Getting the princess out of the palace was an undertaking and a fucking half. Anakin was fairly sure that she had never been anywhere anonymously in her entire life, given that she had reacted to his suggestion that she put on something more casual and perhaps leave the crown at home as if he had been speaking a foreign language she had never encountered before. Apparently, she had been told since birth that every single move she made was as a public representative of the royal family, or something.

"Look, I hate to repeat myself, but I'm trying to keep you safe," he said with barely restrained annoyance. "The point is that if you look like any other girl, it's highly likely that no one will look at us twice."

In the end, she put back on the jumpsuit she had been wearing earlier that morning, which at least had the advantage of being a particularly unimpressive shade of beige and not having any frills or ornaments, removed the tiara, and let her hair hang down loosely around her shoulders.

When she came out of her bedroom, she stopped in the doorway and raked her eyes over him from top to bottom.

"What about you?"

He looked down at himself in surprise. "What? What about me?"

"I know I'm not an expert on normal people, but I'm certain they don't wear armor and leather tunics." The princess's eyes traveled over him again, lingering for a moment on his chest and shoulders before they dropped down lower. "Or lightsabers on their belts."

It pained him to admit it, but she had a point. He had been dressing for war for so long—and had been around other people getting ready for battle, or coming from the battlefield, for so long—that the appropriateness of his own clothing hadn't even occurred to him.

Some bodyguard he was.

Anakin didn't respond verbally, as if somehow not saying aloud that she was right would make her easier to live with, but he reached up and lifted his cuirass over his head. He tossed it carelessly onto the loveseat and shook his head to force his hair out of eyes. Next he unhooked the strap of one pauldron, then the other, and threw them next to the cuirass. He had to take off his belt in order to remove his leather tunic, but he treated his lightsaber with much more care than he'd treated anything else.

After he had stripped off his protective outer tunic, he glanced up at Princess Cailee as he started to fasten his belt back around his red inner tunic.

"The lightsaber stays. We'll just have to hope that no random person on the sidewalk knows what it is."

She hummed. "Well, I guess you'll have to do. Although you're still going to stand out." She swept her gaze back up to his face. "How do you feel about masks?"

"What?" Anakin found himself asking again, his fingers pausing momentarily in confusion as he threaded the excess end of his belt through the loop meant to hold it in place.

"Nothing. Never mind." She looked down, probably to hide the faint flush covering her cheeks, although he had no idea why she was embarrassed.

The next obstacle to their little adventure came as Cailee took a right in the hangar and Anakin continued several more steps straight toward the speeder he had his eye on until he realized that she had veered off his intended course. She seemed to realize at the same moment that he hadn't followed her.

"My speeder is over there." She pointed in the direction of a row of large, shiny black speeders that would each clearly sit at least eight people.

"I figured." Out of the corner of his eye, Anakin could see a security guard notice them. He grabbed the princess by the wrist and tugged her in the other direction. "We're going to take this one."

It was impossible to tell whether she was more shocked by his manhandling or the rather nondescript speeder he was pulling her towards.

"But this one isn't for the family," protested the princess.

"Yes, I know, but it won't kill you to ride in a servant's speeder."

"Oh, no, that isn't what I—" Cailee was cut off by Anakin opening the door of the speeder and gently pushing her towards the passenger seat. She sat down stiffly and glared up at him. "What I meant was this only has two seats. Aren't we going to tell Commander Sindian we're leaving and pick up my guard detail?"

The genuine confusion coloring her face was enough to dampen Anakin's harshest reaction. He was frustrated at her continued insistence on not understanding how serious the situation was, but, honestly, he felt more than a little bad for her that her entire world was being upended. And he kind of hated being the one to have to pull the rug out from under her.

Anakin deliberately tried to soften the perpetually harsh expression he was sporting these days. "Princess, given that the assassins have access to the palace and detailed knowledge of your movements, it's possible that a member of the guard is one of them, or at least giving them information."

She looked like she was torn between arguing with him and crying. He sighed and closed the passenger door, then made his way around the back of the speeder to the other side. Upon sliding into the driver's seat, he immediately bent down to peer underneath the dash and reached out in the Force.

"But don't we need my guards?" Her voice was noticeably shaky. "I always have at least four guards plus a driver."

"No. They would just get in my way." Anakin glanced up from fiddling with the wires underneath the speeder's steering yoke. Cailee had turned halfway in her seat to watch him, and past the waterfall of blonde hair hanging over her shoulder, he could see out the window that the guard he had noticed earlier was making his way towards them. "Anyway, even if I didn't think a member of your security detail is trying to kill you—and I do—you can't exactly be anonymous with half a dozen men marching in formation around you."

"But…" she trailed off as the guard shouted from behind her.

"Hey, Jedi! What are you doing?"

Cailee turned to look at the man quickly approaching the passenger door, just as Anakin twisted the wires together and gave the speeder a final push through the Force. It came to life beneath them with a gentle, anticlimactic whir.

Anakin immediately turned his attention to the hangar door and lifted his left arm to force it upwards, using his right hand to jam the throttle forward at the same time. The speeder lurched and, after taking a few moments to react to his commands, accelerated out of the bay as quickly as it was able. Anakin thought that he might as well have put the princess on his back and run out the front door for all the good the speeder would do them. The door cleared the top of the vehicle by barely a foot, and he released it as soon as they had passed under it, letting it fall and cutting off the clamoring of the security guards they had left behind.

They made a sharp turn at high speed (or, well, what passed for high speed in this vehicle), which Anakin had to assist with a generous Force pull to keep the speeder on track. It was like trying to fly a damn cinder block. The princess screamed at a high enough pitch to make his right ear buzz with static.

"Are you insane?" she screeched.

They left the palace grounds via a gate that Anakin had to force open and then descended into the city. Anakin drove straight down the main boulevard for several clicks, his senses stretched out around them, but they didn't appear to have been followed. He supposed that the guard were not in a position to undertake a chase at a moment's notice, not even to catch a speeder that some great grandmothers could have outrun on foot.

Anakin turned onto a small, crowded side street, merged expertly into traffic, and slowed to the speed limit. Their speeder was nearly identical to at least eight others within his immediate field of vision, which justified his choice of vehicle. He glanced over to see his passenger watching him, white-faced and still gripping the door handle in a white-knuckled grip, even though they had slowed down.

"Did you steal this speeder?"

He thought for a moment that it was a rhetorical question, but from the expression on her face he quickly realized that she expected him to account for himself.

"Well, what did you think I was doing under the dash?" he asked incredulously.

"Oh, I'm sorry that I've never seen someone hotwire a speeder before," she said, her eyes narrowing into an all-out glare. "I thought you were just looking for… sabotage or, or a bomb or something. Because of what they did to my last speeder."

Anakin quirked up an eyebrow.

After a few moments, the princess let out an audible breath and slumped back against her seat. "And that's another reason why you wanted to take this random speeder instead of mine."

"Good, you're catching on." Anakin offered her a smile, which she responded to by pursing her full lips into a thin line. "Cailee, seriously, relax. Don't you own all of the speeders anyway?" He reached over to pat her knee as if he were praising a particularly bothersome dog. "Now, tell me how to get to this dress shop before I change my mind."

She did tell him and, after a couple of wrong turns, given that she had never actually driven herself there, they managed to find it. She kept the disapproving expression on her face the entire time. Anakin couldn't actually feel any particularly negative emotions from her, but he supposed it was the prerogative of teenagers to sulk over nothing. She didn't question him when he drove past a perfectly good open parking spot right in front of the shop and turned at the next corner to park further down the block, so he supposed that was progress. Whether it was progress towards her understanding his methods or merely towards her accepting that he was going to do things she didn't understand, he couldn't say. But it was progress either way.

Once they stepped onto the crowded sidewalk, she quickly dropped the sullen act and more or less plastered herself to his side. It was clear that she had never been anywhere without an armed escort or maybe even a red carpet, and had certainly never been in the middle of a mass of strangers packed tightly enough to brush shoulders as they passed.

Anakin did think that their attempt at anonymity had failed when they kept getting glances and occasional double takes on the short walk from the speeder to the dress shop, but the Force was silent regarding any danger.

"Relax," Cailee hissed. Anakin felt pressure around his mechanical wrist and glanced down to see her thin fingers wrapped around it. He hadn't even realized that his hand had drifted to the hilt of his lightsaber. "I don't think they recognize me. I think they're just shocked to see such an attractive couple."

An incredulous laugh escaped Anakin's throat before he could suppress it.

"I'm serious. And you're so tall that people can't help but notice you. I told you this would happen."

He snorted. "Yeah, it's my fault. Because you're so vertically challenged."

Fortunately, Anakin wrenched open the door to the shop before she had a chance to respond. He was more than relieved to put the topic to rest. Forever.

It isn't that he was unaware that people found him handsome; it was just that the concept made him uncomfortable. As awful as things had been as a slave working in Watto's shop, it had been a thousand times better than being a sex slave. Even at age nine, Anakin had been aware of how dangerous it was to be an attractive slave. Almost as soon as he had figured out what sex was, he had believed that he must have been the product of Gardulla the Hutt selling his mother to some man and that his mother had just said he didn't have a father to spare him that knowledge. (After over a decade of hearing all about his unprecedented Force power and being the Chosen One, and because he preferred her story to the idea that she had been raped, he was starting to come around to the possibility that maybe he was a child of the Force after all.) His mother had tried to guard him as much as she could, but he had not been entirely aware of his own attractiveness even back when he was nine. In retrospect, Anakin knew that if he had still been owned by Gardulla at that age, his body would already have been sold for years to perverts who liked young boys.

If Qui-Gon hadn't taken him away from Tatooine, chances were that by the time he had been fifteen or sixteen, even Watto would have been whoring him out to men and women who liked to fuck pretty young things. He still would have made Anakin fix things around the shop during the day, of course, but at night…

Cailee's melodious voice interrupted the downward spiral of this thoughts. "Aoife, it's so lovely to see you!"

The woman approaching them from the back of the store looked surprised, but from the way her eyes flitted around and finally landed on Anakin, he concluded it was because she had expected Cailee's usual four guards. She recovered quickly, turning her gaze and what Anakin thought was a clearly insincere smile towards the princess, and executed a curtsy.

"Your Royal Highness, it is a pleasure to see you, as always."

Given the warmth and familiarity of Cailee's greeting, Anakin expected the princess to give the woman permission to call her by name, but she did not.

She offered a smile and a tilt of her head in acknowledgement. "I do appreciate you accommodating me on short notice. I'm afraid that the more I look at the dress I had been planning to wear, the less I like it."

The two women began making their way towards the back, walking between mannequins dressed in elaborate ball gowns that reminded Anakin of the costumes Padmé (or her decoy) had worn when they first met. Failing anything else to do, Anakin trailed awkwardly behind them and sat as gently as he was able on a dainty chair next to the one Cailee had chosen.

What followed was several hours of pure torture.

Anakin wasn't sure that he had ever been so bored in his entire life, at least if he didn't count the cumulative months of his life he'd wasted trying to meditate. (And why would he count those for anything?) From how excited the princess had seemed about this shopping trip, Anakin had hoped it would be at least halfway interesting. Not that he didn't enjoy looking at a beautiful, well-formed woman as much as the next man, but he doubted he even would have been able to watch his own wife try on so many dresses without wanting to point his lightsaber at his own chest and ignite it.

There were long dresses and short dresses, flowy dresses and tight dresses, simple dresses and dresses covered in thousands of sparkling sequins. There were strapless dresses with sweetheart necklines, and dresses with jeweled straps and necklines that revealed half of her breasts and a good part of her stomach, and one dress with a bunch of fabric that gathered at the waist and fanned upwards in an elaborate sweep nearly to her chin.

Finally, when Anakin was just beginning to contemplate whether the Council would kick him out of the Order if he were to just get up, walk to his ship, and fly away, the princess caught his eye in the mirror she was facing.

"I think it's between these two. Do you like this one better or the last one?" she asked, and Anakin had to resist the urge to let his head loll against the back of the chair in despair. She caught the roll of his eyes and turned to face him, her hands on her hips. "Don't give me that, Skywalker. You're the one who said I couldn't bring Leeya."

Anakin was really beginning to hate it when she had a point.

"That one," he decided.

Cailee frowned and turned back to the mirror to look at herself again. She was wearing a fitted champagne-colored dress that was tight at the waist and accentuated the curves of her breasts and hips while covering almost every inch of her. It was lightly sequined in a pattern that crisscrossed her body, with feathers artfully arranged around the bottom of the skirt and forming short sleeves that just covered the caps of her shoulders.

"Are you sure it isn't too much?"

"Princess, the other one you like is purple and has about ten thousand gemstones and an honest-to-god train. I think too much might just be your style."

She whipped back around to face him, her expression caught somewhere between indignation and concern, but Anakin didn't hear what she said. All of his senses had dulled suddenly to the world around him and sharpened intently on the oppressive feeling in the Force. He made a decision and moved more quickly than his conscious mind was able to register, lifting his hand and using the Force to yank Cailee off the pedestal she was standing on and towards him as he met her halfway.

She collided with his chest with a bone-jarring thud, and he immediately shoved her to the ground. They landed heavily with the princess's pained gasp in his ear as his full weight pressed her into the plush carpet, just before the explosion drowned out all other noise. Anakin managed to throw up a Force barrier, fueled entirely by instinct and a spike of adrenaline, to keep them from being incinerated in the initial blast. He could still feel the searing heat at his back as the building went up in flames around them. The fire seemed to get more intense with each passing second as his barrier strained from the onslaught. But more importantly, he could feel the princess pressing her face into his neck to shield herself from the heat, and he could feel her body trembling and sense her abject terror.

If his barrier didn't hold, they were going to burn to death.

Or maybe he was going to burn to death and she'd be trapped alive beneath his smoldering corpse until she suffocated from the smoke.

With a shuddering exhale, Anakin let every shred of self-control he had ever cultivated fall away, then inhaled as deeply as he was able and reached into the churning, luminous supernova that he could always feel but had always been too frightened to access completely.

Anakin's body faded away. All that was left was the Force. It didn't just flow in him and around him and through him, although it did all of those things, but it was him. He was the Force. The barrier was an extension of himself, and he would no more let it fail than he would stop his own heart from beating.

Cailee sobbed against his throat. He could feel her tears tickling his skin and, suddenly, he was aware again of the hot air pressing in around them and the sweat trickling down his back and the wet hair plastered to his head and face.

He lifted his head to look around and quickly realized that bright flames were licking up the walls and consuming the hundreds of gowns on the racks surrounding them. Guided by the Force, he could just make out a crater a few feet away from them, in the direction where the dressing room where Cailee had changed dresses used to be. The remaining floor was starting to slough away into the growing hole. The walls on the side and front of the building were collapsing, and he could feel debris from the ceiling battering against his Force barrier with increasing frequency.

He forced himself up to his knees and pulled the princess into a sitting position in front of him. Her face was streaked with tears and shiny with sweat, her hair damp and tangled around her shoulders.

"We have to get out of here!" he shouted and instantly realized that he could barely hear himself.

There was a ringing in his ears and, underneath that, the dull wooshing and crackling and snapping of the fire.

Cailee appeared to be having the same problem, as she was staring at his mouth with a horrified look on her face, her pupils blown so wide that he could barely make out a ring of blue around them. He could also see her lips moving, but he couldn't make out her voice either, which he had to agree was a frightening prospect.

Anakin staggered to his feet, bodily lifting the princess into his arms rather than try to communicate further. He couldn't risk that they would be separated, or that she would yell out in pain or warning, when he wouldn't be able to hear her. Apparently she was perfectly alright with it, because she immediately wound her arms around his neck and hid her face in his shoulder.

If he had been less strong in the Force, he was sure that they never would have made it. Even with the awesome, massive connection to the Force that he singularly possessed, which he had completely opened for perhaps the first time in his life, by the time he stumbled out the gap where the front door used to be and onto the sidewalk, he was panting from the effort of keeping the shield up, enhancing his strength and balance to carry the princess over the rubble, and using the Force to guide himself through the maze of flames and falling debris to find the way out. The thought flittered across his mind that he had a newfound respect for Master Yoda, if this is what he had to go through every time he used the Force to enhance his aging body for training or combat.

Outside was pure chaos.

Anakin had to step over several bodies and severed body parts on the sidewalk to reach the curb, and he was doubly glad that Cailee still had her eyes closed and her face burrowed as deeply into his tunic as was humanly possible. The street was full of emergency vehicles, and police, medics, and firefighters were milling about with varying levels of urgency or confusion, some of them clearly trying to push the crowd further down the street away from the site of the explosion.

Anakin barely paid attention to any of them, other than to note somewhere in the back of his mind how any of them who stood gaping at them instead of getting out of the way were violently knocked back as they came into contact with his Force barrier.

On the other side of the street, behind an ambulance that blocked any view of what used to be the storefront or the bodies littering the sidewalk, he found a speeder that was relatively clear of dust or debris and set the princess down on its hood.

She refused to unlock her arms from around his neck, at first, until he managed to catch her eyes with his and offer whatever calming influence he was able through the Force. He reached up with his right hand and gently pried her arm away, allowing her to instead slide her hand down his arm and grasp his hand with hers. That done, he was finally able to let himself collapse next to her, sprawled across the hood of the speeder and leaning back against the windscreen to allow the ever-present rain to wash the sweat off his face and out of his hair.

It had been extremely easy in a physical sense, but draining emotionally and mentally, to allow his connection to the Force to open fully. It turned out that putting it back in the box presented the opposite problem: Anakin was desperate to do it, but it seemed physically impossible.

The best he could do was finally, mercifully, to allow the Force barrier to fall.

He experienced an immediate sense of relief that left him gasping for air. It felt like, without him realizing it, his chest had been constricted by the weight of keeping the shield up and he had been unable to take in a full breath of air until that moment.

As if they had timed it perfectly to annoy him the most—and because why wouldn't they—the palace guard chose that moment to descend on them. The only silver lining was that his ears hadn't recovered enough to be able to clearly hear their shouts and screams.

They made their point pretty clear by pointing high-powered blasters directly at his face, though.

Unfortunately for them, the princess clearly had absolutely no intention of leaving Anakin's side, and Anakin had absolutely no intention of letting them take her. He was tired, he was stressed, he had nearly been blown up, he couldn't hear worth a shit, his connection to the Force was still so overwhelming that he couldn't seem to marshal it to the purpose of reading their intentions, he had just endured hours of dress shopping, and he was more than a little suspicious that the guys in their prissy scarlet coats might be the very people who had tried to kill the princess. And, by extension, Anakin.

"What are you doing?" the princess yelled, nearly hysterically, from less than two feet away from him. To Anakin, it sounded like he was several feet under water and she was standing on the deck yelling across the surface of the pool. "Don't shoot him! Put those away!"

The guards' plan to take Cailee and to arrest him or kill him or whatever they wanted to do would never have worked, not even if Anakin had been at his most magnanimous. But all in all, circumstances being what they were, he felt barely sane in that moment.

Anakin had never realized how highly he depended on Force-enhanced hearing and his general ability to sense people in the Force, until both of those senses were compromised. A guard he hadn't noticed before approached from somewhere behind them and grabbed Cailee's arm in an effort to physically remove her from Anakin's side.

She reacted like a feral tooka, snarling and shrieking and scratching at the guard who held her.

Perhaps it would have been better had she kept hold of Anakin's hand rather than releasing it to drag her fingernails in a vicious swipe across the man's face, but, then again, maybe not. If Anakin had kept hold of her with his unyielding mechanical hand, maybe he would have accidentally broken her wrist or dislocated her shoulder in the struggle.

Anakin used the Force to move faster than normal human eyes could follow, leaping off the hood of the speeder and calling his lightsaber into his hand before he landed next to the struggling pair. Cailee was in the way of any clear strike he could have made against the guard, especially given her unpredictable twisting and bucking in the man's grasp.

Anakin lifted his left hand and began to squeeze.

Had he been feeling generous, he may have choked the man just enough to startle him and make him loosen his grip on Cailee so that Anakin could pull her to him with the Force. But he did not feel remotely kind or forgiving. He was nearly incandescent with rage.

He squeezed tightly enough that the man's face went from pasty white to blooming pink in a matter of seconds. Anakin watched it happen with rapt fascination, barely sparing any attention at all to the blaster bolts he deflected back towards the guards who tried to shoot him. He was dimly aware of screams of pain and anger and bodies falling to the ground, but his focus was primarily on the princess. After a few moments, the guard let her go completely in favor of clutching both hands to his throat, as if that would somehow allow him to breathe.

Cailee landed on her feet and stumbled, no doubt due to the ridiculous shoes she was wearing and the limited range of motion allowed by her tight dress, but spared no time regaining her balance and scrambling to safety. She positioned herself behind Anakin where the only sight of her the guards had was of one wide blue eye peeking out from around his arm.

Anakin gave one last malicious squeeze to the guard's windpipe, just because he could, then lifted him with the Force and tossed him through the air, where he collided with two of the other guards who were still standing.

"The next person who touches her loses that arm," he growled, "and I don't appreciate you shooting your blasters in her general direction either." Out of the corner of his eye, he saw one of them reach for his utility belt, and he turned his head to pin the man with an unblinking stare. "The next one of you idiots I see so much as flinch is going to get cut in half."

It seemed like every emergency responder and bystander on the street had stopped whatever else they were doing to watch the scene. It was clear that, even if she hadn't been before, the princess had clearly been recognized by now.

Anakin saw the telltale flash of a camera and, if he had trusted his senses enough to reach out in the Force and check, he was sure he would have found multiple video recorders. Distantly, as if the thought somehow originated far outside of his mind and had to be relayed through several communication outposts to reach him, he realized that this did not look good at all. Still, he couldn't have let them take the princess. Someone who had prior knowledge of her visit to the dress shop must have had time to plant an explosive… and they must have also had enough access to have heard about Anakin's ability to detect the listening devices, given that they had obviously chosen some sort of old-school explosive device that he wouldn't be able to detect. Perhaps a simple pipe bomb with an analogue watch to time the detonator?

Regardless, his priority was the woman currently clinging to the back of his tunic as if she'd float up into the atmosphere if she let go for a moment.

"Princess, get in the speeder," Anakin ordered her (he thought gently, but he couldn't exactly hear his own voice well enough to properly modulate his tone at the moment).

He backed them up towards the driver's door. She went willingly enough, although her fear spiked when she had to let go of him to slide from the driver's seat into the passenger seat. He kept one eye on the guards, most of whom were still in various states of lying or sitting on the ground, as he looked over the speeder's controls. Fortunately, unlike the palace speeder they had taken that morning, which was clear on the other side of the mob from them now, this one had minimal security. There was just a fingerprint scanner, which he was able to bypass with a simple pulse from the Force.

He promptly piloted them over the roofs of the buildings in clear violation of Arkani traffic regulations.

The palace was just a short flight away. Anakin had no idea what they would find there (probably not a very warm welcome for him) and was honestly reluctant to take Cailee back there given that there had just been a third assassination attempt by someone with palace access. But he couldn't exactly take her to his ship and fly her off-planet, at least not unless he planned to be accused of kidnapping the crown princess.

Maybe—and it pained Anakin to his very core to admit this—Windu hadn't been exactly, entirely, one hundred percent wrong. Although based on his investigation so far Anakin wasn't sure what Windu could have done any differently…. He was sure that the Jedi Master would let him know as soon as he had a chance.

"I'm sorry," the princess said from the passenger seat, and Anakin could just make it out through the ringing in his ears that had only begun to subside.

Anakin turned his head to see her anxious face peering at him. "For what?"

"For making you take me shopping. For not taking what you said more seriously." She reached for his hand, which he gave her willingly. She squeezed so tightly that, had she been holding his left hand instead of his right, it would have been painful. "You were right. I'm so sorry."

"Cailee," Anakin spoke as clearly and firmly as he was able, "you didn't make me do anything. Don't be sorry. If anything, I should be apologizing to you."

It was obvious from the way she was staring at him that he hadn't convinced her and that he probably wouldn't be able to.

She was silent for another minute or so. Then, with a little hum of confusion, she declared, "Your eyes are back to normal."

Anakin creased his eyebrows together, confounded by such a statement. "What?"

"They were gray when we were in the fire. Or, well, not gray, exactly. Silver? They were glowing. But when you were…" She squeezed his hand again, seemingly absentmindedly. "When the guards were there, they were yellow. Is that a Jedi thing?"

Anakin couldn't stop his sharp intake of breath or the way his rapidly pounding heart seemed to drop into the pit of his stomach. He glanced into the speeder's mirror with dread, despite Cailee having said his eyes had returned to normal, and felt a flood of relief when he saw blue.