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Rap-rap-rap.
The sound of someone knocking at the door echoed in the small kitchen of the Jinn/Kenobi quarters, but no one rose to answer it.
Rap-rap.
“Obi-Wan?” A voice from outside called.
Rap-rap-rap.
“Obi-Wan?” Master Qui-Gon tugged on their bond slightly, trying to call his Padawan to alertness. “Are you going to say hello to your friend?”
“Yes, Master,” Obi-Wan said blankly, rising to his feet and missing the eyes of his Master narrowing slightly in concern. He pushed on the keypad next to the door and it swooshed open, revealing none other than Bant Eerin.
“Finally,” the young Mon Calamari woman exclaimed, hands on her hips. “I thought you were going to leave me waiting forever.”
Obi-Wan blinked. “Sure felt like forever sometimes,” he said softly.
Bant softened and restrained herself for one second, two, then threw herself at him, arms outstretched for a hug. Adrenaline shot through Obi-Wan’s body, and any lingering tiredness he felt from their long journey just the day before left him in an instant. He instinctively sidestepped and brought his elbow down on the attacker’s back, causing them to stumble. In the next breath he was whirling around and using his forearm to pin them to the wall.
“Obi-Wan!” His Master exclaimed from somewhere behind him.
“Take Satine and run,” Obi-Wan said through gritted teeth. “I’ll hold them off.”
“Obi-Wan, it’s me, it’s Bant,” said the attacker, in a familiar voice, high and trembling. Gradually, details began to filter into his brain. Pinky-orange skin. Bright, globular eyes that were staring right at him.
“We’re in the Temple, Padawan.” Qui-Gon was speaking right at his side now. “We’re safe. Let go of Bant.”
Obi-Wan blinked a few times, and all of a sudden the face that was staring back at him was not a nameless Death Watch soldier but his oldest friend, Bant. He stumbled backwards, releasing his hold and inadvertently bumping into Qui-Gon, who grabbed him gently by the shoulders to steady him.
“Are you alright, Obi-Wan?”
“Yeah,” Obi-Wan said immediately, shaking his head as if to clear dust out. “I’m – I'm sorry, Bant. I must not be awake yet.” He threw in a chuckle that even to him sounded a little weak, but Bant just looked at him for a moment and then relaxed, brushing her webbed hands down her tunics to smooth them.
“You always did sleep strangely,” she teased, seemingly brushing past whatever had just occurred. And she wasn’t wrong – his visions often struck at night, especially when he was still in the crèche, and it earned him a bit of a reputation.
He didn’t know how to respond, so he didn’t. The silence grew as Bant looked at him, waiting for some glib reply, but Obi-Wan couldn’t fill it.
“Are you going to have breakfast together?” Qui-Gon asked after a few seconds. Bant leaped at the opportunity.
“Yes, I thought that might be nice.” She shot a glance towards Obi-Wan. “I’m sure you’ve missed the sweet bean buns.”
A surge of adrenaline rushed through him for a completely different reason now. “Sweet bean buns?”
His mouth watered. In the beginning, he would lie awake at night, stomach grumbling as he wished for just one of them to appear suddenly on Mandalore. Then he got used to his stomach being empty, and they slipped his mind entirely for all those many months until this moment.
Bant laughed. “C’mon, let’s go.”
“Don’t forget your appointment this morning,” Qui-Gon reminded him, handing him his robe. It still felt strange to have a robe again. It was one of the first things he lost on Mandalore. By the end, he hadn’t had any part of his Jedi clothing, just making do with whatever they could scavenge from kind villagers or steal from the mercenaries who came after them.
“Yes, Master,” Obi-Wan murmured, following Bant out the door.
The walk through the Temple was strange, very strange. Everything was bright and cheery and infused with Light, a far cry from the dark, damp surroundings he’d gotten used to. Younglings dutifully lined up behind their crèchemasters, Initiates ran after their friends, Padawans carried datapads through the hallways to their next class, Knights and Masters mingled in the hallways towards the Archives and the salles. Obi-Wan found himself shying away when people got too close passing him. Bant either did not notice or simply pretended not to.
By the time they made it to the nearest dining hall, Obi-Wan was already feeling overwhelmed, and walking through the doors inside only heightened that. It was loud and bustling, being a peak time in the morning, and most of the seats were full.
Bant shot him a look out of the corner of her eye. “Why don’t you grab us a table and I’ll get some food for the two of us. I think I see an empty spot in the corner over there.”
Obi-Wan took the lifeline gratefully and quickly made his way over to the seemingly sole empty table. There were only two seats, and without thinking, he took the one that would allow his back to face the corner and give him sightlines of all the entrances.
It didn’t take long for Bant to return. She put down a massive heap of sweet bean buns in front of him, then continued setting down dishes: a bowl of rice, a rolled tip-yip egg omelette, the hot salty soup that was a staple of his childhood, some pickled fish and vegetables, and a steaming cup of green tea. Her own dishes consisted of fish both grilled and raw, and the marinated seaweed he knew was her favorite.
Obi-Wan blinked at the table in front of him, which was almost overflowing. It was, quite literally, more food than he’d seen in a year.
“I got your favorites,” Bant said, smiling at him as she sat down across the table.
“You did,” Obi-Wan agreed. He couldn’t take his eyes off the food. This would have fed him and Qui-Gon and Satine for a week or more.
She waited until he finally took a bite of sweet bean bun before verbally pouncing.
“How does it feel to be back? I mean, you’ve been gone for… wow, over a year at this point.”
Obi-Wan chewed slowly, only swallowing once he had decided on an answer. “It feels good to be back,” he said. That was what she wanted to hear, he knew. “I missed you all so much.”
Bant looked touched.
“Mainly the sweet bean buns, though,” he added, just because he truly had missed the look of faux-outrage that Bant now sported.
There was a loud clattering noise nearby that made him sit straight up in his seat. His eyes flickered around the room, landing on every person and deciding if they were a threat. At the table next to them, a youngling picked up the tray they had dropped. Obi-Wan blinked and tried to force himself to relax, shirking Bant’s concerned look and taking another bite of his bun.
“So,” he asked nonchalantly. “What did I miss?”
Bant leaned back in her chair. “Big question, hmm…” She thought for a long moment. “Garen won last year’s saber tournament against Poa-Zli, that was a pretty big deal. Reeft switched tracks to become an archivist like his Master, finally. We’ve all been trying to convince him to do it for ages, of course, but finally Master Nu sat him down and asked him why he’d been following her around for a week.”
Humor swirled in the pit of Obi-Wan’s stomach, but it didn’t rise enough to force more than a faint smile on his face.
“Oh!” Bant exclaimed, waving her fish in the air excitedly. “We all completed the Gauntlet!”
For a second, Obi-Wan couldn’t remember what she was talking about, and then it came to him. At age fifteen or species-equivalent, all Padawans had to complete a survival training course: two weeks spent on a remote planet with various climates, little to no gear to their name, all the while being tracked and hunted by Masters. It had for years been referred to among the Padawans as “the Gauntlet,” because it forced them to pass through their limits to make it to the other side.
“That’s great, Bant,” Obi-Wan heard himself say.
“Yeah, it was pretty tough,” Bant said. “I think I went hungry that whole week. So many things kept trying to eat me, instead of me eating them. And Master Gallia was on our trail the whole time. So many close calls…”
Obi-Wan set down his bun, not hungry anymore.
“When are you going to do it?” Bant asked, wrapping a piece of seaweed around her chopsticks. “They’ll probably let you join the next cycle, if you can get caught up on your classwork in time.”
He laughed hollowly. “I think I’ve just had enough of all that for a lifetime on my last mission.”
“Well, maybe,” Bant said doubtfully. “But it wasn’t the Gauntlet.”
“No, it wasn’t.” Obi-Wan’s throat was tight. Blasterfire danced behind his eyes, phantom hunger gnawed at the pit of his stomach, fear clawed its way down his spine. “It was about fifty times worse.”
He stood up suddenly, chair scraping behind him. “I’ve gotta go, I don’t want to miss my appointment,” he said. “It was nice seeing you again, Bant.”
Bant called after him, but he let the hum of noise around him wash over him like a wave as he walked away. He felt very bad just leaving all the food there, but he felt like he might vomit if he put anything else in his mouth just then, and besides, the Temple was extremely good about letting nothing go to waste. Whatever was left untouched would be donated to local soup kitchens, and whatever had been half-eaten would be given to the large variety of animals housed in the Temple, or used for compost.
Still, the guilt continued to follow him even as he walked through the corridors of the Temple towards the Halls of Healing. He had an appointment in the Halls of Healing for a post-mission checkup. These normally didn’t take too long, unless he was really injured, in which case he was probably there before a normal checkup. But he was fine now. He would be in and out in fifteen minutes.
The first sign that he would not in fact be in and out in fifteen minutes came when after taking his height and weight, the Healer Padawan on duty told him that Master Vokara Che would be with him soon.
“What?” Obi-Wan asked, and they paused in the middle of closing the door. “My Healer is Healer Yralla, not Master Vokara Che.”
The Healer Padawan shrugged. “I’m just reading what’s on the schedule here.”
“Okay,” Obi-Wan said, nonplussed but obediently sitting down on the edge of the exam bed, sterile paper crinkling under him.
Sure enough, it was not long before the door to the exam room opened again to admit the Twi’lek Master Healer, Vokara Che. She had been recently named Head Healer, one of the youngest in a long time, and everyone said she had a gruff exterior with a heart of gold. Obi-Wan hadn’t had many interactions with her, but he’d never seen that soft interior and frankly he was a bit skeptical it existed.
“Why are you here? Where is Healer Yralla?” The words escaped his mouth before he could stop them. He was too on edge to think about social niceties, especially after having experienced such deterioration in his conversation skills over the past year.
Thankfully, Master Vokara Che did not seem put off. “She’s helping out with the youngling vaccinations today and asked me if I could take this appointment instead.”
“Why you? Why not another pediatric Healer?”
She smiled mildly. “Maybe I just wanted to meet the young man I’ve heard so much about.”
That was obviously not the answer, but she ignored his narrowed eyes and continued. “How are you today, Obi-Wan?”
“Fine,” he said automatically.
Master Vokara Che looked down at the datapad in her hands for a moment. “You’ve been on Mandalore for the past year, correct?”
“The Mandalore sector,” Obi-Wan corrected. They’d fled from planet to planet as necessary, never able to stay in one place for very long, even Mandalore itself.
Vokara Che nodded and tapped on her datapad. “What were you doing there?”
It was almost certainly written somewhere in his file, but Healers had the annoying but probably useful habit of asking people to explain things in their own words. “My Master and I were tasked with protecting the Duchess Satine.”
“What did she need protecting from?”
“What didn’t she need protecting from… Bounty hunters, mercenaries, Death Watch, wild animals… ” Obi-Wan muttered. It had become almost comical after a little while, the amount of threats against both her life and theirs. Then, as they got closer and closer to succeeding, it grew less funny.
“What was that experience like?” She sat down on a rolling stool.
Obi-Wan frowned. “Hard.”
“Would you be able to elaborate?”
“We didn’t have a lot of food, or reliable shelter, and when we did manage to find it more often than not something else would find us before we were able to enjoy it. It was… It was hard,” he finished weakly.
Master Vokara Che just nodded. “Did you get injured at any point?”
“Of course,” Obi-Wan said, almost scornfully. These questions were making the hair on the back of his neck prickle, and he felt jittery, like his bones were going to shake out of his body if he sat there for too long.
“How?”
“Broke my left leg twice. Got stabbed a few times. I was sick at one point with something pretty bad.”
He was understating all of it a bit. Both he and Qui-Gon had thought that sickness would kill him, though they tried to hide that from Satine (unsuccessfully). There had been fever, shaking, hallucinations, and even when they had food and water he’d been unable to keep it down. It got so dire that Obi-Wan had a vague memory of Qui-Gon praying the last rites over him at one point, though once the sickness finally, miraculously broke, Qui-Gon refused to acknowledge this ever happened.
Master Vokara Che hummed and jotted more things down on her datapad. Obi-Wan tried to lean over to see what she was writing but the angle was wrong.
“Are any of those lingering health problems?”
“No,” Obi-Wan said, which wasn’t a lie so much as it was a… mistruth. Sure, his leg still ached most days where he’d broken it, and the scars from the various stabbings were painful sometimes when he stretched, and he still occasionally started coughing if he breathed too deeply as a result of the sickness, but those weren’t really problems, per se, just annoyances.
Now it was Master Vokara Che’s turn to narrow her eyes at him.
“Time for a full health exam,” she announced, to an immediate groan from Obi-Wan. A “full health exam”, in Halls of Healing lingo, meant an extremely comprehensive examination that was so in-depth it could last hours. Internal testing, head-to-toe scans, stress tests, even a mental health evaluation. He’d only had one once or twice: once as a youngling with the rest of his crèchemates, and once when becoming Qui-Gon’s Padawan. It had been threatened on multiple other occasions, but they’d never actually gone through with it.
Obi-Wan tried protesting, but Master Vokara Che would not be swayed.
“You’ve been gone from the Temple for over a year, Obi-Wan, and by your own admission have gone through physical and no doubt mental traumas,” she said, readying her scanners. “This is necessary.”
Three hours later, after a veritable battery of tests and meetings and exams in which Obi-Wan was poked and prodded and maneuvered and verbally grilled, Master Vokara Che sat in front of him once more with her now-familiar datapad.
“Can we go over some things together?” she asked, looking at him kindly, with no expectation.
Obi-Wan wondered what would happen if he said no, if he got up and left right then. She wouldn’t stop him, probably. He could just walk right out of the Halls of Healing and never have to hear what she had to say. Except then they’d probably tell Qui-Gon, and his Master would be disappointed in him again, and everything they’d rebuilt would crumble, and–
“Okay,” he said instead.
“Your height and weight were flagged when you first arrived,” Master Vokara Che said, looking down briefly at her datapad as it to confirm data she no doubt already knew. “You haven’t grown a bit since your last appointment here a year and a half ago, which is concerning enough given your species and age, but on top of that you’ve lost 17% of your body mass as well.”
Obi-Wan blinked. He knew he had lost weight – it had become even more obvious when he pulled his old clothes out of his closet that morning and he had to tie them much, much tighter than usual – but he hadn’t realized it was that much.
“I’m putting you on a specialized diet plan,” she said. “We’re going to have you come check your weight with us once a week until it’s at a less concerning number.”
“Once a week?” Obi-Wan could not help his exclamation of surprise.
Master Vokara Che frowned at him. “Obi-Wan, this is almost grounds for hospitalization. The only reason I’m not doing that is because you’re right on the cusp and I feel like increased isolation here in the Halls might be detrimental, and more than that, I know it wasn’t your choice to eat like that in the first place. But if the scales don’t trend in the right direction, or if your mind healer indicates something else, then we might have to look at another option.”
She uncrossed and refolded her legs. “Speaking of your mind healer, Healer Denno says he would like to continue sessions with you on a weekly basis as well for the foreseeable future. You went through a prolonged traumatic experience, and it can be good to talk about these things with someone.”
“I don’t need to talk about anything with anyone.”
“Well, Healer Denno gets a bit lonely sometimes now that his Padawan has passed the Trials,” Master Vokara Che said, a slight smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth. “Perhaps you can keep him company once a week.”
Obi-Wan knew he wasn’t going to win this argument either, and he considered it a sign of his hard-earned maturity that he backed down.
“There were a few other things of concern,” she continued. “The puncture wounds seemed to have healed relatively well, all things considered, though there is a small chance we’d have to do an exploratory surgery in your abdomen and stomach if the nutrition issues continue to see if they’re actually being caused by scar tissue. I also want to try bacta treatments on your leg to see if we can improve that to any degree. Since it’s been so long, there’s only so much we can do, but either way we’ll work on pain management techniques there as well.”
Obi-Wan resisted the urge to rub his leg even as it throbbed in time with Master Vokara Che’s words.
“The antibody test we ran confirmed my suspicions of a diagnosis of Petrian flu, which, to be completely honest, should have killed you, and we must have only the Force to thank that you are still with us.”
This was not anything Obi-Wan did not already know, even if Qui-Gon did continue to deny his administration of the last rites.
Perhaps it was Obi-Wan’s continued silence that caused Vokara Che to pause and switch tactics.
“Obi-Wan, is there anything else I or any of the other Healers can do for you?”
He did not say none of your scans and tests revealed the real problem: that Mandalore was the greatest Trial I could imagine. That it feels like I tore my heart in two and only returned with half. That walking the halls of the Temple does not feel like home in the same way it once did. That I feel like a stranger now amongst friends.
Instead, he looked her right in the eyes. “No thank you, Master Vokara Che.”
They held gazes for a long time, each one sizing up the other, before Vokara Che made a tactical retreat.
“I’m going to write up your treatment plan and send it to your Master so he can be informed,” she said, turning off her datapad and rising. “Please see the Padawan on duty at the front desk to schedule your next appointment, which should be next week at the same time.”
She softened then, and tried to meet his eyes once more. “I know it’s hard, Obi-Wan. What you went through is uncommon even for many Knights. But know you have a whole team of people around you supporting you, if only you will let us.”
He did not say anything. She left, and Obi-Wan did soon after. He walked right by the front desk and did not stop.
He didn’t remember walking to the Room of a Thousand Fountains then, like somehow had taken control of his body and simply piloted it around while he watched passively, but when he blinked next he was suddenly there in his old favorite spot in the Room, awash with the sights and sounds of nature.
Especially as a child, he had been enamored with the Room of a Thousand Fountains. It was so tantalizingly different from the dirty urban environment of Coruscant that every time going there felt like a whole other world. Now the sprawling and wild nature of the Room was all too familiar.
He had spent many, many nights sleeping under the stars with Qui-Gon and Satine. Often, their only shelter from the elements would be the trees, or their robes hung between branches, back when they still had them. The crinkle of leaves, the rustle, the quiet swaying – here in the Room of a Thousand Fountains they were a soft lullaby, a promise to the Jedi within that life was near, watching and protecting. On the mission though, those same sounds had haunted him. He would lay awake at night and listen to the noise of the forest around them, senses ever sharp to potential danger that could – and had – creep up at any time. That crinkling, that rustling, that swaying that had in the past soothed him so on Mandalore only brought dread pooling and swirling in the pit of his stomach. He would fester in those anxious, high-strung feelings until he quite literally passed out from exhaustion.
Qui-Gon had asked him about it once, but he had brushed it off. His Master was not one to back down easily, especially from difficult conversations, so it was a blessing for Obi-Wan that Death Watch had chosen that exact moment to launch their next attack against them. That engagement was the second time Obi-Wan got stabbed, and that successfully distracted Qui-Gon from continuing. Then, at least. He had alluded to it a bit on their flight home, little comments about how Obi-Wan must surely be happy to sleep on an actual bedroll now, that he was sure to sleep much better in such luxury as that.
He had not. They got back to the Temple late last night, and though Obi-Wan was more exhausted than he had ever been in his entire life, he lay awake staring at the ceiling for hours. There were no stars to distract him, no branches swaying in the wind, just the quiet hum of the Temple’s internal heating system and the sound of his own breathing. He eventually fell unconscious between one breath and the next, but even there he received no respite. His nightmares were so loud they woke Qui-Gon, who burst into his Padawan’s room lightsaber drawn, as if expecting to find him under attack like Obi-Wan had been in his dreams.
Qui-Gon did not make him talk about it, just quietly bundled him up and made him tea and sat him down at the kitchen table, and they sat there together until the tea had long gone cold and Bant rang the doorbell a few hours later.
“Obi-Wan?”
His head whipped around, locking eyes instantly with Qui-Gon, who was standing tall and serene a few feet away, robe rustling slightly in the wind.
Obi-Wan turned back and stared at the blades of grass between feet and the cascading waterfall down below, refusing to hold Qui-Gon’s gaze, but it did not stop Qui-Gon from sitting down beside him.
Obi-Wan refused to be the one to break the silence first, but Qui-Gon had never been a proud man, at least not in that way.
“How was your morning?”
“Fine,” Obi-Wan said, plucking a piece of grass and twisting it between his fingers.
“Bant told me you left breakfast early, without hardly eating anything, and then you didn’t return to our quarters even hours after your scheduled appointment time. I half thought you might have gotten lost, having forgotten directions after all these months away.” The smile in Qui-Gon’s voice was evident even if he wasn’t looking at the man. “Then I got quite a long message from Master Vokara Che.”
Obi-Wan stiffened, hands freezing near the ground. “Yeah?”
Qui-Gon hummed his agreement. “We’re going to be grounded for quite a while, but I think that will do both of us good.”
Once upon a time, Obi-Wan might have thought that too, but now that he was here, he wasn’t sure. He felt like a puzzle piece being shoved into a spot that didn’t fit. He hadn’t felt like he truly belonged on Mandalore though, either. Maybe it would have been better for everyone involved if he had gone to the Agricorps for good after all.
“Did I make the right decision?” Obi-Wan asked, voice breaking in a whisper. “Am I in the right place?”
“Oh, little one,” said Qui-Gon, invoking the epithet Obi-Wan had not heard in many years, not since before Melida/Daan. Obi-Wan hung on to his words, waiting for the answer that would tell him if he was wrong or right. But instead, Qui-Gon asked him a question back.
“Search your feelings. Search the Force. What do they tell you?”
Obi-Wan closed his eyes and shuddered, feeling a hot tear leak down the side of his face. He tried to think, he did, he did try, but the answers were too big, too complicated for him just then. He felt so small, like the universe and the weight of its questions were crushing him. How could he hold it up? How could he ever hope to try?
“I don’t know, Master,” he sobbed. “I don’t know.”
Qui-Gon put his arm around him and drew him close. Obi-Wan ducked his face into his Master’s robes and breathed in through the tears, leaning into the steady warmth and letting himself be grounded by the man’s presence. They passed untold minutes in that position, Qui-Gon holding firm on the back of his neck and tucking his head into his chest, before Qui-Gon spoke again.
“I don’t know the answer, Padawan,” Qui-Gon murmured, because never, not once, had Qui-Gon made it easy for him. “That is between you and the Force, not I. We will never know what might have happened had you stayed on Mandalore with Satine. You are still with the Jedi now, and the only way is forward.”
Obi-Wan sniffled into his Master’s robes, feeling like a small child in a way he had not been able to in over a year.
“We will never know what would have happened had you gone,” Qui-Gon repeated, and then his voice dropped down to a whisper. “But I am so very glad you stayed.”
And Obi-Wan took a slow, deep breath in, feeling it quiet his mind and soul for the first time in so many months. The only way was forward. The only way was forward.
And then he breathed out, and lifted his head. Home was what he made of it. This was his home once, and it would be again.