AN: On AO3, this is posted as a series - I'll be rearranging the chapters to fit chronologically as I write and post them, which is a lot easier in a series on AO3, but we do what we can with the tools given us.
Anakin is standing over her when she wakes.
No.
Darth Vader is standing over her when she wakes. She can feel him beside her even before she opens her eyes, the hush-shush of his breathing through a respirator dragging her uneasily from a drugged sleep, the sickly-sweet waves of his dark-tainted joy, the heavy clomp of his booted false-feet on the steel floor.
She opens her eyes, and she screams.
He does not take it well.
That she fears him.
But what does he expect?
She has always made it clear that it was not the darkness in him that she loved - the darkness was a part of him that she was forced to accept, if she wanted the light, and he knew that. He has always know that. Padmé loved the boy who sliced her pear with the gifts given him by the Light, loved the boy who wept for the damage inflicted by his own hands in return for his mother's death.
Padmé does not love this… Thing that has sprung from the ruins of the boy she loved. Instead, she curls in on herself, agrees when the medidroid and the healers tell him that it is all for grief of the child, for the imbalances of her body chemistry, and she shuts herself away inside.
Later, she will have to emerge.
For now, she hides somewhere deep down in her heart, by the lake on Naboo, with that beautiful boy and their beautiful children.
She named them Luke, and Leia. She thinks. She remembers saying the words, but she remembers her babies being alive, remembers Obi-Wan holding them, and obviously that's not real, so maybe she didn't name them at all. Maybe they didn't even cry when they were born. She doesn't know, not really.
By the lake on Naboo, Luke's hair grows the same sandy-gold as Anakin's, and Leia's curls dark around her ears. There is sunshine, and there is laughter, and there is no pain.
The lake on Naboo is far away, but Padmé hides there all the same.
"We can have other children," Vader says, as if his mask hides her grief as well as his scars. "As many as you would like."
Padmé wants just two children, the perfect babies she gave birth to on Polis Massa, but they are gone now.
"No," she says, a smile forming automatically on her face, a smile reflected in the thick transparasteel of her new bedroom windows, so that he will see it. "Better we don't. They'd only be used against you."
His emotions seem to boil over at the slightest thing now, and she is washed in a froth of sickening pleasure-pride, and she supposes that he thinks she wishes to spare him the risk of having children used against him for his sake.
Padmé knows that if she ever gives birth to another child of Anakin's, it will be swept away by Palpatine, and she will never see it - until one day, the child will die in some horrible accident, and Vader's rage will be turned on some enemy of the Empire or other.
She cannot bear the idea of carrying another child, not while her belly is still soft and round from the twins, not while she's still taking the little yellow tablets every morning to stop herself lactating. It all hurts so much, and she wishes that, if she cannot have her children, she might have Sabé or Dormé with her, or anyone who is not there explicitly on the Emperor's orders.
She's never gone long without someone to trust, without an open ear attached to a closed mouth. It's causing a different sort of ache in her belly, having so much anger and pain trapped in her body without an outlet, and at night, she cries herself to sleep, and dreams of the lake on Naboo.
Imperial Senators are expected to wear a uniform.
Vader allows her to finish the course of little yellow tablets before reminding her of her senatorial duties, and she spends the better part of a day standing on a stool in the middle of her exquisite if austere apartment, being fitted for sweeping robes and trained capes with high, square shoulders, such as she has noticed becoming the trend in the military parades that sometimes pass below her windows.
Does Vader know that she understands this palace to be a prison? She suspects not, because he genuinely seems to think that she can be happy here, and it is easier not to say a word.
The uniforms are surprisingly comfortable, for how severe the tailoring is. The sleeves are tight but not so much that they limit her movement, and the support of the boned bodices is more welcome than she'd ever admit to her still-tender breasts. The boxy half-cape meant for everyday wear in the Senate chamber is warmer than she expected, and affords her a place to hide her hands during Senate sessions, when she wishes more than anything to leap from her pod and strangle the so-called Emperor with her bare hands, dark powers of the Force or not.
She doesn't care.
Even trying to do it would get her killed, but she doesn't care.
And then Bail sits in her pod, during her seventh session since losing the twins.
"Ahsoka," she says, tasting a name near forgotten and wondering how they have all come to this. "I have not heard of her in a long time."
"She is the bravest woman I know, short of you," Bail says quietly, the neutral little smile on his face belying the weight of their conversation. "She means to see all the wrongs of the Order righted, in her own way."
"The Order didn't-"
"They did," Bail disagrees pleasantly. "They allowed him to become this. They should have seen , Padmé."
She can't bring herself to argue that point - the Council should not have seen Anakin become this thing, but she should have - so she only shrugs, and nods, and sips her drink. It's sweet and fruity, tasting pink on her tongue and silver in her throat, and if she has more than one she'll feel sick. She almost thinks she'd welcome feeling sick, just for a little variety, and so she finishes her drink and calls for another.
"You've gotten very thin," Bail says, uncharacteristically blunt, his face still bland and fixed and pleasant. "Is he not feeding you?"
Once, Padmé had tried smoking some of the strange herbal things her sister's husband had liked in their youth. Instead of the promised serenity and happiness, she'd been left queasy and paranoid, and had finished the night by vomiting for what had felt like days into an ornamental vase. Bail's blandly pleasant face makes that same queasiness erupt in her stomach, under the stretch marks, and she has to choke back a sudden rush of bile.
"He was not always this," she says, low, urgent, terrified - if she does not defend Anakin, if he hears confirmation of the hatred he must know she bears for the thing he has become, will he turn as cruel to her as he is to his underlings, as brutal as he was to the children at the Temple? "Bail, please, you must know-"
"I did not mean to question your choice of husband," Bail promises her, laying a hand on her arm. The contact shocks her, because no one has touched her except for medidroids in so long, since Obi-Wan carried her into the ship on Mustafar, or maybe since Obi-Wan held her hand and brushed back her hair on Polis Massa. "We are all worried for you, Padmé. Whatever he was when you married him, he is not that now. We do not trust for your safety."
Only her years of training keep her from crying, here, in one of the small social areas within the Senate Building, for all that she has lost.
No one else has cared until now.
There is a tiny comm in her pocket, when she undresses that night. It has the smooth lines she considers a hallmark of Alderaaian design, sleek and pale green-white and lovely. Everything that comes from Alderaan is.
There is a message, in plain text, on the comm - Padmé hasn't seen a text-only comm in years, not since she was Queen and her handmaidens sometimes used them to communicate discreetly while attending her, or pretending to be her.
0100 standard. The usual place.
Bail's callsign feels almost like a mockery - is this all a ruse? Will he turn her in, put her in Vader's arms as a traitor?
(Will Vader's hands once more seal her throat from twenty yards away? She never feared the Force, not until Anakin used it to try and kill her.)
Turning in a traitor would buy an awful lot of good will for Alderaan, and Bail Organa is nothing if not loyal to his homeworld. If he was known to be so loyal as to hand over someone thought to be conspiring against the Empire, then there would be no way for anyone to doubt Alderaan's position within the Empire, least of all the Emperor himself.
However, Bail as she knows him - as she knew him, she supposes - was always more a dissident than anything. It was with him that she first shared her fears over the fractured, falling state of the Republic, and with him that she gathered a band of conspirators. It was with Bail that she began planning a mass succession from the Republic, for fear of it becoming just precisely this.
Has it really been less than a year?
Usual password? she comms back, not caring whether this is the right thing or the wrong. She's reached a point of do-or-die - if she doesn't do, she will die.
And frankly, Padmé thinks, sitting down at the elaborate dressing table in her elaborate bedroom and picking up an elaborate comb, there's far too much fighting left for her to just lay down and die.
Bail's official offices in the Senate Office Building are much the same as Padmé's own, touched here and there with hints of his personality - a banner of the House of Organa which hangs behind his desk, two broad stripes the rich green of their precious emerald grapes sharp against the misty silver-grey background, primary among them.
His other office, hidden away in the financial district, is far more nondescript, and far less likely to be spied upon. It could be the office of any comfortable financier, with shuttered windows and heavy doors, and Padmé breathes deeply as soon as she is inside.
Mon is there. Tall and elegant and regal, just as she has always been, and there is compassion in her lovely face without any of the pity or scorn Padmé had feared she would be met with.
"I am so, so sorry," Mon says, taking Padmé's face in her hands. "Bail told me of your loss, my friend. I am sorry."
Padmé remembers, very slightly, that Mon lost a child. It was years ago, during Padmé's first year or two as a senator, but evidently the pain does not fade.
A little boy, she thinks. She half remembers seeing holos of the boy, red hair dimmed by the blue transmission, but he had his mother's long nose and high brow, even as little more than a toddler. She wonders what her babies would have looked like, because she cannot believe that they would match up with her dreams of the lake on Naboo.
"There is nothing to compare it to," Bail agrees, arriving beside them with a cup in his hand - a cup for Padmé, evidently, since he takes her hand and wraps her fingers around the warm porcelain. "Breha and I have had- difficulties. We know something of your pain, but, of course, there are none of us here who know all of it."
Other friends are gathered, friends who Padmé has known and trusted with everything in her life short of Anakin for years now, and she sinks into this remnant of her old life as easily as if she had never left, as if she does not have to be sure to be back in her new apartments in the Imperial Palace at least an hour before dawn so that Vader does not know she left, as if her skin does not crawl with every second she spends in her husband's company, as if she does not wake every night at least once, screaming for all that she has lost, that he has done.
"I know the other side of it," someone says, and Padmé chokes back a sob when Ahsoka steps forward, her lovely face drawn and new scars criss-crossing her arms and shoulders. "Had I known what he would become, Senator Amidala, I would never have left the Order."
"Had I know what he would become," Padmé says, "I would have smothered him in his sleep years ago."
There is a beat, a choking silence (and doesn't she understand just how that feels, better than anyone else in this dimly lit office), and then a burst of laughter that might be hysteria, but which feels like healing.
Padmé manages to join in before everyone else stops.
Everything she knows of Vader's movements, and of the Emperor's, in return for a safe haven, and a home, once the Empire falls.
Padmé wants nothing more than to see the Empire fall, except perhaps the lake on Naboo, with a fair-haired boy and a dark-haired girl and a man whose temper scared him more than anything except the thought of her coming to harm.
But she cannot have the lake on Naboo, not really. So she will become a charming, eager wife to Lord Vader, and she will force herself not to show even the slight hint of revulsion when the Emperor presses his scaly lips to her hand, and she will become a font of knowledge for the Rebellion, gathering intelligence that no one else could possibly reach.
Ahsoka kisses her on both cheeks, as fierce and powerful as Padmé feels small and lost, and it feels like a beginning, a flash of true hope where Padmé has only known despair, this last while. If she and Ahsoka could become friends, building something good from the ruins of Anakin's legacy, then perhaps all is not lost.
Bail tucks the little porcelain cup into a tiny box stuffed with soft cloth, and tells her to bring it with her. There is a transmitter embedded in the base, and if she keeps the cup with her - a cup decorated with the crest of the Royal House of Naboo, so it will not draw undue attention - they will always be able to find her.
She takes it as a promise, rather than a threat.
"My children are lost," she whispers to the broad panes of transparasteel around her bed, looking out over the theatre district, looking out over a life she cannot believe has continued unchanged since the rise of the Empire. "But the galaxy is not."
She could not save her children, but maybe she can save the galaxy. It might not be the legacy she wanted, that she wants, but it is a better legacy than most, and it will have to do.