#no need to veil his words the way he does with the capitol....and sometimes even with hyuk :'D

[clemencetaught]

"No matter the battles we fight, it's side by side that we stand." From Deva.

this one definitely has standards :'D ( platonic bingo for patrick ( verse three ) w/ @uroborosymphony )

"Quite right too. If there is such thing as heaven and hell, our ride down there would come in a two-seater." He snorts, refusing to admit there is a certain...comfort that her presence provides. It's not one that say, Hyuk or Felicity has given him, one that brings him peace, but with Deva- it's companionship in the viper's nest. A comfort that makes the worst of circumstances...more bearable. "Now you wouldn't happen to have a cigarette on you, would you? I ran out on my commute over."

[the-last-kenobi]

Sunlight and Seashells (both are broken)

What is affection in a relationship forced into being by the whims of others?

What was affection?

Even in a culture where attachments were forbidden and relationships beyond friendship and mentorship discouraged, the answer to that question had once come easily to Obi-Wan.

Affection was the brightness in the aura of his tiny clanmates when they offered one another hands to touch and hold in comfort, in their high voices when they gave greetings and farewells. 

Affection was the embrace of his creche master, the softness of their voice when they explained things he did not understand at first, the steadiness of their arms when they soothed his fevers and nightmares.

Affection was the warmth of Bant’s smile when she saw him and the way her arms fit about his body when she flung them around him in a joyful embrace.

Affection was the way Garen would clap him on the shoulder when he spoke - in solidarity, in reprimand, in greeting, in humor, in congratulations. 

It was the way Reeft would save him food he knew he liked from the commissary and the way he walked close to Obi-Wan in the hallways, to shield him from bullies and be shielded in equal measure. 

It was the way Siri punched his shoulder when he said anything, and the firmness of her grip when she helped him to his feet after a spar, or vice versa. 

It was the conversations late into the night, the inside jokes and quips, the bolstering comments during a trial, the delighted praise after a victory, and bracing reassurance after a failure. 

It was the light of suns and the exhilaration of certainty. 

...

It was. 

Once. 

...

After Bandomeer -

After a fight started by a bully who managed to play victim, after being kicked out of his only home weeks ahead of schedule, after being harshly rejected by his last hope for a teacher, after being attacked by Hutts, fought by pirates, tricked by a jealous Darksider and enslaved on a deep sea mine -

After offering his life in exchange for the lives of innocents, and being praised for his Jedi-like heart by the same man who had dismissed him as too angry and too selfish -

After days of ups and downs, of Qui-Gon Jinn drawing near to him and then away again, of his strong hands bringing Obi-Wan back from bruises and breakages after Hutts and then again after slavers, of his cold stare before and after and in between -

Obi-Wan doesn’t know, anymore.

The gap between Master and Padawan is so broad.

No matter how close they stand, they’re never standing together. Even with the maverick Jedi’s hand on his shoulder, Obi-Wan doesn’t know what it means to have the man’s support. 

No matter how often they speak, they never seem to speak on precisely the same level. Like branches shaken in a breeze, they bump and rustle against one another with accidental harshness, grating and scraping - sometimes, briefly, locking together.

And sometimes, even more briefly, they settle.

Stretching towards the same sun. 

Qui-Gon tells him, “We will practice the basics to perfection, Padawan.”

Perfection is never reached.

Obi-Wan’s limbs have sketched the katas so often he can feel the motion down to his bones merely by thinking about it. He knows his every failure, every repeated stumble, just as well. 

...

He raises his grades, and then raises them again.

Food is exchanged for tutoring and meditation, sleep for studying.

He asks his Master, “What do I have to do to be perfect?”

Qui-Gon only frowns, and once again, they have spoken past one another, neither one of them understanding. 

After Melida/Daan, things are broken and stretched beyond belief.

Qui-Gon suddenly offers comfort and apologies, but still, still he will not allow Obi-Wan to move on. 

“You need to reflect and learn,” he says during katas, but his eyes have the shadows of their broken partnership within them. 

Obi-Wan dwells on katas and his failures, and feels he learns nothing.

...

Over the first two years of their partnership, they face Hutts, thieves, mind-wiping tyrants, bounty hunters, fools, insurgent groups, and terrorists. 

They brush with death every day.

They hover on the brink of a broken apprenticeship almost as often, lightened only by moments of unity and humor, where a common chord is struck. 

Out of all the monsters and terrors they encounter, undaunted, it is surprising - and yet fitting - that what brings them together is the threat of separation. 

They’re on a minor mission to a small, sparsely populated system on the regions skirting the borders of the Republic itself, and they make landing on a forested sphere where it rains nine days out of ten. There are no terrorists, no pirates, no tricks.

There are, however, deadly lightning strikes in a violent storm, and they go separate ways in the dark.

Obi-Wan tracks himself through the forests, his focus absolute, his determination unswayed by the rain driven so hard by the winds that it blows sideways and with enough force to sting his skin through his sodden robes. Without stars or compass or signs he flings himself into calculations and plottings and runs, runs, with all the passion of a Jedi. But his mind is not on his mission. He thinks to himself, If I can only reach the capitol, Qui-Gon will be there. I will not let him down. 

Little does he know that miles away, Qui-Gon Jinn is meditating in a hollow cave, pressed against the stone, forming himself against the weathered walls. He flings himself into the winding paths of the Force, its whispers and tangled threads, and strides through mud and storm towards the capitol, thinking to himself, Obi-Wan will not let me down. I must not abandon him again. The Force will lead me back to him, it always has. 

...

Afterwards, Obi-Wan has an answer -

Affection, here, is Qui-Gon’s signature in the Force reaching, reaching out to him like a plant stretching towards sunlight, but stronger, more protective - a hand plunged into icy depths to rescue to drowning man below.

It is a Jedi Master infamous for rule-bending and for not wanting an apprentice, for pulling people in and then pushing them away, drawing him into a one-armed and muddied embrace, steadying the boy and searching him for injuries in one movement.

It is the pride and relief in his blue eyes, though he does not put them to words.

It is the way Qui-Gon pauses outside his Padawan’s door that night, gently checking on him through their bond, and the soft glow of warmth that passes even into the boy’s sleeping mind, soothing troubled dreams before they even occur. 

...

Afterwards, Obi-Wan finds more answers, sometimes rare, sometimes strange - even a little broken - like seashells washed upon the shore for him to find. 

He gathers them in his hands and holds them tight to his chest. 

Affection is Qui-Gon’s presence at Obi-Wan’s every sparring tournament, silent and steady in the background. 

Affection is his Master waiting for him in the seating room of their quarters after every day of exams and trials with his favorite tea already on the stove, miraculously steamed to perfection just as the weary Padawan returned. Triumphant or not, content or not, Obi-Wan would sit with Qui-Gon Jinn and share completely different teas in comfortable silence, the scents of the different brews mingling pleasantly on the air. 

Affection is the way that Qui-Gon teaches him to bandage his own wounds, with and without bacta, ever patient. He shows no judgement and no hesitation in the face of the boy’s muffled hisses and tears, his callused hands gentle on Obi-Wan’s smaller ones as he guides his apprentice through sutures. 

Affection is the way Qui-Gon throws his head back at Obi-Wan’s jests, where in public his response to humor is a sly smile and a tilt of the head. 

It is the way the man refuses to allow certain Masters to influence Obi-Wan’s training in any way.

And it is in the way Obi-Wan tells his Master about his day without being asked, turning it into an anecdote that makes the older man’s eyes twinkle. 

In the way Obi-Wan offers to brush back and tie Qui-Gon’s hair when his Master is too injured or too tired to do it himself, or simply when he seems to need a reason to have his apprentice by his side after the mission is complete and the time for separation would come. 

In the way the Padawan crafts his saber in his Master’s saber’s image.

In the way he strides one step in Qui-Gon’s wake at all times, a show of humility and learning as much as it is a way to guard the man’s back. 

But mostly, affection in the Master-Padawan pairing that some might say should never have come to be was simply that they were.

In so many ways opposites, after so many times where they had grated and clashed and walked separate ways, they always returned to each other, driven by the Force and by things just as deep and powerful and perhaps more nameless. 

Friendship, perhaps. 

Love, even. 

They did not speak of it.

They did not need to.

Qui-Gon simply trusted the Force to guide him back towards the sun, the stars; Obi-Wan trailed in his wake, gathering seashells and cradling them like treasures beyond reckoning.

And always, always, they circled back together, a wayward Master and a straightforward Padawan, by destiny and choice. 

...

"Promise me you’ll train the boy,” gasps the dying Master.

“Yes, Master,” swears the Padawan. 

There is no devotion in these words, only fear and desperation and the still-surging, fragile hope that somehow, somehow this is not the end, it cannot be, their partnership is not finished and what was it all for, then -

There is, however, one last token to be given, to be recieved.

Obi-Wan nods, takes a shuddering breath, and steadies Qui-Gon with his strong arms.

Qui-Gon reaches up with the last of his strength, and brushes his fingers against that familiar face.

They exchange one last gesture of affection.

...

...And it is thirty-two years before there is another, although it is sweeter, perhaps, for the waiting. 

Obi-Wan falls through the veil of death, leaving no form behind for his killer to malign, and directly into the arms of Qui-Gon Jinn. 

[ears-awake-eyes-opened]

Toasting

(Hayffie 💕. Loving when we’re afraid is deeply authentic courage. In dystopian reality, loving with arms holding one another close is a fundamental act of civil disobedience and essential for trauma integration.)

His fingers were clumsy as he wrapped a pale blue ribbon around Effie’s hair. She’d pulled it back loosely into a bun with tendrils coiling down the back of her neck. Working with the satin ribbon felt alien compared to the knots Haymitch had tied throughout his life.

In childhood, as soon as he was tall enough to reach the clotheslines, his mother had given him the job of pulling the lines tight and tying them with no slack. Those needed to be ready each week for the task of holding the family’s clean laundry up to the sun. He and his brother were scolded sometimes for playing underneath the damp sheets, which held the fragrance of springtime no matter the season. It must have been the dried flowers his mother put into the soap. Later on and still, each time he passed those flowers in the Meadow, their smell cut straight into his heart. It’s one of the reasons he’d steered clear of that place even before it became a mass grave.

Unlike the pungent flowers, his mother’s voice calling as they played was a faint memory. “If you boys tug those lines down, YOU will be the ones washing that laundry all over again!”

“Those are MY knots. They ain’t gonna be comin’ loose.”

“Your knots WILL NOT be cominG loose, you mean. Don’t allow your speech to conceal your intelligence.”

“Okay, Ma.” He said as he and his brother lay on the grass, sticking their tongues out to catch drips from the sheets like drops of rain at the end of a sunshower.

The clotheslines were made of twine. Haymitch learned to work with thicker rope during training before the Quell. It never took him long to learn something, and once he did, it was committed to memory. In time, having a mind too sharp to forget things had become more of a curse than a gift.

Suddenly here he was with delicate ribbon between his calloused fingertips, and the fine muscles there were forgetting everything they’d ever learned about tying.

“I’m kind of fucking this up, sweetheart. I’m usually UNtying your ribbons, not the other way around.”

“I trust you.” She kept her body still as she knelt on a rug in front of the fireplace. 

When the ribbon was tied, he adjusted the bow until the loops were even. Then he ran his fingers through her wispy curls.

“Your ‘something blue,’” he murmured, sliding his hand down her arm and lacing their fingers together.

She stared at the polished band on her left hand. “Something old...” Haymitch’s father had made the ring 50 years prior from a small metal disk and some tinkering tools.

Effie brought their entwined hands to rest on her stomach. “...And something new.”

A chill ran through him. “Maybe you should have a backup just in case—“

“Do NOT say that! Don’t even THINK it. I’m further along this time. No arguments... our baby is my something new.”

He held her tighter and kissed her neck in apology. “All right. The baby it is.”

She changed the subject before the unspoken word had a chance to start spinning in her mind. “The tongs from the bakery are ‘something borrowed.’”

“Did Peeta ask what you planned to do with them?”

“Yes.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“I said we’ll be using them to toast the loaf of bread that I was there to buy.”

“Shit, Effie. What’d he say?”

“He hugged me, and told me how very happy he was to give us the bread and lend us the tongs.”

“Let me guess... His eyes were all teary.”

“That dear boy.”

“And your eyes were all teary too.”

“Whenever the children cry, I can’t stop myself.”

“He knows now, of course. I thought we we’re keeping this a surprise!”

“I confirmed nothing.”

“The boy knows anyway. You two are thick as thieves.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I’m sure he will ACT surprised when we tell them.”

“So the kids already know. It’s fine. ...Are you ready to do this?”

“Absolutely.” She nodded.

“...With ME,” he teased.

“Come here.” He’d been curled against her back, and she tugged him to kneel beside her. “We’ve done this before, you know.”

“Have we?” He chuckled, “I doubt any amount of liquor would make me forget doing this with you.”

“I was 8, with an big imagination and—“

“That kid on those screens is long gone, honey. You know that better than anybody.”

She pressed her palm to his chest. “This heart is the same. They broke it a thousand times, but they didn’t destroy it. ...I draped a shawl over my head as a veil, and I swore on every doll I owned that nobody would take this heart from me. I’ve kept swearing it... no matter how many pairs of my shoes you vomited on.”

He brushed his thumb along her cheek. “I married you sometimes in my dreams.”

“Does that explain any of the occasions you woke up screaming?” She smirked then caressed his forearm because nightmares were never a light topic regardless of the context.

“No. But it explains the times I woke up with my dick so hard that all I did was move and I was coming.”

She flushed from her chest to her cheeks, wanting him like that right then. “When was the first time?”

“The night after the picnic. Remember? In my dream you were wearing those silky lace gloves, buttering warm chunks of bread with one hand and getting me off with the other.”

“We only spent a few hours together that day, and you dreamed you were marrying me? You hardly knew me.”

“I knew enough to feel you slipping inside me. I tried to fight it a long time, but I couldn’t stop it.”

“So... now it’s full surrender.”

“Being married won’t make this any easier,” he said, “The last thing you and I could ever be is easy.”

“When is anything worth doing easy to do?”

He traced the neckline of her dress with the tip of his finger. The pretty thing dipped so low that he could have slipped his hands inside and filled his palms with her breasts. But he waited. The dress was pale blue like the ribbon, and overlaid with a weaving of tiny pearls.

“Sex,” he answered belatedly, “It’s one thing worth doing that’s always been easy for us.”

She toyed with a button on the shirt she’d picked out for him. “That’s true. Let’s make a fire and toast that bread so we can do that other thing worth doing.”

Haymitch had said no Justice Building, no party, and no singing. So Effie softly hummed the tune she remembered from Katniss and Peeta’s marriage ceremony. She hummed it straight through as Haymitch laid tinder on the andiron and she stacked kindling around it in the shape of a teepee. Then he built a small cabin over that with dry wood. She struck a match and used it to light the one he held. They both lit the tinder and watched as each piece of wood caught fire.

Over the years, she’d started many fires in that fireplace. The first time she tried, Haymitch had passed out in a snowbank on his way home from the Hob. A neighbor saw him lying there and helped him home.

After a warm bath, he was still shaking, so Effie covered him with blankets in front of the fireplace, and she managed to get some flames going as he slept. Her fire died out quickly, so she called the kids to show her the way. Katniss came. “I’m glad you’re here,” the girl told her, “He needs you. He fights it, but it’s a fierce thing to fight against.”

“What is?” Effie asked.

“That kind of hunger. That hollowness that only one thing can fill...” Katniss tapped Haymitch’s foot with the toe of her boot. He was out cold. “Alcohol just covers it up for a moment as it’s passing through.”

“What fills it?”

“When he realizes he’s worth loving, and when he loves himself the way that you love him.”

Effie shuddered at the thought of everything her girl had been through that instilled that kind of knowing in someone so young. “Katniss, I haven’t said anything about love.”

“Good. Hearing you say it would only scare him more.”

Effie said it now as chunks of wood burned down to coals, and flames danced orange and blue. He saw the dance in her eyes. “I love you,” was still difficult for him to reckon with.

“Loving you is the only thing I’ve been sure about in a long time,” he responded as the truth rose up over fear.

“Show me.”

He picked up the loaf of bread with the bakery tongs. “Let’s do this together.”

She put her hands atop his as they toasted the bread over the fire. When the crust was golden brown, they turned the loaf out onto a cutting board.

Effie slipped an oven mitt onto her hand and held the bread with it as she cut a thick slice from the middle. Then she spread it generously with butter, like in Haymitch’s dream. He picked up the slice and broke it in half, holding onto both pieces.

She eyed him warily. “Are you going to smear that on my face?”

“This isn’t the Capitol, sweetheart. No marriage tradition here wastes even a speck of food. ...But I’ll smear butter anywhere you want as long as I get to suck it off you after.”

“Let’s save that for later when I’m not wearing my Nana’s dress.”

He handed her half of the slice and they fed each other, licking the butter from one another’s fingers.

“My heart is yours,” she said, “It always has been, and I swear that’s never changing.”

“Keep swearing, honey, because nobody and nothing’s going to take mine from you either.”

Their kiss was slow, starting at the corners of their mouths, tasting the salty seams of each other’s lips, and opening to the sweetness that only comes with deep familiarity.

“Oh—“ She startled without breaking away. “Butterfly wings! The baby woke up. It must like the bread.”

Haymitch wiped his hands on a towel near the cutting board, then he cradled the bump on Effie’s belly. She cleaned her hands too so she could guide him to the rapid flutter.

He soaked up the movement. With the one they buried, he didn’t get to feel this. They never got to feel her alive. “This one’s strong already.”

Effie simply nodded because she knew if she said anything, then joy would spill from her eyes, and she wanted to keep it all.

“...Strong like my wife,” he said.

Joy spilled regardless, even in silence. Her tears were saltier than the butter, and he kissed every drop. The sunshower was beginning.