anakin (anakin) wrote in thedoorway, @ 2013-02-04 09:32:00 |
|
|||
Sometimes Leia really just needed to get out of Potts Tower, even though she was still hesitant about where to go. She had spent time on Coruscant, which frankly was much bigger than New York City, but at least there, she knew where to go. Here, everything was unfamiliar. But it didn't do anyone any good to stay cooped up in a building all the time, so Leia decided to go for a walk and, hopefully, make a stop at the market. She was only about a block away when she heard the catcall. She stopped, turned even though she knew it was a bad idea. There were two men, larger than her, larger even than Han, if she was comparing them to him, and they were advancing on her. "Oh hey, look at what we have here. Are you the real Princess Leia?" one of them asked. He had a strange tattoo along his neck, visible out of the top of his shirt. "Bet you're feisty then. Can't imagine Han Solo would settle for anything less." He nudged his friend and they both laughed. She swallowed and straightened. "I am, and if you knew anything about me, you'd know I don't take kindly to this sort of conversation or taunting." "Oh? And what are you gonna do about it?" the second one asked, reaching out to grab her elbow even as she tried to pull away. He tightened his grip. "I don't suppose you've got a lightsaber or a blaster hidden in that dress, now do you?" "Let go of me," she commanded through gritted teeth. The spike in the Force grabbed Anakin's attention despite the busy chaos of the New York City crowds -- a clear note amidst a blend of background noise. The past few months had fostered a familiarity that led him to suspect the source, and as he allowed himself to be led to the market, his suspicions were confirmed. Leia, cornered by two large, looming men...men that were clearly unwelcome. They scarcely knew each other -- he was pretty sure she didn't even like him...at least wasn't comfortable with his presence here -- but seeing that man's aggressive grip on his daughter's arm sparked in him a protectiveness that seemed to forget it for a moment. Whether or not she was capable of defending her was less of an issue (he knew his daughter was strong and spirited enough to hold her own), but rather in that cornered and restrained stance, thoughts of his mother flashed through his mind. It was not because these thugs were likely to drag Leia off and torture to death, but because he knew whatever plans they did have were harmful, and Anakin was never one to feel comfortable sitting around waiting to see if someone would get hurt without his intervention. Harnessing the Force, he took hold of the elbow-grip, and with an almost casual-looking tug of his hand, he broke the man's hold with a finger-prying yank. For a moment, Anakin kept the hand frozen in the air as he walked up to them. The startled search finally identified him as the source of the interruption, and he met their recognition with an unflinching gaze. When he spoke, his voice remained calm, almost conversational -- a tone he frequently employed when engaged with recurring Separatist targets -- but the focus in his eyes held the embers of a fire being kept delicately at bay. "Not that fun, is it?" he said with his eyes flickering between them but settling primarily on the one who had grabbed Leia, extending his Force-hold down to man's own elbow to prove his point. "I suggest you apologize and move along before you make a very big mistake." Leia was surprised when the man's grip let go out of nowhere, and she stepped back, fully prepared to knee one then the other in the stomach (or crotch) then make a run for it, but she stopped, fully aware of someone else approaching them. She turned and saw her fa -- saw him stalking toward them, clearly concentrating on the two men who had been taunting her. She realized from the look on his face and the way his hand was held at his side, that he was using the Force. Leia had seen it before -- seen Vader manipulate another person's actions like this, forced someone else to be hurt. She looked away. The man who hadn't been manhandling her snickered. "Look, Daddy came to rescue the fair princess," he said, but sobered when he looked at his companion and realized he was actually being held in a Force grip. She took that as all the motivation she needed to grip his shoulder and slam her knee into the joint at his hipbone. He doubled over. The first man was standing still, his face a bit pale. "Sorry," he squeaked out (not from the pain, though it was uncomfortable to feel someone's grip on him without seeing that person's hand gripping him, but more from the fact of who it was that just showed up). "We're going. We're going." Noting that the men were suitably ashen and apologetic (even if it was simply because they valued the continued use of their breathing passages and weren't interested in further knee-jabs), Anakin released the man's arm with a bit more of a push than was arguably necessary -- though with the way the man was already starting to scramble in the other direction, it made little difference. The men wasted no time in their escape, and even before they had vanished around the corner of a building, the tension in Anakin's eyes cooled to meet his otherwise calm demeanor. Glancing over at Leia, he saw that she had recovered admirably. Every bit as regal as her mother, even if she might not see it that way herself. "I trust you're alright? That was a well-placed hit," he commented with the touch of a compliment, suspecting that she had received at least some degree of training; generally, that kind of effectiveness wasn't random. The fact that some other person was responsible for guiding her skill was a little jab to the part of him that yearned to know and raise his own children, but he made an effort to push it down... As the men struggled to run off, Leia took a moment to calm herself and to regain her thoughts. She was angry that he of all people had shown up. But at least he acted in quite the same way she always imagined he would -- with violence and a show of power. Leia narrowed her eyes at Anakin and didn't answer him straight off with anything more than a sharp nod. She adjusted the bag she had over her shoulder and smoothed down the front of her dress. "I was handling that just fine myself," she said coldly a moment later. "There was no need for you to come and show off your torture techniques." "'Torture techniques'?" Anakin asked with a genuine tone of surprise, lifting his eyebrows as his arms crossed across his chest. "Trust me, you did way more damage to that one guy's hip than I did to the other guy's hand." Even if he should have expected it, he couldn't help but feel ruffled that even trying to help his daughter resulted in scorn -- more scorn than usual, even. "You aren't helpless, and maybe you could have taken on those two huge men while pinned up against the wall, but I am a Jedi, and I'm not in the business of sitting back and waiting for people to get hurt before helping them." Well -- actually, the Order as he knew it did sit around and wait for people to get hurt before helping them, in most cases, but Anakin couldn't claim that was a policy he was in favor of, whether the victim in question was a friend or a world of strangers...a mother or a wife. No matter how many times it landed him in unfavorable circumstances, he just couldn't passively watch. Leia shook her head again and gave a huff. "Well, as you can see, I'm fine. I need to finish my errand, so if you'll excuse me..." she turned and continued walking in the direction she had been headed before she'd been stopped. Anakin's arrival ruffled her more than she wanted to admit. He might say that he was a Jedi -- and it was true that she'd spoken with Luke, before, about Jedis and such, but her knowledge of them and history with them was severely limited. In fact, the only times in her life she really ever saw the Force at work was with anything that Vader did. And what she just witnessed Anakin doing wasn't so far removed from the other bits. "Leia," Anakin called out before he really put much thought into what he was going to say or whether it was a particularly good idea to say it. Watching her walk away, knowing by her cold mood that she had not interpreted the intervention in any sort of positive way -- maybe he was better off letting it lie, but on the long list of things he maybe-ought-to-do-but-rarely-did, letting things lie was another prominent one. "I know you have no interest in getting to know me. I know you want to see everything I do as possessing some evil intention, but I didn't come to show off or hurt anyone." Even if it could have (deservedly) escalated in that direction, had they gotten their way... Anakin's eyes were focused, passionate but open in a guilelessness that reach down to a very different emotional space than the budding anger he'd felt toward the men harassing his daughter. He wanted her to understand him, even just a little... That he wasn’t as bad as she might think. "I'm not perfect, but I'm trying. Believe it or not, I don't want to be Darth Vader any more than you want to be around Darth Vader." Leia stopped at the sound of her name, and she turned to look at him as he walked up to her and kept talking. Somewhere inside of her, she understood that the man who stood before her wasn't the monster she actually did know, but it was very difficult for her to comprehend that he might not ever become him. Or, in Anakin's own words, might not want to become him. "You used the Force to manhandle that man, to get him away from me. I watched Vader do the same, to worse ends. How can you stand there and tell me that it's not the same?" Anakin furrowed his brow, the connection between a Force-grip and Force-choke delicate and more than a little bit uncomfortable. Even at this point, he knew he had slipped into his future self's trademark when he had needed to extract information necessary to save Padme and his padawan Ahsoka -- something he wasn't proud of, but that had been infinitely more effective than asking nicely -- and for a brief moment, he simply took in the sight of Leia. A young woman who had spent her life trying to topple an Empire...an Empire that Anakin himself was more than a little bit responsible for. Even in his wish to help and protect, his future abuse of the Force -- and any more recent abuses of it, though the very thought sparked a defensiveness within him -- had colored her view. "Jedi harness the Force all the time. We remove an assailant from the situation without a lightsaber when that's possible. I was removing him from the situation without hurting him." And to a degree, he had been making a point...probably more along the lines of her concern, but hardly the same as Force-choking as far as he was concerned. He knew he walked a thin line, that maybe it had been too thin a line to walk when Leia was clearly so uncomfortable, and yet.. "I know it looks the same when all you've really seen is the dark side, but..." He dipped and shook his head slightly before looking back to her. "Maybe I should have just walked up and 'asked nicely', but breaking someone's grip and physically restraining is not the same as physically choking them, and neither is doing the same with the Force.” Leia was listening to what he was saying, what he was arguing, really, and it sounded more and more like an excuse to her. He was excusing his behavior on technicalities. She crossed her arms and took on a rigid stance, shaking her head. "Maybe you should have just let me take care of it the way I was going to take care of it. I didn't need your help or your interference." "Maybe so, but that doesn't change the fact that by choosing to step in, I wasn't committing some act of torture, as you seem to be suggesting," he countered, trying to curb his frustration. Maybe there was nothing he could do to change her mind, but he sincerely doubted the Sith he became in that story had many helpful intentions -- it simply wasn't that black-and-white. "Do you want me to apologize for helping you?" She shook her head. "No, of course not. That would be ridiculous." What Leia did want, was to be on her way to the market to shop for what she needed to shop for, and then so she could get back to her home and relax. She didn't want to be having this conversation, now, out in the open, where anyone could come stumbling upon them. The response threw him off just briefly -- Anakin had expected further argument -- and once again, he lifted his eyebrows. If she had a problem with it but didn't think it was a problem to even consider apologizing for (not that he actually wanted to apologize for something that was so ridiculous), he didn't know what she wanted. Anakin knew that the disconnect was still there, that the stiff and unfriendly response was not because of this interaction alone, but it was an uphill climb with a wall waiting for him at the top. He wanted to know how to fix it, what he could do to prove himself...how to reach her. If it was possible. If his future self had not so gravely misstepped that even now, there was nothing he could do to make up for what had yet to come. "Okay," he said after a moment, dropping his arms from a cross to rest his hands loosely on his hips. "We can agree on that, at least." Leia nodded again, eyeing him warily. "If you'll excuse me," she said, turning, "I have some errands to run. Give my best to Padmé, will you?" It was a direct cut, she knew, and she chose to say it on purpose, knowing that it would. Maybe that was a little rude or mean-spirited of her, but once it was out, it was out. She headed away from him to the corner, where she would turn left to head to the store. The cut was sharp and effective, wiggling in and jabbing the vulnerable part of Anakin that was trying to reach out. His fists curled up tightly, his arms immediately shifting to cross firmly across his chest once again, as if to imprison the frustration and the hurt in a restraining hold. Any stranger on the street might have irritated him with an interaction like that, but this was his daughter -- whether or not she was willing to acknowledge it -- and more than just affronted annoyance, he couldn’t turn off the lingering sting. Without another word, he instead turned and walked off in the opposite direction, losing interest in his exploration of the market area. The silence may not bother her the way it would bother him, but there wasn’t anything else to say: She had made that perfectly clear. |