Archive of Our Own

They sit in that darkened room for hours; at least it feels that way to him. Time slides. The clock ticks. The lights buzzes, but it sounds as more than just an idle consequence of its function but a disturbance not dissimilar to the roar of planes with their bellies stuffed with destruction. His heart beats in his chest and he fears when it will give out.

“Hallucinations. Paranoia. Trouble concentrating, disorganized thinking and speech…” the healer, C’chachri, reads through the paper; he can’t tell what the emotion in their voice is and it makes him feel as afraid as his brain can be. Qui-Gon next to him is a dark, gray, unmoving shadow. Like he’s holding his breath. That makes no sense, and is probably just his mind...not working again. “Trouble sleeping, distrust of others...you said he was responding to the antidepressants favorably, correct?” 

Obi-Wan breathes. Tries to push away the danger that presses onto his body and does its best to crush him. He closes his eyes. His head feels like someone stuffed it on the inside, crushing his brain and putting pressure on the inside of his skull, like a tumor and well, radiation, that wouldn’t be surprising but they haven’t found any yet; he wonders how much can it bear before it cracks. 

He floats beside his body, ill-fitting for the broken, crooked, sickened flesh that swims with self-hatred. The light buzzes with the roar of planes. He doesn’t stare at his hands lest he see blood like he did the day before, and then again and again and again until Qui-Gon had noticed. They are adults and he doesn’t trust them and he doesn’t trust himself and keeps his eyes closed.

“Yes, yes, he— was, it’s just…”

“Good, good,” the healer says as if anything about this could be good. He scoffs; they quiet for a second. A panic in him awakes at the fact that they can see him, can actually hear him. He’d...thought they could not. He doesn’t know why.

“What could be causing this?” Qui-Gon asks and there’s a fear unlike any other in his voice. A shaky, terrified thing; out of his depth and trying to desperately grasp for anything that could help.

“It is...entirely possible for this to be an early onset— alternatively, many drugs in overuse, especially in the formative years, can cause symptoms and diseases like this to manifest, and...” they trail off.

“What is— what is happening to him?”

Oh, he sounds so afraid. Like he cares. 

“Your Padawan,” she starts and he wonders why they’ve kept saying that when it’s not true, “is most likely experiencing the first symptoms of early-onset psychosis.”

“Psychosis— oh, oh Force.”

“It’s treatable and it isn’t, by any means, the end of the world, it will just...it has complications and it will affect him for presumably the rest of his life. But it isn’t something we, or him, can’t handle.”

They’re speaking about him. He has to not be in the room for them to do so; he has to be a ghost, floating beside them. Is this conversation even something he is meant to hear? He isn’t sure, but his ears make the decision for him anyway.

“I…” Qui-Gon trails off. The famed Negotiator.

“I understand this is hard for you but I need to stress; he doesn’t need your fear. He needs support. He needs understanding.”

The sound of a folder quietly shutting closed. His heart beats within his chest and it feels like it’s going to strangle him as much as a heart can be a rope given that well ropes are— his chest compressed by something out of his control and he can’t breathe. 

When he finally forces his lungs to expand he does so with a gasp, too-loud and shocking even himself like a gunshot and he sounds like he is dying, his body rocking with the effort to breathe alone. His new knees still ache. He grips the armrests of his wheelchair, white-knuckled.

“Shh, shh, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Qui-Gon acknowledges him and oh, oh, he is being heard. A hand touches his shoulder and he flinches with a cry as it sets his mind alight with horror; getting close but not yet quite to trigger the Jaybird’s call. The hand goes away. He’d started crying; he doesn’t remember that.

“Obi-Wan, look at me,” the medic says and he tries, he really does, but his eyes stay shut, stuck together; he shakes his head as he heaves for breaths that don’t quite come.

“You are safe. You are at the Jedi temple and you are safe. We are going to help you.”

He latches onto the steel-strong certainty in their voice with desperation. He fears what they’re saying isn’t the truth.

He fears that maybe, maybe they’re offering something that they can’t give.

They speak some more but he doesn’t catch the words in the fog that his mind slides; or he does, but he doesn’t think them enough, worthy enough or just enough , to process.

He can hear. It’s just his mind that’s the problem.

“Obi-Wan,” they call him. It sounds urgent. They probably have said it more than once. 

“Padawan, you’re safe, you’re alright—“ Qui-Gon joins with desperation.

Oh. He’s gasping for breath again. They called them panic attacks; it meant nothing to Obi-Wan. Nothing but agony in his lungs and something very sharp and cold and very thin stuck in his brain, making it feel afloat, like a knife wouldn’t. He thinks. He doesn’t exactly want to test the theory.

“Count with me, Padawan—“

He growls; the anger is sudden and hoarse and borne out of the sheer spike of fury in that he’s done with this, he’s done with this stupid, useless, infuriating exercise he needs to do five times a day or more just because his brain refuses to work, he’s done with hanging helplessly off his own body like an unwanted appendage that has about as much control as a tick has of the wolf; he’s done. The growl snaps to a keen because well, no matter what he oh-so-nobly thinks, he is still choking.

“Obi-Wan, breathe, breathe—“

Hands on him again. Impossible, swirling colors blind his brain and force him into vertigo. He tries to yell but he doesn’t have enough air for it; his shields shudder as the Jaybird in him awakes and readies to launch them upwards to breathe not on air, not into the lungs of his body, but on the Force itself and the world itself and breathe it in and crush it within his fragile self like a star collapsing just before supernova; and explode just as violently.

“Padawan please—!”

Qui-Gon’s words— begging, almost— slice through the vertigo and fear and anger and cut into bone and the Jaybird’s call dies again, slams down into slumber. He feels his own lungs again, straining. He opens his eyes and cries out at the light.

Eventually; painfully, agonizingly; he follows the exercise, quietly seething his own weakness. Takes control of his body again like a shaken man grabbing on to the reins of a rogue chariot and knowing he is bound to lose them again, like they lost Chariot, for no reason and before they could blink, which he isn’t doing right now either as his eyes have closed again.

Conversation resumes. He leans— crashes— into the backrest of the wheelchair and tilts his head backwards as far as it would go, just breathing. Just that. He used to do that against the sun in the mountains. 

“—possible solutions, I could stay in the Temple—“

“—friends who could support—“

Qui-Gon’s voice stays nervous. Distinctly guilty; it wafts off him so much that Obi-Wan doesn’t need the Force to feel it. 

“—put up an application for a service animal—“

“—could help—“

“—much as anything—“

“—help with reconvalencense—“

“—older than 14 years of age—“

“—surgeries?”

“I am certain—“

The clock ticks. It’s what clocks do but it cries out like clicking, bug on the wall, poisonous spider biding its time and he supposed that’s what time is in the end; he has nothing against spiders. The light sounds like incoming planes. He doesn’t want to open his eyes because he doesn’t want to see whatever awaits him.

He floats beside his body, eyes tightly shut, until Qui-Gon’s voice breaks through the fog and says: “Come on, Padawan, we’re going home.”

The wheels creak; he feels himself being moved and lets it happen, his consciousness wavering in the light.

—

“Obi-Wan?” Qui-Gon’s voice finds him as always, laying in the dimmed-down room of his quarters; he’s slowly beginning to recognize them as little more than just a transitional, liminal space between hospital stays. It doesn’t feel like his own anymore. The only thing he recognizes as something that describes him as a person is the roekel meter affixed to the wall that’s there because in his eternal tragedy he’s managed to convince himself every sunrise is a nuclear bomb; Qui-Gon eventually forced the truth out of him after the fifth time he noticed Obi-Wan reacting to the sight of the rising sun by sliding instantly into— pain, bright, stabbed-through-the-brain, who did it— a panic attack. He still doesn’t know how he managed to comprehend Obi-Wan’s half-mad (well, fully-mad now, apparently) rambling. The roekelmeter helps. Mostly.

He puts down the book he’s not-really-but-sorta-reading— a textbook of Galactic history where he marks every battle and notes why he thinks it might’ve been won— and turns towards the now-open door.

“There’s...someone I want you to meet,” his not-Master (how he managed to convince the Council that he should be elected as Obi-Wan’s caretaker is beyond him, though if he knows Qui-Gon well enough, he assumes the right answer is that he did not ) comes into the room— the door creaks— and walks over.

Obi-Wan nods; anxiety presses at the outside of his ribcage but doesn’t reach his brain. He is not afraid, only his body is. 

He somewhat awkwardly crawls into the wheelchair, sacrificing dignity in favor of avoiding as much of the pain as he possibly can.

“This is Zdiska Harbitov, she’s a member of the CSSA; it’s the...Coruscanti support services association,” he says as he wheels him out; Obi-Wan eventually tries to slap his hand away from the back of the wheelchair, not making contact, seething; wheeling himself the rest of the way.

Qui-Gon reacts to it only with a weak: “Okay, okay.”

The woman standing just in front of the door is not a Jedi. It’s the first thing he notices, even if just from the clothes and the way he can clearly see her combination of wonder and nervosity, an out-of-placeness he can painfully well relate to. It spurs some curiosity. Not enough to make him say more than a monotone: “Hello,” but given that he mostly spoke less than three words a day, that was probably already an achievement.

“Hello,” she says back and smiles. It’s a healer’s smile. The sort of expression that says I can help you, a certainty and kindness in one; it mostly just unnerves him.

She crouches to be eye to eye with him; her maroon coat brushing against the ground. He hates it. It doesn’t make her loom, sure, he’d hate that more, but it still wakes something angry and hurt and embarrassed inside him. He led an army. He isn’t, no matter his age, a child.

“I’m here because the Jedi have placed an order for a service animal for you,” she explains and oh, what?

“Do you know what a service animal is?”

He wants to say yes, of course he does, he isn’t that blind nor stupid— the word gets stuck somewhere. Not like hello or good morning or good night, those he could do; he struggles now when it’s an answer, no matter how simple, paranoia erasing the words that should’ve come. Inhales; his head hurts and nothing comes out. She’s waiting for his reaction and that only puts more pressure on him to respond, to not keep her waiting, to not be rude; he can’t do it. 

He nods.

She says: “Okay,” like she hasn’t just stood there waiting for...a minute? two? and continues: “I’m going to look around and talk to your…” she trails off, eyes fixed on Qui-Gon.

“Master,” he helps.

“Yes, your Master, and talk about the options and how our service could help you, okay? And if possible, I’d like to talk to you, too.”

He nods again. His brain goes blank.

She repeats the gesture and smiles again; effectively ending the conversation; and stands back up. He lays his hand on the wheel of his wheelchair, intending to move away; the thought dies before he can do so and he freezes, trying to complete the motion he can’t remember. She ends up walking around him as Qui-Gon offers her a chair, and moves him too, wheeling him to the table. 

They talk. It’s mostly planning; explanations and shuffling medical documents on the table and the woman probably learning more than even the press knows about a Jedi’s schedule but she stays professional throughout the entirety of it, her surprise or confusion showing only at the words that she doesn’t know the meanings of or whenever Qui-Gon mentions that Jedi don’t get paid. They talk about insurance. Doctors. Capability and the options that she offers; he learns of the species they train and she offers him a place to make an opinion but he doesn’t even have it in him to shrug. They move on.

Obi-Wan just listens. He doesn’t join the conversation. 

—

She appears again. He’s too busy absently worrying about the slowly nearing lung transplant to mark the time and realize it was planned; he doesn’t have a good awareness of the time anyway. It feels slippery. He just knows sometimes he wakes and thinks a nuke has gone off and spends the rest of the morning terrified of if the roekel meter just simply doesn’t work. 

He lets Qui-Gon wheel him to the main room this time. He doesn’t have the energy to be contrary.

She’s waiting here. She’s not the only one.

Qui-Gon voices the: “Oh!” for him.

The lizard that stands at her feet; roughly tall enough for its head to be level with Obi-Wan’s chest; turns its head to them as soon as they enter and fixes its stare straight at him, those yellow, burning, intelligent eyes cutting through his soul. The crown of purple-blue-jade feathers on the back of its head lifts as it considers him like an equal, like a challenger, and he straightens without thinking. A sort of harness wraps around its body along with a vest; it says on the side, SERVICE ANIMAL IN TRAINING, and DO NOT DISTRACT, black font on bright orange.

“Obi-Wan,” the lady tries to get his attention but he’s too busy having a staring contest with the animal that reminds him so closely, so terribly of some half-forgotten idea of home. 

“I want you to meet Boga.”

— 

“I assume this is not the typical Jedi life?” Zdiska asks Qui-Gon absent-mindedly over the cup of tea and he doesn’t mind missing his not-Master’s reply; he knows she’s actually watching him and Boga interact, judging how well Boga responds to his commands and attunes to his state of mind. 

He understands the reason for her prolonged presence; they aren’t entirely sure him and Boga will fit together, that the varactyl can provide him given the short amount of time in which they’ve been matched. He’s been told that she comes from an offer that had actually been rejected as a bad fit, which makes Zdiska ever so watchful of how the animal behaves with him.

He’s the only one who can pronounce the woman’s name the right way, and he’s only said it once; he keeps wondering about it in the evenings when his mind is kept awake by insomnia and nothing else. Where a person from Coruscant could have a name so similar to what he recognizes, how did they get here, what did he miss. If it’s even something he missed, anyway, like chances.

He doesn’t voice it aloud and oh, it’s not like he even thinks he could.

It’s a rocky situation. Mostly because of him; more than once does he end up spiralling into guilt for not being able to convey what he wants to the varactyl well enough; she has this way of tilting her head when she doesn’t understand, and somehow the judging nature of it doesn’t bother him. It’s simply understandable. It’s also without condemnation, and without that incomprehensible complex mess of emotions that the others stare at him with; like pity and guilt and fear and quiet anger that makes him want to scream because what do they have on him to fear — he killed people, yes, he killed so many, bullet to the head, to the brain, crumbling the fragile universe in the mind of a creature, but now when he tries even as little as conveying what he wants for breakfast his Master stares at him as if he’s speaking gibberish and Obi-Wan has to face that truth, and quickly learns not to speak at all.

Boga doesn’t judge him like that. The vocal commands, also, are easy enough, even if he can tell he still slips from time to time.

He doesn’t want her to go.

He looks into the varactyl’s deep, orange eyes— layered frills of a dying star played in slow motion languid enough to stop time itself, rivers, deep and dark and meandering with fire— and thinks; You’d been rejected too. You’d been left alone. You weren’t good enough for them either.

That wound was years ago. The thing about trauma is that all of those fuckers have a long memory, and all of them come back at the worst time. 

(Preferably to overlap.)

He thinks he hears that the press has made a thing of it; Zdiska and Qui-Gon caught in a long conversation discussing the corruption of the news as he sits and aimlessly runs his hand through Boga’s feathers as she lays her head in his lap, still listening but comforting him also. It feels strange; to know that her existence essentially revolves around him.

He can’t take care of her. That becomes the focus point of so many of those document-shuffling-quiet-voice-professional-tone conversations, how to work it out so Boga would be cared for even with Obi-Wan unable to do so himself.

It’s not that he doesn’t want to. That it doesn’t tear at his soul and remaining integrity of himself as a person that he cannot even do that little. It’s truly, horribly, because he can’t.

 Motivation and focus are a finite resource and he’d wasted his all.

She wakes him with little happy trills at set hours in the morning and quite literally yells at him if he doesn’t get up early enough (trained, as he finds out, to get an adult into the room if he refuses even after she does her best impression of a smoke alarm) and on some lucky days he’s too busy thinking fine, fine, fine, I’m going that he forgets to glance at the roekel meter once as she chases him; as much as she can, given, well, knees; into the bathroom to get as ready as he possibly can. 

Their match is deemed a success. He thinks he feels some way about it.

—

She’s a warm and unfailingly steady presence as he waits for the meds to kick in already and he appreciates that, but it makes the eventual surgery; the last one if Force is willing; even that more terrifying given the, well, attachment (fuck it all), and the fact that she isn’t allowed into the intensive care rooms where they want to monitor him for the first few days. It’s an already terrifying concept on its own. 

This is that much harder.

He picks up on the uncertainty surrounding the decisions; all the meetings and weighing a possible life-and-death risk of his lungs collapsing with the current, already bleak situation that he’d found himself in.

The diagnosis eventually was deemed an error. It wasn’t an early onset psychosis, not really. 

Disorganized schizophrenia appeared sooner than others.

It’s when the healer comes forward with that diagnosis that they bring up documents he’s never even seen and they do not appear to have either; the way his heartbeat picks up when they bring it up spooks Boga into action with a squeak-yelp and laying her paw on the side of his thigh (instead of his knee) as she’s been taught.

It doesn’t really help because the healer is saying: “I’ve managed to dig up a medical report about his biological mother and it appears this case is genetic.”

“His mother—?”

“Was diagnosed with disorganized schizophrenia as well, if this is even correct. Also has an allergy to an organism I have no record of, and has described her pregnancy as ‘carried out in difficult times’, whatever that could really mean.” They read from the file on the table, shrugging at the last sentence as if Obi-Wan’s world isn’t sort-of ending and quivering and falling apart as he’s never even known his mother— whom he remembers so vaguely, too vaguely, Force he wishes he could recall more— left him a note and all that note had was just a medical record like a premonition that eventually came true. 

Boga keens; it’s a short, deep, throaty sound that gives him flashbacks but makes him focus on her again. His gaze always falls to her eyes. She studies him back.

“Are there not any names?” Qui-Gon asks, doubtful.

“No. None. Whoever wrote this, they wanted to stay unknown.” Their voice goes softer: “Some of them do.”

Obi-Wan, with effort, moves his hand and pats his other thigh as Boga tracks the movement.

She lays her head into his lap as commanded and he buries his face in her feather as something empty and cold eats at him from the inside.

—

He supposes he should’ve paid more attention to the side-effects of lung surgery when Qui-Gon had filled in the paper for him— he’d been there but Force it felt like all they were doing nowadays was signing and sorting and shuffling paper, and it ceased to exist for him as anything else than white noise. He should’ve maybe cared about it a little more because when he wakes post-surgery, confused and dazed and with a migraine of the millenia, he wonders if he’s lucked himself into all the minor side-effects at once; but he can’t really remember the list, and he can’t check.

At least he doesn’t have a lot of space to think of Boga or Qui-Gon or really anyone in that mess as he struggles to breathe and struggles to even bear the way his body trembles in rushes of sudden and nonsensical cold and fever and needing to throw up what feels like every other hour. He stares at the chrono affixed to the wall in helpless despair and watches time move so slowly that he thinks sometimes it may just be freezing around him. That the concept of time itself just hates him too.

The healers try to help— they obviously see that he needs it, that he’s quite literally suffering— but he can’t voice what he wants and doesn’t even have the energy to really put it into thought beyond impressions of desperate desire to escape his own body to somewhere that doesn’t hurt and makes sense. He can’t sleep. He never feels awake.

There is nothing left to him other than wait, watch the clock and trust that it will someday end.

He gets better when they move him finally to a semi-normal healing room; Padawan ward again, his second home at this point, so much so that the healers just call it his bed; and Boga is allowed to accompany him given her status and training. 

He thinks from the trills and chirps she lets out into the air— spooking the only other occupant of the three-bed room— she’s as glad to see him as he is, maybe more. She doesn’t smother him though, approaches slowly with care and lays her frontal claws on the bed only when he taps it. He hugs her around the neck; her head presses heavy and warm into his shoulder and it settles something inside him so sharply it almost makes him want to weep, and hold her tighter. The vibrations he can feel running through her throat and chest eventually become louder, more pronounced, just generally more and cross into the territory of near-purring, a deep rumble that goes along with her slow breathing in a rhythm of climb-apex-cease. His own breathing follows along and matches the sound without thinking.

“She missed you,” Qui-Gon says from the door; something about it sounds amused, slightly sarcastic. Obi-Wan doesn’t have the energy to look at him and just nods into Boga’s hide as if to say I missed her too.

She stays by his side, stands careful, calm vigil, as Qui-Gon starts a one-sided conversation with some monotone “Yes,”s and “No,”s thrown in there. Obi-Wan keeps one hand hanging off the bed, fingers curled in Boga’s feathers and brushing over the cool side of her beak and manages a “Good night,” as Qui-Gon leaves.

C’chachri; his assigned healer and Qui-Gon’s clanmate, if what he’s heard from their conversations was true; takes care of her for him. They only ask him yes or no questions and he appreciates it.

His roommate doesn’t stay long; even then, Obi-Wan somehow manages to convey his attempt at communication of a question about what brought them to the healing ward through gestures and individual words alone. An unlucky encounter with a strangling viper, apparently.

When they ask him back— and it’s kind-of surprising, he thought they’d already know from all the rumors and all the jokes people think he doesn’t mind just because he doesn’t say anything— he struggles to put the words together, genuinely wanting to reply, wanting to have a conversation as he misses it, misses the ability to just say things but he can’t trust himself not to fumble and say something that doesn’t make sense even if it does to him; he flounders and as his anxiety peaks, Boga’s head snaps to watch him. Her throat gives out a questioning chirp and after that a sound he associates with her getting close, like a warning, like an I’m coming, please stand by— she lays her claws on the edge of the bed again and he gives her the space as she hauls herself on top of it.

Her head level with his own, she blinks, making sure she has his attention; then she bows her neck and lies next to him, her cold beak stark against the skin of his neck and her body warm through the blanket.

“Hey, hey, it’s fine,” the other Padawan— actually a Padawan— says in reply. “You don’t need to say anything, I’m sorry.”

A frustrated noise makes it out of his throat because it’s not fine, because he wants to reply but he can’t .

Boga doesn’t like it. She purrs almost aggressively, a half-growl that runs down her throat and makes her skin quiver against his own as she presses closer and forces him to listen to it; forces him to breathe like a passive-aggressive threat, an I won’t move until I hear you’re okay. He can’t explain to her why that won’t work— both because he wouldn’t find the words and because she’s, well, not a fluent Basic speaker in the case of being an animal— and so he surrenders to it. Tries to comply.

She eventually declares it to her satisfaction with a sharp inhale accompanied by a sound he can only describe as an opposite of a caw; sharp and sudden against his ear. It definitely wakes him from a kind of fogginess he didn’t even know he’d succumbed to.

The last night before his roommate left; fully healed, how Obi-Wan himself never will be; the boy had covered his eyes with his hand and groaned, his eyes narrowed in irritation under the shadow his palm threw, an expression Obi-Wan remembers they made in the mountains’ trenches from time to time when the sun got just too sharp all of a sudden; and then glances to the light, the air in his lungs leaving in a heavy huff.

“I know I should just walk to the light and turn it off,” he says, hypnotizing the switch that interrupts the probably meant-to-be-soothing light blue color with its stark white, “but I don’t wanna.”

Obi-Wan doesn’t know why he’s saying it aloud. He still takes a breath of his own.

“Boga,” he whispers; repeats it stronger and then cringes when he realizes he’s repeated it too much, too many times; she’s already focused on him and there’s no need. She doesn’t mind.

He takes the little light he’s been given; a laser pointer the color of which went into the ultraviolet as apparently that made it easier for Boga to see, and watches as she trails the little light all the way to the switch.

She turns back to him when it stops moving— as much as his hands ever stop moving, thus trembling in circles— and chirps a question.

“Lights,” he says.

The Padawan, watching with obvious interest, giggles. He thinks he might be twelve, maybe thirteen; it’s hard for him to tell now given his skewed view of youth. His first lieutenant had been thirteen and him and Obi-Wan had stood on nightwatch and laughed, without joy, at how maybe once the world finally dies the mushroom clouds will be something that grows.

The sheer noise Boga makes as she moves gathers his attention from where it’d swam away, outside of his body, like outside of the windows where it’s cold; right after that, the room goes dark with a definite slap-click of Boga’s claws against plastic.

“Oh,” the other boy says, giggling again. “That’s nice.”

He can tell exactly where she is from the sound of her movement alone but she still chirps; quieter and slower, a soft creaky sound; when she gets close. I’m coming.

He taps the bed, a very small whisper of: “Up, up, up, here, here...here, yes,” making it past his lips. “Good girl.”

She likes being close to him. He likes having the warmth and sheer bursting burning life next to him as well, the way she never quite stills, not really, her eyes wide with the watchfulness that reminds him so much of magpies. She’s steady and yet not frozen; careful and yet still clumsy with the natural entropy of all living creatures; her heart a loud and unignorable, demanding thing that makes the beat of his own a little less terrifying. 

She snores and it sounds like the wind.

—

They’re sharing coffee at the table in the main room. He knows that; he is pretending to sleep on the couch only a few meters away, the new crutches lying on the floor and a glass from the morning’s routine of pills still on the small coffee table, half-drunk. Qui-Gon had told him he was able to dry-swallow more than ten pills at once but that he couldn’t demonstrate it; Obi-Wan remembers it so he can force a demonstration out of him next time he needs to (remember to) take the ten red pills for his own post-surgery convalescence support every damn morning.

“What will happen to him after all this, C’chri?” Their voices are muted, but not entirely. He thinks that maybe they’re truly convinced by his act— oh, right, he hasn’t moved in hours, not even to open his eyes, Boga snoring softly on top of him with her head falling over his shoulder and the quite-sharp beak digging into his cheek. He knows one sign of distress, one call, would have her wide awake.

“I don’t know. I really don’t know but you need...you need to start thinking about this.”

“I know.” He sounds defeated. Unsure. It doesn’t fit the Qui-Gon that he knows, but this time has brought a lot of revelations for all of them.

“He’s not even connected to the Force anymore; you know it disturbs the Initiates? We’ve had a few kids asking us if this is what is going to happen to them if they don’t listen to their Masters. They think he’s dead, or...or something.”

A heavy sigh. The room goes quiet.

“Force.”

The rustling of cloth; he seems— sounds— exhausted. He tries to pretend this doesn’t affect him when he knows that Obi-Wan is paying attention; the truth is that Obi-Wan already knows. 

Cerasi was right; the night before she marched to her death and he didn't stop her. All he’s ever going to be good for from now on is killing people.

Aiming and pulling the trigger required nothing at all but calculation— and he could. He could still do that.

(He didn’t want to.)

“A lot of people have asked me if I really never think of the past,” Qui-Gon says and Obi-Wan’s breath wavers for a few seconds; but his connection to the Force is dead and it’s not like their ordinary biological senses can pick up on a shift as small as that. “And always, I’ve...The answer was always yes, of course, it’s the Will of the Force to observe the present and flow through the rest, but…”

“Yes?”

He sighs again, a defeated noise; and Obi-Wan thinks he hears him turn his head— the shifting of cloth and all the faint little impressions of sound that hair makes. “I have...a lot of regrets, don’t get me wrong, but this…”

“It hits different when you’re forced to live with it, doesn’t it?” They say it so gently and yet he knows, truly, that it isn’t gentle at all. Truth never is.

The burning of Qui-Gon’s stare pricks at his skin. “Yes.”

The clinking of cups. Boga snores and it’s a little congested, a tiny bit blocked in a way that makes her breath whistle sometimes right past Obi-Wan’s ear, and the sound comforts him with some absurdity of the things the conscious mind doesn’t remember but still reacts to like the peak of the iceberg is moved by the currents and fish that drag the very bottom deep underneath, far away from the sun. 

“It was so...easy. I was so certain that it would just solve itself, somehow, that he was going to be fine— or I don’t know, exactly, what I was thinking.”

Breath in. “Beyond Xanatos.”

His nails tap against the table and the sound actually wakes Boga; she wakes loudly, all at once with a squeak-shriek and a flinch, and shifts on top of him— her claws crushing the bones in his arm for a second, ouch— before realizing her position and settling down once more, alert.

A brief chuckle. “Oops?”

It’s answered by nothing more than another sigh, but maybe this one is fonder.

“I just keep thinking of...of what would I say if I went back. To the moment when he almost pulled his weapon on me and I—“ he huffs.

A cup faintly clicks against the wood. The humming of this light, this little orange lamp that hangs above it, an ancient model with a wolfram string that Boga really liked because it exuded more warmth than it did glow— is comforting, at least, unlike the fluorescent ones they use in the healing ward and in the hallways and— everywhere. This one sounds like nothing but it burns, like fire. It comforted him— the climbing, searing tongues— when they could allow it, burning away in buckets or just on the ground when they decided not to care.

“What would you say If I...if I said I was a liar?” He asks. Sardonically. Fragile.

“I’d say you’re finally acting like a person, Grand Negotiator.”

He groans. “I’m not joking—“

“And neither am I, Qui. You’re a person with flaws. You’re not perfect. The Council— no, to be fair, Yoda specifically— may say whatever drivel about pureness but you know that’s not true.”

Condemning silence.

“You have flaws. You have— Force willing, admit it already— trauma, and yes, this is partially your fault,” they summarize it and it doesn’t sound cruel— just merciless. “But if you hadn’t convinced yourself you were just fine, yeah, if you hadn’t pursued some half-flung idea of perfection, we might’ve not had to sit here now.”

“Thanks.” he replies, a little angry, a little gutted.

“You need help just as he does, Qui. And the first step is admitting whatever you were doing before hadn’t worked, and so this? This is good.”

Their voice gains a little, well, not desperation, but determination— trying to make their friend understand exactly what they mean, what they’re pursuing besides the surface hurt-anger-irritation, and he curls up a little more where he lies on his side below the blanket and below Boga’s heavy body putting pressure on him that helps all the shards of him stay at least marginally together.

Cloth shifts and is pulled and protests.

“Do you get it? This is good, Qui.”

Silence. He just hears their breathing.

“I wish it hadn’t…you know.”

Someone’s hand crashes a little loud— not too much, not angry, just with exhaustion— down at the table. 

“Yeah. Yeah, me too.”

His legs starts to cramp and he ignores it for as long as he can as the two of them go silent; eventually he has to shift, however much he’s pulling on negative-void energy to do it, and it causes a chain reaction in Boga realizing he’s awake and giving out a thrill of something like joy, a greeting, a hello hello awake but get up now. He freezes after moving and expertly ignores the way she lightly pulls at his ear a few times.

“Do you think he’s—?”

“No idea.”

Being Force-null Force-blind and Force-dead had some advantages, apparently.

Boga gives up eventually, and makes sure he hears her displeasure at that with her beak being so close to his ears. It still doesn’t make him move.

A cup dragging against the wood before the sound abruptly ceases. “Do you want more...of this?”

“I don’t think we should be drinking coffee this late, honestly.”

An audible shrug. “We can just burn it away with the Force.”

“Qui-Gon. ” 

Their tone conveys warning on the heels of a question, or a threat.

“Oh.”

“Please don’t tell me— actually, no, this is absolutely something you would do, but please don’t, don’t—” 

Frustrated huff. “You’ve already taught him this, didn’t you.”

Qui-Gon’s voice picks up at a height, on the defensive. “It’s important for burning away drugs and tranquilizers—“

“It’s not healthy when you use it for coffee.” They cut him off.  “You know, instead of, ha, not drinking it? ”

“Fine. You win.”

“I’m glad.”

A pause; it ends when his not-Master inhales, loudly; the exhale is even more that, like he’s readying for something difficult, a gesture so human that it’s completely erased anywhere else and replaced with a careful inhuman stability.

“What do you reckon will happen to him?” Back to serious.

“Not sure. His ALA tanked though, you know, through the fucking seabed of Coruscant. He’s not even eligible to be a Padawan anymore.”

“Who even thought of this—“

“I’m going to stop you right there because I get you, really, I do, it’s fucking— stupid and it’s hard and it shouldn’t be a thing but it is.”

Pause.

“If you don’t want to try to rehaul the whole order in the timespan they gave him, that is.”

An inhale. They cut right through it. “Don’t answer that.”

The breath he was taking morphs into a low sound of frustration that smooths right after; he is a Jedi, after all. Like Obi-Wan is not. 

“So...what will…?”

“Honestly? I have no idea. I’ve arranged a meeting with Koon— you know him and younglings— but will we arrive anywhere? Who knows.”

Clicking. It’s the sound when they rub their claws against one another, the small snap-snap-snap of chitin. “It’s...a fairly unique situation and what I’ve been considering so far is honestly just, yeah, the same services as retirement.”

“Which is given only to seasoned Jedi for their lifelong efforts.” Qui-Gon follows, tonelessly.

“Yeah.”

“So the real question is the Council.”

“Isn’t it always?”

He groans and then surprises him when he actually chuckles; small and sad and definitely nowhere near happy but the dark amusement is obvious in the noise and in its context, and they repeat it too. 

It fades out, slowly. Silence. The light buzzes. Boga’s breathing whooshes into his ears.

“I need to get going.” The chair creaks; the legs drag against the ground.

“Of course, I— thank you.”

“No problem, Qui.”

—

It’s only when he takes out the gun again that he discovers Boga can be furious. 

He doesn’t know why he still cleans the thing; he doesn’t— obviously— use it anymore and so it doesn’t really need to be cleaned at all but sometimes when his hands feel restless and he’s tired of stacking and restacking books and doesn’t feel well enough to try and tackle the crutches he just...thinks of it again, sitting in that beaten box under his bed, a quite literal buried secret he’s still not sure if he wants to forget about.

She watches him when he pulls the box out and it explodes with dust in the low light that swirls in the air and he struggles to put it on the bed as Force he’s forgotten it was that heavy, and lets it thump onto the covers. Takes a breath.

He’s been thinking of Melida/Daan, understandably enough; it refuses to slide off his mind, refuses to go, and the longer it stays the more he realizes just how fucked it all was. It’s terrifying to pull out that box again and having to face it was real and even more horrifying, to be comforted by that. 

C’Chachri has spoken with Qui-Gon once about how the symptoms were too severe when he’d come back to the Temple— even if unnoticed at the time as they believed his silence and apathy and lack of motivation and all of those things to be consequences of a hundred other causes— for them to have started just now. That they have to have already been present during that nightmare of a year and he keeps thinking of that, a little worm buried in his brain and wiggling and refusing to let it go. Of the strange and slightly worried looks that Bastr gave him more and more when they talked late in the nights and late in the war and of the way, well, Nield’s men towards the end have called him the Mad General and somehow it didn’t cross his mind at the time that it could be more than just an intimidation tactic. 

He sits back down, cringing and closing his eyes in pain as he shifts to sit in a close but not quite enough approximation of a meditative pose. Boga, splayed over the rest of the bed, tail hanging off from the side and the feathers at the end of it brushing against the ground, watches. He knows the look of curiosity well enough; she lifts her head as he moves the box closer to him, makes a chirp that rumbles through her chest but which she doesn’t open her beak to make. She reminds him of a tooka, sometimes, like this. Something cute and innocent; he thinks all those seem the same so it makes sense to think of it.

He opens the box on a sliver and drags the rag out first; it produces a scratching sort of sound as it drags against the lid. He lets it hang out of his hand, throwing it over his thigh right after before he decides he’s ready to touch the (metaphorically; he keeps it clean) blood-soaked steel again.

He reaches for the gun. It’s cold.

He hates how the world makes a lot more sense as soon as he feels its weight in his hands.

It’s a learned thing; he knows it’s really nothing more than the habit, the ways he’s taught himself to think when he stares down the scope where emotions couldn’t be allowed to distract him as he possessed a simple purpose that made him feel— useful, good; he was doing something that affected the war, moving them closer to victory, to peace, one bullet at a time (he’d hoped.)

He still welcomes the way his mind just goes quiet. Calm. The chittering hundreds within his mind ceasing their endless noise and stilling in anticipation.

He lifts it out of the case, barrel first; Clocktower’s Mary was made of three parts; and lays it in his lap as he pulls out the rest; Boga watches, wide orange watchful eyes and some kind of self-consciousness awakes with that as he isn’t used to having an audience for his memory of violence and ritual of reminder, not now, during the war it was normal and they joked of it side by side in the warmth of the fire that revealed specks of dirt but here, no.

He clicks the individual parts together, slowly, no rush, no rush; he could do it just as perfectly in under three seconds but there’s no need for that anymore, so he takes care to do it with gentleness instead that a weapon probably doesn’t deserve. 

(He’s not allowed to even be close to a lightsaber. He wonders if Qui-Gon just simply forgot he had the gun at all.)

As soon as it clicks together and he lifts it a little to see how it glints under the low, gray light of early morning, Boga goes ballistic. 

He actually flinches when she cries out, the sharpest sound she’s ever made and so sudden it has him blanking out and watching dimwitted and empty and blank as she jumps to her feet, her muscles tensing all at once, her tail whipping from side to side in some kind of fury.

Her eyes immediately go to his own and if he was thinking anything at all at the time he would find an animal’s terror in them and wonder why that is. 

He’s still frozen when she charges forward and that, finally, makes him move again, restarts whatever made him shut down; not soon enough to move the gun out of her range as her beak closes around the part where the stock and barrel meet and attempts to rip it out of his grasp.

She almost succeeds. 

His hands clench on instinct and after that the intent of fear-shock-anger; he jerks it back, towards himself, and her head follows. The grasp of her beak around the steel doesn’t lessen.

They enter a tug of war— his arms too weak to rip it free and her bearing not firm enough to drag it away from him.

He struggles and it awakens a kind of panic in him; his peace shattered too suddenly, sharply, his heartbeat picking up in desperation. On her side, Boga keeps growling; a rickety, sharp and unceasing noise.

“Boga,” he hisses through clenched teeth as she reaches forward with one of her claws and manages to slam it on the gun, pressing it down and away, digging into his flesh.

“Boga, s—stop.”

She keeps screeching— angry, agonized growls. Her head thrashes from side to side as he thinks varactyls probably do when they hunt, when they catch their prey and need to tear it to pieces and rip it apart alive, and his hands are slipping, still-weak muscle barely recovered from near-starvation straining to keep his own; when she lets go just a little, a fraction, a millisecond, to adjust her grip as the edge of her beak slips on the steel, he gathers all his strength and finally yanks it out.

It scratches the paint on the gun and he briefly mourns it the same as he worries over toxicity but Boga gives him only a second before she shrieks; loud and bothered and angry. The sheer wrath of it slams him sharp and merciless into his body; he holds the gun by the barrel away from her reach as she forces her lungs and vocal cords to give it their all and he tries to make her stop, palm open towards her and thinking instead of saying: Shh, shh, shh, stop, stop, please.

“Boga, Boga—“ 

She doesn’t.

The panic reaches its peak as he thinks— Oh Force, what if Qui-Gon hears this— and only then realizes, remembers, recalls that Qui-Gon took on a mission and it’s C’Chachri substituting yet again; as a healer, working shifts in the very early morning when he’s meant to be asleep and hopefully, just hopefully not here now.

He tries to touch Boga, to force her head away. She dodges the attempt expertly and crows, a three-set of furious, determined calls as she follows the movement of the gun he’s still holding in his hand and it’s then that it occurs to him— he grabs the case underneath her shaking, prancing body and, well, disassembles the gun in less than three seconds, all but throwing it inside as she claws at his arms, never enough to hurt.

“Stop, stop, stop, Boga.” He begs but the calls lose power pretty much as soon as the lid is back in place and the gun out of sight; she definitely remembers where the gun is, though, given she immediately starts snapping at the sleeve of his tunic and crying to jank it away from the off-gray box. It actually pinches once— a young varactyl’s beak is nowhere as sharp as an adult’s but still packing a capacity for violence.

He raises his hand as an attempt to get her to stop and her head follows the movement, facing upward, unable to reach. She gives out a trill, displeased and challenging. Like she’s not going to give up just because he doesn’t like it.

He shifts, slowly, out of his pose and once he frees his leg, balancing on his other knee as Boga still follows his hand in her sights, he kicks the box off the bed. (He can’t stop the quiet, voiceless cry that comes out when— Force, his knee. Oh, G-d.)

She whips her head to follow it, crown of feather open and raised like a peacock’s hide, and leaps to the edge of the bed to stare at the offending object on the floor. Crows again but lower. Like a dark threat to an inanimate enemy, See, I won, don’t try this ever again. 

He swings his other leg down as well— over Boga’s head, which ends up in ruffled feathers and some pulling at the edge of his trousers in retaliation— and pushes himself off the bed and onto the floor, kneeling (ouch) and grabs the box, checking the contents with a glance that lasts but a millisecond and then shoving it under the bed, where it belongs, buried like the dark secret it is.

A heavy thump on the floor; her feathers, rouch-sleek, brush against him as she lands to inspect the job. She glances first at him, exactly as cold with her evaluation as any healer he knows, and then turns her attention onto the box, extending her neck to see it as best she can below the bed, hidden and harmless in the dusty darkness. Sniffs at whatever smell she finds; sneezes right after. A sharp whistle that has him cringing, but there’s something funny about it, too.

His heartbeat finally returns to somewhere like normal; he stops hearing it in his ears. He uncurls his fingers and absently marvels at their soreness. It hurts.

With a clicking, questioning noise she forces herself into his field of vision; then thrusts forward and he flinches, but she does nothing more than press against him, her head against his chest; he lets her. He doesn’t know how to react. His right hand awkwardly in front of him and his left on the ground, his knees aching like hell; she leans her full weight into him and steps with one of her claws onto his thigh—ow — and he, well, his his balance shot to hell by a hundred other things— collapses backwards.

She lands on his ribs hard with a surprised, joyful screech and thankfully has the conscience to roll off before he starts coughing; not too hard, not too bad either, just surprise, dust and sudden, unexpected pressure; she dances around him and he sees those flashes of orange, blue and bright green in the corners of his vision.

The fit ceases and leaves him somewhat gasping on the ground, closing his eyes. Too much.

She mrrps and he waves it off; it doesn’t phase her. At all.

Her next decision is to bump her head into his shoulder— hard— and repeat the noise and he lifts his head and tries to look for no other reason than that he knows she will attempt to get an adult immediately should he not get up, and he’s pretty sure he heard the hallway door open in all this mess. Maybe. Unclear.

“Boga,” he says. 

She caws. It sounds very much like a magpie and that, yes, embarrassingly enough, brings tears into his eyes.

“Boga, girl.”

More cawing. Twice. Like she’s talking back; he knows she likes when he speaks, even if it’s nonsense— You kind of look like magpies. They’re, they remind me of death, they said they create, worship grief as they stand alone against the world, there was a saying about the count but that’s not how it, how it, how it works not like the one don’t go into the forest there are things there, child, there is, golden spinning-wheel— they put her back together, I wish they could do that to me too, cut me apart and put me back together, I feel like I’m made of shards, Boga, and none of them fit— but it still hits him anew as she stares at him from atop, peering into his eyes as he lies on the quite cold ground in his quarters. Her neck moves like a bird’s; starts and stops almost mechanically sharp and that seems especially interesting from, well, below.

Her warmth seeps into him. She keeps staring.

“Hey, hey.”

Two caws. He might be reading too much into it but he thinks it sounds a whole lot like Yes, I hear you .

“Do you— you, you, uh, want,” he completely forgets what he was going to say. The thought is gone. Boga waits patiently for it to come back again and he blinks hard, willing it to happen, summoning it, like a ghost. “me...get up?”

She stares in silence for a longer while, restless eyes and her crown rising like it sometimes does when she appears to be running something very important through her varactyl brain.

One caw.

“Okay,” he tries to move and crashes back down after barely getting his torso off the ground. “Minute.”

She trills. It’s like a longer caw, he realizes; just more drawn out, slower, both deeper and higher in the different layers. He hears her tail rustle against the ground.

“Good, good, good...girl. Good girl.”

She, well, wiggles. It’s all he can describe it as. There’s so much joy in it, simple, true, sincere joy that it bypasses something broken inside him and makes him feel giddy. He doesn’t smile but he thinks she gets it regardless, somehow; the next trill is louder and almost celebratory as she dances in place and her crown spreads so wide as to make a purple-blue halo around her face. Her beak stays open; she forgets to close it.

He reaches with one of his hands and taps on her lower jaw, gently guiding it closed. Chuckles. Nothing loud. Nothing substantial.

Her crown falls for a brief second as she makes a face that just reads to him as hilariously offended; narrowing her eyes and jerking her head tilted to the side, considering him. Then calls again and proceeds to attack his sleeve with valiant vigor until his hand makes contact with her feathers and he’s forced to pet her head.

The vibrations her chest-chirping produces travel through his bones and make him feel nearly every nerve in his arm but the touch of her feather and the way she simply decides to rest her head on top of his chest and lay beside him settles something else inside that had been missing, or floating, or lost; he thinks; for a long time. 

The door opens after a while and he hears it freeze; narrows his eyes against the orange-yellow light it lets in— the blinds of his own windows are always closed— and peers at the healer.

“Obi-Wan?” They still, obviously surprised and on the edge of worried. 

With their species it’s hard to tell but he thinks he still catches the way their eyes seem to focus on Boga— who watches them carefully, even relaxing as she is— as they walk through the door and close it gently behind them without as much as a creak. “Did something happen?”

The first words get stuck in his throat; he doesn’t know how to explain this, doesn’t know where to start and how to say it without, well, all that, and he doesn’t want to ruin the sort of pleasant not-cold-not-void-not-empty calm that he’s reached with Boga’s purring thrumming through his chest and her breath whistling so near, the warmth and pressure of her body setting the bones inside his own right; so he falters, but they’re used to it.

He thinks. Really hard. It’s not easy and, well, he’s tried to explain it to Qui-Gon before that it’s about focusing but he fumbled with it (he thinks he ended up talking about guns and they cut it short?) and even then, it’s not quite right. Not quite there. It’s really— communication in the literal sense of conveying differing meanings like, translation, language to another and what sounds normal to him into something more awkward but that’s, in some way, better for them. It’s hard. It’s— tricky. Sometimes not quite there but enough; it’s also incredibly exhausting, enough so that he thinks the first time he’ll have a full conversation with another person he’ll enter a two-day coma but they say it gets better with meds and practice and well, yeah. Probably. It’s like...masking, in short.

Like lies, he supposes. And he once had the Negotiator for a Master; he knows lies. Very well. Maybe.

“I uh...I...fell.”

They don’t sound doubtful; only ask: “Are you alright?”

“Yea—yeah,” he manages. “She— Boga— caught me.”

Well, that has two meanings, he supposes. It’s a little funny. A joke just for him and Boga alone.

“...Okay,” they reply eventually, and it doesn’t strike him as suspicion but rather relief, or a precursor of it.

“I’ll make tea, okay?”

He nods.

Once they close the door, he waits a second, maybe three, and then giggles to himself and Boga cheerfully, joyously imitates the sound; making her feathercrown quiver in flashes of purple, blue and green.