Coming Home
Recycled air met Yan Dooku as he strode through the doors, stripping away the faint ketone sweetness of Coruscant's evening breeze. At first the change was noticeable only to his subconscious, but gradually - as his path led him through cool marble arches and vaults of empty light - he began to feel as if he was breathing in sterility, strong enough to choke.
Anodyne. Flavourless.
After five years in the field he had expected this to be something of a homecoming - that all the chaotic confusion of the many cultures he had visited, the petty passions of their leaders and the grinding similarity of their poor, would make him glad, if only for a little while, to be back in the calm. Instead he felt more like an addict snorting his next shot - relieved to have made it this far, but resenting the need.
There was no-one to meet him. He didn't expect there to be, but still, it was a chill welcome. They no more want me back than I want to be here.
That too was a cold thought, closing over him with familiar pain. Five years of danger and toil. Every mission a success. And I have still not achieved acceptance. He was honestly beginning to wonder why he bothered.
Yoda rubbed his knee - it had begun to ache in the dry cool of the Council Chamber. Many things had begun to pain him this year, his students not least. He looked at his padawan, standing in the centre of the chamber, as rigid and cold as a pillar of ebony, and could not suppress a sigh of regret. "Unorthodox your actions were, Knight Dooku. Condemn them we do not...yet. Only attempt to understand we do."
"Jedi Knights may kill, if necessary. But we do not torture." Master Dikean's tone of voice summed up all the revulsion of the Councillors as he called up the exact data on his padd. "This warlord, Malmer C, you flayed the skin off him and chained him up to be eaten to death by insects - over a period of weeks."
"And you're accusing me of enjoying it?" Dooku had let his hair grow in the five years since his knighting, it brushed his shoulders now, heavy and glossy as a fall of tar. Though Yoda knew it was foolish, he could not help wondering if the sable locks represented an outward sign of some growing inward darkness.
Understand him, we do not, but understand us he does, all too well. Yoda had hoped that experience in the real world might have mellowed his wayward padawan, might have brought him further into the fold. It didn't seem to have happened.
"I find it worryingly excessive." Dikean said, lekku quivering, "When a clean death would have solved the problem just as well."
"A clean death would not have served." Dooku's aristocratic voice was as polished and hard as diamonds, and his deep eyes seemed almost black with indignation. "Malmer C was guilty of genocide, torture, rape, disappearances... a campaign of such terror that if his death had not served as an outlet for the people's rage there would have been riots of such ferocity that thousands of innocents would have been killed. What I did, I did to prevent that. Every man, woman and child on the planet understood that justice had been done. And I knew, when I was doing it, that I acted to save life. Not out of vengeance or hatred. Certainly not out of enjoyment. Out of necessity."
Yoda sagged with relief and some pride. Eloquent, he is. Indeed, the young knight's voice had a power that promised to make him one of the Jedi's greatest negotiators. Now that his apparent taint had been explained away Yoda felt content to work on drawing him in, making him feel more included in the Order. Anchoring him, so that he did not drift away because of his strangeness.
"Correct you are, Knight Dooku - not always pleasant are the deeds the Force asks of us." He thought of his current padawan, Qui-Gon, another quiet, unorthodox boy whom he was going to hurt badly in the near future. "But do them we must if we are to achieve anything good."
The concession softened the grim slash of Dooku's mouth and won a small bow out of him. "Master."
"Concluded then, this session is." Hopping down from his seat made Yoda's knee twinge again, but the pain seemed irrelevant now that his plan was viable once more. He leaned on his stick and limped his way over to tug at his ex-padawan's cloak. "Late it is. Tired you are. Tomorrow you will dine with me, hmn?"
Dooku straightened his cloak, without seeming to realize what the gesture implied. "I would be honoured, my Master."
"Good." Yoda gestured the young knight to go out ahead of him. Solve two problems at once this should. He looked at the set, tense shoulders, the long stroke of midnight from hair to polished boots, and his heart misgave him. Or drive both away. He hoped the Force would forgive him if he was wrong, because neither Dooku nor Qui-Gon would.
"Hold!"
Qui-Gon froze in place and concentrated on the trickle of sweat between his shoulderblades, so that he did not have to see the looks of disgust on the faces of every other Phoenix Clan child.
"Jinn? Would you like to explain exactly what you think you're doing?"
He didn't know why he had this kind of affect on Master Septima, who had infinite patience with everyone else, but recently she only had to look at him for her long, bewhiskered face to spot with irritation.
Beside him Ki-Adi-Mundi stooped his elongated head to whisper "Chuuba, Jinn, not again. Apologize and shut up this time. For our sake, OK?"
But he couldn't do that, not even for Ki. He'd worked every night since his birthday on this, thinking of variations, running computer simulations to test them. He knew his change to the kata met every combination of attacks the somersault was designed to counter, and more. Now he had only to explain the new moves to the Sensei. "You said I was too slow coming through the somersault, Master, so I..."
"You decided you would just drop it." The Dug Master's voice drooled contempt as only her species could and her fan-like ears flattened against her head to protect her from hearing any more of this.
Not *just* drop it! Qui-Gon thought, with a sick, sinking recognition. She wasn't going to let him speak, was she? "I worked out a variation that..."
"This kata was designed by the great Ng-Chi Kit, grand-Master of the Hawkbat style. What gives you the right to meddle with it, just because you're too lazy to practice it correctly?"
Behind him someone sniggered, and the periphery of his vision was full of the smiles of children who know that whatever they do now, it won't be quite as bad as this. He tried not to feel exposed, outnumbered, angry, but it wasn't fair! Septima knew how many hours he'd put in trying to do the kata as it was designed. She knew his slowness was just because a body his size couldn't move faster - not without an application of the Force that seemed excessive. Aren't we supposed to avoid using the Force frivolously? Or is that just when *they* decide?
"I don't see why the somersault's necessary. If I understood, I'd do it if it killed me. But I figured out that..."
Septima shook her head, like a kaadu tormented by flies. "This isn't about the kata at all, is it? This is about you, Jinn, and your desire to be the centre of attention. Don't think you can get away with that in my class just because you happen to be Councillor Yoda's Padawan."
Always, Qui-Gon thought, racked painfully between misery and illicit fury, it always came back to that. But why? Since when had he ever used his status for anything? "This is nothing to do with Yoda!" he shouted, conscious that his near neighbours had taken a step away from him. "And I'm not showing off. I can't do it your way, so I worked out a way I could do it. What's so wrong with that? I just want to understand. If you're my teacher why can't you teach me?"
The Clan found excuses to follow him around the North Wing and watch him as he cleaned the toilets, his braid tucked under his collar to keep it out of the lavatory bowls.
He could hardly blame them. It must be a novel sight - a sentient being reduced to the humiliation of droid-work. And he deserved it. He knew that. He should never have lost his temper and shouted, shaming himself, shaming his Master. I still can't get anything right, can I? My way or theirs, I'm still rubbish.
"I did tell you." Ki said, without sympathy, sitting on a shower stall some hours after lunch was over. He shook his crested head in disbelief, "I mean, kriff, Jinn, what's come over you these last weeks? You've always been a bit strange, but when you hit your 13th birthday and went through the meditation.... Well, most kids come out of that serious. Committed. They work harder. They think more. But you've gone right off the flightpath. What went wrong?"
Qui-Gon sat back on his heels and looked up into his friend's face with disquiet. "Nothing went wrong, Ki. This is me being more serious." The Cetean boy should understand that - he had helped Qui-Gon through the evaluation of his childhood, helped him make the decision he was acting on now. Qui-Gon had felt sure that Ki at least would understand. He put his washcloth down and gestured impassionedly. "I decided I couldn't keep pretending to understand things when I didn't, just to get approval. I'm trying to be honest. Do you know what I mean? If I'm going to be any kind of Jedi, I have to be the kind I can be. I have to be the real me."
Ki grimaced. "This is the real you?" He looked away, examining the tiles for grime, then sighed. "Blast it, Jinn. You don't ever stop asking stupid questions, you interrupt our lessons, lower our collective scores. I didn't want to have to say this, but you're an embarrassment to the whole Clan."
Conviction or anger strengthened him enough to turn back, to meet Qui-Gon's stricken gaze with certainty, his grey eyes cool. "Some of us don't have Masters yet. Take some advice before you drop the Clan's ratings so far that none of us get Chosen. Go back to pretending. Because everyone liked you better as you were."
Long moments after Ki had left, Qui-Gon still sat, stunned. Eventually he picked up his cloth again and turned to begin cleaning the next toilet. A shadow of himself, reflected in the water, mocked him, its lip trembling as if it was about to cry. His chest was tight and the first narrow breath wavered embarrassingly close to a sob. Plunging his hands into the icy water, he concentrated very hard on scrubbing the bowl spotless, and breathing carefully, like a Jedi.
I guess I knew no-one would approve. I should have expected to lose friends. He squeezed his eyes shut until he could open them dry, and thought fiercely, It doesn't matter. My Master accepts me for who I am. Yoda wanted the real me, not the pretence. I don't need anyone else.
Shadow slid over him. He tensed, knowing the weight of it, expecting sarcasm. He didn't know if he could deal with that right now, but he made a gargantuan effort and looked humbly up into Master Starthief's mercilessly lined face. Yoda believes in me. Starthief's hatred doesn't matter.
"Yoda's Padawan." Starthief looked down with a satisfied smile. "On his knees cleaning out latrines. Oh, how the mighty are fallen!"
With anyone else, Qui-Gon knew he would have bitten the answer back. But he was already worthless in Starthief's eyes, and that made him feel strangely free. He was half conscious that he replied more out of the pain of Ki's rejection than Starthief's disapproval, half conscious that it was reckless and impolite in the extreme, but by now he found it hard to care. "Well Master Starthief," he said, scowling, "It's better than handling some of the other shite I get dished out around here."
Qui-Gon raised his head off the floor, a little, just enough to watch his Master's face. Yoda looked so small, so hurt that Qui-Gon couldn't bear to meet his eyes. He dropped his gaze and touched his forehead to the ground again, throat tight with misery. I don't mean to do this to you, Master. Honestly I don't. I don't know how it happens.
"Disappointed I am, Padawan."
"Yes, Master."
"Angry you are, disrespectful, disruptive. Stop, this must."
"I will try harder, Master, I promise."
The stick came down on his shoulder, ungently, "No 'try' there is! Raise you to speak nonsense I did not."
"No, Master."
A long silence. Qui-Gon's water-wrinkled fingers were touched with many colours as Coruscant's evening came alive with floating neon. He crouched, crushed by repentance, and tried not to grow frightened as the pause lengthened into a portent.
At length, Yoda sighed, and there came the rustle and tap of his moving away. "Sit, Padawan. Wish to speak of this to you yet, I did not. But go on like this we cannot. Unfair to the other children it is. Unfair to you..."
Qui-Gon scrambled out of the posture of penitence with a feeling of panic. This was bad - he knew it - but was it even worse than he'd imagined? "Master?"
Sometimes Qui-Gon had dreams in which his Master disowned him in front of the entire Temple. He had grown to know the settings intimately, so the dread began as soon as the dream images shifted. On waking he had always consoled himself that outside nightmares no emotion could bite so deep. Nothing could really hurt that much. But now some of that primal terror bowed him down in waking life as he watched the small green figure limp gingerly away. This is not a premonition, he balled his fists as if he could beat the idea down, You're just overreacting.
"Not good for you, the strictures and traditions of the Temple. Set in their ways some of the teachers are - not good for you, this is." Yoda passed his hands over his ears, flattening them down - the most extreme gesture Qui-Gon had ever seen from him. Qui-Gon's heart speeded, and each breath was a weight he could hardly lift. He edged forward, wanting to touch at least the edge of Yoda's robe, to make a contact that could not be broken. He's not really going to say it. I'm making this up.
"Saw it on your birthday I did. Not good for you, I am."
No! He surged forward, grabbed a handful of the worn woollen cloak which lay pooled about Yoda's feet, and tried to hold on, somehow. How did this happen? What did I do? "No, Master! That's not true! It's not your fault, it's mine. Please! I don't know what you want me to do, but I'll do it. I won't be any more trouble, I swear it..."
"Oh, youngling." Yoda's sigh diminished his whole body, as if everything but the basic truth had been pared away, "No longer can I be your Master. Not fit for each other, we are."
"You liked me better as I was too." Qui-Gon choked out. A tear fell from his jaw, he wiped his sleeve across his face, heedless. What did it matter if the whole universe saw him crying now? It wasn't as if there was a single person in it who thought he was worth anything in the first place. "I thought you..." Believed in me. Cared about me. I thought you loved me.
"Not the end of the universe, it is, Qui-Gon. A new master we will find for you."
"I don't want another Master! I want you!"
Yoda smiled a little, sadly. He leaned down to pry open Qui-Gon's hands in order to push them away. "Attachment is forbidden, young one. You must let go."
The night smelled of high octane fuel. The wind was thin and bitter. With a hand on the balcony Qui-Gon leaned out and looked down at the golden threads of traffic and the long drop, blacker than space. He would have to pick a gap in the flow of vehicles, so that his falling body did not harm some innocent motorist.
I won't be inflicted as a burden on some hapless new knight. I won't have to pretend to be someone I'm not, and I won't have to disrupt the Order any more with my weirdness.
He wondered if he would suffocate on the way down, or live to feel himself break into pieces at the bottom.
Traffic was heavy. He had a long time to wait. Time enough for it to dawn on him that it was almost pleasant out here. The cold was smooth as ointment, and the night was huge and silent around him. If he looked up instead of down he could see clouds scudding on the untamed breeze. Smog was scarcely thicker than a spring mist, driven as the clouds, parting to give a glimpse of the star-spattered opal which was Coruscant's sky. Above Qui-Gon's head wheeled the very heart of the Galaxy, alight with glory.
It's so beautiful.
He hung in the moment, quiet before the grandeur of the night, and his own concerns slipped away from him into the cool air. In the immensity, the Force was all around him, still and glad. It didn't prevent him from suicide, nor did it encourage him, it only waited to see what he would do. And somehow - knowing that it watched - Qui-Gon found he no longer had any desire to jump into the darkness.
Stepping back onto the balcony, his legs trembled and he collapsed onto his knees. Groping in his inner tunic pocket he brought out the pebble he had found on his homeworld. It lit him with soft radiance, and warmed his shaking hands. A focus, a proof that something existed beyond his emptiness. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry..." he chanted, shaking, trying to pull himself back together after he had abandoned all desires but death. I promised to obey the Force, and I never even bothered asking what it wanted.
When he had enough control over himself, he straightened his back - making his meditation posture as formal and perfect as if he was in class - and closed his eyes. The wind sifted through his clothes, pulled at his cloak and sent his braid streaming. Light and warmth soothed his face from the river-stone, and the night pressed in at his back as he opened up all the alienation and gave it to the Force.
"What am I supposed to do?"
There was no answer, only the encirclement of a silent presence whose touch deepened his ragged breath and filled him with relief. He waited a long time, slowly growing conscious of the rough graze of stone under his knees, cramp in his foot, dew settling frigid on his face, and sighed at last, defeated. "I guess I have to figure it out myself."
The Force had not rejected him - that was enough for him to continue to live. But he was still masterless, unwanted, a shame to his teacher and an embarrassment to his friends. He damaged both his Order and himself by staying here...
In the bleak reality of those facts, the answer was obvious, but strange. More frightening than suicide. I have to leave the Jedi.
He struggled to his feet and stood looking at the millions of stars. Only a moment ago this immensity had been comforting. Now he felt bewildered and very small before it. I don't want to be alone.
But he could not deny that he was already alone. In the teeming millions of Coruscant, in the thousands of calm, accomplished knights, he was isolate, unreachable. Maybe it won't hurt so much if I'm not surrounded by people to disappoint.
Dread coiled like a tapeworm deep inside. As he returned to his quarters he noticed how much about the Temple was dear to him, how much he would miss. But I will do what the Force wills, and leave. It's the only way.
Dooku folded his cloak into a thin cushion beneath him before sitting down on the floor. He stretched his legs out under the low table, leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes. Now here was the sensation of homecoming he had missed before. It even smells the same. Touching the wall, his hand displaced the condensation and small droplets pooled around his fingers - he could already feel the moisture soaking through his hair.
Incredible. I grew up in these rooms, in a climate designed for a different species.
Already the pleasant rush of nostalgia was fading. Warm, damp air pressed on his face like a pillow, and as he moved to draw up his legs he caught his shin on the tabletop. A reminder that he had moved on, that he had forgotten what it was like to be so cramped, so restricted. Here, every gesture had to be carefully monitored not to take up too much space.
I felt like a sane man in an undeserved straightjacket, slowly being driven mad by restraint.
That feeling had not entirely passed. He called on the Force to suppress the surge of anger that arose when he thought how willing the Council had been to believe the worst of him. Let them go out into the field and see how desperate the need is for action, not words. If they can criticize me then, they are welcome to.
But no, they would remain in a Temple which was a larger version of this room; stagnant, constrained, complacent, while the Order withered around them and the Galaxy fell. And then, he chuckled at the absurdity of the thought, They will find a way to blame me for that too.
"Nice it is to be home, yes?"
Dooku opened his eyes to find that Yoda had hopped up on top of the table and was watching him, nose to knee.
"It has clarified a great many things for me, Master," he said with total honesty. "But I'm eager to be gone again as soon as possible."
Yoda's twisted grin showed his small teeth. "Impressed by your flawless record we all are," he said. "Out from my shadow you are already. Some rest you have deserved."
Surprised, even touched by the gesture of support, Dooku smiled back. "There is a strong light behind you, my Master. You cast a very long shadow."
"Competing with me you are not."
"No, Master. But I would like, one day, for people to look at me and say not 'there's Yoda's Padawan', but 'there's Yan Dooku.' I am trying to earn my own name."
"Hmn!" Yoda's nose wrinkled and his eyes narrowed, but the lecture Yan had been expecting with some dread was forestalled when the door swung open and a boy slipped through, towing a repulsor-tray full of covered dishes.
"Enough stew you have eaten in your lifetime, yes?" Yoda said, bestowing a measuring glance on both the tray and the padawan who pulled it. "Sent down to the Refectory I did. When 800 years you have, an occasional perk you will also be allowed."
This consideration sat uneasily with Dooku. He levered himself away from the wall with a sigh, recognizing that his Master was up to something. He's being too pleasant. What does he want? It rankled that Yoda could not just pass the time of day with him, but sought him out only in order to interfere.
The boy set the table with an economy of movement and avoidance of accidents that showed he was well used to this place. When he had done, he retired to the corner of the room and knelt there, efficient and self-effacing as a slave. At no point had he even looked at his Master's guest, utterly lacking in curiosity. Little zombie, Dooku thought, suppressing a shiver.
"Two meals you have brought. Eating with us you are not, Qui-Gon?"
"I ate while they prepared the tray, Master. So that I could serve you." The voice cracked and slid between a boy's register and a man's. It had both the roughness and warmth of raw silk, and would have been engaging, had it not been so lifeless.
"Thoughtful that was. Thank you."
This, Dooku thought, with the sensation of his veins freezing, Is what he has replaced me with. This is what he always wanted me to be, and I could not. A young teen, who could sit silent and empty as a droid, and be praised for it. Gods of Light! What are we doing to our children?
"So," Yoda stirred the mass of noodles and raised an ear quizzically. "Your own name, you wish? Always 'so-and-so's Padawan' a Knight is." He poked Yan playfully in the wrist with his chopsticks. "Invisible to the Order they are. Many there are." He nodded vigorously, amused, as the boy, Qui-Gon, returned to put down a small tumbler of green wine by his right hand. "If recognition you wish, a Master you must be."
So that was what this was about, Dooku thought. He could feel his mouth go hard, his jaw set, the pain begin across his shoulders as he braced to fight - this was the home he remembered. Five years of freedom has been enough, and now they want to rein me in. "I have no desire to take a Padawan, Master. The Galaxy needs active knights, not nursemaids."
Qui-Gon stepped up to his side and poured wine, face still averted, any sense of self absent. It was like being attended by the living dead. Anger, birthed out of panic, clutched at Dooku's throat. Imagine being followed through the Galaxy by such a creature. Knowing the boy was watching his every move, silently criticizing his every unorthodoxy, running to the Council every time he stepped out of line. So perfectly unattached that he doesn't understand the concept of personal betrayal.
"An apprentice you should find, Young One. Good for you it would be. Involve you more in the Order - too solitary you are."
"I like solitude, Master." He pushed his food away. This time he did not have to stay and listen. He intended to keep it that way. "Please don't pretend this suggestion is prompted by concern for my welfare, when really you would use it as a new method to control me." He curled his lip, "Projects. Assessments. Examinations. Having to live in the Temple. Knowing that the child's status is dependant on my good behaviour..."
The Temple was beginning to resemble a giant trap. He had to break the web before he was devoured. Shaking his head, he stood up quickly. "Forgive me. I've suddenly recalled an urgent appointment. I must go."
"Rude you are, Padawan."
"Rude, perhaps." Dooku flung on his cloak, "But very determined. You will not talk me into this, Master, I promise you."
And tomorrow I will take the first urgent mission out of here while I still can.
He slammed the door behind him, pointedly.
Yoda slumped down in front of the wasted meal. For once, in a long career, he felt ancient. He was growing old even by the standards of his own species, and his bones were heavy.
Why so paranoid, must Dooku be? And why - on this night of all nights - so ostentatiously perfect was Qui-Gon?
Sometimes it felt as if the whole Jedi Order existed just to vex him.
Qui-Gon rolled onto his stomach, flattened the pillow with unnecessary violence and sighed. How many hours now until the morning? It had been just past midnight the last time he checked, and that must be... - he found the chrono lying wedged under the mattress and groaned - it was only five minutes ago.
Memories of this evening recurred - being called thoughtful in front of that dark, disapproving Knight. How could Master Yoda praise me for that? The fact was I wasn't... I wasn't really there at all. Couldn't they see that? It was so much easier to go through the motions when he didn't care about them. So much easier to fake perfection than it is to do it for real. But he hated the idea that he could earn approval for it.
No, I don't belong here. Every train of thought came back there, and every iteration caused another jab of sorrow. Why did the night have to be so long? Why couldn't he just get it over with and leave?
Unwinding himself from the tangled bedclothes, he sat up and dragged a thumb over the switch, filling the air with processed light. A farewell note was already composed on his datapad, and he looked it over again without being able to improve on it.
Precisely two things in this world belonged to him - the pebble and a flatpic of his far-off family. Packing would involve putting them in his pockets and walking out of the door.
In the morning - penniless as he was - he could try and find a ship on which to work passage back to his homeworld. But he was not such a fool as to venture alone into Coruscant's spaceport districts at night. There were six more hours till dawn.
Picking up his lightsabre, he cradled it on his knee like a pet it was going to break his heart to leave behind. His right hand gripped the hilt hard, his left lifted and knotted in the long braid behind his ear. He closed his eyes against inner and outer pain. I don't want to go. But there was no other way and he needed to accept that. He needed to meditate, more urgently than to breathe.
"We will open the safe at 7.30 in the morning. At that time you must take the documents and go straight to the Senate. A Security detail will be waiting for you." The young woman pushed back one mouse-brown hair which had escaped from her tight bun. It floated loose again and she plucked it out impatiently. "Knight Dooku, be wary. BTech Conglomerate will do anything to prevent this evidence reaching the Supreme Court."
"I understand. And my ship departs for Malastare when?"
Sealing the force-field behind her, the young librarian followed him from the high security storage to her own cluttered desk. She handed him a datachip with a harried look. "If the Senate approves further investigation you'll leave immediately. Here is your extended briefing. A starfighter will be prepped and waiting for you at docking bay 34."
"You're very efficient, thank you."
She looked surprised, as if he had complemented her on being human, and then coloured, embarrassed. Amused, he bowed, "May the Force be with you," and swept out of the room with a flourish he had practised on princesses. It couldn't hurt to cultivate allies in the Library. There was knowledge there which interested him.
In a few years he might return and slake his curiosity about the past, about methods and techniques abandoned out of simple fear. But now - he stretched, feeling the tension creak along his back - he would work out a little, then sleep, and in the morning he would leave again, free.
At night, the corridors of the Jedi Temple acquired a palpable peace, heavy and soft as a cloak of mink. Lights were dim and the spaces fell away into shapeless distance, warm and still. A few cowled Masters, gliding past noiselessly on nocturnal business, nodded to him but said nothing, reluctant to disturb the earned rest of others. At the knowledge of liberty and in the quiet something eased in Dooku. He sighed, and melancholy settled on him. Formless as the shadow, he didn't even know why he felt sad.
There was someone in his favourite salle. At this time of night? Green-gold light ran along the walls in long, smooth passages of movement which seemed familiar to Dooku, as a personal song is familiar. The sabre's hum did not break the silence, gentle and steady, as if it and the ancient peace were in harmony.
Intrigued, he sidled around the open door and stood, astonished, in the atrium. He barely recognized the boy he had met in Yoda's quarters - a zombie no more - deep in communion with the Force. Everything in him had been transfigured - competence into speeding grace, the oval, non-descript face and empty eyes into an expression of wonder.
And the kata! It was seconds before Dooku recognized what he was seeing, before he stopped bracing himself to accept the showy gymnastics of the Hawkbat form. This is 'Walking with Angels, number 3'. And it was being performed with the predatory strength of a big cat, grounded, subtle, powerful. The boy's movements were so assured and so fine that it seemed almost churlish to complain he had the tempo and the timings utterly wrong.
Absurdly, Dooku found he had a lump in his throat and tears pressed behind his eyes. I thought I was the only one in the Universe who knew this. I thought it would die with me. He had never seen the Sandpanther style from the outside before, and oh! it was elegant.
The kata ended, and the boy - Dooku dredged the name out of disinterested memory - Qui-Gon, took a datapad from his tunic and frowned at it, clear aqua eyes narrowing in concentration. Using the Force to float the pad where he could see it he tried out the opening move of the Fifth Sandpanther kata; 'Parting the waters.'
He learned from a book. Dooku thought, discarding his earlier assumptions like an unwanted coat. That's why his timing is so appalling...
He had not intended to step up silently onto the mat and take the boy's arms to reposition them. It happened out of instinct. At the touch Qui-Gon went completely rigid, and Yan had a fleeting impression of terror, conquered and released so swiftly he might have imagined it, before the boy relaxed under his hands into a perfect stance.
"There," he heard his voice sound hushed in the pause, dark tones oddly uncertain, "You can't see in the picture, but the rear hand is in position to block a cut to the back of the knee."
"How could a hand block a blade?" Qui-Gon rounded on him, unrecognizable as the cowed creature from Yoda's quarters, fierce with curiosity, "It doesn't say this is a form for two sabres."
Dooku took a step back from the intensity, though it delighted him like finding a hearth-fire in a cold room full of candles. Genuinely interested in the forms and unafraid of authority. It was like finding a younger version of himself. He understood now that what he had encountered in his Master's company was an impeccable deceit. A pretence, just as I pretended to be something I wasn't in order to survive my youth. "It isn't," he said, " 'Parting the Waters' is a kata from a time long before the Republic, when sabres were inefficient and could be stopped by armour made from certain alloys. This is a form for sword and shield."
"It's that old?" the boy's face could be subtle and expressive as his style, the awe was easy to read, but beneath it were nuances of vulnerability and decision that Dooku couldn't begin to fathom. Qui-Gon smiled shyly, as if offering his foolishness to be criticized. "When I found it I felt as though it had been designed especially for me."
Yan swallowed, silenced by a shared truth. Yes, that was exactly how it was. That was the trail which lead him into the past - the knowledge that long ago there had been other ways to be a Jedi. Ways that didn't seem to involve him ripping out his soul first.
In the pause a look of bereft calm came down over the boy's face. Dropping his gaze to the ground he stepped back, shamed. "I'm sorry. You must want this salle, and I'm in the way. Please excuse me." He tried to bow - Oh no you don't! - and Dooku forestalled him, catching his shoulder. Again there was a frisson beneath his fingers; snap of tension and then a relaxation as if the boy's very cells could not decide between fear of exposure and yearning for comfort.
"Stinne Kritanta," Dooku said impulsively, "Who taught me this style, was a very old woman. Crippled. I have never sparred with another student of the discipline. Stay and practice with me, if you will." He was charmed by how easily the boy's Jedi mask fell. There was a real person under there after all, full of eagerness and life.
"....And I still don't know what I did that was so wrong." At the end of the long tale, Qui-Gon gestured with his mug. Around him the Refectory dreamed in pre-dawn twilight. At a far off table a newly arrived Master/Padawan pair were eating in quiet exhaustion before retiring to try and catch up with Coruscant time. Even the droids, floating up to refill Knight Dooku's mug of caf and his own juice, did so silently, their running lights dim.
Qui-Gon couldn't remember when he'd last talked so much, or actually felt as though he was being listened to. It was a luxury he seized with both hands, hardly able to stop. "I mean the Hawkbat style is designed for people like Yoda, right? He's small, he has to fight off the ground. Um...and the twirls and somersaults are like, well, misdirection. You can't see where he is, and as soon as you do he's somewhere else." He grimaced at his inarticulacy - he hadn't imagined he would ever get the opportunity to say this to anyone, so it was somewhat unrehearsed.
But Dooku nodded, smiling. The gash of his mouth still looked cruel, but Qui-Gon was willing to bet that was just physiognomy, not a reflection of character. "Indeed," he said, "Master Kit, who invented the style, was a Sullustan. For someone that size it is a perfect style. The madness is that is considered the only Jedi style. Those of us unsuited to cartwheeling in the air are considered to be either incompetent or in active rebellion."
"Master Septima was so angry!" Qui-Gon burst out. Everything welled up in him - the injustice, the disownment, the decision to leave which was still lying poisonous on his heart, trying to turn this unexpected gift into a new bitterness. He pushed it down. Even if it broke him trying, he would not spoil this rare time of comradeship by remembering how soon it was to end. "What did I do?"
"Imagine," Knight Dooku had the most beautiful voice, chocolate brown and soft as velvet. He leaned back and his umber clothes and hair blended with the darkness, leaving his pale face rimmed with shadows, reflective and sinister, "Imagine that a famous writer wrote a captivating poem, perfect of its type. A thing of beauty. Down the years many people were enriched by it. It had its own truth." His eyes were so dark they seemed all pupil, intense enough to be a little frightening. "Now imagine some unproven nobody coming along and putting their own lines in, dealing with this perfection as if somehow they could make it better, regardless of the will or intentions of the original author. Would that not be sacrilegious? Would it not be an insult to those who loved the poem as it was?"
Put like that it was so obvious Qui-Gon didn't know how he could have failed to see it. He had taken someone's work, their art, tried to break it and remake it in his own image. No wonder Ki and Septima thought it was nothing but disrespect. No wonder he had grieved them. He bowed his head, feeling guilty for the first time, because finally he understood what they had known all along.
Knight Dooku reached out and ruffled Qui-Gon's mop of hair - like him it wouldn't stop growing, too long again. It felt strange to be touched by something other than a stick. He wasn't sure if he liked it or not.
"They don't see what we see, Qui-Gon. Katas are not poems, not stationary vessels of ultimate truth. They are devices to teach us how not to get killed. If they don't serve that purpose then of course they must be changed." The smile again, its gentleness strange on a face designed by nature to intimidate. "One day your variation of the form may save your life. But it would perhaps have easier on you to keep it as a secret to yourself."
More than you know. Suppressed misery crested and broke over Qui-Gon. He could no longer ignore the steady lightening of the sky outside the Refectory's huge windows. Dooku's hair was touched with blued-steel highlights as the early shift lamps flicked on. There was a rattling of plates as droids began to lay the long tables. If only Septima had given me an answer like that... I wouldn't now be leaving the Jedi.
At the sheer agony of that thought he wanted to throw himself at Dooku's feet. Tell him I've been disowned. Beg him to take me on as his apprentice. Surely, if he did he would be following Master Yoda's plan. And it would be *so* good! But how could he? Dooku's panic at the thought of taking on a Padawan had been so strong during the earlier meal that Qui-Gon had felt it in his own chest, a pressure compressing his heart to coal. A trap closing. It was something Dooku could not do, any more than Qui-Gon could continue to pretend to belong. He understood that. I can't ask him to lose his very self just to save mine. Not for me. Not Unless...
The six o' clock chime fell on Qui-Gon's hearing like an executioner's footstep. He squeezed his eyes shut and dug the heels of his hands in the sockets to conceal a momentary dampness. Please let me be wrong about leaving. Let him say something that'll make me stay. Please, Force, give me a sign. Tell me what to do.
Dooku pushed away the dregs of his third cup and stood. "And now, alas, I have a mission." He folded his hands in his sleeves and bowed low, "It was an unexpected pleasure, my little brother."
This is my sign? Qui-Gon got to his feet, suddenly furious with everything - Dooku for being so blind, himself for being such a coward. The Force - You give me hope and then you take it away?! He breathed deep and tried one last time. "When will you be back?"
"If all goes well, not for a couple of years. You'll be on missions of your own by then."
Not likely, Qui-Gon thought bitterly,I won't be here at all. He did his best to bow and grate out the traditional blessing, but refused to watch the man walk away. Instead, sullen, doomed and very lonely, he returned to his room to change clothes, and leave the message and his lightsabre on a carefully made bed.
When he reached his father's house he would com and talk to his friends, but if he did it now there would be inquisitions, delays, questions. The Council would get involved. Yoda would get involved. In the long process of dismissal he would lose his nerve and be forced into some solution no-one wanted. Better to go immediately, and hope they would forgive him.
Nor did he want to go in anger. As he walked towards the door he trailed a hand along the wall and felt serenity, solid as stone beneath his fingers. It wasn't as if the Force had taken anything away from him, after all. It had given him a few hours of comfort instead of leaving him to a night of anguish. But now he should let that moment go and accept the next just as willingly. Things were as they were, and he had to deal with them as they were.
Out of a back door, onto the path which would take him to a small taxi firm. He knew a driver there who could give him a lift to the spaceport. He patted the wall of the Temple again and then turned his back on it. This was an adventure. The will of the Force. He should be content. Gritting his teeth to stop the tears, he walked away.
An early rain was just ending as Dooku launched his speeder into the morning. Glimpses of sunshine made mazes of reflected light through the lanes of traffic, and a rumour of rainbows confused far distances, hanging between the silvered towers. The air was almost fresh, with a tang of wet metal and adventure. The knowledge that he was playing with something not entirely safe added relish to the over engineered beauty.
He had been over every inch of his speeder checking for bombs or tampering. Without result. He had not consigned himself to some form of transport where the driver could be suborned. Therefore the threat - if there was one - would come from outside, and he would be ready for it.
Unobtrusively, he joined a slow moving queue heading for the Government buildings. There was still no sign, either physically or in the Force, of any pursuers, and he relaxed his vigilance slightly. Perhaps young Jocasta had been exaggerating the danger. Or perhaps an attack would occur on the ground, outside the Senate where it could be disguised as random political violence. Or... Truth was, there were too many possibilities for it to be worth calculating risks, but this moment at least seemed safe enough.
Oddly, the prospect of his imminent mission no longer seemed quite so attractive to him. Spending a couple of years infiltrating the corrupt businesses of the Gran had looked such a fascinating exercise last night. He couldn't imagine what had changed to dull his interest. Possibly mere fatigue was draining the emotional satisfaction out of this escape. Talking to Yoda's Padawan through the small hours of the night had, maybe, not been such a wise idea.
No suspicious movement showed in the lines of vehicles. Sunlight gleamed fully now on wet landing platforms, sending up plumes of steam. Why does my Master continually pick pupils with whom he has no empathy? he wondered, unable to shake the image of the boy's parting unhappiness. Will this one survive apprenticeship, or will the Order succeed in smothering him; turning him into what he pretends to be?
The worry perturbed him. Why could he not leave it alone now? Qui-Gon Jinn was no concern of his. Yoda's Padawan, Yoda's problem. What difficulties he had could be resolved by others... Yet he could not deny that moment of communion in which the boy had offered him a smile. A gesture of reckless trust, like a wild creature coming tentatively to his hand to be fed.
Approaching the Government sector he tried to concentrate on the patterns of traffic flow, the great shining stillness of the Force. This surely was one of the danger-points of his route. But still he found himself thinking more of the child than of his own safety.
Perhaps I'll contact him and talk him through the katas. It seemed little enough to venture, and he owed it to Master Kritanta to pass her knowledge on to the future. After a thousand years of dormancy the Sandpanther style would become a living tradition once more. Yes. He smiled, feeling a relief in his chest as if something he was struggling against had come lose. That's what I'll do. It wasn't much. He could spare that much attention. And while I'm at it, I can at least give him an elder brother's advice on how to handle the old troll.
If the boy could be trusted not to go blabbing to his Master whenever Dooku raised an unorthodox opinion it might even be pleasant to have a fellow Jedi to talk to; a confidant to whom you were not always having to explain your own culture...
The turn off to the Senate loomed - a snicket between high buildings whose walls fell away into an abyss of darkness. He swung the speeder into it, accelerating to maximum. Here. the Force told him, interrupting his reverie. It will be here.
Out of the shadows of the canyon, like a monster of the deep, rose a gunship, its ion cannon trained on him. He fell back into the calmness of the Force, blissfully, scarcely thinking. He loved this - the danger, and the knowledge that he was equal to it, the fact that the Force brought out of him something very like perfection.
The ion cannon fired, ruby bolt hurtling towards him, he slewed the speeder above it, still plunging at blinding speed toward the gunboat. His speeder could not outrun plasma, nor could he leave this thing at his back to take him out as he slowed for a landing. So he would destroy it.
Imagining the expression on the pilot's face as he realized the Jedi was about to ram him, Yan laughed out loud. He swung the steering yoke minutely, muscles coiling with energy as he waited for instinct to scream at him when to jump.
Now!
Leaping straight up he grasped at the sky as if to fly. Below his feet the speeder ploughed into the gunboat, crumpling, metal shrieking and fracturing as the ship's shields - designed to stop energy, not matter - buckled, sparked and failed. Laser fire speared through the air around Dooku, but he was a small target and whoever the pilot was, he was more concerned with recovering from the impact than with accuracy.
Shrapnel was a greater problem. Severed trim tore a gash in Dooku's arm as he came down neatly on top of the gunboat's cockpit. A minor injury, but it cooled his enjoyment. He threw himself down, seeking purchase on smooth metal, and gouged a hole through the hull with his lightsabre.
Spreadeagled as he was partly over the viewport he could see the Gran inside, the rims of its three eyes showing - violet with anxiety. If he could capture the creature it would do almost more than the documents he carried to destroy its corrupt corporation. He switched his sabre to the other hand and began to cut through the window.
Abruptly the Gran sent the ship into a spin. Dooku found himself clinging onto minor abrasions in the hull, fingertips on fire with strain and pain, upside down above a mile high drop into Coruscant's black depths. Desperate for a hand hold, wind plucking at his cloak and the long fall like an ogre at his back, he reached up and wedged his left hand into the hole he had drilled in the hull. It was still red hot. He smelled his flesh burning. Agony was a shrill white note in the music of the Force.
He was no longer amused.
He cut through the viewport in one long stroke, hooked a leg over the edge. The Gran aimed a blaster at his face, movements preternaturally slow to Dooku's Force-speeded senses. A sabre-flick took the creature's arm off at the shoulder before it could fire. "You can speak before the Senate as you are, or I can carry on," he suggested harshly over the noises of its pain, "You would be more convenient to me with no limbs at all, and it would not reduce your ability to give evidence."
Its skin was ashen, but its face held a look of nobility that jarred through him with the strength of a Force warning. What...! Its remaining hand drove down on a covered red button, smashing the protective covering, driving it into its socket.
I underestimated what Jocasta meant by *anything*, he thought, eyes locked to the Gran's as they exchanged the look of men about to die. It smiled. A mile above the ground Dooku let go, plummeting, as the gunboat exploded, self-destructing in a burst of howling flame. Something hit his shoulder - a blunt snap of pain - and his thigh - sharply hot. Fire washed over him. The air roared in his face as he fell, almost too fast to breathe.
Not dead yet! He thought with determination, twisting to grab onto the ends of his cloak. Anchoring his feet in the hem, ignoring burn and broken bones, he wound fabric around his wrists, spread legs and arms, stretching the black material between them like wings. The updraught caught him with a great whoom of power. The jerk of resistance was like being stretched on the rack. He slowed.
Gods of Light! It was now barely possible to ignore his various agonies, but he must. He thought of the far off ground, the power of the air, and brought all his training to bear in one phenomenal effort, calling the very molecules of oxygen to him, making the wind race and fountain beneath him. He slowed again.
He had to believe it would carry him, weightless as a leaf falling in Autumn storms. If he could levitate stones then surely, surely he could become light himself, light enough to drift down to Coruscant's dark soil unharmed.
At last, driven so far into the Force that he was almost inhuman, he saw the ground beneath him, loosed his feet from his cloak and fell truly, landing in a jarring crouch. It was a revelation just to breathe and breathe again. There was slime beneath his one supporting hand, and walls drove up in blackness to a square of remote sky. A window, hundreds of metres up, reflected golden light from an invisible sun onto the wall behind him.
He felt strange. One leg seemed very cold, and yet his foot was encased in warm liquid, thick as honey. Touching his black trouser leg he found the material was soaked through. Clammy. The wet palm came away crimson. He wriggled his toes and pain lanced from the wound in his thigh. My boot is full of blood, he thought, dizzily.
This was not good.
A whispering came from the shadows, and there slid into the light the points of twenty durasteel spears, albino faces behind them twisted with hatred and dread. Dooku's grip was barely strong enough to kindle his lightsabre - amber as the far-off sun. I don't know if I can do this, he thought in despair, watching the warriors sidle inexorably towards him. Force... Help me!
He rose to face the blades and - at the movement - shock and blood-loss sent him into oblivion more swiftly than any enemy's blow.
"Lad, what you're asking is illegal."
"Not very illegal. And how else can I get home? Please. I can work hard."
Jasha Slecg leaned back against the scaffolding and watched the tall boy from beneath the brim of his borrowed workman's helmet. Soon the real workers would arrive. He would have to be gone by then, but this had proved a good place to sit - an idle labourer eating breakfast - and scan the crowd for possible merchandise.
He had spotted the boy almost an hour ago as he stopped, a lonely little figure in the middle of the huge concourse. Dawn had lit the raised profile and thrown into sharp relief the hopeless, dazed look of the newly homeless. A look of vulnerability. A look that to Jasha said 'saleable commodity'.
If the boy had turned at once to the liners, the first-class transports of the rich, Jasha might have washed his hands and walked away, but he had drifted instead towards the tangle of half-repaired docks where the cargo-pushers, the small time smugglers and the down-at-heel spacers lay docked in a tangle of bricks, gantries and building tools.
Watching him beg for passage to some obscure little farming colony on the Outer rim, his deference and the almost Jedi-like homespun of his drab clothes convinced Jasha that he and his family were dirt poor. Even if the parents were frantic at losing him they would not have the resources for an adequate search.
He was not pretty, Jasha thought, assessing how much risk he was worth. But his thick hair was strokable - a deep brown with amber highlights. His figure was coltish but graceful, and his face ...marketable, the eyes and mouth good. The broken nose might almost make him more attractive to certain clients - evidence that he had survived harsh usage in the past. And the fake padawan braid - a perennial fashion item among children - was a nice touch that he might be allowed to keep. The customers would like the idea that he was a young Jedi.
Taking off his helmet, Jasha straightened his clothes. Satisfied that he looked respectable and trustworthy he tapped out a code on his wrist com. "Caen? Arikyn? Over here. I've found another one."
"I have hard workers among my crew." The purser of the 'Night of Splendour' wore an expression Qui-Gon had become all too familiar with - the haunted, guilty look of a good woman who has been placed in an impossible position. "And, honestly, kid, we aren't going anywhere near that entire sector."
"I..." It was the last ship. The last independently run transport on the grid. More would be coming in an hour, but suppose they couldn't take him either? Suppose the sun went down and found him still here, waiting. Growing increasingly desperate until he accepted Force-knows-what deal with some criminal, or Yoda sent a knight to drag him back in disgrace. And why? Because he would not accept the help he might have if he only asked for it.
But I don't want to have to com my family and ask them for money. I don't want to come home on the end of an invoice for transport costs.
"I can wait until your schedule allows you to divert." He looked up at the woman's discomforted face, feeling as if he was nothing but a nuisance to the whole Galaxy, "I'm a trained engineer and pilot. I can navigate. I have some skill with most weapons, and with healing..."
Her grey eyes filled with pained disbelief. So now she thought he was a liar too? He didn't know what else to say, "I can shift cargo." He was scraping the barrel now - she would probably not appreciate his knowledge of etiquette. "I speak three languages.... I can even cook. A little."
"We just can't." She pulled a handful of dataries from an inside pocket and held them out to him in a gesture of finality. "Here. Take these and go to a public com. Call the Coruscant Security Force. They can help you."
The credit chips were warm and slight in his hand. It didn't occur to him to refuse them - the only kindness she had to give.
"And while you wait, stay in the cafes on the concourse," she finished, looking ashamed, "Where there are plenty of people."
He watched her hurry on board with a feeling of disbelief. Why wasn't this working? If the Force wanted him to leave Coruscant, why was it not helping? The ramp retracted, and the hatch sealed. A moment later he was buffeted by the great rush and suck of air as the ship rose straight up, turned and was gone. Last of the outgoing ships for another hour. When it had gone, silence fell.
Had he been wrong? Was this really not what the Force wanted? If that was so, why did he feel so adamantly that he could not go back to the Temple? If he had not been driven out in order to go home, then why?
"You should put that away, you know." A man's pleasant voice alerted him to the fact that he was standing, lost in thought, in the middle of a deserted hangar, ostentatiously holding out a handful of money. "Even in the daytime the docks are not the safest of places."
"I'm sorry," he ducked his head, the automatic bow due to every adult, "Thank you, sir."
"My name's Jasha," the man said, gently, "You look a bit lost. Maybe I can help?"
"I don't think so." Looking up at the kindly face Qui-Gon smiled uncertainly. Something about this situation was not reading right, and he didn't know what it was. Something about the man's clothes? They were neither rich, nor poor, muted colours, they bore no labels or motifs. Every item was so innocuous that nothing of the personality showed through. Jasha's face was as respectable and bland as his clothes - brown hair, tanned skin, brown eyes smiling emptily, as if all identifying marks had been sanded even from his soul. There was nothing whatsoever wrong with him, and he was offering help, yet somehow Qui-Gon found it hard to breathe. "Thank you."
Sharply aware that the man's gaze had not left his back, Qui-Gon turned away. Am I being paranoid?
Just to one side of the scaffolding along the wall there was a small cafe, a bar surrounded by a scattering of tables and stools, under an awning which had once been striped. In the lull between flights it was largely empty, but a Givin pilot sat at one table like a skeletal revenant and behind the bar a greasy looking human was wiping his hands on the strained cloth over his belly. Witnesses, Qui-Gon thought, and protection.
Why was he thinking like this? Perhaps the purser's warning had poisoned his mind. This was not the pirate outpost he had been sent to infiltrate at the age of nine, where every adult was a source of abuse. This was Coruscant, in the daytime, and he was a Jedi. He should not be afraid.
He bought muja juice, not reassured by the fact that the bartender did not meet his eyes, and sat down.
A few moments later, casually, the bland man set a cup of caf on the table with a cheerful clink and lowered himself into the chair opposite, looking sympathetic. "I heard you trying to find passage home. You're a bit stranded aren't you?"
There had been a man on the pirate outpost - a man called Hobb - who had made Qui-Gon's skin crawl like this. Hobb was...
The flashback came without warning - the sound and stench of a skull bursting apart; the warm cloying splatter as blood and matter hit his face, soaked his clothes, the knowledge in every cell of his body that he would never be clean again. Hobb was dead.
Qui-Gon recoiled from the vision, gasping, and found Jasha watching him with a mask of concern. "And in trouble, I can see. Do you do drugs?"
Mutely Qui-Gon shook his head, trying to understand what was happening. He hadn't had a flashback for two years now. If something about Jasha had triggered one the chances were it wasn't just his imagination, but a warning. He gripped the edge of the table fiercely and breathed, waiting for the sensation of being coated in gore to recede.
"If you come with me I can get you a job. A temporary thing, of course. In a couple of months you can save enough money to get home."
Qui-Gon was not the innocent he had once been, this had the sound of a kind of 'temporary' that devours lives. "What kind of work?" Though he could guess.
"Easy work," Jasha smiled like a shark, "In the entertainment business. Come with me and I'll show you."
He stood up, holding out a friendly hand, the smile around his mouth like a chemically induced rictus. Instantly the Givan 'pilot' was at Qui-Gon's back, silent and intimidating as the newly raised dead.
These were accomplices?! Qui-Gon tried not to be furious with himself for walking into a trap. He was a Jedi for crying out loud! He should have more sense! But at the moment he didn't feel like a Jedi, he felt like a panicky nine-year-old about to re-enact the greatest mistake of his life.
"Caen here will just make sure we're safe, come on."
Jasha's hand closed around Qui-Gon's wrist. His characterless eyes were triumphant as he pulled the boy up.
But this is not Hobb. There are no blasters, and I can take them both out without... He could remember the feel of the darkside on him as he reached out and drove terror and rage into Hobb's skull like a sledgehammer; the boiling abyss of it, the sheer coruscating power.
'Forever will it dominate your destiny. Yearn for it, you do.'
"No!"
"Don't make this hard on yourself." Jasha's hand tightened bruisingly, and something real showed for the first time on his cosmetically altered face - cold impatience.
Torn by fear and fury, poised between light and dark, the present and the past, Qui-Gon felt that his head was splitting. But no, that was what he'd done to Hobb. If he opened his mouth to scream he would swallow the blood.
Behind the bar the shopkeeper turned away, flinching, and Qui-Gon caught the look of ground in shame that dirtied the man more than his stains. He understood suddenly that this was not the first time this place had been used for kidnap. "Please, do something! Call the CSF. You can't let this..."
Along Qui-Gon's back the material of his shirt parted and he felt the faint electrical tingle of the very edge of a vibroblade's field. The Givan's picked-flesh face descended over his shoulder, "Just walk."
Maybe he could just Force-push them away and run? But not here. Not in this tangle of chairs. Fighting down revulsion he let himself be led out through the builder's yard of pipes and railings onto the open concourse.
There. Now he had a chance. He would break left, unexpected, run Force-fast for some place that was safe. And let them go?
On his left the darkness shifted and moved. A cowled Tiw'lek loomed into view, his indigo skin little brighter than the shadow, fingers tipped with scalpels.
They pick up lost children and sell them into slavery or...prostitution. How can I let them go? The realization was like falling over on thin ice - snap of shock and then a plunge into heartstopping cold, I have to prevent them from doing this to anyone else.
He stopped walking and the vibroblade slid along his ribs, leaving a thin red line of agony. "I'm not coming anywhere." What a time for his voice to break - he sounded like a stupid, frightened child. "I warn you that I am a Jedi Padawan, and it will go easier on you if you surrender to me."
Their laughter did not make it easier to control his anger. He looked around for a weapon, panting with horror, most of his mind back there on the asteroid when he had chosen to become a murderer rather than let himself be raped. This is not then. This is now.
But he was terrified that if he reached out for the Force, what would come would be the addictive poison of Darkness, and he would be lost.
"Get moving, kid, or we stop playing nice." The Tiwlek put his hand on Qui-Gon's shoulder and squeezed. The scalpels grafted into his fingertips pushed effortlessly through Qui-Gon's shirt and dug with a warm sting into his bare skin, but he didn't mind the knives. It was the feel of the man's fingers on his flesh that almost made him give in to the Dark side; surrender to a desire to break them all open and leave their entrails strewn about the station as a warning to others. He closed his eyes.
Help me!
The cry was an eruption in his mind; shocking, elemental. Thought stopped in a moment of paralysis, started again with the revelation heavy on it, demanding explanation. Who had called?
Was that his own voice, crying out to the Light side to save him? It couldn't be - the mind that spoke had a greater depth and texture than his - a different accent and timbre. It was the voice of a grown man, crying out in pain and desperation, needing help.
Crying out to me. Opening his eyes, Qui-Gon saw the three kidnappers anew. They were not a re-enactment of his fall into darkness, they were only an obstacle in the path of helping someone else. The temptation to use the darkside had not lessened - he felt its delirious pull singing in his blood, But I am a Jedi with a task before me and I don't have time for this.
He didn't have time for fear or anger on his own behalf, he dropped them, like dropping a heavy load in order to free his sword-arm, and called on the Force. It came, instantly, still and bright, and he pushed the men away, just to get some distance between himself and the blades. They went reeling, caught utterly off guard, and they were still clambering off the floor, gaping at him in disbelief, when he stretched out a hand and called a loose length of duranium pipe to him from the scaffolding.
It came flying, catching the light for a moment like a silver sabre.
"Chuuba!" Caen swore, dropping into a crouch, vibroblade held out before him professionally, "He was telling the truth."
"He's still only a kid," Jasha spat, "Get him."
But Qui-Gon had not waited for him to finish his sentence. The vibroblade was the most dangerous weapon he faced, so he would take it out first. Moving at Force-enhanced speed he closed with Caen, feinted with his bare hand towards the knife as if he meant to take it. Caen twisted away and punched the blade towards Qui-Gon's chest. Expecting the move, Qui-Gon slid aside, blocked the blow at the wrist and drove the pipe with all his strength into the Givan's stomach. As he doubled over Qui-Gon hit him neatly on the back of the head and let him fall.
The vibroblade lay trembling on the plascrete floor. He called it to his right hand, swapped the pipe to the left. A flash of glorious insight reminded him of the kata - now he was equipped with sword and shield - and he could understand how perfectly the form fitted together. An academic joy in this moment of danger.
The Tiwlek was tall. Qui-Gon ducked under the first swipe of his razor-edged hands and smacked the pipe full force into his groin. As the hands came down he used the vibroblade to slice through fingers. Scalpels rang like bells as they hit the floor.
"You...!" the Tiwlek grasped for him with the other hand - a fistful of knives coming straight at his face. Qui-Gon waited till the last moment, vaguely aware of a discordant sound and a large shadow rushing towards him on the right, and then moved inside the blow, knocking the arm aside and bringing his elbow up to connect solidly with the Tiwlek's jaw. It went down, headtails slapping flaccid against the ground.
The racing blur proved to be a dark-liveried swoop, bearing down on Qui-Gon like a tsunami. He spared it a glance, but his instincts told him it was no threat, so he turned away to find Jasha running full pelt in the opposite direction, heading for a distant door.
Oh no you don't! Stretching out both hands, Qui-Gon dug in his heels and pulled with the Force, bringing Jasha struggling and cursing back like a hooked fish on a line. When he was within range Qui-Gon hit him as precisely as he had with Caen and dropped him like refuse on the floor. Putting his weapons down he wiped his hands on his tunic to remove the feeling of having touched filth.
"What's going on here?" The swoop rider clambered off his bike and came close. Taking off his helmet, he revealed close cropped hair and the wary eyes of a military man. A patrol officer of the CSF. "The bartender over there told us you were being kidnapped. That's not what it looks like to me."
Qui-Gon glanced over at the cafe and wondered if the fat man had truly tried to help, or if he'd merely seen that Qui-Gon was winning and called Security to save his own skin. At this moment it didn't matter, he was grateful. It would simplify things. "I am Jedi Padawan Qui-Gon Jinn." he said urgently, knowing he had forfeited any chance of leaving Coruscant unofficially, but in the face of that cry for help, not caring. "My Master is Councillor Yoda. Please take these men into custody and I will give you a statement when I return."
"When you return?" the officer had taken out a datapad and was scrolling through the data on Yoda's padawans. There was just time for Qui-Gon to see his own face flick onto the screen before he had dived past the man and vaulted onto the swoop.
"I have to go and rescue someone. Under Jedi authority I'm requisitioning your transport." He kicked the throttle open, swerved madly as the officer tried to grab a hold, registered the "Here! Hold on!" as an irrelevance and was skimming down the concourse and out into the open air before he had time to think of all the different ways in which he was in deep trouble now.
Yan Dooku awoke to such profound darkness he wondered if they had blinded him. His head was painful enough, and he could not raise his bound hands to his face to touch where the wounds might be.
Cut stone was cold and smooth under his back. If they explored more than a few centimetres to either side the fingers of both hands met air, and nothing seemed to be supporting his overhanging heels against the drag of heavy chain. Chill air smelled of old death - blood and ordure left to rot - and there was a fullness in the silence that, even without his Jedi senses, would have told him that somewhere outside his personal darkness many eyes watched him with malicious delight.
Bound to an Altar, he thought, tracing the outline of it as far as his imprisoned hands would reach. He could have groaned at the cliché. Didn't these people ever get any new ideas? Yet he supposed he should thank them. Lying flat and still must have allowed the blood flow to cease and had probably saved his life. Temporarily, I'm sure.
If he squirmed slightly the datacrystal containing the Senate's precious documents rolled like a heavy stone against the inside of his belt-pouch, and - surprisingly - the length of his sabre-hilt shifted on his hip. On its metal casing there was an imprint of fear and pain so strong it was barbed. Perhaps one of these underdwelling primitives had injured himself on the weapon and restored it to Dooku as a way of neutralizing its anger. Or perhaps their gods were more honoured by the sacrifice of an armed man than an unarmed. Either way, they must have supposed it would do him little good, weakened and immobile as he was.
And they might be right, he thought, feeling the bones of his broken shoulder grind together in a breathtaking throb, the glowing furnace of infection spreading beneath ragged jabs of agony from his leg. Tellingly, his head felt full of light and his body weightless with the threat of fever. They might be right. Even if I can get free in time, I don't know how fit I am to fight.
His best course of action seemed to be to wait for the ceremony to begin and then threaten to decapitate the officiant. Once he had a sabre to their priest's throat he was sure the situation would look less grim.
Relaxing back against the altar he closed his eyes, pleased that the movement of his lids caused no more pain - perhaps they had not put out his eyes after all, perhaps it was just very dark. Hearing was sharpened; he could now detect the susurration of many people breathing; small movements which seemed far away; a trickle and plash of small drips from an unseen ceiling and something new... On the opposite side of him from the breathing there came a scrabble and click, like fingernails on concrete, like claws.
It drew nearer, and with it, like a heavy stench, came the sense of something subhuman approaching, bestial but not quite animal, aware enough to enjoy its own brutality. Without warning, a scream rent the silence, its blood-freezing malignancy echoing from the walls.
Force help me! The realization was a stab in the gut, Corridor ghouls. This was no altar. This was a feeding station. He was not to be sacrificed by a priest with whom he might be able to reason. He was to be eaten.
Qui-Gon drove the swoop more by instinct than training - the security forces model had many more buttons and joysticks than the small things he was used to. As long as he didn't think about it too much, his hands would find the right controls by themselves. So he didn't think. He emptied his mind in meditation, and waited for guidance. When he realized that his heart rose the further down into Coruscant's depths he plunged, he turned the yoke fully and dove unhesitatingly down into the black centre of the earth.
The swoop had a powerful automatic headlight, which cast a circle of blue-white illumination on the rain-slick towers, picking out still-lives as he descended. A lit window with a gambling den behind it. A dingy cafe surrounded by dealers.
Further down - a refugee camp full of waifs from the Galaxy's wars.
Further down - the high security forcefield and open gun nozzles of a Crimelord's garrisoned training camp.
Further down - the homeless, sleeping on fire-escapes, eating granite-slugs, gleaning cast-off rubber and fabrics for their smouldering fires.
Further down - a layer of nothingness, where he began to hear the wails of hunting ghouls.
And at the very bottom - too dangerous even for the criminals and the desperate, the utter desolation in which the legendary underdwellers lived. In the Temple Archives, there were tales of creatures who had infested the very heart of the planet since before records began. Once human, millennia of dwelling in the darkness had mutated them - given them pigmentless skin, reflective, nightsighted eyes, and the meaningless cruelty of the ghouls, whom they worshipped.
Qui-Gon had heard the tales, but he hadn't believed them. Hadn't the Jedi also lived on Coruscant for millennia? We wouldn't have let it happen. We wouldn't have let a whole race of people fall into evil under our very feet.
Nevertheless, he quailed a little when the gaps between buildings grew so narrow he could not get the swoop between them, and he had to get off and face crawling into a gaping, glassless window into the utter blackness beyond. Not for the first time, he wished he hadn't left his lightsabre behind. But maybe I can get the headlight off?
The light was self-contained and easy enough to remove. The power-pack was another matter, deep in the circuitry of the bike's drives. If he got it out, he doubted if it would ever go back in again. Mechanics had always been his worst subject, even when he was calm and unhurried. And the Force was throbbing in his head now, urgent, telling him he didn't have time for messing about with wires.
He pressed the headlamp against the lightsabre charging plate which was built into his belt. It came on instantly, but the readout showed enough stored power only for a few minutes of use. Better than nothing, I suppose. But next time I run away I'm going to take a full emergency survival kit.
The headlight should be held in reserve then. Qui-Gon pushed it into the front of his tunic, took a deep breath - disturbingly moist and laden with the smell of petrochemical mold - and using the Force to sense his way he squirmed into the blackness beyond the empty window.
Hurry! He could hear, almost as a word in his head, the warning of the Force that time was running out. The feeling of panic made it ever harder to concentrate on the small intuitions of direction. Like the children's game, when he came to a junction in the warren of underground passages, he would turn slowly and ask himself 'hot? cold? lukewarm?'. Turning away from those places which made him feel safe, towards peril, he followed his sense of being needed like a thin thread through the maze.
"Help! Help me!"
He had moved automatically towards the voice before he realized it was not who he sought. The Force slackened, like a physical sensation - a current of cold in warm water. This was not his problem.
"Is there anyone there? Please!" Words in a strange accent, but a child's voice, interspersed with sobs. What do I do?
Certainty had grown on him since he heard the call in his head. The voice he had heard must have been that of Knight Dooku. There was a connection between them which had snapped into place over the ancient kata. Hadn't he felt it like a tug in his chest when the Knight walked away from him? No one in the Temple had ever before read him so easily, or taught him so effortlessly. No, he could not imagine who else there was whose cry for help might reach him when he was closed tight in fear as he had been in the spaceport.
In one movement of sympathy it seemed he had involuntarily given away his heart. I don't want to fail him. But there was a child crying in a corridor close to him, and how could he pass her by?
Can't I do both? Warnings crawled along his skin like electric discharge, and his fingers shook, but there was no feeling that he was absolutely forbidden to change course. So then maybe helping one won't mean I'm too late for the other? Maybe I *can* do both! Turning away from his straight path he edged cautiously into the tiny crawlspace from which the voice had come.
There had been a ...cave in, he supposed it must be called, though the debris he pulled away was mostly permacrete blocks, bent girders, industrial waste. As soon as he began to shift some of the rubble the girl's voice had silenced and then returned, frightened. "Hello?"
"I'm trying to dig you out. Are you hurt?"
"No. I just couldn't lift..." A sound of scrabbling and frustration, and he could feel her presence at last as a small flame of life in the abyssal darkness. His questing hands came up painfully against a huge metal joist. The smell of rust was choking, disturbingly similar to the smell of blood.
"What's your name?" he asked, as he felt around the place where the joist had broken in two. The edges were sharp.
"Tia." Her voice lost its despair and wavered, intrigued, "You're strange."
"You can see me?"
"Of course I can," she said, as if her estimate of his intelligence had dropped precipitously, "There are lightspores everywhere."
He narrowed his eyes and looked hard at where his fist should be. With the Force to aid perception he could just see, perhaps, a glimmer like faintly luminous dust, which possibly outlined the shape of fingers. It was not a lot of help.
Something cold touched his skin, like a bundle of sticks left out in the evening dew. They flexed and closed, and only then did he realize he was holding the little girl's hand. "Ew, and you're hot!"
So much for the gratitude of a damsel in distress. Qui-Gon smiled in the darkness. "Can you move away from the joist? I'm going to try making this hole bigger."
Opening himself to the Force set his heart hammering once more. Too late, you're going to be too late, but training had taught him not to care about anything so much that it made him useless. He reached beyond it and linked into the strength of the Living Force. Even on Coruscant life would not be denied. Pouring it into his arms, he pushed the broken ends of the ruined pillar apart, millimetre by painful millimetre. Long before he thought any child could pass through the gap he heard the sound of wriggling, and then she said. "Thank you."
Dazed and sick with exertion and anxiety, he stopped, and the tiny, clammy fingers touched his eyelids gently. "You're blind."
"No, I'm just not..." he didn't know what to say. He lifted his hands and explored the cold, fragile face, feeling lashes come down over huge round eyes. She smelled of damp rock. "I suppose I'm just not human like you."
"Aaaah!" A long breath. Then suddenly she shoved him in the chest. He could hear her backwards steps and frightened breathing. "You're a demon from the sky! You're a demon come to burn us! Stay away from me!"
"No, wait!"
But she was running, footsteps slapping loud against the ceramic floor. The sound led away in the exact direction he should have been following all along. Crawling out of the ruined tunnel he sprang to his feet and ran flat out behind her; catching up in a few seconds. "Please wait. I'm not a demon. I'm a boy...just a child like you."
"You're a demon, like the other one." Her voice had changed. He realized the echoes were different. This had the sound of a much larger space, and a white-hot presence in the Force like many living creatures standing together in silence. Oh Force! Hopelessness settled on him like the weight of all the buildings poised above his head. There are hundreds of them. And if they all think I'm a demon...
"What other one?" he could not sense the presence of another Jedi, but that wasn't surprising, given the overload of other life-signatures. Tia, though, close to him, he could read. No longer afraid, her shy curiosity had returned.
"You really can't see, can you?" Two small hands closed around his elbow and drew him down so she could whisper melodramatically in his ear, "He's over there, tied up, and the ghouls are going to eat him. That's what we do with demons."
Ghouls? Corridor ghouls? Qui-Gon's heart gave a lurch of horror. How could he fight ghouls without a lightsabre? He was one demon-child alone among a crowd of humans. What could he do?
The weight of a thousand invisible gazes began to settle on him. Even without sight it was obvious the crowd were slowly turning to look at him. He had walked into a trap and was caught.
"He's not a demon either," he said quietly, defeated, "Tia, we're only people...and he's my friend."
"Too late now anyway," she said, with a tinge of regret, as the screams began.
Abandoning all thoughts of the future, Yan Dooku called the Force to himself. His control wavered like a haze of air above the fire of his fever, but he struggled on, lifting the lightsabre from his belt and cutting the first of his bonds just as a ghoul's claw came down over his face, smothering him. Nails burrowed into his cheeks as he called his weapon to the free hand and sliced, sightless and breathless, up into the back of its head. It fell on him, a painful weight, and scraped its way to the floor, leaving a trail of spilled brains.
Two more were coming fast, goaded by the smell of carrion. Dooku cut both feet free in a single movement and rolled to the side, shackled by a single wrist. His wounded leg tried to buckle beneath him as he stood. His eyes ached and watered in the golden light of his sabre, as they readapted. His left arm hung useless from a broken shoulder, and agony sang through his frame with a voice more urgent and intense than the Force.
The second ghoul attacked, leaping at him through the air, long teeth aglitter. Stupid animal, he thought, and gutted it as it flew, stepping aside at the last moment to let its momentum take it past him. It landed with a splatter on the feeding platform, just as the third - older and more cunning - leapt from behind to bear Dooku down under its weight. Its long, clammy arms wrapped around him, pinning him. Under the rush and impact, the half closed gash in this thigh reopened, and the bones in his shoulder shifted as they wrenched against the chain. He stumbled, reeling into the altar as the ghoul lowered its long teeth toward his neck, its breath foul on him.
Nnh! Something was tugging at his hand, trying to get the lightsabre away. Delirium pulled at his mind, and he wondered dazedly what invisible presence was trying to disarm him.
"Knight Dooku! Please let go!"
The voice...he had heard it... He struggled out of pain into the light, briefly. Yoda's Padawan. How had Yoda's Padawan turned up here? At the sheer surprise of it his grasp slackened, and the sabre winged from his hand like a phoenix. Am I delusional? But there was the long thrum of a cut, and suddenly the confining arms around him slackened. Weight dropped away from his back. With a second buzz, the restraint around his wrist was severed. Some of the agony lessened in his shoulder.
If this was some fever dream it was a welcome one. He only needed a few seconds to rest, and then he would figure it out. He slid to the floor and lay there, just breathing.
The boy knelt down by his side. Gilded by sabre light he was a picture in gold and brown and cream, like one of those maudlin 'After the Battle' studies in the art galleries in the Upper West Side. He was evidently saying something. Dooku frowned and paid attention with some effort. "What?"
"They have a moat against the ghouls. I leapt it, but they're getting ladders and they'll be across soon. Please, Master, please stand up."
"Bleeding... " Yan indicated the wound in his leg and the boy's eyes went round.
"Oh!" He didn't waste time asking for instructions, but cut strips from the hem of Dooku's robe and bound them with practised hands around the deep cut. Silent and competent. What did he call me?
Like a sorcerer's apprentice singing a spell, the boy put both hands over the bandaged leg and closed his eyes, concentrating. A stream of Force washed cool over Dooku's fevered spirit and he seized it eagerly, directing its clumsy strength into the intricacies of healing. A haze lifted from his vision and he was soon able to meet the worried eyes of Qui-Gon Jinn with a small smile. "Thank you, little brother. If you would?" he held out his hand for help to rise, and got gingerly to his feet, leaning on the boy's shoulder.
As Qui-Gon had said, the platform where the feeding station lay was surrounded on three sides by a deep drop, and on the fourth side by a wall in which a single door led, no doubt, far closer to the breeding chambers of the ghouls than he ever wanted to go. On the other side of the drop the small, pale figures of the underdwellers were seething. Here and there amid the throng an open eye would gleam like a star, and the owner squint, cursing the sabre's light. They had already begun hauling two sections of bridge toward the moat.
"Hard to fight them all," he said, "But perhaps we can negotiate."
"I have another way, Sir." Qui-Gon gave him back his sabre and took the lump out from under his shirt. It was some sort of headlight, and the moment the boy pressed it to his belt, a blaze as bright as burning magnesium burst from it, so strong it filled Dooku's dilated eyes with needles. He controlled his recoil, but the underdwellers did not, they fell away from the headlight as though it was a high pressure water cannon, clearing a space for the Jedi to jump to.
Despite the healing, his landing was jarred, and he stumbled, pain lancing through him. But he grit his teeth and pushed himself up, running - or perhaps lurching - through the light-carved pass. Unaimed spears were hurled at them both, and as Qui-Gon passed the crowd closed up behind him, covering their huge eyes and crying out.
There was a passageway, a dark square in the brightly lit wall. At its entrance Qui-Gon turned, fanning the light over the crowd. "If you go first, I'll follow behind and keep them away."
He put a hand on the boy's shoulder, astonished that they had both come so far, leant down and whispered. "How long will the light last?"
"Not more than 3 minutes, Sir."
"Ah. And how long did it take you to walk here?"
"Twelve minutes," The Padawan looked down at Dooku's gashed leg and his mouth twisted wryly, "I was counting on being able to outrun them."
"Not always tactically sound, relying on the Force," Yan said, the first time he had dared say such a heresy to a child of the Temple, "Plus they may know other routes you don't."
He gave Qui-Gon the sabre again, and took the headlight himself, allowing it to switch off, so they stood only in the gold of the blade. Then he turned to face the crowd. He breathed deeply and called the Force into his voice, strengthening it, making it smooth and pervasive and clinging as steam, so they would breathe his ideas in as gently as the air. "In the time that you were all blinded," he said to them, "The boy and I could have killed hundreds of you. But we did not, because we mean you no harm.
Think on this. If you kill us more will come, looking for vengeance or justice. And if you kill them, even more. You will never be rid of us that way. But if you let us go, we can speak with others of our kind, and return with aid..."
"We don't want you here, sky-demons!"
"Or not at all." Dooku finished smoothly. "More of us, until you have been sufficiently punished? Or we return and tell them to leave you alone? It remains your choice. "
There were small movements through the crowd. The blade's illumination was dim, but just enough for him to see the nearer edge of the sea of faces. They were oddly delicate, pale and sleek as marble. Children entombed in darkness, and turned into stone. At that moment, unsure if they would attack, certain he would not survive if they did, Dooku found himself pitying them. I wish I could save them from this barbarism.
A woman stepped forward - she might have been a chief - she wore a circlet, hammered out of electrical wire, on her hairless head. "And what about our sacrifice?"
"The ghouls want meat. They have it." Dooku drew himself up, the better to look like a visiting dignitary, like her equal. He indicated the three corpses by the stone. "They don't care what kind it is. They'll eat their own species readily enough."
She frowned, and he felt the mood shift from hostility into bemusement. Evidently no sky-demon had previously survived long enough to talk. He searched desperately for the one right thing to say. The one thing which would free her to change the paradigm, to take that leap of faith.
As he wondered, a child behind her reached up and tugged the edge of her plastic-sheet skirt. "The boy helped me, Nana. I think they're only people, like us. I think we should let them go."
He could see that she had already decided, but the girl's words were an excuse, making the moment easier for her. She shook her head, her face all eyes and fragility, but still a Queen to her own people. "Go then, and don't come back."
Dooku bowed as deeply as his injuries would allow, and turned to stride into the darkness of the passageway, conscious of Qui-Gon following like a shield at his back. Only when a bend in the path had cut them off from view did he allow himself to sag against the wall and groan with exhaustion and agony.
The boy caught up and stood nearby, looking concerned. He didn't seem to be in uniform, and with his shaggy hair and dirt all over his face he looked like some sort of nature spirit. A tree perhaps - planted, rooted, content, needing little more than light, air, and freedom to grow as it would. "You did well," Dooku said, his voice shaking with the effort of speech, "But I don't understand how you came to be here. No-one knew... No one knew where I was."
"You called me." Qui-Gon said with utter conviction and a little patience, as if humouring a severely injured man.
"I didn't call anyone. I don't have anyone to call." Force! He was sick. Never in his life had he let that bitterness show, nor should he have done so now, because the boy's sky-coloured eyes had darkened with hurt.
"Well, I'm not anyone. Not really." Qui-Gon turned away, his face shadowed, closing up over something as he had in the training room.
Dooku sighed, his mouth was parched and his head full of flames. This was not the right time for any sort of conversation, let alone one of such aching delicacy. He levered himself away from the wall and held out a hand. At once the boy returned, slipped Dooku's uninjured arm around his shoulders and took some of the weight off the lacerated leg. All without command, without saying anything. He really was, Dooku thought, a very peaceful child to have around.
It was pleasant in this darkness and this pain to have someone to lean on. If I called to him, he thought It was along a bond I didn't know I had. One that we will not be permitted to keep. He had not forgotten that the boy had a Master already, and not one to be lightly set aside. No, sad though it was, it was better not to think about such things.
"So, not anyone," he said quietly, "Let's get this data to the Senate, shall we?"
"Coruscant Court are holding the first inquiry into Jasha's child-prostitution racket." Qui-Gon got up to look out of the infirmary window. His hair had been shorn into an impeccable Padawan cut once more, and - though it was too soft to stand in spikes - the severity of the cut made his face look younger, more vulnerable. "I have to go and testify."
Dooku pulled on his outer tunic, wincing a little as the newly healed shoulder ached. He smelled of Bacta. Everything in this place smelled of Bacta. "Surely you've returned to the Temple as a hero?" he asked, "Not many Padawans can claim to have shut down a vice ring and rescued an errant knight in a single morning." He found it touching that the boy had found time to check on his elder brother's health, "But you look forlorn."
Qui-Gon spread his hands on the window as if he wanted to be out there, flying. The sky was high and bright before him, but he seemed more overshadowed than he had been in the darkness. "I broke a lot of rules."
Along a bond Dooku had not asked for - would certainly have struggled against had he known of it earlier - he could feel the boy's calm. It was flat - emotions squashed like a spider underfoot. If he was a tree now he was a tree in too small a pot, branches bound in wire, being slowly, torturously bent to some design that was not his own. Dooku remembered that feeling himself - remembered all the stages of anger and denial; the driven urgency with which he had tried to find even one other Jedi like himself; the despair and deception when he discovered there was none, and he was utterly alone.
Strength had returned to him, and with it a sense of defiance towards the whole Order. The boy was Yoda's Padawan, but he should not be. It was an injustice - a wrongness - and he existed to put such things right. "A man who can't break a rule at need is truly shackled."
The look of astonished gratitude settled things for him. He folded his stola and lay them neatly across his shoulders, buckled his belt over all. "Qui-Gon, I will stand by you. I will stand by you as my Padawan, if you will have it."
His training in observation stood him in good stead. Without it he might have missed the burst of heartfelt longing that blazed for an instant in the back of the boy's subtle eyes. He might have been convinced by the polite and weary smile that followed. Qui-Gon sat down on the adjacent bed, with a look of compassion he seemed to have learned from the soulhealers. "Knight Dooku," he said, but he couldn't hold Yan's eye as he spoke. His gaze was on his clasped hands. "You know I would have come for anyone. It's what the Force asked of me. You don't...I don't want to..." Now he looked up, certain, "You don't owe me anything."
"I am not offering out of debt, Padawan."
They must have been exactly the right words, because Qui-Gon gave a little gasp as if in pain and turned away. "You don't have to do this."
And Dooku felt rage, fierce and huge, for the boy's sake, and for the sake of the boy he himself had once been, in a Universe that had no space for those who saw things a little differently than the norm. He closed his eyes and breathed it down, letting the darkness and fire pass out of him like a dragon on the wing.
"Perhaps I want to," he said at last.
"Of twelve infractions of the Code, you are guilty, Padawan Jinn. Broke three Coruscant bylaws you did. And worse - betrayed the trust we had in you, by trying to depart from the Temple without authority."
Qui-Gon stood in the centre of the Council chamber and listened with all the careful courtesy they had trained into him, but his mind was elsewhere. Behind him, Knight Dooku stood, a shadow and silence all the more powerful for being veiled. Would he really say it? Would he make a claim, or now that he had heard what kind of Jedi Qui-Gon was, would he - quite understandably - not want to deal with that sort of irritation?
"Yes, Master," he said quietly, "Yes, I did."
Yoda sighed, and his expressive ears sank. "Consider, you did not, that concerned we might be for you?"
Guilt stung a momentary flash of anger out of him. Weren't you the one who told me 'there is no love'. I don't suppose you would have cared much. And if you had, you would have gotten over it soon enough. "I was going to comm when I reached home."
Yoda's thin lips drew back from small teeth, "And still regret this behaviour you do not?"
He had thought about that. Thought about it hard in the night, when he sat on a bed in the infirmary and watched Dooku float in the glass coffin full of bacta, blood drifting in graceful ribbons through the liquid. "I don't think I can, Master. I think, without knowing it, I was doing the will of the Force."
The gimmer stick rapped explosively against the chamber's marble floor. "Always the excuse that is! Every Padawan prank 'the will of the Force' it is. Stupidly you behaved, Qui-Gon. Killed you could have been, or worse. See your own stupidity you will not, and understand this I cannot!" Yoda slid from his chair and hobbled over to gaze up fiercely into Qui-Gon's face. "If admit your failures you will not, unteachable you become." He turned away, his back bent. "What to do with you, I know not."
"Perhaps I can help there, Master." Dooku took a step forward. It put him at Qui-Gon's shoulder, his aura as calm as night, cool amid the tension. "If we are to discuss the Force's Will, we must surely address the issue of the training bond the boy and I seem to have developed."
"Unwelcome this is to you, Knight Dooku?" Yoda's question seemed genuine, but there was a gleam of satisfaction deep behind his green eyes. Qui-Gon's heart faltered when he saw it, suddenly understanding the game his former master was playing. This has been his plan all along. To get Knight Dooku to offer for me, thinking it's his own idea. That's why Master Yoda didn't mention me at all, at the meal. He had to control his breathing to stave off sudden grief, But when Dooku finds out he's been manipulated, he'll hate me for being a party to it.
"It is not unwelcome, my Master." The tall knight smiled a wry and charming smile. "Indeed, if you find the boy unteachable, allow me to suggest a solution." He looked deliberately at the ring of observant council-members before returning the challenging gaze to Yoda. "Not long ago you were urging me to take a learner. The Force has made it plain which child is for me. I will take a Padawan indeed. I will take yours."
At the indrawn breaths of shock and insult around the room, Dooku's eyes filled with prideful humour. Qui-Gon knew how much he was enjoying wrong-footing them, defying them, and it made him feel sick; because the fact was that they were playing him for a fool. He couldn't let it go on. He had known all along that there was no happy ending for him, and he had been an idiot for briefly hoping otherwise.
He said goodbye to that hope now, turned to look up into the aristocratic face of the man who was too good to be his Master. "Knight Dooku?"
There was another stir of disapproval. It wasn't his place to speak unless spoken to. He swallowed, ignoring it. "I think you ought to know that I'm not Yoda's padawan."
"What?"
"He cast me off the other day. That's why I left. I'm not Yoda's Padawan any more. I'm just Qui-Gon Jinn."
Yoda shook his head in disbelief, and slumped. Something dangerous glinted for a moment in the hot darkness of Dooku's gaze, as he understood. He drew himself up and smoothed the long fall of his black cloak until every crease was a statement of excellence, then he looked from his towering height down on Qui-Gon's resigned despair. "We have this in common then," he said, "Nor am I Yoda's padawan any more. I am Yan Dooku. Let history remember us for who we are."
Qui-Gon folded his hands in his sleeves and clenched the fingers together so hard they hurt. What had happened? Not the rejection he expected, but certainly something. Something a little frightening. There was a shadow of insult and hurt over the knight that made him seem almost sinister, even in the swirling light and brilliance of Coruscant's noon.
"Since this is clearly your will, as well as that of the Force, Master Yoda, I take Qui-Gon Jinn to be my Padawan Learner," said Dooku, his words edged like scalpels. "Please forward the records of his transgressions to me, and I will deal with any punishment required."
"Glad I am, of this partnership." Yoda said, holding the knight's gaze, "Glad you will be also. Be mindful of your feelings, my student. Your anger will achieve nothing. Go now and meditate. May the Force be with you Master Dooku."
Dooku strode out of the room, and after a moment's hesitation Qui-Gon bowed and followed. He had to run to catch up. "Knight Dooku, Sir. Please! What is it?"
The tall knight stopped. With extreme gentleness he placed his open hands on the wall and bowed his head, breathing in the pattern of the 'arch of peace' meditation. Qui-Gon stood very quiet beside him, recognizing a man at breaking point. Even so he must have looked, when Master Starthief came upon him after Ki's words. Deliberately, in sympathy, he settled his pulse, put aside his concerns, and joined the meditation.
"Officious..., meddling..., dishonest old troll," Dooku snarled at last, "Someone should teach him he's not the very Force itself."
Qui-Gon had a sudden vision of Yoda as the Force - stretched out into particle thin-ness so that he could touch and guide all things. 'To my voice you will listen, young Jedi.' Despite uncertainty, he couldn't help laughing. He felt strange, disorientated. Both nervous and elated.
Sighing, Dooku stretched out a long arm and patted him on the shoulder affectionately. "Thank you for telling me. I should never have trusted you again, if you hadn't."
"So," Qui-Gon took a deep breath and let it out, "Is everything all right?"
His Master straightened up. "The Order is stagnant and manipulative, the Galaxy decays, the Senate goes downhill daily. But between you and me, Padawan, yes. Everything is all right." The smile was back, charming as ever, "Shall we check the mission roster, and see how soon we can get out of here?"
Qui-Gon laughed again, and joy filled him up like wine. "Yes, Master," he said. "Yes please."
The End.
