FIC: The First (Star Wars, PG)
For shoiryu's birthday, and for once within my deadlines ;) 333 words on Anakin and a white dragon.
THE FIRST
Time: 32 years before the Battle of Yavin
Place: Tatooine
Feel: heat, fading.
The desert gives it away as fast as it takes it, and that is why with a few exceptions of so-called intelligent life, walking the desert is done from sunsfall to sunsrise.
The chittering, fast-moving creatures with their screaming metal and their tools and their pain-sticks hide in their homes from the darkness, and that is another thing that She Who Roars likes about the night.
Her claws spread over the sand. She carries her head and her tail high as she descends the slope of a dune. She smells metal and smoke: the chittering ones were at it again. They left one screaming machine on the bottom of the slope, and in a spasm of anger She Who Roars swipes at it with her tail. The fragments bury themselves in the sand.
There is a chittering creature lying next to where the screaming metal was. A not-a-Tusken, she realises, small and sweet-smelling, and-
Alive. He struggles weakly to his knees, and she waits for him to scream. She thinks she won't chase him if he runs. The smell is sweet.
Then it changes. Her head, her mind, her thoughts. There is curiosity and amazement, joy, tension, uncertainty. Sadness, as the not-a-Tusken's yellow-haired head turns towards the ruined machine, and back to wonder as a small hand stretches to touch She Who Roars. Like a nestling's tongue smelling her snout, she thinks, and she wonders if the little one has a den-keeper waiting for him.
Awed and bewildered, she bends her head towards the sand.
* * *
"Has he ever been injured?"
"Not as much as other children his age," Shmi says. "Though I'm worried that he hit his head when he crashed his pod in the last race. He told me he saw a white krayt dragon bow to him."
Master Jinn does not smile. "What's so strange about that?"
"There are no white krayt dragons."
THE FIRST
Time: 32 years before the Battle of Yavin
Place: Tatooine
Feel: heat, fading.
The desert gives it away as fast as it takes it, and that is why with a few exceptions of so-called intelligent life, walking the desert is done from sunsfall to sunsrise.
The chittering, fast-moving creatures with their screaming metal and their tools and their pain-sticks hide in their homes from the darkness, and that is another thing that She Who Roars likes about the night.
Her claws spread over the sand. She carries her head and her tail high as she descends the slope of a dune. She smells metal and smoke: the chittering ones were at it again. They left one screaming machine on the bottom of the slope, and in a spasm of anger She Who Roars swipes at it with her tail. The fragments bury themselves in the sand.
There is a chittering creature lying next to where the screaming metal was. A not-a-Tusken, she realises, small and sweet-smelling, and-
Alive. He struggles weakly to his knees, and she waits for him to scream. She thinks she won't chase him if he runs. The smell is sweet.
Then it changes. Her head, her mind, her thoughts. There is curiosity and amazement, joy, tension, uncertainty. Sadness, as the not-a-Tusken's yellow-haired head turns towards the ruined machine, and back to wonder as a small hand stretches to touch She Who Roars. Like a nestling's tongue smelling her snout, she thinks, and she wonders if the little one has a den-keeper waiting for him.
Awed and bewildered, she bends her head towards the sand.
* * *
"Has he ever been injured?"
"Not as much as other children his age," Shmi says. "Though I'm worried that he hit his head when he crashed his pod in the last race. He told me he saw a white krayt dragon bow to him."
Master Jinn does not smile. "What's so strange about that?"
"There are no white krayt dragons."