Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [187]
He leaned on the pillar and brought a hand weakly to his eyes. “The Hero With No Fear. What a joke … Padmé, I can’t lose you. I can’t. You’re all I live for. Wait …” He lifted his head, frowning quizzically. “Did you say, us?”
She reached for him, and he came to meet her hand. Rising tears burned her eyes, and her lip trembled. “I’m … Annie, I’m pregnant …”
She watched him as everything their child would mean cycled through his mind, and her heart caught when she saw first of all the wild, almost explosive joy that dawned over his face, because that meant that whatever he had gone through on the Outer Rim, he was still her Annie.
It meant that the war that had scarred his face had not scarred his spirit.
And she watched that joy fade as he began to understand that their marriage could not stay hidden much longer; that even the voluminous robes she wore could not conceal a pregnancy forever. That he would be cast out in disgrace from the Jedi Order. That she would be relieved of her post and recalled to Naboo. That the very celebrity that had made him so important to the war would turn against them both, making them the freshest possible meat for an entire galaxy full of scandalmongers.
And she watched him decide that he didn’t care.
“That is,” he said slowly, that wild spark returning to his eyes, “… wonderful … Padmé—that’s wonderful. How long have you known?”
She shook her head. “What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to be happy, that’s what we’re going to do. And we’re going to be together. All three of us.”
“But—”
“No.” He laid a gentle finger on her lips, smiling down at her. “No buts. No worries. You worry too much as it is.”
“I have to,” she said, smiling through the tears in her eyes. “Because you never worry at all.”
Anakin lurched upright in bed, gasping, staring blindly into alien darkness.
How she had screamed for him—how she had begged for him, how her strength had failed on that alien table, how at the last she could only whimper, Anakin, I’m sorry. I love you. I love you—thundered inside his head, blinding him to the contours of the night-shrouded room, deafening him to every sound save the turbohammer of his heart.
His hand of flesh found unfamiliar coils of sweat-damp silken sheets around his waist. Finally he remembered where he was.
He half turned, and she was with him, lying on her side, her glorious fall of hair fanned across her pillow, eyes closed, half a smile on her precious lips, and when he saw the long, slow rise and fall of her chest with the cycle of her breathing, he turned away and buried his face in his hands and sobbed.
The tears that ran between his fingers then were tears of gratitude.
She was alive, and she was with him.
In silence so deep he could hear the whirring of the electro-drivers in his mechanical hand, he disentangled himself from the sheets and got up.
Through the closet, a long curving sweep of stairs led to the veranda that overlooked Padmé’s private landing deck. Leaning on the night-chilled rail, Anakin stared out upon the endless nightscape of Coruscant.
It was still burning.
Coruscant at night had always been an endless galaxy of light, shining from trillions of windows in billions of buildings that reached kilometers into the sky, with navigation lights and advertising and the infinite streams of speeders’ running lights coursing the rivers of traffic lanes overhead. But tonight, local power outages had swallowed ragged swaths of the city into vast nebulae of darkness, broken only by the malignant red-dwarf glares of innumerable fires.
Anakin didn’t know how long he stood there, staring. The city looked like he felt. Damaged. Broken in battle.
Stained with darkness.
And he’d rather look at the city than think about why he was out here looking at it in the first place.
She moved more quietly than the smoky breeze, but he felt her approach.
She took a place beside him at the railing and laid her soft