Disclaimer: I own nothing except my OCs and possibly some percentage of the plot.


Cara had apologised to Obi-Wan about a month after the blow-up she'd had over the spar. She was still aggravated about his backhanded attempts to turn her into some sort of Jedi, but he wasn't really aware he was doing it and it was a sort of compliment, she supposed. Also, she missed him. He was a friend, and one she could be completely honest with. Shmi was the only other person she'd been able to really talk to about those things. While she planned to tell Anakin some day, age eleven was not that day.

He had come back and they both avoided discussing that issue, choosing instead to dig out and conquer another memory or two, then perhaps just enjoy the time spent comfortably sniping at each other.

After the last time, one of Cara's greatest fears had resurfaced, so she stepped into the memory, determined to push it back, and also to maybe get through to Obi-Wan about why she was so terrified of being pushed into situations where a lightsabre was needed.

Casta was still learning from her master, but this was a different experience. The electric current of fear that always hovered underneath everything these days was accompanied by the anger and hatred she felt for the collar around her neck and the metal bands on her wrists. One wrong move, one wrong step and the explosives at all three points would be set off and she would die.

They stepped off the ship and onto the space station. It was a little orbital place soaked in the dark side. In cages around the place were children and in pride of place was an actual Jedi, chained within an inch of her life.

She suppressed the nausea and concentrated on the darkness roiling around them all. It was strangely soothing and took away some of the fear, replacing it with a bubbling sort of anger. Anger was good. Anger meant she wasn't freezing, meant she could think. A shocked scream from one of the cages made her whip around, startled. One of the other darksiders was pressing a glowing hot metal knife against the face of the occupant.

The idea came to her that she might be expected to participate. The nausea surged again, but she had to stay calm. She couldn't rescue anyone, she couldn't rescue herself. To buy herself time she affected an unaffected tone. "Do you have to do that?" she asked. "It's just that screaming children are very loud and I'd rather not get a headache from all that."

She tugged a little harder on the darkness. She wanted it to take away all the things she was feeling because she didn't want to feel them.

Casta didn't need to participate after all, because they just played Sabacc for hours, betting on who got to keep the children, eventually working up to who would get to keep the Jedi. Her master was terrible at Sabacc, but since not helping him was a tiny way to fight back, she'd take it and watch him lose with amusement. Eventually one of the other players got bored and tugged her aside, whispering how attractive she was and Casta let him. He was gorgeous, yellow eyes or no, and having sex was at least not going to hurt anyone else. She tugged on the dark a little more, borrowing his feelings of arousal to shore up her own.

When they ambled back to the table, the Jedi looked at them both in distaste. "You're both disgusting," she said. "Aroused by the torture of these children."

Earlier in the evening she might have been ashamed. Now she was just angry. How dare this woman judge her? How dare she sit there, chained up and pretending to be unaffected while Casta had to play this game? Her hand flashed out, backhanding the woman across the face. "How about you shut up, Jedi," she snapped. Then, without a thought she brought a hand down again, this time in a calculated move, breaking the woman's left pinkie finger. The way she twitched, pain briefly colouring the Force around her was satisfying as the smug bitch shut up.

One day later, isolated on the ship again, the high of the dark Force wearing off, Casta vomited until her stomach rebelled, then helplessly wept for the rest of the night.

The nausea dispersed as Obi-Wan pulled her loose from the memory. He looked disturbed, but seemed to be reserving anything he had to say. They had sometimes dipped into other memories of her giving in to her worst impulses, but this was the first one she'd let him see where she had been consciously reaching for the corruption.

"And yet you still saw that it was wrong," he said in response to her unspoken thoughts.

It was hard to work through this one, harder than many others because the choices here were so deliberate. Getting lost in the feelings of her terrible memories was difficult, and here she kept spiralling into self-hatred and disgust, unable to concentrate on everything that had happened, just how terrible she'd been.

But Obi-Wan was as relentless as he could be kind and drew her unflinchingly to her successes and faults, and eventually Cara could see it without the immediate gut-wrenching guilt and anger with herself. Back in her mindscape, her mental image of a freighter, travelling through hyperspace, had another pristine panel back in place. The chaos of her mind slowly retreating.

Obi-Wan shared with her the fight where he lost his master. She helped him with his doubts over having fought in anger, with his grief and fury over the fact that Qui-Gon just wouldn't wait. The doubts that had arisen all over again when his final words weren't affection, care or encouragement, but a warning not to fall. Privately Cara thought it was an awful thing to do to someone you cared about, making your last words be a lecture on the dark side, rather than something like that he was proud of Obi-Wan, but she wasn't going to say that to her friend.

When they both surfaced, he shook his head, looking a little disbelieving. "Is that something they do a lot?" he asked. "Play Sabacc for the chance to torture a Force-sensitive?"

Cara shrugged. "Sometimes, but I think it's partly about being able to be around other dark Force users and not have to pretend otherwise. You don't trust anyone there, but you don't have to pretend to be nice, you don't have to impersonate a Jedi and you can be open about all of it."

"I . . . hadn't even thought of that," Obi-Wan said.

"Y'know, darksiders are people too. We like to hang out and shoot the breeze like anyone else," she pointed out.

He graciously didn't call her out on her identification with other darksiders, but his raised eyebrow made her flush. "Did you go there a lot?" he asked curiously.

"Often enough that I got a lot of use out of my ground, centre, shield and cloak technique," Cara said. "It's what saved me in the end."

They hadn't talked again about any of her reverse-engineered techniques. "What is that?"

She explained about the techniques and then walked him through grounding and centring. Obi-Wan gasped as he felt an internal stability and certainty he'd never felt before. "It's something that, even without the camouflage I developed with the dark side, is so helpful for avoiding falling into it."

"It is a . . . remarkable feeling," Obi-Wan commented as he explored the oddly liquid solidity that was his centred self. "But you said camouflage?"

Cara nodded, slipping back into her didactic state. "Once you've got your link to the light side of the Force and you've centred, you want to shield that core. You wrap it up and lock it down as tightly as you can. You're protecting it from any external forces. Then, you build layers on top of it." She had pulled him inside of her shields to demonstrate, and he watched as that tightly shielded core was covered by layer after layer of gauzy thoughts, building the external appearance of the mind overtop. "Since you can touch the Force with positive emotions, I'm going to build up the same sort of coverage I would with the dark side, only with happy thoughts."

Obi-Wan had never heard that you could use positive emotions in the Force the way a darksider used anger or hatred, and as he watched she began to glow, the happiness and joy layering on until she was a ball of light that warmed and uplifted. She was, in fact, radiating the precise opposite of what he had felt when facing the Sith on Naboo. It was remarkable, all the more so when she deconstructed the whole of it again, and he could see that all that light hadn't seeped into the core of her. The thought of being able to walk into a den of darksiders with the appearance of being one of them while hiding himself in safety underneath complex shielding was very attractive.

At his insistence she taught him. But she had the firm caveat, "Obi-Wan, this is hard. You don't realise how hard it is until you're sitting there with all that darkness clinging to you. And it does cling. Worse, it's like walking into a rancor pit with a lit lightsabre and having the strength of will to not use it. You have to maintain the appearance of being like them, you have to maintain the cloak, you have to keep yourself separate from the dark in the cloak and you have to do this all without cracking because you'll feel the dark side of the Force and it will be all cold fire and awful and tempting. This isn't something you just slip into and out of and it's not something you do unless it's an emergency."

It was a sobering reminder, and he was careful as he learned how to layer on those gossamer thoughts creating an outward appearance of self, wrapped around his true self, then the layering on of all those emotions he normally released into the Force.

Cara then insisted on what she clearly felt was a dangerous trade. In exchange for lessons how to hide underneath the dark side, he would help her build a lightsabre and teach her to use it properly, as opposed to the half-learned, dark Force driven first form she worked with. He took her to Ilum, helped her with how to find the right kyber crystals and they changed out the old red crystal for a yellow that was the colour of a Sith's eyes, and a pair of small matching crystals of purple that went into her fans. Then he re-taught her the forms for the lightsabre. While he had changed to favour Soresu since his fight with the Sith, she favoured his old form of Ataru. Much like any movement with her fans, she preferred to dodge rather than meet force for force. Soresu was about turning aside attacks, but Cara simply chose to not be there when the blow landed. It was a very different way of looking at Ataru, as in Qui-Gon's hands it was an aggressive form, while in Cara's it was wholly defensive and any sparring between them took a ridiculously long time with both of them having to move against the inclinations of their respective forms to attack.

The better she got with her weapons, the more Obi-Wan found himself thinking of her in the training salles at the Temple, thought of her teaching younglings her unusual mental disciplines and imagined her being there to spar with and talk to and be among his friends. The closeness fostered by their work on both their memories was like an analogue to the comfort he had with others at the Temple who shared the same upbringing and living space and experiences as he did.

He'd practised the techniques she taught him as well, going over them again and again under shield when alone, when meditating in perfect isolation and then eventually holding the whole of it while walking through crowds. Obi-Wan felt certain of his skill with them, confident that if he needed to he would be able to use them.

So, when the emergency beacon was set off by Master Plo Koon saying the ship carrying initiates and a padawan had been attacked by darksiders and Obi-Wan was the only one within range to help, he didn't hesitate. He didn't hesitate as he felt the pulse of darkness from the small space station orbiting a moon in the middle of nowhere.

Before he began, he sent off a message to Cara, letting her know what he was doing, confident in his skills but wanting to let her know he was grateful for the learning. He grounded in the light, centred himself, shielding and veiling and then gently tugged the darkness into place over everything, followed by a normal shielding such that any trained Force user would have. He was carrying Cara's old red crystal, having had the thought it might be useful at some point, and with some small adjustments swapped it into his own sabre. Then he glanced into a mirror seeing the yellow eyes of a darksider or Sith stare back at him. A quick change to his clothes so that he no longer looked like a Jedi and he was ready. He could feel the dark side of the Force swirling around him, not touching him but bleeding into the atmosphere and confidently swaggered up to the airlock, determined to rescue everyone.

He was greeted by a suspicious-looking Twi'lek. "Lovely afternoon," he said, looking her dead in the eye. "Don't suppose you've got room for one more? I heard the Jedi beacon and I got curious."

"Depends," she told him. "What've you got to put into the pot?"

It was always wise to have money, so Obi-Wan pulled the credit stick and let her check what was on it.

"Jedi issued?" she asked.

He essayed a careless shrug. "I'm figuring I'll wait until they notice. In the meantime, no point in getting cut off early." He gave her a lazy smile that he recalled Cara using when she'd been among the darksiders.

"More the merrier," said the Twi'lek. They walked down the short hallway into a central space which, just like Cara's memories had initiates caged and chained around the room. "But I'm not interested in sharing," she said and abruptly lunged at him, the sound of her lightsabre a warning on its own.

But Obi-Wan was one of the Temple's best and he snapped his own now-red sabre out, blocking her first cut and then easily slicing her head off on the second. Her body collapsed to the floor, her eyes wide and shocked and he glanced around the room of darksiders. "Oh dear. I guess we're back to whatever the previous number was."

Underneath his shields, buried under the layers of darkness, intervening thoughts and more shields he felt sick and suddenly very worried. He was committed now, though, and he carefully did not swallow and smirked at the room.

"Well, I guess that's it for her," agreed a Tholothian man. "Petass Tollie," he introduced himself.

"Ben-"

"Kenobi?" gasped Plo Koon from where he was chained. "When, and why?" He sounded pained and it took everything in him to keep Obi-Wan from breaking character.

Instead, he turned so that Plo Koon could see his eyes and hopefully let that resultant shock and horror act as his passport. "I felt like things were a little more . . . open on the other side," he said vaguely.

A Rodian, sounding obscenely delighted, said, "A former Jedi, this is a pleasure. Please, do join us."

Carefully, watching his back, Obi-Wan sat and joined the others in cheating at Sabacc. When the Mirialan woman who didn't share her name made one of the children scream after a few hours, it made everything in him shudder. He found himself nearly doing what Cara had done, trying to let the dark soothe the hurt away. He felt sick. It was there, and the desire to use it to hurt and kill all these people was now writhing inside his shields. He couldn't, he had to hang on, had to stay focused.

"Could you stop that?" he snapped at her.

The others all turned to look at him. "Any reason why you're protecting the baby Jedi?" asked Tollie.

A familiar voice and an oddly familiar darkness suddenly appeared behind him. "Maybe because some of us find that awful noise tiresome and are here to play some Sabacc and maybe get a baby Jedi to play with that isn't coming pre-broken?"

"Casta Fentan!" exclaimed the Mirialan, "Haven't seen you around since you did away with that idiot of yours."

Cara shrugged. "I've been working on things . . . stuff . . ." she leaned down over Obi-Wan and whispered in his ear. "You're an idiot."

He was able to slip his undying gratitude to her through the Force with no one the wiser. "Love you too, darling."

"So, I sent him on ahead. I was thinking we could get one of the baby Jedi and maybe take the time to adopt one and raise the kid up right," she settled herself on his lap and in spite of himself, he couldn't help but nuzzle at her for some relief from the horror. She was surrounded by a solid pulsating darkness, but just knowing she was there helped him feel stable.

The others exchanged looks. "Since when do you like to buy pets?" asked Tollie.

"Well, the nice thing about seducing someone to the dark rather than breaking them is that they'll be just so devoted to you. It's a lovely feeling," she said. Obi-Wan put an appropriately besotted look on his face. After a few rounds they'd actually won the lives of a couple of the initiates and he carted the two children off, chained up, and dropped them into Cara's ship. They were terrified and hyperventilating and all he wanted to do was comfort them.

Before he could, she tugged at him through the Force. He stepped out of the ship and she cycled the door closed behind him. "Don't. Not right now. If you make them feel better it will read through the Force. A couple more rounds and we'll lose a couple to boredom."

"I can't . . . the children," Obi-Wan couldn't even put it into words. He was shaking.

Then he felt her along the bond they shared. She tugged on the memory of their first meeting, the arousal he'd felt as he'd lost himself in the purely physical. The complete lack of worry about the Force, not feeling anything but his nerve endings and with a moan Obi-Wan pressed her against the wall, suddenly aching with the need to touch bare skin and stop thinking. He kissed her, intending to shove aside the mental for the clean sensation of just touching someone with affection and for pleasure.

Underneath that, pulsing at that level that was buried underneath all that nauseating, tempting darkness was the bright line of their Force connection which abruptly sparked and grew into a solid bond.

Physically, he yanked clothing out of the way, sliding into her, and shuddering in relief at how good it felt. The coupling was brief, but intense. When the last shudders eased, he pulled back. "Better now?" she asked. He looked at her eyes, which for a moment shifted to brown.

"Yes," he said, pulling away and then pulled himself together.

When they came back a few of the others who weren't good enough at cheating at Sabacc had left. Some of the children were gone as well, but a quick check told him they were merely on other docked ships. Master Koon looked disgusted. "I had thought better of you," he said. "But I see you have truly given yourself up to the dark."

The flash of ire surprised him, and it was only Cara digging her nails into his arm that pulled him back from the edge. He tugged at that anger, then his guilt and self hatred and used them to pad his dark side cloak. Cara meanwhile walked over to the master Jedi and backhanded him hard. "That is for your self-righteous mumbling, Jedi." She smiled viciously. "I wonder how long I can take that mask off for before you really start to suffer."

She pulled the mask off, watching him gasp, staring at him fixedly. If it weren't for the ticking over he could feel in their new bond, Obi-Wan might have broken his character. As it was, she held it off just long enough to leave the Kel Dor mostly incapacitated before putting it back on. She turned to the children who had begun pleading for the master's life. "Oh, don't worry," she said. "I don't want him dead, I just want to watch him squirm while he sees me turn some of you."

"Well, I want to make him scream," grumbled the Mirialan.

Obi-Wan grabbed Cara, pulling her into his lap again, just for the steadying feel of her. "Don't you have any subtlety?" he asked the green-skinned woman.

They played again, this time driving off one more who also lacked the patience to wait it out. The padawan and one more of the initiates wound up in Cara's ship. "We'll sell those two on the open market," Cara said carelessly. "Honestly, the money would be nice. Just imagine some time spent on a resort planet. Beaches, hot tubs, my darling Ben here dressed in nothing at all."

Tollie laughed. "You are so ridiculously pre-occupied with sex."

"I just think taking over the galaxy is too much work," Cara said. "Think of all that administrivia you have to oversee."

And then she signalled and they rolled apart, launching at the other darksiders. As he saw the sparks go up when red lights and the one yellow struck walls and spars, yet caused minimal damage from the lightsabres, Obi-Wan realised that these sorts of fights must happen frequently enough the station was built for it. But Cara was quick and he was better trained and in moments they were surrounded by dead darksiders.

With them all dead, Obi-Wan froze, shaking. He could feel the need screaming down the Force at him to let go and let the dark in. He could feel how it was touching him, clinging just as Cara had said.

Suddenly the oppressive air lightened and he realised she'd let go of her cover. "Come on, Obi-Wan, you can drop it now. Just let it go. You don't need it anymore." Her voice was soft and convincing. Convulsively, he shoved it all away. Immediately he felt better. Saner. "Just a little longer," she said. "Help me get them onto my ship, it's bigger. Then we'll slave your controls onto mine and get everyone back to Coruscant."

"Right," he said and pushed everything away into the Force. When they were safe he could worry about what he'd done or almost done. Right now, they had to get the children and Master Koon.

When they had them all on Cara's ship and his controls set to follow her, they took off from the station, leaving it to self-destruct. And then the children were all safe and he could let it go and . . .

Nausea overwhelmed him and Obi-Wan flung himself into the fresher, vomiting.


Plo Koon, who was still recovering from his stretch without his breathing mask, just rested, watching everything, wholly confused. Cara ignored him beyond making sure he was comfortable, trying to get the children to at least settle. "We're heading to Coruscant," she said, and even brought the padawan to the cockpit to look at the course settings. From the moment she had apparently returned young Kenobi to some semblance of normality in the Force, she had been near-invisible in the Force.

"It's true," said the Togrutan boy. "It's set to get us to Coruscant."

And then Cara made the children hot chocolate and distributed blankets. She made gentle jokes and soothed them, dabbing injuries with cleansers and small bandages. The whole time she broadcast a gently glowing sense of the Force without a flicker of dark. She then settled in to wait beside Plo Koon. "If you're wondering," she told the master, "I'm waiting for Obi-Wan to finish throwing up. It's bad the first time, and I won't be able to help him until he doesn't have the dry heaves anymore. Crying, sure, I can work around that, but not vomiting."

He didn't say anything, lacking both the breath to speak and the ability to frame a question, because none of what was happening made sense. As he watched, the young woman settled and began meditating, but despite every effort he made, he could feel nothing from her in the Force besides that gently glowing light.

Young Kenobi abruptly exited the fresher in the back looking pale and shocky. Cara heaved a sigh and stood. "Come on, Obi-Wan. Let me help you."

"How can you . . ." he staggered to her. "I can't . . . I didn't . . ."

"Sit down before you fall down," she said. He practically fell over onto her, then began shaking. After a moment his breaths started to sound like sobs. She held him close and made soothing sounds until he calmed. "Now." She told him firmly. "You need to meditate. You need to centre yourself again, and then we're going to get you straightened away."

He looked away. "I don't know if I can-"

"You are going to or else I will make you. You do not want me to make you, Obi-Wan," the woman snapped.

In the background, Plo was vaguely aware of the children saying, "Oooooooo."

"Make me?" The young knight looked at the woman, startled. She looked aggravated, and then suddenly the shields she'd had seemed to drop away and the brilliant light that was her Force signature swelled out and wrapped around the young man. Obi-Wan's eyes widened in surprise, then sank closed as he softly said, "Oh," in tones of surprise bleeding into relief.

Suddenly Obi-Wan's whole body relaxed and settled into meditation. Plo looked at his aura which was, despite the earlier display of darksider behaviour, basically bright, with a few spots of darkness here and there. By contrast, Cara's was brighter, but with darker places that weren't just spots but seemed to be yawning holes in her very being that writhed with darkness. But as he watched, she reached out through the Force and did something to those darker places on Obi-Wan, something that seemed to gently tug on the darkness then lift it away, and once she'd done that, Obi-Wan released it as he would have any such emotions.

It was remarkable, all the more so for the fact that he had never heard of any way to enter the dark side of the Force and come back from it. But it looked as though Obi-Wan had found a way. As he watched, Obi-Wan did something that felt like finding solid ground after being in quicksand. The pair came out of their paired meditation, both layering their shields back into place. Obi-Wan looked once more like the Jedi knight he was supposed to be, while Cara had gained the appearance of being a null.

"What the hell were you thinking!?" she shouted abruptly. Anger began colouring the air around her. "I get back to the hotel after the show and you've left me a message saying you're hanging out on that damned station pretending to be a darksider!? I didn't teach you that technique so that you could risk getting yourself killed, or risk actually Falling!"

"They needed help," Obi-Wan told her, looking intense, but thankfully not angry. "I will admit I was overconfident-"

"Overconfident!" she shrieked. "Do you have any idea how close to the edge you went? If I'd been a minute later you'd have either been having to fight all of them or you would have gone right over the edge, good intentions be damned!"

"I was not that close to falling," he replied, though perhaps not as firmly as he should have.

She hissed. "Fine. Let's pretend you're right, which you're not. You were close to losing it and getting into a thirteen-to-one fight with lightsabres. Just because you can take on any ten darksiders or any one Sith doesn't mean the eleventh won't get you."

"And I'm grateful you came to help," he said. "You were right, I was wrong."

Cara was totally wrong-footed by his acceptance. "Don't do that. I'm trying to vent at you because you were an idiot and you deserve to be yelled at. Also, my . . ." she glanced at the so-interested children and one Jedi master. "Madam Pleska is not going to be happy with me. I took off and I'm going to be late getting back and I will be in so much trouble and I can't explain it. I am very tempted to tell her I had to bail you out of prison."

"And this affects me in what fashion?" Obi-Wan asked.

She narrowed her eyes at him. "I would set Pleska against any Jedi Master any day. The next time you stop by the studio I will make sure that she's there to tear a strip off you. You will rue the day. Also, I am hugely unhappy you put me in the position of having to bail you out. I hate lightsabres, I hate everything to do with being a darksider and right now I'm very close to hating you."

Obi-Wan flinched. "I'm sorry, Cara. I'm sorry I didn't listen to your warnings. I allowed my pride to overwhelm my sense and you have every right to be upset." He looked desperately sad.

She, on the other hand, was clearly struggling with her temper. Master Koon wondered whether she had studied at the Corellian Temple instead of Coruscant. He only knew he'd never met the young Jedi woman. She suddenly threw her hands in the air and stormed away towards the fresher, likely to get some space. She abruptly turned toward two of the whispering initiates and said to them, "Enough with the Sith-Killer thing. It's not something you parade around, it's a very unpleasant experience and I don't need him bleeding his upset over that mess all over my ship. Find something else to talk about, like how unpleasant I am, okay? Good."

"Oh, she is never going to forgive me this time," Obi-Wan said aloud to himself, then vanished into the cockpit.

After she was done in the fresher, she threw him out of the cockpit, closed the door behind her and left him to look after the initiates, padawan and master.

Plo Koon kept his silence beyond answering yes or no questions regarding his physical welfare. Young Kenobi looked shaken still, and with everything that had happened he was quite determined to find out what had been going through the young man's mind before any report was shared with the Council.

So, it was much later that he got to ask his questions. After they'd returned to the Temple, the lot of them disembarking from Cara's ship with the rather sharp farewell from her to Obi-Wan of, "No. I am still mad at you. Shut up. Karking moron." After he was helped to the Halls of Healing, after the children had been taken back to their creches and the padawan returned to his master. Finally the healers left and Master Koon was able to speak openly.

"That was a very interesting series of events," he said to the knight.

Obi-Wan was frankly miserable. "Cara developed the technique under duress," he explained. "She was trapped with a darksider and had to learn how to counterfeit going dark. She . . . she offered to teach it to me for if I ever found myself in a similarly desperate position," he said. Then he looked at Master Koon. "I was overconfident. She warned me it was . . . not good. She said it was difficult, like walking into a pit of rancors with a lit lightsabre but having to not use it. I thought . . . I had better training than she did. I . . . I was overconfident."

The master considered the much younger Jedi for a long moment. It was clear that he was more concerned with protecting his friend than he was with himself. It spoke well of him, as did his understanding that he had taken a terrible risk. "I felt you both being intimate. I assume now that it was her assisting you with the difficulty you had placed yourself in?"

Flushing, Ob-Wan said, "It . . . I was starting to . . . lose control. It was about . . . temporarily distancing myself from the dark side without breaking character. It's . . . being very purely physical . . . helped." There was a pause, then he blurted out, "I'm sorry Master Koon. I just thought I could do it. Cara and I have . . . discussed her experiences with darksiders and I thought I knew what to expect. I thought I could save you and the initiates. That I wouldn't have to delay and risk losing anyone. I should have listened when Cara said I didn't understand how bad it gets."

Gently, Plo told him, "This is why so few of us are called to be Shadows." He considered the woman who had come to both their rescue. "Your friend must be very good at her job. Is she from the Corellian Temple? I don't recall seeing her here before."

"She's not a Jedi," Obi-Wan said, then paled. "Please, Master don't say anything. I . . . I've spent a long time getting her trust and I promised her I wouldn't tell anyone. She's . . . not fond of the Jedi as an institution."

Several thoughts settled into place and the Kel Dor felt his eyes widen. "She was a darksider." He contemplated the thought a moment. "She managed to return to the light?"

Obi-Wan shrugged. "There are apparently a few. Cara said that it's rare enough to be in a situation where it's worth trying to turn them back to begin with. She thinks that it's never happened with people who went dark because they wanted to harm others or take power for power's sake, but that if a person went dark out of desperation to protect someone, to save someone, even just to save themselves it's possible. But they have to want to go back first. And it will always be there waiting." He looked at Plo Koon. "The Jedi say there is no coming back, and that's why we don't hear about it. She tries to hide most of the time because she doesn't want someone taking her away from her life and bringing her here and locking her up because at one point she went dark in order to escape from the madman that killed her family and ruined her life."

"You have spent much time with her," the master noted. "You are not merely speaking of her beliefs, you have come to echo that, however slightly."

Obi-Wan stood suddenly, pacing in agitation. Master Koon watched him calmly. Still, a small trickle of concern about the knight began to creep in. Not that the young man would turn to the dark, everything he had seen seemed to prove that was not a concern, but that doubt about the Order was creeping in. "I want to help her," said Obi-Wan. "I keep seeing all the potential she has and I think of how amazing she would be as a Jedi."

"She cannot be a Jedi," Plo reminded him. "She is too old and set in her ways and I do not believe she would wish it even if we offered such a chance."

The younger man's pacing stopped with a sharp turn to look at the Kel Dor in a sort of desperation. "But she could teach. She's created such amazing techniques, like the one that let me get among the darksiders without detection. Even just the base part of that, grounding and centring, it's . . . you have no idea how . . . settling it is."

"Centering you have learned," Yoda's voice came from behind him. "Attention to your surroundings you do not have," he added as Obi-Wan startled badly.

"Not like this," Obi-Wan retorted. Then he realised what he had said and to who. "I am sorry, Master Yoda."

Yoda eyed him. "Show me this grounding and centring you will," he told Obi-Wan, plopping himself down on a high stool. There was an interminable pause as the knight hesitated. Correctly interpreting the reasons, Yoda added, "Learn, we all do, at all times. From our elders, we learn, but also from youth can we learn. With Melida/Daan the Elder learned from the Young."

Bitterness coloured the air briefly around Obi-Wan. "I only learned that I need to try harder to cleave to the Code," he said. "I am still not fully trusted." He closed his eyes, purging the anger into the Force. Yoda's eyes widened.

"Misunderstood you have," he said slowly. "Misunderstood I have. Anger you feel for yourself, not others. Meditate on this, I must."

"On what?" Obi-Wan asked sounding puzzled. "Anger is anger, no matter the direction."

Plo sighed. "But anger with oneself for an assumed failure has a different cause and source than anger at others."

Wryly, the young man said, "Oh, I was quite angry with the Temple after being aged out. However I can finally look to Bandomeer and not feel an irrational need to blame the Jedi for my brief enslavement. Though, that was as irrational as my conviction that my lack of success at finding a master made me somehow less."

Master Koon felt alarmed. "Less?"

The two masters were given a flat look. "Of course less." A slight hint of sarcasm underlaid his words, but the sense of truth nonetheless remained as he said, "An initiate who cannot become a Jedi is a failure." He said it as if explaining the tenets of an alien religion or political ideology. He also spoke as one who had believed - still believed it on some level. "If you have been raised in the Temple you are expected to become a Jedi knight and if you cannot be, you are flawed. Being sent away is a clear sign of . . . lack of the fundamental moral or . . ." he waved a hand in the air vaguely, "Something essential to being a Jedi. You are less because the Jedi are wholly more." Then he shook off the melancholy. "Not important," he said. "I do understand better now, with some space from the rejection."

It was important. It was wholly important because Plo had never thought of those angry, desperate older initiates in quite that way and by the movement of Yoda's ears, neither had the Order's Grandmaster.

The confusion on Obi-Wan's face at Yoda's expression made it equally clear that he had assumed this understanding was one known throughout the Order and simply accepted, not ignorance of the genuine struggles of the initiates sent on to the Corps by those more quickly and easily chosen. "But if you want to know about grounding and centring," he said, and began to explain.

When he finished, the young man dropped his shields to show the two masters what the process looked like. The way that had been found to reach for the Force without reaching outward was masterful, and the centring was even more powerful. Yoda had slowly straightened when he had managed the technique, looking surprised. "Strange this is," he said. "From how I have been taught, different it is."

Obi-Wan smiled. "It is the fundamental paradox of the Force, Cara says," he told them. "That the Force is everywhere and in everything, and so we are part of everything, but I am also myself and present here. I must be here to exist in this moment and this place. I can be only myself and no more." Then he paused. "She never puts it that way, of course. 'Obi-Wan, you have to live in the real world. We've got the Force interconnectivity junk, but to really use it you have to know what makes you you, even if you don't know every single bit of your youness.'"

The air around him was coloured by a feeling of powerful affection that took both masters somewhat aback. "Careful of attachment you must be," Yoda warned.

Head coming up in surprise, Obi-Wan nodded obediently and the warmth dispersed, followed by sharp melancholy, then a sense of peace that was startlingly like a hollow absence. It was as though the personality leached briefly out of the young man leaving a shell of a Jedi. Then it filled back in, but something of the emptiness stayed in the air.

"I will see you both at the Council meeting tomorrow for my debriefing," Obi-Wan said, abruptly standing and bowing before taking his leave.

Yoda looked after him. "I think," he said slowly, "Understand attachment young Kenobi does not."

Plo looked over at him. "You are likely right if he has learned all the wrong lessons on what it means to be a Jedi." Unspoken was the question of how many of their own shared that misunderstanding.

The next morning Master Koon was well enough to take his seat on the Council and Obi-Wan was called before them to account for his actions. The fullness of the protective technique was demonstrated, broken down and discussed, as was his overconfidence and Cara, whom Obi-Wan steadfastly protected from discovery as best he could.

When it was over, he was ordered to teach several knights and masters who were known to be Shadows how to perform grounding, centring and how to disguise oneself in the Force in the way he had learned from his friend.

It was a double-edged sword, in its way. The longer Obi-Wan spent with the Shadows, the easier he felt in himself. He watched these Jedi who skirted the edges of the Code and sometimes walked right off, but always came back and were not seen as lesser. He began to relax his desperate clinging to perfection and found he was not rejected by the masters he had been so certain were waiting for his failure. At the same time, he became more aware of the limitations of the Jedi path that he had so stringently ignored before.

When he spoke to his friends about it for the first time he discovered he was an oddity. Obi-Wan had genuinely considered leaving the Order only infrequently. Most others had doubts quite frequently. In talking to Bant, Quin and Garen he discovered he had choices that he had never even acknowledged as being choices before, and it was overwhelming. Through it all, Cara was steadfast in refusing to push him either toward or away from the Order every time they commed or met. He was much less so, because he wanted her there in the Temple with him and he would push her to come and teach what she knew. Those conversations usually ended in her blowing up at him.

Also, her ballet mistress Madam Pleska was actually quite as terrifying as any of the Jedi masters he knew.