Chapter Text
Anakin looked terrible.
As Padmé entered his hospital room and approached the chair next to the bed he occupied, she had to forcibly remind herself that the Jedi healers had assured her that he would be okay. He had finished his long stint in the bacta tank yesterday, which Padmé knew how much he would have hated had he regained consciousness at all since they had found him, on the edge of death, sprawled on the floor of the Chancellor’s office. Her husband’s face was still discolored by fading bruises, and the hazy red tendrils of burns from what the healers assumed had been sith lightning crept up his neck, peeking out from underneath the collar of the patient’s tunic they had put him in.
She braced both of her hands heavily against the mattress so she could lean over low enough to kiss his forehead before she sat down. It took her some effort and longer than she would have liked due to how unwieldy her pregnancy had become, and it made her back twinge uncomfortably, but it was worth it to feel Anakin’s skin—warm and therefore alive—under her lips. She carefully lowered herself into the chair with a soft groan and then smoothed his hair, still somewhat sticky from the bacta, back from his forehead.
“Good afternoon, Commander,” she greeted to Anakin’s silent observer and guard in the corner, who was Rex at the moment. The man’s helmet nodded at her before resuming its focus on the area near the door of the room. They still weren’t really sure what had happened, and Anakin’s men had insisted they set up an around-the-clock watch (in the middle of the Jedi Temple, no less) to make sure that whatever it was couldn’t happen again while he couldn’t defend himself. It was sweet how protective they were of him, really.
“Hello, darling,” she murmured to Anakin, “I missed you.”
It had only been since yesterday that she had seen him, but every minute she’d spent away from him in the past week had been difficult. It was challenging enough for her to fall asleep at night when eight months pregnant, but near impossible when she was worried about her absent husband at the same time. The few hours each afternoon she had insisted be built into her busy Senate schedule for her to visit him were the most restful part of her life, now.
She reached across the bed to run her thumb thoughtfully over Anakin’s knuckles, careful to avoid the IV line the healers had run into the back of his left hand. It wasn’t that she had anything against holding the metal one, but they couldn’t be sure how much feeling Anakin actually had in it until he woke up and could tell them how well the artificial nerves were working.
She kept holding his hand as she began to tell him about her day. The Senate was an entire mess after what had happened to Anakin, considering that they’d found the Chancellor’s dead body right next to Anakin’s dying one. A Sith had broken its way into the most secure office in the galaxy and killed the Chancellor and very nearly the Republic’s most revered general, and the Senate hadn’t even known that there was another Sith out there, what with Dooku dead. The Jedi Council had known this, but they didn’t have any idea who it was or how to find them. So, with wild accusations and investigations flying—not to mention the election that was being organized—what the Senate really needed was for Anakin to wake up and tell them what the hell had happened.
Was this—this uncertainty and this secret Anakin was now “keeping” from her—some kind of cosmic payback for the secret they had booth been keeping from the galaxy for years? The kind of disastrous jinx that she and her friends had whispered about and feared as small children on Naboo?
Yes, they were still at war, and even before that assassination attempts hadn’t been uncommon in either of their lines of work, but Padmé couldn’t shake her perception of some divine hand in all of this. Did the Force get angry at perceived slights? Had they risked more than just their careers, but in fact the possibility of retribution from fate itself when they had married? Still, even knowing that Anakin had almost died, Padmé found that she couldn’t regret their union. Not with the baby in her womb and the promise that Anakin would come out the other side of this alive.
Padmé was in the middle of explaining to her unconscious husband about the factions that had formed behind several of the strongest candidates to replace Palpatine as Chancellor, namely Bail Organa and Mas Amedda, when she felt his finger tremble ever so slightly under her hand. She abruptly cut herself off and leaned forward, watching his face intently.
“Ani?”
A muscle in his cheek twitched and then his eyelids were fluttering weakly. She brought her hands to touch the sides of his face, feather light, not quite sure what she should do.
“Ani, can you hear me?”
He drew a ragged breath.
“P’dmé?” he said in a gravelly voice. She watched attentively as his eyes opened halfway and focused on her. Oh, thank the Force. Padmé pressed a hand to her mouth, hung her head, and made a strangled noise out of sheer relief. Anakin’s breath caught.
“ ‘R you—are you alright? Is—”
Padmé let out a watery laugh. Oh, her dear Anakin, of course that would be the first thing he asked—so worried about everyone but himself.
“Yes, yes,” she assured him quickly, “I’m fine. We’re fine.”
Anakin’s eyes slipped exhaustedly closed again at the confirmation.
“How are you feeling?” she asked, when she had composed herself. He swallowed thickly.
“Like I got hit by a speeder,” he admitted roughly. Padmé made a sympathetic noise in the back of her throat and turned to reach for the button to call the healers into the room—they could give him something for the pain, probably—
“No,” Anakin protested, barely audible. She froze.
“Just—stay,” he asked plaintively.
“Ani—” she protested.
“Please,” he said, looking at her and giving her a glimpse of his blue eyes that she had missed so keenly, and that did it for her. She rested her hand carefully on top of his again and he clumsily tangled his fingers with hers.
“You’re really—” he paused to cough slightly and his eyebrows drew together in sudden pain, “—you’re really okay?”
“Really, Anakin,” she tried to reassure him, and then had a terrible thought. Those dreams he had been having—he’d been unconscious for days. In his sleep, had he been trapped in them, watching her die? Her heart leapt into her throat.
“Did you—" she tried at first, hoping she wouldn’t be correct, then, “you’ve been unconscious for a week. Whatever you saw, it wasn’t real. I’m right here.”
“ ‘S Okay,” he said, “ I didn’t…”
Padmé felt another wash of relief run through her. They’d kept Anakin sedated while he had to be in bacta—she would have never forgiven herself if it had unintentionally made him suffer more. She felt the baby kick sharply against her side, in apparent agreement with its mother’s sentiment.
Bless you, little one, she thought to herself, then excitedly took Anakin’s hand—his right one, the closest one to her—and gently used both of hers to guide it to the spot on her stomach so he could feel.
“Your son is happy you’re awake,” she confided, not really caring if Rex in the corner heard, because it was Rex. Another sharp kick.
A smile curled across Anakin’s mouth before he started to move his left hand across his body. A strangled grunt of pain escaped his lips—the movement clearly tugged at the still-healing lightsaber burn wound that ran right though the middle of his abdomen—but he managed to replace his prosthetic hand on her stomach with his flesh one.
“Is the mech not working?” she fretted, “we can have someone fix it if—”
“It’s working fine,” Anakin said, his voice still thick with disuse and lingering sleep, having cracked open his eyes again to look at the spot where his hand rested on her pregnant belly, “ ’s the one thing that is.”
“Then why—”
“Not the same,” he said. He’d claimed something like that soon after she’d told him she was pregnant: something about how he wanted to really, actually feel the baby kick with his real hand.
“Don’t strain yourself just on principle,” she admonished him. The baby kicked again, and the smile returned to Anakin’s face.
“Worth it,” he informed her.
They both were silent, waiting for the baby to kick again.
“That’s my daughter, by the way,” Anakin said eventually, when the baby seemed like it had settled down. Padmé smiled widely. Her husband really was okay if he was bringing this back.
“That again?” she joked, “I still can’t believe you think you know better than me.”
“It’s the Force,” he said.
“A mother’s intuition,” she challenged.
“I’m still right.”
“Somehow I doubt sensing babies in the womb is part of the Jedi padawan curriculum, so I think you’re messing with me,” she said. They’d had this conversation before, but she would be glad to discuss anything with him right now, even the most boring topic she could think of, which this was not.
“I’ll check again,” he said.
“I doubt you’re strong enough to lift a pebble right now,” Padmé said, since he really did seem weak as a Tooka kitten.
Anakin’s eyes drifted closed, and she thought she had won for a second until she felt a light Force-induced tug on one of the braids Dormé had done her hair up into today. Far be it from Anakin to let someone tell him he wasn’t strong enough to do something.
“Alright, mister,” she said fondly, “take it easy.”
“Still a girl,” he slurred after another moment, definitely sounding like it had tired him out. Padmé took his hand and carefully moved it back to rest lightly on top of his chest. She began tracing his knuckles with a soft thumb again.
“Anakin—” she started, too anxiously curious to let him fall back asleep just yet, and not wanting to be without his company again so soon, “do you remember what happened?”
Anakin exhaled a laugh then winced as even that small reaction must have caused him pain.
“How could I forget?” he muttered breathlessly.
“Who did this to you?” she asked, unable to keep some of the anger at the as-of-yet unidentified sith out of her voice. Anakin squeezed his eyes shut and frowned.
“They found Palpatine’s body, didn’t they?”
“He died, Ani, I’m so sorry,” she said, since she wasn’t sure if he knew that yet. Anakin didn’t visibly react with surprise to the statement, so maybe it had happened before he passed out, she wasn’t sure. She felt another wash of sorrow for what Anakin had gone through—watching his friend die like that must have been terrible, especially since this was Anakin and he hated feeling like he couldn’t protect people—hated it more than maybe anything else in the galaxy.
“And I’m here, aren’t I?” he said.
What? Of course he was. Maybe she should have waited to ask—
“I—I don’t understand what you mean—” she said, “You’re not making sense, Anakin, you’ll need to explain more. Palpatine turned off the holocamera monitoring in his office. Nobody saw anything at all.”
Anakin opened his eyes to look at her again.
“No shit, Padmé,” he said, distantly, “ ’course he did.”
“Are you sure you’re up to this? I’m going to—” she started, reaching for the call button for the healers again. His grip tightened on her hand before she could.
“Th’ footage would’ve looked terrible f’r him,” Anakin said tiredly, as if everything should have made sense, which it probably did—to him.
“What would have looked terrible?” she asked, feeling a strange thought itch at the back of her mind that their speculation maybe should have been focusing more on what Palpatine and Anakin had been discussing before the Sith had even gotten there.
“Him killing me,” Anakin said.
“But how could Palpatine have known that you would be attacked?”
“It was him.”
Padmé was halfway out of her chair now, leaning over Anakin’s body. Hadn’t she just been marveling at how coherent he was a minute ago? She shook her head, uncomprehending.
“Who is he, Anakin?”
“Palpatine’s the Sith.”
Padmé sat back down into her chair. Hard. That couldn’t be true.
“There had to have been a third person there,” she protested, but it was meant for herself more than Anakin. There wasn’t much concrete evidence to that effect, of course—there wasn’t much concrete evidence to any effect—but it was what everyone had assumed. Anakin exhaled shakily and shook his head weakly against the pillow.
“Was just us,” he said.
Hadn’t Obi Wan told her just the other day that the Jedi Council’s suspicion was that the other Sith they were looking for had influence in the Senate? Hadn’t she just been saying to Anakin days before everything that Palpatine was grabbing at too much power? What if Anakin was perfectly in his right mind right now? Who would believe him if he was?
They had found another lightsaber in the office with Anakin and Palpatine. Everyone had assumed that the Sith attacker had left it behind after using it to kill the Chancellor and wound Anakin, which had seemed uncharacteristic of such a powerful and clandestine Sith. But what if it had actually belonged to—
“If there was no one else there, then who killed—” she heard herself saying, before she forced herself to shut her mouth and stop speaking with an audible click of her teeth.
After she’d heard exactly how Palpatine had been killed, it’d taken her a while to get the imagined scene out of her head: a burning red lightsaber surging to deadly life, spearing right through the middle of Palpatine’s face, between his eyes, and out the back of his head. That first night after it happened, Padmé hadn’t even tried to sleep—too busy and too worried about Anakin—but if she had, it would have kept her wide awake. There had been two lightsabers in that room, and she had just assumed it had been the red one.
Anakin lolled his head to the side on the pillow so he could look at her. The look in his eyes was weary, miserable, and full of weighty expectation—it as good as confirmed the dark, twisted, treasonous fear bubbling in her chest that she hadn’t even considered until just now. He drew a painful sounding breath and opened his mouth. Padmé jerked forward and pressed a shaking finger to his lips.
“Wait—” she blurted, her heart threatening to beat out of her chest. Anakin closed his eyes slowly, out of exhaustion or relief or guilt, she wasn’t sure.
“Don’t—Don’t say anything else. If—we should—a lawyer should be here. I shouldn’t have asked you—"
Her husband had killed the Chancellor of the Republic. There had been no witnesses, he had killed the Chancellor of the Republic, and then he had almost died. The insidious thought crossed her mind that he still might die for it if they didn’t play their cards right—if few enough people believed him. She banished it quickly.
But she did believe him, right? The Chancellor had been Anakin’s good friend, he looked up to him, surely he wouldn’t have done it without a really good reason—
He wouldn’t have. She had to trust that Anakin did what he thought was right, and that was all she could do.
“Padmé,” Anakin croaked, his lips barely moving against her finger.
“Shh,” she whispered, trying to get herself to stop trembling. She felt Anakin’s hand wrap weakly around her wrist.
She slid her hand to the side of his face and leaned over to press her forehead against his, closing her eyes at the contact. He was alive. Her husband was alive, and he had managed to survive so he could become a father to their baby, and the rest they could figure out. She would talk to Obi Wan and he would know what to do—she had already confessed everything else to him and he had taken it in stride and still stood by her and Anakin. They would be okay, and so would the Republic. She had to believe that.
Padmé felt Anakin’s soft sigh tickle her cheek and she methodically smoothed her thumb over the patch of his hair above his ear.
“Sorry,” she and Anakin both breathed into the small space between their lips at the same time.
“I scared you,” he said, and she could feel his eyelashes brush against her cheeks, “sorry.”
He had. A week ago, when she had poked her head out of her senate office to see a flurry of activity of guards and a medical team with a stretcher hurrying down the hall, and again just now.
“I’ll deal with the politics of it all, I promise,” she assured him, “but for now you just need to rest, please.”
“Let someone else deal with politics,” Anakin muttered. A beat. “But I know what happened. I’m telling the truth.”
“I know,” she said, and she hoped he wasn’t too tired or hurting to not sense her sincerity. She started to pull away, and Anakin started to sit up to try to follow her. He didn’t get very far before he fell back with a whine. Padmé felt her nervous heart slow as it perversely reminded her that, if nothing else, in light of Anakin’s bombshell of information, they could make a strong case for self-defense in a court of law.
She watched as his hand drifted to press against his stomach, which was wrapped in thick layers of bandages and bacta beneath the blanket that covered him. He was grimacing. She should have let him sleep without trying to pry, she thought guiltily. She finally completed the action of calling for the healers and Anakin didn’t try to stop her. His breath stuttered.
“Hey, hey,” she said, “just hang on, I know it hurts.”
“Didn’t—didn’t think I’d get this far, but,” he panted, “After he,” Anakin’s lips twitched with dark humor, “skewered me, ‘s a good problem to have.”
The last time this had happened to someone she knew—and wasn’t it terrible that this wasn’t the first time?—Qui Gon Jinn had died. The healers told her that it was basically a miracle that Anakin had survived long enough for anyone to find him. That he had survived at all after that. They didn’t treat a lot of patients with wounds like Anakin’s and that was because they almost never made it that far.
“Yeah,” she choked out, feeling her throat start to tighten in remembered panic.
The door opened, casting bright light from the hallway into the room, causing Anakin to screw his eyes shut. The sith lightning couldn’t have been kind on his brain and nervous system, Padmé thought— because apparently a lightsaber through the stomach hadn’t been enough for Palpatine.
Stars, Palpatine.
Master Che, the Temple’s lead healer who had been in charge of Anakin’s care so far, entered the room, accompanied by a silent padawan, and said cheerfully, “Back with us, Skywalker?”
“Yep,” Anakin bit out.
“How are you feeling, then?” she asked, reading the display of the monitors they had hooked Anakin up to.
“I’ve been better.”
“He’s in pain, Master Che,” Padmé clarified for her, since that was the whole reason she’d called her in here in the first place.
“Hopefully we can do something about that,” Che said, seeing Anakin’s face. Padmé thought the pain had probably been steadily getting worse ever since he had woken up. Che nodded at the padawan, who left the room, and then leaned over Anakin’s bed.
“Open your eyes for me,” she said, and Anakin complied, with some conscious effort, it looked like. She peered into his eyes before asking,
“Can you tell me where you are?”
“The Halls of Healing, probably,” Anakin said.
“Do you know why you’re here?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he groaned, “got stabbed.”
“Among other things,” Che agreed, “Do you know what day it is?”
“Padmé said a week, so… Centaxday?” Anakin replied.
Che nodded, seemingly satisfied. She turned to check the bag of IV fluid attached to Anakin. Anakin looked like he was debating something, then,
“Not gonna ask me who the Chancellor of the Republic is?” he gritted out. Padmé scoffed. Ancestors help her, this really was a mess.
Che turned to him, her eyes narrowed.
“Was that a joke?” she asked. Anakin raised his eyebrows and then pressed his eyes shut again.
“You noticed.”
“Well, your cognition is as good as ever, Skywalker, at least there’s that,” she assured him. She noticed his hand on his stomach and gently pried it away before pulling the covers back to check his bandages.
“Pain, one to ten?”
Anakin was silent for a moment, thinking. Nine, Padmé thought, considering how well she’d seen him hold up right after losing his arm, which had to have been pretty bad, compared to now.
“Five.”
Che shook her head, professional but with a faint air of exasperation. Their familiarity with each other settled heavily in Padmé’s stomach. She wished she could have been with him the other times he’d been here—there’d surely been a lot of them over the course of the war, and he probably hadn’t even told her about each one. She hated seeing her husband in pain, but it was worse to think of him being in pain and without her.
“Liar. If I made the Senator leave the room, you’d give a different answer.”
“Ani,” Padmé warned at that assessment. He didn’t have to put on a brave face for her. Or protect her from reality. But it would be, unfortunately, just like Anakin to try both. Che’s lips twitched when she heard the nickname.
“Fine. Seven,” Anakin ground out as Master Che’s deft fingers checked the bandages to make sure he wasn’t bleeding through them. Padmé looked over just long enough to see for herself that he wasn’t. She reached over to squeeze Anakin’s metal hand and he squeezed back.
The padawan from before slipped back into the room, a new IV bag in her hands, and Padmé hoped it contained painkillers. Che took it from her and checked the label on it before moving to set it up.
“We’ve done what we could in terms of speeding your healing,” Che informed Anakin, “but from here on, it’ll be time and rest for the most part. Once the meds kick in, you should be able to go back to sleep. Don’t strain yourself.” She warned.
“I’ll make sure he doesn’t,” Padmé assured her.
Once Che and the padawan had left the room again, Anakin and Padmé were silent for several minutes. She heard Anakin’s breathing smooth out over time, and she combed her fingers through his hair as gently as she could. It was near impossible for her to keep her hands off him, but she knew Anakin didn’t mind. They both were very tactile people—being with each other, in each other’s company, close enough to touch, after they had so often and so long been separated was a heady, divine feeling, and Padmé would have happily drowned in it forever. She noticed Anakin’s eyelids grew heavy, but he kept blinking away sleep.
“Master Che said you should rest, Anakin,” she whispered to him.
He didn’t say anything, just struggled to keep his eyes open long enough to look at her, with something unsettlingly close to desperation in his gaze, but she somehow knew what he meant.
Padmé didn’t doubt that the confrontation with Palpatine—learning he was a Sith (and she felt the certainty of that truth growing in her with each passing second, to the point where she was beginning to wonder why she hadn’t considered it before)—had been traumatic for Anakin. What had Palpatine said to him? What had he threatened? Anakin had been so afraid when he woke—afraid for her.
This was far from over, but surely they had both earned a respite for the time being, so she promised him, “He can’t hurt us. We’re safe. I’ll be right here,” and Anakin slept again.