Disclaimer: I don't own Star Wars.
Spoilers: None.
Note: This one actually has a much stronger ROTS feel to it, and isn't directly connected to the Clone Wars show, but it is about Anakin's war experiences, and it seemed to fit better within this series than as a stand alone fic.
Anakin Skywalker
Padmé thinks he doesn't trust her, but that's not true.
She's always asking him questions about the war. She wants to know about his missions, the places he's been and the action he's seen, his thoughts, his feelings. She asks him specific questions and vague, and at first he tries to answer them, but he always stumbles and breaks against the wall of his words. There's an anger there that he doesn't entirely understand, and definitely doesn't want her to see.
And so it always ends with him kissing her, hard and deep, because that's something he can do. She always lets him, but when it's over she gets that sad faraway look in her eyes. "I wish you would trust me," she says. "Like you used to."
He always tells her the same thing. He does trust her, and nothing has changed (but everything has, hasn't it?), and he can see that she doesn't entirely believe him.
But what he knows, now, is sulfur-stink and blaster shot and bombs slicing through air with a whistle and fast-raining fire and little dead girls with missing feet, and those are realities, but they aren't words. There are no words anymore.
He thinks that language is just something people invent to keep reality at a distance, and he can't tell her, because the words are all meaningless.
And in the end it's really very simple. He loves her, but she wasn't there.