Kreia (twicebetrayed) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2014-02-01 00:58:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, anakin skywalker, kreia (darth traya) |
WHO: Anakin Skywalker and Kreia
WHAT: Some much-needed direction
WHEN: 1/23 or so
WHERE: A park across the street from Kreia's apartment
RATING: PG
STATUS: Complete
Broad daylight in a park would normally have delighted Kreia. She appreciated nature enough to enjoy a carefree walk through a well-kept path and smell the proverbial roses, and she’d spent many an afternoon sitting against trees and reading.
Now, though, it was all becoming grey.
She’d ventured out of her flat to test if it was her, or merely the cheap lightbulbs her landlady had insisted on using, but her hopes had been dashed; even in the burning sun, it felt like she was wearing a sun shade. Kreia had to squint to see in front of her; any more and she’d have to fumble about with a cane and ask for help from young people in a pitiful, querulous voice. God, she might as well walk into traffic.
She turned, carefully, to the left, where she thought she could make out a bench in the distance. But just as she turned and shifted her weight, she went flying, having tripped headlong over what felt like a thick tree root. She would have cried out, an inchoate thing, but then she hit the ground, and she was too stunned to do anything for an agonizing half second, feeling the tears burning against her eyes.
There had always been a lot made about Anakin’s ability to see the future. His dreams were largely prophetic, they had been even when he was a small boy and had prepared him for what came to some extent. He was considered reckless and seemed to have an unnatural talent for piloting, but that too was the Force whispering to him, telling him what would be before it happened. It wasn’t confined to that dream world either. When he was paying attention he could accurately predict how something was going to happen, it had made tolerating the California traffic a great deal easier. But it required his full attention, at least it had since he had started dreaming anyway. His mind had been other places as he meditated, with the Force or his girlfriend or Obi-wan, it tended to wander, and only too late for him to act did it come to tell him that the older woman was going to trip over him.
When she hit the ground his eyes opened wide and he immediately moved to help, feeling more than a little responsible. He had quickly moved around to her side, up on his haunches he put a hand to her arm. To anyone looking it would have seemed he was just going to help the woman up but he was delving into the Force to scan her for any injuries such as broken bones or bleeding. “Ma’am? Ma’am, are you alright? I’m so sorry, let me help you up.”
“I’m all right. Really, no, I’m all right.” Kreia’s words didn’t have their usual bite behind them, their usual strength. She would rather die than let this young man see tears, and she had lots of practice at hiding emotion, so she kept her head down, trying not to fumble as she clawed herself to her feet. “I’m very sorry, young man. I ... was clumsy.” She wasn’t entirely sure which was worse - admitting to clumsiness, or admitting it was damned hard to see more than two feet in front of her. “It’s unlike me.”
His eyes narrowed slightly as she got up, brow furrowing. She was uninjured, sure she was likely feeling pain but she wasn’t going to need medical attention. It hadn’t been her soundness that had him concerned though, it had been her eyes. There was something wrong there, something Anakin couldn’t exactly name or understand, he wasn’t a doctor after all even if the Force could tell him a great deal. There really wasn’t anything he could do about them for her anyway, he hadn’t been granted the ability to heal, not that this felt like an injury. It seemed like a disease to him, or something that required more than just putting something back together the way it had been.
Anakin pushed himself to stand, “You’ve had a knock, are you sure I can’t help you to a bench or to your car?” His eyes were watching hers though from what he felt he doubted she would be able to tell. “Excuse me, but would you happen to be the older woman that has been speaking to Atton Rand on the net?” He couldn’t remember the name but he did remember suggesting an eye doctor to a woman that was having some trouble with her eyes. Master Qui-gon had said that there was no such thing as coincidence, and it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that this could be the same woman.
Kreia blinked. If she’d been able to see his face, she might have been able to reconcile that he somehow knew her. “I don’t know that name, but I’ve been speaking with many people on the computer network. Some of them men.” A few of them had been respectful, a few cheeky. “I am Kreia.” She tried to act normal, to gain any shred of her dignity back.
But as she began to shake her head to decline his offer, a feeling took root in her gut - well, not there specifically, but it was the stereotypical gut feeling. There was something unusual about this young man. Instead of blurting out what would be seen as senile ramblings, though, Kreia took a breath to steady herself. “Is it true what they say, about this place?” she asked instead. “That odd things happen? Because my vision was utterly clear until perhaps one month ago, and now I can barely see. Cataracts or old age do not work so fast.”
“Anakin Skywalker, I think we’ve talked a few times. I suggested an eye doctor when you asked for one.” He didn’t mention that they dreamed of the same places because technically they didn’t, at least one was going with Kenobi’s typical Jedi-trained logic. He hadn’t forgotten Atton’s warnings about her, especially the parts were he said his death had something to do with this woman, but Anakin wasn’t ready to jump to conclusions and expectations for her behavior. After all, he had slaughtered his share of people in his dreams and there was very little chance that he would continue that here, she deserved the same benefit of the doubt.
“Orange County, you mean?” he was of the opinion that one could say that about the whole of California but she was probably referring to the strangeness that happened in Orange County in particular. “Yes, as far as I’ve seen it is true. I didn’t have a mouth for a week, my girlfriend could not speak, we’ve both had items appear from out of nowhere. My Maste- My friend was turned into a cat for a time, over the holidays he was turned into an old man and has had a few things appear for him. Apparently it’s all very common.”
Kreia would have stared, if it was possible. Technically, it wasn’t. “You had no mouth?” she echoed, wondering if there was a particularly virulent strain of lunacy going around. “How is that possible? I mean. And turning into a cat? It sounds like I’ve fallen into a fairy story.” But her eyesight was going, and she was blind in her dreams except for this Force, whatever it was, and this was all spiraling full on out of control.
She took a sharp breath. “Young m - Anakin.” Kreia corrected herself belatedly. “I’m sure you’ll understand my hesitation; I worry at this age about going senile. What you’ve just said has not lessened that fear. Will you be patient with me if I ask some questions?”
“Only if you will sit while we talk. I didn’t feel any injuries when I-” he suddenly cleared his throat and motioned to the bench. Perhaps it wasn’t going to be easy for him to keep the whole ‘Jedi thing’ quiet, and he probably didn’t even need to but he did his best to keep it up. He knew practically nothing about Atton’s dreams after all, and like the Jedi were so fond of saying truth usually had more to do with point of view and relying on the perspective of a man who had died probably wouldn’t leave him with the most fair opinion. “After that fall you probably should sit for a while.”
The urge to get her to sit was probably entirely due to her age but he tried not to think on it. “But I wouldn’t worry much about going senile. That’s just how Orange County seems to be. I thought everyone was insane or just I was insane at first, but I’ve pretty much come to accept that what is happening here is real. Maybe that makes me crazy, but it’s like that old Waylon Jennings song ‘I’ve Always Been Crazy’. I might be crazy but it’s kept me from going insane.”
She didn’t like being patronized, but she had fallen over him rather hard. “I suppose I can do that,” Kreia finally said, though she did her best to keep her dignity as she walked over to the bench. She felt the back of it, and went to sit after making sure she was in the right spot - the color didn’t match the grassy green underneath it.
Once comfortable, she turned back toward him. “I do know that very odd things seem to happen here. Or at least I’ve heard about it - I chalked it up to heaven knows what. But then I began to dream about being something called a Jedi. It was very vivid. And in those dreams, I began to definitively go blind.”
“I am familiar with the Jedi.” Anakin admitted, coming to sit beside her but at a respectful distance. He got the feeling this was going to be more in-depth than a simple ‘crazy shit happens, huh?’ sort of conversation. “And I wouldn’t doubt they were weirdly vivid dreams and, of course, there is the bleeding effect. Or that’s what my girlfriend has been calling it. Where things that happen to you in your dreams bleed into your waking life. Like potentially your blindness, or ability to use the Force. But I have found that in some cases there are parallels. For instance in reality and in the dreams I lost my mother and my right arm through unrelated circumstances.”
He wanted to believe he had come to terms with that particular weirdness, and that he had lost his mother twice but got through it. Of course there he had slaughtered a camp of Sandpeople and here he occasionally spoke to a therapist or meditated, strangely he had healed faster there as he had been immediately thrust into a war and a secret marriage whereas here he had to go on living his normal life. As painful as it was he found himself embracing the life he saw in his dreams more and more. “I am sorry, but it could be that if you were blind there you could be destined to be the same here, as much as I hate that word.”
“A bleeding effect.” Kreia repeated, turning the image over in her mind. If he’d lost his right arm both there and here, it might be unfortunately named. “Well, if you’ll pardon me, it does set my mind at ease at least a bit that others are experiencing these parallels, even in the same setting that I am. I am very sorry for your losses - I imagine experiencing them twice would be triply painful. Were these before or after you became familiar with these “Jedi”?”
But when he spoke again, Kreia didn’t care about the answer to her question. She wanted to lash out - young people were vain, most of the time, and so sure of themselves it made her head spin - but this Anakin was respectful and quiet, and had none of the characteristics where she might enjoy terming him a blowhard. She bit her lip, eyes closing, trying to recover her composure before continuing on.
It took her a few moments. “If that is indeed my fate, there is one possible silver lining. I became able to see again with the aid of something the Jedi simply referred to as the Force. If the dreams take my sight” - still impossible to say with equanimity, still impossible to accept as real despite the evidence quite literally in front of her face - “could they not grant me this Force power?” Was that even possible?
Anakin was generally very respectful of women, his mother had drilled that into him at a young age. And of course any women over a certain age reminded him of her, more a saint than a real woman. There was also the fact that he had been meditating, something he tried to do when he was feeling ‘even’. So Kreia was currently getting an Anakin that wasn’t often seen, one that Obi-wan likely begged to see and deal with more often.
“Both before.” he answered then after a moment or two of deliberation decided to be as honest as he could be. If she had her sight he would have demonstrated what telekinetic and pyrokinetic abilities he had gained through the Force, as it was he would simply have to explain it. He cleared his throat and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, “For those of us that have already had more than a handful of dreams the Force has already granted us several abilities. I wouldn’t call us Jedi, we’re not quite trained enough for that, but we are able to do much of what true Jedi do. My master, my former master I mean, he could likely explain it better, but I believe he would say that as long as this technique was properly studied in your dreams you ought to be able to do the same here once your connection to the Force is re-established.”
“So it is real.” Kreia mused. The idea seemed absurd, of course, but when one was faced with the impossible and the improbable, one chose the improbable. “There are a few of you, then? That can do things like I saw in my dreams?” Somehow, the notion that there were more than just the two of them was what cheered her. This wasn’t some unfortunate, freakish happenstance; at least a few people on this earth had the same dreams and the same problems.
“There are three of us who can command the Force, yes. And then there’s my girlfriend who while not a Jedi has the very same sorts of dreams.” Harmless enough information and it seemed to brighten her, and he wasn’t merely going by the way she looked. He could feel it with the Force. He hadn’t been trying but as Obi-wan had explained it sometimes it caused him to be empathically receptive, meaning mostly he could feel the emotions of others nearly as well as he could feel his own.
Strong emotions were uncomfortable, likely why he had been bending over backwards to keep Padme happy just so he wouldn’t have to suffer feeling annoyed with himself. He was still working out the finer points of it though, he was still learning to put up his walls, but he hadn’t been in any hurry. There was nothing in his mind that would bother Obi-wan and Atton to feel after all. “I’ve heard of Force sight but I’m not familiar with it, though if you dream of learning it you may likely be able to do it here for yourself.”
“I see.” Kreia nodded. “So basically, you are telling me there is a possibility, but nothing more? I can be content with that - even a possibility is more than I had before.” She even managed a small smile. “Would you be hesitant, incidentally, to giving me the names of these other people who dream as I do? I will understand if you decline, of course, but I can only tell you that I will feel better gathering as much information as I can.” She tried to be practical; gathering information was assuredly practical. Though at the same time, these dreams were unusual, and she understood the need for privacy and sanctity better than most.
“I believe it is a strong possibility, at least where the Force is concerned. I can see it running through and around you, it’s merely a question of when. And even if the dreams don’t provide the key to exactly what you were able to do I think it’s possible the four of us could come up with something similar.” Of course he wasn’t going to be able to get away without telling her. He had never been very good at keeping secrets even if keeping the information hidden was his first impulse. It went back to his mother and her teaching him to be respectful and deferential to women of any age but older women in particular. “You’ve already spoken with Atton Rand, my master is Obi-wan Kenobi and my girlfriend is Padmé Amidala. As a whole,” he was including Atton in this as he hoped the man would see sense enough to try to be friendly. “I think they would be willing to help with whatever you may need.”
“You can see it?” Kreia echoed, interested yet somewhat nervous at the same time. The idea was still so foreign that it was hard to understand. Still, what choice had she but to, as they said, roll with it? “What is it like?” To be able to view a mystical force, to feel in tune with the universe on that level - she’d sought that kind of enlightenment a very long time ago.
“In a sense I can. I can feel it more than I can actually see it.” Though he was fully aware of how silly he sounded. Even though his connection to the Force had been established with his first dreams he had been more than a little resistant to the idea of it all. The looks he had given Obi-wan were now the sorts of looks he got when he tried to explain it. It was strange to be on the other side of the issue for once, but he fully embraced the Force now, even if he couldn’t explain it very well. “It’s like a current that runs through all living things, like an arch of electricity that connects to everything else. It moves and it changes but it’s always there. And when it comes to a sentient being that is strong with the Force they have this… Field around them. A sort of energy field. I’ve heard of some special techniques that allow one to see this field, but I can always feel it.”
She believed him. Maybe she was going senile, but she absolutely believed him. This young man spoke with an honesty that was hard to ignore. “Thank you,” was all Kreia said. “I understand what you mean.”
She visibly straightened up. “I should likely, however, not take up any more of your time. I live just across the street, so I should be able to get home - my vision is good enough that I could see a car coming, I assure you.” Well. A large colored blob, but still. good enough. “I will seek out the people you mentioned - likely via text; I wouldn’t want to incommode anyone. But the more I learn, the more I can help myself.” She owed this Anakin, really.
Anakin frowned. With her sight as bad as it was, bad enough that she could trip over him, it didn’t sit well with him that she would try to get herself home, even if she was just across the street. He wasn’t exactly a boy scout and while Jedi could possibly be classified as something like that he wasn’t a true Jedi here, still it wasn’t in his nature to ignore someone when they could possibly need help. Still, if she didn’t want his help he had no right to force it on her. “If you’re sure you don’t need help. It’s no trouble, really.”
Kreia practically heard the frown, and figured that he’d been so honest with her, she might as well reciprocate. “I do not want help, even if I may need it.” She sighed. “I promise you, I can see cars, which is the thing that matters. I appreciate your offer in the name of being kind ... but leave an old woman a little pride, if you don’t object.” Hopefully he wouldn’t be offended; she had no intention of being rude.
He raised his hands in surrender even if she couldn’t truly see it. She of course had every right to refuse and he would not force the issue. If nothing else he could watch from where he was and stop any cars that came too close. His skill with the Force was growing steadily and he was confident that if he had to step in he could do it without her noticing. “Of course, I understand.” he got to his feet, bowing to her in the traditional Jedi way. “May the Force be with you, Kreia. If you are ever in need of anything, please do not hesitate to call upon me.”
“Thank you, Anakin. For all your assistance.” And she truly meant it. Kreia inclined her head, following the path of the light brown blob toward the fence, across which she could see a steel-colored blob, which she was fairly certain was home. At least all did not seem to be lost.