Rest Easy - Anakin Skywalker

Anakin is all too familiar with restless sleep. So, when he sees just how tired you are, he offers to help.

“There’s that look again.”

There was a moment’s hesitation before you flicked your eyes up from the data display. Statistics and statement pieces still swirled about your vision, even as you met Anakin’s gaze. His brow was furrowed, in the way it always seemed to be since the Clone War began. Only, in that moment, as he looked at you, there was a softness in his eyes that threw your thoughts far from the image of him in battle. Such a gentleness had no place among the blaster fire and metallic corpses of droids.

“Sorry, what?”

“That look,” Anakin echoed, raising a hand to gesture to your face. “You’re either displeased or thinking too hard.”

A stunted, sour laugh slipped past your lips. “Or both.”

“What’s wrong?” Anakin asked, leaning over across the table, hand outstretched for you to take. Slowly, you moved to meet him in the middle to intertwine your fingers with his. Warm, the skin of his palm kissed yours in the mildest way, melted the ache behind your eyes, and relieved some of the heaviness of your limbs.

“Reviewing old legislation is neither entertaining nor easy on the mind,” you gave Anakin’s hand a squeeze. “That’s all, though. Nothing I can’t work through.”

“It has nothing to do with how you were tossing around last night?”

You quirked a brow at him in question and Anakin leaned back, his hand slipping from yours. A frown quivered along your lips at the loss of contact, but the loss was brief. Anakin stood from his seat across the sleek, metal table and started towards you. The dark folds of his tunics shifted with every step that brought him closer to you. When he was within arms reach, he pressed his hip against the table’s edge and leaned down towards you.

“You didn’t sleep, so I didn’t sleep,” he murmured. “Tell me what’s wrong, Y/N.”

As he spoke, his eyes held contact with yours, unyielding, reading your every microexpression. You knew the second you swallowed too hard that Anakin saw your resolve break. Memories of kicking your legs under the soft sheets of your bed, tossing from side to side, flooded back to you. Anakin must have seen those same memories too because he nodded, all too knowingly.

“Tell me, let me help you.”

There was never any hiding from him.

“Unless you can lift the weight of thousands displaced by the war and convince the Senate to provide for them, then there’s not much helping me,” you explained. “Padme’s proposal is necessary but the precedents for it…they’re nonexistent. At least according to everything I’ve read.”

The thought of all the reading you had done nearly made your throat close up. Endless pages of Basic, detailing every piece of humanitarian legislation passed by the Senate had absorbed you, mind and body, for the past few planetary cycles. Yet, despite all that time, your research had come up empty. There were no prior models that you and the rest of Padme’s team could use to base her new, improved plan off of.

“So, you have to start from nothing?” Anakin asked, putting voice to your whirling thoughts.

Bitterly, you nodded and let your eyes fall from his. “Yes, and when you phrase it in that way, it sounds even more dire.”

“Sorry, you know,” Anakin’s fingers hooked under your chin and lifted your gaze back to him, “it’s not a doomed idea. You make things real.”

“But not without a precedent,” you countered, “this is something new.”

“We’re in a new galaxy, a new Republic,” Anakin pressed. “Now is the best time to push progress forward.”

You couldn’t help the smile at his persistence. “Careful, you’re beginning to sound like a senator’s speech. Padme may enlist you.”

“I’m enlisted in a different war,” he replied, his hand moving along your jaw to cup your cup. “One with fewer speeches.”

You frowned at his words before you pressed a kiss to the meat of his palm. In response, the corners of his mouth quirked upwards ever-so-slightly, but not for long. When his lips fell down again, Anakin stepped closer, letting you feel the warmth of his body more fully. He leaned in closer too, waves of light brown hair falling to frame his face.

“Tell me what I can do.”

“I did,” you sighed, eyes flicking from his to his lips. “Save the people.”

“I’m trying, with every battle, but what can I do for you, right now? How can I get you to rest easy?”

A grin broke out along your features the second the thought entered your head. Anakin seemed to sense it, part of you wondered if it was the Force. Perhaps he used it to help read you, read your mind even. But no, that wasn’t it. It was just Anakin, the bond you shared that gifted you both with a sort of secret language. Either way, he knew what you were going to say before you opened your mouth.

That didn’t stop you from saying it anyway: “I know one way you could help.”

A rumble of a chuckle raced up his throat, a sound that you quickly swallowed when you leaned forward to close the little gap between you. Your lips found his as if you were never parted, to begin with, like being close was your natural state and separated being a foreign condition. Using his hand and, this time you were sure of it, the Force, Anakin pulled you up from your seat until you were standing. As he did, his other hand came up to the other side of your face so that he could hold you impossibly close.

“Would you believe me,” Anakin managed to whisper when you parted for air, “if I told you this wasn’t my initial intention?”

His teasing tone, like the warmth of his hand in yours had only a minute before, lifted your tired spirits. Any hint of exhaustion alleviated, if only for a precious few seconds. A laugh, one truer and lighter than the first, slipped past your lips. Anakin laugh again too and renewed every nerve ending fried by work. You leaned in again, for another kiss. His lips move fluidly against yours, soft and warm.

Then, when you pulled away, you replied, “no, but I’m alright with that.”