#and takes the blade for him and anakin kills him rather violently | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

starculler · 3 years

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Whumptober 2021: Day 3

Word Count: 6341 || Read on Ao3

Tags/Warnings: Star Wars, Anakin Skywalker, Boba Fett, Time Travel, Alternating POV, Violence, Injury, Blood, Slavery/Tatooine Slave Culture, Death Mention, Hopeful Ending

Inspiration: Family is more than Blood by Quillfeet

Got this one in by the skin of my teeth lmao. Did my best to handle any sensitive topics as carefully as I could under a time constraint, but feel free to let me know if any issues crop up.

Anakin bounced on his toes, eager to see the stranger who’d drawn so big a crowd long after the suns had set, but unwilling to leave his mom’s side. Not when he could practically feel the tension in the air, thick enough to cut through with even the dullest, poorly-made shiv. Still, impatience and curiosity burned through him and his admittedly small well of patience had already been wrung dry after an unbearably long day of having to behave in front of Watto, his customers, and the other masters in the market.

He tugged on his mom’s warm, calloused hand and she squeezed his, her grip tight but not painful as she peered over another slave’s shoulder. She frowned at whatever she saw, brow pinched and her mouth pursed in the way it sometimes did when she tried not to look worried in front of him. Anything that worried his mom like that should have made him nervous. It didn’t. He practically vibrated out of his skin at her side instead, his need to know turning to a prickling itch that crawled up his arms and down his back.

“Mom,” he said, low and in the tongue only Tatooine’s slaves knew, the word drawled out into an almost-whine he was nearly too old for.

His mom only squeezed his hand briefly, a reprimand and warning, and Anakin’s shut his mouth before any of a dozen question slipped through his chapped lips.

One of the slaves, a twi’lek near his mom’s age, on his other side turned their head just enough to make it obvious they’d heard him. He flushed, embarrassed until they winked and shifted so there was a a small gap to see through between them and the human blocking most of Anakin’s view. He wasted no time leaning over, putting most of his negligible weight on one foot so he wouldn’t pull his mom’s hand while he snuck a glance and give himself a away. Not that it mattered.

He gasped, all the breath stolen from his lungs when he caught his first glimpse of a scene seemingly pried free from some of his worst nightmares. Funny enough, the first thing he saw wasn’t the stranger body, but the sand beneath them: wet like someone had spilled water on it and dark red, almost black in the low light of old, flickering lamps made of more rust than metal — most of which he’d helped his mom fix more than once. Eyes wide, his gaze trailed up from there, from the soles of the stranger’s ratty boots to the top of their head for just long enough that the image of them burned itself into his memory.

Too soon and not soon enough, his mom pulled roughly on his arm, tugging him close against her side and hiding his face in her skirt. He clung to the dull, brown fabric and soaked in her familiar warmth even though it did nothing to stop the way his body shook. She squeezed his shoulders, but did nothing to scold him for looking. There was no sheltering a slave from horrible things. Not really.

Anakin had seen a lot of bad things in his terribly long eight years. He’d seen slaves beaten bloody and others blown up, some so violently that there was almost nothing to give back to the sands when they were mourned. He’d watched his mom scream and bleed and, once, beg to take his punishment when he’d been even younger and taking it himself might have killed him. He’d seen slaves in chains marched across the market and put up for auction. Others he’d watched be chased out of Mos Espa entirely, out into the sea of sand never to be heard from again.

This, however, was new. A cruelty his mom had so far kept him safe from, laid out on the sands of the slave’s quarters for all of them to see. The stranger’s face had been the most visible without any of the tattered bodysuit in the way. It almost looked like some master had at least taken a vibroblade to their face, carved him up bad enough that they were missing a good amount of dark, curly hair on one side of their head. The rest of them, he thought, looked a bit like a krayt dragon tried to chew them up only to spit them out halfway, leaving them worse for wear but just functional enough that they hadn’t just left them out on the sands to die.

Whoever they belonged to, Anakin hoped he never found out if only because not knowing might keep him and his mom safe from being sold to them too.

By the time he’d calmed down enough to pry his hands free from his mom’s skirt and shuffle back around to see, the bulk of the crowd had drifted away — off to sleep or work or wallow until the suns rose on another grueling day. The only ones left were him and his mom, a few adults rushing soiled and new strips of cloth back and forth, and the three grandmothers kneeled beside and working on the stranger. His mom squeezed his shoulders again, half distracted by a conversation with another mother about infection and recovery and the fact that they had no water to spare for the stranger bleeding on the sands as aged but experienced, sun-weathered hands stitched the worst of their wounds closed.

Anakin leaned back against his mom, watching. Without anyone to block his view, he could see more of the picture than his first glimpse had allowed. A red and tan bodysuit torn to shreds that might have been white before the blood and the sand had gotten to it. Strips of cloth ripped by experienced hands to be used as bandages. Green armor whose paint looks like it had been half-dissolved rather than properly stripped off, carefully pried away from the body and set aside with all the gentleness something so obviously expensive deserved. A not-so-small arsenal of blasters, grenades, a rocket and rifle, and more knives than Anakin cared to count all set just as carefully aside with well-deserved fear rather than reverence.

And pain. He saw it in the twitch of the stranger’s lips and the furrow in their brow. In the way they seemed to flinch at the grandmothers’ not-quite-gentle touch despite how he was sure they couldn’t be awake. He saw it in the ragged, uneven way their chest rose and fell, like just breathing was so hard it might as well have been crossing the dunes in a sandstorm.

He frowned. He remembered being so sick once he could hardly breathe — how much his chest had hurt and how his mom had helped soothe it by rubbing something gooey and awful-smelling into his skin. Remembered being punished, ten stinging, throbbing, bleeding lashes on his back, and how he’d cried while his mom held his hands, whispering in his ear to comfort him while another slave had stitched the worst of them closed. He wondered if the stranger had someone like his mom to hold their hand and help them breathe before they’d wound up with whatever awful master had done this.

It made his stomach twist itself into knots to know that they had only the grandmothers to help fix him and an audience to watch and fetch supplies, but no one to help make the worst of the hurt go away. And Anakin…

Anakin felt a tug, deep in his stomach and behind his navel. The kind that urged him to be silent, to run, what people to avoid, or what he needed to do to fix up a droid or appliance just right. He didn’t think before he moved, ducking out of his mom’s loose grip and ignoring her startled cry of “Ani!” as he trotted forward until he stood next to the stranger, deliberately slotting himself into place where he knew he wouldn’t get in anyone’s way.

One of the grandmothers, Amiya who Anakin knew his mom still called auntie even if she’d only ever been grandmother to him, looked up at him as he approached. She slanted a glance at his mom and for a second after she looked back at him, he thought she was going to send him away. Instead, and to his surprise, she only pursed her lips and waited, her work paused mid-stitch and her one scar-split brow arched as she waited. Anakin complied hastily, though the words come out tongue-tied and clumsy despite how he’d spoken the slave’s language just as long as — longer than, even — he had Huttese or Basic.

“They need someone,” he said, soft and suddenly too aware of how quiet the quarter was at night. “To help. Like mom does when I’m sick or hurt.” He stopped, floundered for a moment before adding, so low he almost doubted she heard him: “There’s not a mom to help them, but I can. I want to.”

Amiya watched him, her gaunt, wrinkled face the even and placid mask most of the adults like her and his mom wore where they might catch a master’s eye — a mask Anakin would also wear one day when he was older and had to hide his feelings from whoever would own him. After a long, almost uncomfortable moment she nodded. He flashed her a bright smile and kneeled in a patch of night-cooled, mostly blood-free sand. For a long time after Amiya turned her attention back to the stranger, Anakin just stared. The damage looked so much worse up close and the smell of the gore alone was nearly enough to make him sick. He didn’t realize he’d started to shake until a gentle hand pressed against his back, slick with blood that would stain his shirt as it rubbed comforting circles between his shoulder blades. The white-haired grandmother the hand belonged to smiled, thin and sad, when he turned to her, and he offered his own much wobblier one back.

“Breathe through your nose,” she advised, voice cracked and croaking from long-healed damage, and he did. It helped, but not much. Still, she patted him twice more on the back and offered up a firm “good boy” that sounded prouder than he thought was warranted.

Anakin sucked in three bracing breaths, shallower than he would have preferred, before carefully — more carefully than he’d ever done anything else — picked up the stranger’s larger, brown hand to cradle between his own smaller palms. He didn’t squeeze. Didn’t pull. Barely even breathed. He just rubbed his thumb over their split, scabbed knuckles and pushed safety and comfort and the other warm things he felt when his mom chased away his pains and nightmares at them. Imagined them flowing down from his thoughts to his arms, pooling in his hands to be poured out from his palms and into the stranger’s rough hands, absorbed through the skin like the first sip of soothing water on the worst days.

Whether it worked or not, he wasn’t sure, but he thought that maybe some of the tension in the stranger’s brow and the stutter in their chest eased just a little bit. He stayed there, holding their hand and sometimes babbling, soft enough it almost counted as a whisper, switching between all three of the languages he spoke and even into brief bouts of untrained Bocce in the hopes that they knew at least one and would find it comforting. It could have been minutes or hours before his mom came to collect him, his head bobbing and eyes threatening to close as exhaustion swept over him. She crouched behind him and ran her fingers through his hair a few times before she spoke.

“Time to sleep, Ani.”

“But mom—” he started, voice more of a brief mumbling slur for all that he didn’t get to say more than those two words before Amiya cut in.

“Mind your mother, Anakin.” He ducked his head, chastened. “You’ve done good tonight, but it’s past time for little ones to rest. This one’ll be here come the suns’ rise and you can sit with them then until you and your mom are off to your master’s.”

Anakin nodded, mumbled a tired “Yes grandmother Amiya,” and patted the stranger’s hand twice before setting it down with a quiet promise that he’d be back as soon as he’d woken up. He stumbled when he stood, grateful for his mom when she put her hands back on his shoulders and steered him back home all the way to his flat pallet. Sleep claimed him easily that night, too tired to even dream.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The world was pain. Burning, stinging, cutting pain day after night after day for what might as well have been a small eternity trapped in the wet, writhing darkness where only his own nightmares provided grim relief until he clawed and rent and tore his way out of that hell and into another. He gasped and dragged himself forward, burning from the heat of the suns above and the sands below until he felt he’d boil away entirely.

Death would have been a mercy, but mercies had never existed for men like him.

He crawled and shoved and pried his way through the sand with the same desperate, all-consuming determination he’d relied on all his life. A legacy left to him by his father. A curse when giving up would have been a kindness to his battered body.

Time was nonexistent. Unimportant to him in his struggle. Day or night mattered little in the suffocating, sweltering heat when he knew the desert would swallow him whole at any moment. Should have swallowed him whole, but didn’t. The desert, for once, was kind and he hated it for that.

He hated it for letting him live, tortured and weak and pitiful enough that no one he knew would have looked twice at him. There were voices and hands, reaching and gentle and alarmed. He hated this one act of kindness — not mercy, this could never be mercy — the desert had granted him and he fought, battered and bit and snarled in the vain hope they’d leave him for dead when he proved too much trouble. They took it as challenge instead and won.

Defeated, he let himself fall into his exhaustion wondering if he might slip away in his sleep instead and prove their efforts useless.

His nightmares weren’t welcome, but they were familiar to him by then.

He watched his father’s head fall from his shoulders a half dozen times as his body was dragged, unconscious, through the desert.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Anakin sat with stranger the next morning like he’d promised, all but sprinting out the door of their tiny home as soon as his mom had told him he could go. He stayed until his mom called him back and worked with her in Watto’s shop until the toydarian let them leave just as the first of Tatooine’s suns had touched the horizon. When they returned, the stranger had been moved into one of the few empty homes in the quarter — the slave who’d lived there recently sold and a replacement yet to be found — to avoid the worst of the day’s heat. He sat with them again after late-meal, holding their hand and talking, helping with any small task he could until they shooed him off to bed.

His mom stayed with him, longer sometimes and well into the night. She helped whoever else was there keeping an eye on the stranger teach him how to change bandages, spot the signs of infection in a wound, to decide which remedies and medicines were critical and which could be spared and saved for later, as well as how to make a few of the most basic ones.

“There isn’t much we can do for them,” Amiya had told him, grave but gentle, on the third night, “except wait and watch, and ease some of the pain if we can.”

He’d nodded, feeling tears prick at his eyes even as he bit his lower lip to help keep them from falling. His mom brushed her fingers through his hair, pulling him close to her side while he worked to breathe through the tangled knot of emotion pressing on his throat.

“It’s not fair,” he said, voice thick, and his mom clucked her tongue, not unsympathetically.

“Life rarely is, Ani.” She pressed a kiss to the top of his head, then leaned her cheek there like she could drape herself over him — a blanket to blot out the world’s cruelties. “Sometimes, your feelings won’t matter,” she said, sounding wretched as the words settled heavy in the air between them. “Sometimes — most times — all we can do is live in reality and accept that it might be cruel no matter what we do, knowing that denying it will do us no favors.” Anakin sniffed, pulling his knees in towards his chest. “And we will live, knowing this and knowing that being kind in the face of this cruelty is the bravest choice we can make.”

“Are we?” he asked after a long stretch of silence, feeling small and miserable. His mom hummed a question against his hair while Amiya stared at him, dark eyes seeming to peer right through and into the core of him. “Kind, I mean. Is. I mean. I heard some of the other adults — I didn’t mean to listen, really, but they were talking about. About…” He trailed off, but Amiya picked up the thread as seamlessly as if she’d read his mind.

“About a mercy.”

He nodded. His mom stiffened, hugging him tighter. He knew there was mercy in death on Tatooine. He’d heard slaves beg for it before, beaten half to death and left, bleeding and wheezing on the ground. He’d watched one new mother walk out into the sands with her baby one night and come back alone in the morning. He’d even seen a grandmother, withered hands bloody and holding a shiv as she walked out of the house of a slave who’d lost most of their arm when their chip detonated and survived, only for the wound to grow infected and the slave so weak they could hardly drink a sip of water.

He didn’t like it, but he knew.

Amiya sighed, leaned back against the night-chilled stone, and looked at the ceiling.

“Let me tell you a story, Anakin,” she said, and he thought she sounded older then than she ever had before.

“Okay.”

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The nightmares had no end. They played on loop — his worst and his best memories twisted together with things that had never happened at all until he couldn’t tell where one ended and another began. He lived them. Was them. Played his part in them until he was sure he really had died out there on the sands and this was hell.

If it was, he wouldn’t give it the satisfaction of seeing him beg even if all he wanted in the worst of it was to wake up, ten years old again before everything had gone to shit.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

The stranger woke with a groan on the fifth morning, just as Anakin had turned his back to follow his mom to Watto’s shop. He gasped, nearly tripping over his own feet as he rushed to spin back around.

“You’re awake!”

They blinked up at the ceiling, stiff as a board the second Anakin had practically shouted the words before slowly, probably painfully, turning their head to look at him. Anakin rocked back on his heels, mouth open and the words just about ready to burst out of him when they beat him to it.

“What?” they asked in Basic, voice a rough, crackling growl that could have been natural as much as it might have been from a parched throat or their injuries.

It was Anakin’s turn to blink then, uncomprehending for a moment before he realized he’d spoken to them like he would have any of the other slaves in the quarter. He flushed, fumbling for a moment from embarrassment before managing to wrangle together the right words.

“I said: you’re awake. You’ve been asleep for five days! Well, four, but today makes five. So, five days.”

“Oh.”

They stared at him, blank except for the obvious signs they were in pain — their pinched brow, their thinned lips, the pallor of their skin, better than it had been but still noticeable — and Anakin fidgeted in place until his mom called his name. He looked back at her, to the stranger, and briefly to his own feet before turning a bright grin on them.

“I have to go now, but Mom and I’ll let someone else know you’re awake. They’ll give you some of the water we all helped save up just in case you did really wake up. Which you did!” he added, too excited to keep himself from pointing out the obvious.

“What?” they asked again, but Anakin had already turned back to his mom with a cheerful “bye” thrown over his shoulder.

The day passed in an agonizingly slow haze of nerves and excitement that had cooled briefly after Watto yelled at him some time close to midday, and reignited when he and his mom started the walk home under the violet-orange lit sky of late-evening-nearly-night. She steered him home and forced him to eat his late-meal before setting him loose with a small smile and a firm warning to be careful. He grinned at her, nodding even as he practically tumbled through the door and back out into the quarter to make his way to where they’d been keeping the stranger.

“Hi,” he said, peeking through the tattered fabric hung up in place of a proper door.

The room was almost empty, lit mostly thanks to the three moons peeking up over the horizon and the last traces of the twin suns falling on the other side spilling through two windows, little more than a pair of squares cut out of solid rock, and the open, arched entrance. The stranger was the only person inside, propped up to sit against the wall furthest from the door, and mostly hidden in shadow except for the light cast from a neat little device about as big around as the palm of Anakin’s hand that they’d put down next to them. On their other side was a pile of their green armor, all but a pauldron which they’d been turning over in their hands until Anakin had poked his head in.

Their small arsenal of weapons, however, had been moved to the corner of the room furthest from them. Not that he faulted anyone for that. Every slave in the quarter would be in trouble if anyone found them, whether they’d actually helped the stranger or not.

“Hi,” they replied, suspicion all but dripping from the word as they slowly lowered the pauldron down to rest in their lap.

Anakin smiled and took the attention as permission to step inside, settled down with his legs crossed on the room’s sandy floor. Even from a few feet away, he could tell they looked better than even that morning — still battered and bandaged and a little paler than they probably should be, but whole and alive in a way they hadn’t been while asleep. Unconscious, technically, but technicalities rarely mattered to an eight-year-old. The silence stretched between them, both of them staring at each other until he chose to break it.

“How do you feel?” It was only polite to ask, even if it wasn’t what he really wanted to know. A dozen questions burned his tongue, but his mom hadn’t wasted time teaching him to be rude so he kept a tight leash on them and waited. Thankfully, not for long this time.

“Fine,” they said, curt if not a bit gruff. They sounded better, he noted, than they had earlier. “You’re the kid from this morning.” They furrowed their brows, speaking slowly like they weren’t quite confident about being right. Anakin nodded even though it hadn’t quite been a question. He knew that feeling well, after all. “What’s your name?”

“Anakin. What’s yours?”

“Boba.”

Anakin cocked his head to one side and asked, shameless: “Just Boba?”

“Just Anakin?” they drawled in return, their unbandaged brow arched. Anakin grinned, all teeth and excitement. He liked Boba.

“Anakin Skywalker,” he offered, expecting to get Boba’s surname in response only to be disappointed when all got instead was a a slow blink and a huff of breath that could’ve meant anything and nothing at all.

“What’re you doing here, kid?”

He pouted, watched Boba’s lips twitch up into a smirk, and pouted harder. He wondered, somewhere in the very back of his mind, if it was smart to be there, alone with someone who wore armor and had weapons and as much muscle and healthy bulk as Boba did. There was a danger to them, in the way their eyes never quite settled on Anakin in favor of scanning their surroundings again and again. It was there in the way they sat, too. At ease, like even injured and newly-woken they knew they could fight their way out if needed. Anakin wondered, but stayed, knowing his mom wouldn’t have let him come if anyone had mentioned they were dangerous.

“Rude,” he said, still pouting but also a little joking. Testing. Boba rolled his eyes and waited for a proper answer. “I come here every day. I even did the bandages on your arm.” He gestured to Boba’s left arm where they’d been sliced from elbow to shoulder, jagged and sloppy. It had needed stitches in three different places where the cut ran extra deep — the wound too long to spare enough thread for the whole thing. “Mom had to fix it the first three times, but I got it right this morning. Before you woke up.”

“Shouldn’t you be out doing … kid … things? Fun things?” Boba asked, sounding suddenly awkward, their gaze sliding away from Anakin after the clumsy question and looking for all the world like they hadn’t really meant to ask it.

“Maybe.” Anakin shrugged. “Watto’s been in a bad mood though, so mom and I have been getting home really late all week. Even if I wanted to, all the other kids would’ve gone home by the time he let us go.”

Boba’s gaze snapped back to him as he talked, focused instead of awkward, and only offered a low hum in response. He felt a little like a piece of meat in front of a starved massif, but did his best to channel a bit of his mom’s unwavering calm. Not the mask she used in front of the masters so much as the air she adopted in front of some of the new slaves brought to the quarter, scared and alone.

“Any siblings?” They sounded almost hopeful when they asked, only to scowl when he shook his head.

“Nope,” he said, popping the p. “It’s just mom and me. Do you? Have siblings, I mean.”

“No.” Boba sighed. “Sort of, but not really.” Anakin wrinkled his nose.

“How’s that work?”

Boba didn’t answer, only waved a hand at him in a vague gesture he took to mean it was complicated. He nodded, understanding. Slave families were always complicated, and he’d learned not to ask about complicated things when they didn’t want to be talked about. Instead, he changed tracks and poked at one of the many other threads he’d wanted to pick at since Boba had woken up earlier.

“How long have you been on Tatooine? I’ve been here my whole life, but my mom wasn’t. She got sold to Gardulla a long time ago before she lost a bet to Watto and he won both of us.” Anakin’s lips tugged up into a grin and he leaned forward, excited despite himself. “Before that she said she was in space, on a real ship and everything. I’m gonna go up into space one day! Get on a ship and fly right off Tatooine and see all the stars up close.”

Boba leaned back, drawing one of their legs up so they could rest their left arm against the knee as they listened. It made it harder for him to read their face, but not impossible. And Anakin was nothing if not good at figuring out how people felt if he concentrated hard enough.

“Sounds like a good goal,” they said, amused. When they said nothing else, Anakin frowned.

“Aren’t you gonna answer?” Boba tipped his head just slightly to one side, and he huffed, shoving as much exasperation into the breathy sound as he could. “My question? About how long you’ve been here.”

“Long enough.”

He nodded, humming a little in response. It made sense, he mused, that someone with a master as mean as Boba’s might not want to keep track of how long they’d been with them. That thought, though, brought up another very important question that Anakin wasn’t sure anyone else had thought to ask them yet. He hesitated, mouth suddenly dry as he shifted in place, and picked at the hem of his tan shirt to buy himself a few seconds more.

“Have you—” He stopped. Pressed his lips into a thin line so he wouldn’t give in to the urge to lick them. “Terrin and Bhan found you out in the sands behind the quarter,” he said, carefully picking his words. “Mom said they brought you back here. And. Well, uh.”

“Spit it out kid,” Boba said, not unknindly but not kindly either.

“It’s just, five days is a lot y’know? And-and some masters’ll wait a few, yeah, if they hurt you bad enough, but. But five is a lot, ‘specially for a slave, even if you look really well fed and have cool armor and get to actually hold weapons. But five is a lot of days! And I was really scared I’d wake up or-or come back from Watto’s and you’d be blown up ‘cause your master didn’t wanna wait anymore and—”

Boba moved, faster than someone that hurt should have been able to, and leaned forward, almost crouched, with his hands up, palms out. Anakin’s mouth snapped shut on instinct and he sucked in a huge breath of air, relieving the ache in his lungs he hadn’t noticed in his rush to get all the words out even as the rest of him tensed. They waited until he wasn’t practically gasping, their already dark eyes almost black in the shadows.

He’d thought Boba felt like danger before, but now they looked it, balanced on the balls of their feet with their hands out in front of them. For a moment, it was like seeing double: Boba as they were, bandaged and hurt, and another Boba clad in green, well cared for armor, crouched much like they were now except they held a blaster in one hand and a vibroblade as long as Anakin’s forearm in the other.

Just then, Anakin thought, a little hysterical, they looked like the predator they could be.

As quickly as it had come, the moment passed and he was left with only Boba as he knew them: unarmored, unarmed, dressed half in the remains of his once-white undersuit and the ratty strips of cloth they’d used to dress their wounds. He breathed, long and slow, until his heart felt a little less like it wanted to beat its way out of his chest, and forced the rest of his body to loosen up at least a little, not wanting to look too much like an animal about to run.

“You think I’m a slave,” Boba said, almost a whisper, but Anakin couldn’t find it in himself to nod or speak. Not yet. “Thank you,” they added, a lot like they were trying not to spook him, “for the concern, misplaced as it is.”

It took a few tries, but Anakin finally found his voice for long enough to ask, soft as he could: “If it wasn’t a master, then —” He swallowed even though his mouth felt drier than the desert. “Then who did this to you?”

They didn’t answer right away, taking a moment to lower themself back down with a groan half-muffled behind gritted teeth. Anakin felt small under their gaze if not quite scared, but did his best to keep himself upright rather than cowed.

“I did,” Boba answered, strained, with a weight to the words Anakin didn’t understand. They did nothing to make him feel any less small, no bigger than a single grain of sand. “I was stupid. Wound up in—” They paused, squinted at Anakin, and then quickly amended what they’d meant to say. “Wound up in trouble with no backup.” They shrugged, the dark circles under their eyes looking suddenly so much bigger. Heavier. “I remember a little of how I got out, but not how I wound up here in … Mos Espa I think someone said.”

Anakin opened his mouth, not sure at all what he wanted to say, if anything, until his mom’s voice at the entrance startled him.

“Anakin, time to sleep.” She didn’t look at him as she spoke, eyes firmly set on Boba, but Anakin nodded anyway.

He stood, brushing sand off his pants for a moment before looking back at Boba. He smiled, dimmer than before, and said: “Goodnight, Boba. See you tomorrow,” he added and waited until Boba’s lips twitched up again — not quite a smile, not quite a smirk, but an invitation back all the same. He did grin then, offering up a little wave before turning on his heel to follow his mom.

“ ‘Night, Skywalker,” he heard Boba say, as the cloth in the doorway settled back in place.

Anakin took his mom’s hand when she held hers out. She squeezed his fingers briefly, then tugged him close. He breathed in. Out. And listened for the little notes he sometimes heard on the wind — the tug in his gut and the pull in his bones that sometimes pulled him closer to one decision or another. He felt it, faint but there. A warmth like good, hot food in his belly or his mom’s hugs after an awful dream, and for a single second, the scrape of fingers on metal ringing in a way he’d never heard before but made him think of Boba regardless.

He let his mom hold him all the way to his room until he kissed her goodnight. His last thought before he fell asleep, curled up on his pallet and tucked under his thin, scratchy blanket, was of the stranger named Boba and the pleasant notes plucking a tune inside and around him, whispering to him even on the edge of his dreams.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Boba watched Skywalker — Anakin Skywalker — leave, nothing but a kid smaller than Boba ever remembered being: naive and vulnerable and dressed in all the inadequate trappings of a slave and so damnably bright that it hurt to look at his little, hopeful face. Not so much as a hint of the Jedi knight he remembered from his youth — most of it propaganda he’d caught glimpses of in prison and a few jobs before the Empire erased everything — remained in the child except maybe in the edges of that smile, confident if not yet cocky, but innocent. Painfully innocent.

He scrubbed a hand over his face, the skin on his palm still a little raw from the acid in the sarlacc’s stomach. Maybe, he thought desperately, he was still there, being slowly digested to death because surely, surely, that made more sense than what every other conclusion he reached for pointed to. He had to be dead or dying, not—

Not 36 years in the kriffing past, if the date the woman who’d told him where on this godsforsaken planet he was had given him was right. It made no sense. He wasn’t a Jedi — little gods no — and he had no connection to their Force or any other magic. He didn’t think the sarlacc had anything to do with it either, but that still left him with no answers and a galaxy’s-worth of questions.

“Fuck,” he growled, as much a helpless sound as it was a curse to whatever or whoever had caused this. He’d wring their neck as soon as he found out, even if it meant figuring out a way to strangle some magical cosmic thing that a dead order of damned wizards had believed in. For now, though, he was stuck. Injured and healing, without a ship or a credit to his name, no reputation to speak of, and Anakin fucking Skywalker who apparently helped nurse him back to health and had promised to come back in the morning.

And a father who was alive somewhere in the wider galaxy.

The realization came slow and with all the strength of an imperial star cruiser hurtling forward at full speed. He swallowed, blinking back a wave of stinging tears as something thick and pitiful welled up in his throat. He breathed, deep and slow, and forced himself back into order by sheer force of will. He was still stuck on Tatooine, tucked away in the slave’s quarter by some idiotic sense of communal good-will that would do nothing for their self-preservation, but he had time. He had time, if not a lot, to find his father and… Do something.

“Fuck,” he said again, but it was tired. A thick and bone-deep weariness that threatened to suffocate him if he thought about it for too long.

He sighed and wondered, for just a moment before he let sleep drag him back down into the darkness and nightmares, if his father was the man who’d raised Boba already, or someone else entirely. He hated that he didn’t know which one he’d prefer if he woke again tomorrow and found that time travel really was the answer to where — when — he was.

#whumptober2021 #no.3 #who did this to you?#star wars #anakin skywalker #boba fett #fic #blood #injury #death mention #my fanfic

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capricornus-rex · 3 years

Text

A Shadow of What You Used to Be (13)

Chapter 13: The Favorite | Cal Kestis x Irele Skywalker

Requested by Anon

Summary: There is another! Years after young Anakin Skywalker departed Tatooine, his mother Shmi delivers a second child—this time, a daughter. Whilst the circumstance of the girl’s birth remains unexplained, Irele Skywalker has yet to choose the true path between those laid out for her.

Tags: Fem! OC, Irele Skywalker, Force-sensitive! OC, Anakin’s Younger Sister, Skywalker! OC, Darth Vader’s Secret Apprentice, Long-lost Sibling

A/N: I’M NEGATIVE FOR COVID, YAY!!1!! That’s the only negativity I need in life lmao

Requesting to be tagged: @heavenly1927

Also in AO3

Chapters: Prelude – 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10 – 11 | Previous: Part 12 | Next: Part 14 | Masterlist

14 of ?

16 BBY

Battered by the sweat and grit in this confined dojo, Irele had proved her capabilities for battle.

For every instructor that walked in to face her, the difficulty climbed as well.

But the dojo had become her sanctuary. No limitations, no rules. She can be angry as she likes, she can be violent to her opponents, and then there would be no repercussion—it was all at the expense of “training” which was basically they had in mind for her.

Now that she was conditioned for combat, the next phase of the plan laid out for her growth would come next—although it would be simultaneous to this training regimen.

Today marks the first anniversary of her training, the day that started this all. To commemorate the event in some sorts, they sent in an electrohammer Purge Trooper to fight with her. No trooper of this sort has ever come in to this dojo until today. For a second, it startled her; but then she shook off the anxiety from her shoulders and tightened her grip on a weapon she had stuck with since Day One—a javelin.

Her one display of power that warranted Darth Vader himself to pay a visit to the dojo in Nur.

“Admiral, ready my shuttle and chart a course to Nur.”

“Right away, my lord.” The admiral did not give it a second thought, he immediately proceeded with the preparations.

Everyone in Nur knew that Darth Vader was coming, and so they were all in full-blast in cleaning up the place to make it presentable to the lord. Everyone—except Irele, who was too engrossed with her training.

It was just getting good when Vader had arrived in the viewing room of the dojo—Irele’s already picking up the pace in the fight, but the Purge Trooper was nowhere near tired. Suddenly, it seems like out of nowhere, a strong invisible wave had lifted the instructor off the floor and threw him across the room. The last thing Irele saw was her hand held out, fingers curved in a manner as if choking a neck, and vibrating with remnants of that energy that had sent the trooper five feet away from her.

Little by little, her sensitivity with the Force has become more active.

She could not explain it. She couldn’t even believe it, she thought those moments were just illusions or daydreams that she had mixed with reality.

But this moment proved otherwise.

And it intoxicated her.

Although she had not mastered how to utilize it actively and consciously, she would take every chance she gets when she felt like it would come to her aid in the fight.

Vader departs the viewing room and makes his way down into the dojo.

“You fight well, child,” he boomed as he entered, causing Irele to turn to his direction, javelin at the ready. “But you’ve a long way to go if you are to master the art.”

Under his cape, Vader revealed his weapon: a silver cylinder accented with black duraplast grips, covered to the pommel. His leather thumb pressed the switch and out comes a blood-red beam. Irele has heard the stories, but never did she imagined seeing it in person; as a matter of fact, she’s not sure if her javelin has any chance against that.

Irele took the offensive, she moved first.

Vader, unbeknownst to her to be her own brother, effortlessly evaded it as simple as stepping out of the way.

The girl had too much pride in her to admit that her opponent was indeed stronger and more skilled, but she thought she could outsmart him, outmaneuver him, not knowing that her efforts would be in vain.

They traded strikes, but Vader was taking the lead in this fight. Irele’s tiring herself out in evading and looking for an opening, landing fewer strikes than she did with her first opponent—the trooper. The dark lord was neither generous nor kind with the training, he wanted to show Irele different levels of strengths—if she were to be dispatched in campaigns where combat is inevitable, she might as well be fazed now than later out in the field.

“It’s unwise to presume you can overpower me, child.”

With their blades locked in, Irele caught a glimpse of Vader’s face up close. The crimson red film of the lenses of his helmet uncovered a hazy view of his eyes—his real eyes: twin golden discs, glinting with menace and at the same time, a sort of grief.

For a moment, Irele’s expression showed humanity; but in the next second, she remembered the fight.

“I wasn’t planning to.”

Her overconfidence in her strike was her undoing, Vader’s lightsaber swiped it out of her hands, leaving her literally empty-handed.

“Perhaps you should re-assess that teenage confidence of yours, little one.”

Vader was moving in for a killing blow. He dared go that far. The operators in the viewing room think, “He’s going to kill her!” but the unexpected happened. In that one moment, time seemed to have slowed for Irele; Vader’s heavy yet nimble movement appeared to be slower in her eyes, which afforded her mere seconds to concentrate.

She closes her eyes… and focused.

Behind the darkness shrouding her view, she wondered why the strike hasn’t landed her yet, slowly she lifts her eyelids and saw a clear sheen shimmering in front of her—like glass with a frosted finish—while her hands were held up in front of her and wide open, sparks sputtered on all sides of Vader’s saber.

There was no time to comprehend this, but what Irele understood is that she needs to use this to advantage… now.

She pushed one hand further away, towards Vader—in effect, he was being backed away, by her. The girl took one more step, and alternately used the other hand to do the same thing as the first hand. Once aligned again, she slowly gravitated both hands to each other, closing the space in the middle and she watched Vader succumbing to his knees.

“Yes…” he lowed, rather satisfied. “You are strong with the Force. Like the blood before you.”

Those words rang into Irele’s soul, like a heavy bell with its ram, and on the top of her mind, there was one that came: Anakin.

She ceased using the Force and stumbled to her bottom, Vader remained kneeling but he held his head up to face the frightened, confused teen.

“Well done, Irele. You are ready.”

–

15 BBY

Irele’s training program did not hold her back, neither did it confine her within the walls of the fortress in Nur.

Roughly a month after her first year, she was tasked to hunt Jedi. Everything she needs to know about them—she did some reading in her time alone. She studied every form, their art and history: down to the most minute part of the culture and norms. And especially the broken legacy that had was their downfall.

It’s been an impressive second year.

Irele has been training consistently, of course, having nothing else to do—except interact with HY-L33, whose programming has been modified into half-protocol droid and half-nanny droid. Most crew members who had the gall to speak to the girl kept telling her that interaction with a droid does little with human social development and growth, to which, in her chagrin, Irele would reply: “I think I’m too old to be told about pediatric psychology.”

Despite her snark, Irele tries to be learned in terms of battle strategies—she’s juggled combat training with studying naval strategies and ground assault tactics, after learning that she may be dispatched on missions with a squadron of troopers in a particular planet from time to time. In one or more occasions, she would cross paths with the devilish Admiral Thrawn, but rarely do they meet for conferences—virtual or otherwise. She can’t help but use some of her street smarts in campaigns, which more often than not, actually works.

These privileges that she enjoys were personally decreed by Vader himself, in the hopes that she would maximize her abilities from more than being a reckless warrior. Some were against it because they perceive her as a rebellious, smart-mouthed child; others decide to give her a chance, because after all, she is a growing girl who’s got a lot to learn in this kind of world she’s been thrown in.

Not all know what she was before—but to generalize it, she was just some local girl in a desolate planet in the middle of nowhere.

The droid HY-L33 looked for her master, and found Irele examining and polishing her lightsaber—something she crafted on her own, the exterior at least. The kyber crystal was harvested from a Jedi survivor she killed not too long ago, in a tropical moon where she was dispatched alone with little to no reinforcements as the troopers were designated as patrols in the town.

“Lady Irele, the briefing with the Inquisitors is due in thirty minutes.”

“Ah yes, the Jedi hunters,” Irele’s brows furrowed, “I thought I wasn’t required?”

“Indeed, but it’s been said to be beneficial for your upcoming campaigns.”

“Who said so?”

“Lord Vader, apparently… and the Grand Inquisitor.”

“Right then, thank you, Haylee.”

Irele dressed into her garbs. Tailored to perfection: the bodysuit and pants were a dark gray waterproof fabric so that the garment won’t weigh her down when fighting under inclement weather such as rain, fog, and snow. The standard material for the armor plating was duraplast—tried and tested against Stormtroopers’ blaster fire and Purge Troopers’ electro-powered weapons—and it covered her torso, shoulders, and forearms; an armor skirt made from the same material complemented the utility belt. Supposedly, they’re to be worn when in the field, but since she’s been cooped up in the Fortress in the past few days, she doesn’t bother strapping on the armaments.

Lastly, she slipped into her low, black boots. Looking at the mirror, she bound her hair in a ponytail. It was once a medium bob with ragged tips, but now she’s grown it out to a length just after her shoulders.

“Alright, I’m ready. I’ll see you in a bit, Haylee.”

The droid gave a short bow and Irele departed her room.

Nur has become her home. The metal maze once confused her, but now she knows where she’s going even with her eyes closed.

She stepped into a turbolift and pressed the button that leads her to the level where the holding rooms and war rooms are.

“Holding Room A-121,” she muttered to herself in reminder.

Along the way, she exchanged short or curt bows to the crewmen who bothered tipping their hats or saluting to her as a greeting. When she saw the engraved number on the door, she pressed another button to prompt the door open. Before her was the group of Inquisitors around a table, lounging about like schoolchildren. Her entrance silenced their already hushed conversations and she stepped in, hoping to find a spot to sit the farthest from them.

“Oh, look who’s come to join us. The favorite.” chided one of the male Inquisitors.

“Let’s make this quick so we can forget each other’s sorry asses were in the same room.”

The briefing consisted of the locations where they would be dispatched. Holograms reflecting the planets flashed one by one on the podium, head profiles of surviving Jedi flashed after the planets, and Irele squinted her eyes on a particular one that stood out like a sore, red thumb.

“Do you know this one, Irele?” one of the male Inquisitors, the Second Brother, asked Irele. He noticed she looked at this one Jedi rather specially—or so he thinks.

Irele turned her eyes to the Inquisitor and replied with a frosty “No” and then she scanned the other head shots. She studied them, since she didn’t want her not being a Jedi-turned-Inquisitor to be a disadvantage. She’s got as much as grit as the rest of them. After the briefing, she isolated herself in one of the couches, locked herself away deep in thought that the Inquisitors’ chatter was just white noise.

She couldn’t wait to retreat to her bedchambers, where she can have some time of her own, unafraid that her idea and its credit might be stolen by another. Over time, Irele has proven to be the kind who “does their homework,” for instance, she remained in the holding room when everyone else had left—probably starting their leg of the hunt once they’re off the moon—and studied the briefing’s log.

“The Jedi are going to be extra cautious if they discover the Inquisitors are hunting them out,” she spoke under the finger against her lip. “Inquisitors are too obvious to spot. The uniforms are a dead giveaway…”

Her eyes widened at the thought.

“But I won’t!” she gasped.

Before leaving the room, she humored herself with listening to the voice logs of Stormtrooper Commanders during their operation in Zeffo. She switched between data tapes, hoping to find an inkling if it was the best place to start.

Audio Data 03403, plays:

“Most of the ancient relics have been extracted from the tombs after much deep digging. Although the acquisition of these antiques were done at the expense of some of us here. Captain Kane, for instance. Who was tagged as K.I.A. while excavating more of these relics underground when local fauna attacked her and a few men in her team.”

Irele stopped midway and scrolled a new one in the databank. Audio Data 34735 plays:

“I’m starting to have a feeling that our patrols are thinning out…”

“Finally, something interesting,” she commented.

“We don’t have the luxury of deploying new troops while sending injured men to the nearest Star Destroyer or outpost. No thanks to that Jedi that was obviously headed in the same direction as we are.”

The girl’s eyes widened upon hearing the word. Her chest tightened, her heartbeat was slow but the thumping was heavy, she could almost feel it pulse through the skin of her ribs. She anticipated more.

“Though I don’t think he was after the relics. I think he was after only one relic, that I don’t know though. Whatever it is, it’s important. But another important thing is that we need to do our job if we don’t wanna lose it—or worse, our lives.”

She’s heard enough and stopped playing the audio recordings. She clicked her way to the metadata of the file and saw that both recordings were one and two days old respectively. She rushed back to her bedroom to slip into her armor, entering the room startled HY-L33, leaving her stuttering and practically choking on what words to say.

“Miss Irele?��

“Haylee, run me a quick scan. How far are we from Zeffo?”

Without question, the droid obeyed. For a minute or two, she stared with unblinking photoreceptors, the white light behind them was unmoving as a faint whirring ran in her central processing unit.

“Approximately two and a half parsecs away, milady.”

“Too wasteful to use Anathema’s hyperspace. No small carrier armed with hyperspace, but the speed is there.”

The words literally rolled off of Irele’s mouth as she talks to herself until she comes into an epiphany of an idea.

“Come on, Haylee!”

“Coming, Lady Irele.” the droid monotonously cooed but one can sense the urgency she adapted with her mistress.

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isitmadness · 4 years

Text

The War is Over

summary: Order 66 doesn’t exactly go to plan for Commander Cody

characters/relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Commander Cody, established Obi-Wan/Cody

words: 1.3k

a/n: This isn’t exactly a fix-it fic, but it sorta is? Order 66 still happens, unfortunately. But I don’t want to give away too much in the summary.

this is my first time posting anything like this here, i’m nervous lol. also, idk what this is really, it just came to me while I was working and I had to write it down. not sure where else it’ll go...if anywhere. but uhh...enjoy.

“Do it,” Cody growled. His usually warm, brown eyes were now hard and steely - a look generally reserved only for his worst enemies. He looked up at Obi-Wan from where he was kneeling on the hard cavern floor. “Or do you not have the guts?”

Obi-Wan blinked. He had never heard such anger come from the commander before, and definitely never directed at him. He gripped his lightsaber tighter trying to steady the slight tremor in his hand. The tip of the blue plasma blade hovered perilously close to Cody’s throat, a low warmth caressing his jaw.

“You’re a coward...and a traitor to the Republic!” Blood slowly dribbled down Cody’s chin when he spoke.

Obi-Wan wanted to reach out and wipe it away with his thumb, cup his jaw, offer comfort. But he resisted the urge. It was surprisingly easy to do when he was being called a coward and a traitor.

By a man who was next to him in every charge they led into battle.

By a man who knew his secret fears...and wants.

By a man whom he loved. And who had professed to love him in return.

After the war, they’d said. Obi-Wan couldn’t think of that anymore.

“I don’t…” Obi-Wan started. “Cody--”

“Don’t call me that.” Cody snarled. Every muscle in his body itched to jump up, move forward, take out the general’s legs with one sweeping motion. But he knew the power the Jedi held, knew the power this particular Jedi held. Any sudden movements almost certainly meant his death now.

Obi-Wan and Cody had been locked in an impasse since they tumbled, alone, down from the upper levels of Pau City and fought in the watery cavern below. Both looked rather worse for wear.

Cody’s armor was dented, scuffed and missing pieces after the fall. He had also lost his blaster and his bucket. Obi-Wan, who had completely given up wearing armor this far into the war, was also beaten and scuffed badly - no doubt the inside was worse, but he gave no indication. There was a purple bruise blooming on his left cheek from where Cody had landed a right hook in their scuffle.

“The men will be looking for us,” Obi-Wan said. Neither of them moved. The only noises this far down in the cavern were the dripping of water and lapping of the underground lake against the rocky walls.

"Let them come. They can help me take care of you," Cody snarled, pressing forward ever so slightly until he felt a faint burn against his neck.

Obi-Wan flicked the switch on the hilt and the blue blade disappeared, leaving them in relative darkness. He clipped it to his belt and Cody sagged, releasing a long-held breath. And yet they both remained.

A gentle whisper cut through deafening silence, "Please...help me understand." Gone was all the usual bravado, replaced with sorrow and confusion.

Cody jumped to his feet and Obi-Wan held up his hands in defense. The lightsaber might have been put away, but Cody knew the Jedi general was just as dangerous, if not more so, without it.

"What part of 'you're a traitor to the Republic' are you not getting?" Cody took a step forward and jabbed a single finger into Obi-Wan’s face.

Still Obi-Wan remained. "I guess you're going to have to explain it to me like I'm a youngling then."

"The Jedi are traitors. They're to be executed without question. By order of Lord Sidious."

Obi-Wan was reeling. He stumbled backwards, his heel catching on a rock behind his boot. His chest was on fire, ice water flowed through his veins. The ache in his head was...was the death of his family across the galaxy?

Thousands crying out, suddenly silenced.

Ahsoka...Mace...Master Yoda...Anakin? Tears sprang to his eyes and he dropped to his knees.

At the exact same moment, Cody pitched forward, also dropping while he grabbed his head in complete agony. His brain was a cacophony of static and white noise.

Too busy dealing with the pain, he missed Obi-Wan moving to his side to lay a gentle hand on his shoulder. Cody tumbled over and swatted the hand away, "Get away from me!"

Obi-Wan backed off, but standing idly by while the man he loved was in such pain was too much to bear. "Please just tell me what’s going on in that head of yours," Obi-Wan finally said softly.

Cody hissed and groaned. His head finally shot up and he looked at Obi-Wan with wide, lost eyes. "Obi-Wan?"

Obi-Wan knelt next to him and put his hand on his shoulder again. "I'm here, dear one."

"Obi-Wan…" Cody choked out a sob and covered the Jedi’s hand with his own, grasping the fingers tightly. "What's happening? Where are we?"

He slipped his arm around Cody's shoulders and drew him to his chest, cradling the frightened commander. "Shhh now..." He pressed a warm hand to the back of Cody's neck. "It'll be okay."

Cody suddenly recoiled in horror, shuffling backwards on his hands, "I tried to kill you."

Obi-Wan gaped.

"We fought and fell...and…" He looked around at his surroundings as if seeing them for the first time. "How did that fall not kill us?"

Obi-Wan huffed out a small laugh, "Jedi, remember?" Somehow, Cody was the only thing keeping Obi-Wan from dissolving into a storm of sorrow. He cleared his throat. "You...remember everything?"

Cody looked dazed. He scrubbed a hand over his short, dark hair. "I remember you on the varactyl, handing you your lightsaber, then...my comlink went off. 'Execute Order 66,' the cloaked man said. And then, this." Cody waved a hand around.

Obi-Wan was again overwhelmed with grief. He sat down on the floor of the cave. “I...I think the war is over, Cody.” Cody stared at him, dreading what was going to come next. “The war is over, and I think the Sith won.”

Cody stood up and came over to sit beside Obi-Wan, wrapping an arm around him as he did for Cody earlier. They sat quietly side by side. The only indication that Obi-Wan was crying was the gentle shaking of his shoulders.

“We have to get out of here, off this rock,” Cody finally said after what felt like an eternity. “We have to warn others.”

They separated so they could look at each other. Obi-Wan wiped his still-soaked tunic sleeve across his face, much good that it did.

“What about you?” Obi-Wan suddenly blurted. “I mean...how do I...how do I know you won’t try it again?”

Cody blinked and looked down at his gloved hands. The blacks were shredded. He could make out his knuckles just barely in the dim light of the cave - they were bloody, scraped, and hurt like a son of a bitch. “You don’t. I don’t.”

“We have to get you taken care of,” Obi-Wan reached out and put a shaking hand on Cody’s cheek. It was surprisingly warm. The tremor ceased.

“Promise me, Obi-Wan,” Cody suddenly locked eyes with his Jedi and latched onto Obi-Wan’s wrist to keep his hand in place.

Obi-Wan hesitated, not liking where this was going, “...promise you...what?”

“Promise me that if I try it again, you will kill me.”

Obi-Wan shook his head violently and tried to wrest his hand from Cody’s firm grip. “No. I won’t do it...I can’t do it. Don’t ask this of me.”

Cody dropped Obi-Wan’s hand so he could put his face closer. “You HAVE to. I will not be myself. I don’t know if I will get lucky enough again to be myself. This might be it. And I want this to be my decision...that I’m forcing you to make on my behalf.” Cody quirked the smallest of smiles. “I trust only you.”

Obi-Wan exhaled slowly. Cody leaned forward and pressed a chaste kiss to his lips.

“I promise,” Obi-Wan finally answered.

“General! Commander!” They snapped their heads up in the direction of the voice - Boil.

“Down here!” Cody called. Obi-Wan sighed and rested his forehead against Cody’s clavicle.

They were going to get off this planet. It was a start.

#my writing #fanfic #star wars #commander cody #obi-wan kenobi #codywan #order 66 #revenge of the sith #angst #what can i say? i like angst #sorry about order 66 #i hate it too #established relationship #dial the angst up to 11 #canon? i don't know her #blood mentioned

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sssssssim · 6 years

Text

May we take a moment to discuss the colors of Reylo?

Today I am going to analyze the ship of Rey and Kylo Ren from a fun perspective: colors.

How the two characters came to have a distinct color associated with them, how the choice was far from random, but most of all, how these colors are used to emphasize their stories and give us a bit more insight to it.

Our story starts at the end of The Force Awakens, but it takes place mostly in The Last Jedi. So join me in a tale with both Jedi and Sith undertones, interesting details, some heartbreak, loads of gifs, some strategically placed outer-links and a bit over 3k words.

Sometimes, this will be a story of purple.

There is no doubt in my mind that the colors these characters have been assigned come from the colors of their lightsabers.

As we know, a lightsaber is a powerful weapon, used by the Jedi and Sith both. However, according to the Star Wars wikia, “Though also used by the Sith, the lightsaber is synonymous with the Jedi, with some in the galaxy believing only Jedi can use lightsabers.” That feels a little like a detail lost across the centuries, because the Sith have always used lightsabers, as far as we’ve seen.

Fun fact! (that doesn’t necessary tie in with our story): the main difference between the two factions, when it came to lightsabers, is that the Jedi favored natural crystals, whereas the Sith almost always used synthetic crystals.

Let’s go back to our characters and their lightsabers.

Kylo Ren’s lightsaber is a crossguard he had made based on an ancient design dating back to a time where the Jedi had attacked a Sith temple, activating it and killing everyone on the planet (the Great Scourge of Malachor). The horrors of this battle apparently would go on to inform Jedi legends for millennia to come, and it tells us something about Kylo’s state of mind. He chose to build his lightsaber based on historic events that didn’t fare well neither for the Jedi, nor the Sith. Not only that, but based on a truly horrible event, and it did nothing to deter him.

Also, we have to note that the lightsaber contains a cracked Kyber crystal, and that is the reason for the lateral vents on the handle, used to divert the extra heat. It is an unstable weapon, not just in appearance, as the plasma blades have a flickering appearance, but in functionality as well. The crystal is barely able to contain the weapon’s power, but Kylo still uses it. Stubbornly so, I think, and once again, it helps characterise him: volatile and unstable, just as his saber.

Another important detail is the color of the crossguard: red. According to basic color theory, red is a color associated with energy, war, danger, strength, determination, and it is a very emotionally intense color. The lightsaber’s color is used to help characterize its wielder, for all of these things are found in Kylo’s personality.

I also feel the need to point out that we’ve only ever seen Sith wield red lightsabers. Sidius, Vader. Red, totally dark side. Heck, if Snoke got a saber, they would’ve need to invent a brighter shade of red. So Kylo is totally dark side. D’uh.

However, red is also the color of passion, desire and love. With Kylo, we caught a glimpse of that in The Force Awakens, but not in the fluffy way you’d expect. When he killed Han, Kylo renounced all of these characteristics. Unsuccessfully, as the next movie points out, but we’ll get to that later.

Rey’s lightsaber is not her own, yet it called to her on Takodana, and it activated her powers. Originally, the lightsaber belonged to Anakin Skywalker, who had made it during his Jedi training. Thus, it is tainted with the dark side, which is a detail we must remember for later on.

However, after Anakin, the lightsaber was passed on to Luke, who used it in his training to become a Jedi. Pretty ironically, it was Darth Vader who cost him the lightsaber (and hand). We don’t actually know how Maz got a hold of it after that, but it did, eventually, end up in Rey’s hands and not only did she (and Finn) use it to fight Kylo on Starkiller Base, but she also used it to bargain for Luke’s return to the war.

This lightsaber isn’t just a weapon, but a symbol and a plot device.

It is bright blue and basic color theory tells us that it is the color of the sky (which Rey dreamed of exploring) and the sea (which she had dreamed of, foreshadowing her journey to Ahch-To). It is associated with depth and stability, and symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith and truth, which are all characteristics Rey undoubtably stands for. It is associated with tranquility and calmness, with heaven. The light.

Which is a stark contrast to Kylo’s red hell.

These colors have been used since the first moment Rey and Kylo interracted. It happened when she touched Luke’s lightsaber, and it is the first moment the viewer sees the bond between the two characters. Rey is thrown into a vision, that leads to Kylo’s side. Just as he’s killing someone, ouch.

But the entire scene is bathed in blue. And Kylo’s lightsaber shines bright red.

Red and blue are both primary colors, but not complementary to each other. The contrast created between them is stark and harsh, as is the battle between Rey and Kylo. At least at the start.

But what happens when you put red and blue next to each other? You create a new color.

Back at it with the basic color theory: purple combines the stability of blue and the energy of red. It is associated with royalty, it symbolizes power, luxury and ambition. Wisdom, dignity, independence, mystery and magic.

What does that mean for our two characters? Light purple evokes romantic and nostalgic feelings, whereas dark purple evokes gloom and sad feeling, causing frustration.

...Sounds about right.

Let’s go on to The Last Jedi, where all the juicy stuff happens. Right from the start, the movie consolidates these colors and their characters.

The first time we see Rey, she is surrounded by the blue sea.

First time we see Ben, it’s a bit more complicated. He’s covered by black, only to be revealed surrounded by white. He gets out of the elevator and into the throne room, which is a shrine to the color red.

Why white, you ask? Well. Basic color theory tells us white is associated with light, goodness, innocence, purity and virginity. YEAH MAYBE NOT. It is considered to be the color of perfection. I know we all love Adam Driver, but DEFINITELY NOT when it comes to Kylo.

However, white can represent a successful beginning. I’m not sure of the successful part, but this is surely a beginning for Kylo Ren. And every beginning starts somewhere, somewhere the character has been before: hence the violent red in the next scene.

After his conversation with Snoke, Kylo gets back on the elevator. While it’s still prominently white and black, there are very small splashes of color: the panels behind him have both red and blue lights.

And as he is destroying his helmet, the red is the color evidenced the most, but blue is still there. Not only that, but the lights he smashes go off with a vaguely blue spark.

It is a little bit of foreshadowing, and it is going to keep happening throughout the film. The red is always there, by Kylo’s side, but in smaller doses so is the blue. ... Rey, I do mean Rey. Kylo has his reddark side, but Rey is always there, in the back of his mind.

I’m not going to lie, I haven’t noticed it happening as much with Rey’s scenes, at least not until she connects with Kylo. All of Ahch-To is a little blue, because of the ocean that surrounds it, but it’s not very evident.

There’s no red, thought, and the lack of it makes sense: she doesn’t care much about Ben at this point, does she? He’s her enemy.

Do you know what is blue, though? The beacons that will bring Rey home. In case you were doubting her place wasn’t by the light.

The first time the bond connects them, this status quo persists.

Kylo is surrounded by red things, with just the tiniest bit of blue, coming from the light above him. Completely dark, with a hint of light threatening to escape.

Rey is completely devoid of blue or red. Neither light, nor dark. Well, maybe that grey has a blue undertone, but that’d be stretching it a bit thin.

But when the bond connects them, it’s very interesting because neither of them have any of their colors around. They are both completely neutral, in their shared shock.

They both get over it and run out of the rooms they’re in, and the status quo returns, again.

Rey has no trace of red around her, but a hint of a blue sky.

Ben has evident red marks around him and in the very background, the slightest hint of blue.

The color display is still a testament to the feelings they have for one another.

Rey sees Kylo as the enemy, the dark side which she wants to keep at bay, far away from her. He is curious about her, scared to let her in, but unable to control himself.

This changes the next time they connect. Because Kylo is surrounded by blue.

He was thinking of her, wasn’t he? Quite a lot, I’d assume, considering he is completely surrounded by her color.

And Rey is as well, but there’s a hint. The light coming from the Falcon’s hatch isn’t red, not yet, it’s orange.

But the jump from orange to red is very slim and by the looks of things, it’s going to happen soon. She has felt the dark side by this point, trully, and she is starting to let it in. Just a hint.

The next time she talks with Luke, he tells her the story of how Ben destroyed his temple. As she’s asking Luke to help her find her place in all of this, even as she’s vowing, loud and clear, that she will not betray Luke as Kylo did... the orange light that is bathing her face looks like it’s one step closer to turning red. Here, have a completely unedited version.

Which brings us to the I’d rather not do this now scene. No, let’s do this now.

Rey wants to know why Kylo killed Han, and she thinks that he had attacked Luke, unprompted. Of course, she is drowning in blue, pushing him away.

At first, Ben does it too. There is a general blue-ness to the scene, but it’s not as evident in an unedited version. There are a few bright red lights, though.

But then, as he’s telling Rey his side of the story, of waking up with his uncle wielding a lightsaber over him, he takes a step towards Rey, thus including a few faint blue blinking lights in the background.

He wants her to understand, and he wants her to Let the past die. So there are more blue flashing lights than in any of his scenes before.

But Rey still pushes him away, no hint of red whatsoever.

And then, Rey goes to the dark cave and things change. She gets out and runs to Kylo, seeking solace because she knew Luke would give her none, seeking understanding.

She is covered and surrounded by red. Well I mean as much red as you can get from a fire, but we’ll roll with it, it’s red.

There is still a hint of blue, by the window on the left, but it’s far away from Rey and out of focus.

In a similar manner, Kylo is surrounded by blue light, with just a few hints of red, far away from him and out of focus.

This is the moment when they truly let each other in. This is the moment when they form a connection, a willing one, and when they do, it’s red.

Fully and completely red, his color, the color of the dark side. Remember when we discussed how Luke’s lightsaber was tainted with the dark side? He had fought against the pull of it, and against his father. He had thought Rey was going to fight against Ren. But seeing this... no wonder Luke thought she was going to turn.

As they meet in the middle, Rey is just red.

And Kylo is just blue.

Together, they should be purple. They’re not, because that is the color of their fights.

Instead, they’re both bathed in his red, with just a hint of her blue by Rey’s head.

As the story shows, this doesn’t mean that Rey is turning to the dark side. No, this shows that while she is still keeping what she stands for (a hint of blue), she is now on Kylo’s side. Ben’s side.

Remember when we were cataloguing what red means? We concluded that passion, desire and love were characteristics that Kylo has relinquished. This is the moment when that changes because this red, it’s not the destructive red of his lightsaber. This is a warmth of passion, desire and love, or at least the possibility of it.

They have reached an understanding. Of course, we know it doesn’t last.

But Rey does ship herself straight to him, in a Millenium Falcon escape pod that has a random bit painted red.

Also (fun fact!), it apparently says PROPERTY OF HAN SOLO / PLEASE RETURN. “Rey wished she could ask Han if that ever worked.” Well it sure as hell worked now, because Han may be dead, but the pod is on a straight course to his next of kin. Anyway, let’s move on.

They are together on the Supremacy.

The elevator they are riding has a red... arc reactor (what do you even call the underneath of an elevator?).

The cuffs Rey was put in are locked on red.

But the elevator, as before, is mostly white, with hints of red and blue. Because they are together, for real, in the same space, for the first time since Starkiller.

As Rey pleads her case, we see a panel lighted blue with hints of red. Just in case you were fearing she was going to turn dark, by this point it’s clear that she’s not.

Kylo rejects her offer, but doesn’t quite reject her, thinking she will be the one to turn. He is once again surrounded by white, by a beginning. One that is clear he wishes to come true.

But Rey doesn’t agree to it, so she is forced to step into Snoke’s red hell.

As stated before, everything is hella fucking red here.

Sure, there are a few blue blinking lights, but you barely see them because of the abundance of red.

And Kylo is most definitely red. Not drowning in it, but enough contrasted by it.

Rey... is not. This lighting is very dramatic (I love and live for it), and you think it is white. And it is, mostly, but look at it a little more closely. The shadows on her face have a blue tint to it, and (I swear I’m not crazy) even the lipstick/lipstain she’s wearing is a pink with a blue undertone.

Yes, I know, that might be stretching it a little. But the blue is there. Barely, but there.

It gets stronger, when Snoke is torturing Rey for information. In a poetic manner, the blue is at her back while the red is at her front. As far as symbolisms go, it makes you think she will shed what is behind her for what is in front of her. Forget the Resistance, join Snoke.

It’s a discombobulating trick, because we see blue again, in a respite. Rey is shown the fate of the Resistance, and the red slowly disappears, while the slight blue sheen of the glass does not.

Meanwhile, the angle in which Kylo is filmed had changed, revealing some really vague and diffused blue lights. A hint of the fact that Rey is still on his mind.

And then Snoke asks him to kill Rey. What does he do? Gets up and completely covers the red lights.

There is no blue, though. So by this point, you’re thinking that Kylo will do it, he will kill Rey. Because that’s what he wants Snoke to believe.

Rey believes it too. The screen is split, between Snoke and her, and she’s framed by red. Not a testament to the dark side, no, but knowing what is coming right next, this red is protection. It’s a foreshadowing of Kylo protecting her.

As he’s saying I know what I have to do, there is still no blue around Kylo. Just really bright red. On one hand it’s because, as I said before, it’s what he wants Snoke to think.

But, on the other hand, it’s also a foreshadow of his final decision, isn’t it? During these scenes, this lack of blue, this onslaught of red? Biggest foreshadow we’ve missed the first time we saw the movie. (I’m just mildly bitter about it.)

The story continues with Kylo cutting Snoke in half (good riddance, asshole). And immediately after, we return to what we have seen at the beginning of Kylo’s journey in this movie, and what we have seen with Rey in the smuthut.

Rey, face lightened by her blue, surrounded by Kylo’s red.

Kylo, face lightened by his red, surrounded by Rey’s blue.

Together, they fight. But it is not purple, because they are not fighting against each other. They are on the same side now. No Jedi, no Sith, the red and blue of their lightsabers does not matter anymore.

What matters is the fact that they are still in Snoke’s red hell.

After the fight is over, Ben starts by saying It’s time to let old things die. He’s not completely surrounded by red, but he is completely surrounded by the type of red you can get with fire as your light source.

But as he’s continuing his explanations, there are small pieces of fiery red falling all around him. And, to note, the hull of the ship in the background looks white.

Rey, while she is surrounded by the same bits of fiery red, the ship in the background is a lot more blue.

And this is where their understanding ends.

You know what happens next. Kylo makes his plea, begs Rey to join him. Surrounded by fire red, but blue as well. Because he wants it, he wants her to join him. He wants her.

Rey, while still surrounded by fire, is framed by some very contrasting pieces of blue light.

She refuses, and they fight, they are fighting against each other. Just like on Starkiller, even if the method is different, and even they are different.

It ends with blue devouring all the red around it. It ends with Rey winning, because she was the one to wake up first and she managed to flee the ship.

It ends with both of them losing each other. And thus, we’re back to how things started, to how things are supposed to be.

Kylo, with his red, fighting his family and all they stand for.

Rey, with her blue sky, saving the Resistance and the people she cares for.

And the end of The Last Jedi?

It ends with Kylo against a vaguely purple background with very distinct buttons, one red and one blue. He still wants her by his side, but he doesn’t want to step away from the dark side.

It ends with Rey against a background that is not quite red. She closes the hatch on their connection, on him.

What does this mean for our character’s future? Except for the fact that there is one, I can’t really say. He still wants Rey by his side, but while she doesn’t hate him anymore, she doesn’t justify his (evil) actions, either.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens, of course. I predict some red and blue will be involved. Maybe some white. Hints of purple.

#star wars #reylo #reyloedit #kylo ren #starwarsedit #my edit #my gif #edit star wars #edit other #sim watches star wars

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hexoskeleton · 3 years

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So, earlier today I challenged myself to fix the plot of the Star Wars sequels with ~minimal~ editing. The original post was on a long thread and had a bunch of typos, though, so I'm putting the cleaned up version here. Feel free to give tips as to how it could be improved! Warning: it is quite long.

1. The Force Awakens

The first movie I would have kept mostly the same. The only major difference is that Snoke would have been introduced as a sort of evil father figure to Kylo Ren. He wouldn’t be too menacing, and he and his followers would be more cult-like and creepy, rather than outright scary. His cult clearly has some sort of big secret that he is the key to. He mumbles to himself a lot. Think creepy, kind of scattered, space-alien Mother Gothel.

Also, Finn would awaken force powers during his fight with Kylo Ren, setting up his start on the path to becoming a Jedi alongside Rey.

2. The Last Jedi

In the Second Film, Rey and Finn go to train with Luke—who retired into hermitage after failing Kylo Ren. The key difference here is that Luke’s backstory (told via flashback) makes clear that Kylo Ren was being indoctrinated from a very young age (Snoke’s cult using the force to communicate with him), and it was Luke’s overreaction (due to Darth Vader-related trauma) that finally caused Kylo to snap. Kylo Ren still tracks them down, and we still get that iconic fight between Luke and Kylo on the salt plains. Note: One of the main things that Luke teaches Rey and Finn is the ability to use the Force to heal others (he demonstrates this on various animals on his island).

The plot involving the First Order battleship chasing the Resistance still occurs, but there is no rivalry between Poe and Amilyn Holdo—in fact, Holdo’s character is completely replaced by Leia. Leia goes along with Poe’s plan to stop the First Order battleship—which involves obtaining battleship plans from a First Order engineer—but mentions (foreshadows) a “devastating” plan B (to ram the First Order Ship with their own) should he fail. Poe still does end up failing, betrayed by the First Order engineer he thought he could trust—but in the process he manages to steal a First Order data crystal. (More on that in a sec.)

This all results in about the same plot, but without maligning Luke’s character (his backstory isn’t that he attacks a defenseless boy for no reason, he’s just a bit too strict and reacted unfortunately due to PTSD) or setting up a completely useless arc for Poe Dameron (while he does still fail in his mission, he manages to get his hands on a very important data crystal.)

The main difference in the second movie is Snoke. He was already revealed in the first movie, but in this one a lot of time is spent on him as he clearly goes a bit crazy—rambling to thin air, talking to mirrors, and generally acting even more scattered than usual. He seems scared of something. At last, when Kylo brings him Rey, he reveals that all this time he was actually communing with a force ghost—the ghost of Palpatine.

Meanwhile, the resistance opens the data crystal that Poe stole: it contains information about Snoke, revealing that the entire First Order is a cult dedicated to bringing back Emperor Palpatine, who is currently a powerful, albeit diminished, Sith ghost. (Sith ghosts aren’t traditional Star Wars canon, but... rule of cool.)

Snoke, though generally weak and creepy, stands up tall, infused with Palpatine’s power. It’s hard to tell if he’s using Palpatine, or if Palpatine is possessing him. He tells Rey that she is the most powerful force user he’s ever met, and offers her Kylo Ren’s position as his apprentice. She refuses, and along with Kylo (who is obviously upset by Snoke’s betrayal) fights and kills Snoke, temporarily banishing Palpatine. The rest of the movie plays out the same way, with Kylo taking over the first order and Rey and the Resistance escaping.

(Not an important plot point, but, in order to make the fight with Snoke more interesting, I’d give him some sort of unique weapon. Maybe a circular blade of light that floats around him, or a bunch of small floating light daggers.)

3. The Rise of Skywalker

In the third movie, Kylo Ren is now the head of the First Order, and is being treated like a god. Palpatine’s ghost now appears to him like it appeared to Snoke—commending him on his power and general evilness. Palpatine also reveals to Kylo all the biological experiments Snoke was working on: attempts to clone the Emperor and bring him back to life. Many of them shriveled up and pathetic.

The most impressive clone is sitting in a tank at the end of an incredible hallway. It looks like the emperor, but a bit younger, and at least twice the size of a regular person. Much of its body is mechanical, and it has multiple limbs. Its eyes, though, are dead. The emperor explains that this body is the “ideal form for channeling the force,” but that a force wielder of incredible power is required to activate it.

The rest of the movie plays out as before, with Kylo tracking down Rey at Palpatine’s command. One key difference here: Rey is actively struggling with anger at this point. She’s angry at Kylo Ren for causing the deaths of Han Solo and Leia Organa, and she’s angry at the First Order for everything they’ve done. This is affecting her use of the force, making it more violent and volatile. Just before Kylo Ren’s redemption, she and Finn duel him 2 on 1, and she ends up stabbing him before fleeing. Finn is the one who decides to save Kylo Ren’s life (using the healing force technique Luke taught them in the previous movie) before following her, which ultimately leads to Kylo Ren’s redemption.

At the climax of the film, Ghost Palpatine gets Rey all by herself, isolating her. He tells her that Snoke and Kylo Ren were the ones who were truly evil, and that he never wanted his power to harm anyone. He tells her that they were the ones using him for their own purposes. He shows her false visions of Darth Vader doing the same, telling her that this is a pattern that has continued for generations—the evil preying on the good. At last, he says, he has a solution that can make things right: the scary Palpatine clone from the beginning of the film.

Palpatine reveals that Rey is his granddaughter, and that only her power and her blood can revive him. Together they can rule the Galaxy, and finally wipe out evil once and for all. After he bombards her with vision after vision of Kylo Ren destroying everything and everyone she loves, she finally gives in and gives up some of her blood for his ritual.

As soon as Palpatine inhabits his new godly form, he disarms and attacks Rey. His new body is incredibly powerful, but just before he can finish her off, Kylo Ren and Finn show up and fight Palpatine back. Meanwhile, Poe leads the fight against the Last Order’s vast armada.

Palpatine is, of course, defeated. However, Rey is fatally injured during the fight, and, just as in the original film, Kylo Ren uses the last of his force energy to heal her, dying in the process. There is no Rey/Kylo Ren kiss. Instead, just before he dies. Kylo and Finn share a moment, and Kylo makes Finn promise to take care of Rey.

There is a moment just after this where it seems that Palpatine managed to retain his ghost-form, but before he can flee again, every Jedi force ghost shows up—Anakin, Obi Wan, Yoda, Luke, Leia, and, now, Ben Solo—and together use the force to dispel him once and for all.

Rey, Poe and Finn reunite, celebrate—personally I would insert a romantic moment between Rey and Finn—and share a cathartic moment of release. Rey ends the film by making her own golden lightsaber and declaring herself “Rey Skywalker.”

Now, I’m not a professional writer, but I think this makes clear that the Star Wars sequels could have made a lot more sense—and been more in-line with character motivations—all while allowing characters to grow in interesting ways (like Finn becoming a Jedi), with just a few small tweaks.

#star wars #long post #writing

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nny11writes · 6 years

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Three’s A Crowd 1

Have some self indulgent nonsense.

Also, I tagged this but in case you don’t have them blocked cw/tw for suicidal ideation, possible body horror, and abusive relationships. Most of it isn’t in graphic detail in this story, but I’d rather safe than sorry.

Please let me know if you’d like me to add any tags to this!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You’re still trying to meditate through the suffocating darkness when his blatant glaring becomes too much. Well, “glaring”, you suppose. Somehow even without his own separate body Vader has learned how to make it feel like he’s outside of you. Maybe it’s Malachor? It fills you with a petty sort of joy to know that for all his terrible power and overbearing ego, the most powerful thing he can pull from the Sith planet is the ability to annoy you.

You must know by now that this is a fruitless endeavor.

Stars a-fucking-bove, he has the most pretentious vocabulary and snooty tone of anyone you’ve ever met. And you grew up in the Temple!

His shape almost changes in the back of your mind, into an oily black with iridescent purple highlights. It’s his own petty little joy at annoying you.

(Like this is even your fault!)

Your pitiful whinging serves no meaningful purpose.

“I,” you hiss, huff out a lung full of air before starting again with a softer tone, “I am full to rights to be upset about this.”

For a moment, just a moment, there’s a golden warmth from him. You’re just hangry. The sensation is gone as quick as the jab. Vader has a knack for drowning Anakin back under with a snarl.

“If you don’t like my attitude you are welcome to leave. Anytime you want in fact.” You wish that wouldn’t sound so childish. It’s an uncomfortable reminder of the power dynamic you once shared with the monster hitching a free ride in your body. It makes you feel small and stupid in a way you haven’t since you were a teenager.

His shadows snap and you hate feeling so hurt by his disappointment. His voice is grating in your mind, You know full well I cannot.

When you were dueling him at the top of the Temple, the honest truth is that you didn’t expect to survive the encounter. You hoped that you could kill him, stop his reign of darkness and terror, or at least slow him down enough for the others to escape. It wasn’t suicidal, or at least you’re pretty sure it wasn’t. You just knew that he was bigger, stronger, and a Sith Lord on a Sith planet who maybe had a big reason to want to murder you violently. Something went wrong though. No, that’s a little harsh. You did stop him at least but the price was some sort of bantha fodder deus ex machina which left you alive and crushed under his corpse.

Then you’d felt him explode from somewhere behind your heart and you’d struggled to breath.

Then you hadn’t had any control at all.

Vader had pushed his own body off of you, staring at your grime encrusted hands in horror. There had been an icy chill, and you couldn’t breathe, and then Vader coughed while brining your hand to your throat. You couldn’t feel your body when he stood and you couldn’t control it as he moved. He’d lurched sideways as if trying to shove himself back into his own form. When that failed he’d tried to leave the now sealed temple. You refused to help (you didn’t know how to help). You would literally rather starve to death than help Vader escape while wearing your body like a flesh suit.

The two of you had squabled like children fighting over a beloved toy. Yanking control of your body back and forth between one another. Each time you were forced aside was just as jarring as the first, and each time he took it back you felt him grow weaker.

He couldn’t take over, not fully and not for long. Not as long as you don’t want him to.

You couldn’t get rid of him though.

“It’s called positive thinking Vader, it makes me hopeful to imagine a future where I’m not trapped with you.” You make your voice sickeningly sweet, smirking as if he can see your face. Maybe he can.

Vader roils with disgust but falls silent.

You count it as a victory, even as you stand to stretch out all the pains in your body. You work slowly so the world doesn’t go spinning out from under your feet again. Yesterday, or at least the last time you’d been awake for a while, you got up too fast and fainted. You’d woken up near the exit with Vader’s rage howling around your montrals when he failed to open the door again.

Right now you know that Vader is trying to check out of this experience for a while, apparently mortified and furious over your weakness. You’re not sure what to think about the fact that he still frames you as his apprentice. That you can feel his anger at you failing him and you can feel Anakin’s faint worry over your health under that. It’s uncomfortable and unwanted attention from them both (or just him?). You wish you could claim this is a weird one off, but instead this has become your life now. Everyday shockingly similar and painfully dull, interspersed with terrifying moments where you can’t control your own body and get to see glimpses of someone long gone.

Vader pulls himself back, as far away from you as he can. His viscous shadowy form compacting itself down into the smallest sphere it can. It makes a hollow popping sound when it forms and leaves the smell of sulfur clinging to your skin.

“Petulance doesn’t suit you.” You say, even as you’re grateful for the reprieve. And the smart thing to do would have been to shut up. Too bad it doesn’t even cross your mind to not poke the rancor. “That’s more an Anakin thing I think.”

For one moment your whole body feels like it’s on fire. You howl and drop back to the ground, roughly catching yourself on hands and knees as you start to dry heave from the phantom pain. The echo fades fast enough, but leaves you dizzy and disoriented. You’d count this as a victory, except you know that Vader could have taken over in that moment. That he could have easily overridden you as you flailed to the floor. He either gave you pity, enjoyed watching your pain from a distance, or…or-

Anakin Skywalker is dead. Do not delude yourself. His voice is a whisper that echoes back and forth, shifting tones and crumbling into a fine sand.

(There’s a faint sensation of vicious pride, that golden warmth pulses just below the freezing cold surface of Vader’s mind. If Anakin really is still there, he’s getting stronger.)

“Keep telling yourself that,” you wheeze before collapsing onto your side.

It feels like you’ve been crushed by two cruisers and hit with a full barrage of ion torpedoes. Maybe it’s because there’s two of you now, your capacity to feel pain has gone somewhere off the charts. You hope he doesn’t feel like this all the time, and immediately snort at yourself for the wasted compassion. Before long the dust on the floor clogs your nose and throat, and eventually you manage to roll onto your back just to stop choking to death. It’s only once there, uncomfortably lying on your rear lek that you acknowledge it might be better to roll onto your stomach and just speed the process up.

Vader is oddly quiet considering your burst of ideation. When you thought about throwing yourself down into one of the Temple’s many pits he’d sneered at you in disgust. When you’d considered impaling yourself on your own blades he’d taunted you for it, offering to take control of your arms to have the honor.

You weren’t suicidal when you faced Vader in that duel.

You are willing to admit that you are becoming less mentally stable everyday that passes with a Sith Lord stuck in your head. Also that whole trapped with no way to leave thing. Certainly put a damper on your positive outlook. Hopeless. On top of that, no one from Phoenix has come back to look for you and you really don’t blame them. But there’s something to be said for the irony of being abandoned again. There’s something to be said for the irony of your little promise to Anakin too. You really need to learn to how to let your attachments go. At least your attachment to your physical body is growing smaller everyday. Maybe if the starvation doesn’t get you first you can finally convince Vader that the best option is clearly to end it now.

Vader’s little sphere shudders, images of pits and fires and the endless vacuum of space rush past your mind’s eye so fast that the floor feels alarmingly like it’s tilting. You don’t start rolling though and force yourself to think through the way your empty stomach is doing flips. Those aren’t your memories. Those aren’t your emotions telling you to end it now.

You growl when you put two and two together. “And you’re bitching at me for it now? What the hell?”

The shuddering grows before finally going silent. It takes you an embarrassingly long time to realize that means he’s afraid. That’s fair. You’re not sure where his little parasitic mind would go once your body is out of the picture. The image of him piloting your shambling, decomposing corpse actually makes you laugh. It’s not funny.

His reluctant hiding leaves you feeling lighter. Like a giant weight is lifted off your chest and it makes you laugh more to realize it’s thanks to the two of you no longer fighting over your breathing pattern. He’s just letting you have full control. Letting you manipulating the way he’s being forced to experience the galaxy right now. This is what he’s finally giving up over? Now? He’s giving up now? Your sides ache and your throat burns as you cover your face, hiccuping through the last few chuckles.

It’s funny because you were basically ready toy step aside and let him do whatever he wanted. You’re tired. You’re just so tired and you’re pretty sure your body will perish before he can do anything with it. It’s cruel but you wanted to see him reach the stars again, only to burn out of existence entirely.

“Sure you don’t want this? One hot mess ready to go.” You pretend it doesn’t unnerve you when he doesn’t respond.

You don’t remember falling asleep.

You do remember snippets of your nightmare.

Of chains around your hands and throat, of being pulled and pushed and stripped naked so your full price can be assessed. The way your mother’s hands carded through your hair as she rocked you to sleep. The way your mother’s hand fell limp from your face as she died.

Vader stays silent when you probe at him, so instead you haul yourself up and crawl to the nearest wall. You’re at least sitting up when you try to sink back into the Force. He leaves you be for the whole session.

#Star Wars #Star Wars Rebels #Fanfiction #Fanfic #Ahsoka Tano #Darth Vader #Body Sharing #cw: suicidal ideation #cw: suicide #cw: abuse #cw:body horror #hit me up if you need/want me to add additional tags #Anakin Skywalker is technically in this chapter but blink and you'll miss him #Force tomfuckery to deus ex machina the stuff #Three's A Crowd

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wingletblackbird · 7 years

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This Weapon is Your Life

“This weapon is your life,” is a statement that, I believe, gets a lot of unwarranted criticism and is frequently misunderstood, particularly amongst the Western, Star Wars fandom. The general opinion that I have found on the subject is that it indicates that the Jedi are teaching people to think of themselves as weapons, and/or that it shows hypocrisy as Jedi are supposed to discourage “possession,” and/or that saying a weapon is your life, encourages or advocates violence. I am here as an apologist for that phrase, because for the reasons indicated below, I think that that phrase is awesome.

What one must first understand is that George Lucas took a lot of inspiration for Star Wars from eastern sources, Japan in particular. Darth Vader’s mask was based upon the Samurai mask, C-3P0 and R2-D2 were inspired by a Japanese movie told from the perspective of two slaves who are caught up in the conflict going around them, and the Sith and the Jedi were inspired by the notion of rival Samurai clans. As such, I feel the lightsabre, its value, its treatment, and its symbolism come from Bushido, the Samurai code, and the katana.

What one must first understand about this is that the Samurai sword, the katana, was considered representative of the Samurai’s soul, so sacred that a Samurai should never be parted from it. Sound familiar? When these blades were made, the smiths would stay up three days and three nights to get the perfect metallic composition, were expected to pray over it and place their very spirit into it, and often had the beginning of the process blessed by a priest. By the time the blade was finished, it was to be beyond a mere sword but the spiritual form brought into physical art. This is similar to how the Jedi view their weapons. They go into a deep meditation for days, in Anakin’s case three days and three nights, and during this time, they construct their lightsabres. They imbue the crystals that make up the blade with their own connection to the Force, and they don’t know how it will manifest until they have completed the construction. Thus, the lightsabre becomes a representation of their very presence in the Force made manifest in the physical realm. (Curiously, Vader’s blade looks just like Anakin’s only black....I’m sure this is significant.) It was said you could know the Jedi from his lightsabre.

As a consequence of this belief, it was the heights of dishonor and the highest insult to disrespect a Samurai’s sword or a Jedi’s sabre. Furthermore, to place one’s sword/sabre into another's hands was to afford them a great honor as you were placing your “soul” into their care. This sheds a lot of light on why Anakin placing his sabre in Padme’s hands was so profound. Moreover, exchanging lightsabres amongst Jedi was called the “concordance of fealty,” and represented a serious commitment between two individuals because of this. A Jedi, or a Samurai, was, put bluntly, never to be seen without his sword within hands reach, even at so young an age as five. This can be observed in how the Jedi encouraged their Padawans, to wear their sabre at all times. Furthermore, in the same way that only Samurai were allowed to wear katana, only Jedi were supposed to wield a lightsabre. In both cases it symbolized their positon of authority and demanded respect.

However, with respect and power comes responsibility. The Samurai’s sword also represented his dedication to Bushido which is the “Way of the Warrior.” In GFFA, this is the Jedi Code. Bushido was based in Buddhism and represented non-violence. It meant that those who wielded the katana should only draw it when absolutely necessary. It meant that they were expected to be honorable, disciplined, obedient, wise...as are the Jedi. The Jedi were taught that they should only draw a lightsabre when necessary, and if they must draw it they must be prepared for the consequences. They were taught that, as a Jedi, they should be responsible for their actions, aware of the consequences, humble and obedient. Indeed, the word Samurai, representing the warrior class, comes from the verb “to serve.” The Jedi frequently say “we come to serve.” The lightsabre/katana symbolizes this very way of life. Ergo, it was their life. They had imbued these blades with the very essence of themselves and their commitments/beliefs and it was intensely personal.

Now, taking all of this into context, let’s look at AotC. (”Next time try not to lose it. This weapon is your life!”) Anakin has drawn his lightsabre quickly and arguably foolishly. As a result, he has lost his weapon. Already in doing so he has shown his disrespect for the Jedi way. However, more than that, and more significantly, he is doing so out of a desire to impress Padme. He is doing it for selfish gain and ambition. His heart is not in the Jedi way, so losing his sword is very symbolic. When Obi-Wan looks at him and says “try not to lose it,” he’s reminding Anakin of his purpose and his oath. He’s saying not to neglect his responsibilities, not to disrespect the code, to be non-violent, and to be selfless. Anakin doesn’t want to hear it and grabs his lightsabre in a frustrated manner. He isn’t listening. He’s treating his very soul, his essence, the light side even, with contempt. (The Jedi Code too, and note, the Code in and of itself isn’t the issue, it’s the council’s unfortunate understanding of it, which we’ve all commented on...So, no, not good at all.)Thus, Anakin foreshadows his own fall.

As someone who was raised in Japanese schools from grade 1 to grade 7, and is fluent in Japanese as a result, I must confess that moment hit me hard and I found it quite profound. Don’t disrespect the sword! There’s rather a lot of subtext there.

Incidentally, swords were often passed down one generation to another and something of the previous owner’s spirit was said to go with it. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the Jedi passed down hilts, and/or crystals, (the best sabres had three after all), down from Master to Padawan to create a legacy that you carried reverently in your hand. Therefore, when Obi-Wan gives Luke his father’s lightsabre, he carries that tradition forward in the hope that as Luke wields it, and wields the Force through it, some of his father’s skill, talent, and essence, before he fell, may pass onto the son on some level. The sword is sacred.

(This also explains why Obi-Wan thinks blasters are “uncivlised” and “clumsy.” They can be mass produced; they aren’t hand-made; they aren’t sacred; they don’t connect you to a higher realm, a greater world, a better understanding. They signify nothing, are attached to no Code. When you hold a blaster, if you are Obi-Wan at least, you feel no connection to anything but mindless violence.)

(And, of course, from a practical stand point, losing your sword in a dangerous environment is also a surefire way to get yourself killed...)

#Star Wars #Anakin Skywalker #obi wan kenobi #This weapon is your life #Prequels #Jedi Code #Lightsabres #Katana #Samurai #Japan #Bushido

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waywardravenmedia · 7 years

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Star Wars Myths and Musings. Episode III: The House of Atreus and Dune

Episode III. The House of Atreus, Dune, and Star Wars.

Catch up on Episode I and Episode II

Some may not be familiar with the mythology involving the ancient Greek story of the House of Atreus, but it has held sway over many mythic developments from antiquity to modern novels, especially Dune by Frank Herbert. At its core, it involves familial/ordained duty in conflict with personal morality/self-determinism, and the abstract of justice, but most of all redemption.

Let’s start with a scant overview of the Greek myth of which there are a few versions and literary offshoots.

The House of Atreus.

Zeus had a son named Tantalus. Being a bit audacious and arrogant, he wished to test the gods omniscience. Being of the twisted sort, he killed his son Pelops and cooked him up and served Pelops pies (not really pies but you get the picture and it might remind you of the Rat King in Game of Thrones). All the gods could tell except Artemis because she was preoccupied with the kidnapping of her daughter Penelope, so she took a bite. This earned Tantalus a fate where he was sent to the underworld where he would be forever hungry and thirsty but water and food was just out of reach. Thus, the word tantalize. He started an imbalance/curse but would not be able to restore balance/lift the curse, which is the essence of the mythic cycle.

Pelops was restored to life. He had two sons named Atreus and Thyestes. They competed against each other and wanted the throne of Argos. Some trickery involving a sheep happens along with Thyestes being a rather poor brother by having an affair with Atreus’ wife Aerope, and he ascends the throne. But, Atreus takes it away and like most brothers, a bit of revenge was taken though in extremis. Following in his ancestor’s unwise footsteps, Atreus killed Thyestes sons, cooked them up, and fed them to his bro, who in an odd sort of shaming was sent into exile for consuming his kids. Now, every good ancient myth/drama needs more taboos, as if cannibalism isn’t enough, so a bit of incest goes down with Thyestes and his daughter Aegisthus. Guess who dies as a result? Atreus. It is a cycle of selfishness and revenge. The sins of the past climb down the generations and reflect the previous transgressions.

But that’s not the end. Atreus had two sons (yes, the parallels are obvious) named Agamemnon and Menelaus. Yup, The Odyssey guys. To cut to the chase, Agamemnon pisses off Artemis just like dear old grandpa. And because Agamemnon really wants to go to war with Troy, he must supplicate the goddess to gain the desired wind so his fleet can set sail. What is called for? Yes, you got it. Another sacrifice of a child. More taboos equal more fun.

Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia so he can go to war and keep his promise to his brother to get Helen (of Troy) back. This, as you can understand, quite irks his wife Clytemnestra. The cycle of selfishness and revenge is renewed. She has Agamemnon killed when he gets back and this calls for their son Orestes to kill his mom, as per tradition, which he does with some help from his sister Electra (not the assassin who has a thing for Daredevil).

With no one to avenge Clytemnestra, the divine Furies/Erinyes go after Orestes. Jump to the end, Orestes is made to marry Hermione (not the Granger), daughter of Helen and Menelaus. This is after Apollo, the good old shiny god, sets up the first trial/courtroom in Athens so to end this cycle of retribution. Some say this myth illustrates the advent of the jury system and the growth of civilization from a clan modeled reality where blood is answered with blood, and that in turn must be answered with blood in perpetuity. Resolutions and justice could now take a foothold from the chaotic past. That is what I was taught but what I always took away was that the original sin of the patriarch infected the family line and redemption for the family could only come with stopping the cycle of violence and embracing a non-violent course of settling contentions.

Where does this fit in with Star Wars and Dune?

First, both are family sagas. Second, the sins of the family or father must be redeemed by the sons. The imbalance that was caused by an initial “divine/spiritual” action had to be brought back in balance with the natural/physical world.

It is evident that Dune influenced science fiction after its publication. The direct line of influence by the House of Atreus on Dune is overt in the name of protagonist. Paul Atredies. Atreus is translated from ancient Greek as “No Fear” or no tremble to be accurate. The descendant of Atreus are called Atreidai in the plural or Atreides in the singular. Overcoming fear is a big deal in Dune. It is spoken of in the Litany Against Fear by the Bene Gesserit and it is fear that keeps the Bene Gesserit from being “all places at once” with a powerful prescience ability that Paul obtains. Fear as a subject matter addressed in science fiction would be forever different after that, and in Star Wars, it is fear that consumes Anakin Skywalker and transforms him into the Sith Lord Darth Vader. It is fear that Luke Skywalker must overcome to redeem his father Anakin Skywalker.

Sure, subjects, topics, themes, can and do flow from many sources but Dune has a direct line from the House of Atreus, and Star Wars borrows a trajectory from foundational science fiction/speculative fiction to manifest a space opera coalesced from mythology. Just the similarities in location and character show the connections. Luke Skywalker is royalty even if he doesn’t know it. His mom was Padme Amidala, once a Queen of Naboo. Paul is the son of Duke Leto Atredies. Both must live in deserts. Powerful emperors plot their destruction or corruption. Both seek the greatest source of power in their universes. Luke the Force and Paul the control of prescience and the Spice Melange, which allows for controlled interstellar space travel and thus is the source of economic control of which all are bound.

Sins of the past or redemption of the father, or family, are the real pepper in the seasoning of the story and what drive Luke in Star Wars (in ROTJ at least) and Paul as he tries to reclaim the rightful place of power back from the Harkonnen, who he happens to be related to by his grandfather, which he doesn’t know until later just like Luke finding out about Darth Vader being his father. The old “We’re related” twist. In the end, Luke and Paul redeem their families. But, Paul really extends the House of Atreus cycle by becoming trapped by able to see the future but not able to change it (very common to Greek myths) and then having his son redeem him, even though it traps him into a destiny that isn’t so cool. Unless you want to be a giant worm that dies if it falls into water.

"...perhaps the Skywalker family has a longer and more deeply rooted history with the Force than we know. "

The imbalance issue. Restoring balance to the Force is reiterated throughout the prequels and the tv show The Clone Wars. What created the imbalance in the first place? Tricky question. We don’t really know. Maybe that will be addressed in the upcoming movie The Last Jedi. But perhaps the Skywalker family has a longer and more deeply rooted history with the Force than we know. Maybe an ancient Skywalker was one of the people who helped trigger the imbalance and therefore the line of Skywalker was mantled with the responsibility to bring restoration? Sins of the father deal. In any case, Anakin Skywalker did bring the Force back into balance, or so we thought. This would end the cycle of storm and stress, tit for tat, dark and light, but as with any system requiring homeostasis, new introductions of actors or elements can shift to imbalance. Looks like it didn’t last long. Perhaps another family was involved in triggering of the Force imbalance in the past and needs to join with the Skywalkers to really restore it.

In Dune, it is not Paul who does the real work to save the universe. It is Leto II his son who become a god-emperor/conquering worm. He, and Paul before him, foresees that human stagnation will lead to demise. Leto II recognizes that stagnation in human growth is the imbalance. To create a balance of potential, he becomes the architect of the Great Scattering where humans will need to leave the Known for the unKnown and ruins the old empire. This kicks adaption into gear.

One could parallel this with Anakin Skywalker being prophecized as the “balance bringer” and he does what he thinks is right for his new empire, even if it made him into a tyrant in an exoskeleton with lovely blinking lights and quaint quilted sleeves of black. Then, Luke just like Leto II comes about to save his father from himself and what he created. If you placed Luke Skywalker into a Leto II role, then the next logical step for his story arc would be he would take on his father’s task but direct it in such a way as to destroy it and create a new path or destiny. Leto II saw the error in the old rigid religious way of thinking regarding human civilization, status, and power so he altered it to be so oppressive that humans would eventually try to dismantle it. Casting it away. It worked. Though Luke tried to recreate the Jedi, it failed. He went to exile (Leto did a self-imposed exile before merging with the sand-trout) and seems to have had a revelation about the religious order he followed. In that “… the Jedi must end” from the trailer.

There are plenty of other elements that link Dune series of novels to Star Wars such as a special set of warriors with super powers, religious sects with rigid doctrine, messiahs, clairvoyant abilities, mystics in the desert, prophecy, twins, dashing rogues who fall in love with a princess (Idaho and Solo rhyme), a penchant for combat with blades/light sabers, forbidden love, desert worlds, and of course odd colored eyes. Lastly, I found it interesting that borrowing from the “Bible” was extant in both works. I mean, the reference to the New Testament is right there with first names, Luke and Paul, but that a whole other influence I don’t want to get into.

Like I have always said to my friends, I always thought Star Wars was Dune blended with tales of King Arthur, strewn with Greek and Celtic mythology, featuring psychic, super-powered samurais in space but it all goes back to the House of Atreus and this could give an idea of where it goes forward.

So ends the musing of Episode III.

Vox clamantis in deserto.

#star wars #mythology #dune

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eirianerisdar · 7 years

Note

Sorry but - fic title suggestion: The Curious Feeling of Falling. And there are different types of falling *wink*

The Curious Feeling of Falling

There is a common misconception about Obi-Wan Kenobi.

It is there, even among the members of his own Order; and even more so within the ranks of the child-soldiers he commands, whispering among the multitudes of the galaxy.

They say Obi-Wan Kenobi could never fall.

Fall, of course, has two very different meanings; but on this particular application, the Jedi and the multitudes do not differ.

There are initiates who whisper that Master Kenobi has never felt the pull of the murmuring Dark. There are knights who wonder if Obi-Wan ever felt the tug of attachment on his heartstrings. And there are children on Coruscant playing at their mock-battles who turn away their toy starfighters at the last moment because General Kenobi won’t kill unless he has to!

The Jedi are mistaken - a misunderstanding spread so deep that it warps even the basic meaning of the tenets of their Order. And the children, of course, simply do not understand the meaning of war.

Jedi, soldiers, and citizens.

In the end, even Anakin.

None understand that to call Obi-Wan’s perfection effortless is to diminish the ceaseless war in his heart to the absence of challenge in the first place.

Obi-Wan has been fighting to overcome himself from the moment he first saw the Force.

It begins, as you might expect, before he even enters the Order.

It begins in a nursery-room on Stewjon.

Obi-Wan drops his rattle.

It makes a horrid clanging noise as it hits the edge of his crib on the way to the floor. The faintest flicker echoes across Obi-Wan’s mind - the beginning of what he would learn years later to be annoyance.

He wants his rattle.

He wants it.

The warm afternoon light filters into the nursery through the gossamer curtains, and seems to flow to him on a breeze of his own making. The rattle makes a perfect sha-sha noise as it tumbles back into his crib, seemingly on its own will.

“Sha-sha,” Obi-Wan gurgles as he crawls after it.

He gives it a shake, to confirm it is undamaged. It does not seem to be.

Pulling himself upright with a tremulous grip on the crib edge, Obi-Wan carefully drops the rattle to the floor again.

The light seems to grow in intensity as it pours in through the window, bright and incandescent and filling. Obi-Wan reaches out to it, and it to him, and the rattle slaps into his chubby hand like the hilt of a-

-a something. Something pure and firelit and plasma-bright, seen only in the haziest of infant dreams.

“Obi-Wan?”

He looks up from his examination of the rattle. He has never heard his mother sound like that before.

“Mama.”

She crouches by the crib. He will look back on this in meditation, years and decades into the future, but no matter how he tries to look through the intervening space with the Force, he can never remember her face.

Her voice he does remember. Low and quietly terrified.

“Obi-Wan? Can you…can you do that again?”

Obi-Wan makes a startled cry as the rattle is tugged out of his fingers and held out of reach. An infant growl rises into the air as it promptly twists itself out of the adult’s grasp and into his hands again. He sticks the rattle in his mouth and gnaws on it with vengeance. He figures the extra force of his gums will prevent it from being taken any time soon.

His mother does not speak. Her hand is still frozen there, halfway between herself and the crib.

She takes it from him again.

Obi-Wan’s small pink mouth curves in a sharp bow of displeasure. The light in the air dims as the rattle is snatched violently away, knocking sharply against his mother’s jaw in the process.

Obi-Wan pauses, one hand securely grasping the rattle handle, and watches his mother’s face crumple.

The pleased yell in his chest crumples, too.

He drops the rattle onto his blankets and reaches for his mother.

“Mama,” he says, plaintively.

She does not meet his tiny hands, waving an arm-span from her face. Her hands are too busy trying to wipe away her tears.

The crystalline tracks on her cheeks suddenly waver and smooth away. She jerks back, startled. Her hands fly to her face again.

Obi-Wan lowers an arm, staring up at her.

The light carries droplets of moisture away from her eyes, just as he told it to.

She snatches him up and buries her face in his hair. Delightedly, Obi-Wan feels the light flow through her too, though it seems rather dim compared to the fire within him now.

The light never flows back out of that nursery window. It is like a floodgate has opened, and nothing stops the current of starfire that rushes into his mind; the universe takes a breath and coalesces into a world of eternal clarity.

His mother rarely puts him down in the three days afterwards.

And then he is placed in the arms of another, leaving only the rattle murmuring sha, sha in her trembling hands.

In the early days at the Temple, the Dark only murmurs to him from a far-off place, in meaningless nightmares and mischievous whispers.

He dreams of strange things. Things inexplicable. Once he even dreamed of a sphere, azure and emerald and ochre, and an unstoppable lance of green fire that shattered the sphere into nothing.

Obi-Wan sits cross-legged in the bright classroom and learns the precepts of the Order.

He comes across an unfamiliar word, and asks what attachment means.

His creche-master is happy to explain. “Attachment is the desire to own something for one’s self, above duty, others, and anything else.”

Obi-Wan frowns at his stylus. It was given to him on the first day of classes, and unequivocally his.

“It is not that you can’t own anything, Obi-Wan,” his crechemaster says gently. “But is your stylus more important than, say, your friendship with Garen?”

Obi-Wan shakes his head.

“And is Garen the most important thing in your life?”

Obi-Wan catches himself, halfway though a nod, because the answer would be no.

The most important thing in both their lives is the Force. He knows he could not live without it, and neither can Garen.

And so his first understanding of the meaning of attachment is paired with that of sacrifice.

Obi-Wan is twelve, and too close to thirteen - to the empty failure of the Service Corps - when the darkness finally breaks out of its fledgling shell.

“Is that all you can do, Oafy-Wan?”

The taunt is ridiculous. Childish. Of no consequence.

The lightsaber in his hand has always been a brush of stardust, but facing Bruck Chun, in an arena ringed by expectant masters, the stardust collapses and compresses into an impossibly heavy neutron star.

He feels as though he cannot help it, though deep within the Force he knows he can; he simply does not want to do anything about it. His simmering anger at seven years of cruelty at the other boy’s words boils over into fury. It gives him strength, for a moment; intoxicating power from the war-drums of his heart down to his fingertips, washing his blade with the wild roar of the unleashed animal-

-Obi-Wan throws himself back into the light, horrified, as Cin Drallig calls his disqualification.

For loss of control.

Obi-Wan Kenobi, disqualified for loss of control.

The assembled masters murmur, disappointed.

It does not matter. There is no-one more disappointed in Obi-Wan than himself.

The Force works in mysterious ways.

It gives Obi-Wan a master.

The days of his apprenticeship are filled with joy, struggle, and grief. The first time that last emotion truly registers - on Melida/Daan, with Cerasi’s still-warm body tucked into his frozen arms - he is surprised at the sheer quantity of it. Grief is not an emotion present in amounts; it overwhelms and erases everything else simply by being present.

He struggles past the selfish desire to turn grief into hate, hate against the civil war that brought about so much death, hate for Qui-Gon, who left him there, and worst of all, hatred of himself.

For allowing this.

For not being quick or wily or wise or strong enough.

The Light swirls in warning. Obi-Wan pulls himself out of the mire of his self-rumination before the darkness creeping at the edges of his vision can pounce.

The darkness retreats a few paces, and waits.

Two years later, on New Apsolon, Tahl Uvain passes into the Force in a glimmer of celestial music, backlit against Qui-Gon’s tears.

Obi-Wan rushes at the shadows flicking at his master’s heels, and plunges into it, wrist-deep, clawing at the obsidian tendrils with mental hands bleeding from effort.

No, he says to it, firmly. You will not take him.

The darkness snarls and writhes and gouges scars into his mind, but he does not loosen his grasp.

Tahl’s voice whispers across the Force, from a place bright and warm and eternally waiting. Qui-Gon throws off the darkness with the horrified agony of a man who knows just how far he has reached over the precipice.

Later, Obi-Wan runs up to his master and throws his arms around Qui-Gon’s chest. He is far too old now to be doing such things, but Qui-Gon does not seem to care, either.

He holds his master a decade later, on the warm durasteel floor of a reactor chamber, and offers up the rest of his life to fulfil what Qui-Gon could not.

There had been a moment there, hanging with trembling hands just below the lip of the reactor shaft, where he had thought about letting go - not physically, into death, but letting go of the tenuous thread of light that connected him to his dying master, and falling into the roiling reservoir of power that bubbled under his feet.

He had glimpsed his master’s Force-signature, turned to the darkness, and said, No.

And then suddenly the shadows fled from him as the light rushed in, clean ever-pure.

And then Maul was a rag doll, nothing more.

Obi-Wan cradles his surrogate father now, close, and opens his mouth to say I’m sorry I’m sorry I almost fell I-

“Train the boy,” Qui-Gon murmurs. But even as those words are voiced, those once-strong hands flutter upwards, flickering at Obi-Wan’s forehead.

It is enough. Obi-Wan understands.

Qui-Gon does not need to voice how proud he is.

Inexplicably, the air around Obi-Wan grows lighter with the darkening of the galaxy.

The darkness slithers, and hovers, and tries to slip between him and Anakin; but he stands firm in the crystalline towers of the Force, and does not let the ink splash even across his boot-tips.

Mandalore.

Satine suspended before him, and the darksaber in Maul’s hand.

The darkness batters Obi-Wan from all sides, wells up from within; bleeds through his bones until he feels it shudder at his fingertips, whispering that all he needs to do is to curl a finger. Curl a finger and the Sith would be slashed in half, turned inside out, hung, drawn, quartered and eviscerated at his merest whim.

He wants to fall.

He wants to stretch out a hand and push the roiling hatred in his veins into Maul’s wrist, and shatter the Sith into crimson mist.

Obi-Wan wants it so much he feels as though he might scream with wanting.

Satine.

But the light had fluttered by his ear, whispering to him that want was not need; and desire need not lead to action.

He can curl a finger, fall, and break free of his restraints.

But he will not.

In his grief afterwards, he finds peace in the smallest of things. The light shines down on him until he is filled to the brim twice over, with surety and calm and quiet joy in the midst of so much suffering. He tries to give some of this assurance to Anakin, hoping that his friend can share in this peace with him.

Anakin brushes him away, but Obi-Wan is calmly relentless. He is rewarded at times by a flash of a rakish grin, and that laughing gaze with a single scar curving over the right eye.

And then comes the time when he realises while he had kept his end of the bridge clean, bright, and shadow-free, Anakin had not.

It is with crushing agony that Obi-Wan realises a bridge blown apart at the opposite end is still a broken bridge, no matter the strength of the stone on the intact side.

Grief howls around him, but he has never felt less of an urge to fall.

Mustafar is lit with the celestial brightness of a single, enduring flame. The newborn Sith cannot see it, shrouded as he is. Obi-Wan dances in starlight wrought of an Order ten thousand years in the making, and waits for his moment.

The light carries him to higher ground, and plants his feet into the lifeless ground like stubborn roots of Spring. He has never been further from falling.

The Force is enough.

Anakin’s falls out of his reach, and he cannot follow.

Anakin’s screams echo though his dreams every night for the next twenty years.

The darkness tries to filter in through those screams, sometimes. Obi-Wan stands on the edge of his mindscape, hand on his lightsaber, and stares it down.

“Do not dare to use his voice,” he says, calmly. “Do not dare.”

You want this, the darkness whispers, hissing at the edge of the penumbra of light his lightsaber scatters on the sandy ground. You want this power we offer.

“Yes. Yes I do,” Obi-Wan says, silhouetted in the cerulean glow of his blade. “I want to. But I will not.”

The feeling of falling would be exhilarating, no doubt. But every pit has its utter end.

Luke listens to him when he speaks of the dark and the light. Better than Anakin ever did.

Obi-Wan has to fight the urge to smirk at when the darkness makes one last attempt at ensnaring him as he duels Vader on the death star.

As the red blade slices towards his shoulder, Obi-Wan looks past Darth Vader’s eyes, through the shadow of Anakin Skywalker, and into the darkness itself.

You have failed, he tells it, with triumph. You have lost the war.

And then he is light. There is no longer anywhere to fall; he can only fly.

END

For @zannatinuviel; this is cross posted to fanfiction.net. Reblog and leave comments in the tags if you like!

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nny11writes · 7 years

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TumblrFrostbite's Public Message: If Ahsoka and Barriss were space pirates, who were also dark siders, that pillaged small space ships of wealth and spread chaos, how dangerous would those two be? Who could stop them?

Ok, well this response spiraled wildly out ofcontrol and completely longer than I thought it would? The concise version is:

Danger levels depend on how they were actuallytrained and what they want. Two pirates just do what they do because why notare much less dangerous than two trained dark side users who are runningerrands for Sidious/Dooku.Actual pirates Barriss and Ahsoka can be taken by anyone, but then fall intoSidious’s hands and become much more difficult to stop as Inquisitors in a fewyears. Dark side users Barriss and Ahsoka are most likely to dramatically dietogether instead of fail, or die fighting the Jedi…dramatically!

Long winded and way more information than youwanted to know versions are below the cut.

The two aren’t formally trained Force users,but they are both aware they’re different. It’s after Barriss discovers hertalent for healing that the two start really scheming. They slowly increasefrom simple cons and petty theft up into more involved and more dangerouscrime. Ahsoka has a knack for fighting and enjoys it, Barriss has a knack forplanning and tactics. Before long the two find themselves well set up but theyare unsatisfied with their gains. There’s more out there. More jobs, moremoney, more anything they want and they DO want.

The first pirate job they do is basically byaccident. They are actually the ones who get boarded by a small Republic Guard vesseland are doing a terrible job of convincing them that there’s nothing fishygoing on. We’re just two girls with our own totally legal ship, yup, that’s theway this happened we run cargo and stuff. Legit. Very. Realizing that there’sno way out of this one, and considering from what we’ve seen there is notreally a juvie system in place, the two decide that they’d rather go down with theship. The thing is, the three Republic soldiers assumed the two were possiblyslaves and were definitely being coerced into something. They aren’t expectingit when the two explode with very violent intentions. There’s a short argumentbetween Barriss and Ahsoka about what to do now. Their ship is not exactly equippedto run long term from the Republic, they have three prisoners, and another shipand what are we exactly doing here?

One of the guards promises that they’ll bereported, found, and arrested.

The girls decide to take care of this byblasting the three out the airlock. They agree to go to Nal Hutta to sell bothships, with the funds they can get a new one. And they do. A much bigger, muchbetter one. Counting credits they realize that they may have stumbled ontosomething great. They made so much more on this one job than what they’ve donethe last few months. They quickly spend the rest on outfitting the ship andgetting themselves some much better gear. Barriss plans their first intendedpirate hit for a few weeks, they draw a larger ship in with their distresssignal and once the two are docked they make quick work of the people inside.They sell off the crew and then they sell off the ship and its contents. Theysimply change up where they make the hits at near random and it prevents anyonefrom really getting them pinned down.

The war hits and suddenly, nobody really caresanyways.

Barriss and Ahsoka are making a killing, andunlike the Pirate Prince Hondo, they aren’t spending it all immediately onbooze, slaves, or drugs. They upgrade all their gear and their ship again, thistime making sure they can hook onto their victims ships to make board a loteasier. A few months in and they are considering hiring a crew to help out whenthey are invited to Serenno. Dooku does a double take and starts trading themtraining for more targeted attacks. For the most part the two still steal,sell, smuggle, and murder their way wherever they go. With some basic forcetraining they are simply getting much more proficient. They are still makingbank and messing with the GAR as a general rule. They both agree to buy a pairof lightsabers off the black market, they have the funds and a few laser swordssound about right to make their lives easier. And it does at first, they areboth trained with swords and knives and pretty much use the lightsabers like asteel saber. Only adjusting as they discover some of the benefits tolightsabers. They demand that Dooku teach them better ways to use them, and heagrees with the understanding that they will obliterate the next large targetusing them or he will kill them himself.

Rex is on a ship full of transfers heading backto the 501st when they are attacked by pirates. Everyone issurprised by it but mostly the attitude is who is dumb enough to attack a cloneheavy ship? Reports start coming back about red blades and lightsabers. Rexmanages to get a handful of men into an escape pod and they launch just momentsafter he catches sight of two CHILDREN tearing up their ship. Oh he is angry ashell about the attack but he is also shocked. They were both so young, he’dassumed they would be older like Ventress.

The Jedi has up until this point been ignoringthem because “there are bigger things to do and they’re just some pirates onthe outter rim, like, really who cares?” and also, ya know, the war. But thislast attack finally gets them on the radar. The Order takes a while to piecetogether all the hits and all the damages the two have really caused over thelast few years. They note the significant uptick in the last half year, and howthey’ve suddenly gone from any targets to specifically attacking Republicships.

At this point pretty much any Jedi we reallyknow in cannon could stop them. They are basically two puffed up thugs whowouldn’t stand a chance against anyone thrown at them. I think if they arecaptured at this point though, that Sidious would transfer them and “free”them. Might as well use that ground work to get him some Inquisitors.

The two are trained force users, butspecifically trained under the influence of Sidious. They were both taken youngand have lived their whole lives training in the dark arts, but neither wereslated as good enough to be full Sith Apprentices.

When the war hits they are released underorders to harass Republic vessels and to make sure that no one really knowswhat is happening to them. So they jump around the galaxy using informationfrom Dooku to take out ships. They knock out comms, board, and then simplyslaughter everyone on board. The ships themselves can then be delivered toSepratist strongholds to be used in future campaigns. They actually manage tofly somewhat under the Jedi’s radar for years, their attacks either beingchalked up to a larger scale infiltration droid team or being assumed asregular pirates who just so happened to attack Senate/Republic political ships.

They are beyond miffed when Dooku gets Savage,and are unimpressed when both he and Ventress go rogue. The two get somethingof a promotion by default and a lot more training, taking them from dark usersto sith acolytes.

The Order is thrown into a frenzy. Ventress hasdisappeared to who knows where. There is a monster murdering Jedi right andleft, Maul is apparently back, and now there are two new assassins who havejust popped out of thin air. They send Anakin and Obi-Wan after the monster andMaul.

So for irony I’m going to say that eitherLuminara or Plo would be in the best spot to fight them. In this version thereis a chance that the two of them could be brought more into the light. There’salso an increased chance of them dying dramatically. Either death by Jedi ordeath by, “we aren’t going to tell Dooku and the big guy that we failed, timeto die together dramatically”.

Like ya do.

#Star Wars #Star Wars the Clone Wars #Fanfiction #Fanfic #writing/question prompt #Ahsoka Tano #Barriss Offee #Funny thing is that I do have the shell of a pirate AU #Nny11 can't seem to help but write even when she should really stop like any day now please #frostbite883

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