Beyond the Force

by Merri-Todd Webster (lonchura@yahoo.com)

Categories: Q/O, Alternate Reality, Drama

Rating: NC-17 for violence

Warnings: Graphic torture, strong religious themes.

Summary: An alternate ending to the movie. When Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan are captured by a Sith warrior, Qui-Gon witnesses his padawan make an unexpected breakthrough.

Feedback: offlist to lonchura@yahoo.com

Comments: I have long wanted to write a story that exposed the inadequacies I saw in Jedi philosophy. After swearing I would never write any more fanfic, I wrote this in one sitting. If you don't like the religious implications, please remember that I warned you.

Beyond the Force
by Merri-Todd Webster
26 November 2001

He should have seen it coming, he thought later. In Jedi fashion, part of him had stood back as he matched blows with the horned warrior, calling on all his speed, skill, and strength; part of him had observed its fighting style, catalogued its strengths and weaknesses, noted both similarities to and differences from the Jedi way of handling a lightsaber. The Sith--for Sith it must surely be--was more aggressive than any Jedi, moving swiftly to the offensive, wielding the double-ended lightsaber with an arrogant display of confidence. Who steps too far for his stride falls over, thought Qui-Gon Jinn; overconfidence was the easiest weakness to turn against an opponent.

He should have seen it coming, but he didn't: a move that the most aggressive, awkward, angry initiate of the Temple would not have made, could not have imagined. A stunning upward blow to the chin with the long hilt of the double-ended saber that threw him backward and clear off his feet, every bone vibrating in sympathy with his jarred skull. He saw the red blade swerve and was certain it would run him through the chest, piercing heart and lung, charring bone and cauterizing tissues. Then everything went dark and Jinn prepared himself to re-join the Force.

When he woke, he was naked, cold, and tightly restrained in a humiliating fashion: hands cuffed together and joined to his shackled feet by a chain that wound cruelly around his genitals in the middle. The cuffs on wrists and ankles fitted so tightly that the flesh was indented, and there was something else about them-- Testing his range of movement brought intense pain, and Jinn realized that the cuffs were lined with piercing spikes.

There was something else beyond the pain, something that was not a presence but an absence. The Force. He was cut off from his sensitivity to the Force. For the first time in many years, Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn felt fear. Was there a power of the Dark Side that could block a Jedi's awareness of the Force? Or was it something in the shackles that bound him, some alloy, some conjunction of metal and crystal? Legend had it that the Sith had created Force inhibitors, collars, crowns, and shackles that could disrupt one's awareness of the Force and ability to draw on it. Legend held also that all such things had been destroyed by the Jedi during the last Sith Wars.

Caught up in the horror of his physical sensations, Jinn had not yet opened his eyes and looked around him. Perhaps he had known that to do so would be useless; he was in a place of utter blackness, if one could call it a place. He was cold, yet he could feel no cold air about him; he was upright, but he could feel no floor beneath his feet, no surface behind his back. He felt nothing anywhere which could support his weight; however, he did not feel weightless. His mouth was dry and his lips were cracked.

He did not know how long he waited, conscious yet with nothing to satisfy his awareness except the agony of his shackles. Once he had catalogued his surroundings as best he could, Jinn's thoughts soon turned to Obi-Wan. Where was his apprentice? Had he defeated the Sith warrior? Were they both captives, or only Jinn, or was he in fact in some hideous afterlife, the Sith hell by which padawans casually swore?

A red glow blossomed some distance before him. His eyes fastened on it as a starving rancor fastens its teeth on its prey. The glow widened and spread, and in the midst of it a dark silhouette appeared. The silhouette came closer, grew larger, until he could see the pleats of its tunic and trousers, the short curved horns of its head.

The Sith warrior approached with its saber in one hand and a length of chain in the other. Only one end of the saber was activated, the source of the red glow. Seen up close, the Sith was a young male, perhaps a Zabrakian or related species, shorter than Obi-Wan but broader, with a strangely vulnerable-looking face.

The red blade of the saber gleamed hot in Qui-Gon's face, close enough to singe the hairs of his beard, as the Sith reached out and clipped the chain to the Jedi's cuffs. "Come," the Sith warrior said, and tugged on the chain. He led, and Qui-Gon followed, docile as a lady's pet, clumsy as a bantha.

They walked through a maze of dim corridors filled with close, stale air. The Sith moved with the certainty of a nocturnal animal; the Jedi, cut off from the Force, discovered how poor his night vision was. He stumbled and fell, bumped into stone walls that bruised and scraped, panted for breath and bit his lips to shreds, unable to manage his pain any other way. The stone floor rose gradually beneath his feet, until the Sith thrust him back a few steps with the hilt of the saber, turned away, and palmed open a door.

Blue-white light seared Qui-Gon's vision, burning through his eyes into his brain like acid. He cried out, falling forward, and instinctively put out his hands to break his fall. Instead, he landed face-first, breaking his nose, and ripping his flesh still more with the spikes that lined the cuffs.

"Master...."

He knew that voice, reedy and breathless and broken with pain as it was. Swallowing blood that gushed from his nose, Jinn scrabbled carefully, painfully to his feet, hearing mocking laughter from another voice that, he thought, he also knew.

It was a spacious hall with a high, vaulted ceiling, a room handsome enough in its bones to be the salon of a wealthy Senator or an influential artist. But there were no thick, patterned carpets on the floors, woven by hand on Naboo or Alderaan, no Corellian tapestries or antique portraits on the walls, no chairs and settles and tables carved of alabaster, plints-oak, or jade. Instead, the walls were lined with racks and restraints and implements of torture, things such as Jinn had only seen in holonovels of the ancient Republic, and the floor was awash with blood--his own, and Obi-Wan's.

In the center of the room was a metal rack that gleamed violet in the harsh lighting, a rack in the shape of an X on which a victim's limbs could be stretched out. It was suspended almost two meters above the floor, so that he had to look up at it, up, to the bruised and bleeding face of his apprentice.

Obi-Wan, naked, was bound to this rack--how, Qui-Gon did not see. He staggered closer, dragging beside him the chain which the horned Sith had let go. His feet... Obi-Wan's feet were broken and twisted, one laid over the other in a way the human ankle was never meant to sustain, and run through with a spike of metal that crackled with violet-tinged Force-energy. Force-energy of the Darkness, thick as the smoke of a chemical fire.

Obi-Wan's hands, too, were pinned by metal spikes, his arms stretched out and his hands pinned through the wrist, below the place where the bones joined. His knees were bent, his chest thrown out so sharply that every rib could be counted, and Qui-Gon realized that he was hanging on that rack, all his weight supported by the spikes driven through the flesh of his wrists.

"Obi-Wan...."

His own voice sounded no less broken than his padawan's. And there was that mocking laughter again, smarmy laughter, coming from a cultured voice that was frighteningly familiar.

"The great and mighty Jedi." Even without his connection to the Force, Jinn trembled at the hatred and contempt in that voice. "How easily they are disarmed and captured! How prettily they cry when tortured!"

A robed figure approached him--not the Sith warrior, not the apprentice, he realized, but the master. Swathed and hooded in black as a meditating Jedi was in voluminous brown, the Sith master seemed to glide across the floor, invisible feet not touching the blood that had pooled beneath the rack. It paused before him, raised its head, and then casually put back its hood.

Senator Palpatine of Naboo.

Silently Jinn admitted to himself that he had not known the truth and would not have guessed. His old master was right about the Dark Side being hard to see.

"Hard to see! hard to see!"

Palpatine mocked him, mocked Yoda, his smooth tones taking on a comic rasp. Jinn forced himself to look into his captor's face, knowing that Palpatine's willingness to be exposed meant death for himself and for Obi-Wan.

"The Darkness is all around you, Master Qui-Gon Jinn! If you cannot see it, it is because you move within it as a fish moves within water. It is the air you breathe, Master Jinn--it is the core of reality."

"No." Hoarse as that voice was, it was loud enough to interrupt the Sith master's tirade. Palpatine turned to look at Obi-Wan, frowning, even as Qui-Gon raised his eyes to his apprentice with some small measure of hope.

"In the beginning was the Light, not the Darkness. So the Jedi have always taught. Love came before hatred, wisdom before ignorance, peace before chaos. So the Jedi have always--"

Obi-Wan screamed as a bolt of violet Force-energy shot from Palpatine's outstretched fingertip. It scored his chest and side with a long open wound that gushed blood as if made by a rusty knife. Qui-Gon closed his eyes, helpless as the tears poured down his face. He could close his eyes; he could not close his ears. He would never erase from his soul the memory of Obi-Wan howling in agony; he would take it with him into the Force, where it would remain forever.

Qui-Gon opened his eyes again, needing somehow to witness this. To bear witness to the pain. Obi-Wan, his apprentice, the love of his life. They had been master and padawan for twelve years now, friends for who could say how long, lovers for two, two precious years. He had kissed the hands that were pinned to the rack, tickled the feet that were broken now and bleeding. He had kissed the beautiful mouth that was wrenched open with an inhuman cacophony; that mouth had suckled his penis to pleasure as he had suckled the penis that now erected, in extremis. They had quarreled over Anakin Skywalker and he wanted to beg Obi-Wan's forgiveness for having neglected him, even for a moment, in favor of the child. It seemed most tragic of all to him, most ironic, that Obi-Wan's padawan braid lay, intact, against his heaving chest.

"Is he beautiful to you now, Jinn?" Palpatine's voice had thickened with disgust. "Can you still desire to rut with this broken thing that makes noises like a wounded animal?"

"You can break his body," Qui-Gon said quietly. "You cannot break his spirit."

Ice-cold fire seized him and threw him, and he cracked his head against the wall. A wash of purple passed over his vision--this was what Obi-Wan had felt, tearing open his side, piercing his hands and feet. Someone took him by the elbows and brought him to his feet, and his vision cleared a little. The horned warrior had helped him; the fearsome red-and-black-banded face was still and set, as if he took no more pleasure in this torture than Qui-Gon.

A high keening noise from Obi-Wan made Qui-Gon stagger forward again, supported by a black-gloved hand on his elbow. His padawan writhed obscenely on the rack, trying and failing to straighten up and support some weight with his legs. A tendril of that cold violet fire was curled between his legs, forcing its way into his body, and he struggled vainly for escape. Qui-Gon gagged as the young man's tortured body overcame inhibition and voided its waste, and the smell seemed to fill the whole room. Palpatine chuckled, the same sort of chuckle with which Qui-Gon had heard him follow a particularly witty jest.

"I can keep him alive for hours... even days. Left alone, he will die of exhaustion and suffocation, the weight of the torso crushing the lungs." Palpatine's eyes roamed hungrily over Qui-Gon's face. "Left alone, you will die of starvation or dehydration. I could give you water while I leave you alone here with him, water but no food. Would hunger reduce you to feeding on his decomposing corpse?"

The black figure at Qui-Gon's elbow moved as fast as he had when he struck the blow that felled the Jedi master, moved like the flicker of an eyelash and like the igniting beam of a lightsaber. The violet strike with which Palpatine countered moved faster, and all that was left of the Sith warrior was a charred body that crumpled to the floor, its skin drifting into ash around the blackened horns.

"Foolish boy. Now I shall have to find a new apprentice." Palpatine smiled, gazing down at the corpse with hooded eyes. "I'm sure that charming little fellow from Tattooine will do quite nicely."

In that moment, Qui-Gon Jinn knew despair. The horned warrior was dead in the very moment he might have struck a blow against his master. He himself was cut off from the Force, in great pain, and slowly but surely bleeding to death from wounds that deepened every time he moved. His beloved Obi-Wan was splayed upon a rack, in the depths of suffering which Jinn could not even imagine. And the Sith Lord, Senator Palpatine, who must have engineered the crisis on Naboo precisely in order to lure two Jedi into his grasp, was turning with obvious relish toward Obi-Wan, raising both hands in a posture of attack.

Obi-Wan, sagging on the rack and gasping, now raised his head. He looked straight ahead, gazing at something in the distance which only he could see. He had always had the visionary talent; was he seeing something now, or was he, too, cut off from the Force? Qui-Gon was unable to take his eyes from his apprentice's face. Bruised, his mouth bleeding, his skin white from loss of blood, unbelievably, Obi-Wan smiled.

"Yes. I see. I see it all now. Thank you." He lowered his gaze, bending toward Qui-Gon with a look of such affection that fresh tears sprang up. "Thank you, master. I have truly loved you, and I know that you have loved me. I forgive you for the quarrel we had over the boy, and I ask your forgiveness also."

Qui-Gon could do no more than whisper his beloved's name, but he felt certain Obi-Wan understood all that was meant by that.

Obi-Wan looked now at Palpatine, who was frowning at him impatiently. "And I forgive you, too, Senator. I forgive you because you do not know what you are doing." He raised his head and stared into the distance again. "I accept my pain and my death. I accept it willingly. I have loved, and I have been loved. I have striven for the right, and I have forgiven those who wronged me. The Darkness may kill me, but I shall enter into the Light. For the Light shineth in darkness, and the Darkness comprehended it not."

Again Obi-Wan smiled, and the smile did not go away when Palpatine, snarling, lashed out with killing Force-energy from both hands. The violet streams struck the naked body on the rack--and were absorbed by it. Obi-Wan smiled, and the Force-energy permeated his body, shading to his characteristic blue, flickering gold around the edges.

Palpatine moved closer, directing his fury upon Obi-Wan's face, his genitals, clawing at him with fire as with a many-tailed whip. Obi-Wan absorbed the killing energy, and the blue brightened more and more into gold.

Qui-Gon heard himself sobbing--sobbing for joy--as his apprentice was cocooned in a cradle of radiance, white and gold fire that burned only brighter as Palpatine fed it with Darkness. The wounds in Obi-Wan's hands and feet and side became too bright to look at, and his eyes were more radiant still. Qui-Gon saw it coming but did not try to shield himself as Obi-Wan exploded, like a nova, an eruption of energy that flowed out, consumed the impotent Palpatine and reduced him to ash, and washed over Qui-Gon like a wave of warm water, like a last kiss from his love.

The brilliancy faded. There was nothing left but a blackened corpse on the floor to his right, a heap of ash to his left, and a rack of scorched, half-melted metal on which had hung his beloved Obi-Wan. Qui-Gon's bonds were gone, and so was the body of Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Qui-Gon woke to the knowledge that he had slept, to the loss of Obi-Wan, and to the face of his old friend and rival, Mace, leaning over his bed.

"How did you find me?" His voice sounded almost normal.

"A vision came to Yoda. He said it came into his mind like a ball thrown into his hand. Thrown by Obi-Wan." Mace's eyes were grave as ever.

"Yes."

Mace shifted. "Yoda is weak, but he'll recover. So will you."

Qui-Gon thought about this. "In time."

He spent a lot of time in meditation, and in practicing the most basic katas at a slow speed that allowed him to sense every fibre and muscle. People avoided him, mostly, except for Mace, and Yoda, who had shrunk yet seemed to glow, and a few other of the Councillors. He was grateful for the presence of Depa Billaba, who sat silently with him in meditation.

He meditated on the death of Obi-Wan. Forced upon him, yet willingly accepted. Engineered by the Dark, yet a portal into Light. Following Yoda's vision, the Jedi had uncovered Palpatine's lair in a deserted area of Naboo, poisoned generatons before by unwise use of atomics, and cleared out his surviving minions. Some had died rather than surrender; others had gone eagerly to the informants' room, and to Republic justice. By the time they found Qui-Gon, the remains of the two Sith had disappeared. He told Yoda, Mace, and Depa the details of what had happened to him and to his apprentice. He said little to anyone else.

Four tendays later, he was meditating in the gardens when he saw Obi-Wan.

One minute he was deep in meditation, pondering those strange last words of his padawan: "For the Light shineth in darkness, and the Darkness comprehended it not." The next, he was looking at his lost padawan, feeling the hairs of his head try to stand up.

Obi-Wan chuckled. "I'm not a ghost, Qui-Gon."

He was not. Force ghosts were misty blue apparitions, insubstantial as a dream, unable to affect the living world except through communication, by speaking to those who could see and hear them. Obi-Wan glowed with health and vitality--and with Light--and his sleeves bent the branches as he walked toward Qui-Gon.

He sat down, folding his legs into his old favorite meditation posture, and smiled at Qui-Gon. After a moment, the master put out his hand and reached for the other man's knee.

He felt it.

"Obi-Wan...."

Without quite knowing how he got there, Qui-Gon lay on the warm grass, his head pillowed on his beloved's knee, and a hand that was as warm as sunshine stroking his face and his hair.

"Qui-Gon, my dearest." Obi-Wan bent and kissed him, and a scent like the rarest spring flowers rushed over Qui-Gon.

"I don't understand." Qui-Gon reached for his padawan's hand and clutched it.

"You don't have to. I don't understand, but I don't have to." Obi-Wan chuckled, then cackled, then laughed, that raucous, full-chested laugh that used to turn so many heads, coming from a demure Jedi padawan. "That's the grand joke of the universe, beloved: We don't understand, and we don't have to."

"What...?" He wasn't sure what question he was asking.

"It's not understanding that counts, Qui. It's love." Obi-Wan smoothed back his master's hair and kissed his temple. "It's love that brings me back to you like this, to touch you, to kiss you, to tell you that all is well."

Strong hands--solid hands--tugged at Qui-Gon, and he sat up. Obi-Wan took his face in those hands and looked at him earnestly.

"There is a way beyond the Force, Qui. I found it. In forgiving Palpatine and accepting my death, I found it."

"Beyond the Force?" He gazed deeply into Obi-Wan's eyes, those changeful eyes that now shimmered with all their colors at once.

"We speak of the unifying energy of the universe as a Force, just as gravity is a force, or electricity. It is neutral. Like electricity, it can be used for good or ill. We speak of the Dark Side and the Light Side, but those are only our uses of the Force. In itself, it is neither. It does not choose. It does not love."

Obi-Wan kissed Qui-Gon, briefly. "We choose. We love. And what I saw in my death is that there is One beyond the Force who chooses and loves us. I have seen that One and chosen him and loved him."

Qui-Gon still didn't understand. But he saw, as Obi-Wan let him go, that there were still open wounds in the younger man's wrists, and they glowed like rubies.

"Obi-Wan...."

"I love to hear you say my name." Another laugh. "And I love it when you're confused." He got to his feet, drawing Qui-Gon with him. "I have to go now, beloved. Shh--" he laid a finger on Qui-Gon's lips. "I want you to hear and remember."

He drew back a pace, still holding Qui-Gon's hand. "There is a way beyond the Force, for a Person is greater than a force."

He was gone. Nothing lingered except a light scent of flowers, more heady than the scent of grass and leaves. And in Qui-Gon's hand was his padawan's braid, lying there intact as if he had cut it at the knighting ceremony.

Qui-Gon tucked the braid into his sash and went back to his quarters, wanting something to eat. He had heard and he would remember. There was a way beyond the Force, and he was confident that when his time came, Obi-Wan would return and show him the way.

end