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Let's just all pretend that the mun posted this before the epic meeting started, yes?

Anyway. There was asking of Inties, and tracking-down of movie sets (during which he got to ride on a land-speeder), and now Steve is dressed proudly in a set of rough brown robes.

If anyone wants to ask him why he's dancing around the Cooper farm fields, waving his hands about like he's got some imaginary sword and making "whnng-whnng" noises under his breath, now's the time.

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"You're a terribly cruel person," Steve informs her.

He starts climbing again, wearing an expression of great put-upon-ness and vitimisation.

"Kriffing right I am. Theeeere you go. Told you it was easy, didn't I?"

"You were lying," says the long-suffering Steve.

Honestly, people do this kind of thing for fun?

Yes. They do.

"Halfway up already, c'mon, I swear you can do this."

Well, they're clearly mad, then.

Steve wheezes at her in reply, hauling himself a little higher. Trees, he's discovering, are really not all that friendly up close. There is rather less skin on his hands than when he started, and there's sap sticking bits of dirt and bark all over him, and he swears to God there are insects in his hair.

Satya is having loads of fun, on the other hand.

Witness the beaming. It is slightly evil. And very... beamy.

Satya is the most evilest Jedi master ever. Eviler than a Sith, even. Darth Vader never made anyone get up close and personal with antagonistic foliage.

...

"It's getting sort of thin," he shouts, trying not to look down.

"Yeah, yeah. All right, gimme a minute."

It's more like forty-five seconds from the time she takes a running leap onto the first branch to the time she's perched comfortably beside him, steadying him with one arm and ruffling his hair with the other.

"So. Feeling accomplished?"

...

...

"More vertiginous," he admits, stranded in a high place without his trusty jetpack.

But, okay, fine, he feels accomplished too. A little.

"Yeah-huh. So, I promise I didn't bring you up here just to laugh at you."

No matter how silly he looks.

"There's actually something to be learned in all this."

It's possible she misjudged him, because the only other option she could think of was to teach him calligraphy.

He might've liked the calligraphy better.

Then again, challenge improves you, right? Right. Okay.

"The importance of wearing gloves when tree-climbing?"

Snort.

"Lemme look at those."

Not that she knows the first thing about Force-healing, but kriff, what's the point of teaching him if she can't learn a little something from it herself?

And while she examines his hands, she's talking.

"This is where I first realized what the Force is. I mean, not here, obviously-- not this planet-- but back on Skifallander, sitting in a tree pretty much like this one."

"I was kidding," backtracks Steve, not wishing to appear unmanly. Even though, what with one thing and another, it's aeons too late to be worrying about that.

The hands look rather battered and abused, but the worst that's happened is that they've bled a little. Bark is rough, but it's nowhere near as bad as, say, a rosebush.

"...what is it?" he asks, with rather more of the attitude appropriate to a padawan.

"Look out at the lake," she says, not glancing up. "I got you, you're not going to fall."

A breath.

"See how..." why did she not realize how dorky this was going to sound until now "...the water and the shoreline and the trees and all of that, they go together and turn into landscape?"

"...Yes?" says Steve, trying very hard to think philosophically.

God forgive him, but it does sound a bit dorky.

She doesn't need the Force to sense that in his tone, which is why she looks up from his hands to give him a half-mocking glare.

"Hey, you're the one who wanted to learn."

All right, all right, calm, Jedi dignity, all those good things she sucks at.

"So. Actually look at it."

If this epiphany doesn't work for him she is going to look SO STUPID, but she can't think about that. (Is it too late to try with the calligraphy?)

"The... synergy, the gestalt of it. Separate things merging into a greater whole. That-- the extra piece, that doesn't come from anywhere, it's just there in the way things are-- that's the Force."

PLEASE DON'T LOOK AT HER LIKE SHE'S CRAZY.

Are Jedi Masters supposed to blush?

This one does.

She also drops his hands, not noticing the scratches are healed.

(Well, the calligraphy would be on ground level, or at least the narration is assuming it would be so. And Steve is starting to wonder a little plaintively why they couldn't have looked at the landscape from the straps of the jetpack.)

For what it's worth, he's trying very very hard to have the epiphany.

(Hard enough that he doesn't notice the hands, yet, either.)

"So it sort of-- makes them all into something coherent?" he ventures.

"...A little bit, yeah. It..."

The narration tries desperately to avoid the duct tape metaphor.

"...holds the universe together. Universes, I guess. It's where everything is, and it's where they're not, and it's the difference between a bunch of attached atoms and a molecule. Between a collection of functioning cells and a living organism."

Hence the tree. This is the organic way to learn how Satya views the Force, and organic things have sap! Well, some of them. This one does, at least.

"Oh," says Steve.

He just got it.

That is actually awesome.

...OH SWEET IT WORKED HE DOESN'T THINK SHE'S CRAZY.

Beam!

Encouraging nod.

"So whilst Frankenstein's monster is a scientific impossibility," muses Steve, who's never had much regard for the label 'scientific impossibility', "tactical application of the Force could make it not only possible but likely?"

...That is so much more complicated than a jet.

"...if I knew what Frankenstein's monster was, maybe I could answer that."

"There's a novel in my world about a man who creates a new human out of bits of dead ones and a lot of lightning. It's some fable about not playing God or something." That last part dismissively. "But the biggest theoretical stumbling-block was always the creation of sentience."

This grin? This is probably not a grin he should be wearing.

"Steve?"

She raises her eyebrows at him, halfway between exasperation and amusement.

"If you don't give up right now on using the Force to make creepy zombie men, I'm throwing you out of the kriffing tree."

With a slight grin, "I think you've heard we have a name for what you get when you add lightning, the Force, and a desire to kriff around with things you shouldn't."

She's half joking here. You can tell because she lacks any trace of that face she put on when she showed him what not to do with a light-weapon.

"I give you my word as a padawan that I won't try to take over the universe with them," says Steve, whose lightsaber will always resolutely be... whatever colour it ends up as that is not red.

THIS WAS SO TOTALLY WORTH CLIMBING A TREE FOR.