AN:

Angie – Yeah I love the scene where Miraj offers him the cigarette. Taking his innocence in little steps.

Hands Clean (Part II)

We'll fast forward to a few years later

And no one knows except the both of us

And I have honored your request for silence

And you've washed your hands clean of this

Anakin hid his face so delicately from her, Padme struggled to see it. He tried to smooth out the anxious brows to keep it together. The two sides of him needed to come out. Show her all of one whole. He needed to accept it or forever be eaten away by shame and brokenness. That shame and brokenness ripped through him so he thought he must always be the best, his charms everlasting, his handsomeness hiding his secret tears. He would sing to the right tune and make no mistakes. Or at least never reveal his mistakes.

He was staring at a potential river of peace, and a skipping rock was about to disturb the stilled reflection of fluffy clouds and mockingbirds. But you have to first face the water ripples and storms to get to that inner river of peace. As long as he was insistent on winning, skipping ahead, cheating the steps, he was not loving. True love wasn't about winning. Padme was not to be won.

"When I was about 17, living with Miraj. . .her husband came home and found us together. He attacked us – he had grabbed a handsaw and aimed it at me. Gave me this scar... " His finger haphazardly swayed toward it. "It hurt so much I couldn't see straight. I just wanted to get him off me. I just remember grabbing onto the handle to shove him away... I must've pushed too hard and it. . .it cut his throat."

Padme's shock showed by the clarity of lines on her face; they were strained as she lost mobility. Purity disturbed as she stared at him, a stare screaming a thousand words that she just couldn't articulate with words. The scar on his face stored and hid so much. He turned away, walking in circles.

He still talked but he was not here in this room. Passing over his eyes were images of that fateful day. When he did finally look at her, these were seventeen year old eyes and what rushed out were memories and trauma that hadn't aged.

His secrets were anguishing, constricting, and no longer able to remain invisible no matter how hard he avoided eye contact. "It was self-defense! I – I didn't want him to die. I wanted to go to the police, get him to a hospital. But Miraj said there was no way out! We were guilty. She – she told me to bury him. And I listened to her."

Padme was struck by stillness, distubrbed by the mounting horror, instability, and strangeness that explained his erraticism and anxiety. Her voice thinner as she tried to think it through. "Why didn't you tell me any of this?"

He appreciated that while she was questioning every instinct, she did not do so with disgust no matter how horrific his words. Like a gambler, he dwelled on his itching for another roll of the dice. God, he wished he had told her this when Miraj was blackmailing him. Hell, if he was wishing for things, he'd start with not taking the canopy job.

"I didn't want to lose you. You are the loveliest, healthiest thing I've had in my life since... I couldn't live without you. And Miraj knew that. So when she reappeared and started coming to your office, she uh. . .she threatened to tell you. Unless..."

"Unless what?"

The more attentively Padme listened, the more afraid Anakin was that she would detect his every crime. He wanted to stay elusive for as long as possible. Once the mystery is solved, your heart can't deny it, you can't blur it, you can't shield yourself from its consequences.

Padme may play into her obsession with truth and brutal honesty, but could she really take it?

His galloping fears ran and ran around in his head as the confession looked for an out. He held his breath inadvertently to delay the truth from coming out, to choke it, suffocate it, anything so her dear and tender heart wouldn't reject him. "...Unless I slept with her."

Padme almost laughed, scoffing at Miraj's audacity. What was with this woman? Satan's mistress sent to earth to wreak havoc? "Wow she is some piece of work. That's crazy! What did you tell her?"

Anakin turned shell-white and withdrawn, his throat shrinking, his heart tightening. The suspense grew monstrous, circuitous, stinging.

Padme's faint chuckle had faded away at the edginess of his energy. "You didn't..." She whispered like a prayer. The look on his face answered for her. She began to tear, knowing that if he spoke, he was about to say something devastating. "You did..." She tried to fight it, not wanting to accept that his silence and disturbed look of regret and frailty rolling out instead was confirmation. Her hand flew to her mouth. "When?"

His body went brittle. He couldn't stomach it.

"Before we were married?" She hazarded, doing all she could to lock up tears.

With his head down and his lashes lying over his cheeks, he muttered, "After."

Padme shook her head from side to side, unable to believe what she was hearing; she didn't know how to react to it. His words destroyed her; she wanted to ask him not to talk anymore, but she had to know. It was like this crushing force keeping her startled, panicked. "How many times?"

"Just once."

She turned with her back to him. How awful was it to paint her life with such fantasy only for it to now seem wasted and unnecessary and uninhabitable.

Anakin's heart grew heavier in his chest. "Padme, I swear I thought of you the whole time." The undertone of panic evident in his voice and in his undeliberate movements, mourning and urgent.

But the sentence inflamed her so much she had to pause to see if she had heard him right. She faced him with condemning eyes. "Oh thank you!" She cried with incredulity and sarcasm. "Thank you for thinking of me while you were having sex with another woman!"

"...I swear to you, it meant nothing. You have to believe me. Forgive me." He pleaded weakly. She was probably far from the all-forgiving type at this point. But if she had an ounce of compassion left, he'd might as well try to extract it. He held onto some idealized forgetfulness of a needy child.

She walked away though, through the house and finally stopping when she reached the kitchen counter. He went after her, closing the balcony doors behind him.

When she looked him in the eye, she spoke with inertia, breathing out slow, indolent. "Would you have forgiven me? If I had slept with Clovis? Would you forgive me if I let him touch me and kiss me and make love to me?"

He talked shakily, jealous and avoidant. "Don't say things like that please. And come on, that's totally different."

"How?!" She was overcome with anger, rising magma about to spew out.

The inner disaster of them erupted like two volcanic souls. As if they had been a long-kept secret in a ploughed field, waiting to explode. Composure dissolved in the heat, objectivity martyred in the lava.

"Because Miraj and I didn't have feelings for each other!" He yelled. He again hopelessly wandered in front of her, lugging himself around and eventually burying his hands in his pockets. "I didn't have feelings for her. Doesn't that make a difference?"

"No!"

"No?" Anakin looked as frayed and helpless and as drained as she did.

"No it doesn't! Because it doesn't stop me from picturing your hands all over her." Padme closed her eyes but that didn't stop the tears. They were no longer singular oval drops but streams trickling down her face. He wanted to hold her. But if his words brought no solace, then his touch probably wouldn't either. It made him even more apprehensive. He was not going to come back from this.

There were no clear-eyed glances. His own tears made his cheeks redden. His face flushed with sadness and fear. He could not modulate the gravitation revolving around this core center of abandonment. His gestures and voice were immoderate pleas. "Padme, I didn't want to do it! I never wanted to hurt you. I just wanted to get her out of our lives!" He sputtered as if tears bubbled back up through his throat. "I wasn't thinking! I was desperate! I just wanted to give her what she wants so she'd leave us alone." He talked hurriedly, eager to get the words out and be done with it. Then he could escape the image of Miraj that heavily pulled him downward into the depths of hell with her like a spectre of insidiousness. He was sinking so fast in those depths, he hadn't noticed what he blurted out in the whirlwind of his decline, "Her face was so smug and I knew then that she'd never go away. So when I saw the pillow beside her, I just grabbed it and—"

"Whoa, whoa, wait, what?!" Padme interrupted him. They were both pulled off the treadmill of chaos and somehow taken further into despair and a rapid state of panic. His hands were in front of him mimicking claws inciting the same violence she had just heard. What exactly had she just heard? "Pillow—what?"

Padme looked confused and annoyed. Until suddenly, wires fused and threads came together like fireworks of truth freed of captivity and pointed at her like a blinding torch in her face, forceful and undeniable, and its brightness stole the last of their normalcy without remorse for the reality it projected and the irredeemable scars it would leave behind. Her hands covered her mouth as if to stop herself from saying the crazy part out loud. "You put a pillow over her head? You killed her?! She didn't run off to some fucking island. You killed her in her own bed!" Repudiating all of it, Padme paced through the living room, her body inclined forward to give her longer strides. Her breath uneven and her steps out of rhythm. It was unimaginable to breathe deeply. "God, this is sick! It's—it's—"

"I told you I wasn't thinking, I–I wanted to protect what we had. All that was going through my head was this bullshit endless cycle with her and it hit me that I'd never get out. We'd never be free." Anakin followed her, hoping not to drown in this awful, gut-wrenching pressure. "Please, remember how I feel about you, okay? I'd – I'd do anything for you." It was too difficult for his possessiveness not to violate her resistance or push the barriers. But her temper only worsened.

She halted, turning around slowly in disbelief and horrified. "Maybe that's the problem, Anakin! Maybe you shouldn't do anything!"

He had never felt weaker than this moment. Never felt more pathetic than this moment. He came to her again. He did not spring this time. He dragged his feet little by little. But his reaching for her pressed against the dam of her patience.

"Don't touch me!"

"Padme—" Slightly whining, he reached out desperately once more but was met with a shrieking cry.

"No! Leave me alone!" She swatted his hand away and closed herself off, hugging herself like a shield that would lead to the decay of the place he called home, his relationship if he dared to break through it. "I want you to leave."

"You can't take care of the twins on your own."

Her glare deteriorated him, inflicting the color and sound of death. "Get out!"

What part of our history's reinvented and under rug swept?

What part of your memory is selective and tends to forget?

What with this distance, it seems so obvious?

Hands Clean - Alanis Morissette