II. The Lesson
Pairing: Master Sol x gn!Reader
Chapter Content: some light Jedi philosophy, lightsaber sparring, mutual pining, first kiss
Word Count: 2.7k
《 [series masterlist] 》 《 I 》
In an attempt to remain as cool, calm, and casual as possible, you’ve left your cloak in your room. You’d only have to take it off in the training room anyway, so you’re saving yourself the extra time and effort. Not that you’re overthinking things. At all. You’ve only re-layered your tunics and tabard half a dozen times, adjusted your belt twice that, and very nearly stepped out with only one boot. Whatever spell you had been under in Sol’s presence yesterday has completely worn off.
You arrive an hour earlier than you normally do, which is about fifteen minutes before Sol comes in with Jecki. If you remember right, Sol is done teaching the younglings by now and is off doing whatever it is he does in his spare hour between duties. While you’re a little deflated not seeing him right away, it’s for the best because his absence allows you focus and control. You can concentrate better on the saber, on your hands, on the slicing of air and the humming of the Force without him distracting you.
After some quick stretches, you unclip your saber and ignite it. The floor and nearby pillars reflect the light back to you, as well as a distorted image of your silhouette. A lifetime’s worth of muscle memory kicks in and your body is alive, thrumming with energy as your wrist twists, then your elbow, then your torso tilts and the saber swings in front, in back, in front again. Your wrist flicks and the saber swirls above your head, down behind your back, and finishes with a flourish at your side.
It feels like coming home.
Switching the saber from one hand to the other, you warm up your other side, copying your previous moments as precisely as possible even though it’s definitely your weaker side. This is the freedom you’ve been missing. You’ve been so fixated on Sol that it’s kept you away from the calm that saber work has always brought you – the repetition of the familiar, the Force as it flows through you, the shadows and highlights cast upon the walls as your saber arcs. Nothing could ever compare to this.
The saber flies into the air after you toss it. This is one of the fancier tricks you’ve seen some of the younger Knights and Padawans practicing, and you can already tell you won’t be able to catch this one properly, not without hurting yourself, so you jump back and flick the blade off with the Force. You fully expect it to clatter on the stone floor, and you’re hoping the fall doesn’t damage the casing or the kyber, but instead it… hovers.
It takes a millisecond to search the room for the source, and another to turn your head. Sol stands near the doorway with his arm outstretched, both eyes open and his face lightly furrowed in concentration. His attention flickers to you before refocusing on your saber, and it unexpectedly flies across the room into his open palm in the second it takes for you to catch your breath.
There’s something remarkably intimate about him holding this piece of you, something so vital to your being as a Jedi that you feel empty without it at your side. Still, if there were anyone you trusted to hold your saber, your very life, in their hands, you think it would be Sol. It just so happens that you also like to watch him hold it, whatever that means to the secret, affectionate creature that lives inside you.
“I’ve never seen you try that before,” he finally says. He starts for the center of the room, his gaze still focused on your saber as he rubs his thumb over the hilt.
You’re strangely breathless and you can’t understand why. “I was feeling adventurous. Saw some of the Padawans trying it the other day and, very foolishly, thought I should try it too.”
The corner of Sol’s mouth dimples into a crooked smile.
Wait, did he just say he’d never seen you try that before? He’s aware of the type of saber work you usually do? Heat blazes across your face at the realization, but Sol is too occupied to take notice, thank the Force. He continues to turn your saber over in his hand, though you’re not sure why. It isn’t so remarkably different from any other saber.
“Why did you think you would disappoint me?”
Your saber is returned, and you clip it back to your belt just to have something to do. “Well, I’m not a Master, for one thing. If I’m going to be sparring with you, I’d like to at least look like I know what I’m doing.”
“It certainly appeared that you did.”
You duck your head the moment he makes eye contact with you. Now that he’s finally here, your confidence wavers, and you know that your concentration will do the same the moment he begins to fight.
“What is it that makes you so unsure of yourself?” he asks with all the gentleness of a man who senses discouragement and knows it like the back of his own hand. “You are an accomplished dueler.”
If only he knew the magnitude of his question, he might choose to ask you something else. Huffing a breath out the side of your mouth, you start with a lazy, “Well, I–”
The air around you seems to vibrate, then electrify as Sol summons his own weapon into his hand and ignites it. He bears down upon you, and you know deep in your heart that he would never hurt you, but this knowledge does not override instinct. Your saber is in your hand without conscious thought, brandished and burning as his blade lands near the hilt. The junction where they touch burns white-hot, so starkly bright that it hurts to even look.
What are you doing? you mean to ask, but the words never come. You’re too enraptured by the flame of blue-white light reflected in his pupils to speak. How long have you spent watching him from afar, marveling at his skill, and now you find yourself on the receiving end of it? It feels unreal. It feels jagged and raw in the same way a cold wind off the sea does, exhilarating in some forbidden sense.
He retreats and you stumble back a step as your lightsaber comes to hang by your leg, still ignited but out of the way. It’s not proper form, but you’re too dazed to care. Sol spots this and advances again, giving you only the slightest margin for error as your blade comes screaming back into position to block him once, twice, three times before he backs up again.
“You react with instinct.” He begins to circle you with his blade extended toward your face. “Good.”
You feel a flash of irritation in your chest at this. While you’re certain (at least, you hope) he means well, this feels more like a Master testing his Padawan than a fellow Jedi electing to spar with you. You are not Sol’s Padawan and you’ve already fought to make your mark as a Knight, you don’t like feeling like a child again and certainly not at his hands. That’s not the kind of feeling you want from him.
“I don’t need a lesson,” you say as politely as you can, which isn’t very much at all currently.
Sol’s head tilts slightly in the way it always does when he’s considering something. “Then why am I here?”
Electric blue flashes across your vision as he slashes his way forward and you parry away. He’s not even giving you time to answer, let alone think, and you know it’s on purpose. Your Master’s used this trick on you several times, but that doesn’t mean you have to like it.
“Why am I here?” he repeats. He doesn’t even react when your blade swings past his shoulder and misses. “Why did you accept my offer?”
You swing again, agitated, and miss a second time, only to be pushed aside by an invisible hand so strong that it nearly knocks your breath from you.
“Because!”
Now that there’s some distance between you, you have a moment to think, to assess yourself, the questions he’s asking, and the answers you want to give. Sol, however, chooses not to give you that time. His arm extends, fingers splayed and palm open as that same invisible hand grasps you by the tabard and pulls. His wrist twists and you come flying into his hand like your saber had mere minutes ago. Instinct and fear kicks in again, and you find yourself forced to choose between freedom with no saber and close quarters defense in the amount of time it takes to decide to breathe.
Your saber drops to the floor, the blade disappearing into itself as you summon the Force to instead push yourself away from Sol and out of his grasp. The resulting blow is strong enough to knock you both off your feet, though you have just enough forewarning to brace yourself for impact. Cold, hard stone meets shins and knees, but you’re already up and recovering your saber. Sol isn’t far behind, but he’s clearly startled. Startled enough to have dropped his saber.
You are no Jar’Kai prodigy, and indeed, it’s been years since you’ve attempted to dual wield with any amount of seriousness, but you try now. It makes sense. It feels right. Sol’s saber is heavy in your hand, heavier and wider than yours, but it doesn’t fight you when you brandish it. His kyber sings a peculiar harmony with your own, as if they were exchanging greetings, embracing each other through the Force. It tickles in the back of your brain like a shot of spotchka.
Sol’s hand meets your wrist when you bring his blade down. The leather glove creaks under the weight of your blow, but his arm remains firm. Your other arm remains frozen mid-air as it quivers with the effort of resisting his Force. He’s got you pinned and while he can’t release you without putting himself back in danger, you can no longer land a blow on him without losing any ground. It’s a stalemate in its truest form.
You’re closer to him now than you ever have been before. His breath fans out across your face as it comes and goes in quick exhalations, and you find yourself wondering if you should’ve brushed your teeth again after lunch. If you’d known he’d be so close to you now, you would have.
“Why?” he grits through his bared teeth. “Why did you accept my offer?”
Something hotter than ice burns from your shoulder down to your wrist with the effort of fighting him. “Because I can’t focus,” you gasp. You won’t be able to hold on much longer. “Keep. Making mistakes.”
He presses his advantage until your arm shudders with enough strength to completely collapse. The saber is snagged from your hand as it drops and quickly redirected to spark somewhere near the column of your neck. There’s no real threat behind it. Sol is moments away from winning this round and your body is already tired.
“Let your instinct guide you,” he instructs, and though it burns to admit it, you know he’s right. “Don’t think. Feel.”
But that’s exactly what you don’t want to do, what you can’t do. Because to feel would mean to let the sin of your affection for him seep deeper and deeper into your bones until you can no longer draw it out like poison from a wound. To feel would be the most beautiful agony imaginable. To feel would be to dream of possibilities that can never be. You would rather not feel it at all, than to feel it and lose it in the end.
You shake your head. “I can’t.”
Sol frowns. He looks so beautiful bathed in the light of his kyber. “What are you afraid of?”
The blue saber deactivates, then your own, and the training room returns to normal, but your wrist remains trapped in the palm of Sol’s glove. He’s close enough now that the voluminous lower half of his robes fall around your knees, brushing your ankles as he adjusts his stance and leans further into you. Is this not everything you ever wanted?
“Tell me.”
And it’s the gentleness of this prompt that finally cleaves through your heart. You are, quite honestly, tired. Your heart and mind are exhausted from the burden of your guilt, from the knowledge that you are already so attached to a man you hardly know. You want to fight his inquisition, but more than that, you want to give in if only to find relief from the torment of not knowing.
With closed eyes and a trembling voice, you finally relinquish your secret. “Rejection. Abandonment.” Half-concocted visions of a future without the Jedi, without the Order or your Master or the life you’ve worked so hard to build, materialize behind your lids. All this because you tend to fall in love a little too fast? How is that fair? “Myself. I’m afraid of myself and what I could do to destroy my own life.”
Something knocks at the door to your mind. It is a familiar sensation, like the sound of boots on stone or a guiding command given between the sparking of saber blades, it burns golden-brown like the sun and the tunic on his chest, and it smells like incense from a far away planet, the incense you sometimes smell on his cloak when he passes you by. You let him in.
You think, at first, that sharing your mind with someone is a bit like a kiss. A gentle nudging of one mind against the other until both become one, pressing thoughts and feelings and vague ideas together like a mouth or tongue might go against your own. You think that it feels like the kind of intimacy you’ve always yearned for but feared you would never know. Then you realize that Sol is actually kissing you.
Shock ripples through you fast and hard enough to make your stomach simultaneously drop to the floor and catch in your throat. You can’t breathe, you can’t move, there’s only Sol and his lips and the blazing freedom of peace cutting through the noise that usually clouds your thoughts.
He withdraws far too soon, and it leaves your mouth tingling and bruised. Your eyes flutter open and are unsurprisingly met with the umber-blackened hue of his pupils. So close. So real. His chest heaves with the effort of… what, exactly? Does he suffer from the same strange side effect as you, the unimaginable urge to kiss him again and delve even deeper? Is he fighting to restrain himself as much as you are?
“I feel it, too,” he whispers, and his eyes drop to your tongue as it darts across the seam of your mouth.
“What?” You don’t even dare to dream, but what if…?
Sol swallows heavily. “The pull. You feel it like I do?”
The hand not grasping his lightsaber drops lazily against his sternum as you both shuffle awkwardly into more normal, non-battle stances. “I do,” you reply. “I have. For a long time.”
There is a soft rustling of fabric and breath as Sol takes a moment to clip your saber back to your belt – the feel of his fingers, even through his gloves, lingering on your belt will stick with you forever – and to gently pry his from your hand. Then he reaches for your shoulder and lays his hand there, his thumb rubbing a semi-circle into your collarbone.
“Is this what you were afraid of? That I would not return your feelings?”
The ease with which he sees through your carefully constructed walls before completely blowing them to pieces is startling. Not even your Master is quite this forward with you. It’s different, to be sure, yet oddly refreshing.
“Among other things,” is your bashful response, half murmured to the space above his shoulder.
“We must have the courage to say what we want, even if we are afraid.” His hand resettles upon your cheek and your breath rushes out of you in an instant. All you can think is Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol, the only prayer you’ll ever need. “Are you afraid now?”
“No.”
“Then… I would like to kiss you again.”
When he smiles, you feel it curling up around your heart, a string that ties you to him, first knotted when he summoned your saber into his hand and now finished with a kiss.
taglist: @wolffegirlsunite
45 notes
·
View notes