Loneliness.
Dec. 29th, 2006 04:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quigonejinnFrom an idea talked about with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
babel a long, long time ago.
For a Master and a Padawan, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan lived surprisingly separate lives.
Obi-Wan spent eight out of every ten waking hours with his master. And when Obi-Wan had been younger, Qui-Gon would curl around him around at night and settle Obi-Wan's head on his shoulder -- it was so that he would know if Obi-Wan slept easily, if his breathing was disturbed. Qui-Gon could have justified it on training grounds, but he loved Obi-Wan, and he was, even if he refused to admit it, essentially alone.
His affection had not diminished with age. It was still the fact, though, that as they grew older, they gave each other plenty of room.
...
"This is their word for hello, Master."
It was dark inside the room, but Qui-Gon heard Obi-Wan working the stopper out of the bottle. A few minutes later, there was a smell, somewhat like Previan roses and freshly turned dirt.
...
"This is their word for danger, Master."
It was still dark in the room, and Qui-Gon listened to Obi-Wan working the stopper otu of another bottle. There was a moment where Qui-Gon could smell nothing -- he later learned that was a part of the Shr'ang speech that was outside near-human comprehension. What was within comprehension was the pleasant, slightly peppery alkaturboxyl smell at the end.
...
Part of the distance between them was in a reaction to what Qui-Gon found other Masters doing. He found that they took over too much of their Padawan's lives. Their Padawans became too dependent on them. Consequently, in their first year of knighthood was spent re-learning independent thinking: when Obi-Wan had been nine years old they had a joint mission with another Jedi Master and his Padawan, and it nearly ended in disaster because the Padawan froze. Her master had been incapcitated. Without someone to give her orders or shape her thinking, she hesitated, and it took some quick thinking and quicker, Force-guided acting for all four of them to survive the mission.
"I do not want you to learn from me. I even do not want you learning from Yoda or your teachers. You are not learning about us, about what we think. That is the not the important thing -- you should be learning the truth, and you should be learning from the Force."
Obi-Wan wrestled with the idea. Qui-Gon could see him struggling with it; it was very much against what every Youngling was drilled with in the creche, and yes, Obi-wan had a tendency to follow orders because they were orders. He liked them. He also liked authority and rules.
"Do you agree? There is a time when you are going to be a Knight and will no longer be a Padawan."
There was a moment of hesitation, but eventually, Obi-Wan nodded. He had just passed the age of nine; he had been following Qui-Gon for a third of the time that he had conscious memory, and Qui-Gon made sure to let Obi-Wan know how impressed he was with Obi-Wan's maturity and decision-making skills.
It was not just that incident, Qui-Gon. He thought he found over-dependence among not only among Padawans, but those who had once been Padawans, too.
...
Obi-Wan was seventeen, and they were on a mission to a planet where the sentient life form used scent as a method of communication. They were insectoid; they lived underground in low light conditions, and it made sense for them to use chemical means to speak to one another.
"In a sense, though, it's extraneous," the pilot was telling them. "They have a kind of telepathy."
From the corner of his eye, Qui-Gon could see Obi-Wan flinch a little. Obi-Wan had done the reading, too; the Shr'ang did not have telepathy so much as a group mind. They had a separate brains, but a merged consciousness. The thought of one Shr'ang, insofar as a single Shr'ang was ever capable of individual thought, occurred simultaneously in the minds of every other member of its species. It was one of the mysterious of Republic science as to how they managed it, but it was a true group mind, and not the linked awareness present on Porinn VI or the Antarid Nexus.
It was also why they had decided to let the Jedi have the child that they were going to find. The Force acted. It marred the connection to the group mind. It set the child apart from all the others of her birth-group, preventing full integration as long as it lived.
After a while, Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon went into the back of the shuttle, and Obi-Wan uncorked a bottle of the scent that meant We are glad for the mind. He sneezed, and Qui-Gon sneezed. Up front, the pilot sneezed.
...
"It makes sense, in a way, Master, that a species with chemical communication would develop a group mind. Inhaled particles become part of you, don't they?"
"They do."
A little later, Obi-Wan spoke again. "Master, what did they do to the Force-sensitive before they becae provisional members of the Republic? I could not find it in either the briefing materials or the Archives."
Qui-Gon's mouth moved a little. Obi-Wan must really be fighting off air-sickness -- he was gripping the sides of his passenger chair quite hard even though the shuttle pilot was doing his best to find the easy spots in the turbulence.
"What do you think they did, Obi-Wan?"
It had, he reminded Obi-Wan, been a minor diplomatic coup when the Senate persuased the Shr'ang, as a condition of provisional membership, to turn over their deformed to the Jedi Order.
...
The Shr'ang had no objections to being part of the Republic, it seemed, and the access to her rich trading routes and broad markets that membership brought. They had greater objections to handing over their children to the Jedi: it seemed that they did not even want Jedi on their planet. Qui-Gon had been accepted children into the Order in a number of situations, ranging from grand ceremonies of state, to having wounded children were being shoved in his arms in the middle of a combat situation.
In every situation, though, there had been some degree of pride in it. The parent was mournful, but he was proud to be giving his child to the Jedi.
A minor official met them on the landing pad that smelled like wood smoke. Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon wore their best robes, and they had doused themselves in a scent-removing liquid -- the child was present on the landing pad. It lay on the ground, in a pile of swaddling cloths, and Obi-Wan bent to pick it up while Qui-Gon turned back to the representative.
"No need to sign," the functionary said, in passable Standard It was slightly disturbing that the voice seemed to be coming from its legs, but Qui-Gon nodded. Of course there would be no need to sign in a species with a group mind and when the species had no desire to keep track of what it had given up.
"You have been apprised of our stance on this," the functionary said, and Qui-Gon turned to the bundle of swaddling cloths. It had developed further than he assumed it would have; there was a face with discernable eyes and segmented antenna. Obi-Wan was looking down at it. In response, the antenna swung a little, as if in a breeze. Its eyes flashed; there was a smell of something like roses and fresh-turned dirt, and then, Obi-Wan touched it on the forehead.
A moment passed. The child fell asleep.
Obi-Wan looked at Qui-Gon, almost in apology, and Qui-Gon lifted his eyebrows the barest half-centimeter.
Obi-Wan, it seemed, had thought of how painful it was to be lonely: he did not want the child to be awake when it was severed from the group mind.
...
"Independent thought and action are something to be cherished, Obi-Wan."
...
"Someday, you will have to be without me, Obi-Wan. You will be a Knight, and you will bear the weight of making your own decisions."
They were outside the caves; the shuttlecraft had landed, and medical personnel, trailed by a weeping Padawan, were using a lift to carry the injured Master into the hangar. Obi-Wan had been watching them; the Master had raised a hand and put it on the Padawan's shoulder to comfort her, but she began to cry harder and would have collapsed entirely onto his gurney if she hadn't remembered, at the last moment, that she was a Padawan.
The shame of having frozen was still with her, it seemed, and Obi-Wan tore himself away from looking at them.
"Am I going to be alone someday, Master?"
Qui-Gon considered Obi-Wan.
For a moment, Qui-Gon thought about answering that since they were Jedi, they were never alone because they had the Force. This was technically true, as well as the orthodox anser to give, but he looked at Obi-Wan, and he thought of the way that he slept with Obi-Wan tucked against him.
He remembered his own crushing loneliness the first year that he did not have a Master anymore, and he remembered how lost he had felt, even after the loneliness ended. The Force was a comfort; it was a companion, but in the events that had just happened, Qui-Gon had taken all the skin off his knuckles. He had also stretched his muscles to their tearing point with the Force; if he did not find a bacta tank very soon, he would collapse.
...
They were back in the shuttle; the child was still asleep as the pilot took them into geosynchrous orbit. Qui-Gon looked over at Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan looked down into the bundle of clothes: he had taken children away from their birth planets before, but it had not affected him this way. He did not look at the planet dropping away, nor did he peer over the pilot's shoulder at the instruments while they were flying. Both of those things were usualy highlights of any planetary visit for him.
Instead, Obi-Wan looked at the child, and Qui-Gon looked at Obi-Wna.
Eventually, Obi-Wan touched his hand to the center of the child's forehead, and it woke. There was silence for a while as it's eyes flashed, and it twisted, trying to find the group mind. At one point, it rolled onto its front and looked at Qui-Gon, and he looked back at it.
There was no sound, though. The species was, without extensive training, incapable of anything resembling vocalization. It was also incapable of weeping; instead, the shuttle filled with the scent of ashes. Obi-Wan reached out to comfort the child through the Force. Qui-Gon leaned over to gave him pointers, and eventually, the child stilled. Eventually, the scent dissipated.
...
The Shr'ang had no word for loneliness -- as a species species with a group mind, they had no concept of it. They had forgotten the time when they existed as individuals, separate from the group, and analogously, Obi-Wan had no smell for loneliness. There had been ashes when Qui-Gon was cremated, but he had expected grief from that. Qui-Gon had trained him for it, and he also had the Force. The Order. Duty. The smell of Qui-Gon's cremation made less of an impression on him. It took subsequent tragedy to give him a sense of it.
For the Shr'ang child, who Obi-Wan met two decades later as a very capable Padawan who would make a fine Knight, loneliness had been the smell of ashes.
For Obi-Wan, in the remainder of his life, loneliness took the smell of sulfur and Mustafar.
babel a long, long time ago. For a Master and a Padawan, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan lived surprisingly separate lives.
Obi-Wan spent eight out of every ten waking hours with his master. And when Obi-Wan had been younger, Qui-Gon would curl around him around at night and settle Obi-Wan's head on his shoulder -- it was so that he would know if Obi-Wan slept easily, if his breathing was disturbed. Qui-Gon could have justified it on training grounds, but he loved Obi-Wan, and he was, even if he refused to admit it, essentially alone.
His affection had not diminished with age. It was still the fact, though, that as they grew older, they gave each other plenty of room.
...
"This is their word for hello, Master."
It was dark inside the room, but Qui-Gon heard Obi-Wan working the stopper out of the bottle. A few minutes later, there was a smell, somewhat like Previan roses and freshly turned dirt.
...
"This is their word for danger, Master."
It was still dark in the room, and Qui-Gon listened to Obi-Wan working the stopper otu of another bottle. There was a moment where Qui-Gon could smell nothing -- he later learned that was a part of the Shr'ang speech that was outside near-human comprehension. What was within comprehension was the pleasant, slightly peppery alkaturboxyl smell at the end.
...
Part of the distance between them was in a reaction to what Qui-Gon found other Masters doing. He found that they took over too much of their Padawan's lives. Their Padawans became too dependent on them. Consequently, in their first year of knighthood was spent re-learning independent thinking: when Obi-Wan had been nine years old they had a joint mission with another Jedi Master and his Padawan, and it nearly ended in disaster because the Padawan froze. Her master had been incapcitated. Without someone to give her orders or shape her thinking, she hesitated, and it took some quick thinking and quicker, Force-guided acting for all four of them to survive the mission.
"I do not want you to learn from me. I even do not want you learning from Yoda or your teachers. You are not learning about us, about what we think. That is the not the important thing -- you should be learning the truth, and you should be learning from the Force."
Obi-Wan wrestled with the idea. Qui-Gon could see him struggling with it; it was very much against what every Youngling was drilled with in the creche, and yes, Obi-wan had a tendency to follow orders because they were orders. He liked them. He also liked authority and rules.
"Do you agree? There is a time when you are going to be a Knight and will no longer be a Padawan."
There was a moment of hesitation, but eventually, Obi-Wan nodded. He had just passed the age of nine; he had been following Qui-Gon for a third of the time that he had conscious memory, and Qui-Gon made sure to let Obi-Wan know how impressed he was with Obi-Wan's maturity and decision-making skills.
It was not just that incident, Qui-Gon. He thought he found over-dependence among not only among Padawans, but those who had once been Padawans, too.
...
Obi-Wan was seventeen, and they were on a mission to a planet where the sentient life form used scent as a method of communication. They were insectoid; they lived underground in low light conditions, and it made sense for them to use chemical means to speak to one another.
"In a sense, though, it's extraneous," the pilot was telling them. "They have a kind of telepathy."
From the corner of his eye, Qui-Gon could see Obi-Wan flinch a little. Obi-Wan had done the reading, too; the Shr'ang did not have telepathy so much as a group mind. They had a separate brains, but a merged consciousness. The thought of one Shr'ang, insofar as a single Shr'ang was ever capable of individual thought, occurred simultaneously in the minds of every other member of its species. It was one of the mysterious of Republic science as to how they managed it, but it was a true group mind, and not the linked awareness present on Porinn VI or the Antarid Nexus.
It was also why they had decided to let the Jedi have the child that they were going to find. The Force acted. It marred the connection to the group mind. It set the child apart from all the others of her birth-group, preventing full integration as long as it lived.
After a while, Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon went into the back of the shuttle, and Obi-Wan uncorked a bottle of the scent that meant We are glad for the mind. He sneezed, and Qui-Gon sneezed. Up front, the pilot sneezed.
...
"It makes sense, in a way, Master, that a species with chemical communication would develop a group mind. Inhaled particles become part of you, don't they?"
"They do."
A little later, Obi-Wan spoke again. "Master, what did they do to the Force-sensitive before they becae provisional members of the Republic? I could not find it in either the briefing materials or the Archives."
Qui-Gon's mouth moved a little. Obi-Wan must really be fighting off air-sickness -- he was gripping the sides of his passenger chair quite hard even though the shuttle pilot was doing his best to find the easy spots in the turbulence.
"What do you think they did, Obi-Wan?"
It had, he reminded Obi-Wan, been a minor diplomatic coup when the Senate persuased the Shr'ang, as a condition of provisional membership, to turn over their deformed to the Jedi Order.
...
The Shr'ang had no objections to being part of the Republic, it seemed, and the access to her rich trading routes and broad markets that membership brought. They had greater objections to handing over their children to the Jedi: it seemed that they did not even want Jedi on their planet. Qui-Gon had been accepted children into the Order in a number of situations, ranging from grand ceremonies of state, to having wounded children were being shoved in his arms in the middle of a combat situation.
In every situation, though, there had been some degree of pride in it. The parent was mournful, but he was proud to be giving his child to the Jedi.
A minor official met them on the landing pad that smelled like wood smoke. Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon wore their best robes, and they had doused themselves in a scent-removing liquid -- the child was present on the landing pad. It lay on the ground, in a pile of swaddling cloths, and Obi-Wan bent to pick it up while Qui-Gon turned back to the representative.
"No need to sign," the functionary said, in passable Standard It was slightly disturbing that the voice seemed to be coming from its legs, but Qui-Gon nodded. Of course there would be no need to sign in a species with a group mind and when the species had no desire to keep track of what it had given up.
"You have been apprised of our stance on this," the functionary said, and Qui-Gon turned to the bundle of swaddling cloths. It had developed further than he assumed it would have; there was a face with discernable eyes and segmented antenna. Obi-Wan was looking down at it. In response, the antenna swung a little, as if in a breeze. Its eyes flashed; there was a smell of something like roses and fresh-turned dirt, and then, Obi-Wan touched it on the forehead.
A moment passed. The child fell asleep.
Obi-Wan looked at Qui-Gon, almost in apology, and Qui-Gon lifted his eyebrows the barest half-centimeter.
Obi-Wan, it seemed, had thought of how painful it was to be lonely: he did not want the child to be awake when it was severed from the group mind.
...
"Independent thought and action are something to be cherished, Obi-Wan."
...
"Someday, you will have to be without me, Obi-Wan. You will be a Knight, and you will bear the weight of making your own decisions."
They were outside the caves; the shuttlecraft had landed, and medical personnel, trailed by a weeping Padawan, were using a lift to carry the injured Master into the hangar. Obi-Wan had been watching them; the Master had raised a hand and put it on the Padawan's shoulder to comfort her, but she began to cry harder and would have collapsed entirely onto his gurney if she hadn't remembered, at the last moment, that she was a Padawan.
The shame of having frozen was still with her, it seemed, and Obi-Wan tore himself away from looking at them.
"Am I going to be alone someday, Master?"
Qui-Gon considered Obi-Wan.
For a moment, Qui-Gon thought about answering that since they were Jedi, they were never alone because they had the Force. This was technically true, as well as the orthodox anser to give, but he looked at Obi-Wan, and he thought of the way that he slept with Obi-Wan tucked against him.
He remembered his own crushing loneliness the first year that he did not have a Master anymore, and he remembered how lost he had felt, even after the loneliness ended. The Force was a comfort; it was a companion, but in the events that had just happened, Qui-Gon had taken all the skin off his knuckles. He had also stretched his muscles to their tearing point with the Force; if he did not find a bacta tank very soon, he would collapse.
...
They were back in the shuttle; the child was still asleep as the pilot took them into geosynchrous orbit. Qui-Gon looked over at Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan looked down into the bundle of clothes: he had taken children away from their birth planets before, but it had not affected him this way. He did not look at the planet dropping away, nor did he peer over the pilot's shoulder at the instruments while they were flying. Both of those things were usualy highlights of any planetary visit for him.
Instead, Obi-Wan looked at the child, and Qui-Gon looked at Obi-Wna.
Eventually, Obi-Wan touched his hand to the center of the child's forehead, and it woke. There was silence for a while as it's eyes flashed, and it twisted, trying to find the group mind. At one point, it rolled onto its front and looked at Qui-Gon, and he looked back at it.
There was no sound, though. The species was, without extensive training, incapable of anything resembling vocalization. It was also incapable of weeping; instead, the shuttle filled with the scent of ashes. Obi-Wan reached out to comfort the child through the Force. Qui-Gon leaned over to gave him pointers, and eventually, the child stilled. Eventually, the scent dissipated.
...
The Shr'ang had no word for loneliness -- as a species species with a group mind, they had no concept of it. They had forgotten the time when they existed as individuals, separate from the group, and analogously, Obi-Wan had no smell for loneliness. There had been ashes when Qui-Gon was cremated, but he had expected grief from that. Qui-Gon had trained him for it, and he also had the Force. The Order. Duty. The smell of Qui-Gon's cremation made less of an impression on him. It took subsequent tragedy to give him a sense of it.
For the Shr'ang child, who Obi-Wan met two decades later as a very capable Padawan who would make a fine Knight, loneliness had been the smell of ashes.
For Obi-Wan, in the remainder of his life, loneliness took the smell of sulfur and Mustafar.
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Re: Snot still here (metaphorically)
Date: 2006-12-31 12:31 pm (UTC)I'm arguing that since Obi-Wan is so awesome later, it's hard to think that he was completely unawesome before he was apprenticed. The sketchy moves are still there, of course. IMO, they're that I equate early awesome with precociousness, equating later awesome with precociousness, and presume that awesome has something to do with the age at which one is apprenticed.
You'll have to forgive me this comment and the previous and of the rambling, in a way. It's now 7:30AM, my time, and I've had somewhat less than three hours of sleep. I have an international flight to catch, which also means that any response you make is going to be a wee bit delayed, as I'm out of my native country for three weeks. 'Net access is going to be a bit sporadic.
I think I'll have to read some more of your stuff, do you mind?
I don't think any writer has ever responded in the negative to that. Ever. XD
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-31 06:05 pm (UTC)