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shywhitemoose · 2 years

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Out of Place

Well, my disaster brain had another idea and wouldn’t leave me alone, so maybe let’s explore what happens if we unceremoniously dump Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, robes and all, into oh.. i don’t know... the middle of desert nowhere southern Nevada? Not far from modern day airplane mechanic and aircraft racer Anakin Skywalker’s home? 🤷‍♀️

I have no grand plan for this but there are a handful of ridiculous situations I absolutely want to write the boys in, so I’m guessing this might end up more like a series of little episodes rather than a solid fic with one cohesive plotline. Anyway, here’s the first bit, along with a link to the full chapter if you’re interested. I hope it’s as fun to read as it is to write 😊

It was 5:30 pm when Anakin felt the tremor.

He was elbows deep in the P-51’s engine compartment, fishing for the socket wrench he’d just dropped behind one of its exhaust pipes, and the ladder beneath him rattled so abruptly he found himself clutching the ribbing of the warbird’s exposed airframe to keep his balance. On the wing beside him an old transistor radio clattered to its back, but its dusty speakers blared on, oblivious, having buried beneath the stale din of AC/DC any outside noise that might have accompanied the small quake.

The young mechanic switched off the radio and glanced over his shoulder toward the hangar gate. Its large sliding doors were still open, flanking a barren panorama of the valley to the north. It was a familiar scene, an arid landscape kissed warm by a late October sun, sparse patches of desert bush flickering in its light as they caught the evening wind. Nothing seemed out of place.

Any other time, Anakin might have brushed it off. He was no stranger to the occasional seismic blip out here—he’d made this airfield his home, after all, and less than thirty miles west was an active military test range. But it seemed a little late in the day for scheduled detonations, and he could feel some small, inexplicable little tug in his gut whispering this is different.

He turned back to retrieve his wrench, then he descended the ladder and walked outside to investigate. When his feet hit the pavement beyond the hangar doors, his gaze turned instinctively westward, and he had to raise his hand to block the sun as he scanned the horizon.

Smoke was rising from a fold in the foothills of Badger Mountain.

Without a second thought, he darted back into the building and wrenched the enormous, weather-worn doors along their squeaky track until they met in the middle, where he locked them shut. He snatched his jacket from a peg on the opposite wall and shrugged it on as quickly as he could, then he grabbed his helmet and popped out the side door to fetch his dirt bike.

The trusty old two-wheeler rumbled eagerly to life, flinging an arc of gravel behind him as he took off in the direction of the fading plume. Patches of yellow-specked brittlebush stretched into blurred lines on either side of him, and he didn’t slow down until he reached the base of the Pahranagat Range, two miles west, where he spotted something emerging through a gap in the hills.

A rumpled sort of form, kicking up little clouds of dust as it moved.

Anakin parked and dismounted, yanking off his helmet and squinting against the sunset as he watched the figure approach.

“Hello there!” it called, raising an arm in an amicable wave.

It had a man’s voice. Friendly enough. Possibly accented. Rough though, as if it hadn’t been used in days.

Anakin itched with curiosity as the stranger came into better focus. He was dressed in brown and beige, a dark cloak of some sort hanging open down his front, its bottom hem whipping around his legs in the gusty desert wind. He walked with a slight hobble, his tousled hair bobbing with every other step, a shimmering halo of golden copper backlit by the sinking sun. A few steps closer and Anakin could make out a beard to match, but the face in the silhouette was still too dark to discern.

“Everything okay?” Anakin called back. It was a dumb question. Clearly there had been some sort of accident. Why hadn’t he called 9-1-1 the moment he’d seen the smoke? You’re an idiot, he told himself. That’s why.

“Ah… no? Not exactly,” the man eventually answered, navigating with care through a rocky patch of terrain as he closed the distance between them. When his feet found level ground, he dusted off his shoulders and thighs, the loose arms of his cloak flapping around cartoonishly with every flick of his wrist.

Anakin could have asked him to elucidate, but he was too distracted because what the actual hell was going on with this guy’s clothes? As if the robe wasn’t bizarre enough, beneath it was some kind of medieval old-timey tunic—or something—with a wide belt or sash or fucking cummerbund around his middle. And was that a tubular socket wrench dangling from his hip, just barely catching the light every time it slapped against his thigh? Did Anakin even want to know? The khaki pants might have been almost normal had they not been tucked into a pair of rust-colored knee-high boots. Boots that were burnished to an impeccable shine but somehow still looked like they’d carried the man through a war.

The newcomer was still looking down, preoccupied with some sort of debris caught in his enormous sleeve, when he slowed to a stop a few feet away from Anakin. “Had a rather… unpleasant landing in your mountains back there,” he said to the folds of fabric at the bend of his elbow. Then he gave the sleeve a final shake, looked up, and—

Jesus.

He was gorgeous.

Anakin tried not to stare, but how could he help it? The man’s honey colored hair was fluttering majestically over his forehead for fuck’s sake, caught by a breeze like he was in the middle of a goddamn GQ photoshoot. And good grief did he ever have the eyes for it—even in the nearing twilight they gleamed, soulful and bright and kind, blue or maybe green but so muted they looked gray. The texture of his skin and the lines by his eyes put him probably a decade or more ahead of Anakin, but what was age anyway? Those fine features flickered with curiosity, and Anakin—

Well, no. That probably wasn’t curiosity. More like…

Amusement?

Right.

Because Anakin was still staring.

He blinked and cleared his throat. “Yeah, kinda gathered that. I meant are you okay. Like, physically. Do I need to get you to a hospital or…?”

The man smiled, a pair of insufferably charming dimples digging into his cheeks beneath his beard. “No no, that won’t be necessary,” he said. “I’m alright. A bit bruised. A bit dusty. A few scrapes.” Somehow the voice that had sounded so gritty only seconds ago had woven itself into soft velvet. And there was an accent, Anakin noted, because of course there was. Something sort of… British? Maybe? Did it matter?

A few scrapes.

Anakin looked him up and down again. There was blood—in copious quantities, in fact—seeping through his pants. Though, considering the impact had been enough to shake the ground back at the airfield, perhaps it was a miracle the man was in one piece at all.

“Was anyone with you?”

The man shook his head. “No. No, just me.” He sounded exhausted.

“Right.” Anakin shifted his helmet from one elbow crook to the other and scratched the back of his head. “Well, it’s getting dark. I can get you to the airstrip—a couple miles east—and you can get cleaned up and rest for a bit. The cell signal isn’t great, but the office has a landline if you need it.”

“Oh. I… Thank you.” The man looked a bit confused. Handsome, but confused.

Anakin’s heart turned a little sideways. “Do you… have someone to call?” he asked.

“I—” The man’s brow furrowed. “Yes. But if you don’t have a hypertransceiver, I won’t be able to reach them.”

Anakin wondered if his new friend had sustained some sort of brain trauma. “Sorry, no… hypertransceiver,” he replied, doing his best to not sound patronizing. “But I can put you up for the night, if you don’t mind an old sofa and a bit of a draft.”

Read the rest of Chapter 1 (Out of the Blue) here 🙂

#Out of Place #my fic #obikin

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thisblogisboundforglory-blog · 1 year

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#3 - Your Constitutional Right to Suck at Math (in Jesus Name Amen)

Charleston Boulevard (for mystical reasons no one can now explain) is shown on maps as Highway 159.

Before it is Highway 159, it is a wagon-rutted trail that runs straight through the Joshua-tree haunted nightmares of California-bound pioneers.

Before the pioneers, it eavesdrops on the untarnished dreams of El Dorado-bound Conquistadores.

Before that, it is a wide path scoured free of vegetation by thousands of feet that follow it from the monsoon season abundance of the Pahranagat lowlands to the sheltered windy-season caves now known as Lost Creek Canyon.

Nobody loses the creek. The creek gets lost. It generally finds its way back.

Pahranagat means place of many waters.

In English, the word is springs or wetlands.

In Spanish, the word is las vegas.

Las Vegas only has two seasons: monsoon and windy. It is ringed by sere, nigh-impassable mountains and topped with a sky so habitually clear and blue that Las Vegans have no real word for rain. It never rains. During monsoon season, it weathers.

As in, “I hear thunder. Are we having weather?”

The answer to that is usually, “No, that was just the Thunderbirds breaking mach.”

An alarming number of visitors take that same path (Remember the path? It's called Charleston Boulevard) from the neon-saturated valley floor up to Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. They are usually hungover, out of money, crazed and wild-eyed from the siren damnation jingly jangly come-hither clamor of a casino, her voice still hissing shrill and tinny in their ears as they stumble into hallucination-pink jeeps and ride them into the astringent clarity of La Madre. The Mother Mountain.

La Mama, if she knows you well enough.

And if they make it that far, they meet Jack. Jack is only a smidge smaller than the mountain.

Jack says, “These mountains were formed about sixty-five million years ago when the Pacific and North American tectonic plates collided, pushing the ancient sandstone seafloors up on this side.”

Point east.

“And the even older limestone layers up on that side.”

Point west.

“The Las Vegas Valley was once part of a vast, shallow inland sea. It wasn’t big. It wasn’t large. It was vast. I have no idea why, but this is a rule. You can check your brochures.”

Group chuckling ensues.

“Does anyone know where you can see the last remnant of that vast sea?”

“Salt Lake!” Respond the Maeas, who are a largish family of Polynesian descent. The Maeas have lingered in Lost Creek Canyon and are just catching up to the tour group, which has trudged the rocky bottom of the Wash around White Rock, where the terrain, quite suddenly, changes from prickly pear to scrubby pine.

Jack hears pride in the cheerful response. Utah natives. Utahns love that question.

“Right now, we are about five thousand feet above sea level. You may find seashells and ancient creatures embedded in the exposed rock as we walk. Driving out from the city, did anyone notice the hills that look like they’d been carved up with big knives? What do you think is going on there?

This response is always slower, and inevitably male. “Mining?” Asks College Cowboy XL.

“Right! These hills are made up of the raw material used to make gypsum board sheetrock for building.” Here, he stands with his feet well apart. His left foot is on a pale, truck-sized boulder that looks exactly like a petrified sand dune. His right foot is on the pine-needle duff of the scrubby conifer forest that grows on the limestone slopes. “My right foot is on an ancient coral reef. Billions of tiny sea creatures died and left their small bodies to build up these limestone mountains over millions of years.”

There is a disturbance in the Force. It is caused by a tan but puffy sort of white woman, mid-thirties, scowling and hushing her three mid-size boy children. Other than that, she has no identifying marks of a stereotypical nature.

“You can’t know that,” she says.

“Researchers have analyzed--,” Jack starts, but she plows right over him like the big pink jeep that deposited her at the trailhead.

“Do you honestly believe that? That these gigantic mountains could be made out of teeny tiny microscopic skeletons? How can you believe that? Like, billions of years.”

“Well, they weren’t micro…”

“God made the world in six days. At least that makes sense.” she states. “I did not bring my children on a nature walk to have you force your theories on them.”

“Theories” is given the same intonation that her midsize boys might give to “cooties”.

Jack abandons the Colossus of Rhodes pose, makes himself smaller, and speaks in a quieter voice than the one he uses for tour guiding. “We respect your beliefs, Ma’am. Part of the nature hike is the geology of White Rock and Keystone Thrust, and an explanation of how this hidden forest got it’s distinctive…”

“God made it that way because he wanted to," she says.

"Forty thousand." Petra speaks, and for a moment, everyone looks around, wondering where the voice has come from. Then she speaks again, and they find her wedged among taller people, who ebb and flow around her until she parts them like a Red Sea of cargo shorts and polo shirts. “Forty thousand feet,” she says.

The woman turns to Petra, using only her upper body in order to demonstrate that the interruption does not merit the effort of moving her hips. The woman is purple in the face. Jack notes that she has not, apparently, brought the water bottles as recommended by the brochure, signage, interpretive center volunteers, cashier, orientation lecture and ticket stub. He fears that she’ll dehydrate herself and keel over from complications of indignation.

He takes off his pack and rummages around for the half dozen extras he always brings for visitors who do not believe in deserts.

Petra is speaking again, low and calm and confident. “With an average size of three centimeters, over the course of the sixty million years of reef formation, they could achieve a height of around forty-thousand feet. Of course, taking compression into account, and from what we know about the depth limits of coral reef formation studying the great barrier reef, it depends on…”

“But these mountains are, what?” College Cowboy Medium (Athletic Fit) says to Jack, “Eight, nine-thousand feet tall?”

Jack pulls out four store-bought liters of water and is handing the first to the biggest of the midsize boys when his mother whips her torso back around and barks, “Get away from him!”

Jack jumps back. The rest of the tour group shuffles about the nearby landscape, looking for physically comfortable places to sit and be emotionally uncomfortable. This involves poking sticks into all the boulder-shadows and blind spots. Because resting rattlesnakes are really chill about being poked with sticks and will understand that this means that you are no danger to them and they should refrain from defending themselves.

Jack holds up a water bottle. “Just noticed you’d finished all your water already,” he says.

Diplomatically.

Because the woman has dragged three children into the desert without water. Or hats. Or sunscreen, as near as Jack can tell.

“What are you?” She growls.

“Uhm,” he says, not clear on the parameters of her question.

“Where are you from?”

The Maeas, arrayed on low rocks among the scrubby pines, peel oranges to pass around.

“Uhm,” he repeats. “Winnemucca?”

“You need to learn how we act in America!”

The Maeas, still peeling oranges, briefly derail the main stage entertainment with laughter. They aren’t peals of laughter. That would be too much. But they are unexpectedly melodious snorts of laughter.

(The Family Maea is largish in both senses. There are nine of them. Many of them mass even more than Jack. So their laughter has resonance in the natural amphitheater at bottom of the Wash.)

College Cowboy XL contributes. “Winnemucca’s in Northern Nevada,” he tells the woman. “There’s a big Basque community up there, and over in Elko, right?”

For some reason, this last question is directed at Petra.

The Midsize boys shrink back from where they have been hovering, obviously longing to take the cool water bottles Jack carefully sets out on the path for them, but unsure about accepting anything from a tall, aquiline, sun-darkened man who comes from something that sounds like Something-mecca, a big mosque community in The North.

“Oh,” says Mother Midsize, “Of course. An Islamic.”

“I’m not,” he begins, then stops, then starts again. “Technically, that would be Muslim for people and---”

“Do your employers know you go around witnessing for Muslim to paying customers? I should have the right to take my boys out for a family activity without having my beliefs assaulted, or have your kind of thinking shoved in my face. And this is government land. You are working for America now, mister, and it doesn’t put up with this bullcrap! There’s nothing I can do about what you get up to on your own time, but you are supposed to represent America, and I--,” brief pause to draw breath and untangle her catchphrases, “-- have the right to practice my religion.”

The three final words are accompanied by three corresponding transfers of weight from right foot to left foot and back to right again in order to demonstrate that the practice of religion merits the effort of moving her hips.

Jack has been hauling dense objects up mountainsides for a long time. He casts about that experience for some kind of reasonable response.

You’re on your own, pal, experience says, backing away with its hands held up in surrender.

Having bullied the world into a shape she recognizes, Mother Midsize looks around at the rest of the tour group, clearly expectant of majority moral support.

Grandmother Maea disengages herself from the shaded sandstone slab to offer an armload of oranges to the Midsize boys. She smiles at their mom and says, “Bless your heart, Sister.” Then she walks back to the shade.

And because Mrs. Midsize gives ten dollars and a box of old clothes to the Guam mission offering once a year, and also because her worldview does not allow for any overlap of those weirdo Mormons and generous Polynesian matriarchs, the woman lets her sons take the oranges. Which are probably from Florida, anyway.

But not, you know, Miami.

At that moment, a cottontail streaks across the stony bottom of the wash, right through the gathered humans, and disappears behind some creosote bushes. That would be enough to get a hubbub of distraction going, but just a moment later, it is followed by a coyote. The coyote is honey-blond. It materializes from a matching rock face on the sandstone side of the tectonic divide. To Jack, it seems to hang in midair for a few seconds, turn, wink, and land lightly on three legs at the end of a graceful arc in the dusty pinecone rubble where the rabbit has gone into the bushes.

The coyote is gone just as fast.

Now there is laughter and excitement and a lot of people checking to see if they’ve pressed the camera buttons on their phones fast enough. The boys occupy their mom by stuffing whole oranges into their mouths and rushing into the bushes after the coyote.

Jack smiles.

College Cowboy XL kind of shuffles backward and sideways to whisper over his shoulder at Jack. “Did that coyote seem to, I don’t know, Michael Jordan or something? In midair?” He asks.

“Yeah,” Jack answers. “They all do that. It’s a coyote thing.”

Then he focuses on Petra, who is the only other person left near him after the live-action Warner Brothers cartoon. She holds a plastic bag, the kind researchers use to collect fur, tissue and scat samples. This one holds orange peels that the Midsize boys have left on the ground. She hands it to Jack.

He shrugs his great shoulders. “Every day, I drag them up the hill and try to give them the wonder of Creation, but…” He leaves it hanging on purpose. There really isn’t anything intelligent to put after the “but”.

Up close, he sees that she is older than he originally thought, not a teenager, but a grown woman. Jack is absolutely clear on that part. Grown. Woman. Maybe late twenties.

Petra takes a deep, calming breath in a neat bit of sympathetic magic that makes him lose the tension in his shoulders. She nods her understanding. He suddenly loses the ability to speak, think, or look her in the eye.

Well, looking her in the eye was always going to be a problem. Jack is approximately fifteen inches taller than she is.

Her eyes are celery green fading to amber brown with coppery flecks and a teal blue ring.

He turns back to the relative safety of a one-woman evangelical jihad and a bunch of snake-poking sightseers.

“Okay!” He addresses the crowd. “That was fun! It’s getting late, though. Does everyone still want to see the secret springs before I take you back to the pink jeep picnic?”

“Yeah!” Chorus the Midsize boys.

The Maeas, who are just drying off after having anointed themselves in the holy water that trickles from the upper walls of Lost Creek Canyon, agree.

#godforsaken hellhole #chapter 3 #jack and petra #La Madre Mountain #One-woman evangelical jihad and a bunch of snake-poking sightseers #Las Vegas

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