Chapter Text
He really only noticed the change in the air when his training room was opened and cleared.
It was annoying; the room was heavily shielded and so was the perfect place for him to practice his katas without inconveniencing anyone with the holocrons he used, but clearly someone else needed it more, so he sat back on his heels in the entrance and took a few deep breaths, letting his surprise and anger go.
The cleaning droids were whirring away, polishing up the floor and taking away the dust. Not that there was too much dust, since he’d kept it fairly clean. Just enough dust to look convincingly unused, not enough to make him cough and choke as he practiced.
Jedi were bringing in equipment that was decidedly not used in sparring practice. He sat and watched them for a while, silent and unmoving. It looked like they were setting up a gym. Curious.
Perhaps it was the influence of the new soldiers he had caught glimpses of walking the halls alongside some of the more prominent Masters and Knights. They bewildered and fascinated him by turns – all quite different in the Force, each with distinct markings on their identical sets of armor, in colors and shapes. Yet the few times he had seen them without their helmets, they had seemed to have the same face.
Perhaps it had only been a trick of the light and the distance? The vents were useful highways across the Temple, but they were not ideal for gathering visual information.
Initiate Obi-Wan Kenobi folded back on himself and slid away from his now-opened training room. He’d have to find another, but first, it was nearly time to slip down to the kitchens and grab some food. It was Zhellday and his fresh food was gone.
As he crouched near the entrance to the kitchens, waiting for the cooks’ attention to turn more to the dining hall and let him begin sneaking food into the bags he brought, he pondered the shifting currents of the Force. It had begun to be far more active than he had ever felt before soon after the soldiers first came.
It was impossible that the Council would allow that many Darksiders into their halls, yet he had sensed a definite, though small, ooze of the Dark coming off each soldiers the first few times he had heard them walking while he traveled in the walls. Their steps were distinctive from any Jedi, and that tiny aura of darkness had made them even more alien. But now he rarely sensed that coming from any of them, though it still lingered in the back of his awareness if he focused on one of them.
Perhaps it was some kind of amulet or small weapon, harmless to a Force-null but disturbing to a Jedi. Perhaps they didn’t even know what it was doing.
He reached out, snagging fruit and bread from the shelves and bringing them to himself, carefully packing them away. It had been a while since he had dared go down and rummage the pantries in person, even if everyone did usually ignore him when he was stupid enough to almost be caught. Getting bigger had some disadvantages.
Yes, he decided as he carefully removed one each of a package of snacks from several shelves, the Council must have detected the darkness and done something about it. There was no way they had not, with how sensitive they were to it. Especially not with all the trouble he had to go to to avoid being found.
Only shielding techniques that were borderline the point of no return from the Dark, a weak Force-suppressing anklet, spending almost all of the few credits he could find or earn on scent-blockers, and sticking to the lower levels of the Temple most of the time, where the signatures became chaotic around the creches and it was considerably harder to pick out one from another from all the centuries of children’s emotions soaked into the stone kept him from having been found and thrown out. Again.
Obi-Wan left the kitchens with two full bags and made his way to his home, a disused and long-forgotten apartment deep under the Temple. There was still running water and electricity, though the lights were dim, and over time he had found or made himself a table and a bed. He had taught himself how to fix the kitchen appliances and they worked well enough for simple food preservation and cooking, and he could at least keep himself and his clothes clean in the ancient fresher.
He sat cross-legged at his low table and ate his last meal of the day, quietly thinking of each thing he had found that day to be grateful for.
It still stung a little, but it was better than living as a slave or on the street.
~~~*~~~
There were soldiers in his training room, wearing strange white armor with all kinds of colors and shapes on it.
Obi-Wan sat back in the vent, wary, and watched as they checked out the room, reminding him a little of tookas set loose in a new enclosure. Once they seemed to be satisfied with their examination, they began to relax, taking off their armor. They all wore the same set of simple close-fitting black clothes beneath it.
Some began to use the equipment, or to stretch. A few sat on the side and began to fuss over their armor. It looked like they were either repairing it or cleaning it.
They did all have the same face. Odd.
He gingerly edged closer to the grate covering the end of the vent and inhaled, slow and deep. All he could scent was the lingering residue of the cleaner the droids had used, and the new smell of the soldiers, swirling around and up as they moved. All of them were betas, similar enough to be a family group but not identical.
More strangeness. What were they, to have the same body but not the same scent or Force-presence?
And why were they all betas? Alphas were typically prized as soldiers, with their heightened reflexes and sensory capabilities. They were the instinctual providers and protectors of society. Betas were the negotiators, interpreters, and mediators. Not exactly the kind of abilities anyone prized in a soldier, especially just one of a unit.
Obi-Wan dug his fingernails into the skin of his arms. Not that that was supposed to matter in the Order, but yet it did. The Jedi were supposed to be able to rise above any biological instincts, use the Force to suppress or heighten them as they chose, act as any as they needed to be in any situation. Some argued that it made them weaker in all ways, that they should just let themselves use the gifts of their second gender that they had been born with and not try to take on the others as well, but the Masters and the Council insisted that the chameleon-like ability of mimicking any gender that the Jedi were famous for was important and not in the slightest way damaging to them.
The point was, the soldiers smelled very much only of beta, and every Jedi in the Temple that was past their first few rocky months of presentation as their hormones became stronger with age didn’t smell especially strongly of any single type. It was even less obvious who was what when they used any kind of suppressor or blocker, and it was not unheard of for someone to live out a long and content life without anyone ever knowing what they were.
Whatever these soldiers were, they were no Jedi, and yet the Council had allowed them quarters in the Temple.
Allowed them to live where the children who had not been considered worthy were not.
It wasn’t fair that this abandoned wing of the Temple would be opened for them, but not for children who had grown up there, had never been outside the walls before. They got to come in and be safe, but the children who were unfit to be Jedi were handed a boarding pass for a ship and an assignment to one of the Corps.
They hadn’t even let him prove his worth, prove that he could master his temper and his instincts and be a good choice for a padawan before booting him out the door as soon as it was legal to and not have it be considered child abandonment. They hadn’t even waited for him to turn thirteen, as was the custom of the Order.
It had just been ‘You’re twelve now and still too angry, here’s your lifetime sentence to the AgriCorps, we don’t care that you would be better suited to literally any other of the Corps and put in applications for some of them, get on this ship and go’ with no chance of appeal. Master Yoda himself had walked him to the entrance of the Temple, had tracked him to the battered freighter that took him away, left him no chance of escape.
Obi-Wan picked at the raised white scars that curled down his biceps and huddled more closely in on himself.
The AgriCorps hadn’t wanted him, hadn’t wanted an angry afraid sad child who was just presenting and had almost no ability whatsoever with the Living Force. They hadn’t come for him when the Darksider had attacked Bandomeer and enslaved most of the null population and some of the Corps members, hadn’t bothered to include him in the rescue operation spearheaded by some Knight the Council had sent. They’d let him be taken off-planet before the mines were blown up and sold again.
He’d had to free himself, escape on his own, make his own way across half the galaxy back to Coruscant, and after all of that, be denied entry to the Temple. He’d had to spend weeks sleeping on the streets, trying to figure out how to get inside. Had to spend more weeks hiding in the walls and living off scraps as he tried to find somewhere, anywhere, he could live that was inside the Temple and safe but also safe from anyone ever sensing him and throwing him out again.
He really wasn’t sure why he’d come back, apart from not knowing any other home.
The weird in-between space he had lived in after escaping the slavers had been safe, for a given value of safety, but he didn’t like how the Force was so mutable there and while he appreciated the lessons that the strange beings who lived there had taught him, he didn’t want to be responsible for people.
He had only ever tried to be Obi-Wan, useful, enough, wanted.
Sometimes he felt that he had stayed on the strange planet for longer than the year and a bit it had taken him to fix one of the crashed ships that littered it and leave. He was nineteen now, still small, paler than ever from living underground and inside walls, still liable to freeze when suddenly confronted and fall apart into shaking pieces afterwards, still nothing and nobody.
Everyone else seemed older, wiser, stronger than he remembered, even from the perspective of his sheltered twelve-year-old self who had never left the creche. The crechemasters he sometimes watched if he safely could had more wrinkles, the youngest initiates he remembered were all either padawans or gone. He knew none of the new ones. That didn’t seem right; he had freed himself at fifteen, spent a year and some on the strange planet, and finally gotten home around his sixteenth nameday.
And now the first safe space he had made for himself where he could let himself dream of being a Jedi was invaded by strange betas who were not even Jedi.
They trained for a long time as he watched them from above, eyes burning and knees held to his chest. They were mostly silent, though they did sometimes give each other encouragement or suggestions. They were surprisingly tactile, easily touching each other on the shoulder or back to give warning as they passed, clasping hands around forearms in what appeared to be approval, and finally all coming together to sit in a ragged circle and cool down.
A few of them slumped across their neighbors, flinging bodies and arms and legs casually into their space, and they were not rebuffed, not gently chided back into proper distance. One had thrown himself bodily across the one to his left as they were polishing their armor, and the recipient had only lifted his arms and set the piece down on their back and kept working.
It was not something he had ever seen before, not among adults.
He ran his hands up and down his arms and watched until they got to their feet and left the room, turning out the lights and closing the doors, and then he followed them through the vents and the walls until he found the set of quarters they were living in; old unused Master-Padawan suites in the same wing, four soldiers to each.
The vents were smaller there and he was now too big to get close enough to the ends to see through the grates, so he listened through the walls and extended his senses cautiously to get a feel for what they were doing through the Force. Most of them were talking to each other in their rooms, and he smelled food.
One of the suites only had one soldier in it, and he wondered why that was so. Was he a bad influence on the rest? Could he not control his instincts well enough, and disturbed the others?
Obi-Wan felt a vague sense of kinship with the lonely soldier. He had been sent away to live in a separate room than his crechemates when he was young, because he could not control his nightmares and the resulting hormones that filled his scent and put everyone on edge.
He sat down in the narrow crawlspace and sank into a light meditation, trying to home in on the soldier’s unique Force-signature so he could remember it for when the man was out somewhere where Obi-Wan could see him and put a face and a set of armor to the signature.
Maybe the man would appreciate some anonymous tips to help him survive a life of isolation inside the Temple? Even if he was a Null and couldn’t sense what he was being excluded from in the web of bonds that all Jedi shared, he would probably face difficulties, be forced to use strong blockers or suppressors, be ignored and scolded for his failings.
Obi-Wan could help him with a few ways to slip under the radar of the Masters and whoever was his authority figure. Obi-Wan could be helpful.
He made his way back to his own quarters as the man’s mind and signature slowed as he went to bed, and resolved to do his best to help his fellow outcast in the morning.