The Sailor and the Stars by Hth He always thought beaches were romantic. Suns setting over the ocean, birds gliding on the wind, all of that. He had that in his head from somewhere. The Force only knows where. Not from me. I grew up by the ocean; my father was a deep sea diver on Hyline. Sand and jellyfish and the constant threat of hurricanes - that's what I remember about the sea. I much preferred the stars, even then. I wanted to fly. Which I have, of course. The life of a Jedi involves nothing if not one ship after another, endless travel, seeing the stars from every possible angle. Here is what I have learned about stars: they become less beautiful as you come closer to them. They lack context, a place in a pattern. I don't know what drew me to this isolated place, this half- primitive fishing village on the remote planet of Aldeli. The sea, I suppose. There must be something in my blood; my father may have worked with submarine vessels and rebreathers, but somewhere in my ancestry there were sailors, and they passed more to me than blue eyes and broad shoulders. They gave me, I like to think, this faint recollection of wood and rope and sail, the sway of waves under my feet, the hush and gasp of sea against shore. The smell of fish, the chill of spray and rain soaking even through my boots, the ache that begins above my elbows and is anchored in the center of my back - even these things are familiar, comfortable, if not pleasant. Hard work. Tangible reward. Food. No lightsabers. My neighbors here are aware that I am a Jedi, and they even know what that means, more or less; a Jedi Knight was here forty or fifty years ago to advocate for them in a trade dispute with a large business, so to them a Jedi is authority, education in the ways of the wider galaxy, justice. It earned me some respect, in the beginning. But after two years, they know me best for other accomplishments. Qui-Gon, the storyteller with a hundred voices. Qui-Gon, the tallest and strongest of them, who can climb a mast in seconds, hang by his knees while he mends a tear in the sail, jump down to the deck without rocking the boat an inch. Qui-Gon, who had his sea legs the moment he stepped on board, Qui-Gon the fisherman. It feels even better than I would have expected, to be esteemed for what Qui-Gon Jinn can do rather than for what a Jedi is expected to do. No, I do not miss active duty at all. I only miss Ben. He always thought beaches were romantic. To me they mean sweat and pain and labor and surrender and life - is that romantic? Possibly. Those were the very things I always treasured, the things I hoped we would share together. The days are hot on Aldeli, but the nights are chill, and we take the boats out after dark, when the fierce sunlight doesn't drive the fish further down into the cool of the deeper waters. Any man will feel small, with the ocean under his feet and the stars above his head - even a Jedi Master. That's the thing we've forgotten, in Coruscant. How small we are. When I fight the winds and the sails, haul up the nets, steer by the light of one lamp and a thousand stars, I remember what it was like in the beginning, when I was just discovering the Force, learning how to move within it. Learning why to move within it. I don't know that the view of the stars is all that much better from Aldeli than anywhere else. But I have laid on the coastal rocks here and looked up at them until the morning grey obscured their light, and it filled something in me. It restored my joy, my awe, my gratitude. All the things that an man tends to lose as he grows old. Especially after his heart is broken. I can identify a handful of stars and recreate the night sky of Dagobah in my memory around them, a sky I knew almost as well as I do Aldeli's. Better than Obi-Wan, probably. He has the heart of a scientist, a scientist's harsh practicality as well, and stargazing does not suit him as well as starcharts do. Occasionally I slip and think of him in the past tense, but I stay mainly on guard against that mistake. He is not dead. On the contrary, he is twenty-one years old, the most promising apprentice in the order, and studying with the head of the Council. Such a bright future. As for Master Jinn's future, if he has his way it might look a very great deal like this. Ships, nets, time measured only in calm summers and stormy winters, the stars over his head where they belong. I had my fill of being a Jedi three years ago. I was Jedi enough that day to last me forever. Oh, but they could be proud of me that day. The way I wove my concentration, my iron-shod serenity around myself, smothering every yearning, sighing breath of Force inside me so he would not hear and would never know. I went to the launch pad to see him off, and I touched him, but only my palm against his. We stood against our hurricane of emotion, hand to hand, and I saw that look on his face that I had not seen in months, the eyes behind his eyes closed, the distance between us impassable. He saw something quite similar on mine, I am sure. How noble. How virtuous. "Yoda is wise. A good teacher," I told him. Hating Yoda in that moment as much as or more than I ever had, for holding me to a bargain I made thirteen years earlier, when everything was different. He smiled, and it was very nearly his old, flashing smile. "That might be interesting." "But he won't tolerate your insolence the way I do." No, he won't be charmed by it, proud of your courage and your uniquely wicked wisdom. He won't love it in you, love the way you juggle your words and wear your honesty unclothed. "Yoda is Yoda. Guard yourself." Maybe it was bad advice. We were supposed to teach each other trust. Well, we did. I trusted him. He trusted me. I got inside his silent self-preservation, inside the rage and fear beneath that. I stripped him of his bad habits, his mental defenses, his unboyish cynicism, and I loved what he was underneath all of that, unequivocally, unconditionally. And then he was stolen from me. No matter that I once agreed - *thirteen years earlier* - to let Yoda finish his training personally. Aldeli has helped me in that regard. Given me my sense of eternity again, of the vast sweep of the Force and the universe. It is harder, when I lie like this with the sound of the surf in my ears, counting Aldeli's stars, feeling the heaviness of near-exhaustion in my body, to cling to my righteous anger. He was never mine. Nothing ever was, or could be. I understand that on nights like tonight, the ebb and flow of time, the transience of it all. Obi-Wan was in my life, and then he was gone. There is no right and wrong in that, no Light and Dark. It happened. It's true. My anger is inconsequential, so small, altering nothing. I can let go of it on nights like this. That's why I stay here. For the wind in the sails, for the context of it all. Because there is a tranquility in me here that I know will vanish forever, if and when I go back to Coruscant. If and when. Just the thought of it - just the name, *Coruscant,* my erstwhile home - I feel my tranquility running dry. What they took from me there - it may have been inevitable, but it's been three years, and I can grieve just as deeply for it now as I did then. Not just Ben. Even my memories of him are tainted by the fear that I betrayed him, that he left without understanding that I was just as changed as he was by our year together - our thirteen years together, but particularly by that final year. I lost my faith. In the Council, in the Code, maybe even in the Force - at least it's different now, I feel the Force differently than I did before. More intimately, more powerfully perhaps, but with a strong undertow of loss and fatalism. That's what I miss most - more than Ben asleep in my arms, more than my whole past, sloughed off perhaps forever. The Code used to make me a Jedi, used to be my goal to strive for and my reason to live through the years of imperfection and self-doubt and regrets. Until I stood in the center of a ring of Jedi and swallowed my hard-won, sustaining pride to softly plead my case. Leave him with me. I am not the teacher Yoda is, but he flourishes best where he has love on his side. Leave him with me. I am twice the Jedi I was before him. We teach each other. Leave him with me. The Light Side is compassion. Let us be happy. And they crucified me on the Code. //There is no emotion....// //But what we feel for one another- //There is no passion... //Dammit, listen to me! //This is as much for you as for the boy. //This is a *punishment*? //This is a lesson to be learned....// It leaves my head some of the time, but never for long. Their voices, cold with purity and correctness. Me, begging - *begging* for their intervention - capable of that for his sake, but not capable of saying goodbye to him. Never once telling him that what I felt for him was love. Sometimes I wonder what the Force has in store for us. If we will meet again, when we are both Jedi Knights, when so much has changed that we see ourselves only dimly in each other's eyes. I don't have the gift of foreknowledge, not reliably. Not like Yoda does, or even Obi-Wan. I have intuition, senses that I can't explain or predict, but that never lead me astray. Sometimes, in the stillest moments of the night, I can extend my awareness almost far enough to touch him. I know he is alive and well. I know his power has grown. Sometimes it is enough, just to know those things. Most of the time, I don't wonder. My future is fixed - I think. Jedi have never agreed on the truth or fiction of free will. I am against it, personally. Struggling to accept my life is easier than struggling to forgive...the Council for their cruelty. Myself for my cowardice. For letting him down when he trusted me and no one else. This is turning into a very dark night, in so many ways. I haven't had a night this plagued by the past in months, and so I can overlook the little jump of pleasure my heart gives when I hear the bells tolling, the signal for the torches in the village to be lit. Bringing a ship in safely from the island will distract me. In my heart, I am still a Jedi. However troubled my heart is, I can protect someone from the jagged rocks and the darkness. I can see the winding parade of torches coming from the village long before I can make out human shapes carrying them. No matter what the hour, when the bells ring out from the island where starships land in this part of Aldeli, the lights will be brought, the visitor welcomed with food and fresh water. That's how I came here, two years ago. Invited in, my boat pulled firmly ashore by strangers' hands. This reminds me, just as surely as the stars do, of what the Force should mean. Light when the darkness is dangerous. Hands outstretched when your travels are at an end. Trusting someone whose face you can only see by flickering firelight. I am glad to join, to be shoulder to shoulder with these people who have always made me welcome in their lives. Tall as I am, I wade the furthest into the sharp, cold water, waiting for the captain of the little ferry to throw out the rope, to let us help pull the vessel onto a soft place on the beach, someplace where the rocks are too small and blunt to puncture the wooden hull. The wind has picked up, in the space of moments, and the roiling of the water around my thighs is surprisingly powerful. Not powerful enough to drag me under, by any means, but it exerts a pressure anyway, and a part of my mind is imagining what it would be like to accept this, too, as another manifestation of the implacable will of the Force. To surrender to the rhythm of the water, to slip under, to...not die, but vanish. To shed the last vestiges of my past - name, title, history both sweet and bitter. The wind is suddenly loud, too, crying in my ears, but the sound is coming from inside my head, and I know it's too late. Too late to vanish. I'm coming back. Everything's coming back. I don't know what that means. It's intuition. I only know that my two years of peace have drawn to their close, and I'm back where I began. I am wet and cold and tired, and the wetness on my face has the warmth of tears as well as the chill of seafoam, and I am back at the beginning. Palm to palm, ready to say what should have been said all along, to change the past. On the rail of the ferry, his arms spread out for balance - perfect balance, light and rock steady, although the wind is shaking everything, churning the water, billowing his robes around him. I am back at the beginning. Even if I couldn't feel him like the sun in my head, I would know him by his leap off the rail, the sharp twist he makes like the spin of a thrown knife, the way he slices through the water with hardly a splash, comes up again. Maybe he swims, or maybe I run. We find ourselves back at the beginning, stars before us and behind us, and I press my hands to his, both hands this time, and he's pressing back so hard that it's almost a game, almost both of us trying to push the other over, crash us into the ocean. The water is at my hips, his belly, and crashing everywhere, raining on us even though the sky is clear. His eyes shine, and his smile cures three years of want and sorrow, even half- glimpsed in the darkness. I can see grains of salt caught in his thick hair, glittering like tiny stars. "I love you," I say. It should have been said so long ago. His smile widens, accentuating the cleft in his chin. "I found you." I can't believe in him. I slide my hands up his neck, cup his face between them. He looks different, but in ways that are already becoming familiar as I devour him with my eyes. "How - how did this happen?" He laughs, low and with a hint of his old cynicism. "Impossible to live with I am, apparently." "He sent you away?" I don't know whether to laugh or shake him. What kind of padawan is he, anyway? Did I make everything this difficult when I was twenty-one? "He told me to find my own Master, since I was determined to learn nothing from him." Obi-Wan smiles; I've never seen him smile so widely before. "It's not as bad as it sounds, I promise. You know how he talks. I learned everything I had to learn there." I pull him to me and kiss him, and my mouth is full of salt - my tears, or the sea water. "I should have told you," I say, the words breaking into pieces, easy for him to swallow. "I loved you all along." "I know. I always knew." We kiss, wet and shivering against each other's mouths, while first one constellation, then another, slips below the horizon.