forgive me if this has been done but please accept the following theory: anakin knows that women outside of tattooine do not die in childbed.

He’s travelled the length and breadth of the galaxy. He’s seen stars sing into being and empires topple to ash at his feet. He’s seen horrors and wonders and he’s a legend in at least fifteen different systems, and he’s seen medical droids work miracles, and he knows – he knows – that Padme is highly unlikely to hemorrhage, or succumb to eclampsia, or die of a slow mouldering infection.

(look, if you think Anakin ‘this woman is my entire life’ Skywalker didn’t research the fuck out of every possible way a woman can die in childbirth you are wrong. He’s a walking talking Web MD of the Worst Possible Result by the time she’s in her fifth month, and he shepherds her to every appointment, and arranges strange and obscure tests which he keeps concealed partly by subterfuge and mainly by Force-choking and mind-control. His eyes are turning a little yellow at the edges. He blames it on exhaustion.)

(since when did tiredness make you go – Padme will say )

(maybe it’s jaundice that’s something you could get, or the baby, or – )

Anakin’s every stereotype of ‘insanely overprotective father-to-be’ and it’s adorable except it really, really isn’t. Because there’s something he learned on Tatooine that he hasn’t shared with his wife: slave-children are property of the master, and are often sold young, and the mothers would protest. Of course they would. 

And when they protested too hard, they were punished, and when the punishment went too far and the woman remained in the dust where they’d pushed her (red red red) they would, euphemistically,say that she had died in childbed. Because, technically, it was true. Her children had caused her death. A few years down the line, maybe, but all the same: if she hadn’t borne the child, if she hadn’t become a mother, then she would have lived.

Anakin’s seen the aftermath of such a conflict. More than once. When they come for your children, you’re meant to say yes, a friend of Shmi’s had said to her. Watoo had been a good master. A kind master. He had never flogged Shmi’s back red because she would not surrender her son. 

(it hadn’t saved her, in the end. but that’s another story.)

Anakin knows that prophecy can come in strange and circuitous language, and dreams of Padme – his Padme! – dying in childbed, well. When they come for your children you’re meant to say yes, thinks Anakin. Be obedient, the council tells him. 

They will not have his Padme. He will save her. He will save his child.