FicWad

Author’s Notes: 1). First of all, this story has been expanded upon since the original version of it was posted, in response to material contained in my short story/character sketch “Shmi Maakaruna Skywalker Lars: Dreaming Flowers Raining in the Desert” (involving aspects of Qui-Gon’s background and behavior that I either didn’t know about or wasn’t certain of when I first wrote a complete draft of this particular story). 2). For anyone interested, this not-quite-a-story is still compatible with my SW AU trilogy Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith/, in my SW AU series /You Became to Me/, if you squint at a couple of things sideways and view a few others solely through the (somewhat biased and limited in scope) lens of Qui-Gon’s eyes. 3). Although this is technically modelled on two different combined prompt sets that I snatched up from somewhere or another on the LJ (I really don’t recall from where, though if someone would like to set the record straight, I’ll add the info and a link to the community in question here in my notes. I combined two sets so I could have more prompts, thereby rounding out his character a little bit more), it’s not actually meant to function as a response to whatever the challenges really are that’s associated with said prompt sets on the LJ. I just used the prompts to give me a reason to string together a (rather limited ) backstory of sorts for Qui-Gon, adjusting for names/concepts that wouldn’t fit in the GFFA as I went, and filling in my own idea for the last prompt given, which was labelled a /writer’s choice/! 4). If reading this doesn’t convince folks that the Qui-Gon Jinn in my AU definitely deserves both descriptors used in the title for this piece, then readers may want to just read my AU version of /Outbound Flight/, entitled /So Much for Outbound Flight (or else read that and then wait for the first of the sequels planned for Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith/), if they want a better idea of why Qui-Gon merits the label of “screw-up” along with “maverick.” 5). Readers interested in knowing who the physical models are for Expanded Universe characters (who never actually make an appearance in the film saga) like Xanatos, Master Cerulian, etc., should /please consult the latest versions of my posted lists of cast original and EU characters and for handmaid(en)s and other important Nabooian characters, which are available on my LJ! 6). I realize that some of my dates/descriptions for when some things happen (such as when Dooku speaks for Qui-Gon, etc.) don’t fully jive with information in the EU. If readers would please keep in mind that the EU is /not/ canon material and that I /am/ writing in an AU of the GFFA rather than dwelling on things like how old Qui-Gon was when apprenticed, I’d dearly appreciate it! 7). Standard temperature, in the GFFA, is measured in Celsius (Centigrade) degrees, meaning that water melts at zero degrees (or thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit) and boils at one hundred degrees (two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit). For a human norm, body temperature should be around only thirty-seven degrees Celsius, and to alter it even by a single degree would be to result in either a fever of one hundred point four Fahrenheit or a low body temperature of ninety-six point eight degrees Fahrenheit. Therefore, for Qui-Gon to be lowering his body temperature by a standard degree or two is, actually, a big deal. 8). Readers should be aware of the fact that the notion that Qui-Gon Jinn is a near-human is inspired in part by my reading of LJ user quigonejinn’s lovely SW fanfic (the first fanfic ever where I came across the notion that Qui-Gon might be near-human, rather than human norm) “Slow Down My Love; You’re Confusing Me” (as well as other SW stories by this author), which can be found at http://quigonejinn. livejournal. com/13708.html for those who are curious! The near-human variant I’ve chosen for Qui-Gon is physically quite different than LJ user quigonejinn’s, but I’m not sure I would have arrived at the notion of making him near-human in my own work if I hadn’t read such a memorable story in which he’s specifically written as near-human. I am providing this information and a link to the story here with the author’s generous permission!


“Qui-Gon Jinn: Jedi Maverick and Screw-Up Extraordinaire”


01.) Know: Qui-Gon Jinn is nearly three the first time he realizes that not everyone can hear the thought-impressions of plants and animals chanting for the light and for food and for shelter and warmth and water; about four and a half when he realizes that hearing the Living Force so clearly is abnormal even for a Jedi; six when he first realizes that he probably hears the Living Force so strongly because the Unifying Force speaks to him almost not at all; eight when he decides the Living Force seems a lot more practical, in a purely useful sense, than the Unifying Force does, and that there’s no use crying after spilt blue milk anyway; not quite ten when he first knows that the all but terrifyingly intense Dooku is going to be his Master, no matter what anyone may say or think; and eleven the first time Dooku approaches him about becoming his Padawan and the Living Force sings within his blood and body so strongly with approval and with joy at the rightness of such a proposed match that he’s filled with an euphoria and an ecstasy so strong – just from a slight sliver of a smile and a softly approving touch on his right shoulder! – that it feels as if the culminate bliss of a thousand ascending in strength orgasms have all come to roost in him all at once and are intent on shivering his body into its composite atoms, and so /knows/, absolutely, that the Living Force and its approval are all he will ever want or need out of life.

02.) Near: So far as he can remember, Qui-Gon Jinn has never not known that he’s near-human rather than human norm – after all, the Healers would have accounted it a failure on their part of criminal proportions, if he’d been allowed to grow up not knowing about the major differences between his own particular kind of physiology and that of human norms and ever been injured badly enough to need to know that information in order to save his life long enough for someone to either get him to a real Healer or else get a Healer to him – but because he’s never really been all that interested in knowing which specific planet gave rise to type of near-human he belongs to (given the distance the most obvious peculiarity of his physiology – his hugely accelerated rate of growth, due to his rapid physical maturity – always placed between him and his peers, in the Temple), Qui-Gon never bothered to try to follow through on that knowledge to try to pinpoint a specific world of origin for himself.

03.) Kind: His particular kind of near-human likes cold and moisture (is actually built to retain heat and to be extra buoyant in water), so one of the first tricks he consciously learns how to do with the Force, as a child, involves gathering in and holding a mass of highly moist air around his body and regulating/cooling his internal body chemistry so that his body will be anywhere from one to two (sometimes even three) degrees cooler than the ambient temperature in the Temple (routinely set in public quarters for the mid to low end of the comfort zone for human norms dressed in Jedi-appropriate clothing) otherwise would have made it, and the trick eventually becomes so natural that he finds it more difficult to turn these methods of compensating for his physiology off, in environments colder or wetter than the Temple, than to simply automatically, indefinitely maintain them, even while sleeping.

04.) Tease: Tahl used to tease him that everyone knew not to invade his personal space, because to do so would be like plunging into a frigid version of a sauna, but Qui-Gon never really believed that she was doing anything other than trying to make him feel better about how gawky and huge and clumsy he seemed to be, from about age five (when he really started to hit his adolescent growth) until not quite age eleven (when he was at roughly ninety percent of his final adult height and finally starting to get the hang of having such long limbs), until the first time he visited a truly hot desert world and came to understood firsthand how uncomfortable such a simple thing as a relatively slight change of temperature could actually be, at which point he gained a whole new appreciation both for her little joke and for his ability to control (at least to a certain point) his body temperature.

05.) First: Tahl is the first person he meets in his age group at the Temple who isn’t either put off by the rate at which his body matures (growing at roughly twice the rate of human norms to adult maturity and then slowing to a rate of aging roughly half that of human norms afterwards) or else simply inspired to try to use his size as a tool to some advantage in one or another of their créche classes, so he grows up adoring her with the kind of simple single-mindedness of a child faced with the first peer to ever truly like and accept him, strangeness and all.

06.) Peer(s): There are surprisingly few of his peers who are comfortable with him (apparently, even the tolerance of Jedi initiates for the strange and different have limits, and a seemingly human child who grows at twice the rate of human norms and towers over them all – and will continue to tower over most of them, even when they eventually do reach their own final adult heights – is just a little bit too much for them to easily take), but he’s always a big hit among the younger clan groups, who love the fact that he’s willing both to play with them and to help them with their lessons whenever he can, and so many of his strongest friendships in the Order begin from an offer to “fly” some pint-sized youngling or another around his head or to demonstrate (sometimes repeatedly) one minor Force trick or another, both when he himself is still an initiate and later on in life, as first a Padawan apprentice and, later, a new Knight (though it is a habit that he unfortunately drops after he loses his first Padawan learner).

07.) Master: When he is a Padawan, people everywhere seem to be either in awe or in terror (or some combination of the two all at once) of his stern young Master, yet his greatest wish (though he knows it cannot, in the strictest sense of fact, ever come true, given how strong Qui-Gon is in the Living Force and how strong Master Dooku is in the Unifying Force) is that he might one day be considered to be something like Dooku, for though he certainly finds the man awesome and will freely admit that Dooku probably seems terrifying (rightfully so, in his opinion!) to evil-doers, to Qui-Gon, Dooku is, quite simply, the most important and beloved person in all the worlds, and he all but daily marvels at his good fortune, at being chosen by such a Master.

08.) Room: A room is all well and good for sleeping, but frankly he’d just as soon be outdoors, out among the living breath of green things growing, than cooped up indoors, and, even with all of his insistence on living in the present, it’s never entirely quite possible for him to forget how his Master once laughingly referred to him as being a perfect candidate for the Agri-Corps, but for the irrefutable fact of his entirely unsuitable strength in the Force.

09.) Green: Quite often, sentient beings confuse him so much that he wishes he could afford to simply withdraw to some garden somewhere – or even the Agri-Corps, excess of strength in and ability with the Force or no! – and just work with green things (natural, uncomplicated, loyal, responding to care and light and warmth and rich good earth and asking for nothing else but those simple things) for the rest of his life and not have to worry about living beings and their bothersome, changeful emotions and strange, fickle, sometimes ridiculously demanding needs.

10.) Rate: His rate of maturity makes it fairly easy for him and Master Dooku to fool beings into assuming that they are two full-fledged Jedi rather than just a Master and a young Padawan, for he has his full height (and it is /considerable/, only about the width of a man’s finger) not all that long after they’ve finished their first two years together, and there are exceptions to the rules involving the traditional (and quite distinctive) long Padawan braid and closely-cropped hair (for the boys, anyway. Girls are allowed to wear their hair long, if they wish, so long as they keep it in queues tight and neat enough not to interfere in battle situations) when missions are involved, and so they are able to bluff themselves out of several potentially dangerous situations . . . leading Qui-Gon to decide that there may well be an upside to his crazy physiology, after all.

11.) Beneficial: Master Dooku believes it beneficial for physical and mental well-being to seek release of the flesh on a fairly regular basis, advising him (soon after taking him as a Padawan, given the maturity of Qui-Gon’s body) to indulge in at least one sexual encounter purely for the purposes of gratifying the urges of the flesh every three to four weeks, if not two or three times per month or even more, so long as it doesn’t interfere with either the successful outcome of a mission or the healing process of the body after an injury, and, though he is, at first, painfully embarrassed by the idea of essentially using someone (however willing) for what amounts to scratching an itch that he could, technically, either will away with the Force or else quite literally take care of by himself, after a few months of obeying his Master (mostly by way of extremely willing young women and men met by chance on one mission or another), he has to admit that he does seem to feel a bit better, overall, and, from then on, Qui-Gon is careful to adhere to his Master’s way of doing things quite religiously, in the process scattering his seed all the way from the Core Worlds out past the Outer Rim Territories into the outskirts of the Unknown Regions (after a couple of highly memorable missions involving long chases).

12.) Pleasure: So long as he lives, he is never going to forget his introduction to his Master’s (quite breathtakingly lovely) homeworld, Serenno, for Dooku brought him to Serenno not as part of a specific mission given to them by the Order, but rather in order to see to it that he learned how to, as Dooku put it, “both receive and give pleasure properly,” in essence handing him over to four – two female (one so small and seemingly fragile that it seemed as if a strong gust of wind might blow her over and shatter her, the other taller and much more voluptuous) and two male (one slightly larger overall than Qui-Gon and the other roughly a head shorter than him and extremely fine-boned) – highly professional and well paid bound concubines of House Dooku (at which point Qui-Gon learns that his Master’s given name is actually Yannis Kitsou Dooku, though apparently no one ever calls him that who isn’t in some way related to him) and ordering him to “behave, child: do not shame me,” before leaving him with them for approximately ten and a half days: it is the one moment in his life in which he has ever been both completely mortified and utterly, unabashedly terrified; yet, when his Master finally came to fetch him on the eleventh day, Qui-Gon was so completely and satisfactorily occupied that he had no real desire to leave, and it was not long afterwards before he made his decision to take his Master’s advice in this as in all other areas of his life, choosing to actively (and quite regularly) seek out casual partners with which to take his pleasure whenever the need or want or even just the opportunity arose, so long as doing so would not interfere with any missions.

13.) Child: Jedi are not encouraged to think of children or the possibility of leaving women behind with child, after a mission, and it’s not until Tahl rather bitterly points out the hypocrisy latent in a tradition that allows male Jedi to casually sire progeny from one end of the galaxy to another (so long as they never try to proprietarily claim any such children) while simultaneously forcing any female Jedi who has become pregnant to either undergo a willing abortion, retire to some branch or another of the Jedi Service Corps until/unless she has the baby (or babies) and gives the child (or children) up, or else force her to conspire to hide her condition from the Order (especially the High Council) during a long mission on a world far from Coruscant (so that word of her condition will not travel back to the Temple), so that she can avoid a black mark on her record for the ill-luck of getting with child (and never mind the fact that such a thing should only happen according to the will of the Force, according to the philosophy that Jedi are all supposed to espouse), that it even occurs to Qui-Gon to wonder about the offspring he could be leaving behind him . . . or his right to be leaving them, thus.

14.) Heritage: His Master has, so far as he knows, never not known of his heritage – it was a condition agreed upon by those who took Dooku into the Order, so eager were they to have someone so overwhelmingly strong in the Unifying Force that the regular injunction against revealing homeworld and family before Knighthood was completely waived and Dooku’s regular classes as an initiate in the crèche was supplemented by coursework on his family, the Serenno system, and principles of governing/government – and Qui-Gon wonders, sometimes, if this doesn’t mean that the logic behind the rule against sharing such information about families and origins is flawed, given how well his Master has turned out, never even once tempted to leave the Order for the planetary fief promised by his heritage.

15.) Serene: The longer he lives, the more aware he becomes of flaws, failings, contradictions, hidden hypocrisies, and outright wrongs lurking beneath the seemingly serene facade of the Jedi Order, and it is as he is approaching the age of Knighthood that he begins to truly question the Code and other traditions and rules that govern both the Order and its members, though it will not be until after the loss of Xanatos that he will all but openly begin to rebel against and defy those customs.

16.) Honor: When he has undergone the ceremony that confers the honor of Knighthood on his unworthy person, his personal records automatically become unsealed for his perusal, as is the norm with most Jedi: this is how he discovers that it was Dooku’s own Master, the venerable Thame Cerulian (whom Qui-Gon remembers only dimly, as an aged man with shockingly blue eyes and long white hair and a long, slightly curly white beard who often seemed to walk with the aid of an elaborately carved white staff), who found and brought him to the Temple, under circumstances rather cryptically described as “necessary to the child’s continued health and safety,” and, since no other explanation follows, he goes to Dooku, to ask if he knows what happened (since Dooku would have been apprenticed to Master Cerulian not long afterwards, given that Dooku was chosen as an apprentice early and there’s only about a decade of difference between Qui-Gon’s age and Master Dooku’s), who tells him that “some things are better left forgotten” (rather unhelpfully); despite Qui-Gon’s determination to uncover an explanation for Master Cerulian’s apparent need to “rescue” him, it isn’t until several years later, when he is a Master in his own right and has been given a mission to the planet of his birth, that he begins to be able to piece together the truth.

17.) Drive: Apparently, Qui-Gon is a Hydarian (a group of near-humans descended from human norm stock from Grizmallt, mutated/adapted by a combination of local conditions and pathogens found on the water-rich Mid Rim world of Hydaria) by way of the planet Thorad (half of a binary system of water-drenched, fairly cold Class M planets – Thorad and Shada – positioned just within the Outer Rim Territories and populated largely by Hydarian-descended near-humans rather lamentably prone to attempts to make war on each other and/or on various sections of their own individual populations), and the Thoradians fear and hate Force-sensitives as /bádhbh /or witches (unlike the Shadans, who revere them as /druadneach/); moreover, apparently, when he was a baby, one or both of his parents, fearful for his life, sought out Master Cerulian and begged him to take Qui-Gon away with him, before Qui-Gon could betray his Force-sensitivity to someone who would wish to kill him by the traditionally prescribed combination of stoning and fire, to drive out the supposedly evil spirits in possession of his flesh and purify his therefore tainted and unclean soul with pain, by way of blood and fire.

18.) Hate: Qui-Gon is amazed that the people who so hate Force-sensitivity among themselves could tolerate Jedi, but evidently, according to their rather peculiar (and highly illogical) local mix of superstition and spirituality, Jedi are consecrated by spirits of Light, whereas any child with the ill-fortune to be born on their world or on Shada (at least according to the Thoradians, anyway, though the Thoradians would argue quite violently to the contrary) with an excess of sensitivity to the Force is automatically presumed to be possess of evil spirits: personally, he finds it telling, regarding how poor an opinion of themselves the Thoradians are betraying, slantwise-fashion, by assuming none of their own could simply be the undeclared equivalents of Jedi initiates in the crèche, but then, that’s only when he’s forcing himself to not simply be horrified by such a hideous thought process altogether.

19.) Compatible: Most Master-Padawan partnerships seem to be cooperative ones – the Force will apparently quite deliberately steer a Master strong in the Living Force to a compatible possible Padawan who’s relatively weak in that but strong in the Unifying Force, as the Master is not, or vice versa – and it is a rare pairing that involves an all but identical set of strengths and weaknesses, and so he thinks, sometimes, that he really should have known better than to speak for Xanatos, whose strength was in the Living Force (just as Qui-Gon’s has always been), rather than letting Master Dooku – strong in the Unifying Force as he is – speak for the boy.

20.) Apprentice: From as early on as his first year as a Padawan learner, his dreams have been haunted by the image of a child with darkly tanned skin, dark chocolate eyes, and riotously curly blue-black hair, and he knows, with an absolute certainty that cannot be shaken, that this is the boy who’s meant to be his first true apprentice, so Qui-Gon searches and searches and searches both the Temple and the galaxy over for this child, and, when, after years of fruitless frustration, he finally finds a strange echoing sense of sympathetic feel to the Force-signature of a young boy with ice-white skin and blue-black hair and darkly beautiful midnight blue (sloe) eyes, he decides that his dreams must’ve been wrong and claims the boy as his Padawan, even though everyone – including his very vexed and disappointed former Master – tries to tell him that he shouldn’t take a Padawan if the Force isn’t specifically telling him that he should.


21.) Betrayal: He imagines, sometimes, that the sense of betrayal he felt over his Master’s (quite unnecessary!) secrecy, on the subject of Lorian Nod (a former Jedi initiate and supposed friend of his Master’s, when Dooku was still an initiate in the crèche, who turned on and betrayed Dooku by trying to blame Nod’s theft of a dangerous Sith Holocron on Dooku, in a deliberate attempt to get Dooku cast out of the Order so that Master Thame Cerulian would then choose Nod as an apprentice instead of Dooku, and who was thereafter cast out of the Order, when Dooku refused to lie about what Nod had done), approached or even surpassed the sense of betrayal his Master felt, when he all but stole Xanatos out from under Dooku’s nose, but most of the time he knows that he’s only fooling himself into making his own treachery seem much less than it actually was, in an attempt to salve his conscience.

22.) Nod: The first time Qui-Gon ever saw Dooku truly rendered dangerous by rage was when he was sixteen and Lorian Nod managed to (eventually) capture them both, and Dooku’s anger was, at that point in time, still largely so unfamiliar to him then that he not only barely recognized it for what it was but was so uncertain as to what he should do to try to calm his normally quite unflappable Master down that he very nearly flubbed the whole thing and let Dooku kill Nod, in his fury; the second time he ever saw his Master so infuriated, it was entirely Qui-Gon’s own doing, and he wonders, sometimes, if it would not, perhaps, have been better (for everyone), if Dooku had challenged him for the right to speak for Xanatos, rather than curtailing his anger enough to turn in a tight circle and stalk stiff-backed and clench-fisted away from him.

23.) Focus: As a Knight bereft of apprentice, he comes to keep his focus bent as much as he can wholly upon the here and now, not so much because it is a tenet of Jedi teaching (though it is one of them) or even a more natural outlook on life (though in some ways it can be), because of his strength in the Living Force, but instead because it’s the only effective means he has of avoiding having to think about the past and the Padawan he lost (drove so carelessly, callously away and abandoned, actually, if he’s being honest) and the former (much beloved) Master he alienated and the awful things he has done, due to the pain of that loss.

24.) Sink: It takes a long time to sink in, just how seriously he screwed up with Xanatos and how absolutely wrong it is of him to even pretend to be worthy of being another Padawan’s Master, but he’s aware of how easy it would be, to find himself banished from the Order entirely, and that potential loss is a prospect that drives his wild enough that the knowledge makes him reckless in his disregard for the rules (most likely out of some perverse desire of being called to account for his actions, even if he lacks the courage of conviction to admit to them to anyone else).

25.) Story: It’s not a story that he’s ever looking forward to telling (much less to his former Master), but he knows, one day, that he’ll have to admit what he did to Obi-Wan, after that awful mess with Xanatos, and the way he so nearly destroyed the poor child, attempting to sever his connection to the Force (as has been done by the Jedi High Council in the past, in instances of extreme need – or perhaps more honestly of extreme fear – with dangerously strong Force-adepts dedicated to or felt to be likely to join the Dark Side) “for his own good,” so that he could never end up like Xanatos.

26.) Weight: Qui-Gon knows that he is neither the man nor the Jedi he should (could) be: the knowledge is like an invisible yoke of collapsium fitted across his soul, pressing him inexorably down; yet, though he would rejoice to free himself of that awful burden, he honestly doesn’t know what (if anything) he could do, to change himself, his life, enough to shift it off of him (short of admitting his sins, according to both the Jedi Code and his own sense of right and wrong, and then leaving the Jedi Order to found a new organization of Force-adepts, unbound by such rules and laws . . . something which he often thinks he should do, though he also knows, logically, that the High Council would never permit it, and he fears what they could do to him – being well aware of what was done to Revan and has been done to those who have been captured after falling to the Dark Side, the High Council burning out minds, memories, and installing false memories, ideas, beliefs, to fill those gaps and convince those so tampered with that they are wholly different beings than they actually have been – to keep him from succeeding).

27.) Pool: The guilt for all the many wrongs he has done is like a spring: some days the current runs swift and thin and (after a while to adjust to its babbling) fairly easily dismissible from his thoughts; some days the water runs all but dry and he forgets what he’s done altogether, at least for a time; and some days the water pools so deep that it overflows its banks and Qui-Gon feels likely to drown at any moment, especially when his new Padawan turns towards him with those heart-breakingly trusting eyes.

28.) Hook: Hook, line, and sinker, as they say, he is well and truly caught and landed, and he’s quite sure he’ll never escape with his life intact, though what one so purely good could truly see in him, he’s quite certain he’ll never understand.

29.) Maze: His heart is a maze that not even he dares to attempt to navigate, though somehow Obi-Wan never fails to find ways to slip past all his defenses and constantly worm his way into the warm center of him.

30.) Bold: He’s quite sure the members of the High Council all believe him bold as brass, for the way he so constantly defies their orders, but the simple truth is that he’s too frightened of what he might end up doing, if he ever goes against his instincts again and obeys them instead of his heart (as he did when he agreed to take Xanatos on that mission to Telos), and so he goes out of his way to avoid obeying them (and not just because a part of him desperately wants to get caught and called to account for his crimes).

31.) Rock: The stone is small, round, smooth, essentially an oversized pebble, and it is, in fact, compressed ancient plant matter that was, while living, phenomenally strong in the Force, rather than mere rock, which explains why it feels warm to the touch and tends to glow brightly when held in contact with the bare skin of one who is strong in the Force: this small rock from the River of Light on his homeworld is one of the few good memories Qui-Gon has of the wretched place, and yet he gladly gives it away to Obi-Wan, if only to treasure the priceless look of confusion on the boy’s face (gradually sliding into surprise and then awe and gratitude, as veins of light in the seeming stone blaze to furious life in Obi-Wan’s hands, dimming to a gentle glow only after he has advised Obi-Wan to concentrate on separating his conscious awareness from the flows of the Force around him) and to think about what must have once been a very similar look on his own face, when Dooku had offered him just such a pebble and he had rather hesitantly noted, “It’s . . . a rock, Master . . . how . . . nice . . . ” refraining at first from accepting the offered pebble because he was expecting the rock to either be part of one of Master Dooku’s jokes (the punchline of which he would be, if he didn’t figure it out in time to avoid it) or to be part of some kind of specific object lesson that he should wait to be told the meaning of instead of simply grasping at the stone greedily.

32.) River: The stone from the River of Light that Dooku gave him on the thirteenth anniversary of the day recorded in his records as his mostly like day of birth was destroyed when Lorian Nod captured him, and, though his Master never actually told Qui-Gon that the wondrous thing was from his homeworld (never used it as a conscious example of the truism that beauty can and often does bloom in even the most inhospitable of surroundings nor equated Qui-Gon with that small rock), its loss was nonetheless so painful that he automatically sought out another such rock, when he finally did find out what that stone had been and where it must’ve hailed from: in retrospect, he supposes that it should have told him something about Xanatos’ nature, when the boy was largely unimpressed by the sight of both the River of Light itself and the pyrotechnics of the rocks taken from its softly shining depths, scooping up a large handful of glowing pebbles only to please Qui-Gon and then promptly giving them away as gifts to various friends of his at the Temple when they returned to Courscant, after the mission was over.

33.) Ache: For as long as he lives, he’s never going to get used to the ache in his soul where his bond to Master Dooku once used to flare so brightly, with so much vigor and intensity that it all but crackled with energy like a coiled rope of live wires all flaring and thrumming and crackling and arcing with power, and, of all the things he regrets, he finds, selfishly, that the loss of that bond – dimmed when he became a Jedi Knight; frayed when he so foolishly insisted on taking Xanatos, even though the Force was clearly telling Master Dooku that the boy was meant not for Qui-Gon but for him; half cut, when he came back from Telos without Xanaos; and then all but severed, when he did not fight Yoda or Obi-Wan hard enough to see to it that Obi-Wan Kenobi ended up being apprenticed to someone much more worthy of that infinitely precious boy than he – is what he regrets the most.

34.) Crush: Every time he turns a cold shoulder to the boy or corrects him more harshly than he needs to or is firmer or shorter or more brusque with him than he truly aught to be or ignores a perfectly valid question or legitimate concern in favor of simply bulling onwards on his set path, he can feel a little more of the heart and spirit and innocence being crushed out of the child, and, though he feels like a monster for doing it, he cannot keep himself from behaving so, not when it was the boy’s innocent trust in him before that so nearly allowed Qui-Gon to destroy him, in the first place, in his madness after Xanatos.

35.) Heal: He truly does wish that he knew how to heal the terrible wounds he’s inflicted (and is still inflicting) on this blameless boy, but all he seems to be able to do is to hurt him again and again and more and more, toughening his heart and forcing him to build walls around his mind and soul so thick and so intricately layered and overlapping atop one another and (hopefully) a time will come when no one – not even Qui-Go himself – will ever be able to breach those defenses and harm him again.

36.) Branch: He wonders sometimes if there’s some vital branching of time’s track that he missed taking when he should have, a choice he was meant to make and failed to even recognize, and if this is why he so often feels as if there’s nothing right in his life at all, aside from the warm clean presence of the Force, but for the life of him he can’t decide what that one thing done or undone or done differently is most likely to have been (or, more properly, what it was supposed to have been), and so all this thinking does is to make him heartsick and snappish and all but hateful to the boy, who so surely deserves better that he soon makes himself stop his wondering.

37.) Reign: The first tyrant and self-styled king they go against to overthrow, Obi-Wan says something typically grandiose and over-the-top about how the king’s reign of evil is at its end, and for a moment Qui-Gon is jut so utterly caught – torn between laughing at himself for a very similar thing he once declared, as Master Dooku’s new Padawan, and weeping in remembrance of the exact same gesture of bravado from his first Padawan learner – that he nearly manages to succeed in allowing said tyrant to shoot him.

38.) Shock: Obi-Wan thinks it was meant as a test, that moment of shocked inattention that nearly got Qui-Gon killed, but then, Obi-Wan (has been made) paranoid enough (and robbed of so much of his natural sense of self-worth) thinks that everything is meant as a test of his nature and skills and worth, and so he does not try to hide his shock with Qui-Gon, weary and sick at heart, snaps at him that it wasn’t a test but merely a moment of foolish distraction and that Obi-Wan needs to learn that not everything in the gorram universe revolves about him.

39.) Hurt: Obi-Wan internalizes every hurt, every barb, every sting, every verbal slap, and, like some character in a story, grows so strangely beautiful with his suffering that he is often mistaken as a young saint, when they go on missions to planets with strong, non-Force-related religions.

40.) Beautiful: Xanatos knew how to be charming and to use his good looks to his advantage, and he was an undeniably naturally beautiful boy, for years almost feminine in his prettiness – the fineness of his features; the fullness of his pouting candy-pink lips; the soft curl of his space-black hair; the slender, fine-boned, almost delicate nature of his frame – but Obi-Wan, who is wholly unaware of his own sense of appeal, is beyond beautiful, beyond precious, to Qui-Gon, and so he will gladly strangle Xanatos with his own two bare hands (like a father or a breeder faced with a child or a pup too weak or wrongly formed to survive), to keep him from hurting or (even worse!) corrupting Obi-Wan, if he must.

41.) Rage: Qui-Gon cannot abide it, hearing Xanatos speak of Obi-Wan, seeing him in those holos with his Padawan and the way that Obi-Wan trusts him and smiles up at him tremulously and even allows him to touch him, softly, on the shoulder, as though all of the power of the Force is crying out and singing with joy and affirmation through his blood and body, and his rage is something so darkly powerful and so ugly that, for a moment, even Xanatos seems afraid of him.

42.) Seventeen: When Xanatos was seventeen, he accidentally walked in on Qui-Gon in an extremely compromising position with lovely local youth who just happened to have raven-black hair and bright blue eyes: when the unexpected opening of the door startled this young man into clenching around him, Qui-Gon climaxed (plunging so hard, so roughly, within that hot tightness that there was a little blood, afterward) with a strangled cry of, “Xani!” and, though the cry was more one of surprise at his apprentice’s rather ill-timed entrance and Xanatos certainly made no mention of any other possible reason that might have prompted such a exclamation, he twists it all about now, insinuating an unnatural lust for him on his former Master’s part that Qui-Gon had certainly never entertained (and would have gone to the High Council about, to see to it that Xanatos was removed from his care, if he ever had, as was only right and proper!), taunting him with several crude comments and lewd gestures and then threatening to tell Obi-Wan all about Qui-Gon’s perversions, to “rescue” him from Qui-Gon before he ever had to suffer the shame of being forced to overhear along their Master-Padawan bond every single time Qui-Gon took his pleasure, be it with his own right hand or at the hands and lips and bodies of one (or more!) or another of his supposedly randomly chosen little sluts, and one thing leads to another until, in the end, they both lie spent and panting, bruised and broken open and exhausted, tangled together on the stone floor, and, though Qui-Gon will try and try and try to justify it to himself (or to at least explain it to himself, which one of them is the one who was actually raped and which the one who took his satisfaction solely at the expense of the other), later, nothing will ever quite succeed in erasing the taste of Xanatos’ mouth . . . nor the ghost of that gob-smacked seventeen-year-old face, full mouth slack in an “O” of surprise and blue eyes all but black with shock, in the battered face smirking up at him, white teeth stained with blood both from Qui-Gon’s savaged mouth and the lower lip that he split apart in return, with a sharply backhanded blow, the gloating look in those blue-black eyes speaking much more of satisfaction than of pain or even surprise.

43.) Echo: There’s an odd sense of something very like an echo in Obi-Wan’s presence within the Force, and, though he’s fairly certain that it’s been there ever since the boy first became his Padawan (as least so far as he can remember, though he is not entirely sure), he cannot help but wonder, sometimes, if it’s something he caused, in attempting to sever the boy’s connection to the Force, or if it’s a sign of something else entirely, perhaps even the tampering of another.

44.) Shadow: The shadow of doubt never entirely leaves his heart, and, when the boy spends too long a time away from his side, he finds himself growing paranoid that perhaps Xanatos has somehow gotten to him and the two are plotting his downfall, especially after the third encounter with his former Padawan proves to leave the current one essentially (suspiciously!) untouched.

45.) Dusk: He wonders, sometimes (a little bit idly, with the kind of numbed lack of care that comes when despair has settled in thickly on the spirit), if the twilit dusk that lies so heavily upon his soul is responsible for his evil actions, or if it is the result of his evil actions, and, either way, why Obi-Wan should be so determined to be the sun that will banish it away, when so many of those evil deeds have been directed towards him.

46.) Dawn: The realization was gradual but, once it succeeded in arriving, there was no more denying it than one might deny the dawning of a sun: the reason he still misses his Master, with the same kind of fierce implacability a human being might miss oxygen for the breathing when submerged in water, is that he not only adores but is actively in love with the man, and it makes Qui-Gon wonder if Dooku knew and this has inspired part of the intensity of the break between them, or if it truly is only his old Master’s disappointment in and anger with him and his own prideful obstinance that’s keeping them apart.

47.) Think: Most beings (Jedi included) seem to think of his former Master as harsh, demanding, anachronistic in his attitudes and manners, entirely too curious about that shadowy area between the Light Side of the Force used by all Jedi and the Dark Side, and frightfully intelligent, but Qui-Gon has never been able to see Dooku as anything other than suave and aristocratic, demanding but fair (and demanding no more than he might of himself, in any situation, in any case), curious and questioning about all things in the way that only the truly brilliant can be and in possession of depths of humor that few who do not know him well ever suspect, unfailingly loyal (and even gentle and kind as well as generous) to those who have earned his respect, devotion, and caring, and possessed of a somewhat unique and generally only privately expressed but nonetheless quite powerful sense of humor (especially when irony is involved), and so he has to wonder, a little, if the discrepancy between what he has always seen and what others see is so great because his love biases him so greatly or because his love merely allowed him to draw that much closer to Dooku than anyone else ever bothered to try to be.

48.) Believe: Dooku never did hold much truck with much of the Jedi Code – particularly the injunction against emotion (being more inclined to believe that a Jedi would benefit from learning how to master emotions, rather than simply deny them) – and Qui-Gon’s flouting of the rules is such that it’s a miracle he hasn’t been hauled up before the High Council long before now and demanded an accounting for his actions, and so it never fails to amaze him how tightly Obi-Wan clings to his believe that both the written rules of the Code and unspoken precepts of the Order as well as the dictates of the High Council ought to be treated as if they came directly from the Force itself.

49.) Fill: With her friendship (and, occasionally, her presence in his bed) Tahl helps to fill the echoingly empty place in his heart and mind left by the withdrawal of his Master’s love and support and friendship, and, between her and the distractions offered up by the various “pathetic life forms” he picks up and (at least momentarily) champions or cares for during the course of his missions, it’s almost enough to keep him from missing Dooku, most days . . . /almost/.

50.) Plain: He wonders sometimes if his defects and inadequacies are as plainly obvious to others as they are to him, but the only people who ever seem at all disappointed in him are Tahl and his Master and Yoda and Mace Windu, and they usually seem upset with him for all the wrong reasons, so he has his doubts, though he can’t understand how beings normally so discerning should be able to miss such glaring faults and flaws.

51.) File: Rank and file, file and rank, the Order expects all of its members to be cookie cutter identical perfect little textbook Jedi, and it all seems so hypocritical and limiting and unrealistic to him that there are days when he wonders if the Jedi High Council has any true notion of the actual shape of reality at all, anymore.

52.) Charm: When Obi-Wan turns on the charm, the beings they’re sent to deal with on their missions almost always generally promptly melt (excluding some of those who turn out to be hardened criminals and sociopathic egomaniacs, of course), and some days Qui-Gon has absolutely no qualms whatsoever about using the boy’s natural charisma to his advantage (and so smooth the way towards a speedy and safe end to whatever mission they happen to be on), though other days he feels an all but incredible urge to snarl and snap and scowl over how damned /easy /everything seems to come to the boy.

53.) Plan: The plan was to fetch Tahl and to get the kriff out of there as quickly as possible, orders from the High Council to try to help broker a lasting peace among the Melida/Daan or not, but of course Obi-Wan took one look at the situation and could not bear to leave without doing everything in his power to help the Young, and it is with a certain amount of vindictive glee (that day happening to be one of his more snappish ones) that he finally finds a reason to cut his losses and run – a disobedience serious enough to just turn his back on the boy and take Tahl and leave.

54.) Blink: All he can do is stand there, gaping, and blink dumbly, as Tahl rips him up one side and down the other for having abandoned both the mission (the attempt of which cost Tahl her eyesight) and his endlessly guilt-inducing young Padawan, still too shell shocked over having had his former Master threaten to challenge him to an honor duel and fight to draw blood (if Obi-Wan doesn’t somehow survive the mission, even after being abandoned midway through, and eventually make his way safely back to the Temple) to even /think /of trying to defend himself.

55.) Grin: He’s done everything in his power to make the boy aware of the fact that he was wrong to leave him behind on that planet and that Obi-Wan was right to insist that they should stay and finish their mission, to let him know that Qui-Gon is proud of him and believes that Obi-Wan will make a far better man and Jedi than Qui-Gon ever has, but the boy still hardly ever smiles anymore, in his presence, and there is very little that Qui-Gon would not give, to see the boy’s brilliantly bright and unguardedly open grin again.

56.) Spoon: The first joke Qui-Gon hears the boy make, after Melida/Daan, is something strange and cryptic about how the initiates simply need to be taught to realize that there are no spoons, and, while at first he cannot at all see the humor inherent in such a lack of silverware, Obi-Wan, Bant Eerin, Tahl, Adi Gallia, and Siri Tachi all laugh so hard that Adi and Bant flush noticeably while Tahl and Siri turn bright red for lack of breath and Obi-Wan’s grin finally actually returns (in full, blazing glory), and eventually even Qui-Gon has to admit that the joke’s funny, when he learns the context of the remark revolves around crèche Master Ali-Alann’s annual lecture to the younglings on the interchangeability of energy and matter and the Force.

57.) Abstract: In a purely abstract sense, Qui-Gon knows he should be a lot more bothered about what it says about his failure to treat the boy properly, that Tahl should be more moved to be kind to and to take Obi-Wan’s part than Qui-Gon – the boy’s own Master! – generally is, but the fact of the matter is that Tahl’s open affection and obvious high regard for Obi-Wan provoke nothing in him but envy, anger, and maybe a little bit more self-hatred, for being jealous of his own Padawan when (so far as he knows) he is the only one who’s sharing Tahl’s bed (even though she isn’t nearly the only being he allows to share his bed) and he knows that Tahl’s love for Obi-Wan is just as maternal and utterly unromantic as her love for her own Padawan is.

58.) Failure: He tries and he tries and he tries not to let his own shortcomings color his opinion of or his interactions with the boy, but most of the time he is a dismal failure, and, for the life of him, he cannot understand what it is that makes the boy cling to him with such determination and such loyalty that he even proves willing to defy a direct order from Yoda and the High Council not to attempt to hunt down Xanatos in order to accompany Qui-Gon on his quest to locate and apprehend his former Padawan apprentice.

59.) Connection: There’s a connection – a sense of sympathetic balance that is almost rapport, almost understanding and fitting and completion – of some sort between Obi-Wan and Xanatos, and, though he cannot even begin to understand why it is there or even what exactly it is, Qui-Gon can no more deny its existence than he can deny the endless ache from the essentially severed bond he once shared with his own Master, though it terrifies him, with its implications.

60.) Want: He does not want Xanatos anywhere near his apprentice; does not want the sense of Obi-Wan within the Force to hemorrhage with pain and confusion and need and that infernal thrice-damned sense of completion, every time Xanatos is near him; does not want to have to do what he knows he’s going to end up doing, in the end (Dooku will never forgive him; Obi-Wan will never forgive him; and Xanatos . . . Xanatos will not be alive to ever forgive him for the wrongs he did to him); yet, in the end, with this, as with everything, what he wants seems to matter little in the face of what his temper demands of him, and he smiles triumphantly even as Obi-Wan cries out in anguished horror, the sense of him within the Force splintering apart with pain and a sundering that, later, will remind Qui-Gon far too much of the all but dead bond between him and Dooku, as Xanatos floats lightly down into the acid pit.

61.) Changes: The changes in Obi-Wan, after Xanatos commits suicide rather than allow Qui-Gon to capture him, are so manifestly obvious and so exceedingly grim in nature that almost – almost! – Qui-Gon might have been willing to let Xanatos live, after all (instead of deliberately harrying him and pushing him to the point where he’d have no choice but to leap to his death, in order to escape), if only it would bring back the sweetly innocent, smiling young boy who’s been replaced with the endlessly private and grimly silent (save when he is passionately lecturing Qui-Gon about a need to obey the rules of the Code and the High Council) teenager who trails along at his heels in Obi-Wan’s guise.

62.) Indifference: More than anything – even more than the fact that such a feat of strength in the Force would most likely be beyond the efforts even of Grand Master Yoda, himself – the look of unstrained calm and casual indifference on Obi-Wan’s fact, as he reaches out into the Force and, with a single commanding gesture, seizes the Corellian Corvette whose engines had stalled soon after takeoff and carefully sets it back down in its previous berth (therefore saving the ship from crashing down into the midst of an extremely crowded, busy spaceport in Anaxes) shocks Qui-Gon, so much so that he cannot even bring himself to comment on the seemingly impossible feat to Obi-Wan, other than to croak out some vague comment of appreciation and respect for the boy’s quick reflexes.

63.) Fear: He is not, precisely, afraid of his apprentice (or so he tells himself quite often, even though he doesn’t stop shaking, at odd points, for months afterwards, and has nightmares both about how easily they could have been killed by the crashing vessel and about how effortlessly Obi-Wan caught the ship mid-tumble, reaching out into the Force and capturing the CR90 corvette as casually as if it were nothing more than a pebble thrown idly into the air), though he is aware that it could be very easy for others to fear Obi-Wan, given such miraculous feats of unimaginable strength in the Force, and so he is very careful to tell no one, other than the High Council (in a private meeting he specifically request on a day when Obi-Wan will be kept busy with general training classes elsewhere in the Temple), of the boy’s miraculous save.

64.) Panic: Obi-Wan is still only fifteen the first time he’s wounded gravely enough on a mission to be in danger of dying, and Qui-Gon, who insists that he will carry his Padawan out of the ship to the Healers’ Ward himself and so has no need of an escort or a hover-stretcher, nearly panics when, after their landing, his old Master comes storming out of the Temple and up to them at a dead run, for a moment terrified that Dooku is going to take the boy away from him by force once and for all.

65.) Snow: They were fighting for their lives in the midst of a blizzard, blinded by snow and wind and relying more on the promptings of the Force than any of their actual physical senses to deflect the blaster bolts flying at them from all around, the first time Obi-Wan deliberately threw himself in the path of a blast meant for Qui-Gon, and Qui-Gon recounts the entire episode – including the fear-induced rage that had given him the strength to literally explode all of the weapons being brought against them in their attackers’ hands (and boots and belts and elsewhere, as well), after the boy fell with a clean strike to his right shoulder, and the fearsome lecture that had made his Padawan grow so silent and white and still that, for weeks afterwards, it had been like living with a barely animate statue – tearfully to his former Master, confessing it and all of his other recent faults and mistakes with the boy in a bizarre sort of act of penance, as if to try to convince the Force (via his own willing humiliation) to spare the child’s life.

66.) Patrol: Qui-Gon and Dooku take turns pacing the hallway outside the room in the Healers’ Ward, as if on patrol duty for some vitally important dignitary they’ve been assigned to protect, and it isn’t until Padawan Bant Eerin finally comes out and tells them that the Healers have ruled that Obi-Wan is going to be just fine that the fact that he’s been up nearly a week straight without sleep (because of the mission and the three days it ended up taking to get Obi-Wan off that damn planet, when the mission blew up) abruptly catches up with him, staggering him in his tracks and (surprisingly enough) making his old Master revert back to Master mode, taking him by the shoulders and guiding him to bed, helping him shed his boots and most of his (filthy) clothes on the way and giving him a rough sort of cleaning via an application of the Force that works rather like a ’fresher’s sonics do before tucking him in and ordering him to sleep, vowing to keep a steady watch on Obi-Wan while Qui-Gon sleeps.

67.) Opportunity: Afterwards, he isn’t really all that surprised, that Obi-Wan should be the impetus they need to finally (if carefully, slowly, and with a few false starts and inevitable – if, thankfully, temporary – setbacks along the way) begin to mend things between him and his former Master, but at the time he’s just too grateful for the opportunity to be in the same room with Dooku again and not be treated like either a total stranger or the absolute scum of the galaxy to really think all that much about why Dooku’s even there.

68.) Vertical: Even when he’s not particularly trying, by the time he’s approaching his sixteenth year, Obi-Wan’s vertical leap is still easily three times as high as Qui-Gon generally manages to reach, anymore, and so he starts to wonder (if only idly, yet) if perhaps it might not finally be time for him to abandon the acrobatics of Ataru for this old Master’s far more grounded (but no less lethal) Makashi.

69.) Horizon: Surprisingly enough, despite his jaded cynicism and pessimism, every time they make landfall together on a new and lovely world, Qui-Gon is moved to embrace hope (if only for a little while), for he can’t help but remember how, on their first trip to Alderaan, the horizon had stretched out before them like all the promises of hope and temptation of riches held within a hundred thousand different sunrises combined, prompting Obi-Wan to ask, with a hushed sort of awe, if Alderaan were always so heartbreakingly lovely, and making Qui-Gon smile and admit that the world is one of the Republic’s most beautiful and most Force-strong planets.

70.) Replace: Though the whole of the Order seems to think that Obi-Wan’s devotion to him is all but dangerously strong, he never quite manages to completely let go of the fear that someone else – Xanatos, Dooku, /someone /– will replace him in Obi-Wan’s affections and loyalty, though on most days he at least manages to repress the fear to the deepest shadowy recesses of his mind.

71.) Fool: He feels like the galaxy’s worst fool, after he’s finally given in to the urgings of his paranoia and spoken to the boy – no, the young man, now – about the dangers posed by too close of a relationship with Siri Tachi, but his Padawan is such a beautiful and charismatic young man that it had simply never occurred to him at all that Obi-Wan might have seriously chosen the path of absolute chastity.

72.) Intervention: Why there was never an intervention made on Master Dooku’s behalf against the increasingly wildly inappropriate advances of his Padawan, Komari Vosi, Qui-Gon is quite certain he’ll never know – just as he’s equally sure that he’ll never forgive the ungrateful little slattern for stressing his former Master out so dreadfully that his hair turned prematurely white – but he is eternally grateful that Dooku has taken no new Padawan, after Komari, for it gives Dooku more time to keep up with Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan’s exploits and for Qui-Gon to converse with him, in between missions, while Obi-Wan is attending other lessons in the Temple.

73.) Love: Attachment isn’t really (or is not only) love, and neither is compassion (or at least it’s not only love), just as sex truly is not (or is not always about) love, and so he occasionally finds it curious that the Jedi Order should embrace a very odd notion of compassion stripped of love and forbid attachment as a cause of love while yet permitting its members to partake in casual sex (and wonders if the third is allowed only because the High Council fears that, otherwise, a high enough level of Force-sensitivity in the various scattered populations of the galaxy to assure the continuation of the Jedi Order might otherwise dwindle to the point of dying out), but he’s quite sure that he never could have chosen the high road (even if Dooku would have tolerated such prudery in one of his Padawans!), as Obi-Wan has, and so he always has to admit that, of all the things to keep available to Jedi, occasional casual sex is probably the most pleasurable and least dangerous of the three.

74.) Gift: It’s a gift Obi-Wan has, to charm all manner of sentient beings and to listen to them and make them trust him and open up to him and be willing to do and to say all kinds of things, in order to simply win more of his regard, and there are times when Qui-Gon has to admit that it’s a damned shame, to know that Obi-Wan’s decision means he will never (even wholly accidently, by the will of the Force alone) pass on any of those same highly useful traits to the next generation of Jedi.

75.) Restless: He’s noticed, over the years, that Obi-Wan grows strangely restless, during the time of year when he . . . lost Xanatos, and he wonders sometimes, fearfully, if perhaps the boy might subconsciously remember something of what happened to him, after all.

76.) Weight of the World: As a youngling and a new Padawan, Obi-Wan suffered more at the suffering of others than most Jedi ever bother to do, and, though Qui-Gon occasionally gently teased the boy about carrying the weight of all the words in the galaxy on his shoulders, quite frankly he thinks he preferred that quietly suffering face to the boy’s tendency, of late, to take the High Council’s part in almost everything and to argue against Qui-Gon’s penchant for picking up (and then just as abruptly dropping, either when the mission in question had run its course or the plant in question had been safely transplanted to either their suite in the Temple or someone in the Temple gardens) stray pathetic creatures and beings, instead of simply completing their assigned missions with a minimum amount of fuss and energy.

77.) Wild: There’s something wild and desperately unhappy lurking at the back of Obi-Wan’s eyes whenever the subject of Xanatos or the Young and Melida/Daan or Bruck Chun come up, and so Qui-Gon quite happily simply avoid talking about much of anything touching on or involving either his former Padawan or his mistake on Melida/Daan or the (soon to be rejected and sent away to the Service Corps) young initiate who was killed, in the Temple, before they finally managed to track down Xanatos and take care of him once and for all.

78.) Harsh: “Being too harsh on the boy, you are: trying to show you the error your ways, as ordered by the High Council, he simply is,” Master Yoda rather firmly declares, rapping his gimer stick rather firmly against the floor to emphasis both is point and his disappointment with Qui-Gon, but all Qui-Gon does is scowl and turn away, even more offended by the notion that the boy should so readily do as the High Council orders than he had been by Obi-Wan’s recent tendency to scold him, whenever he deliberately flouted orders to follow his instincts and the promptings of his heart or the voice of the Living Force whispering to him.

79.) Initiative: He really shouldn’t be upset with Obi-Wan’s insistence on occasionally taking the initiative and even occasionally semi-defying him, in the course of achieving the goals of their missions, as, after all, he’s been nagging the boy for years about trying too much to please and not trusting enough in the voice of the Force when it speaks to him, but unfortunately it’s an entirely different thing to want something, in the abstract, and to actually receive it, in reality.

80.) Pang(s): His conscience pangs him every time he receives the credit for a mission’s success that’s actually largely due to Obi-Wan’s work and talents, but the High Council ignores him every time he tries to laud the boy (convinced, evidently, that he’s still trying to get rid of the boy early) and he gets the feeling that being praised and being singled out for recognition of his many diverse abilities are things that Obi-Wan actively dreads, and so he avoid trying to praise the boy much at all, anymore (at least where Obi-Wan can overhear him).

81.) Primal: It was a primal sort of fear and rage, what he felt when that bitch Zan Arbor implied that she had captured Obi-Wan and used him successfully several times already in her little experiments with the Force and the nature of Force-sensitivity, and he remembers that taste of darkness quite vividly, when Tahl is murdered.

82.) Bribery: Force-persuasive or bribery would have been easier, probably, and certainly less destructive, but he’s in no mood to be either reasonable or calm, and so he uses the Force to grab the smirking self-named “information broker” roughly by the throat and simply squeeze until the information he wants about Tahl’s killer is finally forthcoming, tossing the man aside like the garbage he is when he’s finished with him.

83.) Theft: Theft technically isn’t sanctioned by the Order, but the High Council tends to turn a blind eye to relatively minor acts of law-breaking (especially ones that end up going unreported by the locals, because of Force-persuasion or the sheer amount of skill able to be brought to bear by Force-strong thieves), so long as the missions being undertaken when such criminal incidents take place are a success, and so Qui-Gon tells himself that a few instances of blackmail and threatening of bodily harm (along with a bit of minor bruising) can’t be all that much worse.

84.) Impatience: After the third time his impatience for vengeance nearly manages to get him killed and Obi-Wan is finally recovered enough from his wounds to notice what Qui-Gon’s been up to, he has to slow down and start being more careful, if only to avoid having Obi-Wan find out absolutely just what a cold bastard he can be.

85.) Pray: It isn’t until he catches himself praying to the Force for revenge, as if to some blood-thirsty god of chaos and destruction, that he even begins to suspect that he might be going too far, and it’s the heartfelt pleas of his Padawan that finally bring him wholly to his senses again.

86.) Blame: Obi-Wan wants to blame himself, of course, for Tahl’s death and Qui-Gon’s nearly disastrous near-brush with the Dark Side, but it really is no one’s fault but the killer’s (and the one holding the murderer’s reins) and Qui-Gon himself, and he tells Obi-Wan so with so much bluntness that, for once, Obi-Wan seems to take something he’s said entirely at face value.

87.) First: Adia Gallia was the first to offer him comfort in the release of his flesh, after Tahl’s death, but Lena Cobral is the first to make his heart stir again, and it warms him, oddly, the way she regards Obi-Wan (not quite as a possible suitor, almost as a younger cousin, and, most of all, nearly as a sort of surrogate son), because of her attachment to him and his status as Obi-Wan’s Master (a role she bluntly tells him is that of a surrogate father and teacher rolled all into one).

88.) Dead: He has no love whatsoever for machines, droids, or other such unliving hunks of metal, given that such things have no clear aura or sense of resonance within the energy field of the Living Force and therefore feel much the same to him as dead beings do, and so he avoids interacting with and spending lengthy periods of time around such dead-feeling objects as much as possible . . . which is precisely why he generally lets Obi-Wan do almost all of the flying.

89.) Eighteen: He wonders sometimes, idly, who the boy with dark hair and eyes whose soul sang to his through the Force of harmony and rightness was, how the Order somehow failed to father someone so strong in the Force into its fold, but it isn’t until Obi-Wan is eighteen and an assignment brings them together with a diplomatic mission from Alderaan attempting to finalize a treaty negotiation meant to add an alliance of half a dozen Outer Rim Territory planets to the body of the Republic proper (and so extend the borders of the Mid Rim) and he is frozen in his tracks by the sight of a tall young man with skin like a cross between caramel and burnt sienna and eyes and hair as dark as a night sky without either stars or ambient light from civilization that he finally begins to understand.

90.) Fashion: Bail Organa fascinates Qui-Gon wholly, almost to a dangerous level, and he is entirely grateful for the fact that the young (barely twenty-nine!) Crown Prince of Alderaan is, to all intents and purposes, just as taken and bewitched with (if not more so, and in a fashion that also includes an obviously strong carnal element) his Padawan, for it brings Bail often into their presence and gives Qui-Gon an excuse to watch, learn about, and even befriend the politician who could have (/should/ have!) been his first Padawan.

91.) Different: He wonders, sometimes about how different things might be (how much better they almost certainly would have to be), if Bail had been given over to the Order for training and eventually become Qui-Gon’s first Padawan, while Xanatos went to Dooku for training, but such thoughts are inevitably depressing, given how badly he feels (/knows/) he has done, without Bail as an apprentice, and so he generally tries to avoid such idle fancies.

92.) Once: He makes the mistake of deliberately eavesdropping on Bail Organa’s unshielded thoughts one night, after a late session between the three of them, and it is a mistake Qui-Gon makes only the /once/: the barrage of feverish, blatantly pornographic thoughts/images/sensory input all focused tightly around his young Padawan learner makes Qui-Gon feel like a dirty old lech and in desperate need of a means to take what amounts to steel wool and bleach to his own mind/remembrances to get rid of even the smallest lingering trace of memory of what the Crown Prince is so busily and intently imaging (and thank the Force for the certainty that he has to only be imagining it all, given Obi-Wan’s long-ago vow! Qui-Gon isn’t certain he could actually live with the embarrassment of knowing that he’s intruded on such an obviously intimate moment between his innocent Obi-Wan and such an obviously highly experienced, imaginative, vigorous, dominating lover! It’s bad enough, knowing he’s intruded on such a moment between the Crown Prince and some paramour he’s taken on as a substitute for Obi-Wan!), so that he’ll be able to look both Bail and Obi-Wan in the face again without betraying himself with a violent blush.

93.) Friendship: Bail makes several strong alliances at the Temple (including Mace Windu, surprisingly enough, even though the Korunnai Master normally doesn’t associate all that much with nonJedi) after making their acquaintances, and so it’s not all that surprising to see the young heir to the throne of Alderaan coming and going from the Temple, so Qui-Gon begins to expect to see the young man both before they leave on missions and when they arrive back from those missions, and it warms his heart, to see the rapid progression of the strong friendship between that earnest young man and his Padawan, though he fears, sometimes, that Bail may be doing himself a disservice, binding himself so closely to one he loves and desires so desperately and knows he can never have.

94.) Obsessed: The High Council fears that he’s become obsessed with the renegade Captain Cohl, but the simple fact is that the Force is telling him that the former hero turned pirate is mixed up in something highly dangerous and even more important to the fate of the greater galaxy – a fact that he considers to be more than effectively proven, given what happens at the emergency Trade Summit and in its direct aftermath, with the Trade Federation.

95.) Merchandise: The concept of slavery is one of the single most repugnant ideas to him in all the galaxy, for he recalls, all too vividly, the rage he felt when he first found Obi-Wan, as a half-dead, half-starved, badly abused child on Tatooine, up for sale like any other inanimate piece of merchandise, and so, though he knows his face takes on frightening, forbidding lines whenever they come across and have to deal with slavers, he cannot bring himself to do anything to soften his expression under such circumstances.

96.) Survivor: Despite his seeming fragility, Obi-Wan is a survivor, and Qui-Gon is certain he’ll survive anything and everything the galaxy might throw at him, but he still plans on being around for a goodly long time, anyway, if only to watch and see what kind of apprentice Obi-Wan might end up choosing for himself, and Qui-Gon tells his distraught young Padawan this quite firmly, after the twelfth time he nearly succeeds in getting his foolish self killed on one of their missions.

97.) Captured: Qui-Gon considers it a general rule of thumb that any sentient being who fails to be captured or captivated by Obi-Wan’s innate charm and charisma for much longer than maybe one or two encounters is someone hard enough of heart to require being watched, and so he finds himself keeping a closer than normal eye on that Captain Panaka fellow, who frankly seems to go out of his way to try to find ways to attempt to nitpick and pick arguments with his unfailingly polite (if sometimes quite firm and occasionally technically polite but truly sarcastic) Padawan.

98.) Uncivilized: The clumsy Gungan creature’s constant refrain, “How rude!” only stops being quite so annoying when Qui-Gon recalls how Obi-Wan’s initial response to the prevalence of physical brawling in many of the backwaters of the galaxy once used to be a somewhat similar exclamation: “/So/ uncivilized!”

99.) Poke: He tries to poke the Tatooine boy with the miniature combination blood reader and midi-chlorian analysis machine when Anakin isn’t looking, but despite the child’s (oddly perfunctory) exclamation of hurt at the needle’s prick, Qui-Gon can’t quite shake the strangely eerie sensation that this slave child knows what he’s thinking and planning to do even before he knows it, and that odd question about Qui-Gon’s missing “light shadow” bothers him immensely.

100.) If: Under different circumstances – if the Order were not so strict, if the rules did not forbid attachment, if he were not (as he sometimes cannot avoid admitting to himself, though he quite often manages to avoid thinking about the fact at all) already deeply, hopelessly, in love with another, with one he knows he can never have – he could grow to love this strong yet gentle woman, and he is not surprised to discover, first-hand, just how truthful her claim of the child’s immaculate conception actually is, when he proves to be the one to finally take her maidenhead.

101.) Mistake: Even before he completes the motion, Qui-Gon knows his guard has dropped too much for the last time and that he should have switched to Makashi while he still had the chance, and it’s only his love for Obi-Wan that keeps him from screaming his frustration about how it’s too early and he’ not ready to go, yet, and it’s too high a price to pay, for one lousy mistake, his outrage so all-consumingly absolute that, later on, he will wonder how much of his survival as a Force ghost was actually based on that burst of rage rather than the love he felt in his heart for his Padawan, and whether or not that had anything to do with his long and difficult path from that survival as a mere Force ghost to the achievement of the status of an actual Force spirit . . .