Not Nailed Down
Yoda was heading back to the ship for some supplies when he heard something move underneath it. He stopped for a moment and listened. Whoever was moving down there -- and it was definitely a who, not a what -- was not large enough to be a wookiee, and he or she was fervently removing parts from the vehicle. Yoda reached out with his mind and found a young soul, so engrossed in what he was doing that he hadn't heard Yoda approaching.
Well, Yoda wasn't going to crawl under the ship just to dig the intruder out. After a moment's thought, he flicked out a hand and used the Force. To his surprise, the person sliding out from under the ship was a human being. Even after all this time working with them, he was not very good at judging the age of humans, but he would say the boy before him was only halfway to becoming a man, perhaps a few years older than their youngest padawans, but no more.
He cursed like a grown wookiee, though, telling Yoda what he thought of him in loud wails and howls. He must have lived on this planet a long time, to have learned Shyriiwook; either that, or he was very accomplished. He was also very dirty. Some of it was grease from the ship, but some, Yoda suspected, was more ingrown than that. In his right hand, he held a blowtorch, and in his left a bunch of loose circuitry. His pockets were bulging with even more stolen parts.
The boy showed his teeth and made a crack about Yoda's heritage that could have made an old wookiee blush, if wookiees had been capable of blushing. Yoda chuckled.
"Stole from my ship, you did," he pointed out, prodding at the circuitry with his cane. That made the boy hold on tighter to the circuitry with his grubby hands, glaring at his foe from under knitted eyebrows. "To fly, need those parts, do I. Call you names, I could."
The boy kept glaring at him. "You talk funny," he said, standing up -- somewhat awkwardly, since he was still keeping a firm grip around his loot. His voice was high, and he spoke Basic with a heavy Corellian accent. What was a small Corellian boy doing on Kashyyk?
"Say the same about you, I could," Yoda said. "Your mother, knows she that you such language use?"
"Fuck you, I ain't got a mother," the boy sneered, as if the mere suggestion was an insult to his budding manhood. He made an attempt to kick Yoda in the shin that would most likely have succeeded on anyone without Jedi training. Yoda simply stepped aside, causing the boy to stumble.
He quickly regained his footing and started running off. Using the Force, Yoda could have caught up with him, but fortunately there was no need to. The boy was so preoccupied with what he was running from that he didn't fully appreciate where he was going, and he ran headfirst into the broad chest of Chewbacca, a young wookiee Yoda knew.
Chewbacca said nothing, simply held out his paw.
"Aw, Chewie!" the boy protested, but he did hand over the blowtorch and, after a moment's hesitation, the circuitry.
The wookiee still said nothing, and his paw didn't move. The boy sighed and dug through his clothes, fishing out more spare parts than Yoda would have thought possible to hide on such a small body. He was impressed with how quickly the boy had deferred to Chewbacca, since he had seemed anything but subservient. Perhaps there was a thing or two the Jedi could learn from the wookiees when it came to dealing with younglings.
Thank you, Chewbacca rumbled.
Yoda walked up to them, still curious as to what the boy was doing there -- not to mention that he still needed the parts for his ship. "Quick, your friend is," he told Chewbacca. "Artful... yet dishonest."
"Hey, I stole those parts fair and square," the boy protested. "I need those parts. I'm making a ship of my own."
Chewbacca rolled his eyes. He's building a pile of nuts and bolts.
"It's a pile of nuts and bolts now," the boy admitted,"but it'll be great when it's finished. And then I'll be a pilot and travel all over the universe. I could be a fighter pilot, maybe..." His eyes were glittering, and his dirty face brightened up in the kind of wide grin that'd most likely serve to weaken the knees of women and men both in a few years' time.
Yoda could sense the skepticism in Chewbacca's mind. It was clear the wookiee thought this talk nothing more than idle fantasies. Yoda was not so sure. Perhaps the boy's only talent was to steal things away, and he'd never build his own ship. Even so, there was something in the way he spoke of being a pilot that made Yoda long for open space, for the rush of the flight, going into hyperspeed. And he'd never cared much for star ships.
Chewbacca shook his head and handed over the stolen parts to Yoda. Sorry about this. I'm trying to teach him not to steal from guests.
Yoda wondered if this meant it was perfectly all right to steal from people who weren't guests, but he didn't say anything. After all, dealing with such an ingenious little thief must be quite a handful.
I can bring a mechanic to fix the ship for you, Chewbacca offered.
"Thank you," Yoda said. "Appreciate that, I would."
"I could fix it," the boy said.
Chewbacca swatted him over the head, but very lightly. You've fixed enough. I don't need you to put back those parts only to steal a dozen others.
The boy grinned, giving silent truth to the accusation.
Nodding to Yoda, Chewbacca said, I'll go get you that mechanic. Come on, Han!
Yoda watched the two of them walk away, Chewbacca with his paw resting on the boy's -- Han's -- shoulder, and he knew that he wouldn't be taking child-rearing advice from the wookiees after all. For Jedi, such devotion to another person would be inappropriate and counterproductive.
He wondered if young Han would have been terrible affronted to know that even though he had no mother, there was at least one parent looking out for him.