Warnings: Explicit sex between two hot guys. If it's not your
cup of tea, leave the pot for the rest of us. No spoilers.
Disclaimer: The characters are George Lucas's, bless him for
having such a fevered imagination, even if it's not as fevered
as mine. I should be so lucky as to make any money from writing
stuff that's this much fun to write. Unfortunately, I'm not.
Note: Alas, this seems to be turning into a series, though with
no formal title to it. Since I'm not keen on serials, I promise
to keep the stories complete in themselves, sans cliffhangers.
If you want to read them in story order, as opposed to the
order I wrote them in, "Crime and Punishment" comes first (no
pun intended); then "The Anger Exercises"; then "The Geometry
of Desire"; then "But For Grace"; then "Master &
Apprentice." A couple of characters from the YA Jedi
Apprentice series (great stuff!) appear or are mentioned
here: Bruck Chun, Obi-Wan's tormentor, and Qui-Gon's failed
apprentice, Xanatos. I don't own them, either. However, if
anybody'd like to sell me Qui-Gon, slightly used or otherwise,
I have a platinum card waiting to be broken in. A trussed-up
Obi-Wan wouldn't be amiss either. Home delivery requested.
Summary: Qui-Gon wonders what the heck hit him.
Feedback: The more I gets, the more I writes, so if you like
what you read, please feed the writer. Warning: Proportion of
writing to feedback may increase exponentially, unless I go up
in flames shortly. E-mail only, please.
I have a new vice now that we're lovers, Padawan: I love to
watch you sleep, as you're doing now in my arms in a ship's
bunk on the way back to Coruscant. We made a very gentle love
this evening because you're still healing from your injuries,
and you nestled against me afterwards, sighing, and fell deeply
asleep almost instantly. The difference in our height allows me
to tuck you under my chin where I can feel your breath against
my shoulder and lie with our legs entwined. Despite that
difference, our bodies seem to match like pieces of a puzzle,
the planes and angles of our flesh fitting together seamlessly.
And when I'm inside you, love, making you cry out, it seems to
me we are really one person, our bodies one continuum. I
confess I've found nothing I like better, except, perhaps,
watching you sleep.
It's easy enough to indulge this small vice, too easy, perhaps,
like most vices, but situation feeds it as much as desire. All
my life I have been an early riser, a lover of morning
meditations that include sunrise. You, when not pressed by the
demands of my schedule, prefer sunset and late nights. Most
mornings, I wake you, but first I watch you for a time,
partially in wonder at my luck, partially in pity for you. I
hate to wake you. You are only a few years out of the stage
where every spare moment is spent in eating or sleeping to fuel
your growing body (or in sex to sooth your hormones), and you
still need more of all those things than I (though you've
rejuvenated my moribund libido to an alarming degree) but sleep
especially, at this moment when you are still recovering, so I
have the pleasure of watching you often.
I love doing so because, in your sleep, I see the laughter in
your face that being raised in the Temple and training to
become a Jedi have suppressed in you. I suspect that if you had
not been given to us, you would have grown into a raucous young
man who smiled and laughed without reserve. I can easily
imagine you engaged in any of the games and foolishness the
young indulge in, risking your pretty neck in fast or high or
otherwise unsafe pursuits simply because you are the age when
everyone is immortal, and finding it all very amusing. Instead,
you know all too well how mortal you are, and I can already see
where your concentration and gravity will line your forehead.
You were a grave child, too, I was told, and a very serious
young Padawan learner, more serious than most, which should
have impressed me much sooner than it did and would have if not
for the well of grief and guilt I inhabited when first we met.
Your duties and training are very weighty matters to you, as
they should be.
I still see your amusement peering out tentatively during the
day, closely held in check, displayed in the ironic arch of
your eyebrows and the wry incline of one side of your beautiful
mouth. But I would love to see you smile more often and more
openly, and I suspect you don't in part because of your gift.
Unlike any of my other apprentices, you have a talent for
sensing distant disturbances in the Force and for seeing the
possibilities of the future in your dreams. The gift is strong
enough that it has become, especially on this last mission, a
burden to you, as you struggle with the consequences of knowing
about events that may or may not happen, that you may or may
not be able to change. That knowledge steals your humor and
joy, something I try to give back to you in the life we have
together.
Restrained and dignified as you are awake, you sleep as you
make love: with complete abandon, restlessly, even when you're
untroubled. Sharing your bed, I often wake to find myself
relegated to its edge, coverless, while you have either flung
the bedclothes aside and sprawled across most of it in acute
angles, or lie balled up in the middle with all the blankets in
a cocoon around you. Wonderfully, I wake just as often to find
you entwined with me in a complicated helix of limbs, though
never for long. Even when you go to sleep quietly in my arms,
you soon extricate yourself from them to roam through your
dreams. And yet I've seen you sit so still in meditation that
wild creatures will light on your shoulder or climb onto your
knee. It's as though all that pent-up energy of your youth must
come out in your sleep, so tightly contained is it when you're
awake.
This past week you've been particularly restless, talking in
your sleep and thrashing in instinctual flight, waking
frightened and gasping, more so after the accident than before.
After its irrefutable fact, your panic started to invade my
sleep as well, having seen you buried in a wall of mud thick as
poured ferrocrete and felt your consciousness snap off like a
shorted circuit under it. I hope you never know the terror that
touched me then, when we pulled you out still grasping the rope
I'd thrown you and the coat of the young woman you'd tried to
save. You were buried so deeply it took three of us and
judicious use of the Force to free you from that glutinous
muck. When finally we did, you were unrecognizable, covered in
filth, drowning in it, one arm dislocated, the other broken,
lying askew on the soaked ground in a sickening parody of the
positions in which you sleep.
We forced the dirt and water out of your lungs and I watched
you cough and vomit violently and helplessly with such relief
that I almost wept. It's not necessarily true that we only
realize how precious something is to us when we nearly lose it,
but it does tend to emphasize the idea.
That was a hard lesson for me to learn: that I am dangerously
preoccupied by your well-being something I didn't expect to
have happen to me. I have known you, after all, seven years
now, nearly since you were a child. Only the kind of love I
feel for you has changed, not its quantity or quality or
existence. But the intensity of feelings I experienced when we
pulled you from the muck hasn't been equaled since the day my
last apprentice turned against me. Why should I suddenly care
so much more? Yet I do. How I do.
I did not sleep the three nights you were recovering. In the
ten short days we've been lovers, I've grown so used to your
perpetual motion that I wake when you lie still too long. An
entirely empty bed was impossible to face. Watching you
suspended in the bacta tank for two days, a respirator tube
down that smooth, elegant throat, the rest of you pierced with
IV lines and catheters, boneless and unmoving in the gelid
fluid, was chilling, nauseating. Watching you in your drugged
sleep through the following day, eyelids flickering, legs and
hands twitching--hardly movement at all, for you--as more
harrowing than I could have imagined. I've come upon you
meditating in more stillness, the rise and fall of your breath
your only movement, and yet you seemed quick and lively even
then, a packet of contained energy. Stuporously asleep, you
were empty and hollow, a preview of death. I could hardly bear
it.
Now, the fear that seizes you in the night makes my heart ache.
I know it will pass. I know it's only your unconscious memories
of being buried alive, of your guilt at surviving where your
friend did not and over your failure to save her, and the
memories of the dream that foretold it. But I hear you whimper
in your sleep, feel you shivering, and smell the fear in your
sweat and I want nothing more than to wipe it from your mind. I
could do it. You would remember nothing, either of the incident
or my intrusion. But it would serve no purpose but to ease my
own feelings, and rob you of the kind of pain and experience
that makes us who we are. So I do the only other things I can:
I hold you and wake you gently and ease you back into a calmer
sleep.
You curl into me gratefully when I do, a lunular curve of warm
skin and solid flesh. I love following the arcs of your body
with my hands, the way it slopes and rises from your shoulders
down your back and over your lovely round ass, down your
columnar thighs, over the little planes of delicate and
sensitive skin at the backs of your knees, rounding out again
in your muscular calves and narrowing to a line in the tendon
at your ankles. Supine on your stomach is my favorite view, if
not quite my favorite position.
I am, obviously, hopelessly besotted with you. If that cannot
make you laugh, then truly your sense of humor has been
murdered, that this old man who could be your father feels like
a teenager again around you. Horny as a teenager.
But you would tell me I am not old, despite the grey in my
hair, the morning stiffness in my joints, the slowing of my
reflexes. Irrelevant; inconvenient but temporary;
imperceptible, you would say dismissively. I look at you and
see a young man in his glory, as I once was, and though I would
not again be your age, I feel a certain wistfulness for the
sense of entitlement that goes with it. Arrogance has never
been a weakness of yours, so you wear the privilege of your
youth and gender with an unconscious grace. Life belongs to you
right now, and you have no need to be told so.
Which only makes your love for me more baffling. What I would
find attractive in you is, perhaps, too obvious, and not, in
truth, everything I love about you: youth, beauty, strength,
grace, even innocence, thought there is precious little of the
latter remaining in you. Jedi grow out of it early. The
physical attributes are certainly distinguished enough to have
attracted other partners to you, though none of them were more
than casual. I wonder if they saw the same things below your
distractingly lovely surface that I do: your utter dedication,
your courage, your hardheaded stubbornness, your kindness, your
enormous capacity for love. There are times when we are making
love that I feel that capacity is fathomless. You may not be as
acutely aware of the living Force as I would like you to be,
but it gathers around you like iron filings to a magnet.
Sometimes you literally bristle with it. You take in what I
give you and return it tenfold. It's this that drew me to you,
your warm, passionate heart, your pure soul.
That would make you laugh, were I to say it to you, and it
would be ironic and a little bitter, that laugh. I wish you
could see yourself as I have come to, instead of seeing your
weaknesses and failures foremost. You are much stronger, much
more competent, more able and more intelligent than you think
yourself. You've advanced more quickly than any of my
apprentices, even Xanatos, whom I thought a star pupil,
because, despite your grumbling about my constant teaching,
everything is a lesson to you, even our lovemaking. I expect
you'll be ready for your Trials by the time you're twenty-five,
and you'll be surprised when I tell you that. Perhaps not, if I
can instill in you the confidence you're lacking in your own
abilities.
And it's an obvious lack right now. I can see it in the way you
hold yourself, and in the outburst of rage I finally managed to
provoke from you yesterday. Though your words were directed at
me, you were angry with yourself for your uncertainty. You tell
me you knew what was going to happen but you're as aware as I
that even Master Yoda does not pretend to predict the future
with any accuracy, and still you saw that as your failure. Have
I been so hard on you, or is it your own need to prove yourself
that makes you so critical of your own performance? I wish I
knew, in the same way I wish I knew for certain whether you
desire me because I am your master, or because you've come to
love the man who plays that role--or if you know the
difference.
That question keeps me awake more often than you know, and
fills my meditations, because there must, must, be a
difference between the two in your mind, or I have made an
appalling and potentially disastrous error in judgement. To
take you as my lover when you think of me only as your master
would be the grossest abuse of my authority and power over you,
amounting to little more than rape in the end. From the day we
first met, I sensed in you a deep need to please me, and I
would be strolling carelessly down the path to the Dark Side to
use that need of yours to fulfill my own desires. No master of
any integrity would do such a thing. I have always known this,
always believed it, in my years of training padawans, but now,
presented with the facts of your willing love and my
incontrovertible desire, the line where one course of action
becomes another has become indistinct to me. When you kiss me,
or touch me, or let me take you in my arms, are you seeing
Master Jinn or merely Qui-Gon? Do you have your own misgivings
about which one of us you most desire? Are you indeed old
enough at the advanced age of twenty to know your own mind in
this matter? Are either of us?
How can two people who have lived together so closely for so
long, know so little of each other's hearts?
You press yourself more tightly against me in your sleep, away
from the cold bulkhead of our cabin, and I feel as though I can
never be close enough to you. Only the empty spaces of electron
orbits separate us, and that is too far. Somewhere between us
is a place, not where you stop and I begin, but where we two
are one. The only thing I know for certain now is that I want
you beside me that closely always.
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