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There is a striped sock in the corner of Qui-Gon’s side table. It is folded in half and tucked under bundled pairs nearly twice its size. The stripes vary in colors, two green, two yellow, two blue and so on. A rainbow of thin bands.
The sock has friends hidden away in a small black cork box in the closet: a few model space crafts that once hovered on their own—helped to fly by lengths of string tied to the tabs inserted into their spines. A few marbles, none the same color or size. And finally, a folder of drawings and written pages chaotically layered on top of each other.
The models and drawings would invoke the strongest pangs of sympathy for most people, but for Qui-Gon, that place of honor is given to the sock.
If he unfolds it, it lays perfectly across the center of his palm. The end of the toe touches the top of his middle finger. The heel, the edge of his palm.
It has been a long time since he held it like that.
It has been a long time since he thought of that padawan.
Anakin doesn’t know about the sock or its former wearer, and as far as Qui-Gon is concerned, he never will. It is a failure that he alone will cradle close to his heart.
Melidaan is a planet that was once built of crumbling bunkers and dilapidated watchtowers. Now, the pockmarks in its streets have been filled in. Gutters have been paved; sewer grates cleared of debris.
Qui-Gon was last here twelve years ago. Anakin has never been here.
While Anakin hops from one foot to the next to avoid the lines molded into the pavement, Qui-Gon finds himself scanning the foot traffic around them. People turn and stare at the jedi as they pass by. Qui-Gon catches every eye, at first without meaning to, but soon with full intention.
There are so many faces on these streets, walking around as if there was never a war. Qui-Gon’s stomach sinks further with every memorial and statue passed. He cannot stop himself from staring into their brass faces, into the lists of names carved into marble.
It is only when he and Anakin stand at the first step of a granite staircase leading up to a minimalist city hall that the thought strikes him:
He may not be looking for the right name.
Next to him, Anakin squints up at the city hall. He loses interest in seconds and hops up onto the first black, speckled step.
“Shall we?” he asks.
“After you,” Qui-Gon says with an indulgent smile he does not feel.
Melidaan has politicians now, of all ages and factions. There are multiple political parties. There are banners with symbols on them lining the rafters from one room to another. They hang like they have been killed and mounted.
Some of the politicians remember Qui-Gon and welcome him back with open hands and bracketed arms, some of them look him up and down in disgust. It is the way of things.
Everything depends on which side of the war you were on ten years ago.
The intention of Qui-Gon and Anakin’s presence is diplomatic rather than based in negotiations. The mayor proudly tells them that those years are behind them. Now, Melidaan is all about gratitude, acknowledgement, and rebirth. He invites Qui-Gon and Anakin to a dinner that night which Qui-Gon declines, to Anakin’s disappointment.
There is business left unfinished here.
In a private office, the mayor tells Qui-Gon that he doesn’t know the name he has offered him. Perhaps a former Young soldier might know. The mayor can put him in touch with Nield, the teenager-turned-governor Qui-Gon worked with a decade ago. He is retired now, apparently leading a peaceful civilian life.
Qui-Gon bows in gratitude.
Nield lives in a suburb of the Central City, about an hour from the eerily clean city hall building and its black speckled steps. He answers the door with a full beard. He was 16 years old when he and Qui-Gon spoke for the first time. Now, he is nearly thirty; there are lines in the corners of his eyes.
“You mean Ben?” He asks. “Gods, it’s been years.”
“Ben,” Qui-Gon says. “Is that what he goes by now?”
“No clue,” Nield says. “Haven’t seen him in more than a decade.”
“I see.”
Nield scratches at the hair peeking out of the back of his collar.
“He got us through the war,” he says like this is a bitter pill he must swallow. “We would have been fucked without him.”
“He did tend to have that sort of energy about him,” Qui-Gon agrees. “Thank you.”
Anakin’s gaze lifts as Qui-Gon turns them around to leave Nield to his well-earned peace.
“He never was much of a Jedi, you know,” Nield calls at their backs from his porch. “He was better off with us. We protected him for as long as he let us.”
These words sound as if they are meant to alleviate the guilt, but all they do is drive the blade in deeper.
Qui-Gon holds the sock when Anakin goes to sleep. He brought it with him from its drawer. He couldn’t have left it, his conscience wouldn’t allow it. But now here in the dark, he wonders if he shouldn’t have burned it or dropped it into the garbage compactor at the Temple before Anakin was even born.
What is the use of a single sock—besides providing a miniature rainbow and a ton of guilt for every year it is old?
It should weigh thousands of kilograms by that measure, and yet it lays across Qui-Gon’s palm like the slow, sleepy blink of a child.
He saw the holonews; the endless coverage of smoking bombed out flatlands that were once a city center, a playground, a hostel, a restaurant, a block of family homes. Reels of the survivors had played on screen after screen on Coruscant. Leaving a bar and peering through the windows of every establishment you passed on the way home, you could have watched the procession of grim, gaunt faces as the camera traveled down line upon line of children giving morbid interviews.
Qui-Gon had avoided looking too long at those clips on the off-chance he saw a face that rang a bell in his memory.
The padawan lost. The rainbow sock.
Who knew where Ben ended up. Perhaps Qui-Gon was making a mistake searching among the living and the memorials. Perhaps he should start scouring graveyards and the edges of country fields for an unmarked grave.
They return to City Hall the next day. Politicians admire Anakin and grin at his precocious quips. He is petted and encouraged to eat, eat, eat from the long refreshments table. Many elders express surprise when he refrains. Qui-Gon keeps him at his side for the first two hours, but releases him to have some snacks for the last half hour before the boy falls asleep on his feet.
The rest of the evening is spent talking about nothing that matters, but trying to read into the rise and fall of voices, the furrowed brows of surrounding bodies, and the rolling eyes of those watching on from the balconies overhead.
The mayor catches Qui-Gon around the elbow on the way out and asks how his meeting with Nield went.
“Very good, thank you,” Qui-Gon lies.
“Glad to hear it,” the mayor says. “How long are you in the city?”
“Another few days.”
“We should get a drink.”
“Always happy to oblige,” Qui-Gon says with a dip of his head.
The mayor leaves him be. Qui-Gon escorts Anakin back to their rooms. Once the boy is settled and sleeping, he takes himself back out to the suburbs.
Nield opens the door of his home for the second time and in doing so, casts a rectangle of yellow light out across his porch and its trio of stairs.
“I knew you’d be back,” he says.
“Where is he?” Qui-Gon asks quietly.
“Left your replacement at home this time?” Nield notices.
“Obi-Wan. Where is he?”
“I told you. Ben’s been gone for years.”
“What do you mean ‘gone?’”
“Gone,” Nield says with growing intensity. “As in, missing.”
Dank Farrick .
“For ten years?”
“At least,” Nield drawls. “Fucked off the moment the first new buildings were raised. I couldn’t even tell you if he stayed on the planet. Not that he could’ve gotten far. No ID. No parents or relations or nothin’ like that. Might have gone out and ended it all in a foxhole two towns over. Who knows?”
“You do,” Qui-Gon says simply.
Nield’s lower lip lifts to meet its upper. He steps back and curls his fingers around the smooth handle of the door.
“I think we’re done here,” he says.
“You’ll find I’m persistent,” Qui-Gon warns him.
“Yeah, and late.”
The door closes. Qui-Gon stands in the light of the porch lantern.
The sock is stowed in its own pocket of Qui-Gon’s traveling bag on the way back to Coruscant, where it remains for the next three years, traveling with him and Anakin. It serves as a reminder to keep checking faces and the names chiseled into graves.
Obi-Wan Kenobi may not have lived on Melidaan since it was given that name. He could be anywhere. He could be anyone.
He could be dead. Hunted and killed by Xanatos, working on old information. Sick and gaunt after the war with nowhere to go when it was officially finished. He could very well have placed a blaster to his temple in a ditch on the side of a road as Nield suggested.
Padawans always keep one guessing, even when all that is left of them is a sock and a box of dented models.
Qui-Gon has spent a decade in regret, however. He can afford to spend just as long checking faces and gravestones.
If Obi—if Ben is dead, then it is on Qui-Gon’s shoulders that the fault lies.
Tahl has not forgiven him for leaving a new padawan in a civil war, and he has not forgiven himself, especially with the benefit of hindsight and the bright gleaming glow of a new apprentice.
Something about Anakin makes Qui-Gon’s mind keep returning to the padawan lost. Maybe it is the lightness of his hair. The blueness of his eyes. Maybe it is because he has just given Anakin the bead of courage he intended to give Obi-Wan. Maybe it is Anakin asking Qui-Gon what he remembers of his mother and searching for a river stone only to remember that he’d placed it in the hands of another boy already.
Somehow, in his heart, he knows that if he finds the stone, he will find Obi-Wan Kenobi. Whether that is kindness or cruelty is yet to be seen.
For three years, the sock travels, and finally, when those years have passed, Anakin overtakes the Obi-Wan in Qui-Gon’s mind. For a while, they were one and the same in unconscious moments, both with blond heads brushing the edges of Qui-Gon’s sternum and twinkling, mischevious eyes, but Anakin’s fourteenth birthday brings with it the realization that Obi-Wan may not have seen his.
As Anakin grows taller, the lost padawan begins to play hide and seek in Qui-Gon’s memory. Unlike Xanatos, who knows nothing of Obi-Wan when he appears to confront Qui-Gon for the very last time, there is no closure. No end. The child in Qui-Gon’s minds turns to him with soft cheeks and fingers curled around a tube of modeling glue. Sometimes, when he turns, his eye socket is full of writhing maggots. The skin on the side of his face is peeled away from its severed muscle and crushed bone. Sometimes, he drops to his knees, then falls onto his side, his last blue eye turning to glass second by second.
Tahl prays that the end came quickly if it came.
Qui-Gon tries to imagine a young man instead. Someone with a dip in their chin and maybe a wash of stubble, a perpetually split lip and a sunburned nose. Great wavy swoops of dark blonde hair.
He tries to imagine it, but the pieces never seem to fit together.
Anakin turns nineteen.
A new war begins.
Qui-Gon finds himself teaching his new knight how to be a general. He himself does not know how to fit his skills into his role, and yet thousands of eyes turn upon him. Depend upon him.
The war feels like a sinking ship from the start, and for no reason at all, on its first anniversary, he dreams of the padawan sitting on his bunk with him, scooted too far back for his feet to touch the floor. His braid hangs beadless, not quite touching his shoulder.
He looks up at Qui-Gon in the darkness and says without preamble, “So now you know what it’s like, huh?”
Anakin has married Senator Amidala. He is angry with Qui-Gon for giving him a choice: the girl or the Order. The girl or everything he’s worked for for eleven years.
The girl or his promise to his mother.
It is not the first argument they’ve had, nor will it be the last. But it is the first one that Anakin brings up Obi-Wan.
“You talk about attachment as if you aren’t a fucking hypocrite,” he snarls, “I know about Kenobi. I know you’ve been carrying his fucking sock with us everywhere we went for ten years . How can you stand there and lecture me about attachment when you can’t even let a dead kid stay dead?”
Qui-Gon’s knee jerk reaction is to say “He’s not dead.”
The room goes cold and silent.
“You can’t even deny it,” Anakin scoffs.
In Qui-Gon’s mind’s eye, Obi-Wan turns to him with a crushed mandible hanging from the right side of his otherwise pristine face. His eyes are hollow as he lifts a blaster to the side of his mutilated jaw.
“You can’t even deny it,” Anakin repeats, shaking his head.
“Help me,” the child Obi-Wan mouths.
Qui-Gon clutches the sides of his head and stands up.
“You are dismissed,” he orders.
Anakin curls a lip at him.
“NOW.”
The volume sends Anakin to his feet. It blows his eyes wide and brings his shoulders up to his ears. The door closes sharply behind him, and Qui-Gon collapses onto his bunk, eyes streaming. His lungs refuse to take in air.
“Obi-Wan,” he murmurs into his hands. “Obi-Wan, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
He is attached. Just as he was attached to Xanatos. The difference is that Xana killed himself and forced the attachment to shatter. Obi-Wan’s sin was being a boy in a war that pitted people like him against people like Qui-Gon. And Qui-Gon proved to him in that fateful moment that he was right to have picked the side that he did.
Dead. Dead .
Obi-Wan Kenobi is dead. Qui-Gon has to let him go. Anakin is right. He is a fool; an old man carrying around the sock of a murdered thirteen-year-old. It’s macabre. It’s sick .
He can’t go on like this. His commander, his captains, his sergeants and privates are depending on him to bring them through this war. They, too, are fourteen, thirteen, twelve years old. They too have committed the fatal crime of walking into a war no one prepared them to cope with.
“I’m so sorry,” he tells the child in his mind, pressing the muzzle of the blaster against the rotting skin of his temple. “I have to let you go.”
The boy merely stares at him, and after a moment, smiles.
Then fires.
Anakin is falling. Falling, falling. Just past Qui-Gon’s reach.
They haven’t made up.
His eyes are wide and blue and pleading.
Help me , they say. Help me .
But his fingers have just brushed the edge of Qui-Gon’s own. Missed by a second.
Qui-Gon knows in that fraction of a second that if he loses one more padawan, he will lose himself. So he leaps without thinking off the platform.
He catches Anakin, and then something, somehow catches him. The drop softens, slows, stops. Anakin, buried in his arms, loosens his grip enough to raise his cheek from Qui-Gon’s neck.
This place is thrumming. The massive engine beneath them shakes the very walls. Beneath that is a power system evaporating crystals at a temperature higher than the human mind can conceive. Down here, the blaster fire and shout of the troopers above are drowned out by the engine’s hum and distance.
And yet there, Qui-Gon and Anakin are suspended.
This is the Force.
Qui-Gon cranes his neck to find the Jedi nearest but it is next to impossible. Trooper helmets have begun to line the edges of the upper levels, many shouting down at him to hold his position. Cody’s sharp orders begin to filter down through the din.
“Master?” Anakin whispers.
Qui-Gon still cannot find the jedi. His eyes dart from level to level above until he realizes that two levels up, there is a Separatist mechanic with their entire body strained and shaking with the effort of pulling against the force.
White armor begins to surround the mechanic and Qui-Gon’s heart drops. He shouts orders up at his men not to shoot. To leave the man alone.
Cody’s antennae make a speedy appearance and he orders everyone to back off and more than that, to help the poor man. By himself, with no apparent grace or finesse, he is clinging to two fully grown men with nothing but the Force.
The mechanic doesn’t have enough strength or skill to hold them for much longer. Qui-Gon can feel the Force shuddering around him and Anakin already.
He shouts up for a line of some kind—a rope, a wire, he’s not picky. Within moments, one is found and thrown down. He wraps it around his fist just as the Force around him and Anakin gives out sharply.
The line goes taut.
Qui-Gon’s arm screams in its socket. But they’re alive, both of them. He grits his teeth against the pain as the troopers hoist him upward and closer to a level to climb onto. In the reeling-in, he and Anakin pass by the mechanic, now on his knees with his hands on his head and a circle of troopers around him aiming blasters at every angle of his skull.
The mechanic’s uniform is a dull blue-gray, which brings out the red in the heavy sheets of his long auburn hair.
As soon as Qui-Gon’s feet hit the floor panels of that same level, only a few yards away, the mechanic lifts his head ever-so-slightly and the world stands totally still.
The mechanic’s force signature chatters like rain on misty water.
He drops his eyes and curls more tightly in on himself, only for his wrists to be seized and the rest of him hauled up to standing. Cody informs him that he is being taken as a prisoner of war. He starts reading out the man’s rights as two officers step in with a set of handcuffs.
That is the last Qui-Gon sees of the mechanic before he is turned around and marched away.
Anakin bursts into tears and apologizes, and Qui-Gon hears him, he does.
But the rain.
He knows that rain.
The Separatist mechanic is using a false name. Mace’s lips form a tight, flat line as he delivers this news to the Council.
Nobody speaks.
Finally, Plo clears his throat.
“What is he calling himself?” He asks.
“Ben Sureti,” Mace says.
Qui-Gon closes his eyes and forces himself to breathe.
“Control over the force, he has retained,” Master Yoda says.
If he were not sitting among other council members, Qui-Gon would scream himself hoarse.
“How has he come to work for the empire?” Plo asks.
“He won’t say,” Mace says. “He’s given us a name and SID. Beyond that, he’s said nothing.”
“Padawan Kenobi, he is,” Yoda says, ripping off the bandage for everyone in the room.
“His force signature is the same,” Mace says, “But he refuses to give any verbal confirmation.”
“He saved us,” Qui-Gon growls. “He rescued me.”
“We asked him about that, too,” Mace says flatly. “Nothing.”
Obi-Wan, why ?
“Perhaps he will speak to Master Jinn,” Plo suggests.
All eyes turn to Qui-Gon.
Obi-Wan is slumped on the table in the interrogation room when Qui-Gon slams open the door and shuts it behind him. Obi-Wan doesn’t react at all to the sound. His eyes remain shuttered closed. His breathing is even.
He’s grown a full beard, complete with mustache. His hair has turned darker with age; dark blond and red and brown from sweat and grease. His cheeks and nose are littered with freckles, but standing out from that crowd of flecks are two larger, darker moles. One one the forehead, one underneath his eye.
“You could have gotten yourself killed,” Qui-Gon snaps.
“Alright, alright, you’re gonna start with that, are you?” A deep voice that cannot be Obi-Wan’s and yet somehow is grumbles.
“Where did you learn that?” Qui-Gon demands.
“From a friend. What does it matter?” Obi-Wan says, unfurling from his arch.
“A friend,” Qui-Gon repeats. “What friend?”
“A fairy,” Obi-Wan says.
He stares right into Qui-Gon’s eyes while he does. His lightsaber was once the same color as those eyes. He also looks away first.
“A fairy,” Qui-Gon repeats. “A fairy taught you how to catch two grown men—“
“You’re welcome, by the way.”
Qui-Gon halts.
Obi-Wan’s accent has changed. It sounds more…rural. More Outer Rim, or something close to it with odd twists and turns that make the words seem like they’re bouncing.
It’s proof that he got away. Wherever he went, wherever he lived, he left Melidaan. He lived. He grew. He saw fourteen and fifteen and sixteen. He is chattering rain with a scar on his temple and enough control over the force to snatch humans out of mid-air.
Qui-Gon cannot stop the tears that begin to blur his vision. His silence must stretch on because Obi-Wan glances up once, then back down. He shuffles his knees.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Qui-Gon says. “Why would you do that? I am your enemy.”
“You do seem damn near determined to be on the worse side of me every time we meet,” Obi-Wan agrees with a shrug.
“Obi-Wan—“
“It’s Ben.”
“No, it’s not. Your name is—“
“My name is Ben,” Obi-Wan says firmly. “I know this because my mother calls me it.”
“Your—?”
“My mother. On Stewjon. Place with the sheep? You know sheep, I hope? Horny bastards? Well, some of them.”
“You went to Stewjon?” Qui-Gon asks. “After the war?”
“Well, where else did I have to go?” Obi-Wan blurts out. “Sue me. I went back where I came from. That’s where the lot of youse were intending on shipping me anyways, wasn’t it?”
No. No, that wasn’t even a consideration. How could he think that?
“We would never have—“
“Oh, Im so sorry. You’d have sent me off back to Bandomeer. My greatest apologies, Master. ”
The word drops an anchor in Qui-Gon’s stomach. His knees threaten to melt into water. He draws back the chair across from Obi-Wan and sits down in it. Obi-Wan recoils as far back as he can.
How he can look so much like the little boy he once was and someone totally different at the same time is a marvel. A complete, wonderful marvel. Qui-Gon can’t stop looking at him.
He reaches into his robe and produces the contents of Obi-Wan’s pockets, now contained in a clear plastic bag. He removes a chrono, a box of matches, a stick transceiver, a few coins, a receipt, and last but not least, the river stone he gave Obi-Wan on his thirteenth birthday.
This whole time, he’d been right. Wherever he found the stone, he would find the lost padawan.
The stone clacks against the table where he places it in front of Obi-Wan.
“You were taught,” he says.
Obi-Wan refuses to look at the stone.
“Who taught you?” Qui-Gon asks.
“If you want it back, you can just take it,” Obi-Wan says. “I don’t need it anymore.”
“Who taught you, Ben?”
The use of his preferred name seems to have an effect on Obi-Wan. His shoulders incrementally slip out of their position by his jaw.
“I told you. A friend,” he says.
“What sort of friend?” Qui-Gon asks.
“Why’s it matter to you?”
“The Temple fears that the Separatists are using force-users now as well.”
Obi-Wan shuts his mouth, finally understanding the position he has put himself in. Qui-Gon mentally traces the scar on his temple as the young man’s eyes dart back and forth through his thoughts.
“The Temple will not approve of my friend,” he admits. “Not that I care for your approval.”
“A magician?” Qui-Gon asks him.
“No.”
“A hermit?”
“No.“
“Books?”
“His name is Maul.”
Maul. No, no, no. Obi-Wan can’t have been that close this whole time.
“I met him—I was working. I found him at work and he was dying. He needed help, so I—I got him help. And then he needed a mechanic. I’m a mechanic.”
Qui-Gon buries his face in his hands. Obi-Wan swallows almost audibly.
“He nearly killed me,” Qui-Gon says softly.
“I didn’t know.”
“Until he told you, I presume.”
“He’s not a monster. He’s—“
“A sith, Obi-Wan.”
“My name is Ben.”
“You accepted the training of a sith?”
“You would have died,” Obi-Wan says. “If he hadn’t taught me, you would have died just now.”
“He’s been hunting me for years,” Qui-Gon says. “And you’ve been helping him. You knew where I was?”
“Not at first,” Obi-Wan says defensively. “Not until two years ago.”
Gods.
The weight of the room’s tension lays itself on Qui-Gon’s head and shoulders. He could sink into the floor right now.
“Maul isn’t a sith,” Obi-Wan says quietly. “Not anymore.”
Qui-Gon can only sigh. For all the ways that Obi-Wan has grown into a man, his logic still reeks of the same naïveté that he carried as a child. The dawning realization makes Qui-Gon’s intestines clench. He raises his head to find Obi-Wan staring at the red marks on his wrists in ever-quieter defeat.
“So you joined the Separatist army because you needed the work?” Qui-Gon asks. “You expect me to believe that?”
His former apprentice says nothing.
“Obi-Wan.”
“My name is Ben.”
“Ben,” he says. “Maul will betray you.”
“So did you.”
Ouch.
“I have a right to counsel.”
“You are a prisoner of war,” Qui-Gon says, noting the abrupt subject change. “You do not have a right to counsel at this point in time. You have a right to humane treatment and are protected from cruel and unusual punishment, which includes torture and hanging.”
“Torture is subjective,” Obi-Wan says.
“Torture by Executive Decree 79910 is not subjective,” Qui-Gon says.
Obi-Wan inclines his head with painfully closed eyes.
“Maul put you on that ship.”
“I want a lawyer.”
“You’re not getting a lawyer. Maul put you on that ship, yes or no?”
“You should have treated him better. He knows things that could end this war.”
“Ben.”
“He didn’t put me on the ship. I needed the money.”
It’s hopeless. A lack of training and education has stripped this young man of half if not more of his potential as a diplomat and negotiator. He comes across instead as petulant and difficult.
“You’re disappointed,” Obi-Wan says to the table, then laughs. The sound is terrible. “I know what you’re thinking. ‘All that trouble I went through and he hasn’t learned a damn thing. Ruined his own life to play soldiers, and he still thinks he’s clever.’”
“Your life is yours to do with as you please. I have no say in that.”
“Then let me go,” Obi-Wan says.
“We, unfortunately, cannot do that either,” Qui-Gon says. “But your actions towards myself and my padawan will affect your treatment—positively, if you were unsure.”
“He’s your padawan?”
“Yes.”
“Like Xanatos?”
“Yes. Like Xanatos.”
Obi-Wan nods.
“You are also my padawan,” Qui-Gon reminds him.
“No,” Obi-Wan says. “I don’t think I ever was. But I think…I think you were kind to indulge me for as long as you did.”
“I was not kind,” Qui-Gon admits.
There is a beat.
Then Obi-Wan suddenly tries to turn completely away from him. When his shackled hands make that impossible, he throws his strength behind his wrists so that the edges of the plastoid dig into them. Qui-Gon stands to stop him, but by then, he’s yanked hard on the device again, this time to the point that, when the shackles pull back, blood smears across Obi-Wan’s pale wrists.
“That’s enough,” Qui-Gon tells him.
“Let me out .”
The shackles strain.
“Obi-Wan, I said, that’s en—“
“MY NAME IS BEN.”
The volume knocks Qui-Gon completely off guard.
“MY NAME IS BEN. MY NAME. IS. BEN . Why can’t you understand? Why can’t you give me that SHRED of decency? What did I ever do to you to make you hate me this much?”
At that point, the door opens, and Mace steps in.
Their discussion is over, but it feels like it never truly began.
Ben refuses to speak after that one meeting. He builds a fortress out of his mind and locks himself in it. He refuses food and water and kicks both at the droids that deliver them. Qui-Gon stands outside his cell and watches him sleep fitfully through the two-way mirror. He rolls his shoulders as Anakin comes up behind him and settles in at his side.
“So that’s him?” He asks in a small voice.
Qui-Gon grunts in affirmation.
“He’s alive. I guess. Kind of…feral though,” Anakin observes.
This is not the first time Qui-Gon has heard that descriptor in relation to Obi-Wan.
“He has suffered so much for so long, it has become a defense mechanism,” he explains.
“You sure about that? I heard he doesn’t even respond to his name.”
“He is upset and frustrated, Anakin,” Qui-Gon says firmly. “But he saved your life and mine.”
“He’s friends with Maul,” Anakin says.
Qui-Gon shakes his head. He doesn’t have any way to defend that. He cannot fathom how those two became confidants. Obi-Wan hasn’t said anything to suggest that he did so as a ‘fuck you’ specifically to Qui-Gon, nonetheless, it certainly feels that way.
“Why are we keeping him?” Anakin asks.
“To draw Maul out,” Qui-Gon says. “He says Maul has information that could end the war.”
“Maul probably told him that to keep him from asking too many questions.”
“You underestimate how little that boy believes in miracles.”
Ben refuses water for the third time the following day. He has curled in on himself and erupts like a child into a tornado of Force-energy anytime anyone that is not a droid approaches him. He has broken down the bunk in the room into its constituent parts and, for that transgression, has had the bunk confiscated. A soft floor mattress has replaced it.
Ben has folded it and stuffed it against the door so that its bulk fills in the food slot and partially blocks the window.
They have tried everything, it seems, to get him to speak. Qui-Gon has tried again with a softer tone only for Ben to cover his ears and scream himself hoarse into his knees. Mace has tried; Plo has tried. Even Shaak Ti, Ben’s original seeker, has not managed to break through the shell he’s built for himself.
He is going to starve himself, and Maul shows no sign of coming for him.
Qui-Gon cannot bear to see this continue. He suggests that a show of mercy might open Ben up a bit. It used to, anyways. A kind word here and there used to bring Obi-Wan’s head up from his pads and models. He would become ten times more chatty in the face of such acknowledgements; it was as if he had been waiting for permission to be himself.
Mace relents and goes in to sit next to Ben on the floor, touching his elbow. He asks if Ben knows the frequency of a family member they can call for him, and finally, they get something.
Ben has an older brother.
The brother answers the comm-call on the second ring; his voice is thick with emotion and an accent that mirrors the one Ben uses now. The man swears his little brother is no threat, and is just a mechanic who works offworld sometimes for extra money. Yes, he’s force-sensitive, yes he is an associate of a Zabrak man called Maul. The brother knows Maul, of course. He may as well be part of the family. He helped rebuild the barn.
Yes, the brother knows that Maul isn’t a saint, but he takes care of Ben and Ben takes care of him, so what else can the family ask for in a son-in-law-to-be?
Qui-Gon discovers then that his breaking point was actually two and a half years ago. He not only wants a drink, he needs one.
Armed with the brother’s compliance, however, Mace steps back into the ring with Ben. He offers him the transceiver with his brother’s voice emanating from it and Ben lurches back to life. He forsakes Basic to speak with his brother in their home dialect until Mace prompts them to switch back to Basic as a condition of the continuation of the call.
“You have to eat, O’Ben,” the brother says softly. “You can’t make Ma cry. She doesn’t have it in her to do it again.”
Ben’s lips press together for a long time before splitting.
“Tell him where I am,” he finally breathes.
His brother hesitates.
“He already knows, bub.”
Ben’s last resolve crumbles as his head falls into his lap. His hand softens its landing, but only so that he can angrily smear away tears.
“Eat,” the brother says. “For Ma.”
“Okay.”
“We love you. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
“Eat.”
“I will.”
18 hours later, a request for docking comes into the war room. Everyone stops what they are doing. Anakin and Rex turn to read Qui-Gon’s face at the same time.
“General,” Cody says. “It’s Maul.”
Over the years, Qui-Gon has taken to calling the scar sunken through his middle his ‘war wound.’ It was a joke then, because they hadn’t been at war for his whole lifetime. Now, the memories of burning flesh and months of staggering rehabilitation come flooding back, drowning every corner of his mind so that the pain is all he can think of when the doors open and Mace walks into the war room with the enemy.
Maul.
Qui-Gon last saw him in-person several months ago when he decided he would take Mandalore for himself. He dispatched the young Duchess Qui-Gon spent a full year guarding when she was just a girl. Her blood didn’t even touch his hands.
Maul.
The bridge of his nose is long, and for once the skin is not bunched in hatred around it, his eyes, or his lips. The redness of his skin is washed out by the teal glow of maps left and right. Upon his arrival, the officers start to shut them off one at a time. Just in case.
They flicker off in time with the thuds of Maul’s heavy metal feet. Each step brings him closer, until his lips are curling up to reveal elongated white canines mere inches from Qui-Gon’s face.
“Where is he?” He asks.
“So it turns out you’ve been living a double life,” Qui-Gon notes. “Got bored of leveling civilizations? Found a new hobby in raising barns?”
“Where is he?” Maul asks again.
“Did you know who he was before you two started up this, what is it, a tryst?”
Maul’s lips lift to reveal more teeth.
Qui-Gon has been chasing and running from him for ten years, and thus far, Maul’s actions have been nothing but curt and decisive. This posturing is something else. He’s on the defensive.
“What are you willing to give for his safety?” Qui-Gon asks.
Maul’s eyes burn yellow in the dark stillness of the room.
“Anything,” he damn near whispers.
Ben jerks when the door of his cell opens; his body snaps into a protective cage. Once he sees who is standing there, it falls away like a spray of water droplets.
He throws himself into Maul’s chest where he is caught and held. His face slots into the space at Maul’s shoulder, against his neck, in a manner which speaks of muscle memory and belonging, and Maul melts with him.
Qui-Gon watches these men he no longer knows through the two-way mirror with the others.
Ben pulls back and searches Maul’s eyes for something he seems to struggle to find. He begins apologizing and presses his forehead tightly against Maul’s own, careful of Maul’s central antler. Maul, for his part, merely shakes his head sluggishly.
“You said it would be safe,” Ben murmurs.
“I was a fool.”
Ben closes his eyes. Forgiveness streams out into the force. Maul’s arms gather around his waist. He withdraws from their head-touching ritual to look Ben up and down.
“You look like shit,” he says.
Ben laughs.
“Says the pot to the kettle,” he says. “What’s this? A shirt? What, are we in church now?”
“One must earn the right to view these tits,” Maul says with a sniff.
“Best cough up the cash then, I deserve back pay.”
Maul smiles. Fondness softens his stark features. He unwinds his arms from Ben’s waist and steps back from him, holding only his fingers.
“How many sheep do you want?” He asks.
“None if you leave and don’t come back,” Ben says.
“That’s not what I asked you, ingrate.”
“There’s no sense in me going home without you. We both know Ma loves you best.”
“Sheep. Give me a number.”
“Two,” Ben says. “And a promise to actually fix the fence.”
Maul cocks his head.
“Two sheep,” he scoffs. “This is why you are so poor and lonely. Four sheep at least; then you’ll have six by the end of the season.”
“Two and a promise for the fence.”
“Ben.”
“Two and a promise. Final offer.”
“My promises have landed you here.”
“Two and a promise, stop trying to get out of it,” Ben demands. “You’re coming back with me. Say you’ll come back with me.”
Maul releases his hands and takes another step away.
“Maul, promise me. I don’t care if you break it. Just—“
“I promise,” Maul says automatically.
Ben’s voice cuts out.
“They will release you from here,” Maul explains. “Do not look back. Go home. This is not your war to fight. What we have is not a battleground. Do you understand, General?”
“I copy,” Ben says in a fast-dying voice.
“Here is where we part ways, then,” Maul says. “May the force be with you.”
Ben was right. Maul does know enough to stop the war in its tracks. And in return for that information, Qui-Gon finds himself holding out a clear plastic bag containing nothing now, but the river stone. Maul looks from it to him.
“It’s his,” Qui-Gon says. “Take care of him for me.”
Maul takes the bag and fishes the stone out. He tucks it into a pocket on the armless vest he arrived in.
“If it is any consolation to you, he didn’t know about our…relationship,” he says once the stone is stowed safely. “I did not tell him until two years ago.”
“It doesn’t matter, does it?” Qui-Gon says.
Maul considers it.
“I offer him positions that utilize his unique skill set through my network, and he turns them down to work these menial jobs,” he says. “He hates war, and loves animals.”
“Perhaps you two have more in common than I thought,” Qui-Gon says. “Couldn’t you also be a general in someone else’s war?”
Maul turns his head away.
“Sidious prefers jedi,” he says.
What irony. In that, and in how these two boys, rejected by the cultures that claimed to make them into great men, found each other in the end.
“I am going to try to forgive you, Maul,” Qui-Gon says. “However, it won’t be easy and I cannot promise that I will not cut you down if you cross me or mine again.”
“I never asked for your forgiveness.”
“Not on your account. On his. I want to believe that there is someone looking out for him who is, at heart, a good person.”
“I have no need for your sympathy, nor does Ben,” Maul says, “If you live through this war, be warned that I will kill you for the injustices you have brought upon him as well as myself.”
Right.
“Best of luck, Jinn,” Maul says with a jaunty wave. “You’re going to need it.”
It is a year until the end of the war, the real end, not the turning point. The Chancellor does not back down easily and for a time, the Republic’s own forces break into factions. The man’s capture puts an end to most of that. The remaining skirmishes are dealt with in due time.
Maul does not appear once through that year. Anakin, ashamed of his descent at the hands of the Chancellor, points this out on the eve of the final treaty.
People have been asking the Jedi generals all week what this end to the war means to them. They have been giving answers that the council has agreed upon and coached their troops to provide. But now Anakin asks Qui-Gon this question in the blue-lit, now-defunct war room when they are alone.
The map projections spin idly across the room’s walls.
“What happens now?” Anakin asks. “What meaning do we have?”
The easy answer is that things will return to what they once were. The Jedi will resume their studies of the force; they will transition back into peacekeepers, diplomats, and negotiators. The service corps will expand their relief operations. There is always work to do in a world as complex as theirs.
But that isn’t what Anakin is asking.
“I think,” Qui-Gon says, “We ought to seek closure to these chapters of our lives and to those we have left lingering from before.”
Anakin casts his eyes down to the ground.
“Master,” he says. “I don’t want to be the third padawan who leaves you.”
The children. The senator. Anakin has struggled with what he wishes to be to them. It is no easy decision to choose between fatherhood, partnership, and the way of the Jedi. Sacrifices must be made and unmade.
“You have served our people well as a knight,” Qui-Gon says. “If you leave now, then so be it. You will not be less of a Jedi for having served this galaxy for a shorter time than another.”
Anakin sighs.
“What will you do?” He asks.
“I have a sock to return,” Qui-Gon says.
In all the time he’s carried the sock, it has never been laundered. Qui-Gon hopes Ben will not read too much into that. He folds it in half and tucks it in its place in his rucksack for one last adventure.
When he arrives to the planet that Ben lives on with his family, the humidity immediately begins to drop itself upon his hair and the shoulders of his wool cloak in minuscule beads. He speaks to several townspeople and sets off down a dirt road out of the town center. He walks several miles before the dirt roads begin to give way to gravel paths flanked on each side by dry stone walls.
Plants spring up from the bases of the walls in bunches. Tiny white and purple flowers collect drops of water in their waiting mouths.
The farm is four and a half miles from town and surrounded by sun-bleached wooden fences. Sheep of many colors crane their heads over the fences to graze on the grasses growing beneath them.
Ben knows that Qui-Gon is coming. When Qui-Gon knocks on the red door of the two-storied dwelling, it is he who opens the door. It is he who invites Qui-Gon in.
“My mother is resting,” he says as he sets an ancient kettle upon an equally ancient gas stove. “She has a wasting sickness.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Qui-Gon says.
“If you don’t mind, I would rather not introduce you.”
“I understand.”
Ben leans his palms on the chair across from Qui-Gon. He prefers to rock his weight from heel to toe rather than sit in it.
“I brought something for you,” Qui-Gon says, reaching for his rucksack.
He pretends not to notice Ben’s hawklike gaze as he removes the sock from its home for the very last time. He holds it out to him.
“You forgot this,” he says. “In the laundry.”
The rocking stops.
“You kept it,” Ben says.
“I like to think that I am not as cold-hearted as others might perceive,” Qui-Gon says. “I form attachments just like anyone else—especially, it turns out, to unpredictable padawans.”
Ben doesn’t move to take the sock from Qui-Gon’s palm. He pulls out the chair slowly and sits down. His hands begin to rhythmically rub up and down his thighs.
“I saw you and the others come back for the final negotiations on Melida/Daan,” Ben admits. “I watched the ship touch down. But I couldn’t move. I was too sick, and I thought for sure that no one wanted to see me again.”
“You were sick?”
“Typhus,” Ben says. “Tuberculosis.”
“My poor boy.”
Ben’s shoulders rise and fall with acceptance.
“I used to hope that I wouldn’t have to ask,” he says. “That you or someone else would just know I was there and would come over to save me. But obviously that couldn’t have happened, and I think it wasn’t what I was truly seeking. What I really wanted was to be treated like a child, not a Jedi or a general or some traumatized soldier. I wanted—I wanted to be cared for.”
Qui-Gon’s jaw twinges with regret and something far more bitter: disappointment. Disappointment in himself for having left this boy to feel insignificant and alone.
“I hope you found that in her,” he says, gesturing gently with his head towards the side room where a shriveled woman lays sleeping in a medical cot with lines trickling down from an IV pole into her wasted arms. Ben follows the gesture with his face.
“She cried so hard when I found my way back,” he says. “She kept saying that it was her fault. She already knew she was sick then, so she cried twice as hard. She asked my middle brother and his wife if they could take me, but they had their own children, and I was selfish and even sicker than her. I tried to run back to Melida/Daan. Didn’t make it far. They called for my eldest brother to come back from off-world and he did. He did everything she couldn’t.”
“He is a mechanic, then?” Qui-Gon asks.
Ben smiles. He nods.
“You work to pay for your mother’s treatment?”
“She’s on hospice. I want her to be comfortable. She gave me what I was looking for after everything. She loves—she loves Maul so fuckin’ much.” Ben wipes at his eyes. “He’s always in here, calling her ‘madam’ and threatening to get her iron lungs. He tells her that if she lets him have his way, she’ll live until she’s 250.”
Ben finally reaches over and takes the sock in his hand. His fingers and palm are thinner than Qui-Gon’s own.
“When I found out that he hurt you, I didn’t speak to him for six months,” he says.
“Your heart has always been too generous,” Qui-Gon says.
“Then when I saw you fall, I forgot everything I ever knew. It was such a mess. I just pulled as hard as I could.”
Qui-Gon’s lips pull themselves into his cheek. He lets enough affection seep into the force that he can see the moment when Ben feels it. His shoulders slump.
“You are the kindest non-padawan an old master could ask for,” Qui-Gon says. “And I came here to apologize for having treated you so coldly. I don’t expect forgiveness, only wanted you to know that I never stopped thinking about you. Everywhere I went, I searched for you. On Melidaan, I read every memorial wall. Every gravestone.”
Ben presses against his eyes with the heels of his palms and shakes. The kettle begins to whistle. Qui-Gon dampens it with the Force, but it is too late.
“O’Ben?” The woman in the other room whimpers.
Like a shot, Ben is up on his feet.
“Just a second, Ma,” he says. “I’m making you tea.”
The farmhouse is modest, slightly cramped but pleasantly so. Each window in the kitchen is outfitted with a planter of herbs or decorative flowers. There are handmade quilts in every room, presumably for the lady of the house. The mantel is lined with knickknacks and mini-projections of family members and captured memories.
Ben’s mother is deeply invested in various ballgames, which he plays on a large screen for her. He closes the door between her room, which must once have been a communal area, and the kitchen when he returns.
He begins fixing two cups of tea behind the counter. Qui-Gon stands.
Ben freezes.
“Are you in a hurry?” He asks.
“I don’t wish to impose.”
“No, no. You’re not imposing. At least have this before you take off.”
“Will you keep this?” Qui-Gon asks of the sock on the table.
Ben hesitates.
“I think you should,” he says. “You gave me the stone. It’s a trade.”
A trade. Yes. That sounds nice.
“Please sit. Here. Sugar? What am I saying. Of course no sugar. A napkin, though—“
“Where is your partner in crime?” Qui-Gon asks as he settles back down at the table and takes quiet custody of the sock once more.
“Maul? Oh, hours out. Something about throttling a pirate—I don’t know. He talks so much, I just say ‘yes dear, whatever you want, dear, please don’t get shot, dear’ until he leaves.”
“He’s quite violent, no?”
“To me?”
“I hope not.”
“Of course not. To others, though.”
Ben drums fingers against his cheek in thought.
“I think I can fix him,” he says with such confidence that Qui-Gon almost spits out his tea.
Ben follows him back out to the path in front of the farmhouse, this time with the family cat stuffed in his arms. He bids Qui-Gon good bye and invites him to stop by if he is ever in the area again.
He calls Qui-Gon ‘master’ just when he’s taken the second step down the road..
Qui-Gon turns around and finds Ben’s eyes just as full of tears as his own. He opens his arms, and then comes flying the padawan, lost no longer.
He still fits against Qui-Gon’s heart. He smells the same as he did twenty years ago. The cat yowls between them and makes them both laugh as they break apart. Qui-Gon lifts a hand to cup Ben’s cheek.
“I am so proud of who you have become,” he forces himself to say aloud.
“You’re going to miss your flight,” Ben scoffs. “Go. Go .”
He’s still waving when Qui-Gon looks over his shoulder half a mile down the road, and the sock in its pocket weighs as little as it ever has.