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

FAN FICTION : THE CLONE WARS ERA

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Echoes in Blue

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Disclaimer: do I look like a middle-aged bearded Californian? Don't own, don't sue.
Archive: I'd be flattered. Just let me know so I can go over, look and gloat.
Rating: If you are old enough to watch AotC, you are old enough to read this.
Setting: Some time between the end of AotC and beginning of RotS (thus no spoilers for RotS).
Dedicated to all the SW people on my flist. You always make me think.
Summary: Their partings are long and hard. Their meetings are short and harder.

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She is waiting. The shades of blue in the apartment tint deeper with the setting sun. C3PO has informed her there will be no callers, as requested. None, save one.

He is back. The knowledge has rooted in her bones. She cannot meet him in public, with all her poise and control. Not after months. He will walk through that door, alone, and find her waiting. She both craves and dreads the moment.

Their partings are long and hard. Their meetings are short and harder.

The first week after he is gone is the worst. She busies herself. She is industrious Senator Amidala. She hurries from meeting to party to conference to show. All to avoid coming home to the ghost of warmth in her bed. To the loss that transcends emotion and becomes pure physical ache. If she were fanciful, she'd say she needs him to help her breathe.

The second week is better. She holds long conversations with him in her head. They are longer than any conversations they really have. If he were really here, the conversations would have been long over. He would have started kissing her, and after the kissing... Well.

She rebuilds her separateness brick by brick, day by day, week by week. Sometimes there are months and she almost forgets she needs him.

And then he is back, and the wall she has labored over comes falling down, a monumental, instant shock. Like a cliché out of a holovid, the world becomes a bit brighter, the colors sharper, the sounds more intense. Her existence slides into focus. She had forgotten she has missed him, and is always surprised to realize that alone she has only been half-self, half-alive.

She learns the topography of his scars. She maps his body by her kisses, marking mine mine mine. He whispers, once, in the tangled mass of her hair: "You are my world. There is nothing without you." It is not a compliment. He is always unready with smooth flow of compliment, and his words of love come with the rough edges of earnest need.

"You are my world. There is nothing without you." It is a truth immovable for him, and the stark enormity of it terrifies and exalts her.

He laughs in her presence, the wide expanse of teeth. He is reduced to a boy, worry utterly wiped from his face. She catches herself trying to make him laugh. Now she knows why she resisted her heart for so long. She knew once she lost the battle, there would be no control. She can no more stop herself now than she can fly.

He is there only long enough to get her accustomed to his presence. He is never long enough to make her complacent. Just long enough to make the scabbed over ache of his loss tear open again.

She has nightmares of him being dead. Of his ship spinning out of control. Of a blast tearing him apart. Of a lightsaber slicing through the tendons of the neck, cutting the bone. She sees the recognition dying out of his eyes, the face going blank, the long body crumpling, night, after night, after night. She has nightmares of him dying by the hand of someone who does not even realize his importance. She has nightmares of him dying by the hand of someone who realizes it all too well.

The blues of the apartment grow shadowed.

She has heard a noise, slight but there, and she turns.

He is on the threshold and something comes alive in his eyes. The sheer intensity in them holds her in a net. It is as if for him, everything that he is or will be is concentrated on that moment. She would revel in the fact that she is the only one who will ever see that look on his face, her secret against the world. She would notice the new scar, already fading, and add it to the bitter catalogue of her mind. But that will come later. Now there is nothing in her outside of a stumbling rush. They meet on the threshold and her tears scatter like summer rain. He is solid against her ribcage. Her hands tangle in his hair as he buries his head in her neck, eyes squeezed tightly shut. She tightens her hold and he makes an indescribable noise in his throat.

They have come together, story book hero and story book queen, their shadows gloriously mingled.

For now.

The End

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