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Obi-Wan remembered the first time he duelled his grandmaster.
He was thirteen, clumsy and aggressive with his forms, and the older man was like water as he flowed around him. He remembers a warm, calm voice, telling him "Good," and "Press your advantage," as he led him through a set of playful passes, Dooku taking turns as the wounded pirate, the overconfident noble, and the rogue Jedi. Each time as he chased his grandmaster around the salle, he caught every feint being subtly foreshadowed, and thought, "I am being taught to see."
Master Qui-Gon had grounded him at the Temple for almost a month after he had — according to him— ruined a negotiation for a trade dispute through 'recklessness and lack of judgement.' But somehow, his grandmaster, busy as he was, had happened to be in-temple during his disastrous report to the Council, when Qui-Gon had been shuffled off for a damage control mission with Adi Gallia, one that was estimated to run over a month.
His grandmaster had seen the thunderclouds on Qui-Gon’s face, Obi-Wan quiet and thin-lipped, and announced that he would be staying in-temple for at least a month. Qui-Gon, in a towering temper, had thundered that he could “do what he liked with the boy. Maybe he would have a chance of learning something useful,” and stormed off, and Obi-Wan, mortified and well-aware that his mortification was the point, had seen his grandmaster turn to watch his former padawan go, face impassive. Not agreeing, not reacting, not disdainful towards Obi-Wan.
It took only a little time to learn that Dooku also was an indulgent grandmaster, in an Old Core aristocratic way.
He spoke with Obi-Wan’s few remaining teachers, and organized a schedule that would allow him to evaluate Obi-Wan's skills. In the afternoons, he would head to the Archives and Obi-Wan would have unstructured time, but the mornings were theirs. He learned that Obi-Wan excelled at hyperspace navigation calculations, and enrolled him in a three-week advanced accelerated course for Knights. And Obi-Wan, who had feared the lapse of mission structure, was suddenly busier than he had ever been at the Temple.
. . . . .
The best of all was the saber training. It was the only evaluation Dooku didn’t trust to another being, and it was clear from the first pass that Obi-Wan was better than he had expected. The surprise gave way to a need to push Obi-Wan, but with instruction and understated praise.
It was as if he had been dropped into another world. They sparred in a closed salle, and where Obi-Wan was used to a formalized, showy rigidity of Temple sparring and terrible criticism if he lapsed or got too angry, the first time Obi-Wan got truly irritated at his grandmaster’s choice of an impenetrable wall defense and began to swing more aggressively, boxing him towards the corner of the salle, his grandmaster's pleased, unbothered voice called out, “Good. Your anger is making you broad. Tight, fast movements, padawan.”
And he tried it, and it worked. Then, instead of continuing to bait him, his grandmaster adopted a persona that would use the impenetrable wall defense, and let Obi-Wan box him in, tire him, and batter the character into submission.
And when the sabers powered off and Obi-Wan was left bewildered and still angry, his grandmaster just laid a hand on his shoulder and said, “Good. That’s very good,” as if he wasn't even concerned that Obi-Wan had failed.
He had known his grandmaster was a duelist, but over the weeks he began to understand what that meant. His grandmaster taught him the traditional formalized salutes and rituals, the ceremonies and counter-ceremonies, the marks of respect and disrespect. He learned about the fighters' signatures, the barest remnants of which persisted in modern duelling in each form's brace stances, and Obi-Wan was taught to replicate and take pride in the signatures that Dooku’s own saber teachers had used, in Dooku's youth themselves the masters of a dying art.
And he was taught with careful movements the beats of Dooku’s own sign. In his downtime, Obi-Wan practiced the signature until he could feel his grandmaster in it, the fluidity of water and the snapped, perfect flourishes. He felt he had been given a secret, an insight into his grandmaster's past that only he knew.
The young Dooku must have been a brilliant, arrogant duelist, and it was only by his choice as an older man to alter the pacing, to create separate smooth and precise sections that he was able to rehabilitate a signature that was simply designed to convey impatience. Obi-Wan enjoyed practicing it both ways, until he felt he had met both versions of his towering grandmaster.
. . . . .
The duels themselves were pure Makashi. Obi-Wan struggled at first, Dooku keeping him just enough on the back foot to be able to turn to his limited repertoire to respond, but the moment another form's moveset entered, footwork shifted or a grip turned, his grandmaster saluted and ended the bout, decisively, though never unkindly.
He simply returned to the bench that was becoming his own as Obi-Wan froze and went to sit down.
And then, too kindly, he would explain with the most perfect clarity, beat-by-beat the tools Makashi could have used to alleviate the pressure Obi-Wan had solved with his instinctive reach for Ataru. Rallies and feints and tricks to get distance that could close the gap, push your range into their guard so that it was them who backed up. And then, neatly as a parry, the mistake became a question of vocabulary rather than of failure and Obi-Wan, who had felt beaten, would rally.
And when they tried the same pass again, Dooku would allow a few iterations to get him comfortable, varied enough to make him think, and then turn the scenario on its head, show him how to respond as if he had been the aggressor. How to hold his ground against a Makashi onslaught when everything in him wanted to be flipping away. Before, he had never understood how duelists could get blade-locked, a deadly move when mistakes could be so fatal. Dooku spent a morning on its context, and taught him how to identify it as an appropriate risk.
The days flew by. His grandmaster ate with his peers at the refectory, but in the rare times Obi-Wan passed the table, he was as often speaking approvingly about Obi-Wan as he was discussing his research. Among these older Jedi, who had likely never so much as thought about him before, he began to encounter smiles and nods in the hallway.
. . . . .
In his classes, he struggled badly, but continually surprised himself at how often he managed to close the gap between himself and his fellow students.
The Knights were good-natured about it, groaning sympathetically about the trials of being a Senior Padawan, even though his braid barely reached his shoulder, and helped him with the problem sets in the refectory when some of the lesson didn’t click. They too smiled at him in the halls, and talked with him when his marks weren’t what he expected.
His grandmaster didn’t ask, seeming content to see the situation play out, as if Obi-Wan practicing complex calculations under extreme pressure was enough. Obi-Wan never needed to ask his grandmaster what the point had been. Even when he hated it, he had been in enough hyperdrive cockpits to understand that this too was a survival skill, as surely as the dueling was. Astromechs could be disabled, and the ability to blind jump could be the difference between life and death.
When at last the course was over and he achieved his certificate, he came into the refectory, walked over to his grandmaster’s table, and for all he wanted to slam it down, cooly placed the piece of 'plast into his outstretched hand. He had been viciously happy, victorious, ready for the shock of someone who hadn’t thought him capable, and instead his grandmaster read the certificate, pleasure brightening behind his eyes. And when he looked up at Obi-Wan, it was with great depth of satisfaction that he said, “Very well done, young one.”
His neighbor, who had been reading over his shoulder, hissed in a breath and said “Dooku, don’t tell me you put the youngling through this—” and Dooku made a gesture with a hand to stop her.
“He is a padawan of my line. He was entirely certain to find his success.”
It was a strange turn of phrase, easily misheard, but Obi-Wan followed it, and his heart seized at the confirmation of his theory, as thrilled as he was foiled that his success had not been contingent on his achievement. His grandmaster somehow trusted the work ethic of a proven failure, and it felt like waking up after a long time sleeping.
“With your permission, Grandmaster, I would enjoy being enrolled in another class for the time until my master returns.”
And Dooku tipped his head towards his neighbor pointedly, who groused, “I don’t know how you keep finding ones who enjoy it, you tyrant.”
And Dooku, with an archness and a humor Obi-Wan had never heard before, simply said, “As my own Master would say, tyranny is simply a point of view.” And winked at Obi-Wan, nodding that he should return to the Junior Padawans' tables.
Obi-Wan smiled confusedly to himself on the short walk back to the empty benches, and recontextualized those seeming-serious conversations he had walked past before. It seemed unthinkable that his grandmaster had friends, even if they were only fellow-researchers.
It seemed unfathomable.
Master Qui-Gon seemed to beat back love and friendship like a man damming back the sea. He called it all attachment, even when Obi-Wan disagreed about what was allowed, though his master did maintain that it was necessary to care about some beings. As he sat down alone, Obi-Wan missed his crechemates badly, all out on assignment in a vast injustice that ached every time he had to eat alone.
And all at once remembered that he had asked for another class, and put his head in his hands and groaned.
. . . . .
The next one, thankfully, was tactics.
It was easy, even though it was a knight-level class. It was clearly a way to ensure that Temple-stationed knights didn’t drop dead immediately the first time they encountered a firefight.
Obi-Wan tested out after the first three classes, and Dooku just raised his eyebrows and enrolled him in the Master-level seminar. It was almost cruel. Tyrant, he thought, and almost smiled.
That cohort was less impressed to have a Padawan among them, especially in the tiny class of five-plus-Obi-Wan. A few tried to be sympathetic, but the majority set out immediately to make him understand his place. It didn’t take much to learn Dooku’s lesson this time. He had to learn to stand his own against those belittling him or risk failing a test he had no reasonable expectation of passing. It was a somewhat clumsy lesson about standing up to Qui-Gon. Obi-Wan appreciated it, even if it was irritating.
The only thing was, the tactics began to shine out to him, clear as kyber crystal, even under the crushing pressure of the social situation. Obi-Wan was used to focusing on the tasks at hand while being undermined and sabotaged, and it barely registered after a while. He listened keenly, even as he fulfilled his role as naiive-question-asker. And when he held back from contributing during the key moments of the class, he stayed afterwards, waiting for the serene, impenetrable placidity of his teacher to give way, to indicate he was allowed to speak.
Eventually, he stopped waiting.
He would sketch out the movements of squads and battalions that he had noticed went unexplored, and when the triparte voice, in a cool monotone, shot down the ones that went nowhere and left the remainder unremarked on, cautiously, he learned to extrapolate, and the cycle continued. If he wanted an explanation he had to think of one himself, and learn if it was correct. It forced him to think like his teacher, to understand himself from an outside perspective, all limitations and narrow experience.
He had handled small battlefields before, groups of fighters, but it was Melida-Daan that his mind kept returning to.
He learned things that made him want to rage at his past inexperience, turn around and bring back the Children he could have saved. And as the course went on and the weeks stretched beyond when his master was meant to return, Adi arriving back injured and reporting that Qui-Gon had stayed to hunt the slavers who had (actually) sabotaged the talks, he learned to manage squads, then battalions, and then fleet wings, refigured from battles from the Old Republic records.
He also began to understand that the main class was a survey course just like the first, when more challenging coursework, real hypotheticals with impossible constraints, began appearing on his terminal in the dead of night.
. . . . .
His grandmaster had stopped his subtle questioning about the class, instead waiting with a forced patience for it to run its course. He spoke with Obi-Wan about the lessons in the evenings, once he had returned from the Archives, skeptical that the difficulty was standard, and watched Obi-Wan cautiously as he pushed on, motivated by the impossible, driving himself to distraction in search of a solution. There were times Obi-Wan understood his disbelief too well.
More and more of his free time was taken up with hunting down answers in the Archives; this past battle being referenced in this subtle maneuver of this false retreat. He had a taste of the language of tactics but needed the vocabulary, and in the Archives he found records, many bearing the mark of first-translation by his tactics teacher. He found information, which he forced into answers.
So he sent back his best, diagrams and citations and week-by-week plays of a campaign, and sometimes would receive back a one-word “no.” But more often he would receive a piece of his own work sent back to him without context, directing his attention and giving Obi-Wan something else to work off of.
The ancient Ithorian master reminded him too much of his grandmaster.
In the salle, everything was slowly coming full-circle. How to drill down on your fundamentals when under pressure. How to learn the language of combat you shared with your opponent. The first time he surprised Dooku with a new Makashi feint, batted out of the air on reflex with the terrifying speed his grandmaster always kept restrained, Dooku turned wide eyes on him. The next day he offered him a bead for his braid.
Obi-Wan hesitated, and asked for more time to think about it, and Dooku agreed without hesitation.
But when they recovened and Dooku spoke to him in the hush of the private room, that the bead had been a gift from Master Yoda, and the only thing he had kept from his padawan braid before gifting it, Obi-Wan felt light-headed with sadness and joy. Master Qui-Gon loved saber combat, but he loved it for what it did, not for its own sake. He would not have taken the gift the way that Obi-Wan did. He would not have loved the tiny golden cuff the way that Obi-Wan did.
“I don’t want my master to be upset if he sees I’ve gained a bead.” He tried to speak lightly, dismissively, hating more than anything to turn this away, but his voice wavered. His master would be furious.
Dooku scowled. “If my padawan feels he has a right to interrupt a tradition of choice out of disdain for me, his foolish head should be struck from his shoulders.” It was shocking, even spoken so quietly and privately, and he looked at his grandmaster like he had grown a second head. There was a grim set to his mouth, his eyes hard. Then he took a deep, calming breath and looked down at Obi-Wan.
“Your master has done you a disservice—“
“Please.” Obi-Wan didn’t know what madness possessed him to cut Dooku off. “Please, don’t. I don’t want to hear you speaking badly about him.” He felt out of his body, like someone else was speaking.
There was fondness, heartbreak, and resignation in his grandmaster’s eyes.
“Come. Meditate with me."
. . . . .
It felt like half a dream to follow after his grandmaster.
For seemingly the first time he heard the whispers as he went, comments about "remedial training" and "if Dooku can't set him straight..." If they’d been happening, he hadn’t noticed them before — how had he not noticed? He looked up at his grandmaster, but as they wove through the halls of the Temple his eyes were urgent and concerned, fixed constantly forward. If he had noticed the whispers, it had been at the beginning, when Obi-Wan didn’t react. He felt so foolish. There was never a clean slate in the Temple, all the people who had smiled at him and talked to him had just been playing the game, he would always be—
And the quietness of their salle enveloped them. Obi-Wan heard a noise like hitched breathing coming from somewhere in the room, locationless.
He bent to remove his shoes, sitting on the bench, only for Dooku to go, “Obi-Wan, leave it. Come here.” It was all so confusing. His grandmaster never ignored protocol. He never spoke Obi-Wan's name.
And then his grandmaster was across from him, and lowered into the first posture of a paired kata, and some part of Obi-Wan went, "Oh, I know this," and everything went quiet for a time. After a long time, he came back to himself.
He only realized he was weeping when he realized his form was wavering, but his grandmaster’s brow was furrowed as if against a blow, and he was projecting long waves of serenity into the Force. They rolled over Obi-Wan and broke him apart like a toy boat, and he surrendered to them, and drowned and found stillness. The rest of the world came back to him gradually, like a throb in the center of his consciousness, a place where he was out of joint. Ruthlessly, he wrenched himself back into place, and Dooku’s eyes flicked open, anger in them for the first time. Obi-Wan gentled his mental hands, and Dooku's eyes closed again. Instead of forcing himself into displine, he grasped his turmoil with both hands and let himself bleed.
The room filled with his pain and selt-hatred and foiled love, slighted and shaken and angry and afraid, and Dooku just breathed against it like a tide, and rolled serenity through the center of it, not bidding it disperse, just like a current, shepherding it away from spiralling. And, an indeterminate amount of time later, when Obi-Wan was done vomiting his heartbreak and isolation into the Force, he was able to see the pieces clearly.
Crammed into his head, they had been enormous.
In the enormity of the Force, they were so small.
He stayed adrift in that for a while, realizing how long it had been since a meditation had been able to touch him, and then began setting himself back to rights, fitting the pieces back into the places in his body he knew they lived. It didn’t feel as good as repressing it, it never did, and it left him feeling shaky and sick. But when he and his grandmaster finally reached the stopping place, and Dooku flopped down unselfconsciously, trembling with exertion to sit on the floor and held his arms extended, Obi-Wan crawled into them like a child and wept, exhausted and wrung out beyond naming. Dooku didn't shush him, just held him fiercely tight.
The next morning he took the tactics exam, and gained the lowest score on record, with three unnumbered extra test questions weighted against his grade that were ten times as complex as the others. He did not receive his certificate, and he ate in the Room of a Thousand Fountains, away from the whispers that even his grandmaster couldn't protect him from.
That evening he received word that his master was returning.
And in truth, Dooku was running thin on pretexts to stay with Obi-Wan. He had a list of planets to chase leads on as long as Obi-Wan’s arm, and had taken to redoing his least favorite translations in the archive’s library, muttering over them whenever Obi-Wan arrived at his suite to spend time with him after dinner. Most of the researchers who had been there when he arrived were long gone, and many of the second group were prepping for departure, clearly side-eyeing him for staying. It was clear that Obi-Wan’s grandmaster was being called elsewhere. Sometimes literally, his comm going off in the middle of a bout, forcing him to disengage with a series of surgical beats designed to force Obi-Wan to yield in a breath while still learning something.
Dooku would move over to the bench to activate his comm, and Obi-Wan never knew the language that was being spoken, but the lines were deeper on his grandmaster’s face when he returned, a hunter’s spark burning in his eyes.
And Qui-Gon was three days out, and then two.
. . . . .
On the day, Obi-Wan felt like he was the last to hear that his master had returned. He had kept busy but available, returning his plasts from the Archive, swimming in the fountains, and trying to feel like a version of himself that could survive in the presence of his Master. But his comm never rang, not from the Council chambers or the healers or their chambers.
But Dooku and and Qui-Gon had obviously spoken by the time Obi-Wan's master returned to their rooms, because he was sullen and battle-beaten, but on his best behavior. He remarked on the bead he'd been given incuriously, and placed it in Obi-Wan's braid, with only perfunctory congratulations on the achievement of certain certificates. There was humor in it - that Dooku had either lied in saying the plural, as a last wink to Obi-Wan, or that Qui-Gon simply hadn’t cared to check. Obi-Wan knew which it was, but he just smiled with a happiness that was almost real, and asked Qui-Gon about the details of his mission.
Life returned to normal, with a few bare exceptions. His former classmates still nodded to him, even the masters from his class. He had earned their begrudging respect in sitting the exam, and their pride had been soothed that he hadn’t passed.
When Obi-Wan looked up one evening in the referectory the Ithorian tactics master watching those masters as Obi-Wan sat alone, he began to wonder too if avoiding earning Obi-Wan possible tormentors had been contributed to the weighting of the three extra questions.
They had been an acknowledgement of what he had learned, yes, but also an acknowledgement that his grandmaster would not be around forever. That plans had to be made for the reality of the field Obi-Wan faced. It gave Obi-Wan a grim and heartbreaking satisfaction, that his tactics master saw his place in the Temple as clearly tenuous as he did.
. . . . .
His master hated his newfound familiarity with Makashi.
Obi-Wan knew that he had always found it antiquated and narrow, unadaptable and obtuse, but now he talked about it like it was a contaminant, and insisted Obi-Wan scrub it from his repertoire outside of their any-form mix for pitched battle. Obi-Wan was used to this, he told himself. It had been the same when he had returned from the Temple with the first few steps of the Vapaad.
But the first time in the salle that Qui-Gon pressed his advantage and Obi-Wan stepped up instead of back, Qui-Gon recoiled and regrouped without noticing. He later couldn’t pin down what it had been about the bout, but complimented Obi-Wan vaguely on his fighting. The awareness of his master's blindness was like ashes on Obi-Wan’s tongue.
His grandmaster hadn't said goodbye, after that terrible conversation he must have had with Qui-Gon. Obi-Wan had known they brought out each other's worst temperaments, but it had hurt when he had passed their salle the next morning and saw it in use for a class of younglings. He didn't end up returning his key to his Grandmaster's suite, but its use as a talisman dried up without him. Besides, within a week Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon had left the Temple altogether.
But between the joys and sorrows as Obi-Wan readjusted to the life of a mission-focused padawan, it became clear that people were no longer dying around him like they had been. He spent less time feeling helpless. Less time sleeping with fresh grief, less time being beaten, less time imprisoned. Those compounded as even more ability to save his charges from disaster.
And when, a year later at the conclusion of a mission, he was gifted a figure of a steel-saber bird, on whose graceful movements the planet’s fighting style was based, he didn't think twice before sending it to his grandmaster – not to the Temple, where everything was pulled apart and dissected, but to Serenno, where it might be a secret that his grandmaster could keep safe.