Title: To Know Others is to Know Oursevles
Author: snowprincess
Rating: G
Summary: With experience comes understanding, and with understanding comes regret of past actions, or the price of walking in another's shoes.
Disclaimer: I own nothing so I really don't see the point in me broadcasting that fact.
Author Note: It's been a really long time since I've written a Star Wars fanfic (look at my profile if you don't believe me), and I don't know how good this will be considering. This is mostly just a thought process I had about the relationship between the characters mentioned that I used to put in Obi-Wan's point of view.
When I was young, I was very self-minded in my desire to become a Jedi. I wanted to rush through my early training, eager to prove that I was worthy to be chosen by a Master. Being an apprentice was my ultimate goal, and I was blinded by it, not always willing to take the tiny steps needed in order to complete the leap to the next ridge. I was a good student and had many friends among the other initiates, but my impatience and my need to feel emotion held me back, almost to the point where I never became a Padawan. Qui-Gon had been reluctant to take me, recognizing the same things in me that had cost him so much pain in the past.
At first I never really understood why Qui-Gon always looked to me and thought of his former apprentice. I knew that his Padawan had turned and that it was an unexpected blow to Qui-Gon, but the emotion behind it remained hidden for a long time. My Master was a private man, not wanting to share personal matters often, and as our relationship grew, I was allowed into his web of life, seeing beyond the mask into who he really was. I think that allowed me to open up and our bond to grow, each of us finding a family within each other amidst the larger family of Jedi. But for a long time, memories of his apprentice would cloud over our training, and he would suddenly lose confidence in himself as a teacher and in the abilities of myself. My impatience and my emotions had led me astray before, and it was a way for him to guard his heart against further pain by keeping his distance, far away from someone else he had allowed to get close enough to injure. For that same time, I pushed much of my energies into trying to make Qui-Gon see that I wasn't a shadow of his past.
The facade had worked for awhile, but it would only last for as long as either of us could keep our shields up and defenses high. When I was 15 we were sent away on a mission to protect a dignitary's return home only to find that the world was torn in rebellion within a matter of the hours it took us to travel the distance in space. After a few harrowing escapes, we ended up camping deep in the planet's forests until Republic security forces arrived to settle things down. We had been in rough, stormy weather and I had gone off on my own to sit under a dripping tree to enjoy the fresh air and clear my head. Qui-Gon and I had spent much of the trip in one of our stages and sometimes I had needed to go off on my own and think for a time. I wasn't that far from the cave we had based ourselves in but the weary and bleakness of my thoughts led me to fall asleep.
And then he was there, shaking my shoulder and looking more worried than I had seen him in the time we had been together. He had been searching for me, unable to feel my presence in the weak bond we had, and that fact had hit him hard. We had been a team for two years and we didn't have a decent bond. Part of him must of realized why, because instead of being frustrated in my dissapearance and attempting to teach a lesson, he sat down next to me and we talked. The humidity swarmed around us and I was shaking from the cold of my presperation, but I can still remember the words he said to me. Qui-Gon always had a way of being candid without giving too much sting in his remarks, and the sentiments of what he was doing had not been lost on me. I still never really understood the comparison he had made in his mind between me and his past apprentice and I don't know if he ever understood my reasons for wanting to prove that I was nothing like a person whom I had never really known.
He had asked me then for patience, to understand that our relationship would take more work to form, and I agreed, though subconsciously. I had lost the hero worship in my Master early on, but my trust in him had never faltered throughout our years. Qui-Gon had seemed to understand that he had that trust from me, and I think he made an effort to never break it. Even when I was little, promises and trust had always been a big thing to me, and I always saw to it that I kept my word in anything I did.
My trust in him had been shaken during the forming of the end of my apprenticeship. Qui-Gon not telling me things before he presented them to the council was not something new, it was just a thing that I had gotten used to, and the occurences of that happening were usually rare. But he had never done something as rash and declaring me ready for the trials and trying to take Anakin as his Padawan at the same time. Looking back on it, part of me knew the day was coming, but the other part of me wasn't quite ready for it. The fact that Qui-Gon was willing to essentially toss me aside like that shook my belief in the bond we had worked so hard to form, and doubts still lingered even after our talk on Naboo. I knew we needed to really take time and prepare for our separation, but we were never granted that time, the Sith's blade stealing our chances and the ending that we had both planned for. Qui-Gon would never see me knighted, never get to cut off my braid or see me train an apprentice. I would lose one of my deepest friends and the only person that was close enough to apply the title of parent, left only with the memories of my Padawanship.
His final words were not of us and our journey together, but the continuation of a future of what he felt was right. He spoke of me training the one who would balance out the forces of good and evil, but at the same time he comforted me in what he already knew would be a difficult separation. In those final moments my trust in him returned, and I knew I had never really lost it, because he somehow seemed to know that I could train a boy who did not know me into becoming what he was destined to be. Qui-Gon's trust in me allowed me to be willing to argue with Yoda into letting Anakin become my Padawan. It had come full circle because I had become in some ways much like the man who helped me to grow up, ready to fight for my beliefs with the council, much to their exasperance.
Anakin and I shared many years along the Jedi road, bonded by a friendship with a man who put us together in his dying words. Even after he was knighted we hardly had missions away from each other because of how effective a team we were, and our relationship evolved from Master and apprentice to brother and brother. We were too close in age for me to really take a father role in his life, and he always looked to me as an older sibling while recognizing that that was the closest thing to a father he would ever have. My trust in him never failed and much like I had told Master Windu, he not once let me down. Neither of us were perfect and we had our disagreements, and I came to realize many of the qualities Anaking possessed were akin to Qui-Gon's. His feeling of the living force and mine for the unifying tended to put us on polar ends of disputes, but it was a perfect balance between us as it had been for me and Qui-Gon. It gave us the perspective of both sides and allowed us to see the deeper issues behind a mission much more easily.
I could never have been the teacher that Anakin deserved however. At 25 and not even a day into my knighthood I apprenticed a hyperactive 9 year old who had to start at the beginning of a journey that most children his age were well into at the temple. I didn't have the benefit of experience outside my apprenticeship to draw from when I didn't know how to approach a lesson, and there were many lessons. Some lessons I didn't know myself because I had to grow while he grew. Parts of his training had to be sacrificed whereas a more experienced teacher with a greater patience reserve would have perhaps suited his youthful, untamed energy better. For some time I tried to base my teachings off of what Qui-Gon would have done, until I realized that I needed to find my own style and my own path of doing things, but Qui-Gon would always play a part in major decisions because he was the one who taught me everything, and I needed to be able to teach Anakin everything.
Knowing why Qui-Gon was so deeply affected when his first apprentice turned was always hard for me to understand. After Anakin's turning, I did know. It was more than just a hollow pain in the chest whenever thoughts of him sprang up. It was the knowledge that the young life that you had helped to mold, caring, teaching, loving as a son or brother, had been destroyed by what they became. It was the feeling of failure whenever I would look back to a spot in his training that I had failed to address or did in the wrong way. It was knowing the consequences of the betrayal and the state of things afterwords. It was looking back to the days when all he thought about was what had happened to his hydrospanner that I had hidden just to pick on him and seeing what he was now. It was being chosen as the one to end his dark days, but being unable to do so because of the love for him I still felt, instead cutting off his limbs and watching as the fires of Mustafar attempted to do it for me, and I would learn later that my love ultimately cost him his life outside a machine and his family to which he would never know.
I did the only thing I could after that: I took his son and placed him in the care of his loving aunt and uncle while I quietly kept vigil on him. At some point I know I will have to help him take the first steps in his training, but now I am unsure that I should do so. After all these years, I finally understand why Qui-Gon had been so afraid to take me as his apprentice, because I am afraid of the same things. I am afraid to take the path of another young life in my hands to mold because of all the flaws I recognize within myself. I've apologized to Qui-Gon in my head hundreds of times for my ignorance and my failing to understand, and for my inability to perform his dying wish adequetely, turning the galaxy upon itself with a brutal tyrant instead of a grand Republic.
I am but and old man now, a shadow of the greatness of the old Republic. All I have left is my training, my memories, and a past that will one day call upon me to serve again.
So tell me what you think. Or not. I really don't care what you do because this wasn't really intended to be a story in the first place.