Dreaming through the noise.

I have a list of 40 prompts (and I'm not sure where I got it.) This was for #15, "After the incident..."

Post Waking Nightmare.

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“After the incident, I secluded myself. For a while. Took the odd job on freighters, in the kitchens of taverns. It was at one of the inns I met the priest of Mara who took me in, gave me stability, safety... A home.”

Danae rolled on her pallet near the fire, looked up at Erandur, brow furrowed. The firelight played across her face, curving along her cheekbones, her jaw, pooling in the hollow of her throat.

“Is Erandur your real name?”

“No,” he said, after a moment. “It was the name the priest gave me.”

“Was Casimir?”

He started slightly, unused to hearing that name from anyone save the voices in his memory. “No, I took that name in service to Vaermina.”

“Would you tell me your real name?”

Erandur smiled. She was guileless. When she’d walked through the door of the Windpeak Inn, he’d known, thought not quite how, that she would be the one to lead him through the miasma, to put right what he’d helped to wrong. He probably could have been forthright with her and still gotten her help, but so many years of skirting the truth had left their mark.

He was just thankful she had taken his subterfuge in stride.

She blinked sleepily up at him. Her pink tongue darted out to wet her lips and she sighed deeply, as she always did when she was about to fall asleep. Sharing close quarters on the road made him aware of all sorts of little intimacies… Two weeks they’d been traveling together and already he knew many of her noises, the sighs that preceded sleep, the quick inhales of shock or surprise, the light bubble of laughter at the unexpectedly humorous. He knew the way she liked to sleep, limbs splayed out like a trama root. He knew how she took her tea, berry or honey sweetened and with milk when available.

It was more years than he’d like to count since he had this kind of intimate knowledge of anyone, let alone a woman. Let alone a woman he’d felt himself drawn to from the first moment he saw her.

The firelight turned her snow colored hair yellow, made her skin glow rose-gold. She wrinkled her nose, opened her great grey eyes. Her voice was soft, on the edge of sleep. “Erandur?”

Guileless. And stubborn.

“Yes,” he said, at last. “I think, one day, I’ll tell you.”

“Obi-Wan, did you and Master Qui-Gon break up?” Anakin’s question came out in so quick a rush a breath that Obi-Wan strained to follow it.

From the moment Obi-Wan retrieved Anakin from Qui-Gon’s quarters to spend the day together (a monthly promised he kept when on Coruscant and off duty), he’d known Anakin had wanted to ask him something. 

That was the last question Obi-Wan expected.

Obi-Wan set aside the gentle chastisement that Jedi did not “date” as the outside world did.

“Why do you ask that?”

Anakin’s eyes grew wide. “Ummmm.”

“Anakin?”

“It’s just…. Master Qui-Gon and Knight Rolene have been eating dinner together a lot. And Master Qui-Gon usually eats in a big group of Knights and Masters or alone with Master Windu when you’re not around and I just thought—I don’t know.”

“Master Qui-Gon is free to spend his time with whomever he wishes,” Obi-Wan said. He knew Knight Rolene. 15 years Obi-Wan’s senior, he was a friend of Qui-Gon’s and one of his former star pupils in a series of diplomacy and negotiation courses Qui-Gon taught.

Anakin frowned. “I guess so.”

They continued their walk toward the public gardens. Anakin soon caught onto another topic, but Obi-Wan kept returning to Anakin’s question. It caused something to clench and coil in his belly as he thought back over his last few layovers on Coruscant. They had been short and Qui-Gon had been brief with him. Obi-Wan chalked it up to his reticent master’s usual sick-but-healing moods; his recovery from the incident on Naboo was slow. Yet, something in the back of his head—a tiny, niggling thought that he’d been loathe to pay attention to—connected with another.