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He tries to explain. He tries, but he begins to cough as soon his eyes open—ash and smoke from the explosion linger in the air, he cannot take a full breath, and so as soon as the emergency medics arrive, his neck is supported by unfamiliar hands while a strap slides over his head, catching on his tangled hair. An oxy-tank is firmly pressed to his face, and the words he wishes to convey are lost in the sudden influx of oxygen.
Qui-Gon struggles impatiently with the mask. He manages to get a finger underneath the strap, breaking the seal on his face.
“The boy,” he gasps. “Where is the boy?”
“We’ve got a fighter.”
A Togruta medic with ochre-red skin and a scattering of cream colored freckles across her cheekbones and nose leans over him. Gold bands lace up and down the lekku that brush across his chest. The medic grasps his hand, forcing his fingers out from under the mask. Qui-Gon shakes his head, evading her.
“Where is the boy?” he asks, but the medic does not appear to understand.
“Who?”
“The boy, my boy,” he rasps. “There was a boy with me, has anyone seen him—”
The Togruta shakes her head. “There was no boy,” she answers, and Qui-Gon closes his eyes in despair. There must have been someone who has seen his padawan, someone who might tell him where the boy is. He refuses to consider the white-draped bodies from the street being loaded on a hovercraft. This cannot be, one of those still forms cannot be his padawan, if there has ever been mercy shown to him by the Force, please let it be now: That his boy should not be among them.
“Please. A boy in a robe, a robe like mine. Someone must have seen him. Please, I cannot leave without him.”
The medic draws his hands away, sealing the oxy-tank back in place.
No! Qui-Gon cries, but he is silenced once again.
He asks the question each time he is roused by the medics on their brief rounds past his bed, or the tech-droids who come to check his vitals.
“A boy,” he asks the Zabrak medic who appears at his side to transfer him to a bacta tank - Sir, do not remove your mask - “a thirteen-year-old boy-” - he is only thirteen, and I have lost him, how could I lose him? - “a human boy with chestnut hair, blue eyes-” - he looks up to me, thinks there is nothing I cannot do, how can I have failed to protect him?
The medic calls for assistance, and strong hands replace the mask upon his face.
“You must wear your mask, sir, do you understand?”
Qui-Gon shakes his head, protesting. He does not require the bacta tank, and he nearly tells them so, but no one will listen. He must find the boy. He cannot have left his padawan behind, in the wake of that destruction.
He is just a child, Qui-Gon wants to shout, just a boy, he should not have been left there alone.
Then there is the cool press of a hypo in his shoulder, and then he cannot protest any longer.
Qui-Gon staggers out of the hoverbed, trailing sheets tangled around his waist and sweeping along behind him on the floor. He does not waste valuable time attempting to remove the mask. He can tell by the way his lungs are laboring that he will not make it far without the supplemental oxygen. Instead he grabs the oxy-tank pole with one flailing hand and uses it for support as he flounders through the halls.
He loses the sheets somewhere down the third corridor, leaving him only in the standard-issue wrapper that hangs slackened to his bare feet. He throws himself against the Force, time and again, stretching out with his senses beyond each door he passes, seeking a familiar presence; but he encounters nothing.
This cannot be, this cannot be.
He locates a data terminal at the end of the corridor and has accessed the medcenter platform within seconds. A few lines of code, and a search is compiling the medcenter’s most recent arrivals.
Human male, mid-fifties.
Twi’lek female, three months.
Quarren female, approx. 46 cycles.
His fingers fly down the datalist, searching for Human male, looking for the right modifiers.
The orderly droids find him near collapsed against the wall, pulling up a profile for a young patient, approx. eleven standard, admitted for smoke inhalation and lacerations of the torso. He is placed on a hoverchair against his wishes, injected with a substance that instantly makes the world spin around him, and escorted back to his room.
Qui-Gon is silent with despair by the time he is returned. The patient in the bed next to his does not stir as he is laid back down and his oxy-tent replaced.
Qui-Gon awakens, cognizant of only one thing. He has left his padawan behind, when he had sworn never to do so again, he had taken this oath before Yoda and the council, made a silent vow in his own heart after Telos, that he would never abandon his padawan to an uncertain fate if it was in his power to do otherwise. And he has broken his word.
He fights his trembling fingers to remove the mask. He must return, he must check the medcenter records, surely someone has seen a boy with reddish-brown hair and no instinct for self-preservation, surely someone must have found him.
He breaks the seal, allowing oxygen to hiss out of the mask, driven to helpless anger by the gravity holding his own body in place despite his wishes, and then there are hands on his arms, hesitant hands patting him awkwardly.
“It’s all right, master, it’s just me,” a voice soothes, and dizzying-white relief breaks through him, rocks him back onto the mattress. He might have wept without even knowing it.
There is the edge of a translucent bacta patch at the boy’s fingertips, running up his arm past his elbow, and sutures already crusting over, black-red at the curve of his padawan’s cheek, and he is here, here, outfitted in the same white linen wrapper that Qui-Gon himself has been dressed in.
“Obi-Wan,” he gasps out, and fumbles with his hand. Needing to touch, to make certain that this is real flesh-and-blood standing before him. The bruised cheek, as gently as he can; the ruffled hair going every which way; the learner’s braid undone completely, existing only as a clump of matted hair hanging to Obi-Wan’s shoulder. “How did you find me?”
The boy’s brows draw together in confusion. “I’ve been right here, master. We were brought in together.”
Qui-Gon glances across the room, at the empty hoverbed with mussed-up sheets, and at his padawan’s bare feet on the tiled floor, and begins to laugh, or cry. The sound breaks out of him with a gasp.
This worries his padawan.
“It’s all right, master,” the boy says. “You’ve only minor injuries, I heard the medics speaking, the bacta helped with your lungs and you’ll be released soon. I think I was supposed to be released yesterday, but they let me stay with you. I’m glad they did. Otherwise I’d have been sleeping in the waiting room.”
Qui-Gon feels the small hand worriedly stroking his forehead, his hair, touching his cheek to wipe away the tears there. He closes his eyes and grasps the hand, bringing it to rest on his chest.
“Don’t go without me,” he says, eyes still shut.
“Go where, master?”
He clutches the hand a little harder. “Anywhere, for the time being.”
“I won’t leave you,” the boy vows. Qui-Gon can feel the truth of it ringing in the Force, beyond his limited vision and out of sight, into eternity as the Force knows it and back into the present. “I swear it. As your padawan.”