Master Apprentice
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Title: Sound of Snow Falling
Author: TheWrongImpressionist
Beta: MerryAmelie
Archive: MasterApprentice, Fanfiction.net
Category: Qui/Obi, Crossover, Alternate Reality, Romance, Action/Adventure
Rating: PG-13, possible eventual R
Summary: in which Obi-Wan gets an education in the Living Force (whether he wants it or not), Qui-Gon further embraces his not-so-inner maverick, and Voldemort engages in a little biological warfare.
Feedback: Would be greatly appreciated at tukitaka@gmail.com, as writing fiction is very hard for me, and I take great pains to produce quality work.
(back to Chapter 6)
–seven–
-regret-
Obi-Wan didn't hesitate when he threw himself upon the woman, swift angles and sharpness in his movements, precision and calculation upon his face. His first few attacks came from the air, rapid downward strikes enough to push the woman several meters towards the lake, farther from both the forest and the red dome, which, due to Obi-Wan's intervention, still hummed and snapped above them.
“Oh my god,” Hermione whispered faintly, eyes very round and fingers coming up to flutter over her mouth. “He killed him. He killed him.”
She stared at the dead body. Harry, too, stared at it, shocked at Obi-Wan's betrayal. Behind him people screamed, a vast echoing screech like shrieking violins. He turned, looking for Dumbledore and finding him in intense conference with Snape; McGonagall and the other teachers went about calming the students as best they could. Dumbledore's back was to Harry and he couldn't make out what Snape said so rapidly, but the git's face was dark, narrowed eyes glittering like faceted onyx. Harry looked away.
“I suppose that answers whether or not he's a Dark wizard,” Ron said grimly, face was pale and voice with a shaky undertone. Beside him, Neville nodded, silent, eyes wide, yet strangely more in control of himself than most.
“Murderer,” Harry whispered with rising fury. The Jedi were right; Obi-Wan was a killer, one who wouldn't hesitate to cut down innocents like Master Pavrell. Now Harry wouldn't be the only one who could see thestrals. Nobody deserved that.
Obi-Wan was a dervish. Human-height above the ground, he whirled, airborne, snapping out legs and arms and that deadly glowing sword of his, bearing down upon the Jedi without hesitation, forcing her inexorably back and on the defensive. He was shouting at the Jedi – it might have been questions, it might not, but with the growing distance it was hard to hear, and in any case, it wasn't in English. For her part, the Jedi only responded sparingly, both verbally and physically; her movements were as stiff and ungainly as Obi-Wan himself had seemed, only moments ago. When she raised her sword with mechanical straightness, Obi-Wan was already canting to the side; when she pivoted to meet his thrust, Obi-Wan was long since in the air, above her reach, twisting lithely and landing on her unprotected side, sword bared.
It was clear she was going to lose.
“What she said before was really true.” Harry murmured aloud distractedly as he watched the impending slaughter play out before him, still feeling anger simmering just under his skin. “They weren't lying about Be- Obi-Wan being the dangerous one. He's done just what they said he would do....”
But then why would he have saved him, Ron, and Hermione, and right after they attacked him? Surely that would have been a prime opportunity-
The woman gasped and sank to one knee, winded, but she was given no rest; Obi-Wan was upon her, sweeping his sword downwards towards her shoulder and forcing her to block, then rise again, though it clearly took a toll.
If only he could get out there somehow...!
“Dobby!”
“Harry?”
“Ron, where's Dobby?” Harry asked, breathless with his sudden idea, already turning to scan the Hogwarts-side perimeter beyond the dome.
“Dunno-”
“There! Dobby!” Harry pointed and waved frantically, half-walking, half-running towards the elf, trying to catch his attention. He heard Ron calling to Hermione, and the two of them catching up to him.
“Harry, what are you thinking? How can Dobby help us?” Hermione nonetheless waved and gestured as frantically as Harry towards the elf.
“He's outside – he can get that thing and let us out – he sees us! Dobby!”
They were still far from that side of the dome, but they'd moved far enough away from the other cluster of hidden wizards that they stood out; it wasn't long before Dobby saw them. Harry began gesturing and shouting at once, hoping a house-elf's hearing was better than a human's.
Round eyes wide in his puckered face, Dobby nodded hastily, ears flopping back and forth before he raised his fingers in a snap; Harry, Ron, and Hermione turned in time to see Dobby pop back into sight on the other side of the dome in a nervous crouch, glancing skittishly at the body beside him while he rose with the small red object in hand.
Hands cupped around his mouth, Harry shouted, “Press it, Dobby!” Swallowing heavily with another skittish glance at the dead Jedi, the elf nodded-
-a flash of green and an outstretched hand and suddenly Obi-Wan was there, yanking the elf towards him with a hand on his shoulder, holding that sword so dangerously close the green reflected off Dobby's frightened eyes, grabbing the device from the elf's hand, pushing Dobby away with a touch to his forehead and something muttered – then Dobby fell to the ground, unmoving, and in his fist, Obi-Wan held the red oval.
Harry was livid; running back to the dome's edge, he screamed, “What have you done to Dobby, you-”
Obi-Wan's face was a mask of concentration; a blue crackle fizzed in his palm and ran over the object like miniature lightning, eliciting a snap and a faint smoke-stream.
Before the steam cleared from the device, Obi-Wan crushed it with his bare hand.
“What the hell are you trying to pull!” Harry hollered in anger, hand on his wand and ready to do something but forced into inactivity by the dome's continued presence, the dome that they'd be trapped in now for who knows how long thanks to Obi-Wan and who knew who else he'd kill while they were stuck with their hands tied-
“Easy, Harry,” Dumbledore murmured, a hand coming to rest on his shoulder; he twitched, startled, and twisted to face his mentor.
“But Professor, he's going to-”
“I know,” Dumbledore responded, voice tight with restrained – what, censure? Fear? Anger? Did Dumbledore even get angry like normal people? “But help is on the way, Harry.”
But what about all those other professors on the other side of the dome? They weren't trapped. Gesturing towards the teachers by the school, Harry began, “There's professors over there who could help-”
“I won't send them to fight a fight they cannot hope to win,” Dumbledore responded firmly, softly, making Harry immediately ashamed – hadn't he just thought himself, a second ago, that Obi-Wan was perfectly capable of killing more people?
Still, it didn't make him any less angry at the foreign wizard, so that when the woman Jedi, taking advantage of Obi-Wan's momentary distraction, caught up to him and started hacking away – finally on the offensive – Harry was all for her as she pressed Obi-Wan back to the wall of the very dome itself, which he wavered ever so close to, not touching but almost –
“Ha!” Harry hissed under his breath – the back of Obi-Wan's left arm touched from elbow to shoulder against the dome with a misleadingly soft skshh and crackle. Obi-Wan let out a short, pained gasp; and when he pulled away, the fabric of his shirt was burnt clean through, exposing partially blackened flesh beneath that broke off at his movements and fell in dry little flakes, like ash.
It was gross and looked really painful. Harry hoped it hurt, because Obi-Wan deserved it.
He watched the fight continue; a moment later, Dumbledore moved away, talking in quiet undertones with Snape, and Hermione and Ron came closer to take his place.
Ron looked a little less white but was pointedly not looking at the body only feet in front of them. “You think he's got,” Ron jerked his head meaningfully at Dumbledore and Snape, “those people coming to help?”
The Order? “I hope so,” Harry replied distantly, watching with a sinking heart as Obi-Wan once again regained the offensive, despite his injuries. In fact, it looked maddeningly like he didn't even feel them, if the speed with which he carried out attack after attack was any indication.
“She's going to lose soon, isn't she?” Hermione burst out helplessly, wringing her hands. “He's going to kill her, too. He's going to kill her.”
No one answered.
~*~
The Force feels wrong, Dark Side-touched.
Pain flows continuously through his mind, shunted off in the slipstream of his actions to a place where he can't feel it. The Force is wild around him, twining, surrounding, meshing, snarling until it isn't a matter of how to reach it, but how much of it he can harness to his use. With each twist of his muscles, he feels a matching shift in the Force, a sense of such acute awareness that it's maddening.
But it's not altogether unfamiliar, this keenness of perception. As if the world is segmented and fragmented and he's an insect to see all possibilities in facets, all at once –
- it was with him many months before, in a small dark space without light or gravity, where only he could provide touch and taste and smell and sound – only he, and a small, continuous trickle of life-sustaining liquid. After a while, everything just seemed like this – big. Too much reality for him to handle. He was held captive, then, like his Master, and close to madness. But now –
Now, he presses forward. She has since stopped answering his shouts, and so he's stopped yelling them. He knows they're moving faster than it seems they are, but each movement comes to him with dream-like slowness and blurriness, like all the clarity has been taken from him and only this haze of Force and necessity remains. And it is necessary. He'll stop her –
He sends a pulse of the Force with his outstretched sabre arm, pushing her back; then, with his other arm, pulls her feet forward. She, like the man, has proven herself very susceptible to most kinds of Force attacks, attacks against which even Padawans can defend themselves with some success. While she stumbles, he lunges, slicing upward through one of her arms and a section of her braids.
“Will you surrender?”
Seamlessly, she adjusts her stance to account for her missing limb. Obi-Wan's too busy releasing the torrents of pain the attack caused in his left arm, now burnt at the back as well as at the wrist, to notice whether or not she's doing the same as a result of her dismemberment.
But he has a definite advantage now. She can't use nearly as much strength in her one-handed parries, and her attacks, fewer than his to begin with, are now virtually non-existent. Their feet crackle atop the crusted snow – he doesn't sink. She does.
A tingle at the edge of his senses – a group of people approaching. He has to finish this soon, before they arrive....
She slices downward; he blocks it with an upward cut and a shove of the Force, following through with a downward stroke that she blocks, barely; then he's crouching and drawing his arm back and cutting downward again, and this time after she blocks he pulls on the Force to speed his upward cut, attacking while her arm's still raised in its previous upward position – and his sabre cuts into her thigh, and he's gritting his teeth against the pull on his wrist that the extra effort it takes to cut through flesh exerts on the damaged joint. Then, continue the stroke upward and through her wrist –
– if he keeps going, he can slice off her head –
– he could –
He doesn't.
Her sabre flashes mutedly out of existence; her wrist falls to the ground. Her face contorts into a horrible expression of utmost rage. She wobbles, once, on her single leg, before dropping like a felled log, joining her appendages in the snow.
Obi-Wan drops to one knee beside her, shunting off waves and waves of pain and fatigue, breath labored and cloudy in the chill air. His Master's sabre remains lit, cutting a gentle swathe into the snow. His eyes focus on the woman with an effort.
“You'll answer me now,” he commands, fingers crossing his torso, words thick with the Force.
She doesn't respond. He presses harder.
“You'll answer me now.”
She doesn't respond. Her face is slack and expressionless and her Force-signature as dead as if he'd killed her like the other.
“You'll answer me....” but he trails off, frowning, and the only sound comes from his harshly panted breaths. Something isn't right....
He stands. Slowly, he pivots, first his eyes, then his head, then his body. Ever-closer, the patch of incoming wizards approach, a bright spot against his senses. They'll be here within the minute. But they're not what makes the tight lurch of tension knot up his shoulders and curdle in his stomach. They're not what looms like a storm on the horizon of the Unifying Force, screaming at him that something stifling and dark is hurtling at him, something that has the potential to kill him more than a lightsabre ever could, and it's inexorably, suffocatingly close –
“You can't –”
Whirling, Obi-Wan brandishes his sabre –
“– even feel me, can you.”
– and stops cold.
“Drop the sabre.”
It falls from his fingers.
“Send it here.”
A flick of his fingertips, and it's gone. A taloned hand picks it up and crushes it – Obi-Wan watches the pieces fall, and a part of his mind is screaming past images of flames and pyres that that's his Master's body lightsabre in pieces in the snow – and his thoughts grasp in tangled directions for a way to save the man lying still and horribly exposed, neck cradled in another clawed hand, thumb-talon sawing little blood-streaks up and down, up and down –
Get off him!
The Force writhes with him – pulsing, ominous....Dark....
“You know, Padawan, if it weren't for your horse friends, I never would have found him.” Obi-Wan watches, transfixed and terrified, as the blood wells from the neck scratches and drips to the snow, sluggishly. “Stay still, and I promise I'll kill you quick, and your Master-”
– prescience strikes swiftly – Obi-wan leaps, letting out an incoherent, strangled sound of desperate fury –
“-never has to know.”
The claws encircling his Master's neck slash -
- Master Qui-Gon MASTER –
- NO!
~*~
Contrary to common myth, few Force-touched newborns are chosen by the Jedi.
The Master who finds Obi-Wan is about to leave the dry, hot planet – too hot, and its people, too hopeless – when she feels the touch of water in her mind - a chime, bell-like and blue. Her path diverts. She follows the infant's mind – delicately, it's such a new and fragile mind – to the underground dwellings crammed together like abscesses and dusted with sand. The people here don't know Jedi, but they know her, and those around watch her steps with a tired hero-worship. They don't know what she's looking for, but they all hope it's they that have it.
At one dwelling, she stops. Heatwaves curl upward from the sand, but inside....The ladder leads her down to a cool, dark, moist place, smelling of childbirth and blood. Shining things glint on the walls.
The midwife is the first and only of this planet to whom the Master identifies herself. In a simple, folklorish way, she's heard of Jedi and their habits; and perhaps it's this that makes her whisper, “If you want the babe, take him now, while the mother sleeps.”
While the mother sleeps....It sits poorly with her, but the Master nods and is led to the bedroom. The mother lies in a pile of purple and red blankets, bunched warm and tight on the ground like an animal's den. The babe is held loosely in her arms; strands of her pale blonde hair trail over his face. In the corner, a pile of soiled linens. There is no father in sight.
“Little Bilal....” The midwife sighs and brushes fingertips over the newborn's scrunched, wrinkly face.
Bilal...moisture. On a desert planet, the child is named moisture.
“He'll lose his name, should he come with me,” the Master says quietly, palming the infant's soft, smooth head. “He'll lose everything.”
“Yes, but,” the midwife watches her with furrowed brows, “What does he have now that's worth so much? His mother might love him as he grows up, or she might not, but I'd imagine your Jedi love is better.”
“I wouldn't-” be raising the child myself, she almost says, and love isn't rated by the profession of its possessor, but in the end, just shakes her head. “Jedi do not love.”
The midwife draws back. “You...of course you do. Look at what you did here, when no one knew what you are. You did good. You did love.”
The Master is, for a moment, wordless. Her palm rests on the warm baby's skin but her attention is, for that one pause, fully on the midwife. She did love? The midwife saw her work on this forsaken furnace of a planet as...love?
Her eyes return to the infant. “I need to check him. Please, let me hold him in peace for a moment. Do not let anyone enter.”
The midwife trusted her as a foreigner; her trust is exponentially greater now that the foreigner is known as Jedi. She leaves without question.
Carefully, the Master extricates the infant from the mother's arms. The woman, exhausted from childbirth, doesn't stir; but the child wakes, eyelids cracking open the smallest amount, body squirming weakly, Force squirming weakly. Already the infant tries to touch his mother's mind, instinctively seeking the protection his body no longer has.
“If you come with me,” the Master says gravely, “I'll take that from you.” And so saying, she begins to dampen down the connection between mother and child – and, a much paler connection, between father and child. The infant's eyes open wider. He tries to fight her hold on the Force, but she is monumentally stronger.
“If you come with me,” she continues, “I'll take your name.” His eyes are blue and solemn, an odd sight in a child so young. He has yet to make a sound. Most infants have cried long before this – been returned to their mothers, long before this.
“If you come with me, you'll be a Jedi. And a Jedi accepts that he has nothing. A Jedi accepts that he may lose everything.” Her mind touches his, imparting the words with primal guidance, translating words to a language older than she can understand. A language with no barriers; a language of the Force, made of images, sounds, smells, sensations. Memories.
“A Jedi does much good throughout his life. A Jedi knows peace, knowledge, serenity, harmony, and the Force. But in the end, a Jedi accepts.”
She sets the child down on the ground, unwrapping the bundle of rags from his tiny body until he lies naked upon the sand. He shifts, jerkily and uncoordinated, but does not shiver. She stands back and faces the infant.
“Do you accept?”
The infant watches her with wide, old eyes. Then, very slowly, his pudgy, baby limbs settle. He doesn't fight to touch his mother's mind anymore. The Master nods, only now crouching down beside him, cupping his face gently in her hands.
Then she severs the last of his connection.
The infant whimpers faintly; she watches him intently. It's a huge shock for an Force-touched newborn to be cut off from his parents – some of them begin dying. Those infants, she swiftly, neatly reconnects and leaves, never to become Jedi. Some cry out, too, or thrash and wail. Those children are also reconnected and left with their mothers – those, if taken, most often grow into the Dark Side. Their need for their mother is too great.
But the Master is entirely unprepared for what happens.
The infant reaches out for her own mind.
The Master stares. She has never had a newborn, upon losing the connection to his mother, seek out her, the severer, as a replacement. He doesn't even want her as a mother – just as a connection....She pushes the infant's attempts away, gently. It's a task that only takes a fraction of her concentration, despite it being surprisingly more difficult than it should be....
“So you seek a substitute?” the Master murmurs, looking down at the infant, starting to wrap the cloth back around his tiny body. “If I take you, will you continually seek substitutes?” Should she end up taking him, one of the crèche-mothers will, in fact, form a connection with the infant, though it's important the child not know that yet. He has to accept this initial nothingness before he can be granted more.
“Is such a strong connection necessary for you? Will your life as a Jedi be weighed down by attachment until you die? Until you become Dark? Until it kills you?”
She picks the child up, holding him to her body. He has stopped all but the most careful of mind-touches, tiny like the breath of a butterfly. “Or is it that your mind is strong enough that you hold equal and blameless the one who has hurt you?” she asks him quietly. “That you see no reason not to seek a connection with even I, who has taken all connection?”
She looks down into eyes blue like water. It's strange for this planet, for these people – most of them have yellow irises....
“Is this compassion? Or is this desperation?”
Neither infant nor Force has an answer.
~*~
Many years earlier, another Jedi Master held a tiny humanoid infant – asleep, and no longer grasping plaintively at his mind – and made the same decision.
“Qui-Gon Jinn,” the Master said solemnly, “your new name is. Jedi, you will be.”
~*~
“What the bloody hell is that-”
“That's Mr. Quinn!” Hermione pointed excitedly at the prone figure lying on his back in the snow.
“No, I meant the other thing,” Ron retorted, managing to sound dry despite having most of his attention fixed on the scenes playing out beyond the dome. “That big, blue thing with the buggy red eyes and the teeth. That thing, Hermione?”
“I see it, no need to be a prat,” Hermione snapped.
“Is he dead?” Harry asked heatedly. “Did Obi-Wan's father die, too?”
“Isn't anybody a teensy bit more concerned about the talking blue monster?” Ron wailed.
“It got Obi-Wan to stop, that's all I care about,” Harry responded darkly. It was true – Obi-Wan stood very, very still, looking thin and fragile as paper in the wind. He'd dropped his sword; his hands were slack and empty at his sides. His eyes didn't move from the blue thing – not as it kept touching Quinn's neck, not as it picked up the gray sword tube Obi-Wan threw its way, not as it crushed the tube in a single hand with a blinding flare of green....
“What is it?” Neville asked beside him, voice tinged with parts wonder and apprehension. Its appearance was utterly alien – two arms and two legs, yes, but its head was bulbous and bony, its red eyes set low and forward, and its teeth a vicious row protruding lip-less over its bottom jaw. Its skin was a slate-like dark blue, and as it gestured Harry caught sight of bone spikes protruding from its elbows – and the talons it had in place of fingers were hard to miss as well. Gender was impossible to tell – it wore a large gold band, inset with a red jewel, across its midsection, from which rectangles of white cloth draped over a pale pink skirt – but what might seem like female traits were offset by a muscled, bare chest. A similarly colored cloak wrapped around its neck in a thick scarf-like clasp, and around the back of its head, another gold metal plate attached and spread like a fan.
“Is it a – a male hag?” Neville continued, sounding skeptical of his own idea. Ron snorted distractedly.
“A man-hag? I don't think they exist....”
“No, they don't,” Hermione concurred, but she added, “though it's a better guess than anything else I've –” The rest of Hermione's sentence was swallowed up by a horrified gasp.
The blue creature raked its claws across Quinn's throat, opening up a gaping, lurid patch of red.
A sound like the world ending; Obi-Wan screamed.
~*~
- NO!
He falls upon the Draethos with mindless ferocity, a blinding, incandescent rage churning through each twist of limb. He'll kill him. The Force knows he'll kill him. It's only a matter of when, and how.
But his Master!
Desperately, Obi-Wan reaches for Qui-Gon's mind – but not with the Dark, never with the Dark, don't let it touch him just because it's in you.... He gets no answering touch, no recognition – stasis prevents it – but he clings with terrible fear nonetheless. He pours himself into his Master – insinuates himself into the nooks and crannies and won't let go.
Something here...if he can't keep his Master alive, something here has the power to break him, and it's not the Draethos.
He thinks of a desert and hot sand beneath his back.
~*~
A few agonizingly long moments of Obi-Wan's fury, and the Aurors arrived. They swooped out of the air in neck-breaking dives that would have done any Quidditch team proud, converging in on the two fighters with spells darting.
But they drew up short, as both Obi-Wan and the blue creature deflected or dodged the spells flung at them; and as none of the Aurors were dumb enough to dive between two locked combatants, they were forced to hover, a half-dozen or so figures dark against the snowy sky, and take their shots when they could. As Harry watched, Obi-Wan lunged forward to evade a stunning spell, hastily converting the motion into a stilted attack. The blue creature took instant advantage, slamming a brutal uppercut to Obi-Wan's jaw, snapping the young man's head up and sending him reeling backwards in a spray of blood. He staggered into an unsteady parry just in time to prevent a hole in his chest from the creature's grasping talons. Blood trailed out the corner of his mouth.
Another hit and Obi-Wan flew several feet, spinning mid-air before landing with a heavy thump in the snow, face-down and twitching faintly.
Before the blue creature could move in, the Aurors as one launched stunning spells at the creature in a great flash of light. Surrounded by the barrage, there was nowhere for it to go. Enough spells hit it to slow it down; more, and it stilled, wobbled, and dropped, immobile, to the snow.
To the side, Obi-Wan pushed himself shakily to his feet, only to be caught under several stunning spells as well. Like the blue creature, he seemed resistant to being stunned, but numbers won out and he dropped his sword, the light flicking out of existence, and fell. He gave an agonized scream before he hit the ground, dreadful as someone having his heart torn from his chest, and still living.
One Auror jumped off her broom and knelt beside Obi-Wan's father. Two more followed suit, one sporting a familiar crop of bubble-gum bright pink hair, while two others took up places beside Obi-Wan and the blue creature. The remaining three Aurors sped quickly towards the corners of the red dome, though one broke apart from the rest.
Kingsley. He approached Dumbledore from the other side of the red barrier even as, with the coming of the Aurors, several Hogwarts teachers broomed over the dome to give aid. Harry surreptitiously edged closer to eavesdrop.
McGonagall, lips thinned and arms crossed, stepped in his path, effectively blocking him. He scowled and opened his mouth to protest but she raised her chin with an especially steely glint to her eye, and he thought better of it.
Instead, he returned to Hermione and Ron, and the three of them did their best to listen from a distance.
“...assisted in destroying the machine...appearance of two...Jedi? Moody, have you heard of – no...claimed he was a rogue...point at which...killed the male victim.”
“....second victim, female, appears catatonic...breathing, but....”
“...third victim, male, status unknown....”
A sudden exclamation from afar, and all eyes turned to watch a flurry of motion erupt around the fallen Mr. Quinn.
“There's too many people in the way,” Hermione complained in frustration, trying in vain to maneuver the magnifying spell around the far-off Aurors to catch a glimpse of what caught their attention, but the witches and wizards formed a virtual wall. Harry instead glanced at Dumbledore and Kingsley. The Auror was speaking into some kind of handheld device that looked suspiciously like a walkie-talkie, though Harry knew it had to be modified in order to work around Hogwarts. Certainly copied the Muggle design, though....
In the distance, the Hogwarts professors landed by the Aurors. Poppy Pomfrey was one of them.
~*~
“This man should be dead. If not from the neck wound, then from the complete stoppage of his bodily organs. I've never seen....How are you keeping him alive?”
The Auror Mediwitch only shook her head tightly. “I'm not.”
“Then what is?”
The Mediwitch didn't look up. Eventually she murmured, “I don't know.”
~*~
Professor Flitwick knew a great deal about charms. A great deal. More than he'd ever taught to any single Hogwarts pupil, more than most Aurors ever bothered to learn unless they were specialists. And if they were specialists – well, who was called in to teach them but himself?
Not that he liked it very much. Hogwarts students were just at the right ages for learning – malleable minds, they had, just on the cusp of maturity. A bit cruel, sometimes, yes, in the way that children are, and often distracted by brighter, flashier things. But still. Despite themselves, they learned. They were ripe for what he had to give them. Aurors...well, the recruits were the closest to Hogwarts students, he supposed, but even they'd look down upon charms if he didn't dazzle their socks off during his introduction. And they all seemed so very mean and jaded when they got older. Show him a happy Auror, and he'd show that Auror a thousand happier charms users.
So it was with the particular grimace he reserved for Auror-related business that Flitwick trundled over to the fallen blue creature, feeling like nothing so much as a big, ungainly penguin waddling about in the snow. They wanted him to check the...the...what was he supposed to call it – him? He was a sentient being, no doubt about that, so creature didn't fit despite that garish appearance, but neither did man. Flitwick had always been more sensitive than most about the proper naming of half-breeds, which this being no doubt was –
“Quite a snarl on this fucker, ain't it?”
Flitwick's expression soured further. “Your vulgarity is rather off-putting.”
The Auror grinned toothily and gave the stunned being a kick. “S'true, though, innit? Eh, teach?”
Flitwick pursed his lips and began searching, starting at the top of the being's gold headpiece, for hidden charms – concealment, disguise, purposeful disfigurement, befuddling, aggression enhancers, strengthening....the list was extensive, but he could sort through them like they were boxed candy and only he had the labeled sheet –
“Ooh....” He suddenly felt a bit woozy. His wand wavered over the blue man's head, right at temple range.
“Teach?”
“It's-” he shook himself, frowning faintly. Red eyes stared at him glassily, unmoving. “Nothing.”
“F'you say so, teach, but one more sound like that, and I'm gonna whip Kingsley over here so fast those fuckin' huge earrrings of his'll be left spinnin' where they fly.”
“Certainly.” It was just important that he make no more sound, then. He almost shook his head again, feeling sort of itchy in there, but if he scratched it that'd only make it worse....
He drew his wand down further, past the being's temple. He could keep scanning for more charms, especially in the torso region, the...torso was where...with the heat, and the heart, charms settled...more easily....
Or, he could remove the stunning spells.
He did try to shake his head then, but it only came out as a faint twitch in his nose, like a sniffle. The Auror didn't even turn. Of course she wouldn't, she was an Auror, crude, lacking in finesse and unable to use the skill that he, a Master of charms, could use, to undo these stunning spells. It would just take him a moment, really.
He shouldn't, though. This being was dangerous. This being had tried to kill another. This being –
Was a half-breed, like himself, being unjustly held down, in a shameful manner, like some common criminal. Surely he could help a fellow half-breed?
Yes.
Yes, he could.
Because Professor Flitwick knew a great deal about charms, but he was very old, and his mind was not as watchful as it used to be.
~*~
He can't see when the Draethos surges to its feet and decapitates the diminutive wizard, but he can see the head that lands beside him in the snow, the expression shocked and confused, blood pooling out of his neck; and he can hear the angry yell and following wet gurgle as the witch's voice is silenced. Screams rise anew like far-off sirens.
The Draethos enters his field of vision, looming over his head with teeth bared in an angry leer. Every instinct Obi-Wan possesses scrambles for a way to kill it before it kills him -
- his mind touches on his sabre, resting deep on the ocean floor. He feels a big, slow, solid and curious presence in the Living Force next to it, and with all the knowledge Qui-Gon ever crammed into his reluctant skull, hastily, desperately connects with the creature through the Living Force and asks –
The Draethos crouches beside him and raises a dripping, bloody arm, ignoring the sounds of chaos around them both like they're alone in the eye of a hurricane. It hisses and brings its arm down -
- Obi-Wan's lightsabre whips through the air, launched by a mighty heave of the giant squid, blue Force energy lighting up only as its proximity to Obi-Wan increases –
- the Draethos begins to turn, then jerks unnaturally when the sabre impales it through the chest.
It falls onto Obi-Wan, dead. He releases the Force from his sabre before it can cut through him, too, as the body smothers his nose and mouth with its mass and the scent of blood, and its weight knocks the breath from his lungs, and his view of the winter-white sky goes dark. With a lurch he shoves off the clinging bits of stunning spells, sticky like a spider web made of the Force, and shoves the body from him.
He lurches to his feet; the Force quickens his steps to his Master. The witches and wizards try to stop him but he brushes them away like flies; he has no time or energy for finesse or diplomacy. He falls to his knees near his Master's temple. Places one hand on his throat, giving all the healing Living Force he can muster. And with his other hand, does something he perhaps should have done a long time ago; he removes his Master from stasis.
All this in the space of seconds. There are hands grabbing at him; impatiently he swats them away with another blunt wave of the Force. They can't have him yet, not until he's healed his Master's throat and brought him from stasis....
He needs his Master to wake. He needs his Master. He needs Qui-Gon. He can't do this on his own anymore; he needs his Master awake and aware and with his Padawan and he needs his Master to need his Padawan, too.
The Force writhes; he loses consciousness in seconds.