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Padmé knows something is wrong as soon as she lets Anakin into her apartment.
It’s been three months since they last saw each other. Padmé spent every other week worrying that he was dead, it felt like. She wants to gather him in her arms, to be gathered in his, to just hold each other and revel in the fact that they are not yet dead.
“Ani,” she whispers, when he won’t look at her. He hugs her, yes, but his eyes are fixed somewhere beyond her, through the window and into the city lights. “Ani, darling, what’s the matter?”
“I need to talk to you,” he mumbles, hands tightening against her. It’s not enough to hurt, just the flex of a man trying to reassure himself that she’s still there, but it worries her. “I’m… I messed up.”
“Let’s sit down,” she says, stepping back and taking his hands in hers, walking backwards to the couch and tugging him with her. They sit. She puts her hand to his jaw and tries to nudge him into looking at her. When he just bites his lip and looks even more worried, she tries to kiss him. He shies away, outright wincing, and her heart drops.
The words are out before she can stop them. “Did you cheat on me?”
His head snaps up and over, horrified. “What? No! I would never!”
“Oh,” she says, but her eyes are already prickling with the need to tear up. “Then what—you won’t kiss me. Did you meet someone else? Or—what happened, Ani?”
He drops his head into his hands, fingers carding up and into his hair and then just staying there. He’s hiding from her, she thinks. She puts a hand on his knee but it takes long minutes before he even reacts. He finally looks up, and he looks guilty and miserable and all manner of things. He leans over into her, though, and hugs.
“You’re amazing,” he mumbles into her hair. “This is just… my fault.”
“What is, Anakin?” She pushes him away so she can look him in the eyes. He’s maybe about to start crying. “You can’t just—”
“I think we rushed into getting married,” he finally blurts out.
Ow.
That’s… ow.
She tries to process that. She tries to process that the man she’d married, the man who would do absolutely insane things for her, the man she’d lied by omission to cover up mass slaughter for no longer loved her.
“What?” She finally manages.
Her voice is small. She doesn’t like that.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and he sounds miserable. “It’s my fault. I was—I thought—you’re amazing, you are, you’re perfect and I dreamed about marrying you for years and I didn’t—I didn’t think—”
“Anakin,” she says, and it takes such effort not to snap at him, but he’s already looking a little unstable. “What brought this on? Is it just our schedules? Did you meet someone you want, or—I’m fine with sharing, maybe, if we talked about it and I know who it—”
“I think I’m gay.”
The words hang in the air, and he won’t look her in the eye. The silence isn’t complete; there is traffic through the window and the air cycler is never truly quiet. Anakin’s breathing is still audible, though, and Padmé hears her own heartbeat thudding in her ears.
“Oh,” she says. “Okay. That. That’s not what I expected.”
It’s the kindest of many reasons, she thinks in a wild moment of relief. It’s not either of their faults, just… something that happens. He doesn’t not love her anymore, he just… was confused when he proposed.
“Are you sure?” she asks instead. “That you don’t just… like both? I do. It’s common.”
He pulls away, hands digging into his biceps. He’s going to hurt himself like that. He still won’t meet her eyes. “I think so. I hoped—I tried, Padmé, I promise, I really did. I spent ten years loving the idea of you, and then you liked me back, and you were literally the woman of my dreams and I just—I hoped maybe I just liked both, because I still love you, and you’re one of the three most important people in my life, but… I just… I can’t. I don’t think it’s like that.”
She’s silent. He sits in that silence for a bit, and then keeps going. She lets him. “I just… it made sense to like you? You were beautiful and kind even when I was a child, and we grew up and you were somehow even more amazing, and you were unattainable. Safe. I could be in love with the idea of you without worrying about rejection or breaking my vows, because you were a queen and I was just a slave boy that got to be a Jedi, but then we were together and you were so incredible as a person and I got everything I thought I wanted, but it’s not… I’m not… I don’t know. I love you. I just. I just don’t think I love you the same way I thought I did.”
“Okay,” she whispers. She feels hurt, but Anakin hurts more, she’s sure of it. “So… how long? Um, how long have you known? And how did you… figure it out?”
She wants her husband. She wants him to love her the way she loves him, and for them to fall back in bed and to keep those vows they made and she wants to be selfish. She wants what he’s given her so far, and they’ve only been married a year but she wants and she had it and now she’s… it’s slipping out of her fingers and she can’t even hate him for it. Every other word from his mouth is still praise for her. He still loves her. He wants to be in love with her, but he’s not and she hates it.
She’s given so much of her life for Naboo and for the Republic, for people and concepts and ideas beyond her, and this one thing, this one bloody thing was for her.
And she doesn’t get to keep it.
“The clones, mostly,” he says, answering the question she’d asked before her bitter anger spiked. “They’re… Jedi don’t have much body shyness either, but it’s different. With the Jedi, I always felt judged, like there were eyes on me and someone was going to tell me off for doing something even in the communal showers. I never paid attention to other people, and I always hoped they wouldn’t pay attention to me, especially the… the scars, the whip marks, all of that. The clones, though, they’re not… they aren’t body shy, either, but they’re casual about it. They walk around shirtless, or in just their blacks, and they respect me but they’re not weird about it, and they’re proud of their scars and make me feel proud of it, so I stopped feeling self-conscious in the showers and I noticed some of them looking, like really looking, and I tried not to look back because I’m their SO and also I have you, but then there was sparring matches and wrestling, and I tried, Padmé, I promise I tried not to… I didn’t…”
He drops his face in his hands again, and sobs.
Padmé feels a spike of her own hate aimed at the clones. She buries it. This isn’t their fault, and they all have enough problems without her hating them for helping her husband realize something about himself.
“Okay,” she says, because she can’t think of anything else that could help. She shifts closer, and puts an arm over Anakin’s shoulders, and he falls into her lap like a stringless marionette. “We’ll figure this out. Give it a few more months to be sure, and then we can… if you’re still sure, we can get a divorce.”
The papers exist. They’re hidden on Naboo and placed somewhere secret and only barely filed; it’s a symbol for them, more than anything. It doesn’t affect their taxes, their insurances, their statuses in the eyes of the Republic. The marriage is only barely legal at all. The only reason beyond their symbolism was Padmé wanting a way to ensure something of her belongings would go to Anakin if she died unexpectedly, with a minimum of drama, and if… if they ever had children.
That won’t be happening, now.
“I’m sorry,” Anakin repeats, still sniffling in her lap. She passes her hand over his head, playing with his curls. He hiccups. “You deserve better.”
“It’s fine,” she tells him. It’s not fine. She’s felt this kind of cold, empty rage at the world very rarely. This time, there is no one to direct it at. It is absolutely not fine. She is fine. “These things happen.”
“I didn’t want to,” he insists. It’s muffled, with how his face presses against the fabric over her stomach, but she still hears him. She wants to tell him that it doesn’t matter that he didn’t want to, because he still did, but that’s not fair. He couldn’t control this, and he’d tried.
“I’m older than you,” she says instead. “I should have been more responsible, insisted on a longer courtship than we had. You were only nineteen. It was your first real relationship. I should have made us go slower.”
She can admit that much, right? That part of it, at least the speed with which they’d hurried to marriage, was on her?
Maybe it’ll make her less angry.
Probably, though, it’ll make her anger bigger, and worse, and aimed at herself.
“Are you going to stay the night?” she asks, trying not to share her anger. “We don’t have to do anything. We can just cuddle.”
“I’d like that,” he says. He’s crying. There are damp spots on her dress.
She has to be okay with this. She has to.
“We can still be friends, right?” Anakin asks, and his voice is so small and scared and tense that her heart breaks for him.
“Yes,” she says, though part of her never wants to see him again. She’ll get over it. “We can.”