Work Text:
The argument begins like so: Obi-Wan sees a hen house in Mos Eisley.
He has a think about them as he goes about his business. He muses. He hums and he drums as legumes fill his cotton sacks. Qui-Gon follows his eye, unseen by the mild bustle of other market goers, across the dusty aisle between stalls to the pen preventing the feathered beasts from escaping their future fates as dinner.
He looks back at his dearest, sweet apprentice with those big blue eyes that have never been as focused on any one thing as they are on those chickens.
Obi-Wan makes three passes by the poultry farmer as he goes about his business, collecting the other sundries he and his unfortunate companion will need for the month. With nothing left to distract him at the end of the process, Qui-Gon stands at his shoulder and watches him count the money left over in his palm.
There is not enough for a hen of his own.
Devastation is not too strong a word for Qui-Gon’s youngest’s face here in this market. He lays a hand that Obi-Wan may or may not be able to feel on his shoulder and gives it a squeeze, but Obi-Wan only puffs up in defiance.
He takes his leftover credits and marches off to purchase some tea.
The argument begins in verbal form like this:
“Maul.”
“Hm.”
“I want chickens.”
Qui-Gon steps between the two young men to get to his usual roost on the far side of the room, on the deep windowsill. He settles in for the fireworks.
“And I want your bones scattered across these wastes while beetles eat away the marrow. We don’t always get what we want,” Maul says.
He resumes picking the broken reed out of the side of the basket in his lap. He’s unpicked a good fourth of it already and has spent the last several days trimming and drying and sculpting and soaking the long spikey leaves that will replace it.
Qui-Gon cannot help but indulge in a smug smirk as Obi-Wan takes a stubborn step forward. He drops his heavy bags of desert peas and tea onto the floor at his feet.
“Maul,” he says again.
“No,” Maul replies.
“Chickens.”
“You already have your cattle. You already have the cat. We struggle enough to feed ourselves and them. The last thing we need is—”
“Chickens.”
“No chickens.”
“I’m no longer asking. I require your carpentry abilities.”
“They are currently at work,” Maul says. “You’ll have to wait until they return from the pasture.”
Obi-Wan stares at him with blue eyes that are nearly silver in the warm tones of his and Maul’s living space. Maul places his sharp cutters down onto the table and pulls the cracking end of a piece of reed out from between its brothers. He dumps this on the floor to be swept up when he is finished with the rest of the basket’s mending.
Qui-Gon swings a foot idly as the cat meanders into the no-man’s zone between Maul’s definitive refusal and Obi-Wan’s blazing silence.
Her name is Chicken Foot.
It is not original, no, and yes, other Tatooine dwellers are more delicate in their naming practices. It is an embarrassment to them to name a tooka Chicken Foot for she cannot help her poor feet. But Chicken Foot knows no better. She comes in to arch her sandy back against Obi-Wan’s legs.
He does not relinquish his gaze.
“Maul,” he says.
“I just said we can’t.”
“I want to sell a calf.”
“We aren’t selling a calf. He’s going to be huge. People will want him as a stud all over.”
“I want to sell a calf.”
“You’re repeating yourself,” Maul says.
Obi-Wan falls silent.
The battlefield rumbles with thunder.
He abruptly picks up his bags of grains and vegetables and tea and swings off into the direction of the underground storeroom out the front door. Maul does not acknowledge his change of course, nor the slamming of the door. He begins threading the new reed into the spokes of the basket.
Qui-Gon welcomes Chicken Foot as she comes over to join him on the sill.
She can see him, even if the young men cannot. He strokes her and she purrs.
The argument is not forgotten, it only simmers. Maul knows this. Qui-Gon can see it in how he checks over his shoulders when he gets up in the morning. Obi-Wan makes a cup of tea for him and stares at him in electric rage while he tests it for poison. He cannot refuse to drink it; water is necessary for all life out here and he ought to know that Obi-Wan would not waste a full cupful on his death. But he is wise to check to make sure that there is nothing lurking in that cup before he swallows.
“You’re angry,” he notes as Obi-Wan turns around to bang things around on the hard stone counter as he moves sliced pickled vegetables and flatbread from the stove to a place where they can both reach them.
Maul has learned to decipher Obi-Wan’s body language perhaps better than anyone Obi-Wan has ever come into contact with. Even Obi-Wan’s initiate playmates, Bant and Siri and Garren, once struggled to read his moods without textual or verbal accompaniment. Qui-Gon would say that he is impressed, but he personally, has always found Obi-Wan to be the most expressive of his padawans.
It is a wonder that so many find him inscrutable with behavior like this.
“Eat,” Obi-Wan says, stooping sharply to snatch Chicken Foot up around her belly. He cradles her in his arms and rocks her like a baby. She preens under his attention and scrubs her face against his chin.
“I’m taking the cattle today,” Maul says, watching suspiciously.
“Fine.”
Maul’s eyes narrow like the cat’s.
“Fine?” he asks.
“Fine,” Obi-Wan pronounces slowly for him.
Their eye contact does not break in any sort of quick way.
“You’re scheming,” Maul accuses.
“Take the karking cattle,” Obi-Wan says.
“What are you scheming?”
“It doesn’t matter to me.”
“You hate when I speak to the cattle,” Maul says.
“They must be walked. They must be free,” Obi-Wan says snippily.
Chicken Foot begins grooming his beard. Neither he nor Maul speak for a long, stretching moment.
“I’m eating on the move,” Maul decides wisely. He begins to fill a flatbread with pickled vegetables and delicate, crumbly pieces of blue-tinged cheese.
“May the Force be with you,” Obi-Wan says.
“No chickens.”
“And may your death come swiftly.”
“If I get back here and there are chickens, I’m slaughtering them all.”
“Leave already,” Obi-Wan says. “This place is in shambles. It would kill you to hang your cloak properly.”
This is untrue.
The home is immaculate. For all their initial attempts to chase each other of the residence through the power of filth and annoyance, neither is naturally of the type to leave things laying about out of order. Qui-Gon enjoyed watching them both slowly realize that their efforts during these early months caused themselves more misery than their intended targets.
The home has now been repaired so thoroughly that the moisture prospector who had once lived there would not recognize it. Obi-Wan’s skills in sewing and mending have produced sturdy window covers that keep most of the sand that slips through the outdoor shutters and glass out of the living spaces. He has repaired many of the home’s cabinets and lined their insides with dark, rectangular tiles normally used as insulators in walls, which has proven to have a remarkable effect on the temperatures inside said cabinets. While the underground storeroom is the coolest place on the homestead, vegetables no longer rot or wilt immediately in the kitchen’s inner workings.
Those cabinets and storage spaces that were too degraded for Obi-Wan’s skills of repairing have been broken and replaced by the surprisingly sharpened skills of his unfortunate companion.
Maul is a bright young man. Having watched him rebuild a good third of the dwelling’s roof, craft a new basin for the kitchen, and set doors into the gaping frames from room to room, Qui-Gon has to say that he feels slightly less foolish for having been killed by him. There is something about competence that appeals to him. It makes him pity Maul for having been swept up by the sith instead of by the Jedi. What good he could have done if only someone had shown him kindness early on in his life.
Speaking of which, Qui-Gon likes to imagine both Obi-Wan and Maul as brand new padawans, bickering over everything that comes their way. It makes watching them go about their new lives as Tatooine farmers wonderfully quaint and interesting.
For example, now Obi-Wan is following Maul around while stroking Chicken Foot intensely. Maul appears to think that this is a power play and gets his work clothes together as slowly as he can manage. He forgets that he has difficulty in putting on his boots. His robotic hips do not bend gracefully. He staggers jerkily for a few moments before Obi-Wan loses patience with him and forces him to sit so that he can shove the boots onto Maul’s prosthetic feet and tie them with an aggression that Chicken Foot fails to register.
She tries to involve herself by playing with the laces.
Both Maul and Obi-Wan swear at her and chase her away with instructions to go patrol the homestead for vermin.
Once properly booted, Obi-Wan hauls Maul up from the short bench by the door and badgers him to leave already. He shoves Maul’s rolled flatbread into his hand and begins packing his herding sack for him.
Maul stands in front of the bench in stiff paranoia.
He becomes anxious when Obi-Wan takes on this fussing role. It has only happened a few times now, once when Maul nearly perished from the bite of a venomous scorpion, once when they both experienced the birth of their first calf, and a few times when baby Luke arrived unexpectedly and proven himself to be the type of Tatooine child who even his father would have loathed: the roaming type.
It is clear from Maul’s clenching fists and flicking eyes now that he knows something terrible is afoot. Qui-Gon watches him from his designated windowsill; he is going through Obi-Wan’s record of behavior between now and yesterday, when he first began showing signs of agitation.
He is trying to out-think the thinker.
Obi-Wan ladles water from the vessel he fetched early this morning into Maul’s traveling skins and brings this and the secured herding sack to him.
He holds them out in complete innocence.
Maul has had 67 thoughts by then. He takes the sack with hesitation and shoulders it.
“I’ll be back in the morning,” he says. “Dolo will yield to my strength in that time; she will forget all of those offerings you have brought her and will agree that my way is that which benefits her most gloriously.”
“That’s good, best get going,” Obi-Wan says immediately.
Maul begins to lower his sack.
“Perhaps it is too late today to—” he starts.
“OUT,” Obi-Wan snaps. “Out out GET—”
“No chickens,” Maul hurls back. “When I get back there will be no—”
“Don’t be stupid, you idiotic man. We have no room for chickens. We have no coop for them. No feed—”
“You say that. See, you say that, and yet we now have a fucking cat—”
“And you love her,” Obi-Wan says. “She is the light of your life. She has your beastly ways and your eyes. Now leave this place before I lock you out and force you to sleep in the stable.”
There is a pause.
Maul breaks it by jabbing a finger into Obi-Wan’s face like it is itself a blade.
“I do not love. And I said no chickens,” he says.
“Cross my scorched heart,” Obi-Wan says with acid.
Maul tears away and slams the door behind him. His dampened voice raises outside to call the livestock. Obi-Wan’s hackles rise and fall at the door. He does not move from that place for a full ten minutes. Then, he explodes into a flurry of movement that startles the cat.
“We must clean this place,” he tells her, “It’s rude to bring guests to a home as filthy as this.”
The argument was over from the moment Obi-Wan had started down the path of ruin. Qui-Gon follows him out to the fence where he picks up a staff to chase away snakes and to give Chicken Foot her marching orders.
She is to check the perimeter at least once an hour. She is to keep the vermin from the storeroom and the tops of the vegetables. She is not to bring sand over the threshold. She is to wash her face and to stay out of the direct sun after mid-day.
Obi-Wan tells her that he, the general, will return once he has collected enough cactus fruit to purchase her new siblings. He demands a confirmation and, upon receipt of a yowl, picks up his basket and sets off into the wastes.
Qui-Gon gives Chicken Foot a good rump-scratch before he follows.
There are different types of fruits produced by the cacti out here in the wastes. Most of them go unharvested because the residents of the more populated areas fear the Tusken people, who they think have claimed the land.
This is nonsense. The Tusken people are nomadic and have an entirely distinct cultural definition of ‘ownership.’ They do not even believe that they own the massiffs that accompany and guard them and their children as they move throughout the desert bluffs.
Obi-Wan has befriended a great number of Tusken people by helping them overcome barriers that their own strength and resources are not sufficient to work around. In return for bits and pieces of their knowledge of desert-survival, he fetches them medicine and metals that people in towns will not sell to them out of fear and prejudice.
One of those things that the Tuskens have taught him about are how to procure the incredibly sweet fruits that live at the top of the towering, scaly plants in the cliffs of the wastes. The plants are hairy and beneath that layer of fluff, lined with sharp spikes to deter any opportunists from digging into their flesh.
Obi-Wan is one such opportunist. He stabs his hand against many spokes before finding a foothold carved into the flesh of one of these tree-cactuses. Through trial and error, he locates the next foothold hidden by the Tusken people on their last trek through these parts.
The footholds only go up so far, they leave off about a fourth of the way down the trunk, leaving Obi-Wan to maneuver his staff cleverly to hook the fat fruits hanging on spindly, flexible branches and twist them such that they, branches and all, tumble down to the foot of the trunk where he can collect them after the ordeal is over.
The fruits themselves are worth a gleaming credit, dried and munched as a sweet for the poor and boiled into a sticky syrup used as a sweeter among the better off in their oasis towns. But the sap from the spindly branches, now that is where the money is really at.
Obi-Wan wastes no time in hurrying down to collect the fruits and branches. He stuffs them into his basket and covers them with thick canvas to keep both branches and fruits plump now that they have been cut off from their water source.
Qui-Gon follows him for four hours as they go through this routine on five tree-cactuses. By the end of it all, Obi-Wan is scratched, bleeding, dehydrated, and triumphant.
He begins a proud march back towards the homestead. Qui-Gon stifles a smile at his back.
Chicken Foot wails in greeting when Obi-Wan’s overheated hands finally unlock the door of their home. Obi-Wan closes the door behind him and almost immediately lowers his burden to the floor. He follows it with himself until his cheek lays against the cool hearth just inside the doorway.
He groans in relief.
Qui-Gon steps over him on his way to kneel on the sofa’s cushions and peek into his face from above. He snickers as Obi-Wan lets out a far grumpier grunt and forces himself up to his hands and knees.
“Work’s never done,” he tells Chicken Foot. “Money will be the ruin of all civilization.”
Chicken Foot mrrps in class solidarity.
Obi-Wan rolls himself over and starts picking at his bootlaces.
He fetches water from the cistern and fills the jug. He sits at the table and works through the fruit, washing them of bird droppings and inspecting each for scratches and beak marks. The most plump and beautiful, he sets to one side to be submerged in water and placed in the underground storage. The bruised and lightly pecked are spread out on a shallow woven basket to be dried in the sun. The remaining will also be dried, but they will be boiled into sickly sweet syrup, where their great faults will never again be witnessed.
It is too late in the day to be boiling syrup, so instead Obi-Wan bathes the most beautiful and takes the ugly crowd outside to dry in the suns. It won’t take long for them to bake. In the meantime, he hides the raw fruit and sets to work on squeezing the sap from the stems left over.
It is arduous, repetitive work—crushing the stems and scraping the first gushes of sap out with a stone. The stems are then soaked in water and the process begins again and again until all that is left is pulp which is heated and placed out in the sun in water, after which it is once more strained. The sap sinks to the bottom of the bowl and comes out in one piece when tugged.
Obi-Wan adds it to the rest of the collection and heats the whole thing to a liquid before bringing it into the cool storeroom to solidify into a single mass.
By then, he is exhausted and must eat. He and Chicken Foot share a few strips of dried bantha meat. Obi-Wan eats a few pickles and a piece of flatbread with it. He forgets, as he always does, that they have cheese in the house and only remembers when he checks on the milk from the day before and finds it starting to curdle.
He swears and sighs and resigns himself to cheese making that night as well. But for now, it is afternoon and all the shutters must be closed; the coverings must go down and Chicken Foot is locked inside.
It is time to sleep.
Obi-Wan wakes around the time the last sun hides itself behind the horizon and stretches. He rolls out of bed and lands on the floor. Chicken Foot lectures him for displacing her so rudely, as he insists on doing in this manner at least twice a week. He apologizes to her with ear scratches and pushes himself up to eat again.
Qui-Gon nudges his empty plate more solidly onto the counter after he has finished and dragged himself off to fetch the fruits from outside.
It is night now. Cool finally. The shutters can be opened, the coverings fastened out of the way. It will be freezing cold in a few hours, but for now, the house can breathe.
Obi-Wan brings in the fruits and drops half of them in a deep pot. He pours three bowls of water over them and wages a battle with fire to light the stove. This pot is left to boil and reduce to syrup. In the meantime, the sap is inspected and cut into neat, tiny cubes which are coated in a ground wheat flour to help them dry. These are carefully collected into a clear jar. They alone will bring in several dozen credits.
Qui-Gon watches Obi-Wan set to work grinding some precious sugar granules into powder to dust the dried fruit with. He tends to work in quiet, Obi-Wan. But Qui-Gon knows he doesn’t enjoy it.
This is one of the many reasons that he has not yet ended Maul’s life.
The man sings.
He sings from other rooms and he sings while he works and he makes up songs to motivate the livestock to do as he wishes, and its not quite a force suggestion, but it does have a same sort of sinking comfort to it.
Obi-Wan misses the Temple where people once sang all the time. He misses his battalion, which was full of Mandalorian-style chants and hyperpop blaring. Music from the radios has only made him more homesick lately. Qui-Gon strokes his hair as he works and hums a few bars from an old lullaby that his own master once sung to a child dying slowly in his arms.
Qui-Gon will never forget the song. He heard it when his own hearing had begun to fade into ringing.
He is unsure if Obi-Wan hears him, but he sings all the same and he spends another lonely night with his young apprentice
—and Chicken Foot, of course.
Obi-Wan is again triumphant in the morning. He gathers his goods and gives Chicken Foot new marching orders, then sets off for the market before the second sun rises.
He encounters Luke on the way.
Qui-Gon is fascinated with baby Luke. He is adorable and strong, strong, strong in the Force. At the same time, however, Qui is not certain that if picked up and shaken, Luke would not make rattling sounds.
He is not sharp, this one, even if he is obscenely optimistic.
Obi-Wan gives him a dried fruit and tells him that it’s their secret. Luke tears it in half and whines until Obi-Wan accepts one of them. Then he beams. He should look like his father or his mother and yet he resembles neither. He is all his grandmother with a golden-blond coating.
Obi-Wan sends him off home and resumes his trek of determination.
90 credits is a lot of money in most places.
90 credits is enough to purchase land in these parts.
And what does Obi-Wan do with 90 credits?
He spends an hour flailing about over which birds he is bringing home from Mos Eisley. The poultry farmer is entertained by him and helps him pick a few hens. He explains how to feed them and how to contain them. He gives Obi-Wan some temporary netting and they talk about egg-laying and collecting and hatching and so on until Obi-Wan pays him for the advice, the birds, the supplies, and the delivery.
He returns home after many hours and tells Chicken Foot that she must take a bath. He has to hide all the evidence of his dealings before Maul gets home.
Maul arrives before the birds. He bathes his horns first thing and presses a damp cloth all over his inflamed skin. He is tired and hoarse from herding the cattle out to faraway grasses and back. His legs can walk for as long as they are oiled and connected to his nerves, but the rest of his body is strained just from using them.
It is many minutes before he emerges from the facilities to lay eyes upon Obi-Wan’s innocent sprawl across the sofa.
“You’re quiet,” he notes in distaste.
“It’s hot,” Obi-Wan says airily.
Maul sneers at him.
“There is food if you’re hungry,” Obi-Wan notes. “How are my children?”
“They’ve abandoned you,” Maul says. He begins poking around in the kitchen area. “Their loyalties have been bought in exchange for dry weed.”
“A pity,” Obi-Wan says. “They’ll come back to the light soon enough. Anyone else out on the hills?”
Maul hates this type of smalltalk. He ignores it. He pokes at a black melon in the pantry and decides that he’s not hungry enough to break into that yet. He finds a little pot of tiny wheat pieces and begins to prepare them with sour pickled fruits.
Obi-Wan refuses to look at him with a resolve harder than duracrete.
After a short while, there is a knock at the door. Maul’s face jerks up. Obi-Wan throws himself off the sofa and goes to open the door.
“Mr. Kenobi?” the poultry farmer’s son asks.
“Yes, that’s me,” Obi-Wan said.
“I’ve got your order, sir.”
Maul sets the jar of pickles down on the counter with a loud ‘thunk.’ His brows and lips have flattened in sudden supreme irritation.
“What order,” he says more than asks.
“Thank you, thank you, my boy,” Obi-Wan titters to the farmer’s son. “You can go ahead and bring them all here to the shady side of the house.”
“Kenobi. What. Order.”
Obi-Wan squeezes through the door to follow the young man out to his cart. Maul’s face morphs through a series of murderous expressions in his absence. He whips his face towards Chicken Foot.
“What did I tell you?” he hisses. “You had one job.”
Chicken Foot blinks at him twice and puts her head down to go back to sleep. Maul claws his hands her way and then thinks better of it and claws them at the sky through the ceiling. He abandons his meal and stomps after Obi-Wan, nearly tearing the front door off its hinges as he goes.
Many people in these parts believe that Obi-Wan and Maul are married.
This is not an unreasonable assumption to make, given the way that they speak to each other.
If they were not dependent on each other’s skills to live more comfortably than they would apart, then they would have ramped up their mutual homicidal tactics much earlier. But alas.
Obi-Wan cannot bring himself to kill Maul. He brought Maul into his home from the middle of the desert, risking his life to do it, and Maul, out of a sense of perhaps respect, perhaps confusion, but most likely spite, decided after that moment that the only way to get his true revenge on Obi-Wan is to making his every waking moment as terrible as possible.
He chose to live that night, and he has made it his mission since to keep Obi-Wan alive to suffer the consequences.
The consequences thus far have included: stealing the affections of the bantha, giving Chicken Foot contradictory orders, and now, proving to be a roadblock to poultry acquisition.
He tries to negotiate with the farmer to cancel Obi-Wan’s order, but it is too late. Obi-Wan already has a bird in each arm. His eyes are glossy with affection. Maul begins negotiating via threats. Obi-Wan unloads the majority of the supplies and beings without anyone’s support.
The farmer’s son gets weary of Maul’s posturing and helps Obi-Wan with the remaining materials. He writes Obi-Wan a receipt. Maul clutches at his head and twists his lips into many different configurations at all the interlopers taking up space in the shade of the dwelling.
One of the newcomers comes and pecks at the toe of his boot.
Obi-Wan tells him that it senses brethren. The farmer’s son takes his leave as Maul explodes into unkind words. Obi-Wan ignores them all and picks up a fat pale hen with a fluffy mane of sorts and shoves it into Maul’s arms. He leaves them there to go start setting up the temporary accommodations.
“You will not live to see the morning,” Maul tells the bird.
It clucks and pedals its feet for freedom.
Maul is too tired and in too much pain to murder all the birds that night. Instead, he heaps abuse upon Obi-Wan and kicks up a dramatic fuss when Obi-Wan tries to help him detach himself from his prosthetics. The spitting and shouting would be enough to wake neighbors if they’d had any. In their absence, Maul goes through the list of expletives that he keeps just for Obi-Wan.
Obi-Wan tells him to shut up and take his bath. He needs him functional in the morning. What use is he if not for coop-making?
Maul refuses to have anything to do with the birds. Obi-Wan notes that he’d said the same thing about the cattle and the cat.
Maul claims that he means it this time, and he emphasizes that Obi-Wan will rue the day that he brought him through that door.
Obi-Wan tells him that he can’t wait to start ruing and slams the door to the facilities. He goes to gather Chicken Foot under the armpits and introduce her to her new siblings outside. She takes many swipes. She terrorizes. She nearly manages to find purchase and ends up getting a talking-to that would have made Anakin weep.
Qui-Gon comforts her when she comes to take cover in his window with him. She curls up and presses into his thigh as he strokes her back.
“No. Eating,” Obi-Wan says, pointing at her from across the room.
Chicken Foot burrows into her legs and turns herself into a defensive orb of cat.
There are six hens, all of whom Obi-Wan loves like they are his own children. He gives them names that do not last the week before Maul has given them ones that stick.
He still hates them, he claims. He did not sanction them, and should anything happen to them, he will not care about their spilled blood. But, in true sith-taught-logic, he sees within hours that they bring Obi-Wan great joy and determines that the only way to deal with that is to make them hate him with unparalleled fervor.
The renaming is step one. Hulu, Bota, Willmina, and Sprout become Big Red, Scratcher, Idle, and Snack.
The other two hens don’t make it past four days. It turns out that there are hawks in the area with a taste for chicken meat. Maul is so insulted by this encroaching of his territory that he is inspired to make the chickens a shelter.
Which, he emphasizes, is not the same as a coop.
“You could just piss on them,” Obi-Wan points out, languidly observing the proceedings from the front step. “Oh wait.”
Maul throws a hammer with enough force to maim if not kill. Obi-wan catches it before it connects with its designated target (his face) and throws it back with the force. Maul throws sand this time and starts a fight that ends with him laying on Obi-Wan while Obi-Wan kicks and swears at how ‘fucking heavy’ his metal lower half is.
The screech of a hawk breaks them apart. Qui-Gon asks Chicken Foot if this is the start of an affair that he will later have to deny to a fellow Force Ghost. Chicken Foot is too busy hunting a moth to hear him.
The chickens have their coop. It is another chore added to the list. Maul throws feed at them like he wants his fingers to fly off the stump of his hand in the early mornings. He is not charmed when the chicks are born, and he is endearingly unsettled by the texture of eggs.
Chicken Foot only gets to eat one chick before she is scolded so thoroughly by her tattooed father that she abstains from then on.
And Obi-Wan remains as happy as he can be in this place where he thinks himself more alone than he actually is.
Life goes on, on Tatooine.
Chickens, cattle, and cat.