Not Think (Redux)
PG-13
Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me
A note: This story contains slash. What's slash, you ask? Well Timmy, it's this beautiful thing where a muscular Jedi Master and his pretty apprentice get it on. Yeah, I know, it sounds great.
Qui-Gon and his apprentice spend the night outside following an unhappy mission. Slash. Possible WIP.
--
In bleary moments, usually at dusk, Qui-Gon wondered if he had forgotten Coruscant completely. For so long there was only this place and its darkness and rot. He could not remember the stillness of the Temple, when all the Jedi seemed to share a communal peace. Nor could he recall what his Padawan looked like, without the shadows under his eyes, or the alarming scruff along his jaw.
But finally, they were going home. The transport waited for them. A stretch of morose, life-leached land separated the teacher and student from escape. Qui-Gon admitted to himself, in the quiet, that he would have walked straight through the night to get to the transport faster. But he could not ask Obi-Wan to do that.
In the hoary yellow grass, his Padawan slept. Turned on his side, Qui-Gon could see the saturated bandage stretched across Obi-Wan's flank. Qui-Gon held his hand above the bandage, willed more healing energies into his Padawan's injured body. He would not think of how it happened, or how Obi-Wan sounded, so unlike himself, so savagely like himself, when it happened.
Obi-Wan was alive. They would leave.
He reached out, and touched Obi-Wan's hair. It would need to be cut after he left the Temple infirmary. Obi-Wan did not appear a Padawan as much as he did a fresh Knight, just grown out of the regulation crop, braid caught inside the neck of his tunic.
His fingers moved to those pale-red stirrings of a beard. The unavoidable laxness in Obi-Wan's grooming was an annoyance to the young man, and Qui-Gon caught him rubbing the new, short hairs on his skin many times.
Obi-Wan would look fine with a beard—some day. But Qui-Gon could not imagine him outside of his Padawan role, and the Master would not miss this straggly, worn out look. He felt….uncomfortable. As if he were lying in the grass with a near-stranger.
He slept when the sky grew too black to watch.
--
He woke when he felt a pressure against his chest. But even the stress of this dragging mission had not changed his basic reactions; he slowly, calmly opened his eyes and looked down. Obi-Wan was asleep, head resting where Qui-Gon's heart was.
He let himself breathe deeply. The air was colder, he realized, and drew his arm around Obi-Wan. But the movement only disturbed the younger man. He sensed an increased alertness in his student.
"On the…..transport?" Obi-Wan murmured, sounding winded, or a little drunk.
The darkness was perfect enough to pass for deep space. "No, not yet. We stopped for the night, remember?"
"Oh," then he seemed to feel the weight of Qui-Gon, half beneath him, and started to roll away with a jerk.
But Qui-Gon tightened his arm around the slender form, held him steadily. "It's alright. It's very cold."
Obi-Wan nodded against him, and was silent.
.
After awhile, Qui-Gon began rubbing his back.
"I never want to think of this place again."
Qui-Gon was startled, but did not slow the rhythm. "Nor do I. But every experience offers a chance of learning, of becoming more than we were to begin with."
"Yes, Master."
A moment passed. Then Qui-Gon whispered, "But there are things about this place I wish to never think of again, ever. I learn nothing new from seeing my Padawan in pain."
He did not expect the water, and warmth, to come to his eyes, any more than he expected Obi-Wan to kiss the tear when it came down his cheek.
"Rather my pain, than yours." Obi-Wan said, and his voice was heavy, mature.
Qui-Gon wished he had not pulled Obi-Wan closer. Everything was too close, and their limbs, their breath, overlapped in a way they never had been before.
He kissed Obi-Wan's forehead. "Go back to sleep."
--
It was not until dawn made suggestions of gray light in the horizon that Qui-Gon woke again.
Now he felt pressure, all over.
"Please", Obi-Wan moaned in his ear, the coarse scruff on his face scratching Qui-Gon's, like how his fingers scratched along the Master's shoulders, "You can have me here, and we'll never have to think of it once we're gone. I won't…I won't…let myself remember it. It's just us here, and it will be good…only you and me."
Qui-Gon tried to pull Obi-Wan's head back, tried to find the earnest youth underneath the guise of this man. But Obi-Wan leaned down again, kissed him on the mouth. He understood immediately that Obi-Wan had never kissed anyone like he was kissing Qui-Gon. He felt the heat of fever in the touch.
Day was coming. Qui-Gon decided to burn the fever out of Obi-Wan, through his hands, through his mouth. Later, he would not think of how it happened, or how Obi-Wa sounded like a stranger, sounded exactly like himself.