OMFG! Anakin might do ~something~ *pearl clutch* (darkforcerising) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2019-07-07 19:41:00 |
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Entry tags: | anakin skywalker, jessica jones |
Who:Anakin Skywalker and Jessica Jones
What: Having an actual meeting
When: Yesterday
Where: Orange County’s VA shelter for homeless and wounded veterans
Rating/Warnings:Some swearing
Status: Complete
Saturday, midmorning, and Anakin was crouched in the sun, sanding the side of Orange County’s VA shelter for homeless and wounded veterans. A few weeks back, his therapist suggested he volunteer when he could get the chance. And because he barely knew how to cook, he willingly took up the ongoing project of prepping the building for new paint.
He’d left his prosthetic arm at home. The two options he had, the one from his dream universe and the one he’s been fortunate enough to get in this world, were far more advanced than what any of the current patrons and occupants of this shelter could get. He felt weird wearing either while he was here. He could sand with one hand.
He looked up when he heard someone approaching, and he offered a half smile and a wave with his left hand holding the sanding block, “I know you.”
Sort of, the woman he was looking at had been part of Yondu’s ship christening flight, but they hadn’t spoken too much.
***
Jessica actually was kind of enjoying the volunteer work she was doing. She was getting paid handsomely for it, courtesy of Admiral Proudmouth who still hadn’t figured out that she wasn’t actually doing the work that he’d hired her for - for now, he still thought that she was investigating his daughter’s sexuality with all this volunteer work - though she knew that that probably wouldn’t last much longer. She didn’t want to admit it, but she was going to miss it when he finally pulled the plug. It felt good, somehow, to be doing work that actually helped people instead of her usual thing.
Construction jobs were some of her favourites. Thanks to the strength from her dreams, she could do more work than the average volunteer, and it didn’t tire her out at all. A lot of to volunteer projects she had taken on were specifically to spite Proudmouth, such as volunteering with gay youth and AIDS centres, but she generally took on anything that she thought she could do good with. Anyway, she didn’t know for sure, but she had the feeling that Proudmouth didn’t especially care much about wounded and homeless veterans, despite being one himself.
She glanced at the person who had called to her, and nearly immediately recognized him. She had the feeling she would never forget her first foray into space. It wasn’t an experience she’d had in the dreams or in real life, or one that she had ever thought would be possible.
“Anakin, right?” she asked, deciding that taking a spot next to him worked just fine. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”
***
Anakin’s smile got bigger. “Where did you expect to see me?” He was usually this self-assured.
***
“Somewhere in the atmosphere?” Jessica suggested. Where did one expect to see someone who they’d only ever seen in a spaceship from a parallel dimension, orbiting the Earth? “Looks like we’re stuck together today,” she said, beginning to start sanding.
***
“Would you believe me if I said that that was my very first time in space- well, in my life on Earth? My dreams are… something else,” Anakin said.
***
“I kind of assumed that going to space wasn’t something a lot of people did, even in this place.” Then again, Jessica could be wrong. She’d already met at least two aliens. Maybe it wasn’t so uncommon. “You’ve been to space in your dreams, then?”
***
“Dozens of planets,” Anakin said. He picked up the sanding block and started back up again.
“Aliens everywhere. Some good,” he shrugged. “Some bad.” His expression soured for a moment but then it was gone. “Some smart, some dumb, some just willfully ignorant. Most just people trying to live.... Like here.”
He looked over at Jessica. “But much less strange.”
***
As far as Jessica was concerned, most people here were more bad than good, but there were some diamonds to be found among all the coal. Overall, it did sound a lot like here, just with a much larger demographic.
“I don’t know if there’s anywhere more strange than this, in the Dreams or out of them,” Jessica said. If it wasn’t undead zombies, it was multiplying peeps or being stuck to someone for a week. “How are they? Your dreams, I mean,” Jessica asked, slightly tentative.
***
Anakin laughed, because he agreed. No matter what he’d experienced so far in his dreams, at least they felt grounded in a kind of reality with physical structure and rules. Multiplying peeps didn’t make any sense.
But then his laughter stopped and he wasn’t smiling anymore.
If she wanted to know the answer to that, well… “You go first.”
***
An image of Kilgrave flashed through Jessica’s head, and her breath caught in her throat. Luckily, she was able to hold it together, and she turned her attention back to sanding the wall. “Yeah, I’m alright with working in silence too,” she agreed, sanding away a layer or two of cement before realizing that she should move onto a different patch of wall.
***
Anakin didn’t need the Force to know that he’d a nerve. At the least, he understood not wanting to talk about their dreams.
“We don’t have to work in silence,” he tried when he noticed she was over sanding one patch of wall.
“You could tell me about the cat you were hired to follow. I did actually want to know about that.”
***
Pulling her thoughts from her dreams to something more mundane was a lot harder than Jessica would have thought it could be, and it took her a moment to realize that Anakin had said anything at all, another moment to work out what it was that she’d just heard.
“That was definitely one of my weirder jobs,” at least, one of the weirder ones that could be talked about in polite company, “but it wasn’t that exciting. You really want to hear about it?”
***
“Ya,” Anakin said. “I hear they are fluffy neighborhood murderers. Is that true? I’ve never had a cat. My current pets are a bantha and some porgs.”
***
“They are,” Jessica said. “I’ve never seen more dead birds than I did in that week. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a cat catch a bird in flight, but it’s something else. This one was a two-timer too. She had two other houses she went to regularly enough that the owners would feed her.” Her actual owner hadn’t been too impressed by that revelation. “And I have no idea what a bantha is. Do I want to know?” It sounded like something from the dreams. She knew that porgs had come from someone’s dreamscape; she’d seen enough of them running around weeks ago to know that much.
***
“Wow, sounds like that cat had it made,” Anakin said. “The internet makes it seem like they just sleep all day, get scared of bananas, and knock shit off things when they are awake.”
Anakin stopped sanding and pulled out his phone and pulled up a picture of Majy.
“This is a bantha. They’re usually bigger, but for some reason this one is staying small.” Which wasn’t that small, it was almost as tall as a pony.
***
“Tell me about it.” Of all the things to be jealous of, a cat was pretty ridiculous, but it must have been nice to just go off and do whatever you want without a care in teh world.
Jessica glanced at the phone, and raised her eyebrows. If she wasn’t already used to the strangeness of the OC - or as used as one person could get to it - then she would have thought it was a welldone photoshop. “From your Dreams, I take it?”
***
Anakin put the phone away, nodding. “At least one of the places in my Dreams.” He picked up his sanding block and started sanding again. “They’re found on a lot of planets but not usually on the rich ones.”
***
“Guess they don’t worry about invasive species in your dream world,” Jessica snorted. There was enough problems just putting an animal from one part of the world to another, she couldn’t imagine that transporting animals from one planet to another was a good idea.
***
“The richer planets do. I could not bring a bantha to the capital planet without a permit,” Anakin laughed. Because a bantha herd moseying through the Jedi Temple like they owned the place was a funny picture, especially because he knew what odors and stains came with them.
“But no one cares about the poor planets,” he shook his head. “Not unless you liked the kind of environment where nothing you did was regulated or came with consequences… those aren’t the kind of people who care about preserving natural ecosystems.” Or life in general.
***
“Sounds familiar,” Jessica said, rolling her eyes a little. It really shouldn’t have surprised her that even after people managed to live all throughout space, they’d still hold onto the same greedy ideas as they did here. It only proved that people, generally, were shit. “Guess people really don’t change, no matter what world you’re in.”
***
Anakin shook his head and shrugged. But he didn’t say anything for a moment, her words struck him. He knew where his dream self fell on that spectrum, and but not where that placed him.
“Ya, you can… go around the whole galaxy- or another galaxy, in my case, and you see the same fear and hatred and injustice we humans are great at doing to ourselves. Doesn’t matter if the planet is prettier or uglier. People are always just… people. My dreams aren’t surprising about that.”
***
Jessica’s lip twitched cynically. No, it wasn’t surprising in the least. “At least there’s something familiar in your dream world of Banthas and space travel,” she said. If there was one thing that could always be relied on, it was human awfulness.