FicWad

Author’s Notes: 1). For anyone interested, this not-quite-a-story is 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 few things sideways and view a couple others solely through the lens of Garen Ídan Muln’s eyes. 2). Although this is technically modelled on a prompt set that I borrowed from somewhere or another on the LJ (I really don’t recall from where anymore, precisely, 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), it’s not really meant to function as a response to whatever the challenge actually is that’s associated with said LJ prompt set. I just used the specific prompts to give me a reason to string together a backstory of sorts for Garen. 3). Readers Readers interested in knowing who the physical models are for EU characters like Garen (who is supposed to look like Obi-Wan, at least when they are adolescents) 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! /Please note/ that characters who may be alluded to but not referenced by name (certain family members of original characters, for example) are considered too minor to be cast at this time, and readers should feel free to imagine them howsoever they wish!

*For LJ user gildinwen, who correctly indicated understanding of who the great-grandparents of a certain very important EU character is in my AU, given that Dooku and Jocasta Nu are the biological parents of one Demara Gaida Nuenno, and that Demara Gaida Nuenno and Qui-Gon Jinn are the biological parents of one Arica Marellis Jade (who, in my AU, just happens to be the mother of said very important EU character). Sorry if this isn’t exactly my best work, hon, but I’m feeling a wee bit under the weather!

“Garen Ídan Muln: Second of the Fearsome Foursome and Willing Shadow of Obi-Wan Kenobi”


01.) First: One of Garen’s first memories is of Obi-Wan (not Obi-Wan as he would most like to remember his friend, but Obi-Wan as he initially knew him, when the Healers first released him to the care of the crèche, after Master Jinn had brought him back to the Temple, still far too small and much too thin and entirely too prone to screaming nightmares that made the walls, floor, and ceiling of the crèche shake and shudder like trees being thrashed by a strong windstorm, all sea-colored eyes and wariness and blazing power and light and whiteness that was somehow both terrible and wonderful in its intensity, like frozen lightning), after one of his nightmares, curled down into a ball so tight and small that it seemed entirely possible he might pull himself in tight enough to vanish completely in just another moment: it was the night after Master Jinn and his apprentice, Xanatos (the one who always acted as if he didn’t know what to do with younglings and didn’t really like them much either, except for when Obi-Wan was around, in which case he swiftly became one of the kindest, funniest, greatest coconspirators and friends a youngling could ever have), had finally had to leave on a mission, so there was no one to come and try to calm the boy down (no one he would allow to get close, anyway. All of the crèche workers who came in to try to help Obi-Wan were pushed violently back away from him, bouncing and skidding across the shuddering floor until they finally gave up and turned their attention to the other younglings in the long, hall-like chamber of the dormer room, nearly all of them shaking and trembling and whimpering in sympathetic fear from under the covers in their own beds), and so finally Garen, unable to take the outpouring of fear and grief into the Force that swarmed and swirled all around Obi-Wan’s tiny figure (and made Garen think scary, nasty, crawling, darksome thoughts about swaying serpentine sea-monsters and floating, spirit-crushing night-hags), climbed laboriously down out of the nest of his bed, toddled uncertainly across the jittery floor to Obi-Wan (where he had somehow propelled himself into the far corner of the room), and carefully began mimicking the rhythmic singsong noises that Qui-Gon and his Padawan, Xanatos, had always made, when they came to Obi-Wan after his nightmares, until Obi-Wan’s shaking finally began to gentle enough for the walls and the floor to stop pitching and yawing under and around them, and Garen could lean down and place a small hand carefully on that violently curved back, to offer what comfort he could.

02.) Separate: Bant really should have been the one to try to offer comfort against nightmares – she’s always been better at that kind of stuff, at making things better (which is why he won’t be at all surprised when she eventually starts training as a Jedi Healer) – but they not only segregate the boys from the girls, in the crèche, they tend to separate younglings by species, too, as a sort of courtesy for those who have either more or less sensitive senses, longer or shorter sleep cycles, etc., so Garen’s the only one available to try to help, unless they’re willing to try to sneak Bant in (something he actually ends up doing a few times, when the nightmares get so bad that it’s really less a matter of him sneaking her in than of hightailing it out to the dormer room for female Mon Calamari as fast as the shifting floor will let him and then banging on the door and hollering for her until she finally comes scrambling out to help), and he’s the one who therefore gets to try to convince Obi-Wan that it’ll be alright if they sleep together on nights when Obi-Wan feels like a nightmare might be coming on, since having someone that close for some reason seems to ward off all except the absolute worst of the bad dreams.

03.) Compassion: Jedi don’t believe in attachments or love (or even much softness, really. A Jedi’s life is hard, not filled with comfort and ease), but apparently, the Order is willing to make a few exceptions for a youngling so throughly traumatized by his life before the Temple that he’s in danger of thoroughly traumatizing all of the other younglings around him (something Garen chalks up to all that babbling about compassion as an initiate and doesn’t start turning over in his mind as a possible sign of expediency and hypocrisy until after he’s taken as a Padawan learner), for he and Obi-Wan spend a lot of most of the next two years bunked down together, sleeping together in either Obi-Wan’s or his bed like a couple of half-grown kits, curled together close because neither one of their identically shaped, relatively narrow beds is really made to hold two bodies.

04.) Four: They each seem to have their assigned places and roles, in their little close-knit group of four, and they fit together so naturally, in the waking hours (when nightmares are far away and whatever evil memories haunt Obi-Wan’s sleep retreat before the brightness of the light and of consciousness), that it’s hard for him to think of a time when it wasn’t the four of them, together: Reeft (of clan heron-catcher, as they will later discover, when Reeft is Knighted and his personal files about his family and home and medical health are unsealed), the Dressellian, the endlessly smiling, effortlessly good-hearted, seemingly always either hungrily stuffing his face or spinning some kind of fanciful, funny yarn or attempting to do both at once (oftentimes to the protests of Bant, who’d prefer not to have a front row view of whatever it is that Reeft is chewing, thanks all the same) practical joker who’s also often the source of whatever physical brawn they need to pull of their little escapades and pranks; Bant Eerin, the endlessly capable, effortlessly ingenious, and eminently able to make things right honorary den mother, the one who automatically looks after every else and always makes sure that they have supplies on hand to deal with any potential bumps and bruises that might result from a joke or an adventure gone sideways, the one whose gentle (but fiercely loyal and ruthlessly protective) nature holds them all together even when they seem on the brink of falling apart; Obi-Wan Kenobi, the charismatic, enigmatic, off-the-charts genius whose brilliance and sheer sense of power effortlessly holds them all in orbit around him even while his seemingly limitless capacity to help think up (or to spring on them, fully formed) plans for adventures, schemes for pranks, and other ways to keep them all happily entertained and busy for hours and hours at a time (if not days at a stretch) makes them all thoroughly happy to be there, in his orbit; and Garen himself, something of a mechanical /idiot savant/, with a knack of always knowing just where to look, to find information for projects and plans involved enough to require research, and a gift formed from a combination of close observance, charm, and of an almost uncanny ability to imitate the mannerisms and motions of others (to an extent, at least) that allows him to think like or even act like other beings he has personal knowledge of, letting him fill in occasionally for one of the others of their little circle of friends (except for Obi-Wan, usually, though Bant insists that he’s already a lot like Obi-Wan and that it’s really just his own sense of deficiency that keeps him from being able to successfully, effortlessly put Obi-Wan’s mien on and off, like a mask) or act as a kind of guinea pig, to help them predict how others might react to a certain given set of circumstances or stimuli, so they can plan for their little excursions and their jokes more thoroughly.

05.) Habit: It is the Order’s habit to, as Master Master Ali-Alann puts it, encourage the youngest initiates to get all of the childishness, all of the high spirits and excessive, largely undirected (and not easily directable) youthful energy and naive tendency towards sharing and indiscretion out of themselves when still very young, so that they may more easily settle into the more measured and mature and patient and guarded state of mind and being needed for a Jedi as they approach their adolescent years, which is why, after being brought to the Temple, younglings in the crèche are allowed to run a bit wild (at least to a degree) for the remainder of their first half a dozen years or so, before their schedules are made much more rigidly fixed (and filled) and they are expected to put childish ways behind them and diligently attend to the very serious arts of self-mastery and education: Garen supposes it makes a certain amount of sense, in a way (after all, there really is only so much one can expect out of a child literally still growing into their soft palate and a basic control of fine motor skills, and the few classes that younglings attend before the age of six are all specifically geared towards the guiding of such eventual control of the kind of physical strength and flexibility and the sort of mind-set that is most needed, in a Jedi), but that doesn’t make it any easier for the actual younglings, who go from having roughly half to two-thirds of each day free to fill as they will (so long as they obey certain rules – or at least refrain from too openly flouting the breaking of those rules – and complete certain basic lessons and perform specific sets of daily exercises in the rooms kept aside from the Temple’s main training salles specifically for initiates to use) to having little more than an hour or two, aside from the time taken up by their sleeping cycles each night, wholly free from supervision, and it is something he often wonders about – if perhaps there might not be a better way of doing things, that is – not only as an older initiate, but as a Padawan and a Jedi Knight and Master.

06.) Order: Garen’s five most terrifying memories, prior to the outbreak of the Clone Wars, are, in ascending order: being too shocked to do anything than stand by, shocked idle, when Reeft began to choke on too big a bite at supper one evening and Bant literally had to dive across the table to get to him, to try to force the food up out of his windpipe so he wouldn’t choke to death; rushing headlong in to the Room of a Thousand Fountains to see a limp form in water-soaked robes crumpled at the bottom of one of the decorative (but suddenly no longer innocuous) waterfall cliffs and not knowing, for sure, if it was Bruck Chun or Obi-Wan (he nearly wept with relief, to discover that it was Bruck, and did cry, unabashedly, when they managed to save Bant after all); knowing that Masters Jinn and Tahl were returning from Melida/Daan and yet not seeing Obi-Wan get off of the ship; seeing the look on Obi-Wan’s face and watching the normally silvery-fair flecks in the back of his eyes somehow simultaneously brighten and darken, until it was as if a thousand tiny violently golden miniature suns had risen over the seas of his eyes, and knowing, absolutely /knowing/, that Obi-Wan would reduce Jenna Zan Arbor down to her component atoms if they didn’t get Anakin back safely from her; and one day out of the blue suddenly having a four-year-old Obi-Wan scream, clap a hand to his face as if something extremely painful had unexpectedly struck his right cheek, and then fall down into convulsions, his whole body covered by a crackling barrier of painful blue-white light that snapped and burned like an open electrical current and kept anyone – even Master Yoda – from being able to approach him until he’d finally screamed himself into unconsciousness and the snarling energy gradually flickered away and died, apparently heralding some mysterious sickness that would keep Obi-Wan essentially comatose until over halfway through his fifth year.

07.) Thirteen: The three of them huddle together for thirteen months, not knowing for sure if they’re ever going to be rejoined by their fourth friend, Bant by turns frustrated to the point of throwing things and saddened to the point of tears that she can’t do anything to help, Reeft growling and surly over the fact that Qui-Gon Jinn (dumb crink!) hasn’t even come to see Obi-Wan once that they know of, Garen torn between trying to calm down Reeft, cheer up Bant, and keep from showing how much it hurts him, to have Obi-Wan lying so still and deathly pale in that bed in the Healers Ward and knowing that Qui-Gon hasn’t visited because even though it looks and sounds like Qui-Gon Jinn, the man wearing that skin isn’t at all the same Jedi Master they knew (and isn’t someone they want to know, now, either), and that Xanatos is never going to come home again, never going to help comfort Obi-Wan after a nightmare or show Bant how to use the Force to gently (gently!) touch and encourage the life-force of a plant in the Temple gardens or come pick him or Obi-Wan or Reeft up to spin and spin and spin them high up in the air before finally releasing them, like human (or Dressellian, in Reeft’s case) javelins, using the Force to help fly them around the room before letting them safely alight on the ground again.

08.) Wake: He’s not really sure which is worse, having Obi-Wan finally (/finally/!) wake up and apparently have no concrete memories whatsoever of his life either in the Temple or before the Temple, or having his friend wake up so – so – so different/, so /changed/, so quiet and trembly weak and uncertain and – and – well, /dim is the only word Garen can think of to describe it, the sense of all but overwhelming light and warmth and thinly leashed power he’s always been aware of around Obi-Wan all but gone, like a light source shut away by thick layers of concealing drapes, his beacon-tower strength in the Force a fitful, fretful, uncertain thing that sometimes comes roaring out of him, uncontrollable and wild and breath-stealing, but mostly just trickles out in precarious dribs and drabs, like water droplets from a stream all but dried up.

09.) Coma: The Obi-Wan who comes out of the coma seems much more perplexed by the shared insistence of his friends in continuing their friendship with him than he seems all that bothered by the loss of his memories, logically (and quite calmly, even emotionlessly) pointing out that, if he suffered from so many violent dreams before his sickness, then the loss of the memories that caused those nightmares is actually a boon rather than something to be mourned or fretted over, and the loss of his other memories an act of collateral damage that can’t be helped and, as the loss doesn’t extend deep enough to have wiped out his knowledge of such things as language or the Force, won’t cause too much actual harm, either, and so shouldn’t be dwelt on, and Garen is beginning to seriously wonder who the hell stole his friend and left this pale little ghost in his stead when he accidentally comes on Obi-Wan one day in the hallways, curled up in a tight ball of misery, crying because he can’t remember the Temple and has become hopelessly turned about and lost, just trying to move around the Healers’ Ward, and it hurts him, to be lost in the place he instinctively knows as his home.

10.) Alone: For some strange reason, even though Garen hardly ever had a hard time sleeping by himself (aside from those first few awful nights, after Obi-Wan first took ill, when he was not only all alone but filled with anxiety and fear for his friend) when he had no real choice but to do so, as soon as Obi-Wan is released from the Healers’ Ward and allowed to move back into the dormer again, Garen can’t sleep, and so he finally gives up and creeps carefully out of his bed and over to Obi-Wan’s, thinking that he should be able to crawl in without waking Obi-Wan up if he moves slowly enough (given the exhausting day Obi-Wan has had); unfortunately, though, he seems to have gravely misjudged the situation, for no sooner has he begun to ease his way down into the bed when Obi-Wan wakes and, with reflexes Garen wouldn’t have believed (but for the fact that he himself has suffered from their swiftness), grabs, rolls, and swiftly incapacitates him, pressing Garen down into the mattress with a slender arm that feels like a bar of durasteel locked tight against his throat, effectively cutting off both his air and keeping him from uttering even a single noise of surprise until, with a confused frown and a blink, Obi-Wan’s brain finally wakes up enough to register who it is that he’s pinned and releases him, blankly demanding, “Why are you trying to enter my bed, Garen Muln?”

11.) Concept: The concept of being so used to another specific presence curled close in bed as to be unable to sleep without that presence seems to make no sense to Obi-Wan (who keeps quietly insisting, with a deeper and deeper frown of confusion, “But I no longer have nightmares that would require another person’s presence nearby to help ward off or drive away!”), but he is apparently too tired to argue too much, for he finally simply sighs and moves over on the bed, carefully turning his back and pulling away to the very edge of the mattress, as if unwilling to risk (much less invite) even accidental contact while still fully conscious, allowing Garen to join him . . . and then either sleeping so soundly as to take no notice of the familiarity (despite his earlier alertness) or else pretending so thoroughly not to wake or to mind, when Garen eventually gets up the nerve to spoon in close behind Obi-Wan and tangle an arm around Obi-Wan’s back and side, so that they end up curled close as of old, tangled together tightly on the narrow bed.

12.) Remember: The sickness or whatever it was hasn’t made Obi-Wan stupid/, no matter what that little /sleemo Bruck and his simpering little sycophant Aalto want to imply (and one look at Obi-Wan’s sky-high test scores is /more /than enough to drive those two jealous idiots into darkly scowling silence, considering how little Obi-Wan has to try to remember things and how hard it is for both of them. Obi-Wan’s easily got the highest test scores of any Padawan in their class – and in every single blasted subject, too, which sometimes irks Bant ever so slightly, given that he does just as stellar in the classes he has absolutely no interest in as the ones he genuinely likes and enjoys – or any of the other two classes to either side of theirs, by age), it’s just, well . . . it’s like it sapped out at least half (if not more) of his will and nearly all of his grace, along with his memories, or something: before, when he wasn’t having nightmares, Obi-Wan had always been the bright star of their little group, cheerful, bright, outgoing, funny, insatiably curious, full of energy, basically into absolutely everything all the time, and quick and graceful enough to pull off eerily perfect imitations of even the most gifted ’saberists, working in the training salles with their lightsabers, and now . . . now it’s almost like he’s sleepwalking through life or something, like there are barriers wrapped so tight around him that he can barely see or hear or touch anyone, anymore, and it hurts Garen, makes his heart ache in a way he hadn’t known it could hurt nearly so badly without simply killing him outright, to see Obi-Wan like this and, worse, to know what he was like before, when Obi-Wan himself can’t even remember what he was like, what he lost, what that blasted illness stole from him!

13.) Guard: The workers in the crèche, especially Master Ali-Alann, still insist on calling them the Fearsome Foursome, but really, they’re not nearly so fearsome, now, and their foursome is more of a threesome honor guard for a fourth who just seems to drift about in a disconnected fog, following their lead and taking part in their pranks and rule-breaking and mischief-making, but only because he doesn’t seem to realize that he can tell them no, that he doesn’t want to be part of their group, doesn’t want to take part in practical joke wars involving the most creative use of the Force and various foodstuffs, doesn’t want to be dragged along everywhere they go (often going to places in the Temple that Obi-Wan used to love, as if, through sheer dint of repetitive visitation, they might somehow manage to trigger some memory or another and somehow restore the friend they all loved and so very desperately miss).

14.) Create: He’s one of the few Force-sensitives who’s truly good with mechanics, machines, not just scientifically aware of how and why they work (like Obi-Wan is) or able to use them if necessary (like most Jedi are, at least to an extent) but truly, deeply gifted in their uses, fascinated by them, able to create new, more efficient designs because he understands how things works on a level so deep that he cannot help but see how things could work, would /work, better than they already do, if only approached from certain novel directions or tackled in specific new ways, and he is, moreover frankly and deeply infatuated with the thought of flying, so it’s an unspoken but fairly widely accepted fact that, when his time to be chosen comes, Garen will almost certainly be apprenticed by the lovely, red-haired Clee Rhara, given that this specific Jedi Master is one of the other few truly and quite happily talented mechanics and pilots in the whole of the Jedi Order, and, though sometimes he’s not entirely sure how comfortable he is with the idea of having a female Master, he /likes Master Rhara (and her inevitable smear of grease or oil somewhere on her person or her robes, usually somewhere that will make the Masters on the High Council – except for Yoda, who usually just seems amused by her preoccupation with her “toys” and her “babies” – sigh or roll their eyes or both), so he figures it can’t possibly be too terribly bad, even if it might occasionally be awkward or strange, and he clings to that thought and his eventual apprenticeship as something to look forward to, when the days seem especially bleak.

15.) Shadow: Garen has unofficially elected himself Obi-Wan’s chief bodyguard and, thus, taken to following after Obi-Wan everywhere that he possibly can, close and unshakeable as a shadow, only ever willingly (or at least mostly willingly) allowing Obi-Wan to pass somewhere out of his sight when he knows, absolutely, that either Bant or Reeft or both of his friends are going to be in close proximity to Obi-Wan the entire time that Garen won’t be able to be near him, much more concerned with being there (or knowing that someone trustworthy is there) to look after and to take care of Obi-Wan (in case something should go wrong or – Force forfend! – he should fall ill again) with how it might look to others, to see him always trailing about in Obi-Wan’s shadow, with his heart more and more clearly out in the open (right there on his proverbial sleeve, even!), where anyone with eyes might see and know just how much he cares for the other initiate.

16.) Attachment: If he’s expecting anyone to say something about his increasingly obvious attachment to Obi-Wan, it’s Bant, so Garen is that much more surprised when Reeft suddenly and quite unexpectedly turns to him one day, in the midst of a shared study-session for one of the classes they have dealing with mechanics (a course that Obi-Wan and Bant are not taking, having opted instead for a course dealing more with basic to intermediate healing and medicinals), and asks (as casually as he might ask his partner for the practical laboratory to hand over a certain socket wrench or hammer), “So do you love Obi-Wan, then, or is all of this shadow-closeness you’ve been indulging in your own weird way of trying to make sure he stays with us this time and doesn’t fall sick again somewhere when one of us isn’t there to try to help him?”

17.) Love: Love isn’t especially a concept that Garen’s ever spent a lot of time thinking about before – it’s one of the major emotions that Jedi are supposed to avoid, so of course the Masters have thoroughly explained it and its regular places and uses in non-Jedi societies, but he’s seven/, for Force’s sake! It’s not like he’s even nearly old enough to be able to think about being able to physically love someone, in a romantic fashion, in the kind of way that Reeft seems to intimating that Garen loves Obi-Wan – and yet, for some reason, after Reeft brings the subject up (even though Garen’s response is a sputtering, mostly incoherent, but definitely firm negative), he finds that he can’t stop thinking about it (even though he’s come up with multiple reasons and ways to deny such a forbidden attachment as love, quite thoroughly, logically, and even a bit vehemently listing all the reasons why he’d never permit himself to indulge in such a dangerous emotion), and his preoccupation is apparently noticeable, because when Bant finally does approach him, it’s to bluntly declare, “Either tell him and get it out of your system or get a Master to help you figure out how to release it into the Force or /something/, Garen, because you’re distracting everybody and giving me a headache and I think that probably everyone /except Obi-Wan – who for some reason seems wholly oblivious to everything involving attachment and love – probably knows by now, given how hard and how loudly you’ve been thinking on the subject!”

18.) Young: Garen doesn’t tell Obi-Wan, but he does go to Master Rhara about his, ah, problem, and she listens to him carefully before, with a faint smile, declaring that he’s much too young to truly be in love and is most likely just confusing a perceived need for closeness with Obi-Wan (residual to the closeness they fostered to try to stave off those traumatic nightmares) with an actual physical need of the body (like the need for sufficient clean air or water or food or light), working his way towards a kind of dependence on Obi-Wan that does, true enough, need to be discouraged, to avoid a not easily reversible linking in his mind of Obi-Wan’s presence in his life to the things that his body truly does require to continue living, but that nevertheless is unlikely to ever become a serious problem so long as he’s careful to separate himself and his thoughts (at least somewhat) from his friend.

19.) Separate: Garen tries to do as Master Rhara has suggested and separate himself from Obi-Wan – he stops crawling into bed with Obi-Wan at night, for example, and attempts to either sit between Bant and Reeft at mealtime or else arrange things so that he won’t be facing Obi-Wan while seated, even going so far as to avoid walking and sitting next to Obi-Wan both on the way to and from as well as during their shared classes – but all it seems to accomplish is to make him rather irritable from lack of sleep (though he does, through sheer perseverance of will, eventually teach himself how to sleep in a bed empty of anyone but himself) and cranky because Bruck and Aalto keep finding ways of using his distance to play tricks on Obi-Wan and trip him up and otherwise make complete and utter asses (not to mention obvious bullies) of themselves, and so, after about a month, Garen decides he’s darn well separate enough and goes back to doing things the old way, with his sole concession to Master Rhara’s advice being his continued avoidance of the deliberate sharing of Obi-Wan’s bed.

20.) Detachment: Calmness and detachment seem to come almost naturally to Obi-Wan, since he woke from his coma – the only emotions that ever truly seem to touch him are confusion and/or bewilderment, embarrassment, and frustration with the illogical behavior/thinking of other beings – and, though Bruck Chun does his best (occasionally with a little added help from his lackey, Aalto) to make it appear as if Obi-Wan has a bad temper and a problem with arrogance, basically everyone who know Obi-Wan knows better than to believe such bilge.

21.) Life: The Temple is the only life that Garen knows (having been brought to the Temple so early as to have no concrete memories whatsoever from the time before that), so he doesn’t really know how extraordinarily advanced, far-ranging, rigorous, and frankly difficult the courses of study or the sheer amount of work required of them for those courses of study truly are, but he does know that he needs the Force, sometimes, just to help him keep assimilating everything and keep up with the swift pace of his many teachers, and he knows that some days his head seems so overstuffed with data as to literally feel in danger of exploding (or at the least springing a serious leak) – and that he’s not the only one to feel so! – and so some days he certainly wishes he could be enough like Obi-Wan to share in his friend’s seemingly perfect eidetic memory, too!

22.) Experiment: Garen knows that some of the older initiates experiment, sometimes, but it’s generally discouraged before one is made a Padawan – and then the Order strongly suggests that Masters keep their apprentices too busy/exhausted for such things until they’re of age to frequent a courtesan or to find willing single-night partners or else the Master deems it prudent to insist on the mastery of certain applications of the Fore that, in essence, either temporarily or else all but permanently (until/unless reversed through the Force, that is) render one sexually neuter – but he isn’t interested in being with just any random person or in learning how to shut that part of his body down/off . . . and that, unfortunately, is the real problem, considering with whom he so increasingly desperately would like to be able to do certain things.

23.) Joke: The joke in the crèche (and likely the whole of the Temple, too, by now) is that the one person everyone would like to have is the one person utterly uninterested in having or being had by anyone, but Garen really doesn’t see the humor in the situation!

24.) Drastic: If he’d known beforehand, that Obi-Wan was thinking of taking such a drastic step as implied by such a vow of chastity, he would have argued against it with all his might, even going so far as to declare his love in such a way as to make the reality of it unavoidable, and damn the consequences, but Obi-Wan didn’t speak of it to anyone until long after it was already over and done with, so Garen never got the chance to try to stop him . . . and, thus, feels constrained never to reveal the depth or true nature of his attachment to Obi-Wan.

25.) Presence: The older they grow, the more individuated their courses of study tend to become, and so the less time Garen is able to spend in Obi-Wan’s company; yet, instead of this added distance between them serving to dim the strength (or the increasingly less than innocent nature) of his attachment to Obi-Wan, being forced to spend so much time apart from his friend only sharpens the desperation of his desire (need) for Obi-Wan’s presence and friendship in his life.

26.) Fly: Garen loves, loves, loves, /loves/ to fly – it is the one thing in the whole universe that can make him forget all of his troubles and doubts and simply revel in freedom, in the pure joy of flight – and so it constantly amazes him, how technically proficient Obi-Wan is as flying and how intensely he personally dislikes both to pilot and to ride along as passenger on a ship, irregardless of who’s doing the flying or where or why or even how far they might be flying, and sometimes he wonders how it is that he can so thoroughly adore someone who so dislikes one of the few truly pure loves in his life.

27.) Red: Master Rhara says that the red in his hair is a boon, for it will fool others into assuming that they are either mother and child or else closely related, and, though Garen personally can’t see enough of a resemblance between the two of them to warrant such an assumption, she seems fairly convinced of it and surely has much more practical knowledge of such things than he does, so he refrains from asking why anyone would do such a thing and simply shrugs and takes it on good faith that she’s right (which, point of fact, she later turns out to be. Right, that is. Not related to him or his mother!).

28.) Worry: Garen, of course, is all but spoken for by Master Rhara, and, despite the fact that she is a librarian, archivist, and historian by training, and not a Healer, Knight Tahl has made it fairly clear that she wishes to speak for Bant, when the Mon Calamari initiate is old enough to be made a Padawan learner, just as Knight Binn Ibes has expressed a marked interest in claiming Reeft as an apprentice, when he is of age; yet, everyone and no one seems interested in speaking for Obi-Wan, and, as they draw nearer to the time when they must either be chosen as Padawans or sent away from the Temple, Garen begins to worry that Xanatos or even Master Jinn might have been the one intended for his friend, before, and that the Force may not bring him to another so suited for him (if, indeed, there is such another person in the Order), even if he is far and away the most worthy of them all to become a Jedi.

29.) Lie: Jedi aren’t supposed to hold on to their feelings, aren’t supposed to want things for themselves (or just for the mere fact of possessing those things, either), aren’t supposed to love, aren’t supposed to . . . well, a lot of things, to be perfectly honest, and sometimes Garen wonders (especially on days when he struggles with his growing infatuation with Obi-Wan) if he’s the only one who finds all of the things they aren’t supposed to do (and all of the things they are supposed to be, instead) so blasted hard, so very nearly impossible, to live by, or if everyone does, too, and the famous Jedi detachment and serenity is all just a pretty lie, something that they tell outsiders so they won’t be afraid of beings who’re so strong in the Force.

30.) Rumor: It isn’t until after his world has been roughly turned upside down and Obi-Wan sent away to Bandomeer that the rumor comes out that Master Yoda has sent his friend to that Agri-Corps world in order to see to it that Obi-Wan is close to Master Jinn, so that the Force will have a chance to work its way with them whether Master Jinn wishes it to or not, and that the Grand Master has, in fact, personally forbidden any of the other many Knights and Masters all keenly interested in apprenticing Obi-Wan from speaking to him, so that Yoda can trick Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan into forming a bonded relationship, and it is then that Garen really begins to wonder about the way that the Jedi Order seems to be run and how arbitrarily and changeable its otherwise vehemently presented as utterly unbreakable rules seem to be held to be by those beings who are actually in charge . . . and to doubt whether or not the Order may actually be set up, governed, or even functioning in the way that it really should be, according to the will of the Force.

31.) Secret: Garen desperately wants to tell Obi-Wan the truth about what Master Yoda did, but Bant and Reeft both insist that Obi-Wan is happy to have Qui-Gon Jinn as his Master and that, strange as that happiness may seem to them, the preservation of that happiness is their duty, as Obi-Wan’s friends, and so, in the end, after much thinking and soul-searching (which results in the unavoidable conclusion that to know the truth about Master Yoda’s manipulations might very well shatter Obi-Wan’s contentment with his new Master and render him miserable with longing for the Master he might have otherwise come to possess), Garen agrees to do whatever he can to help them see to it that Master Yoda’s dirty little secret remains a secret from Obi-Wan.

32.) Stark: Despite being virtually (and all but miraculously) unscathed, when they return to the Temple after the conclusion of the bloody Stark Hyperspace War, Qui-Gon Jinn insists that Obi-Wan should have a complete physical, and it is thus, in the finding of certain abnormalities in Obi-Wan’s blood chemistry, that it comes to light what Obi-Wan has done, though Obi-Wan somehow manages to make Garen and his other friends (as well as the young Healer who makes the discovery) all promise to keep both his vow of chastity and the lengths to which he has gone, through the Force, to see to it that he physically has no choice but to keep that vow (so long as he does not decide to use the Force to undo what he has done) a secret, fearful as he is that Master Jinn might somehow view such a vow and such an extreme way of keeping that vow as signs of conceit or arrogance on Obi-Wan’s part.

33.) Chance: Garen hates, hates, hates Siri Tachi – hates her rudeness, hates her insistence on behaving as if she’s a friend (as though that could make up for what she said, the way she acted, after Obi-Wan came back, from Melida/Daan, especially given that she hasn’t even bothered to try to properly apologize!), hates her blonde prettiness and her rough and tumble tomboyishness and her precious pink girlish lightsaber and her obvious and growing interest in Obi-Wan and the way he accepts her presence because all he sees is that she wishes to make up for being such a bitch, before, by being friendly now – and one of his few consolations, in his dealings with her, is that she has no more chance of truly getting close to Obi-Wan (or getting out of him what she so blatantly desires of him) than Garen or indeed anyone else does, given that blasted stupid vow of chastity that Obi-Wan took!

34.) Combination: Garen isn’t really sure what it is about Obi-Wan that makes him so endlessly fascinating and desirable to so many different beings – objectively, Obi-Wan’s features, though regular, are boyish, almost fey, rather than classically handsome, and he is slender and small in a way that (especially when viewed next to a behemoth like his Master) makes him seem delicate, even breakable, rather than wiry-strong and supple as an acrobat (as he truly is) – but it certainly cannot be denied that Obi-Wan gathers admirers, would-be suitors, and even friends (if, granted, friends whose affection is fueled at least in part by intense desire for Obi-Wan’s person and/or his continued presence in their lives) everywhere he goes, and Garen assumes that it must be some unquantifiable combination of looks, spirt, and sheer, innocent earnestness that makes him so very appealing to so many . . . including, apparently, Qui-Gon Jinn’s former Padawan, who seems to have conceived a certain fascination for Master Jinn’s new apprentice.

35.) Resemble: Garen’s aware that he’s thought by many humanoid and nonhuman residents of the Coruscanti Temple to resemble Obi-Wan a great deal, and he supposes, for those less used to discerning various minutiae of details among humans, that this is true – they both have slender builds, both are small for their age (he won’t really hit his stride, growth-wise, until he’s in his early twenties, and Obi-Wan will always be a little bit short of the mark for his own potential size, given certain deficiencies his diet suffered from – and an apparent tendency of his young body to sap its internal energy stores in order to call on the Force to speed healing, when dealt grievous injuries – before he was brought to the Order), both have naturally fair skin that burns easily (after freckling) in too much direct light, both have predominately blue eyes (though Obi-Wan has eyes like oceans, filled with many different colors and changeful as the patterns that form in moving water, and Garen’s eyes are more like the steadily pale blue sky of some winter-bound world), both have fairly oval-shaped faces with pleasingly regular, harmonious features marked by strong planes and angles and softened by dimples in their chins, both have hair that hovers in the color range somewhere within that no-man’s-land where blonde and red and brown all meet in a nexus of all-color and no-color, forming shades of hue not easily agreed upon or labelled by others (though Obi-Wan’s naturally tends closer to copper or red-gold while Garen’s hair is closer to a light russet brown, beneath the sun-bleached reddish-golden layer on top) – but most humans and near-humans are able to tell them apart fairly easily enough, the more familiar with the both of them they are and the older (and more distinctly, individually themselves) the two of them grow, so they don’t get to play the trick of swapping identities too often, though he supposes that it must’ve been often enough for someone to notice, because he’s fairly certain that Obi-Wan wouldn’t’ve volunteered Garen to essentially impersonate him like this (since it is, after all, a dangerous request, given Xanatos’ involvement), and unfortunately he just doesn’t think that Master Jinn really pays enough attention to Obi-Wan and his friends to even realize that his Padawan has a close companion who knows him well enough and looks just sufficiently like him to maybe be able to fool someone largely unfamiliar with both Obi-Wan and Garen into thinking that Garen is Obi-Wan.

36.) Traitor: Obi-Wan mourns Bruck’s death (despite the fact that the little sleemo brought it on himself, helping Xanatos the way he did) as if that traitor were actually worth the mourning, and, as far as he’s concerned, the first time Siri Tachi does anything that’s worth admiring is when she strides up to Obi-Wan, after the whole awful thing is over with, and firmly declares, “Don’t you dare try to blame this on yourself or mourn his death! He betrayed the Order and his agemates in the crèche – he conspired with a Dark Jedi to help murder innocents/, Obi-Wan! – and he /earned /his death, by the Force! He chose to take this Dark path, and this is the reward he has reaped for it, and you have /no right, no /cause/, to feel responsible for what he’s brought upon himself!”

37.) Clueless: How anyone can be quite so intelligent and otherwise perceptive and yet still mange to be so gorram dense and utterly clueless about both himself and the desires of other beings is entirely beyond Garen’s capability to comprehend, but he can tell, from the way Obi-Wan behaves and the way he reacts whenever Garen tries to gently probe around the edges of the issue, that Obi-Wan really is wholly innocent of the nature of his own appeal, and he supposes that’s at least a little bit comforting (despite being headache-inducing), given that Garen is not the only one whose interest in him Obi-Wan is so utterly blind to.

38.) Encourage: Despite Garen’s earlier conviction never to tell Obi-Wan the true nature of his affection for him, Garen is trying to get up his nerve to say something about how he feels, after the whole debacle with Xanatos and Bruck, when Obi-Wan comes bursting wide-eyed into the Temple gardens as if a whole pack of Sith-spawn were hot on his heels and, spying Garen, drags him aside to rather exclaim (in an obviously dismayed tone of voice) that Siri Tachi has just tried to – tried to – well, she groped him, for Force’s sake, and tried to get him to kiss her, and he was so shocked that he shoved her away from him with the Force and now she’s furious with him and by the stars, Garen, what could he have done, to encourage her to think such a thing of him, and how can he stop doing it, so no one else will make the same mistake, and Obi-Wan is so plainly distraught that Garen finds himself rather swiftly back-pedaling away from the idea of confessing the rather less than innocent nature of his attachment, given his unwillingness to add to Obi-Wan’s hurt or confusion.

39.) Job: He’s not entirely sure how he ended up with the job, but Garen nevertheless ends up being the one who gets to try to explain to Siri why her infatuation with Obi-Wan isn’t all that likely to produce any of the results that she might wish for (and, in fact, he rather bluntly tells the irate girl, “You’re about five years too late. Obi-Wan took a vow of chastity when he was about nine, and I think you know by now how Obi-Wan is – he never does anything by half – so you shouldn’t be surprised to know that he used the Force on himself to make sure he would keep that vow completely, no matter what. And before you ask why none of his friends tried to talk him out of it, well, believe me, if we’d actually known what he was about, we would’ve figured out a way to stop him. But he did this all on his own – never told anyone, even the Healers or his own Master, so far as I know. The first time anyone knew of this wasn’t much more than a year ago, when he came back from a mission wounded and a Healer noticed some . . . abnormalities in his blood chemistry, for someone of his age and physiology.”), and it is, perhaps, one of the few times he not only genuinely feels sorry for the girl but doesn’t even blame her for her reaction at all, when she breaks down in helpless tears of mixed sorrow and rage over the news of what she can never have . . . though he swiftly loses that sense of understanding and shared grief when she turns to him, in her tearful anger, and tries to convince him to become her pillow-friend (as it is apparently called among initiates and Padawans and perhaps even full Jedi), since she can never have Obi-Wan and Garen’s a little bit like him and she trusts him not to hurt her or toy with her feelings or try to demand more from her than she is willing or able to give, as a Jedi in training.

40.) Swing: Siri Tachi is, objectively, physically quite lovely – blonde, blue-eyed, fair skinned (though in a way that lends itself to a faintly golden gilding, from excess sun, rather than to either freckling or burning), slender and muscular from her training yet still quite pleasingly rounded in all the right places, for a beautiful woman, and possessing a gorgeously lush ripe mouth that he has heard more than one male (and even a few female!) older initiate and Padawan refer to both vulgarly and longingly as being made for providing pleasure – but Garen would, quite frankly, rather take a vow of chastity like Obi-Wan did than to casually sleep with her, and it is one of the most difficult things he has ever had to do, both to refuse her in such a way as to make his utter disinterest in her perfectly clear and to reject her offer in such a way as to not either draw her wrath down upon him or to make her suspicious of the reasons for his disinclination to have sex with someone so plainly beautiful and obviously available, but somehow or another (thank the Force!) he manages to swing it, and his relief is such that he promises himself that he will never offer the pleasure of either his company or his body to another being unless he is completely positive that the other person is going to accept that offer, first!

41.) Exorcize: Garen has spent nearly four full years with Master Rhara, after being formally spoken for, before she finally seems to think that he’s old enough for the series of lectures on normal human sexuality, the need for Jedi to be and to remain irreproachable to the masses, and various ways to balance those two things without risking damage to either health or reputation, offering to take him to one of the many worlds where houses of professional courtesans and/or religious celebrants of the flesh are known for their cleanliness, safety, discretion, and eagerness to be of service to the members of an organization as important and powerful as the Jedi Order; yet, though Garen accepts the offer and is determined to use the trip as a way to exorcize certain demons from both his flesh and his soul, he finds, to his embarrassment, that some things are not so easily dislodged, and, after being kindly but firmly told by five different highly professional and extremely perceptive bedfellows that it is obvious that Garen prefers the company of men to women in his bed and that he specifically seems to prefer one type (not to mention one particular individual, whose name he keeps crying out in the throes of passion) above all others and that there is, moreover, no shame in these things and that he will only do harm to himself if he tries to deny or repute these facts, Garen has to admit that his attempt to somehow cast out his need and desire for Obi-Wan is, quite simply, doomed to failure.

42.) Trick: Despite (or perhaps because of) his earlier failure to get rid of his love for Obi-Wan, Garen goes through a phase where he deliberately pursues every single individual he meets, in the course of his many missions with Master Rhara, who reminds him even a little bit of the oblivious object of his affection, hoping to trick his body into letting go of the infatuation that way, but after a year of that he has to give it up as useless, too, and, though his Master doesn’t ever say anything to him about it, the way she looks at him lets him know that she’s been worried about him and that she hopes he will soon find a way to stop struggling against himself so much and learn how to accept what he must and to release the rest into the Force, as a true Jedi should and must do.

43.) Heavy: For pity’s sake, it isn’t as if Garen hasn’t tried to release his emotions concerning Obi-Wan or his very improper attachment, for he’s tried and tried and tried to get rid of both his feelings and his infatuation to no avail (meditating on the subject until he feels like a supplicant who’s gone blue in the face, from sheer dint of repetition of a request); it’s just that every single gorram time he thinks he may have figured out a way to come to grips with these things enough to keep them from affecting him, Obi-Wan does or says something or is just there and looks at him in a certain way, and it all comes rushing back to the forefront of his mind again, filling him with a painfully intense longing and a sort of hyperfocused awareness of everything Obi-Wan says and does, every word, every glance, every gesture, the look/scent/touch/feel/sound of him from dozens of purely innocent encounters (and a few not so innocent brushes of contact) filling his feverish thoughts and inflaming his already excited senses, the heavy, gut-clenching taste of the musky/sweet/clean scent of Obi-Wan’s skin, his hair, the whole of his body (especially when in concentrated form, during and after hard-fought sparring practices) seeping into Garen’s skin, his mouth, coating the back of his tongue and haunting his dreams, his fantasies, until he feels all but crippled with want of Obi-Wan, and, unable at last to trust himself to remain at all functional without some kind of relief (for fear of mauling his friend, otherwise), Garen is forced to either withdraw somewhere private and take matters (and overheated, aching flesh) literally into his own hands or else to find someone he trusts to receive his lusts and to spend himself so utterly that not even memories of the sight of Obi-Wan naked are sufficient to rouse his flesh again.

44.) Obsession: The first person to really say something to him about his growing obsession with Obi-Wan is, of all beings, Quinlan Vos, who quite abruptly one day after a private sparring match (and an idle comment on Garen’s part about how some things about the Temple never seem to really change) declares that he believes roughly half to two-thirds (if not more!) of the human and near-human population of the Temple within thirty years or so of their age bracket all seem to want Obi-Wan the oblivious and to have wanted him for some years, now, but that he would be just as happy to find someone he could talk to and maybe even regularly work off some of the more major frustrations associated with being one of those many unnoticed fans; when Garen looks up from where he’s been gathering up the outer layer of tunics he stripped out of for their little mock combat, expecting to somehow find himself the butt of one of Quinlan’s odd jokes, he instead finds himself meeting the very vulnerable looking gaze of an oddly naked looking (for all that he is, technically, fully clothed) Quinlan Vos: four long steps, a swift circling of strong arms around a muscled back and lean hips, and a kiss that beings brusquely, melts into something far more tender, and eventually transmutes into something so greedy and passionate and heavy with need that it could have been plucked from one of Garen’s more heated private fantasies removes that vulnerability (and leads to a great deal more nakedness, all around), and that is how he ends up being the occasional pillow-friend of the Padawan learner nearly the entire Temple seems to think of as a living embodiment both of sex on legs and fickleness in flesh form.

45.) Reputation: Quinlan Vos has a bad reputation in the Temple, not just because he apparently lost his virginity at the tender age of nine (apparently all of the arguably many different kinds of virginity it is possible for a male human/near-human to have, to a trio of admirers composed of a Padawan learner and two fairly young hired workers in the Temple, ranging in age from five to nine to thirteen years older than he, and all three of whom he supposedly seduced) and hasn’t stopped having various crushes and sexual escapades since and is apprenticed to the Jedi Order’s feared spy-master, Tholme, but because he came to the Order late, scarred by the ability to read an object or a place’s history through the use of psychometry – an ability so strong that he could barely control it, and often went about inadvertently spilling secrets some individuals would have rather kept hidden, after accidentally brushing up against them or sitting where they had recently sat for a long time (or been engaged in other, more active pursuits) or touching an item that they had dropped or left lying about in plain sight, etc. – and not too terribly picky about using that ability to carve himself a niche in the Temple he considered unassailable by bullies of any sort; yet, though Garen will be among the first to admit that Quinlin has a bit of a ruthless streak and is somewhat . . . loose in his adherence to more conventional sexual mores and occasionally rather less than discrete about certain of his liaisons, he would also be among the first to argue that the Kiffar is a good person, fanatically loyal to and protective of those rare few he truly, deeply likes (or loves) and admires, intelligent and crafty and well-suited for the line of work he will likely be taking up, as a Knight, with a Master like Tholme, extremely strong in the Force and liable to make a formidable Master in his own right (given that he survives the next couple of decades), and shockingly honest, for someone all but destined to be a spy and a master of spies: he is proud to account the Kiffar Padawan learner one of his closest friends, perhaps the very best of his friends, after Obi-Wan and Bant and Reeft, and he is daily grateful for the fact that Obi-Wan befriended (and proceeded to bewitch) the slightly older teen.

46.) Time: With an occasional few rare exceptions, Garen almost exclusively likes a very certain kind of male for a lover – a type that Quinlan Vos doesn’t really match, given the fact that he’s quite a bit taller and more muscular than Garen – while Quinlan himself is what he proudly refers to as omnisexual, so it constantly surprises him that they should get along as well as they do; yet, for someone seemingly so self-sufficient as to occasionally appear cocky and even brash, Quinlan is actually a deep thinker who thrives on talking things through/out with someone he trusts and regards as either an intellectual equal or superior, one who is as open to discussing his emotions as he is to debating the various methods by which the rules governing admission to the Jedi Order have been not only changed but actively corrupted by various political expediencies over the centuries, and he is, above all, interesting, so they end up spending a surprising amount of post-coital (and intra-coital) time wrapped up around each other or lounging together somewhere comfortable enough for such reclining, talking about Obi-Wan and the Code and the questionable state of things in the Order and all that they think is wrong with the Republic and the galaxy in general, idly touching and occasionally stroking each other as they listen in between comments.

47.) Relationship: They don’t love each other and are very clear about it (in fact, Quinlan quite regularly ends up spending some of their time together somewhat ruefully apologizing for calling out Obi-Wan’s name, instead of Garen’s, both while on the verge of and in the throes of orgasm), but they are extremely fond of each other, and the fact that they so often talk about things with one another that they feel they can’t discuss with anyone else only adds to that sense of closeness, leading to a relationship so strong and so supportive that their individual Masters (despite some initial misgivings on both of their parts) are soon quite unabashedly supporting their friendship, for the added stability it helps to bring both of them.

48.) Teach: They spend a lot of time, both separately and together, with Obi-Wan, taking turns trying to teach him the tricks of their particular specialities and, in general, doing their level best to try to help him love all of the things that they do (or at least understand them enough to know why someone else would love them, when it comes to flying), forming such a tight-knit little unit despite (or perhaps because of) Obi-Wan’s continued obliviousness that occasionally Bant or Reeft will tease them about being a tripartite Padawan party.

49.) Problem: Quinlan, Force bless and keep him, instinctively understands that it isn’t so much that he has a problem with Master Jinn because Qui-Gon gets to spend so much time with Obi-Wan, but that, quite honestly, he has issues with the man because he seems to care so little for the spending of that time and still seems to know or understand so little of Obi-Wan, after essentially living with Obi-Wan (as a father might live with a son) for years, now . . . issues that Quinlan, for one, frankly admits to sharing.

50.) Talk: Garen misses Xanatos, mourns his death like he might mourn that of one of his good friends, and is glad that Quinlan, at least, both remembers the older boy very well and is willing to talk about him, even after the truly awful things that Xanatos tried to do to get back at Master Jinn (who deserved worse, in both his opinion and Quin’s) and the Jedi Order (not only for all but arranging to have Master Jinn murder his father right in front of them and cast him out for protesting it, but for so shamefully neglecting to protest Qui-Gon’s bungling of that mission and his abandonment of his duty to the boy, despite vehement protests on the matter from a Master as highly regarded as Dooku of Serenno – actions that both he and Quin find horribly, treacherously vile), for the good memories that Garen has of Xanatos from his childhood are one part of his life that he’d like to cherish, even if Xanatos did eventually bring him and his loved ones (especially Obi-Wan) pain, too, later on in life.

51.) Quandary: From the way that Obi-Wan has spoken of Xanatos (having no memory of him from before – something that neither Garen not Quin can quite figure out how Xanatos could have known about, to take advantage of the way that he initially did, without also knowing enough about Obi-Wan to have been able to instantly see through the trick that they eventually played against him, using Garen as a decoy for Obi-Wan), Garen can almost imagine that Obi-Wan liked him, felt a connection to him, perhaps even thought, for a time, that he would rather be with Xanatos than with Master Jinn . . . though he cannot, for the life of him, make that seemingly strong affinity and affection for the former Padawan quite fit with the knowledge that Obi-Wan had at least three good chances (besides the one that they all know he unsuccessfully began to try to convince Xanatos to take, there near the end, before Qui-Gon managed to ruin his attempt with his meddling) to try to convince Xanatos to let go of his grudge and just go away with him somewhere far enough from Coruscant to escape any attempt at interference from the Jedi Order – an offer that Garen frankly can’t imagine Xanatos ever being able to refuse, even for the sake of (deserved) vengeance against both Master Jinn and the Order, not if faced with that earnestly pleading expression of Obi-Wan’s that no one with a working conscience (with the possible exception of the occasionally quite heartless Qui-Gon Jinn) ever really seems to be able to refuse – even if he’ll admit that Quin’s opinion that Obi-Wan may never have felt quite brave enough to make such an offer fully clear (given his ridiculously low overall opinion of himself and his worth) makes a certain amount of sense as a possible answer to that particular quandary.

52.) Strange: He imagines that it must have been strange, for Xanatos, knowing that Obi-Wan remembered him not at all from before, and wonders, sometimes, if Xanatos did the few rather less than friendly things he did to Obi-Wan (like putting him in a mining facility for prisoners, for safe-keeping, rather than keeping Obi-Wan with him, after the first time he stole him away from Master Jinn) as a way of reacting to and showing that hurt, over being forgotten, thus.

53.) Ready: Garen is of course saddened when Knight Tahl is murdered, but to be honest he’s more worried about Bant (who’s lost her Master several years shy of being ready for her Trials) and about how frantically worried Obi-Wan seems to be about how badly Master Jinn is taking Tahl’s death than he is grieved by the actual murder.

54.) Like: It’s not that he didn’t like Tahl or anything – she was a very smart lady who always had a smile for everyone, treated Bant quite well, and always took Obi-Wan’s part whenever her pillow-friend, Master Jinn, was being especially idiotic or pig-headed (or both), including in the wake of that whole awful Melida/Daan debacle – but she always struck him as being a bit, well, fey (and occasionally almost even fickle), somehow, and careless about her attachment to Qui-Gon, allowing him to think of her as if she were more to him than she was or could ever really be, and that always made him a bit nervous, even before he had to worry about how Qui-Gon’s reaction to Tahl’s unexpected murder.

55.) Pass: There are days when Garen seriously wonders how in the name of the ever-blessed Force Qui-Gon Jinn ever managed to qualify for (much less pass!) the Trials to become a Knight, and the day he learns how close that idiotic crink came to going to the Dark Side in his fury over Tahl’s death is definitely one of those days!

56.) New: Garen likes Kit Fisto – is, in fact, rather more impressed with Knight Fisto than he ever really was with Knight Tahl, so much so that he decides fairly quickly that he’ll be surprised if Bant’s new Master doesn’t end up on the High Council, one of these days – and is thrilled for Bant when the Nautolan Knight approaches her about taking over her training and she accepts.

57.) Dread: He has a bad feeling about things from the moment Darsha Assant is sent out on her own – she’s not one of their especial friends, true, but she is a regular sparring mate (given both her nearness in age/experience and who her Master happens to be) and she is in their age-group (not to mention essentially Siri Tachi’s best friend), so he and his best friends at least try to keep track of what’s going on with her, much as they do with each other – and that feeling of dread only intensifies when the High Council decides to send Obi-Wan out looking for both her and her Master, Anoon Bondara, one of the most highly regarded lightsaber instructors at the Temple and the Order’s named battlemaster (after he’s also gone missing, presumably while out searching for Darsha), /alone/, without even a proper guide to help Obi-Wan navigate his way safely through the extremely dangerous lower levels of Coruscant, to try to search them out, even though those treacherous levels have apparently swallowed both Darsha and her Master whole.

58.) Believe: Garen hardly knows what to think, much less believe – Sith? In this day and age? And one of them on Coruscant chasing after stolen plans involving a planned invasion of the Mid Rim world of Naboo? – but Lorn Pavan strikes him as too proud (and too shaken by his recent experiences) to lie abut such a thing and Obi-Wan seems to believe him without question and the Trade Federation certainly is quite illegally occupied in blockading Naboo, so when he hears that Master Jinn and Obi-Wan are to be secretly sent to Naboo (without the Senate’s knowledge), to try to bring about a peaceful resolution to the increasingly problematic situation there, he runs through the Temple like a madman solely for the purpose of waylaying Obi-Wan and making him swear to be extra careful, even going so far as to throw caution aside long enough to throw his arms around Obi-Wan in a quick, desperately tight embrace, after Obi-Wan gives him that promise, before letting him hurry on towards the diplomatic courier ship waiting to take him and his Master to Naboo.

59.) Gift: Garen’s gift is oddly balanced between the Living and Unifying Force, with perhaps only a shade more strength to the second, but he doesn’t need to be a Master of the Living Force to know that Qui-Gon Jinn is at his most stubbornly pig-headed and know-it-all furious, the strange little boy is terrified half out his wits, Obi-Wan is physically hurting as well as mentally and emotionally distressed and quite simply all around miserable, the High Council is in an extremely high collective rage, and even Master Dooku is completely infuriated with both the situation and, apparently, his former apprentice, Qui-Gon Jinn, so Garen just does his level best not to attract anyone’s attention or ire while also making it clear that he’s available to lend an ear, a shoulder, even a way to clandestinely arrange a visit to a Healer (via Bant), if necessary, so that Obi-Wan will have no cause to believe that his friends are deserting him, even if his idiotic Master seems to be trying to do so.

60.) Process: Garen is so stunned that he’s fairly certain he doesn’t really being to process the information (Qui-Gon dead! Obi-Wan a Jedi Knight and a Sith Killer and Master to a boy the High Council is saying might actually be the Chosen One of prophecies, now, given his part in the saving of Naboo from the Trade Federation!) until after he’s seen Obi-Wan return with the oddly harder looking young boy in tow and no sign nor whisper of Master Jinn with them.

61.) Natural: Master Rhara swears that Garen is one of the best natural pilots and most inventive mechanics she’s ever known or heard tell of, and so it’s that much more surprising, to discover himself so wholly outmatched in both areas by a ten-year-old former slave from Tatooine who is apprenticed to (of all people!) Obi-Wan Kenobi!

62.) Creepy: Objectively, Garen thinks that Anakin Skywalker may very well be one of the best things that’s ever happened to Obi-Wan Kenobi, but that doesn’t keep him from finding the kid’s utter preoccupation with and focus on Obi-Wan just a little bit creepy, sometimes, especially given how little attention he seems to pay to Obi-Wan’s wishes and his teachings.

63.) Crush: He’s as surprised as anyone when Siri Tachi quarrels so violently with her Master, Adi Gallia, as to just up and leave the Jedi Order (to take up with a man suspected of piracy, no less!) – sure, the girl has a ferocious temper, and some . . . issues . . . with both the Jedi Code and the rules that govern/prohibit knowing reproduction, among the vast majority of Jedi, but she’s also extremely passionate about being a Jedi and enormously attached to the Order because it is where Obi-Wan Kenobi makes his home – yet, in an odd way, he’s also somewhat relieved, given that she never really has seemed to give up on her hopeless crush on Obi-Wan.

64.) Resent: Garen wishes he could resent people like Bail Organa, Sabé Dahn, Padmé Amidala, for being allowed to be so obvious, so forward, with their affection for Obi-Wan, when he must keep his love for his friend secret from Obi-Wan (and most of the rest of the galaxy, too), but the simple truth is that he likes the Alderaanian Crown Prince (the man is warm, funny, smart, and he brings Obi-Wan out of his shell and gets him to consider the larger picture, beyond the narrow bounds of the Jedi Order and what the High Council might be willing to share or even to regard), he adores Sabé (also highly intelligent and funny and loyal and Force but doesn’t she just feel like to the way that Obi-Wan does, in the Force?), and he feels sorry for Padmé Amidala, who is so caught up in her love for Obi-Wan that, much like Siri Tachi, she is so utterly unwilling to let go of it that he has a feeling she will miss out on much of her life, in the pursuit of something (and someone) she can and will never be able to have.

65.) Relief: Garen is far less surprised by Siri’s return to the Jedi Order than he is by her abysmal taste in Padawan learners – personally, he would be not at all surprised to learn that Ferus Olin arranged for the death of his first Master, and Quinlan seems all but convinced that this is what must have happened – and so he heaves an enormous sigh of relief when the High Council is finally forced to wise up to the fact that Olin is not at all what he appears to be and casts the boy out of the Order.

66.) Arrangement: He has no illusions about his relationship with Quinlan Vos – they are, as Quin generally puts it (with one of his trademark smirks), friends with benefits – and he knows that their arrangement is neither anything approaching exclusive nor permanent, so he is that much more surprised and dismayed when he discovers that his first response to his rather cheeky friend’s declaration that he is going to seduce Siri Tachi, to give her a reason to stop brooding about Ferus and certain other things she can’t have, is neither fondly tolerant amusement nor understanding for Quin’s wish to help her stop brooding but rather a sort of pained fury and jealous possessiveness that is not at all like himself and which forces him to stop and reconsider both his strange relationship with Quin and his lingering dislike of Siri Tachi . . . after which he is not only forced to conclude that he has grown both far closer to Quinlan and more dependent on their arrangement than he had thought possible or likely, but to acknowledge the necessity of extricating at least part of his sense of himself and his place in the greater scheme of things from his awareness of his relationship with Quin, which eventually results in the two of them gradually drifting ever so slightly apart.

67.) Hell: From now until the day he dies, he is convinced that he is going to think of Geonosis every time he hears someone invoke the concept of hell . . . and he is quite firm in his belief that only his desperation to help save Obi-Wan is responsible for seeing him through that quite literal hell on earth.

68.) Scream: Though the first battle is something of a shock, the actual Clone Wars surprise him not at all – Garen has been waiting for something like this to happen for years, now, even if he never thought it would happen on a scale quite this epically huge – and he finds it bitterly ironic that the Jedi starfighter corps begun by his Master and killed by some no-name reactionary in the Senate is essentially what the Senate begins to scream about needing to have, once a state of civil war against this so-called Confederation of Independent Systems has been officially declared.

69.) Attrition: He feels sometimes as if this entire conflict is little more than a thinly veiled war of attrition aimed specifically at the Order, for far too often is seems as if not an engagement or an action occurs in this war but that they lose someone or several members, and the Jedi Order can so little afford to absorb such loses that it’s difficult to avoid the thought that the fighting is far less about rebelling about the Republic than it is about trying to covertly undermine and destroy, piecemeal, the organization that is most responsible for the continued existence of the Galactic Republic as a democratic institution.

70.) Mourn: It’s difficult to focus enough to truly mourn for a woman he’s never particularly liked when so many other good beings have either already died or are still dying, seemingly ever day, on the battlefields, as this terrible, interminable conflict drags on, but he finds, to his surprise, that Obi-Wan’s aggrieved pain and his own (somewhat startling) sense of regret is enough to carry him properly through the funerary wake held in Siri Tachi’s honor.

71.) Protect: Though Quinlan and Obi-Wan have both assured him (more than once) that Dooku is, in fact, a Sith Lord now – stylizing himself as Darth Tyranus – even after all of these years and all of the atrocities, Garen still finds it hard to believe that a man as honorable and as fair and as loyal as he remembers Dooku being truly has betrayed both the Jedi Order and the Republic he once fought so hard to protect.

72.) Change: The demands of the war – all of the skulking in shadows and pretending to support the enemy and walking seemingly arm-in-arm with the Dark Side, as demanded of a spy of the Order – seem to quite literally be eating Quinlan alive, and so Garen is hugely relieved, when he finally gets Master Tholme to admit to him that Quin has someone on the other side who cares for him enough to not only act as an anchor, of sorts, for his soul, but who Tholme is pretty sure will be willing to change sides solely for Quin, whenever his cover is finally blown past the point of salvaging, with Count Dooku and the Separatists, and he’s forced to openly come back to the Temple.

73.) Bereft: Somehow, it’s not at all shocking to learn the truth about the Supreme Chancellor (in fact, in retrospect, he’s more surprised that no one caught on to the fact that Palpatine and Darth Sidious were, in fact, one and the same, earlier on in the war); however, while Obi-Wan being the Chosen One and Anakin being the Sith’ari and the two of them together being some kind of natural balance of the Force are also far less than startling, to him, than the fact that Obi-Wan and Anakin are together as a couple now in all senses of the word, though he is of course happy for his friend, Garen can’t help feeling somewhat bereft and cast loose of his personal moorings, after learning the news, and a small part of him finds it somewhat ironic that he should be far more deeply rattled by this one thing (which everyone else seems to have been expecting) than he is at all affected by the knowledge that the Supreme Chancellor was also the Sith Master who masterminded the whole blasted war, in an effort to both to destroy the Jedi Order and to remake the Galactic Republic into his own personal Dark Empire.

74.) Lonely: Garen is glad that Quinlan has Khaleen Hentz, glad that Obi-Wan has Anakin, glad for everyone who has managed to come through this war not only intact but growing in such a way as to have love for another blossoming within them, but /Force/, how he would like to have someone of his own, so that he might not feel quite so miserably left out and lonely!

75.) Mission: There is something about Roan Shryne that reminds of Qui-Gon Jinn, and he’s not entirely certain that he trusts the man, but if Obi-Wan wishes for him to go on a special mission past the limits of known space with Master Shryne . . . well, then he supposes that’s just what he’s going to end up doing, then, now isn’t it, given the persuasive power of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s pleading expressions?