Journey's End

by Am-Chau Yarkona
Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon, Anakin, Luke: balance.
Gen-fic. Spoilers for ROTS, and the other movies. Lucas owns the lot, of course.
Unbetaed at this time. I'm not sure what to do with this (everywhere I'm reading only wants slash...), so I'm sticking it up to see what happens.

* * *

"I can't seem to remember owning a droid," Obi-Wan told the boy. It was true, too; he remembered working with several, even some Artoo units like this one, but they had all belonged the Jedi Order, or the Republic, or Anakin. Most often Anakin. Just as creatures, usually of the cute but pathetic kind, had gravitated towards his master, so droids had flocked to his padawan.

Be in the moment, Qui-Gon's voice reminded him, and he returned his focus to the conversation. "Very interesting."

Luke still look curious, but the sand-people hadn't gone far, and the desert was not a place to sit around and chatter. "I think we'd better go indoors," he said. With luck, the journey would give him time to collect his thoughts.

* * *

Reaching out with his mind for Anakin, Obi-Wan didn’t see the first lump of dismembered droid until he had stubbed his tow on it. He sighed. Once, he had hoped that Anakin would learn to tidy up even while mid droid-cleaning session, but that hope had faded into the Force some time ago.

He followed the trail of parts through the rooms which they were—for two more days—sharing as master and pupil. Soon enough, he found Anakin, hard at work and covered with grease, seated at a kitchen table laden with droid parts. Shielding his thoughts to disguise himself, Obi-Wan stood silently at the door, waiting for Anakin to sense his presence.

It took a split second longer than it usually would; but when Obi-Wan rebuked Anakin for it, Anakin replied, "Better than often, then, master. At least I was focused and in the moment."

* * *

Spreading the slightly lumpy white paint over the walls took concentration if one was to succeed in covering them, Obi-Wan found. He moved carefully, never looking at the trunk in which he'd stowed those few precious things he still owned: two lightsabers, a datapad, a rock Qui-Gon had given him, blankets borrowed from Bail Organa's ship.

In one dark corner, an insect with a venom-bearing tail had taken up residence. Obi-Wan found he didn't want to kill it, and instead stunned it with a small Force-flick before throwing it out the single window.

When the walls were painted, he walked over the dunes to Anchorhead, and bargained, begged, or stole the things he most urgently needed: water, a little food, hints about where there might be work. He took jobs here and there, but there wasn't really much to do; so he salvaged droids in the slow times, and argued with the Jawas over a fair price. Occasionally, he hit such a lean time that he went to town and cheated at cards to win a few coins.

* * *

The Healers refused to deal with the feral animals with which the centre of Coruscant heaved. Injured by bad landings or fights among themselves, ill with diseases of starvation or pollution, a steady stream climbed to the balcony of Qui-Gon's rooms, and he would take them in and tend them for a while if he was there.

"Compassion is part of a Jedi's duty," he would say, in the early hours of the morning as he sat with the weak chick of a once-proud hunting race, now reduced to scavenging in a vast conurbation.

"Yes, master," Obi-Wan would reply, and yawn. Eventually, he would give in and sleep, but not before he had learned the lesson: compassion towards others, self-sacrifice, and where others will not act for what is right, you must act yourself in whatever measure you can.

* * *

Luke grew. At such distances, Obi-Wan could not feel Leia's Force-presence, though he knew it must be there; but Luke's was close enough, and known enough, that he could sense the boy with little effort.

An independently-minded child, Luke escaped his aunt's watchful eye more regularly than she would ever admit. At such times, Obi-Wan would find him, playing in the sand or, later, trying to get to Anchorhead. Obi-Wan found him so often that Luke at six decided that he might as well go straight to Ben's hut, and it rapidly became a game of sorts.

At such times, Obi-Wan would snatch the chance to give him a little instruction—but there was little time for more than generalisations before Beru or Owen fetched the boy home. Sometimes that made Obi-Wan sad, because he had loved to teach; but sometimes it made him fiercely glad, because at least Luke would escape whatever mistake had been made in Anakin's education.

* * *

In Anakin's hands, one mechanical thing became another as if both were mere illusion. Obi-Wan had been told that he had once built a pod-racer from parts, but if he had never witnessed the small miracles Anakin could work, he might not have believed it. On one mission, for example, they crashed their light-weight flier, and were faced with a ten-day trek through a mountain pass. Anakin, pleading minor injuries from the accident, asked for a day to rest before they started: Obi-Wan, a little shaken himself, granted it, and allowed Anakin to study the wreckage for while.

Anakin turned the smashed and twisted flier into a serviceable—if drafty—land-crawler, in which the trek took them only six days. "On my return to Coruscant," Obi-Wan said as he surveyed it, "remind me to ask the dictionary compliers to remove the term 'write-off'. Clearly such a thing does not exist."

In his meditation hours, however, he asked the Force to ensure that mechanics were the only thing Anakin found so flexible. He showed signs of regarding the rules and codes of the Jedi order in a similar light, and that Obi-Wan found disturbing.

* * *

More puzzling than the creatures Qui-Gon saved were the ones he took in to kill. A merg stands out in Obi-Wan's memory: a small, dainty beast, black-furred, meat-eating and sharp-toothed, elegant and silent in movement but vocal when triumphant in the kill. Mergs were common as feral animals on Coruscant, living on the smaller animals which fed on civilisation's waste.

Obi-Wan found this particular merg, curled in a corner of the Temple's roof-top garden, mewing pitifully. He hurried it back to Qui-Gon, expecting another all-out attempt to save the creature's life, Force-healing and midnight feedings: but Qui-Gon laid it on a blanket by the heater, and then simply sat with it until it had breathed its last.

Why? he wanted to ask. How is that compassion? But Qui-Gon smiled gently at him, and told him that in time he would understand. "And now, my padawan, it's your turn to do the washing up."

* * *

The Force does not let Jedi slip away. At that time, Obi-Wan had imagined death as an ending: stark, brutish, cold, absolute, and most definitely the province of the Dark Side.

Death is not an ending. Eons worth of Jedi swirl in blue clouds, losing their identity bit by bit; when Qui-Gon visits the living Obi-Wan, a vague but lively creature visits with him, tagging along at his heels. When Obi-Wan is finally allowed to join him because his work for Luke is done, he finds that death is more like song than stone.

Time does not pass here. Anakin joins them, and Luke, and Luke's son, and… Obi-Wan loses track.

* * *

"You left me to die," Anakin says.

Obi-Wan cannot deny it. "I thought it would be better… I didn't think it would take long."

"For Luke to see his father, it took just long enough," Qui-Gon says.

"Completed, the journey is," Yoda agrees. "Balanced, the Force is."

Luke, seeing what he expects to see, smiles, and goes on with his life.