Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Obi-Wan is sleeping in his harness when Qui-Gon finally finds it in himself to relinquish the deathgrip he’s had on his own harness for the last two hours of un-asked-for in-flight entertainment.

It is gobsmacking what this boy will sleep through now. Shipwrecks, klaxons blazing, bombs—you name it. Obi-Wan will find space between the explosions for a little nap. Just a few minutes. It won’t take him but a second.

Qui-Gon watches him waist-deep in a sea of confliction. He watches the rise and the fall of the harness straps, the sag of Obi-Wan’s head, the way its weight drags his neck into an arc the way a willow hangs over a lazy river.

If their ever-closer destination does not reabsorb its lost child, then this talent for unconsciousness will prove exceedingly useful for a young jedi.

So useful.

Whether it is a sign to come is no longer something that Qui-Gon has a say in. He is here to do the Council’s will.

He is here to right the wrongs his hands had their part in rending.

Qui-Gon unbuckles his harness and slips carefully down the row of passengers to ask the captain how much longer until they reach the transit bay.

Eighty-seven minutes brings them to the transit bay. Obi-Wan sleeps for seventy-two of them. He wakes groggily when Qui-Gon shakes his shoulder. He wipes at his mouth and his eyes with his robe sleeves and stretches like a kitten, which draws the indulgent attention from the other passengers, most of whom have been watching Obi-Wan this whole journey.

He’s the littlest body in all four rows. Still so small that his toes point downward at the floor and swing with every jostle of the craft.

Eyes down the aisles—mostly human—look upon him coated with glossy sheens. They are not seeing Obi-Wan with his swinging boots, they are seeing their own children, their own siblings, their students, their nieces and nephews and neighbors.

Children do not ride these vessels.

“How old?” the man across from Qui-Gon asks as Obi-Wan tries to get comfortable again in time for landing.

“How old are you?” Qui-Gon says.

Obi-Wan looks up at him first and then to the man. Immediately, his body starts to curl in on itself. His fingers seek out the back of Qui-Gon’s sleeves, but are thwarted by the thick plastoid walls set between the seats.

“He’s thirteen,” Qui-Gon says for him.

“Thirteen,” the laborer says like a sigh. “My girl’s nearly eleven now. Dunno how she’d do on a flight like this. Not nearly as graceful as your wee one there.”

Qui-Gon looks down to see Obi-Wan peering quizzically out of the corner of his seat—the smallest, most secure place that he can find with his limited mobility. His eyes are rounding out and his head tips lightly to the side as he takes in the man’s accent. His attention snaps back up to catch Qui-Gon watching him and resumes trying to stuff himself into his miniature plastoid fortress.

“He is my apprentice,” Qui-Gon tells the man.

“Oh? For hold long? You’re jedi, yeah?”

Yeah. They’re jedi.

“For as long as he’ll tolerate a grumbly old man,” Qui-Gon says.

The man’s lips pull into a grin as the craft shudders into the landing bay and comes to a terrible stop like its insulted its mother and is suffering the consequences.

“You’re Galaecian?” he asks once everyone start to unbuckle themselves and reach for their luggage.

Obi-Wan nearly falls out of his seat. The man at his side catches and steadies him. Qui-Gon hands him his rucksack from the overhead net.

“Via Coruscant, yes,” Qui-Gon says.

“The jedi setting up a temple on Stewjon now?”

Qui-Gon huffs a chuckle.

“Not a permanent one,” he says.

“Where’re you headed to? Nelwin?”

“Coan-Cannoch,” Qui-Gon says. “We’re not here for me.”

The man’s dark eyes flick down to the crown of cowlicks Obi-Wan’s hair has arranged itself into over the last few hours.

“A Stewjoni jedi?” he asks with a broadening smile. When Obi-Wan pops his attention to him, it turns into a great gleaming grin.

“We’ll see,” Qui-Gon says.

“May the wind run with you, little shepherd,” the man says to Obi-Wan in their mother language. Obi-Wan loses interest in him. People are exiting the vessel now. This person is not an active threat. He tugs at Qui-Gon’s sleeve to encourage him to start moving.

“May your journey be kind to you,” Qui-Gon says.

“Thank you, sir.”

Obi-Wan hops over the end of the short ramp into the bustling transit bay.

“This is Stewjon,” Obi-Wan keeps saying, staring out at the rainbow of greenery in every direction. It is broken up here and there by local dwellings and architecture, some made from bricks, some from lumber, some from dry stacked stones and thatch. Great, tangled lines of brambles and centuries-old hedges and stone walls divide one family’s ancestral land from another’s.

Qui-Gon stands before the meeting of one such hedge and one such wall with his pack hanging off a shoulder and his apprentice perched high on the wooden platform of a kissing gate.

Their transport should be coming soon. Qui-Gon looks up at the sky and tries to read the likelihood of rain from the gathering grey clouds.

Obi-Wan begins counting.

The crèchemasters told Qui-Gon before they set off from Coruscant that Obi-Wan came to them with a speech delay. As a toddler, he understood his mother tongue and in the early days at the Temple spoke fragments of it—nouns and verbs and the occasional adjective as little ones are wont to remember before all of those pesky tenses and helping verbs get in the way. Never has he managed full sentences, however.

Unfortunately there is no other Stewjoni at the Temple who might have been able to help remedy that. The closest match may very well have been Qui-Gon himself, and Qui-Gon’s people are not Stewjoni; they come from the same system, yes, but they are proudly Galaecian and their language branches away from the Stewjoni tongue in twists and bends at turns predictable and entirely unanticipated.

They do share a number system, though. It is one of the few things that Qui-Gon taught his new apprentice that actually seems to have stuck for the long-term.

(Well. Besides the other things that appear to be sticking around for the long term.)

“Give us sixty,” Qui-Gon says at the sky.

“Sixty,” Obi-Wan says in Stewjoni.

“Fifty-nine.”

“Fifty-eight.”

“Fifty-seven.”

At twenty-four, the sounds of their kindly valet and his humble wagon begin to filter up from beyond the nearest hill.

It is raining by the time they reach Coan-Connach. Qui-Gon holds his cloak over his head and watches Obi-Wan, tucked with him under the make-shift shelter, walk a late-season red beetle from the back of one hand to the back of the other.

It’s a gleaming beetle with white spots on its wings and black legs with yellow feet. Obi-Wan has named it after one of the pools at the Temple.

“We’re here, Master Jedi,” the cart driver says.

Qui-Gon drops his cloak and begins to collect their things while Obi-Wan scoots off the edge of the cart’s open end and brings the beetle hesitantly up to the driver. Qui-Gon counts out twelve silver coins and slings both his and Obi-Wan’s bag over his shoulder before joining them.

He stands back and is very quiet as Obi-Wan stands up on his toes to transfer custody of the beetle. The driver indulges him and tells him that these beetles are good luck in these parts. He should keep it.

Obi-Wan hurries away from him.

“Skittish boy you’ve got there,” the driver says at Qui-Gon.

“Thank you for your trouble,” Qui-Gon says, giving his own thanks in the form of coins.

“You let me know when you’ll be needing a ride back,” the driver says. “Thank you for the luck, little shepherd.”

Obi-Wan does not acknowledge that he’s being spoken to. He waits until the driver’s horses’ heavy shoes are clopping away before letting out a huge breath that he must have been holding. Qui-Gon gestures for him to follow.

The rain chatters against the wide leaves of the plants all around them. A frog croaks. Crickets chirp. Obi-Wan’s boots splash in puddles as he jogs to take his place at Qui-Gon’s right side.

The rain is pouring down by the time they reach the town clerk’s office. The planks on the floor of the small place creak as Qui-Gon removes his cloak to hang on the line of hooks by the door. The floor echoes hollowly as he makes his way to the line of windows at the back of the office. The whole line is slightly raised and carved from wood. They look like they ought to each have a set of shutters, but instead there is a piece of framed glass with a shade that has been lowered before each.

Obi-Wan’s steps are much lighter, but no less hollow as he goes over to the fire burning in the hearth to warm his hands.

Qui-Gon knocks on one of the closed windows. It is some time, but a door’s hinges wail somewhere behind the row and Qui-Gon turns as another door opens at the very end of the row of stations. A man with round spectacles and a graying beard carefully steps onto the floor.

The first thing he sees is Obi-Wan, who sees him exactly at the same moment.

Obi-Wan goes perfectly still.

“Clerk Bai-Le,” Qui-Gon says.

The man’s gaze swings from Obi-Wan’s shortened padawan sleeves to Qui-Gon’s face.

“Master Jedi,” he says.

“Jinn,” Qui-Gon says. “And Padawan Kenobi.”

“Kenobi?”

“My apologies for our tardiness. Our first flight was delayed.”

“It’s alright,” the clerk says. “I’ve got the key for you. I do warn you, though, you may want to look into alternate lodgings tonight.”

Qui-Gon will be the judge of that.

“Your boy. He is—?”

“The key, sir,” Qui-Gon says. “And if you would be so kind as to lead us to the dwelling?”

He feels the brush of Obi-Wan’s robes against the middle of his back. The shadows thrown by fire have done him many favors in the arena of stealth. Qui-Gon reaches back and lays a hand on his head.

The clerk observes the two of them with a squint.

“Do you have better cover than that?” he asks, lifting his chin at the hanging cloaks by the door.

“We will manage,” Qui-Gon says.

He waits. The clerk purses his lips and shakes his head.

“Let me get my coat,” he says. “It’ll be just one second.”

The roads outside are muddy and the walk, while not long, is further than Qui-Gon expected.

The cottage is about two miles from town. And it is, hm.

It is...

“Like I was saying, perhaps the inn would be kinder for tonight, Master Jedi,” the clerk says of the dilapidated, blackened walls.

The cottage’s roof is composed of water-logged, lumpy thatch, held up by rotting wooden beams. And now Qui-Gon is unsure why anyone bothered to store a key when the door to the place has been removed clear from its hinges and shipped off to oblivion or possibly Correllia—whichever its thief encountered first.

A great forest of ivy and weeds have overtaken and obscured what remains of the cottage. The rain rattles against their many leaves and collects in deep pools around their roots. Obi-Wan has found another frog croaking at the edge of a puddle that one day, long ago, must had been the corner of a kitchen garden.

Qui-Gon takes his chances to step into the little dark building. He surveys its decades-old, crumbling interior. Whatever furniture once called the place home has been scavenged. In its place, graffiti of many shades has been left.

The tap of water seeping through thatch is inescapable, and Qui-Gon’s apprentice is blowing on his hands outside, watching his breath make clouds that are shot down by raindrops acting as atmospheric arrows.

“An inn, you said?” he asks the ceiling.

“The very best in town, sir,” the clerk says.

It’ll have to do for now. They’ll come back in the morning.

“Obi-Wan, let’s go,” he says.

The innkeeper is asleep, but his daughter wakes and takes pity on Obi-Wan in particular. She gives them a room and asks where their things are. Qui-Gon assures her that their belongings have been safely transported. Obi-Wan is happy to be inside out of the cold. He startles when the innkeeper’s daughter takes his hands into hers and briskly rubs them.

“Where is your hat?” she asks.

Obi-Wan shies away from her and stuffs his hands into his sleeves.

“Where’re you coming from?” she asks as Qui-Gon brushes past to bring the rucksacks into the room.

“Coruscant,” he says.

“Coruscant? You traded Coruscant for here?”

“Your mayor submitted a request for aid,” Qui-Gon says. “He asked if we might aid in rebuilding the priest’s cottage a ways north of here.”

“That old thing? I heard they were trying to make it into one of those functional museums—the mayor asked a jedi to come do that?” the innkeeper’s daughter asks.

“He did indeed,” Qui-Gon says. “If you would be so kind, madam, we appreciate your hospitality, however I think my boy is just about ready to keel over of exhaustion.”

This is not true. Obi-Wan is well rested from the flights. But the locals seems to be able to smell a shared culture on him.

“You poor thing,” the innkeeper’s daughter says. “What’s your name?”

Obi-Wan does not acknowledge her or her question. He ducks under Qui-Gon’s arm and burrows into his side.

“He’s shy,” Qui-Gon says.

The innkeeper’s daughter’s expression is nigh pained when she lifts her face and straightens out of her stoop.

“I hope you can get some rest,” she says. “Come down for breakfast in the morning. You’re both pale as the moons themselves. Good night. Sleep tight.”

“Good night,” Qui-Gon says with the bow of his head.

Finally, after two days of traveling, they are left alone. Obi-Wan peeks out. Qui-Gon sighs and lets his shoulders fall.

“It’s a piece of junk,” Obi-Wan tells him.

“A piece of junk that we must transform into honey and roses,” Qui-Gon tells him. “We have our work cut out for us.”

“What are roses?”

“You know what roses are.”

“Like Tiana? I thought she was a cactus.”

“She is a cactus; a cactus rose,” Qui-Gon says.

“A cactus would drown here,” Obi-Wan says, not fighting as Qui-Gon lifts his sodden cloak from his shoulders and places it with his own by the door. Both of them drip. The innkeepers have already thought of this. They’ve left a deep square basin under the coat hooks.

“I suppose we won’t be planting cacti then,” Qui-Gon says.

Obi-Wan flops himself down on the side of the bed. He flattens a cheek against its heavy quilt.

“Carrots,” he says.

“Carrots would do better in spring,” Qui-Gon tells him.

He takes off his boots.

“Mmmmmm cabbage then.”

“Cabbage is a good choice. What else?”

“Tubers.”

Qui-Gon chuckles and tugs at the back of Obi-Wan’s leather boots until he grumbles and sits up to start peeling them off.

“Cabbage, tubers,” Qui-Gon says. “Kale—perhaps some turnips.”

“Master, no.”

“Master, yes. Are you hungry?”

He gets no answer, which means yes. Obi-Wan runs his finger along the line of stitches tracking along the large quilt patch under his head. He doesn’t react when Qui-Gon slaps a foil rations packet against his thigh. Qui-Gon leaves it with him.

He’ll eat it when he’s ready. Qui-Gon has been awake for 30 hours. He’s finally hit his wall.

He scrubs a hand over Obi-Wan’s head, pretends that teeth did not just click at him, and flops down to go to sleep.

In the morning, Qui-Gon wakes to find that he is being used as a human heater for a padawan made almost entirely of elbows. How he, a grown man of more than six feet, ended up with four inches of space on the edge of the double bed, is beyond him.

He starts to move and Obi-Wan scrunches his face up in his sleep. Qui-Gon resists a sigh.

It is one of great sadness. Great heartache.

To see his padawan here, so unconsciously comfortable, so accepted by his people even when he does not know them, and they do not know him.

Perhaps the Council is right. Perhaps the greatest kindness the jedi can now give Obi-Wan, after all of the suffering he has endured, is to give him back to the land from whence he came.

Qui-Gon gives him the rest of the bed and lets the grief of on-coming loneliness into the Force. Today is supposed to be a day of work. They must head off soon, or else the early fall will consume more of their day than it did the one previous.

Stewjoni people drink caf and tea and sometimes, they even mix the two. Qui-Gon cannot bear to see it done and so politely declines the offer of the innkeeper’s wife in the morning. She tells him that her daughter let her know that a jedi was in town, and she’s delighted, but surprised, that the jedi Council would care about some old, withering cultural artifact.

“We don’t only leap into battle,” Qui-Gon tells her. “A poem is just as important as a sword for many, many societies.”

“Freya tells me that you’ve got a boy. Where is he?”

“Still sleeping,” Qui-Gon says.

“She says he looks like So-Feya from the Kenobi homestead.”

Yes.

Yes, Qui-Gon is sure that he does.

“You know, they gave their littlest boy to a jedi nearly ten years ago,” the innkeeper’s wife says.

Her gaze is as solid as granite.

“He never came back,” she says. “Poor dear was struck in the head. Some out-of-towner came right through their garden with a hatchet. Heard about a changeling up here. Superstitious fuck if you ask me. Nearly killed their little boy.”

Qui-Gon sips his steaming caf.

“That’s him, isn’t it?” the innkeeper’s wife asks sharply. “You’re bringing him back? Is he not good enough for you? Too country? Too poor?”

Qui-Gon sets the white mug on the counter calmly.

“Obi-Wan is my apprentice,” he says calmly.

“For now. What’s the matter with him? What have you people done?”

Everyone in this town must have known the second the clerk left the inn last night. Word in such communities spreads quickly. And they are protective of their own.

“Thank you for breakfast,” he says. “We will be out of your worries shortly.”

He sends the boy down to get his breakfast separately. The tones that emanate from downstairs while Qui-Gon gets the packs in order are a thousand times softer. Pitying, almost.

The landlady is right to pity, even if she knows not why.

Obi-Wan nearly runs up the stairs to get back into the room. His chest heaves. His chin threatens to tremble.

Qui-Gon stops what he’s doing and rises to sit on the edge of the bed. He waves Obi-Wan in next to him and wraps an arm around his thin shoulders as he works to let his fluttering emotions into the Force.

Obi-Wan hides from the ladies of the inn on the way out. Qui-Gon thanks them both again. They glare into his soul.

It is what it is.

He and Obi-Wan take a walk down the sodden trail towards the abandoned cottage. There are many fewer clouds today; they roll by in puffy balls overhead. The storm from the night before left behind a sharp, biting wind that cuts through the warming sunlight.

Obi-Wan finds another kissing gate to climb up onto and survey the surroundings.

“Master?” he asks.

“Padawan.”

“You’re not leaving me here, are you?”

He’s always been quick, this one.

“We’re on a mission,” Qui-Gon says.

Obi-Wan turns around to look at him, finally taller up on the gate’s platform.

“Then why are you so sad?” he asks.

He knows Qui-Gon’s emotions in the force now. He can feel the grief. He’s felt it before.

“Up and over,” Qui-Gon says. “Those gates aren’t made for lingering.”

“Master.”

“Up and over.”

Obi-Wan rolls his eyes and pushes through the gate. He hops down on the other side only to realize that there is now an old dry stone wall nearly his height between him and Qui-Gon.

Qui-Gon doesn’t bother to suppress his smile as he walks along and Obi-Wan keeps popping up every couple of yards, furious at having betrayed himself like this.

“Master.”

Aha. He’s found a sheep’s gate--a square just wide enough for stubby livestock to pass through. Qui-Gon feigns innocence as Obi-Wan tromps up to him and grabs his hand to place on his own head.

“You said you wouldn’t leave,” he says with determination.

“I don’t intend to,” Qui-Gon says.

“When why are you sad? You promised,” Obi-Wan says.

“I know, O’Ben.”

“You’re not answering questions. Why? Did I do something again? I want to stay with you. You said I could stay.”

Qui-Gon stays calm so that Obi-Wan will stay calm. This boy has cried enough over the last few months. Screamed, too. Called hoarsely through so many nightmares. Shied away from so many well-meaning touches.

“I want you to stay,” Qui-Gon tells him. “But what I want more than that is for you to have a choice, Padawan.”

“A choice between what?” Obi-Wan asks.

“Not many padawans have the opportunity to meet their families.”

Obi-Wan pushes his head firmly into the center of Qui-Gon’s palm like an angry bull.

“I want to be a jedi,” he says.

“I know, Obi-Wan.”

“I want to be a jedi.”

This is another thing that Obi-Wan has learned from Melida/Daan. It is a method of praying. A way of manifesting a wish or a will.

The Young would tell themselves and each other all sorts of things—that they were safe and everything was okay, that they weren’t hungry, that the bleeding would stop, that their friend would wake up—as if saying it out loud over and over would make it come true.

Obi-Wan, in the greatest of his panic attacks, falls into an endless stream of praying like this. His hopes are murmured or whispered. He curls his body into as tight as a ball as he can manage and rocks back and forth with his arms clutched tight over his head.

In those moments, he is not at the Temple. He is in a sewer. He is under an over-turned children’s slide. He is in the refresher of a bombed-out house.

His forehead presses against Qui-Gon’s palm. He’s learned that if he sinks his fingers into his own hair and scalp, and skull, someone will start trying to remove them. But it if it’s Qui-Gon’s hand, he can keep pushing through.

Qui-Gon lets his arm go loose and lets his padawan topple into him.

“Come here,” he says. “Up here.” He taps at the top of the stone wall and waits as Obi-Wan messily manages to scrabble his way up to stand on it. He stares down.

He feels safer when he’s up higher, but he’s too high up now for Qui-Gon to make his face out against the white sun.

“Sit,” he says.

The command is obeyed. They are now more or less the same height.

“Do you trust me?” Qui-Gon asks him.

“No,” Obi-Wan says immediately.

It isn’t hostile. It is pure, bouncy honesty.

“Well, that’s your mistake then,” Qui-Gon tells him in the same tone.

It brings a flickering grin. He pretends to ignore it.

“I told you that you would be my apprentice, yes?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“And you told me that I would be your master, yes?”

“Yes!”

Obi-Wan is catching onto the game. He is actually smiling now. It hurts Qui-Gon’s throat. Swallowing is difficult. He knows his apprentice can tell from the slight softening in his force signature. But they are playing a game. It is always easier to play a game.

“Alright, so. You know how you are on probation, then?” Qui-Gon asks.

“You’re on probation, too,” Obi-Wan works out perfectly.

Qui-Gon tsks and throws himself away from the wall to pretend to start walking away in disgust. Obi-Wan leaps up and gives chase. He blocks Qui-Gon’s path on the sandy track. Qui-Gon goes around him.

“If you know everything, then why bother asking me?” he asks obnoxiously.

“Because you’re running,” Obi-Wan says.

“Running? From who? From what? Jedi Masters do not run. We flee.”

“You’re fleeing, then.”

“Nonsense.”

Arms latch around Qui-Gon’s diaphragm. He fights back a laugh and continues walking laboriously with Obi-Wan trying to walk backwards without letting go of him. Qui-Gon can feel through the tightness of his grip that he’s starting to understand the full situation.

“The council wants you to have the choice,” he says to the mountains in the distance, “And as long as I too, am on probation, your welfare is in their hands. Not mine.”

“I don’t even know them,” Obi-Wan says, muffled by layers and layers of robes.

“You must at least give it a chance, padawan. Just in case. You never know where you will be happy.”

Obi-Wan finally extracts his head from Qui-Gon’s robes and looks up at him with reddening, glossy eyes.

“Fine,” he says like a stabbing gesture.

Yes, he’s a very clever boy.

“It’s just six months,” Qui-Gon tells him.

“An eternity,” Obi-Wan rasps, scrubbing at his eyes.

“An eternity is precisely how long it takes to make an important choice like this,” Qui-Gon says. “And if you find happiness here and choose to stay at the end of our time, then I can at least sleep knowing that you are where you are most meant to be, even if that is not by the side of a careless jedi master. Is that not fair?”

“You’re not careless. You’re just aggravating.”

Oh, Mace has been teaching him bad habits so well.

“I’m a complex person; perhaps I can be both. At once even. Now what do you think of that?” Qui-Gon scoffs.

Obi-Wan’s lips stop trembling. He squints mulishly in the direction of the cottage.

“I hate farming,” he says.

“Such a thing to say, O’Ben. You were born for farming. Look at it all. The possibilities are endless,” Qui-Gon says, gesturing grandly to the hills.

Obi-Wan is not impressed.

“What if we revolted against the Council?” he asks instead.

 Aha. Now this is thinking that indicates a dire need of a task.

Chapter Text

Qui-Gon has built many houses in his time. He hasn’t lived in many, but he’s certainly built them, and not by his own will, no. He has reliably had a master and a padawan-brother to volunteer his services on his behalf.

Obi-Wan, however, has never built a house. He’s not old enough to have taken the service learning modules, which means that his main job in the re-construction of the priest’s cottage is to supervise and report external damage that Qui-Gon has not already catalogued.

He does this poorly.

He’s found a puddle teeming with late-season tadpoles. Qui-Gon leaves him to micromanage that while he takes stock of the work that needs doing.

The foliage clinging to the exterior of the cottage has wheedled branches and roots through the mortar holding the walls’ stones together. Wind has eroded some of the holes so that now daylight can been seen clearly all the way through them.

The thatch of the roof hasn’t been changed in years, possibly decades, and is full of vermin. The inside of the cottage smells of urine and alcohol, and a few scattered caps, bottles, and paper filters indicate that certain persons of the area currently use this space as a liminal one for intoxication.

It would be easier to level the whole plot and start over. Alas, the thing about cultural projects is that as much of the original method and materials must be kept as possible.

If Qui-Gon is going to knock down the walls, he must at least save the stones. The beams overhead must be inspected to see if any of them are worth keeping. The thatch is all going, Qui-Gon doesn’t care. He’ll see Master Nu and Tahl in the pit if they would like to discuss it further.

“Master.”

“Yes, padawan.”

“There’re bones.”

“Yes, padawan.”

“Are they people bones?”

Obi-Wan does not need to know how to build a house; if he ends up choosing to stay here in Coan-Connach, his community will almost certainly educate him in such ways. In the meantime, what they really need is an inventory.

“Get your pad; we need to make a list.”

“About bones?”

...no. They will discuss the bones at a later date.

The bones are human.

Welp.

Obi-Wan wins this one. There are now law enforcers from nearby Nelwin covering the place in tape and putting a real dent in Qui-Gon’s renovation plans.

Qui-Gon catches himself tapping his foot. Obi-Wan keeps giving him complex brow-based expressions that ask him why these people are disrespecting the good rules of Master Nu who everyone knows says not to treat history as a kickball.

An officer bumps their ass into one of the cottage’s walls and sends a shower of dirt and filthy water down onto themselves, the bones, and the hearth.

Qui-Gon makes the mistake of grimacing and finds himself shortly thereafter in an interview room, being accused of having murdered the victim, who, it turns out, was a teenage girl from the city. Qui-Gon blinks slowly and asks as evenly as possible if it feels good for them to terrify the living daylights out of his apprentice in the other room.

He asks them how that’s going, by the way.

Not well, he’s sure, given that he can hear Obi-Wan dissolving into one of his more aggressive panic attacks through the walls.

The law enforcer ignores Qui-Gon’s questions.

Instead, he is asked if he’s Galaecian.

Qui-Gon says that he is a jedi.

He is asked if he has identification for himself and the boy.

He explains that he does have identification for the both of them, however it is in his rucksack which has been unnecessarily taken into evidence and is currently being rifled through.

He’s asked again if he’s Galaecian.

Yes. He is Galaecian. By way of Coruscant. Thank you. Can they please move on?

He’s asked if he’s part of the itinerant Galaecian culture.

He leans an elbow on the table and sighs as a bunch of officers outside start shouting. He knows why they’re panicking.

They have failed to disarm his apprentice. A rookie’s mistake. There are easier ways to gain proof of a person being a jedi, such as, oh, say, asking them.

“We can keep going in circles here,” he says over the sudden alarm of his interrogators, “Or I can spare your colleagues’ limbs.”

Obi-Wan is in a state when they are eventually invited to leave the station. He’s jittery and paranoid and expressing that through jerky movements and wide-eyed glares. They return to the inn, where Miss Fraya and her mother are shocked at the digging behavior he is subjecting Qui-Gon’s cloak to.

He’s looking for cover is all; it’s quite hard to find on a country lane.

Qui-Gon asks if it’s alright with them if he and his apprentice spend another night at the inn.

“My god,” Fraya’s mother, Mor-Ag says. “How long did they hold you, sir?”

 “Forgive me,” Qui-Gon says, “Do you happen to have a refresher?”

Obi-Wan is soothed by the novelty of a deep, hot bath. Violence flees his body as quickly as it descended upon it. He accompanies Qui-Gon downstairs for lunch when he is done and is much more sociable.

A social worker arrives from the city with a formal apology the next morning.

On the third day, Qui-Gon calls the Council so that Mace can have a turn shouting at the law enforcers who are still here, digging up this historic landmark with no reason to do so. That done and the Stewjoni Society for the Preservation of Culture and History contacted, Qui-Gon decides to take Obi-Wan fishing.

It will be good for both of their blood pressures while Mace, Yoda, and the SSPCH have it out with a bunch of cops.

There is a river nearby and it is full of slim silver fish, watersnakes, pinecones—everything a boy needs to grow happy and healthy.

Obi-Wan catches a foot-long fish with his hands instead of the reed net he and Qui spent so long making and stands in shock with it thrashing in his hands, unsure of what to do next. He holds it helplessly out to Qui-Gon and does an anxiety spin in place upon being told to put it in the net.

Qui-Gon ends up wading out into the water to take custody of the creature.

Immediately after depositing this in the net, he looks up and find that Obi-Wan has gotten ahold of another one and is now gleaming with confidence.

They bring six fish to the Inn. Fraya asks Obi-Wan if he caught them. He beams. She asks if he took the hooks out of them. Obi-Wan explains that there are no hooks; they caught them with a net.

This is a lie, but Qui-Gon is tired.

“So they do teach you things in that city of yours,” Mor-Ag says.

“Where might we purchase sand in these parts?” Qui-Gon asks her.

Come hell or high water, Qui-Gon is rebuilding this cottage. He no longer cares about these idiot cops. He cares nothing for their foolishness and desire to bring dogs onto the property. If there are more bodies, then he will honorably unearth them while he’s rehoming ivy and tearing these walls apart.

The locals, he notices after the third day of this complex dance with dismayed city enforcers, have come out to watch the spectacle.

He will allow it. There isn’t much else going on in these hills.

He sets Obi-Wan to the task of digging all of the plants away from the cottage’s foundation, and when he’s finished with that, he sets him the task of scrubbing the old stones, and when he’s finished with that, he sends him off to determine just how abysmally soaked the soil of the plot’s gardens are.

Around then, a local mason comes over and explains to Qui-Gon that his stone stack is impressive, but not quite the traditional way to do it. He shows him how to mix the new batch of mortar properly and invites himself into the stone-stacking party.

A few more men join.

One of them has sandy-blond hair with a note of orange in it. He hands Qui-Gon a stone three times heavier than it appears as though it weighs nothing.

“What’s your name?” the man asks him.

“Qui-Gon Jinn,” he says.

“Knight?”

“Master.”

“What’s the difference?”

“I have turned a padawan into a knight.”

“Is that what you’re doing with my brother?”

Qui-Gon forces his body not to pause in accepting the next stone.

“If that’s what he wants,” he says.

The Kenobi Clansmen has gray eyes and a thick, ginger beard. He has to be far younger than he presents himself to be.

“My mum wants him back with everything in her,” he says.

“He’s quite skittish,” Qui-Gon says.

“We heard.”

Of course, they’ve heard. Everyone hears everything in this place.

“What happened?” the Kenobi Clansmen asks.

Here they go. The part Qui-Gon has been dreading.

Most people in the galaxy only know Melida/Daan as the place on the holonews where all of those poor children were slaughtered by their terrible extremist parents.

Reporters had swarmed the place in the last few days of the conflict. They’d taken recordings of hundreds if not thousands of filthy, starving children. They’d done strange comparisons and demonstrations for hostage situations, the range of variously used ammunition, the effects of various weapons on child-sized crash-test dummies.

Stewjon is a largely agricultural planet, but it has its industrial cities, and its especially wealthy continents. The people out here in the town are connected to the holonet and therefore the holonews; perhaps not as efficiently as their urban counterparts, but enough for the masons to cease their rhythmic stacking and mortar spreading.

The Kenobi Clansman needs to sit down. A few of the men help him.

“You let him fight in that?” the man asks in a high creaking voice. “You left him in that?”

“I did,” Qui-Gon says.

There is no sense in denying it. Obi-Wan’s actions are not the only ones what have lead them to this place.

“How could you?”

“Callousness,” Qui-Gon says. “Frustration.”

“He’s a wain.”

“He is.”

“How—”

“There is nothing you can ask now that I have not already asked myself,” Qui-Gon says. “It was behavior unfitting of a jedi master, and it has resulted in dire effects on the boy. He and I have been working through the effects. However, the Jedi Council feels that having been so traumatized by the last year as an apprentice, it is only fair that Obi-Wan is allowed a choice in continuing his current path or not. He does not wish to take up any path the jedi can offer besides that of a knight. And if he cannot become a knight due to what has happened over the last year, it is the opinion of the council that he must have the opportunity to return to his home culture.”

“But you’re his father.”

“I am his master. Jedi do not have fathers.”

“No,” the Kenobi Clansman says, struggling to get to his feet and to crowd himself into Qui-Gon’s space. “I don’t believe that. You’re his da. You messed this up. You have to fix it.”

“Debatable on the first point; strongly agree on the second and third,” Qui-Gon says.

He and this young man stare into each other’s eyes for a good two or three beats.

“Is something the matter with you?” the Kenobi asks. “Why are you so—so—bloody calm about all this?”

Qui-Gon shifts his weight back to his other foot and lifts a shoulder.

“If you want to see, then you need to be quiet,” he says.

The masons leave the site, perplexed. Lak-Lan, Obi-Wan’s eldest brother, goes to the Inn upon Qui-Gon’s instruction. He is to have dinner there in an hour’s time.

In the meantime, Qui-Gon continues stacking stones until it is too dark to see.

“Master.”

And who should join him here?

“Are you cold?” he asks.

Obi-Wan gives a cheerful grunt of affirmation. When Qui-Gon looks up, he finds the reason.

“Who’s are you now?” Fraya asks at the door.

“Her name’s Nala,” Obi-Wan tells her.

“We are not keeping the sheep, we are not naming the sheep, the sheep is being returned to her owners,” Qui-Gon repeats in the same flat tone he’s used since the sheep’s arrival.

“She’s lost,” Obi-Wan tells Fraya.

“Is she?” Fraya asks. She wipes her hands on her heavy pants and comes outside to inspect the creature. She pulls at its ears and looks its wool over. She ends with sitting back on her heels and saying, “Huh.”

Qui-Gon does not like ‘huhs.’ Especially when they pertain to sheep.

“Master, she’s a pathetic lifeform,” Obi-Wan whines.

“Tell me she is from a flock,” Qui-Gon begs of Fraya. “We can deliver her wherever she needs to be delivered to.”

“No markings, Master,” Fraya says. “No color, no earmarks, no number. I guess she’s yours now.”

Obi-Wan becomes a white dwarf star in his radiance.

“She is actually yours,” Qui-Gon tells Fraya. “Congratulations.”

Obi-Wan throws himself into hugging the sheep.

“Master,” he nearly whimpers. In front of other people, no less. If Qui-Gon was not now thinking about six hundred sheep logistics on top of soil quality and crop cycles, he would be impressed—pleased even. But no. He shall abstain, thank you. His vision of Stewjoni life for six months never involved sheep.

“Here you, get inside,” he says, herding his padawan away from the hanger-on.

“She’ll be cold,” Obi-Wan says.

“She won’t,” Qui-Gon says, “But you will be. Inside. Show Fraya your bounty for the day. No Nala, you stay out there.”

Nala bleats at him. Fraya grins as she stands.

“Did you catch another one, O’Ben,” she asks.

Obi-Wan stiffens for a moment at this person who he barely knows using his nickname. She even says it properly, the way Qui-Gon says it, with a diphthong on the ‘e’.

Obi-Wan takes that as a cue to become unbearably shy. If he were a toddler, he would have burst into tears, but he’s tougher stuff than that, and, Qui-Gon can see he is starting to like Fraya. To trust Fraya. She has let him sleep in the rooms of her house for nearly a week now and gives him warm food when he’s cold.

He gives her a snake from his pocket. It is not the rabbit he caught that Qui-Gon was aware of.

Fraya shrieks and gives everyone in the area a heart attack before coming up, absolutely gushing with laughter.

“Where’s you find that, lad?” she asks. “They’re hibernating. Did you dig underground?”

Obi-Wan merely stares.

“In a rock,” he says.

Qui-Gon collects the snake and feels the weight of every stone he lifted that day. It is a small, black and green thing. It wraps itself around his wrist defensively.

“So we traded up for the rabbit,” he observes.

Oh, he of little faith. Obi-Wan produces the rabbit next. His robes are bottomless. Fraya accepts it as well.

“Thank you,” she says. “Would you it cooked or spared?”

“Spared,” Obi-Wan says.

“I will add it to the collection then,” Fraya says. “Are you eating supper with us?”

Obi-Wan defers to Qui-Gon.

“If you would be so kind to feed him,” Qui-Gon says. “I require a drink.”

“Will you be along later then?” Fraya asks.

Yes. But only much later. The pub serves food and Obi-Wan needs a reason to sit on a high stool next to his big brother, currently sitting nervously at an old wooden counter by the inn’s kitchen.

Qui-Gon returns late. He’s had a few drinks, but they do not erase the sheep peeking at him the inn’s livestock shed.

He stares.

Nala stares back.

She bleats.

He goes inside. The lamps are not lit in most of the inn, but the light grows brighter in a backroom. Qui-Gon dampens his step as he approaches it.

From the shadows, he can just see into the room, where Lak-Lan Kenobi sits at a table with Fraya; both of his arms are wrapped around a familiar, sleepy boy.

Obi-Wan is so comfortable where he is that he’s tossed an arm over Lak-Lan’s shoulder. He starts to wake up at the feeling of Qui-Gon’s force signature’s proximity. Lak-Lan notices the signs of reawakening and shushes his brother, rocking him slowly from side to side.

It’s too late, though.

This boy is up. He squirms around until Lak-Lan can contain him no longer and releases him. Obi-Wan tumbles to the floor and jumps up to come greet Qui-Gon around the corner. He tugs at Qui-Gon’s hand until he is pulled more into the light.

“Master,” he says. “This is Lak-Lan. He’s Fraya’s friend.”

“Nice to meet you,” Qui-Gon says.

Lak-Lan smiles back broadly.

“Always making friends, you are,” Qui-Gon says down at Obi-Wan. “That sheep’s going to haunt us.”

Obi-Wan beams.

“Bant will like her,” he says.

“She is not coming home with us.”

“We can build her a stable.”

“Excellent idea. That is your job for tomorrow. Find her a stable.”

“Build,” Obi-Wan corrects.

“Find,” Qui-Gon tells him. “It’s late. We must work tomorrow to shave another day off our imposition on this poor inn. Say goodnight to your friends.”

Obi-Wan does, and then follows Qui-Gon up to bed.

Morning comes. The two-mile trek is made, this time followed by uninvited persons.

Nala knows a sucker when she sees one. Obi-Wan gave her half of his breakfast.

Qui-Gon releases yesterday’s snake into a sunny patch of grass and tells Obi-Wan to keep his animal-whispering to a minimum. What is okay for the Temple is not okay for a place that once tried to kill certain younglings. Qui-Gon would rather not have to deal with ‘superstitious fucks’ coming out of the woodwork while he’s trying to thatch a house.

He gives Obi-Wan new instructions for the day.

He’s going to learn how to build a stone wall.

It is two days (and one unshakable sheep that has somehow turned into two) before the locals return to see the walls of the cottage raised enough to be recognizable. They watch. Qui-Gon builds. Master Dooku comms in to interrogate him and Obi-Wan as to the details of their most recent endeavors. He has several suggestions. Qui-Gon does not recall soliciting them. He eventually distracts the old man by sending him off to ask Master Nu for a book on farming saturated soil.

Blissful silence is achieved for a short time.

“Why does Master Dooku call you so much?” Obi-Wan asks.

“Because I am old and forgetful,” Qui-Gon says.

“You’re not nearly as old and forgetful as him.”

“Don’t flatter me, padawan.”

“It’s like he’s your master.”

“He is my master.”

The shock. The awe. Qui-Gon must have forgotten to mention this at some point.

“I get it now,” Obi-Wan says.

It does explain a lot of things, Qui-Gon must admit.

Qui-Gon must have passed some test because the next morning, Lak-Lan Kenobi, a younger man who looks exactly like him in the eyes, and several other men are already waiting for he and Obi-Wan at the cottage when they arrive. Obi-Wan rushes to meet Lak-Lan and is swept right up off his feet.

Lak-Lan greets him in Stewjoni and Obi-Wan repeats the best he can hear of the greeting back. Qui-Gon sets down their packed lunch and nods at the other men.

They nod in return.

It certainly feels like there was a midnight town hall meeting that he was not invited to. Maybe he should spend more time at the pub.

He ties up his hair.

The young man with Lak-Lan is his younger brother. He is nineteen years old, and his name is Ah’O-ley. He offers Qui-Gon his hand, which proves to be a piece of bark in disguise. Where his brother’s complexion is a healthy pink, Ah’O-ley is a man made up of freckles. His eyes are grey like his brothers and formed exactly in the same shape. The bow of his upper lip, which his brother does not have, however, gives him away as a relative of Obi-Wan.

Not that Obi-Wan even notices him.

He makes friends with one person at a time, but never is he without a buddy, this one. He can make friends wherever he goes, and his friend of the day is Lak-Lan and Lak-Lan only.

Ah’O-ley is devastated. Pleading-eyed, wobbly-lipped devastated at Lak-Lan once he has released Obi-Wan to go look at the lumber that has been delivered from a yard up north that still sells the same variety that the original beams in the cottage were made from.

Ah’O-ley asks Qui-Gon if there is some trick to befriending the small man among them.

“He likes animals,” Qui-Gon tells him. “If you go fishing with him, he may warm up to you.”

Ah’O-ley grimaces at the idea of fishing in the frigid river.

“That’s good of him,” he says, and his accent must be two times as thick as Lak-Lan’s.

“The other option is to help him use a plow,” Qui-Gon says.

The young man volunteers with massive enthusiasm to take up this challenge. Qui-Gon defers to the older brother, and Lak-Lan reluctantly agrees, but not before telling Ah’O-ley to mind himself, to behave, be careful, go slow, and not to say anything stupid or pressuring.

Ah’O-ley hears either none of this or all of it; he’s off the direction that Obi-Wan went with haste. Qui-Gon surveys his hurry with coolness. He shifts his gaze to Lak-Lan.

“Mum said that we ought to go slow,” Lak-Lan says. “She’s furious with you.”

That’s fair.

“She wants to know if you’ve got a man or a lady back home to receive your coffin.”

“The jedi burn their dead,” Qui-Gon says.

A hush falls over the workers.  

Qui-Gon lays the first stone of the day.

The walls of the cottage go up quick enough that there is time afterwards to examine the lumber. The master mason declares it terrible wood. His friend says it’s not so bad. The friend’s son says it’s nice wood—why’s everybody got to complain about every little thing?

Qui-Gon takes this to mean that it’s so-so. It’ll do. But there are other issues at hand. He knows how to thatch a roof, but he doesn’t know where or what to use to start making the thatch. He is told about places where locals source various materials to serve the purpose. There are a number of reeds and brambles and vines out that way which are deemed appropriate enough for the job.

The kicker is that Qui-Gon is going to need a vehicle to get all of that thatch from the lowlands back here in the hills.

Qui-Gon asks then where he might locate a cart.

He’s told that the men will ask around. Someone somewhere in town surely isn’t using their’s every day. He is much obliged and asked what happens when children are taken away to be jedi. Is there some ritual?

“Not especially,” Qui-Gon says. “Usually, we bring them to our medical staff and try to scrounge up their documents if they are not given with them. After that, they go to the crèche where jedi and apprentices specializing in childcare make sure they develop as they ought to.”

There is a long, drawn-out pause.

“So there’s no ritual?” one of the guys asks, clearly disappointed.

“The only ritual is trying to avoid them when they learn how to walk,” Qui-Gon says. “Force-sensitive children always remember their jedi-finders, and no door is strong enough to withstand their power. The youngling I found, I would have to give back to his masters twice a day, so insistent was he in tracking me down when I was home.”

Lak-Lan chews on this for a while.

“Do you know if O’Ben was like that?” he asks.

“I’m afraid that I did not meet Obi-Wan until he was well beyond babyhood.”

“Right.”

Qui-Gon wishes he had more to tell these people, but the Order is not nearly as mysterious as people wish and dread it to be.

He clears his throat.

“His finder—if you remember her—is a friend of mine. I could ask her if you are interested?”

Lak-Lan’s head comes right up from its disappointment.

“Master Ti?” he asks hesitantly.

“The one and only,” Qui-Gon says. “If she is available, I will contact her.”

Ah’O-ley has helped Obi-Wan ruin a field by the time the old people come upon them. Obi-Wan is standing in the wet dirt looking more skeptical than Qui-Gon has ever seen him. His lips are pinched into a deep frown that his brow is furrowed to match.

Ah’O-ley promises them all that it’s the plow that’s faulty. Not their method.

Obi-Wan glares at him.

It is heartening to see them establishing such a brotherly rapport so early in their acquaintance. Lak-Lan clutches at his face. Ah’O-ley tells him to mind his own damn business. They’re making it work.

While the brothers are arguing, Obi-Wan turns his irritable attention onto Qui-Gon, asking him silently why he sent this man who does not know how to plow a field to him. He did nothing to deserve this incompetence. He learned how to plow years ago in the Temple gardens. This plow is fine, it’s just old fashioned and if Ah’O-ley hadn’t showed up, Obi-Wan and his sheep friends could have managed it perfectly well on their own.

Qui-Gon does notice that there are now three sheep friends.

He tips his head in question at his padawan and receives small gestures which convey that this other one arrived on its own accord. But more importantly, Master, focus on the plow.

Qui-Gon dutifully turns his attention to the plow once more and finds the Kenobi brothers now arguing vociferously about the tool. It appears that between them, Lak-Lan does most of the plowing at home, and this is exactly why.

“I think we’ve done enough for the day, don’t you?” Qui-Gon asks Obi-Wan.

“No,” Obi-Wan says. “We still have to build a stable.”

A stable means that they are keeping the sheep.

A stable means that there may be more than just sheep in the future.

They are only supposed to be on this assignment for six months. There has been nothing in the contract pertaining to maintaining livestock. A vegetable garden, yes. That is something that the tourists from the large Stewjoni cities like to come and see. Pigs? Horses? Sheep?

No one pays to come see sheep, surely. Not in these parts.

And yet Obi-Wan persists. He wheedles a promise out of Qui-Gon that if there is any scrap wood left over from the beams and the thatching, it will go towards a stable. Qui-Gon is sure that there will be so little left over that the only stable constructed from them will be fit for a mouse.

Regardless, it is a harmless promise, so he makes it and Obi-Wan is cheered. He transforms from a stone apprentice into a human one again and scampers over to settle in at Qui-Gon’s right side in his customary place.

Ah’O-ley watches him fall into line and frowns a bit.

“Aren’t you cold, O’Ben?” he asks.

Qui-Gon feels Obi-Wan’s reaction more than he sees it. He suddenly has company inside his cloak.

This is interesting because Ah’O-ley is younger than Lak-Lan; he is in the same range as many senior padawans and Obi-Wan has had fewer troubles adjusting to the presence of senior padawans than he has with knights and masters.

Lak-Lan does not fail to notice the disappearing act; he seizes the opportunity to hiss more threats at his brother; these ones for failing to heed his early word and for scaring the little one. Qui-Gon chooses not to listen in on their arguing this time. He places a hand on Obi-Wan’s head and earns a glance upwards.

“Nervous?” Qui-Gon asks him softly.

Obi-Wan shakes his head.

“Later?”

Now a nod.

Okay, they will talk back at the inn.

“He looks like someone I know.”

Qui-Gon wrings his overtunic out in the water sink in the small refresher and hums in acknowledgement.

“What sort of someone?” he asks. “From home?”

“I dunno,” Obi-Wan huffs. “Maybe from Melida/Daan?”

He was three years old when he came to the Temple. It would be unlikely that he’d remember his siblings from before that time. Qui-Gon suspects that he’s thinking about how Ah’O-ley’s lips resemble his own without knowing that he’s thinking about his own face.

“Is he alright?” Qui-Gon asks.

“No.”

“No?”

“Big.”

Ah, yes. Ah’O-ley is certainly more muscled than his older brother, and his older brother is not what one might call ‘stringy.’

“You’ve fought plenty of people two, three, even four times your size,” Qui-Gon points out. “A few Hutts, if I recall.”

Obi-Wan kicks his socked feet against the mattress and goes flat. His outer tunic is soaking in the tub at the moment. Qui-Gon isn’t sure either of them will be clean or dry enough to wear by tomorrow. They may have to locate additional clothing. Civilian wear.

It should be fun.

“Master?”

“Yes?”

“I want to go home.”

It stings Qui-Gon’s heart. Obi-Wan’s thin shoulders are sinking towards the mattress.

“I know,” he says. “I do, too.”

“Who’s watering the plants?”

“Hopefully, Tahl.”

“Bant’ll over-water them because she’s pissed at me.”

“That’s alright, you can tell her that you’ve replaced her with sheep.”

Obi-Wan shoves himself up onto his elbows and wrinkles his brow at the quilt. It smooths out for a moment, then furrows again in a different sort of way that has Qui-Gon setting the washing aside and coming over to sit on the edge of the bed as well.

“Don’t you want to meet your family?” he asks.

Obi-Wan blinks angrily and shakes his head.

“Did you meet yours?” he asks.

Yes. No. Sort of.

“I saw them,” Qui-Gon says. “When I was a little older than you, I went to see them. They live on Level 2312,” he explains.

Obi-Wan’s head turns his way. He wipes at his face.

“That’s low,” he says.

“It is low,” Qui-Gon agrees. “They never noticed me watching them. I stole their location from my file on Master Dooku’s pad.”

Obi-Wan tsks at him in good humor.

“What were they like?” he asks. “Did they remember you?”

“I never spoke to them,” Qui-Gon tells him. “I was too fearful that someone would notice a jedi where they shouldn’t be. I listened to them. It’s how I learned to talk like this.”

“Your accent,” Obi-Wan says.

“Yours is coming out a little,” Qui-Gon tells him.

Obi-Wan swipes at the finger threatening to bop his nose.

“I can’t understand them,” he says. “Ah’O-ley sounds like mush.”

“A goal for you, then.”

“I’ll learn to talk like them, then go home?”

A pang of painful sympathy does laps through Qui-Gon’s jaw.

“We haven’t been here a month yet, padawan,” he says.

Obi-Wan lowers his face again. He lets his left elbow fold and lays his temple on it, studying the wall opposite of Qui-Gon. Qui-Gon shifts and lays back until his hair is nearly brushing Obi-Wan’s.

“When the cottage is done, if you still want to go home, we will tell the Council that you want to,” he says at the ceiling. “But you have to promise me that you will try some Stewjoni things. They will want to see that you’ve tried to participate in the culture, O’Ben.”

“I don’t want to.”

Obi-Wan’s stubbornness might have been corrected by a different master. A better master. But Qui-Gon has already expended his reserve of cruelty.

“I made you a promise,” he says. “Will you make me one?”

A non-commital grunt answers him.

“O’Ben.”

“Okay.”

“Good, lad. Let’s try tomorrow. We need clothes. I wonder if Ah’O-ley has any left over from the time when he was a sapling.”

Obi-Wan doesn’t lift his head. Qui-Gon reaches across himself to ruffle his ever-longer hair. In a few weeks, it will be long enough to resemble his brothers. Maybe then he’ll start working out who they really are.

Chapter Text

In the morning, there is frost on the beams and four goddamn sheep in the makeshift shelter Qui-Gon put up last night. Obi-Wan is tired and cold without his overtunic and waterlogged cloak. He shivers and presses the backs of his fingers against his neck. The tip of his nose and the lower halves of his cheeks have begun to gain color.

Qui-Gon is not exceedingly warm himself. They cover the beams more securely with the tarps they arrived with and head back to town.

Coan-Cannoch is not large. A few hundred people live in the town itself; a few hundred more are scattered across the nearby hillsides. There is however, a main-street in town a little ways from the inn. The pub is along there and a few storefronts down from a blacksmith, there is a general store.

Qui-Gon counts out the allotted credits. They don’t have enough to buy new, but that’s not a problem.

The shopkeeper hears him out when they arrive and shows them a small collection of boots, gloves, and socks. Most of the clothing he stocks is the mass-manufactured basics just as easily found in a Coruscant market. They aren’t warm and they aren’t outerwear. The majority of people in this more rural part of Stewjon make their own clothes.

That is no big issue; Jedi, too, can make their clothes. Really, they need some fabric, a needle, and thread.

“That’ll be at the Kenobis’,” the shopkeeper says.

Obi-Wan’s shivering halts.

“They’re weavers,” the shopkeeper says. “Very fine wools. Excellent sheep. They make some ready-mades, too.”

“Could you point us in their direction?” Qui-Gon asks.

“You’re at the priest cottage, yeah?”

“Yes.”

“Keep going north about four miles. You’ll see them. Their land starts at the edge of the wood.”

“Thank you,” Qui-Gon says. “Shall we?”

Obi-Wan’s pace slows by a quarter every mile, until the very last one where Qui-Gon finds himself standing in the middle of a gravel trail with his padawan shaking his head violently at every suggestion to move forward.

Qui-Gon sighs.

He knows what this feels like, to be so close yet so far. So close to the site of the very first rejection.

Unwanted.

Given away.

Worthless here.

Obi-Wan begins to gasp somewhat raggedly out of frustration. He’s working himself up into a panic attack. Maybe even a seizure. Qui-Gon doesn’t want to chance fate out here in the middle of the road.

“Come,” he says, crouching down and turning around.

Obi-Wan loathes being carried; the idea of someone wresting control over his body from him is one of his triggers. But he’s struggling to take this step by himself, and it is the master’s job to know when the challenge is too great for the padawan’s current ability to work through it.

Obi-Wan has lost weight on Melida/Daan; too much. Too fast. He should be heavier; he should make Qui-Gon’s back groan. But instead, Qui-Gon stands without much strain and bounces Obi-Wan up a little higher so that he can hook his arms more comfortably under his apprentice’s knees.

“Alright,” he says, “Warm enough?”

Obi-Wan buries his face into the hair in front of him so that Qui-Gon can’t see the few tears that have come loose in the shifting.

“Onwards we go, then,” Qui-Gon says.

The Kenobi Clan’s homestead is built of stone. It is two-storied and has a hard, shingled roof instead of a thatch one. There are multiple buildings visible coming upon it from the road. Each story has two large windows sectioned out into nine glass panels, in front of each is a window box with stubby greenery peeking out of it.

It isn’t a glamorous home; there is paint chipping on the door, several home-made windchimes hanging around the entrance and every window is full of a different color of curtain. Laundry lines run the span of the front yard, and huge barrels sit in lines upon lines at the side of the house where even more laundry lines run the opposite way of their front-garden brethren.

The Kenobis are weavers, Qui-Gon reminds himself. They need space to dry their dyed fibers.

There is a shed several yards from the house built of wood and a stone cottage-style structure with a thick two-tiered door. A cat sits in the corner of the half-open top one in the secure nook where the door meets the frame. The cat watches Qui-Gon coming up the road with giant round yellow eyes.

It leaps into the stable as he makes his way up to the bright red front step of the dwelling. It has been so carefully swept that he isn’t sure that he’s meant to step on it. Still, there is a door a little ways away with a hand-painted ‘open’ sign on it.

“What do you think?” he asks his apprentice.

Obi-Wan shifts and chances a peek.

“Look familiar?” Qui-Gon asks.

He feels the head shake against his neck and adjusts Obi-Wan’s ever-stiffer weight to tug open the door handle and shove a boot into the gap before it closes.

The shop itself is filled with stacks upon stacks of carefully rolled fabrics. They’re all stowed behind a long, wide table with a measuring stick built into the wood itself. On the other side of the shop, closer to the windows, are show racks upon which several well-tailored suits are arranged. Many  would not be out of place on the senate floor and beside them are ones with waterfalls of pleats which Qui-Gon understands to be examples of traditional Stewjoni dress.

He carefully stoops and lets Obi-Wan slip off his back to the floor. Obi-Wan stares at the suits with a quizzical twist to his lips.

There is a muffled sound through the ceiling overhead followed by the creak of a door opening. It closes sharply and a torrent of quick footsteps brings a man down a staircase behind the cutting table.

The man is tall—only a few inches shorter than Qui-Gon himself—with blue-grey eyes and muddy brown-blond hair. His lips are hidden by a thick mustache and beard of the same color. He walks forward to greet them while tying on a leather apron with the air of a war-weathered tailor.

“My apologies, sir,” the man says with a strong accent. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

He stops.

“No, no. It is our fault,” Qui-Gon says. “A man in town told us that we might find some clothing here available for purchase?” 

The family’s patriarch isn’t looking at him.

There’s a boy standing in his shop with cheeks and eyebrows shaped exactly like his own. With a little mole on his forehead and a smattering of others down his cheek and neck that a father would know anywhere, but especially on a toddler with a hatchet wound in the side of their head.

“Obi-Wan,” the patriarch whispers.

Obi-Wan doesn’t react.

“Obi-Wan?” the patriarch tries again.

Finally, the boy snaps out of his reverie.

“Da?” he asks in the tiniest voice Qui-Gon has ever heard from him.

“Oh my god. Oh my god.”

If this weaver were a jedi, he would have leapt over his own table. Alas, he is not a jedi; he is merely a man. Still, he rushes through a short gate at the side of the table and drops to his knees in front of his son.

“Obi-Wan,” he breathes, holding long fingers around Obi-Wan’s cheeks as though he thinks touching them will shatter the illusion. Obi-Wan blinks at him a few times before taking one of the hands and touching it to left side of his head.

There is a scar there that his hair grows around. Qui-Gon found it the first time he shaved Obi-Wan’s scalp. It’s a few inches long, and this father knows it as well as his finger know thread.

“O’Ben. O’Ben. My son. My baby. Come here. You’re alive.”

Obi-Wan doesn’t have much choice in the matter. His father is not barrel-chested like his older boys, but he is strong from years of carrying sheep and heavy, wet wool.

He sweeps Obi-Wan right off his feet into his arms and swings him around in a tight circle. The circle finishes with Obi-Wan settled against his shoulder, an arm supporting him from underneath and the other clutching him as close as humanly possible. Obi-Wan makes a little huffing sound against his neck and tries to get closer, too.

“Da,” he whimpers.

“SO-FEYA,” the patriarch shouts at the stairs. “It’s alrigh’ little one, I’ve got you—SOFI.”

The stairs erupt into thunder.

It isn’t just the mother, it is Lak-Lan and Ah’O-Ley and, at their heels, a sister with a crown of braids. The room becomes smaller with each person’s entry and every one of their shock and celebration at the arrival.

Qui-Gon slips outside the door with the bell.

The cat is back on the tiered door. This time, she doesn’t run when Qui-Gon draws near after inspecting the barrels of dyes, the barn for sheep, and a room around the corner of the house that is open to the elements and contains multitudes of newly spun yarn enduring a thorough bleaching.

The cat sniffs his hand as he offers it to her and rubs her soft head against it.

“Do you run this place?” he asks her.

She bites softly at his hand when he starts to retract it.

“They must be good people,” Qui-Gon says. “So good that you keep an eye on them and the...horse? Cow.”

The cat begins an assent from the door to his shoulder. He keeps up the scratching. A lady must have her chin varnished.

“You’ll watch over him for me, then?” he asks her.

It is not against the jedi code to experience loss or grief. It is against the code to let those feelings take over one’s mind and to guide one’s actions.

The Council is right.

Obi-Wan belongs here with his family. He is so loved; he is so wanted.

He will be safe now. He has enough training to control his force behaviors, to sense danger when it is coming, and to defend himself should it overtake him. Qui-Gon only regrets having failed to teach him more. They were only together for such a short time. Enough for tragedy, not enough for much more than that.

One day, maybe, he will come back and say hello to the Weaver Obi-Wan Kenobi. One day, they’ll talk about Bandomeer and Melida/Daan, and Qui-Gon will apologize for being the cause of decades of future nightmares and clawed hands.

One day, he will finish the priest’s cottage. The sooner it happens, the sooner they all can go back to the places where they most belong.

“What am I going to do with the sheep?” he asks the cat.

“Master Jedi? Master Quinn?”

“It’s Jinn,” Qui-Gon says to the cat so that she can tuck it away in her memory.

“Master.”

He tips his head back and finds himself looking at the patriarch. He follows the man’s arm down to find Obi-Wan’s clear eyes staring back up at him. He’s allowing this man to touch his shoulder. Qui-Gon raises an eyebrow. He turns his brow upon the patriarch.

The patriarch clears his throat and says a little desperately. “We were wondering if it might be acceptable if we hang onto the boy for a bit?”

It is more than acceptable. That is the entire point of this adventure.

“He is so dear to us, Master Jedi.”

Yes, Qui-Gon knows the feeling.

“Not so frightening after all?” he asks Obi-Wan.

Obi-Wan flattens himself to his father’s side the way he does to Qui-Gon anytime a threat pops unexpectedly into existence (including but not limited to: crickets, venomous worms, alarms, and grenades). Qui-Gon understands better now the confusion the Lak-Lan expressed when he denied being the boy’s surrogate parent.

“What do you think, O’Ben, do you want to start learning your family’s trade?” Qui-Gon asks.

Obi-Wan watches him. He’s reaching hesitant tendrils into the Force, prodding at Qui-Gon’s own signature, hunting for disappointment, disproval, condemnation. Qui-Gon waits until he realizes that there is no judgement to find.

The sudden scowl that takes over Obi-Wan’s face is proof of his accomplishment in this area.

“You made me promise,” he says.

Qui-Gon holds up his hands in the face of such accusations.

“I did,” he says.

“I’m holding up my end. You’ve got to hold up yours. It’s only a test run. You’re still my master.”

“Yes, yes. I hear you.”

“Da says he’ll help with the testing.”

“Da is very wise. Thank you, sir, for your patience. And your name was?”

“Master, I’m talking to you.”

“And you’re doing it so well, young one.”

Obi-Wan begins to puff up as an incensed bird does and is only stopped in that motion by the laugh of his father.

“Hami-Son,” the father says, holding out a hand. “Hami-Son Kenobi. I’ve heard the troubles you and O’Ben have gone through, through my other sons. I must warn you that my wife has been ready to drown you all week.”

This is nothing new; Qui-Gon has been infuriating decent mothers for two and half decades now.

“I am told I have that effect on people,” he says.

“Not a lot of—” Hami-Son gestures at his face in a circle. Qui-Gon chooses to remain obtuse about the suggestion there. He waits through the awkward silence.

“Right,” Hami-Son finally says. “You’re working on the old priest’s cottage?”

“It is a restoration project that has been negotiated between the Historical Society and our Archival Unit,” Qui-Gon says.

“For how long?” Hami-Son asks. “Will you be here through the winter?”

Qui-Gon despairs that the current weather is these people’s autumn. He can only imagine how cold it gets in winter.

“The assignment is for six months; the request involves a cycle of crops,” he explains. “An interest in horticulture earmarked me for the assignment.”

“Master grows plants,” Obi-Wan tells Hami-Son.

“Does he now?” Hami-Son asks him.

“They bite.”

“They what?”

“I am happy to negotiate an agreement with you such that Obi-Wan’s training in the Force continues until he makes his decision as to whether to carry on with his association with the Jedi Order or to remain here with you, his family. The end of spring is when a decision will be requested. Is this satisfactory to you?” Qui-Gon asks.

“How can plants bite?” Hami-Son asks him.

“How can you?” Qui-Gon asks back.

This poor man doesn’t understand the question. Qui-Gon clears his throat.

“Is that a yes or a no on the negotiation issue?” he asks.

“What is the alternative?” Hami-Son asks.

“That we both fake our deaths, and I open a bar and raise him as a sport fighter on Corellia.”

Obi-Wan brightens at the suggestion. Hami-Son holds a protective arm in front of him.

“The negotiation is acceptable to me,” he says. “My wife may beg to differ, however. If you have the time, please do come inside. It’s not on to do this sort of work in front of the cat.”

Oh?

Qui-Gon asks her if this is true through the Force. She begins to clean a paw.

Obi-Wan’s Mother, So-Feya (Sofi for short), has thoughts and feelings about Qui-Gon that her daughter keeps interrupting before they come to fruition. The daughter, Ah-Dair Kenobi is marvelous. If the universe was just, she would be force-sensitive alongside her brother. There is not a move of her parents’ and siblings’ that she cannot anticipate and manage with a threatening curl of her lip or the sudden memory of a task needing doing.

So-Feya Kenobi snips at her to stop her nitpicking. She holds a shirt up to Obi-Wan’s back and asks him what illicit deals he’s made with the lake-fairies to make himself so scrappy. Obi-Wan mumbles that he’s only seen a river and its not very deep.

The thought of her youngest throwing himself into the water at this time of year sends the woman into paroxysms that her husband mitigates by reminding her of the task at hand, which she informs him that she is more than aware of.

It is fascinating to see the source of Obi-Wan’s perpetual restlessness in action.  

“Here’s your deal,” So-Feya tells Qui-Gon, back to the subject at hand, “I give you my boy for ten years and you bring him back filthy, skinny, covered in chilblains—”

“Darling—” Hami-Son tries.

“—and in return, I tie that hair of yours into a rope and hang you with it myself—”

“Sofi.”

Qui-Gon delights in the idea of this plump lady, who cannot be more than four or five inches taller than Obi-Wan, trying to haul the entirely of his body up onto the dwelling’s roof to drop him from it. In his mind’s eye, it is like an owl trying to wrangle a particularly lengthy frog into its nest in a tree hole.

“This is too small. This is too small. This is too large. Did we never have boys, Ham? Did we never have boys? Only babes and then men?”

And she’s already off once again, shaking the hand-me-downs at her husband like it is his fault that the world is happening to her all at once.

“Perhaps one of Ah-Dair’s—”

“The boys in town will laugh at him. How is he to make friends?”

“Dear, I don’t think they’ll notice.”

“You. What are your measurements? A tall bastard like you. You must be miles long.”

“What do you say of four days per week, and I will manage the other three?” Qui-Gon offers her.

“Three days? Three days of working out at that cottage? He’ll freeze.”

“Mum,” Lak-Lan sighs. “He’s already working with the others. He knows how to plow better than Ah’O-ley. Any less work and his hands’ll be as idle as the MacUll boys’.”

“Idle, children’s hands should be,” So-Feya snaps at him. “Has O’Ben not suffered enough? Has he not earned his idleness?”

Obi-Wan pleads with Qui-Gon silently to tell this woman that he has, in fact, not earned idleness, that idleness is the bane of his existence, and surely the cause of his future demise.

“Yes, I understand. I’ll keep him for the four and you’ll have him for the three,” Qui-Gon says.

Outrage.

Anxiety.

He is a terrible, cruel, godawful master with no wit or humor about him.

How dare he come into this house, half-freeze So-Feya’s children, and then demand more than half a week’s time with the boy she trusted that wonderful, helpful Togruta with all those years ago. Speaking of which, why is Qui-Gon here instead of the Togruta?

“Master Ti is not able to take a padawan on at this time,” Qui-Gon says. “She is preoccupied with other matters and duties as a member of the jedi Council.”

“And you aren’t?” So-Feya asks.

“Sofi,” her husband sighs.

“Did you get thrown off it?”

“I have refused a position,” Qui-Gon says.

“What, you are too good to guide your own people?”

Obi-Wan’s stress is climbing into his face. His sister, with supernatural timing, pulls a thick brown jacket out from the bottom of the box of hand-me-downs.

“Aha!” she cries.

Her mother gasps and clutches at her chest and immediately falls into admonishing the girl for causing such a fright.

“Come here, you,” Ah-Dair tells Obi-Wan.

She flattens the material against his back and nods sagely. This is the one. She coaxes Obi-Wan into opening his knot of a posture into something that she can slip the coat onto. It has a high collar that blooms into a hood; a zipper has been fitted down the front of the jacket, which it leads down the center of the garment to two pockets embellished with delicate white knot designs.

“Do a turn,” Ah-Dair instructs her brother.

He doesn’t understand.

She stands up and flutters a hand until he takes it. She then lifts his arm to lead him into a twirl in place. The jacket is nearly the same color as his and Qui-Gon’s cloaks; it is knit on the outside and lined with a soft wool, which is aged, but still entirely serviceable.

“He wears it better than Ah’O-ley ever did,” Ah-Dair says fondly.

Obi-Wan stares up at her with rapidly growing awe. She will almost certainly outpace Lak-Lan in the favored sibling category in a few days time.

Speaking of which.

“Five days, then,” Qui-Gon says.

“THIS MAN,” So-Feya roars. “Ham, do something about him.”

“Five at the start,” Hami-Son says. “So that O’Ben is not subjected to the chaos of this household before he’s ready for it. The days can increase afterwards.”

This is a deal. Qui-Gon thanks them and stands up.

“Where do you think you’re going?” So-Feya flings at him.

The Kenobis are generous people, who apparently have a compulsion to clothe and feed anyone who crosses their threshold.

Obi-Wan leaves with his new coat and a pair of trousers in a green color. Qui-Gon’s measurements are taken, and he is threatened to return in two-days time to pick up a work-jacket suitable for the ‘nonsense’ he’s inflicting upon the priest’s cottage.

‘Outdoors work,’ the rest of the family translate for their matriarch.

Hami-Son walks Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon to the road with apologies for his wife’s enthusiasm rolling off his tongue. They are filled with affection. He is a soft-spoken man; mild-mannered, and gentle with his clients and children. Qui-Gon is charmed at the dynamics between him and his fiery wife. He says so and the man flushes up his face just as Obi-Wan does.

Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan bid him farewell and take up the walk back down the road.

“Lak-Lan is my brother.”

“Yes, he is.”

“Ah’O-ley is, too.”

“Are you pleased?”

“No,” Obi-Wan says. “He gets in the way. Ah-Dair is my sister. I think I remember her a little. Do you have siblings, Master?”

“I have six.”

“Six?”

“I met two when I was young and sneaking out. Couldn’t understand a word they were saying.”

Obi-Wan closes his mouth and gazes at the cottage as it comes into sight.

“That’s too many,” he says. “Do I have to stay with them?”

“You’re trying, remember?”

“Can we keep it to five days?”

“O’Ben.”

“They’re nice,” Obi-Wan says. “But they’re weird. Mum is loud.”

“And you are every bit her son,” Qui-Gon says.

Obi-Wan huffs. He cannot deny it, so he pouts as hard as he can instead.

“You’ll need to try to talk to them, yes?” Qui-Gon says gently.

He doesn’t look down, but he can tell that Obi-Wan is chewing his lip.

“It’s hard,” he says.

“You are very brave,” Qui-Gon reminds him.

“I wasn’t earlier. You had to help.”

“That is what a master does,” Qui-Gon says.

They walk in silence. Obi-Wan tucks his hands in his new pockets. The sky is nearly clear of clouds now; even the occasional rolling puffballs seem to have been blown away.

“We need thatch,” Obi-Wan says.

“We do indeed.”

“But first we need a cart.”

“Yes, this has been the tricky part.”

“What do we do until we get a cart?”

“Well,” Qui-Gon says thoughtfully, “I suppose we best plow the field.”

“Without Ah’Ol-ley,” Obi-Wan says urgently.

“We best plow the field quickly,” Qui-Gon says.

Chapter Text

The plow is not quite the same kind of that Qui-Gon’s body remembers from his last stint doing manual labor. A few false starts help he and Obi-Wan realize that, while it is possible to do all this through their own manpower, if they must locate a horse if they hope to get all of this done before Ah’O-ley arrives to ‘support’ the endeavor later on in the week.

Two tall horses with enormous hooves are acquired. Fraya demands that they be feed and treated with the utmost benevolence upon their return. Obi-Wan insists that he’ll take care of it.

Ody and Toby are hitched to the plow and do magnificent work. The cottage’s land is not large and the gardens need not be as extensive as a true farmer’s does. The work is completed just after nightfall and the horses returned to their stable. They must be fed. They must be brushed. They must receive high praises and be sung to in Obi-Wan’s warbling tenor.

Qui-Gon leaves him to acquire warm food for humans and comes back to find him perched on the back of one of them, speaking to it while brushing its mane.

There is no sign of any climbable objects to have helped him get up there.

The next few weeks are not especially interesting in jedi-terms. Qui-Gon works on the thatch issue, Obi-Wan chases the sheep away from the garden and tries to plant some seeds, only to have to rush over to chase the sheep away from the garden once more.

There are ten sheep now. No one has come to claim them. Qui-Gon has been forced to build them a stable. Master Dooku, the greatest artist of pig-pens that the Order can offer, instructs him how to do so through a hololink. They argue for hours.

Anytime Obi-Wan passes through, chasing the sheep, Master Dooku starts talking about how Qui-Gon needs to find a damned dog to take over half the boy’s current work.

Qui-Gon reminds him that he is not trying to add animals to this situation. He’s only here for another five months.

Master Dooku tells him to find the estate a dog, then. And a cow. Every good cottage has a cow.

This man refuses to put an end to his nagging, and if Qui-Gon did not need him for technical information, he would have hung up and burned the pad at dawn.

Alas.

To everyone’s disappointment, the sheep get their stable and Qui-Gon is gifted a cow.

He did not ask for this creature much as he did not ask for the ever-multiplying sheep. Fraya tells him that she didn’t ask to give it to him either. Someone just left it in a field. She’s sick, the cow is, when the rope wound around her head is thrust into Qui-Gon’s hands. Obi-Wan agonizes over her being sick for two full days until Qui-Gon gives in to his better nature and researches bovine gastrointestinal distress.

He spends money that they do not have on a livestock veterinarian’s good will and willingness to come down from Nelwin on a train while carting with him no fewer than seventeen observing students from his college.

They do unspeakable things to the cow and set her to rights.

They also take a look around the grounds and, while they’re in the area, set a few other livestock back into their proper order, order a great deal of sandwiches with mugs of mixed caf and tea from the pub, stay a night in the upper rooms of Fraya and Mor-Ag’s inn and are off in the morning just as cheerful as the day is long.

Mor-Ag asks Qui-Gon if this is how a tourist industry works.

He gives her as many links to as many books on the subject as he can find and returns to the fields to find that the damned sheep are sticking their heads into the garden to eat the new seedlings once again. It has been Obi-Wan’s assignment to keep them from doing this, and yet no matter which way Qui-Gon swing his hair around, he can’t find the boy.

This is because Obi-Wan’s sweater blends into the rock wall. Qui-Gon needs spectacles, clearly. He finally spies his apprentice only a few yards down the road at the edge of the stone-wall talking to two other boys. All they can see of each other over the top of the wall are their heads.

One of them reaches over the wall to show Obi-Wan what looks to be a shining card of some sort. The other holds out a foil packet to him, about the same size as the card.

Qui-Gon decides to forgive him in this instance of shirking; friends are good for growing boys.

So are dogs.

Obi-Wan insists that he can manage the sheep. They have talked about this many times and Qui-Gon has failed to make him understand that one cannot use the force to convince livestock to do as one pleases. That is the thing about livestock: they are impervious to most sense and almost all forms of magic.

The apprentice will not hear of it.

He chases the sheep for two full days before he’s exhausted enough to admit that he could perhaps use a commander in his crusade. But he doesn’t want a dog.

He wants a cat.

Qui-Gon holds his face in the middle of a frost-covered cottage and breathes in sharp air to breathe out clouds of fog.

“A dog,” he says. “We’re finding a dog.”

Obi-Wan sulks. He sulks so hard that when Hami-Son comes back to pick him up for the week, he asks if the boy has taken ill.

“Yes. The mules’ disease. I’m afraid it’s terminal,” Qui-Gon says.

It takes Hami-Son a few moments to catch onto the idiom.

“He is so much like his mother in his manners, it is eerie,” he says. “Has he always been like this or is it catching?”

“As long as I have known him,” Qui-Gon says. “He has started talking to you?”

“Yes,” Hami-Son says.

“Good.”

“His accent is muddled.”

Having Coruscanti instructors and a Galaecian teacher will do that to a child.

“He’ll relearn it. He’s quick with languages,” Qui-Gon says. “Do you know where I can find a dog?”

Hami-Son says that he does, actually.

The beast that is delivered to Qui-Gon’s honest, hardworking attention looks like the pile of mop-heads left to accumulate in the Temple’s laundry room before the big wash at the end of the week. She has mats of fur all over her and three colors of the stuff that are all competing to be the same spot on her coat.

Her name is Nessie, short for Vaneta; she’s three years old and has been described by all who know her as ‘reactive.’ Qui-Gon has to have a talk with himself about attachment after she’s been washed, dried, combed, and tended to by the enthusiastic troop of student veterinarians who’s institution has now formed an agreement with the town to host practicums.

Nessie is a very, very good girl.

Obi-Wan disagrees, largely because she is a working dog and has no time or patience for him to pet on her and cuddle her. When he sings to her, she sounds the alarm. When he wakes up—now in the fully-built cottage, much to Fraya’s disappointment—Nessie’s ever sharp gaze emerges from the sheep stable. She slinks out and assumes the position in front of it.

She and Obi-Wan square off every morning as to whether or not he’s allowed to release the flock from their holding cell.

Fall turns to winter and Qui-Gon has resolved himself to working this rocky plot of land until his final breaths. His hands have never been soft, but now when he rubs his fingers together, the ridges seem to catch on each other.

Obi-Wan lives with his family for five days of the week more regularly now. He has regressed somewhat, Hami-Son reports with concern.

For the first few weeks, the boy spoke with his eldest brother and with his sister. He hushed up around his mother and father and Ah’O-ley, the last out of irritation more than anything else, but would answer their questions and do what was asked if him when addressed. The week before last, however, Hami-Son reports that he hardly said anything to anyone at all and bungled all his work at the loom. This week, he has again fallen into silence—the most he has said has been ‘thank you.’

This is the secondary of Hami-Son’s concerns. The one of the greatest importance at the moment pertains to food.

Qui-Gon ceases his wood-cutting to listen.

Hami-Son clears his throat and explains that while Obi-Wan has never outright asked for food, recently he has been taking a bite or two of the meal set in front of him and then looking off at some corner of the room or another until prodded to have another spoonful.

Qui-Gon asks if he is having seizures. Hami-Son doesn’t understand the word for some time, but confirms that no, he is not having seizures.

Seizures are the most dire cause of Obi-Wan’s refusal to eat at times, all others are manageable. It sounds to Qui-Gon like they may be working with anxiety here. He tells his compatriot to try letting Obi-Wan herd the family’s sheep. Yes, it seems senseless, but it always seems to brighten his mood around the cottage, especially if it means that he can one-up Nessie.

Hami-Son thanks him kindly and heads off.

A seed feels as though it has been planted in his wake.

Obi-Wan comes back for his two days with Qui-Gon and eats and sleeps just fine. Despite the frost and the wind, he goes through his saber forms with care and attention and, when released from them, rushes off to go greet the cow.

He comes back smelling of oats and hay.

In the warmth of the now-completed cottage walls, Qui-Gon cups his cheeks in his hands and squints. Obi-Wan grabs his thumbs and glares back.

“Where is your fat?” Qui-Gon asks him.

“Lost it,” Obi-Wan says back in the same tone.

“Your father tells me you’re not eating.”

Obi-Wan tries to squirm out of the grip. Qui-Gon allows it.

“You don’t have weight to lose,” he says.

“I’m eating. I’m fine.”

“Are you not hungry?”

“I’m okay. Look I’ll eat now.”

This reminds Qui-Gon of the bag of skin, bones, and scabies that stepped off the ship with him a few months ago now. Obi-Wan had been too hungry to eat more than one fist-sized portion of anything at a time or else he’d become sick. And after several nights of frustration of still being hungry, still being cold, always nauseous no matter what steps forwards or backwards or sideways were taken—and now all this at home where it was supposed to be safe— he’d started refusing meals.

And lying. He’d done plenty of lying.

‘Yes, Master. I had lunch in the reflectory.’ ‘I already had a snack.’ ‘I’m taking it with me to eat in my room.’

Obi-Wan’s anxiety takes a mysterious form of pretending that everything is okay. It is a trait that will serve him well as a knight, but as a child, it is his unbecoming.

“Do you miss the food at the Temple?” Qui-Gon asks him.

“Home,” Obi-Wan says.

He has noticed. Qui-Gon swallows.

“Do you miss the food at home?” he asks.

“Home.”

Here it is.

“O’Ben. Answer the question please.”

“I want to go home.”

Well, that was indeed the directive.

“I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to go home.”

Qui-Gon sighs. Tears are gathering in the rims of Obi-Wan’s eyes even as he clenches his jaw at the door of the cottage.

“I hear you are an excellent weaver already,” Qui-Gon says.

“I don’t want to WEAVE.”

“No need to shout, padawan. Come here and sit with me.”

Obi-Wan flexes his fisted hands and looks anywhere but the table that Qui-Gon’s hand sits on. The fire in the hearth throws shadows all around them. The next task on Qui-Gon’s list is installing lamps in the walls from the original era.

“Obi-Wan,” he says again.

A padawan rarely needs to be asked twice. Obi-Wan nearly trips over himself to flop into the other chair at the table. He folds his hands together in front of him and scowls at them. Qui-Gon leans a cheek on a palm.

“Homesickness is no cause for resentment. The people here have only been kind to us,” he says. “You have been in worse places for much longer.”

Sourness spreads through the unhappy curves of his apprentice’s lips. His knee begins to bounce.

The tears are back, though unfallen.

“What is it you are struggling with?” Qui-Gon asks. “Put it in words so that we might assess it.”

Obi-Wan swallows.

“Angry,” he finally says.

“Who is?”

There is a long, aggravated pause.

“I am,” Obi-Wan admits.

Qui-Gon nods.

“What is inspiring these feelings?” he asks.

“Everything.”

“This is not true. Nessie is innocent of any and all crimes.”

“You like the dog more than me.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because.”

“Because tells me nothing, padawan. Why would I prefer a dog’s company to yours?”

Obi-Wan drops his forehead onto his clenched hands in front of him.

“Because she listens,” he says, muffled by table and sleeves.

“You listen,” Qui-Gon points out.

“And she’s obedient. She doesn’t take three tellings for things to stick in her fat head.”

“Yes, she also is a dog,” Qui-Gon says, “Her directives are not complicated. Yours are infinitely so. Are your siblings annoying you?”

“No. Yes.”

“How so?”

“They treat me like a baby. They all do. Mum especially.”

“Tell me more. I don’t have a mum, remember?”

Obi-Wan glances up and drops back into his arms.

“She’s always moving around,” he says. “Ah-Dair says that she’s got a routine, and it’s easiest if we all stick to it and let her putter. But she won’t let me do anything. She says I’m too little and sick or whatever. She’s always asking if I’m going to be sick.”

“Are you sick?” Qui-Gon asks.

Obi-Wan huffs.

“’M always sick,” he says.

“Your mother worries about your seizures, O’Ben. She was the first to notice them.”

“I haven’t had one in weeks. And it’s not like doing things makes them happen. If doing things made them happen, I’d be better off in a frozen lake.”

“We can make that happen,” Qui-Gon offers.

There is a contemplative pause.

“Nah.”

“Too bad.”

“Da doesn’t talk much.”

“Does that frustrate you?”

“He talks to Lak-Lan, but not anyone else. Except you. To tell on me. I guess.”

“Does Lak-Lan talk to you?” Qui-Gon asks. “I thought you were friends?”

“He lied to me,” Obi-Wan says simply. “He knew who I was before I knew who he was, and he didn’t say anything about it when we met.”

“So you’re not talking to him?” Qui-Gon asks. “What about Ah’O-ley?”

“He laughs at my accent. And how I do things. How I do everything.”

Qui-Gon is almost positive that these are chuffs of endearment which have not been received as such.

“And Ah-Dair?”

“She can stay.”

Qui-Gon hums.

“It is a trial to have a family, isn’t it?” he asks.

Obi-Wan sighs. His shoulders slump lower and lower with every breath.

“I’m ungrateful,” he says like this is a tenant of his personality.

“Frustrated, not ungrateful,” Qui-Gon corrects. “You have been asked to find a place in a family that last knew you as a toddler; they have established dynamics that seem to be happening around you instead of with you.”

Obi-Wan taps his feet against the hearth rhythmically for a few moments before stopping himself.

“Maybe I’m spoiled,” he says. “Because I get your attention only and they all have to share each others’.”

The last thing Obi-Wan is, is spoiled. Qui-Gon knows this because he knows Xanatos. He made Xanatos.

“You aren’t spoiled, O’Ben.”

“I dunno how much to eat anymore.”

The raw tears have returned.

“I dunno how much is too much. There are all those people, and everyone needs to eat, and everyone’s watching all the time, and they don’t let me do work so how am I supposed to know?”

“Padawan, we have talked about this.”

“I know, I know. I can’t turn it off, though. And then I get like this—” he pulls at his cheeks hard enough to make Qui-Gon wince “—and everyone knows I’m screwing up. But then what? What am I supposed to do, Master?”

The simple answer is to eat. But that isn’t the root of Obi-Wan’s troubles. It is a symptom, not a cause. The boy is suffering a toxic, bubbling potion of homesickness, overstimulation, and helplessness. Out of fear for his apparent delicacy, his family has reconfigured their working routines and unknowingly ostracized Obi-Wan from them.

They hold the same perspective that has earned Qui-Gon ire in the streets and Temple since Obi-Wan’s return from war.

His apparent lack of care; his apparent failure to acknowledge the condition of the half-mute boy jogging to keep up with his stride—Qui-Gon understands that from the outside it looks callous. But if there is one thing he has learned about his apprentice in their short time together it is that Obi-Wan, more than anything less in the entire galaxy, wants to be independent and useful.

He wants to be useful so, so adamantly. If he does not feel that he is useful in a small sense, then he flounders to understand why he has been allowed to come this far in a broad sense. He has seen suffering now on a scale that the Temple children his age cannot hope to understand. He has witness first-hand death’s unpredictability and told himself a thousand stories to try to come to terms with how his life was spared but another’s taken.

Qui-Gon’s jaw aches at his padawan’s steadfast determination that the kinder of his circumstances are an accident or a misplaced privilege which may be revoked at any moment.

He seeks out punishment at times now, as if to show himself that he is right on this point. And if no one proves willing to punish him, he has no choice but to punish himself.

“O’Ben,” Qui-Gon says.

He wants to apologize for whatever he has contributed to this cycle of pain.

He wants to impress upon this boy that he does not need to work to earn his place in the galaxy or every mouthful of food he puts into his body.

He wants Obi-Wan to understand that his current struggles are not caused by his personal failings. That all that happens to him is the result of a trickle of falling dominos which cascade through decisions made and unmade. The dominos, the results, are not capable of hostility. They have no sense of morality. They simply are.

The Force is.

It is people who give such things meaning. And it is therefore up to people to determine what is right and just. But not all evaluations of ‘right and just’ are equal. Including the ones that ring throughout one’s own mind.

But what he says is, “Go fetch some more wood for the fire.”

Obi-Wan eats the stew Qui-Gon puts in front of him that night after a day of tasks. Chores. Saber studies and meditation. Anything that might occupy his mind. He climbs sleepily into bed and buries himself under the smaller of the feather-stuffed quilts. This is his quilt, which he spent many hours over the last month stitching from scraps of fabric offered by the occasional pitying visitor to the estate.

Qui-Gon sits down on the bed next to him and gathers a bit of his cheek between two fingers without pinching.

The plea needs not to be voiced.

“I’ll try,” Obi-Wan says quietly.

“Thank you.”

A hand catches Qui-Gon’s wrist before he can retract it.

“You promised,” Obi-Wan says.

“I am not leaving you unless you ask me to,” Qui-Gon tells him.

“Can we go back to four days?”

“Is it not warmer at your family’s house?”

Obi-Wan’s shadow-darkened eyes flick away. Qui-Gon takes his hand out of the grip to ruffle it through Obi-Wan’s long hair.

“I will ask your father. But he will certainly ask you about it. Be sure that you know how to explain it to the whole lot of them.”

Relief floods the Force.

“Kay.”

“Good night, padawan.”

“Good night, master.”

Chapter Text

The Kenobis are hurt. Qui-Gon left Obi-Wan at the cottage to have the conversation at their workshop so as to maintain separate and distinct spaces. So-Feya is far more subdued than she was in their first meeting. Lak-Lan stuffs his hands in his pockets and speaks with his father through eyes alone.

The younger Kenobis do the same with each other. They only halt their discourse when their father returns from a brief visit to the downstairs part of the home, where business is conducted.

He brings with him a folded piece of fabric that is a light blue with rows upon rows of orangey-pink diamonds and little white squares around each side.

“It’s in his blood,” Hami-Son says, holding the cloth out to Qui-Gon. “He is more patient than any other boy at his age. He learns so quickly.”

Qui-Gon holds up the full length of the cloth; it is perhaps a yard long. He could smile at it in other circumstances.

He knows who this piece is because these thousands of twinkling stars are what little Bant Eerin feels like in the Force. Obi-Wan is rain on water. He and Bant share the blessing of pinpricks of energy that radiate and ripple out into things greater than themselves.

“His crechemate Bant,” he starts to explain. “Is a Mon Calamari child. They grew up together and have only been separated this last year. She is gentle with everyone but Obi-Wan. They bully each other terribly the second they are in range. My own crèchemate and myself have given up on intervening. She is a mighty force in so small of a girl; Obi-Wan saved her life this last year.”

“He misses his family,” Lak-Lan says.

“The jedi do not have families,” Qui-Gon counters.

“You keep saying that,” Lak-Lan says with an edge to his voice.

“We have lineages,” Qui-Gon says, “They go from master to padawan, master to padawan. My grandmaster is the current leader of the Jedi Order.” 

He keeps himself pleasant through the Kenobis’ understandable shock.

“It is Grandmaster Yoda’s most sincere wish that O’Ben remain in our lineage,” he continues, “But he does not value O’Ben’s potential over his current happiness and long-term welfare. O’Ben, of course, finds it difficult to understand why his great-grandmaster, whose company he far prefers to my own, has agreed to send him away to a place that he doesn’t remember, to people he doesn’t know how to please.”

“He doesn’t need to please anyone,” Ah-Dair says.

“The mark of a worthy jedi knight is the ability to place the needs of the greater unit over their own,” Qui-Gon says. “Initiates selected to be trained as knights must show potential for a certain level of this sort of compassion in addition to discipline, strength, and the ability to remain calm under pressure. It is not uncommon, however, for the young ones to misconstrue a desire for harmonious relations or others’ happiness for compassion.”

“You could just say that he feels like he needs to do things for people,” Ah’O-ley points out.

“No, no. Flowery book-talk is the jedi way,” Lak-Lan says.

“If you wish for the shortened version, it is this: Obi-Wan has come to understand over the last year that if one does not work, one does not eat. He has adjusted his behavior according to the labor dynamics in this household, however, he has found that his expectations and yours do not match on this rather vital point, which is resulting in great stress for him. Now, he is trying to manage that stress by reducing overall time spent in the space where expectations are unclear. Does that help?”

Whether or not it helps is set aside in favor of communal silence. This is fine. Qui-Gon enjoys quiet-time, too.

“Master Jedi,” So-Feya says, “We can’t ask the boy to work; he’s skin and bones.”

“He works at the cottage,” Qui-Gon says with a shrug.

“Yes, but—”

“But?”

“Sir, with respect. You said yourself you are not his father. And truth be told, you do not act like it.”

Qui-Gon hums.

“I can only give you the information that I have to give,” he says. “It is up to you to make your decision. If you are amenable to having him here for four days of the week instead of five, then I have no issue with him spending another one at the cottage.”

“That’ll just confuse him,” Lak-Lan says. “To go from mostly home, to half-home, half-away. Isn’t the purpose of your time here to integrate O’Ben into his home community?”

“My mission is to restore a historic property to working order,” Qui-Gon says. “Obi-Wan’s mission is to determine if he would like to remain here or a member of the Jedi Order. It is his choice, not mine and not yours.”

“We understand, Master Jedi,” Hami-Son says before Lak-Lan can start speaking again. “And we are grateful that you have been so helpful in reuniting us with our boy. It is only difficult for us, culturally, to ask a member of the family who is so often ill or in the role of a guest to take on the same level of work as the rest of the household. I see where O’Ben must be confused, though. So if you would be so kind as to tell him that if he wants to work, he will work. But also tell him he does not have to break his back to earn his keep here. That is not how our family works.”

Qui-Gon has heard in the village that when Hami-Son Kenobi speaks, everyone must shut up and listen because you might not have the opportunity to see it happening again for the next century.

He is notoriously a man of few words, which is a shame because if he wasn’t, he might have been a diplomat in his own right. Perhaps one shouldn’t be surprised to learn this of a man who has spent his life with so many fateful threads passing through his hands.

“May I be frank?” Qui-Gon asks.

“Of course, sir,” So-Feya answers for her now-silent husband.

“I have been encouraging Obi-Wan to try to integrate himself into his culture and community, however at every turn, he reads this as me trying to push him away from the Jedi Order, which I must admit, I am loathe to do for a number of reasons, one of which may or may not be selfishness. So if you are feeling perhaps unsure of how to proceed in this situation, please rest assured that you are not alone.”

“Man, I know he’s trying to communicate with us,” Ah’O-ley sighs, dragging his hand through his hair.

His sister thumps a fist down viciously on the nerves in the top of his leg and sends his face through forty emotions in the span of a second.

“He’s sayin’ that he doesn’t want to give O’Ben away as much as we don’t,” Ah-Dair hisses.

“Was that fuckin’ necessary?”

“Guys, shut up,” Lak-Lan says.

“Children,” So-Feya soothes over all of them. Her gaze when it lands back on Qui-Gon is serious. “Four days is fine. We’ll find something for O’Ben to do around here that won’t break him in half—but if we are all being honest, Master, what will you do if O’Ben decides to stay here on Stewjon?”

Qui-Gon can’t help his expression of surprise.

“Me?” he asks.

The Kenobis nod.

“I will go wherever the Council sends me.”

“With another wee boy?” So-Feya asks.

Hm. No.

“Obi-Wan will be my last padawan,” Qui-Gon says. “I have no intention to take another. I am getting too old, and my others are handfuls enough.”

...why all these faces now?

“You have other apprentices?” Lak-Lan asks.

They needed to backtrack, actually, and define ‘apprentice.’ Qui-Gon has one foul-mouthed knight and one murderous ex-protégé.

“Two,” he says generously.

“Both alive?” So-Feya asks.

“Nigh unkillable,” Qui-Gon says, thinking about Xanatos stomping around and swishing his blue-silk lined cape high and low like a courting bird.

“Can we talk to one?” Ah-Dair asks.

Oh. Now this is a thought.

“What do you wish to know from them?” Qui-Gon asks. “If you have questions about jedi training, I am available to answer them.”

The brows in this home are nearly plaiting themselves, they are so twisted.

“Just as a reference,” Ah-Dair says.

“In that case, Feemor may be available for a chat,” Qui-Gon says.

Feemor comms the next morning after Qui-Gon has sent the younger apprentice off to go have an awkward conversation up the road.

He proudly informs Qui-Gon that there was a minor incident of leaked intelligence, but not to worry about it, as he has protected the lineage and all its members from the outsiders who seem to have gotten ahold of his frequency. He asks how the probation is going and if Qui-Gon has found his calling as a Stewjoni hermit, yet.

Qui-Gon reports that he has not. The ground out here is nearly frozen; snow is beginning to fall and stick in clumps around the estate. He and Obi-Wan have covered the fledging cabbages, kale, and turnips they planted with long sheets of thin plastoid. They have gathered reeds from the edge of the river to build baskets with on the other side of the sheep’s stable. They’ve taken an exciting journey into candle making that has resulted in many rather nice specimens and several that Obi-Wan has twisted and bent into curious shapes so as to liven up the candle-lighting experience.

Feemor says in a flat voice that that all sounds excruciating exciting.

He tells him to make booze, next.

This is actually not a bad idea.

There are apple trees all around the perimeter of the estate. One of Obi-Wan’s first jobs when they arrived was to climb every tree and pick as many as he could manage. One of the masons showed him how to sort the apples by the number of bruises and holes, and as such, there are now several crates of apples in the cottage’s storeroom, in addition to a number of sacks of apples that Qui-Gon has not thought of doing anything with until now.

He gets up and puts on his boots to see to that. It isn’t like there is much else he can do today besides read, anyways.

Fraya tracks him down that weekend and walks on his heels throughout the estate, asking him questions about the jedi order.

She wants to know if the jedi let people come and look at their temple the way people do for the priest’s cottage. She wants to know where Qui-Gon lives for the greater majority of the year and will not accept ‘on public transit’ as an answer.

She asks him about his accent and points out that Obi-Wan’s is coming back to him, muses about how fat the cow is becoming, and asks Qui-Gon why he’s collecting weeds.

He re-introduces her to the weeds as food.

She tells him that if he’s that hard up, he could have just said so.

He shakes his head and re-re-introduces her to the weeds as foods. He is collecting them to add to a salad.

“Are you sick?”

He is not.

“I don’t understand.”

That’s fine.

“What do you do all day when you’re not doing jedi things?”

Qui-Gon takes a moment to meditate on the question of if he is capable of doing anything besides ‘jedi things.’

He concludes that he is not.

“You can come around for a meal,” he says. “I’ll cook for you.”

“You can cook?”

Of course he can.

“Jedi food?”

If she wants it. Obi-Wan certainly won’t mind. Thus far, he has not been such a proponent of the local flavors. He misses the fermented sauces, the chilis and oils and piles of aromatics heaped onto dishes.

“Only if you come with me to find the necessary components,” he says.

Fraya jerks to attention.

Fraya is what her mother calls a ‘new age, filthy social rebel’ which means that she has been waiting her whole life for someone to take her into the woods and teach her how to forage the way her ancestors once did. She spends the entire journey to the woods talking about sustainable living and how she’s bothered her mother enough that she’s been put in charge of buying supplies for the inn.

She talks about how she’s been setting up a holonet site for the place. It hasn’t gotten much traffic yet, but she is hoping that that will change when Qui-Gon’s assignment starts to draw the interest of the coast people, who are always seeking to immerse themselves in so-called ‘cottage culture.’

Handfuls of chestnuts covered in prickly coats stymy her thinking for a short while. These are followed by a handful of snow-dusted berries that have somehow managed to escape the frost. They’re so sour that Fraya nearly gags.

She looks up and scowls.

“Are you laughing at me, Moon Man?” she demands.

“That’s a new one,” Qui-Gon says. “Is that what they call people like me in Nelwin?”

Fraya huffs.

“No,” she says, “They’ve got other names for people like you.”

“Did you go to university, Fraya? Is that where you’ve learned all this about sustainability?”

“University. No. We couldn’t afford that. I went to a local place. It’s like university but shorter and, er, smaller.”

“I see.”

“Do jedi go to university?”

“We do not,” Qui-Gon says. “Our academics remain at the Temple. I was merely curious. Might I ask, whose idea in your family was it to start an inn?”

“Mum’s dad,” Fraya says immediately. “He bought it when the priest still lived in your cottage.”

“So a priest actually lived there?” Qui-Gon asks.

Fraya hums.

“He moved in to kick the witches out, the story goes,” she says. “He died of cancer when your little guy was born. He was the only priest for miles around, so word out in the corners of the area was that the new Kenobi child was bad luck.”

Hm.

“In a way, they weren’t wrong. After the priest passed, the number of out of towners coming through fell right off. He was one of those hermit-types. People would come from far and wide to watch him do all his old crafts and the like. Every school north of here would send their kids down to see the ‘old ways’ during autumn and summer.”

Qui-Gon stops her and starts searching the ground. She joins in even without knowing what they’re looking for.

“Nowadays, it’s only the Kenobis who bring people through,” she says. “Mostly fashion people from the coasts. Natural fibers are a new hot thing. There are a few traditional dress makers who always buy, but they had some celebrity come through and try put in some rolling orders. Stupid amounts of wool, you know? Hami-Son told her that his family is not a factory, and she sent some lawyer to shout at him—so you know how So-Feya handled that. The SSPCH got their home and work classified as a heritage product, but then they wanted to set up the same sort of thing with the priest’s cottage with their dye shop. And you know, it’s just not the same. The Kenobis don’t want people tramping through their home. They’re artisans, not showmen.”

Qui-Gon finds a flexible vine from the summer that has failed to rot all the way through under the top layer of snow. He pulls it up and digs through his belt pockets for a knife so that he can cut it and shave away some of the off-shoots.

“There’s just not a whole lot going for us,” Fraya sighs. “It’s heritage this, heritage that, or nothing. We’ve got to play quaint countryfolk to get the city people into town to spend money. We certainly don’t have it. Everyone’s got some big-shot client they’re selling their goods to now; we can’t afford each other’s produce even. Everyone’s still got horses and gardens because there’s no choice; having food brought in is just as expensive and it all tastes like water.”

Some bark on a tree only feet away has begun to peel off. Qui-Gon tromps through the ice-covered leaves and works the rest of it off carefully with a knife. Some strategic folding and twisting produces a few holes in the edges and a bucket-shape. Qui-Gon takes the vine-cord from Fraya’s hand and holds it so that she can see it, then laces it through the holes.

He hands her the makeshift basket.

“Rose hips,” he says, gesturing around them at the blips of red suspended from long, scraggly branches.

“Oh,” Fraya says.

“Gather them. The softer the better,” Qui-Gon says. “Do you have sugar?”

“Yeah?”

“We will make syrup.”

“Right on.”

They gather a full birch basket of rose hips and a kerchief of winter greens. There are some edible mushrooms still hidden among the underbrush which are carefully plucked and inspected for infestation and mold. Those that pass the test are stowed in a hastily made shallow basket of old brambles.

They manage to find a tree with its branches dotted with velvety berries that are used regionally to flavor drinks. Qui-Gon will add some to a test-batch of cider at the cottage. Fraya says she’ll add some into the drinks at the inn’s bar.

Their noses and cheeks and knuckles are swollen red from the cold as they head back towards the town square.

“Where did you learn all this?” Fraya finally asks.

“My master,” Qui-Gon says.

“Is he some kind of outdoorsman?”

“By necessity, yes,” Qui-Gon says. “His master is a three-foot-tall troll, so one either sinks or swims in such an apprentice-ship.”

Fraya gapes at him. He keeps on crunching gravel under his feet in the direction of the cottage. She’ll catch up.

And she does.

“Wait. Wait. Like a real troll?”

“He is small. He is fuzzy. He is green. We are unsure what else he could be.”

Fraya bursts into a gust of giggles.

“This is what you’re teaching O’Ben, then?” she asks.

“In an ideal world,” Qui-Gon says. “But we haven’t quite gotten here yet. So far we have gotten to ‘how to take cover during a firefight’ and ‘when not to pick fights with Hutts and diplomats.’”

“That’s so cool. Ah’O-ley is having a hard time with him—O’Ben, I mean.”

“O’Ben would say the same thing about Ah’O-ley,” Qui-Gon says gently.

Fraya grins, swinging her body from side to side.

“Everyone needs a man with four thoughts in the whole of his head,” she says.

“Perhaps ‘everyone’ is just you,” Qui-Gon says.

“Yeah, probably.”

They arrive to the inn, and Fraya goes to get bowls to fill with her half of the produce.

Chapter Text

Obi-Wan comes sprinting ahead of his father to the cottage a few days later with a paper-wrapped parcel bouncing chaotically around in his hands. He bursts through the cottage’s half-open window and scrambles in while Qui-Gon is giving the rooster a talking to about breaking and entering.

The rooster explodes into a flapping war-machine and throws itself from Qui-Gon’s hands to the ground, and then out the open door to startle Hami-Son Kenobi on the flagstones.

“Shoes,” Qui-Gon says immediately.

Obi-Wan bolts up from the floor and does a tight circle and thrusts the bundle into Qui-Gon’s hands before backtracking to wrench his wet boots off with the grace one would expect more from a drunk hedgehog than a jedi padawan. Hami-Son pulls open the cracked door and holds helpless hands around Obi-Wan’s elbows in anticipation of a fall that does not come, for while the hedgehog is drunk, its center of gravity is still low to the ground.

Obi-Wan comes scurrying back and climbs onto the back of Qui-Gon’s chair, over it and onto his shoulders.

“Son, settle down” Hami-Son says sternly.

“He’s alright,” Qui-Gon says as knees dig into the flesh of his trapezius and eventually find their way over the muscles into a more stable seat among the hair. “What is this, padawan?”

“Open it,” Obi-Wan tells him.

“This?”

“Open it.”

“Open this?”

“Master.”

One must get one’s kicks where they can. Qui-Gon endures the hands digging into his hair and carefully unties the string holding the bundles contents together. After that comes the paper, and under that is a full, finished length of fabric perhaps a yard in both directions. It is silver with green motifs woven into it. They appear to be the same leaf facing opposite directions, each with a star under its stem.

The fabric is silky and drapes heavily across Qui-Gon’s fingers.

“Did you make this?” he asks up at Obi-Wan’s vibrating excitement.

“Yes.”

“It is remarkable,” Qui-Gon says. “The details must have taken you so much time.”

“I did two,” Obi-Wan says. “This is the practice one. The other one I’m doing for Master Yoda. It’s neater and red.”

“I don’t see how it could be,” Qui-Gon says, holding up the cloth to look past it at a somber father. He lifts his brows. Hami-Son shakes his head and tips it at the door. He has not taken off his boots.

“We must celebrate this,” Qui-Gon says. “You get the things down to make hotcakes. I’ll be right back inside.”

He leaves Obi-Wan to hunt through the pantry for flour and a skillet and follows the father out into the snow.

Hami-Son strokes his mustache while he explains that a customer came to the shop today and noticed Obi-Wan’s padawan braid. They accused the boy of cultural appropriation, and Obi-Wan downed tools to go outside; he’s been there nearly all day since, talking to the pigs, feeding chickens from cupped palms.

Hami-Son is worried because he only managed to coax him into the house for about thirty minutes before he wanted to leave.

“I see,” Qui-Gon says.

“Master, is there truly no way that O’Ben can be both jedi and a boy with a family? It seems to me that he is caught in-between, and I see no reason why he should have to choose only one or the other.”

It is an honest question that rings clear like a bell in Qui-Gon’s head.

It is the sort of question that a padawan asks a master, in fact; and Qui-Gon is supposed to be, before all other things these days, a teacher.

“There is something in jedi belief systems that we call attachment,” He begins. “It refers to a feeling—positive or negative—for any one object or person which a jedi is incapable of separating their identity and future from. Family structures in most cultures beget attachment.

They tell a child, from their very first breath, that they matter more than anyone in the world. That loyalty to a family member or the unit as a whole is paramount. That there is no future and no past that can exist harmoniously without a connection to and between members of the unit.

It is not the fault of those within the family that they do this; many if not most individuals from such cultures find enormous comfort and personal meaning in it. However, a jedi is a specific thing. A jedi does not stand astride the line between attachment and non-attachment. It is an either-or situation, Master Weaver. And for that reason, Obi-Wan must choose.”

Hami-Son sinks his teeth into his lip.

“It is a senseless thing,” he says.

“To you,” Qui-Gon says.

“Loving another person does not mean that you cannot distinguish between right and wrong.”

“I never said that it did.”

Even breaths. Qui-Gon keeps his shoulders rising and falling.

“You are offended that I have called your love attachment,” he realizes.

“I’m offended that you can’t just say what you mean,” Hami-Son says. “I want to know how you feel. Not the jedi. You are the one he goes to. You are the one he trusts. I want to know that he is not living in such an unfeeling, cold—”

“Does it frighten you that your son may not ever be able to return the strength of the feelings that your family has for him?” Qui-Gon asks.

Hami-Son’s lips close.

Qui-Gon takes in a soft breath of the icy air hanging between them and growing sharper and colder by the second. The only light that graces them is that from the two moons above and the fire’s glow from the window on this side of the building.

“You seem to be stressed as of late, Master Weaver. Might I ask: what is the true reason for that?” Qui-Gon says with as much patience as he can muster in the cold.  

And suddenly, this man full of thoughts with hands full of threads cannot look him in the eye.

It turns out that there are people in the village who think that Obi-Wan’s presence relates directly to the town’s prosperity. It is a peculiar thing, and one that the Kenobis have tried to avoid as much as their privilege allows them. But the fact of the matter is that not everyone in town has wealthy city clients coming to buy their artisanal wares, and there has indeed been many a coincidence involving a certain young boy’s arrival and departures from Coan-Cannoch.

When Obi-Wan is home, outsiders pass through the village and when he is gone, the economy falls into shambles. The locals have pressured Hami-Son and Sons and Daughter and Wife to keep the boy home, to protect the many.

The Kenobis are not superstitious themselves. What they are is human—a species which Qui-Gon is intimately familiar with.

In such tight-knit places as Coan-Cannoch, where town halls take place every night at the pub, where daughters of all families bump shoulders in town, the pressure of humans is nearly as indomitable as any hurricane. One wrong move and a person can wave their stability away. Rumors will bind one’s hands and feet and wither one’s fields. Loyalties between families and clans from times long ago become weapons, and threats of ostracization affect more than an individual.

A whole family, nay a whole business, can be laid to ruin by failure to adhere to the majority’s opinion.

Qui-Gon has borne witness to this family who loves their lost boy so dearly, but who are caught trying to understand his complex needs and trying to meet the demands of those who they must satisfy in order keep each other safe and warm.

Obi-Wan is still an outsider here, and even if Qui-Gon leaves him and he eschews the way of the Jedi, he will remain one. For in the minds of the neighbors—regardless of all evidence and good sense—he is not only a strange boy—perhaps a ‘changeling,’ perhaps a ‘fairy’— but the murderer of a priest and a bringer of both wonderous and terrible fortune. It is the curse of the force-sensitive to be floating between worlds, special in ways that invoke every fear and prayer all at the same time.

Qui-Gon stays back as the father leaves into the frigid, chirping night after laying bare the honest truth. He gives himself two long breaths and goes inside the warm home to make hotcakes with his apprentice. When the dark has swallowed everything but the orangey-red blaze of the fire, Qui-Gon watches Obi-Wan tap around on his pad with sleepy eyes and thinks, not for the first time, that he is glad that he never met the people who handed his infant body to Master Dooku after hours of arguing.

Who knows what they thought of him? And why should they affect how he sees himself.

This mission is a different kind of cruelty; the Council just can’t see it yet.

“Hey, you,” he says in the darkest time of night, when even the fire has gone out, with a hand laid on Obi-Wan’s shoulder.

Muzzily, Obi-Wan pries himself from sleep. Dim glints form in his eyes from the moons’ light outside.

“I think we have earned a vacation, don’t you?” Qui-Gon says.

Obi-Wan blinks at him.

“Going home?” he asks.

“Of all the places in the galaxy you can pick, you pick home?” Qui-Gon asks.

Obi-Wan sits all the way up to face him.

“It’s a vacation, isn’t it?” he asks.

“Is that your final answer?” Qui-Gon asks.

“How long are we going for?”

“Just a few days.”

Four and a half, to be precise.

“Then home. Final answer.”

“Alright. Boots, quickly now. We’ve got a long way to go.”

It is what Mace affectionally calls the Ever-Loving Ass-Crack of Dawn when Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan arrive at the Temple. The artificial sun has not even kissed the horizon. Obi-Wan fell asleep an hour ago in Qui-Gon’s arms on a jam-packed tram. Qui-Gon had pulled his hood over his face after the third station stop, but in his sleep, Obi-Wan had yanked it off again.

He woke up right before they arrived to their stop, apparently having felt Qui-Gon’s muscles tense in recognition, and ever since, he’s been dragging Qui-Gon by the fingers in the direction of home, home, home.

They enter the Temple and go up to their apartment.

Two hours later, while Obi-Wan is again dead asleep, this time in his room with his handmade ship-models whirring and bumping into each other faintly at the ceiling, all hell breaks loose in the Council chambers. Qui-Gon leans back and revels in it.

Master Dooku sighs and asks him for the third time in front of all the senior council members why he has not finished his mission. Qui-Gon naturally explains that he is not not-finishing the mission. He is simply here because there is little to do at the cottage at this time in the winter, and his padawan has been suffering of homesickness for weeks. Nearly three months now, to be precise. Given that Obi-Wan is, as everyone present has made abundantly clear, a child, Qui-Gon does not see why one day back home halfway through a six-month assignment is such a travesty.

Master Dooku glares at him through slits for eyes. Master Yoda hums and haws a lot to poorly conceal his absolute glee at this occurrence.

“Padawan,” Master Dooku says with a pinched hand in front of him. “The mission is very clear.”

“The mission was completed last month when I brought in the cow and Obi-Wan told me for the fifty-seventh time that he wished to come home,” Qui-Gon says. “But I understood that the assignment is an extension of the probationary expectations that the honorable Council has decided upon, and so out of respect for their wisdom and despite the successful renovation of the cottage and sprouting of a full field of crops, I elected to stay in place and meditate on the meaning of acceptance for an additional thirty or forty days.”

Master Dooku’s upset gives way to Qui-Gon’s favorite emotion of his spectrum: defeat.

“Padawan.”

“Yes, Master?”

“Did you at least tell someone you were leaving?”

“No, Master.”

“I don’t know why I bother.”

“There is no need to tell anyone; we will return before the agreed upon time at which Obi-Wan’s relatives will pick him up.”

Master Dooku turns around and throws his hands in the air. Master Yoda deftly steps into the place that he has left vacant.

“Receptive, the family has been to young Obi-Wan?” he asks.

“More than receptive,” Qui-Gon says, “Although Obi-Wan finds his reintegration into that space to be challenging. He has, however, proven to be an exceptional weaver.”

Master Dooku throws his hands up again, but this time he’s completely across the room by a bookshelf.

“Important, the arts are,” Master Yoda says with a solemn nod. “The boy, where is he?”

“Fast asleep, sir,” Qui-Gon says. “If you would like to speak with him, I can wake him.”

“No, no. Sleep, he must. At noon we will speak. Yourself, some rest you must get. Haggard, you are looking, grandpadawan.”

After only a day home, they head back to Stewjon. They take the same transporter there. The same transfer. The same delay as the very first time.

Obi-Wan is less comfortable in the seats. Some steward on board realized that his swinging feet are against regulation and argued with Qui-Gon for half an hour over paying for a safety seat before giving up and stomping back down the line. Obi-Wan isn’t tired enough to sleep this time. He has been reinvigorated by tussling with his friends in the Room of a Thousand Fountains and giving Kit Fisto heart attack after heart attack at the edge of his experimental ponds. If anything, he is more awake than he has been in months. Which is really a shame. The way the rows are situated do not give him the opportunity to do much besides watch the snoring laborers across from him.

His feet twitch like a cat’s tail.

Qui-Gon does not acknowledge his attempts to become more comfortable until they become distracting to others, at which point he sends Obi-Wan to the refresher to go do fifty squats so that when he comes back, he’ll at least be well-stretched.

They disembark from the transporter and follow the hedges and stone walls to the place where they first caught a cart to Coan-Cannoch. They catch another one. Now used to travel via horse and wagon, Obi-Wan leans precariously over the side of the cart and watches the wheels turning until it becomes too dark to do so.

The driver stops by the end of the fateful road. He is well-paid.

The mission continues.

Obi-Wan’s pack is a little heavier on his shoulders now because the knight overseeing requisitions was scandalized by the blisters on his hands. She found a new set of cold-weather padawan robes that are nearly twice as thick as the usual ones. In addition to that, Obi-Wan has been given triple pairs of socks and two sets of gloves and a scarf.

Qui-Gon himself has been outfitted with winter clothing, for which he has never been more grateful. He even stopped by Master Dooku’s apartment to say good-bye before their departure.

He and Obi-Wan walk to the cottage where Obi-Wan lights a fire and Qui-Gon reorganizes their belongings. He waits for Obi-Wan to start dozing before putting away the new winter clothes in his pack. There is a knock on the door.

Perfect timing.

Qui-Gon stands to open it and finds Lak-Lan there in his father’s stead.

“You’ll forgive him; he’s had a long day,” Qui-Gon says as he stands aside and allows the young man to come in and witness his sleeping brother with his head cradled in his arms in the seat of one of the two chairs.

Lak-Lan looks over his shoulder with a peculiar expression. He kneels and shakes Obi-Wan’s shoulder until he wakes and murmurs to him that it’s time to go.

Obi-Wan gets up to go with him and it is then that Lak-Lan notices the new winter robes.

“Where’d your coat go?” he asks.

Obi-Wan is too tired to answer him. He lays his cheek against his brother’s sternum and attempts to resume his nap standing up this time.

“It’s just there,” Qui-Gon says, gesturing with his chin at the hook by the door. “I wrote home for some warmer clothing so that we might not impose ourselves upon your family any longer than we already have.”

Lak-Lan knows something isn’t right here, but he can’t quite put his finger on it and every second longer that continues, he becomes more defensive.

“It’s no trouble,” he says. “O’Ben. Come on. Wake up, we’ve got a ways to go.”

Obi-Wan would rather sleep in a ditch, thank you. He pulls away from his brother and appeals to Qui-Gon as a pathetic lifeform by attempting to dig into his cloak.

That is sadly not part of the mission. He is removed and callously herded back to his brother who thanks Qui-Gon for looking after the boy and hooks an arm around Obi-Wan’s shoulders to guide him outside with. As an afterthought, he snags Obi-Wan’s rucksack by the door in his elbow.

The door closes. Qui-Gon lets go of a breath he’s been holding since Coruscant.

Time to get to work.

His apprentice does not wish to stay on Stewjon; he has made that clear to Qui-Gon and now clear to the senior Councilmembers, but until the waters in this small town are settled. Clearing him a path for an uncomplicated exit is going to require some good, old-fashioned, jedi bullshit.

Qui-Gon’s first instinct is to go levitate a few cows and draw eyes on fence posts, but it feels a smidge disrespectful, so he takes stock of the cottage and ruminates on the role of Coan-Connach’s old priest instead.

‘To scare away the witches,’ Fraya had mentioned.

To scare away the witches.

And people in the parish and surrounding foothills are superstitious enough to think that one force-sensitive child might be the difference between a burgeoning and a broken economy.

Qui-Gon takes these little grains of information and rubs them between his fingers as he does some pecking on his datapad’s keyboard.

He has heard of this thing called ‘dark tourism,’ wherein people travel to places of great fear, tragedy, and pain to roll around in the spaces between life and death, despair and hope, gratitude and fury.

Dark tourism fuels numerous small towns throughout the galaxy. Although more academic corners of the holonet inform Qui-Gon that many of these small places become consumed by the events that once happened there. They become dependent on specific representations of their historic tragedy such that the nuance and suffering that once took place comes to be in danger of transforming into yet another product to be consumed by a hungry galactic population seeking excitement and distraction in their mundane daily lives.

Coan-Connach does not need to become a site of dark tourism. It simply needs a little drama. A little mystique. Something to draw a certain kind of crowd.

Qui-Gon reads through the night until he happens upon a holovid-genre of a type of people who he has had many an unfortunate encounter with.

Paranormal investigators. The jedi’s third greatest enemy (the first are the sith; the second are those most persistent individuals who keep trying to worship them or the jedi as holy figures).

They come from all over the galaxy, though, and they have enough income to buy a great deal of expensive, nonsensical equipment.

Qui-Gon himself has never purposefully been on the type of journey that the paranormal enthusiasts call a ‘ghost hunt.’ The closest experience he’s had is when a gang of such persons followed him and Master Dooku up a mountain to find an ancient scythe some knucklehead stole from a local museum and buried. Qui-Gon must have been eight or nine at the time, and Master Dooku told him before they set off not to look at, talk to, or suggest that he had heard a single thing the interlopers spoke aloud to him, themselves, or each other.

There are no such things as ghosts, Master Dooku said.

There is only the force.

—and force ghosts.

But those are different. And no one is ever to tell the paranormal people about them or else the entire Temple will shudder and be swallowed up by Coruscant’s crust, do you understand, padawan?

Qui-Gon understood then as well as he understands now.

He must learn the definition of ‘creepy’ that these ghosthunters are using, and once he has done that, he must manufacture it out here in the middle of nowhere.

A magnificent plan. Master would hate it, which means it’s perfect.

The holonet says that creepy places are places that are isolated, dark, and full of distorted structures. The creepiness is amplified by the addition of objects traditionally associated with childhood, playthings especially.

Further, creepiness hinges on a number of narratives. It seems that a story must be told through rotting objects placed strategically around an area. Cryptic messages help immensely.

Qui-Gon must come up with a story. He looks around the priest’s cottage, lays back on the quilt and stares up at the rafters, pondering.

Pondering.

What is a good story?

What is a scary jedi story?

Hm.

As a little one, Xanatos was petrified of mirrors. Qui-Gon could not, for the life of him, understand why the boy covered his eyes before walking into the refresher at night only to come slamming out of it like he’d just outsmarted a pack of rabid dogs.

There must have been a scary story involving a mirror told in the crèche.

A mirror must be involved here then. And witches. The area has a history of witches. Qui-Gon has to look some more things up on the holonet at the memory.

There are all sorts of witches in the universe. The Nightsisters of Dathomir, the Order of the Unseen, the fortune tellers and card readers, the wisewomen, the priestesses of Kelanoon. The witches known on Stewjon seem to be either young, beautiful, naked women with multiple nipples and an urge to steal penises or elderly, withered naked women with warts, who also coincidentally have an urge to steal penises.

Penis theft is only their hobby, thankfully. Their crimes are much more interesting and far-reaching.

They are said to curse cattle and steal children from cradles. They are said to throw blights upon whole fields of crops and to ride pigs, goats, and push-brushes into the night sky on full-moons. There are legends of great heroes confronting witches—the hero that Obi-Wan is named for is endlessly pursued by three witch sisters who nearly kill his wife to take his baby son. He vanquishes one by shooting an arrow through one of her eyes.

These accounts are all intriguing but not what the paranormal investigators on the holonet would call ‘creepy.’ They are more allegorical. There are too many morals to all these stories. The object here is to create a narrative out of isolation, darkness, and distortion.

Qui-Gon keeps going until he happens upon the gold nugget among the dirt.

The witches of Stewjon are said to live in huts.

He lives in a cottage, which is a hut with reinforced walls as far as he is concerned. It took him several weeks to build the cottage, but a hut is a much less formal structure that might be built only out of wood. Wood certainly decays faster than stone, and if Qui-Gon times it right, the snow and rain will quicken that process.

He will simply build a hut out in the woods. It will be isolated, it will be dark, he can put a child’s plaything and a mirror in it. What more could a paranormal investigator ask for?

Chapter Text

Fraya is recruited once more by promises of more foraging. The syrups made from their last adventure have proved popular at the inn’s food counter. Mor-Ag is pleased that her daughter is showing interest in ‘the old ways’ after all this time.

Fraya arrives to the front of the priest’s cottage nearly half an hour before she and Qui-Gon are meant to meet. She has small baskets tucked into cloth sacks this time. She tilts her head at the sack of tools that Qui-Gon slings across his back and the spade in his hand when he comes out to join her.

“Building a bridge?” she asks.

“Something like that,” Qui-Gon says. “Fraya, I am in need of a con-conspirator. My usual one is making tartans. Do you feel up for the challenge?”

Fraya gapes.

“Me? As your padawan?” she asks.

“Temporarily,” Qui-Gon says.

“Really?”

“Only for three days this week, the council will skin me if I give the other any other impression, so—”

“Fuck yes.”

Easily said and done.

Deep in the woods, Fraya absorbs Qui-Gon’s suggestion of turning Coan-Connach into a destination for paranormal investigators and practically rolls around in it.

She adores it. She thinks it’s perfect. And most importantly, she is a young person with intimate understanding of what ‘creepy’ actually means.

It is, she declares, wrapped up with not only isolated, dark, desolate places but tension. Tension is key. As many human emotions should be introduced to the arena as possible, she says, but especially those which are angry or sympathetic.

Witches, she claims, are okay, but a tale of murder is much scarier. After all, witches are nothing to than the ghost of a man who has killed once and is seeking to kill again.

Qui-Gon asks if she’s alluding to him.

“You’ve killed someone?” Fraya asks. “Isn’t that against the Jedi way?”

Qui-Gon has never wished to understand the public’s imagined jedi more than he does now.

“Yes?” he says. “I do not relish it, but if the situation demands it and there are lives at stake, I am prepared to do it again. That is the call I make every time I wear the saber.”

Fraya ignores him to shovel decaying leaves away from the side of a large rock slab surrounded and topped with trees.

“Okay, you’ve got to channel murderer-vibes,” she tells him. “What was the situation the last time you murdered someone?”

“Murder is quite a strong word,” Qui-Gon points out delicately.

“Offed ‘em?”

So crude.

“Tell me about your worst ever lethal stabbing then.”

“A particularly memorable one was unfortunately the end of my former padawan’s father.”

Fraya straightens up and leans on the handle of her spade with pouting lips.

“No ‘unfortunately,’” she says. “Stuff the jedi pity-party for fifteen minutes, would you? We need a story. You’ve killed people. I haven’t. Tell me what it feels like.”

Qui-Gon would rather not. Fraya groans.

“Fine,” she says. “We’ll ask O’Ben.”

“Obi-Wan has not killed on purpose.”

“Yeah, well; I’m not looking for an on-purpose, I’m looking for a story.”

That sounds like a fantastically bad idea. Qui-Gon distracts himself by tracing out the foundation of a small, one-room shack in the wet dirt.

Fraya cares not for Qui-Gon’s sensitive nerves; after they have spent several hours digging around and foraging materials to begin their efforts on the hut, she marches them a strange way through the woods which twists and turns and lands them in a field which is spotted with a few huge fluffy white and black sheep. These, unlike the pack of terrors that mosey around the priest’s estate, are all marked with a spray of blue on their back left flank.

They move lazily for a few moments, but then startle and begin to scramble away from the far flung edges of the field as a door slams open from a dwelling in the distance and a small shape wearing a brown coat comes sprinting through the snow.

This is apparently the back of the Kenobis’ property.

Qui-Gon tries not to grin as the back door slams open a second time and another much larger shape wearing a blue cardigan comes tearing out after Obi-Wan.

Lak-Lan has only his long legs to help him catch up.

The sheep begin herding themselves before Obi-Wan can hop over the short fence that keeps the animals away from the dyeing yard. Fraya grabs Qui-Gon and pulls him back into the woods to hide while the brothers approach. Eventually, they are close enough that Qui-Gon can hear Lak-Lan pleading with Obi-Wan to stop doing this shit already.

“She’s not trying to dry you,” Lak-Lant sighs.

Obi-Wan has already begun herding the sheep. Persuading him not to do it is an exercise in vast patience and strong arms. The real trick is to simply remove him from the situation and block the sheep from view.

“O’Ben,” Lak-Lan sighs.

“Don’t want to be squished,” Obi-Wan snaps.

“Oh? He speaks now, does he?” Lak-Lan asks.

“Don’t want to be squished!”

“Why’re you shoutin’? What’s the matter? No one’s squishin’ you. It’s a mangle, spud. It’s for dryin’. Otherwise, we’d have to wring the water out with our hands, and it takes years off your life, that does.”

“Why’s it called a mangle if it’s not for squashin’?” Obi-Wan demands from the safety of the middle of his circle of sheep.

Lak-Lan opens his mouth.

Closes it.

“That’s what I thought,” Obi-Wan sneers at him. 

Listening to Obi-Wan being his normal stubborn self in the accent of his people is unspeakably endearing. Watching his eldest brother attempting to reason with him is even more touching.

Fraya muffles a snicker in a hand as they watch Lak-Lan drop his head and huff and puff out clouds of hot air. Obi-Wan sinks deeper into the safety of the sheep.

“Okay,” Lak-Lan finally says, “Okay, there’ll be no manglin’. You don’t have to touch it, but only if you watch me use it; is that a deal?”

“No.”

“O’Ben, come on. Work with me here.”

“I’m a jedi.”

“No one says you’re not, wee one. You can be a jedi and a weaver. Aren’t there jedi weavers? Aren’t there jedi sheep?”

Obi-Wan squints suspiciously. Lak-Lan realizes that he’s hit upon something.

“The jedi make their own robes, do they not?” he asks.

Obi-Wan points at him to indicate that this is cheating, foul play, and morally reprehensible.

“If they’re makin’ their own robes, they’re manglin’, I don’t know what to tell you, son.”

“You’re not Da.”

“I see what you’re doin’, and it’s not going to work,” Lak-Lan says. “The point is the jedi are manglin’ just like we are. Those clothes you’re wearin’? Bleached. That’s dyein’. Dried. That’s mangled.”

“NO.”

“O’Ben.”

“NO.”

“O’Ben; for god’s sake, boy, you won’t speak a word to your mother, but you’ll take me to task in a fuckin’ field, will you?”

Obi-Wan considers this.

“Yes,” he finally says.

Lak-Lan pounces into the circle of sheep. Obi-Wan lets loose a piercing shriek that makes Qui-Gon’s muscles tense. Fraya grabs ahold of his arm to keep him in place as Lak-Lan hauls Obi-Wan out of the sheep and hefts him over his shoulder like a heavy sack of dry concrete.

“You made this bed,” he says over the wriggling.

Obi-Wan makes a miserable noise and goes completely limp. Lak-Lan valiantly ignores this for a few stomped yards before guilt overtakes him.

“It’s not so bad,” he says. “How’s about this? We do two hours indoors and then we can go to the river—so long as you promise not to go out there on the ice again.”

Obi-Wan sighs in response.

“O’Ben,” Lak-Lan says. “Little brother, I promise.”

“Everyone promises,” Obi-Wan says miserably. “I hate it here.”

“You’ve barely been here.”

“I want to go home.”

“We’re going home right now.”

“No. HOME. No one’s listenin’ to me. No one ever listens.”

Qui-Gon yearns to step out of the woods and snatch the boy of his brother’s arms, hold him up to eye-level and tell him that he is listening. He is trying to listen. He is learning how to listen and how to read Obi-Wan’s silences for what they truly are.

“I’m listenin’,” Lak-Lan says gently. “Da’s listenin’. It’s too much to ask for of Mum for now, but she’ll get there.”

Obi-Wan struggles on his shoulder; Lak-Lan concedes defeat and sets him down, but not without getting a hand securely around Obi-Wan’s wrist.

He kneels and presses the captured hand against his clavicle.

“You feel that?” he asks. “That’s my heart beatin’ double-time. You feel it?”

Obi-Wan tries to wrench his hand out of the grip around his wrist.

“O’Ben, I’m talkin’ to you.”

“Let go.”

“No. You’ll run off again. Here, it’s a trust exercise, humor me.”

He shall not. There are physical restraints present.

“O’Ben. Please. Feel. See? All that beatin’? That’s because I’m worried about you. Always worried. Worried you’re hurtin’. Worried that man is going to come back and crack in your head. Worried you and Mum’ll never talk. Worried that master of yours is going to snap you up and we’ll never see you again. I’m sick with worry. Because I love you. I cried for hours the night the jedi took you away. An’ every time I see you now, all I can think of is that it’s all going to happen again. Do you see why me, Da, Ah-Dair, Mum—and Ah’O-ley too, believe it or not—do you see why we can’t let it happen again?”

Obi-Wan flicks his eyes up to his brother’s face.

“You have an attachment to me,” he says.

Lak-Lan’s lips seal into a line.

“Yes,” he says at length.

“You should try meditating,” Obi-Wan prescribes.

Lak-Lan sighs. With bone-weary limbs and strength, he stands.

“Ten minutes,” he says. “And then I’m comin’ back out here for you. Are we clear? Get it all out of your system with the flock if that’s what it takes. You can’t be runnin’ around the vats like that. They’ve got chemicals in them that can hurt you.”

Obi-Wan says nothing as his brother leaves him in the snow-covered grasses with the livestock. His eyes are the color of storm clouds. His cheeks flush slowly with the cold. The gray, mottled sky looms over him, a tiny figure on a vast hill.

Qui-Gon can’t leave him there like that. He sends a pulse through the Force and Obi-Wan startles out of his reverie.

“Master?” he asks.

Fraya stomps on Qui-Gon’s toes. Qui-Gon sends another pulse that inspires Obi-Wan to nearly go rolling down the hill in his haste to get to the edge of the woods. He stops there, searching. Searching.

Qui-Gon pings him one more time and Obi-Wan’s gaze whips around to the tree that they are hiding behind. He comes tromping over and stares up the tree, then looks around it.

“BOO,” Fraya says.

Obi-Wan lights his saber.

Qui-Gon waves from behind her.

Obi-Wan should only have ten minutes to talk, but he is reluctant to leave now that he’s found some familiar people of comfort. If he was younger, Qui-Gon would have picked him up and bounced him around a bit before sending him off toddling towards home. But alas. Obi-Wan only tolerates that sort of handling under pain of death and dismemberment.

Fraya, unable to sense the waves of anxiety and pleas of rescue flowing through the Force but human enough to empathize with a boy being told what to do at every turn, distracts him by asking him what the scariest thing he can think of is.

“Xanatos,” Obi-Wan says definitively.

Yes, Qui-Gon will go die now, thank you.

“I don’t know what that is. We’re trying to stage a murder,” Fraya says.

“Xanatos,” Obi-Wan repeats firmly.

“Alright, alright,” Qui-Gon says.

“He tried to drown my friend,” Obi-Wan reports.

“Oh shit,” Fraya says.

“And before that he had me sent into a deep sea mine and there was no way out and we were all wearing these collars that could explode.”

“Uh?” Fraya says. “We just need like. Normal people scary.”

Obi-Wan blinks.

“Like To-Ma and Pyet-Ris’s idea of scary?” he asks, referring to the local boys he chats with over the stone wall.

“Closer,” Fraya says. “Give me your morbid imagination. Your old guy is bad at this.”

Obi-Wan doesn’t need to tell them a story about a murder. He reports that a detective from Nelwin showed up to the homestead this morning to ask the family questions about ‘suspicious persons’ lurking around the area a few months ago. One of these people is said to have worn tall overalls and carried a pitchfork.

“Da didn’t see anyone like that,” Obi-Wan says. “But Ah’O-ley saw someone trying to get into the neighbor’s shed. He shouted at him, and the guy ran off. He thought it was To-Ma or some other kid because he can’t see and he’s in denial of it.”

Fraya stares.

“I saw a guy with a pitchfork,” she says.

The woods arounds them becomes very still.

“Right before we came?” Qui-Gon asks.

“Yes,” Fraya says quietly. “He came into the inn and asked for a room. He was down the hall from you guys.”

Oh dear.

It seems that they have stumbled into a murder investigation.

Chapter Text

Qui-gon sends Obi-Wan back to the family workshop and spends the journey to town soothing Fraya’s ever-growing panic. They walk and he guides her through a meditation. Calm. Collected. Thinking about times past, times future. Thinking about light and darkness. Heat and coolness.

He walks her to the inn and sits with her at the long counter they shared their early acquaintance eating meals at while she calls the main law enforcement station at Nelwin with shaking hands and an even shakier voice.

She tells them that she heard from one of the Kenobis that one of their detectives is looking for a person with a pitchfork.

She explains that one such person stayed at her family’s inn. She told him to leave the pitchfork outside, and he told her to go fuck herself. She was so offended she made her father do business with him. They had agreed as a family to keep an eye on him all night.

No trouble came from his room, although Fraya remembers him hurrying out the next morning when two jedi arrived.

Law enforcement tells her that they would like to take a formal statement. They ask who else was at the inn that night.

Qui-Gon quickly finds himself being interrogated once more, only this time, law enforcement is terrified his aggressive ‘runt’ when he arrives, as they did not realize was a local. They try awkwardly to apologize to Hami-Son Kenobi who will not allow them to interview Obi-Wan on his own.

The officers ask Qui-Gon if he can please disarm the child. Qui-Gon considers declining on principle, but ultimately asks Obi-Wan to please give him his saber for now. While he is doing that, the officers select their friendliest looking teammate and assign them the unenviable task of talking to the boy. Qui-Gon is given the toughest looking of the group.

He is exhausted already.

Hami-Son’s shoulders are nearly up to his ears. The friendliest-looking officer offers Obi-Wan a boiled sweet and received dead eyes in return.

“O’Ben,” Qui-Gon says before he’s herded away. “Look at me. No biting.”

Obi-Wan stares after him.

The boy won’t talk to strangers. This should surprise no one, and yet here they are, every single time.

Qui-Gon, however, will talk to strangers. He tells the officers that he did not notice anything amiss when he arrived to Stewjon, and no, he is not here on a private investigation. No, the SSPCH has not set him up to anything. He did not see anyone wielding a pitchfork. The first time he saw the cottage was in the middle of the night. He went inside, yes, but came right back out again and did not notice the remains inside until the next morning. His padawan noticed them before he did.

No, the boy does not speak to strangers. It’s a medical issue, and it is, in large part, involuntary.

There is no need for an interpreter because Obi-Wan does not use sign language to express himself. He simply does not speak to adults that he doesn’t know.

“He may have noticed something that you didn’t,” the officer says gruffly.

This might be true, but Qui-Gon can’t make Obi-Wan speak. He struggles to speak even to his mother; an officer is out of the question unless they would like a repeat of last time.

“Master Jinn,” the officer says. “This young lady’s family is grieving. She deserves justice. They deserve closure.”

“What happens if I find your perpetrator before you do?” Qui-Gon asks airily.

The officer blanches.

“Sir, I recommend strongly against involving yourself in these matters,” he says.

Qui-Gon twists his mustache between two fingers.

“Noted,” he says. “Am I free to go now?”

“I said no biting,” Qui-Gon says as he, Hami-Son, and Obi-Wan leave the town clerk’s building.

Obi-Wan scowls.

“He had it comin’,” he says.

Hami-Son takes his hand for the second time. Obi-Wan allows it for maybe fifteen seconds before wrenching it away.

“This is unbecoming behavior for a padawan,” Qui-Gon says. “You cannot bite a diplomat to make them agree with you.

“Master Yoda could.”

“Master Yoda is two generations evolved from a snapping turtle, and you are not Master Yoda.”

Obi-Wan giggles. Hami-Son takes his hand again and when the gesture fails, tries to guide him by the shoulder.

“Is the suspect still here, Master?” Obi-Wan asks.

This is thousand-credit question.

“Unsure,” Qui-Gon says. “But there are ways to find out.”

“Is that a job for you, sir?” Hami-Son asks.

“I don’t see why it shouldn’t be,” Qui-Gon says.

“Master investigates things all the time,” Obi-Wan tells his father.

“The victim was left in our house for months before we found her,” Qui-Gon says. “And her story is catching fire in the city. Those who killed her will be prideful at first, but that will quickly turn to anxiety. They will continue to return here to destroy whatever evidence they can find.”

“We built a house on top of it,” Obi-Wan points out.

“We did indeed,” Qui-Gon says. “So I am pleased to say that we may be expecting visitors in the area soon.”

“How can you be so sure?” Hami-Son asks.

“The Force provides,” Qui-Gon says.

“We’ve got bad luck times two,” Obi-Wan says. “Can I stay with Master?”

“Absolutely not,” Hami-Son says. “They could kill you. And you too, Master Jedi.”

Qui-Gon halts his steps and stares with compassion into the eyes of this man. He keeps telling himself that it is compassion anyways, otherwise it would be offense. He takes up his stride again. This time, Obi-Wan goes jogging after before his father can get another restraining hand on him.

“Saber?”

Ah, yes, the saber. Yes, there it goes.

“Master Jedi. You did not come here to mediate these things. Please leave it to the city enforcers,” Hami-Son says.

Mmmmmm no thanks.

“Master Jedi. If you make yourself a target, then you will make Obi-Wan a target.”

Qui-Gon is half counting on Obi-Wan to be kidnapped, actually. He has a talent for it, and it would sure quicken this process.

“Stay with your father, O’Ben,” he says to quiet the other man.

“But you’re going to set a trap,” Obi-Wan pouts.

“There will be other chances to set a trap.”

“But I won’t know how to when we get to them.”

The boy has a point. Qui-Gon is rescinding his earlier order.

“I require him for training,” he tells Hami-Son. “I will deliver him to your doorstep when we are finished.”

Obi-Wan pumps a fist in triumph. Hami-Son sputters and tries to re-open negotiations. There is a reason that he married his fearless wife, however, and that is because he is not strong in the area of confrontation. Qui-Gon now suspects that every moment they have spoken to each other has been rehearsed between him and So-Feya.

How charming.

Tahl would tell Qui-Gon to go drown about his worries and get back to her when he’s being thought-provoking again.

“Master, please,” Hami-Son says.

“Master, please?” Obi-Wan counters.

Master is no longer having this conversation. What he said before still stands. Now, everyone go away. He’s got to entice a man with a pitchfork out into the woods where they can be alone.

There are many ways to coax a murderer into the open; Rael’s favorite way is to create the absolute perfect conditions for their return and to wait in the middle of it all like a spider in a web. In the past as a teenager forsaken by their master on account of a ‘meditation retreat’ in the library—which was Master Dooku’s way of saying ‘get out of my hair, I am trying to get Master Nu to take me seriously as a love interest’—Rael took Qui-Gon along with him on a mission that he will never forget.

It was regarding woman who had poisoned her sister-in-law and stolen 71 million credits in the form of classical art.

Rael had watched this lady for weeks and had learned exactly what she’d liked. When she walked into her hotel suite, he’d arranged to have petals strewn across the floor and bed. He’s ordered two bottles of white wine and had them placed on the hotel’s table in buckets of ice.

He’d gone and strummed on a guitar under a miniature pine tree in the hotel garden, and she, looking out her window, saw a man with warm olive skin and dark curly hair playing a song that might as well have been written just for her.

She came out to ‘bump’ into him, and Rael stopped his playing to turn just enough so that she could see that he was a jedi.

He explained that he was only here for a night, and he hoped he hadn’t disturbed her with his practicing.

She asked him where he learned that song.

He smiled and gestured her in closer and closer until they were nigh nose-to-nose. At which point he lit his saber behind her head and told her that he’d learned it from her husband.

It was done so smoothly that Qui-Gon had buried his face into his hands and lamented the fact he would never, ever be that cool.

To this day, he has not managed that. But he has managed to persuade an untold number of powerful people to admit their faults and vices and sins in grand public settings, and he has stolen compromised operatives from right under their guards’ noses.

To this end, he puts up his hair and does a lap around the estate with Obi-Wan, wondering out loud to the Force what might happen if he went into the woods all alone with this spade in his hand. What might happen indeed?

In the woods, Obi-Wan finds the foundation of the hut Qui-Gon and Fraya started to build up against the slab of stone. He jumps over the ‘threshold’ and back a few times before going to the middle of the square and staring directly down at his boots. It has not snowed since that morning, and so the dirt is still freshly upturned.

Obi-Wan stomps it down and gets distracted with some slow-freezing ice in one of the corners of the foundation. He hurries over there to fall on it. Qui-Gon lets him have his fun. He can feel no living beings moving around the area with them. Their murderer has not noticed their meddling.

Qui-Gon looks up into the starry sky through the evergreens and watches a comet faintly streak across it.

“A falling star,” he murmurs.

Obi-Wan yelps as he lands half in the brush on the other side of the foundation’s icy corner.

The stars hold steady overhead.

“Shoe.”

Qui-Gon lowers his gaze and finds Obi-Wan blinking rapidly at the brush. He points. Qui-Gon comes over to join him.

And indeed, there is a shoe. A funny one with a white sole and many eyelets. It is far too cold to be wearing such a thing out here and Qui-Gon is sure that he and Fraya would have noticed something so bright and new-looking during their earlier efforts. He leans over Obi-Wan and picks up a cold leaf to keep his fingers off the shoe’s surface as he lifts it.

The sole is clean.

“New?” Obi-Wan asks.

“Carried,” Qui-Gon tells him. “Shall we seek more clothes?”

“It’s too dark,” Obi-Wan tells him.

Qui-Gon raises a brow and unhooks his saber.

“Never too dark,” he says.

His saber’s green light and Obi-Wan’s blue one bathe the forest in ethereal light. The light moves and makes the forest appear as though it is moving as well. Obi-Wan scurries hither and thither in the wide zig-zags he’s seen Nessie do when she’s herding the sheep. Qui-Gon reaches out in the Force.

He knows better than to ask for the owner of this shoe to be a living body. He also knows better than to think Obi-Wan might be traumatized by finding one. Dead bodies are nothing new to him now. It is a cruel but practical fact of his reality.

“Master?”

“More clothes?” Qui-Gon asks.

He looks over to see Obi-Wan standing on a stump with both feet braced on its edges. He comes closer and his saber brightens the gleam of a piece of metal in the hollow rotted out of the center of the stump.

A chrono. An expensive one. There is melted snow in the stump, but the chrono is still working; its faint glow illuminates the water underneath it.

“What time is it, padawan?” Qui-Gon asks.

“01:07, sir.”

“Remember that.”

“No force signatures,” Obi-Wan notes.

“No.”

“Dead?”

“Or hidden.”

Obi-Wan hops off the stump and lands on both feet.

“What if Fraya was doing the murdering?” he asks.

“Shush, boy.”

“She’s too nice to be real.”

Qui-Gon wraps a hand around Obi-Wan’s cheek and moves him away from the stump. They keep walking.

They are nearly to the back of the Kenobis’ property like they were during the day when Qui-Gon feels a pulse ripple through the force. It is blurry and faint. Obi-wan, sleepy now, after a four-mile hike, comes alive with its first flutter.

He starts sweeping his head left to right in wide arcs.

The blur in the Force grows in intensity and softens. Qui-Gon sends a surge of force energy through the hilt of his saber to brighten it. Held aloft, it is as good as a spotlight.

Obi-Wan re-ignites his own saber and goes still. His grey eyes are neon green, staring endlessly into the dark of the woods.

He sheathes his saber and shivers.

“Master,” he whispers.

There is an incoming pulse; this one is not blurry. It is hot and it is coming right at them, faster and faster with every step. Qui-Gon starts to hear ice crunching and waterlogged branches rubbing against each other.

“Behind,” he says.

The order is followed before it has even left his lips. Obi-Wan ducks under his cloak and flattens himself as close as he can into Qui-Gon’s flank so that the cloak drapes as if he is not there.

The life approaching burns bright in the Force until it stops.

Qui-Gon keeps his saber at its current radiance. He can see the person’s shadow behind a tree. They aren’t aware of its tendrils creeping out into a misshapen version of the body it mimics.

“Hello there,” Qui-Gon says pleasantly.

Out of the dark steps a young man. He’s holding something in his hand.

“Witch,” he hisses.

Oh, interesting.

“Get out of here.”

“No need to shout,” Qui-Gon says.

“I’ll kill you,” the young man says as he draws closer. The object in his hand has a handle and a head.

There is a scar on the side of Obi-Wan’s skull. It is a few inches long and his hair grows around it.

“Witch. I heard of you. I heard you killed that girl. You filthy piece of shit.”

The young man is not a young man as he steps into the light of Qui-Gon’s blade. He is older than Hami-Son Kenobi. Quite possibly between his age and Qui-Gon’s own.

“You’re hiding that boy, witch,” the man says. “I can smell his rotten flesh. I knew the second they found that girl, he was back here. Didn’t take. Didn’t take.”

This person is articulate. His clothes are not torn. Not patched. He doesn’t stumble, doesn’t slur, isn’t speaking to himself.

This is a calculated decision.

Obi-Wan’s fingers clench against Qui-Gon’s lower back.

“Please stay where you are,” Qui-Gon says evenly. “I have no desire to harm you.”

“Fuckin’ WITCH.”

“I’ll ask only one more time, sir.”

“You take my daughter; I’ll take your son.”

Yes, now this makes sense.

“Your daughter is sick,” Qui-Gon says.

The man starts running, but not for long. Qui-Gon puts out the light and moves deftly to the side. He sweeps Obi-Wan up as he goes and sets him down behind a tree while the man is cursing and swinging his hatchet blindly in the place where they were.

Obi-Wan understands implicitly that he is to remain silent. Qui-Gon smothers his force signature with his own before walking with as soft of feet as he can manage several paces way. Here, he again turns on the light.

The hatchet man leaps in terror and whips around. Qui-Gon crinkles his eyes in the corner and waves at him. There is no hesitation. The man surges forward. The light goes out.

Qui-Gon steps aside and watches the dark shape struggle around until the blade of the hatchet manages to get caught in the trunk of a tree. The man starts hacking away at the thing—thwack, thwack, thwack—before realizing that this is not a person. Again, he turns. This time, Qui-Gon steps in close. So close that the clouds of their breath would become one if Qui-Gon was not holding his.

On goes the light.

The man’s eyes explode into wide, watery marbles.

It is too late for him. He’s backed himself right into a tree and now before his face hums a blazing sword of energy. The heat it puts off is enough to inspire stillness.

“Not a witch,” Qui-Gon says. “A jedi.”

“Fuck you,” the man stammers. “Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.”

“Grief makes us do terrible things,” Qui-Gon says. “It may cause us to believe that the suffering of one might be lessened if another suffers more. Does your daughter know what you’ve done in her name?”

The man gives an attempt at a struggle, then realizes that the scent of burning hair is coming from the fine hairs on the side of his neck.

“Careful,” Qui-Gon says. “Did you follow us?”

“Die.”

“Answer the question.”

“Lured you out like a bunch of rats,” the man says.

Mmm, Qui-Gon doubts that. Regardless, he’s getting bored of this guy. He brings the saber close enough that the man has to lift his chin.

“Haven’t you ever heard?” he whispers. “The number one rule of hunting a jedi child is to make sure the master is dead first.”

The man’s throat heaves under the saber. He’s terrified out of his mind, and furious about it. Qui-Gon holds him there to give him a chance to think, then steps back. He does not sheath the blade.

“Go,” he orders.

The man’s hands are trembling. He wants more than anything to lift that hatchet. Qui-Gon sends a blaze of force energy through his saber so that it crackles and sparks.

“I will not say it again,” Qui-Gon says. “This is your final opportunity. Go.”

The man flinches, then, like a dog, slowly begins to turn around. He keeps his eyes locked on Qui-Gon’s face with every step back into the woods. Into the darkness.

After two long minutes, Qui-Gon straightens his back and goes to find his padawan where he left him.

Obi-Wan is sitting at the base of the tree with his hands over his ears and his forehead buried in his knees. Qui-Gon kneels down and starts to break the knot. Within seconds, there are arms around his neck. In the dark, he holds his padawan, rocking back and forth until he can no longer feel the thud of Obi-Wan’s heart through two layers of winter robes.

Only then does he pull back and rise to his feet.

He offers his hand. Obi-Wan takes it.

And together they re-enter the woods.

Chapter Text

This adventure is no longer a fun one. Obi-Wan is flighty and paranoid. His grip clenches and flexes in Qui-Gon’s own until they reach the hut foundation where the clean shoe is still located. This time, however, it is sitting neatly on the crux between the two foundation beams. Sitting there like it walked itself out of the bushes and thought a balance game might be a refreshing change of pace. Obi-Wan refuses to go near it.

“Someone’s been here,” he murmurs.

Indeed, someone has. Or something. There are still no force signatures in the area, even though Qui-Gon’s neck has not ceased prickling.

“Come, you,” he says down to Obi-Wan. “This is enough for tonight.”

The cottage is cold when they arrive. Qui-Gon puts Obi-Wan in bed before starting a fire. Obi-Wan takes off his winter robes under the covers and folds them into a neat rectangle to lay on the corner of the mattress. He lays his head down on one of the two pillows. His hair is so long now that it fans out in a mess around his head, obscuring his braid and forehead.

“That was frightening,” Qui-Gon tells him. “I think I have a better understanding of all this talk about ghost hunting.”

“Not a ghost,” Obi-Wan says in a miniscule voice.

“No, he was not a ghost. He was very real.”

Obi-Wan shuffles deeper into the pillow and duvet. He isn’t talking much, even to Qui-Gon.

That’s not a good sign.

“I will not let him harm you,” Qui-Gon assures him.

The boy turns away and burrows.

“Kay,” he says so softly Qui-Gon almost doesn’t hear him over the popping of the fire.

Obi-Wan becomes glue the next day. He has no interest in battling Nessie for the right to release the sheep. He attaches himself to Qui-Gon’s hip and trips him all the way out to check on the hens. The cow moans, and he sprints for cover in the covered field of crops.

Qui-Gon has to crouch between cabbages and turnips to convince him that all is okay.

This is familiar. It is like the early days of his return from war.

It extends to breakfast, which Obi-Wan is wary of eating. And then to work. And to every person who passes the estate.

Qui-Gon swallows his sighs and tells himself on a loop that recovery is not linear and, at every turn so far, the adults in Obi-Wan’s life persist in restraining him, threatening him, and showing him time and time again that generosity and sympathy is ephemeral. Qui-Gon has to take him inside for two meditation sessions in the morning alone to halt an enormous, delayed panic attack in its steps.

He decides to write the day off and introduces his padawan to holodramas from his own youth. It is cold outside anyways. And raining now.

There is no better way to pass the time.

The next morning is better, although in the time that it took Obi-Wan to re-center himself, the town has somehow learned of what happened in the woods. Hami-Son is waiting when Qui-Gon opens the cottage door and lets Obi-Wan out to go argue with the dog. The man’s cheeks are stained the color of plum flesh. Blotchy and threatening to turn purple at any second.

Qui-Gon wraps a scarf from the Temple around his neck and goes out to greet him.

He is still feet away when Hami-Son starts demanding to know what he was thinking.

“This is everything we have been trying to avoid,” he says.

“The boy is safe,” Qui-Gon tells him. “If you know who threatens him, why do you not report him to the authorities?”

“That isn’t how things are done around here,” Hami-Son says.

“Is it? I suppose you sent your boys to tip his cows as retribution?” Qui-Gon asks.

The Kenobi patriarch does not rise to the challenge.

“You brought my son here to choose to stay, but you are doing everything in your power to convince him to stay at your side,” he says.

“The boy is unharmed,” Qui-Gon repeats. “And it is not my power which convinces him to remain where he is. It is Coan-Cannoch’s. Your community has more power than I could ever hope to, to sway the boy’s stance on his circumstances here. You blame me because I am here to be blamed.”

“We cannot allow Obi-Wan to remain in your custody.”

“So that he can be closer to the man who wishes to kill him?”

“He is safe with his family.”

“Yes, because that worked so well the first time,” Qui-Gon says.

The bridge he has built is burning. He can’t bring himself to care. He is through with fathers. He’s lost one padawan to them, and he’s not going to lose another.

“There is another body in the woods,” Qui-Gon says outright. “We did not find it, but the signs are all there. A city-dweller most likely. If anyone comes looking, you can tell them what you now know. But if you insist on taking the boy, then I will insist to the Jedi Council that Obi-Wan be allowed to make his decision on a shortened timeline. I have been nothing but respectful to you and your family, Master Weaver. However, my duty as master demands that I place the child’s life and welfare before my own. And I will admit that I have thus far failed in that, but I am not a person who carries on failing once I have seen the error of my ways.”

Hami-Son purses his lips.

“I will contact the SSCHP to let them know you will be departing early,” he says.

“Then I will be contacting the Jedi Council,” Qui-Gon counters. “It has been an honor to make your acquaintance.”

“Going home?” Obi-Wan asks him as Qui-Gon brings out the packs once more.

“Are you still frightened, O’Ben?”

Obi-Wan curls into himself. This is not fear. This is shame.

“It is alright to be frightened, small one,” Qui-Gon soothes him.

Obi-Wan doesn’t answer him for several long minutes of packing.

“Da was here,” he finally says in a small voice.           

“He is quite upset,” Qui-Gon tells him. “He believes that I put you in danger last night. He also believes that it is high time that I move on from this place. It seems that I have caused more trouble than the people here can tolerate.”

Obi-Wan stands as he stands.

“Just you?” he asks.

There is note of dread in the question.

“Obi-Wan,” Qui-Gon says. “This is your last chance to be with your family. They love you dearly. They would do anything to secure your happiness.”

“Except give me away again.”

Qui-Gon falls quiet. It is the most words Obi-Wan has said all morning, and he is getting bolder. Obi-Wan lowers his face and rubs the back of two fingers against his eye, and then against his nose, trying to fend off a sniffle.

“’Are you sure I’m not ungrateful?” he garbles.

“No.” Qui-Gon drops the datapad and canteen in his hands to gather Obi-Wan’s face in his palms. “You are not ungrateful.”

“I can’t,” Obi-Wan hiccups. “I can’t love them—?”

“Shhh.”

“Am I broken?”

“No, you are not.”

Obi-Wan crosses his arms over his chest.

“Why can’t I do anything right?” he whispers.

Qui-Gon swallows and it makes his throat click.

“You are not broken,” he says. “The world around you is. But all hope is not lost because of vast unkindness.”

“The Force is the only thing that ever stays,” Obi-Wan says. “But no matter how hard I try follow it, it just keeps hurting. What am I doing wrong?”

Qui-Gon’s well of answers has finally run dry. He does not know why Obi-Wan’s fate seems to be tragedy upon tragedy. He does not know how long it will last or if it will ever cease being so.

All he knows is that there is only one place that Obi-Wan will be safe.

“I can’t fix this,” he tells Obi-Wan.

“Then what do we do?” Obi-Wan asks.

“We ask for help,” Qui-Gon tells him.

Shaak Ti arrives to Coan-Connach in her Council robes with Plo at her side. Qui-Gon feels their arrival before they reach the cottage and stands to dress himself to match. The cottage is lived in. It is built. The crops are not yet full-grown, but they are growing. There are sheep. A dog. A cow. Hens. All have shelter.

Obi-Wan had not spoken at all the previous day, not even when Lak-Lan arrived that evening to take him to the homestead. Qui-Gon agreed to a final night. One more before handing the situation over to those with greater authority over it.

He exits the cottage with his pack on his back and Obi-Wan’s slung over his shoulder. He waits outside in front of the stone wall for nearly half an hour before he sees Shaak’s tall montrals in the distance. He waits even longer, with an ever-closing throat, until her boots are directly across from his own.

“Qui,” Shaak says in a voice full of pity. She offers a hand down which he accepts. Plo, the newest member of the Council, offers him another, which, for the hell of it, he also takes.

His crèchemates pull him up to his feet.

It feels like it should be symbolic of something.

“Where is he?” Shaak asks.

“With his family,” Qui-Gon says.

“How far is that?” Plo asks, looking around the rolling hills.

“A few miles,” Qui-Gon says. “I am not welcome there.”

“That sounds like you,” Shaak says. “It’s been a long time since I was here last. Master Tvyokka was with us then.”

A moment is given for the departed. Plo remains admirably in control of his feelings. If only Qui-Gon could be so graceful now.

“Come with us. You can stand outside,” Shaak says. “Obi-Wan will want to see you if he decides to return home.”

“I worry there is no home that will be gentle enough for him to ever find peace in,” Qui-Gon says.

Shaak and Plo tip their heads at him in opposite directions.

“Grown much, our brother has,” Plo stage-whispers to Shaak.

“Must you?” Qui-Gon snaps at him.

“Yes.”

“I should have dropped you off that tower when we were children.”

“But you didn’t,” Plo says brightly.

Qui-Gon gives him a look that he hopes conveys the sentiment of ‘never say never.’

Qui-Gon stays out in the lane in front of the Kenobis’ homestead as Shaak and Plo push open the shop door and step inside. He thinks he hears a bit of a yelp which he pretends is Obi-Wan catching sight of his most beloved finder. Beyond that, however, the home and its attached shop are quiet. Even the barn cat is nowhere to be found.

Drops of melting ice drip off the edges of the roof into the narrow tunnels that their predecessors made for them.

Qui-Gon checks the time on his comm unit and finds that twenty minutes have passed.

Then thirty.

Then an hour.

Finally, the door of the shop opens, and Qui-Gon’s heart sinks.

Plo exits. He comes to stand in the lane next to Qui-Gon.

“So?” Qui-Gon asks him.

“I see now why Master Yoda said this was a bad idea,” Plo says.

Ah.

“We overestimated the ability of the family to allow the child to lead the decision.”

“They prioritize the community over the individual,” Qui-Gon says.

“As do we,” Plo points out. “With notable differences. But with the same goal in sight.”

Qui-Gon holds in a sigh.

“Would you like assistance in releasing your sorrow into the Force?” Plo asks. “We will be here some time more.”

Yeah, why not?

Meditation is like sinking into an ocean where one needs not worry about breathing. There is no pressure, only growing darkness. It starts with awareness and ends with a profound, vast connection to all that grows, pulses, and holds steady. Time moves as it wishes to move.

And with its winds are swept the sorrow, the worry, the anxiety and helplessness. Qui-Gon has no palms or fingers to cup together in the Force, but the relief of emptiness fills them anyways, until they are pouring over with the stuff.

The meditation breaks with the tinkle of a bell and a cry.

Consciousness does not flood back so much as it explodes back into existence.

Qui-Gon jerks and is assaulted by pressure around his waist. Relief of another variety seizes him by the throat. His hands move on their own; one to cup Obi-Wan’s head and the other to press into his back.

“Padawan,” he greets.

“Master,” Obi-Wan says, muffled by layers of robes.

“Are you ready to go home?” Qui-Gon asks him.

He looks down and smiles as Obi-Wan wriggles himself enough out of the robes to return his gaze.

“Not before Master Ti finds the body,” he says.

Plo becomes a piece of chalk.

“The what?” he says.

“Oh? Did I not tell you?” Qui-Gon says.

Shaak finds their body. It is only a few yards away from the white-soled shoe from the night before.

It’s a young man. More of his belongings are scattered throughout the area. A half-filled bag of items has been wrenched open and dug through a ways away by a frozen creek. Shaak is not happy about finding any of it; while Plo comm law enforcement, she sweeps Obi-Wan up like a baby and refuses to put him down until they are at least a mile away from the site. Nelwin law enforcement does a double take when they pass by the departing squad, apparently amazed and alarmed that the number of jedi in the area has doubled.

Qui-Gon stops their group before they climb into a cart to head west to the transit station. He needs to stop by the inn.

There is a bevy of gagging in the distance, coming from the woods.

Fraya throws her handful of dishes back into the sink when Qui-Gon knocks on the inn’s counter.

“YOU,” she says. “You’re leaving?”

“We came to say goodbye,” Qui-Gon says.

“Both of you?”

Obi-Wan pops out of the front of his robes and then hides again. Fraya’s eyebrows rocket up her forehead.

“Both of you,” she confirms for herself. “The family must be devastated.”

“It is best for all of them,” Shaak intervenes.

Fraya screams and grabs the nearest bottle of the counter. Qui-Gon has to reach across and steady her hands.

“Another jedi,” he explains hurriedly. “Both of them.”

Plo wiggles his talons by the door.

“Crèchemates—childhood friends of mine,” Qui-Gon says. “Now councilmembers.”

“Council? Members?” Fraya asks.

“Very important,” Qui-Gon says. “Stabbing is considered treason.”

“Oh,” Fraya says. She giggles nervously and puts the bottle haphazardly back on the counter. “Nice to meet you? Will you, uh, be having a drink?”

“No,” Plo says by the door.

“Just saying good bye. Thank you for your kindness, Fraya. I wish we could have done more,” Qui-Gon says.

Fraya makes a breathy scoff and a dismissive gesture with her hand.

“We’ll figure it out,” she says. “Thanks for, uh. I’m going to cry.”

Qui-Gon smiles.

“We’re on a timeline, Master Jinn,” Plo reminds them.

“Best of luck, Fraya. You know where to find us if you’re even in need,” he says. “O’Ben. Say good bye.”

“BYE.”

—and maybe try not to be so happy about it.

Home is an apartment full of light and plants, where the furniture does not smell perpetually of smoke and getting out of bed is not a race against fading warmth. Qui-Gon lays in bed for an extra ten or so minutes just to appreciate the feeling of a non-straw mattress.

Reliable electricity is a secondary marvel. The kettle that boils in less than a minute is a third.

A cup of tea unpolluted by caf or the suggestion thereof the fourth.

Obi-Wan does not emerge from his room for another fifteen or so minutes. He’s gotten used to rising with the sun, and the sun does not rise quickly during winter on Stewjon. When he does manage to wrench himself from sleep, he groggily bumps into every corner available on his way to the refresher.

Qui-Gon hears him cursing in there as well. He knows the feeling. He kicked his toes directly into the sink’s base only ten minutes ago.

While the boy brushes his teeth, Qui-Gon digs through his refrigeration-freezing unit and finds a box of frozen, prepared hot-cakes that were one of the two things he could convince Obi-Wan to reliably eat when he first came home from Melida/Daan.

He sets it out on the counter.

When Obi-Wan emerges from the refresher, he notices it, snags it, and carries it back into the freezer.

“Miss rice,” he tells Qui-Gon, still only half awake.

Qui-Gon almost stops mid-swallow in surprise. They haven’t been home in four months. Does he even have rice?

He definitely doesn’t have rice. Only 27 varieties of pickles and a pint of frozen cream.

“Shall we journey down to the refectory?” he asks.

Obi-Wan blinks blearily.

“Are they gonna be open?” he asks.

He still speaks in the accent he learned from his family. Qui-Gon is sure that his friends are going to circle him like confused puppies.

“I’m sure they will be,” Qui-Gon says. “Shoes.”

They both start putting on boots before realizing that they can just wear Temple shoes. It is a relief. Obi-Wan puts his on and immediately goes sliding down the hall until they reach the elevator doors. These ding open and reveal, of all people, Rael.

He looks like someone just blew out the air of a bellows in his face and his hair got stuck that way.

“Well, lookie-here,” he drawls as Qui-Gon shoos Obi-Wan into the small space with this new person. “Look what the cat dragged in. Look who’s finally joining us today. Sleeping beauty herself. The bee’s knees. The frog to her majesty’s princess—”

“Good morning, Rael.”

“I’m not done. Don’t interrupt me, I’ve got a memory like a sieve. Now look what you’ve done. All my idioms all over this newly mopped floor.”

“Obi-Wan, this is my padawan-brother.”

Rael drops his pad right onto the floor of the elevator and just stares at it. Obi-Wan looks up at Qui-Gon in concern.

“He’s always like this,” Qui-Gon tells him. “Rael, we were just on—”

“Stewjon, yes I heard. Master lamented for six thousand years,” Rael says, still bemoaning his pad in quiet despair. “Heard there was a murder?”

“Did you?” Qui-Gon asks.

“I did,” Rael says as the elevator comes to a stop. “Stewjoni senator’s daughter, it turns out.”

Oh.

Well. That is no longer Qui-Gon’s problem.

“Good to see you, brother,” he says. “We are in pursuit of rice.” 

Obi-Wan is the first of his friend group to claim one of the padawan tables. He sets his bowl of rice, bowl of stewed meat, and the mandatory pickled greens plate out carefully in a neat arrangement. By the time he’s let go of his last dish, he is besieged by younglings. His friends bury him beneath layers of affection. Little Bant is the last to arrive; she makes up for her tardiness by letting loose a scream and sprinting for the table.

Where Bant is, Tahl follows.

Qui-Gon builds a spoonful of food and waits until fingers land on his shoulder. Tracing. Tracing.

“The stars of my sky,” he greets.

“The disturbance in my archive,” Tahl says with a smile in her tone. “Which side?”

“Whichever pleases you,” Qui-Gon says. He takes her tray and allows her to settle in with her left hip pressed against his right one. “Soup at one o’clock, meat at six, veg at eight,” he tells her.

Her warmth melds itself to his side. An arm drapes around his back.

“I missed you, too,” he says.

“Where is your padawan? Bant has missed him so thoroughly, I thought she would be sick.”

“If I had to guess, I would say under the pressure of five bodies,” Qui-Gon says, looking over to watch the kids playing a game of ‘sandwich’, which has always and will always involve squashing the person at the center of the group as hard as possible from both sides.

Tahl laughs.

He missed her laugh so much.

“Your hair smells like an ashtray.”

He will wash it.

“Is this your hand? Or a tree?”

He will soften them.

“Did you meet anyone good?”

“Have you ever been grateful to be born in a city?” Qui-Gon asks.

Tahl’s lips peak into a puzzled pout.

“Yes?” she says. “Why do you ask?”

“I thought I could help them,” Qui-Gon says, “But all I ended up doing was building a house and inheriting other peoples’ lost sheep.”

“Ah.”

“The issues the people of Coan-Connach are experiencing are those which investment and infrastructure might be able to address. Perhaps I should have just ruined the road from the town to the transit station. The parish council may have been forced to put in a tram.”

Tahl chuckles as she dips her spoon into her bowl of stewed meat.

“What was your solution instead?” she asks.

“Tried to make a haunted forest.”

“Oooh. For tourism?”

“For tourism?”

“Did it work?”

“No, the place was already haunted.”

“Bummer,” Tahl says. “What else did you do?”

“Planted turnips,” Qui-Gon says.

“You hate turnips.”

“I hate turnips.”

Tahl’s smile is brighter than any snow that could have fallen on the priest’s cottage in Coan-Connach. Qui-Gon almost wishes he loved her the way that the Kenobis love their youngest son, but wisdom has come to him from the mouths of babes.

He loves her enough that when he sees this sunlit smile, his heart tells him that, to keep it glowing like that falling star in the forest, he would do anything.

Even letting her go.