Obi-Wan finished bandaging Tredze's wounds and sat back on his heels. The governor had regained consciousness a few times, trying to speak, but now he was sleeping the sleep of the drugged, his pallor masked by the strange glow of the Soulfire.
Thankfully, his injuries were minor, and the only ones sustained during their escape. Now all they had to do was stay hidden, survive, and make their way to the rendezvous point in ten hours, when the transport returned.
He stood, and looked at the woman who stood taut as a wire facing the cavern's entrance. "Sabeeth."
"You stopped me. You drew on me."
"I couldn't let you --"
"You knew I meant to kill him. I had to kill him. I thought you understood that."
"You didn't want to just kill him. You wanted to torture him."
She whirled on him, eyes flashing dark fire. "And you stopped me."
"We hadn't the time --"
"That's not it at all."
Obi-Wan sighed. "No. It isn't. Sabeeth, I am a Jedi, I could not stand by and watch you sear the flesh from him inch by inch."
He winced at the memory, of her light saber lowering toward the pinned and terrified Dol Bethra. The man had been pressing against the wall as if he hoped its stones would turn to mist and allow him to pass through, but there had been no way out, no way to avoid the humming violet beam as it paused just above his head.
In his mind, Obi-Wan could still hear the crisp sizzle of Bethra's leonine silver-white hair burning away, and then the first scream as the light saber had scored a slow path down his forehead, forever marring his aristocratic despot's handsomeness, headed relentlessly for his bulging, staring blue eye.
Such control; even in his horror Obi-Wan had been forced to admire Sabeeth's control of the weapon, the precision with which she handled it. Worthy of a Jedi ... except for the savagely cold expression shown clearly in the backsplash of amethyst. He could feel the sadistic satisfaction emanating from her, and how flash-quick it had turned to cheated fury as he knocked her blade aside in a nova of blue-white and violet.
"He deserved it," she said now. "A swift death would have been too good for him."
"It's not the way."
"It's not your way." She began to turn away, and he took her by the shoulders. "Sabeeth, what you could be if you could forsake this madness for revenge!"
"Forsake myself? It's all I have, all that I am. You're the one who doesn't understand. You and your Council, high and mighty, coddled and comforted in your righteousness, unwilling to admit to your own darker emotions as if that'll somehow make them go away ... but do you know what? I don't think they go away. I think they fester, buried and locked away in your hearts, and you make greater monsters of them than they truly are. If you let them out, accepted them and admitted they were a part of you, instead of calling them evil and condemning those who don't follow your strict code ... oh, Obi-Wan, what you could be!" "The Dark Side cannot co-exist with --"
"Denying the Dark Side doesn't make it go away. If this Force of yours is to be balanced at all, you have to have both."
"What did you say?" he asked, suddenly chilled. "Both. Light and dark. Good and evil. They both exist in all of us. Your Council doesn't seem to understand that. They'd destroy everything they think of as evil. Then what would they have? Nothing. They'd start seeing evil in other places, making it up where it didn't exist. There has to be a balance."
"No ... no, that can't be ..."
"Am I all evil?" Sabeeth demanded.
He tightened his grip on her, shaking his head as he wrestled with what she'd said. "I ... I don't want to believe that you are. There is good in you."
"And there's darkness in you." Overriding his protest, she continued. "In all of us. Yes, I'm further one way than the other, it's my life. Maybe we both have a lot to learn." "The Council would never agree with your reasoning."
"They would sense the hatred and bloodlust in me and call me evil. It's easy for them to say, from their safe and lofty place."
"No one can blame you for accepting the only life you've ever known. But Sabeeth, it doesn't have to be like that anymore. We're leaving Rannok. You can start anew."
"If I leave now, with Bethra still alive --" "No!" His hands slid from her shoulders up to the sides of her neck, no longer gripping but holding, loose tendrils of her hair tickling softly along the back of his hands. "Bethra doesn't matter!" He sensed her struggling with her next words, and saw the earnest appeal in her emerald eyes when she lifted them to his.
"I cannot be the kind of woman you'd have me be. No matter how much ... no matter how much I might like to be. This is what I am ."
"You can be more than revenge." "I wish that was true." Her fingertips found his face again in that tender caress.
"You have been so badly hurt. Let it go, Sabeeth. Let it --" He was silenced by her kiss, silenced and overwhelmed as her passion stormed with power equal to her fury.
"Why...?," she breathed against his mouth, "Why?"
"Because," he mumbled in reply. "Hate brings only death, and I don't want to loose you... " "You wont, Obi-Wan", she almost purred and nestled closer to him, caressing his lips with her own.
"I want... I can't..." he tried to restrain himself.
"You can." She moved willingly against him. "The rest doesn't matter."
"It does . If ... if I were to make love to you --" she interrupted him with a deep kiss. When they finally broke he continued, even more breathless then before. "It would be ... like ... yielding a part of myself ... to the Dark Side."
"This part?" She grasped him with devastating effect, and he threw back his head with his jaw clenched against a hoarse cry.
"Sabeeth, stop ... you don't understand ..." Now his pauses were filled with frantic gasps for breath, his arms closing around her with involuntary strength. "A Jedi ... is not as other men." "That's not how it feels from here."
He managed a strained laugh. "Not what I meant."
"Don't tell me you've sworn an oath of chastity."
"No ... that's not it ..." It took a tremendous effort of will, but he made himself take her arm and move her delicious, tormenting hand. "When a Jedi is ... intimate ... more than his body is involved. Even as I ..." he swallowed and nearly trembled at the thought, and she uttered a breathy moan as his feelings transmitted themselves to her, "even as I entered you, I would be ... touching your soul."
"And my soul frightens you." She leaned her head on his chest. His shirt had come open and her cheek rested on the skin just over his rapidly- pounding heart.
"My mind and my emotions are at war", Obi-Wan said hoarsely. "I want you, and I fear you. What passes between us is more than a meeting of a man and a woman. Our very fates are at stake."
"Are you my redemption, or am I your downfall ... is that it?"
"It could be that."
"I fear you, too," she admitted, drawing away from him. "You and all that you represent. I ... don't want to learn that there is more to life than pain and anger; it makes my purpose and very existence a hollow thing! But at the same time ... oh, how I want you."
"You're right ... we're not so different. I have been raised to be Jedi for as long as I can remember. All that we are, is what we've been taught to be, and now we are a threat to each others' way of living. My path is not to be feared, Sabeeth. You wouldn't find emptiness behind your pain, but a new purpose."
"My path's not to be feared either. But there's no way ... except one." "What do you mean?"
"Walk in the fire, Obi-Wan. If you want to know my soul, know all that I am, you'll find it in the fire."
"The ..." he looked at it, at the leaping gold-black-violet flames reaching toward the cavern's ceiling. "I can't go in there."
"It will only hurt you if you let it. It won't change you, only show you."
"Will you come before the Jedi Council?"
"A test for a test?" she asked with a slanted half-smile. "Fair enough."
"Then we're agreed." He moved toward the Soulfire.
Sabeeth stopped him, her smile widening. "Oh ... you'll need to remove your clothes." He raised his eyebrows at her.
"Honestly," she said. Picking up a scrap of leftover bandage from his tending of Tredze's wounds, she tossed it into the flames. It blazed gold, then settled in a heap of glowing violet embers.
Obi-Wan cleared his throat. "And this will only hurt me if I let it?"
"You saw me go into the fire. You touched me, felt the flames run over your skin without burning."
"Mm-hmm," he said, unconvinced.
"I promise, I'll keep my hands to myself." She placed them demurely behind her back.
He shrugged out of his cloak. "What about your eyes?" "Oh, now, Jedi, that is asking a bit much." The eyes in question, bright green, glinted amusedly.
"I think I finally know what Master Yoda meant about being seduced by the Dark Side," he muttered, undoing his belt and stripping off his shirt. "I never expected it to be literally." When he finished undressing and looked over, saw how she was biting the fullness of her lower lip and watching him with such desire, he came very close to forgetting the fire and just going to her. Her hands were still clasped firmly behind her back, the posture pushing her breasts forth, pressing them against the fabric of her tunic, they rose and fell in time with the quickness of her breath. Instead, with the last strand of resolve, he turned and stared into the depths of the Soulfire. Right beside it, he still felt no blistering heat, but its radiance bathed his bare skin and its whispering crackle filled his mind.
He hesitantly sent one foot toward the flames. They reached for him, and there was no searing pain, only a warm and welcoming fluttering sensation. Inhaling deeply of the smoke, Obi-Wan stepped into the Soulfire.
Immersed.
Black and violet and gold, all around him, seemingly all through him. No sense of solid floor beneath his feet, as if he were suspended in space, floating.
No fear. It melted away like a thin sheen of ice.
In the blink of an eye he was in a depth of meditative trance that it usually took even the best-trained Jedi several minutes to reach. Keenly alert yet thoroughly relaxed, distanced from his body yet aware of every nerve ending.
Peace and serenity.
As one with all things.
As one with the Force, both sides of it light and dark and all the myriad shades between. And he saw, understood, that as far removed as Sabeeth was from the Jedi, she was nearly as far removed from the Sith. Yet ... yet they were all far closer to one another than he would ever have believed.
"In us all," he said, and the words came from his mouth as visible puffs of white-blue that mingled and then were absorbed in the hue of the flames.
He looked out at Sabeeth, saw the tension and anxiety on her face, felt her worry that she'd been wrong, that he would find only agony in the fire. Her soul was laid bare to him, as she'd known it would be, every secret and every hope set out before him, and the bravery, the sheer courage that would let her so expose her innermost self ... the miseries that she had endured brought him near to screaming, what a wonder that she wasn't evil, under such torment, even a Jedi might have broken ... then, stark and terrifying, the realization that she would have gladly died once she'd seen her revenge complete, that the end of Bethra's life would be the completion of her own.
"Sabeeth," he called, reaching out with hands and mind. "Don't let it end that way! If you die to kill him, he wins even in death!"
Visions whirled around him. The past, the future, a confusing cyclone that made perfect sense. He saw himself approaching a domelike structure in a dune-swept landscape, an infant in his arms and a terrible sense of loss and dread burdening his steps. He saw the child that he'd been, standing with the others as the Jedi Knights came in to choose their Padawan. A vision heard but not seen, of ominous mechanized bellows laboriously drawing and releasing air.
Then came an image still sharp and painful, only a few years old. Reddish energy keeping him apart from Qui-Gon as his master knelt in calm readiness, and beyond, the horned scarlet-black visage of the Sith. But with the new understanding of the fire, theirs souls were open to him too, and something that he had long suspected but never admitted even in the most private corners of his thoughts was now proved to him. "No!" he cried, and stumbled from the flames. He fell to his knees and would have toppled full-length but Sabeeth was there, catching him, kneeling with him, holding him.
"He knew," Obi-Wan said shakily. "He knew he was going to die, and he let it happen. It was the only way to bend them to his will."
"Who?"
"My Master, Qui-Gon. He let himself die so they would allow me to train the boy. They wouldn't ... I wouldn't ... refuse his last wish. He knew that. Had he lived, he would have gone on fighting the Council, defying them. He believed... he believed it that strongly. And I doubted him. We all doubted him. He made us accept it the only way that he could, at that cost." Mute sobs wracked him, the unshed tears hot behind his eyelids. She held him and he clung to her until the wrenching grief began to ease. He realized how foreign the task of giving comfort was to this woman, something she'd never done before. What, he wondered, would Qui-Gon have made of her? "He would have liked you," Obi-Wan said. "And seen the good well before the danger. He was ... a much wiser man than I will ever be."
"I should have warned you. I'm sorry. The fire ... it can be --"
"No. I needed to know. All this time ... I've blamed myself for failing him. Now ..."
"Now you know he had faith in you. If he let himself die, he did so knowing that you would be able to finish what he'd begun." She twined his short hair through her fingers. "He did better than trust you with his life, Obi-Wan. He trusted you with his death."
He closed his eyes and lay his head on her shoulder. "Promise me you won't do the same. You have more to live for than revenge."
"You've seen my soul ... what else is there for me?"
He let his lips be the answer. No longer colored with fear, no longer struggling against himself, he gave over wholly into the kiss, feeling her surprise swiftly drown in sweet dissolving desire.
"My hands," she whispered.
"Your hands?"
"I forgot about keeping them to myself."
"I forgive you." He unbraided her hair and let the midnight satin spill down her back. "Do ... do as you will with them."
"It's much easier now that you're undressed." She drew her palm and trailing fingers down his chest, to his waist, lower. He groaned softly, pulling her close as she caressed him. "You're not."
"That can be remedied."
"Let me." He lifted her tunic over her head. Soon she was completely naked. They reclined together in the shifting gold-violet light.
She explored his body with a demanding fervour that left him breathless. Her hands, her mouth, her full yet muscular curves, her hair sweeping across him like a curtain of night, her passion as intent and powerful as her anger had been. Then, startling, the brush of her mind that told him this was her first time willingly, first time with a man of her choosing, the apprehension she felt. And a surge of amazing tenderness filled him, no longer just wanting her and needing her but consumed with an overpowering wish to show her how it should be, share with her how it could be.
He gently pushed her down on the onyx-smooth floor, her skin untouched by the light of any sun as pale as milk, beautiful, the scars only accentuating that beauty, and bent to explore her just as diligently, just as purposefully, as she had done to him, taking even greater joy in her gasping cries than he had in his own sensations. But as he rose over her, made ready to complete the act ...
"No," she protested, suddenly tense, suddenly frightened. "I can't --" "Be calm, Sabeeth, and trust me," he urged mildly.
He lay back and drew her atop him. She hesitated, searched his eyes and his mind, and saw that he never meant to hurt her in love. With excruciating slowness, she lowered herself, and they were one, body-mind-soul as one, the Force so strong in both of them creating a meshing, sinking into one another.
"Ohhh," she exhaled in wonder. Backlit by the Soulfire, her body arched, her hips moving in a lazy rhythm, and he could feel the gathering explosion in her loins, both of them yearning for it and then striving for it, and her wail was silent, echoing only in his mind. She fell upon his chest, his arms encircling her tightly, locking their lips in a kiss as he let himself go, let himself pour into her, not so much meshed now as fused , her thoughts his, his thoughts hers, a single soul shining between them like a star.
Thankfully, his injuries were minor, and the only ones sustained during their escape. Now all they had to do was stay hidden, survive, and make their way to the rendezvous point in ten hours, when the transport returned.
He stood, and looked at the woman who stood taut as a wire facing the cavern's entrance. "Sabeeth."
"You stopped me. You drew on me."
"I couldn't let you --"
"You knew I meant to kill him. I had to kill him. I thought you understood that."
"You didn't want to just kill him. You wanted to torture him."
She whirled on him, eyes flashing dark fire. "And you stopped me."
"We hadn't the time --"
"That's not it at all."
Obi-Wan sighed. "No. It isn't. Sabeeth, I am a Jedi, I could not stand by and watch you sear the flesh from him inch by inch."
He winced at the memory, of her light saber lowering toward the pinned and terrified Dol Bethra. The man had been pressing against the wall as if he hoped its stones would turn to mist and allow him to pass through, but there had been no way out, no way to avoid the humming violet beam as it paused just above his head.
In his mind, Obi-Wan could still hear the crisp sizzle of Bethra's leonine silver-white hair burning away, and then the first scream as the light saber had scored a slow path down his forehead, forever marring his aristocratic despot's handsomeness, headed relentlessly for his bulging, staring blue eye.
Such control; even in his horror Obi-Wan had been forced to admire Sabeeth's control of the weapon, the precision with which she handled it. Worthy of a Jedi ... except for the savagely cold expression shown clearly in the backsplash of amethyst. He could feel the sadistic satisfaction emanating from her, and how flash-quick it had turned to cheated fury as he knocked her blade aside in a nova of blue-white and violet.
"He deserved it," she said now. "A swift death would have been too good for him."
"It's not the way."
"It's not your way." She began to turn away, and he took her by the shoulders. "Sabeeth, what you could be if you could forsake this madness for revenge!"
"Forsake myself? It's all I have, all that I am. You're the one who doesn't understand. You and your Council, high and mighty, coddled and comforted in your righteousness, unwilling to admit to your own darker emotions as if that'll somehow make them go away ... but do you know what? I don't think they go away. I think they fester, buried and locked away in your hearts, and you make greater monsters of them than they truly are. If you let them out, accepted them and admitted they were a part of you, instead of calling them evil and condemning those who don't follow your strict code ... oh, Obi-Wan, what you could be!" "The Dark Side cannot co-exist with --"
"Denying the Dark Side doesn't make it go away. If this Force of yours is to be balanced at all, you have to have both."
"What did you say?" he asked, suddenly chilled. "Both. Light and dark. Good and evil. They both exist in all of us. Your Council doesn't seem to understand that. They'd destroy everything they think of as evil. Then what would they have? Nothing. They'd start seeing evil in other places, making it up where it didn't exist. There has to be a balance."
"No ... no, that can't be ..."
"Am I all evil?" Sabeeth demanded.
He tightened his grip on her, shaking his head as he wrestled with what she'd said. "I ... I don't want to believe that you are. There is good in you."
"And there's darkness in you." Overriding his protest, she continued. "In all of us. Yes, I'm further one way than the other, it's my life. Maybe we both have a lot to learn." "The Council would never agree with your reasoning."
"They would sense the hatred and bloodlust in me and call me evil. It's easy for them to say, from their safe and lofty place."
"No one can blame you for accepting the only life you've ever known. But Sabeeth, it doesn't have to be like that anymore. We're leaving Rannok. You can start anew."
"If I leave now, with Bethra still alive --" "No!" His hands slid from her shoulders up to the sides of her neck, no longer gripping but holding, loose tendrils of her hair tickling softly along the back of his hands. "Bethra doesn't matter!" He sensed her struggling with her next words, and saw the earnest appeal in her emerald eyes when she lifted them to his.
"I cannot be the kind of woman you'd have me be. No matter how much ... no matter how much I might like to be. This is what I am ."
"You can be more than revenge." "I wish that was true." Her fingertips found his face again in that tender caress.
"You have been so badly hurt. Let it go, Sabeeth. Let it --" He was silenced by her kiss, silenced and overwhelmed as her passion stormed with power equal to her fury.
"Why...?," she breathed against his mouth, "Why?"
"Because," he mumbled in reply. "Hate brings only death, and I don't want to loose you... " "You wont, Obi-Wan", she almost purred and nestled closer to him, caressing his lips with her own.
"I want... I can't..." he tried to restrain himself.
"You can." She moved willingly against him. "The rest doesn't matter."
"It does . If ... if I were to make love to you --" she interrupted him with a deep kiss. When they finally broke he continued, even more breathless then before. "It would be ... like ... yielding a part of myself ... to the Dark Side."
"This part?" She grasped him with devastating effect, and he threw back his head with his jaw clenched against a hoarse cry.
"Sabeeth, stop ... you don't understand ..." Now his pauses were filled with frantic gasps for breath, his arms closing around her with involuntary strength. "A Jedi ... is not as other men." "That's not how it feels from here."
He managed a strained laugh. "Not what I meant."
"Don't tell me you've sworn an oath of chastity."
"No ... that's not it ..." It took a tremendous effort of will, but he made himself take her arm and move her delicious, tormenting hand. "When a Jedi is ... intimate ... more than his body is involved. Even as I ..." he swallowed and nearly trembled at the thought, and she uttered a breathy moan as his feelings transmitted themselves to her, "even as I entered you, I would be ... touching your soul."
"And my soul frightens you." She leaned her head on his chest. His shirt had come open and her cheek rested on the skin just over his rapidly- pounding heart.
"My mind and my emotions are at war", Obi-Wan said hoarsely. "I want you, and I fear you. What passes between us is more than a meeting of a man and a woman. Our very fates are at stake."
"Are you my redemption, or am I your downfall ... is that it?"
"It could be that."
"I fear you, too," she admitted, drawing away from him. "You and all that you represent. I ... don't want to learn that there is more to life than pain and anger; it makes my purpose and very existence a hollow thing! But at the same time ... oh, how I want you."
"You're right ... we're not so different. I have been raised to be Jedi for as long as I can remember. All that we are, is what we've been taught to be, and now we are a threat to each others' way of living. My path is not to be feared, Sabeeth. You wouldn't find emptiness behind your pain, but a new purpose."
"My path's not to be feared either. But there's no way ... except one." "What do you mean?"
"Walk in the fire, Obi-Wan. If you want to know my soul, know all that I am, you'll find it in the fire."
"The ..." he looked at it, at the leaping gold-black-violet flames reaching toward the cavern's ceiling. "I can't go in there."
"It will only hurt you if you let it. It won't change you, only show you."
"Will you come before the Jedi Council?"
"A test for a test?" she asked with a slanted half-smile. "Fair enough."
"Then we're agreed." He moved toward the Soulfire.
Sabeeth stopped him, her smile widening. "Oh ... you'll need to remove your clothes." He raised his eyebrows at her.
"Honestly," she said. Picking up a scrap of leftover bandage from his tending of Tredze's wounds, she tossed it into the flames. It blazed gold, then settled in a heap of glowing violet embers.
Obi-Wan cleared his throat. "And this will only hurt me if I let it?"
"You saw me go into the fire. You touched me, felt the flames run over your skin without burning."
"Mm-hmm," he said, unconvinced.
"I promise, I'll keep my hands to myself." She placed them demurely behind her back.
He shrugged out of his cloak. "What about your eyes?" "Oh, now, Jedi, that is asking a bit much." The eyes in question, bright green, glinted amusedly.
"I think I finally know what Master Yoda meant about being seduced by the Dark Side," he muttered, undoing his belt and stripping off his shirt. "I never expected it to be literally." When he finished undressing and looked over, saw how she was biting the fullness of her lower lip and watching him with such desire, he came very close to forgetting the fire and just going to her. Her hands were still clasped firmly behind her back, the posture pushing her breasts forth, pressing them against the fabric of her tunic, they rose and fell in time with the quickness of her breath. Instead, with the last strand of resolve, he turned and stared into the depths of the Soulfire. Right beside it, he still felt no blistering heat, but its radiance bathed his bare skin and its whispering crackle filled his mind.
He hesitantly sent one foot toward the flames. They reached for him, and there was no searing pain, only a warm and welcoming fluttering sensation. Inhaling deeply of the smoke, Obi-Wan stepped into the Soulfire.
Immersed.
Black and violet and gold, all around him, seemingly all through him. No sense of solid floor beneath his feet, as if he were suspended in space, floating.
No fear. It melted away like a thin sheen of ice.
In the blink of an eye he was in a depth of meditative trance that it usually took even the best-trained Jedi several minutes to reach. Keenly alert yet thoroughly relaxed, distanced from his body yet aware of every nerve ending.
Peace and serenity.
As one with all things.
As one with the Force, both sides of it light and dark and all the myriad shades between. And he saw, understood, that as far removed as Sabeeth was from the Jedi, she was nearly as far removed from the Sith. Yet ... yet they were all far closer to one another than he would ever have believed.
"In us all," he said, and the words came from his mouth as visible puffs of white-blue that mingled and then were absorbed in the hue of the flames.
He looked out at Sabeeth, saw the tension and anxiety on her face, felt her worry that she'd been wrong, that he would find only agony in the fire. Her soul was laid bare to him, as she'd known it would be, every secret and every hope set out before him, and the bravery, the sheer courage that would let her so expose her innermost self ... the miseries that she had endured brought him near to screaming, what a wonder that she wasn't evil, under such torment, even a Jedi might have broken ... then, stark and terrifying, the realization that she would have gladly died once she'd seen her revenge complete, that the end of Bethra's life would be the completion of her own.
"Sabeeth," he called, reaching out with hands and mind. "Don't let it end that way! If you die to kill him, he wins even in death!"
Visions whirled around him. The past, the future, a confusing cyclone that made perfect sense. He saw himself approaching a domelike structure in a dune-swept landscape, an infant in his arms and a terrible sense of loss and dread burdening his steps. He saw the child that he'd been, standing with the others as the Jedi Knights came in to choose their Padawan. A vision heard but not seen, of ominous mechanized bellows laboriously drawing and releasing air.
Then came an image still sharp and painful, only a few years old. Reddish energy keeping him apart from Qui-Gon as his master knelt in calm readiness, and beyond, the horned scarlet-black visage of the Sith. But with the new understanding of the fire, theirs souls were open to him too, and something that he had long suspected but never admitted even in the most private corners of his thoughts was now proved to him. "No!" he cried, and stumbled from the flames. He fell to his knees and would have toppled full-length but Sabeeth was there, catching him, kneeling with him, holding him.
"He knew," Obi-Wan said shakily. "He knew he was going to die, and he let it happen. It was the only way to bend them to his will."
"Who?"
"My Master, Qui-Gon. He let himself die so they would allow me to train the boy. They wouldn't ... I wouldn't ... refuse his last wish. He knew that. Had he lived, he would have gone on fighting the Council, defying them. He believed... he believed it that strongly. And I doubted him. We all doubted him. He made us accept it the only way that he could, at that cost." Mute sobs wracked him, the unshed tears hot behind his eyelids. She held him and he clung to her until the wrenching grief began to ease. He realized how foreign the task of giving comfort was to this woman, something she'd never done before. What, he wondered, would Qui-Gon have made of her? "He would have liked you," Obi-Wan said. "And seen the good well before the danger. He was ... a much wiser man than I will ever be."
"I should have warned you. I'm sorry. The fire ... it can be --"
"No. I needed to know. All this time ... I've blamed myself for failing him. Now ..."
"Now you know he had faith in you. If he let himself die, he did so knowing that you would be able to finish what he'd begun." She twined his short hair through her fingers. "He did better than trust you with his life, Obi-Wan. He trusted you with his death."
He closed his eyes and lay his head on her shoulder. "Promise me you won't do the same. You have more to live for than revenge."
"You've seen my soul ... what else is there for me?"
He let his lips be the answer. No longer colored with fear, no longer struggling against himself, he gave over wholly into the kiss, feeling her surprise swiftly drown in sweet dissolving desire.
"My hands," she whispered.
"Your hands?"
"I forgot about keeping them to myself."
"I forgive you." He unbraided her hair and let the midnight satin spill down her back. "Do ... do as you will with them."
"It's much easier now that you're undressed." She drew her palm and trailing fingers down his chest, to his waist, lower. He groaned softly, pulling her close as she caressed him. "You're not."
"That can be remedied."
"Let me." He lifted her tunic over her head. Soon she was completely naked. They reclined together in the shifting gold-violet light.
She explored his body with a demanding fervour that left him breathless. Her hands, her mouth, her full yet muscular curves, her hair sweeping across him like a curtain of night, her passion as intent and powerful as her anger had been. Then, startling, the brush of her mind that told him this was her first time willingly, first time with a man of her choosing, the apprehension she felt. And a surge of amazing tenderness filled him, no longer just wanting her and needing her but consumed with an overpowering wish to show her how it should be, share with her how it could be.
He gently pushed her down on the onyx-smooth floor, her skin untouched by the light of any sun as pale as milk, beautiful, the scars only accentuating that beauty, and bent to explore her just as diligently, just as purposefully, as she had done to him, taking even greater joy in her gasping cries than he had in his own sensations. But as he rose over her, made ready to complete the act ...
"No," she protested, suddenly tense, suddenly frightened. "I can't --" "Be calm, Sabeeth, and trust me," he urged mildly.
He lay back and drew her atop him. She hesitated, searched his eyes and his mind, and saw that he never meant to hurt her in love. With excruciating slowness, she lowered herself, and they were one, body-mind-soul as one, the Force so strong in both of them creating a meshing, sinking into one another.
"Ohhh," she exhaled in wonder. Backlit by the Soulfire, her body arched, her hips moving in a lazy rhythm, and he could feel the gathering explosion in her loins, both of them yearning for it and then striving for it, and her wail was silent, echoing only in his mind. She fell upon his chest, his arms encircling her tightly, locking their lips in a kiss as he let himself go, let himself pour into her, not so much meshed now as fused , her thoughts his, his thoughts hers, a single soul shining between them like a star.