A/N: Er… sorry for the insanely long wait. Assuming any of you were waiting, anyhow… But here it is, and I can pretty much promise that most of the rest of the story is probably all sort of planned out. Again, unbeta'd – these in between chapters are giving me a… well… a fucking headache. A part of this may look familiar to two of you in particular, just blame that on my uncreative self – and penguin, this chapter is most definitely for you. Hope it's okay?

The Long Drift: Muted Cries

Bazil Gray was not a very big man. He was of no substantial height, rather thin, with pale gold hair cropped close to his head and nervous blue eyes. He stayed in his rooms much of the time – letting his business run itself and his deeply trusted hired hands keep his papers in order.

Obi-Wan would see him sometimes scurrying about in the halls, and had tried speaking to him once, though that was a very un-slave-like thing to do. The man had simply stared at him, something close to horror whitening his face.

"I'm – I'm sorry, sir, but I just need to know…" Obi-Wan tried explaining his situation, stepping closer to the man, palms out to calm him. Gray edged backward against the wall, twisting his handkerchief in long, nimble fingers.

"Oh, dear," he murmured, "Oh, dear…"

Someone Obi-Wan recognized as a field overseer came upon them, then, grabbing the young Padawan and dragging him away with a most sincere apology to the stricken master.

Once out of sight the man growled, "That's a week's hard labor, boy. Just who the hell do you think you are, scaring the man like that? Mistress Fauve sent you, didn't she? Well. We'll be getting rid of you soon enough, thank the gods. A whole lot of you… Come on, then. Pick up your feet."

The sun was absolutely brutal on the young man's back and he paused in his work for a moment, dragging the back of his hand across his brow. It came away drenched in the sweat that was stinging his eyes, wetting the roots of his hair. He rolled his head back, trying to work the unbearable stiffness out of his neck.

Other slaves around him snuck in quick breaks in the same manner, most of them much more subtle about it. He reached his arms up over his head, popping his shoulders and quickly bent back down again to grab his shovel, returning to work.

There had to be some end in sight to this. It had been three days digging. Digging deep enough so the next shift could come in and find the vegetables that thrived underground. They took two years to develop, and poor planning had let the land dry out and the dirt grow stiff.

"Hey."

Obi-Wan turned at the word, squinting in the scorching sunlight to find its source. His gaze finally settled upon a human girl and boy standing behind him, staring at him with dark and guarded eyes. The young Jedi's attention shifted to nearby overseers patrolling their working boundaries, but no one was watching. Looking back to the two who had called him he hefted his shovel in his aching, blistered hands. "Hello."

The two exchanged quick glances before stepping closer to him. Obi-Wan saw that they each had deep, coarse sacks slung over their shoulders, the openings of which lay waiting at their hips. He glanced around anxiously.

"Is it time to go?" the Padawan asked them.

"Soon," the girl said blandly and moved forward, crouching down on the ground beside him and reaching into one of the recent pits he had dug. "You're Obi-Wan?"

Obi-Wan's brow creased. "Do I know you somehow? You both look familiar," he admitted.

The boy choked up nervous laughter and squatted down in the dirt beside the girl, craning his neck to regard Obi-Wan from the ground as he picked the brown vegetables out of the ground.

"You come from the Great House Fauve."

Obi-Wan didn't think the house was all that great, and almost told them so, but an overseer close by made him wary and his humor wafted out of him with a heavy sigh as he heaved the shovel back into the ground. "Yes. I came from there."

"So did we!" the boy exclaimed, but the bright smile that had lit his face shriveled into a thin line as the girl elbowed him sharply. "Sorry," he whispered.

Obi-Wan watched the short exchange curiously. The boy had light brown hair, short and somewhat bleached by the sun, and a thin but soft featured face. His eyes were liquid brown, like the spice drinks he had seen Mistress Fauve have sometimes. His skin was white but appeared to be taking the brutal sun better than Obi-Wan's. The Padawan grimly glanced down at his red arms, frowning.

He never had tanned well.

"We recognized you out here," the girl explained, "and thought we should come on over. Only four others got sent and they're inside." She shrugged and her smile was empty. "Gets lonely out here, huh?"

The girl went by Spyre and the boy Roark. They had, somehow, remained together for four years. Obi-Wan talked with them shortly before being herded off the fields by the overseers and sent to his cabin with the nine other slaves he shared it with. Once there he made it on unsteady legs to his cot and collapsed boneless into a dreamless slumber.

*  *  *  *

Was the ache ever going to leave him? The pain of his overworked muscles and the exhaustion in his body had distracted him from it before, but…

The headache was certainly at full throttle now. And oh, Force, but the nights were worst. When it was quiet… when nothing was there to distract him. When he was left alone with his memories and his mind had time to wonder if this would never end. Would Qui-Gon ever find him? Would he ever find Qui-Gon?

He dared not move – any stirring would only worsen the pain. Each inhalation made his brain dry out and crumble inside of him, turning it to gritty powder and each time he breathed out stars burst in his retinas, an explosion of screeching madness as the part of him that had always had a connection to something more clawed at his skull. That part of him was starved now, begging his body for the nourishment it was never meant to be without.

Obi-Wan lay curled on his side his hands clutching the sides of his face, fingers making tiny white imprints in his reddened flesh, eyes staring unfocused at some invisible horror before him, lips parted…

A soft moan in the darkness, then a whisper.

"It's killing me."

*  *  *  *

Obi-Wan knelt before two of Bazil Gray's consultants as they spoke quietly. He let his thoughts drift, appreciating the roof over his head. His sentence of hard labor had ended the day before and now he was back doing errands for the house. His skin was still sore, had even blistered in some places, but Spyre had found him some cream to put on the hurting flesh. It helped a little.

The Padawan had quickly learned that it was easier to do as his new masters said without question. He was tired of exchanging pain for minutes of stubbornness that got him no closer to freedom or Qui-Gon. Obi-Wan did not like how he had to keep telling himself that his reasons were just. He remained unmoving with his head bowed – though his neck was fast stiffening – on the floor and waited to be recognized. Even without the Force he could easily sense the worry in the consultants' voices, see it on their faces.

"Four days, Enri. He's been in there four days."

"No one has seen Amit leave?" the other man asked with a frown, though he already knew the response. His gaze rested blankly on the slave's bowed head, his focus turned inward.

His companion shook his head, eyes wide with urgency. "No. He can't have – What I mean to say is… You don't think he's…?" His question died away.

"Again? Certainly not. We're leaving this wretched planet in two weeks. Surely he has more sense than that…" Enri did not believe his own words and did not expect his partner to. "Boy," he said to Obi-Wan, who shifted slightly to prove the man had his attention. "Go to the kitchens and fetch your master and his guest a pitcher of wine."

Obi-Wan risked a glance up, meeting the consultant's eyes. "But I've been instructed to keep away from his bed chambers." The lost Padawan hesitated. "That is where he is, isn't it?"

Enri waved a dismissive hand, his rings glittering finely in the wall's lamp lights. "Never mind what you have been told. Bring him some wine and return to our office immediately afterwards. Do you understand?"

Obi-Wan nodded, fighting the angered scowl that wanted to leap onto his face. They acted as if he were little more than an old 'droid. He climbed to his feet and began a hasty walk to the kitchens.

He had needed a little help from one of the cooks who was, Obi-Wan thought, overly dramatic about having to leave his post for a short time. That had delayed him some but the bottled alcohol now stood flanked by two glasses on a glinting silver tray that Obi-Wan held carefully with both hands. He did not want to spill it. He cautiously climbed the stairs and crept down the empty halls to Gray's bedroom.

The young Jedi finally came to a stop at the double doors of the slave owner's room and, hefting the small burden in his hands to one arm, knocked. He waited for a response, wondering just what it was that Gray's two consultants had been discussing earlier. What had the man done before that was so foolish?

A muffled thump from the opposite side of the door made Obi-Wan alert. Silence followed and he knocked again.

"Master Gray?"

No answer.

Obi-Wan's immediate thoughts were that the man had come to harm. But he wasn't by himself, was he? Why didn't his guest, Master Amit, answer? Did this have something to do with the conversation earlier? Obi-Wan put the tray down on the floor and placed his palms on the wooden door. There was no handle, no lock… Bazil Gray treasured his privacy and this entire wing of the household was generally off limits to anyone else. Locks and handles would interfere with the delicate design of the polished wood.

If the man was in trouble, and Obi-Wan saved him, would this be the instance that might free him?

Obi-Wan pushed.

The door creaked open and the boy stepped slowly inside, his gaze sweeping the room.

"Master Bazil," he called. "Master Amit?"

Still, silence. Obi-Wan strained his ears for the slightest of noises, trying to sense even the breath of another living being in the chambers.

A sudden boom behind him and he felt his skeleton rip out of his skin and jump right back in again. He wheeled around with a cry.

It was the door!

Obi-Wan forced his rapid breaths to calm, deepen, and his thundering heart to slow.

"Relax, Kenobi," he muttered, feeling as if the walls soaked up the very sound of his voice, it was so quiet. He moved forward, still sensing no other presence and wandered to a lavish chest of drawers. One was partially open and he peeked in, curious.

What he saw inside at first confused him, then caught his gut in such a frigid and squeezing grip he thought he might be suddenly and violently sick.

In the drawer…

Hair – all different colors, dried and shriveling, cracking and split and broken…

And nails – yellowed and curling, splintered with age.

Bile stung his throat, spraying its acid touch at his insides.

"Oh, gods," he gasped forgetting for the moment where he was. The hair was of all different colors, lumped together in a dried, fraying, multicolored mess. The strands were long dead and the nails were yellow and curling, stiff as corpses, flecks of brown blood dotting them. "Oh, gods!" he cried out, fright confusing his senses.

What was he to do?!

"Oh… Oh, dear. Oh, dear." The wavering murmur behind him made him leap nearly to the ceiling and Obi-Wan whirled around to catch sight of Bazil Gray standing in a newly opened doorway, his body naked except for a pair of under-trousers. Crimson covered him. Just past the man the Padawan glimpsed a nude body sprawled on the floor.

"Master Gray," he whispered hoarsely, his voice lost to him. "What… what are you doing?"

The man seemed to shrink against the doorframe, shriveling up like the dead hairs in the drawer. "I had to… What are you doing here? Once more. I had to. Oh, dear." He started to shake his head in tiny jerking movements, staring wildly down at the floor. A low whine filled the room and Obi-Wan knew at once that he would never forget the sound of that horrible keening, no matter what happened. "Oh, what have I done?" The whine grew louder until the man's voice cracked. His fingers, finding no handkerchief, twisted about each other and Obi-Wan could hear the popping of knuckles from where he stood.

"I can't let them go," Gray whined. "Do you understand me? I can't let them go…" He turned his eyes on the body in the connecting room, and something Obi-Wan thought he recognized as peace fluttered over the tight features briefly. The Padawan realized that what he had first defined as simple neuroticism in the blue gaze was really something deeply disturbed. And Obi-Wan also realized that people in the house knew about it.

"You've done it before," he rasped, recalling the terrible image of the drawer in his mind. It was still there – just to the right of him. Open. "You kill people! You keep their… their… Oh, gods." He backed away from the man who shivered in the doorway. He had to tell someone. But the consultants knew. They knew! And they had sent him up here, anyway!

Obi-Wan sprinted for the door and did not slow down, slamming into it and using the force of his impact to jar it open. Bazil Gray's high pitched wailing thinned the air and strummed through his brain. The wood bounded against the wall soundly and Obi-Wan was in the hall, paintings and lights whizzing past him as he ran…

At the stairs he met two men who stopped him, assured him everything was going to be quite all right, and led the frightened boy away to a room he had never seen before.