Work Text:
Art by @spectral-musette on Tumblr
It had been a couple of years, just enough time for Satine to stop crying when she looked at all the Holopics. Now, she would kind of smile, which was something she had not felt like doing in a while.
Despite the late hour and Kalevala's pouring rain, the doorbell to her private apartment rang. Satine left the comfort of her sofa and opened the door to find a familiar pair of blue eyes at the entrance.
“I just want to talk,” Obi-Wan said.
His shaggy auburn hair clung to his face, and his brown poncho appeared to be completely soaked through. Refusing to let him in would be like turning away a wet puppy.
“Come in,” Satine relented as she silently begged, “Please don't ruin this for me.”
Obi-Wan tried to embrace her, but Satine stepped back from him as she said, “Please don't make it harder than it already is. I'm trying to get over… this.”
He confessed, “I was hoping I could spend the night.”
“I can't say ‘goodbye’ if you stay here the whole night,” Satine replied curtly.
“We can say goodbye in the morning,” Obi-Wan promised.
She sighed. “But you see, it's hard to find an end to something that you keep beginning over and over again.”
Obi-Wan took her delicate hands into his toughed ones and said, "I want to find a new ending for us."
“The ending always stays the same,” Satine replied as she pulled away from him. “There's no good reason to pretend that we could ever exist again.”
“Why not? Don't you believe in second chances?” asked Obi-Wan, desperation barely concealed in his voice.
“Because this is never-ending, and we have been here before.” Satine took a deep breath and then said out loud the words that she silently repeated to herself nearly every hour of every day. “I can't be your friend. I can't be your lover. I can’t be the reason we hold back each other from our futures. For Force’s sake, go fall in love with somebody other than me, Obi-Wan!”
Satine bit the inside of her lip to keep from crying as she rushed to the refresher and closed the door behind her. “ What have I done? ” she asked her reflection in the mirror as she gripped the sink to keep herself standing. Her head throbbed with pain as hot tears rolled down her cheeks. She splashed her face with cold water and took a few slow, deep breaths before returning to face him.
Obi-Wan stared at the floor and whispered, “If that’s how you truly feel, then I will leave.”
“Since you came all this way, I guess I'll let you stay for as long as it takes to grab your Holopad and your cloak,” Satine conceded and handed him a large brown towel from the refresher.
He began to dry himself off before asking, “Where are they?”
“My closet.”
Obi-Wan made his way into her room, and Satine reluctantly trailed along behind him. The last time they had been in her room was one of the few times they had ever made love together on a real bed.
“This is my cologne, isn’t it?” he asked while picking up a small dark blue glass bottle from a shelf in Satine’s closet.
“The good one that you bought when we were fighting that one time.”
She did not tell him that it was still on her clothes and everything she owned from back then and that the smell of it made her feel like dying.
Grabbing his cloak and Holopad, Obi-Wan slowly walked out of the bedroom while Satine tried to keep herself together.
“After you and Qui-Gon left, I was barely just surviving,” she confessed quietly.
Obi-Wan asked, “How so?”
“The damage done during the war was immense. The death tolls were so high it was hard to believe that the numbers were even real. Keldabe was, at best, ruins. We are still in the process of relocating the capital to Sundari in some ways.” Satine said, “I want to build a Peace Park and have a Memorial Shrine for the lives that were needlessly lost to violence amongst our own people.”
“That sounds like a lovely idea.”
“How about we get something to drink?” Satine suggested as she headed towards the kitchen.
Her drink of choice would usually be a rich Mandalorian red wine, but that would not be strong enough for tonight.
“Narcolethe or tihaar?” she asked Obi-Wan.
“Tihaar, please.”
She pulled out a short glass and added ice to it before pouring the colorless spirit over it and handing the glass to him. He drank it fast as she prepared herself a mug of narcolethe.
“Qui-Gon loved some Mandallian narcolethe,” Obi-Wan noted absent-mindedly and refilled his glass with more ice and tihaar.
Satine whispered, “I wish I could have been there for the service.”
“I miss him. I wasn’t ready to be made a Jedi Knight. I’m still not. Everyone says that it was the will of the Force for him to die, but I still don’t understand it. No Jedi has died at the hands of a Sith in 1,000 years.” He sank to the floor and half-sobbed, “I expected to go through the Trials and be knighted in a proper ceremony with Qui-Gon at my side. Then we would be friends for the rest of our lives.”
Satine nodded sadly.
“I promised him I would train Anakin, but I don’t know what to do. How can I train Anakin? Is he the Chosen One? Qui-Gon never doubted the prophecies after our mission to Pijal.” Obi-Wan paused and finished off his tihaar. “And I have to find faith? No, I have to choose to have faith.”
Taking the empty glass from him, she refilled it and passed it back.
“Kriff, I took on a padawan only hours after I was made a knight in a hasty field promotion. What was I thinking? Sometimes, I wake up at night and find Anakin sleeping on the floor next to my bed because he is desperately afraid that he will lose me, just like he lost his mother and Qui-Gon.”
Satine looked at him, the man she loved. Here he was, crying, drunk on her kitchen floor, curled in the fetal position.
She whispered, “I wish that you would stay in my memories. Just stay in my memories, Ben.”