EAST OF EDEN ( anakin s. ) ✔️

024 | Flesh and Metal..

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" flesh and metal "
...
━━━ ༻ CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR ༺ ━━━

          ANYTHING ALIVE HAS THE born ability to adapt over time. Some environmental aspects require entire generations to overcome, while others push the individual to adapt within days, even hours or minutes, all under the most basic instinct the Force infringes upon its many manifestations: survival. 

Chaos is the one state which is hard to constrain to a defining approximation, to a scantling that will predict how long would it take for anyone to adapt to its malignant slither into an environmental picture it aims to poison. While some beings get used to absolute mayhem within minutes, turning it into their defensive home with impregnable barriers erected to block out everything light touches, others inhale the Pandemonium their whole life without ever learning how to breathe through it, thus making their survival a paradoxical tale of a martyr. 

The ship they were into was a piece of junk that no one should ever feel safe flying or even being into. The storm was on their tail and its metal-devouring winds were munching on the shields with far more speed that they which they could achieve. And yet, despite the absolute havoc of an earthquake rupturing inside the spacecraft, making it impossibly uncomfortable to remain seated and almost boundlessly terrifying to consider that each noise could be the last one heard, despite seeing her world tremble and everyone righteously fret, Eden couldn't help the urge to smile as her eyes remained focused, even at the sake of blurring out everything else, on Cay Lanshee.

A gentle sense of deja vu, carried on the wings of a lukewarm wind, encapsulated this moment of having her wounds be treated by his mastery of a Force ability that Emissary Lanshee alone had turned reliable. Eden watched it unfold with a tender gaze, how he placed both his palms over her most prominent wounds, his left hovering her skin and his right pressing down on top a handful of small, violet flowers whose roots still dripped of water from his flask, but their petals were falling into a graduate decay, the more he managed to heal. 

Cay's eyes were closed and he was immersed into a hurried concentration that defied their current situation, only so he could coerce Eden's frail tissue into remembering its moments of being clean of pain. It was hard to get it back to four days ago, when she was perfectly healthy; he hadn't enough flowers to pay the price for such a lengthy pick of cellular memory, but he had just enough bandages to go back in fragmented bits to when her wounds were not so bad, with the confidence that he could wrap the spots up and tend to them as a normal doctor would.

"Why are you here?" Eden inquired, knowing well enough that he would recognize the depth that her voice, now half restored at the price of a dozen dead flowers turned pile of dust scattered beside his right knee, alluded to in clouds of mist. 

His head was bowed already, seeking to relief his bag of another handful of flowers, thus when the question pierced through to him, the immediate reaction of a smile to hear her voice's healthiness again was stilled to the seclusion of draping shadows, lined behind the silked locks of his hair falling over his wrinkled features. The smile remained frozen for a second, as it lost its radiance of relief and his shaking hand dove a little deeper in his bag, grasping on the solid object he packed at the very bottom of it. 

Of course, he knew her question was less about how he had found her there of all places in the galaxy, because neither of them was a stranger to how much the Force could tell if only asked in the impatience of a kind soul. She wanted to know why he left Anope. What could have possibly made the man that tried to keep her there at all times take the ship he swore he did not have and fly off?