deercountry | Sun rises, night falls, sometimes the sky calls...

"I think Obi-wan would say 'how can you serve everyone, if you've devoted yourself to one person above everyone else?' My answer is - and I'm not completely sure on this, because well, I'm only eighteen. But I don't think marriage will ever be for me. Not even sure about sex. And that's not a Jedi thing, just. Hmmm, I haven't wanted any of that with a specific person, for longer than about 5 seconds initial consideration?"

He tilts his head at her. "Does that mean I don't have empathy? That I love less?"

"I don't know." She smiled a little, shaking her head. "I'm twenty, but the truth is that doesn't make me wiser than you. I've never been in love. Never had sex."

It occurred to her, for about half a second, that a similar conversation to this had started all of the trouble with Anakin. But Ezra was just so much...

Well, she couldn't say calmer for sure. But he seemed less volatile that Anakin, anyway.

And really, she didn't understand the humanoid hang-up, talking frankly and honestly about sex. It was truly baffling.

"And I don't know that wanting those things necessarily makes me more empathetic." She reached over to pick a dead twig off of the cherry tree. "I don't mean to speak about individuals though. I guess I'm just confused by the mindset as a whole. Blame it on the way my parents were, I guess. They were always at their strongest together."

"I think that was true for my birth parents. And generally for Kanan and Hera. Hera isn't a Jedi. She's a pilot - an amazing one." Which might mean Hera was a little more Force sensitive than average. That wouldn't surprise Ezra. Also not the point.

"But mostly she's a great person. I don't know all the details, but somehow meeting her made Kanan stop shutting the Force out and want to be a Jedi again. She convinced him to offer to teach me. But duty to the greater good - to the rebellion against the Empire - that was important to both of them."

Ezra bites his lip. "When Hera was captured, Kanan asked me to step and lead the mission to rescue her. He didn't want his feelings for her, and his fear, to lead him into a making a mistake. One that might risk her or our bigger mission."

Try as she might, Ariadne couldn't imagine a situation where a threat to her father would ever make her mother stand down. If anything, knowing Feofan was in danger would propel Rotspine to do the impossible.

It was strange to hold her mother up like that. Some kind of bizarre sort of mirror. They'd never gotten along, while Rotspine was alive. They'd fought like cats, in fact. And if it hadn't been for one of their many fights, there was reason to supposed that Ariadne wouldn't be alive now.

Impossible to live with. And yet some kind of ideal.

Kind of funny. Like the multiverse had a sense of humor.

"These friends of yours sound interesting," she said. "I'd love to hear more about them."

Edited 2022-01-10 20:51 (UTC)

"And here I was beginning to worry I was talking about myself too much," he says with a laugh.

Then he sobers. "I'd love to tell you more about them. But I think I have to ask you not to tell Anakin any of the personal details. I'd like to think that he's wrong, that just because in my past, he chooses to serve the Emperor and hunt Jedi and rebels, doesn't mean he's destined to make that choice. But if he somehow went home and with all his memories from here and did make the same choice...."

Ariadne nearly laughed. Not because it was funny. No. None of it was even remotely funny. Painfully familiar, if anything.

But. The idea of her telling Anakin...anything. That...that part was laughable.

"Ezra," she said, holding up her hands in a gesture of surrender. "I don't mean to sound dramatic. But if I ever see Anakin Skywalker again, the last thing you need to worry about is me talking to him. After the way he's treated me and my friends, he'll be lucky if I just turn around and walk in the other direction." She wasn't violent by nature. But she was sorely tempted to throttle him.

All that to say:

"We're not friends any more."

"Good to know," Ezra says, sincerely.

"We're not friends either, but he's kinda family, so. Never fun when you have to tiptoe around and keep secrets from even family you don't know well, and may never get along with."

This time she did laugh. A little. "Remind me, someday, to tell you some horror stories about my mother. There was a lot of tiptoe-ing in my childhood."

But now wasn't the time for that.

She made a sweeping gesture toward the shop. "Come inside? I'll make some tea and you can tell me about your friends. I might even have some leftover chocolates, if you like your tea sweet."

They were a prized possession. But she was more than willing to share with Ezra.

"That sounds extra difficult," Ezra replies, sympathetically, about tiptoeing around her mother. He lucked out, as far as moms go - when they've been around and alive, at least.

"And I'm happy to try tea without any sweetener. Thanks," he adds, following her.

She opened the door to the shop, trotting happily across the threshold, holding it open for Ezra.

The lower level was one enormous great room, ringed with countertops. Across them, spilled out like coins in a treasure, were a variety of dried herbs, picked from the orchard. In the middle of the room, there were a series of tables, with a variety of mismatched vases. Some of them are real vases, others are just jars or pretty containers that Ariadne had encountered.

And the air smelled of springtime.

That was one of Ariadne's favorite things about the place. Even though it was dark and cold outside, if she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine one of the rare, lazy afternoons on the shores of Lake Hyli, watching the dandelion seeds drift on the breeze.

"This," she said, "will be filled with flowers in the spring, I hope. And herbs and spices. And fresh fruit."

The flowers surprised Ezra a little. Not that he didn't like flowers - he'd grown up surrounded by the wildflowers of the grasslands of Lothal. Sometimes the green daises by the tower he'd made his home for a long time had seemed like his only friends.

He just hadn't really expected anyone to take the time to grow and collect things what were that temporary and just pretty.

"What, no vegetables?" he teases.

"We have farmers for that," she said. "Anyway, this isn't enough land to cultivate more than a kitchen garden. And since I barely use a kitchen, I think it's more practical to dedicate it to a space that everyone can use."

Also, she just wasn't a farmer. She admired them, yes. Even thought they lived idyllic lives. But theirs were lives that followed routines and cycles. And ultimately, that wasn't for her. She was a little too spontaneous. Too energic.

Too mischievous.

"Although I have been wondering if people might like to bring some of their vegetables or herbs here for trade. A sort of open, neutral space people can use to fill their larders."

"Well, if we have enough people growing food, I guess I can do....something else," Ezra muses.

"On the other hand - there's not anywhere like a market for food stuffs?"

"Hard to know," she said. "We arrived after the fall harvest and it's been winter, which means food is a little scarce. But I hope..." Ariadne always had that. She always had hope. "...that come the summer, things will get lively and there will be plenty to go around."

The soil was, sadly, lacking. But who knew what Varian and Fern and the others could come up with?

She had more than hope. She had faith.

With a nod of her head, she led him to a spiral staircase in the corner of the great room. It wound up to the second floor, which was Ariadne's apartment. A small space, with a large canopy bed on one side and a practically-untouched kitchenette on the other. In between was a low, wooden table. Surrounded by an assortment of pillows in various jewel tones. Ariadne had started decorating her home with mobiles of found objects: pieces of glass and metal and ribbon. Casting sparkling colors all over the room in the mid-day sun.

"Make yourself comfortable. I'll start the tea."

"Oh. I hadn't realized a bunch of you got here that recently," Ezra said with a blink.

He went and folded into a loose lotus style position one of the pillow.

"It's true," she said. "No one has been here much longer than half a year, at this point. Except for the natives." Who were, on the whole, much friendlier than the natives of Deerington had been. Strange and fascinating, of course. But in an entirely different way.

She walked over to the kitchenette, filling up her trusty tea kettle in the sink. Tea was, more or less, the only thing she ever made in the kitchen. So she liked to think she made it very well.

Which didn't mean, of course, that she didn't move with incredible caution as she lit the stove. Fire was fire, no matter how practiced. And she never trusted it, entirely.

"Those of us who remember Deerington," she said, stepping back from the stove, "first started arriving all in one month. It was a bit of a shock for us. Because Deerington was falling apart. Like a...well, like a dream in the middle of ending. There were seams in reality Everything around us was unraveling. And then we were in the sea, brought up to the shore here."

Ezra frowns thoughtfully. "Deerington was a...bubble reality?"

"Or a dream," she said, not fully knowing the difference between bubble realities and dreams.

She went to her cupboard and pulled out two mismatched cups. One was a lopsided, glazed mug that was purple and spotted. The other was a stout thing that narrowed up at the top, glistening blue, with a handle like an arched eyebrow. Carefully, she pinched together one of her experimental tea combinations, dropping a little in the bottom of each while she waited for the water to boil.

Ariadne hadn't dedicated a lot of time to trying to understand Deerington. Alastrians were built for survival. And there were others there, much smarter than she. Better equipped to try to unwrap the mysteries. She saw it as her responsibility to protect them, in order for everyone to learn.

But she'd never absorbed a lot.

"They said it was the dream of some great being called Cynthia Sodder."

"Huh." He'd have to look or the Archives or ask around. Maybe. He's still very much working out his list of priorities here. Survival came first, but he was willing to leave some of that in other qualified hands and move to more medium and long term goals.

"Just out of curiosity, did most people get memories of a life that matched the dream or were you all aware you'd been pulled into it?"

"We all knew who we were," she said. At least, she'd never once forgotten. Others had gone through occasional periods of confusion. But Ariadne's sense of self was, if anything, stronger than before. That happened when you were removed from everything you knew.

And she'd been removed twice.

...three times? She still wasn't sure if Trench was a continuation or a new beginning, most of the time.

When the tea kettle screamed, she snatched up a rag and wrapped it around her hand, carefully pouring out the hot water into the cups. The whole room started to smell of green pear and rose.

"Was it different for you?"

"Well, it was a thing that only lasted about a month, for us. One of the guys in town could bend reality, and usually it was in small ways, but he kinda....panicked and cast a spell to try to protect us all? And bam, there was this bigger, nicer city, and most of us believed we were on Earth, rather than the planet we were actually on, and had always lived there."

He takes a breath and plows on in his explanation. "I was one of the odd ones out in that I kept my real memories and the magic ones the entire time. Most everyone else forgot their real lives for a while. Although both lives felt pretty real to me at the time."

"That sounds awful."

Perhaps she shouldn't have said it quite so baldly, but it was true. The idea of not knowing who you really were was kind of terrifying. Like history being lost and forgotten which, for an oral culture like hers, was as bad as not existing in the first place.

She picked up the mugs and walked over to the table, offering him the purple one, as she sat down on the floor. "Or, at least, very confusing?"

"That smells really good," Ezra said about the tea.

"It wasn't all bad. I got memories of way more education than I had as a street kid. And a big brother who had always been there for me-"

He broke off and cleared his throat. "And it didn't take long to work out what wasn't real, because Ben was so much happier in the life created by the spell. Which...does sound awful when I put it that way..." he trailed off.

Yeah, he's walked himself right back into the tangled mess that was him trying to figure out how to relate to Obi-wan, here, hadn't he?

"It's okay to say things that sound awful," she said. "Especially when you don't mean them that way." He was just working out his thoughts. She could hardly blame him. In her mild rage after Anakin killed Dean, she'd said some pretty awful things about him and Obi-Wan and all the rest of them.

None of which she really meant.

She pulled her heels beneath her, wrapping her hands around her mug. "And...it makes sense," she added. "He doesn't seem like a very happy person."

A small, huffy part of her decided that was due to the 'no-attachments' rule, but she didn't want to go down that argument again.

Ezra frowned a little.

"Really? He seems tired, but I figured a lot of that is being worried about Anakin and things they keep hearing about possible futures. But at least Anakin is here. A lot of what Ben lived through...hasn't happened yet. There's hope."

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