Author's Note: My first Star Wars fic, and one that has been sitting around in my head for ages just waiting for the time to be written. Less a story and more a series of vignettes (the length will vary) taking place within the Revenge of the Sith timeline. These won't be posted in chronological order, but by the end should hopefully come together to form a cohesive whole. I'm not sure how many chapters this will contain, but it will probably depend largely on the feedback. So if you like it, review.
Slouching Toward Bethlehem
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
(William Butler Yeats – The Second Coming)
Waiting
It rains incessantly.
Half mesmerised, Senator Amidala watches the droplets pounding against the balcony railing and leaving silvered rivulets on the metal. Some fall on her bare arms, not cold, but warm. This is no longer unusual. The city blurs before her gaze, a rising sea of fire and glass. She tilts her head back, looking up at the sky, or what she can see of it.
Her apartment is many storeys up, higher indeed than most of the city can boast, but it would take a power greater than hers to discern what is happening beyond those lowering clouds that hover over Coruscant, a smokescreen mirroring a confusion that has spread across the entire Galaxy. She lifts her face up, feeling the rain soak through her in a baptism of pain. It is heated no doubt by the fires of war taking place above the clouds. Every now and then, she can descry red flares streaking across the dark grey sky. There is no way of knowing what it means, small victory or substantial defeat, only the dark tedium of hours before the result of this skirmish will be discussed in detail in the next Senate meeting.
It reminds her of looking up at the stars, only to know that they have probably died long ago, it is only their light that is visible years after they have burned out.
There is something restless and unsettled in her soul tonight. The city is too quiet. Unnerving. In spite of the rain, the atmosphere is stifling and oppressive, the kind of brooding, slumbering expectancy that normally precedes a storm. The rainfall causes steam to rise from the traffic below, and her curling hair has begun to frizz slightly at the ends. Although the warmth is verging on oppressive, she shivers in her thin nightgown, the natural Nubian material a far cry from the opulence of her usual wardrobe. Her fingers pluck at the light fabric, its pastel shades seeming woefully out of place in this terrible world with its hard colours of metal and blood and fire.
But oh, there is not fire enough in the world that could warm her until he returns.
Padme tightens her hold on the cool metal as the dream she sought to escape curls around the dark places in her memory. Night after night her sleep is disturbed by hauntingly erotic dreams. They are always the same, yet so very different. He is in them of course, waiting for her with a smouldering intensity; his cerulean eyes the most vivid thing in this dark world. Then nothing but blurring pleasure and darkness, a sensual mouth moving over her own and breathing in her ears, thick and heavy, her hands entwining in the coverlets. How often she has awoken to find only a cold, empty room, her heart pounding with a fierce and ungovernable yearning. Then she tries to sleep once more, because she feels more vividly alive in the dream-world than in the real one.
Anakin Skywalker. Her knight, her lover, her handsome death. He is steel and flame, her salvation and destruction. Protected by leather armour and an arrogant smirk that dances the edge of danger before diving headlong in. It has been nearly six months since she last set eyes on him. No news other than whispers and snatches she can glean from the Holonet, always careful not to show too much interest.
Where are you, she wonders helplessly.
Beneath her, momentarily, the ground rolls like thunder.
When she looks up again, something – a shadow, a ripple – moves in the corners of her vision. She turns quickly, a ridiculous hope rising within her. Of course, it is only her handmaid, smiling with a kindness that does not quite hide the concern in her eyes. Padme feels her chest contract in disappointment, her heart breaking just that little bit more. However, she covers her fractured soul with a brittle smile. Old routine, long practised. The Senate has taught her well.
"Is everything alright, Milady?"
The air swims and she feels dizzy; it takes a moment to catch what her handmaid is saying.
"Yes, thank you, Dorme. I merely wished for a little air."
She wonders if the lie is convincing. It hardly matters. The pain of missing Anakin is one she must endure alone within her own private world, and it is a world she is not yet willing to let her handmaid have a glimpse inside.
Dorme, the only third person to know of their marriage. Padme was reluctant to divulge the secret at first; she is such an intensely private person that she has trained herself never to disclose any information, personal matters least of all. But Dorme was already suspicious. Anakin's frequent visits, her mistress's secretive behaviour led her to confront her mistress directly.
She could have denied it, of course. After all, with the military and political situation Anakin is absent far more than he is present and her behaviour she could chalk up to the fact that her duties were taking their toll. However, she knows that her handmaid, when her curiosity is piqued, will leave no stone unturned in trying to solve the mystery, but trust her with a secret and she will guard it with her life.
"Where is Threepio?" Padme asks. Her voice is calm and cool. Fragments of everyday conversation they have all begun to fall back on, to persuade themselves that life still holds some kind of normalcy.
"I sent him on an errand. I thought you would want some peace and quiet."
Padme smiles slightly. "He's an excellent droid. Anakin made him himself, you know. But he can be a little –"
"Overzealous?" suggests Dorme.
"Yes."
Her handmaid comes towards her then, her hood drawn up against the soldering rain. The sapphire shade accentuates the vivid blue of her eyes, and why that particular colour should cause Padme such a thick, constricting sensation of ethereal pain she chooses not to consider.
"You need to look after yourself, Milady." Dorme's voice is almost lost in the harsh, unremitting downpour, the clang of water on metal. "If not for own sake, then at least for your baby's."
Padme shivers then, although she is never normally a person who shivers, or trembles. She focuses her gaze on a Speeder that passes just below her balcony and concentrates on breathing slowly, the completeness of it. The air is stifling; it feels like she is inhaling ashes.
It had been impossible to hide the pregnancy from Dorme. The frequent nausea, the irrational mood swings had alerted her naturally astute handmaid to the situation a matter of days after she had discovered it herself.
Padme had cried when she first discovered her pregnancy. Overcome by fear, resentment and bitter anger, she had lain on her bed and sobbed in her husband's absence, willing the child growing inside her to disappear. But as the months passed, the fear and anxiety were fading in the wake of a fierce, ungovernable love for her unborn baby that frightens her with its intensity. She has never loved anything the way she loves this child. Her naturally caring nature is heightened and augmented, and she knows she would die a thousand deaths to protect it. In a gesture, new and uncommon to her, she slides a hand towards her stomach, feeling the unfamiliar swelling beneath a sea of silk.
A sudden, vivid flare illuminates the sky with frightening red light. Her hand stops mid-motion, the breath catching in her throat with shock. For a moment, it seems as though the city is bathed in blood. The illusion goes as quickly as it came; only a trick of the light after all, as the sky is already returning to black.
She knows there will be no dawn.