Aha! Well, sort of.
The present chapter in my Free Fall revision is getting better - I think, anyway. Still needs some work. Thanks go to
pronker and
kittywriter for their feedback on the earlier draft. I'm still tinkering, but I think at this point I have something pieced together that carries (some) emotional reality and yet (sort of) makes plotty sense. My main worry is that the profundity of Ryn's distress, while psychologically plausible, may seem a little disproportionate to readers. That's the thing about depression, of course: one's feelings of despair are out of all proportion to the present situation. But the nice thing about fiction is that things make a lot more sense than they tend to do in real life, which means that while Ryn's feelings may be out of proportion, the writing should not be. I've played around with her scenes in this chapter; I'd love to know if you guys think they are an improvement over the last version (if you've read it), or if they ring true with the elegance of fiction here (if you haven't).
A further concern is how I'll get all three characters spaced out properly for Obi-Wan to deal with the science stuff in the next chapter, where I think we're going to talk about vegetovascular dystonia, which I am not making up. I still think I need to work in some more exposition about Jedi vs. Lorethan philosophy here somewhere, but that's kinda hard because the only character who could reasonably be expected to address it (Ryn) is not exactly firing on all thrusters in this chapter.
Anyway, I have added three new scenes, in addition to editing the ones I posted last time, and I welcome feedback from anyone who has time to leave a comment!
______________ Part VIII, Draft ________________
This is how it feels to be Ryn Orun, right now:
It hurts everywhere.
The pain rises up to meet you like it’s bleeding through your veins, and that would make sense, this pounding that takes over from inside your chest, maybe that’s why they call it heartache ...
You hear yourself laughing weakly at the small joke, and you know you’re mad with pain, giddy with it, you weren’t ready to feel this much of anything. It was so much easier sleepwalking through life ...
The dark opens its arms to greet you and you give yourself up to it like a lover, like it’s always been there, waiting, and you were meant for each other.
It’s a relief not to be fighting any more, and you just let go.
: : :
Ryn pushed herself up on hands and knees, still shaking all over, breathing raggedly. There was vomit on the floor; she had lost control of her stomach sometime before she blacked out. That had been happening more and more often lately; she wasn’t even sure how much of her physical distress was caused by the Temple treatments and how much was just her pathetically wounded reaction to Anakin’s probably-justified rejection.
Overreacting, she told herself, dragging her aching limbs into a sitting position against the wall. You’re overreacting. But while that might be true, it didn’t help how she felt, and right now she felt too much; she wasn’t ready for this, the joy or the pain, all of it was more than she could stand …
Ryn wasn’t fool enough to believe that feelings were ephemeral things, separable from the rest of one’s being, that could be enjoyed or discarded at will. The Jedi were wrong about this, she was sure of it; pain, all pain, was a sign of injury. It could be survived, it could be overcome, it could even (sometimes) be healed; but it could not be safely forgotten. The Jedi forgot thewholeness of Being, of lived reality as a single entity: they said luminous beings are we and then acted as if physical pains were the only kind that had reality, and only psychic joys had any truth. They separated themselves from themselves, mind from body - but life in the galaxy meant both, and the state of true separation was what most beings called Death …
It's just philosophy. But it still hurts.
She sat shivering on the floor of a cold Temple corridor, lost in the darkness, and let herself fall apart.
: : :
Obi-Wan knew the part of the Temple where Ryn’s quarters were listed, but he hadn’t been there in years. This was a place with walls steeped in failure and shame and the fear of uncertainty, a place where dreams came to die.
Less poetically, it was where Agri-Corps workers on home leave and the Younglings receiving some final training before joining them ate and slept, in the Temple and not of it, present but not belonging. It was, Obi-Wan could not help thinking, the perfect place to find Ryn.
She wasn’t there.
He knocked on her door, called her name, focused the Force to find signs of life, all to no avail. He was lifting his hand to knock again when a door to his right slid open, and a half-dressed woman just approaching middle age leaned out.
“What’s all the noise?”
Obi-Wan turned and gave her his best smile. “I’m sorry to disturb your rest,” he said genially. “I’m looking for the girl who lives here. Ryn Orun?”
“Don’e look like she wants to be found,” the woman remarked. She looked him over with a critical eye. “What d’you want with her, anyway?”
“To talk,” said Obi-Wan.
“Huh. Awful late in the evening for conversation.”
What the ... oh. In spite of the woman’s glowering stare, Obi-Wan found himself grinning in amusement. He stepped over and held out a hand. “My name is Obi-Wan Kenobi, and I promise I really do just want to talk,” he said firmly. “Are you a friend of Ryn’s?”
The woman stared at him suspiciously a moment longer, then took the hand. “Name’s Mathilde,” she said brusquely. “And I don’t know the little git. But I do know she’s too young to be let on her own.”
“She might surprise you,” Obi-Wan said. “But I’m glad she’s got somebody looking out for her. Any idea where she is now?”
“How should I know?” Mathilde asked, hitching her robe irritably. “Told you I don’t know her, di’n’ I?” She flapped a hand down the corridor, that same robe flapping garishly, its bright colors catching the light. It was certainly not Temple issue, but enforcement of the Code ran much looser in the Agri-Corps, a sort of compensation prize for the potential its members had never lived up to. “But you can’t hang around here all night. Looks like to me you’re bang out of luck.”
Obi-Wan gave her another smile, hanging on to his patience. “And so I am. If you see Ryn, do please tell her Master Kenobi stopped by.”
“Won’t see her,” Mathilde grunted. “Keeps to herself, that’s what.” She raked another disparaging glance over him, from head to toe. “Can’t blame her.”
There wasn’t much he could say to that. “Good evening to you,” he said anyway, and left the place he’d almost lived.
: : :
It comes in the night, a dark smear of blood that means she’s a woman now. All things considered, she thinks she might have preferred something less messy and a little more impressive to mark her passage into womanhood. But what she has is this: a glob of stale, sharp-smelling effluvia in her underwear, and a sinking feeling that things are only going to get worse from here.
For a moment she is tempted to steal a rag from one of the older girls’ packs and just pretend that it hasn’t really happened yet, for as long as she can get away with it. Her breasts are still awfully small; surely they could go unnoticed for a couple more years, if she just keeps wearing bigger people’s castoffs?
But in the end she does the responsible thing, the expected thing, the thing everybody’s been waiting for her to do ever since the day she was born - although not, it has to be said, with any great hopes that she will do it well or gracefully. She washes her underwear in the river, tugs on a fresh pair, and goes to tell her brother his clan has a woman now.
The feast celebrating her new womanhood is a miserable affair, largely because she’s so uncomfortable with all the expectations. It is brought home to her, now more than ever, that one is born female, but learns to be a woman - and nobody has ever taught her anything about it.
The young men her brother has invited, who should have been her suitors, vying for her attention, do their best to look politely interested, but she knows that in reality they aren’t any more enthusiastic about her than she is about them. She finds herself standing against a wall out of the firelight, her woefully small breasts bared to view as the custom demands, and fails entirely to feel the thrill of anticipation that would supposedly signal her readiness to claim one of these fellows for her own.
She doesn’t invite any of them to bed, and only her brother looks disappointed.
: : :
Anakin came back to himself with a jerk, feeling slightly sick with disorientation. He was sitting on the meditation pad in his own chambers in the Temple, and he was a fifteen-year-old boy who had just experienced getting a period. He could still feel the phantom ache of cramps, a drawing tightness in muscles he didn’t even have.
He had had visions from the Force before, of course, misleading as those could often be (he shoved the memory of Yaddle aside with a burst of renewed guilt and shame). But they had never felt like this, had never let him see inside another being. It was disconcerting and shocking and compelling, all at once.
Anakin had never seen those people or places before, but he had no trouble identifying them, just the same. The brother from the vision looked too much like Ryn for the resemblance to be mistaken: the masculine version of Ryn’s sharp, slightly square jaw and high cheekbones, with the straight nose drawn a little longer and broader, the forehead a little higher, the mouth not quite as full. His eyes were hazel where Ryn’s were green, but he shared her wild extravagance of lashes.
And he was clearly disappointed in her.
Anakin could see him - a memory, now - standing quietly to one side, sipping some strong-smelling brew from a carved goblet and watching the failure of his sister’s debut. Anakin couldn’t tell why exactly Ryn had failed; in the vision, she had believed herself to be physically inadequate, vaguely androgynous and therefore not suited for sex, but Anakin didn’t really feel that that was it.
It’s the same reason she hasn’t made any friends in the Temple, he thought dully. But why?
The taste of Ryn’s mind had left him groggy and confused. It felt familiar and strange at the same time: both like and unlike the Ryn he’d met here on Coruscant - muffled somehow, almost numb, as though she hadn’t really cared what was happening to her at the time. Withdrawn from reality.
He stretched out with his feelings, seeking in the Force for a trace of the personality he’d felt in his dreams without knowing it …
…and recoiled into himself, queasy with shock. The sick feeling he’d been fighting a moment ago wasn’t a memory, and it wasn’t coming from the vision; it wasn’t even really his own. It was Ryn’s, and it was happening now. If he concentrated, he could find her still: horribly alone, swamped in a misery too encompassing to be pain.
Whatever it was, it was getting worse.
Anakin threw himself at the door and started running.
: : :
Ryn answered the comlink automatically, old habits of obedience dying hard or not at all. “Orun.”
“Ryn, it’s Ma - it’s Obi-Wan.”
“Oh.”
There was a pause. Then: “Ryn? Are you all right?”
Good question. She’d thought she tasted blood earlier; how much of a problem that was probably depended on where it was coming from. “I’m fine.” The rasp in her voice wouldn’t have convinced a three-year-old in the Creche. She cleared her throat and tried again. “What did you want?”
“To talk to you.” Obi-Wan sounded uncertain.
“Oh.” That wasn’t the right response. Ryn remembered dimly that she had a mission and she was supposed to care about it; she was supposed to be getting the Jedi on her side, Loreth’s side. “I can meet you,” she said, dredging up the words with an almost painful effort. “Where?”
“No.” There was something odd about Obi-Wan’s voice; she should have been trying to figure out what and why, but her thoughts kept slipping away into the dark. “I’ll come to you. Where are you, right now?”
Ryn cast a weary glance about her, surveying her surroundings without much interest. “I don’t know.”
“...you don’t know?”
She tried to take a deeper breath, grimacing when her aching lungs protested. “Somewhere beneath the Eastern Spire, I think.”
“All right,” said Obi-Wan after a moment. “Stay … just stay there. I’ll be there soon.”
Ryn dropped the comlink and closed her eyes.
This entry was originally posted at http://wyncatastrophe.dreamwidth.org/114159.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
pronker and
kittywriter for their feedback on the earlier draft. I'm still tinkering, but I think at this point I have something pieced together that carries (some) emotional reality and yet (sort of) makes plotty sense. My main worry is that the profundity of Ryn's distress, while psychologically plausible, may seem a little disproportionate to readers. That's the thing about depression, of course: one's feelings of despair are out of all proportion to the present situation. But the nice thing about fiction is that things make a lot more sense than they tend to do in real life, which means that while Ryn's feelings may be out of proportion, the writing should not be. I've played around with her scenes in this chapter; I'd love to know if you guys think they are an improvement over the last version (if you've read it), or if they ring true with the elegance of fiction here (if you haven't).
A further concern is how I'll get all three characters spaced out properly for Obi-Wan to deal with the science stuff in the next chapter, where I think we're going to talk about vegetovascular dystonia, which I am not making up. I still think I need to work in some more exposition about Jedi vs. Lorethan philosophy here somewhere, but that's kinda hard because the only character who could reasonably be expected to address it (Ryn) is not exactly firing on all thrusters in this chapter.
Anyway, I have added three new scenes, in addition to editing the ones I posted last time, and I welcome feedback from anyone who has time to leave a comment!
______________ Part VIII, Draft ________________
This is how it feels to be Ryn Orun, right now:
It hurts everywhere.
The pain rises up to meet you like it’s bleeding through your veins, and that would make sense, this pounding that takes over from inside your chest, maybe that’s why they call it heartache ...
You hear yourself laughing weakly at the small joke, and you know you’re mad with pain, giddy with it, you weren’t ready to feel this much of anything. It was so much easier sleepwalking through life ...
The dark opens its arms to greet you and you give yourself up to it like a lover, like it’s always been there, waiting, and you were meant for each other.
It’s a relief not to be fighting any more, and you just let go.
: : :
Ryn pushed herself up on hands and knees, still shaking all over, breathing raggedly. There was vomit on the floor; she had lost control of her stomach sometime before she blacked out. That had been happening more and more often lately; she wasn’t even sure how much of her physical distress was caused by the Temple treatments and how much was just her pathetically wounded reaction to Anakin’s probably-justified rejection.
Overreacting, she told herself, dragging her aching limbs into a sitting position against the wall. You’re overreacting. But while that might be true, it didn’t help how she felt, and right now she felt too much; she wasn’t ready for this, the joy or the pain, all of it was more than she could stand …
Ryn wasn’t fool enough to believe that feelings were ephemeral things, separable from the rest of one’s being, that could be enjoyed or discarded at will. The Jedi were wrong about this, she was sure of it; pain, all pain, was a sign of injury. It could be survived, it could be overcome, it could even (sometimes) be healed; but it could not be safely forgotten. The Jedi forgot thewholeness of Being, of lived reality as a single entity: they said luminous beings are we and then acted as if physical pains were the only kind that had reality, and only psychic joys had any truth. They separated themselves from themselves, mind from body - but life in the galaxy meant both, and the state of true separation was what most beings called Death …
It's just philosophy. But it still hurts.
She sat shivering on the floor of a cold Temple corridor, lost in the darkness, and let herself fall apart.
: : :
Obi-Wan knew the part of the Temple where Ryn’s quarters were listed, but he hadn’t been there in years. This was a place with walls steeped in failure and shame and the fear of uncertainty, a place where dreams came to die.
Less poetically, it was where Agri-Corps workers on home leave and the Younglings receiving some final training before joining them ate and slept, in the Temple and not of it, present but not belonging. It was, Obi-Wan could not help thinking, the perfect place to find Ryn.
She wasn’t there.
He knocked on her door, called her name, focused the Force to find signs of life, all to no avail. He was lifting his hand to knock again when a door to his right slid open, and a half-dressed woman just approaching middle age leaned out.
“What’s all the noise?”
Obi-Wan turned and gave her his best smile. “I’m sorry to disturb your rest,” he said genially. “I’m looking for the girl who lives here. Ryn Orun?”
“Don’e look like she wants to be found,” the woman remarked. She looked him over with a critical eye. “What d’you want with her, anyway?”
“To talk,” said Obi-Wan.
“Huh. Awful late in the evening for conversation.”
What the ... oh. In spite of the woman’s glowering stare, Obi-Wan found himself grinning in amusement. He stepped over and held out a hand. “My name is Obi-Wan Kenobi, and I promise I really do just want to talk,” he said firmly. “Are you a friend of Ryn’s?”
The woman stared at him suspiciously a moment longer, then took the hand. “Name’s Mathilde,” she said brusquely. “And I don’t know the little git. But I do know she’s too young to be let on her own.”
“She might surprise you,” Obi-Wan said. “But I’m glad she’s got somebody looking out for her. Any idea where she is now?”
“How should I know?” Mathilde asked, hitching her robe irritably. “Told you I don’t know her, di’n’ I?” She flapped a hand down the corridor, that same robe flapping garishly, its bright colors catching the light. It was certainly not Temple issue, but enforcement of the Code ran much looser in the Agri-Corps, a sort of compensation prize for the potential its members had never lived up to. “But you can’t hang around here all night. Looks like to me you’re bang out of luck.”
Obi-Wan gave her another smile, hanging on to his patience. “And so I am. If you see Ryn, do please tell her Master Kenobi stopped by.”
“Won’t see her,” Mathilde grunted. “Keeps to herself, that’s what.” She raked another disparaging glance over him, from head to toe. “Can’t blame her.”
There wasn’t much he could say to that. “Good evening to you,” he said anyway, and left the place he’d almost lived.
: : :
It comes in the night, a dark smear of blood that means she’s a woman now. All things considered, she thinks she might have preferred something less messy and a little more impressive to mark her passage into womanhood. But what she has is this: a glob of stale, sharp-smelling effluvia in her underwear, and a sinking feeling that things are only going to get worse from here.
For a moment she is tempted to steal a rag from one of the older girls’ packs and just pretend that it hasn’t really happened yet, for as long as she can get away with it. Her breasts are still awfully small; surely they could go unnoticed for a couple more years, if she just keeps wearing bigger people’s castoffs?
But in the end she does the responsible thing, the expected thing, the thing everybody’s been waiting for her to do ever since the day she was born - although not, it has to be said, with any great hopes that she will do it well or gracefully. She washes her underwear in the river, tugs on a fresh pair, and goes to tell her brother his clan has a woman now.
The feast celebrating her new womanhood is a miserable affair, largely because she’s so uncomfortable with all the expectations. It is brought home to her, now more than ever, that one is born female, but learns to be a woman - and nobody has ever taught her anything about it.
The young men her brother has invited, who should have been her suitors, vying for her attention, do their best to look politely interested, but she knows that in reality they aren’t any more enthusiastic about her than she is about them. She finds herself standing against a wall out of the firelight, her woefully small breasts bared to view as the custom demands, and fails entirely to feel the thrill of anticipation that would supposedly signal her readiness to claim one of these fellows for her own.
She doesn’t invite any of them to bed, and only her brother looks disappointed.
: : :
Anakin came back to himself with a jerk, feeling slightly sick with disorientation. He was sitting on the meditation pad in his own chambers in the Temple, and he was a fifteen-year-old boy who had just experienced getting a period. He could still feel the phantom ache of cramps, a drawing tightness in muscles he didn’t even have.
He had had visions from the Force before, of course, misleading as those could often be (he shoved the memory of Yaddle aside with a burst of renewed guilt and shame). But they had never felt like this, had never let him see inside another being. It was disconcerting and shocking and compelling, all at once.
Anakin had never seen those people or places before, but he had no trouble identifying them, just the same. The brother from the vision looked too much like Ryn for the resemblance to be mistaken: the masculine version of Ryn’s sharp, slightly square jaw and high cheekbones, with the straight nose drawn a little longer and broader, the forehead a little higher, the mouth not quite as full. His eyes were hazel where Ryn’s were green, but he shared her wild extravagance of lashes.
And he was clearly disappointed in her.
Anakin could see him - a memory, now - standing quietly to one side, sipping some strong-smelling brew from a carved goblet and watching the failure of his sister’s debut. Anakin couldn’t tell why exactly Ryn had failed; in the vision, she had believed herself to be physically inadequate, vaguely androgynous and therefore not suited for sex, but Anakin didn’t really feel that that was it.
It’s the same reason she hasn’t made any friends in the Temple, he thought dully. But why?
The taste of Ryn’s mind had left him groggy and confused. It felt familiar and strange at the same time: both like and unlike the Ryn he’d met here on Coruscant - muffled somehow, almost numb, as though she hadn’t really cared what was happening to her at the time. Withdrawn from reality.
He stretched out with his feelings, seeking in the Force for a trace of the personality he’d felt in his dreams without knowing it …
…and recoiled into himself, queasy with shock. The sick feeling he’d been fighting a moment ago wasn’t a memory, and it wasn’t coming from the vision; it wasn’t even really his own. It was Ryn’s, and it was happening now. If he concentrated, he could find her still: horribly alone, swamped in a misery too encompassing to be pain.
Whatever it was, it was getting worse.
Anakin threw himself at the door and started running.
: : :
Ryn answered the comlink automatically, old habits of obedience dying hard or not at all. “Orun.”
“Ryn, it’s Ma - it’s Obi-Wan.”
“Oh.”
There was a pause. Then: “Ryn? Are you all right?”
Good question. She’d thought she tasted blood earlier; how much of a problem that was probably depended on where it was coming from. “I’m fine.” The rasp in her voice wouldn’t have convinced a three-year-old in the Creche. She cleared her throat and tried again. “What did you want?”
“To talk to you.” Obi-Wan sounded uncertain.
“Oh.” That wasn’t the right response. Ryn remembered dimly that she had a mission and she was supposed to care about it; she was supposed to be getting the Jedi on her side, Loreth’s side. “I can meet you,” she said, dredging up the words with an almost painful effort. “Where?”
“No.” There was something odd about Obi-Wan’s voice; she should have been trying to figure out what and why, but her thoughts kept slipping away into the dark. “I’ll come to you. Where are you, right now?”
Ryn cast a weary glance about her, surveying her surroundings without much interest. “I don’t know.”
“...you don’t know?”
She tried to take a deeper breath, grimacing when her aching lungs protested. “Somewhere beneath the Eastern Spire, I think.”
“All right,” said Obi-Wan after a moment. “Stay … just stay there. I’ll be there soon.”
Ryn dropped the comlink and closed her eyes.
This entry was originally posted at http://wyncatastrophe.dreamwidth.org/114159.html. Please comment there using OpenID.