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Obi Wan hated the smell of burning hair.

But that acrid, sharp stench burning its way into his nostrils was going to be the least of his troubles. That is, if Anakin didn't put the lightsaber down. If he let the white-hot blade barely kissing Obi Wan's quivering adam's apple slip from his hands. If the nimbus of searing ozone now incinerating the sandy hairs of Obi Wan's beard into bubbling dots of char got any closer.

And Anakin, it looked, was in no mood for negotiation.

"What were you trying to do to me?" he asked. His voice was soft and low and eerily calm. Dark eyes shone glassily with some surge of unnatural serenity. "You had something planned? Get me sick? Tire me out?" He pressed his face up to Obi-Wan's, teeth bared. A fresh sizzle rose up under Obi-Wan's chin. "While my back was turned?"

Obi-Wan made his voice as calm and textureless as possible. "Anakin, put the weapon down."

"Don't TRY that on me!" A new, more frightening surge of anger twisted the boy's features. "I'm not some fucking Sand Person who just got off the last transport. What do you take me for?"

Obi-Wan hadn't tried a mind trick. The force of his padawan's delusion now frightened him. All of Yoda's warnings about the boy suddenly fell into formation in his frantic mind as he scrambled for a plan of action.

He could kill the boy. His own lightsaber was still at his belt. Without even touching it he could ignite it, toss it in a telekinetic arc so the moment of ignition would cleave the boy into two char-edged halves.

If that was too distasteful, he could shove him across the room. He could slip behind him and disarm him. He could try a mind trick, for real this time.

He could do all these things.

Anakin pressed forward with the blade. Obi-Wan's neck reflexively jerked back from the heat. His knees crumpled underneath him. Anakin's blade followed his neck all the way down.

Obi-Wan looked up. Anakin, standing above him, eyes boring as intensely as the seething blade humming just outside Obi-Wan's vision. Fury no longer rippled under his handsome face. In its place was a preternatural calm, a certainty. His breath was relaxed and even, his chest rising and falling with deep, smooth regularity. His fingers wrapped around the lightsaber hilt were no longer white and clenched. He swallowed hard, and adjusted his stance. A flicker of the child flashed under the face of the young man.

And suddenly, the answer was clear.

Obi-Wan folded his hands behind his back. His blue eyes never left Anakin's as he slowly lowered himself, backing away from the blade, inching onto his back, laying flat on their chamber's hard stone floor. Eyes open. Eyes trusting. Eyes unblinking and kind into Anakin's.

Anakin dropped to his knees, leaning over Obi-Wan, blade still to his neck but now with a confused curiosity, a child following an experiment all the way through but now uncertain of the outcome. His face softened. His padawan braid dropped from behind his shoulder. Its tip swung against the blade and instantly vaporized in a burst of sharp black smoke. The cauterized end brushed a lazy arc against Obi-Wan's cheek. Obi-Wan didn't flinch.

"Do what you will," he said.

Anakin blinked a few times, uncomprehending, stunned blinks.

For a few infinite seconds, the universe reduced to three sounds. Anakin's heartbeat. Obi-wan's heartbeat. And the electric drone of that blade.

"Someone's owned me my entire life," Anakin finally said. His eyes unconsciously drifted to some far corner.

"I don't own you," said Obi-Wan.

Tears glossed each blink of Anakin's eyes, but he held it in ably.

"You're my padawan, Ani." Obi-Wan said. "I have a responsibility to you. I am duty bound to shape and guide you. But I don't own you. There's a difference."

Anakin said nothing. Twin tears slid from downcast eyes, gliding wet solitary tracks down his cheeks.

He lifted the blade.

And switched it off.

Obi-Wan breathed deeply and reached immediately for Anakin. The boy collapsed in wrenching sobs instantly, collapsing into Obi-Wan's chest as Obi-Wan did his best to hold the boy tightly, wrap his arms around his broad back. Hot tears seeped where cloth met flesh at the edge of Obi-Wan's neck, as Anakin buried his face in deep, as if to disappear somewhere inside him. "I'm sorry," he begged. "I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

"Shhhh . . ." Obi-Wan held him hard. The boy cried unstaunchably until finally the sobbing spasms abated and the salty wet at Obi-Wan's neck grew cold.

Anakin lifted his head. His eyes were rimmed red, his eyelashes mascaraed dark with tears and glittering with salt.

"Did you really mean that?" he whispered hoarsely.

"Meant what?" Obi-Wan asked, brushing a stray hair from the boy's forehead.

His face was inches from his. The words escaped from his pout in a barely audible breath.

"Do what you will."

Obi-Wan said nothing.

The question hung between them. All its unspoken permutations bloomed heavy and fragrant and unspeakable in the silence.

"Take off your clothes," said Anakin.

The gauntlet was thrown down. The blood drained from Obi-Wan's face.

"They never asked," said Anakin. "So this time, I'm asking you."

Obi-Wan considered this.

Then, he reached for his belt.

The outer belt came off first. The latch unclicked and dropped to the floor. Obi-Wan reached behind and fumbled for the obi's ties, then unwound the cloth from his waist in several slow criss-crosses. Freed from their corset, the tabards sagged and slipped off too. The folds at his tunic's shoulder dropped. One tie at the left waist. Another tie hidden in the inside right waist. Obi-Wan slipped the garment off his shoulders.

Anakin wasn't even watching. He bit his lip and defocused his eyes at some unbelieving place on the floor as Obi-Wan slid his wrists out of the cuffs of his undershirt and, after one hesitant moment, lifted it over his head.

"Take off your pants." The order escaped choked and barely audible from Anakin's lips.

"I'll have to stand up."

Anakin said nothing. Obi-Wan gingerly rose to his feet, eyeing Anakin carefully. The boy stayed seated, eyes still focused somewhere else.

Boots unbuckled. Pants untied at the waist and slid down narrow hips. The boy's expression didn't change but his lower lip quivered and his temples flickered with the invisible grinding of his teeth behind his clenched mouth.

Obi-Wan stood there.

Anakin exhaled shakily.

He rose to his feet.

He stepped slowly forward, close enough that Obi-Wan could feel the heat of the boy's clothing radiate softly on his naked skin.

Anakin breathed in, a fluttery, sucking breath, eyes rolling for an instant ecstatic and terrified under shut lids. He held his breath

and reached for Obi-Wan's face

and as fingertips touched his cheek he exhaled, the gasp of a child awakened from a nightmare, the gasp of fresh air upon release from a small and stifled space.

Obi-Wan reached to touch his wrist but the boy's mouth was already upon him. Fingers dug into the hair at the nape of his neck and crested the soft spot behind his ears as Anakin seized him, pressed him closer, pushing his tongue against his, the open plush of his mouth a voluptuous, infinite cavern that hummed with unsacred energy.

Obi-Wan froze in shock and then melted. An instant of revulsion cascaded into a blood-searing pulse that surged through his body and found root in his rapidly warming groin. The click of tooth against tooth, the soft muscled slide of tongue against tongue.

"They never kissed me." Words whispered hot into Obi-Wan's mouth. "Never." His lips glanced off Obi-Wan's swollen and stunned lips. Anakin pressed his forehead to Obi-Wan's, breathing deep like a swimmer preparing to dive and plunged once again into Obi-Wan's increasingly responsive mouth, only to jerk away. Obi-Wan's lips closed on empty air.

Anakin's thumbs traced the jugular hollows of Obi-Wan's neck. His touch was not light. "One of them choked me. He got behind me and squeezed until I blacked out." His thumbs dragged trenches in Obi-Wan's neck with uncomfortable pressure. "I could do that to you."

Obi-Wan swallowed hard. His adam's apple bobbed under Anakin's hard thumbs. "You could," he finally said.

Anakin breathed deep, seized him again, kissed him with increasing force, pushing him across the room until the edge of the bed bounced against the back of Obi-Wan's knees. "Lay down." he said, with a push that made discussion impossible.

Quickly the boy straddled him, thighs locking around Obi-Wan's hips, cold leather tabards pressed to Obi-Wan's chest. His hands searched out Obi-Wan's, fists closing hard around his wrists, pinning his hands above his head. "They pinned me. They pinned me in sand." His face, hissing inches above Obi-Wan's. "Do you know what that's like? To try to breathe face down in sand?"

"I don't," answered Obi-Wan truthfully.

"I hope you never do."

Pity surged in Obi-Wan's heart. But he scarcely had time to reflect when Anakin seized him again, mouth over his, arms pinned behind his head. His mouth searching Obi-Wan's crazily, he fumbled his grip and consolidated both of Obi-Wan's fists in his right hand's grip, fumbling frantically under his tunic with the other, all the while his mouth ceaselessly searing a white-hot bolt of pleasure in Obi-Wan's brain.

"They did all kinds of things to me. But they never kissed me. And there was one other thing they never did." His free hand grabbed Obi-Wan's right and drew his hand down to under his tunic. Obi-Wan shuddered involuntarily -- pleasure? shock? -- at the sensation of warm turgid flesh against his fingertips.

"And that's what you're going to do." Anakin scooted his hips up to Obi-Wan's collarbone, shoulders pinned under the hard, flat bone of his kneeling calves.

"Anakin --" he began. "No --"

But the no choked on a mouthful of hard flesh as Anakin shoved his cock into his mouth, bouncing hard against the soft gagging point at the roof of Obi-Wan's mouth. Anakin's hands grabbed a handful of Obi-Wan's hair and yanked his face close as Obi-Wan's mouth rebelled, involuntarily gagging as Anakin's cock crested over the deep back of his throat with choking, violating thrusts.

The explosion was almost instantaneous. Obi-Wan gagged and panicked with a drowning man's reflex, coughing up a bitter, salty mouthful, his jaws nearly snapping shut in reflex on Anakin's cock. He had come deep enough to sting the delicate passages of Obi-Wan's nose with his corrosive cum. The back of his neck stung as if he'd been hit with a brick.

Anakin didn't notice. He'd collapsed forward, his elbows at Obi-Wan's ears, bent over in silent, breathless communion with the orgasmic opiate coruscating through his brain. Finally he took a deep breath, straightened up, slipped his cock out of Obi-Wan's mouth, and lifted his weight off Obi-Wan's shoulders, standing up and tying his pants shut once more.

Obi-Wan lay there, naked, gasping, trying to make sense of what happened, trying to ignore the still-thumping blood in his own cock.

"Aren't -- aren't --" The words had to right themselves in Obi-Wan's flummoxed brain. "Aren't you going to do something . . . to me?"

"No." said Anakin.

He stepped out of the room, then paused and turned back for a moment.

"But I can, if I want to."

He crossed the threshold and disappeared.

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