Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [165]
“I didn’t have many friends when I was a kid,” he’d told her, “so I built one.”
And C-3P0 had shuffled in behind him, gleaming as though he’d been plated with solid gold.
Padmé had lit up, her eyes gleaming, but she had at first tried to protest. “I can’t accept him,” she’d said. “I know how much he means to you.”
Anakin had only laughed. What use is a protocol droid to a Jedi? Even one as upgraded as 3PO—Anakin had packed his creation with so many extra circuits and subprograms and heuristic algorithms that the droid was practically human.
“I’m not giving him to you,” he’d told her. “He’s not even really mine to give; when I built him, I was a slave, and everything I did belonged to Watto. Cliegg Lars bought him along with my mother; Owen gave him back to me, but I’m a Jedi. I have renounced possessions. I guess that means he’s free now. What I’m really doing is asking you to look after him for me.”
“Look after him?”
“Yes. Maybe even give him a job. He’s a little fussy,” he’d admitted, “and maybe I shouldn’t have given him quite so much self-consciousness—he’s a worrier—but he’s very smart, and he might be a real help to a big-time diplomat … like, say, a Senator from Naboo?”
Padmé then had extended her hand and graciously invited C-3PO to join her staff, because on Naboo, high-functioning droids were respected as thinking beings, and 3PO had been so flustered at being treated like a sentient creature that he’d been barely able to speak, beyond muttering something about hoping he might make himself useful, because after all he was “fluent in over six million forms of communication.” Then she had turned to Anakin and laid her soft, soft hand along his jawline to draw him down to kiss her, and that was all he had needed, all he had hoped for; he would give her everything he had, everything he was—
And there had come another day, two years later, a day that had meant nearly as much to him as the day they had wed: the day he had finally passed his trials.
The day he had become a Jedi Knight.
As soon as circumstances allowed he had slipped away, on his own now, no Master over his shoulder, no one to monitor his comings and his goings and so he could take himself to the vast Coruscant complex at 500 Republica where Naboo’s senior Senator kept her spacious apartments.
And he had then, finally, two years late, a devotion-gift for her.
He had then one thing that he truly owned, that he had earned, that he was not required to renounce. One gift he could give her to celebrate their love.
The culmination of the Ceremony of Jedi Knighthood is the severing of the new Jedi Knight’s Padawan braid. And it was this that he laid into Padmé’s trembling hand.
One long, thin braid of his glossy hair: such a little thing, of no value at all.
Such a little thing, that meant the galaxy to him.
And she had kissed him then, and laid her soft cheek against his jaw, and she had whispered in his ear that she had something for him as well.
Out from her closet had whirred R2-D2.
Of course Anakin knew him; he had known him for years—the little droid was a decorated war hero himself, having saved Padmé’s life back when she had been Queen of Naboo, not to mention helping the nine-year-old Anakin destroy the Trade Federation’s Droid Control Ship, breaking the blockade and saving the planet. The Royal Engineers of Naboo’s aftermarket wizardry made their modified R-units the most sought after in the galaxy; he’d tried to protest, but she had silenced him with a soft finger against his lips and a gentle smile and a whisper of “After all, what does a politician need with an astromech?”
“But I’m a Jedi—”
“That’s why I’m not giving him to you,” she’d said with a smile. “I’m asking you to look after him. He’s not really a gift. He’s a friend.”
All this flashed though Anakin’s mind in the stretching second before his comlink finally crackled to life with a familiar fweewheoo, and his heart unclenched.
“Artoo, where are you? Come on, we have to get out of here!”
High above, on the wall that was supposed