And a River Runs Through It

by Tem-ve H'syan

Title: And a River Runs Through It

Author: Tem-ve H'syan

Pairing: Qui-Gon Jinn/Obi-Wan Kenobi

Rating: PG-13

Summary: Once upon a time...

Notes: Written for the "worship" prompt on my kink_bingo card on Dreamwidth, and inspired by a Japanese garden I saw last weekend. I realise this is not remotely a kink fic in the sense of porn, but there is certainly enough Jinn-worship to fill the prompt to the brim! Warnings for slightly off-kilter fairy-tale style...and did I mention Jinn-worship? I did? Oh good.

Disclaimer: These characters are the property of the creators of Star Wars, and no offence or profit is intended.

Once upon a time, there was a young knight named Kenobi. Only he would never have started his story in this fashion, not until he was a much older knight. As a younger knight, Kenobi was never once upon a time. He was in many places at once, or so it seemed to him, always in the thick of things, occasionally on top of them, but more often than not running to keep up with the particularly hectic and frayed spot in history that he had been knighted into.

You see, it was the time of the Clone Wars, and not until the last of the clones had died of blaster fire or premature age would they end. To be fair, the battles ended a little before that, what with the Empire sweeping away the remnants of their enemies' armies and making them their own. Which was a bad thing for our young knight, who had in the meantime risen to be a general, General Kenobi: not only because the end of battles and armies left him out of work, but also because the army he had fought with had been the other one, the one not on the side of the Empire.

General Kenobi was a wanted man, and not in the way he had imagined when he was still a young knight. Those who wanted him now wanted him dead, or if they wanted him alive, it was only to do terrible things to him on the way to making him dead. Not surprisingly, General Kenobi wanted nothing to do with these people. But alas, the people who had wanted him back when he was younger - those who had wanted him to practice, to meditate, to understand, to help, to consider, and occasionally to sit up straight and bloody well listen - those people were no more.

His teacher, admired to the point of worship and quite studiously oblivious of the fact, had died in a fight that had foreshadowed the Great Clone War which had, in its course of long years, taken the friend of his teenage years, his craggy mentor, his childhood nemesis, and, in a way that was not quite death but even more terrible for it, his own student. He had fought him almost to the bitter end, and then had been unable to take the life-light of the one remaining member of his erstwhile family of ten thousand. Whatever he had become.

Since that fateful day, General Kenobi had been wandering, a knight errant, a General without an army who met his likeness on posters in every major spaceport and who had had to resort to disguises and deception to save his sorry life.

His student's children, the last people he'd felt any warmth for, had been left in care and safety - which, for one such as him, sadly meant being as far away from him as possible. And so General Kenobi had taken to wandering the galaxy, in the vain hope of finding someone he remembered, or someone who would want to be remembered.

All he carried with him were the clothes on his back, the skill of his hands, and a mind heavy with memory. For he carried all his family of ten thousand in his mind, and spoke to them often, but they remained silent. Only in the bars and cantinas of the outlying towns did he find comfort at least for a few suns or moons at a time, in the company of mild intoxicants and strangers who did not find it odd that he talked to people in his head.

It was one of these, long after the sun and the moons had all set and the patrons of the cantina had all gone home or wherever it was that they slept; it was one of these strangers who had recommended, before settling for a relaxing nap on a pad of moss underneath a bench by the roadside, that he seek out the Old Man Stone. Because, he had continued in tones that spoke of something he'd said often since he was little and had no thought of intoxicants and roadside benches, the Old Man Stone made the voices in your head be quiet. *It's so you can hear yourself think again,* he had said before falling into a sleep so deep that he was almost like a stone himself.

Sadly, the drunk man stone had not left General Kenobi with any directions on how to find this Old Man Stone, and so he spent almost half a day wandering and wondering what to do next, before deciding to throw caution to the wind and ask. By that time of course, the drunk man stone had uncurled and gone about whatever his daily business was, and was nowhere to be seen. So General Kenobi asked a child playing on the pavement, and followed a small outstretched finger until the road ended. There, he asked a woman working in the fields, heavy with the promise of offspring, and followed a strong loamy finger until the path ended too. When he found nobody to ask, he settled down for the night and slept an uneasy sleep; not for want of a pad of moss but for his unquiet thoughts and the ten thousand voices in his head.

When he got up in the morning, he sat for a long time, unsure where to go. An armed horseman came passing by long the edge of the field, but General Kenobi hid from him, certain that his finger would not have pointed him to the Old Man Stone but guided a weapon into Knight Kenobi's noisy heart.

After he had sat for another while and not a soul had come by, he decided to set out on his own anyway, to the top of the hill where the path would have gone had the path gone on. As he ascended, the fields turned to bush and the bush turned to forest and shadows fell upon him as the sun rose, for which he was very grateful as it was the height of summer.

A ways into his ascent, a small stream joined him and entertained him with its soft murmuring and its cool clean water, and he washed his sweaty face and drank his fill and stayed by the stream, following it uphill until he came to its home.

The stream disappeared under the old wooden door, neglecting to invite him in, but the house looked derelict enough to be unarmed, and so Knight Kenobi looked sideways along the wide weathered and windowless walls and saw nobody on the lookout for him, and pushed the door open.

It opened easily and without sound, and when it opened to reveal the inside of the house, all General Kenobi could do was stand and gaze and get his feet wet in the stream that was still murmuring through the door quietly but incessantly.

The house was not a house - it had walls all right, but there was no roof, and was more of a set of walls with eaves that held a garden so much lighter that the surrounding forest that General Kenobi had to shade his eyes.

On a smooth gravelled plane that followed the contour of the hill like a carpet sat plump cushions of green that were bushes and trees and rocks, and he could not tell which was one and which the other. There were also trees that were merely trees, with proud gnarled stems that spoke of old age and strength. He had found the old, then, and he had found the stone. And the man was hard to overlook.

For on the largest rock in the middle of the garden lay a man, curled up and with his naked back turned to him, his long white hair mingling with the water that trickled down the rock to become the stream.

"Close the door," a roughened voice said. "And be quiet."

Knight Kenobi frowned, but did as he was bidden; the strange old man had not moved from his sleeping position nor had he even raised his head to greet his visitor. Thinking it polite to at least introduce himself, General Kenobi raised his hand and his voice, but before he had as much as taken a step in the direction of the other side of the garden, the old man's voice spoke again.

"Stay where you are. Observe. Worship if you must. But listen. Be quiet."

And so he stayed where he was, unsure why he was even obeying this strange naked old man, or why he wasn't just walking out. Worshipping, that much was clear, was far from young Kenobi's mind. There was nothing he saw about the man that was worth worshipping.

For the rest of the morning, Kenobi sat under the eaves of the strange roofless house, his back leaning against the wall, his feet stretched out or tucked under him or propped up or tapping quiet rhythms against the gravel under them. The old man paid him no heed; midway through the morning, he sat up, stretched long bony arms, and lay down again on his other side, still turning his back on Kenobi.

As the sun rose in the sky, Knight Kenobi observed that the man's skin was pale despite ostensibly being in the sun all day; the sun must not touch him, he thought. Or maybe it just did not contain the appropriate radiation to tan his skin. He liked the first explanation better; nothing seemed to touch the man. He, on the other hand, felt the sun's rays acutely as it melted the thin band of shadow that had sheltered him, and before long, he was hot and uncomfortable and loosening his tunics and wondering whether the water of the stream would be enough to cool his heated skin.

"Take them off," the old man's voice came. Kenobi startled but the man continued unperturbed. "I have no need to see you in them, and you clearly have no need to wear them right now."

"How did you - ?" He wasn't even sure what to ask of a man who could apparently see what was happening behind his back.

"I can *smell* you," the voice replied evenly.

With this, the old man apparently considered the conversation over, and General Kenobi uneasily divested himself of his layers of tunics until he stood barefoot and bare-chested in nothing but his leggings, and felt thirsty.

He stepped out of the thin band of shadow, and his skin soaked up the sun and made him bigger, fuller, brighter. And thirstier.

He took a few cautiously crunchy steps across the gravel that separated his lonely spot from the stream and knelt down to drink. The water tasted blissfully cool and clean and made him softer, heavier, calmer. And hungrier.

His stomach must have rumbled loud enough to be heard above his cautious barefoot steps, for the old man chose this moment to remark, "If you can bear to wait, there will be food. It is not much, but it will suffice to keep us both from starving."

"Thank you," General Kenobi said, not sounding in the least general-like. "Uh, I can't help noticing that you haven't had anything to drink all day. Would you like me to bring you some water?"

A low laugh was the answer, a soft rocking vibration that seemed to emanate from the rocks and the rocklike bushes and the bushlike trees and the tree-like trunk of the old man all at once. "You forget I am resting right on top of the source. And even if my mouth would not drink, my skin would."

But his skin did not drink, General Kenobi observed. His skin made thirsty, made his own skin thirsty for that tree-trunk calm. With a sigh, he sat back where he had been told to sit, and tried again to observe, and listen, and be quiet.

Listening came easily to him; there were the sounds of the birds and small animals of the forest beyond the wooden walls, there was the constant murmuring of the stream in its bed of pebbles, there was the distant rustling of the trees. The trees inside the enclosure appeared to be silent, and there was no movement in the leaves of the large round rock-like bushes, to the extent that they seemed solid, sun-warmed textured green rocks beckoning him to lie down on one like the old man was lying on his big central rock.

Observing was harder; there was so little to observe, and his eyes and thoughts kept straying back to the strange old man on his rock, the man who was clearly unwilling to face him, for all that he would speak to him. And even answer him now that he had been spoken to. Still, there was precious little observing to do about the old man; the old man did precisely nothing most of the day. Occasionally, he wound turn over, or sit up, but never would he show his face, or get up off that rock of his. Once, briefly, General Kenobi found himself wondering how the man attended to his bodily needs; himself, he had so far lost the day's drink of water in sweat, but sure a man who ate and drank had to pass water and ... other things?

At that point, the man had chosen to sit up again, and General Kenobi's thoughts had turned to less unsavoury observations. He observed the length and breadth of the man's back as he stretched, the length of his arms and his hair, and concluded that the old man would be substantially taller than he was himself. If he were to ever stand. Knight Kenobi had simply assumed the old man had legs and feet to stand on; as it was, he had nothing to base that assumption on except the fact that the rest of him seemed human. When he is asleep, General Kenobi resolved, then I shall walk around to his other side and look at him.

Though, in all honesty, he would have been at a loss as to how to determine whether the old man was indeed asleep.

As it were, he had precious little to tell him that the old man was indeed an old man; true, there had been the name, Old Man Stone, and the voice, which was a man's voice, and low and roughened as befitted a tall elder. But the skin of the man showed none of the blemishes and wrinkles of old age, none of the scars and discolorations even his own skin was beginning to show. The old man's skin was as if it had soaked up the steady bright sunlight and solidified it into a layer of semi-translucent smoothness, as if he had grown out of the smooth round rock itself and polished himself into life.

His hair, too; it had the semblance of a vein in the rock, more so where it darkened to a gilded grey where the water soaked it and made it into a wet twisted strand that was so much a tree-bough as the old man's body was a tree-trunk and his legs, unseen though they were, were the roots that held him in the ground.

He was old as a tree was old, as a rock was old, not as a man was old. There was no frailty in the clear angular lines of his slender torso, no bend or bow to his spine, no weight on his shoulders. For a while, General Kenobi entertained the thought that the strange man might be younger than he was, merely endowed with white hair and a demeanour that made him appear as old as the rock he was sleeping on.

If indeed he ever slept. More than once during the sun-drenched, preternaturally quiet afternoon, Kenobi had caught himself nodding off, and had jerked awake after moments or minutes, only to find that nobody had noticed. Here's it didn't matter whether he slept or not. Nobody observed him, nobody listened to him. It was a thought both disquieting and relieving to General Kenobi, and the anticipation of an unbroken night's sleep filled him with a cheer he had not felt in long years.

Nobody saw him smile.

Later, as the sun stood low and the shadows of the walls began blanketing the old man's pale body, the door opened soundlessly to admit a small boy who knelt silently, lowered his forehead to the ground and remained like this for a long time, then got up and walked out without sparing General Kenobi or the old man a glance. He had left a lidded wooden pail, and Kenobi's hunger was so great that he fancied he smelled the warm nourishing scent of the grain therein even through the wood.

"Eat," said the old man. "Pay him no heed. I've tried to discourage him, and his brother before him, and his father before them, and nothing would sway them. They feed me, and they worship me. Neither without the other. And now they feed us."

"Thank you," General Kenobi replied hesitantly, lifting the lid of the pail. A cloud of scent made him sigh. Within lay a generous serving of steamed grain seasoned with something grassy and fresh-smelling and shimmering with a thick brown sauce. To his surprise, it was indeed enough to feed two men. Had they seen him come here? Or would the old man ordinarily eat two men's helpings? Seeing as this was the first and probably only meal of the day, that was sadly likely.

"How much energy do you think I expend resting on this rock?" the amused voice came from behind him. "Tuck in, I say. I customarily eat at midnight, so please forget whatever your mother taught you and eat."

General Kenobi obeyed, if not the old man's order, then certainly that of the scent. The food filled his senses and his mind, to the point that thinking was not possible until he had filled his stomach and more than half-emptied the pail. He sighed happily, pleasantly full of food, and enjoyed a lucid and shocking moment of happiness before another kind of hunger took possession of him.

"I couldn't help seeing," he said, not looking at the old man because he knew the old man wasn't looking at him either, "that the boy worships you, and that even the drunkards down in the valley town speak highly of you."

Silence greeted his overture. The pale back lay quiet as a rock, sunlight soaked deep into its unseen core, its shell grey now and smooth.

"Who are you?" General Kenobi finally asked. "Where did you come from, and what is it you do in this place?"

"I could ask you the same things," the voice replied evenly, perhaps a shade darker now that the sun had faded and the shadows of evening were casting purple-grey cloaks over the enclosure. "I could ask you where you came from, and what it is you do in this place. But I will not ask you that. It is of no consequence to me. As for who I am..." a minute shrug of marble shoulders, "...who do you want me to be?"

And that, once again, was that.

Puzzled and more than a little frustrated, General Kenobi considered his options. Not as to who he wanted the old man to be, because he knew full well his own wishes meant nothing to who the old man was. Nor were they, truth to be told, fulfillable.

No, he was pondering along the lines of just how he had gotten here and what he was doing here. And whether, and when, to stop being here and be on his way because whatever it was that this old man was renowned for, it wasn't having the desired effect on General Kenobi. It was making him antsy, and all told it was only the proven remoteness of the place and the promise of a night's unbroken sleep - certainly undisturbed by any activity from the rock-like old man - that persuaded him to stay, at least for the night.

Besides, dusk was falling fast, relieving him of his nominal duty to observe. For a while, he humoured himself by watching the sharp crinkles of the bushes' foliage fade into velvety indistinctness, then he gave that up as well and stretched out on the gravel as best he could, his arm as a pillow and his clothes covering enough in the balmy night air. The time would come when his arm would be asleep and the rest of him awake, and maybe then he would hazard a glance at the old man's face. For now, he would be freed of the duty to observe, and listen, and to not be seen and listened to.

It came as somewhat of a surprise to General Kenobi, then, that he could not sleep at all. It was as if his eyes had become addicted to the task of seeing, observing without thinking, as if his ears refused to shut down without hearing that next sound, and the one after that, and on and on as the trees rustled and the water murmured and the old man breathed softly in his sleep.

He hadn't heard the man breathe before, and for a moment he pondered whether his hearing had become more acute or whether the old man was simply snoring as old men are wont to. And if the latter, then that meant his time had come to catch a glimpse of the man's unguarded face. Cautiously, he raised his head off his arm, hissing at the needles and pins, blinking more light into his eyes, or as much as the planet's moons allowed him. The man's back was as unnaturally white in the moonlight as it had been by day; if anything, at night it appeared even more angular, even taller, and even more imposing.

Then, just as Kenobi gathered his strength to rise up silently, the man did the same.

Without as much as a hitch in his breathing, he rose fluidly from his reclining position, stretched his arms above his head as he had done two or three times during the day, and let his legs slip sideways off the rock to stand.

His legs were long, as General Kenobi had predicted; he stood maybe a head taller than his guest. They did not give the impression of legs that were idle all day, as the old man's surely must be. True, he could guess at bony knees and angular hips from the outlines he was presenting against the garden's darker backdrop, but the long thighs were doubtless used to walking and the large feet seemed so rooted in the ground that it seemed inconceivable that they spent most of the day not touching it. His toes were like the roots of a tree, and General Kenobi was sure, breathless as he watched, that the old man must do more than merely eat at night. Surely he roamed the entire hillside with those massive feet of his? Surely he would walk easily over obstacles and through the underbrush, with the long determined stride of a man accustomed to feeling his way, and having his way unfold before him?

General Kenobi had once known such a man, and the memory of following in his footsteps made him want to reach out and touch those feet and utter his silly, childish wish, that he be allowed to follow in those footsteps once more, just once more for direction, or to fall at the feet and curl up around them like the old man curled around his spring, for the memory was his spring and all the more powerful for it.

And then the feet took a step, and another, and the man moved and lived, and General Kenobi did not know where to look first.

The long torso and the tree-bough arms were all still there of course, but now there were hands, large and strong as the feet were, and shaking up echoes in General Kenobi's heart that he had a hard time keeping within his mouth. The hands stretched, fingers fanned like wings, like strong blunt-tipped branches, like patterns of memory on General Kenobi's skin. He shivered, and the gravel underneath him shivered back, and the old man paid him no heed, squatting where Kenobi had left the lidded pail, his grey-white hair falling past his shoulder, and all long limbs and big bony knees and old powerful hands and shameless nudity, and then the moonlight caught the man's profile and General Kenobi opened his eyes as far as he could, as much to hold within them the sight he was seeing as to keep them from filling with tears.

The outline of the bearded chin, the craggy brow, the crooked nose and the mouth too soft to be a warrior's, and yet none other would have sat well in that face, the face that General Kenobi saw in his mind's eye as much as in his body's, and that made him want to call out a name he had not spoken aloud in years.

This was the mouth that had spoken to him. Laughing and crying were one and the same, fighting to break through the defences of Kenobi's own lips. This was the mouth that had told him to listen, and observe, and take off his clothes, and eat, and worry not about who he was. It all made such absurd sense.

"I see you have made up your mind," the voice said softly, the accent now familiar too, and the man - the man who had a name General Kenobi wanted so badly to say - stood and walked towards where he lay crouched on the floor, all semblance of sleep forgotten. "Come."

A hand reached out, and before his fingers had even completed the journey across the expanse of moonlit darkness between them, General Kenobi already tasted the warmth of that palm, its calluses and quiet strength, and he wanted to leap into that hand bodily and curl up inside it, on his knees like the little boy had been.

The hand pulled him up into a tight embrace as if he was that little boy and weighed no more than a rabbit, and then it held him away again, palm flat against his hammering chest, and General Kenobi drowned in the flood that was coming from the man's eyes, blue and strong and filling his thirsty soul to overflowing.

If this was cleansing, then he had found his spring. If this was worship, then he had found his temple.

"Qui-Gon." No more than a whisper, but the pale lips curled in a smile, so achingly familiar, so asymmetrical and wry and so full of life it drew him in and he feasted his thirsty lips on it, he who had not seen a genuine smile in years of drought and was now ready to drink the oasis dry, mirage though it may be. It felt real enough, the arms and the mouth and the awkward angle because Qui-Gon was still tall, or again.

Had he been dead at all? Struggling to gather his white-flushed thoughts, General Kenobi pulled back and looked, shaking his head as if he could not believe what he was seeing, feeling, experiencing. Living, as if it had been he who had been dead.

"Yes, it is I," the man who was Qui-Gon confirmed. "Though maintaining the bodily form is as yet hard work for one as new to this, and as old, as I am."

"You are *not* old, Ma... uh." He trailed off. "What do I call you?"

"What would you like to call me?" the quizzical smile responded, blurring slightly around the edges.

"I have such names for you," General Kenobi whispered, his voice unsteady, "as would drive you into that underbrush with embarrassment." He attempted a smile, and felt his cheek wet, and a moonlit fingertip coming up to caress it.

"Call me Jinn," the old man suggested softly. "For ghost I still am, at least some of the time. For the rest, I will have to rely on you. If you are willing to be my anchor?"

"Nothing I would rather be," General Kenobi replied, and his feet rooted in the earth and his bones became heavy and his arms like steel and his mind like a heavy, warm, smooth, sun-drenched rock.

For the first time in many a year, General Kenobi was at rest.

For the first time in many a year, he had something worth holding.

And if ever after was a requirement, then he would gladly honour it.

-- end ---