#ughghghghg

[yeyinde]

This might sound so cringe and cliche, but I wanna be of help in some way-

how about price faking injuries to see a specific nurse he has a crush on but won’t admit.

Cringe and cliche are quite on brand for me, tbh.

It starts as a concussion, a stiffness in his neck. A pinch in his shoulder. 

Then it changes shape, shifting, evolving, into something more. A tenuous dance held together by silken threads. He tugs on the ends sometimes, just to watch little pieces of you begin to unravel. Raw skin, untouched and new bared to his curious eyes. 

You’ve thrown him off-kilter, left him feeling strange. All asunder. 

He shouldn’t be too surprised by the way you unmoor him so easily. Your eyes swallow the atmosphere around him, eating through gravity. Weightless, he’s left to drift in the aether until you snatch him from the air, leaving him wing-clipped, and kept cupped in the soft swells of your palm. 

It’s greed, he thinks. That awful little thing that makes him keep coming back for more.

The helicopter crash did a number of things on him—mild concussion, a fractured rib, sprained wrist; it seemed to have flipped his insides all askew for a moment when he plunged to the earth before somehow righting themselves when he'd landed—but in retrospect, hindsight, whatever, it could have been a lot worst. 

A fact Gaz seemed to have picked up on quicker than he had when they'd met in the medical bay together, holding their broken bodies with trembling hands. 

(Or maybe threaded together by a statuette of Nefertem laced in the fibres of their hearts.)

"What's this now," Gaz asked when he limped in, knee smarting without the surge of adrenaline keeping him upright. Mirth rolling through his teeth, ge offered Price a fractured grin that very likely might have been a grimace. "Two for two? Might be a sign, cap…"

"A sign for what?"

Gaz shrugged, pressing tender fingers against the gash on his forehead. "Stay the fuck out of helicopters. Take the bloody bus instead."

There's a retort in the back of his throat, but it's swallowed when you walk in, hands gripping a medical bag between blanching knuckles. He's closest to the door, and you turn to him with an air of pensive uncertainty that nudges the spot inside of him that preens under authority. That likes law, order, and the simplicity of life. A natural-born leader. He plays the part, of commander and captain, and dips his head toward Gaz, a silent motion meant to convey him first. 

The always in that is ironclad, he thinks. Brassbound. Even if he was bleeding out on the pavement. His men, his boys, first. 

Except, he catches Gaz doing the same thing toward him. A stalemate, then. 

You're new, he notes; ears still wet, face still green. He braces himself to step in, to lay down the authority you need before you flounder, unsure what to do, but instead of being met with uncertainty, he finds himself breathing in your ire. 

"Well, heroes," you snip, brow pinching together in displeasure. "One of you has to go first, don't you? So while I put my stuff on the table, I expect you to have figured it out amongst yourself, yeah?"

And it's—

It's something. 

A strand of static in the air. Direct current to his heart. It thuds in a strange murmuration, off rhythm, off balance. But it makes sense. You'd thrown him so wildly off kilter. 

He clears his throat of the soot that congeals the back, and nods once. Sharp and jerky. 

"Right, yeah…" 

Price turns to Gaz, brows pinched in the middle. A messy bow. 

It isn't like him to be so askew, but you turned everything upside down before he could familiarise himself with the world in its right state. He's adrift for a moment. Floundering, he notes, tasting something sweet behind his teeth. 

Gaz meets his eyes somewhere in the fog, the furrow in his brow asking the questions he won't voice aloud—you alright, cap?—but he isn't sure what he's meant to say. Everything feels like it was knocked loose inside of him, left to roll off shelves and clatter to the floor. Disorganised chaos. Awash. Lost in tangled webs. He isn't used to this. To feeling so useless, so askew. 

He later finds it just the concussion warping the edges of his mind, turning his thoughts into a slurry. That the mild part was an oversight, one that was immediately corrected by you—firm fingers holding his chin still, nails scratching against his beard as you peered into his eyes with a clinical air of detachment that shouldn't have made his heart beat as loud as it was. 

You smell of summer rain. The musk of water on a hot pavement. He breathes it in until it's clogging the back of his throat, so thick he can almost taste it. So heavy, so heady, his head swims. Ozone. Charred wood. War tucked in a bottle.

The soft fingers against his pulse was a shock, made potent by the little curl of your brow when you counted the beats per minute and found they were much too fast. He isn't embarrassed. Doesn't think he has it in him anymore to feel that way, but there's a sense of frustration in the back of his mind as you move around him, commandeering him with an ease that leaves him feeling a little breathless. 

"You're concussed," you say at last, lips pitching downward as you read his charts, the scrawl left behind by the nurse who'd seen him earlier. The one who promptly sent him to you. "And it isn't mild."

With that, and a list of things he ought to do (non-negotiable), you send him on his way. Gaz, too. Fixed up with gauze and made shiny and new. 

Soap asks why he's so quiet later when they meet for a debriefing later on (one that he knows is definitely on the list of things you told him not to do), and has to stop the rip current from spilling past his lips. 

"He's concussed," Gaz supplied, narrowed eyes clipping the side of his face when it lands; a physical blow. "Doc said he needed rest. But good luck telling him that."

"Don't need rest," he grumbles. There's a blossom of pain in his temple. A little sapling that flourishes under the waning sunlight. "'M fine."

They don't believe him, but the debriefing is too short to push him to lay down, and he spends the next hour pretending he's not seeing shadows in his periphery. That the words on the pages don't bleed together. 

(That the scent of Petrichor doesn't glue to the back of his throat.)

When the hurt in his head dims, he finds his thoughts drifting back to you. Meek and unassuming. A wolf in sheep's clothing. It lingers long after the meeting has ended and he's ushered to the barracks for rest. Home tomorrow, Gaz promises on the tail end of yawn. Gonna sleep for a whole year, I think. 

Aye, gonna head home in the morning, Soap murmurs, but his eyes don't stray from the corner where Ghost leans, chin dipped low to his chest. 

(Price wouldn't put it past him to be asleep already.)

They tell him to get some sleep, dressing the worry in their voice as a friendly admonishment, and he takes it as it is. 

But rest doesn't come. 

He's curious about you. The little hellion that managed to snatch him clean from the air, and cup him in the palm of your too-small hands. 

(He wants to feel it again.)

It begins as idle curiosity.

Price is a large man full of bulk and grit. The snarls in his throat command authority, respect. He isn't used to feeling so wing clipped, sidelined, and he blames that on why he seeks you out. 

A pinch in his shoulder. His chest feels swollen around the broken rib. His knee hurts. There's an ache in his throat. A throb in his kidneys. 

Each time is met with the same stern expression, firm hands. You commandeer him around the room, dragging out the ailments with ease that always seems to leave him off-kilter and breathless. 

He realises what it is the fourth time he comes to your office, exacerbating some mild pain. 

You take up space. All of it. Any crevasse, or corner is immediately filled by you. You have this presence about you that is so at odds with the meek façade you carried on your countenance like an ill-fitting mask when he'd first laid eyes on you. 

You're an enigma, a paradox. A riddle begging to be solved. He wants to take you into his hands and pull you apart until your insides are bared to him, true and real, and known. 

He's met people like you in his lifetime. Leaders in roles that don't fit them. He thinks you belong in worn pages of history, tucked behind a desk as you commandeer the world around you with firm hands and a gnarled smile instead of standing before him, musing softly at whatever ailments he throws your way. 

Despite his plethora of issues, you tackle them all with an air of severity and seriousness that he finds kinship in, touching softly at the twined mass that writhes before him. The cuts in your gaze are made from the same shorn razor as his, and he wants to see what's behind that ill-fitting mask. 

He wants to see you slip. 

But you don't. 

Tongue between teeth, clenched so hard that blood blooms and swells in the tip, you keep everything locked tight to your chest, and usher him out with pantomime remedies to heal his farcical hurts. 

Price isn't sure why he keeps going—curiosity, maybe. An attraction that cracks like lightning striking through his chest. A gale of turbulence that leaves him seaswept and standing on shaking knees. He doesn’t know what to do with the kinetic energy that buzzes in his veins, begging to be free, and so he tests. Pulls and tugs at the seams that keep you spooled tightly together just to see that fissure that once split across your face, leaking fury and fire into the air until it ripped through his nerves, an electrical fire, and set him alight from the inside out. 

(He finds he likes the way it hurts.)

As much as he tugs, he finds he likes it when you pull back. 

"Should be careful," you coo, and the syrupy sweetness of your voice sparks against some dormant part of his mind. "You seem to have a lot of bad luck when it comes to ailments."

He shrugs. "Just unlucky."

"Or you're being cursed." 

"Oh, yeah?" He hums. "Could be." 

You offer a flimsy smile, but it’s enough to soothe the ruffle through his plumage. 

"What's your name?" He asks, fingers plucking at the gossamer that sits between you, unsettled by the quiver in his chest. 

The smile you flash at him is all teeth. "Sekhmet."

Laswell doesn't ask why when he requests your records, but he senses the confusion in her voice when she calls. 

"All of them?" 

He grunts in response. 

"I vetted them personally, John… but," there's a shuffle in the background. Boxes sliding on linoleum. She's overseeing the tearing up of Shepherd's office, and this minute request suddenly turns his stomach sour. "Fine. If that's what you want."

"It's just—"

He isn't quite sure what to say. He was weakened and flummoxed by the world around him. You turned the tipping axis on its head, leaving him feeling asunder. 

"Heard they were quite rough with you," she teases, an olive branch. An excuse. "Bossing around the boss. Is this what it's about?"

He scoffs, then, and only feels an inkling of pain. "No, Laswell. And I wasn't bossed around."

"Manhandled?"

It gives him pause. That feeling from before swells in his chest. Soft hands against his talons, clipping his wings. 

"No," he mutters, but the airiness of his voice gives him away. 

Laswell, in a feat of mercy, just hums. "They're good, John. Good for this team."

Good for you, she doesn't say. John thinks she doesn't have to. He hears it, anyway. 

There are cracks inside of him, ones made from the chipped clay that once concealed an unslaked black hole. 

You fill space, he thinks. 

He isn’t surprised to find you fill the gaps inside of him, too. 

He goes again, but this time it’s real. A bullet grazed his shin, deep enough to warrant stitches, and finds you waiting for him with that clipboard pinched between your hands. 

The look on your face gives him pause. It’s pulled taut, coiled like a defensive viper, but where he expects the same clinical efficiency and detached airs, he instead is met with a palpable sense of uncertainty—too much, he thinks, like the first time you walked into the room, unsure and wobbling on unsteady feet. 

His heart thunders under your prying gaze. “Need some stitches,” he says, if only to fill in the terse silence that settles over the room, hushed and aggrieved. 

“Right,” you echo, eyes dropping to the blood that runs in streaking rivulets down his leg. 

And you say nothing else after, working quietly as you knit skin back together and sponge the drying blood from the wry thatch of curls that blanket his shin. 

Price takes in the paleness of your lip, pinched tight against your clenched teeth. The deep ravine that cuts a line between your brows, heavy with shadows and flooded in some strange amalgamation of anger—potent enough that he can catch the embers in the air on his tongue—and this uncharacteristic sense of disquiet that makes your shoulders tense, your hands slacken. The firm, sure touch is gone—replaced, instead, with clouded unease—and you no longer commandeer him around the room, catch him from the air and manoeuvre him to your fanciful whims. You nudge, now. Soft utterances; requests. 

You don’t move space to fit yourself between the brackets. You linger in the periphery. 

He isn’t accustomed to this, and the hesitancy in your brow needles behind his ribs, pinching and pushing until he’s left feeling that same, strange sense of weightlessness as before. But where you led him around by the tip of his ears, he finds himself unmoored. 

(He likes the loss of control, but only when it’s tethered to your hand.)

His wound is patched up, skin knitted together with silken black lines that cut a neat crisscross through his tumid skin. There is no reason to linger, despite the weight on his tongue urging him to speak. 

But you strike first, catching him at the door. 

"Is there a problem?" You ask, words stripped bare, and masticated between clenched teeth. Reluctance is a heavy weight on your brow when he turns to you, as if you don't want to ask, but are compelled to. Forced to. 

It's the first time he's felt any sense of control around you. He stretches his wings. 

"Problem?" He echoes, and tucks his hands beneath his arms. Steadying his stance. Preparing for the fight. 

You mimic his pose, but grab the knobs of your elbows between tense fingers instead. There's fire in your eyes. The room fills with smoke. 

"You asked for my papers."

The meagre file tucked away in his cabinet spoke of your accomplishments in the same detached, clinical distance as one of the many façades you adopt. It listed your education, your former employment, and your accolades in Times New Roman, all standard affairs. Impressive, of course, but he found it all to be quite lacklustre. 

It didn't mention the firmness of your fingers when you take his pulse or commandeer him to your liking. It said nothing about the paralysing weight in your gaze, vipers tucked in the corners of your eyes when he meets your stolid authority with his own fiery wrath. 

(Or the softness of your cheeks when you try to hide a smile. The admonishing pinches made in jest when he says something that distracts you from your task.)

"I did."

"Okay," you breathe heavily through your nose. "Why?"

"Is there any reason why I shouldn't?" 

"You just—" another breath. He has the peculiar urge to syphon the next directly from your lungs, to taste your air on his tongue. "You come here, week after week, with some—illness, and just—"

"Just what?"

"If you have a problem," you say at length, eyes flashing. "You could have come to me? One on one. I would have—"

"A problem?" He singles the word out, tossing it back at your teeth. “I don’t have a problem.”

You laugh, but it's scathing. "Are you undermining me? Is this—hazing?"

“Hazing? No,” he shakes his head, chasing the tail end of your derision. “Consider this vetting.”

And there it is—that fissure. Heat pops from the lavascape, spilling down the split of your lips. 

“Right.” You snip, shaking your head. “Well, I hope I met your expectations, Price.”

He huffs, then. The noise is a broken facsimile of a laugh forced through crooked teeth. “Of course you do.” The pinch in your brow wobbles. “Wouldn’t be here if you didn’t, love.”

He rents the air with his admission, splits the seams of this tenuous dance you make each week he shows up, speaking of some phantom pain ripped the pages of the textbooks that sit, worn and well-loved, on the shelves behind your desk. 

You say nothing when he leaves. 

(Or when he rests a piece of himself on the doorframe—a glossy feather from his primary remiges just for you.)

He doesn’t go for the next three weeks, but it isn’t cowardice that drags him away from this oddly shaped choreography. He’s caught in a storm halfway across the world with sand in his hair, and the curve of your confusion nudged between the fibrils of his chest. 

In the softness of night, he wonders what you've done with his clipped feather. 

Price meets you at the beginning, but this time, he stands in the medical bay with firm knees, and a clear head. Searching, seeking. 

The thread vibrates, and he finds you with your back to him, doling out gentle, firm, commands to the medical staff congregated around you. Clinging to your breathy orders with the same listless uncertainty that makes his chest swell with the urge to lead whenever it's rested on his shoulders. 

He isn't sure if you can feel the reverberations through the thread, the leftover sutures from when you weaved a needle over the cut on his forearm, and accidentally sewed a piece of yourself into his skin, or if it's just the heavy weight of his gaze burning brands into your back that draws your attention. 

(It certainly garners enough from the staff around you, their flighty eyes flickering from the mountain of a man seething at your back, to you—feigning obliviousness as he strips you bare beneath his glacial gaze, cutting a path to your membrane where he knows he'll find the piece of himself that you snipped off months ago.)

When you finally turn, you give a peculiar look over your shoulder, eyes clouded over, gaze inward. He watches you for a moment, taking in the curve of your cheek, the slope of your nose. Foreign, of course; but familiar under the cloak of darkness and the hail of gunfire. 

The fire still burns in your unreachable depths, but the embers are smouldering. He feels the heat even from this distance, but when you return from whatever thoughts were racing through your head, he finds the look that fixes itself there to be strange. Pensive. 

A quiet contemplation as you take in the length of his shoulders, the width of his chest. 

His heart hammers against the cages of his sore ribs, leaping to the base of his throat where it pulses like a raw wound. 

The whole of his body smarts like a massive contusion—muscles bending at odd angles, bones brittle—but he knows in an instant that he won't mention it to you. He'll tuck the hurt aside. Let it moulder. Let it rot. 

This thing between you—crafted from the design of his heart—has been pulled and pinched, flexed and stretched too taut. It's ready to snap. To break. 

He waits for that moment, bracing himself for the inevitability of the recoil clapping him against the chest, but it doesn't happen. 

You give a small dip of your chin. 

Then, you're gone. 

You've been moulding him between form hands since the beginning, moving him around however you please. 

So, it just feels natural when he follows. 

This time it's his chest. 

You go through the same dance, steps known. Ingrained in muscle memory. Your hands are firm, authoritative as you lead him on this little chase, pushing and pulling, tugging on the threads that keep him sewn up and whole. 

But an incipient path is born. A new routine. The hand on his cheek, as you read his temperature, lingers, thumb brushing over the dividing line that separates skin from wry curls. 

The touch is familiar. You’re no strange to feeling around the phantom aches and pains he presents to you, but this is an electric shock that rattles through his nerves. The trail your thumb leaves behind as it strokes idly at his skin prickles and burns. Goosebumps rise, creating cresting hills and peaks along his topography. You map it all with nimble fingers, firm and sure. 

You take the thermometer out of his mouth after a moment, not even pretending to read the results (thirty-seven degrees, always), and it’s tossed back on the tray quickly before your hand returns to his skin, drawn there by that same innate pull he feels in his iron bones. The warmth of your palm threatens to suffuse his skin, mated together in ferromagnetism. 

His chin rests, plinthed in your palms, and there’s a sudden swell, a rush, that gorges on his heart. The façades fall, clattering to the ground. The broken pieces lay in remains by his feet. 

Price doesn’t spare them a glance. 

Can’t, maybe, because in azimuth he finds that solidary feather he plucked for you resting between your teeth. 

Wonderment. Awe. He feels the surge of something ripping through his body—a paroxysm—but he can’t look away from the shapes of your bare face; the imperfect asymmetry, the wrought iron lines, the convulsing atoms. It’s mesmerising. 

And maybe it’s an electrical phenomenon—no let go—but he doesn’t spare it a single thought, even as the current burrows deeper into his chest, igniting his tissue until red-hot, blistering, charred. Even then, even with the scent of smouldering, necrotising flesh brimming cloyingly into his scenes, the absolute apathy he feels for himself at that moment is a testament to the unshakeable draw, that primal magnetism that glues him to you; met in perfect equilibrium in the middle.

It’s you who moves, who splints the poles until they fall apart when you let your hand drop.

But you’re not finished. The tips of your fingers move, a long peregrination down the twisting, sloping topography of his visage; snaking down his temple, the dip of his nose, the rough bushel of curls, the soft pout of his lips, the ulotrichous hair along his cheek and jaw, the long decline of his check, the ridged of his collarbones, the swell of his chest. It’s there where it lingers, fingers spreading like webs along the birdcage of his thundering heart. 

Price watches you, rapturous and nearly choking himself on the avarice that spills from his heaving lungs. 

You rest the flat of your palm there for a beat; lost in perambulation. Feasting on the thud of his heart. 

He thinks you’ve had your fill. Quenched yourself. 

But when you look up from the slight tremor of your hand, pulsing in time with his hurried beats, the look in your eyes is distinctly unslaked. 

(—and he can’t stop the rumble from spilling out of his chest at the sight.)

Price isn’t sure how long you stay like that. Minutes, seconds, hours. Aeons might have passed since you let your mask slip. Since he plucked at threads keeping it upright. But he shakes back into cognisance when you pull away, cutting through space and time, and filling the gaps once more with the heavy weight of your presence. 

“You’ll be fine,” you say over your shoulder, reaching for your clipboard. “A little rest is all you need, captain.”

There’s an insurmountable number of things he can say, but you press on his throat, and he swallows them down, nodding at your back instead. 

The cloven strands fall around him, broken with distance. There’s an urge in his bones to sew back into his skin, to press them like drying flowers into the folds of his heart where they’ll say, nurtured on his blood and suffused into his being. He rests his laurels on it for a moment, feels the weight of his want, his desire, and compares it to the fraying wisps dragging along the linoleum. 

But he doesn’t reach for them. 

He is wing clipped and flightless. You hold the only feather that gives him lift between the monoliths of your teeth. 

A fine place to keep it, he thinks and turns around, ready to leave on unsteady feet, but—

"Seven," you say, firm and sure. No nonsense. But when he turns, he catches the pallor of your knuckles gripped tight around the clipboard. You hold it to your chest like a shield. The vipers in your eyes quiet their hissing, tongues lashing out to scent the air. "There's this place in Manchester that makes the best Beef Suya."

You're not asking him. 

(But you don't really have to, do you?)

His lips pull up. He catches the drifting threads in his bare palm. "Manchester, mm?"

"I hope you like a little bit of spice."

"I can handle the heat." 

You swallow thickly, and he thinks the action on anyone else might be easily mistaken for nerves, but the livewire that pulls taut between you thrums with a heavy sense of anticipation. 

"I hope so, John," he startles at the mention of his name. It makes your lips curl back, and he shouldn't find it so mesmerising when can't tell if it's a smile or a sneer. "Otherwise I'd be quite disappointed." 

His chin dips to his chest. It renders his voice to little more than smoke and ash, but you shudder from across the room at the growl. 

"Wouldn't want that, now, would we?" 

It isn't breathless when you speak, but he licks his lips and tastes the pulsing excitement that sparks in the air. It curls in his lungs. Saltwater on burning coals. 

"Don't be late." 

It's a promise, he thinks; a warning, too. A threat. "Wouldn't dream of it, love."

He turns away from you, shielding the growing smile from your searching gaze, but your voice stops him short at the door, fingers curled around the frame.

“And Price?”

“Yes, love?” He calls, featherlight in a way he hasn’t felt since he was eighteen and free. Ready to soar, to fly.

"You know," you say, brows knotting together. Despite the severity of your expression, there's a note of playfulness between your teeth. "If you wanted to see me, you could have just asked." 

After dinner, they fucked so nasty that Qadesh could be heard gagging across the aether.

[orenjjj]

also this one is so cute!

[thunderheadfred]

Trying to find a dupe for my mom’s holiday cookie recipe (which was unfortunately lost to time) but web searching for recipes these days is like wading through an AI ghost-written ad-pocalypse hellscape. I swear I’ve yet to see a single recipe “blog” written by an actual human being in the top page of results, and those are the ones that aren’t just fake spam redirect sites 🫠

[h0wdyydee]

DAILY POORLY DRAWN GROGU EVERYDAY UNTIL 2022 ENDS: DAY 91

that lunar eclipse last night sure was fun!

[strawberry-pretzels]

what if i break my skull trying to bash it on the table

[chocolatey-umbreon]

if renfield wins over seward im going to be so mad

he didn’t even make it like the first round this is so upsetting.

i don’t care about the malpractice i care about the anxious lonely nerd who thinks he’s so put-together crying into his phonograph when he can no longer stand the horror.

[atyped]

i  wanna  redo  my  tags  but  that’s  soooo  much  workkk

[sunxstreaker]

Someone will have to read the first chapter of volume 6 to me i cannot fucking look at that art for 100+ pages

[valkatra]

OMG ya'll Interview With the Vampire episode 1 got me dying

[sjoongki]

it’s so hot i don’t deserve this

[mixxsweetheart]

ignore the fact i didnt draw that bird pattern thing I didnt feel like it </3

[novelmonger]

Hiya! It's Windmill from Discord! Saw the prompt meme - could you do Obi-Wan and Qui-Gonn with "I love you. You know that, right?" If you're up for it! Thanks <3

Hi Windmill!

Let Me Count the Ways ask game

(Note that this follows the canon of the Jedi Apprentice books - set right after #8, The Day of Reckoning - but I tried to make it still understandable for those who haven't read them.)

Obi-Wan had already powered down the lights in his room in the Temple and lain down on his sleep-couch when someone knocked on his door. He'd felt a pulse in the Force a moment before, and instantly knew the person on the other side of the door was Qui-Gon.

Strange. They'd seen each other not long ago, for a time of meditation in the Room of a Thousand Fountains. And they were due for a training exercise at 0600.

Slowly, Obi-Wan sat up, pushing aside his blanket. “Enter,” he said, reaching over to turn on a lamp.

The door slid open and Qui-Gon stepped inside. “I apologize for disturbing your rest,” he said stiffly.

Obi-Wan shook his head, shifting to sit cross-legged on top of his sleep-couch. “I wasn't asleep.”

Qui-Gon nodded, then paced back and forth across the small space, hands clasped behind his back. He'd left his cloak behind, Obi-Wan noticed, and his dark hair fell loose about his shoulders. It was as though he'd been in the process of turning in for the night, then realized he'd forgotten something and come directly here.

Tentatively, Obi-Wan quested out towards him in the Force. Their bond had been damaged, fractured, since everything that had happened on Melida/Daan. They were in the process of mending it, and their unofficial mission together on Telos had taken them a good distance down that path, but Obi-Wan knew it would still take a long time before they could restore the deep trust that had once existed between them.

Qui-Gon paused, gazing down at the workbench where Obi-Wan had left his lightsaber after cleaning it moments ago. As he stood there, an answering thread in the Force touched Obi-Wan's, like fingertips brushing against each other. Obi-Wan was surprised at how hesitant it felt as well.

“Tahl reminded me today,” Qui-Gon said slowly, absently straightening the tools on the workbench, “that we cannot simply return to the way things once were. And nor should we. We are not the same as when we first met.”

“Master Yoda said something similar to me,” Obi-Wan said with a wry smile. “'Expect not to tread the same path twice, for a path through sand it is, washed away by the tide.'”

Qui-Gon snorted, but he looked amused rather than annoyed. “And Tahl spoke to me of pottery. We're being conspired against by poets.”

Obi-Wan grinned, just as Qui-Gon glanced up with a twinkle in his eye. Their gazes connected for only a moment, but it was one of those moments Obi-Wan had learned to prize above all else in recent days. It was a moment that reassured him that, however else their relationship might change going forward, the bond between them was still intact.

After a moment of silence, Qui-Gon left the workbench and sat down at the foot of the sleep-couch. There was a deliberate quality to his movements, as though he were about to say something of vital importance. Obi-Wan found himself straightening attentively. This was why Qui-Gon was here.

“Tahl also counseled me to be more open with you, Obi-Wan. Too often, I fall into the trap of thinking that, because I can see a path forward, you will also see it and agree with me.” He shook his head. “It is dangerous when a master forgets that his apprentice is also a being with wisdom to contribute.”

“But I was wrong!” Obi-Wan blurted out, his hands curling into fists on his knees as shame pooled in his gut—just as it did every time he thought of that day. “I was wrong to...to defy you, and steal the ship, and....”

“Yes.” Qui-Gon reached out a hand, settling it on Obi-Wan's shoulder. “You were wrong. And so was I, Padawan. I was the one who put you in a position where you felt such actions were necessary. But perhaps, had we taken the time to communicate more openly...some of that could have been prevented. You are my apprentice, Obi-Wan. Not my servant. We are meant to be a team.”

The warm, comforting weight of Qui-Gon's hand on his shoulder somehow made the shame break apart and fade away into nothing, like mist on a warm morning. Obi-Wan looked into those wise blue eyes, full of the esteem and respect he'd been afraid he would never see again. So unlike that day on Melida/Daan when they had turned icy and forbidding, as Qui-Gon had held out his hand for Obi-Wan to give up his lightsaber.

Confusion. Betrayal. Outrage. That was what they'd both been feeling, on the day their bond had shattered. Neither of them had been able to understand the other's decisions, and neither had been willing to explain or ask further questions. They had each known they were right, and the very thought that the one closest to them could possibly disagree was unfathomable.

And that had made their relationship brittle, too easily broken. Maybe this was what Qui-Gon had been talking about, when he'd said on Telos that he looked forward to their next disagreement. If they argued, that meant they both knew they weren't of the same mind, and they could work together towards a solution. It didn't have to mean they would abandon each other again.

“I'll try to live up to that,” Obi-Wan said quietly, as Qui-Gon's hand slipped from his shoulder. “I want to earn your trust again. I want to be worthy of it.”

Qui-Gon sat quietly for a moment, then got to his feet, his back to Obi-Wan. At first, Obi-Wan didn't think he would say anything, but finally he said, in the softest voice he'd ever heard from him, “I love you, Obi-Wan. You know that, right?”

Obi-Wan stared at him. “I...yes. Yes, I know.”

It wasn't exactly that Jedi didn't speak of love. Attachment was forbidden, but the entire Order was built on a foundation of love—the selfless kind of love that led to thousands of beings devoting their entire lives to aiding strangers across the galaxy. And of course every Jedi had special affection for their closest friends and teachers, not to mention the deeper-than-blood bond between Master and Padawan.

But Qui-Gon had never been one to speak openly of his feelings. His first thought was always for the mission, or for a lesson to pass on to Obi-Wan. He was foremost a Jedi Knight, and secondly a teacher—as it should be. But underneath it all, he was still a man. A man with emotions and cares and, yes, affections too.

Of all people, Obi-Wan shouldn't have been surprised to see evidence of that. He had seen evidence of that, plenty of times before. But it was still strange to hear Qui-Gon speak of it so bluntly.

Qui-Gon was almost at the door by the time Obi-Wan realized he was leaving. Apparently, he'd said what he'd come here to say. “Master, wait!” Obi-Wan sprang to his feet.

Pausing with his hand on the door, Qui-Gon looked over his shoulder.

Nervously, Obi-Wan swallowed hard. He'd never said this to anyone, but when he instinctively reached out to the Force, it rang with the chimes of a hundred golden bells in his heart, and he knew it was the right thing to say. “I love you too, Qui-Gon. I always have. Even then.”

Even when he was angry and hurt. Even when they were shouting at each other. Even when Qui-Gon left him on a war-torn planet. Even when their connection in the Force frayed and snapped, and it seemed pointless to hope they could regain even a fraction of what they'd once had.

Though Qui-Gon didn't move, it felt to Obi-Wan as if he had reached out his hand and grasped his. The Force wrapped around both of them like a warm blanket, and Obi-Wan found himself aware of Qui-Gon's breathing and heartbeat, in a way that normally didn't happen except sometimes in the heat of battle, when all of their focus centered on their movements synchronizing and complementing each other.

For a moment, Obi-Wan thought he caught a glimpse of the future. All of his worries about whether they could mend the rift between them faded away, because he knew they would be together. Perhaps not always—eventually, Obi-Wan would grow up and leave Qui-Gon's side. One day, he would become a Jedi Knight. One day, he would take on a Padawan of his own.

But nothing would come between them like this again. Not really.

“Yes, my Padawan,” Qui-Gon murmured, turning once more to the door. “I know.”