InsaneJournal

Who: Anakin and Padme
What: Having an awkward conversation over spaghetti dinner
When: This last weekend
Where: Padme's apartment
Rating/Warnings: Some swearing, that's all.
Status: Complete






Anakin showed up at Padmé’s door with store bought rolls in one hand and gummy worms in the other. The latter was a habit he couldn’t kick. It was one of the few candies that Ahsoka could eat, as they were made from animal protein, and she was a carnivore now. He didn’t ever want to leave Ahsoka out. And now they were the candy he reached for.

“Tell me I got the right kind of rolls. There were options. And isn't bread just bread?”


Padmé peeked at what Anakin had and smiled. "Yes, those are the right kind of rolls." Motioning him in, she pointed to the island. "You can put them there."

Her home was a nice loft, with a wide open space. There was no real divider between the kitchen and living room other than the long island/table she used, but she liked it better that way. Her building's use of space was something she loved. "And to answer tour question, no -- bread isn't just bread. Depends on what you need the bread for. I have seen socialities have a meltdown due to having crumpets rather than scones."


"Don't... you just need bread for eating?"

Anakin's approach to food was simplistic. A product of growing up poor in a literal desert. Also, it wasn't as if the air force served gourmet food in the cafeteria on base. And now on his own, it just seemed like a hassle to pause and learn these fine differences. He did understand that rolls were different from sliced bread, but sliced bread substituted for every kind of bread in his childhood home. Rolls were fancy.

He knew what scones were, but, "What's a crumpet?"


"Mmm, it's a spongier English muffin, so I could actually understand that meltdown." Padmé didn't realize she'd described a bread using another type of bread. Her mother, already a very busy woman in politics when Padmé was born, was a self professed foodie. From a young age, Padmé was eating all types of cuisine and meats, exposed to things the average child wasn't.

Of course, it also meant that sometimes, she yearned for those simple meals, the ones she barely had like spaghetti. A good, home-cooked spaghetti was her favourite dish, but her mother always insisted on a traditional Bolognese. Nope, Padmé wanted an American style spaghetti, and that was what they were having.

"Every culture has some sort of bread. Different styles, different tastes but still fundamentally bread. It's a pretty important food."


“I do know what English muffins are,” he said. But he didn’t have any idea what ‘being spongier’ meant. He felt that might be a rabbit hole down which their conversation would drop and not recover so he saved that question for a different day.

“Where do you want me to put these? And how can I help?”


"The island." She turned back to her sauce and tasted it before turning it down to simmer. "And I was going to ask you to do the salad, but now I'm worried you don't know what lettuce is." Padmé was teasing, of course....partly. A good tip when having a guest over was to give them a task to do, make them feel helpful. Somehow, she didnt think she should be relying on etiquette books when dealing with Anakin.

With ine hand, she motioned to a bar stool. "Sit and tell me how you've been." She reached for the romaine and started tearing it. "I feel like its been forever, but now my weird winter wedding streak is done and I can finally socialize again."


In his Dreams he was now an apprentice in the Jedi Order – an empathic child who could feel all the Order’s Masters’ contempt or fear of him when in their presence. Obi-Wan might be his personal master, but he had to sit through remedial instructions with the other youngest initiates; and those instructors and those fellow students were at best uneasy with him, at worst resentful. One would think an organization dedicated to the concept of bringing peace and justice to the Republic would at least treat a child better than this (never mind a child raised in abject poverty and abuse), but one would be wrong.

And the feeling of missing his mother was amplified times a hundred. In the dreams he was a child who couldn’t process those emotions and no one to help him with them. In the waking world, his mother was dead, and no amount of emotion would change that.

But he didn’t know if Padmé had started Dreaming yet. And he’d decided back when he started Dreaming and then learned where the Dreams would end, that he wouldn’t dump his feelings about them on specific people who dreamed of the same universe.

“Work is the same. We have a deadline coming up for one project, and then we can start testing on that,” his eyes shone with mischief – he specifically brought up this project to mask any feelings about his stupid Dreams.

“I’m making robots for another alien on the Network. They’re for his space ship, and I’m helping him with putting his space ship together. He keeps receiving different parts at random. But someday it will fly.”


A spaceship? "I met someone named Jim on the network the other day. He said he wanted to take me to Saturn. I kind of thought it was a joke, but it's real, isn't it. Aliens exist." Padmé shook her head in wonder as she added the dressing to the salad. She put her hands down on the island and looked up at Anakin.

"And you're helping one build his ship. That's really cool, Anakin. What kind of robots do you need for a ship?" Padmé wanted to learn everything. Now that her mind was open, she didn't want it closed again.


Anakin wondered if he should mention it to Ahsoka that Padme hadn’t noticed her glamour bracelet fail. But he definitely didn’t think he should be the one to blab Ahsoka’s secret.

“Ya, there are a few here. Like the one I’m helping. He doesn’t need robots, I just convinced him that expanding his ship’s diagnostic system would benefit from ambulatory extensions.”


"Does anyone need robots?" When the Echo started gaining popularity, Padme toyed with getting one, but the idea of being listened to all the time? It was too strange. She had a human assistant, that was enough for her. Although she did have a roomba -- those were fun and weren't likely to rise up and kill her. Hopefully.

Salad done, it was time to set the table. Being a small studio apartment, her island was both counter space and dining space. "Is it easy for you to build those things? I mean, I guess if you design planes, it probably isn't very hard for you to create robots. I wish I had a brain for that." Clearing the island off, she turned around to get the place settings, plates, and napkins. With little effort, she had the island set for a meal, the plate topped off with a classic three-pocket napkin fold. "I'm always so envious of creative people. I'm good at my job because I'm practical, I can fix any problem, and I'm rational -- three things most brides need in their lives. I let them come up with their design, and sure I've picked a few things up, but as you can tell by my relatively spartan apartment, I'm not a designer." In fact, even though she'd lived in the studio for three years, it was still as basic as it was when she bought it. Same colour on the walls, no real pictures, nothing that would tell anyone about the person who lived there.


Anakin looked around but he didn’t see anything wrong. Compared to his apartment it was clean and organized. His was almost a junk heap, half the windows were broken – his fault from the night his Force powers manifested – some walls he’d hung chalk boards or white boards but these couldn’t be called ‘art’. They were there to let him work out an idea, the mathematics and design.

His work desk looked about the same.

As for how easy it was for him to build robots- “Ya, growing up, I was always taking things apart and putting them back together- except when I was in the air force. I don’t think the government would like if I just decided to take apart a jet.” He left out the part about his weird abilities with the Force, like how, if he concentrated enough, he could feel anything electronic or mechanical.

“What’s wrong with being practical? We have project managers at work. If we didn’t, we’d probably just be out testing designs by blowing them up. Sometimes that useful information, but it makes doing more tests difficult.”


"Isn't that boring though? I think I'm boring sometimes. If it wasn't for the surfing, I would probably be your average white girl." With a cheeky smile, she raised an eyebrow. "In the fall, I put pumpkin spice on everything ." A serving dish of spaghetting bolognese was now on the counter, the salad was done and the dinner rolls Anakin brought were in a nice basket lined with a linen napkin, matching the ones on their plates. "Except spaghetti. That has oregano. Did you remember that? Now help yourself, mangia . It's family style."

She motioned to the food and finally sat down on her own stool before jumping up. "Oh wow, I didn't even offer you a drink! If you ever meet my mother, don't tell her -- she'll be horrified. What can I get you? I have wine, water, milk...soda..."


“Water is fine,” he said as he started dishing up food. He hadn’t even noticed the lack of beverage.

After his plate was full he set it down and pulled out his phone. He opened an app to show Padmé.

“I don’t have an internal mental clock- I can’t gauge the passage of time. An hour can pass and to me it feels like a few minutes, or five minutes can feel like hours. I- this isn’t exaggeration, this is part of having ADHD.” Anakin didn’t mind explaining this, it wasn’t something he could change if he meditated harder or just focused more--how many times a child had a teacher said that in exasperation at him. It was just how he was built, he wouldn’t apologize for being forthright about it.

“Lucky for me, I have apps that help me keep track of time, activities, projects, commitments, emotional coping habits-” He showed her his screen and the layout for the days. He pulled up one of the days. “Each day has alarms I need for that day, I can change them up when I need to, or set a timer for the moment- I’m very good at hyper focusing for twenty – thirty minutes before my brain quits and wanders to something else. I can set those sessions and the app will automatically tell me when to take a five minute breaks so I can pause, reset, start focusing all over again.” He put his phone away.

“My point is, unchecked, my creativity won’t be productive at all. I’d have fifty projects lying around everywhere, all just twenty minutes complete and blowing them up wouldn't be fun after they're all blown up. It’s not boring to know how to control chaos. Like, isn’t that what conductors do in the orchestra?

“That’s what you are,” he said starting to laugh. “A surfing conductor.”


Padmé glanced at Anakin's app, and was surprised at all the checks and balances he put into his daily life. She just woke up and went with the flow, but the fact that he had this disability that didn't stop him at all? Wow. Padmé was oddly pleased that her initial assessment of him, all those years ago, was still valid: Anakin Skywalker was a force to be reckoned with.

His laugh caught her attention and she looked up at him, surprised until she processed what he said. "Oh! As if," she laughed back, handing him his phone. "I have to say, with all the weddings I've planned, there hasn't been a surf-themed one yet." She gave a fake pout as she turned her attention to her own plate, finally service it. "You'd think someone would have suggested it yet, but no. It's all 'rustic country' or 'princess dreams' or 'fairy wonderland'." She rolled her eyes. "Sometimes, I just google what's trending on pintrest. It's almost like one of those magic 8 balls for ideas."


“Not one surfer wedding?” Anakin asked. This was So Cal, the land of sunny beaches and relaxed work-life ratios. He found it hard to believe that there wasn’t one couple out there who wanted surfing incorporated in their wedding.

“Have you tried pitching it?”


"You have to remember my clientele," she pointed out. "I cater to the wealthy and my parents' friends. They all think I'm crazy for my surfing 'thing' so no. They are popular opinion brides, through and through."

Padmé focused on her pasta, twirling it in a fork. "And at the end of the day, it's not about me. It's about their vision, and what they want, no matter what I'm planning. My ego's not so big that I don't check it at the door." She glanced up at Anakin. "Don't you feel the same with your work? Or is there a piece of Anakin Skywalker, flying through the air?"


"Maybe you should take on a few funner couples," he said, but it was in jest.

"My job binds me to Earth's understanding of the mathematical principles of physics and buggets. But within that, as long as I make my deadlines, I'm allowed some creative latitude. My company does get research and development grants, it has to stay competitive."


"Do you have to go to an office and work? I find it hard, picturing you in a suit and tie, mulling about a water cooler." She grinned. "You seem more like a mad scientist type of guy." A joke, based on what she'd seen at his place. She hasn't really meant to snoop, but a whole weekend in a strange place? Of course she looked around and took it in.

"Hey, I meant to ask you -- do you still do any motocross or is that dream done?"


“I do work in an office. The projects I work on are proprietary, the company won’t risk their intellectual property being leaked. But no one wears a suit, our dress code is ‘don’t be naked,’ and ‘practice good hygiene,’ and ‘don’t be bigoted in some way.’ ”

His smile flattened and he sighed. Hardly exasperated about the question or Padmé asking it, just more at reality.

“I’m not allowed.” He raised his robotic arm. “To get any kind of license to operate motor vehicles I need a bunch of doctors to sign off on it. And outside the Network, people don’t see this prosthetic. They see an Earth-made prosthetic- something weird about this place. Not that it’s always a bad thing, I don’t want to become a test subject, but it does make some things impossible.”


Padmé blinked a few times before blurting out "I don't even see it." Wow, that wasn't a dumb statement, she thought. Trying to clarify, she continued. "I mean, I literally see it, but it doesn't even register. When we met, at the ball? It wasn't until we were dancing that I realized you only had the one arm."


“Life is different on Earth with one arm,” he said with a small shrug. But he didn’t really want to talk about his arm.

“So… why surfing?”


From one awkward conversation to the next she thought. Biting on her lip she looked at him from the corner with her eye, before deciding to throw caution into the wind.

"Do you really wanna know? Promise you won't get mad?" She saw him nod and she sighed, a small smile tugging on her lips at the same time. "You. You're the one that inspired me to surf. I mean, not in so many words but...do you remember meeting me? Like.... almost 10 years ago? I went to one of your meets, and we chatted afterwards.... you were just so full of passion and excitement and it made me realize that I had nothing like that. I was doing what made other people happy and it was like this... a-ha moment for me. I dropped out of school, got myself this horrible little apartment, and just tried everything on the water I could until I realized surfing. Surfing was it for me. I feel so at peace when I'm on the water, on my board...."

She looked down bashfully. "This is so weird to say out loud..."


Anakin was taken aback, stirring in a complicated mix of emotions. Not all of them bad. Some were definitely not good.

He talked about flying the same way Padme talked about surfing. He could go on about loving the feeling of gravity tugging on him, but defying it anyways. Gravity was the weakest forces in the universe on the macro scale, but on a micro scale, it could devour the whole universe. And every time he could fly he was presenting a one finger salute to the laws of physics. It was loud, chaotic, thrilling – and yet centering as the reverberating wave of middle C.

He knew what that joy was like and it was infectious, delighting to see someone had taken a grain of that joy and nurtured it and grew it into something of their own.

But.

That grain had come from him.

This wasn’t about ego, he didn’t need to know that he’d inspired someone: it was just that that someone had been, was Padmé.

She would dream about their shared universe and her dreams would end with him killing her.

What would happen to her joy of surfing after dreaming about that?

He looked down at his food, hoping his emotions hadn’t played across his face – they probably had. But he looked up again.

“I didn’t think I was inspiring anyone. I bet your parents didn’t react well to the news that you’d been inspired by a motocross competitor?”


Padme felt mixed emotions as well, getting that ..well, that confession off her chest. It had spilled out before she could really stop it, and she was nervous at his response.

Judging from how he looked away from her to gather his thoughts (she hoped), she felt a crushing feeling in her chest. Why throw that on someone right away, she chided herself. It wasn't fair to bring up something like that, something from how long ago, something that probably hadn't meant a thing to him, and then put him on the spot.

But he'd asked, and she found herself not wanting to lie or hold back. There was a connection she'd felt with him, and to have him back in her life like this ... she didn't want to risk it. When he spoke though, she felt a relief. She could answer this easily enough. "Oh, well, I didn't put the blame on you, obviously. I simply told them that I was done living their lives for them again. My parents were really upset, and refused to pay for anything that wasn't the poli sci degree I was going for." She shrugged. "So I told them that was fine. Got a crappy waitressing job, and made my own way. My sister, oddly enough, decided we needed to stop behaving poorly and be a family again. I think it was about a year later that she hosted a semi-intervention." With a sigh, she pushed away from the island and tried not to tap her foot on the floor. She didn't really like remembering this. When she looked back, she saw the immature brat she was, but at the same time, she applauded that girl for at least trying.

"Do you want a drink or something? Can you have a drink? I think I need one." There was always wine.


Oh shit. Anakin could tell he’d made things weird. As try as he might to use the behavioral therapy coping mechanisms he knew to reign in his emotions, a lot slipped out before he could run them through a filter.

Padmé had gone from one moment gushing incandescently about something she love, and the next instant she was stiff and awkward.

What could he say that wouldn’t be a tumble down a rabbit hole of questions? This stupid place made everything complicated, even just meeting new people.

Of course, he would start with, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to- and that was too personal of me to ask-” But he failed at finding what to say next. So he fumbled along a bit more. “I’m sure they are proud of you- You have your own business and you’re happy.”

He understood that Padmé was trying to smooth things over by offering him a drink. But he didn’t drink alcohol. It’s not that he couldn’t, but it made him choose between his meds and drinking. But, another but, he wanted things to stop being awkward, so he said, “Sure.”


That gave her something to do. Turning around, she bustled around the kitchen, seeking a bottle of red, two wine glasses and a corkscrew. With little effort, she decanted the bottle and poured them both a reasonable glass. She didn't say anything until she was back in her spot, and a glass was in front of each of them. "You're right. I am happy. My business is doing well, I do what I want when I want, I volunteer....I'm the kind of child you should be proud of. And if they can't see that? Then so be it."

She reached for her glass and thought a bit more before continuing. "I'm the one that should be apologizing. It was rude of me to put you on the spot there. Think you can forgive me?"


“You don’t have to apologize,” Anakin said. “This place…” he continued, but then paused, because, again, what could he say that wouldn’t turn into a confusing and convoluted string of questions. It would be like a row of dominos falling down, but it would just keep going to exhaustion. He knew because he had nothing but questions and frustration for Ahsoka when he learned he was caught in this place’s net.

During one of their earliest conversations, he had asked her if his mother, on Earth, had been real. He remembered the desperate feeling of needing to know that.

“Here,” he tried again, “… connections between people are weird. With things seeming normal most of the time, but then things like the zombies happen. And when the zombies are gone, almost no one around us knows what happened. We’re back on Normal Earth again, and… if you think too long about it, you start to wonder what connection you have with anyone.”


Anakin's words had a ring of truth around them. She'd tried not to think about her family existing in a completely different realm than her, but at the end of the day, how could she not think that? When she'd called Sola last weekend, there was nothing she could talk about. How could she mention ice zombies without her sister thinking she'd gone insane? Padme did not want to think about being on the tail end of an another intervention.

"You know...I did have a strange dream the other day. A few actually. I haven't really been sleeping well...and then I saw how some people on the network have been talking about dreams. Made me wonder how much this is distancing me from my ...normal life, I guess for a lack of a better word."


Well, shit. Anakin was hoping that the dreams would leave Padmé alone just a bit longer. But when her introduction to this place was a Zombie attack…

“Oh, ya, the Dreams,” he said, sounding resigned. “People make it work.” He didn’t want to ask what Dreams she had. He and Ahsoka weren’t in them, obviously, or she would have said something for sure.

“Whatever the Dreams… do to them.”


Padmé nodded, picking at her food. At this point, her wineglass was getting far more attention, but she'd managed a good size portion of her food.

She wanted to tell him that she'd had two dreams, obviously set years apart, and maybe not even from the same universe: one where she was a young queen, barely a teenager, and another where she was a Senator.

The senator dream was a little too close for comfort, but the queen one? Not too bad. After sharing so much personal stuff though, she didn't know if she wanted to risk blurting that out.

So instead, she went with safe. "Did you like the dinner?"


Anakin had eaten most of his dinner, and touched very little of the wine.

“Ya, it was good.”

But something nag at him from the back of his mind. There was so much to say, and not enough time or space to do it. He’d known her for years now, in that Dream world. It was a kind of her, the kind that had grown up to be a Queen and then a Senator, but it was still so much her. She, on the other hand, only known him for a few weeks.

It reminded him how photons interact with relativity, light traveled the universe free from the passage of time, while the universe looked on and aged.

No time or space between them.

But he did feel she needed to know a few things.

“Padmé, you should know something about the Dreams,” he started cautiously. “They… are real, in a sense. It ties back into the multiple universes thing. But sometimes what we Dream about… happens to us. We haven’t known anyone to die from dying in their Dreams. But people do get hurt from the things that happen in their Dreams… Or, the Dreams change them. We don’t know how to stop them, we just… try to support each other if things… wake up with us.”


Anakin's words seemed tinged with worry, but Padme was filled with anything but that. It could be that her Dreams were so innocuous that she wasn't concerned, or maybe it was that she thoroughly believed that nothing bad could possibly have happened to her, even though she knew full well the multi-verse theory was exactly that -- just because she was happy in this life, didn't mean that there were Padmes out there who weren't happy.

She tried not to dwell on it.

"You'll support me, right, Anakin?" She looked up at him, a soft smile on her face. He had stepped in so quickly during that attack, without a second thought. She had felt safe, with Anakin and Ahsoka.


Of course he was worried. He’d woken up with body modifications. Ahsoka was an alien now, who was an obligate carnivore. Anything could happen in these dreams. And Anakin was mostly at age ten or eleven in his right now. That was a lot of time he’d couldn’t account for yet.

“Of course,” he said. But he didn’t ask the same of Padmé.

“I should probably get going. This was really good. Next time we’ll have to watch Labyrinth.”