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Plo opens the small rear door into the Initiates’ refectory, and steps into a sonic smack in the face. He spares a by-now habitual moment to miss the relative calm of the main refectory, and forges on.
It’s just past six in the evening. The diurnal crowd is due for latemeal, the nocturnals are filtering in for their firstmeal, and those on obligate crepuscular schedules are taking a break for lunch. The end result is a dining hall that can be heard from three corridors away. Why does putting large numbers of children together in one space always seem to result in such a terrific din?
Heliost Clan puts up with the noise only as long as it takes to collect their dinners. They split duties—Micah and Sina join the proteins line, Tahl takes Lanti off to prowl the vegetarian buffet, and Plo heads to the ever-so-slightly quieter rear of the dining hall with an armful of water bottles to refill.
Usually, Qui-Gon would be around to snag something for dessert. Today, he’s conspicuously missing.
He’s not stuck on homework—they’d checked with Crechemaster Hukatere.
Neither is he on on the extra Temple Service roster, experiencing Consequences for his regular low-level mischief. They’d checked that too, just in case, but most of the time it isn’t just Qui in trouble, it’s Micah, and occasionally Plo and Tahl as well. They’d know, if it were a punishment detail.
Filling water bottles is the quickest of the dinner tasks. That’s why Plo gets to do it; he’s the one most in need of a quick escape. He beats a hasty retreat.
The sense of tingling pressure in his sensory horns eases quickly once he’s out the door, heading right along the corridor toward their usual meeting place. Volume sensitivity is a difficult thing to work around when the structures that do the job of ears take up so much space on one’s head. The sensory horns—kolmi, in keldeorinyaa—sprout from the temples, curve up and backward around the magnetoreceptors as hollow chambers that give him a sense of atmospheric pressure, anchoring just behind the joint of his jaws. Technically there’s an ear canal hidden somewhere in there, but the whole structure picks up sound and magnifies it. Earplugs aren’t really an option.
A full insulated hood might do the trick, Plo muses; he’s seen something like that on open-cockpit landracer pilots. It seems a bit of overkill for a noisy dining hall, is all.
He settles down in the empty balcony they’ve chosen for today’s latemeal. Sunlight filters in through the transparisteel windows, partially obscured by a hotel skyscraper a few city blocks away. Plo closes his eyes behind his goggles, enjoying the warmth.
Tahl and Lanti arrive within the minute.
“Here,” Tahl says, shoving the largest of the takeout boxes into his lap, “babysit the fried greens for me. I have, let’s see, tofu and noodle mix in this one, baked kumara and oca with sauce in that one. Seaweed and salt onion for Sina—” this box gets set aside— “and here’s your fresh grasses, Lanti.”
Lanti mumbles a thankyou, sweeping her long tail into her lap and pinning it beneath the box. The tip twitches happily against her knee.
“Still no sign of Qui,” Micah announces as he and Sina arrive. “I’ve got some extra momos just in case, but if he doesn’t turn up soon he’s going to miss out. Man, that part of the kitchen smells good today.”
“To you, maybe.” Sina gestures at Plo; he passes her water bottle up. She unscrews the whole cap and takes a long, long drink. “Meat-eaters are weird.”
“Fish counts as meat,” Micah retorts.
Lanti laughs around her mouthful of broadleaf grasses and says something totally incomprehensible. Agreement, probably. Tahl tells her not to talk with her mouth full, which has absolutely no effect.
“Qui’s probably down in the garden levels somewhere,” Plo observes, after he’s taken the edge off his hunger. Micah is right, the dumplings are spectacular today. “Maybe he’s lost track of time. I sent him a message earlier, but he’s left his pad in the dorm.”
Micah licks a stray drip of plum sauce from his wrist. “Yeah, probably. Kitchen gardens, orchard, or meditation gardens?”
“He’s been complaining about the ivy in the maze lately. I think that’s one of the meditation gardens, isn’t it?” Tahl snags the fried greens box from Plo. “He says the gardenmaster is making them do the trimming by hand, because, you know, the maze is supposed to be a meditation aid and I guess the electric trimmers mess it up.”
Sina hums over a mouthful of some sort of baked fish paste. “He said something about mulch a few days ago. Are they doing that by hand too?”
“Don’t ask me, I haven’t done the gardens rotation since I was a junior.” Tahl rolls her eyes. “Micah, you did them last year.”
Micah hastily swallows. “Yeah, in the kitchen gardens. It was all spraying for aphids and picking slugs out of cabbages or whatever. You know how many times my kriffing spring onions got black aphids? And the spray they use to kill them smells like rotten garlic.”
“We know,” Tahl sighs. Micah had complained, at length.
“I doubt he’s mulching,” Sina says. “I can’t imagine him not getting bored in five minutes.”
“True,” Micah laughs. “Seedling nursery, maybe? That or his pet fruit trees.”
Plo leans over, dipping his last momo in Micah’s plum sauce. “We can always go and look. The nursery and the maze aren’t that far apart.”
Micah snatches his sauce pottle away. “Do that again, Plo Koon, and reap the consequences. My sauce.”
Plo unlatches his mask one-handed and smugly stuffs the whole dumpling into his mouth.
The dinner hour comes to a close; Qui-Gon continues absent. The extra momos have gone cold. Plo portions them out between himself, Tahl, and Micah, and they're still delicious, but his mind is on other things.
The Temple gardens take up eight structural levels beneath the twenty-odd used for living and working spaces. Each level is a masterwork of agricultural technology. The lower two are dedicated to hydroponic farms; the five above that to soil-planting of crops that cannot be grown hydroponically, and the uppermost to non-crop plants and the gardeners’ workshops. The Temple still imports a significant amount of food, but anything that can be grown on-site is.
They find Qui-Gon on that upper garden level, thanks to a helpful Knight-gardener who flags them down in the seedling nursery, Qui’s usual haunt. It turns out that Tahl’s earlier intuition had been dead right—their friend is indeed working on the ivy. Tahl leads the way down to the green-waste workshops, her expression Jedi-neutral and the Force around her sparkling with smug satisfaction.
There’s a damp, musty smell all through the workshops—product of the composting bins, Micah explains, wrinkling his nose. It isn’t that bad a smell, Plo thinks, but then his rebreather strips out a lot of scent from the air he breathes. Perhaps it’s stronger to the others.
Qui-Gon stands at the end of the workshop, a pair of secateurs in his gloved hands. Behind him, a pile of ivy trimmings reaches halfway to the ceiling.
Micah cups his hands around his mouth. “You missed dinner, dumbass!”
Qui shakes his head, not bothering to turn around. “I was meditating! You’re interrupting!”
Micah laughs. “What, meditating over chopping up dead bits of plant?”
“Ugh, you wouldn’t understand.” Qui-Gon pulls a length of wilted ivy longer than he is tall out of the pile and strips the leaves from the stem in one smooth movement. “Either get some shears and help me out, or shove off.”
There’s a rack of secateurs hanging on the wall near the door, and some spare gloves. Sina takes the smaller ones, while Micah and Tahl argue for a moment over the larger. Eventually they split the pair, on the basis that the hand holding the shears is unlikely to be cut by the shears, and while Micah is right-handed, Tahl is more or less ambidextrous.
(This leaves nothing for Plo, but that’s all right; kel dor skin is tougher than most.)
Qui-Gon demonstrates the leaf-stripping trick for them. “Leaves and soft stem in here,” he says, casually kicking the first of two wheeled carts parked up beside the pile. “Cut back to the woody bits, then chuck those in the other cart. Leaves and soft stem go into regular compost, woody bits get mulched. Technically we could just mulch it all but I think someone wants the leafy stuff for an experiment.”
Sina pulls on what looks like a shorter stem. There’s a sudden landslide of greenery.
“Seems like kind of a pain,” Micah comments. “Who’d you annoy to get stuck with this?”
“I volunteered,” Qui-Gon insists, rolling his blue eyes. “Like I said, I have some things to meditate on.”
“Have you ever willingly meditated in your life?” Tahl grabs a handful of ivy and gets stuck in. “You can’t blame us for wondering.”
Qui huffs noisily. “Well, it’s true. I’ll eat later.”
Micah raises a patchy eyebrow. “That’s also weird as kriff, though. Since when are you not the hungriest of all of us?”
“Since Master Dooku asked me if I wanted to be his Padawan,” retorts Qui-Gon.
He turns away, dropping a handful of bare woody stems into the receptacles. His presence in the Force is paradoxical: something vivid and bright like rose blooms, bursting with pride, but thorny too beneath the surface. He’s conflicted.
Tahl is the first to speak. “That’s awesome, Qui-Gon,” she exclaims, a broad grin spreading across her face. “Did you say yes?”
“You better say yes,” says Micah, his eyes wide. “Master Dooku gets the best missions. And imagine learning saber combat from him!”
Qui-Gon tilts his head, facing the pile of ivy. “I asked him for a couple of days to think about it,” he says, and his voice lilts up at the end of the sentence, questioning. “I mean, it’s a big decision, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Plo agrees. He breathes in, deep and slow, and snips the ivy in his hands into the compost bin bit by bit.
He’d known this was coming. It’s actually a couple of weeks early, compared to his memories: Qui and Tahl have only been back from Gathering for a couple of weeks. Is this a ripple of change stemming from his vision? Has Dooku’s mission schedule changed? Or is this simply a result of the increased attention being paid to Plo himself, and by extension all his friends?
Qui-Gon whirls back to face them. His thick eyebrows are drawn low in a frown, and his pale face is paler still, tension written in the set of his mouth. “What do you guys think?” he asks, all in a rush. “Like, really think. I kind of want to say yes, but… is that just because Master Dooku is really cool? If I say yes, are we actually going to be a good team?”
“I’m sure you will be,” says Tahl, instinctively reassuring. She reaches out through the Force, and Qui responds, wind rustling through yellowed autumn leaves. “You’re one of the best in our lightsaber cohort, and Master Dooku’s one of the best swordsmasters in the Order. Imagine how much he could teach you.”
“If it’s your personality you’re worried about, don’t be,” put in Sina, typically blunt. “I’ve met Rael Averross. He’s not exactly a paragon of formality either.”
Qui-Gon shakes his head. His shaggy hair, grown out in preparation for padawanhood, goes everywhere. “It’s not that—mostly not that, I mean. I just…” he trails off, gesturing helplessly with a handful of ivy. “Yeah, there’s so much Master Dooku could teach me—but would I learn it? Sure, I’m good at saberwork, but you all do better in class than me. I’m not stupid, but I’m not… I feel like, shouldn’t someone like Master Dooku have a Padawan who’s good at both?”
“No,” says Plo, almost without thinking. “What would be the point of that?”
His friends turn to stare at him.
“I don’t follow,” says Micah, blinking. “What do you mean?”
Plo hesitates, for a long moment. This is the sort of answer that seems obvious, as a Master who has raised three Padawans to Knighthood—but how to translate it to the frame of reference of an Initiate?
“The point of being a Padawan is to learn, right? And the point of being a Master is to teach.” He searches their faces—no sign of comprehension. Ah, well. “Qui, why do you think classwork skills should be important to Master Dooku? He spends most of his time in the field.”
“Oh.” Qui blinks, and his tense frown melts away in a moment. “Right!”
“Yeah!” says Tahl, brightening. “Let’s be honest, Qui, you were never going to be an Archivist or whatever. You’d be so bored, stuck in the Temple all your life.”
“Ugh, right.” Qui-Gon gives her a wry smirk. “Good thing I don’t want to be one, then.”
Tahl smirks back. “So, you know what Master Dooku does. Is that the sort of Jedi you want to be?”
To his credit, Qui-Gon thinks the question over. “I think so,” he says. “I think maybe I don’t want to spend as much time negotiating as he does, but I want to work with all sorts of people and I want to make a difference in the galaxy, like he does.”
Behind his goggles, Plo stifles a wince.
“Then you should say yes to him,” Micah says firmly. “Who cares if half our classmates have better grades than you? He didn’t ask any of them to be his Padawan. And I know he knows what your grades are—Master Jumikel says pretty much everyone asks around when they’re interested in an Initiate. He bugs me about my statistics grades all the time.”
“You’re still doing better than me,” Qui-Gon mumbles, but the smile lingers at the corners of his mouth all the same. “Thanks.”
Graduating from Initiate to Padawan means leaving the Creche. Qui-Gon spends his last week with Heliost Clan alternating between being fussed over by Crechemaster Hukatere and the Knight-Assistants, tackle-hugged by Juniors, and kidnapped into group hugs and blanket forts by Plo and the other Seniors.
Qui bears the fuss magnanimously, but letting go of the Clan he’s grown up in is hard for him and everyone can tell. His hand keeps coming up to fiddle with the stubby padawan braid that now hangs behind his left ear, and every time he looks at his slowly-emptying bunk there’s a shudder through the murky puddles of his presence in the Force.
Plo helps him ferry the last of his plants up through the Temple to his new private quarters. This is a small studio apartment, typical Padawan accommodations, featuring a basic kitchenette and fresher attached to a single living space. Downstairs in the dorm, Qui-Gon’s plants had covered every spare space in his section of the dorm. Here, they all fit comfortably on a low table in front of the windowsill.
“Don’t put the ferns in direct sunlight,” says Qui-Gon, directing Plo toward the kitchenette bench instead. “I’m going to see if I can hang them up by the bunk.”
Plo sets his armful of delicate little fernlets down on the benchtop. Polished quartzite warms the Force unobtrusively beneath his fingers.
“I can put in a request for hooks when I go for Temple Service tomorrow,” he offers, turning to survey the room. Padawans have free rein to modify their quarters as they see fit, mostly, but the Temple Maintenance staff like to keep an eye on what they do, at least until they get the hang of installing shelves and furniture themselves. “They’ll send someone to install them, but if you’re around when they do they can teach you how to do it yourself.”
Qui-Gon gives him a short sidelong look. “All right,” he says, a little suspiciously. “That’d be great.”
There’s an awkward silence.
“You’re going to have to get yourself some more plants,” Plo ventures, observing. “Look how much room there is in front of the windows.”
Qui-Gon chuckles a little listlessly. “Yeah, there is. I was thinking maybe some Onderon violets, and Master Sisha down in the gardens told me I could have a cutting off her pied monstera. Will you water them for me, when Master Dooku takes me out on missions?”
“I will,” Plo promises without a second thought. In a year or so, there’s going to be plants everywhere in this basic little room, vines twining up the legs of his simple wooden loft bed, succulents in terracotta pots in the sunny patch on his desk. He’d gotten into orchids at some point—Plo thinks it was early knighthood—and those had taken over his caf table in short order, and then every other flat surface in his rooms. You didn’t give Qui plants for his birthday; you gave him more furniture to put plants on.
They end up sitting together on the floor in front of the windows, looking out at the Temple District’s rooftops. Late-afternoon sunlight pours in through the clear glass.
“Did you know?” Qui-Gon asks, eventually. “In your vision, did you see that Dooku was going to be my Master?”
The Force ripples a little around them. Plo pays it no mind.
“I did see it,” he admits.
Qui seems to relax at this; his shoulders drop just a little, and his frown eases. “I’m gonna guess there’s a reason you didn’t tell me about it.”
“Two reasons, actually,” says Plo.
Qui-Gon breaks into a smile—“Of course,” he says.
“What else do you expect from me?” Plo shakes his head, projecting wry self-awareness through the Force. “One—I wasn’t sure how seriously to take a lot of the details, and I still don’t have a lot of proof that any of it was right, so I didn’t want to get your hopes up if I was wrong.”
Not that he had thought that was a likely outcome. So far, life has been a lot like he remembers it. But it was true that Qui-Gon was a natural talent with a lightsaber in his hand, and with the fundamentals of the Living Force. He must have had far more eyes on him than just Master Dooku.
“Two—I… also didn’t want you to feel pressured to just go with it if I was right. If it really was the will of the Force, then you’re the one the Force needed to be talking to, not me.”
Qui chuckles, a self-conscious note in his deepening voice. He’s starting to grow now; his wrists are hanging out the ends of his sleeves and he’s going to be all knobbly knees and elbows in a short couple of years. “It did, I think.” He leans forward toward his collection of plants, myriad shades of green in the sunlight, and reaches out to gently pluck a dead leaf from his red coleus. “Master Dooku offered to introduce me to some of the other field Knights if I wanted, and I just thought—no. I didn’t even think about it, the answer just resonated.”
“It’s like Micah says—visions are kind of unnecessary for a lot of things.” Plo steps closer, bumping his shoulder against Qui’s arm. “I meant what I said in the gardens. A good teacher doesn’t need to have the best student. They just need one who wants to learn.”
“I still don’t really understand what you mean by that,” says Qui-Gon, and oh dear, his frown’s come back. “Wouldn’t you want to pick the best student?”
“Only if you think you’re in a competition,” Plo replies, without elaboration. Qui-Gon gives him a long, suspicious look, and he worries for a moment that he’s said too much, but eventually Qui sighs and looks away.
“I wish you could just talk about everything you saw. It’s annoying sometimes, how much I can tell you’re not saying, and it makes me worry, Plo. We’ve been friends for as long as I can even remember, so why is there so much you can’t tell me? But I guess you have reasons for that too, huh?”
“Too many to count,” says Plo, entirely seriously. “I’m sorry.”
Qui-Gon’s blue eyes flick sidelong toward him again, and this time the look in them is almost grieving. “It’s like you’re a whole different person. You passed out in class and never woke up again, and there’s a whole different Plo in there now piloting my friend’s body around. I mean,” he says, audibly backtracking, “you’re still my friend, obviously. It’s just… I don’t know. You feel so different in the Force, more than anything. And I’m not the only one who’s noticed. You’ve seen Mace squinting every time he looks at you, right?”
Plo nods wordlessly, feeling like he should apologise all over again. Mace has just graduated to Senior Initiate; he’s chosen the empty bunk furthest away from Plo’s in the dorm, and Plo doesn’t think that’s a coincidence.
The guilt opens up a chasm inside his ribcage, a hot darkness that threatens to swallow him whole. He wants to spill his secrets, to beg for Qui-Gon’s forgiveness, but when doing so could put them all in so much danger? No.
“You’re like…” Qui trails off, glancing around the room for inspiration, “um. Have you ever seen a Raioballo stranglerfruit tree?” He waits for Plo to shake his head, and forges hesitantly onward. “They’re a sort of parasitic vine that grows up around the trunks of other trees, and if you let them grow for long enough they kill the host tree and keep growing around the dead wood. And they live for centuries, so eventually the dead host rots away and you end up with kind of a hollow web of vine in the shape of the original tree. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but that’s kind of what you remind me of, now? Like you’re shaped around something that’s not there anymore.”
That… might actually be an accurate description. Like a geode, Plo thinks, minerals forming into a cavity within the rock. Or possibly a fossil.
Qui apparently interprets his thoughtful silence as him taking it the wrong way. “I don’t mean you killed whatever was there before,” he says hurriedly, shuffling around to face Plo and grabbing his hands. “I mean, when I think about how you used to be and how you are now, you’re different, but not scary different, you know? Like obviously no-one’s worried about, I’unno, you got possessed by an evil Dark Side spirit or some stupid thing like that.” He grins down at Plo, clumsy encouragement filling his presence like sunlight, and gently squeezes his hands. “I don’t think I’m explaining this very clearly, am I?”
“It’s clear enough to me,” Plo says. He slips his hands out of Qui-Gon’s, and leans forward into a hug. Qui hesitates only a moment before he wraps his arms around Plo’s skinny little child’s body and squeezes back, the Force hot with relief around them.
“I think you’re right,” Plo says into Qui’s shoulder. His voice comes out muffled by the fabric of Qui’s shirt. He loosens his grip just enough to speak clearly into the space between them. “I lived through so much in that vision that I am a different person now—but you weren’t there to watch it happen, so you can feel the ways I’ve changed but not what shaped them. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah—it does, actually.” Qui-Gon pulls back, his arms falling away, and he gives Plo a sheepish little grin. “That sounds way nicer than what I said.”
Plo’s tusks twitch against his rebreather. “I have had a lot of practice at explaining things,” he says, dryly.
“Yeah,” Qui-Gon laughs, “I can see that.”
Qui-Gon comes back from his first offworld mission with boundless enthusiasm for the galaxy, and also a broken toe.
“I tripped over an airlock,” he confesses, later that evening. “Sort of caught myself on the doorframe but then I kicked the doorframe in the process.”
“What did Master Dooku say?” asks Micah, clearly fishing for gossip.
Qui smirks right back at him. “He just made sure the bones were aligned and then taped my toes together. We were heading home at that point, so it wasn’t a big deal. The worst part was walking across the terminal at the spaceport on Ishqibel. He offered to carry me, but I was like no, Master, I’ll be fine! And then I really wasn’t.”
“Did he try healing it?” asks Mace Windu. The four of them are squished in up on Qui’s loft bed in his fancy new apartment, sharing a basket of spicy fries from the refectory. The bed is spacious for one adolescent boy, but four of them plus Qui’s giant childhood plush rancor is testing the limits of the space somewhat.
Qui-Gon shakes his head. “Apparently he’s only got a self-healing certification. He says if I want to learn, he can put my name down for the Padawan intro course. I think I do. It feels like something that could be real useful.”
“For you, absolutely.” Plo lets gentle humor fill his Force presence. “I think you’d be good at it.”
“Really?” Qui gives him a sharp look. “You’re not just saying that I’d get a lot of practice, right?”
Plo nods, sincere. Qui-Gon’s strength in the Living Force had tended to give him an instinctive leg up in the techniques that utilised the philosophy of the Living Force, of which healing was the most fundamental. “Well,” he adds, unable to resist, “you would get plenty of practice, but I’m sure you’d make a good Healer anyway.”
Out the corner of his goggles, he sees Mace blink.
Qui makes a face. “I don’t want to be a full Healer. I just think a healing certification would make me a better field Knight. Master Dooku says I have good instincts—” he grins, his presence filling with remembered joy— “I just need to build the skill and experience to go with it.”
Micah crunches thoughtfully on a particularly well-fried chip. “Mace, you’re doing Temple Service in the Halls, right? Is that ‘cause you’re looking at a Knight-Healer path?”
“Yes, but no.” Mace selects a chip and dips it judiciously into the sour cream. “Temple Service in the Halls gets you a spot in Intro Healing if you want it, which I do, but I’m going to be a field Knight. I think it would be useful to be able to do more than basic first aid, that’s all.”
“Exactly! I’m thinking of, you know, keeping people alive until you can get them to a proper hospital. I’d suck as an actual Healer, but I think I could do that much.” Qui-Gon pauses, turns abruptly toward Plo. “Would that help, do you think?”
Plo blinks, caught off guard. “With what?”
“With whatever you’re trying to avoid. All your stupid research.” Qui-Gon gestures loosely, his eyes fixed on Plo’s goggles. “I know you’re scared to talk about it directly, but there’s got to be something else we can do to prepare for whatever’s coming. I don’t need to know details—just maybe a hint in the right direction? Every little thing helps, right?”
Plo can’t help laughing. Qui-Gon makes it sound so simple.
“Yes,” he says, “it could help.”
Mace squints at him over the bowl of chips. “Is that what all the shatterpoints are about? You’re trying to change the future?”
“In a roundabout way, yes. I’m sorry about them, by the way.”
Mace waves a disinterested hand. “It’s fine. There’s nothing you can do to make them go away.” His squint gets a little harsher, and a moment later he turns his head away from Plo, blinking rapidly. “There really is a lot of them. It’s not as bad as looking into the sun, but that’s what it feels like, a little bit.”
Plo reaches out through the Force, sympathetic. “I have a lot of options, shall we say.”
“Which is exactly what I’m thinking.” Qui-Gon folds his arms, and his brows come together in an expression Plo knows all too well. “Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. What could help me if I end up in the bad ending, Plo?”
Plo looks down at the half-empty bowl of chips.
He’d read the final report on the liberation of Naboo a dozen times. Qui-Gon had died in some sort of peace, and the relaxed, almost satisfied expression on his lifeless face had haunted the lines. Cause of death: aortic rupture, secondary to the trauma of being run through with a red-bladed lightsaber. He’d survived long enough to saddle his Padawan with the training and raising of the (possible, debatable) Chosen One, and then he’d bled out in moments.
Micah leans in, knocking his shoulder against Plo’s. “You all right, Plo?”
Plo takes a deep breath. “Healing would be a good start,” he says, far more steadily than he feels. “It would help for all of us, actually.”
“I thought so.” Qui-Gon looks around for Master Rancor, and stuffs the plushie into Plo’s arms. “Here, cuddle up to him for a while. You look like you need it.”
Hugging Master Rancor tight works, to Plo’s immense resignation. He huffs a gusty sigh through his rebreather, and rests his chin on the thing’s furry head.
There was a basic amount of healing that almost all Jedi could do, regardless of training. The Force as a source of energy was boundless—if you could direct it, you could heal with it. The danger, the reason the MediCorps and the Halls of Healing were strict with their certifications, was that the risk of misdirecting that energy was far higher if you did not know what you were doing—and this risk was doubled when attempting to heal someone else. A limited sort of first aid, like what Dooku had done for Qui-Gon, was fine.
Perhaps Qui-Gon might have lived longer, had Obi-Wan known how to identify and reinforce a damaged aorta.
Micah shifts at Plo’s side, discomfort threading through his presence. “I don’t know if I can learn healing,” he says, hesitant. “The Living Force really doesn’t vibe with me. Never has—you know that.”
Mace shakes his head. “It’s not actually a requirement for healing. Master Katun says it’s harder work to learn if you’re more on the Unifying side, but you can still do it.” He selects another chip, dips it liberally in the sour cream. “And apparently you’re less likely to get carried away healing if it doesn’t come naturally to you.”
“Great, more work.” Micah rolls his eyes. “Plo, you’ll have to let me quit researching. No way I’m doing both.”
“Deal,” says Plo, stubbornly not thinking of Yinchorr.
He distracts himself by unlatching his mask and stuffing a handful of fries into his mouth. This particular spice mix is popular in the Temple; it works for a lot of different species and isn’t poisonous to anyone that can digest potatoes in the first place. The flavor profile is a little different for kel dor, he’s gathered; there’s a sharp smoky tang under the heat that goes well with the mild sweetness of the sour cream.
The conversation shifts to other, lighter topics. They polish off the rest of the fries between them, discussing classwork and sharing tidbits of Temple gossip. And gradually, the red fades from his sense-memory.