The Moons of Iego: The Padmé Amidala & Anakin Skywalker Website

FAN FICTION : ATTACK OF THE CLONES ERA

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I Won't Be Long

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Something about the way he walks away chills me.

Something about the hard look of his eyes, the unnatural stiffness as he turns, the outward twitch of his cloak as he strides away... that he doesn't turn and steal a look at me.

The way the air seems to completely deaden once he disappears from view.

They bother me because they're not my Ani.

My Ani. I really don't have the right to think that. We know well where both of us should be, and that means I can not be in a place where I can call him my own. He has already left that place, or at least has certainly given it the old try.

Doing so was when his nightmares came back.

They make me want to dive back into that place, just for a little while, and take him with me. My steadfastness toward duty seems to mock me now, wondering if this emptiness from him and in me, the knowledge that for the sake of every obligation we both have I'm doing the right thing, is satisfying replacement for what I've given up.

He has visited me every night in my dreams since the evening I chose to forever give him up. Under any other circumstances they would be very pleasant, even happy... but under any other circumstances I wouldn't have to dream.

He is as close to bliss as I have ever known.

The only Ani - aside from the one who haunts my unconscious - that I can truly claim is the one who opened up to me, and myself to him, for that small period ten years ago. The little boy with an open face and spirit and pure motives, a little boy who missed and loved his mother, who wanted and needed comfort, and never asked for it. The boy whose affections I could freely accept and reciprocate - who I also gave up when I enforced the line that has to exist between Anakin and me.

Those feelings I've come to painfully cherish hold no place here, as they shouldn't have on Naboo, and shouldn't in my sleeping hours (besides, bliss and happiness that exist in dreams are still only dreams). And though I am by his side I now feel further from him than I have ever been.

When he was younger I feared our separation because I could no longer shield him from the world he didn't want to change around him. Now that chance to protect him is here again, and that world strikes back at him in the cruelest way by taking away what he's already lost. And, selfishly, I'm now angry that yet something else I care about has been stripped away, that his innocence was stolen from him this way.

That where he's going now, again, I can't protect him.

He in that and other ways I've come to know these past weeks is no longer 'my' Ani. And yet the part of him I always considered mine is still there in myself and him, and in this time alone with him it's grown even more so, despite what I've tried (not as steadily as I should have) to avoid.

A long minute after he disappears up the stairs to the surface, I'm still standing there at the deathly silent kitchen table. I don't remember having stood up. Anakin's extended family hovers at the corner of my vision, watching me as if waiting for me to do something.

I have to go. I have to help her...

I'll go with you.

I stare toward that staircase again, as if maybe if I look hard enough I can see past it to the surface where he may or may not still be.

Don't follow him. He'd have given some indication if he wanted you there.

Follow him. You know he never asks for comfort even if he were dying for lack of it.

Don't follow him. He's certainly gone by now anyway.

Follow him. You love him too much to let him go.

The thought's not as much a jolt to me as it might have been several days ago, but no less a pain. It's a truth that, though too quickly and intensely to be savored, came nonetheless. He waited for me to say it, to say something -

"Then you do feel something!"

It's not the issue. Seeing that was the easiest part of this. I can admit now that I love him, am in love with him, and that is the first step in moving on past it.

As is never telling him that I feel that way, so he can move on as well.

The Larses say nothing, their expressions as blank as the desert that will soon consume Anakin. All that answers my thoughts is the thin evening wind, taunting so only I can hear, that it will gladly take him from me again, as it took his mother from him.

I hear it laugh faintly as I dash up the stairs to the surface, that it's already taken him and with him that part of me he doesn't even know he possesses, to not ever return.

His shadow on the curving slope of the main dome of the house is the first thing I see; a formless, cold shell of him. I don't look at it long, moving my eyes to the almost equally black, lightless form standing against the desert, spiked hair glinting bronze in the double sunset the only color from him. He seems larger than life yet connected to it, to me, by only a shadow...

You're still too late...

But he turns to me. He takes a few steps toward me, but it's me who covers most of the distance between us, stopping just out of arm's reach: professional distance. Several feet, several parsecs - there's really no difference.

The suns are to the side of us now, sheathing him one half in red-gold light and the other in shadow, hardened eyes staring at me - softening a bit, but their purpose no dimmer. I could not stop him now even that I wish it - to deny him the resolution of self that threatens to elude me, and that I fear will forever do so if he does not return, or once our time together ends. I have denied him much. I won't deny him this. I've been selfish enough for a lifetime, and it has made this moment much more difficult.

You're going to have to stay here.

If I threw myself against you as you got on that speeder bike, would you stop me?

These are good people, Padmé. You'll be safe.

He truly has no idea that ever since that day in the meadow it's been perfectly clear whose safety I'm most concerned with, despite that I'm supposed to be the endangered one? When he fell off that shaak, lying so eerily still, that threw open a door within me. For the first time the possibility of a future where he didn't exist anymore, had been taken from my existence - it hit me, leaving me cold, empty.

Afraid.

You'll be safe...

And that was only the teasing. This is real. It's the strangest thing - I have faith in him, I know he is skilled and resourceful enough, familiar enough with this world that he can withstand anything this place might throw at him.

Then why is that door gaping wide again?

I suddenly hate this world even more, the one that first gave him to me and now threatens to take him back.

(You should never have had him.)

If he does return, but he doesn't find her...?

I can't think that far; I can't imagine that the Force would be so callous as to give him these dreams, then have them only be a reminder of a failure.

As it gave you him, who it knows you can never have?

Or should I feel guilty myself, knowing that if I had stepped up sooner, if we hadn't been playing on Naboo with feelings neither of us can ever reap the full joys of, he could have been here long before now?

I can't stop every selfish urge. Something in me seeks release, ventilation - it gets it in his name slipping through my lips, the step forward and opening of arms that miraculously coincides with his own. In that moment, in the arms enveloping me, the softening of eyes that have been hard since coming here, the face breathing hard into my hair and the crook of my neck, my Ani returns.

My arms around his neck, standing tiptoe to bury my face in his shoulder, holding him to me stronger than anything I ever have, so the little boy I've suddenly found again doesn't disappear from my sight. His face buried in my neck as if for a moment he's hiding from what he's about to do and wants me to keep him there, arms completely around me, warm hands on my back stirring echoes of his touch before he first kissed me. We hold one another as if to merge ourselves into one seamless being, as our shadows did so effortlessly. His presence surrounds me, filling me more than anything ever has.

He pulls away, just a little - still holding me, still gazing at me, again, just like before we kissed - and looking at him I suddenly feel moving on isn't worth it if it means he isn't in my life, isn't possible, and that hiding from him what I feel is pointless. And if he never comes back, if something happens to him, what good will it do either of us for him to believe I don't care, don't feel the same way he does -

(to think his last thought, if it is of us, may be a lie...)

But before I can open my mouth to speak then he pulls his gaze from me, turns and walks away, and that's when I suddenly feel that door I felt in the meadow open again, its icy wind curling its fingers near my neck - or maybe it's just the evening chill. In the instant as he turns I see some change, see that hardness again taking the place of the deep blue that always stirs my doubt when I deny where we are, makes me want him to look away.

Except now. I want him to look back, look at me, so that kindness will return, so that door will close and I don't have to think about what my mind continues to try to show me through it.

I won't be long.

The wind continues to laugh in my ears long after the desert swallows him completely.

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