DISCLAIMER: Star Wars and all publicly recognisable characters, names and references, etc are the sole property of George Lucas, Lucasfilm Ltd, Lucasarts Inc and 20th Century Fox. This fan fiction was created solely for entertainment and no money was made from it. Also, no copyright or trademark infringement was intended. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. Any other characters, the storyline and the actual story are the property of the author.
They lay gasping together for only a moment, and then the Jedi rolled off her. He kept his hold on her hand, though, and as he came to rest beside her, he brought the hand up onto his chest and wrapped it with one of his hands, holding it above his heart.
Which was hammering. Shmi could feel it even through the layers of clothing, and both his hands were wet with sweat. Tatooine was a hard planet, and would strip moisture from you any way it could. Offworlders adapted to its heat, given time, but this man had been here less than a day.
Shmi rolled up to a sitting position, then leaned over Qui-Gon, took a deep breath, and blew a stream of air onto his sweaty face and throat. Qui-Gon's face relaxed into a grin of pure pleasure, though he closed his eyes against the slight puff of sand that came with it. Shmi sucked in more air and blew across his forehead and the closed eyes; a long, happy 'hmmmmmm' sighed out of him.
She wrapped her fingers around his hand and stood, tugging him up after her. His eyes came open, but he accepted the pull and stood up also, nearly a foot taller than she, and stood looking down at her. Shmi smiled, then ducked her head around his sides until she spotted the join of his sash. She undid it, and worked her way down the layers of his clothing until vest, tunic, and undertunic lay in a heap at her feet, nearly blending in with the sand.
There was little light in Tatooine's moonless night, but even that little showed the sweat clinging to his body. Nor had his breathing completely recovered, though he was standing in perfect calm, as he always did. He was still smiling, somewhat quizzically, as if amused and curious. He looked rather like an eeopie being loaded, Shmi thought, the way they would turn their heads and watch you with big calm eyes, like they didn't understand what you were doing, but were somehow naturally patient enough to just permit it. Now she bent over and tapped a boot, just as she would tap an eeopie's leg to get at its foot. There was a sound overhead that might have been a chuckle, and and the foot came up. QuiGon lifted his foot nearly to her waist, standing utterly still and perfectly balanced on one leg as Shmi unbound the boot's fastenings and slipped it off, then changed legs and let her repeat the process. Last of all came the trousers, still undone from the sex and sliding down the Jedi's hips. She peeled these off as matter of factly as she had the boots, and now Qui-Gon stood stripped in the desert night.
Feeling the air against his skin. She blew a little on his chest again, but then stood back just to watch him, and let him feel the cooling night breeze.
Qui Gon Jinn knew well that his great strength and greatest weakness were the same: it was the living Force he felt and heard most keenly, moved with as if it were the clothing he wore. A sense of it would touch him, stir lightly as it had done the day before in Otoh Gunga when he began to turn from Jar Jar Binks; would say, _there is a depth here you have not seen, Qui-Gon,_ and he would turn to it with easy obedience, _show me then_.
There were few moments in a Jedi's life that were wholly his or her own, quiet suspensions between event and event, choice and choice, in which a knight could bask. And Qui-Gon knew this was not truly one of them: the woman had wanted him to follow, and he had done so, moved by curiosity and desire and something more -- again, the small touch of the present's insistence on its own importance. It was part of the haze of possibilities that surrounded the boy like a bright cloud, this child who was strong with the Force, and whose one powerful attachment in life was to this woman, his mother. But it was also to do with the woman herself, wise and protective within the confines of the small life fate had allowed her, fighting her fears with her faith in her son.
But this moment, Qui-Gon thought, *this* moment. The breeze, the sweat drying on his back, the woman who'd made love with him standing a few feet away in calm happiness and harmony, the cooling sand under his bare feet and mounding up between his toes, the sense of the village of Mos Espa and more distantly, of the Naboodian transport with his Padawan aboard ...
Almost every being that wore clothes tended to stand a little differently when stripped of them, Shmi mused, but not this one. The Jedi Knight was still as a rock... well, not a rock, but a tree, she thought, though many years had passed since she'd last seen a wild tree. There was neither bravado nor shyness in his nakedness, no preoccupation with what she might be thinking. There was no sense of greater vulnerability about being undone.
//Well, not quite undone,// she thought. That hair was still so tightly disciplined . . . she stepped forward again, went behind him and reached up to set her hand to its binding. There was the smallest tightening in his shoulders as she began, but it released and he bent back to make her reach easier. The binding was thin wire wrapped in cloth with no knot, she found, and tried to simply slide it off. There was a small popping sound as a few hairs ripped from his scalp.
"Oh, I'm sorry!" she said, appalled -- the first words spoken between them -- but the Jedi was laughing. He turned to face her, his face bright with humor.
"Jedi are taught to welcome pain as a friend, a teacher," he informed her, his voice solemn but his eyes merry. He folded his arms in his grave and patient stance, tempting her.
"Oh, well," Shmi said back, equally mock-serious, the lilt of her voice growing even more musical with suppressed fun, "let me give your friend his full welcome." She ducked behind him again and slid the binding all the way off, carrying a good number of hairs with it.
"Ouch!" he said, but laughed again, scratching his scalp vigorously against the pull. It had the pleasant effect of spreading his hair in all directions -- it was fine hair that weighed little, and it stood out in odd bunches and flows where his fingers had gone through it, to be caught in little wisps and threads and lifted by the night breeze. But in the next instant he seemed serious again, the laughter fading from his eyes.
//So little time for play,// Shmi thought, watching his reaction. // Is this Annie's great dream?// With her son, despite their status as owned people, Shmi had much time to play, and there were few games he played with his friends that he did not also play with her. Annie had reached the age where he did not like to be kissed and hugged like a little child, but Shmi was still strong and agile enough to pin him some of the time, kissing and tickling him until he giggled helplessly. //Did this Jedi ever giggle? Even once? // she wondered. //What kind of life takes away one's laughter?//
They studied each other, separate selves who had been locked into a single animal only minutes before. Both well past their first youth, both slender and straight but showing the markings of time on face and body, the roughening of skin, the small weaknesses of flesh against time, gravity, emotion. Though she was clothed and he naked, the Jedi seemed not to mind her careful scrutiny as it travelled past his face to the rest of him.
With natural curiosity, Shmi looked first at the organ that had given her such pleasure, dark and slackened -- and still large, she notice with a barely suppressed smile. But really it was the rest of him that was most interesting. The man was almost all muscle, and hard, used muscle at that.
It made her wonder about his life, about the nature of the quiet that was wrapped around him naked exactly as it had been clothed, because this patently was not the body of a man who had spent his years talking. They were called Guardians of the Peace, but this body had suffered wounds -- curiously, it was the fresh skin that gave this away, the traces of bacta-grown skin that must have replaced his natural skin. It had not yet had time to roughen and be worn -- and this had happened at many different times, for his skin turned out to be a patchwork of ages.
She shivered, though the air was warm.
The next instant she was in his arms, held close and hard against him. He dwarfed her, surrounding her above, behind, at each side. It was wonderful to be inside this giant presence. Pressed against him, she looked nearly straight up to meet his eyes, and read in them, the instant before it happened, the kiss. This was possession again, but also inquiry, dance, praise. His hands curved her into him, one splayed wide across almost the whole breadth of her back, the other reaching down to curve around her ass. She brought her hands up to his face, cradled it, stroked the beard, ran her fingers into the fine, soft hair. They paused to breathe and found themselves standing almost perfectly still at a moment when even the night wind seemed to have paused in its motion.
Qui-Gon Jinn felt Force-flooded, perfectly balanced, as if this were exactly where the Force itself had wished him -- not his own carnal desire, not the curiosity of a woman who'd been a stranger to him scant hours before.
Pausing for a moment to test himself, his sense of the Force, even as he held Shmi Skywalker tightly (wonderfully!) against him, he reflected for perhaps the thousandth or ten thousandth time that both his Master and his Padawan were in much greater harmony than he was himself with the balancing Force, the weight upon the present of past and future. Even so, when they had first landed he had felt a whisper of something dark, somewhere ... it was here on Tatooine, and he thought now that this was the disturbance Obi-Wan had remarked on before, that he himself had not sensed. "Something elsewhere," Obi-Wan had said as they stood on the Trade Federation ship. Perhaps because the deceptions and attacks had begun that would ultimately land them in this desert place, the balancing Force had touched Obi-Wan from the future and made him feel slightly troubled, while Qui-Gon had sensed nothing yet. And Yoda, his Master, was among the rare Jedi whose gift gave them specific knowledge of possible, even probable future events, rippling outward from the present.
It could make a Jedi too cautious, too stinting of present beings to be act solely for the future's benefit, Qui-Gon believed, and this was the root cause of his occasional defiance of the Council's guidance. It was also, however, a great danger to him, as he was always mindful that haste, impetuousness, and seeking for present satisfactions were all easy paths to the temptations of the Dark Side. A quick resolution that seemed to satisfy the moment could leave an imbalance in the Force that would go unfelt until it exploded into tragedy. And every Jedi initiate had the potential treachery of life's pleasures drilled into his or her consciousness from earliest childhood.
His present was this woman, and their pleasure together. And at the moment, as honestly as he sought for it, he could not find even the small ripples of potential disturbance that he had felt while he followed her away from the lights of Mos Espa. Whereever the darkness was that he sensed was hidden on Tatooine, it was not here or now, not in this experience, this woman.
And what beauty she had in her setting, a jewel in the desert. She had the strange gift for the happiness that must exist in the center of sadness; while not Force-sensitive, it seemed as if she too believed in the richness of the existing moment, of the need to honor it, of the need to fill it with one's own existence.
He bent and nuzzled her face to have access to her mouth again, and kissed her as deeply as before. He broke the kiss, but only to kiss the rest of her face, big openmouthed kisses, brushing his lips across her skin, closing, kissing, moving, stooping low to kiss her throat, one hand sliding up to curve around the back of her head. He stopped, then, and pushed her backward lightly, his hands on her shoulders. Shmi landed on her heels, raking his face and finding joy on it. His fingers probed at her looped and pinned braid, brought it down, slid off the binding and began unbraiding her hair with such speed and certainty that it seemed like something he must do every day.
Shmi's earlier thought recurred, but this time as a joke, and she said it aloud. "Jedi training?" she teased gently. He grinned, but kept at his work until, moments later, his fingers were fanning her thick black hair wide, draping it around her shoulders.
Now his hands fell to her waist. With the same amazing ease, he unclasped her belt, her skirt and her tunic, sliding every stitch off her in what seemed like seconds. It really was astonishing.
"Jedi training?" she repeated a little hesitantly.