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The safehouse on Kalevala had a leaky roof. Rain tapped a nervous rhythm on the durasteel, running in thin lines down cracked walls. Satine sat on the pallet, fingers pressed hard into her own stomach as if she could will the world back into place.
“You’re pale,” Obi-Wan said softly from the doorway. “Paler than usual, I mean.”
He tried for a smile. It almost worked.
“I’m fine,” she lied.
She was late. Days, then weeks. The quiet queasiness in the mornings, the drag of exhaustion, the way her chest felt different under her hands when she dressed. She’d seen enough war widows to know the signs they never dared name out loud.
Obi-Wan crossed the tiny room, kneeling in front of her. The lamplight caught copper in his hair, blue in his eyes. “You were almost killed in that ambush. You could at least pretend to let me worry.”
“If I let you worry,” she said, “you’ll never stop.”
“That is an unfortunate possibility,” he admitted.
His hand hovered, then settled over hers where it still rested, trembling, at her abdomen. For a heartbeat, something flared between them, terrifying and sweet and so, so fragile.
“Satine?” he asked, the question barely a breath.
She almost told him then. The words rose, heavy and astonishing.
I think…
A blaster shot cracked outside. The roof shook with the roar of engines. Someone yelled her name. Obi-Wan’s head snapped toward the door.
“Stay here,” he said. “I’ll—”
He rose, his hand tearing away from hers as if the universe itself had reached down and pulled him to his feet. Then he was gone, robe flaring, saber already in his hand.
The moment shattered. The words fell, unspoken, between the cracks in the floor.
—
Mandalore returned her like a prodigal daughter and a symbol, all at once.
“The war is over,” they told her. “The pacifists have won. You will be Duchess.”
There was no room in the speeches for the nausea that bent her over in the mornings, or the nights she woke with his name on her lips, or the way her hands shook when she read news from the front and wondered if he’d survived another day.
By the time her gowns no longer hid the growing curve of her belly, the Council of Regents had begun to look at her as if she were a weapon pointed in the wrong direction.
“It cannot be known,” the Prime Minister said, voice like ice. “Not now, not after everything we’ve fought for. A pregnant duchess, unwed—do you understand what the traditionalists would do with that?”
She understood.
Her quarters felt very small when she told Bo-Katan. Satine hesitated when she had to mention who the father was.
“Don’t be an idiot, Satine, I know who put a little Jedi in you.” Bo sank down opposite her. “Does he know?”
“No.” Satine swallowed. “I didn’t tell him. There was never time, and then… there was a war and he’s… only nineteen.”
Bo snorted. “You’re only eighteen.”
“But I feel very old.”
Silence stretched. Rain tapped at the tall windows of Sundari’s palace, just like it had on Kalevala’s bare metal.
At last Bo said, “We can hide this. For a while. But eventually there will be a child.”
“His name is Korkie,” Satine said, surprising herself. “If it’s a boy.”
Bo raised a brow. “You’ve already named it?”
“After father,” Satine whispered. The loss was still a raw wound. “Something of him should live.”
Bo exhaled, then nodded once, decisively. “All right. Korkie it is. We’ll tell them he’s our brother’s boy. Or sister’s. They love a tragedy.”
“Bo—”
“It’s a story,” Bo said, jaw tight. “We give them a story they can live with, or they make one for you. And their story will hurt more.”
Satine closed her eyes. For a moment, she let herself imagine something else: Obi-Wan at her side, hand steady at her back as she walked into the throne room; their child carried openly in her arms, no lies required.
The vision was so bright it hurt. Then it was gone.
“All right,” she said, because there was a planet balanced on her tongue and she could not drop it. “He will be our nephew.”
Bo’s hand came down over hers, squeezing hard. “You’re not alone,” her sister said, fierce and ferociously loyal. “He won’t be either.”
Satine did not weep when Korkie was born. She was too tired, too hollowed out, as if the child had taken half her soul with him when he left her body. She held him, memorized every line of his face, every fragile breath.
Obi-Wan would have loved you, she thought. He would have been so afraid of dropping you.
She let herself imagine his laugh in the nursery, the way he’d have argued with her over stories and bedtimes, the way his eyes would have softened when the baby reached up for his beard—
No. She pressed a kiss to Korkie’s brow and whispered, “You are wanted. You are loved. Even if you never know the whole story.”
—
Years later, in a quiet hall on Mandalore, Obi-Wan stood across from her with dust in his hair and weariness in his bones.
The wars had carved new lines into his face. His eyes were still the same. They had always borne too much.
“You should have told me,” he said, and the words were soft, too soft, as if he were afraid they might cut them both open.
Satine’s fingers tightened around the cup of tea she’d poured purely for the excuse to hold something. “I thought I was protecting him. Protecting you.”
“From what? From his father?” A bitter, self-mocking smile flickered. “The vaunted Jedi who preaches compassion but cannot claim his own family?”
“From the Council,” she said. “From scandal. From being used as a weapon against you. Against Mandalore. Against us.”
He looked down, lashes shadowing his cheeks. “I held him, once,” he said quietly. “Here. In this palace. You remember?”
She did. Korkie had been ten, all elbows and bright questions, insisting on showing “Uncle Obi” every hidden passageway in the palace. Obi-Wan had laughed, genuinely laughed, as the boy tugged him along.
“He reminded me of you,” Obi-Wan said. “And I thought—how strange, that Satine’s nephew seems to have my talent for finding trouble.”
Satine’s throat closed. “I watched you together. I told myself it was enough. That having you both alive, even if you didn’t know, was better than risking everything.”
“And now?”
“Now there is a war stealing everything else from us.” She met his gaze. “I don’t know if it was right. I only know that at every turn, something was being taken—our youth and choices. I would not let them take him, too.”
He crossed the space between them slowly, as if every step weighed the years. When he reached her, his hand lifted, hesitated, then brushed her cheek, reverent.
“How old must he be?” Obi-Wan asked.
“Seventeen,” Satine said. “He’s brilliant. Stubborn. He wants to save the galaxy and has no idea how much it will hurt.”
“Like his parents, then,” Obi-Wan murmured.
Something twisted in her chest. “Do you hate me?” she asked, very quietly.
He looked startled. “Satine. No.” His thumb traced the line of her jaw, as if memorizing it anew. “I hate… the Order’s fear. This war. The way everything we touch seems to be claimed by someone else’s cause. I hate that our time with him was stolen before it ever began.”
His voice roughened. “But I could never hate you.”
She leaned, just for a moment, into his touch. “I used to imagine what you would have done if I’d told you on Kalevala,” she confessed. “Would you have stayed? Left the Order? Asked me to run?”
He smiled, small and sad. “At twenty, I might have made a very foolish choice.”
“And now?”
“Now I will do what I can with what little is left to us.” He dropped his hand, stepping back before they both forgot the lines they had drawn. “If you’ll allow it, I’d like to know him. Even if I am only ever his… eccentric ‘uncle’.”
She exhaled, a sound that was almost a laugh and almost a sob. “I think,” she said, “that would make him very happy.”
“And you?”
“It will hurt,” she admitted. “Every time I see you together, I will think of all the years we lost.”
“Yes,” he said. “It will.”
Satine straightened. She had a world to govern, a war to navigate, a son to keep safe. “Very well, then,” she said, meeting his gaze. “Let us steal back what little time we can.”
A faint, fierce light sparked in his eyes. “Gladly, my dear.”