They had been no good at playing at unattached friendship in the first months that they had known each other, in the days where they had furiously fought to deny all those traitorous feelings – affection, attraction, an aching tenderness – that they had felt. They were hardly any better at it now.
What was one supposed to feel, exactly, when the father of one's child arrived for a half-day visit, forty-eight exhausting and lonely cycles after the last? How was one supposed to reconcile the image of a baby wrapped in the green-blue of the Clan Kryze cradled against the brown and cream of Jedi linen? And what was Satine supposed to feel, damn it, as she beheld the severed Padawan's braid that had been placed in her palm?
"By tradition Master Qui Gon would have kept it," Obi Wan had said, as he bestowed upon her this strange gift. "Master Yoda said it wasn't right for him to take it. He said I ought to give it to someone who had suffered my youth more than he did. I thought that you…"
He had given her a smile heavy with pain.
"After Master Qui Gon, you've taught me the most. And I thought it would be good for you and Korkie to have it, in case one day anything ever…"
"Don't be ridiculous," she had told him, but taken it.
Whatever she was supposed to feel, she certainly was not supposed to feel like reaching out and touching that place where the braid had been severed. She was not supposed to cradle his head in her hands. She sat down on the edge of her bed and busied herself removing her shoes from her aching feet. She would make the most of this brief intermission in her crowded schedule.
"You miss it?" Satine asked, massaging her cramping calf.
Obi Wan raised his free hand to his scalp self-consciously; Korkie fitted comfortably in the crook of his right arm alone.
"It's strange, not having it," he admitted. "I still feel it on my shoulder, sometimes. Like some absurd phantom limb."
His words underscored how rapid and unprecedented this change – these many changes – had been. How impossible these past months had been.
"Master Kenobi," Satine murmured, still with disbelief.
Obi Wan snorted and grimaced.
"Please don't call me that. Really."
Satine raised her eyes to meet his.
"Why not?"
"I didn't realise how inappropriate the title was until it was given to me," Obi Wan muttered, frowning down at his son, who had begun to mewl and grumble. "My Padawan is a newly emancipated slave, for star's sakes…"
Satine looked at Obi Wan with alarm.
"Anakin?"
Obi Wan did not reply immediately; he offered his disgruntled infant the tip of his little finger to suck upon. Korkie had learned to suck, since his father had seen him last. He had graduated the syringe and transitioned to a bottle with a teat.
"I've not found another Padawan, Satine, since I saw you last."
"Baby brain," Satine grumbled – a more benign explanation than the illness rioting in her head. "Anakin was a slave?"
"On Tatooine," Obi Wan reported shortly, gaze focused once more upon Korkie. "Worked in a junk shop."
"And the Jedi Council bought him?" she pressed.
Obi Wan shrugged with discomfort.
"No Council funds were expended. Qui Gon wagered against Anakin's owner that Anakin would win a pod-race. And he did."
Satine let her jaw drop.
"The Jedi Council won your Padawan in a bet?"
"His mother wanted him to go with us," Obi Wan explained shortly. "But we had to free him first."
Satine rubbed at her forehead.
"That's appalling."
"Maybe so," Obi Wan agreed quietly, beginning to rock to soothe Korkie, who had begun to stir again. "But it's happened now, and if it weren't for me Anakin wouldn't have anyone."
He shot Satine a look that betrayed his quiet anger.
"The Council never freed his mother, despite my appeals. And everyone still pretends to disapprove of his training, although I know they're watching with keen interest. Waiting for me to fail, presumably."
"You're stuck cleaning Qui Gon's mess," Satine translated, placing the braid beside her on the bed and rising to her feet.
"Anakin is not a mess, he is a person," Obi Wan corrected her with quiet firmness.
Satine nodded wearily.
"Of course. All I mean to say is that it's rather ironic, no, that you are now a slave to Qui Gon's vision for this child? A slave to the Council who have placed the sole responsibility for training Anakin upon you, a prematurely graduated Master?"
Obi Wan shook his head, face contorting with effortfully repressed frustration.
"Firstly, Satine, I'm not sure from where your authority on the qualifications for Knighthood stem-"
"Don't let your ego into this, Obi Wan. You and I both know that you were not expecting-"
"And secondly," Obi Wan went on, speaking firmly over her, "you would do well to recall that we are not all autocrats in this galaxy, Satine. Almost everyone but you has some authority to answer to. It's not slavery. Your privilege is showing."
Satine rolled her eyes.
"You are not paid, Obi Wan."
"Neither are you."
Satine raised a sceptical brow in response to this childish retaliation.
"I'm as wealthy as the system is, Obi Wan. Which soon, under my reign, will be very wealthy."
Obi Wan shrugged it off.
"Jedi are paid an allowance."
"An allowance!" Satine scoffed. "For risking your life and forsaking all relationships?"
Obi Wan's face contorted with frustration.
"I make my own decisions, Satine!"
"And when you fly back to Coruscant this afternoon and leave your son behind you will do well to remember it!"
She had shouted at him, and raised a remonstrative finger. The silence that fell was sad and horrible. They had not raised their voices at each other like this for a very long time. Korkie refused Obi Wan's placating finger and began to cry in earnest.
"I'm sorry," Obi Wan murmured.
The apology was not directed at Satine but at the baby, as Obi Wan stroked Korkie's head and rocked once more.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
Again and again, but never to her.
Korkie did not quieten even in the face of the warm attention. It was normal, of course, for an infant to cry inconsolably from time to time. Satine could have reassured Obi Wan that Korkie did this to her not infrequently. But she held her tongue; he could blame himself, if he wanted to.
Eventually she held out her arms and Obi Wan accepted the offer to transfer the wailing child. As she began to rock with Korkie upright against her chest, his cries loud beside her ear, she watched Obi Wan sink to sit on the edge of her bed, rubbing at the place where his Padawan's braid had been.
"Friends who respect each other."
His tone was bland and Satine was unsure, her head filled as it was with Korkie's cries, whether this echo of her words was a pledge that he repeated to fortify himself, or whether he was regarding the concept with derision.
Anakin was the oldest initiate ever inducted into the Jedi Temple. The only child to be begin his training with the title of Padawan, with the only Master who hadn't sat the Trials. He was the only Jedi who spoke Huttese, or who had never been to a doctor before, or who had been a karking slave. The only one who knew his mother's name.
From whichever way you looked at it, Anakin was different. And children the galaxy over, Jedi younglings notwithstanding, knew different when they saw it.
Most, to be fair, tried to be kind.
"Did you know that Master Sinube says that it's not healthy to have two serves of ice cream after dinner?"
"Come on Anakin, jump in! We're swimming up to the fountain!"
"Master Plo, you skipped Anakin! He hasn't had a chance to read to the class yet."
Others more deliberately challenged Anakin's new mandate of Jedi serenity.
"How long do you reckon it'll be until your Master palms you off to someone else? He's way out of his depth, I heard Master Cale say so."
"Did you commit any cool crimes on Tatooine?"
One particularly strapping young Initiate had chosen to tower over him and demand the answer to a question haunting many of his thus far unapprenticed peers.
"Chosen One? That's bullshit, desert rat. Chosen by who?"
And Anakin wanted terribly to say something clever and hurtful to make them all just leave him the hell alone, but all he could think to say was-
"Obi Wan."
It was comforting, in a way. To hear that truth spring naturally, unexpectedly, from his own lips. It was true. Obi Wan had chosen him. Obi Wan cared for him.
The Initiate had simply smirked.
"Obi Wan's just doing what crazy Master Jinn told him to do."
And at that, Anakin had hit him, with a quick punch to the chin that floored the taller boy.
"Obi Wan chose me," Anakin repeated, as he walked away.
But the comfort of those words waned as one of the smaller initiates ran off to tell a nearby Master of his crimes. Anakin knew what would happen. He'd made transgressions enough to recognise the script now.
Obi Wan rubbing his forehead as though he had a headache. (He probably did have a headache.) Mounting an effortful expression of serenity. Brewing some tea and sitting him down. Recounting the incident drily and factually. And the silence in which Anakin was given the opportunity to explain himself.
"They called Master Jinn crazy, Obi Wan."
Obi Wan diverted from the script then, with a smile tucked away into his dimpled cheek.
"Something I've been told – stars, Padawan, something I've said myself – hundreds of times."
Obi Wan didn't understand. Anakin felt the burning of tears. He cried far, far too much for a Jedi Padawan and he knew it.
"But Obi Wan, he wasn't crazy, he was-"
"He wasn't crazy," Obi Wan conceded with a sigh, "but he was different. And complex. And oftentimes hard to understand. Those who struggled to understand him, my young self included, called him crazy. We do not punch our classmates for their lack of understanding."
Anakin nodded sombrely, anxieties unallayed.
"He was the one who chose me, Obi Wan. He was the one who said I was the Chosen One. If he's crazy-"
Obi Wan nodded with understanding and took Anakin's hands in his own. A wave of comfort washed through the Force.
"To be the Chosen One at nine years standard must be a difficult thing, young one."
Anakin nodded his mute agreement, wrestling with the tears still.
"I did not choose you for any prophecy, young one. Only for your brightness in the Force that deserves its opportunity to shine throughout the galaxy."
It should have been comforting but was not.
"Korkaran is bright in the Force," Anakin mumbled.
Obi Wan might have grimaced, but smoothed it quickly away.
"And his mother is well-equipped to let him share his brightness," Obi Wan vowed calmly. "I can care for you both, Anakin."
But he barely ever got to see Korkie. Anakin bit back his protests.
"I'm very grateful, Master Obi Wan."
"Just Obi Wan," was the patient correction.
You are too kind to me. I have never deserved this kindness. I punched that initiate right in the face and I didn't even stop to think or breathe and-
"Padawan," Obi Wan warned gently, catching Anakin's eye.
He always somehow heard him.
"Let us shift our focus from this Chosen One business, Anakin," Obi Wan suggested, giving his hands a gentle squeeze. "If you focus on following the call of the Light in the Force, it will take you where you are destined to go."
Anakin nodded but was pretty sure it wasn't that simple.
The warning was in the Force as soon as Obi Wan descended the shuttle's ramp. Satine stood with the bundle that was their son pressed tightly against her chest in the face of the cold wind that howled outside of Sundari's dome tonight.
"Satine, Korkaran…"
He touched each of them in turn – the brief laying of a hand on Satine's shoulder, the cradling of the baby's sleeping head.
"I'm sorry about the change of plans. Thank you for letting me come so late. I really appreciate it."
Satine accepted his apology with a regal nod, turning to lead him inside.
"You've been very busy, I understand."
He could hear the challenge of it in her voice.
"No more than you, Duchess," he acquiesced.
Satine grimaced, perhaps at the formal use of her title.
"Korkie has grown," she told him instead. "Finally, he has reached the median birthweight for a Mandalorian infant."
Obi Wan smiled despite the tension.
"Congratulations, young one," he bade his son, laying a hand upon his head once more as they walked. "It will soon be time for his public debut, I presume?"
"This week," Satine agreed. "I wanted to wait until I'd seen you. Just in case…"
She shook her head clear of what she had been about to say.
"I presume you're accepting of the narrative. An abandoned child I'm taking as my foundling."
Obi Wan nodded.
"Of course."
"Good," Satine declared curtly.
She opened the door at the end of their private passageway, and they climbed a dark flight of stairs to her bedroom. Korkie stirred as they moved into the brighter light.
"You'll coach your Padawan not to say anything damning when the media story is aired at the Jedi Temple?"
Obi Wan almost retaliated at the accusation but supposed that he could not, in the light of Anakin's past transgression.
"He will say nothing of it."
"Good," Satine said again.
She sat upon the foot of her bed and unwound the silks that bound Korkie to her chest. She offered the infant to him.
"I apologise, he's quite fast asleep. You mightn't get the chance to see his latest trick."
"His latest trick?" Obi Wan asked, brightening.
He looked into the sleeping face of his son, appreciating the new weight of him in his arms.
"What have you learned, my clever little one?"
"He smiles now," Satine informed him, unable to keep the warmth out of her own voice, as reserved as she had been. "When you talk to him and smile at him, he smiles back. Sometimes he even laughs."
She must have caught the bright enthusiasm dawning on Obi Wan's face.
"Don't you dare wake him," she warned. "I know you want to see it but I'm not having him cry a minute longer than he must. He screamed for an hour before he fell asleep this evening."
Disappointed, Obi Wan acquiesced. He could admit that it would be rude to wake him; Korkie's Force presence radiated tranquil contentedness in his slumber.
"You should call me, when something like that happens," he said instead, lifting his gaze upwards to Satine. "So that I can see."
The tension in the Force swelled again. Satine raised a sceptical brow.
"You would like to receive communications from me to update you of our son's activities?"
Obi Wan had a feeling where he might have mis-stepped.
"Satine-"
"I will gladly call you next time he smiles, if you have the time to receive such correspondence," Satine told him primly, removing her shoes. "Although I'll admit I find the request rather surprising. Given you did not send me any correspondence, say, in the period surrounding your recent injury."
Obi Wan arrested the urge to swear in front of his infant son.
"I didn't think it relevant," he muttered.
Satine nodded with affected understanding.
"You wish to receive communications only relating to the child, then? My apologies for assuming that some relationship existed between us independent of our son."
Obi Wan groaned.
"I didn't want to disturb you with the news, Satine. You're busy enough as it is. And it was hardly life-threatening."
Satine raised a shrewd eyebrow.
"Were you or were you not unconscious in a bacta tank for a week?"
"Six days."
Satine hummed her disapproval as she tugged her hair loose of its coronet.
"I don't ask to hear everything from you, Obi Wan," she informed him brusquely, rising to her feet and walking to her dresser where she began to remove her jewellery. "But you must understand that it was a little embarrassing to hear of your condition from the Queen Amidala at the Trade Summit. I believe the quote was: 'You must be so worried for him. I know that you are close friends.'"
Obi Wan heard the sourness in her voice and leapt to gain the upper hand.
"Don't be envious, Satine. My own Padawan is in love with the Queen Amidala – he's probably the one who told her I was in the tank in the first place. To become involved with her would be the height of immorality."
Satine scowled furiously.
"I was suggesting no such thing. She's fourteen, Obi Wan!"
"I'm joking, Satine."
"Di'kut," Satine muttered, stabbing an earring into its velvet cushion.
Obi Wan shrugged and returned his gaze to his son.
"I really would like to see him smile," he murmured, stroking Korkaran's cheek.
"I'll call you next time he does it," Satine offered. "In exchange for news when you return safely or otherwise from your di'kut missions."
She looked at him with a vulnerability in her eyes then; she knew that she had given something away in this request.
"It's decent courtesy," she muttered, turning her face back to the mirror and stroking the tension lines in her forehead and under her eyes. "I had Bo call you, when I was dying, and I thought that you might offer me the same-"
The words strangled in her throat.
"I was so glad you called, Satine," Obi Wan assured her hurriedly. "I-"
How to find the words, when she had forbidden him from loving her?
"I still care what happens to you," he resolved delicately. "I still want to know when you are in danger. And I can appreciate you would like to know the same of me."
Satine gave a tight nod.
"I confess that I am exhausted," she told him, and pulled at the ribbon of her dress.
She undressed before him with a crackling defiance. Friends who respect each other. She bared her body not for him, but in spite of him. And he could not help but watch her, so familiar and yet changed. The scar from Korkie's birth was nothing like the neat curve of a modern caesarean on Coruscant; her abdomen was rent in two by a thick line running from sternum to pubic bone. Obi Wan felt a swell of sadness. He hadn't been there. She'd suffered that nightmare alone.
"Emergency laparotomy," she muttered, catching his eye. "Not very pretty."
He could have told her that she was wrong, that she was as beautiful as she had ever been, the scar merely a mark of her warriorhood. But she wouldn't want to hear it. Obi Wan willed himself to see the body before him as she wished him to see it – with ambivalence, the way he would see the body of a comrade in the Jedi Temple.
"I'm going to sleep. Stay awake with Korkie for as long as you wish. When you're ready to leave you can place him in his cot and go out the way we came."
Obi Wan nodded awkwardly, and settled into an armchair to cradle his son. Satine collapsed into sleep within minutes of laying down. Obi Wan remembered how she had lain awake, so many nights on the run. Her exhaustion now was profound in the Force. A newborn child born months too early. A newborn government, its foundations laid upon a battleground.
"Your mother is extraordinary," he told his sleeping son. "You ensure that you smile for her often, young star."
Obi Wan had not seen her smile this entire evening.
"Everything will be easier soon, Korkaran," he resolved.
The Force thrummed with a quiet sadness.
Not so much easier, Obi Wan Kenobi, it seemed to say. Not so soon.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: love is hard.
In better news, yay for our little Korkie baby who is growing and smiling. Next chapter is much happier: Korkie will make his public debut - a news story that does not go unnoticed in the Jedi Temple - and Satine will come to have her hands very much full with a talented little infant.
We're getting into the section of the story that is not as concretely planned out and pre-written, so hit me with any requests that you have for moments you would like to see! I would love to reward you beautiful readers after all these sad chapters I've put you through.
Much love,
S.