EXT. ███ THEED ROYAL PALACE NABOO, DAY ©
𝐍aboo made this warrior homesick for a future he'd never actually lived. Anakin is back to Naboo, though, for a time while the war continued to grind its enormous millstone over the stars without much noticing his brief absence. But things were different now He was different now. The Republic is to praise him now, with a readiness found gratifying and obscene, while something much darker in him, something much older than his wisdom and much younger than his title, stirs like cyanide in his gut. And yet he answered to this beck and call, summoned by a handmaiden who had never once needed much to command any attention. She, who belongs to one of the oldest and least conquerable regions of Padmé's life, who knew her before him, beside him, in all the small shadowed chambers of girlhood and queenship, has asked for him. [And Anakin, for all the increasingly dangerous webbing of his mind, is still made first and last of response.] “ I've got to admit, ” His voice disturbed the hush. The balcony welcomes him with pale stone and salt-breathed wind. He approaches upon Sabé with his hands behind his back, a gesture almost boyish and much unlike a decorated general in its attempt at calm, “ You certainly know how to pick a place for conversation, huh? ” It's warm and a smile found him almost despite himself familiar, crooked thing. For one leisurely moment his attention wandered, A glance over one shoulder. Blue eyes trace empty balconies and the grandiose doors he has come through. “ No guards ... or curious eyes. ” Now, Anakin looks back to her. @queenshadow stands in the secrecy she herself arranged, and he begins in that instant, to understand the scale of this arrangement. She is too disciplined for ornaments.
“ A great deal of trouble. ” Playful, almost. His smile lingered for just a heartbeat longer, then begun its slow death of its own accord. [Perhaps, there were only so many reasons she would ever summon for him in secret.] Now it starts to click, a dreadful interlocking of pieces in motion. There exists a Padmé. Dear Padmé, who has long since ceased to function in Anakin's emotional architecture as a being to love in any ordinary sense She is axis, she is climate. More luminous than any golden sun among the stars, than any morality. Right now, Padmé waited for him somewhere beyond those gilded doors, warm and living and wholly herself, while he stood with her counter on this balcony. Was he only ever to be her doom? Is that what Sabé has noticed?
He has heard, too recently and too often, whispers of serpentine powers and unnatural salvations, rot that seeps and gets in through these hairline fractures of his. Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis The Wise?
Anakin looks at Sabé then with that awful sincerity of his. He lowered his head in thought, his approach slowing into those heavy, unhurried steps. “ ... This is about her, isn't it? Go on. ” He gives her rest in the next breath and the waves go on writing themselves against the shoreline in long, dissolving lines.