Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

suzukiblu:

excerpt from current writing: 

He helped save their people and all he wants in return is a place to swear himself to–to belong. Padmé cannot imagine why the Jedi would think such a person wasn’t worth keeping, but at this point, it’s their loss and Naboo’s gain.

Her gain, she admits to herself as she enters the training room to see Yané and Cordé working with Anaké, who is wearing plain, simple linens that don’t match today’s handmaiden robes. He’s already seen the palace tailors, but even a Naboo tailor can’t turn out a full wardrobe in half a ten-day, so for now he only has what he brought with him and a few basic outfits quickly altered to fit. They notice her immediately–it would be hard not to, since she came flanked by Sabé, Rabé, Eirtaé, and Dormé–and Anaké perks up noticeably. Padmé smiles at him in greeting, and he beams back.

“Padmé!” he says delightedly as he runs up to her, then balks and corrects himself with an embarrassed expression–“I mean, Your Majesty. Sorry.”

“It’s all right. It’s only us here,” Padmé reassures him with another smile. She would let Anaké call her “Padmé” all the time, honestly, but it does put a bit of a kink in the decoy arrangement when she’s wearing Amidala, and he’s already been very eager to fall in line with the others’ manners anyway. “We can’t stay long, we’re afraid. We’ve just come to see how your first day is proceeding.”

*reverent*

I love this AU.

in-a-trans-like-state asked: (sorry for spamming you with asks) Is anakin known by everyone as ani in this au?

suzukiblu:

AT LAST THE NEXT PART IS DONE. \o/ And holy crap it’s like 3500 words?? When did THAT happen. 

I will confess I’m a little nervous about posting this one, because I made up some bits of Naboo handmaiden/Tatooine slave culture to fill the story out better and I’m not sure how well it all came together/works with canon. I hope it at least works for you guys? 

Keep reading

words-writ-in-starlight asked: *appears to harass you again* Okay but for real, talk to me about the disaster that unfolds as Anakin has to deal with Padme's insistence that no one OWNS him, because he's a PERSON, not a thing, and also how that turns into handmaiden!Anakin, and also whether this eventually turns into Padme/Anakin, and also whether this still ends with Vader or if Anakin loses it completely and they have an untrained Dark Side nine-year-old. I swear I'll get out of your inbox someday, but clearly not today.

suzukiblu:

(I’ll be honest there’s a lot here so I just wrote The Next Thing That Happens, lolll. hopefully it satisfies?) 

Anakin cries for a very long time, surprising Padmé exactly not at all. She guides him a little further away from the funeral stragglers and does her best to disappear him behind her robes in the shadows, suspecting that later he might be ashamed to know the Jedi had seen him do it, even if he’ll never see them again. Perhaps some part of her just wants the excuse to disappear him, but that doesn’t make her wrong either.

It doesn’t hurt to get him to sit down somewhere, either. He looks so exhausted.

So Padmé takes a seat, and she lets Anakin lean in against her side and weep silent tears into her chest. She does not reflect on why a nine year-old might cry hard enough to shake without making a sound. Her fists curl inside her sleeves, though, and she makes no effort to disturb his grief.

Anakin cries and cries and cries, and Padmé lays a hand on his back and watches the embers of Qui-Gon Jinn gutter out into nothing. Even with as long as the pyre has burned already, it takes a very long time.

She is so very tired, and there is so very much to do.

“Your majesty,” Sabé murmurs sometime later; Padmé blinks, slowly, and looks up at her. The gesture feels thicker than it should, padded by exhaustion and borrowed pain and a tinge of grief.

“Sabé,” she says, the name coming out slow too. Sabé and Rabé stand side-by-side in front of her, as close to mirrors as any two humans could be. Padmé wants to say more, but the right words won’t come. Words don’t seem to want to come at all, in all honesty.

“Anakin Skywalker is asleep, your majesty,” Sabé says; Padmé glances down automatically and finds that she speaks the truth, although she had not doubted it anyway. “Shall we take him to the Jedi’s rooms?”

“No. He is not a Jedi,” Padmé says, her fingers flattening against Anakin’s back. “He is one of the Naboo. He will stay with us, until such a time as he chooses not to.”

Sabé looks at Rabé, who looks back at Sabé. Padmé looks at neither of them, because Anakin is small and soft and sleeping against her side, body half-hidden by the heavy length of her sleeve but tear-stains still visible on his face.

“We will prepare a room for him, your majesty,” Sabé says, she and Rabé both inclining their heads in perfect unison.

“If you would, please,” Padmé murmurs, and lifts her arm a little higher to better hide Anakin. He shifts in his sleep and lays heavier against her side. She wishes, again, to disappear him–make him unremarkable, unnoticeable, uninteresting. As if she could take his Force strength and his grief and uncertainty off him as easily as she herself takes off Amidala and vanishes into a handmaiden’s cloak.

Of course, even when she takes Amidala off, she is always still Amidala, and Anakin would be no less Anakin if she could do the same for him.

Still. It’s nice, sometimes, to not always be looked at as though she is.

And even without everything he’s done for her people and planet, Anakin is someone who looks at her the same way no matter what she’s wearing. Padmé meant it when she told him he was valuable, and not just in the inherent way that any sentient is, not just for what he’s done–Anakin is valuable to her, for how he treats her. It’s one of the few truly selfish things Padmé has allowed herself to feel since being elected, and she has no intention of changing it.

Honestly, Anakin might need more people to be selfish about himself. Especially now, with Qui-Gon Jinn dead. Who else does he have, now that he’s left his home?

Her.

He will have her.

The rest of it … the rest of it they’ll just have to see, she supposes.

*opens mouth*

*screams forever*

clones-away-deactivated20161015 asked: Padme is gonna fix it right? I mean, we haven't even gotten to the handmaiden-ing thing. Those girls will raise Anakin well, I think. ;)

suzukiblu:

“No one owns you, Ani,” Padmé repeats, not understanding how he can ask that like he’s worried. Except–she does. Of course she does. 

He’s nine. And she’d even thought it herself, too. 

Of course he’s worried about not being owned. 

“You are a friend to Naboo, and you have done a great thing for our people,” she tells him quietly, again barely resisting the urge to grab his hands. She knows she would still grip them much too hard, especially now. “You will never be a slave again, but I promise, you will not be abandoned. Naboo will take care of you as one of our own, if you will have us. We would be honored to take care of you.” 

“I can fix things,” Anakin says, ducking his head in a very young way, his hair hiding his eyes. "And I can fly–you saw, I’m a really good pilot. And I know how to–” 

“Ani,” Padmé interrupts carefully, and allows herself to settle her hands very gently on his shoulders. “I know that you are valuable. You are very valuable to me. You are kind and you are brave, and–”

“I’m not brave!” Anakin blurts, shaking his head. “The Council would train me if I was brave. But they looked, and I’ve got too much fear in me.” 

“That makes you no less valuable. We all have fear in us,” Padmé says, mystified as to how fear could possibly be a hinderance to a peacekeeper. Fear is like pain–a needed warning, and a lesson. “Fear is a thing that you feel, but brave is a thing that you do. And I have already seen you choose to do it time and again.” 

Anakin ducks his head again, looking very small, and Padmé wants so badly to wrap him up in her arms and all her regalia and disappear him someplace where the Jedi and the Gungans and the Supreme Chancellor and just–none of them are, not a one, just herself and Sabé and Rabé and Eirtaé and– 

Someone like Anakin should never look so small. Really, no one should, but Anakin of all people even less so. 

“I can read Huttese and Bocce and I understand Binary, and I can fix anything I can take apart, and I can take apart anything if I’ve got tools. And I know how to build a portable vaporator and I built C-3PO all by myself, and I know how to find food and water in the desert and cook porridge and stew, and, and I–” he stutters, and Padmé just listens helplessly as he keeps obsessively rattling off his skills like he thinks needs to prove something about himself to her. She lets him, because he seems just as helpless to stop himself. She doesn’t know what to say anyway. 

Maybe she has a little more sympathy for Obi-Wan holding back from telling him about the Council just yet, though. Listening to this hurts. 

“That’s very good, Ani,” she manages once he finally runs out of words, or maybe just runs out of breath, and swallows hard at the sight of him. He’s flushed and half-panting and looks like he might cry. She feels like she might cry, and she wants to disappear him more than ever. She wishes Master Qui-Gon had lived. She wishes Obi-Wan could do–something. “I’m sure you’ll do very well on Naboo, if you stay.” 

“Stay where?” Anakin asks, giving her an unnerved look, and Padmé thinks of his fear and uncertainty and poorly-defined concept of “freedom” and has a strange, irrational urge to never trust another sentient near him again. 

“Wherever you want to,” she says anyway, because Anakin is free, even if he still doesn’t fully understand what it means, and she can’t answer that question for him. “We’ll help you find a place you like. Naboo will take care of you no matter where you are.” 

“I’m scared,” Anakin says, shoulders hunching again and expression ashamed. 

“That’s okay,” Padmé says, tightening her grip on his shoulders hopefully not too much. “You can fix things and fly, and you are a very good pilot. And you are so, so brave and kind.” 

“I’m not,” Anakin says, shaking his head. 

“Would an angel lie to you?” Padmé asks with a weak attempt at a smile. Anakin tries to return it, she thinks, but his attempt is even weaker. She does not blame him. “You can feel as afraid as you like. That’s fine. We’ll be here to help you be brave, too. We are Naboo. That is what we do for each other.” 

Anakin stares at her for a long moment, nods helplessly, and then starts to cry. Padmé is certain she grips him too hard when she pulls him into a hug, but he only pushes in harder. 

Anonymous asked: Dark Suzukiblu show me the handmaiden au

suzukiblu:

“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. 

Anonymous asked: nooo he called her master omg

suzukiblu:

“Ani,” Padmé says, her expression stricken, and Anakin flinches. She wants to throw her damn title on the fire. “Ani, no, I didn’t mean–I would never take your freedom from you. And even if I would, no one can do that here. This is the Republic.” 

“I don’t get it,” Anakin says uncertainly, his shoulders hunching. Padmé grits her teeth against the sight. She is wearing Queen Amidala’s face and should not let so much show on it, but she can’t help it when his face looks like that. 

“I swear to you, Anakin Skywalker, no one is going to own you while I breathe,” she tells him fiercely, dropping quickly to her knees in front of him to put them on a level with each other and only resisting the urge to grab his hands because she doubts he’d find any reassurance in the grip. Especially not how tight she’s sure she’d make it, whether she meant to or not. 

“But–you won’t own me either?” Anakin says, looking even more uncertain. “And Master Qui-Gon’s dead and his heir isn’t allowed to inherit me, so–so then I–”

“You’re free, Ani,” Padmé reminds him. She thought he knew what that meant. He does, doesn’t he? 

“But who owns me?” Anakin asks helplessly.