"I never thought I'd feel old."

Noela was halfway across the living room, but he could still see the roll of her eyes at his comment. "You're not old, Qui-gon," she protested. "You're just no longer..."

"Young?"

She grimaced. "Not the word I was looking for, Knight Jinn."

Now it was his turn to grimace. "And that title makes me feel younger than springtime," he groused.

"It makes you sound venerable," Noela corrected. "Dignified. Grown-up."

"Old," he repeated.

It was getting to be very difficult to keep a grin off her face. He could tell these things, especially with someone he'd known for as many years as the woman who had gone from a glorified secretary to a respected Ambassador for Alderaan.

"If Yoda heard you complaining about being a Knight at the ripe old age of twenty-five," she reminded, "you wouldn't be able to walk for a week."

"True."

She checked her watch. "All right," she said with mock severity, "you've had your ten minutes to grouse and if you continue in this vein, we're not going to make our reservation."

It was her typical, efficient way of dealing with things, but she knew him too well and therefore, her attempts to cut him off were more a product of her tendency to mother him. This, of course, included her tendency to rescue him from self-pity.

"All right," he sighed. "I'll forget for the rest of the night that I have every reason to complain."

She looked at him with one of the flatly disbelieving stares that never failed to exasperate him, but shook her head and headed for the door to the kitchen.

"I'll get my coat," she explained over her shoulder, "and then we'll remember that we're supposed to enjoy this one night a year."

With that, she officially made him feel guilty. They hadn't managed to arrange for her to be his escort in six years and they had sworn that Hoth and high water would not ruin this year's event. As a result, he'd made reservations at the 23rd Hour and consulted Dex, his friendly neighborhood fry-cook on where he should take a young lady for a night of dancing. Not that he could dance particularly well, but they were a perfect match with her tendency to run into things and his unnatural ability to step on toes.

All in all, it promised to be an enjoyable evening and he had looked forward to it.

Right up to the moment when the Council called him out of his sparring to Knight him.

It had been as much a shock as an honor, since they had clandestinely gone about the procedures of administering the Trials, but had followed his Master's counsel to avoid mentioning them for fear of making him nervous. They had also reasoned that he would perform better when he didn't know what was about to hit him.

The age argument, however, was a mask for the fact that he felt there was a severe error in thinking that he was ready for this role, even at the traditional age of Knighting.

He would not, however, let that stand in the way of treating Noela Ovorp as she deserved. Newly resolved, he headed for the kitchen to tell her so.

And headed straight into the swinging door. Qui-Gon hadn't made a single sound since she sought out her overcoat, but she suspected that he was calming himself rather than sulking. For all his bluster, it did not seem in his nature to dwell on things like this for long.

Especially when it was his annual duty to act the perfect gentleman.

The sound she encountered upon opening the door, however, was anything but what should come out of the mouth of a dock-hand on Sluis Van, much less a perfect gentleman or Jedi Knight.

He was nowhere to be seen, so she simply followed the sound of his fluent cursing to the other side of the door.

She immediately wished she hadn't been curious enough to look. There seemed to be blood everywhere and his head was lolling as if he had been knocked senseless.

"You..."

"I'm sorry!" Noela gasped. "I didn't mean to..."

"You..."

"I'll call the Healers," she promised, hand fumbling for her commlink. "Just say you accept my apology."

His eyes rolled back in his head and for a moment, she thought he'd succumbed to unconsciousness, but his voice rumbled forth in a tone that was more plaintive than accusatory as he pulled his hands away from his nose.

"You run into doors, not me!" he protested. "What's so hard for the Force to understand about that?"