Grin.

"Oh - speaking of necessary discussions and certain pleasures - we wanted to know if you could give me my own body?" she asks Ellie. "I don't actually want to be permanently embodied, though, so I'd want something I could just leave or dissolve when I wanted, without needing to make a mess first."

"Prrrobably? Should be easier than bringing your friend back, at least."

"It'd be good if it could be - practice for her, too," Anakin says, softly.

"Could be, yeah."

"Thank you," Anakin says, sincerely, and takes a few bites. "Do we want to trade stories, then?"

"Could do. Who starts?"

"Oldest to youngest within a world makes sense - tell the background in order. Though between worlds - well, we could do oldest to youngest there, too." Small smile. "And unless you secretly age very slowly, I bet I have all of you beat for age. I'm ninety two."

"Yeah, that's about double my Fay."

"Figured."

"So - I was born in the waning years of the Galactic Republic, which was the biggest galactic power for about a thousand years. I was born into slavery in Hutt space, on a planet called Tatooine - outside of the Republic's influence. I - escaped, eventually, when I was about nine, and I became an apprentice Jedi. Elesse was my teacher, then, and she raised me from that point. When I was nineteen, a war broke out - the Clone Wars, the first major galactic war since the Republic's rise to dominance. I turned out to have an ability called battle meditation, which was indispensable to the war effort. It allowed me to telepathically link thousands of people at a time, spread across light years, to coordinate battle maneuvers."

"I took my Knighthood trials after the war broke out, graduating from my apprenticeship under Elesse, and became a general in the army. It was... Tough. I'm not made for war. I stayed, though, out of love for Elesse, and eventually to protect my soldiers."

"The war was being orchestrated by a Sith Lord, though - who were an order of users of the dark side of the Force. He was exceptionally powerful, and had evaded the Jedi's investigation... And he was, secretly, the elected Chancellor of the Republic, Palpatine. He accelerated a consolidation of power that had been ongoing for a bit, and he used the war to ratchet that into high gear, using crisis after crisis as an excuse."

"He turned his attention to me, and he decided he wanted my talents turned to his ends. This - wasn't something he could easily get out of me. I'm unsure to what extent everything that happened next was magical influence on my mind, or preexisting mental illness, but... I began losing time and memories, and I started having - emotional instability, odd beliefs, some things that might have been hallucinations or false visions."

"A bit three and a half years into the war, I realized I was pregnant. I didn't remember getting pregnant."

"Things - escalated quickly, after that. I didn't have anyone to turn to - Elesse and I had been speaking increasingly less since my knighting - and I wasn't doing well mentally. Palpatine timed the Jedi High Council learning that he was the Sith Lord basically perfectly, and they tried to arrest him, and he killed them, and he used that as an excuse to have the Jedi purged, declaring them traitors who had attempted a coup."

"The war ended in the Republic's favor, nominally - and Palpatine convinced the Senate to dissolve the Republic, naming him Emperor."

"I - tried to untangle myself. I gave birth, sent my children into hiding, and ripped the knowledge they'd survived from my mind. I went and found Elesse, then, but - we argued, and one of us - I don't remember which - drew a weapon, and - she died in the fight."

Pause. Deep breath.

"I killed her, and then I tried to kill myself, but Palpatine stopped me. He reforged me into his right hand, Darth Vader, a role I filled for the next twenty three years, until my son Luke convinced me to turn on Palpatine. I killed him, and died of my wounds from that fight."

"His Empire collapsed, after, and the rebellion against him organized into the New Republic. My daughter, Leia, was a major figure in that, and she's currently their leader - though she somewhat hates me, so that's unlikely to be of much use to us."

"The imperial remnants had a period of intense chaos, eventually emerging into the modern Empire about two and a half decades ago."

"I wandered as a ghost. And - fourteen years ago, I found Lily as a toddler. She'd been abandoned and was nearly dead. I raised her away from - all this, until she found Ellaita stranded in the desert four years ago, which ultimately brought us back onto the galactic stage."

Ellaita puts a gentle arm around Anakin.

She leans into Ellaita, snuggling.

Wow what the FUCK is possibly worse than all that such that Anakin's comfortable saying these things but has Further Private Things to tell just her girlfriends.

That is probably not a productive line of thought.

Anathema moves her chair so she can join the cuddle line on the other side.

Anakin smiles a little, though not very happily. "I think next is - mostly Ellaita and Anathema's story. I wasn't present for most."

"Not... quite as exciting, fortunately. After the collapse of the old Empire, a lot of the regional governors scrambled to reorganize into their own petty kingdoms, to keep their holdings away from the New Republic. I was part of a resistance movement against one such, as a fighter pilot. The Reps sent us some aid secretly, including Anakin's granddaughter Jaina. But she was only there because Anakin's grandson, Jacen, was on the other side. She figured out that he was looking for Anakin, and sent me to find her first. I tracked the rumors to a planet called Jakku. That was where the Imperial wannabes caught up. They captured me, and I was taken to be interrogated by Jacen. That's when I met Anathema."

Anathema takes over, then. 

"Jacen's wanna-be Empire were calling themselves the First Order. A lot of the imperial satellites have been experimenting with cloning soldiers - that got used during Anakin's Clone War but there'd been issues with it. The First Order used multiple clone lines, and I'm part of one - so's Sharp. We'd decided to defect, and when Ellaita got captured we figured that was a good ticket to someone to defect to. So I rescued her."

"We talked some, but we got shot down over Jakku. I couldn't find Ellaita after the crash, so I took my girls and the information Ellaita'd had to her resistance group."

Glance at Ellaita and Anakin. "Turned out Lily had found and rescued Ellaita. Them and Anakin left Jakku, started making their way back to the resistance, but the First Order caught up. Jacen captured Anakin using some weird artifact. We'd known he was moving on something, so I led a strike force and rescued Lily and Ellaita from him. Ellaita and I started dating a bit later, while we were following leads on rescuing Anakin."

"Which we did, getting her out of the ghost trap thing - and then she proceeded to terrify the shit out of Jacen by disintegrating the mountain his base was in, destroying all his mens' arms and armor, and then recreating the mountain with the rock they'd cleared when digging under it back in, like the First Order had never been there. She dumped him and whatever of his men didn't want to defect with enough supplies to last until someone came looking for them, didn't harm a hair on anyone's head. Or even any of the plants or animals that had been living on the mountain, far as we could tell."

"Jacen was very, very intimidated, and we started working on peace treaties really soon after. That was four years ago. We've kept Anakin's past a secret successfully, so far, but there's a lot of tension still."

Shrug. "And a couple days ago me and Ellaita decided to seduce Anakin, figured out how to get her to possess someone. Last night was our first time together as girlfriends."

"So, there you have it."

"A lot's gone on, then."

"Yeah." She glances at her wife. "Though our world's had a lot of crap, too."

"Nothing galaxy-shaking, but people can still be awful to other people."

Serious nod.

Fay hums. "We had a war, too," she says, "That broke out a bit after I turned twenty - I was a teacher's assistant at our country's main school of magic, Hogwarts, at the time. A man calling himself Voldemort started a terror campaign. It lasted about a decade, during which I made a name for myself opposing him, before Voldemort received a prophecy that a certain child would be his downfall."

"That child was Ellie. Voldemort started targeting her, and her family went into hiding, until Voldemort caught up to them. Ellie's mother, Lily, set a trap for him, sacrificing her life to destroy his body and dramatically delay his ability to take physical form again - something he'd already had."

"Voldemort's forces crumpled after that. I'd become a full professor over the course of the war, a position I continued with. Things - were more or less peaceful for a while, after."

"Voldemort's first defeat was when me and Ellie were one," Anathema picks up. "My mom was his right hand, Bellatrix, and Voldemort was my father. My mom was arrested after Voldemort got beat, and I went to live with her husband's sister - her husband was a different person from Voldemort. My aunt was a huge asshole and I hated her and eventually I managed to run away, in time to go to Hogwarts at eleven. I was pretending to be a muggleborn - someone with parents who aren't magic - though I wasn't super good at that."

"School was... Weird, I guess? I met Ellie on the train. I liked learning, hated some of our teachers, loved others - Professor Fay was the best." She smiles down at her and Ellie's pet. "It turned out Voldemort was possessing our history professor, and he possessed me and tried to kill Ellie - that failed, which was when we learned Ellie's mom had put a magic protection on her."

"...Honestly most years had weird stuff happen. In second year, one of our... Not quite friends... Was possessed by one of Voldemort's horcruxes - an item he'd put a shard of his soul into to anchor himself to the mortal world. She set a basilisk, a giant deadly snake, on the school, though I managed to take control of the snake by declaring myself the true heir of the person who'd made her - Slytherin, who was Voldemort's ancestor. We destroyed the horcrux and rescued our friend. And then in third year, Ellie's godfather Sirius escaped prison - he'd been wrongfully imprisoned because people thought he had sold out Ellie's family to Voldemort - and then my mom escaped prison. We faked Sirius's death and got him settled in - he could take the shape of a dog, so he kinda just went to live at Fay's house as a dog. My mom - was harder, she was kinda skittish, and really - had been hit hard by the prison's guards, Dementors, who steal happy memories and eat souls. The Dementors were chasing her, and during a meeting with her to try to talk her into coming with us or something, a bunch of Dementors attacked, and she led them off so me and Ellie could escape. We thought she'd - worse than died."

"She hadn't, but we didn't find that out for another year - in fourth year, there was a big tournament between schools, with students competing in different tasks. Someone slipped Ellie in even though she wasn't at the minimum age requirement, and forced her into the tournament with a magically binding contract. That someone was Voldemort."

"Fourth year was when me and Ellie started dating - there was a big dance in the middle of the year, and I'd been thinking of asking Ellie, then another school's champion asked her to it, and I got jealous and so... In classic teenager fashion, decided to make Ellie jealous back, and asked out the third school's champion, Elodie."

" - I would like to note that that worked and it got me Elodie as a friend, even if it was unnecessarily dramatic in the meantime."

"It was unnecessarily dramatic for about fifteen minutes. The champions only had to do the opening dance together. So Krum and I did the first dance and then went to go sit and I expected Anathema to come over and sit with me, but she didn't, she kept dancing with Elodie. Who is, by the way, unfairly pretty for magical heritage reasons. I got a little bit angry and realized that I was getting angry because I wanted to be dancing with Anathema like that. So I went over and Elodie was very mature about the whole thing and graciously handed Anathema off. So we danced and then we went out to the garden and kissed."

"That's adorable."

She giggles. "We are. And I'm pretty sure Fay spent the entire drama somewhere between amused and vaguely exasperated - though she has no room to judge about melodrama. I had to lock her and Ellie in a closet to get them to kiss."