#With Her Tapestries Red|Padme and Melakeni

[brooklynislandgirl]

​❝ i need to step away, get some fresh air. ❞ Padmé

Sense and Sensibility || Accepting

Though she is not one of the Senator's handmaids, she moves with the swiftness of a coursing river and the silence of some great dark storm cloud for all her small size to follow silently behind the stateswoman. The others remain behind and watch the women exit the Senator's social chamber, and not for the first time does she wonder why they are allowed to sit back, smug and fat on the Senator's largess. A different choice,a less strong sense of duty and loyalty, and rather than braids, Melakeni would wear a crown. She would not tolerate the backbiting and the spinelessness. When she was through with the audience granted, they might lack heads, too. But it isn't her place to say so. She takes each measured step in contemplation, and it isn't until they are ensconced on the balcony that she bothers to bring it up. She stands a sedate five paces back, hands enveloped in the sleeves of her robes. "Senator? Are you quite well? I sense...no distress. You seem flushed, however."

[brooklynislandgirl]

What’s something they’ve mildly been afraid of before? Not a huge trauma, something small?

Tell Me No Questions... || Accepting {{@mynameisanakin for reasons}}

She does not understand. How the Senator can stand having so many people desecrating her private apartments, the chamber where she sleeps. They trample her privacy the way they do her rugs. Not that it's the woman's fault. This had been the second closest attempt made on her life. Were it not for Anakin They're both to blame, honestly. Him for talking her into being bait, regardless of how willingly she agreed, her for letting him make his plan sound attractive enough to allow it to come to full fruition. She sees at least four ersatz copies of the Senator gading about in simple night clothes ~does Naboo participate in cloning, or was the gene pool simply that shallow~ and remembers that they are handmaids. Decoys as it were. Not a very good job done, clearly. The Force here is dim to her. A hint of Master Kenobi's general grumpiness lingers in the outer rooms. It's in this one, the Senator's bedroom, that she feels it most strongly and she would admit that it's shaded in all the hues of Anakin. The red of his adrenaline bleeding into the yellows of impatience. The shades of blue that tinge his clarity of purpose and-- --and she shudders.

Kouhuns. The halves of their corpses ~bisected courtesy of Anakin's lightsabre~ are corpse-white in the bright lights, but somehow still look grotesque. The smell of them scrunch her nose and she has to do her level best to not cover her face. It's not that Melakeni is frightened of all insects or arthropods, some are quite lovely and long before she left home she had an entire hive of hawkwasps just as lethal as these things but entirely exquisite. Her dislike comes specifically with worm like creatures. How often does Anakin recall saving her sanity by gently removing common garden slugs while they were about their chores, or receiving lessons together from other Masters during the course of their training? Before they were apprenticed and often pulled apart she has lost count, and now? Now it is a fond memory. Well, for one of them. Keni does not relish the creeping sensation down her spine of their sliminess. She doesn't enjoy the meditative thought experiment that somehow they are digesting her from the inside out. And if she thinks about Anakin curious enough to try and lick one? Utterly makes her gorge rise. She stops one of the cl…handmaidens. Something beginning with an S… "You, girl. Carefully encase those things-" she points to the kouhun remains "-into specimen jars, and put them in that satchel. I will then remove them from the Senator's apartment." "Yes ma'am." A pause. "Are you quite alright? You…you look a little green-" Melakeni turns on one booted heel, does not have the civility to answer her.

[brooklynislandgirl]

@southern-belle-outcasts {{xx}}

The air tastes like bitterness. Like something wounded that may never recover. It as far as what she knows as the bowels of Coruscant are to the lofty towers that still catch glimpses of a reflected sun. Were she born on this world she might never know a difference. However she had been blessed to grow on a garden world, one rich with resources and space for all, including those who found a talented enough Zelosian pilot to navigate them through a shroud of black holes so they might experience the same natural beauty. While the Senator squints against the pink-tinted gold of the light ~before the darkness comes~ Keni basks in the reflected warmth as much as she can. Exposed face, hands removed from the heavy trappings of her robes. All of her aches to embrace the waning sun. She bites back the question that springs to mind; the one that begs to know if the former Queen so hates the the complicit treachery that pours through her work, why she chooses to do it? Why does she play the games of ambitions and duplicity when perhaps outreach might suit her better? What a few hours and a sharp knife might do for the Republic. But no, that is a thing to tuck away behind a mask of unperturbed indifference. She does so knowing that she could make her fathers proud if she ever changed her mind. "Perhaps," Melakeni says with an uncharacteristic upturn of her lips, "We might arrange with the Masters to entertain your… guests… at the Temple. Perhaps upon seeing how slow agreements are reached in the fullness of wisdom and meditation, they might not be so displeased at how the Senate turns?"

[brooklynislandgirl]

@southern-belle-outcasts  {{xx}}

The Force speaks to Keni directly. Not in words but implications, colours, signs, feelings. It besets her as if she were standing on the Spine while the sea roared around her, its salt-laden arms lashing her skin and leaving burning kisses on her lips. Sometimes it embraces her as softly as her father might. Right now though it is cloudy. Dark and light in a ceaseless dance. Emotions that are being kept in check but that rage against their binding. It is Anakin then despite the fact that the Senator has not spoken a single word. Were it her politicking, were it some sickness or disease…Amidala has a hundred doctors that would cater to her, at least a dozen other politicians that might be more sympathetic to her pet cause. There would be no need to risk coming here in disguise. She does not allow any of her sudden, sharp disquiet to bleed through to her delicate features. If anything, she looks more like a statue than a consular knight. She doesn’t so much as blink. A diplomat’s grace, she merely wishes to conceal her affections for her friend, the boy she has grown up with, the man who is almost the other half of her. Especially when the person who sought her out and here of all places is that very same person’s wife. She meets Amidala’s dark gaze with a certain calm. Until she speaks. Her emerald gaze dips down from the former Queen’s face to her belly and back. She can all but taste the new life within her. It is not her place to question. Someone is surely bound to notice and there’s no doubt the other half of the parentage will be obvious. As obvious as her outrage that they’d sent Pe-Tyr to the Service Corps without even allowing him to make an argument for himself, and how bitterly she’d wept into Fane’s chest in the aftermath, clutching desperately at her only remaining clan-mate for fear he would be taken from her as well. Keni’s only clear course then is to incline her head in short order, then step aside from the bed, permitting the Senator a place to sit. She withdraws her hands into the sleeves of the robes. “As it pleases you, Senator.” The tapered points of her sharpest teeth bite into her tongue and she can taste the sweetness of her own blood to keep from answering the other woman’s thoughts, so loud in Keni’s head that she hears them as if they’d been passionately uttered. “Some are… allowed to walk away, after an ill-defined term of service, it is true.” Well, at least that is what is said. When Dooku left, he had done so while being respected by his fellow Jedi, and they did very little to hinder him at all. Some said he had been misguided and it was considered something of a pity to lose him, but he was allowed to leave peacefully, in a dignified manner, and remained favoured even with renouncing the Order.  The same would not be Anakin’s fate. But this she knows. The longer the war goes on, the more and more the Order and the Republic sensationalise the Chosen One, the Hero With No Fear, the less likely they will loosen their hold on him. Even if the CIS chose to cease fire in the morning, there would be one more crisis, one more galaxy shattering threat that would require him to address. “Senator, have you considered that his visions are not merely fear manifesting the only way that he can process it? That you and your offspring are in grave danger from the entire galaxy? I do not believe the Separatists would be afraid to do great harm to deal him a blow.” Nor would Keni doubt for a single moment that the Order itself would be above conspiring against Anakin if his betrayal of the Order were to come to light. Amidala stands to lose much face and her standing as a Senator, Anakin’s life might be forfeit. She also knows that no one would ever get close enough to him to do what the Council might ask, no one but herself. And she would sooner burn Coruscant to the very overdeveloped and poisoned ground than carry it out. “I make no effort to hide my bond with him, my lady. I do not say this to upset you, but you can see with your own eyes the veracity of what I say. So I ask, what would you have me do? What goal do you have in mind?”   

[brooklynislandgirl]

Orange: What’s one tactile sensation that turns you off?- Keni

Colour Me Sexy || Accepting

Ultimately it must be said that all things deserve balance, a fairness that must be acted upon because life so rarely is so forthcoming. And perhaps she has asked one too personal a question of the Senator in the past, that of course, she must repay. Perhaps not in kind, she lacks fundamental experience in that regard; with her few forays into sensuality never fully satisfied. Not that there wasn't the desire. It lived and flowed between them in and through the Force, but they were well aware of the associated risks, until hiding it became second nature. There is also nothing of, on, or about Anakin that Keni finds repulsive in any fashion. If anything, she equates desire with the sweat-damp curls at the back of his neck, soft and wet and reminiscent of plant-silk, and if anyone is an expert on that, it is Keni. There's the mole between his shoulder blades that is like a compass point that if she stands on the tips of her toes or has the higher ground, she can just manage to kiss. There's the myriad of other little freckles and whatnot that dot his skin. The scars both new and old, a contrast to the rest of his skin. Though her face remains an impassive mask for the longest time, meditative in a way that most Jedi masters take decades to perfect, Keni's hands slip into the sleeves of her robes. Around her left wrist is a woven band, a braid of silver-sheen gold that has darkened over the last couple years. It is still as soft as the rest of its source, and letting her fingertips rest on it makes her feel that much more connected to him. He keeps her braid on him as well, always. They'd promised to always keep a piece of the other regardless of where the Order sent them; regardless of how long and how far they were apart, they would still be together. So, no...Anakin fails to live up to the Senator's question because there is no part of him she cannot stand to touch. Not his flesh, his robes, or his boots, which they might both have too particular a fondness of, his for the comfort and hers for the way they look on him and off. Even those years during their early adolescence, when they each hit that awkward stage where they were no longer children but not yet set down the path that would hint at what physical maturity would bring, she can remember them. It was a year and a half or so in which he seemed to withdraw deeper within the Force and had grown quiet. Long limbs that did not fit his trunk, too thin by half. New golden hair, much darker than his head, in places most unexpected by either of them, when she'd honestly wondered if he were infected with some kind of disease that was causing him to devolve into some primordial state. His scent had changed, too. Sharper. Deeper. That makes her jaw ache for want of... Reflexively, she runs her tongue over the sharp points of her teeth. It takes all of her best efforts to keep the green flush of blood out of her cheeks, and down the slender column of her throat, the pulsing of her nastic responses quickening. That same year, when she'd sought him throughout the Force and comforted him when he seemed inconsolable, they hadn't yet grown in. All of her too small, too narrow, to misshapen. She had changed too, and Anakin had had the grace and foresight to love her despite her lack of beauty, despite ...well, everything. And if she had to choose the most disturbing thing opposite of what she feels?

"Hutt flesh."

She turns her head to carefully watch Amidala's face. "Imagine if you will the most enormous of tongues, but set apart of the mouth, without its teeth. Long, grotesquely fat and often warty, mottled, diseased looking with great reptilian eyes. This tongue is shrouded in the toughest flesh that can possibly exist, and densely coated in wretched oil and sweat and slime the stench of which can turn even the staunchest of stomachs. So foul, in fact, it is said that sarlaacs will regurgitate a Hutt body rather than risk consuming it. "Now imagine it trying to wrap around you. Constricting you with impossible strength. Coating your skin in the stench and the putrescent oozing. Smothering you under the weight of mountains, of star ships, of duty." It's one of the missions she does not speak of, no matter how gently questioned, provoked, searched through and picked over by the Force. And no matter how much distance between that moment and the now, she cannot cease to recall every livid detail. Her throat burns raw, the air befouled with memory, and her flesh crawls. Urges her to flee to the nearest refresher or actual water shower and never come out.

She shakes her head. "I would rather die."

[brooklynislandgirl]

“At least you survived to show him love. Maybe something good will come of it.” 💫 ghostly whisperings

@mynameisanakin {for reasons} In The Dark || Accepting

The blindfold was supposed to enhance her meditative trance, to attune all of her senses to the Will of the Force and nothing else beyond it. This was not her preferred method, not with her sabre in hand, ignited, but the days of old... they have since passed into some strange mixture of relief and sorrow. It burns her tongue like salt, makes the back of her throat thicken with the way the silence malingers when once it was full of voices and micro-constellations of connection to others of their kind.

So perhaps it should be no great surprise when the Living Force now speaks with the voice of the dead. That is its the Senator’s voice that lingers at her mostly covered ears and insinuates itself into her thoughts, drifting ephemera on the breeze. Perhaps Padmé had been wrong after all, that the spark of her was not confined at all to Naboo, though her world isn’t as far away from Zelos as say... any of the Core worlds. She doesn’t like it though, does she? Once the dead are gone, they ought to remain that way. A shiver prickles Melakeni’s spine. There are those who have passed away on her world and have continued to walk. Hungering for the life and light of the still living as though devouring it might somehow grant them a boon. They come in the dark, in the night, when Zelosians are blind if not protected by light. And even if she can feel the white sun bearing down on her.... Well, Anakin is far from okay. What little sleep he gets is fitful and the Emperor’s grasp on him, the terrible things he’s been made to do, have shattered an already fragile and broken young man. Which is why she brought him here. Her place of refuge, of safety, and she is of the belief that if the Force wills it, there is nothing her fathers cannot fix. Is this one of Anakin’s fever dreams then, made manifest? She doesn’t know. Shouldn’t be, she’d given him a sedative that should have rendered his rest dreamless. So she must treat the moment as if she could just reach out. Lay a hand on the Senator. To do that she must swallow down the rage, a fire in her belly that spreads to her tongue with an anger unchecked, one that is as unable to understand as it is unsettlingly close to fuelling the Darkness. The very same feelings that demand why Padmé did not fight harder. Nothing in any world, no person, no spirit, not even the Force itself, could make Keni give up on him. Nothing would make her leave his side. And there was the child....the children.... to consider. She’d never wanted children, she doesn’t even want a padawan of her own {not that that is an option now}, but if somehow she could create life from his seed inside of her... She would see it for the blessing it was. A cross-species miracle. One she could not so easily give up. What makes her angry is this woman, who claimed in life, to be so strong, so incorruptible... simply chose to give up. To abandon the man she claims to have loved, the children she created with him. Who had a hand in his near murder because Keni will never believe that she did not know Kenobi had stowed away on her ship.

And there is something accusatory in the words Keni hears now. As if she should be ashamed. As if she were the one that left behind a broken psyche, broken words, a broken heart.

Tightening her grip on the hilt of her sabre, she begins to move through each of the forms she’d been taught but there’s a lack of enthusiasm, a splintering of her concentration. It is fruitless. One cannot fight ghosts in this way.

“I trust in the Force, Amidala,” she addresses the idea of the other woman, though her tone is weary, clouded with emotion. “As you should have. His heart...it was big enough for both of us, I think. But yes, I am still here. And I shall stand beside him, support him, love him in anyway he needs. I will sacrifice anything, everything...the entire galaxy if need be....for him. And maybe the good that comes is his restoration. I am also prepared to do and be all of this even if he is never the same.

“To that end...I must beg you...to let him go. Do not haunt him. There are already so many pieces of him that might never be fixed, he cannot withstand another blow like that. If you truly loved him in life, spare him now.”

Her voice breaks on this final word, one that she has hardly ever spoken, one that feels foreign on her tongue.  “Please.”

[brooklynislandgirl]

17. What are you favorite foreplay activities?

Sweet and Spicy || Accepting  {{ @mynameisanakin for reasons}}

She’d been dozing off in front of the bacta tank. One slim, dusky hand pressed against the transparisteel surface as if in his sleep he could feel her reaching out to him. Pushing her strength, her determination through the Force so shore up his lapses. Hearing nothing back even in that fathomless connection except the slow heavy sound of the re-breather, rasping and mechanical. No fitful dreams but no screaming agonies either. She doesn’t think she will ever forget the precisely organic, charred smell of his burnt flesh.  And this is not yet the worst of it. They were unable to save his arm. She wasn’t able. So she has to do something for him, even if that is only to commune with him the only way available. Which is perhaps why she did not hear the Senator approach. Even as quiet as she can be, Melakeni can often hear her footsteps, smell her before she arrives. Knows how that scent is on her own, and on him ~robes and skin alike~. It isn’t easy to catch a Jedi unaware, even just a padawan. How long had the Senator been standing there? Was this her first question or the last in a string of many meant to jar her from her weariness and meditation? She doesn’t know the answers to this.  But of course she is here. Of course the Masters would grant her passage to the Halls of Healing. She is charmed above many others and might do all she pleases without censure. It seems a little unfair but then she doesn’t really have any say about the matter. The hand previously splayed out on the tank slowly retracts into it’s sleeve before her arms fold together and it disappears entirely from view. She turns gracefully and inclines her head to the other woman. There is no obeisance in the gesture, but it is polite. Brittle. As much as Keni can manage without the strings holding her together snapping, leaving her to collapse to the the floor. She doesn’t raise her head when she finally speaks, breaking the stillness that lingers between the sound of machines and medical droids. “Padmé.” Stripped down, the husk of leaves on a duracrete sidewalk, no honorifics, not even the courtesy of addressing her by rank. They are beyond this, surely, if this is the question being asked of her. She doesn’t raise her gaze from the empty spot on the floor between them.

“Surely you know that such things are forbidden of the Jedi.” Beneath the demure veil of her lashes the bright emerald green ~unnatural at best amongst many of the humans in the galaxy~ slash their way to Anakin’s floating form. Only a second, easy to be believed that she might not have looked at all for the fact that nothing else about her moves.  It isn’t a lie and yet it is the same as it lays there on her tongue which she pushes up against the sharp points of her teeth. She and Anakin have never quite crossed that line, though they’ve sauntered together, limbs entwined, heated breaths and kisses and little nips that stop just short of bites, right to the edge of it. She can, if she closes her eyes, hear the very specific kinds of sound that she’s drawn from his throat a hundred dozen times when they play their games. His fingers flexing against her bones grasping for purchase anywhere he can find it; hips and ribs and ever so gently around her throat and in her hair. Colour suffuses her cheeks and in the low light maybe Padmé will not notice the distinct hue of that flush. She is not ashamed of her love for Anakin, it has never wavered and it has never demanded, it has always sought to protect him. There are other truths though that she tries to keep from him. Ones that are safer to share with her, because if the Senator chooses to try to excise her from their life with the information? Then it will only be Melakeni to suffer.

“But we are not blind to aesthetic beauty, and my master is as beautiful as he is terrifying. On my world, we have specific duelling daggers, long and slim with a blood groove down the centre of the blade. It is meant to give a merciful end. They are wickedly sharp.” A soft ripple of a shiver flows through her before she finally looks at the other woman.  “I have had dreams that he... my master... did not use them on me for their intended purpose. I have dreamed of losing myself in the eternal night of his gaze just before he devoured me entirely. But that is the nature of dreams. They are insubstantial. Transient.” Another surreptitious glance toward the tank before it returns and she gives a slightly rolling shake of her head. “I suppose I shall never know. But why do you ask? I do not think you came here simply to question my ignorance?”