Chapter Text
The storm came without warning, as Tatooine's storms tended to.
Ben had learned long ago to not trust the stillness of the desert. He'd learned it the hard way, in the early months, before the sand had worked its way into the very marrow of his bones and taught him what it meant to be small. Seven years and the lesson still held. He’d felt the pressure drop, felt it in the way the banthas three ridges over went suddenly quiet, and he'd moved.
Not fast enough.
The wall of orange overtook him between the second and third ridge, between one breath and the next, and then there was nothing in the universe but noise and particulate and the burning conviction that he was going to die here after all – not to a blade, not to old age, not to any of the many things that haunted the small hours of his desert nights, but to a sandstorm on a Benduday, which seemed, in a distant and dissociated way, deeply unfair.
Yet, he could not give in. He didn't think, just dropped to his knees and started working his hands into the sand, guided towards something – a hollow, a dip in the ground, any depression at all – and found it, a place where the bedrock fell away and left a sliver of space he could wedge himself into. He pulled his robe over his head and pressed his face against his knees and stopped being a person.
Became stone instead.
And waited.
When –
The ground shifted. There was a sound like the world clearing its throat. And then Obi-Wan Kenobi was falling – tumbling through what he'd thought was solid rock – and then he was not falling, because something had changed beneath him, some quality of air and light and the smell of green, and he landed less like a catastrophe and more like a man stumbling on an uneven step, staggering three paces and catching himself with one hand on –
Grass.
He knelt in a… highland.
It spread around him in every direction; pale silver grass running in slow waves under a wide, pale sky, stone outcroppings at intervals like the ruins of something once deliberate. The light was all wrong for Tatooine – singular, gentler, coming from a sun that sat lower and cooler than the twin burning points he knew. The air smelled of rain that had already fallen.
Ben thudded down on his ass in the grass. And breathed.
For…
A while.
He was still sitting there, boots off, conducting a methodical inventory of himself – blistered heels, sand in places he would not dignify with enumeration, nothing broken – when he heard footsteps.
He looked up.
A man was walking toward him through the grass – tall, broad-shouldered, long and dark hair – moving with the kind of unhurried ease that Ben had spent years trying to approximate. He was wearing Jedi robes – not the worn and patched thing of a man in hiding but the real article, clean and layered, the weight of someone who belonged in them. He was squinting slightly, one hand raised to shield his eyes against the pale sky, and he looked –
He looked just exactly as he had the day he died.
Had died in his arms. The word fell through Obi-Wan like a stone down a well. He could not find it again. He could only sit in the grass and watch Qui-Gon Jinn walk toward him, and when his old Master came close enough to see his face clearly, his expression shifted into a small, achingly familiar curiosity.
"Hello," said he, and crouched down to his level, which was something he had always done, that particular courtesy of the very tall toward the not-quite-as-tall. "Are you lost?"
Ben did not answer.
He was running a rapid and very private diagnostic.
Sandstorm; he had inhaled a considerable amount of particulate, likely. He was dehydrated – he'd been dehydrated before the storm, in the way that had stopped feeling remarkable somewhere around year three – and he had fallen some distance through rock, which was not a thing that happened… and therefore suggested that something had gone wrong in the processing of sensory information. The visual cortex, under stress, produced. He knew this. He'd had this lecture. Ben had also, in his darker years on that desert rock, spent some difficult months keeping close watch on the borders of his own mind, making sure grief had not tipped quietly into something that required more intervention than he could provide himself.
This was, he thought, with a calm that was entirely surface, probably that.
"Are you all right?" asked his Master. Still crouching. Still looking at him with those eyes, the specific quality of that gaze that Obi-Wan had catalogued helplessly at sixteen and never quite uncatalogued since, the gaze that always seemed to be working on a problem it found genuinely interesting and had decided the problem was you.
His Master had been dead for twenty years.
His Master was crouching in front of him in a field of silver grass, real and warm and casting a shadow.
Stop it, he told himself. You are hallucinating. This is the desert. This is stress. This is –
"I –" His voice came out wrong. He cleared his throat. Tried again. "Master?"
The blind truth was, that Obi-Wan would rather stay in this – whatever this circumstance was – than return to the reality of the hell which had been the last seven years of his life.
Qui-Gon's head tilted. The warm gaze moved over him with the careful consideration of a man who does not recognise what he is looking at. "I'm afraid I –" A pause. Something shifted in those blue eyes, something that looked like the beginning of recognition, which could not be real because a hallucination would know his face, a hallucination wouldn't need to work at it – "You do look…" Another pause, longer. Genuinely longer. The pause of someone cross-referencing. "Obi-Wan?"
The name landed like a punch to his solar plexus.
Something cracked open in the middle of his chest. And a little to the left.
It was not the name – he'd heard it every day of his life, in his own voice and a hundred others, it was simply his name – even as it had not been uttered the last seven year – but it was the specific texture of it in that mouth, that voice, the voice he had heard every day for thirteen years and then heard silenced on a reactor floor with a sound he would take to his own grave, and hearing it now did something to his structural integrity that he was not prepared for.
"Yes," said he, from very far away.
"You're –" Qui-Gon studied him with undisguised bewilderment. Genuine bewilderment, not the constructed kind – Ben knew his tells, had mapped them all before he was twenty, and this was real. A hallucination would not be confused about his face. A hallucination would not need to find him in it. Yet the hallucination’s hand reached for his face, though it never touched him; only hovered between for a number of long heartbeats before lowering again. "You're a great deal older than…"
"Yes," Obi-Wan croaked out.
His hands were shaking. He looked down at them with something like academic detachment. Clenched his fists.
"How?" asked Qui-Gon. And then, more quietly, almost to himself; "When?"
Ben looked up at him. Looked at his face – the lines of it, the gray at the temples that had just been arriving when he died, the scar at his jaw from a mission on Devaron in his third year as a Knight that he'd claimed was a training accident and Obi-Wan had known was not – and felt the thing in his chest pull open further.
He had watched this man die.
He had held him. He had felt the moment the Force presence he'd known since boyhood – the vast, warm, frustrating, beloved thing of it – had been gone, and he had understood in that moment what people meant when they talked about silence as something that had weight, had texture, could press you flat.
He had been twenty-five.
A lifetime ago – several lifetimes.
And Qui-Gon Jinn was crouching in front of him in a field of grass he had no explanation for, and waiting, and alive.
Ben's hands were very still in his lap now, very still the way hands go when you are applying all available resources to keeping them so. He was a man who had spent seven years in a desert teaching himself not to want things. The thing he wanted right now was to reach out and take his Master's hand and hold on until his knuckles went white, hold on until the realness of it transmitted through his palms and settled the question his mind was still trying to ask.
He did not.
He breathed out very slowly; his words lodged deep in his chest.
Qui-Gon sat in the grass across from him, folded his long legs beneath him with easy grace. He looked at Obi-Wan. He looked at the swaying grass around them, and the sky and the white clouds moving over their heads. The winds swept across them, its quality so very different from Tatooine. From the desert.
“I would almost think this a hallucination, or a dream perhaps, but it’s –”
“Real.”
The word hung between them. A long time.
Later, Ben would not remember the exact how of it, only that he needed – meditation, or giving in, or simply running out of the energy required to be upright. To be seen. He moved some distance from where Qui-Gon had settled, found a flat shelf of rock with a view across the silver grass, and sat and breathed until the breathing became something more deliberate. And the air cooled on his face.
He was trying to find the Force and finding instead that the Force was already there, waiting, steady in the way it only ever felt in places that had not yet been broken by consequence.
He opened his eyes.
Qui-Gon Jinn – his Master – was sitting before him. Cross-legged on the grass, close enough that their knees nearly touched, watching him with a patient expression that contained no apology and no whatsoever urgency. Just attention. The same attention Obi-Wan remembered being turned on him as a boy, as a Padawan, as a young man standing at the wrong end of a lightsaber on a ship he couldn't get off –
“You’re almost my age,” said he, not quite a question.
Ben nodded, a wry smile – or a grimace, perhaps – tugging on his lips. “I’m… forty-five.”
His old Master laughed; a low sound, with the tint of believing the unbelievable. He rubbed his face, then those blue eyes raked over Obi-Wan, as if cataloguing him still; comparing and contrasting to what he knew. Being unused to such scrutiny any longer – in fact, such only held danger now – he shifted minutely. Qui-Gon found his gaze, the ghost of a smile.
“My sweet Padawan,” said he. “You’ve become a Master.”
“That boy is long gone.” Ben looked away. “And I’m only the husk of a broken man.”
“You will always be my Padawan, Obi-Wan.”
His words were low and the words landed somewhere undefended. Ben looked at the grass. A silence. The highland kind – full rather than empty, the grass moving in it. And animals rustling through the grass.
"You haven't changed," murmured Obi-Wan, finally. It came out quieter than he intended.
"I have been here perhaps a day," said Qui-Gon, with a faint wryness. "I haven't had opportunity."
"No." He looked up. "I mean – you are precisely as I remember you. Every detail." He paused. "It's rather alarming."
"I imagine it must be." Qui-Gon regarded him with that particular steadiness, unhurried. "I confess the reverse is somewhat – you are so like him, and so entirely not." A slight tilt of his head. "There are things I recognise. The way you hold your shoulders. Your hands." A pause. "You frown exactly the same way when you're working out whether to say a thing."
Ben stopped frowning. "I wasn't –"
The corner of Qui-Gon's mouth moved. Just slightly.
Averting his gaze, something loosened in his stomach – something he did not have a name for, only the sensation of it, like a knot that had been pulled incrementally tighter for years suddenly losing one degree of tension. And not trusting the feeling.
"Are you well?" asked his Master. Differently – not the social form of the question, but the real one. The one that meant I am asking about the actual state of you, not the state you intend to present.
He had forgotten about that distinction. About being asked things that meant what they said.
"I am –" He stopped. Tried again. "I am alive. I'm not certain that covers the full scope of well but it is what I have."
Qui-Gon Jinn said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.
"Seven years," began he, to the grass. "On Tatooine. Alone, largely. Watching a boy grow from a distance." He turned a hand over in his lap. "It has been – it has not been easy. I am –" He exhaled, quiet and long. "I don't know what I am. I know what I was, before. I know what I became. Whatever is between those two things I've not found good language for."
"Tell me what you were before," asked he.
Ben looked at him.
"Humour me."
The strange thing was, he found he wanted to. Found it rising in him not as reluctance but as something almost like hunger – to be known by someone who had known him first, to say this is what I was to someone who could verify it, who had been there for the original.
"I was a General," said Ben, tasting the shape of the words. "A Council member. A Master." A pause. "I was– they called me the Negotiator, which I always found slightly ironic given how much I disliked talking about myself." His mouth curved despite itself. "I was a great many things. Most of them ended."
"And before the General," prodded he. "Before the Council."
"I was your Padawan," said Obi-Wan.
"Yes."
"And then I wasn't, and I – tried to be what you would have made of me. Whether I succeeded is." He stopped.
"Obi-Wan."
He looked up.
"What happened?" asked Qui-Gon. Softly.
And Obi-Wan told him.
He was not a man given to lengthy self-disclosure. He had made something of an art form of brevity. But there was a particular quality to Qui-Gon's attention – always had been – that made brevity feel not like efficiency but like dishonesty, and so he told the whole of it: Naboo and Maul and the thing he could not prevent, the Council and the boy and the knighthood that should have felt like victory and did not, the years of imperfect mastery, the friendship that built itself into something like a family and the night the Sith had found them, the fall, the burning, the survivors, and then Tatooine. The hut. The horizon. The boy who would grow up knowing nothing of any of it.
He talked until the pale sky began to change colour and he could not tell if the change was sunset or something else entirely, and when he stopped, he became aware that he had been crying for some portion of the telling without noticing, and that this was fairly mortifying. His throat also ached.
"I don't remember it," said Qui-Gon. At long last.
"Mn."
"Any of it. Not –" He turned his palm up on his knee, a familiar gesture. "Not truly. I remember fragments; the ship, the Queen. The negotiation. I remember Anakin. And then I'm here." The blue eyes moved across the highlands with a look that might have been loss and might have been something else. "I've been here for –" He considered. "Not long, truly. I woke up a bit from here this morn. However… I feel as if I’ve slept an eternity."
Ben wiped his face with the back of one hand. He could not find an adequate response to that, so said he nothing.
They sat together while the sky changed.
Then – achingly, unbearably – slowly Qui-Gon reached for his hands; those hands, with their long fingers, and scars and callouses and familiarity… and their warmth settled on his. Heartbreakingly real. They grasped his gently, and his old Master simply held him. Obi-Wan found he could not move his gaze from that sight.
And when the light had gone down enough that the air had teeth, Qui-Gon broke the silence.
“We must find shelter for the night.”
He then tugged them to their feet, ever keeping a grip on Obi-Wan's hand, as if keeping them tethered together to not get lost. Or to get lost together at least. They walked towards a stone formation visible in the distance.
The grass was tall enough in places to brush their clasped hands. Where the ground dipped toward a shallow depression that held the ghost of standing water – not now, but recently, the soil still dark – Ben slowed. There were tubers just visible at the depression's edge, small knobbled things where some burrowing animal had already begun the work. He crouched and began freeing them with his hands.
"I know these," said he. Not from Tatooine – nothing on Tatooine grew like this – but from somewhere earlier, some mission in his knighthood years, a briefing on highland flora he'd absorbed without knowing he was keeping it. He firmly did not think of the boy he’d brought on that mission. "They're not poisonous."
He passed the first two he freed to the older man, who cleaned them as best he could on the grass. "High praise," said he.
"They're not much," Ben allowed. "But."
They would be better cooked. That was something to work toward.
Yet they both knew to not forego an opportunity for food in their circumstances. Ben unearthed a handful, which they tucked into his forgotten net.
They kept walking
The stone formation resolved itself, as they drew closer, into what he'd hoped it might be; a tumble of large pale limestone blocks, ancient and unhurried, collapsed into each other at angles that created pockets and passes between them. He worked around the outside of it methodically – Qui-Gon following, not releasing his hand, which required a certain cooperation in the navigation – until he found what he was looking for.
The overhang faced south-east, which would mean morning light. It was low – he had to duck his head going in – but deep enough, and the floor was dry, the stone above it intact. The rock still held some residual warmth from the day, faint but real, the way stone does in country that gets proper sun. The opening was just wide enough for two. It was with the greatest of reluctance they released their desperate grasp upon each other.
"Here," said Ben.
He gathered grass in armfuls, the kind of work his hands knew how to do without direction now, and banked it against the back wall and across the floor for insulation. Qui-Gon collected what dry matter existed – scrubby dead stems, a cache of small branches caught in the rocks, bark that had peeled from something and dried – and Ben built a fire the way he'd learned to build them in places that didn't forgive waste: small, efficient, contained between two flat stones at the overhang's mouth where the draw would take the smoke out and the heat would reflect back in.
He roasted the tubers in the coals until they gave under pressure, then split them open on the stone and let them cool. They were starchy and bland and he ate his share with the focused appreciation of a man who had learned not to disdain anything edible. Qui-Gon ate his more slowly, watching the small fire, and said nothing for a while, and the silence was the kind that doesn't need filling.
The sky beyond the overhang went fully dark. Not Tatooine-dark, not that hard and airless black – this was softer, clouds somewhere high above diffusing the starlight, the horizon faintly luminous where the last of the day had gone. The fire was down to coals by the time the cold properly arrived.
Obi-Wan lay down on the banked grass and felt Qui-Gon lie down behind him, the full length of him, an arm coming over and settling with quiet certainty across his ribs. He was warm. Unreasonably, impossibly warm, the warmth of a living person, specific and undeniable, and Ben lay very still for a moment while something in him insisted on cataloguing every point of contact with the intensity of a man who does not trust what he has.
He was real. He was here. The arm across his ribs was real.
Obi-Wan put his hand over Qui-Gon's and held on.
"I had forgotten," murmured Qui-Gon into the nape of his neck. "What cold feels like."
His breath caught in his throat.
"I don't mean…" A slight pause. "I mean the specific inconvenience of it. The body's complaints." He sounded faintly bemused, as a man might who has been reminded of a language he once spoke. "I had forgotten that."
Nothing could be said to such.
Obi-Wan thought of twenty years. He thought of all the things Qui-Gon had been without a body to be cold in, and closed his eyes. And did not sleep for a long time – but the not-sleeping was gentle, and warm, and when sleep came it came without argument, while the coals breathed their small red breath at the cave's mouth and the highland dark lay soft over everything.
In the morning, they chose a direction and walked.