aboard Integrity, flagship of the Open Circle Armada, seven months before the Fall

Padmé is thirty-four; Anakin is thirty-two

She doesn't speak to Bail for weeks. Anakin and Obi-Wan are still away, and the cycles of the ship and fleet are reduced with their absence, and the absence of the men who went with them. The ship is larger and quieter, and it's easier than it should be to avoid him. Her nights are short and full of thoughts too big to avoid, and mornings are accompanied by bouts of nausea that leave her exhausted. She's too tired to fight with him, too scared to hear what he might have to say, too angry to hear what he will say. She understands his reaction-it's not dissimilar from a reaction she might have had to someone in her position, but he's wrong about this. He doesn't get, has never gotten, this thing that she and Anakin have. And she's not saying it makes sense, or even that it's particularly safe for either of them but she can't, and has never, found it in herself to particularly care. Anakin is the cautious one, the safe one, and it's laughable to think it, that of the two of them, he's the one to fear this thing. The truth is, she's made this thing hers, and everyday she doesn't go back to the medbay and demand a quick solution is another day she chooses.

The days stretch into weeks and almost a month or more, but this thing is more than her inability to give this up. He's lost so much, too much; the Jedi and Owen and the Tusken Raiders back on Tatooine have taken everything from him and she promised herself years ago she would never take from him without asking. Bail had argued once (right before she had broken it off for the last time) that her desire for him to give up the order was basically taking away who he was, but he didn't understand. Anakin might have been a Jedi, but he wasn't Obi-Wan. The Order wasn't the only thing he had in his life, and she was a chance for him to have more. She wasn't taking anything-she was giving.

Regardless, she avoids Bail for as long as she can, and he doesn't seem any more inclined to see her than she is him. Anakin will be back soon (his comm comes through while she's asleep in the early hours of the morning "two more weeks") and then maybe she will be strong enough to talk to him. (She is not nervous about telling Anakin, at all. If there is anything she knows, she knows this; that he will choose this child as she did, that this thing between them means more than a wartime romance hidden in the depths of space, that their family can be more than whispers in the darkness and conversations he doesn't want to have. That this is real and possible, that when this war ends they will not.)

Anakin comes back a week before she gets the message from Palpatine recalling her to Coruscant with a request for help on a project he tells her "could use your touch, my dear". When she goes to tell Bail, it's the first time she has been alone with him since she had told him she was going to have Anakin's child. (It's more real, now, because Anakin has pressed his hand to her belly and even though it's impossibly early she had felt it, a shift, a movement, a tether between the child inside her and the man beside her and she had loved him then, fiercely.) She had seen Bail at the briefing when Anakin and Obi-Wan returned, and she knows he's probably talked to Obi-Wan about it by now.

She can picture it, Bail cold and clinical, Obi-Wan with that damned air of benign peaceful blandess all Jedi seem to have (except for hers. Anakin has never been benign in his entire life) but she doesn't care. She feels, for the first time in a long time, strong and immovable. The fragility she'd felt in the wake of her last fight with Anakin, when she's told Bail she'd ended it for good (and she had, god she had, she'd tried, because she let herself believe Bail, that this thing they had was dangerous, destructive, but then Anakin had smiled at her in the briefing room (sometimes she feels like her life can be broken up into a series of important meetings and briefing rooms and desks), and she decided that she didn't care, she'd burn down worlds for him) is gone. She doesn't need to fight, to fear losing him to the Jedi, to Tatooine, to promises he should never have had to make, because he's hers. This is her's now, here, and she will raise this child with his father and everything will be okay. The war is ending, and they have made it. She doesn't allow herself to hope-she doesn't need to. She sees the end and she isn't afraid.