Disclaimer: Everything belongs to George, Dave, and co.
Notes: This fic references characters and events from the Clone Wars episode "Children of the Force," and may contain minor spoilers. If you don't want to bother with watching the episode, you can look up "Mahtee Dunn" and "Roo Roo Page's mother" on Wookieepedia. This fic also works perfectly well without any knowledge of Clone Wars.
Warning: suicide
Mothers of the Disappeared
Shmi Skywalker had always known that her son would be lost to her.
When the Jedi came to tell her that Anakin had been freed, Shmi also heard what he didn't say.
She knew that she wouldn't be leaving Tatooine with them. She'd prepared for this eventuality; she'd even been expecting it since the moment the Jedi walked through her front door. And she'd already made her decision. Whatever else happened, she wanted her son to be free. So she let him go.
When he turned back, face crumpled in on itself, a child already motherless though not yet gone, she tried to comfort him with the old question. "What does your heart tell you?"
His answer was slim hope wrapped in strangling despair.
She reached out and held him close one last time. "We will see each other again," she whispered, and felt him straighten with determination in her arms.
It was the easiest lie she had ever told.
Kalhran Offee came from a long line of healers. She herself was a surgeon, and she would, perhaps, have been proud to know that her daughter, too, was a healer.
But she did not know this. She did not know anything about Barriss, beyond the shape and form of her two year old face, and her last anguished wail as she was taken away. Once a child was taken to train, there was no communication from the Jedi Temple.
For years, what she knew about her daughter was simply nothing. And then this: that her daughter was a traitor, and dead, and untimely young.
Shalka Tano knew three things about her daughter: she was fourteen years old, she had recently been apprenticed to the famed General Skywalker, and she was a soldier.
Shalka was a farmer herself, and her two other daughters looked likely to follow her in that profession. Rika, especially, had an affinity for seeds and young plants, for the birthing of new things.
Sometimes, when the night was darkest and most sleepless, Shalka tried to imagine battle: the smell and taste of it, the knowledge of life and death.
She kept a small holo taken from the news nets on a table beside her bed. In the image, Ahsoka stood beside General Skywalker: young, victorious, a stranger.
Shalka was in the fields with Rika when someone told her, drew her aside the short distance that meant loss. The Jedi, they said, were traitors, and her daughter—a stranger, fifteen, and a soldier—was dead.
Mahtee Dunn had not wanted her son to be a Jedi. Wee had been born with the war that claimed his father's life, and Mahtee had no illusions left to spare the Jedi.
But she did not have a choice. A traitorous, small voice within her wondered how many more mothers there were like her, if the Republic had been forced to pass a law to ensure their compliance.
Wee was not yet three years old when the Jedi took him for training. Not even a year later, the Jedi had been declared traitors to the Republic, and Wee was three years, seven months, and four days old. He would never grow any older.
Mahtee went to the chest in her bedroom and took out the old blaster, the one she'd bought on the day Wee's father died. She hefted it in her hand, remembering the Jedi and the bounty hunter who had both come for Wee, and laughing, a bit, because there had been no difference in the end.
She raised the blaster to her temple and squeezed the trigger.
Tal Tal Page had never let herself think about what would happen to her child until the day the Jedi came to take Roo Roo away. This was a conscious decision: she knew where such thoughts would take her. (Before the "Battle of Naboo," as the outworlders were calling it, the Republic had taken no notice of the Gungans. Their laws had not applied to the Gungans. They had not taken any Gungan children.)
After Roo Roo was gone, she couldn't stop the thoughts any more. She thought about how much they had won when they defeated the droid army, and bitterly wondered if it was enough to make up for everything they had lost.
She left the city and returned to the deep swamp, to cool water and the old ways and quiet talk of rebellion.
When they heard about the purges of the Jedi, Tal Tal refused to mourn. Her daughter was four years old and had been gone a year already. This was only a more final separation.
The Empire wanted to resettle the Gungans, to draw them out of the swamps. To civilize them. Roo Roo would have been seven years old. Her mother decided that she was done with bowing to the laws of humans.
Padmé Amidala had spent most of her pregnancy trying not to think about the Jedi.
She and Anakin had talked about the Jedi issue, of course, but only just. There was no easy solution, and neither of them had truly wanted to face it. Padmé had simply hoped (unreasonably, perhaps, but hoped all the same) that their child would not be Force sensitive.
In the end, the choice was taken from her as she had always known it would be. There was no Jedi Order and no Republic left by the time her children were born. But the Jedi took her children all the same.
They were only six women out of thousands.