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“Maybe we gave him the benefit of the doubt too often,” she said. It was a thought that had struck Padmè as soon as the pain at her throat had started to wane to a dull, less distractible ache, and now hounded her ad nauseam. She knew she was not without fault. That she had played a pivotal role in what had led to the total collapse of everything they’d both held sacred and dear. But a part of her can’t help but wonder just how willfully she had done so. “Allowed the good we saw to outweigh the bad on a scale predisposed to tilt in his favour. Did we knowingly blind ourselves?”
“We did,” he said it so plainly. No emotion to it, stated merely as a fact of life. “Of course, we did. We loved him.”
So, Obi-Wan openly acknowledged it. Their mutual, crippling weakness. She hadn’t expected that. Not yet. “And look what our love has wrought.” She was bitter and angry. The fury burned at the pieces of her that were once idealistic and hopeful, much too romantic, and devoid of such a profound sense of self-loathing.
“You mustn’t blame yourself.”
Oh, but she very well could. “I don’t need absolution. Especially not from a man who refuses it himself.”
Padmè saw the deeply formed cracks in his eyes, as surely as she does the ones in the mirror. He was not so good at hiding himself anymore. There was none of that immaculate persona left for him to fall into. “You carry the blame as heavily as I do. Even more so, I suspect.”
“I have much more to account for.”
“Spoken like a man who wants all the blame for himself.” She tried to smile then, but all it did was flounder and fall into a sad imitation of one. “Well, too bad, you can’t have it.” Despite everything, and even at their most contentious with one another, they had always been able to humor each other. This seemed like as good a time as any to fall back into old habits. Banter had once come so easily to the two of them.
Obi-Wan seemed to appreciate the effort.
“Perhaps it’s better not to dwell,” he proposed, once the silence began to weigh heavy. “Too easy to get lost in the dark of it.”
“And we’ve already lost far too much to the dark side.”
He glanced away, like he were unable to bare to look anymore at such palpable grief. He who has had so much more taken than she, and yet, he mourns for her and her losses as acutely, just as profoundly, as he does all that has ever mattered to him.
Quiet as a ghost in his sadness and sorrow, parts of him as dead and gone as the rest of them were.
Obi-Wan stayed with her because he has nothing left. Nowhere else to go. Her companionship offers him no reprieve from the burden of the guilt he wore now like a second skin. She is no man’s salvation.
Padmè had never intended to be.
Yet the galaxy was burning down because one man had thought otherwise.
Had chosen to assign her life more value than that of the billions upon billions of others that existed far and wide amongst the stars. Doing so as swiftly, just as thoughtlessly, as she had those slaughtered Tuskens once upon a different lifetime ago.
“…they're dead, every single one of them.”
She was no better than him. Not in the one moment when it might have truly mattered.
Everything she'd done after that had become white noise to her. A mockery of all the things she had once believed herself to be. Loyal instead, and in secret, to preserving her own self interests.
“Padmè,” his voice was cutting, clearing that narrow path away from her thoughts. Helping her to pull free from the ashes of her despair. The soot and grime of a horribly lost love. That suffocating memory of the pain it brought her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, feeling numb and so far removed from who she once was. She doesn’t really know what else to say. “I’m so sorry.”
“That’s my line,” Obi-Wan contested, offering up his own poor excuse for a wry grin. “And that you can’t have.”