

Master's reboot was effective if different from any program I had ever seen before. He would train, hard and fast, until his lightsaber's scald and the sweat rolling off his faceplate had scrubbed everything clean again. Mistress' programming left her equally cleansed, but depleted in a way different from Master. Her power-down protocol was accompanied by a humming and shaking that made my internal wiring ache to see unfold.

Crying. That's what she called it later. I'm sorry you had to see me crying like that, Artoo. I didn't know it then, but I would hear her say that exact phrase more often than my internal counter could track, even after the second trip when they finally managed to fix the faulty code that had been responsible for their previously jammed transmissions.

At the outset, I wasn't slated to accompany them back to Naboo. Master and Mistress kept a lot of the details to themselves early on. There was some back and forth about the matter, though they never discussed it in front of Threepio directly – he would most assuredly have gotten us grounded on Coruscant had he known, and I suspect was a large reason if not the reason we were originally supposed to remain behind.

I hadn't meant to overhear yet another private conversation but they didn't stop at my sudden intrusion either. Maybe it was because I was already guarding their fledgling secret… at least that's how I initially interpreted Mistress' plea to Master when she said, "He was already with us the first time." Hands on his hips, Master had eyed me thoughtfully, before Mistress walked up behind him, wrapped her arms about his middle, and added, "Besides, he can help us."

The obvious reason for wanting our help was that they needed witnesses. Under certain circumstances, droids can testify in court had the validity of their union ever come into question. But Threepio would have been able to handle that all by himself, and much more effectively than a lowly astromech. Sometimes, I will admit, sometimes being a protocol droid had its advantages.

No, the real reason why I was on that second trip – and later allowed to be privy to all of the details –was because they wanted the memories.

Master helped me with the storage of all those holostills and vids. He tried to be gentle, but the reconfigurations of my internal security and the additional programming uploads needed to encrypt such sensitive data often left me feeling a little queasy in the soft drive. Once I got used to the new wiring and data processing routes, it didn't really bother me. I learned to have patience when something would trigger my hard drives to bypass the vaulted synapses in my memory core. That momentary lapse as my directive was re-routed always annoyed C-3PO to no end.

Master knew what he was asking of me to undertake though; I could see he was sorry for rooting around deep in my circuit boards. The installation of redundancies and firewalls wasn't the most pleasant experience I carry around in my memory banks.

The redundancy tickled a little whenever I had to undergo cleaning. Master was very careful about that too, and was adamant that he oversee all of my military updates and data scans. He frequently disobeyed directives concerning memory wipe protocols. On one instance, he almost lost the argument to Admiral Yularen, but appeased the older in age, if not in rank organic by dismissing me and himself from the bridge to "wipe his system right now, if it'll cool your damn thrusters." He hadn't stayed to listen to the response, and I cooed fearfully to his back as we rolled to the assault ship's subdecks. Master didn't respond to me either, not until we were safely tucked into his room. Chucking the datachip in his hand under the cot along with the others, he sat down, and just looked at me.

We'll wait a few minutes down here, pal, just so they think I've done it.

Then he put his head in his hands, covering his vocabulator with them so that my scanners almost didn't pick up his auditory output.

Gods, I miss her.

He never cried like Mistress did. Or maybe he just never let me see when his lubricant leaked, but I could sense his primary directive fritzing in those moments. I never knew what to say when Mistress' wavered, but I almost always knew what to say to Master.

Well, not what to say exactly. I wouldn't actually say anything. Upon my approach, he'd just reach over and unlock the encryption key so I could play back one of the memories they had entrusted to my care.

Master never requested any particular from their secret archive, but, for him, I always knew to start at the beginning.

Their wedding was beautiful, which I realize may sound a bit sentimental coming from a droid programmed for mechanical repairs, but it was undeniably true. Before his memory was wiped several times over, Threepio often lamented how shameful it was the moment couldn't be shared with more people. I reminded him that it was a secret and couldn't be shared or Master and Mistress would face all sorts of trouble. He would snap at me and mutter something about understanding all that but still it would be nice to have someone ask now and again.

And then came a significant period of time where no one ever asked, silently or not, to access that data. Years and countless "memory wipes" and several masters later, I finally had one individual try to challenge the security of Master's embedded vault. The ironic part of the whole situation was that I wanted to help him, but somehow Master had hidden the encryption key so deeply, I was unable to. He once asked Threepio to try to help, though a lot of good that did him.

"I'm sincerely sorry, Master Luke," Threepio had said. "But I have no idea what Artoo's going on and on about."

(As I mentioned, Threepio received his fair share of scrubbings and not just the oil bath variety.)

Master Luke never held it against me, though I could tell how disappointed he was. I think he would have genuinely been interested to see a history told to him in a way the galaxy never knew, through a photoreceptor that still remembered an age of larger-than-life heroes and enduring friendships.

But maybe the most surprising moment of all came when she asked me to show her the man who had once been one of those larger-than-life heroes, had had enduring friendships with someone named Ben – I never understood the ridiculous pseudonym -

Or maybe it shouldn't have surprised me when Mistress Leia unlocked the deepest secrets I kept stored within me. Even as she was trying to reconcile Master with the corrupted version he turned into, she understood on some level the place where ultimately this all started.

And, just like I did all those times before for Master, I started the playback…

from the very beginning.