been meaning to tell you.
Nov. 1st, 2005 01:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quigonejinnTotal trash snippet stemming from this conversation with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
neotoma and, you know, you're kind of going crazy when you're writing AU for your own fanfiction. And randomalia mentioned how it would be nifty to see a conversation between Padawan Obi-Wan and a Qui-Gon who had gone a rather darker shade of gray?
Like. Yeah. Excuse the COMPLETE FAILURE TO DO ANYTHING IN VAGUELY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF OBI-WAN'S ACTUAL INTERNAL VOICE. This is rather bloody-minded, for the record, and is nothing but me indulging myself wildly. I suggest that you stop reading now. :D
When circumstances conspire to deliver a Sith directly to your lap, it is not wise to let him walk or talk or even breathe too much. He falls to the ground in front of you, hit in the spine from a blaster shot in the back when the Queen and her handmaidens break through to the inner room.
By all rights, he should have a hole burned through him; he should be dead. Instead, the shot seems merely to have punched a hole in him from front to back. Just large and central enough to disrupt spinal function -- hence the falling down, the thrashing with the arms, including the shredded right one, and the desperate attempts to grab a lightsaber that you carefully pulled out of the way and the sudden difficulty in breathing because it appears that it also cut function of a large part of what passes for his diaphragm -- but not large enough to kill him.
You stare at him. You have his lightsaber in hand, but he's not looking at it. Instead, he's staring at a point somewhere beyond your right shoulder, is trying to draw breath through a mouth that's in the shape of an O.
Out of the corner of your eye, you can see that your master has taken the Queen aside. He is gripping her by the elbow, and he is asking her, with great intensity, whether the storage facility of the invading Trade Federation would have been located stored anywhere near here.
...
The reason that your master was asking about the Trade Federation storeroom is this: Tibanna gas. Your master has an eidetic memory, and he knew that the Federation kept it around for high-damage blasters. There was also a quantity of carbonite around; a statue commemorating the Twelve Founders of Naboo had been in progress when the Federation invaded, and well. Only the Naboo would use carbonite for decorative art.
It is fortunate, though, for you and your Master. Tibanna gas and carbonite together make for an unbreakable suspended animation system.
The Sith's expression, caught in carbonite, is much the same as it was in life. Mouth open because he was gasping for breath. Forehead creased with pain because shrapnel had caught him in the shoulder. Eyes fixed somewhere beyond your shoulder.
...
You don't see him awake again until the second day of interrogations. When he wakes up, he only has one arm. He doesn't say anything about it, though he must know immediately because of the sudden lightness in one shoulder.
"Go ahead. Touch it," your Master says. The Council is arranged in the viewing chamber behind; you are in the side control room with the controls for the carbonite-Tibanna compound still encasing the lower half.
The Sith looks at him for a moment. He is lying on a metal bed, tilted up at about a seventy-five degree angle, and again, he's still encased in carbonite from mid-chest down. There's nothing said between him and Master Tholme for a moment, and you wonder whether the Sith even heard Master Tholme because you had never heard of this partial-carbonitization procedure, wonder whether you've done something wrong, and then the Sith picks his remaining hand off the metal bed.
Casually, as though he'd been thinking about doing it anyway, he reaches over and sort of gingerly feels where his lightsaber arm used to be.
He only has one hand left, and he strokes the empty air underneath the sleeve thoughtfully. Moves his hand up to run a finger over the stump and the cauterized scar lies underneaththe cloath. You saw the needle of bacta that they put into that arm of his before they took the rest of him out of the carbonite; sharpnel had hit him there. It would have festered and infected once they took him out of suspended animation. They had been trying to save it.
Now, though, the Tibanna gas is still swirling around the floor of the room. The air had to stay saturated with it in order to keep the carbonite block effective on his lower half.
"I would not be much good to my Master with one arm." You can hear him say it because of the intercom. "He might give me a mechanical arm. I would refuse it, of course."
Your Master makes you leave before the torture begins. In fact, he has assigned you a rather specific, difficult course of reading and meditation for the next few days.
...
"Be mindful of the present," the Sith says to you on the night of the third day as you're sliding him back into the carbonite. You have never been in a room with him, and even with the intercom, you can barely hear his voice over the whisper of the Tibanna gas flooding into the chamber. His voice is also weak because he's been screaming, and your mind had indeed been drifting a little a moment or two before he said that.
The two of you are not alone, though. Ki-Ai-Mundi is a few feet behind you, checking your work, and both of you tilt your heads up and pay attention when the Sith says something.
There's a thought half-formed in your head. The Sith has his head turned to look at you.
"Master Yoda is a fool," you hear him say just as the Tibanna gas slides over his mouth.
After that, you are no longer given the duty of re-coating the Sith in carbonite at the end of each day's interrogation. Someone else takes over the duty.
...
Master Tholme has made no progress, it seems, so the Council brings in the Force-telepaths on the fifth day. Waves of pain and remembered misery leak out of the interrogation room; green washes over your vision more than once since the telepaths are interrogating him both inside his head and inside the Force. You're forced to leave the room to which you are supposed to complete to which your Master has assigned you.
You are twenty-five, and you leave the complex of rooms underneath the Palace to go up into the Palace proper. One of the Queen's handmaidens finds you wandering in the hallways, and she brings you before the Queen, with whom you have tea that afternoon. The two of you talk about Naboo politics, the new Gungan-Naboo accord, Tatooine. A time or two, you almost get up the courage to ask her what she thinks of Jedi interrogation tactics, but then, you see how cool and calm and strong she is even during an informal tea in her private garden.
The tea is very good.
...
"He talked today."
"Indeed, Master?" You look up from your studies. Was your tone odd? Your Master gives you a long, hard look, after all.
"Not much. Not what we wanted, of course. Instead, he told us a story about how his master had saved his life when he was an infant. Apparently, he had been inordinately precocious and caused the death of his parents by using the mindtrick on them at an inopportune time. He caused the air shuttle carrying them to crash, and his Master found him lying in the wreckage, sobbing in the lap of his burned-up mother."
Your Master is gripping the edge of the table so hard that there you actually hear the wood compress underneath his hands.
"In fact, according to him, he is not actually a Sith. His Master is, but he claims that he is just a Dark Jedi."
...
You are, again, studying a bit of Nabooian history, leg tucked up underneath you and sitting on the edge of the window seat with the night breeze blowing over you.
Your master looks up from his own studies and says, suddenly, "He claimed today that he had been to the Temple. Admitted to the Initiate program, then expelled young enough so that he was returned to his family instead of being placed in the Agricorps. It was after his return that he killed his family. That is why he hates us."
...
The Nabooian equivalent of a butterfly has three pairs of wings, it seems. One pair to provide lift, one pair to provide steering, and a third pair pair for no apparent reason at all. There is a cloud of the creatures flitting about the garden when you see Padme next. She is wearing less makeup than she normally does, is wearing only a simple shawl, laid over her head and with blue beads trimming the fringe. They click when she turns her head to leans forward to pour tea for you, and the six-winged butterflies keep trying to drink from the flowers embroidered at the top of her headdress.
It is just the two of you on the pavilion, talking as usual about politics, Naboo, the Republic. Planets you have seen. She begins to ask you questions about life on Corsucant, what the Senate is like, and despite how beautiful she is and the dimples that jump out on either side of her mouth when you make her smile -- really smile, as opposed to one of her polite expressions of state -- you end up feeling sleepy in the sun.
She gets to telling you about Tatooine since it is the only other planet she has really been on besides Naboo. She tells you about a little slave boy that she met on Tatooine. Sandy hair, owned by the junkyard supplier who sold them parts. He had given them shelter when a sudden sandstorm hit the port town, and as far as you can tell, Padme is very fond of him.
...
On the eighth day, you have the answer that your Master asked you to find: the Jedi was named Qui-Gon. He had been from the planet of Thorad, and the only Jedi master who had been assigned to the planet of Thorad in a space of five years following Qui-Gon's expulsion from the Initiates had been named Dooku.
This Master had, in fact, left the Order directly after his mission on Thorad.
"Qui-Gon," you say, frowning down at the readout in your hand. The hyphenation, the structure of the vowels.
"He also named you," your Master says. His voice is a little sour. "Before he left us, Dooku was a great finder and trainer of Jedi. He was, in fact, a great Jedi."
You blink at your Master for a few moments before you set the readout aside and return to your assigned studies.
...
On the eleventh day, the Council executes the false Jedi. You are there for it; you make a formal request to your Master for permission, and you have not seen the prisoner since the third day.
His beard is ratty, and his skin is pale. The hair has not only been trimmed short, but it has been shaved entirely on the side where he is missing his arm, and there are raw, puckered sores where the electrodes had gone. The fingers of Qui-Gon's one hand has gone dark purple from lack of circulation. In fact, the arm might be broken because he keeps it tucked against his chest.
The carbonite has, however, been removed from his legs, and someone tucked his legs up underneath him so that he is kneeling on the floor in the middle of the stripped chamber.
Windu enters, and he ignites his lightsaber. Shadows jump in existence along the walls, purple and gray fading into black, and Qui-Gon turns his head and watches as Windu comes up to him. It is awkward because he cannot move his legs, so he has to twist his torso and hold him self in what must be an uncomfortable position.
He doesn't change it, though, until Windu is standing directly over him. At that point, Qui-Gon turns his head, and he looks directly at you -- you had not even known that he saw you come in and stand in the side-control room, and he smiles.
"My master has the boy."
Windu raises his lightsaber above his head, and Qui-Gon smiles even more widely at you. In fact, he looks almost conspiratorial. He might even be laughing.
"Obi-Wan, we have already become powerful than you can possibly imagine."
...
There is a flash of light, and then, you realize that it is all over.
neotoma and, you know, you're kind of going crazy when you're writing AU for your own fanfiction. And randomalia mentioned how it would be nifty to see a conversation between Padawan Obi-Wan and a Qui-Gon who had gone a rather darker shade of gray? Like. Yeah. Excuse the COMPLETE FAILURE TO DO ANYTHING IN VAGUELY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF OBI-WAN'S ACTUAL INTERNAL VOICE. This is rather bloody-minded, for the record, and is nothing but me indulging myself wildly. I suggest that you stop reading now. :D
When circumstances conspire to deliver a Sith directly to your lap, it is not wise to let him walk or talk or even breathe too much. He falls to the ground in front of you, hit in the spine from a blaster shot in the back when the Queen and her handmaidens break through to the inner room.
By all rights, he should have a hole burned through him; he should be dead. Instead, the shot seems merely to have punched a hole in him from front to back. Just large and central enough to disrupt spinal function -- hence the falling down, the thrashing with the arms, including the shredded right one, and the desperate attempts to grab a lightsaber that you carefully pulled out of the way and the sudden difficulty in breathing because it appears that it also cut function of a large part of what passes for his diaphragm -- but not large enough to kill him.
You stare at him. You have his lightsaber in hand, but he's not looking at it. Instead, he's staring at a point somewhere beyond your right shoulder, is trying to draw breath through a mouth that's in the shape of an O.
Out of the corner of your eye, you can see that your master has taken the Queen aside. He is gripping her by the elbow, and he is asking her, with great intensity, whether the storage facility of the invading Trade Federation would have been located stored anywhere near here.
...
The reason that your master was asking about the Trade Federation storeroom is this: Tibanna gas. Your master has an eidetic memory, and he knew that the Federation kept it around for high-damage blasters. There was also a quantity of carbonite around; a statue commemorating the Twelve Founders of Naboo had been in progress when the Federation invaded, and well. Only the Naboo would use carbonite for decorative art.
It is fortunate, though, for you and your Master. Tibanna gas and carbonite together make for an unbreakable suspended animation system.
The Sith's expression, caught in carbonite, is much the same as it was in life. Mouth open because he was gasping for breath. Forehead creased with pain because shrapnel had caught him in the shoulder. Eyes fixed somewhere beyond your shoulder.
...
You don't see him awake again until the second day of interrogations. When he wakes up, he only has one arm. He doesn't say anything about it, though he must know immediately because of the sudden lightness in one shoulder.
"Go ahead. Touch it," your Master says. The Council is arranged in the viewing chamber behind; you are in the side control room with the controls for the carbonite-Tibanna compound still encasing the lower half.
The Sith looks at him for a moment. He is lying on a metal bed, tilted up at about a seventy-five degree angle, and again, he's still encased in carbonite from mid-chest down. There's nothing said between him and Master Tholme for a moment, and you wonder whether the Sith even heard Master Tholme because you had never heard of this partial-carbonitization procedure, wonder whether you've done something wrong, and then the Sith picks his remaining hand off the metal bed.
Casually, as though he'd been thinking about doing it anyway, he reaches over and sort of gingerly feels where his lightsaber arm used to be.
He only has one hand left, and he strokes the empty air underneath the sleeve thoughtfully. Moves his hand up to run a finger over the stump and the cauterized scar lies underneaththe cloath. You saw the needle of bacta that they put into that arm of his before they took the rest of him out of the carbonite; sharpnel had hit him there. It would have festered and infected once they took him out of suspended animation. They had been trying to save it.
Now, though, the Tibanna gas is still swirling around the floor of the room. The air had to stay saturated with it in order to keep the carbonite block effective on his lower half.
"I would not be much good to my Master with one arm." You can hear him say it because of the intercom. "He might give me a mechanical arm. I would refuse it, of course."
Your Master makes you leave before the torture begins. In fact, he has assigned you a rather specific, difficult course of reading and meditation for the next few days.
...
"Be mindful of the present," the Sith says to you on the night of the third day as you're sliding him back into the carbonite. You have never been in a room with him, and even with the intercom, you can barely hear his voice over the whisper of the Tibanna gas flooding into the chamber. His voice is also weak because he's been screaming, and your mind had indeed been drifting a little a moment or two before he said that.
The two of you are not alone, though. Ki-Ai-Mundi is a few feet behind you, checking your work, and both of you tilt your heads up and pay attention when the Sith says something.
There's a thought half-formed in your head. The Sith has his head turned to look at you.
"Master Yoda is a fool," you hear him say just as the Tibanna gas slides over his mouth.
After that, you are no longer given the duty of re-coating the Sith in carbonite at the end of each day's interrogation. Someone else takes over the duty.
...
Master Tholme has made no progress, it seems, so the Council brings in the Force-telepaths on the fifth day. Waves of pain and remembered misery leak out of the interrogation room; green washes over your vision more than once since the telepaths are interrogating him both inside his head and inside the Force. You're forced to leave the room to which you are supposed to complete to which your Master has assigned you.
You are twenty-five, and you leave the complex of rooms underneath the Palace to go up into the Palace proper. One of the Queen's handmaidens finds you wandering in the hallways, and she brings you before the Queen, with whom you have tea that afternoon. The two of you talk about Naboo politics, the new Gungan-Naboo accord, Tatooine. A time or two, you almost get up the courage to ask her what she thinks of Jedi interrogation tactics, but then, you see how cool and calm and strong she is even during an informal tea in her private garden.
The tea is very good.
...
"He talked today."
"Indeed, Master?" You look up from your studies. Was your tone odd? Your Master gives you a long, hard look, after all.
"Not much. Not what we wanted, of course. Instead, he told us a story about how his master had saved his life when he was an infant. Apparently, he had been inordinately precocious and caused the death of his parents by using the mindtrick on them at an inopportune time. He caused the air shuttle carrying them to crash, and his Master found him lying in the wreckage, sobbing in the lap of his burned-up mother."
Your Master is gripping the edge of the table so hard that there you actually hear the wood compress underneath his hands.
"In fact, according to him, he is not actually a Sith. His Master is, but he claims that he is just a Dark Jedi."
...
You are, again, studying a bit of Nabooian history, leg tucked up underneath you and sitting on the edge of the window seat with the night breeze blowing over you.
Your master looks up from his own studies and says, suddenly, "He claimed today that he had been to the Temple. Admitted to the Initiate program, then expelled young enough so that he was returned to his family instead of being placed in the Agricorps. It was after his return that he killed his family. That is why he hates us."
...
The Nabooian equivalent of a butterfly has three pairs of wings, it seems. One pair to provide lift, one pair to provide steering, and a third pair pair for no apparent reason at all. There is a cloud of the creatures flitting about the garden when you see Padme next. She is wearing less makeup than she normally does, is wearing only a simple shawl, laid over her head and with blue beads trimming the fringe. They click when she turns her head to leans forward to pour tea for you, and the six-winged butterflies keep trying to drink from the flowers embroidered at the top of her headdress.
It is just the two of you on the pavilion, talking as usual about politics, Naboo, the Republic. Planets you have seen. She begins to ask you questions about life on Corsucant, what the Senate is like, and despite how beautiful she is and the dimples that jump out on either side of her mouth when you make her smile -- really smile, as opposed to one of her polite expressions of state -- you end up feeling sleepy in the sun.
She gets to telling you about Tatooine since it is the only other planet she has really been on besides Naboo. She tells you about a little slave boy that she met on Tatooine. Sandy hair, owned by the junkyard supplier who sold them parts. He had given them shelter when a sudden sandstorm hit the port town, and as far as you can tell, Padme is very fond of him.
...
On the eighth day, you have the answer that your Master asked you to find: the Jedi was named Qui-Gon. He had been from the planet of Thorad, and the only Jedi master who had been assigned to the planet of Thorad in a space of five years following Qui-Gon's expulsion from the Initiates had been named Dooku.
This Master had, in fact, left the Order directly after his mission on Thorad.
"Qui-Gon," you say, frowning down at the readout in your hand. The hyphenation, the structure of the vowels.
"He also named you," your Master says. His voice is a little sour. "Before he left us, Dooku was a great finder and trainer of Jedi. He was, in fact, a great Jedi."
You blink at your Master for a few moments before you set the readout aside and return to your assigned studies.
...
On the eleventh day, the Council executes the false Jedi. You are there for it; you make a formal request to your Master for permission, and you have not seen the prisoner since the third day.
His beard is ratty, and his skin is pale. The hair has not only been trimmed short, but it has been shaved entirely on the side where he is missing his arm, and there are raw, puckered sores where the electrodes had gone. The fingers of Qui-Gon's one hand has gone dark purple from lack of circulation. In fact, the arm might be broken because he keeps it tucked against his chest.
The carbonite has, however, been removed from his legs, and someone tucked his legs up underneath him so that he is kneeling on the floor in the middle of the stripped chamber.
Windu enters, and he ignites his lightsaber. Shadows jump in existence along the walls, purple and gray fading into black, and Qui-Gon turns his head and watches as Windu comes up to him. It is awkward because he cannot move his legs, so he has to twist his torso and hold him self in what must be an uncomfortable position.
He doesn't change it, though, until Windu is standing directly over him. At that point, Qui-Gon turns his head, and he looks directly at you -- you had not even known that he saw you come in and stand in the side-control room, and he smiles.
"My master has the boy."
Windu raises his lightsaber above his head, and Qui-Gon smiles even more widely at you. In fact, he looks almost conspiratorial. He might even be laughing.
"Obi-Wan, we have already become powerful than you can possibly imagine."
...
There is a flash of light, and then, you realize that it is all over.
