The Story of Why Obi-Wan Kenobi Hates Flying

by

Title: The Story of Why Obi-Wan Kenobi Hates Flying
Pairing: Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 1,651
Summary: The Story of Why Obi-Wan Kenobi Hates Flying - the title says it all.
Notes: *waves* Yes, I'm still alive! This was written for the "authority figures" prompt on my Kink Bingo card, barely in time to make the amnesty period. Thank you, Qui!muse, for unleashing that rather insistent image on me... really, sleep is secondary when there's Jinn backstory to explore. :)
Warnings: None.

It felt strange, moving into a p-pod of his own, and for the longest time, Obi-Wan couldn't bring himself to even open up the storage containers holding his meagre few belongings and transferring them to the compartments that made up the top and bottom of the pod's hexagonal cross-section. He had had no real desire to either hide anything under the bed or to fill the shelving with display items, and so the storage bin had sat, uncomfortably ignored, at the foot end of the mattress, there to await the quartermaster's polite enquiry about its return, emptied of course of Master Kenobi's personal effects, to be re-used for the benefit of other Jedi currently not at Temple.

Of course, Obi-Wan had been entitled to exclusive use of a p-pod for years; everyone of Senior Padawan status and up could request temporary use of the small honeycombed 'privacy pods', and they usually did once they became sexually active or asexually grumpy (which often happened at roughly the same age point in a given species' life cycle) and chose the quiet of a p-pod over the cramped camaraderie of the Padawan dormitories and common rooms. Knights and Masters could request permanent use, and especially those with long-term Temple duties had been known to turn the sterile off-white hexagons into veritable miniature homes over the years.

Obi-Wan lifted the lid of the storage bin. Nothing in there needed to be out; nothing was going to spoil or die, unlike the straggle of exotic plants that Master Yoda had filled his pod with, and some of which had spilled over into his own Master's pod.

Master. The word still rang strange to his ears, though he had come to answer to it. If he opened the lid of the storage bin a little farther, he would be able to read the very word, in the bright scrawl of an eight-year-old's hand, attached to an improbably tall figure with short reddish hair and a big smile. Attached to him was a speech bubble that proclaimed, "I hATe FLyiNg."

Flying.

Master.

Obi-Wan sighed and stared at the white wall. It felt like yesterday that he had been that beardless, short-haired figure with the big smile, small in the presence of his own improbably tall Master. Not for Qui-Gon to leave the storage bin at the foot of his bed - stretched out, he had filled the floor space almost completely. Not for Qui-Gon to keep the images of his past under a lid either.

Not for Qui-Gon to hate flying. The picture on his shelf spoke clearly of that, in a language that felt antiquated a mere generation later, like the paper books propping it up, some of them in alphabets that Obi-Wan had no chance at decrypting without the use of a transliterator. The picture, two-dimensional and mounted on a flexible sheet, showed a younger Qui-Gon, improbably tall and smiling, wearing ill-fitting grey coveralls clearly made for someone rather shorter and wider, a full beard, and hair that had been cut to an awkward length because it would have interfered with the seal on the helmet. Qui-Gon had learned to fly from the atmo pilots, before space flight was something for a mere Knight to aspire to. And being Qui-Gon, he had sought out and learned from the best, the most daring, and those with the least dress sense: Corellia, planet of rogues and roughshod engineers, had made the jump into interplanetary travel with Knight Jinn at the helm of an improbably souped-up atmo transporter, fiercely smiling sailor-bearded face behind the visor of a safety helmet, body held in place by a ridiculously makeshift-looking assortment of hide straps and metal buckles connected to the pilot seat. Those were the days before portable gravity units, of course.

The smiling Qui-Gon in the picture was wearing his flight harness; and as ill-fitting as the coveralls were, the harness seemed made to his exact proportions. Grey fabric bunched and pulled, but nowhere on the Jedi's long frame was it ever unclear where Master Jinn ended and the outside world began.

Of course, it was only logical, in the days before gravity-on-demand, to outfit flyers with perfectly-fitting harnesses that could attach to a variety of craft. But that train of thought only went so far. He had other memories of that harness, and maybe now, in the privacy of his own p-pod, he could safely approach them once more.

The walls were the same shade of off-white; not surprising since it had been the exact same type of pod. Ten, maybe fifteen years ago, long enough that Obi-Wan had, even then, been familiar with the concept of p-pods and had made use of them a few times to relieve the tension of growing up a human male in the company of... well, Jedi had never been known for restraining their natural hormone output. Or maybe he was just being sensitive. He had been young after all. Young and foolish.

Master Jinn had been assigned a teaching rotation at Temple, of the pre-Padawan cohort, and Obi-Wan had teased him mercilessly (ah, the hormones of youth, and the freewheeling bravado of fear at being found out), painting mental images of younglings crawling all over his still-impressive frame as he struggled to keep up with Jinn's long strides while dragging a storage bin behind him that purportedly contained half the senior Jedi's belongings. It had felt like it had contained rocks, and he must have said something to that effect, because at some point in his incessant, auto-pilot ribbing, Qui-Gon had turned around and given him a steely look that would have made him freeze if it hadn't been for the lopsided smile on the lower half of Jinn's face.

He would be reintroduced to that smile minutes later, squatting in the entrance hatch to the Master's pod and staring at the picture of Jinn the flying ace.

He would see it flickering on and off his Master's weathered face as he heard all about that picture and the years preceding it.

He would almost mirror it as his Master hauled the flying harness out of the storage bin he had been dragging across the temple floor; he would drop it (the smile, not the harness) immediately as Jinn's smile winked out and made the world steely and grey and daring.

A lesson in flight indeed.

Of course, Jinn's harness had been too large for his considerably smaller torso, and of course, with hindsight, his Master had fully meant to accommodate the too-long straps by fastening them over his arms rather than under them, effectively pinning them to his sides. Obi-Wan had been intensely grateful when Jinn had turned his back, giving him a moment's respite from the steel-blue gaze, the enigmatic half-smile, and the solid Jedi Master presence that seemed even more tangible, almost oppressive, in the tiny space.

His Master had sat down on the mattress that took up most of the floor space, slowly folded his legs under himself, and begun a meditation.

Obi-Wan... and it still felt uncomfortable to say it, even in the quiet of his mind's voice in the privacy of his own pod. Obi-Wan had flown.

Well, floated. Lost his footing. Flailed, arms useless, legs kicking at air while Jinn sat meditating, focused to the point that Obi-Wan felt like he could taste it in the air surrounding him, the greasy charge of Unifying Force marshalled by a mind not accustomed to it, unleashing its sheer raw power to control it.

Jinn was levitating him. All one-hundred-and-seventy-odd centimetres of him, in a space that should not even have accommodated him standing up straight. His skin crawled. Underneath him, Master Jinn's hair lay at perfect rest, bound with a leather strap, its unassuming greyish brown no indication of the raw power that lay beneath.

Obi-Wan had had no idea how long he'd been hanging in the air like this; at some point, he had stopped trying to regain his balance and pulled his legs up, a loose ball of human Padawan finding his place on a pillow of thin air, uneasily at first. An infinite number of silent moments later, he had noticed he wasn't resting motionless at all ? which was admittedly hard to ascertain given the featurelessness of the walls. But he had felt it in the weight of his own body, and verified it by gauging the relative distance of the top of Jinn's head.

Thinking was hard when you were being levitated above your Master's head, rising and sinking in time with his breathing. Thinking was very, very hard.

Breathing was easier. Loosening muscles he hadn't known he had tensed. It did nothing at all to change his position ? he wasn't physically lying on anything after all ? but it did change his place in the room.

He was no longer afloat. He was anchored. He saw. Not so much saw as felt, and itched to touch. Solid within himself, and held in the grip of Jinn's concentration, he was the centre of the room. He was here, he was now, he was safe, he was wanted, and he was sure he was going to release bodily fluids from some orifice if Jinn kept this up.

He would be at a loss to say how long Jinn had actually kept it up; he remembered tumbling to the mattress in an approximation of an armless forward roll and lying there breathless, sweating, and thrumming with liquid Force careening around under his skin.

The touch of his Master's hand to his face had been like nothing he had ever felt before or since. And no amount of flying, whether in the arms of skilful professionals or in the cockpits of the Republic fleet's finest interstellar fighters, had been able to bring that feeling back.

It was not so much that Obi-Wan Kenobi hated flying. He missed it.

end