Notes: Can't speculate any more on Episode 1, so that leaves two and three. . . Nothing I say is true, you realize; some of it is false; and some of it is coincidence. Don't ask me which is which; I don't know, and if I did, I wouldn't tell.
Think of this as a fable, and all will be well.
Pairing: Q/O
Rating: PG
Series: I hope not.
Spoilers: Set pre-TPM, and post Ep 3 (I think, I don't really know, this is all spec).
Summary: Beginnings, endings, and loss.
Warnings: I don't use betas. :( Any mistakes are solely my fault and the fault of my *#^&@ spellcheck.

The small, stooped Master did not turn away from the fire, although he had felt the fluctuation in the Force which signalled the presence of another of his like as surely as if he had been struck by a hand. Movement was not necessary; not to do it would not prevent the inevitable. He stayed.

The mind that touched his groped its way through the darkness, seeking; he felt nothing of it but this, the reaching out of one lost, to him. It was a cold feeling, lonely. He knew who it was, this coldness he had felt before, the same sheen of frost which had touched another far too familiar ever to be forgotten.

He did not speak for a long time after he knew that he was no longer alone in the small circle of light around his fire. He had been sitting there for hours, waiting, without moving. The Force brought all he needed to him; he needed not to move, to draw it in.

"It is done," the other finally said. His voice was as hollow and alone as his life-essence, cracked and dried with loss. "All of it. We are the last."

The old Master nodded. At last he ventured to look upon the man opposite him, the waves of the flickering firelight turning him into a shimmering, ethereal visage. It was what was meant to be, somehow: a ghost-portrait of a man long lost, half-flesh, half-memory. The Elder allowed himself to remember the first sight of the man, and the last: the features were more pronounced, thinner; there was a sudden streak of silver in his hair, not yet overtaken by it, but soon; lines around his eyes and mouth marked by time and sorrow; and those eyes, still blue, were not his own. The Elder had seen those eyes in the face of another, in another life; one lost. He was glad that the living man had them, now. "Know you you have done the right thing," he said; it was a question and not.

"Yes," the man answered, shaking his head in disagreement with his own words. "Yes. It had to be done. We both knew."

"Three of us, there were," the Elder corrected. Pain flared for a second in the younger man's eyes. "Forgotten, you have?"

His lips tensed, released. "No."

"From the first," the Elder said. "Your destiny it was, from the first."

"He knew when he asked of me - ?" He could not finish.

The Elder shook his head at the fruitless question. "Ask, you both did, always that which you knew. So much the same, you were; a mistake it was, the closeness between you. A precious bond severed in the one you achieved; knew you both it would be so. And yet hate him you cannot, after all of this. Your destiny it was, from the first. Fight against it, you cannot. Hate him, you will not. Stronger than he, you are." He stoked the fire with the end of a long, pointed stick; sparks flew up to the heavens. "Stronger, you always were."

"No," the man said. "I cannot hate him. Not even hate could fill me up inside." He looked up, across the fire. "I cannot hate either one of them, though they have torn me to pieces; all I have for them is love. That's all I ever had, for both of them, even though my love was not enough to save them from their destiny. And still, it is not over, is it Master? This is not the end of Us, we two."

"No," the Elder said. "It is not. But you may rest, young one - "

The man smiled genuinely at the epithet; it had been years since he had been called - or had felt - young.

" - go somewhere, hide yourself, and rest. There will be another; there must be. He will find you, as your Master you did. Destiny of you both, it was. Yours remains - unfulfilled."

"He never told me," the man said, "what you said to him about his destiny, that day he came to you, asking for your help. Never. I didn't know if we had your leave - " His voice trailed off, wisps of vapour in the chill night air, evaporated by the fire.

The Elder looked at him, the question an open one. "Know, you did. Still, hurt you it could not," he said, after a moment, "now, to be told. It is now, as it was that day, too late."

The Elder knew, as he spoke, that the vision his words created rose up between the two of them, in the flickering firelight, real and fresh as the day it had happened, decades past.

The man knelt in the middle of the circle, a halo of light around his bowed head. The edges of that circle, normally filled with others, were broken. Only one stood, the Elder, in front of the kneeling man, so much his junior, despite the silver in his thick hair. A question hung in between him - guidance sought, permission asked for a thing which could not be permitted, which had never been between two of their kind, before. A Bond; that which could not be; that which went beyond the sacred Code of their kind. Guidance sought by the younger of the two, over yet another, younger than himself by half again; he desired a denial given him by another, something to rage against, fight, and acquiesce to. He had come to the one person he knew he could ask; the one person he knew would not give him what he sought.

The Elder moved, leaning heavily against the rough staff, closer to the man. "Know you what you are asking?"

"Yes." His voice, though barely more than a whisper, was sure; the Elder felt his feelings, testing them for falseness, for anything which would make him not do what he would do. Nothing was there, no question at all. He knew what he was doing, what he was asking leave to do. The Elder knew, in that surety, that it was done; the Bond had been created. Nothing that he could say - not a sharply worded 'no', not separation by time or distance - could prevent it; the physical manifestation of that Bond could be stopped, yes, but the Bond itself -

He was more sure than he had ever been of anything that they had not yet touched. There was nothing in the man that could have shielded that truth. He was an open wound, his heart bleeding and vulnerable. He had no defenses; the boy had stripped away every one, as soon - or sooner - as his Master could erect them. The man was exhausted with the effort to save himself; there was nothing that he could do now but give in.

It was done.

The Elder nodded his head. "Tell you I cannot what you will do; it is done, even now. Tell you only this, I can: no longer his Master, will you be. Train him, you will, and watch him grow. But see him - see who he is - after this, you will not. Shut off from you, his destiny will be."

"I realize that, Master," the man said, with bowed head. "That is why I have come to you. I need you to - "

"Watch him for you, I will," the Elder said, speaking the man's thoughts for him. "See him where you are blind."

A wave of relief, sadness - and fear, sharper than the rest - flooded the man, and he nearly slumped to the floor under the weight of released emotion. He nodded his head, unable to speak; he would have died rather than leave the boy alone so young, with no-one to watch over him. The other choice would have been to destroy the love, but how to do that, the man could not begin to comprehend. Remove his heart from his chest, perhaps; remove the heart of his beloved - that, also, he could not do. Even then - even in death - the love would have remained.

"Go to him, you must," the Elder continued. "Tonight. Fear you share; destroy it, you must, before it destroys - "

"Both of us," the man said, looking up. "I cannot let it destroy both of us."

"No," the Elder said. "Allow that, I cannot."

"Master, I must ask - will he - " The man could not continue. His question lay broken between him; along with the fragments of the man's heart, shattered.

"Tell you, I cannot, from this moment forward, the way his path lies. The choice has been made, for both of you."

The man nodded.

"Go."

The Elder watched the man across the fire, watched his eyes open, saw what he saw. Night followed that day.

The boy's eyes had been wild; he moved about the room, too small to contain him, his fear, and the loss of his Master. He knew that was what it was to be. The Bond they sought could not be allowed - there was no way. It was Wrong. His feelings - their feelings - were wrong, a mistake, a trial. They would leave here the same as they were when they arrived, but cleansed, purged like magic of this thing that had come between them. They would be Master and Apprentice; no more, no less. It would be the way it had to be.

The doors opened, and everything contained within flooded out, but for his physical presence. The moment that he saw the eyes of his Master, he stopped breathing. It was not true, it could not be; he shut his eyes, quickly, but not quickly enough. It was done. They were beginning; they were done.

He fell to his knees in tears, in anguish, cried as if his heart would break, mistaking the pain of the knitting wound for that which had broken it, already. He felt nothing, even as his Master's lips brushed over his face, absorbing his tears as they fell from his eyes, bitter salt that did not quench his thirst for them.

Still the tears fell as their lips joined, though softly; their bed, of lightest down and feathers, was thorns against their skin, and still they did not part. The Bond was pain, for one and the other. It joined them, sewed together two halves of what, in one man, would have been perfection; in two, it was destined to be nothing but tragedy. Still, they did not stop. They touched, breathed, felt, tore at each other, bled from every pore. It was danger, more black than the Darkest thing that they knew. It was bliss.

When it was ended, they lay, washed clean by the fluid of each other's bodies, closer in that instant than they ever had been, not daring to move. They knew that the first movement on either part would tear apart that first stitch that joined them; from that moment on, there would be fewer and fewer to Bind them, until the last one tore free, and They were One, and One, again.

The silence fell in between them for a long time. The Elder watched the flickering fire dance across the face, and shine in the hair, of the man, his eyes clouded with more than a dozen years of unshed tears, dried before they could fall. There was no new sorrow, here, no one to drink of his tears. He understood.

Finally, the man stood. "I must go."

"Yes." The Elder looked up at him. "Remember, you do, what I have taught you? When you fall, how to resist the pull - "

The man nodded. "I will do as you have said, Master. I will not become One with the Force. I will resist. I will not let it absorb me, join me. I will remain myself."

"In time," the Elder said, soothingly. "In time, you will rest. Lose yourself. Find yourself."

The man paused, his back turned on his Elder, looking instead out at the swampy regions before him. "Master, I must know - will we ever see each other again?"

The old Jedi took a long time before answering. Finally, he spoke. "Difficult to see, the future is. Always in motion, shifting."

The man nodded with a smile that did not touch his eyes, and made his slow way back to his ship, and away from the swampy planet, to lose himself in his destiny.

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