Letters between Qui-Gon and Obi-won.

oh my god I just read a post that was like “fuck this nonsense send MACE WINDU back in time to unfuck the prequels!!” and now I will never, ever be satisfied until I find the 300k version of that fic, ever. I NEED THIS FIC LIKE I NEED AIR. WHY IS THIS FIC NOT ALREADY IN MY HANDS??

“Shh, shh, we’re almost there,” Feemor murmurs, and the trembling teenage girl pressed tight to his side gives a jerky nod, though she doesn’t release her death grip on his belt.

Jango's eyes flicker up, down, up again, and it’s meant to be dismissive, but Shaak knows wariness when she sees it, and it makes her smile just a little. “Lady, I just tried to put a slug through that fancy headdress of yours.” With a chuckle, Shaak takes a step closer. “Fett, I've been a Jedi for decades. If I held a grudge against everyone who had tried to kill me, I would have more enemies than you.”

Padme lives. She runs. -- Leia is growing in fits and spurts, eating greedily and crying loudly. She stays in a sling on Padme’s chest when they move, Luke held snug in a sling around Obi Wan’s. Luke gets a whole head of thick brown hair while Leia’s is still patchy and bald, but he never matches his sister’s powerful lungs. When Padme had been sitting in her high senatorial apartment on Corsucant, holding Anakin’s sweaty hand, she had never imagined she’d be murmuring desperately soothing noises to her fussy daughter while she shot around a corner at stormtroopers, while R2D2 meddles with a ship’s blast doors behind her. Luke starts teething on a hot jungle planet where they hunker down for three weeks, sleeping in an abandoned old temple and catching the local wildlife for dinner. Leia takes her first steps in the belly of a Corellian freighter they’ve stowed away on. She wobbles between Padme’s outstretched hands and Obi Wan’s knees and boxes of smuggled luxuries. When she falls down, Obi Wan surges forward, heart in his throat, but Leia laughs.

Commander Ponds whirls around at the sound of Mace’s step and bolts up to his feet. He begs Mace not to take Boba back to Kamino. He says that he’ll look after him. He’ll take responsibility. With hands pressed together, he pleads for mercy for his brother. Mace tells him not to be ridiculous. Of course he isn’t taking Boba back to Kamino. He’s waiting, that’s all. It is only fair to give everyone a second chance. Even Jango Fett. (An AU where Mace Windu acquires and shares custody over a six-year-old Boba with Jango.)

While cut off from the GAR during an extended campaign, Obi-Wan discovers an infant and a sense of self-preservation.

“This is incredibly sweet,” Obi-Wan observed with a fond smile. Cody was currently telling the cadets a story and they listened excitedly to his every word. “He just exudes ori’vod energy. The younger ones can’t help themselves,” Alpha replied. “It’s been like this his entire life.”

Ponds is wandering the halls of the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, on his way to a meeting with his general, when he finds a crying youngling. He’s clutching his hands close to himself and Ponds abruptly remembers a mission with General Vos, who had an eerily similar reaction to a set of manacles. Ponds can’t help but kneel in front of the kid and offer him his pair of brand new gloves.

Later, he will say it was a calculated choice, that he looked at the odds and looked at the clones and decided that better the Jedi he didn't know than the Sith he did. This is, as it happens, a bare faced lie. (or: A Sith Lord realises, abruptly and rather late, that war means casualties, and decides that the great Jedi genocide plan can go fuck itself.)

The first time she wakes up and doesn’t immediately want the world to go back to sleep with her, Fox is on the other side of the tiny room, bouncing Leia on his knee, with Luke asleep against his shoulder.

"I fear that, when you reached into the Force to ease this man's pain, you reached too far. And without proper shielding… it’s easy to see how a rudimentary connection might have been established," the force-ghost of his former master says contemplatively, as if he is not casually ruining Luke's entire life. Luke buries his face in his hands. “You’re saying I gave too much.” “In a sense, yes," Ben replies. “I’m a force-whore,” Luke moans. “Oh, kark. Leia is going to kill me.”

It all comes down to this: the babies in his arms are just so little. “You should sit down, Sir. Let Waxer and I take the tubies for a minute,” Cody gentles. Despite the even, easy tone, despite knowing that it’s Cody and that, as the last twenty-four hours have successfully proved beyond a doubt, Cody would rather die than see any harm come to him, Obi-Wan can’t suppress his immediate reaction to the thought of putting the twins— his twins, his now, and he’ll die before he lets anything touch them—down. “Full disclosure, I don’t believe I am capable of letting go of them, at the moment.” He thinks for a beat and then adds, “Possibly ever.”

He’d known how some of the men are with younglings—known from Waxer and Boil how sharply those attachments can form with little ones. Hell, the men were raised to be protective, so much so that Obi-Wan has often wondered if their protective drive was not written into their very atoms, some intrinsic part of their DNA. It wasn’t something Obi-Wan had ever questioned. He’d thought he had understood the scope of it. In reality, he hadn’t understood a thing. Not until Kamino. Or: Not all that dive from cliffs make a running head start. Sometimes, the Fall is only a natural progression.

Two months after the Guard officially moves to Coruscant, the lawyer shows up. _ In which Obi-Wan Kenobi never returns to the Jedi order after the war on Melidaa/Dann and instead finds another way to follow the Force's will. Namely, by fighting sentient-rights abuses all over the galaxy and emancipating the Grand Army of the Republic, one clone trooper at a time.

When Obi-Wan Kenobi closes his eyes and lets himself fade into the force, he thinks he'll finally rejoin his fellow Jedi. Instead he wakes up on Stewjon, barely a Padawan's age. Certain he's been sent back to end Sidious, he steals a ship and begins his journey towards becoming capable of killing a Sith Master. It just so happens the ship he steals is Jango's. (Or: Obi-Wan would like to kill the sith and save his people. The Mandalorians are just trying to keep up.)

“How’d you get stuck with babysitting duty anyway?” Boba asked one day during dinner. “Oh, I volunteered for this,” Fox told him. “Why the kark would you do that?” “Language,” Fox admonished. “Well, I was just living my normal boring life and I thought to myself, ‘I don’t get called an ugly piece of banthashit often enough.’ So I decided to adopt you.” Boba snorted. “You’re a psychopath,” he told Fox. “I’ve been called worse,” Fox replied breezily.

Obi-Wan stared at the newcomer standing tense in the corner. Dark smoke curled around the other padawan’s boot like the tail of a lothcat. With a huff, Obi-Wan disengaged his own lightsaber and clipped it to his belt, bowing in greeting. “Hello, Padawan Antilles.” OR Padawan Obi-Wan Kenobi makes a friend and the universe changes for the better.

The door slams closed again the second Fox clears the threshold. The street crowd has largely fallen back into its normal rhythm, everyone moved on from the disruption. Which just leaves Fox, and the kid. Great.