Starkiller: An AU Outline

[sanerontheinside]

original post

So I probably won’t be writing this, but there is some rudimentary headcanoning below. It’s not a full worldbuild, and it neatly skipped over a few decades there, but it’s a start ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

springboarding from the Luke Time Travels AU to waaaaaay way ahead in that AU’s future

So the way this goes, Qui-Gon eventually learns to See ghost!Ben, and possibly also ghost!Anakin, possibly with the help of some other Temple - say, Lothal Temple, since all the weird stuff seems to happen there. (I need to see some more headcanons/fic on precisely why, but…) With their help, Qui-Gon manages to ruin a certain rising Senator’s political career.

Not that this slows Palps down all too much, of course. In short order, he becomes the head of a corporation of some sort. It used to be an innocuous shell company, but it doesn’t take too much to make it legitimate and fully functional. In a few years, he’s controlling the funding for so many Senators’ campaigns it hardly matters that he isn’t personally a sitting member anymore. At this point it’s even harder to trace him than before.

Qui-Gon meanwhile, is Knighted. Ghost!Ben gets to meet Xan as that three-year-old crècheling who wouldn’t let go of Qui-Gon’s leg. It’s precious and adorable.

Ghost!Ben gets to see Xan’s training, too, for 6 years (I am following the ReEntry timeline). Then, though, Obi-Wan is born. Ghost!Ben vanishes, which Ghost!Ani finds quite confusing, and Qui-Gon is a bit mournful. Ghost!Ani doesn’t remember much of Qui-Gon from the previous timeline, though. While hanging around for the last few years has helped, it’s still a little strange to him.

When Obi-Wan is brought to the crèche a year later, Ghost!Ani feels a familiar shift in the Force, but nothing really tangible.

A few years after that, there is trouble on Telos. Crion has been meeting with an investor - a kindly old man with glacial blue eyes who takes a particular interest in his son - about Telosian business and Offworld. When Xan and Qui-Gon travel to Telos to resolve rising tensions, Xan Falls.

Still, though, for all that he does attack his Master, his heart isn’t quite in it. He seems to be trying to fight it, and honestly if anything he would much rather flee altogether.

With no real idea of how to do so, but recognising the signs of someone else’s manipulation, Ghost!Ani does his best to comfort Qui-Gon, and convince him that there is more to the story. He tells him about a young man who was manipulated by a Sith Lord, tells him about his Fall, and the terrible losses that he had wanted to prevent, and even ended up causing some of them. He tells him that the Line of Bane is a Line of people who Fell against their will, and really, does it mean it can be right to kill them, without trying to save them at all?

That night, one of the younglings in the crèche can’t sleep. The crèchemasters, worried by the clear and sorrowful eyes, too full to really belong to a child so young, call Masters Yoda and Mace in a panic. They already know about the boy’s prescient dreams, but this is entirely too much, too much, this sightless gaze that should belong to someone much older. Only Starkiller, now a crèchemaster also, doesn’t seem to think it unusual - he only sits down on the Initiate’s bed and scoops him into his arms.

It’s Mace who has the most luck talking to Obi-Wan in the coming days. Mace, who’s seen Shatterpoints since he was six - he knows what it’s like to see different possibilities and realities at once. While Obi-Wan sees principally the timeline he’s already once lived, the long time he spent hovering in the Force and flung between timestreams seems to have left him with the ability to see more possibilities - not quite as Shatterpoints, but very close. He does not have any real memory of that past life (not yet), but maybe someday he will.

When Qui-Gon returns to the Temple, Obi-Wan goes missing from the crèche. It’s Mace who finds him outside, and what a tableau this child is a part of: a throughly exhausted Master Jinn, who took all of one moment to crouch down to this child and ask him if he’d wandered off from the crèche and got lost, and fallen asleep against the wall with the little Initiate curled against him.

Something urges Mace not to separate the two.

In time, Mace begins to spend more time with both of them. Tahl and Micah return to the Temple shortly, and Qui-Gon, for once, is grounded not only by a ghost, but also a number of sympathetic friends and an affectionate Initiate, who won’t leave no matter how many comments are made regarding Attachment. Frankly, Qui-Gon is impressed. By the time Obi-Wan is nearing eleven, Yoda starts pestering Qui-Gon to take another Padawan, and Obi-Wan would seem to be the logical choice. But Qui-Gon failed, failed with Xanatos, and -

And Mace is the one who understands Shatterpoints. Mace is the one who knows just how hard it is to grow up with prescience and this Sight that honestly is more hindrance than help half the time.

When Mace asks Obi-Wan, he doesn’t refuse.

(Somewhere in this time, perhaps not long before Obi became a Padawan, Ghost!Ani vanishes as well.)

Still, Mace is a Council Master, and that doesn’t really take many missions. So Obi-Wan goes traveling with his sister-Padawan, Depa. In the next couple of years, Qui-Gon occasionally joins them, or they cross paths saving each others’ sorry hides. Depa swears her brother-Padawan is a trouble-magnet. Which is true, really - this version of Obi-Wan isn’t a ball of fite me, but the Force is a cruel mistress. Once a trouble-magnet, always a trouble-magnet.

It’s when Qui-Gon has a mission to Bandomeer, to mediate some new agreement between AgriCorps and the corporation supplying them with much of their equipment, that things really go to hell in a handbasket. There are explosions in the tunnels, the possibility of sabotage, attacks on the miners, someone attempting to destroy some of the greenhouses and ruin the fields. Negotiations don’t break down, but are definitely put on hold. Everyone is more worried about surviving this. One of the parties gets out a distress call.

Depa and Obi-Wan happen to be in that sector of space, and they pick up the transmission. Obi-Wan insists they must go there - he is adamant - and Depa can’t bring herself to argue.

Picking his way through the tunnels, meanwhile, Qui-Gon stumbles across a rather miserable, battered-looking Xan, who leads him out of the mines into the sun. He explains, rather haltingly, that he didn’t know what to do after Telos, so he ran. Ran as far as Bandomeer, where he tossed his lightsaber away somewhere, tore away the braid, and stayed with the Corps - as a penance? of sorts?

Depa and Obi-Wan find them. Obi-Wan is distrustful at first, the older parts of his subconscious spinning in their immediate reaction. Qui-Gon doesn’t miss his reaction, and his own is not far different. Obi-Wan spends about half the time scowling and sniping at Xan while they try to figure out exactly who is causing all the trouble on Bandomeer.

But when they find out that the very same company that had so much power on Telos has been trying to take over Offworld; that that same person with ice-blue eyes and an genial, grandfatherly manner, the very mention of whom nearly throws Xan into a panic, is the head of that company; that he probably paid saboteurs to ruin Offworld and cause as much damage to Bandomeer in the process, and told them to keep a special eye out for the former young Prince of Telos -

That’s when we find a very angry Obi standing over Xan in full PROTECT HIM mode, lightsaber in hand. Qui-Gon appears just in time to help them out of the really sticky situation they’ve landed in, and is frankly perplexed at the sight. He decides to go with it though, at least in the years he’s known Obi-Wan the kid has had perfect instincts.

They somewhat resolve the situation on Bandomeer, which is to say they attempt to capture the saboteurs without getting killed or killing them and have an approximately 30% success-rate: i.e. they ended up with one dead before capture and didn’t get themselves killed, but the other two are gone. They think there were another two, they’re not even sure about that.

Xan tags along with them back to the Temple because Obi-Wan won’t let him go, and honestly neither will Qui-Gon at this point. Most of the trip back, Qui-Gon has his former Padawan wrapped up in a hug, Code be damned. He found a broken former Padawan, haunted by Dark and now free, but broken. Like hell he’s not going to at least hold him.

Obi-Wan gets to Mace first, and asks him what the Council’s policy would be regarding people who were manipulated. He tells his Master what Xan told him hours ago. Mace gives them a reprieve and sends them all to get some rest after that hell of a mission, and spends the time their report would have taken arguing with the rest of the Council on what to do with Xan.

They do agree to hear Xan’s story, which he tells haltingly, but ultimately they let him stay and push him in the general direction of Mind Healers.

Better than any Mind Healer, though, there is Qui-Gon. Under several years of a very cuddly Initiate’s influence, followed by his still-cuddly years as Mace’s Padawan (which - what? but not complaining at all, really), and still remembering the story a certain Force ghost told him on Telos, Qui-Gon cares even less for the Council’s hidebound ideas. After a little while, listening to Xan’s recounting of some of the things that happened to him in the last few years, Qui-Gon presents him with a tentative offer - to complete Xan’s training as a Padawan.

Qui-Gon Jinn is the only person who still feels like home. The only person who could forgive Xan - after all, the only person he’d wronged in his actions, and deserved none of it. The rest of the Temple doesn’t matter, really, not like this. Well - also there’s Obi-Wan, who seems to trust him and he really really shouldn’t, but still - it lets him hope he has a chance. And the moment Xan asks about the others, Qui-Gon says, with more conviction than ever, Fuck The Council.

So Xan accepts.

He is Knighted barely more than a year later. In time he meets his Grandmaster, Master Dooku, and the two find a common tongue. But Xan gets a chill every time Dooku mentions a certain businessman or bits of his research on Sith arts, and eventually talks him out of several key investments and decisions, drawing him back into the world of Temple politics and finance. Here, Dooku discovers the Order’s finances to be a right mess, and honestly, what the hells?

A few years later, Obi-Wan is Knighted - earlier than in the original timeline. He’s more sure of those flashes of memory now. With Mace as his Master, he’s had some better training on how to handle Shatterpoints and visions, but on the other side of it now he can tell the difference between events that actually happened. He thinks he might be a little crazy, but his favourite crèchemaster, Master Starkiller, tells him that it’s real. And Starkiller seems familiar….

For the last several years, Obi-Wan has been sparring with Qui-Gon, both verbally over philosophical texts and debates of scientific theory, and in the training salles. Not long after he is Knighted, he approaches Master Jinn with a proposition that they partner for missions, citing a need for more experience and practice in diplomacy. Not that Qui-Gon believes he has need of it, but agrees.

A couple missions later, the two find themselves on Tatooine with the Naboo contingent, in need of a hyperdrive. There, Ani immediately latches onto the two Knights like a barnacle. Obi-Wan and Anakin race together on Boonta Eve - Anakin comes in first, Obi-Wan second - and with the winnings from bets on them both, they buy Watto out of debt, leaving the planet with Ani and Shmi in tow.

It’s certainly a bit easier to escape Maul on Tatooine, but it’s a suitably terrifying fight all the same. They defeat him together on Naboo - neither runs ahead, not this time - and though Maul holds out against them for entirely too long, they still dispatch him neatly.



And I’m gonna break this off right here, since that’s all I’ve got for now. A lot of details aren’t really ironed out, as you can tell, and quite frankly writing anything pre-TPM is probably going to be difficult. I don’t know of much EU in that time period, so I’ll have to make stuff up I guess? Anyway there are a number of legitimate questions to ask that currently have a set default answer of ‘weird Force shit’, so please bear with me.