"The age of the Galactic Republic is over. A group of politicians would gather around, talk about tea and disregard the worlds in need. During the era of the Republic, there was still slavery, child prostitution, illegal drug trades…" a woman in a light green pants suit argued against several other people sitting in a semicircle.
"I have to agree with Mally," a dark skinned woman with gold makeup nodded. "The Republic was just talk. The Emperor has promised things about his rise and he has delivered so far. Some of the Outer Rim planets are already being cleaned up. Gangsters are being cast off; drug rings are being taken apart…"
"He has delivered, but on what cost? This has turned into a takeover, and war has broken out. People who have been allies for centuries have turned their backs on each other. Thousands upon hundreds of thousands of people are dying." A second darker skinned woman snapped back, her shoulders squared. Her companion, a diminutive man with black hair and blue eyes, nodded silently, concurring.
"The Empire has, in its four years of standing, done more than the Republic has within a span of twenty. How can it not have our best interest at heart?" argued the first woman again.
Padmé changed the program.
"The Empire has closed off several Outer Rim planets due to the fugitives still on the run. While the Jedi continue to elude the Empire, all planets are asked to be on the lookout for them and to hand over any they may harbor…" Amar Kuklett, a Twi'lek reporter was all charm and smiles. Padmé didn't care for him. He made light of massacres and vicious guerrilla tactics the Empire employed to overthrow governments and snuff out those who even hinted at opposing the mandates of the new galactic order.
The old reporter, an older female human, had been replaced. Freedom of speech had been silenced; the woman had spoken the truth of the Empire live for the last time. Padmé kept her picture. There were so few who said what they meant and meant what they said.
A finger tapped at the glass. Padmé ignored it, instead concentrating on the Holonet reports of Palpatine's scourge of the galaxy. She couldn't help but curl her lip up about it. The tapping became more insistent and slowly the datapad floated out of her hands. Padmé floundered to grab for it. She held it tightly. The tapping stopped. Padmé did not look behind her, focusing on the news and other reports.
"The Imperial Army, under their Naval Commander Darth Vader, has recently just quelled a civil war happening within the galaxy, both planets signed over their monarchs and new governments are being established…"
A puppet government, of course; convenient to reach out to and easy to control. The Imperial Army was invasive, going into the cracks of the universe without so much as a by your leave, illegal searches were being conducting and sentient beings were sold or forced into slavery. Darth Vader, the Emperor's right hand, scoured the galaxy, tearing people and planets apart at his command. Anakin, the boy who had loved his mother so much – no, he was Darth Vader. He wasn't Anakin Skywalker, with dreams of grandeur and a heart of gold.
Darth Vader had no heart, but he had still been born from Anakin. What did it make Anakin?
A tear slid down but Padmé didn't bother to wipe it away. It was only one tear these days. It had become easier to not mourn for the boy who had told her he loved to pod race because it had felt so free. For the good of the galaxy, she prayed that Darth Vader would die, for the good of the boy who had pledged to help her on Tatooine.
She had cried often in the past for the little boy and the earnest padawan who had tried to make her fall in love with him. Maybe if she had loved him back, if she'd comforted him, maybe things would have been different. He'd needed love, love the Jedi couldn't provide. Instead, for all his comfort and insecurities, all he'd had was a twisted old man in the guise of the kindly grandfather.
She reached for her cup of tea and took a lengthy sip. It was spicy, made from an underground plant called chujupak, native on Dantooine. It burned her throat like good rum. She went to her reports, listing and documenting, cataloguing all that went on that she could manage to fit in her memory.
The tapping began behind her again and when she placed her cup down on its coaster, it slid to the left. Padmé closed her eyes for patience. "Stop that." Her voice was harsher than she had intended, but she couldn't help it anymore – not with, with that.
Things happened all at once, as if he'd heard her mind's echo of unease.
The lights flickered and the Holonet was abruptly shut off. Her datapad flew across the room and shattered into several pieces. She flinched when a piece of shrapnel hit her ankle. The tapping turned into knocking, a heavy fist slamming at the large tank filled with green bio-fluid.
Padmé reached for her tea again, if only to hold the warm comfort of a cup, something solid, but the cup imploded and hot liquid covered her desk, splashed on her hand and touched on the edges of her dress and the shock of it drove her to stand. Her fingers curled into her palm. She almost turned around to confront the tank but the lights flickered one last time before they shut down completely. She could still hear the hum of the generators and saw the lights in the hallway on. She swallowed the instinctual ire that rose in her chest.
Why was she here? Was it necessary that she stay here? She was not a scientist or physician – she was an advocate of freedom with a Rebellion to run. She was once a Queen, once a Senator, never a babysitter. She did not want to be here.
Something touched her hair. Before she could flinch away and leave the room, she heard the pins holding her hair up clatter to the floor. They were yanked out quickly, almost angrily. The knocking was thunderous now. She did not move. She heard the door lock.
What felt like fingers brushed through her hair, curious like a child's, touched the smooth line of her jaw, the curve of her earlobe and the shell of her ear. The knocking had stopped. One of the thick straps of her periwinkle evening gown slid halfway down her shoulder. It moved no further than that; it was an attention seeking maneuver, not a sexualized intimidation tactic.
Padmé yanked it up and turned quickly, "Stop it. You know better." She ignored the voice that said he might not. In the dark, she could still see the glow from the fluid within the tank and the illuminated naked body within it.
Bright blue eyes were narrowed at her, short hair waved around the angry face of the teenager within it. His lips were pulled back in a grimace of wrath. Anakin's face stared back at her bitterly. A hand slammed against the tank's surface open palmed.
"Stop it. Just stop," her voice was softer now, disappointed instead of angry. "Stop being so childish." She tugged absently at the strap, fussing, and folded her arms across her chest. "You're nineteen," but you haven't lived for that long, "You need to stop throwing these tantrums." She scolded, feeling like a mother with an unruly child.
The fingers of the hand against the tank curled. Then look at me. Talk to me. The words came as a whisper, spoken but not said. "Don't be difficult," she murmured. He gave her a pained look. She remained stolid in the face of his suffering.
Why won't you talk to me?
Padmé reached for the lights, touching the sensor pad to turn them on. They wouldn't activate. She breathed out a large sigh.
Why? The voice seemed to be getting impatient, angry again.
LOOK AT ME!
The roar in her mind caused Padmé to flinch and face him, readying to weather the storm to come though she needn't have been afraid. He wouldn't hurt her. Her facial expression must have betrayed her even in this darkness. The boy's eyes dropped from her, chest moving rapidly. Please. Please just look at me. His nakedness no longer bothered her; it was everything else about him that did. "I am."
The statement didn't help, his shoulders dropped after she said it. The boy's forehead rested against the tank, looking defeated. Padmé couldn't tell if he was crying or not in the fluid, and was thankful for it. She saw a light flashing and looked at her comm. It was Bail. She touched the sensor pad again and the lights flickered on reluctantly.
"Padmé," she answered her comm.
"We've made contact with the arms dealers. They've agreed to a location." Padmé nodded, listening carefully through the static of their controlled link. Bail said something but static killed his voice.
She frowned, "Where Bail? Where?"
"It's dangerous there Padmé, very dangerous. We can't spare many men and the Senators are on lockdown after the Empire seized control. We can't leave our planets without notifying the Emperor." His voice was muffled, distorted, and parts of his sentences between his previous ones and the next were lost in the bad transmission, "It would be suicide."
"I would rather risk it than not." Padmé quipped; she knew where this was going.
"The Kaminoans said he should be ready soon."
"They can contact me later; this is far more important Bail." Padmé said firmly.
"Take him with you Padmé," she knew who Bail was insinuating.
"He's not ready" –
"He will be ready by the time you will need to leave for the scheduled meeting," Bail soothed. "It's perfect timing."
"Taun We said that his condition is remarkable. She had even recommended that he should stay in his tank until more tests can be run." Padmé retorted, feeling anger she shouldn't feel at the situation.
"I know that your situation…disquiets you, but we need him and so do you." Bail's voice was quieter, softer as though he were trying to gentle a nearly wild animal.
"We do not know how stable he is," Padmé drudged up the cool, distant politician Palpatine of all people had made. "He is a new subject; Taun We said that he is the first to have developed so well. Other clones produced at such a fast rate were deformed or mentally incapable." told herself every day.
"Padmé, it isn't like you to make excuses." Senator Organa's tone was almost scolding.
"These aren't excuses! I'm worried for him," Padmé snapped her mouth shut. Bail, for his part, managed to not look smug.
"I know, but it would be in his nature to worry about you if he can't go with you," Bail's voice was almost gently teasing, but Padmé couldn't bring herself to appreciate it. Her throat tightened and the sour taste of grief and disturbance lingered on her palate.
"We do not know what his nature is." It was the truth, a truth that Obi-Wan had told her when he confronted her the last time she saw him before he went after his once-padawan. They had not known his, the real Anakin, true nature. Now, with this, they did not know the nature of the new-but-not beast. It was dangerous. Padmé could not shake the suspicion and fear of him.
The tone of Padmé's voice made her unappealing to argue with, and so Bail conceded defeat. "Take him with you Padmé. He needs to learn what he must do eventually and he is the best security you could possibly have. Taun We also said he would be capable within a week. His muscles are developed, strong, his brain functions are high" –
"Where is the meeting Bail?" she cut in, she couldn't stand it when they spoke of him as if he weren't there, floating behind her, ever the watchful and silent audience to her everyday life, as if he were a specimen of some sort – Padmé stopped her ranting. She cooled down. He was. He was a specimen. It was the same mantra she repeated to herself nearly every day.
"Raxus Prime. As soon as we have your confirmation they will give us the coordinates of the meeting."
Padmé straightened, Raxus Prime; a heap of old junkyard parts and a surprisingly complex society of Jawas and humans. "How sure are we about these dealers?" she asked, voice quiet. A perilous place that the Empire had already begun to lay stake in. It was like going into the nexu's den. Padmé entertained a brief, depressing thought of being caught while on that miserable planet. She cast it off.
"We aren't." Bail's face was grim and drawn. "But our numbers are growing faster than we have sufficient supplies for. This is an extremely enormous danger to undertake, but it must be done Padmé."
Padmé sat back down and thought of the young man in the tank behind her. She didn't look at him. She couldn't. Choices had to be made and most of them were out of her hands. Circumstantial choices were never really choices at all. "Give them the confirmation." She plucked at her dress. "I will contact Taun We; Bail set me up with a ship and the necessary papers, something nondescript, ordinary. My security cannot be more than two people, preferably a man and a woman. It will be easier to blend in if it doesn't seem like I have a legion of bodyguards tracking my every movement."
Bail raised his brows up at Padmé's tone. Chastised properly by his nonverbal gesture, she offered a humble, "Please Bail. Please."
He nodded, "Be safe."
"You as well." The link ended and Padmé leaned back against her chair. She closed her eyes and felt something nudge at her. Like a touch, but it wasn't physical.
She frowned momentarily, but allowed it. She opened her eyes and swiveled to look at the body in the tank.
He stared at her knowingly. The tank wasn't soundproof. She rested her chin on her palm and simply watched him. Was he ready? Would it be a grave mistake to let him out? Would past experiences prevent him from being a new person? Would exposing him to violence at the same age as the real Anakin just lead him down the same path?
But he had no mother to lose. He had no one to lose, no one to drive him to become consumed by anger and grief, emotions so powerful and strong that they would be the death of him. He was more of a blank slate than the tumultuous Anakin Skywalker.
His brows furrowed, as if hearing her.
Padmé stood abruptly, pressing a call button. A protocol droid scuttled in, "Yes miss?" the voice was female and softly accented, origins likely Central Alderaan. Bail had once claimed they had the best built droids on Alderaan there.
"Contact Taun We, I shall need to speak with her, and send in Dr. Philscop. I need him to run some tests."
"Yes miss. Right away. Would you like your lunch?" the protocol droid cocked its head at her.
"Yes, please. Send it here, I'll be taking lunch in my office." It was hardly an office anymore, but Padmé made due.
"Very good miss. Today's lunch is stuffed Iriaz belly with a light salad. Acceptable?"
"Yes." Padmé had returned to the Holonet, "Could you get me a new cup of tea…and a new datapad?"
"Yes miss, right away."
"Thank you."
The protocol droid scuttled away. Padmé watched the reports of the Holonet, focusing on the Empire's slowly all-encompassing reach. Dantooine was allied with the Empire, technically. They had offered her sanctuary far, far out of the Empire's reach, glad to be allied with fighters of the Republic. The jungle was not a particularly found place for outsiders to venture in. Communications were weak and at times navigational technology failed. Her fortress was composed of the trees and fauna of the planet, underground with alert systems that would make intruders would be hard pressed to get in. It made Padmé very safe and secure, but incredibly isolated and her base of operations was far from her allies. Her isolation was also one of the ideal places to hide him from the Empire, and her former friendship with the original made it obvious that she understood him more. She'd told Bail once before that she had never really understood him at all.
She would have to take him with her if everything checked out. She didn't want to though. It would be carrying around the mirror of the past, where there had been a politician and there had been the protector. It wouldn't be different, but at the same time, nothing would ever, ever be the same.
Lips pursed, she shut the Holonet off and bent to the floor to pick up her fallen hairpins.