5 and 21 for Anakin, 10 and 24 for Obi-Wan if you want?
5) A cherished personal belonging.
A slave owns nothing, so Anakin learnt to collect little sentimental scraps and hoard them, hiding them so no one has a chance to take them away. There’s a rusted old gear box that will never fit into a ship’s system again, a weird circuit board that he had to remove when he was building C-3PO because it got in the way of some of the bits and pieces he wanted to add to make the droid more durable. Lots of different japor snippets, some of them pretty, some of them not, but he can carve those into nicer shapes. (He took a beautifully round and smooth one that he wouldn’t usually carve to make Padmé’s necklace. She was kind enough that he thought she deserved it.) He keeps all the little trinkets in a scrap metal box he welded together himself, small and flat so it fits under even a bedroll with minimum discomfort, always hidden.
21) Their fondest childhood memory.
Sometimes, the slaves of Tatooine have parties in the night. For the adults, they are hushed, cautious affairs - no one knows if the masters mind, no one knows if the masters know, and so when Anakin and Kitster and all their friends are allowed to stay up late and are excited and talkative and bouncing off the walls, their parents and all the other older slaves are tense and stiff. And that did worry Anakin, when he was little.
But once they’re all together in the biggest room that the slaves can find, once the adults let their spines relax even a little, then it becomes a delightful fest of the best food their tiny ovens can make - some of it saved for months just to give their children a little taste of luxury - and cheerful songs and stories from other places and everything that the masters take for granted while slaves scurry and work in silence.
It is not much. For the children, it is everything; a night to pretend that they are the same as the free children four streets over, the children who do not have to wake at dawn and scrub floors (and that’s if they’re the lucky ones who are allowed to stay safe inside), the children that don’t risk death for someone else’s displeased frowning.
The night Anakin remembers more than anything is the night they nearly got caught. On an impulse, he asked to take a look at the lock on the door. The slaves who shared the low-roofed, worn-down place had no idea how to operate the degraded system. A few minutes of tinkering, and seven-year-old Anakin managed to get it working again. With the door locked to make sure the lock held as intended, someone knocked on the door. Then they tried to open it, making it rattle and creak. Every adult in the room turned stiff again.
But Anakin could grin, because he’d done so well. He’d fixed the lock, so now they wouldn’t get caught. It wasn’t just Watto who was helped by his knack for fixing things.
10) How they deal with pain.
He grits his teeth for a long, long time. He can’t do his job if he’s worrying about how much it hurts. Pain makes people frustrated and angry, that’s not helpful either. He can’t worry about pain while on the job, so he holds it back, until he’s asleep at night, until he’s off this mission, until, until, until it all spills out because sooner or later the best of Jedi will crack.
It is not usually a dramatic snap - a momentarily raised voice, a couple of tears, maybe just an odd roughness to his voice that sounds like a common cold - but he gets remarkably dolorous about every single one regardless.
24) What they wish they could change about themselves.
He is not jealous of Qui-Gon, or Anakin. He is not. They were both reckless and difficult to work with, as brilliant Jedi as they were, and that is not something to be proud of.
But sometimes, he will remember how everyone laughed the moment he mentioned Qui-Gon’s name, offer some comment about ‘that rascal’ or ‘he’s a character’, or he’ll see how everyone looks at Anakin and sees the Hero With No Fear, this larger than life caricature of the adventurous rogue that much of the galaxy wants the Jedi to be, and he sighs at how average his own accomplishments seem.
He is not jealous of them. He is not. And he has his own appellation. He is the negotiator, the voice of reason and peace on the battleground.
More often, he is Qui-Gon’s apprentice, or Anakin’s master. And sometimes he will wish that he could be something more remarkable than merely a good Jedi. Maybe even be a memorable one.
That is a desire that is hard to articulate, when every Jedi he considers memorable is so because of all the ways that they are not good at being Jedi Knights. And he does not know how to want to be anything other than a good Jedi.
