Theed, Naboo

19 BBY

Theed was graveyard quiet as a sizeable chunk of its population flooded the streets at the appointed hour. The repulsor-lift casket appeared promptly in the square outside of the palace, with its attendant hooded figures, heads bowed so few if any of their features could be discerned. Some thought they looked like grim reapers. Others wondered if they would throw themselves on the pyre, so to speak. What could a handmaid possibly do with herself after her queen was dead?

The erstwhile queen lay on a bed of flowers, her face even more waxen against the dark perfection of her meticulously arranged curls. She had been found two days previously, placed in the throne room on a brown cloak with her hands folded as carefully as if she were already lying in state. No note. No explanation for what had happened to her. The Supreme Chancellor had called for Jedi heads in response, but that had been his answer for everything for weeks.

Now starflowers dotted her hair, and her bloodless fingers were curled around the japor snippet a boy had once given her on some desert planet somewhere. They rested on the swell of her abdomen where her child would sleep forever. Such a terrible shame. The women wept for her, but more for her as an idea than a person, a symbol of their own lost youth and desire to protect their vulnerable children.

The coffin moved slowly through the city streets, not a light showing except for the globe lamps in the hands of the processioners. A hum began amongst those in the procession, and progressed to a low, slow Nubian hymn. It was something about the moon goddess taking lost souls to the silver lands at death, no one knew the exact translation anymore. The procession made it to the edge of town where the festival grounds were. Once they had celebrated the thwarting of an invasion here. It seemed fitting to send off the young queen at the site of her triumph.

The hooded attendants gathered close around the casket as it floated to the hillside bathed in moonlight. They formed a half circle as it slowly rose off the ground and into the air, disappearing into the spangled darkness above.

When the distance above ground was safe and sufficient, the casket exploded, white hot with drifting embers floating down.

They'd been warned ahead of time. The moment was supposed to evoke a feeling of majesty and continuance, the funeral director had explained. Rather than burn on the ground like a commoner, the Queen's remains were vaporized by the bright magnesium explosion and then slowly drifted to the ground to integrate with the soil and be reborn among the plants and animals.

It was utter bullshit. A platitude peddled by vultures. Sabe saw nothing but the violent reclaiming of her beloved Padme by the nihilism of the new age. She cried out. The half circle of handmaids was thrown into disarray as they attempted to restrain her, but she pulled away, pushing through the crowd. She heard Eirtae calling her name but ignored it. They all probably thought it was grief, but they were wrong. It was rage, pure and choking. Let someone touch her. Let anyone come near her.

Then someone did, grabbing her by the elbow and hauling her into a nearby alleyway. She fought and punched blindly. Peace is a lie she hissed between her teeth and let her fists and nails fly at the person

who was undoubtedly some warm-hearted, tender-headed fool who did not know that everything was utterly-

Her fists stopped beating as she was forcefully spun around and as she looked beneath the hood of the person holding her in an iron grip by the shoulders. All resistance drained out of her as his hand found hers, and she led herself be dragged out of the alley and back into the crowd, weaving between hips and shoulders and down one street after another before he paused long enough for her to say anything at all.

"You're alive," was all she could choke out, touching nerveless fingers to his face to make sure this wasn't the final hallucinogenic tipping point into madness.

"Where can we go?" Obi-Wan asked.

She collected her wits. "My old place. Do you remember?"

He nodded, then led her by the hand again on a complicated path seemingly to throw off anyone who might follow. He shouldn't have been there. He should have been anywhere else. She quickened her steps, looking behind them, listening desperately for any trailing footsteps.

At last they reached her old flat, hers for only a week longer. No one would come. Eirtae and the other handmaidens had planned to shelter together in the palace, sharing grief and comfort if they could find any. The prospect had never appealed to Sabe. The thought of sharing the pain she felt seemed like a new wound altogether.

She pressed her palm on the lock and pulled him into the darkened doorway, giving a quick look around the street outside. She engaged the deadbolt and felt her way to a chair with shaking hands. "It is really you?"

In response he only reached over and turned on the small illuminator.

"I was sure you were dead."

"There have been times when I wished I was."

She jumped up from the chair, her hands fisting at her sides. "Do not say that. Never say that. Two people in the universe mattered to me. The rest could hang for all I cared. I thought you were both gone."

Then she couldn't berate him anymore, because she felt like she couldn't get a breath at all. It seemed like every feeling trapped in her throat for days behind a frozen mask came crashing out at once.

He looked alarmed, coming to her and helping her sink back into the chair. "Breathe," He said, cupping her face in his hands. "Just breathe."

She tried. It took a while, and concentration on the way she should be breathing, the way he was. When she could speak again, she said. "You shouldn't have come here. They are looking for you."

"I had to. There is something you need to know."

"None of it matters all that much," she croaked, shaking her head.

"You're so wrong," He said, and to her shock, he actually smiled. "You don't know the most important thing of all."

With that he pulled out his comvid and turned on the holograph projector. Sabe looked and then leaned forward and squinted at the grainy blue image. Squirmy bundles, grimaces, a tiny fist, a foot coming loose from the coverings. At first she didn't know what she was looking at. Then she didn't know why.

"Luke," He said, pointing to one of the bundles, and then the other. "Leia."

They were Naberrie family names. He probably didn't know that. When they were in the Academy together, those had been the very names Padme had chosen for her hypothetical future boy and girl. Just like Padme to set her heart on something like that and never change her mind. "You are telling me that...But she was still..."

"It may have appeared that way, and certainly we did all we could to give that impression. But they are alive."

Sabe snatched the comvid from him and turned it off. She couldn't resist a look at the windows. The shades were drawn. Were the walls thick enough? Could anyone be listening somehow? "Where?"

"Not here," He said. He pointed upwards. "Far away. Safe. Master Yoda is watching over them until we decide on the next steps."

"Master Yoda," She felt something else inside. It hurt like blood returning to a limb that had been asleep. Hope, that's what it was.

"He did not want me to come," Obi-Wan admitted. The corner of his mouth turned up. "He hit me with his gimli stick, called me a fool."

"Why in the Republic would you?" Sabe demanded, exasperated.

"I had to tell you about them," He said.

"Take me to them, then," Sabe said.

He frowned. "It's complicated."

Her heart sunk. "Why?"

"Their force signature is immense. Like nothing I've ever felt before. Together with your force signature and mine..."

"It would be like a homing beacon," She finished for him.

"I can't even look after both of them. The boy is to be sent far away where I can watch him without fear of being recognized. But the girl...it seems Bail Organa will adopt her."

Sabe thought of following Senator Organa, trying in vain to catch him doing something wrong. A star scout. A truly good man. "Padme would have liked that, I think."

"She will be well cared for. But she will be close to the Core, and you know as well as I do that he is no warrior," He was looking at her from beneath his brows.

"I will shield her, of course," She said, recognizing the unspoken question.

He glared at the floor. She saw that he hated his choices, but also knew they made sense.

"It's my talent," She reminded him. "The thing I'm best at. I can keep her safe until you return."

She dared him to contradict her last words with her eyes, but he didn't. He only sighed and nodded, moving to stand. She caught it then, a small wince. Like a scarred old tusk cat, he always refused to show the slightest sign of pain until the wound was grievous.

"You're hurt," She said.

"It's nothing."

"Shut up," she said, and pushed off his cloak, ignoring the hiss of his breath as she drew aside the edges of the simple tunic he wore beneath and slid them off his shoulders.

She tried for his sake not to react, but her gasp was impossible to disguise. The story of his fight with Vader was written on his skin as indelibly as with ink in shades of blue, black, red and yellow. She trapped any further sound with her hand over her mouth as she surveyed the bruises and abrasions. Nothing looked mortal, anyway. Hesitantly, she touched him as gently as she could, trying to remember the way she had healed Ome once in the Morsa Loinga, but it had been long ago with a power she no longer had. Also she could feel him resisting. He didn't want to give up his wounds. It was as if he was doing penance. Beneath her hand, he shuddered.

"I tried," He said in a choked voice.

"I know," She said. "I wish I had been there."'

She couldn't move away again. Her hands seemed to move of their own volition, encircling him. She assumed he would shy away from the embrace, as he always had. To her surprise his hands came up and hooked over her forearms, holding them tightly. Then he moved slowly, stunningly, taking one of her hands and turning it over, kissing the palm.

"I thank the Force you were not," He whispered, the words tickling her fingers.

She went very still, looking down at his wounds, wishing she could take them on. "I will not add to your burden. Your guilt."

"My failings are many," He said quietly. "They weigh me down. I stumble beneath them."

He turned, his lips tracing a path from her hand to her shoulder. Sabe's eyelashes fluttered but she couldn't close them to the intensity of his gaze as he cupped her face in his hands with infinite care. "But loving all the bravest, best, and noblest things in you? I can't count that among them. I won't."

He tilted her face up and pressed his lips to hers. She'd almost forgotten what kissing him was like, how it shattered her. She moaned, eliciting an answer from him, and at the sound her knees nearly buckled beneath her. His arms encircled her, tightened until she was flush against the hard line of his body. She heard her own pulse pounding in her ears as his mouth opened and his tongue touched hers.

They undressed each other quickly, but with reverence too, pausing often to look at one another in wonder. When they stood entirely revealed, Sabe couldn't help staring, trying to comprehend his strangeness and his beauty at once. "I've never..."

Obi-Wan shook his head. "Nor I."

I was waiting for you.

He opened his arms to her and she stepped into them. They breathed together for a moment, feeling the heat of another person's unencumbered skin for the first time. Gaining courage, she traced the hard planes of his chest. Her heart pounded. Surely he could feel its wild rhythm. His hands glided up her arms to her shoulders, lifting the loose strands of her hair and letting them slide through his fingers. He bent his head, nuzzling the space between her neck and shoulder, his mouth finding the little dip just beneath her ear. "Is this okay?"

"Yes."

"And this?" His lips grazed along her collarbone.

She nodded, her voice failing as she allowed her hands to wander the lines of his body.

"And this?" His lips and hands drifted lower still.

The only answer she could give him was a kind of pleading gasp.

There was no pain when they came together. He moved too slowly for that, sensing what she needed even where words and experience were inadequate. Her mind had never been less guarded. She couldn't have shielded if she'd wanted to, and there was nothing she desired less. She clung to him, urging him deeper still, awash in the overwhelming rightness of the joining their bodies seemed to have been made for.

Then he began to move, and she with him. Behind her closed eyelids it seemed she could see the milky drifts of the Morsa Loinga again, feel its currents across her skin along with his hands. They quickened. She rolled like the sea. He shifted, drawing her on top of him, half-formed words escaping him in a sound like a prayer.

When she looked down into his face she became a wave, cresting and breaking over him, sobbing in release and loss at the same time. Dimly she was aware of his movements taking on a greater urgency and then a hoarse cry as he too fell over the precipice.

They opened their eyes, panting. Her hair fell around them in fiery tendrils. His face glowed with a fine sheen of sweat, his eyes wide and dilated. She let her fingers glide over the slight damp of his forehead, but stilled as she sensed it. There it was again – the stream of a consciousness not her own. She looked into his sea change eyes as he touched her cheek. She saw that he could sense it too, and had the disorienting feeling of looking at herself from the outside. It was like meeting him again for the first time.

Hello. Goodbye. Another sob escaped her. His arms tightened around her, and he raised his chin to claim her mouth again. The kiss was desperate, his cheeks wet.

"Perhaps this is my punishment," He said, his voice hoarse. "To have one night when a thousand wouldn't be enough."

"You are mine," She whispered fiercely. "You will always be mine."

"I should have...years ago..."

She stroked the errant curls back from his forehead. "No, don't. Just be here with me, right now."

Even as he drew away a little, the cold air insinuating itself between their two bodies, she felt something remaining. A door left open that could not be closed again. Even just a few hours ago she had been sure she would not live through this day. Now she could get up. She could get on with things, keep going for a little while yet.

"Promise me you will live. In whatever way proves most happy and fulfilling for you," Obi-Wan said.

"I promise. Can you do the same?"

He smiled. It was not a happy smile, but there was no poison in it. "I will watch a child grow, guide him insofar as I am able. What better way to hope for the future?"

She smiled back. "It will be enough."

He traced a finger over her profile. She saw the careful way his eyes darted over her face. Memorizing details, just as she was. She could still catch the gist of his feelings, if not the actual images and words like a few moments before. "I love you. I have for a very long time. Did I tell you that yet? I should have. I never told them, not until it was too late."

A noise escaped her, almost choking out the words she needed him to hear. "I have loved you all along, Obi-Wan. All along."

He kissed her again. Her fingers threaded between the longish curling hair at the nape of his neck. She felt the burn of his lips move from her mouth to her neck and beyond as his hands slid up her body. A wave of desire crashed inside of her again. He turned, pulling himself over her and enveloping her again in light and heat in the dark.

When she awoke, it was dawn.

He was gone.

She stared at her own hand, outstretched across the place where he'd lain. The spot was rapidly cooling. Just a hint of warmth remained there. She thought of him sitting there, his elbows on his knees, willing himself to stand. She thought of him looking at her, knowing that if she opened her eyes he would be unable to leave. And he had to leave. He just had to, for the sake of the goodness they had both sworn to.

He'd managed it, just before he sensed her surfacing from the deepest sleep she'd had in weeks. Now she was alone. In her upturned palm was the palest, most perfect starflower she had ever seen. It was so delicate that the morning light glowed rosily through its curved petals. Not even the pearly dewdrops on the blossom had been disturbed by whatever magic had separated it from its vine and nestled it into her hand.

She curled her body around the flower and wept.