Work Text:
Once when she was very young, Padmé got to witness the innoculation of newborn lambs.
There were only two veterinary surgeons in the little town of Stewjon, but with the help of the shepherd and his sons they’d managed to corral what must have been two or three hundred lambs into one big, unlit barn. This was well before electricity had made it to this part of the English countryside, and sitting on her father’s shoulders looking through the big glassless window, Padmé saw the legions of lambs huddled together like bits of spun gold, their wool filament-bright in the afternoon sun.
All the ewes were congregated outside the barn doors, braying like crazy, an unending roar of noise compounded by their babies calling for them inside. Padmé remembers asking her father, How will the babies find their mamas again?, but she doesn’t remember how her father answered, if he answered. What was said wasn’t important, anyhow.
What was important was that her father had let her up on his shoulders, that she could feel how strong he was, his big hands wrapped around her ankles. She made little braids in the tufty top of his hair, waiting for the lambs to come out; even now, when she thinks of her father, she first pictures the top of his head, how his hair was warm from the sun and how when he realized what she was doing he chuckled, and she felt his shoulders buck happily.
Then the veterinarians were done, and the lambs were let out to run on wobbly legs among the ewes, and in the space of thirty seconds, like magic, they had all found their place.
Her father died less than a month later, on a business trip to France that Padmé didn’t learn until she was much older was actually an assignment from the U.S. State Department, which in those days handled all the business of spying.
At the time, seven years old and suddenly deprived of her father, it didn’t matter at all to Padmé how he’d died, only that he had. Her memories of that time are mostly of the funeral, how her mother had wanted to bury him on American soil except the State Department had been able to find nothing to bury, the thin wobbly voice of the choir boy who sang Kyrie in the only Catholic church they could find, the starched collar of her dress, how her sister had been frowning stonily while she buttoned Padmé into it, like she was determined not to join Padmé in her crying. Standing around the open grave after the service, the intricate updo of her braided hair wilting under a fine drizzle, Padmé reached out for her mother’s hand and got swatted away.
That’s the last time she can remember reaching for her mother, though she’s sure she did it again; in her mind, that’s where it ended.
There were no more lazy afternoons spent cuddled up in the puddle of sun on the window seat in the family’s library, reading a book with her sister. No more of the absent kisses her mother deposited on top of her head every time she walked past, how she’d snag her child’s arm and pull her back if Padmé was going too fast, if she was going to miss her.
And of course there was no more of her father singing her to sleep, on those rare nights he was home before she went to bed, carding his fingers through her hair, Sola too old for that sort of thing but watching bleary-eyed from the next bed all the same. There was, from that day forward, to be no touching in the Naberrie household, barring such solemn occasions as Christmas and high school graduation, when Jobal bestowed fluttering, almost polite hugs upon her daughters.
One of the members of the congregation who’d attended the funeral had an Eric-Campbell automobile, and graciously offered to give them a lift home. Padmé watched her sister for the first few miles, juddering along in the wide, slippery back seat, but Sola wasn’t looking at her. She was looking out the window, and after a while Padmé looked out the window as well, at the smeary yellow spots of sheep moving over the hillsides.
She thought if she and Sola were lambs they wouldn’t be able to find each other. They wouldn’t be able to find their mother, either.
*
In February of 1946, Parliament is bickering over whether or not to nationalize the B of E, the Soviet Union is spreading like a stain across the map of Europe, and Padmé finds herself in Stewjon once again.
She’s in poor spirits, having just been discharged against her wishes from the O.S.S., but she figures there are scant few better places to wallow in her discontent than the unhappy locale where her family fell apart. It was long enough now, her father’s death, that she’s numb to it; the part of her heart that used to give her trouble is covered over with scar tissue; the last few years of war have hardened her to almost everything. But she thinks the gray heath, the mud and the constant drizzle seem appropriately dour for her re-entry into society. She spent the war as a spy and a woman—now she’ll have to learn to be content being just a woman again.
A woman with a pearl-grip Walther strapped to the inside of her thigh, granted, but still.
Just a woman, nonetheless.
Her first act as just a woman—aside from back in London, where she’d threatened to stab her MI-5 handler’s eyes out with a pencil if he didn’t show her the telegram with her coded termination—is to check on the house.
Sola’s in their mother’s mansion in Naboo, in upstate New York, which is one of the many reasons why Padmé is staying in England—she doesn’t want to have to make up stories about being an army nurse when she inevitably starts to wake up screaming. Right now she’s still too numb, still too tired, so she sleeps the sleep of the absolutely exhausted, but pretty soon she’s going to catch up on all the rest she missed, and all hell’s going to break loose. The Stewjon house, which none of her family has been to since her father’s death, provides the requisite seclusion.
What it does not supply, apparently, is a roof.
Padmé supposes it serves her right, in a way. It was her and Sola who neglected to hire a caretaker for this place, once they took over their mother’s accounts; with so small a property, they’d assumed it would take care of itself.
Not so. Padmé stands in what was once the living room but is now little more than a pile of rotted wood and mud, nylons soaked, her trunk which she has just hauled all the way up the hill sitting at her feet and waiting now to be hauled down.
It serves her right, and yet somehow, after everything—after friends dying in her arms and parachuting into enemy territory in the middle of the night and her mother passing quietly halfway through 1944 with nothing more than a telegram from Sola that read, Mother gone from influenza—this is what makes Padmé feel like she can’t go on.
This is what makes her feel like she might finally break down. Wet nylons.
She doesn’t break down, though. She hefts her trunk back down the hill, the knee where she took a bullet in Paris a few months ago stabbing badly, and moves summarily to her third act as just a woman—which is to head to the pub and get very, very drunk.
The local, which she thinks is meant to be called the Jolly Jester but is misspelled the Jolly Jetster, is a sleepy place full of farmers and shepherds—quiet men with roughspun clothes and roughspun faces. Padmé draws every eye in the place when she forces her way through the door bent in half and wrestling with her trunk, but the eyes move away just as quickly as they came.
No one gets up to help her. The barkeep barely glances in her direction when she heaves herself up onto a stool and orders a scotch, extra neat, extra scotch. Goodwill towards Americans doesn’t seem to have made it this far out into the heath, judging by the look on his face when he hears her accent—or at least that’s what she thinks, until she realizes she’s not the only American in the place.
She hears him before she sees him, adjudicating a game of darts in the shadowy back corner of the room. His voice reminds her of baseball games, yelling in the stands—Hey, batter batter—sneaking away from her mother on a trip to New York City and riding the subway up and down the isle of Manhattan for hours and hours until the police found her. It reminds her of boys dying in medical tents, dying in army hospitals, in the trenches yelling Oh God Oh God as they held their guts in with one hand, the other blown off by the same grenade.
It reminds her of a pilot she caught a jump with once from London to Corsica, over some very dicey territory.
Possibly, she realizes as he turns to face her, he reminds her of that pilot because he is that pilot.
And if she were talking to him right now, she’d have to pretend not to quite remember his name—they only talked for a few minutes, and Padmé’s come to realize that people are mostly unsettled when she can remember their name three years after the fact—but because she’s over here with her scotch, she can freely recall, in the privacy of her own head, that his name is Anakin Skywalker. That he slapped the wing of his plane three times before he got on, some sort of superstitious thing, that he’d nicked his thumb, that they couldn’t find a bandage—and really, to not have bandages on a flight over German-occupied France—and that Padmé had to bully him into using her handkerchief. Aw, but it’s so pretty, ma’am, he’d whined, and she gave him a chiding look and tugged a bit harder on the makeshift binding just to get him for calling her ma’am. He’d smiled at her like he knew exactly what was going on in her head, and she remembers—like a bolt of lightning—that she’d been attracted to him. It had been ages since she’d thought of anything but her work, the war, and to feel that familiar uncoiling of heat in her stomach, that flush in her cheeks—it knocked her off-kilter.
Three hours after Anakin dropped her in Corsica, Cordé was dead and Padmé was running for her life. She forgot all about her handkerchief; she thought she’d never see Anakin again.
But now here he is, in the Jolly Jetster.
And here she is, practically drooling over him. It’s embarrassing, is what it is. He is, after all, not the most attractive man she’s ever seen, even with his rakish smile and his hair curling down around his ears and his healthy tan that stands out so much amid all this pasty white. There’s just something about him. Padmé feels, ridiculously, as if there is a string connecting them heart to heart.
In England, it’s not generally the done thing for a woman to approach a man in a pub, but Padmé has spent a lot of time in France lately and a lot of time in New York before that, so she doesn’t think much about it. She just picks up her scotch and goes over to the dartboard.
“Hey,” she says, leaning her hip against a table, “you look awfully familiar.”
Anakin turns mid-laugh. The grin falls off his face. He stares.
“Holy shit,” he says weakly.
Padmé smiles.
*
Anakin, as it turns out, was a month away from graduating veterinary school when he was drafted into the war. He’d had experience flying crop dusters out in Tatooine, Arizona, so after his letter came, he got shunted to the Navy instead of heading to the frontlines as cannon fodder, where he’d mostly been relegated to supply runs until, in his own words, The brass woke up and noticed they didn’t have too many guys who could do barrel rolls in a Shooting Star without losing their lunch. He spent the last six months of the war dropping bombs on ball bearing factories in Germany, went back to the States to finish school, then swung right back around to join a tiny veterinary surgery in Stewjon, England, where he became assistant to the owner of the practice, one Mr. Obi-Wan Kenobi.
“So—What?” Padmé says, over her third scotch. She’s still mostly level-headed, thanks to the good people at the Farm, but this many drinks in even she’s starting to get fuzzy around the edges. “You saw an ad in the paper and decided to follow it across the ocean?”
Anakin laughs at her gentle teasing. Padmé decides then and there that he has the best laugh she’s ever heard.
“Not exactly,” he says. “Me and Obi-Wan were stationed at the same base for a while, during the war. RAF Birch. As you can imagine there aren’t a lot of veterinarians flying planes, so through mutual friends we hooked up pretty fast. Got each other out of a lot of tight spots, and when the war was over he offered me a job.”
“I wish someone would’ve offered me a job,” Padmé says. “The war’s over, there’s no more work shortages, and suddenly the men of the world don’t have to pretend women are people anymore. They handed me my—” she trips up momentarily, starting to feel those first two drinks—”my discharge papers without so much as a how do you do.”
Anakin hums. “You have family in Stewjon?”
Padmé shakes her head. “A family home. Only it turns out the roof’s gone in sometime in the past decade, so I suppose I’ll be on the next flight back to the States.”
Her drinking companion is watching her with far too much understanding in his eyes for someone she’s known for all of two hours. “You don’t want to go back, do you?” he intuits.
Padmé looks away, down at her drink. There’s something about how he looks at her that makes her feel like a little girl. How vulnerable, how naïve she was, before she learned her mother’s stiff upper lip.
“My sister…” she starts, then falls quiet, searching for her words. “My sister didn’t serve in the war. She spent the whole thing cloistered away in my mother’s house near Westchester, and I don’t…I’m not sure we’ll be able to coexist, anymore. I’m afraid we’ve been too vastly separated by experience.”
“I get it,” Anakin says. “Living with my mother, even just for a month…I love her, of course I do, but she just…it’s hard, being around someone who doesn’t get it.”
“That’s why so many soldiers are marrying their nurses, I’d expect,” Padmé jokes.
Anakin’s eyes crinkle. He’s humoring her, she knows, but it’s good to feel someone smiling with her. It’s been a whlie.
“I don’t mean to insult you,” Anakin says, after a minute. “I know you’ve got experience as a nurse, but we are looking for a secretary. Room and board are included, and you’d be doing medical-adjacent work, at least.”
Padmé’s last job offer came in an army recruitment office in New York City. I see you worked for the State Department, the recruitment officer had said, while Padmé sat there on the medical exam table shivering in her skirt and her bra. The recruitment officer—the sort of woman who Padmé thought of when she heard the name Olga—looked her over with a cold, critical eye, and Padmé, unnerved by the silence, had said, Yes. Some secretarial work, right after college. My father worked for them, before he died. And Olga was silent for another long minute, bloodlessly deciding Padmé’s future in the secrecy of her own head—and then she said, I can’t take you as a nurse. But how would you feel about a different posting?
A different posting. That was all Padmé knew about it until the silent tan-suited man who picked her up at Dulles drove her into the hills of Virginia, out to the anonymous training ground where she’d joined five other female recruits—Dormé, Cordé, Sabé, Versé and Eirtaé—and learned over the course of a gruelling two months that what they’d been hired to do was spy. It had felt right, in a way, to be following in the footsteps of her father, while Sola prepared to root out a marriageable man and follow in the footsteps of their mother. There was something in Padmé’s bones which knew she was meant to serve her country in the backrooms and dark alleyways of the world.
And there’s something now, in this pub in the untrod wilds, that knows she’s supposed to say yes to Anakin—if not because she’s destined to be a secretary at a tiny veterinary surgery in Stewjon, England, then at least because she’s meant to be with this man.
“I’d be honored to be your secretary,” she tells Anakin in all seriousness, “assuming Mr. Kenobi is amenable, of course.”
“Oh, he’ll be plenty amenable,” Anakin says. “Wait until you see the state of our office.”
He’s right, as it turns out—about Mr. Kenobi, and about the office.
The surgery is run out of a rambling stone house at the north end of town, along a narrow but—miraculously—paved lane. There are chickens in the front yard, and one spectacularly fat pig in a pen near a run-down barn, and though it’s nearly eleven when Padmé and Anakin return from the pub in his Austin Twenty, they find the front door flung wide open, spilling warm yellow light into the chilly dark.
Mr. Kenobi, as it turns out, has just come back from a call out to Ki Adi Mundi’s farm up the heath—a calving, he reports to Anakin later that night, over a hot cup of tea, and a tricky one at that, slim hips on the cow and he’d spent two hours up to his elbow in the beast’s womb trying to get the noose around the calf’s lower jaw—but despite his tiredness and the unidentifiable grime he’s covered in, he does seem honestly delighted (not to mention a bit relieved) to see Anakin come back from the pub with a secretary.
He hires her on the spot and installs her instantly in the spare room upstairs.
It’s sparsely furnished, much less than Padmé would’ve been used to four or five years ago, but now she’s spent enough time sleeping rough in the French countryside, hiding in basement rooms and attics for weeks on end, that she requires little more than a pillow and a patch of dry ground. Judging by those standards, the bed is palatial, idyllic; the riot of pillows against the headboard even more so.
The rest of the house is equally charming, and Padmé’s stressed-out heart calms to see it, to imagine how the sun will shine through those windows—that picturesque countryside sun—and how it will be quiet in the morning when she gets up to make coffee and quiet at night when they set down to dinner. How no one will send her halfway across the world with no more than an hour’s notice, and no one will try to kill her, and hopefully no one will die.
She very much so hopes that no one will die, because as fond as she is of Anakin after a few hours, she’s just as fond of Mr. Kenobi—who insists she call him Obi-Wan—by the end of the night.
It’s a long night indeed, on top of an already long day, but Padmé is well versed in long nights and she doesn’t much mind.
A few minutes after they put the kettle on to boil, Padmé’s trunk stashed safely upstairs, the phone rings three times in quick succession. The first call is for a sow in bad labor, the second for a horse who’s managed to tear open his hock, the third from a tittering old woman worried about her Pekingese throwing up its dinner. Obi-Wan assigns Anakin the Pekingese and takes the sow and horse for himself, an arrangement that astounds Padmé until Obi-Wan informs her, as they judder along in his truck on their way to the first stop, that the old woman with the Pekingese thinks of her lapdog as a child and thinks of Anakin as that child’s uncle.
“Completely batty,” he confides, eyes smiling, “but she pays very generously, considering all Anakin does is tell her to stop feeding the poor thing cake.”
“Anakin must love that,” Padmé remarks, even though she hardly knows him at all.
She must be right on the money, because Obi-Wan laughs. “Indeed,” he says. “I like to think that it keeps him humble. It can go to your head, after all—the glamor of our profession.”
Glamor, indeed. Padmé’s glad that the boys were thoughtful enough to lend her a pair of Wellies before they set out, because slogging from the end of the path where they have to leave the truck out to the actual barn is a mile uphill through ankle-deep mud. Her thighs are aching by the end of it, her nylons wet all over again, but this time she doesn’t care.
This time she isn’t alone, but walking beside a man with a kind smile and burnished copper hair that reminds her of sitting bundled up beside a fireplace. This time, she watches fascinated in a barn lit by a single, bare bulb as Obi-Wan kneels by the ailing sow in his shirtsleeves, rubs his arms down from elbow to fingertip with antiseptic lubricant, and helps the sow pass the first piglet—stillborn, cold blue—and then the second, squealing and pink, and the third, and the fourth.
She ties back her hair to help Obi-Wan wash down with warm water, and watches the wriggling piglets latch onto their mother’s teat, guided by the unerring instinct that all animals seemed to have for their kin.
“Quite something, isn’t it?” Obi-Wan says softly, and Padmé only nods, not knowing why she’s so overwhelmed but feeling again, for the second time today, as if she’s about to cry.
She doesn’t, though she’s still grateful for the bracing way Obi-Wan shrugs back into his jacket and says, “Right. On to the next, then, shall we?”
On to the next—it starts to rain halfway there, and the road becomes impassable, which leaves them walking, each lugging half of Obi-Wan’s instrument kit as they go to meet a farmer bearing an oil lamp. Obi-Wan introduces her as his secretary, and somehow the grizzled old man doesn’t even bat an eye at a secretary coming to stitch up his horse, only grunts and waves for them to follow. Padmé thinks she can see the weariness in Obi-Wan’s steps, now, but she can’t see a trace of it on his face.
And she can’t hear any trace of it in his voice as he puts his hand on the horse’s face and murmurs softly to him, calming the gelding’s harsh pants. He’s a natural horseman—that much is clear, to Padmé and to the horse. It takes a natural horseman to approach an animal like this, not spooking them, putting them at ease.
Padmé watches Obi-Wan’s hands—strong capable hands, hands she just watched deliver three healthy piglets—move over the horse’s haunches, over the taut line of his flanks, showing the horse where he is every step of the way with his touch, until he comes to the torn hock. It’s a jagged cut, probably snagged on a loose bit of fence, but Obi-Wan betrays no dismay at the sight of it, only motions for Padmé to bring him his bag.
She does, approaching the horse carefully from the front, as she learned to do when she was a young girl taking riding lessons at her grandmother’s stables; Obi-Wan injects a local anesthetic just above the horse’s hock, earning nothing more than a huff and a stomp in return, then sets to work suturing the wound.
The whole business is finished in the space of five minutes.
The sun’s just beginning to rise as they head back toward the surgery, a pale gray bleed that turns gradually to white by the time they reach the town. The morning bell chimes, ringing down the sleepy cobblestone streets.
Padmé pulls her hair out of its knot and shakes out the tangles, and Obi-Wan asks casually, as they pass through the shadow of the church’s steeple, “You’re not a religious person, are you?”
Religion, in Padmé’s experience, is a touchy subject even among the unflinching British, but the way Obi-Wan phrases the question tells her she’ll have no trouble if she admits the truth. So she does—she says, “No. Not really.”
“That’s alright, then,” Obi-Wan says softly, gaze on the road.
“Are you?” Padmé asks. “Do you believe in God?”
He looks at her, and she has the sense of something deep and unfathomably sad just beyond his eyes. “I wish that I could,” he says. “But when you have seen two great wars—when you have seen men go to their deaths in droves for something that God ought to have been able to solve in an afternoon—it is only the strongest among us who can go on believing.”
Padmé wouldn’t have said it was the strongest who went on believing. Not at all. The thickest skulls, maybe—the most obstinate, most unwilling to change, most unthinking—but not the strongest.
She doesn’t say any of that to Obi-Wan, though. There’s a look on his face as they pass the church, the trickle of people heading in for the first service of the day, that tells her the loss of faith has pained him greatly.
*
She suspects almost the first day after arrival that Obi-Wan and Anakin are in love, but does not have it confirmed until nearly a month into her stay, when one morning the phone rings in the upstairs hallway and she pulls her dressing gown on to answer it at the same time that Anakin comes dancing out of Obi-Wan’s room, barefoot on the freezing stone floor.
He sees Padmé standing in the open door to her bedroom and stops dead, a deer in the headlights, while the phone keeps ringing.
She knows what he’s frightened of—the same thing any man in a relationship with another man must be frightened of—and wanting him to know right away that he has nothing to fear from her, she says, “So that’s why I’ve been hearing so much moaning at night. I thought we had a ghost.”
Not the most tasteful joke, to be sure, but the phone’s still ringing and Padmé doesn’t have time to remedy the situation.
She doesn’t have time to remedy it until hours later, when Obi-Wan has wandered groggily down to the kitchen and Anakin’s come back from the call up to Kit Fisto’s farm buzzing with nervous energy.
She traps them at the kitchen table with plates of scrambled eggs and bacon from one of their client’s pigs. Then she sits down across from them and tells them, with seriousness that feels very out of place at half seven in the morning but is nonetheless called for, “I want you to know that you can be yourselves here, around me, without any fear. I want you to know that I would never do anything to hurt either of you.”
Obi-Wan stares at her with very wide eyes.
Anakin looks down at his legs, brow furrowed in a way that Padmé’s come to recognize isn’t a signal of unhappiness, but rather a signal of any strong emotion.
She wants to reach out and take his hand—she wants to take both of their hands, which is rather the crux of her issue—but she senses that this is an instance in which they are better left to each other, so she gets up, taking her coffee with her, and retreats into the garden.
This does not mean that she doesn’t position herself strategically where she can see through the window over the kitchen sink. She can’t hear them, but she watches them with their heads bent close together at the kitchen table, Anakin’s dark blond curls that he won’t let her cut and Obi-Wan’s neat trim like fire in the sunlight, watches Obi-Wan rub soothingly over the back of Anakin’s shoulder, crinkling his button-down shirt, watches Anakin put a hand on the side of Obi-Wan’s head, over his ear, and pull him into a kiss.
She can’t see their mouths meet, not from this angle, can only see the back of Obi-Wan’s head, but she can tell from the position of their bodies and from the gentle motion that they’re kissing—just softly, probably, with closed lips, but the sight still sends a thrill of electricity straight through her.
Padmé is no stranger to misery, so she knows that this—being in love with two men, who are in love with each other—is an entirely mild form.
It’s nothing like holding herself perfectly still, hidden in a Parisian attic, while SS officers search the room just below her. Nothing like being roused from her bed at the Farm with a bucketfull of freezing water, or hiking for hours through the Russian countryside in the dead of winter because the howling wind made her bring her parachute down miles from her mark. Nothing like learning to walk again after being shot, or turning on the light in a London hotel bathroom and seeing livid bruises in the shapes of fingers around her windpipe, feeling that awful weakening fear and being completely alone.
Nonetheless it is misery. To hear the hints of their lovemaking in the middle of the night, floorboards creaking under the secret motions of the bed; to see that soft, private smile that Obi-Wan reserves only for Anakin; to observe how Anakin turns instinctively in a room to keep Obi-Wan in his sight.
Half the pain is that she cannot begrudge them this, their casual intimacy and their happiness; half the pain is that on top of falling in love with each of them she has also fallen in love with their love, with the way that they exist together, the way they care for each other.
Anakin is prone to fits of anger, prone to dark moods and entire days spent in brooding silence, and oftentimes there is nothing Padmé can do to bring him out of it; there is only Obi-Wan, the quiet steadiness of his understanding, like a breakwater that Anakin can rage at and crash against without fear of doing damage. Obi-Wan, Padmé has come to discover, is like her—he keeps his emotions carefully organized, tucked away in the locked strongbox of his heart. Only Anakin has the key. Only Anakin can set a hand on the back of Obi-Wan’s neck and set his whole body trembling with pent-up anguish, only Anakin can murmur to Obi-Wan and draw forth a gentle rain of tears, like coaxing a skittish dog out of a corner, kneeling to its height, reaching out a hand for it to smell.
They are not always so careful with each other—certainly not at night, and not always during the day, either. Padmé observes Anakin sock Obi-Wan in the face to get him out of a bar brawl, observes Obi-Wan threaten to throw Anakin out of the house on three separate occasions for minor veterinary offenses, never once following through. She takes this to be evidence of their gender. Boys, as they say, will be boys.
And as much as her housemates are men, they are also boys. They take simple delight in the animals under their charge, in the foals and the calves and the old dogs who have to be carried across the threshold by their masters. They laugh, and shout, and on one memorable occasion strip fully naked in the back yard to get the cow muck off with the garden hose, standing starkers in the grass, skin pale in the cool spring sun, heads bent under the crystalline spray of water.
Padmé thinks that maybe now they’re finally getting a chance to live the childhoods stolen from them by war—to live them even better than they might have lived them as children, in each other’s company.
She feels no desire to relive her own youth, solitary as it was, and when Obi-Wan and Anakin ask her about it, she gives vague, evasive answers.
Anakin does get a single detail out of her, though—one evening they attend a party thrown by Mrs. Yaddle in honor of her Pekingese, Anakin dressed to the nines in a rented tux, Padmé dolled up in a red dress she hasn’t worn since she left the service, and as they take a spin about the dance floor Padmé admits, “My father taught my sister and me to dance, when we were little.”
“Is he a good dancer?” Anakin asks, voice a low murmur under the music.
Padmé smiles fleetingly. “He was,” she says. “He worked for the State Department. There were a lot of galas, state dinners, that sort of thing.”
Anakin’s gaze is soft and understanding, and with his hand on the small of her back, Padmé feels warm and safe and at the same time more rotten than ever, because she knows she can’t have this.
She can’t have Anakin, the clean, freshly-shaved line of his neck, the solidness of his body against hers, his big hand holding hers firmly—and she can’t have his lover, either. Not in the way she really wants.
That night Anakin and Obi-Wan are called out to a herd of cows acting strangely up at Mace Windu’s farm that Obi-Wan suspsects before they’ve even climbed in the Austin have lead poisioning (Mace is always re-painting that damned barn, he says).
It’s four in the morning, but Padmé’s been lying awake since she and Anakin got home around one, haunted by the ghost of Anakin’s hand in hers and his smile tucked against the side of her cheek. She decides, as she watches the Austin disappear down the gravel drive, that she’s not going to get back to sleep no matter what she does.
Sunrise finds her at her father’s grave.
She’s borrowed one of Obi-Wan’s brown coats, as she is wont to do when it’s chilly out, because it’s long enough that her legs don’t get too cold in her nylons, and she turns up the collar against the breeze. It’s not all that cold, being nearly May, but she’s shivering—fine, involuntary tremors that she knows from experience have very little to do with the temperature.
She remembers making tiny braids in her father’s hair, how her fingers were sticky as children’s fingers so often are but how he didn’t complain a bit, even though it must have tugged. Her mother had always complained when Padmé was too rough tugging on her hair, even when she was too young to know better—but then, those small, daily acts of love which had come so naturally to her father had always been alien to her mother. Jobal provided for her daughters, she saw them through college and would have seen them married or off to promising careers if she’d lived long enough to do it, but the love that she had for them was often more like duty than genuine affection.
Padmé turns her face into the collar of Obi-Wan’s jacket, inhaling his scent and the faint stink of hay, horses—thinks of Obi-Wan touching her shoulder as he moves behind her to get to the coffee pot, Anakin drawing a blanket up over her legs on the couch, pausing at the scar on her bad knee, thumb brushing the pucker of angry pink flesh as he says, How the hell did that happen? Thinks of making up a lie, because the O.S.S. made her sign about a million NDAs before they let her leave the building after her termination, how when she’d been lying there bleeding in a puddle of rainwater on that street in Vienna she’d cried out once, delirious with pain, for her father, before Sabé clamped a hand over her mouth, how she would never have lied to him about any of this if he was still alive and how for a split second, before she said, Just a riding accident, when I was little, she thought about telling the truth.
It takes longer than Padmé was expecting for the nightmares to catch up with her, but catch up they do.
The first few are quiet enough that the only person she wakes is herself, shocking back to consciousness with a gasp and a jerk, skin coated in clammy sweat, heart racing hotly in her chest.
But there’s a cycle to this that she’s come to expect—the worst nightmares have always visited her when she’s most vulnerable, most tired, and after three nearly-sleepless nights she’s dead on her feet by the time she makes it to bed.
No more than two hours later she comes awake to realize that she’s screaming, sobbing enormously, and that Obi-Wan and Anakin are in the room with her.
Obi-Wan is saying something, sitting beside her on the bed, stroking her hair, but Padmé’s faculty for human language seems to have abandoned her. All she can understand for long moments is the animal, the warmth of Obi-Wan’s touch and the calming cadence of his voice and the dip of Anakin settling down on the other side of the bed.
The heavy security of being bookended by two men who have never hurt her; who she trusts never would.
“…Padmé,” she realizes Obi-Wan is saying, after some time. “It’s alright, my dear. We’re here with you. We have you.”
Padmé comes back into her body. Her eyes are raw and burning. Her throat feels almost like it did after she was strangled, rough and tender. How long was she yelling, she wonders. Did she say anything. Do they know.
Anakin’s hand settles on her waist. He’s shaking. “Padmé,” he whispers, voice rough.
She turns on her back, takes his hand, gives him a smile. “I’m sorry, Ani,” she says. “It was just a nightmare. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Jesus, Padmé, I don’t care about that.” His grip on her hand tightens. “You sounded like someone was killing you.”
Padmé doesn’t know what to say to that. Normally she would be able to come up with something, brush it off, but now they’ve caught her in the messy, stumbling moments before she becomes human again, and all she can think of is the truth, which they can’t know.
They can’t know that someone was killing her, that a man’s hands had closed around her throat and that he was straddling her, his weight heavy on her legs, that she was scratching at his face but he wouldn’t let go, that his breath was stale and smelled like herring and that she can acutely remember how his stubble felt against her palms, as she forced his chin up and away, trying to force him off her. If they know that, this whole place will be tainted, and they won’t want her here anymore.
Obi-Wan has been watching her unerringly this whole time, his hair stuck up on one side from his pillow, robe hanging rumpled and loose from his shoulders. Anakin is shirtless, Padmé realizes with a jolt, and it’s a shame that she’s not in the right frame of mind to appreciate it, Anakin shirtless in her bed.
She can’t think of sex; all she can think of is how they might arrange themselves in bed, how they were laying before they ran in. Do they sleep apart, on opposite sides of the mattress, like her parents did, or—No, she thinks they must sleep tangled together, arms and legs and Obi-Wan’s face pressed to the bare skin between Anakin’s shoulder blades, the warm lumps of their bodies in bed rising and falling gently with the motion of their breathing. All she can think is that they came from there, from their bed, and that they’re going to go back there, and that she’s going to be left in here alone, in the cold. That she’ll probably wait a while to make sure they’re asleep and then wander out to see the pig, or the chickens, that she’ll sit on the stone wall that rings the property and watch the sun rise over the mist and the rolling dell.
It’s not a bad life at all, really, as far as they go—it's peaceful. Restful. More than adequate. But God, she’s so lonely.
“Padmé,” Obi-Wan says softly, “you weren’t really a nurse, were you?”
Her eyes go wildly to him.
Oh no, she thinks. Oh no. But she’s never been a coward, so she swallows her fear and pushes herself up into a sitting position, because this really isn’t a conversation that should be had flat on one’s back.
"No,” she says. “I wasn’t really a nurse.”
She’s not sure what she’s expecting. Painful silence, maybe. A sudden distance between them.
Every day she has felt as if she was getting closer and closer to them, invited more and more into the fold, and every day she has wondered where the wall will be—when it will be too much, when she will reach the limit and be allowed no further. She knows this should be it. They should now begin the delicate business of excision.
But there’s no silence, no distance. No excision. Obi-Wan cards his fingers through her hair, so tender that she feels her heart tremble, and says, “You told us once that you would never do anything to hurt us. Don’t you know that we feel the same?”
“Of course I do,” she says. “Of course. But I…The things I’ve done…”
“Aw, hell,” Anakin says softly, “none of that matters. Look at me, will you?”
She does. His eyes are red-ringed, and still a little bleary with sleep, and even after such a short time he is so achingly familiar that Padmé thinks if they met under other circumstances they’d have been married already.
Anakin takes her face in his hands, thumbs soothing over her wet cheeks. “It was a war, sweetheart. We all did stuff we’re not proud about, but when it comes to this sort of thing I figure going home guilty’s the price of going home at all. And I for one am awfully glad you made it home.”
“Me too,” Padmé murmurs, eyes locked with his. “Anakin.”
He pulls her into a tight hug, Obi-Wan’s hand moving up and down her spine, still looking to comfort her, and even though they do leave her there alone, they leave her a lot warmer than they might have done.
*
A week later, Padmé wakes just after sunrise to a silent house.
This is not unusual, especially the morning after a thunderstorm—which this one is. All their clients with dead cows in the night will have called Anakin and Obi-Wan out first thing to pronounce their animals killed by lightning, the surest way for the farmers to get their insurance money. Padmé vaguely remembers hearing the phone through the fog of sleep, and anyway, it’s the end of lambing season and they’ll be out doing innoculations all day. So it’s not at all strange that the house is silent, except that it is. Something in Padmé’s gut tells her that it is.
She slips out of bed silently and finds her pearl-grip Walther, stashed under a false bottom in one of her dresser drawers.
Her feet are bare. Goosebumps rise on her skin, under her silken nightdress. She checks that the gun is loaded and puts a round in the chamber.
Her mind has gone to the cool, silent place that it always goes when she’s in danger, and as she puts a hand on her doorknob, listening to the tiny background noises of the house, she realizes why.
She can hear the front door open. It’s a very slight variation in the way air moves through the hall, but it’s distinctive.
It could be a farmer—most of their clients don’t bother waiting on the front step if the door’s unlocked. But Obi-Wan and Anakin wouldn’t have left it unlocked while she was still asleep. And farmers aren’t the sorts to enter quietly.
She turns the knob slowly, listening for the floorboards. Pushes open the door an inch, peering out into the gloom of the hallway…
And pivots back into the room as a bullet splinters the doorframe where her head just was.
Her heart races in her chest, but she doesn’t panic. She crouches inside the door, back against the wall, below where the intruder will expect her to be, and waits.
A moment later, she hears the creak of a floorboard. Smells the strange foreign smell of him, out of place in her house, hears the motion of his clothing and the quiet in-and-out of him breathing through his nose. She takes aim at where a man’s head should be, coming through the door. She knows she’s only going to have one shot, and she’s not about to waste it, so she breathes out, thin and silent, and then stops, breath held on the exhale.
A man’s boot, pressing the bottom edge of the door. It swings open.
In the split second before Padmé’s finger tightens on the trigger, he sees her—she sees him see her, sees the brief waver of fear behind his professionalism. It doesn’t matter.
One shot—BANG, brainmatter splattered crimson on the white canvas of the door—and the man hits the ground.
Padmé straightens, pistol still trained on him.
Her bad knee protests the time spent crouching, but she ignores it. The man’s face is mostly gone, but even still she reaches to check his pulse. Old habits. Protocol. The ritual of assuring herself that her heart is the only one beating in the room. He’s dead as a doornail.
She pulls her thigh holster out of the false bottom on the drawer and straps her Walther on under her nightdress, then steps over the dead body and hurries downstairs.
Wrapped in Obi-Wan’s coat and driving the old Eric-Campbell they sometimes borrow from the very old couple next door, Padmé drives like a madwoman through town, across the main road, out into the heath. All she can think of is Anakin and Obi-Wan lying dead in a field, the Austin pulled over by the side of the road and blood spattered all over the inside of the windshield, two bodies slumped over in the front seat—she hardly realizes that she’s come up on Mr. Yoda’s farm until she has to stomp on the brakes to avoid plowing into a herd of sheep.
They’re gathered outside the closed door of a barn, and even inside the car with the doors closed and the windows up, Padmé can hear the din of the lambs wailing inside, their mothers braying for them. The white noise brings her back down out of the clouds, through the roof of the car, into her own skull. Into her racing mind.
She climbs out of the car and slams the door, realizing only then that when she jammed her feet in the first shoes she could find she ended up in Anakin’s Wellies, too big and awkward on her feet. Oh well—she tugs Obi-Wan’s coat tighter around herself, then winces as something tugs in the base of her neck. She peels the coat carefully away, examining her pale white shoulder, exposed in her nightgown, where an enormous splinter of the doorframe is stuck deep in her muscle.
Her slip is stained rusty red, dried blood caked up and down her neck, and God, she must have gotten it all over Obi-Wan’s coat, but she decides that she can’t worry about that now. She has to find her boys.
So through the ewes she wades, through the smelly sea of wet wool, and then through the barn door, cracking it open just enough that she can slip inside while keeping the ewes at bay with her foot.
There’s still no electricity in this barn, even in 1946, but the morning sun is streaming through the glassless windows, and Padmé can see clearly enough. The roiling carpet of lambs, precious faces raised to cry plaintively for their mothers, some two or three hundred crammed in here to be stuck with needles—and in the midst of it all, working slowly and checking the lambs’ ear tags as they go, Obi-Wan and Anakin.
They’re clear on the other end of the barn, sleeves rolled up, having an amicable time of it as they talk loudly over the noise, and neither of them notice Padmé coming until her approach starts to send a ripple near the animals closest to them, lambs shifting to accommodate her passage. The hem of Obi-Wan’s coat is positively filthy with loose wool, and Padmé will have to apologize later, but right now there are more important things.
Namely, that Anakin and Obi-Wan are alive. Namely, that they are standing to meet her, Obi-Wan still holding a lamb tight against his chest and Anakin still holding a needle. Anakin recovers first. He sets the needle back on their instrument tray, nudging lambs out of the way with his foot so he can get to her.
“Padmé,” he says, hand going gently to her shoulder. “What happened? Why are you—Why are you covered in blood?”
It’s so loud she can barely hear him. “I’m okay,” she tries to say, “I’m fine!” but it’s obvious from the look on his face that he can’t hear her.
“Out here!” Obi-Wan shouts. He’s holding a back door open just an inch, fighting off lambs. Anakin helps Padmé over to him with a hand on her back, proprietary, leaning close to her, and they all three spill out into the spring sunshine.
“A man came to the house,” Padmé says distantly, as Anakin herds her away from the door, to where he can hear her. Obi-Wan realizes he’s still holding a lamb and has to duck back to replace it inside with the others, then hurries over to them, one hand going to Anakin’s waist, the other to Padmé’s hair.
“What man?” Anakin demands.
Padmé shakes her head. “I don’t know. He’s dead now. I’ll have to tell the Company. Unless they sent him, in which case I probably shouldn’t—” she breaks off, laughing. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. This isn’t supposed to happen to me anymore.”
She’s still laughing when she finishes talking, and then the laughing feels like it’s going to turn into crying, so she stops, swallows, blinks. Obi-Wan is peeling his coat oh-so-gently away from her neck and shoulder, exposing the ugly splinter buried deep in her trapezius, and her hand is starting to feel weak, like her leg felt after she got shot, like once the splinter is out she’s not going to be able to use the arm for a while.
“Sweetheart,” Anakin says, hands on her face, “oh Jesus, Padmé,” and she cuts him off with a fond, “Ani,” and says, like she tried to say in the barn, “I’m fine. Really. I just wanted to make sure you two were okay, and also…”
She turns her face into Anakin’s hand and kisses his palm. He makes a soft, hurt sound, but before he can say something (I don’t like women, or You know I’m with Obi-Wan), she eases his hand away and turns again, this time to kiss Obi-Wan hard on the mouth. It’s Anakin who makes a sound again, Anakin’s hand that tightens in her hair. Obi-Wan is unflinchingly gentle under her lips, his beard gentle against her face. He tastes exactly like she expected, exactly like he smells, and with a painful twist in her chest Padmé realizes that she loves him all the more for having known him in this way. That it will be harder now, to lose him.
She feels like a thief as she pulls away. She shouldn’t have done that, she knows, but on the drive over here she realized that she could’ve died not knowing what it was like to kiss either of them, and she just had to be safe.
“Sorry,” she starts to say, looking back to Anakin.
But he’s not angry; he’s not glaring at her with dark, jealous eyes. He’s laughing, laughing in that wrung-out, startled way, like a man who’s just cheated death, and he’s still got a hand in her hair, and he’s saying, “What the hell are you sorry for? Jesus, come here.” And then he’s kissing her as well, pressing her close against his body like the night they danced, Obi-Wan’s hand still on the small of her back.
Padmé does cry then, tears hot between her and Anakin’s cheeks, the sheep wailing all around them for their families. And she thinks she knows the answer to the question she asked when she was a little girl, even if she can’t put it into words.
You just know, she understands, now. You just know.