Chapter Text
Anakin sighed and stared up at the ceiling.
It was dark in his room.
Well, dark except for that strip of light coming in from between the gap in his curtains from the streetlight on the sidewalk.
He really should get curtains that fit this bedroom's window.
Curtains weren't too expensive, were they?
Blackout curtains probably were; Anakin had heard of blackout curtains; maybe he should try blackout curtains? Maybe they would help him sleep better.
He was pretty sure they sold curtains at the big Target, the one that was also a grocery store.
Of course first he'd have to measure the window to know what size he needed.
They probably sold curtains online come to think of it; he didn't have to load the kids in the car and go to Target.
He wondered where his tape measure was.
Actually, wasn't he supposed to be boycotting Target? They had done something…homophobic, maybe? Or was that Walmart?
He'd tried an eye mask once but didn't like the feeling of having something touching his face while he slept.
The tape measure should be in the garage, but it might still be in one of the moving boxes.
He hoped it was Walmart he was supposed to boycott, because he didn't think he'd ever actually been to a Walmart; although did it really count as 'boycotting' if the only reason he didn't go there wasn't because of any moral stance but simply because he'd never lived near one?
He was pretty sure he'd let Leia have that eye mask.
He was also pretty sure she'd drawn a unicorn on it; it had been in the middle of her unicorn phase…
Anakin groaned and sat up. This wasn't working, he admitted to himself as he rubbed two fingers against his closed eyelid. He knew, intellectually, that the only way to fall asleep was to actually lie down and close his eyes, but at some point after lying in bed awake for three hours he just couldn't take the racing thoughts anymore. He kicked the blanket - twisted, now, around one of his calves as he'd tossed and turned after tucking Luke and Leia in for the night - to the foot of the bed and swung his feet to the floor.
Slippers. Maybe that's what he should tell Padmé he wanted for Christmas. Padmé didn't buy him Christmas gifts anymore, of course - which was fine with Anakin; it saved him the trouble of trying to think of something to give her - but she always made sure he had something for Dad, from Luke and Leia under the tree to unwrap, and as they had only just turned five and didn't have any money of their own, these presents were always things Padmé had bought and wrapped for them. (They could write their own names on the tags, now, though…or at least sort of write. Anakin could tell whose name was whose, at least.)
Padmé asked him before every birthday and Father's Day and Christmas for gift ideas, and made no habit of pretending like she didn't think his ideas sucked. All he could ever think of to ask for were either woodworking supplies, things for the house, or, Padmé's least favorite, things for the kids. This year he'd confidently told his ex-wife that he would like a new bathmat for his birthday. For Father's Day he hadn't been able to think of anything so told her that what he really wanted were Peppa Pig Legos.
"No, Anakin," Padmé had said, with a long-suffering sigh. "That's what Luke wants."
(Apparently, Lego did make gifts for adults, now. "Luke" and "Leia" had given him a Lego racing Ferrari set this year. He hadn't built it yet. It was probably still in one of the moving boxes, in its box. Or at least Anakin hoped it was. It was more fun building Legos with the kids now that he was pretty sure they weren't going to swallow any of the pieces.)
On the one hand, if he was going to be awake at 2am anyway, he might as well do something productive. It wasn't like there were any shortage of chores that needed doing. On the other hand…well, Anakin's other hand only had three fingers, because he'd had an accident while working the table saw that probably wouldn't have happened if he hadn't been operating a table saw on three hours' sleep in a forty-eight hour period.
On the other, other hand - the twins had been eighteen months old at the time, and into absolutely everything, and Leia had been about to lick motor oil off the ground, and who the hell did get a good night's sleep while single-parenting two toddlers?
It was probably safe for Anakin to be operating heavy machinery right now, was his point. He pulled at the scrunchie around his wrist with his teeth until it came off and used it to pull his hair back into a high, if messy, bun.
Ooh, he also hadn't found the kids' bike helmets yet. They were probably also just in a box somewhere, but if they weren't, he could ask for new ones of those. Yeah, they weren't technically for him, but he and the kids liked to ride their bikes together, and they couldn't do that without youth helmets, and the activity was the part Anakin liked. It would be a gift for him - from a certain point of view.
Anakin groaned as he stood up. Was getting out of bed supposed to hurt? He was only twenty-eight. Well, maybe 'hurt' wasn't quite right. It was more like achiness, a generalized sort of tiredness, like he'd pushed his body just a little too hard the day before and was paying for it now. If he still had a regular gym routine, the way he'd had before dropping out of college and having two kids, that would be one thing. He might even be excited that he'd stretched his body in new and novel ways. Now, though, he was just vaguely pissed off.
He pulled on a pair of track pants and slid his phone in his pocket before going to pee and then to check on the kids. He'd preferred sleeping naked before kids - less fabric bunching around him and ending up in uncomfortable twists and wrinkles - but after kids, he always kept at least a pair of boxers on, pretty much from the moment he stepped out of the shower. Luke and Leia both liked climbing into bed with him at random times, and, whenever one of them had a nightmare or couldn't fall asleep, he did what his mom had always done for him and carried them back to his bed and laid down next to them and rubbed their back until they fell asleep. He didn't get a lot of sleep on those nights himself, but at least the kids were pretty good about conking out. So far, neither of them had seemed to inherit his insomnia, although he hadn't had it at their age, either. That had come later.
He wished, as he did for so many things, that both the twins would take after Padmé in that regard. She'd always slept great. He'd laid awake next to her and resented her for it. He could probably manage to tamp down that impulse when it was his own kids, though.
Anakin shuffled, rather than stepped, down the dark hallway to Luke and Leia's bedroom. It was a huge, exciting step for them to be renting a two-bedroom place now, but a three-bedroom would have to wait. Anakin had set a goal of getting both kids their own rooms by the time they started high school. He didn't yet have a concrete plan of how to accomplish that, but at least he'd gotten this far.
Luke and Leia might have to share a room, but it was their own room, that wasn't Anakin's room, and it was separate from the living room, with a door that shut, and they'd only lived here a week and so far he hadn't needed to but he could, at some point in the future, say things like, "go put that in your room" or "go to your room!" and that would actually be a physical place that one or both of them could go to, and it might not be much but it was a far cry from the fold-out couch and hand-me-down bassinets he and the kids had slept in, within arms' reach of each other, the first year of their lives together. Anakin was annoyed by a lot of things - moving house, for one, was an exceptionally annoying process - but this? This was something he was unequivocally proud of. He wished his mom was still around so that he could share it with her.
The hall, like Anakin's room, the kids' room, the living room, the kitchen, and the breakfast nook, was full of half-empty, only semi-organized cardboard boxes, some labeled and some of which the contents were anyone's guess. Anakin had started packing up their shit very methodically, then gotten distracted, then finished packing everything up in a panic the night before the movers were supposed to come, and by that point he hadn't even known where to find a Sharpie, much less had the wherewithal to actually use it. Honestly, where did three people, two of whom only lived with him half the time and were barely out of toddler clothing sizes, get off having so much stuff?
Upon being told they were moving, Luke and Leia had (again) asked for a dog, and then (when that request was again denied - they might be in a single-family home now rather than an apartment but Anakin still had a landlord, and that landlord had a no-pets contract he'd had to sign) had switched tacks and started asking for bunk beds instead. Anakin had to assume this was something they'd seen on some cartoon their grandparents had let them watch.
But Anakin, thinking in purely practical terms, was not actually against the bunk beds idea - except for the fact that each twin had demanded that they be the one to sleep in the top bunk. Anakin had tried explaining the impossibility of this arrangement, and then had only semi-listened to a twenty-plus minute diatribe about how they promised to be good about taking turns and being fair and not arguing over whose turn it was to sleep on the top, none of which he'd believed for even a moment. He could easily see bedtime stretching over thirty, forty, even sixty minutes as the kids argued and made Anakin make calendars and sticker charts and god knows what else to keep track of who got which bunk. It made him exhausted just thinking about it.
So, on a week when the kids were at Padmé's, he'd gotten out his phone and scrolled through Pinterest for 'bunk beds for twins ideas' until he'd come across something called loft beds. From there, he'd jumped to the woodworking forums, and now, in the last week of August, just days before the kids were about to start kindergarten, he'd…
Well, he'd finished making one loft bed. The kids were currently not only sharing a room but sharing a bed, although they had gotten their wish of both getting to sleep on the top bunk, at least.
But Anakin was happy with it, for what it was. It was really just a regular bed with extra long legs, underneath which was room for a little school desk and a rolling chair and some plastic storage tubs stacked on top of one another. Anakin had built the desk, although he'd given in and bought the rolling desk chair when the office supply store had been having a blow-out Back to School sale. (Anakin didn't much care for working with upholstery anyway.)
He'd already started building the second loft bed, although he'd had to put that project on pause when he'd gotten a couple of new orders in rapid succession and decided that paying work outweighed the need for Luke and Leia to have their own beds right at this moment. They were five, not fifteen. They could wait a few weeks.
Besides, they didn't even seem that mad about having to share. Anakin eased the door to their room open and glanced around. Both kids were in bed, and seemed asleep. He watched their little chests rise and fall for a few breaths to reassure himself and then pushed the door open a little further, tiptoed inside, and reached for the baby monitor on the bedside table, beside the lava lamp nightlight Leia had seen at somebody's garage sale and shrieked in excitement so loudly Anakin had worried she'd been stung by a bee. But he'd dutifully backed the minivan up, haggled the seller down to a buck-fifty, and presented his three-year-old with a lava lamp, which she'd hugged tightly to her chest the entire rest of the car ride, clutching it in both hands as she rode in her carseat. Anakin still shook his head fondly to think of it. Kids, man. They were always surprising you.
The twins were probably about to be too old for a baby monitor, and the house was small enough that most of the time Anakin didn't need one, but since he was going to be technically exiting the house and going into the garage he figured it would be a good idea. He thumbed past the, now faded, rocketship sticker Luke had stuck onto the back of it at some point, and flicked the transmitter end on. The receiver, he clipped to the waistband of his track pants. He didn't have one of those fancy video monitors, just a cheap audio one, but it did its job and would alert him if one or both kids woke up early. He wasn't planning on being in the garage for hours, but he also knew he had a tendency to get absorbed in his work and not realize how much time had passed until he either got hungry, needed to pee, or one of the kids called for him.
Anakin shut the door to the kids' room again and edged his way through the messy stack of boxes to the side door, which was closer to the garage. He'd gotten lucky that this house had already come with a screen door. It squeaked, but it did leave him able to keep the main door open and only lock the screen overnight, letting the nighttime breeze keep the house (relatively) cool even during the summer. The lock probably wasn't all that trustworthy, and their neighborhood was known for being the poor part of town, but Anakin was a light sleeper and could hold his own in a fight; he didn't worry about break-ins too much.
While he was outside, though, with his kids sleeping inside - he locked both doors. Just in case.
He crossed the (very) short path from the house to the garage. The previous tenants had obviously not felt like bothering to raise their water bill enough to keep the grass alive, so the 'yard,' such as it was, was more yellow and prickly than smooth and green. But it was a yard, and it had a fence around it, and Anakin could send the kids outside to play - or come outside to play with them - without having to get all three of them fully dressed and walking them down to the local park every time they needed to get out of the house.
He wished he'd had this luxury when they were smaller. The park, really, had not been all that bad; Anakin had always been an apartment kid growing up; playing at the park was all he knew. There were often other kids there for Luke and Leia to play with, and Anakin didn't have to worry about upkeep of any of the playground equipment. But sometimes it rained, or one of the twins decided to throw a fit about putting their shoes on, or they wanted to bring a toy of their own with them, and it would have been nice to have had an option that was closer to home where no one cared if one of the kids was playing in a swim diaper and nothing else, or was holding a ball that the bigger kids wanted to play with and was too shy to ask for it back when Anakin decided it was time to go home. Not necessary, obviously; the kids were fine, just…nice.
Anyway, at least they had a yard now, he supposed, as he toed on his boots and unlocked the door to the garage side entrance. (Now, of course, just when they no longer had downstairs neighbors, the kids had mostly grown out of the 'stomp my feet as loudly as I can just because I can' stage…shit timing, really, but what could you do?)
It was a two-car garage, in only passable shape, but it was large enough to hold all of Anakin's woodworking equipment and, with strategic placement of a couple of tarps, it was watertight enough that he felt confident that even in the rainy season all of it would stay relatively dry. It did mean he had to park the minivan out in the elements in the driveway, but he would get around to building some sort of carport or something for it eventually.
(The woodworking equipment was a lot more valuable than the minivan, anyway. If anything was going to stay outside and run the risk of rusting, it was definitely going to be the minivan. Anakin could, and had, get by just taking the bus if he had to. He could not get by without a way to generate an income.)
Anakin was greeted - or, more like smacked in the face - by the smell of wood shavings as soon as he opened the door. When Qui-Gon had died, he'd left Anakin all of his woodworking equipment as part of his will - big stuff like the jointer and the table saw, but little things, too, like his favorite awl and the block planer he swore was the straightest he'd ever found. Anakin had been immensely grateful, of course. A full setup like that, brand-new, would probably run somewhere north of a hundred thousand dollars, which Anakin would never in his wildest dreams be able to afford, and Qui-Gon's kit wasn't brand-new, but rather broken-in, honed after years of his hobby work and Anakin's professional work, and collected over a lifetime. Qui-Gon had given Anakin equipment that was, frankly, just plain better than anything on the market today - not because it was more expensive but because it was built to last. Qui-Gon had loved to rant that modern machinists and tradespeople were being forced to cut corners by the holding companies and foreign conglomerates that bought out their companies, venture capitalists who didn't know jack shit about integrity or quality workmanship. It was one of his top five favorite rants, really.
So the bones of the stuff Anakin had was good. Great, actually. But it was also large, and heavy, and without Qui-Gon's house to store it all in, Anakin had been at a loss for what to do with all of it. He'd been living in a studio apartment the year Qui-Gon died.
He'd ended up renting a storage unit, which was…okay. He technically wasn't supposed to be running a business out of his storage locker, but the owners weren't around much and were easy to avoid on the rare occasions that they were. It was the monthly rental cost that was the real problem. The first few months weren't so bad, but that was just the cheap-ass 'starter' rate they used to get you through the door. Once you were all settled and moved in, then they hit you with the real payment. Anakin had paid that, plus his own rent, plus half of the kid's tuition at the daycare Padmé had picked for the twins. It had been a tight four years.
But now, the kids were finally five, and a week away from starting public school. They were going to go to school, for free, for eight hours a day. Anakin finally had some (financial) breathing room. He'd taken all the money he had been paying the daycare, and all the money he'd been paying the storage unit place, and suddenly found himself able to rent this house, with its two-car garage. He'd moved all the woodworking equipment and gleefully torn up his contract for the storage unit. (Well. Deleted the emails, at least. All the paperwork had been digital. He kind of wished it had been on paper, so that he could have torn it up. He bet it would have felt great.)
He'd significantly lightened his workload over the summer, cut the kids back to three days a week at summer camp rather than five, and began the long and arduous process of moving into their new rental. They still weren't done, but Anakin wasn't super fussed about it. He was looking at eight kid-free hours per day starting next week! He could absolutely manage to finish unpacking while the kids were at school.
He had caved this week, at Ahsoka's urging, and started saying yes to some of the commissions that had been languishing in his inbox. She loved to gripe at him about how hard she was working for him - technically for free - and how little he appreciated her. He liked to clarify that he did appreciate the work she did for him; he just didn't understand it.
Ahsoka and her parents had been Anakin's neighbors at his old apartment complex, and as a high school student she'd picked up quite a bit of babysitting work from him. She was good with Luke and Leia and she didn't charge him an arm and a leg (pun intended). After graduating high school she'd started taking classes at the local university (the same one Anakin had half a degree from, and still owed money to) and decided to do a double major in business and graphic design. She still picked up the odd babysitting gig now and again, but mostly she used Anakin as a case study for her courses. She made him a website, and an Etsy page, and 'did his socials,' which seemed to involve her taking videos of him working on her phone.
"Push those safety goggles up on top of your head. No, like a headband," she'd direct, looking at him critically while sawdust flew around them.
"Best safety practice for safety goggles involves actually wearing them over my eyes," Anakin would deadpan back.
"You want people to see your face. It looks sexier that way. You'll get more business," Ahsoka urged. (Ahsoka was a lesbian.)
"I want my clients to know I'm not a dumbass who wears his safety goggles on top of his head," Anakin countered, ultimately unsuccessfully.
To give Ashoka credit, though, whatever it was she was doing, it was working. Anakin had more orders than he knew what to do with. He had to actively turn work down each December, when the kids' daycare closed for their holiday break, every year or else he'd find himself working straight through Christmas.
Right now, for instance, he had this dining room table and chair set he'd promised the client would be done in September. Unfortunately they weren't a very interesting table or chairs - not even any lion feet or anything - and in fact they were an exact copy of a set he'd already made six months ago for the client's neighbor. It was nice that she'd admired her friend's new dining room set, and even nicer that she'd asked the friend where she'd bought it and the friend had passed Anakin's name on, but it wasn't particularly intellectually stimulating.
Anakin pulled on the flannel shirt he kept hanging on a hook by the door and buttoned it up. The sleeves were already rolled up to his elbows, and he no longer wore gloves - he didn't wear gloves at all anymore, not since the lathe incident, and had the burn scars up and down his hands and forearms to prove it, but at least he still had eight of his original ten fingers - so all he had to left to do was put on his safety goggles, set the baby monitor on the side table beside his tool box, side-shuffle around the back of the table saw, which took up most of the room at the center of the garage (and could be expanded by the handy and simple method of leaving the garage door open, if he was working on cutting something really long), and start working.
As he'd hoped, it did hold his attention…for a while. After half an hour or so he needed to pause and retake some measurements, and without the background thrum of the machinery the garage was stiflingly quiet.
He glanced at the baby monitor. Not a peep. Anakin knew his hearing wasn't great, after almost ten years of working around heavy mechanical equipment, but he definitely would have noticed if one of his kids was shouting, "Dad! Dad!" over and over.
Anakin had placed the baby monitor on the nearest open surface, wanting to keep it close by as he worked, and that surface happened to be the shelf where he kept his (open) toolbox. The shelf had come already pre-installed in the garage when they'd moved in, and Anakin had shoved the previous tenant's left-behind crap off to one side and told himself he'd sort through it later. Which, so far, he hadn't done.
One of the pieces of junk that didn't belong to him - but also did, sort of? At least until he threw it away - was an old transistor radio. Anakin's mom had kept a radio kind of like that in the kitchen when he was growing up. It had sat on the windowsill, and Shmi would turn it on sometimes while she was washing dishes and hum along to herself until it went to a commercial break and then she'd switch it off again.
Anakin smiled at the memory. Listening to music while he worked with his ruler and pencil sounded kind of nice. But, like his mom, Anakin wasn't exactly a fan of commercials, and besides, the battery in that old radio was probably corroded anyway. He didn't pay for any sort of music subscription service on his phone, but he could at least pull up YouTube. He set his pencil down, got his phone out of his pocket, and woke it up.
Only for it to immediately die again.
Goddammit, Anakin muttered under his breath. He'd forgotten to charge it again. He clearly remembered thinking, 'I should charge my phone,' to himself while drying the kids off after their bath last night, and then…nothing. He'd forgotten to do it.
So, that was it for the music idea. Anakin sighed and tossed his phone, currently no more than an expensive paperweight, onto his workbench. His charger was in his bedroom, but if he stopped long enough to go and get it, he knew he'd inevitably start unpacking 'just one box,' or making breakfast, or doing something else he'd get distracted with and probably never get back to work. The kids would be up in a few hours, and he still needed to take a shower. Best to stay the course. He got back to work.
God, it was boring, though. Anakin lasted all of five minutes before tossing his pencil to the table in frustration. Maybe he could scrounge up a few D batteries and fix the radio, ads be damned. Whatever they were advertising, the silence was probably worse. It was dark out, and Anakin was feeling like the only person awake in his entire city. He just needed a little company, something to remind him he wasn't alone.
Shockingly, the batteries in the back of radio looked pretty good. Anakin chanced flicking it on.
Static squealed through the tinny speakers so loudly Anakin gasped, worried it might wake the neighbors up. He found the volume knob - no wonder; someone had left it set all the way to HIGH - and quickly turned it down.
That helped the volume, but there still wasn't any music coming through. Anakin frowned and turned the radio upside-down, looking for an antenna. He found it tucked against the side and extended it.
The static turned into mariachi music. Next to the volume knob was a knob marked TUNER. Anakin nudged that. Mariachi wasn't a particular favorite of his.
The next station was static, and no amount of jiggling the antenna made it come in any better. The one after that, also static. Then an ad for a tire place having a 'buy three, get one free' sale. Some pop music that was way too upbeat for three o'clock in the morning. Two more ads, one for laser eye surgery and one for a personal injury lawyer. Classical music. More static. An ad for a different personal injury lawyer. "I Know This Much Is True," or whatever that song was called, the one by the one-hit wonder with the weird name. Salacious Crumb or whatever. Anyway. It was a song, but Anakin didn't like it, so he changed the station again. Something with a lot of drums…and then he was back around to the mariachi station.
Anakin debated giving the stations that were playing ads one more chance; maybe when they broke from commercials they'd start playing something he was actually into? But honestly, that sounded like a lot of work, and he'd probably taken a long enough break from doing actual work already. The thing with the drums was the best out of a bunch of bad options; might as well stick with that. He backtracked the knob a little until he got past the mariachi.
The drums were still there, but now mostly overshadowed by a guitar solo. That was…actually pretty cool. He didn't recognize it, but it had a good beat. Anakin started nodding his chin along in time with the music and bent over his work table again. He picked up his pencil and ruler. It was nice, having some background noise while he worked. Something to help him focus, but not something that pulled his attention so badly that he couldn't concentrate.
The song was still playing when Anakin turned on the table saw, and good luck hearing anything over that. Once he was done cutting the boards he'd been measuring, though, the station came back. He must have missed the announcement about what the name of the song was, though, because now somebody was taking an organ solo. That was too bad. Anakin had been kind of curious.
Wait. Anakin paused mid-reach. Organ solo? What kind of rock music was this?
No, that was definitely an organ. It was probably pretty impressive, if you were into that sort of thing, because the organ player sounded like they were really going at it, but Anakin wasn't, really, a big fan of organ music, so it wasn't doing much for him.
There was still somebody playing drums in the background, though. But lots of songs had drums in them - most of them, actually. This couldn't be the same song, could it? Nah. That didn't make any sense. That would mean it had been, like, fifteen minutes long, and nobody wrote songs that long. There were some lyrics - a man was singing something like 'in the wind' and 'blazing torch,' but Anakin couldn't make out enough of it to be confident he could Google it and get a good answer. Without a pause, it turned sort of techno-y for a while, which Anakin didn't really get either.
He shook his head and let it go. Either the station would announce what the title was, or they'd go to commercial break in a minute, and Anakin could fiddle with the dial and find something else to listen to then.
Only then the song just sort of…ended, really abruptly. No station announcer came on. Instead there was a long, silent pause, and Anakin had just enough time to start wondering if he'd lost reception when a man's voice came through the radio. Well, maybe not so much a man as a young kid, really, although he sounded like he'd been smoking his entire life. He was speaking, not singing, and Anakin blinked. What the hell was this? Was this the DJ or something else entirely?
"There's this book coming out, and they asked me to write, uh, something about Woody. Sort of like, 'What Does Woody Guthrie Mean to You,' in twenty-five words."
The crowd behind him laughed, so this was obviously something recorded live, but Anakin still didn't get why it was being played on a music radio station. Was this just a really long, spoken-word intro to a song he'd never heard before?
"I couldn't do it," the man admitted. "I wrote out five pages."
Okay, so that explained the joke. It still didn't explain what this was, though. Anakin realized he was leaning on his workbench, listening intently, not doing a bit of woodworking.
"And, uh, I have it here. It's a…I have it here by accident, actually," the man said with a chuckle. "But I, I, uh, I'd like to say this out loud," he stuttered. He wasn't much of a public speaker, really. What business did he have being on the radio?
"So, uh, if you could sort of roll along with this thing here; this is called 'Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie."
The only Woody Anakin knew was from Toy Story, but Anakin didn't think that was what this guy meant.
It didn't start out like much. The man's voice grew much quicker and more confident, but now he was reading a poem, and Anakin had never much cared for poetry. And besides. He really should be working, not listening, anyway.
And then he stopped.
When you're lagging behind and losing your pace
In a slow-motion crawl of life's busy race
No matter what you're doing if you start giving up
If the wine don't come to the top of your cup
If the wind's got you sideways with with one hand holding on
That is what it feels like, Anakin realized, with a feeling like he'd just had the air knocked out of his chest. His life. The wind did have him sideways. That's right. That's it. This guy gets it, he thought, suddenly desperate to hear more. He gripped the edge of his work table and leaned forward, like getting closer to the radio might help him not miss a single word.
He spoke of summer storms and cheap houses that rattle when the wind blows through, and Anakin pictured the town he'd grown up in. "Your minutes of sun turns to hours of storm," he said, and Anakin thought of his very short marriage. "And to yourself you sometimes say, 'I never knew it was gonna be this way; why didn't they tell me the day I was born,'" and Anakin thought of his mother.
On and on it went, for five minutes, Anakin just standing there, breathing hard and staring at an old antenna radio like it contained the secrets of the universe.
He spoke about failed marriages and hard times and poverty and life gone sour and things not working out the way you wanted them to and opportunities missed and how it was just so fucking hard, sometimes, when you were trying your best but life just kept getting you down.
Who am I helping, what am I breaking
What am I giving, what am I taking
But you try with your whole soul best
Never to think these thoughts and never to let
Them kind of thoughts gain ground
Or make your heart pound
But then again you know why they're around
Just waiting for a chance to slip and drop down
Cause sometimes you hear them when the night times comes creeping
And you fear that they might catch you sleeping
And you jump from your bed, from your last chapter of dreaming
And you can't remember for the best of your thinking
If that was you in the dream that was screaming
It was things Anakin had felt, had thought, had lived, but in a way he'd never be able to put into words like that if he'd tried for a thousand years. It was true, though. He found he could hardly catch his breath.
You need something to open your eyes
You need something to make it known
That it's you and no one else that owns
That spot that you're standing, that space that you're sitting
That the world ain't got you beat
That it ain't got you licked
It can't get you crazy no matter how many
Times you might get kicked
God, Anakin wanted that to be true. He wanted to be able to say that he wouldn't let the world beat him down, that there was good in it for him and for his kids and their children and their children, that no matter how many times they got kicked down they'd still get up again. But he also knew how hard it was to believe that late at night, alone in the darkness, staring up at his ceiling.
Like the song before it, the poem just sort of…ended, with something about the Grand Canyon. Anakin was breathing hard. He felt like he'd just run a mile. He wasn't sure he got it, exactly, but he'd certainly felt something, and that was more than he could say for any poem in his entire life.
He was so deep in his thoughts that the next time a voice came through the radio he nearly jumped in the air.
"Okay, folks, that'll wrap up our show for tonight," a man said, not the same man who had just read the poem. He had a posh accent, and he sounded authoritative, much more sure of himself, but at the same time also friendly. Kind, even. Like the kind of guy who knew how to make and take a joke.
"I'm Ben Kenobi, and you've been listening to Guiding Light," he introduced himself. "Thank you for staying up with me until the wee small hours of the morning. Next up on KJEDI twenty-one-point-two FM, we've got a weather report and then your local news hour, so stay tuned for that. Goodnight, everybody."
Anakin realized with a start that he'd been listening to the local university student radio station. He hadn't really been paying attention to what he'd turned the dial to, but he remembered, vaguely, hearing about the station, K-JEDI, during his own (aborted) student days. He couldn't remember ever listening to it, though, at least not on purpose. Even back when Anakin had been a student, local radio had been a bit passé. Everyone he knew, himself included, had had an iPod by then.
At least that explained their lack of commercials, though.
Anakin glanced out the door. He'd left it open, inviting a cross-breeze, and he checked to see, over the roof of his house, if he could see the sun starting to rise yet, but it was still dark. If he tried, he could probably make out a few stars or even a planet or two.
(The kids had been asking about stargazing lately. Anakin had checked a couple of books out from the library and was thinking of getting them a family telescope for Christmas.)
While he was lost in thought, one of the neighborhood cats stepped through the open doorway and sauntered inside Anakin's garage.
He sighed. The cat would be a pain in the neck to try to move out when Anakin was ready to go back in the house - last time he'd lost nearly twenty minutes trying to claw one out from underneath the washing machine - but he would appreciate the company. Even if it was just a cat.
"Hey, Floofy Tail," he said wearily. He intended to find out the names of all these cats eventually. This one wore a collar, although without any tags on it, and he was pretty sure he knew which family fed it each evening, but it seemed to be entirely or almost entirely an outdoor cat. Friendly, though, and well taken care of, other than not being allowed in its family's house.
Entranced by this cat who rubbed up against their legs, but without any clues as to its gender or name, the twins had taken to calling this particular cat Floofy Tail. On account of its very floofy tail.
(There was another, different cat, this one small and black and sleek, who also hung around sometimes. Anakin had shown the kids Kiki's Delivery Service, which had gone over well once Anakin realized that his usual preference for subs over dubs didn't work with kids who couldn't read yet - and they'd both immediately shouted, "Jiji!" when they saw the small black neighborhood cat. So now that cat was Jiji.)
Floofy Tail stalked into the garage like it owned the space, looked around, and then laid down and rolled onto its back at Anakin's feet. When, after a few moments, it became clear that Anakin was not going to give it belly rubs, the cat got to its feet, shot Anakin a dirty look, sauntered toward the far corner of the garage, spun in a circle three times, yawned, and laid down to go to sleep.
"We should all be so lucky, cat," Anakin muttered under his breath, and got back to work.
The weather report wasn't nearly as interesting as the weirdly long song or the spoken-word poetry had been.
last thoughts woody guthry, Anakin Googled after his shower a few hours later, after the sun had come up and he'd plugged his phone in beside his bed. Even clasped back in a plastic hair claw, his curls were still dripping water down his bare back, and his wet towel was lying on the bed probably getting his sheets damp, but he wanted to look up the name of the mystery poet before he forgot entirely.
Bob Dylan. That was the answer. Anakin had certainly heard of Bob Dylan - hadn't everybody? - but didn't know him well enough to recognize his voice by sound alone, and the DJ had never said. Or maybe he had, but before Anakin had tuned in.
Well. That was one question answered, at least. Anakin let his phone fall back onto the mattress with a bounce and set to looking for a clean pair of cargo shorts.
Anakin felt like he was kind of constantly winging this parenting thing, but if there was one tip he'd feel confident passing on to other dads, it would be about the magic of cargo shorts. Kids just needed so much damn stuff, and were constantly handing that stuff to Anakin - the same stuff they'd insisted they couldn't leave the house without five minutes earlier and then grew immediately bored of, exactly the way he'd warned them - and somehow generated more trash than any two thirty-pound people logically should. When they were out with Padmé, she was forever pulling a Kleenex or a fidget spinner or a dry pair of socks or some cheese crackers out of her purse, but a lot of the time on Anakin's custody weeks it was just him and the kids, and he didn't carry a purse. Which was where the cargo shorts came in. They looked dorky, but Anakin felt like Dad of the Year every time one of the kids complained of being thirsty and Anakin magically pulled a half-full water bottle out of his pocket.
Anakin heard a thump - that would be one of the twins hopping down from the ladder; they avoided the bottom step like they were allergic to it and jumped to the floor from the second-to-last step, every time - and then the kids' bedroom door opened. Small, bare feet slapped against the wood flooring down the hallway and then made an abrupt left turn.
"Hey, bud," Anakin said, glancing down to see which child it was as he slipped on his wrist brace. Tendonitis was a bitch, and the wrist braces only helped a little. They'd probably help more if he could wear them while he worked, rather than only after, but Anakin was understandably gun-shy about risking losing any more limbs to the spinning blade of the table saw than he already had. "Your sister still asleep?"
Luke, never much of a morning person, only grunted, and he tipped his head down and headbutted Anakin on the thigh with his forehead. He was wearing his cowboy pajamas, with the little cartoon boots and hats on the tops and bottoms. Anakin chuckled and, finally finished with the last of the Velcro around his wrists, bent down to scoop Luke up and settle him on his hip. He held his son with his left arm, and tossed his wet towel over his shoulder with his right. Luke sighed and rested the side of his face against Anakin's chest.
"You're wet," Luke complained.
"If I wasn't, you'd complain about me being smelly, instead," Anakin pointed out, and this got Luke to giggle. "Come on," Anakin encouraged, as if he were not the one directing their movements, and carried Luke out of the bedroom. "Let's get you set up on the couch." They were making some headway with unpacking - the couch now only had two moving boxes on it, rather than three. "Cereal and cartoons this morning?" he asked, as if they didn't do cereal and cartoons every morning.
"Yeah!" Luke agreed, picking his head up and feeling a little more chipper now.
"And then I'll go put a shirt on," Anakin said, mostly to himself, and dropped a quick kiss to his son's sandy-blond hair.
Three nights later, Anakin found himself wide-awake at 2 a.m. again. He gave it another thirty minutes - which really just meant he unlocked his phone every five minutes, to see if thirty minutes had passed yet - and then got up. He puttered around the house for a while, gathering up dirty laundry as he went, scooping his and the kids' clothes into the basket on his hip, and then decided he might as well do a load of towels while he was at it.
It was Monday morning - very early Monday morning - and Luke and Leia's first day of kindergarten. He was going to be dropping them off, and meeting their teachers, and hugging them goodbye, and then he planned to go have a good long cry alone in the driver's seat of the minivan - but it was Padmé who was going to be picking them up at 3p.m. and hearing about how their day went. That was their routine during the school year. Anakin got them Monday afternoon through Monday morning one week, and then Padmé the next.
Summers were different. Summers, Anakin had them for all of June and all of August, while Padmé took them for the month of July for a long visit with her family in Varykino. Anakin loved summers the best of all. Every other week the other nine months of the year just wasn't enough time. Anakin knew he shouldn't rely on two five-year-olds as his only source of human companionship, but he just got so achingly lonely without them. Everything - the house, Anakin's whole life - was far too quiet while they were gone.
Anakin couldn't help the way his gaze fell on the radio still sitting on the shelf in the garage as he passed by with the laundry basket. He wondered if that weird late-night radio show was on again. It had been on around this time earlier in the week, right? He flicked the knob to ON.
Ugh. Opera. Anakin couldn't help but pull a face. He turned the volume down - not all the way off, just down - and opened the lid of the washing machine. He poured in the soap while some woman used way too much vibrato, then winced as she hit an unnaturally high note as he dumped the dirty clothes and towels into the drum. He shut the lid, twisted the knob, and pushed the button.
The singing, mercifully, stopped. The DJ who came on was a young woman, and sounded nothing like the man Anakin remembered from earlier that week. She recited the name of the opera they'd been listening to in flawless Italian, and then started to introduce the next aria, but Anakin had already crossed the garage by then and turned the radio back off again.
He made a mental note to himself that late Sunday nights/early Monday mornings were not the time for him to be tuning into the local college radio station.