Who: Allana (Narrative) What: Realizing Kon is dead. Dealing with this as Hapans do: getting very calm and grabbing weapons. When: The end of This thread Where: Her apartment Warnings: :(
When Allana had first been sent to live with her grandparents she’d been a solemn, quiet child. Gaining and losing a father, feeling darkness as your first exposure to the Force, and then being sent away from your mother, all in the space of a year, would do that to you. Han and Leia hadn’t been overly concerned, had merely worked on drawing their granddaughter out, convincing her that she was safe, and that safety included permission to make a fuss, to be careless every now and then. ”Well that worked a little too well,” Ben Skywalker had remarked dryly, when his younger cousin, a month or two after coming to live with her grandparents, had developed a penchant for wandering off and into things that she called interesting, and her family called dangerous. As a teenager she’d grown still further from the serious little girl who Jaina had worried would give herself away with her stiffly perfect posture, had begun purposefully emulating her idolized aunt and grandfather's more erratic style. Still, no matter how many layers of Hapan Princess she shed, there was still the first lesson her mother had taught her, engrained as deep as instinct – “Only the people we love deserve to see our true emotions,” Tenel Ka had told her daughter, ”and sometimes not even them.” She’d needed that instinct only a handful of times in her life, only when things got so bad that there was nothing she could do, no one she could focus on, either to help them or to trust that they had the answers.
She was in her apartment, reaching for a can of Daisy’s food to bring back to Cade’s (where they’d all been doing their planning), when she felt the disturbance in the Force. She’d been “watching” the fight between the two Kryptonians since it began, tracing the feelings of alarm and pain and confusion from bystanders and the fighters themselves in her mind like anyone else would run their finger along a line on a map. She’d felt them move away from the city and taken that as a sign that Kon was in control of the situation, this Clark wouldn’t have cared about hurting civilians. She’d been worried about her boyfriend getting hurt, or having to hurt Clark. She’d thinned her lips as she imagined standing next to her cousin’s couch and lecturing a recently-healed Kon about how he’d said he would be careful and a fight like that was actually the opposite of careful. She’d been worried, but she’d been going on with her business, her own plans, because that’s what you did when you were a part of a war. Even after your friend was yanked back through the seal, your other friend became addicted to demon blood, and your cousin had his mind twisted by Lucifer, even after you couldn’t pretend this was just a vacation from your real life any more, you still had to go on. You had to go to school and make plans and believe, to a certain extent, that each day would follow on and on like the one before despite evidence to the contrary, or you would never get out of bed again.
That was why, when she first felt the final disturbance in the Force, she was buffered, for a moment, by sheer disbelief. Her arm completed the motion of taking the dog food down from the shelf, her hand wrapped securely around the metal can, and she lowered it into her backpack, nestling it between an extra cardigan and her American history book.
I still need to give Kon the homework, she thought. He wouldn’t have… and then she was on the floor, sitting with her back against the cabinet door, posture ramrod straight, and she couldn’t remember sitting down. She thought, with the feeling of one making an observation about a situation a great distance away, that she should close herself off from the Force before things got bad, and then discarded that option. Instead she opened herself up to it, doing a sweeping mental check, her friends, her family, the other Clark, and then the last place she’d felt Kon, the place where there had been a disturbance and then a drop into nothing. Her own presence was calm, completely calm in a way Allana, who threw herself and all her excitements and cautions into the Force without reservation, never really was.
She looked down at her hands, saw that the left had begun to shake, but noted that her saber hand was still steady. With a deliberate nod she reached into her bag again and pulled out her history book, a notebook, a novel, and a few other odds and ends. They were left on the floor when she stood up again, traveling lighter and freeing up room for the gun her grandmother had gotten her when they’d started going shooting together, along with the long, curved knife she’d taken off a mugger while patrolling with Kon one night.
She pulled out her phone, typed a quick message, and by the time she walked out the door, mentally tracing the route of the Force disturbances the fight had caused all the way to where it had ended, her left hand had steadied too.