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The Force wraps itself around Qui-Gon, a heavy soothing weight, but his eyes still cannot open. Qui-Gon breathes, steady and assured, and waits.
This is where the other Masters falter. He has spent enough time debating with them to know that they are limited by the senses they use most, such that when the Force blocks their vision—or their hearing, or senses a Human like Qui-Gon cannot understand—they panic. They withdraw. They believe the Force is no longer guiding them.
They’re not fools, but they are too busy bickering with politicians to wait the hours necessary for the Force to find another way to touch them.
Qui-Gon has learned how to find that time.
“Slow down,” Master Dooku had told him once. Qui-Gon had been sixteen and full of fire. “Sit in a meadow and watch a flower bloom and close with the sun.”
Later, Qui-Gon wondered if his master had been exasperated and wanted a day of peace. But at the time, it had been a challenge he knew he could meet. Qui-Gon had planted himself in a field, fixed his eyes on a simple daisy, and opened himself to the living Force to such a degree that he had only broken out of the trance when Master Dooku covered the flower with his hand.
That had been the first time Qui-Gon had lost himself in the Force.
It would not be the last.
Now, with the Force slowly twisting around him, Qui-Gon sinks into not a field of wildflowers but the far less grounded realms of time and probability and power. He doesn’t ask the Force anything directly, nor does he push towards any particular outcome; he will learn nothing but what he already knows that way.
So he breathes.
Qui-Gon doesn’t know how long it takes. There’s something bitter on his tongue. He parts his lips, and the taste clarifies: petrichor. It’s followed by steady vibrations in the ground he had forgotten was beneath him. Qui-Gon withholds expectations until the sound turns not into a rainstorm but the too-regular beat of thousands of marching feet.
The final sensation, the one which breaks him out of his meditation, is velvet against his fingertips turning damp and warm.
The moment Qui-Gon thinks Blood, naming it, providing shape to the unformed maelstrom around him, the vision collapses.
Qui-Gon opens his eyes to the ever-bright sky of Coruscant, thousands of glimmering windows and hundreds of flickering ships turning it into a facsimile of the Galactic Core. His muscles ache, not from stillness but from the Force’s warnings of battles yet to be fought. They have manifested on his body, here and now, and the most painful wound is the one that almost killed him on Naboo.
He sighs and presses his hand over the scars and metal of his stomach. The Force’s presence will linger until he cleanses himself, which he cannot do until he tells the Council what he’s learned. Despite frequently asking him to look into the Force where they cannot, they rarely give him the courtesy of following the advice he brings back to them. They don’t want to hear, yet again, that war is coming. That the Sith are rising. That so long as they cut themselves off from the Force they cannot do anything about it.
Qui-Gon stands, bracing himself on his cane rather than the Force, and begins making his painstaking way to the Council chamber.
He will tell them anyway, again and again, for as long as it takes.
This, too, is the will of the Force.