Your dose of Obidala - The hut
I have no clue where this came from. It's a first part, I guess. Maybe there'll be more. Who knows with my muse? Not me, certainly. Tell me what you think...
tw: angst, post-partum depression, hurt/comfort
They live in a hut.
In the first year, the walls of the hut are brown. The walls are rough and she pulls a face whenever she touches them accidentally. The hut is made of some type of clay, Obi-Wan explains but she turns away, dismissing the information outwardly.
She still doesn't talk to him if she doesn't have to.
He endures it with soft features, not a hint of bitterness around his mouth.
Not like she who lives on bitterness likes its sustenance.
The hut is not only brown and ugly and dark, it's also small.
It's smaller than any housing she ever lived in. The whole thing might fit in her childhood bedroom. It's too small for two adults and two babies.
Every time the twins wake her, he wakes too.
And without fail, he takes one, while she takes the other. She doesn't ask, she doesn't have to. They don't talk in the middle of the night. (They also don't talk during the day.)
Dusk is cold and clammy here and she hates it more than the days.
Because at night they have never enough blankets and she is always cold. They always sleep near each other out of necessity, the babies between them.
She is never warm anymore. She misses her planet and the green lushness of it. She misses the luxury of Coruscant. She misses Anakin and his warmth.
*
He is good with the babies.
But she would be good with them too if she could sense what they need.
*
She is getting better.
The first half year was hard. She hated nursing them. Hated their demanding, scrunched-up faces and their wailing that could only be stopped when she fed them her nipples.
She knew she waited too long to feed them and by that time they were ravenous and thrashing their heads from left to right blindly searching, searching like baby birds. Her breasts were raw and bloody and she felt a deep-seated aversion to her own children that made her recoil when she tried to think about it.
She cries in the darkness when she nurses them, her back to him, so that he might not see. She knows that he knows. You cannot hide in a hut this small.
He can feel her sadness, she is sure. Just like he can smell the curdled milk and the salt of her tears.
Moisture always comes with a smell in the desert.
The midwife says her children are always hungry because her milk is not nutritious enough. She cries and nurses them, cries and nurses.
"We can feed them Bantha milk," he says, in the darkness behind her, like it's a secret.
And somehow she cries harder, as if by taking this one act of kindness she is admitting to one more failing.
"Padmé," he whispers. ", did you hear?"
She nods her head. Her hair is matted where she lays on it and it rubs against her wet cheek. One of the babies is still biting her nipple. It hurts. It always hurts. And she can only bear it by telling herself she deserves it.
She thinks of her sister feeding her niece, and imagines her tranquil face and kind smile. Not once, did she feel like this.
The tears flow.
If she could nurture her children on her tears they would be fat and happy.
*
The hut is ugly.
Its colors are brown and beige and grey and brown. Always brown. Everything is rough and dry. But the hut means comfort because it's cool inside during the day and holds warmth during the night.
Obi-Wan works outside during the day and his skin is chapped at all times.
During those first weeks, his skin is burnt from the sun to a worrying degree. He never complains even though she knows that it must hurt. He is too fair. But the sun changes him. His pearly white skin turns red and angry and then a ruddy unbecoming tan.
"Sit down," she says, but doesn't wait for him and starts putting ointment on his face. He winces. It must hurt. Her fingers aren't gentle.
"You have to put this on your skin before you go out."
He doesn't say anything.
"Did you hear?" she asks and grabs his chin, the bristles of his beard rough under her fingers. She meets his light eyes.
"Yes," he says, and because he can't pull away he closes his eyes. In defeat?
Strange how powerful that makes her feel. There is a sensation in her chest, hot and achy and new. She lets him go as if burned by his skin.
"See to it!" she snaps, unable to look at that face: The burnt skin, the rough, dry patches with the ointment settling into it.
Maybe, she thinks, he is doing it on purpose, so she will tend to him.
Just to feel something else.
*
He uses the ointment and she doesn't have to touch him anymore.
And why should they touch? They never did before.
But the smallness of the hut, the constant touching of the babies, makes her realize what is painstakingly obvious: They don't touch because they fear that they wouldn't be able to stop once they started.
*
After the first year, he whitenes the walls.
One morning she rises, bleary-eyed and in need of kaff and he is already at it in the living room. He is only wearing beige pants that hang loosely on his hips. How didn't she notice how much weight he lost? She can count his ribs, could touch them, and feel them moving under the skin.
But what is even more fascinating is that there are constellations of moles on his skin.
She is transfixed by how white this secret skin of his is. She never sees him like this.
She has the urge to put her brown hands on him.
She shakes her head, trying to put this thought to rest.
She fails.
And thinks of it. Again.
And again during the day.
*
The first time she rides him is in the pitch-black darkness. They are only bodies and he helps her to slake her desperate lust.
She couldn't possibly say what he thinks. She only feels that he is hard, just like she is wet. And she knows they fit and it makes her feel whole.
He could be anyone, during those nights. But strangely, he never is.
She never imagines him to be anyone else.
Come to think of it, she never even considered it.
Her hands curl into his chest hair, certainly hurting him, but he doesn't say anything. Let's her. And she imagines his face, not anyone else.
His face.
In the morning she wonders how this could've happened.
Like so many things in her life, she lets them be, ignored but not forgotten. Ready to be considered at a different time.
Just not today.
It doesn't take Obi-Wan long to whiten the walls.
Maybe, she thinks, fucking him was her way of saying thank you.
She considers it, then dismisses it.
She will think about it some other time.
The thing about Tatooine is, that you have all the time in the world.
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