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Laughter condenses, sharp as honey and painful, etching itself into her bones in all the spaces where grief should live. It is monstrous, that Satine should find happiness here amid the violence, on the run, with death nipping at their footsteps.
Her father is dead, Mandalore broken, and in all the small moments she is happy.
They sit beside a fire in the cool dark beneath the stars, while Obi-wan cooks a small animal he insists is not a rat.
(“You’ve been on Coruscant too long, you’ve forgotten what your own fauna looks like! Civilized planets have biodiversity, you know.”)
And Satine laughs, a quiet breath of air. Obi-wan seems to glow in the firelight as he turns the rat skillfully on its stick. Satine had not known that this was a skill that one could have, but obi-wan manages it; he’d caught the thing skillfully, gutted it and cleaned it with fascinating efficiency, and now he sits cooking it with an incongruous sense of finesse.
It is their hunger, Satine knows, that makes the unseasoned rat taste better than it has any right to. It is the hunger, and perhaps the company.
(“See? Could a rat taste this good? I assure you that they do not.”
“It is merely that you have never had the pleasure of tasting a Mandalorian rat before. We are a people superior in all things, including the succulence of our rats.”)
Obi-wan’s laugh is a low, broken thing, as though he is afraid of it escaping him. It trembles gently in the air, rumbling up against Satine’s heart as if it belongs there.
They sleep curled together, Satine closer to the fire, and Obi-wan at her back. It is a matter of warmth and security, to sleep thus, but the practicality does not diminish the intimacy of it.
They breathe together in the silence, and their hearts, she imagines, beat as one drum. They are one together here, with only the stars as their witness. She cannot help but think she would go on like this forever if she could, despite the dirt and the hunger and the threat of violence. If this moment could stretch on forever, if they could forsake their responsibilities and fates and worlds, then she would stay with him like this all her life and be happy.