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wlwanakin · 2 hours ago

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stalking his god - ao3 link here

9.9k, references to depression and suicide + made up jedi philosophy & a complete disregard for anything other than the movies, so not canon compliant at all

obi wan on tatooine, and the ghosts of his past

Do not let the trials of the external world nor your emotions distract you. Acknowledge emotion and allow it to pass, do not allow it to be your master. Seek calm, even when in the midst of a storm. Remember, there is no emotion, there is peace.

Be vigilant and observant. Do not refuse answers because they are disagreeable. Seek out and preserve truth. Do not pretend to possess what you do not have. Reject injustice, embrace justice. Remember, there is no ignorance, there is knowledge.

As you must guard against excessive emotion, one must guard against unconsidered action. Be measured in your affect and put others before you, but do not indulge in self-neglect. All are fallible. Remember, there is no passion, there is serenity.

In action, mind, and word, you must act in unison. Do not betray or lie to yourself. Do not act in disunity. Of this world, we may know that all that is done has meaning. Pursue meaning and balance. Remember, there is no chaos, there is harmony.

With endings come beginnings, this is known. Do not allow fear of death to poison your mind and overwhelm your body. Do not seek to prolong life through unnatural means. Do not become fixated upon it. Remember, there is no death, there is the Force.

. . .

The suns rise slowly. The dark of night is chased away as the sky bursts gradually into colour, deep orange radiating out from the first sun, burning white-gold as it climbs higher, past the deep red rocks and over the sandy wastes. The few birds that live in this desolate world - thin brown things, feathers ragged - sing out, green lizards move in flashes to claim space on rocks being gradually warmed by the sun, and then the second sun breaks past the rocky barricade on the horizon and dyes the sky a deeper, redder colour, chasing after its faster and brighter brother. Overhead, pale clouds shiver as they turn gold, and a lone vulture soars. It’s looking for dead things, even if they haven’t stopped moving yet.

The man uncorks his waterskin and takes a small sip, just enough to wash out the papery dryness in his throat for a few seconds, not enough to sate his thirst. Be moderate in all you do. He has not eaten yet. The man recorks the skin, fingers rubbing against the supple leather, bought when he had first arrived, when his Republic credits still meant anything - that had surprised him, that they’d been accepted at all, but they had been and he’d handed over twice, three times what the waterskin was worth uncomplainingly. Tatooine had only become more alien to him since he last came here. To the north, over the rocky foothills and across the canyons, carved out by dried up, dead rivers, was Mos Espa. To the southeast, over sandplains and shallow salt flats covered in a thin layer of undrinkable water, was Mos Eisley. He rubs one finger over the cork. It’s horn. Cut from the same animal that was killed to make the waterskin and wrapped round in a thin layer of peeled Safa bark to make it fit better. He wants to drink more, his throat is still raw and hurting, torn up by walking in the desert without a proper face covering, but he is disciplined, and cannot afford more fabric. He will be able to, after this next job is done. He’s been walking all night; it’s too hot in the day, but he’s nearly there now. He stands, brushes sand off his cheap synthfibre robes, and begins to walk again, stepping over the little green lizards that scatter wildly across his path as he moves.

During the war, there were always underfoot creatures, running madly from the great tire-treads of the tanks and ponderous weight of the walkers. The commonest sight in war was destruction, and his had been no different - on the way to targets they tore through field and forest, carved deep dark grooves into golden fields and sent teams out to fell woodlands for ease of passage. He’d stood watch as they brought trees down, observing the busy, distant, movement of the clones, ant-like in indistinguishable business, and he’d stood still as the trees far away from him cried and broke, great groaning snaps echoing out and sending bursts of brightly coloured birds up and away from them. Further still was Qui-Gon, who handed over a large beetle to him, telling him to move it out of the path. He’d done so obediently, placing the creature where it would not be crushed, then he’d disavowed Qui-Gon’s languid concern for the world and thrown himself into a rigid framework half of his own making. He grew to disdain the job of moving beetles out from underfoot - they’d crawl back there and die to someone else anyway. During the war he had found himself picking them up again, moving them to safety and thinking: I don’t know why this matters. Every day in the war was the same, starships crawling across the galaxy to blow themselves and others up in bright explosions, screams, and then the creeping cold of space and death. It was the easiest thing in the galaxy to die. The Separatists burnt villages and bombed towns, and they responded as they had to, there was a war on, and it was worth it for the Republic, for peace that would come again. The anti-war faction in the senate struggled with that, refused to understand that the Republic couldn't survive being torn in half endlessly, as would happen if the Separatists won; more planets would spiral away and they'd be less and less able to govern, and all this death would be magnified a thousand times for far pettier reasons. I'm sorry, I don't want to, he thought another tree fell and the clones cheered, I'm sorry that I have to do this, he had thought as they gunned down Separatist civilian militias, the smell of burning hair and skin rising up over the battlefields as they blasted their way to victory, I'm sorry, there's no other choice, he whispered and hoped somewhere Qui-Gon was listening and that he had sounded honest when he said it.

Once, they’d plowed up a wheat field. Hundreds of acres of bright golden wheat, harvested by droids and itinerant workers who smiled and said they liked the work when questioned, reduced to black mud and scarred pockmarks from bombs. They’d dragged all the hulking machinery of war across that field, sent tiny mice fleeing from their passage or catching them underfoot, grinding their tiny, fragile bodies down into gristle and bone, and then pressing them into the dirt and covering them with tents and the golden straw, pulled and thrown onto the ground, regardless of hungry mouths scattered all over the galaxy, to prevent the ground from becoming unusably muddy as the soldiers strode over it and churned it up. The Empire hadn’t bothered picking up the bodies of fallen Jedi, he had learnt upon returning to the killing fields, unsure of what he wanted to find. They’d left them there to rot, to be dragged away by wild things or crushed below and entombed within new duracrete foundations for looming buildings. Mice, under the tread of a monstrous tire.

. . .

It is instrumental to be considered in action and word. We are warned as younglings, and again as padawans, and once more as masters, that we should endeavour to avoid attachment. At each stage in our life, we face this challenge in a new way. As younglings, we must bear in mind the fact that our state of being as part of the Jedi, rather than as part of a family. This is not hard, since we have no memory of being within a family, but outsiders most often struggle with this aspect of who we are. The Jedi does not have parents or siblings. It is incorrect to assume that our masters are our parents and our agemates our siblings. To the latter, one must understand that our connection is as Jedi first, and friend second. A sibling relationship would test this necessary order in an unnecessary way. I do not share blood with any of my fellow Jedi for this very reason - there is no level aside from the extremely general or deeply philosophical that we should relate to another being as more than simply a being. To the former, the answer is easy: our masters are our teachers. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the creche, where the constantly rotating cycle of masters ensures that we do not become overly attached in the blind folly of youth to any one of our instructors, and furthermore enables us to enter our time as padawans with a broad understanding of philosophy and the Force. We are blank slates as younglings, only just beginning to prepare the surface that we will inscribe ourselves upon. As padawans, we must face this challenge of attachment with renewed purpose. Our masters are teachers first, and are neither friends nor family. They will guide, but not control, us. They will treat us as any teacher would treat his student. At this age, attachment is the hardest to overcome, but it is equally the most important time to overcome it, as it is now that we begin to set down who we are. It is now, for the first time in our life, that we will be near constantly in the presence of a single being. It is only natural for attachment to form, but just as we surpass the bounds of nature by using the Force - which is itself both a part of and separate from the world - we must surpass this. The struggle of the padawan are mirrored in the struggle of the master, albeit perhaps amplified by an awareness of the familial relationships practised by non-Jedi. A master may look upon their padawan as a student, as a friend, but they should avoid assigning such labels as ‘brother’ or ‘son’, even in their private thoughts. Your padawan is your student, and your student will respect you if you treat them appropriately. Love and care for all, but do not do so to excess. There is nothing that raises one being in value above another, and this is true of dear students just as it is of strangers and the self.

. . .

The job is what it always is. A half measure, work for a man with no real skills, too old in his bones to learn new ones. He’d been on ibutripane-lanilol, before. Medication for aching joints, fragmentary tears in the thin tissue that holds him together. He couldn’t afford it now, even if he wants to take it, which he doesn’t. The pain in his knees, in his arms, in the small of his back and even in his neck all says be moderate, all says persevere. He unsheaths the dull knife, forces it down onto the fins until they snap and tear off and discards them into a bucket on his left. They keep them, the foreman told him, to give to the slaves. There’s nothing to them, just thin skin and thinner bone, but they pay for it anyway, desperate for the salt that clings to them. He scrapes off scales, uncaring of where they fly, then snaps off the head, slices the belly open and pulls the organs and guts out, discarding them in the same bucket. The fish is then tossed into the large cooler in the middle of the circle, and another is slapped onto his table, eyes staring blankly upwards, salt-poisoned water dripping from the table onto his tunic. He begins again. The fans for the cooler whirr endlessly in the heat and the still air of the tent. He can hardly breathe, the smell of sweat and salt and blood is so strong, but he must, so he does. He is a fast worker and untalkative. The foreman likes him for it. The slave runner taking the fish from the salt flat to the man’s table is sweating, his legs sparkling with dried salt; when he drinks from the bowl of tepid, brackish water the foreman provides, he is economical and cannot speak. The foreman said he used to talk too much. The foreman said he wanted quiet. The man has wanted quiet for over a decade and has won it at higher stakes than the foreman. He feels guilty for that thought, drags it across the rough sandpaper that the roof of his mouth has become, and swallows it dry like a pill. He will feel guilty for that thought until he dies. The other men in the tent are sweating, one is singing a Huttese worksong. There is peace, in discipline. There is peace, in simple labour. The saltwater finds every cut in his hands, all the microscopic tears in his skin, and burrows into them. Good, the man thinks, and feels guilty for that also. He throws the fish, waits for the next to slap down in front of him. This one is still alive and he cuts the head off first and doesn’t feel sorry, but irritated. It’s easier if they are already dead, already gone and subsumed into the Force, not lingering where they should not, like a superstitious ghost. He cuts off the fins and slices the belly open. A scale he missed digs into the space between nail and nailbed, prying him open, and he bites it out, spits it onto the ground. The singer pauses for breath, the slave boy races in with a new fish, trips on the ground and as he stumbles to his feet, the foreman slaps him back down, pointing at the fish, covered in sand. The man has become very good at not reacting. The only injustice he has stopped recently is some children, sun bleached hair and thin arms, who were throwing rocks at a stray dog. It had growled at him as he petted it afterwards, but it had not bitten him. Gratitude, in Mos Espa, was little more than that. He descales another fish. The suns begin to lower. He sleeps uneasily beside the singer and another man, stares up at the fabric of the tent until he isn’t anywhere anymore, until sleep finally overtakes him in a crashing wave. He won’t feel rested when he wakes again.

Three years and the smell of sweat and blood still makes him think of battlefields, of sieges, of clones in white armour dying all around him to the gasoline stink of too many droids in one place. His childhood masters had told him to find joy in the small things of this world, to reject needless emotion, to dwell on nothing that was unproductive. He thinks: I have mastered one of those tenets, at least. They eat in silence as the sun rises. It’s barely food, a watery soup of the bittergrass seeds that grow wild around the saltflats, and viscera from the cast-off buckets. He eats without complaint, do not be demanding, and the singer introduces himself as Csko. Asks the others how they ended up here, if they’re sending the money back to anyone, if they have plans. One says that his daughter is ill, that he’s sending back money for medicine. Another that he lost his last job to droid automation. The man says: I came here for work. The singer laughs. All these men look identical, deep tans from the Tatooine suns and no protectant, missing teeth and thin hands. One has a scar cutting over his lip and introduces himself as Fisook. Wrong type of fishing, another laughs after sounding it out, rough accent jumping over the missing ‘h’. The man finishes his meal and rubs his hands clean in the hot sand outside. The warm gold of the desert stretches so far in this light that the salt flats are barely visible, the transition from dry sand to water smoothed over in the glare from the suns; the sky is utterly cloudless.

“Wet season is nearly over,” The foreman begins, walking up to his side, “expect fewer fish today.”

There’s no need for a response. He’s done this job two years now. The foreman likes his rituals. The man draws a circle on his thumb with his forefinger. They are standing just far enough from the other men that they can’t be overheard. He’s done this before, stood here and listened. He’s had a lot of time to listen.

“A krayt came down last week, out west - a few klicks past the racetrack. I know the boss on it, I’ve put in a good word for you, Ben.” He smiles and breathes out. As he exhales his breath is hot and rancid against the man’s face.

“Appreciated.”

“Ask for Karvè in The Starfighter if you want it.”

The man nods, begins to try and thank him -

“I’m finishing up here early this year. One, maybe two more weeks, and then I’m out. Don’t know ‘em, don’t care to forewarn about the reduced pay, and I know you can keep your mouth shut about this: all I’ve been hearing is word of a census,” The foreman waves one hand dismissively, “more modernisation shit from our masters on high.”

When he visited the Lars’, when little Luke was being taught in the hut that passed for the local nursery the west Eisley area moisture farmers used, Owen talked of nothing but planetary politics, a homespun council chamber with Owen and him facing one another across a table and over steaming tea, while Beru patched work trousers or prepared food. They never spoke about the ghosts in the room, never crossed the lines that the three of them had drawn out three years ago when he first arrived.

“I’ve heard.” He says.

The foreman sighs, “Well, it’s bad business for me. Don’t want to stay still for too long until this all blows over.”

. . .

We wake early and sleep early. Be measured in body, and the mind will follow. Upon waking, we meditate, and then may practise forms, perhaps spar. It is important to be mindful of your actions, and reflection and deliberate movement lead one to consider more fully the nature of being and doing. The Force moves through and around us, always, so we endeavour to be aware of it in all we do. Lightmeal is most often eaten alone, or with one's master/padawan, to encourage and facilitate quiet reflection, but as with many of our customs, this was not an absolute rule. I remember many pleasant meals shared with friends, watching the sun rise. I shudder to imagine what has happened to it, but there was a particular room that I always enjoyed watching the sun rise and spread across the shining metropolis of Coruscant from. As a padawan I was always more eager to spend time either in study or with the few beings I considered friends, but a master myself, I came to cherish this early hour, for how it allowed a gentle camaraderie to flourish between my padawan and I.

After this, we then study, teach, or, rarely, venture out into the city on our own errands. My master was a great proponent of constant study; he liked me to write essays and hand them over to him for review, one every fortnight. I cannot say I found the activity particularly pleasant in the moment, as he would often task me with niche or seemingly random topics, but as with everything he did, I understand now that it was an exercise in discipline, and I have often had a desire to thank him for the efforts he took in imparting such a wide range of knowledge upon me. Teaching is the most common way to spend the morning, however. We instruct younglings in junior lightsaber forms or martial exercises - while you should never be apart from your lightsaber, you must also understand how to defend without it - as well as history, ethics, mathematics, the sciences, literature, languages, art, and more. These classes continue on over the whole day, and so it is not uncommon for a master to teach first a morning, and then an evening class. As a master-padawan pair, it is expected that you will also spend part of the day teaching your padawan, most often through activity rather than lecture, although it is dependent on the character of the master and padawan. My own preference as master was for a more structured imparting of knowledge. We will then eat midmeal, most often communally, and continue to work, study, meditate, and exercise until it is time for latemeal. Sometimes, we gather to debate. I have fond memories of those debates, the gentle noise of voices, like an aviary filled with light birdsong, the air teeming with rhetoric and idea. I was a poor debater as a young padawan, but I was eager to learn, and now they have shaped my skills greatly.

The Jedi are not solitary creatures unless our struggle with the world has become too great to bear, or we have acted poorly and need to self-reflect at great length. We dedicate ourselves to the Force wholly and absolutely. It may be tempting, for an outsider, to see our warnings of attachment as a sign of some solitary heart to our existence, but that is incorrect. Within the physical world, we value community deeply. Within the Force, there can be no real isolation, and it follows that isolating the body and mind to excess is antithetical to the Jedi way. Trust, and a vastness of community is emphasised - isolated behaviours and obsessive, singular, attachments are, for those connected to the Force, ways of harming the self. Atonement and individual re-focusing upon the Force must be done with care, to avoid engaging in harmful behaviours.

. . .

At the end of the first week, they load up a truck with the coolers. They were heavy duty; it hurt to touch the outside of them. The foreman nods in approval, and they pile in alongside the coolers and drive into the outskirts of the city. Saltfish themselves are worthless, skin and bone mostly, with bland flesh. They taste like thin saltwater most of the time. Where they have any worth is in their appearance, round fat-seeming bodies and grey-blue scales, since they look like salao. Salao are imported, like anything worth anything on Tatooine, and the market is cornered by the Hutts, who buy cheap and sell expensive, the forced scarcity of the fish contributing to demand. It was easy, laughably so, to forge an import record complete with official customs stamp and a slip confirming them as Hutt retainers, and thereby transform the saltfish into salao, half prepared already, but here’s a whole sample for you, sold at below market price to the homes of the middlingly rich.

The foreman smiles greasily at them, dressed in clean red robes and draped with golden jewellery. Deception is to be avoided unless unavoidable. The truth: it often was. Sometimes he wonders if there was any virtue to anything he had learnt, rote, as a child. Maybe it would have saved them all, but maybe it had killed them, and it was increasingly difficult to live by any of it. He speaks rarely, says it is good quality fish, and nods when the foreman asks him questions. He did this last year, he has had practice. You look reliable, the foreman had said. I am, he hadn’t replied, because everyone who had relied on him had been let down. He’d been asked to teach the younglings philosophy when the war ended. He’d made lesson plans. If it hadn’t been destroyed or repurposed, they were still locked away on his datapad in his quarters on the Negotiator. Trust in the Force, his teachers had said, and they’d died. Trust in the Force, they’d told the younglings, the children, and they’d died too.

“It’s high quality.” He affirms. The cook buys it, relief flashing across her face. Just past her, a scrawny child is sweeping the floors.

. . .

In the sunset, the Temple was golden. I did not realise, until I began to write this, how much I miss walking through the great shadows cast by pillars, I did not realise how I missed it all. I have not been in residence at the Temple for years now, the war took me away from it first; I came to know the utilitarian space of my quarters on the Negotiator as home quickly. I will never see the Temple again, I will never see the meditation rooms, the gardens, the archives, the sparring rooms, the fishponds. I will never see the statues, or the mosaics. I will never again read about the actions of heroic Jedi of ages past. How many of us are left? How long will this last? It would be impossible for me not to feel unbearable grief at everything we have lost. Perhaps some day, Jedi will walk the halls of the Temple again, and younglings will laugh in the gardens, but for now our betrayal has been absolute. In times of war, one may have to be incautious, but in times of peace, when caution seems unnecessary, we must exercise it more vigorously than any other time. Perhaps we could never have stopped this, but I cannot shake the feeling that the extent of the harm we have suffered could have been minimised.

. . .

They collect the other men, drag them out of bars and back onto the truck, and drive back out to the salt flats. They’re three short, but that’s normal. People always drop off when they take the fish to be sold, weigh the money up against the conditions and decide to go home. Nobody enjoys spending over a month in a tent, barely speaking, descaling and gutting fish after fish after fish until the feel of the knife and the sound of it against the scales and the whirr of the fans and the stench is bone deep. His first year there, an older woman had told him: you’ll never hate anything like you’ll hate these fish. She hadn’t been right exactly, but she also hadn’t been wrong. Gutting them feels natural at this point, a smooth extension of his own being, less foreign to his body than the thought of wielding his lightsaber. He’d caught his reflection in the rearview mirror and hadn’t recognised himself. His hair is too long, his beard too unkempt, there is white where there should have been none, and new lines scrawled themselves over his face, a tally of defeat and sorrow. Saltfish live in the gritty mud of the salt flats, hibernating in layers of sand and salt during the dry season until distant rains resurrect the half-poisoned rivers that feed the flats; they spend half the year slowly drowning just to wake up and be beaten to death with a flat stone.

The last week of the job, signalled by how the foreman nervously runs his tongue over his white teeth, the man with a sick daughter died. Heat exhaustion. He collapses in the early afternoon, sweating violently as he folds over onto his table, head slamming into the fish he has just pulled the guts out from. They leave him like that until the day ends. They all need the money more than they need to move him. After latemeal they reenter the tent, drag him outside. He’s too light for a full grown man. Too young for a dead one. In the fading sunlight, his hair looks almost golden, curled around his face loosely. The last time he had seen Anakin asleep was four years ago, when he had to wake him up because they were nearly at the Temple and they needed to give a report when they arrived.

“What’s his daughter’s name?” He asks, almost without realising. His voice is rough, scratched and torn from thirst and disuse. The water here is unbearably salty. The others look between themselves, almost nervously.

“Temi.” One - Fisook - offers. “Temi, from Kirrek Third, Mos Espa. The house has a blue door, he said.”

“You’re better off leaving it alone.” The singer says. The man doesn’t respond, can’t respond. All four of them, standing in a half circle around the dead man, are thinking the same thing: the girl will die anyway. Waste of money.

They cover the body with a canvas cutoff the foreman provides, weigh it down with rocks, and file back inside to sleep.

Three days later, and they’re all leaving. The foreman removes the canvas from the corpse, packs it away in the truck and wrinkles his nose sympathetically at the man’s look. Life is hard here, harder than anywhere else. As they drive off, the man whispers, may the Force be with you. There are rituals he will never be able to unlearn. He isn’t sure if he is thinking of the right dead man as he says it.

. . .

The lightsaber is a curious instrument to define a peace keeper. This was my master's opinion, and it is one I share, albeit with some differences. He believed, in the school of Masters Anh He Tan and Saubel Faurer, that the lightsaber embodied the tension between the mission of the Jedi - peace - and the inherently chaotic nature of our lives. We cannot control chance, nor even predict it absolutely, and so there is chaos in our lives even as we strive for order. A general misfortune that affects you is not caused by personal failings. A specific one is likewise unrelated to your being, unless some defect in your character engineered it. The Force does not test us, it simply is. It is not, however, a passive tool in our hand. We may look at the lightsaber and be tempted to view it as a pure symbol of our relationship to the Force, a powerful weapon that must be respected and treated with care, but the truth of the matter is more complex: the Force is the lightsaber and it is also us holding the lightsaber. We are both active and passive, and it is both active and passive. The Force at once exists without exerting influence, and also exerts great influence. Prophecy is at once a firm and gentle hand. My view does not differ so greatly as to assume that it is worthy of record here, but it must be said that in light of our great misfortune, I cannot conceptualise of the Force as having a firm hand, unless we also accept that the hand is cruel, which I find to fly in the face of all I know of it. The Force is not cruel. Unrelenting and unpitying, perhaps, but not cruel. We bring cruelty to it.

During the war, the lightsaber became not just a symbol of our relationship with the Force, the way that the Force both is wielded by and wields (the lightsaber leads in all combat!) us. Rather, it became a symbol of our defence of the Republic - do not mistake us in that, we defended it. Certain figures may claim that we sought to control and destroy it, but this is a lie. We defended our Republic, the great coalition of planets that had for hundreds of years proven itself a committed ally of the Jedi. We do not give into attachment, but defending a known and trusted friend from the malicious attack of another is not attachment, it is justice. It is only unseemly attachment if our defence of that friend flies in the face of all reason. We did not do this. The Separatists brought chaos with them - picture, please, a galaxy where there is no central authority, where there is no free movement or economic agreement. A galaxy where criminals would only have to travel offplanet to be exonerated, no matter the crime. A galaxy where countless civil wars are allowed to ravage worlds unopposed, where internal conflicts multiplied into disaster and bloodshed with ease. The lightsaber both defends and attacks, and so too did the Republic. It is sometimes necessary to cut off diseased limbs to keep the disease from spreading.

. . .

The man had told the news slowly, gratingly to the young woman who opened the door. He had pressed money into her hand, and said that he was sorry for her loss. He had never done this before. How the war worked was: it tore your world apart and then moved on. If you were lucky, whatever planetary government infrastructure was around hadn’t been bombed into oblivion, and so they told you, or you found out from a seemingly endless list of the dead. Most of the war he watched things happen from a safe remove - there were certain limitations on what he could do considering his rank - so he never pressed money into the hands of grieving widows and children, but that was how he had felt in the moment, refusing to meet her eyes. She had told him what her sister was dying of, and he’d let it wash over him. Death didn’t really change, so he pressed platitudes into her hand along with the coins and left. On his way back, he stopped by the market, browsed a few stalls disinterestedly and bought more ink. It had cost most of the money he made. Back in the cave he calls home, now, he unwraps the ink sticks, lays them out on a rough stone table. They shine dully in the fading light that creeps in from the rough hewn windows. Unveiled, they smell faintly medicinal, a fatty smokiness in the air. They’re a rich black colour, stamped in red with a seal he remembers seeing on ink sticks in the Temple. He remembers the smell of the flimsi archives, shelves teeming with scrolls and books, loose sheets of flimsi near translucent they were so thin. Most had never been digitised, and now never would be.

Qui-Gon had never been a stickler for tradition. He had preferred flimsi, but scribbled down ideas on anything, anywhere. After his death, the man had been asked to clear out his rooms. It was an exercise, done rarely, in letting go. There had been piles of flimsi in Qui-Gon’s little study, hundreds of ideas, comments, rough lesson plans that he brushed his fingers over, seeing himself practicing forms endlessly reflected back in the loose blue strokes of the pen. There were more notes on Qui-Gon’s holotab and com units, but those he’d never see in this room, those were destined for the hands and eyes of the archivists. It had been one of Qui-Gon’s eccentricities, his lack of concern for tradition - not because the Jedi were inflexible, but rather because Qui-Gon’s philosophical bedmates scorned technology. They favoured flimsi and ink, spent thousands of Temple credits on buying them, and spoke at length to anyone who’d listen about the importance of material awareness and presence to their connection with the world and the Force. As a padawan he had disliked them. As a masterless one sorting through Qui-Gon’s possessions he had despised them bitterly, for the memories everything brought back. After the Temple fell, he’d never expected to see the ink sticks again, too much of a useless speciality good to be sold on somewhere like Tatooine, so the ruby glint of their seals in the market was a shock. The seller had bought them from a woman who had sold them for repair money, and thus they ended up in his hands, in his cave, in his corner of this wretched planet.

He grinds the ink in contemplative silence. He isn’t thinking, not really. He makes ink and writes, and then folds the flimsi away again and packs up ink stone and sticks, as if they were never there. There is a spot of ink, blacker than the night sky, on the pale stone of the table, and another on his thumb. He mops them up with his roughspun robes, and feels hunger, lets it pass over him like wind over the sand dunes. The sky outside is wide and empty, cloud cover hiding the moons and stars. He lies down on his hard bed and stares up at the rough ceiling until he wakes up with the creeping light of the suns. He has seen Luke once since handing him over to Owen and Beru, three years ago.

His mornings pass in silence. Still hungry, he thinks of ancient Jedi masters, so attuned to the Force that they could live for months on water and air alone, and chews on a strip of dried meat. Farming on Tatooine is a constant struggle that holds no appeal for him, and he has no interest in tending to livestock, so in the mornings he meditates. He does not practise lightsaber forms, nor use the Force, he simply sits in silence and hollows himself out. One of his creche masters had told him to envision meditation like flattening a dough that has been rolled into a ball. Gentle work. He allows himself to drift, to watch the grains of sand dance and lizards scurry past, and then he closes his eyes and stares out into the vast blankness of space. There is a war in his head that will never cease.

. . .

The way of the Sith is best understood not as a way of engaging with the Force, but as a way of engaging in self-harm through the Force. This is abhorrent. I will not go into the behaviours of the Sith, insofar as we understand them, for this is information better allowed to die, and I will not serve evil by polluting this work with accounts of their deeds - it serves my purposes to say only this: that as they harmed themselves physically, by engineering deadly attacks upon their fellows, they also harmed their minds and the Force itself. Evil must never be tolerated.

Fools will claim that since the Force allows the existence of the Sith, they cannot be truly evil. They will say that we are misguided, and restricted by the words of masters from centuries ago. This is wrong. The Force is not a judge, it does not decide with absolute certainty the direction of things to happen. What we dream may come to pass, or it may not. It may be influenced by the Force, or it may be influenced by what we have eaten. There is a balance that we understand and must walk, between viewing the Force as a blunt weapon to be sharpened, and assigning it motives that we dream of. We cannot know the Force, we can only gaze upon the surface of the pond, blind to the fish swimming in its depths. The Sith thrust their hands into the pond, trying to catch the fish, and in the process disturb the surface violently and cut their hands against rocks and shells. Just as the Force does not control us, we do not control it, and thinking that we can is harmful chiefly to ourselves.

. . .

He is sitting across the table from Owen. Beru wasn’t in the room, but she comes in carrying three mugs of tea. This is their fourth meeting. It is a compromise between Owen, who wants him to leave forever, to take all the misfortune he brought with him and sweep it away, leaving only Luke behind, and the man, who says that he thinks it is important for them to fully understand the story behind the rise of the Empire. He is selfish, and enjoys the feeling of a warm cup in his hands, and the smell of slightly floral tea. He sometimes sees colourful kids toys scattered around where they haven’t yet been tidied up, a little orange speeder on the table there, a chalk drawing of the night sky on the side of a wall, half the stars furious white scribbles and the other half neatly drawn. You couldn’t go to the Lars’ home and miss the presence of Luke. They will have one more of these, and then he will have told his edited story, and then he will never see them again. Vanity is shameful, and he chides himself for it, but Owen’s attention and political rants, and Beru’s thoughtful questions after his ragged retellings remind him a little of teaching, and he answers as best he can. Today, she asks about the Force, about how it manifests. She’s worried about Luke, clearly. Will he start spontaneously levitating things? He stares over her shoulder for a few scant seconds, imagines saying ‘when Anakin was young -’ to her, and finds he could not even if he wanted to.

“It’s possible. Force sensitivity manifests differently for everyone. I’ve seen younglings who could disassemble puzzle boxes in their sleep, and ones who struggled to lift rocks. Normally, it’s intuition that shows Force sensitivity though.”

“Intuition?”

“Knowing things before they happen. Supernaturally good reflexes. That type of thing.”

Owen and Beru nod at the same time. It’s such a casually intimate act, that he feels a little unsettled. Beru’s dress has a pink stain in the shape of a lopsided heart on the sleeve. He imagines Luke drawing it on there, and then tries to imagine Luke, but all he ends up with is Anakin.

“This intuition - is it obvious?” Owen asks, finishing off his tea.

“If you’re looking for it, it will be clear, but I cannot imagine that anyone is looking, not here.”

Owen exhales, pleased with his answer, and the man makes his polite goodbyes as Owen and Beru begin to clear up.

He pauses at the door, turns to look at Beru, “How is Luke?”

“He’s well. Owen reckons he’ll be reading soon.”

“He may have a temper as he grows, if he has inherited anything of his father’s nature.” He says it absent-mindedly, on hand on the doorframe still.

Her mouth thins out slightly.

“You haven’t told us everything. I understand that you have your reasons - but you handed Luke over to me. If he is angry, then I will handle that. Whatever happened between you two - Luke isn’t Anakin. You don’t know him, Ben, and I’d like to keep it that way. We’ve got enough to deal with here already.” She says.

“All I want is for him to be safe.”

“That’s all we want too.”

Behind her, he can see the rough plaster walls of the house, and beyond that, a brightly coloured woven blanket, thrown onto a chair. The house smells faintly of rosewater and spices, and on the windowsill a collection of herbs are growing. He leaves.

. . .

I do not know what has happened to the fishponds in the Temple garden. In my mind they will remain as I last saw them, large winding pools filled with cool water and the thousand sinuous flashes of silver movement as the fish in their schools swam. There was always at least one gardener around, and often a master-padawan pair tending to the plants that were set around the pools. I remember it was a favourite exercise of my master, to set me down and give me the duty of weeding or, when I was impatient, to count the fish. I spent hours sitting beside those pools, trying to count the fish in ones, twos, guessing wildly and growing frustrated as they turned back on themselves or rose up out of the darker, deeper waters of the ponds almost as if they knew I was labouring at an impossible task. Gradually, however, I began to notice differences between the fish and the different schools. I lost myself watching how they’d dart under lily pads, hiding in their shade and only venturing out to snap at food on the surface. There was one, a large fish patterned in silver and red, that often swam in circles, diving down into the dark waters where I could not follow with my eyes, nor discern it from the bright awareness of the mass of Living Force that blanketed those gardens. It would resurface, bite at food and dive down again, sometimes alone, often joined by other fish. They were not solitary creatures, I realised quickly - it went beyond even a general awareness of their communal living, but an understanding that they were not solitary: they did not live alone unless forced to, and even ones I could easily spot and follow for their distinctive characteristics were never truly alone. What, to me, had seemed a tiresome exercise in attempting the impossible, was revealed to have been a lesson in patience, awareness, and the cultivation of peace. We do not suborn our emotions into tranquility, rather we recognise them and allow them to pass. This precept - peace, rather than emotion - is of the most crucial; unregulated emotion leads to unregulated and destructive action, a most unfavourable outcome regardless of one’s personal philosophy on the nature of the Force. My master, by teaching me to calm myself and engage with the lives of the fish, so much smaller and less aware than I, was attempting also to emphasise the value of life to me, in much the same way that he made me sit and grind ink to calm my mind and better understand our history. When dressing, one should be mindful of the acquisition of your clothes, when eating, one should be mindful of the acquisition of your meal. Observe well, and you will come to know better. Observe well, and you will come to know peace. Without peace, one is ruled by emotion, and when one is ruled thusly, others will suffer. These, at least, are the tenets that we swore to live by. In truth, I feel that while our aims were noble, we did not observe well enough the conditions that led to the war and Palpatine’s rise. It seems so clear now that had we been more perceptive, had we hesitated before rising to our duty, many may have been spared, and much saved. Duty is not peace, obedience is not peace. It is tempting and easy to assume that only material hardships are temporal distractions, but our allegiance to institutions other than the Jedi can be as much of a distraction as any personal suffering. Our ancestors spoke truly when they said that the autumn winds care little for the walls of this hovel. It is unfitting to linger overly on the past - as unfitting as to attach oneself to this transient world - but I write this in the hope that some of what we once were can be regained. I am tempted to view this as a test, but what could this test for? We did not shirk our duty, we were not so evil for wishing to preserve the greater and lasting peace that the Republic could bring. I cannot accept anything other than the fact that I was wrong about much.

. . .

The rocking motion of riding an eopie is strangely calming. It’s a two day journey, and he makes the first half of it in bitter silence. He’s resting overnight in a wilted valley hidden in a great circular bowl carved into the hard rock that hid just under the sands in this area. He’s familiar with it, and first chose it for the steep rock walls that enclose it, and make it a nightmare to traverse if you don’t know the way down. There’s a thin river at the bottom, wet mud covered with a layer of running water, drying out gradually as the rainy season ends. Hardy plants, palms and thorny scrub, grow around it. He should be alone here, but he isn’t. He doesn’t realise this until he’s tied his eopie up, and finds a blaster pointed at him, a woman with unkempt and dull hair pointing it at him. He raises his hands. She edges closer, waves the blaster at him until he backs away from the saddlebags he was lowering to the ground. In a moment, she dives on them, digs through them and scoffs at the meagre amount of food and water he’s carrying. She still takes a handful of jerky, ripping a chunk off as she settles down across from him, blaster by her hand, eyes fixed on him.

“Hello?” He asks.

She responds quickly in Huttese, snatching up the blaster and gesturing at him. He raises his hands again, walks to where she directs him, and sits down across from her. They sit like that for several long minutes, looking at one another, until she sighs, and slings a box off from her shoulder and begins to go through it. As she moves he catches sight of a scar. Sometimes he thinks it's disturbing, that the war never left him with any. The woman says something in Huttese as she assembles her rifle. Not to him, he thinks, although he also doesn’t think she would have said it if he hadn’t been there. It’s a long weapon, the sort of thing he’s seen hunters and nomads carrying before, and he feels strangely calm. She washes her hands in the river, shakes off the excess and he watches as the droplets burrow into the soft sand. She opens a box, counts through bullets, stands and walks away. He watches her as she goes, climbing out of the bowl with an unerring confidence.

He doesn’t leave. Three years ago, he would have. Three years ago, he never would have been surprised by her; the Force would have rang in his ears like a warning bell. Instead he sits and meditates. The gentle sound of the river is a rarity on Tatooine, and he lets it wash over him and drown him. She comes back as the suns are just dipping below the sides of the bowl, dragging a womp rat with her, and drops it down in front of him. It’s on the smaller size, and there’s a crust of dried blood and sand on its forehead. She says something in Huttese again, gestures at it, and locks eyes with him. He nods, instinctively, and she grins briefly.

The hunter carefully disassembles her rifle, taking each piece apart and laying it down on cotton rags, polishing and cleaning each segment, then packing them away into her rifle case. Her methodical calm reminds him of cleaning his lightsaber, taking it apart and putting it back together. His lightsaber has been gathering dust, wrapped in a scrap of cloth like a shroud. She looks up at him, flicks out a penknife, and begins to skin the rat. He watches, and builds a fire. They cook it, eat it. He swallows the meat and can’t taste anything other than watery fat, but it’s hot, and with night the temperature is beginning to plummet. She breaks off the protruding front teeth from the skull, and wraps them in another scrap of cloth. He hears the crack of the skull breaking and thinks of the Jedi.

“How do you live here?” He asks her. She stares at him blankly, and passes her bowl to him, gesturing to the river, and he goes to wash up. When he comes back and hands the bowls over to her, she begins to talk.

She doesn’t speak Basic, and he doesn’t understand Huttese well enough to follow what she is saying - rather than catch what few words he recognises and try to understand them, he lets them envelop and pass him. When she stops, he starts. It’s the most he’s spoken at any point, and he allows himself to speak without thinking, to speak as if he’s pouring out water into the sand.

. . .

Much of our duty, when it truly comes down to it, is talking to people. Peace may often be won only through war, but a testament to the function of the Republic was that, more often than not, we Jedi acted as negotiators rather than warriors. Our lightsabers were drawn only in self defence. On many occasions, we assisted in interpersonal conflicts, our advice was sought and we gave it freely. We were impartial mediators, even-handed jurors, and unaffiliated diplomats. This was the practical side of why clear and considered speech was stressed; the philosophical was that, as with everything, we must act with consideration. Speaking rashly was frowned upon as much as throwing oneself heedlessly into a fight. This is why we debated as much as we trained. None of us were ever expecting to be thrown into a war.

. . .

The hunter sees him off the next day, he catches Mos Espa in her goodbye, and he wonders for a brief moment if she is running from or to it. He walks beside his eopie for a while, and then rides, and then walks beside her once more. Walking feels purposeful in a way that riding simply does not. Walking allows him to ignore everything save for the shifting sand underfoot, the burning heat from the suns, and the physical form of the landscape stretching out before him.

When he first arrived on Tatooine, he had handed Luke over and then gone to Mos Eisely. He’d sold the ship he arrived on - a nondescript snub nosed grey thing, he’d abandoned Padme’s silver star skiff as soon as he could - and walked straight into the nearest bar. He had told the barkeeper that his brother had just died, so he wanted something strong, and three drinks in, told the Twi-lek next to him that his brother had killed himself, and after five told the bartender that he had killed his brother. The holo-vision screen over the bar was playing reruns of podraces from earlier in the year, nothing at all about Palpatine’s declaration, about the Jedi. Do you even care, he’d asked the bartender, we’re all over now. The bartender had poured him another drink and told him to get out as soon as he was finished. He slept in an alleyway that night, walked into the desert until he found his cave the next day.

Sometimes, he likes to think that he had been drawn to the cave. Sometimes, he likes to think that it is all just random chance, that he is spared from dying in the desert wastes, his bones being stripped of flesh by the sand and bleached by the suns, for no great reason at all. He dislikes the planet, and the people, but some areas of it resonated with him. It was here, in the high empty places of the Jutland wastes, where the sky seems endless, that he could most easily pretend to feel at peace. The world is a hollow expanse of ruin, great columns of rock and the withered remains of once-verdant trees. The wind roars through the canyons, tugging and pulling at his cloak like some child had a lifetime ago, always keen to ask why? Sometimes he imagines that he can hear their voices, all the voices of everyone he’s lost, echoing in the screams of a sandstorm, and he’s tempted to step out and join them; there’s a strange, wounded animal buried in the hollows of his heart. He does not use the Force anymore. His cave is small, carved out by some nameless earlier inhabitant. He has not decorated it beyond necessity. It is an ascetic’s paradise. The only touches of anything personal are the box, high up on a shelf and covered with a dark cloth, that he put his lightsaber in when he first arrived and cannot seem to bring himself to move, and a small toy starfighter. He’d seen it in the market in Mos Espa, and had bought it on a whim, thinking that Luke would like it, because he knows that Anakin would have loved it. It’s gathering dust now.

Those last days of the war, the space between Dooku’s death and Anakin’s - it had felt like there was something coming, like pressure building in the air before a storm. He'd passed Anakin in the Temple corridors, a few days after Anakin had brought the Invisible Hand down, and for a moment he didn’t recognise his friend. He was too pale, lavender shadows pressed under his eyes, and he was standing as if to say: I cannot take another step forwards, and he had wanted to take him by the shoulders as if he was still a child and shake him. He had wanted to ask what happened, but there was no point in asking an answered question; the war had hollowed out the Temple, took Jedi Knights and Masters and Padawans alike outside and lined them up against a wall. They would continue, though. The war would end soon, the war powers would be pried out of the Senate’s hands, and they’d continue, so he had nodded politely to Anakin and walked on. In a room in the Temple, if it hadn’t been gutted or destroyed, there was a collection of dying spider plants and half-finished mechanical projects. Maybe the sunlight still pooled through the windows and cast shadows onto the floor, maybe the window shades were permanently drawn, maybe there was nothing in there at all. He’d wondered, when he first became a master, when Qui-Gon’s absence felt a little smaller, and his bitter regret over how he had acted towards him had been subdued somewhat, if some scholarly interest came through when he watched Anakin practise controlled Force manipulation, disassembling and reassembling intricate puzzle boxes. It wasn’t his interest, not really, it was inherited from Qui-Gon, who used to sigh in exasperation at his essays and hand them back, heavily annotated, preempting one of their well trodden fights. Qui-Gon had such unshakable faith in the Force. The man used to think he did too. Anakin veered between determination and glee as he worked on the puzzle, using the Force as naturally as a bird took to air, and all he can think now was: did he feel gleeful when he tore through the Temple and did the Force come to him easily and beautifully then too?

The little toy starfighter remains on the shelf, next to his unused lightsaber.

. . .

I have failed, failed a thousand times over - Anakin you will never read this. I am not sorry for what I did, I am sorry that it ever was a necessity and that I did not have strength enough to follow through, but I am not sorry for the deed itself. I do not understand you any better for living here. I do not understand how you could have raised a saber against the Temple - do you remember, after we returned from Naboo, when I showed you around? The way you gasped when you saw the gardens and waterfalls and meditation rooms and the archives? I am not sorry for standing against you, I cannot ever be sorry for that, since war has hardened my heart, but I am sorry that I did not realise when that little boy became a cruel and wicked man. I do not understand you, and I cannot understand it, save to conclude that there must have been some flaw in my teaching that I did not recognise at the time, or that the suspicions of the council were true all along and I was too blinded by grief to see it. One’s character is visible most clearly in youth. I wondered, you know, when you were quick to anger and slow to let your past lie, but I then looked at your progress, at how fast you learnt, and I believed that you belonged there. I am sorry that I did not see it. I am sorry that I have lost a dear friend. I am sorry that I have lost many dear friends.

. . .

The suns rise slowly.

#OH MY GOD #reading later

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