Re: The Open Door (megacrossover)
Posted: 2009-03-04 12:40am
by Academia Nut
Chapter Seventy-two: Land of the Dead
While he wore one of his customary frowns as they rode in the LAAT, Obi-wan could not particularly fault Anakin for saving a life, although something was off about the young man his student and friend had brought aboard, something strange about how he felt through the Force. It was almost as if the Force became tangled about the young man.
“And what stray did you pick up this time Anakin?” Obi-wan asked as Anakin looked over the young man, the clone medic assisting him.
“I’m not sure. As we were pulling out I felt something in the Force call out to me, and I found him in some rubble and…” Anakin then trailed off as his eyes went wide at seeing the damage done to the young man’s body beneath the rags he had been wearing. His entire torso was covered in ragged Vs of scar tissue, almost as if someone had opened him up as invasively as possible to look at all of his organs simultaneously.
“I’ve seen worse, but that’s impressive,” Obi-wan noted impassively as he took in the extent of the damage. It did seem that the poor young man had at least been mostly healed from whatever had happened to him.
Scanning over the young man with both the Force and medical equipment, Anakin confirmed Obi-wan’s suspicions, “His body is overloaded on endorphins and pharmaceutical decay products, and it looks like his spleen has recently been regenerated, but I think he’ll be all right with some rest and a meal.”
Anakin then paused for a moment and said, “And I think he’s a Jedi.”
Obi-wan raised an eyebrow at that and asked, “And what makes you think that?”
“He’s very strong in the Force. There’s something not quite right about him, but I don’t think there’s anything actually wrong either. He’s definitely not part of the Dark Side. He’s certainly powerful enough to be a Jedi. Plus his hands have the distinctive calluses of someone who uses a lightsabre,” Anakin pointed out, showing off patterns of wear and tear on the palms characteristic of extended lightsabre use.
“Uncharacteristically observant of you Anakin,” Obi-wan teased.
Smiling, Anakin replied, “Well we can’t all be old men with failing eyesight.”
Shaking his head wryly, Obi-wan just smiled before he shifted his attention back to the young man and said, “Well that might be, but I know of no Jedi assigned here that would match this young man’s description.”
“Maybe he was captured by the Confederacy and escaped?” Anakin suggested.
“Maybe,” Obi-wan conceded. “But it seems unlikely.”
Their LAAT flying up into the launch bay of a hovering Acclamator and settling down, Obi-wan shrugged and said, “We will just have to see what he has to say when he wakes up. Men, get him to the sick bay.”
“Right away General Kenobi,” one of the clones said while another two got out a portable stretcher.
When you’re lying in your sleep, when you’re lying in your bed
He awoke with a start, his whole body seizing up in fear from a dream of monsters dancing about him while playing upon dread flutes, piping out songs of madness, trying to lure him into darkness, offering him powers and pleasures beyond the knowing of mortal minds. They were chameleons, changing their skins to the pleasing forms of friends and family, tempting him with visions of what might come.
He refused and they praised him for it while redoubling their efforts.
And now, here he lay, in an unknown infirmary somewhere, strapped down to a bed, monitors and machines softly beeping and hissing around him, with a massive headache and a feeling of colossal dread in his heart.
Slowly inhaling, he tried to centre himself in the Force, only to discover that everything felt wrong. The Dark Side cloaked everything like a palpable presence, trying to prevent him from achieving full peace with the Force. But after the encounter with those beasts of the Dark Side and…
“I should be dead,” he whispered, remembering those last few moments fighting the Yuuzhan Vong with crystal clarity. He had become One with the Force, energy flowing through him and giving him the strength to continue to fight despite the fact that his body had taken enormous amounts of damage from weapons and venom. More than enough to have killed him.
But they had saved him, had rebuilt his body with their foul methods, all for some plot he could not understand. He did not know who or what they were, just that they delighted in wild excesses and perversity, and that they had some bizarre interest in him.
His thoughts were interrupted by an unfamiliar yet paternal voice announcing, “Well you very well would have been if not for my student. I do apologize for the restraints, standard procedure with unknowns. Especially unknown Force users.”
Looking up, he found a middle aged man with short brown hair and a full, if neatly kept, beard standing next to his bed, smiling wryly down at him with a wise, fatherly sort of look. Somehow, despite never really seeing him before, he knew the name of the man before him.
It was Obi-wan Kenobi, a man who had been dead for over a quarter of a century.
Anakin Solo looked agape at this man, far younger than the tales spun by his uncle implied, standing over him, bigger than life. The first impulse than came to his mind was to blurt something out, to warn of the actions of his namesake, of Palpatine, but something instinctively slammed his jaw shut. Perhaps it was the Force, still interacting strongly with him after his brush with Oneness, or perhaps it was just his own subconscious telling his conscious that it would be a bad idea, but either way, he held his tongue.
You’re going to be a ghost for us, wandering in a land of ghosts.
Anakin had no idea if this was real or illusion, reality or unreality, but for the moment he would treat this pragmatically as if it were real, that he was in fact somewhere back in time, which presented him with a bit of a quandary. The first was whether or not he could change anything or not, or if history was set in stone. The other was that if he could, whether he should. On the one hand he had the lives of countless trillions in the Galactic Civil War and the Yuuzhan Vong invasion, and on the other he had his own existence owing to the events of the Civil War, and while as a Jedi he had no problem with sacrificing his life for the good of so many, the ontological paradox implied by erasing himself from history hurt the head to think about. Especially if the universe’s solution was to destroy the affected part of itself to undo the damage, in which case Anakin would kill more people than the wars had.
So Anakin decided to play by the most dangerous rules he could think up: he could change the past but paradoxes would have lethal results. Fortunately small changes didn’t seem to affect the tide of things as his mere presence hadn’t erased the galaxy from existence yet.
So he would keep his mouth shut and try to learn more about what was going on before he tried to stop his grandfather from falling to the Dark Side.
Now frowning slight at Anakin’s silence, Obi-wan asked, “You looked like you were going to say something before.”
“I uh… I didn’t know what to say when I first saw you,” Anakin admitted.
“Ah, I see. Have you been watching too much of the Holonet stories on us then? Well, I’m afraid that those tend to exaggerate our feats,” Obi-wan said humorously.
Us? Our? No. No!
“Maybe they exaggerate your exploits, master,” a man said as he walked into view.
If Obi-wan had come as a shock, then the man before him, not much older his brother Jacen was an even bigger one. Full of brashness and self-confidence, he was not the hissing mechanical monstrosity that had stalked his dreams for as long as he could remember. And between these two men who had been like simultaneous new moons on Anakin, unseen but still exerting a perceptible tide upon the course of his life, he could sense none of the anger that had lead to one man striking down the other. No, there was friendship and camaraderie and brotherly love.
Anakin could feel the familial connection between him and his namesake grandfather, and for a brief, horrific moment he thought the other Anakin would recognize the bond they shared, but that moment passed in an instant, leaving Anakin the Younger to wonder what could have changed in his grandfather to transform him from this bold young Jedi to the twisted Sith he had become in his later life.
“You seem overawed,” Obi-wan noted jovially at Anakin the Younger’s discomfort.
“Well… I had heard so much of you from my master that it was a bit of a shock to see you in the flesh,” Anakin explained, deciding to get his identity as a Force user out of the way quickly, even if he would be altering the spin of the truth slightly.
Ironically, an older Obi-wan would know the trick quite well.
“Your master? So you have received training in the ways of the Force. By whom?” Obi-wan asked.
“By my uncle, who was in turn trained by two former Jedi masters, both of whom left the Order over forty years ago,” Anakin explained while not exactly lying, for which he got a strange, sick feeling through the Force of a presence somewhere snickering in delight.
“Oh, and what did these masters leave for?” Obi-wan asked, obviously not buying the whole explanation.
Anakin paused for a few moments before he said, “I don’t exactly know, but generally I think it was over the deaths of other members of the Order.”
“I see… and your name young man?” Obi-wan asked.
Looking a bit sheepish, Anakin replied, “Uh… by something of a coincidence it’s Anakin. I was named after my grandfather.”
This caused both Obi-wan and the older Anakin to look at the time displaced Jedi somewhat quizzically before the Anakin the Older said with a laugh, “Well this will make conversations interesting!”
“I see,” Obi-wan noted. “We’ll have to look into this and we have other questions, but for now we would like to see what your training has been like.”
Focusing, Anakin telekinetically undid the restraints about him before sitting up and finding that his body didn’t feel all that bad. Sure, he had a few aches and some tightness here and there, but after all the damage he had taken he expected to need more than just a few training sessions to get back on top. Of course, now he was wondering what had been done to him by those Dark Side monsters.
Smirking, the older Anakin said, “Well, it looks like you have some of the basics at least. But let’s see what you can really do…”
Anakin the Younger rubbed his jaw while picking himself up from the floor of the training room within the troop transport. They had started with basic telekinesis practice, but once they saw that he had plenty of training in that area they began to move on to other areas of a Jedi’s skill set. Eventually he had been given a training light sabre, a lower powered blade that could only really singe hair and clothing, and been asked to square off against Anakin.
It had been difficult to maintain his focus and calm while fighting his grandfather, there was just too much emotion associated with the knowledge of what he would become, what he would do one day. Even though it wouldn’t actually do anything, the thought of ‘slipping’ and saving the galaxy decades of pain and suffering kept creeping into his mind, distracting him. He kept those thoughts tightly sealed away where Obi-wan or Anakin the Older wouldn’t accidentally pick up, but he could not concentrate fully on what he was doing.
And his grandfather was incredible with a lightsabre, taking all of Anakin’s attention just to keep up with him. Distracted as he was by outside concerns, including what it was that had brought him here in the first place and a nagging worry about the conflict with the Yuuzhan Vong, he did not have his full attention forward. The shroud of the Dark Side over the galaxy and the memory of the taint of those things also kept him from achieving full focus and he found himself frequently knocked down by a punch or a telekinetic shove.
Still, the older Anakin wore a huge grin on his face while he sparred, and more than once offered a helping hand to hoist his younger namesake back up. The first few times Anakin had been shocked and almost refused, but he managed to get over his anxiety, consciously setting it aside as unnecessary. But every time his hand met his grandfather’s he felt a thrill in the Force pass through him, and he wondered how Anakin the Older could not notice such a thing.
Helping him up once more, Anakin the Older said warmly, if a touch arrogantly, “I can feel the disappointment in you, but you’re really quite good. Most Jedi don’t even push me, and while you’re no Mace Windu, you’re not exactly a pushover either.”
Silently stroking his beard on the sidelines, Obi-wan moved closer to them and said, “Yes, young Anakin… err… the older of you two – this will be rather confusing – is amongst the most skilled lightsabre combatants in the Order and he is not slacking off in a spar like he usually does even when against Masters. Your style is quite unorthodox however, and you are skirting distressingly close to the Dark Side at times.”
Young Anakin nodded and said with a sigh, “I am… distracted. Much has happened to me, much that I cannot explain or even understand, and it is hurting my focus.”
Frowning a touch, Obi-wan said, “There is that, but it is more fundamental as well. I am not quite sure how to describe your style, but it seems to draw heavily on elements of Form V, specifically Djem So. But there are a dozen other elements I would be hard pressed to categorize, with your overall style possessing a strong aggressive element to it. Emotional response seems integral to the way you fight.”
Anakin considered this analysis for a long moment, and he silently wondered at the enormous gaps between his grandfather’s Order and the one he belonged to. While calm and serenity remained the core principles of the Jedi Order, other emotions were allowed, even encouraged. And while active strides were taken to prevent it, it seemed that to become a truly great Jedi Master in the New Jedi Order redemption from the Dark Side was first necessary. Kyp Durron, Kyle Katarn, and even, or perhaps especially, his uncle Luke had all fallen to the Dark Side at one point before being brought back. He had trained and fought beside Jedi who had been trained in the Dark Side before, and he trusted Zekk, a man who had received his initial training in the Force from the Shadow Academy, to have his back during the Myrkr mission.
He supposed that a touch of the Dark Side was present in all of the members of the New Jedi Order. Sometimes Jedi fell, but considering just how piecemeal their training was and the vast number of Dark Side users spawned by Palpatine and the Empire, Anakin supposed that his uncle Luke had a remarkable track record for keeping his Order in line and in actually redeeming those who fell.
With a click Anakin felt a sort of epiphany. You had to want redemption. You had to want to turn back on the path into Darkness and stride, to struggle, back towards the Light. Darth Vader had his son, Luke, to show him the pain of the Dark Side, to remind him that love was worth sacrificing for. Luke had Leia to bring him back from the brink and even from the other side when Palpatine had exerted his corrupting influence.
Anakin had his own attachments, his own passions and loves, and while they could lead into a disastrous spiral, they could also serve as emotional anchors, ways of centering a Jedi, of reminding them why the Darkness was not worth it. A Jedi of the New Order was like an ancient mariner upon a tempestuous sea, such that in times of strife they could remain secure and steadfast, their friends and family grounding them and preventing them from becoming lost to their own emotions, and when the skies cleared they could lift their burdens from the sea floor.
Emotions and attachments were set aside calmly and rationally, but they were not forgotten.
Anakin could see it now, could feel it in his grandfather. The older Anakin had his passions and attachments, but he did not truly know how to properly set them aside. He could not lift his anchors, and they were going to snag on something and bring him, and the galaxy, to disaster. He could neither let go of his anger and fear and love nor safely tuck them aside when they became a hindrance. No, he was bottling them up, twisting his soul into a terrible knot.
His thoughts having taken only a moment, Anakin then smiled and slowly exhaled, remembering his own attachments. His mother and father, his brother and sister, his uncle, all of his friends… and a certain blonde haired girl… he all saw them in his mind. He would get through this, he would find them all again… somehow. He would not let them down.
Tension flowed from his body and he felt a wave of calm break over him, carrying away his anxiety and stress. Raising the inactive hilt of the training sabre he had been given, he asked, “I… I think I’m ready for one more go? Are you up for it?”
Anakin the Older just grinned and said, “Of course. I haven’t had this much fun since I surpassed old Obi-wan!”
Obi-wan on the other hand frowned slightly as the young man, who bore the same name as his friend, companion, and brother, suddenly seemed to untangle slightly within the Force. Emotions still bubbled within him, but it was not the boil that his apprentice sometimes exhibited or the raging storms of anger and hatred that the Sith cultivated. Obi-wan also suddenly had the feeling that there would be a lesson in humility in store soon.
Squaring off, the two Anakins faced each other, activating their sabres with the distinctive sound of air being pushed out of the way and lightly ionized by the blades. Anakin the Younger faced his grandfather for the first time without fear or anxiety. The Force would guide him, as it had guided him on Myrkr. His sparring partner was more experienced and better trained, and stronger in the Force, but now that he could focus, the younger Anakin knew that he had two major advantages. The first was that Anakin had a much broader pool of experience to draw from, even if it was much shallower and overall had less volume. His grandfather had sparred with the best in the galaxy, and fought against countless blaster wielding opponents, but how often had he fought life-and-death with another opponent in melee? How many Dark Siders had he actually fought? His grandfather trusted fully in the Force, but had he ever faced opponents to which the Force was blind?
The other advantage was that Anakin had for a few instants become One with the Force, had felt all the life in the galaxy flowing through him. The wisdom and experience of countless millennia of Jedi flitted at the edge of his memories, including those of Anakin Skywalker throughout his life as a Jedi and as Darth Vader. Anakin could not grasp those memories directly, but he had an edge none could guess at.
Both were students of war, sculpted on the battlefield, but each Anakin had fought in a different war, and each had been honed in different ways into different warriors, into different men. This would not be easy, and Anakin the Younger suspected that he would lose once more, but things would be very different this time.
Far away and yet very near, the Stiletto loitered in their own personal Warp, peering out into the universe within a bubble of their own native physics. Rong-Arya sat and smiled, observing distantly the sparring match that was about to occur. She said somewhat musingly, “Did anyone here go through the historical entertainment archives we ‘acquired’ from the Federation?”
There were a few nods and Ichiro-Faust said, “Of course. It was the data from those movies that led us to find this universe in the first place.”
Rong-Arya said with a small, toothy smile, “Well for those of you who have studied it a bit more deeply, now may be a good time to cue up the instrumental of ‘Leave you Far Behind’ and get some popcorn.”
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Sorry about the delay and wording, trying to work with two characters with the same name is major pain in the ass.
Just. As. Planned.