Zenaida's Den

…So, she and I discussed this topic back in February. And fought about it. She has some ideas I don’t agree with. Like I could understand her not wanting to do anything that affects or invades her body and that’s so valid, like personal autonomy is really important to me too, but—she goes even farther than that. She doesn’t believe in using anything. I’m hesitant to tell you that because I don’t want to make her sound like a nutjob but…well, I don’t know, she comes from a different background (it’s not even that she’s a Jedi, I cleared this with Amalia, this isn’t a Jedi thing at all it’s just Fan—maybe it’s a culture thing I mean she literally has over a hundred siblings and the goddess where she comes from is always depicted as pregnant). She really believes in natural order, I guess, and that’s where all her ideas come from. And I challenged her and challenged her and challenged her, but she and I just come at things from such radically different starting points, so none of my arguments meant anything to her, and none of her arguments meant anything to me.

She was still all about the baby thing then, because of the thing with Bunnie, and how she had spent the last year wanting to be a mom—and I wasn’t against having kids, but I thought we should wait a few years first. That was when we first brought up the nitty-gritty, and that was when I first heard her stating all these ideas and opinions she’s apparently always held that I genuinely did not know people in the modern galaxy held, and I was like “you are insane you are crazy I did not know you believed things like this” and she was like “can’t you just respect this like you respect the other things we don’t see the same way” and I was like “I respect your right to do whatever only affects you but this affects me too, so, no” and she was like “well then I guess we’re just not going to sleep together because I’m not okay with what you want to do” and I was like “okay, yeah, that’s legitimately a fair compromise, let’s go with that” and then she got mad at me because apparently she had meant it like a threat. (Unfortunately, I was the wrong person to leverage that threat against.)

So we kinda just left it there for a while. But over the course of February and March, her depression was getting worse, and the worse her depression got, the more open I became to having kids soon. I really thought she was depressed over the baby thing, and that having one of our own would bring her back—because she loved Bunnie, she loved that kid, I know I didn’t write much about that time of my life because—well—I was helping take care of a baby—but she was so happy back when we were taking care of Bunnie, and that was the last time I had ever seen her happy, and I really wanted to see her happy again.

So by the time April rolled around, I had pretty much accepted we were gonna have a kid in the next year or something, and that we were probably gonna wind up with a few. That was back when everything was going really great for me, so I was in a very “ah, what the hell” time of my life—I felt like I could handle anything, and I was actually starting to think having kids would be pretty cool. But…that was when she told me that she didn’t want kids anymore, y’know, that time in the park when she also told me she was becoming passively suicidal. So then I just assumed, “oh, okay, so she’s finally come around to my perspective and we’re gonna do what I said we should do then.”

Which…was an assumption I held all the way into May, when I found out it’s a little more complicated than that. She is still afraid to have kids, because she’s afraid of not having enough of herself to give like her own mother didn’t, but…basically she sees a rift between what she wants, and what she thinks is right. And believe me, I tried to talk to her about it, because I really think she’s holding herself in a cage of her own making, but…it’s just impossible to convince her out of certain things. It really is. I have tried really, really hard. It’s impossible.

Some people aren’t able to handle that about Fannie. It even gets hard for me sometimes. But, hey—there’s a lot of things most people can’t handle about me, either, so that’s kind of how I’ve found my patience with her.

Long story short…she still didn’t want me to use anything.

I told Amalia this when we visited, because she will just ask me any damn question and I’m usually stupid enough to give her the answer, and she reacted pretty much the same way I had originally. And she brought up a lot of the same concerns I have, about Fannie’s mental health, and how getting pregnant could affect that, and are we just gonna wind up with five hundred kids by the time she hits menopause, and be like those weirdo cult families on reality holoshows.

But what I told Amalia was: “Okay, but, I don’t even know how often we’re gonna do it anyway. We barely even kiss anymore, so when we get married we’ll probably be even more over it. We’ll probably just do it once after the wedding and then like twice a year on Valentine’s Day and our anniversary, and I think I can face those odds.” And Amalia was like “well first of all it only takes one time and second of all really are you serious you’re only gonna have sex twice a year” and I was like “well it’s been almost half a year and we haven’t even made out since we got engaged, so…yeah?” and Amalia was like “are you sure she’s not just depressed and mad at you right now” and I was like “what are you talking about, she and I just aren’t that physical” and Amalia was like “no you’re not that physical she’s mad at you for something” and I said “you’re crazy” and then it turned out Amalia was not crazy and, in fact, right.

Cut to sloppy makeup makeout session in the speeder. (Which, to be clear, did not result in sex—as if I would ever do it in a public parking lot in MY MOM’S SPEEDER are you freaking kidding me I would rather be impaled—but anyway, she wants to save it for after the wedding, which I used to think was quaint, but it’s nothing compared to this other thing.)

And now it’s June. And I just sent my almost-wife to inpatient psychiatric care. And had to keep her from being put in police custody upon her release because she’d attacked one of the officer droids who had brought her there. And I’m trying to find her a therapist. And still have to finish planning the wedding. And all these things cost money. Money I don’t have. And you are very correct. I can’t afford to have a kid. I can’t even afford to get us out of my parents’ house. And that’s just talking about the financial side of things—she and I are working through a lot right now and we just—it wouldn’t be a good time.

So I talked to Fannie last week and was like, “hey, you can’t get pregnant, we are not gonna make it if you get pregnant, what are you willing to do to make sure you definitely don’t get pregnant because I’m not even joking we cannot let that happen we’ll be screwed if that happens no pun intended.”

And she was like “well, we could do this sort of thing” and I was like “no you don’t understand there needs to be zero chance like none at all or at least less than three percent.” And she was like “well the only way for there to be that little of a chance is this or this” and I was like “yeah exactly so which do you want it to be” and she was like “well I don’t want to not be able to have you, but I can’t compromise what I believe, I just can’t” and I looked her in the eyes and told her, “Fannie, you chose to compromise what you believed when you chose someone who doesn’t believe all the things you do. As much as I made a stink about it at the time, this is exactly the kind of thing Luke and Amalia warned us about at the very beginning, and you chose me anyway, and now you have to sleep in the bed you’ve made, again no pun intended.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. I think it broke her a little bit.

It made her start to cry.

But…I mean…it’s true.

So I got all quiet and I said, “Are you sure you still want to marry me? Because if you don’t, you need to decide soon.” And I tried not to say it like a threat. I tried to just give it to her straight and be as gentle as I could, because—yeah she can’t keep doing this she can’t keep moving forward with me while secretly not being okay.

And she was silent for a long time, which sort of freaked me out, but…eventually…she shut her eyes and said it all in one breath, like she was diving headfirst into the ocean—“Yes I’ve made my choice Ben I’ve already chosen you and I choose you still and I choose you forever.”

And I said, “good,” because for a second there I was really worried.

“But you chose me, too,” she said, giving me a hard stare. “You knew I was like this, and you chose me too.”

And I stared at her too, and, well—she was right. Maybe I hadn’t known her every single position on everything. But I had known the kind of person that she was, which was just the kind of person I wasn’t, and I had chosen her in spite of that just as much as she had chosen me. From the very start, us choosing to date and then marry each other had been kind of like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. You really can’t do that without losing some corners.

…For both of us, really. Because I have had to compromise my license for her as much as she had had to compromise her ideals for me.

And so…well…we both gave in a little, about the sex thing, and together we worked something out. I won’t tell you what we worked out. That’s between her and me. (Believe it or not, I actually have some ability to keep certain things private.)

But…we did work something out, in the end.

This issue is only one of many things we are having to work out right now. And maybe this is sort of my fault—rushing into things, not getting enough cleared up between us early on—but, it’s just as much her fault as it is mine. We shouldn’t have started this, and we started it anyway. We probably shouldn’t have continued, but we’re continuing.

I don’t know. Maybe we were kind of incompatible to begin with.

…But I’ll be damned if I ever let that stop us, and I think that she agrees. I will die before I give her up.

The last thing I had for her was a friendship bracelet. Unfortunately, it was a friendship bracelet that had been made by me, so “bracelet” is a bit of a generous description. Hairball-a-lothcat-vomited-up might be a more apt visual to provide. I had found a friendship-bracelet-making kit in the gift shop while wandering the medcenter at 3 AM, and, with nothing to do for hours and an overconfidence bolstered by sleep deprivation, I had gotten a little crafty.

I had those things waiting in my mom’s speeder. With the exception of the friendship bracelet (which, despite its appearance, was the product of many hours’ labor), I had scrambled to pick them up as soon as I got the notification they were getting ready to let Fannie go.

When I returned to the medcenter my parking job was even worse than the bracelet. I jumped out of the speeder, almost got hit by a different speeder, ran up to the automatic doors, almost ran into the automatic doors, and finally rushed back to the waiting room, sweaty and breathless, just as Fannie was being ushered by a nurse droid out of the holding area. And I barrelled into her and threw my arms around her and spun her in a circle, and accidentally took out the nurse droid with Fannie’s slippered feet.

After getting kicked out of the waiting area, I took her to the lobby and sat her down on one of the cushy benches.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, looking embarrassed. “Yes, I’m all right. You’re not…mad at me?”

“Do I look like I’m mad at you?” I chuckled.

“Well…no,” she said. “But I feel so stupid, Ben…I shouldn’t have done what I did. I’m sorry I caused such a fuss.”

She was still fidgeting with her wristband ID. I had noticed it was bothering her when I had visited her earlier, so I had come prepared. I gently took her wrist and got out a pocketknife and cut her free.

“Hey,” I said, looking into her eyes. “I forgive you.”

She looked at me, surprised.

This tender moment was cut short by a blaring alarm as a droid rolled up to us, yoinked away the pocketknife, and sent me to security to get a full patdown. Apparently you’re not supposed to bring knives into hospitals.

After getting kicked out of the medcenter, I walked Fannie out to the parking lot, only I’d forgotten where I’d parked, so we had to wander a little. But we did eventually recover the speeder, which was primarily recognizable by the terrible parking job, and, like I said, I had a birthday cake waiting for her.

It was not Fannie’s birthday. (She actually doesn’t have one; they don’t celebrate them where she’s from.)

It was, however, a symbolic gesture from her poet boy fiancé.

Fannie looked at the cake, confused, as our knees touched in the back seat of the speeder. “‘Happy…birthday?’” she asked, reading the bright red frosting on the cake. I could tell she thought I had just run to the store and grabbed the first cake I could find—which, to be fair, sounded like something I’d do.

“Let me tell you a story, Fan,” I said. “Eight years ago, I woke up in the Hanna City Medcenter, where I’d been born seventeen years before. I had just tried to die, and had almost succeeded.”

I paused for dramatic effect.

“…Luckily, I rarely succeed at anything.”

Fannie’s lips curved upward in spite of herself.

“I thought my parents would be so mad,” I went on. “I thought they’d never forgive me. But instead, they hugged me. They had presents waiting for me. And my mother said to me, with tears in her eyes: ‘Ben, my son, you’ve come back from the dead. It’s as if you’ve been reborn to me.’”

“That…sounds like a line you came up with,” Fannie said, smiling suspiciously. “Did she really say that?”

“Maybe I’m embellishing a little,” I admitted good-naturedly. “But the point is: you’re here, Fan. Welcome back to the land of the living. Happy birthday.”

Fannie looked at the cake, embarrassed.

“…I don’t know that my situation warrants quite as much celebration as yours did,” she said ruefully. “I remember when they found you, Ben…you really were so close to dying. We didn’t know if you would live. But me…I never was going to do anything, not really. I simply lost my head. And I didn’t do anything—I’m not hurt at all, just…humiliated. So…I don’t know that it’s really fair to say I’ve come back from the dead as you have.”

“Fannie, I don’t care if you were never really going to hurt yourself,” I said, looking her in the eyes. “Do you think I would have called the cops if I didn’t think there was even the slightest chance I could lose you?”

Fannie rubbed her wrist where the ID band had been before. “No, I…I suppose you wouldn’t have.”

“Look at me, Fan,” I said. “For a split second in time, I was forced to face the possibility of a galaxy without you. That possibility, however slim, did not come to pass, and I finally have you here with me again. So don’t you dare tell me not to celebrate.” I popped open the cake’s see-through box and balanced it on my knees…only to realize I had forgotten utensils. Classic me.

I looked around for a moment, then shrugged and dug into the cake with my fingers. (Also classic me.)

“Oh, Ben…” Fannie chided.

“What?” I asked defensively. “This is how we ate stuff when we were back on Ryloth. Here—I’ll feed you so you don’t have to get your hands dirty.” I pawed off a piece of cake and held it to her mouth, then grinned. “Hey, we can practice for the…”

Fannie’s eyes became sad.

“…the, uh…the Endor Day pie-eating contest,” I finished awkwardly.

She gingerly leaned forward and took a mouthful of cake from my fingers, reminding me of a fathier—only, the saddest one I’d ever seen. It was the third time in May I had watched her eat a piece of cake and look like she was about to cry. Her lips closed around my fingertips, and a shudder ran down my spine.

“…I’m sorry I responded so foolishly,” she whispered hoarsely after she had swallowed. “About you wanting to…wanting to cancel the wedding. It was wrong of me to react the way I did, no matter how I may have felt about it.”

I shook my head gently. “Hey, if you’re apologizing to me about overreacting,” I said, “you have no idea who you’re talking to. You’ve had a hard few months, bud. Sometimes a person just…snaps. I know you probably wouldn’t have done it, but…I’d never been so afraid you would. And I wasn’t gonna take that chance, Fan. I wasn’t gonna take that chance. Sometimes we get feelings so big and so sudden, they make us go and do things we would never do.”

“So it would seem,” she murmured. “Looking back, I can hardly believe what I’ve become. Oh, Ben…I’ve been just awful—I’m so ashamed. I’ve allowed so many things to get the best of me. I should not have permitted myself to hold onto my anger, or been so naive to think it would all simply go away by ignoring it. Nor should I have placed you in such a horrible position last night, when you were only doing what you thought was right… You were willing to make a difficult choice in the name of wisdom. How could I fault you for that?”

I stared at her, almost too afraid to hope. For the first time in a very long time, Fannie actually sounded like…Fannie.

“You seem…different,” I told her. “A lot different. Different from last night and from the last five months. And different from when I saw you this morning.”

Fannie smiled a little. “Yes, well…I suppose that, now that I think of it, there is a way in which I feel I’ve come back from the dead. I don’t feel all the way better now, not quite, but…I do feel as if some life were breathed back into me. Or the beginnings of it, at least.”

I couldn’t help but grin. “Fannie, that’s…that’s amazing. Seriously. You have no idea how happy I am.” I shamelessly scooped up another piece of cake and put it in my mouth. “Did—did something happen in the last six hours?”

Fannie eyed my fingers longingly.

“Hey, you can have more,” I told her encouragingly, sliding the cake forward a little. “I got it in your honor, after all.”

“I…still don’t want to get my hands dirty,” she said. “Could you give me some?”

Could I! I would have given her the world.

I dug off another piece of cake and held it out. This time her tongue grazed the undersides of my fingers as I fed it to her, and the sensation hit me like an electric shock—a sharp exhale left me as she pulled away. The longer I looked at her, the more the feeling built upon itself more and more—I liked her, I liked her, I liked her, I liked her—and it wasn’t just in my head, it was in my body, shooting up and down my nerves and pulsing through my veins. It was her—she was here—after many months of slowly losing her, I finally had her again, and I didn’t just have her, I had to have her—I suddenly wanted to take her up in my arms and—

I felt self-conscious as soon as I had the thought, and suddenly I kind of wanted to claw off my skin. I didn’t like when my body did stuff I have no control over: I didn’t like getting the hiccups, I didn’t like getting a runny nose, and I didn’t like getting turned on. If I was lost in a moment together with her, it wasn’t so bad…but right now the moment was only mine, and we were just sitting there, and there was nothing to distract me from how vulnerable and animal and out-of-control I suddenly felt. It was like being naked, even with all my clothes on.

I strategically pulled the cake closer into my lap and resolved not to think about it…at just the same moment that a large crumb fell from Fannie’s lips and straight down the front of her robes. “Oh…!” she said softly, and went reaching into the place where her robes folded over.

Oh, you have got to be kidding me.

The hems of her robe tugged down with her hand, revealing a little more of her skin—not a lot, but more than I was prepared to see. I coughed a little, hoping my face wasn’t as red as it felt.

She looked up. “Oh. Sorry,” she said, and turned away to finish de-crumbing while I stared into my lap.

“But…yes,” Fannie said, as she turned back around and re-tied the sash around her waist. “I do feel as if I were reborn. When they had me in that bed and refused to let me leave, I had...sort of an…epiphany, I think.”

“Sex dungeons are great places for epiphanies,” I said reflexively.

“What?” Fannie stared at me like I was insane.

“Sorry, uh…that was one of the chapter titles from my book…when I wrote about going to Ryloth for the first time…you know, when we were in the…”

Fannie blinked.

“Anyway, psych wards are also great places for epiphanies—go on.”

“I just couldn’t believe what had happened to me, when I was lying there,” she said, fiddling with the ruffles on her skirt. “Of course I haven’t been feeling like myself for months, but…this really was the worst of it. I had never felt so low in all my life, so horrible, and so far from who I wished to be. And…finally…after a long time of having given up…I reached out to the Force again.”

I raised my brow in surprise. I knew she hadn’t meditated in a while.

“And did you…feel anything?” I asked.

“Well…no,” Fannie admitted.

Her confession made me feel both disappointment and relief. Relief because maybe there wasn’t something uniquely lost about me if Fannie still couldn’t feel the Force either…but disappointment because if Fannie couldn’t feel it anymore, I didn’t know if I ever would again. Because I did feel it, sometimes. I’d felt it back on Ryloth, where I’d had an epiphany of my own. (In a sex dungeon. It’s a long story. About 126,000 words, actually.) But, every time I have felt the Force, it’s always faded away eventually, like sand slipping through my fingers.

“Still,” Fannie said, “even though I didn’t feel it…what I realized is I shouldn’t need to feel it.”

I hadn’t expected her to say that.

“How so?”

“Well,” she said, “while I was lying there, begging the Force to meet me, becoming ever more angry that it still seemed to hide itself in my moment of crisis, I realized…I was not truly seeking the Force at all. I was seeking the comfort I wanted it to give me. The justices I wished it to set in motion. I had come to view myself as the center of the universe, and everything else in terms of how it related to me—even the Force itself. I considered it only in terms of my being able to sense it; my being able to derive comfort from it; my being able to wield it toward my own ends—but it’s not about me, Ben; nothing is.”

“Okay, sure, but…it makes sense why you’d want the Force to comfort you and give you some kind of recompense,” I said slowly. “You’ve had a lot of bad things happen over the last few years.”

“Yes…horrible things may have happened,” Fannie agreed, “but I am hardly the first person in history to face horrible things. I suppose I felt that, since I have tried so hard to do good in the galaxy, I deserved to receive more good as a result. But that is not how it works. The Force always works toward balance, and we are simply too small, too limited in our knowledge to discover what balances out what. A Jedi does not do good in order to receive it back. A Jedi does good for good’s own sake. And I failed, Ben, I failed…I allowed darkness to eat away at me, and I clung to attachments…” She fidgeted with her ring, turning it around her finger twice. “And I accused the Force of concealing itself from me. But it was my own selfishness that inhibited my ability to perceive it, and I must learn, now, to let go of myself. The more that I can let go of myself and all the things that pull at me, the more in tune with it I shall become again. I may not feel it again immediately, as I begin to seek anew. But with patience and humility, and with time, my connection with it will grow once more.”

She looked up at me again and smiled calmly, as if all she had just said really gave her some sort of hope.

“Well…I don’t know if it’s fair to take all the blame upon yourself,” I said. “Can’t the Force ever be wrong for once?”

Fannie said exactly what I knew she would say.

“The Force cannot be wrong,” she said, with a warmth in her tone I couldn’t relate to. “Only a person can be wrong, and the Force is not a person: it is a law; a substance; an energy. It cannot hide itself from view any more than a mountain can shrink into the earth, so any failure in alignment with it is solely my own. Should I blame the mountain for the fact that I have turned my eyes away?”

So...according to Fannie, then, the whole not-really-feeling-the-Force thing was just my fault after all.

“No, I, uh…I guess not,” I mumbled.

Fannie’s response to this idea was honest self-amendment. My response was to give the universe my middle finger. I was open to the idea of having something like Fannie did—in fact, there were even times when I wanted to—but I was just so sick and tired of playing cosmic hide-and-seek, even if I was playing it with a mountain. And I didn’t like the way Fannie talked about letting go of herself as the primary requirement for spiritual enlightenment. Someone had asked me to give myself up for him before, and years later I was still trying to get back all the pieces. So I guess I felt like I was kind of done searching for whatever was out there—whether it was an all-encompassing energy like Fannie believed in or a supreme being like Amalia believed in or something else entirely. If it wanted me to find it, it was gonna have to come after me. And if all that was out there was just some immovable mountain I seemed to be stuck facing away from, I didn’t see why I should bother turning around.

But…the Jedi thing really seemed to work for Fannie. And her beliefs did make her a better person—even I could acknowledge that. She was the nicest person I knew and always quick to apologize and never seemed to worry about her own problems, at least up until her crisis this year. As much as the strength of her convictions made her seem a little narrow-minded at times, she was always kinder and more at peace when she was in tune with them. I guessed she was right...it was when she was focused on herself and her own preferences and concerns that she became judgmental or rigid or hypocritical or controlling.

Pennie had believed Fannie to be that way all the time. Amalia believed Fannie to be that way a little more often than she was. I thought I saw Fannie the most clearly: as someone who had genuinely found something she believed in more than anything, something that made everything make sense to her, something that really did make her a better person. So I was willing to look past all the things that made me uncomfortable in order to appreciate how…how founded she was, like a tree with its roots deep in the earth.

I wasn’t like her. But I liked sitting under her shade.

And besides...she really did seem way more like herself than she had in the last five months. The woman before me now was definitely not the same one who had flung herself out the window last night. So maybe there really was something to the Force thing…for Fannie at least, if not for me.

“…I know I’m not the only one who has suffered from my self-absorption, Ben,” Fannie said softly, breaking me from my thoughts. “I’ve realized I have not been as kind to you as I ought to have been. You have done so much for me since we became engaged…given me a safe place to stay, made so many preparations for our future, shouldered me through the heavy days. I was so fixated on the things you did in the past, I failed to fully recognize and appreciate all the things you are doing now. You have changed and grown so much from the boy I once knew—even from merely a year ago.”

Her gentle affirmation caught me off guard. She had no idea how much it meant to me to hear that.

“...You think so?” I asked in a small voice.

Fannie nodded, her eyes softening with affection. “Yes. I am the one who has not behaved maturely, and…I can more than understand why you think we should not be married yet.” Her expression saddened, and she looked down at her hands. “You were right, Ben...I do need help beyond what I can manage and you can offer. I could no longer deny the truth when I saw where I had ended up. And...I don’t know if you would still consider keeping our wedding date as it was, but…whether or not you choose to marry me now, I promise I will begin to seek help.”

I was speechless. Just like that, one little timeout in the psych ward had accomplished what my months of cajoling and reasoning could not. Maybe she should’ve jumped out the window sooner.

“Well…it’s not just my choice, Fan,” I said quietly. “About when to get married. You and I are a team. I think we should both come to a decision about what’s best, and make the choice together. Don’t you?”

Tears clung to her lashes like dewdrops.

“You already know what my choice is, Ben,” she said softly. “I have chosen you, and I am going to spend the rest of my life with you, no matter what.”

“Yeah...you said that last night.”

“And I meant it, Ben.”

I paused.

“…Well, I…I don’t want us just to live together, y’know,” I said quietly. “It’s not a roommate I’m after.”

“Yes, I know,” she said softly. “You already know I intend never to leave your side. But…I swear to you as well that neither shall I ever leave you in spirit. Truly, Ben Solo, I promise always to love you, in my deepest being, for the rest of my life.”

I looked into her eyes. And I knew she meant that.

...I knew it so deeply, I felt safe enough to break into a smile.

“Well…you can just love me for the rest of my life, if you want,” I teased. “I don’t really care what you do when I’m dead.”

“Oh, shush,” she said indignantly. “I’m being serious.”

“So’m I. So if you wanna hit up the old folks’ home for hot single grandpas after I go—”

“Ben, please!”

I grinned and shut up.

“…I…do still want to be married now, if you will have me,” Fannie said. “But...I am also willing to wait however long you need to feel ready. I do understand. As I said, I have not loved you well. I thought I was being everything a wife should be…quiet…reliable…enduring…but…I…I…I suppose that I…”

“You were being your mom,” I said.

“…What?”

“You were being like your mom,” I repeated. “Checked out and silent and only present enough to do what was expected of her, without a single thought of her own she’d ever dare to express.”

Fannie didn’t speak, but her eyes softened with sorrow.

I gently traced a finger under her chin.

“…I’m not your dad, Fannie,” I said quietly. “You don’t need to be your mother with me.”

She blinked rapidly as she looked at me, her eyes growing wide. Then she bit her lip and lifted her head toward the ceiling.

“And you don’t need to be like Pennie, either,” I said. “The way she held so tightly to marriage as the thing that would solve all her problems. That was why I accidentally said her name before. I could see you were starting to do that too.”

She looked at me again, then sighed, brushing away tears with the heel of her palm.

“Oh, Ben…I had so hoped to be different from my family...”

“Hey, you still can be,” I told her gently. “Maybe we do inherit things from the people who came before us. I can think of a lot of ways I’m like my mom, or like my dad, or…or like my grandfather. But we’re not stuck that way, Fan. We can be a new family together, and we can choose new things.”

“…Yes,” she said at last. “You’re right. You’re right, Ben, and…I’m so sorry.”

“I forgive you, Fannie,” I told her warmly. “And…when I say I forgive you, I mean it. I’m not holding onto anything in secret; I’m not letting anything drive a wedge between us. I’ve let it go, I’ve opened my hands, and it’s gone.”

She knew immediately what I was getting at.

“…I…I do want to forgive you, Ben,” she said quietly. “I truly do. I…suppose that was why I was so quick to claim that I had. And…I’m sorry that I have not forgiven you as much as I had claimed. The way of the Jedi is to forgive fully and to live in the present, without dwelling on things of the past…so...as long as I am still holding onto it, I am not living up to my ideals.”

“It does hurt that you still hold it against me,” I said quietly. “I know I hurt you first, in a way I can never fully undo. But…it scares me, Fan. I’ve done so many things wrong in my life and made so many mistakes, that everyone’s forgiveness of me is really the only thing I have left to stand on. If I don’t have that, it all falls through. So…can you promise you’ll be honest with me, and not make me have to doubt the ground beneath me? Please?”

She grimaced, but didn’t look like she was quite ready to promise. She fidgeted with her fingers in her lap.

After a couple of minutes, I cleared my throat.

“Let me show you something, Fan,” I said, setting the cake down between us and leaning down to grab the shoebox at my feet.

I put it in her lap.

“Open it,” I said.

She did…and her eyes grew wide.

Inside the shoebox was every single letter, every single greeting card, every single dried flower and pebble and button and seashell and every other random thing she had ever given me on Ossus, in the years before she had gone to Ryloth and I had gone to Naboo. She used to do things like that when we were young—drop things in my pockets, hand them to me while we were sitting in the grass, take my hands while I was sitting on her bed so she could fold trinkets into my fingers. She had always liked me, though she had kept her distance ‘cause I hadn’t liked her back…but she had never been able to suppress her affection. It had leaked out of her day by day in the form of pebbles and buttons and seashells.

“You…you kept all these?” she asked, sounding surprised. “Oh my goodness...I had forgotten.”

“Well, don’t be too touched,” I said with a sheepish grin. “I wasn’t really treasuring them up on purpose or anything. Just…every time I emptied my pockets before laundry day I would find all these random things in my clothes, so I threw ‘em in a box and kinda forgot about it till now. I found it under the bed when I was putting your lightsaber down there.”

“Oh,” she said, sounding disappointed.

“But...now that you’ve become such an important part of my life,” I told her, “this box of stuff does mean something to me. You were my first friend ever, Fannie, the first person besides my family to really care about me, and I want you to be the longest friend I ever have. Which is why,” I said, pulling the red and blue tangle of braided cord out of my pocket, “I made you this.”

“Oh!” she said. Then: “…What is it?”

I couldn’t blame her for asking.

“It’s a friendship bracelet,” I told her. “Like the one you made me.”

It wasn’t like the one she had made me at all. I happened to be wearing hers—I usually was—and it was nice and neat with a tight, even weave. Mine looked like it had been made by a four-year-old. I watched her try to hide a smile, and I had to laugh at myself a little too.

“Sorry it sucks,” I apologized. “But…it’s from me. Because you were my friend first, Fan, before we opened up all of this. And that is still the most important thing to me. I never really wanted to get married, after all. What I wanted was a friend I’d never have to say goodbye to. So...”

My space was limited, but I hefted my right foot up onto the seat and sat on top of it, nearly plunging my knee into the cake between us.

“I already asked you to be my wife,” I said, holding my bracelet out to her. “Can I…ask you to stay my friend?”

She looked up at me, her eyes wide with surprise…but I also saw in them care, and tenderness, and remorse, and...understanding.

For a long time, she didn’t speak.

But I didn’t mind. I was willing to wait forever. Because if she was going to say yes, I needed her to really mean it.

And…after a couple of minutes…she did.

“Yes,” she said at last, holding out her wrist to me. “Yes, Ben, I will stay your friend. And I promise to give you everything a strong friendship requires: honesty, and patience, and forgiveness. And I will believe the best of you, and I will always remember how much fun we’ve had together, and all the ways and times we have kept each other strong. Yes, Ben; I promise to be your friend always.”

I smiled. It was exactly what I needed to hear.

“I promise to stay your friend, too,” I told her.

I moved to tie the bracelet around her wrist…but remembered that one of my hands was still covered in cake and frosting. I went to scrape my fingers against my jeans (see, told you) but Fannie stopped me immediately.

“Ben,” she said, giving me a stern look. “You are not about to wipe your hands on your pants.”

As weird as it sounds...this reprimand made me happier than anything. Because it meant she really was feeling better. First I smiled, and then I grinned, and then all this emotion bubbled up inside of me—I had a hard time placing what the feeling was, but it felt good and exhilarating and it made my heart beat faster.

“Well—what do you want me to do?” I asked with a laugh. “I don’t have anything else.”

“Oh, just lick it off or something!” she cried. “But for heaven’s sake, Ben, your clothes are not napkins—really.”

She wasn’t actually mad at me. She grinned too, with an oh-you-lovable-idiot sort of smile, and her eyes shone in a way they hadn’t in maybe over a year. My heart pounded faster. The feelings got bigger.

I looked at her for a moment as my smile faded.

And then I…slowly held my hand out to her, my fingers just an inch from her lips, like I had when I was feeding her bites of cake. Only…now there wasn’t any cake. Or hardly any, at least.

There was only me.

She looked at me. And then she looked at my fingers. And she looked at me again.

I think she could see it in my eyes. The helplessness. The embarrassment. It wasn’t me trying to be sexy. It was…well, I didn’t know what it was.

Maybe it was just me needing her. In a way that I didn’t know how to express.

Our eyes were locked on each other. I wasn’t sure what kind of thoughts she was having. I anxiously quirked one corner of my mouth, up and down, as if to give her a little shrug, begging her to humor me.

And then we sort of…clicked.

Her eyelids lowered a little, and she lifted a hand to support mine, her fingers resting gently under my palm like it was a bird she was allowing to perch. Slowly, she came forward till her lips met my hand…and then, one by one, she licked all the frosting from my fingers.

And when she was done she drew back, and we stared at each other, embarrassed, and she carefully folded my fingers into my palm like she was closing a little box. And then we kept staring at each other.

All of a sudden, I didn’t really care about tying the bracelet anymore. I slowly inched forward and reached out and carefully tucked it into the pocket of her robes.

And then I finally got that damn cake out of the way and put it up in the passenger seat along with the shoebox.

Twenty minutes later she was sitting on my lap and my face was in her neck and her hands were in my hair and I had to stop myself from biting her like an overstimulated puppy. I could hear the way her breath hitched right next to my ear, the way she whispered my name, and all I wanted was to make her feel, to make her feel, to make her feel how much I felt for her, and the little part of me that still felt all weird and self-conscious about it was nothing compared to all that feeling.

We hadn’t done anything like that since before we’d broken up. I had kind of assumed it was a phase of our relationship that had ended, an awkward side effect of being in love for the first time that had naturally faded away…but here it was again, raw and quivering and hungry. (Not to mention utterly embarrassing to anyone else in the parking lot who might’ve caught a glimpse of us. A mom with a bunch of kids pulled up in the next space over, and we ducked down under the window, blushing and laughing.)

But...it was still my friendship with her that was the most important thing to me. Knowing I had that with her was what made me able to want her any other way.

And finally having my friend back after almost half a year of darkness made me want her a lot.

I had wound up underneath her when we’d ducked under the window. I was pulling her down into me and kissing her and kissing her and kissing her and kissing up her neck and up her chin and getting closer and closer to her lips until she stopped me.

“Ben—Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben.”

“Oh—sorry,” I said, letting my head drop down onto the seat and wiping spit from my mouth with my sleeve. “Sorry.”

She didn’t say anything about the using-clothes-as-napkins thing this time. Only smiled, and leaned down to press her forehead to mine.

“Don’t be sorry, love,” she whispered. “Just marry me first.”

I stared up at her, feeling even more like a puppy than I had before.

“Yes ma’am.”

And that was the night I brought Fannie back home from the medcenter, and announced to everyone that, first of all, she was doing okay now. Maybe even better than okay.

And, second of all…that we were still getting married in July.

Mom wasn’t too happy about this.

Amalia wasn’t too happy about it either.

Ain’t too sure how happy you are, to be honest.

But…me and Fannie?