Master Apprentice Archive A Darker Side Quick search:

Homepage: http://www.sundive.co.uk/

Rating: PG-13

Fandom: Star Wars/Forever Knight

Pairing: Qui/Obi, Nick/LaCroix, Obi/LaCroix

Categories: Angst, POV

Archive: any, just ask

Warnings: none really, just the muse being a little odd

Summary: With so much in common, LaCroix searches out a grieving Obi-Wan

Thanks to: my wonderful beta reader, Tomy

Disclaimer: characters are beloved creations of and copyright George Lucas (SW), James D Parriott & Barney Cohen (FK)

"Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish he'd go away."

A Darker Side
by elfin

I was drawn to him. From the moment I'd arrived on Coruscant, from the moment I'd laid eyes upon him, I'd been fascinated.

Jedi are notoriously difficult to shield from, and it took all my millennia-old skills to continue watching him without him sensing me. But it was worth it.

I did my research, asked those I could influence, took the knowledge from those I could read, and once I dared to reach out and touch him.

I know he felt me, and later, just before I chose to approach him for a second and final time, I know that he saw me.

And what I felt from him, each and every time I got close, was the most terrible battle raging inside his soul.

I know about the Jedi. I've studied them simply because of their similarities to my kind. The way that a master forms a bond with his padawan, the fact that they live out their lives behind masks, guided by rules and codes. They're everywhere but no one really sees them.

Once I knew about this particular knight, I searched him out. My sense of irony really. I had lost my son. He, I knew, had lost his master. Both of us were grieving, both left with broken bonds that hurt like severed limbs.

I wondered if he too woke from sleep and reached for the one who should have been linked so intimately with him, to find that he was completely and utterly alone.

If the sith are the dark side, I couldn't help but muse on what we would be.

I liked the idea of there being a dark side. I often found myself thinking along the lines of, 'if there's a dark side, is there an even darker side? What of us who only walk the night?'

I met a sith lord last year, in a bar on Tatooine. We talked for a while, got on well I think. I'd considered making him my morning meal, but I wasn't sure of his biology. We have to be so careful out here.

Over the years, synthetics have been developed, making travelling so far from home a possibility. To take the locals was always a risk.

Out of all the places I had been, I loved this place the most. I loved the quiet control of the Jedi mind, despite it being more difficult to hide my true nature from them.

Nicholas would have loved it too. I told him so many, many times. And in the end he agreed to come out here, to be with me for a while.

He always hated to fly.

There was an accident, and his ship was destroyed.

So far apart, we couldn't feel one another through our bond as we'd able to when we were both on the same planet.

Yet I felt him, at that last fatal moment. I felt him touch me for a single second. And then he was gone. And the void left in my mind was still raw even now, over a year later.

When I first saw Obi-Wan Kenobi, just after Nicholas' death, he was standing on a landing pad just across from mine. He was being ordered around by a long-haired man who was obviously annoyed with him. He looked so miserable that I was instantly attracted to him.

Misery loves company, or so they say. I think they might be right.

I knew nothing of him, not even his name. And I watched his ship take off into the sky with a twinge of regret. I thought never to see him again.

I'd taken rooms in the city. Oddly, the place reminded me of Toronto so very many years ago. Bittersweet memories of Nicholas and our time together in that metropolitan city were my only company for several long months.

It was a huge place and no one missed the odd lurker if they happened to vanish into the night. I lived on synthetics and the homeless. I easily linked up with the community; they found me. But although it was pleasant sometimes to have another vampire to talk to, my grief quick wore me down and I never stayed for long.

A couple of my victims sated my more base needs before I killed them, but not a great number. For the first time in my very long life, I wasn't interested. And I kept remembering something I said to Janette one distant night in Chicago.

"I don't want a new one, I like that one."

Nicholas. I missed him more than I ever could have thought possible. To know he was alive - as it were - and happy somewhere, had made the pain of separation easier. Our paths would one day cross again.

But with him gone from me forever, my existence no longer seemed to hold any joy or excitement.

One night, sitting in a random bar in the city, I started to consider staying up to watch the suns rise.

That was when I saw him again.

I recognised him immediately. His hair was longer, the same golden blond as Nicholas' had been. He was swamped in a dark brown robe obviously meant for a taller man. And the misery that I had felt from him that first time I had seen him had been replaced by a grief so palpable I could feel him drowning in it.

He was sitting at the bar a few stools down from me, and I couldn't work out why I had only just realised he was there, for he'd obviously arrived some time ago.

There was a drink in front of him, most definitely alcoholic, but it was untouched. He was staring into it, as if all the answers he sought would be found at the bottom of the glass. How many had I killed who had believed just that?

I became more and more aware of him as his tightly-held shields slipped just a little. Reaching for him tentatively with my mind, I ghosted over his.

His head snapped up and he looked about.

There are many romantic stories written about vampires. I'd read one once written about Nicholas and had always remembered the phrase with which the writer had lovingly described his eyes, as ' blue as the oceans during a storm'.

This Jedi had the same eyes.

After a while, a longer time than I would have imagined, he settled back over his drink. Perhaps he too was haunted by the ghost of one lost to him.

Sliding from my stool, I approached him, leaning my back against the bar next to him. "Despite being so close to your home, you look more lost than the loneliest traveller."

He looked up at me, and for a moment I would have sworn that I saw a glimmer of amusement in his eyes. But it could just have been my imagination.

Silence stretched between us. Until he pushed his drink in my direction and moved gracefully from his stool, gathering his robe around him. He glanced up at me.

"And what if I am further from home than anyone else in this galaxy and can never return?"

He vanished into the crowd and was gone.

The meeting at least had renewed my interest in life. I no longer felt the need to end it abruptly, and left for my rooms before the suns of the planet rose into the sky.

I thought about him all day, and that evening I started to ask about him.

Obi-Wan Kenobi, I discovered, had become a Jedi Knight when he'd fought his master's killer, a sith lord named Maul.

Qui-Gon Jinn was infamous for doing exactly the opposite of what the Jedi council decreed. He had taken Obi-Wan as his padawan under some duress, but had taken him as his lover willingly and only just at the legal age.

They were well-known throughout the city. Obi-Wan was considered a prize, knights and masters alike looked upon him with some degree of interest. But at the age of eighteen he and Qui-Gon were bonded, dashing their hopes of ever getting their hands on the boy.

Just after I'd first spotted Obi-Wan, they'd apparently taken off for Naboo. There, Darth Maul had killed Qui-Gon in a fight, and Obi-Wan had kept his final promise to his beloved master, to take on a young boy - Anakin - as his own padawan learner.

All this was information I could gather from any one person I met in a bar. I wanted to know more, deeper things about the young man whose bleeding heart had called to my dead one.

I went to the Jedi temple at night and walked through the bountiful gardens, gleaning as much as I could from open minds that surrounded me.

And finally I found what I'd been searching for.

Obi-Wan had given up his training of Anakin. Something I might have guessed myself, from the fragile state of the man I'd met in the bar. But what I wanted - what I found - was why.

Every master and apprentice pair formed a training bond. When such a connection had begun to form between Anakin and Obi-Wan, the latter had fallen ill. Very ill. He'd started to experience the worst headaches of his young life. A scan had revealed a blood vessel had burst in his brain, near to the surface.

The temple healers had... healed him, for the time being. But his experience had left him frightened and unwilling to take his padawan back.

Since then, he'd grown increasingly depressed and withdrawn. He believed his mating bond with Qui-Gon had prevented him from carrying out his master's dying request. He hated himself for that.

The council, it seemed, had tried sending him on missions to pull him from his revere. On one occasion, he'd almost been killed. The last time, he'd been raped.

Since then, he'd been staying with the great Jedi master, Yoda, protected and looked after by the council themselves and kept away from anything they believed threatened him.

I was still trying to work out why they'd had such a change of heart when I heard a story. It was just rumour, perhaps even simple urban legend, but the man who told me, right before he became my evening meal, truly believed it.

The two men who'd raped Obi-Wan, on a planet not far from Coruscant, had been found dead three days after the attack. Their genitals had been sliced clean off - the wound cauterised - not unlike the wounds made by a lightsaber.

Obi-Wan had already been in the care of the healers back at home. So who had exacted his revenge?

Only when I finally went to him, did I find my answer. And I also learned how wrong I had been, how many assumptions I had made, and how different the Jedi were to us.

I went to the temple on the Night of the Dead.

At regular intervals, along the marble walls of the temple, candles burned brightly and I was reminded of Toronto once again, for some reason, of Nicholas' loft.

It was so quiet that the only sounds I could hear were Obi-Wan's footfalls.

He walked with his head slightly bowed, using the living force to guide him. I could feel it, all around him, protecting him. At least, that's what I thought it was.

His arms were tucked into the long deep sleeves of his tunic, the posture indicative of the sombre thoughts brushing over his mind. I reached toward him, adding my touch to his delicate state. In the bar he had noticed me; here, now, he didn't even twitch.

I followed him, through the temple to his temporary rooms. They were sparse. No worldly possessions to distract him from the healing process that even I could feel wasn't working. The living area comprised of cushions scattered over a hard wooden floor, and a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the gardens. An archway off this small area led to a bathroom with a sunken tub and a toilet, while a second led to a bedroom with a large mattress lain directly onto the same polished floor.

There was only one sign in here that Obi-Wan was an individual Jedi and not just a part of a larger order.

On the mattress in the bedroom, folded neatly, was a brown robe that didn't have the same... force signature as everything else that was Obi-Wan.

Tightly shielding, as I had in the corridor, I waited just inside his rooms. Open to the living force around him he should have known that I was there, lurking in the shadows away from the moonlight pouring in through the tall window.

But he was barely aware of his own surroundings. I could feel the waves of exhaustion buffeting the force around him as he started to prepare for yet another sleepless night.

In the bedroom, he dropped his robe and runic from his shoulders and folded them, placing them in a corner of the room that I could not see. He removed his boots and leggings and took as much care stowing them for the night.

I watched, fascinated, as he padded from bedroom to bathroom, his pale skin almost translucent in the bright light of the Coruscant moon.

I waited. He bathed quickly and dried himself, settling down onto the mattress and unfolding the brown folded robe to cover himself in it. Curling into a foetal ball under the heavy material, he closed his eyes.

Once I was sure his breathing had at least evened out and his mind had wondered from the here and now, I reached out mentally and touched him. Soothing, stroking caresses over his troubled thoughts, I gently eased him from consciousness into sleep.

Only then did I step forward into the white light and walk slowly, reverently, into the bedroom.

Kneeling next to the mattress, I touched my hand to his soft blond hair. The spikes of his youth had grown out, his ponytail gone, his padawan braid snipped off a year ago. He'd become a knight because of the anger that had taken its hold of him after he'd watched his master's death. Trapped, unable to reach the one that had bonded so deeply with him, he'd been forced to witness the red blade of their enemy's lightsaber pierce the body he loved so much.

Closing my eyes, I breathed him in, wondering how he would taste. But would I take him, kill him, lose him forever to my desires? Or would I do as I'd planned on doing in the long months I'd waited for this moment? Would I have him with me forever?

Gently pushing my fingers into his hair, I leaned forward to touch my lips to his, my mind ready to calm or silence him should I need to.

Something happened then, something I can't explain without feeling my sanity slipping from me.

For at the moment my lips touched Obi-Wan's, I became aware of a third person in the room with us. I could see no one, but I could feel him. Like the static that comes before a lightening storm.

This other presence... pushed me back, away from Obi-Wan, and in the moment between sleeping and waking I heard a name uttered from between his lips. "Qui-Gon."

He opened his eyes and faster than I could see, he was sitting up, his lightsaber in his hand, its green blade resting a hair's breadth from my throat. I hadn't even noticed him lay it next to him when he'd gone to bed. His stunning blue gaze flashed in the moonlight.

"Who are you?" he demanded, confidence in his posture despite the fact he was naked under the robe he'd gathered around himself.

"My name is Lucien LaCroix," I told him softly, loving the sound of his accentuated voice.

"What are you doing here?"

"I came to see you. You won't believe me but... you called to me."

He moved his head to one side. "I did no such thing. What do you want?"

Knowing that he could kill me with the lightsaber, but gambling that he wouldn't, I reached out with my hand, touching his temple with my fingertips.

"You've been torn from the one who was on the other end of your bond." I sensed his shock, felt the cold heat of the shimmering blade so very close to my dead skin. "I too have been separated from my lover."

He wavered, but he must have sensed that what I was saying was the truth, for the lightsaber was deactivated.

"You were bonded? A Jedi?"

I shook my head. "No.... I'm a vampire. Nicholas... was my son. He was with me, in my mind, for over a thousand years." I heard his intake of breath, and moved a little closer to him, reaching for his hand. He allowed me to lift it, and opening the buttons of my shirt, I touched his fingertips to my chest.

A minute later, I heard his whisper. "You have no heartbeat."

"I am dead."

"But you... you walk and talk. You... grieve for your Nicholas."

I nodded. "And it hurts more than an open wound would ever do." I saw my pain mirrored in his expression. "I can make it go away. The two of us... we could be together. I can keep you safe from death, can bond us. We would neither of us be alone again."

But he was staring at me. "What you're offering me is a life much darker than that of the dark side of the force."

I hesitated then. There had been no tone or emotion in his voice, nothing that I could grasp, nothing for me to work with.

"I'm offering you a way of leaving your pain behind."

A small smile touched his lips. "My master was the other half of my soul. He was my lover, my teacher, my friend. He completed me. Nothing you could offer me, nothing you could do to me would ever change that."

"But to remember and to grieve are very different things. You have so much fire within you, Obi-Wan, your melancholy wastes so much of you."

"My fire died with him," he told me certainly, without regret.

Every word he spoke, every movement of his lips and blink of his eyes fanned my desire with each passing moment.

Slowly, controlling, I let the change come over me. He started as my eyes darkened and the sharp teeth protruded over my bottom lip when I smiled. "It's all right," I reassured him, "when I bite you, it won't hurt. You'll feel complete again."

"I won't ever be complete again while I still walk in this universe. And you won't bite me."

He was right, but it wasn't for lack of trying. I pounced, aiming for his naked throat, ready to strike and drink enough in the first few moments to render him powerless to stop me from doing with him what I would.

But before my teeth touched his skin, I was thrown back to the floor with a power that surprised me. And when I looked up, I saw that Obi-Wan hadn't moved.

"I am sorry, Lucien," he murmured to me. "Death means nothing to me but separation. One day, I will also pass over and Qui-Gon and I will be reunited, rebonded." He reached out his hand to me. "I wish you also had my hope." I touched his warm skin with my cold fingers. "No one else can ever touch me."

I was confused. "Then why mourn?"

"For myself, Lucien. For my sickness, for the padawan whose fate I will change when the weakness in my brain kills me. For the balance that might never come." He sighed, and I remembered why he'd given up Anakin Skywalker in the first place. "Leave me before the sun rises and wipes you from existence. Leave the temple. Your kind is not natural, and while I feel for your intimate loss, I cannot think of why a Jedi would ever consider your offer."

And I had to admit, after talking to him, neither could I.

I left him, sitting wrapped in his master's robe, and his master's very presence. He would always be protected, eternally loved. How Qui-Gon - or at least, his spirit - must be mourning the imminent death of his beloved padawan.

I left Coruscant a few days later. I never returned.

fin
elfin