A/N: And here we come finally to the last chapter of the arc. Thank you so much for reading up to this point; I've been waiting for this chapter to be written for a long while. There's an interlude after this before the starting of the next!
Music for this chapter: Your Father Would be Proud (Rogue One) - Michael Giacchino
High above Nal Hutta's atmosphere, plasma flies and durasteel shatters, sending leaking tibanna and bodies flash-frozen in their dying screams blasting into re-entry.
"Transmission from Starbird One-Ten, your majesty!"
"Open channel," Alephi replies, eyes darting from point to point on the hologram before her. The ghostly remnants of the Hutt cruiser Gasha flickers across her features.
The voice that fills the bridge of the Aquiline is surprisingly young; the rasp of a young man's voice. Alephi does not react, though some of her bridge crew do. She knows precisely who is speaking – one of her son's closest friends.
"Starbird One-Ten to Aquiline."
"Acknowledged, Padawan Tori," Alephi states calmly.
There is a tight note to Huei's voice that belies a brutal attempt to master himself. "Your majesty, we cannot continue to engage. The Hutt ships are partially manned by slaves."
The intake of breath across the bridge is instantaneous. At the wide viewport looking towards the battle itself, Ben-Avi spins in place and meets his wife's gaze with a look of horror. Beyond him, downed Hutt ships bleed debris, bodies and pale durasteel across the hard vacuum, with Stewjon ships capitalizing on the new gaps in the Hutt defensive line to hammer the next layer of Hutt battle cruisers with wave after wave of plasma cannons and turbolasers.
Obi-Wan.
Alephi does not allow herself to dwell on the possibility that one of the bodies frozen forever out there might be her son.
"Acknowledged, Starbird One-Ten," she says, quite evenly. Then, to her communications officer: "Any news from the Jedi team planetside?"
"Communications blockade in effect, your majesty. Nothing but Hutt communications through."
"Then give me fleet-wide. Route to our allied fleets."
"Yes, your majesty!"
Alephi squares her shoulders. "Allied fleets, this is Queen Alephi Kenobi of Stewjon. We have received new intelligence from our frontline starfigher squadrons that the Hutts have pressed their slaves into serving on the enemy fleets before us.
"A risk it may be to us, but we cannot further danger innocent lives. Captains, advance at your discretion. Our aim is now to disable the Hutt fleets, not to destroy them. Starfighter squadrons, your primary target for each Hutt ship should be her bridge. Good luck."
As the communications officer shuts the connection and Alephi begins the first of her new orders, a hush falls over the commanders of the starfighter squadrons. Each turns to their command console with hard lines at their mouths.
"This is suicide," one of them mutters, as far, far below, the first of the Stewjon starfighter squadrons dive right into the heaviest of enemy fire, skimming plasma so closely that their shields flash white-blue.
The next console over, Master Clee Rhara's lips curve into a sharp smile.
"Not for a Jedi," she murmurs. "Starbird One, engage."
(:~:)
Ezhno's gloved hands are full of blood.
The thin layer of plastifilm between his orange-skinned hands and the gaping wound in the young lieutenant's thigh grows slicker by the minute – with sanguine fluid on one side, and Ezhno's sweat on the other.
The lieutenant bucks under his hands – teeth bared, the insignia of a Stewjon ibis on his lapel stained rust-red with blood, his eyes wide in a rapidly paling face.
Ezhno's hands slip, and he flinches back at the gush of new blood that wells up under the decreased pressure.
"I need some 'elp 'ere!" he yells – so hard that the effort scratches his throat. He cannot hear his own voice or the chaos of the triage station around him, but his efforts must have been enough. Three blue-uniformed Medical Corps personnel dash to the stretcher, kneeling on the blood-slick floor alongside Ezhno.
A senior Corpswoman – three stripes on her shoulders, not two – slams a soft stick between the lieutenant's teeth, rips fresh sterile gloves and an artery clamp from their packaging, and thrusts both clamp and gloved hand into the open wound.
Ezhno cannot hear the man's screams.
But he can see them. He can see the lieutenant's lips curl back against the stick in his teeth, the whiteness of his face almost decaying to a colourless grey, the sheer shock and agony in his tear-filled blue eyes as he shudders under Ezhno's touch.
The Corpswoman pulls back. The clamp sticks straight out of the wound – but no fresh blood wells out of it. She has found the torn vessel and clamped it shut.
As fresh gauze appears and the other medical corps members begin to pack the wound around the clamp, Ezhno takes a shaking breath and sits back a little on his heels. The knees of the uniform marking him as a ward of the Order are soaked through with all manner of horrible fluid; the disposable gown he wears over it streaked with drying rust-coloured stains.
All around him the triage station is amok with activity; as each escape pod from the downed Stewjon battle cruiser Ibis passes through the humming energy field of the hangar fifty metres to Ezhno's right, tight groups of medical personnel swarm the new pod; the worst injuries are transferred to hover-stretchers and pushed across to the triage station immediately. The rest come up in small groups, half-carried or by their own power.
There is death and horror everywhere, blood and unspeakable things underfoot, but a terrible order to it all, done up in clean gauze and fresh gloves and the endless flow of stretchers into the triage station and out again, stabilised, down the hallway and into further care.
There are also those stretchers that lie to the side, of course, each covered in a pristine white sheet of plastifilm. The forms beneath are still.
Ezhno feels something halfway between a sob and a laugh threaten to bubble out of his chest.
He had started his (in hindsight now, very stupid) stowaway journey somewhat concerned he would be thrown in the brig if he were found. As it turned out, stowaways mattered little if the transport the said stowaway chose was the only medical brig within reachable distance of an eviscerated battle cruiser.
Ezhno had emerged blinking an hour previous into the light of the triage station, having crept through maintenance tunnels in an effort to find a hangar with a better view of the battle. A senior medical corpsman had taken one look at him and the Jedi starbird on his collar, and ordered him to work.
Not that Ezhno can do much else except put pressure on wounds where he can and ferry supplies.
The merest whisper of a touch at his knuckles startles him out of his reverie; he looks down, and finds the young lieutenant's fingers curling plaintively where Ezhno's hands rest at the edge of the stretcher.
He glances at the lieutenant's face. Under the ashen pallor of one who has lost too much blood there is still uncertainty, confusion, and fear.
Ezhno takes his hand. There is a layer of slick blood between their fingers, but as Ezhno tightens his hold the lines around the lieutenant's mouth disappear. A measure of relief enters his gaze.
Then Ezhno becomes aware that the lights of the monitor beside them are flashing yellow.
There is a flurry of activity. More things happen than Ezhno can explain or understand; with people speaking too quickly to each other for him to lip-read, the monitor flashing red, now, and then the hand in Ezhno's grasp slowly slackens.
The activity around them stills.
The monitor is still flashing.
Ezhno remains there, holding the hand of the lieutenant whose name he does not know, until he helps pull the fresh white sheet over the insignia of the Stewjon ibis.
(:~:)
Huei feels as though he is fading.
No, that is not quite right – he is not fading so much as being stretched, hammered out thinner and thinner until he can barely breathe. His Force-senses have been spread to the limits of his ability since the beginning of the battle, and each downed starfighter or disintegrating capital ship is a snuffing out of Force-signatures within his mindscape, black holes and emptiness where a moment before had been starlight and the Living Force.
Then there are those he hunts.
Hutt starfighters, each a bilious yellow star to his senses. Garen might see plasma bolts and flares and ion trails, but to Huei there is only his quarry and himself, twin swamp-lights dancing across the plane of the Force and surrounded on all sides by fireworks of possible death.
Garen simply finds them an opening. Huei is the one who kills.
He aims his port wing cannons by feel alone, and squeezes the trigger.
The yellow star flares into a brief nebula, and then dissipates with a ripple into the sea of the Force as though it never existed. Garen, of course, heads straight through the ensuing debris without a care; the psychic backlash from the pilot's death lashes Huei full in the face.
Huei clamps his teeth shut tight against the gorge rising in his stomach.
"Good one, gunny!" Garen's victorious whoop is accompanied with a violent lurch as he jerks them into a backwards corkscrew to evade a flare in the Force – an ion missile? It felt like an ion missile – somewhere behind them.
There was a Hutt command ship ahead, Huei knew – a huge cluster of life-signatures in the Force surrounded by a solid wall of solar flares screaming death that could only be its ventral turbolasers and antifighter flak. To the seeing person it must be a display almost too bright to look at – seething tibanna and bursting flares and turbolaser charges so wide they could swallow a dozen starfighters whole – but there, amongst the starfire and the shrieking warning of the Force, is an opening. A…shatterpoint, almost, glimmering to his second sight like phosphorescence on the sea.
"Garen," Huei breathes. "Take us in."
It is a testament to how much they have been through together in this battle that Garen does not hesitate.
"Starbird One-Ten, engaging Hutt command ship."
Huei feels them draw an arc over the Hutt ship, a tiny, candlit flame above a sea of bright lights.
The squadron draws in closer around them, brighter Force-signatures amongst a tossing sea, brilliant and together, skirting death and crossfire by mere meters. A flock of starbirds flying so close to the sun that they almost burn alive.
Then the roar of repulsors going to full throttle thunders behind Huei's head, and they drop into a dive – so sheer and so fast that the Force-signatures of the rest of their squadron around them blur into comet-trails.
Huei reaches out with a mind scraped raw with overuse, and feels a thousand impressions coming closer at the speed of a half-klick per second; whispering death from the antifighter flak skimming over their wings, overwhelming fear from hundreds of bonded slaves in the depths of the ship, determination, bitterness, exhaustion, and…hatred.
There, in the middle of the shatterpoint; a Hutt captain's hatred for the Republic, for Stewjon and her allies, and strangely, for Gardulla Besadii the Elder, for forcing the Hutt Council into war–
Huei fires.
He feels the plasma charge build in the starboard and port cannons as though they were his own arms; a languid swell like a bubbling solar flare; then a brilliant retort that shudders up his form as the guns spit out molten death.
In the Force, Huei follows the shot; holds on to it tightly, with his own shields blown wide open, and feels it connect as though it were a lightsaber in his own hand.
Oh.
The impact he feels physically, a shockwave that nearly flips the starfighter as Garen wrenches them to up to evade.
Sunk as deep into the Force as he is, Huei only begins to notice the cheering over the comms when Garen fairly screams, "Huei, we've won! The Hutts are calling for parlay! They've struck their transponder colours!"
"Oh," Huei murmurs, faintly. "I did not expect it to come so suddenly."
He hopes, through the ringing of the Force, that it will be enough for Obi-Wan.
(:~:)
Obi-Wan staggers into the eastern hangar step by halting step.
A vague part of him wonders when his slave transmitter will go off and end his life finally and forever, but then he remembers the lightsaber in his hand knocking the transmitter control from Gardulla's grasp, and onward he trudges, a need to finish this eclipsing any concern he has for himself.
Nal Hutta's sun is rising across the mud and mire; yellow light lances diagonally through the bruised green of swamp-fog to divide the hangar in dim shadow and dirty luminance. There is not a transport to be seen. Over the lip of the hangar blast doors and far, far below, Bilbousa tumbles onwards towards the swamp-wilds of the horizon; a filthy, polluted city of bulbous structures lit in neon strip-lights and choked with misery.
Obi-Wan stumbles forward. His sword hand grasps his left shoulder against the jarring ache that lances through the joint with each step. He had run as far as he could up from Gardulla's receiving room; run until he could only walk, and walked until he could only hobble, a pitful, swaying pace, torn boots and sawing breath.
Behind him and a pace to his right rings the steady, ceaseless pace of his master.
Qui-Gon had placed a gentle hand on Obi-Wan's shoulder a few corridors back, offering aid but not demanding acceptance. Obi-Wan had shaken his head once, shrugged off his master's hand, and carried on.
There had been a spike of some unreadable emotion in Qui-Gon's Force-signature, but he had followed Obi-Wan without protest nonetheless.
The echo of Anakin and Shmi's Force-signatures emanate from the furthest edge of the hangar, almost at its lip, where a sheer drop falls away to Bilbousa proper. Obi-Wan blinks away the blinding light as he approaches, shuffling faster, urgency pounding in his wounded shoulder and throbbing through his frozen veins.
He hears his master halt and feels the weight of Qui-Gon's gaze upon his torn back as he staggers the last few steps into the light of Nal Hutta's dawn and reaches the bundle of russet cloth at the hangar entrance. It is ruffling a little in the high winds here, still warm to the touch.
Obi-Wan's Jedi cloak.
His knees give way as drops before it, hands curling into the echo of Anakin's Force-signature there. He never had a gift for psychometry, but here the Force offers him a glimpse; the echo of desperation and fear and a tiny, flute-like voice.
"Obee!"
Anakin had called for him here; called as he and Shmi were bundled up the durasteel ramp behind a blue-skinned Dug, called until an overseer had torn the cloak Anakin was wrapped in away from him and thrown it to the ground. The river-stone had nearly followed the cloak; but Anakin had grasped at it with instinctive, invisible hands, and it had slid back into his chubby hands at his call.
Obi-Wan feels the shudder of the ship ramp sliding closed behind Anakin, Shmi, and their new owner echo in the Unifying force through the intervening time like a tombstone sliding into place.
The stone flute in his sleeve is cold.
He shivers as his eyes snap open, and finds salty tears sliding down his bloodied face to fall like summer rain where his hands still clutch the rough cloth of his Jedi cloak. They glimmer in the dawn light like liquid crystals, catching the light of Nal Hutta's sun and fragmenting it into a thousand tiny fractals of unspeakable grief.
"Obi-Wan."
A warm presence crouches at his side. A familiar 'saber calloused hand finds his good shoulder, and this time, Obi-Wan does not reject the touch.
Qui-Gon folds him into an embrace that so feels like the home that Obi-Wan has dreamed of for so long that he shudders; the smell of Qui-Gon's tabards, the familiar hint of Sapir…
A home without Anakin and Shmi.
This last, bitter blow is too much to endure. He cannot bear it.
There, with his face buried into Qui-Gon's shoulder in a silent howl, Obi-Wan asks for the Force to take him.
The Force stirs lightly around his battered form, and gently refuses.
Qui-Gon's sharp inhale shudders through Obi-Wan as he reads the eddying currents around them. "No," he murmurs, tightening his hold around his padawan. "You must never ask that of the Force, Obi-Wan. Never. Promise me."
The Unifying Force cascades out of the Nal Hutta dawn, to the pale, pale face of Xanatos DuCrion, begging his master to let him go; to release the pressure on the wounds in his side and surrender him to the Force.
Obi-Wan feels his master's grasp stiffen around him, a desperate, almost fearful motion–
–and Obi-Wan nods once, a scraping of his bloodied forehead against Qui-Gon's shoulder.
He feels Qui-Gon exhale into his hair, a small, quiet thing. A steady hand against the back of his neck, fingers buried in the filthy spikes.
"I am so proud of you," Qui-Gon murmurs. "So utterly proud, Obi-Wan."
At any other time before Nal Hutta, Obi-Wan might have given anything to hear those words. Now grief overwhelms all else; he is blind, and deaf, and mute, and there is only the awful emptiness of failure and the sobs that he cannot voice in his throat.
And so Obi-Wan allows himself to be held, his fingers digging into Qui-Gon's side so tightly that he must be causing pain, but if Qui-Gon is pained by it he does not respond other than to hold Obi-Wan closer.
They remain there, statues bathed in the growing light of the Nal Hutta sunrise, until Qui-Gon's comm flares to life with news.
The Battle of Nal Hutta is won.
"It is your sixteenth life-day, my padawan," Qui-Gon murmurs. "And you are free."
Obi-Wan's hands shake where they grasp Qui-Gon's cloak.
It is also Anakin's first life-day; a year since his birth.
And Anakin is not free.
(:~:)
The slave-transmitter is out of Obi-Wan's neck before the transport even clears atmosphere.
Qui-Gon had wanted to wait until they were aboard the Aquiline and within her well-equipped medbay, but despite the reassurance of the Jedi healer that they had successfully deactivated the transmitter and it was quite safe, Obi-Wan had insisted.
So, a stim shot, a local anaesthetic and a deft bit of work with a vibro-scalpel later, Obi-Wan has a bloody marble of durasteel in his hand the size of a small muja nut.
Qui-Gon stands silently to the side. Around them the Corpsmen quietly clean up as they shoot surreptitious glances at the object in Obi-Wan's fingers.
"Would you like to keep it?"
Obi-Wan startles out of his reverie at the healer's question. She looks at him with earnest acceptance in her earth-brown eyes, the Mirialan tattoos stretching at her chin as she smiles kindly.
He looks at the transmitter. Calls on the Force and lets it hover languidly above
his palm.
Such a small thing.
Obi-Wan's fingers snap shut into a fist, and the transmitter shatters in midair. The broken pieces rain down around his boots and scatter over the pristine floor.
He stands in the shocked silence, signs, "I apologise for the mess," to the uncomprehending healer, and limps into the next compartment with his chin held high.
Beyond the transparisteel, the bile-choked surface of Nal Hutta gains a curve, then a haze of yellow atmosphere; then all of a sudden drops away, like the ripping of an old bandage off a wound.
His prison for the last year, gone at last.
Obi-Wan shudders once and turns away.
Qui-Gon joins him. They exchange not a word as the indigo shield of the Aquiline's main hangar draws closer.
Down comes the ramp. Obi-Wan's torn boots slip a little on its rutted surface, but he waves away the hands that reach for him and makes his own slow way down to the hangar floor proper.
The hangar is thronged with medical corps personnel, wounded shuttled in from various medical brigs, slaves from captured Hutt ships organized in little groups for processing and identification, starfighter pilots gathered around their tattered craft deep in conversation, and Obi-Wan has barely taken stock of it all before the cacophony in the hangar falls completely silent and every head turns towards him.
He freezes in place, eyes widening. He is suddenly aware of the filth that clings to every part of him, dirt ground into his skin, blood on his forehead, the slump of his injured shoulder, the tattered remains of what was once a pristine set of Jedi tunics.
Stars and galaxies, there are wounded down there. Wounded for him.
A rustle of coordinated movement; every uniformed man and woman with the insignia of a Stewjon songbird on their lapel take a half-step forward – and those wounded who cannot rise sit up as best they can – press their right hand to their chest, and bow as one.
"Your royal highness," they murmur.
Obi-Wan nods once, carefully. He is not sure if it is the right thing to do.
It is apparently enough; the hangar begins to bustle with activity again, and Obi-Wan releases a breath he did not know he was holding.
Then, suddenly: a navy blue star rising on the horizon of the Force, and an orange-fired comet right beside it.
Obi-Wan forgets how to move.
But it doesn't matter, because the next moment his vision is filled with navy blue headtresses and gold-white montral stripes and he crashes to the ground with the force of two lithe figures barreling into him at full sprint.
The pain at the impact is nothing. He is crying. Or laughing, silently. Or both at once.
"Obi-Wan!"
Obi-Wan melts into the comfort of Huei and Ezhno's embrace and pretends he cannot feel the dampness leaking into his hair where their faces are pressed.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry–"
"I'm sorry, lil-Obi–"
Obi-Wan elbows a space for himself so that a gabbling Huei and a mumbling Ezhno stand at arm's length from him – blast their height, they seem to only have gotten taller in the year since Obi-Wan has last seen them – raises his hands to grab their shaking faces, and gently but firmly clocks their temples together.
"Argh!"
"Yowch!"
As the two of them stumble back, Obi-Wan notes that Ezhno already has a black eye, and the knuckles of Huei's right hand are suspiciously raw.
But that can be addressed later.
They tumble to the ground, a mess of blood and grime and laughter, and when Obi-Wan finally surrenders himself over to the disapproval of a waiting Vokara Che, it is with a webbed hand and an orange-skinned one supporting his weight, and his own arms flung over his brothers' shoulders.
(:~:)
He rises out of the comfortable gloom with a gap in his memory so complete that it can only be from potent medication.
Obi-Wan does not recall falling asleep, but he wakes with a mild reluctance; there is a wonderful soft give under his shoulders and abused back, and there is a scent of clean, fresh linen all about him, without a single hint of the Hutt-stink that has pervaded around him for a year. His hair is soft and yielding, and his many hurts have been dulled to minor aches. And he is warm; so beautifully warm he thinks he may sink into it forever and happily remain there for eternity.
There are hands holding his – one creased with a scholar's work and another, slightly smaller, calloused from sword-work.
Obi-Wan opens his eyes to find his parents smiling down at him, the white lights of the medical cubicle edging their faces with soft lines.
Abuzz with pain meds, it does not even occur to him to raise his shields; the Unifying Force blurs the moment with a memory so far back in his subconscious that he wonders if it might be a dream. They had looked down into his playpen with as much love in their eyes as they do now.
Is this what it would have been like as a child if he had remained with his parents since birth?
He squeezes both their hands as tightly as he can, and knows from the death-grip they return that they are far more relieved than they appear.
The next hour they fill with inane conversation; he signs slowly, sluggish from exhaustion and injury, but they speak of Obi-Wan's sister Kifi and the Republic and the condition of the thousands of slaves recovered from the Hutt fleets; how the Republic is slowly consolidating their power in Hutt Space, and how the Chancellor is in public disgrace – citizens all around the galaxy seem to much prefer Stewjon and her allies instead, Senator Palpatine in particular.
A light frown touches Obi-Wan's lips at this latter revelation, but his parents rise at an unseen signal between them, admonish him to rest, and move carefully out the door.
Qui-Gon and Tahl slip into the room a moment after, and the jarring comparison between those leaving and those arriving slams across Obi-Wan's unshielded mindscape.
He blinks rapidly to clear the illusion. He is too raw and exposed for this; he does not need to think about family and masters and the thin line between parents and mentors when his shields are practically non-existent.
Qui-Gon and Tahl pause in unison, glance at each other with a look uncannily like Ben-Avi and Alephi's shared signal, and seem to decide to leave words unsaid.
Obi-Wan melts into their shared embrace. His drug-heightened Force-senses notes that there is a thread of tension still running between Qui-Gon and Tahl – but at the moment Qui-Gon seems quietly apologetic and Tahl in a wholly forgiving mood, so Obi-Wan pushes this and all other questions away in favour of resting in the present moment. As Qui-Gon taught him when he was a gangly-limbed youngling desperate for a mentor.
Everything else can wait a little while.
(:~:)
"Obi-Wan!"
Aeron is the first to notice him in the bustle of the second-level mess; over the clanking of cutlery and plates her cry is taken up by one former slave of Gardulla's estate, then another, until he walks gladly forward and is enveloped on all sides by eager touches – hundreds of eager forms dressed in simple medbay linen surrounding his too-thin form in his borrowed Stewjon navy uniform. He knows every face, every name. Shared water and bitter tea with many of them. Each has a fresh patch of bacta-sealed skin where their neck meets their left shoulder; slave transmitters removed and healed over.
He finds himself smiling.
Aeron's mane of white hair is gathered into a thick bun at the back of her head, shiny and clean. Her weathered face seems to have de-aged by ten years since Obi-Wan saw her last; younger even than the joy that had suffused her features when Obi-Wan had aided in Anakin's birth.
He gently breaks free of her hug and raises his hands to speak. "I am glad to see you well. To see you all well."
Her smile at that is tinged with sorrow; there are two faces missing from the throng, and no amount of joy at this reunion would be truly complete without Shmi and Anakin.
Someone jostles him gamely, and a hand ruffles through his hair.
"What's this we hear about you being a prince, Obi-Wan?"
"And a Jedi! A Jedi!"
"Can we see your laser sword?"
The last, from a pair of Togruta twins no older than ten, draws a grin from Obi-Wan's lips; he shoos them back carefully and unclips his lightsaber from the belt of his borrowed crew uniform.
The flare-hum of his lighsaber activating is accompanied by a gasp of sheer delight from the children watching, and when he throws the lightsaber into an arc above their head and recalls the hilt into his hand, the twins practically dance with delight.
Looking at them, Obi-Wan is reminded painfully of another set of twins; Twi'Lek, young, and eager for escape.
Tarun and Tuari would never taste freedom.
His hand tightens on his lightsaber.
He will make it his life's mission to ensure Anakin would.
(:~:)
Qui-Gon tries not to hover. He really does.
Of course, he fails spectacularly, but the effort has to count for something; and there is still something terribly fragile about Obi-Wan, even after a few days.
Take now, for instance, as the transport settles among the hustle and bustle of the Temple's Eastern hangar and Qui-Gon tightens his shields automatically against the hum of ten thousand Jedi in the Force, so close and so clear that it is like a permanent galaxy housed in the Temple ziggurat, Obi-Wan goes sheet-white, hand grasping at the rim of the transport door.
Qui-Gon moves slightly closer – not enough to alarm Tahl and Feemor and the others, but close enough to support his apprentice if need be – and whispers, "Are you well?"
Obi-Wan nods. One hand flickers as though to press to his temple.
But he walks quite steadily on his own down to the durasteel floor of the hangar proper, Stewjon navy uniform or no, and makes all the proper bows to passing masters and knights who welcome him home.
Qui-Gon maintains a careful arm's length from his apprentice all the way to the healers' wing; keeps an eye as sharp as a shriek-hawk on proceedings through the resulting full medical check up, and accepts the mountain of nutri-packets a newly promoted Master Healer Vokara Che insists on supplementing Obi-Wan's diet with.
And then a servitor droid comes in with an armful of cream and russet cloth in one arm and oiled nerfskin boots in the other, and Obi-Wan freezes in the act of getting off the examination couch.
The servitor droid is not programmed to respond to changes in the atmosphere of the room; it drops off its load with compliments from the quartermaster, a hope that everything is the proper size, and clanks away.
The rise and fall of Obi-Wan's chest is a little too quick for Qui-Gon's liking.
Qui-Gon sets the box of nutri-packets aside. "I could wait outside while you change, padawan."
Obi-Wan shakes his head once, a trifle vehemently.
"…Or if you require more time, I can stay."
It takes a moment, but Obi-Wan stops using his hands to brace himself against the examination couch to say, "Just turn around for a minute?"
A strange request.
But at this point, his apprentice could ask Qui-Gon to find him swamp slugs to eat and Qui-Gon would acquiesce without complaint.
He turns in place, and listens to the quiet rustle of cloth behind him. Then a hand taps his elbow and he turns around.
Obi-Wan stands before the cubicle mirror, eyeing his reflection critically. The cream tabards are exactly in place, sleeves just so, new nerfhide boots shining with bantha oil, cloak brushing the floor, lightsaber clipped at his side – and perhaps the hollows in Obi-Wan's cheeks and the shaggy, unkempt mess of his hair are obvious to both of them, but to Qui-Gon it means little.
"The quartermaster has outdone himself in his guesswork," Qui-Gon says, amusedly. "Or perhaps he was lucky for once, the poor sod."
A flicker of Obi-Wan's old snarky humour in the twitch of his lips. But there is a faint hesitation in his gaze nonetheless – as though he is gauging what sort of Jedi he has become, with eyes too old for his young self and the new growth of hair at the top of his padawan braid causing it to hang askew at chest level.
"Ah," Qui-Gon says, reaching for a pair of medical scissors. "One last thing to do before we go. Sit."
Obi-Wan stays very still as Qui-Gon brings the blade close and trims his hair; a careful, detached stillness so complete that Qui-Gon's lips thin at the implications.
But soon Obi-Wan's hair is rebound in a clubbed nerftail exactly as is proper, and Qui-Gon carefully unwinds the padawan braid, combs the long lock of hair straight – by the Force, it is long enough to reach Obi-Wan's chest, now – divides the lock into three parts, and begins to weave it anew.
Qui-Gon had been silent throughout the process so far, but now he begins to speak. Quiet. Solemn. "The Master, the padawan, and the Force," he murmurs as he tightens the first weave and begins the next. "Just as the braid does not begin with either of the three, neither does our path."
Obi-Wan jerks in place at the familiar words, first spoken so long ago at the binding of his first braid.
Qui-Gon holds him fast. The paths in his hand do not diverge.
"The three of us walk as one," Qui-Gon continues, as though nothing has changed. "The Force binds teacher and student together." The first bead, purple, for courage, and a lesson taught from student to master. For Obi-Wan's long-ago bravery on Ilum. "The master follows the Force, the student follows the master–"
Obi-Wan's hands move.
"And the Force leads and serves them both."
Qui-Gon smiles; the smile is seeping into his voice, but he does not care. "The path of a Jedi has no beginning or end, but the three walk it together."
Together.
The Force seems to exhale, and something a little like peace surrounds them for the first time in as long as they both can remember.
The last bead, a new one, black and gold, and Qui-Gon ties off the end with deft fingers. Obi-Wan reaches back to bring his braid forward and examines the new bead with curiosity.
"For a great trial," Qui-Gon says, and, grinning a little because he knows exactly how his next words will impact his padawan, "The Council was of half a mind to knight you. There have been historical examples in the Old Republic where padawans were knighted for less."
Now that has some effect.
Obi-Wan fairly leaps out of his chair. He faces his master with what can only be described as an utterly aghast expression. "What in the nine Corellian hells," he says, hands flickering with disbelief around the signs.
"Come now, Obi-Wan," Qui-Gon says placidly. "What did you expect? You kept a Sith holocron from being ill-used, brought the plight of thousands of enslaved Republic citizens to light, and endured a year's worth of bondage with a fortitude that most masters would find a challenge. It's no wonder the Council very nearly knighted you." He heaves a sigh. "I'm told even Mace considered it, but then it was decided that a field promotion, so to speak, wasn't conducive to your education. Not to mention it would be…trying, for myself."
That admission sends a happy little spark dancing through Obi-Wan's Force-signature. Neither of them comment on it.
"So…I'm not going to be knighted then." There is something of relief in Obi-Wan's shoulders as he drops his hands.
"No, you're not a knight," Qui-Gon says gamely, packing away the scissors and gathering the box of nutri-mix into his arms. "You're only the youngest senior padawan of your cohort now. Congratulations. You're going beat Huei by six months, which is really a year and a half considering that he's a year older than you. Do remind me to tell Feemor when we next meet up for dinner, I can't wait to rub it in his face."
Obi-Wan's eyes are nearly goggling out of their sockets, now.
Qui-Gon turns away rapidly and nudges the door open; he is certain that if he watches his padawan's face for a moment longer he will burst into laughter and upend the mountain of packets in his arms.
"Come now, senior padawan," he chuckles. "Let's go home."
(:~:)
Late that night, after a supper of nerf stew braised to perfection in The Pot (Bant, Garen, and Reeft had shown up too and hugged him half-dead) Obi-Wan lays awake in the squashy, nostalgic comfort of his own sleep pallet and stares up at his ceiling.
He is so happy he feels as though he is bursting at the seams.
But that is the problem.
Here he lays warm in his own sleep pallet, pleasantly full, with Qui-Gon in the next chamber over and his closest friends safe in their own beds, while somewhere out there in the furthest reaches of the galaxy, Anakin Skywalker would be receiving his first slave transmitter chip.
Obi-Wan had promised himself once that Anakin never would never graduate from slaver's anklet to transmitter.
He had failed, and now Shmi and Anakin were beyond his reach.
The thought turns the fullness of his stomach to nausea.
He rolls out of bed, snags his flute and lightsaber, and slips on his boots. A year ago he might have never made it out of quarters without Qui-Gon sensing him, but twelve months of practice at being silent and unseen allows him to slide past the larger bedroom and out of their quarters with nary a whisper of boots over carpet.
He passes unseen through the Temple corridors. The doors to the roof gardens open for him with the merest wave.
For a moment he stands there, mesmerized.
His muja tree has flowered. There among its branches, now tall enough for him to have to stretch to reach, is the first of its early fruits.
He steps through the trickling stream and across the starlit grass, and plucks it from its branch. It is firm and plump and ripe under his fingers, and when he bites into it, sends a flood of sweet juice over his tongue.
Sweetness he has not tasted in a year.
Obi-Wan savours the fruit in small, careful mouthfuls, throws the pit into the river, and with the starlight drenching the gardens in silver, pulls out his lightsaber and activates it.
He begins with the simplest forms first, wrist aching from disuse, and works his way upward – through all of Shii-Cho, then Ataru, until he moves with the shadow of his former agility.
Anakin Skywalker is somewhere in the galaxy, still.
That is enough.
Obi-Wan will find him.
Next up: An interlude chapter where we tie up a few loose ends and get an idea of where things are going before the next arc! I can't wait to continue this journey with all of you. I'm hoping to get that interlude chapter out by Sunday, since I go back to work on Monday and it's straight back into 34 hour shifts again. And I didn't mention this in the chapter I uploaded 2 days ago, but I'm from Hong Kong and right now we're fighting for the right to democracy. It's been a long six months and working in the medical field I've been exposed many of the protester injuries. So between that and the nature of the job I probably will be posting the beginning of the next arc sometime in the next three months or so.
But not to worry - there's still the interlude left, and I've got plenty of plans for that already! See you guys in a few days!