Chapter Text
I.
Qui-Gon Jinn is thirty-six years old, and he believes in the will of the Force.
This has been the one great constant of his life, the one belief he has never questioned, through the simpler anxieties of youth and the more complex dilemmas of adulthood and knighthood both. He has always been somewhat inclined to anxiety on a personal level, but whenever he can tap into the calm core of himself, into the serenity that connects him to all things, he has always found a steady certainty in the present, in the knowledge that what is is what was meant to be. Years of practice in meditation and time spent among an abundance of life have made that core of himself easier to find, until he can reach deep within and find the rightness, the alignment of himself with the Force.
Those around him do not always feel the same way about it. Qui-Gon has learned that, as well – that sometimes the clear answer that as good as sings to him within the currents of the Force is not so favorably received by his peers, or his superiors on the Council. (Meditation is frequently needed on that account, too, to untangle what is right in alignment with the Force from what is Qui-Gon’s own stubbornness.) But this particular rightness, this particular desire, is not out of line with what is expected of knights his age: this year, it is time for Qui-Gon to take on an apprentice.
Years of meditation, years of knighthood, years of study and diplomacy and fighting for rightness and justice when it must be done, and finally he feels that the time is right. Perhaps it is the will of the Force that he will find the right student this year, or perhaps it is merely something more personal, his own anxious standards for himself: that finally he has done enough to have something to pass on. To make him worthy of the honor of teaching.
But then, perhaps that anxiety too is aligned with the will. What is to be will be. He will take a padawan this year, if he can find the right match.
The trouble is . . . he doesn’t know what to listen for.
The day of the initiates’ trials is approaching, and Qui-Gon has visited the training sessions that are open to would-be masters: lightsaber duels, tests of skill, tests of the mind and of connection to the Force. In the last few years, since he began to seriously consider taking on an apprentice of his own, it has begun to feel a bit crude to him. Who he was at age twelve, before Dooku chose him, feels so far away from who he is now as an adult and a knight, and that is largely because of his own master’s influence. Skills are meant to be learned as a padawan, not inherent – how can they know what kind of Jedi a youngling will be until they have been trained? But then, how else are they to judge these would-be padawans but by their skills?
The Force will speak to you, is the answer other masters have given him when he asks. Qui-Gon has always thought it somewhat convenient that the Force tends to speak to those would-be masters precisely at the time of the initiates’ trials every year and no one ever questions them – and yet when it tells him in no uncertain terms that the way to convince the governmental faction of a jungle planet to stop devastating their local ecosystem is to finagle a practical demonstration of consequences, all he gets are the raised eyebrows of the entire Jedi Council.
Well, those who have eyebrows, anyway.
He wants to ask his own master, but Dooku has been strange lately, withdrawn and frustrated, less receptive to questions and advice. Perhaps it is because he wants Qui-Gon to strike his own path, to forge his way without his master’s influence – he has always prized Qui-Gon’s independence – but that explanation sits uneasily with Qui-Gon, the stale taste of a rationalization. Uneasily enough that he does not reach out to his master with the question, for fear of hearing the answer – or of hearing an answer he will know is not the full truth.
Instead he watches, and meditates, and frets. The time to choose is drawing near, and the Force is strangely silent –
“Lost in thought, you seem, Qui-Gon. Not in the present, your thoughts are, hmm?”
He startles against the balcony where he has been standing, looking down at the lightsaber class below. His cheeks heat despite himself, and he feels suddenly as wrongfooted as the youngling who down below has just taken a fall. “Master Yoda,” he acknowledges, with a dip of his head. Yoda is right – he has been drifting in his own anxieties rather than attending to the moment. It is a lesson he has learned again and again, one he has never been served by turning away from, but with the here and now such a mire of confusion, perhaps it is understandable that he has strayed.
“Take on a student this year, will you?” Yoda says shrewdly. “Chosen already, perhaps you have?”
A leading question, but – if Qui-Gon cannot have his master’s advice, perhaps the advice of his master’s master will serve him as well. “I have not, Master,” he admits. “I have been striving to attend to the Force on this, but I find it – curiously silent.” He gazes over the edge again, passes his eyes over this year’s class of initiates. There is the Togruta who fights with the ferocity of a meteor shower: she would need tempering, meditation on serenity, but surely that is the sign of a strong spirit. There is the human who stops to murmur a word of reassurance to their fallen friend; this may be an isolated moment of compassion, or they may have the soul of a healer, someone who would understand Qui-Gon’s affinity for the Force in growth and life. He does not know. He has not seen enough.
“Hmm.” Yoda nudges his way closer to Qui-Gon, peering through the lower slats of the balcony rather than over the top. Qui-Gon wonders if perhaps he has an advantage over other masters when speaking to Yoda; his height means he is used to speaking to others on two different levels, has learned to look down subtly for clues of expression. Yoda now looks pensive, considering. “Young Kenobi a fine match for you would be, I think.”
“Kenobi?” Qui-Gon looks down, his eyes passing over the younglings now watching their teacher in rapt attention. “Which . . .” He knows some of the initiates by name, and Kenobi is one he has heard before, but he cannot always attach the name to the face. Another reason for his concern, as no particular youth has stood out of the jumble for him.
Yoda gestures with his stick towards the far end of one of the rows, the human boy with the serious face brushing sweat-soaked auburn hair out of his eyes. Qui-Gon has noticed him before, though no more or less than any of his classmates. He is quick in body and mind, enough to draw attention – eager. Impatient. Qui-Gon knows that the flaws of youth aren’t necessarily a tell of the adult, but it is enough that he hasn’t seriously considered the boy before now, thinking he would not match well to Qui-Gon’s own tendency to wait for life to come to him first. “What makes you suggest him, Master?”
“Good for each other, you would be,” Yoda says, and when Qui-Gon looks down to meet his eyes, they are sharp with knowing, as if he has picked up on Qui-Gon’s own thoughts. “Much he could learn from you. Much you could learn from him, in turn.”
“Perhaps,” Qui-Gon murmurs. He looks back down at Kenobi, whose first name he can almost remember, trying to appraise him anew with Yoda’s words in mind, to see him for his actions now and their potential later. Ferocity, determination – if a performance in class can serve to reveal innate traits of personality, the boy seems to possess those in abundance. There is an edge to him, a sharpness, that could be honed to a political savvy – or could cut to the bone. Neither fills Qui-Gon with especial confidence.
He stares hard at the boy, trying to sense whatever Yoda might be sensing in him, whatever Force current he is supposed to feel at gazing upon the student that will be his, and feels no automatic connection.
“Relationships to build, time it takes,” Yoda says, as if reading his mind – echoing his own early thoughts. “Potential I see in the boy. In this relationship.”
“No doubt he has potential,” says Qui-Gon. Below them, young Kenobi has been paired with another of his classmates, and he launches himself into a ferocious attack. “But are you sure that I am the right master to bring it out in him? I have been seeking to listen to the Force in this choice, my Master, and I cannot hear it.”
“Sometimes through the voice of another, the Force speaks,” Yoda says knowingly. “Advice you must learn to take, Knight Jinn, if Master, you would be.”
Now that is hardly fair. Qui-Gon has taken a great deal of advice in his life – as a padawan and as a knight – and just because the advice he listens to does not tend to come from the Council is no reason for Yoda to accuse him of such a thing. But – all the same, Yoda has a point. The Force does not have to speak through serendipities and signs. Sometimes simple, straightforward words are enough.
“I thank you for your wisdom, Master,” he says simply, and continues to gaze down over the youths at their training. Below them, Initiate Kenobi is knocked to the floor by his sparring partner. He bounces back up in an instant, saber at the ready, circling his partner and seeking an opening.
With a grunt of satisfaction, Yoda walks away.
“Obi-Wan?”
The first name rushes to his mind just as it leaves Master Modun’s mouth, quickly enough that he could almost convince himself that he had remembered it on his own, except that Qui-Gon is not in the business of lying to himself. Yes, Obi-Wan is his name. Obi-Wan Kenobi. Padawan Kenobi. He tests it in his mouth before inclining his head to Modun, though she has not yet looked up from whatever she is writing. “The very same.”
“You were considering him?” The surprise in her voice makes Qui-Gon frown. Is that surprise that Qui-Gon is considering Obi-Wan, or that Obi-Wan has been considered at all? The tone nearly sets him to bristling instinctively, but he tempers his reaction.
“Master Yoda suggested that we might be well-matched,” he says, carefully even. “But as I know little of him, I thought to seek more information before making my choice. As his crèchemaster, surely you know more than I do. What might you be able to share?”
“He’s a fine boy,” says Modun. “Headstrong and spirited, which no doubt anyone could tell you. A streak of rebel in him, though. Perhaps that’s why Master Yoda recommended him to you.” She looks up at him at last, a touch of humor in her voice and her eyes. “He must have thought you wouldn’t be frightened away.”
“Rebel?” Perhaps Yoda was making a commentary on Qui-Gon himself when he recommended Obi-Wan, knowing Qui-Gon would seek out more information before making any decision and hear about this. Rebel is not the word he would have chosen to describe Obi-Wan after the few classes he has witnessed, but then, such witnessing can provide so little information.
“He’s a rulebreaker, that one.” Modun sighs, not without fondness. “He will make a fine Jedi, but if you’re considering him as a student, you should know that from the start. He doesn’t like to do what he’s told.”
Well. Neither does Qui-Gon himself – and the reputation is well-earned, passed down from his master before him. “Doesn’t like to do what he’s told, you say,” he echoes. “I can respect that in a student.”
She smiles at him, a little too knowingly. “Well,” she says. “If you take him on, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
The official selection takes place after the initiates’ trials, after the lightsaber duels that mark the final test, but what most initiates do not know – what Qui-Gon did not know until well into his knighthood – is that those trials do not make or break any results. Through his own process of selection, he is learning rapidly that “listen to the Force” means a much more literal sort of listening.
The other knights and masters begin to approach him before he knows to ask any of them. Whispers about who is on the lookout for an apprentice seem to have made their way around, and thus begins the quiet network of negotiating and questioning that is, Qui-Gon quickly realizes, the real process of selection. The Force does not, in fact, evenly match every initiate with every seeking master in a perfect, single go. Qui-Gon has overheard more than one heated discussion on the subject of who is better suited to which apprentice, but more often it is more cautious than that. Feeling one another out, getting a sense for one another’s choices, negotiating the right matches.
No one seems in any hurry to pick Obi-Wan Kenobi.
“Him?” says Zhin in open surprise when Qui-Gon ventures a question of his own. “I mean” – She backpedals quickly, as if she could undo the instinctive first impression. “I only meant – I’m surprised at your interest. It didn’t seem like an intuitive match.”
“Well, no,” Qui-Gon admits, “not to me, either. But Master Yoda recommended him to me, and I’m inclined to trust his judgment.”
He finds himself repeating the explanation in the face of almost insulting surprise – and finds that that surprise is more motivating than Yoda’s advice, more than the crèchemaster’s words. Qui-Gon has gained a reputation for being somewhat contrary, and he can’t deny that it is somewhat deserved. But it is more than that – he finds himself offended on Obi-Wan’s behalf. These knights cover their surprise by claiming they think Qui-Gon is a poor match for him, but it is not Qui-Gon they are commenting on. How many of these people have judged Obi-Wan Kenobi without giving him a chance to prove himself to them?
Qui-Gon will give him that chance, he promises himself. They will take it together.
The trials are finished, the initiates lined up in various stages of disarray: sweaty and bruised from their duels, some with helpless tearstains on their faces from disappointment in fights or in tests – and it is time for the selection process.
Qui-Gon remembers this feeling all too well: the anxiety of the fights, of the tests, his dogged determination to trust in the Force, though he could not convince his heart to stop pounding in fear. He did not know, then, that most of the would-be masters had already made their choices, that it would take a significant show of bad faith or incompetence to unmake them.
Whose idea was it to have the selections announced like this? Where disappointment cannot be hidden and uncertainty is only drawn out?
“Berloc Arundel?”
Berloc steps forward, his gaze seeking one initiate unerringly across the rows. “I choose Prie Marneg as my padawan learner.”
Yes – this was a choice that faced no debate, not even in the secret whispers leading up to the trials. Berloc practically took Prie on as an apprentice last year and has unofficially been mentoring her ever since, drawn by a shared connection to and love for animals. For another master to have requested her as an apprentice would have been an injury and an insult to both of them. Perhaps sometimes the Force does speak slightly more loudly, Qui-Gon muses.
So it goes, on down the line: knights stepping forward and naming the younglings they wish to train. The numbers of masters to initiates do not always match up, but those who have not found someone have stepped out in deference this year, so as not to disrupt a delicate balance already found. But Qui-Gon is not called for some time, and he watches the line dwindle as Obi-Wan is left among a smaller and smaller handful of younglings.
He watches Obi-Wan now, through the corner of an eye to maintain an appearance of subtlety, watches as the crowd thins around him. Watches how the jaw clenches and the lips press tight and the chin does not lower. Watches every line of stubborn pride in the young body, fear and frustration and the determination not to let them show, not to lower his head in shame, even as the gaggle around him dwindles and diminishes and a few more knights step forward and announce that they have decided to postpone their decision until next year –
Pride, and defiance, and determination. A will like iron, despite the too-bright shine in the boy’s eyes.
Qui-Gon has already as good as made his decision, encouraged by Yoda’s recommendation and his own defiance. But if he is looking for a sign from the Force, here it is now: a sense of rightness, of potential – the knowledge this boy will do great things someday, that teaching him would be an honor that Qui-Gon can only hope he is worthy of.
He steps forward.
“Qui-Gon Jinn?”
He inclines his head to Master Nartano, who has called him forward, and paces to where Obi-Wan Kenobi stands on the trials field, the last to be chosen – but, Qui-Gon can only hope, not the least. “By the will of the Force,” he says, “I choose Obi-Wan Kenobi as my padawan learner.”
“Master?” Obi-Wan’s head snaps up, that face alight with shock, those overbright eyes and the very Force around him brimming with emotion he cannot hide. He expected to go unchosen, Qui-Gon realizes, to be the only student not selected, and he remembers his own master’s generosity with his youthful fear, with his own unshielded emotion. He can only hope he will do as well with his own apprentice now that the time has come.
He smiles. The boy is shorter than he realized, this close; the pride in his demeanor lends him greater height. “If you will have me,” he says placidly.
“I – of course I” – Obi-Wan catches himself, clamps his mouth shut. “Master,” he says again, and the word shivers down Qui-Gon’s spine with the rightness he has been looking for. “I am honored to be chosen.”
II.
Qui-Gon Jinn is forty years old, and he is at a crossroads.
The floor of a spaceship has never been his favorite place to meditate, far from the stability of a planet or the rootedness of growing things, but he has spent enough time flying around the galaxy in his life that it is familiar to him, that he can settle into this calm easily enough. He can feel the hum of the ship around him, the muted sounds of the crew going about their business . . . the unease of Obi-Wan in the other room, a notable distance away from the bridge, where he would otherwise have been eagerly observing the pilots.
That unease is a ripple in Qui-Gon’s own calm, a tug nearly strong enough to make him rise from his kneeling posture and seek out his padawan, but he refrains. Obi-Wan’s ordeal is still recent, he reminds himself. They will have time enough to determine whether Obi-Wan’s recent misadventure is a moment that will fade in time or a trauma that must be addressed.
A flicker of unease in himself, the true disturbance of his calm, the true reason behind his need for meditation – and perhaps this is the source of Obi-Wan’s distress, as well, beyond his newfound fear of flying. Will they have time?
Something twists in his chest at the thought and he breathes into it, calling upon years of practice at emotional regulation and the endless struggle towards self-awareness. The offer of the Council seat still awaits him, Obi-Wan told him, and that thought feels like a lurch in his stomach, reminiscent of the old anxieties he has spent so long learning to reconcile, the ones he recognizes in Obi-Wan himself, sharp with the urgency of youth. He could not do anything other than what he has done on Pijal; he believes, with a thoroughness that almost comes as a surprise, that everything happened as it was meant to happen – but were his own actions driven entirely by the dictates of the Force, or was there another motivator, a deeper reluctance?
Can he be sure that he was not, somewhere in a corner of his mind he did not examine thoroughly, attempting to sabotage his invitation to the Council?
And if so, why? Was it out of a desire to avoid making such a difficult choice? Or was it because some part of him had already made it?
The differences between himself and the others on the Council have seemed insurmountable in the past, and then for a few glorious blinding moments they seemed not only negotiable but a benefit: the thought of bringing his perspective to the Council, debating with its other members as equals rather than as superiors. But now – he is still stinging from their refusal to listen to him, from the reminders of the many horrors in the galaxy that slip beneath the Republic’s notice, the Order’s willingness to act. Can he knowingly align himself with the body that makes those decisions, give up the potential to act in defiance to it, even if that defiance would align itself to the Force he knows?
But there is more than that, a different potential he does not know if he can give up, smaller and larger at the same time. All-important, with the power of a promise made four years ago, a promise Qui-Gon has tried and failed and tried again to live up to, a promise sacred to the very nature of the Order: the promise to teach.
He yearned so to be a teacher, and he cannot help but feel that he has failed again and again, and yet – is this something he can so easily give up?
This too may not be a choice. Ultimately, the choice here belongs to Obi-Wan: if he wants to be parted from Qui-Gon, after all the strife of this mission, he is well within his rights. But for Qui-Gon’s part –
This is what it means to be a rebellious master with a rebellious padawan. It means they will struggle; it means they will disagree. It means, at times, they will defy one another. But this mission has been a lesson for Qui-Gon, too, on what that disagreement can mean, what it can look like – and it feels, somehow, right. Aligned. Like the poles of their differences can push against one another in the right ways to bring about the best outcome.
Obi-Wan may choose otherwise. He may return home to turn away the Council seat, and he may find that his apprentice no longer wants his teachings. Qui-Gon Jinn may have pushed everyone around him too far, this time, and he may come away with the losses to show for it. This may be the end of a relationship that he has realized, almost too late, that he does not want to lose.
But somehow –
“Master?”
Qui-Gon blinks his eyes open and twists around to where Obi-Wan has tapped at the door between their rooms. His padawan is already drawing away, an apology on his lips. “I didn’t mean to disturb your meditation. I can come back later.”
“You didn’t disturb anything,” says Qui-Gon warmly, rising to his feet and dusting off his robe. “I was just finished, anyway.”
– somehow, he feels like this is just the beginning for them.
III.
The Force is eternal.
It is in all things, and it is all things. It is motion and stillness, swirling from one place to the next, and both at the same time. It is in all things, living and dead and without life, for nothing is unalive in the Force. Life – as it emerges and ends and flows and ebbs – is the Force, and the Force is life, and it is all. In the Force, everything is yet to happen, and everything that is yet to happen has already come to pass. It is time, and it is outside of time – all things happen at once, and nothing happens at all. The Force is eternal, without beginning or middle or end.
And yet the Force is out of balance.
Light and Dark are endless and endlessly opposed, striving equally in all that lives and all that does not; there is no intention in their natures, only a rhythm ancient and essential; neither can exist without the other, and nothing can exist without both. But their wielders can change that balance, pushing back and forth to corrupt the rhythm always at play in the smallest individual heart, the largest galactic institution. And now – ah, now –
The Dark expands from the inside out, not the push-pull of balance but a sucking corruption pulling Light into the black hole of its existence; the Light begins to dwindle as pillars fall, as fear consumes from within, as stability becomes domination and ritual dogma. Dwindles, until the Light is but a series of pinpricks, thousands of them, spread across the galaxy –
And then, among them all, a supernova, a blaze of energy.
It is not Light alone, it is a swirling miasma of Light and Dark in perfect balance, one pushing the other out before being pushed back in turn: a vergence, a split. A pocket of potential, of promise, a balancing force that has not yet happened and has always happened, is always going to happen.
Time is nothing and everything here, past and present and future all condensed into the knowing of what is laid out, a future held still and always in motion, one that has always already happened, infinite paths all made into one. He understands it better here, the inklings he had once when he was but a dull spark of a single consciousness.
He. Yes. Once this fragment of the Force was narrowed into a single consciousness, had distinct form, distinct thoughts. He was a man then, or he never was, for what is such a concept as a man against the eternal allness of possibility? – but he knew himself as one. He. Him.
He knows himself more here, in proximity to this great beacon in the Force; there is something here that calls to him as Force and as the consciousness he once was, the great beam of potential drawing him in and something else – holding him. Reminding him of who he once was, who he still is, if memory can be said to sustain life. All of it is the Force. Who he is. A man. A Jedi.
Qui-Gon Jinn.
Yes. He was Qui-Gon Jinn once, and he never was, and he always will be. His consciousness coalesces around this beacon of light, and the memory comes back – the dizzying smallness, suddenly, of retracting from the infinity of the Force, of becoming a self once again, though both less and more a self than he ever was. Enough of a self to remember.
To remember the trainings that created this consciousness, allowed him to release it and reform it, allowed him to connect and detach at the same time. Him. He is . . . he is.
He is.
And he knows this great beacon of energy and promise, though its staggering potential is more powerful than the slight inkling he first felt, when he was only a man. Powerful enough to draw Qui-Gon into its orbit before he had even coalesced into a remembered consciousness. A brightness that would have been blinding, could he have seen it as it is with his human eyes.
Anakin Skywalker. The boy from Tatooine – but no, so much more than a boy. A promise, though he looks small now, brows drawn together in defiant argument, the devastating force of his will brought to bear against – against –
The other presence is a pinprick of light in the Force, not Anakin’s blinding potential but a steady shine, unwavering. The kind of Light that will stand alone against enveloping, suffocating Dark, stalwart and true, brave and good and as vital as Anakin’s brilliance, a fulcrum in the flow of fate. This close to a single defined consciousness, too near to a linear sense of time, Qui-Gon has no inkling of how or why, only the certainty, the knowledge of something essential.
But then, he always was.
Obi-Wan looks different than he did in the last moments of Qui-Gon’s life, different in a way that should be startling. His hair and beard are longer than Qui-Gon has ever seen with living eyes, the first tired crease beginning to form between his brows, and something about the way he holds himself has shifted, solidified – a change in the gravity of his stance. But the past settles into Qui-Gon’s awareness with the ease of time passing, and for all his changes, nothing about this moment is surprising. It is all familiar: the whip-quick motion of his mind and his tongue, as sharp as ever in response to Anakin’s defiance, and beneath it all the resolute steadiness, the unwavering dedication, the fine mind and the steadfast soul –
The consciousness that was Qui-Gon Jinn has not felt so sharply defined since the moment of his death.
Obi-Wan, he says, and although he cannot yet form enough voice to make his words carry beyond the swirling eddy of the Force, every non-atom of his consciousness drifts closer, curls towards him, as if to wrap his former apprentice in a ghostly embrace. Obi-Wan.
Obi-Wan does not respond.
That is all right, thinks Qui-Gon with the teacher’s sensibility that has returned from the simple sight of his apprentice, though a grown master in his own right now. We will try again next time.
Next time.
Even now, his consciousness is fading, beginning to scatter. He will learn to hold it for longer, next time. It is a lesson for him, too. Obi-Wan has always taught him the most important lessons.
He will find them again, he knows it, by the great beam of Anakin’s presence in the Force, but . . . but he should find Obi-Wan on his own, too, should always know where his padawan – knight – master – can be found.
With the last of his fading consciousness, he reaches out, and – there is nothing physical that can be used to describe it, but he creates a link, a hook. Sinks some part of himself into Obi-Wan, some memory of his consciousness so that he will know to find his way back here. So he will always know.
An attachment, perhaps, it would be called in the crude language he once spoke. Would be called, and frowned upon. But what is attachment but connection? Here, now, attached and detached as he is to all in the universe, this one link is simply . . .
A reminder. A marker.
A choice.
Qui-Gon takes one last long look at Obi-Wan before spreading himself out again, letting his individual consciousness dissolve once more into the endless Force.