Disclaimer: Everything belongs to George.
Notes: This fic could be considered an AU branching off from my fic, "Patriarchy," but it can easily stand alone. Also, chus is a Tatooine concept similar to the Korean idea of han, but more focused on the internalization of evil experienced.
Warnings: This fic is rated for military violence, some disturbing imagery, and post-trauma symptoms, and could potentially be triggering.

Clone Wars GI

It was ironic that, after everything, he should have come back to Tatooine. That he should consider it a place of refuge was more ironic still.

Tatooine had more than its share of problems. It was rank with corruption, and slavery, poverty, and desperation were far too common. It was, to all but the original inhabitants, a harsh, unforgiving world, with few prospects outside of crime. In the most important matters, Jabba's word ruled, but in all else, Tatooine remained virtually lawless. The Republic certainly did not exist there.

And that was why, after all the vows he had made never to go back, Anakin Skywalker found himself once more on Tatooine. Because the Republic did not exist there.

There was no war on Tatooine.

He was reluctant to go to the Lars homestead. He had been there only once, and had barely interacted with any of his stepfamily. The idea of going there now felt awkward at best. And he would need an explanation. He hardly felt able to explain this even to Master Obi-Wan or Padmé or the Chancellor. He was not about to attempt it with the Larses.

That really only left one person. He had not seen him in nearly twelve years, but he felt certain that, if nothing else, Kitster Banai understood the death of dreams.

It took him longer than he had expected to find the place. Kitster lived in Mos Eisley now, and he did not remember it as well. The streets were winding and clogged with people and transports and vendors' stalls, and none of them were clearly marked. But he found it at last—a small, maybe three room little hovel in a crowded market district just south of the main spaceport. In front of the hovel, edging on the street, a small booth had been set up, with a ragged multi-colored curtain hanging over the opening. A hand lettered sign advertised a puppet show every two hours. Today's show was about the famed pirate-hero Akar Hinil, and it seemed that it would be starting soon. A number of children were gathered around the booth, scuffling their feet and waiting impatiently for the curtain to draw.

Behind the booth sat a man with skin the color of fresh-brewed tzai and the face of someone who was older than his years, but who had not forgotten how to laugh. He was sipping at a cup of water and quietly perusing a datapad, worry written across his features.

Anakin stared. Somehow, it had never occurred to him that, if he had grown up, Kitster must have, too.

One of the children called out, "Hey, when's the show?" and Kitster looked up, chuckling to himself.

His eyes took in the vaguely familiar stranger, with his paler tan and his nervous air, standing just in front of the group of children, and he blinked once, twice. Then he looked back at his datapad, as though it were somehow responsible for the apparition before him. "Anakin?" he managed.

Anakin scuffed his feet in the sand. He had an idea what must be on Kitster's datapad, and for some reason, he felt oddly shy. It was one thing to write about the war to someone he thought he would never actually see again. It was quite another to find himself face to face with that person.

"Hey Kit," he said, falling without thought into his old Tatooine way of speaking. Among the Jedi, he never said "hey."

Kitster stared at him for a moment, as though weighing the possibilities. And then he grinned. "Well, since you're here, you can help me with the performance, and then we can talk," he said. "It's always easier with two."

Anakin balked. Somehow, even after twelve years, Kitster had remembered that the best way to talk him into anything was to catch him off guard. "You mean… But I don't know anything about puppets!"

"It's easy," Kitster said, rising and pulling Anakin with him towards the back of the booth. "You remember the story of Akar Hinil, don't you?"

Anakin nodded.

"Then all you have to do is pull the strings."

"You're not supposed to be here, are you?"

The show was over—it had not been nearly as difficult as Anakin had feared—and the children had scattered. Anakin was helping Kitster dismantle his booth and move it inside his hovel for the evening. He'd been hoping to delay this conversation as long as possible.

"What makes you think that?" he asked a little too innocently.

Kitster snorted. "I've read your letters," he said. "Your Jedi don't exactly strike me as the kind who would let you come halfway across the galaxy just to look up an old friend. They never have before. If you're here, it's because you're on some sort of assignment. Or you're running."

Anakin said nothing, just lifted the last pieces of the booth and carried them indoors. Kitster followed with a box full of puppets. He set the box on the shabby table in his small kitchen and turned on his friend, hefting the datapad for good measure.

"And we both know you're running," he said.

Anakin's jaw set. "I'm not going back," he said. "I can't. Not to that." He twisted his hands behind his back and added, in a tone that was much less certain, "I was hoping maybe you would help me."

His eyes flitted around the interior of Kitster's tiny home, noting the small kitchen, the table with its single chair, the sleeping pallet laid out in the main room, and the half-open door to the small fresher. The pieces of Kitster's booth were piled in a corner of the main room. There was nothing else in the house.

"Of course I'll help," Kitster said.

Kitster laid out another sleeping pallet in the main room, but Anakin did not enjoy it long. That first night he woke in a cold sweat after less than three hours of sleep, panting and fighting the urge to scream. Kitster didn't get much sleep, either, because when Anakin tried to navigate his way to the kitchen for a glass of water, he bumped against the table and let loose a string of Huttese curses loud enough to wake most of the neighborhood.

They ended up spending most of the night sitting on the floor sipping tzai from the only two mugs Kitster owned.

"What's it like out there?" Kitster asked. "What's it really like?"

Anakin laughed bitterly. "It's not like anything they show on the holonews, if that's what you mean," he said. He stirred his finger absently in his near-boiling cup of tzai and added, almost philosophically, "I saw a man blown to pieces in front of my eyes. He didn't even have time to scream."

Kitster took a great swallow of his tzai and tried not to think about that. "And all the things you wrote in your letters?"

Anakin sighed. "Yes," he said. "I saw all that too."

They fell silent, sipping tzai and looking at anything but each other.

"We received orders to bombard a city on Hisra," Anakin said suddenly. His voice was subdued, and Kitster had the distinct impression that he was not really speaking to him. "I walked through that city after it was over. There was rubble everywhere. And bodies. You couldn't miss the bodies. I saw a little girl with her foot ripped off. She was lying all twisted up like a jerba cord. And a few blocks later I saw her foot." He said this tonelessly. Kitster wondered if he even knew he was speaking.

"You can stay here as long as you need to," he told Anakin, because he couldn't think of anything else to say. "You don't have to go back to that."

"But I'm a Jedi," Anakin said, finally looking at him. "I'm supposed to bring peace. I'm supposed to…" He broke off and swallowed thickly. "I'm supposed to be better than this," he whispered.

His hands tightened, white-knuckled, around the mug, and Kitster suddenly wondered if they were only talking about the war anymore. Anakin said nothing for the rest of the night. But neither of them went back to sleep. Kitster was thinking of the sandy-haired boy who had been his friend and struggling to reconcile that boy with the man who sat next to him, the man with one hand made of metal and a war scar across his eye.

Anakin was imagining the twisted body of a Tusken child, lying face down in a crumpled heap, her foot missing, sliced cleanly away by the burning edge of a lightsaber.

"Are you going to tell Padmé?" Kitster asked.

Anakin had been on Tatooine for four days now. That meant that someone had already noticed his absence. They would probably find him soon.

"I don't know," he said quietly.

"You have to tell her something," Kitster prodded. "It's been long enough—someone must have noticed you're gone. And when they find you, it will be all over the holonet. You don't want her to hear it that way."

Anakin glared at him. He apparently hadn't thought of that. But all he said was, "I don't have a com anymore. I got rid of mine so they couldn't track me."

Kitster had a com, of course. But he could barely afford the cost of a comcall to Mos Espa. He twiddled it in his pocket for a moment, hesitating.

"You can use mine," he said at last, producing the com. The money would have to worry about itself.

Anakin fidgeted. "I…I don't know what to tell her," he said. "I can't expect her to follow me. Not this time."

Kitster shoved the com across the floor to him. "Shouldn't that be up to her?"

Senator Amidala arrived before the Jedi did, and Kitster was surprised to see that she was the same offworlder girl Anakin had had a crush on all those years ago, just before he left with the Jedi. Funny how Anakin had failed to mention that little detail. Kitster filed it away as something to tease him about when the opportunity arose.

Anakin tried to explain to her, but he stumbled over his words, and there were long and frequent pauses, and when she asked him more about Hisra, one of Kitster's only two mugs shattered in his metal hand. So in the end, they showed her the letters he'd sent Kitster. The letters he hadn't sent her.

Kitster could tell that she was more hurt by that than she was willing to show. And he could see that she was increasingly horrified by the things she was reading. She looked up at Anakin when she'd finished, but all she said was, "You never told me."

Kitster caught Anakin's eye and nodded slightly, then turned and slipped outside. Anakin took a deep breath through his nose and said, "I didn't want it to touch you. I thought… You were the only thing I had that wasn't touched by the war."

Padmé came to him, cupped his face lightly between her hands. There was something like pity in her eyes, and Anakin wasn't certain he liked that. But her voice, when she spoke, had a certain edge to it, and he found it oddly reassuring that the edge was directed at him. "You should have told me," she said. "I'm a Senator, Anakin. If for no other reason than that, I deserved to know."

He pulled back from her touch and made to retort, but she cut him off. "How long is it going to take for us to be honest with each other?" she whispered.

Anakin crossed his arms and turned away from her. "I don't know," he said, but she heard more vulnerability in his voice than he had perhaps meant to let on. "I don't know anything anymore."

She looked at the vulnerable curve of his back, the way his shoulders shook ever so slightly, and hesitated only a moment before taking him in her arms—just as she had that other day, the last time they had been on Tatooine—and letting him cry.

By now the holonet was buzzing with the story. Anakin Skywalker, the great hero of the Republic, had abandoned his role as a Jedi and a Commander in the Republic army and simply disappeared. But the Jedi were certain that he was not dead. Somehow, this had been leaked to the media, though Anakin was sure the Council had never intended to release that information.

Anakin was adamant that Padmé not be caught up in this. He didn't want her to leave her position in the Senate because of him. And he didn't want her to be trapped in the war of public opinion over his actions.

Padmé, however, had other ideas. She was determined that the galaxy should hear about his experiences, that they should know why he left the Jedi and the war. But he wasn't quite sure why himself. He only knew that the war had shown him himself, and finally he knew that he must either embrace the monster that lurked within him, or else leave everything behind. He wasn't certain he could really express that to Padmé, or to anyone. It was only a little easier writing about it, but then, he'd only allowed himself such honesty in writing to Kitster because, at the time, he'd been sure he would never see him again.

Padmé seemed to think that it was simply the horrors of what he'd seen that had finally forced him to this point of fracture. He didn't know how to tell her that, in his own mind, he could no longer separate the dead girl with the missing foot on Hisra from the sprawled bodies of Tusken children.

Kitster recommended art. "It's a way to get the chus out without letting it choke you," he said. "Sometimes the puppets do that for me. Some people use painting. But you've got to find something."

So he tried art. His first attempt was done mainly in shades of red, vast, chaotic swirls of it. But the prone bodies at the center of the swirls were still clearly distinguishable. He ripped the flimsi to shreds before Padmé or Kitster could see it, and he was surprised at how good that felt.

His second attempt was a little more recognizable. This time, the bodies clearly belonged to Tuskens. He destroyed that one, too.

The third was of an AT-TE walker crushing the bodies of several children and one grown woman. There were no distinguishing features, but somehow Anakin knew that the woman was his mother.

He didn't destroy that one fast enough.

"Ani…" Padmé breathed, but she didn't say anything else. The flimsi slipped from her hands and she sat down hard beside him on the floor.

"I can't draw anything else," he said dully. "I've tried, but…" He reached out absently and reclaimed the flimsi, balancing it over his knees and staring at it without seeing anything. "This one was supposed to be a speeder schematic."

He felt Padmé's arms wrap lightly about his waist and her head rest on his shoulder, but he didn't turn to look at her. The flimsi fluttered slightly with her movement, then settled back to rest on his knees.

"Why can't I draw anything else, Padmé?" he whispered.

He felt her arms tighten around him. "I don't know, Ani," she said, her voice subdued. "Maybe it's like Kitster said. You have to get the chus out."

The fourth piece had fewer bodies and more images of weaponry. It looked almost like an arms dealer's catalogue. He didn't destroy that one fast enough, either. Padmé and Kitster asked about some of the images, and he answered in a detached, too-calm tone that left them exchanging worried glances.

The fifth drawing showed an older man devouring the body of a child. He didn't even bother trying to hide it from them, but when Padmé bit her lip and looked away in horror, he felt a sudden rush of guilt that was oddly reassuring. It was nice to be able to feel guilt again.

Kitster, though, didn't look away. "It's like Mother Dorja's story," he said. Anakin looked at him in surprise and nodded.

"Yes. Just like Mother Dorja's story."

They spent the rest of the evening telling Padmé the story of the king from Sedui who offered his own son as food to the gods. When they were finished, Padmé looked again at the image that was still resting on the floor between them.

"If Anakin is the son," she murmured, "who is…the other one?" Her hand gestured towards the gruesome figure at its meal. "The Jedi? The Senate? The Chancellor? Maybe the war itself?"

She had expected some form of angry reaction from Anakin, some heated defense of the Chancellor or the Jedi, at least, and the fact that he didn't give her one told her more surely than anything else that something was very wrong.

"I don't know," he said dully. "Maybe. Or maybe they're both me."

Three days after Padmé's arrival, the Jedi Council appeared on Kitster's doorstep.

True, Kitster hadn't known many Jedi in his lifetime. Anakin was the only one, really, and since Kitster had known him mainly as a child and now, when he was hiding from the Jedi, even that one was arguable. Nevertheless, the Jedi were easily recognizable, not only by their similar shades of brown dress and the lightsabers hanging at their hips, but also by the identical stern, pensive expression each wore.

Kitster wondered vaguely which one was Obi-Wan Kenobi, but he was more concerned with whether it would even be possible to lie to a Jedi, or whether he should just keep his mouth shut. It was about then that Anakin stepped through the doorway and took the decision out of his hands.

"Hello, Masters," Anakin said, offering the traditional Jedi bow to his superiors. No one seemed surprised to see him, although some of the Jedi did seem a bit puzzled.

Things moved quickly after that. Kitster was asked to wait outside, and after a moment Padmé joined him, while the Jedi and Anakin stepped inside his house, the door sliding firmly closed behind them. Neither Padmé nor Kitster said anything. Although Padmé was far more familiar with the Jedi than Kitster, both of them knew what was happening.

Kitster thought of warm nights under the stars, so long ago now, when he had dreamed of becoming a famous actor someday, and Anakin had dreamed of becoming a Jedi. And now, although Anakin had left Tatooine and he had not, they had both watched their dreams die. Reality had shown his dream to be hopeless, and Anakin's to be a lie. He wondered which was worse.

A few moments later, the Jedi emerged from Kitster's home and Anakin followed them, the ever-present lightsaber no longer swinging at his hip. He looked oddly calm for a man who had just lost his life.

Kitster watched as the Jedi turned as one and walked away without a backward glance. He watched Anakin struggle against himself before finally calling out, "Master, wait!" to the Jedi's retreating backs. And he watched as a ginger-haired, bearded man in his middle years turned from the group as though he had simply been waiting for Anakin to ask.

"Master," Anakin said when the man reached them, "I'm sorry." His eyes were trained firmly on the dust at his feet.

The ginger-haired man hesitated a moment before resting a hand on Anakin's shoulder. "You did what you felt was right, Anakin," he said slowly. "I may not understand fully, but…I am proud of you. And I hope you find the peace you're looking for."

Anakin swallowed hard and looked up. "Thank you, Master."

"Where will you go?" the Jedi asked.

"Naboo. Padmé says…" Anakin let out a breath and began again. "Padmé says they can offer me sanctuary there. Naboo has never supported the war, so…"

The Jedi nodded. "I'll miss knowing that you're watching my back, Anakin, but if you're certain of this…"

"I am, Master," Anakin said quietly. "I can't do this anymore. I'm sorry." Then he looked up and offered a weak but genuine smile, the first smile Kitster had seen on him since he arrived. "I'm going to miss you, too, Master."

Obi-Wan Kenobi smiled back. "Then may the Force be with you, Anakin," he said, and turned to rejoin the other Jedi.

"May the Force be with you, Obi-Wan," Anakin whispered as the Jedi disappeared into the streets of Mos Eisley.

Padmé and Kitster both came to stand beside him, and Padmé took his metal hand between both of hers. "Are you all right?" she asked quietly. He was still staring after the Jedi.

"It feels lighter," Anakin said suddenly, gesturing toward his now empty belt, where the lightsaber had once hung. "I think…" He hesitated. "I think maybe I could get used to that."