Okay, so here I am, an innocent lurker, having just found this blog, when I see: "what if the skywalkers were cthulu-type monsters." excuse me??? please elaborate you just wrote that and nothing else im dying ex p la i n y o ur s el f
The Force is everything that ever was and ever will be, every storm and every silence, the hunting krayk dragon and cowering bantha calf: it is huge, all-consuming, completely inhuman. How, then, could its children be anything short of monstrous? (Wonders, yes. But monsters all the same.)
Anakin Skywalker is boy-shaped, but Obi Wan cannot bear to look at him.
A clarification: he can look at him with his human eyes; but he must clamp down the extra eyes his Force-sensitivity gives him, because when he doesn’t – well. The first time he met the boy he hadn’t closed those eyes; he’d open them, wide and curious and seen –
teeth and claws and roiling shadows, a slipslide of features and starfire, the white blur of warpspeed and it hurts –
Anakin Skywalker is the son of the Force, half human and half something extraordinary. There’s a reason the Jedi don’t like him, why Yoda mistrusts him; they all have to close their extra eyes around him; and even when they’re white-knuckled with effort, clamping down so the Force can’t so much as whisper to them (and that hurts Jedi, of course it does, it runs counter to all their training about opening up and trusting in the Force) and even then they still feel the velvet quiver of unseen limbs over their skin.
And more. And worse. When he is angry – which is often – his shadow warps into something awful, and even the least Force-sensitive being quails at the profound wrongness of the sight. His features warp and melt, teeth spiralling out from his pupils, his mouth cracks open wide, his tongue growing scales and feathers and catching fire and he smiles, oh how he smiles and –
nothing like him should exist and
and you blink, lose the moment, he’s just a young man glowering at you, and his shadow is the same, but the memory of that horror is seared into the back of your brain.
It is no surprise that Padme dies in childbed.
The first child’s cry makes Obi Wan’s bones rattle. It – you could not call it anything but an it – is a twisting, squirming mess of light and dark. There’s a wing, a thorned branch: you cannot focus on it. You cannot pin a shape to it. Obi Wan wants to run away, run and never look back. But the Med Droid is offering it to him; and it is a child, of a sort; and Obi Wan takes it, and it coalesces into a soft pink baby girl. He places it – her – against Padme’s white breast. Padme cradles it. “She’s beautiful.”
The second is just the same: pushed out like any human baby, but a roling mess of lightening and thick syrupy cloud, one moment tentacled and the next furred, pure power condensed. Obi Wan takes it in his arms and it solidifies into another fat baby, small and squalling.
He’s not like the other babies, Luke Skywalker. He’s a funny one. When he smiles, you have the sudden absurd impulse that he’s got too many teeth for his face. His hair is corn-gold, but when you see it out of the corner of your eye you swear that it isn’t hair at all, but fire and teeth. Looking at him too long is like staring into the sun.
The other children are scared of him, Behu says to Owen, once. And Owen says: children always know. And Behu says: he isn’t a bad kid. Owen says: he’s a wonder. And that’s the problem.
Jabba’s goons go to the Lars farm to collect water once. Only once. They return to Jabba’s palace gibbering nonsense, with their eyes burned out. Both mumble something about there’s something wrong with the boy and then jump into the ragnar pit.
Don’t do that again, says Owen, but he hugs his nephew all the same, pulls him close, kisses his temple. He feels something hot-cold run over his spine, like something far larger than the child is trying to embrace him back. That night, Behu runs her fingers over the new white scartissue on her husband’s back, and says, he’s a good kid. Owen says, I know.
If I was there I could have saved them, Luke says to Ben Kenobi, years later, and in that moment he has a thousand thousand eyes and all of them are burning, and he has no limbs but a dozen wings bearing him aloft, and each feather is molten gold and each feather drips blood. Ben thinks of Anakin, screws his Force-sensitivity closed. Luke is a monster. A wonder. But first and foremost he is a boy, and he is grieving.
Ben Kenobi holds him while he weeps.
When Leia comes, she turns into a celestial horror with more teeth than Han cares to count. “Huh,” he says, after their first time. She’s so little in his arms, but so vast. He feels something gentle his back. He says, “Next time, I’ll wear a blindfold, princess. Don’t want to blind me, do you? Then I won’t be able to see when you’re doing stupid shit.” She titters, presses her face into the curve of his neck.
Love comes to everyone, including monsters.
vaporwave
yousharknotpass
