quigonejinn | lost in those blue eyes. (Reply)

I'd like to note that Shakira's "Wherever, Whenever" is the theme song of the ongoing WIP Knightfic AU/AR/whatever. And you'll have to forgive me because I just finished reading The Persian Boy by Renault and; lfkj;lgkdjf.

Supposedly about Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan, but really. Is anything I write not a segment on the All Qui-Gon, All the Time Variety Show?

Qui-Gon

Obi-Wan wanted to be a squire more than anything else in the world.

Becoming a knight was something that he did think about in a vague, unformed sort of way. Being a faithful squire led to becoming a knight after a number of years, after all. He knew about the progression of things, could recite the superiority of knightly duties and virtues as compared to the ones for squires, but if you had asked him when he was twelve what the ambition of his heart was, Obi-Wan would have said that he wanted to be like Xanatos.
At some point in time, this house must have been different. There were high ceilings, a flagstoned courtyard, and a great hall could have comfortably seated a hundred. Obi-Wan had seen Qui-Gon stand completely upright in the fireplace for that room -- during the winter, they stopped up the great fireplace with straw to keep the drafts from blowing into the room. Now that they were back in the great hall, chunks of half-rotten straw kept falling into the fire.

It was one of the indignities of living in an old manor, and as smoke rolled around Qui-Gon and Xanatos's shoulders (and Obi-Wan's face and over his head), he heard Qui-Gon say to Xanatos, "I told you that we should have stayed in the smaller rooms all year."

Xanatos was batting smoke away from his nose and mouth, but he stopped for a moment to look at his master. It wasn't explicit disagreement, and Xanatos wouldn't have done that in front of Obi-Wan, but from the way Qui-Gon looked away and shrugged, Obi-Wan was sure that it should have been taken as that. There had been a disagreement about this.

The next morning, while Xanatos was out with the horses, Qui-Gon brought himself out of his study. It sent the cook into a sudden panic because she thought that she had lost track of time and forgotten to send his lunch in, but Qui-Gon then spoke to Obi-Wan. He wanted Obi-Wan to come with him to the Great Hall so they could finish clearing out what he called our dear friend Xanatos's obsession.
"He was a very great knight once, you know," Xanatos had once said to Obi-Wan. They were sitting in the spare room that served as the armory, and they were polishing armor together. Obi-Wan was working on a greave while Xanatos had the chest plate turned over his knees. "The year that he took me as a senior page, he had won the summer jousting tournament."

There was a winter storm going around the walls outside, and they'd just gone through all of Qui-Gon's armor two days ago, so out of the corner of his eye, Obi-Wan could see their faces reflected back up at them. His face with brown hair and the bits sticking out around the ears.

Xanatos's black hair, pale skin, a little bit of his skin reflected in the piece that Obi-Wan was working on. Qui-Gon undoubtedly kept a mirror in his bedroom for shaving, and Xanatos probably used it with Qui-Gon's permission, but this polished armor was the closest that Obi-Wan ever got to seeing his face inside a metal mirror.

The fire behind them popped, and then Xanatos bent back down to looking down at the chestplate. "My father would not have given me to a lesser man."
When Obi-Wan was very young, a situation came up for Qui-Gon's judgment: a man had a quarrel with his neighbor, so he stole his neighbor's hog. In the stealing of the hog, he also killed his neighbor's young daughter. The hog was recovered in his possession; the man had apparently boasted to others about killing his neighbor's child, and all in all, it was proved, to Qui-Gon's satisfaction, that the man had been responsible for both the theft and the death of the girl.

Instead of executing the man, as would have been his right under the laws of property or branding him as a murderer under the laws of murder, Qui-Gon had him brought out to the courtyard. It was getting close to fall, so the sky was blue, and the grass that poked up between the stones was beginning to yellow. Qui-Gon had the blacksmith and Xanatos wrestle the man down onto his knees, then tie his arms to a large, flat stone that had been brought into the courtyard for this day.

Qui-Gon had in his hands not his broadsword, but the axe that they used behind on the woodpile behind the kitchen, and he used it to cut the hands off of the man.

He then remitted the taxes of the healer woman from the village for the next year if she would take care of the man until his stumps healed.

Shortly after the man left her care, the man disappeared. It was assumed that the girl's brothers and father killed him, defenseless and unable to grip a weapon as he was, and while standing in the courtyard, watching the healer woman bind the man's wrists and try to stanch the bleeding, while still hearing the echoes of the sounds the man made when he saw Qui-Gon casually strolling towards him, axe in hand, Obi-Wan had Xanatos turn to him and say, in a calm, satisfied tone, that of all crimes, the one that was most hated by their master was the murder of a child.
There were hints, every now and then, of the things that Qui-Gon had done in the past. This manor, for example, must have been an award for field of valor: there was certainly little enough money in the place, and Qui-Gon showed no interest in the administration of it, so he had not bought it. M

Qui-Gon would sometimes roll dice with Xanatos when they were bored on winter nights, but it was always for splinters of wood and not actual coin. In fact, Obi-Wan had seen Qui-Gon frown down, rather uncomprehendingly, at one of the wooden boards that Xanatos kept the household accounts on – Qui-Gon had looked down at the figures, looked over at his squire, smiled a little, then handed the board back to him.
There were, as far as Obi-Wan could tell, no trophies from foreign lands. He had been with another knight for a while before his father had moved him, and that knight had foreign armor and weapons in his armory. It was taken out on feast days, and there had been strange pointed helmets and heavy, bare chain link armor. A mace as long as Obi-Wan's arm with spikes as long as his fingers, purely ceremonial because it was engraved with beasts along the handle and the spikes were tipped with bronze. Those strange carved chests that seemed to move under your eyes and to be more carving than actual wood, and Obi-Wan had once been on hand while the lady of the house unpacked hangings to be put up for a particularly honored guest.

The hangings smelled in a strange but not unpleasant way, and Obi-Wan must have made a face while the cloths piled in his arms because the lady of the house, a kind woman with deep brown eyes, turned and smiled at him. The smell was from the wood, she explained. The chests had been brought back from the Otherlands, and it had the special property of keeping safe any cloth that was kept inside it. There would be no holes, no worms, none of the dry rot.

Only the most precious robes and cloth went into these chests. The wood was also dry, prone to splintering and unable to bear weight, so nothing was ever stacked on top of them. They stood alone against the storehouse walls, and Obi-Wan had never actually had the chance to examine one of the chests, but he knew that there weren't any at Qui-Gon's manor.
Qui-Gon was an intelligent man, but he was not a brilliant one. It wasn't hard to see that Xanatos was more brilliant, more charming, and would rapidly become more accomplished if Qui-Gon would only take him to court or let him have more of an active place in political life. Qui-Gon had his stories of crusading in the Holy City and his battlefield experience, but he kept those stories to himself. Instead, it would be Xanatos at the dining table, talking of things that he had found, a bird's nest or an unusually colored stone, singing a snatch of song in a foreign language or telling of how his repairs to the west end of the house were going.

It should be no surprise that Obi-Wan idolized Xanatos instead of Qui-Gon.

Qui-Gon hunted, rode his horse, shut himself in his private study for hours. He spoke little. He was a presence in Obi-Wan's life in much the same way that clouds were -- almost always there, but far away. Drifting in another universe. Obi-Wan saw, on more than one occaision, Qui-Gon ride out to the slight cliff that lay on the east side of the house and look out on his holdings. The curve of the river. The golden fields.

He would be mounted not on his enormous grey warhorse, but instead, on Xanatos's small chestnut, and Obi-Wan would see Qui-Gon's head move as he scanned his holding, but he never seemed to be actively looking for something. He never seemed to find it, either.

"If he was such a brilliant knight, why is he living out here? Why aren't we ever called into service?"

They were kneading bread for Cook, and Obi-Wan and Xanatos were both covered up to the elbow in flour.

Xanatos looked at Obi-Wan, pressed his lips together, then went back to kneading. He said nothing.
There were no trophies, but while rooting around in the stables one rainy afternoon, looking for a spare bit of leather that he could cut up to repair a bridle, Obi-Wan found a foreign saddle jammed at the bottom of the scrap leather bin. It was a tiny bit of a thing, not much besides a pad laid on the horse with straps underneath to hold it in place, and he was thinking of cutting it up to use for the patch job until he saw the quality of the leather and realized that the buckle was made of metal a bit different than the usual brass.

It was covered in green and filthy, but it was whole, and it sang like a struck bell when Obi-Wan flicked it with a finger. It was like silver but shinier because when he rubbed at it, the green flaked off. Bit by bit, Obi-Wan worked it away until he could see his own face, bent in the surface of the buckle. It had kept its shine after all these years.

The tongue of the buckle was engraved, too, with what like water ripples,and It took Obi-Wan a great deal of effort to get the green out of the lines, but Obi-Wan had heard that the language of the Otherlands looked like that. Ripples. Dots.

He stuffed the saddle underneath a pile of other scrap leather at the back of the bin, and when he slipped back out to the stables with a brush and some soap and a sharpened knife so that he could scrape the green off more cleanly, he found the letters engraved on the reverse of the tongue.

Otherlands scrawl on one side and block print reading JINN on the other.

Obi-Wan

Qui-Gon was not a particularly literate man: he was bright enough, and he could read military orders. He could also puzzle out a short letter given enough time; he could certainly sign his own name, but he was not much for puzzling out treatises or articles. Xanatos would occaisionally bring him short scrolls copied in the main city or give him bits of essays or thoughts that he, himself, had authored.

This afternoon, though, Qui-Gon was frowning at a text that Xanatos had gotten as a gift from his father the last time that he had gone to the City. It was supposedly a learned treatise in the art of war. Xanatos had flagged the sectioning concerning proper use of heavy cavalry or something to effect, and to please him, Qui-Gon was now trying to make the letters swim together into words.

It was dreadful going. He didn't recognize half of the terms, he had only the vaguest notion of what the man was talking about although he'd spent most of his li --

Suddenly, though, there was a jingling in the courtyard. Like silver bells.

Qui-Gon's study was one of the few rooms on the third level of the central tower that was furnished and in use. He rushed to the window, and when he looked out, he saw a young boy with light brown hair, struggling to get light war saddle onto a bay horse.
Obi-Wan was still small like a child. Rarely showed fear, but his face and skin were like a child's, and his air cut short in the way of a young boy. Arms and legs still thin, and he was still built straight from shoulder to hip.

Qui-Gon would go days without speaking to him. Xanatos and the armsmaster handled the entirety of his training.
There were no trophies that Qui-Gon had kept.
The first time Qui-Gon saw Obi-Wan was when Obi-Wan had his nose bloody: Obi-Wan had been a page with the Order at the Abbey then, and he had gotten into a fight with another page. They were brawling on a grassy area between two tents; Qui-Gon had been passing by, and he began to move to stop the fight and save Obi-Wan a beating, but then he saw Obi-Wan pick himself up off the grass. There was blood streaming down his face. One was swelling, and he moved stiffly, but Qui-Gon watched as Obi-Wan picked himself off the grass and threw himself, hard, at the other boy.

No skill, not much thought. He ended up bloodying the other, much larger boy's face, too, and slamming him into the ground, but it was all fury. Anger. Something verging on hatred. After Obi-Wan had Bruck on the ground, he began to kick him in the stomach and the chest. In fact, he had one foot raised to kick Bruck in the side of the head when a young knight tore past Qui-Gon and pulled Obi-Wan away.

On hiw way over, the knight gave Qui-Gon a quick, incredulous glance as he went by for not stepping in earlier, but Qui-Gon kept his arms crossed and watched Obi-Wan with narrowed eyes.

A crowd soon gathered to watch the medics come to see Bruck and to see Obi-Wan marched off for discipline.

Obi-Wan, now with the armsmaster in the courtyard at dawn. Obi-Wan, trotting around after Xanatos and asking hundreds of questions. Obi-Wan, mounted on a saddle from a war fought and lost and mourned long before he had been born, trotting around the courtyard in utter ignorance.
Qui-Gon still remembered the Otherlands. The memory of summer in Sar Haberr would come to him sometimes in dreams; sometimes, in the colors of the setting sun, he would see the mountains known as the Spine of the World, topped with snow in every month and girded around the base with golden plains. The huts of the peasants in the river deltas, the same color he same mud from which they drew their living. The long irrigation systems, winding their way through fields that were greener and more fertile than anything Qui-Gon had ever seen.

He remembered, too, the hosts of cavalrymen, the roar of the catapults. What it had been like to be on his mount, sweating so hard that he thought he would drown inside his armor. Peering at the world through his visor and holding his warhorse back with every ounce of strength in his arms because Chandere could sense that the city wall was almost completely toppled and the charge would come soon.

To maintain fighting strength in a foreign land, though, they had become a conglomerate force. It was more than just the Order; there were armies of other kings, and armies from the native forces, too. Tribes who chafed under the rule of the Empire, and there had, in particular, been one chieftain who performed faithful service.

One day, during the winter season when there was less fighting, the chieftain went to the Order and asked the Order to help him take care of his half-brother, a rival to his power. The half-brother was aligned with the Empire; his brother had taken most of the fighting force, but he had nevertheless committed atrocities. Qui-Gon had seen the burned villages of those who had given supplies and aid to the Crusaders, and he had lost his wounded squire when the half-brother razed an encampment of the wounded.

The half-brother was a young man, fully grown and capable of defending himself, but after Qui-Gon killed him, he killed the brother's children, too. In fact, to make sure that it was done and the lesson was made absolutely clear, Qui-Gon went to the room beyond, the one that the half-brother had been defending killed them himself.

Two boys, one old enough to hold a man's sword and try to protect himself and his, who was some years younger and stood against the wall behind him, wide-eyed in fright. A baby of indeterminate gender, wrapped in swaddling clothes. A girl hiding underneath a pile of dead bodies in the corridor outside, betrayed when she whimpered in fear as Qui-Gon walked by with blood from her brothers and father on his sword.

The saddle was given to Qui-Gon by the grateful cheiftain, and it came with a particularly beautiful and light-footed charger.

Slender legs, the most elegant head that Qui-Gon had ever seen on a horse, and blue eyes. Unlike most horses with eyes that color, though, this one was neither blind nor deaf.
Qui-Gon had not wanted to take Obi-Wan. A single squire was enough for him; he had no interest in training up a page, and his armsmaster was old. Not up to the task of taking another raw boy and pushing him into shape, and Qui-Gon told Yoda as much, but Yoda insisted.

They were in the Yoda's central tent at the tourney. It was grouped together with the rest of the tents of the Order, but ceiling on this one was hung low enough so that Qui-Gon had to bend forward and stay mostly at the center, where the primary support was and where the ceiling was a little bit higher.

"He is in danger at his current placement, Qui-Gon. Not every family is like yours and Obi-Wan's and completely abandons their children to the Order. You know what Bruck's family is like." A pause while Yoda leaned on a heavy stick that was carved with signs of the Order and was one of the symbols of his office. In typical Yoda fashion, though, he used it as a walking cane and to rap the shins of those who gave him mild disobedience.

Heavy disobedience received the look that Qui-Gon got then. "He is one of many pages here, Qui-Gon. Take Obi-Wan away and put him under your protection, or his death will be on your hands."

Qui-Gon said nothing, still, though. Eventually, Yoda turned away from him and his voice was hard.

"It will be so, Qui-Gon."
Knights in full armor made a terrible noise. The heat, the weight and the noise of the armor was why most of the Order wore their full gear rarely, but Qui-Gon could still remember the sound of five hundred knights on their mounts. Before the charge began, he would already be half-deaf from the sound of his fellow knights.

Medean cavalry was somewhat quieter and lighter on their deep-chested, long-legged horses, but the wealthier members would nevertheless have their tack made out of that beautiful shining metal that looked like steel but sounded like silver. When they went on raids, they wrapped cloth around to keep the pieces to keep it from making noise, would unwrap before the charge, left it noisy normally. Qui-Gon was standing there while the chieftain lifted the severed head of his half-brother out of a sack and raised it up in front of his two thousand riders, the best light cavalry in the world.

In the custom of their people, though, they did not roar or shout. Instead, they jingled the metal bits of their reins, and the sound was like that of a ten thousand bells ringing together.
That night, during the celebratory feast, the chieftain leaned close to Qui-Gon and praised him for his thoroughness. "As well done as if one of us had done it. I will make a special offering for you and get our priests to bless something special for you."

Engraved on the tongue of the buckle was was a prayer, in their language, for his preservation through war, famine, and disaster. A statement that this buckle would give way only when the heart of the rider gave.

Qui-Gon could not refuse either the gifts or the thanks of the chieftain or even the prayer, but he made a point of riding the blue-eyed horse to death a few months later.
By the time that Obi-Wan returned from his ride, it was towards the end of the afternoon. The skies were starting to turn dark around the edges, and it was easy for Qui-Gon to stand in the shadows and watch Obi-Wan go about the business of taking care of his horse after the ride. The groomsmen were already inside with dinner, so Obi-Wan settled his bay into stall by himself. Made sure it was cooled down, made sure it got a little but not too much water to drink. It had been a long ride, after all; Obi-Wan came back with his cheeks red and the horse winded despite the light saddle.

Qui-Gon watched as Obi-Wan brushed his horse down, hummed as he picked the burrs out of its mane, hung up the light riding saddle properly next to the heavier one that he used for jousting practice. Qui-Gon stayed in the shadows still, without moving or speaking, and then he watched Obi-Wan sneak over to the forbidden side of the stables. Chandere stamped and tossed his head, at first, when he heard Obi-Wan coming toward him but he soon settled down. Chandere even came over to be patted on the nose and investigate a bit of wild apple that Obi-Wan had found on his ride.

Obi-Wan offered it to the horse on the flat of his palm; he had to stand up on his toes to pet Chandere's nose. He wasn't so much allowed in this part of the barn, much less to slip his master's horse a bit of a treat, but Qui-Gon didn't say anything.

The apple was not quite ripe. Chandere lipped at it, but didn't actually have any of it. Eventually, Obi-Wan gave up on trying to feed him and instead talked to him -- a low, indistinct murmur that Qui-Gon couldn't quite understand but could just barely hear. The word Xanatos came up more than a few times, though.

The light was almost entirely gone as Qui-Gon left Obi-Wan and slipped away.

lost in those blue eyes.

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