Anakin Skywalker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
chainsarebroken) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
sojournerdeep2016-09-18 07:00 pm
chainsarebroken) wrote in sojournerdeep2016-09-18 07:00 pm
Entry tags:
[Location: Arrival Plaza] [ETA: Closed] to everything turn, turn, turn
“Welcome, traveler.”
Waking up in a strange place always begins with an inventory: functioning toes, arms, spine, check. Lightsaber, check. Wits, probably. That’s almost everything. Anakin Skywalker sits up and touches his flesh-and-blood hand to his temple with a grimace and looks around himself, first for dangers, then for Obi-Wan Kenobi. Neither immediately present themselves. It’s just as well, if he’s been captured--again--that his master hasn’t been captured alongside him. Of course, after a fashion, it would also be convenient if he were. But that’s no reason to wish it upon the man.
The tinny droid-sounding voice is still saying something. Anakin’s not really listening; he’s getting to his feet, testing his balance, cracking the knuckles of his left hand. The room has the inoffensive dimensions of a hotel room, not a prison cell, but Anakin’s come to distrust what prison cells do and don’t look like. There are no immediate exits: not even barred ones, just no immediate exits, smooth wall all around. That’s unusual. He powers on his lightsaber--without immediate intent to use it, even, just to see if it works--takes mild, somewhat warlike comfort in its usual hum. Then it occurs to him that someone has knocked him out cold and abducted him (again!) and, again, not bothered to deprive him of his lightsaber.
That’s not comforting, for all the usual reasons. For all that the direct, somewhat Gordian workings of Anakin Skywalker’s mind tempt him to try and cut through the wall of his enclosure, one or two additional thought processes are popping up as well: and one of them says, did that work last time?
He powers it off again. The AI is repeating the same phrase over and over again, which catches his reluctant attention.
”May I have your name?”
That’s odd. Presumably any new captor already knows who he is. Anakin is a Jedi: he’s become somewhat accustomed to people knowing who he is. He frowns at the voice, trying to ascertain where it’s coming from, and instead his eyes alight upon what looks like a comlink on a chair--the room’s only furniture--miniature screen glowing brightly. He gingerly scoops it up with his free hand with the intent of seeing if it has any functionality; his last prison comlink has gone missing, after all. This one looks marginally different: of a slightly more up-to-date tech level, for one. And it’s prompting that he enter his name.
Instead he tests the channel of his Force bond. Nothing. Not nothing nothing--just no useful feedback. Obi-Wan is elsewhere, that’s all.
Anakin’s brow furrows. But he figures: why not? Maybe they do already know. Anakin Skywalker, he enters into the comlink and waits gamely for the rest of the lecture.
It’s short, and seems geared towards how to use the simple device. Obviously Anakin has missed the operative part of the orientation. He tabs through a few screens on the comlink and the AI sounds satisfied. He tunes it out again when it starts abjuring him to introduce himself to the rest of the network, whatever that is. Instead he opens the network on his new comlink and looks for a Contacts section in case a familiar name is already programmed in. No dice.
Across from him--as if in resignation--a door drops open like a hatch. A hatch in what appears to be… stone, stone lacquered over with some kind of insulation and wallpaper. Well, that tells him… virtually nothing, he observes philosophically, but that’s not quite the same as absolutely nothing. He gives up on his excavations, scoops up the comlink, and decides to go exploring.
He’s presented with: a plaza. An atmosphere. A sky? An unfamiliar sky, currently in the grips of something that approaches nighttime. The illumination is all from sources on the ground, anyway; he’s arrested briefly by the sight of what at least looks like a non-dome, non-artificial set of stars before he returns his attention to everything around him.
He’s surrounded by people, bustling. People he doesn’t recognize. Architecture he doesn’t recognize, either, though it’s certainly beautiful--a silvery spire unfolds itself in the near distance, and nearer are a set of cloisters and what appears to be some sort of silent-running tram. None of this does anything to explain what he missed entirely in his orientation, though, so he scans the crowd for familiar faces, not with particularly high hopes. He’s been lucky enough before to be captured alongside friends. It doesn’t seem likely this many times in a row. All the same he looks: and tries to make sense, again, of the world around him.
He doesn’t succeed, but existential dread takes a while to collect in a mind like Anakin’s. For now it occurs to him that he may have a mild concussion.
Waking up in a strange place always begins with an inventory: functioning toes, arms, spine, check. Lightsaber, check. Wits, probably. That’s almost everything. Anakin Skywalker sits up and touches his flesh-and-blood hand to his temple with a grimace and looks around himself, first for dangers, then for Obi-Wan Kenobi. Neither immediately present themselves. It’s just as well, if he’s been captured--again--that his master hasn’t been captured alongside him. Of course, after a fashion, it would also be convenient if he were. But that’s no reason to wish it upon the man.
The tinny droid-sounding voice is still saying something. Anakin’s not really listening; he’s getting to his feet, testing his balance, cracking the knuckles of his left hand. The room has the inoffensive dimensions of a hotel room, not a prison cell, but Anakin’s come to distrust what prison cells do and don’t look like. There are no immediate exits: not even barred ones, just no immediate exits, smooth wall all around. That’s unusual. He powers on his lightsaber--without immediate intent to use it, even, just to see if it works--takes mild, somewhat warlike comfort in its usual hum. Then it occurs to him that someone has knocked him out cold and abducted him (again!) and, again, not bothered to deprive him of his lightsaber.
That’s not comforting, for all the usual reasons. For all that the direct, somewhat Gordian workings of Anakin Skywalker’s mind tempt him to try and cut through the wall of his enclosure, one or two additional thought processes are popping up as well: and one of them says, did that work last time?
He powers it off again. The AI is repeating the same phrase over and over again, which catches his reluctant attention.
”May I have your name?”
That’s odd. Presumably any new captor already knows who he is. Anakin is a Jedi: he’s become somewhat accustomed to people knowing who he is. He frowns at the voice, trying to ascertain where it’s coming from, and instead his eyes alight upon what looks like a comlink on a chair--the room’s only furniture--miniature screen glowing brightly. He gingerly scoops it up with his free hand with the intent of seeing if it has any functionality; his last prison comlink has gone missing, after all. This one looks marginally different: of a slightly more up-to-date tech level, for one. And it’s prompting that he enter his name.
Instead he tests the channel of his Force bond. Nothing. Not nothing nothing--just no useful feedback. Obi-Wan is elsewhere, that’s all.
Anakin’s brow furrows. But he figures: why not? Maybe they do already know. Anakin Skywalker, he enters into the comlink and waits gamely for the rest of the lecture.
It’s short, and seems geared towards how to use the simple device. Obviously Anakin has missed the operative part of the orientation. He tabs through a few screens on the comlink and the AI sounds satisfied. He tunes it out again when it starts abjuring him to introduce himself to the rest of the network, whatever that is. Instead he opens the network on his new comlink and looks for a Contacts section in case a familiar name is already programmed in. No dice.
Across from him--as if in resignation--a door drops open like a hatch. A hatch in what appears to be… stone, stone lacquered over with some kind of insulation and wallpaper. Well, that tells him… virtually nothing, he observes philosophically, but that’s not quite the same as absolutely nothing. He gives up on his excavations, scoops up the comlink, and decides to go exploring.
He’s presented with: a plaza. An atmosphere. A sky? An unfamiliar sky, currently in the grips of something that approaches nighttime. The illumination is all from sources on the ground, anyway; he’s arrested briefly by the sight of what at least looks like a non-dome, non-artificial set of stars before he returns his attention to everything around him.
He’s surrounded by people, bustling. People he doesn’t recognize. Architecture he doesn’t recognize, either, though it’s certainly beautiful--a silvery spire unfolds itself in the near distance, and nearer are a set of cloisters and what appears to be some sort of silent-running tram. None of this does anything to explain what he missed entirely in his orientation, though, so he scans the crowd for familiar faces, not with particularly high hopes. He’s been lucky enough before to be captured alongside friends. It doesn’t seem likely this many times in a row. All the same he looks: and tries to make sense, again, of the world around him.
He doesn’t succeed, but existential dread takes a while to collect in a mind like Anakin’s. For now it occurs to him that he may have a mild concussion.
no subject
The pain cuts him off when he digs too deeply into his temple with his fingernails, and he winces and shuts his eyes for a moment. Then he goes back to exploring, trying to determine the shape and size of the object by poking around even more, which mostly yields more pain. He tries to feel around with the Force instead, but it's too difficult, too precise, and concentrating on it just worsens his headache.
After enough prodding he eventually just presses his hand to his forehead against the pain, and lets it drop, squinting at Jason.
"Have you got anything sharp?" he says. "And small? Much smaller than a lightsaber?"
A new priority has inserted itself before steal the ship: get rid of this mind control implant. He doesn't question that it is a mind control implant. Obviously it is a mind control implant.
no subject
The pain is sharp, like a nail driven through the skin and into bone and tissue beneath; Jason stops a few seconds before Anakin. At the question, however, he nods. "Yes, I've a pocketknife, one moment--"
--no, he does not have his pocketknife, he realizes as he pats at his clothes. This realization is disgruntling. "--never mind.
"--anyway, you can't go cutting it open right here, like this," he says crossly. (Note this bit of common sense might not have materialized had the knife actually been available.) "At the least we would need good light, and disinfectants, Skywalker."
In days to come, Jason may regret his use of the 'we.'
no subject
The knife turns out to be the easy part. It's not hard to find someone in the crowd willing to part with their pocketknife temporarily, though the man Anakin finds looks leery of what Anakin plans to do with it. Since this is Anakin alone temporarily, though, he lies glibly and pays it altogether no mind.
The disinfectant proves more of a challenge. After a while it occurs to him that the Ship's Services droid said something about asking it for help, and he finds himself redirected to a strange, many-buttoned vending machine of sorts. It's a high chute built into one of the sloping iridescent walls and it has a familiar logo next to it: familiar because Anakin's fairly certain he saw another one of these chutes in his arrival room, although he'd dismissed it as part of the architecture at the time. "First aid," he says clearly and presses the button.
It takes a few tries, but several boxes of Band-Aids later, he emerges with gauze and isopropyl alcohol.
For Jason Blood's part, he's tasked to find a proper room. What he eventually selects looks like a laboratory: or potentially a repurposed lecture hall. It's difficult to tell, but it's bright and spiraling according to some alien understanding of the Golden Ratio and has a number of curved white tables scattered among its steps, with gel-like specimens in pillar display tanks around the room. The tables look clean. Many things look clean here.
Anakin takes a moment to make sense of the room; when this fails, he shrugs it off, sets his supplies down on one table and then hoists himself up to sit on it.
"Why don't you try me," he suggests like they're taking turns on a swingset. "I have a thick skull. --Really, I get the risks," he says in a lower voice when Jason makes a face. "I recognize this kind of thing could go seriously wrong. But so could not getting it out."
no subject
It had occurred to him, while Anakin was hunting supplies, that in some ways it might be safer for he himself to 'go under the knife.' Ultimately brain injury isn't precisely permanent for him, after all. Then he'd reminded himself that Anakin Skywalker would be the presumed operating surgeon in this scenario, and decided that no, he was not going to volunteer himself as patient.
So he only nods, slowly, at Anakin's off-hand suggestion, taking the knife and the alcohol for some quick-and-dirty field cleaning, as it were. He gazes sidelong at Skywalker as he wipes the blade, with a critically assessing look.
"You should lie down; your head would be steadier that way." Pause. "We do have a pillow."
"No," says Harry from where Jason has propped him. "I don't wanna be bled on. You don't think I got one of these things in me, do you?"
"I checked, Harry," Jason says patiently. "You're fine. Presumably it wouldn't work on you-- whatever 'it' does-- since you do not have a brain."
"Oh, thanks."
"Well, you don't," Jason says with equanimity. "I am ready when you are, Mr. Skywalker."
no subject
He looks up at Jason with the half-gung-ho expression of someone who is fairly certain they are not about to receive a backdoor lobotomy. "Go ahead," he says, and closes his eyes.
no subject
It hadn't seemed very deep, when he'd touched his own. And it hadn't seemed anchored, but slightly-loose beneath the skin. Presumably it's not drilled into the bone of the skull, just... subcutaneous, which should make the removal fairly simple. (Optimism seems the way to go here.)
The temple has a lot of blood vessels; this is likely going to bleed like the devil, Jason supposes. Well, they have gauze and he's bound more than a few cuts in his time, at least.
Jason settles his free hand on the other side of Anakin's head, firmly, his callused palm securely cradling the young Jedi's skull. (Jason's touch is disconcertingly warm.)
"Is trepanning a thing, in your home... world, or whatever?" Jason asks with conversational curiosity, bracing the heel of his hand on the table's angular edge. "I've performed a few of those."
The shiny edge of the pocketknife-- and Jason thanks Whoever that its owner keeps it sharp, at least-- touches Anakin's skin, cold steel, and Jason exerts careful pressure as he begins to nick a half-moon slice around the edge of the foreign object. His current plan is to cut a centimeter's exit gap, and then attempt to push the object out the little flap, from the other side, with pressure from his fingers.
That is his plan.
no subject
As soon as the knife makes contact, the color starts to drain out of Anakin's face; as it cuts, his breathing grows shallower and shallower into hyperventilation. He very obviously belabors his breathing a bit then, to try and control it, but to no avail--his chest is seizing up. It is the remarkable silence of someone in extreme pain. His fingers are balled up into fists, even the metal ones, and his feet kick and scuff at the table's surface. But he holds his head still.
His pride is only spared crying out by a second--a second in which he goes slack and still all at once, and Jason has to prop his head up by reflex to keep it from lolling. Anakin's blacked out completely.
That probably makes things easier, for the time being.
Blood is pouring out of the side of his head. Gauze is going to be a temporary solution, at best.
no subject
and stupidly machosense of.... perhaps respect, for Anakin Skywalker's presumed space monk training which, Jason thinks, has likely included pain endurance training and meditation and the like. Clearly the young man is no stranger to past trauma, if the arm alone is any indication.He wonders if it was a mistake, that lack of restraints, as Anakin's lungs switch into overdrive, as his booted feet twitch and jerk on the table, but it seems that--
--and he's passed out. Jason frowns, abstractedly, as hot blood starts runneling from the little gash, down over the side of Anakin's face, into his hair, onto Jason's own hands. He frowns because, yes, no doubt it hurts, being cut never feels good, but--
But in the grand scheme of things, the cut is less than a centimeter long. It is bleeding profusely, which will need dealing with, but Jason is honestly surprised that it could make Skywalker actually pass out.
--well, he had better take advantage of this and finish the matter as quickly as possible, Jason supposes. He lets go Anakin's limp head (gingerly, easing it into stable position--). Press here, and tease with the blade's tip to coax the little disc--
White pain explodes across Jason's field of vision. It feels very much as though someone took a sledgehammer to his own little implant. Possibly also a railroad spike. The knife drops from his nerveless fingers to clatter on the table in the sticky growing pool of Anakin's blood.
Jason clutches at his own head on reflex, and that is the last thing he does for a while. Unless one counts actions such as toppling off the stool and slithering down, down, into a pile on the floor.
Harry blinks.
"Uh... guys?"