#that plaintive gurgle of “is this a dream? is this a dream?”

[circleofbirds]

My bunker above the sky, I lived, but why? Yearning, yearning to hear a voice beyond my own In vain I continue to transmit the static It shatters It shatters It shatters

I saw the ore of machines melted down in an instant Organic compounds of cyborgs turned to steam Is this a dream? Is this a dream?

[squidpro-quo]

For the prompt : Jaskier is kidnapped and used as leverage against Geralt (I'd be forever grateful if you did this op)

    Thank you so much for this prompt! A perfect opportunity for angst and whump and hurt and comfort, i can only hope i fit it all in here. This was a load of fun!

Jaskier strained against the rope tying his hands together, reminded of another time when the same circumstances had led to his life changing—he’d argue for the better most of the time—and now it might just happen again, except the change to his life will be that it ends. His fingers are turning numb, with how long he’d been held in the stone room it’s no wonder, only a question of how much longer until they figure out that it was all for naught. Bribing the innkeep, getting the herbs necessary to drug him, the fortified hold they’d decided to hole up in? It was all too much effort for a lost cause, but he’d kept his mouth shut for once knowing that if he spoke a word of the futility of their plan, then they’d have no reason to keep him alive anymore. 

    The door creaked; the sound of the key scraping in the old lock had him struggling to scramble as far away from the door as possible, his body protesting every movement even as he knew it wouldn’t help. They’d made up their mind. 

    “How’s the little songbird now? Ready to sing a sweeter song?” The man that entered had a grin with the curve of a sickle, sharp and cutting, to offset the fact that his lisp would have undercut any threats made in anyone else’s mouth. The sharp whistle of his breath through the cracked crags of his teeth accompanied his heavy steps and Jaskier bit back a retort about his singing’s quality in favor of staving off the inevitable by just a few seconds. 

    “No refrain? I’d heard it was hard to shut you up, not the other way around. Guess some things just end up embellished into lies, don’t they?” The look in his grey eyes grew hard.

    Jaskier knew what was coming, he might have found himself in trouble more times than he could count but he’d learned when to expect a punch by the set of a man’s shoulders. This time was no different. The blow caught him across the temple, leaving his ears ringing and the ache in his head redoubled after he’d just started to regain some peace from the pain. He slipped sideways down the wall, unable to catch himself when he couldn’t feel the stone beneath his fingers, to the hoarse laugh of the man he’d realized was the orchestrator of it all. Jaskier rested his forehead against the cool stone floor, hoping it would take away some of the pounding that he felt reverberating through his skull. Like metal clashing against metal, the clanging sounded deceptively close despite the fact that he knew it was only his tired mind playing tricks on him. 

    “Talk,” the man ordered, in a deceptively soft tone, forcing Jaskier to look up at him to read his lips and discern his meaning. “You can talk to that monster, but not to a human?”

“What do you want me to say?” Jaskier couldn’t hold his tongue any longer, though his own voice sounded muted and echoing inside his head. His fear had been a thin veneer before, but now it was being poked through with the usual thorns of irritation and the aching need to be glib. “That I haven’t seen him in months? That I don’t know where he is? That I doubt he knows, or really cares, where I am either? You didn’t understand it the last time I said it, but I guess the constant whistling can get in the way of listening comprehension.” 

“The entire continent knows you’re companions, traveling together, dining together… sleeping together,” the man raised his eyebrows, before continuing, “You know him better than anyone.” 

“Do I?” Jaskier swallowed, to get the dry taste of irony out of his mouth and to keep from retching at the way the world turned blurry before him. “If sleeping together was all it took, I’d have several dozen of those I’ve courted lining up at your doors. So I’d say you’re out of luck on that shaky limb of logic.”

It was a good joke, considering he’d likely die just from the surprise of Countess de Stael riding up so many months after leaving his poems as ash in her fireplace. Or Geralt, who last he’d seen was firmly in the arms of someone Geralt had risked his life for against all odds and against all wishes, her own included. Not that she’d seemed to mind at the end. 

“Is that a note of pity I hear?” 

“I can’t do many things, fight a murderous band of men for example, but I know when I’m not wanted. I don’t begrudge anyone that.” He didn’t, he loved freely and indiscriminately, pouring his affection into the world along with his quips and commentary as an inexhaustible resource. Because what better way to try and stay a memory in someone’s heart long after the flare of passion has gone cold. He couldn’t help it if Geralt had been a never-ending well for him to attempt to fill, not realizing how he’d fallen down into it in the process and the answer he’d been chasing had been merely his own deluded echo in return. 

“He might not come for you now then—” Jaskier had a brief moment of hope at the contemplative look on the man’s face, the sliver of mercy amidst the cold calculation. “But he’ll surely come for your headless corpse. If your songs have even a fraction of truth, he’s the sort to be mad about that kind of thing.” 

Cold ice slid down Jaskier’s spine, because the man was right. Geralt was nothing if not a righteous man, perhaps surly and grumpy to a fault, but he’d fight anyone that threatened the helpless, never mind that it happened to be Jaskier. He’d written songs about it after all, he’d know. Blood pounded in his ears, the sound seeming too loud in the confines of his terror and he could almost imagine the keep itself was resounding with it, the thump of his heartbeat bouncing through the walls in an irregular series of bangs. 

The man snatched his attention back when he slid his axe free of the belt at his waist, hefting it for a better grip and leaning down to yank Jaskier upright. 

“Wait! Wait, what if you just let me go? There’s a new idea, worth considering—”

“Don’t worry, if it really doesn’t matter who ends up dead as long as it’s someone he could’ve saved then we have an endless supply of who to use. As you’ve said, it doesn’t take anyone special,” the man said, rank breath wafting into Jaskier’s face, and he wished that wasn’t the last thing he’d ever hear. 

Axe shining in the flickering light of the torch, the man shoved Jaskier into the right angle despite his best efforts to scrounge together enough strength to resist. The man lifted his arm, already evident that he wouldn’t be able to make it one clean cut and didn’t particularly care, and swung. 

Jaskier had closed his eyes, content with the darkness if that’s all that was left of life anyway, and so the sound of wood breaking from close by and the short gurgle of a last breath was all he knew before there were hands on his face. 

Calloused, rough, and warm, familiar from the many years and he leaned into them so quickly they were all that held him up. He didn’t need to open his eyes to know, but he did anyway because he needed to see, to remember the sight of Geralt leaning over him, engulfing him in his shadow and tracing the bruises on his face with a touch so gentle he could’ve sworn it was a dream. 

“Jaskier,” just the rumbling timbre of Geralt’s voice was enough to make Jaskier realize that he’d been worried, chest heaving and sword bloodied from his rush through the keep. To him. 

“Cutting it pretty close, no?” Jaskier snorted, relief making him lightheaded. Relief that he wasn’t dead, that Geralt was there. “Did you get it? He was about to cut my head off, that  kind of death offers so many opportunities for pithy jokes. Would be a shame to waste it…” 

“I came as fast as I could,” Geralt said, tone not plaintive in the slightest but desperate, as if he thought Jaskier was really doubting him. As if he hadn’t been doing just that not a few minutes ago. 

Jaskier swallowed, this time to keep the words, all the damning and too honest words he wanted to bare before Geralt, down and keep what he’d been willing to carry to the grave with him just a while longer. 

Before he could find anything to say, Geralt pulled him close, palms brushing over his ruined doublet and down to Jaskier’s deadened hands, enveloping his fingers in a grip he could’ve sworn was trembling just slightly. His other hand slipped into Jaskier’s hair, until he felt the spot last touched by the man lying dead at their feet. 

Jaskier hadn’t meant to flinch but he saw the way Geralt’s eyes narrowed at the movement and tried to stand on his own to make up for the moment of weakness. 

“In the area, were you? I don’t think you’ll get much coin for this job.” He wanted to ask, wanted to see if he was more trouble than he was worth but he didn’t want to hear the ugly answer.

“I was already searching for you, when I heard.” Geralt’s hand stayed on his back, just like when he’d carried him around in the djinn’s aftermath. “Last time I saw you, you were covered in your own blood, like now. You left… and I didn’t know where you’d gone.” 

Jaskier stumbled, both from the way the room seemed to spin beneath his feet at the change in altitude as he got up and the fact that Geralt had followed him this time, sought him out and found him. 

“I got into yet more trouble, as you can see. Nothing new there.” He rubbed his newly freed hands and grimaced at the red welts the ropes had left behind. He’d have to wear his longer-sleeved wardrobe to cover those up. He looked up to find Geralt’s gaze still raking over him, the furrow in his brow the one that always formed when he was considering something. “Did you need something?”

“You shouldn’t be alone.” 

“W-what?” Jaskier stuttered. “What does that mean?”

“I’m trouble,” Geralt continued, looking like he was choosing his words carefully. “And you are too.”

    “Thank you for the astute observations… Where are you going with this?”

    “I already said it. That you shouldn’t be alone.” 

    Jaskier waited, but Geralt stared at him with the same set look on his face as when Roach gave him a neigh instead of a bump in the chest, unsure what to say. But words had always been Jaskier’s forte, even if he swallowed them down sometimes. 

    “Are you saying you think trouble loves company?”

    Geralt nodded, and that was enough for Jaskier. He’d never be empty of what he poured into the world, and so when something spilled into him instead, he overflowed. Geralt’s empty well might just have a bucket of water inside it, and he’d managed to fish it out after all. 

prompts open

[loversandantiheroes]

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply Category: F/M Fandom: Dragon Age: Inquisition Relationship: Female Inquisitor/Cullen Rutherford Characters: Female Lavellan (Dragon Age)Cullen Rutherford Additional Tags: Canon-adjacent, Lyrium Addiction, that goddamn hole in cullen's roof, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Nightmares, Implied Claustrophobia, implied trauma

First multi-chapter for these idiots is actually done.  I am a little beside myself.  Thanks to those that have been following along.  The follow-up for this will be called Structural Damage, so keep your eyes peeled.  Iluall <3

Epilogue

------------------------

The hands that clutch at him are sharp, the points of them squealing against his armor, shredding the leather at his joints, cutting neatly into the flesh beneath.  It is a seeking touch, scrabbling for the bits and pieces it wants. The face above him is achingly pretty and a deep violet, with wide, slender horns that curve out from the brow. It shifts, form uncertain, undecided, the jaw widening to something more masculine, eyes more hooded, then back to the foxish chin and alarmingly inviting mouth that leer down at him.  All around is fire and lightning and blood and screaming. So many voices raised in fear and anguish, pleading mercy, gibbering and bleating like sheep in a slaughtering pen, collapsing into rasps and gurgles. So many of those voice belong to his friends.

He prays, covering his head, trying to turn away from that face and those awful hands.  The thing laughs.

Perhaps another face will warm you, my sweet, it says, tittering.

He twists, but the face follows.  The hair, now a rich brown, tumbles past bare shoulders to cover its breasts.  The face widens, skin ruddy and sun-touched, a malevolent, lascivious hunger glinting in familiar wide green eyes.  He roars, trying to buck the thing off, but it only laughs again, claws cutting deeper into the meat by his hip bones.

And then all at once they fall away, and the sounds of the charnel house Kinloch has become fall away with them.  The pain eases with a wash of coolness like spring rain, and the eyes that look out of that face are gentle and hers.

Be easy, she says, placing a graze of a kiss on his burning forehead.  It's a nightmare, no more.  Look up.

* * *

He came awake with a half-choked shout, the Chant a desperate litany on his lips, hands scrabbling at empty air.  The only sound in his ears was the thin, high whistling of wind outside, and his own heartbeat.  Skyhold, he reminded himself, fighting to untwist his legs from the bedclothes with shaking hands.  Pressure in his chest, not enough air, the old familiar vise grip feeling around his ribcage, stomach roiling.  Not the Circle, not the Gallows.  Skyhold.

Look up.

Light, pale and silvery, spread across the bed.  Knuckling the tears and sweat from his eyes, Cullen followed the light up to see the moon, nearly full, drifting slowly across a darkened sky.  But where he had grown accustomed to the view through a ragged hole of broken wood and the accompanying blast of bitter, icy air that drove him to shivering, there was instead the sharp outline of a domed window.   Moonlight glinted off the edges of the glass, the rough-blocked shapes of sprinting dogs and tall pines painted shades of blues and grays. The fire in the stove was low, a faint crackle, but enough to keep the chill away.

Relief swept through him in a wave, the clenching feeling around his ribs spasmed once, then faded, leaving a tingling lightness.  The memory of her returned, standing just a few feet from where he now lay, smiling in the sunlight, and the sweetness of her mouth on the battlements after.  Since Haven, she'd said.  Cullen fell back, eyes to the sky, suddenly overwhelmed, the lightness in his chest growing to an almost unbearable point, as if he could drift away into the moonlight with it.  

For me, he thought, staring up at the open sky, tears still leaking steadily down past his ears.  She did this for me.  

“Thank you,” he whispered.  “Thank you, thank you, thank you.  Maker, thank You.”

Even now, in the silence of an empty room, he could not bear to unpack the words growing steadily in his ribs.  And so he prayed. He prayed in plaintive thanks for her presence, a prayer for her safety, and a prayer for the strength to protect her when he could. And with that prayer on his lips, he fell again to sleep.

He awoke to a pale dawn, and remembered no more dreams that night.

[redknight3996]

28: The Catacombs

The smell hits you first. The smell of blood, of rot, of meat, of iron. A river of gore laps up to your ankles as you reach the end of the stairs and begin your walk. 

The walls here look older than they should, and as you travel, you hear voices through them. Moans and groans and gurgles, choking and coughing, and then a massive drop when you get to the edge, where a bloodfall rains down into an immense pit of dead humanity.

Lipless corpses gather here, naked and mutilated in a sea of bodies surrounding a single mass of red flesh, covered in tears filled with teeth, endless mouths to consume and feast as withered, vestigial hands grasp at nothing. It pulses with the beating of hearts, commanding the dead, controlling the dead, and keeping them in their place, in the Park. Here is the heart of death, where the dead gather and strip themselves of skin and fat, sinking into the feeding mass as its maws chew at offered meat. The servants, the dead, gather and retch, feeding into the mass, feeding the pulse in their brains, the ties binding them, the gluttony of death, until the slurry leaks from above and begin to drip into the maws along its body.

Greedily, it feasts and feeds and begins to push up, seeking more sustenance as its body bloats. The gathered dead grip at their god, begging, pleading, crying in voices that do not work, in moans and groans and guttural sounds, their nails digging into the flesh and tearing more maws open as the mass drifts upwards, feasting in lolling tongues, licking and suckling at the cracked ceiling.

Light begins to fill the room as it breaks through, awakened, tongues hanging like tentacles and strands of flesh, roots ripped from their mooring as it pushes into the sky, ripping with it the succor of its plaintive and leaving them with rotting blood and worthless skin.

Ignore them, for they mean nothing, and travel further, through the paths now illuminated, through thick, blue slime. The crackle of wiring is easy to find, as is the second mass of flesh. Blue this time, the color of suffocation and silver poisoning. Wires jack into the flesh, cords and machinery jutting into its body as a different signal buzzes into the air, a scrambling, a silencing, a way to keep things quiet, to keep things neat, to keep the wrong parts of the world from knowing and let the right parts of the world see everything.

It has no worshippers, no plaintiffs, no supplicants. It sits and buzzes and chimes and works as it should, keeping the signals right, keeping the voices quiet, a diligent worker on its floor, heeding all commands and ignoring your presence as its tiny fins stiffen with electric tingling.

It’s harder to ignore the water that seeps through the ceiling though. The winding, curling liquid that moves with an intelligent grace, drifting steadily downward and curiously examining the buzzing mass. The mass regards the water with disquiet, from what you can tell, noticing the sudden cold in its presence. It buzzes and crackles, as though agitated, and you see its flesh ripple in a shiver as a hand forms from the water and caresses its pallid surface.

You may watch the seduction if you desire, the shivers and quivers as Rusalka sets its skin alight. The slow touches, the gentle stroking along its ridges; you can hear a whimper of need when she draws back for a moment, and the earned giggle creates a violet blush. Wires rip free, sockets bared as cords quiver and rise, the bulging, bulbous mass following the siren call up into the water. 

Another broken ceiling brings light and a flood, and if you weren’t careful, a deadly shock as it all electrifies. The equipment is most definitely murdered though, and the WiFi is shot. Tragic for the surviving idles, but no worries, no matters, love is in the air and away it goes, another flesh balloon in a bright sky.

Of course there’s another one along the way, down the halls of dripping wax and slick slime, until you reach a room reeking of spoiled milk. A white mass greets you this time, leaking its milk into the basin around it through translucent tubes and faucets of ivory membrane. Piping sucks it through the park, and if you take a drink, you’ll see why.

You’ll also see the reality of life, the dreaming god that holds you on the tip of their finger, watching with a pupil the size of a galaxy, and you will see your own fated death and your own fated birth and what the moon is really made of. You will know how to keep a monster docile, how to command the wills of others, and just how sweet certain tastes can be.

Cream has no real reason to leave, not like Cherry or Blueberry. It might glance at you with a milky eye, its sole concession to an inert life, but it has no quarrel with you. No desire to hurt, or help, or even do anything besides be milked for indulgence.

If you want it to float, give it a reason to. Some extra incentive. Blood won’t do it, that’s Cherry’s priority, and love means nothing to the most beloved being in the park. So why not give it a treat in turn?

The likelihood of you managing to hold onto a chocolate bar in all of this mess is unlikely, particularly since you’d more than likely eat it beforehand, but if you have one, offer it. It’s a better solution than using pain to get it to leave, as while the eye is sensitive, the mass is perfectly willing to use its piping to crush you like a gnat.

That same piping will rip free if you’re sweet to it, and off it will drift, at least a little curious about what sorts of tastes it can find outside. Drifting tubes hang loose and leaking as it breaks through the ceiling, tearing apart the park without issue and absolutely devastating the Quarry it was below. You might get a bit of tar dripped on you, or a lot drenching you, but that can be avoided if you just stand in the right place, and besides, Cream seems to enjoy the new treat.

One more to go. Good things come in fours, after all. Four sisters, four behemoths, four masses. One more set would be good, but we’ll see, as soon as you see the last mass.

Sanguine Park has always had an announcer, an MC, speaking to what is happening, to what occurs, and it’s under here, under the swamps, that you’ll find Blackberry, still talking, still explaining, now commenting on the fights topside.

A mass of black and purple flesh, covered in eyes and snouts and mouths, with black teeth and black sclera and black oil dripping from smiling lips. Things are heating up, they’re getting exciting, and its so eager to do its job as it stares at the mass of screens all around it, watching and listening and talking all the while.

You arriving there does surprise it though, bewildering the big talker. You should be having your adventure, not wandering down in the dark. How in the world did it miss you?

Then the consequences of Blueberry wandering away hit, and every screen goes dark. There’s a brief moment of panic, an insistence that it has to know what’s happening, and the fourth begins to rise, tearing its way out of the hole and letting light and mud rain down as its bulbous body floats skyward, letting the fourth flesh balloon see the chaos of the park in all its ruinous glory. And judging by its laughter, it’s even happier for it.

Four masses of flesh float around the park now, each for different reasons. Tongues lap at a slurry of gore as deadened wires drift in the water, resting happily in the cool liquid. Tubes leak milk and drink up thick tar as wide eyes take in the devastation all around, though without the connections to let it speak its words to the whole park. It doesn’t seem to mind though, content to float and watch and listen and enjoy.

And you, still down there, in the places that once were dark, have one more stop. The end of your journey is close, but the wrap up still has some time to go.

So walk along until the path turns to grass, and find your finale amid the drifting blossoms.

[eirianerisdar]

Sorry but - fic title suggestion: The Curious Feeling of Falling. And there are different types of falling *wink*

The Curious Feeling of Falling

There is a common misconception about Obi-Wan Kenobi.

It is there, even among the members of his own Order; and even more so within the ranks of the child-soldiers he commands, whispering among the multitudes of the galaxy.

They say Obi-Wan Kenobi could never fall.

Fall, of course, has two very different meanings; but on this particular application, the Jedi and the multitudes do not differ.

There are initiates who whisper that Master Kenobi has never felt the pull of the murmuring Dark. There are knights who wonder if Obi-Wan ever felt the tug of attachment on his heartstrings. And there are children on Coruscant playing at their mock-battles who turn away their toy starfighters at the last moment because General Kenobi won’t kill unless he has to!

The Jedi are mistaken - a misunderstanding spread so deep that it warps even the basic meaning of the tenets of their Order. And the children, of course, simply do not understand the meaning of war.

Jedi, soldiers, and citizens.

In the end, even Anakin.

None understand that to call Obi-Wan’s perfection effortless is to diminish the ceaseless war in his heart to the absence of challenge in the first place.

Obi-Wan has been fighting to overcome himself from the moment he first saw the Force.

It begins, as you might expect, before he even enters the Order.

It begins in a nursery-room on Stewjon.

Obi-Wan drops his rattle.

It makes a horrid clanging noise as it hits the edge of his crib on the way to the floor. The faintest flicker echoes across Obi-Wan’s mind - the beginning of what he would learn years later to be annoyance.

He wants his rattle.

He wants it.

The warm afternoon light filters into the nursery through the gossamer curtains, and seems to flow to him on a breeze of his own making. The rattle makes a perfect sha-sha noise as it tumbles back into his crib, seemingly on its own will.

“Sha-sha,” Obi-Wan gurgles as he crawls after it.

He gives it a shake, to confirm it is undamaged. It does not seem to be.

Pulling himself upright with a tremulous grip on the crib edge, Obi-Wan carefully drops the rattle to the floor again.

The light seems to grow in intensity as it pours in through the window, bright and incandescent and filling. Obi-Wan reaches out to it, and it to him, and the rattle slaps into his chubby hand like the hilt of a-

-a something. Something pure and firelit and plasma-bright, seen only in the haziest of infant dreams.

“Obi-Wan?”

He looks up from his examination of the rattle. He has never heard his mother sound like that before.

“Mama.”

She crouches by the crib. He will look back on this in meditation, years and decades into the future, but no matter how he tries to look through the intervening space with the Force, he can never remember her face.

Her voice he does remember. Low and quietly terrified.

“Obi-Wan? Can you…can you do that again?”

Obi-Wan makes a startled cry as the rattle is tugged out of his fingers and held out of reach. An infant growl rises into the air as it promptly twists itself out of the adult’s grasp and into his hands again. He sticks the rattle in his mouth and gnaws on it with vengeance. He figures the extra force of his gums will prevent it from being taken any time soon.

His mother does not speak. Her hand is still frozen there, halfway between herself and the crib.

She takes it from him again.

Obi-Wan’s small pink mouth curves in a sharp bow of displeasure. The light in the air dims as the rattle is snatched violently away, knocking sharply against his mother’s jaw in the process.

Obi-Wan pauses, one hand securely grasping the rattle handle, and watches his mother’s face crumple.

The pleased yell in his chest crumples, too.

He drops the rattle onto his blankets and reaches for his mother.

“Mama,” he says, plaintively.

She does not meet his tiny hands, waving an arm-span from her face. Her hands are too busy trying to wipe away her tears.

The crystalline tracks on her cheeks suddenly waver and smooth away. She jerks back, startled. Her hands fly to her face again.

Obi-Wan lowers an arm, staring up at her.

The light carries droplets of moisture away from her eyes, just as he told it to.

She snatches him up and buries her face in his hair. Delightedly, Obi-Wan feels the light flow through her too, though it seems rather dim compared to the fire within him now.

The light never flows back out of that nursery window. It is like a floodgate has opened, and nothing stops the current of starfire that rushes into his mind; the universe takes a breath and coalesces into a world of eternal clarity.

His mother rarely puts him down in the three days afterwards.

And then he is placed in the arms of another, leaving only the rattle murmuring sha, sha in her trembling hands.

In the early days at the Temple, the Dark only murmurs to him from a far-off place, in meaningless nightmares and mischievous whispers.

He dreams of strange things. Things inexplicable. Once he even dreamed of a sphere, azure and emerald and ochre, and an unstoppable lance of green fire that shattered the sphere into nothing.

Obi-Wan sits cross-legged in the bright classroom and learns the precepts of the Order.

He comes across an unfamiliar word, and asks what attachment means.

His creche-master is happy to explain. “Attachment is the desire to own something for one’s self, above duty, others, and anything else.”

Obi-Wan frowns at his stylus. It was given to him on the first day of classes, and unequivocally his.

“It is not that you can’t own anything, Obi-Wan,” his crechemaster says gently. “But is your stylus more important than, say, your friendship with Garen?”

Obi-Wan shakes his head.

“And is Garen the most important thing in your life?”

Obi-Wan catches himself, halfway though a nod, because the answer would be no.

The most important thing in both their lives is the Force. He knows he could not live without it, and neither can Garen.

And so his first understanding of the meaning of attachment is paired with that of sacrifice.

Obi-Wan is twelve, and too close to thirteen - to the empty failure of the Service Corps - when the darkness finally breaks out of its fledgling shell.

“Is that all you can do, Oafy-Wan?”

The taunt is ridiculous. Childish. Of no consequence.

The lightsaber in his hand has always been a brush of stardust, but facing Bruck Chun, in an arena ringed by expectant masters, the stardust collapses and compresses into an impossibly heavy neutron star.

He feels as though he cannot help it, though deep within the Force he knows he can; he simply does not want to do anything about it. His simmering anger at seven years of cruelty at the other boy’s words boils over into fury. It gives him strength, for a moment; intoxicating power from the war-drums of his heart down to his fingertips, washing his blade with the wild roar of the unleashed animal-

-Obi-Wan throws himself back into the light, horrified, as Cin Drallig calls his disqualification.

For loss of control.

Obi-Wan Kenobi, disqualified for loss of control.

The assembled masters murmur, disappointed.

It does not matter. There is no-one more disappointed in Obi-Wan than himself.

The Force works in mysterious ways.

It gives Obi-Wan a master.

The days of his apprenticeship are filled with joy, struggle, and grief. The first time that last emotion truly registers - on Melida/Daan, with Cerasi’s still-warm body tucked into his frozen arms - he is surprised at the sheer quantity of it. Grief is not an emotion present in amounts; it overwhelms and erases everything else simply by being present.

He struggles past the selfish desire to turn grief into hate, hate against the civil war that brought about so much death, hate for Qui-Gon, who left him there, and worst of all, hatred of himself.

For allowing this.

For not being quick or wily or wise or strong enough.

The Light swirls in warning. Obi-Wan pulls himself out of the mire of his self-rumination before the darkness creeping at the edges of his vision can pounce.

The darkness retreats a few paces, and waits.

Two years later, on New Apsolon, Tahl Uvain passes into the Force in a glimmer of celestial music, backlit against Qui-Gon’s tears.

Obi-Wan rushes at the shadows flicking at his master’s heels, and plunges into it, wrist-deep, clawing at the obsidian tendrils with mental hands bleeding from effort.

No, he says to it, firmly. You will not take him.

The darkness snarls and writhes and gouges scars into his mind, but he does not loosen his grasp.

Tahl’s voice whispers across the Force, from a place bright and warm and eternally waiting. Qui-Gon throws off the darkness with the horrified agony of a man who knows just how far he has reached over the precipice.

Later, Obi-Wan runs up to his master and throws his arms around Qui-Gon’s chest. He is far too old now to be doing such things, but Qui-Gon does not seem to care, either.

He holds his master a decade later, on the warm durasteel floor of a reactor chamber, and offers up the rest of his life to fulfil what Qui-Gon could not.

There had been a moment there, hanging with trembling hands just below the lip of the reactor shaft, where he had thought about letting go - not physically, into death, but letting go of the tenuous thread of light that connected him to his dying master, and falling into the roiling reservoir of power that bubbled under his feet.

He had glimpsed his master’s Force-signature, turned to the darkness, and said, No.

And then suddenly the shadows fled from him as the light rushed in, clean ever-pure.

And then Maul was a rag doll, nothing more.

Obi-Wan cradles his surrogate father now, close, and opens his mouth to say I’m sorry I’m sorry I almost fell I-

“Train the boy,” Qui-Gon murmurs. But even as those words are voiced, those once-strong hands flutter upwards, flickering at Obi-Wan’s forehead.

It is enough. Obi-Wan understands.

Qui-Gon does not need to voice how proud he is.

Inexplicably, the air around Obi-Wan grows lighter with the darkening of the galaxy.

The darkness slithers, and hovers, and tries to slip between him and Anakin; but he stands firm in the crystalline towers of the Force, and does not let the ink splash even across his boot-tips.

Mandalore.

Satine suspended before him, and the darksaber in Maul’s hand.

The darkness batters Obi-Wan from all sides, wells up from within; bleeds through his bones until he feels it shudder at his fingertips, whispering that all he needs to do is to curl a finger. Curl a finger and the Sith would be slashed in half, turned inside out, hung, drawn, quartered and eviscerated at his merest whim.

He wants to fall.

He wants to stretch out a hand and push the roiling hatred in his veins into Maul’s wrist, and shatter the Sith into crimson mist.

Obi-Wan wants it so much he feels as though he might scream with wanting.

Satine.

But the light had fluttered by his ear, whispering to him that want was not need; and desire need not lead to action.

He can curl a finger, fall, and break free of his restraints.

But he will not.

In his grief afterwards, he finds peace in the smallest of things. The light shines down on him until he is filled to the brim twice over, with surety and calm and quiet joy in the midst of so much suffering. He tries to give some of this assurance to Anakin, hoping that his friend can share in this peace with him.

Anakin brushes him away, but Obi-Wan is calmly relentless. He is rewarded at times by a flash of a rakish grin, and that laughing gaze with a single scar curving over the right eye.

And then comes the time when he realises while he had kept his end of the bridge clean, bright, and shadow-free, Anakin had not.

It is with crushing agony that Obi-Wan realises a bridge blown apart at the opposite end is still a broken bridge, no matter the strength of the stone on the intact side.

Grief howls around him, but he has never felt less of an urge to fall.

Mustafar is lit with the celestial brightness of a single, enduring flame. The newborn Sith cannot see it, shrouded as he is. Obi-Wan dances in starlight wrought of an Order ten thousand years in the making, and waits for his moment.

The light carries him to higher ground, and plants his feet into the lifeless ground like stubborn roots of Spring. He has never been further from falling.

The Force is enough.

Anakin’s falls out of his reach, and he cannot follow.

Anakin’s screams echo though his dreams every night for the next twenty years.

The darkness tries to filter in through those screams, sometimes. Obi-Wan stands on the edge of his mindscape, hand on his lightsaber, and stares it down.

“Do not dare to use his voice,” he says, calmly. “Do not dare.”

You want this, the darkness whispers, hissing at the edge of the penumbra of light his lightsaber scatters on the sandy ground. You want this power we offer.

“Yes. Yes I do,” Obi-Wan says, silhouetted in the cerulean glow of his blade. “I want to. But I will not.”

The feeling of falling would be exhilarating, no doubt. But every pit has its utter end.

Luke listens to him when he speaks of the dark and the light. Better than Anakin ever did.

Obi-Wan has to fight the urge to smirk at when the darkness makes one last attempt at ensnaring him as he duels Vader on the death star.

As the red blade slices towards his shoulder, Obi-Wan looks past Darth Vader’s eyes, through the shadow of Anakin Skywalker, and into the darkness itself.

You have failed, he tells it, with triumph. You have lost the war.

And then he is light. There is no longer anywhere to fall; he can only fly.

END

For @zannatinuviel; this is cross posted to fanfiction.net. Reblog and leave comments in the tags if you like!

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[kimitak-e]

Mustard Mary

1.

the first thing Mustard Mary did when she was born was to bite her mother on the thigh with a full set of steak-knife teeth. the second thing she did was scream, at the top of her lungs, as if she herself was the one bitten. 

it was a mystery why Mary had shark’s teeth when both her parents were normal, but they did the best they could, and when she grew up they sent her to school.

on the first day of school, Mustard Mary ran up to another girl and bit her too, right on the shoulder. this time the girl was the one who screamed. then she clubbed Mary over the head.

“you can’t go around biting people,” said the girl. “biting is rude, and besides it really hurts.”

“what is ‘hurts’?” said Mary. 

“’hurts' is when something feels bad and you want to get away, but you can’t, because it’s your own body. like when you stub your toe, or fall and skin your knees.”

Mustard Mary stood very still, swaying back and forth. nobody had ever explained it like this to her before, and she felt ashamed at her own ignorance. she shrugged one shoulder stiffly. 

“when i bite somebody, i feel it on me where i put my teeth on them. is that also a ‘hurts’?”

“that’s exactly what it is.” the girl crossed her arms. “if it hurts you too, why do you do it?”

“i don’t know,” said Mustard Mary. 

but she thought about this exchange for many years after.

2.

Mary’s heart was pounding. she was naked in her boyfriend’s dorm room because they were going to have sex. she had filed down all of her shark’s teeth long ago, and she had learned to stop biting people too, because the girl from her old school told her it was rude. later, though, she had read on the internet that sometimes it was not rude to bite people, because it was sex. this time she would try something she had never done before.

“bite me,” she said, holding out her arm.

“what?” said her boyfriend.

“just this once. i want to try something out.” 

to her boyfriend, Mary looked like a holy crusader on a mission. it scared him because he couldn’t understand it, but it was hard not to do what she wanted because he loved her, even though it was plain she didn’t love him back. they had been together four months. 

“if you say so...” he replied, taking her arm carefully and putting it to his mouth. “like this?” he bit down.

“yes. but harder.”

he bit harder.

“harder.”

he bit harder.

“harder!”

this was too much. her boyfriend sat back and dropped her arm. “doesn’t that hurt?”

“of course it does.”

“then why do you want it?”

“let me see your arm.”

Mustard Mary put their naked forearms together, one with an ugly red welt, one unmarked.

“doesn’t it hurt you when you bite me?” asked Mary.

her boyfriend looked at her strangely. “what? like, emotionally? kind of, yeah.”

“no. i mean, physically. physically, don’t you feel hurt when you hurt other people.”

her boyfriend began to look at her even more strangely. “no. why would i feel that?”

“i don’t know,” said Mustard Mary. “but i think i have to go.”

3.

a few paddles out from shore, Mary pulled in the gillnet. she was Assistant Professor Mustard Mary now, shark researcher. she had let her teeth grow long again, and didn’t care what people said. she was not much like a shark, but in her mind, they were as close as anything to being like her. it was like love.

these days she liked the evening collection best, when the summer sun set the sea ablaze in a riot of passionate pinks and purples. there on the water you could be alone in your boat, and it would hold you in the centre of the sky, the past and future spanning out into nothingness all around you.

she knew she could leave the collection to her research students, but there was a skill demanded by the task that was satisfying to live up to. if there was a catch, you had to lift the line from the water quickly, without letting it scrape the side of the boat. then when the shark was in your hands -- juveniles only, no longer than a few feet -- you had to untangle it quickly, and ease it into the collection container before it could struggle.

today, though, the weight on the end of the line felt different: light and dragging, not at all lively. sometimes this happened when the net got caught on a bit of seaweed. Mary pulled it in anyway, and then sucked in a breath.

no seaweed this evening-- it was a shark: a stiff head with the eyes not just uncomprehending but unseeing, mouth set in an innocent grimace. the rest had gone missing behind the gills, save for a few bloodless rags of flesh. it was a little lemon shark. or what was left of one.

Mary held the carcass in her hands and inspected the damage. it looked like the body had been severed in one clean bite, without much struggle; eaten, most likely, by another shark. it was grisly, but she tossed the head back into the water without dwelling much longer. these things happened, after all.

to her surprise, a second, strong splash followed the plop. a gurgle came next, until a glossy head emerged from the water. 

the face she saw had eyes set wide apart, with black irises like a dog’s -- no whites at all -- and two flat nostrils that opened and closed in the air. a mop of long ragged hair drifted from its scalp in all directions, floating on the water. its skin was the colour of an old corpse, but its gaze was intelligent and alert.

“hello,” said the mermaid. 

4.

“hello,” said Mustard Mary, too shocked to do anything else. when the mermaid spoke again, it revealed a wide mouth full of steak-knife teeth, which were fuzzy with algae.

“why are you in that thing? are you hurt?” the mermaid asked. it had a pleasant, sexless voice, neither high nor low. 

“no. i’m fine. i use this boat for research.” Mary hesitated, then said, “thanks for your concern.”

the mermaid’s head bobbed up and down in the water. “no need to be so formal. if you’re not hurt, you should come and join me for dinner-- it’s not every day you see a cousin.”

“cousin?” Mary said.

“well, sure. i’d know those teeth anywhere. we’re the same.”

“i don’t understand,” Mary said.

the mermaid gazed at her contemplatively, then rose an inch above the water as if to emphasize a point. “it’s not every day you meet another mermaid,” it said patiently. “like you.” 

Mustard Mary stared at the mermaid, wondering at the statement. Mary had dry skin, clothes, and a fresh haircut: all of the things that made a person a person, with the exception of her teeth. she had always thought they belonged on an animal, or shark, but perhaps through some unknown magic she had been switched in the womb, and her teeth were as natural as anything else on her-- the birthright of a mermaid’s child. 

other possibilities presented themselves to her in rapid succession: she was dreaming; she was dying; she was victim to some sort of televised hoax, with an actor in a wetsuit. still, the situation demanded some sort of response.

she gathered up her courage said:

“that’s the thing-- i don’t know if i’m a mermaid. all my life i’ve been different from other people. i've felt things they don’t feel and had compulsions they couldn’t dream of. my teeth are made for hurting others but my own flesh bears the scars. i have never heard the words ‘we’re the same’. do you think we truly could be kin? could i really live as a mermaid?”

Mustard Mary leaned out plaintively over the boat. the mermaid, ever-impassive, looked back at her with its solemn dog eyes. after a long, thoughtful silence, it answered:

“those are good questions, and i will try to answer them well. but to begin, we mermaids have never wanted for anything, speaking as we do from the heart. our teeth are for tearing kelp from the ocean bed, not for wounding others. it is a serious matter to use your mouth in this way; perhaps that is why you are so afflicted. the thing you should have been taught from birth is that the pain you deal always comes back to you, and i am troubled that you did not know. but make no doubt about it-- we are the same. and you can come live as a mermaid if you like.”

“so-- you didn’t eat the shark?” said Mary in a small voice.

“no.” the mermaid blinked one eye, then the other. “but if you come live as mermaid, you will see.”

“and how do mermaids live?”

“forever at the bottom of the sea, ponderous in sadness, rapturous in play, eternal in grief. and alone -- mostly alone -- swimming solitary through the world’s great oceans.”

“that is a lot,” said Mary, now less sure. “that’s a lot to take in.”

“it’s just the way we are. the choice is yours to make.”

“i don’t know. i don’t know what to do at all,” said Mary.

“that’s all right. but if ever you decide to live like us, come back to this spot and call me with your heart. we’re cousins.”

“we’re cousins,” Mary repeated, feeling her heart squeezed by the word.

the mermaid nodded. “absolutely. i’m going now, but remember what i said.”

Mustard Mary watched the ragged head sink underwater again, noticing how the light on the ocean seemed to sink with it, and how all at once the night had come folding in. once more she was alone -- though not alone like a mermaid -- adrift in a boat a few paddles out from shore. the lights from the research centre winked out from atop the sand banks, and beyond that the city rose up, close and boisterous. people lived out their lives there, and below the sea they were living them too. 

somehow, everyone got by.

“what to do?” Mustard Mary asked herself.

overhead, a bright, full, moon was rising overhead.