Ch 12
After an hour of using her practice saber to go through blaster deflection drills with the remotes, Andi asked if she could borrow one of Obi-Wan's spare lightsabers.
He took out the one he'd loaned her earlier, but did not proffer it. She rolled her eyes, pulled it to her hands with the Force, switched it on, lowered the power to fifty percent, and went through a practice Kata.
"I'm not used to this much gyroscopic cant," said Andi.
"It doesn't have much, especially with the power down."
"Still more than a training saber."
"You're plenty strong enough to control it even with the power at full."
Andi said, "Perhaps I should just keep using a practice saber. I volunteered for the Medical Corp because I couldn't see myself fighting."
"You didn't age out?"
"No. Maybe joining the Medical Corp early was a way of making it my choice when I realized I might not be picked as a Padawan. But still, I might have been. Being in the Medical Corp is my choice. But it can't hurt to practice with remotes. It's good exercise, like you said."
"Yeah."
"Master Dorla's been in fights. She's told me. Mostly in dangerous places. Civil wars and the like. Not random terrorist attacks like this. But you know, she still only has a practice saber. I asked her why once and she said, 'First, do no harm.'"
Obi-Wan said, "Four Mandalorians died during the fight. She got two of them." With Force pushes. He'd killed another, which left one more, dead to blaster fire. Whether it had been the cop or one of the Jedi deflecting blaster bolts, Obi-Wan didn't know.
Andi said, "I know. But still, it's a statement of intention. A practice saber is a protection, not a weapon."
"You can aim the deflected blaster bolts. It's the same."
Andi said, "If a practice lightsaber and a standard lightsaber are the same, why do you think she's silly for carrying a practice saber?"
"Not the same exactly. I'm just saying that they're both weapons. A standard lightsaber is a better one."
"Better for killing and dismembering. Not better if you'd rather not do that."
Obi-Wan said, "Not any worse either. If you turn the power down enough a standard lightsaber is just like a practice saber."
"The fact that it's made for beheading people is meaningful, independent of whether you use it so or not."
Obi-Wan said, "Do you know I used to have this exact same argument with Masters at the Temple? I wanted Jedi to carry rifles and wear armor. Depending on the mission."
"That's crazy; it sounds like something you would do. I'd wondered why you weren't chosen."
"You think I shouldn't have thought that about rifles and armor?"
"Maybe, but what's crazy is arguing with Masters."
"It should be a free exchange of ideas, everyone arguing as equals on the open plain of rhetoric."
Andi said, "Sure, Obi. That's just what a bunch of middle-aged Masters who've been on hundred of missions and in hundreds of dangerous fights want. A twelve-year-old arguing as an equal about combat tactics and the galactic perception of Jedi."
Obi-Wan frowned, bothered by how good of a point that was, and Andi activated three of the remotes.
Her movements were pure Shii-Cho, quickly adjusting to the saber. She couldn't build new skills in a single day, but it was plenty of time to shake a lot of rust off of old ones. And to adjust at least a little to being stronger in the Force since the last time she'd done saber practice, not to mention taller.
They moved on to a light spar, careful not to damage walls in the confined space of the living room, and Obi-Wan was pushing her defense as far as they could go but no further when Dorla returned, bearing take-out for their meal, enough groceries to feed them for a week, bedding, and a sixth security droid.
Obi-Wan wondered how she was getting them. They were legal on the planet, but Obi-Wan's understood that there was a long, arduous and expensive permitting process.
He asked over dinner, and her only answer was a long look indicating that thirteen-year-olds didn't need to know such things. "Have you meditated upon the fight yet?"
"No," they both admitted.
"Don't let it fester."
After dinner, she took him aside. He and Master Dorla sat cross-legged in her room. She was silent and still, but did not meditate, only looked at him, prepared to listen.
Several times, he opened his mouth to speak, then closed it, till after past ten minutes, words escaped.
"Had you killed before?" Obi-Wan said.
"I have made medical mistakes that led to the deaths of patients who would've lived if I'd made the right decision. And I have helped those who had no chance to live end their lives peacefully, without pain. But if you mean killing in combat, then yes, twice before. I have at times been sent to where a Healer who can take care of herself might be needed. Though not with two children in tow. Most Medical Corp members go their whole lives without knowing combat. I had hoped it would be thus for you and Andi."
"And, when you killed, you were okay after?"
"I was not unaffected, but nor was I traumatized."
'Not traumatized.' That sounded like a reachable goal. "Do you think he was a good person at all?"
"What is a good person?" said Master Dorla.
Being good. Making the galaxy a better place by being in it? Being kind to those you knew? Being kind to those you didn't? He didn't know.
Dorla said, "Obi-Wan, why do we kill?"
Such questions had seemed very simple before he'd decided it would safer for someone to not exist, and then actualized that decision. Jedi killed to prevent the killing of others, and took the freedom of those who took others' freedom. It made no sense, but he couldn't imagine what else they could do.
If it was just a numbers game, then if two people tried to kill a single innocent child, it would be wrong to defend the child with lethal force. So It wasn't just a numbers game. He could say "we kill when it's necessary," but so soon as he thought the word necessary, unjust calculations popped into his head.
Obi-Wan said, "Killing is never justice. But sometimes it's less unjust than what would happen if we didn't kill. Killing someone trying to kill me and innocent others-it's fair, in a way. But him trying to kill those people isn't fair at all."
"Think on it more," said Master Dorla. "When it happened, how did you feel?"
Obi-Wan told her he'd felt nothing but urgency at the time, and even now he was numb to it, not filled with any particular emotion he could name, but exposed, raw, as if he had lost his skin, lost the layer of himself that insulated his inner workings from the world.
She listened more than she spoke, and when he'd talked himself dry, she sent him to meditate as she spoke to Andi.
In meditation, he recalled the moment. Then imagined the man beneath the mask. A hardened killer, motivated by money or ideology. Yet kind to his wife and children. Or, maybe, a wife-beater and child abuser. No way for Obi-Wan to know.
A man whose future had likely held more senseless murder. Or, maybe, just possibly, redemption and heroism. A possibility extinguished by Obi-Wan's blade.
He focused on the memory, examining it through the Force, and with a strange twist and turn, saw it from third-person.
He watched the whole battle, or skirmish rather, which couldn't have lasted more than half a minute. Less even. He saw his own face as he struck the fatal blow, his expression intense, focused, a hint of controlled fear, but neither angry nor hateful. The same expression he'd worn the rest of the fight.
In killing the man, there was a loss of positive potential, but also a loss of negative potential. The situation suggested that the lost negative potential was much greater, but there was no way for him to be sure of that.
A lethal strike, he decided, had been better than the other option, going easy on someone who twenty seconds before had been shooting indiscriminately at civilians, and was even then shooting at people protecting those civilians. Animals were most dangerous when wounded, the saying went, and people were animals, after all.
It would be easy to be proud that he'd killed 'one of the bad guys,' but that wasn't the right way either. It was what it was, the right yet tragic choice, and if he found himself in the same situation again, he'd make the same choice, and he wouldn't feel caviler about it, but it wouldn't traumatize him either.
He moved into the sort of meditation Master Dorla had taught him, sensing his own body with the Force. Though he was doing it with his own twist, of course, sensing his body from both his perspective and the Force's perspective, the two merging into one view.
Proteins, lipids, water and honeycombed calcium. Surreal, that such a strange and squishy construct bore what it bore and shaped what it shaped.
By the time Andi touched his shoulder, he'd mostly healed the cuts he'd acquired from flying fragments of stone and brick. His eyes fluttered open, and he saw that she held her bedding in her arms.
"Want to sleep in the living room tonight?" she said.
He nodded, understanding that she didn't want to be alone.
He took his shower before checking that all the doors and windows were locked, laying out his bedding a few feet from hers, and turning out the lights. He settled into his bedding and closed his eyes.
From somewhere in the house, there was a soft whine, quieter than Andi's breathing, audible only in the pause between inhalation and exhalation. It lulled him to sleep.
#
#
Old Ben had been nearly frantic when Obi-Wan had, apparently without realizing it, used a technique identical to or very similar to what Old Ben had used when the Force had giggled and the timelines had split and Old Ben had turned into a spirit. He'd wondered for a wild moment if there would be a third timeline, one containing an Obi-Wan Kenobi with the Force connection of three Obi-Wan Kenobis and two Obi-Wan Kenobi Force ghosts following him around.
He'd briefly imagined an infinite recursion as progressively more ridiculously talented Obi-Wan Kenobis used the technique to reflect on a progressively stranger fight.
Fortunately, the technique had worked just like it was supposed to. Obi-Wan had viewed a memory through the Force, without even the slightest hint of time travel being possible. No snowballing of souls whatsoever.
Dying had given Old Ben strange worries. Including Obi-Wan's dislike of aging. It wasn't proper for a Jedi to use the Force to disrupt the natural harmonies.
True, Jedi typically aged a tad slower than non-Jedi, a benefit of using the Force, but it was small. Old Ben had aged a little faster than non-Jedi, thanks to same of his early failed experiments in shielding his Force presence from Sidious and Vader. He'd temporarily cut himself off from the Force a few times, and each time had been hard on his body.
Old Ben hoped that those bad experiences, a connection between aging and a profound loss of the Force, unnatural even to non-sensitives, was the inherited trauma motivating Obi-Wan's dislike of age. The other option was that Obi-Wan couldn't accept his own death.
Or worse, and more likely, Obi-Wan couldn't accept weakness.
Though if not for that tick, if not for how obsessively Obi-Wan had trained as an Initiate, and how hard he'd worked to keep it up since, he likely wouldn't have survived the fight.
Old Ben was very much hoping that the Jedi taskforce would arrive soon, and that Obi-Wan's reports would be enough to alter events without any further interference from Old Ben.
He'd caused Obi-Wan to notice the ship, and had nagged at him to investigate it. No visions as yet, but then, Obi-Wan wasn't doing the right sort of meditation to prompt such. He was doing a lot of deep meditation, that was true, but turned internally, examining and adjusting his own body.
Old Ben had never fully appreciated what Force Healers could do, and it had long since occurred to him that Obi-Wan not being selected as a Padawan might've been for the best.
So long as Obi-Wan's occasional mutters about 'conquering the galaxy' didn't turn out to be literal.
#
#
Komari stood in the Council Chambers, so close to Master Dooku that their arms touched. Nearly thirty Jedi were packed in, in addition to the Councilors. Knights, Masters, and Senior Padawans, not a one under twenty, and all of them skilled in combat. She had been part of group missions before, but never one like this.
Master Mace Windu, recently elevated to the head of the Council at quite a young age, addressed them. "The rim planet of Galidraan is being terrorized by Mandalorian warriors."
A murmur swept through the Jedi at that. Not spoken, but felt through the Force.
Mace Windu said, "They're slaughtering political activists, attacking colonists, and launching senseless terrorists attacks in urban areas. Their motivations are unclear. Speculations are that they've either been hired by a player with interest in Galidraan's civil strife, or are avoiding the struggles on Mandalore and seeking to set up shop on Galidraan. The council desires for you to journey to Galidraan, investigate these matters, and, if they are as they seem, take these Mandalorians into custody."
Master Dooku said, "And if taking them into custody proves impossible?"
Master Windu's gaze was firm. "Then you shall do whatever else is required to ensure the safety of Galidraan."
Another murmur of surprise swept through the Force. It was not common for the Jedi to act so militantly. But if it was Mandalorians...
Master Windu said, "Galidraan is sparsely populated. What military they have is small and poorly equipped, not up to the task of dealing with this threat, and they have no allies to call upon. They are depending on the Order in this."
That straightened everyone's backs. The Jedi were peacekeepers, not warriors, but when innocents were attacked by relentless murderers, the roles became much the same.
Master Windu said, "We are placing Master Dooku in charge of this mission."
Master Dooku nodded. That was no surprise.
Yoda spoke, "A source on Galidraan, I have. A planet in accord with all Republic principles, it at first appears. But, if dig deeper you do, my source claims, discover it is a manipulated democracy you will. Bloodier than officially claimed, the split between government and colonists may be. Trust this Governor Sindar, my source does not.
"However, on Galidraan, three Jedi of the Medical Service Corp there are. Caught up in one the atrocities, they were. Survive, they did, and confirm Mandalorians, they did as well. Yet trust Governor Sindar, Master Healer Elwith Dorla does not. Cautious, you must be. Evaluate the validity and import of my source's reports, you must. Take offensive in battle without understanding, you should not."
:::
Thus far, the changes brought about by Obi-Wan/Old Ben are small. They'll stack.
The reference I'm using claims that Mace Windu is a mere 15 years older than Obi-Wan, making him 28 at this time. However, the Jedi Apprentice series has him already heading the council when Obi-Wan is 13, & I think the Mace in TPM looks older than 40. So let's say he's actually about 40 right now, and is closer to 50 during TPM.
