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Her first moment of awareness comes with a gasp, and she surges upward. The movement leaves her dizzy, and she nearly sinks back down, but the thought of lying down, lying exposed, strikes deep fear into her, so she curls into herself instead and presses her knuckles against her face.
“…Padmé? Padmé, can you hear me?” a deep voice burrows below the ringing in her ears, but it takes her a few moments to realize that she’s the one being addressed.
She looks up, and flinches. The figure looming over her is a void of a man, the expected features of a face absent, or present only in the abstract impression. But he clenches his fist like a man in response to her recoil, and the room seems to shake in response. A beat, and it settles, and he releases his grip.
“I am not going to hurt you, Padmé,” he says. “I saved you.”
“Who are you?”
The room seems to tremble again.
“It’s me,” he says. “It’s Anakin. Obi-Wan did this to me.”
She feels dizzy again. “I don’t know you,” she admits, “I don’t know Anakin. I don’t know Obi-Wan. I don’t even know Padmé.”
The room is definitely shaking now, she can hear things crashing to the ground behind her, but she’s afraid to look away from the raging storm in front.
By the time its over, she doesn’t remember why it started.
He tells her to get to her feet and follow him. A persistent feeling of being off-balance hinders her steps. She pushes through it, doing everything she can to remain upright and putting one foot in front of the other. She doesn’t want to be dragged to wherever they’re going, so she ignores the way her movements feel stiff, stretched in ways they shouldn’t go.
She hopes it will pass so that she can make a run for it.
They stop.
In the new room – there was a room before, wasn’t there? – there is a tank.
“Padmé.”
It takes a moment to remember. Already it had slipped away, dissolved into empty noise until his voice crushes it back into a solid shape, tangible and certain and out of place in the fog of her mind.
“I will show you my face,” he says, “and you will remember.”
Already as he lapses into silence and enters the tank, the edges begin to fray, the words slowly losing their shape to the fog.
Inside the tank, he removes the mask.
Inside the mask, there is a face.
He watches her, expectantly. He looks the way she feels, half-alive and pressed into the impression of a human being. Perhaps he, too, would melt away into the fog if it were not for his mask and armor crushing him back into shape.
But nothing holds her back from the fog. He had wanted something from her, but she cannot remember.
She only knows that she has nothing to give.