Chapter 1: In Which Tragedy Is Not an End But a Beginning
Padme wakes on a medical shell in a metal room with a metal droid on the other side of the room making whistling noises that she recognizes as an old comfort pattern. She is unreasonably calm. For this moment, she is entirely disoriented. Her stomach is flatter than it should be. She is not in her apartment on Coruscant. This room is blank and ugly and sterile. Behind her mask of manners, it makes her cringe in the bottom of her decorous Naboo soul.
She feels her stomach, empty of child, and then she - she remembers. Giving birth in this cold room. Twins. She was going to surprise Anakin. She named them, Luke and Leia, one for her and one for him. She was going to surprise her husband. But he's turned into somebody she can't recognize - gone down a path she can't follow. He choked her. That's when she knew she'd lost him. Her Ani would never have done that to her.
Carefully, Padme feels the rest of her body. There wasn't any pain, which means she was probably on heavy medication for the childbirth. There was a cast around her throat - probably why she was still alive. She closes her eyes, then opens them, and tries to take small breaths. Deeper ones. Concentrate, she tells herself. Don't fall apart. She tries to move her leg, and manages about a meter off the table before letting it fall back down. Her spinal cord is fine. Her legs and arms are fine.
She closes her eyes again, letting herself cry a little. It's not that she's ashamed of crying; it's just that she wants to see her babies first. She doesn't want the first time they see her to be full of tears. They deserve a mom who can smile and not be overwhelmed by grief.
Padme decides she can work on that later as the medical droid scuttles around, calling her Patient 187. Her two babies are nearby, in specialized neonatal units. It reassures her that they're as healthy as twin premature babies can be. It also tells her that Bail, Obi-wan and Yoda are nearby, if she's ready to talk to them. It means to be comforting.
If she can't have her mother, she supposes three men were the next best thing, so she gives the droid the go ahead. It shuffles off with an aura of disappointment, and Padme feels a little bad for being so curt. But the fact that she can speak at all is incredible, so. Small steps. Her great-grandmother hadn't talked for three weeks after losing her wife. It can check her over later.
She wasn't sure of what to anticipate. She'd hoped - she'd hoped that Anakin would have this conversation with the Jedi, while she supported him. But she has nothing to be ashamed of, here. All they had between them was love, and the expression of it. She'd always thought that Obi-wan had quietly condoned them. It wasn't as if their relationship had been some big secret. It wasn't as if either of them had been trying too hard to hide.
Maybe she'd hoped, a little, that something would come up and Anakin wouldn't be able to pretend anymore, and then he'd see that what he'd been avoiding hadn't been something to be fear after all. The realization hits her then, just like that - maybe his fear was greater than his love.
She tucks that thought away as Bail, Yoda, and Obi-wan come in, looking like they haven't slept in ages. Obi-wan's eyes are more tender than she's comfortable with seeing, more attached than a good Jedi should be. "How do you feel?" he asks.
"Like I just gave birth to twins after my husband turned to the Dark Side," she says, because she doesn't have the patience to wander around the coils of this conversation. She feels her focus ebbing, a little, as she watches Yoda hop up to one of the other beds. "Can you raise my bed, please?" She doesn't trust her arms to function the way she wants them to yet, and she wants to be at equal eye level with them.
Obi-wan obliges her while Yoda sits. "How long have you been married?" Yoda asks, because of course he does.
"Since the beginning of the Clone Wars." Their six-year anniversary is coming up. Was coming up. "Is Anakin alive?" Padme can't pretend to be anything but concerned. He's her husband. She's allowed to care.
Obi-wan and Yoda look at each other. "I left him on Mustafar," Obi-wan says, picking his words carefully. Padme's nerf-shit sensors ping. "It would have been very difficult for him to survive. Padme, I don't think he's Anakin anymore. Anakin would never have done this."
Yoda shuffles in his seat. Padme looks from Obi-wan to him, and back, and she - she knows. "You left him." She thinks back. She'd been struggling to breathe, screaming any way she had, using everything she had. "You left him to save me."
The pain in Obi-wan's face is unbearable. She closes her eyes to shut it out like light. "Yes," he says. "I thought that the man Anakin had been would have preferred to die than to be what he had become."
But you couldn't make the killing blow, Padme thinks. And neither could I. She imagines the scene for one brief, startling moment, the way that it would be in a holovid: bright lava, dark against light, the screaming, the burning. As if she had been there herself. In that moment of selfishness, she's glad. There is a part of her that has the capacity for anger: for herself; for her children; for the Jedi Anakin called family that he betrayed.
"He was afraid," she says. Yoda lifts up his head and looks at her. "I didn't know he was doing this until it was done. But I know that he was afraid for me the way that he was afraid for his mother. He thought I was going to die in childbirth."
She looks down at herself. There is something grimly amusing about the fact that the reason she's still alive has nothing to do with him, if you were into cruel ironies. She - she should have known. She'd known what he'd done when his mother was threatened, even if she hadn't quite believed it. She hadn't engaged. She'd let time smooth it over, hoping it'd be fine. Clearly, it wasn't.
"Fear leads to anger," Yoda says. "Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. It is the path to the Dark Side." He lets out a sigh. Dooku had been his apprentice, once upon a time; he had failed him. "This is why attachment is forbidden to the Jedi."
"Attachment is not what made Anakin afraid," Padme rasps out sharply. She has a good six years of words waiting to tumble out of her, and none of them will wait for her voice to clear. "Your inability to accept and understand him is what made him afraid. He was a slave, and you bought him, and you expected him to be a perfect Jedi under the threat that you would throw him out if he didn't comply.
"You bought him and expected him to cut off his mother as if he'd never known her. As if the fact that she was still living in slavery wouldn't affect him. As if knowing that she could be sold, raped, murdered, and beaten at a command shouldn't worry him or make him angry. When he brought up concerns you ignored him. When Ahsoka was under trial you abandoned her." Obi-wan flinches. Good. "These things aren't attachments, they're normal sentient relationships! It's not attachment to honor them! It's respect!"
Padme finds herself breathing heavily. She should have said this all earlier. Maybe she could have stopped these horrors by speaking her mind. She'd been afraid to lose her tenuous allies. But now here they were, at the end of the galaxy, and if words were all that were left to her she would use them. Bail was looking at her like he had never seen her before. She hadn't discussed Anakin with him. Maybe she should have. Should have, could have - all she had was the present. Padme gathers herself for one last burst through her still-wounded throat.
"It is legitimate to be angry at the cruelty of the galaxy. It is legitimate to fear for your loved ones. It is legitimate to hate evil. You don't achieve serenity by pretending that these emotions don't exist, or by believing that having them makes you a horrible sentient!" Where were her debate classes? Professor Xun would rake her over the coals for not finishing off with a symmetrical rebuttal. "Fear can lead to action. Anger can lead to clarity. Suffering can lead to compassion."
"You skipped hatred," Bail says mildly, but mostly to needle her.
Padme shoots a glare at him. Damn their years of joint speechwriting. "They gave me the good meds," she says. "Ugh. Hatred can lead to understanding? You've never hated anything so much you had to understand how it works?" It feels like a reach, but in this moment she believes in it with all of her still-functioning brain. Bail spreads his hands, still grinning, like the pest of an older brother he was. She feels suddenly deeply grateful for his presence. He could not be here without substantial risk to himself. At least, in the middle of all this, there's somebody familiar.
"Padme, you are a great light in the galaxy," Yoda says. "If you had died, at peace I would not be. Think on these things, I will." His wrinkled head seems deeper, somehow.
She feels her anger crumble, some. "That's all I can ask," she says. Stars above. "I know that Anakin has done terrible things. He killed all the younglings at the Temple." Saying it aloud made it real. Not her Anakin. But there it was, anyways. She couldn't say she loved him and not understand this about him - that he was capable of youngling murder when afraid and angry. That he was capable of youngling murder when it came to protecting her life.
"He called himself Darth Vader," Obi-wan says. "He's in the service of Emperor Palpatine, also known as Darth Sidious. I don't know how long Sidious has been influencing him." Even his beard was sad - unclipped, ruffled, slept-on wrong. He hadn't been like this since Satine, Padme realizes with a start. "I should have seen the signs. I should have stopped this."
"My planet elected him as Senator for twenty years," she says. "I called for the no confidence vote in Chancellor Valorum as Queen on his suggestion. We were all fooled."
"Even those of us who should have known better, hmm," says Yoda. "Complacent, the Jedi were. Too trusting. Too presumptive. All of us, blind." He sounds tired, and old.
"And now he's Emperor," Bail adds. From his mouth it was like a curse. "An Emperor with an army of clones ready to turn on anyone at his command. There'll be peace, but at the price of a blaster at our heads."
What a way to live, Padme thinks. What a way to raise her children. More fear, anger, hatred, suffering. She longs, desperately, for her mother. She wants to hug her. She wants to cry. She wants to pretend for a little while that a universe where these things could happen wasn't the one she lived in.
But she was a mother now. She was the only parent Luke and Leia had. She had to be strong. "How long will it take me to heal?" she asks. Her throat hurts. She tabs the droid for water, and drinks gratefully.
"A few days, for the childbirth," Yoda says. "Longer, your throat will take. Neither Obi-wan or I have skill with healing, but what we can do, we will." He seems pensive. "No safe place for Jedi there now is. For you, the Senate is no haven. Not while Luke and Leia are with you."
Padme lets out a short laugh. "No," she says, "I don't think it is. And Naboo is too predictable." She misses home. It devastates her to think what Sidious might make of it. But it was too strategic; too important. She could hide with the Gungans, maybe, but for how long? She'd be noticeable. Naboo was no option for her and her children.
"It's a big decision," Bail says. "You don't have to make up your mind right away. This is far enough away from the Republic that they shouldn't be able to track us down. I'm going to have to return to Alderaan soon, though. I'll be missed." He had a planet to care about, too, and Breha deserved to have her husband with her as she tackled leading her homeworld in this catastrophe.
Yoda pauses. "This, you will not like to hear," he says. "But perhaps it is that your children will be safer away from you. Adoption-"
"No," Padme says, without thinking, without breathing. "So I could return to a Senate that has become entirely ineffectual? So Palpatine can mutter threats in my ear until I break and tell him where Luke and Leia are? He took Anakin. He's not getting my children." Besides, position wasn't the only way to be politically active. It wouldn't be the first time she'd used a pseudonym to publish papers. Or viruses to circulate them, for that matter.
Yoda nods briskly. "So it is, then." He did not seem relieved. But he respected her decision, for which she was grateful.
"I'll go wherever you go, Padme," Obi-wan says. She looks up at him, startled. "I owe it to Anakin. And as it stands, I have nowhere else to go."
All the Jedi were dead. Maybe some stragglers had survived, but not many, Padme knows. It would not be long until the rest were hunted down. She can follow these steps at least, even if her mind cannot fully contain the atrocities that she knows have happened. Her political acumen hasn't failed her that much.
"Thank you," she says. "You've always been a good friend." It would be nice to not have to do this alone. "Has anyone heard from Ahsoka? Last I heard, she was striking up in the bounty hunter business."
Obi-wan and Yoda exchange looks. Bail responds. "She hasn't made contact."
"Sabé might know," Padme says before yawning. "She was in charge of my black ops work. I asked her to pass on a few assignments." She feels so sleepy, suddenly. Childbirth, and the ensuing medications, would do that to you.
Yoda hops down from his table and pats her hand gently. "Rest," he says. "We will manage without you. Heal, you must."
Padme forces herself awake. "I want to see Luke and Leia." She could do this. "I just want to hold them." They were babies - they probably didn't care - but she wanted them to know that she cared. She wanted to see who she'd spent eight months carrying.
"Of course," Obi-wan says. He and Bail headed over to the neonatal units and returned quickly, each with a red-faced newborn.
The babies didn't have clothes. The station hadn't been prepped for that, and Padme hadn't prepared her spacecraft for an early delivery. But they had blankets, and that would have to be good enough for now. Padme thinks longingly of the baby clothes she'd bought and the nursery she'd designed on Coruscant in hope for a future that would now never be. Padme had been a politician whose biggest secret was a forbidden romance. She was an idealist, a fighter, and a lover. Who she would be now was anyone's guess, least of all her own. But what she was right now, in this moment, was a mother, like her mother before her.
She falls asleep like that, holding her babies, hoping beyond hope that they would have a future. It might not be what she'd grown up with - they might never be able to run for office on Naboo - they might never be Jedi - but if she kept fighting they might still have one. She had to try to make that possible for them. She had to make it so they would not live in fear. If she did that - maybe she could say that she had not failed entirely.