For Padmé

[bring_balance]

Anakin hasn't slept.

When he finally returns to Padmé's apartment in the dark of night, he thought that he might try, but now he's sure he won't. He tires to quiet his thoughts and to meditate, but that doesn't work either.

So for hours, Anakin sits on the couch outside of Padmé's bedroom, running over the events of the night in his head. The Chancellor truly was a Sith Lord. He'd lied to them all, been responsible for the deaths of so many...

And Anakin had trusted in him and believed him more than anyone. He knows that as soon as Padmé awakens, he'll have to tell her about it, but for now, he just sits, alone with his spiraling thoughts. And before he knows it, the sun is rising and he feels no more settled than he did when they'd left the throne there in the clearing.

Comments

[nabooqueen]

Padmé wakes at sunrise to find herself alone in her bed. It's almost strange, how in a few short months that's gone from being the norm to being a cause for concern, but in Darrow, at least, it's not like Anakin to leave in the middle of the night. She's frowning as she slips from the bed and tugs on a robe, only to emerge from her bedroom to find that he hasn't gone far at all.

"What's happened?" Her voice is soft, concerned. "Was it another nightmare?"

[bring_balance]

Sometimes, Anakin thinks that Padmé can read him so well that she may as well be Force sensitive. And times like this, he's glad that she actually isn't, because he imagines the shame and sadness he's feeling is so easily felt in the Force that she wouldn't have had to ask the question at all.

He looks up at her, quiet for a long moment as he tries to find the right words. He doesn't think they exist.

"How did you sleep?" he asks, sure that she won't let him slip out of this so easily, "Well, I hope."

[nabooqueen]

He should really know better than to think that that's going to work.

"Extremely well," Padmé says, coming around to sit next to him on the couch. "Until I woke up to find that my husband was sitting out here instead of in bed where he was supposed to be. Ani, what's going on?"

[bring_balance]

Well, it was worth a shot.

Anakin isn't quite sure to begin, so he pauses and takes in a deep breath. Truthfully, he can't imagine keeping something like this from Padmé. They've agreed to be honest with one another and Anakin has no intention of doing anything else.

Though it occurs to him that likely means being completely honest now. He still hasn't told her about the nightmare he had before arriving in Darrow, the nightmare he still has sometimes.

But for now, he'll start with tonight.

"I felt a disturbance in the Force tonight," he explains, "That's why I left."

[nabooqueen]

"It must have been a fairly big disturbance, to bring you out in the middle of the night," Padmé says softly. She doesn't pretend to understand how the Force works, but she's spent enough time with enough Jedi to know that when they start talking about disturbances in the Force, the cause is almost never good. "Are the others alright?"

[bring_balance]

"Everyone's fine," he says, and though he knows Rey was just as shaken as he was, she's not hurt. She'll be okay with time, just like he will. He hopes.

"Something arrived here," Anakin goes on to say, and he looks down at his hands, folded in his lap, flexing the fingers of his mechanical hand.

"A Sith throne. Rey found it not far from the city."

[nabooqueen]

“A Sith throne?” Padmé can’t help the chill that runs through her at the thought, and she draws a little closer to Anakin. Her encounters with the Sith, limited as they have been, have never ended well.

“The Sith - they’re not... here, are they?”

[bring_balance]

"There are no Sith here. It showed up seemingly out of thin air. We're safe. You're safe," he adds, because Anakin is more concerned with her safety than anyone else's, and he always will be.

Anakin's still not sure how the throne showed up so suddenly, but he's certain someone would have found it before now if it had always been there.

"There's more. And I'm not sure... I'm not sure if I can even bring myself to say it."

[nabooqueen]

The surge of relief Padmé feels at the confirmation that the Sith aren’t in the city, too, is almost immediately dwarfed by her anxiety at what Anakin says next. After all he’s told her over the years, she can’t even imagine what might be so bad that he can’t bring himself to talk about it.

“Take as much time as you need,” she says, reaching out to wrap her hands around his. “I’m not going anywhere. Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

[bring_balance]

He looks down at her hands, wrapped around his, and finds strength to continue. The shame he feels... he's knows Padmé won't judge him for it.

"When the war started, we suspected there'd be another Sith," Anakin says, deciding that the beginning is the best place to start, "There are always two. When Dooku revealed himself, we just weren't certain whether he was the Master or the apprentice."

He should have known. They all should have known. But all Anakin can think of is every word the Chancellor had said to him. Of the times they'd rescued him from the Separatists. The first time he would have killed to protect him. The second time, he did.

"The Chancellor was that Sith lord, Padmé. The throne was his. He made fools of us all. The war... he orchestrated it all to divide us, to destabilize the Republic, to weaken the Jedi. He was right under our noses the whole time."

And Anakin... Anakin had treated him as a trusted friend, had told him things he hadn't told anyone. He'd let the Chancellor use him.

[nabooqueen]

There’s a long moment where Padmé doesn’t know what to say. Not because the Chancellor had been a Sith lord, but... had Anakin not known? Obi-Wan had told her about Palpatine’s true nature almost immediately upon her arrival in Darrow, and Anakin had been closer to the Chancellor than anyone - surely Obi-Wan would have told him, too. If nothing else, she can’t imagine how he could have managed to explain the fall of the Republic while leaving that particular detail out.

“I know,” she says finally. “Did Obi-Wan not tell you? He deceived us all.”

[bring_balance]

"He did," Anakin admits, and saying it aloud makes him feel like a fool all over again, "But I didn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. Not after everything."

He pauses again, and that guilt and shame within him simmering into something closer to anger. When he meets Padmé's eyes again, he's blinking back tears.

"I trusted him. More than almost anyone. As much as I trust you."

[nabooqueen]

There had been a second where Padmé hadn’t believed it, either, and Palpatine had been her political enemy, not one of her closest confidantes. And she knows all too well how loyal Anakin is to the ones he loves. She looks into his eyes and her heart goes out to him immediately.

“Oh, Anakin.” She disentangles one of her hands from his to reach up and cup his cheek. “It wasn’t your fault for trusting him. You thought he was your friend. He manipulated everyone around him and none of us even noticed.”

[bring_balance]

So often, Anakin finds Padmé's touch calming, sometimes the only thing that can make him feel as though everything will be okay. He tries to focus on it, the feeling of her hand on his cheek. Only, when he shuts his eyes, all he can see is red.

Anakin shakes his head, but doesn't move away from her touch.

"I told him everything, Padmé. He knew about what happened on Tatooine. He knew about us," he says.

[nabooqueen]

“You couldn’t have known,” Padmé says. She’s not sure what to think about the revelation that Palpatine had known about them, but that’s something to deal with later. For now, Anakin needs her support.

“If you told him all that and he never tried to use it against you, how could you possibly have known?”

[bring_balance]

"That's just it," he goes on to say, "I'm not so sure he wouldn't have. I'm not sure of anything anymore." And he's been running over the rescue on The Invisible Hand over and over in his head.

Did Dooku deserve mercy more than did the Sand People who tortured your mother to death?

I have always kept your secrets, have I not?

That trust, that had run more than a decade deep had driven Anakin to fight his way through that ship. He'd been prepared to move heaven and earth to rescue the Chancellor, and he had.

"Count Dooku was defenseless, Padmé. I should have captured him. Instead, I listened to the Chancellor. He... he died by my hand, not a day before I arrived here."

[nabooqueen]

Padmé pulls back in shock at that.

“Count Dooku’s dead? The Chancellor ordered you to kill him?” It makes a certain amount of sense, she thinks. If Palpatine had indeed orchestrated the entire war, he must have been afraid that Dooku would talk. She knows she ought to be appalled at the idea of killing a defenseless man, but she can’t find it in herself to blame Anakin for it, not after the war. Not after all Dooku had put him through.

“Whatever the Chancellor was up to, you were just following an order, that’s all. And after he’d slipped through your fingers so many times... I don’t blame you for that.”

[bring_balance]

"It was not the Jedi way," Anakin says, an echo of the very words he said to the Chancellor on that day. He'd known how wrong it was, and he'd ignored those feelings. "It wasn't his order to give and I shouldn't have listened."

It makes him wonder now, what else he would have done, simply because the Chancellor had asked him to. The idea of it shakes him to his very core.

How far would that trust have taken him?

[nabooqueen]

"You can't blame yourself," Padmé says, then adds, "Or you shouldn't, at least," because she knows perfectly well that Anakin can and likely will blame himself for this.

"You gave in to three years of built-up anger for one moment, at the urging of a trusted friend. Almost anyone would have done the same. And you know better now. If you could do it over again, would you make the same choice?"

[bring_balance]

If she had asked him this only a day ago, Anakin wouldn't have been sure of his answer. But now, being so sure of what he knows after last night...

"No," Anakin says, "I would have captured him instead. And gone to the Council about the Chancellor."

What he would have done after that, Anakin can't say. He's not sure he could have bared to see his friend and mentor exposed as an enemy. He's not sure how he would have managed, knowing the one man he was certain he could trust wholly was only using him for his own purposes.

[nabooqueen]

"Because you're a good man," Padmé says, taking his hands again. "He didn't take that from you back home. Don't let him make you question it here."

There's a part of her - a small, terrible part - that wonders what the Chancellor had wanted with Anakin, to have kept him so close for so long. She ignores it.

"I'm sorry," she says. "I know he was your friend."

[bring_balance]

He should have suspected no less from Padmé. He's laid his more shameful secrets bare and she has nothing but support to offer him.

It lifts the weight on his heart just a bit, but it's not fully gone yet.

"He was more than a friend. He was like a father to me. I loved him." Anakin pauses again, looking down at their entwined hands for a long moment. "I shouldn't have kept all of this from you. I'm sorry."

[nabooqueen]

“It’s alright,” Padmé says. They’ve agreed not to keep things from each other, but she hadn’t expected Anakin to tell her everything that had happened to him before they came to Darrow all at once. She’s just glad he’s telling her now.

“Seriously, it’s alright. That’s not the sort of thing that’s easy to just bring up in casual conversation.”

[bring_balance]

Anakin takes in another deep breath, and that weight on his heart feels lighter still. Perhaps there's one less person he knows he can trust, but he'll always have Padmé. He'll always be able to trust her, to tell her anything.

It may not have much to do with what happened tonight, but knowing now what he knows... Anakin is certain now that he has to come completely clean with Padmé. If she's truly the only person he can wholly trust, he can't keep his nightmare from her any longer.

"There's one last thing," he says, "And it's also not so easy to bring up in casual conversation."

[nabooqueen]

“Something else?” Padmé has to wonder just how much had happened in the months between her departure from Scipio and his arrival from Coruscant, for there to be something else that’s hard for him to talk about, something else that makes him look so solemn. But she only says, “what is it?” and waits for him to find the words.

[bring_balance]

"It happened the night before I arrived here," Anakin says, and though he feels like a fool, knowing what the next words out of his mouth will be, he knows Padmé won't judge him for them.

Why has he concerned himself with a nightmare of his wife dying in childbirth when she's no longer pregnant?

"It was a nightmare, like the ones I used to have about my mother," he knows Padmé remembers those, and how they'd taken them to Tatooine, "Only... these were about you. You die in childbirth."

[nabooqueen]

Padmé certainly remembers the nightmares Anakin had had about his mother, though she still isn't sure what to make of them - if they'd been genuine visions or just a case of fortuitous timing. Anakin had certainly taken them seriously, though, and that alone is enough to give her pause. Except...

"Have you been worried about that all this time?" Back home, she would have understood, but they've been here for months now. "Even if it was more than a dream, Ani, I'm not pregnant. Not here."

[bring_balance]

"I know how it must sound," Anakin says, "But my dreams about my mother were true. And this... it feels the same. They started before I arrived here, and they never stopped."

Though, they're not quite the same. Sometimes the details are slightly different, but they always end the same way.

[nabooqueen]

"It's not that I don't believe you," Padmé says softly. "But if you first dreamed about me after you found out I was pregnant back home, and you've been having the same dream since you arrived here, I think they must just be dreams. I'm not pregnant anymore, and the medical care here isn't that primitive."

"If you're that worried about me dying in childbirth, though, that seems like a problem with an easy solution," she adds. She wants to have children, actual children some day, yes, but she wants to get that look off Anakin's face even more. And if his dreams are true, well. She would prefer to avoid that fate, if at all possible.

[bring_balance]

He's considered this. For months, he's thought that perhaps these were just dreams, nothing more. Things have changed for them in Darrow, but he still isn't sure if they should trust it.

"Perhaps," he answers, and there's an unease to his tone that isn't usually there, "but I don't know if that's a chance we can afford to take. I... I only wish there was a way to know for sure, if they're only dreams."

[nabooqueen]

"Obi-Wan might know something, if you asked," Padmé says, because they actually can ask him about things like this now. She has no idea if he'll know anything or not, but as far as Jedi in Darrow go, he's their best shot. Unless...

"Or I suppose we could ask Rey and Ben what happened in our future," she adds, suddenly reluctant. They will know. Padmé's not entirely sure she wants to know the answer.

[bring_balance]

"No," Anakin says immediately, "I can't burden them with this."

He can't imagine going to Rey, especially after what happened last night. He nearly lost himself to his rage as he came to terms with the scope of the lies he'd been told for years.

"But Obi-Wan... he might be able to offer guidance."

He remembers the night he'd arrived in Darrow, waking up from the nightmare, and before realizing what had happened, Anakin has thought about how he couldn't say anything to Obi-Wan about any of it.

But in Darrow... things are different. Anakin is beginning to see that. Perhaps he won't just get the same Jedi platitudes about death and attachment.

[nabooqueen]

"So we talk to Obi-Wan," Padmé says, "and then we go from there. We'll figure this out, love, I promise. If nothing else, I'm certainly not at imminent risk of dying in childbirth. We've got time."