A/N: Sorry about all the angst in this chapter... but... I have to say: Always wanted to write some angst!

Chapter 13: The Heart of One Beloved

You touch so blissfully because the caress preserves,

Because the place you so tenderly cover does not vanish;

Because underneath it you feel pure duration.

So you promise eternity, almost, from the embrace.

-Rilke, Second Elegy

In Theed Palace work went on despite what sounded like the whole of Theed celebrating outside, hollering in the streets. Doctor Amadine Koos, medic first class, shook her head at the noise. It was almost better during the invasion, at least then the sick and injured could rest in relative peace.

"Will you go and yell at them for me, please, Captain," she said to a very dusty Captain Panaka, who stood immediately, battle-frown already forming on his face. She noted that one of his sleeves was ripped, and there was a burn forming on his left cheek bone, raising itself into a scarlet welt. Panaka the impeccable, they used to call him. He wasn't now.

She touched his arm as he passed her, and saw the guilt sitting on his shoulders, his incipient grief.

"You should rest, Captain, or at least go look after your men. Go find your family. The girl will still be here when you return. I promise."

He frowned at her, but she had seen that look enough times to know it as acquiescence. The Captain of the Guard was then heard roaring outside in the courtyard for a good minute, after which all fell quiet. Question the man's methods if you must, Amadine thought, but he always managed to get the job done.

One of her nurses tugged at her elbow, and she turned to see that the young Jedi had finally risen from his seat by the one who had died. He had been in that position ever since the body had been brought in almost an hour ago.

Amadine watched him open a small knife and cut off the long braid that hung down his shirt with two swift hacks. His eyes were dry, but Amadine knew shock when she saw it, and whatever else was said about them, Jedis were not exempt from grief. One could not deny, even after years of training, the part of you that refused to be taught, the part that still feared the dark and the end of all things.

The young Jedi gently tucked the long braid of hair under the older one's interlaced fingers, and staggered out of the small side room had had been set as a temporary morgue.

Amadine walked toward him, determined to make him sit and take a cup of hot chocolate if it was the last thing she did. Then she saw him stop by the bed of a girl who had been brought in after him, the girl with the short stubbles of hair whose stretcher had been followed by Captain Panaka and a slew of other young men and women, all of whom she had to stop at the door.

If the young Jedi could have gotten any paler, he would have. Amadine watched as he approached the bed, his steps shaky, his hand outstretched.

"No, no no no, please," she heard him whisper, the first words he's spoken since he arrived.

She saw the love so clear and vulnerable in his face that she wanted to turn away, for no one should see, on the face of a stranger, such tender things exposed to the cruel air. But thirty years she had been a doctor; she did not turn aside. Instead she took his arm and seated him in a chair before he could fall down.

He turned to look at her, blue eyes empty.

"She is still alive, master Jedi," Amadine said gently. Her heart hurt for him, as the hope began to war with the sadness in his face, even as he tried to gather the shreds of self-possession around him.

"But she's so cold," he said, touching the girl's hand.

"To tell you the truth, I don't even know how she survived. A man was here who saw her take a blast directly to the heart. She pushed him out of the way, he said; she saved many lives."

He made a mirthless noise, "Yes, that sounds like something she would do."

He was regaining control of himself, she thought. The pieces of his armor was coming back together in her presence. He sat straighter, swallowed, and cleared his throat to control his voice.

"And what is her prognosis, Doctor?" He said.

"She's a miracle," Amadine replied, "and she is stable, but we can't wake her. It's as if her body had shut down in order to heal itself."

"I see," he said, and put his hand on the girl's hand, which was bandaged from an old wound. There was still a lost look in his eyes.

Amadine had an idea. She took her stethoscope off her neck, where it sat more as a badge of authority than an instrument of diagnosis, since machines took care of so much now. She offered the earpieces to the young man. He moved slowly, as if in a dream, but placed the device in his ears.

Amadine chose a spot left of the sternum where the blaster hadn't singed the skin to a bright, angry red, and laid the bell of the stethoscope against the girl's heart.

There was no reaction in his face in those first moments when the faint, regular beat filtered through, intimate and undeniable. But then Amadine felt, rather than saw, the change in the room as he gave up that terrible fear inside him. It felt like the scent of thaw on winter morning that heralds the sun. Such was the power, to hear the heart of one's beloved, she thought.

Amadine saw the glint of a tear catch on the edge of his eyes and fall. With a last hand on his shoulder, she drew the curtains around the bed and left them.

For a long time, the void was empty beneath her feet, until it seemed to Sabé that she stood upon snow. She looked down, and there were her feet, still in the tall boots of her battle dress. So she would be Queen Amidala's decoy, even to this afterlife.

The thought gave her no distress, dying. After all it seemed that she was already over the threshold, upon the other side. In the cold, clear air there was still little to be felt, standing in the powdery cold bank of snow, brilliant white, stretched as far as she could see, ceaseless under a cobalt blue sky.

There was no sun anywhere upon the sky, though everything glowed. When Sabé looked down again, marveling at her own feet, she found a set of footprints next to her, as of a person who had walked her way and passed by her while she stood there, lost in thought. The feet were larger, and the imprint was deeper, the stride longer. A tall man, striding leisurely, had left this imprint of his path in the snow. He was going the opposite way

Sabé began to follow the tracks back to where they came from. It seemed imperative that she did not go where the man had gone, but retraced his way, back to the beginning. The wind began to blow. She walked until the cold stung at her arms and legs like a thousand needles.

Then Sabé lifted her head and looked about her, taking shallow breaths as the air stung her lungs, and realized that the snowy field around her was scored with countless tracks, all headed in the opposite direction as her own. Her legs felt like lead weights, and at her next step she stumbled and fell to her knees, stirring up a pile of white powder, which flowed up around her like smoke.

Then two strong hands clamped on her shoulders, and hauled her to her feet. And Qui-Gon's voice, that same wry tone, came in upon her ears.

"Stand up, little ghost," he said, his voice was muffled, far away yet near, so near she thought that she had heard him in her mind.

"Take care of Obi-Wan for me, will you?" Qui-Gon said, and the voice was full of emotion, both sadness and a calm, brilliant joy that Sabé could not name.

"He was like a son to me," the ghost of Qui-Gon said in her ear, and there was a cracking noise like great trees splitting from weight of the winter snow, and the pain of her true body returned, and Sabé felt her heart burn as if a winter storm howled inside it, sending jagged ice into its chambers.

Sabé thought she cried out, but the air was still and empty of voices. A moment, when the pain receded to only a dull ache, and Sabé opened her eyes, for the second time in her life, on a world she thought she had left.

The air smelled of antiseptic. The curtains around her ward were black swathes in the night's blue shadow, and asleep, slumped over his chair, with this head resting sideways on her bed, was Obi-Wan Kenobi. He had turned his head from her in sleep, so Sabé could see by the jagged cuts where his Padawan braid had been severed, and not with great care.

She remembered that familiar deep voice speaking out of the cold, and guessed what must have happened. She imagined Obi-Wan's grief, and how far he had to go to be composed again, to climb back into the skin of a Jedi master. She knew that no matter how much he had wanted to be detached and stand impassive, that Obi-Wan was a passionate man, that he had been passionately devoted to his master, and because he had always hidden the inner effulgence of his emotion from others, he must also stand to bear the passion of his grief alone.

"Take care of Obi-Wan for me," Qui-Gon had said.

"But how?" she whispered, "when he won't let me?"

Then, Sabé realized, as Obi-Wan's hands flexed on hers, that he had covered her cold fingers with his own as he slept.

She felt the sting of tears in her eyes.

Whatever face he showed to the world, Sabé thought, I know his soul, which no mask could cover, not even the mask of control and restraint that had grown into him, into his very bones. I know that in his heart, he cares. He cares desperately; he can do naught but care.

And it was for his heart that she would try to care for him in return; for it was his heart that knew and did not pity her love.

Sabé felt ungainly, but she managed to peel off one of her own numerous blankets, and settle it across Obi-Wan's shoulders, which must soon bear so much responsibility. It probably was unmannerly to take advantage of his sleeping, weakened state and plant a kiss upon his head, but Sabé was no state dignitary, no monarch, who must observe the rituals and articles of war.

"You were like a son to him, you know," she said to the sleeping Obi-Wan. Then Sabé took his hand again under the covers, closed her fingers around his calloused palm, his fingers preternaturally warm as always. And holding his hand, Sabé fell back into a sleeping trance, as a diving bird pierces the surface of the great ocean.

When Obi-Wan woke, the bright clear yellow light of the Naboovian sun was coming through every window. Yet even at his first breath he felt as though he had passed a gate behind him, never to be regained, that thtere was a point of equilibrium in his past that had been materially altered. Some deep, basic, molecular changed had occurred in him, and its effect was making the cascade through his veins.

There was still a pain in his chest, a pain that did not go away. His balance was off, Obi-Wan thought. So the world was this: consistently pulling the rug out, readjusting the weights, the worries, the balance of life and death. And even though his heart recoiled at the feeling of such imbalance, he thought it fitting.

The world was changed. Qui-Gon was dead.

He remembered Sabé saying how she had wanted, more than all the wonders of the world, to be still. It was grief, he realized. Though she did not remember her parents or their deaths it was a kind of grief for them nonetheless. It was a grief he shared now; the grief of knowing how the world moves on.

There was no possibility of avoiding heartbreak, he thought; there was no getting away from it.

There was a certain peace in that knowledge.

Once he had calmed, long after the grey-eyed doctor with her gaze of mercury left the room, Obi-Wan realized something about Sabé that had never occurred to him before. Sometime around his own fifteenth birthday, Obi-Wan had not slept for half a week on a mission, spending the long nights plotting, worrying, hearing Qui-Gon's deep nasal whistle while he slept. That was the trip when a badly executed block had broken three of his fingers, snapped all at once in a clean yet sickening crack. Back on the transport, infection and fever had set in his blood. Obi-Wan was delirious with it and remembered nothing until two days later, waking in the comforting convalescent rooms of the Jedi temple. No bacta needed, one of the healers had said to him. His body merely needed the quiet to repair itself.

"You were in a force-induced healing trance," Qui-Gon had told him later that day, completely normal procedure, no tender inquiries, no further questions, pleased, for Qui-Gon too hated to be in the infirmary. He did not like anything that kept him land-bound, slow-moving. Always in motion, that was Qui-Gon Jinn.

Obi-Wan bit his cheek as the terrible longing swelled through him, filling his heart, choking him.

But through the maelstrom of unbidden emotion he called the point of significance, that was the realization that Sabé too, was in that state of force-induced trance. He had reached out to her through the force, and found it there, like a opalescent dome enclosing her body, glowing like a swift running brook that wove itself trough the air around her. She would be well, he thought, closing his eyes and reading her vital signs through the force. She was a force-sensitive. How could he have missed it?

Last night, Obi-Wan thought that he should leave her, for he was no company for anyone, comatose or awake. As it was, he had found all the blankets he could, and wrapped her in them. It was peaceful to be near her. He had fallen asleep at her side, comforted by the faint sense of her beating heart.

For a second yesterday he thought that the would not be able to stand it, if in addition to his master, he would also lose Sabé, who yearned to see so much more of the world, who had so much of her heart to give. It was a dangerous idea, he realized now, to make claims on what was fair, and what was not. Fate had no concern; war had no sympathy, no pity, no justice.

But she was still here.