"Tell me yours first." Padmé leans in with a coy smile, gratified to see that she's managed to embarrass Anakin for once instead of the other way around. "I won't tell Obi-Wan," she coaxes, tilting her head to try to meet his wandering eyes.
"I already told him," Anakin retorts. "Right after it happened. I'm a better Jedi than you think I am, you know." He has that defensive note in his tone again, but Padmé's set her mind to prying open the durasteel doors around his heart.
"Then you won't mind telling me, too."
He shifts, continuing to avoid looking at her, and suddenly she worries that she's struck a nerve, that something really terrible happened to him. He was a slave; perhaps he'd been forced—
"I don't remember how old I was. Fourteen, maybe. Or fifteen," he says, even as Padmé parts her lips to excuse him from sharing. She lets out her indrawn breath as a little sigh of relief. "She was a Padawan a couple years younger than me. I didn't want to; she just ran up and did it. Her friends dared her to. They were all scared of me."
He doesn't mention why, but Padmé knows. She's half afraid of him herself, in the most spine-tingling way. She remembers the smouldering focus in his eyes as he knelt above her, blue-white light flashing inches from her face, the air buzzing with plasma and the sizzle of kouhoun flesh. And she remembers long ago when the HoloNet was raving over the story of how the young prospective Chosen One, his first real lightsaber barely warm in his hand, had killed an infamous pirate and slaver. Surprised, Padmé had counted on one hand the years since she'd last seen her little Ani, and her mind incredulously echoed, Killed?
She can almost hear it: Dare you to kiss the Chosen One. Bet you'll end up impaled, like Krayn.
"Children that age can be so cruel," she says now, as much to justify as comfort him. "Was she cute, at least?"
"Wh—? No! I don't know!" Anakin's laughing again, and not for the first time, Padmé finds herself marvelling at how a young man with so many burdens can laugh so freely. He's a walking paradox, lurking darkness coexisting with pure blazing light. She's seen the proud ice in his eyes, but right now he's making her feel warm enough to thaw Ilum.
"She was gone as soon as it happened, and I heard them all laughing down the hall." His smile dwindles. "I just remember it was really… forceful. Chapped. She smelled funny, too."
He looks back to Padmé, and she can read in his eyes what he doesn't say: Unlike you. It's possibly the strangest compliment she's never been given, in a day of strange compliments, but she refuses to lose her composure. The last time she was caught off guard by an odd remark of Anakin's, she forgot to stop him from kissing her.
...And would that be so bad?
"That was the only other time," Anakin says, disrupting her thoughts.
"The only other...?"
He's embarrassed, pulling his lip through his teeth. "Before you."
A consummate politician, Padmé conceals her shock with a smile. "I'm sure Obi-Wan was very busy keeping them away from you. With a face like that..."
She trails off. He's blinking at her, uncomprehending, his eyebrows dipping into that little consternated furrow just like when he was a child. He doesn't realise. She's the first girl he's willingly kissed, and he doesn't even realise how beautiful he is.
If he weren't a Jedi, she finds herself thinking, desperately, if he weren't a Jedi, if he weren't a Jedi—and Sola's words come echoing back to her. You're the first boyfriend my sister's brought home. If he weren't a Jedi, she'd let him be. She'd let him whisper his strange compliments into her hair, interlace his fingers with hers as he escorts her to the palace. She'd make him court her for months, slow summer romance in the deep blue haze, and she knows he would, gladly.
If he weren't a Jedi—and she aches to let him worship her, body and soul.
But he's a Jedi. They've both made commitments to the greater good. It's just so easy to forget anything else exists when clear blue eyes are fixed on her as if she were the entire universe, the Force itself, and she can feel love blazing from him like the Tatooine suns.
"I was twelve," she says, looking down. "His name was Palo…"