EAST OF EDEN ( anakin s. ) ✔️

026 | In Rose Gardens..

━━━━━━ ༻ 🌄 ༺ ━━━━━━
" in rose gardens "
...
━━━ ༻ CHAPTER TWENTY SIX ༺ ━━━

          FEAR THE DREAMS YOU DON'T REMEMBER.

Eden flinched herself awake. A scream of terror coldly lingered in the minuscular cracks of her shivering lips, dry in the stagnant air of her room. Bored blue hues danced in faintness through the blinds on the window outside of which the city without sleep roared in its ever motion. Through the gasped part of her lips heaved breaths rippled out, yet their ragged sound escaped her hearing and buried itself deep into her chest in a simmering vibration. 

The ringing in her ears was growing distant, escaping towards the diffused noise of Coruscant. With that deafness moving away at the pace dictated by her blinks, scarce and fearful to lose sight of the obscure darkness of the walls, Eden grew aware of the aftermath of her teary eyes first. Their sting echoed a knot in her throat and the sort of pain in her heart that rooted itself so deeply she could no longer tell what its seed had once been. 

Vagueness enveloped the night terror that had startled her awake. The memory's consequences were there, but the thought itself escaped well outside her reach, abandoning her to the cold, cold repercussions, dripping a dark water with a scent of fear.

It was not quite the dead of night, she eventually grew present enough to tell. In fact, it so seemed, without as much as a single attempt to look to the side and seek a clock, that the sunrise was not all that far away. The faint shuffling of the covers and a shyly quiet creak of the bed came from her right side, burning away the last strands of the nightmare from compelling her to remain still and seated, staring in the void towards which the dream was gone. 

She sighed a breath before the warm hand on the bare skin of her back moved ever so tenderly to escape the pull of gravity as it aimed to desert him to solitude on the bed. Instead, by the sense of a belonging, Anakin maintained his hand's hold around Eden's waist, a movement otherwise sufficient to give him that half-awakening jolt that helped him sit up. 

The kiss he peppered on the back of her right shoulder held the weight of his sleepiness, while his voice, dragging its raw taste across that softened patch of freckles skin, murmured, "Come back..." A whispering beautiful dream, his tone compelled her to lean into his warm embrace as it called her back to their pillows, on their side, to stall in bed and not hurry the sunrise to end their rest. 

Anakin was a conduit of instinct, though as the seconds passed, he was less so inclined to even remotely have a possible association with the state of drowsiness that would be normal for someone so abruptly plucked out of sleep. The instinct was to keep his left hand underneath Eden's side as she laid back down besides him; it was the motion of his right hand pulling the blanket over them both before the chills of the room could turn their bareness into a map of goosebumps. But as soon as his temple rested back on the pillow, his eyes held no heaviness but that of worry.

"Another nightmare?" he asked. 

As much as he dreaded it, the truth was that Eden's nights had recently turned concerningly restless, and therefore, so did his. It's been a disquiet month in the fallout of which he shuddered at the mere thought of leaving her for another mission. He was the only one left to protect her from the massacre of thought which lurked in the subconscious and he so prayed it was just another scar on her soul and not the Seer trying to puncture more holes in her heart. 

Though he's been granted the rank of Master and he did attend some of the Council Meetings, whenever it was required that another vote settle a draw dispute, they've shut down each of his attempts of bringing the conversation of the Seer to forefront. They've made it clear they had no time or resources to deal with the issue just yet, and when Anakin volunteered to go hunt the Seer down himself, they've reminded him sparingly of an irritating fact: despite his earned rank, he was not trusted the coordinates of Anope just yet.