Archive of Our Own

In the end, Qui-Gon makes the choice he can live with.

Obi-Wan makes the choice he cannot live without.

Obi-Wan first kisses him on Coruscant. Qui-Gon doesn’t think it would have felt real, anywhere else.

But perhaps it feels too real, here in the Temple that is their home.

It’s gentle and soft and almost chaste, except for the sound that it draws from Obi-Wan’s throat. Obi-Wan’s mouth curves lightly against his own, clings warm and dry on the edge of opening, and Qui-Gon wants to live in the span of that moment forever.

It lasts hardly an instant.

Obi-Wan is twenty-four, and this has been building since—

—Qui-Gon doesn’t know. It’s been building for a long time.

Sometimes they sit for hours, late into the night with datapads in hand. Obi-Wan sprawls at the far end of the couch and fits the arch of one foot to Qui-Gon’s thigh. He feels the warmth of that contact like sunlight and fire after the vastness of space.

He shivers with a delight that borders on longing as Qui-Gon traces the bones of his ankle, the slight flare of his calf. Those fingers feel purposeful in their idleness. It is a touch that comes without thought because it has been thought of for so long, and Obi-Wan hoards each one away like the precious thing it is.

Sometimes, Obi-Wan will wake the next morning to the press of the couch at his back and the slow, inevitable beat of Qui-Gon’s heart. The cadence weaves its way into his soul like another sense, a thing to which he is always attuned. He thinks he could follow the thread of that heart through the fabric of all the galaxy.

The Code urges peace over emotion, serenity over passion, harmony over chaos. But Qui-Gon is peace and serenity and harmony all in one. Obi-Wan does not know that he could have them otherwise.

If he must take the emotion and the passion and the chaos that come too, he will find a way to balance them in the end.

Qui-Gon has never been good at following rules he sees no use for, but he sees a use for this one. That doesn’t make it easier to follow, but he does it anyway.

It isn’t that he doesn’t trust Obi-Wan to know his own mind. Obi-Wan is strong in a way that Qui-Gon knows he never will be himself. Obi-Wan looks at him with stubbornness and implacability and pride, and Qui-Gon is lost.

But Qui-Gon needs there to be a line, for now, even if it feels like a mark in the sand. He needs a before and an after, a now and a then, a present and a future. If those distinctions collapse into nothingness at Obi-Wan’s Knighting, then that, too, is a before and an after. Not a present and a future, perhaps, but a past and a future, and that is close enough.

For hours he lets Obi-Wan trace the shape of his lips with his own, so long as it progresses no further. Not yet, but one day. He knows the way Obi-Wan’s mouth tastes as they pass in the kitchen, as they sit on the couch, as they part to their own separate rooms in the night.

He allows himself to kiss Obi-Wan’s cheeks and his brow, and even—on occasion—that spot behind the curl of his ear. He knows every freckle intimately, and counts with with precision. Once, breathlessly, he presses his mouth to the dip between Obi-Wan’s collarbones, and he doesn’t know whether the sound or the feel of Obi-Wan’s shaky inhale hits him harder.

The Code forbids possession, but Qui-Gon does not possess Obi-Wan any more than Obi-Wan possesses him. They exist intertwined, in the same space and the same heartbeat and the same present.

Perhaps that is no different after all.

But Obi-Wan is like air and Qui-Gon—

—Qui-Gon is greedy.

And in the end he is greedy enough to be glad that Obi-Wan is too, at least in this.

Obi-Wan knows what it is to want things, to live with craving and desire and need. As a child he had wanted to be a Jedi with a single-mindedness that ached. As a new Padawan he had craved excitement with a covetousness that stung.

Qui-Gon is not an absence. He fills Obi-Wan’s days and his thoughts and his heart to overflowing. But Qui-Gon has taught him the meaning of appetite, because Obi-Wan will always want more.

He charts the slope of Qui-Gon’s nose and eyebrows, sifts his fingers through the loose strands of Qui-Gon’s hair. Some mornings he binds that hair back before Qui-Gon goes out into the world beyond their quarters; some evenings he brushes it free. He maps the shape of Qui-Gon’s hands with his own, the contours of knuckles and palms and wrists. They cup his face and skim his waist, and Obi-Wan leans in to eradicate any space.

Obi-Wan knows patience, or at least the concept of it. He knows composure and endurance, in theory.

Sometimes he thinks it would have been better to forbear entirely, that complete darkness would have been easier than compromise. But he thinks of oceans with no air, and deserts with no water, and he knows that was never a possibility.

The only thing that makes it bearable is that he is not alone in it.

In the end, Obi-Wan makes the choice he can live with.

Qui-Gon makes the choice he cannot live without.