Home.

Funny, how it's here, on Coruscant. Not there. Not on Stewjon, where the grass rolls toward the pastel sky and the families are painfully normal. So much so that they cannot possibly fathom the spreading expanse of difference that is between us, refusing to see the abyss rather than attempting to cross it, or just plumb it.

I realize now that this is why I seem to have problem holding onto things: much too much space separates me from the rest of the universe—just as it does to every other Jedi.

But now I'm home, and there's not stone's throw barring me from the scarce feeling that somehow I belong. Not that I am accepted, embraced, am always lavished with shows of gaudy affection—after all, Jedi are still Jedi. Still reserved. Hesitant to open up, to let the entanglements begin to snare them from the inside out—but at least they are somewhat like me. And they don't overlook me, peering through my mortal hide to see faces on the other side. Faces that are familiar to them, aren't strange and arid and icy like that of their son-brother.

Before I left, however, someone took notice of me. Again. And it wasn't merely a someone, either: it was Alee, striding jauntily toward me as I had been preparing to leave. To pack up my meager "belonging", shove them aboard the dormant starfighter that would take me far, far away, far from the listless farmland and swift sunrise.

"You're leaving," she said, skin and hair and everything else soft with the rising sun's silver kiss.

Hand poised to hoist my lugged into the starfighter's pitifully minute storage compartment, I paused to regard her. She wasn't delirious this around, eyes focusing on some private, thought-spun world. She wasn't forgetting things, wasn't standing at the river with urn and bottled grief clutched to her chest, maddening her—but she wasn't entirely whole, either. Even with the poison gone (that particular brand of toxin could affectively induce temporary memory loss, you know) and the river far behind her, her face looked ashen, more so than her sad, blanched little home.

I nodded warily. "I am. I decided it was time to head back home, to get down to business."

Her arms folded over her dimensionless chest. "Owen says you're a Jedi."

All of my inward gates and barriers began to rise. "So he told you, then."

"He did. And you mother—she says that you're not allowed to have families or something, which begs a couple of question. Like, why are you here, visiting your family?" Her eyes scrutinized me, slicing through layer upon layer with a surgeon's precision. "Or why did mention that you'd lost someone you loved, back at my cabin?"

I turned, busying myself with my luggage. "You remember that?"

"The poison's worn off, Kenobi," she pointed out, hackles rising. "So yes. I remember that, and I want you to explain."

Leaning over the prow of my starfighter, I sighed. Massaged my tired eyes, trying to work away the residual glow of a lifetime of sights. Failed, then opted to simply let shoulder hunch, admitting defeat in the face of age and pressing memory. "It's personal, Alee. I'd…I'd rather not go there. Not today."

Chin tilted up, Alee sent me a hard, measured look. "If you don't go there now, you never will. Because time doesn't make things better, Jedi: it only allows memories to flood in. Lets more things fester beneath the surface."

I risked fixing her with a brief look askance. "Is that why you were there at the river that day? Were you trying to…I don't know…face it? Or were you 'remembering'—your word, not mine."

A slow nod. "I was remembering my husband, Kenobi—even if that poison had my head in a different place. That's part of losing someone, after all, the remembering. Recalling that that someone is really gone, and all you have left are ashes and memories."

"Memories aren't always the most pleasant experience in the galaxy, Alee. Hence rum. And deathsticks."

"Of course they always aren't," she agreed. "Hardly anything is steady, accept for truth. And sometimes, the unsteady things come from what's reliable, trustworthy: like fires bringing either warmth or burns." Her unremarkable gaze softened, just a tad. "Good things can bring us pleasant things just as soon as evil. You should've seen that these past few days, what with that blasted river and all."

I pinched the bridge of my nose, hard. Squeezed my eyes shut, shut tight, hoping no light would stream in. Maybe darkness would keep the memory at bay, would keep me from recalling how I set out early this morning, spreading an urn-full of pale ashes into that ever-whispering river. "Believe me, I know that. Perhaps better than you. It's just that it's hard to actually believe it to be true."

"I think," she said softly, carefully, "that you do believe it. You just have a hard time remembering that you do."

My eyes snapped open, pupils shrinking away from sun rising. "You honestly think that."

"Was that a question or a statement?"

"Both, I think. Neither. Really, I have no clue."

"Do you remember her name?"

Twisting at the waist, I sent her a bemused—if not somewhat vexed—frown. "How you did you know it was a woman?"

She shrugged, all leonine nonchalance. "Just a lucky guess, I suppose. And you didn't answer my question: what was her name?"

"You didn't ask that," I pointed out. "You wanted to know if I remembered her name, didn't ask what it was."

"What's the difference?"

"If I'd answered your first question, my response would've been 'yes. But I wish I didn't.' But if you'd asked me that former, I would've told you that her name was Satine, and that she's dead—and blast it, it's my fault. My fault; I did it. Let it happen."

"I never asked you if you any of those other things either, Kenobi."

I hunched over the starfighter, palms pressed flat to the hull. No, she hadn't. But I'd said it nonetheless, had relinquished a single howl of the beast lurking within, and now it hung there, filling the air between us. And it begged—oh, it begged—to be noticed. "I do remember. A lot of things." I spread my fingers wide, letting the sunrise play with the metal hull beneath. "I remember that I'll die, one of these days."

"And remember that you are alive today, thanks to the powers-that-be."

After she backed, turned away and trudged back over downy fields, I never saw her again. Ever. To this day, all I have is a memory of her, her drab hair coming alive in the morning-promise-rising light.

And all I have left of Satine is my memory, after I freed her ashen cloud and let it drift away with the river.

It seemed fitting, somehow. Letting her listlessly travel a current, no apparent meaning in sight—it was a portraiture of her life, you could say. Of all life, now that I've seen war and warless bloodshed and suicides and murder and, oh, a thousand other things. Now that I've watched the will of the force take its strange, indiscernible shapes. Forms that look for all the world like tombstones, funerals, and ceaseless river-tears, but are really pathways intended to drive the world toward some unforeseen future.

What isn't seen…it's incredible, I've heard. Breath-taking. Which is why it's better that it's not visible—that it's unseen and yet here, always before us on the path.

Qui-Gon compared it to a river, once. I was young—younger than that moment with Satine, even. Really, you could've called me a boy: newly apprenticed, skinny, with a shock of red hair capping my head. Freckles lightly dusting my gaunt cheeks (Maybe I'm more of an echo of my mother than I care to admit) as I took in Qui-Gon's voice, taking comfort in the steadiness of it. The certainty.

"Its currents are sure," he'd said, hazel eyes carrying the burden of years-worth of seeing, "but it often doesn't appear that way. In fact, it appears as though it's aimless, as if every direction it chooses has no purpose. But that's only a lie, Obi-Wan: a lie told by our senses, which can never see past what's merely visible. That's the heart of despair, really—believing that seeing equals faith, and that all we see is all there is. No hope, no chance of something being made right. Because believing is seeing, Obi-Wan: seeing that there is something beyond, and that it is guiding history toward some fixed point. That everything—and I do mean everything—happens to for a reason."

But it's in the face of death when we forget it most: the current is carrying us home, toward the swift sunrise.