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Luke is a little boy in a rebel base when he finds the first Lost thing - a dark, twisted looking piece of metal that his mother takes and throws away at once.
The next day Mara finds a cup of milk in her previously bare room. She drinks it all in mere moments, almost sobbing with relief at the first thing to pass her lips in days.
No, perhaps that is not the right place to start. Too late.
Sheev Palpatine finds a book on theology with annotations in a bold, elegant hand. His Master gives him a bomb, which he primes and then Loses.
The next day the headlines scream of an explosion in the Jedi Temple that had killed three Knights. Sheev never wonders which one had lost that book.
No, no, too early. Far too early. And it sets unnecessary precedents - only a Sith could pervert a soulmate bond so, and only one does so within the story we are telling.
How about this then?
Padme Naberrie loses the notes for her election speech. It is not the first time she has lost things like that and she knows that Ani will lose them back before she needs to give it.
Ani isn't the best speaker, but his Mum is a better proofreader than her own. She knows his name because he doodles it in the margins of her notes.
She's been losing her pocket money systematically since she was nine, in the hopes that it will eventually add up to enough to do something. Ani loses exotic fruits and little gadgets on Life Day and her birthday, which she treasures more dearly than even gifts from her sisters.
If either of them lose anything on their first adventure together, the other finds it quickly enough that they don't notice.
She finds his lightsaber twice in the ten years they don't see each other. She refuses to lose it back, because she thinks it's funny when he has to go back to Ilum with the younglings for yet another crystal.
They lose a lot of things during the war. Anakin loses his name at the end, though Padme doesn't find it for twenty years. She's too busy starting a rebellion, and watching as the Order rises from its own ashes once again. She starts looking for it when the Jedi can take over the Rebellion somewhat.
The one thing she never, ever loses is actually two things. She never loses her children, no matter what.
She never loses any sensitive plans or documents either, but Vader loses many. He's always been careless like that. It gives the Rebellion quite an edge.
Or, no. That isn't the main story. For once, it isn't really about them.
How about this:
Half the Order finds nothing for years upon years of their lives, and then suddenly they find child sized boots, little pads, blasters, a hundred other things.
Then a little later another group reports suddenly finding things. And then again, exactly the same amount of time later. And again, and again, and again.
Once the shock at realising so many Jedi are paired with people ten, twenty, thirty years their junior wears off, the Order becomes concerned. Why do so many children of the same age have armour and weapons?
They start a search - no one has met one of these children yet, despite the Jedi actively searching most of the known galaxy. While they look, the things being lost expand exponentially.
Only four years ago they were finding toddler's clothes and now everything seems to belong to preteens. The Jedi realise that their soulmates seem to be being born in waves. Suspiciously regular waves.
What is happening?
They do their best to lose back the things they find, and try not to lose too much of their own. If what they suspect is true, contraband items may endanger their soulmates. They cannot, will not do that. Not after Knight Sef, who lost a letter introducing herself and found a pile of ash.
It takes ten years and an accident, but Knight Kenobi happens upon Kamino while on an entirely seperate mission. She is walking past the mess when she locks eyes with one of the clones, a man of about her own age.
He drops his spoon under the table, and as she shoves her hands into her pockets, she closes her fingers about the cold metal.
The horror is enough to make her lose track of the conversation for a minute.
Clones. Half of the Order is paired with clones who have been brought up in this terrible place and killed and abused and-
She loses her lightsaber when she is captured by her own grandmaster. It returns to her by the time she is conscious. She loses it as the door opens. This time her soulmate doesn't lose it again. He hands it to her personally as his gunship lands in the bloodstained arena.
His name is Cody, though his records name him CC-2224. He becomes her Commander, her best friend, and eventually her lover.
He tries to kill her on Utapau after the Order goes out and yet in the twenty years that follow, he never loses a weapon. He never loses anything at all, but she can sense him still. Why does he no longer lose anything? Why can she sense him if he loses nothing?
She cannot sense the daughter she gave to the Temple, with her own red-gold curls and Cody's dark eyes. She had practically lived on the frontlines when her child was born - that was no place for anyone, never mind a newborn. Her baby had been so strong in the Force even from the womb, and so they had placed her in the creche to keep her safe.
They had visited her whenever they were onworld, their sweet little girl who had beamed and demanded treats whenever they arrived. She had thought that her child died in the attack on the Temple. She had mourned her and remembered her and wondered what kind of galaxy it was where mothers outlived their daughters.
She does not know that her child survived, not until Luke brings home his own soulmate - a woman with shadowed dark eyes and red-gold curls that match her own hair before it had been bleached by the desert sun.
The chips had gone with the emperor, tied to whatever magik he had done to take control of four million minds. For the first time in twenty years, she had found a gauntlet. She had lost her lightsaber. They hadn't come face to face for another year. He had been-
Perhaps not that story.
How about this - Mace Windu loses a blaster, though he had never owned one. Ponds finds it and shoots Aurra Sing before she can shoot him.
By the time he finds Mace's missing hand, it means nothing to CC-6454, at least until he's kidnapped and his chip cut out of his head.
The biggest thing Mace ever finds is Ponds.
Or maybe, Ahsoka finds a datapad with unfamiliar modules on it. The Jedi with those mysterious soulmates are taught not to lose things if they can help it, but she learns everything she can and then gives it to her crechemaster who passes it on to the council.
At first her soulmate seems younger than her, and then she realises despairingly that they are much older.
Once the war starts, she begins to find much more individualised things. She asks her crechemaster what one loses for a soldier, and then proceeds to lose clothes and games and a bit of every new food she tries.
She keeps up the habit until several months into her apprenticeship when she sees Rex wearing a pair of gloves she lost two months before.
Then she stops losing things for a little out of sheer mortification - it's Rex, he's...stuffy and old and no fun at all. But at the same time, it is Rex, who fusses over her as much as Skyguy and scolds her, and helps her get away with things. He's her friend and her big brother, and does all the other stuff really matter?
They start to lose and find things again after the Order. It's easier to check the other is alive that way.
Or, the first thing Bly ever finds is a bunch of pretty, brightly-coloured ribbons. He has no idea what their purpose is until he is grown and meets General Secura who twines them about her lekku.
The last thing CC-5052 ever finds is her lightsaber, which fell out of her dying hands and he threw back into the mud...no.
The last thing Bly ever finds is Abeth Secura, who had been hidden with his mother's family for twenty years until it was safe. CC-5052 hadn't remembered Bly's son with a traitor.
Or, Quinlan has no clone commander. That's fine, he's never found things that look like a clone lost them.
He's been finding little trinkets since he was seven, and losing little gifts for just as long. Often money, so that the girl he sees in the memories of the trinkets can provide for the needs her master doesn't.
Her lost things stop arriving with memories imbued after a while, which is oddly relaxing.
He doesn't think much of it until six months into the war when a Sith assassin turns up with a necklace he'd lost earlier that day. At the very least, she'd also stumbled at the sight of the wooden beads strung about his wrist that he'd found a month before.
She doesn't lose much for a while after that.
He loses a bunch of Alderaanian roses, and she throws them at him the next time their paths cross.
She loses gloves in his exact size.
He loses a medical kit which includes burn soothers that work on lightening burns.
Eventually he loses himself undercover, and she finds him and brings him back to the Light.
They run from the Empire together, until they have no choice but to stand and fight.
Or, Fox doesn't find the same things as the rest of his batch.
He finds gold jewellery and floaty clothing and drafts of speeches in a language he doesn't understand.
He's holding one of them in the Senate one day when a younger Senator with big blue eyes and soft purple hair spots the datapad with a sound of relief.
If there's anything CC-1010 could feel grateful for, it would be that she is not a Jedi. He doesn't have to kill the one good thing that ever entered his life.
She finds him again, many years later. His hair is graying and his scars have multiplied, but he has his name and his mind back.
Or, Caleb and his soulmate have been losing weapons and disguises almost as long as they can remember. They didn't meet during the Clone Wars, but his grandmaster and her father had been friends of a sort. They had seen each other on holos as the adults responsible for them talked sometimes.
He only keeps the things she loses after the war because he knows she isn't a clone. He doesn't think he could bear having a clone as his soulmate after watching Grey gun down his Master.
He meets up with Hera after several years and they set up their own rebel cell. His grandmaster drops in occasionally, but knows better than to bring Ponds.
They find a boy who calls himself Jabba the Hutt and who's bunk quickly fills up with Sabine's lost aerosols of paint. Sabine's bunk quickly fills up with junk and the pair argue about it constantly.
It doesn't seem to occur to either of them that they could simply return the things they found.
Kanan and Hera have a good laugh, watching their charges bicker.
Perhaps, instead - Leia Amidala insists she's less stupid about her soulmate than her brother is. The fact that she keeps the dice she found one day and turned the into a pair of earrings is simply because she needs a distinctive item so she knows when she meets her soulmate.
She's horrified when it turns out to be a scruffy smuggler who fails miserably at rescuing her from the elegant apartments her father had locked her in (he refurbishes the cells on every ship he enters, so that he can contain his wayward family should they be captured). Her mother just smiles like she knows something Leia does not.
Luke is horribly jealous that she meets her soulmate first. She is horribly jealous he's living in blissful ignorance of what his soulmate is like. They argue and he appeals to Mace and she appeals to Obi-Wan. Neither of their masters is particularly sympathetic.
She pouts and sulks and tries not to blush too darkly when Ahsoka finds her and Han kissing in an abandoned corridor. It was an accident.
Her son is named Ben, for her master, and also to spite her father who is still jealous of his old master.
So, in the end, perhaps it is a story about the Skywalkers.
Padmé finds Anakin again, twenty years after he lost himself. She keeps him alive, and agrees to watch over his house arrest - on Naboo, far away from the rebuilt Jedi Order.
They had found each other, all of them. Some of the Jedi had been given only a few short years of moments snatched between battles. Some had clawed more time from the universe. And some had been born of those brief, doomed pairings to hold the memory of those marching ahead.
There is no one to find Sheev. He had made sure of that before the story even started.