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600 years ago, in the days of old, when Mace still had things like hair and blind faith and chubby cheeks, he’d developed a mean-spirited habit of scaring his friends awake. Namely one friend—one friend who just so happened to sleep in the cot next to Mace’s in the crèche. That friend.
Why?
Because there is nothing quite like pissing off a baby owl.
Qui-Gon had three eyelids back then, in addition to a hiss that broke free from the cavern he made of the back of his throat when someone surprised him. The sound wasn’t a cat’s warning slash; it wasn’t a spray of noise that receded, but rather one that exploded into existence and then grew and grew into a crescendo of terror. If Mace had to describe it, he would offer the image of a piece of cotton yards and yards and yards long being ripped from the strength of two hands in the dark of a cold night.
Qui could produce that hair-raising sound for nearly a whole minute uninterrupted if he was that way inclined, but try as he might, Mace’s teeth and throat refused to form the right shape to make it back at him in those early mornings. Out of pity, Qui had taught Mace how to imitate his warning clicks instead, which he’d lived to regret for the remainder of their childhood.
Mace, however, regretted nothing besides his friend’s untimely demise. He’d made several thousand bird jokes, all of which were received with the same sneer, and when Shaak Ti had commed in from thousands of miles away to report that she had found a chick—yes, a chick—Mace had become seven times more insufferable.
He, along with everyone else, immediately earmarked the boy to be Master Dooku’s next apprentice.
The Eagle himself always seemed to be in search of another downy little thing to sit on. This chick would do nicely, yes so nicely.
And for whatever reason, that had pissed Qui right off. Not the thing about his master being a collector of all padawans avian, no, not even he could deny that. But the ‘chick.’
It was the wording.
Qui-Gon insisted that those near-humans who hailed from Stewjon were not chicks. He, himself, was not and had never in his life been a chick. This little baby was an owlet, just as his and Qui’s intermingled people had been for generations before them both.
An owlet, you idiot humans, get it right. It takes 5 minutes to do a holosearch.
Everyone was very chastised and sorry in the face of Qui’s uncharacteristic explosion of irritation in that moment. No one followed him as he raged away back to his rooms. Of course, the dramatics of his outburst were quickly forgotten when Master Dooku popped out of a corridor with a bright, “I hear there’s been a chick?”
Obi-Wan is pronounced in Qui-Gon’s native accent in such a way that it sounds like ‘Obé-in.’ He shortened that even further to ‘Behn,’ and ‘Owen,’ both of which Obi-Wan responds to, to this day.
He does not respond to ‘chick’ anymore, sadly. Even Master Dooku had to move on to referring to him as a ‘filthy juvenile’ eventually.
The results of this have been interesting, especially in that they have only made themselves known in the last hour or so in the canteen, where young Skywalker is making a racket loud enough for Ponds to come to ask Mace if they ought to send someone down there to break up the fight.
“What’s he shouting about?” Mace asks.
“Something about betrayal, sir,” Ponds reports solemnly.
“By the chancellor?”
“No sir, by General Kenobi.”
This is unsurprising. Those two go through this cycle weekly.
“It should be fine,” he assures Ponds. “Let them to their warfare. We can wrap the rest of this up around them.”
“Yes, sir.”
A voice shrieks out from the canteen, loud enough that it stops Mace in the corridor just outside the double doors.
“You’re a fuckin’ BIRD?” it shrieks.
This is where thirty-two years of memory assault Mace like a club. Years and years of Qui-Gon snipping at Obi-Wan in the hallways and in ships and in private to Mace come flooding back alongside the delightful realization that, because Obi-Wan has finally outgrown his diminutive moniker, he has now joined the ranks of his older lineage members who also appear, to the untrained eye to be totally, completely, and oh-so-reliably human.
Apparently, so human that he’s brushed right past his own padawan without a hint of recognition that anything might be off.
For coming on 13 years.
Mace lets himself indulge in a snicker while Ponds watches him in concern.
Mace must see how this conversation continues; he takes himself to the very end of the corridor and stays in the shadows. Across the canteen, he can see young Skywalker holding the sides of Obi-Wan’s face between two hands.
Obi-Wan blinks at him.
Owlishly.
Mace cracks himself up.
“Sir? Are you alright?”
He waves Ponds off.
Commander Cody, he notices, is sitting at Obi-Wan’s side wearing an expression. This in itself is enough to cause concern, but Mace will look past it for now so that he can absorb the fact that the expression is overwhelming guilt.
Guilt. Cody is guilty and he can only be guilty because he has done something that has incited this whole chain of events and Mace is praying to all the little gods that Cody has made one of his infamous jokes.
A bird joke, no doubt.
He probably delivered it bone-dry and expected a positive reaction, as he often receives from his brothers to whom Commander Cody is more or less a master comedian.
Oh, he couldn’t have known the damage this would do. Mace would like to pat his shoulder and congratulate him.
“Obi-Wan,” Anakin says seriously.
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan returns.
“Please. Don’t do this. We just did the war thing.”
“Don’t do what, my dear apprentice?”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t?”
“Say you aren’t.”
“I will not say I’m not.”
“OBI-WAN.”
Obi-Wan is the darling of his grandmaster’s eye exactly because he’s taken in Yoda’s humor and really done something with it that makes it acceptable to the masses.
He knows he’s funny, too. That’s why he’s giggling.
“Does it really disturb you that much?” Obi-Wan asks his problem child.
Anakin pouts. He’s hurt. He’s actually hurt.
“Yes,” he says.
“I see. What would you like me to say?”
“That you aren’t.”
“I never lied to you, Anakin.”
“You’re a birdperson. I thought—everyone said—you were—”
“Human?”
Young Skywalker releases his master’s face and sits down again across from him. Ahsoka looks between the two of them and wisely decides to take cover under the table.
She will go far, that one.
“I’m human enough,” Obi-Wan says. “Mostly human, even.”
“But—”
“It’s an absurd thing, but if you needed a percentage, the geneticists tell me I’m about 27% native Stewjoni.”
“What?”
“27%,” Obi-Wan repeats over his mug of caf. “My master was 25%.”
Anakin gapes.
“M-Master Qui-Gon?” he asks.
Obi-Wan hums in confirmation through a sip of caf.
“Master Qui-Gon was a birdperson, too?”
“Why do you think he rescued you, Anakin? The man’s nesting instinct—”
“Shut your fucking face.”
Obi-Wan chokes on his swallow. Commander Cody, sat next to him, is staring so intensely into Captain Rex’s eyes that Mace thinks he might self-destruct.
“There, there, little one,” Obi-Wan snickers. “You have not been adopted by common birds, if it brings you any comfort.”
“Common?” Anakin says drily.
“Here, I’ll show you.”
“Don’t.”
Obi-Wan isn’t listening. He starts by tipping his head to one side, then the other, and then, over the increasing volume of Anakin’s protests, twists his head almost completely around so that his chin is where his temple usually sits.
Anakin stares in complete and total silence. Obi-Wan rights his chin. Smiles. Takes another demure sip of caf.
“I hate you,” Anakin says.
“Owl,” Obi-Wan says.
“I hate you so much. I’m going to put sand in your fuckin’ shoes every day for the next forty years.”
“You want to see the other way?”
“I’m putting pins in your sock drawer.”
“I used to have feathers.”
“You lying bastard.”
“Here, feel.”
Obi-Wan takes Anakin’s flesh hand from the table and flattens it against the nape of his own neck.
Mace can nearly feel the same sensation against his own fingers and palm.
As a kid, he would cram his cheek into the crook between Qui-Gon’s neck and shoulder when he was defenseless and daydreaming. His face would inevitably be stabbed with a series of partially formed pin-feathers, and Qui’s animal reaction to this was to slap him immediately and take up the Screech.
The righteous fury was so worth the pain.
It was several years before Qui’s bumpy, pimpled neck gave up its valiant effort to cover his throat the whole way round. He’d taken medication to tame this particular expression of his avian genes on account of not really wanting to walk around with a half-chest of plumage, which, as far as Mace knew, Obi-Wan similarly desired.
Anakin’s face continues to empty of its will to live.
Obi-Wan grins at him.
Mace is not at all surprised when he is approached by a troop of young knights who have all received news of Anakin’s discovery. They’re all similarly shell-shocked to learn that their very own junior council member (the coolest, the shiniest, the closest to their own generation) is not what they believed him to be.
Mace asks them why they’re all asking him and what they want from him.
“The truth,” Anakin says. “Master Plo says you were friends with Master Qui-Gon.”
Ah, yes. Plo is out passing the buck, apparently.
“Master Plo was also good friends with Master Qui-Gon,” Mace says, barely refraining from calling the man ‘Quiggs’ in public.
“Was he a birdman, too, Master?” Knight Unduli asks.
“Owl,” Mace corrects before Qui’s ghost goes ballistic in the afterlife.
The knights huddle together for protection against the unknown and upsetting.
“How?” Anakin demands—ever the bravest of all of them.
“How do I know? Or how was he an owl?”
“Yes,” Anakin says.
Mace smirks.
Master Yoda knew going into Master Dooku’s apprenticeship that he’d picked up a near-human child. Neither of them had any say in that because those were the days before medication to suppress certain inconvenient or painful near-human traits was in widespread use.
In practical terms, that means that Dooku’s early holoimages are of a child with a shock of dark hair with a thick layer of wild, white-ish gray down mixed in among it. Even his black eyelashes look fluffy in the images.
The knights are captivated. They cram themselves in around Mace’s datapad.
Master Dooku’s feathers started growing in when he reached puberty; his down disappears from the images of him and his black tunics start to make a more regular appearance until black is the only color that he wears. His robes are tucked tight and he wears a high collar in teenage-hood. The only signs of his avian heritage are the smattering of tiny black feathers that trail down from his hairline and that peep up in little black spots around his brow and cheekbones and the ever-so-slight orangeish hue of the skin from the inner points of his eyes to his lower cheeks.
The anatomical differences in his eyes are concealed by the humanoid silhouette of his skull.
He stands next to Yoda very primly and properly for two whole padawans cycles. First Komari. Then Rael—both very, undeniably human.
Then, of course, he got Qui-Gon. Baby Qui, even, because Dooku has always had a silver tongue and somehow convinced the Council at that time to allow him to lay claim to Qui-Gon before any of them were old enough to be initiates, much less padawans.
In the first holo of Qui-Gon and Dooku together, Qui is perhaps five years old and he is—Mace cannot stress this enough—an explosion of white down. Only his cheeks, hands and feet have been spared the fluff, which his robes do no little job in exhibiting. In contrast to the earlier pictures and to this ball of cotton, Master Dooku is a black tower of supreme dignity. He holds Qui-Gon securely on a hip as one holds an enormous silk pillow.
Qui-Gon, at the time of the photo’s taking, doesn’t understand that he is meant to look at the person snapping their fingers at him. He’s spotted something with his giant blue eyes to the direct left of Dooku’s shoulder and has zeroed his attention in on it, which is something he never stopped doing.
Despite the medication he began taking in their pre-teenage years, Qui-Gon’s pupils were always disproportionate to his irises.
He could see so much more, so much more sharply than anyone else in their generation, and of course, he had an extra few eyelids to really drive that fact home to all who might question him.
Anakin refuses to believe that this sentient snowball is his Finder. Mace shrugs and tells him to believe what he wishes. He has a plenty more pictures to put the proverbial nail in the coffin for this kid.
When Obi-Wan arrived to the Temple, he could very well have been a newborn seal pup with the thickness of his traveling coat.
He too, in the grand tradition of things, was a cotton ball of white down, although, unlike Qui-Gon, his hands and feet were just as absent in color as his down. His eyes were much darker than they had come to be a few years later. His face, unlike Dooku and Qui-Gon, was totally smooth and perfectly round.
It was nearly a week into living at the Order when the crèchemasters discovered that Obi-Wan actually had hair on his head.
He remained this way for about a year, which Mace remembers perfectly because someone was always calling up to have Master Dooku removed from the area. Qui-Gon refused to involve himself, which was very well since he had Xanatos to chase at the time, so it was Mace who had to deal with it.
At around four or five, Obi-Wan’s down parted enough to liberate his spine and the majority of his legs. He started to develop color—flesh tones with actual, if little, melanin, in the skin that was visible. Around six years old, his hair began to darken to blonde, then to red, and by age eleven or so, it had settled into a light brown with the occasional patch of auburn.
Qui became Obi-Wan’s master when Obi-Wan’s wrists no longer bore the fuzzy remnants of his down, although from neck to hip, he was still covered in a light white-gray velvet.
It was around then that he began taking medication.
There wasn’t anything anyone else could do for him.
On the outside, the condition appears as an autoimmune disorder when the medication is not in play. Obi-Wan’s cells attack the calcium in his bones, trying to lighten them for a flight he cannot not take. His eyes are shaped peculiarly, trying to be both round and tubular and doing poorly at both, ruining his vision so he must depend on the extra vertebrae in his neck to swivel his head around to see the world around him.
Feeling threatened, for Obi-Wan, incites instinctual toe-dusting—he lowers his face and sways from side to side. He clicks. He hisses. All of which subsequently brand him as an easy target for those who cannot fit him in their existing schema. This was an issue in the crèche early on, where other initiates saw Obi-Wan as an easy mark.
Since Obi-Wan, no other avian-humans have entered the Order and so increasingly, the traits Qui-Gon once made him feel comfortable displaying now make him feel like an outsider, even in his own home.
Mace would not be surprised if Obi-Wan’s dosage had increased enough over the years to stop the pin feathers from peeking through his skin. He would harbor no judgement if it was just that much stronger than Obi-Wan’s cells technically needed in order to keep exquisitely tiny feathers out of his hair and away from his cheekbones.
It is only the early images that truly convince Anakin that his master is not lying to him.
Mace lets the knights go through his holo-albums to find images of grandmasters, once young, and great-grandmasters long dead. He doesn’t mind. The war is over now, there is time to let them be nosy while the senate sifts through the ashes of its own institution.
They’re all just waiting for the all-clear now. It could be days, it could be months.
Mace sits back and lets the knights, padawans, and troopers entertain themselves. They’re all bored. There’s nothing to do now but to turn all phasers from kill to relief.
But even the relief efforts are taking eons to coordinate. It’s not Mace’s place to set those wheels in motion, the service corps leaders know this terrain best.
So he sits back and relaxes.
And watches the faces of the new generations as they gaze upon those of the old.
It is three days until boiling point is reached in the most dangerous place on Base.
The masters are growing restless.
Unlike the knights and padawans, who are happily satiated with gossip and study and holodramas, the masters are all, unilaterally, over-achieving busybodies.
They’re generally too old and experienced to accept suggestions for how to spend their time from others. Plo, for example, gives not a singular shit about if Mace thinks he should sleep more than three hours at a time or not. Kit backs him up on this and has encouraged people to take time to explore their goals for the next few months, which okay, sure. That is fine for 15 minutes of meditation perhaps, but after that, additional thinking is nothing but dangerous as there is quite literally nothing to do.
Obi-Wan, one of the most restless young masters, is especially affected. He badgers Commander Cody, seeking distraction that Cody is either uninterested or unable to provide. He graduates then to badgering Shaak Ti, who, as his Finder, is less likely to snap at him than other council members are.
She tells him to find peace within himself.
She suggests trying knitting. Wood carving.
Obi-Wan rattles away from her in dissatisfaction. He thanks her over his shoulder. She tells him not to do something he might regret later. No tattoos.
Obi-Wan leaves her with a mumbled half-assurance that he cannot possibly mean.
Mace decides to take up the role that Qui-Gon has deserted for a time. He did promise that he would look after Obi-Wan if anything happened to Qui.
Obi-Wan hunts down Cody again, this time inside Cody’s quarters. Cody sleeps with his brothers in one of the command barracks in the old part of the GAR base. He is astonished to find his general clambering up to join him on his bunk.
Obi-Wan flattens himself directly on top of Cody. Cody lays where he is, surprisingly tolerant of the addition of weight and restriction of mobility.
“Sir,” he says.
“Cody, Cody, Cody.”
“I heard you the first time.”
“I’m going to climb into a fountain.”
Cody lets his body go limp with exasperation. His brothers take pleasure at his expense.
“Cody, I’m going to drown.”
“Where is your puzzle?”
“I broke it. I’m going to drown.”
“Have you considered perhaps not drowning?”
Obi-Wan clicks furiously into the meat of Cody’s neck.
“I see,” Cody says.
Obi-Wan shoves himself up abruptly.
“What if I laid an egg?” he tries.
He now has the attention of all the commanders in the barracks and most of the captains.
Cody is gentle with him.
“You cannot lay an egg,” he says.
“Perhaps I could.”
“You are misunderstanding, General.”
“Which part?”
“The part where you lay an egg.”
“Oh I see. Shall I hatch one, then?”
Cody deserves overtime pay for this conversation alone.
“What you do with your time is not of my concern, sir,” he says.
This is clearly not the case. Mace is reading both of these young men right, and he’s reading the acceptance of the whole barracks right.
These two are entwined. Qui-Gon would be devastated to have someone with such an abundant reserve of good sense this close to his lineage.
“I’ll hatch an egg,” Obi-Wan says. “Will you be the father, Cody?”
“No.”
“The mother, then?”
“I’ll consider it.”
Obi-Wan is delighted. Sarcasm cannot stop him now.
“Thank you for your dedication, Commander,” he says.
“Remove yourself,” Cody says. “I have requisitioned multiple puzzles.”
Mace watches the Commander hand Obi-Wan a small, clear plastic rectangle with a series of tiny clear boxes stacked in it. Each box has a few nuts in it. A few appear to have strips of jerky. At the bottom of the piece hangs a bell and a few pieces of dried reed.
Obi-Wan holds it in a hand, now parked at the side of Cody’s shared bunk, staring.
“It is enrichment for people such as yourself,” Cody tells him.
Obi-Wan shakes the box so that all of the contents rattle.
“Very good,” Cody says.
Obi-Wan shakes it harder. The bell rings desperately.
“It will teach you to forage for sustenance,” Cody says.
“Hm,” Obi-Wan says.
“When you are finished foraging, we may revisit the idea of egg hatching,” Cody says.
Obi-Wan tries to pick one of the clear boxes open. His fingers are too big. It slips out of his grip right back into the box. The force energy around him begins to grow like a small thunderstorm.
He mumbles something about needing a tool and sets off out of the barracks. He is so focused on the box that he doesn’t notice Mace waiting outside the door for him.
“I thought he was supposed to be an owl,” Commander Fox says in his wake.
“Bird,” Cody says.
“Owls can’t be trained,” Fox points out.
“Quitter talk,” Cody deadpans.
Mace follows Obi-Wan to the GAR base and makes his presence known. Obi-Wan starts at him, and upon processing who it is, he holds out the clear box in a silent cry for help. Mace does not take it.
“It seems to me that you’ll need a tool,” he says.
Obi-Wan clutches the box in both hands.
It is precisely 30 minutes of fantastic entertainment to watch Qui-Gon’s student bang the shit out of the box on a table until one of the inner drawers falls out. Obi-Wan is rewarded with two folded up strings of jerky which he blinks rapidly at for several beats before deciding to eat them.
The other boxes sadly, are not so easily accessed through brute force. Tweezers are needed. Tweezers, in Obi-Wan’s experience, live only in Anakin’s pockets, and so Anakin is ambushed, manhandled publicly, and shaken until the correct tools make their presence known.
Then he is dropped, the tools collected, and Obi-Wan goes on his way.
Anakin notices Mace observing and asks him what the fuck is going on.
Mace says nothing. He gestures for Anakin to join him.
“He could have asked,” Anakin says with his arms crossed over his chest.
Obi-Wan has liberated another box from the puzzle. It contains 3 tear-drop shaped nuts. He eats one and puts another in his pocket for later, and resoundingly obliterates the last from his field of awareness.
The box on bottom, Mace is noticing now, requires a key. He cannot wait to see how that goes.
Commander Cody arrives just as Obi-Wan has grown frustrated with conventional tools and has resumed banging the box on the table top. Anakin looks over his shoulder and waves. Commander Cody nods. He does the same towards Mace.
“We’re three for five,” Mace informs him.
“Disappointing,” Cody says.
“He shouldn’t be eating dried fruit,” Mace puts out there for no particular reason.
Anakin and Cody study him.
“You know more than you are letting on, General,” Cody says.
“Perhaps I do,” Mace says.
“What is your price for knowledge, sir?”
Obi-Wan crows in triumph at cracking the whole box. Doing so dislodges the fourth box from the puzzle frame. There is still the box with the lock left, but given the current method, keys will not be necessary for future success.
“I am being entertained,” Mace says. “That is enough for me.”
Commander Cody looks through every holo of Obi-Wan that Mace has in his collection in dead silence. After some time, he sets the pad aside and folds his fingers.
“Sir,” he says.
“Commander,” Mace replies.
“You are an associate of the General’s master?”
“A close associate.”
“Did you apply puzzle objects to his situation?”
“I did not, and now live with regrets,’ Mace says.
“I see. Sir?”
“Yes, Commander?”
“The General has become fixated on the topic of eggs,” Cody says. “Is this something which your associate also experienced?”
Mace refrains from snorting.
“It is indeed,” he says. “Although Qui-Gon was quite taken with small, helpless creatures in general, he was especially interested herding the young. Obi-Wan, as a child, satisfied a yearning in him to mind and feed a chick.”
Cody takes this information with a grave expression and a nod.
“Where does one acquire a chick?” he asks.
“Obi-Wan already has a chick,” Mace says, gesturing to Anakin. “What he wants now is an egg. They’re slightly different in terms of responsibility, but regardless, I suspect that the issue is not one of rearing or reproduction. I suspect that he is expressing a desire to nest.”
“Owls don’t nest,” Anakin says.
There is a pause.
“I looked some stuff up,” Anakin says defensively.
“Owls don’t nest,” Cody says.
“They do, actually,” Mace says. “But it often involves stealing an already established nest which means—”
“We have to build a nest,” Anakin tells Cody.
“There is no ‘we,’” Cody informs him.
“We’re going to build a nest,” Anakin tells Mace. “Where should we start?”
“I did not consent to your command,” Cody maintains.
“Wherever it pleases you,” Mace says. “The hard part isn’t the nest but making him care about it afterwards. Plo is good at it, if you require guidance.”
Both Cody and Anakin’s eyes lock onto him.
Plo used to bother the ever-loving shit out of Qui-Gon by taking him by surprise and making him puff up into a giant ball of flesh and wannabe feathers.
Plo also used to bother the ever-loving shit out of Mace by taking him by surprise and asking him four thousand questions about why Qui-Gon hated him.
Mace used to tell him that it was because he was 4 years old and annoying, but eventually he settled on wisdom.
He told Plo it was because he was haunted.
That worked for a few weeks until he got caught and he and Qui ended up taking the fall and sorting the younglings’ blocks in the crèche until dinner. After that, Qui started telling Plo that every lake was the result of ancient reptiles’ footprints and that if you didn’t hold your breath when you went across a bridge, then demons would come out and drag you to the dark side.
So, you know. They’d really learned absolutely nothing.
It’s little wonder why Plo trusts Mace zero-percent when he and his new entourage approach him in the hallway.
“Brother mine,” Mace greets.
“I’ve done nothing,” Plo says immediately.
“I’m paranoid now,” Mace says.
“Alas, a fault of your own.”
“We require your unparalleled knowledge in building a nest,” Mace explains.
“Please,” Cody tacks on there, and as an afterthought, “Sir.”
Anakin points at him in agreement. Plo takes them all in.
“Only because you’re so polite,” he says. “Why a nest?”
They have now activated a long dormant part of Plo’s brain that compels him to gather woven fabric. Robes. Unattended cloaks. Napkins. Sheets. Pillows from unoccupied beds.
Plo insists that the object is to find a ledge and then make the nest feel as though someone is fully intending to return to it. To set the stage, so to speak.
A few padawans join them when they see something interesting happening, which is good because they need to find somewhere high off the ground to start stowing things. Ahsoka climbs up onto Anakin’s shoulder to check in an overhead hold. It isn’t what Mace would call a fun place up there; it appears rather like the luggage compartment on a transporter, but it technically is a ledge and it is also up high.
Plo evaluates it and gives it a 6 out of 10. They must keep looking.
They check out 3 more places, each worse than the last, and then circle back to the luggage rack. The padawans are hoisted up into it and the linens and pillows and fabrics are handed up to them to arrange into a pillow-fort situation. Once they have accomplished this, Plo says they must acquire snacks to impart a sense of current occupation to the space. Down everyone comes.
To the kitchens they all go.
They acquire a few troopers on the way back. A mug of hot caf and several packets of biscuits are procured from the canteen. The troopers stack up on each other’s shoulders to help arrange these goods in the nest.
The trap is set.
Now they must lure the target in close enough to notice it.
Commander Cody hustles back to his barrack bunk and clambers onto it to pretend to be deeply engrossed in something on his datapad, which Captain Rex and Ponds tell Mace is a sure-fire way to attract Obi-Wan’s attention and presence.
They all hide in the crevasses of the barracks, holding their breath and waiting.
In a few minutes, the door creaks open.
Obi-Wan peeks in with no puzzle device visible. Cody lowers his pad and then lifts it hurriedly as though he is trying to cover up the fact that he heard anything. Obi-Wan visibly perks up. He hurries over and stands at the side of Cody’s bunk.
Sheepishly, he digs around in his sleeve pockets until he produces a piece of shattered plastic and pushes this slowly into Cody’s field of vision on the edge of his mattress. Cody quirks a brow.
“You broke it,” he says.
“You didn’t say not to,” Obi-Wan says.
“Does it please you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you feel able to forage?”
“No.”
Cody examines Obi-Wan closely.
“What is it you need now?” he asks.
Obi-Wan takes this as permission to climb up onto the bunk with Cody. He flops down on top of him just as before. Cody gracefully pretends that the wind hasn’t been knocked out of him.
Obi-Wan clicks.
It’s a delightful sound. Mace hadn’t realized how much he’d missed hearing it. It makes him think of Qui-Gon waiting until Master Dooku had turned away from them before mimicking his way of speaking, ending each sentence with a snappy click as an attitude marker.
“Eggs,” Obi-Wan finally says.
“I cannot help you with eggs,” Cody says. “I’ve thought the situation over and I am not yet prepared for motherhood.”
“Hmmm.”
“Are you disappointed?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Obi-Wan’s laugh is muffled.
“What if,” he says, levering himself up and off Cody’s pillow, “What if—”
“Why don’t you go find somewhere comfortable to rest, sir?” Cody offers.
There is a long, long pause. Force energy begins to gather around Obi-Wan just as before.
“Rest?” he asks.
“Sir.”
“I am resting now.”
“Are you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then. I suppose you are.”
Obi-Wan can sense that something is afoot and he needs more information now. Curiosity threatens his life, his limbs, his happiness. He flexes his hands on each side of Cody’s shoulders. If he were not on his medication, he’d be growing talons from each finger, none half as useful or graceful as Plo’s.
“Tell me,” Obi-Wan pleads.
He and Cody must play many games like this. Mindgames. Pranks. Back-and-forth ‘I know something you don’t know’s. Mace knows this because Cody’s usually down-turned lips have flattened due to a suppressed smile.
“I will give you a hint,” Cody says. “Your padawan will not fit with you.”
Obi-Wan holds his gaze for a long, bleeding moment.
“Where’s Anakin?” Obi-Wan demands.
They have to do some sticky, tricky maneuvering to get Obi-Wan out of the barracks so that they can then get Anakin out of the barracks and hide him.
And hide him.
And keep hiding him because Obi-Wan is a hunter and his hearing is absurd. They end up having Plo and Ahsoka stand guard as look outs.
They start with a supply cupboard, all 12 of them who have joined this game, and then move from there to an ammunition hold, to the armory, and then up into the rafters right under the living roof. There, they huddle in, legs carefully drawn up and breath held as Obi-Wan swings his head around in a wide, near-perfect circle down below.
He can sense Anakin’s force signature no matter how loudly the people around him are broadcasting theirs to drown it out. Anakin, for his part, is doing everything he can to make the signature small, so small, tiny.
It is like taking a gas giant and compressing it into a black hole. Somehow, Anakin trying to help is only making things worse.
Obi-Wan at the very bottom of the wide room lets out a sound that he normally would not in the company of others. It’s that familiar screech. A little one. Cotton fabric ripped between two tight grips. Anakin’s eyebrows shoot up and the padawans all search each other out in delight.
Mace gets the feeling that they love that Master Kenobi is more like many of them than they previously thought.
He looks up and signals to Plo with his chin that they’re going to do one more hiding place before they let Obi-Wan find his target.
To the laundry room.
The door is barely open. Anakin is pretending to have been here the whole time, sitting on one of the shaking machines, playing a game on his pad.
Obi-Wan flings open the door with the Force and lunges at him.
At some point in hunting down Anakin, Obi-Wan must have found the nest, but his attention was so wrapped up in finding Anakin that he appears to have put a pin in the nest situation so as to finish what he’d started.
He drags Anakin across two holds by the back of his tunic towards the nest. It is like watching a mother cat try to carry her overgrown kittens back to safety under a deck. Anakin is awkward and heavy, but that matters far less than the mission.
“Is this necessary?” Anakin asks.
“Why’re you being weird?”
“Is this a bird thing?”
“Are you being a bird?”
“Are you sure you’re an owl, I read they’re monogam—”
Obi-Wan has relocated the nest and his full attention is now on it. He dumps Anakin to the side and approaches, only to realize that he can’t reach it. Not without support. Or flight.
He cannot fly.
This is common to every bird person Mace has met. Their bodies crave it, prepare for it in every way, but for this, they are too human. Their arms aren’t wide enough—the wingspan necessary to lift a human body is enormous. The weight of the wings alone would require even more adaptations. Their ancestors were shape shifters. Their offspring, however, seldom are.
Flight, the ultimate purpose, remains out of reach.
Obi-Wan’s gaze is not quite mournful. He’s already worked out a solution. Surely, he reasons while the rest of them watch on, Cody meant that Anakin is a means to an end.
Anakin sighs and stoops down so that his master can clamber onto his shoulders.
The birdman has never, in his whole life, been more fulfilled and satisfied than he is huddled up in that nest on the ledge. He’s so pleased with himself that when Cody comes to talk to him, he doesn’t move. Doesn’t invite him up. Doesn’t say hello.
They have moved past satisfaction right into territorial.
Cody asks him how the egg incubation is going.
Obi-Wan tries to hand him down the mug of caf, now cold, which is putting a dent in his immersive experience. Cody accepts the mug, standing all the way up on his toes to receive it. Obi-Wan withdraws and sets about digging around in the linens, content to shuffle things around until they are as he likes them.
Cody asks if he needs anything.
He does not. He’s going to sleep now.
“Good night,” he says.
“Good night,” Cody replies.
Obi-Wan sleeps in the base that night, and if Mace were fully committed to the part of the observer, he would set a holorecorder on him to see if he stays awake until dawn, hunting mouse droids. But alas.
Mace has already done this before. Plo remembers it and agrees that no one’s prey-drive can beat Master Dooku’s prey-drive. He is still traumatized, thank you.
They take the young people back to the Temple and Mace goes to the Room of a Thousand Fountains to leave a lit candle for an old friend.
“I hope you’re watching this,” he says to the candle. “We’re missing you very much these days, Qui.”
It is not windy, but the flame sputters.
Mace feels the tension in his body soften.