Disclaimer: I own none of the characters, ideas, etc., of Star Wars. You know the drill.
Summary: AU, PT. Drama. A shadow has left the force, but other threats remain as Padmé and Anakin prepare for the birth of their child.

First, a few notes! This fic is a sequel to The Pitfalls, a very short, joke-y fic I posted a couple of weeks ago. You don't need to have read it to read this; all you need to know is Palpatine and Dooku are both dead, Padmé was only just pregnant at the time, and it was all very funny (she says, with enormous confidence). A River Flowing is going to be both more serious and much longer.

Ahsoka Tano of the Clone Wars cartoon is an important supporting character in this fic, so if you aren't familiar with her or you don't intend to watch the show, I recommend at least skimming her Wookieepedia page (or, uh, maybe just skipping this fic, haha). Characters from the EU also make appearances, most notably Djinn Altis (another character you might want to read up on Wookieepedia) from the Clone Wars novel No Prisoners, but I'm trying to stick mostly to film canon. In general, I'll play fast and loose with Clone Wars and EU canon; if it works for the fic, that's how I'll use it, is the approach I'm taking. I understand this isn't an approach persons who are intimately familiar with all Star Wars canon will necessarily enjoy, which is why I'm letting you know about it upfront.

ARF (writes Barkour) will consist of seven chapters, with six interludes individually spaced between chapters. Updates will occur every other Wednesday. I've written the first three chapters and the first two interludes, and I'm working on the next interlude and the fourth chapter right now, with a timeline of events I've yet to write as a guideline. So if you're worried this, like so many other WIPs, will be abandoned, please don't be: I'm nearly halfway through writing the whole, and I don't intend to let it fall by the wayside. If for any reason I need to change the update schedule, I'll make a note of such on my profile. Please be forewarned that chapters will be fairly long, ranging anywhere from 12,000 to 18,000 words. Interludes will be much shorter, at 3,000 to 5,000 words.

I will not be making any more author's notes until the final chapter, as I always find chapter notes distracting; they break me out of the story's spell, so to speak. If you've questions, please do PM me, and I'll try to reply privately to any concerns you might make in (signed) reviews.

Thank you very much for your patience and for your time! I hope that this fic will interest you and, of course, that you'll find some enjoyment in it. :)

So let's go!


A River Flowing
Two Months


She woke fully in the dark, with the night still long and Anakin gone from their bed. She raised her hand; it hung in the air. Something had woken her. An ill-defined suggestion of intent slipped from her, and as it faded she wondered what it was she had wanted to do so powerfully that she'd come to as she had. Padmé touched her temple.

Anakin came in like a shadow through the door. His head was down, his hair a tangle of half-curls, and he was pulling a long black glove over the intricate metal work of his prosthetic hand. The Jedi had called him, then. Her hand fell to the bed, and the little rasp of her fingers brushing across the silk brought his eyes up.

"Oh," he said, surprised. "I was coming to wake you up."

She eased up against the headboard. The top sheet pooled in her lap. She'd worn a very light shift to bed, her shoulders bare and the chest cut low across her breasts, as it was a hot night even for Coruscant. Now her skin pricked. A chill took her. A sort of thin ache started at the backs of her eyes.

"You didn't want to just steal away in the night?" she tried to tease. "Out the window and off the balcony, like a secret lover would." She pressed her cheek to her shoulder, looking out as she did so at the city, how it shone through all hours.

He crossed the vast, empty spaces of the bedroom. His heels sounded hard on the stone. She knew, even before he reached her, what he would do; it was the certainty of a dream. With the other glove stuffed in his flight jacket's pocket, Anakin sat on the edge of the bed, at her feet. Her toes curled beneath the sheet. He offered her his hands, the gloved hand and the whole hand, and she took them. The leather was very smooth, but his bare fingers were callused at slight angles. He held the lightsaber more often than he held her hand.

"It's a simple escort mission," he told her. "I shouldn't be away for more than a week."

Padmé cocked her head to the side and smiled lightly. "I'm not a child, Annie. This isn't the first time you've gone away."

His fingers tightened around her hands. In a moment, he would kiss the back of her hands, first the right and then the left; and then he would stand and leave. She saw him doing this, like through a clear sleeve, even as he held her hands and looked down at her knuckles.

Before he could bend to her, Padmé leaned forward and kissed his cheek, where the scar that divided his eye ended. He started. She didn't catch him off-guard terribly often. He'd lines under his eyes, faint bruises. Once, he'd told her Jedi didn't have nightmares, but she'd felt him shuddering as he slept; she'd heard his breath catch. Jedi or not, the war had come home with him.

"It will be over soon," she said. "You felt it. Don't you remember?"

Easier to believe the war was drawing to a close in the dark and quiet hours of night, their heads together and their hands clutched between them.

"Yes," said Anakin. He looked at her, as if he were trying to see it in her eyes, the certainty they'd both felt the week before when he'd reached out for her in his sleep. Slowly, he said again, "Yes. The war is almost done," and she made herself believe it, so he would believe it when he saw it in her face. She wanted to believe many things. Most of all, Padmé supposed, she wanted to believe that the distance that had grown between them over the last year could be crossed as easily as he'd walked from the door to the bed to sit beside her. If it could be crossed, she would have to walk too.

"I'm proud of you," Padmé said.

Anakin ducked his head. He was laughing, the corners of his eyes creasing. Padmé smiled at his dark head and lifted her hand out of his grip to brush the hair back from his eyes.

"Every day," she said to him as he looked up to her again, "I am—so proud. I think, Anakin is very brave and he is very strong, and so many people throughout the galaxy look up to him as a hero, and I think, he'll be coming home soon. He'll be coming home to me very soon."

The hand he still grasped, he grasped so her fingers ached. Then he let her go. Her hand fell to the sheet. His jaw worked.

"I'm sorry I haven't been here," he said.

"You have a duty to the Republic," said Padmé, "just as I have a duty to it. We have our responsibilities and we must take care of them." She caught his jaw with her fingertips. "Anakin—"

"Sometimes," he said lowly, "I don't care about duty at all. Out there, I—" His hand had found her knee. He clutched at her through the sheet. His eyes, when he lifted his gaze to her, were shadowed; the lights of the city were at his back.

"There's so little worth saving," he said. "Do you know, out there, I see all the ways the Republic is failing, the way the Jedi are failing—"

"That doesn't mean they aren't worth saving," Padmé countered. She cupped his face in her hands; she made him look at her. "Just because something has been broken doesn't mean you can't fix it. Do you remember, on Tatooine—"

He tensed, and she knew he thought of that night in the desert when he'd found Shmi dying in the sand while Padmé waited at the Lars' homestead and felt, for perhaps the first time in her life, thoroughly useless and unsure of what to do.

"That podracer," she said firmly, and the muscle in his cheek began to relax, "that we helped you build. There wasn't much time before the race and we only had a little money for parts, but you won with that racer."

A smile flickered at his mouth, there and gone and then, quietly, there again.

"I remember," Anakin said. He brushed his finger across her chin. "I remember you laughed at me when I said it would work."

"I never laughed at you," she protested. "I thought you were very brave—"

He shook his head, but he was still smiling, lopsided now as he smiled when he laughed at her. "You didn't think I could do it," he said. "You thought it was horrible, letting a little boy in a podracer, and for money."

"Well, you did win," she said, "even if it was horrible. And I did believe in you—I do believe in you—"

"You were frightened," he declared. "You thought I was going to crash into a cliff, and then you'd all be stuck on Tatooine." Tatooine, he said; he always said it as if he'd rather dive into a lake of fire than set foot on Tatooine again. He'd the right to that.

She traced the swell of his cheek with her thumb. His eyelashes dropped.

"I'm fighting this war too," she said. "And I'm always on your side, even when we disagree. Just like you're always on my side. You'll come home again, and I'll be here. And whatever's broken, we can fix it together."

His hand stroked up her leg. The sweep of his long fingers along her thigh was a promise she intended to hold him to.

"I'm sorry I'll miss your speech."

She half-laughed, only an exasperated breath she let out. "I'm sure they'll play it over and over again all week," she said, "along with a thousand other tributes, until everyone's sick of hearing about it."

Not kindly, she thought perhaps with Palpatine dead, Anakin would move away from the more fascist ideologies the late chancellor had encouraged in him. But she knew too that Anakin had truly respected Palpatine, and she had herself once known him as a kindly statesman from Naboo who had offered her advice when she was still very young and new to the throne; so this she buried deep.

Very earnestly Anakin said, "I could never be sick of hearing your voice."

Padmé kissed him, there in the dark of their lonely bedroom, and she was smiling as she did so. Everything would be all right, she thought again. She clung to that. Anakin sighed against her; his hands rose to frame her shoulders; he pressed into the kiss, and she drew him to her, her fingers in his hair. They parted. His eyes were closed. The scar bisecting his eyebrow and gouged into his eyelids—she kissed that again, chastely.

"I love you," Anakin said. His voice was rough. His teeth flashed. "More than anything else—sometimes, when I think there's nothing out there worth saving—"

She wouldn't let him say it. Padmé caught his mouth and gave softly of her own, so whatever was rising in him would be at ease again.

"When you come home," she said when she settled back, "I'll be here."

He touched her face fleetingly one last time, the padded leather nearly obscuring the sudden corners of his prosthetic fingers.

"I will come back," he said.

He was a shadow in shadows. The city glimmered, uncaring. How many denizens on every level of the great and endless city? None of them knew that right now, Anakin Skywalker's fingers slipped from her cheek, and all Amidala wanted for one awful, selfish moment was to take his hand and set it on her jaw again.

"I know you will," said Padmé.


The message from Ahsoka arrived shortly before the state funeral for the Palpatine. Plainly, Ahsoka wrote that she wanted to see Padmé, if the senator wasn't too busy. That was all. Half-dressed and at odds with a very poorly timed bout of morning sickness, Padmé managed as little: she suggested a time in the afternoon for the day after next, at her residence. She thought Ahsoka had likely had enough of grave meetings at imposing offices.

The funeral was an involved affair. Palpatine had been loved truly, and in his death it seemed as though all his faults had died, too. As Senator Organa, leader of the opposing party and thus, according to the galactic senate's organization, vice-chair beneath Palpatine, spoke of loss in the time of war, Padmé—rather, Senator Amidala—sat on the stage, from which Palpatine had orated, behind the great, black casket now dedicated to him. The casket was empty, as Palpatine's body had been returned to Naboo for a proper water burial. It was winter in Theed now, and the palatial canals would be rimmed with the faintest hint of frost. Padmé stared past the casket and tried not to vomit.

The herbal supplement she'd taken had done little to settle her stomach. So difficult to believe at first, the pregnancy had certainly dismissed any lingering doubts she'd carried about with her. Soon, she thought, she would have to schedule an appointment with an obstetrician, someone disinterested in either gossip or money. Padmé had few enemies, but scandals didn't require enemies. A pounding had started in her head, at odds with the roiling of her gut. She wished she could remember how long Sola's morning sickness had lasted; she couldn't think of how to ask now, with her sister's youngest child nearly eight.

Her name caught her attention. She looked up from the nothing she was considering.

"Senator Padmé Amidala," Bail had said. He gestured to her, his palm up.

She rose with all the grace of long practice and walked around that bare casket to the speaker's podium. It was cool in the senate's ampitheatre, the ventilated air here far cleaner than that of the Coruscanti open. Yet a sudden heat tiptoed up her back, and a sensation of being unmoored gripped her. In her turn, Padmé gripped the lectern tightly and hoped her hesitation would be taken as grief for a beloved leader of their shared people. Senator Jar Jar Binks had been invited to sit on the stage as well, in full recognition of Naboo, but she knew Palpatine had never considered any Gungan to be his concern. He had argued very slickly against allowing for Gungan representation of Naboo, as, he'd said, they'd so little involvement in the planet's political sphere.

Senator Binks sat quietly behind the casket. His hands were folded. He did not mourn.

Looking out across the hundreds of thousands of persons crowded into all the many stories of the enormous theatre, Padmé wanted to wipe from the tablet the speech she'd written so very carefully and shout out, "The death of Palpatine can only mean the rebirth of the Republic, and the restoration to the people of power he would have taken for himself." It was as if she had stepped into the shadow of a dala'st, the hateful ghosts said to lurk in the mountain caves that stood watching over wintry Theed.

Coruscant waited for her. Anakin would be watching, she thought, or listening to it where he could. Whatever she said now would be played at regular intervals throughout the news cycle; he could hardly miss it. Another secret, then, that she had to keep for the moment. How lucky, that she would not begin to show for another month, two if she were truly fortunate. Anakin had said as much last night, before he'd received the call, his hands spanning her naked belly.

She had turned her gaze down to the lectern. Bail, ever solicitous, rested a hand on her shoulder, like a man lending his strength. She thought his show of sorrow was as false as her own. When had she become such a cynic?

Only a moment had passed, surely enough to grant a peer struck by the loss of a beloved mentor. Padmé lifted her face. She'd no real need for the tablet anyway. She'd memorized the speech, as she memorized all her speeches, a little touch of honesty that had not gone unnoticed or unappreciated. And if I am nothing, Padmé thought, I am honest.

"People of the Republic," said Senator Amidala, "divided now by war, a great tragedy has united us once more today."


Padmé fixed a pot of shizi tea in the hour before she expected Ahsoka. The tea, along with the other herbs she'd uncovered in the very back of the cupboards over the refrigerator, had been a last minute gift from her mother on her last trip to Naboo, a year ago. If Anakin had been home, he would have hopped onto the counter and found everything. Padmé had to fetch a ladder from the closet.

"I really don't think you ought to be doing this in your condition," C3PO fretted.

Half-on top of the refrigerator, she'd looked back at C3PO. "My condition?" she asked. "Am I ill?"

"Your fecundity," he whispered before resuming his usual plaintive tenor. "What if you were to fall? What of the baby? I implore you, come down, Mistress Senator. You must think of the baby's well-being."

"The baby will survive me looking into a cupboard." Padmé hitched her knee on the side of the refrigerator and started rooting in the cupboard. "I'm not as delicate as everyone seems to think I am, Threepio."

"I must beg to differ," he said, affronted. "You are quite small, and very human. Why, if anything were to happen to you while I'm here—I just don't know what I'd do."

"Oh, Threepio," said Padmé. She leaned out of the cupboard and smiled down at him from the top of the fridge. "You'd call the emergency services line and correct the medical droids when they got here and fuss over me the entire time, and you'd be entirely happy."

"I could never be happy if you were hurt, Mistress Senator," said Threepio. "Please, allow me—" Stiffly he reached for the ladder.

He was a dear, but oh, how he fretted. In a strange sort of way, it was like having her mother with her.

"No, I'm all right! Besides," Padmé said, "I don't think you'd like it up here. It's all dusty, and is that—" She brushed at a cobweb and said, "Oh, it's just a spider."

"My word!" He recoiled entirely. "I shall have to speak with the cleaning droids. That is most unacceptable."

Padmé crawled deeper into the cupboards.

"Please do, C3PO. They're sure to listen to you. Would you speak with them now?"

"It's disgraceful!" he said. "How barbaric! Spiders in the cupboards! I'll straighten this out right away. In the cupboards!" he was muttering as he left to harangue the suite's attached droids for an hour. Two, if she knew C3PO.

"Thank you, C3PO!" she called after him. Hitching her sleeves up, Padmé began dragging old tins and forgotten goods out of the recesses.

When she did at last find the package at the back, wrapped in plain paper and tied with a blue ribbon, she slipped the ribbon over her hand and carried it carefully. Halfway down the ladder, the room flipped onto its side, and Padmé clung to the ladder. Her head pounded. Desert heat closed around her, so ferociously she thought she would throw up and then C3PO would never let her leave her room ever again. But the wave of vertigo faded as quickly as it came upon her, and after a moment Padmé could take the last two steps to the floor and then, gratefully, the four steps to the table by the wide box window that stretched up into a skylight. She could rest then, but she'd set out for something, and she wouldn't lay her head down on the table and doze there in the sunlight when she had what she'd looked for.

As she unwrapped each of the tidy bundles one by one, hunting for the distinctive serrated edging of the shizi leaves amidst all that paper, Padmé realized she hadn't spoken with her mother in nearly a month. She went incrementally still, there in the airy kitchen. The late morning light snuck in through the skylight, though the sun's movement would soon lead it behind an opposing skyscraper. A shadow would glide in through the sheet of transparisteel then, and she would have to move to the sitting room to enjoy the sun.

Her mother had insisted Padmé take the packets of herbs with her. Dawn had just swept up the mountain; it stained the kitchen of Padmé's childhood with the cooler reds of a Naboo morning.

"They're from your father's garden—"

"You don't have to bother. I'm fine, and you know they always double-check how much weight you carry on with you, down to the microgram—"

"Yes," Jobal said, "but you can't get any of these on Coruscant, I know you can't, I asked your father to check and he said—"

"Why would I ever need shizi tea?" Padmé had laughed. The leaves were famously known to help with stomach ache, but everyone knew—everyone on Naboo, at least—that really, shizi was for morning sickness.

Jobal folded the paper neatly around the herb and said, "Well, I don't know. I don't know what you get up to out there. Maybe you'll meet someone nice." Her mother turned to look for the tape and then straightened. "Oh! I saw that Anakin of yours on the holo the other day. He was so nice—he looks so ferocious now. Is he all right?"

Padmé leaned against the counter, her arm flush with her mother's arm, their shoulders together and their elbows too. Jobal pricked her thumb on the dispenser's razor and, swearing, brought her thumb up to suck at it.

"I don't speak to him anymore," Padmé said.

Her mother frowned. "Oh, but I liked him."

"He was only watching me because it was his job to do so. And anyway," Padmé said lightly, taking her mother's hand, "Jedi aren't allowed to have relationships like what you're thinking." She found a little plaster in the drawer, where Jobal always kept the plaster in the kitchen.

"And how do you know that?"

"Everyone knows that," said Padmé, as she bent to clean her mother's thumb. "I don't have the time for a relationship as it is. Not with all the work to do in the senate, and the war going on."

When she'd finished, Padmé kissed her mother's hand and laughed, but the lines around Jobal's eyes only deepened. She rested her hand on Padmé's cheek, like she'd done when Padmé was very young and had a fever.

"I do worry about you," said Jobal softly. "All alone and so far away."

Padmé covered her mother's hand, her fingertips light on her mother's bony wrist. A knot showed in her mother's brow. The dawn had crept all the way up the island in the center of the kitchen and was now making its way up the far wall, illuminating the faded mural of fishermen they'd never gotten around to painting over. The confession was chewing at the bottom of Padmé's tongue.

"I'm not alone," Padmé said, "I have all of you calling me when I'm supposed to be working." Teasingly she said, "Worry about Anakin instead."

Her mother had swatted her, and that had been the end of it. On the ground-to-orbit shuttle, Padmé had watched Theed recede into the greater continent and the continent into a splotch in the connected sea. If she had told her mother, Anakin and I are thinking of children, what would Jobal have said? The herbs had sat at the bottom of one of her bags, and when she'd got back to her suites she'd put the bundle in the cupboards over the refrigerator, and now here she was staring at her hands while her stomach roiled. C3PO would be back soon, and Ahsoka was on her way. Padmé got up and requested the hot water she'd need for tea.

She was nursing a second cup in the sitting room when the bell sounded. C3PO broke off his lecture concerning the efficacy of a number of hardy and evidently distasteful herbs native to Tatooine to answer the door. The cup had cooled in her hands. Padmé looked up.

"Threepio."

He paused at the threshold. "Yes?"

Briefly, she touched her flat belly. "Discretion," she said only.

C3PO drew his straight back up even straighter and said, "Always, Mistress Senator," and then he had gone.

Padmé considered the cup of tea she held. The cup was a deep bell, in the southern Naboo tradition; the aesthetic was one not of bell but bubbles, rising to the surface from somewhere dark in the ocean. Shizi leaves made for a thin tea with little color, and if she tipped the cup so light caught inside it, the tea showed very faintly blue against the rich, patterned green of the glazed glass, patterned so the glaze looked like the way light played on sand beneath the water as waves rolled on. The cups had been a gift from her parents when she'd been elected princess of Theed. As the prospect of a child settled on her, she found ghosts of her family all around her.

C3PO's chatter preceded him. Padmé drained the rest of the tea and then set the cup aside on its saucer, shaped like a flower with petals curling up so as to hold the cup securely. The sitting room, she realized, was decorated in the Coruscanti fashion. At one time she must have thought that necessary. A neutral choice, to reflect the metropolitan nature of Coruscant, rather than to make explicit homage to Naboo where she would greet guests: a political choice, and one that suddenly sat oddly in her chest. She had not been homesick in a very long time.

C3PO stood a moment in the doorway. "The lady Ahsoka," he said, with only the very slightest of hesitations before he called her lady. He stepped into the room, making space for Ahsoka, who lingered in the doorway. She'd grown; her montrals were thicker, and she stood an inch or so taller than she had when Padmé last saw her those five months ago. Ahsoka had worn plain brown clothes then and boots that ran up to her knees. Now she was in green, bright green, and her toes curled against sandals. Padmé smiled at her.

"Thank you, C3PO," Padmé said. "Would you mind getting Ahsoka a glass of—" Water, that was what Ahsoka usually had.

Still hanging back with her hands stuffed in her jacket pockets, Ahsoka finished for Padmé. "Fizzy juice. Please." She'd her chin tucked down; she peered out from between her striped tails.

"Certainly," said C3PO. "We have many flavors to suit the tastes of most everyone, although, Mistress Senator, I do believe the dispenser may have a virus as it has been very rude lately—"

"Taitai juice is fine," Ahsoka said, and C3PO, cut off, started.

Quickly, Padmé said, "I'll call the company tonight and see if they can't find out what's wrong with it. Will you leave me a note on the datapd on my desk so I'll remember to do that?"

"Of course," said C3PO, turning from Ahsoka. "And may I say, it is so refreshing to have my insights respected. Everything would just go to shambles around here if it weren't for me. I can't begin to imagine what your schedule would look like…" His voice floated back to them as he made his way to the kitchen.

"I forgot how much he talked," said Ahsoka.

"Well, he's an enormous help," Padmé said. "And he is right; nothing would run half so well without him. Please, sit. You don't have to stand there all day." She gestured to the long, wraparound sofa that took up so much of the sitting room.

Ahsoka perched on the end opposite Padmé so that the circular table was between them. She sat very lightly, and just before she did sit, she paused and looked across the room, for what Padmé couldn't imagine. Ahsoka's lips pursed and then smoothed. Her hands stayed in her pockets. The jacket had a sequined collar and her flowing trousers sported stripes in alternating red, orange, and blue; the effect was garish. After a moment, Ahsoka took her hands out of her pockets and set them on her knees.

"Thanks for making the time to see me."

"I'm just happy to hear from you," Padmé said. "I haven't seen you in so long. Look how much you've grown! Sorry—" She covered her mouth. "I sounded so much like my mother."

At last, Ahsoka smiled. "It's all right," she said. "It's nice. But I know I called you really suddenly, and you didn't have to see me so soon. So thank you." Her fingers tightened on her knees and then eased. "What I really wanted to thank you for was, um, defending me in the trial. I left so quickly that I guess I forgot to say thanks."

C3PO came in with the fizzy juice and the pot of tea for Padmé; he left again. Ahsoka didn't touch the juice.

Gently, and with care, Padmé said, "That was very hard for you, all of it. You don't have to worry that I've held it against you. After something like that, anyone would have wanted to go as far away as they could as fast as they could."

"It still wasn't right," Ahsoka said. Her chin came up. "I should have thanked you. Especially when everyone else had decided I was guilty, but you kept fighting for me."

"Master Skywalker didn't think you were guilty," said Padmé. "He believed in you very much, just like I did."

It was a particular high beam she had learned to cross very well, very steadily, with her hands at her side so no one would ever suspect she walked it; to speak of Anakin as she would a friend, not even a terribly close friend though someone she respected, when the truth was that the day Ahsoka had left the order, Anakin had told Padmé he was afraid that everything he had sought to achieve in his life with the Jedi was worthless, that he had failed Ahsoka.

"Have you spoken with him yet?" Padmé asked, knowing already.

"No," said Ahsoka. "I don't—regret leaving the Jedi." She said this harshly, as though she expected a reprimand; but Padmé only waited. Ahsoka looked searchingly at Padmé. "I don't regret it. I had to leave. They didn't trust me—no one trusted me—and I knew that they didn't—" Her jaw hardened. She was just a child, still. Her voice rose. "They teach you acceptance, to seek harmony and knowledge in the force, but I couldn't accept that. I can't accept that. They asked me to come back to the order but they weren't sorry—they wanted me to just, to accept it. To accept that they didn't trust me, that they thought I would set a bomb off to kill innocent people, and—"

Her fingers were digging into her knees. Ahsoka's gaze dropped to the tall glass of fizzy juice. The bubbles popped, drifting up from the bottom of the glass.

"He isn't ashamed of you," Padmé said.

Ahsoka looked up to Padmé. Her eyes—very large, very blue—fixed. The table between them was very wide; Padmé could not rest her hand on Ahsoka's hand. Instead, she went on.

"Anakin isn't ashamed of you," Padmé said again, firmly. "We spoke once about that day, and he told me what you said to him, that he's unhappy with the order as well. He understands why you left, and I feel that—I believe that he is proud of you. He has never stopped being proud of you."

Two months ago, Padmé had found in her jewelry box a little braided bracelet Ahsoka had made for her the year before out of leudu silk and clay beads. She'd laughed and slipped it on her wrist and worn it all day, and Anakin, spotting it, had asked her where she'd got it. She told him, thinking perhaps he would smile, but instead his eyes had darkened; he'd looked away. She'd thought then, too, of Sola: how when her sister, fourteen years old and furious with it, had run off with a boyfriend for a week, their parents had been silent and worried. Once, they had argued late at night, as Padmé listened from the corridor, sitting at the top of the stairs and waiting for her older sister to come home.

Anakin had reached for Padmé's hand and touched the bracelet Ahsoka had given her and said, "I'm worried for her. She never speaks to me. I don't know where she is or how she's doing, Padmé."

"You have to be patient," Padmé told him. "She's very young, and she's just had to give up everything she's ever known. She's probably out there trying to find herself."

"What if she's in danger?" Anakin demanded. "What if she's in trouble and I'm not there to get her out of it?"

Like her father had said of Sola to Jobal, then Padmé had said, "You have to trust Ahsoka."

Now Ahsoka sat across the table from Padmé, Ahsoka with her knees together and her hands clutching her knees so fiercely and all her joints still so knobby. She'd grown, Padmé thought again; but she was so young. Older than Padmé had been when she had been queen, but young, a child, and she'd been alone for months, out there without anyone to protect her or at least listen to her. But that was a parent's fear, that their child could not survive without them, and here Ahsoka was, taller than she'd been before, her horns growing, surviving.

"I've never stopped being proud of you," Padmé said.

Ahsoka's eyelashes flickered; the corner of her mouth flicked too. When she smiled, she did so shyly. How often had anyone told Ahsoka they were proud of her?

"Thank you," Ahsoka said, and Padmé had swallowed through the swelling in her throat.

"Drink your juice before it goes float," she scolded Ahsoka, and she reached for her own tea. "And I want you to tell me everything you've been up to since I last saw you. You're so much taller now!"

"No, I'm not," Ahsoka protested. "I don't think I'm ever going to get any taller. I'm just going to be short forever. Everyone's going to call me snips until I'm dead."

Padmé ran her finger around her cup. "Well, I thought I wouldn't grow anymore for years but when I was sixteen I found I'd added another inch. So there's always hope."

"But you're tiny!" said Ahsoka, laughing. As soon as it was out, her shoulders snapped in tight; her eyes rounded—a strange, funny, sweet thing to see from a girl Anakin had so often characterized as reckless and impolite, never seeming to recognize his own person in this, though Padmé had happily teased him for it many times.

"I'm sorry," Ahsoka said, "senator—"

"No, it's all right," Padmé said. "I've accepted it. And," she said on the impulse, "you can call me Padmé."

That got her another smile, brighter now. The tension in Ahsoka's shoulders eased, and in slow, slight, unconscious increments she began once again to sit up straight before Padmé. She wished that Ahsoka had sat beside her, so that she could rest her hand on the girl's slim arm, and the distance between them would not seem so great. Ahsoka, again, glanced across the room. Perhaps she'd heard C3PO puttering around in the kitchen.

"So what have you been doing?"

Ahsoka shrugged. "Not a lot."

"That can't be true. From what I remember, you're always doing something."

Ahsoka rolled the glass between her hands. The bubbles in her drink shivered. "I traveled a little," she admitted. "There was a group of rogue Jedi that Master—" She stumbled a moment. "—Skywalker and I worked with a while ago. I thought that maybe they could help. Altis—he left the Jedi, too."

Quiet, then.

"Did it help?" Padmé asked.

"I don't know," Ahsoka said. "The Jedi who follow Altis, they disagree with the council's teachings. But I'm not sure that I do. It's what the council does, not what they teach." She deflated a bit. "Sometimes. Some of the stuff they teach, I don't think that's right either. I'm not sure." She looked down to her drink. "That doesn't make a lot of sense."

"It makes more sense than you think it does," Padmé said. She picked her tea up and cradled the cup in her hand, a simple gesture that caught Ahsoka's attention. "Politics is often like that. A person can say and do many great, wonderful things, but at the same time they can do and say just as many awful things. Sometimes you have to work with people you don't very much like to do something worth doing. And sometimes a person you do like believes in ideas you disagree with fundamentally."

Ahsoka's fingers curled around the glass. "Like you and Master Skywalker," she said.

Padmé paused, the tea cup at her lips.

"Yes," she said. "Like us. We respect each other very much, but our political views are…"

"You think he's wrong," Ahsoka said.

Padmé took a sip and then, delicately, set the cup down in the matching saucer.

"Yes," she said. "I disagree with his belief that it is the right of those with power to govern the lives of those without power."

She looked at Ahsoka, who was looking not at Padmé but at the bank of windows at Padmé's back, the transparisteel sheets that opened out onto the wide balcony that stretched along the side of the suite. Padmé could not know precisely what Ahsoka thought or felt in the moment any more so than she could know what anyone else thought or felt at any time, but she hadn't forgotten Sola or how Anakin had once said to her, "They don't understand anymore, none of them do. I wish I could just leave," and she had thought, Why don't you? but held her tongue knowing it was for the same reason why she hadn't left politics, even as Palpatine's power grew.

"It's hard, isn't it," said Padmé, "leaving something you loved. Leaving people you loved. And every now and then you think, I made a mistake when I left."

"Did I?" Ahsoka asked.

"When I was elected to the senate, I asked my mother the same question," Padmé said. "I was only twenty-two, and I'd been queen since I was fourteen. I'd spent all my life in politics, it seemed, and it was only when the results came in for the senate elections that I realized I'd just agreed to four more years of it. And even though I knew it was selfish of me, I kept thinking, Now I have to leave my family again. And my mother said, the only person who could tell me if I'd made a mistake was my self. I don't think I did."

Ahsoka looked down at her hands. The sun had moved on. Silently, the artificial lights grew in strength.

Softly, Padmé said, "Master Skywalker has told me that the Jedi teach letting go of regret. On Naboo, we say, the river keeps flowing. Once you've done something, you can't take it back." As Anakin had bent to kiss her, there at the lake on the day of their wedding, she had thought this. The river kept flowing. Now I cannot take it back, she thought as she rose on her toes to kiss him in turn. She had given herself to the course. The river would not stop. Wherever it would go now she would go with it.

As Padmé spoke, Ahsoka had lifted her head; she'd tipped it to the side, as if to hear her better. She'd begun to frown, just so. Padmé might as well try.

"You should speak with Anakin—"

Then Ahsoka shot up onto her feet. Padmé, startled, leaned back.

"What is it?"

"There's someone else here," Ahsoka said. She turned on her heel, first one way and then the other. "Is he here? Did you bring Master Skywalker here?"

The bottom fell out. Padmé felt suddenly, intensely ill. She kept no holos of them; every surface in the apartment was bare. Sparse, clean, professional: that was the aesthetic she had cultivated. No relics of their marriage existed but for the padawan braid she kept locked in a wooden box under the bed. She tried for calm, for polite confusion.

"Excuse me?"

Ahsoka hissed through her teeth. "There—it's gone again—but I know he was here; I could sense him. It's like—"

She cut short. She was—so briefly—very still, and then she rounded on Padmé. Ahsoka's head-tails swung. Her lips had parted; her teeth, slightly edged, flashed. She stared at Padmé as if she had only just noticed her. Ahsoka's gaze dropped, from Padmé's face down to the as yet sleek plane of her belly. I am going to throw up, Padmé thought as Ahsoka's eyes snapped back up to her. Any illusions Padmé might have allowed herself died; she could hardly mistake the comprehension in Ahsoka's face.

So: it was done. You knew this was coming, she thought. Secrets had a way of outing. The sensation of nausea ebbed. Padmé was glad she'd set the cup down; it couldn't betray her. She folded her hands together in her lap to hide the shaking. Pinprick certainty had replaced the overpowering impulse to lean over and be sick. She saw it all very clearly; she had spent so many hours considering the possibilities. Anakin would be expelled from the order. If Padmé were lucky, the distance of the next election from the breaking of the scandal might preserve her career; the senatorial elections were in two years. The preservation and unification of Naboo under her rule, that might protect her, and of course Anakin was a hero of the war. Before, he had been a hero to Naboo: the boy pilot who had saved the young queen. Surely they would survive this; surely they could survive it.

She would have to tell her mother. The Jedi, she knew, would want to test the baby; Anakin was so very strong in the force. Master Jinn had been adamant that the boy be taken from Tatooine to Coruscant. She remembered it very well.

"C3PO," Padmé said, as calmly as if she'd forgotten an umbrella on a rainy day, "could you please bring me some water?"

"I knew it," said Ahsoka, breathlessly. She darted around the side of the sofa. "I knew it!"

"Excuse me?" Padmé said again. The house was falling apart all about her, and she could not think of how to stop it though she had meticulously planned out any number of contingencies. The truth was, she had hoped so profoundly that no one would ever realize that she had begun to believe it impossible that anyone should. No one knew. No one could know.

Ahsoka will not tell, she thought; but Ahsoka had known.

"I knew it, but no one would have ever believed me," Ahsoka said. She clambered onto the table and sat there, her knees folded up, just before Padmé. Her arms hung off her knees."I knew he was in love with you, but I didn't know if you loved him back. You're a way better liar than Master Anakin is—"

Padmé managed, "How? How did you—" Her hands separated. She brushed her belly. The admission clutched her throat.

Ahsoka blinked at her. She tipped her head very slightly; her long tails drooped. The darker, masking skin of her eyelids showed again, at odds with the paler tones of her cheeks. "I was with Altis and his students for a month," she said, "and Altis lets his students marry and have families. Force babies have this sort of—this kind of—" She wiggled her fingers by her head. "Like an echo. But I didn't think—not you."

It was the "not you" that did it, the mingled awe and surprise. Padmé leaned forward and grasped Ahsoka's hands; she clutched them so tightly her own fingers hurt. Ahsoka's breath started, and Padmé eased her grip or tried to.

"Please," she said, "please, don't—if they learn of it, Anakin—they'll make him a master soon—" And her career—Naboo was so conservative; to wed a Jedi in secrecy— That fell out of her, too, awful and selfish, it had to be such a thing, but she could not return to the mountains of Naboo when she'd so much still to do, so much else she wanted to see through. Padmé's hands fell away. Serenity washed over her again.

Ahsoka turned her hands over and caught Padmé. Her fingers encircled Padmé's wrists. All the weight of all the worlds was in Ahsoka's hands. That was how it seemed to Padmé, as if she were untethered and floating into the sky and Ahsoka were a stone. Ahsoka's hands were cool, her fingers very long. She lowered her eyes.

"I'm not a Jedi," said Ahsoka. She said it in a worn voice. The Jedi hadn't trusted Ahsoka, but Padmé, volunteering to represent her before the court, had; Anakin had trusted her.

"I'm sorry," Padmé said, clutching Ahsoka, "I know you wouldn't tell, I do—but it's been so long—"

She would retain her composure, Padmé thought. The secret would have come out sooner or later. Ahsoka was only a girl; and Padmé collapsed against her. Ahsoka held her there. She was just a child.

"How long?"

Padmé closed her eyes. She was trembling.

"Before the war," she said. "After Geonosis."

"The entire time," said Ahsoka. "And he never told me. I can't believe he never told me. I was his padawan, and he never told me—"

"We didn't tell anyone. We couldn't. Our duties," said Padmé, "before all else," and she laughed, thinking of the two years of secrets and lies and here she was lying again, talking of duty as if she hadn't forsaken hers the moment she told Anakin she would marry him. Did she make a mistake? The river keeps flowing, she thought. Ahsoka rubbed the bony nubs on the outsides of Padmé's wrists with her thumbs. Was this how Jobal had felt when Padmé tended to her cut hand in the kitchen?

At the doorway, C3PO said, "Oh, dear! Mistress Senator! Are you all right?"

"She's fine, Threep," Ahsoka called to him. "Did you get the water? Bring it over here." And as Padmé made to sit up—to push away and push down everything, lock it up again so she would not break, she would not—Ahsoka hugged her fiercely once and whispered, "I won't tell anyone. I promise."

"Thank you," said Padmé, and she squeezed Ahsoka's hand; she clutched it; she let Ahsoka go. Now someone knows, Padmé thought; and it was relief that flooded her chest, not fear. Someone knew. She could breathe again. She did, as C3PO poured Padmé a glass of water and Ahsoka said, lightly as only a young person could,

"I can't believe you never told me. When I see Mister Skyguy again, I'm going to pop him on the nose."

Padmé looked at her and she could say it now. She could. You don't have to pretend as if you don't know, she thought.

"He misses you, Ahsoka," said Padmé.

"He'd better," said Ahsoka, but she was smiling, not shyly at all but pleased like a child hearing she was loved.

"Here, Mistress Senator," said C3PO. He pressed the cold glass into Padmé's hand.

"Thank you, C3PO," she said, and she found she too was smiling.

What a difference it makes, she thought, to know I'm not alone; and though she could not know what Ahsoka thought or felt, she suspected—she felt—she did know, somehow, as if she had always known, that Ahsoka thought the same. It wouldn't hold. For the moment, it was enough.

Ahsoka said, "More fizzy juice. Please."


The only persons with the authority to enter the apartment, without either an escort or being allowed in by someone already inside, were Anakin and Padmé. Naturally: she was a senator, after all. Already she had lived through two assassination attempts; security was paramount. So she'd no other expectations when the balcony doors opened. She was curled up on the sofa with a glass of juice and her datapad, having meant to reread the proposal to tighten regulation of the interstellar food trade. Instead, Padmé had begun to doze; dozing, she had slept.

The doors, opening, whispered against the stone floor. At first she thought it part of a dream; Anakin, too. He took the datapad from the table and sat down on the corner, near enough so his knee brushed her arm where it dangled off the sofa. It had to be a dream, she thought; he'd been called away and he wouldn't be home again, not for long, lonely months. Perhaps that had been the dream. Anakin traced her jaw with a finger. The leather was warm from his skin and it smelled as leather did but also as Anakin did, drily and distantly sun-burnt.

She smiled up at him. His hair was a mess, a tangled sort of dark halo. He'd such fair hair once, but she liked it brown; she liked the little secret veins of gold that peeked out every now and then. She had been very near to sleep after all.

"Oh," Padmé said, covering his hand on her cheek, "you're home. Was I expecting you?" She couldn't remember.

"You weren't there," he said. His hand slipped out from under her fingers. He meant to sweep the curls from her eyes, and he did so, his fingertips tickling her brow. "I looked for you all over the hangar. I would have been home sooner if I'd known you weren't going to come."

She yawned and stretched her arm up, up and then back over the arm of the sofa. She'd a knot in her neck and another at the small of her back, where she'd twisted so her legs were out flat, knees up, and her shoulders turned so she slept on her side. He'd the datapad in hand, rested on his thigh.

"You know I can't always greet you. Someone will notice I'm there to see you, sooner or later, and then they'll begin asking questions."

"Let them try," said Anakin darkly.

Sleep grimed her eyes; she rubbed the grit out as she struggled upright. "What time is it?"

"Late," he said, shrugging. "You shouldn't sleep out here. You'll get cold and then you'll get sick—"

"It isn't cold in here." She pinched the nearest of his knees, tugging at his trouser leg. "How did the mission go?"

"Well enough. Boring," Anakin admitted. Then he smiled; it was the wolfish smile close to a smirk. "Though we did have some trouble near the rendezvous. I took care of that. If I'd someone useful with me, it would have gone a little more quickly."

"If only you could have had more fun," Padmé teased. "I'm sorry you didn't have as much excitement as you would have liked."

"I suppose you'll have to make up for it," he said, dipping low.

His hands braced, one on the sofa's arm and the other at her shoulder. She slid her hand up his loose, belled sleeve to clasp his elbow. His eyes had closed; she watched him. Kissing, once, had been such a furtive, hot thing. Now his fingers curled so when he stroked her arm, his bared nails slipped smoothly over her skin. Padmé knew his mouth very well; when the war was over she would know it better. She breathed across his lips and Anakin turned his head; his mouth opened to her; his unruly, dark hair brushed her throat. He'd so many old freckles around his eyes, and she was forever memorizing them. When the war was over, would they know how to live with one another? He'd worn his boots inside again. The stones could be cleaned easily, but she did want to lay down some textiles from Theed. The domesticity of the thought burst like a warm bubble in her chest.

Padmé wrapped her arms around the back of his neck and pulled him toward her. He slid off the table and came to sit beside her, there on the very edge of the sofa; the hand at her arm dropped to her hip; he snuck that hand back behind her waist. The arrangement would not sustain, too precariously were they set, but she twisted her fingers in his hair and drew him down anyway so that his boot groaned as it ground along the stone floor. His eyelids flickered; she did not look away. Anakin engulfed her. He clutched her; he wound his arms around her; his breath stuttered while she kissed his lower lip, drawing it between her own lips. The gloved, artificial hand on her backside settled firmly.

She let his mouth go, at last. Anakin chased after her. The mess of his hair blocked out nearly all the light; in the shadow he cast, only Padmé remained. He kissed her cheek, the side of her nose, the corner of her eye nearest to her nose and then the corner on the outside. The lights glimmered, peering now and then through his hair. She carded her fingers through the mess, and he drew in a hard breath when she pulled a knot out.

"Let's go," he said. He caught her up in another kiss, and Padmé set her hand high on his chest. Her thumb fit to the notch in his clavicle; she pushed him back.

"Padmé—"

"We need to talk."

His jaw set, mulish; but he relented. His hands slipped from her. He leaned back, still just barely on the sofa.

"All right," he said. "What about?" He touched her throat, one finger again, following the column. "Can't it wait?"

"No," Padmé told him. She drew away, so that she might sit up truly, her back to the sofa's arm. The space so made between them was insubstantial. Even had they been in separate rooms, it would feel so. Hadn't she only just thought how comfortable they were now? Seeking distance enough to marshal her thoughts proved that well wrong. There was a consumptive intensity to the way he ran his fingers over her shoulder, and though her skin pricked, she still could not say if it frightened her.

"I saw Ahsoka," she said.

The petting stopped. He met her gaze. His hand, slowly, closed about her arm; then he drew his hand from her; he began, remotely, to close off, his expression blanking.

"You did?" His brow knotted. "When?"

"Two days ago," Padmé told him. "She came to see me here."

"She didn't—" Anakin compressed his lips. His fingers flexed; he made fists and then relaxed and then made fists again. "She didn't speak to me."

Padmé took his hand. He let her, unwilling.

"She's afraid you're ashamed of her."

"She—" He turned on Padmé. "How could she think that? She's my padawan, I could never—"

"That," said Padmé, "is what I told Ahsoka." Gently she forced his fingers out flat so she could run hers up the length of his palm. "How many times have you complained about Obi-Wan to me?"

"That's different. He's—"

"Your master."

"I'm a knight now. Obi-Wan is no longer my master."

"And Ahsoka isn't your padawan."

Anakin looked away from her. The tendon in his wrist stood out sharply.

"I told her to call you," said Padmé. "That you miss her, and there's no reason why you shouldn't speak with each other."

"She's left the order," he said to the far wall. "Any attachment I had to her—"

"Is a good thing." Padmé clasped his wrist. "Anakin. Look at me. You've already made a decision that goes against the Jedi's laws—"

"It isn't really a law." He did look at her then, sidelong with his eyelids nearly down. "It's more of a—enforced guideline."

Padmé sighed. "I don't want to debate moral semantics. I just want you to know that she misses you as much as you miss her."

Stubbornly, Anakin said, "She hasn't called me. If she needed me—"

"You always wait for someone else to start something," Padmé said, exasperated, "but don't you see that for Ahsoka, it's just as hard—"

"I don't wait," he said, "I don't—you make it sound like I'm, like I'm indecisive—"

"She's so much like you as it is—"

"And is that a bad thing? Is that wrong?"

"I'm not saying it is," Padmé argued, "but if you find it difficult to reach out to her, then maybe it's true that she has trouble reaching out to you."

"She's never had trouble before," Anakin snapped. "She was always very clear with me about what she felt and wanted—"

"She's a teenager, Anakin."

"She's a Jedi!" The muscles in his cheeks worked. His mouth screwed up and then flattened, but the tension around his nose lingered.

"She was a Jedi," Padmé corrected him. "She isn't now. You can't expect her to know what to say to you when you've stayed with the order. She feels that the Jedi betrayed her."

"I'm not the council. I didn't betray her," Anakin said, "I believed in her. I trusted her. I found her so that I could clear her name—"

"And then she left anyway," said Padmé.

He stared at Padmé; fixedly, she knew, and with growing anger. She'd cut too deeply, too precisely. It was a skill politics had honed in her, to understand a person and to know how and where to push at them. Be kind, she thought. Be kind. Padmé ran her hand up his wrist and down again.

"She didn't leave because of you."

"She didn't stay for me either," he said.

"I didn't tell you this because I wanted to argue with you about it."

"I'm not a child." He took his hand from her. "Don't talk down to me—"

"I'm not talking down to you!" Padmé said. "If you would just listen to me!"

"I am listening!"

"So stop arguing with me," she snapped. "I don't know why you are arguing with me."

Anakin rubbed at his closed eyes, thumb at the left and his fingers massaging the right. "I'm not arguing with you; I don't want to argue with you. I just want to know why Ahsoka would go to you before she would come to speak with me."

"Because you're still a Jedi."

"And what's wrong with that?" he asked, accusatory. "That I've decided to stay with the order instead of leaving?"

"Nothing is wrong with it." She cast about. "If you feel guilty—"

He was quick to cut her off at that.

"I don't feel guilty. This is my life. I've made the choices I wanted to make for myself."

"But it isn't Ahsoka's life," Padmé said, struggling with her own rising temper, "not anymore. She made a choice to leave the order, for herself, and now she's worried that you don't want to speak to her."

Anakin rose off the sofa. "How could she think that? Why wouldn't she trust me?" Pacing, he spun on his heel. His hair flared out; his jacket, unbuttoned, hung loosely around his chest.

"Maybe because she's afraid you'd act like you are right now!" Padmé said, and Anakin laughed furiously. "She looks up to you, Anakin. She wants your approval. You're like a—" She cast about; it wasn't the right word for it, but she didn't know how else to put it to him so he'd understand: "Anakin, you're like a father to her. She's afraid that you'll be disappointed in her."

He turned his face away.

"She should trust me," he said.

"You should trust her," said Padmé. "Like you did before, when she was your student. You have to trust her. You must. Anakin. Look at me. Please. Anakin," Padmé said again as he finally, reluctantly, came back to her. "Anakin, she knows."

He understood immediately. The change washed over him, as thoroughly as a storming ocean might knock a man off his feet. In Anakin it manifested as a widening of the eyes, a little slack in the jaw, a sudden and terrible stillness in his shoulders, his bearing; the set of his hips. He took a step toward Padmé, a single, abbreviated step. His heel clicked lightly on the stone. The remaining five steps of such a similar length he took in two strides and then Anakin was down on his knee beside the sofa, between Padmé's knees; he was reaching up to cup her face.

Urgently he asked her, "What did you tell her?"

Padmé remained as she was beneath his hands: collected now, unmoving.

"Nothing, at first. She found it out on her own."

"How?" Anakin's hands fluttered; he could not stop touching her, first her face, then her arms, her belly once and fleetingly. "How did she find it out? We were careful—" That, too, he said as a question.

"She felt the baby," Padmé said. She lowered her eyes. Dreamlike, she too touched the slope of her abdomen, where nothing lived and yet something was growing, as had happened so many times before and would again, a thing so immensely ordinary that nevertheless struck her as unbelievable. "It isn't really even alive yet, but I suppose those things—" Padmé colored slightly; this was a Jedi's consideration and not hers, and she'd never really bothered to learn the biological roots of the faith. Haltingly she said, "The… midichlorians. They're there. Ahsoka sensed them, somehow. She thought it was you until. You're the Jedi," she half-joked, but it was weak.

Anakin settled his palm on Padmé's gut; the heel of his hand covered her navel. He was fixated on that spot of contact now. Padmé strained and yet she could feel nothing; she sensed nothing, no more than the warmth of his hand through her dressing gown. It didn't live, not yet, whatever the child would be; it was, now, in the early days of the second month, little more than an expanding bundle of nerves, twitching and forming small connections as a rudimentary brain developed.

"Already," he said, and that was another question. His gaze rose; another.

"She won't tell," Padmé said. "Ahsoka promised me she would keep the secret. So you see, we have to trust her."

His hand migrated up to the side of her breast; from there, to her arm.

"Ahsoka always keeps her word," Anakin said slowly. "And it isn't visible yet."

Padmé thought to sweep the tangled hair back from his brow, to tuck it behind his ear if she could. She kept her hands in her lap.

"The pregnancy will show," Padmé said.

"Not yet. Not for a few more months," Anakin said, "that's what the journals say."

Of course Anakin had looked into it on his own. They'd talked, briefly, of what to expect, in hushed words together; but it had been another thing they let rest silently between them, for fear that to speak of it would disturb it. A silly superstition, she saw now.

"There are holos of my mother," said Padmé, "and my sister when she was pregnant, and my grandmothers. My family does not have—" She wetted her lip, a childish gesture she found humiliating as soon as her tongue passed the corner of her mouth. "A history of discreet pregnancies. If we are very lucky, the baby won't show until the end of the fourth month. But it's likely that I'll—grow by the start of next month."

Anakin was shaking his head. "The journals say, for a first time mother, it's not like that."

"The journals can say whatever they want." Padmé forced her hands out flat. She'd begun pulling the fabric of her gown into thick creases. "And maybe that's true for most pregnancies, but I don't think it will be true for ours. I think," she said, very carefully, "that I should go into seclusion before the end of the second trimester."

"No," Anakin said; he began to stand. He was wild; she'd known that since that awful second trip to Tatooine; now as he rose once more with his hair like a storm cloud around his head, she saw it ever more clearly. And yet even as his ire struck, neatly as the first spark that set off a wildfire, Padmé found she was calming; she was cooling; she felt like a lake on a hot summer day without a breeze, still and uncaring.

"It's for the best," she forged on. "We have to think of our careers. A scandal might hurt my standing in the senate, but it will destroy your place with the Jedi."

"I don't care," he said quickly, "the council is full of fools and old men, and whatever they think—"

"But we must be reasonable about this. We both agreed that we would have to keep the marriage a secret—"

"We never agreed anything about the baby—"

She held steady as his voice rose; he deepened with it.

"We understood that the agreement would cover it."

"I understood no such thing," Anakin said. "You're assuming that we agreed on something when we didn't even talk about it—"

"When we decided to try for the baby," Padmé countered, "I said that we would have to keep it to ourselves, and you agreed with me, you said that was the right decision—"

"Then, I said that then, I never said that we should keep it secret always—"

"And when I told you that Ahsoka knew," she challenged him, "I saw your face, I know that you were afraid—"

"Of what Ahsoka might think of me!" he said.

"And if the Jedi find out," Padmé said. "If they know that you married in secret, that you are going to be a father—"

"Master Ki-Adi-Mundi had a family," Anakin said lowly, "he had five wives, Padmé, five, and the Jedi Order gave him dispensation for this, and all I want is to be married to you, to have my family, with you—"

"Well, I'm glad you don't want to marry anyone else," Padmé said, half-laughing and knowing it unkind, "but that doesn't change the fact that if they find out now, then you will never have the opportunity to become a master!"

"I don't want to be a master!" Anakin shouted.

Padmé caught the confession as she would a blow. The back of the sofa held her straight. His hair was wild, yes, and his voice rough, but his eyes, shining, were intent; he meant it, she realized.

"Of course you do," Padmé said, struggling with this. "It's what you've wanted all your life—"

"You're what I've wanted!" Anakin ran his hands back through his hair. "And maybe—yes, I want the recognition, I want them to, to stop looking at me like they're just waiting for me to fail—"

"That isn't true. That isn't how they look at you. Obi-Wan respects you; they all do. They took you in—"

His teeth showed. "They took me from my mother—"

"Everything you've worked for!" She threw her hands out, beseeching. "You'll become a master—they'll ask you to the council—"

"I don't want to be on the council!" Again he raked at his hair; he tore at it. "I don't want to be a master on the council, not when they demand these, these stupid things from the Jedi—"

"That doesn't mean you can run away from it," she said. "I disagreed with the chancellor, but I didn't quit the senate just because I found his politics repulsive."

"The chancellor is dead," Anakin said, "so you might show some respect for him now at the very least—"

She laughed again, crueler now than before, and cast her gaze up to the ceiling. Respect! As if that was what she lacked!

"And I'm not running away from anything," he said fiercely. "I'm allowed to decide my own fate, and maybe I don't want it to be with the Jedi, on their sacred council!"

"And what will you do instead?" she demanded of him. "Have you thought any of it through? If you leave the Jedi, where will you go? What life will you live?"

"I'll go with you," Anakin said. His hands dropped before him, his palms to her. His back was curved, his neck a muted arc leaning to the side. He looked as if he might fall over. "I'll just live—with you. That's all I want. That's all I've ever wanted. Even before I met you, that's what I used to dream of, I think."

Padmé looked up at him, her wild desert boy, and he wasn't a boy at all anymore; he hadn't been a boy for years. When she spoke, she did so with such aching slowness, but she did not want her voice to break; she did not want him to hear it in her, the fear sown deep.

"And if that was all you had," she said. She looked at him and then away, because she could not bear to see him looking back at her so. "If everything you had—if that was only me—would you be happy?" Padmé made herself turn to him. She would not close her eyes. Her throat hurt terribly. "Would you? Could you be happy, with just the two of us, and no missions, no grand adventures, no—quests to undertake for the good of the people?"

"Yes," said Anakin.

And once more she laughed, but the edge of it cut her instead. Padmé covered her eyes with her hand. She heard his jacket rustle as he moved closer to her.

"Could you? Can you promise," she said, "that you would never look at me and hate me for taking you away from the Jedi, for trapping you in some quiet, little life?" She lowered her hand to her mouth; she let her hand fall entirely. Anakin was on his knees before her; he was reaching for her. "You can't," she said before he could answer her. "You can't promise me that. I couldn't promise you, if I lost my career with the senate, that I wouldn't hold it against you."

He flinched. His hand, near to her wrist, hesitated.

"So you see," Padmé said, without triumph, "it's for the best if I go into seclusion in a few months. I'll go back to Naboo, and you will stay here."

His fingertips settled on the side of her knee. She pressed her lips together at the touch. Kneeling, Anakin lifted his face to her. I was queen once, she thought. He'd knelt to her then, too, a little boy betrayed by a handmaiden who rose as a queen.

"I would be happy," said Anakin. "I would."

She closed her eyes. Evenly she said, "You'll be a master soon."

"Fuck the council," Anakin snarled, "I'm tired of lying like this."

It was your idea, she wanted to say. I told you, didn't I, that you would hate it, that it would eat at us both, that our responsibilities demanded distance between us that could never allow for love: but she had come to him after Geonosis; she had been the one to kneel beside his medical cot and hold his hand and say, "Yes."

"Do you think I enjoy it?" Padmé asked, too worn for disguise.

Anakin bowed his head. His brow pressed against her knee.

"What do you want from me?" he asked her, and he was worn as well.

She bent over his head. Her hands cloaked his nape. Her hair, now, made a curtain, and she felt how the breath shuddered through him.

"I want you to be happy," Padmé admitted, very quietly. "I want our child to be safe. I want this damned war to be over, and I want you to come home, and I—want you not to regret it. That day when you married me by the lake."

He reached back, grasping her wrist in his hand. His thumb was hard along the inside of her arm.

"I won't regret it. I'll never regret it."

She wanted very much to believe him; but the force was alien to her, and when she looked to the future she saw nothing at all. Anakin slipped his hand slowly up her arm.

"Do you regret it?" he asked her.

Padmé turned so her cheek rested on top of his head. The tangled ends of his hair caught on her lips; they tickled her ear.

"No," she said. "I don't regret it."

And Anakin, perhaps he saw something she could not: he sighed and took her hand from his nape to kiss the backs of her fingers, and when she made to pet his cheek with her fingernails, he tipped his face up so she might kiss him instead. She did kiss him then, gently on his harsh mouth. Anakin breathed out again, warm and deep. He said, "I'm sorry."

Padmé, caressing the long edge of his cheekbone, said, "So am I," and brushed her lips across his scarred eyebrow. His eyelashes were dark; they veiled his eyes. She kissed his other eyebrow, and as she kissed him she smoothed the wrinkles from his forehead with her thumb. He let her do this, accepting every touch, and when she was done she framed his face between her hands.

"I love you," she said to him.

He'd always had such blue eyes. Lighter than his eyelashes, yes, but dark as water. Yet it was the sky of Tatooine she thought of when he looked up at her like so, that pale blue sky that stretched on without a spot of kindness. But you are kind, she thought of Anakin as she stroked his cheek again.

"I love you," he said. He reached for her. "Padmé," he called her; that was the name he'd known her by all these years, since the day they first met, before she'd stood up in that field and named herself Amidala. Padmé, so called, draped her arms over his shoulders and let Anakin lift her from the sofa, her legs slung over his arm and her fingers lacing at his nape. She loved him. She did, so much so at times she wished she'd never loved him at all. She wondered, as he carried her back to their bedroom, if he ever wished something like that too; and she wondered if loving was enough, if they could be happy. They'd been married for nearly three years and of those three years they had only lived together for a cumulative four months.

The bed was soft; it always was whether he was with her or not. Anakin bent to unlace his boots.

Padmé, alone on the bed, rose up onto her elbows. In the dark of the room, Anakin was a shadow, half-known and half-not.

"I want to be happy with you," she said to that shadow. "That's all I want."

He stood and kicked the second boot off. It thumped against the baseboard and fell away.

"We will be happy," he said, with such certainty.

The bed dipped. He climbed up beside her. In that absence of light she had nothing to go by but the nearness of his skin and the sound of his breath. On faith, she stretched her hands out, and she caught him. His shoulders curved; he sloped; he bent to her.

"Do you believe me?" he asked her.

His breath was warm and steady on her thigh; he was there in the dark with her. She swept her knuckles along his jaw.

"Yes," Padmé said.