sith_happened | Office hours [all day]

He'd meant to do this last week, really, but ~~got temporarily eaten~~ ended up so caught up in a side project that he'd missed Tuesday completely.

Anyway. Anakin made his way to the office wing of the school building and stood in his grandfather's doorway, knocking once on the doorframe lightly. That this was a much less contentious situation than the last time he'd been here was -- he wasn't sure if that was better or worse.

"Come in, Anakin," Anakin said, not taking his eyes off of his game.

Popping all of the frogs was very important, okay? And not just because he had no idea how to proceed in this conversation.

"Is now a bad time?" Anakin asked, not so much looking at the game as he was at Anakin's intent focus on it. "You seem busy."

[[OH GOD PROPER NOUN FUN.]]

"Nothing that can't wait," Anakin said, putting down the computer. "Just a bit of distraction."

Anakin tilted his head thoughtfully. "Do you need a lot of that around here?"

"For the most part, I've gotten used to the slower pace," Anakin said, "but there are days when I need to do something else."

"Why Fandom?" Anakin had to ask, curiosity overriding any need for a conversational transition. "Why did you decide to settle down here after . . . everything?"

"I was a student here when I was young," Anakin said. "I came back to watch Luke when he was a student and...it felt like home here." He shrugged, embarrassed. "I'd forgotten what that felt like. After the second Death Star blew up, I knew there was no place for me in our galaxy any more. Here seemed like as good a place to be exiled to as any."

He hadn't thought of it as an exile, so Anakin's surprise showed in his expression. "Well, I guess if you had to choose . . ." But there was one thing that had been bothering him all along, and since he was here he might as well bring it up.

"But you look younger than Uncle Luke -- at home, I mean -- and still know everything that happened to him and Mom back during the Rebellion."

Anakin shooed the radio squirrels with a nudge in the Force.

"Cloning," Anakin replied with a nod. "The Emperor had a backup plan for everything."

Anakin's lips thinned a bit, and his expression closed down a bit. "The Emperor and his clones," he muttered. "Of course."

He shook his head. "I was wondering how that had happened. Bet this wasn't exactly what he had in mind for you when he set that contingency plan."

There was a flash of anger in Anakin's eyes that said at least where the Emperor was concerned, it wasn't hard to see why he had fallen. "Probably not," he agreed. "I took down the entire facility after I woke up. No backup plan for him."

Anakin nodded. "Good. And then you came here to teach a bunch of teenagers? That's an interesting choice for exile."

He was a teenager, otherwise he might have had a completely different perspective on that.

"I have a strange sense of fun," Anakin replied.

"So I'm learning," Anakin said, barely missing a beat. He tried a brief, crooked smile. "It isn't exactly in the HoloNet archives."

"I did a pretty good job scrubbing those," Anakin admitted wryly.

"I wish you hadn't," Anakin told him honestly. "I think I understand why you did, but I wish we'd had more of a chance to know who you were."

"I didn't want to remember who I'd been," Anakin said flatly. "I was ashamed of what I'd become."

Anakin chewed on his lower lip, filing that away in his memory as something to share with his mother and Uncle Luke later.

"Knowing who you'd been would have been nice for me," he admitted. "It was hard, when I was a kid --" he said as if he wasn't still one -- "to understand what kind of name I'm carrying when the only things I knew about it had to do with Vader."

Anakin nodded. "It's quite a burden your mother placed on your shoulders," he said quietly and not without sympathy, "by giving you my name."

"I can handle it," he said, trying and not exactly succeeding at making it sound convincing. "I don't mind so much, now. But it'd be astral if half the adults I know would stop warning me about turning to the Dark Side every time I so much as breathe funny."

It got really tiring after a while.

Especially when it was the other two Solos they should have been watching...

Anakin looked annoyed. "It's not a name that will take you down that path. It's an attitude combined with teachers not paying attention."

Anakin huffed lightly. "Hopefully not people paying too much attention to every little thing I do, either. I try not to let it get to me, but it's irritating -- and I don't miss it here." He looked slightly bemused as he added, "Here, when people find out my name, and then find out I'm related to you, I usually end up hearing all about how great you are."

Or scary, but it seemed like a bad idea to bring that up.

Anakin looked genuinely shocked--and kind of touched--to hear that. "Really?"

Anakin nodded, his hair falling into his eyes as he did. "I get the impression that you're tough on them as a teacher, but when things get bad you're always there."

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NFB

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