He'd catch up eventually. There was something satisfying about picking the burned wires apart to shreds that he was enjoying at the moment.

"I feel like they undid a lot, sometimes." Anakin drew his lower lip between his teeth, scraping over it before continuing. "I mean. I used to worry that Watto had bought some other little kid, was making them race and punching them in the head when he'd had too much to drink, and planned to go back, buy that kid and take them away. Just free one kid. I haven't thought about that in years. And I love my men but they are product for the Republic. And I tell myself it's not like that, and sometimes I can almost believe it but..." He really couldn't. They had serial numbers, not names. He knew what they were, and what that made him.

"I don't like to not be in control. I. I like how it feels, for a moment, the power in it and how I'm soaring in it, but then it sucks me under and I'm not in control. It. It frightens me." Anakin shredded that last bit more aggressively, pushing the birds into a pile. Then he reached back inside the wing, shifting the partly stripped panel into place.