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Most Jedi sought out the Room of a Thousand Fountains for, well, the plants.
They didn’t say it that way, of course. They talked about the infinite wellspring of the Living Force, the multitude of small, vigorous life forms down to the humble lights of the moss and hellebore, how it made such an apt metaphor for pretty much everything. And that was fine, of course. Sniffing flowers was nice and all.
For his own spiritual needs though, Sifo-Dyas preferred the water.
In the Force, the place bubbled, trickled, sputtered, and roared. There were tall waterfalls, channels meandering alongside the paths, and of course, the famous fountains from which the massive indoor garden took its name. This place made it easier to sort out the flow of energy in his own wild mind. He could walk along the waterside paths and return to the larger Temple feeling refreshed, as if he’d taken out his brain and washed it in the deep pools. Especially soothing after a long mission, such as the one he’d just returned from with Master Kostana.
Today, however, Sifo-Dyas’s stroll through his favorite place was interrupted by one Padawan Dooku, striding his way with all the intensity of a missile that had locked onto its target.
He hadn’t seen Dooku in weeks - an unusually long separation for the two best friends. Their apprenticeships often took them down different paths - Sifo-Dyas out into the galaxy’s further reaches with Master Kostana’s research, whereas Dooku learning under Master Yoda kept him closer to home. Dooku looked well; he seemed to have grown even more stupidly tall in the interim, and there was a perky white pimple in the fold of his nose that Sifo-Dyas wanted very badly to pop. He might’ve expected an embrace or glad greeting after the time apart, but Dooku just blocked his path, staring him down.
“Sifo-Dyas, what do you have?” Dooku sounded suspicious, using a tone like someone rhetorically asking a pet tooka what was in its mouth.
“Hm?”
“Sifo. Answer me.”
Sifo-Dyas held up his beverage to show his friend. “Juice?” He took a sip to demonstrate, rattling the straw. “Muja fruit. Mmm, premium.”
Dooku’s frowningness increased. “What are you carrying? On your back?”
“Ah,” Sifo-Dyas heaved a sigh. “The weight of my powerful yet complicated gifts?”
“That’s a child.”
Truly nothing got by Dooku.
“What, are you jealous?” Sifo-Dyas did occasionally pick up Dooku: always against his will, and usually just to prove the point that he could if he wanted to. “You can call the next turn for a ride.”
At that, the curly-headed boy perched on his shoulders sputtered a laugh. Sifo-Dyas’s own grin widened. He handed him up the juice box for a sip.
“Where did you even get that? Do the Creche Masters know?” Dooku tilted his head; his “big idiot working out a problem” face. Once, they’d been punished with six hours in the refectory dish pit after Sifo-Dyas had “borrowed” a particular data crystal of some interest out of the Archives. They often found themselves both facing shared punishment for mischief that was one or the other’s idea, as their Masters could not always work out which Padawan played which role. Dooku was probably doing quick math to work out how much time they’d get for stealing a kid.
“Of course they know,” Sifo-Dyas waved off his concern. “I’m his Seeker. I’m showing him my favorite places around the Temple.”
“You are not a Seeker,” Dooku pointed out, a trace of desperation creeping in. “You’re sixteen.”
“Well, I found him, so that makes me his Seeker, doesn’t it?”
…It was actually true that Sifo-Dyas hadn’t been trying to locate any Force sensitive children when he and Master Lene turned up at the Ringo Vinda starstation for emergency repairs. It just happened that way, the way things always ‘just happened’ to Sifo-Dyas.
One instant, he’d been playing with the beggar kid, clowning around, and the next, it was as if Sifo-Dyas stood outside his own body and saw a kind of double image. The little barefoot boy, but also a laughing Knight, strong and impossibly quick, already familiar. I know you. I will know you. I have always known you.
Sifo-Dyas had been so startled that he’d almost tripped backward. His new gifts frightened him - even in those small flashes, though the true visions were so much worse. Sometimes, he felt as if he could only run out far and fast enough ahead of them, he could escape altogether. Tell the Cosmic Force no thank you. Not today. Pick someone else this time.
But Master Kostana was good. She already had learned to recognize that particular look on his face. Already knew how to ask. What did you see?
“Meet Rael Averross.” Sifo-Dyas smiled at Dooku. “And Rael, this is my best friend Dooku, who I was telling you about on the way here.”
“Hello, Rael.” Dooku inclined his head in formal greeting to the five year old.
Sifo-Dyas felt the small legs tighten on his shoulders: an almost imperceptible inward scrunch. Rael hadn’t seemed shy at all when they’d first met. He’d placed his small hand immediately in Sifo-Dyas’s, and sure, it was also because he was trying to pick his pocket with the other one, but still. Maybe the child was getting tired, or the problem was Dooku’s annoyingly-greater height…
“Hi,” Rael hesitated, deliberating over the unfamiliar protocol of Jedi titles, and added, “...Master.”
Under the influence of that word, Dooku produced a soft choke. Sifo-Dyas thought he was observing his overachiever friend’s brain chemistry change in real time. He wanted to laugh, but worried Rael would think he was teasing him over the mistake.
“It’s okay, Rael, you don’t have to call him that. Dooku’s not a Master yet, he’s just a kid like me. A Padawan. Can you say it?”
“Padawan,” Rael pronounced seriously. He could be a little goofball, but grew very solemn when receiving information about his new home.
“Good!” It was pretty cute in that thick Ringo Vinda accent, too.
They’d reached the place Sifo-Dyas had been aiming toward: a nice stretch of bank where the water was shallow enough for short legs to wade. He remembered playing here as a little boy with Dooku and the rest of the Hawkbat clan: happy, golden days that glowed in his memory like the feeling of sun-warmed skin. He knelt to let Rael climb off his shoulders, then flopped on his back on the sand. Dooku eased down cross-legged beside him, folding up his long limbs. Sifo-Dyas liked that about Dooku - how he always chose the spot nearest to him, no matter what they were doing. His friend still seemed a little dazed from the whole being-called-Master thing, but he’d get over it.
“What…what is it?” Rael wanted to know, looking both fascinated and not too sure about the water.
“It’s all a big indoor system powered by the same pump functions that make the fountains and waterfalls run.” Sifo-Dyas rearranged himself so that his head was pillowed more comfortably on Dooku’s leg. This whole being-a-Seeker thing was actually both easy and satisfying. “Sometimes, younglings like to wade here. We did when we were your age.”
“Wade?” If it was possible, the boy’s brown eyes grew rounder. “Like, go in?”
“Yeah, you can take off your shoes and put your feet in. It’s fun, try it.”
Rael slipped off his shoes and considered the water’s edge with an oddly serious expression on his little face.
Sifo-Dyas turned his attention to Dooku, plucking at his pant leg. “You want to get in too? For old times’ sake?”
“So you can attempt to splash water on me, like a foolish child?” Dooku flicked him lightly in the center of his forehead. “No, I don’t think so.”
“I wouldn’t dream of splashing you,” Sifo-Dyas lied easily. Splashing Dooku had always been one of his favorite games during that same Creche clan era.
“Is that so? So why are you thinking of it right now?”
Sifo-Dyas snorted. “You might be good at the Living Force, but you’re not that good.”
“I don’t need the Living Force. I know you.”
“Yeah? You can just read my mind through my face?” Sifo-Dyas tilted his head back so Dooku could have the benefit of his whole upside down eye-rolling expression. He was so full of bantha shit; Sifo-Dyas had missed him so much. “Okay, so what am I thinking about right n–”
Rael started abruptly crying.
“Rael!” Sifo-Dyas lurched upright. “What’s the matter? Are you hurt?”
The boy stood in the water to the depth of his ankles, sobbing as if his heart was broken. He couldn’t see any evident injury or possible thing that had startled the boy. Sifo-Dyas opened his arms, uncertain, and Rael threw himself forward out of the shallows. He hit his chest hard, buried his face in his tunic, and wailed.
“What should I do?” Sifo-Dyas mouthed at Dooku.
“How should I know?” Dooku looked almost as scared as he felt. “You’re the Seeker.”
They exchanged desperate looks over Rael’s head.
“Give him more juice,” Dooku suggested in a whisper.
“I don’t have any more juice!”
“–Because you drank it all, ass!”
“He finished his own juice,” Sifo-Dyas defended himself a little wildly. “That juice was mine! We had two juices!”
“Calm down, you’re making everything worse.” Dooku addressed himself to Rael, using his reasonable adult voice; an effect that typically worked well for him, unless of course, that newly-deepened voice of his happened to crack mid-sentence. “What has upset you, little one?”
“It’s so… it’s so…” Queried by the impressive Dooku, Rael struggled valiantly for the words, swallowing down his cries for a moment. “Wet!”
“Okay, yeah, it is. It is. It is really wet.” Sifo-Dyas patted his back soothingly. He looked again to his friend for more help. They had a start.
Dooku looked thoughtful. “Where did you find him?”
“Oh come off it, Dooku,” Sifo-Dyas frowned, trying not to let his irritation touch the edges of himself in the Force. He was a troublemaker, yes, of course, but he wasn’t actually a steal-a-kid level troublemaker. “I already told you: I checked him out of the Creche using the proper methods, they really do know I have him–”
“No, no, originally. Where did you “seek” him from?”
“Oh, uh,” Sifo-Dyas frowned. “Ringo Vinda. That big starport there.”
“The starport? He lived there, as in inside of it?” Dooku put it together first. “Rael, have you ever seen something like this before? This amount of water?”
Rael shook his head very hard, his curls swinging.
“Oh, right,” Sifo-Dyas blinked. He wouldn’t have. The starport was entirely indoor with no green spaces or natural elements. It would be absurd to have a water feature in such a place. “I guess this might be a little overwhelming, huh?”
“It’s just so wet,” Rael repeated. He was starting to calm down now that his concerns were being treated seriously.
“These types of waterways and lakes are all over the galaxy - real ones, not indoors like this,” Sifo-Dyas explained. “My birthworld, Minashee, is mostly all water. People live in big floating towns and get everywhere by boat. Or swimming, I guess.”
Rael rested his head on Sifo-Dyas’s shoulder a moment, clearly trying to picture this incomprehensible world. “Did… did you swim?”
“Umm, I was pretty little for swimming when I lived there, but…” A memory hung somewhere in his mind, maybe real, or maybe just something he’d imagined so many times that he started to think it was real. Wide brown hands holding him afloat in a flat, turquoise sea. A man with a huge laugh, and Sifo-Dyas was laughing too. His father? Or a big brother or uncle? Large families were common on Minashee, or at least that’s what the Holonet said. Sifo-Dyas sent a thought toward that unseen blue bead hanging somewhere in the Cassandran system. Be well. I hope your nets are full and the storms spin you home. He’d memorized that prayer off the Holonet, too.
“I dunno how to swim,” Rael wasn’t crying anymore, but his voice remained small and sad. He blinked large, wet eyelashes as he looked between Sifo-Dyas and Dooku. He seemed to be waiting for one of them to tell him that this was an obvious disqualification from being a Jedi.
Yes, the water had been very wet, but it was beginning to occur to Sifo-Dyas that possibly there were more factors in play than the unexpected sensation. Rael was in a huge, new world full of new people, rules he didn’t know, titles he didn’t understand. He and Dooku had come to the Temple so young that Jedi culture came naturally, growing in their bodies with each bite of fruit from the refectory gardens, each new word they learned to say. And they’d always had each other. Sifo-Dyas had never known what it was like to feel alone in this place.
“We’ll teach you,” Dooku said.
“You will?”
“We will?”
“Yes.” Dooku repeated, strangely earnest. “Not today, but when you’re more settled. We’ll check you out of the Creche for an afternoon and teach you how to swim in one of the larger pools. It will be easy. And, ah, fun,” he added, as a kind of afterthought.
Sifo-Dyas studied Dooku, surprised. Maybe that “Master” comment really had lodged itself into his brainstem. Or maybe it was a Living Force thing. The thing was, it actually wasn’t a bad idea, and he could tell by Rael’s face that he was too curious about this excursion to continue being upset.
“So…I’ll see you two again?” Rael asked, the relief in his voice palpable.
“Of course you will. I’m your Seeker.” Sifo-Dyas gave the boy in his arms a slight squeeze. “We’ll be a part of each other forever.”
“...and we do also live here in the same building,” Dooku pointed out.