The Wizard of the Jundland Wastes
(Or, three drabbles from the universe where Ben Kenobi trusts himself to the Force and finds himself somewhere very unexpected.)
I. calling forth from the vasty deep
The Tusken camp was dark, now.
Shmi kept her eyes closed and tried to make herself drift into peaceful darkness, to float away from her aching body. She succeeded, to an extent- and found that Something was sharing the darkness with her. Something that felt as tired and empty as she did.
She reached for it.
surprise/confusion/bewilderment. Lost.
Shmi sent a mental image of herself the Tusken Raider camp, and her less-than-privileged position within it.
curiosity/concern/protectiveness!/determination
Shmi sent the Something the idea of a smile. (It hurt too much to make a real one.)
Then the Tuskens came back again.
II. two solitudes
The Force blazed.
The suns passed, and passed again.
A woman lay face-down in the sand, and fed it her despair.
It was… sad.
It was wrong.
It should be changed, he thought.
He gathered the scattered threads of his identity together and tried to make a plan.
Time bled by.
He found he could move small things. (The mind of a Tusken child, depositing a broken speeder mere meters from the woman. A rock, marking the perimeter patrols.)
After a little more time, he remembered his name.
The blood rite paused when the suns went down, and Obi-Wan acted.
III. to the morning through the shadows
Afterward, Shmi could never recall clearly the days she'd spent in the camp. Everything had spun into one terrible, nightmarish moment.
But she remembered that her pain had faded just long enough for her to move.
She'd felt the speeder she was escaping in falling to pieces even as she rode it, bits of it shaking and threatening to tear off.
Cliegg had said, later, that it shouldn't have worked at all.
Shmi had no nightmares, the night after she returned. Instead, she dreamed of taking tea with an old hermit in the Wastes.
(His smiles had been sad ones.)
AN:
Sources for titles go as follows:
"I can call spirits from the vasty deep." King Henry the Fourth, William Shakespeare
"…love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize, and protect and comfort one another." Han Suyin
"You can only come to the morning through the shadows." J.R. Tolkien.