Disclaimer: Star Wars was written by George Lucas and belongs to Disney. "La Belle Dame sans Merci" was written by John Keats.

A/N: This is a huge thank-you to my 100 followers I now have on tumblr! Please enjoy!

"Oh, and Senator Amidala? If you wouldn't mind staying a moment, my dear."

Padmé turned at the Chancellor's call as the rest of the assembled Senators and Representatives who formed the opposition to the newest tax bill filed out, chattering amongst themselves.

She put herself immediately on guard. The sudden affection in his voice made her wary. Not that Palpatine had no reason to be warm toward the Senator and former Queen of his home planet, and one he had known since her childhood and had a hand in mentoring, no less. But the longer this horrendous war lasted, the more their friendship had grown cold as their political stances grew wider apart. And Padmé, for one, was not about to let loyal Republican planets with pacifist ideologies be taxed heavily for not allowing Grand Army weapons to be mass produced in their centers of industry just because an elderly gentleman favored her with a smile and told her how fine she was looking this afternoon.

Padmé was a better player of this game than that.

She would start with a subtle hint that the tax-bill was off-limits for this conversation.

"I see. You must have heard that the spice miners are threatening to strike again. It's been hard for the mining conglomerates to keep from cutting wages, now that the prices have dropped so steadily with the war."

After all, there was no reason for him not to be interested in Nubian concerns, now, was there?

"Actually, no. The Nubian ambassador to Syrlesia stopped by just last week. I understand you and she are longtime friends. She wished to pass along a gift since you were off-planet – a souvenir of sorts that she bought at a market during some sort of local holiday."

…or maybe it was something completely mundane, as though elected officials had nothing better to do than exchange exotic objects when the rights of sentient beings were at stake. Not that she would let him consider this a favor she owed him.

She took the simple gift box he handed her and left, trying to think if there was any subtle consequence she had overlooked. Not that she could have refused the gift, but it wouldn't harm her credibility among his other opponents, would it?

It wouldn't cause trouble, would it?

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake,

and no birds sing.

Something was wrong. Anakin Skywalker wasn't sure what it was, but he could feel it in the depths of his being.

Something was terribly wrong.

It had nothing to do with the horrifying battlefield he stood on, where clone troopers struggled to lift cannon placements from where they had sank into the mud of a siege that had been equal parts long and desperate. At least the people had been evacuated long before there was any real danger. But he did wonder what they would do with what they had left to come back to. After all, the battlefield had once been a field – you know, for growing things.

He sometimes tried to console himself with platitudes. After all, it wasn't his fault that the Separatists had chosen this planet to invade, and conquer, and oppress. And better they have to do a lot of rebuilding in the next five years than live in peace and plenty – and gradually increasing tyranny. That sort of thing leads to what is, more or less, slavery.

And there is no worse evil.

But that – what was that? It was different than the guilt he often felt on such distant worlds, whose civilizations would've been content never to interfere with the rest of the galaxy but that two armies decided to make that world their playground. It wasn't anger at the Separatists, or the remnants of the dark joy of battle-rush. And he now realized it'd been there for some time – a long time – but masked by the terror and death of battle.

It was wrong, but it was not guilt, or sorrow, or anger, or hatred, or bloodlust. And it may not have been fear, but it was certainly causing fear, and a lot of it. Terror, even.

Stumbling a little, Anakin sat down, shaking, on the nearest thing to hand – the mostly-whole remnants of a super battle droid.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

so haggard and so woe-begone?

The squirrel's granary is full,

and the harvest's done.

I see a lily on thy brow

with anguish moist and fever dew

and on thy cheeks a fading rose

fast withereth too.

"General? Sir? General Skywalker!" Rex was kneeling beside him, shaking his shoulder gently, but urgently. Anakin only half-registered this, deep within himself as he was, lost in inward meditation, frantic to find the source of the wrongness.

He had to find it, he knew, though he did not know why. It was imperative that he find it, that he fix it. It was everything.

A part of him felt hands lifting him, felt himself being moved from a sitting to a lying-down position – a medical stretcher? Clones – or maybe other people, he wasn't sure – were poking and prodding and taking measurements. He almost laughed, except that he couldn't spare the time. He knew he was more familiar with his men than some of the Generals, but had they forgotten he was still a Jedi? Things were bound to get kriffing metaphysical and weird once in a while and this was just an average day, wasn't it?

It might have been minutes or hours by the time he realized that it was not from him. In fact, it felt a little like someone had died, but not quite. And it felt a little like when, on Mortis, the Son caused Ahsoka to Turn – but not quite. There was darkness and there was emptiness, but neither of those quite –

Oh.

It was a replacement. Of sorts. The original presence was not gone, and there was a dark presence there now, but it was not the original presence.

So…a full possession? Was that even possible outside bad holo-dramas?

Anakin had seen darkness in the course of the war. But he had only ever seen dark influence on independent spirits – even if the spirit could not resist, as had been the case with Ahsoka. It had never been…habitation.

But that's what it felt like.

His mind went immediately to the most concrete and well-defined of his connections to other living beings, the one that had been most deliberately created and longest maintained.

Okay, Obi-wan was fine.

He checked Ahsoka, just to be sure, though his connection to her had grown dim with disuse.

Good on two counts.

And then he checked the state of the Jedi Order as a whole, and quite thoroughly, too, because he did not want to know what he would see if he looked…

No.

No.

Force, no.

Not her. Please not her. Anyone but her.

He had been too deep, too long, sensing for Force-signatures too far away even for him. The mystery solved, his consciousness began to slip into an ocean of unconsciousness, but not before one more thought could coalesce into realization.

How.

Dare.

You.

I met a lady in the meads,

full beautiful – a faery's child,

her hair was long, her foot was light,

and her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,

and bracelets too, and fragrant zone;

she looked at me as she did love,

and made sweet moan.

Wrong.

She'd voted wrong.

Bail Organa couldn't believe his ears. Senator Amidala stood before him, proud as you please, announcing with a cheerful smile that she had voted for the new tax bill they had been fighting for weeks. He wondered who she had told, how many she had swayed to her side before the vote.

The Senator from Alderaan was shaken out of his anxious thoughts when she put her arm gently through his.

"And I was wondering," she said softly, "whether the two of us might…meet up…one night to discuss – in great detail – our differences of opinion concerning the future of the Republic." She subtly leaned in, pressing the curve of her body closer to his.

He looked down at her in shock, only to find himself transfixed by her glorious eyes. How had he forgotten what a soft shade of brown they were? And she had worn her hair down today, and its chestnut curls tumbled elegantly across her shoulder. He swore he could almost smell its sweet scent. There was something he was supposed to remember, something wrong about this, but she was so beautiful, he just had to have her –

An annoyed cough broke him out of his reverent gazing and he turned upon the interruption. A Reformist senator – one of Palpatine's puppets, a spoiled young humanoid without a mind of his own – leaned against the wall near them, tapping his foot angrily.

"Senator Amidala," he growled possessively, "you were meant to go to lunch with me nearly a half-hour ago."

"Ah. And so I was. Until later, dear Bail! Don't you go forgetting my proposition!" And with that, she lithely extracted her arm from his and was gone in a swirl of skirts and perfume.

But Bail was not so easily fooled. He remembered what he was meant to remember: for one, that Padmé and that particular senator positively loathed one another. More importantly, he remembered long, straight hair like a raven's wing, gentle, dark doe-eyes, light bronze skin, and a soft voice that heaved in sobs he had not been there to comfort, stuck on Coruscant, helpless when they had finally given in to admitting she would never have children.

He wondered then if that was what was troubling Amidala so that she would begin throwing herself at the men: had there been some family tragedy? Had she lost a lover she had been secretly courting? Had she finally snapped over the pressure of devoting her entire life to a self-sacrificial career? Certainly, she had turned on her charms to their maximum effect, and it was working, not that there was any reason it wouldn't. But that she had lost herself to the extent that she was risking all the good she had ever done by waging her romance in the political arena?

Something was wrong. And Bail wasn't close enough to her to ask why, to ask how he could help. But he knew someone who could.

Someone who had seen enough of her charms, and been alone with her enough times that certainly, this was nothing new, and who cared about her enough (he wasn't born yesterday) to do something about it.

Calling an aide over, he asked have a comm line to the Jedi Temple ready when he returned to his office.

"Tell them I need to speak to Master Skywalker."

I set her on my pacing steed,

and nothing else saw all day long,

for sidelong would she bend, and sing

a faery's song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,

and honey wild, and manna dew,

and sure in language strange she said,

"I love thee true."

Bail hadn't really expected the Hero with No Fear to show up at his office within minutes of his call, but he did.

And gods, but the boy looked half-dead. How long had it been since he'd had a proper night's sleep? Bail graciously offered him a chair, but Skywalker refused, and Bail couldn't help but notice the haunted look in his dark-circled eyes.

"There's something wrong with Senator Amidala, you say?"

If anything, Skywalker's surprise sounded affected, but perhaps he was just weary. Certainly the young Knight would be feigning casualness when it came to Padmé.

"Yes, I have reason to believe she isn't in her right mind. Her votes recently have gone completely against her widely-known values, and she's been behaving in an overly flirtatious manner. She's currently out to lunch with Senator Ro'lin."

"What."

"I know, she hates him. I'm afraid there's been some tragedy in her personal life, or perhaps with her family, that she's…well, that she's expressing in an unhealthy manner. I thought, as her friend, you might get her to open up about it."

Skywalker got some life back in him at that, even if all it amounted to was 'confused.'

"But aren't you her friend?"

"Not really. Not to that extent. You have to understand, we're political allies now, but before this whole Separatists and Wars business, she was almost a Reformist, if a principled one. She was an idealist who thought that it was alright to change the Constitution – only bits and pieces, see – and where the benefits were clearly altruistic. She was very bitter toward my defense of our founding principles when it meant some citizens of the Republic might continue to live hard lives. But now she sees that the Reformists are really after a gradual change of our governmental system, away from our old democratic values, which is why she's switched to the Loyalist party."

It was amusing the way Skywalker leaned forward, his blue eyes widening as he drank in every word. "Wow. I didn't know that," he breathed.

"But aren't you her friend?"

Anakin smiled sheepishly. "Touché. But…we don't really talk about business much."

"Which is exactly why I need your help."

Skywalker frowned. "I don't quite see your point."

"You two come from different worlds, which I suspect is why it's so easy for you to set aside your careers and see each other as people, rather than colleagues. You're her friend, in the most basic and unconditional sense of the world. No political alliances, no decorum, no strings attached. You are yourselves around each other. I need you to get her to talk to you, to stop making these foolish romantic decisions that could destroy her life."

Skywalker paled a little at that as an aide ran in to announce that Senators Amidala and Ro'lin had returned to the Senate Offices, and that Amidala was, in fact, headed this way.

She swept in in the same whirlwind in which she had left, and headed straight for Bail with a smile that was disturbingly friendly and cat-like at the same time. She completely ignored Skywalker, who looked so floored at her unusual appearance that the ground might have swallowed him up and he wouldn't have noticed. But strangely, a moment later his bright eyes flashed with a deep, deep anger, and he set his face like a lone warrior faced with vast enemy legions.

"I have returned! And I haven't forgotten our little plans! Why don't we take a short trip to my place – it's only just around the corner – and discuss things like I said we would, as old friends?"

As she spoke, Bail felt the spell begin to weave its way around his mind again, and struggled futilely against it. In another instant, there was a snap like the rending of a portcullis chain, and the gate to his mind was forcibly closed with a thunderous boom. He felt the spell vanish, and something else recede – something primal, seething with innate power.

And then he realized that they had both just been in his mind, which shouldn't have happened, because Padmé wasn't Force-sensitive.

Bail was in shock. Certainly he was of a too rational disposition to closely entertain the notion that Senator Amidala might have been possessed by some dark power.

But it made a strange amount of sense, especially considering how they were looking at each other now.

Skywalker still had that warrior battle-ready look, while Amidala's eyes flashed first with sharp irritation (at being forced out of Bail's mind?), then with shocked recognition (of Skywalker's Jedi status?), and finally a strange, fierce hunger.

And then they went back to that girlish, excited glow they'd had earlier. She pranced over to the Jedi and latched herself onto his arm. "But since you seem so terribly busy, Bail, I'll just steal this young Jedi instead – is that alright, Master Jedi? I've always wanted to meet a Jedi, you see." And she proceeded to drag him from the room.

This time Bail might have been swallowed by the floor and not noticed.

Did Padmé Amidala just not recognize Anakin Skywalker?

She took me to her elfin grot,

and there she wept, and sighed full sore,

and there I shut her wild wild eyes

with kisses four.

And there she lulled me asleep

and there I dreamed – ah! Woe betide!

The latest dream I ever dreamed

on the cold hill side.

Darth Raymara was just having too much fun. It was almost a sin, to have this much fun with silly men. And now she'd found herself a Jedi.

And what a Jedi.

She almost purred out loud thinking of the young man sitting out on the balcony, waiting for her to return from the kitchen with drinks. Real drinks, mind you, as the Senator did keep some on hand for special guests and Raymara, being Raymara, had found the cabinet on the first night.

She was almost certain he knew what she was. That would only make this even more fun, watching him cave to her dark pressures.

But still she started when he said, "So, how long have you been in there, anyway?" and turned to see him leaning nonchalantly on the doorframe, a smirk playing around his lips.

Rather than push down a twinge of her own fear, she drank it in deeply, using it to feed the lustful smile she returned him. She had felt him, earlier in the Alderaanian man's office. She had felt his power, power unlike anything she had felt before. Would that he were hers, and hers too then that power! But now she saw he was a strong shielder, and very perceptive. She began to understand why a Knight's confidence graced a boy young enough that, were he anyone else, he would still be a Padawan.

What she did was gasp falsely in shock, her hand over her mouth in mock surprise, brown eyes comically wide.

"Oh, dear!" she teased. "I've been found out!"

She sashayed around the kitchen table toward him, relishing the feeling of having hips again. She sent tentative, dark feelers toward his mind, cupping his face in one hand when she reached him. "But that's why you find me so fascinating, isn't it, sir Knight? That's why you let me lead you back here."

The young man removed her hand, holding it gently but firmly in what she belatedly realized was a mechno. Now, that was interesting. And he had all those scars. A warrior then, but on the cunning side of warrior, not the brute strength smash smash side. Otherwise he might have tried to attack her in the Senate Offices.

"Well, I was curious," he admitted. "I'm an acquaintance of the Senator's." He made a show of looking around the room. "It's really fancy, though that's what you expect with Senators these days, I guess." He turned back to her. "How have you been getting around, though? Did you go through the Senator's memories?"

She scoffed at that. "Oh, no, what business have I for silly little mortal girls and their silly little political games? Oh, she's locked up tight and safe, don't worry, but I can manage quite well on my own, thank you. Would you like me to show you just how well?"

She had been getting to him, she must have. Roguish young Jedi or not, he was still a Jedi. His strength of earlier must have been a fluke, an illusion. She had confused him sufficiently. It was unthinkable that he would have allowed himself to be taken in like this any other way. It was time to go in for the kill.

And so she tightened the feelers around his shields, just on the edges of his consciousness, and opened her mind fully to him.

And Darth Raymara drowned in a sea of pain as everything happened at once.

I saw pale kings, and princes too,

pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

they cried – "La belle Dame sans Merci

hath thee in thrall!"

Admitting that it hadn't looked at Padmé's memories had been its first mistake, though he had suspected that for a while.

Letting him into a space with which he was so, so intimately familiar was its second.

The dragon dove for Padmé first, slicing through the stifling darkness like a lightsaber through so many paper screens. The bond snapped fully back into place with a fiery crack, shining a light of connection between knight and lady. That done, he turned on the intruder with a roar of a terrible fury suppressed for far too long.

Like a hurricane, he blew its thoughts into disarray, and then blew its entire self out of her, driving it out before him with sheer power.

He surrounded it, and encompassed it, and did not let one bit escape, and he saw it for what it was – a lady Sith, long dead. Far be it from him not to help the spirits of the dead leave this world for good.

It – she – was drowning in her own terror now, afraid and not understanding why she had lost.

Anakin deigned to answer her.

Because I love her, you fool. Why else?

And then the dragon shattered her.

I saw their starved lips in the gloam

with horrid warning gaped wide,

and I awoke and found me here

on the cold hill's side.

Padmé's head hurt. She struggled to open her eyes, to wake up. She groaned. Her brain felt too small for her head, as silly as that may sound, and it seemed as though it had been literally jostled about and rattled around. Literally.

And still, she felt safe.

She didn't remember why, so she tried to move, tried at least to move a hand to feel her head for lumps, and found that she couldn't move at all.

There was something heavy lying on top of her, and it was moving.

Her senses began to return to her, ever so fuzzily, and as the sounds of the world came back to her in a rush, she realized it was actually – he was actually – crying. Great, heaving sobs that begged and pleaded with her to wake up. To wake up because it was safe now, he'd killed it and it was supposed to be all okay now, and it'd been an hour why wouldn't she just wake up, just wake up for him, just show him her beautiful eyes filled with her beautiful soul.

When she tried the other hand and found that it was free, she reached up, with him all unaware of her movement beneath him, and, reaching up to her beloved's head, began to stroke her husband's curls ever so softly.

"Ani, sweetheart," she asked weakly, "why are we on the kitchen floor?"

His breathing hitched with hope and his sobs paused as he shot up to crouch over her staring into her eyes with barely-concealed anticipation until he found what he was looking for and his crying started again in earnest.

She sat up shakily and through her arms around him, and he returned her embrace with fierce affection and relief.

She still didn't remember what had happened. She didn't remember anything, even what day it was – last she had heard, Anakin had been away, far away in a battle on another world.

But as she began to kiss his tears away, and his weeping turned to bashful bouts of laughter – half relief, half embarrassment at being caught being not-tough by her for the umpteenth time – she knew one thing with utter certainty.

They would get to the bottom of this.

Together.

And they would succeed together.

And this is why I sojourn here

alone and palely loitering,

though the sedge is withered from the lake,

and no birds sing.

A/N: I didn't want to say this earlier, because it's too spoilery, but the reason I didn't have Anakin just destroy the Sith from the beginning to protect Padme was because in my headcanon, in this universe mental conflict (of the Force-related kind) is a very sensitive thing. He didn't know where she was in all that, so he didn't know if he might hurt her - even kill her - by interfering before he had more facts. Hopefully that makes sense.