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Sometimes, Obi-Wan felt cold.
Well, he felt cold all the time in those sewers, with the leaking pipes, not as many blankets as the children needed and a general lack of heating.
But he also felt cold. In his head. In his mind. In the Force.
-
He didn’t really remember when, but Obi-Wan thought those… episodes must have started before Melida/Daan. Or even before his stunt on Bandomeer.
What he remembered, though, was the everlasting feeling of loneliness that had seemed to follow him throughout his childhood in the Temple. Of course, he had his friends, Bant and Quinlan coming to mind immediately, his Clan Master and various other Jedis that he was familiar with. And yet, he was never able to shake the feeling away.
He did not fit in like the others, not exactly. He was not as powerful, not as interesting, not as obedient… On the contrary, most of the time, he had proven he could be too brash, too angry, too clumsy. Obi-Wan had overheard a multitude of derogatory terms used to describe him by the Masters, and those had certainely made him feel cold in the moderate heat of the Temple. Most of the time, the Masters did not mean him to hear them when they criticized him, too busy furiously whispering to each other at the end of the class to see Obi-Wan was still here, listening and trying to keep it together to not show any weaknesses in front of his bullies, who were regularly waiting to jump him in the corridors.
Indeed, while he never really could accept it, Obi-Wan certainly understood why he was sent away from the Temple when he couldn’t find a Master. He wasn’t adequate, and he didn’t need Masters to say that to him anymore, because his traitorous mind could do it well enough on its own.
Otherwise, why would have Qui-Gon accepted him as his Padawan only when he offered to blow himself off in the Bandomeer mines? Maybe Qui-Gon really did see it as a kind of ultimate Jedi sacrifice, but it was still revealing : the first and only time a Jedi Master looked at Obi-Wan and didn’t find lacking was literally when he offered to kill himself to save the other slaves (no matter that he had been feeling the cold creeping on him worse than ever because he had been tortured and starved for days, and that he was so tired that his nerves had been threatening to crack).
And Obi-Wan… Obi-Wan had been so very thankful for Qui-Gon and for being taken as a Padawan learner. He was so proud. Finally, he belonged. Finally, he was in the norm ! It didn’t matter that sometimes, being Qui-Gon’s Padawan felt… Stiffling. It didn’t matter that Qui-Gon wasn’t really affectionate with him and sometimes made him feel like a burden, or that his grades weren’t always as high as his Master wanted (Obi-Wan had learnt to stop asking for help for his homework soon enough), or that he was always compared to Qui-Gon’s former Padawan and was watched like a hawk like he, too, would turn to the Dark side.
He was happy. He pushed the Cold away. He was the Padawan of an honourable Jedi Master, and his apprenticeship would lead him to become what he had always dreamt to be : a Jedi Knight, roaming the galaxy and helping people along the way.
And because he had learnt, very early in his padawanship, that his worth laid in his sacrificing his well-being to help others, Obi-Wan had thought that Qui-Gon would be proud of him when he decided to stay on Melida/Daan to help the Young, poor hurting starved children who just wanted the war that had been destroying their planet for centuries to end.
Obi-Wan couldn’t have been more wrong. And when he had watched Qui-Gon’s ship taking off with his ex-Padawan’s lightsaber and cut-off braid, accompanied by Cerasi and Nield and many other emaciated children who had also watched with dull eyes their only real substancial hope fly away, Obi-Wan’s heart had been freezing.
-
He tried so hard to keep the Cold at bay for the other children, because he had stayed to help them, not to scare them to death, but it proved to be difficult at times. On the first days after Qui-Gon’s departure, the youngest kids would cry when he tried to approach them, or when they were a little older and they had learnt that silence meant continuous survival, they would stare at him in silence with big terrified eyes accross the gloomy damp cave they were hiding in.
-
Time passed, and while the Cold stayed, everybody got accustomed to it, even the littlest ones. They started to understand that it wouldn’t hurt them, and that in fact, part of it existed for them. The Cold made Obi-Wan protective. It made him fierce.
While he had started as an outsider in the sewers (of course he was, he wasn’t born on the same war-torn planet as them, and had a comfortable childhood unlike them), he proved himself in their eyes. He was always there to help them, be it for the planning of an surprise attack on either the Melida or the Daan, to clean bloody wounds off the arms and legs of the child soldiers, or to give his meager share of food to a younger kid.
And what if his hands were sometimes so bloody that he couldn’t clean it all off from under his fingernails ? What if he felt colder than usual after a violent altercation with the Elders when they didn’t prove to be the most brutal and vicious ones ? What if one night, after one of those fights, he spooked Mawat off because « I swear when he looked at me, his eyes were yellow ! » ?
They still trusted him because he belonged there. Nield whispered to him in the dark of the night, speaking of glory and hope for a better future. Cerasi snuggled with him under a ratty blanket, trying to warm him up, which was not always a fruitless effort. The youngests children never tired to ask him for stories of his adventures in outer space.
Their living conditions were horrible and they always went to bed with grumbling stomachs, trying to survive a war against their bloodthirsty families. But they were together, and they would try to survive to win this war as a group, as a newly founded, disjointed family.
-
They won.
But they certainely weren’t a family anymore.
Cerasi died. And Obi-Wan’s tears hadn’t yet started to fall on his cheeks, Cerasi’s blood hadn’t yet finished to congeal on his shaking hands that Nield had accused him of being responsible for all of this.
Obi-Wan had tried to defend himself - « Please, believe me ! I didn’t want that to happen ! It wasn’t my intention ! » - but honestly he couldn’t blame him. He was certainely rational enough to understand that he wasn’t the one to pull the trigger, but it was his actions that resulted in Cerasi’s death. He had tried, again, to forcibly slot himself into another group of people, whose structure collapsed because of his ever-present failings.
And as he ran away, away from corpses, blood and the ambiant suffering, Obi-Wan felt Cerasi’s residual warmth slowly fade out.
-
The vibrations of the ship he found himself on felt jarring after months of silence and the stillness of living (alone) in sewers to survive.
Qui-Gon had finally come back for him. Obi-Wan had called, and his Master had come back. They hadn’t exchanged a lot of words before taking off together, and even if Master Jinn still proved to be distant and looked at him with a weird expression on his face – a mix between stiffness and guilt – he had told Obi-Wan to help himself to any amenities he might need. Obi-Wan had fled to the fresher to be able to think, alone and away from the sharp-eyed Master, while they were on their way to the Temple to see if the Council might accept him back as a Jedi, and if Qui-Gon could take him as a Padawan again.
Obi-Wan hadn’t certainely thought he could ever see the Temple again. It would be a dream come true, that he, a failure of a Padawan, could become a Jedi again, even after all the suffering and the deaths he was the origin off. It had to work. He wouldn’t... He couldn’t survive it if the Council said no. It would be his last straw… He didn’t know what he would do and he was on the verge of … something.For the first time, the Cold didn’t feel like a companion, but like a threat.
Obi-Wan had to do everything in his power to make them accept him. Even if it meant that he had to change himself to fit in, and if it hurt him in the process ? He wouldn’t care. He couldn’t let anyone feel his cold anymore.
He had to fold it in. Hide it. Fold it away.
And as he looked at his emaciated dirty reflection in the small mirror above the sink his hands gripped with too much force, Obi-Wan vowed to never let anyone see how corrupted by the Dark he was.
He was a Jedi. He was Light. He wasn’t bothered by the cold.
A solitary tear fell from one his eyes, rolled down his sunken cheek, and came to rest beside a fake smile.