Master Apprentice Archive Before Azali Quick search:

Categories: Angst, POV (Qui's)
Archive: M_A, my site (www.slashcity.org/~ana), April's babyfic site if she wants it
Summary: Just as the title suggests, this fic goes into the details of what happened before the fic 'Azali'.
Rating: PG for mature themes and nonconsensual sexual relations (although it's neither explicit nor really 'sexual'...)
Pairing: Q/O (...from the perspective that Obi-Wan is Qui-Gon's padawan. For reasons which will become clear at the beginning of the fic, Obi-Wan does not appear in this 'chapter' of the series...although he is mentioned extensively throughout.)
Status: Complete
Spoilers: Only for Azali...WHICH YOU SHOULD READ before you read this one.
Warnings: Although from the Azali series titles it sounds as if there is a clear viewing order, PLEASE HEED THIS WARNING...The series SHOULD BE VIEWED in the following order: 1) Azali, 2) After Azali, 3) Before Azali.  Reading out of order will spoil some very painstakingly crafted scenes and detract from the fics' potential impact.  The other fics can be found at <http://www.slashcity.org/~anafic/azali.htm> and <http://www.slashcity.org/~anafic/AA.htm>
Feedback:  Please... When I don't hear  from anyone, I get a complex... : )
Disclaimers:  Never been there...never done that...just wish I had.  : )
Thank yous:  Thank you to Calysta Rose and Robin Serrano, who refused to allow me to post this fic in a rush... Thanks for sticking by me, you two, even when I kept asking the same questions over and over, and for holding out for some better descriptions and a (hopefully) more fulfilling ending.
Thanks also to Helen Stagie Karidi and Sheltie for giving the story a 'test drive' before its posting. Their suggestions have really helped to flesh out some of the story bits.

Two days away from Melarka, I thought to be almost safely at my destination. With any luck, I would be headed back to the Temple within the week, providing the Melarkan's new government remained stable.

I found that I already missed my padawan immensely, missed his bright smile and his shining eyes, the quick intelligence that was so much a part of what was one day going to make him a grand Jedi.

The attack seemed to come out of nowhere.

One moment, I was sitting, talking to the pilot of the ship, and the next I was watching the console before him explode, taking the pilot's life with it.

Not able to worry about my own minor injuries, I was left to defend myself, bringing the ship out of the spin it had been sent into and attempting to move out of the range of fire. On the screen, I could see several other ships that had been attacked as ours had, and one by one the ships exploded, sending debris in every direction.

My ship was shaken again, sending me sprawling to the floor, limbs tangling, head cracking sharply against the deck. It was all I knew.

Waking slowly, I attempted to stand. When my legs would not cooperate, I rolled to my knees, waiting for the dizziness to pass. Slowly, I gripped the pilot's chair and pulled myself up and onto the seat. Panting, I fought off a wave of nausea.

One by one I checked the ship's systems. Many were dead, many others damaged almost beyond repair. If I made it to Melarka it would only be because the Light was on my side.

Checking the chrono, I  realized I was more than twelve hours past my check-in time with my padawan.  Apparently, I had been unconscious rather a long time. Regulating my breathing to cover the fact that my damaged lung and broken ribs had me gasping, I placed the call.

"Master? Is everything all right?  The check-in time was so long ago, I feared something had happened."

"I am...fine, Obi-Wan," I lied. It would do no good to worry the boy about something over which he had no control.  "There was some weapons fire from the planet which neighbors Melarka. My ship sustained damage, as did several other ships in the vicinity."

"And y...you, Master? Obi-Wan asked fearfully. "Are you injured?" He studied me carefully, watching for anything that would tell him of my status.

"I was injured," I admitted. "But it's nothing. The pilot, on the other hand, has been killed."

"Master, you are alone and hurt. What will you do?" There was uncertainty colored his words.

"The ship is still maneuverable, I think. I believe I will be able to successfully reach Melarka and land."

Better to make the conversation swift, than to allow Obi-Wan more time to ask probing questions. "Please make the Council aware of the situation."

"But Master..." Obi-Wan was unwilling to be so easily dismissed.

"I thank you for your concern, Obi-Wan," I told him. "Please keep your thoughts positive. I will contact you as soon as I reach Melarka and am able to do so."

Obi-Wan sighed. "Yes, Master. And Master...? Please be careful."

I smiled inwardly at his concern. He had always been protective of me. "I will, my Obi-Wan," I said. "Mind Master Windu and I will speak with you again soon."

Almost before I could terminate the transmission, the ship was hit again. This time there was no mercy.

Thrown from my seat, I was slammed against the far wall, my head and back falling victim to the sharp metal now protruding where the bulkhead had once been. Blood blurring my vision, I crawled back toward the piloting console, the pain down my spine making me feel as if I were being skinned alive.

With difficulty, I looked up at the screen, seeing the ship coming up fast upon a planet. As the ship breached the planet's atmosphere, I grasped the controls. Using strength that seemed to come out of nowhere, I managed to hold the ship steady until it hit the ground and knocked me down again.

Rolling toward the doors, which had burst open on impact, I escaped and continued to roll away from the craft until it exploded. At the outskirts of the fiery explosion, I was thrown further away from the ship, losing consciousness.

"Try not to move."

The voice brought me around and I attempted to open my eyes. Easier said than done.

"You have been injured," the voice said.

There was something cool on my forehead, my lips, and I nearly passed out again, from the sheer relief on my senses.

"Your ship crash-landed here, many days ago by my estimation.  It's likely you have been lying out in the hot sun for over five rotations. It's a wonder you're still alive; Azali is not known for its cool, inviting temperatures."

Furiously, I tried to recall what had happened. I remembered being thrown about the inside of the ship and of being thrown away from the ship as it exploded. Swallowing, I tried to talk, but my injuries, coupled with dehydration, made speech and movement impossible.

"We need to get you out of the sun, away from the desert heat," the woman said. "Please, try to drink this."

The liquid that poured onto my lips, into my mouth as the woman held my lips apart, was cold but bitter. When I could move my mouth and tongue, I tried to force the drink away, but the woman held my chin in place and continued to trickle the liquid down my throat.

Gagging, I felt my chest heave, reversing the swallowing action, urging the drink in the opposite direction.

"Oh no, you don't," the woman warned, concern lacing her tone. "Not after you've finally gotten a decent amount of this into you."

Moving her hands over my chest and stomach, the woman gently massaged the muscles that were threatening to revolt.  Little by little, as she fed me the liquid, I became able to accept it more easily.

"Yes, that's it," she said. "I can tell you are feeling stronger already. You're going to need to hold onto that, because while I can help you out of here, I certainly can't carry you. You'll have to do some of the work on your own."

This time when the coolness was passed over my eyes, I made a gargantuan effort to open them. I was partially successful, but the piercing white light of the sun caused my eye to tear and it quickly closed again of its own accord.

"Your other eye is swollen shut," the woman said. Gently, she wiped the dampness away from my good eye.

When I tried to open it again, I could see fuzzy bits and pieces of the woman who had likely saved my life by finding me here.  She was covered from head to toe in a beige suit of some kind, probably to deter the heat and sand.  The only part of her visible was her hands; her fingers, long and slender, were those of a musician...or a healer.

"You must try to stand now," she was saying.  "The day is becoming hot and will soon be unbearable even to those of us who were born here.  Without desert gear you will become very uncomfortable very quickly...to put it mildly.  And then not even I will be able to help you."

Standing was impossible, as we soon found out.  I had no feeling from my waist down, something I hadn't even noticed before, and even with the woman's support there was no way I could have hoped to walk.

"I believe there has been damage to your spine, not just the surface damage to your back as I first thought," the woman said.  "In which case, you should not be moved."  She gave a short, ironic laugh.  "But you can't stay out here in the heat, can you?  So you'll have to be moved.  Somehow."

She blew out a frustrated breath.  "Will you allow me to examine your back again?"

I nodded, but inwardly I dreaded it. Irritated and raw, the scabs that had formed on my back as I lay on the desert floor had reopened and begun to bleed again when she'd 'examined' my back the first time.

Slowly, she probed the deep gouges and angry bruises, the slightest touch causing me to bite my lip to avoid crying out.

"I'm sorry," she said.  "But this next probe may hurt a bit more than the others.  I'm going to move my hand down..."

As she spoke she touched me and all I knew were stars and blackness.  Unable to stand the pain that sizzled through my synapses, I passed out.

When I awoke, it was to the feeling of being jostled and pulled along the ground, every bone and muscle in my body on fire.

"I'm afraid our journey has been made twice as long," the woman's voice was saying from above me. "But at least the continued movement is unbearable enough to have kept you blissfully unconscious for the last six hours."

Six hours?  I chanced opening my eye. I was staring straight up at the sky, fastened to my own Jedi cloak with the sleeves bound tightly about my waist.

"It's not the fanciest of set-ups," the woman admitted. "But it will have to do. Just try to relax."

Hardly a state I was able to reach, I settled for attempted meditation to keep my mind off the pain of the endless journey.

For the first time in days, I was cool. My skin, burnt and uncomfortably tight from the sun's effects, was almost bearable to be in; the flaking and itching had faded to tolerable levels that no longer threatened my sanity.

"We're indoors," the woman's voice confirmed.  "I've put some salve on the burns, and it's healing things quite nicely."

When I tried to open my eyes, I found them both in working order. Everything was bright, but they adjusted rather quickly.  For the first time, I had a face to put with the only voice I had heard, even in my sleep, since the crash.

"Ava root does wonders for swelling," the woman commented, seeing the look of surprise on my face. "Your head wound has also begun to heal, thanks to the mixture of ginga leaves and pan pollen."

She was tall and slender, skin smooth and pale.  Her long, red hair hung straight and free, down past her shoulders.

She sighed. "I'm afraid the injury to your back will not be quite so easy to fix. According to my examinations, it might be a very long time before you can walk again."

I was intrigued.  I had to know... I tried to speak, but my throat was too dry.

"Here, this will help." Again, a cup of the bitter liquid was held to my lips.

"W...who..." I began, testing my voice. "Who are you?"

The woman smiled. "*Who* am I...or *what* am I?" she asked. "I'm Linnea, for starters. And I'm a healer, largely self-taught, using natural healing agents found all over Azali."

I listened intently, interested in all she had to say.

"My people think I'm crazy, think I'm a rebel because I don't use the mighty Azali technology that is available to me. My mother was a natural healer; I learned everything from her. She died trying to help people and save lives...and the same will happen to
me. But at least I will die with the knowledge that I've done all I could to change the lives that have intersected mine."

I gasped before I could stop myself.

"Have you had such a vision?" I asked, wondering not for the first time about the woman's mental abilities.

"It is not a vision," Linnea told me. "It is what will happen. What is going to happen...in the next phase."

Azali, I learned, was caught in a rotating visibility shift.  Every ten months and ten days it passed out of phase with the planets around it, making it invisible to those in space.  Then, for twenty days, it slipped back into phase, enabling Azali to communicate and trade with its neighbors.

When Linnea spoke, there was a sadness in her voice that hurt me to hear. Even without the Force fully in my grasp, I could feel her pain. She felt sure that she was going to die.

"In the next phase?  How do you know that with so much certainty?" I asked softly.

"Because the decree has come down and my death sentence has been written."

"They..." I was nearly speechless. "They mean to kill you?" The thought was so barbaric I couldn't stand to think about it.

"Yes," she said. "As they killed my mother before me. It is the price we pay for using the gifts we were born with, the gift to heal and to use something other than technology to do so. I knew what my fate would be...and still I chose to use my gifts. So, in a way, you could say that I've brought this upon myself."

"It is an unspeakable atrocity!" I said as loudly as I was able. "We are not all created the same and we must each be allowed to use that which is so individually ours...so uniquely us."

"You cannot stop it any more than I can," Linnea said, as she arranged my limbs into a more comfortable position.  Gently, she started to rub more salve onto my  ravaged cheeks and forehead. "Let us enjoy the time we will have together. I would rather concentrate on the sharing of ourselves, not drowning in the pity of what is to come."

In the days that followed, I learned everything about Linnea. She told me of her accomplishments, her failures, of her joys and of her regrets. She made me tell her of my life on Coruscant and of my padawan. Whenever we spoke of Obi-Wan, she got a wistful, far-away look in her eyes.

"What about my apprentice makes you so sad?" I finally asked.

"I do not regret having spent my life doing what I was meant to do, and I do not blame others for wanting to keep as far away from me as they can. But I find myself regretting that there will be no others after me, no one to carry on my legacy, to possess the gifts which the women in my family have possessed for more than three centuries."

Azali was a female-dominated planet, where the males were the bearers of the children. Women held most of the jobs and positions on the world, while men remained at home to supervise the household and raise the children. If Linnea had been blessed enough to have found a husband, a child of theirs would have thrived, been cared for, even in her absence.

"Obi-Wan is not my flesh and blood," I reminded her. "He will not inherit anything from me, will not pass on my name or my genes. Like you, I will probably never have anyone to carry on my legacy."

"But you will," Linnea insisted. "You do. Don't you see? You have already had the opportunity to teach your apprentice so much. He has learned from you, learned to be like you."

"My apprentice has learned independence," I insisted. "He has not been instructed to behave in specific ways other than those within Jedi parameters. He does not rely on me for anything more than instruction."

"That is where you are wrong, Qui-Gon," Linnea said. "You may believe your apprentice is only that, but you would be wrong. None of us can spend that much time with someone and not begin to behave and think differently. We affect others more than we realize.

"Fortunately for you, you have had someone come into your life whom you can influence, teach. He may not be your flesh and blood, but your apprentice has undoubtedly learned more from you about life and about himself and who he is, than he has from anyone else. And that is what being a parent is all about. I regret that I will never experience that, never have the comfort of knowing that when I am gone a part of me will still live on."

Linnea tried every herb and remedy she knew to heal my back.  She even invented several new ones, but nothing seemed to work. After a while, I began to get a slight bit of feeling back in my feet, which was extremely promising.

"I've come across some berries I've never seen before," Linnea said, coming into the house.   She held up several bunches of the small, pink fruit.

From my usual place on the cot in the corner of the room, I propped myself up higher on the pillows.

"What do you think they will be useful for?" I asked her. "Salve? Curing headaches? Breakfast?"

She laughed. "They seem to have great healing power," she said. "I'd like to combine them with the fennis seed mixture we tried last month and apply them to your back. The possibilities have promise."

I agreed, and in the evening Linnea injected me with a muscle relaxer which would help the pain and allow the salve to work more quickly. Before she went to bed, she helped me turn onto my stomach and rubbed the mixture into my skin. I was asleep before she finished.

In the morning, I was groggy. My back ached and there was something else which didn't seem quite right.

"Linnea?" I called.

From the back quarter of the house, she appeared.

"You're awake. Good." She did not quite look at me as she bent down to examine my back.

"Linnea?" I asked. "What is going on?"

Gently she touched the place where the scar ran along my spine.

"Linnea...it is unlike you to evade my questions. Tell me what has happened."

Slowly, calmly, she explained.  The salve from the night before had not been solely for my injuries; the injection had not been to relax me.

While I slept, Linnea had performed a...procedure. The injection had changed my body, forcing it to emulate the inner body of an Azali male. As I lay unconscious, she had extracted the sperm needed to combine with eggs she had extracted from herself. With little more effort than it would have taken her to do some other mundane task, such as preparing lunch, Linnea had
injected me with the fertilized eggs. In short, I was pregnant.

"WHAT?" I roared. If I could have stood, I would have leapt to my feet. "You speak of freedom, of being treated unfairly and being unable to make your own choices! And yet you have done this to me, against my will, without my permission!"

"Before this phase is complete, I will be gone," she said. "With any luck, your people will find you when the planet is visible again and you will be free."

"And if they don't? If this pregnancy does take and if you are not here, then what?  I could accept that my life might end here, with my thoughts and the Force to accompany me into the great beyond. But now?

"Do you understand what you have done? You have created a child who may very well never see the light of day, and if she does, may be born, only to die here, with me. Is that the sort of life you wish for your child?"

"You have said yourself that you will never have a child of your own, made from your own genetic code," Linnea pointed out. "It is what I fear also. Now we both have what we have wished for."

"I did not wish for this," I told her bitterly. "And I *know* that this unborn child had no such wish." Turning my head, I looked away from her, refusing to continue such a conversation. With much difficulty, I dropped into a light trance, meditating on what had just taken place.

It was truly amazing. The child that had been planted within me was growing. Every day my awareness of it became greater and greater, until the only thing larger than my knowledge of my daughter's health and development was my belly.

From the baby's first movement, I began to understand why Linnea had done what she'd done.  Feeling the presence inside me, knowing that the tiny spark of energy would one day be a life I would be able to hold in my hands, to nurture and love, altered my perspective.

I wasn't sure I would ever be able to accept that Linnea had intentionally concealed her intentions and violated my right to choose simply to obtain what she wanted, but Linnea and the baby were becoming more and more a part of my life with each passing day and I found myself wanting the path the Force had placed before me more than I wanted to question why it had
been placed there.

"How is she today?" Linnea asked, coming in from outside.

"Active," I said, standing up slowly and stretching. My spine was finally beginning to heal. I had feeling in my lower extremities nearly 100% of the time now, save for some occasional numbness and the times when I overdid it.

Linnea placed her hand upon my belly.  "Bright morning, little one," she said.  "You're going to be big and strong like your father, aren't you?"

"And she is going to have her mother's spirit," I told her.

"Qui-Gon..."

I raised my head to look into Linnea's eyes, saw something there I had never seen before: defeat.

"Linnea...?"

"They're outside, Qui-Gon. They've come to take me into town."

"NO!" I shouted. "They can't!"

"Yes, they can," she said with maddening serenity. "I've known about this day almost my whole life. You've known about it almost as long as you've known me. Please don't make this any harder than it has to be."

"Linnea..." I felt my legs begin to go numb, the cramps in my back, which hadn't bothered me in weeks, started again. I sat down hard on the sofa, not of my own accord, and found that I could not stand back up.

"Don't, Qui-Gon," Linnea chided. "You'll only cause the symptoms to return. And you know it's not good for the baby.  I've left all the medications in the kitchen, the cupboards have more than enough food to tide you over for a long time. And I've said a prayer that your people will find you quickly."

She laid a hand against my cheek. "Goodbye," she said. "And thank you...for everything."

Turning to go, she spared one glance backward and then was out the door.

*NO!* I screamed mentally. But she was gone.

They did not come to take me away, figuring my humiliation, to be bearing the child of one such as Linnea, was great enough.  Day by day, missing Linnea, missing Obi-Wan, missing the life I'd left on Coruscant, my health worsened.

I took to sleeping, when I could sleep, in the bedroom furthest away from the front of the house. To my way of thinking, if someone wandered across the house and became curious, they might very well not find me and assume the house was abandoned.

Eventually, the medicines and the food ran out. I was large with child, my back was infected again, and I could barely sit up, let alone walk. For the first time since my arrival on Azali, I felt despair closing in on me. The only thing that kept me sane was
thinking about the life I held within me. She might be doomed to eventual death, but I would not consciously cause it or allow her to be taken from me any sooner than the Force deemed necessary.

And so I continued to live, to breathe, to communicate with my unborn daughter, and to think about being rescued. But as my health deteriorated and help did not come, the times that I dreamed of rescue came fewer and farther between, dreams of death overshadowing everything.

Until one day...when I dreamt I heard Obi-Wan's voice in my mind, felt his presence through our bond.  It was everything  that was good and pure about my padawan. It was warmth...and joy... and love.   It was hope, and even if it was a dream that never came true, I vowed to hold on to it for as long as I lived.

Smiling for the first time in months, I fell into a deep, peaceful sleep.

~ el fin ~

Comments? Anything? Please? (padawan_ana@yahoo.com)