trans_9 | still alive at twenty-six

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still alive at twenty-six

Zero gravity. It was not something Arha was familiar with. Today was a day to do new things. She floated in the middle of the Sensorium's white environment, getting used to the feel of it as metal walls and a series of corridors began to appear. Arha was no swimmer, but she was good with figuring things out and that was going to include how to move in a zero-gravity environment.

She took a breath as a thin column appeared next to her, and shoved off, carefully manipulating her body to angle herself toward her target--another wall twenty freet from her. She missed and went crashing into the edge of the wall, which spun her hard into another. She hung there, cussing under her breath, her knees tucked against her chest as she finally slowed and came to a bumping rest.

Twenty-six years ago today, she had been born and given to the Bene Gesserit. Twenty-six years. Time had passed and had brought her here, to this place, this time, and this moment.

"I survived twenty-six years," Arha said aloud as she untucked herself and set her feet against the wall before trying the next one. "Twenty-six minus forty-one." She closed her eyes, her fingers reaching for the wall. "Fifteen. Fifteen more years to go, Leto. Maybe I shall live past those years in spite of history. Ah!"

She opened her eyes as her fingertips met the wall and she used the tiniest bit of pressure to send herself off in another direction, tucking herself in as a target popped down. Her hand flashed out to hit it as she sailed past. Another popped up at a different angle. Twenty-six. Arha spun, her lines clean and efficient even as she tried to correct herself and missed a target, pushed off and found herself face to face with Leto. He said nothing. Arha clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide as she immediately tried to block an impssoibly quick strike. Her free hand closed over his wrist. This is not real, remember? The crysknife hung there, its tip brushing her plantsuit. And then she was hurtling in another direction, spinning completely out of control.

Leto was gone.

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Today's daily round of the sensoriums contained a surprise. A maze of columns and walls...and as she stepped in, she began to float. Her stomach began to tie wild knots before she forced it to stop clenching.

She floated up, arms and knees slightly spread, looking up at Arha...Who was the figure she was with?

The God-Emperor. Leto 2. The Tyrant. The man (a wiry youth of about 17, short brown hair, blue within blue eyes, skin covered with the leathery plates of sandtrout) did not look much like the God-Emperor, but even in simulation he had an amazing presence to him.

He was also the man who lived even now in her sandtrout in their urban pen. When they combined to form a worm once more, it would carry part of his consciousness.

Then he vanished.

"Why are you communing with the dead?" She called, neutral and unable to gauge Arha's mood.

With a grunt, Arha caught a ridged wall with her fingertips and clung to it as she heard Sheeana call out. Communing with the dead. She let out a wild bark of laughter and swallowed the next one into silence, stuffing the flare of momentary panic into the back of her mind. She was supposed to be a Reverend Mother. Calm. Resolute. Unruffled.

Leto II's presence, however unreal and completely out of the blue, had shredded that. Her fingers dug into a groove for a moment as she wiped her expression clean and carefully shoved herself in Sheeana's direction.

"I was not communing," Arha said and despite it all, the edges of her voice bore strain. "But I may have been thinking much too hard on a certain matter." A hand curled into a fist at her side.

Now was a time to be plain spoken. With outsiders, they could afford time for subterfuge, but for two who had Shared, none was possible.

"The God-Emperor is not going to kill you. His worm always liked you." Sheeana said and scrambled for purchase on a wall that jutted from the ceiling. "Neither of us can return to Rakis."

"There may yet be a time when I must return," Arha said with a frown. "What will happen if I do not? Will you not exist? There is too much at stake for me to simply...not go back when it is time. And he will kill me then because that is the course that must be taken, yes? In the meantime, every year I live cannot be squandered. Such is the reminder, I suppose. It matters not if he or his worm liked or disliked me, Sheeana. The fact remains that one day he shall spill my water. I suppose it is a thing that I am still preparing myself to face, now. I lack the serenity I am supposed to have on the matter, for I wish to protest."

The good news about Qhatara and Tess was momentarily forgotten. She raised her voice as she floated closer to her. "I'm not letting that happen! There's nothing left in our universe for me either. Rakis is gone, Chapterhouse is in the hands of those whores from the scattering and Duncan and Miles are probably in storage here. We are outside the flow of time here. We can enter and exit the qanat at any time!" Sheeana only allowed herself to get emotional like this around someone she'd Shared with. There was no point to hiding it with her.

She was momentarily surprised at the strength of the outburst.

"I do not..." Arha's mouth snapped closed for a moment. "I cannot. Sheeana, I am afraid that if I do not go back if our Universe is restored that you shall not become yourself. I suppose there might be some other way, but still. I cannot ignore it. Is it not a valid thing? Should I cast that aside and say my path lies between Universes, heedless of where I am supposed to be? Do I have options? Real ones?"

Sheeana looked pained. "Muad'dib sacrificed the universe to save his loved ones. I will not be like him. If your death is the only possible way, then I will accept it. But I think..." And 'think' ended small and choked. Had she not been Fremen she would have been tearing up. "...think I understand how he felt."

Arha nudged herself close and hugged Sheeana with a soft sigh. She had been born this day twenty six years ago for a reason. Whatever that reason was, she had wound up here, in this place. One thing was certain, she would do the right thing. Arha gently stroked Sheeana's hair for a long while.

"We are not at the point at which that path must be chosen. Today has simply reminded me that one day, it will come. It is amusing to note that, if I am correct in the very screwed up timesense this place leaves, I am a year older today. My birth, for whatever reason, reminded me of Leto...and my death. One cannot eliminate death, sooner or later it comes. I will take this as it should be, then, and live without reservation. This is a good thing, yes?"

"'To know the future is to be trapped by it.'" She quoted the man who would split the warm body that wrapped around her, her own many times great granduncle. She trembled still. "I am invisible to prescience though. All of us with Siona genes are. There has to be a solution there, though it hides in my subconscious no matter how I and my mothers-within dig. But you are a year older today? This outfreyn custom is new to me but...happy birthday?"

"I am..." Arha attempted to smile. "I get this thing Leto II says, for that is him. There are moments when I feel the walls of my own life pressing in. Here and now, I may have broken those walls." She paused and let out a soft laugh. "It is a new custom for me, as well, but thank you, Sheeana. It will be happier now that I have passed that certain point of reflection, for I am alive and have reason to be pleased with my current life."

She pulled away to cup Sheeana's face, then kissed both her cheeks and forehead.

"Had I not been awakened in this place, had our Universe not been destroyed, I should never have met you, Sheeana Brugh. You make anything that is predetermined in my life worth every second, for you are a singularly incredible person. You are the gift I was never meant to see. Now that I have, I am...profoundly grateful of the small part I had to play."

Embarrassing the master seductress was not an easy thing. In fact, noone on Chapterhouse could ever remember it happening. Nevertheless, Sheeana's cheeks became hot. Quickly she shifted the conversation away from herself. "Sacrifice after sacrifice after sacrifice. It is the engine on which the multiverse runs. Yours, mine, Leto's..." And if her idea bore fruit, they would close in on each other in a loop that stretched across millenia.

"Ah but there was a reason I wanted to find you. I have good news. Two new Sisters will be taking their oaths tommorrow."

"I am pleased to hear you have taken them on," Arha said with a soft grin. "I have met Katara. I do not this I have met the other one. I shall, of course, attend. I remember taking my own oath at five, just before I was taken to the desert place on Chapterhouse. There is nothing quite like that, I think."

"I think you would find her order of 'Grasshoppers' most fascinating. I am glad of your presence, Sister. I wanted to ask you..." There was a pause while she gathered her thoughts into something coherent. "...A person can be two things at once. Not the best example, but Muad'dib proved that. I have seen how much joy the Jedi bring you and I will never intefere with that. I respect them and their ways. But I have come to realize that I cannot accomplish this alone but for two acolytes. If noone formed a new church, Martin Luther's heresy would have died with him. In order to continue Darwi's work...I want to ask you...and this is a request you can refuse, not me ordering you as Mother Superior...to be an amphibian. Please, give this proper thought and tell me your answer when you have found it." Not a literal frog, of course. Sheeana knew she would meditate on the origins of the word, what it literally meant.

"You know I shall lend you support in whatever you do," Arha said after a moment's pause. "There will be times when I cannot, due to conflicts, but as much as I am able, you have me. I have great love for you and the Jed-Eye, thus I shall do what I can for both in any capacity I can. There are moments when I feel as if I am to be ambassador-liaison, balanced on the edge of what I have been and what I am becoming. I am one thing with many parts, such a thing I have always been. As such, if you have need, ask, and I will do what I can. Does this suffice?"

"That answer gratifies me. I left Chapterhouse to flee the Bene Gesserit mingling with another order. While the Jed-eye and the Honored Matres are nothing alike...If it were not for that my decision caused me to meet you, I would wonder if it were I that was the fool and Murbella the wise one. It would do all of us good if we were to learn from each other." And there she realized that Murbella was probably the better example, except that Arha had no personal experience of their captured Honored Matre. That, and the admission was painful, something Sheeana didn't bother to hide. She had become Duncan's mate, after all.

"To close oneself off from all around them is an injustice, for learning from everything around you is a thing that must be done if only for survival. My time in the deep desert taught me as much. We must adapt and shape ourselves to this new universe, I think. Change makes fools of us all if we ignore it," Arha said with a soft frown.

"In other words, 'adapt or die'. And I will not let the Sisterhood die." Sheeana would have very much liked to pace, but floating as she was, it just wasn't possible. "Revising thousands of years of our educational practices is not easy. First will have to go the assumption that noone else has anything to teach us. When the Jed-eye are more established here, I would very much like to set up a student exchange program where my acolytes and their pahduans exchange places for a small time." She was both airing her ideas and, she hoped, giving Arha a small distraction from her distress.

Arha floated a bit crookedly and thought this proposal over for a long while. It was a good thing to set up an exchange as such, if her Jed-Eye did not mind it. Her hair coiled and drifted around her face as she thought, her eyes closed and contemplated the several strands of thought that surrounded the matter.

"I will discuss this with all Jed-Eye when the proper time comes," she said at last.

Luke, surprised by the sudden change of gravity as he stepped from Stacy's hallway to Sensorium, let out a very un-Jedi like squeak as he began to rise, but had the presence of mind to call up a wall from the Sensoriums to kick off of and float toward Arha. As he did, he felt her turmoil in the Force, her sudden spike of--fear? Surprise?

"Arha?" he called out, floating toward her as she spun toward him. "Arha, what's wrong?"

Her mind was stuck on it for a moment (on the crysknife, on what it meant, on Leto II) and her chin jerked up as he said her name once more. Wrong? Wrong. What was... Oh. The slight pull of a frown darkened her features, but she blinked it away a moment later.

"Thinking," she finally said, her fingertips reaching for a wall that was too far away--one she missed, though it slowed her down. "Too much thinking. I shouldn't do that in this place." Arha shook her head, her hair fanning out around her as she scowled. "But it cannot be helped, now. I suppose I am not yet comfortable with my future, though I try to be. This day is one that...well. It is a reminder."

Luke used the Force to shift his position, line them up, and caught her neatly when she spun close enough, helping right her in the zero-grav environment. "Don't focus on the future, on what may be--or will be--but keep your focus on the here and now where you can do the most good. Then things will seem less..." he searched for a right word, face screwed up a little bit. "...daunting."

"It is just this day," Arha said, her cheek against his shoulder for a moment before it drifted. Her arms went around him to keep her there and she laughed softly. "Usually, I am good about not thinking of it, or distracting myself enough that it is not a focus. But when one realizes that they are a year older, it can be startling. My mind slipped and I was faced with my future for a moment. This is no place to be...uncontrolled. Such a thing startled me, I am afraid."

Arha let her forehead come to rest against his shoulder.

"I am here, with those I care for," she said a moment later. "If anything, the future should remind me to live my life to the fullest. One never has enough time."

He held her for a moment, smiling. "That's for sure," he said. "We all should. We never know which day will be our last. But that's not any kind of thought to have on a name-day. How old are you?"

"It is appropriate to reflect, I suppose, on what you have and what is before you," Arha said with a twist of a smile. "I have not ever taken notice of such a day before, but I just remembered it. I am twenty-six this day. Possibly twenty-seven. I do not know if the year was correct when it was recorded."

"Happy name-day, then," Luke said with a smile, and unwrapped his arms, giving her a little push that moved him back as well. He tucked his feet under him, pushed off a wall, and floated slowly in the opposite direction.

"Thank you," she murmured and let herself float where he had put her. "I remember the day Sister Kalim told me it was the day I was born. She said I was to walk for as long as I could at the beginning of the evening and when I had walked thusly, I found a meal in a pack waiting for me on a rock. Of course, I did not go back that evening, nor the next. I think that was a test to see if I could find what had been set out for me. But it was a decent meal, one I made last for seven days, and I had time to reflect on my birth in the mean time. The woman was furious with me when I did show my face, but pleased that the desert had not eaten me. I was a good Fremen child, even if I did not know it then. I found water in the least likely places."

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still alive at twenty-six

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