It feels as though she couldn't think straight these days.
Padmé walks beside Senator Organa, not really listening to his quiet conversation. If anyone took note of her slight change of mood as of late—how increasingly thoughtful, quieter, and gloomy she's gotten—, they gleaned it from either stress or the recent trauma of surviving yet another attempt on her life.
For those who thought they knew her, the former explanation seemed more likely than the latter. Senators and the people alike know her spirit is near indestructible: that it would take more than a few threats and a pistol to her head to make her yield to any evil cause. But only she herself knew that it was truly the latter that weighed on her mind. The aftermath of that treason on Scipio.
Padmé and Bail rounded the corner to her office, and when they are in front of her door she automatically dialed in the passcode to open it, nodding along politely as her friend continued to speak. She still did not register a word of what he said. Truly, her mind and heart are elsewhere, sick with worry
It has been a month since the disaster on Scipio. A month of silence between her and her husband.
Never before has she felt this sort of anxiety coldly settle itself in her chest like stone. It left her unbalanced, unable to think clearly. It consumed her time and energy just thinking about the rift between her and Anakin, the explosive arguments about a renegade dead man, the things left unsaid between them that she so desperately wanted to tell him... and it simply exhausted her.
Mercifully, Bail bids his farewells to her, and Padmé's mouth moves to do the same. She waves back and pins on a smile that sits tightly on her face too.
The stack of filmsis and datapads on her desk, once thought as a hindrance to spending precious time with her beloved now feels like solace. It is a blessed distraction from those dark curls, the blue eyes, the tall frame, to her tumultuous feelings altogether. Immediately, Padmé dives in head first into her work, switching gears to numb her mind of herself, of all her problems, of him, to focus on a galaxy that still needs her no matter what.
But the day will end soon and the work will eventually finish soon enough. The stone in her chest will still be there, unsympathetic and waiting for her to notice it once again. And she does. Day after day, for the past month, like clockwork.
Both the heaviness in her and the emptiness besides her is more apparent as Padmé lays in bed after a long day. Staring at her dark ceiling, she briefly wonders if he is dealing with this as badly as she is, if he is feeling this same sort of way.
If he too is feeling this madness in silence as well.
A/N: Here is both my first fic posted and my contribution to Angstpril2021. The prompt was silence and I immediately thought of the awkwardness between P/A at the end of the Clovis arc lol. Fluff comes more naturally to me, but I had fun with this fic anyways. Thanks for reading!