Day 3 of my final finale, unfortunately we get another slightly sad chapter. . . My apologies. But this is the last of the depressing chapters!
Chapter Four: D
D is for Drowning
Elanor is drowning.
She is drowning under the never-ending pull of a current that she can no longer keep up with. She is drowning in an enormous sea of torture and pain and cruelty. She is drowning in a cold void that is empty and silent and impassive.
Those blanks that used to possess her and make her unable to remember anything? Now they are full her memory with empty blanks. When she falls to the floor at night, blank spaces is all she can remember, if she even bothers to try.
Once, when she was a youngling, she read about things called automatons. Things that were alive yet moved automatically at their master's bidding. As Jedi value life, she scorned them and thought them horrible beyond belief.
Now . . . Now she is one.
She has locked herself into a dark, deep, small recess in the back of her mind, along with the things that made up the core part of her soul. All of her most cherished memories go there, locked away so deep that sometimes even she cannot find them. Her abilities – to sense, to feel, to touch the Force – they go there too. Everything that she once carried proudly is now locked away.
All that is left is an empty, broken soul inhabiting a barely functioning and beaten husk of a body.
She knows that she looks terrible. Her hair is mangled beyond belief or saving; most likely, soon her captors will just slice it clean from her shoulders. They long ago ripped away the Padawan braid, and she fought them . . . or she thinks she does. She can't really remember anymore.
And her body – her body is covered in scars, some as fresh as three hours ago and some as old as . . . as old as . . . well, however long she's been there. Whatever skin that isn't scared is severely bruised or freely bleeding.
She is like an automaton. Sometimes she doesn't even hear the order called, but then her body is responding, and she follows it anyway. She moves automatically to do what must be done.
Her arm is still badly hurt, but all it is to her is a weakness. They need only grip it lightly and she will scream as agony floods her, as if Skywalker was standing right there twisting his lightsaber into her arm again.
A few of her ribs are broken too. Once, she might have been able to heal them in a healing trance as her Master taught.
Now . . . Now she can't.
And sometimes she grows so weak from a lack of food and lots of beatings that she can't even follow the orders, and that only earns more isolation and torture. She doesn't even remember what the devices are called or do anymore; all she knows is that they cause unbearable pain and when she tries to wriggle away, the pain intensifies beyond words.
Her mind is not her own anymore either. If she speaks – if she remembers how – her voice is flat and quiet, and her words are automatic, mechanical, reflexive. She doesn't remember how to joke or tease, much less to smile or laugh.
And she no longer remembers how to truly use the Force. Due to the collar, whenever she tries to reach for it, sparks of pain crackle into her being.
The Force used to give her a small amount of comfort, giving her dreams of someone – she didn't know who and still doesn't know – who wanders around. She saw how he held her lightsaber in a familiar way, and she used to believe – foolishly, she knows – that he was a Jedi.
But because of the collar around her neck, she doesn't dare reach out to the Force anymore. The Force is simply a cold, impassive, empty void inside of her that she can no longer touch. And she doesn't want to. Her life is dark enough now without sensing the – what were they called?
She can't even remember that now.
Elanor is drowning, and nobody cares anymore.
D is for Desperate
Obi-Wan is becoming desperate.
He has never felt this way before. Patience and the Force and his experience as a Jedi Master have always prevailed before. Always he managed to resolve the situation, no matter how strange or hopeless or delicate it seemed.
But this situation seems beyond him.
It has been well over a month – perhaps even longer – since he found Elanor's lightsaber abandoned in the sand. He has searched and searched for her relentlessly since then, but his searches have turned up nothing.
He doesn't understand what happened. Elanor seems to have just vanished into thin air.
Then again, it doesn't help that he isn't familiar enough with Tatooine to determine more than the fact that most likely she has not left the planet. It also doesn't help that he doesn't know who took her; whoever did left no traces that he can find.
He is going out of his mind with worry for Elanor. He worries about where she is, what is happening to her, and everything else. He worries that she might be hurt beyond salvation, in which case he will have no choice but to grant her a merciful, painless slip into the Force.
But most of all, he worries that she might not go that far. That her captors might deliberately make sure that she can be salvaged. That she will be right at the gray line between life and death, so close that a single shuffle will send her plummeting.
He has tried every method he knows of tracking her Force-signature, which he now knows as well – or perhaps even better – than he knows his own. But her Force-signature is gone from the Force, as if she has become a void . . . or no longer exists.
He refuses to believe that. She must be alive.
He doesn't wish this because he doesn't want his searches to be all for naught. He doesn't wish this because she is a fellow Jedi. He doesn't even wish this because he doesn't want to know that he and Yoda are the only surviving Jedi.
He wishes this because Elanor captured his interest once, and he wants to see if she has changed.
No doubt she has.
But he wants to test himself as well. He wants to know if he still feels that same tug towards her that he felt the first time he saw her. He wants to know if he still feels that strange sensation in the Force that he felt the first time he touched her hand. He wants to know if he still feels that overwhelming feeling in his soul that he started feeling the more she worked with him.
He doesn't know what this feeling is, but right now he has more important things on his mind that discovering what it is or even determining if it is dangerous.
Right now, all he wants is to find Elanor, to rescue her from her tormenting captors, to know that she is safe.
And so he searches. And searches. And searches.
Constantly.
He doesn't have time to himself anymore. All he has is split between Luke and Elanor.
He knows which duty is more important, but he can't stop himself from spending a great deal of time dwelling on Elanor, on finding her.
Finally, Obi-Wan becomes desperate enough to decide to go to town and use the Force to get the answers he wants.