Chapter Text
Ten years ago I gave Obi-Wan his first nameday gift as my padawan. We just barely made the Temple’s rather arbitrary deadline, else he would have been too old to be anyone’s padawan, at 13. He was tall for his age then, having come into an early growth, and both looked and acted older than most of his agemates. Obi-Wan was a very dedicated boy and moreso as a padawan, hardworking and serious about his studies and about being a Jedi—sometimes too serious. Before I ever knew him, I sensed that about him, watching him spar with such intense ferocity against Bruck Chun in a desperate bid to show himself worthy of my attention. So for his first nameday gift from his master, I gave him a rock.
It saved his life.
Since then, we have made something of a joke of that gift, but the stone itself has become almost a fetish for us, both symbolically and literally demonstrative of the way the Force can guide us, all unknown, how it both brought us together and seems to actively protect us, if not for each other then for its own use, some time in the future. This isn’t to say we are never hurt. Both of us have sustained at least one serious injury during our time together, and will doubtless suffer more. A Jedi’s life is hard and dangerous. But the Force brought us together as master and padawan first, then as lovers, and through it we have healed each other and grown together. So each year I give him another rock on his nameday, to remind him of the earliest days of our bond and the ways of the Force.
They are not always just stones. A few are carved in some likeness or with some symbol to remind him of one mission or another that marked a turning point in his training or a goal achieved, or some special event. The stone from the year we became lovers is incised with the likeness of a young vine working its tendrils into the cracks, splitting it open while at the same time holding it together in its twining grasp. Some are cut and polished and mounted to display their natural beauty. Some are set in another object, like the crystals in his saber, to make it useful or beautiful. One of them hums when it is stroked, because Obi-Wan loves music of almost any sort. Another changes color in response to the heat of the hand holding it. Jedi rarely wear jewelry, even when not on active duty, so there are no rings or pendants or earrings, simple or gaudy.
By temperament, Obi-Wan is not a collector of things as I have been, and before we became lovers, his room was spare and unadorned but for the stones I gave him. Now they line a shelf in the common room with some of my books. He has clear favorites among the nine I’ve given him, but he considers all of them often, sitting where he can see them when studying, using them as points of focus for his thoughts. Occasionally, when he has difficulty meditating, he will hold the first one I gave him and find his way to the Force through it, or stroke the singing one with his thumb to produce a soothing tone. So, joke or not, I know he values them, as he values our bond.
I would have known that even without what he did a few days ago. For the first time in our decade together, Obi-Wan chose to honor our bond on the anniversary of our joining as master and padawan. He did so elaborately, with a wonderful meal and a blue silk robe which I enjoy wearing as much as Obi-Wan enjoys seeing me in it. Then he gave me the gift of his body, as he has done so often before, though it is always hard to say who gives and who takes, and who receives the most pleasure. We ruined his newest set of blacks in our enthusiasm for one another, but that, surely, was part of his plan. So I have made my own plans to mark his nameday.
Today he turns twenty-three, and I sent him out with his friends to celebrate. Thirty-five years separate us, and although we have been together for ten years and lovers for the last three, our social circles overlap only slightly. Most of his friends are young knights or senior padawans not far from their own knighthoods, as he is not, and most of mine are masters and senior knights, a few of them members of the Council. It is difficult enough to fraternize with your elders and superiors at required functions, and Obi-Wan needs friends of his own, his own age, as much as I do.
I know, however, that he will not be out all night, despite the fact that many more of his friends are at Temple than is usual at one time, including someone very close to him whom he does not see often enough. I have not asked him to come home tonight, nor do I expect it of him, but I know Obi-Wan will, as I know what katas he likes best, and which side of the bed he prefers, and where and how to touch him to make him cry out. When he comes in, it will be quite late, and with his clothes reeking of various kinds of smoke and inhalants sold and consumed at the club they have gone to, with his mouth tasting of kisses, his breath of one or another of those inhalants, his body full of adrenalin from a night spent dancing, his eyes still alight with shared laughter. If he comes home tasting of semen and smelling of sex, so much the better.
Perhaps I should be jealous that Obi-Wan has another lover, but I do not feel so. I have never asked for an exclusive devotion from him, nor has he of me. Though lovers, we are still master and padawan, and he is not free to give that kind of devotion and will not be until he is a knight. I would not ask it even then, for what we are dictates our behavior in ways that make that kind of relationship nearly impossible. Once he is knighted, both of us will likely be away from Coruscant and each other for long periods of time, each of us perhaps training a padawan. This is likely the longest period of time together we will share.
Even so, I have always hoped he would choose to remain my lover after his knighting, and that perhaps the Council would pair us as it sometimes does two Jedi who work particularly well together, as we always have. I fear this is an old man’s wishful thinking. Few Jedi are paired permanently in any way, and life bonds are nearly unheard of, though they were not so rare in the past when there were more of us. Not that I would wish that entanglement on him, not with an old man like me.
And I would tell him none of this before his knighting. My reflexes are slowing and my body complains more and more with the weather and mornings, and Obi-Wan comes closer each day to fighting me to a draw or clear defeat in our sparring. I do not know how much longer I will be in the field, though I suspect it will not be much past Obi-Wan’s knighting, and it would be wrong to deprive the Order of his capabilities by keeping him near me. Jedi are taught to live in the moment in all things, even this, so I am glad enough that we have each other now, even knowing I am not the only one.
In truth, I find it a relief to know he has someone his own age who clearly loves him as I do, if not, perhaps, for the same reasons, and who will, I hope, be a comfort to him when I am one with the Force. No matter what we feel for each other—and I have no doubt of Obi-Wan’s love or my own—there is always the difference in our ages to consider, something he is more likely to overlook than I. There was a time when I had energy enough for two lovers, as he does, but not now. It is sometimes all I can do to keep up with him, though he does not think so. I am content with the one I have, but he need not be.
And I knew before he did that he was not content. I know that at first he turned to someone else in loneliness and pain when we had parted angrily and I was gone from him for a half-year, but that was not his only reason, not when he went back for more. There are pleasures I cannot give him because of who and what I am, and despite of the depth of my love for him—pleasures that I would not deny him. I would rather he sought them from someone I know and trust than from a stranger who might give him more than he bargained for or wanted. And while there is much I can and have taught him, there is much more he needs to learn himself, from his peers.
His other lover has taught him much. Obi-Wan has been with me long enough to know there are many ways to negotiate and many ways to win peace, and so he did from a long-time antagonist. By the time I returned, cleansed by fire of Xanatos’s shadows, Obi-Wan had won a bitter enemy to his camp, and changed the life of a young man the Council seems intent on throwing away. While it is something I might have done, it is not my example he followed, but his own heart, and in his own way. It is a pleasure to see him learning to trust himself so. For that experience alone, I am happy enough to let him go.
He does come home late, and I am not precisely waiting up, but he finds me sitting in my chair, wearing his gift, reading, when he comes in. Knowing I would be, he makes no attempt at stealth, but comes in singing and drops his black boots—the only part of his Jedi garb he has worn tonight—with a noisy thud beside the door. I love hearing Obi-Wan sing. He has a beautiful tenor that he has taken some care to train as part of his studies, as I learned the poet’s craft while still a padawan, as each padawan is encouraged to find an art to practice.
This moment or that—
how do we know?
In the mirror of the past
It's too obvious:
I did this, should have done
nothing, did that, should have . . .
but it's gone now.
I don’t recognize the song, which is hardly surprising, but the melody is sweet and a little syncopated, in a minor key, and the lyrics are rather melancholy. I wonder for a moment if he has enjoyed himself, until he straightens up and smiles at me.
His eyes glitter, the pupils large with desire, and he slinks over to me in my chair, moving with a liquid stride designed to arouse his old, tired lover. It works. I’m half hard by the time he slides onto my lap, straddling my legs and pressing his mouth to mine. His hands comb through my unbound hair, fist in it, and hold me hard against him. His tongue opens my lips and meets mine. He tastes just as I thought he would, smells of sweat and smoke and sex. By the time we come up for air, my cock has escaped the robe and is arched against my belly between us. He grinds his groin against me so I can feel the twin bulge in his soft, tight leather pants. The friction of the leather nearly makes me come.
“Did you enjoy yourself, Obi-Wan?” I ask him when we lean back to inhale again.
“Yes, thank you. Very much. It was good to see everyone again, in one place at the same time, and the music was quite good tonight. I think I danced with nearly everyone in the club. At least it feels like it.”
“You could have stayed longer. . . .”
“When I had you to come home to? Why would I?” He leans forward to kiss me again and my hands mold themselves around his hard little ass. I wonder if he is already loosened and ready for me.
“Bruck says hello,” he murmurs, shivering, hands playing in my hair.
“Does he?” I reply vaguely, engrossed in the taste of Obi-Wan’s earlobe.
“Yes. He also says you’re a lucky man.”
“I am,” I agree, not so vaguely, and curl my tongue around his ear. Obi-Wan’s breath catches a little in his chest.
“Want to show me how lucky you are?” he growls.
“Oh yes. And I have a present for you.”
“Ah, let me guess what it is,” he says slyly, leaning back to look at me, arching one ironic eyebrow and stroking a finger up my cock. This time it’s my breath catching. “Is it hard as a rock?”
“Yes.”
His hand closes on one testicle, fondling. “Is it cold as a stone?”
“No.”
He hesitates then, and I could kill him for stopping. “No? What could it be then?” He closes one hand around my scrotum, strokes his thumb lazily over the crinkled skin, tugging a little, pulls me in with the other hand for another kiss. It’s all I can do not to erupt where we sit.
“Not what you think, padawan,” I tell him when we come up for air again. I’m surprised I sound as controlled as I do.
“Oh? Well, let me shower then and you can show me what it is, since I can’t guess.”
“You needn’t. Shower, I mean. I like the way you smell now.”
He smiles a little smugly, as he does when he thinks he has cracked my control. “I thought you might,” he says. Wicked boy.
Supporting his weight a little with the Force, I stand up, holding him as he wraps his legs around my hips. I have more room to knead that hard muscle he sits on now, and do so, making him grind against me again. He locks his ankles behind me, holds me tightly around the neck as though he were much younger, and lets me carry him into the bedroom. I set him down gently on the side of the bed, though I’d like to throw us both down on it, strip him out of what clothes are in the way and drive myself into him. I may yet get to do that, but it is his privilege to ask for it tonight.
“Is this my present?” he asks, picking up the velvet bag I’ve left on his pillow, fondling it the way he did my testicles. The inference isn’t lost on me.
“Yes. Open it.”
He does so, pulling out one by one, like a beaded necklace, a string of four stone spheres, two centimeters in diameter, strung ten centimeters apart on a coated silken strand of woven monofilament. Dangling from the end is an oversized ring big enough for two of my fingers. The spheres are black veined with white, white veined with pink, pink veined in green, and green veined with white, very smooth and highly polished. “You’re right. They’re warm,” he says, “like yours,” with a wink, weighing them in his heavy hands. “This one’s a bit sloshy inside. And this one . . . hums. And this one is heavier than it should be. And this one, this one feels like it’s alive, or there’s something alive in it, bumping about.”
“Magnetized bearings inside a polarized shell,” I explain.
“Very pretty. And very mysterious. What are they for?”
“Shall I show you?”
“Yes, please,” he replies, getting a glint in his eye again.
“It involves taking your clothes off,” I warn him.
“Oh all right. If you insist,” he replies with mock annoyance.
“Let me, if it’s such a bother,” I offer, and he acquiesces, pretending to sulk. He’s long outgrown that trait, but it makes his eyebrows curve so wonderfully that I never tire of seeing the mock expression on his face, and he knows it.
I open his shirt first, running my palm down his sleek chest and belly inside it as the closures split open. He shivers. He’s worn the green shimmersilk I bought for him on our last anniversary, the one that changes colors as he moves in the light. It ripples over him now like an aurora as I slide it off his shoulders and down his arms and over his hands, laying it out over the bench at the foot of the bed with my own robe.
Then I get up on the bed behind him and pull him in between my legs so he’s lying back against me, and slide one hand down the front of his pants, popping the snaps of the black leather with my thumb. The first time he put these on, I could barely keep my hands off him. They fit him like a second skin, soft as his own, and I enjoy taking them off him as much as seeing him in them.
I slide my hands down his hips, which he lifts a little off the bed, and down the outside of his legs, stripping off the leather at once, bending him forward beneath me as I reach down to his ankles. My cock grinds between us against the small of his back. He kicks the leather off his feet and onto the floor. I lean back again with him following, trailing my hands up the inside of his legs, behind his knees, inside his thighs, spreading them against mine. The skin there is unbelievably soft.
We’re both shaking now, hearts pounding, rocking us against each other.
Freed of the confining leather, his cock arches up against his belly. I run my fingers through the tight gingery curls at its base and inhale the scent on them, smelling his musky pong and someone else’s, almost familiar. Though three of us together does not appeal, knowing my lover has been with someone else before coming to me is surprisingly exciting.
Obi-Wan turns his face against my neck and bites a little. “I want my present,” he growls.
“You shall have it, my love,” I tell him. “Patience.”
Clasping him, I roll us both over then kneel up between his legs, pulling him onto his until he is kneeling beneath me, my cock sliding over the crevice between his cheeks. He shivers in anticipation. I reach beneath him and squeeze his balls, making him gasp and moan and arch against me, then put a hard pillow beneath him and push him down onto the bed again and spread his legs wider. He wriggles a little and props himself up on his elbows, making a curve of shoulders and back and rump even more attractive than his eyebrows. Beautiful. And shamelessly so. He knows this is a view I like.
I nip his shoulder, then kiss my way across it and down his spine, ending at the small of his back, just above the V of flesh at the top of his ass. It’s one of his most sensitive spots and I spend some time there, licking and sucking and nibbling, running my beard over the soft skin, listening to him sigh and moan, which he does eloquently. Then I mark him there, leaving a painless bruise only I can see, in the shape of my mouth. There are other bruises there, not mine.
Down the middle of his back are other marks of my own, permanent ones: two pictograms in Danjii, raised against his fair skin in welts and colored a deep blue. I trace a finger along the first one, lean over him again and whisper, “Passion”; trace the other one and murmur “Serenity,” then let my hands slide down his back again and watch as he shivers. “Which do you want tonight?” I ask him, holding his hips.
“Passion,” he growls.
I lay the string of balls against the curve of his spine, spread his cheeks and let the first of them slip between those firm hemispheres. Making sure my fingers are slick, I stroke two over and around the revealed pucker of muscle, coating it. He moans and wriggles, grinding against the pillow under his hips.
“Patience, love,” I tell him again, rubbing my palm against the small of his back and slipping two slicked fingers into him, flicking over his prostate. He bucks against the touch, crying out. As I thought, he’s loose and relaxed, though he tightens a little around my fingers. I stretch him a little more, soothing him, then coat the first of the smooth stone balls with lubricant and press it against his opening.
“The order these go in is very important,” I tell him, pushing it in gently. “They're strung this way for a reason.” Obi-Wan moans as it disappears into his rectum, stretching and filling him. I coat the next one and push it in, feeling it vibrating softly against my fingertips. Obi-Wan cries out and clenches his fists in the sheets as the first bumps his prostate and the second sets off an unnameable sensation in him. I coat the third—with its pellets pinging off the interior and each other, making it quiver unsteadily—and push it in against the second one. There is something incredibly intimate and erotic about pushing these into him and watching them disappear inside his body and seeing the cord hanging from him. It makes my hands shake. Obi-Wan throws his head back and moans again, writhing and grinding against the pillow beneath his hips. “Oh gods, Qui! What—”
“Shhhh. One more,” I tell him, and push the fourth one in just past the interior ring, then tug on the woven cord a little. His muscles clamp down hard around the cord and there’s a little bulge around his anus where the last ball sits packed against it. I lean down and run my tongue over it, making him thrust back. He’s breathing heavily now, and when I roll him over onto his back, leaving the pillow under his hips, his eyes are glazed, his mouth open. “Rock your hips a little.” I want him to feel what it’s like without any other stimulation.
He does, and the sound that comes out is articulate in its own way, though wordless. He reaches up to me, a little dazed, almost hypnotized by what’s going on inside him. I lean down and kiss him, his mouth first and then along his jaw, down his throat, over his collarbone, his nipple, which I bite a little. His fingers clench in my hair, his pelvis rocks, his cock leaking. I disentangle his hands gently and let them fist in the sheets as I kiss my way downward, over his ribs, his hard belly, swirl my tongue in his navel. Everywhere I taste the other, faintly. They’ve cleaned one another up, no doubt, as Obi-Wan’s often done with me, but the smell of another’s skin and sweat still clings to him without soap to wash it away. Wondering what they’ve done together makes me harder.
I take his cock in hand and swirl my tongue over the crown, making him thrash beneath me like a hooked fish. That only makes the vibrations and pressure in his rectum stronger, and moves the balls over his prostate. He cries out as though I’ve burned him. His muscles are quivering now and he’s breathing harshly. Relaxing my throat, I take him all in and find the ring at the end of the cord, slipping two fingers through it and pulling the last ball tight against his anus, almost out, stretching him open. I pull my mouth up his cock slowly, just grazing him with my teeth, tongue the sensitive spot on the underside and slide down again, repeating the motion again, again, again, again, each time a little faster. His hips pump into me and he’s crying out, lost, undone, so much in the moment, so beautiful. Mine. He arches up, coming, crying out. I swallow a little and let the rest of his cum spatter against my neck and chest so I’ll have his scent on me the way I know his other lover does. Despite the fact that he’s been with another, he comes in a long ropy jet. I rub it into my skin like cream and nuzzle my face against his softening cock.
“Oh gods, Qui. That’s amazing,” he murmurs dreamily, rocking, rocking, more gently now, still lost in the feelings coursing through him. He runs his fingers through my hair again. “It’s always so good with you.”
Sweat- and cum-slick, I slide up his body until I can recapture his mouth. I wonder if his other lover can make him say that. “Happy nameday, Padawan,” I murmur against his lips. He strokes his hands down over my back and closes them on my ass, pulling me hard against him, so he knows I haven’t come yet. His tongue thrusts into my mouth as he grinds against me and one finger strokes against my anus. It makes me shudder against him. He’s all fire tonight.
“Tell me what you want,” I murmur against his mouth.
“I want you. I want to be inside you, Qui. Let me in.”
It’s not a request he makes often; it’s not something I offer, or ask for, either. I don’t think he knows how much I want it, so it’s ironic he should think of it as a special gift. I roll over, pulling him on top of me and he sits up and straddles me, thick fingers drawing a trail of heat down my body to my groin. He moves back down my legs and then between them, as I pull my knees back against my chest for him. I should feel vulnerable like this, but all I feel is desire as he hefts my balls and strokes the skin behind them and back to my anus. I give him the lube and he slicks his fingers first, sliding one inside me.
“I want to hear you cry out, Qui, I want to know how I make you feel. I want to know I can rob you of words. Don’t hold back. Not tonight.”
And what harm can it do, for one time, one night? He knows the constraints between us as well as I do, and he is old enough now not to test them as he might have, as he did, once. In a few years, he will have all of me, along with his knighthood. So I let go.
He slides one finger in and out, rotates it, flicks against my prostate and I let out the sounds I’ve kept stifled other nights, other times, thrusting back against him.
Then he starts to tell me what he and his lover have done that evening: Dancing in a pack of young sweaty bodies, rubbing up against each other indiscriminately, hard and aching for release, kissing with tongues and hips mimicking each other. He twists and strokes with his finger, the other hand circling my cock, moving up and over the crown and back down. My hips rock up into him, back against him. I hear myself moan.
“Yes! Yes!” he hisses, ferally delighted. “Show me what you want, Qui, show me you like it.”
He works another finger inside me, waits for the muscles to stop spasming, and gently scissors me open more, slowly moving my foreskin over the crown of my cock. He tells me about leaving through the back exit with his lover, what they did there in the alley. It’s torture. I want more. And I find myself wishing I could have watched, could have, perhaps, fucked one of them as well. In my younger days, I would have.
“Tell me, Qui.” He squeezes my cock, slides the tips of three fingers in, and tells me about the ride home, then, as he’s working those thick fingers in deeper, how his lover shoved him against the wall of his quarters and—
“Oh, gods, Obi-Wan! Now!” I hear myself shout, my hips thrusting as mindlessly as his had been earlier. My heart feels like it might burst and I can feel the heat in my face and neck and chest, most of all in my groin.
I feel his fingers withdraw and then he pushes into me, showing our age difference in his quick return to hardness, hooking his arms behind my knees to hold me open and leaning over me. He builds the rhythm slowly, my cock caught between his lean belly and my own, until he goads progressively louder sounds out of me with each stroke until I’m groaning loud enough to make glass shudder. Each thrust sends a wash of fire through me. I open my eyes, see him above me, head thrown back, gleaming with sweat, hips working his cock into me. I know he’s feeling the balls inside him as well as his own pleasure of being inside me. “So beautiful,” I tell him. “So good, so hard, so hot, so good, so good, so good . . .”
It’s wonderful to let go a bit with him, but there’s more I want to give him too. With what little presence of mind I have left, I grope for the ring at the end of the cord and as he shudders into completion, I tug it, pulling the balls out one by one. His hips spasm and slam into me as each one leaves his body and he comes with a deep, guttural groan, more like the sounds I make, like the one I make now, coming with his last thrust and grind against me.
After a moment, he rocks back on his heels and we disentangle ourselves so he can collapse back into my arms. The smell of sex is thick in the air around us, and I can smell Obi-Wan’s lover more strongly now, for the heat. Or perhaps it’s only my voyeuristic imagination.
“Did you really let him—”
Obi-Wan chuckles. “Yes. I can’t believe I did, though.”
I can’t either, but I’m glad of it. Obi-Wan needs someone his own age to goad him out of the early senescence his own nature and having an old man for a lover would doom him to.
That said, Bruck Chun is the last person I would have thought to see him with, though he could be said to have brought us together. Somehow, his life has become intimately entwined with ours and he and Obi-Wan have taught each other much since they became friends and lovers. I find I like the boy, as well, though the two of them together are a study in contrasts. And I begrudge Bruck nothing he has of my lover, for I know I have the greater part of his heart, at least for now.