FicWad

Author's Note: THIS CHAPTER SHOULD BE CONSIDERED NC-17 FOR THE OBI-WAN/ANAKIN SCENES AT THE BEGINNING AND END OF THE CHAPTER(PROBABLY LESS THAN A FOURTH OF THE CHAPTER, ALTOGETHER)!






Love is like a golden light spreading throughout his skin, as if a sun were rising within his body, where Anakin is sprawled wantonly on the bed below Obi-Wan's body, power vibrating and pulsing between them like waves of heat pouring off the surface of a star. Anakin's skin is the color of deep golden amber, blood and power so close to the skin that it flushes a darker shade than its normal golden bronze, darkening and brightening all over to a color like dark honey, if honey could burn and spark with light and power, and he burns, he blazes, as if love has stripped him down to nothing but a core of blinding energy, only just contained by the stretch of his skin. Propped up with his left hand curled around Anakin's shoulder so he can see everything, Obi-Wan is certain that he couldn't have kept himself from running his free hand down Anakin's chest, stomach, and wrapping his fingers around the long hardness of him, even if he had wanted to. Anakin is simply too beautiful not to caress, not to touch worshipfully in awe and joy, not to love with every breath in his body and every iota of strength within him and everything within him that makes Obi-Wan who he is.

So he holds Anakin with gentle firmness in his right hand, long and hard and real, even though his body glows so brightly that Obi-Wan has to fight not to either close his eyes or at least shutter them partially against that incandescence, and it's as if he's holding a heated, pulsing piece of Light made solid, Anakin feeling like a fragile skin of warm silk sliding over a scalding length of velvet wrapped around a rod of durasteel, impossibly soft and firm all at once, a gliding smoothness that throbs into his hand to dance inside his veins, the pulse of his heartbeat spilling heat and even more heat down throughout Obi-Wan's body, like a searching wave that touches and glides over and into him, searching and searching, until finally Anakin's power finds the heart of him, touching his center, that seemingly contradictory darkly luminescent core of power, so perfectly balanced and overwhelmingly powerful, whenever Obi-Wan's adamantine control falls enough for his power to slip the leashes of a lifetime's worth of habitual constraint, unfolding into a fountain of energy so strong that it seems as if the power should ride just under his skin at all times, straining to burst at the bonds of his flesh and explode in a conflagration of Dark and Light and Life and Unification and a thousand, thousand other myriad colors and senses all blending to a blindingly phosphorescent /Whiteness/, Anakin's love and Anakin's power filling Obi-Wan from the inside out, his warmer (darker), more golden (green) glow racing with Obi-Wan's incandescent power, his body, his pleasure, so that Anakin's glow runs before Obi-Wan's, coaxing out a brighter and ever brighter shine in answer, power spilling endlessly between them, intoxicatingly raw and wild and sweet, stripping their surroundings until the bedchamber is full of shadows from their twinned light, full of shadows that have no place in that room, as if their twining power is pushing through some invisible barrier, revealing things about their surroundings that have nothing to do with the physical realm around them with its tangible objects of solid matter and space, nothing to do with the physical dimensions of the room, the bed, their writhing bodies.

With a moan that is half pain and half ecstacy, Anakin raises his head, curling his upper body upwards from the mattress to capture Obi-Wan's mouth, kissing his lips as if he were feeding from his mouth, as if Obi-Wan's mouth were a flower or a cup, wordlessly encouraging Obi-Wan until they are both drinking and sipping and lapping at that heady combination of power and love from each other's mouth, probing fiercely and ravenously licking along lips and teeth and tongue and slick palate and wet cavernous skin as if their mouths were bowls and they were both trying to tease out and scrape away and devour every last drop of some indescribably exquisite brew. Obi-Wan tightens his hand around Anakin, moving his fingers in a long gliding motion as he pulls his mouth away from Anakin's, and Anakin screams as he comes away from his lips, back bowing, head thrown back violently into the pillows, pelvis thrusting up towards the sky, towards Obi-Wan's hand, Obi-Wan's heat, Obi-Wan's light, and that is all the invitation Obi-Wan needs. He slides down the bed, along Anakin's body, until the straining tip of him is parallel with Obi-Wan's kiss-reddened mouth, and then he simply opens up and pulls Anakin in, not waiting long enough for Anakin to catch his breath or for any doubts to surface in his own mind, sucking Anakin between his lips and marveling at how it is like suckling on satin that happens to be hot and rigidly muscled and alive. The sensation of the soft skin and the hardness of him makes Obi-Wan cry out around Anakin, which in turn makes Anakin cry out and arch up beneath him, helplessly pressing closer, plunging up into Obi-Wan's open mouth, the hard press of flesh making Obi-Wan arch his neck instinctively so that the incredible length of him can slide unimpeded all the way into his mouth and down his throat, Obi-Wan relaxing and swallowing until every last millimeter of the thick, long, heated, satiny muscled column of Anakin is between Obi-Wan's lips and teeth and deeper.

He catches a glimpse of Anakin's face among the pillows, bright as a sun, blazing and beautiful, his expression indescribable, pain but not pain, pleasure but not pleasure, broken open as if by tragedy but radiating joy, but then Obi-Wan finds Anakin's hips and begins to push and pull on them, coaxing him to move, until Anakin finds a rhythm and nothing exists but the heady mix of love and power all around him and the plunge of warm muscled satin in and out of his mouth, caressing lips and sliding back over half-wrapped teeth to glide along his tongue and follow it back along its path to meet, bump against, and slide past the back of his throat, thrusting inside until he is buried so far within him that it feels as if Anakin has grown impossibly huge, impossibly large, and is filling up the whole of Obi-Wan's body, spreading down into him with each plunging thrust, waves of power, of love, of /Light/, flowing down the back of Obi-Wan's throat, filling him up like an empty cup, like a hollowed out pool dry of water, one drop of pleasure at a time, one thrust at a time, one thick taste at a time, flesh and power crashing up inside him and filling him up and up and up until Obi-Wan's entire body is nothing but a white-hot boil of pleasure and power, blue-tinged white flames dancing across him and mingling with Anakin's blazing, ghostly green-gold light, mixing and twining into a blazing incandescence that paints all colors of the rainbow across the mattress and sheets, all colors and none dancing on the pillows, the room filling with a blaze of wildly spinning kaleidoscopic colors and shadows that flee through the air until it is as if they are wrapped in a maelstrom of dancing leaves or butterflies or sheaves of light given all but solid form, fluttering scarves of incandescent neon light and power and weirdly there and not-there riband twists of unspooling writhing darkness.

Anakin cries out again, his left hand snaking through Obi-Wan's hair and attaching itself to the base of his skull as if it has been grafted to him, but even though the haze of building power enough awareness remains to be gentle as he moves in a shifting and wriggling dance beneath Obi-Wan, pulling and tugging on him until Obi-Wan is crouching up over Anakin instead of just propped up over him, almost kneeling above him, so that Anakin can finally reach down between Obi-Wan's thighs, right hand closing like the hand of god around him, long fingers branding him, immediately falling into rhythm with the long, deep thrusts of his hips, making Obi-Wan scream around Anakin, and that's enough, that's one too many drops of pleasure, and it's like two suns colliding, power spilling out and over, triggering an explosion in Anakin's hand while Anakin pours thick and hot down Obi-Wan's throat and he swallows that salty power, feeling the burn of it traveling down and through him to join that spill of love and Light, and then there's nothing but love and love and love, power and Light and love, an endless spilling together, no physical boundaries left, only each other and the Force and a timeless blaze of affirmation and love and joy, two become one, a beacon of Light against a shimmering backdrop of infinity.

***

She is staring. She knows she is staring disgracefully - mouth hanging open, eyes wide, pupils dilated by surprise - but her calmness and her certainty have shattered like icicles dropped down from the height of a tall tower onto unforgiving cobblestones below, her thoughts flying apart in every which direction all at once, shock roaring in her ears with a din like crashing of a collapsing building, and all she can do is sit there and stare at Darred Janren, who is kneeling before her with her hands clasped warmly in his, gazing up at her earnestly, dark eyes boring into her, a tangle of hope and pain making those dark eyes seem to shine, a flicker of something that looks like love, like silent adoration, skimming across their darkness like rippling reflections of briefly flickering flashes of light, skipping across the surfaces of two vanishingly deep pools of inky blackness. The thought of flight briefly tries to surface in her numbed mind, but his hands are holding hers so firmly that she couldn't have even if she'd had the strength to stand or the presence of mind to try. He's looking up at her so earnestly, that dark mop of curls (the color of burnt cinnamon, as a distant portion of her mind notes, not truly simply dark brown, as she had always assumed it was, before) so tousled that there's something almost boyishly earnest about his face, despite the careful line of hair accenting the strong, long lines of his jaw and the sharp shape of his chin - which in turn is divided by another, far narrower line that covers and yet draws attention to the dimple beneath it - and the narrow lines of a moustaches that join the wider line of hair along his jaw and outline his mouth in an almost boxy shape, drawing attention to lips that manages somehow to seem sensual despite their relative thinness. And what is she doing, what is she thinking/, noticing the shape of his mouth like that? What in stars' sake is /wrong with her?

"Padmé? Are you well? Should I get someone?"

"No, Dar. I'll be fine." The urge to laugh is almost overwhelming. Fine? /She'll be /fine? She can feel the seemingly paradoxical soft crispness of those burnt cinnamon curls under her fingertips as if she's run her hands through his hair a hundred, a thousand, a million times, knows how the shape of that mouth would fit against hers and how those carefully groomed lines of hair across his face would paint burning patches of redness across her neck and chin, she knows what it would feel like to have him fit his teeth to the skin of her neck and the underside of her jaw (their passing leaving behind red, inflamed marks in the shape of even, slightly rectangular little bricks), and how in the name of the Force can she possibly know these things, when she and her brother-in-law are barely more than old friends who have drifted so far apart that they are little more than polite strangers?

"If I have offended you - "

"/No/, Dar. Sweet stars! You have not offended you. You are tempting me. And that is far worse," Padmé finds herself saying, cutting him off with a painfully false laugh, though she surely did not mean to say such a thing, to admit such a thing, surely she does not think that -

His hands tighten on hers slightly and there is a slight catch in his voice when he speaks again, quite obviously pained by what he is saying, and yet still he tries to ask it, his conscience prompting him to offer to go when he patently does not want to. "Padmé, if you wish me to leave - "

"No/, Dar. /Please. Stay with me." The words are out of her mouth before she is even aware that she has drawn a breath to speak, and it belatedly occurs to her, in the midst of a sudden rush of confusion and heated embarrassment that perhaps Sola isn't quite as gone from this body as she has been assuming. Before she can truly catch hold of the thought, though, Darred begins to speak again, effectively driving everything else out of her mind.

"I don't want to try to pressure you into something that you would not wish to do, Padmé, but you must know that I am perfectly serious about this," he insists, so sweetly earnest that she can feel color rising in her cheeks. "You don't have to go if you don't want to. We - the girls and I - would welcome you if you would stay."

And even though she's quite certain that she only opened her mouth to inform him of all of the many reasons she has for allowing herself to move on into the Force once and for all, after she's done with her farewells, just like she told Obi-Wan and Anakin and her grandmother and parents, to her surprise what comes out instead is, "Dar, I know you would. That's part of what makes this so hard. A part of me really does want to stay. I adore those two little girls and I'll miss them terribly. But I can't keep being selfish and thinking only of what I would want, like this. In the end, it wouldn't be right for me to stay. I would just keep wanting more and more for myself, slipping further and further back into old habits and ways of being, and that just wouldn't be very fair to anyone. Besides, this body has been banned from Naboo. If I stayed, it would only be to have to leave you all. And though I would mean to come back, I don't think I would do so. I think I would leave and never come back, Dar, because I would be too afraid to risk falling back into the trap I was in before and terrified of somehow upsetting what Obi-Wan and Anakin have. I couldn't ever do that to them, Dar. Obi-Wan . . . he truly still does care for me - I know he does, I could feel it in him - though I have a hard time understanding why. But he's also afraid of me, Dar. He's afraid that I could somehow take Anakin away from him. And even though that would be even less likely to happen than it would be for all of the criminals of the galaxy to suddenly turn themselves over to the law and willingly confess all of their illegal activities, he can't see it, because the Jedi Order has taught to regard himself as a nonentity for so long that he can no more grasp at the true importance of the place he holds in Anakin's life than - than - well, than Sidious could have understood the meaning of morality or justice or of an unselfish love. He knows that Anakin loves him, but he also knows that I had Anakin first and a part of him just doesn't understand that Anakin has never truly loved me, that he has never even known we well enough to have been able to love me even if he had truly wanted to. And Anakin . . . Anakin!" she finds herself choking out a small and terribly bitter laugh, one that claws and scratches at her throat as if she were actually expelling a mouthful of broken glass instead of an acrimonious chuckle. "Dar, a part of Anakin has regretted agreeing to our handfasting ever since the words left his mouth, and, now that he knows now that he never truly knew me and didn't really love me, he can't comprehend how he ever could have been so weak-minded as to become so obsessed with winning my good regard and establishing his worth in my eyes. He's been trying to do that ever since I forgot myself enough to let my horror show over his status as a slave, on Tatooine, and Sidious took advantage of his need to prove himself and twisted it, encouraging us both to allow it to become an obsession that could eat him alive. And I let it. I was letting that happen, too cowardly to even try fighting against it, even though I knew it was wrong, and now that Anakin knows that, he is so bitterly disillusioned and disappointed that he could very well come to hate me, Dar, if I were to do anything else to prove my own unworthiness, my own cowardice, my own selfish venality. I can't do that, Dar. I can't. I couldn't live with myself if I truly made Anakin hate me or Obi-Wan feel he has reason to fear me and my influence on Anakin."

"But Padmé, you can't let yourself die, either, for fear of living. How would that be any better, any more an act of courage and selflessness, than remaining here for selfish reasons?" Darred only asks when the increasingly loud and hysterical torrent of words flooding out of her mouth have slowed to a trickle and stopped. Eyes soft with understanding, he adds, "You can't let fear rule you, Sabia."

"But neither can I let my selfishness rule me, either."

"Do you think we would let you fall? Do you honestly believe we would let you leave here alone? Little sister, we all love you. Ryoo's first words claimed you as her mother, not Sola, and Pooja worships you. And I - " he falters here a moment, a wash of high color reddening his face, before continuing with " - I have adored you ever first I first laid eyes on you, when you and your family were first moving into this house and claiming it as your own. You know that, don't you?"

Padmé has seen the future that Sidious had planned for her, both from Master Qui-Gon's mind as he patiently explained why he had saved her from the natural consequences of her body's death and just recently, in Obi-Wan and Anakin's memories, the images vivid and nightmarishly real from Obi-Wan's far-sight visions, and she feels now much as she imagines she would have felt at the beginning of her end, unable to breath as a veil of red descended over the world, vividly remembering clawing at her throat even though there had been nothing tangible there that her hands could touch, her constricted throat strangling the truth and locking it inside her head as the world-veil of red smoked towards black and the inevitable white flash of impact that would blast her into night and begin her journey towards death and dissolution within the Force, and only barely manages to choke out one desperate syllable before her voice gives out on her, feeling as if the ground is being ruthlessly carved out from under her feet as she desperately whispers a protesting, "Dar - !"

"It's the truth, Sabia. You'd know, if ever you'd been selfish enough to think of yourself and your own hopes and pleasures first. Sola knew. She always knew, but she cared for me enough that she accepted my promise to love her as much as I was able for as long as she still wanted me, and so we were wed when it became obvious that you would never willingly turn away from your calling in the political field, even though we were young for it, because Sola was certain in her love for me and I was equally sure that I would never be able to find a better match for myself, since you were so obviously unable. Before we knew what a monster he truly was, we used to laugh together about how sure we were that you would be the next Palpatine - living and breathing your career and remaining there far past when any other would have withdrawn, until finally one day the end would come and you would perish there as well, passing on only when you were well satisfied and certain in the knowledge that you had given Naboo and the galaxy the whole of your adult life. I never could have guessed or dreamed for something like this. You've been given a second chance here, Sabia. Why not take it? There are so many people here who would welcome you, who would love you and help do and devote their lives to helping make up for all the time we've lost, because of our foolish certainty and the cowardice that would not let us question those certainties. Please. Please/, love. At least consider it. You wouldn't have to be alone. There would be no need for you to risk Anakin's disappointed anger or the fearful doubt and uncertainty that Obi-Wan's self-deprecation would encourage, for you would be with us. You are not Sola, Sabia, and neither are you Padmé Amidala any longer. The banishment was for Sola, not for you, and that body is not who you are. If necessary, the entire family would legally declare ourselves satisfied according to the oldest forms of /eneach-clannd and so revoke the /khiel-streppain/. Then you could start over, here, with us. We could all four of us, you and I and the girls, go to Dala City as a real family and finally truly learn ourselves, our limits and our powers, now that this new order has been established. You could have a life for yourself this time, Sabia. We would give that to you. The girls and I would do anything to give that to you."

"Dar - "

"I am not just saying this," he only insists, plowing ahead over her nearly inaudible attempt at a protest. "Ryoo could feel you, you know. She must have known you were here from the moment you made your presence known in the tower. She and Pooja came running to me, then, begging me to find a way to convince you to stay with us. I didn't dare believe them, didn't dare dream that you could still somehow be here with us, but for stars' sake, Sabia, /please/, just stop and think about what it is that you're doing, what it is that you'll be giving up, if you let this fear dictate the rest of your life."

The cry escapes her before she can close her teeth upon it, and the soft exhalation, "Not fair!" follows before she can quite manage to close her mouth again.

"No, it isn't. But it's the truth. And if it will make you stop and think about what you propose to do to yourself - "

"It's not that easy! I'm not - I don't - Dar, please - !" she tries again to protest, fumbling with the words, unable to think of what to say that could possibly make him understand.

But, "/No/, Sabia," he only cuts her off, shaking his head, hands squeezing tight around hers. "All of this - all of your explanations, your excuses - it's just not good enough. I /need /a better reason. If I'm to let you go again, if I'm to let you go for good, then I deserve to be given a better reason than guilt and fear and some nerf and Wookiee show about how it's past your time and you've already stayed longer than you should have and blah blah blah!" he insists, eyes kindling.

"It's not like that! I just don't know how else to explain myself! The Force - "

"Oh, aye, the Force! The Force that you didn't even have enough sensitivity to sense on your own, when you were still alive. The Force that you knew nothing about how to touch, much less use, before you died. The Force that the Jedi Bendu say Sola has been glutting herself on from her father - and from me as well, if from some much more recent point, though they assure me that she had not yet become either so demented or so desperate for more power that she was feeding off of our daughter - probably ever since she first gave herself over to the Sith Lord. This Force that Master Kenobi says shines in Ryoo like a living star and insists is very strong in me as well, though I've never experienced anything that I would ascribe to the Force's power or any sensitivity to its energy. The only things I've ever felt of the Force are the effects of Sola's attempts to escape from here. And yet I am supposed to just lay back and accept that this mystical energy field demands your life in exchange for - "

"It's not a matter of exchange, Darred!" Padmé explodes, tearing her hands out of his grasp and shoving herself to her feet as she cuts him off, brushing brusquely past him to pace a wide circuit across the center of the room, her frustration making her voice grow louder and become so vehemently strident that she is glad she sent the twins out with her mother instead of insisting on keeping them here with her the entire time as she said her farewells to the adult members of her clannachd/, since it means that they won't have to suffer through the noise and negativity of this confrontation. "It's a matter of balance and growth! I can't grow as a person if I remain here and I'll upset the balance if I'm selfish enough to try to do it anyway! They're just /now starting to get things back in balance - I can't possibly do something that I know would just upset things all over again! Don't you realize how close the galaxy came to catastrophe, because of a lack of balance? Palpatine would have been Emperor for nearly two and a half decades and then come back as a Sith spirit and attempted to resurrect his Empire again and again! Anakin would have slaughtered younglings in the Temple to clear Palpatine's way for an imperial throne and then Vader - for that's the name the Sith would have given Anakin - would have ended up killing Obi-Wan, before he found the strength to turn back from that darkness! Droyk/, Darred this isn't a joke! I'm not - I /can't - I would rather die than risk upsetting the balance, Darred. Don't you understand? This is so much larger than just me, so much more important than what any of us might want. I nearly damned us all once already with my selfishness and my weakness, and I will not do it again, Darred. Not for me. Not for you. Not even for the girls, as much as I love them and would love to stay, if only to watch them as they grow."

"The twins - " he immediately begins to try to protest, automatically taking a step towards her as if to intercept her in her circuit of the room, having pushed himself to his feet and turned to face her as soon as she had pulled away to start her pacing.

"They have nothing at all of me in them," she cuts him off with a sharp gesture of her right hand, her voice utterly flat. "Can't you tell it, just from looking at them? They are Obi-Wan's children and Anakin's children. The Force gave them flesh and that flesh has been modeled off of only Anakin and Obi-Wan. I don't really enter into the picture at all, and if they haven't told you that already, Dar, then it's only because they're still trying to protect me and save me from getting my feelings hurt. They think I've already been through enough and I've convinced them that I will be going into the Force when I'm done with my goodbyes, so they likely believe it would be best just not to explain that to the rest of you until after I've gone."

"That doesn't mean that they aren't your children or that they won't need you, Sabia!" he only snaps back, obviously not believing her explanation (though she notices that he doesn't try to argue with her again about the need for keeping balance, even if the expression on his face when she'd spoken of the necessity of protecting that balance had rather visibly revealed his opinion on the matter - so clearly, in fact, that she is sorely tempted to protest how obviously he thinks she's exaggerating both the danger the galaxy had so recently been in and her ability to upset that so newly redressed and still all too precarious balance), hands planted challengingly, aggressively, on his slim hips.

Instead, determined to at least put this one argument to rest, she insists, "I'm sorry, Darred, but you're wrong. That is precisely what it means," her voice quiet but unwaveringly firm. "They belong to Anakin and Obi-Wan: those twins will have an entire galaxy full of Jedi Bendu to love and care for them and to help raise them, when their fathers are away on missions. I would be entirely superfluous. In truth, I would be worse than superfluous, because I wouldn't be able to protect them against anyone or anything truly determined to try to do them harm. And they will be Jedi, of course. They will both be Jedi. It would be impossible for them to be anything else, as strong as they are in the Force. Even if there were anything at all of me in them and I actually had some sort of valid claim upon their lives, they would be better off with their fathers. I wouldn't be able to contribute anything positive to their lives, Dar. I couldn't possibly try to justify staying for their sakes, when I know I would be bringing nothing but pain and confusion and a dangerous imbalance into their fathers' lives and would have nothing constructive to contribute to their upbringing?"

"But surely they will need a mother, Sabia! Surely they will need you!" he stubbornly tries to insist, striding over and planting himself directly in her path so that she has to either stop pacing if she doesn't wish to collide with him or else swing wide to go around him, the words exploding out of him with such a desperate vehemence that she comes to a sudden stop in front of him, her heart twinging painfully with remorse and sorrow as she realizes just how much he wants her to stay and just how little attention she must have been paying, not to notice before now just how deep his affection for her runs.

"When they will have Anakin and Obi-Wan and the whole of the New Jedi Bendu Order - not to mention every single friend and ally they've ever had or will make - to act as father and mother and family to them?" she asks, trying (and mostly succeeding) in keeping the incredulity out of her voice as she spreads her hands questioningly wide, shrugging slightly in response to his deepening scowl. She waits for a few moments for a reply, but he only continues to stand there, arms crossed defensively across his chest, his face a darkening thunderhead. "I don't think so, Dar. I'm sorry, but no," she finally replies, voice and face softening with sympathy and regret for the pain she is causing him.

"I can't believe that. I'm sorry, but I just don't believe that you would be so willing to give up your family and your life like this. This isn't the Padmé that I know, the Sabia that I practically grew up with - or at least until politics and your need to help and serve others essentially took over the whole of your life and took you away from all of us," he adds, face hardening and bitterness creeping into his voice, flooding her with coldness.

"Darred - no, Dar, please, don't turn away from me," she sighs, reaching out to place a hand on his arm as he makes to turn away from her. "I'm sorry, Dar. I never meant to hurt you like this. I didn't know - I never realized how much pain I was causing you. I never even dreamed that I was - that you were - " she stumbles, flushing, unable to bring herself to say it.

"What, that I was hopelessly in love with you and you were too preoccupied to even notice?" he snorts, his acrimony hitting her like a lung-full of caustic fumes, making her recoil before she can stop herself. "Don't look so shocked - you can't possibly expect me to just give up and let you go," he continues, uncrossing his arms so he can gesture at her curtly. "If you're going to use this ridiculous fear of yours of somehow upsetting some bizarre mystical balance in the Force as an excuse to take the easy way out and leave us, then you should know just who and what it will be that you're giving up."

"Darred, I'm /sorry/. You're a good man - "

"I'm a fool who settled for second best because he stupidly thought that it was the noble thing to do, given how patently devoted the one he loved and truly wished for was devoted to her chosen career and how much he was sure it would hurt her, to be torn in two different directions, and so, in failing to even take the chance - instead simply blindly accepting what was offered by another - in a way got exactly what he deserved. Sola should have strengthened herself by stealing Force power from me instead of her father," Darred adds with a bitter little self-depreciatory laugh, shaking his head, hands fisting at his sides. "Ruwee I could at least trust would have had enough sense to put that talent to good use. I, on the other hand, would obviously make a terrible Jedi Bendu."

"Oh, Darred! Dar, don't! Don't talk about yourself like that! /Please/, Dar. Don't take on so! You're strong and you're a good man and I know your heart is just so much bigger than mine or Sola's ever could've been, Dar. You're a natural /ceithern-a-varnða/; of course you'll be a good Jedi - " she immediately begins to try to protest, her hand tightening reassuringly on his arm.

Another dismissive, self-depreciatory snort, and he shakes her hand off his arm, cutting her off by quietly noting, "I rather doubt it. All things considered, it would probably be better for everyone if I didn't even try. I have no love for the Force, Sabia, and I certainly have no wish to learn how to let go of my feelings. If they're all I'm going to be allowed, I'd just as soon keep my emotions."

"Darred, I'm sorry - "

"Don't. Just - just /don't/, alright? /Skarn/, Sabia!" he practically spits. "I'm not a child to be taken in by /piast/-tears and I'm not quite so foolish anymore as to be comforted by your platitudes or put off by your excuses! If you don't wish to stay, then you don't wish to stay. But don't try to say it's because you're trying to protect some kind of cosmic balance, because I don't believe that there even is such a thing and I certainly don't believe that this is the real reason you won't stay with us!"

"Fripping frak, Dar, I can't help it if you won't listen to me! I'm telling you the truth! I don't know how else to explain this to you without drawing a skroggin' map!"

"I have been listening, Sabia! I just haven't heard anything that sounds at all convincing. Why don't you just cut the phobium and just tell me what it is that you're really thinking?"

"Dar - !" The impulse to either shout or to grab him by his shoulders and shake him until all of the stubbornness has been knocked loose from him is so great that she has to double her hands up into painfully tight fists to keep herself from doing either one. Forcing herself to take a deep breath, she starts over by stating, in a carefully even voice, "We're going in circles, here."

"You could say that," he drily agrees, recrossing his arms over his chest.

Another long, slow breath to keep herself from setting her jaw and taking a more combative stance, and she quietly declares, "I think I know how to solve this dilemma."

"Oh?" He simply raises one eyebrow at her questioningly in response, something in his manner somehow seeming more mocking than serious, despite his quiet politeness.

"Yes," she snaps through clenched teeth before she can stop herself. Then, forcing herself to exhale her breath in a long sigh, she once again starts over, calmly telling him, "There is a very simple way for us to settle this, once and for all. But it would require your cooperation and the use of the Force, Darred, and you would have to help me when I reach out in the Force to you, because I only know a little about how to use the Force and even though this body is accustomed to channeling such powers I am not entirely habituated to this body. Can you trust me enough for that?"

He looks at her hard, then, as though suspecting some kind of trick, scrutinizing her silently for several long moments with wary, pain-haunted eyes before finally, slowly, allowing, "I don't believe you would try to use any of those infamous mind tricks the Jedi and their ilk are known for. If you truly think this will help in some way - though I, for one, have a hard time believing there is any way we could ever come to see eye to eye on this - then I don't see what it could hurt."

"Alright, then. Come and sit down with me. This will probably be easier if we're comfortable," she explain, trying not to let her eyes show her hurt when he flinches away from the touch of her hand to precede her back across the room to the double-seated sofa she had been sitting in earlier. Resisting the urge to hunch her shoulders and rub her hands across her arms to alleviate the sudden feeling of cold that his distance and distrustful behavior inspire in her, she trails along after him, warningly adding, "This may . . . feel a little odd. I've never really touched another person's mind like this. I know how it's done, but I've never had to initiate the contact before. Just . . . try to relax and open your mind to me. And whatever you do, don't panic and break the link and don't try to reach out to me on your own. It's dangerous to do either one - the first is like a sudden blow to the psyche and could send us both into psychosomatic shock and the second could hurt you badly enough to separate you from your body, if you hit my shields hard enough to rebound from them out into the Force. Do you understand?" she asks, catching his eye as they sit down and determinedly holding his gaze until he finally nods. Then, raising her hands but at first simply holding them up so that he can see that they are empty and no real threat to him, she explains, "Every time I've experienced something like this - except for with Qui-Gon, and by then I had no body for him to touch - Obi-Wan or Obi-Wan and Anakin have always put their hands against the sides of my face. I think it's more to help anchor the other person, but that doesn't mean it won't help make this easier. May I?"

Darred simply looks at her for several long moments, searching her face as if looking for clues to some puzzle, before he finally drops his gaze to her proffered hands, a light momentarily blooming in his eyes that could have been excitement or might have been fear. All he says, though, is, "Yes."

There are far too many shades of meaning crammed into just that single syllable for her to even begin to pick them all out - more than she ever could have thought or dreamed could be packed into such a small word - and so finally, after a pause that she knows is too long and is giving more of herself away that she probably should be revealing to someone who wants her to stay so incredibly badly and is willing to do or say just about anything to convince her to do it, she reaches out and gently lays her hands against his face, her palms cradling the long planes of his face, fingertips brushing up over sharp cheekbones and heels just skimming across the line of hair along the bottom of his jaw, all the while trying (and mostly failing) to ignore just how right the gesture feels, how the knowledge of the feel of his face in her hands and that hair under the heels of her palms exactly matches what some part of this body has been telling her all along that they would feel like, how they would shape themselves exactly to the long and willowy slenderness of this body's fingers and palms. Then, with another deep breath (meant to be steadying but having almost the exact opposite effect on her nerves, as her floods her with the scent of him, something wild and sweet and musky and uniquely /Darred/, not like anything she has ever experienced before but familiar, familiar in ways she cannot rationally account for) she gathers herself up, purposefully remembering everything about the Force that Qui-Gon Jinn has ever taught her and that she has learned from observing Obi-Wan and Anakin and being touched, by one of the other of them, through the Force, and then, forcing herself to focus only on her own intentions, she reaches -

- and immediately tumbles up out of herself into a universe of darkness so vast it makes her mind ache and light so beautiful it makes her soul ache and life and love so inexorable and expansive that she knows instantly that she has somehow managed to do something very like what Obi-Wan did for her on that ship heading to Tatooine, only this time, this particular go-round, there is a warmth and a sorrow so solid it feels like an anchor of leaded crystal trailing out behind her like the tail of a kite, alight and blazing with anger-darkened incandescence, and she knows that Darred is coming with her and that she has both failed at her chosen task and succeeded at it in ways that she never could have dared dream to, for in that joy-dazzled mad rush of luminescent feeling and insistent throbbing life and blinding rainbowed light and empty, unspent, inexhaustible darkness she knows that Darred will come to know the Force and the need for balance in ways she never could have hoped to explain, even if she had been able to bring him fully within her own mind and memories and shared with him the visions of all of those futures of Anakin slaughtering younglings in the Temple and burning on Mustafar and cutting down Obi-Wan upon a false moon of malignancy that Qui-Gon had nightmared her with. Before they are done, Darred Janren will know the Force and the Force will know him and there will be nothing within him that will be able to hide away either from the Force or that dawning knowledge or even from Padmé herself, as she will be witness and accomplice and incitement for the entire terrible and awesome transaction and transmutation as the Force opens itself to them both and accepts them within it and they are both, in turn, laid bare and peeled open, one inexorable layer at a time, as that vast and coruscating and impossibly multifaceted and multivariated energy learns and claims them, one atom at a time.

***

For a moment Darred Janren sits there, concentrating on being "open" (whatever the kriff that means) instead of being closed off by and within his own pain and anger and desire and staring into the dark eyes of the woman who is and is not Padmé Amidala, eyes in the pale face of a body that is and is not that of the being who once was (but was she ever really, or had it only been a show, a mummery, a mask she had assumed, only a seeming of a being and not truly a whole being, the entire time he thought he knew her, thought he had her?) his wife, Sola. He is so busy concentrating on openness and her eyes that he thinks at first he is imagining the faint iridescent tracings of a current of opalescent incandescence swirling all around her, as if she were fully immersed in a river of ghost light. Darred has just enough time to notice and to be shocked before the warmth of his body quite suddenly all smokes away, his vision wobbling in the wake of its absencing like an overfull bucket of water, and then abruptly he is falling, rising, /something/, moving both up out and plummeting down within himself, the visible world melting into the darkness of a bottomless plunge. He opens his mouth to cry out, but the vast emptiness around him absorbs whatever pitiful sound of fright and shock he might have made. And in the next instant that soul-crushing void abruptly floods with light, unfolding into an unimaginably vast, cosmic tapestry, a woven fabric so intricate and complex as to stun him all but senseless with its beauty. He is surrounded with, cradled inside, permeated by, a perfect piece of art, beautiful beyond description, beyond belief -

But wait. There is perfection here, yes, but there is also something else. He can sense flaws in the pattern - tiny, almost insignificant defects scattered here and there all throughout its immeasurable expanse. And yet, somehow (though he hasn't even the faintest trace of an idea as to how he could possibly know this), he understands, instinctively, that these seeming infinitesimal mistakes are somehow necessary, that they are like stitches in the skein of existence, somehow helping to hold things together - seemingly imperfect, perhaps, but nonetheless essential to the coherency of that soul-shakingly lovely tapestry of light. Without them, the fabric would not hold together. Stunned and shattered by the beauty of that tapestry and light and more than a little bit curious about those seeming flaws, he automatically reaches for one of the small twisted threads, seeing it expand and shift before him so that it becomes readable, somehow . . . only the concepts that are revealed to him are not quite words or images, and nor are they smells, tastes, sounds, or touch. They are instead some kind of wondrous amalgam of all of these, plus senses no being of flesh has ever had . . . and in the moment of that realization Darred suddenly realizes that he is a part of that grand pattern, can sense just how he fits in among all of that blazing color and light and those dark imperfections of seeming flaws. And it is more knowledge than he ever could have been prepared for. It's all just too . . . big. He can't even begin to imagine how anyone would ever be able to accept it, take it all in, process it. It simply won't and can't all fit within the cramped spaces of his limited consciousness, defying him comprehension no matter how he strains after it. It's like trying to confine the blazing, multifaceted glory of a firestone into a flat 2-D image. His senses, corseted into only three dimensions, can't even begin to make sense of it. But a part of him instinctively realizes that he doesn't have to make sense of it. He only has to accept it, to surrender to the truth of it and accept whatever knowledge of it he can, and so, in the process, be one with it. And it is glorious, uplifting, and terrifying, all at the same time . . .

He is still hovering on the cusp of acceptance or rejection, awe only the merest thought away from either unreasoning terror or absolute euphoria, when he is abruptly reminded how he got to this place and why he is here. The sense of words crisp themselves directly into his thoughts, hard and alien and blazing, like lines of light blazing through the blackness of absolute night, shocking him back to himself, to the anger and grief and want that drove him to the agreement that has brought him here, whips of fire flaying him open. Listen to me, Darred! This is important. This is very likely the most important thing I could ever tell you. Qui-Gon Jinn told me this, once, and, though I did not fully understand him at first, his meaning has long since come plain, transparent as a diamond of light. What you are in now - the tapestry of energy you see all around you - is our cosmos, and it is also the Force. The Force is an energy field, and energy, as you know, is light. Light is at the heart of all life, Darred, both physical and nonmaterial existence. Thus, light being energy and the Force being energy (and light), the Force is also life. Dissolving into the Force is not a metaphor for death. It is a way to describe the individual-within-oneness that comes when a spirit's light joins the greater light of the Force. No, don't panic, damn you! I told you this might feel a little bit strange. You agreed anyway. This is just the shock of learning that reality is so much more than the half-truths and lies your body tells you. Give it a moment - you'll adjust. No, stop trying to scream! Remember what I told you would happen if you panic? Calm down, Darred! Heed me - concentrate on my words - I can be your anchor, if you'll just let me. Focus on me, on what I am telling you. And don't interrupt! This is important, Darred, and I don't know how much time I have left with you! Pay attention to me - focus - that's it, that's right. Calm. Focus. /Understand/. The body, with its senses, is need. This need is not yours. There is a way out. Surrender is a door, a portal, a pathway, a way of flight, half the answer to conundrum of living. Choose to enter, to embrace, and you can become the balance between mere physicality and the refinement of pure light. No - don't interrupt, Darred! This is important. Light is spirit. Mind is relationship, not action. Soul is action. And mind is pattern. But the body is an ocean. Tidal currents and waves move within the blood in a parabolic calculus of rhythm and growth and connection. Cells reef bones like anthozoans. The same flow-lines water carves in channels across earth and stone alike can be seen in the heart's ventricles where blood circles. In everything, identical forces are at work: tides, currents, streams and spirals of power. Flows. Energy. /Light/. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, at the simplest and most basic of levels. Light is energy. And matter is just energy slowed down, chilled, to shapes so dense that the electrical flow of mind, of thought, interprets them as solid. But all matter is light and all light is patterned. Patterns. Flow. Action. And the action, the pattern, of life is all in convergences, assemblies, ontological phylogeny. This is also the power of metaphor and identity. Impact - affect - enjamb - pattern. But we are all of us consciousness itself - not the /objects /of consciousness. We each have a body, but those bodies are not who we are. We are the /awareness of our bodies. We have thoughts, but we are not our thoughts. We have feelings, but we are not they. We go back, all the way back, to nothing. And nothing is ever truly lost - only on its way back. Infinity is unity. All things are one thing. We are all of us dreams in the void. And everything we imagine is real./

Utterly lost in the blinding glare of an infinitely complex unfolding blossom of variegated woven light, confused by the tangle of riddling word-senses blasting their way into his consciousness (not really true words, as there is no sound to them, no shape to them, only the sudden unfurling meaning of them dawning across his mind like the illuminating rays of a rising sun curving around a horizon to warm him and inform him of her knowledge and her intent), Darred desperately begins struggling to get ahold of himself, trying to shrug out of this terrifying and bizarre dream, fighting to pull free from or at least break the plummeting fall without/within that keeps carrying him through the rich fall of light (peppered here and there with those dark scars of seams) even while Padmé continues to communicate with him. But as more and more of those word-senses come at him (to him), it becomes harder and harder to struggle. Though they are not true words, there is, nonetheless, a sense of hypnotic rhythm to them, a resonation that feels like a lulling chant, like the staccato music of raindrops falling, like a heartbeat drumming, like the rhythmic, mind-numbing pounding of the surf as it crashes again and again to shore, and he finds himself calming, his struggles quieting to tranquility, to passivity, in spite of himself.

Yes. That's right, Darred. Good! Be still. Repose. Center. Everything is filled with heat, with light, with life. Being is so much more than mere thought and bones! Being is endless and moving, like light, never in one place long enough to truly be anyplace. Memory is the bone and light, soul, is the marrow of being. Existence looks small through physical eyes and the senses of our bodies. But we are all bigger than we know. Can't you feel it? The eyes may see, but they are blind to themselves. We burn through all the moments of our lives. And we all keep on burning, because distance is all there is, and finishing isn't everything, finishing is really nothing more than a figment of imagination, a nightmare given shape by thought. And thought is a matrix that engenders its own reality. The ideas, concepts, belief-systems, thoughts that our ancestors trapped when they first became sentient have become our traps. We are trapped by our bodies, by our perception of the universe, our limited ideas of reality. What we truly know of reality arises from our disbelief in it. It's all self-deception. All physical sentient beings are biologically deceived, Darred. Ego - the sense of self that physical beings think is all of what they are - is only a carapace, a protective covering, a husk, a mask synthesized by the body like fingernails or hair. It surrounds the feeling self of the soul-light and the electric mind and acts as an interface and a barrier between the embodied self and the greater truth of reality. Your ego is nothing but body-consciousness, Darred. It wants to center itself and break everything else down into shapes simpler and smaller than itself. It wants to know truth, but the closest it can come is feeling, and even then it's only touching a part of your being. Unfortunately, the ego can never be completely done away with or else sentience itself with fail or the living being's body will eventually die. The most one can hope for is transparency. The ego must be clear. It's not a question of will, though, of doing something to improve yourself. You are/. What I'm talking about is allowing yourself to become more than you think you are, trapped as you are within your body. No - you're doing good, Dar, don't try to interrupt or protest now! Everything will eventually lose its gravity, you know. Even you. Your body will fail you one day. No fingers to grasp. No tongue to reassure. No eyes to set limits. But the core of you is light, Darred. Accept that truth. Surrender to it. And you can become a prism, refracting and directing the light of truths much greater than your physical body alone./

A brief moment of disconnectedness intrudes then, in a lull between the light-patterns flowing to him like words. The memory of a woman's harsh voice, accidentally overheard laughing bitterly into the recorder of a private holo-diary and declaring, "Everything that moves will come back on itself sooner or later. I know that better than anyone in this family, even /her/. Movement is a sphere: a declension of vectors from the rounding curve of the expanding universe to spiraling galaxies, spinning stars, rotating planets, and curving, cycling cells - expanding again up through the blastosphere, the eye, and the skull. And the V of victory we still wear in our emblematic double-collars symbolizes both the descent and the lofting return - the journey of light down from the identitiless freedom to the freedomless identity of crystal and its rebound up through life to light again. If I were to etch it on the foreheads of their skulls, I wonder if its timelessness would plummet their spirits loose of time and speed them back down again to me?" At the time he had simply backed away, full of too much grief over the loss of a second child and fear that his wife might have been losing her mind to try to riddle out any real meaning in that tangle of words, but now, after all that has happens, it occurs to him that he may have missed the last chance he'd had to turn Sola away from the path of darkness she chose to pursue, with the Sith, in that moment. Grief and anger beat at him in waves of shamed remorse, distracting him so much that he loses the thread of his awareness both of the miracle surrounding him and the knowledge being imparted to him, so that the light-whips have to flay at him to recapture his attention.

Dar, what are you doing? Pay attention! For pity's sake, don't stray now! We're almost done here and if you move too far away from me the bond might break. I don't know if I'd be able to catch you if you fell from this height. Here - focus on me, concentrate, calm yourself! Remember how I told you that the core of you is light? Well, life, like the Force, is electric. Life is light, life is growth and change and flow, and all light is timeless. The flesh may be impermanent, but the light always remains. And light doesn't age, doesn't die, doesn't even truly dissipate, as it moves through space. The light remains after the body passes and it moves as it would, currents of energy in the vastness of the void. A light's course can be irrevocably altered if it collides with anything in its journey. But the universe is mostly vacuum. Most light can and will quite happily wander forever, freed from the restrictions of flesh and the false matrix of personal reality, broken open to the greater truth of the universe and growing more and more into itself, into the fullness of its own power and its oneness with all else. And this is what the Force offers us when our physical lives have reached their ends. This is what is waiting for me when I leave this body. Limitlessness, knowledge and growth. Infinity. Oneness with all. The Light. The Force. /All one. And waiting for me, Darred, waiting for me to return to it. Are you really surprised I am weary of remaining here, so long past the time allotted to me, to my body? This is not my home. When my flesh failed, the electric thoughts of my mind and my soul-light, my spirit, was instinctively heading for home when Qui-Gon Jinn intercepted me. But my task here is done now. And I wish to be free. I wish to be only light again. Now do you understand?/

Instinct says to open his mouth and speak, protest, argue, question, but in this place he is only mind and feeling, with no access to or even real sense of his body, and what happens instead is that a whelming welter of confusion and frustration, fear and denial and fury, pour out of him into the blazing heart of that overwhelmingly gorgeous light tapestry, all of the brilliant jewel-like lights in his immediate vicinity flickering, guttering, like candle flames caught in a sudden stiff breeze, giving him a glimpse of a darkness behind it so absolute that his mind instantly bends away from it, trying to deny its existence, but that denial feeds upon the earlier denial until he is a raging maelstrom, color and light and life fleeing away from him like shadows before a light, and he is on the verge of blind panic as more and more of that horrifying void comes clear around him when it happens. Even more abruptly and unexpectedly than his original tumble into the Force, there is an explosion, an eruption, a conflagration, a sudden geysering of so much light and love and life that his mind whites out with energy and joy, and it's like someone has transmuted an orgasm into light, and what in the stars -

A response eventually comes, but only when he's been broken open and permeated by life and light and ravished so utterly with love and joy and pleasure that almost all awareness of himself as an entity separate from that wellspring that it takes a small eternity for the sense of the communication to truly reach him and another for him to regain enough of himself to comprehend it. Anakin and Obi-Wan. They join with one another and the Force. This is a reaction to that melding. They are no longer entirely mere beings of physical flesh. They move essentially effortlessly back and forth across the gulfs that separate states of existence as corporeal beings and entities of pure spirit. The Force has never truly known their like before and came so perilously close to being robbed of them with this ability that it cherishes them above all others and rejoices in their love and their joy so much that it works to arrange things so that the ripples of their joining will touch as many other beings and spread as far and wide within the scope of the cosmos just as quickly as is possible. That's why it helped give them the twins. The Force knew that the children would make them happy. And the Force always encourages life and growth. The twins blaze with light. They will doubtlessly serve life and the Force much as their fathers have - if not, exactly, like they now are. Do you see now? Nothing of me is them. I would be worse than superfluous, were I to remain. My task here is done and my time is already far past. I can do nothing more here, aside from give my farewells. I will serve the Force and myself best by becoming one with its greater light. And I wish to go. And you know exactly why, now. I am sorry to cause you pain - I see that you love me - but I cannot remain. Do you understand?

Buoyed by echoes of a love and joy so vast and powerful that it is impossible to feel true anger or hatred, sorrow and disappointment blunted to a distant ache of acceptance by understanding, all he can do is acquiesce. And then, bathed in blinding rush of gratitude, holding on to as much knowledge and understanding as he can as they begin the long fall back out of the Force and up through all of the layers upon layers of self, away from Padmé and the cosmic light-tapestry, back into just himself again.

***

Obi-Wan comes back to himself between Anakin's spread thighs, still kneeling up over him, his body already instinctively moving to slide up across all of that gorgeous golden skin so he can claim that mouth, feeling the need for a kiss like a physical ache brought on by lack of air or insufficient water, a goad that he is all too happy to allow to drive him towards Anakin, who is already smiling and uncoiling from the mattress to meet him, head rising to meet him halfway, that incredible mouth fitting itself against his lips in a perfection of joining, not so much a kiss as a deliberate, determined attempt to echo the indelible permanence of their bond by fusing their bodies together forever at the mouth. At some point Anakin's arms encircle him and bear him irresistibly down to the bed, rolling him beneath Anakin's slightly greater height and bulk, and he's reasonably certain that there is a little bit of blood being drawn in there, somewhere, as they roll and roll across the bed, though it's impossible to tell whose it is (it's like an explosion of sensation on his tongue, hot and strangely sweet), but it doesn't matter. What matters is the inalterable fact that they are each other's, so if, perhaps, there is some small mark to show the branding of that mutual ownership, then nothing will come of it but that others will know that they belong to one another, in which case there is no harm in it. One more wanton rolling circuit, bodies twining and striving for more and ever more closeness, and then they've met the edge of the bed and are tumbling over, and someone instinctively calls a tendril of Force energy to them - it's entirely impossible to tell who, they are still so closely wrapped that there is only an exhilarating instant of stomach-plunging awareness of gravity before a cradle of warmth catches and cushions them, the Force wrapping them and buoying them like blood-warm water - allowing them to hang for a moment, bodies cleaving together, Anakin arcing against nothing but power up into Obi-Wan's body, hooking his legs up around his waist in an attempt to shift him down under his backside, and then Obi-Wan shocks him by sliding a hand down across his buttocks, fingertips parting the firm cheeks suggestively bebore coming to rest there and going no further in either direction, and Anakin cries out into the kiss that is so much more than a kiss and rolls aggressively back in the other direction, pinning Obi-Wan down to the mattress and splaying him out, hands reaching purposefully for what he wants, Obi-Wan half laughing and half groaning up into the incredible heat of Anakin's mouth at the firm, sure touch.

When Anakin positions himself over Obi-Wan, everything happening a little too quick but never quite fast enough, a hand still on him to guide him in straight, shoving back down onto Obi-Wan with a violence that should have hurt but instead only curves Anakin's back in a convulsively tight arc, like a bow drawn to the absolute limits of its tension before it will break, their mouths finally come apart in an explosion of twinned cries, their lips both smeared with blood blazing bright as burning rubies from the power spilling between them, a current of electric energy already (or perhaps still?) flowing between them, and, as they begin to find a rhythm, Obi-Wan has just enough self-awareness left to notice the exact moment when the light starts to build between them again, spilling out of their bodies as if their bones are blazing bars of jewels and their skin is only the thinnest transparent membrane between that reality and this one before Anakin begins to ride him in earnest, alternating between bending forward to seal their impossibly red mouths together over and over again - teeth clashing and tongues dueling, temporary retreats used to trace wet trails down Obi-Wan's bared throat to his heart, pathways branching out to nipples that are soon painfully hard and almost painfully sensitized from a combination of relentless suction and the spine-bowing scrape of teeth - and arcing back in complete abandon, shoulders bowing back towards the foot of the bed, only kept from completing that circuit back by the presence of Obi-Wan's hands upon his hips, firmly anchoring him in place above the plunge of hips that drive up and up until Anakin could almost fancy that Obi-Wan is buried so far within him that he is coming up the back of Anakin's throat.

The dance is so perfect that they can both tell it won't last nearly as long as they might like - too much heat, too much power, too much energy needing release - so when the room is fluorescing with pulsing light and color like the lust-maddened heart of a sun at high summer and Anakin's back snaps tight again, Obi-Wan moves with him instead of anchoring him, letting Anakin's arc bear them both inexorably backwards (half a thought spared for gratitude, given the largeness of the bed), lifting and manipulating them both half with a graceful shimmy of rippling muscles and half with a delicate flow of energy that comes from everywhere and nowhere and feels so natural, rising so easily, that it's like an extension of them rather than something that's truly separate from their flesh, so that he ends up bearing Anakin back onto the bed beneath his weight, Obi-Wan rolling Anakin half back and sliding his hands up across the joints between groin and thighs to encourage Anakin's legs to spread even wider than they already are so that he can plunge more deeply within and have a clear path down to his mouth even when pleasure throws his head back against the mattress. And Anakin lets his legs gape wide in wanton welcome, his heels almost touching his buttocks, before he moves beneath Obi-Wan, raising himself up to meet Obi-Wan's downward plunge, grabbing onto him with his legs so tightly that his heels dig almost painfully hard into the small of Obi-Wan's back, their bodies clashing together and striving for ever more and more closeness, the power building between them with each twinned plunge up and down in the rush for togetherness, now much too far gone in ecstatic joy to notice the blinding brightness of the kaleidoscopic palette of incandescence flooding out from them and building within the room like an unfolding time-stopped capture of an explosion of opalescent, rainbowed light. A timeless stretch of plunging and arcing together, and then their mouths meet in one more explosion fusion of desire, blood between their lips branding them, more binding than any promise or claim, tongues sliding past one another in a plunge of double penetration, screams being swallowed as bodies and power alike erupt between them for a second time that night, the Force rebounding and flooding and exploding with euphoria as they fall together in a conflagration of Light that puts to shame all the burning stars of the galaxy.

***