Project Revision: Free Fall. Part V. (DRAFT) PG-13: Obi-Wan, Anakin, Yoda, Ensemble.
Author's note: OMG, YOU GUYS, I NEED HELP. Because I have rewritten this section no less than a dozen times, and it still doesn't … quite … work. It is supposed to cover roughly the same territory of exposition as the original Chapters Two - Four, thus bringing us up to the meeting with Evinne (can't wait!) and the fight scenes in Ziro's palace (probably some of the best material from the original story). But it has to be a) non-creepy; b) believable; c) internally consistent; and d) not pedantic. There are some parts here that sound suspiciously like a public service announcement, oh dear Lord. I've been working on it since Friday, and I would really like some feedback from anyone who has the time/interest/inclination to do a good deed. I know some bits are better than others, so hit-and-miss responses are fine. It needs to end up with another three-way conversation that draws in Anakin, somehow - but since this is already nearly THREE TIMES as long as the earlier parts, I thought I'd better let it break here and pick up the threads again in the next section. Anyway, this is my cry for help. Anybody?
(Also:
chameleon_irony , I still owe you the Han/Leia drabble for catching biostrata and its origins. I haven't forgotten, and I'm working on it, but mysteriously Luke keeps inserting himself, which is awkward.)
Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. I am not making any profit from this work of fan fiction, which is a shame, since I could really use the cash …
It took Obi-Wan the better part of two weeks to make up his mind about interviewing Ryn Orun personally. She was the obvious source, if he wanted to know more about what she was doing here and why, and the Temple records were disturbingly vague; but he had seen the way the girl looked at his Padawan, and he wanted neither to subject Anakin to the embarrassment of becoming the object of unwelcome affections nor to make Orun’s personal circumstances even more uncomfortable by raising unwarranted hopes. He remembered too well what forbidden love had felt like himself.
In the meantime, it wasn’t as though he lacked for things to do. He and Anakin together combed through the material the Padawan had been able to gather on Orun’s home planet (but not the medical records, which Obi-Wan kept carefully to himself), and ventured briefly off-world on an unrelated mission to resolve a minor dispute in a local system, at the request of the Jedi Council. Obi-Wan had requested a few months of light duty for himself and Anakin, much against the latter’s wishes, in hopes of inculcating a more contemplative state of mind in his apprentice, and now they looked likely to get them; but the Lorethan problem continued to nag at his mind.
Nevertheless, it was not until Anakin started having dreams - in which Orun played an uncomfortably prominent role - that Obi-Wan finally sought her out.
The connection - imprint?- Orun had established with Anakin should long have faded, but Obi-Wan forbade his Padawan to seek it, as a precaution; if only Obi-Wan had acted quicker and more decisively, such a connection could never have been formed, and now it was best left to wither, untouched. Instead, he sent Anakin for a lightsaber training session with Cin Drallig and went to find Orun on his own.
He tracked her down using information she had given Anakin, apparently casually, during their second encounter: her favorite place in the Temple was the Lesser Arboretum, and she often went there during her free time. In the event she was not difficult to locate: a bright clear presence in the Force, and a soft thread of song in an unfamiliar tongue, weaving its way through the trees. Obi-Wan followed both until he stepped through a narrow band of trees and found her in the deep moss beside a rippling pool, crouching over some waterside planet he did not recognize. Orun herself was unmistakable: a shock of unruly hair, blue-black against the stark white of her skin, beautiful but somehow cold: a frozen flower.
“Ryn Orun?”
She jerked and spun to face him, her song cutting off with a strangled noise as she leaped to her feet.
They stared at each other in silence for a long minute, Orun’s eyes very wide in her sharp pale face.
“I apologize,” Obi-Wan said, recovering. “I did not mean to startle you.”
That seemed to snap her out of her reverie. The girl drew one quick breath and shook her head. “No. It is I who owe apology. I beg your pardon, Master Kenobi - I was not attending. What can I do for you?”
The shadows beneath her eyes looked like bruises. Against her pallor, the presented an ominously corpse-like appearance.
“I was hoping we could talk.” He hesitated. “Are you well?”
Her face went very still, but Obi-Wan thought he could detect a flicker of surprise in her aura. “Of course,” she said - and Obi-Wan could take it as his answer, or merely a response to his desire for conversation. “What did you want to talk about?”
Obi-Wan opened his mouth to say not here. Stopped, caught by an odd sense of insistence in the Force, urging him - in Qui-Gon’s voice, as it so often did - to be mindful. He looked at Orun again.
And again.
Kenobi, you’ve been asking the wrong questions again.
“Not here,” he said at last, after all. “Have you eaten yet?”
She blinked at him.
“Come have lunch with me,” Obi-Wan suggested, giving her his best effort at a charming smile, “and let’s talk.”
: : :
Orun was quiet, guarded; oddly dignified. In short, she was as much unlike Anakin, or even himself at the same age, as Obi-Wan figured it was possible for a member of the same genus to be. His limited experience with other Padawans gave him no help with her. The girl remained polite but wary: cooperative, knowledgeable, and not at all interested in talking about herself. At the end of half an hour, Obi-Wan had learned that Orun had volunteered for the mission to Coruscant when no one else wanted it because “someone had to go,” that she liked plants better than people (a curious revelation), and that her main task in the Temple was to be always available “to serve” any Jedi. The nature of this service seemed not to concern her much. Asked whether her duties ever involved trips to the Temple’s medical center, she looked down at her plate and said only, “Sometimes.”
About her home planet, she proved considerably more forthcoming. She made an attempt, not very successful, to explain their social organization; outlined succinctly their agricultural practices; and recited for his benefit a comprehensive and eminently boring list of the deeds of one of their heroes.
Obi-Wan tried to question her about her pilgrimage to the Jedi Temple, but Orun could not or would not answer the queries to his satisfaction.
“I am a hostage,” she told him repeatedly, her patience with his insistence that the Jedi did not take hostages obviously fraying. “Sacrifice. A life for a life.”
“The Jedi do not demand such sacrifice,” said Obi-Wan patiently.
“But my people give it.”
“And you are here because ...”
“I am the sacrifice,” she answered doggedly. “The price to redeem our honor and forge a new alliance with the Jedi.”
“Forge a new alliance,” Obi-Wan repeated. “Why?”
Orun sighed; her disobedient hair was escaping from its leather bindings and curling around her face as if in sympathy with her frustration, giving her a somewhat bedraggled appearance. “Darkness is coming. The Soulless steal lives. We must stand together, or fall.”
The barest flicker from the Force made him ask, “The Soulless. Who are they?”
Orun shook her head helplessly, getting one errant tendril of hair caught in her eyelashes. She batted it impatiently away, still focused on Obi-Wan. “No one knows. We first heard tell of them from the Chiss - slave-raiders who make sacrifice to gods of pain. They are dead to the Force - but how or why, we do not know.”
It all sounded more like a ghost story to frighten Younglings than any reliable account. “And they threaten your space?” Perhaps here was the answer to the mystery he had sought.
“They threaten the galaxy!” Orun proclaimed dramatically. “If the Chiss fail - if Loreth falls - no one will be safe.”
She sounded utterly sincere, and yet she might as well be talking about the bogeyman, for all the sense Obi-Wan could make of her information. “The Chiss,” he said, picking up on a name she’d used twice now. “Allies of yours?”
“Enemies.” Orun grimaced. “But better than the Soulless.”
“‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend?’”
She gave him a wry little grin, the expression odd on such a young face. “Exactly.”
The only topic which seemed to inspire a comparable degree of animation was, rather unfortunately, Anakin. Orun had politely - and, Obi-Wan thought, studiously - avoided mentioning him while they made their way to the Temple dining halls, filled their trays, and slowly ate their lentil soup with bread. But with the meal over, as Obi-Wan paused to find his next question - there had been not so much as a whisper from the Force since she had told him about the slave-raiders she called the Soulless, and how to interpret that Obi-Wan just didn’t know - the girl dropped her gaze to stare at the spoon she was turning idly in her fingers, cleared her throat, and said, “Master Kenobi?”
Something in her voice alerted him. Obi-Wan sat up a little straighter. “Yes?”
“May I ask you a question?” The delicate emphasis on you reminded Obi-Wan that, although he had endeavored to put his companion at her ease, their chat over lunch had been more like an interview than a conversation.
All the same, her tone had put him on his guard. She sounded awfully nervous about the question ...
“You may ask,” he said, using a little emphasis of his own.
She nodded once, accepting this. “Why did you take me for questioning today?” Her cheeks pinked. “I mean ... why now?”
And her question made it sound more like an interrogation.
It didn’t help that he really didn’t want to be discussing this with her. She was right, even if she didn’t know why - it was time to approach the matter directly, instead of dancing around it and hoping to trip over some answers.
“My apprentice has been having dreams lately.”
“Dreams?” Orun frowned at him. “Nightmares?”
“Jedi do not have nightmares,” Obi-Wan instructed her, even as he wondered what else some of Anakin’s dreams - now and as a child - could be called. “We are concerned about what these dreams might mean.”
This earned him another frown. “Is he a seer, then?”
It was Obi-Wan’s turn to frown. “All Jedi can sense the future to some extent,” he explained carefully. “The Force reveals to us the shape of future events, warning us of danger. But it is not always easy to interpret these warning accurately. Visions of the future area a dangerous gift.”
“Master Yoda says that the future is ‘always in motion’,” Orun suggested, watching him intently.
“Yes,” Obi-Wan agreed. “The actions we take today can change the course of the events we dreamed last night. Yet it is difficult to know what changes will be right, and which are wrong. By trying to prevent one future from coming to pass, you might unwittingly set a worse one in motion.”
“I see.” Orun stopped, biting her lip. “And ... does he see me, in these dreams?”
Obi-Wan sat back and searched her face closely. “You knew,” he said finally. “How?”
Orun shook her head. “I guessed,” she corrected him carefully. At Obi-Wan’s look she added, “I have ... felt ... your apprentice in my own dreams, as well. I thought ... I’ve never had such vivid ...” She broke off, bright pink dusting the tops of her cheekbones. The color made her look both younger and more alive. “I thought it was just me - part of the awakening. I had not thought that he would feel ... anything.” A helpless, one-shouldered shrug. “But now I wonder ...” the blush deepened, and she finished in a strangled little voice “... if perhaps he might be touching my ... my mind, you would say ... without knowing it.”
He should be following up on the question of Anakin’s dreams, but ... “Awakening?” Obi-Wan asked her. “What is that?”
If he had thought she was blushing before, it was nothing to her embarrassment now. Deep magenta flooded her skin from neckline to hairline, and for a moment, she seemed to be struggling, unable to speak. Obi-Wan was about to withdraw the question when she choked out: “One of the reasons I was deemed especially appropriate for this mission was that I never ... even when I became a woman, I never had any ... sexual feelings. The elders who trained me, they said - they said I was not made for love.” She swallowed hard and went on: “But ever since I met ... Anakin ... the other day ... I ... I ...”
“That’s all right,” said Obi-Wan quickly, interrupting her humiliated floundering for words. “I get the idea.” Orun subsided into relieved silence, and he wracked his brain for something to say. He’d realized the girl was attracted to Anakin, of course; but that was a problem that was growing more and more common. One had only to look at Arayna Dresnell - and Obi-Wan was beginning to have his suspicions about Darra Thel-Tanis, as well. “And you really think Anakin is - er - responsible?”
“I can think of no other explanation,” Orun whispered desperately, her grip on the spoon white-knuckled. ‘Master Kenobi, please, don’t tell him -”
Oh my. Only youth could be so mortified; Obi-Wan had almost forgotten the capacity for so much shame.
“Miss Orun,” he began, interrupting her again, and then stopped. “Ryn,” he tried instead. “May I call you Ryn?” She nodded jerkily. “You need not fear that I will betray your confidence. But - if I may - you are very young. I mean no disrespect to your elders, but ... surely any definitive statement about your sexuality at this point must be at least a little premature.” She looked baffled, so he tried to explain: “Many beings take years to understand their own responses - and some beings find that what they want changes over time.” Ryn shifted uncomfortably; time to put an end to this before he made matters worse. “What I am trying to say,” Obi-Wan concluded gently, “is that you have your whole life ahead of you still. Take your time and don’t let anyone else define your experience for you.”
Ryn tilted her head to look at him in a gesture oddly reminiscent of Yoda. “I didn’t think Jedi cared about such things.”
“Some Jedi don’t.” Obi-Wan paused. “But you are not a Jedi yourself. You have every right to take advantage of this time of discovery. And whatever your teachers may have told you, I can assure you that for many beings - even Jedi - it is natural, and healthy, to do so.”
Ryn returned his smile hesitantly. “Thank you,” she said, sounding none too certain about it.
Silence fell between them. Obi-Wan wanted to pick up the dropped threads of their conversation - what might she know about Anakin’s dreams? - but it was a struggle to find his way back. He needed an opener more subtle than have you any plans of mayhem scheduled? For her own part, Orun - Ryn - sat very still, waiting for him; he could feel her patient regard, like a quiet rain against his senses. She had that curious quality Qui-Gon had sometimes shown, of making him feel that he was, at the moment, the center of her universe, and she had nothing better to do than sit and wait for his next thought.
She waited.
“Do you dream of falling?” Obi-Wan asked at last.
“Falling?” Orun made a quick dropping motion with one hand, eyes on Obi-Wan to be sure she’d heard him right; her Basic, he had noticed, was clear but not always confident - several times now he’d caught her lips moving, silently repeating his questions to herself with an air of intense concentration.
“From a great height,” he stipulated, mimicking her gesture - reaching his hand arm’s-length above the table and then dropping it quickly.
Ryn frowned. “Nooo,” she said slowly, drawing the word out. “Does A - your apprentice?”
“He dreams of you, falling.”
“Well, it is Coruscant. Anyone could fall, here.”
Obi-Wan blinked at her, uncomprehending. “Why is that?”
“It is Coruscant,” she repeated distinctly. “None of the buildings even touch the ground.”
Oh. Obi-Wan had grown up here; he had never thought of the Temple, for instance, as a precarious footing. But Orun, a stranger here, clearly saw the world’s vertical spaces not as neutral areas to be traveled through, from one level to the next, but in terms of their distance from the ground - a planetary surface which probably no one living had ever seen and lived to tell. The manmade structures that formed the “lower levels,” home to criminals, refugees, and the sub-basements of the very oldest buildings, did not count at all for her.
The revelation felt odd, as though he had been staring at an ink blot for a long time and then suddenly blinked and saw in it something different, another shape.
“I don’t know what I can do for you,” Ryn was saying, frowning worriedly. “I am not interpreter of dreams. I might be able to ease them, if they are troubling him - but is that wise? If the dreams carry a warning from the Force ...”
But the instant of disorientation had forcibly shifted his point of view, wrenching it into a new perspective. He looked at Ryn now, not the dangerous symbol of destiny and change, but lost and lonely and trying to help, so painfully earnest. He had told himself this days ago, and then not listened: whatever danger the Force was warning him of, this girl was not its cause ... though she might be its victim, caught up in events beyond her control. She looked worse than Anakin; the circles under her eyes bespoke the same lack of sleep. Maybe there was a reason she had asked about nightmares.
And, as so often happened when he ceased struggling and became still, the right answer - or in this case, the right question - appeared to him, because it had been there all along, waiting for him to see it.
“Actually,” he said, offering her an embarrassed smile, “I was wondering if there might be something we could do for you. Is there anything you need? Anything that would make your time in the Temple a little easier?”
Shock. Naked longing. A raw, aching vulnerability, quickly masked. The expressions flitted across her face in a torrent of feeling, and then swiftly shuttered, hidden by her still mask - the only telltale of wrenched emotions the rigid line of her sharp young jaw. Anakin’s name hung unspoken in the air between them, a revelation she hadn’t been quick enough to catch from the Force; Obi-Wan knew with painful clarity that the only thing she really wanted was to meet him again. There was a desperate edge to her yearning, something more than the untrammeled intensity of a girl’s first crush, and he wondered just how lonely her first months in the Temple had been, for her affections to seize on Anakin so completely.
And then ... “No,” she said, quietly defiant. “There is nothing.”
Oh, that deliberate, unnecessary heroism. So determined to sacrifice her feelings in respect of Anakin’s boundaries. There was something of a tragicomic flair about Orun: absurdity touched with pathos. She felt too much and too keenly, disproportionate to her circumstances and yet unabashedly sincere. Obi-Wan wondered, watching her, if this was why all the great tragicomedies were about adolescents: older hearts learned to fear their own ridiculousness, and gave up pathos in quest of dignity.
I wish I could tell her it all turns out right. But she’s too young to understand - and maybe it won’t, not for her.
For just an instant, so brief he could never afterward be sure whether he had only imagined it - but he could never forget it, either - he felt an odd resonance in the Force, like an echo of this girl’s future, always stained with sadness, bittersweet.
Then it was gone and he was sitting in the slowly-emptying dining hall, facing a girl with challenging green eyes who insisted there was nothing he could do for her.
“Maybe Anakin will think of something,” he said, and watched Ryn’s mouth drop open in surprise and alarm. “But in the meantime ... you look tired. Too many visits to the medical center?”
She went whiter than ever, already-pale skin turning a strange, chalky blue-white. Even on her sharply symmetrical features, it wasn’t attractive. “I - I don’t -” she stammered, floundering again.
“Ryn.” He waited until she met his eyes, her own wide now and frightened. “I am trying to help you. Why are you really here?”
“I told you!” she hissed, fear breaking through into anger. “I came to repay our debt to the Jedi and forge a new alliance against the darkness. It begins with the Soulless, and who knows when it will end? We must stand together.” She shook her head. “The Council will not listen to me. If you truly want to help, speak to them.”
“I am speaking to you,” Obi-Wan replied evenly. “And if you are really here as a diplomatic envoy - why are the Healers studying your biostrata?”
“I -” Ryn choked, cleared her throat, and tried again. “I don’t know.”
Obi-Wan opened his mouth to question her further, and then stopped. The Force spoke clearly at last: she was lying through her teeth. And she was bitterly afraid, but not of him. Of the Healers? But if she had lied to him about the first question, what good would it do to ask her more?
This entry was originally posted at http://wyncatastrophe.dreamwidth.org/111233.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
(Also:
chameleon_irony , I still owe you the Han/Leia drabble for catching biostrata and its origins. I haven't forgotten, and I'm working on it, but mysteriously Luke keeps inserting himself, which is awkward.)
Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. I am not making any profit from this work of fan fiction, which is a shame, since I could really use the cash …
It took Obi-Wan the better part of two weeks to make up his mind about interviewing Ryn Orun personally. She was the obvious source, if he wanted to know more about what she was doing here and why, and the Temple records were disturbingly vague; but he had seen the way the girl looked at his Padawan, and he wanted neither to subject Anakin to the embarrassment of becoming the object of unwelcome affections nor to make Orun’s personal circumstances even more uncomfortable by raising unwarranted hopes. He remembered too well what forbidden love had felt like himself.
In the meantime, it wasn’t as though he lacked for things to do. He and Anakin together combed through the material the Padawan had been able to gather on Orun’s home planet (but not the medical records, which Obi-Wan kept carefully to himself), and ventured briefly off-world on an unrelated mission to resolve a minor dispute in a local system, at the request of the Jedi Council. Obi-Wan had requested a few months of light duty for himself and Anakin, much against the latter’s wishes, in hopes of inculcating a more contemplative state of mind in his apprentice, and now they looked likely to get them; but the Lorethan problem continued to nag at his mind.
Nevertheless, it was not until Anakin started having dreams - in which Orun played an uncomfortably prominent role - that Obi-Wan finally sought her out.
The connection - imprint?- Orun had established with Anakin should long have faded, but Obi-Wan forbade his Padawan to seek it, as a precaution; if only Obi-Wan had acted quicker and more decisively, such a connection could never have been formed, and now it was best left to wither, untouched. Instead, he sent Anakin for a lightsaber training session with Cin Drallig and went to find Orun on his own.
He tracked her down using information she had given Anakin, apparently casually, during their second encounter: her favorite place in the Temple was the Lesser Arboretum, and she often went there during her free time. In the event she was not difficult to locate: a bright clear presence in the Force, and a soft thread of song in an unfamiliar tongue, weaving its way through the trees. Obi-Wan followed both until he stepped through a narrow band of trees and found her in the deep moss beside a rippling pool, crouching over some waterside planet he did not recognize. Orun herself was unmistakable: a shock of unruly hair, blue-black against the stark white of her skin, beautiful but somehow cold: a frozen flower.
“Ryn Orun?”
She jerked and spun to face him, her song cutting off with a strangled noise as she leaped to her feet.
They stared at each other in silence for a long minute, Orun’s eyes very wide in her sharp pale face.
“I apologize,” Obi-Wan said, recovering. “I did not mean to startle you.”
That seemed to snap her out of her reverie. The girl drew one quick breath and shook her head. “No. It is I who owe apology. I beg your pardon, Master Kenobi - I was not attending. What can I do for you?”
The shadows beneath her eyes looked like bruises. Against her pallor, the presented an ominously corpse-like appearance.
“I was hoping we could talk.” He hesitated. “Are you well?”
Her face went very still, but Obi-Wan thought he could detect a flicker of surprise in her aura. “Of course,” she said - and Obi-Wan could take it as his answer, or merely a response to his desire for conversation. “What did you want to talk about?”
Obi-Wan opened his mouth to say not here. Stopped, caught by an odd sense of insistence in the Force, urging him - in Qui-Gon’s voice, as it so often did - to be mindful. He looked at Orun again.
And again.
Kenobi, you’ve been asking the wrong questions again.
“Not here,” he said at last, after all. “Have you eaten yet?”
She blinked at him.
“Come have lunch with me,” Obi-Wan suggested, giving her his best effort at a charming smile, “and let’s talk.”
: : :
Orun was quiet, guarded; oddly dignified. In short, she was as much unlike Anakin, or even himself at the same age, as Obi-Wan figured it was possible for a member of the same genus to be. His limited experience with other Padawans gave him no help with her. The girl remained polite but wary: cooperative, knowledgeable, and not at all interested in talking about herself. At the end of half an hour, Obi-Wan had learned that Orun had volunteered for the mission to Coruscant when no one else wanted it because “someone had to go,” that she liked plants better than people (a curious revelation), and that her main task in the Temple was to be always available “to serve” any Jedi. The nature of this service seemed not to concern her much. Asked whether her duties ever involved trips to the Temple’s medical center, she looked down at her plate and said only, “Sometimes.”
About her home planet, she proved considerably more forthcoming. She made an attempt, not very successful, to explain their social organization; outlined succinctly their agricultural practices; and recited for his benefit a comprehensive and eminently boring list of the deeds of one of their heroes.
Obi-Wan tried to question her about her pilgrimage to the Jedi Temple, but Orun could not or would not answer the queries to his satisfaction.
“I am a hostage,” she told him repeatedly, her patience with his insistence that the Jedi did not take hostages obviously fraying. “Sacrifice. A life for a life.”
“The Jedi do not demand such sacrifice,” said Obi-Wan patiently.
“But my people give it.”
“And you are here because ...”
“I am the sacrifice,” she answered doggedly. “The price to redeem our honor and forge a new alliance with the Jedi.”
“Forge a new alliance,” Obi-Wan repeated. “Why?”
Orun sighed; her disobedient hair was escaping from its leather bindings and curling around her face as if in sympathy with her frustration, giving her a somewhat bedraggled appearance. “Darkness is coming. The Soulless steal lives. We must stand together, or fall.”
The barest flicker from the Force made him ask, “The Soulless. Who are they?”
Orun shook her head helplessly, getting one errant tendril of hair caught in her eyelashes. She batted it impatiently away, still focused on Obi-Wan. “No one knows. We first heard tell of them from the Chiss - slave-raiders who make sacrifice to gods of pain. They are dead to the Force - but how or why, we do not know.”
It all sounded more like a ghost story to frighten Younglings than any reliable account. “And they threaten your space?” Perhaps here was the answer to the mystery he had sought.
“They threaten the galaxy!” Orun proclaimed dramatically. “If the Chiss fail - if Loreth falls - no one will be safe.”
She sounded utterly sincere, and yet she might as well be talking about the bogeyman, for all the sense Obi-Wan could make of her information. “The Chiss,” he said, picking up on a name she’d used twice now. “Allies of yours?”
“Enemies.” Orun grimaced. “But better than the Soulless.”
“‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend?’”
She gave him a wry little grin, the expression odd on such a young face. “Exactly.”
The only topic which seemed to inspire a comparable degree of animation was, rather unfortunately, Anakin. Orun had politely - and, Obi-Wan thought, studiously - avoided mentioning him while they made their way to the Temple dining halls, filled their trays, and slowly ate their lentil soup with bread. But with the meal over, as Obi-Wan paused to find his next question - there had been not so much as a whisper from the Force since she had told him about the slave-raiders she called the Soulless, and how to interpret that Obi-Wan just didn’t know - the girl dropped her gaze to stare at the spoon she was turning idly in her fingers, cleared her throat, and said, “Master Kenobi?”
Something in her voice alerted him. Obi-Wan sat up a little straighter. “Yes?”
“May I ask you a question?” The delicate emphasis on you reminded Obi-Wan that, although he had endeavored to put his companion at her ease, their chat over lunch had been more like an interview than a conversation.
All the same, her tone had put him on his guard. She sounded awfully nervous about the question ...
“You may ask,” he said, using a little emphasis of his own.
She nodded once, accepting this. “Why did you take me for questioning today?” Her cheeks pinked. “I mean ... why now?”
And her question made it sound more like an interrogation.
It didn’t help that he really didn’t want to be discussing this with her. She was right, even if she didn’t know why - it was time to approach the matter directly, instead of dancing around it and hoping to trip over some answers.
“My apprentice has been having dreams lately.”
“Dreams?” Orun frowned at him. “Nightmares?”
“Jedi do not have nightmares,” Obi-Wan instructed her, even as he wondered what else some of Anakin’s dreams - now and as a child - could be called. “We are concerned about what these dreams might mean.”
This earned him another frown. “Is he a seer, then?”
It was Obi-Wan’s turn to frown. “All Jedi can sense the future to some extent,” he explained carefully. “The Force reveals to us the shape of future events, warning us of danger. But it is not always easy to interpret these warning accurately. Visions of the future area a dangerous gift.”
“Master Yoda says that the future is ‘always in motion’,” Orun suggested, watching him intently.
“Yes,” Obi-Wan agreed. “The actions we take today can change the course of the events we dreamed last night. Yet it is difficult to know what changes will be right, and which are wrong. By trying to prevent one future from coming to pass, you might unwittingly set a worse one in motion.”
“I see.” Orun stopped, biting her lip. “And ... does he see me, in these dreams?”
Obi-Wan sat back and searched her face closely. “You knew,” he said finally. “How?”
Orun shook her head. “I guessed,” she corrected him carefully. At Obi-Wan’s look she added, “I have ... felt ... your apprentice in my own dreams, as well. I thought ... I’ve never had such vivid ...” She broke off, bright pink dusting the tops of her cheekbones. The color made her look both younger and more alive. “I thought it was just me - part of the awakening. I had not thought that he would feel ... anything.” A helpless, one-shouldered shrug. “But now I wonder ...” the blush deepened, and she finished in a strangled little voice “... if perhaps he might be touching my ... my mind, you would say ... without knowing it.”
He should be following up on the question of Anakin’s dreams, but ... “Awakening?” Obi-Wan asked her. “What is that?”
If he had thought she was blushing before, it was nothing to her embarrassment now. Deep magenta flooded her skin from neckline to hairline, and for a moment, she seemed to be struggling, unable to speak. Obi-Wan was about to withdraw the question when she choked out: “One of the reasons I was deemed especially appropriate for this mission was that I never ... even when I became a woman, I never had any ... sexual feelings. The elders who trained me, they said - they said I was not made for love.” She swallowed hard and went on: “But ever since I met ... Anakin ... the other day ... I ... I ...”
“That’s all right,” said Obi-Wan quickly, interrupting her humiliated floundering for words. “I get the idea.” Orun subsided into relieved silence, and he wracked his brain for something to say. He’d realized the girl was attracted to Anakin, of course; but that was a problem that was growing more and more common. One had only to look at Arayna Dresnell - and Obi-Wan was beginning to have his suspicions about Darra Thel-Tanis, as well. “And you really think Anakin is - er - responsible?”
“I can think of no other explanation,” Orun whispered desperately, her grip on the spoon white-knuckled. ‘Master Kenobi, please, don’t tell him -”
Oh my. Only youth could be so mortified; Obi-Wan had almost forgotten the capacity for so much shame.
“Miss Orun,” he began, interrupting her again, and then stopped. “Ryn,” he tried instead. “May I call you Ryn?” She nodded jerkily. “You need not fear that I will betray your confidence. But - if I may - you are very young. I mean no disrespect to your elders, but ... surely any definitive statement about your sexuality at this point must be at least a little premature.” She looked baffled, so he tried to explain: “Many beings take years to understand their own responses - and some beings find that what they want changes over time.” Ryn shifted uncomfortably; time to put an end to this before he made matters worse. “What I am trying to say,” Obi-Wan concluded gently, “is that you have your whole life ahead of you still. Take your time and don’t let anyone else define your experience for you.”
Ryn tilted her head to look at him in a gesture oddly reminiscent of Yoda. “I didn’t think Jedi cared about such things.”
“Some Jedi don’t.” Obi-Wan paused. “But you are not a Jedi yourself. You have every right to take advantage of this time of discovery. And whatever your teachers may have told you, I can assure you that for many beings - even Jedi - it is natural, and healthy, to do so.”
Ryn returned his smile hesitantly. “Thank you,” she said, sounding none too certain about it.
Silence fell between them. Obi-Wan wanted to pick up the dropped threads of their conversation - what might she know about Anakin’s dreams? - but it was a struggle to find his way back. He needed an opener more subtle than have you any plans of mayhem scheduled? For her own part, Orun - Ryn - sat very still, waiting for him; he could feel her patient regard, like a quiet rain against his senses. She had that curious quality Qui-Gon had sometimes shown, of making him feel that he was, at the moment, the center of her universe, and she had nothing better to do than sit and wait for his next thought.
She waited.
“Do you dream of falling?” Obi-Wan asked at last.
“Falling?” Orun made a quick dropping motion with one hand, eyes on Obi-Wan to be sure she’d heard him right; her Basic, he had noticed, was clear but not always confident - several times now he’d caught her lips moving, silently repeating his questions to herself with an air of intense concentration.
“From a great height,” he stipulated, mimicking her gesture - reaching his hand arm’s-length above the table and then dropping it quickly.
Ryn frowned. “Nooo,” she said slowly, drawing the word out. “Does A - your apprentice?”
“He dreams of you, falling.”
“Well, it is Coruscant. Anyone could fall, here.”
Obi-Wan blinked at her, uncomprehending. “Why is that?”
“It is Coruscant,” she repeated distinctly. “None of the buildings even touch the ground.”
Oh. Obi-Wan had grown up here; he had never thought of the Temple, for instance, as a precarious footing. But Orun, a stranger here, clearly saw the world’s vertical spaces not as neutral areas to be traveled through, from one level to the next, but in terms of their distance from the ground - a planetary surface which probably no one living had ever seen and lived to tell. The manmade structures that formed the “lower levels,” home to criminals, refugees, and the sub-basements of the very oldest buildings, did not count at all for her.
The revelation felt odd, as though he had been staring at an ink blot for a long time and then suddenly blinked and saw in it something different, another shape.
“I don’t know what I can do for you,” Ryn was saying, frowning worriedly. “I am not interpreter of dreams. I might be able to ease them, if they are troubling him - but is that wise? If the dreams carry a warning from the Force ...”
But the instant of disorientation had forcibly shifted his point of view, wrenching it into a new perspective. He looked at Ryn now, not the dangerous symbol of destiny and change, but lost and lonely and trying to help, so painfully earnest. He had told himself this days ago, and then not listened: whatever danger the Force was warning him of, this girl was not its cause ... though she might be its victim, caught up in events beyond her control. She looked worse than Anakin; the circles under her eyes bespoke the same lack of sleep. Maybe there was a reason she had asked about nightmares.
And, as so often happened when he ceased struggling and became still, the right answer - or in this case, the right question - appeared to him, because it had been there all along, waiting for him to see it.
“Actually,” he said, offering her an embarrassed smile, “I was wondering if there might be something we could do for you. Is there anything you need? Anything that would make your time in the Temple a little easier?”
Shock. Naked longing. A raw, aching vulnerability, quickly masked. The expressions flitted across her face in a torrent of feeling, and then swiftly shuttered, hidden by her still mask - the only telltale of wrenched emotions the rigid line of her sharp young jaw. Anakin’s name hung unspoken in the air between them, a revelation she hadn’t been quick enough to catch from the Force; Obi-Wan knew with painful clarity that the only thing she really wanted was to meet him again. There was a desperate edge to her yearning, something more than the untrammeled intensity of a girl’s first crush, and he wondered just how lonely her first months in the Temple had been, for her affections to seize on Anakin so completely.
And then ... “No,” she said, quietly defiant. “There is nothing.”
Oh, that deliberate, unnecessary heroism. So determined to sacrifice her feelings in respect of Anakin’s boundaries. There was something of a tragicomic flair about Orun: absurdity touched with pathos. She felt too much and too keenly, disproportionate to her circumstances and yet unabashedly sincere. Obi-Wan wondered, watching her, if this was why all the great tragicomedies were about adolescents: older hearts learned to fear their own ridiculousness, and gave up pathos in quest of dignity.
I wish I could tell her it all turns out right. But she’s too young to understand - and maybe it won’t, not for her.
For just an instant, so brief he could never afterward be sure whether he had only imagined it - but he could never forget it, either - he felt an odd resonance in the Force, like an echo of this girl’s future, always stained with sadness, bittersweet.
Then it was gone and he was sitting in the slowly-emptying dining hall, facing a girl with challenging green eyes who insisted there was nothing he could do for her.
“Maybe Anakin will think of something,” he said, and watched Ryn’s mouth drop open in surprise and alarm. “But in the meantime ... you look tired. Too many visits to the medical center?”
She went whiter than ever, already-pale skin turning a strange, chalky blue-white. Even on her sharply symmetrical features, it wasn’t attractive. “I - I don’t -” she stammered, floundering again.
“Ryn.” He waited until she met his eyes, her own wide now and frightened. “I am trying to help you. Why are you really here?”
“I told you!” she hissed, fear breaking through into anger. “I came to repay our debt to the Jedi and forge a new alliance against the darkness. It begins with the Soulless, and who knows when it will end? We must stand together.” She shook her head. “The Council will not listen to me. If you truly want to help, speak to them.”
“I am speaking to you,” Obi-Wan replied evenly. “And if you are really here as a diplomatic envoy - why are the Healers studying your biostrata?”
“I -” Ryn choked, cleared her throat, and tried again. “I don’t know.”
Obi-Wan opened his mouth to question her further, and then stopped. The Force spoke clearly at last: she was lying through her teeth. And she was bitterly afraid, but not of him. Of the Healers? But if she had lied to him about the first question, what good would it do to ask her more?
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