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Thanks to Oreph for beta and encouragement.

Paper
by Hetre Z

You shop at market regularly. Everybody knows you. Children crowd around and laugh; hitch their breath in anticipation. You smile to yourself, lift exotic coins and glass ornaments out of your pockets with invisible hands, and the hitches turn into cheers.

They know you’re a good one for tricks, all kinds. Asking the sky to go different colors, or bending spoons for bracelets. It makes the children happy when you do this, lightens the weight of years. But in each jest is the memory of someone who doesn’t use his magic for parlor tricks. Behind your waving fingers and the sound of laughter, you think of someone beautiful and pure, natural. And then the smiles of the children mean so much less.

Parchment paper runs out fast, what with your History of Worlds, and his chronicling of songs and stories. Every time you buy more you make an effort, greater even than lifting a palace or bringing on storms, not to raise the paper to your cheek and rub against it. You make an effort, every time, not to measure which one is drier and rougher.

Time is passing.

You know it and he knows it. Someday it will pass away from you entirely, leaving you still and cold. Leaving him untouched. When that happens, he’ll go into the West, just as if he had never found you.

You used to think you were his West. That you were his perfect city, the thing he reached for in the night and thought of in the day. But you’re just a pause, and when the pause is over he will take his ship and leave. You think maybe he’ll leave before you. Sometimes you want him to go first.

But those days are few, days when the sun isn’t out and his eyes are dark under the smooth forehead. The other days you want to cling like a vine, putting roots into him all up and down, so that you can never be separated. And some days the need for paper separates you, and you go out to buy some.

At market you see the Boy. The one Qui-Gon found, and Ben with him. It’s been years since the finding, so few to your great many that it’s like a single breath, out and in. So many years to his few that he now stands tall and harsh where he was once small and soft. His eyes burn with anger he doesn’t know he has.

You see Ben and the Boy now, smiling and laughing and catching looks from each other when they think nobody else will notice. You see them thinking, together, that what they built is going to last. That a Senator and Jedi training, and even their own hearts, will never keep them from each other. You can see them think this, just as you see the shadows of what they’ve done with each other.

There, the ghost of a hand on the Boy’s cheek, spirit-memory-print. It’s dim now where it used to be bright; days or weeks ago, when Ben held his hand to that cheek and said the word “love”, and kissed the lips and pressed the word into them, over and over. That word will stand between them always, and someday they will kill each other for it.

The thought of this hurts you, and the smiles of the children have lost all their charm. What you want now is to go home and circle yourself with his arms. All you want is for time to stop, because it will never be as good as it is right now. Things will never be whole again. In a little while everything will break, and you’ll have to watch it.

The children see you turn, beg you to stay. It takes some time for you to be able to say no, leave now I must. I must leave now. This isn’t because the children don’t listen; it’s because you can’t say it plain. Words don’t make sense when you say them, never have. The most you’ve ever been able to prove with words is a basic emotion, like hunger or madness, like fear.

Your gift isn’t language, but feeling.

You can feel the energy, electric, that rises off of Ben and Anakin. You can see traces in daytime of where they strike sparks off each other in the night. Those traces are shadows and smoke against the pale skin; against red anger or yellow happiness, because these two are rainbows to you.

Your gift is feeling, and so you do. You feel the water-drip presence of Elrond, seeping out of the house he never leaves and splashing into the street. People from all over the city come to sit on your doorstep, somehow knowing that a magical creature lives inside. You’ve never had the heart to send them away.

Feel, you do. You feel the sharp impatience of the Senator, her own little fire and her hunger, seeking Anakin through the eyes and the smile. You see her longing gazes; can almost taste them through the wall when she visits.

You do feel. War boiling on the horizon, and the pain and anger and happiness of regular people, aside from bending spoons or telling fortunes. The purity of these same people, with their simple emotions and their complicated lives.

You feel, you understand things, that’s what you do. You’ve never been able to explain them, never needed to. You just needed to know them. You think about things by making them like other things. Some people are cotton cloth, woven simple, the same colors and different textures, or the same textures and different colors. Ben and Anakin are a rope, twisting through itself and wrapping around itself, burning the skin as it twines.

Anakin and the Senator are something different, sweet and complicated for all it looks so simple. Complicated because of Ben. Complicated because of a future you see for them that you couldn’t stop if you wanted to. The future is love, and you have never been willing to stop love. Not even Ben’s.

It’s complicated by the part you can’t see, the future beyond marriage or true love, or whatever they happen to be traveling toward. You don’t know what will happen, aside from a tightening of your throat when you think about it, but you wonder. Is the tightness from Anakin and the Senator happy together, and from Ben’s sadness? Or is it something else altogether, something you can’t even imagine? You don’t know, can’t tell. So, you see, complicated.

But it’s never as complicated as this thing between you and Elrond. Nothing has ever been like this. You are the spider’s web, the parts of you weaving together in little patterns, interlaced with the Force, memories, and love. He is the spider, learning how to be one after all the years you’ve spent together.

Or maybe he was already the spider, with his lovely face and effortless magic and the way he knew you, from the very first second, seeing you look down from the upper window of your house that day. He just looked up, and the eyes found you, knowing before it happened what they would find. And he walked over and knocked on your door, and you were lost in it.

So then, maybe he was the web and he caught you, looking up into your eyes from the street.

You never asked what he was doing there in the first place. It was enough that he was there, and that he hasn’t left yet. Or almost enough, when you remember the ship he has waiting. You’ve never seen it, and after the first day he didn’t leave your house, so you’ve never seen the rest of them, these alien creatures with their white sails and their stories about a ring and a child-man, and missing fingers.

It doesn’t make any sense, what he says about it. You have the Force inside of you; you know all the secrets the universe will ever tell anyone, even if that isn’t as many as the universe actually has. You know what can and cannot happen; you’ve seen things that are going to be, and things that you have prevented from becoming.

So you’d know if this was real or some kind of story, but you have ideas. This isn’t real, you tell yourself. He can’t tell you or won’t tell you what he is, what he’s doing here. Which is another reason to want to cling like the vine, though you don’t quite know what the reason is. To find out what really happened, perhaps, or maybe learn how to trust.

Because eight hundred years hasn’t taught you how to trust a living thing. You trust the Force, yes, but that’s inside of you, not outside. It isn’t wrapped in beautiful features and a possibly-lying tongue, it doesn’t make your heart ache when you look, it doesn’t wait patiently to get on a ship and sail away from you. No number of years could prepare you to trust that. That is your only obstacle, the only thing you will never learn. You know this, and possibly he knows this.

So he stays.

In the house, all the time, watching the street from the window, the way you did once. Waiting for you to come home, trying to catch a glimpse of his ship, watching the parade of life going past your house. He doesn’t hide, quite, when the other Jedi have meetings here. He’s just never around when they do. You’ve looked and looked for him when guests were there, and he’s not quite hiding, you know, but you’ve only ever found him the once.

The day you found him, he wasn’t-hiding during a break in the words, during meditation. He was standing by a window looking into the street out back, an alley. He was watching the shadows as if he saw something there.

When you looked, it was empty, but you felt whispers and traces, sparks against skin. You couldn’t concentrate when you went back to the meeting. The next day you looked, knowing what you would find, and you saw the handprint on Anakin’s cheek.

Elrond knows everything, you think sometimes. He knows what you are afraid of; he knows what he is afraid of. What Ben is feeling, what Anakin is feeling; what everyone does to everyone else. We twist ourselves, you think. We used to be pure straight lines, but then we bent and stretched ourselves painfully, and he is the only one who can see it to unwind us. You can’t see it, you know. You can only feel it, in yourself and others, but feeling it doesn’t help. You can’t stop anything that is truly meant to be, you can only watch it as it happens.

You asked Ben if he was in the alley that day, and he muttered and hid his face, and you didn’t need him to answer. You have never asked Anakin.

Sometimes you imagine them sliding across each other, propped up in the alley, or finding a place to hide, a house that belongs to someone else, and shhh, shhh, don’t make any noise, they’ll hear us. It’s like you’re there when it happens, and when you see it you don’t want Anakin to talk to the Senator ever again. But then you see the Senator with him, and you don’t want what they have to end either.

The worst thing about you, you think, is how nothing you do has ever changed anything. You are the only one who stands still while everyone else moves; you even keep Elrond from moving, though he shakes with it sometimes. You think maybe someday, someday, something you do will be of use somewhere. You’ll find a planet, someday, and stay there and wait to be of use to someone. Because you know you will, you can feel it.

Time is passing, things are changing. You know this, you tell yourself every day; and most of the time you love it, shifting sands and river-water. Changing, changing, creating something new and different, powerful and lovely in its difference. But there are days when all you want is to keep everything where it was, for nothing to change so you can finally keep up.

There are cracks in your world, in the world you’ve created for yourself, and you can’t see them to fix them. You only know they exist, feel them getting wider, and your heart gets colder as you realize that nothing you ever do will stop it or help it.

Time passes and you wait. For what exactly, you don’t know, but something is coming. You can tell. And the paper lies heavy in your hand, dry and rough, as you start off for home.