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Snapshots of Padmé Amidala's Life, After Obi-Wan
0 reviewsTITLE: "Snapshots of Padmé Amidala's Life, After Obi-Wan" PAIRING: Not entirely applicable, though Padmé is in love with Obi-Wan and she eventually marries/handfasts Anakin. RATING: Uhm, pr...
0Unrated
01. Motion
When the young Jedi warrior explodes over the edge of the roof into a dancing flurry of motion – kicks, slashes, spins, somersaults, flips, and lunging blocks, all punctuated by a diamond-blue brilliant blaze of lightsaber – she can feel her heart stutter to a stop in her chest, rooting her feet in place, and it takes the grasp of two of her handmaidens and the jolt of forced motion, in time with the touch of the young man’s equally intense blue eyes, to start it and her again.
02. Cool
Logic says that eyes so blue – a miracle of water-based colors, blues and greens and indigos and silvery grays all mixed together – should be liquidy cool, and the unfairness of the fact that they burn more brightly than the frozen laser of his Jedi weapon makes a scream catch in the back of her throat.
03. Gentle
She touches his hand lightly, a gentle caress that goes unnoticed by the others within the tent they have congregated within to plan their attack but which causes him to look over at her, to see that she is smiling shyly up at him, and, though he returns her soft smile with a gentleness that stops her breath, he also slides his hand from under hers to move away from her, back to his ungrateful Master’s side, and she feels her heart shivering itself to pieces yet again.
04. Young
She is too young to want what she does of this young man, even for a people who think it no strange thing to elect a teenager for a monarch, but Force help her, she wants this man, /wants /his seed, can see herself carrying his children with such vividness – fraternal twins with flame-touched hair cradled in her arms as she looks up at him, smiling lovingly at his boyish features as he beams down on his children with all the blazing brilliance of the sun – that her empty arms ache with the loss of the weight of a boy and a girl.
05. Last
The last thing she wants is to shame or embarrass him in any way, but she cannot understand how an organization that claims such benevolent goodness could ever deny him the comfort of so much as even a single hour in her arms, in her bed, and she cannot keep from offering herself, again and again, even though he never accepts.
06. Wrong
The Jedi Order claim that love is wrong, that it’s a selfish and dangerous emotion, but she has gained so much from her love of him, even though she knows, now, that she can never and will never truly have him, that she knows, all the way down to the marrow of her bones, that the Jedi are wrong, and that knowledge tempts and terrifies her, both, to no end.
07. Thousand
She must have told him, “I love you, Obi-Wan, and I will never stop loving you,” at least a thousand times, but she knows that she will say it at least a thousand more – or however many times it takes until he no longer doubts her, until he no longer believes he is undeserving of her love, until he understands and believes that her love for him is not dependent upon whether or not it is appropriate for her to love him or if she can ever even physically have him.
08. King
She wonders, sometimes, how it would have been, if their situations had been reversed – she the Jedi Padawan whose promotion to Knighthood was long past due and he the newly elected King of a planet invaded and overrun by machines of war – but she knows that she never would have been able to adhere to the vow of chastity he has so effortlessly upheld the whole of his life, and the knowledge makes her weep in frustration and shame and hate herself for such wonderings.
09. Learn
She has learned that she can ask virtually anything of him, short of possession of his body, and that he will move the sun and stars if he must to give her what she wants, but it’s never quite enough to stop her from wanting to unlearn that caveat, and the knowledge that she cannot leaves a bitter taste of ashes in her mouth.
10. One
All it would take is one word, one motion, one confession of desire, and she would make herself his alone, for all time, but he isn’t the one who finally comes to her to speak to her of passion and reach out to hold and kiss and cherish and worship her, and her soul weeps once more for the one she cannot have.
11. Blur
He moves to catch her, as she’s falling, so quickly that she cannot even see him, only a blur of brown and beige robes crowned by a fiery corona of hair like the heart of a sun, and she wants so badly to kiss him, when that blur resolves into his body cradling hers, in the shadows of the sacrificial pillars, that the lingering taste of his Padawan’s desperate mouth on hers at once makes her want to vomit and to find that young man and bear him down rapidly beneath her slight weight onto the sands and claim him, as she cannot claim the man cradling her so carefully against his chest now.
12. Wait
Things are spinning rapidly out of control, and she knows she should stop, should wait before deciding what to do or say, but to pause now would be to acknowledge the folly of turning to one who should be as unavailable to her as the one she does not just love but is so irrevocably in love with that she cannot imagine her life without him in it, and to do that would be to condemn this young man, this young Padawan, for a weakness she has actively encouraged, and she is too ashamed of herself to cause him such pain, and so she rushes, headlong, into his arms, despite the bone-deep knowledge that what she is doing is wrong.
13. Change
She is both horrified and terrified of the irreversibility of the change she’s inflicted upon her life and Anakin’s, and, in a way, the open declaration of war is a blessing, because it lets her hide from that change, pretending it hasn’t occurred (if never quite forgetting that it has), behaving as though Obi-Wan should trust nothing has ever or will ever change between them.
14. Command
He is a man of command and control, a man who clearly puts a lot of thought into everything – every expression, every gesture, every word that passes from his lips, all obviously the result of much careful internal debate, and all therefore carrying an immense weight of power, of charisma and command – and yet he so clearly puts everything of himself into a course of action, once a decision has been made, that she wonders, sometimes (especially given Anakin’s lack of control and forethought, even if he also has charisma and command to spare), if the reason he clung to his vows rather than cleaving to her isn’t because she so often succeeds in bypassing that control and making him act without forethought that he feared he might lose himself within her.
15. Hold
Despite everything that despicable creature had done to him, the hope of her redemption had such a tight hold on him that Ventress’ death broke something in Obi-Wan, and so she finds her arms opening to him, cradling him with the same fierce tenderness as when she held onto him, that night after Qui-Gon’s death, utterly unsurprised to feel the wetness of his face against her right shoulder and neck.
16. Need
The Jedi Order accounts need a sin as dangerous as desire, and so when he admits that he needs her, that she is both a balance and an anchor for him, her heart stops painfully in her chest, and she nearly blacks out, from lack of oxygen, before the need to breathe jerks her back to life and motion again.
17. Vision
The vision of fire-touched twins morphs, one night, into a nightmare of a boy with golden hair and blue eyes and a girl with brown hair and brown eyes who will destroy first the Republic and then the galaxy she knows entirely, and she wakes, screaming, to realize she’s missed one of her menses entirely and is due for another that has not yet come.
18. Attention
His name can command her attention as no one and nothing else can, and her handmaidens claim, half teasing and half exasperated, that the sky could fall down around her ears and she would not notice, if Obi-Wan were on the HoloNet – a claim that makes her flush in tongue-tied silence, for she cannot bring herself to protest when she cannot be sure that they are not right.
19. Soul
Her soul feels as if it were dying within her, but the time comes when she can no longer justify putting off a visit to a med-droid, and the pain is such that she cannot keep from crying and must be blindly led by her handmaidens into the examining room.
20. Picture
There is a picture of them that she carries everywhere, protected by half a dozen different codes on her personal datapad, and she stares at his beloved features, too shocked even to weep, wondering if it might not be best to simply kill herself now, before he can find out the truth.
21. Fool
She’s such a fool that even though she knows, in her heart of hearts, there’s no fixing the mess that she’s made, short of death, she talks herself out of suicide, desperately hoping he’ll be able to find another way for her to salvage the situation.
22. Mad
She weeps like a madwoman as she destroys her chambers, ravaging all of the fragile little gowns she can no longer wear and the delicate expensive ornaments she no longer feels worthy of wearing, feeling the silks tear under her nails and the frail shell carvings shatter in her hands and wishing like mad that it were her skin and her bones, instead.
23. Child
The child – she refuses to believe her vision of galaxy-ravaging twins may be the truth – literally makes her sick, and, though she hates suffering from illness, she is viciously glad, because she believes the misery is no more than she deserves.
24. Now
She’s had to alter her entire style of dress, now, to disguise her belly and prolong the day when she will have begun to show so badly that it will no longer be possible to camouflage the truth, and she dreads the coming of that day so badly that she starts to wonder, again, if it might not simply be best to throw herself off of her balcony, now, and have done with it all, before she can ruin both Anakin and Obi-Wan’s lives with her folly.
25. Shadow
The stains under her eyes have darkened to the point where it’s no longer possible to cover their shadow completely with makeup, and, as she contemplates herself in the mirror, she morbidly wonders if their shadowy presence presages the shape and tenor of things to come.
26. Goodbye
On the day when she is certain that she has begun to show, despite all the concealing drape of extra fabric, only the selfish desire to tell Obi-Wan goodbye face to face keeps her from drinking from the cup of a nonhuman visitor and deliberately swallowing poison.
27. Hide
Her handmaidens hide what she is certain is an increasing amount of rumors and gossip, and yet still she sobs herself to sleep every night and rises every morning to sick up the contents of her stomach, wishing so badly to be hollow and empty that she can no longer hide behind her mask of imperturbability.
28. Fortune
The messages cost a small fortune to send, in bribes, but she does not hesitate to pay, when she learns that there is a Nabooian among the regiments of soldiers being sent to swell the ranks of the Broken Circle Armada that Obi-Wan and Anakin command, and knows she would have paid ten times as much, if necessary, to contact both the man she loves and the man she is still so desperately and hopelessly in love with.
29. Safe
The fighting is getting so much worse, now, that she’s begun to wonder if it’s wise, to consider Coruscant safe, but she cannot bring herself to speak her suspicions out loud, as a small voice in the back of her mind has also pointed out that dying in an attack would be an honorable way for her to go, and she is desperately afraid of the confrontation that she knows will come, inevitably, if just such a fate does not claim her (and so save her) first.
30. Ghost
As the days without contact pile up, she becomes paler and paler, until finally Bail exclaims one day that she looks like a ghost and insists that she go home and rest, and she hasn’t the strength to argue, even though she knows she will simply sit alone in the darkness of her room and cry.
31. Book
She feels, increasingly, that the book of her life is nearly complete, and she fears so much the afterword she will engender that she begins to start nervously at sudden noises and shadows, until her handmaidens become so afraid that she will have a nervous breakdown in the midst of some Senate or committee meeting that they finally insist that she begin to take calming draughts.
32. Eye
She sees him in every blue eye she meets, and her sorrow is so great that the stains under her own brown eyes more closely resemble warpaint than shadows.
33. Never
“I’ll never stop loving you,” she whispers, alone, into the darkness and silence, and, despite everything that has happened, it is no less true now than it was when she first laid eyes upon him, whirling and somersaulting and drop-kicking his way into her heart during that first fateful rescue, on Naboo.
34. Sing
She cannot keep anything down, and the blood sings in her ears so that she often cannot tell exterior noises from the interior din of that rushing hum, the illusion of music lulling her to drift and dream of smiling bright blue eyes and sun-touched hair and ’saber-calloused hands cradling her body with infinite tenderness, gently guiding her to the steps of a dance older than time itself.
35. Sudden
A sudden outpouring of rich melodic laughter knifes through the noise of the sitting room, and she knows instantly who it is and so doesn’t look up, because seeing his face on the HoloNet now would only make the painful cramping in her stomach worse.
36. Stop
She wants so badly to stop that she’s begun to have dreams of dying that make her smile maniacally in her sleep, worrying her handmaidens so much that they’ve stopped letting her go anywhere – even into the ’fresher, to use the necessary – because they’re afraid of what she might do, if left alone.
37. Time
Time has gone oddly fluid and strange, some days flowing past in a never-ending rapid stream while some minutes freeze in place and seem to endure forever, and she wishes so badly that he were here with her and despairs so of all the time she’s had with him that she’s squandered that not even the calming draughts can keep her from bursting into tears in the midst of her afternoon tea.
38. Wash
She dreams of the gentleness of his lightsaber-hardened hands upon her, and so, when the two newest handmaidens wash off the chalky pale pancake makeup slathered upon the shadows under her eyes (which does nothing but turn their blackness to a cool blue stain that reminds her of his eyes and makes her want to cry) with heart-crushing tenderness, she wants to scream so badly that she finally gives in and does, keening like a wounded beast before her vanity mirror.
39. Torn
She’s torn in so many directions that she no longer knows whether she’s coming or going, and when she visits Mon Mothma one day and the Chandrilan Senator insists on letting Padmé lie down for a nap in Mon’s own bed and giving her a pill that will make sure she sleeps, she swallows it without question, half hoping it will tear the burden she’s carrying from her and so make the decision she’s too afraid to make for herself.
40. History
It’s incredibly strange to think that the battle that is sweeping ever more rapidly down upon them will one day be regarded as little more than a part of the Republic’s history, but she hopes, with all her might, that it will also be remembered as the tipping point that kept the course of events from conforming with her nightmares, and so she welcomes the noise of the Separatist droids, when the din of battle finally becomes too loud to mistake it for anything other than what it is.
41. Power
Her power has always been in her mind and her body – she’s never had any strength to speak of in the Force – so when she can see the death that is coming for her, she is so surprised that it doesn’t occur to her in time to try to warn Bail.
42. Bother
She’s never wanted to be a bother, and the thought that her doom might drag Mon Mothma and Bail down with her is so painful that she wants to scream out in anger, but then it’s too late to protest, and all she can do is cry out to Anakin and Obi-Wan and hope that they hear her and will forgive her for her weakness when she is gone.
43. God
The humans of Naboo have no organized religion, as such, being strong believers in the Force rather than in some kind of strange, all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing (and therefore endlessly proven to be utterly lacking in any real sense of justness or compassion) deity, but Obi-Wan has been her god for so long that she finds herself welcoming the end, as it rushes towards her.
44. Wall
She wakes crumpled against a wall she has slammed against so hard that it has broken her, and she smiles up at Mon Mothma so sweetly through her pain that the Senator instinctively recoils a little, horrified by the thought that her fellow Senator and friend might wish for death instead of wanting to rage and fight against it.
45. Naked
She always felt oddly naked, in Obi-Wan’s presence, and the sensation returns as she presses the necklace of hair formed from Anakin’s Padawan braid into Mon Mothma’s hands, her friend’s assumption that the beloved she’s spoken of who gave that token to her is Obi-Wan rather than Anakin stripping her bare and leaving her feeling oddly light.
46. Drive
She always thought that her drive was a gift, not a flaw, but as she lays there, dying, she knows that Palpatine used that determination and ambition as a means to a terrible end, and she desperately hopes that her death, now, will be enough to forestall the coming of that end.
47. Harm
If anyone speaks of her death to Anakin before Mon Mothma can bring the news to Obi-Wan, then she knows that the harm she has inflicted will be more than enough to destroy the two men who mean the most in all the worlds to her, and so when the spirit of Qui-Gon Jinn (a man she has never fully trusted nor been able to truly respect or like, given his treatment of Obi-Wan) offers to help her see to it that it will be Obi-Wan who breaks the news to Anakin, she accepts his proposal without so much as an instant’s hesitation.
48. Precious
Obi-Wan is infinitely precious to her, she cares a great deal for Anakin, and she knows how precious Anakin is to Obi-Wan, and so she rejoices uninhibitedly when their mouths meet in their first kiss.
49. Hunger
Their hunger for each other is as boundless as her joy for them, and, when she finds that she can help to give those two wonderful men the flame-touched children she used to dream about so often, she is so hungry to help them that she nearly kisses Anakin, for bullying her into staying in her sister’s body long enough to give her other family members all a proper goodbye.
50. Believe
They have come to trust and believe in one another as much as they love each other, and she is so perfectly content to find her belief in them proven right that she slips loose of her borrowed second body and into the Force with a smile, as certain as ever that she will never stop loving Obi-Wan and no longer able even to regret the fact that she was not the one who would share his heart and soul and life, not when she can see how complete Anakin has made him.
When the young Jedi warrior explodes over the edge of the roof into a dancing flurry of motion – kicks, slashes, spins, somersaults, flips, and lunging blocks, all punctuated by a diamond-blue brilliant blaze of lightsaber – she can feel her heart stutter to a stop in her chest, rooting her feet in place, and it takes the grasp of two of her handmaidens and the jolt of forced motion, in time with the touch of the young man’s equally intense blue eyes, to start it and her again.
02. Cool
Logic says that eyes so blue – a miracle of water-based colors, blues and greens and indigos and silvery grays all mixed together – should be liquidy cool, and the unfairness of the fact that they burn more brightly than the frozen laser of his Jedi weapon makes a scream catch in the back of her throat.
03. Gentle
She touches his hand lightly, a gentle caress that goes unnoticed by the others within the tent they have congregated within to plan their attack but which causes him to look over at her, to see that she is smiling shyly up at him, and, though he returns her soft smile with a gentleness that stops her breath, he also slides his hand from under hers to move away from her, back to his ungrateful Master’s side, and she feels her heart shivering itself to pieces yet again.
04. Young
She is too young to want what she does of this young man, even for a people who think it no strange thing to elect a teenager for a monarch, but Force help her, she wants this man, /wants /his seed, can see herself carrying his children with such vividness – fraternal twins with flame-touched hair cradled in her arms as she looks up at him, smiling lovingly at his boyish features as he beams down on his children with all the blazing brilliance of the sun – that her empty arms ache with the loss of the weight of a boy and a girl.
05. Last
The last thing she wants is to shame or embarrass him in any way, but she cannot understand how an organization that claims such benevolent goodness could ever deny him the comfort of so much as even a single hour in her arms, in her bed, and she cannot keep from offering herself, again and again, even though he never accepts.
06. Wrong
The Jedi Order claim that love is wrong, that it’s a selfish and dangerous emotion, but she has gained so much from her love of him, even though she knows, now, that she can never and will never truly have him, that she knows, all the way down to the marrow of her bones, that the Jedi are wrong, and that knowledge tempts and terrifies her, both, to no end.
07. Thousand
She must have told him, “I love you, Obi-Wan, and I will never stop loving you,” at least a thousand times, but she knows that she will say it at least a thousand more – or however many times it takes until he no longer doubts her, until he no longer believes he is undeserving of her love, until he understands and believes that her love for him is not dependent upon whether or not it is appropriate for her to love him or if she can ever even physically have him.
08. King
She wonders, sometimes, how it would have been, if their situations had been reversed – she the Jedi Padawan whose promotion to Knighthood was long past due and he the newly elected King of a planet invaded and overrun by machines of war – but she knows that she never would have been able to adhere to the vow of chastity he has so effortlessly upheld the whole of his life, and the knowledge makes her weep in frustration and shame and hate herself for such wonderings.
09. Learn
She has learned that she can ask virtually anything of him, short of possession of his body, and that he will move the sun and stars if he must to give her what she wants, but it’s never quite enough to stop her from wanting to unlearn that caveat, and the knowledge that she cannot leaves a bitter taste of ashes in her mouth.
10. One
All it would take is one word, one motion, one confession of desire, and she would make herself his alone, for all time, but he isn’t the one who finally comes to her to speak to her of passion and reach out to hold and kiss and cherish and worship her, and her soul weeps once more for the one she cannot have.
11. Blur
He moves to catch her, as she’s falling, so quickly that she cannot even see him, only a blur of brown and beige robes crowned by a fiery corona of hair like the heart of a sun, and she wants so badly to kiss him, when that blur resolves into his body cradling hers, in the shadows of the sacrificial pillars, that the lingering taste of his Padawan’s desperate mouth on hers at once makes her want to vomit and to find that young man and bear him down rapidly beneath her slight weight onto the sands and claim him, as she cannot claim the man cradling her so carefully against his chest now.
12. Wait
Things are spinning rapidly out of control, and she knows she should stop, should wait before deciding what to do or say, but to pause now would be to acknowledge the folly of turning to one who should be as unavailable to her as the one she does not just love but is so irrevocably in love with that she cannot imagine her life without him in it, and to do that would be to condemn this young man, this young Padawan, for a weakness she has actively encouraged, and she is too ashamed of herself to cause him such pain, and so she rushes, headlong, into his arms, despite the bone-deep knowledge that what she is doing is wrong.
13. Change
She is both horrified and terrified of the irreversibility of the change she’s inflicted upon her life and Anakin’s, and, in a way, the open declaration of war is a blessing, because it lets her hide from that change, pretending it hasn’t occurred (if never quite forgetting that it has), behaving as though Obi-Wan should trust nothing has ever or will ever change between them.
14. Command
He is a man of command and control, a man who clearly puts a lot of thought into everything – every expression, every gesture, every word that passes from his lips, all obviously the result of much careful internal debate, and all therefore carrying an immense weight of power, of charisma and command – and yet he so clearly puts everything of himself into a course of action, once a decision has been made, that she wonders, sometimes (especially given Anakin’s lack of control and forethought, even if he also has charisma and command to spare), if the reason he clung to his vows rather than cleaving to her isn’t because she so often succeeds in bypassing that control and making him act without forethought that he feared he might lose himself within her.
15. Hold
Despite everything that despicable creature had done to him, the hope of her redemption had such a tight hold on him that Ventress’ death broke something in Obi-Wan, and so she finds her arms opening to him, cradling him with the same fierce tenderness as when she held onto him, that night after Qui-Gon’s death, utterly unsurprised to feel the wetness of his face against her right shoulder and neck.
16. Need
The Jedi Order accounts need a sin as dangerous as desire, and so when he admits that he needs her, that she is both a balance and an anchor for him, her heart stops painfully in her chest, and she nearly blacks out, from lack of oxygen, before the need to breathe jerks her back to life and motion again.
17. Vision
The vision of fire-touched twins morphs, one night, into a nightmare of a boy with golden hair and blue eyes and a girl with brown hair and brown eyes who will destroy first the Republic and then the galaxy she knows entirely, and she wakes, screaming, to realize she’s missed one of her menses entirely and is due for another that has not yet come.
18. Attention
His name can command her attention as no one and nothing else can, and her handmaidens claim, half teasing and half exasperated, that the sky could fall down around her ears and she would not notice, if Obi-Wan were on the HoloNet – a claim that makes her flush in tongue-tied silence, for she cannot bring herself to protest when she cannot be sure that they are not right.
19. Soul
Her soul feels as if it were dying within her, but the time comes when she can no longer justify putting off a visit to a med-droid, and the pain is such that she cannot keep from crying and must be blindly led by her handmaidens into the examining room.
20. Picture
There is a picture of them that she carries everywhere, protected by half a dozen different codes on her personal datapad, and she stares at his beloved features, too shocked even to weep, wondering if it might not be best to simply kill herself now, before he can find out the truth.
21. Fool
She’s such a fool that even though she knows, in her heart of hearts, there’s no fixing the mess that she’s made, short of death, she talks herself out of suicide, desperately hoping he’ll be able to find another way for her to salvage the situation.
22. Mad
She weeps like a madwoman as she destroys her chambers, ravaging all of the fragile little gowns she can no longer wear and the delicate expensive ornaments she no longer feels worthy of wearing, feeling the silks tear under her nails and the frail shell carvings shatter in her hands and wishing like mad that it were her skin and her bones, instead.
23. Child
The child – she refuses to believe her vision of galaxy-ravaging twins may be the truth – literally makes her sick, and, though she hates suffering from illness, she is viciously glad, because she believes the misery is no more than she deserves.
24. Now
She’s had to alter her entire style of dress, now, to disguise her belly and prolong the day when she will have begun to show so badly that it will no longer be possible to camouflage the truth, and she dreads the coming of that day so badly that she starts to wonder, again, if it might not simply be best to throw herself off of her balcony, now, and have done with it all, before she can ruin both Anakin and Obi-Wan’s lives with her folly.
25. Shadow
The stains under her eyes have darkened to the point where it’s no longer possible to cover their shadow completely with makeup, and, as she contemplates herself in the mirror, she morbidly wonders if their shadowy presence presages the shape and tenor of things to come.
26. Goodbye
On the day when she is certain that she has begun to show, despite all the concealing drape of extra fabric, only the selfish desire to tell Obi-Wan goodbye face to face keeps her from drinking from the cup of a nonhuman visitor and deliberately swallowing poison.
27. Hide
Her handmaidens hide what she is certain is an increasing amount of rumors and gossip, and yet still she sobs herself to sleep every night and rises every morning to sick up the contents of her stomach, wishing so badly to be hollow and empty that she can no longer hide behind her mask of imperturbability.
28. Fortune
The messages cost a small fortune to send, in bribes, but she does not hesitate to pay, when she learns that there is a Nabooian among the regiments of soldiers being sent to swell the ranks of the Broken Circle Armada that Obi-Wan and Anakin command, and knows she would have paid ten times as much, if necessary, to contact both the man she loves and the man she is still so desperately and hopelessly in love with.
29. Safe
The fighting is getting so much worse, now, that she’s begun to wonder if it’s wise, to consider Coruscant safe, but she cannot bring herself to speak her suspicions out loud, as a small voice in the back of her mind has also pointed out that dying in an attack would be an honorable way for her to go, and she is desperately afraid of the confrontation that she knows will come, inevitably, if just such a fate does not claim her (and so save her) first.
30. Ghost
As the days without contact pile up, she becomes paler and paler, until finally Bail exclaims one day that she looks like a ghost and insists that she go home and rest, and she hasn’t the strength to argue, even though she knows she will simply sit alone in the darkness of her room and cry.
31. Book
She feels, increasingly, that the book of her life is nearly complete, and she fears so much the afterword she will engender that she begins to start nervously at sudden noises and shadows, until her handmaidens become so afraid that she will have a nervous breakdown in the midst of some Senate or committee meeting that they finally insist that she begin to take calming draughts.
32. Eye
She sees him in every blue eye she meets, and her sorrow is so great that the stains under her own brown eyes more closely resemble warpaint than shadows.
33. Never
“I’ll never stop loving you,” she whispers, alone, into the darkness and silence, and, despite everything that has happened, it is no less true now than it was when she first laid eyes upon him, whirling and somersaulting and drop-kicking his way into her heart during that first fateful rescue, on Naboo.
34. Sing
She cannot keep anything down, and the blood sings in her ears so that she often cannot tell exterior noises from the interior din of that rushing hum, the illusion of music lulling her to drift and dream of smiling bright blue eyes and sun-touched hair and ’saber-calloused hands cradling her body with infinite tenderness, gently guiding her to the steps of a dance older than time itself.
35. Sudden
A sudden outpouring of rich melodic laughter knifes through the noise of the sitting room, and she knows instantly who it is and so doesn’t look up, because seeing his face on the HoloNet now would only make the painful cramping in her stomach worse.
36. Stop
She wants so badly to stop that she’s begun to have dreams of dying that make her smile maniacally in her sleep, worrying her handmaidens so much that they’ve stopped letting her go anywhere – even into the ’fresher, to use the necessary – because they’re afraid of what she might do, if left alone.
37. Time
Time has gone oddly fluid and strange, some days flowing past in a never-ending rapid stream while some minutes freeze in place and seem to endure forever, and she wishes so badly that he were here with her and despairs so of all the time she’s had with him that she’s squandered that not even the calming draughts can keep her from bursting into tears in the midst of her afternoon tea.
38. Wash
She dreams of the gentleness of his lightsaber-hardened hands upon her, and so, when the two newest handmaidens wash off the chalky pale pancake makeup slathered upon the shadows under her eyes (which does nothing but turn their blackness to a cool blue stain that reminds her of his eyes and makes her want to cry) with heart-crushing tenderness, she wants to scream so badly that she finally gives in and does, keening like a wounded beast before her vanity mirror.
39. Torn
She’s torn in so many directions that she no longer knows whether she’s coming or going, and when she visits Mon Mothma one day and the Chandrilan Senator insists on letting Padmé lie down for a nap in Mon’s own bed and giving her a pill that will make sure she sleeps, she swallows it without question, half hoping it will tear the burden she’s carrying from her and so make the decision she’s too afraid to make for herself.
40. History
It’s incredibly strange to think that the battle that is sweeping ever more rapidly down upon them will one day be regarded as little more than a part of the Republic’s history, but she hopes, with all her might, that it will also be remembered as the tipping point that kept the course of events from conforming with her nightmares, and so she welcomes the noise of the Separatist droids, when the din of battle finally becomes too loud to mistake it for anything other than what it is.
41. Power
Her power has always been in her mind and her body – she’s never had any strength to speak of in the Force – so when she can see the death that is coming for her, she is so surprised that it doesn’t occur to her in time to try to warn Bail.
42. Bother
She’s never wanted to be a bother, and the thought that her doom might drag Mon Mothma and Bail down with her is so painful that she wants to scream out in anger, but then it’s too late to protest, and all she can do is cry out to Anakin and Obi-Wan and hope that they hear her and will forgive her for her weakness when she is gone.
43. God
The humans of Naboo have no organized religion, as such, being strong believers in the Force rather than in some kind of strange, all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing (and therefore endlessly proven to be utterly lacking in any real sense of justness or compassion) deity, but Obi-Wan has been her god for so long that she finds herself welcoming the end, as it rushes towards her.
44. Wall
She wakes crumpled against a wall she has slammed against so hard that it has broken her, and she smiles up at Mon Mothma so sweetly through her pain that the Senator instinctively recoils a little, horrified by the thought that her fellow Senator and friend might wish for death instead of wanting to rage and fight against it.
45. Naked
She always felt oddly naked, in Obi-Wan’s presence, and the sensation returns as she presses the necklace of hair formed from Anakin’s Padawan braid into Mon Mothma’s hands, her friend’s assumption that the beloved she’s spoken of who gave that token to her is Obi-Wan rather than Anakin stripping her bare and leaving her feeling oddly light.
46. Drive
She always thought that her drive was a gift, not a flaw, but as she lays there, dying, she knows that Palpatine used that determination and ambition as a means to a terrible end, and she desperately hopes that her death, now, will be enough to forestall the coming of that end.
47. Harm
If anyone speaks of her death to Anakin before Mon Mothma can bring the news to Obi-Wan, then she knows that the harm she has inflicted will be more than enough to destroy the two men who mean the most in all the worlds to her, and so when the spirit of Qui-Gon Jinn (a man she has never fully trusted nor been able to truly respect or like, given his treatment of Obi-Wan) offers to help her see to it that it will be Obi-Wan who breaks the news to Anakin, she accepts his proposal without so much as an instant’s hesitation.
48. Precious
Obi-Wan is infinitely precious to her, she cares a great deal for Anakin, and she knows how precious Anakin is to Obi-Wan, and so she rejoices uninhibitedly when their mouths meet in their first kiss.
49. Hunger
Their hunger for each other is as boundless as her joy for them, and, when she finds that she can help to give those two wonderful men the flame-touched children she used to dream about so often, she is so hungry to help them that she nearly kisses Anakin, for bullying her into staying in her sister’s body long enough to give her other family members all a proper goodbye.
50. Believe
They have come to trust and believe in one another as much as they love each other, and she is so perfectly content to find her belief in them proven right that she slips loose of her borrowed second body and into the Force with a smile, as certain as ever that she will never stop loving Obi-Wan and no longer able even to regret the fact that she was not the one who would share his heart and soul and life, not when she can see how complete Anakin has made him.
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