A/N: A prompt sent to me by a friend. Too long to post elsewhere, so here we are.
A Falcon in the Dive
Eirian Erisdar
Obi-Wan sees his first spire-falcon at the age of eight.
It melds so perfectly with the silver-gold towers of Coruscant that his eyes slide over it twice before locating it again - a sleek plume of metallic-white feathers ruffling over red-gold under-feathers, like an incandescent sunset shafting through a cloud bank.
Obi-Wan watches, face pressed to transparisteel window, as the falcon tilts forward and drops effortlessly off the spire that gives the species its name. For a moment, the breath is trapped in his throat as the falcon falls a hundred stories and even further, down to the planet surface kilometres below.
Then Coruscant Prime's afternoon light glints across angled primaries, and Obi-Wan realises that the falcon was never falling. It is diving. A fall is uncontrolled, helpless. A dive is a drop so breathtakingly fast that the air cannot fall with you, and flees towards the sky as you curl it below your wings.
The falcon pulls out of its dive in a flare of wings caught in the mesh of true sunlight and Coruscant's artificial glare, and when it rises, a juvenile duracrete slug is clasped in its gleaming talons.
Obi-Wan's fingers slip towards the training 'saber at his belt - his first blade.
He holds his hands out to his sides, and imagines wind under his fingers and a padawan braid over his ear, and the Force roaring into a jubilant shout as he dives into it.
The spire-falcon wheels towards the sky, and lets loose a clear cry of victory.
Qui-Gon tells him to jump, so he does.
Melida/Daan has many cliffs. This one falls upward, past Obi-Wan's clenched fists and locked limbs. He feels for the Force but it is as though the air has solidified into opaque walls, and his fingers slip at Force-cracks without gripping.
A silhouette hurls itself off the cliff edge far above.
As the shadow dives towards him, Obi-Wan wonders if it will snatch him up in wicked talons like the spire-falcon did to the duracrete slug so long ago, piercing flesh and crushing bone–
Russet wings flare into the rising wind.
No. Not wings. A Jedi cloak.
Obi-Wan shouts as Qui-Gon slams into him. He feels his master's arms wrap securely around his waist as their dive is checked with a gut-churning wrench in the Force.
They tumble into dust. Obi-Wan barely has an instant to suck in a breath before he is pulled into a sprint. Plasma bolts slam into the dirt at the cliff base, freshly stirred by their landing only moments ago.
They run, and leap, and hide; and Obi-Wan, still so young, questions if he has the courage to take the dive.
Melida/Daan has many cliffs.
Obi-Wan stands between those who are Young and the ancient Order, and dives.
There is a common misconception regarding grief. One does not sink into grief.
True grief is deep enough to dive into.
The days after Tahl's funeral are a clear-cut play of pantomimed ceremony, and Qui-Gon has dived too deep to surface.
So Obi-Wan brews cup after cup of Sapir. Some days, he clenches the clay pot in bloodless hands, and wonders if it will crack open, spilling Noorian blossoms between his fingers. It does not.
Qui-Gon drinks the Sapir in little, emotionless sips. Obi-Wan takes his as he always has; in whatever mouthful does not scald him. It still burns.
The pain is paltry when compared to Qui-Gon's distant aloofness, though. There is something almost cruel in the statue-like stillness of his expressions, especially given the man's previous easy inclination to laughter.
One morning, after Qui-Gon has consumed his tea silently and left to take care of the day's business, Obi-Wan comes to a decision.
He had been running a soft cloth over a blue cup when the shards in his chest suddenly coalesce into crystal, and he doubles over, gasping, as this newborn heart thuds into life. The cup slips from his fingers.
It is as though the Force speaks directly into his heart.
This cannot continue.
The cup smashes into the kitchen floor and sprays blue shards in a perfect, radiating circle.
Staring at the remains of Tahl's favourite cup, Obi-Wan knows he will have to reach out and shake Qui-Gon out of his stupor; take this grief and shatter it into pain and action. It is a leap of faith; one that may separate their bond as master and padawan.
Obi-Wan folds his trembling hands into fists, and makes the dive.
It is years later, when he is truly a young man and the braid behind his ear has dropped almost to his waist, that he truly understands the meaning of attachment.
Satine Kryze, Duchess of Mandalore.
He could not have chosen higher.
He waits for her to say it. Say the word, and I will leave the Jedi Order. If there is one dive he must take, this is it.
She does not.
He smashes into the ground, hard. The empty pit of his heart is not bottomless, after all. He had dove into it, and found its utter ending.
There is love, and there is attachment. They are different. But she did not speak, and so in the end, there is only the Force.
There is always the Force.
He commits her to a place far above him, higher than the highest spire, where no falcon can reach.
Obi-Wan flexes his wings, and hurls himself into his future.
Obi-Wan lunges for the end of the corridor, but the laser shield drops, hissing crimson, before his outstretched fingers.
The moment Qui-Gon fell will forever be tinged scarlet in his memory, through a filter of sanguine energy.
Fear threatens to swallow him whole as he watches his master crumple, so he throws himself into anger instead. It burns from his heart down his sword-arm and washes the blue core of his lightsaber into an unnatural, blazing white.
A chasm in the Force opens, like a rift beyond the known universe into a world so perfectly dark that the smallest breath would be stifled in its beginning; filled with a liquid hate deep enough to drown a man in.
It whispers for him to dive into it, and take it for himself; a power tantilisingly close to his outreached hands. It is a gateway to a kingdom that has already assembled his crown and would make him king. He only needs to lean forward, and fall.
Fall.
His hands catch around a circular protrusion on the side of the reactor shaft. The echo of his lightsaber falling into oblivion is a clarion cadence; it is as though the crystal within sings for him one last time, leading him back to the Light.
The abyss in the plane of reality suddenly shrinks back, as though terrified of something. Not Obi-Wan, but the light itself.
The world is suddenly very clear.
Obi-Wan does not even notice the red fury of Maul's blade. He watches the Force cascade down the reactor shaft and buoy up under his feet.
He simply jumps when it tells him to.
Like Qui-Gon had, so long ago.
In the victory and grief and uncertainty that comes afterwards, Obi-Wan stands on the next precipice of his path. The padawan, the path-seeker, is gone only in name; the lamp in his hand is only bright enough to show the next few steps.
But no matter. The Force wills.
Holding on to the tether of the Force, he leaps into the wild unknown of knighthood.
Somehow, this headlong dive takes him straight through knighthood and into mastery.
And now, he is a general.
The nearly seven hundred child-soldiers of the 212th Attack Battalion look to him for guidance.
The 501st become his children, too, in a secondary sort of way. As though he is a not-too-distant uncle of some sort.
Obi-Wan looks to Anakin as an advisor now, of equal rank. It is…comforting, to have a brother-in-arms by his side. It is something he has never quite experienced before – to fight alongside someone, whom he knows well and in turn knows him well, enough so that they hardly need to speak, sometimes.
And then there are times they do not speak when they perhaps should have, and those end in explosive outbursts on Anakin's part and quiet frustration on Obi-wan's.
But the war burns on, and so the Negotiator and the Hero With No Fear continue.
It burns, and it burns, and then the fire boils to a crescendo of howling flame and turns in on itself.
The Temple burns. The Jedi burn.
Anakin Skywalker burns, on the black sand of Mustafar.
You were my–
Anakin.
I–
Obi-Wan burns the image of the brother from his mind, and commits himself to exile on the flame-fed forge of the Tatooine dunes.
He would sell every last one of his possessions except his and Anakin's lightsabers for a pool of water deep enough to dive into.
Then he remembers.
The last time that had happened was on Utapau.
The Millennium Falcon dives into the Imperial blockade over Mos Eisley with far too much speed and too little control to be called anything similar to elegant; but as the pull of Tatooine's gravity falls away and hyperspace pulls streaks of starlight across the transparisteel windows, Obi-Wan sighs with release.
His exile is finished, and he is once again among the stars.
Watching Luke with the little training remote, waving Anakin's lightsaber with the innate instinct of an initiate given his first training saber–
There had been a window, once, high on the western face of the Jedi Temple, far away on Coruscant. There, a young initiate had watched a spire-falcon throw itself into a breathless dive.
The initiate had felt for the Force had thrown himself into a lifetime of willing servitude.
The end of the dive is coming, quicker now. Obi-Wan can sense it. He does not mind.
Obi-Wan sits back against the backdrop of frozen, timeless stars, and watches his student move through the lightsaber forms of his ancient Order.
The Millennium Falcon speeds towards Alderaan on hyperdrive wings.
End
A friend sent this to me as a prompt on my writing blog on tumblr, but it became too long for me to post there. It was meant to be a drabble, but ended up being well over 1600 words. I'll get back to writing The Silent Song now; I've been busy helping my twin get settled down in another country for work. I write many shorter drabbles and stories on my tumblr at eirianerisdar tumblr com (replace spaces with dots) and I also answer questions about my current in-progress fics. Reviews are always welcome. Many thanks, as always, for reading.