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There were plenty of Jedi who thought Qui-Gon was mad. He knew this. He also knew that many of the clone troopers under his command felt the same, though Rex had mostly trained them out of saying so out loud.
Qui-Gon knew why they thought as much. The Living Force pulled at him, and, in these times of persistent death, it was sometimes easier to just close his eyes, close his heart, and let the Force drag him away to places where he could do good. Too often, Qui-Gon knew that the men on the battlefield would die no matter what he did, whereas if he let the Force pull him away from a fight to fix a bomb shelter in a nearby town or to break up a bar fight before it started, that would count. To the people there, it would matter. Perhaps his calculus was cruel, but it was all he had left in him. He did not think it was madness.
But this? This was definitely madness.
Qui-Gon stared across his meditation mat at the glimmering blue ghost of Anakin Skywalker. There was no holoprojector, no light source, no telltale waver of a recording. This was Anakin Skywalker, and his Force signature, in everything save his flesh.
“Am I dead?”
“No. I am.”
“But Jedi Skywalker, how are you here?”
He spread his hands. In Qui-Gon’s memory, Skywalker had been the tallest, most powerful person he had ever seen. Now, Qui-Gon realized unsettlingly, he was taller than Anakin Skywalker had ever been, and broader as well, made muscular through force by the war.
“I am one with the Force, and the Force, as they say, is in everything.”
“The Force allows you to…”
The Sith believed they could subvert death with their darkness, a sentiment Qui-Gon had always found farcical. The Force wasn’t a demon you could bargain with for power, any more than you could margain with magnetism or gravity. Thinking it could grant immortality only showed how wrong the Sith were, and so having it proven true here unsettled him. But what Sith wanted was eternal power, eternal domination. This, Qui-Gon could tell, was something very different.
“The Force has always been with me more than most, since I was a child. My mother says that it was the only father I ever had. In time, with peace and practice, I was able to truly join with it. With more practice still, and your brilliant connection to the living force, I’m finally able to reach you.”
It seemed impossible, and yet the Force concurred, swirls of green and gold, warmth and swelling string instruments. Qui-Gon breathed it in, feeling certainty settle in his chest.
“So you came to me because I was the only person who could hear you?”
Anakin Skywalker’s smile had made Qui-Gon feel truly seen. Only Obi-Wan and Padmé had ever come close to replicating that feeling. He smiled at Qui-Gon like he was something remarkable, not for anything he did, but for himself. It was a feeling both in the Force and in his heart. Even after all these years, even when the smile came from a ghost, it still worked.
“I came to you because I trust you. I tried to visit Obi-Wan, Feemor, and Ahsoka for the same reason.”
Fourth on the list was no small thing, in truth, particularly since, “you only knew me for a few days.”
“No,” Anakin corrected. “You only knew me for a few days. The Force has been with you all your life.”
It had. It had been with Qui-Gon in the gutters, guiding him to the next bite to eat, to the safest places to stay. It had been with Qui-Gon in the Temple, brighter and warmer than he had ever seen it, helping him to know that he belonged there, as a Jedi. It was in Obi-Wan and Dooku, Aayla and Padmé, Rex and Jesse.
It had guided him, always, and now it encouraged him to ask, “why did you need to come? Why disturb your unity with the Force to speak to me? It is not a matter of attachment, with the light I feel from you.”
Grief washed off of Anakin, and regret. “I would not begin our reunion in darkness and sorrow.”
No. They had time, if Anakin could hold the connection. Qui-Gon always tried to meditate for an hour in the morning, and since they were not in active combat, here on Devaron, they had time. In fact, “is the light of the Devaron Vergence helping you communicate?”
“Possibly,” Skywalker agreed, “though I confess I paid less attention to theory than I should have. I believe, of our lineage, you have the strongest credentials in that area but for Yoda. You have done very well.”
Qui-Gon felt, obscurely, a bit like crying. The Force took the weight of the feeling from him. “Padawan Dooku may outmatch me there. Madame Nu wanted him for the archives.”
“You must be proud of him.”
Voicing a dark thought, one he had only shared with the Force, Qui-Gon said, “I’m no Master to him. I never asked for a Padawan and I wasn’t ready for any student, let alone for one like Dooku, who is both brilliant and troubled. He and I couldn’t be less alike, and I know that I’m failing him.”
Anakin reached out to him, and though there was no flesh to him, the pure warmth of the Force passed over Qui-Gon’s hand.
“I wasn’t ready for Obi-Wan,” he said, “and Ahsoka would tell you that she wasn’t ready for me, even after training Rael. No two Padawans are alike, and often their experiences are unlike yours. My mother said to me, the last time I saw her before I died, that parenting is a lifetime’s worth of surprises and changes. When I asked her what she meant, she told me that you never give birth to a baby. You give birth to a person, and you have to get to know them. Being a Jedi teacher and being a parent are alike in that regard. It is always a surprise, no matter how prepared you are, and you can only parent – or teach – the child you have.”
“I’ve already kriffed it up.”
There was a wry sympathy in Anakin’s smile at that. “I told you already: You aren’t dead, Qui-Gon Jinn. Your future is yours to do as you will. You are learning to be a Jedi Master. Part of that means learning to take responsibility for another, to guide them, not in the way you were guided, but in the way that they need to be led. Can you learn to do that?”
Dooku needed someone who could look at him as an equal, someone who respected him and who he could respect in turn. But he also needed someone to show him that his way of examining the world was not singular and it was very far from flawless. Somehow, Qui-Gon needed to become that person for him.
“I… will try.”
“That’s all anyone can ever do.”
The Force around Qui-Gon thrummed with promise and possibility, but again it encouraged him to ask, “why did you come, Teacher?”
The grip on Qui-Gon’s hand turned cool, and he sensed a wave of grief-regret-sorrow-shame, which washed off of Anakin like the rains on Kamino, constant and drowning.
“I need you to deliver a message for me.”
Of course Qui-Gon had never been his real target; even if he had watched Qui-Gon from love, he did not trust him, think of him as a colleague or ally. He thought of Qui-Gon as a child.
“To who?”
“Tell Obi-Wan, but instruct him to pass the message on to Satine and Ahsoka, and to ask my mother if he doesn’t understand. Tell him this exactly:
There’s always a chip somewhere.”
“A chip?” It was obscure wisdom, but it resonated. Even the most perfect-seeming things were a little broken. Perhaps he meant to invoke shatterpoints, or to direct Obi-Wan to see the weaknesses of the enemy in another way.
“Just so. If he doesn’t understand, you can also ask him where the collar is. He’ll know what I mean.”
Anakin’s eyes met Qui-Gon’s then, and his touch turned to sunlight against Qui-Gon’s skin. “I am proud of you, Qui-Gon. You’ve come very far from the boy I first met on Coruscant, and yet you have kept your faith and your capacity for wonder. I admire that so very much. I know you struggle with the terrible responsibility you’ve been given, to your soldiers and to your padawan, but struggling and failing are not always signs of moral weakness. The only sign of that is a failure to admit your mistakes and rectify them. If you find fixing them impossible, if a weight is too great to carry, you can always ask for help, for someone to guide you. That doesn’t end just because your braid is cut.”
“Do you regret finding me?”
“I regretted two things when I was dying,” he said, “I regretted leaving Obi-Wan, and I regretted that I’d failed my promise to you. I have never regretted that the Force brought me to you that day, and I never will.”
Anakin faded from his vision like mist in the dawn, and the sunlight of him swept over Qui-Gon’s body like he was standing in a beam of it, eyes closed and face turned up towards the warmth. He surprised himself with the wet beading of tears in his eyes.
--
Obi-Wan listened patiently to Qui-Gon as he relayed his message from the Force, and Qui-Gon could tell that he didn’t believe. Obi-Wan had always allowed Qui-Gon to talk about the living Force, had asked questions and encouraged him to pursue it, but to him, the Force was a tool rather than something that used him as one.
“Chips?” Obi-Wan repeated, mild tone disguising both his skepticism and confusion. In the fabric of their former bond, Qui-Gonn could feel both.
“If you don’t understand, you’re supposed to ask Lady Skywalker, and I’m supposed to ask you ‘where the collar is’?”
The Force turned to ozone, the sharp anticipation of a lightning strike. “Anakin said that?”
“Yes.”
“Osik.” Obi-Wan had spoken Mando’a before he’d ever met Qui-Gon, but it had never been part of his regular vocabulary until he’d started spending time with the clones – and in regular covert meetings with the Mandalorian government.
“Why? What does it mean?”
Obi-Wan, in lieu of a response, put a hand to his throat and closed his eyes. He looked sick and Qui-Gon hoped he wasn’t going to throw up.
“Breathe, Master. The Force is all around you.” It still had that dry tinge that felt like Anakin. That was, possibly, Anakin.
“It means,” Obi-Wan said, closing his hand into a fist pressed against the notch at the base of his throat, “that slavers always have a system of control, and if you try and run away before you dismantle it, you’ll die.”
Qui-Gon’s knowledge of slavery was mostly intellectual. He was more familiar with exploitation and poverty in less blatant forms, in the slow slide of people and families down Coruscant’s levels into the darkness and the mud, working until their nails fell off surrounded by toxic chemicals, out of sight and out of mind.
“Which slavers?”
“He means the vode. He wants to warn us that if we mean to free them, there is a trap that will snap shut.”
There was agreement from the Force at the idea, and in Qui-Gon’s stomach a sense of impending dread coalesced into a solid lump.
“Did Anakin say anything else?” There was no doubt in Obi-Wan’s voice now, his faith in Anakin far more absolute than his faith in Qui-Gon.
A nudge of encouragement from the Force opened Qui-Gon’s treacherous mouth. “We also discussed Dooku.”
“What about him?”
He could have lied, some part of him wanted to lie, but Qui-Gon had always trusted in the Force and the Force trusted Obi-Wan. “I believe I may be failing him rather utterly. I didn’t ask for a Padawan. It was not the will of the Force for me to have one, and I don’t understand him. But I now have this duty to him that I must fulfill. He could have died on Umbara and I was the one who left him there.”
“Somehow,” Obi-Wan said mildly, hand finally drifting down from his throat, “I doubt he resents you for that in the least.”
It was true. Dooku had been grateful to be left on Umbara, where he could duel a fallen Jedi over a matter of disrespect. He had never, it was plain, considered the idea that Qui-Gon could have stayed with Dooku. He didn’t blame Qui-Gon because he had stopped expecting better of him.
“He’s a good kid under it all,” Qui-Gon said, “and I haven’t the faintest idea what to do with him. He’s incomprehensible, and he doesn’t trust me and the Force isn’t guiding me. I thought it would show me when I needed to act but that time has passed and it hasn’t.”
“Or maybe it has,” Obi-Wan said, “and the calls were not the kind you were used to.” He had been saying as much for years and Qui-Gon had always interpreted it as a lack of faith.
“Help me, Master.”
“Are you asking me to teach you how to be a teacher? Or are you asking me to teach him in your place?”
Qui-Gon knew that Obi-Wan had been considering the latter. He would have been infinitely more suited to the task than Qui-Gon himself. And yet the Force did not advise Qui-Gon to leave Dooku now. He had a duty, even if it was not one he had chosen.
“Teach me.”
“It’s different,” he said, “for every pair. But one thing that never goes amiss, particularly not with someone like Dooku, is honesty. Anakin didn’t want me any more than you wanted Dooku, and he told me as much. He also told me that he was afraid to fail me and that his reluctance was not because he hated me or was ashamed. You might try telling him some of the things you’ve told me. Particularly that you think he’s a ‘good kid’, and that you admire his loyalty and courage.”
“I didn’t say that.” It was true, though. That boy would have burned to death if he thought it was his duty. It was as admirable as it was concerning. “He already doesn’t trust me. How is he going to feel if I tell him I don’t want him?”
“Do you think he doesn’t already know?”
“Force,” Qui-Gon said, and put his head in his hands. For once in his life, the Force was deathly silent in response.
--
“Qui,” Padmé said, folding her feet underneath her one the couch, “my dear brother. My lovely heart. Why the fuck would I be able to give you and relevant advice on raising a child? I don’t even spend much time with my niblings.”
Padmé was one of Qui-Gon’s favourite people in the entire galaxy. The Force around her had a lick of fire to it that he found entrancing, and she always treated him like a person worth knowing. Most people Qui-Gon knew were more inclined to indulge him than to actually like his company.
“You were a too-noble child with far too much responsibility too young.”
“I was that,” Padmé agreed, “but comparing Dooku and I is like comparing sunflowers and starfish. I was a too-noble child with too much responsibility and loving and supportive parents who would have adored me even if I’d never wanted to be queen. I’ve always known that I was loved unconditionally. From what I’ve picked up about Dooku’s life, from you and the news, he’s never had that.”
Dooku loved his family and his world. Qui-Gon could feel it on him. And yet, on the occasions when he’d met Count Gora, Qui-Gon had been struck by the utter absence of feeling Gora had in turn. There was nothing more to that man than ambition and a disdainful hatred for anyone different from himself. The Force around him was sick and cold. Qui-Gon wouldn’t trust him to care for a plant, let alone with an impressionable child like Dooku.
“No,” Qui-Gon agreed, “he hasn’t.”
“I only have one suggestion then.” He waved her on. “Maybe stop thinking of him as a too-noble kid taking on too much responsibility by choice, like me, and start thinking of him as a kid who’s been abused and abandoned and then, to add insult to injury, had the responsibility of a war dumped on his head.”
“I do hate it when you’re right.”
Padmé laughed. “I’m usually right. That’s why you love me.”
In as much as Qui-Gon loved any individual, it was.
--
Master Jocasta Nu hated Qui-Gon. She had never liked him, even in the years when they had occasionally attended ‘family reunions’ together. Her impression of him had always been that he held too much faith in his own abilities and trusted too little in the words and experience of the ancients. Qui-Gon knew this because she’d told him as much. That baseline dislike had transformed into true hate – as was unbecoming of a Jedi – when he’d been given Dooku as a Padawan. Qui-Gon, who had not put his own name on the Padawan roster, felt this was utterly unfair, but some part of him could not object. If he were a better Jedi, a better teacher, she would not have resented him.
Dropping the stack of requests on the desk between them, Madame Nu gave Qui-Gon a highly suspicious look. “The six most highly rated books on parenting children with mental health challenges in our collection, two general volumes on adoption, Professor Giverius’s The Serennian Family at Home and Off-World, and three back volumes of the Carannia City University Journal of Political Sciences.”
“That’s right,” said Qui-Gon, in lieu of giving her the satisfaction of trying to justify himself. “Everything I asked for was in?”
“What game are you playing, Qui-Gon Jinn?”
The Force around Madame Nu always had a feeling of history about it, more ancient by a thousand years than she herself. It was like the air of an undisturbed tomb, the feeling of delicate and dusty pages beneath fingertips. But in this moment, that still air felt less calm and more oppressive, as if the oxygenless tomb had sealed itself behind him.
“No game,” he said, raising his hands in surrender.
“I’m meant to believe that after more than a year of you jerking that child around like a puppet on strings and treating him with no more care than most people would offer said marionette, you intend to change your path now? I would have to be a fool to take such a matter on faith.”
It wounded more deeply than he would have expected to have the condemnation voiced with such pure confidence and dismissal. “I never asked for any of this.”
“And, by sheer luck of the draw, you were handed one of the most extraordinary Padawans in a generation. Someone who had a plethora of other options in front of him. What have you done with it?”
What would have happened to Dooku if he hadn’t been placed with Qui-Gon? Almost certainly, he would have found another placement. Madame Nu, evidently, would have taken him in a heartbeat on basis of his intellect. His skill with a lightsaber would have been a draw for many more. Perhaps Qui-Gon should have petulantly put his foot down, utterly refused to engage with Dooku and made them reassign him. Doing so would have been both generous and cruel. Instead Qui-Gon had chosen a lesser and longer-lasting cruelty.
But what would have become of the 501st, if Dooku had not been placed with Qui-Gon? What would have happened to Rex, captured by the Separatists? What would have happened any time they had encountered Grievous or Maul? Dooku was already a more serious threat to either of them than Qui-Gon was. What would have happened on Umbara, without him?
“I’ve needed him,” Qui-Gon said, “and I believe I’ve given him too little in return.”
Madame Nu folded her hands on the cane in front of her and regarded Qui-Gon like he was scum on the bottom of her shoe. “Yes, you have. But you are also a Jedi, Qui-Gon Jinn. Do you understand now what that means?”
“Less than I used to, I suspect.”
Perhaps for the first time, she smiled at him. “It means that you will learn every day for the rest of your life. As Master Luan Zya said, ‘the universe is knowable’. You are endowed with the tools to know it, but the only soul in the galaxy who can discover it is you.”
--
Just as Qui-Gon meditated every day, no matter how intense the demands of the war became, Dooku trained every day, lightsaber in his hands as delicate as a gymnast’s ribbon. Afterwards, just as he did after every battle, he cleaned it lovingly. Qui-Gon’s own lightsaber was mostly simple black plastoid, a single piece with a metal clip fastened to it, but Dooku’s always seemed to have a thousand different parts, each apparently more worthy of love and care than anything else in Dooku’s life.
No, that wasn’t fair. There was a meditation in this. Qui-Gon could feel the pleased hum of Dooku’s kyber crystal. If a Jedi’s lightsaber was their life, part of their self, as Qui-Gon’s master had always told him, then Dooku was caring for himself by doing this.
“Padawan Dooku?”
He set the cleaning cloth down with a stuffy care, and straightened each piece of his lightsaber on the table where he had arrayed them.
“Master Qui-Gon? Is my presence required?”
Qui-Gon recalled, when he was not so many years younger than Dooku, training himself out of slipping into lower-level creole so the other Padawans would stop looking at him funny.
“Not now,” Qui-Gon said, “but I was hoping to take up a minute of your time, if that’s all right.”
“Yes, Master Qui-Gon.”
The title was a strange one. Dooku used titles for everyone, of course, except for Dogma, and sometimes Fives and Echo. That was normal Serennian culture. But Qui-Gon had been turning ‘master’ over in his head since his conversation with Anakin, who had always rejected the title. Qui-Gon felt a disconnect from it too, for very different reasons.
What was a ‘master’ of the Force? Could you ever master it? Or was it as Madame Nu – who also forewent that title – said? Being a Jedi was a process of eternal learning. Mastering the Force was like trying to master art. You could get better at it, yes, but the task could never be declared finished.
And, hearing it from Dooku, there was another reason why it bothered Qui-Gon. “Do you consider yourself a member of my house, Padawan?”
He blinked, startled from his formality. “What?”
“I won’t judge you,” Qui-Gon said, “if you still consider Count Gora your family first and foremost.” The last time he’d seen Adan-To Jinn, he’d thrown a plate at Qui-Gon’s head, but Qui-Gon still wore the name. “But the lineage of Ahsoka Tano traditionally considers themselves ‘clan’ in the Togruta sense of the word.”
With a politician’s tone, Dooku said, “Jedi choose to classify lineages in a variety of different ways.”
It was neither an acceptance nor a denial.
“I have not been much family to you, have I?” Qui-Gon asked.
Dooku, baffled into silence, said nothing.
“You probably already know,” Qui-Gon said, “that I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not… I was not ready to be a Jedi Master, and I do not know what you need. Obi-Wan and Rex have both been more master to you than I have. Madame Nu would have been too, if she was allowed.” The Force was humming a tentative approval. “You deserved better. I’m sorry.”
Dooku nodded slowly.
“I’m not sure I can fix this,” Qui-Gon said. “In truth, I’m not sure how much I have to teach you, in the areas you love, and my skills… they’re not suited for this time, for this place. How can I teach you to be a good Jedi, when I’m not one myself?
“If you want, this tie between us can be severed. I would go to the council and ask that you be placed with anyone you wanted. I understand that what I’ve done to you isn’t a thing that can easily be mended.
“But if you were willing to try, I would like to. Not only as Master and Padawan – we’re too close in skills and age for that, I think – but… I think we are two people who are not very alike, and who have a great deal to learn from each other. If you would have me in that capacity, I would have you as well.”
There was warmth, approval in the Force still, but from Dooku, a chill radiated. It carried with it dark and shifting pine forests – Serenno, no doubt – and the howling of wolves.
Padmé had sent him a blog by Serennian dissidents accusing Count Gora of having abandoned a child to die in the woods as some sort of twisted experiment. They’d believed the baby dead in truth, and had not connected the story with the disappearance of Gora’s younger son into the Jedi Order.
Qui-Gon thought of Adan-To, forgetting him in the speeder when he was five, and how his mother had screamed at Adan-To for it.
He thought of Ahsoka, tearing into him for failing to rescue Dooku quickly enough.
Dooku said, “you’re not like Count Gora, you know. He’s never… I don’t think he would apologize for anything. I don’t think he thinks he’s ever done anything wrong.”
“He has.”
“Obviously. He’s a war criminal.”
“And to you. He’s done things that were wrong to you.”
“He doesn’t believe that either,” Dooku said, leaving painfully open the question of whether he believed it himself.
“I do. Of him, and of me.”
“I offered to go back to him once,” Dooku confessed, eyes fixed on the pieces of his lightsaber. “He had Rex and me, and I thought – I imagined that he might want me still, my service or my power or my loyalty.” Not, Qui-Gon noted, his love.
“He was very foolish,” Qui-Gon said.
“Maybe,” Dooku agreed, “but maybe I am too.”
“Perhaps, but not more foolish than I am.”
“More foolish than you,” Dooku said, “because I agree with you. We should try as… something not like we were before. I don’t understand the Living Force. I don’t understand why you let it pull you away. But I do want to. I want to understand why Yoda thought we were so suited.”
“Thank you. There are… things I would like to learn from you. That you should show me, with blade and Force both. I would like to know how your crystal is so happy.”
Dooku took the compliment as intended, a subtle curve of his lip serving as a smile, and Qui-Gon took the opportunity to add, “if we’re equals, but not yet friends… Jedi Qui-Gon would be the best thing for you to call me, I think.”
“Jedi Qui-Gon,” Dooku echoed, testing it out. “I would like to be Commander Dooku, I think. Padawan is an equal title, but… that’s more important, right now. To me.”
Commander Dooku was the title that tied him to the clones, to Dogma and Rex, to this covert war they’d gotten themselves into.
“Then Commander Dooku you shall be.”