Chapter Text
“I heard you are considering Anakin as Ahsoka’s Master?”
Truly, nothing traveled faster than gossip, Yoda thought, especially in the Temple. He paused in the sunset-colored hallway, leaning upon his cane to look up at Obi Wan; a promising child, even with the roughness of youth and how smooth and great he’d grown. “Match, I approved just yesterday.” And last he heard, Obi Wan had been on a mid-rim battlefield. “The Force calls them to each other. Feel it, you can.”
“As the Force once called Qui Gon and I together.” Obi Wan spoke without approval, without a hint familiar fondness or sorrow as so often colored his voice when his Master was mentioned. This particular tone was very like the Late Qui Gon Jinn, which in Yoda’s long experience required a long brew.
“Tea, would you like?” he offered. “Not far, my quarters are.” Less further, when he leapt up on Obi Wan’s shoulders and let the younger man carry him there.
Humans had strange tastes in tea, but his last two Padawans had been human and Qui Gon studied Ataru with him. Familiar habit lead him to black tea, spices – Obi Wan appreciated a heavy hand there – and prepared himself for a long talk. “Disagree with the Force, do you?”
“Qui Gon did, in the beginning. Part of the reason our beginning was...rough.”
A talent for the understatement, had Obi Wan. “A Master Qui Gon was declared. Listen to the Force, he knew.” Yoda poured one of the few plant-milks he could stand, lightening and softening the dark, bitter tea. “Hard, the loss of a Padawan is. Hardest of all, the loss from a Fall.”
“It is not a hurt a child can be expected to heal,” Obi Wan stated firmly, “Are you again using a child to heal an adult?”
Yoda carefully poured the tea, first for his guest, then himself. “Concerns, you have of your former student?”
Obi Wan cupped his tea, savoring the warmth, the subtle waft of steam rising from one of Yoda’s cups, a little lopsided, the handle too thick the design smudged by a careless fingertip. Dooku’s work? Cin’s? Some bygone Padawan known only to their old Master and the Archive’s history section? He added a small spoonful of honey to his. Yoda, whose tastes ran towards savory, did not. Finally, he took a sip. The strength of the tea came through, bitter notes mixing with the sweetness of the honey, the bite of spices on his tongue, softened some by the nut milk Yoda liked, but not enough.
This wasn’t a proper tea ceremony, but was he not still an honored guest? “The taste of parting,” he whispered into the cup.
Yoda did not sigh, “Think you, treat a fellow student poorly, your student would?”
Obi Wan’s fingers twitched around the cup for a moment. “No, Anakin would do his best by her.” He put the cup down. “But he is much like Qui Gon, in favor and fault.” Yoda took a sip of his own, far less spiced cup. “Why now? Anakin is younger than I when I took a Padawan and I was a young knight to be a Master. Ahsoka is but fourteen, even someone a year or two more experienced…”
“Distant, Anakin becomes to our Order. Not so like Qui Gon,” Yoda stared into the murky depths of his own cup, the tea grounds impossible to discern. “While Dooku’s captive, you were, felt from Anakin Skywalker such pain, such suffering, such fear,” in a whisper too quiet for sharing, too loud for secrecy, he added, “Such Darkness.”
Obi Wan opened his mouth, then shut it, “ – that still sounds like you want a child to heal him.”
“Adrift he is, from the Jedi. Ground him, a Padawan would. A war, terrible place for a Knight to be lost.”
Revan. Ulic Qel Droma. Jedi history was full of their best and brightest, Fallen in victory. Yoda pushed away the rest of his tea, temporarily without appetite. “No more elders there are, all sent to the war. No more promising Padawans to knight. No end in sight, there is,” Yoda finished softly, eyes half-lidded and old as a dragon’s. Obi Wan abandoned his own tea. “Survived Anakin has, when many of his peers did not. A Padawan’s best hope for survival, your student may be.”
Obi Wan trembled faintly. A breath, then another. He grasped for the Light as Yoda had with his cane, a beam of balance amid a maelstrom of dark memories. “Melidaan.”
“Much like, across the whole Galaxy.”
“Qui Gon...shouldn’t have left.”
Yoda pressed the tea into Obi Wan’s hand. “My sorrow, for your pain. For my part played.”
Obi wan clutched his cup back to himself. “Then find a better way. Is that not what we do for the Lost? Find a better way to heal Anakin than a child. A better way for a child to survive war.” Obi Wan stood, “You made a mistake pushing Qui Gon and I together.” He paused at Yoda’s doorway, “Learn from your mistake.”
Wisdom wasn’t a passive accumulation like age, as many thought. In Yoda’s experience the Elderly had no fewer follies than youth, and there truly was no fool like an old fool.
His own former Padawan was proof of that. The Dark Side. The Sith. Darth Tyrannus and bled soul as though he had not learned, known and taught the futility of the Dark Side. Master Dooku had known better. Could do better.
Wisdom was also not an accumulation of experience. Some people could grow wise through conflict, through Yoda’s experience in the previous ‘war’ the Republic had waged – the excursion of Mandalore – taught him war made for desperate decisions, not wise ones.
No, time and experience, conflict and peace, all could provide opportunities for Wisdom, but only conscious action – inward and applied – grew that too-rare flower. Even then, no amount of wisdom was enough to inoculate one to foolishness. Dooku’s old Master, an example of that.
But the height of foolishness, to repeat the same mistake yet another time. So Yoda considered Obi Wan’s wise words, grown from the soil of painful experience. He meditated on the potential he had felt between a future Master and Padawan, and a past one he had felt so sure of.
He came back to the age limit, or the lack of one. No such rule in all twenty thousand generations of knights, yet the rumor popped up like a bad cold. Initiate Yoda had been subjected to the horrors of ‘the age limit rule’ most cruelly. Overcoming that fear, and the fear of not being a Jedi had been another step – a most necessary one – in Yoda’s journey to knighthood.
In truth some Padawans remained so for thirty, forty standard years, even longer. Jedi philosophy did not impose an external time limit on an internal journey. Sometimes, even a Master chose to become a Padawan again
Yoda paused his meditation, considering the stray thought closely. He let the thought go, but not before spawning a wonderful, awful gremlin idea.
Meditate. He would meditate on this path. Focus on meditation, on the Force. He would not fall to the foolishness of rushing down a path because it was funny.
(Though...tempting)
Sometimes The Force could be a gremlin too.
Anakin could hardly believe his ears, “But it’s Obi Wan who wanted a Padawan, not me?”
“I am sure you will do your best Anakin.” Obi Wan reassured. Obi Wan was not being reassuring.
“But I’m not, I’m just...a Padawan...would only slow me down.”
Whatever Obi Wan would’ve said was interrupted by the arrival of a ship. One carrying two Force signatures. One he recognized, but the other…
“Hello, I’m Padawan Ahsoka Tano,” Anakin inwardly winced. On his shoulder Obi Wan’s hand twitched. “Assigned to Obi Wan Kenobi.”
His old Master didn’t have to breathe such a loud sigh of relief. “Oh well that’s good.” He looked up at old Yoda, “Guess you made the right decision. A Padawan would only slow me down.”
“Assigned to you, a Padawan had been.”
“What?”
“Padawan Yoda, I am, assigned to Master Skywalker.”