A/N: I haven't properly written fanfic in eight years (scribbling vague snippets doesn't count when they don't even amount to a drabble). Darth RL just drowned me. Recently I've been seriously making attempts at going at it again.

I chose an Obi-Wan&Luke bunny to ease myself back into things. It's starting out as missing scenes from RotS, and is very slightly AU in that it supposes a longer time elapses between Padmé's funeral and the final shot of the film than how that concluding montage is usually interpreted. Fairly unoriginal premise, and since Luke's a newborn, it's pretty much an Obi-Wan virtually-intertrilogy (mostly-)introspective. As if anyone needed another one of those! But I don't care; it's Obi-Wangst. More for me if no one will have him.

Disclaimer: All recognisable characters and/or situations are property of Lucasfilm. I wouldn't invest so much time and emotional energy on someone else's stuff if I wasn't doing it for love not money.

Dystocial Hæmorrhage

Prolegomenon

(Later, he would not remember it, but the first arms that held him were Obi-Wan Kenobi's.)

From the first, they have known love, him and his other-self, for it has made them: has knit their bones and woven their organs, threaded together their nerves and synapses, and thumped their little hearts against their still-malleable ribs. It sings in the spreading network of their veins, and before all other lights it shines in their half-formed eyes behind their transparent lids. It is the curled-up hands and soul's mirror-sense with which they touch, skin and psyche against membrane-thin skin and unfurling psyche. It is the watery bed that cradles them in the Time before time.

It is Her: Her voice and the quiet-shine of joy thrumming in it as She softly hums to them; Her body as it cradles and gives shape to their own, flesh of Her loving flesh; Her heartbeat as it teaches theirs to keep time. It is the yearning and hoping and waiting they feel in Her.

And then, upon a time, it is Him, too: the blinding brightness that envelopes them—and Her as well—the touch that is gentle, yet cool and hard and also…

Fearful. Their tiny, almost-translucent bodies twitch together in joint alarm at the strange, powerful sensation—it drags at them, and it is cold. But then She laughs, and Her hands caress their cradle, and their startlement becomes wriggles of joy.

Yet fear has entered the world, and from there it grows. Slowly, to be sure; slower than they themselves are growing—but only barely just. As the fear crescendoes, She is afraid too. And then there is pain, Her pain and sorrow, that feels to them like the universe is tearing itself apart, limb from bloody limb. His fear is a blade the colour of Her love.

They cling together, he and his other-self. It is all they can do. They would wail in terror, if they could; but they do not know how.

Her love is an imperturbable shelter, but She is fading. He takes from Her, and She gives and gives, because that is what She does. They cling to Her, as He does, and for a time unmeasured She bleeds transfixed between them, as though Her limbs are pierced through and pinned to them with cruel stakes. And still She gives.

The walls of their cradle push at them, warning that they will crumble. It is time, they seem to say; go, dear ones, while you can—with all the intimacy of wordlessness, like the speech shared between a current and the ocean, a raindrop and its motion. Her body pushes him, even as Her love enfolds and quickens him with Her own life-force. His body, the flesh and bones fashioned from Her own, knows what to do, twisting sideways and through Her. As he labours through that primeval passage, that first and greatest of journeys, he becomes aware of time—of how agonisingly slowly he moves, of Her pain. But here it is love and not fear that pains Her, setting Her body against itself: the holding-close and the sending-forth striving in equal love.

Cold and light flood his senses. For a terrible moment he feels with sudden sharpness his first loss: of his other-self and of Her. It is like falling endlessly, and in his distress, he instinctively opens his mouth. A cold rush floods through him, scouring his wet flat nostrils, his bare gums and the roof of his mouth. Something inside him opens and fills and, before his throat quite knows what it is doing, he pushes out again. To his astonishment, a wail rips through the cold. The not-having feeling is unbearable. He draws his second breath, and pushes it out again in another, stronger cry.

Then a warm strength enfolds him, driving back the cold, and arms that are gentle but smell strange—leaving a prickling in his nose and throat—surround him. For a heartbeat, his damp eyes blink open, and his first sight is of smudged shapes and watery colours that his brain instinctively makes sense of as a face. He knows, in the way he knows of Her love and His fear, that this face means the strength and warmth he feels.

The arms bring him lower, and suddenly he becomes aware of Her again: not with the intimacy of the cradle of Her womb, but close nevertheless. His cries subside to gurgles. Her hand brushes his face, and in that brief raindrop-touch he feels Her—love that can fill the galaxy's every black hole—as She whispers, "Oh, Luke."

Luke's eyes are squeezed shut again, against the overwhelming light, but he does not need them to see Her beauty. For Her beauty formed his eyes and brain; it is imprinted deeply upon his sight and deeper still in his spirit. It will illuminate everything he ever sees.

The strange-smelling arms hold him close to Her. He feels Her give all She has, and then hears a cry that echoes his own—a voice he recognises immediately, though he has never heard it before and the sound of it has scarcely any distinguishing features. He would know his other-self even were all the wheeling stars to change between them.

"Leia."

He turns towards Her voice as She speaks, his small flailing limbs giving expression to his growing distress, for he senses Her slipping away with a terrifying finality he cannot begin to grasp. And now She gives the only thing She still has, the very last. Even that She does not withhold. He feels it settle into him, a frail and desperate fluttering that She had not the strength left to name.

A tenacious thing that puts down deep roots, hope, for all its fragility. But Luke does not know that.

All he knows is that She is not-there-anymore. He cannot understand the way the fractured universe collapses on itself, every star She had kindled draining into the awful yawning chasm She leaves behind. The shock of being born is swallowed up by this. This cold and wanting and not-having.

He would wail for Her to come back, were he a little older—but young as he is, he does not conceive of himself and Her separately. So he howls for the sheer incomprehensible not-having. This dizzying, dragging vacuum. But She is not there and— She was, and now She is not. He cannot imagine, yet, what-may-come. He does not yet grasp that She now will never be there, which is a mercy perhaps. But neither does he—can he—begin to imagine that this will ever pass. That he will ever be whole. Distantly, he senses his other-self, too, screaming throat and soul for Her, the reflected loss magnifying his own, until all feeling is smeared thin and colourless against the emptiness. With all his might he reaches to follow Her—for death holds no terror for him, not yet.

But the warmth that belongs to the arms carrying him presses closer, and the strength there wraps comfort around him that holds him back from Her. It is not Her—he will learn, in time, that nothing now will ever be—but it eases the cold and not-having, a little. And it bids him stay. Luke squirms, wanting more, wanting the warm comfort closer. A gentle touch embraces him, nudging him softly into drowsiness—for half a heartbeat it is like Her body cradling him, in that long-gone Always-before-now—and he sleeps.