Freedom
Happy Halloween ! As we do not really celebrate it here, and as I am currently enjoying the wonders of the city of St-Malo, I’ll post this as my spooky contribution. It’s a gift for @deadcatwithaflamethrower , to celebrate the release of her book. It’s a fanfic (ficlet, to be honest) of her wonderful fanfics, ReEntry & Journey of the Whills.
Also available here on AO3
Enjoy !
He was trapped. He had been trapped here for seventeen years. He had only been a few months old when he was made a prisoner inside that damn box, and had not been free since then. Freedom… was a foreign concept.
He was trapped.
That did not mean he took it lying down. He fought against his bars. He screamed and trashed, trying to get free. He had done so early in his imprisonment, and he would continue until he obtained his freedom.
The definition of insanity is to do the exact same thing over and over again, and to expect the results to change.
That’s alright. He’s stubborn, and not very sane. Sanity is overrated.
Early on, he discovered that endless fighting did not procure satisfying results. The walls of his box were strong ones, sturdy ones, made by talented hands.
He needs to gather his forces before launching an assault.
He usually waits four months to rest from the previous attempt and prepare for the next one.
Four months spent thinking, overthinking and seething, surrounded by Darkness and awful memories. He had reached out to his jailors when he escaped from his previous hell, believed in his old friends, trusted them to help him. When he had blacked out, he still believed they would help. He loved them, and thought they loved him. And then, he woke up trapped. Four months of reminiscing is a good span of time to gather enough Darkness to hurl himself against the walls with strength, able to barely glimpse the outside world before he is, again, cruelly defeated and sent back in his prison.
His strength usually last for two whole weeks. Sometime a bit more.
Fourteen days of relentless assaults on the walls, trying to escape, trying to grasp at the outside world.
He never succeeds.
He has been here for nineteen years when Light reaches him.
It’s strong, potent, purifying. It melts away most of the madness and soothe him for a while. It gives him hope. If there is a way in… then there is a way out. Now that the Light cleaned his mind, that he is mostly in control of the Darkness instead of it controlling him, he can think again. He knows that his endless cycles of waiting and trying are doomed to fail. He has to lie low, wait longer. Be forgotten. And then, he will strike.
Two years.
Two years spent in waiting, medidating as much as he could, surrounded as he was by Darkness and deprived of anything, except for memories. Bad ones. Two years to remember why he does this. He wants to be free. There are people, outside, that he loves. Some that he thought lost forever, now returned to him, and he wants to reach for them. He wants to hold them close. Even the ones that betrayed him. They were lost but now they are here… he can reconsider the many ways he had planned for them to pay if it means he gets to see them again. . But for that, he had to get out.
After two years in waiting, he hurls himself at the unbreakable walls of his prison.
He fails.
When, eight months later, he is freed at long last from the box in Obi-Wan’s mind, owing his freedom to the man he hates most in the galaxy is a very sour pill to digest.
Sidious will die, Venge swears so. At his own hands, preferably, for ruining his freedom and tainting it with pain and horror. But now, he is free. And he will never be imprisoned again.
.
(I had been wondering about Obi-Wan’s cycles of nightmares, and why they were like that, for some time. And, instead of asking, my brain decided “Hey ! Let’s try our own explanation !” and I made a fic out of it. So, this is probably an AU of an AU, my own explanation for Obi-Wan’s nightmares and why they stopped between the Yinchorri Uprising and Divergent Paths I.) (I have made myself sad about Venge, great job brain)
