Padmé had insisted on supplying the picnic, pointing out that there was no point in Aayla making extra work by submitting the cost of the picnic to the Temple as a mission expense so that the Senate would pay for it, when Padmé could pay for it out of the money the Senate paid her. Aayla is pretty sure there are significant differences in how exactly the money moves around in each option, but she did have to admit that it was one less bit of datawork for her to do later.
She arrives at the Coruscant Botanical Gardens first, and when she spots Padmé she exaggerates her movements slightly. Padmé Amidala's girlfriend Lyn, who works in the administration department of the RRM, does everything a little bigger and a little more honestly than Aayla Secura. Well, 'honest' was relative in this context, but where Aayla automatically mutes the expression of her emotions when she's in public, Lyn does nothing of the sort.
Padmé kisses her in greeting, and it's a testament to Quinlan's training that she doesn't freeze in surprise. At the beginning, Aayla had been the one to initiate the affection; she assumes Padmé has, if anything, been taught not to do any of that, as a public figure. Maybe that's why Padmé's blushing.
"Hi," Padmé says, and Aayla is very glad Quinlan can't see the look on her face because she suspects it is more adoring than she means it to be. Maybe Obi-Wan had a point—not about Padmé being untrustworthy, of course, but about… well, how pretend this is. She's tried to keep it separate, but as she's got more comfortable being Lyn, the lines have begun to blur.
Instead of releasing her complicated feelings about this into the Force, she neatly packs them away and hopes she never has to revisit them. It'll be fine.
Aayla's never been to the Botanic Gardens before. It has an admission fee (which she thinks defeats the point of a botanic garden, but it's not her area of expertise) and, while it's definitely more extensive than the gardens at the Temple, she's never felt the burning desire to go. Padmé, on the other hand, leads her confidently through the gates.
"I figured we could eat first and see more of the plants after," Padmé says, taking her hand. "There's a picnic area near the middle—we might not get one of the tables, but I brought a blanket for the grass."
"Sounds good to me," Aayla says. She closes her eyes for a moment, trusting Padmé to lead her and revels in the life all around her. Coruscant's upper levels have some flora, but the botanic garden almost feels like she's not on a planet composed of a giant city. The soft hum of plantlife drowns out the hubbub in the Force and in the quiet, Padmé is a bright spark beside her. When she opens her eyes, Padmé's looking at her almost in wonder, but before she can comment, Padmé turns away.
"This is one of the Naboo sections," Padmé says, nodding to her left. "The bush with the circular leaves is a bhansgrek. It doesn't look like anything special now, but you might have seen its flowers in paintings—it only blooms once every hundred years, so of course it's a popular subject for art. There are art historians that can date works from how it depicts a bhansgrek flower, because they can tell whether they're referencing a real life flower or just someone else's painting of one."
"How do they do that?"
"I don't know all the details, because I'm not an art historian, but we know when the flowers bloom—they do it all at once, no matter when you plant them—and every flower is slightly different. They look at the stripe pattern and know which bloom it is, so that automatically dates it to a particular century. And then I think it's a matter of looking at the mistakes that get replicated—if I paint a bhansgrek and I'm lucky enough to be able to do it while looking at the real thing, but then you come along a month later and copy off mine, you'll paint it slightly differently. And then people who are basing theirs on your copy will assume yours is accurate. As I said, I'm not an art historian, so you'll have to read a proper explanation. I can look up some publications for you."
For someone who doesn't know how it works, Padmé sure sounds like someone who does. It does feel a little beyond Aayla, though; the compulsory art history classes which focused on much broader trends were quite enough for her as a padawan.
"What does it look like?" Aayla asks. The only Naboo art she can bring to mind is the various paintings and sculptures in the Theed palace, which she didn't examine extensively. There must have been flowers, but she doesn't remember them.
"It has large purple and pink striped petals with hundreds of blue stamens inside that are as long as the heel of your hand to the tips of your fingers," Padmé says, using her hand to demonstrate. "It's traditional to embroider one on the first thing your baby wears, as a wish that they'll live to see the next hundred years."
"That's beautiful," Aayla says, the words feeling entirely inadequate.
They meander through the rest of the temperate Naboo section, Padmé pointing out the plants she knows something about. There's a plant with a spray of flowers each as small as Aayla's smallest fingernail in all the colours of the rainbow; a tall, narrow tree whose branches naturally create a perfect circle of foliage; and a moss that smells like a perfume Aayla's sure Padmé has worn before.
When they reach the picnic area, all the tables are taken, but there's a spot underneath a tree that allows patches of sunlight and patches of shade. The blanket Padmé pulls out is colour-coordinated with her dress; Aayla can't help but laugh, and at Padmé's questioning look she can only say, "It's very Naboo."
They set out the picnic—Padmé opens her bag to reveal a host of pockets dedicated to individual wine glasses and cheese knives and place settings. Aayla is pretty sure the only times she's been on picnics they haven't had any cutlery, just sandwiches and cakes and the cups common to travel kits that every Jedi kept at least one of.
Padmé makes up a full charcuterie board and pours them each a glass of wine. It is the furthest thing from a picnic that Aayla can imagine, but it is delicious.
"I brought feen cakes," Aayla says, loath to ruin the aesthetic Padmé has going but not wanting to forget to give them to her. "I couldn't work out how to stop the tops from cracking a little, though—they're not meant to do that."
"You made these?" Padmé asks, selecting one.
"I had a little help," Aayla admits. "I didn't expect some of the spices to be so difficult to get on Coruscant." She's never bothered making feen cakes before (there are bakeries that make them better), but she wanted… she wishes she could say that she was thinking of what Lyn Dira, Ryloth-born-and-raised, would bring to a picnic, but she wasn't. She chose the feen cakes because she wants something she made to bring Padmé joy.
Padmé takes a small bite and makes an approving noise. "It's delicious. Are feens naturally blue?"
"On the inside, yes. The skin is green, but you don't eat it."
As Padmé takes a second bite, there's a soft click and then a flash behind her, and she freezes. Aayla's hand goes to her hip on instinct, but after a moment Padmé relaxes and rolls her eyes.
"Paparazzi," she says. "Usually I have people to make them go away—I didn't even think about it."
Aayla glances to her left and there, trying to be inconspicuous behind a tree, is someone pointing a cam at them. She leans in close and murmurs, "Attention's what we want, isn't it?" before kissing her for the camera.
She probably does not, strictly, need to kiss Padmé as often as she does. Padmé hasn't expressed any discomfort, though—and even if this isn't real, the kissing certainly feels nice. When she goes to pull away, Padmé presses one more kiss to her lips, which answers whether Padmé is uncomfortable, she supposes. Hopefully the smile she can't keep off her face looks more like someone already comfortably in love and not like she's just been surprised.
When she absently licks her lips, they taste like feen cake.
They ignore the cams for the rest of the picnic. Aayla tells Padmé about various missions and misadventures that she can easily edit to make them sound like they're relevant to the RRM; while the changes she has to make to the stories make it impossible to forget her cover, it's easy to pretend there's no one else around.
Aayla has no idea how much time has passed by the time they finish the bottle of wine, but she's pleasantly buzzed and full of Naboo delicacies. Once they've packed up, they resume their tour of the galaxy's fauna. There's a whole section that's a set of enormous transparisteel tanks full of water and aquatic plants with a tunnel for visitors to walk through; Aayla's never seen the plants or the creatures that swim lazily between them before.
Padmé knows far less about these, naturally, but still has a few facts to contribute. She laughs when Aayla gasps in alarm at the emergence of a truly enormous fish from the underwater forest they're standing in front of, and Aayla elbows her, which only makes her laugh more. When the fish turns to go back the way it came, Aayla sees it's flat as a panna cake. This does nothing to settle her instinctive fear, but Padmé taking her hand and kissing the back of it while solemnly promising to protect her makes her insides fill with such warmth that she forgets the fish is there at all.
They emerge back into the open air and Aayla can see the gate in the distance as they complete the circuit around the gardens. Padmé is still holding her hand as they enter the Kashyyyk section, the sunlight dim as it filters through the trees.
"I should take you to the Room of a Thousand Fountains," Aayla says without thinking as they stand in front of a banyan, a gigantic tree whose buttress roots stretch almost as far as its canopy. She tries to salvage it with, "One of the Jedi helping with some negotiations we're doing says it's beautiful. I asked him and he says it doesn't actually have a thousand fountains, though." She'd asked Quinlan that soon after she'd arrived at the Temple, and had been bitterly disappointed at the answer.
"I'd like that," Padmé says, only a small raise of her eyebrows indicating that she's noticed Aayla's slip. Aayla hopes she's not made herself look entirely incompetent, though she certainly feels it. Serves her right for getting tipsy on the job.
When they part at the gates half an hour later, Padmé kisses her again and Aayla feels the ghost of the hand she'd rested on her shoulder all the way down to the lower levels, where she's stashed a change of clothes.
Galactic Gossip 13:4:2
PADMÉ AMIDALA SPOTTED AT BOTANIC GARDENS WITH GAL PAL
[Image: Padmé Amidala kissing her new gal pal Lyn Dira at Coruscant Botanic Gardens]
Padmé Amidala of Naboo, Senator for the Chommel Sector, has been seen around Coruscant being very cosy with her new gal pal Lyn Dira. The pair have been spotted across the Senate District over the last two weeks. Amidala, known for being very private about her personal life, didn't seem to care who saw them clutching paws or locking lips as they had a picnic on… [Read More]