(no subject)
Characters: Juhani, cathar_jedi
Date/Time: Starting, oh, something like September 17, ending October 8th.
Location: The Fourth Floor, in the form of the Jedi Enclave on Dantooine.
Rating: Hmm. PG-13?
Summary: (Juhani goes to the Fourth Floor and undergoes catharsis. Great angst is ahead.)
Juhani was rarely able to take an empty elevator. Edensphere was filled with early risers, so there was always someone else there even in the early morning. In the days when she had lived in the standard housing, she didn't have one entirely to herself more often than perhaps one day in eight.
Now she lived as a drifter among the islands, sometimes sleeping in the loft of a barn. It was well enough. She was broken. Staying away from them was as much a service to them as it was to her.
But of course, she was still a Guard, and because of that, she still had a need to travel daily to the upper branches. Getting down was easy enough. Juhani didn't fear falling here, even if the distances sometimes made her eyes water. It was only getting up which required her to ride the elevator. She had thought of precautions, such as heading up in the least popular of hours - predawn. There were people even now at the Access Point, but fewer than at other times.
On one such early morning, misty and drizzling, she came to Access Point with her usual weapon, a small sword with a wire-wrapped hilt, and the meal she intended to have while on duty. As she had often been doing since rediscovering her name, she swept about in the Force, looking for minds. She had not been followed. She was not being watched. Good.
The car of the elevator arrived not long after she summoned it. It was entirely empty. She stepped in, casting about again for anyone who would be seeking to board. There was no one close; a rarity. Juhani hit the indicator and settled back as the doors closed on the rain and the car began to move.
There were no stops between the City Without Walls and the residential sector. For the moment she could relax. In a minute the doors would chime, and she would make her way among or across the sleepy houses to the Hall.
In a minute which was stretching into several. Juhani frowned. The upward movement had slowed. She stretched out in the Force and found nothing of note, as with every time she had attempted to use it to explain what happened within the Sphere.
It had slowed, and stopped, but she knew that she was not at the residential level yet. The Force was not something to call on for accurate distance measurements - even so, the sleepers and early risers or late night owls were well above her head. Strange. This had never happened before.
It was then that the car lurched, and started again downwards. Juhani pushed herself upright. Was it - She looked at the indicator, the small bank of glowing buttons. The topmost one was no longer lit. The fourth one was.
If she had been the sort to swear, even to herself, she would have now. The fourth floor!
Juhani wanted to know nothing more about her old life. Not anymore. There could only be more unhappiness there, in her past. Even the masked woman, Stranger - better not to know. What she already knew was more than enough.
Not that she was given a choice. She paced restlessly as the car descended. Back past the Bazaar, and then there was the usual blunting of the Force as she reached the third floor; she could never feel out what the Wilderness was like until the doors opened on it. Of course, they did not. Not this time.
She cast looks up at the ceiling, at the false grill fixed into it. There was no escape. If she had her journal with her - but she didn't. Even if she had, what was the point? No one would care that she was gone. No one would miss her.
In time the doors did open, and not on that dark city she had half expected to see. Instead -
It was an enclosed circular courtyard walled in flagstones, with grass and a thick, short tree in the center. The grasses were long and golden and sighed in the wind, which was warm and dry and smelled of late summer. The Force was quiet here. It was early morning, as it had been in the rest of the Sphere. The sky was just paling to white, the sun not yet over the horizon, and she knew from the high, few clouds that the day would at least begin warm and dry and sunny.
It was still several minutes before she left the elevator. She knew that it would not simply return her, not as easily as that. But as Juhani realized that she recognized the place from somewhere, she also felt a deep sorrow. This... Had this been a home, once? If it were, something must have happened. Something she regretted.
In the end she did step out into it, and kept herself from looking back as the doors closed and the car vanished. Juhani turned slowly in a complete circle, hugging her package of food to her chest. The wind blew.
She reached out in the Force and found... Not nothing. But the only things that lived, here, were the plant life and insects. Strange.
Juhani explored what she could reach beyond the courtyard. There was a large flat paved area, very open to the sky, where she supposed ships might land, and what seemed to be an empty mechanic's shop led into it. There was a series of rooms, like Temporary Housing but not so depressing, and others which were larger.
There was a circular chamber with a strange, deliberate air. She did not stay long in it.
She also found an exit onto a courtyard which was open to a vast, rolling stretch of prairie. This too was familiar, in much the same way. The calm, almost lazy feel of the ambient Force. The dry summer's grass yielding beneath her feet. The wind bringing her the smells of summer on a grassland. The scattered trees, like the one in the circular courtyard. The sound of wind and buzzing insects.
She shouldn't be here.
This was - Juhani shook her head hard enough that her beads stung her cheeks. She couldn't remember. It was there, but there was a layer between her and that knowledge, and she couldn't bend the Force to break through. She didn't know how.
There was a wide, placid stream out here, and along its banks some of the grass had not dried and gone golden. Here and there it still showed lavender, as it did in the spring and early summer. Past the stream, fields and occasional groves rolled out to the horizon. A bridge had been laid across it.
When she tried to cross she found that she could not. It was as simple as that.
Juhani tried ranging about, wading through the shallow water in places, and soon found that while she could go some distance from the structure, far enough that perspective made it something she could hide behind an outstretched hand, that was as far as it went. The far bank was forbidden to her.
The Force wasn't blunted off here, as it was in the elevator near the third floor or past the transparisteel of the Sphere. Just as she could see places where she could not go here, she could sense the curve of the terrain and the life forms inhabiting it.
For a time, she did nothing but explore what she could. The open courtyard had another door leading into a different part of the complex, one rife with hallways and other rooms. The door would not open. When she called on the Force to shatter the lock, it refused, which was altogether a strange and baffling experience.
There were other doors in the first complex which she had missed, the first time she had seen it. Some opened. Others would not. She found nothing more animate than small mantis creatures. There weren't even manikins.
Juhani was alone.
In that first day, she soon found herself quite bored. There were only so many times she could go through the limits of the place, seeing mostly-bare room after mostly-bare room. It was as if the owners of the complex had packed up their major possessions and left.
Assuming that she would not be there for more than a day, she ate the food she had planned to take on her shift, and spent some time worrying that her superiors would not believe that she had been taken to the fourth floor. She had not made an entry about it. Juhani tried to take herself through some of the combat forms she had learned from Handmaiden, but found her limbs dragging. The Force was quietly suggesting that it would be better if she did not.
Sundown came, and she slept uneasily in one of the small side rooms, her head pillowed on a flat cushion that someone had forgotten to take from a different room. She woke up several times in the night, habitually, casting herself out of cloudy, miserable dreams and making certain that she was not being stalked.
The next day began with wandering, reestablishing what she already knew about how far she could go. She was hungry and irritable, and consumed with thoughts of where she would go and what she would eat once the elevator returned for her.
It did not.
Juhani took to waiting in the small, circular courtyard, sharpening her wire-hilted sword with an improvised whetstone until she sickened of it. She tried meditation, but it would only work to a point before she was unable to stop the thoughts from coming. Thoughts which had been close to her mind since she had regained her name.
She was broken. She hadn't consciously known that she was broken until she had seen it, but at some level she had always known. Whole people could sleep through a night. Could spend days free of rage or fear.
It had happened years ago. She'd been a child. If she hadn't healed by now, she never would be.
Something was wrong with her. Perhaps there always had been. She wasn't just broken, she was - defective. Flawed. Yes, she knew that things happened to people no matter who they were. That if she had heard of someone in similar circumstances expressing such an opinion she would have argued against it. That the masked woman believed that there was something worth saving in her, and Handmaiden felt similarly.
She knew all of that. And yet.
And yet. She thought all those things, all the dirty, miserable things she hadn't wanted to consider. Juhani wept, a little, and raged, and got up to pace, and dredged up curse words she head heard before hurling them around like lightning bolts, and handled as uneasily. Once she started, she couldn't seem to stop, and in the normal course of things this would have been terrifying. Now, today, it was not.
All of her hatred and fear and resentment, everything she'd felt about anyone she'd spent any time with. People she generally considered friends. People she avoided stridently. People who were gone now. There was something that fit everyone, even if it was nothing more than jealousy. They were whole.
The invisible thing which directed life in Edensphere, yes. But it was nameless and faceless and she did not know anything about it, so there was only so much that she could
The Force itself. She did not know if it guided people in some grand master plan or if it was blind and thoughtless, and either way was a betrayal, in a way. It was supposed to be benevolent. It was supposed to help her. It was supposed to care.
The people from her memories. Those... men, the Zabraks, Dak, her father. The masked woman, Stranger. Her mother.
Herself.
It was exhausting. In the end she collapsed on her back under the endless starscape that was the night sky, utterly spent. She felt as if she had been scraped clean, hollowed out. There was no anger left.
After that, it became harder to be conscious of the days. At times the sky was bright. At times it was dark and sprinkled with stars. It hardly mattered. There was nothing here. Nothing but herself, and the Force, and the growing sense that there was not so much distance between them as she had once believed.
She surrendered herself to it.
For a time she could not measure, the Force that was in Juhani mixed itself into the greater Force. Like pouring a cup out into the ocean. For a time she could not comprehend, she only was. Had any part of her consciousness stayed herself, she would have found it terrifying. And exhilarating.
For a time she could not properly imagine, she was much more than herself, and she saw and felt and was so much more, and learned more than it was possible to know. The Force existed, and it lived, and that was enough.
In time, in a great deal of time or none at all, part of it remembered of it was an unhappy Cathar woman. It was hard to remember why it should care. Hardest, maybe, to turn back. But they did. Many disparate particles clustered, here.
The Force opened Juhani's eyes and made her take a ragged, halting breath.
She coughed, her throat dry, and stiffly regained her feet. Water. That would be good. She staggered to the stream and drank, and the sensation of cold on her flesh was strange and dulled compared to -
- To whatever she had done. She could not remember it now. Juhani sighed. Filled first with self-loathing and rage, then with the Force, and now...
If someone had come to her and said, You are just a small part of the greater whole, and that whole cares as little for you as you for a random cell in your body, she would have agreed, and thought that person dim for saying something so obvious. That was the nature of the revelation, she supposed.
Things were not miraculously fixed now. Soon enough, she knew that she would have doubt and fear and anger again, and perhaps it would not simply be purged. There was always the risk that she would fall to the Dark Side. Something was still wrong with her. Something would always be wrong with her.
But that did not bother her overmuch, not just now. Juhani returned to the courtyard and made another once-over of the rooms.
There was one which she had missed somehow, and she expected it to be as empty as the others. It was not.
It had a workbench, with a light built into the surface. Someone had cleared out the tools from the appropriate drawer, and the majority of the other drawers were also empty. But she saw a few small items which she could never remember seeing before. Yet they seemed important.
There was also, neatly folded, a set of garments, primarily in orange. Juhani unfolded them.
Robes cut as a Jedi would wear them, and with shoulder coverings and armguards, and soft trousers made of the same material. She stared down at them, troubled - and made up her mind.
Very well. She would take them, and she would wear them. Perhaps not today. But another time. She refolded them, perhaps less neatly, and took them and the small items from the workbench back to the courtyard with the tree.
The doors to the elevator were there and now stood open. Without hesitations she stepped in, and the doors closed before it began to move. Juhani realized, for the first time in some time, that she was very hungry.
Soon she could not feel the place in the Force any longer, but it mattered not. It was a part of her now. She savored the thought, turning it this way and that. It was a good thought. It meant, perhaps, that she could return in her mind, if she ever had the need.
She smiled. Very slightly, but it was a smile.
Date/Time: Starting, oh, something like September 17, ending October 8th.
Location: The Fourth Floor, in the form of the Jedi Enclave on Dantooine.
Rating: Hmm. PG-13?
Summary: (Juhani goes to the Fourth Floor and undergoes catharsis. Great angst is ahead.)
Juhani was rarely able to take an empty elevator. Edensphere was filled with early risers, so there was always someone else there even in the early morning. In the days when she had lived in the standard housing, she didn't have one entirely to herself more often than perhaps one day in eight.
Now she lived as a drifter among the islands, sometimes sleeping in the loft of a barn. It was well enough. She was broken. Staying away from them was as much a service to them as it was to her.
But of course, she was still a Guard, and because of that, she still had a need to travel daily to the upper branches. Getting down was easy enough. Juhani didn't fear falling here, even if the distances sometimes made her eyes water. It was only getting up which required her to ride the elevator. She had thought of precautions, such as heading up in the least popular of hours - predawn. There were people even now at the Access Point, but fewer than at other times.
On one such early morning, misty and drizzling, she came to Access Point with her usual weapon, a small sword with a wire-wrapped hilt, and the meal she intended to have while on duty. As she had often been doing since rediscovering her name, she swept about in the Force, looking for minds. She had not been followed. She was not being watched. Good.
The car of the elevator arrived not long after she summoned it. It was entirely empty. She stepped in, casting about again for anyone who would be seeking to board. There was no one close; a rarity. Juhani hit the indicator and settled back as the doors closed on the rain and the car began to move.
There were no stops between the City Without Walls and the residential sector. For the moment she could relax. In a minute the doors would chime, and she would make her way among or across the sleepy houses to the Hall.
In a minute which was stretching into several. Juhani frowned. The upward movement had slowed. She stretched out in the Force and found nothing of note, as with every time she had attempted to use it to explain what happened within the Sphere.
It had slowed, and stopped, but she knew that she was not at the residential level yet. The Force was not something to call on for accurate distance measurements - even so, the sleepers and early risers or late night owls were well above her head. Strange. This had never happened before.
It was then that the car lurched, and started again downwards. Juhani pushed herself upright. Was it - She looked at the indicator, the small bank of glowing buttons. The topmost one was no longer lit. The fourth one was.
If she had been the sort to swear, even to herself, she would have now. The fourth floor!
Juhani wanted to know nothing more about her old life. Not anymore. There could only be more unhappiness there, in her past. Even the masked woman, Stranger - better not to know. What she already knew was more than enough.
Not that she was given a choice. She paced restlessly as the car descended. Back past the Bazaar, and then there was the usual blunting of the Force as she reached the third floor; she could never feel out what the Wilderness was like until the doors opened on it. Of course, they did not. Not this time.
She cast looks up at the ceiling, at the false grill fixed into it. There was no escape. If she had her journal with her - but she didn't. Even if she had, what was the point? No one would care that she was gone. No one would miss her.
In time the doors did open, and not on that dark city she had half expected to see. Instead -
It was an enclosed circular courtyard walled in flagstones, with grass and a thick, short tree in the center. The grasses were long and golden and sighed in the wind, which was warm and dry and smelled of late summer. The Force was quiet here. It was early morning, as it had been in the rest of the Sphere. The sky was just paling to white, the sun not yet over the horizon, and she knew from the high, few clouds that the day would at least begin warm and dry and sunny.
It was still several minutes before she left the elevator. She knew that it would not simply return her, not as easily as that. But as Juhani realized that she recognized the place from somewhere, she also felt a deep sorrow. This... Had this been a home, once? If it were, something must have happened. Something she regretted.
In the end she did step out into it, and kept herself from looking back as the doors closed and the car vanished. Juhani turned slowly in a complete circle, hugging her package of food to her chest. The wind blew.
She reached out in the Force and found... Not nothing. But the only things that lived, here, were the plant life and insects. Strange.
Juhani explored what she could reach beyond the courtyard. There was a large flat paved area, very open to the sky, where she supposed ships might land, and what seemed to be an empty mechanic's shop led into it. There was a series of rooms, like Temporary Housing but not so depressing, and others which were larger.
There was a circular chamber with a strange, deliberate air. She did not stay long in it.
She also found an exit onto a courtyard which was open to a vast, rolling stretch of prairie. This too was familiar, in much the same way. The calm, almost lazy feel of the ambient Force. The dry summer's grass yielding beneath her feet. The wind bringing her the smells of summer on a grassland. The scattered trees, like the one in the circular courtyard. The sound of wind and buzzing insects.
She shouldn't be here.
This was - Juhani shook her head hard enough that her beads stung her cheeks. She couldn't remember. It was there, but there was a layer between her and that knowledge, and she couldn't bend the Force to break through. She didn't know how.
There was a wide, placid stream out here, and along its banks some of the grass had not dried and gone golden. Here and there it still showed lavender, as it did in the spring and early summer. Past the stream, fields and occasional groves rolled out to the horizon. A bridge had been laid across it.
When she tried to cross she found that she could not. It was as simple as that.
Juhani tried ranging about, wading through the shallow water in places, and soon found that while she could go some distance from the structure, far enough that perspective made it something she could hide behind an outstretched hand, that was as far as it went. The far bank was forbidden to her.
The Force wasn't blunted off here, as it was in the elevator near the third floor or past the transparisteel of the Sphere. Just as she could see places where she could not go here, she could sense the curve of the terrain and the life forms inhabiting it.
For a time, she did nothing but explore what she could. The open courtyard had another door leading into a different part of the complex, one rife with hallways and other rooms. The door would not open. When she called on the Force to shatter the lock, it refused, which was altogether a strange and baffling experience.
There were other doors in the first complex which she had missed, the first time she had seen it. Some opened. Others would not. She found nothing more animate than small mantis creatures. There weren't even manikins.
Juhani was alone.
In that first day, she soon found herself quite bored. There were only so many times she could go through the limits of the place, seeing mostly-bare room after mostly-bare room. It was as if the owners of the complex had packed up their major possessions and left.
Assuming that she would not be there for more than a day, she ate the food she had planned to take on her shift, and spent some time worrying that her superiors would not believe that she had been taken to the fourth floor. She had not made an entry about it. Juhani tried to take herself through some of the combat forms she had learned from Handmaiden, but found her limbs dragging. The Force was quietly suggesting that it would be better if she did not.
Sundown came, and she slept uneasily in one of the small side rooms, her head pillowed on a flat cushion that someone had forgotten to take from a different room. She woke up several times in the night, habitually, casting herself out of cloudy, miserable dreams and making certain that she was not being stalked.
The next day began with wandering, reestablishing what she already knew about how far she could go. She was hungry and irritable, and consumed with thoughts of where she would go and what she would eat once the elevator returned for her.
It did not.
Juhani took to waiting in the small, circular courtyard, sharpening her wire-hilted sword with an improvised whetstone until she sickened of it. She tried meditation, but it would only work to a point before she was unable to stop the thoughts from coming. Thoughts which had been close to her mind since she had regained her name.
She was broken. She hadn't consciously known that she was broken until she had seen it, but at some level she had always known. Whole people could sleep through a night. Could spend days free of rage or fear.
It had happened years ago. She'd been a child. If she hadn't healed by now, she never would be.
Something was wrong with her. Perhaps there always had been. She wasn't just broken, she was - defective. Flawed. Yes, she knew that things happened to people no matter who they were. That if she had heard of someone in similar circumstances expressing such an opinion she would have argued against it. That the masked woman believed that there was something worth saving in her, and Handmaiden felt similarly.
She knew all of that. And yet.
And yet. She thought all those things, all the dirty, miserable things she hadn't wanted to consider. Juhani wept, a little, and raged, and got up to pace, and dredged up curse words she head heard before hurling them around like lightning bolts, and handled as uneasily. Once she started, she couldn't seem to stop, and in the normal course of things this would have been terrifying. Now, today, it was not.
All of her hatred and fear and resentment, everything she'd felt about anyone she'd spent any time with. People she generally considered friends. People she avoided stridently. People who were gone now. There was something that fit everyone, even if it was nothing more than jealousy. They were whole.
The invisible thing which directed life in Edensphere, yes. But it was nameless and faceless and she did not know anything about it, so there was only so much that she could
The Force itself. She did not know if it guided people in some grand master plan or if it was blind and thoughtless, and either way was a betrayal, in a way. It was supposed to be benevolent. It was supposed to help her. It was supposed to care.
The people from her memories. Those... men, the Zabraks, Dak, her father. The masked woman, Stranger. Her mother.
Herself.
It was exhausting. In the end she collapsed on her back under the endless starscape that was the night sky, utterly spent. She felt as if she had been scraped clean, hollowed out. There was no anger left.
After that, it became harder to be conscious of the days. At times the sky was bright. At times it was dark and sprinkled with stars. It hardly mattered. There was nothing here. Nothing but herself, and the Force, and the growing sense that there was not so much distance between them as she had once believed.
She surrendered herself to it.
For a time she could not measure, the Force that was in Juhani mixed itself into the greater Force. Like pouring a cup out into the ocean. For a time she could not comprehend, she only was. Had any part of her consciousness stayed herself, she would have found it terrifying. And exhilarating.
For a time she could not properly imagine, she was much more than herself, and she saw and felt and was so much more, and learned more than it was possible to know. The Force existed, and it lived, and that was enough.
In time, in a great deal of time or none at all, part of it remembered of it was an unhappy Cathar woman. It was hard to remember why it should care. Hardest, maybe, to turn back. But they did. Many disparate particles clustered, here.
The Force opened Juhani's eyes and made her take a ragged, halting breath.
She coughed, her throat dry, and stiffly regained her feet. Water. That would be good. She staggered to the stream and drank, and the sensation of cold on her flesh was strange and dulled compared to -
- To whatever she had done. She could not remember it now. Juhani sighed. Filled first with self-loathing and rage, then with the Force, and now...
If someone had come to her and said, You are just a small part of the greater whole, and that whole cares as little for you as you for a random cell in your body, she would have agreed, and thought that person dim for saying something so obvious. That was the nature of the revelation, she supposed.
Things were not miraculously fixed now. Soon enough, she knew that she would have doubt and fear and anger again, and perhaps it would not simply be purged. There was always the risk that she would fall to the Dark Side. Something was still wrong with her. Something would always be wrong with her.
But that did not bother her overmuch, not just now. Juhani returned to the courtyard and made another once-over of the rooms.
There was one which she had missed somehow, and she expected it to be as empty as the others. It was not.
It had a workbench, with a light built into the surface. Someone had cleared out the tools from the appropriate drawer, and the majority of the other drawers were also empty. But she saw a few small items which she could never remember seeing before. Yet they seemed important.
There was also, neatly folded, a set of garments, primarily in orange. Juhani unfolded them.
Robes cut as a Jedi would wear them, and with shoulder coverings and armguards, and soft trousers made of the same material. She stared down at them, troubled - and made up her mind.
Very well. She would take them, and she would wear them. Perhaps not today. But another time. She refolded them, perhaps less neatly, and took them and the small items from the workbench back to the courtyard with the tree.
The doors to the elevator were there and now stood open. Without hesitations she stepped in, and the doors closed before it began to move. Juhani realized, for the first time in some time, that she was very hungry.
Soon she could not feel the place in the Force any longer, but it mattered not. It was a part of her now. She savored the thought, turning it this way and that. It was a good thought. It meant, perhaps, that she could return in her mind, if she ever had the need.
She smiled. Very slightly, but it was a smile.