wake up your saints

Padme Lives AU for your AU thing!!

Padmé wakes to the back of Obi-Wan’s head, his hair mussed and his arms spread, outstretched over her knees as though to shield her from all that would come. (Too late, Padmé thinks, feeling the dull ache around her throat, where phantom hands tightened. Much too late for that now.) His head is heavy on her thigh.

From where she lies, she can see there is already frost—fine, but silver in the light—on the wheat of his hair.

Anakin will never go grey, Padmé thinks dispassionately. (She has never been dispassionate, and it feels odd to allow such chilly thoughts.) Anakin will never be anything but young and handsome and ash, so much ash on the banks of Mustafar’s burning rivers.

Obi-Wan stirs when she does, as she is bending to press a kiss to the crown of his too-heavy head. 

“Where are my children?” she asks.

Obi-Wan blinks at her. He looks like a bantha, with his long lashes, the open, dumbfounded expression on his face. “Your…?”

“My daughter,” Padmé says, and does not stumble over the word though it feels strange in her mouth. (She is a daughter, how can she have one of her own?) “And my son. My children. I just gave birth, I doubt they wandered away under their own power.”

“The droid,” Obi-Wan says with a vague gesture. His arms are still spread over her knees, and she can feel the way his muscles shift for so small a thing. It makes her feel unexpectedly tender, the reminder that even Jedi Master Kenobi’s elbows are sharp.

(Will her son have Anakin’s bony knees? Will her daughter have his strong jaw? Thought experiment in genetics have consumed Padmé for eight months—but it is suddenly very real, to have those hypotheticals outside herself, existing in the world.)

Obi-Wan makes a pained sound when she moves, struggling to shift so that she might plant her feet on the deck of the starskiff. “You should rest,” he protests. “The meddroid said—”

“I want to see my children,” Padmé says, holding out her hands to Obi-Wan. The deck is very cold under her feet, and she shudders at the feeling.“Take me to them.”

She feels stretched-thin and trembling as Obi-Wan escorts her from the room, all her weight balanced on his arm. Occasionally they stop, so she might lean against the wall and take a few deep breaths. “The meddroid said you should not—” he begins.

“Be quiet,” Padmé says weakly, resting her forehead against the cold inside of the metal hull. (The sound of the engines is a low, distant whine shivering through the wall. She loves that sound now, more than anything else.) All she wants is to see her babies; she refuses to think of meddroids right now, or of the Senate, Bail, Palpatine or even Obi-Wan, with early frost on the gold of his hair, how Anakin will never—

There is Luke, and there is Leia, and the whole galaxy is the corridor between them and her. 

Obi-Wan is quiet.

Her children are very small and sleeping in the bassinets, their mouths soft. They breathe quickly, little chests rising and falling. “They’re perfect,” Padmé says in a shaking voice, touching Leia’s skullcap, Luke’s cheek. (She is not sure how she knows which is which, but she is sure, inexorably.) “Look at how perfect they are, Obi-Wan.”

“They’re perfect,” he echoes, a strange note in his voice. When she turns back, he is looking at Luke as though the baby holds all of Obi-Wan’s heartstrings in his fat fist.

What a thing to inherit from their father, Padmé thinks. A heavy gift—the awful and unflinching love of Obi-Wan Kenobi.

“We should set course for Naboo,” she says, half to herself, half to Luke and Leia, still sleeping. They are so small—they were inside her, she thinks, looking at their faces, red and puckered up, like a minister of defense she had once when she was still queen. They were what she felt, pressing on the inside of her skin. And now they are real. “Naboo will protect us.”

“You know Sidious—Palpatine will look there first,” Obi-Wan says quietly. “And I am certain he will look. For Anakin’s children, he would do much more.”

Padmé does not flinch at the name.

“He won’t look among the Gungans,” she says instead. She feels a strange, supernatural equanimity, looking at the faces of Luke and Leia. Maybe it’s the Force, she thinks, and resists the inappropriate urge to laugh because Maker, she is done with the Force. The Force can fuck itself on the business end of a blaster.

She does not ask if Obi-Wan plans to follow her to Otoh Gunga. She is afraid to give him the chance to refuse.

.

(In hindsight, she is not sure why she thought he could refuse—Obi-Wan Kenobi had stood as the Jedi Temple crumbled around him; Obi-Wan Kenobi had followed his padawan to the burning shores of Mustafar, where only death walked. Obi-Wan loves things to their ending, and Luke and Leia had only begun.

He was never going to leave.)

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