A Crown of Hollow Stars

by Mirabella (alt_mailbox@yahoo.com)

Pairing: Q/O, O/A
Archive: Master_apprentice
Category: Angst
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Well... vague ickiness, I suppose.
Spoilers: None
Summary: Anakin wants.
Feedback: sure, on or off.

Moonlight spills over his Master like slow water, silvering red-gold hair, pooling beneath him where he kneels in meditation by the window. The folds of his robes are filled with shadow, darkness in luminance, unstirred by the breeze off the sea or the slow rise and fall of Obi-Wan's breath; and in this stillness, Anakin begins to understand.

He understands that desire can come without warning, without welcome. He understands that he can resent his Master, chafe against his control, and still want him so badly that every other wanting in his life pales like starlight in this one moment. Most of all, he begins to understand how fragile the course of a human life is when everything can change so irrevocably between one breath and the next, and he wonders how much of himself he has already lost.

He steps forward, not quite out of the shadow. He is a Jedi now, powerful as he dreamed of being, no longer a small child who too often felt helpless; and the distance between want and take and mine seems a distance that should be closed as easily as the few feet between him and Obi-Wan. But he goes only a step, and no farther, because in that moment of clear revelation he saw something else as well: that the soft aura of the Force enfolding his Master is redolent with the dimly-remembered presence of Qui-Gon Jinn like the smell of rich spice hanging in the air. Love, protection, belonging, bound between Obi-Wan's memories and the living Force, cradling his Master as gently as Qui-Gon's arms must have, long ago.

Anakin steps back, leaving the room as silently as he came, and understands something else: that fondness for a child's memory of a man can turn to hatred as suddenly as the fleeting glint of moonlight on tears.

On this world the night sky is full of auroras, sheeting over the sky in brilliant dancing colors, glimmering like the light from a newborn star. Anakin has spent the last four nights on his knees in that dim coruscating glow, trying to release unwanted emotions, unwanted realizations, silently pleading with the Force to wash him clean of his sins. For brief periods during those meditations release has seemed within his grasp, the vaunted Jedi calm hovering tantalizingly close, nearly making him believe that there is no emotion but serenity.

Not tonight.

Tonight he sees ten long years of being bound by a whisper-thin bond to a somber young man who never cried and rarely slept; of pushing himself through kata after kata until he was staggering with exhaustion, trying and failing to match his Master's grace and speed; of occasional flashes of humor and rare, brief moments of affection that fade all too quickly and leave him filled with a painful, unquiet longing for more. He remembers the day he realized that the Council agreed to his training not because they wanted him but because they feared what he might become, and that Obi-Wan took him as padawan only because he had given his word to the dead. He wonders what would have become of him, if not for that promise.

He is nineteen now, a man grown; and, hidden in veiling shadow, he watches Obi-Wan on the terrace below, stripped to the waist in air that chills Anakin, flowing through an empty-handed version of a saber kata. No longer reaching for serenity, no longer even sure that it exists to be reached for, Anakin watches the light shimmer on his Master's skin and thinks, It isn't fair.

There is no death. There is only the Force. Obi-Wan told him that ten years ago, in a voice overlayered with serenity as thin as a sheet of ice stretching over a chasm. His eyes had still looked lost then, dark and changeable in a way that Anakin had had no words for until the day he saw a storm-cast sea, and Anakin had watched warily to see if Obi-Wan would break and leave him alone in this cold alien place.

There is no death. That was the first lie Obi-Wan told him, though he suspects that it was not the last.

He needs no chronometer to tell him that the anniversary of Qui-Gon's death is approaching. He sees it in his Master's increasing withdrawal, in his irreproachable civility, in the hint of shadows under his eyes. He's never asked how Obi-Wan knows so unfailingly in the courts of half a dozen worlds, in the middle of rubble and blaster fire and blood-churned mud, in the hospital wing of the Temple, Anakin has watched his Master go silent and still, as if he were listening to something that no one else could hear.

Anakin has never let on that he sees. He doesn't intend to start now. So all through dinner he keeps himself distracted while Obi-Wan pretends to eat.

Candlelight on his master's hair, gleaming amber, and Anakin wants so badly to warm his hands at that fire. He wants to shout He's dead! He's been dead for years! I'm right here! Look at me! He wants this to be the same as any other day, for them to eat in peace, to live in peace, without this shadowland stretched between them like the Jundland wastes. He wants to be given the gift of that body against his, to be everything and every moment to Obi-Wan, to utterly displace this long-dead Jedi who came to Tatooine and remade the entire universe in a day and then got himself killed, leaving chaos and emptiness behind him.

He wants, so much that it drowns out even the voice of the living Force, so much that there is nothing left of him but the wanting, and it terrifies him.

When Obi-Wan rises and quietly excuses himself to retire, dinner left uneaten on his plate, Anakin cleans up the kitchen and tries to release his feelings to the Force. But it is too much to release, this need and anger and bitterness and frustration that have become so bound to him that he no longer remembers a time when he didn't feel them. He believes that he might be able to release them if it were not for the sheer unfairness of it all; that Qui-Gon should be able to reach across ten years from his funeral pyre and hold Obi-Wan just out of Anakin's reach, that Obi-Wan should be unwilling to open his eyes and see that the future could hold love as well as the past...

And suddenly Anakin is angry, angrier than he can ever remember being.

He kneels silently in front of Obi-Wan, watching without being observed; if Obi-Wan is aware that his apprentice is there, he gives no sign of it. The multihued glow of Coruscant's night plays over his features, limning strength and weariness, glittering from the slow tracks of tears.

"Master," Anakin whispers.

Another moment of stillness before Obi-Wan's eyes flutter open. He frowns a little at Anakin, irritation at having his meditation disrupted warring with faith that Anakin would not have interrupted him for something not urgent. "Ani "

Anakin silences Obi-Wan with fingertips that tremble against his Master's face. "Hush. Don't speak." And then his mouth is on Obi-Wan's, the taste of his Master is all through him like the flow of the Force, and the contrast between the soft warmth of Obi-Wan's lips and the light scratch of his beard sends Anakin reeling. He darts his tongue against those lips, demanding entrance.

Which is denied. Obi-Wan is still for a startled moment and then draws back. "Anakin "

"Master, don't. Let me "

"No, Padawan," Obi-Wan says, gently but implacably.

One thing Anakin learned early, while he was still a slave, is that there are always ways around no. Every armor has a chink. He picks up Obi-Wan's hands and rubs them gently, thumbs pressing into soothing pressure points. His Master frowns but doesn't resist, and Anakin can feel the need in him not for sex, but to be held, comforted, to share his grief and hurt as he once shared such things with Qui-Gon. Anakin would like to believe himself to be above using that need for his own purposes, and knows in his heart that he is not. He has wanted too long and too desperately, and there is nothing now that he would not use.

So he speaks, low and soothing. He speaks of his mother, parsecs away; of childhood friends lost to pod-racing accidents or Tusken raiders; of grief clung to because to let it go, even for a second, was to risk having the memory of the dead fade and losing them again, a second bereavement all the more frightening for leaving not even grief behind. And he puts a little of the Force behind his words, not much Anakin can wield the Force like a battering ram but does not trust himself in more subtle things.

And he wants Obi-Wan to come to him freely. He wants his Master to carry that weight with him forever, because desire and hate and need and revenge have become so intertwined in Anakin that he is afraid he might never be able to tell them apart again. He wants Obi-Wan to remember. He wants him to know.

And so he begins to talk of small griefs shared and lessened, of needs that are not sins, of things that friends will do for each other and then never speak of again. And when that is done he talks of Qui-Gon for the first time, of the way he and Obi-Wan had shone in each other's light like Tatooine's twin suns, of things noticed by a small boy everyone was too busy to take note of: quiet words, soft touches that lingered a moment longer than they needed to, the way years and care lifted from Qui-Gon when he spoke his padawan's name. He watches Obi-Wan struggle with control Obi-Wan, whose control is so effortless; whispers, "Let me help you, Master, just this once," and leans forward again.

It takes a little more pressure through the training bond to break through the last of Obi-Wan's resistance. But after so many years of training, Anakin thinks that he might well know Obi-Wan better than any other living being, no matter how much of him remains out of reach; and he is going to have this one night, because he knows that he will never have anything else, and knows what he will pay for it.

Obi-Wan's skin is like water under his hands.

When he wakes, he is alone: alone in the bed, alone in his mind, the training bond shielded tightly against him. He smiles grimly and reaches for his clothes.

Obi-Wan is kneeling on the floor of the common room, not so deep in meditation that he doesn't look up when Anakin enters. His eyes are dark and troubled; and Anakin, who does not always need the training bond to read his Master, sees shame and something very like despair. "We need to talk, Padawan," Obi-Wan says quietly.

Anakin grabs his robes from the back of a chair. "No, Master," he answers. "I don't think we do."

He is gone before Obi-Wan can press the point.

Once upon a time, when he was still Ani and believed with a beloved child's surety that the dark whispers that followed him through the corridors would turn in time to love and acceptance, Anakin thought the Temple gardens were a strange, lush paradise, full of birds and colorful flowering plants, rich with scents and so damp that they made his nose run and his chest ache. Then, slowly, he began to see the blight: the wariness, resentment, fear, of him, Anakin who had always been loved; and as the years passed and the Jedi Temple became more alien instead of becoming home, Anakin's dislike of the gardens grew.

He stands in them with his eyes closed and his face turned to the weak, watery sun, and in his mind the wind sings over barren rock and vast stretches of clean, ascetic sand.

Near him, a bird begins to sing. Without opening his eyes, Anakin lashes out with a Force tendril like a whipcrack and closes it around the bird, immobilizing it, paralyzing its respiratory system. The bird's heart speeds frantically as it tries to struggle, and Anakin listens to it, waiting.

There are things he would rather have bought with love. He tried, over and over. Until this morning, he believed that he would try forever. But what cannot be bought with love can be bought with power, and Anakin is very, very good at getting what he wants.

Something in the bird thrashes against his control, for all that it cannot move. Anakin squeezes tighter, and listens to its heart.

One day things will be different. One day things will be right. And they will be made right by people like Anakin, who understand that some things are worth buying in whatever coin comes to hand.

The bird is weakening.

Anakin is still young, and is in many ways unclear on how exactly the universe can be made right. But he knows that serenity is an impossible ideal, that the Jedi Code is obsolete, and as the bird suffocates he begins to understand that the Force is the most powerful tool in the galaxy but still only a tool, and a tool does not care what hand uses it or for what purpose. All his life Anakin has searched for purpose. He believes that it exists, that there is something that is worth paying for with something more than his life. But it is not here, in this garden, in this Temple, in the Force.

There is silence now where the bird's heart was. Anakin searches for silence in himself, and hears the wind keening over sand.