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Padmé Amidala knows how to love. It's stoic, yes, and it's for her planet, yes, and she loves viciously and fiercely and proudly. She wears her love like a badge of honor. She would do anything for her people, without question. She was a queen and she is now a senator and she makes decisions and she knows how to be a politician. She knows how to love politically. Her heart fits very neatly tucked away in her ribcage. Padmé loves for the good of things, not for personal gain.
Padmé has seen siege erupt from the edges of the galaxy and Padmé has seen power rise and fall and seize people by the middle and eat them straight through. She is kind, and she is fierce, and she has her heart as a compass, and her mind as a ruler. She put restrictions on her love long ago, when she was in a sandy wasteland with danger pressing from all around: she would not lend pieces of her heart out to those who had the power to destroy it. She was asked if she was an angel, and she swallowed it down. Her throat tasted of finality, of denial.
A few nights later, laying in her bed on the sleek silver starship, Padmé pressed the necklace the same young boy had given her, his eyes alight with infatuation. I have a planet to rule, Padmé had chastised herself, turning around to face the wall. It tasted like absolution, like bitter promise.
Padmé Amidala knows how to love. It's just not allowed to show its teeth.
Padmé is twenty-four now and she is a senator and she has left her days of ruling her planet far in the past. She is a senator and she has much more important things to do than love. She stays awake sometimes until sunrise, thinking and rethinking battle plans and neutrality and equality. Her hands still fit perfectly around the necklace Anakin carved for her, many years ago, and she wears it in the night.
People around Padmé are dying, and fast. Her ship explodes as soon as she touches down on Coruscant for the first time in months; one of her greatest friends is killed. She is told to swallow this down like so many deaths before. Her stomach is getting restless. Dormé did her job, is Padmé's consolation as she tries to push this tragedy down inside of her, like so many before. It hurts more and more every time. Padmé's heart is starting to run rampant inside of the little box she has bargained with herself for.
When she voices her restlessness to the emperor, he bestows upon her two protectors: her old friend Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Anakin Skywalker, now grown up. Padmé has a hard time forcing her heart down this time. She can feel it snarling inside of her chest, and as Anakin smiles at her, she pulls away. Careful, Padmé, you cannot fall in love, her mind whispers, barely audible over the sound of her heart. I'm in trouble, her heart sings out, and for the first time, Padmé toys with the idea of letting the latter win.
Padmé is being hunted now, almost definitely. She has a price on her head and she does not want to run. But her hand is being grabbed by the Senate, by Anakin's earnestness, and she runs along with him, intertwined with her guilt and her want. She goes home and she tries to calm the war inside of her: head versus heart versus head versus heart versus head. (She is still not ready to let her heart win. She can't. She has a rule she cannot go back on.)
But when Anakin presses his lips to hers for the first time, his breath hitching in his throat, Padmé kisses him back. For a second, if only a second, she imagines what this might be like: no politics, no war, nothing but love.
No. This is not allowed. Padmé wrenches herself away. Anakin's face is brooding, a storm in his eyes. He too is pulsing with everything he cannot have. He keeps a distance between them after that, after walking back, after bidding her a good night. She doesn't sleep.
Be careful, Padmé, her inner reason snaps at her again, but it has become much more muted. She's getting better at learning to ignore her head. She doesn't know if this is a good or bad thing.
The next day, they travel to the middle of the field that Padmé used to run around in as a child. She is determined to keep things light. Anakin starts hounding her about politics, and against everything she's been taught, she sees why he doesn't like politicians.
"I don't think that the Jedi Order makes that much sense, either," he admits, picking the leaves off of a clover. "Their rules are... stupid."
"They're rules for a reason," Padmé says softly, and Anakin's eyes glint as he flashes them towards her. His smile spreads across his whole face, as if he's being lit up from within.
"Rules are meant to be broken," Anakin whispers, and then turns his gaze back towards the rolling green hills. He teases her about diplomacy, though, and democracy. Padmé tries to argue back, but his wit is as sharp as her knowledge. Anakin teases and Padmé falls for it, every time. Soon, they're running over the hills and Anakin trips and she falls down next to him, and they're rolling down one instead, and his face is alight with more joy she's ever seen before. She stops atop of him, both of their clothes stained with grass and her hair blowing in the wind, curls every which way, and let's her heart roam around in her chest if only for a moment.
Oh, Padmé thinks, as Anakin reaches up to pluck a blade of grass from behind her ear, his skin brushing hers, so this is what I can't have.
Later, they eat and he floats her food into her mouth and they laugh, and when they sit together next to the fire, he breathes and pulses and tosses with the wanting. "The thought of not being with you, I -- I can't breathe," he forces out, and Padmé gets up and faces away from him. This is her heart and her head, finally fighting their age-long war to see who will triumph. "You are in my very soul, tormenting me," Anakin breathes, and it takes all of Padmé's strength to not turn around and confess every feeling, every thought of hers. "If you're suffering as much as I am, please tell me," he says through gritted teeth, and she summons the strength. She turns.
"It would destroy us." Quick. A clean break.
Head it is then. Her heart must hide its teeth.
It isn't until he wakes up from a nightmare and confesses to her that he needs to see his mother. "I can feel her, in pain, Padmé," Anakin says, ghosts of tears in his eyes. Padmé nods. She liked Shmi, back when she had first stepped onto Tatooine. She was kind and loving and cared for her son above all else. "I have to go," Anakin says, his voice hitching, and Padmé nods again. "I'll come with you."
Anakin's mother has been taken by inhabitants of the planet that are much less than human, much less than even Watto, who held Shmi and Anakin as his slaves for years. Anakin is a hurricane, a tsunami, as he strides through the desert that used to be his prison. His stepfamily is kind, yet without hope. Anakin follows a lead to find his mother, and Padmé can tell that he, at least, will not give up on her without proof. Her heart wrenches itself free from its own cage as Anakin looks at his mother's husband, eyes burning with love. "I'm going to find her," he spits definitively, and Padmé feels her will shattering. She runs outside behind him, and in the setting sun, his shadow is stretched over the sand.
"Anakin," she says, haltingly, aware that this is going to change everything. He closes the gap between them, his arms engulfing her.
Padmé sighs and she knows that this is not allowed, this is not allowed, this is not allowed, but finally, she lets herself close her eyes and get caught up in the moment. I can make my own rules, Padmé's heart whispers defiantly to her head, and for once, her mind is overruled.
Anakin returns the next day with Shmi's body and Padmé watches him in rapt attention as he whirls around the basement, hurling spare parts and wrenches and telling her how he killed all of the sand people with his lightsaber, eyes alight with that fury, tears streaming down his face.
"You're not all powerful, Ani-"
"Well, I should be!" Anakin snaps, his voice trembling. Padmé sees the fire inside of him, whirling and engulfing and pulsing. He is passion, personified. She knows it is dangerous, this love of theirs, but not how strong he can be. She wills her heartbeat back to its normal beating and curls her fingers around the back of his neck.
"I could have saved her," he whispers, broken, and then sobs into her lap.
Obi-Wan is on a mission, and his final transmission to her ship is him being attacked. Truthfully, Obi hasn't been on the forefront of her mind lately, and Padmé curses herself for it. She knows he's her oldest friend. She knows he would do anything to protect her. So when she sees he's in trouble, she ignores Anakin's halfhearted protests and sets course for where Obi is being held captive. Anakin's smile is softened; hers is all teeth.
They end up captives as well, and Padmé's head is no longer thinking up battle plans and diplomacy and democracy. Her heart is given free reign.
"Don't be afraid," Anakin says softly, glancing around the room carves out of rock they're being kept in, ready to be wheeled to their deaths.
"I'm not afraid to die," Padmé says, barely a whisper. "I've been dying a little more each day since you came back into my life."
Anakin turns to her, eyes alight even in the darkness. "What?"
"I love you," Padmé whispers, and the war inside of her is suddenly quieted. She loves him. She loves him and this is the only thing on earth she wants. Her heart is alive inside of her, although she feels it seeping from where it's been held captive in her ribcage to all through her body. The truth tastes sweet when it's not being forced back down.
Anakin blinks. "You love me?" He glances from her eyes to the ceiling, then his hands, bound together. "I thought we had decided not to fall in love," he finishes, bitterly. "That we would be forced to live a lie, and... and that it would destroy our lives."
Padmé bites her lip, knowing that this might be her last chance. "I think," she says, barely audible, her heart beating a symphony against the left side of her chest, "that our lives are about to be destroyed anyway. I truly... deeply... love you, and before we die, I want you to know." Anakin's mouth is moving closer and closer to hers and she leans into it, her lips pressing against his.
There are fireworks going off. This is what she can't have.
And yet, she is letting it happen anyways.
After the war has truly begun, after Padmé has fallen in more ways than one, after Anakin's arm has been lost in a battle against the diabolical Count Dooku, after she has said and thought "I love you", she presses herself to Anakin and whispers, "come back with me to Naboo."
He does, without second thought, his hand in hers. When she looks up at him at sunset, arms wrapped around his neck, she breathes, "marry me" and he smiles bigger than she's ever seen him.
"Are you sure?"
"Positive."
"I love you," he says, the inner corner of his eyebrows pulling upwards in earnest, and she grins.
"I love you," she says back, and it's a vow.
They kiss at the next sunset, his hands in hers. Padmé knows the war has only just begun, and they cannot speak a single word of their marriage to anyone, not to Obi-Wan, not to the Senate, not to any of the Jedi Council. She knows the war will be raging on and she can feel things starting to shift. Padmé knows this is dangerous. For a fleeting moment though, as the sun sets and Anakin holds her close to his side, she can forget about the galaxy beginning to implode. She can ignore the politics, just for this long.
It's worth it, it's all worth it, with Anakin heaving above her, their bodies slicked with sweat. He is an animal, he is more earnest than she's ever seen him, and he moves with such an intensity it's terrifying. He is moving in time with her, and he is moaning, and his lips are against her neck and she can think of nothing else but this.
No politics, no war. Just love. Just him.
He holds her afterwards, his body still on fire. Like she's something he could easily snap in two. He's powerful enough, strong enough, that he could if he wanted to. Padmé traces constellations on Anakin's back in the moonlight, and he looks up at her like she's the whole world, the whole galaxy.
"You know I have to leave soon," he whispers.
"I wish you didn't," she replies.
He presses his lips to her collarbone. "Me too," he says, and his voice is choked up with something beyond simple desire. "I love you," Anakin says, arms still tangled around Padmé. "So much."
Padmé turns to face him, her mind churning with all of the ways this can go horribly, disastrously, terrifyingly wrong. She has never been good with letting her heart out of its cage. She has always done the right thing. She has always loved inside of a cage. She doesn't know if she can do this, have this marriage without limitations, without laws, without reason. Anakin makes more sense to her than anything in her life, but she knows there is a darkness embedded deep within him, clashing and churning and burning. She doesn't know if she can just let go of reason.
Then her heart takes over. It surges. It pulses. It wants. And her mind's eye is clouded as she lets herself love, even if it's going to destroy her. Padmé wants, and for once, she allows herself to.
"I love you," she says back to Anakin, voice unwavering.
Padmé Amidala's heart has teeth. And here, she lets it devour her.