the spirit is right, the spirit will say

“Luke,” Ben says, and his naked shoulder is glistening in the dark broad and white, emerging from under the blanket as he shifts against the pallet, “are you there?”

Luke says, foolishly, “No.”

“Did you call for me?”

The throat of his tunic is tugged down like an invitation. None of them have ever called Luke master, and that is the one thing that would make this worse than it already is — the darkness that had been radiating from Ben has vanished like incense in a strong breeze, but the memory of it lingers like scent. It had been so overwhelming and so potent — Luke was nauseated, and now here the only smell in the air is sweat and dry plaster. They’ll need to remake these crumbling outbuildings sooner rather than later. The students make themselves at home, and the structural damage is starting to show.

Luke shifts back on his heels. His voice sounds strange in his own throat, like he hasn’t spoken in a very long time. “It’s all right, Ben. You can go back to sleep.” The smell of blood is still thick in Luke’s nose and mouth, it’s filling his head from the inside out. An insistent tug in the Force wants to tell him that something is not right here, something is crooked and sideways and askew, but it’s hard to pick out where the tugging thread leads so close in proximity to the roaring pit of fear he’d felt, he’d known.

Ben’s voice is tentative, almost frightened, and it makes Luke’s heart lurch in his chest. “Were you watching me, then?”

The boy rolls over in a tangle of blankets. His bare chest is marked by a constellation of moles — he’s naked to the waist now when he sits up, perilously naked, and Luke can see every mark on his pitiable body with keen detail. He doesn’t look powerful in this attitude, broad chest and pillar-legs and swinging arms — he looks soft, with nostrils flaring, framed in the soft rise and fall of his breath. His big hand rests for a moment against the white flat of his stomach, just shy of the ledge of his hip. The gesture is somehow provocative.

“I’d better go.” Luke stiffens, turning aside — hoping dearly that Ben won’t notice the lightsaber at his belt, but unable to look away from him. The memory is too indelible.

Luke was going to kill him. He was going to kill this boy without even a fight — his thumb had moved, almost involuntarily, to power on the lightsaber he would have thrust through his heart. The head, the heart, the hand. He would have butchered him in his sleep and stopped it at all. So why didn’t he? Decency, shame.

“No,” Ben says. “Stay. Stay. I had a nightmare.”

Luke had one too. It came on him in the meditation hall, a vision of his apprentice and nephew in the arcing light of the blade — the smell of fire, the sound of screams. Like a fool, he’d thought it was something that was going to happen to Ben, a fate that might befall Ben, a cruelty at Ben’s expense. But it only became clearer upon waking — with the cold air licking at his face and his eyes wide open, when Luke’s body jerked back into the waking world and instead of terminating the vision intensified.

“I’m sure it’s nothing. Meditate on it. Go back to sleep.” Two mutually contradictory conditions. Luke’s fingers flex at his sides.

“Sit with me. Don’t be frightened.”

Here in the bedroom-dark, Ben’s voice is borderline subsonically low. The collar of Luke’s tunic feels tight around the base of his neck.

Treacherous, treacherous. Luke is rigid with apprehension — he must hide what’s in his mind, Ben can’t know, Ben can’t know what he’s discovered or what he has nearly done. Maybe he can still fix this. Ben leans lasciviously against his side, close enough for Luke to feel the swell of his chest and the thump of his heartbeat, close enough. Too close. Closer still, with the horrible dark gash in his apprentice’s heart radiating like a wound. When it happens it happens at great length, in slow motion.

“You came here for me,” Ben says against his mouth, “why are you hesitating?”

“I didn’t know—”

But it’s already happening, Ben is happening to him like the worst cataclysm. His mouth is hungry and grasping, his lips are hot and chapped and soft — his mouth is almost obscenely full, his tongue is wet against the inside of Luke’s lip.

Who told him? Who told him Luke wanted this? Had Luke betrayed it in his eyes somehow — in the way he’d stood over him, in some motion, some gesture Ben had mistaken in the dark? The alternative is the only thing that could possibly work — the only thing that’s easier than the knowledge that he’s looked on his nephew with murder in his heart instead of lust. Clinching together in the dark, all guilty.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Luke stammers out. He makes a gesture with his hand, but grazes skin by mistake.

“Then show me.” Ben’s fingertips stub against his chest. “I’m going to give you everything you want.”