"Are you an angel?"
The question was simple, but nine-year-old boys are not universally known for their complexity. He only asked the truth as he understood it because she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. In all the years of his life that followed, she would remain that one most precious and lovely thing in his eyes, his heart, his mind.
The space travelers talked, and he listened. No one took particular notice of slaves or children, and as it was his lot in life at that time to be both, he was doubly invisible. As he heard the stories, he imagined piloting to the stars, and sometimes he thought of meeting an angel.
And then she came.
She walked with grace and was nothing like anyone he had met on Tatooine. When she let him know she was just a lowly handmaiden and had traversed the galaxy with her queen, it only served to make him dream that much more because his angel was not so different from him after all. They both shared lives of servitude, and yet she was still able to travel the stars.
But she was not like him.
She was a queen, and he was a slave from one master to the next even if he no longer officially held the title of one. First it was the Hutts, then Watto, and then the Jedi. When he was no longer himself, his master was the Emperor. The only time in his entire life that Anakin was truly his own man was in his last few minutes before he became One with the Force.
But she had been his angel, and that didn't change when they were apart for ten years. It didn't change when she died, leaving him alone with the Dark Side of the Force as his cold companion. He'd been burned alive in hell and had remained, a conscience within a thin shell. She had left him and gone away because true angels never stay; their lives are transient and fleeting.
Though she had denied it, for him it was true. Padmé had always been his angel.