Star Wars One-Shots

The Field Trip Menace

Author's Note: Here's a gift request for Sinvulkt on ao3. :D

~ Amina Gila

Just so everyone knows, you don't have to know who Mill is to understand the story. :) 

~ Tirana Sorki

While struggling with his nightmares of Padme's death, Anakin runs into an old friend at the Temple. Mill Alibeth. One thing leads to the next, and she gives him an idea she never intended to, on how to save Padme. If the Council won't let him into the restricted area meant for Masters on the Council, then he can enlist the help of a group of younglings to get inside anyway.

Anakin doesn't think he even felt this worn on the fronts. Every moment, he's filled with that unclenching terror, that knowledge that Padme and his child are about to die. It's not just his visions. He can feel it in the Force, this overwhelming sense of something changing. It's as though her Force presence is fading, and he doesn't know what to do about it. He has to find a way to stop it, but he doesn't know how.

He can't fail her like he did his mother, but he doesn't know who to go to. The Jedi aren't an option. Perhaps, if he could research the Archives, in the section only for Jedi Masters and Council members, he could find something of use, but not in the general area.

And even that isn't something that's been granted to him.

Because he's on the Council now, but he's not a Master. He's an outcast, just as much as he always has been. They don't need to remind him he doesn't belong here. He already knows that. And he doesn't understand why they always break their own rules, make exceptions, only for him. Because he's somehow different, and he can't understand why.

Of course, there's also the mission to spy on Palpatine, which makes it hard to be around him, too, knowing what he's been asked to do, how he's betraying the one person who always stood by him. He can't trust the Council at all anymore, and it's....

He's so tired.

"Master?" a voice asks, softly.

Anakin looks up with a start – he's standing near one of the windows gazing aimlessly out at the Coruscant skyline beyond, so he didn't notice the person approaching behind him.

He recognizes the black-haired Zabrak girl instantly. How could he not? Even if it's been three years since he last saw her, at the beginning of the war.

"Mill?" Anakin asks, surprised. Right after his Knighting, he'd been on a mission to watch over a group of younglings, and she was one of them. Her connection to the Force was... different; she strongly senses others' emotions and always had a hard time understanding why the other younglings were so excited to go fight. That's why she finally settled for doing relief work and helping people without fighting – she's never going to become an official Jedi Knight.

Anakin had helped her deal with it, and she... had helped him, in more ways than she realized.

"You don't always have to be the sun dragon," she'd told him, about his constant need to be strong enough to protect everyone. He hardly even understood it, because everyone around him always needs, demands of him to be better, more. And this time, right now, he knows he has to be, for the sake of his child.

That doesn't change how much the words had meant to him. He's always wanted to... be more than that.

"I did not expect to see you here. It has been a long time," he says.

She nods, smiling faintly before frowning. "I sensed you. Are you... alright?"

The question catches him totally by surprise. No one's asked him that since this started, except Padme which hardly helps when she's the one in danger, and also stubbornly maintains that she isn't. "There is much going on," Anakin answers, after a moment of hesitation.