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Here’s the thing about falling in love.
They tell you it’s illogical. They tell you it’s wild and inexorable, an all-consuming flame in which you are a single stick of kindling. They tell you it’s everything, and you spend your entire life believing they must be wrong.
Until it happens to you. And then you’ll realize you were right after all, not to believe them, because falling in love is not any of those things.
It’s worse.
Obi-Wan Kenobi realized this in about six seconds. He just realized it a year too late.
“Asteroid belt on the monitor. Better drop out of hyperspace.”
She was always doing that—leaning over his shoulder, reading the controls when he was the one at the wheel. He could practically feel Satine’s smirk even before he turned around, and was already prepared with a quip and an eye-roll.
“Ah, the return of the back-seat driver,” Obi-Wan replied, spinning around in the pilot’s chair. “Delightful.”
“I wouldn’t need to be if you knew what you were doing,” Satine said. “And anyway, this is my territory now. I know it better than you do.”
“You haven’t been here in a year. How would you know a particular asteroid belt from an especially large gathering of space junk?”
“Well, I should know. I’ve spent the better part of a year traveling with one.”
She pushed off the back of his chair, and as she moved away he swore she stirred up a wind in the cockpit. With a silent huff and a shake of his head, he allowed himself to admit that she was right—and dropped them out of hyperspace.
The silence that followed—the loud thrum of the hyperdrive replaced with the soft white noise of space—felt empty. They were near enough to Mandalore now that they probably wouldn’t need to jump to hyperspace again. And that should’ve been a good thing. It was a good thing, Obi-Wan reminded himself. After a year of destructive civil war on her home planet, the duchess could finally return to her people and begin the process of rebuilding. He’d fulfilled his duty. Now she could fulfil hers.
So why did he feel so empty?
He maneuvered through the asteroid belt while Satine watched, though her usual snarky comments didn’t come. He wished they would. Then this might feel normal.
But nothing was normal about saying goodbye.
-- THEN --
He met her in the midst of battle. Fitting, given that all she ever seemed to want to do was fight him.
Qui-Gon had told him the situation was messy, but he wasn’t expecting to walk into an ambush. They’d entered the atmosphere and begun to sink down the surface, when soon enough there was an explosion at the rear and alarm bells shook the ship.
Obi-Wan leapt from the co-pilot’s chair. “What was that?”
Qui-Gon grimaced. “Welcome to Mandalore,” he said with a rueful smile. “May our stay be short.”
And it was. No sooner than they’d landed in the midst of a battlefield did an entourage approach, six figures in Mandalorian armor. They gave no indication of meaning no harm, and had Qui-Gon not stood his ground, Obi-Wan might’ve drawn his lightsaber in preparation to defend himself. But they slowed, and stopped, and so Obi-Wan followed his Master’s lead and bowed.
“You’re here for the duchess,” said one of the Mandalorians, voice rough from a vocoder.
“We are,” Qui-Gon replied.
There was a rumble in the distance—explosions somewhere far off, before Obi-Wan caught sight of Sundari’s glass exterior lighting up in red. Reflections of destruction. He looked down. But all around him he could still sense it—lives being lost as jetpacks exploded above him and beskar struck flesh.
“Leave quickly,” said another Mandalorian, one standing in the back. A woman. “Before—”
The bomb went off before she could finish.
Obi-Wan didn’t fall—the Force rippled behind him and prevented him from stumbling too far. And so he could see it all happen, how the back half of the Mandalorian entourage was knocked hard to the ground and engulfed by the flames, and lay there among the ash after it receded.
They didn’t get up.
Obi-Wan’s eyes stayed there on the bodies.
“Milady,” came Qui-Gon’s voice—steel. Calm. Obi-Wan didn’t even bother to look at which Mandalorian he spoke to. “We’d best be going.”
Obi-Wan looked up. One of the Mandalorians nodded, once. She looked at the other woman to her right—one of comparable height, in blue armor with a helmet that much resembled a bird. As if saying goodbye.
And so they did go—leaving a trail of bodies in their wake.
The hum of the ship seemed muted as Qui-Gon initiated the launch sequence and scrambled their signal, enabling a clandestine escape. Obi-Wan followed this Mandalorian duchess person into the cockpit, finally allowing himself to look at her. Her armor was red. Plated with bronze-colored beskar on the shoulders, the knees. She didn’t look like a politician—she looked like a warrior.
When Mandalore had faded from view and the echo of battle was replaced with the whir of hyperspace, Qui-Gon turned.
“You are safe now, milady. Rest assured that you will not be troubled while you are in under our protection.”
“Not troubled?” Even muddled by the vocoder, she sounded fierce. “While my people suffer and die without my even bearing witness, not troubled? While I apparently deserve some divine protection that others do not?”
“Milady, your protection is necessary to—”
“Oh, don’t mistake me for a fool, Master Jedi. I understand why it is necessary that I leave. I exist as merely a piece in a delicate political game of chess, and I recognize that it would be foolish and selfish to jeopardize the game for the sake of a few pawns,” the duchess snapped. “But sometimes I wonder—what use is the king if she is the only one left standing on the board?”
Qui-Gon was silent for a long time after that. Obi-Wan stood unmoving, and suddenly his breath seemed so loud he couldn’t bear the sound.
Qui-Gon exhaled. “If the king is the last piece to remain, milady,” he said, “that is how she wins the game.”
Qui-Gon left them shortly after, excusing himself to meditate and leaving Obi-Wan with the bridge. The duchess never sat down—she stood at attention by the doorway, and it bothered him that he couldn’t tell where she was looking. Was she staring at him? Plotting his demise so she could commandeer the ship back to Mandalore? He’d dealt with many a politician in his time as a Padawan, but never a politician with beskar weaponry.
And yet somehow he found himself searching her words for the person beneath the armor—for the person who was anguished over the fallen she didn’t even know, who understood her place but rued it just the same. He didn’t even realize he was staring until it became evident that she was, in fact, staring back.
“There are many portraits of me in the Sundari Palace,” she said. “Perhaps procuring one of those would benefit you, since it’s significantly less rude to stare at a portrait than a person.”
He coughed and murmured his apologies. Blast. I wish I had a beskar helmet.
And yet bashful as he was, the words tumbled out anyway:
“Did you know them?”
She tilted her head up just so—a question, perhaps. Or a confirmation.
“The others who escorted you. Were they people you knew?”
She was silent at first. But then she was nodding slowly.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I knew them.” Her posture didn’t loosen, but something about her voice carried a new weight. “The two in the back—they were my parents.”
He didn’t have words after that—knowing any condolence he could provide would fall flat. Luckily, she didn’t seem to be searching for one. He watched as slowly her hands moved to her cheeks and she pulled the helmet up, over her head, and took it into her hands.
Her eyes were blue.
“I’ve been trained to view it all as a game,” she said, her voice much softer now without the vocoder. “But you can see, then, how I may grow attached to a few of the pieces.”
She stepped closer to him, then stopped a pace away.
“I am meant to be perfecting my strategy, all these years, in the art of politics and war. But sometimes I think all I’m perfecting,” she said, “is the art of sacrifice.”
-- NOW --
They’d reach Mandalore by morning. Qui-Gon was asleep, and Obi-Wan rather hoped he’d stay that way—and figured he probably would. After a year on the run, one thing he’d learned about his Master as that he slept long and deeply.
Much to Obi-Wan and Satine’s benefit.
“I brought you a mealpack,” Satine said, appearing behind him again. “And tea. I noticed you didn’t eat much at dinner.”
Obi-Wan turned. “Neither did you.”
“Hence the second mealpack.”
She sat in the adjacent chair—the pilot’s place. Of course she would. They opened their mealpacks in silence and ate as the stars whirred by in streaks, a kind of silence they’d grown far too accustomed to.
Obi-Wan had been trying not to notice one unavoidable fact—Satine’s old armor was in the cockpit. She hadn’t worn it since he’d met her—hadn’t donned the helmet again since she took it off the first time. His eyes trailed to it now.
“Will you wear it when you return?”
Her eyebrow raised. “What?”
“The beskar,” he replied. “I assume it’s tradition.”
“I don’t think I care much for tradition anymore.”
They chewed in silence, and Obi-Wan assumed that to be the end of it. He was wrong.
“I don’t know the world I’m going back to,” she said. “But it can’t be the same as the one I left behind. I shouldn’t be either.”
“I don’t think you could be.” Obi-Wan leaned back on his chair, setting his empty mealpack down on the monitor, an act that would make Qui-Gon cringe. “We change in response to the things that happen to us. Good and bad. You’ve sacrificed a lot,” he said. “Just make sure you don’t sacrifice your ideals, too.”
“Why do you always have to sound like a fortune cookie, Obi-Wan Kenobi? Can we drop the poetry for once?”
“You’re one to talk.”
“I’m one to talk, of course. Fine, let’s talk about ideals. You’ve lived your whole life in the shelter of an Order that can choose who to help and when to help them, and when it’s over you get to return to your comfortable life to go help someone else you deem deserving. And when you’re done with me, you’ll go do it again,” she said, and didn’t leave room for him to argue. “And then there’s me—returning to a world that’s been destroyed by the longstanding tradition of death and destruction, and I’m going to pick up the pieces alone, by hand, one-by-one, probably for the rest of my life. Do you see how one of us might have a slightly skewed perception on the concept of ideals?”
“Now who needs to drop the poetry?”
“I’m just saying—don’t try to give me advice when you’re the one whose job is finished now. You get to move on. I get the hard part.”
“I thought you wanted this part—the part where things get to change.”
“I do.”
“Then why are you angry?”
“Just because I want it doesn’t mean it’s not allowed to hurt.”
He didn’t even realize she’d stood up, or that he had—until he was stepping forward and she was stepping back and her heel was striking the beskar armor on the ground. The helmet skidded across the floor and scraped the durasteel with a sound so loud Satine went rigid and white.
For a long moment, neither of them remembered how to breathe.
-- THEN --
They needed food. That much was obvious.
Obi-Wan started getting hangry first, and then so did Satine, and Qui-Gon had had enough of them before they’d even made camp for the night. He sent them off and insisted upon setting up the shelter himself, while they went off to pick the ripe fruits from the trees they’d passed a mile back. Obi-Wan was fairly sure he heard his Master mutter good riddance as they left.
And so that was how he found himself pulling sweet granadillas off branches using the Force, while Satine climbed the tree to his right, muttering curses.
“I could just do it myself, you know,” Obi-Wan said. “It isn’t necessary for you to climb up there.”
“I’m not about to stand around while you have all the fun.”
“From the slew of foul language you’re raining down upon me, I’m not sure I’d say ‘fun’ is the word.”
Between the two of them, the job did go quicker. Soon enough they had a pile of fruits between them, ready to peel, and Satine plopped down in the grass beside it.
“Let’s eat some,” she said. “Replenishment for the journey back.”
“I don’t need replenishment.”
“I meant for your sour attitude. I don’t fancy walking all the way back to camp with a hangry Jedi.”
And so with an eye-roll, Obi-Wan found himself lowering to sit. He reached for the fruit and began to peel, aware of Satine’s eyes on him without looking right at her again.
Qui-Gon had said these were sweet granadillas—Obi-Wan had taken his word for it, having never seen the fruit himself. And so as he peeled it open, he wasn’t prepared for the brown seedy pulp on the inside. He recoiled.
Satine wrinkled her nose. “You’re certain these are ripe?”
Obi-Wan shook his head. “I never said I was certain. Qui-Gon recognized these, not me.”
But she was looking down. Looking pensive, as if she could see the future in the reflection of watery brown liquid that filled the fruit. He waited.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said quickly. “I just remembered something. Something my sister used to say.”
Obi-Wan was silent. Satine never talked much about her sister, nor the parents she’d lost the day they met. He wasn’t sure if that was another biproduct of growing up royal—banishing all weakness, quelling any signs of loss—or if there was something else. He didn’t ask. He almost didn’t want to.
“When we were little, we used to crawl under the bed,” Satine started, eyes cast down. “She was seven and I was nine, and we’d squeeze beneath the bedframe in my room at night when the fighting downstairs got too loud, or we feared it would trickle into our own rooms and we’d be dragged into the battle.” She smiled, a bit rueful, a bit warm. “We even started keeping some food there—midnight snacks. Except Bo-Katan’s snacks included apples, the silly girl.”
Obi-Wan smiled slightly. “She kept apples under the bed? For how long?”
“Too long. One night she bit into one and discovered it wasn’t as pristine at its core as it was on the outside.”
“Rotten?”
“Rotten.” Satine shook her head. “She spit it out, naturally. But as we laid back down under the bed the voices downstairs got louder. The arguing. Something crashing. So in contrast to the prim and proper façade they put on during the day while the holos looked on,” she said. “Bo-Katan looked down at the rotten apple in her hand, and said the fruit wasn’t the only thing like that.”
For a long moment, Obi-Wan didn’t say anything. His eyes found their way to the open fruit in her hand, then to the dozen unpeeled ones beside them. He swallowed.
“I can understand that feeling,” he said softly.
“What?”
“Being rotten on the inside. Like anyone who looks deep enough will see that I’m not what I appear to be.”
Satine’s eyes were on him now, but he dared not look up. “I think I’ve seen a bit of the inside. And it doesn’t seem rotten to me.”
Obi-Wan did look up then, but not into her face—but beyond her, back into the woods from which they’d come. As if by looking hard enough, he might see through the trees to Qui-Gon’s drawn face and find there something he’d spent his whole apprenticeship looking for.
“He almost didn’t choose me. No one did,” Obi-Wan found himself saying before he could stop himself. “Even now I think he questions whether I should stay.”
Satine’s eyes followed his out into the trees. The wind made the branches shudder.
“Jedi can shield their emotions from others,” Obi-Wan continued. “But in the early days, before you’ve fully learned…well, there’s only so many nights of sensing your Padawan hyperventilating under the covers before you question if he’s cut out to be the Jedi into which he’s expected to grow.”
Satine looked to him again. Her face didn’t give anything away. “Do you still?”
Obi-Wan squeezed the fruit in his hand. The gooey core spilled all over his fist, dripping onto the ground.
He exhaled.
“Sometimes.”
They stayed there a while longer. Let the wind fill the silence, and nothing more.
They didn’t bring the fruit back to camp.
-- NOW --
They’d made a bit of a mess.
When Satine kicked the armor across the floor, she stumbled. Knocked Obi-Wan’s half-empty meal pack onto the ground, then her own. Vegetables skittered across the floor and bumped against the helmet by the wall, speckling the ground like stars. Obi-Wan briefly wondered if they’d woken Qui-Gon, but there came no sound.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured, dropping to his knees to start cleaning the floor.
She moved to help, but he shooed her away. “I’ve got it. Sit down.” And then he couldn’t explain why, but he found himself adding the next part: “Besides, after tomorrow you’ll have someone doing all the cleaning for you.”
He regretted it instantly. Even more so when she punched him in the chest.
“Don’t think I won’t do my own dirty work,” she said, while he rubbed the spot she’d struck. “You know full well that I’m not the kind of person who lets other people do the ugly things for her, and I won’t be the kind of politician who does either.”
“I wasn’t making any remark about what kind of politician you are.”
“What kind of remark were you making, then?”
What he didn’t say was this—that he was the one who’d better get used to it, to the fact that things would never be the same again. That they both had roles to play in the galaxy’s grand game of chess and they’d never cross the same squares.
He didn’t say this, though. Just continued cleaning the floor in a deep and heavy silence.
But he did look up, and found her eyes there. They flickered down to somewhere lower on his face.
He forced his own gaze not to waver away.
-- THEN --
The first time Obi-Wan had been kissed, he was sixteen years old.
It was stupid. He was dumb and immature and all his friends were watching it happen, which in hindsight was incredibly embarrassing but—as aforementioned—he was dumb and immature and therefor did not care.
And to make matters worse, it was Quinlan Vos.
Satine was relentless when she’d found this out. He absolutely would not have told her if he hadn’t been drunk. But the fact is—he was drunk.
And so this was happening.
And apparently this entailed a midnight game of embarrass-yourself-in-front-of-the-duchess-of-Mandalore.
But she was laughing, in the way only too much hard liquor could do. Qui-Gon had picked it up at the last village they’d passed through, before they’d moved on to their next camp in the woods, off the cliffs of Draboon—for medical purposes, he’d explained. Just as Obi-Wan would have to explain tomorrow how it had mysteriously disappeared.
But that was a tomorrow problem.
“Was he good?”
She giggled at her own question, and Obi-Wan rolled his eyes. “Quin? At kissing? Oh, certainly.”
“Were you?”
“Me?” The question startled him, and with the alcohol dulling his reflexes he actually stammered. “I—well—”
But then suddenly it was happening.
He didn’t remember the moments between her laughter and her lips on his. Just that suddenly she was doing it—kissing him, actually kissing him, and for a moment there was nothing but the softness of her against him, and the puff of air as she was still laughing.
It was short. She pulled away. And Obi-Wan wasn’t even sure it had happened at all.
He was sitting on the ground on the edge of the cliff, where they’d been watching the stars and passing the bottle between them. He leaned back on his hands now, as she still leaned so close he could smell the rum on her breath.
“I had to test that hypothesis,” she said, still giggling. “Since somehow I don’t think you would’ve answered that question for me.”
He couldn’t swallow. Couldn’t breathe. “And what was your conclusion?”
Satine grinned, and then her eyes were flickering down again, to the place her lips had left.
“I think the jury’s still out,” she murmured, already leaning in again. “I’d better test it again.”
And this time, it wasn’t rushed or misplaced or broken by laughter. This time, it was real.
He could’ve been anywhere—in the midst of battle, in the center of the Council Chamber, hurtling through space and time at the speed of light and it wouldn’t have made a difference. He wouldn’t have noticed a thing outside of this. This—kissing her. Feeling her hands on his face. Closing his eyes without even meaning to. Feeling her breath against his mouth each time she pulled back before leaning in again, and the realization that all the times her hand had brushed his, or her fingertips twirled his braid, or he pressed his shoulder to his, or fell asleep beside her and couldn’t explain why he felt the urge to roll closer—
What he’d wanted, all that time, was this.
And that made it all the more painful when they both, at once, pulled suddenly away.
“That was stupid,” Satine murmured. “I shouldn’t have—”
“I shouldn’t have.”
Silence. Wind. Night bugs.
“We can’t do that,” she said at last. “Not forever.”
Obi-Wan swallowed. His lips felt raw.
“No,” he said. “Not forever.”
His eyes met hers, and there was a smile somewhere deep within them. Hiding there.
“But perhaps now is enough.”
She fell back into him, with a rhythm of now and now and now.
-- NOW --
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what I meant.”
Obi-Wan was still on his hands and knees, surrounded by the wreckage of spilled mealpacks and Mandalorian armor. Satine stood by the doorway now, arms folded across her middle.
“I thought Jedi were trained to be good with words.”
Obi-Wan felt another quip rushing to his mind, but what came out instead was this: “Some things manage to undermine that training.” He shook his head. “Or some people.”
She didn’t reply. In fact, she had left the cockpit before Obi-Wan could even stand up again.
He put the ship on autopilot and followed her.
She’d taken the Mandalorian armor with her, and when he entered the sleeping quarters that’s where he found her—returning it to its rightful place with her other belongings. She looked ordinary—nothing out of place if you didn’t know where to look. But Obi-Wan knew where to look.
Her hands were shaking.
He walked up behind her. Stopped a few paces away, and when she turned he realized he didn’t know what he’d come here to say.
“Tomorrow things will be different,” she said before he could try. “Forever, things will be different.”
He nodded. “But not now.”
“No,” she replied. “Perhaps not now.”
There were moments he wished she’d never kissed him at all. That he could go on pretending he didn’t love her, that he could let go.
But then she did it again. And instantly the moment was gone.
She pressed him backward. The backs of his knees struck the bed, and then he was sinking down into it, and so was she. Her hands found the hem of his tunic and slid it gently upward. He let her. And as she pulled it over his head, for a moment the fabric obscured his vision, leaving him blind.
But then he could see her again.
Could see her crying.
She fell asleep in his arms. The lights were still on, and the armor against the wall stared at him with a watchful eye, but that wasn’t what kept him awake.
He could stay there.
He wanted to.
But soon it would be tomorrow.
And so he slipped his arm out from beneath her neck. Pushed back the covers, then tucked them around her again.
Then he turned out the light and climbed into his own bed, and laid there watching the shadows on the ceiling and listening to the tide of her breathing, wishing the sound weren’t so far away.
Here’s the thing about falling in love.
They tell you it ends. Badly, violently, up in flames. Or slowly, turning to ashes and then to dust. They tell you it will come again, and you spend your whole life wondering when, and how, and if.
But love is not a letter or a holo or a book. It doesn’t end with a sign-off, the click of a button or the closure of last lines. It doesn’t end in flames or even ashes. At least, it didn’t for him.
Because for him, it didn’t end at all.
The thing about falling is that it is just that—falling. You don’t know what’s below—what’s down there to break your fall, if anything will at all. You don’t know if you’re doomed to spend the rest of your life grasping for a hand that isn’t there to pull you up again, or even just waiting to hit rock bottom.
Maybe you never will. Maybe you don’t want to.
Because love is also the thing that makes you walk away and break your own heart for the sake of someone else’s, and it’s the thing you can deny and hide from all you want but it finds you just the same. And it’s the thing that hovers between the whispered words you aren’t brave enough to say, and you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering if they might’ve made a difference—the words please stay.
Love wants you to say them. And love keeps you from saying them. Because maybe love knows that it’s better this way.
In the bed across from him now, she was asleep. The next time he’d see her with her eyes closed, she wouldn’t be.
And so in the space between now and then, he’ll wait. He'll keep falling.
Waiting to hit the ground.