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Say there are over seven billion people in the world, at this moment. Say that there are three hundred twenty five million people in the United States of America alone, and that there are eight million people in New York City alone, all minding their own business, not counting the ones only passing by.
Now say there’s a woman out there, with warm brown eyes and a smile like the sun (the brightest star, the closest star, even stars burn out). Her hair’s pinned back, her touch is light, and her breath comes easy and tickles against tanned skin.
Now say that somehow, impossibly, she still loves him.
Anakin knows he can’t. Not for sure. It’s an untested hypothesis, or so he’ll claim, and it doesn’t bear testing because he knows, for a fact, that Padmé died because of him. And she knows that, he’s sure. And—
And most days he can’t even look himself in the mirror. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to look her in the eye, doesn’t want to think about what he might find there—anger, hatred, fear. The same things he sees in his own eyes, when he can bring himself to look.
He hadn’t. He hadn’t meant to.
But he’d done it anyway.
Love won’t save you, he thinks, viciously, looking up from the sink and at his reflection in the mirror.
Except it had. Except he can listen to Darcy pontificate about some movie he happens to be in all day and even she’ll return to the point that Luke had saved him, because he’d loved him. He’d seen something worth loving, in the ruined creature Anakin Skywalker had become, and pulled it out into the light.
He looks down again.
He doesn’t know if Padmé will see the same thing. He doesn’t think so, but a treacherously hopeful little part of him thinks, she might, she might, she might.
But it’s a pipe dream, an unrealistic fantasy. He stopped dealing in those years ago, or at least he thinks so, anyway.
“Stop thinking about it,” he tells himself. His voice reverberates in the bathroom. “Get to work. There’s eight million people in this city, you’re not going to run into her on the street.”
He’ll run into a number of other things on the street, first. Not her. Never her.
He’s not sure if he should be grateful for that.
–
He doesn’t run into her on the street.
–
One of the fun things about being a Respected Scientist, with many frequently-cited (and frequently-plagiarized, you’re welcome desperate college students) papers to his name and a number of schools clamoring for his attention, is that sometimes, he’s asked to come judge entries at a science fair. For example: Columbia University, his alma mater, is holding a science fair.
Okay, they’re calling it a science and engineering expo, not a fair, but it’s definitely a fair. He knows it from the second he steps onto the grounds and smells food, the scent of it beckoning him closer.
“Wait up,” Darcy complains behind him. Anakin chuckles, slows his stride down to let her catch up. “Why do you have to be so freakishly tall? Jerk.”
“You don’t complain when it’s Ahsoka,” he says. "She's, what, two inches taller than I am?"
“Because she’s my girlfriend,” says Darcy. Duh, she doesn’t add, but Anakin sees it when she rolls her eyes skyward. “Ooh, what’re they cooking? Do you know?”
“Flavored fries,” says Anakin.
“Jedi stuff?” says Darcy.
“No,” says Anakin, pointing at a slightly pitiful banner that’s hanging on to the stand by a thread, flapping sadly in the wind. “They’ve got a banner.”
Darcy glares up at him, but follows anyway. “So Ahsoka and Selvig are busy setting up the table and arguing with the other judges,” she starts, and Anakin lets her chatter at him while he orders their food, breaking into her rant only to ask her what she’ll be having.
She keeps it up even once they find a table, and just in time too, because there’s just the one left. Cheese-flavored fries are popular, apparently.
“You hoping to see anything this year?” says Darcy, sitting down as Anakin pulls his notebook out from his bag.
“A working hyperdrive,” he shoots back, sitting down as well and opening the notebook. “Barring that, an EM drive. I know NASA’s working on one right now, I keep hearing people talking about that.”
“Good luck with that,” Darcy snorts. “What else?”
“Maybe a chocolate volcano,” says Anakin, dryly, scribbling equations in his notebook, black on white, m' = m / √(1 − v2/c2). “Like a high schooler’s volcano project, except with more chocolate.”
“That’d be the day,” says Darcy, dreamily.
Anakin hums in answer. “Anyway, a few years back Dr. Connors came up with splicing animal genes onto humans as a cure for whatever disease you might think of, and got Oscorp to pick him up for it.” He looks up from his notebook, twirls his pen in between his fingers. “I know there’s a few other entries going that route, now that he’s kind of gone off the deep end, I figure maybe one of them will get picked.”
“Why’d they ask you to judge, then?” says Darcy, propping her chin up on her hand. “Genetics isn’t your thing.”
“Because technically this is a general science fair,” says Anakin, “and they at least need to give off the appearance of being fair.” He shrugs. “Anyway, I get a free lunch, a plaque with my name on it, and a chance to show Richards up, so really, I’m not complaining.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Darcy says, with a snort of laughter.
Anakin looks back down at his notebook with a smile, and starts absently writing another equation, P = 2πr / v, solve for the value of v if r is 10 and P is—
“Excuse me, is anyone else sitting here?”
Anakin looks up.
His pen clatters to the table.
Padmé. Padmé is standing in front of him, holding a Coke can, asking if he’s willing to let her sit at his table, and her eyes grow wide when their gazes lock, and his throat goes dry. She’s changed, he thinks, there’s a streak of grey in her hair, almost permanent dark circles under her eyes, but she’s as radiant as she ever was, it's impossible to calculate the magnitude of how bright she is even without looking in the Force, and all he can think of is her warm brown eyes and her soft skin and her laugh like bells and her smile like the sun, even stars burn out—
“Sure, you can definitely sit here!” Darcy chirps, unmindful of Anakin’s inner crisis. “And—holy shit! Kirsten fucking McDuffie, is that you? Good to see you finally got out of the publishing biz.”
“Hey, Darcy,” chirps another girl, with light brown skin, her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail that sways as she steps out from behind Padmé, holding a file folder. “You can thank Ms. Avery here for that, I know I am.”
“Congrats,” says Darcy. “Hi, Miss—”
“Patricia Avery,” says Padmé, still staring at him.
Darcy pauses, looks between the two of them. “Um,” she says, realization dawning on her face.
“Um,” McDuffie echoes. “Uh. I guess we’ll leave the both of you to it?”
“Please do,” says Anakin.
–
The girls leave, chattering all the while about each other’s lives—Thor and Greenwich, the rumors of a black-clad vigilante emerging from Hell’s Kitchen.
Padmé sits down at the table and says, to her long-lost husband, “You look well, Anakin.”
He doesn’t quite flinch, but she sees him tugging self-consciously on his medical bracelet anyway, catching the sunlight on metal. “You too,” he says, at last. “Um. You’ve. You look good. Distinguished, even. Like an angel.” He pauses, winces. “God, no, that was bad.”
Padmé ducks her head, hides her smile by taking a quick sip of Coke, and says, “No, no, it’s fine,” she says. “Distinguished is—fine.” It's a great deal better than holy shit, you got old, in any case. She absently swirls the soda around in its can, and says, “So, uh—Ahsoka mentioned you’d come back.”
Anakin blinks at her. “She’s been in touch with you?” he asks, and there’s a flash of hurt in his tone. Hurt that she put there, she thinks, and something twinges painfully in her chest at the thought.
“I asked her not to mention me,” she says. “You were amnesiac, and then—” She shrugs. “I had to get my head together.”
“Been doing that since Greenwich,” Anakin mutters, looking down at his notebook and writing something that looks like an equation. Padmé looks up, watches the clouds pass overhead before she looks back down at him, meets his bright blue eyes. He twirls the pen nervously in his hand. “I, um. I didn’t think. I didn’t know you’d be here.”
Otherwise I might’ve avoided you, he doesn’t say.
Honestly, she’s pretty sure she would’ve done the same.
“I’m a lawyer,” she says. “Usually this isn’t my scene.”
“So why make an exception this year?” says Anakin.
“Kirsten,” says Padmé, with a long-suffering sigh. There’s a giant bantha in the room, and it smells like the pits of Mustafar, sounds like Anakin snarling liar, liar. “I’m technically here as a legal consultant on patent laws for engineers and scientists interested in patenting their findings. I have a booth and everything. You?”
“I’m a judge,” says Anakin. “They wanted a space guy to round out their panel, I guess.”
“Neat,” says Padmé, and she mentally slaps herself. Neat! For fuck’s sake—one of the first things she says to him in decades, and it’s just neat. God, how long has it been since she dated anyone? “Oh, god, that was just—”
“I know,” says Anakin. “Can we start over? I mean. No, I—”
“God, yes, I mean—only if you’re offering—”
They stop, and stare at each other.
Then Padmé bursts into a fit of laughter, and says, “Goddammit, and here I had a speech planned.”
“At least you had a speech planned,” says Anakin, with a shaky laugh, “I was sort of thinking I’d just never see you again. I mean,” he waves a hand at the stall, at the college, at the grounds, “eight million people in New York, give or take. I figured I had good odds.”
He smiles at her, brittle and scared, so much like the boy she had once known and not at the same time.
She lets out a breath, reaches across the table to brush her fingers over his.
He breathes out and says, quiet, “I’m—sorry. I know it’s not. I know it’s not enough to just say sorry for everything I’ve done, especially to you and to—to our children. I know I’ve been a terrible husband, a worse father, and if you never forgive me or never want to see me again—” He swallows, continues, “I’d be okay with that. It’d be what I deserve. I just—I want you to know that I’m sorry. And I loved you, I love you, truly, deeply.”
Enough to let her go, she realizes, when he pulls his hand away, reaches up to wipe at his eyes.
She reaches out again, and takes his hand, slender and slightly-calloused fingers settling over his gloved hand. “I love you,” she says, “truly and deeply. I can’t forget what you did to me, or to our children, or to the galaxy, no, but I always knew there was a little bit of light still inside you.” She rubs her fingers absently along his knuckles, and says, “I want to see you again, Anakin. And—well, last time we didn’t exactly work out all that well. We should try it again, maybe we might have better luck.”
“Yeah,” says Anakin, ducking his head, almost shy. “Yeah, I mean, Darcy has opinions about that, she won’t stop talking my ear off about how the beginning of a war was a stupid time to get married.”
“Neither will Kirsten,” says Padmé. “So, I guess—this time we’ll try and. Take it a little slower. What do you think?”
Anakin sets his pen down and rests his other hand over hers. “A little slower,” he says, softly. “Yeah. That’s a good plan.” He smiles again, and this time she thinks of bright blue eyes, a sunset on Naboo. “I have a Starbucks gift card and some free time for lunch tomorrow before I have to start going around the expo. You?”
“Well,” says Padmé, with a snort of laughter, “fine, then.” She grins at him, and says, “I have to say, I’ve never been wooed with Starbucks before.”
She expects the jealousy that flashes across his face in that moment, but she doesn’t expect him to let out a sigh, let it go, and say, “Well, my favorite diner got torn up in the Chitauri attack, so my options are pretty limited.”
“I could take you out,” she says. “I know a place or two.”
“You really don’t have to,” says Anakin, his expression softening. “It’s the first date, and besides, I actually do like Starbucks. They make amazing frappuccinos.”
“There is no way your favorite chain café is better than a five-star restaurant, Ani,” huffs Padmé.
“I am so glad you proposed this taking it slow plan,” says Anakin, with a growing smirk, “because it absolutely could.”
–
Darcy stops in her tracks, squints at the two.
Kirsten says, dryly, “I think we’d better leave them to it.”
“Yeah, probably,” Darcy decides, taking a fry from the bag that she’s designated as Anakin’s. “So when did you find out?” she asks.
“She walked in on me watching Attack of the Clones and said, ‘oh, that’s the one with me in it,’ and I’ve never been the same since,” says Kirsten. “You?”
“It’s a very long story,” says Darcy. “Hey, come on, I wanna see your booth and crow about how much more awesome ours is.”