AN: Heeeeeeeeey...I'm baaaaaaaaaack...

Sometimes, one just has the urge to write something truly awful and horrifying. My last piece for this lively world created by Super Writer Extraordinaire, Glare (it rhymes because it's true, damn it) was dark also, but this one hits a new level of Whhhhhhhhhhy?!

As before, this one is based on the excellent Negotiation by Glare. If you haven't read it, and you're a fan of serial murder, forced abduction, Stockholm Syndrome, and being generally awful, go read it. It's really damn good!

This piece of shit is brutal, it's bloody, there's murder, and I'm pretty sure I cross the line of non-consensual SEVERAL times. You have all been warned. If you're still here, I hope you enjoy it as much I enjoyed writing it, you sick fucks. We're all going to hell at a breakneck speed, kids. Let's hit the road!

Negotiator

Obi-Wan sat hunched over a cup of coffee in the professor's lounge of Coruscant University's English Department staring vacantly at a dark red stain on the table, dark rings under his tired eyes and his hair only not a complete mess because of a half-hearted attempt to style it, leaving it looking disheveled, but not disarrayed. Beside him sat a high stack of manilla envelopes and folders all stuffed with his Classical Literature class' final papers, ten to twenty page monstrosities of pretentious drivel and pseudo-intellectual theses that weren't original or clever ten years ago when he was in school. Next week, his graduate classes turned in their dissertations, which would be more interesting, though nearly triple the length, so the stack beside him had to get finished before then, which was proving to be exceedingly difficult with his mind drifting elsewhere. At this moment, it was to the stain on the table.

The table was fine, polished dark oak, a beautiful thing that fit in nicely with the decor of the rest of the room, an elegant thing that catered to the elevated tastes of his fellow professors in the English department, more a haughty effort to appear cultured and well traveled than anything else. It was nice, to be sure, or had been until last week when the offending stain had been acquired. It wasn't even that Obi-Wan was particularly fond of the table, but the stain had ruined the perfection of the dark lines in the wood's grain, which was particularly loathsome to the fastidious Kenobi, who thrived on order and perfection.

The stain had come to be there when one of his peers had knocked over a glass of wine during one of the early holiday parties as the drunken fool attempted to shamelessly drag him into one of the offices so he could bend her over a desk to be throughly fucked. Not only was it distasteful and the woman repulsive, but she had casually ignored the spillage during her seduction attempt, allowing the wine to soak deep into the wood, soiling the integrity of the pristine desk forever.

It was enough to drive a man to murder.

He sat with his coffee mug clutched tightly in his hands, his tired eyes fixed on the dark, red-tinged stain, a wide, pooling thing that not only had colored the wood, but had disrupted the finish, the otherwise lovely sheen appearing matted and tacky when the light hit it right. To his tired mind, the stain looked like thick, heavy blood, dark in color as it always was when there was a considerable amount, and he couldn't look away from it, couldn't stop seeing the thick, heavy spurts as it dripped off his table and splattered to the floor, or slow, labored gushing from deeply severed arteries that pooled upon his immaculate, stainless steel workbench. His mind trapped him as he stared at the stain in a cycle of vast irritation and the wash of relief, his eyes dark and hungry as his frustration grew too soon after, too quickly. Relief never lasted long in winter, and there was still one to go, still one more...

"Hey, Kenobi!" Obi-Wan struggled for a moment to tear his eyes away from the stain, but eventually looked up to see the smiling face of one Professor Luminara Unduli, a teacher in the Political Science department, though she used a minor in English from collage as an excuse to hang out in the English Department's lounge with Obi-Wan, the presence of the handsome young professor often enough to deter some of the frequent and unwanted attention from other professors that the woman attracted. Luminara had gone to Obi-Wan's office at the end of term a few years ago to discuss plans for the following semester and found the hapless man fending off a scantily clad sophomore aggressively attempting to seduce the professor in exchange for a higher grade, the same girl who only an hour earlier had been in Unduli's office trying to do the same. It was awkward, but since then, Luminara had considered them friends, like they shared some terrible secret and were forever bound together by the advances of a poor student.

The feeling was not mutual, of course, but while Obi-Wan never sought the woman out, he somewhat enjoyed Luminara's company, if for nothing else, it played well into the persona he had so carefully crafted like a wall to hide the savagery within him.

"You look like shit," Unduli said as she looked the haggard man over, and Obi-Wan gave her a weak, half-hearted smile. "Long night?"

"Long night," Obi-Wan quietly agreed, taking his pen in his hand and tapping it on the stack at his side. "Just not the kind you'd want. Papers due this week, final exams next week...I never get any rest this time of year."

"Terribly unfair, isn't it?" Luminara asked with a knowing, sympathetic smile. "You up for going out this weekend? Get this semester out of your system, drink the memory of awful writing away, get some rest with some poor, pretty young idiot you tumble into bed with..."

"I'm booked solid, I'm afraid," Obi-Wan said with a groan as he rubbed at his shoulders and took a long drink from the cooling coffee in his mug. "You know..." he said, patting the stack of papers. "Plans."

"A few hours away from reading term papers may do you some good, Kenobi, I don't know if you can afford to lose any more brain cells..." Luminara sighed as she slid into the seat opposite Obi-Wan and leaned back in the reclining chair. "I ought to get a friend that teaches over in the Science Department. They all use scantrons. No weeks of grumpy, stressed, tired English professors and social isolation. They're over there mixing drinks in graduated cylinders and test tubes while you look like something one would pull out of a clogged drain."

"Yes, well, they don't need to wade through hundreds and hundreds of pages of the most droll, remedial essays you have ever seen..." Obi-Wan muttered, his cheek resting on the palm of his hand as he flipped through the pages of the stacked papers. "There's nothing like the restlessness of seasonal depression that comes from being reminded that in the months I have spent trying to provide the best education I could, my students have learned nothing." He sighed heavily and threw back the rest of his coffee, wincing slightly as the still hot drink burned on the way down. Every semester, I find myself wondering why I am doing this to myself..."

"For all the students you inspire to expand their minds and better themselves?"

"No, that's not it," Obi-Wan said quickly and decisively.

"...the paycheck."

"...oh yes, that's right." Another professor entered the room at a swift clip, purposeful bordering on the frantic as she crossed the lounge and picked up a remote on a table, the LED television powering on and she quickly set to flipping through channels. Several others filtered in after her, chatting quietly and nervously amongst each other for a moment before they fell silent, their eyes glued to the breaking news report on the television.

"Oh, come now, it's too early for this shit!" Obi-Wan said in a strained, exhausted voice, gesturing to the television when the studio switched to their field reporter standing in front of a line of cops and a police barricade, flashing sirens and crime scene investigators diligently working in the background. The others in the room paid him no mind, their attention held by the reporter's description of the gruesome scene that was found in one of Coruscant's many parks that morning. A body had been strung up in a large, central fountain, her bound wrists draped over an elevated basin from which water poured over the corpse, pooling in the open body cavity from which red, bloody water overflowed from. The body's heart sat neatly between the woman's palms, held there by the tight binding of the wrists. The lungs, the liver, the kidneys had been carefully cleaned and prepared and sat on the fountain's edge, the morbid sentries of a pool dyed red with blood.

"The crime in this city gets worse all the time..." Luminara said mournfully, managing to tear her eyes away from the horror on the screen and laying her head on the desk to watch Obi-Wan open one of the folders and begin reading the essay inside, his pen tapping against the pages and occasionally scribbling something in the margin. "Think the cops will catch this one?"

"Not bloody likely..." Obi-Wan muttered, completely disinterested and yawning as he flipped the page. "Every single day we get reports like this, how often do they report that they actually apprehend these murderers?"

"This one's different," one of the women in the group watching the screen said, turning around in her chair and looking at the two professors, and it took everything inside Obi-Wan not to roll his eyes. She was a grad student in her last semester at the school, and she had spent an absurd amount of time sending Obi-Wan lustful glances, sitting in ways that allowed her skirt to slide up and reveal her long legs, and catching his eye at every moment. He didn't remember her name. It wasn't unusual for Obi-Wan to attract attention like this, and usually, he would simply pretend to be oblivious or subtly flirt, nothing too suggestive, but it was enough to make him very popular with both the staff and the student population. Now, he had no patience for it. Now, he had no patience for anything, not with the burning urge eating away at him.

But Luminara was kind and gracious and welcoming, genuinely as opposed to Obi-Wan's faked, and she graciously turned to face the younger woman "Of course not, no two crimes are the same..." she said softly, her voice tight as she looked quickly up at the television. "It seems as though crime in this city is getting worse every year. It's almost like our criminal element is vying for attention with this grotesque sensationalism."

"That isn't what I meant..." she whispered, leaning in as if she was telling some great secret. "My brother's in forensics, he called me on his way to the station to drop off the first load of collected evidence. He says there's going to be a press conference about it this afternoon."

"An awful lot of attention for one crime, isn't it?" Obi-Wan muttered, closing the folder and taking another from his stack.

"Well that's just the thing..." she whispered, scooting her chair closer with a delighted smile when Luminara made room for the excitable grad student. She immediately placed her hands on the table and leaned in toward Obi-Wan, and he couldn't help but notice that her hand was resting on the offensive stain. "It isn't just the one murder. That one last week they found at the public library? They think the same guy is responsible for this one." Obi-Wan stopped writing mid-sentence, his eyes flicking up to finally look at the girl, something wild and feral and dangerous resting just beneath the surface that he was only barely able to contain.

"How...can they think that?" Obi-Wan whispered, his eyes drifting up to the television where the reporter was interviewing a stocky police officer. "The incidents are nothing alike."

"I don't know," she shrugged. "He couldn't talk about the details, but it sounds like they're pretty sure." She took a short, sharp breath, equal parts excited and nervous. "There's a serial killer in Coruscant."

"I do hope you know you are walking me home tonight..." Luminara muttered, and Obi-Wan nodded absently, his eyes fixed on the screen and giving the reporter his full attention, his hand resting on his chest in what looked like shocked horror as he felt his rapidly beating heart as he watched reporters and police officers and forensic investigators discuss his crime scene. His masterwork, the second in his annual line of three in a cycle that had gone on for years and could only be broken by his death. Three victims, three murdered unfortunates for Siri Tachi, for Qui-Gon Jinn, for Satine Kryze, the only three people that ever meant anything, all violently taken away from him, leaving Obi-Wan to wallow in a pit of blood and death from which he could not escape.

The fact that the cops had caught wise to the nature of the beast meant nothing. His murders would continue. They had to continue. And the next one perhaps sooner than he had planned, the sudden spike of anxiety and stress over his first two effigies being linked stirring the all to familiar hunger inside him, the feral and primal need to hunt and kill again gnawing at the very core of him, the agitation and irritation that slowly ate at him in the time between his kills exploding in sudden need. It was too soon, too soon, the relief from last night's violent, beautiful murder and the reverence of his grim work with the body afterwards should have kept him sane and functional for at least a week. But this...investigation into his art tarnished the feel of life as it faded from his victim with her slowing pulse, the smell of blood thick and heavy in the air as it gushed from the precise, fatal wound, the metallic taste on his tongue as he mouthed at her neck when blood smeared across pale skin as he worshipfully caressed her perfect body, the sight of his victim who gave his body to him before he took her life from her, a far more intimate thing than sex could ever be, laying upon his table in a thick pool of her own blood...

He looked back at the stain on the table as he became trapped in his own thoughts, fixated on the memory of last night and the knowledge that his new found public status as Coruscant's reigning serial killer would see him kill soon again. He had to, regardless of how hard Coruscant's finest were looking for him. He couldn't stop the cycle any more than he could stop the tides.

He watched the broadcast in pensive, shocked silence with the other members of the faculty until he had to depart for his classes, and he spent the rest of the day in a haze, unfocused and distracted and grateful that he had designated his classes in the final week before exams as a study hall, a thing he did for his benefit as much as theirs, and the students were always grateful for it. He tried to take a sizable portion out of the term papers he had yet to grade, but his mind continuously wandered to last night as he sat in sated, blissful ecstacy covered in the lifeblood of the dying woman in his arms, a feeling far beyond anything the orgasmic highs of sexual pleasure ever brought him, leaving him feeling more drunk than any alcohol ever could. Blood, all of it blood, warm and wet and wonderful, filling the emptiness inside him like a thick, dark red lake, a thing the vast majority turned away from in revulsion, but he was drawn to it, wanted it, needed it to even begin to feel whole, like he was human at all.

More than once, he found himself staring blankly at the essays before him, his eyes unfocused and causing the words to blur, his own writing in red ink standing out in sharp contrast against the clean, white paper as it speckled and splattered the page in his hazy vision. Periodically, a students would interrupt him with questions, and the red ink would become writing again as he focused, a tight, tired smile on his worn, stressed features, the same weariness and exhaustion that many of his students sported. Be it up late studying or at seasonal parties to celebrate the holidays and the end of term, his students all looked as haggard as he did, wandering through their day in a sleepless or hungover daze.

At this time a year, everyone looked like a mess of stress, exhaustion, and bad habits, a yearly excuse for the collapse in his own sanity during the duration of his killing cycle. It was the perfect cover, and as a young, enthusiastic professor, a known perfectionist and workaholic, nobody thought twice to question it, not a single person detected that there was something unmistakably off about Professor Kenobi, nobody saw the soulless look in his eyes as anything other than exhaustion when the reality was a wild, savage hunger that burned him from the inside out.

He took an extended lunch break to lock himself in his office and watch the live stream of the police press conference from his laptop, his fingers steepled together and pressed to his lips as he listened intently to their report of the crimes they now attributed to a singular man, a serial killer at large in the streets of Coruscant, and the following frantic, fearful inquisition of the press, which the poor officers seemed ill-equipt to properly handle, prepared for a day at the pool instead of the fierce ocean storm they were swept away in. They shared little, but they knew even less, reluctant to reveal what exactly it was that led them to this conclusion, which only served to frustrate Obi-Wan, even through his deep admiration for the one, nameless man that supposedly had a brain over at Coruscant PD that suggested the grisly murders may be linked.

He couldn't think. Everything in his mind was blood and death and obsession, not about the case, but about the final victim in his cycle, his final masterpiece of the year, and while reason would have him quietly dispose of the body when he was through, his pride, his process would not allow it. His grim effigies to Siri, to Qui-Gon, to Satine, the friend, the family, the lover that had been so cruelly ripped from him, never to be had again must be mourned, must be immortalized, and he couldn't bring himself to do anything less than his best for that which had been stolen from him. Police investigation or no, it must continue, his crimes linked together and attributed to a single man, elevating his work and giving it the attention and the meaning it had deserved.

No, he liked this. It was, bar none, the best way he could have thought to immortalize those he had lost, what he had lost when companionship was ripped from him forever. This would be talked about, investigated, studied by people who could not possibly comprehend, yearly markers, gruesome tombstones to Siri, Qui-Gon, Satine, gone down in infamy and haunting the collective memory of Coruscant. One look at the detectives at the press conference, an old, wizened chief of police long past his retirement date, and a large, froggish man the size of a fridge and looking to possess the intelligence of one, and he knew he was in no danger, knew there would be no leads, knew that by the time they had a chance to fully mobilize detectives and investigators to take on a case of this magnitude, his cycle would be over, and the maddening urge would abate until the winter came again the next year. He would disappear into spring, summer, fall, just long enough for the investigation to grow cold, not forgotten, perhaps, but pushed to the wayside in favor of the smaller, petty crimes that rippled across Coruscant every single day.

This was new. This was different, exhilarating in a way he hadn't known before. Him, not just some unknown killer, stalking through the streets of Coruscant like a predatory shadow, but a labeled serial killer, his crimes exposed in a way they hadn't been before, and it made the hunger in him grow, the maddening, restless irritation within him escalate. His plan that morning was to return home after work and spend the rest of his evening as throughly drunk as possible, but it had to be tonight. It had to be if he was going to be able to set his troubled mind at ease and fully enjoy the pathetic, fruitless flailings of an investigation that would never go anywhere. It was outside his pattern, which was distressing enough to make the itch even worse, usually able to go a week or so before the urge to kill gripped him again. This disruption, this anomaly was upsetting, highly so, especially for the fastidious, regimented Obi-Wan. He appreciated a schedule, found peace in his consistency, and the unexpected break was sending him reeling off balance. He disliked this loss of control. His next victim would suffer for it.

He was too careful, too cautious, had been doing this for too long, had far too much practice in his art to leave a trail, and the cops were too disorganized, spread too thin, too careless, too stupid to make any headway. They may come to surprise him, as they had today, but the likelihood of that happening was very slim. No, Obi-Wan had a long, successful, gruesome career ahead of him made all the more sweet by the game with the authorities he was now actively playing.

He shut his laptop, reached into his pocket and produced a cigarette which he put between his lips, and quickly packed up his things. It was time to go. There was work to be done.

Obi-Wan ran his fingers through the thick, sticky pool of blood that covered the stainless steel counter and dripped in slow, viscous streams on to the floor and stared with half-lidded, pleasure-hazy eyes into the blank, sightless expression of his latest victim, the second of his new cycle, the first year after the discovery that Coruscant had a serial killer. There was, as he expected, no headway in the case, which Obi-Wan was watching very closely, though not with any great interest. Any exhilaration he felt upon his crimes finally being linked had died quickly when the third victim of his last cycle had been discovered, and the subsequent press conference proved to be an exercise in idiocy. Pong Krell, the lead detective, was a boorish oaf, his thick, heavy set muscular body clear compensation for what he lacked in a brain.

His pathetic attempt at profiling this killer had gotten nearly everything wrong, and in the following days, Obi-Wan watched with waning interest as the police scrambled to sort through thousands of leads, each one of them produced by glory-seeking morons eager for their twenty minutes of fame, the morbid work of a serial killer presenting a fine opportunity to garner attention. It lasted for months, the media buzz surrounding the killings taking advantage of public fear and morbid fascination to sell papers and boost ratings, every day producing new witnesses who swear the killer was the biggest man they had ever seen, was hunch-backed and hideous, killed with a gun, was a surgeon, had to be to remove organs the way he did. There was even one girl who swore she escaped from the mysterious killer, though she never got a good look at the man, though she swore he was well over six feet, with dark hair and darker eyes.

As the months wore on, with no new gruesome displays appearing, public interest began to wane, and while Obi-Wan still killed occasionally, practice for the winter, honing his art so there would be no mistakes when it came to crafting his perfect masterpieces, those bodies were dumped unceremoniously in dirty, filthy alleyways of Coruscant's crime-infested streets, and those crimes were rarely solved. Obi-Wan spent his formative years there, learning to stalk and kill his victims, learning how to use every advantage he could to lure the unsuspecting away and leave their remains in places where they would never be found or never be cared about. With no sign of their serial killer, the police thought that he moved or died, that he was caught for another, smaller crime and serving a short jail sentence as many criminals were, careful on the big things, but sloppy on the smaller. Before long, even the lead detectives put the case away.

Then winter came, and with winter, a new body.

She had been young, barely eighteen, if that, with lovely dark skin and eyes that popped green. She was innocent, and she was trusting, which made it very easy for Obi-Wan to casually drug her and drag her to his cabin in the woods where his kill room was located. He started quickly with her, killing her mere minutes after she had woken so he could feel the sweet rush of that first release since his last cycle, the gnawing agitation and the restless, animal hunger satisfied for a time, and he wished to have as much time as possible to work with the body, to get back into the easy flow of his work. Two days later, her body was found outside a popular fraternity house a fifteen minute walk off Coruscant University's campus, and the hunt was on once again.

The Second Cycle, the detectives at CPD called it. The beginning of their serial killer's second set of kills, and that had amused Obi-Wan more than anything else.

Frankly, Obi-Wan was surprised that the police hadn't caught on sooner. He had been caught in the cycle of death for some time now, and each past winter had seen him refine his craft, transform his art from the experimental into the masterpieces he began creating the year before. His first true cycle, the first time the chill of winter gripped him with the urge, a thing that went beyond the want to kill and became a need to kill, began the year after he had lost his lovely Satine, his first winter truly alone. He had killed before then, of course, his first time being mere weeks after Satine had died, and he had killed several others in the spring, summer, and fall that followed. But winter had brought the urge, and with it, his cycle of three. By his count, this year wasn't his second cycle, but his sixth.

His first few cycles were...messy. Uncontrolled. A new, strange thing to him, an animal hunger that came to overtake him during winter when he so keenly felt the pain of his losses as he sat in a stupor of depression, anger and alcohol, ticking away yet another year without Siri, Qui-Gon and Satine. It was swift and sudden, feral and dangerous, and he had tried to resist the hunger for death and blood that pulled at him, frightened of the craving that had grown within him. But in the end, he couldn't resist the urge, couldn't keep the need from clawing at the inside of his mind like a trapped beast, and he had given in, sudden and savage and impulsive, his first victim one of convenience that had been quickly killed and left where he had died. The relief was immediate, but the restlessness didn't fade, and he resisted until he could no longer, and then he killed again. And then again.

Understanding of what he was, what he had become when he was bathed in Satine's blood, slowly began to dawn on him after that, and by his third cycle, he began experimenting, began carefully planning for winter and choosing his kills more carefully. His needs evolved as he understood his urge, became willing partners with it instead of a reluctant hostage. He could hardly blame the police for being unable to link his current crimes with his older ones. They were experimental at best, a child with finger paints first learning how to blend colors. Every victim had been different, every kill unique, each dissection of the body exploratory as he discovered what he liked, what relieved the most stress, what made him feel the most good, the most right for longest.

His third and forth cycles saw him displaying his victims, the bloody markers of his painful losses, and while he knew there were open and long cold investigations on each of them, he knew they would never be attributed to him. He chose his victims regardless of age, color or gender, and though his type had always been blond, blue eyed and intelligent, that never figured in to who's blood ended up being spilt to satisfy his hunger. Blood was blood, regardless of who it came from, though his enjoyment beforehand often did hinge on his luck in picking up a pretty blond willing to fall into bed with their cunning seducer.

He did not always sleep with his victims, though it was an added bonus if he managed it, and it was with his unsuspecting art projects that he most enjoyed sex, the thrill of being willingly allowed inside the men and women that would soon be on his table exhilarating in a way that nothing else was. The method of death changed, sometimes strangling, sometimes through drug overdoes, sometimes urging them to drink until their bodies succumbed to fatal intoxication, but in the end, it was blood, always blood which satisfied him best.

A part of Obi-Wan was glad these early murders, these experimental displays would never be attributed to him. The thought of his early, uncivilized murders sitting beside the crime scene photos of his last year of flawless masterpieces and polluting his case file was offensive, like putting the lazy scribbles of a toddler next to a fine artist's portfolio. Some of them were, quite frankly, embarrassing, and it left little wonder as to why the cops had never been able to link his crimes together. A particularly humiliating moment for him had been at the end of his third cycle, his victim a woman so stunningly similar to his Satine that for just a moment, it was as if she were truly walking beside him again. Seducing her had been an easy thing, and he had taken to sex with her like a man parched, desperate and needy as he took from her what he felt he had been missing for so long. He stayed in bed with her longer than he usually kept his victims, buried within her and relentlessly making her moan his name in climax over and over again.

The cracks in his delusions appeared soon after, the differences in his precious Satine making themselves more apparent as his hunger grew. They were small at first. A misplaced birthmark, the absence of the scar on her hip she got when they were young, the way she felt around him just shy of the perfect fit she had been, the way she moved under him, the way she moaned his name. Each one small, but cracking the perfect image he had of his Satine, and the more he noticed their differences, the less this woman fit what he knew, and the more agitated, the more furious he became.

It culminated in a brutal, impassioned stabbing of what now appeared to be a pale imitation of his beloved, so deep that she had been dead by the fifth time the knife struck, so many times that when his fury abated, his hunger sated without him even having realized it, she had been stabbed so many times that she was little more than a mess of skin cut to ribbons and splattered blood. Her organs had been completely destroyed, making her body absolutely useless to his process, and Obi-Wan was disgusted with himself, feeling like an amateur who reduced the perfect materials for a masterpiece in a show of temper. He was better than this, and he was forced to dump her body as it was on a park bench, and though his cycle was completed, he didn't feel fulfilled, and had been off until his next murder almost three months later, a swift and dirty thing devoid of his usual markers done just so he could feel right again.

Things like that had no business in his file. Mistakes and failed experiments were best forgotten under all the other unsolved crimes in Coruscant. But his fourth cycle had been exemplary, not yet quite the masterpiece that his fifth cycle had been, but it was close. Very close. Close enough that he was shocked that the investigation into his crime last year didn't unearth his crimes from the year before, which could have easily been linked to him. But they weren't uncovered, and the detectives didn't attribute them to him, which only made Obi-Wan more disdainful of Pong Krell and his fellow detectives. It wasn't entirely their fault, of course. Coruscant was a large, sprawling city composed of many precincts, which made communication between stations poor at best, made even worse by the frankly absurd amount of crime they were forced to investigate.

So two cycles was all Obi-Wan got. Which was fine. There would be many more after.

Obi-Wan slowly walked around the table, his eyes roving over the naked, body laying in blood, his dark green eyes clouded with death, his dark hair matted with blood that pooled around him. He had been looking at another victim that evening when this man fell right into his lap, already hopelessly drunk and offering to go with him some place private and suck him off in exchange for money for extacy. It was too good an offer to pass up, so Obi-Wan loaded the man into his car and drove the long way to his cabin outside Naboo, the man quickly passed out when Kenobi had supplied him with a bottle of very fine, very strong whisky.

Obi-Wan did have sex with this victim, making up for the speed of his last kill by taking his time with this one, the drunk man offering no resistance to anything that the Kenobi wanted from him. It had been rough, as it nearly always was with Obi-Wan, more animalistic claiming than anything else, though he refrained from biting down on the fool's ruddy flesh like he usually would with the sexual partners he had outside his cycle, the ones that helped regulate him when he wasn't killing, the ones he wouldn't kill when he was done with them. As inept as the police were, it was just careless to leave behind dental records on a murder victim.

His fingers ran over the tanned, naked flesh, leaving trails of blood upon it as he grabbed for the knife on the table's edge, razor sharp and stained with the rusty color of blood as it dried upon the polished steel. Obi-Wan wiped the blade on his pants, quickly cleaning it as he dipped his fingers in blood and drew an even line from his sternum and tracing along the left side of his ribs, lightly touching two points on the cooling flesh before he stepped back, examined his work, and nodded as he sunk the blade into the body and sliced along his bloody line. Carefully sinking the knife between the ribs over the spots he had made on his chest, he put the knife aside, pressed the cut skin down and reached up under the ribs, withdrawing his hand a moment later when he held the man's heart on his grasp.

He always removed the heart. Always. Perhaps it was that which linked his murders together, perhaps it was something else, but it was ultimately irrelevant. All that mattered now was this, his work of art, his masterpiece, his poor, drunken fool that would be forever immortalized in death when his life would have seen him fade into obscurity. This one was for Qui-Gon, his second victim for his second loss, and a small part of him wondered what his father would have said to know how much he mattered to his wayward son, how important he had been in shaping what he had become.

He had very carefully planned what he was going to do with this body, had known before he even went out hunting that evening. It was the holidays, and it was a time to celebrate.

This one was going up in a tree.

Obi-Wan sat hunched over at his desk in his classroom, his head between his hands as he looked through bleary eyes at yet another term paper, though he wasn't getting anywhere. He was hopelessly hung over, the result of a long night of drinking to drown the nagging irritation of his cycle and forget about his blunder earlier that night. Everything was set, everything perfect, the body laid face down on the grass as he finished his preparations when a cop showed up. Obi-Wan hadn't heard a car pull up, hadn't seen headlights and was a fair distance from the road, so he was pretty sure the young officer was a beat cop or had a bicycle somewhere, but how he got there was irrelevant. What mattered was that he was there, and there was a naked, eviscerated body on the ground in front of him.

He was more irritated than panicked as he stepped between the body and the officer, his hands held up before him as he quickly looked the man over, observing the neat, crisp lines of his uniform, the bright sheen on his badge, the suspicion on a youthful face and determined him to be fresh out of the academy, too new to have experience, too wide eyed to be street smart. Obi-Wan calmly explained how his friend here was very drunk, which hadn't exactly been a lie, and had called him after skinny-dipping in the park's pond to come bring him home. Being a good friend, he was happy to come, and so here they all were.

The young officer believed him, Kenobi calm and pleasant like only a good Samaritan could have been, and he told Kenobi to tell his friend that public indecency was a serious crime. Promising that he would make certain his friend knew the weight of the law, Obi-Wan bid the officer a good night, and with a scowl of distaste when the officer was out of sight, he continued his work, making certain to inform the dead man that public nudity could earn him a place on a sex offender list, or, worst case scenario, on a serial killer's table. When his work was complete, Obi-Wan slipped a cigarette between his lips and returned home, cracked open a bottle, and drank until he blacked out. When he woke up in the morning to the sound of his alarm ringing in his ears and a splitting headache, he vowed to begin drinking again the moment he got home.

It was his final class for the day, that last study session before finals began on Monday, and most of his students were still filtering in, some gathered at the back of the room, huddled together as they discussed the reading from that semester that may appear on the final, save for the handful of girls and the lone male that occupied the front row specifically so they could look at their professor, the reason, he supposed, that they had taken this class at all, as their grades had been edging on failure. They day had been busy, mostly spent sitting in his office as his anxiety-ridden grad students filtered in and out to discuss last minute concerns about their dissertations or to have him field their questions and concerns for a final that was worth a major part of their grade.

The few moments he had to himself were spent checking the news reports on the state of his latest crime, discovered that morning by the landscapers that came by to mow the park's lawns. So far, there had been no word on the cop he had run into, no break in the case because there was, for the first time, an actual eye witness. There were certainly no detectives coming to his office door, and by the time the afternoon rolled around and there was no manhunt, he was certain nothing had been brought to light. His young night cop saw nothing, he was certain of that, and was no doubt catching hell for letting a serial killer carry on with his business of making their lives a living nightmare.

There was going to be a press conference, of course, as there always was, though Obi-Wan was going to have to catch it later, the event the headline on all major news networks and was guaranteed to be running in a continuous loop the rest of the evening and well into the next day. He was mildly irritated by not getting a chance to watch the conference live, but he couldn't justify closing his class just so he could get him early, and his DVR had been set to record the afternoon news, which would undoubtedly be playing the press conference and then having their unique brand of experts on hand to analyze what the cops had said, putting in their two cents into what sort of man they were looking for and the motives of their mysterious killer. They were wrong, of course. Everyone was always wrong about it. It was no wonder he hadn't been caught.

"Professor Kenobi!" one of his students said as he stormed into the room, his eyes wide and wild and excited, followed in by his usual entourage, who were buzzing excitedly about something Obi-Wan couldn't catch. Obi-Wan didn't answer him, only looked at the boy with a raised eyebrow, and taking it as a sign to continue, he took a deep breath and swept his hand through his hair. "Did you hear? The Negotiator struck again!"

"...the what?" Obi-Wan asked thickly, staring at the boy and rubbing his temple in an attempt to stave off the pounding in his head. Asprin hadn't worked, and this wasn't helping either.

"The Negotiator!" the boy said again, more excited this time and grinning broadly for his chance to share information with his teacher that the man clearly hadn't been aware of. "You know, the serial killer? He left another body!"

"...they're calling him Negotiator now?" Obi-Wan scoffed as he rubbed his eyes, perking up slightly when the throbbing in his head was overshadowed by his curiosity. "Because murdering people is in the very spirit of negotiation? Is the name meant to be ironic?"

"Beats the hell out of me," the student said with a shrug. "There's a lot of different stories circling around right now, but from the sound of it..." he said almost slyly, his arm upon the desk as he leaned closer to the professor. "They actually caught the guy last night, and he just convinced them to let him go."

"There's no way that actually happened," Obi-Wan said with a roll of his eyes. "I know our beloved police force doesn't have the best record, but there is no way they would just let the guy walk, not if they caught him. They're not that incompetent."

"I don't know," the boy said thoughtfully. "That's just what they're saying. Regardless of what actually happened, it's a media shit storm. It's really bad for the cops." He waited for a moment, watching as he lost the professor's interest, his eyes drifting back to the papers he was grading. "The press release for this mess is happening in a moment. Can we watch it?"

"If you didn't want to study, you should have skipped class..." Obi-Wan muttered, looking up for a moment to see the rest of the class staring expectantly at him, the conversation between the professor and their boisterous classmate easily overheard, and he had his excuse. Sighing heavily, he made a show of pushing aside his reluctance as he grabbed the remote to lower the classroom projector. "Alright..." he muttered to the excited chattering of the class. "But just because this last foray for our sensationalist killer. If they do in fact have a witness, and an officer no less, then they will apprehend him by the end of the week."

Chairs shuffled as Obi-Wan powered on the projector, hooked it up to his laptop, and connected to the internet, and quickly typed in the address for Coruscant's premier news network. By the time he had the news program playing on the white screen and had dimmed the lights, all his students had crammed into the first two rows, watching in nervous excitement as a panel of reporters spoke to a criminal psychologist and a police consultant about the latest crime, the second of the season, a countdown until the press conference in the bottom right corner. He leaned back against the front row, the students behind him leaning to the side to see around him, and they quietly watched and waited for the press conference, a feeling of unease settling over the room.

The Negotiator. Obi-Wan scoffed to himself, rolling the sobriquet around in his mind, listening to how it sounded when the host of the show and her guests referred to the killer by the name, and decided he liked it, even if he couldn't understand why that, of all things, was what they had latched on to in order to give a name to their faceless killer. He had so many signatures, so many patterns, so many things they could have called him, so many more things that would have been more apt, more appropriate, but instead latched on to what amounted to the utter incompetency of the police in this case. He appreciated the irony, if nothing else.

He supposed, in a way, the name was more apt than they realized. It was more of an unconditional surrender than a negotiation, but from a certain point of view, Obi-Wan supposed that the way he took his victims could be seen as such. Not that the police or the media who assigned him the name would ever know, but there was something deeply personal between him and every single one of his victims, from the moment he took them and long, long past their deaths. Not all his lovely victims had been drugged and abducted, and the better he got at his craft, the more successful he was in managing to get them to go with him willingly, either through seduction or by accepting an offer from a kind stranger they felt they could trust. The struggle came afterwards, when they had passed their off-ramp, when he headed in the wrong direction, after they finished having sex, when something in the handsome man felt off, wrong, a gnawing tension at the back of their minds subconsciously alerting them to the danger of the predator in the room.

He supposed that was when the negotiations occurred for his victims, right in the moments before their deaths as they struggled to escape, as they begged for their lives, for mercy, as they were forced to realize that they were already dead, and had been for some time, long before they saw the wild, hungry bloodlust in their captor's eyes. Perhaps his victims negotiated, but Obi-Wan never did. He didn't have to. The negotiations were over the moment they were in his grasp. Their lives in exchange for seeing the real Obi-Wan, the monster that lay carefully hidden inside him, a predator that wore a human's skin and prowled undetected through a sea of people that didn't know they were prey. It was intimate, made him feel the touch of connection that he so rarely felt and the intense relief of shedding the confines of his disguise. He was himself with his victims, raw and exposed like he could never, ever be, and he bought that deep connection with their lives.

The Negotiator. Perhaps not accurate, or even the name he would have chosen for himself, but it suited him, and the more he heard it used, the more he appreciated it, both for it's jabbing irony toward the incompetent cops that allowed him to continue, and for the much more personal touch of his own dealings with his immortal victims.

The press conference began in a fit of chaos, the press hardly able to keep themselves from nervous, restless movement as Pong Krell addressed them, spoke about the newest crimes, their new thoughts on the case, and their plan moving forward, but when the floor was open for questioning, all anyone wanted to talk about was the young officer that had seen the serial killer at his work and simply turned the other way. All attempts to clarify, redirect, or refute the questions only made the situation worse, and before long, the police had lost control entirely, looking every bit as useless and incompetent as the case made them out to be.

And still, even with the quickly imploding investigation before a media that seemed intent on eating them alive, all Obi-Wan could look at was one man at the side of the stage, his officer's uniform clean and neat, his arms crossed over his chest, and an expression on his face that appeared nearly as frustrated as he was bored. It was the look of a man who had lost patience with the whole matter, one that seemed to scream of intelligence straining under the weight of foolishness, one that was as disgusted with the wolfish reporters as he was with the floundering detectives. When Krell abruptly ended the conference, the young man rolled deep blue eyes and swept his hand over gently curling golden hair, stepping forward to take charge of shutting the reporters down as the detectives left the stage.

Obi-Wan couldn't breathe.

"This is a bigger mess than I thought it would be," one of the students behind them said with a mournful shake of her head. "They're never going to catch this guy, are they?"

"I wouldn't be so sure..." Obi-Wan said reassuringly, though he never took his eyes off the screen and the angel that was now tersely telling the reporters that there was no further comment on anything they could possibly think to ask. "Criminals make mistakes, they always do, and the detectives are clearly not revealing everything. Say too much and you end up with all kinds of false leads like last time..."

"I hope they catch him soon," another student said. "Nobody deserves to end up like that."

"Do we know who the officer is?" Obi-Wan asked, ignoring the previous comment and pointing at the increasingly irritated cop on the screen. "I don't believe we've seen him before in previous press conferences."

"Beats me," one of the students said with a shrug. "They're probably just pulling in more help to deal with the case."

"Not that it'll make a difference," one of the boys scoffed. "I mean, did you see how badly the lead investigator looked out there? The cops are in over their heads."

"Now, now..." Obi-Wan gently soothed. "New blood on the case is a good thing. Different perspectives and all that. Perhaps one of them will provide the insight they need to finally catch this killer." At the very least, it would give him something to look at besides Pong Krell's ugly mug. Obi-Wan never denied that he had a very clear, very defined type, and this new officer fit the bill perfectly. Blonde, blue eyes, a face that shone with intelligence...were a man like that running the case instead of the oversized buffoon, Obi-Wan would be paying much closer attention. Perhaps this fiasco would finally be the thing that gets Krell off the case, and CPD could put in something nice to look at. They were his crimes, after all. They should be flattering him, tailoring the investigation to suit him, not making him disgusted with his own investigation by making some stupid toad its cover boy. Maybe if he was lucky, they'd put someone like that angel in charge.

It was just what Obi-Wan deserved, after all.

His name was Anakin Skywalker, and he was perfect.

After his final kill of his sixth cycle, his second according to the police, a beautiful woman who had been savaged, cut into pieces, and laid lovingly strewn about on the playground of a local kindergarten, the police were scrambling, breaking under the pressure of a public in a state of panic and absolutely no leads to chase, no sign of their elusive Negotiator at all. He had, just like last time, vanished, gone with the melting snow, and in the spring, months after the last murder and the case growing increasingly cold despite persistent public and media pressure, Pong Krell was forced to step down as the lead detective on the case. They were making no progress, and on a case so high profile as this one, the police needed to at least look more competent than the ham-fisted Krell. So long as they had no suspect, no leads, no serial killer in hand, the face of Coruscant PD needed to inspire faith the Negotiator would be caught, not fear that his gruesome cycles would continue.

For the task, they brought on Anakin Skywalker.

The angel he had seen at the press conference of his sixth cycle's second kill, the very same man that had so caught his attention, had fallen so perfectly into his desired type, the man who looked nearly as frustrated with the investigation as Kenobi felt in watching them spoil the divine meaning of his masterpieces with their idiocy. He wasn't just on the case, he was in charge. The lead detective heading the Negotiator murders. His own private, secret pet, though young Skywalker had no idea about it. Obi-Wan had him on a leash, chasing after him in a vain attempt to follow his footsteps and come to him, and oh, how Obi-Wan would enjoy beaconing for him to follow. And Detective Skywalker would. He had to. It was his job.

For as nice as young Skywalker was to look at, what truly caught Obi-Wan's attention was the press announcement in the spring where Krell stepped down and officially passed the torch to Anakin, Coruscant's new darling officer, the youngest person ever promoted to the rank of detective, the poster boy for the entire CPD. The boy wasn't just a pretty face, it seemed, but he was every bit as intelligent as he looked the first day Obi-Wan laid eyes on him, perhaps more than he let on, and after the formalities of accepting his new post were out of the way, he began speaking. And he had a lot to say.

The Negotiator murders, he explained, were too good, the cuts too precise, the method too flawless for this to be a young killer, as they had previously been led to believe. No, the Negotiator was at least thirty, and he had killed before these cycles began, practicing and learning as he grew better at what he did, and were they to look closely, Skywalker believe they would find that his two completed cycles were not the beginning of the Negotiator's pattern, but rather the culmination of years of trial and error. They only found what they did, the way they did, because the killer was finally proud of his work and ready to show them.

The victim and the displays were a fluid, changing thing, and while outwardly the Negotiator was experimental and unpredictable, the signatures in each murder were almost hilariously consistent. The heart was always cut out. Always, and displayed prominently in his work. Originally, they had believed the man to be a student returning home for the holidays, killing in the time he was allotted on his vacation before returning to some distant school. Then the theory evolved, their killer now caught for a lesser crime and imprisoned, only to begin killing again when he had been released. Anakin was quick to assure the reporters that this wasn't the case, and the public was safe until next winter. This was, as they had aptly termed it, a cycle, a set of three kills every holiday season to be completed before Christmas before the Negotiator melted back into obscurity until it was time to do it all over again.

Most importantly, though, was the time it took between murders, usually around a week before the Negotiator would surface again, and in this matter, he was extremely consistent. He was a man with a set pattern, one, Anakin hypothesized, that did not like change and was frustrated by breaks in his routine. He was a creature of habit that was singularly, intensely focused, and deviating from his strict killing schedule simply wasn't an option. No matter what was going on in the city, the Negotiator would find a way to set up one of his gruesome displays, right on schedule, three times a year.

Except for once.

Except for the first cycle, the first time the police had linked his murders together. The day they discovered the second body and announced that Coruscant had a serial killer, the very next day, another victim was found. It was inconsistent with his pattern, and while the times between murders was somewhat flexible, it was never so short, the very next day far too soon to take another victim and kill them, leaving no time at all to revel in the second. Anakin had admitted it was a longshot, but he was willing to bet that the linking of his crimes and unearthing exactly what it was that prowled through Coruscant was shocking and upsetting enough to disrupt his cycle. It was a mistake. The Negotiator could be rattled, which meant he could be caught, and Detective Anakin Skywalker vowed to do exactly that.

Obi-Wan had saved the recording of the press announcement and Skywalker's subsequent speech and Q&A session with the flurry of excited reporters, and he watched it obsessively, over and over again, the intensity of his focus increasing with each viewing, determined to learn everything he could, everything about this perfect creature that had so blissfully graced his life. Until now, the police, the media, the entire city was populated with nothing but fools who misinterpreted his work, missed the obvious, looked for meaning where there was none to be had and went digging in all the wrong places, but Anakin understood him in a way that nobody ever had before, not since he had his heart ripped to pieces, not since he had become this. A serial killer, a murder, a monster wearing the skin of the man that was once Obi-Wan Kenobi.

His close examination of his repeated viewings gave Obi-Wan a better understanding of his beautiful new plaything, and each time, he noticed something new in the way he spoke, a slight stutter before he launched into his brilliant deductions, the way he picked at the hem of his sleeve, the way his beautiful eyes darted upwards briefly every time he considered a question, the way he subtly shifted his weight as he spoke, the darting of his tongue across his lips to wet them when the Mayor praised his efforts. On and on it went, a hundred ticks and habits that made up his beautiful collection of nerves and personality quirks, and even better yet was the fact that as he sat watching the recording for possibly the second dozen time that day, the very same angel Detective Skywalker had moved in across the hall.

He had been attracted to Anakin before, but after the stunning detective took over the Negotiator case, Skywalker unwittingly had Obi-Wan's full attention and interest, made only worse by the man living so very, very close, and by the time summer had rolled around, physical attraction and professional interest had festered into obsession. He maintained his distance, of course, a difficult thing with the man living so very close, with their nearly weekly contact, with the way that Anakin's eyes very obviously roved over him when he thought the professor wasn't looking. But Obi-Wan was always looking, always watching, and though he was never the one to instigate contact, always was polite and respectful, never engaging in anything other than neighborly behavior, in the privacy of his own home behind his locked doors, he was already planning for winter, a new series of murders tailored specifically to the object of his obsession.

He had spent so long learning and perfecting his craft, turning death into an art form, his victims into masterpieces, and for years, that had been enough. He was content to continue his memorials to Siri and Qui-Gon and Satine, his purpose for killing deeply rooted in that which made him kill, his murders trapped within the same cycle that trapped him. The victims didn't matter so long as there were victims. They weren't the point, though sometimes, if given the opportunity, they were. He couldn't count how many doppelgangers of Satine he had murdered over the years, covering her living copies in their own blood and returning them to nothing to be with their twin that he had loved. Or how many Qui-Gons he had slaughtered just as the original had been, or how many Siris he had left cold and lifeless like the day he found his friend so long ago. And that was fine. That had been enough, the same pattern, the same memorials every year to make their deaths.

But now, with Anakin on the case, he felt inspiration strike. His obsession was consuming, and he thought of very little else as the nights grew colder on their way to winter, often catching himself laying away at night and seeing nothing but the intelligent detective and imagining that in some way, Anakin was doing the same thing, staring at the ceiling in the apartment across the hall, his mind filled with his crimes, his victims, his beautiful pieces of art, haunting him just as the detective had so throughly haunted him.

It was close enough, intimate enough for Obi-Wan to decide that lovely Anakin belonged to him, that he needed to be cherished and protected from whatever force it was that seemed to decide that Obi-Wan should be alone. So he kept his hands to himself, even though he fantasized about burying himself deep inside that beautiful body, kept his distance even as he was desperate to own more than just his thoughts, content to watch him from afar even though he so longed to keep the detective chained up in his apartment where he could always, always keep him near and safe...

But so long as he never touched him, never drew near, there was nothing for him to lose, and there would be no cruel fate to rip Anakin away. Though he did think about it. Often. About absconding away with Skywalker and keeping the precious thing to himself, at hand at any time so that he may take his pleasure out of that lovely body, the object of his obsession always within reach to service him in all the many way he could dream up, and Obi-Wan had always been very creative. But Detective Skywalker was an officer of the law, a feisty and smart one, and Obi-Wan doubted that the boy would come along willingly, and a struggling Anakin may prove to be very difficult to keep against his will, to say nothing of the investigation that would be launched upon Coruscant's rising star cop being abducted. No, it was safer this way, and Obi-Wan was content to simply be his neighbor and watch him from a safe, secure distance.

Abducting Anakin would ruin everything anyway. He and Skywalker were bound together now in a beautiful, complete circle, with the cop hunting the killer and with the killer silently stalking the cop. They had their attention focused on the other, and to remove Anakin from the equation would be to destroy something beautiful and profound and intimate, even if only Kenobi could see it. With the exception of his victims, Obi-Wan hadn't felt so close, so intimate with anyone since he had lost Satine.

It was enough for him to change his cycle, to alter his pattern, and Anakin Skywalker served as his inspiration.

By the winter of his third official, documented cycle, Obi-Wan's victimology had drastically changed, no longer the mix of gender, age and race that had made him so difficult to predict, but now only taking men in their mid twenties with golden, gently curling locks and deep, beautiful blue eyes, all of them thin and fit and undisputably handsome, each of them a twin to Detective Anakin Skywalker. The police investigation had taken a turn there, not coming any closer to the killer, but now fully aware that the Negotiator wasn't just watching the case, he was playing with the lead detective. That cycle had been particularly enjoyable as Obi-Wan watched from the shadows as Anakin became more and more agitated, more determined to solve the case, more frustrated when he could not, and more angry that these poor, innocent victims were chosen and killed because of him.

Anakin was taking this personally, which was exactly what Obi-Wan had wanted. His complete and undivided attention, along with an emotional investment that the detective could never be rid of.

That had been last year, an experiment to test and see how young Skywalker reacted. This year, Obi-Wan was raising the stakes.

His first victim in this cycle was found at the pool of a community center, the seasonal cover torn off and the body found in the water, the cold night air already haven frozen a thick sheet of ice over the water, the body half frozen inside the ice, a vacant, eyeless gaze seeming to follow the detectives no matter where they went. Worse was that the organs had been dropped inside the pool and had sunk to the bottom, and the investigators spent hours cutting through and fishing the innards up, with the exception of the heart. That they had found snugly wrapped up in a little bed of towels inside the lifeguard's office, along with a note for Detective Skywalker, reminding him to keep warm that winter.

His second victim had been completely opened up and displayed at one of the city's post offices like a gruesome envelope, the internal organs wrapped up in clear plastic wrap and laid neatly inside the empty body cavity, along with a note for Detective Skywalker informing him that the man's organs were not in their proper place and it should be corrected immediately, lest he suffer from adverse health effects. The Negotiator had also reminded Skywalker to take care of his own health. Anakin hadn't seemed to like that, and Obi-Wan had heard him complaining in the hallways that evening that the case was puzzling enough without having to solve the killer's actual gory puzzle.

And his third victim...

He was looking at him right now.

Obi-Wan prided himself on being able to find men with an uncanny resemblance to Anakin, but when he found this boy in the bar that night, he thought for a moment that he was actually looking at his neighbor. There were differences, of course, but he had to look closely, and with the stress of his closing cycle upon him, the need burning within him for blood as his deadline fast approached, it became very easy to overlook the small differences and begin his seduction of the boy. It had been easy, the flirtatious, promiscuous thing more than happy to have the attention and praise of the handsome, refined man, and it took very little convincing to get the boy inside his car and on the way to his cabin.

He had dragged the man up the stairs and threw him on the bed the moment they arrived, Obi-Wan wasting no time in tearing the clothes off the eager young man and proceeded to spend the rest of the night driving into him, caught up in the moment and the thrill of sinking himself deep within a man that served as a perfect stand-in for the object of his obsession. He had been rough with the boy, punishing in his pace and relentless in his need to drink deep of the body beneath him. Obi-Wan took him in every way he could imagine, his frenzy only growing as his bloodlust intensified, but he did all he could to stave off the urge to kill in an attempt to extend his time with this Anakin lookalike.

When the boy's pleasured moans became whimpers and groans of pain, his tired, roughly used body aching for rest, Obi-Wan plied him with alcohol, the intoxication making him submissive and willing for a time until Kenobi could no longer be bothered with niceties and fucked him for all he was worth, his hand wrapped tightly in his golden curls and heedless in his obsession of the man pleas for him to stop, to be gentler, to let him go.

Dawn was just beginning to light the sky by the time Obi-Wan could no longer stave off the urge to kill, and he unceremoniously slid out of the man and pulled his pants on, his eyes never leaving the bed where the exhausted, used boy lay still and nervous of the man that had broken him, his lean muscles trembling with each breath and his eyes wide and fearful as he watched his brutal lover pace like a caged animal, just staring at him. Realization came to him slowly, but the man was too afraid to move, hoping that being still would somehow make the dangerous thing in the room simply go away.

"Get up," Obi-Wan snarled when he couldn't take it a second longer, and the man tensed, looking at him quickly, his eyes wide and alert and fearful, and Obi-Wan scowled, snarled viciously as his hand shot out to grab a fistful of his curling gold hair and unceremoniously yanked him off the bed, pulling the struggling, screaming man out into the halls. He scrambled for purchase on the stairs as he was pulled down, his hands gripping for the railing and never quite managing to get a grasp on it. When he hit the bottom, Obi-Wan's grasp slipped for just a moment, long enough for the man to get his foot solidly on the ground and push away from his assailant, a chunk of his fine hair pulled out with the force of his escape, and he went stumbling away from the terrifying man he was trapped with, naked and disoriented in a dark house he didn't know.

He didn't get far, his frantic gasps and fearful whimpers ringing loud in his own ears as he went stumbling over chairs and crashing into cabinets. When he had finally gotten his footing, finally saw the fain light of the sky through a window, he dashed toward it, only to run right into Obi-Wan's fatal embrace, his arm wrapping around the choking man's neck and dragging him backwards through the house as he struggled and kicked at the ground and the walls. When he finally was released, he found himself falling, flung backwards to spin in the air and crash heavy down a flight of stairs to land hard on the cold ground.

He wasn't sure how much time had passed, only knew that muffled sounds surrounded him like he was under arctic water, and when he felt strong enough, he sat up, groaning as every muscle in his body objected to movement. His eyes were bleary when he opened them, and after a moment, he managed to blink away the haze, his breath stopping in his chest as he looked at a stainless steel table in the center of a room filled on every side with sharp knives, jagged saws, blunt instruments, all immaculate, all ordered on the wall by the size and type, and all his fears were confirmed.

A startled, sudden shriek was pulled from his throat when strong arms wrapped around him, pinning his arms to his side and keeping him from moving, despite his best efforts. "Y-you're the Negotiator..." he stammered in a weak, frightened voice, his last ditch effort to somehow get free when all other chances were gone. "I-I've been following your case, y-you're-"

"Have you really?" Obi-Wan whispered, slowly backing him and his captive up, the boy attempting to fight back his frightened tears. "That's hardly a surprise, I do believe everyone has their eyes on my work..." He firmly pressed his lips to the boy's cheek, and he began sobbing in earnest. "And soon, they will all be looking at you. My greatest piece yet."

"P-please..." he stammered, renewing his struggling when Obi-Wan reached behind him and slid a long, thin knife off the table behind him. He fell still, his frantic pleas for his life stopped when the killer wrapped his hand around his throat and squeezed down hard, his fingers digging into the sides of his trachea.

"You must be remarkably stupid..." Obi-Wan said with disgust, trailing the knife over his shivering, naked skin and leaving a thin, shallow line of blood in its wake, any scream he might have had cut off by the hand squeezing his throat. "If you've been following my case, you know I take boys just like you, you know I have one kill left before my cycle is complete...and yet you still went out and accepted the invitation from a stranger for sex in a remote getaway. Tell me how you don't deserve this."

"M-my family-"

"I'm afraid your family's feelings mean very little to me," Obi-Wan said, soft and sweet as he dragged the man against the table, pulling him back by the neck and forcing him to lay upon the cold surface, the hapless man renewing his struggling for only a minute before the thin knife pierced through the side of his neck, the feel of the sharp metal almost seeming to scrape along his throat as he felt it poke out the other side. He fell still, his eyes wide and frightened, his chest contracting but pulling in no air, and he could feel the slight trickle of blood down his neck. The moment he fell still, the Negotiator swiftly restrained his arms by the wrists in steel cuffs anchored to the table.

"You see..." Obi-Wan drawled, laying languid kisses on the man's hip as he restrained his legs as well. "You are going to be a gift for someone very important to me, and his feelings do matter. Very, very much so..." Obi-Wan took a deep breath, brushing back the quietly choking boy's hair and wiggling the knife in his neck, watching as he strained against his bindings in a surge of adrenaline caused by fear. "Stop struggling, dearest..." he whispered, pressing his lips against the man that could have been Anakin's lips. "You'll be dead soon. My cycle must be complete..."

Obi-Wan swiftly removed the knife, and blood began to gush out of the punctures in thick, pulsing spurts, running over the table and dripping into a seeping puddle on the floor below. He took a deep, relieved sigh as he ran his fingers through the stream that flowed in time with the twitching man's dying heartbeat, his gaze locked on the man's face and watching those beautiful blue eyes roll back in his head, his mouth gaping as he struggled for breath, the killer's hand soothingly stroking the thick, sweat-matted hair from his face. When he had stopped moving, the steady stream of blood becoming a thin trickle, Obi-Wan shuffled to one of his workbenches, picked up the chainsaw that lay beside it, and pulled the starter rope, and the engine reved to life.

"Oh, motherfucker!"

Obi-Wan took a deep, contented sigh of relief, removed the reading glasses from the bridge of his nose, and closed his book, setting it neatly upon the side table. His apartment was immaculate, recently cleaned from the numerous empty bottles, the smell of smoke that clung to everything, the atrocious stack of term papers from the end of the semester. It was two days past Christmas, two days since he had completed his cycle, his crowning achievement an absolute glorious mess of blood and dismembered limbs and dissected organs and even more blood, his victim's heart artfully pinned to the outside of the left section of his chest. The grocery store where the display was spread had to be shut down, the entire place carefully combed through, and even after their third pass, they were still finding pieces of the victim in freezers and tucked among the shelves.

The police hadn't left the scene yet, and it looked as if they would be there for a long time yet. And while his counterpart was working, Obi-Wan had returned home, smoked his final cigarette, fell into bed and slept, the first real, restful sleep he had since winter began, since his urge gripped him and his cycle began once again. With it's end, he returned to a state of false humanity, comforted and peaceful and once again able to function. His fourth official cycle, his eight actual cycle, had come to an end, and Obi-Wan Kenobi was at peace, free to enjoy the remainder of the University's winter break before classes resumed mid-January.

From the sound of it, Anakin wasn't having nearly as good a time.

Obi-Wan gripped his door handle, a soft smile on his lips as he closed his eyes and listened to his profane neighbor stomp through the halls and curse in long, creative strings of words that had absolutely no business together, but seemed all the filthier for it, and Obi-an couldn't help but wonder how it would be to kiss that mouth. Much like kissing his last victim, he suspected, though far sweeter.

When he had calmed his racing heart and gotten control of the almost giddy smile on his face, Obi-Wan opened the door and stepped out into the hall to find Anakin Skywalker, Detective and Dreamboat, fumbling for his keys and dropping the files he kept under his arm, his cell phone in his hand, his wallet and his badge that had been hanging loosely from his back pocket. His hair, usually ruffled and styled to look unkept, was in actual disarray, his handsome face worn and tired, his shirt half tucked in and half hanging down his leg, his tie badly and wrongly knotted, his eyes stormy with fatigue with dark circled beneath them. It was almost the very image that Obi-Wan had cut himself only days before, the stress of his cycle keeping him a sleepless wreck in even his best moments. He found Anakin's obvious physical distress...endearing. It seemed as though he had cycles as well.

"I believe your loud and aggressive cursing may give the children in the building ideas," Obi-Wan said in a light, easy drawl, the slightest smile coming to his lips when a startled Anakin quickly spun around, his back and the palms of his hands pressed flat against his door. "You, Detective, are a bad influence." Anakin stood there sputtering for a moment, his eyes wide as he stared at the neatly groomed, handsome professor, and managed to fail entirely to find his tongue. "Do you need help, Anakin?" Obi-Wan asked softly, his eyes drifting to the frankly embarrassing mess Skywalker had left in the hall in his attempt to get home.

N-no..." Anakin stammered, the swift expanding of his chest jolting him into action with a lung full of air after he had unknowingly been holding his breath. "No, thank you, Obi-Wan, I..." He looked down at the mess at his feet, his eyes burning and wavering on his feet in his exhaustion, and he sighed heavily and hung his head. "Yes, actually...that'd be great..." Obi-Wan didn't hesitate to cross the short distance in the hall and kneel in front of Anakin, carefully and neatly piling the scattered files together before Anakin cursed under his breath and knelt down as well to help his neighbor in the task of picking up his things.

"Long day?" Obi-Wan asked, and Anakin hung his head and groaned.

"Long season..." he muttered almost bitterly. "I don't know if you heard, but the Negotiator struck again..." Anakin pouted, and Obi-Wan couldn't help but covertly glance up and stare at his pursed lips. "And on Christmas! Tell me, Obi-Wan, what sort of a man murders a man and paints a supermarket in blood and body parts on Christmas?!"

"Mm, the wrong sort, I suppose..." Obi-Wan said, a touch of humor in his voice that got the desired effect out of the Detective when the man shook his head and chuckled softly.

"You're telling me..." Anakin groaned, standing up and thrusting his phone, his wallet and his badge deep into his pockets so he doesn't lose them again. "And if the day couldn't get any worse, that was the last kill in his cycle. He's done. I...missed my chance to get him. Again." He groaned in frustration, a scowl on his face as he slammed his fist against the door, a sharp, panicked bark bursting from behind the door of Anakin's apartment for a moment before it grew distant, then silent. Anakin didn't seem to notice. "I have to wait another year to have a chance at that bastard!"

"Is there any chance you might find him outside his pattern?" Obi-Wan asked, and Anakin swiftly shook his head.

"No," he said, strong and immediate. "He doesn't kill outside his cycle, so far as we know, and without a crime to track, he may as well be invisible. He can't make mistakes we can find him with when he's not committing crimes." Anakin sighed wearily and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Each day that passes from the date of his last murder is another step he takes away from us. No, we won't find him. Not until we have another shot next year..."

"If anyone can catch him, it's you, Anakin," Obi-Wan said kindly, and a small, grateful smile crossed the Detective's lips as he looked almost shyly at the professor. "In the meantime, it is safe for us to emerge from our homes, yes?" Obi-Wan asked in a slow, lazy drawl that made Anakin squirm slightly against the door, his weight shifting from foot to foot. "I haven't been staying in, of course. I'm of the understanding that I'm...not his type."

"No, but you're handsome enough..." Anakin said, his eyes widening and his hands flying to cover his mouth when he watched one of Kenobi's thin eyebrows raise and realized that he had said that out loud. "Oh, fuck, Obi-Wan, I am so sorry!" he gasped, trying to backpedal, and when he realized that he was only making things worse, he ran his hands down his face to hide the fierce, embarrassed blush quickly staining his cheeks. "I haven't slept in two days, I'm exhausted, I don't know what I'm saying!"

"It's alright, Anakin."

"No, it's not alright!" Skywalker said almost frantically. "Two days, Obi-Wan! Two days of going through every aisle of a market and finding notes written to me in blood with suggestions for good nutrition." He swiped his hand through the air. "These, not these! In blood! A-and we found the head in a meat freezer with a note telling me to have a safe and festive holiday and that he'll see me next year!"

"Mm, sounds like love..." Obi-Wan said with a roll of his eyes, taking the keys from Anakin's shaking hands, handing him his files, and unlocking the door for him. "Come now, Anakin, you've been working too hard. To bed with you," he said, gently pushing the stumbling Detective into the apartment while he stood in the hallway, respectfully keeping away from the threshold.

"Where the hell is my dog..." Anakin muttered as he rubbed his eyes, unceremoniously dropping his files on the small table beside the door.

"Probably hiding in the bedroom, you know how Threepio hates it when you yell," Obi-Wan said soothingly, a small smile on his lips when Anakin turned to face him.

"Sorry, Obi-Wan, I shouldn't have unloaded on you like that..." Anakin said meekly, his tired eyes lazily raking over the man, completely unaware that he was obviously staring.

"You know I don't mind," Obi-Wan said, his hands clasped behind his back and leaning forward slightly, and Anakin unconsciously leaned closer. "How about when you're rested, you come over for drinks. It seems we both have quite a bit of weight to unload. You with your case and me, the most awful thing of all..." He leaned in closer, Anakin's eyes widening, his lips parting slightly and his tongue darting out to lick his lips when a sly smirk crossed the professor's face. "Term papers."

"I think you might have it worse than I do..." Anakin said with a weak laugh, taking a step back when Obi-Wan straightened up. "Thanks. That sounds great."

"Call me any time, Detective. I'm free until the spring term begins."

"I will," Anakin said with a tired yawn, his previously tense shoulders finally beginning to relax. "Goodnight, Obi-Wan."

"Goodnight, Anakin. Do sleep well."

A shy smile, a quick, final glance at the professor, and Anakin closed his door with a soft click. Obi-Wan stayed in the hall for a moment longer, the smirk on his face dropping away as he stared intently at the door, and with a slight, manic grin of victory, he crossed the hall and disappeared into his own apartment.