Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Qui-Gon had promised him once that he would be a Jedi, and Anakin had held on to that promise, all through the cold strangeness of hyperspace on their return to Coruscant, when none of them had known whether Qui-Gon would live or die from his injuries. 

Anakin clung on stubbornly.  I will be a Jedi, I will be a Jedi, he repeated to himself.  He had closed his eyes and willed the thought into existence, because it just had to come true.  If he could be a Jedi, if his wish came to pass, it meant Qui-Gon had come through with his promise.  And Qui-Gon would have to be alive in order to do that.  

He didn't want to picture a universe where Qui-Gon did not survive.

He'd held up the image in his mind, to make it permanant: Qui-Gon, strong and whole again, and Anakin himself, a true Jedi; the two of them fighting side by side.  Anakin had gone wild with his imaginings.  When you’re free, you can do that, he had reasoned.  Anything was possible when you were no longer a slave.  He’d pictured Qui-Gon teaching him how to use a lightsaber, and how he would become a knight and then set off to free worlds.  

Anakin hadn't had much in the way of actual expectations - his upbringing did not allow for those - but if he’d had any preconceived notions of what being a Jedi would be like, the reality is about the furthest thing from what he might have pictured.  Coruscant is far grander and larger than anything he had the knowledge to come up with. And nothing he could have dreamed up could have prepared him for being Qui-Gon’s padawan.

When Anakin imagined himself as a Jedi, wrapped solemnly in crisp robes and outfitted with a lightsaber, he had pictured himself at standing at Qui-Gon’s side, as his apprentice.  But he isn’t even that for a very long time.  Mostly because of Qui-Gon's slow recovery. 

Weeks pass before Qui-Gon is allowed back to his own quarters, with many days that pass in a blur of activity.  There are some spots that stand out from the sheer shock of strangeness, in the weeks where Obi-Wan had walked with Anakin to every place he was supposed to go: To see the Council, to visit a recuperating Qui-Gon in the halls of healing, to have his own health assessed by the healers, back to be frowned at by the Council again.    But after a long stretch of cycles where Anakin feels alternatingly ignored and like an insect under a pair of specs, his wish comes true, and Qui-Gon leaves the halls of healing.  

When Qui-Gon finally returns to his own quarters, he insists on throwing open the doors to the balcony and lowering himself painfully to the floor, Obi-Wan close by his elbow and ready to assist. 

“I must meditate,” Qui-Gon says stubbornly, in response to Obi-Wan’s look of exasperation, and rather to Anakin’s surprise, instead of arguing, Obi-Wan simply folds himself neatly to the balcony floor at his side. 

“I didn’t know those doors would open,” Anakin says, awed.  He has been living in Qui-Gon’s quarters since their return from Naboo.  The Council had allowed him this privilege, while not guaranteeing anything else.  It’s hard not to feel like a stranger here, even in Qui-Gon’s private rooms.  He walks around carefully, half-afraid to touch anything.  You break it, you bought it, Watto had drilled into him, and though the Jedi don't seem to seem much interested in currancy, he knows better than to handle anything that doesn't belong to him. 

He can see that Qui-Gon is still in pain from the long walk back to his quarters, yet he manages a smile aimed at Anakin’s direction.  “You’ve made a practice of mediation already, I’m sure, Ani,” he says, and Anakin squirms.

“Not exactly,” he hedges.  Well, he’s sat next to Obi-Wan while he meditated - that must count for something.

“You’ll learn, in time,” Qui-Gon remarks, and he closes his eyes, breathing deeply.  The air has a faint scent of flowers, drifting up to them from the gardens below, and soon Qui-Gon is deep in a trance, breathing out his own pain and releasing it.   Anakin can see how far into the Force Qui-Gon has gone.  And then Obi-Wan joins him, drifting along in a lighter trance that allows him to keep a watchful eye, so to speak, over both his charges.  So Anakin dutifully closes his eyes as well for a moment, until he is sure that no one will notice if he opens them again. 

The balcony opens to a courtyard below; if you look up, you can see Coruscant’s sky above your head, past the Temple’s dome.  Anakin looks up, but none of the star systems here are familiar to him at all. The night skies of Coruscant are nothing like Tatooine’s.  His mother had told him the names of the constellations, back home.  She could not tell him the names of planets, but she could tell him the names that the slaves gave to the shapes they found in the night sky: The Twins, the Kryat, Maiden’s shield.  He can still see them in his mind, as clear as being there.

He doesn’t have a name for any of these stars.  

Anakin feels the hot stinging building up behind his eyes.  Sand blasting hot in his face, suns scorching down on his head.  Even Tatooine’s memory is hot.  He shakes his head, pushing those molten thoughts as far from him as he can.

When he surfaces, too fast and his brain reeling from his rushed exit, Qui-Gon is standing up slowly.  Obi-Wan does not hover over him, but waits for his master to make the first move, and then smoothly steps in to offer him assistance without a word.  

Anakin watches the way his soon-to-be master and his master’s former apprentice circle around each other and thinks, abruptly, of two suns, and how one rises first in the morning, followed by the other.  The first star always leading, the second star always in its wake. 

Binary systems, Anakin keeps thinking, long after that first night they spend together in Qui-Gon's quarters.  Who’s orbiting who? he wonders. They know each other so well. Will I ever be able to understand Qui-Gon that way?

Anakin had expected Coruscant to be different.  He had expected to feel out of step, out of place, missing vital pieces of information.  But he had not expected to feel so out of place at Qui-Gon’s side.

Coruscant is many things.  Right now it is a holding pattern, a waiting game.  Anakin has no official status yet.  He is still Qui-Gon’s ward.  This means that Anakin can live in Qui-Gon's quarters, that Qui-Gon - and by relation, Obi-Wan as well - is in charge of his welfare.  But it is not long after Qui-Gon is released from the healers before everything changes once again.  

A docent appears at their door after the last evening bell, holding a datapad in her hand.  “From Master Windu,” she discloses, and passes the datapad to Obi-Wan.  

Obi-Wan reads the information silently.  Then he stands, lost in thought, for a long moment.

The moment drags on.  Anakin makes himself a bit smaller in the Force, pulling himself in so that they do not think to send him away.  He wants to know what the datapad says. His heart is thudding in his chest. He knows about this kind of thing - it’s news, whatever it is, and it means change.  For all of them.  

Qui-Gon gets up with difficulty in order to stand behind Obi-Wan and read the datapad over his shoulder, rather nosily, in Anakin’s opinion.  But then again, Obi-Wan is still his apprentice. And Anakin is still only - well, whatever he is to Qui-Gon. “What is it?”

“You should be sitting down,” Obi-Wan says automatically.  Then he seems to collect himself and he passes the datapad to Qui-Gon.

Qui-Gon’s expression changes to one of understanding.  “Oh, padawan,” he murmurs, and then sinks back down on the couch, passing his hand over his chin, lost in thought.

Anakin waits patiently for one of them to let him know what’s going on.  Then he realizes that being smaller in the Force might make noticing him more difficult, so he pushes himself back into the room, and Obi-Wan falls into focus on him again.  

“I’ve been summoned to the Council tomorrow morning,” he tells Anakin.  The line between his eyebrows is back, Anakin noticies with interest. 

“Good luck with that,” Anakin says with feeling.  

Anakin is allowed to come with them as far as the Council antechambers.  He watches Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan disappear through the chamber doors, and sits down to wait.  

Left behind again, he thinks, and stifles a sigh.  He’s pretty sure the Councilors can sense his impatience even all the way in another room.  He can guess why Obi-Wan was summoned. A mission, finally. Waiting for Obi-Wan’s first assignment is what has kept them all together these past several months.  Waiting for this holding pattern they’ve found themselves in to change. For Qui-Gon to recover - for Obi-Wan to be promoted - for Anakin to finally become a padawan.  

Anakin looks out the tall windows displaying a view of the Coruscanti sunrise and wishes that he had something to do, a task to keep his hands and mind occupied.  Patience is the Jedi way. But it is not his way.  Not yet, anyways.

But in less time than he expects, the chamber doors open again.  Anakin takes a good look at Obi-Wan, trying to see what, if anything, has changed about him.  Obi-Wan’s padawan braid had vanished right just before they had left Naboo, and now his hair has grown a trifle longer in the months since then, but that is the only difference he can see.  He would have thought that Obi-Wan would be smiling at least in celebration.  But Obi-Wan still looks about the same as usual: Tired, and a bit cross. Anakin’s thinking maybe that’s just his default expression.  

To his surprise, Obi-Wan addresses him first.  He crouches down next to him. “I’ve been assigned a mission, Anakin,” he says without preamble.  

Anakin does not quite understand at first.  He glances at Qui-Gon, who looks unusually solemn.  And then he realizes: Obi-Wan really will be leaving them.  He feels a choking feeling rising up in his throat.  He hadn’t realized until that moment how Obi-Wan had become someone he didn’t want to lose.

Stupid, he tells himself fiercely.  Nothing’s the matter with you. You’ll stay here with Qui-Gon.  Nothing will be any different. This is what you’ve been waiting for, after all.  He gulps and manages to ask, “When are you going?”

“I’m leaving now,” Obi-Wan says gently.  “Anakin, I’m sorry.”

Anakin can’t look at him, so instead he stares at Obi-Wan’s boots, the lightly-scuffed leather worn and creased along the toes.  “Don’t forget about us,” Anakin chokes out. Obi-Wan’s hand is on his shoulder, squeezing gently.  

“I won’t,” he says.  “I couldn’t. Goodbye, Anakin.  May the Force be with you.”

Anakin can’t help himself, he throws his arms around Obi-Wan’s neck.  He feels Obi-Wan’s huff of surprise. He repeats the words in a mumble.  “Take care of him,” Obi-Wan says under his breath.  “He’ll need you.”

The words are just for Anakin’s ears.

Then Obi-Wan lets go, and he stands up.   Anakin can see those lighter brown boots step closer to Qui-Gon’s darker boots, and he looks up in time to see Obi-Wan shaking his master’s hand before turning away.  

Qui-Gon watches him go with an expression that Anakin can’t read.  He can almost see the way a string emerges from his master’s chest and disappears out into the universe after Obi-Wan as he strides away.  

Then the door closes quietly behind him, and Qui-Gon and Anakin are left alone.

They don’t seem to know what to do with each other, Anakin and his master.  They drift around their quarters, abandoning any pretense of a routine or schedule. 

Qui-Gon is strange in the days after that.  Unfocused, as though he is walking around half-asleep.  Qui-Gon shuffles around with his cane, moving potted plants around on the balcony, emptying out the drawers in the kitchen and then tiring before replacing anything.  

Doesn’t he miss Obi-Wan at all? Anakin thinks, aggrieved.  I do.  But his master does not express any theoretical emotions he might be having to Anakin.

Anakin wonders if it’s the pain in a silent, frantic kind of way, not quite sure enough of himself to ask Qui-Gon if he’s hurting more than usual, or if he should fetch a healer or comm Obi-Wan for advice.  But really, his master is no slower than usual when he walks, limping gamely along on his cane. It’s more to do with how, when Qui-Gon sits down to rest, his eyes close slowly and the lines in his face seem to grow deeper.  

Anakin stands by Qui-Gon’s place on the couch and asks hesitantly what the problem is, but it takes three tries before Anakin can get his master to hear his words.

“Just aches and pains, Ani,” Qui-Gon assures him.  But he doesn’t really smile when Anakin tries to joke him out of his mood.

It’s all my fault, Anakin thinks wildly.  He’s spent all this time coasting by, content to let Obi-Wan handle Qui-Gon, and now he doesn’t know how to help his master.  Should have been paying attention, he reproaches himself. Should have asked Obi-Wan before he left. Should have, should have...  Well, too late for that now, he thinks, forlorn. 

They have both grown used to Obi-Wan being there to do simple things, to notice when Qui-Gon begins the process of standing up from the couch, or when he is looking around for his datapad, and how Obi-Wan will have a hand under Qui-Gon’s elbow before Qui-Gon thinks to ask for help, how the datapad will handed over before Qui-Gon realizes it has gone missing.  

“He did a lot for us, didn’t he,” Anakin says, finally realizing.  He does not have to specify who he is thinking of.  

“Yes,” his master sighs, “he did.”

Qui-Gon has to think a bit before remembering to ask Anakin for assistance.  After a meal, he will move back to the couch from his chair in the kitchen, his cup of tea left forgotten on the table, then blink around the room moments later.  

“Er, Anakin-” he begins.

Anakin stands quickly, so fast his chair ricochets backwards across the floor.  “I’ll get it,” Anakin says hurriedly. “Don’t get up.”  

He spills a few drops of tea on the floor in the process, but Qui-Gon accepts the cup with gratitude.  “Thank you, Ani,” he rumbles while Anakin is hunting down a cloth to wipe up the mess. 

Tea, thinks Anakin, right.  I can do that, at least. And he throws himself into making tea with gusto.  

In the days afterward, Anakin makes dozens of cups of tea that Qui-Gon will thank him for absently, take a single sip of, and then abandon on tables and windowsills.  Preparing tea is calming, in a way. It’s something to do with his hands. And he can stand in the small kitchen area of Qui-Gon's quarters, watching the kettle heat up on Qui-Gon’s illegal heating coil until it steams over, and set the tea in the old chipped pot to steep.  Making tea becomes a schedule in itself.  Just when you've finished one, you can start another.

There are many canisters of tea in the cupboards.  Anakin investigates and finds several he likes. There’s a Noorian blossom blend, almost entirely gone, that Qui-Gon seems to prefer.  There is one blend that smells like pondwater. Must’ve gone bad, Anakin thinks. He scrunches up his nose and pours it down the drain.

“Thank you,” Qui-Gon says with baffled appreciation, when Anakin sets another cup of tea in front of him  “but I’m not sure this is entirely necessary. Despite what Obi-Wan may have told you, I don’t require tea in such vast quantities, Ani.”

“Are you sure?” Anakin says doubtfully.  “You sleep such a lot. You might need something to wake you up a bit.”

Qui-Gon chuckles a bit at that, and Anakin feels a little better.  “I’ll try to stay awake long enough to meditate with you tonight,” he says dryly, and Anakin makes a face of despair.  Obi-Wan had done his best, in their limited time together, to get Anakin interested in meditating. Anakin can’t understand why.  It’s like falling asleep, but more boring.  Obi-Wan actually likes to meditate, which tells you everything you need to know about him.  And even Qui-Gon, otherwise a sensible person, approves of the activity.  

All the same, Anakin can’t help but think that when Qui-Gon had first offered for him to become a Jedi, this wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind.  He had sort of been looking forward to having all of his master’s attention, once Obi-Wan left.  

It’s not that he’s jealous, he thinks. He doesn’t want what Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan have.  Not exactly. He would just like to be that close to somebody, here on Coruscant. The way Qui-Gon used to bend his head to catch Obi-Wan’s eye, and how they would exchange a look that he could never decipher.  He can see the way Qui-Gon’s head comes up when he overhears Obi-Wan’s name come up in conversation with another master or knight. He would like to be important to someone that way.

If he can’t be that, than he can settle for at least having an official status at the Temple.  He goes back to the Council chambers with Qui-Gon, this time to be told that he is no longer Qui-Gon’s ward, but a padawan in his own right.  

“This is important,” Qui-Gon explains to him later, back in their quarters.  He is carefully braiding the short strands of Anakin’s trimmed hair. “Hold this,” Qui-Gon says, and Anakin obediently pinches the end of the braid between his fingers.  

His master takes up a packet of red thread.  Qui-Gon winds a length of the thread around one thumb, then breaks the string off with a quick tug of his fingers.  He looks at the string for a long moment, rubbing absently at his chest. Then he turns to Anakin.  Qui-Gon ties the end of his braid with the length of thread, knotting it firmly and tucking the corners underneath the binding in a practiced movement.  

Anakin touches the braid.  The wisp of hair at the tip brushes his neck when he turns his head.  This will take some getting used to. “I thought there would be a ceremony,” he remarks.  In his limited experience, he has discovered that the unwritten law of the Temple is, There’s a ceremony for that.  

Qui-Gon chuckles.  “There is a speech, if you’d like to hear it.”  Anakin shows what he thinks of that by making a face.  His master continues, “The only part of it that you truly need to know, Anakin, is that this braid is a connection.  To the Force, first and foremost. And to the other Jedi who have come before you. That is what traditions are, after all.”  

“Oh,” he says.  He can’t stop touching the braid.  “Will you cut it, when I’m a knight?”

“Yes,” Qui-Gon answers.  He has a faraway look on his face.  Is it the pain again? Anakin wonders, distracted out of the moment by worry.  But the distance on his master’s face is gone before he can ask about it.  

“I look forward to that day,” Qui-Gon adds.  There’s a slight smile almost hidden by his moustache that gives Anakin a boost of confidence.

This is the first time that Anakin feels good about being here, that this is right , that his hair belongs in this braid and that he belongs in the initiates’ clothes he has been wearing since he arrived.  He feels awed, in the kind of way he had felt once when his mother had taken him to hear the holy women singing on the outskirts of Mos Espa.  He thinks Qui-Gon feels it too, this rightness.  

He was meant to be Qui-Gon’s padawan, Anakin thinks with some satisfaction.  This sense of belonging sort of makes it all worthwhile.

It’s a good moment.

But afterward, Qui-Gon takes himself back to their couch and lies down, one hand covering his face.  He looks as though he is resting, but Anakin can sense his pain, an ache that doesn’t appear to go away no matter how long his master keeps his eyes closed.

After that, he is an official padawan, with his own passcodes and datapads and official records.  Not much has changed, from Anakin’s perspective, except that he suddenly feels more adrift than he had even those first few weeks when Qui-Gon was in the halls of healing.  So what, he wonders, has changed now?  

It takes him a while to realize that though the structure of their quarters has not changed, he is missing a rather important pillar of support.  He had not realized, until then, how much Obi-Wan had done to make sure that Anakin was looked after, fed, given something useful to do.  Obi-Wan had, if not quite taken a shine to him, at least taken charge of him.  It was Obi-Wan who rounded up clean clothes for him, taught him to use the water showers - he still doesn’t like them, how can anyone stand being so wet is a mystery to him - and how to find the refectory.

Now he is floundering, trying to decide where to focus his attention.  Obi-Wan had kept them on a schedule. Meditations first, more for his and Anakin’s benefit than Qui-Gon’s, a morning meal.  Lessons for Anakin, to catch him up to the other Temple students, reading history and geography texts and explaining complicated and esoteric forms of arithmetic.  Obi-Wan had been in the process of teaching Anakin the Aurebesh before he had left.  

“Can’t you read Basic?” Obi-Wan had asked in horrified amazement early on, and Anakin had squirmed under his attention.

“Of course I can,” he had replied defensively.  “Most things. Almost everything, really. I just need more practice.”

There had been physical therapy and health visits for Qui-Gon, while Obi-Wan had accompanied Anakin to the gardens to, as he wryly put it, commune with the living Force.  This statement had always made Qui-Gon chuckle when he said it, though Anakin could never understand why.  Now he has a class schedule, but it does not occupy all his time.  And Qui-Gon still has his therapies, but he also finds a considerable amount of time to doze off on the couch.

Anakin has repaired an inefficient cooling unit and the broken door now chimes with the arrival of a new presence at the threshold.  Qui-Gon does not seem particularly grateful for this act of kindness. He usually covers his eyes with his hand whenever the door chimes to announce a visitor.   Anakin tries to find other things that need to be done around their quarters, but he only has so much patience for wiping down walls and tables, and they don’t make very many dishes between the two of them.

“What should I be doing?” he finally asks Qui-Gon, who has been drifting off on the couch again, and his master startles all the way awake.  The Council could have waited to send Obi-Wan away until after his master did not need quite so many naps, Anakin thinks privately.

“Well,” says Qui-Gon, struggling a bit to sit up.  “You might as well take yourself out and explore a bit.”

Anakin has.  He had spent the first few weeks of Qui-Gon’s extended stay in the halls of healing exploring as much of the Temple as he could get access to with Obi-Wan’s passcodes.  

“I’ve done that,” he says patiently.  “I’ve been to all the meditation gardens, and the archives, and the common areas.  Everywhere I’m allowed to go.” Obi-Wan had explained once that you had to be patient with Qui-Gon, when you wanted to make a point.  He likes to come to his own conclusions, Obi-Wan had said dryly.  He was right, Anakin thinks.  He can tell when Qui-Gon comes to a realization, because he sits up straighter and rubs at his untidy beard.

Qui-Gon sighs.  “I know this isn’t exactly what you pictured, Anakin, when I first gave you the idea of becoming a Jedi.  You were not expecting a master who could barely manage to walk to the Council chambers. This is hardly fair to you.  I’m afraid I haven’t done enough for you. For that you have my deepest apologies.”

“It’s not that,” Anakin protests, feeling horribly guilty for reasons he does not quite understand.  “I just - I keep feeling like I’m waiting for something.  Only I don’t know what. And I can’t rest until I figure it out.  I know you’re still healing,” he hastens to add. “I don’t mind, I really don’t.  I can wait as long as it takes.”

“I think,” admits Qui-Gon, “that we both have much to learn about waiting, Anakin.”  

So Anakin keeps on puttering around their quarters uselessly.  He finds other things that need to be fixed and spends long hours working on them, well into the night.  My nighthawk, Shmi had always called him. He’s never needed much sleep anyways. He likes staying up late, feeling the Temple settle around him.  The noise and bustle from all the other beings seem to fade from his mind, and he is left with only his own thoughts. In the quiet, he can finally get a sense of himself.

Qui-Gon is much the same way.  After dozing through the day, he will stay up well into the night, restlessly combing over datapads and paging through texts that he has the archivists deliver to him.  The two of them stay up long past the last bell most nights, Anakin fiddling with mechanical parts and electrical wiring and Qui-Gon reading through his catalog of philosophers, until Qui-Gon notices the time.

“Shouldn’t you be in bed by now?” he asks curiously, and Anakin looks up from the old FN-278 model droid he has been scavenging for parts.  

“Shouldn’t you?” Anakin counters, and his master sighs and motions with his hand.

“Off with you,” he says mildly, and Anakin puts down his spanner and heads to his room, sighing loudly as he goes. 

Anakin has a sleeping alcove of his own in their quarters.  He is sure that it formerly belonged to Obi-Wan, but there are no traces of his master’s former student there.  Obi-Wan must have emptied the room of his things at some point after they had returned from Naboo, perhaps while Qui-Gon had floated silently in tanks of bacta and while Anakin had spent an uncomfortable night in the healing wing under the careful watch of a novice healer who administered vaccines until Anakin’s arm ached and then removed his transmitter implant.  He does not know what Obi-Wan had done with his own possessions, because the room had been empty except for a bed and clothes hanger when Anakin had arrived.  Obi-Wan had slept on the couch while Qui-Gon convalesced in his own room and while Anakin adjusted to sleeping on his own for the first time in his life.  

That, Anakin thinks, might account for the way he can’t seem to sleep with the door closed.  He has programmed the door to stay slightly ajar at night, illuminating his room with two inches of light from the glow-panels of the common room that leak across his bed in pale stripes.  From the angle of his head on the pillow, he can see his master’s door.

“Many beings feel safer if they are able to close themselves in at night,” was all his master had said when he noticed.

Anakin had looked at him suspiciously.  “Then how do they see what’s coming?” he demanded.  On Tatooine, better to keep a line of sight to the exit at all times.  The Temple is a safe place, or so his master claims. Still, he sleeps better when he can see the exit.

Perhaps he ought to enjoy the privacy, a luxury in no large supply even here in the Temple.  But it feels wrong to be unsupervised. Dangerous, somehow. Anakin does not know what he might get up to, if he is allowed to do exactly as he likes.  In his previous life, he had always been watched, during the day by Watto, then by Shmi at night. His sleeping alcove in their slave quarters had no door, only a thin sheet strung in front of his bed.  He had always been able to see the low lights his mother had kept in their kitchenette, to glance around the sheet and see his mother asleep on her cot in the main room...

He shakes his head fiercely, blinking back a sudden onslaught of tears.  He can’t let his thoughts go down that path.  

Jedi don’t have attachments, he tells himself, over and over, until his eyes stop aching.  Haven’t you learned anything, being here? 

Anakin puts his clothes away neatly in the wardrobe before curling up on his sleep couch.  He can still see Qui-Gon sitting in the common room. 

If his master gets up to go to his own bed, it happens sometime after Anakin has fallen asleep.

Anakin’s master is trying to teach him patience.  It is an honorable goal, but a strenuous task.

“Let us meditate,” Qui-Gon says a few evenings later, and Anakin sighs.  The one thing Qui-Gon seems to have the energy to do at all times is meditate.

He knows he is supposed to sit still, but he can’t.  Or, rather, he knows he can make his body sit still. He thinks he might be afraid of what happens if he allows his mind to quiet down as well.  It’s easier when Qui-Gon lets him leave their rooms to go for a run, long laps around the garden paths or on the dirt path that encircles the arboreum.  It tires him out, empties his mind, but then leaves him wrung-out and too exhausted to think, or to feel. He keeps busy enough most of the rest of the time, with classes and Qui-Gon’s intermittent, unpredictable reading lessons and his own mechanical projects, letting his mind get cluttered up with ideas and plans.  Their meditation sessions have been a spectacular disaster so far. Anakin is prepared to let tonight be another one.

But tonight Qui-Gon has other plans.  Anakin settles his legs underneath him on the pillow, and Qui-Gon brings out a string of beads.  He hands the string to Anakin.

Anakin examines the string curiously.  It might be a necklace, he supposes. Each bead is different, some rough-hewn and asymmetrical, others with polished facets.  There are round beads so smooth they feel like septsilk. “What’s this?”

“This is a strand of meditation beads,” Qui-Gon tells him.  “Here, see. You hold them in your hand, use your fingers to feel each stone.  Concentrate on the feel of each one. Examine the colors and patterns. See, how this bead is green glass? It came from the moons of Pellinor.  I found it by the seas there.”

Anakin’s fingers trace the green glass bead, with its frosted tint of color.  “Did you find all these beads?”

Qui-Gon gazes down fondly at the string of beads.  “Some,” he says. “Others were gifts.” 

Anakin can see that the string is special to him.  “And I can use it?” he hazards. He has known since he was a small boy that it is better not to assume that anything is a gift. 

“It is for you to keep,” Qui-Gon acknowledges.  “Now. Let us meditate.”   

Learning to read is another exercise in patience.  Qui-Gon goes over the Aurebesh alphabet with him, time after time.  Anakin tries to speed through, thinking maybe if he can go fast enough, the words will fall into place, but he only trips over his own tongue.  He wonders darkly if anything was ever this hard for Obi-Wan. 

“It takes time,” his master says.  His eyes are kind. “Just go slowly.  Letter by letter.”

Anakin takes a deep breath and tries again.  

Qui-Gon takes a little more interest in Anakin after that.  He brings Anakin to the salles to watch other master-padawan pairs spar with their lightsabers and to provide a running commentary of what Anakin is watching.

“Watch Master Drallig,” Qui-Gon tells him.  “He will show you how sun mok is done correctly.  Padawan Tisko hasn’t noticed yet that Drallig has him cornered.”

They watch the matches go on for a while longer, until Qui-Gon is satisfied that Anakin understands what’s going on, and on their way back to their quarters, Qui-Gon is stopped by a Togrutan master Anakin doesn’t recognize.  

“Where is your padawan, Master Jinn?” says the master.  Anakin almost says, I’m right here, before he realizes the master is not asking about him.

Qui-Gon smiles.  “The Outer Rim, I’m afraid, since his knighting.”

The master peers at Anakin.  “And who is this?” he asks.

“My new learner, Anakin Skywalker," Qui-Gon replies, and the Togrutan master makes a sound of surprise. 

“I hadn’t thought you would take another apprentice after Kenobi.”

Qui-Gon puts his hand on Anakin’s shoulder.  “He is special,” he says quietly, and Anakin feels a rush of pleasure.  He had been thinking that Qui-Gon might have come to regret taking him on after all.  For all his talk about Anakin being the Chosen One, Anakin has lately felt more like a mistake, something Qui-Gon had tacked on his to-do list as an afterthought and then promptly forgot about.    

“May the Force be with you,” says the Togrutan master, and he and Qui-Gon part ways.

“Come, padawan,” Qui-Gon says absently, and begins to walk in his halting way down the corridor.  Then he jerks his head, seemingly startled, and blinks down at Anakin in bemusement.  

It’s a mistake, Anakin knows instantly.  He was not the one Qui-Gon was thinking of, when he used that word.  There are boundaries here, ones Anakin isn’t always aware of, and others that he is.  This is one. Qui-Gon calls him the nickname his mother gave him, or by his full name. Just as Anakin does not call him Master, but rather, Qui-Gon or simply Sir .  

They are an odd pair in some ways.  A teacher who isn’t called master , and a student who isn’t called padawan .  But these names mean different things to each of them, and though they have not spoken of it, there is an understanding between them, about these things.  

“I’m sorry,” Qui-Gon says at last.  He does not seem to know what to say.  

“It’s all right,” Anakin says.  “I know you didn’t mean me.”

Qui-Gon gives him a crooked smile.  “I ought to get used to saying it. You are my student, Ani.”

“You don’t have to call me that yet,” he says, risking a look up at his master.  “These things take time.”

“Yes,” Qui-Gon murmurs.  “Yes, they do.”

One day, Qui-Gon checks his messages to find a voice message from Obi-Wan.  Qui-Gon sets it to playing while he goes through his morning routine, watering plants and setting their table to rights and placing a pot of water on the heating coil.  

“Qui-Gon and Anakin, I arrived on Helios a tenday ago -”   

It’s nice to have Obi-Wan’s voice in the background, even if he is only telling Qui-Gon a story about negotiations on Helios Prime that makes absolutely no sense to Anakin himself.  Qui-Gon chuckles at some parts and frowns at others, and makes a tssk noise in his throat when Obi-Wan tells him the details of a trade summit he attended in his capacity as a guardian of the peace.  

Anakin is gratified to hear his own name mentioned.  “And Anakin, I thought of you when I saw the royal fleet - all Miossk-type class D starfighters.  You’d like to see one of those in action.  Smooth as septsilk.”

Obi-Wan ends with a footnote on the local flora that seems to please Qui-Gon.  “Take care of each other,” says Obi-Wan’s voice, hollow with distance.   

When the message winds down, Qui-Gon doesn’t say anything, but after a while he goes back over to the terminal and sets the message to playing again.  

“ Qui-Gon and Anakin- ”   

“He is doing well,” his master murmurs, almost more to himself than to Anakin.   He doesn't say much after that.  He just goes on standing by the terminal even after the voice message ends.

The next day, Qui-Gon does not rise with the morning bells.  Anakin doesn’t think much about it at first. His master is not always particularly punctual.  But when two hours go by and still Qui-Gon hasn’t risen, he starts to feel concerned.  

Help! He thinks frantically.  I don’t know what to do with him.  Obi-Wan would know how to help. He had always managed Qui-Gon before. 

He stews about it for a little while longer, but he can’t go on pretending nothing’s wrong.  And Obi-Wan told me to take care of him, Anakin reminds himself firmly, so that’s what I’m going to do.  So he waves his palm in front of Qui-Gon’s door.

Qui-Gon’s sleeping alcove is spare except for a sleep couch programmed to hover rather higher than usual off the floor, and a table that holds several half-drunk cups of water, pieces of flimsi and styluses, a bottle of medication, and one plant with drooping leaves.  He notices for the first time that there is a holocard on the table. So Qui-Gon has personal belongings, after all, in spite of being a Jedi. Anakin hasn’t ventured into his private room much. Obi-Wan mostly accompanied Qui-Gon there to help him change the dressing on the wound.

His master opens his eyes.  “I’m a bit slow getting up this morning, Ani,” Qui-Gon says apologetically.  His voice sounds dry with misuse. “Forgive me - I think I might rest a while longer.  Can you manage?”

“Of course, yeah,” Anakin says.  He asks, feeling doubtful, “Don’t you need help?”

“I’ll be all right,” Qui-Gon assures him, which is most likely a dismissal, but Anakin’s attention is caught by the holo.  

The capture is of Qui-Gon, looking much the same as usual, with his attention on something beyond the frame, with one arm crossed in front of his chest and the other stroking his moustache absently, and of Obi-Wan, much younger than Anakin has seen him, imitating his master’s stance with his learner’s braid draped over his upper lip.  Obi-Wan’s face is solemn, but there is a decided look of mischief in his eyes.

“Is that Obi-Wan?” he demands.

Qui-Gon coughs a bit.  “Yes, it is.”

Anakin takes a closer look.  “I didn’t think he had a sense of humor, that’s all,” he explains.

“Oh yes,” Qui-Gon says.  “He would say the most irreverent things.  He always made me laugh.”

He did? Obi-Wan? Anakin considers this point of view.  It is different from the one he has held of Qui-Gon’s former padawan.  Well, Anakin had always suspected a great deal of Obi-Wan’s usual cross expression had mostly to do with him.  

He lingers at the door for another moment.  “Sure you don’t need any help?”

“No,” Qui-Gon says in a voice that brooks no opposition, and Anakin beats a hasty retreat.

Anakin keeps a close eye on the door, but his master does not appear until late afternoon.  

Am I doing something wrong? he wonders, feeling helpless and hating it.  He can’t stand feeling like this - knowing something’s not right but not understanding how to fix it.  With machines, there’s a diagram to help you repair a problem, diagnostic tools to identify an issue. With people, there’s only words - and Anakin’s no good at that. 

When Qui-Gon finally emerges, it is almost evening.  Anakin is waiting, resigned, for Qui-Gon to notice him and to initiate their nightly meditation.

“Let’s try somewhere different tonight, Ani,” Qui-Gon says unexpectedly.  He opens the balcony door and beckons Anakin to follow him.

They have not used the balcony for quite a while.  But during the time it had been the three of them in these quarters, Qui-Gon had liked to come out here.  Far below them, Anakin can hear water cascading from a fountain.  Far above them, the transparisteel ceiling is open to the Coruscanti night sky.  If he cranes his neck to look directly up, he can see a small sector of the sky, crowded with ships and transports, and the few faint stars bright enough to be seen against Coruscant’s light.

Anakin feels like there is a string that goes from under his chest out into the galaxy.  He can never feel entirely present in his own body, because he will often feel a tug on that string that pulls him out of the present and back across the millions of black sky and stars back to Tatooine.  Perhaps his mother is thinking of him in those moments, worrying over him, remembering him with love and affection.  It comforts him to think that his mother might feel those same tugs, so he thinks of her the way he would pull on her sleeve when he was much younger, Notice me, remember me.  

He thinks, from the look on his master’s face, that Qui-Gon feels the same way.  They sit on the balcony and look up at the bright Coruscanti sky, too bright to see most stars, and yet Anakin thinks he can tell where two suns might be, for Tatooine, and Qui-Gon’s eyes are drawn to an empty corner of the sky.

Chapter Text

Their rooms keep sliding back into a state of disarray.  Anakin tries to keep the place neat and orderly, but he gets overwhelmed so fast that he gives up well before their quarters have reached any true peak of tidiness.  How did Obi-Wan do it? he wonders despairingly.  Anakin can keep the dishes washed and surfaces cleared, but there’s an air of neglect to their quarters all the same.   

Maybe it’s the way his own projects keep expanding out of his room and into the common areas, leaving a trail of wiring and tools and circuitry.  The piles are tidy, in their own way.  Anakin can look at them and the arrangements make sense to him, how he has spread out everything he needs to reconstruct the FN-278 droid’s optical regulator in neat groupings.  He’s almost finished reconstructing the modules.  This project keeps him up all night, until the first bell of the morning startles him out of his calm, methodical headspace into alertness.

His master comes out of his own room, takes a look at the tangle of wires and erratic droid limbs, and closes his eyes briefly.  

“It’s almost done,” Anakin reassures him. 

“That is encouraging news,” replies Qui-Gon, and avoids the common room by way of the kitchen, where he makes his own cup of tea and then vanishes to the balcony where, as he puts it, a being might experience a state of serenity.

“It’s just that I’ve got to have something to do,” Anakin explains to him later.  He has replaced the optics on the FN-278 droid and they’re working fine, despite the second-hand parts he’d scavenged from the tech storage closets, and he is feeling exceptionally pleased with himself.  That feeling causes him to bump around the common room, thoughtfully picking up stray parts he had missed the last time he had tried to clean up after himself.  “I think I’m bored,” he adds.

“Not for much longer,” Qui-Gon says ominously.  “You’ve passed all the initiate level classes, Anakin. You’ll be beginning a practicum rotation with the other padawans in a few days.  I sense that these classes will, er, be more of a challenge.”

His good mood deflates somewhat.  Anakin thinks resentfully that his master seems awfully pleased by the thought of getting Anakin out from underfoot.  He dumps the parts back in his room, not minding the mess.  “I thought I'd be learning from you once I passed those tests,” he objects.  “Not going back for more classes.”

“You will be,” Qui-Gon assures him.  “But all students learn from many masters during the course of their education.  I cannot teach you the finer points of intergalactic literature, after all.”

Neither, it becomes apparent, can the instructor on intergalactic literature.

“Anakin, really,” Qui-Gon says in exasperation when he sullenly offers up his midterm grade.  

“It’s hard to focus,” Anakin says morosely.  He can’t explain how it happens.  He goes to class, he opens the correct datafile and reads the assigned texts.  But nothing seems to stick with him.  The information just runs out of his mind like the water streaming from the garden fountains.  

The worst part is that all the material sounds familiar afterwards.  But when he tries to dig the memories out of his mind, it blurs together, leaving him frustrated and insecure.  He can’t stand feeling like that.  And what he hates even more is stopping the class to ask another pointless question again, and having the instructor and the other students stare at him like an insect crawling up the walls.  

I’m supposed to be the chosen one, he tells himself.  I’ve always been smart, smarter than most of all the other kids I’ve ever known, back home.  I can do this by myself.  So he keeps his mouth shut and swears to himself he’ll relearn the material back in his own quarters, on his own time.  Only that doesn’t seem to work, either.  As his grades reflect.

“Never mind,” Qui-Gon says, correctly interpreting the turmoil that must be reflected in the Force around him as frustration and a desire to do better.  “I’ll review the assignments with you myself.”

Qui-Gon keeps to his promise.  He finds the energy to recline on the couch and talk Anakin through his lessons, and Anakin will exhibit understanding of the texts in the moment, and then by the next day, the lessons have leaked out of his head again, leaving only the urgent desire to find a blueprint for a Vespertine starfighter and build a miniature model.  Right now.  This perplexes his master to no end.  

There are other lessons as well.  Qui-Gon observes Anakin closely over the following days, until Anakin begins to wish that he would return to his previously indifferent manner.  He can’t quite put it into words, but Qui-Gon is somehow less strict and yet more exacting than Obi-Wan.  

“Anakin,” Qui-Gon begins one day.  He is looking at Anakin intently.  Not quite critically.  “I think I have noticed that you refrain from using the Force.”

Anakin frowns.  “How can that be true?” he says dubiously.  “I can do everything you ask of me.  I can move stuff.  I can levitate.  Look.”  And to prove his own point, he throws himself into levitating everything he sees, tossing objects into the air haphazardly:  Qui-Gon’s cane and datapads, an almost-empty carafe of water, his own untidy heap of spanners and wires and power chips from the corner where he has been working on the Vespertine model.  

“Yes, I see,” Qui-Gon says patiently.  “I know you can use the Force when you are asked to do it.  You can perform any task I set to you.  But you won’t let yourself feel the Force.  You are closed off to it, in a manner that concerns me.”

Anakin hunches his shoulders.  He knows he shouldn’t, but he hates when Qui-Gon finds him lacking.  He’s only trying to teach me, he reassures himself, but his emotions spiral rapidly and bottom out in despair.  I’ll never be good enough to be here, he thinks.

Qui-Gon puts a calming hand on his head.  “Being a Jedi is more than being able to manipulate the Force.  You have not managed to balance yourself yet, Ani.  That is what we must work on, more than classes and lessons in literature and finance.”

“This is about meditation, isn’t it,” he says despairingly, and Qui-Gon sighs.  He is well aware of his padawan’s feelings regarding that particular activity.

“It does come down to that,” he says kindly.  

Anakin finds himself settling into a routine of sorts, which soothes him even as his mind loudly protests the tedium - but then one day, Obi-Wan sends them a message that sparks things up.

“What’s it say?” Anakin asks, looking up from his shaky handwriting.  Qui-Gon has him at the table, using a pad of flimsi and a stylus to practice the Aurebesh by hand.  

The message must be good news.  He can tell, because Qui-Gon begins to smile.  “Obi-Wan is returning from his mission on Helios,” his master answers, sounding more pleased by that than he has about anything that’s happened in the past several weeks.  Anakin perks up.

“When do you think he'll arrive?” Anakin asks excitedly, and even Qui-Gon, for all his outward serenity, looks flustered.   

“He’ll get here when he gets here,” Qui-Gon says rather tersely, a phase Anakin has heard many times from Shmi throughout his childhood.  That is one maxim that crosses cultures, Anakin reflects.  And yet, Anakin notices later, Qui-Gon is checking the days off almost as eagerly as Anakin is, despite his outward composure. 

“Only three more days,” Anakin reports one morning.  “He left Helios a week ago, and there’s only four days of hyperspace to get back to the Core.”  

“That was only an estimate,” Qui-Gon says repressively.  “Ships have frequent delays, and missions have a tendency to compound in problems towards the end.  And the Council might send him to another planet before he even makes it back to the Temple.  This is all to say, Anakin, that he might get here later than we imagined.  Do not lose focus on the here and now.”

Anakin groans.  He doesn’t think he can wait that long.  It’s strange.  He hadn’t thought that he would be so eager to see Obi-Wan again.  Maybe he’s just looking forward to having their routine, as far as that goes, shaken up a little.

Qui-Gon is in the kitchen, rooting through the cabinets and frowning over the tea.  “Have you any idea what happened to the Yarba tea?” he asks.  “I had thought there was an entire canister of it left still.”

“I think it went bad,” Anakin explains.  “It had a smell to it, so I poured it down the drain.”

“Oh, thank goodness,” murmurs Qui-Gon.  His hair hasn’t been combed in a while, Anakin notices guiltily.  There’s quite a few knots in the back of his head.  He tries to remember the last time Qui-Gon had worn his hair up in a smooth half-tie, and nothing comes to mind. 

“What about the sapir, Ani?” Qui-Gon is asking.  “I’d like to have more of it around.”

“Er, Qui-Gon-” Anakin begins, meaning to make a remark on his hair, and his master looks up.  Anakin quickly changes his mind.  Obi-Wan will be along soon to take care of that.  “Never mind.”

Things are easier between them, knowing Obi-Wan will be back soon.  Anakin settles down gratefully, secure in the knowledge that if anything is wrong with his master, Obi-Wan will know in an instant, and will take on the responsibility.  And Qui-Gon, for all his imperturbability, looks as though a weight has lifted off his shoulders.  

But Obi-Wan manages to surprise them both, and get back earlier than he had said.  They are drinking a morning cup of tea, Anakin building the to-scale interior cockpit of the Vespertine and Qui-Gon checking messages on his datapad, when the door panel chimes and the door whisks open before either of them can even register the noise.  

“Hello there,” Obi-Wan greets them from the threshold, and Anakin gives a shout of joy and runs to him.  He almost collapses on Obi-Wan, but Obi-Wan catches him before they can both go down.  

“Did you miss me?” Obi-Wan says teasingly.  Anakin looks up at him and he is surprised to see the absence of a frown between his eyes.  So maybe Qui-Gon was right about him having a sense of humor after all.

“I knew you’d get back early,” he grins.

“How did you know that?” Obi-Wan asks, a single eyebrow raised.

Anakin shrugs.  “I’m the chosen one.”

Surprisingly, it is Obi-Wan who laughs, and Qui-Gon who frowns at him.  

Qui-Gon begins to stand up stiffly, leaning against his cane.  Both Anakin and Obi-Wan start to move to catch his elbow.  But then Obi-Wan pulls back.  Anakin hesitates.  But Obi-Wan raises an eyebrow at him, so he forges ahead.

Qui-Gon looks at him quizzically but allows Anakin to be the one to help him up.  He gives Anakin a brief smile.  “Thank you, Ani.” 

Anakin can see Obi-Wan looking at Qui-Gon carefully.  Assessing.  But what he sees must reassure him, because instead of regaining that familiar pinched look around his eyes, Obi-Wan just sighs in relief.  

“My padawan,”  Qui-Gon greets him, gripping his shoulder with one broad hand.

“Not your padawan now,” Obi-Wan says mischievously.  “Your knight.”  

“My knight, then,” Qui-Gon says tolerantly.  He is still radiating his usual composure.  But he is smiling.  He manages to look somehow boyish, despite the gray in his hair.  

“You look well,” Obi-Wan says. 

“Anakin has me quite in hand,” Qui-Gon replies.  They might have just gone on smiling at each other forever.  But then Obi-Wan notices the state of the apartment.

“Is this how you’ve been living?”  Obi-Wan asks, incredulous.

Anakin looks around their quarters with new eyes.  Qui-Gon’s hair and beard are rather ragged.  The low table is cluttered up with datapads and tools. None of it looks very much like taking care of Qui-Gon, not with pieces of droid scattered everywhere.  Anakin has a moment of panic.

Maybe Obi-Wan won’t mind, he tells himself optimistically.  But no chance of that.  Obi-Wan pokes around their quarters, looking aghast.

“You can’t expect us to be as tidy as you were,” Qui-Gon remarks, over Obi-Wan’s faint horrified noises.  Obi-Wan must have finally caught a glimpse of Qui-Gon’s matted hair.  

“Anakin, really, you let this place get into such a state.  Go take those things to your room.”

“All right, all right,” he repeats, trying to pacify Obi-Wan and do what he says at the same time.  Qui-Gon never scolds, he realizes as he's collecting another armload of specs and wires.  And Obi-Wan scolds all the time, him and Qui-Gon both.  But Anakin doesn’t really mind being scolded by Obi-Wan.  It almost reminds him of his mother, in a way.  Something about it is soothing, in its own way, a private ritual.  It speaks of caring, he thinks suddenly, that you matter enough to someone else for them to make a fuss.  

Anakin sees how Qui-Gon’s gaze follows Obi-Wan as he moves around their quarters, relentlessly cataloging the disasters.

“You should rest,” Qui-Gon says.  “Have a chance to eat, clean up.”

Obi-Wan looks at him, almost uncertainly.  “I thought I’d come here first.  See how things have worked out for you two.”

“Well, we’re glad to have you,” Qui-Gon says.  This seems to be the right thing to say, because the tension in Obi-Wan’s shoulders melts away.

“Besides,” Obi-Wan adds, “I’ve got to give you your gifts.”

“Gifts?”  Anakin echoes.

“For you, master,” Obi-Wan says, and tosses a small dark blue rock in Qui-Gon’s direction.  Their master catches it easily, and smiles when he glances down at the rock in his hand.  

“Bluslate,” Qui-Gon notes.  “Quite difficult to find.  How’d you come by it, padawan?”

“An old woman in a village hurled it in my direction,” Obi-Wan grins.  “She was as glad for me to leave as I was.”

“You honor me,” says Qui-Gon dryly.  But the rock disappears into a pocket in his tunic, Anakin notes.

Obi-Wan has not forgotten Anakin. He has brought back a small handful of pebbles and fragments of shells.  Nothing of great value, just tokens.  Anakin thoughtfully places them next to the string of beads by his meditation cushion.  

“Oh,” says Obi-Wan, noticing the string.  “May I see, Anakin?”

Anakin nods.  He can see by the way Obi-Wan handles the string of beads with such great care that it is important to him.  “Qui-Gon said the green one came from Pellinor,” Anakin says, testing the waters.  But Obi-Wan is smiling.  

“Yes,” he says.  He points to another stone, small and black and glittering.  “And this came from a mine on Telos.”

“You found it,” Anakin guesses.  It’s not really a guess.  He can feel the truth of it already.  

“I did,” Obi-Wan confirms.  He points to another bead.  “And this one, and this one.” 

“Do you take a rock from every place you go?”

Obi-Wan looks over at Qui-Gon.  “Most places,” he answers.  “The important ones, anyway.  It’s a way to remember where we’ve been.”

And better than those tokens, Obi-Wan has brought back stories.  He allows Anakin to park himself at his side at the table and tells him of his mission, late into the evening.  Qui-Gon sits away from them, ostensibly puttering around in their kitchenette and watering his plants, but Anakin can feel  the bright, curious spark of his attention trained on them.  Finally he gives up even the illusion of pretending he is not just as riveted as Anakin is, and sits down at the table by Obi-Wan.

Anakin can tell the instant he loses Obi-Wan’s attention.  He does not mind.  It is enough to be remembered, and to have possessed his attention for a while.  

Anakin leaves them still sitting at the table, voices in a low murmur, their heads bowed together over the table in the bright morning light.

“I’m not tired,” Obi-Wan says, just before he falls asleep on their couch later that evening.  He is awake one moment, and in the next instant, he has closed his eyes and drifted away.

“Is he all right?” Anakin wonders.

“It’s difficult to readjust your sleep cycle after a mission,” Qui-Gon explains quietly.  Anakin can understand that.  It had been weeks before he could stay awake all day after returning to the Temple after Naboo.  “He never has slept well in hyperspace.  He always does better on Coruscant.”  His hand near Obi-Wan's head smoothes out the fabric of the couch.

“Can I help?”  

“Fetch a blanket from my room,” Qui-Gon says in a near whisper, and Anakin does.  They cover up Obi-Wan and leave him stretched out on the couch, sleeping heavily.

Then Qui-Gon has him drag his pillow out on the balcony for their meditation.  Anakin plays with the rocks Obi-Wan brought him.  Qui-Gon holds the small indigo stone between his thumb and forefinger, rubbing absently at the smooth planes.  He reaches inside his belt pouch and takes out a piece of candy - another gift from Obi-Wan - and passes it to Anakin, saying, “Here’s a meditation anchor for you tonight.”

“What are you doing?” Anakin asks Qui-Gon curiously.

“Spoiling your dinner,” Qui-Gon rumbles.  “Eat your candy.”

“Did you used to spoil Obi-Wan’s dinner?” Anakin wants to know as he peels off the wrapper.

“No,” Qui-Gon says.  “He would never let me.  Always insisted on regular meals instead.”

“What was he like, as a padawan?”

Qui-Gon’s eyes go to a faraway place.  “Diligent,” he says slowly, “focused.  So curious about everything.”

“I’m glad he’s back,” Anakin confides in his master.  “It’s funny.  When I first met him, I didn't think I was going to like him at all.”

“Oh? What happened?”

Anakin reflects, chewing slowly on the candy.  He had felt a connection to Qui-Gon from the start.  But it was Obi-Wan who had ended up taking care of him for months, who had stayed up at night with him when he cried in fear for Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan who came to check on him.  It had been Obi-Wan who had combed sand mites out of his freshly-cut hair on the voyage back from Naboo. 

“I don’t know.  I guess he just grows on you.”

Qui-Gon is wearing a small, private smile.  “That he does.”

That morning, Obi-Wan is still on their couch, still sleeping.  Anakin and Qui-Gon stand over him.  Anakin shrugs feverishly and Qui-Gon shrugs back, looking at a loss.  Do they wake him up, or...

“Let him sleep,” Qui-Gon says, very quietly.

“Okay,” Anakin whispers back, and they tiptoe around the common room all morning.  They both make sacrifices, for Obi-Wan’s sake.  Qui-Gon doesn’t whistle while he waters his plants, and Anakin even eats his breakfast in his room so that he won’t disturb Obi-Wan by chewing with his mouth open.  He still forgets not to do that, sometimes.  

Then he sits on the meditation cushion next to Qui-Gon and tries not to squirm too much.  Instead he blinks his eyes open and spends some time noticing things.  He is good at that, noticing things.  He focuses on a slight crack running up the wall, and how the cool tile floor is pitted and marked with scuffs.  

Obi-Wan frowns in his sleep, Anakin notices, a line of determination creased between his brows.  Then Qui-Gon opens his eyes, signalling the end of their morning meditation, and Anakin exhales in relief.  

He carries his boots out of their rooms when it is time for him to leave for his classes, padding across the floor in just his socked feet.  Qui-Gon is very carefully picking up a datapad from the floor near the couch when the door closes behind Anakin.

Obi-Wan is awake when he returns, though only barely.  He looks rumpled and messy with his hair falling in his eyes and the beginnings of a reddish-gold beard on his cheeks.  Anakin deposits the plates he has brought back from the refectory on the table and methodically begins doling out three portions.  

Obi-Wan comes to join him at the table.  He is running a hand over his chin.  “I should shave.”

“Don’t shave,” Anakin says.  He decides not to wait for his master to join them, and starts eating.  “He likes the beard.”

The hand stills.  “He said that?”

“No,” says Anakin around mouthfuls of ranji noodles.  “I just know.  I can tell.”

“He never said anything like that to me.”

“He wouldn’t,” Anakin explains.  “He doesn’t want to influence your decisions.  Or something.  Are you going to eat that?”

“Hmm,” Obi-Wan says, but he passes over his muja muffin.  

Anakin consumes the muffin with enthusiasm, and Obi-Wan closes his eyes in a pained sort of way.  “Close your mouth, Anakin.”

“Okay, okay.”

While he on Coruscant, Obi-Wan keeps their apartments relentlessly clean and takes Anakin for grueling training sessions in the salles.  Anakin does not miss the way these outings coincide with Qui-Gon’s more difficult days.  He thinks back to their first few months together, when Obi-Wan had taken him for long walks around the Room of a Thousand Fountains and to explore the market stalls of CoCo Town.  He can see now that those must have been times when Qui-Gon needed rest and quiet.  

Obi-Wan is waiting for him when Anakin returns from his classes.  “Care to visit the salles?” he asks.  

“Sure,” he says.  It does not escape Anakin’s notice that Qui-Gon has gone to lay down in his room.

“I thought I’d see how your Shii-Cho is coming along,” Obi-Wan explains, brushing past him into their practice room and turning on the glow panels.

A likely story, Anakin reflects with a sniff, but he’ll take it.  He’s reasonably confident that Obi-Wan likes him for his own sake these days.  He grins and pulls on his blindfold.  Obi-Wan watches him deflect bolts until his arms ache, and then drills him mercilessly on his forms.     

“You’ll get there,” he counsels, and Anakin groans.  “Go put up your training 'saber back in the supply closet.”  

Anakin can feel himself bristling.  He stomps over to the closet and takes his time putting the lightsaber away.  He doesn’t like to be told to do things.  He doesn’t mean to, but he finds himself resisting even Qui-Gon’s mindless orders.  Not that Qui-Gon does that often - he is usually more mindful.  But Obi-Wan never thinks twice about bossing him around, and he finds himself digging in his heels, even though he really wants Obi-Wan to like him.

Qui-Gon is livelier, with Obi-Wan around.  It pleases Anakin to no end.  They all go to see Obi-Wan sparring against the other knights and senior padawans. 

Anakin looks at his master in surprise when Qui-Gon heads to the door with him, balancing carefully with his cane.  His master's hair is neatly combed, tied back in a loose braid and draped over his shoulder.  Obi-Wan must have helped him with that.  “You’re coming?”

“Of course,” Qui-Gon remarks.  “I trained him, after all.  Now this is my reward.”

“Watching him practice?” Anakin asks skeptically.

“You’ll see,” Qui-Gon promises.  And Anakin does.

He comes back to his rooms, shaken to the core, his confidence bruised as though he’d taken a fall himself.  Obi-Wan isn’t just good.  He moves like he is on the ege of a precipice, carefully balanced, solid on that edge.  Not a step out of place.  He hadn’t seen Obi-Wan train before.  He had heard that it had been Obi-Wan who was the one to defeat the Sith he and Qui-Gon had encountered on Naboo.  But he had never really believed it until now.  

“You taught him to do all that?” Anakin asks Qui-Gon weakly.  He doesn’t see how it’s possible for a human to do the kinds of things he has just witnessed.

“I did.”

“D’you think I’ll ever be able to use a lightsaber like that?”

“Almost certainly.”

“You mean it?”

“You’ll have to pass Core history first,” Qui-Gon says placidly, and Anakin groans.

Anakin feels better with Obi-Wan around.  Or he would have, if he still did not feel such a restless, shifting unhappiness in himself.  It comes and goes.  Mostly he can distract himself from noticing it.  Often Obi-Wan can wear it out of him in a training session.  But then again, sometimes that feel slides back up to the front at night, when he can’t escape from it.  

Anakin wakes that night again, from another dream about Tatooine.  The funny thing is, he thinks, sleepily rubbing at his hair and waiting for his heartbeat to calm back down, is that the dreams aren’t horrible.  It would be easier if they were, somehow.  If he could explain his own unhappiness away because of nightmares, awful things happening to Shmi, himself unable to prevent them.  

But the dreams are just of heat, and sand blasting in his face, and his mother, moving quietly around their home, humming softly.  He wakes from these dreams aching all over, down to the bone, and with tears sliding out of his eyes.

He hadn’t had a problem with dreams, at home.  He would pull the sheet across his small sleeping alcove and settle on his mattress and go on a dreaming spree.  He’d come up with all kinds of things in his wild imaginings.  In reality, Anakin had not seen how he could bear to leave his mother, but when you’re only dreaming, it’s perfectly all right to set off on an adventure without a single backwards glance, so his dreams all started off with him leaving his home.  A gruff but honest spacer offering him a job on a transport bound for Takodana, maybe, and the adventures he would have battling pirates and traveling the stars. Or there were dreams where he set off over the ridges towards the wastelands and coming across the ruins of a ship that he would set to working, and then escape from Tatooine.  And there were other, more mundane dreams, about podraces and winning a raffle at the midsummer festival and finding lost treasure buried just beyond Mos Espa. 

But the most important dream was the last one he’d picture at night before falling asleep: Coming back home after a long time away, Anakin himself older and stronger and the pilot of his own ship, and seeing the look on his mother’s face when he told her she was free.  

Anakin used to tell his mother all his dreams.  He had asked his mother once what she dreamed about. 

“There is no place in my life for dreams,” his mother had laughed.  “I just live, Ani.” 

Anakin had thought about it, then said, “Well, I think I'll keep dreaming - I like to.”  Then he had glanced at his mother uncertainly. “Is that wrong?” 

“Keep your dreams, dear one,” Shmi had said, her voice fond and patient in the way Anakin always remembered her after he'd left home.   

In the end, what had happened those last few days on Tatooine was stranger than most of the dreams he’d bothered to come up with, even when he was much younger.  Lost queens, winning the Boonta Eve Classic, being taken under the wing of a Jedi master.  

Well, he’d gotten what he’d dreamed of, after all.  You’d think he could manage to be pleased about it.

After waking up like that, Anakin can’t go back to sleep.  He pulls on an undertunic and pads out to the common room.

Obi-Wan is still awake, reading his datapad on the couch.  He keeps saying he is still on Helios time.  Anakin isn’t sure if he believes it or not.  That’s what Obi-Wan had said to turn down an invitation to join Master Yoda for tea the day before.  But he’s grateful all the same for Obi-Wan’s presence.  

Obi-Wan looks up.  “Are you all right?” he asks, very quietly.

Anakin scrubs at his eyes fiercely.  “Yeah.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

He shakes his head.  He finds Shmi hard to talk about.  He wants to keep her memory close, carefully folded up like a worn letter in his heart. He can't bring himself to talk about her.  Not even to Qui-Gon.  

But it’s late, and his body suddenly remembers that he is tired, and he sidles up on the couch next to Obi-Wan and lets his head fall back against the cushions, and drifts back to sleep.

One afternoon Obi-Wan disappears.

“A meeting with the Council,” Qui-Gon explains.  “He’s delivering his report.  Among other things.”

“What other things?” Anakin wants to know, but Qui-Gon shoos him away, citing a need for peace and quiet.  Anakin obliges by heading to the gardens and turning fifteen back handstands in a row to work his energy out.

He finds out soon enough what other business Obi-Wan has with the Council.  The next morning, he wakes up to find Obi-Wan standing over him, cheerfully flicking his socked feet hanging off his bed.

“I’ve got to move into my new quarters,” he explains.  “Care to help?”

“Sure!” he agrees, and he helps Obi-Wan load up the containers from Qui-Gon’s room and haul them halfway across the Temple to his new quarters.  When they get there, they drop the boxes on the floor of the empty room and poke around a bit.  There’s not much to see, frankly.  Obi-Wan's new quarters consist of a single room for sleeping and living in, and a sink and mirror.  There isn't even a private refresher.  Qui-Gon’s rooms are much nicer, in Anakin’s opinion, and he flops on the bare floor and tells Obi-Wan so.

“Qui-Gon looks like he’s doing well,” Obi-Wan says pensively.

A thought occurs to Anakin.  “Were you worried about us, when you were gone?”

Obi-Wan is opening the blinds on the single small window in the room.  “Yes, I was.  I wanted to be here, to help Qui-Gon, to help you.  I did not want to leave.  How is he, really?”

“He’s all right.”  Then Anakin puts a little effort into really thinking about it, from his vantage point on the floor.  “He still hurts a lot.  He feels thin, in the Force somehow.”

“I know.  I’ve felt that as well.”

“He’s happier when you’re here,” he tells Obi-Wan.  It’s true.  He mentally calculates up all the times he’s seen Qui-Gon laugh in the past few weeks.  He asks, “Do you have to leave again?  He does better with you.”

Obi-Wan looks resigned.  “I must go where the Council sends me.  You know that, Anakin.”

“Yeah, I know.  But couldn’t you tell them Qui-Gon needs you?”

“I’m afraid that’s why I must go.”

Anakin sits up and shakes his head.  He feels tired and bemused, and angry on Qui-Gon’s behalf.  “I don’t understand.”

“It’s a hard lesson to learn.”

“Why do you have to go?” he demands.  “I need you.  He needs you.  I know you don’t care about me,” he says hurriedly, seeing Obi-Wan start to shake his head,  “But don’t you care about him?”

“Anakin, staying any longer would not help you or Qui-Gon,” Obi-Wan says.  “Qui-Gon has healed, and you are settled.  It’s time for the two of you to learn to work together.  For you to begin the work of learning how to be a padawan, and for Qui-Gon to learn how to be your master.  To stay with the two of you would only get in the way of that.  And I have my own work to do."

Anakin feels Obi-Wan's hand lightly brush his shoulder.  He shrugs it away.  

“And I do care for you,” Obi-Wan says.  “You and Qui-Gon both- more than you can understand.  You’ll see, one day.”

Anakin keeps shaking his head, stubborn and angry, stricken with grief all over again.  “I won’t.  I could never understand.  I don’t want to understand.”

“There’s your problem then,” Obi-Wan says lightly.  “I think it would be very hard to teach you something you didn’t want to know.  You and Qui-Gon have quite a task ahead of you.”

Anakin doesn't respond.  He can still feel Obi-Wan's hand, hovering close by.  He stubbornly ignores it.

After a while, he hears Obi-Wan sigh, and turn away.

It takes Anakin a while to realize that when Obi-Wan is there, he’s there , with Anakin and Qui-Gon in their quarters.  He might leave to report to the Council, or to run errands, but for the most part, when he is at the Temple, he is spending his time with them.  

It’s hard for Anakin to notice the significance of that, when having Obi-Wan around simply feels normal, harkening back to Anakin’s early days in his master’s quarters, with Qui-Gon still recovering in the halls of healing and Obi-Wan watching over him in their quiet rooms, or the time after that, with Qui-Gon returned to them and Anakin having moved into the second bedroom.  

Anakin doesn’t quite get it until he leaves his room in the middle of the night for a cup of water and finds Obi-Wan asleep on the couch again, just like all the nights before, when Qui-Gon and Anakin had needed him so.  When he had taken Anakin to all his classes and brought Qui-Gon all his meals to the corner of the couch where Qui-Gon had spent the majority of his time.  

Now Obi-Wan doesn’t have to do those things anymore.  Still.  He has chosen to stay with them, to be here with them instead of leaving to sleep in his own newly assigned quarters.  Obi-Wan is one of those people who you don’t seem to notice much when they’re there, but you feel their absence when they leave, how many things they do without acknowledgement.  Anakin finds himself thinking of his mother.  They are both the sort of people who take care of others quietly, without making a fuss about how hard they're working or asking for anything in return.

Anakin stands still for a moment.  Looking at Obi-Wan stretched out across the couch, his bare feet hanging over the edge, his arms folded across his chest and his chin tucked to his collar.  Thinking, He doesn’t have to be here.  But he is.  

He gets his cup of water and swallows it down in three thirsty gulps.  Then he goes back to his room and fetches one of the blankets off his bed and tiptoes back out to the common area.  

Obi-Wan briefly opens his eyes and looks at him as Anakin drags the blanket over Obi-Wan’s legs.  “Thanks,” Obi-Wan says.  There is a note of surprise in his voice.  

It is colder without the extra blanket, but their quarters feel better when Obi-Wan is here.  Worth it, Anakin decides, and he burrows down underneath the sheets and blankets and falls back asleep.

Obi-Wan is gone again a few days later.  Anakin comes out of his room one morning and finds his master winding a length of chestnut-colored braid around his fingers.  

“Did Master Obi-Wan leave?” he asks, though he can already tell.

“Yes,” his master says absently.  “A little while ago.  He said to tell you goodbye.”

He might have waited and told Anakin himself.  But Anakin is not particularly bothered.  He can tell now how Obi-Wan hates to have a fuss made over him leaving.  Anakin knows he will not be back for some time.  

That night when they sit down together to meditate, Anakin’s master is holding the length of reddish braid.  Anakin sees how he winds the braid around his fingers, then traces down the braid from beginning to end, slowly moving over each knot and bit of string.  When he reaches the end, his master winds the braid into a knot, then his broad-knuckled fingers close around the braid until it is hidden from sight.

“He worries about you,” he tells his master, when they both emerge from their mediation. 

“I know,” Qui-Gon responds. 

Chapter Text

Anakin had almost expected his master to drift back to listlessness after Obi-Wan left again.  Therefore he is taken by surprise when Qui-Gon shows no inclination of returning to his previous state of inaction.  His master is restless and sharp-eyed in the days that follow, noticing everything and seemingly rather displeased by it all, from the state of their quarters to his own appearance.  

Qui-Gon tosses his cane across the common room one morning.  Anakin watches wide-eyed.

“Useless thing,” Qui-Gon grumbles.  He takes to groping through their quarters, leaning against the walls and gripping the edges of the furniture to navigate instead.  

The cane is left where it fell for several days.  Then, in a fit of curiosity, Anakin retrieves the cane and disassembles it.  A simple design, a gravity well tucked inside a durasteel rod for strength, covered with a natural driswood casing, meant to offer additional balance and support within the veneer of nature.  Anakin has noticed how the Jedi seem to prefer natural items, when they can be acquired, rather than plastoid or durasteel: Natural fibers for their garments; genuine leather for their boots, when available; real wood used to build even the shabbiest of furniture for their quarters.  Qui-Gon had once mentioned that this tendency speaks of a desire to be constantly reminded of the living Force.  

He runs his fingers over the driswood of the handle, a dark brown, almost black, patterned with ochre-streaked grain.  The wood is beautifully smooth, glossy to the touch.  Anakin tampers with the gravity well, wondering if it might be malfunctioning, but he doesn’t find anything that would make Qui-Gon wish to fling it across the room.  

He shrugs and puts the cane back together, then leaves it leaning up against the wall in an empty corner of the room, where it begins to attract dust.  

It’s a mystery.  So is the way Qui-Gon has taken to stretching out on the floor, his arms and legs outstretched.  He is deeply concerned the first time he returns from his classes to find Qui-Gon prone on the floor.  

“Are you all right?” Anakin demands with real alarm.

“I am perfectly fine, Ani,” Qui-Gon says serenely from the floor.  

He hovers over his master, hands on his knees.  “Do you think you can you get up by yourself?” Anakin asks, still worried.

“Yes,” answers Qui-Gon, who makes no actual effort to move.  “When the Force allows.”

Anakin stands up and lets him be.  He thinks Qui-Gon might be wearying of requiring constant assistance.  There is an expression on his master’s face these days that he can’t ever quite understand.  He finds himself thinking of how slaves’ faces look when they arrived in Mos Espa, brought in from other parts of Tatooine or even offworld, how blank and still their faces looked for the first few months.  As though they were caught in a dream and not entirely awake.  And then how gradually most would wake up, growing restless and angry, though some of the new slaves had never seemed to wake up at all.  He had supposed that it was easier for them to stay blank.  Qui-Gon at times reminds him of someone waking out of a dream, only to find that nothing is the same.  

Accordingly Anakin does his best to stay out of his way.  But it is not so easy in their shared quarters.  

Qui-Gon graduates from stretching on the floor to moving through slow, open-handed lightsaber forms on the balcony.  This is how it comes to be that he finally catches a glimpse of Qui-Gon’s wound for the first time.  

Anakin is just returning from his afternoon classes, sliding into a seat at the table to divest himself of his datapads, styluses, and various pieces of sticky flimsi he’s been using to outline his plans for reconstructing an older medical droid he’s found in the surplus room of technical services when Qui-Gon comes in from the balcony, balancing unsteadily on his feet and breathing harshly.  

Anakin’s eyes are drawn to the scarring on his chest, the raised red skin there with the scar tissue bubbling out in a deceptively neat round mark.  He has never seen Qui-Gon’s injury from the battle with the Sith before.  It has always been covered by a dressing or tunics.    

“How was your practicum with Master Tilba today?” Then Qui-Gon intercepts his stare.  “Ah,” he says.  

He doesn’t seem embarrassed, only faintly rueful, so Anakin risks a question.  “Is that from - well, you know.”

“It is,” Qui-Gon replies.  He sits down at the table across from Anakin.  

“Does it hurt?” Anakin asks, fascinated by the way the skin tugs as Qui-Gon reaches to pull the tea pot towards him from his seated position.  He thinks about how it must feel to be burned like that, to feel something that hot tear through skin and bone, and shivers.

“At times,” Qui-Gon acknowledges.  “My range of movement is greatly diminished.  It does make tasks more difficult.”  

Anakin nods.  He has seen how Qui-Gon winces when he attempts to raise his left arm overhead.  

“Does it frighten you?” his master asks.

Anakin tears his eyes away from the wound.  “No.  It’s just - that must have hurt.”

“Quite a lot,” Qui-Gon agrees.

Anakin is noticing again how thin his master feels in the Force at times.  On Tatooine and Naboo, Qui-Gon had been solidly balanced, firmly a part of life.  Now he feels nebulous.  It rattles Anakin to encounter that in Qui-Gon, who had always seemed larger than life.  Now he wonders if this is what the other Jedi mean when they talk about being unbalanced in the Force.

Is that what I feel like, to them? he wonders, for the first time, if he might feel that way in the Force to the other Jedi, to Master Windu - not thin like Qui-Gon, but not quite right either, lacking the balance that Qui-Gon always seems to be talking about.  It is an unpleasant thought, so he banishes it from his mind.

Qui-Gon’s sharp eyes are turned more often to his padawan’s direction now, and Anakin is now finding himself under the scrutiny of his master more often than not.  Qui-Gon has him working on using the Force to perform delicate, intricate tasks - using the Force to move a miniature silver ball through a complicated pattern in the air, or to take apart an old chrono and put it back together using only the Force.  

Anakin is finding there is a good deal of difference between levitating objects and using the Force to manipulate them.  Today his goal is to use the Force to manipulate a series of latches and locks to open a heavy silver box.

His lack of skill frustrates him to no end.  “Would you like some advice?” Qui-Gon offers.  His master’s brow is lined with a deep frown as he observes Anakin struggling through his task.  

“No, I’ve got it,” Anakin says through gritted teeth.  He wants to do it himself - he will do it himself.  The trick is, he has discovered, is that he must hold several of the latches open at the same time in order to open the box.  This complicates things somewhat.  

He keeps trying, more to prove to himself that he doesn’t need Qui-Gon’s assistance than from a desire to complete the task.  Still, the box remains stubbornly latched.

“That was a complete waste of time,” he grouses, releasing his hold on the latches and flinging himself on the floor.  

“Practice is never a waste of time, Anakin.  However, I think we cannot accomplish much in these sessions until you decide you wish to learn from me,” Qui-Gon says pointedly.  

Anakin is taken aback.  “I do want to learn from you,” he protests hotly.  Then he reconsiders.  He wants, yearns for Qui-Gon’s respect and admiration and praise.  But he hasn’t yet really wanted to learn anything from him.  

He thinks about Obi-Wan, who had probably never needed instruction or assistance from Qui-Gon during his time as a padawan, and who doesn’t seem to require praise and admiration at all.

He doesn’t need any of that, Anakin thinks with a flash of insight.  He wants something else from Qui-Gon.

“You have a mother who loved you, nurtured you.  Therefore you don’t require these things from me, Ani,” Qui-Gon explains when Anakin asks him about it.  “So, yes, he looks to me for something you do not.”

The sharp look in his master’s eyes dims with his words.  That faraway look is still there by the time Anakin unlatches the last of the locks and opens the box in triumph.

There isn’t much of the Temple that he has access to that Anakin hasn’t explored thoroughly by now.  He has found a handful of particular spots he frequents.  There is a perch on a balcony edge over the main hall, where he likes to curl up in and watch the Jedi walking sedately or rushing or pacing underneath, and there is a corner of the technical department where Miro lets him tinker with broken equipment, and another quiet corner in the rock gardens that reminds him of Tatooine.  In his private places, he sits and thinks about what Obi-Wan had told him about learning to work with Qui-Gon.  

Aren’t we doing that already? he wonders.  He thinks about their cluttered quarters, Qui-Gon’s spot on the couch he hardly ever ventures from, surrounded by datapads and holocrons from the archives, and Anakin himself on the floor, engrossed in his own activities.  They seem to be on parallel flight patterns, always in eyesight of one another but their paths not quite seeming to align or intersect - that must be what Obi-Wan had meant.

Then Master Windu catches him in his corner on the balcony above the main hall.  Anakin feels a jolt of fear rush through him.  

“Does your master know your whereabouts, padawan?” Master Windu inquires.

“Yes, sir,” Anakin answers, trying not to sound sullen.  He wants Master Windu to think of him as friendly and eager to learn, two qualities he does not actually feel like demonstrating at the moment.   “He likes for me to get out and stretch my legs.”

Master Windu deliberates on this statement wordlessly.  “How is Qui-Gon?” he asks then, which surprises Anakin so much that he almost falls from his perch on the balcony edge.  

“Fine, I think,” Anakin replies with caution.  

“Excellent,” Master Windu says in return.  He has not taken his eyes off Anakin the entire conversation.  “Perhaps you’d better find another meditation spot,” he goes on.  “You are alarming some of the masters.  You might return after we are assured that you have mastered the art of self-levitation.”

“Of course, sir,” Anakin gasps.  He slides off the balcony railing and flees.

It is perhaps not surprising, after that interview, that the following day, Qui-Gon surprises him by waiting at the threshold of their door as Anakin returns from his classes.   

“Come, Anakin,” he says.  “I wish to show you something.  I think you’ll like this.”

It’s a slow journey through the Temple, because Qui-Gon has not brought along his cane.  Anakin keeps pace beside his master as they inch along the corridors, Qui-Gon pausing to lean against the wall every so often and pant for breath.  But at last they make it to a quiet hallway.  Qui-Gon presses his thumb against the scanner and the door slides open, and then Anakin is in the midst of a rainshower.

He stares up at the high ceiling of the room, trying to make sense of it, while his tunics become damped underneath the light shower of cool water.  There are delicate-fronded ferns and vines climbing up the walls, and several smooth rocks laid out in a circle among all the greenery.

“The rain gardens,” Qui-Gon remarks.  “Primarily used as meditation gardens for aquatic species of Jedi.  I thought you might find it unusual.”

Anakin is holding his hands up to the rain, allowing the water to pool up in his cupped palms.  “It’s amazing,” he breathes.  He has seen rain twice before, both times on Naboo, when a sudden rainstorm had painted the streets of Theed with little rivers of water, and another brief shower one afternoon spent waiting for Qui-Gon to stabilize enough to be transported back to Coruscant.

It is clear enough that Qui-Gon has brought him here for the sole purpose of meditation, but his master does not seem to mind when Anakin proves too enamoured of the rain to close his eyes.  Qui-Gon perches on one of the smooth rocks and falls into a light, breezy trance as his hair and tunics are slowly soaked.

That’s gotten easier for him, Anakin noticies.  His master feels more robust in the Force here.  Anakin can distinguish how Qui-Gon is drawing on the plant life surrounding them to give him the strength and energy to touch the Force.  

Anakin lets water stream down his cheeks and slip through his fingers and doesn’t try to meditate at all, but after a while he closes his eyes and feels the drumming of raindrops beating down on his head, and soon after that he is not thinking of anything but the cool water running down his chin and catching in his eyelashes.  

When he opens his eyes, Qui-Gon is smiling down at him, his eyes crinkled at the corners.  Anakin grins back, pleased to be the recipient of his master’s approval. 

“I thought you’d enjoy that,” Qui-Gon says.

“It’s wonderful,” Anakin agrees devoutely.  

My mother would love this.

The thought sours the experience.  Before he can halt his thoughts, Anakin is remembering the times Shmi had talked about the rain.  She had not always lived on Tatooine, and she remembered rain from her time on another world.  Shmi had described it for him since he was a baby, lulling him to sleep on dusty hot nights with a funny, rhythmic song about rain with little hands and feet tapping at the roof.

He no longer feels awed, only wet and cold.  Anakin finds himself shivering in his wet tunics, and his master notices.

“Perhaps we overstayed,” Qui-Gon says.  He uses Anakin’s shoulder as a means to help himself to his feet, and then they begin the slow, shuffling journey back to their rooms.  

Chapter Text

In his dreams, his mother calls for him, reaches out for him, her face desperate with worry.  My son, my son, Shmi pleads, and in his dream Anakin turns and runs away.

When Anakin awakens, the tears on his face burn like desert sand under the soles of his muslin-wrapped boots.  

Go away, leave me alone, he thinks wildly.  You told me I could go—so let me go!  

The tears continue to come, even though he’s awake.  Shame thrashes in his chest like a batha caught in a sarlacc’s trap.  How could Anakin turn his back on her, even in a dream?

I wouldn’t, he swears to himself.  I would never, could never.   But Anakin knows from experience that the look on Shmi’s face will haunt him for the rest of the day. 

He has awakened far too early; the morning bells have not yet begun to chime.  So he tries to distract himself in his room.  He checks his datapad for messages and takes a brief tour of the Temple’s databases.  Fiddles with the wiring on a burnt-out motor for a mouse droid that Miro had allowed him to keep.  And then he crouches on his sleep couch and tries to levitate again.

He’s been thinking about the balcony, and Master Windu’s words, but he still hasn’t figured out how levitation works.  He has seen many other Jedi perform this feat, even initiates much younger than Anakin are able to hover motionlessly in the air, holding themselves aloft by their own power.  

Easy! Anakin had thought with confidence, and he had thrown himself into the attempt, grabbing at the air with the Force that came so easily to him.  But no amount of strength of will has worked to hold him aloft.  It gnaws at him, that there are Jedi able to perform a feat that he cannot learn.

This morning he experiments by taking wild leaps off his sleep couch, throwing himself into the Force and seeing how long he can remain in the air.  He can manage only a few seconds at most.  Anakin holds the fall for four seconds before crashing to the floor in a tangle of limbs.  

He is sore and limping and bleeding slightly from the head by the time he drags himself out to the main rooms.  Qui-Gon is already up, reading his datapad at the table.

“I thought you must be up,” Qui-Gon begins, setting down his datapad.  Then he catches sight of Anakin’s head.  “For the Force’s sake—what have you done to yourself, Anakin?”  

“Nothing,” Anakin says evasively, ducking out of his master’s reach.  All he has to show for his attempts at levitation are head wounds and bruises all up and down his spine.  Maybe there’s something he does want Qui-Gon to teach him after all.  “Do you think I could learn about levitating?” he asks in sudden hope.

Qui-Gon raises a brow at him.  “Could you learn? Oh, I’ve no doubt, if you wanted to.  But you only get there by having a clear and balanced mind.  That means—”

“Meditation,” he recites glumly along with Qui-Gon.  “I should have figured.”  

“Why do you want to learn?” Qui-Gon asks.

There’s no reason not to tell him.  Still—Anakin sidles away from the question.  He doesn’t think he’ll get in trouble over the balcony situation, if he hasn’t so far.  But for some reason he doesn’t want Qui-Gon to know his real reasoning.   He shrugs.  “I just want to know.” 

“Well, you’ve cut yourself rather badly.  Come here.”

Qui-Gon bandages him up in the ‘fresher.  He takes out the first aid kit and searches through it, muttering softly, until he finds the tube of bacta.  It’s sort of nice, having Qui-Gon take care of him this way.  It reminds him of how he had originally wanted Qui-Gon to be his father, at their first meeting on Tatooine.  He had wished passionately that the strange outlander would fall in love with his mother and take them both away, far from Mos Espa and the slave quarters.

Anakin wonders again what it would be like to have Qui-Gon for a father instead of a master.  It might be easier in some ways.  Then again, Anakin decides, Qui-Gon is such a complicated person.  Maybe their relationship would be just as complicated, no matter if Qui-Gon was Anakin’s teacher or his father.  

He thinks back to the Jedi he had met on Tatooine, with a keen look and steady stance and arms folded across his chest as he gazed at a rising sandstorm in the distance.  Qui-Gon no longer resembles the man that Anakin had so admired, though he looks far better than he has since Naboo.  He is moving more easily and walking further distances on his own without pausing to catch his breath, but there is still something that makes him look different from how Anakin remembered him on Tatooine.  

The beard, Anakin thinks, it could be that.  It remains uneven and wild, with considerable amounts steaks of gray running through the brown, even though Qui-Gon now keeps his long hair braided neatly out of his face. 

His master catches Anakin staring at him as he carefully places a line of bacta across the cut and then waits momentarily for the gel to solidify into a protective bandage.  “What is it, Ani?”

“You look older,” he blurts out.  “From when I first met you.  Like you're almost a different person.”

Qui-Gon doesn’t seem bothered, but if there’s one thing he’s learned about Jedi, is that you can never tell how they’re really feeling just by looking at them.  You have to peer inside a Jedi, like looking through a glass of water, trying to tell what’s on the other side, when with a normal person Anakin could just know.

His master examines himself critically in the mirror that hangs inside their ‘fresher.  

“Quite true.  I find that I am an old man, Anakin,” Qui-Gon says easily.  “It does come as quite a shock to the system, you know.  In any account that would explain the sudden influx of gray hairs.”  

“That’s not what I meant,” Anakin protests, already regretting his words.  He knows that Qui-Gon is unhappy with his current conditions, his limitations.  His master has enough energy to want something to do, as he had told Anakin once in a fit of pique one day, but no strength to do anything, and few tasks that seemed worth doing in the first place.  Qui-Gon had said it after learning that the Council had forbidden him against journeying off-world for the span of three years, upon which he would be reevaluated for field work qualifications.  

Qui-Gon sighs and shuts the mirror up.  “You’ll be fine.  Go on with you, now.”

Anakin hovers at the door to the ‘fresher, unwilling to leave.  He casts about for the right words to say to make amends, a way to make Qui-Gon feel better.  What would Obi-Wan do?  he wonders despairingly.  Then he knows.  

Anakin looks up at Qui-Gon appraisingly.  “I think you had better trim your beard.”  

His master reflexively reaches up and brushes a hand across the untrimmed hair on his chin.  “It’s not important, Ani.”

“I saw this morning on the Temple flight log that Master Obi-Wan’s ship has docked,” Anakin says.  

“For stars’ sake, Anakin, Obi-Wan couldn’t be bothered about how I look,” rumbles his master with uncharacteristic irritation in his voice.

Anakin shrugs.  “I think it makes him feel better to know you’re taking care of yourself.”

Qui-Gon stares down at him.  “Oh,” he says in altogether a different tone.  “I suppose I should, at that.”  

Then, moments later, “Flight logs?  You shouldn’t have been able to— Anakin .”

All the same, Qui-Gon spends a considerable amount of time in the ‘fresher and emerges with significantly less beard.  Anakin does his lessons in his room, his door slightly ajar.  He watches Qui-Gon’s broad back in the ‘fresher, bent in front of the small mirror and braced between the counter and his cane, carefully trimming the hair on his face.  He snips off the length of it until there is only a neat fringe on the sides of his face and his chin, then he shaves his neck. 

Anakin can see his master turning his face back and forth in front of the mirror.  He smiles.

Obi-Wan arrives, and Anakin can tell in an instant that this mission has been difficult for him.  His appearance is as neat as ever, but the pinched look has returned around Obi-Wan’s eyes, the one that Anakin remembers far too well from the long hours he had spent at their master’s bedside just after Naboo.  When Anakin reaches out on instinct to him, his presence in the Force is clouded and grey, like the low-hanging stormies he has seen rolling in on the plains of Naboo.  

“I can’t stay long,” is the first thing he says to either Qui-Gon or Anakin.  He says it apologetically.  “I’m heading back out to the Mid-Rim again at seventh bell.  We’ve only returned to stock up on supplies and refuel—the planet Andean is still in turmoil.”

Anakin swallows hot disappointment.  He can tell that Qui-Gon feels the same way.  His master is shaking his head, clearly unhappy.  “The Council should not deploy you again so soon.  You deserve a chance to rest.”

“Ah, but lives are at stake,” Obi-Wan says calmly.  “And my master has always taught me to go where there is suffering.”

Anakin can sense, suddenly, how his master lets his disappointment go.  It is there, and then it isn’t.  Like magic.  

“What a wise man your master must have been,” Qui-Gon says lightly.  

“Oh yes,” Obi-Wan agrees in the same tone.  “He has also been known to spout wisdom concerning the here and now.”

They smile at each other.  Then Obi-Wan turns, and their smile grows to include Anakin.  “What shall we do with the time we have?” he asks.

But Qui-Gon shakes his head.  “You must be exhausted.  Go get some rest, Obi-Wan.”

“Ah, but that’s why I’m here,” Obi-Wan says.  “So that you can take care of me.”

Something shifts in Qui-Gon, then, that Anakin can almost feel.  He seems to straighten up in the Force.  

“Have you eaten yet?” Qui-Gon asks.

“Dex’s, then?” Anakin asks hopefully.  Obi-Wan had taken him to the cafe several times when he had lived with Anakin and Qui-Gon.  On his first visit, Anakin had bolted down the greasy joppa stew and fried tubers in minutes and then had been violently sick once he returned to the Temple.  It is one of his favorite memories since coming to Coruscant.

“Oh no,” Obi-Wan answers, astonishing Anakin.  “I’d much rather have something Qui-Gon has cooked.”

Anakin swivels to look at Qui-Gon.  Cooking, if it is truly a skill of Qui-Gon’s, has not yet been in evidence in the six months Anakin has spent with him.  They have been eating their meals off trays brought up by the refectory droids since Obi-Wan left.  

“You can cook?” he hazards.

His master chuckles briefly.  “Does that surprise you, Ani?”

“You just don’t seem the type,” he explains.  

“I have an astute sense of seasoning and meal preparation,” Qui-Gon assures him.  “It comes with being a Jedi master on intimate terms with the Force.  Oh, I don’t know, Obi-Wan.  I have not prepared a meal in...well, quite some time.”

“I have every faith in your ability to improvise,” Obi-Wan says dryly, and follows Qui-Gon to the kitchen.

Qui-Gon scours the food preservers and comes up with a handful of vegetables and a meat that he cubes and then cooks over the heating coil.  He adds liberal pinches of spices while Obi-Wan lounges against the countertop, snatching pieces of fruit while Qui-Gon dices and needling him over his inability to follow a recipe.

“I do not require directions.  The living Force shall be my guide in this, as in all things,” Qui-Gon retorts.  “I follow its currents, and thereby learn what shape and form this meal shall take.  Don’t you dare touch these frostberries, padawan, or I shall not be responsible for any appendages you might lose.” He shakes his dicing knife warningly in Obi-Wan’s direction.

“Did Qui-Gon cook often when you were his padawan?” Anakin asks as he sets some powdered rhy bread to rise in a bowl, dabbing water on the spongy top with a fingertip.

“Oh, yes.  His first action after returning to the Temple was always be to prepare a meal.  He always said it was his way of getting back in touch with the living Force.”

“And so it was,” Qui-Gon says.  “Pass me those nerino roots, Ani.  A grounding exercise, you might call it.  I would send Obi-Wan all over the Temple to fetch what I required.  To the greenhouses for vegetables, to the refectory kitchens for spices.  A good way to tire out an over-excited padawan, you understand.”

“I hardly minded,” clarifies Obi-Wan.  Anakin notices how he deftly snatches a berry while Qui-Gon’s back is turned, and he smothers a laugh that would surely give Obi-Wan away.  “After all, you always allowed me to stay and share the meal with you.”

“I did not always know how to cook—I was forced to learn when I very suddenly became a master again, after years of supposing that I had taught my last lesson.  I experimented with quite a few recipes after that,” Qui-Gon continues.  “It was a challenge to keep him fed.  He often claimed to be on the edge of malnourishment.  I’ve never had a more appreciative dinner guest before or after Obi-Wan became my padawan.  The taek sauce, please, Anakin.”

Anakin passes him the sauce.  From the corner of his eye he sees a slice of muja fruit floating from the countertop into Obi-Wan’s waiting hand, and grins.

Obi-Wan has hardly finished his meal before his commlink chitters.  He takes one last bite and drops his grubsticks in the bowl, thanking Qui-Gon even as he hurries out the door.

Anakin and Qui-Gon are left to finish their meals.  Anakin swirls the scinto peppers at the bottom of his bowl, disgruntled.  

“You could have asked him to stay longer,” he grumbles.  “He would have, if you had told him to.  He listens to you.”  He tosses down his grubsticks with a clatter and shoves the bowl aside.

“I cannot keep him here with me, just as I could only be his master for a short time,” Qui-Gon answers in his measured way.  “This is why we must focus on the moment, while he is with us.”  

Anakin looks at him, and realizes suddenly that Qui-Gon is just as unhappy as he is.  Only he does not let it show.  The only reason Anakin can tell is the thin, wavering feeling in the Force of frustration and concern that emanates from his master.  

“He’ll be all right,” he says, wanting to reassure Qui-Gon. “The Force likes him, can’t you feel it?  There’s something he’s supposed to do.”

“That,” says Qui-Gon, “is what I fear.”

Chapter Text

Anakin has not lived among the Jedi for very long, but he has gotten used to the routine of the Temple, the hours in which knights and masters bustle up and down the walkways, the bells that chime the hours.  He has gotten used to the clothes he wears, which are not so different from the ones he had worn on Tatooine—cleaner, most of the time, and made from finer cloth, though in shape and ornamentation they remain as plain as his old ones.  And Anakin has gotten used to having belongings of his own, to cherish and protect.  

His own sleep-couch, tucked inside his own bedroom alcove; his own datapad to use in his classes and for study.  It’s still something of a shock to realize that there are things that belong to him—that only belong to him.  It hits him at least once a day.  His room, his clothes, his tools.  Not that he didn’t have his own room and clothes and tools back on Tatooine.  But there’s a difference, possessing things, when you yourself are something that can be possessed. 

He knows good and well that the Jedi don’t really think in terms of ownership; everything in the Temple, down to Anakin’s undergarments, are really Temple property.  But the rule on Tatooine was always that possession wasn’t just 9/10 of the law—it was the law.  And there are many items in his possession. 

Anakin has discovered that he enjoys acquiring things, just for the sheer delight of having them.  Everything Qui-Gon gives him goes straight into his room, from his new set of boots to a secondhand pair of spectrometers that Anakin had coaxed away from Miro in the technical department.  Anything useful he sees lying around he’ll bring back to the quarters he shares with Qui-Gon, just in case he might need it later.  Discarded parts from the mechanics’ bay, broken couplings and power cables he’d found rooting in the depths of the Temple trash compactor, hydrospanners and welding gloves and all sorts of equipment that he’d submitted a requisition form for through the quartermaster’s department, as a kind of test to see what the Jedi would actually let him get away with, and then been utterly shocked to receive.  

When his box of requisitioned items had actually arrived, he’d taken it to Qui-Gon and dumped it at his feet.

“And they just let me have it,” he’d explained, aghast, and had blinked when Qui-Gon had only thrown back his head and laughed.  

“Well,” he’d said, when he’d regained his breath, “you did ask for them, Ani.”

“That doesn’t mean I ought to get them,” Anakin had retorted.  “I’m only nine!  I shouldn't be allowed to have this!”  He's holding up a Corellian Flameblaster 2000 blowtorch, which he knows for a fact has zero safety regulations and is illegal on half a dozen systems.

“Do you think you require more supervision?” Qui-Gon had inquired, amused.

Anakin briefly considers the amount of trouble he could get into, knowing as he now does that the entire resources of the Temple are his for the asking.  And he could ask for a lot.  “Yes! ”

“Then,” Qui-Gon says kindly, “rather than requesting every single part and tool you can ever imagine yourself wanting all at once, we might try requisitioning items one project at a time.”

He thinks about it.  “That sounds fair,” he decides.

“And next time, Anakin, remember this: That if one asks for something, one ought to be prepared to receive it.”

“Okay, okay.”

It's possible that Qui-Gon doesn't notice how many items Anakin has snuck into their shared quarters, tucked under his tunics or cleverly concealed underneath refectory trays.  Anakin's never exactly sure what Qui-Gon does notice--he's so good at turning a blind eye to whatever he does not wish to concern himself with.  But even Qui-Gon cannot pretend not to notice how bad Anakin's hoarding has gotten when he enters Anakin’s room and instantly looses his balance over the pile of dismantled droid parts lying across the threshold. 

Qui-Gon turns his head slowly, taking in the heaps of unwashed clothing lumped in piles in front of the closet and the haphazard piles of wires and optics and metallic exoskeletons blocking the path from Anakin's door to his sleep-couch.

“Perhaps you should consider returning some of this equiptment back to Miro,” he says, rather testily.  "You can't possibly need all of this, Anakin."

“I do need all of it,” Anakin protests hotly.  “Those parts are for my new astromesh droid!”  He has started to feel protective over his belongings in a way he can’t explain.  Maybe it’s because he’s never had anything that was truly of his own before.  It gives him a comforting, soothing, settled feeling to look around his room and see so many things—all his, just for him, tools and parts and robes, boots and datapads and styluses, all scattered around his room in vast piles. 

And maybe that’s why it suddenly occurs to him that some things belong to other people, too.  He has been drinking from a cup he found early on in Qui-Gon’s small kitchen, a plain, white ceramic cup with a chink missing from the rim and a thin crack running through the handle.  He had taken it at first because it did not seem as fine as some of the other objects on Qui-Gon’s shelf, not like the pale blue translucent cup Qui-Gon always drinks from or the handsome emerald-green glazed cups he pulls out for company.  And after that first morning, Anakin kept reaching for that small white cup day after day.  

Then one morning he goes to select it from its usual spot on the shelf and realizes, with one of those startling flashes of insight that seem to hit him when he leasts expects it, that this is the cup that Obi-Wan must have always used, when he lived in Qui-Gon's quarters.  That’s the only reason why Qui-Gon would keep a half-broken cup like this in his kitchen.

He cannot explain how he knows, or why this insight has only now dawned on him.  Anakin sets the cup back on the shelf with a clank that rattles the other dishes, his ears burning.

Qui-Gon, sitting at the table with his datapad in front of him, raises a single eyebrow.  “Something the matter?”

“No one ever told me,” Anakin accuses.  

“Told you what?”

“About that!”

Qui-Gon follows his shamed gaze to the cup.  “Ah,” he says.  

“I didn’t mean anything by it, honest.  I didn’t know it was his, and he never said.”

He doesn’t have to specify whom he is referring to.  They both know. 

“I don’t think Obi-Wan minded,” Qui-Gon says slowly, as though he is feeling his way cautiously through dangerous terrain.  “But I think it might be time to add some new cups to my cupboards.”

He takes Anakin to the refectory for lunch.  They leave with a thick gray cup Anakin has selected at random off a table.  “Isn’t this stealing?” he ventures, trotting along Qui-Gon with the cup cradled uncertainly in his hands.  He's always taken care to ensure that all his carefully aquired objects were either pulled from the trash compactor or given to him directly from Miro.  He remembers all too well the punishment for stealing back on Tatooine.

“Hardly stealing,” his master assures him.  “A simple matter of requisitioning, Ani.”

“But you’re supposed to submit form 49-Besh-Aura for requisition requests.  It’s standard procedure.”

“Allowances will certainly be made for an elderly Jedi whose memory is failing,” Qui-Gon responds lightly.  And, as usual, he’s right.

Knowing that he has taken Obi-Wan’s place changes things for Anakin.  When Obi-Wan returns from his rescue and recovery mission on Balin’s third moon, Anakin finds himself hanging back, unexpectedly shy.  He suddenly has seen himself through Obi-Wan’s eyes.  Someone new who has come to live in Obi-Wan’s room, to wear Obi-Wan’s old robes and drink out of his particular tea cup.  Anakin feels mortified, and maybe a little angry about how embarrassed he is.  

But Obi-Wan asks what’s wrong, he just growls, “Oh, nothing.”  And he doesn’t know why.  

Back on Tatooine, he never would have had to feel so out of place, because Tatooine was a place where he belonged, in every sense of the word.  And even if he had had so many uncertain feelings, Shmi would have noticed at once and understood him without the need for words.  

He’s so overcome with shame that he can hardly look at Obi-Wan all throughout what should have been a pleasant homecoming dinner.  All he can think of is that he’s taken everything that Obi-Wan ought to have.  Obi-Wan’s room and clothes, his place at Qui-Gon’s side.  Everything that Anakin has ought to be his, but Anakin had swooped in and stolen his life.  And Obi-Wan hadn’t even said a single cross word about it.  

He must hate me, Anakin realizes miserably, and the thought makes him so miserable he snarls at Obi-Wan when he asks Anakin if he prefers chilto beans or Chandrillian rice on his plate.  

Anakin’s master glances at him in surprise.

“All right, Ani,” Qui-Gon says.  “I can see something must be on your mind.  What’s all this about?”

“I said it's nothing!"

Qui-Gon might not be his mother, but nonetheless, he has a radar for knowing when Anakin is lying.  He raises a single eyebrow.  “Nothing?” he queries.  “It doesn’t sound like nothing to me.” 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Anakin says miserably.  “I’m just so mad."  Mad isn't quite the word, even Anakin knows that, but he can't find any other word to describe all the feelings swirling around inside him.  Mad, he decies unhappily, will just have to do.  

“I see,” Obi-Wan says.  “Over the chilto beans?”

“Not that, not really.  I’m sorry I lost my temper,” he says remorsefully, to Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan both. “I shouldn't have.  Do you think I’ll turn to the dark side because I yelled at you?”

“The future uncertain is,” Qui-Gon says distractedly as he reaches for the plate of curried nerfsteak, which isn’t exactly the reassurance Anakin had been hoping for.

“Well, did you ever think you might turn to the dark side?” Anakin asks desperately, and Qui-Gon stops and gives him his full attention.

“I used to think I might,” he says.

“What happened?” Anakin asks.  He's suddenly fascinated.  He doesn't know very much about Qui-Gon's life, apart from the past year or so of it.

“I had a padawan once, who turned dark.  I was terribly unhappy for a long time afterwards, and there were times when I thought that my grief and anger might be the undoing of me.  I said I would never take a student again.”

“But you did,” Anakin says.  “What changed your mind?”

Qui-Gon begins to speak, then closes his mouth.  Then he begins again, in an uncertain tone that Anakin doesn’t know how to read.  “There was a little boy,” he says, and Obi-Wan’s grubsticks stop moving abruptly.  “He was rather reckless, and just as unhappy as I was, and even though I’d thought I’d never teach again, he thought otherwise.  He seemed to think that only I would do for his master, though I haven’t the faintest idea why.”

Anakin doesn’t quite understand the look that passes between his master and Obi-Wan. 

“What happened to your student after he fell?” Anakin presses him.  “Could he have turned back from the dark side?”

“Only if he really wanted to.  And Xanatos didn’t.”

“Oh,” Anakin says in a small voice.  It’s all he says for a while.  He's busy thinking about what Qui-Gon had just told him.

Obi-Wan sprinkles scinto pepper seeds liberally into the plate of curried nerfsteak, over Qui-Gon’s strident objections.  “Think of Anakin,” he rumbles.  

“Oh I am,” Obi-Wan grins.  A dimple has appeared in his cheek.  “Anakin, tell him.”

Anakin sniffs ecstatically.  “It smells amazing.”

Maybe it’s the chilto beans, or maybe it’s the scinto pepper seeds that cause Anakin’s dreams that night.  He wakes up with his heart pounding and tears forming in the corners of his eyes.  He shakes them away stubbornly.  It’s foolish to cry, he tells himself fiercely, it’s foolish , and it’s a waste of water.  Tears are valuable, on Tatooine.  And his mother wouldn’t have wanted him to spend so much on her.

With an effort, he quells the tears, but he still can’t go back to sleep, so Anakin pulls on his nighttime robe and stumbles out into the common room.  To his surprise, Obi-Wan is sitting on the couch, reading his datapad.  

“Qui-Gon’s in bed already,” Obi-Wan says, raising his head.  “Is there anything you need?”

Anakin still feels a bit awkward around him.  “No, I just can’t sleep.”

“Do you want to talk about it, or would you rather be distracted?”

“Distracted,” Anakin says gratefully.

Obi-Wan stands up, and locates his field pack, dropped casually by the door.  He fetches a creased pack of cards out from a pocket of the field pack and shuffles them expertly.  “Has Qui-Gon taught you how to play sabacc yet?”

“I already know how,” Anakin says, affronted.  “I’m from Tatooine.”

Obi-Wan takes the cards to the table and pulls out a chair.  He adopts a pitying look guaranteed to rile Anakin up.  “You don’t know how Qui-Gon plays.”  He counts out one hand to the empty chair at the table, then another for himself. “What shall we play for?”

“I dunno,” Anakin says, stifling a yawn as he sits down cross-legged across from him.  “Chores?”

Obi-Wan raises a single eyebrow.  “Would you even bother to do them, should you acquire more?”

“Qui-Gon would make me," Anakin explains. "He believes in paying one’s debts.”

“That sounds like him,” Obi-Wan remarks.  “Tell me what’s on your mind.”

“I don't want to talk about it," he mumbles.

“Thoughts are gifts,” Obi-Wan says.  “I’d like to know.”  His words have the ring of the Force behind it.  

Anakin thinks back to the nightmare he’d woken up from just now, and shudders.  “Not mine,” he says with certainty.

“Have you tried meditation?” Obi-Wan asks, cheekily, and Anakin groans.  He continues remorselessly.  “You want balancing.  You’re all out of sorts in the Force.”

“I know I am!  I just don’t know how to balance myself!” he objects.  “I don’t think I should have to be held to the same standards as Qui-Gon.”  

“It’s not Qui-Gon’s standards.  It’s every Jedi’s.”

Anakin glares at him from across the table.  “Well, I’m not a Jedi yet.”

Obi-Wan stops rifling the cards.  “It sounds to me like you don’t want to be.”

“I do!  I do, it’s just—”  Anakin stops and bites his lip.  “Let’s just play cards,” he grumbles, and Obi-Wan obligingly deals him out his hand. 

Anakin’s down for two before he speaks again.  “Maybe I can’t be a Jedi," he says quietly. "Maybe it's too late for me, like Master Yoda said.  Maybe it was all a waste, Qui-Gon giving you up to train me.  He never should have picked me over you.  He didn't want to, I know it.”

Obi-Wan says nothing.  He just looks, but somehow that single calm, steady gaze is enough to get Anakin to keep talking.

“He loves you,” Anakin says recklessly.  “Qui-Gon.  He loves you.”

It’s a shocking breach of confidence, to say this to Obi-Wan.  But he wants to go there, wants to hurt Obi-Wan somehow—but he doesn’t, not really—he just wants Obi-Wan to feel as badly as he does, to shock him into betraying himself, revealing something more of himself than he has offered Anakin so far.  

But Obi-Wan doesn’t blink an eye.  “I know,” he replies calmly.

“He didn’t want you to go off on missions,” Anakin snaps, with mounting frustration.  “He wanted you to stay at the Temple.  He still needed you.”

“I know that too,” Obi-Wan says.  His face is placid, unshakable.  Anakin wants to throttle him.  

“Then how could you leave?” he demands.  “How could you just go away, knowing that?”

“There is nothing,” Obi-Wans says thoughtfully, “of love in the Jedi code.  Only attachment.”

“But that’s the same thing— !” Anakin protests.

“Ah,” Obi-Wan says.  There’s a glint of something in his eye.  “Is that what you think?” 

“Of course it is! If you love someone, you stay with them! You don’t just leave them—you belong to them!”

Obi-Wan tilts his head and frowns at him quizzically.  “Whatever gave you that idea?”

“You did! You all did!  You said—”  Anakin stops short.  Hadn’t the Jedi told him that? Why would he think so, if they hadn’t told him that?  He doesn’t quite like the direction this conversation is headed.  He rapidly changes course.  “So you aren’t going to do anything about Qui-Gon?” he demands hotly, and finally Obi-Wan sighs, his single concession to Anakin’s insistent pushing.  

“I am a Jedi,” he says reasonably, “and so is Qui-Gon.  And this is the life we have chosen.  I cannot choose Qui-Gon over the needs of a thousand other lives at stake, just as he cannot do the same for me.”

“But don’t you want him to?”

“Anakin,” Obi-Wan says patiently, as if he is explaining simple physics to a small child, the pull of gravity as it applies to children who have taken a tumble from their beds, “I already have everything I require from Qui-Gon.  It is enough just to be loved.”

“But what's the difference between that and attachment?” Anakin demands.  "I don't get it."

“It would be attachment if Qui-Gon wouldn't let me go, or I of him.”

“But I replaced you.  You must hate me,” he groans.

“I don't hate you,” Obi-Wan says, cheerfully enough that Anakin actually believes him—”and you didn’t replace me.  People can't replace people.  Could Qui-Gon ever replace your mother?”

He couldn’t; even Anakin could see that.  He thinks about this, hard.  "You let him go so he could be my teacher,” he says slowly.  “But didn't it hurt to see him take a new padawan?  Didn't you want to stay with him forever?”

“Yes, of course," Obi-Wan acknowledges.  "That’s normal.  We are human, after all, and not wanting things to change is a very human emotion.”

“But you had to give up everything,” Anakin argues.  His eyes are blistering with tears again, and he doesn’t understand why.

“I didn’t give anything up,” Obi wan says.  He has a small, private smile on his face.  “Our relationship may have changed—but that can be a wonderful thing.”

“I don’t understand,” Anakin mourns.  That's becoming his mantra, he thinks ashamedly.  Or maybe Obi-Wan was right, before, when he had said that Anakin simply did not want to understand.  

“Of course you don’t,” agrees Obi-Wan, “you’re far too young,” and in a flash Anakin resolves to understand the differene between love and attatchment if it kills him.  

He tells this to Obi-Wan after the next hand.  The way Obi-Wan is looking, as satisfied as a lothcat who’d just caught a rodent, Anakin notes sourly, you’d think that was his plan all along.  And Anakin finds he can’t stay mad at him for too long—he can’t help but laugh.  He changes the subject to something else that's been on his mind.

“Qui-Gon thinks I have too much stuff,” he tells Obi-Wan, stifling a yawn.  “Is that attachment, too?  Do you think I’ll turn to the dark side because my room’s so messy?”

Obi-Wan, to his credit, does not laugh at Anakin.  “No,” he says thoughtfully, “—though I imagine it makes it harder to levitate.  A cluttered room indicates a cluttered mind.”

“Oh.”

Anakin really does yawn, that time.  Obi-Wan takes the sabacc cards firmly out his hand, and sends him back to bed.

Obi-Wan has vanished back to his own quarters by the time he wakes up.  Good, Anakin thinks sleepily; he has to think more about all the perplexing things that Obi-Wan had told him, and he can’t do that if Obi-Wan is still here, filling Anakin’s head with even more baffling, philosophic ideas.

“You’ve overslept,” Qui-Gon remarks at him the next morning when Anakin tumbles dazedly out of bed.

“We stayed up late.  We played sabacc.”  He drops on the couch next to Qui-Gon and burrows his face into the warm, comfortable fabric.  He says, muffled through the cushions, “Did you ever play sabacc with Obi-Wan?”

“Yes,” answers Qui-Gon.  “Though not until he was much older.  He did not come to me already knowing how to cheat, mind you, and I did not fancy doing the dishes every night for the next twelve years.”

Anakin lifts his head and flashes a grin at him.  A sudden thought glints at him, like desert sunlight on the surface of a bead of water.

“Words are a gift—there’s something he wants to hear,” he reports to Qui-Gon.  “Now is better than later.”

“Is that something you learned from the Force?” Qui-Gon wants to know.

Anakin shrugs.  “I dunno.”

“Well,” says Qui-Gon, “I’ll keep that in mind.”

On his last night at the Temple, Obi-Wan stays at their apartment late into the night, talking with Qui-Gon and Anakin on the balcony until at half-past third bell.  Anakin gives up even trying to pretend to follow their conversation about some mission hijinks on Hegras Minor and trudges, sleep-eyed and practically stupid with exhaustion, to his room.

He doesn’t mean to overhear their conversation.  But their quarters are so quiet that he can hear their voices drift back towards him, even through the balcony doors.  The sound of it almost lulls him to sleep.  

Then Obi-Wan’s voice breaks a long silence. 

“I wanted to be here to help you.”

“I know.”  Anakin can hear Qui-Gon sigh, long and slow.  “I wanted better for you than that.”

“I know.”

That’s all they say, before Anakin sits up and slides his half-open door closed all the way.  He doesn’t mind, even though he feels a bit like a caged animal.  He can afford to give them a little privacy.

They see Obi-Wan off at the hangar this time.  When Obi-Wan’s transport takes off into the dirty gray Coruscanti skyline, Anakin feels a keen sense of sorrow that’s not his own.  He realizes then that the sense of dissatisfaction he occasionally feels from Qui-Gon has never been about him.  He doesn’t know how he feels about that. 

“I’m only nine,” he says suddenly.

“What’s that, Anakin?”

“I’m only nine,” he repeats.  “And Obi-Wan was with you for twelve years.  That’s longer than I’ve been alive.   It makes sense that you would miss him so much.”

Qui-Gon looks down at him, as though from a vast distance.  Then he blinks slowly.  “I see.”

“I’m not him,” Anakin continues.  “I can’t take his place. I’m not trying to.”

“I know, Anakin,” Qui-Gon says quietly.  He seems very old to Anakin then, and tired.  He settles his hand on Anakin’s shoulder.  ”I know.”

Chapter Text

Shmi had spoken once of leaving her homeworld as a child, of watching as the small green world she had been born on grew smaller and then disappeared in the wake of a slaver’s ship.  And so when the queen’s starship had slipped out of hyperspace and fallen into Coruscant’s gravity, Anakin had pressed his face eagerly against the transparisteel of the porthole, searching for the green he had expected to see.  

Coruscant had been all light, silver and gold, glowing brightly even when viewed from space.  But there had been no green.

Qui-Gon had laughed when Anakin had told him of what he had been looking for, on that first trip to the capitol.  

“You’ll not find much green on Coruscant, for all its treasures,” Qui-Gon had remarked.  “Still, a pocket here and there...”  He made a thoughtful noise.  “You’ll have to look closely, Ani, but they do exist.”  

But Anakin had not seen a single green thing on Coruscant until Obi-Wan had brought him to Qui-Gon’s rooms after Naboo, and there he had found green things aplenty.

Anakin was fascinated with the sheer volume of plants.  There were plants on the low tables and shelves, there were plants floating near the ceiling, arranged on hovering platforms to create the effect of a cascade of greenery rippling down the walls of Qui-Gon’s quarters.  He had gone to touch one, wanting to bury his hands in a verdant, lacy fern, when a sudden sting caused him to snatch his hands back.

“Careful, Anakin,” Obi-Wan had said.  “That draconis fern doesn’t like to be handled.”

So green things bite back, Anakin had thought, sticking his sore finger in his mouth.  It figured.  After that, he had taken care to stay far away from Qui-Gon’s plants.  Until now.

Qui-Gon has begun to educate Anakin on the green growing things of the Temple, and in his rooms.  He has set for Anakin the task of tending to the plants living on their balcony, as a lesson in the living Force.  

“Not all plants have the same requirements for sunlight and water,” he had explained the next morning, patiently rescuing a waterlogged kapris tree from its pond and relocating it to a drier pot.  “They are individuals, Ani.  You must learn to care for each one based on its needs - not on your convenience.”  

Which was Qui-Gon’s way of saying that Anakin’s method of setting up an automated watering system that bypassed the plumbing to their ‘fresher and released the water on the balcony was not a good idea.  Which Anakin was beginning to figure out for himself.

These days, Qui-Gon brings him along whenever he goes to work in the Temple gardens. 

The entire center of the Temple opens up to the skylights that allow in Coruscant’s weak light, and all the gardens in the Temple are structured in levels underneath this dome: The lake and lazy, shallow river at the lowest level, with fountains and waterfalls trickling in a thousand pockets of pools; the greenhouses on the levels above, where Temple staff grow fruit and vegetables and edible lichens for the kitchens; the meditation gardens on the highest levels are where the masters go to seek solitude and wisdom, and to offer counsel to their fellow Jedi.  

Anakin takes off to explore the all levels while Qui-Gon gets on his hands and knees in the greenhouses, tearing out weeds.  It seems to him rather a waste of green.  But it brings his master great satisfaction to end his days with dirt-streaked hands and sweat cooling on the collar of his tunics, and Anakin enjoys the roaming, and in this way they spend their time after Anakin’s classes and before evening meal.  

It is in the gardens where Anakin begins to meet other Jedi.  Before, the legions of Jedi had been a blur of formless figures cloaked in browns and beige.  Now he can put names to some faces.  Master Billaba likes to wade barefoot in the lake, smiling and hiking up her robes in a way that makes her seem more like a friend than the austere master Anakin has seen in the Council chambers.  Master Windu reenacts historic dramas with the senior padawan literature class in the amphitheatre.  And Anakin has seen Master Yoda pluck rods of arrowroot  from the marshes and chew thoughtfully on the stems while observing a class of younglings.

At first Anakin keeps apart, content to overhear private lessons between masters and their padawans from the shade of a damas palm, or to listen to the gossip between crechemasters and Jedi corps members.  He tells all the gossip to Qui-Gon in their rooms afterward, how Padawan Azilia has returned from the Hapes Cluster as Knight-Elect Azilia, and how among the younglings there is one Torgruta, only recently brought to the Temple, who has bitten all her crechemates and several of the masters, and when Master Windu visited the creche, she had bitten him too. 

Once Anakin overhears gossip about Obi-Wan that makes him grin in the shadows of the damas palm.    

He darts back to Qui-Gon, still planting out rows of fragile briscumber seedlings to report this information.  

“Master Cadolis says that the Council is considering Obi-Wan for a long-term mission to Wild Space,” Anakin reports.  “Do you think it’s true?  It’d be years before we could see him again.  Is he allowed to tell the Council no?”

Qui-Gon sets out a seedling and frowns.  "Are you sure?" 

"That's what I heard," Anakin says defensively.  "Master Cadolis said he'd be a shadow."

A new line of worry appears on his master's weathered face.  

"I didn't train him to be a shadow," Qui-Gon says, almost to himself. 

"What did you train him for?" Anakin asks with great interest.  It's something he's wondered since the day he became Qui-Gon's padawan.  But this is one of those occasions where his master choses not to hear him. 

“Hearsay is a poor source of information, Anakin,” Qui-Gon says, rather testily.  

Anakin shrugs.  It’s the only source of information he has, now that Qui-Gon has forbidden him from accessing the Temple’s databanks.

But the gardens and the forbidden databanks are not the only place in the Temple to pick up information, he discovers.  Qui-Gon has begun to venture to the archives with regularity, and often insists on Anakin accompanying him, much to his dismay.

“I had thought you wanted to see more of the Temple,” his master says dryly.

“The exciting bits, I meant,” Anakin grouses.  He says it rather loudly, but Qui-Gon is in a mood to overlook his padawan’s reluctance, and instead ushers him down the hall with a wave of his hand.

Qui-Gon can spend hours in the archives, studying the documents that Master Nu’s padawan brings out to him, and he likes to linger in the vaults of the special collections where the holocrons are stored.

The holocrons intrigue Anakin.  They sit in rows, glowing in shades of blue and gold and green.  “How does it work?” Anakin asks the first time he sees one, and Qui-Gon passes it to him.  

“A holocron is an archive of information, organized and complied by masters,” his master replies.  “See, Anakin.  This is the holocron of prophecy.  It contains research about the prophecies foretold by Jedi mystics long ago.”

It takes Anakin a moment to figure out why the sound of that is familiar.  Then he remembers: Qui-Gon facing off against the Council, his hands on Anakin’s shoulders, proclaiming that he was the chosen one.  Then Anakin has the uncomfortable realization that he might be in that holocron somewhere.

He doesn’t like the way that thought makes him feel.  Nor does he care for the way that Master Nu sniffs when Qui-Gon requests the loan of the holocron for his personal use.

“I had rather thought you would not have the time for indulging your academic pursuits, Master Jinn,” Master Nu says severely.  

She turns her head and looks meaningfully at Anakin.  But Qui-Gon just smiles serenely and thanks her for her understanding.  

Sometimes, Anakin thinks in exasperation, sometimes you can tell that Qui-Gon truly doesn’t understand what someone is trying to tell him.  And other times he’s only pretending to be cryptic and vague—but only when it suits him.  And sometimes Anakin still can’t figure out which is which.

It all makes Anakin want to throw his hands up in the air.  I give up, he thinks.  Masters are impossible.  Especially mine.

Anakin is running laps one day around the gardens, on the packed dirt trail that winds around the lake and follows along the little river that goes on to disappear at the edge of the garden under an arch of moss-covered rocks into a tunnel.  

He has just started to settle into his paces, his legs stretched out and finding his rhythm, when he is overtaken by a taller figure.  The figure bounds ahead of him, stirring up a cloud of dust that causes Anakin to sneeze several times in rapid succession.

“Hey,” he protests, then he realizes who it is.  Obi-Wan turns his head and grins at Anakin slyly over his shoulder.  “You’re back!”

Anakin chases him down the trail, but Obi-Wan maintains an easy lope that is somehow impossible to overtake, never once losing his breath.  Finally the trail loops back around and Anakin and Obi-Wan crash through the clearing and land at a meditative Qui-Gon’s feet.  

Qui-Gon opens his eyes slowly.  “I thought I sensed your light, padawan.”

“When did you get back?” Anakin demands, panting.  He throws himself down on a cushion of moss and gasps for breath.  

Obi-Wan isn’t breathing hard at all.  He folds himself down to the ground by Qui-Gon’s feet and turns that blinding smile on his former master.  “Oh, sometime last night.  Or perhaps it was this morning,” he muses.  

“And you didn’t come and see us?” Anakin says, indignant.

“Obi-Wan does have other duties to attend to, beyond paying his respects to his old master,” Qui-Gon says reprovingly.  

“Oh no, he’s quite right,” Obi-Wan says.  “Next time I’ll be certain to show up at your door at first bell.”

“All right,” Anakin agrees, mollified.  

Obi-Wan has returned from his latest mission to the Outer Rim, and smuggled illegal cuttings of a flowering liaster back for Qui-Gon.  Qui-Gon seems to appreciate the rule-bending more than the actual plant.

“You broke seven intergalactic trading laws—for me?” Qui-Gon asks as he accepts the small clear vial containing water and plant and holds it up to the light.

“Don’t get used to it,” Obi-Wan advises.  “I am hardly of your maverick tendencies.”

“I shall cherish it,” Qui-Gon replies, as he always does whenever Obi-Wan returns with gifts.  

“I don’t get it,” Anakin breaks in.  “It’s just a plant.  Why is it illegal?”

“The lister flower is famed for its beauty,” Qui-Gon answers.  “It is rare indeed to see one outside its homeworld.  It is said to bloom only once in a hundred years.  I have always wanted to see one.”

Anakin stares at the small vial in his hand.  “But this one is nowhere near blooming,” he points out.  He can tell that much, even if he doesn’t know much about plants.  

“True,” concedes Qui-Gon, tucking the vial away inside his robe.  “But I shall cultivate it for as long as I can, so that someone else shall have the opportunity.”

And for Anakin - 

“I thought you’d appreciate this,” Obi-Wan says, and hands him a miniature starship, no larger than his finger.  He places it on Anakin’s palm, and the starship’s light blink rapidly, then it floats up to hover near Anakin’s head.  “It relies on heat sensors for power.” 

“Thanks!” Anakin says devoutly.  He remains absorbed with the miniature starship the entire time while Obi-Wan is telling Qui-Gon stories, and when at last Obi-Wan says his farewells and leaves, Anakin goes to put it in his room straightaway.

He treasures the items Obi-Wan brings back from his missions, maybe more than anything else.  Anakin keeps these gifts in a small wooden box by his meditation pillow, along with Qui-Gon’s string of meditation beads and the small red-orange crystal that Master Gallia had slipped in his hand after the ceremony when he had been made Qui-Gon’s padawan.  

He adds more items to the box each time Obi-Wan returns.  There is the small rock, clouded white, with a flicker of internal light that shifts in colors from pale green to blue to violet from Hestium.  There is a wooden lothcat, carved out of smooth dark wood with a spicy scent.  There is the small change purse from Tezara’s moon made of a shimmering dark green fabric.   

Qui-Gon has a similar collection, Anakin notices.  His master keeps an odd assortment of items on the hovering shelf by his meditation cushion.  A small length of yellow string, a handful of rocks and pebbles similar in variety to Anakin’s, a piece of dark brown wool with ragged edges.  And there are even times when a copper-colored braid joins the collection.  

Obi-Wan spends the next few months coming and going from the Temple.  Always it seems that the first thing he does aft er reporting to the Council is to make his way to their quarters, sometimes even before the first morning bell, in order to wave open the door and peer inside, inquiring, “Did you miss me?”

They get used to Obi-Wan arriving in the haphazard, never-certain way that he does, scrambling to tidy when he shows up unexpectedly and staying up all night for him when his transport arrives and he is not onboard, until Anakin is half-asleep against Qui-Gon’s arm on a bench in the hangar.  And every time Anakin sees him again, he’s different somehow. When Anakin first came to the Temple, he had not thought Obi-Wan so powerful, but he seems to grow in the light, growing stronger every day, a crystal being polished until it is pristine.

As time goes on, Anakin comes to realize that Qui-Gon was right about mission timelines.  Obi-Wan might return a day or two later than anticipated, and on other occasions he is quite late, and comes staggering back to the Temple weeks and and then months after the time he was supposed to arrive.  But rarely is he ever right on time.  Anakin and Qui-Gon get used to all the coming and going, until the times Obi-Wan is with them becomes a pattern of its own.  When Obi-Wan is there, Qui-Gon laughs more, and Anakin talks more, and somehow things become fun.  When Obi-Wan is gone, well—sometimes Anakin is so busy he doesn't have the time to miss him hardly at all—and then there are weeks that stretch out agonizingly as they wait for him to return. 

At times Anakin wonders uneasily if the fact that they rely so much on the anticipation of the advent of Obi-Wan means something isn’t right between himself and his master.

That can’t be true, he reassures himself.  Qui-Gon wouldn’t let that happen. He’d tell me if there was something wrong.  

Obi-Wan is assigned a new mission in the Outer Rim, supporting a group of refugees as they settle into their new colony on an inhabited satellite of Resinn.  He leaves on a rerouted Corellian freighter without saying goodbye, but Anakin does see him one last time.

In the middle of the night, Obi-Wan slips inside their quarters so quietly that Anakin only knows he’s there by the sudden brightness of the Force, a beacon in the quiet night of the Temple.  He rolls over on his sleep couch and blearily glances through the crack in the door.

Obi-Wan is standing at the threshold of Qui-Gon’s room, just looking in.  Anakin cannot see his face.  Then he steps back, and Anakin can see the hem of his robe dragging along the floor as he leaves.  

He closes his eyes again, wondering if it had been just a dream, and falls back asleep almost instantly.  The next morning, he stumbles yawning from his room to find Qui-Gon at the table looking pensively at his datapad.

“Obi-Wan left last night,” his master says.  “He will not return for some time.”

“You always say that,” Anakin protests.  “Maybe it won’t be that long.  He might be back in time to see me in the initiate’s tournament.  He’s surprised us before.”

“No, Ani,” Qui-Gon says heavily.  “I do not think so.  Not this time.”

Anakin watches as Qui-Gon absently empties the last sips of water from his glass into the liaster flower on the windowsill, a recent habit of his.  A fragment of a memory stirs within Anakin.  His mother, offering the last drops of water from her water bag to the wild yellow flowers that survived Tatooine’s dust and heat to grow under the window, in the shade of the slaves’ houses.  

Foolishness, old Jira had called it, shaking her gray head, a waste of precious water.  Hope, Shmi had always responded lightly.  But then, she had come from a green planet.  

Chapter Text

Life is far less exciting, without visits from Obi-Wan to look forward to and plan around.  Anakin settles down dourly into working twice as hard at his lessons, which he always neglects when Obi-Wan is here, and he practices for the upcoming padawan's tournament.  He rummages through the trash compactors for a thrilling assortment of treasures, tinkers with his droids, tries to clear his mind enough to levitate, and does his best to avoid Master Windu’s steely-eyed gaze when he visits the balconies.  And he helps Qui-Gon with the liaster. 

The plant Obi-Wan had brought back is growing rapidly.  Qui-Gon has to repot it at least once a week.  It’s curling green leaves are already up to Anakin’s waist, which surprises him greatly.

“I thought it would take forever to get this big,” Anakin says, watching from the couch as Qui-Gon gently tips the pot over and slips the liaster out.  “Since it takes so long for it to bloom.”

Qui-Gon carefully crumbles the dirt away from the roots, then slips the liaster into its new home, a large, copper-colored basin that he had stolen—borrowed without asking, Qui-Gon had corrected him—from the laundry rooms.

“It is an unusual plant,” Anakin’s master agrees, absently brushing off the dirt on his hands on his tunics.  It leaves a brown stain on the seat of his pants that Obi-Wan would sigh over, if he were here to see it.  Anakin swallows a grin and jumps up to fetch Qui-Gon a damp towel, which he accepts gratefully, if perhaps a bit perplexed by the gesture.  “Some things take to change slowly, but then grow by leaps and bounds once they’ve settled in.”

Anakin digests this.  His master does not look as though he means anything by those words other than talking about plants.  But Anakin has learned to read him well enough to know that whatever Qui-Gon says usually has more than one meaning behind it.  

He can’t help but wonder if he might be one of those things that Qui-Gon is talking about.  It’s around that time that Anakin had realized, with a certain shock, that he has been at the Temple for an entire year now.  

He receives a notice in his holomail requesting that he appear at the Temple’s administrative offices the next day at tenth bell.  

“I don’t understand,” he says blankly, and Qui-Gon takes the holopad out of his hand and holds it up close to his eyes.  His master begins to smile.

“It’s for your yearly holo,” he advises, passing Anakin back the holopad.  “I recommend you wear your brown tunics, as it does not have any grease stains on it—yet.”

He’s one to talk, considering the current condition of his own clothes.  But Anakin doesn’t bother quipping back at his master.  He’s thinking back to his first arrival at the Temple after Naboo, the whirlwind of forms and paperwork that Obi-Wan had spent days filling out for him, the trips to the quartermaster for new boots and new clothes and new bed linens and new toothbrushes.  At some point, in the middle of all the chaos, he had been bathed—a real bath, not just the sonic showers Anakin was familiar with—combed, nails scrubbed, and squeezed into a shiny new set of dark brown robes that touched the tips of his boots, and then had a holocapture taken in front of a marble wall.  It was the first occasion Anakin had ever considered how many millions of credits the Temple must spend yearly to afford luxuries like real baths.  

“Does every Jedi have to go and stand in line for a new holo every year?” he asks, appalled.  “What a waste of time!”  

“Never a waste of time, Ani,” Qui-Gon replies, composed.  “Merely a marker of it.”

Qui-Gon makes him take a bath before marching him down for this year’s holo.  Anakin grumbles, but only a little.  He grumbles a lot more when he’s standing in line at the administrative offices, and even more when it’s finally his turn to be arranged in front of the marble columns and cheerfully ordered by the padawan manning the holo booth to Look serene .

After the capture is taken, the padawan advises Anakin that he can stand down, which he does with relief, then clicks several buttons on his screen.  Qui-Gon is bending over the padawan’s shoulder, watching with interest as the new holo is added to the Temple databanks.  

“What a change,” he murmurs.  Then he looks up, his eyes strangely bright.  “You’ve grown so much, Ani.  Would you like to see?”

Anakin hesitates.  He’s not sure he does, if he’s being honest.  But he slides off the stool anyway and obediently looks at the screen.  And there he is.  

He looks neat and tidy—nothing like he usually looks, with grease stains covering his hands and smeared across his tunics, and his hair ruffled and padawan braid straggling out of its fastenings.  His expression is more annoyed than serene.  Still, nothing about him looks much out of the ordinary, except for the neatness of his attire.   Then he looks at last year’s holo. 

He looks younger—well, he had been younger, by a whole year—but that’s not what’s so different.  This Anakin is just as clean and tidy, but his expression isn’t bored, and certainly not serene.   There’s a blank, frozen look on his face that makes Anakin shudder slightly, and dark hollows under his eyes.  He looks small, and almost frightened. 

He looks back at his new holo.  He just looks—well, bored, and slightly uncomfortable in his robes, and a bit put out by having to stand still for fifteen minutes while Qui-Gon tried to get him to pose more naturally ( Hands on your hips, Ani—no, never mind, just let them hang down naturally—no, not like that!)

He looks so normal.  Like a Jedi, comfortable in himself.  Not at all like the holo from last year, where he looks so stiff and fearful  Has he really changed so much in just a year?

Anakin can’t stop thinking about that holo over the next few days.  A whole year, away from Tatooine.  Away from his mother.  He’s grown so much, and his mother doesn’t know about it at all.  Would she even recognize him, now, if he went back to Tatooine?  

A year of growing, he keeps thinking, a year of refectory food whenever he felt hungry and desserts with every meal except for breakfast—Obi-Wan’s rule, a year of weapons training and calisthenics; a year of regular haircuts and enforced hand-washing before meals—Qui-Gon’s rule.  All of it has changed him, even though inside he feels just the same as ever—still the sandy-haired little slave boy who’d only dreamed of podracing his way to freedom.  

He knows all the names of his classmates, now, even if he rarely spends time with them outside of classes and tournament practice; sometimes a little Twi’lek girl from his astrophysics class will even wave her hand at him when they pass in the halls.  He still feels like he doesn’t quite belong here in the Temple—but he doesn’t not belong, either.  

Thinking about it gives him such a strange-mixed up feeling.  Anakin doesn’t like it, so he tries to find other things to think about.

His master certainly has other things on his mind.  Qui-Gon has taken to studying the holocron of prophecy during every spare moment.  Anakin doesn’t understand the holocron’s appeal.  It’s nothing but long-dead Jedi mystics droning on about prophecies that may or may not come true.  But then it hits him that maybe Qui-Gon’s fascination with the holocron is because of him.

“You said something about a prophecy when you first brought me here,” Anakin hazards one evening, watching his master bent over the small glowing cube.  “Is it about me?” 

Qui-Gon glances up from the table absently.  He’s looking at Anakin, but he’s not really looking at him: He’s looking through him.  Anakin shivers, though he doesn’t know why.

“I know nothing for certain,” his master says.  “I have been studying this particular prophecy for a very long time, Ani—longer than you’ve been alive.  And I still have no more answers than I did when I first heard it.”

“When was that?” Anakin asks.

“Not long after I became Obi-Wan’s master,” Qui-Gon replies.  “I had once thought—"  He hesitates.  "Well, never mind," he murmurs. "It doesn’t matter.”

But Anakin is quite sure that it does.

“What does the prophecy say exactly?” he presses, and Qui-Gon, rather than explaining, simply hands him the holocron.  Anakin squints into the cube.  Instead of projecting a hologram outward, this holocron reveals its information only when you peer inside one of its facets.  

“A child would come,” Qui-Gon quotes, without even looking at the holoron.  “An avatar of the Force.  This child would come to the Temple later than most younglings, he would be exceptionally strong in the Force, and he would bring balance to the galaxy before being returned to the Force.  This child of the Force would come to understand suffering as no one else has before.” 

Anakin gulps.  He’d heard bits and pieces of this prophecy before, the first time he’d stood in front of the Jedi council, but the enormity of the entire message feels suddenly like a weight dropping down on his shoulders.

“And you think that’s me?” he asks hollowly.  

Qui-Gon sighs.  Anakin doesn’t know why.  “I believe that the Force brought me to you for a reason, Ani, that's all.  Now go to bed.”

It’s not a real answer, but Anakin doesn't realize that until he’s already in bed ith his lights dimmed.  

He tosses and turns all night.  He’s supposed to be the Chosen One, if the prophecy and Qui-Gon are right, but how can he ever bring balance to the Force if he’s not in balance himself?  It’s far too overwhelming to think about, so Anakin tries not to.  Mostly he succeeds, because around that time, Qui-Gon begins training him in earnest.

His master has begun to bring him to the training halls regularly to practice for the padawan tournament fast approaching.  Qui-Gon does not spar with him, but he does call out directions to an older student, Master Cadolis’s padawan Telloran, who matches Anakin’s attacks and parries his increasingly-desperate lunges and slashes with an ease and grace that Anakin frankly can’t stand.

Anakin ends each session with sweat dripping down his back, panting heavily.  So this is how Obi-Wan got so good, he thinks grimly.  Constant practice.  Would all this effort be worth it, if he could wield a saber like Obi-Wan? 

Anakin decides that it is worth it, and throws himself fervently into practicing every spare moment he has.  He has a painful, burning ambition to win the tournament.  He does not tell Qui-Gon about these dreams.  He knows perfectly well that his master would chide him for harboring such desires.  But in his mind’s eye each night, Anakin sees himself besting each opponent, one after another, then Obi-Wan magically appearing just in time to see the final slash that wins Anakin the tournament, and Obi-Wan picking him up and carrying him on his shoulders the way Qui-Gon had, when Anakin had won the Boonta Eve’s Classic.

He falls asleep with that moment of triumph flashing before his eyes.  It’s a far better dream than the ones he usually has.  And when he wakes, Anakin swears to himself he'll do whatever it takes to make it come true.  He'll practice as hard and as often as Qui-Gon will let him.

It’s about the time Obi-Wan should be returning, Anakin figures, and accordingly he presses his ear against the Temple doors, so to speak, for any news of him.  Will he get here in time for the tournament?  

His master refuses to speculate.

“If he can, he will come,” Qui-Gon says serenely.  “If it is at all possible, then he will.”

Which is not a real answer, no matter how you look at it.  Accordingly, Anakin lurks behind bushes in the gardens and listens hard to every piece of gossip that floats his way.  He follows the oldest of the masters on their morning walks, with high hopes of hearing something about the Outer Rim, or Shadows, or bright young knights making a name for themselves. But instead he overhears something far more sobering.

Anakin is lying down beneath the overgrown yuko cypress near the lake.  He likes this spot because the thick, feathery-froned branches hide him completely, and the yuko cypress is close enough to the sandy walking path that he can catch a snatch of conversation from every Jedi who walks past.  He’s peeling a muja fruit and getting juice stains all over the front of his tunic when a pair of masters walk by, and their words catch his attention.

“Padawan Minari,” a master Anakin doesn’t recognize is saying sadly.  “Only fifteen cycles.  A terrible accident, it was.”

“It is the first death of a padawan the Temple has seen in many years,” says Master Ketichiwan dourly.  “Her master had such hopes for her.”

Anakin shivers behind his hedge.  He hadn’t known Padawan Minari, hadn’t even ever heard of her.  But the news of her death rattles him all the same.  He waits until the masters have left the path, and climbs out of the yuko cypress.  

Qui-Gon is sober when Anakin returns to their quarters and tells him about it.  

“We must attend her funeral,” he says quietly.  “We must pay our respects.”

Anakin opens his mouth to object that he hadn’t even known her, but the look on his master’s face forestalls him.   He swallows his objections and, four days later, stands quietly by Qui-Gon’s side as the Temple guards unload the rectangular cryptocoffin.  

Padawan Minari’s master is weeping wildly as the guards lower the cyptocoffin into the incinerator.  It shocks Anakin rather.  He had expected—well, he doesn’t know.  More of that Jedi stoicism that he has become so familiar with.  Seeing the dead padawan’s master’s grief causes his stomach to swoop and flip in an unfamiliar way.

He glances over at his own master.  There is something terrible in Qui-Gon’s expression that Anakin has never seen before.  It frightens Anakin to see it.

“Was it her master’s fault?” he asks quietly.  “Is that why she’s so upset?”

Qui-Gon sighs.

“No, Anakin.  It was not her fault.  It is a terrible thing for a master to lose their padawan, a master’s greatest fear.  A Jedi master’s highest priority is to teach their padawan, and to protect them.  Though we may bring our students into precarious positions due to the nature of our work, that is not the same thing as not caring about their safety.  No master would be willingly reckless with their padawan’s safety.”

Anakin is quiet that night.  He does the dishes without chattering to Qui-Gon about how his new model cropduster’s coming along.  The look on Padawan Minari’s master’s face haunts him so that he cannot sleep.  He thinks Qui-Gon must be thinking of her too, for he is just as silent.  

Late that night, he hears the sound of his master’s voice in the common area.  Anakin creeps out of his room, hoping that Qui-Gon will tell him to put the kettle on the heating coil to start a pot of tea.  But he stops short before he gets there.

It is dark in the room, except for a pale light casting a bluish shadow on Qui-Gon’s face.   His master is bent once more over the holocron of prophecy.

“It must be the boy,” Qui-Gon is muttering fervently, “it must be him, it cannot be—anyone else.”

Qui-Gon’s almost wild manner alarms Anakin.  It makes him forget what he had wanted in the first place.  He slips back into his room unnoticed.

Chapter Text

The tournament is swiftly approaching.  Anakin alternates between feverish excitement and an ice-cold terror that twists his insides up in knots, and an almost-painful hope that Obi-Wan will make it in time.  But by the week of the tournament, there’s still no word from Obi-Wan.

“He’s never gone this long without sending a comm before,” Anakin says despairingly to his master, who is frowning at the comm, currently empty of messages.

“I’m certain that Obi-Wan has other things on his mind right now,” Qui-Gon answers distantly.  Anakin does not point out that he is refreshing the comm over and over again, without any noticeable change.  “And besides—” he adds, in a rather distracted way, “—communication with outposts beyond the Outer Rim can be unreliable.  There is every chance that he has sent along messages that have not yet reached us.”    

Still, Anakin’s hope holds out.  After all, Obi-Wan has always come through before.  Then the day of the padawan tournament finally arrives.  Anakin doesn’t say anything, but Qui-Gon must know how he feels.  That morning at breakfast, Anakin’s master puts a hand on his shoulder.

“I know you are disappointed,” Qui-Gon says gently.  “You had hoped Obi-Wan would be here to watch you.”  

Anakin shrugs hard, and Qui-Gon’s hand falls off his shoulder.  It’s unconscionably disrespectful, but he can’t bring himself to care about the consequences.  “Nah,” he says recklessly.  “I knew it was only a slim chance he’d make it.  I’m fine.”

He feels Qui-Gon’s eyes on him, but he refuses to meet his gaze.  He glared down at his breakfast and stabs his fork into a piece of muja.

“Well,” Qui-Gon says eventually.  “We cannot linger here much longer, I’m afraid, Ani.  Let’s head down to the practice rooms and get you warmed up.”

He does not attempt to rest his hand on Anakin’s shoulder again, and Anakin tells himself fiercely that he doesn’t care about that either.

The tournament hall is crushingly full of padawans and masters.  Anakin feels so crowded he can hardly breathe.  He waits impatiently for his turn, his eyes fixed on the bracket board floating over the arena and ignoring Qui-Gon, waiting off in the wings.  Then the training master calls his name, and he’s up.

His first fight is against a tall girl with reddish-brown hair and a soft smile.  Anakin thinks he might have liked her as a friend—but she’s a formidable foe in the ring.  He’s swimming in despair--and then he sees an opportunity.  He knocks away her approaching saber and it flies out of her hand.  

“Point,” says the training master.  The girl stands up, with her soft smile, and offers her hand to Anakin to shake.  He takes it reluctantly.

He’d won, and he wants to gloat about it.  If only she’d be a sore loser, then he wouldn’t have felt bad about it.  On Tatooine, winning was everything—it was life, and death, and freedom; pure survival.  No being entering the podraces would do anything but gloat about winning.  But now, Anakin feels instinctively, it would be wrong.  So he swallows his pride, and tries to smile back.  

“Good job,” says the girl, and walks away.  And with that, Anakin advances into the next round.  

His next opponent is a wiry young Rodian, fast and sneaky.  He’s very good at making Anakin look slow and stupid in comparison.  His swift lunges and unpredictable attacks from behind make Anakin begin to huff—not with exertion, but from an effort to control his temper.  But Anakin wins anyway, with brute force: He’s bigger and stronger, and manages to knock the saber out of the Rodian’s hand by knocking his elbow hard against his opponent’s wrist and slamming his shoulder down against the boy's chest.

There’s only a small smattering of applause when he wins this time.  

“Well done,” is all Qui-Gon says when he steps out of the arena.  Anakin feels a sudden spurt of shame.  He hangs his head.  He knows, without even asking Qui-Gon about it, that he had not done the right thing.  Obi-Wan would have been ashamed of him, if he’d seen it.  Anakin is suddenly very glad he isn’t here.

“That Rodian was better than me,” he admits.  “I shouldn’t have won—I cheated.  I was bigger and stronger, and I took advantage.”

Qui-Gon looks at him searchingly, then seems to come to a conclusion.  “You did not cheat, Ani,” he says gently.  “It is true, that the other boy outmatched you in speed and agility.  But physical strength is a resource you had at hand, and you used it to your advantage.  If this had been a true match to the death, I should hope you would use every ability you possessed to win,” he says, rather severely.  

Then he adds, more amused than annoyed, as far as Anakin can tell, “Still—this is a student’s tournament, and the rules of combat here have more to do with fair play and keeping one’s honor intact than than the rules that govern the worlds outside these halls.  All of this to say, Ani—if you find yourself feeling badly after making a choice like that—then perhaps you should refrain from such tactics in the future.  Your feelings of shame are telling you that this is perhaps not a line you feel comfortable in crossing.”

It’s a good suggestion, and Anakin knows it. He’s starting to think that maybe, keeping your honor intact is better than winning at all cost.   In that instant, he decides that no matter what, he’ll play fair—even if it means he loses.  

He tells that to his master.  Qui-Gon’s sober expression smooths out in a smile—a real one.

“If you have learned that, Anakin, then no matter how you fare in the next few rounds, you have won,” Qui-Gon tells him. 

Anakin knows he’s pleased.  That makes him feel better.  He grins up at Qui-Gon and mops up the sweat dripping down his nose.  He’s feeling almost happy again when he steps into the area again.  

This time, he vows to himself, he’ll do what Obi-Wan would have done.  And when he wins the next round fair and square against the pale blue Twi’lek in his astrophysics class, she grins at him and gives him an exhausted but appreciative salute.  He grins and salutes back, and this time, the audience claps loudly.

Anakin advances further through the rounds.  Some he beats handily, others he barely squeaks by.  It’s more luck than anything else that has him in the next to last tournament round.  

He’s up against an older boy, whose ruffled brown-and-gold hair and rumpled tunics bely the precision of his footwork.  Anakin can’t find a way to break through the wall the other boy has created.  There’s no way through, no lapse in defense that he could take advantage of.  Smashing through his opponent's barricade the way he had before won’t work, even if Anakin wanted to try it; the other boy is taller than he is by a head.  And no matter how Anakin tries to take him by surprise with the Ataru moves that Qui-Gon has taught him, he simply won’t be surprised.  Anakin gathers the Force and somersaults over the boy’s head, then spins around and slashes at his unprotected back, but somehow the boy’s azure lightsaber is there to meet him.  

He’s not attacking, Anakin is starting to realize.  He doesn’t need to.  All his opponent has to do is to keep blocking him, and let Anakin wear himself out with all those acrobatic leaps and spins.  He’s seen Obi-Wan fight like this before, when he practiced against the other knights.  Calm, steady, and absolutely unmovable, like a mountain in the face of a bitter northern wind.  Anakin had not understood this method of fighting at all, then.  

“What’s he doing?” he had demanded of Qui-Gon.  “He’s just...well, standing there.  That’s not Ataru at all!”

Qui-Gon had not quite been able to conceal his pleased expression. It hadn’t quite been a smirk, but then again, it didn’t refrain from being one, either.   “That is because it is not,” he had replied.  “That is Soresu.  And Obi-Wan is well on his way to mastering the form, though he’s only been studying it for six months now.”

Anakin had shaken his head in astonishment.  “But I know he can do better than that!  I’ve seen him do it before!  He could run circles around the other knight!”

“Ah,” Qui-Gon had said.  The not-quite-a-smirk was still there.  “But now he does not have to.”

Anakin hadn’t understood, then.  He had much preferred Qui-Gon’s style of fighting.  He enjoyed the theatricality of the deep lunges and dramatic attacks.  It was much more exciting to watch, and far more fun to practice.

"Why would you change your form?" he had demanded afterward, and Obi-Wan had paused and turned to look at him.  

"Because," he said slowly.  "Because in that fight on Naboo, Ataru was almost not enough.  It was not enough for Qui-Gon to defend himself, and it almost was not enough for me to stop the Sith from getting to the Queen, or to you.  And, Anakin--I found I could not let any fear of change keep me from learning new forms.  Not if it was the difference between protecting you or Qui-Gon someday."

Anakin can’t keep this fight going forever.  He has to change his tactic.  And instead of coming at his opponent with another lunge, he settles his stance firmly into the ground, and holds his place.  He doesn’t attack.  He holds his center, and so does his opponent. 

And when the training master finally calls time, he and his opponent are both still standing.  Both holding firm.  Both unmovable.  It’s a tie.

The Anakin of that morning would have been brittle with anger over sharing his victory.  But he’s gone through what feels like several years worth of growing since then.  And this Anakin, winded and exhausted and beaming with pleasure, is nothing but grateful.  

“Thank you,” Anakin says.  “You taught me a lot.  You forced me to change.”

He bows to the other boy, still grinning.  And his opponent bows back. 

“You’re welcome,” he says.  He grins back.  His dark hair, streaked with gold, hands in sweat-stiff strands around his face.  “It was a great match.  You surprised me there, at the end.”

“I surprised me, too,” Anakin admits. 

And then, just like that, the tournament is over.  Masters and knights are collecting their padawans, offering hydration capsules and linen towels, and ushering their students out of the arena.  Anakin’s opponent is ushered away by his approving master.

Across the arena, Qui-Gon catches his eye.  He is smiling.  

Anakin makes his way toward him, pushing through the crowd.

“I am very proud of you, Ani,” Qui-Gon says quietly, and somehow that soft, open look in his eye is worth more than all the cheers and accolades Anakin had dreamed up in his imagination.  

Almost hesitantly, his master drops his hand on Anakin’s shoulder, and Anakin leans into it.

His glow of pleasure lasts through their celebratory dinner at Dex’s and the quiet walk through the streets of CoCo Town.  Anakin enjoys combing through the market stalls, looking at all the wares.  

“Is there something you’d like to buy, Anakin?” Qui-Gon asks.

Anakin shakes his head.  He doesn’t really want any of these things for himself.  There’s a thought in the back of his mind, trying to push forward.  Then inspiration strikes him.  

“Let’s get Obi-Wan a gift, for when he comes back,” Anakin suggests.  “Something for his missions.” 

He knows perfectly well that Jedi do not expect gifts, as a rule.  It is simply one of those things that he finds it hard to train out of himself.  When you are a slave, living on a world where nothing is free, not your water or your food or the seasoning for your food, not your home or your safety, and especially not your life, the only thing that is free are the gifts you can give, whenever you are able.  

His mother had taken such pride in being able to offer gifts.  Canteens of water of the older slaves, baby gowns made from clothes Anakin had outgrown offered to the young mothers in the slave districts, the shawls she had knitted late at night while Anakin slept to old slaves who sat outside on the streets and begged for alms.  And hospitality to strangers, even.  

“Like what?” Qui-Gon wants to know.

“Like—” Anakin glances around the market stalls.  He’s blanking out, all of a sudden.  There’s not much that a knight needs, besides protein rations and water-cleansing pellets.  Tea, maybe?  He knows Qui-Gon drinks it in copious quantities, and Obi-Wan has always indulged him—does that mean he likes it, too?  Could a knight even take something frivolous like tea on an Outer Rim mission?  “What about a blaster holster? Or a vibroshiv?”

“Er,” Qui-Gon says tactfully. “Practical, certainly.  But I am not entirely certain that it would be appropriate.”

“Well, can’t you think of something to give him?” he asks Qui-Gon in despair.  “You know him better than me.  And we don’t have to buy something here.  We could always make something.  What would you get him?”

“I’m afraid I have nothing to offer him that he might need,” Qui-Gon says rather sadly.  His tone makes Anakin look at him suddenly.  

You give when you are able, my star, Shmi had told him time and time again, in her birdsong voice.  Being able to give is a better gift than receiving one.  

“You give what you can, my mom always says,” he says, remembering.  Qui-Gon pauses. There is something troubled in the way he is gazing down at Anakin.  “It’s the giving that matters, not the gift.  He always thinks of us, when he’s away.  I want him to know we think of him, too, when he’s not here."

Qui-Gon is very quiet for a long moment.

“Your mother is very wise, Ani,” his master says at last.  “And so are you.  All right.  Let’s find something for Obi-Wan.  He will like it very much, when he returns.”

Anakin enjoys selecting a gift with Qui-Gon, and the quiet taxicab ride back to the Temple, and setting the gift on Obi-Wan’s waiting meditation cushion on the balcony.  It's a good night.  

Until the doorbell chimes.

Qui-Gon’s eyes go to the door.  Anakin notices, for the first time, the presence approaching them.  The door opens to admit Master Windu.  

“Qui-Gon,” Master Windu says.  “The Council has received a message from Sinpau Outpost.”

Qui-Gon stands up.  His hands are shaking.  He doesn’t appear to notice.

“No,” breathes Qui-Gon, “No—”

Anakin’s heart plummets.  “Is he dead?” he demands.  “Obi-Wan, is he dead?”

“I regret to tell you,” Master Windu says, “that the Council received word that while on an undercover assignment, Obi-Wan’s communication link has gone silent.  We do not know where he is, or what condition he may be in.”

“So he’s dead,” Anakin says savagely.  He’s shaking with a sudden rage.  How dare Master Windu dance around the truth like this?  This can only mean Obi-Wan’s dead.  Dressing up the truth in fancy words doesn’t change it.  Anakin knows exactly what it means for Obi-Wan to have gone missing like that on an Outer Rim world, doing the kind of assignment he was doing.  

“We don’t know that, Anakin,” Master Windu says, almost gently.  “And you must not give up hope.”

“What’s there to hope for?” Anakin says bitterly.  “He’s gone .  He won’t come back.”

Qui-Gon closes his eyes and sinks back down in his chair.  

Master Windu inclines his head.  “I am sorry, Qui-Gon, truly.  Is there anything I can do for you?  Shall I stay with you?”

“No,” Qui-Gon says faintly.  “Thank you, Mace.  I think...I think Anakin and I would prefer to be alone right now.”

“I understand,” Master Windu says.  He gathers himself up, as though squaring his shoulders beneath a heavy weight, and leaves the apartment as soberly as he had arrived.

The room is silent, except for Qui-Gon’s harsh breathing.  Anakin’s rage flickers, then crashes to the floor by his feet.   There's nothing left but emptiness, and a horrible choking feeling in his throat.

Anakin sidles up close to his master.  “I’m so sorry, Qui-Gon,” he whispers.   He puts his hand on his master’s shoulder, the way Qui-Gon had done for him.

Qui-Gon does not appear to be able to speak.  He opens his mouth, then closes it.  He simply pats Anakin’s hand.

“Do you think there’s any chance—” Anakin’s eyes are stinging.  He blinks hard.

Qui-Gon swallows hard.  “There is always hope, as Mace said,” he says hollowly.  “We must always have hope.”

He does not sound as though he believes his own words.  Anakin casts about helplessly, desperate to do something to help him.  “Can I make you a cup of tea?” Anakin offers timidly.

“No, there is nothing you can do for me right now,” his master says heavily.  “Go to bed, Anakin.”

He leaves his door cracked when he goes to his room.  He is too agitated to go to sleep.  He sorts through the wiring for a mouse droid he has picked up from the laundry rooms, even puts away the clothes and datapads scattered on the floor.  

But he can see through the crack in the door when Qui-Gon leans forward in his chair, his elbows propped up on his knees and his face pressed into the palms of his hands.  His master stays that way long after Anakin has pulled his blankets tight up to cover his eyes and thrown himself fiercely into the black void of sleep.

Chapter Text

The hardest part of the next several days is how Qui-Gon waits for any word of Obi-Wan.  Anakin can see it in the way his head turns toward the door seconds before the bell chimes to announce a visitor, the way he checks his messages the instant his holosceen flashes blue.  Aside from these rare moments, Qui-Gon has scarcely moved from the meditation cushion, kneeling and head bowed in the same stoic silence he's maintained since the night when Master Windu had first told them of Obi-Wan’s disappearance.

To Anakin, Qui-Gon’s silent, frozen grief is almost worse than if he had been in a wild frenzy of despair.  There’s no sound in their quarters except the low hum of the glowbanks and his master’s soft, uneven breathing from the corner where he sits on his meditation cushion, eyes closed and unmoving.  

It’s a silence that Anakin instinctively knows shouldn't be broken, so he tries to make himself as small as possible.  He tiptoes around their apartment, gathering up his breakfast items and eating his muja and barberry porridge in the safety of his room, wincing each time his spoon clicks against the rim of the bowl.  But he thinks that even if he had gone around screaming and shattering all the transparisteel windows that Qui-Gon might not have noticed.  Qui-Gon is as remote as a mountain peak in the furthest reaches of Wild Space.  There’s a terrible, blank look on his master’s face that makes Anakin shudder to see it. 

He’s almost relieved to abandon his master to the terrible silence when it’s time for him to leave for classes.  He slings his satchel over his shoulder and places a glass of water and a piece of sunfruit on the floor next to Qui-Gon’s meditation cushion.

“I’ve got class soon.  Is there anything I can do to help you before I go?” Anakin ventures to ask.  His voice, as whisper-quiet as he can make it, is still jarringly loud.

Qui-Gon does not open his eyes.

“No, Anakin,” his master says heavily.  “Nothing can help me right now.”

And there isn’t anything to say in reply to that.  So Anakin says nothing at all.

Anakin tries to stay out of their quarters as much as he can, the next few days.  When that terrible stillness gets to be too much and starts gnawing at his bones, Anakin wanders through the room of a Thousand Fountains, down the sandy trails that lead to the lake, or the gravel paths that take him through the arboreal forest.  And when he’s walked all the trails, he takes to the Temple halls, wandering aimlessly up and down the corridors, not noticing the other padawans who sidle out of his way or the masters who shake their heads sympathetically as they brush past.

Anakin hadn’t thought there was any purpose to his wandering.  But when the last evening bell rings and the Temple lights are dimmed, he stops for a moment to rest his legs, and he finds himself at Obi-Wan’s door.

He knows he shouldn’t enter another Jedi’s room in the Temple without permission.  But Obi-Wan had given him permission, that time long ago; he had even set Anakin’s handprint to scan and give him entry.  Obi-Wan surely wouldn’t mind, he reasons.  He hovers his palm over the door pad.  Then the grief coiled inside his chest flares into a sudden sharp ache.  

It’s not like Obi-Wan’s even around to care, he tells himself fiercely, and presses his palm to the pad.  The door hisses open, and then he is standing inside Obi-Wan’s apartment.

There is not much to see.  The rooms have the air of a place where no one has been in quite some time.  There is the small plant that Qui-Gon had given Obi-Wan as a housewarming gift, still alive, thanks to the new and improved automatic watering system Anakin had installed.  The houseplant is thriving under a panel of half-dimmed glowlights.  There is a small pile of datapads cluttering up a corner of the low table, and a single cup left out, sitting by the sink.  

Anakin picks up the cup and holds it up. It is the chipped cup that Anakin had first used when he had come to the Temple, before he knew it belonged to Obi-Wan.  Obi-Wan must have brought it back to his own rooms at some point.  Perhaps it had been one of those times when he had gone to Qui-Gon's and Anakin's quarters directly after arriving at the Temple, to say hello to Anakin and have Qui-Gon indulgently brew him a cup of sapir; maybe he had wandered out of their quarters with a half-finished cup of tea still in his hand.

The cup has a faint line inside, where someone—where Obi-Wan —had rinsed out one last cup of tea, but hadn’t had time to wash it properly.  Anakin carefully takes a sponge and sprinkles soap power on it, and scrubs the cup until it is clean.  He watches the soapy water vanish down the drain.  He knows he ought to leave.  But for some reason he can’t explain, he can’t bring himself to set the cup back down on the drainboard.  He grips the handle tightly, and then, without letting himself think about what he’s doing, he turns around and walks out the door.

He carries the cup back to his and Qui-Gon’s quarters, clutching it carefully, like a relic.  Maybe it is, in a way.  Maybe this cup had been the last thing Obi-Wan had touched in his apartment, before leaving on that final mission, the one Qui-Gon hadn’t wanted him to take.

Anakin hides the cup inside the cabinet, at the very back of the shelf, behind Qui-Gon’s pale blue translucent cup and a stack of earthenware plates.  It will be safe there, he knows.  He doesn’t think that Qui-Gon has had the heart to brew a cup of tea since that terrible night.

Over the next few days, Anakin finds himself pattering over to that cabinet—sometimes late at night when he can’t sleep, or early in the morning, when Qui-Gon is still locked inside his room, and the stillness of the apartment feels like the edge of a vibro-shiv—and he will cup it gently between his fingers and, though he hasn’t the slightest touch of psychometry, he can almost imagine he feels Obi-Wan nearby.

It’s a soothing secret to hold in the back of his mind, during class or solitary dinners at the refectory since Qui-Gon stopped cooking any meals.  And at night, when Qui-Gon has gone to bed, Anakin warms up blue milk or watered-down sapir tea in it, and drinks it in his empty room.  The heat of the ceramic warming his hands is a comfort.

But that kind of comfort can’t last.  It never can.  And one morning when he goes to pick up the cup, it slides straight through his fingers, and falls to the ground.

It’s terrible, how the crash breaks the silence.  It’s the first noise Anakin has heard in their quarters since the night Obi-Wan went missing.  It leaves Anakin frozen, standing in place, staring down at the thousands of sharp ceramic fragments that had once been something that had belonged to Obi-Wan.  

It’s strange, he thinks absently, it’s strange how something could exist, and then suddenly it would not.  All it takes is a blink of an eye, and something tangible, something you could hold in your hand, it just wouldn’t exist anymore.

“Anakin, what’s this?”

It’s his master, bending over him with a worried look on his face.  

“A cup,” Anakin whispers.

“A cup?”  Qui-Gon pauses, his hand paused halfway to Anakin's shoulder.  “Where did it come from?”

“From Obi-Wan’s room.  It was his.  I—I stole it.”  

Anakin dares to look up at him.  There is a terrible expression on his master’s face.

His voice feels like it’s coming from somewhere far away.  “I went into his room, I’m sorry, I just wanted—I just wanted—” But he cannot think to say just what it is that he had wanted.  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry —”

He finds himself sliding to the floor, his hands curling up to cover his face.  

For a long moment, there’s nothing but that awful silence that’s been in their quarters since the night Obi-Wan went missing.  Then there’s the soft whisper of linen as his master sinks to the floor beside him, and then large, gentle hands are gathering him close.  Anakin looks up at him.

“Oh, Anakin,” Qui-Gon says heavily.  “Oh, Anakin.  It’s all right.”

“No, it’s not!  Obi-Wan is gone.  He’s never coming back!”

A muscle jumps in Qui-Gon’s cheek.  “We do not know that for certain.”

“Yes, we do!" Anakin wails. "You heard Master Windu.  It’s hopeless!”

Qui-Gon lowers his head.  “A Jedi must let go of their attachment to any outcome,” he murmurs.  Anakin knows, knows he means well.  But somehow this is the absolute worst thing his master could have possibly said.

“How can you say that?  You let Obi-Wan go, and it killed him!” 

The words burst out of him.  Anakin doesn’t even know where they come from.  He’s instantly horrified at himself, and ashamed.  I don't really believe that, he tells himself swiftly.  But doubt seizes him.  Does he believe that?  

Qui-Gon’s words come slowly.  Anakin can tell, even in the midst of his distress, that his master is choosing them carefully.  “I could not keep him, Anakin, no matter how much I would have like to.  He has his own destiny, his own path.  I could not force him to stay with me and give all that up.”

“He would have stayed, if you asked him,” Anakin says bitterly.  "I know he would have."

He thinks that Qui-Gon’s hand on the back of his neck will fall away.  But his master's hand does not falter.  

“I would not ask him,” Qui-Gon says simply.

“Even if it means he dies?” Anakin challenges him.  “Even if he never comes back?”

Silence falls between them, for one long moment.  Anakin almost holds his breath.  And then Qui-Gon says, “Yes.  Even then.”

He squirms away from his master, pushing away his hands furiously.  “But you love him,” he accuses Qui-Gon.  “Obi-Wan.  Even though you’re a Jedi.  You love him, I know you do!” 

Qui-Gon bows his head.  His graying hair falls over his shoulders, and Anakin thinks he looks older now than he ever has before.  

“I do."

“If you really loved him, how could you let him go on that mission?" Anakin demands.  "You knew how dangerous it was, you said so!  How could you let him do that?” 

“That is the risk we take in loving,” Qui-Gon says.  “You cannot choose anyone’s path for them, Anakin.  Your mother knew that.”

“This isn’t about my mother,” says Anakin, badly stung, but he knows it is, probably, under everything.  The string that connects her to his heart pulses taut and fraught with unacknowledged grief.  “It’s nothing like what my mother did!  You let him go, when you could have held him back and saved him.  And my mother—my mother, she—”

Anakin hesitates instinctively.  Never show him a weakness if he can help it, what if Qui-Gon decides he’s not meant to be a Jedi after all, what if he throws him out of the Temple.

“Tell me, Anakin," his master says gently.  "I want to help, if i can.”

“She let me go!” he bursts out.  “Because I wanted to leave!”  

And there it is, the terrible truth that Anakin has tried to keep himself from acknowledging for so long.  What must Qui-Gon think of him now?

“I asked Mom to let me go with you.  I begged for her to let me go.  But—how could I?  She needed me—”  He looks up at his master, searching his face for some sign of understanding.   “I helped her with everything. The chores, the food, I kept her safe.  How could I want to leave her?” 

He drops his head back into his arms.  For a long time, he can manage nothing else besides shallow, gasping breaths, fighting against a terrible ache in his throat as he tries to keep the tears from coming.  Slowly, he feels Qui-Gon’s arm ease carefully back around his shoulders.  

“Why’d she let me go?” he asks finally, when the ache in his throat has eased enough for him to be able to speak.  “She loved me, I know she did.  She should have known how hard it would be for me.  If she really loved me, she wouldn’t have given me up.”

“Your mother loved you,” Qui-Gon agrees.  “But she felt that the best way to show her love for you was to give you what she so desperately wanted for you.  Freedom.  A future.  Even if it wasn’t with her.  It’s the hardest kind of love to understand, Anakin, because it’s the hardest kind of love to offer: A love that sacrifices."

Anakin looks up at him.

"There are different ways to love, Anakin.  To show your love by the way you serve those you care for, by your deeds and actions.  To love by holding someone close.  But the kind of love that lets you let the one you love go—Anakin, even I can’t get it right.  I have always struggled with it. I struggle with it even now.”

“I’ve been so angry at her,” Anakin says softly.  “And I hate myself for it—I hate myself.  I know I shouldn’t feel that way.  I know she loves me.  I even know why she let me go.  But I can’t stop wishing she hadn’t been able to give me up.”

Qui-Gon makes a thoughtful noise.  “I can understand why you would feel that way."

Anakin shakes his head.  “But it doesn’t make sense,” he objects stubbornly, and Qui-Gon sighs.

“Anakin, emotions do not always make sense.”

Anakin scrubs his face with his sleeve.  “Does that mean that I have to let of her, too?  I just—I mean, she really loved me.  Do I have to give that all up?”

“I couldn’t ask you to give that up,” Qui-Gon replies.  “And I would never want to.  You can always keep the memory of your mother’s love.  But none of us get to keep the ones we love with us forever.”

“Like how you couldn’t keep Obi-Wan.”

“Exactly like that," Qui-Gon agrees.  "I couldn’t keep Obi-Wan my padawan forever.  But I tried.”  

Anakin squints up at him.  “You did?”

"I tried to keep him with me, far longer than I should have.  But in the end, I had to let him go.  He was grown, he was ready for knighthood—he was ready years ago, after Mandalore.  But—”  Qui-Gon shakes his head.

Anakin thinks he understands what his master means.  “But you weren’t ready.”

His master takes a deep breath.  “No.  I wasn’t.”

Anakin says slowly, “So you made it all about you.  Because you didn’t want to let him go.”

“No,” Qui-Gon says sadly.  “I did not.  And I have wondered, ever since then, if I had done him a disservice.  If I had been selfish, not simply cautious.  But Obi-Wan—he never complained.  Never asked when he might be ready for knighthood.  But I wonder, now—does he push himself so hard now because I held him back? Does he feel he must prove his readiness to me now, to the council?  He takes on such dangerous missions.  We had often taken such missions together before—but I was always there with him, to protect him, if the mission became too dangerous.  Now he is out there in the galaxy, alone, and I cannot protect him anymore.”

His master continues to speak, his eyes far away, as though he is telling a story from long ago.  Anakin listens to his words, rapt and absorbed.  Qui-Gon has never shared so much of his own thoughts with him before.

“If I had let Obi-Wan go when it was time, he would not have been with me on Naboo.  If I had let him go, he would not have had to face the Sith.  It was so close—that warrior almost killed me.  I remember lying on the floor by the thermal generator with a hole in my chest, not knowing if my padawan would survive the fight.  For months after Naboo, every time I closed my eyes I could see it happening. My padawan, the one I’d vowed to protect, might have been slain there, because of my selfish folly.”

On impulse, Anakin slips his hand between Qui-Gon’s lax fingers.  He feels his master start lightly in surprise, but then he wraps his hand tightly around Anakin’s.  

“I think he wanted to stay with you," Anakin tells him.  “I think he wanted to be with you as much as you wanted it.  I don't think you held him back.  And I don't think Obi-Wan thought that either.  I think he was glad to be on Naboo with you, so that he could save you.”

“He had already saved me in so many other ways,” Qui-Gon says ruefully.  “But he never saw that.”

“That sounds like him,” Anakin agrees.  He wipes his eyes belatedly, then squints up at Qui-Gon.  “You’re not mad about the cup?”

His master considers.

“I can let go of things that remind me of Obi-Wan, because I know I will never forget the love I feel for him,” Qui-Gon answers.  Anakin can feel the truth of his master’s words ringing through the Force.

Anakin sits for a while, digesting those words.  Then he asks, “What do I do now?”

Qui-Gon gives him a brief smile.  “You might meditate for a while,” he says, and suddenly Anakin is laughing through the remainder of his tears.

“I was afraid you’d say that,” he chokes out.

His master meditates.  Anakin makes an honest attempt, short-lived but sincere.  Even though he’s not actually mediating, he sits still, for Qui-Gon’s sake.  He doesn’t want to disturb him, not when his master’s face finally has something like peace infused across his austere features. 

When he finally opens his eyes, he picks out some loose threads from the hem of his robe and slowly winds them around his fingers, tying knots, twisting the three strings into a braid and thinking idly about the way the strands wrap around each other, all twisted and knotted together.  First there was his master and Obi-Wan, all wound up in each other, and he had come along, and Obi-Wan had left, leaving a thread hanging and incomplete.  He wonders if his master has ever thought of it that way.  He keeps thinking of what Obi-Wan had told him before, about how Anakin would never understand what attachment meant because he hadn’t wanted to learn, and about his mother, who had let him go when he wanted to leave.

It’s not just attachment, he argues with Obi-Wan in his own head, it’s—it’s living together, and doing for each other, helping and working together.  A kind of balance in itself, the daily rhythms of routines and chores, the way you grow to depend on another being.  And when one thread is ripped away, the balance is gone, and you’re left with a fraying thread and an aching heart.  Is it even good to love others after all, if there's nothing but hurting in the end?

At last Qui-Gon gives up and opens his eyes.  It startles Anakin, who almost topples off his cushion.

“I do not think I can focus on meditation tonight,” his master says.

“Because you are worried about Obi-Wan?” Anakin hazards.

“Yes, very worried.”

“Do you really think he isn’t dead?”

“No, I. . .”  Qui-Gon sighs.  “I just don’t know, Ani.  I had always believed that I would feel him go, if. . . that we were connected enough for me to feel him pass if something should ever happen to him.  But perhaps I could not feel his light leaving because I cannot bear to know the truth.”

“We don't have to meditate,” Anakin suggests.  “We could just sit here together and think of him.  Like a rope out for him to catch on to. To let him know we are thinking about him.  Missing him.”

“I’d like that, Ani.”  

Qui-Gon takes Anakin’s hand and then closes his eyes. 

“When you think of your mother, what do you think of?” Qui-Gon asks.  “What do you remember seeing her do?”

Anakin almost tries to change the subject.  But then he remembers Obi-Wan’s advice, that sometimes offering your thoughts can be a gift, as well.  Qui-Gon had opened up to him.  Maybe it's time that he does the same.

“Cooking,” Anakin says slowly, remembering.  “In our kitchen, stirring the pot with a wooden spoon.  And sitting on the stoop of our door to watch the sunset.  She did that every night.”  

He tells Qui-Gon everything he can remember about his mother, and Qui-Gon listens to it all, about his mother’s handmade dresses and shawls, how she would dye the fabric with dyes made from their food, grays from the lichen that grew on moisture vaporizers, and pale yellows from the bell-shaped jarra flowers that grew in the shaded corners of the slave quarters; about the old nightgown she had dyed a deep blue with the leaves and stems of the gi-gi berries she had collected from discarded remnants in the marketplace, a color she had never been able to replicate, though she had often tried.   How Shmi stitched up the tears in his clothes with her prized bone needle, how she had hummed songs as she worked.  How his mother had been born on a world with oceans, and birds, how she taught him to whittle small figurines of all the animals she remembered, the ones Anakin had never seen.  The stories poured out of him the water rushes down the rocks in the Room of a Thousand Fountains. 

Qui-Gon listens, his eyes intent on Anakin.  It hurts to talk about Shmi, but it feels sort of good at the same time.  

“Sometimes I think the worst part is that I don’t have anything of hers,” Anakin says, his voice cracking on the words.  “We didn’t have much, you know.  Like you.  Like the Jedi.  I don’t have anything to remember her by.”

He opens his eyes, and almost wishes that he hadn’t.  There is compassion written all over his master’s face.  It makes Anakin’s chest ache.

“I understand,” Qui-Gon murmurs, and Anakin scrubs his sleeve over his face in just the way Obi-Wan keeps reminding him not to do.  But Qui-Gon doesn’t say a word about it.  

“I think I've been afraid to remember her,” Anakin says quietly.  “Afraid of how much it would hurt, to think about her.  And because—well, what if I start to forget?  What if I tried to think of her and found out that I'd forgotten something important?”

“You won’t forget her.  I promise you that, Anakin.”  Qui-Gon drums his fingers absently on his meditation cushion.  Then he says, thoughtfully, “You know, Ani, I think we’ve gone about this backwards.  Before letting go, you must first let yourself hold on.”

Anakin looks at him questioningly, and his master gives him a rare smile, the kind that reaches his eyes.

Then Qui-Gon says, “I believe I have an idea.”

Chapter Text

The next day, Anakin’s master does not require him to attend his usual lessons.  Instead they prowl through the Temple, collecting random objects.  

Qui-Gon brings him to the refectory first.  “First things first,” he says.  “We shall find a replacement cup for Obi-Wan to use, when he returns.”

Anakin eyes him uncertainly.  His master intercepts his sideways glance.  

“You had reminded me,” Qui-Gon says gently, “of the immense power of hope.  I will plan for a future where Obi-Wan returns to us.  And perhaps he will feel that hope, wherever he is—whatever might have happened to him—and it will help him hold on.”

“Oh,” Anakin says.  “I mean, yes, we should.  Definitely.”

Qui-Gon raises an eyebrow.  “But that was not what you were thinking about, was it, padawan?”

Anakin’s stomach rumbles audibly.  “Well, I was thinking maybe we could eat breakfast first," he admits.

“Ah,” Qui-Gon says.  “Yes, you are correct.  We should.”

They walk out of the refectory with full stomachs and a moss-green cup that Anakin had selected at random off a table.  “I still think this is stealing,” he grumbles, trotting swiftly alongside Qui-Gon’s lengthy strides.

“As I told you before--this is hardly stealing,” his master says easily.  “I prefer to think of it as unofficial requisitioning, Ani.  The Temple is our home, and we may take whatever we might need—provided that we do need it, of course.”

“And are you sure this isn’t this attachment?” 

“This,” Qui-Gon assures him, “is an exercise in meditation.  We are creating a basket of meditation anchors.”  

It really is a basket, Anakin discovers, plucked from a dusty shelf in the youngling’s classroom, and placed next to his meditation cushion. 

The first item that goes in it is Obi-Wan’s shattered cup.  Qui-Gon had spent the remainder of the morning applying adhesive to the broken pieces, and carefully putting the cup back together.  When he was finished, he washed the adhesive off his hands and placed the cup on the kitchen table to dry.  Now, Anakin reaches out and touches the place where the broken pieces have been joined back together.  

“You said these would be meditation anchors.  But an anchor holds you down,” he says slowly, “and we’re supposed to let go of the people we love.  Are you sure this is really a Jedi thing?”

“Holding on and letting go are not so different as you might think,” his master says gently.  “Love can also be an anchor in a different sense--something to hold you steady when you are in need of something greater than just yourself.  It would be beside the point to force you to let go of Obi-Wan, or even your mother, before you are truly ready, Ani.  You’ll come to that point in your own time.  And you are the only one who will know when that is.”

Anakin thinks about it.  Then he removes his hand back from the cup.  “I guess Obi-Wan can’t exactly use it for tea anymore,” he says sheepishly.  “It’d leak all over his robes.”

“It would,” Qui-Gon agrees.  “But it will serve as a reminder of him, for you to hold and remember his presence.”

Anakin frowns at him.  “Don’t you need something of his, too, then?  For you to hold on to?”

His master smiles.  “I already have such an item, Ani.” 

And Anakin notices the reddish-brown braid laid across Qui-Gon’s own meditation cushion.  He thinks about his master with his eyes closed, levitating slightly off the ground, the braid wound around his hand.

Qui-Gon follows his gaze.  “Obi-Wan’s braid has been an anchor for me through the past year,” he remarks.  “A reminder that though our time together as master and padawan has ended, he will never truly be gone.  His life has been woven through mine, in a way that time and distance and even death cannot erase or diminish.”  

He stoops over to pick it up.  Anakin watches how he twists the braid tightly between his rough fingers.  

“I tied the knot in this braid one the day Obi-Wan became my padawan,” he says slowly.  “And I had thought that I would be the one to cut it, when the time came.  When I awoke and found that he had already been knighted—it pained me, in a way I’d never thought possible.”

Qui-Gon is staring down at the braid in his fist.  Before the past few days, Anakin would have found his master’s expression to be incomprehensible.  But now he thinks he’s beginning to understand.  It’s the same hollow, frozen expression Anakin himself had worn in that first holo after Naboo.  

Grief.  

“These ceremonies, these rituals, they have great meaning to me, Anakin,” Qui-Gon murmurs.  “One to mark the beginning of a relationship; the other to mark the end.  And without it. . .”  He sighs.  “Well.  It has been difficult to let go.”

Anakin suddenly has a flash of a memory—that last moment with his mother on Tatooine, before he had left with Qui-Gon and Padme.  He had turned around, and Shmi had been there, smiling fiercely at him.  

In that moment, Anakin hadn’t realized he was letting her go.  He’d kept thinking, all the way to Coruscant and then Naboo and then back to the Jedi Temple, that somehow he could change his mind about being a Jedi and go back to Tatooine, and things would be the same as before.  

But he couldn’t, and it wouldn’t—but the thought that maybe his decision could be reversed has kept him paralyzed here in the Temple.  He’d liked the idea of being a knight, but even though he’s been Qui-Gon’s padawan for a year, he still hasn’t really committed to being part of the Jedi.  He’s been living here, learning how to use the Force, training with a lightsaber and even wearing the robes and a padawan braid—but at the same time part of him is still back on Tatooine, watching his mother give him up.    

He’d wanted to go—he’d always wanted to—and his mother had known it.  So Shmi had let him leave.  And Anakin knows without a doubt that it was because of love, not from any lack of it.  It had been a sacrifice she had been willing to make, if it meant his happiness.  And in giving up her son, Shmi had been living out the very ideal of what it meant to be a Jedi.

And maybe that meant that Anakin being able to leave her wasn’t because he didn’t love her too.  Maybe in becoming a Jedi, he’s honoring Shmi as best he can, and everything she had sacrificed for him.

“I think I know what you mean,” Anakin says out loud.  “My mom—I mean, I didn’t have much time to really think about what it would mean to leave her.   And we didn’t have much time to say goodbye.  I think—I think it’s been hard for me to let go, because of that.”  

Qui-Gon’s thumb absently smoothes over a strand of Obi-Wan’s braid.  

“An anchor is something we can hold onto for a time,” he says.  “They are not meant to last forever.  But I hope that the ritual of bringing together objects that remind you of your mother, objects that remind me of Obi-Wan, that this might be of some comfort.  To help us feel that our loved ones are still close to us—still in our hearts, and always in the Force.”

Anakin gently touches the rim of Obi-Wan’s repaired cup.  “I think that’s a good idea, Master,” he says.

Qui-Gon abruptly turns his head to look at him.  

“You have never called me that before,” he says, with a note of wonder in his voice.

Anakin shrugs.  

“I just figured it was about time,” he offers, and his master throws back his head and begins to laugh.

They keep adding items to their mediation baskets over the following days.  For Anakin’s, Qui-Gon locates a needle from his own emergency kit, and they sneak a wooden spoon out of the kitchens.  It takes longer to acquire a piece of cloth the right shade of blue.  But Qui-Gon returns to the kitchens, and he comes back with a basket of unwashed gi-gi berries, still attached to their stems.  

“Suppose you dye it yourself,” he says. “I am not much gifted when it comes to handicrafts,” and he lets Anakin use his steamer pot and heating coil to dye a strip of fabric taken from an old pair of robes bound for the incinerator.   

After the fabric is rinsed and left to dry on the balcony, it turns a rich, dark shade of indigo.  Anakin winds the cloth through his fingers with satisfaction.  Maybe it’s not quite the same blue he remembers Shmi wearing, but it’s close enough.  And the simple act of hand-dyeing it had made him feel closer to his mother has he has since he left Tatooine.  And that gives him an idea.  He carefully tugs out a few loose threads from the fraying edge of the cloth.  They’re as deep and richly blue as the fabric.  

He brings the threads to his master.  “I thought maybe you tie them in my braid,” he explains to Qui-Gon.  “And I can look at it and I’ll be reminded of Mom— and I’ll think of you.”

Qui-Gon blinks.  “That,” he says, “is a very good idea.  Hold still, Anakin.”

Anakin’s master wraps the indigo threads at the base of his padawan braid, then ties a secure knot and tucks the ends inside the braid.

“There,” Qui-Gon says.  His hand is lingering on Anakin’s braid.  “There, now.” 

That night as they kneel in meditation, Anakin rubs the cold smoothness of a needle between his fingers and when he closes his eyes, he sees his mother, haloed in the light of dusk creeping in through their only window, her dark head bent over her son’s torn tunics and counting stitches under her breath as she works.  

And Anakin arrives at a decision.  There’s finally something he thinks he wants Qui-Gon to teach him.

He reaches out and grabs ahold of Qui-Gon’s sleeve, and tugs it.

“Will you teach me how to let go?”  Anakin asks his master.  “I think—I think I’m ready.”

Qui-Gon opens his eyes and looks down at him.  

“I would be honored, Anakin,” he says quietly, “to be your teacher in this.”

Chapter Text

After that, Qui-Gon and Anakin can’t seem to stop letting go to each other.

They talk all the time, a conversation that might pause for a day or so but then get picked up again at the most random moments.  Anakin will spring out of bed first thing in the morning and stand just outside Qui-Gon's room, saying, “I thought of something else to tell you about Mom,” and Qui-Gon will say, slightly muffled through the door, “Tell me, Ani.”  And Anakin will. 

Or Qui-Gon will be in the midst of washing up after dinner and begin telling him about one of their missions when Obi-Wan was just a boy like him.  Today, Qui-Gon is telling him all about a planet called Bandomeer, and and a mine, and a bomb.  Anakin drinks those stories up like a dmelzofly drinks up nectar.  Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan had spent so many years together, it seems like they have a thousand shared moments and inside jokes that Anakin isn't part of.  It had always made him feel left out, that they should know so much about each other, when he barely knew them at all. 

Sometimes all Obi-Wan would have to do was to glance at his master with a slight quirk to his mouth and say, "Master, do you recall--" and Qui-Gon would shake his head irritably and say testily, "It's nothing like that at all, Padawan.  And for that matter, I do not appreciate the insinuation--" and Anakin would be left bewildered.  There were so many things that Qui-Gon had shut him out of, without even realizing he was doing it. 

I don't think he meant to, Anakin thinks.  But when your entire life has revolved around just one person, when you've given all of yourself to that one person, it's hard to remember that there's anyone else in the entire universe.  I know what that's like, he thinks.  He thinks he understands Qui-Gon more than he ever has before. 

He's long despaired of ever knowing Qui-Gon well enough to have a conversation like the ones he'd had with Obi-Wan, no matter how many years he spends as Qui-Gon's padawan.  But now, hearing his master fondly recount the adventures he had had with Obi-Wan, Anakin feels--well, like he's part of the story somehow, even though he hadn't been there.  

“Obi-Wan was so determined to be my padawan,” Qui-Gon says now, lost in remembrance, and then he sighs.  “I was never quite sure why.”

Anakin wash a plate, and hands it to Qui-Gon to dry.

“The Force told him,” he suggests.  “Didn’t the Force tell you he was supposed to be your padawan?  It told me.”

Qui-Gon glances down at him, startled.  “I suppose so.” 

Anakin shrugs, and picks up another plate.  “He knew it was right.  He always did know when things were right.”

“Yes,” his master says reflectively.  “He always did.”

And once upon a time, these memories would have had Qui-Gin drifting into the unwelcoming silence of his memories, that familiar pensive mood that he could have spend days and weeks lost in.  Even now, his eyes cloud over briefly.  But then he blinks, and shakes his head mildly, and turns to look directly at Anakin.

"I think you'd better go change into your practice gear, Ani," he says, "We've got the sparring hall reserved for the next two hours, and we'd better not waste it."

"All right," Anakin says.  He drops the plate he's holding back into the sink, unwashed, and streaks joyously to his room.

Somehow days pass.  There are classes to attend, and exams to study for, and essays to write.  And then one day, Qui-Gon looks at the lister plant in its small container.  “The liaster has outgrown its container,” he says musingly.  “I think it’s time to let this one stretch out its legs.  Anakin, will you help me?”

They bring the liaster to the Room of a Thousand Fountains, to a large, empty patch of soil in a secluded glade.  

“Are you sure it’s okay to plant here?” he asks Qui-Gon dubiously.  “Wasn’t it banned in seven systems?  I thought it was some kind of invasive species.  And Master Relliqam doesn’t like those.  He told me so.”

“There are no more native species local to Coruscant,” Qui-Gon points out.  “They all died out thousands of years ago.  And it’s only the trade of the liaster plant that’s regulated, not the spread of it.  And remember--I’ve already asked Master Yoda, and he’s just as keen to see this one bloom as I am.  So Master Relliqam is, unfortunately, overruled.”

Anakin grins as he thinks back to the moment Qui-Gon had proposed his gardening solution to Master Yoda.  His master had looked at Master Yoda expectantly.

“I believe it is still a worthwhile pursuit,” Qui-Gon had said persuasively.  “Think of the generations to come, and how they will be able to watch its progress.”

“A hundred years from now, you will not be here to see its bloom, Master Qui-Gon,” Master Yoda had said reflectively.  But then his ears had twitched.  “But I will.”

Anakin watches as Qui-Gon kneels in a secluded section of the garden and turns the plant over.  He gives the container a gentle shake, and the lister slides out into Qui-Gon’s waiting hand.  

“See,” Qui-Gon murmurs as he carefully loosens the soil caught up in the roots, “see, Anakin, how the lister is root-bound.  It could not continue to thrive in any container.  The only way to keep it from dying is to give it the space it needs to keep growing.”

Anakin crouches beside him.  He thinks he does see.  The roots of the liaster are still the shape of its container.  It would have kept trying to grow, he thinks, it would have kept climbing towards the grow lights and absorbing the water, but it couldn’t grow, not really.  Qui-Gon is right.

So he helps Qui-Gon dig a hole twice the size of the lister, and, when it is finished, he helps Qui-Gon ease the plant into its new home. 

“There,” his master says when they have filled the hole with new soil and watered it thoroughly.  “Now we can visit it on occasion to check on its progress.  I’m certain it will do well here.”

“Yeah,” Anakin says.  The plant does look happy, he thinks.  It’s glowing almost golden in the Force, eager to spread out and grow.  “I think it will, too.”

All this time, there has not been any news of Obi-Wan, though Master Windu has taken to visiting Qui-Gon and Anakin just after their dinner.  

“No word yet,” he will say, and then he will stay to drink tea and talk to Qui-Gon about which councilors he is finding it difficult to convince of a particular proposal to bring the EduCorps to various planets near the border of Wild Space, or the senators that object most strenuously to regulations within the banking clans.  

Council gossip, Anakin thinks, amused.  It draws Qui-Gon back to life like nothing else has.  Anakin’s master, it seems, is full of opinions on how things ought to be, and he’s more than pleased to share those opinions when solicited.  And he can’t even see that Master Windu is grooming him to be the next high councilor when Master Taniq retires next year, Anakin thinks, and grins to himself.  Because it is clear to him that this is exactly what Master Windu is doing.  

Qui-Gon will be on the Council before the midwinter solstice, and he won’t even see it coming until it’s already happened, he thinks, and laughs out loud. 

Master Windu’s eyes drift over towards him right then, and Anakin gulps.  Did he read my mind? he wonders uneasily.  That’s the danger of living in a temple full of people who hear your thoughts.  You can’t even think in private.  But then Master Windu does something surprising.  He sends a long, slow wink in Anakin’s direction.

Anakin almost falls off of his seat in shock.  But he can’t help but grin back at him.  

Master Windu stays for meditation.  He uses Obi-Wan’s cushion, but Anakin doesn’t hold it against him: Obi-Wan wouldn't want him to.  He looks at Anakin’s anchor basket with interest.  “What is this, Padawan Skywalker?”

Anakin picks up the basket and rifles through it, passing each object to Master Windu.

“This is the string of beads Obi-Wan gave me when I first came here,” he explains, “and this is the cup that replaces the one I broke.  This cloth is the same color that my mom dyed her nightgown--well, it’s as close to that blue as I could get it.  The needle is because she sewed all our clothes.  This rock is one that Master Gallia gave me, right after the padawan tournament.  See how it holds that amber light?  Qui-Gon thought having something to hold in my hands and fix my attention on would help me meditate better.  We're practicing letting go.”

"Is that right?"  Master Windu inspects each item gravely, turning them over in his hands.  “A wise idea,” he agrees finally, turning his somber gaze towards Qui-Gon.  “I believe you have been good for one another.”

Qui-Gon smiles down at Anakin.  “I think so, too,” he agrees.

When the evening reaches its conclusion and the latest Temple bells are chiming, Anakin walks Master Windu to the door to say good night.  

“I’m glad you came,” he says.  “Qui-Gon will be a good high councilor.  If you can get him to agree to do it, I mean.  He doesn’t like council meetings; he thinks they’re a waste of time.  But he loves telling people what he thinks they ought to do.”

Master Windu raises a singular eyebrow at him.  “So you have found out my plan, then?” he asks.  He sounds almost amused.  Then he bends over and says in a low voice, “Do not tell your master, or I shall never be able to persuade him into accepting the position.  Qui-Gon never likes to do a thing unless he believes it is own idea.”

“I know,” Anakin says.  “He’s stubborn that way.”

“Indeed,” Master Windu agrees.  “Then it is our secret?”

“It’s our secret,” echoes Anakin, and Master Windu winks at him again, and then glides out the door, his robes billowing and sailing behind him like a particularly smug Corellian solar-wind yacht.