quigonejinn

Title: Easier Than Dying
Fandom: Star Wars
Character: Qui-Gon Jinn
Theme set: Delta for

1character
Disclaimer: Not mine, not mine, not mine.
Rating: PG.

#01 - Blend

He was, when grown, the most peculiar blend of arrogance and humility.

#02 - Stain

Once back from Telos, Qui-Gon had the droids not only clean the robes for stains and odors, but also completely sterilize at the highest setting.

#03 - Island

True, he may not have been a complete island, and true, Qui-Gon would probably have violently disputed even the applicability of the saying to Jedi, who were joined to the Force and could never be truly alone; neverhtleess, the truth was that for the long decade between when Xanatos left the Order and when Obi-Wan became his Padawan, Qui-Gon had penninsula joined to the main body only by the narrowest of isthmuses.

#04 - Apple

Qui-Gon realized that he may, in fact, have made an inappropriate choice of a second Padawan when he found an eight thousand word report titled "Vegetation-Based Temptation Myths of Republic Worlds: A Survey" lying on his desk the next morning.

#05 - Paper

"Certainly a barbaric and foul method of record preservation," Dooku said, and even he sounded a little choked from the stench coming from the river.

#06 - Relax

When the time came to go, to truly dissolve into the Force, Qui-Gon found that it was was even easier than dying had been.

#07 - Leaves

"This is truly foul, Master," Obi-Wan muttered, making an absolutely wretched face around the raw Lherda leaves, but they were the only edible thing in a five mile radius and all they had for dinner, so he continued to jam them into his mouth.

#08 - Proof

Qui-Gon had never been very good at the logic exercises that Dooku put him through -- he had gotten competent at them through hard work and diligent application, but he never acquired an actual knack for proofs and corollaries and premises.

#09 - Ugly

He kept waiting for his Padawan to go through an ugly, strange-looking stage -- even Xanatos had, after all -- but somehow, the boy never quite did.

#10 - Book

Qui-Gon remembered, in fact, the first time that he showed a printed, material information volume to Obi-Wan -- the boy had blinked, looked at Qui-Gon, and then assumed a neat, blank, and vaguely obedient expression that, in later years, once the boy finally grew a sense of humor, signalled the imminent approach of a teasing statement about "pathetic lifeforms" or "irritating antiquities" or one of Qui-Gon's other eccentricities.

#11 - Brood

Qui-Gon was prone to periods of brooding himelf -- it was the quintessential preoccupation for an order whose primary gift was the gift of precognition, and all the Living Force in the world didn't entirely balance that out -- but after their off-Corsucant mission together, Qui-Gon had to wonder whether the boy had been genetically engineered for maximum worry capabilities.

#12 - Mesh

Qui-Gon still remembered vividly the first time that he had trained wearing the sensory-deprivation mesh set at its highest level, which meant that it started to shut down even pressure receptors under your skin, inducing a sense of freedom and weightlessness such that you felt like you were floating in the darkness, mostly deaf, possibly half-asleep, utterly relaxed, with something that hummed and, as your master irritatedly pointed out to you after the mesh had been removed, was an actual, working, powered-on lightsaber that might, for example, the way that you had been waving it around, come perilously close to separating your Master from his knees.

#13 - Soft

The boy reminded Qui-Gon of the Seranian dormouse had once seen kept as a pet -- small, brown, soft-looking with bright eyes, and equipped with both a remarkably sharp mind and remarkably sharp teeth.

#14 - Shelf

The materials that Qui-Gon had collected over the years on the prophecy of the Chosen One were not much referred to, and he kept them on the topmost and dustiest shelf in his Temple quarters.

#15 - Alone

As a youngling, Qui-Gon had understood, mentally, the notion of being alone, but he never actually experienced it until he was thirteen and accompanied Dooku to one of the scorched planets of the Dark Zone.

#16 - Fall

A telling linguistic quirk, Qui-Gon thought, that the local word for the transition into the cool seasons was also a homophone for uncontrolled downward movement.

#17 - Knot

"That'll hold my weight, Qui-Gon?"

#18 - Crowd

Dooku had explained to Qui-Gon, once, that even though a great man might walk in and among a crowd, he nevertheless remained alone, always.

#19 - Denial

Qui-Gon had used the Force to crack open someone's mind completely only once -- it had been when he was sixteen, and he had not dreamed of the man in many, many years.

#20 - Train

Qui-Gon had been assigned alone the duty of protecting the rear of the baggage train from attacks, which, admittedly sounded glamorous, but mostly meant that he ate mule dust for the remainder of the journey to H'ladan.

#21 - Fur

Dooku's heavy winter cloak had been lined with heating elements as well as trimmed with fur.

#22 - Chrome

Each of the shining buttons on the piloting board just about half of the size the smallest nail of the smallest finger on Qui-Gon's; he had to squint to see them, and well, no idea of how he was actually going to operate them.

#23 - Heart

Obi-Wan's heart was, in the way of his species, rather large and covered only by a thin strip of bone; Qui-Gon's, however, was encased to the point that a common cause of death on his birth planet in primitive times had been calcification of the channels permitting return of oxygen-depleted blood to the heart.

#24 - Intention

Qui-Gon had intended, before Tatooine, for Obi-Wan to be his last Padawan.

#25 - Push

For Qui-Gon, performing the mindtrick felt much like leaning his weight against a door and pushing it open.

#26 - Look

When Obi-Wan was sixteen, he picked up the habit of giving Qui-Gon supremely reproachful looks out of the corners of his eyes while keeping the rest of his face blank and respectful, and well -- Qui-Gon wasn't yet sure what he would do if he ever caught the Padawan who had shown Obi-Wan that particular trick, but it definitely involved suggesting to his Master that he set his Padawan to writing, with the Force, I will not corrupt other Masters' students several thousand times in the Temple sand gardens.

#27 - Weight

The knot had not, in fact, held Tholme's weight.

#28 - Spider

There was very little in the way of edible animal life on Tattooine, and when Qui-Gon pointed out that the six-legged jumping rock spiders were probably eminently nutritious sources of animal protein, even in his advanced age, Obi-Wan made such a face that Qui-Gon had laughed and never suggested anything of the sort again.

#29 - Robe

No, the Jedi were not assassins, but yes, at Qui-Gon's order, stitched into the hem of Obi-Wan's robe was a length of narrow-gauge Yranian wire, strong enough to hold a space shuttle together during re-entry and thin enough to garotte most upright structured species.

#30 - Umbrella

It was not easy sharing an umbrella with someone who was a head and a half shorter than you and had shoulders as broad as yours, not to mention a profound distaste for getting any part of himself wet.

#31 - Surface

"You should like this planet, Obi-Wan -- during particular times of the year, the surface tension of the planetary liquid cover is high enough to walk on."

#32 - Idea

Another concept that was difficult for Qui-Gon or, really, any Jedi to ever process: life without the Force.

#33 - Diamond

A field composed entirely of highly compressed carbon pebbles made for a wretchedly unforgiving -- though aesthetically attractive, he had to admit -- walking surface.

#34 - Blind

There had been a brief, terrifying period on Oline where Obi-Wan had gone blind -- Sardell spores, released into the mining tunnels precisely for the purpose of flushing them out and thankfully incompatible with Qui-Gon's body chemistry -- and Qui-Gon didn't think that he would ever forget that rush of fear, the first time he had felt even the faintest hint of that emotion in over a decade, when he saw Obi-Wan standing there in the tunnel, eyes milk-white, spores powdering his shoulders and hands golden, and him trying to calm himself enough so that he could use the Force to navigate.

#35 - Flow

The sewer, in the way of every sewer that Qui-Gon had ever visited, stank, and without having to look behind him, Qui-Gon told Obi-Wan to stop using the Force to float himself over the ankle-deep goo.

#36 - Movement

Qui-Gon had never actually been all that clumsy; he had been born big, after all, and had learned to move carefully long before he stepped into a training circle.

#37 - More

There was a notion among the Jedi on the limits of knowledge: there might be an infinite amount to learn in the universe and infinite ways to know the Force, but for each person, there was a limit, a line, a demarcation past which he could not go.

#38 - Honey

Qui-Gon remembered being rather revolted when he learned the process by which honey was produced, and after learning its origins, he never quite re-acquired his old taste for it.

#39 - Weather

It was unusual to find pebbles from the River of Light weathered down and as obvious as this -- usually, they were covered in at least a shell of igneous rock, but this one lay in Qui-Gon's palm and quietly went about it business of glowing in the presence of a midichlorian node.

#40 - Blue

The refraction index of water gave most planets a blue sky, but Terpsichore, with its typical passion for the overdramatic, carried enough exotic organocompounds in its atmosphere to make its ceiling only a shade or two darker than the blade on Qui-Gon's lightsaber.

#41 - Double

The Shaman had, in the dream, two faces: one flesh that looked so much like Qui-Gon's that they could have been blood brothers and then, another looked like it was made entirely out of blue light.

#42 - Braid

Dooku had to punish Qui-Gon out of the habit of chewing or otherwise playing on his Padawan braid; Obi-Wan, on the other hand, came to being a Padawan hungry for all the signs and dignity of that status.

#43 - Thread

There was no set regulation as to how or which events a Padawan would mark on his braid with extra thread -- guidelines, yes, but regulations, no -- and Qui-Gon respected Obi-Wan's privacy enough never to ask what his bands marked.

#44 - Angles

His arm hung such a funny angle in front of him that, even though he could only feel the pain dimly, at the edges of his mind, Qui-Gon could only assume that his arm was broken and the bit of white and red poking out at the side was where the bone had broken through the skin.

#45 - Daydream

Sufficiently trained Jedi rarely allowed themselves to fantasize, and even if he had been emotionally inclined for it, Qui-Gon could not have conceived of a life besides that of following the Force and going planet to planet, ship to ship, with his Padawan by his side.

#46 - Nightmare

Xanatos had, as a child, been somewhat prone to nightmares; Obi-Wan, on the other hand, slept with the lifelong assurance of someone who had arrived at the Temple hours after he had been born.

#47 - Honor

There was no honor among the Jedi; there was only the Force.

#48 - Palm

It was a combination of genetics, rough usage, and sheer phyical size but by the time he was thirty, the palms of Qui-Gon's hands were almost twice as big as that of most other near-humanoid adults.

#49 - Screen

"Tatooine, Master," Obi-Wan said, and from the angle at which he stood, Qui-Gon could make out not only his reflection on the screen, but also Obi-Wan's, all bright eyes and concentration.

#50 - Warmth