Ahsoka was just leaving Muggle Studies when her Anakin-is-up-to-no-good sense sent a tingle down her spine. Not a moment later, Anakin himself materialized next to her elbow.
“Hey, Snips!” He crowed with an impish grin.
Ahsoka narrowed her eyes at him. He had his History of Magic book tucked under his arm and he was far too chipper to have just spent an hour listening to Professor Mundi drone on about the damned Goblin Wars and how it impacted things like Centaur migration patterns.
“Dammit Skyguy,” she hissed, slinging her arm around behind her to grab at the back of her robe as best she could, “Where’d you put it?”
Anakin gave her his patented baffled-puppy look: head tilted to the side and too-blue eyes blown innocently -wide open.
“What?”
Oh, he wasn’t fooling her for a SECOND!
”The pin!” She snapped.
They were drawing looks now. Two students stopped to stare at them. The corners of Anakin’s mouth twitched upwards like they did when he was fighting a smile.
“What pin?” He asked innocently.
Ahsoka growled. “Anakin, I swear to god…”
And…he was already gone. His cackling laugh echoed off the stone walls like the cry of some sort of demented hyena. Ahsoka gave his retreating back one last ireful glare and sulked off to lunch.
(She found the damned clothespin on the bottom of her hijab when she took it off for bed that night.)
How exactly it got started, neither of them knew.
One day Anakin found a stray clothespin that hadn’t made it back into the bag after laundry day on one of his robes. He’d clipped on to Ahsoka’s sleeve when she wasn’t looking, and then she’d clipped it back onto him in their next class together.
They’d meant to take it back to Laundry. That did not happen, and somehow the game had evolved into the two of them trying to trade the pin back and forth, trying to pin it in the most obscure place without the other noticing.
(Currently, Ahsoka was in the lead. She’d pinned it to the inside seat of Anakin’s robe during Potions and the only reason Anakin found it was because he’d sat on it. The detention he’d gotten for cursing in the middle of Class had made her victory all the sweeter.)
“Anakin, Professor Kenobi called out to him just as he was leaving class, “you’ve got something on the back of your robe.”
To his dying day, Anakin would deny the sound he made.
Professor Kenobi watched on in amused bafflement as Anakin shucked his robe off as if it were on fire, hoping from foot to foot to dislodge it. He gingerly pulled a simple clothespin from a fold just beneath the hood and help it up as if it would bite him.
"How the hell did she do that?" Anakin hissed, his face an interesting shade of green, "I didn't even see her today!"
He tore out of the room, leaving poor Professor Kenobi standing there with more questions than he'd started with. (Or that he really wanted answers to. Something things were just better off left alone, after all.)
In their defense, Qui-gon did turn his back on them. It was getting into the last few minutes of Herbology and someone in another group had accidentally disturbed the teething venomous tentacula. Qui-gon had turned around to deal with the incident...and coincidently left his back exposed. His hair that day had been pulled back into a nice, thick ponytail, and Anakin and Ahsoka were getting rather bored.
Ahsoka looked at Anakin with an impish grin.
"Do it," she muttered, "I dare you."
Anakin, never one to back down from a dare, grinned back at her and quickly hissed a spell under his breath. The clothespin appeared, clipped to the very top of Qui-gon's ponytail. The clocktower chimed out the hour and the end of class, and Anakin and Ahsoka just made it out of the greenhouse before they doubled over, hooting and howling with laughter.
Qui-gon gently pulled the clothespin out of his hair and looked at it, then at the door where his students had just tumbled out into the hallway, and decided that he was getting a little too old to care about this sort of thing.
Ahsoka tried to repeat the events of Herbology later in Care of Magical Creatures. Unfortunately, her timing wasn't quite as good (or maybe Professor Fisto's hair was just more sensitive than Qui-gon's) and she ended up having to stay after class to muck out the pins as punishment for disturbing class.
"GIVE ME THAT!"
The clothespin flew out of Anakin's hand and into Windu's. The deputy headmaster scowled at the pair. Anakin wrinkled his nose in indignation; Windu hadn't even given them a chance to explain or hand it over themselves!"
"Why?" He shrugged helplessly at Windu.
"Because," Windu growled, "I've gotten complaints from no less than three teachers about you too causing trouble! I won't have you disrupting the whole school with your tomfoolery and hijinks! This had gone on long enough."
"Oh come on!" Anakin whined, "this is harmless!"
"Yeah," Ahsoka chimed in, "this isn't like the giant dung bomb..."
"Or the glitter bombs..."
"Or the..."
"I DON'T CARE!" Windu roared.
They shut their jaws with audible clicks. The vein on Windu's forehead was throbbing dangerously and his face was starting to turn as purple as his robes. That...probably wasn't good.
Windu took several deep breaths to calm himself.
"Not," he hissed, "Hogwarts rules are very. Clear. NO muggle artifacts. THIS." He shoved the clothespin in their faces, "is contraband. And I'm confiscating it and taking 20 points from both of your houses!"
He was shouting by the end of his spiel. Anakin's face twisted up with anger.
"But..." He didn't get to finish.
Windu shoved his face into Anakin's personal space, looming over the both of them and blocking out the light.
"Want to make it 50, Skywalker?" He hissed.
Anakin growled and Windu glared at the both of them, raising one hairless eyebrow.
"Just for that, I'll see you both in detention for the rest of the week..."
A quiet tap, tap, tap interrupted whatever else he'd been about to lay on them. They all turned towards the sound. Headmaster Yoda was limping down the hallway towards them, the tapping of his cane on the stone floor echoing around the empty hallway. Windu's made a truly beautiful expression; like he'd swallowed an unexpected lemon.
"Headmaster," he gritted out, "what can I do for you?"
Yoda hummed and held out a small, wrinkled hand. "This, contraband. See it, may I?"
"Of course." Windu handed over the clothespin. Headmaster Yoda looked at it for a moment, a curious smile forming on his face.
"Fascinating," he said at last, "the minds of children are."
Windu's sour face curdled further.
"Sir..." He started.
Yoda held up a hand to silence him (it really should not have been as satisfying as it was) and tucked the clothespin into the folds of his robe. The wrinkled old Headmaster smiled at each of them in turn.
"A bit of harmless fun, hrm?" He asked.
Anakin and Ahsoka nodded quickly, hardly daring to breathe. Windu's lips started curling in displeasure.
"Yes, Headmaster." He muttered.
Yoda tilted his head to the side, "No need to punish harmless fun, there is? To take points, there is no need. Yes?"
Oh, this was now the best day of their lives! Just for the fact that Windu looked as if he were simultaneously stepping in sour milk while wearing his favorite socks and getting a root canal with no anesthetic. Anakin and Ahsoka had to bite their tongues to keep from laughing and spoiling the moment.
"Yes, Headmaster," Windu finally snarled.
He stormed off in a swirl of purple velvet, off to torment some other poor soul. And as he left, there, pinned to the topmost fold of his robe...
...was the damned clothespin!
Anakin and Ahsoka gaped at his retreating back until he'd turned the corner and was lost to sight. They turned back to Yoda. The cheekily little troll chuckled under his breath and waddled off to do whatever it was that Headmasters did when they weren't pulling pranksters out of trouble.
"Did that really just happen?" Anakin whispered.
Of course, that was not the end of the Saga of the Clothespin. Ahsoka found three of them pinned to her robe that evening and Anakin found one Inexplicitly attached to his sock.
How exactly, they did not know. The house elves took the pins back gratefully, and Anakin and Ahsoka quietly decided not to ask too many questions. After all, it was only meant to be a little, harmless bit of fun.