WHO: Dr. Aphra, Anakin Skywalker WHEN: Late tonight WHERE: Gateway Cruises 311 (Aphra's suite) WHAT: Anakin has one of his nightmares. Aphra has a blaster. They both realize there's more to this than sex. UGH. Feelings. WARNINGS: Anakin's burning and Vader suit/armor (body/medical horror)
______________
One of the drawbacks about sleep was not just having physical defenses down, but psychological ones as well. Anakin unfortunately had long been prone to having nightmares, whether they were visions or the more mundane sort that came from a history of trauma. Maybe it was just having a strong imagination or maybe it was the Force's enhancement that made Anakin's nightmares so vivid.
Whatever the underlying reason for them, they had him bolting awake in Aphra's bed, sweating and gasping for air like he couldn't pull in enough.
Aphra was a notoriously light sleeper. Her lifestyle didn't exactly leave much room for deep sleep, not when anyone could just decide to waltz in and accuse her of stealing money from them. Or giving them a bogus product. (Two things she did when it suited her.) So seconds after he bolted up, Aphra was wide awake, blaster in hand.
"What is it?" She struggled to hear anything. Maybe if she had the Force, she could sense whatever it was that he was sensing. "What's wrong?"
Anakin was slow to notice the blaster as he was throwing the covers off, overheated. It didn't quite register as a threat, maybe because he wasn't as fully awake as she was or because she wasn't radiating any hostility.
"What?" Not really an answer to her questions. He pushed up from the bed and stumbled a bit. "Burning."
She looked down at the blaster in her hands, now held sideways with the safety clicked back on. Not a threat, or he'd be on edge, looking for his lightsaber. Just a dream then? A nightmare from the looks of it. Aphra tossed herself out of bed after him, not intent on leaving him alone for this.
(When had things gotten so personal between then?)
She hooked her fingers around his prosthetic wrist in the hopes of slowing him down so he didn't run into anything. "Hey. What's burning?"
The room layouts weren't too different and he'd used her shower before, so he was able to move himself in the bathroom's direction in a staggering fashion until she caught his wrist. Aphra had asked him a question, but he needed a moment to answer. "Me."
Her body might be awake, but her mind was much slower to catch up. Was he having a nightmare? Was it the past? Was it the future? She knew that Force-Wielders could sometimes tell the future. Was it just a horrible fear that he had? Was burning the answer to why he was in that suit?
She put her hand on his shoulder, gripping it tight enough that he could feel her presence. "You're not burning here. You're okay."
His skin was almost feverishly hot under her touch, but he was grateful for it and put his hand over hers. Thankfully he was awake now, and he hadn't lashed out in his sleep. He might've taken a blaster bolt if he'd reacted to the remembered pain. He was still disoriented and feeling out of touch with his own limbs, but her touch and voice were helping to ground him in the present.
"I need to… cool off." He'd been (would be) unable to stop the fire consuming him, but here and now, he could bring his temperature down and wash off the sweat.
"Come on." Aphra had her fair share of nightmares, though they happened when she was much younger. Before she'd taken off on her own. Even for a while after. The longer she ran from her past, though, the less the nightmares followed. Her hand slipped from his shoulder to his hand to pull him in the direction of the bathroom.
There was a tiny night light that lit up when the door open, but beyond that, she didn't reach for the light switch. If he wanted it on, he knew where it was. She quickly turned on the shower — a waste of water if you asked her, but it felt good on your skin — and set it on the cooler side, but not icy cold. "This should help."
Anakin let Aphra lead him, gripping her hand a little tighter for more reassurance. Water 'freshers were something he'd had to adjust to after his childhood. He enjoyed them, but could do without. With the remembered burning, though, cool water seemed like the perfect thing to counteract his memories.
It hit him that Aphra hadn't pressured him to answer questions, just went right to work responding to what he'd said. That was a thought that he needed to come back to when he'd cooled down.
With a gesture to the light controls, he turned the lights on to a dim setting. He still instinctively flinched at the first contact with the water, but it was just a biological reaction to a mild shock. He didn't wait to adjust to the temperature before stepping fully into the streaming water.
Aphra was grateful there were no dianogas in the refreshers around here. She hadn't seen any back in Tumbleweed either. She closed the lid and laid a towel across it; she wasn't sitting on that cold thing without clothing. Actually, now that she could see even if the light was dim, she tugged one of the fluffy robes they put out each night around her shoulders.
Her old psychiatrist, the Imperial one she saw after her mother's death, always asked her questions about what she was feeling, how the nightmares started, what did she think they meant? Aphra knew what they meant: she was weak and ran instead of saving her mother. Aphra valued her own life more than she valued the life of her mother. That's what it meant. (And she hated herself for that.)
But always there were questions.
Sometimes Aphra wanted him to ask questions, if only she could howl and yell about what a stanging heartless moron her father was. So she could curse herself and her father and everyone else who had a hand in her mother's death. Other times, she wanted to sit in sullen silence, to shove that stupid datapad back in his face and tell him where he could shove his stupid questions.
Aphra was no psychiatrist so she mostly just stayed there with her presence, occasionally asking if he needed something. A cloth. Soap. Those were tangible things she could do. Anything emotional, and she knew that she was utterly useless. Or even worse: she'd make the whole thing even more traumatic with her mouth.
Anakin was quiet as he showered. At first he just stood with his hands to the tiles as he leaned his head into the stream, then he started to look for shower supplies, and he let Aphra help with that. She didn't probe him with questions or make some unhelpful comment about how to cope ("dreams pass in time," really?). To his relief, she let him instead have some quiet time to come down from it and he could just gradually relax instead. Not 100% fine, not that he ever was, but definitely better than how he was upon awakening.
He reached for the faucet and paused to look at her; did she want to use it? If she did, she probably wouldn't want it to be quite so cool. He turned it off and toweled himself just enough to not be dripping so he could step out of the stall. He leaned down to give her a brief, soft kiss. "Thank you, Aphra. That helped a lot."
Aphra froze, realizing that this was something that — what? Couples would do? Soothe each other after a nightmare, take care of them when they needed it? Be quiet if that's what was called for? Kiss you in gratitude without expecting anything else in return?
Relationships always made Aphra feel like she was drowning, trying to reach the surface and never quite getting there. Out of her depth. He'd been married, so at least he had more experience than she did.
"Nightmares are a kriffing … nightmare." She silently was glad it was him and not her. That blaster might have been fired if it had been. She wasn't used to people sleeping next to her. "You wanna talk about it? I got plenty of questions I remember from my days with a psychiatrist if you need. Otherwise, I can just shut my mouth."
So the kiss was a mistake. It had been a small but impulsive gesture, and he could see in her eyes that she hadn't expected it and didn't know what to do with it. Certainly not an expression that she was overjoyed with it. He turned around so they didn't have to look at each other while he continued drying.
"They are." Talking about it, he wasn't quite sure about. Obviously she hadn't missed how strongly he'd reacted and she'd want to know what was behind it. He felt more like she deserved some explanation than he felt like sharing the details. He hung up the towel and spoke slowly. "Sometimes nightmares are… memories."
She nodded, then realized she'd have to make some sort of noise of agreement since his back was turned to her. Aphra struggled to keep her own memories down in the recesses of her mind. This was not the time to have her own little series of flashbacks. Whatever he'd dreamt about must have been intense if he'd been burning.
"Was that — how? Burning?" She reached out to hook her pointer finger against his pinky. It seemed to help him before. "The suit. You never said how you ended up in it. You're taller in it too. Prosthetics?"
It was a small point of contact, but he appreciated it. "... Not in here."
A bathroom really wasn't the place for opening up about painful memories. When they'd walked back to her bedroom and settled back onto her bed, he fixed his gaze up on the ceiling.
"Yes," he said. "The prosthetic limbs were because of a lightsaber— like this arm was, but a different… combatant." It didn't feel quite right to call Obi-Wan his 'enemy,' even though that's what they'd been to each other on Mustafar. "I was unable to escape. He left me to burn."
Aphra figured the blaster had no place in this conversation, so she moved it to the bedside table, facing away from both of them. She'd have to remember to move it back before she fell asleep.
"Why didn't he just finish you off? That would have been kinder than burning." She paused, realizing who she was and the galaxy she came from. "Then again, who's ever really kind?"
"Yes, it would have been." He couldn't keep the bitterness out of his voice. How could Obi-Wan have claimed to love him yet leave him in absolute agony? It wasn't like Obi-Wan had never killed before. How could Obi-Wan see and hear and smell such misery and just… walk away? Anakin doubted he'd ever understand. He knew cruelty, had visited it on many, but what Obi-Wan did on Mustafar was something else. "He didn't spark the fire, but I wouldn't have been in that position if not for him, and he made a choice to leave me to burn to death when he could have stopped it and just killed me cleanly."
Questions came at Aphra full speed, and she had to stifle the urge to ask them one after another. In the darkness of the room, it didn't seem like the time or place to unload a typical series of Dr. Aphra questions. Especially not given… what they were to each other now.
Whatever that was.
There was really the one question that mattered: "How did you survive?"
"I refused not to. The dark side was with me." Surely Aphra had many questions in mind, and he could anticipate some of them, at least. "And the Emperor foresaw my… situation. He had me put in a medical capsule and taken in for surgeries. My limbs, for instance."
Aphra frowned. Even during the Clone Wars, there should have been advancements for the treatment of burns and limbs. There'd been a respirator, and an entire suit that kept him physically away from the real world. He hadn't even been looking at her with his own eyes. Were they badly damaged too?
You mean the Emperor decided to put you on a leash and use you for his own purposes. Even Aphra, blood doodling on the edge of the real story, knew that the Emperor puppeted Vader on a string. She'd seen that on the Executor before she'd been ejected out of that damn airlock.
She bit her tongue.
"All of your limbs? None of them were left?"
"That is correct." He held up his right hand as if examining it. "Among other injuries from the fire and heat." He turned his head to look at her with too much intensity. "You want to know, but you also have theories."
"Yeah, but it's your story to tell. I've had theories from the moment I heard about you." She noticed the change in his tone, the way he spoke. It was much more formal. Had he the respirator, it would have been Vader to the core. She wondered if that was how he looked at people from behind that visor. Aphra knew that she couldn't let him go down that path right now though. Her blaster was behind her, and he wouldn't even need it to take care of her.
She did the only thing she thought might change his perspective on things. Aphra leaned forward, a hand against his cheek, closed her eyes, and gave him a soft, gentle kiss. The way he had in the bathroom, when she'd froze up.
"You said I was 'even more interesting than you could have hoped'. I wonder what those theories were."
Someone like Obi-Wan who tried to talk about him as separate people might have said that Anakin never wore the suit, only Vader. It was too easy going down that path when they were talking about it, and still not easy to pull himself away from it.
A kiss, however, definitely wasn't something he expected when he got like this. After the initial moment's surprise and confusion at her touch, he returned the kiss.
She was betting her life on this kiss, and when she pulled away finally, she didn't completely move out of his personal bubble. Aphra could tell that talking about this brought out that other side of him, the one that hated her for betraying him. "Yeah, I did say that. A guy like you, with the rumors I'd heard, had to be an incredible story. The suit was clearly meant for intimidation, but also for life support, and then there you were with your hand out to me while I was dangling over that ledge, saying you had need of me."
Aphra paused, tapping her finger against his lower lip. "Need of me. And suddenly, I was a part of your story."
Anakin's gaze went to her lips as she tapped his. It really had been quite a kiss. "And you like stories." He wasn't sure how to keep telling his own without it becoming a risk for her. Thus far, she'd managed him well, but discussing the trauma around being put in the suit was more of a challenge.
"Everyone has a story. Some are just more interesting than others. Those are the ones I like." The more screwed up, the more comfortable Aphra felt. People who didn't have a tragic backstory reminded her too much of what a screw up she was. Luke Skywalker had lost everything and still came out of it a good person. Those were the kind of people she stayed away from — and especially after they told her to. After she'd screwed them over.
"Do you have those often? Nightmares?"
"I don't know. I guess so." How much nightmare-having was the usual, and how did he compare? "At least, other people seem to think it's often. More than they do."
Maybe it was because he'd also had such 'normal' nightmares that his visions got discounted by the Jedi as just more of the same, more mere dreams, even though he could feel the difference.
"And then I became what other people have nightmares about."
She wasn't fooled by it. Sure, he was unhappy with what he became. Aphra supposed she couldn't blame him for it. No one really set out to be someone else's nightmare, and there was plenty of talk about Vader being the Emperor's weapon, and not his right hand man. A weapon meant he was a tool. Did he realize it?
"But you still had nightmares, didn't you?" She could imagine it. That mask with those imposing, but ultimately lifeless eyes to anyone on the other side. He could hide whatever pained him, whatever hurt him, whatever tortured him. All those times he was silent in reply to her, was there some expression beneath it she wasn't meant to see? (Yes, of course there was.)
A beat in which she realized another thing. Something else they had in common. "You had no one to talk to about any of it."
They'd developed an honesty between them, but it was still tempting to pull back and close off from the questions. She was right, after all; he had no one, because of course he had destroyed that. These were things he could never talk about before even if he'd wanted to. Ahsoka would listen, but he knew it also pained her to think of what he'd become. Aphra was more… curious. Not that she thought it was tons of fun, what he was sharing, but she didn't become so emotionally engaged in it.
"... There was no one. And there were only nightmares, when I did sleep. Sleep is… not possible inside the suit. But my ships have— they will have meditation chambers."
Nightmares housed horrifying visuals for her, and it was a box she was trapped in when she was younger. The years put some distance, of course, but she could never quite outrun it, and sometimes — like when her father came back into her life — the box grew around her again. She struggled and fought against it, and Aphra wondered if it was the same for him. Was that suit a cage?
"That suit is a work of art, but I can't see how it would be comfortable at all. I don't even know why you'd be stuck in it. There are ways of grafting burned tissue and making limbs that aren't noticeable from yours now. Did — did you want to put a barrier between you and the world?"
He reached over to take her hand again, keeping his grip light. If his verb tenses got mixed up, oh well; she wasn't getting confused by them.
"Did I want it? No. It was done to me. I wanted to live, but I had no choice in how I was made to survive. I was actually kept conscious for the surgeries by his design." He squeezed her hand a little tighter. "And I hated it, at first. My body wasn't my own any more. I couldn't even breathe for myself any more. The Emperor was deliberate about having only the 'necessities' addressed. Restored appearance? Unnecessary. Human sensation? Unnecessary. Terrifying his enemies? Necessary. Reminding me that I was his? Necessary. I could either continue to hate that I could only live through machines, see myself as lessened, or I could convince myself of the benefits. Like always having a barrier between me and the world. The suit, or a chamber, or a bacta tank… always something."
It was moments like this, like Alderaan, that made Aphra question whether the Empire was a government she wanted to follow. People needed order, yes. They needed strong leadership. But it was hard to quantify the loss of life for Alderaan than the relentless Clone Wars loss of life. It had to be better, right? People were better off for it, weren't they?
Aphra found herself hating the Emperor in that moment more than she'd hated anyone but her own father, the raiders who came to her village, herself. Darth Vader became less than some terrifying menace of her past, the one who tried to kill her with an airlock, but someone who deserved to be freed from his shackles. If he couldn't do that, then she could damn well try whenever it was that she was returned to her timeline.
In the here and now, Aphra had no words. She was utterly speechless in any way to try and comfort him, and words always seemed so hollow. I'm sorry for your loss. was bullshit, and even if someone was, it didn't change a damn thing. Aphra scooted over, still holding his hand. Bodies were meant to fit against one another in a variety of ways, the same way droids had parts that all worked together to make a whole. Aphra tucked herself against his side, her head on his shoulder. Her nose and lips against his neck as she slung her other arm around him. If she was someone else, she might have said something stupid and cheesy about about there not being a barrier between him and the world now.
Instead, she squeezed his hand tighter. "You're not his."
It wouldn't have been Aphra at all to say something like that, and it was strange but… nice, that she'd offer comfort. He leaned his head slightly against hers, not quite smelling her hair or kissing her head but close to it.
"I'm not any more."
Now that she'd done it, she wondered if this was too far. This wasn't passionate sex. It wasn't even helping someone cope with nightmares after he'd been in your bed. This was more than that, and Aphra hadn't had feelings for a man in a very long time. Maybe that was because women were softer or easier to woo. Maybe it was because they were more of a challenge to get back to her ship. Whatever the reason, Aphra only flirted with men, occasionally bedded one whenever she was in the mood. She wasn't picky.
This wasn't even on the same level as any of her past relationships. He knew things about her. She knew things about him. They shared. Then she realized what was peculiar: she'd thought of this as a relationship. Not a booty call, as they called it on Earth. Not a hook-up or a friends with benefits. This was a stanging relationship.
"Nope. You are one hundred percent your own person. Free to do whatever you want. No Jedi. No Emperor. No suit. No rules."
He had no idea what to say in response to that. Yes, but…? Thanks? I'm exhausted and would like to stop talking now? He was reasonably sure that if he wanted to go quiet, or change the subject, she would let him. But if he just moved on from what she'd said without acknowledging what it meant to him...
It was something he'd like to find out. He brought his hand under her chin to tilt her head up so her mouth was closer to his.
"You're free now, too."
There was a thought that came to her, unbidden and unwanted, and she took great pains to shove it down. Shove it down as hard and as fast as she could. It meant that her expression was as naked as she was with no bravado or glibness, not even that cocky smile she often used to make people believe that she knew more than she did. The urge to turn her face away from him was there in the back of her mind, but her body didn't follow through. Aphra looked at him, his breath on the bow of her lip.
"I don't know how to be that."
"Neither do I."
They'd kissed over the past couple of weeks (sometimes quite a lot), but he felt different about kissing her after what they'd said. He held her closer to him. Neither of them knew, but maybe they could figure it out together.