[fic] Interpenetration
Title: Interpenetration
Fandom: Star Wars
Rating: PG-13ish (for mentions of sex)
Spoilers: Draws from the EU but doesn't follow it...so no real spoilers.
Disclaimer: Obviously, Star Wars is not mine.
Summary: Meant to accompany Second Chances but in a very different style. Watch as I destroy Jedi philosophy and Zen Buddhism AT THE SAME TIME! XD and here you thought it couldn't be done! Never underestimate my ability to f-ck things up! XD.
***
They float, though there really is no they and there is no floating. Emptiness, as they had been told in their youth, had finally been emptied, and there was only.
(the force) Eternity.
And then they feel it: the strange darkening, the way the edges shrivel. Thoughts are processed, debated, refined, and ultimately the decision is made.
There is no turning back.
They yank a part of themselves from the nebulous web of space and time and the force, coalescing into a form they had - he had - in the life that came before.
They are suddenly outside the newly made form, no longer in complete unity. And once more alone inside his head, the form remembers the separate and distinct personalities of Qui-Gon, Yoda, Mace, Obi-Wan and all the others, even though they are still they: entwined and one.
He remembers that he has a name, that he prefers his right hand, and that he has a singular (rather than multiple) life of memories. He was a son (failing) once, a lover (desperate) once, a father (briefly) once. And now he is again. He is Anakin Skywalker, the chosen - if flawed - vessel of the force.
And he is on Corva Yag.
The Empire had a facility here, a cloning facility. The Emperor deemed the project a failure, and the scientists who once worked in the lab did not meet very good ends.
The great hulking tanks of bacta are still full, the clones suspended, though their minds were gone. The Emperor had perfected the process of cloning dead minds in healthy bodies: the clones’ empty husks waiting for his mind to take up new residence, until the corrupting power of the dark side once again made him seek out a new body to house him.
But for all his cunning, the Emperor had never been able to overcome the greatest barrier: entering the clone of a force sensitive that was not made from Palpatine’s own genetic material.
Anakin looks at one very particular tank, looking up at the slack features of himself frozen at the age of sixteen standard years. At sixteen, he knows he had been stupid and over-eager on his first Master-less mission, and he had been absurdly jealous of Ferus.
But now he knows he had still been an innocent then. Too quick to anger, perhaps. Too quick to obsess and make snap judgments (he’d trusted Marit and look where that had gotten him, all because she bore a similar resemblance to the always out-of-reach Padmé).
He wonders if the clone has the slight scar Anakin once carried on his left hand, the burn mark on his thigh. He knows the clone doesn’t, but he wonders anyway. True awakening to the force may have been achieved at his physical passing, but koans still hold their fascinating power.
Anakin closes his eyes, though it is not necessary. Habit, a thing long discarded with and yet so easily remembered. Once again, he has been given a task, and this time he will not fail. And so, enlightenment recedes, and the abyss yawns.
***
His lungs burn, and he tries to draw breath, gaining a lungful of brackish, bacta-infused water for his troubles. He splutters, kicks himself upwards with legs Obi-wan never has and never will cut off, and with shaking, flesh hands, hauls his head and shoulders above the rim of the tank.
Gasps into the gloom.
There is the stench of rot here, of decay, a sense of great evil and despair. He can read it from the sense-impressions on the tank, feel it in the air. Reaches out to gain that clarity he had only moments before, that ineffable understanding of how the unifying force and the living force were somehow one and yet still two.
Fails.
He is no longer one with the force. He is only a man again, subject to the limitations of a man’s mind.
He coughs out the fullness of his lungs, and when he’s convinced he can breathe again, he pushes himself out of the tank.
There are no other living clones of him in the facility, and Anakin is thankful. He destroys the other clones - all of Palpatine - one by one, methodically and without regret. He knows - from what he can remember - that force sensitive clones played an important part of what has and might yet still come to pass, even without their - his - intervention.
The computers have gone slowly mad without sentient interaction, built as they were with the best of artificial intelligence. Anakin learns this when he tries to boot one up and gets nothing but jibberish. He had hoped to get a blueprint of the place. As Vader, he had never allowed been allowed at Corva Vag. The Emperor had wanted no inkling of his cloning experiments with the samples taken from Anakin Skywalker’s long-lost right arm to reach the auditory-implants of the former Anakin Skywalker.
He had still known, of course, but the time had not been ripe, and Sidious had failed in trial after trial, and after that, it had become just another pet project of his master, just as doomed as Darth Bane’s attempts to recreate a Holocron.
Anakin reaches out, slowly, tentatively, with the force, letting the force imprints left in the walls and the floors of the place create a slowly unfolding spatial map for him to follow.
Obi-wan may have likened the force as an energy field that bound the universe together, and Yoda may have said the future was like a raindrop, but the ability to understand the force was beyond all sentient thought or expression.
And yet, even the force, as its tremors ran up his arm, locked tight around his heart, and settled, intimate and low in his belly, on occasion, could be surprised.
***
Her clone is as beautiful in its almost-death as she was in life. Anakin stands before it, like a parishioner at any number of the galaxy’s holy sites. It is some moments before he can stop his eyes from tracing the familiar planes of her face and look a bit closer at the tank.
The clone’s vitals are failing. Unlike the self-regulating bacta immersion his own clone had been placed in, Padmé’s clone is an afterthought, a cruel joke Palpatine had hoped to play on a treacherous servant. Or perhaps a lesson he had hoped to teach a devoted student. Or even, in his own twisted way, a gift to a favoured and loyal enforcer.
No clone deserved such a fate, and she does not deserve her death now. Her slow starvation, prolonged by the bacta, had been longer than any human could withstand, and her mind had died as surely as Padmé did when he clenched the force ‘round her neck.
“Only my new powers can save you,” he had told Padmé then, unaware - as he had been of so many things in his youth - of the irony.
He decides that the least he can do, as a murderer of countless innocents, not to mention the destroyer of the rest of her cloned brethren, is to hold the clone’s hand when she goes.
The tank beeps at him as he starts it to life, draining the bacta. The hinges pop with a hiss, and then -
Then she’s in his arms.
***
He lays her in state on a lab table, wishing that there was something other than the emergency hypothermia jackets to cover her with.
She may not be a beloved Naboo queen or a popular galactic senator, but she deserves to die with a quiet sort of dignity.
Her hand - so small, so fine, so fragile - still fits so well inside of his, and he grasps at it, tightly. Past and present blur, or maybe that’s just the tears in his eyes because even though she’s been dead and gone for almost thirty years, he cannot bear to let her go.
And so, in spite of everything. In spite of knowing, in spite of learning, in spite of gaining understanding, he does it anyway.
Non-force sensitives, like all living things, went back to the force, replenishing the universe like maggots replenish the soil. But the strands - delicate as a necklace of Searous hair, smooth as Dramassian silk, and bright as pikah stones - that made up the living, breathing essence of Padmé Amidala, had not yet been changed and remade anew. They still floated throughout the vastness of space. As Vader it had pained him to reach out for them, though he hadn’t been able to stop himself when the pain became unbearable, clenching his fists as if to keep her close, in some strange parody of the way he had asphyxiated the life right out of her.
He never loved her the way she deserved, though he always thought he did. He knows that if he truly loved her, he would stop now before it’s too late. But his love for her has always been, and will always be, unhealthy in all the worst kinds of ways.
He weaves the strands together now, almost as if he were plaiting his long-gone padawan braid. His mind pauses whenever he feels a particularly vivid memory, a particularly powerful emotion. Feels it deep in his gut, hotter than Tatooine’s twin suns or the sting of a training saber.
And then he concentrates on one pure, powerful memory. The one thing he still kept, cherished, even when Obi-wan thought him forever lost to the dark.
She’s fourteen, and every bit an angel as she’s always been, but he doesn’t know it yet. He’s nine and sure of himself, so sure that he takes her hand and takes her home.
And then he pours every bit of her he can feel into the clone’s body.
Her back arches as if in orgasm, breathing no longer shallow and close to death but deep and as gasping as his had been when he had drawn his first breath.
He kisses her before he realizes he’d doing it, cupping his palm at the back of her fragile skull, the soft fuzz of hair bristling against his skin.
She’s tentative but willing, mouth a soft ‘o’ of surprise that his tongue can’t resist tasting. His eyes fall closed because after twenty-odd years he’s finally, finally home.
***
next >>
Fandom: Star Wars
Rating: PG-13ish (for mentions of sex)
Spoilers: Draws from the EU but doesn't follow it...so no real spoilers.
Disclaimer: Obviously, Star Wars is not mine.
Summary: Meant to accompany Second Chances but in a very different style. Watch as I destroy Jedi philosophy and Zen Buddhism AT THE SAME TIME! XD and here you thought it couldn't be done! Never underestimate my ability to f-ck things up! XD.
***
They float, though there really is no they and there is no floating. Emptiness, as they had been told in their youth, had finally been emptied, and there was only.
(the force) Eternity.
And then they feel it: the strange darkening, the way the edges shrivel. Thoughts are processed, debated, refined, and ultimately the decision is made.
There is no turning back.
They yank a part of themselves from the nebulous web of space and time and the force, coalescing into a form they had - he had - in the life that came before.
They are suddenly outside the newly made form, no longer in complete unity. And once more alone inside his head, the form remembers the separate and distinct personalities of Qui-Gon, Yoda, Mace, Obi-Wan and all the others, even though they are still they: entwined and one.
He remembers that he has a name, that he prefers his right hand, and that he has a singular (rather than multiple) life of memories. He was a son (failing) once, a lover (desperate) once, a father (briefly) once. And now he is again. He is Anakin Skywalker, the chosen - if flawed - vessel of the force.
And he is on Corva Yag.
The Empire had a facility here, a cloning facility. The Emperor deemed the project a failure, and the scientists who once worked in the lab did not meet very good ends.
The great hulking tanks of bacta are still full, the clones suspended, though their minds were gone. The Emperor had perfected the process of cloning dead minds in healthy bodies: the clones’ empty husks waiting for his mind to take up new residence, until the corrupting power of the dark side once again made him seek out a new body to house him.
But for all his cunning, the Emperor had never been able to overcome the greatest barrier: entering the clone of a force sensitive that was not made from Palpatine’s own genetic material.
Anakin looks at one very particular tank, looking up at the slack features of himself frozen at the age of sixteen standard years. At sixteen, he knows he had been stupid and over-eager on his first Master-less mission, and he had been absurdly jealous of Ferus.
But now he knows he had still been an innocent then. Too quick to anger, perhaps. Too quick to obsess and make snap judgments (he’d trusted Marit and look where that had gotten him, all because she bore a similar resemblance to the always out-of-reach Padmé).
He wonders if the clone has the slight scar Anakin once carried on his left hand, the burn mark on his thigh. He knows the clone doesn’t, but he wonders anyway. True awakening to the force may have been achieved at his physical passing, but koans still hold their fascinating power.
Anakin closes his eyes, though it is not necessary. Habit, a thing long discarded with and yet so easily remembered. Once again, he has been given a task, and this time he will not fail. And so, enlightenment recedes, and the abyss yawns.
***
His lungs burn, and he tries to draw breath, gaining a lungful of brackish, bacta-infused water for his troubles. He splutters, kicks himself upwards with legs Obi-wan never has and never will cut off, and with shaking, flesh hands, hauls his head and shoulders above the rim of the tank.
Gasps into the gloom.
There is the stench of rot here, of decay, a sense of great evil and despair. He can read it from the sense-impressions on the tank, feel it in the air. Reaches out to gain that clarity he had only moments before, that ineffable understanding of how the unifying force and the living force were somehow one and yet still two.
Fails.
He is no longer one with the force. He is only a man again, subject to the limitations of a man’s mind.
He coughs out the fullness of his lungs, and when he’s convinced he can breathe again, he pushes himself out of the tank.
There are no other living clones of him in the facility, and Anakin is thankful. He destroys the other clones - all of Palpatine - one by one, methodically and without regret. He knows - from what he can remember - that force sensitive clones played an important part of what has and might yet still come to pass, even without their - his - intervention.
The computers have gone slowly mad without sentient interaction, built as they were with the best of artificial intelligence. Anakin learns this when he tries to boot one up and gets nothing but jibberish. He had hoped to get a blueprint of the place. As Vader, he had never allowed been allowed at Corva Vag. The Emperor had wanted no inkling of his cloning experiments with the samples taken from Anakin Skywalker’s long-lost right arm to reach the auditory-implants of the former Anakin Skywalker.
He had still known, of course, but the time had not been ripe, and Sidious had failed in trial after trial, and after that, it had become just another pet project of his master, just as doomed as Darth Bane’s attempts to recreate a Holocron.
Anakin reaches out, slowly, tentatively, with the force, letting the force imprints left in the walls and the floors of the place create a slowly unfolding spatial map for him to follow.
Obi-wan may have likened the force as an energy field that bound the universe together, and Yoda may have said the future was like a raindrop, but the ability to understand the force was beyond all sentient thought or expression.
And yet, even the force, as its tremors ran up his arm, locked tight around his heart, and settled, intimate and low in his belly, on occasion, could be surprised.
***
Her clone is as beautiful in its almost-death as she was in life. Anakin stands before it, like a parishioner at any number of the galaxy’s holy sites. It is some moments before he can stop his eyes from tracing the familiar planes of her face and look a bit closer at the tank.
The clone’s vitals are failing. Unlike the self-regulating bacta immersion his own clone had been placed in, Padmé’s clone is an afterthought, a cruel joke Palpatine had hoped to play on a treacherous servant. Or perhaps a lesson he had hoped to teach a devoted student. Or even, in his own twisted way, a gift to a favoured and loyal enforcer.
No clone deserved such a fate, and she does not deserve her death now. Her slow starvation, prolonged by the bacta, had been longer than any human could withstand, and her mind had died as surely as Padmé did when he clenched the force ‘round her neck.
“Only my new powers can save you,” he had told Padmé then, unaware - as he had been of so many things in his youth - of the irony.
He decides that the least he can do, as a murderer of countless innocents, not to mention the destroyer of the rest of her cloned brethren, is to hold the clone’s hand when she goes.
The tank beeps at him as he starts it to life, draining the bacta. The hinges pop with a hiss, and then -
Then she’s in his arms.
***
He lays her in state on a lab table, wishing that there was something other than the emergency hypothermia jackets to cover her with.
She may not be a beloved Naboo queen or a popular galactic senator, but she deserves to die with a quiet sort of dignity.
Her hand - so small, so fine, so fragile - still fits so well inside of his, and he grasps at it, tightly. Past and present blur, or maybe that’s just the tears in his eyes because even though she’s been dead and gone for almost thirty years, he cannot bear to let her go.
And so, in spite of everything. In spite of knowing, in spite of learning, in spite of gaining understanding, he does it anyway.
Non-force sensitives, like all living things, went back to the force, replenishing the universe like maggots replenish the soil. But the strands - delicate as a necklace of Searous hair, smooth as Dramassian silk, and bright as pikah stones - that made up the living, breathing essence of Padmé Amidala, had not yet been changed and remade anew. They still floated throughout the vastness of space. As Vader it had pained him to reach out for them, though he hadn’t been able to stop himself when the pain became unbearable, clenching his fists as if to keep her close, in some strange parody of the way he had asphyxiated the life right out of her.
He never loved her the way she deserved, though he always thought he did. He knows that if he truly loved her, he would stop now before it’s too late. But his love for her has always been, and will always be, unhealthy in all the worst kinds of ways.
He weaves the strands together now, almost as if he were plaiting his long-gone padawan braid. His mind pauses whenever he feels a particularly vivid memory, a particularly powerful emotion. Feels it deep in his gut, hotter than Tatooine’s twin suns or the sting of a training saber.
And then he concentrates on one pure, powerful memory. The one thing he still kept, cherished, even when Obi-wan thought him forever lost to the dark.
She’s fourteen, and every bit an angel as she’s always been, but he doesn’t know it yet. He’s nine and sure of himself, so sure that he takes her hand and takes her home.
And then he pours every bit of her he can feel into the clone’s body.
Her back arches as if in orgasm, breathing no longer shallow and close to death but deep and as gasping as his had been when he had drawn his first breath.
He kisses her before he realizes he’d doing it, cupping his palm at the back of her fragile skull, the soft fuzz of hair bristling against his skin.
She’s tentative but willing, mouth a soft ‘o’ of surprise that his tongue can’t resist tasting. His eyes fall closed because after twenty-odd years he’s finally, finally home.
***
next >>