Title: A Dancer and a Jedi Walk Into a Bar
Disclaimer: I own nothing except my OCs and possibly some percentage of the plot.
Summary: There's a mostly secular Force tradition and it changes things. Or, I am terribly self-indulgent.
Notes: So, as noted in the summary, this is me being self-indulgent. This is not serious enough for what it really should be, and it's also not actually silly enough to justify itself either. This is just a bunch of things that I like, smushed unreasoningly into a fixit fic with no actual regard for canon. Also, as will be noted at the end of the fic, I basically ignore the sequel trilogy unless there's something there I want to snag, but I treat none of that as canon.
Notes2: I REITERATE, I AM NOT PAYING REMOTELY CLOSE ATTENTION TO CANON!
Since time immemorial there have been the two sides of the Force, the Jedi and the Sith. Constantly opposing each other, struggling against each other and each trying to destroy the other.
Well, that wasn't wholly true. Because long ago, lifeforms had only just evolved enough to understand that there was a power that allowed those so gifted to move objects without touching them, allowed warriors to fight better than anyone else, allowed people to leap higher and run faster, to dream of the future, to touch the past with a fingertip on an old table or to see into the distance in the present with neither the eyes nor the ears, but the mind.
Some saw this power as a tool. A strange tool, one with many facets and dangers, but ultimately no different than a hammer. Others, however saw it as a divine gift of the gods, and still others saw this Force as a god itself.
There were always those who gave in to their darker impulses, and the natural tendency of the Force to amplify the emotions of those using it caused many of those who gave in to lose themselves. It came to be known as the dark side of the Force. For, just as joy and love amplified and lifted the spirits and selves of those who felt those emotions, bringing light with them, so did the dark amplify and drag those others down into a spiral of hatred and anger.
Among the many users of the Force there emerged the Jedi. They were one of the few sects of Force-using warriors who could be trusted. It was the rare warrior indeed who could use emotion in battle without falling to the dark, and the Jedi espoused a concentrated focus on serenity to offset the ease with which one might feel anger in combat. They were a religious order that had come to see the Force as a god in itself. They worshipped it, threw themselves into being at one with its light side, and called many to join them in their new religion.
As technology progressed, those Force users who had seen it as a mere tool began to fade. No longer were the services of a master Force user needed to lift heavy objects into the air, to find missing items or to heal those injuries that could not be healed by other means. The greatest practical uses of the Force lay in combat and diplomacy. There had always been a number of Force users who turned to the dark, but with their strict code of serenity above all, the Jedi were the most trusted as they lost almost none of their number to the darkness.
Their besetting sin was a sort of pride. The certainty that comes with religion led to their belief that theirs was the only true Way of the Force. Warrior traditions of a different nature from their own, those who had not stepped upon the path of a warrior at all, those who only wished to quietly use their Force skills in peace for the good of their homes, families and friends, all these were seen as lesser by the Jedi. It was not an official doctrine, of course, merely a side-effect of their certainty of rectitude. As some of those continued to fade, the Jedi's insistence on a sometimes stultifying serenity drove away those who led with their hearts, not passionless logic, sometimes even driving them to the dark side under duress.
The Sith did not start out in darkness, but the determination to run counter to the Jedi in all things sent them down that path. In the end Jedi propaganda (however well-intentioned and theoretically dispassionate) about other Force users and the attractions of the dark caused a schism, the dividing line between the two groups being stark, clear and unequivocal. History was written by the victors, and details were slowly lost to posterity.
Those who had no philosophical or religious bent in relation to the Force went underground.
They travelled where the Jedi did not to bring the Force sensitive to safety from the grasp of the darksiders and Sith, they travelled in secret to find those children rejected by the Jedi and sent to support positions or back to families they didn't remember, and when a Jedi left the order, they not-infrequently found their way to the underground too.
On those rare occasions a darksider escaped the pull of the dark side of the Force, they were made welcome, their words and experiences to be put towards finding a way to bring others back from the brink or beyond.
And they hid to avoid the constant disappointed huffing of the Jedi, to avoid the watchful eyes of those who thought if you were not Jedi you must be in some way suspect and to avoid the darksiders who were often equally convinced there were only two ways. In charitable organisations meant to provide assistance in war zones; providing therapy of the mind and body; as bounty hunters; as artists and dancers and musicians; as teachers; as explorers. A whole network underground working to avoid the notice of the Jedi, the Sith or the public at large, to exist in peace without the label of 'Force-user' appended to everything they did, but with actual training to reach their full potential.
So it was that several months before Queen Amidala of Naboo was taken off course and landed on Tatooine in the company of two Jedi and a Gungan, a boy and his mother were found, freed, and taken away to one of the nerve centres of the underground, Ik'Mat'Kri, a single-planet solar system on the border of the Unknown Regions that almost no one had ever heard of.
