Star Wars fic: Dirt in the Machine (5)
Mar. 15th, 2012 01:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardPrevious chapters: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4. Or read it on the AO3.
Thanks to Dogstar for the beta!
After devouring one of the reconstituted meals that Anakin offers her, Obi-Wan settles down on the bed, folding herself into a lotus position. Anakin has gone back to his droid, though he looks up at her from time to time, his gaze dark and worried. Obi-Wan, used to being observed by him, doesn’t pay any attention, just settles her hands on her knees and closes her eyes.
Immediately the absence of the Force is there, a vast yawning blankness that swallows up everything around her. Obi-Wan is front and center with it, alone in the stark desert of her mind, with nothing to ground her. For a heartbeat the panic rises up at all that emptiness, the way it had last night, but the same truth still remains. Obi-Wan Kenobi is a Jedi Knight: she lives and breathes the Force. Nothing can keep her from touching it. Even Asajj Ventress’s mask could only keep her from concentrating. Dooku’s drug is a truly marvelous and terrifying invention, but nothing that can truly keep her from touching the Force.
Obi-Wan breathes in, out, in again, fitting her breath into one of her oldest and most familiar meditative patterns, the first one she’d been taught as a youngling at the Temple. She stretches her mind out, trying to find the edges of the emptiness, because all illusions aside, it can’t go on forever.
Let go, Obi-Wan, she hears Qui-Gon say, something out of the distant past, a life she can barely remember. Open your mind to the living Force, which resides within all beings. Nothing can truly take the Force from you.
Master Yoda, in a class back at the Temple when she had still been a Padawan: A way, there always is. If through you cannot go, around you may, or over, or under. Always a way there is.
And Obi-Wan finds a way. Deep in her trance, she can feel the drug inside her, an oily slick on the surface of her mind, wending its way through her blood vessels, wrapped around her muscles. Beneath it, the Force lies placid and calm, deep as the oceans on Dac, waiting for her to release it. The drug isn’t a poison, it’s a prison, but prison locks can be picked.
Using the Force to purge a drug from the body is child’s play. Obi-Wan has done it a hundred times, a thousand, but never like this. She lets her mind race over the surface of the drug, trying to find a weakness that she can exploit, an edge of it that she can slip under, anything that she can use to touch the Force and destroy it.
No. That’s not right. Obi-Wan Kenobi is a Jedi Knight; it’s not her task to destroy. The drug isn’t evil, merely a tool. Destruction is not the way of the Jedi. So how –
Twelve hours. It must take more time to work its way through her system, but not by much; Anakin had mentioned that he could feel it wearing off. Obi-Wan breathes in. I am a Jedi. She touches the surface of the drug experimentally. It’s only been a few hours since the last dose, but she can feel it thinning with every nanosecond that passes. It will be hours more until it’s gone entirely. Not that way, then.
Obi-Wan changes her breathing pattern to a different one, sinking more deeply into her trance. Even for a Knight, it’s dangerous to go so deep, especially without the Force to tether her to her own body. She can still feel a line binding her to the surface – the Master-Padawan bond with Anakin, and a second one, stubborn and thorny and unwanted, wrapped around it. Her affection for him. Her love. Obi-Wan acknowledges it even as she leaves behind her own body, letting her consciousness expand beyond the limits of her skin. Once more she comes up against the boundaries of the drug, but this time they move with her gentle push, letting her mind pass through them with only a little burning resistance, like stepping through an energy shield. And there the Force is, waiting for her.
She doesn’t fight back yet, just explores the underside of the drug with her mind. It’s a clever thing, really. Biochemistry isn’t Obi-Wan’s specialty or even something she particularly enjoys, but she’s studied it at the Temple and knows enough to tell that Dooku’s drug truly is a remarkable creation. The Jedi Council will need to know about it. They may even be glad to have a sample of it – no. They will be, and not just because it could be a terrifying weapon against both the Jedi and the Sith. It’s very difficult to find undiluted evil; this isn’t it.
With the Force behind her, Obi-Wan doesn’t need to look for a weakness in the drug. Her mind races across it, past the superficial horror of the thing (and even there she can find some good, because sometimes it’s a mercy not to have to feel the living Force), and sinks deep into its chemical make-up. She spends further time exploring it, until she’s confident she could recreate it on a computer screen, if not in the lab, and settles down to pry apart the atomic bonds within it, rearranging them into something that will sink harmlessly into her bloodstream. As an afterthought, she leaves just enough on the surface that it will appear on a med scan, though not enough to impact her use of the Force once she’s back in her body.
Freed from the confines of the drug, Obi-Wan lets her consciousness expand outward. She touches Anakin first, deep in moving meditation, his mind focused totally on the task his hands are doing. Even with the drug settled under his skin she can feel the strength of the Force, gathered in a close cloak around him with the dual ferocity of his concentration and his emotions. Obi-Wan has never been able to train that out of him. She lingers on him for a moment, gentle with fondness, then moves past him, past the walls of the room and further out into the dreadnought.
The Dark Side reigns on the starship. Obi-Wan passes by Tol Skorr’s rage and lingers at Asajj Ventress’s hatred, before moving on. Skorr and Ventress are simple – pawns of the Dark Side. Both of them could be more if they ever accepted it. She finds Quin brooding in the hangar bay, lurking on his ship and trying to find serenity in meditation. The Light Side and the Dark Side are all tangled up within him, each warring for superiority. He feels – he feels like a Jedi, Obi-Wan realizes as she brushes the surface of his mind, not a Sith, and has the mad urge to whisper a greeting in his ear, though she restrains herself and passes on. Droids everywhere, the beautiful humming energy of the ship itself – and Dooku.
There’s no cloud of the Dark Side hanging over him, not coiled up around him or enveloping him. Instead it’s all gathered close beneath his skin, so that when Obi-Wan looks at him, all she can see is shadow and darkness. His control is absolute; it doesn’t spill past him the way it does with his apprentices. Even this deep in trance, Obi-Wan can’t touch his mind; looking into such utter blackness would be like looking into the abyss. She edges cautiously back, hoping he hasn’t noticed her intrusion, and lets her mind flow further outwards, past the boundaries of the starship’s walls, into the echoing hollowness of space. The hyperspace confuses her for a moment, until Obi-Wan falls into the rhythm of the movement and steadies herself. She’s strong in the Force, but not as strong as Anakin, and as she reaches further and further out, hundreds and thousands of parsecs out from their current position, searching for a Jedi, any Jedi, she feels the edges of her conscious mind, the markers that make her her, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and not just a gathering of loose atoms, starting to burn off into the flow of the Force.
This is what Qui-Gon had warned her about, the only other time she’d tried this. She could lose herself in the Force, fade away or wander forever or – no one knows for sure, because those who lose themselves that way seldom return. Obi-Wan hesitates, still reaching out, stretching to the very edge of her capacity, and edges up against the mind of another Jedi.
Only a few Jedi are telepaths, and Obi-Wan isn’t one of them, not by nature. Kit Fisto isn’t either, and from everything that Obi-Wan has read on the subject, she wouldn’t be able to do this if he wasn’t meditating as well. His trance isn’t as deep as hers is, but it doesn’t need to be. She spills out her relief in emotions instead, practically throwing herself against his shields until he notices and replies, Obi-Wan –?
Kit, help – She shoves the image of the ship at him, Dooku and Ventress and Skorr, the drug and everything it entails, Anakin being choked with the Force. He wants me, and he’s going to kill my Padawan to get me!
We’re coming – where –?
Don’t know. Hyperspace. Destination maybe Serenno. Maybe Lola Sayu.
We’re coming, Kit repeats, more reassurance than real words. Hold on.
Bring Aayla or Tholme, Obi-Wan adds, afterthought. Quin here. Can still be saved.
Will try. Don’t fear ¬–
Hesitating, she blurts out her final suspicion: Tell Council. Think Chancellor is Sith.
Shock radiates back towards her. Why ¬–?
Makes sense.
Will tell. Have to go. May the Force be with you, sister.
And you, brother.
He disengages from the mental connection. Obi-Wan does as well, satisfied that she’s accomplished what she set out to do, and realizes to her horror that in doing so she’s done exactly what she’s been cautioned over and over again never to do. She’s left her body without creating a line to guide her home again, and now she’s lost in the Force.
Her own panic threatens to swallow her. Obi-Wan loves the Force; she’s known it her entire life, from the moment she took her first breath until the heartbeat when she sank inside herself to come here, and she’s never thought that she could be afraid of it. Afraid of what it could do, certainly; she’s seen the power of the Dark Side and she knows the risk it poses to all Jedi. But that’s the Dark Side, not the Force itself. This, though – this is the Force, pure and simple. It stretches out around her, beautiful and terrible and endless, and Obi-Wan knows she has a choice. She can try and find her way back to her body, wander through the Force forever while parts of her spin off into eternity, or she can simply – let go.
For a heartbeat, it’s tempting. Let go, and become one with the Force, never have to wield her lightsaber again or know the sudden searing loss of another Jedi as more and more of them fall in battle. Never have to know fear again –
Or love.
Obi-Wan shouldn’t love anyone, but she does. She loves the Force and the Jedi and the Republic; she loved her Master and she loves her apprentice. Loves Anakin. As tempting as it is to let go, it’s not her time yet, and giving up isn’t the Jedi way. She can’t leave Anakin alone to face Count Dooku.
I’m sorry, she whispers regretfully to the Force, reaching out. There has to be a way to get back. Surely she must have left some kind of trail ¬–
No trail, Obi-Wan realizes slowly, but a line stretched thin that binds her not to her own body, but to Anakin Skywalker. She’d missed it before, but she finds it now, and follows it back, feeling the steady anchor of his mind at the end of it. Anakin does everything ferociously, feels too deeply, loves and hates too easily – all things that a Jedi should never do. She feels the fierceness of his love growing the closer she gets; not the steady flame of a candle, but the brilliant incandescence of a supernova, the kind of love that threatens to destroy everything in its path. If Obi-Wan had any sense, she’d fear it.
It seems an eternity before she slides into her own skin again. Her body seems stiff and unfamiliar, like wearing someone else’s clothes; for a moment she has to consciously think about every breath she takes just in case she stops. Her eyes feel like they’ve gummed shut, scratchy and a little sore when she opens them to find Anakin sitting across from her, his position mirror image to her own. She’d slipped into trance with her hands on her knees; now Anakin is holding them, fingers twined together and palms pressed to palms, binding them together. His eyes twitch behind his lids as she watches, then he shakes himself a little, throwing off the trance. His grip tightens on hers as his eyes snap open.
“You left your body,” he says accusingly, not waiting for her to speak. “You were lost in the Force – I felt you leave, and you didn’t come back –”
“I’m sorry,” Obi-Wan croaks, her throat dry. “I didn’t know I was going to do that.”
Anakin gives her a suspicious look, then clambers down off the bed to get her a glass of water. Obi-Wan takes it gratefully, stretching her cramping legs and wondering why she’s so sore.
“How long was I gone?”
“Hours,” he says, still grumpy, and settles back on the bed again, one knee knocking against hers. “I felt you touch the Force again, and then you left and didn’t come back and I didn’t know where you’d gone ¬–” He clenches his fists; Obi-Wan can hear frustration warring with fear in his voice.
“Help is coming,” she explains wearily. “Kit Fisto – he’s closest. I touched his mind.”
“He doesn’t know where we are,” Anakin says cautiously. “We don’t know where we are.”
“There are only a handful of places Dooku would bring us. The Republic knows where they are and where we were before we were captured; they can place ships along the hyperspace routes to intercept us, if they can spare them.”
Anakin apparently hasn’t thought this far ahead. “The Citadel on Lola Sayu,” he says, shuddering. The ancient prison had been designed to hold Dark Jedi centuries before the Clone Wars had begun; unfortunately for the Republic, it had been captured by Separatist forces near the beginning of the war. No Jedi who is sent there has ever returned.
“Maybe,” Obi-Wan concedes. “But I think it’s more likely that we’re going to Serenno, Dooku’s homeworld. He’ll want us somewhere that he can control us, and there are too many variables at the Citadel or any other Separatist planet.”
“So we might have a chance of being rescued!” Anakin says, straightening up. “Instead of just waiting for the Council to – you know. Decide whether or not they want to trade us for the Sith Lord.”
“Me,” Obi-Wan corrects. “Dooku will return you to the Jedi. It’s me he wants, not you; he told Windu and Yoda as much.”
Anakin’s mouth sets in a stubborn line. “I won’t leave you to the Sith, Master.”
“I hope you won’t have to,” Obi-Wan says. She runs a hand through her hair, pulling out the pins that are keeping her braids up.
Anakin chews absently on a fingernail. “So what did you do, Master? I thought Dooku’s drug blocked Force use.”
Obi-Wan drinks some more of her water, which is tepid and with a bitter aftertaste from being recycled through the ship’s water filters. “Dooku may be wise in the ways of the Sith, but he’s forgotten the living Force. But it was dangerous,” she adds.
“You were nearly lost in the Force,” Anakin rebukes.
“Yes.” She turns a hairpin over between her fingers. “I nearly was. Thank you for following me in, I know you’ve never been comfortable with that aspect of the Force.”
“Well, you’re the only Master I have,” Anakin says, trying to make his voice light and failing. “I’d hate to lose you.” Again, neither of them have to say.
Obi-Wan puts the empty glass aside. “I’m sure Master Ki-Adi-Mundi would be glad to take you on again.”
“I’m pretty sure I turned Master Ki off taking a Padawan ever again,” he admits sheepishly; Anakin had been temporarily placed with the Jedi Master while Obi-Wan had been Ventress’s captive. “Or at least that’s the rumor.”
“Nonsense. Master Ki is a very skilled Jedi. Someone else’s Padawan, no matter how stubborn, is not going to turn him off the whole breed.”
Anakin just grins at her.
Obi-Wan flips the hairpin over her knuckles, a little restless. “Besides, most Padawans are far more obedient than you are.”
“Hey, I saved you,” he says indignantly. “Again.”
“For which I am very grateful, of course,” Obi-Wan says, smiling back.
She feels her smile slip a little at the intensity of Anakin’s expression, as he leans forward slightly and says, “So would this be a bad time to have that talk?”
Obi-Wan catches the hairpin between two fingers, barely stopping herself from bending it out of shape. “All right,” she agrees cautiously.
She and Anakin stare at each other, both of them speechless for the moment. Talking about their feelings isn’t exactly a Jedi tradition.
“Uh,” Anakin says eventually, eloquently.
Obi-Wan raises an eyebrow. She doesn’t know what to say either.
“You know that I – I care about you,” Anakin says eventually. “A lot. And not just because you’re my Master. I’m in love with you. I have been for years. I don’t remember exactly since when, but for years. I didn’t think you’d ever find out. I didn’t want you to, because I knew that nothing would ever come of it, even when I became a Knight and wasn’t your Padawan anymore. I was hoping that it would go away.” He looks down at his hands, blushing furiously. “Do you remember – when I went to Naboo with Padmé, and you followed Jango Fett to Kamino?”
Obi-Wan nods. She can hardly forget; that had begun this whole bloody war.
“I was in love with Padmé,” Anakin says, a little distantly. “Since I was a kid. You knew that. And I thought it was going to be our chance to be together. She said no at first, and then she said yes when she thought we were going to die – this was on Geonosis – and afterwards, when we were on our way back to Naboo, she said that we could –” He makes an indistinct gesture with his right hand. “But we would have to get married. You know her, she’s upper-crust Naboo, they have all those rules – and I was going to say yes.”
“What?” Obi-Wan bursts out, shocked. She’d never known any of this; Padmé has never mentioned it, and Anakin certainly hasn’t. “You’d be breaking the Code! You’d be thrown out of the Order!”
“I know!” Anakin says quickly, scarlet. “I was going to say yes, and then we’d get married and keep it a secret, and when the war was over I could leave the Order to be with her, but then I thought about you and I couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t, because then you’d be all alone and you’d die, because I wouldn’t be there to watch your back, and – it would be really awful for Padmé to keep a secret like that. And the Queen would dismiss her if it came out that she’d ¬–” He makes another gesture. “Because of stupid Naboo morals, you know. It’s all right for her to have an affair with a Jedi Knight if she’s a woman, but not to be married to one if he’s a man.”
Obi-Wan supposes she should have seen that coming, but now isn’t really the opportune moment to point out that just because she and Padmé Amidala are friends who have sex on the rare occasion that they’re on the same planet at the same time doesn’t mean that they’re having an affair.
Anakin swallows. “So I said I couldn’t do it. Not like that. And she said she understood, and I dropped her off at the Palace in Theed and then I came back to Coruscant and then we went to war.”
“I see,” Obi-Wan says faintly, and doesn’t ask what this has to do with her. Well, she supposes it explains why Anakin had stopped mooning over Padmé in the aftermath of what had seemed to be a foregone conclusion on Geonosis.
He stares down at his hands. “And I loved you,” he muttered. “Because you were – safe. And I knew you would never – do anything, so it was all right, and you’re all I have anyway, and you’re wonderful and perfect and beautiful, and…I love you. And I don’t expect you to do anything, I know you can’t, or – or won’t – and that’s all right. And I don’t care what Dooku does, or says, or anything. Unless he tells the Council and they throw you out,” he adds. “Then I’m going to kill him.”
Obi-Wan feels her own cheeks heating, speechless for once. Anakin looks up at her hastily, that desperate expression back on his face.
“Anakin,” she says eventually, but doesn’t know what to follow that up with.
She hadn’t thought it was possible for Anakin to go any redder, but he does, until his cheeks are the exact same shade as Master Shaak Ti’s and Obi-Wan is starting to get a bit worried for him. “And I’m really sorry about this morning!” he blurts out. “I shouldn’t have done that, I just – I couldn’t sleep, and you were hurt, and I could barely sense you in the Force, and you said – you said –”
“I said I loved you,” Obi-Wan says, rather distantly even to her own ears, even though she hadn’t said exactly that, now that she thinks about it. It doesn’t matter; Anakin knows what she meant.
“That,” Anakin says. “You said that.” He stares at her desperately. “And now you’re not saying anything.”
“I,” Obi-Wan says, “I don’t really know what to say.” There goes her sobriquet of “The Negotiator,” since she apparently can’t even negotiate her own personal life, or perhaps, lack thereof is a better way to put it.
Anakin stares at her. “I’ve changed my mind,” he decides. “I don’t think we should have this conversation after all.”
“It’s – a little late for that,” Obi-Wan says, and scrubs her hand through her hair before picking her words carefully. “Anakin, I care for you very much, in a manner that is completely inappropriate for a master to have towards her padawan.”
The Force is with her now; Anakin has let his shields lapse slightly, so she hears the thought that he keeps from vocalizing: I wish you would stop bringing that up.
She folds her hands in her lap, making sure her voice is steady. “I have for some time now. I’m sure my judgment towards you is somewhat compromised, but I will not – I cannot – allow my feelings for you to supersede my duty to the Jedi and the Republic. I hope you understand that.”
Anakin nods, some of the light going out of his eyes. He looks down at his hands again and mumbles, “But you do love me.”
Obi-Wan squeezes her eyes shut. “Yes,” she says, and senses the Force lighting up with Anakin’s intense joy. “Yes, I do love you.”
She opens her eyes again. Anakin is looking at her steadily, his padawan braid falling over his shoulder – he’s leaning forward a little, trying to be closer to her and probably not even aware he’s doing it. “What about Dooku?” he says.
“Well, I’m not in love with him.”
Anakin laughs. “He doesn’t seem like your type.”
“He lacks your youthful charm, it’s true,” Obi-Wan says, and for a moment it’s just that – a joke that they can share together, and not a secret that could destroy them. Then the moment passes.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says, feeling tired and far older than her thirty-six years. She fiddles with one of her long braids, her gaze going to the few strands of silver mixed in with the red. “We’re Jedi,” she says finally. “Whatever Dooku thinks he can make us do, it doesn’t matter. We’re Jedi.”
Anakin leans towards her, then away, plucking awkwardly at the knee of his trousers, and Obi-Wan remembers the familiar, comfortable way he’d relaxed against her after Dooku had choked him. Had it truly only been yesterday? “Would it really be that bad?” he mutters. “I mean – what’s wrong with love? Jedi are encouraged to love, to be compassionate, but we’re not allowed to be in love –”
They’ve had this discussion before, but only in theory, never in earnest. Obi-Wan opens her mouth to reply.
“And don’t say the Dark Side,” Anakin adds hastily. “I don’t think Dooku’s ever loved anything in his life.”
“Strong emotions are dangerous for a Jedi,” Obi-Wan says slowly, choosing her words as carefully as she had a few minutes before, when she’d told Anakin she loved him. “We have a great deal of power, both by virtue of our position and our use of the Force. We ought only to wield this power in the exercise of our duties, not for reasons that are compromised by our emotional investment.”
“I know all that,” Anakin says, peevish.
Obi-Wan scrubs a hand over her face, suddenly exhausted. “Think about it this way,” she says instead. “If you had to choose between my life and the Supreme Chancellor’s, whose would you choose?”
Anakin opens his mouth, then closes it. Eventually he says, “Do we still think that the Supreme Chancellor is the second Sith?”
“Senators Amidala or Organa, then.”
“I – both of you,” Anakin says. “Or all three, I don’t know Senator Organa very well, but Padmé likes him.”
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan sighs, “that’s not how you make a choice.”
“I don’t like making choices!”
Obi-Wan forbears from saying that she’s known this for the past eleven years. “Could you do it, Anakin? Could you make that choice – between someone you love and the good of the Republic?”
Anakin stares at her. “I don’t know,” he says finally.
Obi-Wan closes her eyes, feeling suddenly exhausted. “That’s why Jedi aren’t permitted to fall in love,” she says, and tries not to think about what she would do in the same situation.
She’s saved from being forced to answer further questions on the subject by the arrival of the medical droid with another dose of Dooku’s drug. Anakin gets it first, scowling and rubbing the place on his arm where he’s been stabbed afterwards, which gives Obi-Wan time to slip into her lightest meditative trance, gathering the Force close around herself in preparation as she turns her back to the security camera. She submits her arm to the needle, keeping her gaze unfocused as she steadies her breathing into the pattern she wants.
Drug administered, the droid deposits a tray with their dinner on it on a counter and trundles off, the door shutting behind it. Dooku isn’t interested in their company tonight, apparently.
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan says steadily, trembling a little with the effort this takes, “find me an empty syringe.”
“Why?”
“Don’t argue!”
Drawers come crashing open as he rummages through them, then slam shut again as he hurries back, holding it out to her. “Why?” he says again.
Obi-Wan draws her right hand away from her left arm, from the spot where the needle had gone in, and following it in the air is a little trickle of pale green liquid, drawn out of her skin drop by drop. Anakin, understanding, jerks the syringe open hastily, and Obi-Wan carefully directs the drug inside it, the drops sliding down the side to pool comfortably at the bottom. Anakin caps it carefully when she’s finished, cradling it in the palm of his hand as he stares down at her.
“I didn’t know you could do that?”
“You know the principle,” Obi-Wan says, taking the syringe from him. “It’s the same as using the Force to keep from ingesting poisonous gases.”
“Well – yeah,” Anakin says, frowns at her, and says, “What are you going to do with it?”
Obi-Wan smiles. “I think Count Dooku could use a taste of his own medicine, don’t you?”
*
tbc
read chapter 6.
Thanks to Dogstar for the beta!
After devouring one of the reconstituted meals that Anakin offers her, Obi-Wan settles down on the bed, folding herself into a lotus position. Anakin has gone back to his droid, though he looks up at her from time to time, his gaze dark and worried. Obi-Wan, used to being observed by him, doesn’t pay any attention, just settles her hands on her knees and closes her eyes.
Immediately the absence of the Force is there, a vast yawning blankness that swallows up everything around her. Obi-Wan is front and center with it, alone in the stark desert of her mind, with nothing to ground her. For a heartbeat the panic rises up at all that emptiness, the way it had last night, but the same truth still remains. Obi-Wan Kenobi is a Jedi Knight: she lives and breathes the Force. Nothing can keep her from touching it. Even Asajj Ventress’s mask could only keep her from concentrating. Dooku’s drug is a truly marvelous and terrifying invention, but nothing that can truly keep her from touching the Force.
Obi-Wan breathes in, out, in again, fitting her breath into one of her oldest and most familiar meditative patterns, the first one she’d been taught as a youngling at the Temple. She stretches her mind out, trying to find the edges of the emptiness, because all illusions aside, it can’t go on forever.
Let go, Obi-Wan, she hears Qui-Gon say, something out of the distant past, a life she can barely remember. Open your mind to the living Force, which resides within all beings. Nothing can truly take the Force from you.
Master Yoda, in a class back at the Temple when she had still been a Padawan: A way, there always is. If through you cannot go, around you may, or over, or under. Always a way there is.
And Obi-Wan finds a way. Deep in her trance, she can feel the drug inside her, an oily slick on the surface of her mind, wending its way through her blood vessels, wrapped around her muscles. Beneath it, the Force lies placid and calm, deep as the oceans on Dac, waiting for her to release it. The drug isn’t a poison, it’s a prison, but prison locks can be picked.
Using the Force to purge a drug from the body is child’s play. Obi-Wan has done it a hundred times, a thousand, but never like this. She lets her mind race over the surface of the drug, trying to find a weakness that she can exploit, an edge of it that she can slip under, anything that she can use to touch the Force and destroy it.
No. That’s not right. Obi-Wan Kenobi is a Jedi Knight; it’s not her task to destroy. The drug isn’t evil, merely a tool. Destruction is not the way of the Jedi. So how –
Twelve hours. It must take more time to work its way through her system, but not by much; Anakin had mentioned that he could feel it wearing off. Obi-Wan breathes in. I am a Jedi. She touches the surface of the drug experimentally. It’s only been a few hours since the last dose, but she can feel it thinning with every nanosecond that passes. It will be hours more until it’s gone entirely. Not that way, then.
Obi-Wan changes her breathing pattern to a different one, sinking more deeply into her trance. Even for a Knight, it’s dangerous to go so deep, especially without the Force to tether her to her own body. She can still feel a line binding her to the surface – the Master-Padawan bond with Anakin, and a second one, stubborn and thorny and unwanted, wrapped around it. Her affection for him. Her love. Obi-Wan acknowledges it even as she leaves behind her own body, letting her consciousness expand beyond the limits of her skin. Once more she comes up against the boundaries of the drug, but this time they move with her gentle push, letting her mind pass through them with only a little burning resistance, like stepping through an energy shield. And there the Force is, waiting for her.
She doesn’t fight back yet, just explores the underside of the drug with her mind. It’s a clever thing, really. Biochemistry isn’t Obi-Wan’s specialty or even something she particularly enjoys, but she’s studied it at the Temple and knows enough to tell that Dooku’s drug truly is a remarkable creation. The Jedi Council will need to know about it. They may even be glad to have a sample of it – no. They will be, and not just because it could be a terrifying weapon against both the Jedi and the Sith. It’s very difficult to find undiluted evil; this isn’t it.
With the Force behind her, Obi-Wan doesn’t need to look for a weakness in the drug. Her mind races across it, past the superficial horror of the thing (and even there she can find some good, because sometimes it’s a mercy not to have to feel the living Force), and sinks deep into its chemical make-up. She spends further time exploring it, until she’s confident she could recreate it on a computer screen, if not in the lab, and settles down to pry apart the atomic bonds within it, rearranging them into something that will sink harmlessly into her bloodstream. As an afterthought, she leaves just enough on the surface that it will appear on a med scan, though not enough to impact her use of the Force once she’s back in her body.
Freed from the confines of the drug, Obi-Wan lets her consciousness expand outward. She touches Anakin first, deep in moving meditation, his mind focused totally on the task his hands are doing. Even with the drug settled under his skin she can feel the strength of the Force, gathered in a close cloak around him with the dual ferocity of his concentration and his emotions. Obi-Wan has never been able to train that out of him. She lingers on him for a moment, gentle with fondness, then moves past him, past the walls of the room and further out into the dreadnought.
The Dark Side reigns on the starship. Obi-Wan passes by Tol Skorr’s rage and lingers at Asajj Ventress’s hatred, before moving on. Skorr and Ventress are simple – pawns of the Dark Side. Both of them could be more if they ever accepted it. She finds Quin brooding in the hangar bay, lurking on his ship and trying to find serenity in meditation. The Light Side and the Dark Side are all tangled up within him, each warring for superiority. He feels – he feels like a Jedi, Obi-Wan realizes as she brushes the surface of his mind, not a Sith, and has the mad urge to whisper a greeting in his ear, though she restrains herself and passes on. Droids everywhere, the beautiful humming energy of the ship itself – and Dooku.
There’s no cloud of the Dark Side hanging over him, not coiled up around him or enveloping him. Instead it’s all gathered close beneath his skin, so that when Obi-Wan looks at him, all she can see is shadow and darkness. His control is absolute; it doesn’t spill past him the way it does with his apprentices. Even this deep in trance, Obi-Wan can’t touch his mind; looking into such utter blackness would be like looking into the abyss. She edges cautiously back, hoping he hasn’t noticed her intrusion, and lets her mind flow further outwards, past the boundaries of the starship’s walls, into the echoing hollowness of space. The hyperspace confuses her for a moment, until Obi-Wan falls into the rhythm of the movement and steadies herself. She’s strong in the Force, but not as strong as Anakin, and as she reaches further and further out, hundreds and thousands of parsecs out from their current position, searching for a Jedi, any Jedi, she feels the edges of her conscious mind, the markers that make her her, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and not just a gathering of loose atoms, starting to burn off into the flow of the Force.
This is what Qui-Gon had warned her about, the only other time she’d tried this. She could lose herself in the Force, fade away or wander forever or – no one knows for sure, because those who lose themselves that way seldom return. Obi-Wan hesitates, still reaching out, stretching to the very edge of her capacity, and edges up against the mind of another Jedi.
Only a few Jedi are telepaths, and Obi-Wan isn’t one of them, not by nature. Kit Fisto isn’t either, and from everything that Obi-Wan has read on the subject, she wouldn’t be able to do this if he wasn’t meditating as well. His trance isn’t as deep as hers is, but it doesn’t need to be. She spills out her relief in emotions instead, practically throwing herself against his shields until he notices and replies, Obi-Wan –?
Kit, help – She shoves the image of the ship at him, Dooku and Ventress and Skorr, the drug and everything it entails, Anakin being choked with the Force. He wants me, and he’s going to kill my Padawan to get me!
We’re coming – where –?
Don’t know. Hyperspace. Destination maybe Serenno. Maybe Lola Sayu.
We’re coming, Kit repeats, more reassurance than real words. Hold on.
Bring Aayla or Tholme, Obi-Wan adds, afterthought. Quin here. Can still be saved.
Will try. Don’t fear ¬–
Hesitating, she blurts out her final suspicion: Tell Council. Think Chancellor is Sith.
Shock radiates back towards her. Why ¬–?
Makes sense.
Will tell. Have to go. May the Force be with you, sister.
And you, brother.
He disengages from the mental connection. Obi-Wan does as well, satisfied that she’s accomplished what she set out to do, and realizes to her horror that in doing so she’s done exactly what she’s been cautioned over and over again never to do. She’s left her body without creating a line to guide her home again, and now she’s lost in the Force.
Her own panic threatens to swallow her. Obi-Wan loves the Force; she’s known it her entire life, from the moment she took her first breath until the heartbeat when she sank inside herself to come here, and she’s never thought that she could be afraid of it. Afraid of what it could do, certainly; she’s seen the power of the Dark Side and she knows the risk it poses to all Jedi. But that’s the Dark Side, not the Force itself. This, though – this is the Force, pure and simple. It stretches out around her, beautiful and terrible and endless, and Obi-Wan knows she has a choice. She can try and find her way back to her body, wander through the Force forever while parts of her spin off into eternity, or she can simply – let go.
For a heartbeat, it’s tempting. Let go, and become one with the Force, never have to wield her lightsaber again or know the sudden searing loss of another Jedi as more and more of them fall in battle. Never have to know fear again –
Or love.
Obi-Wan shouldn’t love anyone, but she does. She loves the Force and the Jedi and the Republic; she loved her Master and she loves her apprentice. Loves Anakin. As tempting as it is to let go, it’s not her time yet, and giving up isn’t the Jedi way. She can’t leave Anakin alone to face Count Dooku.
I’m sorry, she whispers regretfully to the Force, reaching out. There has to be a way to get back. Surely she must have left some kind of trail ¬–
No trail, Obi-Wan realizes slowly, but a line stretched thin that binds her not to her own body, but to Anakin Skywalker. She’d missed it before, but she finds it now, and follows it back, feeling the steady anchor of his mind at the end of it. Anakin does everything ferociously, feels too deeply, loves and hates too easily – all things that a Jedi should never do. She feels the fierceness of his love growing the closer she gets; not the steady flame of a candle, but the brilliant incandescence of a supernova, the kind of love that threatens to destroy everything in its path. If Obi-Wan had any sense, she’d fear it.
It seems an eternity before she slides into her own skin again. Her body seems stiff and unfamiliar, like wearing someone else’s clothes; for a moment she has to consciously think about every breath she takes just in case she stops. Her eyes feel like they’ve gummed shut, scratchy and a little sore when she opens them to find Anakin sitting across from her, his position mirror image to her own. She’d slipped into trance with her hands on her knees; now Anakin is holding them, fingers twined together and palms pressed to palms, binding them together. His eyes twitch behind his lids as she watches, then he shakes himself a little, throwing off the trance. His grip tightens on hers as his eyes snap open.
“You left your body,” he says accusingly, not waiting for her to speak. “You were lost in the Force – I felt you leave, and you didn’t come back –”
“I’m sorry,” Obi-Wan croaks, her throat dry. “I didn’t know I was going to do that.”
Anakin gives her a suspicious look, then clambers down off the bed to get her a glass of water. Obi-Wan takes it gratefully, stretching her cramping legs and wondering why she’s so sore.
“How long was I gone?”
“Hours,” he says, still grumpy, and settles back on the bed again, one knee knocking against hers. “I felt you touch the Force again, and then you left and didn’t come back and I didn’t know where you’d gone ¬–” He clenches his fists; Obi-Wan can hear frustration warring with fear in his voice.
“Help is coming,” she explains wearily. “Kit Fisto – he’s closest. I touched his mind.”
“He doesn’t know where we are,” Anakin says cautiously. “We don’t know where we are.”
“There are only a handful of places Dooku would bring us. The Republic knows where they are and where we were before we were captured; they can place ships along the hyperspace routes to intercept us, if they can spare them.”
Anakin apparently hasn’t thought this far ahead. “The Citadel on Lola Sayu,” he says, shuddering. The ancient prison had been designed to hold Dark Jedi centuries before the Clone Wars had begun; unfortunately for the Republic, it had been captured by Separatist forces near the beginning of the war. No Jedi who is sent there has ever returned.
“Maybe,” Obi-Wan concedes. “But I think it’s more likely that we’re going to Serenno, Dooku’s homeworld. He’ll want us somewhere that he can control us, and there are too many variables at the Citadel or any other Separatist planet.”
“So we might have a chance of being rescued!” Anakin says, straightening up. “Instead of just waiting for the Council to – you know. Decide whether or not they want to trade us for the Sith Lord.”
“Me,” Obi-Wan corrects. “Dooku will return you to the Jedi. It’s me he wants, not you; he told Windu and Yoda as much.”
Anakin’s mouth sets in a stubborn line. “I won’t leave you to the Sith, Master.”
“I hope you won’t have to,” Obi-Wan says. She runs a hand through her hair, pulling out the pins that are keeping her braids up.
Anakin chews absently on a fingernail. “So what did you do, Master? I thought Dooku’s drug blocked Force use.”
Obi-Wan drinks some more of her water, which is tepid and with a bitter aftertaste from being recycled through the ship’s water filters. “Dooku may be wise in the ways of the Sith, but he’s forgotten the living Force. But it was dangerous,” she adds.
“You were nearly lost in the Force,” Anakin rebukes.
“Yes.” She turns a hairpin over between her fingers. “I nearly was. Thank you for following me in, I know you’ve never been comfortable with that aspect of the Force.”
“Well, you’re the only Master I have,” Anakin says, trying to make his voice light and failing. “I’d hate to lose you.” Again, neither of them have to say.
Obi-Wan puts the empty glass aside. “I’m sure Master Ki-Adi-Mundi would be glad to take you on again.”
“I’m pretty sure I turned Master Ki off taking a Padawan ever again,” he admits sheepishly; Anakin had been temporarily placed with the Jedi Master while Obi-Wan had been Ventress’s captive. “Or at least that’s the rumor.”
“Nonsense. Master Ki is a very skilled Jedi. Someone else’s Padawan, no matter how stubborn, is not going to turn him off the whole breed.”
Anakin just grins at her.
Obi-Wan flips the hairpin over her knuckles, a little restless. “Besides, most Padawans are far more obedient than you are.”
“Hey, I saved you,” he says indignantly. “Again.”
“For which I am very grateful, of course,” Obi-Wan says, smiling back.
She feels her smile slip a little at the intensity of Anakin’s expression, as he leans forward slightly and says, “So would this be a bad time to have that talk?”
Obi-Wan catches the hairpin between two fingers, barely stopping herself from bending it out of shape. “All right,” she agrees cautiously.
She and Anakin stare at each other, both of them speechless for the moment. Talking about their feelings isn’t exactly a Jedi tradition.
“Uh,” Anakin says eventually, eloquently.
Obi-Wan raises an eyebrow. She doesn’t know what to say either.
“You know that I – I care about you,” Anakin says eventually. “A lot. And not just because you’re my Master. I’m in love with you. I have been for years. I don’t remember exactly since when, but for years. I didn’t think you’d ever find out. I didn’t want you to, because I knew that nothing would ever come of it, even when I became a Knight and wasn’t your Padawan anymore. I was hoping that it would go away.” He looks down at his hands, blushing furiously. “Do you remember – when I went to Naboo with Padmé, and you followed Jango Fett to Kamino?”
Obi-Wan nods. She can hardly forget; that had begun this whole bloody war.
“I was in love with Padmé,” Anakin says, a little distantly. “Since I was a kid. You knew that. And I thought it was going to be our chance to be together. She said no at first, and then she said yes when she thought we were going to die – this was on Geonosis – and afterwards, when we were on our way back to Naboo, she said that we could –” He makes an indistinct gesture with his right hand. “But we would have to get married. You know her, she’s upper-crust Naboo, they have all those rules – and I was going to say yes.”
“What?” Obi-Wan bursts out, shocked. She’d never known any of this; Padmé has never mentioned it, and Anakin certainly hasn’t. “You’d be breaking the Code! You’d be thrown out of the Order!”
“I know!” Anakin says quickly, scarlet. “I was going to say yes, and then we’d get married and keep it a secret, and when the war was over I could leave the Order to be with her, but then I thought about you and I couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t, because then you’d be all alone and you’d die, because I wouldn’t be there to watch your back, and – it would be really awful for Padmé to keep a secret like that. And the Queen would dismiss her if it came out that she’d ¬–” He makes another gesture. “Because of stupid Naboo morals, you know. It’s all right for her to have an affair with a Jedi Knight if she’s a woman, but not to be married to one if he’s a man.”
Obi-Wan supposes she should have seen that coming, but now isn’t really the opportune moment to point out that just because she and Padmé Amidala are friends who have sex on the rare occasion that they’re on the same planet at the same time doesn’t mean that they’re having an affair.
Anakin swallows. “So I said I couldn’t do it. Not like that. And she said she understood, and I dropped her off at the Palace in Theed and then I came back to Coruscant and then we went to war.”
“I see,” Obi-Wan says faintly, and doesn’t ask what this has to do with her. Well, she supposes it explains why Anakin had stopped mooning over Padmé in the aftermath of what had seemed to be a foregone conclusion on Geonosis.
He stares down at his hands. “And I loved you,” he muttered. “Because you were – safe. And I knew you would never – do anything, so it was all right, and you’re all I have anyway, and you’re wonderful and perfect and beautiful, and…I love you. And I don’t expect you to do anything, I know you can’t, or – or won’t – and that’s all right. And I don’t care what Dooku does, or says, or anything. Unless he tells the Council and they throw you out,” he adds. “Then I’m going to kill him.”
Obi-Wan feels her own cheeks heating, speechless for once. Anakin looks up at her hastily, that desperate expression back on his face.
“Anakin,” she says eventually, but doesn’t know what to follow that up with.
She hadn’t thought it was possible for Anakin to go any redder, but he does, until his cheeks are the exact same shade as Master Shaak Ti’s and Obi-Wan is starting to get a bit worried for him. “And I’m really sorry about this morning!” he blurts out. “I shouldn’t have done that, I just – I couldn’t sleep, and you were hurt, and I could barely sense you in the Force, and you said – you said –”
“I said I loved you,” Obi-Wan says, rather distantly even to her own ears, even though she hadn’t said exactly that, now that she thinks about it. It doesn’t matter; Anakin knows what she meant.
“That,” Anakin says. “You said that.” He stares at her desperately. “And now you’re not saying anything.”
“I,” Obi-Wan says, “I don’t really know what to say.” There goes her sobriquet of “The Negotiator,” since she apparently can’t even negotiate her own personal life, or perhaps, lack thereof is a better way to put it.
Anakin stares at her. “I’ve changed my mind,” he decides. “I don’t think we should have this conversation after all.”
“It’s – a little late for that,” Obi-Wan says, and scrubs her hand through her hair before picking her words carefully. “Anakin, I care for you very much, in a manner that is completely inappropriate for a master to have towards her padawan.”
The Force is with her now; Anakin has let his shields lapse slightly, so she hears the thought that he keeps from vocalizing: I wish you would stop bringing that up.
She folds her hands in her lap, making sure her voice is steady. “I have for some time now. I’m sure my judgment towards you is somewhat compromised, but I will not – I cannot – allow my feelings for you to supersede my duty to the Jedi and the Republic. I hope you understand that.”
Anakin nods, some of the light going out of his eyes. He looks down at his hands again and mumbles, “But you do love me.”
Obi-Wan squeezes her eyes shut. “Yes,” she says, and senses the Force lighting up with Anakin’s intense joy. “Yes, I do love you.”
She opens her eyes again. Anakin is looking at her steadily, his padawan braid falling over his shoulder – he’s leaning forward a little, trying to be closer to her and probably not even aware he’s doing it. “What about Dooku?” he says.
“Well, I’m not in love with him.”
Anakin laughs. “He doesn’t seem like your type.”
“He lacks your youthful charm, it’s true,” Obi-Wan says, and for a moment it’s just that – a joke that they can share together, and not a secret that could destroy them. Then the moment passes.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says, feeling tired and far older than her thirty-six years. She fiddles with one of her long braids, her gaze going to the few strands of silver mixed in with the red. “We’re Jedi,” she says finally. “Whatever Dooku thinks he can make us do, it doesn’t matter. We’re Jedi.”
Anakin leans towards her, then away, plucking awkwardly at the knee of his trousers, and Obi-Wan remembers the familiar, comfortable way he’d relaxed against her after Dooku had choked him. Had it truly only been yesterday? “Would it really be that bad?” he mutters. “I mean – what’s wrong with love? Jedi are encouraged to love, to be compassionate, but we’re not allowed to be in love –”
They’ve had this discussion before, but only in theory, never in earnest. Obi-Wan opens her mouth to reply.
“And don’t say the Dark Side,” Anakin adds hastily. “I don’t think Dooku’s ever loved anything in his life.”
“Strong emotions are dangerous for a Jedi,” Obi-Wan says slowly, choosing her words as carefully as she had a few minutes before, when she’d told Anakin she loved him. “We have a great deal of power, both by virtue of our position and our use of the Force. We ought only to wield this power in the exercise of our duties, not for reasons that are compromised by our emotional investment.”
“I know all that,” Anakin says, peevish.
Obi-Wan scrubs a hand over her face, suddenly exhausted. “Think about it this way,” she says instead. “If you had to choose between my life and the Supreme Chancellor’s, whose would you choose?”
Anakin opens his mouth, then closes it. Eventually he says, “Do we still think that the Supreme Chancellor is the second Sith?”
“Senators Amidala or Organa, then.”
“I – both of you,” Anakin says. “Or all three, I don’t know Senator Organa very well, but Padmé likes him.”
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan sighs, “that’s not how you make a choice.”
“I don’t like making choices!”
Obi-Wan forbears from saying that she’s known this for the past eleven years. “Could you do it, Anakin? Could you make that choice – between someone you love and the good of the Republic?”
Anakin stares at her. “I don’t know,” he says finally.
Obi-Wan closes her eyes, feeling suddenly exhausted. “That’s why Jedi aren’t permitted to fall in love,” she says, and tries not to think about what she would do in the same situation.
She’s saved from being forced to answer further questions on the subject by the arrival of the medical droid with another dose of Dooku’s drug. Anakin gets it first, scowling and rubbing the place on his arm where he’s been stabbed afterwards, which gives Obi-Wan time to slip into her lightest meditative trance, gathering the Force close around herself in preparation as she turns her back to the security camera. She submits her arm to the needle, keeping her gaze unfocused as she steadies her breathing into the pattern she wants.
Drug administered, the droid deposits a tray with their dinner on it on a counter and trundles off, the door shutting behind it. Dooku isn’t interested in their company tonight, apparently.
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan says steadily, trembling a little with the effort this takes, “find me an empty syringe.”
“Why?”
“Don’t argue!”
Drawers come crashing open as he rummages through them, then slam shut again as he hurries back, holding it out to her. “Why?” he says again.
Obi-Wan draws her right hand away from her left arm, from the spot where the needle had gone in, and following it in the air is a little trickle of pale green liquid, drawn out of her skin drop by drop. Anakin, understanding, jerks the syringe open hastily, and Obi-Wan carefully directs the drug inside it, the drops sliding down the side to pool comfortably at the bottom. Anakin caps it carefully when she’s finished, cradling it in the palm of his hand as he stares down at her.
“I didn’t know you could do that?”
“You know the principle,” Obi-Wan says, taking the syringe from him. “It’s the same as using the Force to keep from ingesting poisonous gases.”
“Well – yeah,” Anakin says, frowns at her, and says, “What are you going to do with it?”
Obi-Wan smiles. “I think Count Dooku could use a taste of his own medicine, don’t you?”
*
tbc
read chapter 6.
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Date: 2012-03-15 11:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-15 11:46 pm (UTC)I'm glad you're enjoying it!