Padme didn't need Anakin. She couldn't. Not when he was away all the time. Not when she couldn't even depend on a secure connection to the holonet to comm him with. Not when, more often than not, it was him that needed her.
It wasn't fair, but the galaxy very often wasn't, and she was happy to be his rock, no matter what he decided to do. Even if he decided to remain in the Jedi Order.
But that didn't mean that the best part of Padme's entire month was waking to someone sitting at the end of the bed. In an instant, she was smiling wider than her nieces when they saw her coming home, and she waited, frozen.
Anakin was quiet, trying not to wake her, a useless endeavor, but she tried not to let him know that. He sighed, pulling off the squeaky leather gloves. A rustle of fabric informed her he was taking off his shirt. Two thumps meant his boots followed.
Slowly, he crawled across the mattress and he slipped under the covers, ending up just a hand width behind her.
Padme rolled back to close the distance, cuddling up to her husband. Tipping her head back to smile up at him.
"Fancy seeing you here." She said, her voice just a touch hoarse. It was the sort of corny thing that would have made her the butt of all jokes for hours with her handmaidens, and would have probably thrown her out of a few circles at the Senate, but with Anakin, there was nothing but love.
He didn't answer. He stared at the ceiling. Swallowed, and groaned, covering his face.
Padme sobered. "What is it?"
"Nothing." He muttered. "Nothing- just- usual business."
Padme raised herself up on her arms, more awake every moment. She started stroking his head, detangling the sweat curls. That was an unfortunate side effect of her husband, constant sweat. He was perpetually overheated, though he always claimed he was cold. Like some piece of the heat of Tatooine had been burned in him and refused to leave, no matter how other more sensibly heated places tried to cool him down.
She didn't say anything, just continued to stroke his hair. He'd speak when he was ready, and she'd answer him then, and there would be nothing but love.
"I really don't know what the Jedi Council's thinking these days." Anakin muttered.
Padme absently pulled a speck of dandruff from his head. "Hmm?"
"Our mission- we were going to the the-" he waved a hand vaguely, his eyes fluttering under her attention, "-Zygarrian slavers-"
Padme could almost feel the adrenaline hit her system. "They what?" She interrupted. "They sent you where? Did they even check with you first?"
"We were the only ones available." Anakin said, eyes shut, though his brow was wrinkled. "Me, Ahsoka, Obi-Wan. They had the brilliant idea of disguising Ahsoka as a slave to be bought."
She froze, her hand tangled in a knot in the back of his head where he slept. "She's fifteen."
"At least she's not in charge of a planet." Anakin joked without the punch behind it.
Sometimes Padme wondered how she's done it. She had been finishing her term as the Princess of Theed, desperation writing her dissertation to put up against the council at her father's college, and campaigning for the queenship. She hadn't even had handmaidens yet. She hadn't felt like a thirteen years old. Padme still didn't feel like she'd been thirteen then. Somehow her parents must have lied. Surely she'd been born five, or even ten years earlier. How could could Padme, thinking back of her younger self, feel so old, so wrung out?
"Well, I was a special sort of child." She countered smoothly, continuing the stroking.
Anakin squeezed open one eye, annoyed. "Ahsoka's special too."
"Never said she wasn't."
"The mission went wrong, and we ended up getting in a tight spot." Anakin continued shortly. Too lightly. "Couldn't contact the council, so they assumed everything was going smoothly. Obi-Wan was stuck in the mines, Rex was helping out best he could but- and I-" his eyes opened, and they dueled furiously with the ceiling, deciding what he could share with her. Sometimes Padme stared at that ceiling too, wondering what he thought while looking at it.
He turned away from her. "I had to play games with the queen." He said in a low voice.
Padme would have been a poor politician if she couldn't read past that. "Did you have to… do anything serious?" She asked quietly, setting her hand on his arm. "Anything I should know?"
Anakin was silent. He shifted a little, and she thought she heard him choking back a sob. "I- a lot of flirting. She touched me. She offered a couple times- I just- she had Ahsoka in a cage and I-" his voice was getting hoarser and hoarser, curling up smaller and smaller. "It wasn't anything like us. I swear to you- there was nothing- and I could barely get permission to even see Ahsoka. And she still wouldn't tell me where was Obi-Wan was. I'm sorry- I'm sorry- I hated it. Every minute." He curled into a tight ball, stealing almost all of the blankets, pressing his tear streaked face into them.
Padme watched him sob into the sheets, stroking his hair again and thinking and thinking and thinking.
"I love you Anakin." She said finally. "Always. I will always want you as my husbad but-" she bit her lip- "did you ever have sex?"
"No." Anakin whispered, and something inside her wilted with relief for hi.. "I think she could tell I didn't- didn't really want it. She wanted me to want her. But there was some- I'm sorry."
"You have nothing to apologize for." Padme promised. She grasped his warm calloused hands and pressed a kiss to his knuckles. "How's Ahsoka doing?"
"She's sleeping in our apartment. I headed out an hour after she fell asleep." He swallowed, uncurling into her arms a little. "I had to see you."
She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and chest and laid her head on his arm.
"I'm happy to be here." She murmured.
Some part of her wanted to march up to the Jedi council and scream at them all. Did they have no compassion? Did they have no sense? Dorme had been raped on Corellia while studying fashion, before she had ever met Padme, and yet Padme was always careful to never send her there unless Dorme promised her she could handle it.
"Ahsoka did well." Anakin suddenly muttered. "She was meditating when I saw her, mostly. She's been meditating a lot since then, spends hours in her room."
"Obi-Wan will be very proud." Padme murmured, turing to kiss the muscle of his arm, and nearly remembered the name of it, back when she had taken drawing classes and had been required to learn human anatomy, but it sank back into her brain before it quite formed on her tongue and she let it.
"She's been quiet. She hasn't been bothering the troops as much- doesn't chatter- she's just- quiet." Anakin was silent. "She won't use our bond like she used to. I can't- how am I supposed to help her? If she won't tell me anything?"
"She'll figure it out." Padme assured him. "She's smart, and she trusts you. She'll come when she's ready."
If Anakin hadn't just cried he would have groaned. "You mean I need to be patient." He muttered. He sat up a little, wrapping his arm around her and tucking her against his chest.
Padme closed her eyes and for a moment she let herself rest in the warmth of her husbands embrace. "You said it," she said in a low voice, "not me."
Anakin chuckled weakly. His mechanical hand in his lap twitched.
"You should take that off. While you can."
He raised it, closing it, letting each finger clink against the metal one by one. His eyes were cloudy, his mouth curled into a frown. Padme knew, withoit asking, he was think of thr day he'd lost it. It had only been two years. It seemed much, much longer. "She's better than I am." He said suddenly. "Less prideful. Force- you should see her in a duel, she's learning so fast- and she somehow keeps up with her classwork even when we're constantly on campaigns. She's-" he swallowed. "I'd give it another year, two, tops before she's ready to take the trials."
Padme was silent at that, and suddenly felt very old. "It wouldn't hurt to hold her back a few more years." She mentioned lightly. "Sometimes because our skills are ready doesn't mean our soul is."
But Anakin was already shaking his head. "I couldn't do that to her she's just- I just feel small, standing next to her." His eyes were getting misty again. "Smaller than a flea, or maybe it's just because I'm so far away from her and yet she still looks so big and I don't."
"I feel that way, sometimes." Padme said. "With my nieces."
Ryoo, the older sister, loved history, she already knew every detail of Nubian history and Padme's sister could hardly give her enough about other worlds. And she had her own planet in her head, Ryoo planet, which she made her own history for. One would think she was just making up on the spot, but she had it all planned. It was written down in her room. Maps, borders through the centuries. How the Monarchy became a Democracy, and when it joined the Republic. And Pooja- Pooja was already speaking three languages now, having picked up Gungan just from traveling with her mother to the market. She never stopped talking about what she wanted to be. A teacher, a doctor, a senator. Somehow Padme felt like she would do them all.
"I can almost feel my gray hair growing, looking at them." Padme said finally, smiling fondly.
"She's going to be the best of us. Of the Jedi." Anakin said so seriously for a moment Padme thought he'd seen it in a vision. "She's going- she's going to be so strong."
"And you will have helped her get there." Padme murmured, then reached up to kiss his cheek. It had been difficult, hearing Anakin stamer through a crackling comm that could barely sustain an audio call, that he wasn't leaving the Jedi order even after he'd become a knight so Obi-Wan could try to get on the council.
She hadn't understood it, not really, but she'd promised herself she'd support him, that she'd always be what he needed, even if it meant she could never need him. But once she'd met Ahsoka she'd known she was going to be the best thing that ever happened to Anakin. Including Padme herself.
"She'll be as famous as Master Yoda." She said lightly.
"And maybe by then I'll be reduced to the size of atoms by our children." Anakin said suddenly. "I can just see it, a little girl that I'll never win an argument with- not that I'm winning them now-"
"A boy who loves as much as you?" Padme suggested, her heart alight. She was only twenty eight. She was young, would be young for a while still, she should act like it. "Not that it matters what they're like."
"Oh they'll be spectacular." Anakin promised. "And I'll have to grit my teeth and love them anyways."
Padme giggled.
They dosed together, after that. But before an hour or more had barely passed before Anakin woke her again by slipping out of bed. He pressed a hot kiss to her forehead and muttered- "she's having a nightmare. I'll see if I can't slip over tomorrow while she has class."
Then he was gone, and Padme laid in her bed until the sun rose and Dorme came in to help her wash and style her hair while she went over the information of the day. Her handmaidens didn't mention the glove Anakin had forgotten on the end of the bed, or the scent of motor oil that trail after her husband. But they did quietly juggle her schedule so she could move her meetings to that evening, scrapping that party Bail wanted her at, so she would be available during class hours at the Jedi temple, and Dorme chose a hairstyle that was easy to take down and put back up in a hurry.
The door swished closed behind Padme, and she stood in the entry arch, watching her husband sit at the end of her couch, slumped over his knees.
Slowly she walked to him, stopping beside him, not behind him, so he'd know she was there, and began stroking his head.
She said nothing, waiting for him to speak. But she stroked and stroked until she'd long detangled his hair and dried it, and he was still quiet.
"It's not your fault." She whispered. It was all she dared say when she felt like sobbing herself. When she wanted to scream at a galaxy that could cut something so beautiful down so easily. How she wished just as much as Anakin that things, somehow, could have been different.
Anakin flinched, twitching away from her hand like it burned him. He stood. He walked to the kitchen, quickly, deliberately, each foot thumping against the floor like thunder.
He opened the cooler and pulled out the packaged spiced soup she always kept on hand when he was on Coruscant and ripped off the top, downing the cold stuff in one go. He threw the canister in the trash can and wiped his mouth on the back of his gloved hand.
"I'm going to join the council." He said darkly.
Padme was careful to let neither emotion nor facial expressions to change. "If that's what you want."
"Someone's got to change how things are running here." Anakin said, his mouth curling into a sneer. "Disconnected from the force, the lot of them. Even Obi-Wan admits it, and yet I can't stop. I never stop feeling it. It's always there- crawling under my skin- buzzing in my brain. May as well put it to use."
Sometimes Padme, dead to the force as she was, swore she could feel that power around him. She swore she could feel it now, clinging to her husband, winding around and through him, more a part of him than Padme would ever be.
She reached up to tuck a lock of hair behind his ear, wishing it would remove the shadow from his eyes. "If you need anything from me, just let me know."
"No." He said shortly, walking past her into the living room, pacing across the rug over the floor. "I can do it. Even if Ahsoka- didn't- even if I haven't raised an apprentice one of the kriffing things I do for them ought to count. I'm winning the battles, aren't I? I winning them when no one else can that should be enough for them. Shouldn't it? And then maybe we'll finally start to see some progress and then Ahsoka will- she'll-" he blinked rapidly, and he turned away, rubbing at his eyes furiously.
"Anakin, she'll figure it out. She'll come when she's ready."
"Yeah." He laughed a cruel laugh, turning on his heel to track the three meters back down the rug. "I just need to be patient."
"Yes." Padme said simply.
He froze in the middle of the rug, right over the vines that circled a flying bird. She wasn't sure what kind, it wasn't from her region of Naboo.
His shoulders trembled. He opened his mouth, and closed it. He clenched his fists.
"I need to go." He said suddenly. "Lots- of work. Now that's she's gone. Paperwork. Need to talk to Rex…"
He stalked past Padme, muttering until the door closed after him. She let him go. He loved her, he trusted her. He would talk about it when he was ready, and she would be there waiting.
