The singing blue of his blade cutting through children- Padmé had seen Anakin cut through a thousand terrible things and more. There were droids, alien creatures, Sith- she'd seen him cut through metal doors and blaster guns, but of all of the things he had swung his blade through- never, never, she would never believe this. The holorecording was a fake, it was meant to distract the Jedi, throw them off the scent of the real trail. It was a setup, it wasn't real, it wasn't Anakin. A look-alike, maybe. A stunningly similar impostor, or better, computer-generated foolishness. The man in the holorecording- that was not Anakin- that was not the love of her life.
Padmé sat in the lounge of her Naboo skiff, picking at the skin around her fingers. The curve of her belly where their child was growing kept her at a clean distance away from the table in front of her, or else she'd be tapping a nervous tune on its surface while Captain Typho threw the skiff into hyperspace. It was hyperspace- it was supposed to be fast. And yet, here she was waiting, looking at the wall of the compartment instead of demanding an answer from Anakin. Instead of seeing whether or not he was safe. He had to be safe- and the recording, it had to be fake. It was decided. Padmé would throw the door open, race down the rail, right into Anakin's arms, like she'd done so many times before. He'd be fine, and whole, with the sweet blue eyes she'd met so long ago on Tatooine. Sweet, innocent eyes, ones that could never belong to a person who could perform such a travesty as killing children. She knew him inside and out, she'd known him all along- she had loved him all along. He had loved her. He still loved her, because he was alive, and all of this was nonsense. She placed a hand on her stomach, on the proof that their happily ever after had just begun.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, a more logical voice nagged at Padmé. The disillusioned reason within her knew better. There were no such things as happy endings, or if there were, she ought to have fallen for a nice, trouble-free fellow Senator whose name she could bear in public. Someone who couldn't potentially kill someone with the flick of his hand, someone who didn't have such a deep, engulfing rage and sorrow anchored inside of him. There would lie her happy ending. Obi-Wan had told her so, with his eyes that day after the Battle of Geonosis. She'd shrugged off her monitoring wires and everything else the Jedi Temple medical team had attached to her and ran foolishly through the medcenter, demanding to see him. At that moment, she had thrown all caution to the wind, needing with every bone in her body to see him- to see that he was safe- but Obi-Wan had intercepted her with those stern, weighing blue eyes. "You need to turn back," he had said to her, and she suddenly realized he might have been talking about more than that one instance at the medcenter. "You need to leave." So she had. She'd turned tail and ran back to her apartment, pacing the floors with every passing second that she hadn't heard a word about Anakin. The days passed without sleep, and her handmaidens continued to press rest and food at her until she dismissed them temporarily. She'd dug through her old things and found the japor snippet that Anakin had given her nearly a decade before, when he was nothing but an innocent child with a crush she thought fleeting. Anything to distract herself from the silence heard on behalf of the Jedi.
She worried herself for nearly a week until Obi-Wan had come to visit, with the same stern look in his eyes that he'd used to usher her out of the Temple. She had barely heard what he'd said, but the tone with which he'd said it sank into her like a ton of beskar- leave Anakin alone, put to rest the blossoming relationship he suspected, let the Jedi go about their own affairs and stay out. It had felt like he'd closed a door in her frost-crusted face on the planet of Hoth. Then she did something that was out of character- she lied. She said yes, okay, I agree. Then Anakin came to see her, and the first thing that came out of her mouth wasn't "We have to stop," like she promised Obi-Wan, but instead "Marry me." She rushed into his arms and the next thing she knew, she was holding the cold steel of his new hand on Naboo, beside the lake, saying her vows to the love of her life. Now she was carrying his child and wondering whether or not he'd killed someone else's. What had happened between then and here?