Bookends II - After

by Tem-ve H'syan

Title: Bookends II - After
Author: Tem-ve H'syan tem-ve@gmx.de
Pairing: Q/O
Rating: PG
Summary: Qui-Gon contemplates his sleeping Padawan. Again.

Notes: Originally published in the MA Fundraiser zine, so thanks to Lori for releasing this early. This piece and its companion piece, Bookends I - Before, are very short and contemplative and also very very mushy by my standards. Apologies to Plato for nicking one of his ideas in this one :)

Warnings: Uh. mush? :)

BOOKENDS II: After

One day, further than the sky

One day, older yet than I

You'll be ending what I have begun

One day we'll return as one

It is almost enough to make me a poet.

The shadows cast by the second sunset are swallowing the ones of the first, fading into a blue dimness that is as nothing to the red and gold spectacle the second sun is putting up on the southern horizon, barely an hour after the first one has set, leaving the northwest stained a bloody red. The shadows are encroaching on your hair, beginning the slow descent back to its natural colour, away from the bright red reflection that makes your head look like it is on fire. A very orderly fire, mind. You are breathing evenly already, fast asleep and curled up in your robe, looking smaller than I am used to seeing you, barely protected by the makeshift tent that is little more than a rug and a piece of deadwood, both of which have clearly been in this place for far longer than you have. And this place - this place makes a creditable effort at defining the term 'middle of nowhere', even on Tatooine. A howling waste, despair singing in the sand that polishes the craggy rocks. You are blessedly oblivious.

Ah, the ability of youth to fall asleep just about anywhere.

And yes, Padawan, you are still young, though you may contest it, and may very well resent being called Padawan. I cannot help it. This is what you are, to the memory of my mind, echoing with the sound of your voice, and that of my hands, with the ghost memory of your hard warmth still on the tips of imaginary fingers. Look around you - rocks and dried-up remains of erstwhile life forms. Look up - pale mother-of-pearl clouds toying with the promise of rain, and yet offering little but the certainty that they will have disappeared come morning.

But I am not looking at the clouds. I am looking at you, my Obi-Wan.

It is not even night yet, and you have already run yourself ragged on your first day here, at what I regretfully assume will be your home for the time being. It pains me to see, Padawan, how life has treated you, and yet I feel selfish for wishing it all away from you, all the scars on your limbs, all the lines in your face, all the grey in your beard, all the hard-won bitter humour of experience that makes my heart sore, full of the impossible wish to keep you away from it all, keep you for my own. Rescue you from this nightmare that the galaxy has become. And yet, without you in it, who could be sure it would not have turned out even worse? Years of war, years of running yourself ragged. You always put yourself in the line of fire, tirelessly working for something the rest of the galaxy had stopped believing in. The General, bruised and wounded, sharing back-breaking quarters with his clone comrades.

You have never been one to complain about hard beds, or aches and pains in the morning.

In fact, you never complained - at least never enough, not even in my most foolish of moments. I may have listened to you, had you been bold enough to pierce my obstinate blindness. No, my Obi-Wan. Forgive me. I should say 'had I been less obstinately blind', trusting in my own judgement of what I imagined was the Will of the Force, and thrusting it upon everyone else, heedless of the consequences.

Now, and only now, I know no more and no less than you who this Chosen One is. In fact, it may well be you, my Obi-Wan, bringing balance, as the Master and the Apprentice, a shining light surrounded by darkness. It may well be me, planting the darkness in the light, allowing the blind fury of the Living to shatter the fragile edifice of the Unifying. It may well be Yoda, who has taught you, you, a seasoned Knight at the knee of one who admitted defeat in his views. I watched as he planted seeds in you, watched the glimmer of hope as you listened, trying to grasp what was too much and too fast to really understand, and it only aggravated my apprehension. It should be easier now that I am dead - at least you couldn't kill me for trying to enter your life again, for wanting to commune beyond what eyes can see and ears can hear, a sunset-hued shell of a general turned refugee.

But you are hard on me.

And then again I remember the split second your face lit up as you heard my name, imagine the light bursting out of you and spilling over your lips and out of your eyes in bright wet streams as you hear me again, maybe one day feel me again, and maybe open up to me again, allowing me inside your mind, over thirteen years after I was torn from you, leaving your bed cold and your heart hardened. General Kenobi, will you be my Obi-Wan again? Oh, that you would open and let the hard grain of 'mine' inside you and turn it into the seed of something so much more beautiful and alive.

An old man may dream, may he not?

Maybe tomorrow, when the suns rise again, will I encroach upon your life. maybe on the morrow I will wait for the opening in your day to make my presence known, and raise or bury the dawn of hope in me.

Sleep, my Padawan.

Sleep and keep watch, as only you can. Maybe it is the child. Maybe you were right, and it is the child. The irony of that would not be lost on me - how wrong the Masters were, and how right the Apprentices are. I know you will make him an Apprentice, lead him on the right side of what you have seen so much more clearly than I ever could, and start again, in your tireless devotion to the Light and a prophecy you were burdened with against your will.

You have been a great Jedi, my apprentice, and a whole and powerful man especially without me, a man who needs fear no mythology.

But for now, while you are near me, allow me to watch over you.

--- END ---