InsaneJournal

WHO: Allana Solo and Clark Kent
WHAT: So a Jedi and Superman walk into a cage... (it's actually a pretty bad joke :/ )
WHERE: Train car at Dark's Carnival
WHEN: Tuesday evening (8/6)
RATING: TBD
STATUS: In progress

The train car was always dark, came of being windowless, but it had been a long time since a beam of light had pierced through the gaps between the wooden slats to temporarily illuminate the dust motes in the air around her, so Allana guessed it must have been evening. That was easy enough to deduce. Evening of what day was the problem she was having, things had begun to run together since her last foiled escape attempt (yesterday? The day before?) when they had finally seemed to reach their quota of chase scenes, grown tired of knocking her out and hauling her back, and had stuffed her into the cage she was currently inhabiting. She knew there had been an earthquake sometime in the past day, a rumble of earth that had her bolting upright and twining her fingers through the chainlink bars of her cage as she scanned the Force for some sign of Kon, some clue as to whether that had anything to do with him, and, if so, whether the rumbling was a symptom of his anger or of him hitting the ground somewhere, unable to catch himself before impact. There was no way to find out, however, and so after a long handful of moments spent pacing and peering into the darkness of the train car, willing the door to open, she’d curled up on the floor in the far corner of the cage, wrapped her tattered wolf costume around herself, and gone back to trying to heal her bruises.

Though she didn’t get the impression that they were specifically out to hurt her, the other attractions in Dark’s carnival hadn’t shied away from using violence in their efforts to foil her last few escape attempts, and it had taken Allana a long time to accept the limits of her eight-year-old body. She was relatively sure that she’d sprained her own wrist during her second dash towards the fun house where she thought Ariel was being kept, and she’d fought long past what was reasonable when they’d taken her lightsaber, launching herself off the ground and straight at the face of the man who was clutching it, so that it shouldn’t have been a surprise when he’d swung out with it. If she’d still been eighteen she could have dodged the blow, but her reflexes were clumsy now, her muscles not fully formed, and she’d taken the strike with the handle of her own weapon straight across the left side of her face. Two days later, her eye was no longer swollen shut, but she knew it probably wasn’t a pretty picture, a mottled mural of vibrantly bruised skin and old blood that twinged constant reminders at her.

The injuries wouldn’t have been a problem in and of themselves, except that her ability to control the Force seemed to be degrading, as if her brain, at eight, wasn’t capable of maintaining the discipline it would be trained to in the future. Or maybe, she thought now, as she huddled in the furthest corner of the cage from the door, I’m just losing it. Maybe I’m not even capable of wielding it any more. It was a thread of anxiety, but it was just a thread in a larger fabric, in the mass of fear that had slowly descended over her, that had built along with what she could sense of her father’s darkness, with her inability to help Ariel, with the whispers she heard from the shadows, and the things that the others used to say when they would climb into the train car to rattle the bars of her cage, call to her like she really was some kind of animal. “Getting ready for the public,” they’d called it, and they’d told her she was as feral as they’d dressed her, they’d told her she wasn’t any better than a wolf, and that she was a danger. They hadn’t been back in a long time, she’d thought she heard them coming a few times, but there were always scuffles outside the door, laughs and yelps of pain that might have sounded familiar, and then nothing. She should have cared more about that, but this body got tired so quickly and she was hurt and frustrated and scared, more scared than she had been in a long time, since the last time she’d been this age, and it was all she could do not to slide into that fear and let it envelop her, let it turn into anger, then hate, and then turn her into what she’d always been anyway, what she was always going to…

The creak of the door to the train car sliding open cut her spiraling thoughts mercifully short, and Allana shifted so that she was sitting up and peered warily into the gloom.

“Hello?” she called tentatively, hoping it wasn’t her fellow attractions, back to their old games as randomly as they had left them. She thought she registered something familiar in the presence of whoever was entering the car, but she couldn’t be completely sure.