quigonejinn

Yes, it's the Qui-Gon document fic. See plagiarization of a certain almost-poet laureate! See lots and lots of totally unlikely handwriting for Qui-Gon! See me repeating the only themes I can ever talk about in Star Wars!

Obi-Wan knew that his Master had not been much one for sustained scholarly inquiry. Qui-Gon disliked having to draft preparatory materials for speaking to the Council; the closest he ever came to using written notes during negotiations would be to look at the ones Obi-Wan had taken down.

Nevertheless, Obi-Wan had been aware of this notebook. He had seen Qui-Gon looking at it when they were back on Corsucant between missions; he would come back from a sparring match or time in the library and find Qui-Gon frowning down at it. They would spend the occaisional evening on Corsucant, waiting for their next assignment; Obi-Wan would read. There would be tea on the table between them, and Qui-Gon would sort through the pile of memos, briefings, miscellaneous ephemera that came from traveling the universe. Unfolding things. Staring down at the dirty little scraps of paper he always seemed to accumulate. Making noises as he realized what this was, deciding what might be useful to remember for a future mission and placing it in the notebook. Deciding what was useless and discarding it.

After Qui-Gon was dead, Obi-Wan had the duty of cataloging and organizing his master's personal effects. Qui-Gon had obeyed the dictum against possessions better than most Jedi. Since they had burned him in his best clothes, there was only his everyday working gear.

And his notebooks.

There were a number of them, as Qui-Gon had worked at them through the years. Obi-Wan had never read any of the notebooks before. Qui-Gon had never invited him to read it, and consequently, Obi-Wan felt more than a little guilty going through something so intensely personal. There was no table of contents; most of the leaves were undated. Not organized for anybody's convenience than Qui-Gon's, and some of the materials were ordinary. Additioinally, Obi-Wan could not work out the rules under which Qui-Gon would leave one notebook aside and start a fresh one. Some were half-empty; others were so filled that the back cover had writing on it.

This, judging by the contents, was the most recent, and yes, as Obi-Wan remembered it, he had been very fond of the flatbread on Yerphonia.

Obi-Wan remembered Andrane.

A number of things had commended it to his memory. The mission had been interesting and complex; the native population had been particularly friendly and welcoming. Qui-Gon had been particularly enthusiastic about their poetry.

Most vivid to Obi-Wan, though, was the native population's disdain for both indoor heating and doors with which to keep out the cold: he and Qui-Gon were assigned splendid diplomatic quarters with a splendid view of the sea and a splendid lack of anything resembling heat.

Despite Qui-Gon's mocking, Obi-Wan went to bed in all of his robes, and he woke in the middle of the night despite it. He remembered pulling the blankets more tightly around him; it had been so cold that he could felt his skin prickling when he moved the muscles of his face. He had turned over to find a warmer position, if it was possible in such a disgustingly cold world, and saw that Qui-Gon had turned towards him in his sleep. Qui-Gon had also given in and gone to bed with all of his robes; the bed was large enough so that two could fit comfortably on it, and Qui-Gn too, was bundled with blankets and two layers of robes.

He was deeply asleep, though, and due to the lack of doors, there was enough light in the room for Obi-Wan to see. There was an open volume of the native poetry on the outermost layer of Qui-Gon's blankets, and Obi-Wan remembered, very clearly, the intense joy of lying there and watching, by moonlight, his master close by and sleeping well.

It was like the cold outside the blankets, but fiercer and inside Obi-Wan's chest.

Obi-Wan blinked, surprised. The following page had a list of planets, but it wasn't even a complete or even particularly chronological list of what they had visited as Master and Padawan. They did not seem to come from any particular time frame; some had been diplomatic missions, and others had been more militiaristic. In fact, Obi-Wan had no memory of many of the planets listed, including the one that Qui-Gon had found important enough to circle. What had they done worth remembering on Morvogodine?

The sheet appeared to have been torn out of the notebook, crumpled, re-flattened, and then re-inserted.

It also appeared to be the beginning of a speech, which made Obi-Wan smile. That certainly explained why Qui-Gon had such difficulty with it, why it had been necessary to begin so many times and why he had been so frustrated with it. Qui-Gon had loathed having to put his thoughts in fixed form before the moment of having to speak them, and this appeared to be his least favorite variety -- a formal speech before a crowd.

It took Obi-Wan a moment, however, to realize the occaision for which Qui-Gon been drafting it.

Qui-Gon had not kept living quarters at the Temple. Instead, he had requested -- and received -- a pair of large lockers close to the central spaceport hangars. He and Obi-Wan did not need assigned living space; they were rarely on Corsucant for more than a few days at a time, and the locker was useful primarily to keep Qui-Gon's personal notebooks, Obi-Wan's collection of souvenirs, and supplies that they needed too frequently for to requisition, each time, from the quartermasters.

Obi-Wan remembered reminding himself, as they were leaving Corsucant for Naboo, that on his return, he probably ought to move his belongings from those lockers.

That was how the notebook ended. There were pages after that, but they had not been used. As far as Obi-Wan could tell, Qui-Gon had not done anything with them, and when Obi-Wan turned the page and found that it and everything following were completely blank, he was more than a little startled to realize that he was crying. In fact, it took him a few moments to realize that he had crying, quietly, for so long that his throat ached.

He sat with the closed notebook in his hands for a very long time. The lights were dim in the sitting room, and the tea next to him on the table had gone ice-cold. There was complete quiet from Anakin's room; he could not hear anything coming from it, but if he concentrated, he could feel the thread of Anakin in the Living Force. He was dreaming of double suns and hot sand.

Eventually, Obi-Wan cleared his throat and stood up. He wiped his face, put the notebook on the table and told himself that he would take it down to the Archives tomorrow for Jocasta. It was the appropriate place for the book, after all; historical value aside, there might be useful information for someone visiting those planets or making a study of ancient Republic syllabary.

Obi-Wan turned back looked at the notebook for one last time, though, as he left. It sat on a table crowded with Anakin's things, in the shadows of the room that Obi-Wan knew he would be living at until Anakin was competent enough for the field. He looked at it for a while, then turned and went to his bedroom.

He slept, and that night, he dreamed of undying love and the ship that was rigged for the long journey.

All poetry and attempts at poetry are thoughtlessly and crassly derived from Philip Larkin. Drawn from the text presented in the Collected Poems anthology of his work, which I cannot lay my hands on right now, but I'm pretty sure that the long "Naboo" poem at the end is from poem XXXI in North Ship. Also from North Ships, I suspect, are the "bone's truth" poem that I've used for the title, which is XXIX from there. I dreamed of an out-thrust arm of land is XXI; the poem that Qui-Gon tries to write is actually Larkin's VIII, Winter. Both QGJ's and my (nonexistant) talents lie elsewhere, so we had to steal. Sorry, Phil, old boy. XD

The font used in the tearout on the first page is actually derived from a real language -- Ahom. I've mirrored the syllabary for aesthetic reasons and because I, uh, don't know a word of the language and uh. Yeah. Subsequent squiggles are derived from a number of other syllabic languages listed on the Omniglot webpage, particularly Brahmi. I've also lifted the names used in some of the later stuff from the syllbaic languages on there.

No, the stains on the first page are not pee stains. It's peppermint-ginger tea. Shut up, shut up, shut up.

Serious thanks to everybody who gave me encouragement about this when I was first plotting it back in November 2005. This includes