Mutual Feelings

The Morning

The next morning, when Padmé went to check on her former boyfriend, she found that the guest bed she'd inserted the almost completely passive Anakin into was empty.

Not wanting to alarm Obi-Wan with an immediate holocall, she instead padded through into the kitchen, in case he was already awake.

She spotted him slumped over the counter, with a half-empty bottle of her whiskey next to him.

"Is it helping?" she asked, keeping the acidic response she wanted to make out of her voice.

"Uh... little." He replied.

"It's ten-o-clock Coruscant time." Padmé pointed out. "And that means that Ahsoka will be... ready for visitors in about an hour."

Anakin dragged himself to his feet at that.

"Get in the shower." Padmé ordered him, "I'll have your caf waiting,"

Anakin just staggered through to the shower.

Stars. He's suffering. She supposed, really, that she shouldn't be too surprised at his reaction. Anakin had never been something to do anything by halves, particularly when it involved sports or interests. If she'd read Ahsoka's body-language correctly the previous evening, they'd probably been in bed together a hour before they arrived at the restaurant, and just over two hours before she was shot.

There was absolutely no way she was letting him drive the four of them to the Temple. Not with all the Force-Cleansing abilities in the world, if he had half a bottle of whyren's reserve inside him.

To her relief, he didn't fall over in the shower. Instead, he stumbled out, dressed in what appeared to be the set of clean robes that had ended up in her wardrobe permanently. His graduation robes looked like something out of a horror flick. So, admittedly, did her coat. Both had been dumped into the laundry machine the previous night.

To her surprise, he sounded coherent in the airspeeder.

"Padmé..." He began, hesitantly. "How much did seeing me with Ahsoka hurt you?"

He's not... he's not thinking I ordered that... for her?

"Anakin." She replied, injecting enough arctic chill into her voice to make a Wampa feel nicely at home. "We've been over for six months. The fact that I'm, to use the colloquialism, 'knocked up,' doesn't matter one bit to me. I'm glad you're the father, compared to a couple of the boy-toys I've had since then."

"Ah." He sounded more than slightly abashed.

"Anakin, seeing you with Ahsoka makes me feel that there is some light at the end of the tunnel. We've all seen the reports on the holonet about Jedi being arrested down in the Red Light district or in some of the luxury hotels in the senate district. A fair chunk of the galaxy believes that Jedi don't marry because they don't want to, not because they are banned from doing so."

"People really believe that."

"You'd be surprised." Padmé replied.

"I probably would be." Anakin commented.

To his surprise, she didn't go directly to the Temple. Instead, she dropped the airspeeder down in a small market, and clambered out, taking Anakin with her.

"Where are we going?" He asked.

"We're picking up something I ordered earlier." Padmé replied, as they turned into a florists, signed as 'the widest range of exotic flowering plants on Coruscant.'

Once inside, Padmé showed her ID to the manager. The ithorian nodded at her, before stepping into the backroom and returning with a massive bouquet Anakin realised, judging from the colouration, was almost certainly a selection of shillian flowering plants.