Chapter Text
‘‘No, Leia.“
‘‘Why not?“
‘‘Because we can’t afford to dawdle. Come on, now.”
“But it wouldn’t even take long, Ben! I just want to look at the flower, just one minute!”
Obi-Wan sighed. This girl. They had been on planet for a few hours now, mainly spent walking straight ahead towards the proposed meeting point, and Leia was getting understandably antsy: She was both tired and bored and now she had gotten it in her head that she wanted a closer look at some tiny wayside flowers the same yellowish colour as the grass surrounding it.
“No. We can’t delay.”
Leia pouted and Obi-Wan was strongly reminded of Padmé once again. Had she been only a few years older than this little girl when she had become Queen of Naboo? Dark eyes so similar to her mother’s regarded him with a mixture of annoyance and exhaustion. He sighed again. He hated having to be so tough and coarse towards her, but it seemed Tatooine’s sand storms had stripped away his capabilities for gentleness. And they really had no time to spare. Reva or, much worse, Vader might already be after them. But maybe a compromise?
“How about this, Leia? You play or do anything that won’t slow us down on the way, alright?”
Less than five minutes and, so he felt, innumerable games of “I spy with my little eye…” later, Obi-Wan was less happy with his compromise. Leia might be less bored, but he was definitively annoyed now. And there wasn’t so much around to make for an interesting game. Yellowish? The plants around them. Green? That bushel of grass or your cloak. Brown? My cloak. Blue? The sky. And that was it.
Apparently, Leia either picked up on his annoyance or grew tired of the game, because she stopped asking only a little later.
Obi-Wan looked at her out of the corner of his eye. For a girl this age who had grown up protected and loved inside a castle she was holding up well. He smiled privately to himself. Bail and Breha had raised a tenacious young lady.
Suddenly, he heard her little voice pipe up in a song he didn’t know. She was singing quietly, so he didn’t catch every word. Something about a nerfling on a meadow? And then she started skipping along the road in time with the rhythm of her song. “And then it jumps, 1,2,3,”, she jumped three times on her left foot, “it jumps, 1,2,3,” she switched to the right one, “over flowers, over stones, and it likes that a lot!”
Obi-Wan swallowed around the lump that seemed to have formed in his throat as he looked at her. Unbidden, a memory came to the forefront of his mind: Anakin, about the same age, kicking stones along the path that they were walking along and making exaggerated racing commentary. “And Greystone passes Blackstone, but don’t count Redstone out of the race, oh no! They still have half a circuit to go. And there comes Brownstone – watch out for that corner! … ” Occasionally, he had helped the stones along with some help from the Force, glancing at Obi-Wan as if expecting a reprimand.
“Ben? Ben!”
Leia’s voice woke him from his reverie.
“Are you alright?”
“Yes, of course. I just…”
But what was he supposed to say? I just thought how much you remind me of your parents, of whom one is dead and the other is hunting us without even being aware of your existence. Luckily.
Far too much to shoulder for such a little girl.
“I just got distracted. It’s nothing.”
Leia tilted her head inquisitively and looked ready to interrogate him further, so he prevented this line of questioning by asking her one instead.
“What was that song you sang? I don’t know it. Did your mother teach it to you?”
Her little face lit up.
“Yes, she did. It’s my favourite song! Do you want to hear it again?”
And she was off, gripping his hand, singing, skipping and pulling him along, while Obi-Wan privately thanked the Force that Bail had pushed him to come to Leia’s aid.