Summary: Obi-Wan is willing to accept that his Master wants a
new Padawan, but his composure is only skin deep.
Disclaimer: All things Star Wars belong to George Lucas.
Absolutely all things. It's really kinda spooky. The details of
this story are mine, but that's really rather ephemeral in the
broad scheme of things, isn't it? All the same, please respect
that the story is mine, so don't mess with it or try to
make money off of it. This is a strictly non- profit venture,
with no lawyers involved.
Sex disclaimer: There is no sex in this story, for which I
thoroughly apologize. (If the idea of m/m affection bugs you,
then you have serious coping problems and have not grasped the
basic realities of 20th century life. Grow up.)
This isn't quite canon, primarily since I haven't read the
'Jedi Apprentice' books. Any deviations from the given history
are therefore entirely my own fault.
or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending
- from "somewhere i have never travelled" by e.e. cummings
He was well-behaved, but he was always well-behaved. His
objections to Qui-Gon's behaviour toward the council had been
routine, and he had been routinely scolded for them. I will
do what I must, ObiWan. All his obedience had surfaced,
then, and he'd used it as a shield for the rest of the day and
into the night. After he left his Master, he found Anakin and
took the boy to bed, settling him in one of the child-rooms
left vacant and ready for visitors to the Temple. He spent
almost an hour there in the near-darkness, telling the boy a
story and rocking him to sleep, then enveloping the tiny body
in as many extra blankets as he could gather without notice.
Anakin shivered all the time. Obi-Wan had some memory of what
it was like to be small and alone in the hugeness of the
Temple, and he was reluctant to leave until he was certain that
the child was securely asleep.
It occurred to him that stressed children, like certain kinds
of animals, bonded with whomever showed them the slightest
kindness, but he didn't expect Anakin to develop any kind of
affection for him. Whatever love the boy had belonged to
Qui-Gon. Obi-Wan was simply a warm body generating some kind of
security in a shockingly sterile maze of parquet halls and
plexisteel views.
Even after he could feel Anakin vividly dreaming, Obi-Wan
stayed seated on the floor of the darkened room. He'd never
been able to sleep with that kind of security; even as a tiny
boy he'd been restlessly insomniac. When he'd meditated on his
earliest memories, the sensations that rose were of lying in
the dark, listening to a dozen or more other children breathe
in the dim night-light of the Academy creche. As a child, it
had taken him so long to fall asleep that he'd been deeply
certain that he didn't sleep at all. He was one to both drift
and wake very gradually. Mediation had helped, but only the
experience of being startled out of dreams had finally
confirmed for him that he had human circadian rhythms.
Meditation didn't come, only the nagging understanding that his
presence was doing nothing further for the boy. Obi-Wan
gathered himself and left, paced back to his own rooms by the
Temple's peripheral halls. The wall-lights were at a
traditional half-burn that indicated deep night in the
unnatural Coruscant environment. There were huge treatises in
the Academy library on the inappropriateness of the city-planet
as a home for the Jedi. Obi-Wan supposed that the continued
existence of the central hall in this place was a rare gesture
of political expediency on the order's part.
He had quarters of his own, though from the earliest time of
his apprenticeship he was more accustomed to sleeping in
Qui-Gon's. Obi-Wan used his private room largely for storage,
neither wishing to add clutter to his Master's Spartan
existence nor quite willing yet to throw his childhood away.
There was dust on everything. By running his hand over a given
surface, he could feel the tiny remnants of the Force that
clung to the microscopic fragments of skin and hair. They had
flashes of lives attached, but too fleeting for him to
reconstruct anything meaningful from them.
He found what he was looking for in the clothes-chest tucked
between the corner and the first of two slightly curving
windows. The robe unfolded slowly, pooling on the ground at
Obi-Wan's feet even as he held the hood and shoulders folded
over his arm. The fabric was meaningless and the smell long
gone, but the living signature was there. Half a decade before,
the robe had been Qui-Gon's, given to Obi-Wan in the last hours
of a particularly wretched mission. He'd been freezing cold and
wet, standing with his Master on a landing pad on a planet that
hadn't welcomed them and which shortly after demanded that they
leave. He'd been so amazingly tired. Qui-Gon had caught him
just out of the corner of his eye as he began to rock with
exhaustion, and shifted without breaking the flow of his
conversation to strip off his outermost garment and wrap his
trembling student in it. Obi-Wan remembered sleeping and
waking, still wrapped in the coat with his head pillowed on his
Master's legs while they both sat on the floor of the ship that
was taking them home. Qui-Gon had never asked for the robe
back, and Obi-Wan hadn't offered it.
It was what he wanted at the moment. Obi-Wan stripped absently
and wrapped himself in the almost-black folds of the garment.
His bed, which he hadn't slept in more that three times in the
past five years, was in the corner, and he found it
instinctively. The position he folded himself into was
semi-fetal, letting the cloth gather in the creases of his legs
and clutching the excess against his chest.
Qui-Gon was going to give him up. At that hour of the night, he
was beyond all logical understanding of his Master's reasons,
and even beyond his belief that he could take the trials and
become a knight. His shivering misery was of a sort that he
hadn't experienced in over a decade, when he'd been a child
that no one wanted on any terms. He hadn't realized the extent
to which Qui-Gon had become the force he balanced himself
against. Lying in the dark, he wasn't at all sure that he was
capable of functioning without it.
He woke to the sensation of a hand on his back, rubbing in
long, uneven circles. His face was rigid with what he gradually
realized was dried salt. He'd cried himself to sleep; that he
remembered. They hadn't been the tears he wanted, the wild,
despairing ones, but he'd been sure that if he let go to that
extent, he wouldn't be able to reconstruct himself. All he'd
achieved was quiet misery, crying into his pillow and the folds
of the robe.
"Shhh. Are you all right?" Qui-Gon's voice.
"Master." Mahstah. His own accent too thick with his
exhaustion. He pulled himself upright, automatically pulling
the folds close enough around him that only his face and hands,
and the tips of his feet were visible.
"You frightened me, Obi-Wan. You didn't come back to our
quarters after you left Anakin. I was hours trying to imagine
where you might be."
He knew where Qui-Gon was, his Master was a shimmering body
within the Force, but it took a long time for him to focus his
eyes on the shape kneeling beside the bed. The hand on his back
had fallen away when he sat up, but it rested by his hip, very
still on the undisturbed blanket.
"Obi-Wan, what are you doing here?"
He was too tired to put any kind of armour on his words.
"You're going to give me up." Once he'd said it, a part of him
wanted to scream all his rage out. He'd been very, very good
for as much of his life as he could remember. He had obeyed and
innovated and listened and learned and negotiated and all of it
was ultimately worthless because Qui-Gon was going to give him
up without any warning and take Anakin to train, keep the boy
and rock him and comfort him, and Obi-Wan would have to get
used again to sleeping in a room this silent. For a score of
his twenty-five years, he hadn't gotten really angry. There
is no emotion; there is peace. There is no passion; there is
serenity.
The scream building inside him had to be twisting the Force it
was so powerful. //I DIDN'T DO ANYTHING WRONG!//
He couldn't remember the last time Qui-Gon had rocked him, but
suddenly Obi-Wan was in his Master's lap, gathered up into a
tight ball of flesh and clothing, and the older man was
whispering into his hair. Very softly, "No, no Obi-Wan. You
didn't do anything wrong. You didn't. You didn't. I still love
you. It's all right. I'm so sorry, Padawan."
The scream never emerged, but he was crying harder than he had
since early childhood. He sobbed until he was sure he was going
to be sick, ripping out all the anxiety in himself that he
could reach and shrieking it into Qui-Gon's chest. It was the
least dignified he had been in his adult life. Qui-Gon was very
still against him, almost silent and shifting his hands only a
little to keep his apprentice from falling or hitting himself.
Gradually, Obi-Wan cried himself out. He stayed curled against
his Master's body, too humiliated to raise his face. The older
man raised a hand to the bent neck and stroked it, waiting.
So softly he could barely hear it, "Obi-Wan."
"M-Master?"
"Is this mine?"
He realized that Qui-Gon's fingers were tangled in the robe. Of
course he would recognize it as his own; his signature was
ingrained in the cross-weave of it. He wondered if the Master
had yet discovered that his Padawan was naked underneath the
stolen garment.
"Yes." His own voice was only a shivering choke.
"How long had you been crying?"
"I don't know. A while."
"In my robe."
"Yes."
Fingers stroked down his neck and slid beneath the robe at the
point where his shoulders widened. He could feel his Master's
touch stiffen suddenly as he realized the bareness of the man
in his arms. It was going to ruin him in a minute, that touch,
but he could feel it all along his spine, too good to give up.
It didn't leave, though, and after a moment it softened, and
the back rub continued on the robe's exterior. Qui-Gon's other
hand braced his shoulder and shook him a little.
"Listen to me, Padawan. I have no intention of sending you
away. I meant only that I believed you to be an adult and a
warrior, and that you were my equal. I am sorry I did not speak
with you before I spoke to the council."
Obi-Wan looked at him with a child's misery, curling even his
extremities protectively under the almost-black cloth. He
wanted badly to be alone to nurse his misery and quiet lust
until morning. Even after what was likely several hours' sleep,
he was still so tired his teeth chattered, and he was shaking
with humiliation. In a few moments, his body was going to
betray him and he would have no excuses at all. It would have
made him very happy to disappear.
"Obi-Wan, look at me."
He looked. Qui-Gon's hands clamped around his jaw and he found
himself staring into flaming blue eyes, so close he could smell
the day's signatures of smoke and sweat in his Master's hair.
He didn't know what shimmer of the Force pushed him to do it,
but he leaned forward and kissed Qui-Gon hard on the mouth. It
was closer to the smell and feeling of his Master than he'd
ever been in his life, and his need to stay there effectively
repressed all the screaming rationality of his brain. Qui-Gon's
beard was soft against his own clean-shaven face, and he could
feel the narrow lines of the older man's lips against his
mouth. For a split second, the man's mouth softened and almost
opened; he could feel the flare of lust which wasn't entirely
his own run down the length of his spine.
Then he was forcefully back, held away by heavy arms and an
almost- visible shield. The blue eyes staring at him held a
great deal of something he couldn't read. At any other time
Obi-Wan might have flinched, but he was far beyond humiliation,
and all he could register was the desire and the need for
contact shrieking up and down his body. "I think, Padawan, that
you are not quite awake."
"Master," (Mahstah again, his mouth was so numb from
that contact), "I --"
"Come, Obi-Wan." Qui-Gon thrust himself upright and away.
Halfway across the room, he stooped and gathered up Obi-Wan's
discarded clothing. "I think you will sleep better in our
quarters. You can come as you are."
There wasn't anything he could say to that. He followed his
Master barefoot through corridors that contained only a very
few people, none of whom spared them more than a tired glance.
The walk shook the last tiredness out of his mind; the
climate-controlled chill of the small hours of the dark cycle
slipped under the robe and reminded Obi-Wan both of his
near-nakedness and of the lines of his own body. By the time
they had completed the perimeter walk and risen the two
necessary levels, the shivering self-pity had evaporated and he
was very close to being angry again.
He'd forgotten the length of the nights on Coruscant. The
pre-dawn period in which the Jedi traditionally rose was still
hours away. The off-set day disoriented him: he hadn't been on
Coruscant for any length of time since his childhood, and the
periods he spent there with his Master had tended to be made of
up snatched sleep and frantic organization for the next
mission. More often than not, his training had taken place in
the emptier parts of their assignment worlds, where his
existence with the living Force was less a matter of effort and
more one of existence within a dense biome. It was the only
thing of peace he'd been given -- those moments of stillness
within a natural place, psychically cradled by his Master while
he pushed his limits outward.
In contrast, the city-planet made him restless and oddly rigid.
When Qui-Gon palmed open the door to their -- his -- quarters,
Obi-Wan stepped past him and stood so awkwardly that even his
own reflection in the darkened windows startled him. His face
was raw and too open; he could see his own resentment in the
glass.
"Sit down, Obi-Wan. Talk to me." Qui-Gon had settled
soundlessly, folding his huge self into a position of such
serenity that Obi-Wan stared at him a little.
"Mas--"
"You can tell me anything you like. I want you to speak for a
while."
The palette in the corner had been his since he was a
narrow-bodied adolescent, and he settled onto it with the force
of old habit. It would have been customary for him to kneel, or
sit cross-legged, but his body's reaction was to pull close
together, and he found himself with his knees pulled up to his
chest. He started talking with his face almost buried in his
robe-covered knees; Qui-Gon was totally hidden from his line of
sight.
"When I was fifteen, we went on a diplomatic mission to Tofino,
and afterwards you took me away to the seacoast there to train.
We stayed in a hostel, it was huge and so stark it felt like an
institution. I remember thinking that the owner must have had
Jedi training, because it looked so much like the Temple, the
rooms just a bed, a chair, and a wash stand, not even a writing
table or a desk. You took me running along the beach. It was
remarkable -- volcanic, I think -- there were hollows in the
rocks that filled with water at low tide, and there were so
many small creatures in them.
"The beaches had the finest sand I'd ever encountered, and it
got in everything. All my clothes were full of it, and it was
in my hair and the hollows of my ears. The rooms didn't have
private bath facilities, there were only bathing rooms on every
floor. The one on our floor had three bathtubs, I think, all
free-standing, and its plumbing was exposed. I was bathing
there, late in the afternoon, when you came in. I must have
looked like a drowned rat to you -- I had been immersing my
head to rinse the sand away. You didn't bathe, just stripped to
the waist and washed down, and then came over and knelt beside
me. I still don't know if you knew I was watching you; you
never give anything away.
"You rested one hand on the back of my neck and just rubbed me
until I felt every muscle in my back unclench. I was almost
liquid under your fingers when you let me go and started
washing my hair. It felt so good, your fingers and the warm
water and very bright sunlight coming in through the high
windows. When you'd rinsed me, you took a cloth and dried my
face off, and you cupped my cheek and looked at me until I
couldn't remember to breathe. And then you dressed and left.
"I sat there until the water was colder than the room. You had
bathed me like that before, but not for years. I was far too
old for it, but the only thing that occurred to me at the time
was a massive joy that you still loved me."
Silence. He could feel Qui-Gon's eyes on him in the dark, and
could see the man's silhouette in the nighttime Coruscant
brilliance that filtered thinly through the tinted view.
"How dare you. How dare you let me love you if you were only
going to give me up."
"I never stopped loving you," Qui-Gon said. "You have been the
centre of my life for a dozen years. When you were a child, you
would curl yourself against my body and sleep there, letting
your shields come down so that I could read your dreams. I do
not sleep securely until I know where you are. I did not search
the entire Temple for you on a whim."
The wall against Obi-Wan's back was cool. Not cold in the way
that a ship's bulkhead was cold, but stripped from the night
air and the extreme altitude of the Temple. It would have felt
good against his face, raw as it was. His skin ached from the
time he'd spent crying.
"Come here, my Obi-Wan."
It took him a long time to straighten each of his joints and
cross the space to kneel in front of his master. It was a
reflexive response to the command. He would have preferred to
stay protectively wrapped around himself on his palette, but
years of training brought him over, arranged him on his knees,
and brought his hand out to touch his Master's feet in the
small ritual of respect he'd learned as a tiny boy.
Fingers touched the back of Obi-Wan's head and traced around to
his ears. He didn't raise his face.
"You have grown into a creature so beautiful that at times I do
not recognize you. I do see you as you are now, but I also see
you as you were. Sometimes I forget the child, and sometimes I
forget the man. For both these lapses I am sorry." The fingers
had descended to his neck, warm against the chilled edges of
his skin. He leaned into the touch, relaxing as Qui-Gon spoke.
"You are going to be a magnificent knight."
Obi-Wan's posture was naturally bent in his kneeling position,
and it was entirely simple for him to complete the bow and bury
his face in his Master's knees. The fingers against his neck
held him there, and relaxed only a little when he straightened
and raised his face to look at the older man.
"I wonder," Obi-Wan said, "does it seem so odd to you that I
might love you as much?" Qui-Gon only watched him
inquisitively. "Why push me away?"
"I have given you my reasons."
"No. You were talking about love. I'm talking about sex. I
kissed you and you pushed me. Do you love me?"
"I love you." Ripples of psychic tolerance were the only force
rendering the conversation at all comfortable. He'd grown used
to this extra communication between Jedi; he wondered if the
absence of it was what made him awkward around strangers.
"Do you want me?"
A chuckle. "I would be a fool not to. I sometimes think I was
given a houri rather than an apprentice. Strangers turn to
watch you in the streets."
"Then why?"
"I will not have you only because you are tired and needy,
Padawan." The statement was oddly fierce. His Master's honour
had flared, but so had his pride. I will not have you for
pity.
Very slowly, very clearly. "What do you want?"
"I want you to come to me as an adult, fully cognizant of what
you do and what it means." Big hands slid from Obi-Wan's neck
to his shoulders, gently pulled him to his feet and over to the
blankets. "I will not have you in any other way. Now go to
bed."
He sat, quietly, while Qui-Gon stripped and settled down to
sleep. Years of meditation had taught him to sit inhumanly
still, and in the darkness of his corner, he knew he was nearly
invisible to his Master. When the older man had quieted,
Obi-Wan gathered his blankets and shifted them the few feet
necessary to put himself close against the bed. He settled
again by reflex. He hadn't slept on the palette since his last
stay on Coruscant, but it was still very much his, and it
wrapped around him with the familiar comfort of his own bed.
Softly, "Obi-Wan, come and sleep with me." He hadn't realized
that Qui- Gon was still awake. One big hand had slipped over
the edge of the bed to touch him, tracing the line of his side
from shoulder to hip.
It wasn't an offer he was going to refuse. Qui-Gon had shifted
back against the wall to make room for him, and a massive arm
closed around his waist as Obi-Wan settled against the older
man's body. Warm fingers slipped into the front of his outsized
robe and rubbed his belly gently, more intimate than the touch
would have been when he was a child, but still entirely
comforting. The heat of the contact relaxed him, finally, and
he drifted, buried in his Master's smell and too tired to
generate thoughts about anything more complicated than sleep.
end
Though I don't usually promise such things, there will probably
be a sequel. Encourage me at 3jane@chickmail.com
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