Plot Bunny: how Anakin and Padme actually managed to grow up.

[beatrice_otter]

So, I read irnan's post about Padme, and trying to figure her character out, and in the process of rambling on in giving my two cents worth gave myself a plot bunny.

It's an AU.  Anakin kills Palpatine instead of Mace, and they read Palpatine's last transmissions and find out where the Separatist leadership is, and Anakin leads the team to go capture them, and when he gets back instead of going to the Temple he goes to Padme's apartment (because, you know, he's upset about Palpatine, and also that the Jedi didn't trust him until he turned Palpatine in, and he's just ready to say "screw it").  And Obi-Wan comes to drag him back to the Temple, and realizes Padme's pregnant and Anakin is the father, and the Jedi don't throw Anakin out, but a compromise is reached where he's "on leave" for a while.  So Anakin and Padme go to Naboo, and her family's overpoweringly thrilled about the baby and upset they didn't tell them and neither Anakin nor Padme can really take it, so they go someplace else.  A quiet planet, not directly involved in the war but still marked and shaped by the underlying issues that caused it.  And in this backwater, Anakin and Padme have nothing to distract themselves and things start to fall apart as they realize that they really don't know each other and don't know how to talk to each other and both are more in love with the idea of the other they've built up in their head than they are with the other person and both have serious issues to work through.  (Anakin's issues are that he's a whiny emo brat; Padme's are that she's a privileged twit who doesn't have the first clue what privilege means and she's spent so much of her life playing the roles of princess-queen-senator that she has no idea who she is without those roles.)  And it's hard and complicated and takes time and they both have to grow and they have therapy both as a couple and as individuals and they have to learn how to be parents.  I don't know if they stay there or go back in the end.  I may or may not write it someday.

Also, I now have a LibraryThing widget on my dreamwidth journal, courtesy of suncat in dw_nifty.

Comments

[imadra_blue]

That sounds extremely believable and true to the characters. Very interesting meta, too. My ideas of Padme are very close to this.

[beatrice_otter]

Thank you! This is one of those plot bunnies where I'd love to read it, but don't particularly want to write it. I suppose I shall sometime, though, because I now have plot unfolding in my head.