EAST OF EDEN ( anakin s. ) ✔️

030 | How Far He'd Go..

━━━━━━ ༻ 🌅 ༺ ━━━━━━
" how far he'd go "
...
━━━ ༻ CHAPTER THIRTY ༺ ━━━

          HE SAW HER STANDING THERE and that was enough for all self-control to slip away. Deserted to the whims of raw emotion going faster than he had means of perception to discern what information he observed and understood, Anakin saw Eden there, watching the landing, and his heart tore itself open instantly. Half of his heart's ache came from an overwhelming relief that for once, he got there on time and that Eden, despite the darkness of his vision, was still alive. The other half was choked under the doubtful observation that Captain Bryyk was helping her stand, a sight sufficiently horrifying to make Anakin consider only the worst scenarios, all piling up over the latter and building his pulse to a face-reddening, self-induced illness.

Despair clawed him open. Its fangs feasted upon his reasonable side, only superficially cultivated over his true nature by the responsibility of having acted as a Jedi Master for the past two years. Such a responsibility was in front of his adoration for the one he bestowed upon the whole vulnerability of his heart, what a particle of dust was to the vastness of the raging ocean: nothing.

Had it not been for Dott's copilot swiftness of taking over command from him, Anakin was certain he would have botched the landing procedures. His absolute desperation of reducing this space between him and Eden completely annihilated his grasp of reality. Insane as it was, he needed to feel her heartbeat, to hear her breath; going without them any longer left him feeling like a stranded man, abandoned amidst an infinite desert without a single drop of water, and suddenly reaching the levels of thirst beyond which death would have been preferable to the miracle of survival.

It was ridiculous, yes. Even he could tell as much. His worries had gotten the worst of him out and claimed his tears while at it too, such that the few lights the Republican outpost on Kasyyyk had around the landing area hazed within Anakin's perception into diluted and elongated lines. Tears fell onto his cheeks by the whims of scarce blinks, but it was not until he hurried out of the landed ship fastening its ramped entrance open that they fell in thin rivers all the way to his locked jaw.

Anakin was unashamed to run. He would have let nothing stop him from reaching Eden, especially as he saw her determined into being reunited with him too. With such a sight ahead, such a blissfully suffocating love fragrant in sweet belonging, had his legs failed him, he would have crawled. Had an army appeared between them, he would have destroyed it all on his own. Had a mountain raised, he would have brought it back down. Had the sky fallen, he would have held it up with one hand so his other could wrap around her and satisfy that cosmic craving which, after years worth of nurtured desire, found the universe's attempt to separate them for a third time an absolute obscenity, if not even utterly sacrilegious too.

Eden let go of Bryyk's helping arm and took her chance at stepping forward by her own strength, mustered in a tug of the strings hinging her heart at the sight of tears shimmering in Anakin's eyes; what torturous sight it was for her to glimpse at the product of mourning maiming the angelic beauty of his gaze and what cruel fate that she's had to seen his tears more times than she could count, without ever being capable of doing more than kissing their salty coldness away from his skin, or holding him until the storm had passed. The cost of war had returned him to her bruised in anguish, stained with misery, trembling scarred under the many facets he had to face cold and stern in order to win. While she thought it was a death by hellfire to try and comfort him while she was on Anope and bound to mere projections, being present and in the flesh had not made any of it easier, because her cures would only ever be insufficient and ephemeral until the war was over.