Log: The Anakins and Padmé WHO: Anakins Solo and Skywalker, Padmé Amidala WHAT: Anakin Skywalker and Padmé have dinner with Anakin Solo. (Did you know it's really tricky to make a log with two people having the same first name and last initial?) WHEN: Late January (wow we're fast) WHERE: The Exosphere
Anakin Solo had no idea what to expect when he met with his grandparents. He'd met them before, of course, back on the Island, but everything had been significantly different there - including them. He was pretty certain his Grandfather had come from a later time based on the sense of darkness he'd briefly picked up on, and the conversation in the original post as well. But he knew his mother had met with them and that it had gone all right, and he wasn't going to miss the opportunity to try to have a relationship here, even if he didn't know for certain what that relationship was going to look like.
He shifted from one foot to the other outside of Exosphere, trying not to be anxious as he waited. He'd been half-tempted to put on his Jedi Robes, but in the end he'd gone for something more like what his Father would have worn - trousers, a simple shirt, and a jacket. He'd been in Tumbleweed long enough that it had begun to feel like a normal thing.
Plus - if his Grandfather wasn't particularly keen on Jedi at the moment then Anakin not wearing Jedi tunics probably wasn't a bad thing. He wanted to make a good impression. Because while he might remember having met his grandparents before - they didn't remember having met him. So this was important, it mattered, and Anakin had always wanted to meet his Grandfather and have him be proud of what Anakin had been able to do - who he was. He could only hope that would be the case now.
As far as Anakin Skywalker knew, it was a first meeting for him with his grandson. Leia had also told him and Padmé that they had other grandchildren as well who were no longer here. It was such a strange thing to be meeting his grown daughter and young grandson before his children were even born. The 'time differences' people had mentioned on his arrival were proving to be quite an understatement.
It had been strange for him to have no restrictions on his wardrobe for the first time. That freedom of choice combined with his rejection of the Order had led to him swapping his old robes for something that still had similar lines and dark colors, but was not clearly Jedi in origin. He kept his prosthetic arm gloved as usual.
Since his grandson had mentioned having an astromech, he decided to bring R2-D2 along. Artoo could prove a useful distraction if things got at all awkward or give them some common ground to talk about.
As Padmé walked with her husband down the hall, closer than she’d ever walked with him on any world or ship before this, she, too, considered all they’d been told about timing. While a part of her was still saddened beyond words that she wouldn’t have the chance to see her children after they were born, to be there and watch them grow up and have children of their own, she was incredibly grateful and happy to have this opportunity. She longed to meet Luke and Jacen and Jaina as well, but could only hope that she might one day in the future. For now, her focus was on Leia and Anakin. And on spending time with his namesake.
When they turned a corner to approach Exosphere, she reached out to take Anakin’s hand. Again, she was in simple clothes not too different from his, and though it was still a shock to see him not wearing his robes when they weren’t actively engaged in a battle, she enjoyed having the chance to study him. She didn’t approve of his choices regarding the Order and whatever else he’d done, but he was still the man she loved - of that she was certain - and she was determined to stay by his side.
Turning her gaze towards the restaurant as they drew near, she smiled tentatively when she saw a dark haired boy outside it who seemed a little nervous, and inwardly confirmed who he was in comparison to the picture she’d seen on the network. After squeezing her husband’s hand subtly, she offered the teen a smile.
“Hello, Anakin.”
"Hey!" Anakin smiled brightly, if a little anxious as he stepped forward momentarily uncertain if he should offer a hug or a hand. A hand was just good manners, if ridiculously formal for what he was doing, which was meeting his grandparents. Which pretty much answered the question for him. He stepped forward to offer his grandmother a hug, before turning to his grandfather to offer the same.
"Artoo!" he added as he saw the droid, and then he realized that the droid wouldn't actually know who he was and he stepped back. "Guess I'm not going to be in your memory banks, huh? Well, it's good to see you anyway."
He looked back at his grandparents and stepped back just a little, hands in his pockets with a posture that had they known his father would have been a mirror image of him. "So, it's good to see you guys. Have you been here to Exosphere yet?"
The older Anakin wasn't particularly comfortable with the offered hug. He could easily name all the people he had ever hugged in his life; it was a short list. He didn't reject it, though, despite how surprising it was for him.
Artoo indeed beeped in question of who this new person was after a quick check of his memory banks turned up no results. It was nice, of course, to be acknowledged and further beeps expressed that.
"It's good to meet you, too. I haven't been to it myself, but Padmé has."
Padmé had no problem in accepting the hug, smiling happily even as he turned to Anakin and gave the same, then pushed a stray curl back from her cheek as she studied him intently. “I had lunch there with Leia,” she said, again slipping her hand into her husband’s.
“I was pleasantly surprised by the offerings, and though I didn’t recognize it all, it was pretty good. Lead the way,” she motioned for him to go into the establishment first, then smiled over at Ani and back at the droid. “We’ll all be right behind you.”
"I found it a couple of days ago and discovered they have food from our galaxy, which may not sound like a big deal," Anakin chuckled as he stepped over to open the door. "But when you haven't had any of it for over a year, it kind of is."
He led his way into Exosphere trying not to get too far ahead of his grandparents. He looked around for a table that might be a good place for them to talk and let them try out some of the things. He hated how nervous he was about all of this, but it was difficult when he didn't really know much about when they'd come from, or what they were thinking of any of this.
He stopped at a selected booth and waited for them both before he slid into the seat on one side. "Are you getting settled a little bit?"
The older Anakin nodded and followed his grandson. "Like I told you on the network-- I haven't gone that long without it, but I can relate." He let Padmé take her seat first before he sat next to her. Artoo rolled himself adjacent to the booth and made a remark about lack of accommodations for droids that made Anakin chuckle. "It's very different from Padmé's-- that is, our apartment on Coruscant, and very different from Temple quarters, and very different again from the ships I've been assigned to before. The two of us, Threepio, and Artoo are all sharing a small space. But I don't mind."
“Over a year? You were in that city I heard mentioned...Tumbleweed? For over a year?” Padmé couldn’t begin to imagine what it would be like to be away from their entire galaxy for that long - even now, it was strange to have no way to contact the Senate or the Council or even Jar-Jar, and they’d been there barely a week. She slid into the booth and smiled at the astromech when he beeped, then turned her attention to her husband and nodded her agreement.
“I’ve seen rooms smaller - but it’s comfortable despite the crowded conditions.”
"Not a year at Tumbleweed," the younger boy explained as he shook his head at his grandmother's comment. "When I first arrived, it was in a pod at a place called Mount Weather. The world had suffered some pretty devastating conditions under a nuclear war, so there wasn't much in the way of infrastructure or communities. So we stayed underground in Mount Weather. The conditions there were a bit less tight than here, but not a lot less. Food was rationed, and it was pretty dangerous when you went out. Initially there was a perimeter and you weren't supposed to go outside of that because of treaties with the locals."
Anakin picked up a menu and turned it over in his hands before continuing. "We were there for probably a good part of a year - seven or eight months anyway. From there we ended up on this island in the middle of nowhere. That was… really interesting. We had to pretty much come up with our housing, our own food everything. We were there for a few months and then we went to Tumbleweed and we'd been there for several months too, and then we came here. Oh, and there was this random fairytale place called Storybrooke, but that was a magical mishap I think."
He shrugged. "I mean, my bunk here is larger than the one I used to have on the Falcon. That's my Dad's ship, it's a Corellian light freighter. That's how I'm used to traveling."
"That many different places, out of your control, for over a year?" Even with the war on, the older Anakin at least got some leave and occasional input into his assignments.
He suspected Padmé would be most interested in the different cultures and people that their grandson had encountered. He, on the other hand, latched onto the mention of ships. "Oh really? What model freighter is she? I had a G9 Rigger for awhile myself. She wasn't much when I... uh, 'acquired' her, but I put in a lot of work."
Ani’s suspicions were correct, and Padmé tilted her head curiously as their grandson described the different locations they’d been in. “Were these all on different planets? The first place - with the mountain - what were the people there like? And what do you mean by a fairytale place? How long were you in Storybrooke?”
It seemed like everything he told them gave her only more questions she’d like answered, because she did truly want to get to Anakin - and she also wanted to hear about these different places. One of the significant cons to being a high-ranking Senator meant that she had been so often tied to Coruscant, and couldn’t leave as often as she would have liked. Ani was far more worldly than she, and she wished sometimes she could see some of the planets he’d described over the years for herself, rather than in holos and archives.
At his words about the ship, she was about to ask about that as well, but stopped when her husband cut in. She shot him an amused look at his wording. “When you illegally kept her, you mean?”
"She's a Corellian Engineering Corporation (CEC) YT-1300 light freighter, although who knows how many modifications she's had," Anakin laughed easily. "My Dad and Chewie, um, that's his Wookiee copilot, they've put so many hours on her and who knows how much she'd already been modified when they got her. She's ridiculously old at this point, but my Dad would stand up for her under almost any circumstance."
The Falcon was mostly good memories at this point and even Chewie, although it was still painful to think of the last time that he'd seen Chewie. He could talk about modifications all day, but he hadn't really answered his Grandmother's question.
"Actually, as weird as this is going to sound - we were on the same planet I think. Like, Mount Weather was a future version of the planet, and Tumbleweed a past, and the island - well, so far as I can tell it was on a version of the planet as well. This is the first time we've been off planet - it's just been like… different timelines, or realities?"
The older Anakin protested, "I didn't illegally keep her! I, uh, liberated her! That Hutt was the one illegally using her for spice runs. And you got him arrested, so his property would've been impounded anyway. I just requisitioned it a little early." He, too, could have easily talked all day about the modifications to any ship. Poor Padmé would find that much less interesting. "A YT-1300, really? I'd love to fly one of those someday, try out those engines I've heard so much about. What kind of configuration did your dad go with?"
“You liberated her and didn’t turn her in. Instead, you kept the ship as your own special project,” she pointed out. As a Jedi, he wasn’t really supposed to have material possessions, but she had never begrudged him it, and she smiled, reaching out to touch his arm lightly. When he started on with another question about the ship, Padmé jumped in quickly to attempt to steer the conversation back to what Anakin was saying about the planet he’d been in.
“All this occurred on a single planet? I suppose that’s possible if there are these...different points in time - “ which was obviously true, since here they were having lunch with their grandson and Padmé wasn’t even pregnant. “But why is this happening? Does anyone know the reason for the vortex doing all this?”
Anakin looked back and forth between his grandparents amused at the whole thing. It sounded a lot like his parents, honestly. His Dad protesting how he'd gotten the Falcon, or some other business thing, and his mother raising an eyebrow and countering the point. It felt entirely natural, honestly.
"I don't think anyone has figured out the why," he offered in response to his Grandmother's question. "I mean, you could say to help people with things - because the first place it almost felt like that. But Tumbleweed it doesn't feel like anyone needed help particularly there, and the same thing here. It's just… a giant cruise. It's kind of… obvious. Or at least, it feels obvious."
The two Anakins would just have to talk ships some other time. Hand on his wife's hand, Anakin Skywalker considered the other worlds and their current location. "Or it's a very comfortable, very appealing prison. So comfortable that people might not even realize it's one, and so never try to escape. Or a giant cruise, yes, but gone wrong. Maybe there used to be a crew of beings until they did something the droids didn't like..." Artoo interrupted with alarmed sounds of protest about murderous droid uprisings. "Maybe not murder, Artoo. They could have been made to disembark." He shrugged. "Or maybe there was never anyone except the droids."
Absently, Padmé turned her hand over so that she could link fingers with Ani, and felt an inner thrill. This experience of actually being able to be themselves in public was so new and exciting that she was a little distracted by the heady rush of it all and had to fight to keep her attention on the conversation.
“I agree - this ship is rather eerie, and based on the amenities and the ample supply of resources, it was clearly designed for a purpose in mind, and it seems to be fully accommodating for humans - or those with primarily human appetites.” And that itself made her a little uneasy. She had long since overcome her own learned xenophobia, but there were far too many other beings out there who hadn’t.
“And no one has been able to discover if it has an ultimate destination, correct?”
"Not so far as I know," the younger Anakin glanced around them. He had to admit that he rather wished there were ways off of the ship. Of course, it had been the same thing at the island, hadn't it? He looked back up and shrugged. "When we were on the island nobody could leave. It was weird, but people who made boats or tried to leave, just ended up back on the island. It's not unlike this… except that so far, you know, this has been all right. The island had this weird smoke monster that… was not good. And also just… it felt dark and weird. This doesn't have the same feel - in the Force anyway. The not knowing what is what? That part is definitely a little unnerving."
The waitstaff droids had come and gone a few times as they talked, taking their orders and then bringing drinks and food.
"If someone did try to leave this ship, maybe in one of the escape pods, they'd probably get stranded and left behind, right? Ships never have much of a presence in the Force anyway-- it's the lifeforms and the events that happen in and on them that we sense. And it doesn't even take Force sensitivity to know something is wrong here." The older Anakin nodded towards Padmé; her instincts had told her much the same. Talk of the Force made Anakin more curious to know where his grandson was in his training. "So you've been learning from your Uncle Luke. Our son."
“Unless the ship has a beacon that can call the pods back,” Padmé offered. She wondered what, exactly, their grandson meant by a smoke monster, but decided that was best left for another time. Focusing on her food, she let Ani lead the conversation, but her gaze remained on the younger Anakin, eager to hear more about Luke as well. She wanted to know everything she could about their lives.
"Yeah," Anakin brightened slightly. "Uncle Luke's been, well, he was really the only person who had any Jedi training for a while. But then he's been training other people. And Jacen and Jaina and I have all been there. My best friend Tahiri, she was here for a while, but anyway she's been training there too. And so yeah, I've been learning a bit."
He took a bite of his food and shrugged. He wasn't certain how his Grandfather felt about the Jedi, but he was a Jedi, and he wasn't going to pretend he was otherwise. "So yes, I've been training, and Uncle Luke's a good teacher. We could, I mean, you have your lightsaber, yeah? We could always practice sometime, if you want?"
"I do." The older Anakin gestured towards his utility belt; his cloak was hiding the lightsaber, but it was there. "I've started giving your mother some lessons, actually. I'd be happy to work with you as well. Do you have your own? Maybe after dinner, if you aren't too full?"
"I'd love that," Anakin beamed at his grandfather as he reached for a piece of bread. He was pretty certain he was going to be able to pick up some tips from his grandfather that he might not have gained from anywhere else. "Man, I wish Jacen and Jaina were here cause we could show you this exercise the three of us came up with."
He reached for the juice as he leaned forward over the table to tell his grandparents a bit more about his siblings and their learning experiences on Yavin IV.