Sand Cube Assignment 7 A Little Help

Obi-Wan's heart skipped a beat in the brief hope that Anakin's attitude had shifted, but the boy's eyes landed hard when they found him. The kid's mouth was still pinched with defiance.

"Qui-Gon's defiance I sense in you." Yoda once told him. At the time, Obi-Wan took it as a compliment, but now he was beginning to understand a Jedi Master's perspective of the trait. Defiance was an insult to a Master's authority, and Anakin was wielding it deliberately.

Obi-Wan chomped his jaw shut and looked out the window again. He focused to cool his own temper before it got out of hand this time.

The tall boy climbed into the booth with a quiet scolding. "I've been lookin' all over for you."

Flo's voice pierced the air like sour milk, "You wanna refill?"

Obi-Wan shifted his attention and gathered his manners. "Yes, please." He absently fidgeted with his teacup while the droid paused for Anakin's order too.

Anakin glared over. "Water," he said it as if it should have been obvious, "with ice."

The droid rolled away.

They were both silent, both avoiding eye contact, and the waitress droid returned a minute later with their orders. Obi-Wan muttered a polite thank you but didn't drink his tea. Anakin didn't say anything to the droid and gulped down the water before the glass hit the table.

Finally, Anakin muttered, "Master Windu said I might find you here."

Obi-Wan sat back in the seat and shrugged his fingers on the tabletop. "Just getting some supper."

Anakin's eyes trailed out the window, looking hurt.

"You and I both needed to calm down." Obi-Wan's tone was as crisp as the water in Anakin's glass.

"I didn't leave to calm down," Anakin argued.

Obi-Wan rubbed his lips together. "I know."

Anakin glared out the window, but a thin veil of guilt eked out on the Force. "I went to ask the council for a different Master."

Obi-Wan clasped his hands together in his lap. After a pause, he shrugged his thumbs. "What did they say?"

"They wouldn't see me," Anakin said, tight lips rippling. "Only Master Windu came out to talk to me."

Obi-Wan wasn't surprised by that. He angled his head and eyed nothing in the air. "And?"

Anakin folded his hands tightly on the table and stared at his own fidgeting thumbs. "He wanted me to recommend another master who believed in me as much as you did." He refused to meet Obi-Wan's eyes as he admitted it. "I couldn't think of one."

Obi-Wan kept his expression stoic despite the reluctant compliment. He suspected Mace sent the boy out here with apologies, but if they weren't going to come from the heart, Obi-Wan wasn't sure what good it would do.

Obi-Wan sighed. "You are very gifted, Anakin, but talent alone won't bring you success. Pride brings upon frustration. You won't succeed at everything." He shook his head. "No one does."

He detected a shred of humility in Anakin's eyes.

Obi-Wan said it clear and firm. "But I do believe you can overcome it… if you work for it."

Anakin's mouth worked to try to stay tense but softened despite it. "I know."

Silence fell upon the table again. Obi-Wan was calmer now and he could tell Anakin was trying to yank pride into check. Anakin slurped his water and set it down in front of him. He fingered the droplets of condensation, brows hard, mouth pinched, trying to work his way up to it.

Obi-Wan almost didn't care anymore. Even if the lad managed an apology, Obi-Wan wasn't sure if he could accept Anakin forgiveness for saying the same things he felt himself.

"I'm sorry I said those things," Anakin finally muttered, his eyes stretched to stare at nothing out the window. "I know you did everything you could to save him. I just wanted to blame somebody."

Obi-Wan let his eyes shift back to look at the boy's face, sensing the pain in Anakin's heart, the anguish. It was like an emotional filth swept under the surface for so long it had hardened to a permanent crud.

But Obi-Wan turned his eyes out to the window too, for, on this topic, Obi-Wan was beginning to have the same problem. He needed to let Qui-Gon go. And he knew it. The attachment was poisoning him. The guilt was gnawing at him. And this little 'pathetic life-form' poking salty words into the still bleeding wound prevented it from healing on its own.

I didn't take him away from you, Obi-Wan grumbled in his mind. You took him from me first.

Obi-Wan closed his eyes to reel in his thoughts, and then he recognized his thoughts. The source of Obi-Wan's pain wasn't about how Qui-Gon died; it was about how Qui-Gon discarded him. Obi-Wan still felt the slice between his shoulder blades from when Qui-Gon stepped up in front of the Council that night and announced he would take on Anakin as his own apprentice… as if he didn't have one already.

In truth, Qui-Gon was simply trying to juggle two students that needed him and a Council that was already weary of his insubordination. But for that short time the three of them were together, Qui-Gon unwittingly began a tug of war; a war he didn't live long enough to resolve.

And now Obi-Wan and Anakin were fighting over the affections of a dead man.

Anakin muttered, sincere now. "I just miss him, is all."

Obi-Wan's throat was too tight to talk. "Me too." He swallowed hard to get his voice back. "More than you know."

Their eyes met for a moment, but Obi-Wan turned away and forced himself to say it, "But he's gone."

So many words gurgled up to finish that statement with something else, if only to continue the sentence. Obi-Wan wanted to tack on any memory to cling to, any idiom to pray to, any sliver of the Code to meditate to, just so the thought itself wouldn't end. But the truth was as stark and as cold cut as the incomplete life to which it referred.

He's gone.

Obi-Wan rubbed his eyelids with thumb and forefinger and stared painfully out the window.

"And now you're stuck with me, right?" Anakin accused sorely.

Obi-Wan sniffed hard, but he didn't have to fight this one so much. "And you're stuck with me," he returned, angling his head to point it out. "Because that's what our master felt was best."

Anakin's eyes flicked to him and Obi-Wan kept his gaze.

Our master.

Anakin absorbed that and loosened his jaw with a thought. "He was a good master." Anakin nodded, carefully eyeing Obi-Wan for his response to it. "Wasn't he?"

"The best," Obi-Wan smiled through his pain and admitted this part with ease. "Better than me by light-years."

The corner of Anakin's mouth stretched a half-grin. Obi-Wan shrugged his eyebrow and sat back, breaking the gaze to sip his tea.

Anakin's expression altered as he made a decision.

The boy reached down to his hip and rummaged out the borrowed sand cube. The purple and white sand was a stew from the trip in his pocket. He set it on the table between them and folded his hands together again. He angled his chin to Obi-Wan with a challenge. "I need to know you can do it."

Obi-Wan's eyes narrowed.

"And then I'll do it," Anakin promised firmly. "I just— I need to see you do it first. And if you can, I'll do anything you ask," his tone was decisive, "from here on out."

Part of Obi-Wan was eager for the clear contest with the boy, convinced the undisciplined and marginally-trained eleven-year-old could do no better at the homework than he, but something whispered in Obi-Wan's subconscious not to give in so easily.

He narrowed his eyes at Anakin and began to shake his head. "Mm… No."

Anakin's mouth twisted.

Obi-Wan lifted his eyebrows and soured his frown, dismissing the offer entirely. He leaned forward over the table and leered hard at Anakin with a firm mouth behind his new beard. "After what you said to me today? If you want me to continue to be your Master," he pointed hard at the sand cube between them and nudged it back at the kid, "you need to prove to me you're worth my time."

Anakin's jaw rippled as he stared at him…

Obi-Wan knitted his brows to stare right back…

Anakin curled his lip.

Obi-Wan curled his more.

Anakin barred his teeth.

Obi-Wan scrunched his mouth.

Anakin smiled. "Okay," He gave in and sat back, but he shot forward again and wagged a finger at Obi-Wan's nose. "But you gotta promise you gonna show me up when I'm done."

Obi-Wan sat back and shrugged his fingers. "Fair enough."

Anakin placed his palms on the table on either side of the cube and stared at the thing. The boy sighed hard, focused harder, and fumbled with the Force.

The purple sand separated from the white in record time. Anakin paused for a breath and refocused to pull up a column of purple through the middle of the white sand. One by one, he nudged out three naked branches from the trunk and spun out three skinny sticks from each branch. It was mildly sloppy as the boy could not yet control his own power, but it looked more like a tree, regardless of its lack of leaves, than anything Obi-Wan ever saw.

(Without glue.)

"There." Anakin flopped back into the booth and motioned to it with a shrug of defeat. "That's the best I got."

Obi-Wan shrugged with bland dismissal. "S'not bad."

"Your turn." Anakin threw down the challenge again, whipping his fingers in the air at the man gangsta' style. "Show me whatchyou got!"

Obi-Wan pressed a sinister grin as if he were about to amaze the boy with his skill. He sat up in the seat and eyed Anakin with an arrogant glare of his own while his palm shook the cube back into a mess and slapped it down on the table between them. With an aggressive flick of his shoulders, Obi-Wan tucked away the sleeves from his forearms and knotted his two eyebrows into one as if to say, Watch this.

With a deep, slow sigh, Obi-Wan calmed his mind and focused his sights on the sand cube.

The sand separated as though the table shook from an earthquake. A stick poked up through the white sand like a sapling, skinny at first, then curling toward the sky as it grew tall and fat, like a stop-motion video of a living sprout growing into a mature oak. The center column pulsed into a stronger existence as if it had blood vessels, completing an image so detailed that ripples of bark scraped up the trunk. A pair of branches poked out as the trunk grew fatter still. Both branches simultaneously split with locks of smaller twigs. The top of the tree sprayed out cilia to bloom into a full canopy. Then, all at once, upon each of its hair-thin branches, sprouted a tiny, spade-shaped, paper-thin leaf.

The whole thing was completed in a less than a minute.

Blue marbles bulged out of Anakin's eye sockets. His jaw was on the floor. "That's amazing!"

Obi-Wan sat back again with a smug smack of his mouth. He sipped his tea and checked his fingernails with cool victory as Anakin groveled.

"How did you do that?" Anakin crooned.

Obi-Wan's eyebrows were in his forehead but his lids weighed heavily over his eyes. He blurted the first answer that came to his mind, "Discipline."

Anakin shook his head with shock and wonder, looking at this perfect, perfect, tree from all angles. "All right," he groaned in defeat. "You win." Anakin angled his head to study the detail with amazement, still not believing it, but accepting it. "You win."

Obi-Wan pointed hard across the table at the kid. "Anything I say."

"From here on out," Anakin agreed, raising his palms with respectful failure and laughing in his disbelief at the expert sand sculpture. He shook his head again with bewilderment.

Dex waddled to them and leaned a giant hand on the back of Anakin's booth seat. He grumbled disapprovingly at the boy, "You know, I heard a rumor about you Jedi kids."

"What rumor?" Anakin shot back at the implied insult.

"I heard you guys don't eat tamal pies."

Anakin blinked back like the idea was insane. "Well, that's just dumb."

Dex lifted his swelling chin to look down his nose at the boy. "Prove me wrong."

Anakin straightened his back and batted the challenge it right back at him. "Bring me a pie and I will!"

Dex chuckled as he returned to the kitchen and Anakin shined a victorious smile about the easiest slice of pie he ever conned out of anyone.

But Obi-Wan took the moment to gaze at the sand cube with curious wonder…

Until his attention was yanked away by the sound of Dex's calling voice, "Obi-Wan? You want a slice of pie too?"

Obi-Wan disciplined himself not to dwell. He nudged the cube away from his attention and rolled his eyes toward the kitchen window, calling out with a comic groan of capitulation. "Oh, I suppose…"

At Obi-Wan's careless nudge, the sand cube knocked onto its back, but not entirely shattering the tree into nothing. The leaves disintegrated, but the trunk and two thick branches were still largely intact. The whole thing shifted up against the original ceiling, smashing the canopy into the top of the cube.

A splash of white sand covered part of the thick trunk to blot out a half-circle smirk and two smudge eyes, as if the tree was peeking up toward the ceiling its head was bumping into… and grinning quietly at its own mess of crazy hair.

Written by Cass Eastham

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