Notes: I do this purely out of love and respect for the series and the characters. Thanks go to my beautiful beta reader, Magikfanfic.
The silence around her is so thick that people rarely move to penetrate it now. The most she has spoken in the last few weeks were the words that rambled and scrambled from her lips as she lay writhing under the birthing pains. Staring now at the children in the bassinets before her, she sighs softly and tears cloud her eyes but don't fall.
She's cried far too much already.
And it's time she stopped being the person she has become.
Looking over her shoulder as the door opens, Padme watches one of the very last Jedi come to her side. The way she looks at him, she could be looking right through him. Her eyes are hollow, and her beauty is stark, the thinness of her form evidencing the fact that she only eats to continue feeding her children.
"M'Lady?" he asks, and she flinches because the sound of his voice seems so loud against the silence of the small, normally locked chamber.
"I think," she starts, her voice rasping from not being used for so long, but she stops, staring at her children. They are her only means of breathing. They are her only reasons left to live. But they're just children, they're *not* life rafts meant for her to cling to. They were almost her death four times on the table, but miraculously she survived.
The whispers, among the very few who know the truth, are that it's because of The Force flowing through her children and slowly circulating out of her veins that kept her from dying.
But they don't know anything.
"Yes," Obiwan prompts softly, and she notices the gentle aspect of his face. How it reveals that he's full of wanting to reach out and yet stands feet from her lest she close up completely again if he reaches too far too fast. He knows he's the first person she's permitted in her presence in a week when human interference wasn't necessary for her children.
"I think," she starts again, rising from her chair, ignoring the shrieks of limbs that have lain silent for so long. She tries to still the inside of herself, to pull out that once invulnerable will that held her through years of being the proud queen and secret wife, but it feels battered now, full of holes. "I think that it's time for Padme Amidala Skywalker to die."
She doesn't look to him to hear his surprise, but she can feel it all the same. The pressure of the room, the sudden change in his tone like he is talking to someone standing on a ledge. "Padme, surely-"
Padme tells herself again, for the hundredth time that day, that she won't cry. The tears don't listen and fall down her cheeks. It's a silent and tragic dirge that exposes the explosion that's shaken her core. She looks at him that way, then toward her children, saying very simply, "It is the only way that we can live."
Letting Luke's small hand capture her finger, she continues to feel the tears fall, watches a few that actually land on the edge of the bassinet, before reaching out with her other hand to stroke Leia's sleeping form. She knows she's speaking in riddles, referring to herself in the third person. But it is the only way now. "Padme must die so that the three of us can live or there will be no chance for us. I, also, need to separate them for their protection and my own. I need you to arrange it for me, Ben."
There is a long silence, and she wonders what goes on in his mind. The conflict is present, and she wonders how the Jedi can focus past feeling everything around them so finely, so acutely. It'll fade now that her children aren't growing inside of her. The midiclorian levels in her system reverting to what they were before she carried the children of the most powerful Jedi known to live.
"He'll come back to us," she says after a second and that cloggy cloud touches everything coming from his hurt, his anger and his doubts. But the dreams that keep assailing her every night push her forward to speak, as she turns her head to look at Obiwan. "You'll see. One day when everything is different. Until that day arrives though, I will need to start gathering those allies who still feel as we do. Always in times of tyranny there are those who will rebel- who MUST rebel."
"Help me, please," Padme pleaded suddenly, shifting so fatalistically fast from strong to broken, holding out a hand to him. The future floods through her, telling her of the challenge ahead where she has to abandon both her own identity as well as the children who've been all she has left of her heart, leave her head spinning. "I'm not sure I can do this alone just yet."
He takes her hand, holding it as one might a sickened child's or a piece of fragile china, and his eyes are filled with doubts that she can see and feel, but he says the words to comfort her and perhaps to comfort the dying hopes in himself. "Of course, M'Lady."