Things My Heart Used To Know

Chapter 1 - Heart, Don't Fail Me Now

Author's Note: Usually I finish drafting my fics before I start posting them but this one is still a work in progress so I can't promise that there's going to be weekly updates but I will try. :)

PS. This is for StefanyAntonietaEspa on Wattpad. :)

~ Tirana Sorki

Excited, childish voices filter in from the streets below. The noise is familiar by now, a part of the constant sounds of the village. Anakin – if that is really what his name is – turns to look out the small window in the attic he lives in. Children run through the streets below, the adults trying to collect them to go home so they can prepare for the festival that evening. Late afternoon sunlight is streaming in the window, as though highlighting the excitement of everyone below.

But maybe what stands out to Anakin the most is their families. They all have families. Parents, siblings, children – everything he doesn't have.

Or does he?

He looks away from the window, back to the attempted sketch he was drawing on the holopad in front of him, one of the few possessions he has.

The half-drawn figure of a girl with pointy head-tails stares back at him. The light marks on her cheeks are wrong. Something about them is supposed to be different, even if the harder Anakin tries to pull up the imagine into mind, the more the little details of it skitter away from him.

He knows this girl, even if all he remembers is her orange skin and her childish laugh and the totally contrary heavy weighted pain and misery in her blue eyes. She wore red. She was obsessed with it. Merely thinking of her always ignites an overwhelming aching longing of something long gone. And a deep feeling of protectiveness that he doesn't know what to do with.

The girl isn't the only one he remembers either.

Anakin flips to a different slide of the holopad. He's been trying to draw everything he remembers, no matter how fleeing it is, to record it so he can look it and try to remember.

And because he's terrified that one morning he's going to wake up and not even remember the little he does anymore.

Everyone has parents and Anakin thinks he remembers his. Maybe. That devoted affection, the desire to make them proud, and to – to be protected.

The man... is a bit detailed. He thinks that he remembers him the best though he could swear something about the details of his hair are wrong. Something tells him he'd be cranky if he saw how inaccurate those details are. He remembers the sound of his voice, his accent, somehow the clearest of all.

The woman on the holopad in front of him has dark hair but he can't remember enough of her face to draw any of it.

Can't remember a name for any of them.

But if these are his parents, he doesn't know why he never remembers them being together, why it's always a separate thing, a – like he never knew them at the same time. Not like he would know, though. He doesn't remember a thing.

There are other people he remembers too. A man with white hair. He's important, someone Anakin knows he looks up to. He remembers the steady feel of his hand on his shoulder and part of him wonders if that's his grandfather but that doesn't seem quite right.

There are memories of someone who's face he can't fully remember but he thinks the person – who looked about the same age as him – had blonde hair. His face is too different to have been his brother. Maybe. He remembers other people around the person who looked the same as him. And something about the colors blue and white. Those colors are important. For some reason.