Life and Story.

[quigonejinn]

Here is a story: when you are young, the Jedi find you. They take you from your parents. Some years later, a particular Jedi takes you on as his student, and from then on, your life is anchored neither in a particular planet nor in a particular context. For six months, you are by his side as a diplomat, and he spends hours every night training every fleck of expressive quality out of your behavior and speech so that you could easily be from any one of half a dozen planets and give offense on none of them. For the next three weeks, you sleep on dirt floors with your hand on your lightsaber; your master could not care less about what you say or how you ate or talked or cursed or breathed.

All the details of your life are controlled by this man, and many years later, when certain details come out, when some of his training methods are made clear, it will appear that certain elements of what he did was cruel. Unreasonable.

Even in his own time, there were those who questioned how appropriate his methods were. You do not know; you lived through them, and you felt that you owed him a great deal.

...

When you are fairly old to be thinking of such a thing, you end up with a student of your own. You had no intention of taking one whatsoever, but you would begin a meditation in your quarters, and you would wake up four hours later, in the Youngling gymnasium, watching them spar. You would come back from three months of talking in a language that required you to use the Force to change the density of the cartilage in your jaw; it would be the day that the Younglings were touring the hangar bay, and they would be staring at you while you got off the transport.

It was frankly ridiculous, and just to shut the Force up about it, there was a certain temptation to just go down to the Youngling section and point to the first one that crossed your line of vision.

You were fairly sure that if you did that, the Force would still hav very definite plans for which one you ended up with and that you would spend the next years dealing with a very smug itch in the back of your head about how it had still managed to slot you with the right Padawan: you ignored the itch for two years, and then, at the end of things, you went down and told the creche master that you were looking for that Youngling named Obi-Wan Kenobi.

At first, she was not sure who you were talking about.

"About this high," you said and put your second finger and thumb rather close together for exaggeration's sake. "Very gifted. Very righteous."

Amusement -- and a certain measure of pity -- dawned on her face.

...

Here is the thing about Younglings: they are not children. They may look like children, and they may occaisionally act like children, but before they take their first breath, they are already stronger in the Force than all but the most sensitive one-tenth of one percent of the population. Unless they are verbally precocial, by the time that they are able to communicate in a structured way with the external, non-telepathic universe, they have already been drilled in the precepts of being a Jedi so thoroughly that for a number of years, until Dooku trained it out of you, you had a difficult time grasping any written language unless you first saw how certain Jedi texts looked in it.

The first time that Obi-Wan thinks he needs to save you is about six Corsucant years after he has been born. He has crawled through ventilation ducts and done a fairly impressive mind-trick on a guard to get to where you are lying, tied up, on the floor. You had picked him up slightly before he hit the ventilation ducts, and you can feel his surprise, too, when you suddenly produce your lightsaber from your sleeve, slice through your bonds, take down three guards, destroy the generator, retrieve the President's data disc from the reader, and tuck him under your arm and carry him out of the blast range.

"Erm," he says as the two of you are walking away from the flaming ruins of Smuggler's Lair.

You look at him.

"Erm," he says, and he has reddened up to the very tips of the ears, up to the cartilagineous parts where you did not think it was possible for members of his species to blush.

...

The second time that Obi-Wan thinks he needs to save you, you really do need saving. It's about four and a half years later, and he still hasn't entirely lived down the shame of having ridden to your rescue and then needing to be rescued himself.

He redeems himself thoroughly this time, hacking into a computer, planting a code-override into a sentry bot and then hiding in its magnetic shadow to reach the secure room where you were being held. He had smuggled not only your lightsaber in with him, but also a basic first aid kid, which you applied, one-handed, to yourself while he fended off the droids long enough for you to become ambulatory again, and if the two of you were less suited for each other, it would have been necessary to thank him afterwards.

Instead, in the shuttle, you look at him. You have let him pilot the shuttle into hyperspace because he is working on his intersystem telemetry skills, and he sees you looking at him, and he flushes up to the cartilagineous bits in his ears again.

The steering yoke is almost higher than he is. He has to grasp it with both hands, and you got some funny looks when the Customs Authority on Bepp 7 introduced themselves and had to scan downwards to see the pilot. Still, though -- after that episode, you were a little more tolerant of your Padawan's tendency to chatter and blather when nervous. If you'd paid attention to him, after all, you wouldn't have needed rescuing in the first place.

It doesn't mean you'll actually pay attention to him next time, though.

...

Here is something about love and Jedi: love is, quite honestly, not all that important to most of them. The Younglings are advised of it, and Yoda will talk about it every once in a while. Dooku gave you a text or two to read about it while he was solidifying his own view of the subject, but both Yoda and Dooku are, in their way, eccentrics, and you have, in your own way, wandered back towards orthodoxy: the Force fills your life. You wake up with it in the morning; you hold onto it as you sleep at night. The older you grow, the more you understand that it is not only the most important thing in the universe, but also the only thing that matters, in any true, honest meaning of the term.

So love is a distant thing. Something that you think about, on a conscious level, only when you have to deal with those who aren't in the Order -- it is that way for most Jedi, you suspect. The Order serves the Force. The Force is the most important thing that could possibly ever be, and the primacy of this idea is one of the things that you appreciate most about Obi-Wan. He loves the Force best; he loves the Order next, and you do not think very much about where you fit into this hierarchy. You are aware, in a vague sort of way, that you are probably fairly important to him, but it's never occurred to you to ask or even think about where, exactly, you fit into it.

At least, not until a planet where the two of you are mediating a resource allocation discussion between a number of warring species. It has been a trying day of negotiations, and the two of you are sitting on the balcony of the suite, looking out onto the B'narr mountains with the clouds all blue and purple behind them. Remains of dinner are on the low table; native birds are calling from the trees, and the two of you are talking, idly. After such charged negotiations, it is pleasant to speak and be at ease.

You ask Obi-Wan what is most important to him.

"The Force," Obi-Wan says without hesitation.

Then, after a little bit of hesitation because he knows you will be displeased: "The Order."

You do, indeed, make a little noise of displeasure, and he gives you an apolegetic little smile. He thinks that most of your displeasure with the order is because you dislike a certain newly-raised Council member; you maintain that it is his policies that you dislike. Obi-Wan has suggested, in the most tactful way possible, that you are irrational in your dislike of Windu.

To show him that you forgive him despite his massive error and impertinence -- no other reason, none at all -- you smile a little yourself. You ask, "Is there anything else that is important to you?"

Obi-Wan looks at you for a moment, then looks away, even more quickly. "This resource allocation is important to the peace in this sector. And I care about the affairs of the Senate, too, I guess."

This is all true. He wakes early every morning to look over the latest transmissions of Senate proceedings, and the boy once read the full Senate parliamentary rules during a voyage where unstable wormholes prevented easy hyperspace travel. You can understand this, and you are studying him and turning over, inside your head, how you have somehow managed to raise someone who enjoys order and rules so much, when the inquiry suddenly presents itself.

The way he had looked at you just prior to that. The way he is absorbed in studying the sunset with his mouth set in a strange manner.

"What about me? Where does your old master fit into this?"

Obi-Wan had, indeed, been staring off into the distance of the mountains, and it is strange how pleasing it is to see him freeze in the middle of scratching the back of his neck. He blushes and fidgets and blushes some more, then flees inside the apartment because he is too embarrassed to be alone with you.

In fact, he cannot look at you outside of work for almost four days -- during negotiations, he is perfect and calm as a basin of cool water, but outside of negotiations, he is terribly unsettled. You had only been teasing him, and you would not have been upset if he had taken it seriously and told you that he had not thought of where you fit, or if he had suggested a number of things that came before you, and Obi-Wan knew it, too.

Strange how pleasing it is. Strange.

...

Jedi do not have families. The only rule about love is that there cannot attachment involved in it.

This is, as you have found, possibly the most difficult precept to explain to explain to someone who is not familiar with the Order. Almost everyone understands the rule against anger; most understand the rule against fear. The rule about love, though, gets blank looks on those occaisions when it comes up -- usually informal dinners after the conclusion of negotiations, and the questions are almost always directed towards you since you are the senior Jedi and because, as Obi-Wan has put it, people have, by then, noticed your tendency to ramble. At length.

And after a number of discussions, you have settled on a standard response.

"Think of it this way," you say. "What would you give up for love? Would you give up something important to you? What if you would destroy something that was important to others? That is attachment. Jedi cannot have that."

Obi-Wan is almost always sitting across from you at these dinners. He has heard you give that little speech at least two dozen times in the past dozen years.

...

You give Obi-Wan a great deal of privacy with the details of his life. In part, it is because you don't care to manage them. In part, it is because you hae every confidence that Obi-Wan will handle them on his own. You know he has various small romances and flirtations and dramas. None of them last very long, and you do not ask about them. He does not talk about them.

...

The Jedi do not have many rules about either love or sex. The only important one is this: what would you give up for love? Would you do anything that was important or difficult?

...

It is true that there has not been a signficant interplantary dispute since the last Trade Federation dispute, but that does not mean that there are no terrible planetary ones: four years after the resource allocation dispute, the two of you are back in the B'narr mountains. The clouds are, again, blue and purple behind the clouds, but the trees are gone, and so is a third of the planet's population. It has been rounded up by the other two-thirds and exterminated, and the place where your shuttle has set down is, as you now understand it, one of the sites of the great massacres. It had been a pass between the mountains, and the soon-to-be-exterminated were lined up on either side of the pass and forced in by gunfire.

More were then lined up. And pushed over the side. As you understand it, this continued until the cities were empty and the countryside clear. This pass, in particular, had been filled until it was level with the cliffs, then abandoned. There are hundreds of thousands of corpses here, you'd guess, and the grief of the Force mixes with the overwhelming stench.

Giving this coordinate as a rendezvous point is, you suppose, an act of intimidation on the part of the exterminating races.

Obi-Wan vomits immediately.

After standing and looking out at the wasteland for a few minutes, you end up retching against the shuttle, too, and you do it for a good long time. You throw up everything in your stomach, and when there is nothing left in your stomach, you throw up bile. When you have thrown up all the bile in your stomach, you dry heave until your stomach produces more bile.

Obi-Wan has been done for a while when you are, and when you straighten, he offers you water from the canteen to rinse your mouth. You take a little, swish it around, spit it out, then hand the canteen back to him. He is studying you with a look of profound concern.

"You should drink some. Dehydration is particularly dangerous in high-altitude climates, Master."

You look at him for a long moment. When you are looking at him, it is almost possible to ignore the smell of the bodies. To block out the meaning of the shapes behind him.

"I remember when you were this tall," you say, and hold your thumb and forefinger almost pressed together. "And when you needed to be rescued."

He manages not to look repentant for having grown. Obi-Wan then hands you a scrap of cloth so that you don't wipe your mouth on the sleeve of your robe.

...

There are moments when you think about extending the relationship to a sexual dimension. Obi-Wan would not mind it, you think. He might like it a great deal, you think, and you would also enjoy it. There are sexual acts that you would like to try on him, and you think, sometimes, about what it would be like to run your hands over him, from forehead to stomach, across the shoulders. Over his closed eyes, the inside of his mouth. Everywhere and anywhere, and soak up every sigh and shift of position and noise from Obi-Wan.

You already know him by sight and voice. He is old enough to have developed a lightsaber sub-style of his own, and you know almost exactly the workings of his mind.

"They would like us for another diplomatic resolution, Master," he says, sounding far more cheerful than he should.

You make a noncommital noise. It would be weakness to show how much you dislike these things.

"It won't be so bad, Master. The planets involved haven't been feuding very long, and the brief says that one of the planets is renowned for the quality of its cooking."

You look over at him, briefly, and prepare to say something about the pleasures of the stomach being inappropriate for Jedi when he gives you the cheekiest smile that has ever masqueraded as obedience from a Padawan. There are some masters, even, who comment on how obedient and responsive your Padawan is.

"Thus, they are likely to have a banquet afterwards, Master. Where you'll be called upon to give those admirable speeches about Jedi virtues and love," he says, and you decide that any non-Jedi poet who had trouble dispelling lust for a loved one had clearly never met Obi-Wan when he was determined to be annoying in order to keep you from brooding about the Council.

...

Here is a story that is also, by coincidence, your life: when you are young, the Jedi find you, and they take you from your parents. One particular Jedi trains you, and to repay a tiny part of the impossibly great debt that you owe to the Force, you train another as your student. You save his life a few times, but he saves yours far more often. You come to rely on him; you come to be fond of him, and at some indefinable point, you come to love him as much as you are capable of loving any single, living being. Your love for him encompasses categories. It surprises you.

He is, in fact, the first person that you love in this way. You love him as a teacher loves a student. You love him like a father loves a son, and also, like a brother loves a brother. You love him the way that a man loves another who shares his life work; you love him like a man loves something that makes him happy, that makes him laugh. There are, at times, moments when you even love him in the way that a lover might, but nothing physical ever comes of that becuase that is not the beginning or the end or even an important middle part of it.

You love him as much as you are capable of loving him, and what it gets you is this: death. One physical death, when you die on Naboo, and one spiritual death when you finally fade away on the high plains of Tatooine. Billions upon billions of deaths when the Force, the one thing that you love more than Obi-Wan, decides that the Jedi cannot be saved and that the Republic must be remade so that she does not depend on them in the same way.

...

Love does not save anything. In light of that, what should either you or anyone else, for that matter, give up for it?