I, Loving Freedom, and Untried
A/N: I really love Padmé. Title from Wordsworth's vaguely ghastly poem 'Ode to Duty.'
Padmé was not happy.
She wasn't sure she could say she had ever been happy, but that was probably the encroaching feeling of being old, in her mid twenties and neck deep in her career, half her life gone to service. The fact was, she had been happy, often and often. She had also, at times, been content.
She had however almost never been both of these things at once, because her happiness had always been in growth and learning and progress, and now it was difficult to be either. Galactic politics were agonizing in a way those of Naboo had never been.
Not just because she had so much less power, out among the stars. Not just because it often took work to understand the minds of people of other worlds and races in a way it never had at home, not even once formal relations were established with the Gungans.
It was because so much of galactic politics was composed of people not caring.
Obviously not every person cared about every thing on Naboo, but the great houses whose business it was to make decisions about weighty matters that did not necessarily affect them personally were raised to believe in service and magnanimity, and the meaning of duty and power, so that even the worst among her peers understood that what became of one became of all, and all of one.
Naboo had not been a closed system in over two hundred standard years, but the lessons of sustainability learned in order to live with the land where the water carried the memory of every error to every place, lingered, and were nurtured.
Padmé could not understand how easy it was for so many beings to take a problem, and throw it out among the stars to become some other system's worry, and consider that any sort of solution. What was the Republic for, if not for solving problems jointly, to everyone's wellbeing? (She did understand, though, because it was her job and she was good at it, she understood how they learned to be so parochial and so cruel and it broke her heart, that this was such a common lesson.)
That was why she had watched the Trade Federation all those years, since Anakin had defeated that first droid army. Waiting for them to make another play at outright, illegal tyranny. Hoping to stop them dead, before they could do any more harm, when they did. (Failing.)
Not because she held grudges, though she admitted she did so rather more than was entirely gracious. But because they had been her problem, and she had stopped them as much as she could, stopped them from taking any more from her people and gotten reparations out of them to compensate a little of the loss, but the odds were good they'd go on to be someone else's problem. Someone with fewer defenses or less luck. And it was her business, now, if they did.
You didn't drive off a Rising Eater from your boat and hope it devoured somebody else's. You called every fisher in the immediate sea together and harpooned it as soon as it surfaced again until it was dead.
This was why she liked the Jedi. They were raised the way the great houses of Naboo were: to be patient, and take everyone's needs into consideration, and not stand by with their hands at their sides when faced with problems that did not touch the Temple walls.
She didn't always trust them to come to conclusions she agreed with, thought they were too obviously Core-raised and failed to understand the Mid-Rim as badly as she often did the Outer Rim, but she had always liked them. They felt like home.
And yet that was what she liked in Ani, too: that he had not been raised that way, not from the start. That he was kind and cared not because he had been meticulously shaped to understand why he should, but because it tore him apart to understand someone's suffering and not act to ease it.
He had learned graces and vocabulary and skills among the Jedi but that part of him, that fierce heart's fire that had led him to offer them shelter the day they met, and risk his life for her mission to save her people with no promise of reward twice over the next week, that part still burned with the heat it had learned under Tatooine's suns, that he and his mother might survive the frigid desert nights.
She even, guiltily, loved how selfish that loving fire could be—that Anakin burst through the bonds of guilt at making irresponsible choices, felt them but did not let them stop him, for the sake of being happy.
Anakin cared. He cared about the galaxy, about the worlds he was sent to aid, about the Jedi Order, about Obi-Wan. And about her. He cared about Padmé, personally, fiercely, in a way not even her handmaidens ever had. Even Sabé who was her other heart had the deep stillness of Naboo lagoons in her, and had served Amidala before and above loving Padmé.
Her parents had let her go when she was ten, and chose to enter the Legislative Youth program—they loved her, dearly, and she them, and that would never change, but they had let her go. They knew that once she went into service she would never be theirs again, not even when her career came to its natural end, and they'd accepted it.
It had been the virtuous thing and the honorable thing and showed their abiding respect for her personal autonomy, but also it set a distance between them that would never quite close.
Anakin had spent ten years among the Jedi. He respected her vocation without her needing ever to defend it. But he would never let her go just because she chose a lonely destiny. He would follow her along it, every step, at any cost. He was hers.
Padmé had not realized until she chose him how desperately she had needed to have someone who was hers.
And now he was going off to war, almost as soon as their vows were pledged, and here she was in the Senate, trying not to despair as she listened to her colleagues' brazen self-interest and understood, even if she could not accept it.
She always understood. That was her trouble.
This time, she understood a little too well.
She thought perhaps if the Separatists offered peace at too high a price, peace perhaps at the expense of not defending Republic worlds they were kidnapping into their power and the power of the Trade Federation's untrammeled exploitation, she would be influenced too highly in her decision by her secret, driving need to have the war ended and her husband home, before his duty killed him.
Even if the war ended well, even if democracy was not only preserved but purged clean and bettered by meeting this challenge, if it cost Padmé her Ani she did not think she could ever be happy again.
And shamefully, she feared that. She would not let the fear control her, she would fight not to let it influence her, but she did fear that pain. The dark face of encompassing love; the thing that had brought Ani back to her with hidden blood on his hands and a shattered darkness in his eyes, under the pitiless Tatooine suns.
She understood, now, why the rulers of Naboo were trained to unselfishness from childhood. She understood that the purity her people valued in electing teenage queens was not simply the pure passion for life and justice you found only in young girls, or the way they had yet to acquire that patina of cynicism that made it easy and easier to choose cruelly.
She understood, now, on a level she never had before, why their ideal was to restrict true power into the hands of those who had the least to love or lose.
She wasn't sure they were entirely right, because she thought that over time the cynicism was inevitable either way, and having personal loves to anchor you was better than becoming worn down too much to remember how to care (was that what had become of Palpatine? Was that why he made so many decisions as Chancellor she could not support, much as she'd like to?) but she understood.
Was prepared on the revelation of her marriage, once this crisis was past, to retreat into an advisory capacity where her experience could be of value to Naboo, without her potential burn-out or emotional compromise steering its course, and find a new form of service to fill her life once she had spent a little while merely being happy.
Once you retired, you were allowed to do that. You could go into near-seclusion except for offering advice when called upon, and do nothing more meaningful than repot roses or raise voorpaks for a decade, if you liked, before anyone expected anything more of you.
She would have all the time she needed to recover her strength and luxuriate in her freedom, and in time find a new form of service that asked a little less. That left her something for herself, and her loves.
This war was her business, her duty to see through. The war against the Trade Federation, the monster of her reign, bearing the mark of her spear, and whatever legal precedents were set in combating that monster's appetite: hers. She could no more walk away from the galaxy in this time of need than Anakin could see Obi-Wan wounded before him, and leave him bleeding.
So each of them would fight, day by day, and dodge droids and assassins to stay alive: for themselves, and for the galaxy, and for their beloved spouse.
One day, hopefully a day that was soon, it would all be resolved, and Padmé would find herself sorting out the reconstruction plans for contested planets, and serving on whatever committee was formed to set up post-war benefits and employment opportunities for the clones, and while she was hoping, Judicial would get a thorough shakeup and be able to address interplanetary conflicts with some level of efficiency and effectiveness.
And the Jedi would be allowed to rest and mourn.
And she and Ani would be free. Free to go home, together. Free to build their own hearth in her family's compound, free to let Ani look her parents and sisters and cousins in the eyes and call them Mother and Sister and Cousin because they were married and her family was his, and nothing could take that from them.
And until the war ended and that day came, they would serve with all their strength, as they had been trained to do, and warm themselves at one another's hearths when they could.
And dream of earning happiness.