Chapter Text
Nothing about that day suggested there would be a storm. There were hardly any clouds to begin with. The sun blazed high and golden in a blue sky, and below the sky was the sea, equally blue and sloshing lazily in the heat of the early morning. Obi-Wan let the tide wash him ashore.
Deception Bay, they called the beach. Local myths claimed the waves had a habit of luring you onto the rocks only to abandon you mischievously, leaving you dry and stranded as soon as the tide turned. Just the typical ghost stories told by the old folk to deter the young from approaching the beaches. If there had been any ghosts, they would have left something exciting behind, bones and blood maybe, and ominous black marks, instead of the worthless piles of flotsam that littered the sand.
Obi-Wan tightened the kelp bag on his back and braced his arms. With a few swift, powerful whips of his tail, he dragged his body up the beach. The silvery white sand stuck to his skin and some of the tiny grains snuck into the spaces between his tail scales. The beach was quiet. A gentle breeze rustled the palm trees and drove lone clouds like great ships across the horizon. The air smelled of decay.
Just above the swash zone, Obi-Wan came upon his first can. From the looks of it, it must have been lost recently, still free of rust and age. Its metal twinkled in the sun, red like Corallium, highlighting the clear yellow lines of some strange, squiggly letters Obi-Wan could not read. The little ring on the tab was still attached. Carefully, he picked up the can, checked if any crabs or worms hid inside, and tucked it into his kelp bag.
“Too much for one day, all this is,” a voice grumbled behind him.
Obi-Wan rolled onto his side to face Yoda. The sea turtle trudged up the beach on his hind legs, back bent under the weight of his pearly carapace. He had picked up a gnarled piece of driftwood and used it as a walking stick. With a sour face, he hooked the tip of his stick into the handle of a half-buried plastic bag and lifted it from the sand.
“Probably,” Obi-Wan agreed. Most of the trash gathered between the rocks, swept in by the morning and evening tides. In these areas, the beach glittered with a thick carpet of plastic that covered everything. There were bottles in every color, big and small, scattering the morning light, and there were sparkling metal cans and bags and strange objects Obi-Wan didn’t have a name for. “Well, every sea was once a raindrop, as the saying goes,” he said. “It always seems like an insurmountable task at first. I’ll start today and come back tomorrow, as always.”
“Careful you must be, so not hurt yourself you will.” Yoda handed him the filthy bag dangling from his stick, as if the piece of garbage was a venomous jellyfish he was scared to touch with his fingers.
Obi-Wan stuffed the bag into his kelp sack next to the can. “I’ll promise to be careful. Why don’t you sit down on the rocks and get some sun, Master Yoda? You look tired.”
“Tired and sad I am, to see all this,” Yoda said. “Good beach for nesting this once was. Full of crabs and worms and oysters. Full of baby turtles. Too hot the sand is now. Makes for too many females.”
“Better than too many males, I’d think. I’m sure there’s a bright side to it, too.”
“Interesting perspective you have to offer, young Obi-Wan. Lucky I am to be already old in these confusing times.” Yoda cackled.
“Lucky indeed.” Obi-Wan scooped up the top layer of plastic, revealing a second layer of smaller scraps and pieces of broken plastic, and underneath, there were even more plastic fragments, so tiny that he could barely pick them up with his sand-covered fingers. “Could this be the beach you hatched on?”
“Hmm.” Yoda rubbed his chin. “Not sure I am. Different everything looked decades ago.” He shook his balding head and limped over to a flat beach rock where he settled. Obi-Wan continued his work. He cleared the patch of sand he could reach with his hands, then jammed his forearms into the sand and slapped his tail hard, crawling a little farther up the beach. The sun beat hotly on his back, drying salt and sand on his skin. Before he had set out that morning, Mace had rubbed his back and arms with a shimmering pigment he had extracted from his corals, its sea blue color similar to the scales that speckled Obi-Wan’s tail. One hour, Mace had warned him, then you’ll want to be back in the water. Don’t burn your skin again.
It was indeed a good day to burn one’s skin, as the only clouds clustered low over the sea. After an hour of crawling across the soft, yielding sand, every muscle in Obi-Wan’s upper body ached. With a heavy sigh, he flopped onto his back and stretched his arms to the sides. Although he had been careful to keep his pectoral fins neatly folded and tucked to his body, they were rolled in sand, so he fanned them out and shook them gently. The large fins spread as wide as his arms and, under the harsh light of the surface world, looked drab, like two withered palm leaves.
The heat of the ground seeped into his muscles. He idly stared at the clean strip of sand next to him. Like the traces of a giant beach worm, the tracks his body had scraped into the sand meandered between the water’s edge and the rocks. Under a half-rotten paper bowl, he had found a small, rectangular piece of aluminum, as long and wide as his thumb. One side shone silver, but the other sparkled a green as rich as the emerald shell of a turban snail. He knew it was a foil wrapper for some kind of food. Trash, nothing more. And yet he couldn’t bring himself to stuff it into his bag with the other junk. It was beautiful. Emerald green and silver. His favorite colors. His heart clenched.
A low clucking jerked him from his thoughts. Yoda wiggled his stick, gesturing toward the tree line. Muffled, high-pitched sounds came from between the palms.
The calls of land-dwellers!
One hand still clutched around the silver-green piece of aluminum, Obi-Wan grabbed his full kelp bag and crawled toward Yoda behind the rocks. He curled up, the bag of stinking trash pressed to his pounding heart.
Voices. They were coming down the beach. Their seagull-like cries echoed off the rocks. It was disorienting. He didn’t know how close they were, if they were coming closer. The stench of hot plastic and rotten fish that rose from the kelp bag made him gag, and he pushed his tongue against his teeth to stifle his sounds.
Silence. What was going on? Obi-Wan peeked around the rock. He caught a brief glimpse of them, four land-dwellers, wading through the trash on their spindly hind limbs—before Yoda yanked at his hair.
Obi-Wan hissed and ducked back behind the rock. “What now? They’ll see us!”
“Your tracks they will notice,” Yoda said. “All over the beach, you have been rolling. Careless you have been, Obi-Wan.”
“I’ve never seen land-dwellers in this area, only their trash.” Obi-Wan pressed his twitching tail flat to the ground in an effort to keep it still.
“Maybe scientists they are, hmm,” Yoda reasoned. “Catch us they will. Preserve us and stuff us they will and make your blue scales into jewelry. Seen it happen to many of my old friends I have!”
“Thank you for your words of encouragement.” Obi-Wan eyed the distance down to the water. He was quite skilled at moving around on land, but if the land-dwellers so much as turned their heads in his direction ... Why had he ventured so far up the beach? “Is there nothing you can do, Master Yoda?” he whispered.
“In the sand, I can bury,” the old sea turtle suggested. “Survive I will, and continue to tell the tragic story of your death I may. As a warning for generations to come, hrrm.”
“But—” a strangled cry made Obi-Wan flinch. One of the land-dwellers was close by; they must have noticed his tracks in the sand, must have noticed that this part of the beach was strangely clean and free of trash—
“Faint the contact with the Force is on land,” Yoda whispered. He stared at the sea, eyes half-closed. “My calls, hear them no one will. Alone we are on land. Alone and lost.”
Obi-Wan made himself as small as possible, his cheek pressed against the hot sand. They’re going to see me. The aluminum foil glittered between his fingers, casting flecks of silver-green onto his skin. His family was in danger. Land-dwellers were quite smart. They would quickly deduce that there must be more of his species nearby and would search the waters around the beach. If Obi-Wan could at least send a warning call to his family before he died ...
Another scream, just beyond the rocks: excited, maybe alarmed. They squealed in their strange language. Did they spot his tracks? His heart pounded against his throat. And then he saw it:
Clouds. Thick clouds, massing on the horizon like a giant family of black hunting fish. Light pulsed and strobed in the darkness. A cold, damp wind whipped up the waves, carrying salt and sand on-shore. The sea, now gray and foaming, reared up and rolled up the beach, reaching out its mighty hands to Obi-Wan, urging him to return to the bosom of its depths. The sky had turned a dark green.
A storm.
The land-dwellers shouted at each other. Obi-Wan watched, entranced, how they gestured toward the sky, snapping at each other like a flock of seagulls fighting over a fish. Then, without warning, they lurched around and fled. Their hind legs swung back and forth like elongated flippers, they almost seemed to defy gravity, the way they flew over the beach without losing their balance and falling. The carpet of plastic crunched below each of their long strides.
Obi-Wan waited until they had disappeared among the greenery, then threw his bag over his shoulder. With swift, inelegant flicks of his tail, he slithered toward the water, more tumbling than crawling. The storm hurled grains of sand against his face: they itched and burned on his unprotected skin, and his vision blurred with tears. The surf came at him, wild and boisterous: —come back, dear child, it chanted, —come back into my arms. Obi-Wan threw himself into its embrace. The water closed over his head. Gravity fell from him, easing the heaviness of his muscles away; at last, he could move freely. A few quick kicks of his tail carried him down into the depths, and the muffled roar of the surf grew quiet. Weightless tatters of seaweed and bits of lost plastic drifted around him.
Where the bay merged into the open sea, Obi-Wan paused. He was home. The air of the sky pooled in his lungs, as his mind pooled in the ocean lungs of the Force. He was the sea, and the sea was the Force, and the Force was within him.
Nestled against the warmth of his clenched fist, he still felt the small lump of aluminum. He didn’t dare to look at it. It was probably crumpled into a tiny ball anyway, hopelessly wrinkled for the remainder of its existence.
—Master Yoda? he chanted into infinity. —Where are you?
—Here I am, Obi-Wan, came Yoda’s soft answer, vibrating in the blue that connected everything. Obi-Wan relaxed. They had made it. Yoda could not be far behind, so Obi-Wan stayed where he was, only flicking his tail occasionally to maintain his buoyancy. The Force swirled around him in restless rhythms. The storm raged right above, discharging its lighting into the water, and as the clouds ate away the light, the sea’s brilliant blue turned into a murky green. He didn’t notice Yoda’s small, compact silhouette until the old sea turtle had almost reached him. In the bosom of the Force, he moved with a dexterity that belied his hunched, limping figure on land.
Obi-Wan swam toward him. “That was a close one. I’m sorry I put you in danger.” It was a half-hearted apology and they both knew it. Yoda was the only one Obi-Wan never needed to worry about.
“My choice it was to go with you,” Yoda said. “Trust the Force I do. Die in the sea, I will, not on land. Not as an object of study. Not as a worthless trinket.” The very idea seemed to offend him.
Relieved, Obi-Wan played along. “They wouldn’t dare turn you into a trinket.”
“Small I may look, but resilient I am.”
“Nobody could dispute it.”
“Nearly two hundred years Yoda has survived. The Great Oil Spill I saw, the time of earthquakes, the passage of the first ships. Survive young Obi-Wan, I will as well.” And there was just enough somberness in the last one that Obi-Wan felt the need to avert his eyes. The game was over.
“We were lucky the weather turned so quickly and spooked the land-dwellers,” he said.
Yoda raised his eyes to the surface, where the darkness condensed. “Lucky, hrm,” he repeated. “A good omen dark clouds are not.”
“The storm saved us.” Obi-Wan checked his kelp bag. It was still safely strapped to his back and hadn’t suffered from his hasty flight.
“Restless the Force is,” Yoda muttered to himself.
“It’s just an empty storm, Master. We would already be dead if it hid a Deep One.”
“Empty it is,” Yoda agreed.
“And chilly,” Obi-Wan added. “The storm has dragged up cold layers.” He stared down into the sunless void below his tail. Oh. Some stubborn sand grains still stuck to his skin. With both hands, he rubbed his arms and chest, then shook out his tail fin. The sand dispersed in a silvery cloud, quickly carried away by the icy current.
“The land-dwellers’ trash you want to return?” Yoda asked, eyeing Obi-Wan’s bag.
“I’ll be quick,” Obi-Wan promised. “You need not accompany me.”
“Nonsense.” Yoda floated up to Obi-Wan’s chest and poked his arm. “Accompany you I will. If die you should, material for a eulogy I need.”
Obi-Wan smiled. He closed his eyes and gauged his position. Below him, at the edge of his consciousness, the Force darkened and distorted, repelled by a shroud that no light or thought could pass, and lightless, thoughtless things hid in that darkness. But ahead of him, where sea met shore, its shimmer condensed into a clear, bright band as if the encounter with matter made it glow. South of Deception Bay, the cragged cape of the Watcher jutted into the sea; beyond it, a desolate stretch of no man’s land ducked in its shadow, bordered by land-dweller settlements. Obi-Wan surfaced to drink some air. The ocean still churned restlessly, kicked up by nasty squalls, but the clouds were already dissipating. He sank back down and swam southwest, following the coastline. Yoda never left his side.
After surfacing twice more to breathe, they reached Greenhouse Beach. By now, the heavy clouds had drifted inland. Golden midday light trickled from the sky and made the white sand glisten. Fishing nets dried in the sun and a small, red skiff rocked on the waves lapping against the pier. Obi-Wan eyed the house perched on top of the dunes. He still had not gotten used to the new paint job. Greenhouse Beach—they should probably rename the place. But Grayhouse Beach sounded as dull as the house now looked, its cheerless walls almost blending with the stormy skies.
“Few days, then summer it will be,” Yoda remarked casually.
Obi-Wan, with his face still half in the water, snorted bubbles into the sea. “I’m just here to return the trash.”
“Perhaps keep the trash you should until the next full moon,” Yoda suggested. “Not yet back she is, their youngling. Nowhere to be seen, her strange swimming device is. Empty the bench is. Look, hrm.”
The bench in front of the house was indeed empty, but Obi-Wan ignored Yoda’s suggestion. He would not risk being seen again. Not after all these years, when she might have forgotten. For a young land-dwelling girl, tricking herself into believing she had merely dreamed of the merman was child’s play, quite literally. Time would make her doubt her memories, the mirage explained away by her wild imagination, or by competing images conjured from fairy tales and bedtime stories. But this kind of self-deception only worked on young children, the ones that were already told to subordinate their experiences to what the world around them considered the truth. Adult land-dwellers, Obi-Wan suspected, weren’t particularly inclined to ignore a merman surfacing in the bay right in front of their house. It was dangerous enough for him to frequent an inhabited bay in the first place. For some time after his visits, bad dreams had plagued him: every night, he was caught in blood-drenched nets, hauled onto land and into the house (its walls still green back then) where the old couple dissected him with dry hands. Strangle his throat, prod his fins, rip out his scales, maybe stuff him, as Yoda had said. But nothing happened. They never even tried to contact him. They only picked up their trash, and later Obi-Wan would find his empty kelp bag tied to a pole at the pier. Once they had left a piece of fresh fish for him. He knew it was for him because they had hidden it in a covered bowl on top of his kelp bag. Obi-Wan hadn’t touched it. There had been another piece of fish the next time he had visited, and again the time after that. Again and again. Almost like a plea. And finally, he had accepted. Anakin had been happy about the fish. Personally, Obi-Wan did not care much for fish, but it had been a thoughtful gift and he didn’t like to waste food.
Today there was no fish for him. The house seemed deserted. Obi-Wan drifted over to the pier. He built up speed and, with violent flaps of his tail fin, darted out of the water, throwing the heavy bag up onto the pier.
It was only fair to give the land-dwellers a chance to take care of their trash.
“You’re going to look like a molting crab tomorrow.” Mace sighed.
Obi-Wan craned his neck to glimpse at his back. “And here I thought your blue magic powder would protect me from the sun.”
“It’s not magic.”
“The magic lies with you,” Depa remarked, “although, to me, it seems to be more like a dark curse. I don’t know how you do it. You get a sunburn just by sticking your nose out of the water.”
”I did stick out a bit more than my nose.” Granted, it was a lousy joke, probably why, in response, Obi-Wan only got a forced smile. Embarrassed, he fell into a threadbare story of how he took a sunbath and dozed off on the beach. They never asked him about his alleged obsession with sunbathing. They believed his lies, or if they didn’t, they pretended they did. Depa nodded along with his words, distracted, while she carefully dabbed a seaweed cloth at the algal film on a blue, fan-like coral. She had perfected the art of floating almost motionless in the water, and it only took a few gentle flicks of her striking fin, tipped with long spines, to stay put. After watching her clean the coral in her garden every day, all these hundreds, thousands, millions of small branches overgrown with algal sludge, with neigh infinite patience, Obi-Wan had shyly asked her if she would like to accompany him on his trips to the beaches. But Depa had merely smiled. “Wild sea horses couldn’t drag me up there,” she had said but never explained why. Her nails and fingertips were always stained: sometimes red, sometimes whitish, sometimes yellow. Today they were blue.
“Are those the same corals you ground up for the powder?” Obi-Wan asked. With each touch of Depa’s deft hands, the coral’s little branches trembled and bounced, bending to a point where he feared they might snap. He could hardly watch, but it was not his place to tell Depa to be careful. She had years of experience with the corals and knew them better than anyone, with the exception of possibly Mace. It pained Obi-Wan that they would believe his burns to be nothing more than the self-inflicted result of frivolous sunbathing. He wanted to tell them that his suffering was deliberate: the dryness of his scales after hours in the hot sand, the scar on his thumb where he had cut himself on a sharp can, and the hollowness he had felt when he had buried that dead bird on the beach, its belly full of plastic bits. He wanted to tell them about the hundreds of kelp bags he had filled with trash. But some lesser secrets couldn’t be shared without dragging up the greater ones, both hopelessly entangled like old netting.
“It’s a beautiful blue,” he said.
“Don’t touch them.” Mace gave him a piercing look. “I’ll give you something you can apply on the burned area. It’s best to do it at night before you go to sleep. And try to stay underwater for a few days until your skin has healed. No more basking on the beaches, Obi-Wan. If possible,” he added, but his words held no insistence. Smart as he was, he knew when a fight was already lost.
Obi-Wan nodded, discomfited at the thought that Mace probably thought him a bit stupid. Maybe he should come up with a better story for his frequent sunburns. Mace retrieved a small stone bottle from the shelf he had worked into a bare rock. Pestles and mortars of various sizes lined up next to even more bottles and jugs and a bowl with seaweed gauze. “I’d ask you to use the powder sparingly,” Mace said as he handed Obi-Wan the bottle.
“Are you saying I should only apply it once?”
“I’m saying you should take better care of yourself,” Mace answered. “The specimen from which we obtain this powder is slowly dying, and I don’t want to harvest the remaining ones to heal burns that could have been avoided.”
“Why are they dying?”
“We are still in the process of figuring that out.”
“Is there no hope that they will recover?”
“There’s hope for everything.”
He had a habit of not dwelling on his optimism, which made everything he said seem oddly comforting. Obi-Wan turned the small stone bottle in his hand. “I could help you with the garden while I wait for the burns to heal.”
The silence lasted a beat too long. “I’ll let you know if we need help.” Mace glanced at Depa. “You don’t need to use the same cloth for all of them,” he told her. “If anything thrives, it’s the kelp.”
Depa looked at her blue hands, turned them to inspect her nails, blue as well, and in the shimmering afternoon light, her fingers almost seemed like little branches of coral themselves. “There’s a lot of sludge this year,” she noted.
Yoda was waiting for him at the edge of the gardens. He hovered in front of the small, neglected garden patch where a rainbow of different coral species adorned the rocks: circular corals that glared like angry, orange eyes, and yellow ones that spread like a cluster of sticks, and pink corals that formed organic, brain-like coils. A tuft of white hairs swayed gently in the current, their ends tipped with glowing buds. Next to it, a collection of stringed pearls shimmered in iridescent colors. But lately, more and more bare spots had started to appear on these rocks, and sadly, the coral most affected by the demise was the one that Obi-Wan considered the most beautiful: a small, inconspicuous, green bush. “I’m not touching anything here”, Mace always said. “Just look at this mess. The frogspawn corals were his favorite, now they’re all dead. He can take care of that himself if he ever gets around to coming back to us.” His tone was blunt, but his eyes were sad whenever he looked at the neglected patch.
Obi-Wan swam to Yoda’s side. “Mace gave me something to help with the sunburn.”
“Hm-hm, good.”
“Master, do you think I should stop visiting the beaches?”
“Stop visiting the beaches you think you should?” Yoda parroted back.
Obi-Wan refrained from rolling his eyes. “When will there ever be a day when you don’t answer a question with one of your own?”
“Come will that day, when interested in my answer to your question you are. You are not. Ask about the beaches, you did not. Ask about my opinion, you did not. Think again, Obi-Wan. A completely different question you asked.”
Obi-Wan sighed. “You insist on accompanying me on every trip I take. And I know it's not because you hope to find the beach where you hatched.”
“When old you are like me, little new you look for. Understand you will that more important it can be to preserve what you have.”
“Preserve what you have? You mean the beautiful beaches?”
Yoda stared at the long-forgotten garden patch. Sunlight filtered through the upper layers of water and drew a luminous web on his carapace, a delicate, intertwined pattern of light. Obi-Wan knew the answer. Yoda need not have said anything more, but he spoke anyway. “Lost too many of you I have,” he said. “To the Deep. To the Blue. Young ones always believe that easier loss gets with each time.”
“I wish it were so.” The bare spots were unnerving. Frogspawn used to grow here, and many-branched Acropora species that looked like trees, and the bright red, thorny ones Obi-Wan couldn’t even remember the name of. Now they were gone, all of them. He averted his eyes. Out there was the vast, silent ocean. Nothing but miles and miles of blue. “Qui-Gon is not lost, Master Yoda. Don’t give up on him. He will come back to you, to both of us. He has always been a free spirit, but even for him, the blue solitude must one day be too much.”
“It might,” Yoda said. “Not much difference it makes. What is lost, never stopped existing it has. Still there, it is, just lost. Return it might, but different it will be from what you have known. Recognize it you might not. A wide spectrum, existence is.”
Obi-Wan was silent. He felt a familiar annoyance rising inside him, but he knew it had little to do with Yoda and his words. In his hand, he still held the small piece of foil wrapper he had found on the beach this morning. Underwater, its emerald green side was all wrong; it looked pale, lifeless, lacking the deep vibrancy it exuded in air, and Obi-Wan’s chest squeezed at the sight, as if something inside was strangling him. Absently, he scratched at the old red scar that bisected his palm. “I didn’t tell Mace about the land-dwellers. Do you think I should have?”
Yoda only gave him a mischievous smile.
This time, Obi-Wan did not suppress the urge to roll his eyes. “I don’t want him to worry. You and I have been spotting the tracks of land-dwellers on these beaches for years. It was only a matter of time before we would see them in the wild. But that doesn’t mean things have changed. If I told Mace, it would only lead to the question if we should leave the islands.”
“And want to leave, you do not.”
“That’s not the point,” Obi-Wan deflected. “As things are now, I’d consider it a rash decision.”
“Never seen them so close to our Stingray Isles we have.”
“You’ve seen how careful I am—I’m sure they haven’t noticed me. And even if they did, they may keep it a secret. Like the ones on Greenhouse Beach.”
“Yes,” Yoda agreed. “But one day, the wrong ones will notice you. Keep the secret, they will not. Always known you have, Obi-Wan. Risk it you still do.”
“And yet you have never told me to stop.”
“And never tell you, I will.” He nodded, heavy-lidded eyes fixed on the play of colors the dancing rays and the corals created together. “If go to the beaches you need to, go with you I will. If catch you they should, catch both of us they will. Leave your side, I will not, young Obi-Wan.”
Obi-Wan smiled. “Thank you for your trust, Master Yoda.”
It was a moment when the bond between them grew stronger, and Obi-Wan would have liked to seal it with an exchange of smiles. But Yoda did not look at him. He was still staring at the neglected garden, his white-haired head bowed slightly.
When Qui-Gon was young, the children played in the shallow reef waters around White Beach Island, a few kilometers from the coasts of the mainland, where the sea only ever reached a depth of twenty meters. Even when they were lying on their backs at the deepest point of the seabed, staring up at the rippling speck of a distant sun, the colors were undimmed. Violets and reds were still clearly visible, and coral and fish and the children’s tails shone with the full spectrum of colors. They would play all day, free from their parents’ supervision, as the only harm that might come to them was the occasional scratch they got from scraping a rock or a coral. There were no killer sharks in these waters, no downwelling currents that dragged you into the darkness, and there was no trash. It was the perfect playground.
At least that’s what Qui-Gon said. Obi-Wan had never seen White Beach. When he was a child, they had already moved out to the Stingray Isles. Obi-Wan grew up between the islands, and White Beach became the myth of the grown-ups, a name full of promise that they brought up while sharing wistful smiles. Oh, that was a thing that happened at White Beach when we would sunbathe on the rocks all day long. Oh, the crabs and the mussels we would find at White Beach, the fish we would catch. All the time we had back then when we didn’t have to check on the kids constantly. Do you remember how good life used to be at White Beach? To young Obi-Wan, White Beach was like fermented kelp and lion’s mane jelly: something the adults enjoyed and gloated over but he wasn’t allowed to have.
“Well, if it was so good, then why don’t we go back?” he had one day snapped.
“Sometimes it helps to acknowledge that the things that are gone were good,” Qui-Gon had said.
Obi-Wan’s child’s mind turned this into “it’s good to acknowledge that things are gone,” which somehow seemed more plausible and less depressive to him at the time. This simple truth ingrained itself indelibly into his memory. He must have been ten or eleven, the perfect age to start rebelling against your parental figures, and thus, holding onto things became a convenient act of rebellion. It started innocently enough, like most things. He insisted on holding onto the fish bones after their meals: they might still be useful. He held on to stories and songs, to fairytales about the Force and nightmarish stories about the Deep Ones, and he memorized all of them. Soon it became a habit he could no longer extricate himself from. For an entire year, he gave impassioned speeches detailing to anyone who would listen why they should return to White Beach, and he refused to let Qui-Gon cut his hair. It was all quite exhausting and wore him out quickly, but he held on. And years later, Qui-Gon loved to revisit that phase during their shared meals for a good laugh—remember how Obi-Wan grew his hair long out of spite? Remember how he cried when we wanted to discard the fish bones? It was one of the great injustices of the universe that the young had no embarrassing childhood stories to share about the old. All children had their awkward phase, right? Perhaps those embarrassing dinner stories were why, even though Obi-Wan had moved on to wearing his hair short and discarding his fish bones, he still felt a slight twinge of shame whenever he visited his trash collection.
For being the cumulative work of ten years, the collection was modest. Except for the palm leaf, everything fit below a large projecting table of Acropora coral. In the afternoon, the light of the sun, low and red in the west, fell into the small cavern and illuminated all the things Obi-Wan held onto.
The aluminum foil would be one of them. He secured it with the empty shell of a turban snail and placed it between the green plastic spoon and the palm-sized shard of green beach glass he had found two moons ago. The palm leaf had to go, he thought. Like most of his trash, it came from the surface, and it had looked different up there. Struck by the contrast of its gentle color and its blade-like leaflets, Obi-Wan had picked it up, but by now, the salt water had eaten away everything that had been soft and green about it, leaving behind a half-rotten skeleton of sad, brown stumps. Most of what he hoarded was in a state of halfway-gone-but-still-good.
“You and your little collection of useless treasures,” Anakin would often say.
“It’s not treasure,” Obi-Wan would correct him, “it’s trash.”
“And how does Master Yoda feel about all the trash you bring into the water?”
“The same as you, I guess,” Obi-Wan would answer.
Besides Yoda, Anakin was the only one who knew about Obi-Wan’s frequent trips to the beaches. It was not exactly a secret, nor was it something Obi-Wan shared freely, it was somewhere in between, one of the many little things that lose their shine if you pass them on too often. Anakin was not born into the family but came from a group of islands far to the north, where the water was warm and land-dwellers still sailed the seas to hunt whales and dolphins. Qui-Gon had brought him back from one of his travels, a wild orphan of six years whose parents had been eaten by killer whales.
“It’s not like I really remember them,” Anakin had told Obi-Wan with a nonchalant shrug that was probably as much for his sake as for Obi-Wan’s. “I just remember being alone until Qui-Gon found me.”
When he joined the family, they found him to be a young and clever boy, a good swimmer with a remarkable talent for fishing. Their eyes glazed over when on Anakin’s first day in the reef, after exploring his new home for a bit, he came back to them, his kelp sack bursting with so much fish he could barely carry it. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Mace, who was usually hard to impress, and Qui-Gon ruffled Anakin’s hair with a “told-you-so” grin.
And since that day, it was mainly Anakin who hunted for the family.
“Hunting is the only thing I know how to do,” he had said one day. “I’m not really good at anything else.”
“Why would you say that?” Obi-Wan asked.
Anakin, who was just weaving a larger kelp sack for his prey, merely shrugged. He was nine then, all lanky arms and a slippery tail that had grown much too fast. It was reddish-brown but lately had begun to darken from the tail fin.
“Do you enjoy hunting?” Obi-Wan asked.
Anakin looked at him as if thinking about it for the first time. “Yes, I do,” he finally decided.
He said it, as children do, with an innocent simplicity, and Obi-Wan’s heart ached. “Anakin,” he said, “can you keep a secret?”
That was when Obi-Wan told him about the trash he was picking up from the beaches.
Growing up, Anakin became so good at hunting fish, he was even able to catch the notoriously agile yellowfin tuna (although he hated its taste and was miffed by the fact that the most respectable fish also had to be the yuckiest). That night, when Obi-Wan had just applied the gel for his sunburn, he heard Anakin call out for him in the Force.
—Obi-Wan!
—What is it, Anakin?
—You have to come and help me.
—Are you still out hunting? It’s almost time for dinner.
—I know. Just come to me, okay? I can’t do this alone.
Obi-Wan probably should have put up more of a fight, but unfortunately, Anakin was blessed with the most captivating chanting voice of all. It was golden and warm, like the sun. Half an hour later Obi-Wan found him at the edge of a patch reef, where Anakin was nervously circling two full gunny sacks of fish.
“There you are,” he said when he spotted Obi-Wan. “Come on, we’ve got to get them home before they attract the sharks.”
“You sure overdid it today.” Both sacks were filled to the brim, and the dense kelp fabric bulged and swelled with the squirming of the fish. Obi-Wan wrinkled his nose. “Who’s going to eat all this?”
“You and me,” Anakin reached for one of the sacks. “I’ve been out here all day and I’m awfully hungry. Besides, you know how much Padmé loves fish.” He heaved the sack onto his back, but huge and bloated as it was, it left him little room to kick his tail. He struggled not to sink to the floor.
With a defeated sigh, Obi-Wan lifted the second sack onto his shoulders. Startled, the fish began to churn and writhe around each other. The sack rippled and almost slipped out of his hands. “I thought we agreed not to overfish,” he grunted.
“I didn’t.” Anakin floundered deeper into the reef. To find their way back home, all they had to do was follow the trenches that cut deep into the rocks and led into the heart of the reef. Schools of little fish scattered in panic, probably mistaking them for a pair of fat, bumbling sharks. “Just look around,” Anakin said. “These days, the reef is infested with food. Sometimes you can’t even see the light for all the fish.”
Obi-Wan followed him. “You say it like it’s not a good thing.”
“I’m not sure,” Anakin said. “I think it’s because the sharks have disappeared. Which might be good, might be bad, depends on who you ask.”
“Sharks won’t hurt you, Anakin.”
“Spider crabs won’t hurt you either, and yet you’re afraid of them.”
“I’m not afraid. I’m disgusted. There’s a difference.”
“That’s just you being finicky over words.”
“No, that’s how language generally works. If everyone makes up their own meaning, the concept of words becomes useless.” Obi-Wan dodged a jutting rock covered in bleached-out coral skeletons. “Anyway, what happened to the sharks? Do you think something drove them away?”
“I can’t imagine what,” Anakin replied.
The sludge, Obi-Wan thought. For the past two years, the corals struggled against the layer of algae and organic waste that threatened to smother them. During the summer months, it was especially bad. Waves of sludge washed into the reef and settled on the coral. Far into the moonlit nights, Mace and Depa would work to clean the gardens until the dirt gathered beneath their nails. What kind of shark wanted to hunt in murky waters? But Obi-Wan knew better than to talk to Anakin about the sludge. Ever since the incident with Ahsoka, it was a sensitive topic, he understood that.
They made their way deeper into the reef, where the trench they had been following widened into a small cauldron. Obi-Wan gently set his sack down on the sandy ground so he could massage and rotate his arms. Anakin stopped as well, watching him with barely concealed impatience. Great, Obi-Wan thought, here comes another stupid joke about my age, but all Anakin said was, “What happened to your back?”
Obi-Wan craned his neck. “Sunburn.”
“Looks nasty. Were you at the beach again?”
“Just this morning.” Obi-Wan peeled a dry flake of skin from his shoulder. “I saw land-dwellers.”
“How many?”
“Three or four, I think. Don’t tell the others. It was fine, nothing happened.”
“They didn’t see you?”
“They were too busy fleeing from the storm. Like I said, it’s fine. It was merely a single sighting.” Anakin stared at him from under furrowed brows, and Obi-Wan was straining to think of something comforting to add. “Yoda said they were probably scientists.”
“Yeah.” Anakin nodded slowly. “Probably. Makes sense. But what storm? What are you talking about?”
“A black wall of clouds suddenly came from the east. I think it was raining, too, but it quickly passed. Maybe you missed it.”
Anakin hoisted his sack over his shoulder. “I’ve been out here hunting all day. There was no storm.”
But the storm had gathered in the east, right above Anakin’s hunting grounds. Obi-Wan could still see them in his mind’s eye: the voiceless lightning clouds that hung so low their rain-filled bellies brushed the waves, and sky and sea merged into a single writhing organism. “Maybe you missed it,” he repeated.
Anakin shook his head. “There was no storm.”
Two years after Ahsoka had left, the entire family had long since returned to gathering at the Blue Bowl for dinner. When the light of the setting sun filled the round basin between the rocks, they grouped around the low stone slab to share fish and their history. They told each other tales of past and present, over and over, to never forget: stories filled with all the ancient knowledge that was carved into the rocks of Blackstone Island, and cautionary tales and embarrassing childhood stories that would become folklore to future generations.
Let me tell you about one of our ancestors who discovered the secrets of the Force.
Have you heard the story about the two lovers that were dragged into the darkness by a Deep One? It is said their corpses still rot at the bottom of the sea.
So, when Anakin was seven and got stung by a fire coral ...
Remember how good life used to be at White Beach?
While Obi-Wan kept to the seaweed, Anakin cut up the fish for Padmé and gave her the best pieces. The further her pregnancy progressed, the more he increased his efforts to care for her. With quick cuts of his bone knife, he severed the tail fins of the fish, snip snap, off they went. On the floor next to Obi-Wan, the cut tails piled up. The sight made him nauseous, but he tried not to let it show, averting his eyes.
“Scorn this part, you should not,” he heard Yoda say. “Most delicious it is.” Roe shimmered like tiny pearls under the distended bellies of the fish. Obi-Wan watched Mace and Depa talking quietly on the other side of the stone slab, heads turned toward each other. The place next to Mace was empty, as the entire far end of the stone slab always was these days.
There had been times when they had taken to eating dinner in small separate groups: for the first time, after Qui-Gon had said goodbye, and later, after Ahsoka had left them. Small groups of five or six people, no more. They had been careful to stay in the shadows of the rocks, had shared their fish during hushed conversations, and, after their meal, had buried the remains in the sand. In both cases, this arrangement had never lasted long. Fear was like any other predator: you only saw it when it moved. As long as it lurked silently, neither coming closer nor moving away, its camouflage of banality concealed it within the environment, up to the point where you eventually forgot about it. And so, after a while, when nothing seemed to change, for better or worse, they too forgot. With Qui-Gon and Ahsoka gone, there was no one left to remind them they should be afraid.
Remember how we never used to have this much sludge? she had said. If we don’t act now, it will only get worse. The sludge will suffocate everything.
Let me tell you about the ships, he had said. Obi-Wan has seen them, too. We need to act now. They will return. Trust me, one day they will.
“No need to hold back!” Anakin’s laugh rang out from along the table. “We’ve got fish for days. No, really, two sacks—Obi-Wan had to help me carry them.”
A forest of coral framed the Blue Bowl. Obi-Wan tipped his head back and looked up. The bleached tips of the coral rose like spears to the surface, already cracked and broken in some places, where the skeleton had become brittle. The evening light spilled into the basin at a steep angle, and the branches cast long, claw-like shadows onto the rocks. At the very top of the bowl, a small yellow dot circled a lone, towering branch. Round and round and round. Like a maniac. It took Obi-Wan a moment: the yellow dot was, in fact, the belly of a single damselfish. Damselfish normally traveled in schools, but this one was all alone, and it went in circles, round and round and round.
The next two days brought a sense of restlessness that made Obi-Wan swim up and down the reef like a starving shark. He could not visit the beaches. He felt trapped in his body, as if his skin, still itching and throbbing with the heat of his sunburn, was too small for him. Feeling useless and cranky he tried to distract himself with all kinds of tasks—cleaning the Blue Bowl, fertilizing the seaweed plantation, picking small crown-of-thorns starfish from the corals—but it never seemed to dispel his restlessness, and thinking too long about the reasons made him feel even sicker. On the second day, he went to see Padmé. She preferred to stay near the seagrass beds where the water was shallow and sunny. Here, she had settled on a smooth rock, her rainbow-colored tail loosely gripping its surface. Fascinated, Obi-Wan watched her hands move, handling the delicate bone needle and weaving green rope into something that looked like a mat.
“It’s for the child,” she said. “I can put them inside and wrap it around their body, so I can carry them and they will be warm and comfortable. It will be ...,” she frowned, “... I imagine it a bit like ...” Helplessly, she raised her head and stared at Obi-Wan as if hoping he would finish her sentence. Now that she had stopped moving her hands, he could see them trembling.
“Padmé.” Obi-Wan touched her arm. “What’s the matter? Are you all right?”
She shook her head, looking down at her weaving again. “What’s the word? That thing you use to carry stuff?”
“A bag?”
She rubbed her forehead. “Yes, that.”
Obi-Wan eyed her. Wrinkles lined her tired face, but there was a healthy flush to her cheeks, not the bluish coloration he would associate with hypoxia. “Do you want me to help you to the surface?” Lately, she had been complaining about back pain, and, with her steadily swelling belly, swimming had become exhausting for her.
She gave him a pained smile, with the kind of practiced air that suggested this was not the first time she had heard the question today. “Thank you. That would be very kind.”
Gently, Obi-Wan took the weaving from her hands and—oh, it was not made from kelp. He ran the rope through his hands: it was stiff, scratching against his skin like wire—nylon, it was nylon cords. A nylon bag. Padmé would place her baby inside. The cords would wind around the tiny body, binding and crushing every part: the weak arms, the small chest, the fragile neck—the baby would wriggle, wildly at first, which would only get them even more tangled; then weaker, as the web choked off their breath—
“What’s wrong?” Padmé linked arms with him, waiting for him to support her body. Her hands were warm, a little shaky, but relaxed.
“Fishing net,” someone murmured.
“Sorry?” Padmé asked.
Obi-Wan cleared his throat. “It’s an old fishing net.”
“Oh!” She laughed. “Ani found it in what used to be the shark grounds. It’s sturdier than kelp. Do you like it? He said you’d like the idea of reclaiming useless land-dweller trash.”
“Yes,” he rasped. He had to get her to the surface. Breathing; they needed to breathe, breathing was important. All he could think about was the column of water that separated them from the surface. He grabbed her waist, but she flinched. “Come.” His voice came from above his head. It sounded very calm. “I’ll help you up.”
The water propelled them upwards, and all Obi-Wan had to do was lightly flap his tail to keep them on course. He hugged Padmé’s body close to his chest, counting his fin strokes in his head: three, four, five—the sun, he could see the sun above the waves, a white, jittering sphere. Their heads broke the surface. Obi-Wan took a few greedy breaths and coughed as the salty air burned in his throat, at the back of his mouth where his heart was pounding. Padmé held onto him so she wouldn’t drift away. She grinned, tipped her head back and her dark hair fanned like seaweed in the water. A wave splashed over them and she spluttered, then broke into breathless laughter. Her body was thrumming with life. She was breathing. “I’m sorry,” Obi-Wan mumbled, clutching her shoulders so hard he must surely hurt her. “I’m sorry.”
“No, no,” she reassured him, “it wasn’t too fast. You were right, I feel much better now.”
His hands seemed far too large, the rough, weather-beaten hands of a grown man who had been exposed to the sand and sun for years. The scars in his palms itched. “Good.” He swallowed and let her go.
She brushed back her long, wet hair. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine.” He latched onto the excuse she had given him. “I was just worried we ascended too fast. Wouldn’t want to scare the baby.”
“Really, you’re worse than Ani,” she said with a lopsided smile.
He was glad she was mocking him and left him no choice but to smile as well, in what he hoped was a convincing manner. They drifted on the surface for a moment. The wind ruffled their hair and the sun warmed their skin. It was a clear morning: if they strained their necks, they could see all the way to the mainland, a muddy brown smear on the horizon. A silver gull circled over their heads and let out a high-pitched wail, then tilted its outstretched wings and turned, heading for the dark shadow in the distance. A whale, Obi-Wan thought at first, but the shadow did not dive—a rock, then, except there were no rocks in this area. And yet there was a black shadow sitting on the water.
A black shadow with an unnatural, angular outline.
Padmé sucked air through her teeth and felt for Obi-Wan’s hand again.
Obi-Wan squeezed her hand. “It must have gotten off course,” he said quietly. “I’m sure it’s just passing through. Heading up north toward the mainland, most likely.”
“It’s inside the reef.”
“Only because it’s small and can pass between the islands.”
“What could it want?”
“It probably got lost. Look, its nose is pointing north, so that’s where it’s going.” In truth, he was not sure whether it was moving at all. With the distance and the swell, it was hard to judge.
They watched the ship for quite a while. But nothing happened. It was not getting any closer, but it did not seem to be leaving either. It just lay on the water and did not move.