FicWad

01.) Worms: The seeds of envy in her heart have sprouted, growing to bear a ripening fruit in the shape of an obsessive desire for what she cannot have, and so madness worms its way slowly but inevitably up into her brain, poisoning her life and ruining any chance for true happiness that she might otherwise have ever known, though of course she does not recognize this truth, infected with the spores of insanity loosed by that ripening fruit as she is.

02.) Vow: She takes her vows of marriage to Bail utterly seriously, and it offends her more deeply than words alone could ever possibly convey to learn that her body has so treacherously failed to uphold its end of the deal by proving incapable of bearing her husband children.

03.) Bleed: The first time her flesh rebels and starts to bleed out the life of a child she’s carrying, she cries herself sick with rage and grief, but foolishly takes comfort in the notion that they can try again, little suspecting that not even all the trying in the world will prove able to give her the baby and heir she desires with all of her heart and soul to be able to give Bail (as the one thing she should be able to do, as a woman and a wife, that the true object of his love can never do).

04.) Sore: Even through the drugs, she can feel how sore and scraped empty her womb feels, and her heart breaks so completely for the loss of their second child that the med-droid swiftly moves to give her something to knock her out, evidently believing that her rising hysteria will cause further damage to her body, if left unchecked.

05.) Redeemer: Alderaanians don’t believe in gods, so there’s no one to pray to, to redeem the fault of her flesh and make her able to carry a child to full term, and she absolutely refuses to ask the Force for guidance, for it was the Force that first brought Bail into contact with the one he truly loves, and, though a part of her knows she is being excessively morbid and even paranoid, she cannot help but feel as if the Force would rather have her out of the picture altogether.

06.) Violence: Alderaanians despise violence, but there is nothing she would not do for a child of her own an heir for her husband, and she would not hesitate to sacrifice even the Jedi’s golden Team on the altar of her need, if only she thought it would truly do any good.

07.) Sheep: For the life of her, she can’t see what’s so blasted impressive, so blinking lovable, about Obi-Wan Kenobi, that so many should either love and adore him to the point of veneration or else lust after him with such single-minded zealousness as to be all but frightening in the fixity of their want of the man, and, on most days, she’s forced to conclude that it must simply be more proof that the galaxy is full of far too easily led sheep and damned blind fools.

08.) Temptation: The temptation is all but irresistible, to simply come right out with it and tell Obi-Wan that it is his name on her husband’s lips, whenever she “accidentally” overhears or sees him alone and pleasuring himself, but she manages to restrain herself, if only because she isn’t sure that even this knowledge would be enough to permanently end their “friendship” (and a part of her is fearful of what such knowledge might inspire, if Obi-Wan were to discover just how desperately her husband loves and desires him).

09.) Spiral: After the third miscarriage, she can feel her control starting to slip a bit more every day, as she wants and wants and is continually denied a child of her own, and she fears spiraling out of control enough to start confining herself more and more to their shared suite of rooms.

10.) Good Enough: Bail cares for her, of course, and she knows that, just as she knows that he’d as soon adopt an heir as risk her fragile health with another attempt at having a child of their own, but she wants /his /child, wants to give him an heir of his body and her blood, and taking in some cousin or fostering an orphan just isn’t good enough!

11.) Change: She swore to Bail, once, that her love for him would never change, no matter who else his romantic and naturally caring nature might lead him to idealize, idolize, adore, or even desire, but she has nightmares about walking in and discovering him truly with Obi-Wan, and she’s afraid that, after having gone through three known miscarriages, if she ever actually did find him in such a compromising position, it would break her enough to destroy her love for him.

12.) Iris: She has to admit that Obi-Wan has incredibly kind eyes that are rather stunningly gorgeously colored – the pupils themselves may be blue, but the rings around them, in each iris, are flecked with purple, lilac, indigo, blue, ultramarine, azure, turquoise, aquamarine, green, gray, and an odd shivery hue that makes her think of light itself, rather than of color – but not even his gentle kindness or his unquestionably pretty (well. Beautiful, if truth be told) eyes can make her forget that he is the person her husband would likely gladly sell his soul to be with.

13.) White: She powdered her skin white, once, and put cinnamon highlights in her hair, to try to be more like Obi-Wan and perhaps seem that much more desirable to Bail, but he only frowned at her in confusion and asked if she were dressing the part of a ghost for some masquerade that they’d been invited to attend and he’d managed to forget about entirely since.

14.) Sober: She hurts so much some days (especially when Bail is away, on Coruscant) that she simply cannot stand to remain sober, and so she drinks too much wine and cries in her cups and falls to sleep exhausted and cranky from the headache that weeping always brings only to wake the following day feeling as if she’s been run over by some careless fool in a speeder and wondering what in the name of the Force she’s trying to do to herself.

15.) Question: The question isn’t whether Bail would ever leave her, for unless the galaxy were to suddenly radically change and Obi-Wan were to abruptly undergo a fundamental change of his own in order to become someone willing and able to take on a serious long-term lover, Breha knows that Bail never will: no, the question is whether or not she can ever make him love her as much or more than he loves Obi-Wan, and she is convinced that she’ll never be able to do so, not without a child of their flesh to present to her husband as his heir, and so she keeps trying and trying and trying to conceive a child she can carry to full term, though each new failure leaves her feeling as if she could simply lay down and die of grief.

16.) Salt: It’s rubbing salt in an open wound, being forced to play the perfect hostess and sit and smile and be engaging and lively and witty and kind and polite and warm to this man, this Jedi her husband desires so desperately, so close to when she’s lost another one of their children, but her husband invited Obi-Wan to Alderaan to relax while he was on his first furlough from the war, and damned if she’s going to give Bail reason to find any kind of fault in her by protesting the visit of his war-weary friend!

17.) Buried Alive: She feels smothered and covered over and buried alive by the weight of her own failures, sometimes, and she hates her weak, undesirable flesh with such a vengeance that it takes a deliberate act of will to avoid taking a blade to herself and trying to carve away whatever it is that makes her too weak to bear a living child, makes her less lovable than Obi-Wan Kenobi.

18.) Embrace: She gives the Jedi the traditional embrace and kisses of peace, and tries not to snarl at him when he flinches away from her ever so slightly but then lingers in her husband’s tight yet gentle embrace, resting his forehead on Bail’s broad chest as if he belongs there, in the warm circle of his strong arms, and is luxuriating in a longed-for returned home.

19.) Under: She can feel her mind straining, starting to craze and crack a little around the edges, sometimes, under all this pressure, but she is an Antilles and an Organa by marriage, and she is strong, and so bedamned if she’ll give that thrice-blast Jedi the satisfaction of making a scene over his presence in her husband’s life and home and even arms!

20.) Worry: Bail would doubtlessly tell her not to worry and that he loves her and that Obi-Wan would never return his affections and could never act on them even if he might ever want to and a million other such things all designed to reassure and soothe her and impress upon her the unfoundedness of her doubting and fearful paranoia, but she finds it rather hard to take such calming sentiments seriously, when she’s already heard and seen him, doing things to himself in the bed and the shower and elsewhere (including once, quite memorably, in a barely semi-private nook in one of the Palace gardens), whimpering and sobbing Obi-Wan’s name as passionately as one might worshipfully whisper and zealously cry out the name of a very personal, private god.

21.) Cage: Her flawed flesh is a gilded cage, this sham of a marriage a lightless room, the remains of her hopes and dreams the charnel residents of a bricked up mausoleum, and she wonders, sometimes, why her heart insists on beating, when she is, in essence, already dead in every way that truly matters.

22.) Unforgiven: She claims to understand and to tolerate her husband’s obsession with the Jedi, but the truth is that he’ll die utterly unforgiven if he gets himself killed chasing off after some damn fool idealistic quest involving the Jedi Order and their war, for she’s never been able to bring herself to truly come wholly to terms with the strength of his loyalty to and love for the young Jedi Master, and, as long as that is so, she’ll never completely comprehend why he should be willing to die for the man he loves, even though that love isn’t reciprocated the way he wants so badly for it to be.

23.) Meditate: She tries to teach herself to meditate, once, to calm her spirit and provide some measure of relief for her overactive brain, but the attempt is a dismal failure, for she cannot help but imagine Obi-Wan in the same pose, at the same task, with her husband quietly, reverently watching or (worse yet) taking advantage of the Jedi’s seeming obliviousness to his surroundings to sneak up on him for a brief stolen embrace (or, worst of all, a not so very brief – in fact, an enthusiastically and even acrobatically returned! – embrace!), and so the deeply spiritual quietude of true meditation utterly eludes her.

24.) Dust: She finds that some dust has gathered on the memorials to her (known) lost children, and she has a raging fit that leads to a meltdown of such violence that it takes half a dozen human medical personnel to get her restrained enough to find a way to safely inject her with something to induce unconsciousness, and, not long afterwards, when her rebellious body betrays her again, she cannot help but think that it was the one sign of neglect that led the Force to reclaiming her other child, and goes off on a frenzy of cleaning that leaves her husband baffled and the Palace staff practically in tears, as she insists on inspecting every last item kept within the sprawling complex of the Palace walls and every single nook and cranny of the Palace itself, searching for dirt and dust and signs of neglect to scrub out of existence.

25.) Unaffected: She pretends to be unaffected by her husband’s decision to get her a minder, but the truth is that she can’t decide whether it’s more appropriate to rage at the blatant insult to her honor or to cry over the evidence that he truly does consider her to be so weak as to need one, and so she finally simply settles on ignoring and belittling whatever empath he hires until he or she or it is forced to give up and quit.

26.) Trauma: The trauma done to her body by the (known) loss of her five children (she suspects that there have been more than five, in truth, but she cannot prove it medically) is so great that even her second mother by marriage declares that it will almost certainly kill her, if she attempts to carry another, but her mind hears nothing but that qualifier, “almost,” and so instantly starts to scheme a way to try again, even if Bail is utterly determined not to do so.

27.) Seduction: It’s an act of seduction that skirts dangerously close to rape, nothing more and nothing less – an opulent, private, intimate dinner for two by old-fashioned candlelight, helped along with a strong (three times the recommended measurement for an adult male) dose of a certain tasteless, odorless, instantly dissolving in liquid drug that is known to make humans both more pliant and suggestive (essentially to the point of being unable to tell another “no”) and more sexually ready (and possessed of highly increased stamina and hugely decreased modesty), and certain items of clothing she normally wouldn’t be caught looking at, much less wearing, along with . . . other such goads and aids, to help matters along – and normally her conscience would bother her (especially since she knows that the drug will make sure Bail won’t remember any of this, the next morning), but she’s far too intent on her goal (and too hungry for her husband’s seemingly undivided and wholly eager attention) to really be much bothered by her duplicity or the way she’s taken advantage of her husband’s trusting nature – especially after the introduction of the blindfold and her insistence that he behave as though he is loving Obi-Wan Kenobi causes such an obvious change in his manner and his eagerness to thoroughly claim and pleasure her!

28.) Drowning: She feels as if she’s sinking in quicksand and suffocating, drowning, her lungs unable to draw breath for the press of water and sand surrounding her and her weak limbs unable to move enough to accomplish any kind of useful action, and the blood spreads in a far too deep widening pool on the floor below and around her collapsed form, killing her dreams as surely as it drains her body of warmth and life.

29.) Vital Signs: Her vital signs ceased completely several times, the last for almost a full minute before the healers and med-droids finally managed to get her back, and she’s been told that her husband collapsed into the nearest chair, palsied and trembling like a leaf caught in a sudden burst of strong wind, when he was told of how close to losing her forever they came, but she feels so empty and cold that she cannot summon up enough energy to truly care.

30.) Time: They have her on so many different medications and confine her to her bed or to quarters for so long that she loses track of time so completely that, for a while, she even forgets that there’s a galactic civil war raging across the known galaxy, and becomes as petulant and whiny as a spoiled child denied some plaything when Bail can’t be with her every single moment of every single day.

31.) Pixie: She gets tired of her long hair one day and tries to take a butter-knife to it, hacking and sawing away with the blunt instrument in an attempt to give herself what she’s heard referred to before as a pixie cut, but the new minder finds her before she can manage to do anything more than become frustrated and exhausted to the point of tears at her inability to do much more than to tear off a few of the long strands.

32.) Doll: One of the minders (she forgets which one, though she’s fairly certain that this was one of the more human-looking ones) gave her a shockingly realistic baby doll, apparently under the misguided notion that having something shaped like a baby to hug to herself and carry about and love and cherish would somehow do her some good, but she corrected his assumption soon enough, returning the meticulously drawn and quartered and vivisected doll in so many pieces that it was difficult to tell, from looking at it, what it had once been.

33.) System: Each new minder has a system by which he or she or it thinks to accomplish the mending of her, and all she need do is find the either the one thing that can convince the minder in question of success long enough to ensure that the minder will leave or else the one deliberate response so awful that it strips away all hope/patience and drives him or her or it to quit outright, to free herself of the burden of their presence and their meddling and their empty reassurances.

34.) Encounter: There is one encounter with Bail that she regrets bitterly: he was trying to insist that she have a hysterectomy, for her own good, and she bluntly and furiously told him that it was her body and her decision and not his, and that if she could have the good grace to refrain from telling him to stop fantasizing about fucking that gorram Jedi boy thirty ways from Natunda, then he could damned well return her the same courtesy by refraining from telling her what to do with her own body!

35.) Lithium: One of the minders gets so frustrated with her single-minded obsession with being able to have Bail’s child that the Equani tries to frighten her into behaving, telling her horror stories about the hideously backwards and primitive methods once used to “cure” depression and hysteria, lovingly reciting details of lobotomies, trepanation, lithium IVs, various mutilations of the female private parts, etc., but all she can do is laugh, for it strikes her as hysterically funny that anyone might believe her capable of caring whether such indignities are inflicted on her body, when her flesh has already so utterly failed her.

36.) Ideal: Obi-Wan Kenobi is her husband’s ideal mate, and if she thought for an instant that killing him and then eating him whole or fucking him and then skinning him alive and crawling quite literally into his skin would make her more like him (and therefore more worthy of her husband’s love and devotion), she wouldn’t hesitate even so much as a heartbeat to do it.

37.) Pretense: She doesn’t know why Bail insists on upholding the pretense that he cares for her and that their marriage actually means something to him, not when the slightest word from Obi-Wan or about Obi-Wan can take him away at a run, not when he can no longer be with her, intimately, unless he is taking her from behind, and most certainly not when the names he mutters and cries in his sleep and his showers are all some variant of Obi-Wan or /Master/!

38.) Fear: On her more clearheaded days, her fear isn’t that Bail will leave her, but that he’ll keep pretending he cares and giving her hope that this caring could some day be more, under certain circumstances.

39.) Facade: Her facade has been so utterly broken that she has a hard time believing that Bail could believe her better enough to not require a new minder, but then she remembers that it’s /Bail/, and just accepts the boon for the gift that it is.

40.) Heal: Everyone seems to think that it’s possible to heal from such losses, such shocks to the system, but then, it’s a bonafide fact that the galaxy is populated with naive thoughtless idiots and brainless morons and outright unthinking fools, too.

41.) Grief: The grief doesn’t ever really get any less; it just gets easier to hide.

42.) Trickster: She’s become a bit of a trickster, fooling all these different people, and she might even be proud of herself for what she’s managed to accomplish, if only she thought it might get her anything but a bit more privacy.

43.) Entwined: Obi-Wan may not know it, but his life is thoroughly entwined with hers, and she regards his friendship with her husband as being directly responsible for the lack of love and happiness and purpose in her life.

44.) Half: She’s less than half useless, for pity’s sake, and it amazes her that it should be so hard for so many to understand the level of devastation and betrayal and fury and anguish and endless frustration she feels, knowing that her body isn’t even capable of doing what any woman’s body should be able to do.

45.) Coarse: She daydreams, sometimes, about speaking to Obi-Wan openly, in brutally coarse language that explicitly details and explains the ways in which he has so completely ruined her life; yet, no matter how hard she tries to cast him in the role of the villain, she cannot imagine him being anything but shocked and contrite and truly sorrowful for her pain, and the memory of those rather incredible lovely expressive eyes robs her of any real sense of accomplishment or victory for her pains, which rather ruins the whole point of dreaming about it!

46.) Saliva: When Obi-Wan comms the Palace asking for Bail, she longs to take the saliva that’s built up in her mouth (whilst listening to him politely apologetic explanation for comming and his firm request to speak to her husband) and just spit it clear through his ever so slightly wavery blue holographic head, but the problem with that, of course, is that it wouldn’t truly touch him, and so what would be the point?

47.) Closer: It should be impossible for the war to have brought them any closer than they already were, considering the fact that Obi-Wan has spent something like seven-eighths of the war on one battlefield or another or else on some clandestine war-related mission or another when not being held prisoner, but she would swear that the two are even friendlier and more reliant on each other and inseparable seeming than ever before.

48.) December: Winter has a hold on her heart and soul so strangling-tight that she can no longer even remember the spring, when her hopes were so fresh and strong and vibrant.

49.) Grace: The only bit of grace left in her life is the memory she carries of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s eyes, and how completely and utterly wrong is /that/, that she should be comforted and granted at least the shadow of serenity by the memory of her rival’s extraordinary beautiful and warm eyes?

50.) Courage: She is in love with a man who simply does not love her back in the manner or to the degree that she wishes him to, and it is as simple as that and as irrefutable and as much her own fault as it is Bail’s or Obi-Wan’s or indeed anyone else’s, for agreeing to marry Bail when she knew that he was in love with someone else, and she knows that she will surely die, slowly, of agonizing shame, if Bail were to die thinking she still blames him (and his fixation on Obi-Wan) for her unhappiness, and so she has no choice to but to dig down in the dregs of her spirit for courage enough to go to him, on Coruscant, and tell him the truth, and see if they have any chance at all of starting over again, or if they need to just give it up and each go their separate ways before either one of them can do anything else to hurt the other again, and that is just all that there is to it.