Who: Obi-Wan Kenobi and Dani Moonstar What: Obi and Dani discuss the mutant situation and the concept of soulmates, and the possibility of having more than one at a time... When: Sunday Afternoon Where: Dani's Home Rating: PG-13; Semi-serious subject matter, also kissing Status: Complete
Typically, Sunday mornings were spent driving Mrs. Higgins to church, and killing an hour in a coffee shop until it was time to take her back home; and although Obi-Wan had enjoyed actually entering the place of worship on that one occasion a few weeks ago, the routine had not changed. Until now. Doom was to blame for that.
At the moment, Doom referred to Dani’s pet squirrel. His little stowaway.
But it soon referred to something else, as he began to text with Dani from the church parking lot. Usually, phrases like I need to talk to you walked hand-in-hand with some level of doom, if such a thing could be graded. So instead of drinking coffee, Obi had spent the hour with a tight knot in his stomach. Loving someone was always a risk. But he’d learned that a very long time ago...
He pulled into Dani’s driveway and turned the key. The engine breathed its final sigh. Obi looked sideways at the squirrel sitting in the passenger seat. “There’s no chance you know what this is about, do you?”
The squirrel, of course, could not answer him, but it tried to anyway, with an angry-sounding chittering noise that sounded like fierce scolding. Possibly this had to do with the lack of trail mix in any of Obi's pants pockets, an amenity to which Doom was normally accustomed to.
The chiding subsided quickly enough, and the squirrel was soon making his way over to stow himself away in one of the aforementioned pockets.
The little tirade was all the warning Dani really needed to know that Obi had arrived 'home', though of course Ho'nene was already running around the downstairs trying to find a way to get out the door faster. Amused, she took the stairs in twos and headed to the door to let the dog out, then leaned against the frame and watched him from his place still in the car.
Following the chittering, Obi was not sure what would happen as Doom dove for him, but when the little guy took on residence in one of his pockets it brought a much-needed smile to his face. And it was hard to shake the smile at the sight of Ho'nene bounding down the front path.
Obi shut the car door behind him, walking slowly as he attempted to read Dani's pose alone and block any emotional information that might cloud his judgement. It was getting slightly easier to do that, like he was building something like a muscle.
"I wasn't able to stop for any of that trail mix," he said, once he was at the door. "I think he's sore over it. Mrs. H gave him a scare." Reading between the lines, he was asking Dani to be gentle with him, because he was very nervous.
"He's always sore over something or other," Dani joked. She retrieved the squirrel from his little hidey hole and backed away from Obi long enough to let the dog jump up and lick at him, before shooing all the animals away and shutting the door.
In all honesty, he didn't even need to be so nervous. She tried to drive that home by pulling him in and giving him a quick kiss. The smell of fresh coffee wafted in from the kitchen - she'd brewed a pot up in preparation for his arrival. Hopefully the warm, familiar smell would also put him at ease. Though perhaps it wouldn't. It was about a 50/50 split as far as conversations while drinking coffee with him were concerned.
She broke off the kiss and took his hand, gently leading him towards the kitchen, "Is Mrs. H okay? Doom didn't give her a heart attack, did he?"
The kiss was like a breath of air after behind underwater a long time. He even felt a little sigh slip between his lips on the way to the kitchen. He walked straight for the coffee pot.
"She's made of strong stuff," he replied, pouring a cup. "I think she's more concerned that you keep him as a pet."
Obi poured a second cup and passed it to her as he turned. He leaned against the counter. "So... what's on your mind?" he asked. There was no point putting whatever it was off, and he was less of a coward these days.
"He's had all of his shots," Dani qualified, with a shrug of her shoulder. She took the coffee mug from his hand, then parked herself up on one of her countertops with it, doing her utmost best to be casual.
She liked that he got straight to the point, though she took a fortifying sip of coffee before proceeding, "After the big green guy, Scott got a few of us on the horn. There's been a lot of talking about what people with powers... mutants... might do. Together, to make the world a better place."
The mug at his lips faltered a bit. He had been expecting... well, some other kind of topic. He tilted his head and nodded. "...Go on."
"... It's a big problem, Obi," Dani made a hand gesture with one hand, coffee mug still carefully held in the other, "I used to be a part of something in that other world called the X-Men. Well... my squad started as a junior squad. A new one. We called ourselves the New Mutants. Only it wasn't an easy life."
It wasn't even remotely an easy life. She frowned, and took another sip before continuing, "We went from mission to mission. No down time. No time to deal. No decompression. Doug died, and the X-men faked their deaths moments after we got back. We didn't even know it was fake. It was like that a lot. We were soldiers. It's not a safe life."
"Neither was mine," Obi said plainly. His face was stony, but his eyes were sharpening. "In my previous life, I was a General in the Grand Army of the Republic." (God, that had rolled a bit too easily off his tongue!) "So, I know what it means to be at war..."
Of course, the films had not gone far into that chapter of his legend. Obi lifted his coffee back to his lips. He felt, if not exactly proud, at least competent. "But why do you want to talk about this now? Do you see a real threat arising?"
"That's not the point." Dani grumbled, then sighed, "Why talk about this now? Do you not understand this? Were YOU ever hunted just for being a Jedi? I have a gene that makes me different, and the world was hell bent on subjugating or killing all of us."
It was a topic she was extremely torn on. She didn't want that life. She understood why Emma didn't want it. But she couldn't run away from it either, and she didn't know what she wanted or how better to handle it.
"If we draw too much attention to ourselves, just be being out there, it'll happen all over again. Scott's nightmare. All of us in ruins and dead. None of us remaining. All over a single gene."
With a shudder, Obi's head fell, and his eyelids fluttered against a sting of pain he could not fully grasp while awake. If his mouth had not suddenly gone dry, he would have gulped. "I was..." he said, after a few solid and silent moments. "I know what that's like. I went into hiding for twenty years."
He still had not lifted his head. His voice was low, mostly breath. He began to nod.
Obi placed the mug on the countertop. He walked toward Dani and hopped up beside her. His hands fell between his knees and he considered them, then reached over for one of hers, lacing their fingers together. He ran his thumb across her skin. He lifted his eyes. “What did you discuss, to prepare for this possibility?”
The problem, as far as Dani was concerned, was that Scott wasn’t even thinking of it that way. She squeezed Obi’s hand a bit, “I didn’t know you had to go into hiding, I’m sorry. But you do understand then, I think. Only we never went into hiding. My entire life that I am aware of from 13 or so onward was war. And Scott isn’t even...”
She shook her head, “We’re talking about building a response team to help with things like the Hulk. The big Green Guy. And it sounds like he’s listening to our concerns, but I don’t think he is. Instead of planning for ‘what happens when we’re hunted again’ he’s gone straight to ‘it won’t happen like that this time’. But it will. It will, because people will see us out there. Simply by putting us out there like that, it will.”
“I told him we should only use our powers as a last resort. If it were up to me we wouldn’t use them, at all. And it seems so weird to say this to a Jedi. Everyone here loves Jedi, but I wonder how they’d feel if they knew I was sleeping with one.”
Obi wasn't even tempted to smile at the final comment, though his ears did turn the slightest bit pink. They were sharing a bed. It wasn't exactly the same thing. Not yet, anyway. Soon, hopefully. Maybe. Eventually...
"You're right, I'm not really in danger. At least, it doesn't seem that way." Unless a certain Sith Lord crossed over into this new world. "For now."
Obi scratched his beard and continued, "When the Green Guy showed up, Kitty got in contact with me and advised me against doing anything foolish. And we spoke, briefly, about your world and that a team of some sort that might take shape." He paused and glanced down at their hands, still tightly woven. "Would you have me, as part of that?"
The terminology was good enough as far as she was concerned. ‘Dating’ hadn’t seemed the right word choice, since they were pretty well past that. ‘In love with’ was harder to get out.
Dani let out a long sigh, but it was one of relief more than anything else, “You’re a part of my life, and that makes you, in some ways, a part of this. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. Because if I’m going to do this, I can’t do it halfway. And I’d rather be doing it with you.”
He brought her hand to his lips and have Dani's knuckles a quick kiss. "I want to be part of this," he said with conviction. "I'd want it even you weren't here, or didn't. But the fact that you are and you do, it makes it something I must be a part of."
“I’m relieved, glad, and actually somewhat anxious to hear that. But I don’t think telling you to stay away from it would have gone over well, not with me boldly tossing myself into the fray.”
Her other hand was still clutching onto a coffee mug, and she took a moment to suck some of it down before nodding her head at him. This part out of the way, she tried to gather the strength to get to the next part of the things she’d been meaning to say to him.
Her texts with Rahne the other night had fueled this internal debate, and she’d sussed through it for most of the morning while he’d been out.
“Obi... do you think it’s possible to be head over heels in love with someone, but soulmates with someone else? Or … possibly, soulmates with two people at once?” She glanced at him as she spoke. Her tone was far less confident than it had been, while discussing the other topic.
His pupils dilated reactively, both in rapture and in fear. It was a strange question. They seemed to be venturing towards the kind of topic that had made him so nervous in the first place.
There was a someone else, and that was rarely a good thing. Perhaps he was a hypocrite, to suddenly feel so ill over it. After all, he had Loras in this world, Anakin in the other. And there was Siri, too; although it had lately been easy to push her from his mind, even if Dani did remind him of her quite a bit, in all honesty.
"It might be possible," he said at length. "Although I'm not sure I... nevermind. Who? Have I met the person you're talking about?" He was still holding her hand. Tightly.
Dani realised belatedly, from his reaction to her words, that she’d said the wrong thing. Or she’d said the right thing, but probably in the very wrong way. She turned a bit on the counter so that she could better look at his face, and shook her head, “It’s different, that’s why I was asking. Only I should have framed it in a different way. Here, in this world, she’s a good friend. I don’t know yet if she’s a soul mate or not, not yet. I feel drawn to her, but in a way that I can’t say is … well I can’t put a label on it. In the other world, we loved each other, but... it’s a confusing love. We both had relationships with men that we loved, besides.”
She took a deep breath and let it out, steeling herself for the words she was about to say next, “Because I believe that you and I fit together too well to be anything else. But then if she’s here, and she is, I’m not sure how that works.”
At this point, he slipped himself from the counter and fetched his coffee mug. Strange though it was, he needed a little caffeine to settle his nerves. His hand felt a little empty now, without hers in it. But he was a master of appearing cool under pressure.
"I don't know if soulmate is a good term to describe anyone. It's a bit... idealistic or utopic, don't you think? ...But you could do better than me as a soulmate."
Maybe she shouldn’t have said anything at all. Dani thought perhaps she’d definitely said something wrong, especially considering the words that had just come out of his mouth in return. She almost looked stricken, in fact. She felt like he’d slapped her.
She looked down into her coffee mug, and tried to get a handle on herself before she broke down into tears, or angry shouting, or both, “...You don’t feel the same way, and I’m an idiot.”
Immediately, his coffee was back on the counter and forgotten. Perhaps there had been too much churning inside him--too many memories of people who had chosen other things over loving him--and it would have been better to bite his tongue for a while. Because he wanted to fly to her, but he could not deny how frightened he was by the presence of a someone else. A someone whom he was now very sacred might do a much better job of loving Dani while she was asleep than he could awake.
He took a few halting steps toward her. "Oh, Dani. I'm sorry. I..." But Obi wasn't sure what to say next, how to explain himself. He took a few more steps to close what remained of the space between them. He was close enough to touch her now, but was sure she'd slap him away. "I'm... very scared... of losing you. I should not have snapped like that..."
The ironic thing was that Dani didn’t even consider Rahne to be a someone else at all. She was confident in her feelings enough to have broached the subject with him because of that. Because Rahne didn’t feel like a threat. Even in that other place, she hadn’t been a threat in any of the cases where Dani had loved another man. She’d been an additional love, but one that was very hard to pinpoint.
It was because of that, probably, that she had no idea why he would even be afraid. The thought had never crossed her mind, “... Losing you is not an option. It wasn’t one. I’m a little confused about what she meant to me. About what she might mean to me. But she isn’t a threat to you, or to us. I thought I made that clear, but now I’m just going to say it plainly.”
Additionally, it was no small thing that this person in question was another woman. That detail had not gone unnoticed, but he felt wary and slipped it into his “pocket” for the time being. Obi's head fell, and his hands found the counter on either side of Dani. He shook his head at the floor before lifting his eyes. "I'm sorry... I'm being childish, aren't I?"
“Well you’re being something, but maybe I didn’t explain it right, either,” Dani admitted. She looked down at him and laid a kiss against the top of his head, then nuzzled her lips at his hair, “You’re afraid. You know I understand that.”
Obi wished he was something a kiss could fix. His hands found her hips, but his head remained low. “Yes, but that doesn’t give me license to react like that. So... petulantly.”
She wrinkled her brow, then caressed a hand under his chin and gently lifted it up so that she could look him in the eyes, "It hurt. What you said, hurt. You lashed out, and I think you had a reason for that, but I don't think it's all on me. You're acting like a wounded animal. One that's been hurt and mistreated, before. Obi... I love you."
She set her coffee mug down so that her other hand could cup his cheek, "Rahne is a lot of things to me, in this world, and even in that other one. But the dream world isn't in our kitchen, right now, and neither is she. Rahne doesn't sleep next to me at night to ward off the nightmares, or dry my tears when I wake up screaming. Rahne isn't the person my animals adopted, Rahne doesn't slip and call this place home. And I would never in my life willingly or purposefully hurt you."
It was still a struggle to keep his head up, even with her hand beneath it. Obi's eyes continued to wander, evading Dani's piercing gaze for as long as he could, and flicking away tears. He did, in fact, feel like a big, dumb animal. He was so emotionally clumsy that there were times he wondered if that was what had turned so many away: his sheer ineptitude; now, he sometimes questioned whether he actually had been a Jedi his entire life. It would have explained quite a lot.
It was not until her other hand was on his cheek that Obi's eyes finally accepted that they would have to lock on hers, and then he was her captive audience. His ears and skin began to warm. His fingers became nervous upon Dani's hips. He tried not to worry about all the things his brain was telling him he must worry about, tried not to think about the love of Dani's dream life being a woman--and the implication of all the things he would never be able to give her--and he tried most of all not to be overcome by the desire to make the most passionate love imaginable right there in the kitchen. He pressed his lips into a thin line and held his breath against the mounting tension in the pit of his stomach.
Obi nodded, eyes still locked on hers. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, in an effort to dispel some of the tension. It helped very little. He gave in to some of it and leaned in to kiss her. When he pulled back, it was only just enough so that he could speak. It was still as if they were sharing breath. "I'm more scared of the ways I will hurt you unintentionally. And there might come a time when I do something without realizing it at all... and then... " His throat tightened. He shook his head. "This is what I meant, when I said you might need to be very patient with me..."
"There was a time when that comment you made previously would have had you punched and then dragged to my door. I'm being very, very patient with you," Dani nuzzled her lips against his a bit, "At some point we're both going to have to come to terms with the fact that neither of us is just going to run away or disappear, leave, stop loving completely, or die. Maybe this relationship is going to be less like work and more like a war we fight together for a while, just to stay in it. And that's alright, too, as long as we fight for it together. I think it's worth fighting for. I think you are. And I don't care if you don't agree."
Obi’s eyes drifted shut and he drew a slow breath through his nose. When he opened them again, half-lidded was the best he could manage and his hands tightened their hold. “That might take a while,” he admitted, and his voice had become something dreamy by now. He couldn’t help it. “If you’re willing to let me fight beside you, I’ll do my best not to embarrass you.” He kissed her again.