Master Apprentice Archive Roses! Quick search:

Rating: PG-13

Archive: MA

Series: none

Categories: Q/O, PWP, first-time, romance

Feedback: Dying for it, please.

Summary: Qui-Gon is receiving mysterious--and huge--shipments of roses for Lovers' Day.

Spoilers/Warnings: no sex. Di-ana claims it needs a spew warning.

Disclaimers: Someday I intend to use my own beloved, beautiful characters to write for fame, fortune and glory. Today is not that day.

Notes: Bunnied, and therefore beta'ed, by Di-ana Wolf. She approached me with this after I posted a whimpering plea on OTP about being bunnyless. (As if. Fifty-seven channels and nothing on...) But hers was so sweet and so appealing, I could not resist. And so we give you Qui-Gon, adrift in flowers.

/.... / Denotes thoughts.

It was the third day.

Qui-Gon could barely maneuver around their small quarters. The single shared bedroom and the 'fresher were clear, but the tiny meditation/common/dining room was filled wall-to-wall, the entire floor covered but for a not-quite-narrow path running diagonally through it.

The problem was not only that the room was filled. The true problem was that it was filled with roses.

At first, Qui-Gon had considered it sweet--or, more properly, "extremely thoughtful." Oh, he'd had his share of classroom students who thought they'd "seen" something in his stance or his eyes; sparring partners who'd gazed at him longingly and smiled just so. He'd received many a trinket for Lovers' Day during times when he was in the classroom. They were all nothing next to this onslaught of petaled foliage. As the flowers had begun to come with increasing frequency and determination during the day, and then the following day, Qui-Gon had drifted past faint flattery and into downright irritation.

And now, on the third day, there was the padawan in charge of gift deliveries once more with blessedly fewer but still too many pots of roses in his arms--but then, it was nearly the end of the day. Qui-Gon was nigh to the point of asking him in for tea, he'd been over so often.

"Thank you," he said doubtfully, pressing his thumb into the identifier on the padawan's datapad. "Is there any way we can... forestall this... ?" He glanced back into the rooms: white, yellow, pink, orange, red, and some faded blue breed from a moon off Corellia decorated, or rather smothered, the entire floor of his quarters, and Qui-Gon was running out of room.

He allowed himself to trail off, though the words he wanted to use ran along the lines of "...unstaunchable flow" or "avalanche" or "explosion." But that would never do. Whoever was going to the trouble of having these roses delivered must be sincere, and to deride that would be cruel.

Shaking his head, the padawan courier tucked the datapad away. "Sorry." His gaze slid past Qui-Gon and into the tiny quarters, taking in the thick layer of knee-high flower vases. "Order's already been placed," he added, a distant tone in his voice and an amazed look in his eye. He met Qui-Gon's eyes again and repeated "Sorry" before hurrying away.

When Obi-Wan arrived back home from a two-day lunar training trip, he stopped in the doorway of their quarters, aghast.

The room was a sea of color. The thought occurred to Obi-Wan as soon as he saw it and then he winced at the triteness of the phrase. But it was true: the quarters were awash in flowers: at least sixty or seventy dozen roses of all size and description in plain, indistinct glass vases covered the floors, the tabletops, what little shelf space there was. The ones in the corners, Obi-Wan noticed, were wilting. There was a method to the placement. The freshest ones lined the path through the common room.

Staring, turning as he walked slowly through the room and into the bedroom, Obi-Wan called, "Master?"

Qui-Gon came out of the 'fresher, wiping his hands. A thorn caught at his leg and he stopped, bending and righting a nearly-tipped over vase and rubbing at the scratch on his boot. "Amazing, is it not? I have... an admirer." He looked at his padawan, surprised to be so glad to see him after such a short absence. Obi-Wan, however, was too distracted for any pleasant homecoming.

Obi-Wan frowned heavily. "But--Great Force! There are dozens and dozens of flowers here!"

The master sighed. "Seventy-two, to be precise." He shook his head. "And counting. At the risk of passing premature judgement, I think perhaps someone might need a trip to the Counselors. It is, to say the least, excessive."

Obi-Wan turned slowly, taking it all in. "I suppose... it's a nice thing to be admired." He cast a glance upward at his master.

Smiling, Qui-Gon plucked one of the roses up and brought it to his nose, wondering. "Yes. There is that."

Obi-Wan continued to stare around him, glad that the roses were small by nature. Qui-Gon was only glad that neither of them had allergies.

They seemed never ending. Roses continued to arrive in two-to-three hour rotations the next day, and the day following, and then another day after that. They seemed very paced out, very methodical in their relentless arrival, though whether the courier carried three or five vases always remained to be seen.

"Your turn," Qui-Gon muttered as the doorchime rang yet again. He was tucked up on a corner of the couch trying to read a mission analysis, the rest of the sofa being taken by the wayward, multiplying blooms. Discreetly, Qui-Gon watched as his padawan moved down from the stool on which he'd been perched, reading. Obi-Wan went to the entrance to their quarters and palmed it open, shifting his weight onto one leg in a way that Qui-Gon found dangerously endearing.

Wordlessly, the padawan courier handed Obi-Wan three more vases, then an indentification slate. "Thumb," he intoned, and when Obi-Wan presented it, the padawan thrust the pad forward onto Obi-Wan's thumb, then tucked it away. "Doing alright today? How'd that astronav practical go for you?"

"How much more of this is there?" Obi-Wan asked incredulously, his voice low.

The courier replied rather sharply, "I will be knighted before this order is finished being delivered." He checked his datapad. "No, let's see... how many've you had... ninety-three... well that leaves another hundred seven to go."

"Dozen?" Obi-Wan squeaked, nearly dropping one of the vases as a thorn sank itself into his hand. He looked back into their quarters, trying to envision an additional hundred and seven dozen overweeningly bright flowers. "But--but the rooms aren't big enough!"

Shrugging, the courier turned away. "Not my problem, is it? See you tomorrow." And he left.

Obi-Wan sat in the middle of the floor, a small patch cleared around him, methodically rifling through roses, carefully trying to avoid thorns and mostly failing.

"What are you doing, Padawan?" Qui-Gon asked, tilting his head and watching Obi-Wan pilfer the vases.

"There must be a--ow!--card here," Obi-Wan muttered, moving on to the next vase and sucking the tip of an offended digit. "There's just got to be."

The master shook his head, crouching a bit, then rising up again quickly to narrowly avoid sitting on one of the objects of Obi-Wan's attention. As many times as he'd done that over the past days, he found that this time he didn't mind; at least it distracted him from the vision of his padawan sucking a finger into his mouth.

"Obi-Wan, anonymous admirers... tend to want to remain that way."

Obi-Wan flushed. "Well of course they do. But... there must be something." He looked up at Qui-Gon, quite agitated. "Are you sure they're all from the same person? Who would send these?" It was almost an accusation.

Puzzled, Qui-Gon managed to take a knee. "I honestly don't know, Obi-Wan. Someone very..." he glanced around him, "...determined."

"Doubtless," Obi-Wan groused, and continued searching.

Straightening, Qui-Gon picked his way back to the bed and took up his robe, bundling it around one arm to keep it from dragging through the sea of thorny color. "Don't take it so personally, Obi-Wan," he chuckled.

Obi-Wan looked up sharply, questioning.

"Well, whatever this person's motivations were," Qui-Gon explained, carefully moving toward the outer door, "I am sure making life difficult for you was not one of them."

The padawan's eyebrows pinched together. "Doubtless."

The scent was overpowering, positively cloying. The color was headache-inducing. The sheer inconvenience was maddening. Qui-Gon couldn't take it anymore. Several days into the deliveries, he commed the florist.

"You must... make it stop..." Qui-Gon said, his voice pained, without preamble.

"Master Jinn," the florist wheedled in Basic, "Mebbe you wanta smaller vases, yeh?"

"Neh," the Jedi countered. "I want to cancel the order. I can't eat. I can't sleep. I can't move. I can't smell anything but roses. Even after I leave my rooms!"

Obi-Wan glanced up from his studies at the small, mostly covered table.

"Aahhh," the florist sighed, lapsing into Toydarian a moment to someone in the background, then asked, "No smaller vases?"

"No. Please. Just... cancel the order. Please."

A few more broken phrases crackled over the hand comm before the florist said, "Yanno, I think tha guy who wanted these, I think he wasn't too bright. Mebbe I shoulda checked, yanno, small difference in the word but big big difference in the number."

Qui-Gon glanced at Obi-Wan, who was staring at him intently, listening.

"What do you mean?" Qui-Gon asked into the comm.

"Eh, yanno. Customer ordered nebbat roses. Mebbe he meant nebbit?"

Pinching the bridge of his nose, the master tried to remember his Toydarian numerics and failed. "And what's the difference?"

"Ahhh, a hundred an' ninety-eight dozen."

Obi-Wan groaned and banged his forehead on the table.

"Get them out," Qui-Gon pleaded a few hours later, after kneeling on the bed and failing at his afternoon meditation. "I can no longer focus enough to center."

"But Master," Obi-Wan countered. "Your admirer--"

"My admirer should understand that I have no room, either in my life or my quarters, for two hundred dozen roses."

"A hundred forty-seven," Obi-Wan corrected bleakly. "The florist did cancel."

"The most honest thing a Toydarian ever did," Qui-Gon conceded in uncharacteristic waspishness, then sighed. "Please, Obi-Wan. Haul them out into the gardens. Shoot them into the sun. I don't care. I can't take it. I don't give a Sith about the admirer anymore. I want him to know just how difficult it is when someone is so thoughtless, either in error or by design. Get them out."

Obi-Wan looked positively stricken, suddenly pale and sorrowful. Qui-Gon cupped his forehead in his hands. "Obi-Wan, I appreciate how conscientious you're being about this, but let's face it: in spite of any lesson I would sharply impart, the admirer likely will never find out."

Biting his lip, Obi-Wan began to take up armfuls of the flowers and walk them out into the gardens.

It took Obi-Wan the better part of the night to get the flowers out of the quarters. Qui-Gon supposed he should find out what had been done with the prolific blooms, but he could not bring himself to do anything but stare around the wide expanses of naked floor with a satisfied sigh. The smell lingered, but that would fade soon enough. For now, he resisted the urge to sprawl out on the floor--or the table, even. The quarters that he'd always regarded as too small now suddenly felt cavernous. Obi-Wan should be here--

"Hmm," Qui-Gon said aloud, enjoying the sound of his voice echoing unimpeded against the stone walls. "Where is Obi-Wan?"

Taking up his robe with a wide flourish that would have taken out at least eight vases, Qui-Gon headed out to the darkened gardens.

It took him a good while to find his padawan, sprawled as he was in a back-forty rolling plains simulation. "Obi-Wan," Qui-Gon chided gently, "I was beginning to worry about you. Where have you been?"

"Just here, Master," Obi-Wan sighed. He was lying on the ground, hands behind his head, staring at the stars. "You know, I was thinking about those roses."

Qui-Gon chuckled. "I imagine they will be a topic of conversation for a good while."

"No, not like that. You see--well." He put his hand up; Qui-Gon took it and tugged, enabling his padawan to curl forward and sit up, then rise smoothly to his feet. "I put them just over this hill. They will decompose quickly enough; but I do have to get the vases. Will you come with me?"

So Qui-Gon followed his padawan over the small hill, then stopped cold.

Written at the base of the small hill in a runic script were huge words, punctuated and accented by the glassy glint of some twenty-odd vases. Qui-Gon did not bother to wonder how much work it must have taken to carefully overlap those thousands of roses. He did not wonder why the words could not have been made smaller, or why they might have been constructed in any one of a number of media other than roses.

Qui-Gon stopped wondering about anything but the fact that, written in flowers on the slope of the hill, delicately moonlit, was "I love you."

"When I placed the order," Obi-Wan explained softly, "it was only supposed to be nebbit." He sighed. "I was afraid--someone else--" He broke off, dropped his head, and shook it, then laughed an embarrassed laugh.

"I know when they say, 'say it with flowers,' this isn't quite what they mean. And anyway it would take a lot more than this." Obi-Wan stared down at the display, some seventeen hundred roses spread out over the plain. "But this is so much simpler." He stepped forward, hands coming to rest on Qui-Gon's chest. Then he stood on his toes, brushing his lips over his surprised master's.

Qui-Gon groaned, tilting his head and returning the kiss gently, almost delicately. He gathered Obi-Wan into his arms and parted his lips, greeting Obi-Wan's tongue with his own and eliciting a most pleasing moan. When Obi-Wan shifted to one leg and pushed forward, it nearly unknotted Qui-Gon altogether.

"Obi-Wan," the master sighed, pulling back and brushing his fingertips over a cheekbone, then trailing them down the padawan braid. Qui-Gon had already forgotten how long he'd wanted this. That he had it now was enough.

Smiling broadly, Obi-Wan tucked himself against his master's chest, enjoying the feel of those strong arms around him.

He tried, very hard, not to think of the florists' bill.

End