FicWad

Additional Author's Notes: 1) MOST OF THIS CHAPTER SHOULD BE CONSIDERED NC-17.
2) When you get to where this request will make sense, please don't protest about what happens if all you want to do is complain that this is supposed to be a slash fanfic. For one thing, it's really not. (And it's the author's opinion that it would be ridiculous in the extreme to try to limit characters in a 'verse as vast and diverse as SW with such a limiting/artificial strictly either/or vision of sexuality.) And for another, yes, this does actually have bearing on what I've got planned for the overall plot of the AU series this WiP has started, as the effects of this will be far-reaching and quite important in the WiP's sequel(s). In other words, I'm asking you to please trust that this isn't just a minor instance of insanity on the author's part, as it honestly isn't. Okay?
3) Regarding the addition of a rape/sexual violence warning for this chapter: This pertains to the second author's additional note and, while it's not exactly rape, it's not exactly consentual sex, either - not on the part of either of the participants. And it is somewhat violent. Please be warned.







The most simplistic explanation for at least the initial trigger for what happens when an almost giddily relieved Padmé leads them back down to their bodies and carefully disengages the temporary telepathic bond that she asked the Force to forge between herself and Darred Janren is a variant of the same thing she has just proven to the man - that life is energy, is electrical, and that all life is light.

The Jedi often explain it to the youngest of the younglings in the crèche thus: every individual being is immersed in a river of energy that is forever streaming from the earth up into the skies of infinity. It is a river of electrons - a current drawn down by every habitable planet from the uppermost reaches of their atmospheres into their firmament. This current, this ion flow, is created by various cosmic rays and solar winds blowing away the electrons of air molecules at the fringes of space, where a planet's ionosphere bleeds into the hard vacuum of space. So it is each planet's own sun and the surrounding stars that pull the electrons up out of the myriad earths, in a river flowing up to the void. This is also why a being's head will have a different voltage from his or her or its feet. Certain beings can modulate the ion flow in their bodies, either naturally or because of innate talent or quite a bit of practice, and some can even learn how to draw on this flow and either direct it out of their bodies or modify it to drawn down more power, more charge, from the river of electrons flowing all around them. However, this is dangerous work for the unlearned and those who fail to practice sufficient caution. Nearly all of the very rare cases of true spontaneous combustion tend to be the result of mistakes that occur when beings are attempting to alter this ion flow, since the potential difference between most habitable planets with Type I (and also a majority of Type II) atmospheres and their ionospheres is about a billion electron volts, give or take a few hundred thousand or so. Since the electric flow of the bodies of most sentient species is delicate, even the smallest disturbance of that flow can result in noticeable aftereffects, the most common being the sensation that one's flesh is not one's own. And since the Force itself is an energy field, those who are sensitive to its flows have a far higher risk for essentially all of the more common types of disturbances to the natural balance of electron flow within their bodies. This is the main reason why younglings in the crèche are routinely shielded from a great deal of their own Force talents and abilities until they reach either an age or level of maturity where they can be trusted to understand why they must maintain complete, constant, unthinking mastery over the electron flows within their flesh at all times, irregardless of what they might or might not also happen to be doing with the Force.

Unfortunately, neither Padmé nor Darred have had any formal training in either the ways of the Force or the ways in which Force-sensitivity can affect certain aspects of a Force-sensitive physically, nor has Padmé's somewhat limited familiarization with certain aspects of the Force taken into account the fact that a being's corporeal nature (or lack thereof) can affect the way that the Force itself affects those who are Force-sensitive. And Padmé (who otherwise might have possibly noticed that something about the interior balance of their bodies was slightly off) is so caught up in her own reluctance to return to the body that has at least temporarily become the home of her spirit (she can see the darkness of the cellular core of that body's life and route back down into that body quite plainly. But she doesn't want to drop back down into that swamp, with its bog of cells and its slow-burning muscular energy. Padmé wants to stay in the Force, where she'll be free of the constraints of thoughts and physical limitations, reduced to the light at the core of her, only sentience and memory and light and will, lucid and solitary as a star in space) that she simply doesn't pay a whole lot of attention to the actual process by which her mind and soul and the former body of Sola become reintegrated once again. Instead, she simply finally allows herself to whirl outwards into the emptiness of existence as one who lives mostly separate from the Force as well as from other beings and inwards into the constraints of flesh, poised only by the inchoate life-love swelling within, gradually rising to awareness of a different flesh flowering all around, colors gesturing into forms, bright vibrations coagulating into sounds (a star-stream of music spiraling off just beyond the brim of ears), until finally she jolts into full integration with a body she doesn't recognize as her own and yet nevertheless knows intimately enough that she can claim as hers. Feeling trapped by the sensations of embodiment, she then immediately leans forward, intending to rouse Darred Janren just as quickly as she can so that she can send him on his way and complete the rest of her goodbyes as swiftly as possible and go back to the Force, once and for all, where she won't be hemmed in and tied down by the many hindrances and limitations caused by existing within a body like this one again.

There is an old saying among Force-sensitive organizations like the Jedi Order: hazard is intent at high velocity. Unfortunately, having of course not spent any time in formal training and also having not been raised within an organization like the Jedi Order, neither Padmé nor Darred are familiar with this saying, though they might have recognized the validity of the sentiment under other circumstances. As it is, though, the situation arises so swiftly that neither one really has the time to spare to try to think things through first. Even as Padmé is returning (however reluctantly) to what once was Sola's body, Darred is surfacing to awareness of himself. And the first thing he becomes aware of, as his consciousness breezes back into his body, is that his mind is open and his heart is relatively still, empty of the welding anguish and the inner squabbling that has been most responsible for freezing his thoughts into an endless and frustrating circling of want and need and anger over the prospect of unfulfilled expectations. Yet, though all of the painful, darker thoughts and feelings have been stripped away from him, washed out by waves of light that have shaped themselves into lines of truth, the love that (in combination with a certain foolishness and selfishness) prompted that furious and frustrated dark circling is still in him, knowledge of it tucked away in a corner of his mind while the emotion itself resides quietly near the center of his heart, precisely where it has been for most of the past decade. He is still trying to adjust to that when he abruptly becomes aware of something else - two very familiar hands bracketing the sides of his face, and a warmth that is drawing closer to him, with a moist rush of quietly exhaled breath rushing out to slide down across his lips and the bare skin of his throat. Startled by that rush of warmth and breath, disoriented by the feeling of familiar hands upon his face, and with the whole of his spirit still reverberating to the echoes of that incendiary blast of love and joy from within the Force that Padmé had claimed was a side-effect, of sorts, to the physical act of joining between Anakin and Obi-Wan and then the Force, he instinctively leans forward and opens his eyes.

With a lingering aura of bright and balmy radiance still throbbing within him, fringing his whole body with a pale and shivery corona of energy, of light, and with the ungrounded power of thousands of sizzling effervescent volts still sparking all across the surface of his mind, Darred Janren beholds the strange and disorienting juxtaposition of his wife and the woman he has loved ever since he was a child leaning purposefully towards him, her hands tightening slightly where they are framing his face as she hastily inclines her whole upper body forward, to him. And, feeling within himself a sudden kinetic certainty of the rightness, the goodness, of what he can see is about to happen, he does that which comes to him most naturally in that instant. At the apex of her curve in towards him, he leans in as well, fitting his mouth against hers, opening his lips to match hers, and kisses her.

***

Kissing is like breathing - automatic, instinctive, something the body does so that it won't die. Anakin returns to himself already moving to claim another, the edge finally sufficiently taken off that he can lean in the fraction of a distance between them and refit his mouth to Obi-Wan reverently, his touch achingly gentle, Obi-Wan's mouth immediately answering by allowing his lips to relax, opening under Anakin's caress like flower petals unfurling beneath the sun. Eventually, Anakin draws his head slightly back, though he curls the rest of his body in a little bit closer so that he can press delicate little nibbling kisses across Obi-Wan jaw and down into the hollow of his throat, where, after carefully lapping and suckling at that depression until Obi-Wan moans and arches his neck until nearly anyone else would've felt pain, he lingers awhile, smiling in satisfaction into that hollow, before working his way back up to the deep cleft of the chin, fitting the tip of his tongue to it before closing his lips around it in an open-mouthed kiss that slides almost effortlessly back up to Obi-Wan's mouth. Groaning deep in his chest as Obi-Wan's lips part beneath his again, Anakin claims what is offered, his tongue probing deep, delighting in the taste as it explodes in his mouth - the flavor that is uniquely Obi-Wan Kenobi, somehow both sweet and spicy as well as completely addictive, somewhat like spiced tea and a rich and ripe cream-dipped fruit, but not quite either one, containing something that's just so much more, something that so utterly defies any attempts as classification, that Anakin is quite sure he could sample this taste forever and never have enough of it to learn all of its secrets - and absolutely certain that he could gladly spend the rest of his life subsisting on nothing but this exquisitely Obi-Wan flavor. Smiling into the kiss, Anakin thoroughly but unhurriedly delves deeper, exploring palate and gums and teeth and tongue before opening himself up to the same type of exploration as Obi-Wan surges forward, firmly and steadily claiming his own right to map and sample, sip and revel, taste and savor and consume.

Since they are lying catty-corned across the mattress, with their heads down near the foot of the mattress, curled on their sides so that they are leaning together and touching all along their fronts, their legs tangling as they press together, Anakin takes the initiative to raise and hook his left leg up around Obi-Wan's hip so that they will fit more closely together. He's in no real hurry this time, and the feel of Obi-Wan silky hair under his right hand and the hypnotic glide of the incredible muscles in his back under Anakin's other hand are as uplifting and joyous to him as any act of sacrament could ever be, but he wants to be closer. He always wants to be closer to Obi-Wan. If he could crawl completely within his former Master's body, if he could curl himself down smaller than small and climb inside Obi-Wan's flesh and never come out again, then Anakin might possibly be close enough to be satisfied. But of course the satisfaction wouldn't last very long, for then he wouldn't be able to ever do this again, kissing like they've invented it, until Obi-Wan's eyes turn a color he could've never even dreamed/, before, molding himself to Obi-Wan and sliding their hard lengths together until they fit to one another, nestling together like pieces of a puzzle, until their entire bodies conform and fit like two halves of the same circle (and Force, how utterly unparallel in perfection, how deliciously prophetic and /right/, is it that the symbol the Jedi Order itself approved and the Galactic Republic rewarded them with, gave over to them as an heraldic emblem to their fleets and their troops, during the war, is a circle of two sublimely fitted halves?) and mouth to mouth and groin to groin and touching almost everywhere in between as well, even their nipples touching, and, oh, Force, this is sweet as well, and more than just satisfactory. /Much more than just satisfactory, when it prompts Obi-Wan to make noises like that/, if truth be told, and /O Force - !

This/, this /precisely/, is what he has been made for, for moving mouth to mouth, flesh to flesh from head to toe and crown to root and moving, moving, slick smooth skin under hands like sleek fire, the curved shape of a skull under one palm like something fundamental and sacred and /meant/, sculpted rising jut of gorgeous buttock filling the cupped fingers of his other hand like something perfect and necessary and life-giving as air filling lungs, all of that hard and delicate structure filling his hands, everything combining in a perfection of benediction as he moves and makes Obi-Wan Kenobi make noises far in the back of his throat that would sound just like groans and whines and whimpers if it weren't for the nakedly aggressive /want and the scorching sense of love that suffuse every single incoherent syllable. Just /this/, every movement singing with the sweet hot sluice of blood in his veins that compels him with every heartbeat to get closer and closer, to capture and grind and ravish and bind and claim, primitive drives hard-wired in the flesh making fusion or meltdown (or both, in explosion) an absolute imperative, until Obi-Wan's heated slow caresses and wanton, languid, graceful writhings finally become powerful thrusts that grow less and less studied with every increasingly straightforward motion, each movement branding Anakin all the same, Obi-Wan's body pushing onto his own, into his flesh, hands grasping and pulling and thighs slamming together with every crushing motion, forehead to forehead and perfectly aligned, so perfectly that everything ceases to make sense except the rhythm building between them. And /this/, the rhythm crumbling, infinitesimally, gradually, steadily, inevitably, disintegrating under the weight of their need, pressure building and escalating and spiraling, until he has to pull away a little, to look at Obi-Wan, to look and to recognize that there is nothing more real than /this/, Obi-Wan's pupils widening in recognition of his recognition, eyes impossibly dark and light all at once, and /this/, yes, /this/, is all the joy in the universe, right here, throbbing and visceral and vibrant as life itself, all encapsulated in two pairs of eyes that can't bear to blink, two bodies that can't bring themselves to move apart, two spirits entwined and rising and blindingly bright, unfurling towards the sky as if to break through that barrier at last as well.

***

A moment of absolute, abject confusion. Disconcertingly real memory of Qui-Gon Jinn telling her things, though of course there is no real sense of his voice, as he had not actually spoken any such words to her. (/The secret, the destiny, of all physical sentient beings is this: we are rooted in light and, like an onion, we have no perceptible seed, no truly separate core, and no self at all if we are somehow separated entirely from the light. And the flesh itself is naught but a skin, a barrier between us and all the rest of creation, easily sloughed and just as easily done without. Endless layers of feelings, sensations, and ideas have gathered together and become you, all of them permeated with light, and their coherency, their ordering, the shape of them, has nothing to do with the existence of the husk of the body and everything to do with the light. The body is friable but the light is eternal. There is only one moment, and it is infinitely long. At its center is nothing - the nothingness that connects all things - the last reality and the origin. No, child. Stop trying to speak. Be still. Sense me. Ken the sense of my thoughts, what I wish you to know. Stop straining after spoken words. Words reveal our dependence on the void. How can we know any word except by the nothingness which holds it - the flat white blankness of a page, the silence around a voice? This is not about a thing that exists only because of the lack of something else. This is about the truth at the core of you, of all beings, the truth that remains when the body fails. Beings often say that to know the end of a thing is to know the why of that thing. Thus it is with your life. The seed of your body was planted in the stars - it sprouted on the earth of a Mid-Rim world - but do you honestly think it ends here? Don't get caught up in such things. Grow beyond what you think you know of reality. Give up your words. Language and words are mere masks. Veils to mask reality. Veils to mask the truth of your spirit. Let them fall and know yourself, finally and forever, the truth that is you. And don't be afraid. Fear and selfishness are the same thing and selfishness is the one thing that can still destroy you./) Sudden sense of utter disconnectedness, flesh not her own or at least not all there is of her, of the body as nothing more than a vessel for the light that is her, skin only the thinnest membrane stretched over a roil of energy and emotion, everything permeated with reverberating echoes of a joy boundless as creation and a love vaster and deeper still than that, and then the sudden electric shock of touch, simultaneously anchoring her and freeing her, and she blazes, sensation exploding through her like a star going nova.

Quite helpless to stop it or to assimilate all the sensation, the whole of her abruptly flushes with rapid heat, stripping her to nothing but light and feeling, as her entire body is suddenly seized in a wholly (holy?) unexpected euphoric ecstacy of burning luminescence. A rapture of colors swirl across her sight and dissolve to a blowing of bright particles. Trembling, shaking, quaking, her body sways, undone by pleasure, her mind falling away, utterly entranced in a soulful absorption, blindly listening to the blazing hum of blood roaring through her body and the snapping hum of electrons bridging synaptic gaps far back in the valleys of her brain. The feel of his mouth against hers is as well-known as the shape of his face beneath her hands, as familiar as the sense of this actual body is. More well-known. More familiar. More natural. More natural even than breathing. When he moves to pull her closer to him, arms coming around her back, following is as effortless and involuntary as the beating of her heart, and she flows forward into his lap like water slipping downhill, with a boneless grace as natural and as inevitable as gravity. And this, too, is familiar, though if she were actually still in possession of enough of her faculties to think it through, she would suspect that the familiarity has as much to do with dreams she had when still in possession of her own flesh (after all, how many countless times has she daydreamed of that time on the ship to Tatooine, when Obi-Wan had taken her on his lap and comforted her in the midst of her grief and uncertainty and she had longed, without really understanding, for far more from him than just the presence of his arms around her and the sense of him all around her, even though that alone had been enough to drive her more than half-mad with want of the man and into a frenzy of love for him? How many times has she fantasized about something like this, of a mouth sealing hers like a promise, lips opening beneath hers like a lock, sure and steady hands sliding beneath her skirt and spreading her thighs so that she is straddling muscled thighs and sculpted narrow hips and pressing firmly up against a shape so long and hard that her body moves of its own accord, automatically trying to get closer to that straining rigidity?) as it does from any memories this body might hold.

Instead, utterly undone by effortless heat and pleasure and a sense of sharing joy and love like sacraments with, over it all, that haze-inducing sense of naturalness, familiarity, necessity, inevitability, she moves against him like a wave and moans into the kiss, hands sliding down the planes of his face to alight momentarily on his shoulders, giving her more leverage to push herself into the powerful rolling motion, before swarming over his chest, seeking out fastenings and layers and tugging, pulling, lifting away, undoing, pushing and pressing and tugging and holding onto him with the strength of her thighs so that she won't slip away from him when he lifts his arms to help her pull away all of that cloth between them, until finally she can slide back against him, the bare skin of his chest scorching her through the thin and ragged material of her nightgown. And when those hands, large and calloused but somehow not rough, even oddly delicate, slide beneath her skirt again, tugging and moving and finally simply snapping something in a confusion of ripping cloth, she rises, locking her arms around his neck and lifting herself over him, giving him enough room to lift something away, and then winds her legs entirely around him, securely manacling his waist, so that when he stands she is still with him and can feel the edges of his hands as his fingers slide beneath his waistband, breaking open the material there to push it away, the length of him springing free to press against her beneath the drape of her tattered skirt, long and hard and smooth and hot, wetness around the edge of a wide and rounded blunt head nudging up against her, the whole of him automatically nestling between her buttocks just as if he belongs there, pressing so tight that she can't help but writhe a little, lowering and then raising herself like an offering and making him growl, pressing back between her cheeks, thick and heavy with need and throbbing with ripeness. A series of quick, wriggling motions swiftly follow and his left hand comes to rest powerfully against the base of her spine, pressing her even firmly against him and spreading her legs even wider, smearing her against his navel. The feel of him, of flat hardness between her spread legs and bluntly round rigidity against her rear, draws small helpless sounds from her, and he kisses her as if he were trying to crawl inside her through her mouth, lips, tongue, and teeth all coming into play, something between a kiss and an eating motion, swallowing those noises straight from her mouth, as if he were tasting her screams.

Eventually, he uses his hands to draw her lower body up further, a bit more away from him, the arms she still has locked around his shoulders (one hand plunged past the wrist in a tangle of curls, the other clenching so hard at the moving muscles of his back that the short nails are cutting into him) giving him enough leverage to put his left hand beneath her, supporting essentially all of her weight on the palm of that one long-fingered hand, while he moves the other between them. And she probably would have realized what that other hand was doing, if only she had been able to think at all, and, if she had, then she would have protested - cried out that it was too soon, that she wasn't ready, couldn't possibly even be close to ready yet because she's only ever been with one man besides her husband (a ritual coming of age that she had put off as long as possible before finally giving in, when presented with a man who had looked so much like Obi-Wan Kenobi that she had been able to close her eyes and give herself over and pretend and pretend and pretend until she'd thought her heart would burst) and her husband had never been this quick with her, never this urgent, never like this, Anakin always so much more concerned with touch, with caressing and cuddling and closeness, than sex, so little interested in the physical act itself, that she can count the number of times he's been within her without coming close to needing more than her own two hands (taking him inside her mouth or her hands doesn't count, isn't like this at all, the same holding true for both the times she'd been able to convince him to let her ride upon the skillful fingers of what had then been his only whole left hand and the even piteously fewer times she'd been able to wile him into using that gorgeous mouth and tongue on her) - but instead she simply goes with him, as he simultaneously lowers himself back to the sofa and lifts her, sliding back into the cupping palm of that hand (trapping her against him as if she weighed nothing at all) so that he can slide his other hand up between them, positioning them both, and then drive his hips upwards and forwards the instant they've both settled back into the cushions, her legs folding back so that she is kneeling up around him again, giving them both more room, more potential leverage.

When he enters her it isn't hesitant or gentle, but it doesn't hurt, either, or more properly it hurts with such exquisiteness as he drives forward, fighting his way up into the wet tightness of her body, both hands beneath her skirt (the material rucked up high in the back to give him more access and to keep it out of the way so it won't get caught between her knees as she moves, the whole front of the skirt having given way beneath the strain and ripped the rest of the way open across her stomach from the point where the lightsaber had so effortlessly parted it down the side, laying her bare to him all across her front nearly up to her navel) on the backs of her thighs now, at once pulling her apart and pushing her down over and onto him as he shoves himself ruthlessly up inside of her, that it effortlessly presses a progression of screams - none of them screams of pain - out of her throat, one after another, rising to a keening wail that will make them both glad beyond words, later, that he closed the doors behind him when he entered the room and that nearly all of the rooms in this house (including this little library) are soundproof once their doors have been shut. Her body bows back on him, curled tight by a pleasure almost too big for her skin, and his mouth finds her right breast, licking her through the fabric, lips and tongue closing around her through that barrier, suckling as if it weren't there at all, mouth closing just enough to make her feel the edges of his teeth, skating that line between pleasure and pain, making her scream again and buck, hard, body slamming the rest of the way down over him, and he laughs, a low rumbling sound that pebbles her skin and tightens her body and makes her want to scream again, but she can't draw another breath fast enough to do it before he starts working his way back out of her, agonizingly slowly, a millimeter at a time, having to really work at it, as if her body were desperately trying to hold onto him - and she's still so horribly tight (even though she's already so wet that she can feel the slickness running down her thighs) that, in a way, it actually is - withdrawing until she is almost free, only to suddenly slam her back down over him as he pistons his hips upwards again, the motion catching her just as she manages to draw in a sucking breath and tearing a shrieking wail from her, making her rake her nails down his back, hard enough that it should have hurt, but he's too lost to the pleasure to notice, already moving to find a rhythm, even though he's almost having to struggle at it because she's still so tight.

And it's like nothing will ever be enough. She moves over him, against him, shoving as hard and fast and deep as possible, riding the movement of his hips, but her body isn't quite open enough yet for the rhythm he's setting (even quicker and deeper and punishingly hard, as if he's trying to shove himself so far forward into her that he comes back out the other side), and at first she can feel him catching on the sides of her because they hadn't bothered to make the time or effort to work her open wider, first, and, even though she's more than wet enough that it doesn't exactly hurt, the tightness slows the plunge of their bodies just enough to make her frantic, wanting him to go deeper, go faster, wanting more, love and sex both words far and away too mild to accurately describe what she wants from him and what he seems just as intent on giving her, forcing him to be even rougher as he works at making her looser, making her open more to him, pushing and shoving and plunging their bodies together almost violently, beating up into her with a thick, wet, somehow meaty sound of flesh slapping against flesh, uniting in an all but savagely urgent rhythm. That rhythm inevitably (if never quite quickly enough) works her larger, making her take in all of him and more, until he moves more easily inside her, out and in and out and in, and, when he's finally able to simply glide almost effortlessly up inside of her, he slams up into her hard enough to tear a grunt out of them both from the strength of the collision, the impact of their bodies shoving him in hard and deep, and its beyond glorious, the feeling of him forcing his way into her body, using his hands to move her above him just a little bit, until he finds a spot that he seems to want, one that he then claims by plunging up into her as if he actually means to come out the other side, deep enough that he reaches the end of her and then thrusts straight past, hitting her cervix hard enough that it should have hurt but doesn't, just makes her scream for him until her breath fails her, the pleasure bursting through her in a whirlwind of sensation that automatically makes her slam down into him over and over again, in an effort to get him to hit that same spot again, but all her desperate struggles do are to bring him into contact with another spot, there on the upper stroke as he's pulling out, one that makes her breathing change because the sensation of pressure and fullness and heat is all so much that it's just barely to the right side of agony, so close to it that she can't even scream.

Every time he slides over that place within her, it makes her breath catch so painfully that her heart feels like it's about to explode, and he notices because he immediately shifts her above him again, just enough to allow him to slide himself over and over that one little spot, stroking her in a way that would seem impossible if she could think about (because if she could think about it, she would be able to remember the one time she'd persuaded Anakin to put three of his fingers in her, filling her to a point of almost pain as they crooked delicately this way and that, touching and caressing and manipulating so much of her that she'd felt as if she were truly dying when he finally brought her to shrieking completion, and yet not even that can compare to this sensation of being purposefully stroked and stoked and all for the sake of this one little spot), the pleasure and the pressure building and building, expanding like a storm, until she's so completely lost to it that nothing else exists for her but that building storm. So the first orgasm catches her entirely by surprise, completely unprepared. One moment she is wholly caught up in the building rhythm of his body in hers, and the next she is shrieking, writhing helplessly over him, pressure and pleasure exploding in her and out of her in a burst of liquid between her legs and knifing shrieks that rip their way painfully free from the back of her throat, body snapping rigid, convulsing, spasming, so that she rakes her nails down his back, his sides, anywhere she can reach to touch him, and when that's not enough she claws at the back of the sofa, too, having to do something with the pleasure to keep the overwhelming pressure of it from shredding her to pieces, ripping mindlessly at the fabric of the cushions in her frenzy. His scream echoes hers, his body tensing and tightening beneath her as their spines both bow, heads thrown back, a howl spilling out from his squared mouth so loud that it almost completely drowns out her own cry.

She collapses over him afterwards, unable to do anything else but melt against him, boneless from the heat they've generated, feeling his gasping pants against the side of her neck, coming so hard and so quick together that he must be almost hyperventilating, and if she could think at all she wouldn't be surprised, since her own breath is coming only with a painful struggle now and his heart is pounding away beneath her cheek like a trapped thing struggling madly beneath his skin, trying to get out. He's still deep within her. And because he is still inside her and still mostly hard, the motion from him gasping after breath while she struggles to gulp in enough air to keep from blacking out is enough to brush that softening hardness up against the sides of her, brushing over that spot and making her writhe helplessly, tightening immediately as he moves within her, making her set her nails into his flesh again and making him scream, his hips grinding involuntarily up into her. The look in his eyes is like nothing human, and it would have frightened her if only she'd been aware enough for fear to be able to register. But then, if she'd actually been that aware, she never would have even dreamed of doing what she does next, because then she would've known better than to try it - would've remembered Anakin laughingly mentioning something to her, once, about her having an added advantage over all other women in him, since his Jedi powers give him increased stamina and strength, and would've realized all over again that men really aren't naturally like women when it comes to such things and can't be safely brought again and again, so close together that one go-round all but trips over the heels of the one before it. Instead, consciously remembering none of these things (in truth, knowing very little aside from how amazing it feels to have a part of the still mostly erect length of him sliding over that incredible spot and how much it makes her want more and more of those gliding touches), she very deliberately forces herself to find the strength and coordination to put her hands on his shoulders and push herself up off of him, raising herself with a purposeful lunging motion -

- only to let herself fall back down over him again, slamming down around him and deliberately tightening all the muscles between her legs, squeezing him until the softness within her rehardens and he doesn't just howl but actually screams, lunging convulsively up into her and then letting loose a garbled stream of half coherent (for anyone with enough sense to actually puzzle after the words hidden in them) curses and half inchoate groaning cries, and this time it actually hurts/, hurts, the pounding motion filling her so much that he touches every bit of her, within, the tender tissues still all flushed and bruised and swollen from the earlier assault of pleasure, and it just /hurts so damned good - ! Too much, too quick, too close together, more like a continuation of the first go-round than a second bout, and she actually has to fight a little, struggle for more control, to keep herself from coming immediately, body already spasming with his every motion as he pounds up into her, his entire body against her as tight and close as he can go, arms locked around her back as he comes up off of the couch and launches himself at the nearest wall, making low sounds in his throat that are a little too close to pain sounds when her legs come up around his waist like a vise, squeezing hard enough that it probably made it hard for him to breathe. Not that it stops him. He still drives them into the wall hard enough that her back slaps against it, hard enough that she would have cracked her head into it if he weren't so carefully cradling it with his huge right hand, and then he's driving himself into her again and again and again, as hard and as fast as he can, pinning her to the wall, and she has to hold him, can't do anything but hold on, legs locked around his body, arms locked around his shoulders, and hold on while he slams into her hard enough that it's like he's trying to put a hole in the wall behind her, so that every thrust feels as if it's pounding her back into the wall, like a nail being driven by a hammer, crushing her against his body and driving her back and back and back, and she is drawing in breath to scream when it hits, crashing over her like an overwhelmingly huge wave, engulfing her and rolling her so that she has to claw at him and scream and buck against the weight and strength of him, so that the orgasm becomes another kind of struggle, another kind of fight.

Her body tries to buck and fails, trapped in a tight press between his flesh and the wall, wild energy whirling within her with no way out, tearing through her as if it will actually rip her apart. Unable to move in any other way, she digs her teeth into his right shoulder while her nails try to find a way through his back, pressing hard enough that the few that aren't already cut down close to the quick snap off against the hardness of his muscles, her body riding his as he pounds her into the wall, and somewhere in all of that his body convulses again, his hips driving in one more powerful effort up into her. He screams (a sound with almost as much pain as pleasure in it) as the motion brings him again and she can feel him pouring himself up inside her, gouts of scalding wetness, can feel it when he puts the hand not cradling her head against the wall and tries to steady them even as his knees give way beneath him, so that they rather suddenly end up in the floor with her legs still wrapped around his waist and him still in her body far enough that the end of him bumps up against the end of her, hitting her cervix and setting off another round of helpless writhing that squares her mouth into a shriek that's a confusion of pleasure and pain, sensation tightening her body again (too soon, too much, too quick, /hurts/, /hurts/, /Force/, so /good!/) and then ripping out through her body like an explosion, tearing through bone and muscle and skin, like a blast of lightning grounding itself it her flesh, flaying her with flinders of jaggedly sharp-edged pleasure, forcing her to ride out wave after wave of overwhelming pained pleasure, nerves all sparking in violent seizures of ecstacy, his eyes wide above her, as if he were simply surprised, his breathing quickening helplessly the instant before the convulsion takes his body, and then he's slamming himself deep within one more time, face frantic with feeling, like he's about to fly apart in her hands, her arms, her legs, her body.

His body spasms again, exquisitely agonizingly, catching her unprepared at the apex of her own convulsion, and her hands (which have come up to cradle that lovely frantic face) lose their grip, rolling her eyes back in her head and making her shriek again, so close on the heels of the one before that it's little more than an exhalation of air, very little sound in all that fury of feeling. And this time when he collapses over her, the motion thrusting him forward with the whole of his body and weight behind the movement, she claws at his back hard enough that his skin gives under her, making him writhe over her, writhing with his body still thrust deep inside hers, causing her nails to dig deeper and making her set her teeth in his shoulder, screaming into his skin, making a gag of flesh between her teeth to keep from screaming her throat raw and bloody, the line between pleasure and pain so blurred that nothing is left but pure feeling, an endless loop of sensation, until abruptly his body throws helplessly backwards into another climax, tearing away hard enough that she has to let go or dislocate her jaw tearing a chunk out of his shoulder, so much sensation that her vision swims, crazed joy shivering deep in all her muscles, her body yearning towards a brighter fulfillment than such mere flesh might ever hold, vision whiting out in a wave of heat and light, heat and wetness spilling between them in an endless wave that effortlessly washes her up out of herself so far that she misses it when he finally manages to disengage from her, his body slipping away in a sudden rush of fear and anguish as full consciousness of self and place return to him, flooding back in with the ability to really think again, and the realization of what they have been doing hits with all the subtlety of proton torpedo. She's so dazed and transported by all that sensation, all that energy, that she loses herself in it for a good long while. Otherwise, she likely would have immediately flown into a panicked rage of humiliation and shame.

Instead, it takes the sound of his voice, half choked with horror and agony as he cries out, "Oh, frag! Oh, fek/! What've we - what did I - oh, /no/! /Rach aireamh múin/, /fâighean múin/, /dàiraidh! Padmé? Padmé! Mho chréidh! Padmé, please - !" to bring her back to herself, groggy and sweat-slicked and sticky, feeling laid open and illuminated, her insides all shiny and softly pulsating with arcing little aftershocks of electricity.

She's wet past her knees with a mixture of his fluids and hers, almost obscenely bright blood smears speckling her here and there, four fingers are bloody from broken nails, and she feels as if something vitally important inside her has broken loose and will shatter into a billion drifts pieces and float away, like shivery silvery motes in a fall of sunlight, if she makes any quick or sudden movements. Focusing past the bleaching brightness in the air is difficult. It takes nearly two dozen rapid blinks to get rid of enough of the black splotches and rainbow sparks clouding over her eyes for her to focus on him - a strangely small huddle of misery, all dark hair and shocky looking pale skin and luridly bright streaks and smears of blood, so many painfully red furrows cutting down his arms that she immediately winces away from the thought of what his back must look like, especially since his back is scooted up against the sofa, pressing so close to it that it look like he's tried to scuttle away from her and stopped only when he fetched up against something too heavy for him to move in his uncoordinated scramble backwards - and four tries to get her voice to work enough to make herself heard over his rising panic. "I'm alright," she finally manages to croak, tilting herself enough to ease her way carefully, gradually upright, propping her back against the wall, struggling not to slip on its slick surface, and attempting (if mostly unsuccessfully) to ignore both the now clammily cold sensation of the sweat-soaked tatters of nightgown clinging to her back and trying to make her slide right off of the wall again and the almost tacky sensation of all that thickly clinging wetness between her legs, so much liquid that her thighs make faintly squelching noises as she shifts her legs together to try to steady herself and there are actually a couple of slender rivulets busily winding their way down towards her toes and great good stars, how much of that is his and how much of it is hers and can all of that possibly be natural for this body?!

"Stars and galaxies, Padmé, I'm so sorry - "

His voice is a rising wail of agonized horror that sets her teeth on edge and hits something in her enough to hurt, hard enough to make it suddenly a struggle to catch her breath. Curtly, short of breath and temper and tired of being in pain, she cuts him off, snapping, "Don't be."

He stares at her blankly, his eyes so dark that they look blind, his face loose and shocked as if she's slapped him. "Padmé - "

"'S my fault. Not yours. Should've known better. Those two - no limits at all. Ani and Obi're like - " she makes a gesture with her hands and a noise, trying to mime an she makes a gesture with her hands and a violently explosive little noise, trying to mimic an explosion, as it belatedly occurs to her just how incredibly reckless and staggeringly foolish (not to mention just plain /stupid/) it had been for her to let them get that close to the conflagration of Obi-Wan and Anakin in the Force " - all the time, volatile, no more'n a heartbeat or three from combustion. Always like that, now - fission, fusion, nova, /boom/." She makes that exploding motion again, trying not to give in to the sudden insane urge to giggle, knowing that it would jar whatever it is that's loose in her too much and that it would break and she would break, and then who would fix this awful mess, if she's broken open on the floor and having hysterics? Shaking her head slightly, trying to clear it without jarring herself, she repeats, insistently, "Should've known better'n to get that close to 'em, Dar. Didn't think it through well enough first. Can't be that near to ground zero without catchin' some o' the aftershocks. Not your fault. 'S my fault. Stop looking a' me like that. /Not. Your. Fault/."

"But - !"

"No/, Dar. My fault. Got us too close to them. Caught too much of the wave coming off them. Wasn't thinking straight - too focused on trying to make you see. 'S my fault. You were just . . . here, 's all. Don't - /don't take on, so. 'S your wife's body. Think of it that way. Sola's body. Not mine. Not act'ly me. You just . . . just had her once more, afore the end, 's all," she offers, with a very careful little shrug. He still looks like he's breaking open, though, his dark eyes swimming with unshed tears, and so, exasperated, she snaps, "Dar - Dar! Stop it right now! None o' this rid'c'lous unhelpful guilt! You didn't really hurt me." Much. "And this doesn't change things. 'M still just here just 'til I can say my goodbyes. There's nothing bad can come of this. 'M sure of it. The Force wouldn't've let it happen, if 'twere anything bad. You were there with me - I know you felt it, too. The Force. 'Member? That feeling of e'r'ything being c'nect'd? That was the Force," she insists, determinedly pushing herself slowly but steadily up to her feet and trying not to be too annoyed by the way her body keeps twinging and making her swallow bits and pieces of her words to keep from making some kind of pain noise that would betray just how much she really does ache. In spite of all her words, Darred still looks like he's about to have a breakdown, his body curled in so far on itself that the clench of his arms around his legs looks as if it's cutting off his circulation, a faint tremor of a rocking motion there that finally, at an utter loss about what else she can possibly do and feeling far too close to the ragged edge of panic herself (and she can't panic, mustn't panic, no unexpected motions, no breaking, no hysterics, no/, dammit, she has to fix this, has to clean it up, has to keep this from escalating into anything worse, can't deal if it gets any worse, can't bear to add another burden to Obi-Wan and Anakin, has to do this herself, has to see to it herself, has to, has to, /has to - !), prompts her to take desperate measures. Holding herself very carefully still, propped up securely against the wall now and tremendously glad to be on her feet (not the least because it means she won't have to keep swallowing syllables out of her words to keep from betraying herself with little whimpers and moans as her motions pull at things that don't really want to move the way she's making them), she makes herself remember both how she'd had a full-blown panic attack and flown into hysterics when Qui-Gon had shown her the truth about Palpatine and the end result (Darth Vader, in that hideous black box of a suit) of his plans for Anakin and how Qui-Gon had ended up having to use the Force to calm her down enough that he could get her attention and explain to her how she could help him prevent all of that from happening. Then, taking as deep a breath as she can manage against the pain gathering in her chest, she reaches after the same twist of the Force that Qui-Gon had used and then says, in an imperious and demanding tone, "Darred Janren, be still and listen to me! You will calm down now/! Remember the Force. /Remember that, those sensations, and be at peace/." She waits a few moments, to make sure the commands have taken, and then, when his body has relaxed enough that she can actually see his face again - see the blissful expression of utter tranquility, acceptance and joy lighting his face and softening his features into a little half-smile - continues, carefully infusing as much power of persuasion, as much Force-command, as she possibly can into her voice, "You did nothing wrong here, today. You did not hurt me. If it will hurt you too much to remember this, then you can forget the details of what happened /after we came back to ourselves from the meld. If you do choose to remember, though, then let the knowledge that this really is my fault keep you from feeling guilt and any need to speak of this with others. I wasn't paying enough attention to what was happening and I didn't think enough about what I was doing before I joined my mind to yours and reached out for the Force. I was reaching blindly, and I shouldn't have been. And I honestly should have known better than to let us get close to Obi-Wan and Anakin like that when we were unshielded. You can't blame yourself for what happened. So don't worry about me. I'll be alright. Just . . . get yourself cleaned up and dressed as best you can and then go see to yourself. And please don't let anyone else see you like this or see the scratches I gave you, because I don't want to have to try to explain this to anyone else. I want to go home to the Force and I'm going to go soon enough. You don't need to worry about any repercussions for this, because I won't be here long enough for there to be any. Just . . . go on, now. Please. But Dar!" she adds, voice sharpening as something else occurs to her, something important that she's almost managed to forget, so wrapped up in her own need to just get him out of there so that she won't be in danger of collapsing in front of him any longer than she has to be that she's nearly sent him off from her forever without even giving him the common courtesy of repaying the truth he's given her with an equal show of honesty. "Know this as well. I am not leaving here because of any lack on your part or any mistake that you've made. You could love me as much as Anakin loves Obi-Wan and I still would not be able to stay here with you. But I do love you, Darred Janren. I have adored you since the moment I first met you, when my family was still so new to Theed and you and your grandparents went out of your way to make us feel truly welcome, but I was . . . under the impression that you loved Sola from the very beginning, and she was so obviously in love with you that I . . . I convinced myself that the noble thing to do would be not to interfere. I was wrong though, Dar. It was cowardly of me, and a mistake, and I'm so sorry I never tried to tell you how much you meant to me. If I had known . . . if I had suspected how good she was at lying, even at such a young age . . . Darred, things could have been very different between us. Many things could have been very different indeed. I regret not taking that chance. More than anything, now, I regret that. And I'm sorry I can't stay here with you now and try to make up for everything we missed out on, everything that we could have been, but you know that I can't and why, Dar. Remember that. /Remember why I can't stay and know that it has nothing to do with you. And /believe Darred. Don't blame yourself for any of this. Don't let this twist you. Please, don't let this break you. No matter what you do, don't let this make you stop living. Move on with your life after this and make something glorious and beautiful. I know you can, Darred. You're a strong man, a good man, and you're so good at creating beauty and building wonderful things. Don't lose who you are because of her. Don't let her win, Dar. Please. Not in this. She isn't worth suffering over. And neither am I," Padmé adds, as seriously as possible. Then, with a small sigh, unable to think of anything else to say and all too aware of just how precarious her hold over the situation and her own control are, she tells him, "Forget me as much as you must to get on with your life. Always know that I love you and that I will miss you . . . and that I hope to meet you again, some day far in the future, when you come home to the Force as well. But don't let Sola win and don't let me or any memory of me keep you from having a full life. Goodbye, Darred. I will see you again, briefly, before I go, but not alone. Be well in life. And remember nothing of this talk, save that I told you love you."

***

The room at the very back of the suite is equipped with all of the normal, necessary equipment, including a shower stall with adjustable controls for sonics or actual water, but there's also a bathtub so extravagantly large that two bodies could float side by side, facing in any direction, and not be able to touch either each other or the walls, and a man of average height could fill it to the brim and stand with his feet planted flat to the marble tiling and the water would cover his head completely. The pool (for that's what it really is, a technically miniature indoor pool) is both built up - seven wide, shallow steps (more like carefully carved ledges than stairs, really) leading up to the brim - and sunken, to make up the height difference, and its sides are not only terraced with ledge-like steps of its own but also gently sloped, so that it's even deeper in the center. It takes a bit of persuading to convince Obi-Wan that they still have sufficient time; in the end, though, when Anakin lowers his eyes and looks with wistful longing up at his former Master through the thick golden fringes of eyelashes, the younger man has his way, and the enormous bath is chosen over the shower. It ends up taking long enough to run it full of water that they have time to christen the stairs, taking turns worshipfully loving each other as they work their way up the ledge of each broad altar-like step, the initial coolness of the marble an almost painfully exquisite contrast with the heat of their bodies as they drive each other up and over levels of sensation in a deliberate pursuit of a higher peak. By the time they slide into the almost too hot steaming warm water of the tub they are clinging to one another as if each one is a missing piece of the other and must be held as close as physically possible, if not even closer, to encourage a proper melding of parts back into a whole. And a corona of visible light is already flowing above and along the surface of their skins, love skating across all that slick wetness and shimmering in a dance of heat and color every place their bodies come into contact, the effect of a radiant and heat-soaked kaleidoscope of pinwheeling sparks like brilliantly hued mad fireflies racing across their arms and backs and dancing in auroral bands out from the press of their lips weirdly beautiful, if occasionally slightly distracting (as when the colors gild Obi-Wan's lips and frost Anakin's wet curls to the color of platinum).

When Obi-Wan eases his way into Anakin's body again, the two of them able to float face to face in a position allowing for more closeness and kissing than any they've yet tried, love and power flood up through their bodies, racing each other with nothing but their skin to keep them apart, and even that isn't enough to keep them apart for very long, for the emotions - the love, the joy, the devotion, the euphoric pleasure in one another and the actual ecstacy of joining - all but instantly burst those bounds in brightly blazing streamers of light energy, writhing between and around and throughout Obi-Wan and Anakin's bodies, the power all-permeating, the energies intertwining even more completely than their bodies are able to, constrained as they are by physical limits. Those ribbon-like streams of love and light and power braid and dance like the strands of a rope being pulled tight, snaking together, lacing together, gliding in and out of Obi-Wan and Anakin and pulling them closer, binding them more wholly together, weaving them so completely through and around each other that anyone, seeing the complex design of that plait, might've been forgiven for thinking there was but one strand to it, looped over and over about in a dizzying spiraling dance of scrolling knotwork, rather than two separate parts. As for Obi-Wan and Anakin, they hang suspended in the water, cleaving together, lips pressed together as if they cannot breathe but through each other's mouth, legs and arms making a knotwork all of their own. The presence of the water all around them slows their movements together, making of their joining a prolonged and oddly graceful dance, languidly elongated motions of thrusts pushing them up towards the ceiling as if in constant offering, waves in the water turning them gradually but inevitably in slow, elegant arcs, spinning them across the currents their lovemaking is causing and skimming them around and around the pool in an endless rhythm far more basic but no less beautiful than that of any waltz.

It is likely due to the slightly surreal aspect of that dance, with the weirdly reflecting echoes of light and heat, energy and passion, love and pleasure and power, that neither man notices the distinctly separate ripples from a somewhat similar but much less powerful and far less joyous melding of beings and forms, vibrating briefly through the Force in close physical proximity with their own location.

***