Category: Romance
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Qui-Gon and the Star Wars universe; I bow to him.
Many sincere thanks to everyone who's offered beta comments and encouragement for this piece!
In my youth I’d half-assumed it was impossible. What else were you supposed to think of such a monk? The Jedi transcended everything. They were above such things as sexual craving and illness and bad hair days.
"I am also a man…" There was a smile in his eyes, limpid gray, soft, soft. The liquid luminosity of clouded crystal, pooled beneath a heavy caveman brow. "Entitled to the pleasure and misery of that condition…"
I say to myself again and again, there is a Jedi in my bed. There is a massive, gorgeous man who can change the orbit of a moon without the merest twitch of muscle, who looks at me, plain Hesta, and sees through my skin into the guts of my feelings, and he wants to touch me like any other man, rough hands on my smooth skin. He is mortal after all. Made of scarred flesh, aching sometimes, and he winces and groans as he sits down in the chair next to my drooping potted sirius and takes off his boots. He massages his huge toes with huge fingers, looking up at me with a weary plea. A plea for what? Permission to be human?
I take his robe, voluminous, slightly scratchy, and scented of him, and I hang it on a peg next to my soft house jacket, a bantha and an eopie stabled side by side. He watches me as I move around, at peace in his chair by the window that looks out on the glittering city. Sometimes he talks about where he’s been, and sometimes he says no word of it, and sometimes he only wants to hear what I have been doing. I make hot drinks, and he smiles gratefully. His hands huddle around the cup like laborers around a too-small fire.
We talk for a long time, never quite about nothing. His voice rumbles softly. His insights are casual and he tosses them off cheaply because he has a ready supply. Yet, he is humble, especially intellectually. I mention my favorite books, The Travels of Ooru-Oir or that quintessentially Alderaanian book A Park with Three Toferu Trees, or maybe the epic poetry of Sglien the Twi’lek, and he ducks his head and admits sadly he has not read them. He doesn’t read at all hardly, not even the news service. Yet he knows everything. I will ask him some time why this is, whether his friends provide him a digest of all that is worth knowing in the universe, or perhaps he feels it all through the Force. I will read to him from Sgilen some time, and he will lay his head on my thigh and listen. He will hear the form and meaning of every word and the arc of sentences and stanzas and the rhyme and meter and the sensuality curving through the language, the oozing undulating eroticism, and he will know it all better than I, who have read it dozens of times. Or maybe I will have him read it to me in his low voice, with his slight lilt that makes me wonder where he comes from, for I have never asked.
Sometimes he cooks, even if he is tired. Tonight he rises with the same groan he sat down with, but his complaints are never real complaints. He smiles at me with his eyes and says, "Rest, I want Galarian pasta and you will overcook it if I let you make dinner." I watch him. He’s more efficient than I am. But he uses too much salt, and if he fries pea pods to go along with the meal he uses real fat rather than my synthetic. They’re very good, though, crisp and perfect. Much better than my mother’s.
Once we are gazing at each other over empty plates, I say, "I’ll do the dishes; go take a bath." He nods deferentially, then gives me a little bit of a look from under his brows to ask, you’re sure? and I nod.
He didn’t make much of a mess, much less than I would have, and in a few moments the chore is done and I find him in the oval tub, leaning back in the warm water with a slack of pleasure on his face. My hedonistic Jedi. "Beautiful man," I murmur appreciatively. He opens his eyes and I watch his abdomen tense into firm corrugations as he stretches up an arm in invitation. Gorgeous.
"Join me, beautiful woman."
I laugh, and shrug joyfully out of my clothes, pulling the bindings out of my graying hair, working my fingers through the plaits to unravel them. He watches me with thoughtful fascination, looking so young. How can a man of 50 look 25? I feel so old, though I am younger than he -- not that it reflects in his eyes. They tell me I am precious to him as this moment is precious.
He settles me between his thighs, fondly smoothing huge hands over my arms and shoulders. There is little awkwardness between us. He reaches for the soap, and I sigh as his hands slide over my tingling skin. Fond, infinitely fond. His attention is specific, as though he is focused on one pore at a time. His fingers both remember and memorize. He is a Jedi in this as in anything, and he knows what goes on in my body perhaps better than I. He coaxes me into the most perfect relaxation, slumped invertebrate against his chest, and we lay thus for a long time, extremities wrinkling in the cooling bath, as he lazily massages shampoo into my scalp.
"The water’s cold," he whispers, as though it is something I have overlooked and ought to be informed about. He rearranges me to disentangle his legs, and steps out of the water. I hear the button click behind me and warmer water flows around my thighs. Hands pull me back till it streams down over my hair, and he rinses the shampoo out.
I move to rise, and he gallantly offers a hand. I smile in spite of myself, and he grins back crookedly. His dark locks cling to the sides of his face and to his muscled shoulders as he towels me dry. There is a ritual combing of hair as we laze on my bed in the rapidly waning light. Soon the aurora will appear in the sky, rolling and magnificent, with the sleepless coruscated city thrumming underneath.
*
I loved him before I ever knew his name. I had seen him now and again in the cafe, a small cafe, unfashionable, and pleasant for just that reason. He sat alone, or sometimes with a young man, his apprentice, judging by the braid. He never removed his cloak, but rather tucked it neatly about him. It hung austerely from his big shoulders, monkish amid the finery and smartness of the capitol.
If there were other Jedi present, he would bow slightly to them in passing. He would return their pleasantries but not be drawn into conversation... he was a man apart, even in the midst of these outsiders.
If one watched his eyes, as I sometimes did, it was clear that he was not lost somewhere remote within himself, but was instead exquisitely present, even at rest. He observed, he sensed. He took note of the ships, and the people sipping Corellian coffee, and the shadows on the terrace with an interest neither idle nor avid. If his young learner was present they ate in companionable silence, or talked occasionally in low serious tones. The boy had an intensity that was almost tension, which contrasted with his master's alert calm. There was an affectionate connection between them though. They complemented each other, yet each was complete in himself.
The master Jedi was alone that day, his long hair spilling finely over the hood of his robe in the sunlight. His gray eyes thoughtfully scanned the lines of ships that coursed by as he savored his simple soup.
I was seated very near him that day, out of loneliness or longing or perhaps in search of that quiet companionability I had seen between this man and the youth with the close-cropped hair. He was conscious of me, as he was conscious of everything. He did not avert his gaze when I looked at him, and when I smiled, he did not begrudge me a warm smile in reply. His eyes crinkled and his lips curved crookedly.
"You’ve been watching me?"
What was the proper answer to that? "You hear my thoughts?"
"Oh no!" he said with a note of dismay, head dipping slightly. "There is… a familiarity in your feelings toward me."
The thought of having my emotions bared was unnerving as well. "I’m sorry."
"No," the Jedi said again, "don’t be."
"We come here at the same times. I see you with your apprentice some days."
He nodded, a beautiful friendly light in his eyes. "I should have noticed such a thing."
"You can’t notice everything..."
"Perhaps not. But the attention of a beautiful woman should hardly be one of those things which slips my perception. I am not that old yet." He was perhaps 40 -- a healthy, robust middle age. He chuckled, lines cracking into his face in places his skin may not have flexed lately, as some private amusement, some deep pleasure, eased his stoic reserve.
I felt a twinge of happy shock in my chest. Did he feel that? Did I want him to? "Thank you."
"Qui-Gon Jinn. May I join you?"
I think I smiled with my whole body and soul. "Please… I’m Hesta."
"I'm used to noticing things," he said, and sat down at my table. "It is something a Jedi is trained for."
"Are you always a Jedi?"
He was surprised, almost but not quite taken aback. I could see an automatic "yes" hovering on the tip of his tongue, but he caught it back and said, "No." I am not sure if he was satisfied with this answer or not, if he doubted its truth or if he realized it was true and it disturbed him a little. At any rate he let it stand.
Something crept up on me, something at once delightful and uncomfortable. My heart quickened, disconcerted and swelling, and I had a weird moment of disembodiment, no longer Hesta but something more elemental, not a woman at all but a swirl of the Force. I understood his comment about noticing things now, because though my eyes had slid closed the scene was carved in my mind in high relief, in sharp detail and luminous like a dream, even the sounds and the smell of food and of the city, and his scent and my own mingling so delicately. He stood out from everything, not monolithic, but curiously intertwined with the rest of the scene. He was Qui-Gon Jinn, Jedi Master, but he too was an eddy of the Force that curled to meet me even as I moved toward him.
"I felt it too," he said softly when my eyes flicked open. His gaze was serious and peaceful, but not unmoved.
Air rushed into my lungs, and I wondered how long I had held my breath. "I can't."
"Can't?" Qui-Gon said.
I balked at that feeling of compulsion, of destiny overwhelming me.... I looked at him helplessly.
He nodded, "What... we felt was the will of the universe. It's powerful, but not inexorable. Each can decide to follow or ignore it. To... trust the Force, or..." Qui-Gon's focus on me was even but not demanding. He reached out an encouraging hand to grasp one of mine softly.
"Or?"
He smiled slightly, "I've never chosen the other option."
I looked at Qui-Gon for a long while, still trembling inside, till slowly the fear slid away and I let warmth seep in. And I was sure about everything.
*
Twenty years' love was cemented in a transformative ten minutes, and yet in the years since I have thought about it only in passing. After the fact it seemed so natural and comfortable. It was like the scene in A Park with Three Toferu Trees in which the god of the ancient Alderans appears to Thight the Unbeliever and Thight is redeemed by the fact that this greatest of all revelations does not shake her a bit. She was a good woman all along, and so her realized duty to a benevolent god does not change her essence. That is a bad analogy, but something in the emotions it stirs is the same.
My Qui-Gon was no god, but a man. People forgot that sometimes. They thought he could do anything, and though perhaps he could do more than other men he could not do everything. They remember now, when it's too late. Or maybe they still haven't remembered. They don't know about me, shivering on the green cliffs, watching a distant finger of smoke rising and dissipating into the night over a strange world. I remember because I, plain, unworthy, and undistinguished, was the respite the Force allowed him, and he the beauty and wonder it allowed me.
I stand here remembering, as if his hands are on me even now and his voice is whispering, "the water's cold."
And I cannot weep, because in a moment I am so warm again.
