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It has been a week since his Master’s death when Obi-Wan notices the plants are dying too.
Their quarters have always been filled with them. What Obi-Wan lacked in sensitivity to the Living Force, as he was so often reminded, his Master compensated tenfold by surrounding them with vegetation. Qui-Gon was always the one to water them, of course—there had been a time when Obi-Wan had been allowed to help, but after he drowned a rare bioluminescent orchid from Yavin 4, he and Qui-Gon had mutually decided it was best he keep his distance.
But now there is no Qui-Gon—there is just Obi-Wan, and the boy, and a room full of wilting plants. And unless he does something about it, soon enough it will be a room full of molding leaves.
He can’t take care of them all. He already has to care for the boy—another thing Qui-Gon has left behind. But then there is the fact that every day, when he gets home from the training salles or the archives or the refractory, there they are. So alive and so unbearably Qui-Gon, that he can’t stand to look at them.
So he doesn’t. That afternoon, when he comes back to their quarters alone, he rips the first hanging pot from its hook and banishes it from sight.
The room is nearly barren when Anakin returns.
“What are you doing?”
Obi-Wan is crouched beneath the kitchen counter, rescuing some spilt soil from the floor, and nearly bangs his head on the marble. The boy has a habit of appearing soundlessly, then announcing his presence so brusquely it startles even a Jedi. Well, perhaps startles a Jedi who is rather distracted.
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan says. He is breathless, but doesn’t know why. “You’re home already—I thought you had class with Master Sinube until—”
“It ended early. What’s with all the green stuff in the hall?”
“The plants?” Obi-Wan fixates on the Rodian poola blossom in its pot, lifting it from the floor. “They’ve served their purpose here. I’m moving them on. Anakin, if I comm Master Sinube to check that class really did end early, will he tell me—”
But Anakin isn’t anywhere close to listening.
“You—” he stammers. “Those were Qui-Gon’s.”
Obi-Wan swallows the tightness in his throat as he answers. “Yes. They were.” His voice catches on the past tense, and he turns away so Anakin can’t see him steady himself. “And now Qui-Gon is gone, so they must go too.”
He starts again for the door, carrying the poola blossom with him.
But then Anakin is there, blocking his path.
“You can’t do that,” he says. “They’re not yours to get rid of.”
Obi-Wan sighs. “Now, they are. Please, Padawan—let me through—”
“No. Put it back.”
“Anakin—”
But then Anakin’s hands are on the pot, pulling it forward and nearly ripping it from his grip, and Obi-Wan is pulling back. Anakin is yelling words Obi-Wan can barely register, and the back and forth and back and forth feels endless until the friction is too much and it flies, impossibly slowly, from both of their hands.
The pot shatters on the ground. Soil spewing everywhere.
He doesn’t know when Anakin started crying. Obi-Wan is breathing heavily, almost as though he might too, but he swallows it down. He knows he should do something—there must be words, something he can say to comfort the boy. To fix this. Certainly that’s what a Master does. What a Master is supposed to do.
Instead, he starts across the kitchen. Pulls the dustpan and brush from the little cupboard, and returns to where the dirt and terracotta shards speckle the floor. He kneels down.
Together, they sweep the soil into a pile and gather up the broken pieces.
The floor is nearly clear again when Anakin speaks. “I just wanted to keep them. Like…it would be keeping him here, too.”
Obi-Wan picks up the last of the fragments and deposits them in the bag. “To be Jedi, we must learn to let go.”
If Anakin notices the word we instead of you , he doesn’t mention it. “Master Sinube says that applies more to people. Outcomes, the future and stuff. Not plants .”
“Ah, so you did go to class today,” Obi-Wan says, trying for a lightness he can’t quite achieve. “And Padawan…you know what I was talking about.”
“Why can’t we just—”
“Because, Anakin, I can’t take care of them all! I don’t—I don’t even know how.”
The admission is sharp, and accidental. And he hopes, desperately, that Anakin doesn’t realize it. That he wasn’t just talking about the plants.
Obi-Wan stands, picking up the dustpan and bag of spilt soil as he goes. He faces Anakin, but beyond him he faces their quarters, now dark and barren. Devoid of the greenery that had filled them once, and the life.
When it comes now, Anakin’s voice is softer, thoughtful. “I’d never seen that much green before. Not in my whole life.”
And the thought startles Obi-Wan. Because–of course he hadn't. Tatooine is as desolate as their quarters are now, and nothing grows there. Anakin might’ve never seen grass before, or flowers, or trees.
Perhaps he should change that.
The Room of a Thousand Fountains is quiet this time of the day. Most Padawans are busy with their classes, and their Masters are busy teaching them, so the space is still and serene.
But in the Force, it is glowing—the sound of the rushing water, the growth of roots and sprouting seeds, the echo of Jedi who have been here before.
They are sitting beside a waterfall when Anakin asks the question. “Did you come here with him?”
Obi-Wan hesitates, then nods. “Yes.”
Anakin looks thoughtful. “I can feel him. He liked it here, didn’t he?”
This time, Obi-Wan can’t manage the words. He just nods.
In the end, this is where they plant them all—every shrub and flower and seedling of Qui-Gon’s. They bring them to the Room of a Thousand Fountains and dig, and bury, and water, until their garden is planted anew.
Well, not all of them.
There is one, with its glued-together pot and fresh soil, that they keep, returning it to its spot by the window of their quarters. And so it sits, in the days and weeks and years that follow–when Obi-Wan helps Anakin learn to meditate, to swim, to read. When Anakin grows, and Obi-Wan beside him, into the Jedi they are meant to be. The blossom is there, flourishing through every growing pain.
Almost as if it is watching.
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In the scorching sunlight of Tatooine, Obi-Wan kneels in the dirt.
Though dirt is, perhaps, too generous a term—the sand is too coarse and dry to really be considered soil. The Mos Espa merchant had laughed when he bought the seeds at all. Even more so when he’d explained his attempts to garden, to save himself some money by growing food of his own.
Still, he couldn’t help his disappointment when they all died.
It is nearly sunset, and Obi-Wan pushes to his feet. His knees ache as he goes. And in the shadow of his lonely hut, the suns’ pink light on the sand, Obi-Wan stares down at death and decay until, at last, he forces himself to turn away. Nothing grows on Tatooine—this, he should have known.
Except for a boy who is, at his core, two people Obi-Wan loved. Two people who are gone.
When night falls, he leaves the hut again to start a fire, to cook up the last of the meat he’d gotten from town. The flame starts small, then flickers against the darkness. Mixing with the moonlight in flashes of red and blue, red and blue.
And it is in this glow of light that he finds it—there, among his dead and rotting garden. One thing that isn’t quite dead. He crouches down to find a tiny stem that sneaks up from the cracks in the ground, its white flowers opening in the dark—a night bloomer.
A moonflower.
Obi-Wan stands. From here, he can see across the dunes and mesas of the Dune Sea, the distant flicker of light on the horizon. He cannot see the Lars Homestead, but although it’s miles off, he can sense the boy there. Growing, even in the darkness. Even in this land of cracked and barren ground.
Obi-Wan closes his eyes and lets it fill him—the fire’s warmth, the Force, the boy. And waits in the silence of growing things.