Work Text:
Grey.
“Padmé.”
Rain.
“Padmé?”
Noise.
“Padmé.”
She blinks and something in her clicks: the world rushes back in, intrusive and demanding, until she is forced to actually see the sheets of rain thundering down before her, to hear it beat furiously against the dark grey concrete, the light grey buildings, the grey, grey skies, to feel its leeching chill. She blinks, and looks at Obi-Wan, who is kneeling before her. He had deposited her and their bags on a bench here, in this little three-walled waiting shelter at the one landing pad which is this planet’s sorry excuse for a spaceport, anywhere between one second and one hour ago. She’s out of the rain, but the landing pad can’t drain the water away fast enough and standing water is washing against her boots. He’s kneeling in it, just to get his face somewhere she might look at it.
“I’ve found us rooms for tonight,” he says, voice pitched to cut through the downpour. “I’ll find something more permanent in the morning.”
She just stares at him. The next five minutes are far from her reach; permanency is unthinkable.
Something in Obi-Wan’s face twitches, but he maintains an expression of calm placidity. He stands and places a hand under her elbow to lift her from the bench, but she shrugs it off as soon as her legs are under her; this, too, he allows without reaction. He gathers all their bags, slinging them over his shoulders and tucking them under his arms until he is wholly laden, and then he reshuffles them all again so that he can get an arm free and lift the hood of his robes gently and carefully over her head. She notes, too late for something so obvious, that he is soaked to the skin: his hair is muddy brown with the weight of water, his singed tunic the same horrid grey as everything else in this city, and there is water dripping from the end of his nose and caught on his eyelashes.
She pulls the robes a little tighter around herself until she feels lost in them, like a child playing at being a grown-up, and ignores the way they drag through the water. Obi-Wan offers her the slightest smile of encouragement for it, and then places his palm on her shoulder to steer her out of the shelter.
It is like walking through a waterfall, through walls of water, through a million cold pellets. The robes drag around her ankles and become heavier the further they stride through the rain, weighed down with it, and she feels herself slowing. She thinks of stopping, of turning her face up to the grey, grey skies and letting the water beat against her face, of it filling her mouth and nose and lungs. She thinks of standing very still, and of drowning, and of peace.
Obi-Wan, hauling the weight of water and luggage and her, simply reshuffles everything again so that one arm winds around her waist and the other hand takes her own and he steers her onward like a solicitous lover guarding his pregnant partner, doing any and all things for her, and not like the kidnapper he is.
He guides them to a grey building on this grey street, the only one with little golden lamps making an effort at colour and light, and presses her inside. The interior is gold-lit too, shining off polished marble floors and a wooden desk which is stained dark and edged with hand-smudged brass; there is a tall, leafy plant in a pot by the door, too vibrant to be native. It must be late, as the lobby is empty and sleepy with quiet. She halts just inside the door, leaving Obi-Wan to approach the desk all smiling, diplomatic charm.
The woman manning it is older than them both and well settled into her authority; she looks suspicious of Padmé, robed and hooded in her hotel, but upon seeing Obi-Wan she melts into serene pleasure. “Your room is ready, sir,” she tells him. There is something odd about her accent - nearly Coruscanti, but trying too hard. Padmé does not believe that this is a true coreworlder somehow lost in the Outer Rim, but it seems that this woman would like her to. “I’ve had additional towels laid out for you and your wife,” she adds, almost conspiratorial in her slight flirtation. Padmé wonders if Obi-Wan has noticed; if he notices how she, Padmé, flinches at wife.
He offers the desk attendant that slightly roguish smile which has charmed allies and enemies alike, which makes its recipient feel like the only person to exist in his universe, which had made him, at fourteen, her first crush. “Serromo, thank you,” he says, with more warmth than she has heard from him for some time. Weeks, maybe. “I’m afraid we’re very tired - it has been a long journey, and-”
“Oh,” the woman says in surprise, and Padmé looks up to find their eyes on her. In her inattention, the robes wrapped around her have shifted and fallen apart slightly. The woman’s eyes are fixed on the round swell of her colossal belly.
Padmé shivers and draws the robes defensively around herself, looking away.
“And we’d like to rest,” Obi-Wan continues after a moment. “Would it be possible to eat in our rooms?”
“I’m not hungry,” Padmé says quietly; Obi-Wan looks around anyway.
“Just something small,” he says over his shoulder to the woman on the desk, his eyes heavy on her.
“I’m not hungry,” she repeats, more firmly. The idea of eating turns her stomach, closes her throat in rebellion, and she is sick of having decisions made for her.
“Well, I am,” Obi-Wan says, voice warmly amused - but he remains turned away from the woman to address Padmé, and only she can see how solemn his face is.
“I’ll have something sent up,” the woman coos and Obi-Wan’s face shifts into a smile as easily as putting on a mask as he turns back to her. “You’re just up these stairs and to your right.”
“Thank you, Serromo,” he says, pushing himself off the desk and gathering all their possessions again. Despite his best attempts, there really are slightly too many bags to get them all under his control gracefully, but he manages. He grins at her in triumph; the woman on the desk glowers at her in disapproval of this delicate flower too fine to carry any luggage. For a moment, this makes her want to take as many bags as she can, just to prove this woman - this stranger - wrong, for she is a Senator, a Queen, she carries planets - but she doesn’t, anymore. She isn’t a Senator now, and it is Obi-Wan’s fault.
She gathers her robes around her and glides impassively past disapproval and delight both. She declines to notice the way Obi-Wan blinks the way that a lesser man might have flinched.
Their rooms are lit with those same golden lamps, light spilling buttery over the cream rugs and deep red velvet of the bedspread and curtains. There is one large bed, and two chairs clustered conspiratorially around a small table. Obi-Wan deposits their things by the door and pads within, leaving wet boot-prints on the floor as he checks over first this room, and then the small adjoining bathroom. Padmé just sits on the bed in her damp robe and looks at the floor.
“There’s a fresher, if you want it,” Obi-Wan says upon returning. He leans on the wall by the door and tugs his boots off, flicking his head to get wet strands of hair out of his eyes. She watches him dig through the pile of bags to find his own small satchel and summon from it yet more loose, beige clothing. She imagines herself stabbing him, watching colour bloom across his stomach and drip from her fingers. He flicks his eyes up and catches her motionless and watching. “If you give me the robe, I’ll hang it up to dry.”
She stands and shrugs it off, ignoring the hand he stretches out for it. “I can do it myself,” she says sharply, maintaining a perpetual distance of at least three feet from him at all times as she hangs his robe on the peg to drip into a tray provided for the purpose. He tries to hand her a bag, but she just kicks her shoes towards his boots - towards him - and snatches it from him as he dodges. She leans in, teeth bared. “I am no wife of yours,” she hisses.
“Padmé,” he says, sounding tired, but she ignores him and shuts herself in the bathroom.
It’s nice. Not royal or senatorial nice, but for an Outer Rim backworld like this, the hotel is a good one. The bathroom is laid out in clean white marble, threaded with blue like veins, and the fresher is pleasantly large without being luxuriously spacious. She undresses absently, leaving her clothes where they fall on the floor in damp piles. The fresher reminds her of the rain, but the water on her face just stings with warmth, not the promise of oblivion. She cannot bear to touch her own stomach.
When she emerges wrapped up in a nightgown, clean and warm and dry on the outside, she finds Obi-Wan sitting and frowning at a datapad, his chin propped up in one hand and elbows leant on the table. His clothes are fresh and he has evidently had a go at his hair with a towel, because it’s slightly lighter and less plastered to his head - in fact, one errant strand at the back of his head which he does not seem to have noticed is sticking straight upward. It is strange and a little endearing to see him out of his stern Jedi mould, as it always is; even though she has seen him laugh at and with his clone troopers, even though she has seen him more relaxed and informal than most could claim on those evenings she could coax Obi-Wan and An- and him back to her apartments for dinners that turned into drinks that turned into lounging on her sofas half-cut and trading stupid stories and lazy grins and incoherent laughter, even for all this there is something vulnerable and strange about his bare feet digging into the rug, the loose neck of his sleepshirt, his hair stuck up on end.
She hates him for it.
“I’m looking for a house,” he says without looking up. “We can’t afford to stay here much longer, I’m afraid; it would be better to invest what we have. Will you help me? There’s food, if you want it.” A plate of soft, floury bread slices, pieces of cheese, and little fruits she doesn’t recognise sits on the table at his left hand.
“I don’t want to stay here,” she says. She doesn’t mean in the hotel.
Obi-Wan’s taut mask cracks and he drops the datapad on the table to rub his hands over his face with a small groan. “Padmé,” he says, voice firm with exhaustion. “We discussed this. There is nowhere else to go, nowhere better than here.” There is no-one else, either. No-one else who could keep her and her round belly safe if the Emperor finds out she still lives, for he will scour the galaxy to take her child and use them to kill and kill again, and Padmé will die knowing that her love for her husband has doomed every soul in the galaxy, starting with his and not ending with her own. She is trapped on this rainy mining planet in this tiny Outer Rim system, trapped with Obi-Wan wherever he keeps her.
She picks up one of the tiny fruits and swallows it whole, hoping to choke. “I’m going to bed,” she says.
She feels Obi-Wan watching her as she crosses the room and curls beneath the covers. She has no idea where he will sleep and cannot find it within herself to care; the bed is big enough to share, but if he touches her she will rip him to shreds with her fingernails and she suspects he knows this. It hardly matters, anyhow, for she cannot sleep - her mind is dark and full of horrors, and she cannot - she cannot -
One by one, the golden lights dim, turned down and then out by gentle fingers, and for a while the only light is the lightning blue of the datapad - then nothing.
The sunlight is weak, struggling through the heavy clouds just enough to make the damp cobblestones shine as they pick their way carefully down the steep road. This town is a strange one, to her; she is accustomed to rural settlements all on one level, in foothills or on lakesides, but the bus Obi-Wan had directed her onto had taken them from the planet's hub out across bleak and windswept moorland and up into the mountains through narrow passes. Here, at least, there is greenery: it is not like the sharp rocks of Alderaan and Naboo, but instead covered all in a thick carpet of grass and interspersed with pockets of forest, fresh and verdant after the rain. They had stopped on a plateau cut into the mountainside near its summit, in the town’s main square, which held a market, a bus stop, and a strange funicular crawling yet further up the mountain to a platform and a gate carved into the rock. The rest of the town spills downhill from this square along winding roads; Obi-Wan explains as they walk that it forms a sort of class system, from what he can tell, in which the houses nearest the square cost the most and are the nicest and those further down the mountain are considerably cheaper.
“Because it’s further to walk for food and supplies,” she guesses, eyes on the wet, slippery floor.
“And to reach the mine entrance,” Obi-Wan adds, gesturing behind them at the funicular.
Padmé looks back up the steep road and imagines arriving at work already tired. She can only muster the mirror of that exhaustion herself, where once there would have been fire, indignation, righteous anger. When she turns back, Obi-Wan is looking at her almost hopefully, and she hates him for trying to make her into some hero, some blinding light, some shadow of the person she used to be.
The house he had found for them while she slept in the hotel - a night and half a day in sweet oblivion, and then his hand on her shoulder and another wrench away from comfort and safety in favour of the unknown - is about half-way down the mountainside, the last house before the road turns and goes further downhill. It, like all the others, is cut into the hill, so that only the upper floor has four real walls and windows and the lower has only the front face. The houses are terraced, and a peculiar dread settles over Padmé at the idea that only one wall separates her home from strangers.
Obi-Wan has already seen and paid for the house; the first thing she notices as he opens the door is half of their luggage, and she realises with a jolt that she had not even considered why Obi-Wan was carrying so much less than he had been yesterday. She is so used to handmaidens and guards and droids. She will have none now.
There would be no room for them here, anyway. The house has only four rooms and the small entry hallway: the majority of the ground floor is one large living space, with a dining table and sofas at the far end and the kitchen divided off from it with counters. Through a side door in the kitchen she finds a bathroom and washing machine; back through the kitchen, into the hallway, a set of narrow stairs leads up to two bedrooms, one a little larger than the other. It’s hard to see how they’ll avoid tripping over each other all the time in a space as small as this - and, worse, the walls are bare and plain and grey. What little light the sun provides touches only a little of the kitchen and the upper level. She is living underground in a hovel like a rat.
Obi-Wan is waiting in the living room for her to complete her tour. He goes to tuck his hands into his sleeves, but remembers too late that he had insisted she wear his robes again; instead, he awkwardly folds his hands across his stomach. “Well?” he says, in tones of cautious, tentative cheer. “Not quite a royal palace, I’m afraid, but there are so few available these days.”
She looks around her. It is so unlike everywhere she has ever lived - everywhere she has ever been, with the possible exception of Ana- of that house on Tatooine. There is so little to commend it, and - and even though they have nowhere else to go, not enough money for anything better, no choices that are better than this because Obi-Wan has thought about this, has spent all the time since Mustafar while she sat stunned and silent in the last meeting with Bail and Yoda and Obi-Wan, while she stared mindlessly at the floor of the ship that carried them out here to the Gower system and then to Rumné, while she slept at the hotel, all this time he has been thinking of where they will go and what they will do and he has found their best option and given it to her for approval for all that they have no other choices that are better than this. Despite all this, she thinks, if she said that she hated the house he would allow it, and find them somewhere else.
“I want to paint it,” she says, and Obi-Wan blinks like he’s flinching in expectation of a blow that had not come.
Then, tentatively, he smiles. “Whatever you like,” he says, and she does not doubt that he means it.
He cooks dinner while she unpacks, giving her free rein to arrange things to her satisfaction. For all the difficulty Obi-Wan had had in carrying all their bags on his own, even in this small house it seems like nothing once she has folded his robes into the dresser in the smaller room and hung her dresses and tunics in her wardrobe. All they have are clothes, in all honesty. There had been no time in the rush from Coruscant to collect much more. Obi-Wan has always had few possessions anyway, but she sets his datapad on the dresser and the small, battered fern on the windowsill where it can reach for the damp light. Padmé has only a datapad and a few cards of Nabooian literature, a hair comb that had been a gift from her mother at her coronation, and a painting of Alderaan that Bail had given her for her last birthday which she hangs in the living room opposite the sofa. Obi-Wan has conjured up bedding for them, as well as food, so she makes up the beds as best as she is able to, which is to say rather badly. The limits to her talents are fathomless.
At the bottom of his satchel, two lightsabers clank against each other; there is a small carved charm in the pocket of one of her bags. She bundles them together and shoves them into the dark recesses of the cupboard under the stairs.
Obi-Wan, when she is finished, is staring at the picture of Alderaan. He glances at her, face unreadable, and then back at the painting. “It’s nice,” he says.
It is. And isn’t. Bail and Breha are there, now, carrying on as ever they were with the Senate and the concerns of their planet. They kept their lives, the work they love, their safety, and she is here in hiding. She wonders if they have held her funeral yet, if Bail wept false tears for her fate, if he has sold the Emperor the lie that she was incinerated on Mustafar. If it would have been better if she had been.
She sniffs. “I think something’s burning.”
“Oh, for-” Obi-Wan grumbles, launching himself towards the stove. He shakes the pan and peers at it thoughtfully. “I think it’s alright,” he decides, prodding the contents with a wooden spoon. A Jedi Master, a General, a diplomat and warrior and teacher with few equals, and he is standing in her kitchen making small unconscious faces at the dinner he has slightly overcooked for them to share and he is proposing to do so every day from here on out for the rest of their lives and Padmé doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry for it.
Over a perfectly acceptable meal, for which Obi-Wan apologises rather profusely, he explains his next plans. “I’ll need a job,” he says bluntly. “We don’t have the credits to survive indefinitely, though we should manage for six months at least, a year at a push.”
She nods. It makes sense, and it doesn’t hurt that the idea of poverty is as obviously unfamiliar and frightening to him as it is to her. The Jedi don’t have possessions, which is not the same as not having wealth. “What did you have in mind?”
“The mine.” At the look on her face he raises an eyebrow. “There’s very little else here, Padmé. It employs nearly everyone in the town, and I am reliably informed that there are often vacancies.”
“Because the conditions are so bad,” she retorts. It had not been a great priority of hers, the mines out in the Rim, but she knows her history. “You know this system was once a Nabooian colony.”
He inclines his head graciously. “I do.” It had been one of the reasons they had chosen to settle here on Rumné, where they both speak the language, if not the dialect.
“It broke away when the Naboo constitution was reformed with greater emphasis on protection of its citizens,” she says, and gestures with her fork for emphasis. “The system made a lot of noise about freedom and independence from the distant homeland, but everyone knew it was about profits and losses from the mines. The mine bosses are required to do very little for the people here.”
Obi-Wan shrugs, aggravatingly unmoved. “Perhaps things have changed,” he suggests mildly.
“They haven’t,” she snaps.
“Perhaps they will,” he says, and he is looking at her like he wants her to be someone she isn’t again, like she’s a force of nature fighting for the side of right and not just so far out of her depth she can’t remember what land looks like and is less and less inclined, every day, to keep on swimming. She is no Senator; she is only tired.
She pushes her plate away, half empty, and watches his lips press together, eyes shuttered. She hates him all over again for taking her here like a bird in a cage and then - of all things - expecting her to sing. “I can’t stop you,” she says, and leaves for the sanctuary of her bed - but not before he fails to entirely hide a wince of pain.
Living with Obi-Wan is… not difficult. Their first full day, she spends the morning shut up in her room and emerges only when she has heard him re-enter and then leave the house again around noon - there’s more food in the cupboards, and six pots of brightly-coloured paint arranged on the table like an apology. After that, they move around each other a little easier, though it helps that Obi-Wan leaves at dawn and works until the late afternoon. Padmé cleans the house from top to bottom, attacking the task with more determination than aptitude or experience; she loads a recipe datacard that she assigns Obi-Wan to buy for her from the market into her pad and teaches herself how to use the local ingredients; and she paints.
She paints the living space in shades of green, lighter in the kitchen and more emerald by the table. Her own room she remakes in vivid purple, all royal and defiant, and she trails vines and flowers of butter yellow and blush red down the staircase, the hallway walls, everywhere she can reach around the bump. She even paints the table in a complex and erratic geometric pattern of squares and stars and triangles, all clashing colours and sharp lines.
And Obi-Wan doesn’t even blink. Well, he does, when he opens the door to the bathroom and recoils slightly at the sudden onslaught of vivid, electric orange, but then he just hums with interest, as if that had answered a question he was yet to ask, and carries on without comment. He doesn’t say anything when he comes home and finds her red-faced and puffing with the effort of moving his heavy dresser - he just pulls his bed into the middle of the room and goes to find her a stepstool without even glancing into the paintpot at the sky-blue she is about to inflict on the only space in this house that is wholly his own. And he is the one to suggest that she paint their front door.
“It’d be nice,” he says, sunk into the sofa and cradling a mug of tea between his palms. He has been working for a full week and a half, now, rising with the sun to vanish into the earth and cut metal from its core, and there is an exhaustion to him which he cannot seem to shake. She is so used to his rod-straight spine, the posture of a Knight amplified by years as a general, and she cannot help but find him a little strange, this loose and boneless man with his head resting on the back of the sofa. “I can’t say I like the grey very much, either. Perhaps you’ll start a trend.”
She peers into the oven for something to do; it has an hour or so left, and she knows it. She likes cooking for its own merits: she finds it brings her a certain peace to make something with her hands, and be nourished by it. But what peace she had found has been disturbed, knocked off-kilter by his suggestion. “I don’t know,” she says. “We don’t want to stand out.”
“Only to our neighbours, to whom we stand out as newcomers anyway,” Obi-Wan points out, quite logically.
“I don’t know,” she repeats - and she doesn’t. She doesn’t want to stand on their front doorstep with her cans and brushes and paint the door, for all that a bright and cheering door appeals to her; she can’t stand out there in the open with her heart dripping paint in her hands. It isn’t safe for them to draw attention to themselves.
“Padmé,” Obi-Wan says gently, “you haven’t left the house since we moved in.”
She looks up sharply and finds his eyes heavy and sorrowful on her. Surely, she - well, there was no need, since Obi-Wan - isn’t it safer, anyway, if she- “How do you know?” she says, finding defence in sharpness. “You’re out all day.”
Obi-Wan looks down at his tea, face working like he’s chewing his words. “At work, they said-”
“So our neighbours are spying on us,” she bites back. “And you’re talking about me behind my back with them?”
“I had no choice!” he says, looking up again all frowning, angry worry. “They all think I keep you locked up in the basement! And they don’t think any better of me for being the last person to know, either.”
“Well, if they’re maligning your good name,” Padmé sneers, watching his eyes narrow slightly in injured outrage.
“I worry about you,” he snaps back, his good name now truly maligned, and part of Padmé thinks - this is it. This is the point where he realises she is too ungrateful, too battered, too screwed up inside to ever be worth saving. That he’s doomed to live with someone who will never again be good company. That she won’t ever be who she was, and that he can go now, because he was only ever laden with the protection of Padmé Amidala, and she can’t be that person anymore. She can only be this snapping, ugly rat in a trap, and this is the point at which he leaves her.
“You shouldn’t,” she says. Because he isn’t leaving, or arguing further, or despairing of her; he’s just sitting on her sofa and frowning fretful and cross up at her. She storms out into the hallway, ready to show him the door in case he’s forgotten where it is, throws it open, and-
-freezes. The sun is setting to her right, the sky for once cloudless and a riot of purple and orange, and golden light is settling smooth over the cobblestones. The valley laid out below her is golden-green and alive, rolling eagerly away to crash into the distant sea and the mists hanging over it. It is beautiful, and the idea of stepping over the threshold is like a hand at her throat.
She turns, eyes wide, to find Obi-Wan standing close behind her. “I can’t do it,” she says, rage forgotten in a flood of fear. Her fingers flutter up and wind into the loose fabric of his shirt, clinging just below his collarbones, and she can’t stop staring up into his comfortingly calm and steady face. “I can’t go out there, please, I-”
“You can,” he says gently, and she feels the rumble of his voice against her knuckles. “It’s alright. I’ll be with you.” His hands settle on her elbows and carefully he steers them out onto the front step, side by side so that she cannot escape - but neither must she relinquish her hold on his shirt.
The breeze on her face is firm, like the hand of a parent or teacher scrubbing carefully at grime on her cheek with affectionate exasperation. She turns into it, lets it push into her hair like gentle fingers, opens her lungs and breathes. It is - better. She doesn’t let Obi-Wan go.
“It’s a good view,” he comments inanely, as if that was their whole reason for emerging. She hums agreement, eyes closed in the wind, and hears him huff slightly in amusement. “You could paint it on the door.”
She opens her eyes to look up at him. “In case we forget what it looks like when we turn our back?” she asks dubiously.
He shrugs, the tips of his ears very slightly pink. “Art was never really my area,” he says, and the world feels marginally less hostile.
She paints cranes, in the end. He leaves her long enough to collect up her paints and brushes, in which time she becomes convinced that she is about to crawl out of her own skin if she doesn’t get back inside right now, the sensation of a thousand eyes on her too much to be borne - but then Obi-Wan reemerges, paints in one hand, brushes and house-keys in the other, and shuts the door firmly behind himself. The painting helps - she has him painting the top of the door in sky blue, in slightly erratic brushstrokes with which he looks rather unimpressed, so that she can sit on the floor and rest her aching spine and swollen ankles. The careful work of teasing out their long, gangly legs and fine feathers, the crests and plumes, the beady eyes and sharp beaks, holds her attention well enough that she can think of little else - no eyes on her back, no swirling dark energy seeking her out, no loose lips and telling tongues and hated husbands. It helps to have Obi-Wan standing over her, frowning at his inexperienced efforts, but she can let him go when he has to edge around their work to finish dinner. He keeps the window open between them and she listens with half an ear to his pottering about, humming under his breath some tune she vaguely recognises as having been popular with the teenagers of Coruscant before the war.
Eventually, he leans out of the window, arms folded on the sill - he must be folded over the sink, she would have to climb into the basin to reach as he is. He smiles when she looks up, all warm and genuine, and she is briefly possessed by her fourteen-year-old, star-eyed self. “May I interest you in a chair, my lady?” he says, all deferential, polished charm. Padmé narrows her eyes at him and he vanishes, only to be replaced by the legs of one of their dining chairs. She guides it carefully to the ground, and his head reappears. “I thought we might eat outside for a change,” he says. “But I’d hate to disturb the artist at work.”
Padmé looks at her work. The door is blue top to bottom, getting neater as it goes, with the cranes of her youth near the lakes on Naboo in fantastical colours scattering and blooming upwards to the sky. She had watched them fly overhead her first morning as a wife. It hurts her heart, this emblem of her home and her marriage and all she has lost, and she could open the door and sweep back inside without trouble - her escape route is certain - but it would smudge the paint to do it, and she finds herself oddly precious of her work.
She looks back at Obi-Wan. “You’d better get the other chair, then. How are you going to get out?”
“I’ll manage,” Obi-Wan says breezily.
And he does - though it is considerably easier to remove the second chair and two plates of food through the small window than a fully grown man, be he ever so powerful a Jedi. Padmé ends up standing by the window so that they can grip each other’s shoulders and fold him through the opening. He gets his feet under him and then looks up at her with a grin, as if exceptionally proud of his gracelessness, and Padmé folds her arms over her belly and endeavours to look unimpressed.
“How’d you lock yourself in then, Ben?” calls a voice, and they both turn suddenly to the street. Padmé takes a half step closer to Obi-Wan and the door before she really even looks at the speaker: an older man with close-cropped grey curls and silvery stubble in similar rough overalls to those Obi-Wan wears to work. He’s grinning at them with what seems to be genuine teasing affection, but how - why - she doesn’t know him, what does he-
“I’d never,” Obi-Wan replies easily, placing his hand back on Padmé’s shoulder as if to ground her, settle her, stop her flying into her bolthole at the first opportunity, and gesturing with the other at the door. “We’re watching paint dry.”
“Oh, very fine,” the man says, inclining his head in respect. “You’re wasted in the pit.”
“No, this is all Mei’s work - Nioneth, this is my friend Mei; Mei, Nioneth is my shift leader.”
Nioneth offers her a half bow. “Fine work, ma’am. Brightens the whole street no end. Tis a pleasure to meet you and all; we was beginning to fear you might not exist.”
Obi-Wan squeezes her shoulder slightly in encouragement and she manages a smile which she hopes is only half as nervous as she feels it is. “I’ve been let out of the basement for good behaviour,” she says; Obi-Wan huffs enormously, making a production of being put-upon, and Nioneth cackles, delighted.
He and Obi-Wan exchange a few more pleasantries and Padmé tries desperately to control her breathing and the feeling that she is about to vibrate out of her skin. It is so hard to be out of doors and in strange company - she feels like a crab peeled of its shell and gently prodded by foreign fingers. Nioneth carries on further down the hill and Obi-Wan presses her gently into a chair with a plate on her lap. The warmth leeches from the food into her thighs; it smells delicious; she, slowly, settles.
“I hope you don’t mind the name,” Obi-Wan says eventually, after a quiet moment of eating and watching the sun sink across the valley, turning all below them to dusky purple dark. “There wasn’t time to ask before signing the contract for the house.”
She shrugs. It shouldn’t take much getting used to, at least, though- “We should use them amongst ourselves, I suppose. It’s hard to see you as a Ben right now.”
He hums agreement, picking at his plate thoughtfully. Like this, in the dying sunlight, his hair is aflame, sparkling out of itself, and his profile is picked out in sharp, golden relief. He doesn’t look like a Ben; he looks impossible, untouchable, unreal.
She had talked about Obi-Wan with - with him, long ago. How beautiful they both agreed he was, how dear he was to them both, how he might fit into the spaces between them. They had agreed, in a very non-binding fashion, to talk to him about it someday. When the moment arose. And then he had gone somewhere so separate from her, somewhere seething and jealous, and she had thought the child would coax him back to her but even that had been a wedge; there had been no question of driving Obi-Wan between them too.
But she could have loved him then. She cannot love him now.
“Do I have a second name?” she asks.
He - Ben, she thinks, trying it out in her head, Ben - shakes his head. “They did not ask many questions,” he says. “We may not be alone in fleeing the Empire, these days.”
All those refugee laws she had written. All going the wrong way. All for nothing.
“You can choose them,” he offers. “It seems fair.”
Skywalker, she thinks. My name is Skywalker.
The sun sets in silence.
She puts on her dull blue rain poncho shortly after lunch. The boots go on mid-afternoon. And then she sits on the floor in the hallway, too huge to even put her head between her knees and panic properly. She doesn’t have to go far or be out for long, just to the end of the street to meet Obi-Wan on his way back from work and then back home, easy - only even that plan makes her feel sick and defensive, let alone that the plan had once been to visit the market, and then to meet Obi-Wan at the mine entrance, and now - now-
The door opens on an unsuspecting Obi-Wan, who very nearly trips right over her. “Oh,” he says, and then automatically he’s dropping his bag on the mat and reaching down to help her as she struggles upright, hands on her elbow and forearm. His hands are cold, slightly damp from the endless rain, but strong and gentle with calluses which are familiar to her from - from other lightsaber users. He has new ones, too, blisters in the soft spaces on his palms between knuckles and on the pads of his fingers, but he doesn’t complain as he hauls her to her feet.
Padmé takes a deep breath and pushes loose hair off her clammy brow. She used to be so coiffed, once upon a time; now her hair is held back in a day-old plait hidden under the staticky raincoat. Sticky and frazzled and half out of her head: she must look awful. “Come on a walk with me,” she instructs him firmly.
He blinks, but he must understand without her telling him, for which she is very grateful. “Alright,” he says, and so begins a habit.
That first day, they only make it halfway along the street before the itching sensation of eyes becomes too much for her and she forces them to turn back. But the next day, they reach one house further along, and the end of the street seems less impossibly far from her reach. She has learned the habit of walking with her hands crossed at the small of her back, wrists digging in just where the aching pressure in her spine is greatest to provide some small relief. Obi-Wan never complains of the walk, even though she knows he is exhausted and has very little energy left to spare on her whims. In fact, he is more dedicated to it than she is - every day, he comes home and refuses to even sit down until she has been coaxed out into the weather for a promenade along the street. And when she baulks and tries to halt or turn back before he decides they have gone far enough, he reaches out all solicitous care and places his palm over her crossed wrists to steer her on.
He inquires after her day, her health, how the pregnancy is going. They haven’t long left, now, until the child comes, and she wonders what Obi-Wan will do with her afterwards. The child is what matters, the child is important - she matters only as its vessel. The Jedi will want the child for their own, for it to be trained in the light and weaponised against the Empire, and the Empire will want it for those same reasons in warped reflection. The Empire, she knows, will have no compunction about ripping it from her and letting her die. Of the Jedi she is less sure. She had been party to one such abduction, and Obi-Wan had hardly batted an eye except to say that the boy, at nine, was too old. He would take her baby at birth if he could.
The worst of it is that she hopes he will.
She dreams, more often than not, of him scooping up the baby, smiling gently and kindly down at her, and then stabbing her in the heart. Swift and easy. And then she can rest, she can be with the man she loves in whatever place is beyond this one, she can be free of the guilt and the horror and the mind-numbing, paralysing dread. She would be already, were it not for this accursed, hated parasite which makes her useful, necessary, which requires her to be alive so that it can push her out of shape and drain her life and energy and trap her, here, where she has no wish to be. It kills her without having the decency to let her die.
But Obi-Wan can have it. He’ll keep it safe, and love it the way she can’t, and then she can be free to go to Anakin.
And until then, she walks with crossed wrists and his hand cuffing her like a prisoner, held hostage by the bump.
On their walks, he introduces her to all the people who pass and smile at them, nodding their heads or touching their knuckles to their brows at Ben. He knows them from work, and they know her by reputation. It is strange to be subject to their gentle smiles, all mingled pity and pleasure at seeing her out and about and heavily pregnant, and some days she bears it better than others. They are not, Ben says, the only ones recently arrived here, and she gets the sense that the locals know well enough why a person might run here, why they might spend long hours safe indoors, why they might shrink under too much attention, for she is spared any interrogating or teasing. Ben is not so lucky, and she must concede to being amused at finding him relentlessly needled for being clumsy with a shovel and pick, fastidiously clean (he is only grimey, where many of his colleagues seem to have dust and silvery metal embedded into the lines of their skin), and having a Coruscanti accent. He has dialled it down, she knows, from his finest Council Member precision, but he’ll always read as something of a snobbish stranger at first blush. One of Padmé’s handmaidens had spoken this dialect of Nabooian and taught it to her well enough that she surprises the locals in the exact opposite direction, which of course is only further ammunition to tease Ben. He takes it all with excellent humour, deflecting at every opportunity all attention away from her unless she speaks up and demands it. He is kind, and good to her, and she hopes he will kill her.
On the day that they make it to the end of the street above theirs, a door opens unexpectedly and an old woman hurtles out at top speed. It’s enough that Padmé recoils away into Obi-Wan’s side and the hand at her back has to grasp her elbow to keep them both upright. “Ah! My love, it is so good to meet you at last!” she says, beetling forward to grasp Padmé’s shoulders and examine her face. The woman is tiny, shorter even than Padmé; the top of her scarf-wrapped head reached little higher than Obi-Wan’s elbow. She is also easily the most colourful thing Padmé has seen on Rumné: her scarf is a wash of purple and green, nearly iridescent, and she wears a long dress in shades of orange and teal. In comparison to the grey overalls of the mine-workers, she nearly glows.
Padmé looks in helpless terror to Obi-Wan, who smiles awkwardly and scratches the back of his neck. “Harad,” he says, voice polite but taut, “you promised to be gentle.”
The woman - Harad - waves this away with a bony, vein-lined hand, frowning at him. “I am being gentle!” she reprimands. “Don’t you tell me my business, boy. Ach, men,” she tells Padmé with conspiratorial glee, “talk talk talk. What do they know? You’re tougher than all that, aren’t you, girl. All that travel and you expecting, and he thinks I’m too much.”
And of course, the truth is that Harad very nearly is. She has spoken to Obi-Wan nearly exclusively of late, barring short greetings and asides to the parade of friendly neighbours whose names and faces are a blur, and Harad is peering intently at her face with no way for Padmé to escape or deflect or demur. It is - a lot.
But not too much. She looks at Padmé with a gaze heavy with expectation, but also faith: she is ready for Padmé to behave in a way befitting of herself, and merely waiting for that moment. It reminds her of her parents watching her practise a regal walk with glasses of water balanced on the top of her head as a child, her tutors waiting for her to answer a question about geopolitics and resources, her advisors standing at her shoulders as she meets a dignitary. Many have had high expectations of her, but curled all around with the belief that she can be the person they hope for; and in Harad’s eyes, Padmé finds such unshakable faith that she cannot bear to disappoint.
Obi-Wan looks at her like that. When she lets him. He always has.
She must hold herself a little straighter, because Harad nods approval and reaches up to gently pat her cheek. “There, girl,” she says, now truly gentle. Then she snaps out of it and holds Padmé at arms’ length to give her a good looking-over. “Now! Let me see you. Little thing, aren’t you? Well-fed enough for these parts-” -and Padmé can feel Obi-Wan cataloguing that, filing it away inside his well-ordered and cavernous mind: well-fed enough, but for a poor worker in the Outer Rim. Not for a Core-world senator. She sends him a quick note of sharpness with her eyes. He already gives her the bigger portion of everything they have.
Harad notes this, her lightning-like eyes snapping from one to the other: sharp Mei, implacable Ben. “You had better not be working yourself into an early grave, young man,” she says, wagging her finger at him; he smiles, all infuriating serenity, and folds his hands away under his rain poncho.
“I’ll manage.”
“Hmph,” is Harad’s unimpressed response, but she turns back to Padmé. “Well, alright,” she allows, “you are managing, both of you. I’d not be worried at all, but-” she gestures at Padmé’s bump, presumably meaning the size of the damned thing. She’s wondered about that herself: whether this is her own perception, distorted by horror and fear of the parasite within her, or a consequence of her own slightness, or if this baby truly is huge. Magnified by its own cosmic importance. “But!” Harad says decisively, “we shall get by, I dare say.”
“Harad is a doctor,” Obi-Wan says gently, and she wonders at his tone. She had established that for herself, actually, so why the careful tread? “If - if anything happens, and I am not there-” And then her throat closes up in dread, so that is presumably what he was trying to avoid.
Her hands flutter out towards him and he darts forward in an instant to gather them up in one large palm, the other settling on her shoulder. “You have to be there,” she gasps out. “You have to, you can’t-”
“As soon as I can,” he soothes, but he doesn’t understand, he-
“You have to be there,” she says again, gripping his hand so tightly it hurts her. What if the child is detectable as soon as it is born, and the Emperor appears before them holding lightning and laughing? What if she dies and there is no-one to take the child? What if - what if it is born with yellow eyes and vicious teeth and grasping, strangling hands, and she cannot bear to kill it? What if it is born with Anakin’s blue eyes and curling hair and charming smile, and she cannot bear to see it live? “You can’t - you can’t leave me alone with it,” she begs, and his eyes, all heartbroken, soften with sorrow and worry.
“I will be there,” he says with gentle certainty. “But Harad may have to be there first.”
Harad reaches out and touches Padmé’s elbow, and she slightly relaxes her death grip on Obi-Wan’s now white and bloodless hand. “There will be plenty of time,” she says, “for you to get one of Gwyn’s lads - she lives next to you, doesn’t she? - and for him to come and get me, and then your Ben, before the babies come. A first birth, and twins,” she sucks her teeth, “it’ll be hours.”
“Babies?” Obi-Wan says sharply.
“Twins?” Padmé echoes.
Harad looks from Mei to Ben to bump, then back to their astonished faces. “Yes,” she says, uncertain only about their reactions. Then she pivots immediately to exasperation. “Well, really! Have neither of you seen a pregnancy before? The poor girl’s enormous! If there’s only one baby in there I’ll eat a mine cart.”
“Harad,” Padmé says levelly, squeezing as best she can the white-knuckle grip Obi-Wan now has on her bloodless hands, “would you get Ben a chair? I think he needs to sit down.”
It’s like an invasion, the way the house fills with things for the child.
Children.
Her first excursion without Obi-Wan is only next door but it feels like needles in her skin regardless; she introduces herself, nervous and retreating behind senatorial reserve, to Gwyn, who is perhaps ten years older than her and has four sons ranging from hip-height to balanced on her hip. Gwyn has light hair and worn skin, and the boys are all rangy and wiry, full of energy. Padmé has a cup of tea pressed immediately into her hands and has to stay to drink it - it becomes less and less exhausting as time goes on to be drawn in to Gwyn’s easy chatter, especially after she lines up all of the children in the little kitchen and makes them all promise, even the littlest, that if Miss Mei comes around and asks them to, they’ll run as fast as they can and fetch Nana Harad, and then Ben.
Padmé returns home with armfuls of baby clothes which Gwyn had been keeping - first for later, then for grief. “Keep going until we had a girl, he used to say,” Gwyn says with clear eyes and a tautness in her jaw. “Someone should keep them boys in line. Left me that job too, the bugger.”
And all Padmé has to do is cook and clean and put her feet up, because Obi-Wan even does the shopping for her. Gwyn works at home and in the mine and has four young children. She prods thoughtfully at the pile of clothes, stacked up on the kitchen table. “At least it’s only twins,” she muses to herself, which makes Obi-Wan choke so enthusiastically on his dinner that he has to go outside to breathe.
There are no cribs here as Padme knows them: no large bed constructions for a baby to sprawl around in and which should be filled with toys and cushions. Instead, Harad scrounges out two large and soft woven baskets in exchange for a few credits, half-filled with a pillow and blanket each and with handles to move them easily, and advises them that most children sleep in a dresser drawer in the half sizes between basket and bed. Privately, she and Obi-Wan agree to cross that bridge when they reach it; even with the baskets tucked into the small space between her bed and the wall, and all the tiny clothes folded neatly into an unused drawer of Obi-Wan’s dresser, and the pressing evidence of her enormous, stretch-marked stomach and fat ankles and sore spine, it is somehow refusing to dawn on her that she is going to have children, and soon. The idea of those children being so big as to need beds of their own is unfathomable.
It’s hard to say how Obi-Wan feels about it all, either. He tends towards the inscrutable at the best of times, but she doesn’t doubt that any worry he is feeling will never be something she gets to see. Sometimes, when he asks about her day and how she feels, when he offers to massage life back into the soles of her feet and insists that she sit down while he fetches and carries for her, she thinks that he is so afraid for her that he is very nearly afraid of her. Not that he ever says as much, about her or him or anything.
But he is returned to full General glory as he hauls home things he has begged, borrowed and bought from their neighbours, all of whom appear bemused and endeared by his sudden rush to prepare. “It takes a man this way, the first baby,” Nioneth tells Padmé as they stand in the street and watch Obi-Wan carrying into the house an incredible quantity of preserved food, blankets and pieces of scrap wood which will, he promises, one day be a highchair. She reckons they’ll get a playpen, in the end, what with Obi-Wan being rather less than a master carpenter. But it’s enough stuff that she has been sent out to stand on the pavement and supervise so that he can get it all into the house without her underfoot. And this with only two inhabitants.
“I wish it would take him back,” Padmé says.
“I heard that!”
“You were supposed to,” she calls back into the house, and hears him harrumph.
Nioneth laughs. “Ah, he’ll settle. He’ll settle, and you’ll wish he hadn’t, for he’ll be back at work and you holding the babies.”
Privately, she doubts this. It’s hard to see him settled here; to see them both in this place together, with a baby each, at home. Easier to imagine a quiet funeral - he is good, he would do so much - and baskets hidden under his robes to be secreted away to some untouched Jedi temple. Where the surviving younglings are, the hidden padawans, the secret masters. There must be one such temple, untouched by a man who had once professed to love her.
Obi-Wan emerges, rubbing his hands together thoughtfully. “The larder is full, there are enough blankets in your room, everything is in position-”
“-and if we deploy the children on the right flank,” she cuts in dryly, pressing her thumbs into the divots either side of the base of her spine, “we can secure the kitchen against invasion. Sir, yes, sir.”
Nioneth laughs; Ben narrows his eyes at her in grumpy good humour. “He’s like this in the pit, too,” Nioneth says cheerfully. “Rear Admiral Ben, always directing the troops. Never had such a commanding rookie.”
“I’m hardly as bad as all that,” he protests, and Padmé removes one hand from her hip to make a face and tilt her downturned palm from side to side doubtfully. “This is mutiny,” Obi-Wan says sternly, eyes dancing.
She ducks her head to huff a laugh, rocking on her sore heels. When she looks up again, both Obi-Wan and Nioneth are looking at her. Nioneth reaches out and gives her shoulder a squeeze. “It’s a nice smile, yours is, Miss Mei,” he says, soft and satisfied.
Helpless, she turns to Obi-Wan; his face is cracked open, vulnerable and exposed in a wash of grief and relief and a desperate kind of fondness, and the smile he musters in return is wobbly and fragile and perhaps the most real smile he has ever given her. “It is,” he says, gruff and very quiet, and then he has to clear his throat. “I’ve missed it.”
They are ready, and yet it is a surprise when it comes.
Obi-Wan is fidgety in the morning, both of them up earlier than usual for discomfort on her part and itching restlessness on his. He fusses around aimlessly, wanting to check things that don’t need checking like window bolts and fresher pipes, and all with a frown carved into his brow. “Be - well, today,” he settles on, sighing at the inadequacy of his words and rubbing his thumbs over her upper arms as he holds her at arms’ length.
She reaches up and grips his wrist - not to move it, just to hold. “If you will.”
He hums agreement, fingers tapping energetically away on her shoulders. “I shall do my best. Oh, I’m only fussing, don’t mind it.”
She has been rigorously putting An- his unhelpful visions from her mind, as she has every other part of him, and so it does not occur to her until noon, and the first contraction, that she knows well enough how Jedi can sometimes sense things which are yet to come.
Padmé lets it go on longer than she knows she ought to, but maybe - if she waits long enough - she won’t have to leave the nest of their house even for so long as to knock next door. She doesn’t want Harad here first, she wants him and she wants Obi-Wan and she wants to be at home. She should be on Naboo with her mother and Sola and her handmaidens to comfort her, to clean her brow and hush her when she cries and tell her what a good mother she will be. She should be able to hear Anakin wearing a path into the carpet outside and Obi-Wan trying to comfort and calm them both, new father and new uncle alike. But they are not here, there is no-one here for her at all, and she is alone in the kitchen wheezing with pain and horror and shock.
The sound of the front door opening sends her skittering into the furthest corner of the kitchen, propped up on the cabinets and breathing heavily. “It’s me,” Obi-Wan calls, and she can hear him fussing about with shoes and coat by the doorway. She can’t unglue her tongue and make any noise, however. “Mei? Are you - mother of moons preserve us.”
I taught him that curse, Padmé thinks idly as he drops his bag in the kitchen doorway and surges forward to collect her up in his arms, though she’s too busy digging her nails into his arms and groaning to say as much.
Obi-Wan adjusts his grip, his shoulders under her arms and hands at the base of her spine to hold her upright, and tries to duck his head and look at her at the same time. “Alright, there, it’s alright,” he soothes, his face pressed in all worried and close. She can’t quite bear to look at him, nor to be apart from him at all, so she leans forward and presses her sweaty forehead into his shoulder. His hands scud up and down her back with slight, nervous pressure and he is hushing her softly in that way people do, when someone is in difficulties and they don’t know what to do.
A vicious contraction rips through her and she cries out, hands like claws in his skin. He just goes on petting and hushing fretfully, pushing waves of calm which he clearly does not feel in her direction.
“Padmé,” he says, her real name a little alien after weeks hidden behind his teeth, hanging in the air like a secret, “Padmé, I have to get Harad, will you be-?”
And she won’t be, really, but they cannot do this alone. She detaches carefully, leaning once more on the counters and resisting the urge to reel him back in and scream into his neck. No-one has held her in so long.
Obi-Wan’s face is tied up in misery and he seems unable to decide whether he wishes to linger longer or run so as to be back sooner. Another contraction distracts her, though she hears the door slam open - then he is back at her side and enfolding her once more in his arms. He gathers her arms around his neck and supports her with broad, shaky palms at her shoulder and hip, their heads close and conspiratorial. When she meets his gaze, confusion at his reappearance shot through with relief and tinged with terror, he grins at her breathlessly. “I sent Gwyn’s eldest for her,” he says and she nods understanding and gratitude.
She is tired already, hanging more from Obi-Wan than standing on her own feet, and there are miles to go yet. She won’t be able to stand it. It is impossible.
A press of energy and comfort washes against her and she stands enough to lean back and look at Obi-Wan. He offers her a tentative, encouraging smile, like he’s afraid of overstepping himself, and she grips his shirt a little tighter. “You can do this,” he says gently, quiet in contrast to her seething breath. “You’ll be a wonderful mother. You are strong and brave and resilient, Padmé, you can do this. And we’re ready for them, we’ve got baskets for them to sleep in and clothes and food for them, we’ve got everything we need.”
His donated comfort and calm is helping: she feels, abruptly, strong enough to raise her head proudly, look him in the eye, and grin all manic, frantic, edgy. It’s the peculiar, hysterical joy of communal terror. “Everything we need,” she repeats. “To think I was going to insist on giving birth on Naboo, near the lakes.”
He raises an eyebrow at her. “There’s a very large puddle at the other end of the road, if that would suit?” Something indescribable in his eyes settles in relief when she laughs, and he reaches up to tidy loose strands of hair from her sweaty forehead. His palm cups her jaw on its way back to her shoulder, and he gazes upon her with a sudden and terrible sorrow. “Padmé,” he murmurs, “I’m sorry. You should be on Naboo with your family, your friends - with more than this, and I’m sorry. You deserve so much better, so much more-”
But she reaches up and presses a fingertip to his lips to still them, because in his relief, in his care and worry and guilt, she had seen a certain truth, which is this: if she and the children die, so will he.
If she gives birth to healthy babies and then closes her eyes forever, she thinks he will go on, for their sake - to be a protector and carer to her children, to his children, to the children of vast importance to the galaxy but also to the people Obi-Wan holds most dear - but he will be nothing else, and only for so long as they need him to defend them. She does not see him laugh with work friends, or sing while cooking dinner, or pretend to live outside the bubble of the children. She does not see him live long past their adulthood.
If the children die and she doesn’t, he’ll live to keep her going. As he has been, ever since Mustafar.
If none of them live, she thinks he will simply sit in the living room and stare at the wall until he fades away to nothingness.
It is not self-importance which makes her think so. She had seen, in his eyes, a reflection of herself. But if she cannot live for her own part, she can do it for him. She’ll go on breathing, just to watch Obi-Wan do the same.
Harad bustles in through the left-wide door and shuts out the rain. Padmé smiles gently at him, tries to push back her own waves of comfort, breathes through the pain as he strokes his thumb over her shoulder and holds her gaze very carefully. “Everything I need,” she says again, tapping her fingers at the back of his neck. “I have everything I need just here.”