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The dreamfield where they met was nebulous and dim. It was a place of everywheres and nowheres, edges fading to mist like the slow creep of dusk. There was a strange kind of beauty in it, one that felt realer and more listless than the waking world at once.
By the time Obi-Wan came into the consciousness of sleep, Vader was already there. He watched Obi-Wan with resentful eyes, one pace away or one hundred; there was no difference in this world. Obi-Wan wondered just how long he’d been waiting, how many minutes or hours had passed since Vader had drifted away and found himself here.
“Tell me where you are,” Vader said without preface, as he did almost every night. There was no wind in this place to stir the folds of his cloak where he stood, but the fabric was so heavy it wouldn’t have mattered short of a gale. The black velvet was soft to the touch; Obi-Wan knew it intimately. He’d allowed himself to be spread out on that cloak a hundred times before, there upon a floor of all things and none.
“Hello to you, too,” Obi-Wan said dryly, and watched as Vader’s eyes tightened in irritation. He’d said all manner of things in all manner of tones in these brief, endless nights since Mustafar. He’d reasoned and raged and cajoled and accused, but in the end, he’d found that droll sarcasm provoked Vader the most.
“I’m not here to exchange pleasantries, old man.” The voice was biting and sharp, and the nickname meant to hurt. It was a reminder of different times, but it was apt enough in the end. Obi-Wan hadn’t known it was possible to feel so old, still shy of forty years, stretched faint and worn almost gossamer-thin. He tried to shrug it off, but it clung like sand on wet skin.
Obi-Wan smiled, as if they were revellers at a ball and he’d been amused. “And yet we’ve had so many pleasant encounters, here.” He thought of Vader’s hands in his hair, greedy and starved, of Vader’s mouth on his cock, insistent and tight. He thought of Vader fucking into his body with anger and ecstasy in equal measure. He couldn’t share those images, precisely—couldn’t send them along the twisted remnants of a training bond that had never been cut, couldn’t take the risk of sand and heat and suns bleeding through—but he didn’t need to. Vader thought of such things as frequently as Obi-Wan did; he could feel the certainty of it in his bones.
Obi-Wan couldn’t even begin to pinpoint when they’d made the shift from attempting to kill one another to this, but it was by far the most effective means of deflection he’d found yet. Vader’s desire was an inferno between them, so hot it was a match for Obi-Wan’s own.
Maybe one day, he wouldn’t even feel shame at that. He didn’t know if he wished that day to dawn or not.
“You can’t distract me forever.”
Obi-Wan could almost think that Vader had somehow read his mind if it wasn’t for the fact that he’d never made any true effort to hide what he was doing. It wasn’t like Vader could have missed it; better to wield openness like a weapon than to stake anything on a battle that had always already been lost.
“One day you’ll slip,” Vader said viciously. “I’ll make you slip.” The softness of the mist made Vader’s face seem starker as his lips twisted around those words, the angles sharp enough to cut the fragments of Obi-Wan’s heart. If there was one thing Obi-Wan wished existed here, it was a sun, to soften those planes and to light the smooth disorder of Vader’s curls. Perhaps, Obi-Wan thought, it would distract from the gold of Vader’s eyes.
He knew it to be a foolish thought even as it formed.
Obi-Wan shrugged one shoulder, slow and deliberate, and watched the way those eyes caught and held on the movement. “Why don’t you try right now?”
“Is that why you come here night after night? Because you want me to fuck you so badly?” Vader taunted, as if Obi-Wan had any real choice in his presence here at all. As if he had any more choice than Vader did. Early on, in those first few weeks that sleep had brought them here, Obi-Wan had tried to escape. He’d searched the hazy bounds of the mist. He’d tried to change the patterns of his slumber. He’d tried even to deprive himself of rest altogether.
Nothing had ever worked. Somehow, inevitably, Obi-Wan had always found himself back here, in this dream space that was shared by a man he’d last seen waking amidst a sea of fire. The one thing he instinctively suspected would end the cycle was the one thing he wasn’t sure he could ever bring himself to do.
To cut the training bond—that would be to admit defeat, and he’d once told a young boy with hair of gold and eyes like the sky that he’d never give up on him.
At his silence, Vader stalked forward until they were nearly touching, an inch and a mile in one or one thousand steps. “Well, I’ll give it to you,” he promised, “if you ask me nicely.”
Obi-Wan raised one eyebrow, deceptively mild. “I believe I’d rather just tell you to touch me right now,” he said, and even as he watched Vader’s eyes burn at his presumption, he knew the goad had worked.
Vader’s flesh hand curled into Obi-Wan’s hair, tugging his head back sharply. Durasteel settled at his waist, fingers tight enough that the ghost of their touch would linger even after they were gone. Obi-Wan wished he didn’t want it to, that his breath didn’t want to catch in his throat as warm lips skirted along the line of his jaw.
When their mouths were so close they would almost catch against one another at the slightest movement, Vader spoke. “Kiss me,” he demanded, and Force help him, but Obi-Wan did. He could feel the exquisite tug of his hair as he pulled against that grip, just enough so that their lips could cling, release, then cling again, barely the shadow of a kiss.
The oversensitivity of that touch after a day apart was like free fall, and the sound it drew from Vader’s throat was so far beyond want or desire that it was the very essence of need.
“Harder,” Vader ordered, the words shaping themselves in the cling of their mouths, and this, too, was a battle Obi-Wan could only begin to direct by doing nothing to hide. Vader might think it possible to disorient him with enough pleasure and shame that he would reveal his waking location, but what Vader would never understand was that Obi-Wan found clarity in this surrender.
The anguish of it was but a whetstone for his resolve.
Into the slick, bruising desperation of that second kiss, durasteel fingers deftly unfastened Obi-Wan’s trousers, and he didn’t hold back from biting into Vader’s plush bottom lip as those fingers skimmed over his balls and his quickly fattening cock. When that hand slid back and two fingers dipped between his cheeks to drag, testing, against his hole, it was to find him already wet and open.
“You’re all ready for me,” Vader whispered wonderingly, as if that was something new.
As if Obi-Wan didn’t frequently work himself open before closing his eyes against the dark chill of the Tatooine night, just to hear that wonder in Vader’s voice.
In response, with a swift deliberateness calculated to drive Vader’s desire higher, Obi-Wan brushed his own hands against the firm expanse of lush shoulders. His fingers released the clasps of Vader’s cloak, letting it fall to the ground. In almost the same instant, he released the tension in his knees so that Vader would have to lower their bodies to that luxuriant pool of fabric.
“So eager,” Vader said, and the triumph in his voice was not lessened a whit by the fact that it was a victory he claimed every night. Obi-Wan didn’t waste time attempting to disperse the flush that rose at those words; at the end of it all, Vader knew him more than well enough to know that the shame was there anyway.
It meant he knew more than enough how to press his advantage, for all the good it would do him.
Sure enough, Vader spoke again once he had dispensed with their clothing and flipped Obi-Wan over to his hands and knees, driving into him in one smooth thrust that had Obi-Wan’s fingers closing into fistfuls of velvet, bracing against the euphoria of fullness.
“Did you ever think about this before, Obi-Wan?” Vader’s fingers dug into Obi-Wan’s hips, marking them as his own, and his rhythm was sure and relentless, designed to overwhelm. “Because he did. He would lay there awake at night, in a bed just metres from yours, and think about how you’d look spread out on his cock.”
Perhaps it was a favourite image of Vader’s. It was the one he resorted to most often, but the repetition never dulled Obi-Wan’s shame.
Stars damn him, he had, and Vader knew it.
“You know what he also thought about?” Vader asked, and then he was pulling out so that just the head of his cock was pressed against Obi-Wan’s hole. Obi-Wan could feel the flesh of Vader’s fingers brush against his ass as they pumped his cock a few final times.
The thought of Vader watching as he came all over Obi-Wan’s entrance in hot stripes, shooting only partially inside, was enough to send Obi-Wan over the edge.
In the grip of orgasm, Obi-Wan felt his limbs tremble and threaten to give, but Vader’s hands caught him instinctively and lowered them both to the cloak beneath. Vader may have claimed his own share of victories this night, but this one was Obi-Wan's. It was unmitigated.
Unmatched.
Once he had apparently arranged them to his satisfaction, Obi-Wan spread out on his back and Vader pressed in against his side, Vader drew his fingers down the length of Obi-Wan’s chest. It was a relentless trail of heat and possession, one Obi-Wan couldn't bring himself to flinch away from. They moved down, to swipe through the mess that was dripping along the inside of Obi-Wan’s thighs, and then two elegant digits were pressing into Obi-Wan’s hole as Vader pushed his own come inside, seating it as deeply as he could.
Obi-Wan might not know how this place worked, but he knew from long experience that he would wake with Vader’s come slowly trickling out of his body, Vader’s scent on his skin, just as Vader would wake with their joined come still staining the inside of his cloak. Obi-Wan wondered if Vader would wear it all day long, but that was a foolish question.
He knew that Vader would.
“Tell me where you are,” Vader whispered again, lips calling the words forth against the contours of his jaw. They were only halfway to a demand, caught somewhere not all the way past pleading. “Then I can come find you, and see if you’re still wet from me. I’ll keep you wet from me all day and night.”
“I’ll tell you where I am,” Obi-Wan replied agreeably, and clenched down around Vader’s fingers. “As soon as you renounce the dark.”
Vader gave a snarl, and Obi-Wan registered the sharp sting of teeth nipping at the column of his throat. Desire flared again in Obi-Wan’s blood, sharp and desperate. “That will never happen,” Vader seethed. “The light is weak.”
“You think the light is weak, because it bends around that which tries to consume it,” Obi-Wan said. “But that’s what makes it strong. The dark is brittle and only breaks. One day, you will know that.”
And with those his parting words, he willed himself awake.
---
Obi-Wan’s eyes opened slowly, as if they didn’t quite want to. He could tell by the fall of light through the window that it was early, still, but he had slept enough to get him through the day.
“Today,” he said, but the sound of his own voice did nothing to make him feel less alone. “Maybe today I’ll sever the bond.” If the words held the cadence of ritual, as if he spoke them at the twin suns’ rise each morning, that was because he did.
And as they did each day, the words soon evaporated like water in the desert heat.