He won't touch her with it at first.
It's like a stranger in their bed; he keeps it at his side, behind his back. When he has to use it to support himself, to hold himself over her, thrusting, he uses his good hand to tilt her head the other way.
He assumes she's repulsed. She's not; she's curious.
He calls it his Claw, but really, is it any different than a droid arm? Padme remembers holding hands with her droid nanny, strong metal fingers clasping her tiny hand with infinite gentleness.
She tells him this.
And later, what she does not tell him: Queen at fourteen, trying to get used to her own body, trying to lead a planet. One of her handmaidens, Rabe or Sabe, giggling and showing her how to reprogram the cleaning droids for more... intimate... work. It wouldn't be seemly for the Queen or her handmaidens to date, but it's easy to wipe a droid's memory.
She remembers Shmi catching her gaze knowingly while she was eyeing the articulation of Threepio's fingers. It had been a little tempting, but it would have felt like second-hand child molestation, fucking Anakin's toy. And really, she had been satisfied; an astromech droid has *so* many interesting attachments.
But she can't tell Anakin that her insides quiver when she looks at his prosthesis, that her nipples harden when she thinks of the smooth metal fingertips and that she gets wet at the thought of one of those fingers inside of her, so she tells him that it's part of him, that she loves him and accepts all of him, even that. Discretion is useful for a Senator. He tells her that he doesn't want to touch her with it because the fingers can't feel her satin skin, can't feel the softness of her breasts, the smoothness of her thighs... somewhere in this conversation they get distracted, but later, when she's riding him, he puts both hands on her hips for the first time.
Anakin under her fingers is an alien planet. She remembers her handmaidens, her decoys, lacing each other in and out of complicated undergarments, so alike it was like dressing herself. And when hands didn't stop at the edge of the cloth it was like touching herself, one flesh stroking the same curves. They all wore the same perfume so they would even smell the same. Anakin smells harsher, a faint smell of ozone from the servos in his arm, and his skin is always hot like it remembers the air of Tatooine. She enjoys sex with Anakin... she suspects he reaches into the Force for guidance, but, hey, if only every seventeen-year-old boy could do that... but she remembers the slick folds and convenient displacement of tongues of her multifold self, and mourns Corde.
Anakin learns to fight again with his new hand and she watches him practice with two sabers, the one slicing with robotic precision, the other slashing like screamed words. It becomes his arm, just like his foot, his anger, his laughter, his past, and he shares it with her like his mouth, his future. It still makes her tingle, tracing a cool counterpoint to his hot fingers. They no longer flinch when her fingers graze the stump; it is one of many scars. Anakin has scars from training, scars from adventures, the blueprint of a great Jedi Knight marked onto his body.
Nightly, Padme amends this blueprint with her nails.
He'll touch her with it now, so Padme is caught by surprise when she leans against his side and twines her fingers through the hinges and wires and he twists and slaps her with the flesh hand, hard, in a burst of fury. It hurts, and she's crying, and he's yelling that it's bad enough that he has a constant reminder of his failure permanently attached to his fucking shoulder, but does she have to rub it in? She keeps crying, and when he catches one of her tears on his finger and puts it on his own cheek as an apology it's with one of the prosthetic fingers.
She thinks she shouldn't have been surprised. She's not Force-sensitive, she was tested as a baby and failed with flying colors, but she can feel something crawling under Anakin's skin. It makes her skin crawl in response. It's the anger, she thinks, churning inside him, and it gets out sometimes. She wishes she could purge him somehow, flay him alive and let all the anger drain away, but she's finding that it was easier to stop a war than it is to help her husband.
So accepts his apology, and kisses him, and they have sex against a wall. She murmurs to him carefully, choosing words that will slip over his skin and not snag on the anger below, touch me baby, I want, so good. She pulls his mouth to hers when she's no longer sure she can control her words and doesn't look down to where his fingers curl around her breasts, two hands, one hot, one cold, one light, one dark.
::End::
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