#only obliquely but idk better safe than sorry

[lilredghost]

drabble: a/b/o arranged marriage

CW: Sort of dark toward the end but there's no violence or gore

Anakin breathes. A light wind breathes with him, picking up sand and carrying it onward.

Anakin, too, will move onward. He’s had the chance to throw his tantrums. The last few days, if he was not packing, he was shouting at the sands and reshaping the earth in his fury. Now, he has wrapped things up and said goodbye to his friends.

Anakin breathes.

He says goodbye to the warm air, too, the desert heat on his skin, not knowing when or if he’ll get to feel it again.

Tomorrow, he will leave for Stewjon, to marry one Obi-Wan Kenobi. An alpha.

A king.

Anakin breathes.

The door behind him opens, spilling light out onto the sand. His mother comes to sit beside him.

“I see your rage is spent,” she says.

“Enough of it,” Anakin shrugs.

“Don’t let them take that from you. The Je’daii, they’re not like us.” Her own emotions—anger, briefly, but mostly grief and loss—swirl around her in a way Anakin can practically see. “Find a place that is safe, there. Somewhere you can work through your feelings without lashing out at anyone.”

Anakin lays a hand over hers. “I know, Mom.”

He won’t let them push him around. Even when the negotiations were happening, Anakin—veiled then, and hidden among other omegas for his protection—had been able to make demands about the way he would be treated in his future home.

And Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Negotiator, had agreed to all of them without a fight. Just like that.

“You are walking into the krayt’s den, and you don’t know if the dragon is home,” Shmi says abruptly. “You don’t know if they’ll actually honor any of the agreements they’ve made, Ani.”

His mother has always had an uncanny ability to tell what people were thinking. He supposes she's right.

But it seems she’s not done yet. Shmi turns his hand over, pressing something into his palm.

It’s a small flask, deceptively plain. The kind of thing that slaves would have worn, once, to hide things from their masters.

“Take this with you, in case you need it.”

Anakin freezes.

“Remember what our people say.”

He knows what’s in the vial.

“It is etched into our bones and baked into our blood.”

Poison.

“Dukkra ba dukkra, little one.”

Freedom or death.