Conquest
by Hth

Summary: NC-17, Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan first time story.
Disclaimers: I am basely and scurrilously misappropriating the creations of
George Lucas, Lucasfilm, and 20th Century Fox, with an eye toward debauching
otherwise upright and decent characters. But no one is paying me to do so.
Archive: Master_Apprentice archive, and Witnesslist: Not Admissible in
Court archive
Feed Me: hth29@hotmail.com

Conquest

He is faster than he used to be. I can barely stay ahead of him now.
Yoda was right about him, though it took me so many years to see it: he is
meant to be a Jedi.
Strike — miss. Parry — barely. I can feel his strength radiating down his
lightsaber as it clashes with mine in a shower of sparks, strength that
races up through my own arms like electric shocks. Not a boy any longer.
Strong, hardened by all these years of my abuse, the long hours of practice,
the climbing, the racing, the tireless, thankless manual labor.
It is how I was treated, when I was a padawan. It is the only way to train
a Jedi Knight.
I hated Yoda, when I was the age that Obi-Wan is now. That was my great
struggle as an apprentice — to overcome the pain of being so powerless in
comparison to him, the anger I felt because he trained me like a Jedi Master
instead of looking after me like a father.
He was not my father. I see that now. Older, wiser. A Jedi Master, and
even, from time to time, a credit to Yoda’s reputation.
Strike — miss. Parry — hard. Still not as strong as I am. Not likely to
be, if this is to be his full height, the body he will wear for the
duration. Still smaller than me, and as firefly-quick and surreptitiously
treacherous as ever he was.
A nuisance. All these years, wondering how I acquired a padawan learner,
and why it should be my destiny to have one who is, if possible, more
ungovernable than I was. He crept in, sooner or later, years ago, a thief
in the night. Not a tagalong boy, full of questions and prone to
overturning my dignity, but a young man, a friend, intelligent and intense,
his heart fiercely pure, though his understanding often clouded.
Strike — miss. He leaps, almost to the level of my head. I never taught
him that. I never do that. Well, he is my apprentice, not a younger self.
He will have his own ways. I begin to see them even now, a habit here, a
tendency there, things I could never have taught him, things I am seeing for
the first time in him. He has begun to amaze me. He will continue, I am
sure.
He is breathing hard, harder than I am. He almost heaves, sucking in
oxygen, and yet the exhaustion only seems to energize him. Obi-Wan thrives
on the challenge. He will not find his still center, will not surrender to
the rhythms of the fight. He wants to break one of us. He longs for the
conquest.
My young padawan. Dangerous, Yoda told me. I see it. He is dangerous.
Impatient. Arrogant. He will never turn away a challenge, however
outmatched he may be. He will throw himself into the jaws of utter
destruction before admitting--
Dodge — barely. I felt the heat of his lightsaber as it swung by me; in a
real fight, that could have incapacitated me. I hesitate. I should concede
his victory this time, compliment him. A good fight, graceful and
effective.
No. No. No. I am still too young — he is still too young. It is not
time for me to face defeat at the hands of my own apprentice. Later, years
from now. It is the way of things, but only in its own time.
Strike — hard. Press — faster. He is retreating now, no longer smiling.
This should finish it, and yet he will not surrender. With nowhere else to
go, he digs in his heels. Leaps again. I hate it that he can do that — so
light, so bright, like a spark, like a flame, not stone and bone and blunt,
barren strength like me.
How dare he? How dare he? Strike — clumsy. He was not always so quick,
and not always so stubborn. He is becoming more aggravating, not less. He
is making me tired, through and through. This is why I have always moved
alone, why I resisted taking an apprentice for so many years.
Block — buckle. No. No. Strike — fail. Falter. I go to one knee in the
dirt, graceless and without effect.
I look up at him. His face is grave, but his eyes glitter. He is
preening, tossing his apprentice’s braid back, twitching off the last of his
adrenaline-fueled energy. He lowers a hand to help me up, and I pretend I
cannot see it. “A heady feeling, is it not, my padawan?” I say, coldly.
“To best one’s teacher.”
“Well fought, my Master.” Casually, complimenting me with the generosity
of the benevolent master. There is nothing of the apprentice now about him.
He is a stranger to me, not at all the boy I raised and trained and
abused, as a proper Jedi should be.
It is enough to break one’s heart. I turn away.
“Master?”
“Skill with the lightsaber can make you a soldier, Obi-Wan, never a Jedi
Knight. There is nothing of the Force in the way you fight.”
“Why should I fight to lose?” Cheeky, practically laughing. He has never
taken my harshness to heart as I did Yoda’s.
I have lost the boy I never wanted. As it turns out, I miss him after all.
“Fight to preserve the balance, not to conquer, my young apprentice.” Not
so young now. It is late in the day for us. I recall the bargain I made
with Yoda, and I feel a chill at my back, whistling between my body and
Obi-Wan’s.
Arrogant. Ambitious. Thoughtless. Reckless. Obi-Wan — and me. So many
times, Yoda swore that if I could not overcome these flaws, would not heed
his teaching and mold myself as a proper Jedi should, I would lose myself,
to death or the darkness. I resented him and his stifling morality and his
bleak, boring swamp and his complacency.
I run my hands through my hair, surprised to find it stiff with sweat.
Obi-Wan makes me work now, as surely as I used to make him fight to prove
every boast he made. A fitting revenge.
When did I lose my fear of Yoda, and my respect for him along with it?
Perhaps when I realized that he was wrong. My arrogance and my defiance
have not destroyed me. Not yet. I have wisdom and compassion with which to
balance them. I manage, a poor excuse for a Jedi Master, I suppose, but
still alive, still in the service of the light. I move, without a doubt,
more easily than Yoda through most circles, walking among the galaxy’s mere
mortals and earning their friendship in a way that virtuous, heartless Yoda
never could.
I, like Obi-Wan, have become my own man, not my teacher’s murky reflection.
I have sacrificed much of Yoda’s skill with the Force, his ability to read
a being’s heart and destiny, and he sacrificed much of my understanding of
politics and practicalities.
What sort of a Jedi will my own apprentice be? Will I ever understand why
he chose the road he did? Will I respect him when I cannot understand him?
Will he respect me when he realizes that I am a stranger to whatever it is
he feels most deeply?
The Force speaks to Obi-Wan in its own voice.
He rarely listens. That gift will come in time. It came even to Qui-Gon
Jinn in time. But it was not a thing that any Master could teach me, and
not a thing I can teach to him now.
The fault was not Yoda’s. He failed me because it must be so, between
masters and apprentices. No more than two, but no less, either. With
Obi-Wan and me, there will always and only be two.
I turn to him, sensing the futility of words to make amends for what I have
just said to him. I can only say, “You have speed. You move with great
control, great precision. It takes most Jedi many years of seasoning to do
what you can do. You should be proud.”
Words I wished someone would say to me when I was his age. Words that went
so long unspoken from my master that the wounds never healed. I went on
alone after I became a Knight, even after I attained a Master’s rank,
traveling on behalf of the Senate and the Chancellor, my contact with the
Council as minimal as I could make it.
Today I failed with Obi-Wan — I gave him too late what he has deserved for
so long. Did I truly know no other way to train an apprentice? Did I want
him, somehow, to share my wound with me, to join me in earnest on my
self-imposed exile?
“If I should be proud, Master, then shouldn’t you, as well?” His voice is
sly; he thinks he is catching me in some logic trap. It is a word game to
him. He doesn’t know how badly I wanted to hurt him, hold him down.
Remain an apprentice forever. Never change. Never grow beyond this, never
go away.
“You will find, Obi-Wan, that the skills you come to rely on throughout
your life are the ones that were never taught to you. You hear them when
you learn to listen to the voice of the Force. If I could teach you only
that single truth, it would be enough to make you a Jedi, in time.”
His hands touch my beard. He has never done this before. His lips brush
mine.
I have known this day would come. Even I, limited as I am, foresaw it when
I first met him. I saw the child grown, a man, handsome and radiant with
confidence and energy. I saw humor and intelligence and desire in his
green-gold eyes, eyes that in the boy before me held none of those things,
only sulky stubbornness. Yoda whispering to me: “Hopeless this is. Do with
him what you can. Look up to you he might.” Insult and plea at once --
this balky, defiant child was like only one Jedi in history, so let that
Jedi have the handling of him. I saw his future then, a hologram
superimposed on that unlovable little boy. I saw that he would be a man of
wit and heart and great power, a man anyone might love.
A man I would love.
The man I do love. Parry — and fail. He has struck home. I wind an arm
around his neck, allow him to lean into the kiss. I touch his hair. He is
still young. I thought this would not happen until he was ready to take the
test, until all vestiges of his youth were swept away with his years as a
padawan, only a memory. There are years left, much refining to be done —
some of it by me, some by Yoda. Obi-Wan is still very much a work in
progress. Still young in so many ways.
I lift my other hand to touch my fingers to his cheek. His eyes are
laughing again. Can’t he sense it? It’s too soon. I have only today
accepted that he cannot be my apprentice forever. I cannot, in the very
same hour, watch him become a man, make him one. My hands knot in the back
of his robe. No. No. No. I am still grieving for my little boy, my
foolish, wayward, reckless Obi-Wan. This man who wants to take his place is
wrong for me now.
His lips part, and I am slow to discourage it. I savor the heat of his
breath, the touch of his tongue as it prods gently between my lips. But
then I stroke his shoulders, and push him away.
The anger in his eyes startles me. I am forcing him away from me, refusing
him something he needs from his master to feel strong. Just as Yoda did to
me when he withheld his praise. Inside, I keen. Must these things always
repeat themselves? Will it always be a master passing on his worst fears,
an apprentice going astray because no one is calling him home?
“Not yet,” I say, hoping that he can see my rejection for what it is.
“When?”
“Patience, my apprentice.”
He pays that as much heed as I would have at his age. “*When?*”
“There will be time.”
Stubborn, like his master, inclined to take only his own advice, Obi-Wan
kisses me again, harder this time, trying to burn understanding into me. I
am shocked by his intensity. How long has he been capable of this, this
insistent seduction? How long has he harbored desires that go this far
beyond aimless adolescent longing, desires that shake me, force me to doubt
my judgement and my willpower?
I reach out with the Force, testing him. Hoping to hear that he has
harbored them all his life, that in some instinctive way he saw what I did
in the very beginning. Hoping that, like me, he is just now coming to the
shore of an ocean he has always known existed.
There is nothing. Nothing.
I am falling, both physically and spiritually. I land, in the first case,
in the grass and soft dirt, Obi-Wan on top of me, pulling my head closer,
resuming the kiss that shattered when we began our descent to earth. In the
latter case, I think I must still be falling.
No. No. No. I have gone through too much with this boy to be this to
him.
I push him away, roughly, because he is deaf to subtlety by now. “There is
nothing of the Force in this, either,” I grate out. “If you intend to make
love the way you fight, then you have much to learn about both arts.”
His eyes narrow; he doesn’t like this, but he won’t speak openly against
me. “Then why won’t you teach me?” he asks, too strictly courteous.
“Would you hone your skills with the lightsaber by dueling with the most
dangerous man you know?” I let that sink in. He may be thinking through
the implications of that for minutes, or years. With Obi-Wan, it is
impossible to predict.
At least he sits up, moving away from me enough to break the immediate
tension. He turns his back to me, and draws his knees up to his chin.
Thinking. He may act before he thinks, but Obi-Wan is more than capable of
thinking when he feels the moment is right.
I press up on one elbow. As tenderly as I can, I reach out and stroke his
long, red-brown hair. “I will not break my word, my padawan. I promised
you that there will be a time for this.”
“When?” He is not overwrought now, not speaking out of an agony of need.
His voice is low, wistful.
“You have been with me for the better part of your life, Obi-Wan, and there
is no other who knows you so well. Give us both room.”
“Room? For what?”
“For you to grow. Trust me, little one.” He half-turns his head at that,
the name I used to use, years ago, to needle him out of one of his fits of
pique. “When you return from Yoda’s, you will be...very different. I will
seem different to you, as well.” I trace my fingers up his curved spine.
“Then we can become acquainted at our leisure.” I feel the smile on my
lips, hear it in my voice.
He lands in the grass beside me with a little thud and a tiny sigh. “What
you’re asking isn’t easy, you know. I’m ready now.”
“Obi-Wan, the hardest lesson I ever had to learn from Yoda was patience. I
was eager to be a Jedi; I felt that when my trials were passed and I was a
Knight, I could be alone and my life would begin at last.”
“Alone?”
“The Force was company enough for me.” Back then.
We are nose to nose, scratched by blades of grass and breathing in a thin
film of dust. His golden eyes are still opaque like stones, and he stares
at me like a stranger. I wish I could feel him, but a part of me is glad he
is too far away to feel my confusion. Where is he, behind those eyes? What
is he looking for as he fixes so steadily on my unbeautiful face? “Did you
love Yoda, Master?” he asks.
I am a stone in the grass, a geode. Pretty image. Hard to keep the
crystal on the inside, hard to stay this blank when I want to smash open for
him. How does he do it, a mere boy as he is? It should be impossible.
Like loving the Master who breaks you to the Jedi’s yoke, it should be all
but impossible. “No,” I admit. “I eventually learned to respect him.”
Not while I was his apprentice, of course, or even during my years as a
Jedi Knight. Only when I wanted to take my place among the other Masters,
but I was still too jealous of my hard-won independence to have any use for
an apprentice of my own. It was Yoda who intervened on my behalf, Yoda who
smoothed the way for me and procured my dispensation from the Council. For
the first time in twenty-five years, I thought it possible that Yoda might
understand what was inside me. He is wise. He knew me well, and it made
him the first to see Obi-Wan’s potential.
*Disagreeable, he is. Untrusting, like you. Teach each other you must, or
your debt to me is still unpaid.” At first I thought it was a supreme
irony: Yoda in his generosity single-handedly sparing me from the duty to
train an apprentice, then single-handedly shunting the worst prospect the
Council had seen in years directly to me. Now I see it differently. Leave
me be when I am sure of nothing, not even my own strength, and bring me a
soulmate when I am growing grey and slow with loneliness. Oh, yes. I am
learning to trust.
“Trust me,” I implore Obi-Wan; we are here in the grass to teach each
other, after all. “Desire must never rule a Jedi. You are the master of
your own passions, Obi-Wan.”
“I want you.” When did he learn this language, this minimalist poetry, raw
and lovely?
My life-Force sings his name much too strongly to answer him with less than
the truth. “And I want you. But I will want you still when the time is
right.”
“Won’t I?”
“I don’t know.” Bright white strands of my own future, conducting my
passion for Obi-Wan up and down the line like searing electricity. I see
that. But his future is hidden from me. Yoda was right, as usual. He is
as untrusting as I was, choking down his own life-Force, locking it up
inside him so that not even I, reaching for him, can find it.
Will he be as old as I am before he discovers that being open, not being
alone, is the serene silence from which the voice of the Force proceeds?
Must these things always repeat themselves? Will it always be a Master
learning much too late that which he should have been teaching all along —
an Apprentice surpassing his mentor in skill and forgetting the secret
language they once shared? Boys grown up, men grown old. The Force growing
sluggish and cool between the two who need each other most.
*Untrusting, like you.* Yoda trusted me to go my lonely way. Then he went
deeper, and he trusted me to teach Obi-Wan, and to learn from him, too. I
give the old man that much. He found something in me to trust, and long
before I stumbled across it myself.
My fingers touch his face. Much power is concentrated in the hands. All
Jedi know that. “Have faith, child.”
Amusement plays in his mossy, dark eyes, and a little pity for me. “Child?
Am I a child to you, Ma— Qui-Gon?”
Silky bravado. He is beginning to believe he can win this fight. He can,
but like the first man you kill, the first man you bed is anything but what
you expect. “You are my padawan learner. It is very like the relationship
between a father and his child.”
The humor blossoms, and the pity becomes a backdrop of sad, untouchable
wisdom. He finds me naive. I find him charming in his vanity. “You don’t
know my father.”
No. But I knew the son we took from him. I saw the bruises, the skittish
glances, the bitterness that marred what should have been a small boy’s
ordinary face. I close my eyes and make a leap of faith, my hand passing
against his cheek, spinning the threads of power. “I know he taught you a
great deal.”
“Not to get hit.” Obi-Wan chuckles, and sighs into my hand. It is another
life for him. He has shed that skin, except for the knots deep inside him
that bind up his Force and keep me from feeling what he feels as he lies
inches from my face.
“If you can’t learn that lesson, none of the others matter.” Obi-Wan’s
lips part to give voice to his light laugh, and we kiss.
We kiss.
We kiss.
Hard to believe in this deep, blind happiness. I have been alone so long.
He has become a brilliant young man overnight, leaving me shy and vulnerable
before the changes in him. I love him. I am untrusting. He must leave me
— so little time left to us now. For all of these reasons, or none of them,
I am too frail to kiss Obi-Wan the way he deserves. I only yield up my
mouth to him, letting him celebrate his first victory over his Master by
feasting on my lips and tongue and teeth.
He can maneuver the wraps and sashes of a Jedi’s habit easily, as only a
man who has worn one himself can. I can allow this, for the moment. Let
him revel. Let him be the conqueror. Soon enough, he will learn his next
lesson: that the seduction is merely a prelude to the work of being a lover.
Still a nag lingers somewhere low in my throat. Is this strange,
inappropriate, unwise? I was never told. Taking a padawan learner is meant
to be a lesson for Master as well as Apprentice — am I failing, even as I
give him what he wants, my hands sinking down inside the collar of his robe?
Difficult to imagine most Jedi caught up in passion, never mind two of
them. Obi-Wan and I were always different.
In love, as in swordsmanship, there are many guiding principles, few
iron-clad laws. One principle, which in my experience is always sound, is
to begin with what has worked for you in the past. I cup Obi-Wan’s face in
my hands. He looks down at me, vaguely puzzled, vaguely pleased at my
touch, mainly waiting to see what the next moment will bring.
“When a child is born, he spends the first months becoming aware of his own
senses. He learns to use his eyes and ears, and to understand that he can
affect the motion first of his own body, and then of other objects around
him.”
“Qui-Gon....” He trails off, giving me one last chance to make all this
relevant.
I smile a bit. He is so intense, even in his attempts at patience. There
is no peace in him, only restraint, and shrewdness. “It was not so long
ago, young padawan, that you were in the habit of calling me ‘Master.’”
He brushes his lips across mine. “Is that really the biggest thing you
have on your mind right now?”
“And after the child becomes aware of his physical surroundings, he begins
to attune himself to the emotional fabric of his universe.”
“Qu--*Master.*”
“As before, he first becomes aware of his own nonphysical relationship to
his environment — happiness, frustration, loneliness, love — and then
progresses, gaining an ability to interpret those nonphysical needs in
others.”
His kisses contain desperation now, and my only hope is to keep him from
blocking my mouth. I guide his lips to my neck instead. “The third stage
in a child’s growth is an understanding of the social reality, of the
external expectations his family and society place on him. He becomes able
to recognize--”
“Stop.” He presses his fingers to my lips, and I have no instant desire to
push them away. “Just stop talking. You’re making me nervous.”
I kiss lightly. There is a stirring of the Force in him suddenly, as
though for the first time he knows I am Qui-Gon Jinn, his Jedi Master, his
friend, and suddenly he is calling out, searching for me. I extend, putting
out a light to lead him in. “No reason to feel anxious, my apprentice.
This is just a brief theoretical introduction to our discussion of the role
of sexuality in the maturation of a young Jedi Knight.”
The expression on Obi-Wan’s face revolves slowly from baffled to appalled
to bemused. “Master. You are the most handsome man I’ve ever seen, and you
mean everything to me. On the other hand, I can’t imagine anyone but you
making sex sound this boring.”
“I hope you will not find the practice so much so as the theory.”
“The practice never seems half so boring as the theory.”
A little shiver runs through me, and into Obi-Wan, as the thought occurs to
me: if he moves in my arms the way he moves when we duel, I may not survive
this.
I notice that while Obi-Wan is holding quite still, I am the one moving in
his arms. Our robes have landed in a ring of their component parts, and I
am rocking back and forth against his chest, letting our nipples brush
against each other in a slow rhythm. “May I finish?”
“Will it wait?”
“About as well as you do.” He bites me under the ear, trying to pretend it
was an accident. Now his life-Force is sneaking out of him in tendrils,
testing around my borders, feeling the shape of my own aura. He wants to
trust. He wants in.
I choose to reward his risk with another kiss, less desperate than before,
even more probing. “Now,” I continue, raising my volume just enough to let
him know that I am serious about this. “Training a Jedi is much like
raising a child. Counter-intuitively, however, it seems that the stages
must be approached in the reverse order. The first stage is to teach proper
comportment — self-discipline and self-control, respect for your elders and
*patience* as well. Only then can you move to an increased awareness of
your own inner states, the first step toward accessing the greater Force,
since, as you know, all of your understanding of the Force as it affects the
universe and the flow of time--”
“Grows out of my ability to understand the voice of the living Force within
me. If you know that I know it, why are you telling--”
“Obi-Wan.”
His hands slide up my arms, elbows to shoulders. “Just make love to me.”
“I am trying--”
“Yes, I follow. Social maturity, spiritual maturity, physical maturity.”
I feel the first barbs sinking into me, Obi-Wan anchoring to my life-Force,
shifting and nestling up against me in more than just body. Strike, and I
am open to it this time. I sit up, pushing him forward with me, my hands
raking possessively over his smooth back, my lips drawn back to his. His
eyes close this time, and he is becoming more and more still in my arms.
“If this is going to make you even more disrespectful--”
He nestles closer to me, until I can feel his breath, heartbeat, even the
slight rumbling of his stomach vibrating against my body. His mouth, warm
and wet, traces softly over my ear. “I’m ready.”
Indeed. I lean him back underneath me and reach for his erection; my own
is pressed comfortably against his hip. His tongue rolls lazily inside my
mouth, and his touch on my hair is sure. He should be nervous, but I can
find no evidence of it.
I am. I am his Master, trusted by the Jedi Council to do his worrying for
him, to be older and wiser and seasoned by hard experience. For once, the
Council can be proud of me. I am older, wiser, experienced, and terrified.
“Hush, hmm, hush.” Nonsense, music, sleight-of-mouth to disguise the fact
that I am without a plan and without faith. Blood burns through the fine
skin of his inner thigh as I track my hand upward. “Mmm, little one....”
So many years alone, sleeping on the cool, hard ground, cradling my own
head on my folded arms while I half-remembered the days of my earliest
childhood — my mother’s singsong voice, my father’s enormous, calloused
hands, my grandmother’s milky-blue eyes set deep, like mine, into a tanned
face. I wrap my arms around his head, protecting it from the earth. With
his forehead touching mine, I try to feed him those bittersweet memories, no
different from feeding him mashed fruit and bread when he was ten and too
sick with walking pneumonia to eat on his own. Slowly, I give him one: her
voice.
It drops into his mind like a loose stone down the shaft of a mine. A
thin, reedy breath of air rises from the darkness — his answer. My voice,
lilting and strong. No words, just a sound, a flat, dark plain of noise
like thunder rolling unimpeded over a prairie. I hear what he knows. I
hear the Force as it speaks to Obi-Wan in my voice, and there is no
separating us now. I am his Master, his fate, his truth, his peace. I am
all his memories, and all his faith.
My appetite for intimacy whetted, I toss down another stone, another memory
of my own that haunted and sustained me through those lean years: his hands.
Even before I receive Obi-Wan’s reply, I cup my hand around his groin,
leaving my mark inside his thighs, making him aware of his present, my
presence.
His answer, his end of the liquid, living dialogue blossoming between us.
His own father’s hands, battering him to the ground with open palms.
Obi-Wan’s head striking the kitchen wall with a resounding crack, the
distant sensation of pain. I stroke my hand through his hair, with a sense
that I can feel the welt raised on his head, the one wound that stands out
in his mind as a symbol of five years of pain and anger. We kiss, we kiss,
his hair parts in rivulets to allow my fingers through, he shivers and draws
his legs up around mine, we groan into each other’s mouths, driven down
against each other by the sudden weight of this much trust.
The moisture of my arousal is smearing indiscriminately across his skin and
mine. Seek — with Force and phallus and fingertips. Find — his heat, his
texture, his tension. Strike — he expects the pain, he almost seems to
relish it, he sinks his teeth deeply into my shoulder. His legs fall wide
open, and he reaches for my hands, clutching at them and pulling them back
up to his hair. His awareness is whipping like wind through both of us, a
ghost river of old hurts and small favors, words and smiles and fears and
conquests. I cannot even separate what he remembers from what I know. My
hand slides down his warm, youthfully narrow chest, a fond gesture that
seems much more under my conscious control than the quick, erratic motion of
my hips.
We kiss, and our teeth click lightly together. He makes an anguished sound
against my cheek, his back arching, and I hold his face tight between my
forehead and my hand. The other hand tears up soil and grass above his
shoulder. “Ben,” I call him, and it must come from his mind, because I have
never known him as Ben.
I am not aware of whatever thoughts and memories I may be transmitting, but
he must be hearing something, just as I am. “Trust me,” he murmurs — his
feelings, or mine? How long must a master and apprentice spend together
before there is no more need for that question?
Minutes more. Seconds more. It is almost upon us, the instant when my
trust demands his trust, and his conquest confirms my success. From now on,
our fortunes rise and fall together, just as our breathing has settled into
a pattern and we both know when to ask and offer a kiss.
Minutes more. Seconds more. A heartbeat, two, and three. His cry. My
hand pressing hard against his cheek, leaving red prints on his face.
Little one, my apprentice, Ben, young padawan — Obi-Wan, a Jedi, my partner,
my lover, the man locked against me in the grip of our intertwined orgasms.
Feebly, I pet his hair back, finger his braid, mingle the sweat and dirt
and fragments of local flora on my palm with the sweat on his forehead.
Peace, the two of us lying undefended in the twilight, hands still hungry
for the shape of each other, but otherwise drained to exhaustion. I taste
his lips again, and now that the flavor is familiar it is only that much
more addictive.
He rolls over, one elbow braced casually over my ribs. “The practice was
much less boring.”
“I must remedy that. Learning should always be dull.”
“Repetition...” he hints, feigning innocence.
I rest my hand comfortably on the back of his neck. My anxiety is gone,
but only because I am blind to the future; for now, there is only the living
Force, and the two of us.
This I do know about my future — not by any Jedi arts, but simply because
it is the kind of thing a man cannot help but know: Years from now, when I
am as old and wizened as Yoda, I will never recall the day or the hour that
Obi-Wan first defeated me with the lightsaber — but I will never be unable
to taste his mouth against mine and smell the dampness of grass and sweat on
his skin, and I will always know how it felt to fall from high solitude into
true humanity for no reason greater than that he asked me to.

Hth
hth29@hotmail.com