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She was a mirage in the desert: an old friend, come to greet him.
More likely, she was a manifestation of wishful thinking, a weathered man’s subconscious regret projected onto a stranger in the township market.
She had the same brown hair, but so did countless other women in the galaxy. Her slight build was no more unique than a tint of rose across skin after a day in the twin suns. Quietly declaring the flutter of recognition as its own sort of mind trick, Obi-Wan Kenobi turned back to the market stall before him. He paid for his goods and began his return trek home.
*
He had never meant to fall for a handmaiden.
He hadn’t meant to fall for anyone, period. After all that business with Satine… doors that should have never been opened were sealed permanently shut.
And yet, the handmaiden had offered him comfort. It was as simple as that.
Maybe it was the market that stirred his mind’s reminiscing. That’s how he’d stumbled upon her again during the war—first crossing paths with Senator Amidala on Coruscant and then being re-introduced to her entourage. Each of their faces seemed familiar because they were meant to seem familiar, but he was assured that he’d conversed with at least one of the women at a previous time.
Sabé, the one who stood closest to the senator, warmly recounted their time on Naboo more than a decade prior. It came rushing back to him, then—a few quiet conversations exchanged in the wake of Master Jinn’s death, though she was careful in how she alluded to that horrific event.
It felt like so many lifetimes ago.
The senator insisted that he not be a stranger, and that he stop by her apartment for another visit soon. The pretty young handmaiden echoed her sentiment with twinkling eyes. Pretty was the word that flitted through his mind, though he gave it no room to linger or take root. Jedi were not meant to find women pretty.
*
His hovel on Tatooine was certainly the opposite of pretty. It was simple and crude, but sufficient. A hermit needed little in the way of comfort. He needed only a place to rest where the vulnerability of sleep could claim him.
Obi-Wan Kenobi was never much of a dreamer. He hadn’t been granted the gift of premonition, for better or for worse. Even at its most frivolous, his mind only yielded to long stretches of quiet emptiness, waking him with no more than the satisfaction of a restful evening. But the night after the market, he dreamed.
“You’re funny,” she told him, leaning forward over the balcony rail and peering down at the city below. “You really flirted with her to get your way?”
“I wouldn’t phrase it that way,” he argued, heat tinting his cheeks. “But one does find negotiations go smoother with a certain degree of… charm.”
“Charm,” she repeated. “So that’s a Jedi Knight’s secret weapon—charm?”
“Well, it doesn’t hurt.”
“No, it certainly doesn’t.” Her smile was infectious. He found himself chuckling along with her.
“So, tell me,” she turned to face him more directly, resting her elbows against the balcony railing and leaning her body back. “How else does a Jedi use his charm? No ladies in waiting, I’d presume?”
“Jedi don’t have ladies in waiting, or ladies out of waiting, for that matter,” he said. “Our dedication is to our practice and to our duties.”
“That sounds lonely,” she assessed. “Admirable, but lonely. I commend you, but I don’t envy you.”
“Just like anything else, it has its perks and downfalls.”
“Do you ever regret it?” she asked.
The question caught him off guard. “Do I regret what?”
“Becoming a Jedi?”
How in the galaxy was he ever supposed to speak to that? It was like asking if someone regretted the ability to breathe. “It’s all I’ve ever known. I was raised in the Temple as a youngling.”
“Then do you regret never having the choice?”
He studied her for a moment before answering. All playfulness was gone from her face, giving way to the questioning in her wide, brown eyes. “I’ve had choices,” he admitted.
“Then do you regret not making different ones?”
And for the briefest moment, her face was no longer that of Sabé the handmaiden. In her place, he pictured Satine: just as young and honest, asking the same question in hopes of an answer that would make a heart-shattering world of difference.
*
Waking was regretful. A lot of things were regretful.
His dreamt-of conversation with Sabé hadn’t happened verbatim in the conscious world. Pieces of it filtered in from different conversations with different people over the decades. Much of it had come from conversations with Satine, during that brief time when he’d truly considered leaving the Order for her.
Satine hadn’t been his only regret, though. She’d been the deepest, but not the only.
After rekindling his friendship with the Senator and by extension her handmaidens, Obi-Wan found himself visiting their apartment with some degree of frequency. It was generally accompanied by a matter of business, if nothing but for the guise of keeping appearances professional. But more and more often, the conversations morphed from business to pleasure, and quite often Obi-Wan found himself speaking solely to Sabé after other matters had called Padmé away. It was a kind of rudeness negated by friendship, and the question of impropriety never crossed anyone’s mind—as far as he knew.
In terms of what he didn’t know…. He didn’t know if Sabé ever confessed to her mistress or any fellow handmaidens about their quiet exchange in the hangar bay.
It started, as usual, with a conversation morphing from business to pleasure. But she then took a turn he hadn’t expected, trying on a vulnerability he’d never seen in the young woman before. She spoke words he both dreaded and welcomed, her confession ending in a broken voice, a shaken resolve, a timid admittance, and finally—a kiss.
She stole the first. He stole the second. The war stole all the rest.
*
He didn’t know if Sabé ever told anyone. He didn’t know if anyone even knew, aside from the Senator and her handmaidens, that he and Sabé had been on friendly terms. There was so much he didn’t know about those final days.
He didn’t know his best friend, his brother, had been walking a frayed tightrope of glory strung over a pit of destruction.
He didn’t know that the Senator’s outlandish outfits had become feats of engineering, specifically structured to hide precious secrets she held within.
He didn’t know that the clones he swore to fight beside would turn and try to sear blaster holes through his chest.
He didn’t know what he’d find when he entered the Jedi Temple. He genuinely hadn’t known what the outcome would be when he left Master Yoda to find Vader on Mustafar.
How could he have known he’d lose everything on that fiery hellscape of a planet? How could he have known that the galaxy as he knew it would come to a complete, screeching halt?
Obi-Wan Kenobi knew nothing, save for his last little mission that he now carried out on his remote desert planet. And he knew, with complete certainty, that the woman he’d spotted in the market was not named Sabé.
*
Sleep was a luxury afforded by the weak, and Vader abhorred weakness. With every labored breath, he sought to destroy the last vestiges of his pathetic former life.
Despite his crusade against lingering humanity, even the dark Lord Vader had to succumb to bouts of meditative respite for the sake of survival. Too long plagued by premonitions in his youth, he was now haunted not by visions of the future, but memories of the past.
Tonight’s specter was the visceral curl of jealousy in his gut, the rise of heat and flame through capillaries and nerve endings that he fought to suppress as he recalled the woman—as he recalled his wife—mere days before her death. The way she’d looked up at him with innocent brown eyes and claimed that all was well, that his former master had stopped by for a visit out of friendly concern, and nothing more.
She’d been an angel and a liar. He’d known it even then.
It wasn’t the first time he’d known of Kenobi’s speeder leaving the senator’s apartment.
But it would forever be his last.