Long Time Coming

by Ruth Gifford (c) 1999

Rating: PG-13 for mild implication of an m/m relationship

Category: Angst

Spoilers: TPM, JA books

Summary: Several months after TPM, Obi-Wan remembers one aspect of Qui-Gon

Disclaimers: George Lucas (damn his money drenched hide) created him, killed him and left so many to mourn. George, if you keep breaking them, we're going feel justified in taking your toys away from you.

Warning/Author's note: I don't even know if this makes any sense. Written in the space of an hour, under pain medication for my sinus headache, while waiting on a street with only one exit, this is more about me than Obi-Wan or Qui-Gon. Lilliana said slash lets us write about ourselves. I guess I'm doing that today. No beta, and just a spell checker. If I waited, I wouldn't be able to post it.

Feedback: If you like, but this is not a plea for sympathy (so many of you have already been amazingly supportive to a new listsib), and even if I knew there wouldn't be a lick of feedback I'd have posted anyway.

This is for Allen R. Gifford who has fought the good fight against cancer for 17 years, during which time he continued to raise two daughters, traveled all over the world, learned to become a first class cook and house- husband, and handled all the food for my wedding to atara (whom he welcomed into the family as another daughter). My first professional novel will be dedicated to my parents, but I wanted at least one story for Dad now.

"Well it's time to say goodbye
And all the things we've said and cried 
Through our lives
You will be on my lips
It'll be a long time coming
'Til we will meet again"

"Long Time Coming"
Toni Childs

I try to tell myself, even now, months later, that it was the way he would have wanted to go. I think of the older Masters who were warriors, who fought every battle face on, only to survive them and die in their beds, fighting the healers even when they knew it was time to let go and let the Force have its own way. I have seen the results and seen how hard it is on them and those around them.

I tell myself that if could be worse, it could be a Healer's Temple with machines and decisions and the restrictions of a bed he could not leave. How he would have hated that, how he would have fought them, and maybe even me. And could I have made the right decisions if it came to that? He told me I was wise, but would I have been wise enough to let him go, or too greedy to keep him by me, regardless of the cost to him?

I tell myself that we said our good-byes. Although the Force was so strong at his death it compelled his words about Anakin, his mind was his own and the words of love flowed between us even as he spoke of something else. How often he did that; talking gravely of something serious and teasing me with the touch of his mind.

And yet tonight it is not the lover or the teacher I mourn. It is the father he was to a young, utterly insecure thirteen-year-old. It took months, maybe even years, before I saw through the gruffness, the leftover unhappiness of that brutally painful failure with Xantos. Some would say it was unfair; that I should have to make up for Xantos' failure as well as my own, occasionally major, failures. But I've learned, all to well, that life is not fair. And when I made him laugh, when I helped him leave that failure behind, my triumph was like few I've had since then.

Tonight I remember the man who held me when the nightmares came, who had infinite stories of a universe I ached to see, who could make everything better when the bottom had fallen out of my world. I remember the man who guided my first steps into the world of the Force and the Path of the Jedi. The man who taught me to temper my ebullience with his patience, and let me teach him to temper his stubbornness with a little diplomacy.

I would rage, if it would do any good. I would storm the very citadel of every race's heaven and plead with deities I don't believe in. How could he be taken from me, from us, so young? He spoke of being old; it was a joke between us, but he was only 61. Middle-aged, if that, for a Human in this day and age.

Even with my vaunted Jedi memory, I can't remember my father's face. When I think "father" Qui-Gon is there, calling me Padawan for the first time, looking disappointed at poor test results and ecstatic at the good ones. He walked me through adolescence with a tact that I hope I have when Ani's turn comes, paying no attention to the long sessions in the bathroom or the inappropriate crushes I gathered along that rocky part of life.

"Father" disappeared when we grew closer in other ways, but that Qui-Gon, that father, would have approved of his Obi-Wan's choice and the way I went about making that choice reality. That Qui-Gon was cheering from the stands when I got myself into a love that not all here understand or approve of.

That Qui-Gon was the father I remember. It is he I mourn tonight and he whose example I will do my best to follow with my own new "son." Along the way, I shall have my failures and my triumphs and I will wish that he could see them, will rage that he cannot.

Qui-Gon Jinn, you were many things to me, but you were a father first.

It will be a long time coming, but we will meet again some day, for there is no death, there is only the Force.

The End