He hovers outside her room for a good half-hour before deciding to finally go in, and feels like an ass. A stupid ass. An ass who wants to go into the room, damnit, so why the hell is he being an ass and avoiding her like the plague?
She’s too pretty to have the plague, he thinks, nonsensically, and finally knocks briefly on the glass partition before sliding the door open, poking his head around its edge. She’s sitting up in bed, looking pale but far, far better than when he’d last seen her (though that wasn’t hard, honestly, given that the last time he’d seen her she’d had a metal spike in her chest and he’d been playing Jenga with her ribs), and below her thickly-bandaged torso she has a lapdesk across her blanketed legs, her bright eyes peering at him over the edge of her laptop.
“Dr. Skywalker,” she says tunefully, and immediately sets aside her work - there’s another young woman sitting at her side with a notebook and tablet of her own, who takes quick custody of the computer and looks far more suspicious of Anakin than he feels he deserves. “How kind of you to look in on me.”
“You remember me?” he says, feeling uncharacteristically sheepish as he steps inside and, belatedly, realizes he’s made no effort whatsoever to look presentable. That’s probably what her assistant is looking at - the remnants of breakfast on his sleeve, or something. “Well,” he says, mostly to cover up his embarrassment, “of course you do. I do pride myself on my spectacularly awful dating technique.”
“Oh, it wasn’t so bad as all that,” Padme Amidala says, winking with mischief as she settles back into her bedclothes and pushes her reading glasses messily up into her hair. (Gods, she’s so beautiful, Anakin finds himself thinking, and aw, crap. He’s in trouble.) “You should try making small talk with Coruscant Senators. I’ll appreciate disaster over boredom every time.”
“Uh-huh,” Anakin says, somewhat bowled over, and then remembers that oh, right, doctor, and makes his way over to the side of her bed, checking her vital readings briefly before he bends in closer to check what he can see of her (perfect, because he did them) stitches through the patchwork of bandages. “How’s your pain?”
“Considering I was impaled, not bad,” she sighs, settling more comfortably onto her back. “Perhaps you could send my compliments to my surgeon.”
“Accepted,” he grins, and then pauses, slightly petrified, as her eyes go wide. “Uh. Yeah,” he adds weakly. “Hi?”
“Okay, so I have to admit that this is now significantly weirder,” she says, though she looks like she’s struggling not to laugh. “Sabe,” she says suddenly, turning to the suspicious girl, “could you give us a minute?”
Sabe goes, with something that seems like bad grace; Anakin can’t help but feel, as the door slides shut behind her, that he has absolutely no idea what’s coming next, and that that’s actually kind of - fun?
“So you really are a hotshot surgeon, huh,” Padme says eventually, smiling through her dark circles. “I have to admit, given how our date went, I had my doubts about - well, pretty much everything you said.”
“Guilty as charged,” he laughs, and shrugs. “I can be an ass when I’m nervous.”
“I can’t imagine you nervous,” she says, somewhat wonderingly. “My nurses were telling me that they - that you had to remove part of my ribcage and then put it back. Nervous men don’t do that.”
“I was shit scared,” he said bluntly, and feels almost resigned at the way her eyes narrow with interest. “I knew you. I mean - I don’t usually know or care who they are.”
“Well,” she says, after a moment’s silence, “whatever it was that got you through it, I’m grateful.”
He coughs a little, gestures to the lapdesk sitting quietly where Sabe had been for the sake of something to talk about that isn’t him. “Are you writing about this for the Coruscant Times?”
“Oh, absolutely,” she says, suddenly reanimated. “I’m fascinated by the entire process of how City resources are allocated for small-scale disaster relief. And I understand there are quite a few undercurrents of stories rumbling here in the hospital, too.”
She pauses, grins, bites her lip, looks up at him like he’s already a willing conspirator, and oh, shit, he would absolutely do anything asked by those eyes. “Come back and talk to me sometime. I’d like to hear your side of the story about what goes on around here.”
“You got it,” he says hoarsely, and then somehow he’s back outside the room, and floating, and it feels completely fucking amazing.
Damn, he thinks helplessly. I guess I’d better start believing in second chances...