#roguerobin013

[jedifest]

Innocent Ones by @intherustlinggrassihearhimpass

I am a child of the Force. In birth, it became my mother, and in life it instructed me as a father, but in death I meet its truest embrace. From thence I come and to there I return.

Rogue Robin Round 2, Callsign #013

Submitted by @saltandlimes

[araydre]

[super-perspicacia]

Innocent ones, (#roguerobin013), round 3

 Entry for @jedifest RogueRobin, round 3, callsign #roguerobin013, continuing the work of @intherustlinggrassihearhimpass and @saltandlimes. The rogue robin squadron post, with links to all the works, is there

@aeremaee played beta, thank you so much for your help!

Era: Prequel Trilogy, (JA timeframe)

Characters: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn, Feemor, Xanatos

Summary: His Padawan was dead and in struggling with his grief, Feemor had perhaps set in motion the death of another child. So they ran, and Feemor let his mind go empty, only the sound of their feet on the soil saturated with water, only the light of Obi-Wan’s Force presence calling them, closer, closer but never close enough.

Under the cut, the fic, also on AO3:

Once there was a little Jedi Initiate, with dimples, green eyes and hair as red as a wildfire. He had the reputation of an angry child and it was true, but it wouldn’t be honest to stop there in the assessment of his personality.

Obi-Wan Kenobi was angry at the unfairness of the world. He had the childhood of a Jedi, safe from the horrors of the Galaxy inside the Temple, so it was the unfairness of bullies, the blind eyes of teachers that used to make his blood boil. And of course his coming birthday, the dreaded thirteenth, too soon, too soon and no Master yet while the Force was whispering he was fated to be a Knight.

Then the little Initiate grew up, found a Master and almost lost his life, multiple times. He learned the unfairness of the galaxy, learned that the Jedi Temple, for all its problems, really was a shining beacon of compassion and peace compared to the rest of the universe.

He still had dimples, but his hair had become darker with age and the coltish built of his teenage years already promised the grace of a powerful young man.

The most important thing was this one: Obi-Wan Kenobi was still angry at the unfairness of the world. That was something so inherent to his being that it was written upon his heart, next to his Jedi identity. But he had learned to make that anger an asset under the strict discipline of the Jedi teachings, under the vows that bonded him to his brothers and sisters in the Force and for that, Obi-Wan was a promise made by the Force to the Jedi. The bud that would blossom into a Knight, with strong enough control and the drive to better the world, to be a shield for people who couldn’t protect themselves, and a blade, when all the other choices had died.

Obi-Wan was a living child, a light within the light of the Order, and as Feemor and Qui-Gon ran into the forest, the young Knight needed half his concentration to send his guilt into the Force.

They had left the Cerean Temple in haste when Obi-Wan had touched the bond, warned Qui-Gon they had company. But it was too late, and they had only found the lightsaber of the sixteen year-old Padawan, scars of blaster shots on the trees and tracks in the mud from motorized engines.

Feemor ground his teeth and vaulted over the trunk of a fallen tree, following Qui-Gon. The rainforest was so dense they had no chance to land their small ship anywhere but on the Temple, so they had chosen to follow the tracks on foot. Jedi were trained as trackers and could run almost all day, drawing energy from the Force, and still fight until dawn, but they would pay for it later, crashing into sleep.

So they ran under the shadow of the canopy, they ran as only Jedi and predators could, silent, the only thing in their minds the bond linking Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan that the older Jedi let reverberate into the stump of the bond he had shared with Feemor once.

Obi-Wan was alive. Probably drugged, because his thoughts were sluggish, uncoordinated, but alive.

So they ran, and Feemor let his mind go empty, only the sound of their feet on the soil saturated with water, only the light of Obi-Wan’s Force presence calling them, closer, closer but never close enough.  

Hybol was dead, his Padawan was dead, and his body no more than ashes from the tip of his lekku down to his favourite boots that Feemor had insisted they put on him for the cremation, even if their colour, purple, clashed with the cream of his clothes before the shroud masked everything.

Hybol was dead and in struggling with his grief, Feemor had perhaps set in motion the death of another child.

Qui-Gon and him found the clearing within the woodlands at dusk. A mine, a lot of engines like the one whose tracks they had followed. A few aircrafts. They fell onto the camp like thunderstorms, the angry buzzing of their lightsabers, the green glow of the two blades, the destruction when Feemor used the Force to send two ships with engines already purring against each other. Nobody was leaving until they were wearing binders and had a meeting with the Judicials about kidnapping children.

They didn’t kill. With the surprise of their arrival nobody was ready enough to force them to those extremes, but Feemor still felt a certain pleasure when he took the hand of a man who thought it smart to draw a blaster on him at close range. He would need to meditate on that later.

There. Inside. Calling him like the magnet call for iron dust.

With the Force Feemor tore down half the metal door from the only building and inside, on a cot, in the dark, he found Obi-Wan. Sleeping, pale, his Force presence reeking of drugs, but alive, alive. Sending confirmation to Qui-Gon, he received a chilling sense of trepidation, fear, anger… What?

The young man thrown over his shoulder, he went back outside. There, proud, tall, dark, his face as beautiful as his Force presence was rotten, his red blade already drawn, was their lineage brother, the Fallen Padawan of Qui-Gon Jinn, the one they didn’t speak of, ever.

Xanatos.

Well, that explained a few things. Qui-Gon and him were already trading insults and for a second… For a second, Feemor contemplated the idea of abandoning them there.

Let them finally mend their feud, let them kill each other or finally make up, Xanatos returning to the Light or Qui-Gon following him into the Dark.

Feemor had needed years to heal from Qui-Gon renouncing him after the Fall of his second Padawan.

Obi-Wan had almost died, multiple times, because Xanatos hated the Padawan Qui-Gon had replaced him with, and the way Qui-Gon had treated the child because of the terrible choices of his former apprentice wasn’t exactly stellar either.

Let them finally close that part of their lives, and Feemor could take Obi-Wan back to Coruscant, safe from collateral damage! He would buy the young man the most sugary treat he could find, and perhaps his first alcoholic beverage and there would be no menace of attack, no old wounds dripping blood again.

That would serve those two….

With a sigh, the Knight put the youngest against a tree, his cape under his head, and then drew his lightsaber again and joined the fight.

Sometimes he regretted his lineage. He was pretty sure Master Windu’s, or Master Even Piell’s lineage had less drama…

[intherustlinggrassihearhimpass]

Innocent Ones

Era: Prequel Trilogy, (JA timeframe)

Characters: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn

Summary: After the loss of a young life among the Order’s ranks hits too close to home, a young Obi-Wan is tasked with keeping a sentinel’s guard outside a long-abandoned temple while Qui-Gon aids another in making pilgrimage within. What could go wrong?

Padawan Obi-Wan Kenobi knelt in flawless meditative pose. He may be young, but he was a traditionalist at heart (a fact Qui-Gon never missed an opportunity to bemoan), and his form was textbook, his legs neatly tucked beneath him and his hands cupped, palms up, in front of his chest. And yet, despite this dedication to form, his focus waivered, drifting from inward reflection to outward observation. The wind whispered soft against his cheek, carrying with it faint chirping of Cerea’s song birds over the sound of rustling grasses. The gentle scent of soil, still damp from this morning’s dew, rose to his nostrils. The sun’s warmth pooled more quickly than he was accustomed too under the fabric of his newly acquired black robe. His mind drifted further. The mainstream practices of the Order did not mark bereavement publically in such a way, but Qui-Gon had chosen the subtle shift in his own dress, and Obi-Wan, out of the deeply plumbed depths of his esteem for his Master had immediately done likewise. And besides. It /had/ been traditional, several hundred years ago. That was not so long. Master Yoda had already been middle-aged during that time!

A sigh slipped through young lips as Obi-Wan opened his eyes, admitting at least a temporary defeat of his solemn intention to meditate. Where was his center? His discipline, his concentration? After three years as Master Jinn’s Padawan he ought to be able to do better. But there was the bitterness of self-malcontent in that thought and he pushed it aside and released it, as Qui-Gon had taught him through painstaking repetition…

When his mind had cleared again he found himself glancing briefly behind himself, at the shadowed doorway of the ancient and long abandoned Cerean Temple, in front of which he had been tasked to keep a sentinel’s guard. Qui-Gon was inside, acting as anchor and companion for the grief-stricken Knight Feemor (who had been his Master’s first apprentice, and thus Obi-Wan’s brother in terms of teaching lineage). The grasses rustled again, carrying remembered words to the forefront of Obi-Wan’s mind.

I am a child of the Force. In birth, it became my mother, and in life it instructed me as a father, but in death I meet its truest embrace. From thence I come and to there I return.

These words had been recited at the funeral, chosen from the sacred texts because of the youth of the life lost, in acknowledgement of the particularly crushing blow dealt to those who remained as a result. The fact that Padawan Hybol had been Knight Feemor’s first apprentice and only fourteen had only made the farewell all the more difficult, and Obi-Wan understood through mere proximity that Feemor grappled now with strong demons as a result—it was why they had come here on this solemn pilgrimage, to this ancient temple, which many millennia ago had been the site of the Massacre of Innocents. Ever since, this had been a place of pilgrimage for those Jedi seeking solace and peace in the face the loss of young life. And so they had come—Feemor and Qui-Gon and himself—the bonds of student and teacher the closest thing a Jedi could have to family.

Despite being nearly the same age, Obi-Wan had not known Hybol deeply. They had not been members of the same clan in the crèche, and Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon’s busy mission schedule meant that they had only met on a dozen or so occasions since they had become Padawans. Certainly, Obi-Wan felt the loss, but it was not so strong that Obi-Wan did not also feel other concerns. Hybol had been the first padawan of Qui-Gon’s first padawan—Obi-Wan feared that Hybol’s untimely loss would leave scars on his master’s teaching line that might reverberate for generations, and as a devoted student of Qui-Gon Jinn and Tradition both, that fact alone grieved Obi-Wan painfully.

Qui-Gon’s line already bore pain enough in the form of the dark, jagged mark left behind by Xanatos’s betrayal. If this pilgrimage could not bring Feemor peace… But no, that thought was ungenerous. And his Master would scold him for even considering such a prideful thing as the legacy of Qui-Gon’s lineage, especially so soon on the heels of Hybol’s death. After all, pride on another’s behalf was still pride, and he dishonored Hybol’s memory with such irreverent thoughts. The all too familiar sensation of guilt washed over him at the realization, twisting his gut and tightening his throat, and a moment later he bent forward in full kowtow, forehead pressed against the cool dirt as he whispered a solemn apology upwards into the Force, where Hybol’s spirit rested, rejoined into the Whole.

When the absolution had been completed Obi-Wan straightened and resumed his previous position, determined to apply himself to his meditations with renewed vigor. He closed his eyes and let out a long, slow, breath as he sunk his weight down onto his heels, pulling thought and spirit along with. He breathed out, emptying self as a tea master pours tea from a pot, until his mind was only an empty vessel, cupped upwards like his own hands, and he floated atop a pool of unadulterated tranquility. He breathed in, letting himself be filled again with the Force, a pure incandescent stream of water falling from a height far higher than that of the central waterfall in the Room of a Thousand Fountains. It filled him until vessel and self overflowed, sinking him beneath the pool’s infinite depths. Time spiraled outwards, but the Force’s gossamer threads spun him inwards, further down, further into the Center. Self was less distinct here, and the Unifying Force—to which had had always been particularly attuned—rose up to meet him of its own accord.

All the while he sunk down and down and then deeper still into the bottomless pool, until there was a pull and a snap as time and space inverted, and instead of sinking he was being borne up and up with the pool’s rushing water until it bubbled up out of a central fountain, the beads of liquid flying up and out before falling amongst the pearls of childhood laughter. Scores of younglings scampered along the fountain’s edge, playing and splashing with sheiks of delight in the heart of the Cerean Temple. The endearing scene may have spun on forever—until it did not. A distant explosion, the familiar snap hiss of a pair of ‘saber blades. But the few who had been given charge over the exuberant younglings were hardly older than Obi-Wan himself, and the intruders were innumerous. There was no true hope in the face of such odds and after the guardians’ defeat there was nothing that could stop the ensuing massacre. Innocent lives cut short, small bodies sliced open by keen steel blades. When viewed from above, the fountain turned a sickening pink and the scattered corpses formed a stomach-turning motif.

The horror and the anguish and the despair rose up so strong they rended the image, twisting and tilting it the way gravity pitched in a disabled starship, until the bloodstained symmetry of the fountain had become the intricate, geometrical inlayed floor of the Council Chamber on Coruscant. Different, living children—a clan of younglings crouched and hid amongst the chambers shadows, until there was again the familiar snap hiss of a blade. And then once again: carnage. The whole clan laid open by a ‘saber until not a single innocent life remained. There was only a humming blade and heavy breathing from a single pair of lungs and—

Obi-Wan wrenched himself from the vision and promptly retched the contents of his stomach onto the grass in front of him. His head spun and throbbed and his hands shook and his heart pounded hard and fast in his chest as the shock of the vision left his body sluggish and slow to respond to his demands of it. Both effects made it arduous to try and release the horror and pulsing fear of what he had seen.

Visions, even of a disturbing nature, were not rare to the young Padawan, but he had grown accustomed to Qui-Gon’s steady presence to anchor him and guide him through their immediate, terrifying aftermath. But his Master was not here—and the vision had been particularly distressing. The first part he could only assume had been the actual Massacre of Innocents, as it had played out millennia ago, but the last part of the dream…

He gagged again at the memory of it, stomach heaving its rebellion even though there was nothing left in it to be expelled. There was a sheen of sweat on Obi-Wan’s brow, and the harder he tried to tighten his grasp on his emotions so that he could rein them in the more easily they slipped through his finger, refusing to be mastered. He was far, far from his center, he thought as he slowly struggled to regain control of himself.

Obi-Wan tightened his mental shields out of shame at his state, but he was not so naïve as to think that Qui-Gon had not sensed his initial distress through their training bond. Indeed it was only moments later that he sensed Qui-Gon’s gentle but concerned wordless query, and he quickly sent back promise that he would be fine. Just another vision. Even though in truth it didn’t feel like ‘just’ in any regard. He resolutely tightened his shields further still; now was not the time. Feemor needed this time, needed Qui-Gon, and Obi-Wan would not be responsible for disrupting the pilgrimage ritual. Perhaps mastery of the vision’s memory and the emotions which sprung from it was beyond him at the moment, but perhaps now was not the time for that either. For now, distancing himself from the memory would be effective enough, Obi-Wan decided as he set to work doing just that, pushing it to a far back corner of his mind.

He wasn’t certain how long the task took or how much time had passed before he noticed a whole flock of prairie birds take flight in alarm, and his Force attuned instincts came alight with a low hum of warning. He ought to have noticed sooner, but the vision and his reaction to it had left him badly distracted, and even now he was far from properly centered or focused. But he would do what he could.

He could hear the distant sound of engines approaching and he pushed himself to his feet… he had a bad feeling about this. He could sense the approaching party was relatively large, perhaps a dozen in number—and distinctly hostile. This last fact wasn’t particularly surprising considering that recent politics on Cerea had made the natives wary and on rare occasion violent towards offworlders, but the plains on which the Temple was situated were sparsely populated at best. They hadn’t anticipated any contact…

His hand strayed to his lightsaber hilt at his hip, but that would certainly be the height of foolishness. The group would be far too large for him alone. And besides, he need only secure time for Qui-Gon and Feemor to complete the rituals. Once the pilgrimage had been completed they would be more than happy to take their leave quickly.

His mind quickly flipped through his remaining options. Hiding was the most obvious, since it was doubtful that the natives would enter into the Temple itself, but while it would have been pitifully easy to hide himself among the tall grasses, their ship resting a short distance away was not so easily concealed. Impossible. That left only negotiation. Perhaps now was the time for him to put into practice the skills he’d acquired through watching Qui-Gon talk them out of countless situations… And just like that, his decision was made. Obi-Wan reluctantly sent a warning of their impending company down his bond with Qui-Gon. He didn’t want to interrupt, but he had been instructed to keep watch, and he knew his Master’s correction would be harsh if he willfully neglected that appointed task. He had often been called headstrong, but he had taken vows—vows which included a pledge of obedience—he would not break them.

He quickly cleaned himself up as much as possible, straightening his cloak and stepping forwards several dozen paces further away from the Temple’s entrance (and the pile of sick he’d left there, carefully tramped into the grass). 

Obi-Wan schooled his expression, folded his hands in his robe, and waited.

[jedifest]

Rogue Robin Squadron Post

        Callsign # 013

Phase One:

@intherustlinggrassihearhimpass - Innocent Ones (fic)

Era: Prequel Trilogy, (JA timeframe)

Characters: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn                  

Summary: After the loss of a young life among the Order’s ranks hits too close to home, a young Obi-Wan is tasked with keeping a sentinel’s guard outside a long-abandoned temple while Qui-Gon aids another in making pilgrimage within. What could go wrong? 

Phase Two:

@saltandlimes - Photoset

Phase Three:

@araydre - Art on Tumblr. Also on AO3

as well as

@super-papagei-universe - Innocent Ones (fic) Also on AO3

Thank you for participating! Be sure to check out the stories and leave a comment!