Fandom/Pairing: SW: The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan
Rating/Warnings: PG at best. Sorry, sex next time.
Disclaimers: I can say they belong to George Lucas, but I don't
think that would stop him from suing me if he so chose. So why
bother?
Archiving: Master_Apprentice, QJEB, Witness, wherever. If you
need a link, "S&S" will be housed as well at
Series/Sequels: Part of Surrender to the Light, which can be
found at the address above. This one is set, oh, fourish years
after "Conquest" and six years before the movie.
Notes: Ah...none, except to reiterate that anyone hoping my
series will resemble the novels in even the slightest sense is
in for disappointment, cause it just ain't so.
Categories: Drama, Point of View, Romance
Feedback: *Mandatory,* do you hear me?
He always thought beaches were romantic. Suns setting over the
ocean, birds gliding on the wind, all of that. He had that in
his head from somewhere. The Force only knows where. Not from
me.
I grew up by the ocean; my father was a deep sea diver on
Hyline. Sand and jellyfish and the constant threat of
hurricanes - that's what I remember about the sea. I much
preferred the stars, even then. I wanted to fly.
Which I have, of course. The life of a Jedi involves nothing if
not one ship after another, endless travel, seeing the stars
from every possible angle. Here is what I have learned about
stars: they become less beautiful as you come closer to them.
They lack context, a place in a pattern.
I don't know what drew me to this isolated place, this
half-primitive fishing village on the remote planet of Aldeli.
The sea, I suppose. There must be something in my blood; my
father may have worked with submarine vessels and rebreathers,
but somewhere in my ancestry there were sailors, and they
passed more to me than blue eyes and broad shoulders. They gave
me, I like to think, this faint recollection of wood and rope
and sail, the sway of waves under my feet, the hush and gasp of
sea against shore. The smell of fish, the chill of spray and
rain soaking even through my boots, the ache that begins above
my elbows and is anchored in the center of my back - even these
things are familiar, comfortable, if not pleasant. Hard work.
Tangible reward. Food. No lightsabers.
My neighbors here are aware that I am a Jedi, and they even
know what that means, more or less; a Jedi Knight was here
forty or fifty years ago to advocate for them in a trade
dispute with a large business, so to them a Jedi is authority,
education in the ways of the wider galaxy, justice. It earned
me some respect, in the beginning.
But after two years, they know me best for other
accomplishments. Qui-Gon, the storyteller with a hundred
voices. Qui-Gon, the tallest and strongest of them, who can
climb a mast in seconds, hang by his knees while he mends a
tear in the sail, jump down to the deck without rocking the
boat an inch. Qui-Gon, who had his sea legs the moment he
stepped on board, Qui-Gon the fisherman.
It feels even better than I would have expected, to be esteemed
for what Qui-Gon Jinn can do rather than for what a Jedi is
expected to do. No, I do not miss active duty at all.
I only miss Ben.
He always thought beaches were romantic. To me they mean sweat
and pain and labor and surrender and life - is that romantic?
Possibly. Those were the very things I always treasured, the
things I hoped we would share together.
The days are hot on Aldeli, but the nights are chill, and we
take the boats out after dark, when the fierce sunlight doesn't
drive the fish further down into the cool of the deeper waters.
Any man will feel small, with the ocean under his feet and the
stars above his head - even a Jedi Master.
That's the thing we've forgotten, in Coruscant. How small we
are. When I fight the winds and the sails, haul up the nets,
steer by the light of one lamp and a thousand stars, I remember
what it was like in the beginning, when I was just discovering
the Force, learning how to move within it. Learning why to move
within it.
I don't know that the view of the stars is all that much better
from Aldeli than anywhere else. But I have laid on the coastal
rocks here and looked up at them until the morning grey
obscured their light, and it filled something in me. It
restored my joy, my awe, my gratitude. All the things that an
man tends to lose as he grows old. Especially after his heart
is broken.
I can identify a handful of stars and recreate the night sky of
Dagobah in my memory around them, a sky I knew almost as well
as I do Aldeli's. Better than Obi-Wan, probably. He has the
heart of a scientist, a scientist's harsh practicality as well,
and stargazing does not suit him as well as starcharts do.
Occasionally I slip and think of him in the past tense, but I
stay mainly on guard against that mistake. He is not dead. On
the contrary, he is twenty-one years old, the most promising
apprentice in the order, and studying with the head of the
Council. Such a bright future.
As for Master Jinn's future, if he has his way it might look a
very great deal like this. Ships, nets, time measured only in
calm summers and stormy winters, the stars over his head where
they belong. I had my fill of being a Jedi three years ago. I
was Jedi enough that day to last me forever.
Oh, but they could be proud of me that day. The way I wove my
concentration, my iron-shod serenity around myself, smothering
every yearning, sighing breath of Force inside me so he would
not hear and would never know. I went to the launch pad to see
him off, and I touched him, but only my palm against his. We
stood against our hurricane of emotion, hand to hand, and I saw
that look on his face that I had not seen in months, the eyes
behind his eyes closed, the distance between us impassable. He
saw something quite similar on mine, I am sure.
How noble. How virtuous.
"Yoda is wise. A good teacher," I told him. Hating Yoda in that
moment as much as or more than I ever had, for holding me to a
bargain I made thirteen years earlier, when everything was
different.
He smiled, and it was very nearly his old, flashing smile.
"That might be interesting."
"But he won't tolerate your insolence the way I do." No, he
won't be charmed by it, proud of your courage and your uniquely
wicked wisdom. He won't love it in you, love the way you juggle
your words and wear your honesty unclothed. "Yoda is Yoda.
Guard yourself."
Maybe it was bad advice. We were supposed to teach each other
trust.
Well, we did. I trusted him. He trusted me. I got inside his
silent self-preservation, inside the rage and fear beneath
that. I stripped him of his bad habits, his mental defenses,
his unboyish cynicism, and I loved what he was underneath all
of that, unequivocally, unconditionally. And then he was stolen
from me. No matter that I once agreed - *thirteen years
earlier* - to let Yoda finish his training personally.
Aldeli has helped me in that regard. Given me my sense of
eternity again, of the vast sweep of the Force and the
universe. It is harder, when I lie like this with the sound of
the surf in my ears, counting Aldeli's stars, feeling the
heaviness of near-exhaustion in my body, to cling to my
righteous anger. He was never mine. Nothing ever was, or could
be. I understand that on nights like tonight, the ebb and flow
of time, the transience of it all. Obi-Wan was in my life, and
then he was gone. There is no right and wrong in that, no Light
and Dark. It happened. It's true. My anger is inconsequential,
so small, altering nothing. I can let go of it on nights like
this.
That's why I stay here. For the wind in the sails, for the
context of it all. Because there is a tranquility in me here
that I know will vanish forever, if and when I go back to
Coruscant.
If and when.
Just the thought of it - just the name, *Coruscant,* my
erstwhile home - I feel my tranquility running dry. What they
took from me there - it may have been inevitable, but it's been
three years, and I can grieve just as deeply for it now as I
did then. Not just Ben. Even my memories of him are tainted by
the fear that I betrayed him, that he left without
understanding that I was just as changed as he was by our year
together - our thirteen years together, but particularly by
that final year.
I lost my faith. In the Council, in the Code, maybe even in the
Force - at least it's different now, I feel the Force
differently than I did before. More intimately, more powerfully
perhaps, but with a strong undertow of loss and fatalism.
That's what I miss most - more than Ben asleep in my arms, more
than my whole past, sloughed off perhaps forever.
The Code used to make me a Jedi, used to be my goal to strive
for and my reason to live through the years of imperfection and
self-doubt and regrets. Until I stood in the center of a ring
of Jedi and swallowed my hard-won, sustaining pride to softly
plead my case. Leave him with me. I am not the teacher Yoda is,
but he flourishes best where he has love on his side. Leave him
with me. I am twice the Jedi I was before him. We teach each
other. Leave him with me. The Light Side is compassion. Let us
be happy.
And they crucified me on the Code. //There is no emotion....//
//But what we feel for one another-
//There is no passion...
//Dammit, listen to me!
//This is as much for you as for the boy.
//This is a punishment?
//This is a lesson to be learned....//
It leaves my head some of the time, but never for long. Their
voices, cold with purity and correctness. Me, begging -
*begging* for their intervention - capable of that for his
sake, but not capable of saying goodbye to him. Never once
telling him that what I felt for him was love.
Sometimes I wonder what the Force has in store for us. If we
will meet again, when we are both Jedi Knights, when so much
has changed that we see ourselves only dimly in each other's
eyes. I don't have the gift of foreknowledge, not reliably. Not
like Yoda does, or even Obi-Wan. I have intuition, senses that
I can't explain or predict, but that never lead me astray.
Sometimes, in the stillest moments of the night, I can extend
my awareness almost far enough to touch him. I know he is alive
and well. I know his power has grown. Sometimes it is enough,
just to know those things.
Most of the time, I don't wonder. My future is fixed - I think.
Jedi have never agreed on the truth or fiction of free will. I
am against it, personally. Struggling to accept my life is
easier than struggling to forgive...the Council for their
cruelty. Myself for my cowardice. For letting him down when he
trusted me and no one else.
This is turning into a very dark night, in so many ways. I
haven't had a night this plagued by the past in months, and so
I can overlook the little jump of pleasure my heart gives when
I hear the bells tolling, the signal for the torches in the
village to be lit. Bringing a ship in safely from the island
will distract me. In my heart, I am still a Jedi. However
troubled my heart is, I can protect someone from the jagged
rocks and the darkness.
I can see the winding parade of torches coming from the village
long before I can make out human shapes carrying them. No
matter what the hour, when the bells ring out from the island
where starships land in this part of Aldeli, the lights will be
brought, the visitor welcomed with food and fresh water. That's
how I came here, two years ago. Invited in, my boat pulled
firmly ashore by strangers' hands.
This reminds me, just as surely as the stars do, of what the
Force should mean. Light when the darkness is dangerous. Hands
outstretched when your travels are at an end. Trusting someone
whose face you can only see by flickering firelight. I am glad
to join, to be shoulder to shoulder with these people who have
always made me welcome in their lives.
Tall as I am, I wade the furthest into the sharp, cold water,
waiting for the captain of the little ferry to throw out the
rope, to let us help pull the vessel onto a soft place on the
beach, someplace where the rocks are too small and blunt to
puncture the wooden hull.
The wind has picked up, in the space of moments, and the
roiling of the water around my thighs is surprisingly powerful.
Not powerful enough to drag me under, by any means, but it
exerts a pressure anyway, and a part of my mind is imagining
what it would be like to accept this, too, as another
manifestation of the implacable will of the Force. To surrender
to the rhythm of the water, to slip under, to...not die, but
vanish. To shed the last vestiges of my past - name, title,
history both sweet and bitter. The wind is suddenly loud, too,
crying in my ears, but the sound is coming from inside my head,
and I know it's too late. Too late to vanish. I'm coming back.
Everything's coming back.
I don't know what that means. It's intuition. I only know that
my two years of peace have drawn to their close, and I'm back
where I began. I am wet and cold and tired, and the wetness on
my face has the warmth of tears as well as the chill of
seafoam, and I am back at the beginning. Palm to palm, ready to
say what should have been said all along, to change the past.
On the rail of the ferry, his arms spread out for balance -
perfect balance, light and rock steady, although the wind is
shaking everything, churning the water, billowing his robes
around him. I am back at the beginning.
Even if I couldn't feel him like the sun in my head, I would
know him by his leap off the rail, the sharp twist he makes
like the spin of a thrown knife, the way he slices through the
water with hardly a splash, comes up again.
Maybe he swims, or maybe I run. We find ourselves back at the
beginning, stars before us and behind us, and I press my hands
to his, both hands this time, and he's pressing back so hard
that it's almost a game, almost both of us trying to push the
other over, crash us into the ocean. The water is at my hips,
his belly, and crashing everywhere, raining on us even though
the sky is clear. His eyes shine, and his smile cures three
years of want and sorrow, even half-glimpsed in the darkness. I
can see grains of salt caught in his thick hair, glittering
like tiny stars. "I love you," I say. It should have been said
so long ago.
His smile widens, accentuating the cleft in his chin. "I found
you."
I can't believe in him. I slide my hands up his neck, cup his
face between them. He looks different, but in ways that are
already becoming familiar as I devour him with my eyes. "How -
how did this happen?"
He laughs, low and with a hint of his old cynicism. "Impossible
to live with I am, apparently."
"He sent you away?" I don't know whether to laugh or shake him.
What kind of padawan is he, anyway? Did I make everything this
difficult when I was twenty-one?
"He told me to find my own Master, since I was determined to
learn nothing from him." Obi-Wan smiles; I've never seen him
smile so widely before. "It's not as bad as it sounds, I
promise. You know how he talks. I learned everything I had to
learn there."
I pull him to me and kiss him, and my mouth is full of salt -
my tears, or the sea water. "I should have told you," I say,
the words breaking into pieces, easy for him to swallow. "I
loved you all along."
"I know. I always knew."
We kiss, wet and shivering against each other's mouths, while
first one constellation, then another, slips below the horizon.
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