elrhiarhodan

Title: From All The Spaces Between Times
Chapter: One
Author: elrhiarhodan / elrhiarhodan / elrhiarhodan
Fandom: Star Wars, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars - Obi Wan Kenobi (TV), Star Wars - Jedi Apprentice Books
Characters Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn, Shmi Skywalker, Anakin Skywalker, Watto, Quinlan Vos, Padmé Amidala, Sabé, Darth Maul, Original Characters, Other Characters To Be Added
Pairings: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Shmi Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Qui-Gon Jinn,
Word Count: ~3600 this chapter
Spoilers: None
Warnings/Enticements/Triggers: Author Chooses Not To Use Warning/Ratings
Summary: Obi-Wan Kenobi has never known it, but he has always been the Force’s Champion, destined to suffer infinite sadness in defense of the Light. On his last turn on the wheel, responsibility for The Chosen One, the false child of prophecy, had been thrust upon him with no warning, and Darkness held the upper hand.

But this time, the Force has marshaled its power and will protect its Champion until the time is right, no matter how long Obi-Wan has to wait and how much he has to suffer.

Or,

Obi-Wan is reborn as a twelve-year old.

He wakes up on a slavers’ ship, with all of his prior life’s memories intact, and he’s bound for Tatooine with a Force-inhibitor collar around his neck, a bomb implanted in his spine, and no way of knowing what state of the Galaxy is in.

Just another day in the life of the Force’s Champion.

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From All The Spaces Between Times - Chapter One (On AO3)

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Author’s Notes on Chapter One - Where Our Souls Will Walk, Hopeless After Death



Meta on the Meta

If you’re here on my Dreamwidth account, thank you for following the link.  I know it’s a bit unusual to do any kind of notes off-channel, so to speak, and particularly here on such an old-school platform.  But I came into fandom in the LJ era and I never lost my love for this kind of blogging.  I may replicate them on Tumblr but I despise Tumblr so much. While I have followers there, I don’t think they are the kind who actually would follow this story.  So, Dreamwidth it is.

I guess I should start with an explanation, an old-school “thesis statement” for why I’m doing things this way.  It’s pretty simple.  

I really hate reading long fics with start and end notes.  They just ruin the flow.  It’s nice to know what’s inside the author’s head, but when you’re reading the story after everything is finished, these kind of notes just ruin the flow.

I also want the freedom to be expansive, to dump thoughts that might otherwise contradict what’s in the story, share ideas that went nowhere, give a few spoilers.  Do a whole lot of old school DVD commentary,

And let’s start with why I decided to write this fic.

Simple, I love time-travel fix-it fics.  I’ve read some truly amazing ones.  Hats off to Flamethrower, to Elfpen, to Intermundia, Jessebee and Peppermint_Shamrock and ScarletJedi and FreakishLemon.   These are the greats of the genre.  I have learned much from them.

But I also wanted to write something different from those excellent stories. 

So, this is not Obi-Wan Goes Back in Time and Keeps Anakin From Falling.  Or Kills Palpatine (or tells the Council about Palps and they kill him).  Or Saves Shmi (and thus, Keeps Anakin From Falling).  Or Anakin is reborn and knows how to fix his mistakes (and they are legion).

I’m also not a Star Wars scholar/nerd and I rely a lot on Wookieepedia for details.  I’ve watched a few selected eps of TCW, and I haven’t been able to watch any of the Prequels from start to finish in decades.  If I need dialogue or context, I check the scripts or the closed-caption dumps.

This story is Obi-Wan Kenobi-centric (he’s my blorbo).  It is also Jedi-positive and specifically Qui-Gon Jinn-positive (also my blorbo).  Some things happen.  Other things don’t.  I’m not rewriting The Prequels, but The Phantom Menace is a jumping off point.

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About the Fic

I’ve been working on the story since mid-July, 2023.  I hate the weekly write/publish/write cycle and it nearly killed my creativity for a year after The Stars Across the Sky Like the Scars Across Your Skin, and I swore I would not start publishing this until I had at least the first two parts finished.

I am a very linear writer, and I never, ever jump around and write the "fun" scenes first. I start at the beginning and go like a freight train. But this time, I just, well, needed to do something different. 2023 was littered with so many unfinished stories - good ideas that just fell flat - that I needed to make sure that this one had meat on its bones. Since I was heading in a different direction from the usual "time travel fix-it" I needed to get some framework in place. I can’t outline outside my head to save my life (I’m a pantser to the end of the line) but maybe writing some out of order chapters might help. Also, I had some emotional issues with Chapter One (that scene in Mos Espa was brutal and I wasn’t up to writing it when I got started).

So I wrote, if not the fun parts, the parts that set the actual plot in motion and brought key characters into the frame. I also went into this exercise understanding that these chapters would ultimately need a lot of editing when it became time to put them into the actual story. Or worse, I might not be able to use them at all. But no words are ever wasted. I’ll be sharing them here in these off-site notes.

But the exercise worked. It set the tone for my principal characters, and some of their quirks, which are very important. And most importantly, it got my engines revving. I put on my Angst Queen crown, wrote the Mos Espa scene and moved on from there.

That being said, I had two major writing commitments at the end of 2023, when I had about 46k written. I had to put this on hiatus until the end of the year and didn’t get started again until January 1st, but I’ve been going at it like the little engine that could.

Right now, the word count is around 130k and I have 27 chapters completed, and Part II is done and edited.  Most chapters are around 5k, some are considerably longer, and one or two clock in around 3500 words (like Chapter One). At the end of March, I decided I wanted to start publishing on May the Fourth, with the better part of a half-year’s buffer of chapters.

(I feel like I’m jinxing myself.)

Do I regret not finishing before starting to publish?  A little.  I have an excellent team of alpha readers (my beloved friends in the Braincell - writestuff, temve, ell and my dearest enabler, Kyele.  They have blessed this endeavor.

As I said, I am a pantser, and that means that while I I know where this story is going (the outline is in my head, it is always subject to change.  So, please feel free to drop in a comment, a suggestion, an idea.  I may hit the brakes hard and incorporate it.  It may become an outtake I publish here in the chapter meta/notes.  I will definitely acknowledge it unless I just completely fail at life.

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The Poetry

I guess I should say something about that.

Years ago, before LJ collapsed, one of my favorite challenges was poetry_fiction, where everyone who signed up would get a fragment (three or four lines) from a poem from the poet of the year.  I still say that I wrote some of my best fic for that challenge.  (I never realized it migrated to DW, d’oh, and I could have signed up any time over the last seven years).

Also, I was always bummed that I missed the year they did Yehuda Amichai, my favorite 20th Century poet.

I decided to use fragments of Amichai’s poetry as inspiration for each chapter and for the chapter titles after reading From All the Spaces Between Times, which inspired the premise of the entire story.

From all the spaces between times,
from all the gaps in soldiers’ ranks,
from cracks in the wall, 
from doors we did not close tight,
from hands we did not hold,
from the distance between body and body
when we didn’t come close to each other—
the great sprawling expanse adds up, 
the plain, the desert,
where our souls will walk, hopeless, after death.


Sometimes, it is difficult to find a line or stanza that matches the plot and mood I’m trying to capture, but these are necessary parts of the story, too.  I promise they won’t often come up in these notes or meta.

This is it for Chapter One. I hope you enjoyed this first peek into my thought process.

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A Spoiler from Sometime in Part III

Okay, so not quite done. I’ll leave you with a bit of a spoiler from a future chapter that (at the time I have written this note) is likely to be cut, or if not cut, then very heavily edited:

For decades, Qui-Gon has been the most peripatetic of Jedi, rarely logging more than a handful of consecutive nights a year at the Temple when he didn’t have a padawan, and when he did have that responsibility, he and his charge were on mission more than they were in Temple.

But taking Obi-Wan as his padawan has changed that. A learner who had not grown up as a Jedi youngling, had not had the benefit of an initiate education, would be a serious liability on any mission without some training - on that the High Council had been in complete agreement, grounding Qui-Gon for the foreseeable future.

And despite Obi-Wan's prodigious display with a 'saber that first day, Qui-Gon had no illusions about his new padawan’s educational deficiencies.

Except perhaps he should have.

Obi-Wan is not only fully literate in Basic, he has a grasp on Galactic politics that rivals many of Qui-Gon’s peers.

I built a holonet transponder and listened to Senate broadcasts…

But that doesn’t explain Obi-Wan's proficiency in higher mathematics. Or languages. Or Mandalorian poetry.

All right, so his padawan is the Chosen One and that seems to mean a lot of things, not just miracles in the Living Force or preternatural abilities with a lightsaber. It’s just a little weird, even though he’d admit it to anyone.

And maybe, in a few more months, they can start taking some missions. Not that Qui-Gon is getting itchy feet; he’s discovered that there’s a vitality to life in the Temple - one that he had never experienced before. His horizons aren’t small at all - not when he has time to spend with friends and peers and colleagues that he hasn’t talked with in years. Time to do some of the research projects he’d always wanted to work on, but had been too focused on the next mission to pursue.

There’s also the novelty of spending time with his padawan in the slow-paced, day-to-day life of an in-Temple master and learner pairing. Time has become syrupy, like thick, golden honey. And just as sweet, too. Obi-Wan is a joy to teach, a joy to train, to meditate with. The boy isn’t mindlessly compliant, Qui-Gon would go mad if he was. No, Obi-Wan is sharp and eager, and witty, and he doesn’t think twice about arguing a point if he believes he’s right.

It’s not arrogance, far from it. Qui-Gon watches his padawan carefully, how he moves about the Temple and interacts with the beings in it. Micah, in the Temple for just a day, had snarked that Obi-Wan walks like he’s a High Councillor, and that maybe Qui-Gon should tell him to tone it down. Qui-Gon emphatically disagreed, he thinks it’s how Obi-Wan is finding his own balance as a stranger in a strange land. He doesn’t want to be known as the padawan who’d been a slave, but he doesn’t shy away from his past, either. So he stands tall in his beloved boots, shoulders even, head back, he looks you in the eye when he speaks, no cringing, no fear. He never gets angry, he never raises his voice, and there isn’t a being in the Temple who doesn’t listen to Obi-Wan when he speaks.

Over the past few months, Qui-Gon has seen this phenomenon time and time again. His padawan is not using Suggestion, he just has a way of making people want to listen to him. It’s a good thing the young man is so thoroughly grounded in the Light - that’s a quality that could be very dangerous. He’s observed Obi-Wan talking with knights and masters, even some notorious high sticklers who had privately registered their objections about Qui-Gon’s sport padawan to the High Council, and when the conversation ends, everyone is smiling and nodding - not in agreement necessarily - but in approval.