#onslenderaccident

light insufficient but incessant by @onslenderaccident, 9k. Mara Jade/Luke Skywalker, modern AU, experimental, dreamlike, just my sort of angst.

[Dang - I want to see how YOU would write this! :-)]

He had never asked whether Satine would have ever wanted to be a mother. It didn't seem like the sort of question she would welcome - nor one which had an appropriate time of asking, or that she would necessarily have an answer to. On the only occasion when the thought had occurred to him, the immediate answer that his own knowledge of her provided was that she would have taken refuge in that old abdication of courage (which was a statement of courage in and of itself, in other ways) that would have been saying that she wouldn't want to bring a child into the sort of world she hadn't been able to change for the better. She had adopted sons and daughters via other paths, cultivating Mandalorian youth, thinking of them as vessels of peace while she herself was to be left behind, irrevocably damned.

On Tatooine, with Padmé still a half-ghost in their shared hut, he hears her asking questions of no one. Where has he gone? she asks, and he steps forward and tells her that Luke isn't far away, that she can go and see him, that he can be hers. She recoils at the thought of it, thinks the past polluted in ways he cannot allow himself to believe for fear he would be swallowed up by it too.

With the sweetness of the innocent, Luke forgives her - indeed he never understands that there is anything to forgive at all. When Beru brings him tripping across the desert to see them, he thinks Padmé finds absolution in his very presence, in the sound of his chattering voice, in the cheerfulness of his eye.

"Don't cry," Luke says once, when he catches sight of Padmé's ill-disguised grief, as her prior composure returns to her only slowly over the years. He frowns for her, and looks to Obi-Wan for help, and Obi-Wan ('Ben,' now, because it's easier for Luke to say) doesn't know what to tell him.

Years later, when Padmé is herself enough to want her daughter, too, to want to reach back out to the stars that betrayed her and remind them that she and everything she is cannot die, she stands by Obi-Wan's side and watches as Luke frantically runs towards his speeder, towards the certain knowledge of his loss; when he returns, with the stench of death and incinerated farm equipment on his clothes, she steps forward and lets Luke cry on her, to clutch at her, to be the strength Obi-Wan hadn't quite known how to provide.

He gets her out of Maul's clutches in the very nick of time.

Satine doesn't look right, looking down on Mandalore's burning surface as their half-destroyed transport drifts slowly out of orbit. She should be down on its earth - perhaps she even thinks she should be buried in it, before her time - not up here, where the air has grown thin and the vaporized life support systems have left them breathing in ice, where he's relying on their emergency beacon to bring help before it's too late.

The first time he had looked back on Mandalore in farewell, he had been too young to understand what leaving it truly meant. He had cared that she had been left behind, cared to the point of distraction, even, and been frantically angry with his Master for rendering her into the clutches of a political situation still unsafe and chaotic. But she wouldn't leave; she wouldn't go; even in later years, when he saw her on Coruscant or in deep space, with her tethers severed, she never seemed to inhabit a space far from home. She was never one not to return, and she knew it, and made comparison of it between them, teasing him (with steel beneath her laugh) about his inability to know where home could ever be.

He sees that certainty leave her, where she sits huddled next to the cracked glass of the portholes in the transport's hold. At first she moves her head, stands and sits, to keep catching sight of what she's lost; as time goes on, she grows still, and quiet, and so very tired that for the first time in all his long years of knowing her, there is something about her that hints at the stresses of age.

"Don't remind me you were right," she says, as though on instinct, as he approaches her; he sees what she's said sink in a moment later, and she flinches and averts her eyes.

I was tagged by @onslenderaccident!

rules - bold the statements that apply to you, italicize your aspirations, then tag nine people

tagging: anyone who wants to.

AIR

I have small hands (one with tiny fingers!) • I love the night sky • I watch small animals and birds when I pass them by • I drink herbal tea • I wake to see dawn • the smell of dust is comforting • I’m valued for being wise • I prefer books to music • I meditate • I find joy in learning new truths from the world around me

FIRE

I don’t have straight hair • I like to wear ripped jeans and overalls • I play an organized sport • I love dogs • I am not afraid of adventure • I love to talk to strangers • I always try new foods • I enjoy road trips • summer is my favorite season • my music is always playing

WATER

I wear bracelets on my wrists • I love the bustle of the city • I have more than one set of piercings • I read poetry • I love the sound of a thunderstorm • I want to travel the world • I sleep past midday most days • I love dimly lit diners and fluorescent signs • I rewatch kids’ shows out of nostalgia • I see emotions in colors not words

EARTH

I wear glasses/contacts • I enjoy doing the laundry • I am a vegetarian or vegan • I have an excellent sense of time • my humor is very cheerful • I am a valued advisor to my friends • I believe in true love • I love the chill of mountain air • I’m always listening to music • I am highly trusted by the people in my life

WEATHER

It’s rare that two Jedi Masters are at the Temple at atime, during the war; as the campaigns escalate and races across the galaxyspeed up and leaves become shorter, Obi-Wan usually doesn’t have time to takein the Temple as a real place of respite around the duties of his reports and hastily-convenedcouncil meetings. Gone are the days when he could take the time to oversee alesson or two in the creche; his rooms are sterile, cool with the absence ofbody heat or talk.

It is Master Fisto, once, who reminds him of what theplace can be. Kit’s rooms, befitting a Nautolan, are only partly above ground;behind triple-thick duraglass, he spends much of his time in a magnificent tankwhich opens along one of its sides onto Coruscant’s skyline. As a youngerKnight, Obi-Wan had often taken comfort in the pleasure of sitting at the water’sedge, thinking it stretched out into nothingness. He used to wonder whether Kitfelt weightless, the water melding into thin air.

In the aftermath of the disaster at Jabiim, he spendsrather longer in the Temple than he has done for some time. Kit, too, is backfrom a campaign of his own, and when, at the end of a week when they have takenfrequent meals or tea together, knowing that they can switch effortlesslybetween talk of wars and tactics and a companionable silence, Kit puts hiselbows on the edge of the tank at Obi-Wan’s feet and, treading water, tells himto shut up and get in, the invitation is more than welcome.

He accepts the rebreather, and lets himself sink. Thereis indeed something deeply soothing about it; refraction renders light fromabove soft in its beams, whereas the nighttime skyline is crystal clear. Itfeels like a long time since Obi-Wan has inhabited his body so entirely.

One of the key parts of GAR training before one is putout into the field – out into the world, the instructors tend to say, thoughthe shinies know that isn’t quite true, that there’s a whole galaxy out there, and that’s hard not toget excited about – is, of all things, sensitivity training. Having been raisedto be a killer, a leader, a commander of men, Cody remembers those few weeks(with his skin still stretching and twisting as it settles over his growingbody) as bewildering, as a time when it felt like his brain was being rearrangedin his head. Having grown expert in weapons training, he then learns how to usewords. How to calm, how to placate, how to reassure, how to approach the civilianpopulations he is meant to protect. How to understand other beings, how theythink, how they fear. 

Fear is a new concept to him, and one he’s not sure heunderstands – not sure any of them understands. Hope is another tricky one;faith is intertwined with loyalty in some cases, he knows, and that is something natural, somethingwoven into his DNA, but faith in the abstract eludes him.

Dreaming sounds unreal. He doesn’t understand why hisbrain would do something like that to him, and when they tell him it can alsomean hope, his sense of what the ‘future’ is fractures and resets intosomething he’s sure doesn’t make sense. He leaves it, in the end, to the certaintyhe has that it either won’t be important, or that someone, sometime, will teachit to him in words that are within his vocabulary.

He doesn’t quite recognize what he feels, when herealizes General Kenobi has taught it to him. It hurts, physically, as thoughhe is capable of compassion, as though he wishes he could help. (To admit tohimself that all of these things are true, are real, is something he knows he cannot allow himself.) He can see itin every time Kenobi comes back from the dead, in every act of humanization hebestows on his troops, in every act of trust: the belief in a better future.The belief that there will be, that there even could be, an end to all suffering.