ways-in a lot of ways-I'm ahead of him. I'm ready for the trials. I know I am! He knows it, too. He feels I'm too unpredictable-other Jedi my age have gone through the trials and made it. I know I started my training late, but he won't let me move on.' Padme's expression grew curious, and Anakin could well understand her puzzlement, for he, too, was surprised at how openly he was speaking, critically, of Obi-Wan. He thought that he should stop right there, and silently berated himself.
But then Padme said, with all sympathy, 'That must be frustrating.'
'It's worse!' Anakin cried in response, willingly diving into that warm place. 'He's overly critical! He never listens! He just doesn't understand! It's not fair!'
He would have gone on and on, but Padme began to laugh, and that stopped Anakin as surely as a slap across the face.
'I'm sorry,' she said through her giggles. 'You sounded exactly like that little boy I once knew, when he didn't get his way.'
'I'm not whining! I'm not.'
Across the room, Dorme, too, began to chuckle.
'I didn't say it to hurt you,' Padme explained.
Anakin took a deep breath, then blew it all out of him, his shoulders visibly relaxing. 'I know.'
He seemed so pitiable then, not pitiful, but just like a lost little soul.
Padme couldn't resist. She walked over to him and lifted her hand to gently stroke his cheek. 'Anakin.'
For the first time since they had been reunited, Padme truly looked into the blue eyes of the young Padawan, locked stares with him so that they each could see beneath the surface, so that they each could view the other's heart. It was a fleeting moment, made so by Padme's common sense.
She quickly altered the mood with a sincere but lighthearted request.
'Don't try to grow up too fast.'
'I am grown up,' Anakin replied. 'You said it yourself.' He finished by making his reply into something suggestive, as he looked deeply into Padme's beautiful brown eyes again, this time even more intensely, more passionately.
'Please don't look at me like that,' she said, turning away.
'Why not?'
'Because I can see what you're thinking.'
Anakin broke the tension, or tried to, with a laugh. 'Oh, so you have Jedi powers, too?'
Padme looked past the young Padawan for a moment, glimpsing Dorme, who was watching with obvious concern and not even trying to hide her interest anymore. And Padme understood that concern, given the strange and unexpected road this conversation had taken. She looked squarely at Anakin again and said, with no room for debate, 'It makes me feel uncomfortable.' Anakin relented and looked away. 'Sorry, M'Lady,' he said professionally, and he stepped back, allowing her to resume her packing.
Just the bodyguard again.
But he wasn't, Padme knew, no matter how much she wished it were true.
On a water-washed, wind-lashed world, far to the most remote edges of the Outer Rim, a father and his son sat on a skirt of shining black metal, watching carefully in the few somewhat calm pools created by the currents swirling about the gigantic caryatid that climbed out of the turbulent ocean. The rain had let up a bit, a rare occasion in this watery place, allowing for some calm surface area, at least, and the pair stared hard, searching for the meter-long dark silhouettes of rollerfish.
They were on the lowest skirt of one of the great pillars that supported Tipoca City, the greatest city on all of Kamino, a place of sleek structures, all rounded to deflect the continual wind, rather than flat- faced to battle against it. Kamino had been designed, or upgraded at least, by many of the best architects the galaxy could offer, who understood well that the best way to battle planetary elements was to subtly dodge them. Towering transparisteel windows looked out from every portal-the father, Jango, often wondered why the Kaminoans, tall and thin, pasty white creatures with huge almond-shaped eyes set in oblong heads on necks as long as his arm, wanted so many windows. What was there to see on this violent world other than rolling waters and nearly constant downpours?
Still, even Kamino had its better moments. It was all relative, Jango supposed. Thus, when he saw that it was not raining very hard, he had taken his boy outside.
Jango tapped his son on the shoulder and nodded toward one of the quiet eddies, and the younger one, his face showing all the exuberance of a ten- year-old boy, lifted his pocker, an ion-burst-powered atlatl, and took deadly aim. He didn't use the laser sighting unit, which automatically adjusted for watery refraction. No, this kill was to be a test of his skill alone.
He exhaled deeply, as his father had taught him, using the technique to go perfectly steady, and then, as the prey turned sidelong, he snapped his arm forward, throwing the missile. Barely a meter from the boy's extended hand, the back of the missile glowed briefly, a sudden and short burst of power that shot it off like a blaster bolt, knifing through the water and taking the fish in the side, its barbed head driving through.
With a shout of joy, the boy twisted the atlatl handle, locking the nearly invisible but tremendously strong line, and then, when the fish squirmed away enough to pull the line taut, the boy slowly and deliberately turned the handle, reeling in his catch.
'Well done,' Jango congratulated. 'But if you had hit it a centimeter forward, you would have skewered the primary muscle just below the gill and rendered it completely helpless.'
The boy nodded, unperturbed that his father, his mentor, could always find fault, even in success. The boy knew that his beloved father did so only because it forced him to strive for perfection. And in a dangerous galaxy, perfection allowed for survival.
The boy loved his father even more for caring enough to criticize.
