Anonymous asked: Dark Suzukiblu show me the handmaiden au
“Obi-Wan told me about the Council,” Padmé says gently as she stops beside Anakin, and he looks away from the smoldering remains of the pyre to give her a confused, worried look she can just barely see by the light of the dying fire. He looks exhausted, unsurprisingly. He’s just a little boy, and the pyre has been burning for hours and hours. It’s a miracle he’s even awake, much less standing.
“What about the Council?” he asks. Padmé’s lips thin. Obi-Wan at least could’ve–no, no. She won’t blame a man who’s lost someone so dear to him for being unwilling to immediately break bad news to a child who’s grieving and frightened himself at a damn funeral.
Well. She might, a little, but she won’t dwell on it, and she won’t hold it against him.
But Anakin saved her people. No matter her own grief, Padmé could never treat him so poorly just to spare herself. She would’ve thought the same of a Jedi.
“They’ve told him that they will not see you trained as a Jedi,” she says. It’s not the entire truth–it leaves out Obi-Wan’s own silence, and the way he’d denied her eyes as he held it–but it is true, all the same.
Kinder, she thinks, where there cannot truly be a “kind”.
“Oh,” Anakin says. There’s a listless numbness to the response, and his already dull eyes unfocus, drifting to a point just past her shoulder. Something stabs into Padmé’s chest at the sight.
“You will be coming with me,” she says abruptly, drawing herself up as her hands tighten inside her sleeves. She’d meant to ask it, not declare it–that had been her intention on the way over, leaving Obi-Wan behind–but all she can think when she sees that look on Anakin’s face is how abandoned and unwanted he must feel. He could not possibly think a worse thing than that.
“Yes, Master,” Anakin says quietly, looking at the ground.
