Kenobi! Obi-Wan!
by ardavenport
- - - Part 2
When he heard the first warning gong of the night cycle, Obi-Wan got up and went to the nearest Needs Building and got a quick, light meal of boiled grains, plant proteins and vegetables. It was plain and bland. Not really bad, but all the selections seemed to be variations on the same thing.
People in the Food and Drink Quarter sat in groups. Some talked. Most of them just went about the work of eating, the necessary refueling that their bodies required. A thin old man grunted to Obi-Wan about the good food he would eat when he got out in the morning, when his name was called.
Another warning gong sounded.
A couple of women with whom he had a passing acquaintance, Bremet and Heeli, passed by him on their way out and asked about his name being called earlier. Obi-Wan shook his head.
"It wasn't the person I was waiting for."
Obviously surprised, they looked at each other as if to ask why that could be important. But they nodded polite agreement back to him and moved on.
After visiting the Bodily Wastes quarter he went back to his cot. He saw a few other familiar faces looking his way, clearly expecting him to be gone. But after the initial surprise they averted their eyes. No one said anything to him. They all returned to their cots; the droids walked up and down the aisles, watchful for any disorder.
The final gong sounded. Soon after, the lights dimmed.
Many people lay down on their cots to endure the passage of the night cycle. A few conversed. Groups of twos and threes were permitted for a short time. They always broke up as soon as a droid moved in their direction.
Sitting alone, cross-legged on his cot, Obi-Wan's mind remained cluttered with the debris of despair. He had not been able to meditate the previous night and he would not reinforce this failure with another, along with the panic and sleeplessness that had followed.
The contradictions of the Charity Holdings stifled him. No one here had any possessions or attachments. To enter they had to give up anything they carried to prove that they were truly in need and that they had no resources or support of their own. Obi-Wan had never imagined that this would bother him when he volunteered to go in to contact Treddius Owain who had taken refuge in the Charity Holdings.
Neither Obi-Wan nor his Master knew why Owain's knowledge was so dangerous or why it was so important to the Republic. But his last message to his contacts in the Republic Judiciary had been where he was hiding from his enemies and that he would only come out if they sent a Jedi to tell him it was safe and that the person sponsoring him out of the Charity Holdings was a friend and not an enemy come to kill him. So Obi-Wan had removed all his outer clothing and given his things to his Master and presented himself to the evaluators as a person who had no home.
After they accepted and processed him, he had gone down into the vast space and found Treddius Owain, the Force as much a guide to him as the mission briefing from the Judiciary. Owain had been suspicious, but Obi-Wan could call things to his hand with the Force and he knew the names of Owain's contacts in the Republic. That had convinced the fugitive. When Owain's name was called from the Tower, he went. Obi-Wan saw him meeting Qui-Gon at the top. They left together, but Qui-Gon had looked down at the ordered plain of cots below him and his eyes looked right at his Padawan. He would be back in a day, after he had delivered Owain to safety.
That had been six days ago.
The rustlings of a forest of people settling into their cots died down, but the pervasive waves of the huge volume of air being moved and refreshed by the overhead recyclers remained. In the twilighting, Obi-wan saw a few black shapes of bodies and heads still sitting up or standing in the distance, but most of the movements he glimpsed were bulges rising and subsiding under greenish blankets gone dark gray in the gloom.
For the first day after Qui-Gon had taken Owain away, he had listened attentively to the names of people to be retrieved from the Charity Holdings by potential sponsors. But he had not expected Qui-Gon to return so quickly.
The second day of waiting had ended in disappointment. But he had rested well that night.
Early on the third day, worry bled into his disappointment. When the lights came up with the morning rush of names called one after another, Obi-Wan had gone to the Posting Station where the cluster of other yellow-clothed hopefuls double-checked lists of people with sponsors calling for them, just in case they missed their own names in the rapid fire first announcements. Too short to see over many of them and unwilling to push through, Obi-Wan had anxiously waited his turn, but his own name had not been not listed.
Though he knew it was pointless, his mind still churned over the many possibilities and events that might have delayed his Master. He exercised by walking down the long aisles, observing the others and wondering.
On the fourth day he met someone who said his name was also Kenobi, though his given name was Crive. He was short and stubbled with graying hair with an unhealthy bluish tinge under his brown skin. He freely admitted to being an addict who had finally used up his last friend. With no home or work, which was illegal on this world, he had handed himself over to the Charity Holdings. They politely parted, but Obi-Wan had deliberately stayed away from the area around Crive's cot since then.
In the snatches of conversation around him at meals and among the cots, Obi-Wan heard similar stories from people who had lost work and hope, gamblers, addicts, cast offs, malcontents. When they finally submitted themselves to the Charity Holdings (or were turned in by the authorities) everyone was examined for physical and mental conditions. Those who needed significant attention were channeled to the Medical Charity Holdings. The healthy, repaired, cured and detoxed went to the general Charity Holdings, to wait out their lives in an orderly way permitted on this planet and wait. Until they were sponsored out.
On the fifth day, Obi-Wan had watched the crowds of people clustered at the Posting Stations and wondered when he should submit himself to an anonymous sponsor, just to escape the Charity Holdings so he could find his way off world and back to Coruscant. But it was still much too soon to give up on Qui-Gon.
Five days was not long at all, but the listless existence in the Charity Holdings had stretched time into a punishment that weighed him down into near despair. Now an adult and a apprentice for several years, Obi-Wan had never imagined that his patience could be worn so thin in so short a time. Realization of the limits of his ability to cope with his relatively benign situation added hopelessness to the malaise inside him. He could not imagine his Master being so badly affected.
Now on the sixth day, after a clear attempt to capture him with a decoy of his Master, Obi-Wan knew that Owain's enemies were still looking for him. And likely looking for Qui-Gon as well.
Or perhaps they had come to the Charity Holdings so many days after Owain was long gone to specifically to capture Obi-Wan? Perhaps to use as a hostage against Qui-Gon, Owain's protector? This possibility felt more real to him. And that meant . . . .
. . . . Qui-Gon was still alive.
Obi-Wan exhaled a long held breath.
He quietly got up off his cot and stood. Slowly he lowered himself, bending at the knees, arms out before him. Then he rose, carefully, feeling the flex of every muscle, his arms stretching upward.
Glowing yellow eye-sensors traveling up and down the aisles turned toward him from all directions. But Obi-Wan was not required to sleep, only to not disturb others. As long as he did not make noise or go near anyone else, the Attendant Droids would only watch.
He stretched and flexed the tendons and muscles of his body, turning, freezing, his awareness sinking into each motion naturally. The exercise was practically a meditation, done so many times by him over the years that it required little thought, the actions well worn in his memory. Obi-Wan was surprised that he had not done it since arriving in the Charity Holdings.
His sense of his own self, his balance, reformed inside him. The Force flowed freely with each movement, smooth and strong.
Obi-Wan wondered that he could be so disconcerted, so diminished by being stripped of his accustomed clothing and lightsaber, and then cast into a huge crowd where he looked no more or less like anyone else. One of many, almost invisible, in a vast cavern, as storage place for people who had no place to go. A Jedi had no attachments, no possessions. But he had felt his identity as a Jedi fading as the days passed, slipping out of his grasp like smoke.
A Jedi had purpose, service. But the Charity Holdings subtly stripped that away from its inmates, offering only basic necessities, order, rules and abstract goals to aspire to. Obi-Wan knew his goal now. He would wait for his Master to return and retrieve him.
When he finished the exercise, he climbed into his cot under the plain blanket and slept well.
- - - End Part 2