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

"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."

"Oh, there's always hope," she said quickly. And firmly. Because if Ariadne believed anything, it was that. "I guess he just hasn't had the chance to explore that hope."

Because Anakin kept killing people.

She sighed. "I know a bit about worrying about possible futures. But the thing I've kind of figured out" or resigned herself to, "is that it's kind of impossible to figure out possible futures here. Because none of the fixed information we thought we knew is the same. It's like trying to calculate probabilities for a card game where the rules keep changing with every hand. I might be able to calculate the odds of a winning hand in a game with 50 cards. But out of nowhere, a new card will be added, and suddenly your hand is four cards instead of three. Constant entropy. Which is frustrating, I guess."

A pause.

"Or you could look at it as exciting. Meaning you never know when something wonderful is going to happen. You just need to...be open to it, I guess."

"Oh, I know there's always hope. Ben would say so, too. In fact, he did. His message saying so to surviving Jedi is a big part of the reason I'm a Jedi now," Ezra says, with more warmth.

"I just meant..." He shakes his head. "Obi-wan can think of most of the rest of his family as still out there. Alive."

She nearly pointed out that Obi-Wan had flat-out told her that he was taken away from his family as a child. But she stopped herself, both because she knew it was out of her grudge against him and because she was fully aware of the fact that family never started and ended with blood.

Instead, she shrugged. "With thousands, if not millions, of versions of reality out there, it's pretty safe to assume that in some of them, they are. Which means there's always a chance they might show up here."

And just as much a chance that they wouldn't.

"But he is here. And deserves to be happy, but has to do it here. Because we're kinda stuck."

Ezra opens his mouth, closes it, presses his mouth together and then decides, no, he's going for it.

"You know, that's all that lack of attachment actually means. At least as I understand it. Try to control reality, or other people, and you'll bring unhappiness to yourself and probably the people around you. You can love people, and hold them...but not that tight."

"I've never really thought of attachment as control," she admitted, sipping her tea. "Kind of the opposite, I think. My father always said that you absolutely cannot control who your heart yearns for." She laughed a little. "Believe me, I'm sure my mother could be plenty inconvenient for him."

But he loved her. And loved her fiercely. Right up until...

She shook her head. "You would have liked him. My father. He was a wonderful man. Calm, like Obi-Wan. But...poetic. Dreamy sometimes."

"He does sounds like someone I would have liked. I'm not even sure I disagree with him about the heart feeling whatever it's going to feel."

He carefully takes a long sip of the tea. "Obi-wan's my brother. There was a time and place we decided, together after the spell was broken that it was still true, and I don't want to change that, even if I could. But here it's just my choice, and my feelings to deal with. It's not this version's problem."

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject