InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Sorry to use harsh letters."

Allana Solo (sanguinesolo) wrote in wariscoming,
@ 2012-01-25 23:09:00

Entry tags:

allana solo, jacen solo

Who: Jacen and Allana
What: Family bonding time, aka flow walking back to a traumatic life event and restoring Allana to the Force. Is this...not how your family bonds?
Where: Tenel Ka and Jacen's apartment
When: Evening of January 25th
Warnings: Not exactly happy times, but it shouldn't scar you for life.

Allana had been waiting when her father had come home from work, sitting on the couch and flipping through channels on the television so rapidly that the soundtrack didn’t have time to start before the next number flickered in the corner of the screen, the next half-formed picture started to unfurl itself into being like a flare of light. Without sound or a settled image the light from the television had been like a signal beacon, flashing in bursts of light, meaningless morse code dances. I should tell him I changed my mind. I should turn off the TV and get a book and go back to my room, I should- but her thumb had kept pressing down convulsively, again and again, like a tic. This is ridiculous, I’m about to get back a power that you need an entire code to regulate, and I can’t even sit and wait without developing a twitch. Very promising.

Then the front door had opened and she had clicked the remote quickly, set it down on the table and turned a suddenly impassive face towards her father. Her grandmother had once told her, back home, back when she had lessons on such things, that when you were in a situation where you were afraid your voice would break you should say nothing, and comport yourself in such a way that you seemed to disdain to speak. She had remembered that and kept her lips pressed together, merely raised her eyebrows slightly at her father and inclined her head in a slight nod, afraid that if she spoke the words would have been, “Never mind, I can’t.”

She hadn’t been sure. Even as she’d agreed to it she hadn’t been sure. It still seemed too big a risk, too high a price if even one person was harmed because she’d taken the Force back. Still, her conversation with her mother had helped convince her that this was what she had to do. She couldn’t make herself stay isolated from her friends and family, even if she had managed it most days she knew she would run back the moment there was a crisis, and she’d already seen that all the warnings in the world weren’t going to make her friends greet her with constant suspicion. The only thing she could do, she had finally realized, was the hardest thing of all – accept that she couldn’t control this, not entirely, and merely try to live her life the best she could, with as little fear as possible. She had been reading the Code, meditating on it in the awkward way of someone unused to taking the topic as seriously as she should have, and she’d found unexpected comfort in it. Her father criticized it and her aunt rebelled against it from time to time, she knew they both found it harsh, too limiting, but she’d begun to think that maybe they needed that, or she did anyway. A reminder of limits, of boundaries and rules.

Still, she hadn’t been sure. Luckily Jacen Solo had commanded troops, and rallying one more gun shy apprentice-level Jedi was not beyond his capabilities. Even uncertain she had gone back with him. Back into the dream, where she’d forced herself not to turn away as she watched everything unfold again. First the old nightmare, Jaina and Ben justifiably turning on her, and then Lucifer’s appearance, which was hard enough, especially with a passenger along for the ride into her private fears. Then she watched herself argue and debate, and ultimately crumble. Heard Lucifer’s words again as he circled her dream self:
“You won't see me coming. You won't know when I'm coming either, try as you might to reach out and find me with your power. You know this to be true, Allana, because I was able to slip into your mind so very easily tonight without you noticing me until it was too late…I'll whisper a suggestion. Just one. And from that point onward, everyone and everything that you love will wither and die at your hand. You can try everything in your power to stop me. You can confide in your friends and family for advice on how to block me from your mind, you can put up every defense in your power, you can warn everyone in advance and pray that it will be enough, but it won't be. I'll take my time. I'll make sure that they're not ready.”

He was right, she’d thought, her foundation of meditation and determination crumbling and whisking away as easily as sand. What am I doing, he was right. I can’t- but there was no time, they’d been back in her apartment as suddenly as waking up, and she’d watched herself sit up in bed, oblivious to Daisy’s howling, hands clutching compulsively at her blankets and sheets for purchase. She’d watched as she’d ripped herself out of the Force fueled by sheer terror of a power that had always been a part of her.

And then it was over, and she was sitting on the couch in the living room of her parents’ apartment and her first thought was, how did I spill something on my hands? I wasn't holding a drink or anything. Then she looked down at her hands and blinked, dazed as someone who really had just woken up from a dream, when she saw that they were clenched into fists, as stiff as if they’d aged suddenly into arthritis. Blood welled, slow and thick and lazy, where her nails dug into her palms. Oh she thought, and then clenched her fists tighter anyway, afraid that if she let go now she’d lose control entirely.

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jeditraitor
2012-01-26 08:39 pm UTC (link)

He'd been worried about this. Of course he had, coming back from work and leading Allana in a flow walk into her own dreams. Oh it wasn't an easy thing, and seeing it. Seeing what he'd done had nearly sent him spiraling with rage. Allana always so sensitive to such things would have felt it if she'd had the Force. But Lucifer had taken it from her with simple words. Oh he was everything they'd said and more besides. A monster truly worthy of the title. And he'd hurt Jacen's daughter. It was hard to watch. It was hard to get his head around everything that had happened in the last few months. But he could be here for her now, he could help her. It didn't take much to bring the tear he needed to his eye. It took the moment when she ripped the power from herself. And Jacen saw it, saw how she did it and his mind flashed back to his time with Vergere. How lost he had been. There was a flash, just a flash in his mind of the bird woman. So many hated her. Blamed her, but Jacen didn't. Not one bit.

Vergere had taught him so much. Including what he needed to do to help Allana.

They came back from the past. From her dream world. Allana looked scared, she was bleeding from her hands and Jacen understood that too. Sometimes it made you remember who you were, that little flash of pain to make sure you were still real. Still in control. His hand moved to his daughter's face, a comforting gesture added to with the healing tears he'd learned from his best teacher. And he could suddenly see it. He saw where the break was with the Force and he knew how to fix it. He knew what Allana needed and his free hand took hers, ignoring the trickles of blood.

"Let it back slowly. It feels like you're missing a limb, I know, and for a while it will feel odd. Believe me I know how this goes. But remember, remember who you are, remember the power you deserve to command, the power you know you can control because you always have before, and no words are going to tear that away from you again. Do you hear me Allana? You say you're a Jedi, then you believe you have the strength for this. Hold to the Code you follow. Believe in it." He hated it. Despised it for its weakness and its lies but if Allana believed it then it was those words she would need to hold to.

"Focus. Just focus and it will come." He hoped she understood his methods and that this, all of this was for her sake. She was his daughter and Tenel Ka's. And the Force was her birthright.

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sanguinesolo
2012-01-27 08:19 am UTC (link)

Once, when Allana was ten, she’d broken her wrist falling off a rock formation she’d been exploring under Ben’s supposedly watchful eye while Luke, Leia, and Han talked inside the Falcon. It hadn’t been an especially traumatic incident, Allana had been trained to be calm in an emergency, and this had hardly even qualified – she knew she wasn’t badly hurt, and after an initial flash of alarm from Ben when he’d seen her fall, he’d been more exasperated than distressed, so there was no secondhand panic. She remembered wedging her back up against one of the rocks and thinning her lips against the pain, reminding herself that Jaina wouldn’t have cried, and then Ben was there and muttering, “Okay, it’s fine, just hang on while I set it.” She’d been tempted to pull away at that, the notion of snapping the bone back into place, but Ben hadn’t given her time. There’d been a burst of pain that made spots dance in front of her eyes, and then the healing. She’d held her arm tense and defensive for several moments after the pain was gone, suspicious of how good normal suddenly felt.

Though she didn’t make the connection consciously, getting the Force back prompted that memory to flash across her mind in the moment she knew her father had found the break, the place where she’d ripped herself away from the Force. He laid his hand on her cheek and she didn’t pull back or squeeze her eyes shut, widened them instead and kept them focused on her father’s face, as if afraid she would miss something he was saying, lose the thread of the reassurance that was serving as a lifeline amidst tides that were threatening to pull her under. She could feel the Force, like tidal waves somehow held back by a flimsy dam, so pervasive and powerful she wondered how she’d ever kept it out, how she was still, just barely, holding it at bay. She gripped her father’s hand and teetered on the brink of fear, the moment before everything clicked back into place, before the potential pain.

“You say you're a Jedi, then you believe you have the strength for this. Hold to the Code you follow. Believe in it."

She smiled at that, even tired and scared she recognized how odd it must be for her father to bring up the Code as anything more than a source of irritation. But he’s right, she thought, I can’t run from this just like I couldn’t stay away from everyone, it will find its way back in eventually and if all I have to meet it with is fear… her muscles relaxed before her mind, and she nodded slightly. Maybe Lucifer was right about me, and maybe he will come back. But this has been as good as letting him make everyone I care about a pawn, deciding they would fail before they were even tested, that they couldn’t be trusted.

At last, the tear inside her began to fuse. It was a flimsy healing at first, but it strengthened slowly until her presence had re-emerged in the Force. It was pulled in tight, the equivalent of someone plugging their ears or curling up with their face to the wall and their back to you, but she was there again, herself again for all intents and purposes.

There was a sudden thud from the kitchen as Daisy, who had decided she’d had quite enough of this strange back and forth, there and then not-there, that she could feel from her owner, unceremoniously knocked over the gate that penned her in the kitchen and trotted out into the living room. The pit bull gave a sharp warning bark to whatever menace had clearly departed the room seconds before she’d arrived on the scene, and then pushed her head onto the couch, looking up at Allana so suspiciously that she laughed before she could help herself. The girl reached out with the Force to reassure her dog as automatically as she’d laughed, and the act of willingly wielding the power seemed to solidify things somehow.

Daisy huffed out a breath as if to say, ”Well just don’t do that again,” walked in a few rapid settling circles, and then curled up next to the couch. Allana looked back up at her father and let the left corner of her mouth twitch up slightly into what was at least a game attempt at a smile. She was still overwhelmed and shaken, her fists wouldn’t quite come unclenched, but she was calmer now, more certain.

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jeditraitor
2012-02-03 05:50 pm UTC (link)

There it was, the sense of everything they were, the sense of the Force returning to her, and he tried to help, he tried to bring it back little by little. A flood was dangerous. A flood was a risk, and so he'd taken her hands, held them as tightly as he could and tried everything that he could to help his daughter find her way back. Even invoking that code. Jacen focused his mind, found Allana that very small presence in the Force, trying to find her way back and he remembered the first time he'd felt her in the Force. She'd been so young when they'd attacked the Anakin Solo. Just so very young, and so scared when he'd put her in his Stealth X and taken her out of the way. Trying to get her to safety. The first thing he'd ever sensed from his little girl was fear, of the situation and fear of him. It had only been a few seconds before he'd calmed her and sent the little girl to sleep but he remembered it, he'd never forgotten and he wondered if she remembered.

It was not the time to focus on that though, He could sense her again. Allana had found her way back and Jacen watched her for a couple of seconds, trying to figure out if she was alright. She was shocked, understandably, and confused. But it would take her some time. It was hard, but his daughter was back where she should be, and he couldn't help but smile as Daisy confusedly looked across at Allana trying to figure out just what had happened. And already Allana was more herself than she had been in quite some time. Lucifer would not get his daughter, he would not get any of them. It was going to be hard. Of course it was, but with her back in the Force, it was just right. It was where she was supposed to be. Her mother would be happy that it had worked, perhaps in spite of her methods. But there it was. It had worked, and it was really Vergere that they had to thank.

"Tell me how you're feeling?" he said simply, deciding not to mention his old teacher. And of course not wanting to push Allana too much. It would take her time to be really herself again. And if her code was what helped her find her way then there was no reason why she shouldn't hold to it, much as he disliked the dogma of the Jedi. She could find focus there.

"Don't rush it okay? It's a shock, it's always a shock. Just take your time. Please?"

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