I know I said I wouldn't be posting anything new for a while, but then I remembered this quick oneshot I randomly wrote in the midst of Madam President and hadn't published yet, so here I am again! Reincarnation AUs aren't usually my thing but this idea just came to me so I went for it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ also I never write in present tense and in fact despise present tense with every particle of my being, but for some inexplicable reason this fic just felt like it had to be in present tense. Finally, disclaimer: I know lots of things about ancient Rome bc I'm a classics major but other than that my historical knowledge is pretty ? so I may or may not have used things such as Pirates of the Caribbean and Jane Austen and Wonder Woman as sources of reference for some of these :P Hope you enjoy!

17 AD

Padmé has always found gladiatorial games to be a very distasteful source of entertainment, but nevertheless she is unwillingly dragged to the Colosseum by her family one day in the spring. Everyone around her is cheering and yelling and booing, completely invested in the spectacle, but she's doing her best not to watch.

Even so, there's one gladiator who's caught her eye, the light-haired one who's been defeating opponent after opponent, seemingly unstoppable. He seems younger than many of them, though Padmé's not quite close enough to see how old he really is. She pretends not to be paying the games any attention, but secretly she's rooting for him.

Despite his earlier victories, he's growing tired and starting to slow down, and now they've pitted him against four other men at the same time. He knocks one out and starts singlehandedly fending off two others, but he's so busy with them that he doesn't see the fourth coming up behind him. Doesn't see, or knows he's there but also knows there's nothing he can do to protect himself any longer. Suddenly, the fourth man lunges with his sword and hacks the gladiator's arm off, and the scream of pain echoes through the entire Colosseum. Padmé winces and hides her face in her hands so she doesn't have to see the blood spilling onto the sand.

The crowd has escalated into a roar of noise, which Padmé takes to mean that the gladiator has fallen and now his fate must be decided. She lifts her head again and searches the crowd, hoping to see the closed fist representing mercy—but everywhere she looks, the spectators are gesturing with their thumbs and urging the gladiator to be killed. There is a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach and every instinct she possesses is screaming at her to look away, but for some unknown reason she can't tear her eyes from the fallen gladiator as his opponent raises his sword again and stabs him through the heart.

Anakin is in such excruciating agony over his lost arm that he's relieved to see the crowd giving the signal for death, and he welcomes his opponent's sword gladly. The death blow is added to all the pain he's already experiencing, and he barely even feels it. He feels the last breaths leaving his lungs and some instinct causes him to glance into the stands which house the spectators.

He makes eye contact with a horrified-looking patrician woman, and Anakin's never much believed in the gods, but she is so beautiful that as darkness closes over him he thinks it must be Proserpina herself come to lead him to the Underworld.

Centuries pass where they never even meet, where they're in the wrong place at the wrong time and just barely miss each other.

1017

Anakin's been in love with her for as long as he can remember, though he's never spoken to her and is sure she has no idea who he is. He's worked at her father's manor ever since he was a small boy, gradually moving from domestic duties to agricultural ones as he got older. Now he works the fields, which has the double disadvantage of being backbreaking labor and preventing him from seeing much of her. The daughter of a lord never goes out into the fields, and field laborers never go into the main house.

But one day he falls out of a tree and breaks his arm. It hurts, but he'll recover. And it probably doesn't hurt enough to teach him not to climb trees anymore either; he loves the freedom of being up high.

Plus, breaking his arm has the added bonus of excusing him from work for a little while—Anakin's no use to anyone when he's only able to use one arm. He spends the days lying around his and his mother's tiny cottage on Lord Naberrie's land, surrounded by the cottages of all the other serfs. He's sitting on the lumpy bed, shivering in the draft, when there's a knock on the door.

Anakin warily approaches, wondering who it could be. His mother is working all day, and he can't think of anyone who would have any reason to come see him. He opens it and almost keels over when he sees that it's Padmé Naberrie herself, looking nervous and determined at the same time.

"M-my lady," Anakin stammers, quickly doing an awkward bow and trying not to panic. He hasn't been this close to her since he was about nine; usually he only sees her from a great distance, if at all.

"I hope I'm not disturbing you," she says, also looking awkward.

"N-no, not at all." He glances abashedly behind him into the dark, drafty, dirt-floored, one-roomed hovel he calls home, but nevertheless politeness makes him say, "Um, would you like to come in, my lady?"

"Oh, no, I don't want to bother you," Padmé replies. Then she holds something out to him, and Anakin belatedly realizes she's holding a blanket and a basket. "I only came to give you these. I heard you broke your arm. I was hoping I could help, at least a little bit."

This is all highly irregular. Why would she care enough about a lowly serf to help him after he broke his arm? Why would she care enough to even bother finding out about his injury in the first place? Anakin doesn't think it would be proper to accept the gift, but he thinks it might be slightly more improper to refuse it, so he gingerly reaches out and takes it. He peeks in the basket and sees that there's an entire loaf of bread, two hunks of cheese, and some meat, and his eyes nearly fall out of his head. "Thank you, my lady, I-I don't know what to say—"

"It was no trouble," she says, and Anakin could swear she's blushing. She clears her throat and turns away. "I hope your arm heals soon, Anakin."

She's ten steps away before Anakin manages to get out, "You know my name?"

Padmé stops walking but doesn't turn around. "Of course I do," she says, and she hesitates only a moment longer before continuing on her way.

The food she brought is delicious and the blanket is very warm. Anakin keeps the blanket for years to come. He covers his mother with it when she falls ill. He wraps it around himself for comfort when he buries her a month later. He sits on the bed holding it and staring wistfully at it when Padmé Naberrie is married off to a neighboring lord, and when he hears news of her death in childbirth two years later. And when Anakin himself dies of disease a few years after that, Kitster buries the blanket with him.

Now that they've spoken face-to-face at last, they continue to meet throughout the next several centuries. But the circumstances are never right—she is obligated to marry someone else, or he is killed in war. They share their first kiss in the fourteenth century and the universe rejoices, but their romance is cut short by plague before it can even begin. They reach their first kiss in every lifetime after that one and soon start making it to second and third and fourth kisses, but nevertheless they are always torn apart before they have the chance to truly be together.

1717

"Come away with me," Anakin pleads, reaching for her hand.

But Padmé backs away, gazing at him in horror. "I don't know you anymore," she says, her voice shaking. "You're—you're a pirate."

She spits the word as if it's a curse, and Anakin flinches. "Please, you don't understand," he says desperately. "I had no choice. Padmé, I was starving, I had no place to live, my mother was dead. I had nowhere else to turn."

"You could have turned to me," she replies. "You could have asked me for help instead of resorting to—to murder and raiding!"

Anakin snorts. "Asked you for help? You, the wife of the governor who's currently offering a massive reward for my head?"

"You don't seem particularly frightened by that, seeing as you just broke into his house in the middle of the night!"

"I had to see you," Anakin says. "I can't come back here again, it's too dangerous. I shouldn't have even come this time, but I had to. I had to see you one more time."

"Why?" Padmé asks, heart in her throat.

He gazes at her with such sadness and longing. "You know why."

"Do I?"

"Because I love you," says Anakin, so softly it's almost inaudible. "I love you, Padmé, and I know you love me too. So I'm here now, asking you to run away with me, leave all of this behind while you have the chance. No one saw me come in, no one knows I'm here. We can sneak out and head back to the ship, and by the time anyone realizes you're gone we'll be far away, out on the open sea where they can't catch us."

Padmé squeezes her eyes shut to keep the tears from escaping and shakes her head vigorously. "Anakin, I can't."

"Why not?" he demands.

"I can't. Do you know what you're asking of me? To abandon everything I know, spend the rest of my life as a pirate, a fugitive from my own husband? It's impossible, Anakin. I can't come with you." I wish I could, she's desperate to say, but the logical part of her knows she needs to get him out of there as quickly as possible before someone sees him.

There are tears in his eyes too now. "Padmé, please," he says. "Please. I love you."

I love you too. "I can't," Padmé whispers. "I'm sorry. Please, just—just go."

Anakin gazes at her for a long moment, looking utterly devastated, almost as heartbroken as she feels. Then he leans in and kisses her hard before standing up and climbing back out the window.

Padmé's lips are burning with his kiss, and she doesn't let herself approach the window until he's long out of sight. She squints towards the ocean and thinks she can just barely make out a pirate flag through the fog, getting further and further away.

She closes the window again and takes a deep shuddering breath, and then she bursts into tears.

When the notorious pirate Anakin Skywalker is captured at last ten years later, Governor Clovis is adamant that his wife come to the hanging and she can't think of a reasonable excuse not to. And so Padmé is forced to watch as they put the noose around the neck of her lost love, as his eyes search for her in the crowd and lock onto her, as he gives her the ghost of his boyish smile, as the air is squeezed from his lungs, as his legs kick frantically and eventually go limp. She is forced to watch, and she can do nothing but stare impassively at him, conscious of her husband's hand on her arm, knowing he can feel her trembling.

1817

"Padmé, we—we can't," Anakin says, heart pounding. "You're to be married in two weeks."

"I know." She takes his hand and looks pleadingly at him. "That's why I want to. I'm going to spend the rest of my life being with someone I don't love, so I want to know—I want to know what it's like to do this with someone I do love. Just this once. Before it's too late."

Anakin knows he shouldn't, knows it would be wrong of him to risk damaging her reputation like this, but he's never been good at resisting her when she asks something of him. And so soon he's carefully unlacing her dress while she tugs at his belt, and then he's laying her down on the bed and worshipping her body with his mouth and hands, listening to the gasps and sighs she lets out with every touch. He makes love to her slowly, tenderly, both of them savoring every moment of their first and last time together.

"We could run away," Padmé says afterwards.

Anakin gives a half smile. "Where would we go?" he asks, allowing himself to indulge the fantasy for just a minute.

"America," she decides after a moment. "We could be together there. No one would care that I'm a lady and you're a footman."

Every part of him is longing to make that fantasy a reality, but he knows it's impossible, knows her family would inevitably track them down and that then the consequences would be much worse for both of them. So Anakin says nothing, instead presses a kiss to the top of her head and waits until she falls asleep before slipping out of the room.

All the house servants are invited to the wedding, but Anakin doesn't think he has it in him to watch her marry someone else, so he pretends to be sick and stays home. He wonders whether Padmé is relieved or hurt that he isn't there.

He doesn't see much of her after that; she moves from her father's house into her husband's. A couple months after the wedding Anakin hears that she's with child, and he's filled with an emotion that's somewhere between jealousy and longing. He sees her a few times when she's at the house calling on her parents, but all they can do is exchange brief pleasantries and a wistful glance when no one's looking.

Anakin tries not to keep track of the months, tries to forget about the baby she's carrying, but it's all the household is talking about and it would be impossible for him not to be aware that Padmé is due to give birth any day now. He wakes early one day as he always does and heads into the kitchen to grab a bite to eat before beginning the day's work, and he stops short when he sees that the kitchen is crowded with his fellow servants, all of them looking gloomy, some even crying.

"What's wrong?" he asks apprehensively.

It's Obi-Wan who answers him. "Lady Padmé is dead," he says quietly. "Complications in childbirth. Twins are so much riskier to deliver."

Obi-Wan watches him carefully—he has always known, Anakin thinks, that there was something more between him and Padmé—but Anakin pays him no mind. He struggles to breathe, he feels like the ceiling is collapsing down on top of him. The others resume talking amongst themselves in hushed voices, and Anakin manages a muttered excuse and strides out the back door.

He walks faster and faster until he breaks out into a run, and he's made it to a deserted stretch of the Naberries' land when his knees finally give out and he collapses to the ground and curls up into a ball and sobs and sobs and sobs until there isn't a single drop of water left in his body.

He wishes the ground would open up and swallow him so he won't have to continue living in a world without her. But unfortunately that does not happen, and it's late afternoon when Anakin finally drags himself back to the house. Normally he would be severely reprimanded or perhaps even dismissed for shirking his duties for the better part of a day, but the house is in such upheaval over the death of its daughter that his absence seems to have gone relatively unnoticed.

Time continues passing, and Anakin is forced to behave as though he's lost only his employer's daughter rather than the love of his life. But Padmé was dearly beloved by the entire household—many of the servants practically raised her and feel her loss almost as keenly as her own parents do—so if Anakin is perhaps a little more grief-stricken than appropriate, no one comments on it.

He doesn't pay much attention to the children who killed her. It isn't often that they come to visit their grandparents, and when they do Anakin looks at them and can't help but resent them for taking her from him, though he knows it's irrational. It's only when they're five years old that he realizes the boy is blond-haired and blue-eyed even though both his parents had dark hair and eyes. It's another five years before he notices that the girl is quite unlike either her father or mother in disposition, hot-tempered and argumentative and bold. Anakin wonders, and wonders, and wonders, until the day he dies.

1917

"Take this," Padmé says, pushing the grainy, black-and-white wedding photograph into his hands. "To remember me by."

Anakin laughs and kisses her on the cheek. "It would be pretty hard to forget the most wonderful woman in the world," he says fondly, but nevertheless he tucks the photograph snugly into his jacket pocket. Then he pulls her close and hugs her tight, and Padmé buries her face in his shoulder, trying to memorize every detail of how he feels.

"Come home to us," she says when they finally let go of each other, the four simple words imbued with all the fear building up inside her that she's trying to hide from him. He'd been so eager to do his patriotic duty when America joined the war, and now that he's about to leave for the front he is…not excited, per se, but confident, as if he knows this is what he's meant to be doing and is sure he'll return home safely when it's all over. Padmé is trying to think optimistically as well, but she can't quite manage it.

Anakin smiles and rests his hand on the slight swell of her belly. "I will," he promises. "I'll be back before you know it. It'll be like I was never even gone."

Padmé blinks back tears and wraps her arms around him yet again, unwilling to let him go. "If the baby's born before you get home—"

"She won't be. I'll be home in time," Anakin insists, as if he has any control over when they allow him to go home and when they order him out to the front.

"But just in case," Padmé plows on. "What would you like to name him?"

"Her," he corrects with a grin, making Padmé give a watery chuckle; they'd been having this argument for weeks. "I was thinking…maybe Leia."

"Leia," she murmurs, covering Anakin's hand with her own. "That's beautiful. Though I doubt we'll be able to use it since it's definitely a boy."

Anakin laughs and bends down to kiss her belly first, then her lips. "I love you," he says, and he turns to go.

Padmé catches him by the hand. "Promise me you'll come home," she says a little desperately. "Promise me."

He smiles at her then, and that split second ends up burned into her memory for the rest of her life. Anakin silhouetted against the sun, half facing her and half walking away, a broad, self-assured smile on his beautiful face. "I promise."

The months pass, and communication with Anakin is unreliable and infrequent, though she saves every single one of the few letters she gets from him. Padmé is eight months pregnant when she receives the telegram. She's sick with fear as soon as she sees it, but she forces herself to open it. It could be anything. It might not be what she's dreading.

But then—

Regret to inform you Lieutenant Anakin Skywalker killed in action Mediterranean November 15th

There's a bit more after that, condolences from whoever at the war office sent the telegram, but Padmé doesn't read it because she's too busy dropping the paper and falling to her knees and screaming until her throat is raw and burning, the baby inside her kicking wildly as if he can sense his mother's distress.

She doesn't even get to bury him properly; his plane was shot down over the sea and his body was not recovered. The babies—not one, but two, a boy and a girl, they were both right, she needs Anakin to know that—are born mere weeks after the funeral, and as Padmé cries and struggles to bring them into the world and clutches at her sister's hand instead of her husband's, somewhere in the middle of the Mediterranean, a waterlogged wedding photo lies at the bottom of the sea and slowly disintegrates.

2017

"Oh my God, I'm so sorry!" Anakin yelps, mortified, as the woman hisses in annoyance and starts rummaging around in her purse. "I'm so sorry, I didn't see you there—"

"It's fine," she says shortly, pulling out a pack of tissues and quickly dabbing at the coffee that spilled onto her blouse when Anakin crashed into her.

"Let me—let me buy you a new coffee, or a new shirt, or—"

"Seriously, it's not a big deal," she says, sounding exasperated. Then she finally looks up and meets his eyes, and her expression changes. She opens and closes her mouth once or twice, as if debating whether or not she should say something. Finally she does. "Sorry, but…have we met before? You seem familiar."

Anakin senses it too as he gazes into her eyes. He could swear he's seen those eyes before, yet the more rational part of him is sure he's never seen this woman before in his life. He shakes his head helplessly. "You do too, but I don't think we've met."

"Maybe we've seen each other before during the morning commute," she suggests. It's reasonable—Anakin does sometimes start to recognize people who wait to catch the train at the same time every day as he does—but still, this particular woman is so beautiful that he's sure he'd remember if he'd seen her before.

"Maybe," he agrees nonetheless. The woman doesn't seem annoyed about her coffee any longer, but Anakin still feels obligated to repeat, "I really am sorry about that."

He waves his hand at her half-empty coffee cup and stained blouse to illustrate his meaning, and she smiles and shrugs it off. "I can easily get another coffee, and I have a change of clothes at the office," she says.

"You do?" It wouldn't even occur to Anakin to leave an extra set of clothes at his office.

"Yeah, I learned my lesson the first time I spilled coffee on myself on the way to work," she says, and Anakin chuckles along with her.

"Still, if there's anything I can do to make it up to you…" he begins.

The woman regards him thoughtfully for a second, and then she turns a little pink and says hesitantly, "Well…if you were serious about buying me coffee…"

Now Anakin's blushing too. He'd meant his original offer as just stopping into the nearest coffee place to get her a replacement for the one he'd spilled, but he's pretty sure she's implying she wants to go on a—a date with him. "Um, yeah. That would be nice," he mumbles, reddening further and rubbing the back of his neck. "How about—maybe Friday?"

"Okay. My lunch break is at noon." She gives him her phone number and they agree to meet at a coffee shop that's equidistant between their workplaces, and then she says, "I'm Padmé, by the way. Padmé Naberrie."

Anakin smiles at her, starting to feel a little less embarrassed and a little more comfortable. "Anakin Skywalker. Nice to meet you."

This time, it's seventy more years before one of them dies—Padmé, peacefully in her sleep, surrounded by Anakin and their children and grandchildren. Anakin follows her in much the same manner two years later. Though his family and friends mourn, they comfort themselves with the thought that husband and wife have finally been reunited; Anakin had spent the two years without her saying over and over again how much he missed her and wanted to be with her again, and everyone imagined Padmé must have been doing the same wherever she was.

She is waiting for him when he arrives, and she smiles and takes him by the hand. This time, the universe allows them to contentedly journey to the next life together rather than spitting them back out into the world yet again and making them find each other. It has taken them two millennia to get it right, and the universe decides that they've long since earned their happy ending.