Elan
It wasn't the first time she fell.
As the dust settled, Elan shifted gingerly, wincing as one palm pressed into some of the broken glass. This fall hadn't been as long or as hard as the first time, when Jacen had been with her and had been so furious that he took away her lightsaber, as though that made some sort of difference. After the first time, she stopped telling Jacen when she was leaving for the ruins and took Cor instead. It was a twin thing, she told Jacen, who had used that same justification many times over in his own life, with his own twin, and so couldn't very well argue.
So she fell again, and again, and Cor would simply perch above the broken window or rotting floorboards or bombed-out shell of a room, waiting her for her climb back up, never saying anything about it.
Cor understood. Cor knew. Every day, he followed, silently, understandingly, as only a melded twin could. He accepted her desperate need for danger and forgetting, even if no one else did.
Elan looked up and around for the skylight she'd fallen through, feeling disoriented. There was one above her head, but the glass was unbroken. She picked a fragment out of her arm and rubbed her scraped elbow absently as she stood and looked at the shadowy walls of books around her.
"Cor," she called up. "Cor, it's a library." A library of the Old Republic. She'd been hoping to find something like this for days, to lose herself in the endless words and unvarnished history.
She brushed her fingers over the embossed covers-remnants of a time when printed books were valued over holos. The room wasn't as stale as she would expect; the books were wonderfully preserved, but the air didn't feel as though things had been sealed off properly. She heard the faint sound of a ship somewhere in the distance. She and Cor had wandered quite a ways from the settlements, so it was likely one of the massive, gasping freighters, bringing food to an almost self-sufficient colony.
She was growing fond of this New Coruscant; the bright sun and air and water and trees fighting for life as they pushed away the ruins of the old world. She might someday like this place as much as Hapes. And she liked the ruins, too; a welcome distraction, constant discovery, and a way to avoid their father on his bi-monthly trips down to the colony.
"Cor," she said again, annoyed. Cor was too often in his own space, a faraway distant point in his mind; she joined him there, sometimes, but quickly grew bored of it. He was far too passive for a Skywalker.
No answer. She shot out a mental call, a jabbing arrow that would push him off balance.
And nothing.
She felt a wild unsteadiness, wholly unfamiliar, as her mental threads flailed for something to hold on to.
"Cor," she said again, feeling panic rise in her throat. What if he'd fallen as well? He was much more careful than she was, but they were so high up, several levels from the bottom of the city.
She backed slowly into the middle of the room, squinting up into the darkness for the skylight she'd fallen through. But still she saw only the one-the unbroken glass glinting now and again as though from the light of nearby ships.
Which was silly, of course. No ships ventured into the crumbling ruins of the old city.
Taking a few deep breaths, trying to slow her heartbeat, she reached out for Jacen, to let him know something was wrong. He'd be furious, of course, but Jace was always furious with her these days.
And again, nothing. Empty air. No Cor, no Jacen. Not even her father's faint Force signature, so easy to sense even a galaxy away.
Well. Something was wrong with her, then. They couldn't all be gone. She breathed a little more easily. Perhaps Luke had finally suppressed her Force ability, what with her wild, unpredictable ways these days. Rude of him not to tell her, though.
She twitched a hand toward a shelf of books, and felt the steady, sure grasp of the Force, the certainty that she could topple every last volume to the ground if she wanted to.
There was a door to her left. She'd have to use the Force to throttle it open, since the ruins had lost power sometime during the final battles between the Rebellion and the Empire, but
It slid open as she stepped toward it, quiet and unassuming, ushering in a wall of sound that made her take two steps back.
The door had opened to a wide hall that skirted the round inner edge of the building. She looked up; the roof was open to the night sky. A cruiser descended past her, and she stepped forward to stare as it continued to drop past other levels. Levels filled with shops, bright lights, smells of food, and many, many people. In the middle of the deserted ruins of Coruscant.
Okay then. Elan suppressed the rising tide of panic and settled instead on bewildered calm. Be rational, E, she heard Jacen say, a million times over a lifetime. Rational. She couldn't sense her family, and suddenly nothing around her made sense. What did rational mean right now?
She gripped the rail for a moment longer, then let go and stretched her fingers out, in, and out again. No way but through, her father's voice said somewhere in the back of her mind. He'd said it the day they found out Dwen had died, said it as though she was some sort of coward for not seeing the way so clearly. The words jarred against different corners of her skull until they settled in with a bitter taste on her tongue. She pushed away from the rail and strode over to the nearest lift with a sense of purpose she did not feel. This level was empty, a forgotten mausoleum of books and gods knew what else. Answers would lie below, where the building was full of light and life and music.
The lift slid down with a hiss and a slight flip in her stomach. Elan pressed a level at random and braced a hand against the wall when it came to a stop. She stepped out, and gritted her teeth against the madness-vendors flying at her with krats and figs and some kind of sausage-bodies milling shoulder to shoulder, pushing past her-a human child slipping through the crowds with outstretched fingers-
She flicked him away and felt amused at the disappointed look on his face. He vanished behind a bearded man in a long, brown robe who turned cool eyes upon her before stepping into one of the shops.
That robe. The robe, and the tunic, and the belt-something nagged at the back of her brain, a feeling that she recognized the outfit. Some particular religious cult?
Elan felt a subtle nudging against her collarbone, and slight twist in her stomach. She tried to ignore the Force as much as possible these days, but she supposed she needed all the help she could get right now. She followed the man into the shop.
It was a Net cafe, or as close to one as she could figure. The equipment was outdated, but well cared for, and most of the cubicles were filled, closed off from the prying eyes of any who might step in. The man in the robe stood near the front counter, a serious expression on his face, by all appearances interrogating the clerk. Elan stepped behind him, as though waiting in line, as though she didn't see the second clerk glancing at her from the end of the counter.
The man in brown immediately stopped speaking and turned to look at her, with a milder expression than she expected. "You need to seek help elsewhere," he said, and she felt an annoying push against her brain. For a second she stared at him, mouth slightly open. No one tried Force suggestion with a Skywalker. That was just insulting.
Wait. Force suggestion?
She forced a smile and a nod and stepped away, keeping her head down. The old Jedi used to wear brown robes, and uncomfortable tunics, to remind them of their low position. But no Jedi wore them anymore. Her father's new Order was free of the legalism and oppression of the old Order. So why was this man, this man who used the Force so casually, wearing old Jedi robes?
She grabbed a time card and slid into an open cubicle, then closed her eyes and settled in to listen. She let the Force slide across the floor and create a magnifying wall around the man, amplifying his words back to her.
"...but are you sure?" he said, his voice slightly tinny in her ears. "You said there was suspicious activity just yesterday. And now there's nothing?"
The clerk's voice was low, nervous. "Perhaps I saw wrong. Nothing out of the ordinary."
The man sighed. "Who got to you?"
She heard shuffling. "No one, sir," the clerk said in a flat tone. "Please. Stop looking for him."
The Force wall wavered slightly as the man walked through it, back toward the door. Elan heard him pause just after he hit it; confused, uncertain as to what had just happened. She let the wall dissipate and slid her time card in the Net station. The date and time popped up on the screen, and she stared, calculating backward in her mind, then jumped at a knock at the edge of the cubicle.
She took two quick breaths, blinked at the date again, and then said, "I just got in here" as she slid the curtain open slightly.
The bearded man was standing there in a restful sort of way, hands crossed in front of him, eyes still mild, but curious this time.
"I was short with you earlier," he said. "I apologize."
Elan tried to slow down her racing mind, the date and the robes and the ancient equipment all colliding to make some semblance of sense. She'd stupidly-stupidly-put up a very obvious amplification wall around an Old Order Jedi of unknown powers, failed to react properly to his Force suggestion, and had no grounding, no identification, no connections in gods sixty years ago to get rid of him quickly and without suspicion.
"It's rude to bother someone at a Net station," she said, throwing up airtight seals around her mind, suppressing any hint of Force ability. He was muted to her in the Force now, but hopefully she would be obliviously, invisibly normal to him if he decided to check.
He smiled, a wry quirk of a smile, and bowed slightly. "Again, I apologize."
She tapped her fingers on her leg, trying for an air of impatience she assumed someone would feel in this situation if they'd done nothing to cause it. The man seemed to recognize it, and fall for it; a sheepish look passed across his face. "Forgive me," he said. "There was something...odd...that just happened. I thought-well, I don't know what I thought. Pay me no mind."
He reminded her, in a sideways fashion, of Jacen, and the thought made her relax a little.
"Well, Master Jedi," she said airily, "if you don't mind...?"
He bowed again, quickly, still looking confused, as though he knew he was missing something vital. "Yes. Yes. Sorry. Again. Master Kenobi." He held out a hand awkwardly, and she tried to ignore the jolt in her stomach as she shook it.
"Elan," she said. "You know, the least you could do is pay for my time card." Obi-Wan bloody-hells-and-gods Kenobi. What gall she had.
He smiled, shrugged, and waved toward the clerk. "On the tab," he told him.
The Jedi had a tab at a Net cafe? Bizarre.
"Calling home?" Master Kenobi asked as the clerk activated more time on her card.
Home. Where was home? She considered a moment, then nodded. "Home, yes. My husband's family. Mine is...hard to reach."
Master Kenobi's eyes narrowed slightly, as though he found even that innocuous bit of information fascinating for a reason he couldn't pinpoint. "Well, a good day to you, Elan." And he walked away. Elan watched, a hollow, stunned feeling creeping through her arms as the Jedi Master her father worshipped slipped out the door and disappeared into the crowd.
Feeling a bit disoriented, she slowly slid the curtain shut and slipped the time card into the slot again. It took a few minutes to figure out how to pull up the intergalactic connection. Gods she hoped the codes for Hapes hadn't changed.
She realized after a few moments that she was shaking. Of all the places in this world, in this time, she was here, and the first person she met was Obi-Wan Kenobi. The thought terrified her. It felt strangely like an ordered destiny, like the first mission she'd gone on with Jacen, or the day she'd met Dwen.
She quickly discarded the idea and forced her hands to still. Destiny, fate…she'd tossed all belief in them aside the day Dwen's ship flashed in deepspace.