Chapter Text
Satine lasted ten hours since Obi-Wan left before she thought of him, and she cursed his image for distracting her. The second time she was eating fruit he’d climbed a tree to get for her, and she cursed him then too. As she did the third time and fourth. It wasn’t until the fifth did sadness coat her curses so they stuck to the inside of her mouth and she was forced to bite them back down. The sixth she didn’t even try to curse, just let it cover her throat. The seventh and eighth happened within minutes of each other, and she felt the longing thicken so she could hardly swallow.
His missing presence choked her the ninth time.
Her handmaiden quoted a poem Satine had whispered in his ear their last night together, and her insides were completely filled; she couldn’t speak for fear of what words the coating would taint. She couldn’t breathe for fear of what she’d exhale. She couldn’t even think for fear of what the rest of that memory would shatter.
She didn’t cry until the sixteenth time. Seventeen and eighteen were less explosive copies of the sixteenth. The twenty-fifth time, she held a comm in her hand, her finger brushing against the number of the Jedi Temple. She imagined his face as a blue-tinged hologram, and her heart beat a little faster. Then she imagined his hands tucked into his robe’s sleeves; she imagined his padawan braid. She imagined Master Qui-Gon standing to his side. She set it down.
The twenty-ninth time she could admit to herself as she stared at his favorite flower she missed him—missed him terribly. The thirty-first, she wondered what world he was on, and the thirty-fifth, she wished he would come back—then viciously severed that thought in a way Old Mandalore would’ve been proud.
Thirty-eight, though the sorrow never left her throat, found her laughing when she remembered how he fumbled with a fish he’d thought was dead and it smacked him in the face. Master Qui-Gon was the one to fetch their food that night. (She didn’t have the strength to keep track of what she missed of the stalwart Jedi who’d kept her on the right path, too.)
The fortieth time, she could speak of her two Jedi aloud without feeling like her words wouldn’t expose her. It was nice, she thought. And her handmaiden thought the fish story was funny, too.
At forty-two, her half-asleep brain thought he was there next to her as she woke. They’d only had the luxury to sleep in beds—in general or otherwise—a handful of times on their travels, but one hideaway in particular, she remembered the moment before she committed to waking, eyes still closed and glowing a faint dark orange from a stream of light hitting her face. The feel of his head nestled against her neck, her arm brushing against his ribs. She purposely opened her eyes to banish the image and ignored the empty silence without a groggy “my lady.”
She wished she could reply with his dry wit in the face of an irritating advisor at forty-five.
The forty-eighth time, she gasped his name from the intimate shelter of her sheets, and the forty-ninth, she was too embarrassed by the last to think much else, though a coldness she wasn’t expecting tickled the places his ghost hands had touched on the fiftieth. She relished the heavy layers of her ceremonial wear the next day, but the chill didn’t abate for the next ten times she thought of him.
She couldn’t sleep after a stressful week of reforming governmental business structures, so sixty-three settled next to her like the memory it was, and her quarters flickered with the light of a lingering fire as Master Qui-Gon whispered tales of truth and love and adventure. That night, her shoulder was pressed to Obi-Wan’s, and she was all too heightened to that fact in the days of shy glances and growing affection. She’d hooked her pinky around his after they were the only two awake, and their whispered words claimed the air around them in a moment of brief privacy before the wind blew them into the night. Were they still drifting in that field, she wondered. Maybe. As she rubbed a finger against her pinky, she thought probably not.
Her advisors wanted her to marry, and seventy-two encompassed an entire week of reasons why she shouldn’t.
She stopped counting after seventy-two.
From there, it became merely an acknowledgment. The fish story, the flower, the poetry—Obi-Wan—then she’d move on. Sometimes Master Qui-Gon would be thrown into her recognitions, but it would be the same, nodding to a ghost before striding into her next meeting.
Months passed, then years.
Then she received a message from him.
She took the hand of her ghosts and watched the stars pass by her on her way to Naboo.