InsaneJournal

Who: Allana and Tenel Ka
What: Having The Talk. You know, "So I cut myself off from the Force" that one.
Where: The Solo family apartment
When: Afternoonish
Warnings: Nothing awful


The piles of papers and books, assignments she’d missed at school, were slowly taking over Allana’s room. At first she’d kept them stacked on her desk at first in a single, tidy pile. Then, when the pile had become precariously high, she’d separated them by subject. Math work sheets, science lab reports, school-issued copies of novels and essay instructions, history documents to read and write about, and those silly health workbooks, all fanned out across the desk. She’d opened one of the health booklets once, half-heartedly trying to make herself believe that she was going to start getting caught up. ”What would you do if you found out you or your girlfriend were unexpectedly pregnant?” the first question enquired in small, italicized font, ”would your family support you? Would you be able to finish your education? IF YOU ARE SEXUALLY ACTIVE YOU NEED TO THINK ABOUT THIS (150-300 words)” She had picked up a pencil and written, If I became unexpectedly pregnant my father would kill my boyfriend and then his guardian would kill my father and the resulting fallout would probably destroy Lawrence before Satan gets a chance. If my girlfriend became unexpectedly pregnant I would assume she was cheating on me as I am not currently capable of impregnating anyone. Give the seal some time though. Then she’d crumpled up the paper, thrown it in the recycling, and gone to sleep. Noon was her prime sleeping time. She liked to know she wouldn’t wake up in the dark. Since then the papers had gotten out of control, spread across her room, and lost all semblance of piles. History had capsized onto math, English and French were blending together in front of her closet, and health seemed to have disappeared entirely. She had been wondering lately, in a sort of far-off way that suggested too much inertia to follow through, if it wasn’t time to just throw them all out and tell Kon to stop getting the work for her, she wasn’t going back to school.

She had found the piles comforting, she realized now, protectively insulating. Her parents had been unsure how to navigate them, hadn’t wanted to step on something important, and so had been reduced, when they braved her room, to talking to her from the hall. With the distance between them Allana imagined that they were shouting to her over the comms on a shuttle or a fighter, orbiting somewhere far away. It had made it easier to nod blandly and appease them when she didn’t have the energy to snap and sulk. With the curtains drawn and the noises from the rest of the apartment muted it had been easy to live in a kind of suspended animation, connecting mostly through the computer, and not often there.

In retrospect she supposed she should have known that being dragged out wouldn’t lead anywhere safe. She should have stayed insulated, wrapped in papers and books, inaccessible. Instead she’d let the argument with her father drive her out and it was as if the sun had burned more than the tip of her nose and the tops of her shoulders, had scoured the cobwebs she had let gather and the gloom she’d let obscure something that, really, she’d known all along. The knowledge of it had spurred her through the streets that night to Ava’s house, lying heavy on her tongue to be released with her friend’s promise, and then diffusing gently into the heaviness around her bones that had kept her anchored inside the house. It had become impossible to ignore in Australia when she’d finally put her fears into words for Kon, but maybe she really had known all along. No one had severed her from the Force. She had done it herself, manifested an ability wielded in recent memory by only the most powerful sith.

She sat in her room now, and ran her fingers slowly over the spine of a book, Jane Eyre. Mad women locked in attics and small, coldly sane women who painted pictures of oceans they would never see from their small, cold rooms. I could talk to Kon, she thought, edging her finger across the edges of the pages, flirting with paper cuts. He doesn’t have the Force, but he’d understand, being afraid of what you can do, of what you’ve done. With Famine… She flipped the book around in a short little spin of a motion. Kon would understand, but she didn’t need to be understood. Jaina had been distant, hadn’t really spoken to her since she’d lost the Force, and Allana recoiled instinctively from coming to her with this. She wasn’t sure if she was afraid of disappointment and shock, or their absence, of too-easy acceptance of the dark side, and she was afraid to find out. Her father she didn’t even consider. What she wanted, more than anything, was for Ben to come out of the seal and be cocky and sure and on her side, but imbued with the history, the tragedy, to forgive her this power.

But it doesn’t work like that. Even if he were here, it isn’t that simple. She’d known all along who she needed to talk to, in the same way she’d known what she’d done. Someone who had never left the light side of the Force, who still believed in the Code and the Order, but who wouldn’t recoil from anything outside them. Someone who loved her, but who wouldn’t be ruled by that, moved to forgive even the unforgivable. She stood up before she had time to think too much about it, so quickly she saw spots and realized she hadn’t eaten all day, that the morning had passed while she was shut up in her room thinking. For a moment she considered skulking to the kitchen, making a sandwich, and retreating again, but she knew she had a limited window of time until her father came home and her nerve was lost along with this chance.

Right. Well then… she opened the door and edged out into the hallway, peering into the living room. “Mom?” she called, taking a few steps into the room, “Are you out here?”