Chapter Text
“I’m going to get us some food, all right?” Master Qui-Gon says. “Is there anything you’d like me to grab in particular, apart from a hydropack?”
Ben shakes his head.
He has a packet of dried muja fruit in his pocket. It’s not lunchtime yet, so he can get away with a snack. He hasn’t– the last time he’d been in the mess hall, the noise, and– and the people– all the people– and so open–
Well. He doesn’t go into the refectory anymore.
They make their meals together now, the two of them. Master Che had given him a meal plan, and Master Qui-Gon makes sure he follows it. Three meals a day. At least two snacks a day, as well. There are bowls of sealed snacks throughout their apartment– protein bars, or bags of nuts and dried fruit that they’d prepared themselves– and he always looks quietly pleased when Ben takes one, whether or not he eats it there. Ben thinks he knows about the stockpile he’s building under his bed, but– he hasn’t said anything. He doesn’t look disappointed, or– or frustrated, or– angry, he just–
He just seems relieved.
Sometimes others join them.
Sometimes Master Tholme comes. And Quinlan.
He’d missed Quinlan.
He thinks Tholme had maybe said something to him, because his friend is a bit quieter, now, than he had been when he’d come to see him in the Halls– but his hug is just as tight, and Ben can’t help but cling to him as the buzzing under his skin seems to– retreat.
Just for a moment.
And Master Tholme is– kind, his craggy face creased in an easy smile, and– and Quin– there’s no burn of sour fear to him, but he– he can’t help it, seeing the two of them together–
But they always let him take the seat between the two of them.
Once Bant and Master Tahl had visited, but Bant kept giving him pitying looks that made him feel all itchy in the Force, and he couldn’t quite make himself look at Tahl. His words had become more and more clipped until they strangled in his throat, and then he’d blinked and they were both gone, and Master Qui-Gon was sitting cross-legged in front of him, easy patience suffusing the Force around them both.
A little ragged noise had torn its way out of his throat, then, and he’d scooted forward, and Qui-Gon had tucked him against his side, draped his robe over his shoulders, and held him until the shaking subsided.
Sometimes Master Yoda visits.
It’s stupid, the way he relaxes. He knows. He knows that Master Yoda is maybe the strongest Jedi out of all of them. He’s seen him fight before. He knows–
But he’s– small.
He doesn’t loom.
He tells Master Yoda this, one day, very quietly, fingers tap-tap-tapping against the floor, back pressed to the wall.
Master Yoda tells him that sometimes the mind teaches the body.
Other times, he says, the body learns its own lessons first.
Sometimes– a lot of times– Master Mace comes.
He’s– warm. And there’s something– very sad, in his eyes.
The first time he visits, the Force sparks bright and angry between him and Master Qui-Gon, sharp enough to make Ben recoil–
But they notice. Both of them do, and the Force settles almost immediately, and Master Mace– he speaks very gently, tells him that he is very glad to see him home, and his warmth unfolds like a blanket, and if Ben shuffles a little bit closer to him while they’re eating, well– no one comments.
He thinks, sometimes, about asking him for help.
He knows the Unifying Force the same way Ben does, and he– he’d always helped before, after all. From the beginning, he remembers– nightmares that weren’t nightmares at all, driving him out of the creche and into the halls, being found– talking him through them, helping him untangle them until his breathing had steadied and sleep had dragged him back down, and– and he doesn’t always remember making his way back to the creche, but he’d always woken up there, and he thinks that maybe someone had carried him back–
But. But. But.
He can do it by himself. He can. He can.
He’d rebuilt once, after the hospital. He can do it again. He can. He does, bit by bit. He packs the lightning away into his bones, pushes it down, and it– it retreats. It’ll– it’ll go away. He’s fine. He’s fine.
And besides. He doesn’t know if he can find the words for it.
He can’t find the words for a lot of things, these days.
Master Bombadil tells him that this is expected. He tells him that selective mutism is a common response to trauma.
Ben tells him that he is not traumatized. That he is fine.
Master Bombadil tells him that selective mutism is a common response to difficult circumstances of any sort. That he himself had dealt with a similar difficulty when he was younger.
At that, Ben subsides.
They practice. At first, all he can manage are jagged bursts of sensation– defensive, prickly, blurred storms of feeling bursting forward like a thunderstorm– and it’s only another thing to mourn, another thing lost, a whole year without anyone else to speak to in the Force–
But the mindhealer coaxes him through shallow, easy meditations, helping him settle, helping him collect himself enough that he can shape the storm into words. Enough to serve a purpose, when he needs them.
And Master Qui-Gon is always waiting for him, when he emerges.
Master Qui-Gon is– gentle. Carefully, cautiously gentle.
He had woken up curled in the bathtub one night, and Qui-Gon had said nothing when he emerged the next morning. But the next night, when all the lights were out, Ben had padded his way into the fresher only to find a pile of freshly-laundered bedding waiting for him.
The whistling kettle had sent him diving for cover under the table, head full of the echo of bombs– and now Qui-Gon always keeps one eye on the stovetop, and deftly removes the kettle just before it starts to boil.
They spend a lot of time in the gardens together, and Ben refamiliarizes himself with the feeling of growing things under his feet. He curls his fingers into the dirt as the sunlight warms his face and watches Master Qui-Gon’s hands as he points out the silk-spun tunnels of a colony of webspinners in the grooves of the underside of a log.
All of his favorite spots in the garden seem to have– changed.
It takes Ben nearly a week to realize why.
The new spots– always, always, there is something at his back. No windows or balconies near them, where someone could get the drop on him from above. Clear lines of sight in all directions for at least thirty feet, at least two potential escape routes, if he needed to run–
And this– just this morning– he thinks that Dex must have said something, because they had gone down to Master Dubon to request a new apartment, something on the lower levels, while Ben, wide-eyed, hardly daring to breath, had watched from the shadow of Qui-Gon’s cloak, the weight of the other Jedi’s hand on his shoulder a comforting pressure–
(They are full of unspoken grace, now, the two of them.)
He calls him Padawan, now, too– all the time. Like a reminder. He can’t– his hair is still too short to braid, and he recoils at the thought of anyone touching it– they’d all kept theirs short, all of them, a dull blade held by trusted hands, because the Elders would reach and grab and slam–
Yes. A reminder.
It’s– nice.
He finds it easier to answer to than Obi-Wan, these days.
He’s home.
(The lightning itches at the inside of his skin.)
He is.
(Like something burning.)
He is.
(And if he scratches at his skin until he bleeds then that’s nobody’s business but his own, he can handle it, he can handle it–)
But. Anyway.
Master Qui-Gon has been gone for six minutes and twenty-three seconds.
The refectory is probably busy.
Seven minutes.
His fingers tap-tap-tap on the stone wall behind him.
Eight minutes.
At least the garden is empty. Quiet.
Sometimes, if there are more people than they’d expected, Master Qui-Gon changes course even before they reach the entrance, saying something about a report he’d forgotten to submit to the Archives.
(He never does end up finishing it.)
Nine minutes.
The back of his neck prickles uncomfortably.
Hypervigilance. That’s what Master Bombadil had called it.
He casts his gaze out across the garden once more, sending out a pulse in the Force, and reminds himself to breathe when he finds nothing in the immediate vicinity.
A questioning tug in the back of his mind–
All good, Ben offers up carefully, and a gentle wash of warmth eases some of the tension from his shoulders.
It is. He is.
Ten minutes.
The prickling doesn’t fade.
Master Bombadil had said it was a well-honed survival mechanism. Needed on Melida-Daan– Melidaan, now, that’s right– but less so in the Temple.
Everyone has tools to feel safe, the mindhealer had told him gently, when humiliation had clogged his throat. This, for now, is one of his. It won’t always be. But there is no shame in using the tools available.
So Ben lets himself be– hypervigilant. He keeps his eyes open and builds up shields in the Force and keeps someone something at his back, and tries to remember he is safe.
He is. He is. He is.
And then, very suddenly, he’s not.
- A flash of red.
- A face melting like candlewax.
- A voice that reeks of death, hissing–
- I will make you witness, before I kill you.
– and Ben doesn’t know who’s screaming louder, if it’s him or the lightning or both at once, because there’s something in his head, there’s something in his head–
Then–
(Hold!)
A voice he knows in an impossible instant, shouting–
(Ben!)
A hand, reaching–
(You must hold on!)
And instinctively, even as the darkness folds in around him, even as all the lights flicker out, he reaches–
–and Qui-Gon feels him shatter like prismatic shards of starlight.
No–
He reaches– the bond isn’t broken, not broken, he can still feel– but Obi-Wan is– in the Force, he’s– in pieces–
Obi-Wan! he screams, and finds nothing.
The Force roils and screams like a wounded animal– something has been torn, twisted and bent until it broke–
Obi-Wan!
He skids around the last corner and sees jagged lightning blooming across the walls, humming under his feet–
Padawan!
Then, as if in answer–
It’s like a supernova.
For a moment, the dreadful darkness falters before redoubling in a wash of astonished, concentrated fury–
The wall in front of him explodes.
Something heavy slams into the opposite side of the hallway.
Qui-Gon blinks– blinks again, trying to– the smoke, the smoke–
Padawan–!
The Force leaps to him when he asks, drawing the acrid stench from his lungs, clearing his breathing–
Then he inhales again, and tastes ozone.
The stranger that steps out of the sky moves in a blur.
When Qui-Gon tries, later, to recall the fight, he will remember only fragments of those first few moments. The two duelists move impossibly fast, darting in and out of the lightning with unparalleled speed, every concussive collision carving another chunk out of a wall, and he catches– glimpses–
A flare of red, the screaming of a kyber bled and broken a thousand times over–
The humming of a blue blade, a melody so oddly, achingly familiar–
Yellow eyes streaked with writhing lightning–
Red hair pulled back into a messy braid–
A shriek that reverberates with incomprehensible wrath in the face of a smile that’s tasted blood–
(Still, the silence, the shattered starlight–)
Qui-Gon surges forward, to the top of the rubble, and oh, oh–
He had left him in the Chrysalis. A sheltered, secluded corner, with its walls of muted color and dappled sunlight, full to the brim with the humming of quiet life. Not quite ready, but waiting. Full of promise. Qui-Gon had left him with a newly-freed butterfly crawling across his hand, slowly flexing its orange-smeared wings, feeling a bit of tension ease from Obi-Wan’s tangled Force signature and a bit of hope unfurl in his own.
Now, the garden is burning, and his Padawan is nowhere to be found.
He leaps downwards, into the ash that is all that remains of hundreds of small promises, lightning crackling up the walls around him, blazing under his feet–
“Padawan!” he screams, turning, searching–
Where, where, where–?
“Obi-Wan!”
–and for a moment, Obi-Wan falters, barely catching the next blow–
In front of him, Sidious snarls even as the skin sloughs off his face, even as the lightning tears him apart from the inside out–
“Like Master, like Padawan,” he hisses. “I should have gutted him first.”
Then he’s gone, and Obi-Wan is a half-step behind him with a mind full of red ray shields and the remembered terror of helplessness–
But he has the lightning now.
Not again.
Never again.
The Force shrieks a warning, and Qui-Gon turns just in time to block the descending slash, the collision reverberating down his arm.
He shifts, recalibrates, raises his saber–
And then beside him, materializing in an instant, the stranger– Jedi, a Jedi, he could not be anything else– raises a hand and the Sith– the Sith– goes flying into the opposite wall.
“Not him, Sidious,” he says, almost conversationally, and when Qui-Gon turns he sees a sliver of blue in a gaze so full of lightning as to be blinding. “Not any of them.”
The Sith– Sidious– howls, surges forward, and the stranger ignites his blade–
Later, fragments of the fight will bob to the surface of Qui-Gon’s memory like debris from a shipwreck.
But now–
There is the Force.
There is the song of his saber.
There is the man at his side who fights with lightning at his fingertips and flaring in his eyes, the most familiar stranger Qui-Gon has ever met.
And there is still, in the back of his mind, an aching, gaping silence.
He catches the next blow, shoves him back, and shouts–
“What did you do to my Padawan?”
His partner falters for a split second, the smallest gap opening in what is perhaps the most solid Soresu defense he’s ever seen, and a blur of crimson flashes downwards–
Haste makes mistakes, Qui-Gon thinks, and swings.
The green blade connects, carving upwards–
Sidious screams.
A shockwave in the Force gives him the instant he needs to disengage, leaping backwards onto the pile of rubble that was once a garden wall, the stump of his right shoulder still smoking slightly, and the two of them surge forward at once–
Then the Sith reaches to his left.
Into the lightning.
And when he pulls his hand back, the world goes cold and still and brutal, because–
He’s holding Obi-Wan.
Snatched from the air, only half-conscious– his head lolls against his chest, just barely missing the plasma blade held an inch above his heart. His half-lidded gaze is sightless, unfocused–
And full of that same, blinding lightning.
When Qui-Gon reaches for him in the Force, he finds again only that dull and fractured starlight.
He freezes immediately. The man next to him, who had been half a step ahead, does the same, spreading his hands, palms open.
(His saber hilt is balanced neatly against the back of his hand, out of sight.)
The Sith looks half-dead. Something scorches the front of his robe– is that blasterfire?– and even as they watch, the lines of his face shift and melt as if under a blowtorch. His voice, when he speaks, is that of a rattlesnake.
“I should have killed you properly when I had the chance,” he hisses.
(Out of the corner of his eye, Qui-Gon sees the hilt disappear, swallowed by a ripple of lightning.)
“But now that I’m–”
A rattling, rasping cough– a splatter of blood–
“Now that I’m here, I wonder if– if I might not pick up where my apprentice left off?”
And then–
His Padawan’s head raises the tiniest bit.
“So much to learn–”
A small hand flexes once, twice, curling into a fist.
“Such power–”
Eyes full of lightning fix on the man to Qui-Gon’s left.
“I wonder if he’ll scream as prettily as you?”
Something materializes in Obi-Wan’s hand.
“Oh, haven’t you heard?” the Jedi says, his smile turning sharp. “I’m so good at faking it.”
Sidious’s eyes narrow–
And then go wide as a blue blade punches through his chest.
Obi-Wan twists, extinguishing the blade as the sword held to his neck dips downwards– a terrible little noise tears out of his throat but he’s still moving, wrenching himself out of the faltering grip, scrabbling backwards on the ground– and the stranger surges forward, the hilt leaping from Obi-Wan’s hand to his, and swings–
The blade materializes just in time to cut cleanly through the Sith’s neck.
The head hits the ground with a thud.
The body follows half a second later.
For a moment, frozen:
The stranger. Lightning webbing across his face. Across his palms. His saber extended in the last moment of a follow-through sweep.
The body on the floor. Yellow eyes faded with fury. Smoldering edges. Death delayed but not dodged.
His Padawan. His boy. Sprawled backwards on the smoking grass. Shaking. The look in his eyes is that of one who rides a comet.
Qui-Gon takes one faltering step forward. Then another.
“Obi-Wan,” he says.
His Padawan doesn’t spare him a glance.
The stranger extinguishes his blade. Tucks the hilt into his belt.
In the sudden, stifling silence, Qui-Gon hears him exhale. A long, slow breath.
It’s a call. A summons. The lightning crawling across the walls begins to retreat.
Into him.
It’s– his.
But the Sith had–
And Obi-Wan–
His boy staggers to his feet, stumbles forward, reaching–
The stranger crouches just in time to catch him. Small hands curl into the sleeves of his robe.
“Hello there,” he says, very quietly. “Let me see. Alright? Let me see.”
A single beat of silence–
“Oh,” his Padawan says, in a tiny puff of breath. Almost inaudible. “Not even the younglings?”
(The younglings, he calls them sometimes, as if to draw a distinction, as if he is not still one himself–)
A hand presses to his forehead.
“Sleep,” the Jedi says gently, and Obi-Wan folds into him like flimsi.
Caught and carried easily– he rises to his feet, Obi-Wan in his arms–
Qui-Gon notices, then, that not all the lightning has retreated.
Something stretches up the length of the rear wall in the garden. A crack in the air. A fracture. A fault line. A wound in the very fabric of the Force itself, humming at the edges– he feels pressure building behind his eyes–
(They had to come from somewhere, those two.)
And the stranger is edging backwards, towards this rift–
With his Padawan–
“Wait,” Qui-Gon croaks, and then again, stronger, as if shaking off a shroud– “Wait–”
But the stranger shakes his head. A shudder tears through him, something flickering behind his eyes–
“He needs– needs help he– can’t get here–”
“We have Healers,” Qui-Gon interrupts, because he can feel– finally– the others approaching, and if he can just keep this stranger here for long enough, then–
“Please, we can go now, let’s–”
“He’ll be dead in– in thirty minutes,” the other Jedi interrupts bluntly. “And– maybe me? I can’t–”
He stops. Shakes himself.
“I’ll be back with– updates. And– to get the body. They’ll need– proof.”
That same, odd stuttering– a momentary slackening–
Then his eyes clear for a brief moment, and Qui-Gon nearly takes a step back when they focus on him.
“I need to go home,” the stranger says. More clear and sincere than anything he’d said before now. “Do you understand? I need to go home.”
Qui-Gon doesn’t mean to ignite his lightsaber.
He really doesn’t.
(But this stranger has his Padawan.)
Then–
Footsteps. A flurry, rushing towards them, and a tidal wave of relief washes through him–
Glancing backwards is a fool’s mistake.
A cracking sound–
A snap of light, bright and blinding–
They’re gone.
He leaps forward, reaching– the rift is open, it’s open, he can follow–
The maelstrom that greets him makes him stagger backwards.
Qui-Gon finds his strength in the Living Force. In wellsprings and harvests, the changing of the seasons, the warmth of the sun. His shields take the form of an old and wild forest, the paths through which only he knows– all grasping vines and shifting roots and ancient, looming life. He digs his feet into warm soil, into cool water, into hot sand– rooted in green and growing things, in life and its promise all around him.
But this–
There are no roots to grab onto.
If he steps in, he will not come out again.
He stares, hand still outstretched, at the gaping, crackling fissure.
They’re gone.
A hand lands on his shoulder.
“Qui-Gon!”
(He has made a lot of promises over the past month.)
“We couldn’t get through, the whole Temple was– warping, almost, it didn’t want to let us–”
(You’re safe, he tells him. Nothing will hurt you here.)
“Is that a– by the Force–”
(Sitting by the door. Tucking him against his side. Giving space and leaving space. Finding a balance.)
He can’t look away from the lightning.
(He’d promised.)
Someone yanks him around, and he blinks, clearing his gaze of the blinding light that sears behind his eyes–
Mace.
His friend’s nose is bleeding.
“Qui-Gon?”
(The truth of it is this, he knows: Obi-Wan keeps forgetting his lightsaber. His hand seeks a blaster every time he moves to draw. The weight of it sits strangely in his hand. Qui-Gon reminds him gently, every day, before they leave their quarters. He dislikes the flush of shame that crawls up the thin face; if shame should fall on anyone it should be him.)
“Where’s Obi-Wan?”
He had forgotten to remind him this morning.
And a Sith had come.
And now Obi-Wan is–
“Gone,” he says.
A ragged wound in the sky, leading–
Where? Where did they go?
“I don’t know where. He’s gone.”
(There’s blood on the ground, where his Padawan had fallen.)