Note: I haven't written fanfic in years, but I just couldn't get this one idea to leave me alone, so I decided to exorcise it from my twisted little imagination the only way I knew how. If I'm too rusty at this, I apologize. I just really had to get it out.
He had taken leave of his senses. Of that one thing, Obi-Wan Kenobi was certain. Why else would a sensible man, a Jedi no less, be wandering around the lower levels of Coruscant at this uncivilized hour? Yes, he must have lost his mind. It was the only possible explanation for what he was doing here, now, when he should have been back in his rooms, asleep in his bed. Even Anakin, who had a tendency to slip out from time to time on his own little adventures, would have told him he was crazy for being here at this time of night. Then again, Anakin probably would have wanted to come along with Obi-Wan on this foolish quest, and this was something that Obi-Wan didn't want his padawan to know about, not under any circumstances. That was why he had left their quarters only after making sure that Anakin was asleep in his bed. Anakin needed his rest anyway. The last few months had been hard on him – Geonosis, the loss of his mother, the loss of his arm.
Of course, if Obi-Wan was to be completely honest with himself, he would have admitted that Anakin was part of the reason he was here tonight. Well, sort of. Tonight, however, Obi-Wan, wasn't being completely honest with himself, and so he told himself that this was just a bit of idle curiosity on his part. Yes, that was it. Curiosity, and nothing more.
From the depths of his hooded cloak, Obi-Wan looked out on the people who hurried back and forth through the streets. He could feel their energy, their excitement flowing out to him in waves through the Force. Humans and non-humans alike brushed their way past him, and past each other, without even a second glance, and bright signs and flashing lights threw their illumination out onto the normally dark and dingy streets. This was the illusion created by lower Coruscant. During the day, these streets and these people were so far below the surface that hardly any light ever filtered down from the levels above, but now, long after midnight, while the upper levels of Coruscant lay wrapped in the dark blanket of night, this hidden section of the city was as bright and as active as if it were daylight.
The establishment for which Obi-Wan had been searching, The Malua Bird, was easy enough to spot, but only because he knew what he was looking for. He imagined that many passed by it every day without ever truly noticing that it was there. It was small, little more than a hole in the wall, really, and it was easily dwarfed by the loud music of the dance clubs and the flashing lights of the gaming halls that occupied this level of Coruscant. Darting though the lanes of pedestrians and speeder traffic that whizzed by, he stopped to study the only lit sign on the building's exterior. "Come see the beautiful Miss Réna," the sign encouraged, "performances nightly." According to the performance time listed on the bottom of the sign, Obi-Wan had arrived just in time. In fact, he had planned on it.
"Miss Réna," Obi-Wan said to himself. Rénala Kolomis, if one wanted to be technical. That was the legal name, the one that had stared up at him from the screen of the data terminal all those months ago in the Jedi Archives. It was nothing more than a misplaced file, a bit of information that somehow ended up in the middle of his research on the political situation on Ansion, instead of gathering electronic dust in some other corner of the archives, where it belonged. Another man would have called it a strange coincidence, but Obi-Wan Kenobi was a Jedi, and to Obi-Wan Kenobi, there was no such thing as coincidence. There was only the will of the Force.
Pulling the folds of his cloak more tightly about him, Obi-Wan slipped through the door and tried to blend into the darkest corner he could find. This was not at all the type of place for a Jedi to frequent unless some duty or assignment made it necessary, and it was a place in which he did not want to be seen, for more reasons than most would suspect. Settling into a corner, he began to survey the room.
Though the business license listed The Malua Bird as a club, it was really more of a pub. Along the front and side walls were an assortment of two and four seater tables. The décor wasn't fancy, Obi-Wan noted, but it was clean, and though the chair cushions were worn in places, they were worn only to the point of comfort. Most of the tables had at least one occupant, and more often than not that occupant was nursing some sort of drink. A few patrons had a plate of some sort of food in front of them, as well. Simple meals, nothing too fancy. Nothing here was too fancy, but everything seemed comfortable and welcoming.
Roughly half of the room's occupants were human. The rest of the clientele consisted of an odd mix of species from throughout the galaxy, mammalian and reptilian alike, plus a few that Obi-Wan didn't even dare try to identify. There was a sense of ease about them, and they chatted back and forth with one another. They knew each other well. Apparently Miss Réna's fans were loyal. Many of these people must come here every night.
Along the back wall was a platform, a semi-circular bar counter that doubled as a stage, and every stool in front of it was full. Here the clientele sat with their drinks, chatted with the bartender, and waited for the "beautiful Miss Réna" to make her nightly appearance. Every few moments, someone would glance towards the kitchen door. Apparently that was where Miss Réna typically made her entrance.
He was studying a Twi'lek sitting at the bar, a frail, pail creature who seemed older than Coruscant itself, when the lights began to dim. The club's customers put down their drinks and began to clap. Then the kitchen door opened, and Obi-Wan got his first look at Miss Réna.
Obi-Wan knew a lot about her. He knew her age almost to the hour. After weeks of weeding his way through Republic census records, her vital statistics had been burned into his memory. He knew that as a young woman she had worked the streets of lower Coruscant, a prostitute, just as her mother before her had been. He knew that her first decent job had been just beyond that kitchen door. She'd been hired to wash dishes, a human doing a droid's job, but it had been honest work, the kind of work she'd wanted. He knew her ID codes, her address, and how long she'd lived there. He knew every fact there was to know about Rénala Kolomis, but he had never found a holo of her, and he hadn't been quite sure what to expect. Whatever it was, it wasn't this. Certainly not this.
His first thought was that the years had been kind to her. She was beautiful, still, with a graceful manner and a feminine figure that belied her true age. The sparkling blue fabric of her gown draped across her in a way that would draw any man's attention, young or old. Her face, likewise, looked younger than it was, with high cheekbones and bright, energetic blue eyes. Upon further inspection, he noticed a few wrinkles here and there, but that was only because he was looking for them. The trace of gray at her temples was the only sign that the brown of her hair was fading with time. He watched as she strolled along the stage and stopped just slightly off-center. And then she opened her mouth and began to sing.
It wasn't the voice of an angel, far from it. It was husky and seductive, the kind of voice that one might expect a night club singer to have. She sang of a beautiful young woman, a woman who knew how all the men admired her pretty face and took advantage of their attention, and as she left the first verse and started into the first chorus, he watched as Miss Réna began to flirt with the customers at the bar. He watched as she wiggled her hips just so in her skimpy little dress, her hands reaching out here and there to ruffle the hair on one man's head, to tweak the nose on another. Frowning, Obi-Wan decided that he had seen enough. He really had taken leave of his senses in coming here. He had come to satisfy his curiosity about this woman, his curiosity and nothing more. He had seen all that he needed to see and learned far more than he should already know. Frowning, he turned to go.
It was a customer in the back who caught his attention as he headed for the door, an aging Trobian who watched Miss Réna with a admiring smile on his leathery brown lips, not the kind of smile one gave a tart in a skimpy dress, but a respectful, affectionate smile. The kind of smile this Trobian might give to his daughter or to his granddaughter. It stopped Obi-Wan in his tracks, and he stepped back into the shadows, this time turning his attention to Miss Réna's audience instead of to Miss Réna herself.
All around the room, men of all ages, sizes, and species wore that same look as they watched and listened to Miss Réna sing. And they were watching her sing. All eyes were focused on her face, and even though she spun and dipped and strutted about the stage, the members of the audience gave her flirtatious dancing little more than a passing glance. Turning his attention back to the words of the song, he listened as the last verse told of a lonely old woman, her beauty long gone because, in her youthful foolishness, she had let her own vanity push away all who might have truly loved her until they, like her beauty, had gone. Smiling faintly, Obi-Wan decided that there was more to Miss Réna than met the eye.
He stayed and listened to another song, and he listened as she paused to talk to the members of her audience. He watched as she leaned over to place a friendly kiss on top of the ancient Twi'lek's head. The whole audience laughed good-naturedly, as did Miss Réna, and it occurred to Obi-Wan that every man in the club knew her, and had known her for many, many years. She was far more than a beautiful woman in a flashy dress to them. She was one of them. She was a friend. They knew her far better than he ever would, and Miss Réna would never know him at all. That realization left him feeling strangely empty.
He laughed with everyone else in the club when Miss Réna asked the ancient Twi'lek what his wife, Oanin, would do when he got home and she found out that he'd had another woman kissing him. "Won't bother me a bit," the old Twi'lek replied, "I haven't had two women fight over me in sixty years!" And Miss Réna just laughed and broke out into another song, this time a ballad of broken hearts and lost love.
Obi-Wan stayed in the shadows and listened and laughed until she had finished the show and taken a seat at the bar. She laughed and joked, talking to every man at the bar, asking about their wives, their children, their parents. Obi-Wan was just thinking he should make his exit when the door opened, and a woman who was more of a child than a woman slid in through the door and moved through the shadows at the edges of the room. She was dressed in a skimpy red dress that left more uncovered than it covered. The paint on her face was smudged by tears, and she walked as though her feet were killing her. He watched as the girl found a table in the corner, slid down into a chair, and tried to be invisible, but the girl's entrance had not gone unnoticed. From her place at the bar, Miss Réna studied her for a moment, and then motioned to the bartender. Moments later, a tired looking Rodian appeared from the kitchen with a plate of food in hand and made his way across the room to where the girl sat.
"But . . . but I don't have any money tonight," Obi-Wan heard the girl whisper to the Rodian, "I can't buy any food. Can I please just sit here for a few moments and rest? I won't make any noise or cause any trouble," she said in a small voice. "I promise."
"You don't have to buy any food," the Rodian answered quietly as he set the plate down in front of her. "Miss Réna's already bought it for you."
And at that moment, Miss Réna turned and smiled at the girl, a smile full of more kindness and compassion than Obi-Wan had seen in quite some time. Excusing herself from the bar, Miss Réna made her way over to the girl's table and sat down. "How old are you?" he heard her ask after a moment.
"Fifteen," the girl whispered as she stared down at the plate of food in front of her. Miss Réna studied her for a moment.
"Do you really want to be doing what you're doing?"
Tears let loose once again, sliding down the girl's cheeks, and she shook her head. "No, no, I don't want to do it anymore. Tonight I just couldn't. I just can't-" She stopped as Miss Réna laid a comforting hand atop her own trembling one.
"Well, then," the older woman said with a smile, "maybe we can find you something else to do." The girl seemed to ponder this for a moment, and then she lifted her eyes to Miss Réna as a hesitant smile began to break out on her face.
And smiling to himself, Obi-Wan slipped out the door and made his way back through the night to his rooms, out of this lower level of Coruscant and back to the life he had been given to, if not to the life he had been born to.
It had been a private errand, something that he had needed to do for himself, but still . . . perhaps he should have brought Anakin along tonight. It might have done Anakin some good, might have taken the young man's mind off of the loss of his mother and let him enjoy himself for a little while. Anakin had been through a lot lately, but through it all, it seemed that his mother's death had weighed most heavily upon him. Perhaps, he thought as he offered himself a moment of self-truth, perhaps it had been Anakin's loss that had spurred his own curiosity this night.
He knew something more about Miss Réna now than he had known before. He knew, from his research, that at one time she had worked the street corners of the lower levels of Coruscant, and that one day she had found herself pregnant at the age of seventeen with no clue just who the father of that child might be. From work records, he had found just how that baby had changed her life, had inspired her to make something of herself, to get an honest job washing dishes in the kitchen of a restaurant.
She had wanted to be a good mother, he knew, and she had loved her baby. She had loved him so much that when motherly intuition told her that her baby was special, she had taken him to the Jedi to be tested, and when those tests came back proving what she had suspected all along, she had given her baby away, had willingly given him to the Jedi because she knew he had so much more to offer the galaxy than he could ever have given stuck in the darkness of Coruscant's lower levels.
Yes, now he knew something more about Miss Réna, about the woman who had given birth to him. Miss Réna had a heart of gold, a heart that was bigger than Coruscant itself. Yes, tonight had satisfied Obi-Wan's curiosity on that matter. His curiosity, but nothing more.
Thoughts, anyone?