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Anakin wakes up, mind oddly silent and body unusually rested.
That’s… wrong.
The Force is always there and screaming just a little. There are always too many thoughts. The war has taken away any and all chance of feeling, in any way, rested.
Anakin sits up, silken sheets pooling in a way that standard-issue military covers don’t.
But Padmé’s do.
Anakin flings off the covers to find softness, a body where scars are little more than silver lines, where both hands are present and accounted for, where a tight set of pectorals is instead a pair of small, shapely breasts, hidden only by the sheer fabric of her nightgown.
No penis, either.
Anakin slides to the floor, balance just a touch off, and rushes to a familiar mirror and is greeted by a not-quite familiar sight. Padmé’s body looks a little different when viewed from her own height, rather than Anakin’s.
A soulmate swap.
Anakin had been worried, when it hadn’t happened after they met again, but not everyone experiences it. Plenty of happy couples never swap. It’s nice when it happens, though.
Anakin giddily goes for Padmé’s comm and dials the Resolute.
--
Padmé wakes up in a body not her own, and for the first few moments, she is disoriented.
Then, she is delighted.
And then, she is confused.
It’s before she even opens her eyes. She registers some of what she expects: the lack of shifting weight on her chest when she rolls to the side, the odd, loose heft that presses to her leg when she doesn’t expect it, no curls against her shoulders.
But there is no ephemeral, awe-inspiring power in her mind. (There is… something, but it’s not what she would call the Force.)
When she clenches her fists, they are… the same. Neither feels different.
She opens her eyes, and looks at her hands, and both are flesh. Neither is mechanical.
The skin, she notes, is darker than she expected.
She swings her legs over the side of the cot, finding herself in a loose sleep shirt—Anakin, she knows, prefers to sleep without a shirt at all, at least when with her—and searches for a mirror.
The room is small, very small, but it’s a solo unit. GAR-issue, from what she can see. There is even, lucky her, a tiny attached fresher.
She heads straight for it, looks in the mirror, and finds what some deep, quiet part of her had expected:
Captain Rex stares back.
--
Rex wakes to a discordant song in his mind.
Something is half-screaming at him, beautiful and terrible.
He can do nothing but clutch at his head, roll over, and fall off the mattress.
Rex lands on the floor in a pile, groaning, one hand far too cold to his head, and the other elbow bruising against the linoleum tile.
He heaves. Nothing comes up. He levers himself up, just a little, mind racing, and sees his arms.
One of them… one of them looks like the general’s. The other is too pale.
…Rex has heard of soulmate swaps, but he never expected one for himself, not for any clone unless it was with each other. He certainly hadn’t thought—the general is married. If anyone’s going to swap with General Skywalker, wouldn’t it be the Senator?
A thousand voices press against his mind, little brushes to his brain that he can’t fully ignore. He tries, by the stars, he tries.
It’s impossible. He can do little more than lever himself up to his knees and try to wait it out.
It doesn’t work, of course. Rex has an inkling that one might call this the Force. He doesn’t know how to deal with it, not at all.
The door slides open, and he sees himself.
“…general?” he tries. It’s more of a croak than a question. He hasn’t been screaming, but he wasn’t fully aware, either.
“Not quite,” his body says. The accent sounds so wrong coming from the face of a clone, any clone; the way of moving, the very expressions on his face, are so different that Rex can imagine anyone who saw them would assume a shiny shaved and dyed their hair, because it just does not ping as being Rex. The accent’s not quite the general’s, either, but it’s closer to that than clone accents, or Kenobi, or Rylothian, or any number of other things.
Not-Rex comes closer, door sliding shut behind, and helps Rex back up to the bed. “Three-way swaps are rare, but not unheard of. How are you doing?”
“…Senator?” Rex asks, because it’s the only thing that would make sense here, except for some kind of platonic swap with Kenobi. Accent’s wrong for that, though.
“Got it in one,” she confirms. “Anakin told me how to handle the Force if this happened, but I don’t think he anticipated anyone else having to manage it. May I help?”
Rex nods. His mind is still screaming, still heavy and buffeted by every passing thought.
“Okay,” Padmé says. “Close your eyes, and listen to me.”
--
Anakin’s calls go direct to voicemail, which may have something to do with last night’s “do not disturb” setting. It’s dumb, because Padmé’s calls should get through, but maybe she’s hitting snooze because she’s not used to Anakin’s alarm?
Hm.
Disappointing.
Instead, Anakin goes to Step Two, which is to scroll through the contacts and call up Dormé.
“Hello?” The woman sounds groggy. Maybe they don’t usually get up at—it’s four in the morning. Oops. “My lady, what’s wrong?”
“Not your lady,” Anakin reports, cheery and pretending that the clock isn’t blinking from the corner of the message. “This is Anakin Skywalker. Padmé says I’m supposed to tell you if this happens, so you can take over until we can swap back.”
Dormé blinks at the holo for a few long seconds, and then gets up with a groan. “I’ll be there, and manage calling the others. Have you called Lady Amidala yet?”
“I tried, but she’s not picking up,” Anakin reports. “Should I do anything before you get here?”
“Shower if you know her routine,” Dormé says, “but if you don’t, then just wait until we get there.”
Anakin nods. “Okay!”
Anakin does not know Padmé’s shower routine. There are plenty of oils and shampoos and so on that Anakin has no familiarity with. Best not to engage.
Instead, Anakin does exactly as tempted, and goes back to the mirror. The nightshift comes down, ruffles and loose mesh gathering as Anakin pulls it together to drape over a chair. The negligee is lacy, sweet and covering, with little straps where one might, in the morning, add a garter or such. No bra, not at night, and…
Anakin flushes, turning this way and that, arms pressing Padmé’s breasts up and together in the image across.
Maybe… well, Padmé wouldn’t exactly mind. They’d talked about what-ifs for this situation, and it’s not like Anakin hasn’t been down there before…
My Lady, Dormé had said. Anakin had denied it, but it’s not entirely wrong, is it? Anakin’s a lady, right now. A small, lovely, gorgeous woman of noble background and political weight.
Anakin’s hand slips into Padmé’s lingerie bottoms, the other gripping at a breast as memories of Padmé saying good boy morph into sweet girl, and maybe, maybe Anakin could say it, could hear it in Padmé’s voice and—
--
For all that she feels like she’s shaped wrong—because she is, she’s Rex right now—the position she’s in is very familiar. Holding Anakin’s shoulders, foreheads together, and talking her partner through a crisis.
It’s not really Anakin, and it’s not her voice, but all the same, it’s not the first time she’s done this.
“Better?” she asks in Rex’s voice.
“Much,” he says.
Padmé smiles, and almost kisses him on reflex. She doesn’t, of course, because as much as this may look like her husband, it’s not. She does hug him, though.
“So,” she says, “soulmates.”
Rex nods. His eyes—Anakin’s blue, for the time being—are wide and confused. Maybe a touch hopeful.
“If I’m in you and you’re in Anakin, then that means Anakin is in me,” Padmé says, “and if he woke up already, then he should have called.”
“You planned for this?” Rex asks.
Padmé shrugs. “Of course. We’re both too important in our respective roles to risk not having a plan. The first step is to call each other, and the next step is for Anakin to call in my handmaidens to take over until we can switch back.”
She sits on the bed, and knocks their knees together. “It’s a bit different for you and me, out here; I certainly didn’t expect this to happen, and I doubt you did, either, but Anakin has a set plan to work from.”
Rex nods. The curls brush his forehead, and he makes a face as he brushes them away. Padmé refuses to giggle at him. It’s a very sensitive time.
“Should we call him?” Rex asks.
“Yes,” Padmé says. “Let me see… ah, here.”
Anakin’s comm is exactly where she expected it to be. She flips it open, and there is a missed call from her husband.
She smiles wryly at Rex, who tries and largely fails to smile back. Padmé wants to blame it on not being used to Anakin’s face or something, but the reality is that this situation is quite deeply unfair, for many reasons.
Padmé calls up her own number, and it rings for a bit, even longer than she expects, but Anakin does pick up.
For the gaff, she angles the comm to capture only Rex, and she only feels a little bad for the slight panic this causes him.
“Angel?”
Anakin looks flushed and flustered. Padmé has a guess as to what he’s been doing with her body. She doesn’t mind.
“Er… not exactly,” Rex says. He makes no attempt to mimic Padmé’s accent, or her tone. He just sounds as awkward and Mandalorian as he has for most of the morning.
Anakin’s cheery, sleepy smiles drops, and he sits up. The expression he puts on Padmé’s face isn’t a common one for her, but it’s not something she’s never seen on herself before.
“What?”
Padmé leans into frame, smiling. “A three-way swap, Ani. Isn’t it grand?”
--
Rex has rarely felt so uncomfortable in his life. Maybe never.
He is in his general’s body. The Senator is in his. And his general is in the Senator.
It’s like a bad joke. How do people this important soulmate swap with a clone?
He doesn’t much like the fake feelings in his arm, either, but that feels like a tertiary problem.
“Rex?” Anakin asks, voice sweet and soft in the Senator’s mouth. His eyes flick from the Senator to Rex and back, and then he goes, “oh.”
“Yes, Ani, oh,” the Senator says, half-cooing. It’s so strange, in Rex’s voice.
Anakin, so self-consciously that even Rex can tell, sits up a little straighter and tugs the Senator’s nightdress a little more closed.
The woman herself laughs, leaning to the side, and is suddenly a line of warmth along his arm. His own body shouldn’t make his stomach flip, but…
“Okay,” Anakin says, “so… what now?”
“Calling Obi-Wan, probably,” the Senator says drily. “This is a bit more complicated than expected, and we had planned for you to delegate everything to Rex until we swapped back. It’s a bit more complicated now, but he’s here and you aren’t…”
“I’m distracted,” Rex announces, before they can go on. The Senator pulls away, as if thinking he means her, which. Isn’t entirely wrong, but it’s also not what he meant. “This, the Force… how do you live like this?”
Anakin’s mouth pulls into a thin, mirthless smile. “Practice. It’s worse on Coruscant.”
It gets worse?
“I think,” the Senator says, while Rex is staring at the hologram in horror, “that we’ll have to avoid anything particularly fun that we’d planned until we swap back, of course.”
Anakin’s disappointment is almost palpable. Maybe actually so. Rex is pretty sure he’s just reading into the drooping shoulders and wide eyes, but maybe he can feel the general like this. It’s his body, after all.
“You can have fun on your own,” the Senator says, and… Rex is pretty sure he knows what she means. He tries to ignore it, because his pants are tenting and he can’t help it. “I just can’t join in while I’m here in Rex’s body, now can I?”
Anakin gives a pointed look to Rex’s crotch. “I don’t know, Padmé, I think maybe you could…”
“No,” the Senator says.
“Okay.” Anakin folds without any further prompting. “But… I’ll just message you after. I guess… Rex, do you mind swapping so that she has mine, and you have your own?”
Rex would love to do that. He immediately holds the comm out to the Senator in hopes that she has his with her.
“And here I thought you might need convincing,” she says, though she’s smiling. She passes him his own comm, and he relaxes, just a touch. “Ani, you already spoke with the handmaidens?”
“Dormé is on her way,” Anakin confirms. “She’s bringing the others so she can be Amidala while we figure out how to swap back.”
Rex frowns. “I thought we just needed to get all three of us in physical contact?”
“Which is kind of hard in a war,” Anakin says, smiling wanly.
Ah. So that part of the ‘how.’
“So we’re calling Obi-Wan,” Padmé says. “I’ll give him my number to call you later.”
“I’m pretty sure he already has it,” Anakin says, clearly dubious.
“It’s still polite,” Padmé corrects.
--
Anakin has to get out of Padmé’s bed when the girls arrive. Standing back is the correct choice, at first, and then Anakin is herded into the bathroom and told in no uncertain terms which order to do what, and how, to shower Padmé correctly. There are rules.
So, showering. That goes well enough. Towel-drying does not, because Teckla very much disapproves of treating Padmé’s hair so roughly. Instead, Anakin is sat down, wrapped in a bathrobe, and dried through a more careful patting and scrunching of the towel, and then a fan, and then braiding so it stays out of Anakin’s face.
Then there’s skincare. No cosmetics, which Anakin decides is for the best, since the skincare is already too sticky for comfort.
Then undergarments, which are on the simpler side, for Padmé, and then clothes. And.
“You’re not putting me in a dress?” Anakin asks, a little surprised at how plaintive, even whiny, Padmé’s voice comes out.
Teckla pauses, turns, and stares at Anakin for a long moment.
Anakin feels the flush crawling into Padmé’s cheeks. Cough. Look away. Gesture at the jumpsuit. “I mean, yeah, that’s probably easier to move in, makes sense that—”
“I’m sure a Jedi’s cloak gets in the way as much as one of the simpler gowns,” Teckla says, and Anakin wishes the Force were sharing her thoughts, at least a little. “It might be more convincing to dress you down a little without looking like you’re on a mission; the senator rarely simplifies her costuming without putting on active clothing. I have one in mind.”
Oh! Well, that’s… good?
Anakin’s wondered what it’s like to wear a dress, sometimes. Wearing one while looking like Padmé…
Anakin should not be biting Padmé’s lip, no matter how giddy that idea is.
Teckla will see, and the handmaidens will not like avoidable damage to Padmé’s presentation. Biting is damage, Anakin’s been told.
Usually from the other side, by Padmé herself when Anakin’s been too enthusiastic, but biting is biting.
“I’ll do your makeup as well,” Teckla says, which Anakin had assumed was going to happen anyway, but maybe not. “I’d thought to stick to just the skincare, with the jumpsuit, but maybe some misdirection would help.”
…sure? Anakin doesn’t know what’s best for a not-Senator right now.
Teckla holds out a dress, unzipped and gathered up. “Step in, Skywalker.”
--