Chapter Text
The thing about Serra Vey that Obi-Wan had come to appreciate over the past nine months was that she was, fundamentally, a practical woman.
She wore her robes like they were work clothes, because they were. She kept her lightsaber on her left hip where it wouldn't catch on bulkhead doors. She'd once repaired a failing atmospheric recycler with a hair tie and what she cheerfully described as "aggressive optimism," and it had, against all reason, worked.
What she was not, in any practical sense, was a diplomat.
"Why is that man staring at me?" Serra murmured, barely moving her lips. She had a glass of something pale and effervescent that she hadn't sipped once, holding it like a prop she'd been handed and didn't know what to do with.
"Minister Dorjan?" Obi-Wan let his gaze drift casually across the reception hall. High vaulted ceilings, Mandalorian-inspired architecture — Kalevala always tried so hard to distinguish itself from its more militant neighbor. "He's been staring at you for approximately twelve minutes. I assumed you'd noticed."
"I thought he was looking at the tapestry behind me."
"There is no tapestry behind you. You're standing in front of a window."
Serra glanced over her shoulder at the wide, dark pane of transparisteel. The reflection of her own startled face looked back at her.
"Huh," she said.
Obi-Wan took a measured sip of his drink. It was going to be a long evening.
The mission was, on flimsi, simple: a trade negotiation between Kalevala's agricultural consortium and the Republic, brokered by the Jedi Council as a show of good faith in the neutral systems. Obi-Wan was here because he'd spent three years building diplomatic relationships across the sector. Serra was here because the agricultural consortium had specifically requested a Jedi with "practical experience in large-scale food production and refugee logistics," and the Council had looked at Serra's Service Corps file and decided she was the obvious choice.
She was. She'd spent the entire afternoon session speaking fluently about crop yield projections and soil remediation techniques with a passion that had visibly startled the consortium delegates, who had clearly expected the Jedi to send someone who would nod politely and defer to their expertise. Instead they'd gotten Serra Vey, who had opinions about nitrogen-fixing cover crops and wasn't afraid to share them.
The afternoon had gone beautifully. Serra had been in her element — confident, knowledgeable, friendly. She'd won the consortium over inside twenty minutes.
The evening reception was a different beast entirely.
Evening receptions were politics: small talk, body language, strategic positioning. Serra handled them the way a tooka handled being placed in water — with rigid dignity and a deep desire to be literally anywhere else.
So Obi-Wan did what he always did in situations like these. He made room for her in conversations, steered her between groups with a light grounding touch at the elbow, and got her a drink so she had something to do with her hands.
He hadn’t really thought about what that looked like from the outside until it was too late.
"He's coming over," Serra whispered, like she was reporting an incoming missile.
"Smile," Obi-Wan said mildly.
"I am smiling."
"You're grimacing."
"It's the same muscles."
Minister Dorjan arrived in a sweep of embroidered robes and cologne that preceded him by a full meter. He was a tall man, broad-shouldered, with carefully maintained silver hair that suggested a personal grooming staff. He smiled kindly at Obi-Wan and then turned the full wattage of his attention on Serra.
"Master Kenobi," he said, extending a hand. "A pleasure as always. And your lovely companion — I don't believe we've been formally introduced."
Companion.
Obi-Wan felt the word land and waited for Serra to correct it. She didn't. She shook Dorjan's hand with a polite smile, small and a little uncertain, and said, "Serra Vey. I'm the agricultural liaison for this negotiation."
"Of course, of course," Dorjan said, and his tone suggested he’d already decided what he was looking at and wasn't going to let facts interfere. "The General is lucky to have such a dedicated partner."
Partner.
Obi-Wan opened his mouth.
Serra said, "Thank you. We work well together."
And there it was. The fundamental Serra Vey problem: she heard partner and thought colleague. She heard companion and thought fellow Jedi. The woman had a genuinely staggering ability to interpret romantic implication as professional compliment.
Obi-Wan closed his mouth. They were mid-negotiation. Dorjan was a key vote on the consortium board. If the Minister wanted to believe the Republic's Jedi envoys were a charming couple, that was, in the coldest, most practical calculus, not actually a problem. It might even help.
He was going to feel guilty about this later. But later was later.
"We've worked together for some time," Obi-Wan said smoothly, resting a hand briefly on Serra's shoulder in a gesture that was, technically, something a colleague might do. "Commander Vey's expertise has been invaluable."
Serra gave him a quick, grateful glance. See? He gets it.
She did not, in fact, get it.
Dorjan beamed. "How wonderful. You know, my wife and I were saying just this evening it's so rare to see two people so clearly attuned to one another. How you anticipated each other during the afternoon session! She said it reminded her of our early years."
There was a very, very faint ripple in the Force. Serra's confusion, surfacing like a fish nosing at the top of a pond.
Don't think about it too hard, Obi-Wan projected, not through any Force communication but through sheer willpower directed at the side of her head. Just let it go.
"That's very kind," Serra said. The confusion was still there, a slight furrow between her brows, but she smiled through it. "The General is... an excellent partner." She said the word carefully, like she was trying it on. "In the field."
"I'm sure he is," Dorjan said, with a warmth that implied in the field was a euphemism.
It was not a euphemism. Obi-Wan knew this with absolute certainty because Serra Vey did not use euphemisms. Serra had once told a holonet reporter, on camera, that a battle had been "a catastrophic failure of intelligence at every level" because she thought he was asking for an honest debrief. She had the subtlety of a thermal detonator in a library.
The conversation continued. Dorjan introduced them to his wife, who was delightful and who also clearly believed they were a couple. She asked how long they'd been together. Serra said "About nine months" (meaning the 212th assignment) and the wife clasped her hands together and said, "Still in the glow!"
Serra smiled and nodded and had absolutely no idea what was happening.
Obi-Wan made it through the rest of the evening on autopilot. He steered conversations, deflected the more pointed questions, and watched with a mixture of admiration and despair as Serra charmed half the consortium by being earnest and knowledgeable and completely, beautifully oblivious.
It wasn't until they were walking back to their guest quarters, the cool Kalevalan night air sharp with the scent of mountain wildflowers, that Serra said, "That went well, I think."
"It went very well."
"Minister Dorjan was surprisingly nice. His wife was lovely." Serra rolled her shoulders, shedding the tension of three hours of social performance like a massiff shaking off water. "I think the afternoon session really set the right tone. They could see we're a real team."
"Mm."
"What?"
"Nothing."
Serra stopped walking. Obi-Wan stopped two steps ahead and turned back. Her face was doing the thing it did when she was running a diagnostic: eyes slightly narrowed, head tilted, working backward through a problem.
"Companion," she said slowly.
Obi-Wan said nothing.
"Partner."
He remained strategically silent.
"'Still in the glow.'" Serra's voice had gone flat. "Obi-Wan."
"Yes?"
"They thought we were together."
"Yes."
"Romantically."
"That is the traditional interpretation, yes."
Serra stared at him. The mountain wind lifted the ends of her hair. In the pale light of Kalevala's twin moons, her face went through confusion, disbelief, horror, and finally a deep, bone-level embarrassment that turned her ears pink.
"Why didn't you say something?" she demanded.
"You were doing so well."
"Obi-Wan."
"The consortium loved you. Dorjan practically pledged his vote during the dessert course. It seemed... counterproductive to interrupt the momentum."
"You let them think I was your — your —" She made a gesture that seemed to encompass the entire concept of romantic entanglement and also, possibly, a desire to hurl herself off the nearest balcony.
"To be fair," Obi-Wan said, "you told his wife we'd been together for nine months."
The noise Serra made was not a word. It was the sound of a woman's soul briefly leaving her body.
"I meant the assignment!"
"I know what you meant."
"I was talking about military deployment!"
"I am aware."
Serra pressed both hands over her face. "This is a disaster."
"The trade agreement is virtually secured."
"I don't care about the trade agreement!"
"You cared about it very much this afternoon. You gave a fourteen-minute presentation on soil pH levels."
"That was before I was apparently your girlfriend."
"I believe 'lovely companion' was the exact phrasing."
Serra dropped her hands and glared at him with the kind of focused intensity that usually preceded someone getting a lightsaber-assisted lecture about safety protocols. Obi-Wan kept his expression neutral through long practice and what he would modestly describe as superior self-control.
Then, slowly, seemingly against her will, the corner of her mouth twitched.
"I said 'excellent partner in the field,'" she said, in a voice that was trying very hard to stay outraged and was losing the battle.
"You did."
"And he thought —"
"He absolutely did."
Serra pressed her lips together. Her shoulders were shaking. "Obi-Wan, his wife asked if we were trying for younglings."
"She asked if the Jedi lifestyle left room for family. But yes, the subtext was present."
"And I said 'We keep busy.'"
The silence stretched exactly two seconds before they both broke. Serra laughed first — a sharp, startled sound that cracked the mountain air — and Obi-Wan followed with a chuckle he'd been suppressing for approximately three hours.
"For what it's worth," he said, once they'd both recovered a measure of dignity, "you were genuinely excellent this evening."
"Don't." Serra pointed a finger at him, still wiping tears from her eyes with the other hand. "Don't you dare be nice to me right now. I have to comm Cody and tell him I accidentally pretended to be your girlfriend for an entire diplomatic reception and I need to be angry so I don't die of embarrassment."
"Why would you need to tell Cody?"
The question was innocent. Obi-Wan's tone was innocent. His expression was the serene mask of a Jedi Master who absolutely knew what he was doing.
Serra opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"Mission report," she said firmly.
"Of course."
"It's relevant operational information."
"Naturally."
"Stop smiling."
He didn't.