Work Text:
He spots her from across the bar.
Fulcrum is in a dark corner, though that doesn’t mean much in places like this, where every corner is dark and even quite a few non-corners are dark as well. Many, many years ago, long before Naboo and longer before Qui-Gon had left the Order, Obi-Wan had remarked that establishments such as these were made for shady business, and Qui-Gon had sighed dramatically before finding some urgent business to attend to so Obi-Wan wouldn’t see him hiding a smile at the pun. Now, the memory sets an odd ache in his heart, and it’s not so much the scent of sweat and spilled liquor that threatens to turn Qui-Gon's stomach as it is the grief that spills out, turning his throat tight and making him clasp the doorway tightly.
No one pays any attention to his lapse in balance, nor to his white-knuckled grip on the steel. Old men fall all the time.
The haze of drunkenness is almost palpable as he crosses the room, and the floor feels slick with the memory of blood, the room turning more treacherous with every step. Still, he’s not so old yet as to not be able to manage a bar, even if his face is more lines than not, and his shorn hair is shock-white.
She watches him as he crosses the room, quiet and still, and when he sits she raises her glass of what looks to be something as dubious as it is potent to him in greeting, eyeing him from under her hood. “You’re easier to find than they said.”
He almost flinches.
It’s brash, perhaps, though not entirely serious, not in the way that makes him think she meant it, but it reminds him terribly of something Anakin had said when he was fourteen, when the three of them had met up on Karnoss, and the memory is too sweet and sharp to bear. Anakin had been smiling brilliantly, flush with victory over the fact that he’d managed to secret out Qui-Gon's hiding place before his master, and been halfway to crowing when he’d announced proudly that Qui-Gon was much easier to find than Obi-Wan had claimed. (Later, Obi-Wan had joined them, smiling softly when Anakin had announced his victory, and then enigmatically when Qui-Gon had murmured that it wasn’t at all like Obi-Wan to get lost on the way.)
The grief wells up again, and for a moment it fills his lungs so he cannot breathe.
“Perhaps I wasn’t trying to hide,” he replies.
She falters, something in his manner causing grief to cloud her gaze as well, but it’s gone the next instant, forced down in favor of single-minded intensity. “You have information on the asset?”
“Mm.” He nods, not bothering to lean closer. It’s not like anyone will be able to hear them over the noise anyways. “You have a team?”
“I don’t need one.”
He raises an eyebrow at her confidence, and again something strikes her, sends a tremor through her like he’s suddenly become a ghost she can’t stand to look at. But as before, the grief is gone a moment later, her resolve hardening.
“There isn’t one I can call, anyways. It’s just me.”
There’s truth to her words—all of them—but the second half spreads through the Force slowly, heavy and dark as molasses, and it settles against Qui-Gon's skin in a way that means the second part means more than she’d meant it to.
It’s just me, she’d said, and Qui-Gon can feel the truth of it ring hollow in his bones too. It’s just me.
For one, horrible moment, he wants desperately to warn her away from the mission, wants to protect her and shelter her and keep her from everything that might fray the ragged edges of whatever she’s managed to weave together of herself after being torn apart. ‘No,’ he wants to say, and ‘Hide,’ and ‘I can’t bear to watch you die.’
She’s young— too young to be alone, too young to have the weight of the world on her shoulders, too young to have the same grief that he has worm its way through her and turn he veins to lead. She is young—so much younger than he had ever imagined anyone could be—and her confidence is all the more heartbreaking for it, because it comes from experience.
Obi-Wan was that young once, and Anakin, and his great-grandpadawan, Ahsoka, would be that young too, if she were still—
Qui-Gon looks at Fulcrum, sees the bright blue eyes peeking out from under her hood, and the grief swamps his lungs again.
She doesn’t know what he’s thinking—could never know it, never understand, but there’s something in her eyes that tells him she knows the mirror of his loss, can feel the way it stretches out, pressing at his ribcage and squeezing around his heart.
Qui-Gon lets the grief swim through him as he forces himself to take another breath, lets it fill every tendon and muscle and dissipate, until the ache is just an ache again, and reaches into his pocket to take out a datachip.
When he reaches into his pocket for the datachip, he feels steadier than he’s felt since he walked in, almost back to his usual poor approximation as normal. It’s only when Fulcrum’s small hand darts out of her cloak to retrieve it, pressing her hand to his, that he feels something terrible and inevitable click into place.
Lightsaber callouses. Ah, so it’s like that.
He can see her eyes widen under her cloak as he feels his own callouses, identical to hers. She tenses, like a hope and a heartbreak too wide and horrible to house has made its way behind her eyes and it’s eating her from the inside out.
“I’m not—” she says, in a voice almost too small to be heard.
“Neither am I.”
Though of course, it’s not as though there’s any basis for comparison any more. They are—or at least: they are what’s left.
He never met his great-grandpadawan—never even heard Ahsoka’s voice, though the missives that came from Anakin and Obi-Wan, as few and far between as they may have become as the war progressed, spoke of her with so much love and pride that Qui-Gon could have half-believed she set the stars in the sky and the planets in their orbit.
It is strange for his heart to ache for her, all the worse because she is almost impossible to mourn. There is nothing to mourn, when he never learned the shape of her face or the cadence of her voice. But still, he would have known her if he’d met her then, he thinks. He would have known her blind and deaf, because she was Anakin’s and Obi-Wan's and his in all of the ways that mattered. He would have heard her laugh, or seen her smile—or, knowing his lineage, make a blindingly sarcastic comment—and he would have known, because it would have been the same as Anakin’s, the same as Obi-Wan's, the same as his.
He has seen the list of dead Jedi, Ahsoka marked on it, right above her master and her master’s master. He has seen the list of dead Jedi, impossible to get rid of when he closes his eyes, and he knows—Fulcrum is not her.
And yet—what does a lineage matter, when they are the only two who might have known what it would mean left? What does a lineage matter, when only one of its members remains, old and haggard with grief? What does a lineage matter, when the only two Jedi in the galaxy are not Jedi at all?
He is old. He was old when the war began, and he has aged decades in the years since it ended. He is old, but she is young, and she is brave, and she is alone.
“Let me help,” he asks, and if there is desperation in his voice it is only because he cannot bear to leave her to bear this burden on her own. “Please.”
Fulcrum stills, and then slowly nods, meeting his eyes with her own wide, bright-blue ones.
“Alright,” she says.
There are cracks in her voice, fault lines that threaten to shatter, and perhaps if she were a little younger and the galaxy had more to give her than a tired old man in a dark bar, she would be able to let it break, but there is no one to patch up either of them anymore, and so she holds her voice steady and Qui-Gon holds his face stiff, and they leave the bar together, two steps apart.