Day 4 of my final finale! Today in this chapter, things finally start looking up for Elanor and Obi-Wan. . . We are done with the depressing chapters, thank the Force!
Chapter Five: E
E is for Echoes
All Elanor can hear now are echoes.
She doesn't really know what has happened that led to observation. All she vaguely remembers is being summoned to the master's room, where the master was arguing hotly with a man in a dark hooded cloak.
At first, she thought that the master was arranging a price.
Then she realized that the master was – but not a price for servicing, as he calls it while he paws the credits her gets, but for sale. She is scared of being sold to another man, but she cannot stop it and so she reserves her energy. It seems pointless to fret over this.
Just a few seconds later – or so it seems to her, but her observation of time has never been on track for a long time now – she is being led out of this wretched place by the man in the dark hooded cloak.
He does not speak or make any gestures to her, and something inside of her tells her not to mess with him, because she knows, somehow, that he is far stronger than her and could easily cause her just as much pain as the others.
Besides, she saw the master give the man the controls for her collar. She knows that all it will take is a single button pressed and she will be on the ground screaming and writhing.
The brilliance of the sunlight makes her squint. Once she might have cared, for it tells her that she has spent far too long in the dark dungeons, but she is more concerned about trying not to get her eyes burned out of her head. She desperately wants to put her hands above her eyes to shield them, but she isn't sure if the man will permit it. That kind of movement might be seen as a feeble attempt at a strike and be punished as such.
Just when she thinks that she can no longer handle the glare of the twin suns that are coming very close to blinding her eyes, her body finally gives out. She stumbles and falls down a sand dune before collapsing in the sand. There, for the first time in the sun for so long, she lays, unable and unwilling to get up.
She closes her eyes and wishes to die.
Suddenly, silently, the man appears at her side. He kneels down and bends over her, casting a cool shadow across her. As he does so, the dark hood that conceals his face falls back, but she is not paying attention to that.
Out of habit, she recoils from him – or tries to, anyway. She knows that it will only get her a worse beating, but she can't help herself. She has been through so much pain, and her body doesn't want any more.
He stops her easily with a firm hand on her arm, but as his fingers close over that spot, she screams involuntarily.
To her surprise, he drops her arm immediately, as if he doesn't want to cause her pain.
That confuses her. She has forgotten what it was like to be in contact with another person and not feel pain. She cannot imagine anything but pain coming from a touch.
He tries to say something to her, but her ears aren't working. Or maybe they are, and her brain isn't. Or maybe she's finally dying.
The words he speaks are strangely soft against her ear as compared to the harsh, grating yells the master used. His touch is just as gentle as his fingers sweep across her hair, brushing it away from her face with something close to . . . well, something. She doesn't remember, but she doesn't have the strength to pull away anymore.
He says something else, something that she can't understand.
Now even her eyes are no longer working properly. She knows she is outside, but things are strangely shadowed . . . and the man is strange too. His face is strangely hazy, as though someone has put a misted glass between him and her. Something about him strikes a cord in her, but she can't think of it.
He leans forward again, and she tenses – or tries to.
But then darkness takes her, and all she remembers are echoes of a voice she thinks she should know.
E is for Eclipsed
Obi-Wan carries Elanor into the hut that has become his home on Tatooine and lays her gently down on the bed. His relief at her rescue is eclipsed by greater, darker feelings.
Amazement, for one. He looks at Elanor and sees the many wounds that cover her. He is certain that there is almost no part of her that was spared, except perhaps her face, which is pale and has dark circles from a lack of sleep and food and sun. He is amazed that she survived, if the wounds on her back and on her arm are any indication.
Then self-reproach settles in. He looks at Elanor's wounds again and feels like hitting himself. He knows that was not much more he could have done, but it is his personality to feel like he should have been able to do more. He is not sure quite what that "more" entails, but he feels like he should have done more.
At last, the darkest feeling: anger. He feels angry when he looks at this beautiful, innocent young girl and sees the scars of torture that her captors have inflicted on her. She has done absolutely nothing to deserve this. Nothing.
Rage fills him and he has to work hard to filter it out and calm himself. He has to remind himself that should Elanor wake up, his anger might do her more harm than good, as she might misinterpret it.
He recalls with sadness how light she was. She is frightfully thin, so much so that were she still at the Jedi Temple, the healers would have strapped her to a bed and refused to let her rise until she gained some much needed pounds. He knows because he knows that his arms should be aching from carrying her so far a distance, even with the Force.
But his arms aren't even tired.
And he did not use the Force.
This means that she is suffering from such a large lack of food and water that she could basically die of starvation right here. He vows to make sure that she lives.
Unable to resist the temptation, he leans over and lets his fingers brush through her hair. The second his fingertip touches her skin, a strange jolt travels through his body.
He sighs. The strange feeling is still there, then.
But he has other, more pressing concerns right now. The jolt reminds him of how when he knelt by her side, her only instinctive reaction was to draw away. He remembers the jolt of pure, unrestrained fear that rippled through her at the same time, as well as how her eyes were glazed with pain and fatigue.
He knows that she fears him, and he fears for what might have caused that fear. He knows that the fear is not born of him being a Jedi Master or just the fear of a random stranger; it is the fear of all men in general.
He sighs deeply and moves away, shifting his thoughts onto something more productive.
And the first thing he does is to use the Force to permanently deactivate the collar around her neck, making sure that it will not malfunction when he uses the Force to trigger the release so that it pops open. He removes it from her at once, disgusted by it and the fact that her captors would sink so low as to deprive her of the only thing that makes life livable for a Jedi, and throws it and the controls for it away, determined to destroy them as soon as possible.
Obi-Wan's joy at having Elanor by his side again is eclipsed by his anger at her captors for what they did to cause her to end up being by his side in this state.