CORUSCANT BEGINNING
There was a dry electric crackle in the air. Something that would get inside your mouth as a sensation of pins and needles and travel down your throat. In some parts of Coruscant the ground would shake as parts of the lower levels would collapse, bringing the levels built on top and very often the surrounding areas down with it. Many miles away the sound of this could be heard as a distant rumble. The air was thankfully still working but had acquired a metallic taste and a faint perfume of ozone. The air of the upper levels of Coruscant was not supposed to have any taste.
Sabe had asked Padme about this again and again, Padme kept responding that it was having no effect on either child. Sabe suspected that in most parts of the day she only thought of them in regards to how they impeded her mobility and sapped her energy. Sabe wasn't sure why she simply didn't have them removed and brought to term in an artificial womb, perhaps it had something to do with being an aristocrat. The Nabberie family name was ancient almost primordial, Sabe was an orphan who had risen up to handmaiden by talent and effort she was aware she wasn't in a position to truly understand even if the two of them were as close as friends could be.
Padme's doctors both sentient and Droid had chided her for demanding the best of both worlds, a traditional pregnancy and maintaining her political career in the Galactic Senate and blindly expecting the medical sciences to deliver.
She had listened politely and then with a sophisticated mixture of selective logic, heartfelt emotional appeals and other tools of rhetoric had managed to make them concede that if they couldn't deter her their responsibility was to give her the best chance she could possibly have. This was particularly interesting to watch in the case of the droids, in one case it's vocaliser malfunctioned causing it to sound as if it were sputtering in indignation.
The medical sciences could deliver miracles but it could only do so much to alleviate the physical strain on her body or her carelessness with her health. Sabe and her fellow handmaidens most important duty these days was to ensure that she ate and slept enough. Padme's enterprising and uncharacteristically morbid suggestion being fed through an intravenous drip while she slept was not an adequate substitute!
Preoccupied with how values and rights of the Republic were being hollowed out from within she couldn't spare any thought for matters like eating or sleeping.
At this moment Sabe was watching her lying in her bed dictating voice memos to herself with the datapad responding to any questions she asked. Her eyes were bloodshot and without her make up you could see her sallow complexion and the scaly bags under her eyes.
It was too much far too much for one person to fully process, just keeping an understanding of the elite bubble that was the Galactic Senate was an all-consuming task. Being on top of this and the the actual state of the Republic it presided over was surely beyond mortal human capacities.
Padmegave no complaint about her children (not born yet but soon enough) but Sabe knew she would be glad to see them out of her. Sabe had been preparing herself for the past few months for the distinct possibility that she would have to practically raise them herself so their mother could fulfil her inhuman political responsibilities. It would be a necessary sacrifice, as a friend and aide Sabe knew Padme's fears were warranted. Tensions that had been managed and balanced for centuries suddenly becoming intolerable.
A few hours ago a report had been issued stating that the Jedi Council had attempted to assassinate the Supreme Chancellor, claiming he was a Sith Lord. (In short the republics head of state was evil personified.) Such accusations against the highest political figures had long been common- almost routine.
It was impossible it was unthinkable. The grand old alliance between Senate and Temple was one of the few constants throughout the history of the Republic. Once this report had been made there had been a general blackout of the holonet, Sabe hadn't known that was possible yet here they were. In a dark apartment at 500 Republica with Padme muttering away to herself with Sabe sitting in a chair close by. The other handmaidens were elsewhere trying to gain facts or rumours by word of mouth despite the current curfew and its enforcers.
It was all so far outside Sabe's control that she was pretending for the moment that nothing existed outside of Padme's apartment. The senate? The Phantom Sith Lords? The possible death of the world city of Coruscant? The separatist armies responsible for so much suffering? They didn't exist they didn't exist they were all just the product of t a feverish mind.
Looking for something to focus on, besides her feverish imaginings. Sabe's gaze settled on the chrono on the wall opposite her, an old analog device that was always exactly twenty minutes behind the actual time and defied any attempt at repair. According to the clock after you added on the missing twenty minutes it was twenty minutes past the beginning of the nineteenth hour of the day. It was enough to draw her out of her mind sufficiently to realise how tightly she was gripping the fabric of her dress. Now aware she consciously loosened her grip, though not letting go. She forced herself to make a smile that ccouldn't reach her eyes. It was best to fake it till you make it when the alternative was anxiety that could escalate into panic.
The galaxy was crumbling. Not for the first time in it's long history but now it was happening in her own life time. These sorts of things weren't supposed to happen anymore, they were supposed to stay in that foreign country that was the past and not trespass on the borders of the present.
She must have blinked,
She was no longer in her chair but standing by the front door of the apartment. Her brain, unable to process this instantaneous transition from sitting to standing caused her legs to buckle beneath her. She didn't dare to get up in case something else happened.
She lay there for what stretched into an hour but in truth was only a minute. The ceiling didn't melt; the fibres of the carpet didn't turn into worms. She seemed to have a grip on reality despite the Gordian knot of fear in her stomach. She pushed herself up with her arms taking careful measured breaths. She remembered her duties, was Padme secure? Resisting the urge to run back to the bedroom, because this would be an admission of panic she walked back to the bedroom with careful deliberate steps not quite ready to trust herself.
Padme was, almost inevitably gone.
What had happened to her?
We will be brief about the fate of Padme because it is unpleasant.
She was taken by three Jedi, who had somehow acquired word of the identity of her children's father and had been told on great authority that they must be hidden from both their father and the Supreme Chancellor. The former was now a supreme traitor to all Jedi and the Supreme Chancellor actually was an incognito dark Lord of the Sith. Padme unable to process the claims they were making had reacted badly forcing the two Jedi to resort to compulsion, something which they were all ashamed of, two of them considered her friends and the third respected her reputation.
But they were scared, and there was no time. Their home the temple which was now a charnel house those who had been their sisters and brothers in all but name and blood.
They were able to smuggle Padme off-world but Padme died in the process of childbirth a few days later, something so rare for someone of her social class. It was almost a miracle. The truth is that her body had risen up against the dictatorship of her will and won albeit at the cost of self-destruction.
Sabe and the other handmaiden subsequently vanished like a good many others in the months that followed. But unlike many their whereabouts remained a mystery the officers of Republic Intelligence, the Chancellors Office and all the other official organs that make some claim of omniscience.
The children who had played a passive role in the death of Padme, an innocent pair of twins named Luke and Leia by their mother in her final moments, were told a great many things in later years- the vast majority of which was true, their elders and guardians had a visceral fear of lies, lies were the cause of this vast the vast disaster that reconstituted the Republic into something far, far, far away from what its name suggested.
Lies were the way of the Sith. And now two of them presided over the Ancient State. Vader in the temple and Sidious in the Senate.