Project Revision: Free Fall. Part VII. PG:13. Anakin, Obi-Wan, Tru Veld, OC.
Author's note: So. We had to have another Anakin & Ryn scene that also draws us back into the next Anakin & Obi-Wan scene, thus setting the stage for more development in all those relationships. I've rewritten this one … oh, about a dozen times now, because I kept feeling that the emotional weight of it was off - either too dramatic or too frivolous. And then the descriptions were too long - we need to know how certain things appear, but we don't need them described in minute detail, that's just boring. And finally I hit on two ideas that I think helped the story along (and I'd love your feedback on both of them):
Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. This story is purely a work of fan fiction, and I am not making any profit from it.
Obi-Wan had asked him to find Ryn’s friends, and Anakin, eager to impress his master, did his best. The task was proving more difficult than he had expected, both because other duties called him out of the Temple all too often - even on light duty, he and Obi-Wan still managed to stay pretty busy - and because Obi-Wan’s instructions to “be discreet” kept him from taking the quickest route to the answers he sought. Instead of just asking the other Padawans what they knew about Ryn, he had to find a way to bring her name up in conversation so that it seemed natural. Anakin had always been best at a direct approach to any problem; these roundabout methods tested both his patience and his ingenuity.
He started out by talking to his own friends. Darra Thel-Tanis was out of the Temple on a mission with her own master, Soara Antana; but Tru Veld had at least heard of Ryn, and recognized her from Anakin’s description.
“I’ve never talked to her,” he said, eying Anakin curiously. “But was Babbit right?”
“About what?” Anakin asked, long accustomed to Tru’s habit of sharing his thoughts from the middle.
“He was some kind of special project from the Jedi Council, and that she was really weird. Did you meet her? Did she try to put a hex on you?”
“What?” said Anakin, startled. “Jedi don’t believe in hexes.”
“Of course not,” agreed Tru patiently, “but Orun might. She’s supposed to be from one of those planets where they believe in those things. Did she do anything funny?”
Anakin remembered Ryn’s brilliant fuchsia blush, the stain in her cheeks, the way she’d laid her hand agains his own, telling him that if he called her, she would come …
“No,” he said. “Of course not. She was normal.”
“Then why does the Council want her around?”
But that was a question no one seemed able to answer. Anakin, of course, had Ryn’s own answer, the one she had given to Obi-Wan; but none of the Padawans seemed to know why she was here or what she was doing, and Anakin kept his knowledge to himself, feeling that his master might be in Ryn’s confidence somehow. He didn’t want to betray her secrets, only to discover them.
But if Obi-Wan was in Ryn’s confidence, nobody else seemed to be. At the end of a ten-day, Anakin had reached the depressing conclusion that he was never going to find Ryn’s friends, because she didn’t have any.
He considered the problem one afternoon, as he climbed the long and winding stairs to an observation room in one of the Temple spires. The observation room itself was quietly busy at this time of day, with Knights and Padawans gathering to watch sunset over the Temple district, but the stairs below were empty and lit with arched windows. Anakin stepped off the spiraling staircase and into one of the casements, tucking himself into its curving walls with his feet against one side and his back to the other so that he caught easily, a seat for one, just out of the way, with a perfect view. He liked to come and sit here occasionally, though the spot was not quite as comfortable as it had been when he was young. It was a good place to sit and think, and Anakin found the view of Coruscant’s endless traffic, silent with walls and distance, hypnotically soothing. It helped him to clear his mind.
Today he needed that concentration to help him think what he would say to his master. A Jedi was not supposed to grow impatient with defeat, but to accept it and find another way. Only this time, Anakin was sure that he could not complete the task his master had set for him because there was no answer: if Ryn had been close to anybody in the Temple, he would have learned something by now. He hated to think of disappointing Obi-Wan, but maybe the fact that Ryn had made no friends could be useful information, a sign of ... something.
It’s a sign that she’s lonely, Anakin thought, and let his head thunk once again the transparisteel of the windowpane.
It wasn’t that his fellow Padawans didn’t know Ryn. They remembered her, anyway. The Temple community was diverse, but not huge, and Ryn wasn’t exactly inconspicuous; she didn’t wear the traditional Jedi robes, and her odd contrast of pale, almost blue-white skin with inky dark hair was striking, even a little spooky. She reminded Anakin of the legendary Ice Maidens of Ord Plutonia: enchanted images carved in ice, whose frozen beauty could trap unwary travelers.
Obi-Wan would have said that he was romanticizing, comparing Ryn to fabled creatures from spacer tales - but he wasn’t a kid any more, the little boy who’d asked Padmé if she was an Angel. He knew Ryn wasn’t an Ice Maiden; there probably weren’t any Ice Maidens. But Ryn looked the way Anakin had imagined them as a grubby little kid: very beautiful and very cold. He’d listened eagerly back then because he wanted so much to believe that such wonders really existed, the deceptively delicate Ice Maidens and the glowing Angels, too. Even monsters. The galaxy was a less exciting place without them. The spacers had assured him that (by contrast to the benevolent Angels), Ice Maidens were dangerous and not to be trusted; but Anakin had always felt sorry for them, in their endless longing for a love that would never come. A single kiss, freely given, would set them free ... but the men who sought their embrace only knew selfish desire ...
Okay, so maybe Obi-Wan has a point about the romanticizing.
Maybe it was always inevitable, that he would look at Ryn and think of Ice Maidens as he’d looked at Padmé and thought of Angels. Maybe it was because he’d been thinking about Padmé earlier in the day, and Angels, and it had seemed natural to compare Ryn to something to ... he didn’t know. Years later, he would look back and wonder if this was the moment when he could have changed everything, if this was where he started comparing Ryn to Padmé and finding her lacking, if that day set them all in the course they’d follow unquestioning for the rest of their lives, if he could have saved one or both or maybe all of them just by letting two women be themselves and nothing like each other. By letting that be all right. Or maybe even by choosing differently, the woman he could have instead of the woman he’d dreamed. But at the time it seemed natural to think of Ryn as one of the Ice Maidens, dangerous to hold and yet somehow undeniable, too. And he felt sorry for her, as he’d always felt sorry for them. She moved through the Temple as a stranger, silent and alone, and Anakin couldn’t help but know her pain, like an echo of his own. Maybe -
“Padawan Skywalker?”
Anakin turned around and nearly fell out of his window seat. “Ryn?”
She crouched there in the stairwell beside him as though his thoughts had summoned her, eyes wide on his and inexplicably frightened. “I thought - I felt - were you calling me?”
“What?” said Anakin, startled. “No.” And then he remembered. “But I was thinking about you.”
Ryn dropped her eyes. “Oh.” He didn’t so much hear her sigh as feel it, a faint exhalation in the Force and in the air around him. “It’s been so long - I’d almost given up - and then today I felt you so clearly - but if you did not summon me, then I should go -”
“Wait!” said Anakin, catching her wrist before she could turn away. He knew almost at once that touching her had been a mistake; he could feel the leap of excitement in her nerves, sudden joy quickly silenced. He hung on anyway; dropping her as if burned would have been even worse. “Stay and talk to me.”
A puzzled expression crossed Ryn’s features and then vanished, as though her stillness resisted such incursions of feeling. “About what?”
“Anything.” She wasn’t looking at him, but out the window over his right shoulder; Anakin tugged lightly on her wrist. “I thought that ... that thing you did ...”
“The touch,” Ryn supplied, still without looking.
“… was only supposed to last a few days.”
“It was,” said Ryn, and now she did look at him, her green eyes anxious. “If the connection isn’t reinforced, it fades very quickly - always! I’ve never known -”
Anakin interrupted her. “When you say reinforced …”
“With repeated touching. Or some other kind of closeness, I suppose. When my brother feels strongly, I can sense him from many lightyears away … but I have known him my whole life, and we are kin.” She spoke slowly, almost haltingly, but Anakin could not tell whether this was because she was unsure what to tell him, or because she was struggling with the words in Basic.
“And you felt me thinking about you,” he surmised, still trying to make the pieces fit.
Ryn ducked her head. “I always feel you, now,” she whispered miserably. He could feel her hand trembling in his grip, and shifted so that his palm rested against hers, a friendlier grip than holding onto her wrist.
“What do you mean?” he asked her, guarding his tone carefully. It would not do to spook her now, when she was so obviously frightened anyway.
“I - ever since we met - I - feel you, all the time.” Ryn struggled, her voice cracking over the words. “I don’t - I’ve never - I can’t explain it. But you’re always there, just out of reach. Like … like sunlight when your eyes are closed.”
Anakin stared at her, fairly certain he had never been compared to sunlight before. He started to speak, to ask her what she meant, but Ryn stopped him with a shake of her head, the gesture a warning and a plea for silence.
“And there’s - there’s more,” she finished all in a rush, gripping his hand tightly in her earnestness. “Your master told me - you’ve been having dreams - and I - I think maybe - you’re touching me, by mistake.”
“What?” shouted Anakin, the shock of this violation momentarily overcoming his resolution to stay calm.
“I tried to tighten my shields,” Ryn half-wailed, clinging to him now. “I swear, I didn’t want to but I tried anyway. And I won’t tell anyone what I … what I sensed, in your dreams. But I’ve never felt anything like this before, and I don’t know … how to make it stop.”
Anakin shook her off angrily, leaping to his feet in the curving stairwell. “You’ve been invading my mind, my privacy, my dreams -”
“No!” Ryn gasped, backing up a step. “No, I couldn’t! It’s the other way around!”
Anakin advanced on her, but Ryn must have found her nerve, because this time she stood her ground and didn’t move. “What other way?” he demanded, glaring at her as the fury built in his veins.
“You’re penetrating me,” Ryn answered, wary but certain. “You keep touching my mind, and I can’t keep you out. But I’m not - I’m not doing anything, it isn’t me. I wouldn’t have that kind of power, anyway. It’s all you.”
Anakin hung there on the step below her, feeling betrayed. Obi-Wan had known - he’d known about the dreams, and he’d talked to Ryn, and he hadn’t told Anakin any of it.
“When did you talk to Obi-Wan?” he asked quietly. His voice sounded unnaturally calm; detached.
“About a week and a half - ten days ago.”
Ten days. The same day Obi-Wan had asked him to find out about Ryn’s friends. He’d said then that he’d talked to her, but he hadn’t mentioned the dreams, or that she was there, in his mind. “You told him?”
Ryn was watching him now in obvious confusion. “I told him I had felt you in my own dreams,” she said cautiously. “I’ve tried to guard myself more carefully since then, but …”
“It hasn’t worked,” Anakin finished for her, and when Ryn shook her head in confirmation, her eyes still concerned on his face, some of the fight went out of him. “Great. I just - I need to be alone right now, okay?”
“Oh.” Ryn shuddered once, then regained control so quickly he could almost have imagined the lapse. “Of course.” She bit her lip uncertainly, still standing there instead of leaving him alone. “I’m sorry,” she said finally, with an awkward little jerk, and then dropped out of sight down the stairs.
: : :
Anakin walked for a long time - hours, maybe. The last vestiges of Coruscant’s glowing sunset had faded from the sky and the night was filled with brilliant city lights before he finally commed his master to meet him outside the Archives. This wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have in the quiet little beige sitting room.
“What is it?” Obi-Wan asked now, striding toward him down the concourse. “It sounded urgent.”
“It is urgent,” Anakin answered, “which is why I’m wondering how come you didn’t tell me ten days ago!”
Obi-Wan raised his eyebrows. “Tell you what, Anakin?”
“You knew!” Anakin half-shouted, but the concourse was empty at this time of day and no one was around to hear the disturbance. “You knew Ryn was in my head, that she was spying on my dreams, and you didn’t say anything!”
Obi-Wan held up both hands for silence, and Anakin, choked with anger and betrayal, obeyed. “Anakin, I can understand why you’re angry -”
Anakin scoffed, a rough noise of bitter scorn scraping in his throat.
“- but you must learn to discipline your feelings. Breathe. Quiet your mind. When you are calm, we will talk.”
“I want to talk NOW!” Anakin yelled, his master’s dismissal breaking through his fragile grasp of control.
“No, Anakin,” said Obi-Wan. His voice was not angry, but there was no give in it. “Only when you are calm will you be able to listen, and so only then will we talk. Go to your room now and meditate. Release your anger into the Force.” Anakin stood there staring at him, unable to believe his ears: Obi-Wan wasn’t even going to answer him? “Go,” said Obi-Wan again, and Anakin knew his tone would brook no argument.
Tears in his eyes, furious, he went.
This entry was originally posted at http://wyncatastrophe.dreamwidth.org/113583.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
- Anakin has interactions with other people besides Ryn and Obi-Wan in this sequence, thus reminding us that these characters don't exist in some mysterious isolation;
- A sneaky "flash-forward" scene, a technique I haven't used much before, gives us a glimpse into the fact that Anakin is at this point (mostly unconsciously) comparing Ryn to Padmé in his head and finding the former lacking, a choice that seems natural at the time but in fact starts to construct the framework in which their future interactions take place.
Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. This story is purely a work of fan fiction, and I am not making any profit from it.
Obi-Wan had asked him to find Ryn’s friends, and Anakin, eager to impress his master, did his best. The task was proving more difficult than he had expected, both because other duties called him out of the Temple all too often - even on light duty, he and Obi-Wan still managed to stay pretty busy - and because Obi-Wan’s instructions to “be discreet” kept him from taking the quickest route to the answers he sought. Instead of just asking the other Padawans what they knew about Ryn, he had to find a way to bring her name up in conversation so that it seemed natural. Anakin had always been best at a direct approach to any problem; these roundabout methods tested both his patience and his ingenuity.
He started out by talking to his own friends. Darra Thel-Tanis was out of the Temple on a mission with her own master, Soara Antana; but Tru Veld had at least heard of Ryn, and recognized her from Anakin’s description.
“I’ve never talked to her,” he said, eying Anakin curiously. “But was Babbit right?”
“About what?” Anakin asked, long accustomed to Tru’s habit of sharing his thoughts from the middle.
“He was some kind of special project from the Jedi Council, and that she was really weird. Did you meet her? Did she try to put a hex on you?”
“What?” said Anakin, startled. “Jedi don’t believe in hexes.”
“Of course not,” agreed Tru patiently, “but Orun might. She’s supposed to be from one of those planets where they believe in those things. Did she do anything funny?”
Anakin remembered Ryn’s brilliant fuchsia blush, the stain in her cheeks, the way she’d laid her hand agains his own, telling him that if he called her, she would come …
“No,” he said. “Of course not. She was normal.”
“Then why does the Council want her around?”
But that was a question no one seemed able to answer. Anakin, of course, had Ryn’s own answer, the one she had given to Obi-Wan; but none of the Padawans seemed to know why she was here or what she was doing, and Anakin kept his knowledge to himself, feeling that his master might be in Ryn’s confidence somehow. He didn’t want to betray her secrets, only to discover them.
But if Obi-Wan was in Ryn’s confidence, nobody else seemed to be. At the end of a ten-day, Anakin had reached the depressing conclusion that he was never going to find Ryn’s friends, because she didn’t have any.
He considered the problem one afternoon, as he climbed the long and winding stairs to an observation room in one of the Temple spires. The observation room itself was quietly busy at this time of day, with Knights and Padawans gathering to watch sunset over the Temple district, but the stairs below were empty and lit with arched windows. Anakin stepped off the spiraling staircase and into one of the casements, tucking himself into its curving walls with his feet against one side and his back to the other so that he caught easily, a seat for one, just out of the way, with a perfect view. He liked to come and sit here occasionally, though the spot was not quite as comfortable as it had been when he was young. It was a good place to sit and think, and Anakin found the view of Coruscant’s endless traffic, silent with walls and distance, hypnotically soothing. It helped him to clear his mind.
Today he needed that concentration to help him think what he would say to his master. A Jedi was not supposed to grow impatient with defeat, but to accept it and find another way. Only this time, Anakin was sure that he could not complete the task his master had set for him because there was no answer: if Ryn had been close to anybody in the Temple, he would have learned something by now. He hated to think of disappointing Obi-Wan, but maybe the fact that Ryn had made no friends could be useful information, a sign of ... something.
It’s a sign that she’s lonely, Anakin thought, and let his head thunk once again the transparisteel of the windowpane.
It wasn’t that his fellow Padawans didn’t know Ryn. They remembered her, anyway. The Temple community was diverse, but not huge, and Ryn wasn’t exactly inconspicuous; she didn’t wear the traditional Jedi robes, and her odd contrast of pale, almost blue-white skin with inky dark hair was striking, even a little spooky. She reminded Anakin of the legendary Ice Maidens of Ord Plutonia: enchanted images carved in ice, whose frozen beauty could trap unwary travelers.
Obi-Wan would have said that he was romanticizing, comparing Ryn to fabled creatures from spacer tales - but he wasn’t a kid any more, the little boy who’d asked Padmé if she was an Angel. He knew Ryn wasn’t an Ice Maiden; there probably weren’t any Ice Maidens. But Ryn looked the way Anakin had imagined them as a grubby little kid: very beautiful and very cold. He’d listened eagerly back then because he wanted so much to believe that such wonders really existed, the deceptively delicate Ice Maidens and the glowing Angels, too. Even monsters. The galaxy was a less exciting place without them. The spacers had assured him that (by contrast to the benevolent Angels), Ice Maidens were dangerous and not to be trusted; but Anakin had always felt sorry for them, in their endless longing for a love that would never come. A single kiss, freely given, would set them free ... but the men who sought their embrace only knew selfish desire ...
Okay, so maybe Obi-Wan has a point about the romanticizing.
Maybe it was always inevitable, that he would look at Ryn and think of Ice Maidens as he’d looked at Padmé and thought of Angels. Maybe it was because he’d been thinking about Padmé earlier in the day, and Angels, and it had seemed natural to compare Ryn to something to ... he didn’t know. Years later, he would look back and wonder if this was the moment when he could have changed everything, if this was where he started comparing Ryn to Padmé and finding her lacking, if that day set them all in the course they’d follow unquestioning for the rest of their lives, if he could have saved one or both or maybe all of them just by letting two women be themselves and nothing like each other. By letting that be all right. Or maybe even by choosing differently, the woman he could have instead of the woman he’d dreamed. But at the time it seemed natural to think of Ryn as one of the Ice Maidens, dangerous to hold and yet somehow undeniable, too. And he felt sorry for her, as he’d always felt sorry for them. She moved through the Temple as a stranger, silent and alone, and Anakin couldn’t help but know her pain, like an echo of his own. Maybe -
“Padawan Skywalker?”
Anakin turned around and nearly fell out of his window seat. “Ryn?”
She crouched there in the stairwell beside him as though his thoughts had summoned her, eyes wide on his and inexplicably frightened. “I thought - I felt - were you calling me?”
“What?” said Anakin, startled. “No.” And then he remembered. “But I was thinking about you.”
Ryn dropped her eyes. “Oh.” He didn’t so much hear her sigh as feel it, a faint exhalation in the Force and in the air around him. “It’s been so long - I’d almost given up - and then today I felt you so clearly - but if you did not summon me, then I should go -”
“Wait!” said Anakin, catching her wrist before she could turn away. He knew almost at once that touching her had been a mistake; he could feel the leap of excitement in her nerves, sudden joy quickly silenced. He hung on anyway; dropping her as if burned would have been even worse. “Stay and talk to me.”
A puzzled expression crossed Ryn’s features and then vanished, as though her stillness resisted such incursions of feeling. “About what?”
“Anything.” She wasn’t looking at him, but out the window over his right shoulder; Anakin tugged lightly on her wrist. “I thought that ... that thing you did ...”
“The touch,” Ryn supplied, still without looking.
“… was only supposed to last a few days.”
“It was,” said Ryn, and now she did look at him, her green eyes anxious. “If the connection isn’t reinforced, it fades very quickly - always! I’ve never known -”
Anakin interrupted her. “When you say reinforced …”
“With repeated touching. Or some other kind of closeness, I suppose. When my brother feels strongly, I can sense him from many lightyears away … but I have known him my whole life, and we are kin.” She spoke slowly, almost haltingly, but Anakin could not tell whether this was because she was unsure what to tell him, or because she was struggling with the words in Basic.
“And you felt me thinking about you,” he surmised, still trying to make the pieces fit.
Ryn ducked her head. “I always feel you, now,” she whispered miserably. He could feel her hand trembling in his grip, and shifted so that his palm rested against hers, a friendlier grip than holding onto her wrist.
“What do you mean?” he asked her, guarding his tone carefully. It would not do to spook her now, when she was so obviously frightened anyway.
“I - ever since we met - I - feel you, all the time.” Ryn struggled, her voice cracking over the words. “I don’t - I’ve never - I can’t explain it. But you’re always there, just out of reach. Like … like sunlight when your eyes are closed.”
Anakin stared at her, fairly certain he had never been compared to sunlight before. He started to speak, to ask her what she meant, but Ryn stopped him with a shake of her head, the gesture a warning and a plea for silence.
“And there’s - there’s more,” she finished all in a rush, gripping his hand tightly in her earnestness. “Your master told me - you’ve been having dreams - and I - I think maybe - you’re touching me, by mistake.”
“What?” shouted Anakin, the shock of this violation momentarily overcoming his resolution to stay calm.
“I tried to tighten my shields,” Ryn half-wailed, clinging to him now. “I swear, I didn’t want to but I tried anyway. And I won’t tell anyone what I … what I sensed, in your dreams. But I’ve never felt anything like this before, and I don’t know … how to make it stop.”
Anakin shook her off angrily, leaping to his feet in the curving stairwell. “You’ve been invading my mind, my privacy, my dreams -”
“No!” Ryn gasped, backing up a step. “No, I couldn’t! It’s the other way around!”
Anakin advanced on her, but Ryn must have found her nerve, because this time she stood her ground and didn’t move. “What other way?” he demanded, glaring at her as the fury built in his veins.
“You’re penetrating me,” Ryn answered, wary but certain. “You keep touching my mind, and I can’t keep you out. But I’m not - I’m not doing anything, it isn’t me. I wouldn’t have that kind of power, anyway. It’s all you.”
Anakin hung there on the step below her, feeling betrayed. Obi-Wan had known - he’d known about the dreams, and he’d talked to Ryn, and he hadn’t told Anakin any of it.
“When did you talk to Obi-Wan?” he asked quietly. His voice sounded unnaturally calm; detached.
“About a week and a half - ten days ago.”
Ten days. The same day Obi-Wan had asked him to find out about Ryn’s friends. He’d said then that he’d talked to her, but he hadn’t mentioned the dreams, or that she was there, in his mind. “You told him?”
Ryn was watching him now in obvious confusion. “I told him I had felt you in my own dreams,” she said cautiously. “I’ve tried to guard myself more carefully since then, but …”
“It hasn’t worked,” Anakin finished for her, and when Ryn shook her head in confirmation, her eyes still concerned on his face, some of the fight went out of him. “Great. I just - I need to be alone right now, okay?”
“Oh.” Ryn shuddered once, then regained control so quickly he could almost have imagined the lapse. “Of course.” She bit her lip uncertainly, still standing there instead of leaving him alone. “I’m sorry,” she said finally, with an awkward little jerk, and then dropped out of sight down the stairs.
: : :
Anakin walked for a long time - hours, maybe. The last vestiges of Coruscant’s glowing sunset had faded from the sky and the night was filled with brilliant city lights before he finally commed his master to meet him outside the Archives. This wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have in the quiet little beige sitting room.
“What is it?” Obi-Wan asked now, striding toward him down the concourse. “It sounded urgent.”
“It is urgent,” Anakin answered, “which is why I’m wondering how come you didn’t tell me ten days ago!”
Obi-Wan raised his eyebrows. “Tell you what, Anakin?”
“You knew!” Anakin half-shouted, but the concourse was empty at this time of day and no one was around to hear the disturbance. “You knew Ryn was in my head, that she was spying on my dreams, and you didn’t say anything!”
Obi-Wan held up both hands for silence, and Anakin, choked with anger and betrayal, obeyed. “Anakin, I can understand why you’re angry -”
Anakin scoffed, a rough noise of bitter scorn scraping in his throat.
“- but you must learn to discipline your feelings. Breathe. Quiet your mind. When you are calm, we will talk.”
“I want to talk NOW!” Anakin yelled, his master’s dismissal breaking through his fragile grasp of control.
“No, Anakin,” said Obi-Wan. His voice was not angry, but there was no give in it. “Only when you are calm will you be able to listen, and so only then will we talk. Go to your room now and meditate. Release your anger into the Force.” Anakin stood there staring at him, unable to believe his ears: Obi-Wan wasn’t even going to answer him? “Go,” said Obi-Wan again, and Anakin knew his tone would brook no argument.
Tears in his eyes, furious, he went.
This entry was originally posted at http://wyncatastrophe.dreamwidth.org/113583.html. Please comment there using OpenID.