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The quiet green darkness of the cave was oppressive, filling Obi-Wan’s lungs with the scent of cool rot and strange, alien fungi. All was silent. No water dripped from the walls, no rubble at the entrance shifted. There was only the sound of breathing—two sets of lungs, offset by half a second as they inhaled and exhaled, slowly using up the limited supply of oxygen.
He could feel where the dust had sprayed into his eyes half an hour, an hour, two hours ago, when the cave entrance had collapsed and he’d jumped backward. They were raw with rubbing, but nothing compared to the gathering tightness in the depths of his lungs. Purely panic, he hoped. Some ancient rabbit-like instinct rearing its head in the face of overwhelming fear. But he had never been much of an optimist.
From next to him came the scraping of gravel and cotton against the floor, as it had at irregular intervals. It was Qui-Gon shifting on the floor next to him, only inches away but utterly invisible in the oppressive blackness.
“Damn it to hell,” Qui-Gon said. It was the first time he’d spoken in hours.
Obi-Wan made a vague sound of agreement.
“Damn it to hell,” Qui-Gon repeated, and there was the sound of a fist striking rough stone.
Some brief and petty instinct jumped to chastise Qui-Gon for his frivolous use of oxygen. But Obi-Wan had nearly died four times in his life, and somewhere between a bullet to the thigh and slowly bleeding out in an empty basement, he’d discovered that he feared dying far less than he feared dying alone. The quiet echoes of the cave were a poor companion.
“What would you be doing now, if you could do anything?” Obi-Wan asked, unwilling to let them lapse into silence again. His voice was shaky to his own ears, his throat parched; moist as the cave was, there was no water.
There was a long silence. Qui-Gon’s breath slowed, an even beat skimming across the walls. “Having a drink,” he said, and if it didn’t sound truthful at least it didn’t sound like a lie. “Somewhere under the sky.” He was quiet for a second more. “What would you do?”
Obi-Wan thought for a moment. “I believe in cases such as these, one is meant to express regret for their mistakes and profess a desire to see their parents again.” He dug his fingernails into the palm of his hand. “I think I would also be having a drink.”
Qui-Gon snorted softly. Then it was silent again.
Obi-Wan opened his mouth, searching for some topic that might be sustained long enough to forget the bitter, empty darkness, but he came up with nothing. What was there to say, when they could do nothing and change nothing and no future awaited them?
Then in the darkness, Qui-Gon shifted again. The warmth of him became abruptly tangible, only a few centimeters away, and an urge awoke in Obi-Wan—sudden in its power, but not unfamiliar—to reach out and touch him.
Many things could be done in the dark, secret and terrible. This, entirely innocuous.
Obi-Wan turned his hand over, feeling the microscopic indents in the floor as he brushed over them. He knocked a stone, which went tumbling with a clatter in the dark, but Obi-Wan paid it no mind. His attention was taken by the brush of Qui-Gon’s knuckles against his own, fingers sweaty and dust covered finding each other and clinging tight.
Somewhere, even as the tightness grew in his lungs, something in Obi-Wan’s chest released.
“I’m sorry, you know,” Qui-Gon said quietly. His voice echoed across the empty floor. “For tearing you away from your life. For bringing you into this. For having it end—” he stumbled on the word end and did not finish the sentence.
“For having me die somewhere as unglamorous as a cave?” Obi-Wan responded. Then, with a weight pulling down his voice. “Don’t.
Qui-Gon took a breath, preparing to speak, but Obi-Wan cut him off.
“I’ve always felt like I’ve been living on stolen time,” Obi-Wan said. “I should have died when I was only six—accident on a frozen lake, I was barely breathing when they got me out. I’ve been pushing my luck since then. You had nothing to do with it.”
It was a lie, of course. But there had always been an unfailing, quiet optimism in Qui-Gon—a sort of determined surety that everything would turn out alright. If it had anything to do with religion, Obi-Wan might have called it faith.
As Qui-Gon had desperately tried to dig their way out, then searched the cave on his hands and knees for some escape, then finally given up and collapsed near him, Obi-Wan had been almost grateful for the darkness. It meant he hadn’t had to watch Qui-Gon’s face as that faith had slowly faded. But even in the blackness, he didn’t have the heart to break the last straws of that resolve. He couldn’t bear to hear Qui-Gon say goodbye.
“Obi-Wan,” Qui-Gon said, and there was a strange sort of desperation in his voice, untempered by resignation but perhaps not unaffected by it. “Before we—”
“Die horribly?” Obi-Wan interrupted. He could feel the callous on Qui-Gon’s thumb, gripping his hand tighter.
“Before we die,” Qui-Gon replied simply, devastatingly. “I have something I’ve got to tell you.”
Obi-Wan turned to look at where he thought Qui-Gon’s face might be, and as he did so something strange filtered into his nostrils. Something hot and dry.
A spark flared in Obi-Wan’s chest as he froze, absolutely still, willing the scent to come back to him, to be more than a fantasy sparked by an oxygen-starved brain. It brushed across his face again, barely more than a hint of warmth, and yet carrying the tang of the dusty brush beyond. He turned towards it and the scent grew stronger. In the background, Qui-Gon was speaking, saying his name. Obi-Wan heard none of it.
He stood up, shaking off Qui-Gon’s iron grip on his hand. “There’s fresh air.”
“What?”
He let Qui-Gon catch his hand again and pulled him towards the source of the draft, finding the wall and running his fingers along the wall. There—in the midst of a cluster of slime mold, a small crack.
The edges of it were loose and dry, clay having been packed in by some storm or another and then left there for ages.
“You must have knocked some of the dirt here loose when you hit the wall,” Obi-Wan said, and let Qui-Gon forward to feel it.
“It’s not a way out.”
“No,” Obi-Wan agreed, but he frowned, probing the area around the crack. Underneath the slime mold, he found more clay—wet, this time, and malleable, and tracing its way down the wall to the floor.
Obi-Wan went over the wall slowly, here and there uncovering more pockets of clay underneath scatterings of fungi and molds. It wasn’t long before he’d found an area purely clay—not big, but perhaps big enough for a man to fit through on his belly. And he began to dig.
It took another hour, perhaps two, before they began to feel the clay get hard and dry. At that point only one of them could work, having to push themselves headfirst into the tunnel they’d created just to reach the far end. It was a tight squeeze at first, but it widened as it went. The cave must have been a rock overhang at one point, slowly covered by the clay-like soil of the area as eons passed. Slowly but surely, rock disappeared and only dirt was left.
Obi-Wan’s nails were broken and torn when he felt another draft and saw a blinding pinprick. A trick of his mind he thought at first—seeing stars—and for a moment his ribcage closed around his chest and he was choking again. The whole thing had been a hallucination; there was no draft, no crack, no clay. He was being smothered to death by the blank darkness of the cave and had made all of this up to comfort himself.
But as he pushed forward, the pinprick widened. Bits of clay began falling on him, delaying his progress, but slowly opening up the roof. Obi-Wan had the strange feeling of the sky crumbling away above him, only to reveal a greater and higher one.
With one final push, he crawled out on his hands and knees. The sun was blinding, now, though it must have been close to sunset, and for a moment all he could do was close his eyes and bury his face in his hands as he blinked away tears.
As he stood, he heard the ground crumbling away behind him, then a wince as Qui-Gon followed him up and out into the open air.
For a long moment, both of them lay there breathing.
There was the tang of dust in their nostrils, and sagebrush, and the seared-clean air of the surface. Around Obi-Wan’s fingernails, the clay was turned dry and crumbled. It fell away as he rubbed at it.
His lungs heaved, and heaved again as he pushed himself up. His mouth was full of dust and grit, with little moisture to spare. He was parched—their supplies had been crushed in the cave-in—and he had no idea where or how to find water. But he stood, used what saliva he had left to spit out the dirt coating his gums, and began looking around for the road.
In a few moments Qui-Gon joined him, the heat of his shoulder brushing against Obi-Wan’s—not so stark as it had been in the cave, but not unwelcome.
Obi-Wan abandoned his search for a moment and turned to Qui-Gon, blinking owlishly. "So what was it?"
"What was what?" Qui-Gon was looking at the ground, shielding his eyes from the sun.
"What you were going to say to me down there. What was it?"
Qui-Gon blinked, then rubbed his eyes a bit more. "Oh, just some rot about it having been an honor."
Obi-Wan squinted into the distance. He thought he could make out the dirt road they’d followed, across the countryside. It would be a walk—and a hot one—but at least it wasn't suffocation in a cave.
He turned back to Qui-Gon. "I have something to tell you."
Qui-Gon looked up at him, squinting. "What?"
"If you'd lost your nerve enough to say anything of the sort, I would have killed you myself," Obi-Wan said briskly, and turned around to set off towards the road. Qui-Gon could follow behind him.