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Obi-Wan does not have a drinking problem.
Really, he doesn’t. And he doesn’t appreciate the insinuation that he does, either. He hasn’t come to the cantina in well over a week, and he hadn’t planned on coming there tonight—it’s week’s end, and this place is wretched enough as is when not filled with sentients of all skins—but he’d forgotten that Tattooine isn’t that far off the Coruscanti cycle, and the day had snuck up on him faster than he’d have liked. Really, he would have liked to have been on Tattooine’s calendar variant, but it’s only been a year, and the Force is still singing her plaintive tune, and he woke up in the morning feeling the heat against his skin like lava-sick fumes and he knows, he knows what day it is. He’d been sorely tempted to dig up that lightsaber just so he could hurl it farther into the dunes—and wouldn’t that be some sick poetic justice, he thinks—but he had barely been able to hold it in his hand before it burns him, hot across the Force he still feels radiating off of it, pain and betrayal and anger and sadness and fear.
So instead he’d dropped it back in the sand, turned around, and began the long walk to Chalmun’s.
It had been a very long walk, across the sand with no Force enhancement, no shielding his calves from the grains that itch and cling, and every step he takes feels like penance. Moving meditation, he thinks, before quickly stuffing that thought down into the corner of his mind he’s cordoned off with memories of Coruscanti crime scene tape. It’s overflowing already. There are too many memories. Elevators and ships and halfway-crashed landings and—no. He cannot. There is no emotion. There is no peace. There is only a sea of Forceforsaken sand.
The long, slow silhouette of the cantina rises in front of him, the only thing amidst a sea of dunes, and he walks through the door with an uneasy air. It’s crowded, so crowded, a reminder of whip-fast nights of Coruscant and ill-gotten drinks and camaraderie and laughter. Everything he comes here to drink away. Despite the throng of bodies, he’s able to find a seat at the bar and immediately calls for a Jawa Juice—no, an Ardees, here—and drinks it straight. The grainy, slurry-like mash coats his throat, dimming the apologies that have been threatening to burst out of his mouth since he’s awoken, soaking everything in haze and mash and burn. It’s easier, he’s been finding more and more over the past year, to succumb to drunkenness than to regret.
He’s just drank half of his third Ardees when the figure to his right moves and he’s startled—and isn’t that strange, being startled, but between the liquor and the walls he’s built around all his memories sewn in with the Force he’s slowly becoming used to it—and the glass shatters in his hand. It speaks.
“My apologies, sir. I did not intend to frighten you.”
It’s smooth and liquid, nearly velvet and vaguely feminine, and he’s not frightened. Something about the slinking formality puts him at ease, actually. He’s always been fond of formalities. “No, ma’am. I’m fine. It’s a… difficult day for me.”
She turns to him, all long limbs and slanted features, and it almost reminds him of the creatures on Kamino all those years ago, the ones whose long, slender necks he has longed to back in time to throttle and abort this whole mess before it had ever happened, the ones whose careful voice had spelled destruction for everyone.
“Difficult, today? Or difficult in a past today?” She leans against the bar on her elbows, casual in a way that he can tell isn’t casual at all, a studied maneuver to elicit conversation. If he were anywhere, anytime, anyone else, he might dismiss it. But today… Today he wantsdesiresneeds to just talk. To be a human, in a cantina, on a desert planet. Nothing more. No one special. Just Ben.
“A past today, as it were. And, subsequently, today. And likely many more to come, sadly.” That’s the understatement of the new Empire. Still, he feels a strange, almost compulsive, urge to keep talking. To this stranger with blond-brown-sand-sun-no hair and a leonine angle to her face and grace. “I lost someone, today. Not the first time I’ve lost someone, but, still, not pleasant.”
She nods, an eyelid flicking in from near her nose over an ice-blue eye. Her profile, he thinks, is striking. “On my planet,” she says, “our physical bodies are rather, how shall I saw, ‘transient.’ We are beings of memory. For us, loss is forgetting—a conscious choice, otherwise all is remembered. I cannot imagine how it feels to have that chosen for you.”
To remember everything… Obi-Wan can’t decide if that sounds pleasant or hellish. He has moments, memories, entire eras of his life he never wants to think of again. But to have to either keep his pain tucked behind his shields or to simply… forget? As much as it hurts, he can’t think that’d ever be able to let them go.
Another blasted attachment. No under he couldn’t save a proper Jedi.
“On our planet,” she continues, “do you know how one Lac’nae”—and he supposes that must be her species—“propositions another?” Her silver lips turn inward, and he watches spots of silver and blue and violet waltz across her neck, freckles that dance like star-gaps in hyperspace from voyages he’d rather not think about.
“No, I can’t say that I’ve ever heard much about your people.”
She smiles, rows of glittering teeth, clear as transparisteel and sharp like a loth-cat’s. “Would you like to share a memory with me?” Shrugging herself back upright, she shifts her weight, her arm landing heavily on Obi-Wan’s wrist. “So, lost man with too many thoughts. Would you like to?”
He won’t deny that there is a tension—to do so would be foolish, deceiving himself, and nothing good has ever come of that—and it would be nice, he thinks, so sink himself into something other than the Force and his own guilt for a change. But he mustn’t. The Code, that blasted, frustrating Code forbids it, forbids attachment, forbids indulgence and escape and—
She turns her head to face him directly and Obi-Wan is lost in her blue eyes, bluer than water the first time he ever set foot on Naboo, bluer than the lightsaber he keeps hidden in the ground behind his hut, and her hair shifts and it’s cornsilksunshinesand, memories of warmth and kindness and begrudging grins and everything he will never have again. All because of the Code that he couldn’t seem to follow, the Code that turned his attachments into sadness and rage and the Code that has taken everything he has ever loved from him. He thinks of the Code and of tawny-gold hair streaming through his fingers and of saber-blue eyes slipping shut and he thinks, fuck the Code.
“Yes,” he hears himself saying. “I think I would.”
Thankfully, she has a speeder, and aside from its hum there’s little talking as they cross back to his hut. She doesn’t question him when he goes around to the back, re-burying the lightsaber he’d so carelessly left exposed earlier in the night. They both know, he thinks, that this is just two creatures looking for an escape from the drumbeats inside their heads for a night. So he goes back inside, guides her to his bed, and pulls her down.
Kissing her is like a long-forgotten dream, bitten lips and foreheads pressed in a facsimile of trust, hands clasped in an imitation of intimacy. She ghosts her long, triple-jointed fingers over his face, his beard, the scar tissue weaving a web across his horse. He can see her consider them, adding another item to the short list of things she knows about the broken, battle-scarred man whose body he inhabits. It’s been so long since he was touched by anyone, and her fingers are just different enough, smooth where they should be calloused and thin where they should be sturdy, that they don’t burn. For an almost-agonized hour, he can almost forget.
He almost doesn’t dream that night, but the ghosts of smoke lick at the edges of his sleep.
When he awakes, his bed is empty, and his brain a haze of half-remembered choices and memories shared and then relinquished.
Across the galaxy, a Lac’nae woman bears a child born of memory and the Force, studded with freckles that dance like the sand her father carries on his skin and in his soul. They glide in a dusty-brown array over her collarbone and the bridge of her nose. And her daughter, born decades later again of a stranger on another desert planet—another name, another cantina, always full of men looking to shut off their minds and avoid their shattered dreams—is almost human. Her freckles are static, humming only when her emotions boil over. Her eyes point at the edges like her mother and grandmother. But like her grandmother’s people, she remembers. Hears the voices of people that should have by all rights faded from view long ago, echoing in abandoned hands and a saber that seems strangely, distantly familiar, on another planet, beneath the sands.