darkforcerising | (no subject)

(no subject)

Who: Canon Anakin, AU Earth Anakin
What: Cross universe shenanigans continue - the two Anakins work on fixing a starfighter
When: now
Where: aboard the Resolute
Rating/Warnings: Probably low

Well it seemed as if Anakin was stuck back in this universe for the time being and he might as well use it to the fullest advantage. Being allowed to remain free, he set out wandering and quickly found the hangar bay. Listening to his music, he walked the perimeter a while, just looking at all the ships that were both so familiar and distant in memory for him. It was the weirdest form of nostalgia.

He stopped next to a currently-decommissioned fighter and rested his left hand on the metal hull. There was something about just feeling the cold metal against the palm of his hand. After a brief pause he started tracing a finger along the seam of a panel. It was so strange how a machine could feel so alive to him. And having twenty-four years of recent experience with the absence of that connection only made the feeling now so strong in contrast.

Movement out of the corner of his eye caught his attention and he noticed another familiar form working on another ship in disrepair. Without invitation, Anakin walked over.

“These were fun,” he said when he was close enough to be heard. He was referring to the Delta-7B Aethersprite-class light interceptor in front of him. “I remember them.”

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“Eh, poverty seems to be a common theme,” no lying about that. “But we were definitely happy.”

He paused before going on. “But that’s not what I meant. You asked what, if I’m from some parallel universe, could I know that’s relevant. This is one - she’s not gone. Here. Death isn’t the end end.”

He could, he thought, handle poverty. Ever if he wanted better, less hard, for his mom. But happy was what mattered.

Anakin scowled and turned back to the wing, carefully laying the phone down before prying the panel open. Lifting his hand, a spanner flow into his hand, landing with a solid thud. "Yes yes. One with the Force and all."

"No," Anakin said. "I mean, that's an overly simplistic way to teach it. It's more complex than that. People still exist, themselves, them. Um, an afterlife."

He tossed it around in his head and then tried, "You know what I'm talking about but you don't acknowledge it because the Order says to believe otherwise is heresy. I remember the Order's position on this. But you know you've heard and felt Qui-Gon still... That's because he's still an entity in existence."

Speaking of not acknowledging, Anakin continued to work on the wiring leading to the cockpit. But his head was turned just a little towards his twin, posture tense. And he didn't say anything for a while. "Not since Mom was killed."

He waited a moment. "The Order believes a lot of things. I don't agree with all of them."

"Ya, well," Anakin added pointedly. "I think you can figure out why he might have stopped talking for a while." There wasn't judgment in his voice - he'd done the same thing to the Tuskens, and so much more - he was just drawing his twin's attention to what the reason for Qui-Gon's silence might be.

He lifted the tool in his hand with the Force so it was suspended in front of him, and then, one by one, he started dismantling the parts of it, still with the Force, so that the whole of the tool ended up as one 3D diagram of itself in front of him.

He couldn't help himself from smiling. "I know."

"I know. I disappointed him." That was an understatement he knew. But he also wasn't entirely sorry fur what he'd done either. Not after all those dreams, those visions. "Did he ever start talking to you again?"

Anakin scooted so he could watch his twin, approving of the skill it took to to that. "Obi Wan wouldn't approve." So don't get caught, he means.

"No one else does. I'm the one whose wrong." So it was nice, if frightening, to have someone agree. Even if that someone was himself.

Anakin shrugged and kept playing with the parts. "I'm very comfortable with Obi-Wan's disapproval." He summoned another tool and, while keeping the first one still hanging, started dismantling the second with his hand. An exercise in splitting his focus.

"Qui-Gon does... And then... of course, I died, and there were many conversations after that."

Edited 2019-11-01 04:51 (UTC)

Anakin just watched for a moment. He was not comfortable with it, although he was used to it. It was why he didn't discuss certain things with his former Master, not wanting to court it.

"I'm glad he does. I miss him." Quite a lot actually. "It's. I know we are told we shouldn't try to peer into the future, that we have to be careful of it." And yet, he was tempted and there where things he wanted to know.

"The Order says a lot of things," Anakin acknowledged. He started putting the tool in his hand back together.

"There are an infinite number of possible futures. Or maybe every possible future is already set and there are an infinite number of set universes and that's what we see in the Force." He shrugged, he didn't care which was the truth because it didn't change anything for him.

But he knew that's not what his twin was getting at.

"What do you want to know?"

"And it doesn't seem to work for me." Which was the problem.

"Yeah the Force is real helpful that way." Vague and indirect and confusing - he was left frustrated more often than not. And feeling alone and like he couldn't turn to others for help. Because their help felt wrong.

Anakin gently nudged his twin's device over, moved to sit with his feet hanging off the wing. His shoulders dipped forward, chin bowed, and he played with the spanner in his hand. "With Mom. I don't. I don't want to feel that again. I don't know what to. I hate the lying. I don't want to lose people but I keep losing them. It's like nothing I do is enough."

Anakin was quiet as he tried to figure out what to say. There were many things he could say, but would it be right to say it. He still was unsure if he was in a paradoxical situation where everything he did had an infinite number of terrible, unforeseeable ramifications. If he said the wrong thing, could he really talking himself out of existence? Like Back to the Future?

But... everyone died at some point. And if what he said helped, wasn't that worth it?

Making the choice to say something was like stepping off the ledge. But he liked that feeling of freefall.

"Everything is stacked against you," he finally said. "Nothing you do is enough because you don't know what enough is to try to give it. You cannot win this war with the resources you have because you don't even know who you're actually fighting against. You can't balance the Force because not even the Jedi Order has a clue what balance is. You can't be truthful because the Jedi raise children to be compliant, not honest. And they can't help you with your feelings because they don't even know where to start."

Anakin loved the feeling of leaping in the air. It was one of the few times he dent truly free. Falling through the air felt like flying. And he'd once dreamed almost nightly of flying away, of the freedom of it.

But his twin wasn't telling him anything that at his core he didn't know. Nothing he didn't know, but didn't dare say out loud. "So what should I do?"

Anakin barked a laugh and said, "Where to start?"

He closed his eyes and started reassembling the tool he was suspending in the air with the Force. Obi-Wan could complain all he wanted if he caught him.

"Start with... forget everything the Jedi say about emotions. They aren't evil. They just... are. They're natural and a mental tool. The Jedi are afraid of them because they take work to understand and at all times are messy and unpredictable, which are two things the Council is not comfortable with."

The laugh was both reassuring and very much not.

Still, he kept glancing at the tool, making sure it was being done properly.

"I never did understand what they wanted, really. I'd try to not let them control, I can see where that is a problem, what I'd done when anger was controlling me. But I don't see how letting them lead me is dangerous. It seems like when I trust that lead, that's when everything goes just right." He's not really looking for reassurance, he's looking for understanding. Because he hasn't gotten it, because he didn't understand himself why one always lead to disaster, but he kept doing it and why the other always lead to success and how to make it happen more often.

“That’s the trick, isn’t it? And there’s so many of them and they never seem to stop.” Ya, he understood.

The final piece of the tool clicked into place, and then Anakin started working backwards again. Taking it apart.

“There are two really important skills you need when it comes to emotions - knowing when to act on them and knowing how to sit with them when acting on them is wrong or impossible. Which means you have to know how to identify what you’re feeling... I can see why the Jedi think repression is easier. Doesn’t excuse them, but I get it.”

"Everything bad I feel just feels like anger, doesn't matter what's happening. And there's so much of it. It feels almost like when I'd try to meditate, and got pushed to look deeper, and all there was was something large, frightening, that felt like it was going to explode on me." So how the kriff does he identify that?

"...I'm not going to be able to stay with the Jedi, am I?" Deep down, he knows it's not the right place for him, he's never fit, like someone trying to force the wrong size screw into a nut. He knows. He's said, more than once, he was going to leave. He had an out in Padmé. And yet, here he was.

“Well, anger isn’t wrong. It just is. It might help to think about what it signifies. We get angry when we encounter injustice - someone has done something wrong and it needs to be addressed or fixed. So what’s at the root of the emotional response?”

Anakin considered how to answer that next question.

“The Jedi need to change. They’re part of the problem of imbalance... Why do you want to stay?”

"I don't know." Jealousy, betrayal, grief, fear, anxiety - all too big to name or even feel properly. So he couldn't really answer the question. He wished he could.

"Obi-Wan." There was no hesitation. Whatever other reasons he had, and he did have a few, Obi-Wan was the chief one. "He had to fight so hard for me. He gave so much to me. I can't just abandon him. I don't want to. I don't want to hurt him, or disappoint him like that."

"Ya," Anakin said. He finally opened his eyes and reached out and grabbed the tool. He was done fidgeting with this one. He wanted another. So he went over to the cart and started rummaging.

"The Jedi don't really like their current members maintaining any connections with those who leave. And Obi-Wan is Obi-Wan. You can't find a more Jedi Jedi than him." He said it affectionately enough that it wasn't an insult. "It would be difficult to leave him."

"Might as well climb up here if you are going to take things apart." There was room, after all, and it seemed unlikely that his twin could break something in a way one of them couldn't fix.

"Ya." It was an echo. "I don't want to lose him."

"What do you want me to work on?" Anakin stayed at the tools for now.

"And you aren't willing to walk away knowing he's still here- alive and fine, but adhering strictly to what the Council will or won't let him do?"

"The wiring needs rerun, last firefight fired the display." So having more than one set of hands would make it go faster.

"I don't think so, no." For as long as he had a choice anyway. Which he knew he might not always. "I'm not as attached to the Order as they'd like me to be. But I'm more attached to him than they'd like me to be."

Anakin picked out the tools he’d need and then climbed up, taking up station on the other wing. It felt like home up on the fighter.

“You’re choosing to stay in an impossible situation. The Council won’t hesitate to punish you if they found out... if they find out anything you’re keeping from them. Do you think Obi-Wan would be more or less disappointed to find out through the Council rather than through you?” Ya, that was a low blow, but a reality that needed to be faced either way.

''You'll be expelled from Jedi Order' Obi-Wan had shouted.

'I don't care!' He'd yelled back with certainty that hadn't really faded with time.

"I don't think he'd be surprised either way. And he's on the Council, remember? He'd be a part of it regardless." Anakin huffed, turned himself back to working on his ship. "Windu would be the worse person to find out from. Followed by Yoda."

"Yoda is a pointy-eared space goblin and Windu is a judgmental asshole." Anakin didn't have to think long and hard about which insults to level at either Council member. It was almost a knee jerk reaction.

He started unfastening a panel.

"So why not tell him yourself?"