Post by Master Audreidi on May 31, 2004 21:45:22 GMT -5
A Star Wars short story I concoted a while ago. It's on Fanfiction.net under my account, where my name is simply Audreidi.
I'm actually in the process of writing another chapter for it, though I'm in the middle of another FFN project called "The Jedi Dawn". We'll see when it comes up.
Reviews go here: ennaani.proboards3.com/index.cgi?board=reviewsforfanfiction&action=display&n=1&thread=1050
So, without further ado...
[glow=red,2,300]The Artist's Way[/glow]
<><><><><>
It wasn’t so long ago.
The night breeze drifted through the park, stirring the early summer leaves to rustle and my long loose hair to stir on either side of my face as I stared down at the blank flimsy in front of me.
I wasn’t sure why it was still blank. Perhaps it reflected my state of mind, at the moment. My right hand was curled under the sheet of flimsy, one finger tapping expectantly. But my left hand, holding the inkstick in a death grip, didn’t move.
The bench was hard beneath me, an old wooden thing that had likely been sitting here before I was born. The lacquer was worn down but the wood, probably grown with some sort of chemical, refused to rot.
I should know. I sat there every evening, watching the sun go down, waiting for inspiration to arrive over the Corellian horizon and set my left hand in motion, scribbling furiously under the streetlights as the daylight faded, writing something the local news would make a killing for the next morning.
No such luck tonight. There hadn’t been for weeks. A few months, really. Little did I know that I didn’t really need to think of a good story, though, because one was about to happen to me. It might not have ultimately determined the fate of the entire universe, or even anyone other than me, but it was my tale, my personal narrative. My world. Nothing the media could ever really understand.
I must have looked really stupid, my lips parted, eyes staring through the void, posture sagging…but he picked me anyway; I was the only one there. Spaced as I was, I didn’t see or hear him coming.
But when realization finally struck, he was already sitting on the bench, face flushed with exercise, his golden-brown hair disheveled, showing a few streaks of gray, ice-blue eyes shining with a dim spark of fear that I hadn’t seen since I pulled a little kid out of a hole in the ice. The kid had been thrashing in the sub-zero water. I hadn’t been much more than ten, but I had known the look in his wild eyes. It was rooted in human instinct. The look of someone that knew he was about to die, that could feel Fate’s icy hands taking a grip over his heart. I could almost feel his terror myself, in a way.
Except that kid never did die, because I was there to pull him out by some freakish coincidence, as my mother put it. I could hear her now: "You were there because you were there, Neymi. He was one lucky kid."
Not that I believed it was mere coincidence. I didn’t look at life that way.
And now I saw the same look in this man’s eyes. Maybe I could do something here, too.
"What’s the matter?" I managed lamely, fear gripping my throat. His beat-up robes weren’t really that important to either of us at the moment, nor his miscellaneous unkemptness. I hardly noticed those beyond that gripping urgency. Not only was the look on his face making me afraid, but…I could feel the raw terror more than ever. Like it was coursing through my own system. He was controlling his fear, though, somehow, putting it in a mental container to deal with at a more appropriate time.
He darted a look over his shoulder. "Can you do something for me?"
"Yeah."
I could tell his mind was churning rapidly. "Pretend…pretend I’m your sweetheart."
I wondered what he was thinking. And what was after him. "As in…my boyfriend…or something?" My thought process was muddled, as usual. He would look a bit old for me, wouldn’t he?
"Yes…please decide now. Or I might die."
Wow. "Okay." I stood up, thoughts whirling through my head. "Come on. We’ll walk under the shadows there." Because I thought it a very good guess that he was being looked for, the way he kept darting his eyes around.
He stood quickly, came to my side. I put my arm around his back, and we strolled off casually into the darkness under the trees.
"What’s going on?" I said, just loud enough for him to hear.
"Hunted," he said. "Somewhere close I can hide?"
I thought rapidly as I heard a faint shout behind me. His pursuers, no doubt. "Keep walking. My place is right across the street."
He quickened his pace a little. My heart pounding rapidly, I matched it and directed us at my house, the little one second from the corner, with no lights in the vicinity. I had griped about that before, but if it was going to save someone’s life now, there were no more complaints coming from me.
A speeder. There was a speeder coming around the avenue behind the park, behind us. He looked around and flinched ever so slightly. Control or not, he knew he was close to being captured. I wondered what had cracked through the emotional shield that he had in all probability worn down prior to these events.
" Don’t worry," I murmured. "We’ll make it. That’s a dead end."
"Not for them."
"What?"
The sound of a speeder mowing over undergrowth.
" D**n it," I said, as if it mattered. "He’s running over the flowerbeds."
We crossed the street, probably looking a bit hurried for a couple out for an evening stroll, but that wasn’t exactly the foremost concern in my mind. Nor his, obviously.
I guided us around my cabin to the back door and fumbled with the security keypad.
His arm dropped from my waist as he listened intently. The speeder kept roaming the park, but there wasn’t any sign that they were on to him.
The door hissed open and I ushered him inside. "Sorry about the mess, though I suppose you don’t care. We’ll go downstairs; there’s something of a hidden room down there.
"So what happened?" I blurted, the thought of a possible homicidal maniac following me into my own basement running around my mind like a loosed vrelt. " Did you murder someone or something?"
The comment surprised him, a lot. "No. I would never do something like that. If you’re going to play that game, they’re the criminals."
"Sorry," I said, relieved.
A segment of unfinished wall was actually a door. I wedged it open with an orphaned tool lying on the floor and waved into the space behind. "It’s actually as big as a bedroom in there, and I clean it out, too. Maybe you can tell me what this is all about when they’ve left."
He nodded and ducked in. The floor of the hideaway was a couple of feet below the basement floor, the room itself directly under my front entrance. When I’d bought this ancient cabin and started to revamp the basement, I’d stumbled across the lone room that hadn’t been included in the blueprints, and spiffed it up rather nicely. I might not have been able to write stories, but I was good at interior décor.
I headed back upstairs, wondering why I hadn’t torn them out for a little airlift, as was the thing to do these days… Am I really that lazy?
…What the hell am I thinking? There’s a guy hidden in my basement that I don’t even know, and someone’s looking for him to try and kill him, and I’m thinking about home renovations…
Mentally kicking myself, I came up to the sitting room to look outside the window. I had never been so thankful for a good solid pane of transparisteel in my life, as there were some sort of idiot goons out there bent on murder.
I wondered why I couldn’t so much as write down a story on flimsy when narratives were wildly running around in my head during my every waking hour.
Agh. He’s probably hungry. And the goons might get suspicious if they see me staring out the window at them.
I was paranoid. Who could blame me at the moment, either? I headed to the kitchen in an attempt to occupy myself.
But my heart was beating with excitement. Sure, I was scared out of my mind, and sure, I could maybe possibly not likely get killed…but I was hiding a total stranger in my basement from a bunch of goons set on murder…<br>
I wondered what had prevented me from seeing that before. Or perhaps I was just seeing it in a whole new light.
Wow. I decided to bring him the leftover roast traladon. It was still fairly fresh, as I had just made it a few hours ago. I heated it up, poured some gravy over it, and thought about cooking another pot of vegetables. My kitchen, like my house, was fairly old-fashioned, the way I liked it…<br>
Another pot of vegetables? I’m not being realistic. He’ll likely be gone in a few minutes, and there goes my exciting brush with danger, which wasn’t really that dangerous at all.
So I headed back down with the traladon and knocked on the hidden door. He took a moment trying to figure out how to open it, as my construction skills were as disorganized as everything else.
I'm actually in the process of writing another chapter for it, though I'm in the middle of another FFN project called "The Jedi Dawn". We'll see when it comes up.
Reviews go here: ennaani.proboards3.com/index.cgi?board=reviewsforfanfiction&action=display&n=1&thread=1050
So, without further ado...
[glow=red,2,300]The Artist's Way[/glow]
<><><><><>
It wasn’t so long ago.
The night breeze drifted through the park, stirring the early summer leaves to rustle and my long loose hair to stir on either side of my face as I stared down at the blank flimsy in front of me.
I wasn’t sure why it was still blank. Perhaps it reflected my state of mind, at the moment. My right hand was curled under the sheet of flimsy, one finger tapping expectantly. But my left hand, holding the inkstick in a death grip, didn’t move.
The bench was hard beneath me, an old wooden thing that had likely been sitting here before I was born. The lacquer was worn down but the wood, probably grown with some sort of chemical, refused to rot.
I should know. I sat there every evening, watching the sun go down, waiting for inspiration to arrive over the Corellian horizon and set my left hand in motion, scribbling furiously under the streetlights as the daylight faded, writing something the local news would make a killing for the next morning.
No such luck tonight. There hadn’t been for weeks. A few months, really. Little did I know that I didn’t really need to think of a good story, though, because one was about to happen to me. It might not have ultimately determined the fate of the entire universe, or even anyone other than me, but it was my tale, my personal narrative. My world. Nothing the media could ever really understand.
I must have looked really stupid, my lips parted, eyes staring through the void, posture sagging…but he picked me anyway; I was the only one there. Spaced as I was, I didn’t see or hear him coming.
But when realization finally struck, he was already sitting on the bench, face flushed with exercise, his golden-brown hair disheveled, showing a few streaks of gray, ice-blue eyes shining with a dim spark of fear that I hadn’t seen since I pulled a little kid out of a hole in the ice. The kid had been thrashing in the sub-zero water. I hadn’t been much more than ten, but I had known the look in his wild eyes. It was rooted in human instinct. The look of someone that knew he was about to die, that could feel Fate’s icy hands taking a grip over his heart. I could almost feel his terror myself, in a way.
Except that kid never did die, because I was there to pull him out by some freakish coincidence, as my mother put it. I could hear her now: "You were there because you were there, Neymi. He was one lucky kid."
Not that I believed it was mere coincidence. I didn’t look at life that way.
And now I saw the same look in this man’s eyes. Maybe I could do something here, too.
"What’s the matter?" I managed lamely, fear gripping my throat. His beat-up robes weren’t really that important to either of us at the moment, nor his miscellaneous unkemptness. I hardly noticed those beyond that gripping urgency. Not only was the look on his face making me afraid, but…I could feel the raw terror more than ever. Like it was coursing through my own system. He was controlling his fear, though, somehow, putting it in a mental container to deal with at a more appropriate time.
He darted a look over his shoulder. "Can you do something for me?"
"Yeah."
I could tell his mind was churning rapidly. "Pretend…pretend I’m your sweetheart."
I wondered what he was thinking. And what was after him. "As in…my boyfriend…or something?" My thought process was muddled, as usual. He would look a bit old for me, wouldn’t he?
"Yes…please decide now. Or I might die."
Wow. "Okay." I stood up, thoughts whirling through my head. "Come on. We’ll walk under the shadows there." Because I thought it a very good guess that he was being looked for, the way he kept darting his eyes around.
He stood quickly, came to my side. I put my arm around his back, and we strolled off casually into the darkness under the trees.
"What’s going on?" I said, just loud enough for him to hear.
"Hunted," he said. "Somewhere close I can hide?"
I thought rapidly as I heard a faint shout behind me. His pursuers, no doubt. "Keep walking. My place is right across the street."
He quickened his pace a little. My heart pounding rapidly, I matched it and directed us at my house, the little one second from the corner, with no lights in the vicinity. I had griped about that before, but if it was going to save someone’s life now, there were no more complaints coming from me.
A speeder. There was a speeder coming around the avenue behind the park, behind us. He looked around and flinched ever so slightly. Control or not, he knew he was close to being captured. I wondered what had cracked through the emotional shield that he had in all probability worn down prior to these events.
" Don’t worry," I murmured. "We’ll make it. That’s a dead end."
"Not for them."
"What?"
The sound of a speeder mowing over undergrowth.
" D**n it," I said, as if it mattered. "He’s running over the flowerbeds."
We crossed the street, probably looking a bit hurried for a couple out for an evening stroll, but that wasn’t exactly the foremost concern in my mind. Nor his, obviously.
I guided us around my cabin to the back door and fumbled with the security keypad.
His arm dropped from my waist as he listened intently. The speeder kept roaming the park, but there wasn’t any sign that they were on to him.
The door hissed open and I ushered him inside. "Sorry about the mess, though I suppose you don’t care. We’ll go downstairs; there’s something of a hidden room down there.
"So what happened?" I blurted, the thought of a possible homicidal maniac following me into my own basement running around my mind like a loosed vrelt. " Did you murder someone or something?"
The comment surprised him, a lot. "No. I would never do something like that. If you’re going to play that game, they’re the criminals."
"Sorry," I said, relieved.
A segment of unfinished wall was actually a door. I wedged it open with an orphaned tool lying on the floor and waved into the space behind. "It’s actually as big as a bedroom in there, and I clean it out, too. Maybe you can tell me what this is all about when they’ve left."
He nodded and ducked in. The floor of the hideaway was a couple of feet below the basement floor, the room itself directly under my front entrance. When I’d bought this ancient cabin and started to revamp the basement, I’d stumbled across the lone room that hadn’t been included in the blueprints, and spiffed it up rather nicely. I might not have been able to write stories, but I was good at interior décor.
I headed back upstairs, wondering why I hadn’t torn them out for a little airlift, as was the thing to do these days… Am I really that lazy?
…What the hell am I thinking? There’s a guy hidden in my basement that I don’t even know, and someone’s looking for him to try and kill him, and I’m thinking about home renovations…
Mentally kicking myself, I came up to the sitting room to look outside the window. I had never been so thankful for a good solid pane of transparisteel in my life, as there were some sort of idiot goons out there bent on murder.
I wondered why I couldn’t so much as write down a story on flimsy when narratives were wildly running around in my head during my every waking hour.
Agh. He’s probably hungry. And the goons might get suspicious if they see me staring out the window at them.
I was paranoid. Who could blame me at the moment, either? I headed to the kitchen in an attempt to occupy myself.
But my heart was beating with excitement. Sure, I was scared out of my mind, and sure, I could maybe possibly not likely get killed…but I was hiding a total stranger in my basement from a bunch of goons set on murder…<br>
I wondered what had prevented me from seeing that before. Or perhaps I was just seeing it in a whole new light.
Wow. I decided to bring him the leftover roast traladon. It was still fairly fresh, as I had just made it a few hours ago. I heated it up, poured some gravy over it, and thought about cooking another pot of vegetables. My kitchen, like my house, was fairly old-fashioned, the way I liked it…<br>
Another pot of vegetables? I’m not being realistic. He’ll likely be gone in a few minutes, and there goes my exciting brush with danger, which wasn’t really that dangerous at all.
So I headed back down with the traladon and knocked on the hidden door. He took a moment trying to figure out how to open it, as my construction skills were as disorganized as everything else.