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The scrapyard is an old, dusty thing. Rusted metal is sorted into exact squares, pieces piled one on top of the other haphazardly with numbers and letters painted onto signs next to each. Above the scrapyard and behind it rise grey-purple peaks. The town lies several miles off along dusty roads, a small collection of houses that disperse out into the jungle and a tiny spaceport, the only one on the planet.
There’s a man in the scrapyard, dull hair and cropped-short beard shining red in the sun. He’s wearing a thick, battered pair of fibrous pants that might have once been made for mining, and a thin, ill-fitting shirt, long sleeved to keep out the sun. There’s an unevenness to his movement, as if avoiding irritating an old injury to his back. Qui-Gon met him only once, more than a decade ago; Qui-Gon would know him anywhere.
He watches as Obi-Wan looks up and to the west, where the sun is climbing over the hills, shielding his eyes. There’s a pause as his gaze flicks first over Qui-Gon and then back to him, squinting. It’s bright already, and humid, mist steaming off the ground where the sun hits it, and Qui-Gon’s face is hidden deep in his hood.
He comes closer, the awkward pattern of his steps ever more obvious, and stops all of a sudden, staring.
“Master Jinn.”
“Obi-Wan,” Qui-Gon says.
“It’s Ben.”
He looks older—older than he should be, face set into a stony expression, thick and unyielding, bitter. He could be almost boyish, Qui-Gon knows, in another world—skin smooth and hair spiked up and brow knotted in the permanent anxiety of the young.
“You’re a long way from Coruscant,” Obi-Wan says. He still has his accent, clean syllables, cultivated. A diplomat’s accent, devastating.
“I need an ion flux stabilizer.” Qui-Gon’s ship is an old thing that had already been close to breaking down when he’d bought it, an improvisation when he’d learned that there weren’t any transports where he was going. No one comes to Ikarin. No one comes to the planets near Ikarin, or the planets near them. Only debris finds its way here slowly—old ships, old people—and never leaves. The whole cluster of systems is a backwater, lush and quiet and forgotten.
Obi-Wan looks at him for a long time. His eyes are blue-green, shadowed—the same eyes. The same eyes, always. “There’s one in the Trill-9 pile. Three piles to the left and one over. I don’t know if it’ll fit your ship.”
“Thank you,” Qui-Gon says. He wants to say more. He would, if he knew what. If he knew how.
He turns and finds the pile instead, looks through it, finds the flux stabilizer. It won’t fit. He picks it up anyways, tucks it under his arm.
When Qui-Gon finds his way back, Obi-Wan is sitting in the shadow of the tent propped up against the entrance to the shop. He’s bent over a table, intent on the mechanics of a transceiver—too intent to hear Qui-Gon’s approach. Or perhaps it’s only that he doesn’t care.
“I’ll take it.” Qui-Gon holds out the flux stabilizer.
Obi-Wan looks up, nods. “Fifteen hundred.”
“Credits?”
He nods again, then turns back to his work. Perhaps he expects Qui-Gon to haggle; likely he doesn’t. He must feel something, at least, of what Qui-Gon is feeling. He must know that Qui-Gon has the money.
Qui-Gon hands it over. It leaves him with precious little to get back, but that, at least, he can deal with. The Jedi will not fund this mission, but they cannot stop him from funding it himself.
Obi-Wan takes it without looking at him. “I suppose this could be the moment where I say that you leaving me on Bandomeer was the best fucking thing that ever happened to me.” He doesn’t sound angry. He doesn’t sound angry, but Qui-Gon can’t tell if he is.
Qui-Gon’s tone is mild—intentional and exact. “Was it?”
“Best’ is always relative,” Obi-Wan replies, equally mild. He does look at Qui-Gon now, cool and far away. Qui-Gon wishes he knew if Obi-Wan was mocking him; he wishes he knew this what this Obi-Wan is, “and never the same thing twice.”
What can he say to that? Nothing but the truth, perhaps. The truth: He slept, and he dreamt, and he saw Obi-Wan with a padawan braid and a lightsaber so blue it was almost indigo. And then he woke up, and that Obi-Wan—young, maybe not so young, smooth skin and an easy smile and a knot between his brows—still stared back at him from behind closed eyelids, asking him a question Qui-Gon didn’t, doesn’t know if he can answer.
“And what’s best now?” he asks instead.
Obi-Wan’s face fills with emotion—still pressed back, beneath a waxy half-mask, but unrestrained. Disdain, disgust, bitter want never recovered from, but old—thinned out by exhaustion, by a decade of living. “I’m not a Jedi. You don’t get to ask me those questions anymore.”
“I don’t get to expect an answer,” Qui-Gon counters, mild, but Obi-Wan only shakes his head, looks away.
“Why are you here?” he asks.
Qui-Gon looks away, stares at the purple rock jutting over the jungle, the thick moss trees. “It’s a pleasant planet.”
“Is it, Master Jinn?” And this time Qui-Gon knows Obi-Wan is mocking him.
Pleasant and bitter, Qui-Gon thinks. The lush temperate forests that fall into steep crevasses, remnants of the mining there hundreds of years ago. The spongy, mossy leaves of the native trees mixed with oak mixed with maple mixed with willow, the rock jutting out of the landscape, lavender-shaded grey. Ikarin is a colonized world, abandoned halfway into its transformation. The irony does not escape him, but the metaphor nags at him like something caught in his teeth.
He can see Obi-Wan when he closes his eyes, watching him, waiting, listening. Qui-Gon doesn’t yet have an answer to give, but there is one. There must be one here.
“It is,” he says. “It’s peaceful.”
Obi-Wan waits for him to look back. “Why did you come here, Master Jinn?” he repeats. His eyes sharp, not narrowed, but thick with intensity. In front of Qui-Gon’s eyes, laid on top of him like a second skin, is the other Obi-Wan—hair spiked, padawan braid long, face open, eyes open, fountains in the sun.
“I was looking for someone,” Qui-Gon says, heart caught in his throat.
Obi-Wan looks at Qui-Gon for a long while. There’s something in his expression that might be bitter, but Qui-Gon can’t tell. He doesn’t recognize this Obi-Wan. He doesn’t know his habits, his expressions. “Did you find him?”
“I don’t know yet,” Qui-Gon says simply. He worries something in his voice gives him away: a break, a rawness he has not come to terms with.
Obi-Wan looks at him a long while, and Qui-Gon thinks: Oh, what you could be. He’s heavy, like this—the weight of him in the air, in Qui-Gon’s lungs, too intense to be a person, to be a junker in a scrapyard on a forgotten planet. Ikarin should have folded beneath him; it should fold now.
“I don’t want you here, you know,” Obi-Wan says. “And now that you’ve come, there’s no way you can go that would make me happy. But I don’t want you to stay.”
Qui-Gon is silent. He can taste the rust on the air when he breathes in, the faint hint of dust in the back of his mouth, most of it weighed to the ground by the moisture.
“This isn’t right,” Obi-Wan says. “I expect you’ll tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about—that I’ve confused fantasy with the Force, that I haven’t learnt anything since I was thirteen. But I’m finally far enough away to see the whole picture, and there’s nothing I can do to change anything. This isn’t right. You can’t fix it now. We’re too far down the stream. The current has changed.”
“This isn’t right,” Qui-Gon says. Right doesn’t exist, of course. There is no right path and there are few wrong ones, just different ways. “What would be?”
Obi-Wan screws a bolt deep into the chassis of the transceiver. “How should I know?” He doesn’t look up at Qui-Gon. “I got caught in a whirlpool—I’ve been circling the same place for years now. The current doesn’t get me out. And even if it did—what would I be, now? This is what I have now. I’m stuck.”
“What would you have been?” Qui-Gon asks, desperation thick in his throat. “Ignore ‘right.’ What would you have been?”
“I’m very good at big-picture thinking,” Obi-Wan’s voice is acidic. “So I likely would have made a good politician. I might have even been an excellent one—for whatever the given value of that is.” He pauses, flicks a bit of rust off the chassis with his nail. “I think I would have made a terrible Jedi. Of course, I’ll never get to know. But perhaps that’s for the best.”
“That isn’t true,” Qui-Gon says. He can see Obi-Wan, his Obi-Wan, in front of him, sharp and gentle, smiling, so full of light and brimming with the want to go out, to be more, only beginning to truly reign himself in, more than halfway to being a good Jedi, the best Jedi.
Obi-Wan turns away from him, walks through the doorway of the shop and beyond into the hallway, where the shadows are deeper. Bits of sea glass join old data tablets on surfaces, the scent of dried flowers is stirred up when he walks past, hangings—woven fiber, simple pictures—hang on the walls.
Qui-Gon follows him, drawn inexorably onwards.
Behind his eyelids, he sees Obi-Wan asleep in a small metal bunk on the ship. His eyelashes brush the skin under his eyes. His cheek presses into the pillow. Qui-Gon has known him for over a decade now; it feels like an age. It feels like no time at all.
In front of him, the other Obi-Wan stops in front of a fireplace, the grate blackened with ash.
“Why are you here, Master Jinn?” he asks for a third time. “I can’t give you anything.”
“I don’t know,” Qui-Gon says, quiet. “I wanted to find you.”
“I can’t give you anything,” Obi-Wan says again. “You don’t want anything I could give. And you won’t give me anything I want. You can’t, anymore, even if you would.”
Silence hangs in the air. Qui-Gon speaks haltingly. “I dreamt of you. We were on a planet—green, like this one. There was a city with copper domes. You were my padawan.”
Obi-Wan looks at him for a long minute. His face changes. He looks tired. More tired than before. Still bitter.
“I see it when I close my eyes. I see you,” Qui-Gon says. He isn’t crying—he isn’t close—but he could. Easily, he could. “I don’t know what it means.”
Obi-Wan’s voice is bitter. “I told you what I know. This is wrong and there’s no fixing it. There’s no going back.”
But going forward, Qui-Gon thinks. Going forward— He almost says it, almost forms the words, almost asks Obi-Wan: Come back. Come home.
“I’m too old,” Obi-Wan says, as if he can hear Qui-Gon’s thoughts, as if he knows what might happen. Maybe he does—maybe this quiet planet, this backwater where junk lands and never leaves, maybe it has honed him to something that can hear without trying, that knows, truly, as few things do. “I’m too bitter now. You give me back to the Jedi and I’ll tear us both apart. There’s no good part left of me that wants it.”
Obi-Wan‑—the other Obi-Wan, the only Obi-Wan Qui-Gon knows, can know—stares back at Qui-Gon from behind his eyelids, unspeaking.
Qui-Gon looks at the real Obi-Wan instead, the curve of his jaw as he looks at the fireplace, the place the cleft of his chin would be if it weren’t hidden by a beard and twelve years of drifting further and further away.
“Do you want to fuck me?” this Obi-Wan asks—the Obi-Wan-that-is. He turns, meets Qui-Gon’s gaze, calm and unashamed, still and unbridled, a force of nature, of the nature of this planet, this backwater, abandoned place. “Once, before you go.”
Qui-Gon wants to touch Obi-Wan’s heart, feel the force of him, understand, understand, understand what it would mean for him to be the same as the Obi-Wan in his mind, the padawan on the straight-and-narrow, clutching to reigns he hasn’t learned to hold.
His eyes here, in the darkness of the shop, are shadowed. This is not Qui-Gon’s Obi-Wan; this is a different thing all together. Beautiful, true-seeing, closer to the moss trees outside than to a Jedi.
Qui-Gon doesn’t have an answer for him. He doesn’t have an answer for any of this.
Obi-Wan’s hand lands on Qui-Gon’s cheek, rough and warm. The sensation of it—not only the touch, but the rush of feeling in his body, something in his veins calling out for more—overcomes him. His hand comes up over Obi-Wan’s, knuckle pressing against palm.
“Don’t think,” Obi-Wan says. “Just feel.”
Qui-Gon turns his head and kisses Obi-Wan, rough, clumsy. He hasn’t kissed anyone before like this; he hasn’t ever wanted to.
Their lips scratch against each other. Obi-Wan’s are rough and peeling. His hands settle heavy on Qui-Gon’s waist, and then under, as he tries to lift Qui-Gon’s tunic up. Qui-gon stills, doesn’t break the kiss as he undoes his belt and lets his tabards fall to the floor, tunic falling open.
“Come to bed.” Obi-Wan pulls back, looks him in the eye.
And Qui-Gon comes.
Later, after it all: The afternoon sun shines onto the bed through a small window, warped and clouded by years of abrasion from the tree branches outside. Qui-Gon leans down, kisses Ben—Ben, master of the scrapyard, twelve-year sojourner on the abandoned, half-wild Ikarin—once, gently, on the forehead, and leaves. When he blinks, Obi-Wan stares back at him from behind his eyelids, and disappears.