Give Me Love

chapter seven

You were alone when you woke up. The throw blanket from the back of your couch had been pulled over your shoulders in place of Anakin, and all three Jedi were gone.

Exactly like they'd all just been a dream after all.

But then you walked into your kitchen, rubbing the sleep out of your eyes and yawning, and you saw a plate full of pancakes, stacked with bacon and eggs.

There was a note next to it, with one word scrawled in swift, slanted handwriting.

Eat.

And under that, a smaller, neater scribble that read:

Anakin meant to write 'please' after that. We hope you don't mind that we used your kitchen, you were sleeping so soundly we didn't want to wake you up. All dishes washed and put away.
-Obi-Wan Kenobi

And then under that were even blocky, blunt letters.

Sorry for leaving! Duty calls. See you later.
~Ahsoka

The paper was crinkled like they had been fighting over it and you smiled at that thought, smoothing it out with your fingers. As soon as you set it down, though, it was like the weight of everything came back to settle on your shoulders.

You wanted your friends. The happiness you had felt with the Jedi was a daily thing with the girls, and you hadn't realized how starved of it you were until now. You guessed it was something you were going to have to learn to live without, from now on. Not that the concept was actually new to you— you'd been dumped before, but it was the 'acclimating to a new normal' that was going to be the hardest part.

With a heavy sigh, you sat down before the plate of pancakes and picked up the fork. They looked good, but you had no appetite. Between the slight hangover and the crushing loneliness swirling around in the pit of your stomach, you could only cut up the egg until orange yoke spilled out over the bacon, analyzing the slightly burnt strip and experimentally nibbling on the end before your gut lurched with nausea and you had to put it down.

Dinner, you decided, and put it on the top shelf of the fridge. The note, you carefully tucked away into one of the kitchen drawers.

Now with nothing to do, your mind began to wander. It was Sunday, and usually at this time you'd be getting ready to go to Padmè's for tea. You wondered if they were still going to do that. And a little part of the back of your brain grew... angry at that thought.

They wouldn't, would they?

They had lost something too, and things surely were weird between them now. Yes, it was true that if Padmè decided she didn't like you, they all wouldn't like you. It was always like that— collective decisions based on what Queen Bee thought. It was one of the things you, admittedly, did not like about your group of friends. It had often caused rifts between the girls, where one person would disagree with one of those decisions but would only whisper it in the down-low before it was forgotten about.

They had all had their share of disagreements, except for Sabè. She never went against anything Padmè said, and she treated her like her words were law. A side effect of being Padmè's handmaiden her whole life. No wonder she looked like she didn't even know you when she passed by you last week.

A glimmer of hope sparked in your chest as you mulled all this over. There had to be some sort of disagreement going on now. Maybe not all of them actually hated you. Yeah, they had all blocked you, but they were probably forced to.

There was only one way to find out. You had to see them for yourself.

With a vigor that had been absent from your body for a week, you ripped open your closet and changed out of your day-old clothes into leggings, boots, and a plain long sleeve shirt with a hint of lace embroidery on the neckline. You wanted to look casual, like you weren't trying to hard to impress them, but a sneaky part of you pulled the olive green jacket Celesta had gifted you over your shoulders to brace the cold outside. Maybe seeing it would pull at their heartstrings a little, and they'd realize what a mistake they were making.