Work Text:
It is late, and their teacups are empty, and the next line is clear to Padmé even before the Duchess opens her mouth to say, “Thank you for the pleasure of your company this evening.”
The look in her eyes, though, is unexpected; Satine has drawn back the velvet curtains and allowed Padmé to gaze through like a sunset illuminating her innermost wants, a room laid out much like this one, table and sofa and delicate china that has been set to the side. So when Padmé completes the exchange, she does not end it. “The pleasure has been all mine,” she says, and then, “an imbalance I would remedy, if your Grace would allow me.”
Satine’s surprise flickers through her, but it is a formality that does not reach her depths. She knew, as Padmé does, the name of the current between them, the limited ways in which they may let themselves harness its spark. “I would,” Satine says simply, and Padmé reaches to her, cups her dear face in her palms, but it is Satine who kisses her first.
Their path to the Duchess’s bedroom is as familiar as the dances of a royal ball, a movement her body knows as intimately as a bow. Satine wraps her arms around Padmé’s shoulders, stepping backwards like a waterfall, elegant and wild.
The door closed behind them, they break apart to address their clothes. The restraint is comfortable in its own way, a posture Padmé is used to adopting. A relief, maybe, to exercise patience in something that is not disappointment, to risk denial where there are no lives on the line. Satine fumbles at the buttons down her back, shaking her head; a wisp of hair escapes to dance against her lips. “I can never get this part without a lady-in-waiting,” she says, her sigh mixed with a gently self-effacing laugh.
Padmé touches her shoulder, turning her lightly beneath her fingers, a world rotating on an axis. “I was such, once,” she says, starting on the buttons at Satine’s neck, fingertips brushing her shoulders, “when I was very young, in function although not in name. My own Lady would wear the garments of the Queen, and I would attend at her side, observant.”
“Wise beyond your years,” Satine says, and Padmé unties the first of three elaborate bows at her waist.
“We had to be,” Padmé says, soft as the silk beneath her palms. Satine steps out of the gown and drapes it on an ornate chair. Her underclothes are a style that can be removed independently, Padmé knows, but the Duchess catches her wrist with a light touch and brings her hand to the soft of her stomach, just above the creases of her thighs. Padmé knows, from the air between her lashes and the breath within her lungs, that they will not have this again, so she goes slow, disarming the Duchess down to her scarred skin, teaching her how to unfasten the Naboo-style buckles on her own dress, kneeling for the sheer joy of brushing her mouth against the inside of Satine’s thighs, the muscle and hair of her, delicate and fine. Even her sex is regal. She’s uncut, leaking at the tip already, beautiful and unashamed.
This further similarity between them is one they realized early in their friendship, the particulars something that stumbled out two nights ago, tipsy from a honey-smooth nightcap after a state dinner that would have bored lesser women to tears. “I was on leave for medical reasons at the time,” Padmé had responded to a question about a particular vote a few years back, and when Satine had voiced her sympathy and concern, Padmé had tilted the script some fifteen degrees, enough for the truth to slide down like a warm drink: “Thank you, but this surgery was a joyous occasion,” she explained. “A pain to negotiate all of the logistics, maybe, but.”
She’s had sex since then, but tonight, Satine’s fingers between her legs, she feels at home in her body in a way she never did in a palace. She’s been thinking about it since that conversation, during the private moments between meetings, at night in bed listening to the sounds of an unfamiliar city: her hands around Satine’s slim wrists, straddling her thighs, sinking onto her until they are coupled.
After, Satine reclines against her ocean of blue cushions, breathing hard, one arm draped above her head like a painting from one of Mandalore’s golden ages.
“This was not my intention when I extended the invitation to you,” the Duchess assures her, running her fingers through Padmé’s hair. Padmé’s belated nerves are soothed, not by the words but by the rhythm of exchange, the ritual.
“Nor mine when I accepted,” she returns, a call and response, a distancing from their professional lives that in practice draws them closer to them through invocation.
She doesn’t return to her guest room until the early hours of the morning. For now, she settles at the Duchess’s side, an arm around her waist, and she dreams of fields that stretch on and on, reaching out for the horizon, not a city in sight.
*
The Duchess of Mandalore sends occasional letters of state to the Senator from Naboo, updates on the Council of Neutral Systems and the ongoing work to weed out corruption from Mandalore’s government institutions. Satine Kryze makes holocalls to Padmé Amidala Naberrie at least one evening each standard week. Her eyes are shadowed with purple like a gas giant’s rings, her neck is sore, and her lovely mouth is set in a firm line. Sometimes she rants about the police forces or despairs over the prevailing threat of Death Watch or rolls her eyes at some hypocritical Council member, but mostly, she gets ready for bed. Long strokes of the brush through her hair, cool water splashed against her bare face, a nightgown resting at the edges of her shoulders. They are not separate from their public personas, Padmé knows, but they are also more than them.
She thinks of Bail, the button on his desk that’s a direct line to his Queen and his love, the way he has ushered the most powerful people in the galaxy out of his office with a smile when it begins to blink. And they smile back, sometimes conspiratorial, sometimes patronizing, sometimes wistful; Ah, young love, they are all thinking, though it leaves a different taste in each of their mouths.
Padmé does not feel young, and her love does not feel young either. A symptom of a childhood surrendered to public service, she supposes. Still, it’s hard to see herself or Satine as any women other than the kind whose hearts bleed in public but who cry in private, who have known for more than a decade how many millions of lives their young hands cradle, too tired to keep believing and too stubborn not to, two martyrs making love at the end of the world.