ALL THE CORRECT THINGS
by ardavenport
Obi-Wan tensed and started.
Qui-Gon paused on a large flat rock and increased his grip fractionally on the body of his fourteen year-old apprentice that he carried. The motion of Obi-Wan's body and legs ceased. Qui-Gon continued to leap up the uneven stones of the pathway, toward the vine-covered cottage that was made of the same flat, streaked gray stones leading up to it.
His young apprentice, now aware of his surroundings pressed his head to Qui-Gon's chest and did not move. Hardly slowing his pace, Qui-Gon extended only his fingers outward and the Force pressed on the locking mechanism of the door before him. It slid aside for them. Behind him, the Jedi Master heard several voices shouting and he smelled burning foliage.
The lights automatically came on as the door closed. The frosted windows of the room were small, letting in only muted natural light from outside. The inside artificial light was white and harsh. Walking around the pale and spotless table and chairs, he carried his Padawan to the back of the room and set the boy down on a covered and perfectly flat sleep bench.
"Stay," Qui-Gon instructed, his finger halting Obi-Wan's open-mouthed inquiry and motion to stand. The room was isolated, sound-proofed from whatever confrontation might be going on outside. Qui-Gon slid his travel pack and robe off into a pile next to Obi-Wan's dangling feet.
In the fresher, Qui-Gon filled a large drinking cylinder; he sniffed the contents. It was fresh, clear and cool, purified, but still with a trace of the hillside springs from outside. He took it back along with a stack of thick, absorbent cloths, pale and unblemished, like the room and the furnishings inside the cottage. He put them on a stand next to the sleep bench and sat next to Obi-Wan who had slid off his own robe and travel pack and taken his med-kit off his belt. It lay opened next to him.
Qui-Gon dampened a cloth and began wiping off the grit and mud from Obi-Wan's face, revealing the scratches underneath.
The shadows of people darkened the window and something thumped against the closed door. Muffled voices, loud enough to penetrate into their refuge, drew Obi-Wan's startled attention.
"That does not concern us, Padawan," he instructed sternly, taking Obi-Wan's chin in his hand and turning it toward him. Obi-Wan's eyes were wide with disagreement, but he said nothing.
Qui-Gon continued cleaning, first the left cheek, then the right. Streaks of red stained the cloth along with the grime, but not much. Qui-Gon's eyes critically evaluated the bruises and scrapes while Obi-Wan watched his Master with increasing intensity behind his blue-gray stare. But he did not squirm or fidget while he submitted to the examination.
Flipping the cloth over, Qui-Gon dipped the unblemished side into the water cylinder and continued wiping Obi-Wan's face, uncovering bruises on his cheek and forehead, and a long shallow scrape slashed across his nose. He dabbed the mud off from the ginger hairline and a round, shiny black bug crawled out onto the pale skin. Qui-Gon caught it on the end of his little finger and scrutinized it critically. Little legs and antennae twitched and wiggled, but it was clearly not parasitic. He flicked it away and continued to wipe away dirt along with tiny brown and black bits of dried muddy plants, but nothing else crawled out of Obi-Wan's hair.
Picking up and dampening a new cloth, Qui-Gon cleaned his apprentice's neck and the collar of the tunic before laying the cloth aside. He gently placed his hand on Obi-Wan's right arm.
"Let me see," he said quietly and Obi-Wan nodded. Qui-Gon gently drew the injured arm away from where Obi-Wan had clutched it to his body and folded his hand around the point of injury. He had not sensed any broken bones or torn tendons and there were none. But it was badly bruised, warm with pain.
"You can lessen the impact of this on your own, Obi-Wan," he said and Obi-Wan nodded, closing his eyes. He felt the Force from his Padawan, a little fitfully at first, gather about the wound, cooling the swelling. Qui-Gon watched carefully before reaching up and touching the bruise on Obi-Wan's forehead. They remained still, Obi-Wan's wounded arm relaxed, still cradled in his Master's hand. A faint mirror sensation of Obi-Wan's bruises prickled the same places on Qui-Gon's body and forehead through the Force. But there was no more serious injury underneath them.
There was more thumping on the door and more muted shouting penetrated the interior of the cottage. Neither Jedi reacted or moved. The noise and shadows over the windows receded.
Qui-Gon opened his eyes and looked down at his apprentice. He picked up an antiseptic stylet from the open medkit, clicked it on and began passing the tip over the facial scrapes, his hand under Obi-Wan's chin.
"You are concerned about what happened," he stated.
Obi-Wan's eyes opened slowly. Qui-Gon read the personal disappointment in his expression, a sense of failure.
"I'm sorry I fell, Master."
"I am sure you are," he agreed, again laying his hand on Obi-Wan's injured arm. While the Force could speed up healing, it was hardly better than a medical droid and bacta. The arm would be tender and sore until they returned to their ship and took advantage of its facilities. "But there is no need to apologize to me, Obi-Wan. You did nothing wrong."
Obi-Wan stared back with a shocked expression as if Qui-Gon had announced that he would be knighted as soon as they returned to Coruscant.
"But I did not realize where the danger was, Master. I though it was safe, but instead I fell through the bramble bridge."
He smiled. "The only reason why I did not step where you did is because you were ahead of me." Qui-Gon began skimming the end of the stylet over the scrape on Obi-Wan's nose. "And which would you say was the greater danger? The rotted bramble bridge? Or the blaster cannon that fired immediately after you fell through?"
Obi-Wan's shock renewed. "It was a cannon?"
Qui-Gon knew that his apprentice might have seen the flash, but the fall stunned him, so he would not have seen his Master leap high to the side and then dash forward to slice the barrel of the weapon into three pieces. The sentry droids that had been harassing them were destroyed next. Their owner had not been pleased. The sentience had bled out of the old man's lined and weathered features as he howled with rage about invaders on his land, and he might have thrown himself on Qui-Gon's lightsaber had the arriving villagers not held him back. Though he looked elderly and thin, he had kicked and thrashed wildly, needing four people to restrain him.
"It was," he answered, still busying himself with the scrapes on Obi-Wan's face. "It looked as if it had been cannibalized from a space cruiser. It was poorly mounted and had a very limited targeting angle, and it was quite inappropriate for atmosphere."
His brows now a little scrunched up in thought, Obi-Wan asked, "I do not understand, Master. How did I not do anything wrong if I fell?"
Qui-Gon smiled. This was the lesson that all Jedi Padawans faced.
"Do you believe that the Force exists to always dutifully obey your commands, my young Padawan?"
"No," he immediately denied. "We are servants of the Force. Selfless in service for the good of others. The Force does not exist to serve us. But. . . ." his memorized ideals failed him here; he had run out of words to express a deeper meaning that he was only now probing.
"But you still feel as if it is," Qui-Gon finished for him. "As do I. But. . . ." Finishing with the stylet and he put it aside. Obi-Wan's scrapes and small cuts were now pink and smoothed. "The Jedi serves the Force. Not the other way around."
Obi-Wan nodded, his expression determined. "I should mind my feelings."
"Yes," Qui-Gon agreed. He laid his hand on Obi-Wan's narrow shoulder. "You should mind your feelings, Obi-Wan, as I have been telling you for over a year now. But what do you think that really means?"
Obi-Wan wordlessly stared up at him, at first not quite comprehending the question and then with some worry for being asked about something that he had taken for granted since he was a small youngling. Sometimes an examination of the most elementary concepts could yield the deepest meanings.
"Um. . . .I shouldn't feel as if the Force exists serve me," he finally offered a little tentatively.
"Well." Qui-Gon shrugged and brushed off the remaining loose dirt still clinging to Obi-Wan's tunic. "If you make such an effort to control your feelings, then there won't be any room left for the Force," he answered. And then smiled. "Minding your feelings, does not mean suppressing them, Obi-Wan."
"Then. . . . I don't understand," he finally admitted, obviously disappointed that he did not already know what Qui-Gon wanted him to know.
"The Force flows through a Jedi. You do not think; you feel where it takes you." Qui-Gon held his hand up. The stylet floated up and he curled his fingers around it, Obi-Wan's eyes following the small thin instrument. He was still too young to have learned such control with the Force. "The Force flows through you as it is part of you." The stylet rose up above Qui-Gon's open palm and began slowly turning. "As you are part of the Force. But there will be times when you have meditated and trained and done all the correct things and you are as deeply aware of the Force as you are of your own breath. . . "
Qui-Gon let the stylet drop and he caught it. ". . . .And yet you will still be injured. Or maimed. Or killed." He touched Obi-Wan's bruised face with his fingertips. "You did all the correct things, Obi-Wan. You were as aware of the danger as I, which turned out to be an old, frightened man with an oversized blaster. The Force guided your steps and you let it guide you as well as I could have."
"If I had not fallen, I would have been hit by the blaster cannon," Obi-Wan said very quietly.
His fingers still touching his Padawan's cheek, Qui-Gon answered.
"Yes."
The old man's cannon had been such a ridiculous weapon to fire in an atmosphere, the energy bolts obviously calibrated for vacuum. They visibly spread over only a short range and would have badly burned the whole body of anyone with even a glancing hit. A partial or direct hit would have simply incinerated them.
"But even though I could feel the Force, I might still have been hit as well," Obi-Wan continued.
"Yes." Qui-Gon nodded, his palm now resting on his apprentice's cheek. "Or I might have been ahead of you. And not fallen and been hit." He sighed. "But I did not. And I was not hit, and you were not as well. It was not chance that you fell. It saved you. But never think that you will always control such events to your favor. Do not think it. Do not feel it. Know it." He touched the side of Obi-Wan's head, the short thick hair and the thin braid that had slowly gotten longer over the past year.
Obi-Wan still looked puzzled, but he nodded. He did not understand, yet. But he would with time and his Master smiled at the concentration on his features, so intense that Obi-Wan did not sense the presence outside.
Obi-Wan started when the door buzzer sounded. Qui-Gon waved a hand and the door opened.
The Village Greeter, a stocky, broad shouldered Human named Meelar, stepped though and respectfully approached them. Qui-Gon stood and bowed to him.
"Well," Meelar began humbly in his deep, slow voice. "Um, I came to see how you were after that, um, after Zern, well, had his little spell. . . . " The words faded into an uncomfortable silence while Meelar looked from Qui-Gon to Obi-Wan. The man winced at the sight the young Jedi's bruised face.
Qui-Gon folded his arms before him and raised his brows, his wordless indication that 'spell' was too inadequate a term for what the old man, apparently named Zern, had done. The Jedi Master was just as broad in the shoulder as Meelar and over a head taller.
"Well, um, first it's really partly our fault. This place isn't really Zern's, but when he came back from the space traders to retire he just planted his things here and said it was his and nobody really felt like arguing with him, 'cause he'd gotten a bit more short tempered since being off-world for awhile. And I guess that does that to some people, but Zern, he was never that nice to begin with. . . ."
Qui-Gon politely listened. Meelar was a pleasant man with a temperament so unassuming and simple that one would never guess that he had once lived on Coruscant for over a dozen years. Meelar rambled on about Zern, his kin, who tended to be bad-tempered in general, but generally not homocidal. Meelar threw in a few stories about how the local children liked to throw rocks at "old man Zern's" sentry droids, which did not have charged weapons and no one in the community took the old man's rants at the village meetings seriously, but they tried to be polite because he was still family with people they knew, and mostly kept out of sight to himself anyway.
Quite a lot of the locals speculated on how Zern had earned his living off-world and what could have made him so suspicious and mean, and what they could do to get him to relax a bit more in the gatherings, and the rumors that some unkind people spread around about Zern falling in with space pirates and privateers only made that harder when word of what was said got back to Zern, who did not like other people talking about him, but that was understandable since most people got a bit itchy when they heard their names talked about when other people didn't think they were not around. . . .
"So anyway, this place isn't on the maps you have so you wouldn't know that Zern was here," Meelar explained, finally getting around to the actual point of his narrative. "But other Jedi have been coming here for their training and there hasn't been a problem before. But Zern's been pretty jumpy 'cause y'know, the kids have been after those droids again lately, since they figured out how to get 'em so they run into each other and Zern has been going on about getting out his 'big gun', but he's been saying that for so long, nobody's really taken it seriously." The short stocky man rubbed his neck, obviously still surprised that a 'big gun' had shown up. "And then, turns out he really had something and he really fired that thing. . . .well. . . .whatever it was. . . ."
"It was a ZT-type blaster cannon and normally it would only mounted on the hull of a space ship. It was also military grade and it is quite unlikely that it was obtained legally," Qui-Gon stated calmly. And politely. He had no wish to penalize Meelar, or the village, for their paranoid neighbor.
"Uuumm. . . . oh." Meelar gulped at the near confirmation that the gossip about Zern being a space pirate might not be so fanciful. "I guess we better look into that. Um. . . .oh, I better get going." He straightened, shaking off his rambling manner and gestured toward the back of the room. "Seeing that your Padawan is tired, you two can stay here as long as you like."
Qui-Gon turned and saw that his apprentice had gathered his Master's robe over him and was curled up on the sleep bench. Surprised, he took a few steps, but Obi-Wan's blue-gray eyes opened half way and he winked.
"Yes," Qui-Gon agreed. He stood over sleep bench, his body between Meelar and Obi-Wan. "I think we will rest here for the day. Though I am sure that the current resident would object," he finished, turning back to Meelar, who was already backing up toward the door.
"Oh, that's not a problem. Zern's mother and aunt came after him after they heard and Tema and Foshern aren't letting go of him for a bit. We'll just clean up when you're done. We've still got people out there putting out the fire anyway, damping out the embers and all that. Just let them know when you go."
Meelar bowed, his hands clasped before him, which was the local custom. Qui-Gon returned the gesture before the door slid shut. They were alone again in the quiet, harshly white room.
"Stay," he instructed when Obi-Wan started to sit up, pushing the robe back. Qui-Gon picked out a stiff, padded headrest from a shelf over the sleep bench. Obi-Wan lifted himself just enough to allow Qui-Gon to slide it under his head.
"Stay," he repeated with a small smile. Obi-Wan lay back down, his eyes still on his Master, his hands clutching the edge of the robe covering him.
Qui-Gon took away the large drinking cylinder and soiled cloths that he had gotten from the fresher and went to the cottage's compact cooking unit. He soon returned to the sleep bench with a tray of water and a some pressed and dried snacks for both of them. He cleared the stand, putting the clean cloths and the medkit on the tray before setting it down. And then he retrieved a comfortable chair for himself.
"I think we shall both rest here for a bit," he announced, making himself comfortable. "And when you are feeling better, we shall meditate on what has happened." He offered Obi-Wan a clear cylinder of water. Pushing himself up, he accepted it and took a sip. Qui-Gon nudged the plate of snacks toward him, but he did not take one. Instead, he took up a clean cloth and poured a trickle of water on it. Sitting up, he leaned forward and touched his Master's face with it.
Qui-Gon felt the sting of a previously unnoticed cut on his cheek. It might have come from the flying droid parts or the brambles, but it wasn't too deep and he held still while Obi-Wan wiped away the dried blood and then picked up the antiseptic stylet.
"And I think we will both heal together a bit as well," he finished. Obi-Wan grinned back.
***##**##**## END ##**##**##***
(This story was first posted on tf.n 5-Nov-2007)
Disclaimer: All characters and situations belong to George and Lucasfilm; I'm just playing in their sandbox.