Chaos
Disclaimer: I don't own Star Wars.
Summary: Sabé reflects on what she is, what she could have been, and what she has become.
It was nearing the stroke of midnight in the southwest of Naboo. The stars shone brightly and coldly, and the group of twenty hollow-eyed, gaunt men and women were nearing the Imperial base. Though no snow fell, they shivered in their dark cloaks and coats, clutching blasters and naginatas and swords for reassurance. Some offered up prayers to their respective patron deities, praying that they would survive the night.
Sabé peered through the blanketing darkness, surveying the base with a coldly furious, yet almost clinically detached eye. She murmured a prayer to the patron goddess she only half-believed in, pressed a hand against the máshida vibroblade at her right thigh, and cursed the day that all this had become necessary.
Sabé knew that, from the moment she was born, the gods had marked her out as a child of chaos. She had been to a mother who had abandoned her, her family, her whole world, soon after birth. Her father had despised her greatly because of that, and as a child Sabé survived only on the goodwill of a kindly uncle who took in many fosterlings, to his generous but much-distracted wife's exasperation.
Her father's only act of kindness towards her (and she could not be sure that even that was born out of kindness) had been to send her to Theed, where the examiners had determined that her level of intelligence merited her being sent to the Royal House of Learning in a class two levels above her age group.
Sabé had never really liked Theed. It was too mild, and it didn't rain enough. Even when the nights were cool, she found that she longed for her wild, harsh home.
Her priestess aunt had given her the level of training (admittedly not overly extensive, though certainly not lacking) in the Force required for all Nabooan Force-Sensitives who were not destined for a life in the priesthood. Even with that, Sabé had always had to fight to keep her emotions from overwhelming her, but now, she felt her control slipping, giving way to the torrential maelstrom growing within her.
Anger clashed with anguish. Sabé had a way of dealing with grief that was unique among the Naboo. Most of the Naboo spent a week of mourning after the passing of a loved one, but after that, they went back to normal, and were expected to act almost as though the loved one had never existed.
Sabé on the other hand, used grief to fuel the fire in her heart. She used her grief to give her the focus that she so desperately needed.
There were days, many days, when Sabé wished that she had never met Padmé Amidala. On a sunny day in spring, there had been a girl who had been taking target practice and was failing miserably to hit the mark. Sabé winced to hear the bull-like instructor berating the student, and after the class, she had approached the girl.
The young girl was extremely surly, and asked sulkily if Sabé intended to work her over like the instructor had. Instead, Sabé patiently put the brown-haired preteen through her paces. They worked for close to two hours, and by the time the sun was beginning to lower in the sky, the girl was, if not a proficient, able to handle the blaster with enough adequacy that there was a good chance that she would no longer be catching hell from the instructor.
The girl had given her name to be Padmé Naberrie. Her parents, though one was a professor and the other a homemaker, were really social climbers. Her father had been granted a title for "services done to the Crown". She referred to her sister very scathingly as "lanky and plain".
Sabé had soon learned that Padmé, like her, had been placed in a class two years above her age level, but, unlike Sabé, Padmé had the support of a stable family and wanted for nothing.
Padmé was an ambitious political climber, just as her parents were social climbers. She was, even in those days, strikingly charismatic, and at her age Sabé was by no means immune to this. Her aristocratic roots in the far north of Arturia and her warrior's training as per the custom of the war torn region made her the perfect handmaiden. When Padmé became the Princess of Theed, Sabé had happily become her handmaiden and devoted protector, and at first thought nothing of the fact that Padmé now firmly insisted that she refer to her as "Your Highness".
Sabé, paused, motioning for her men to drop and hide, as the guards walked by, marching rigidly in their white plate armor. Wind howled over the plains, making some of the more superstitious of her men shudder and make the sign against evil.
Earlier, one of the men had looked at their grim, stalwart leader and asked, "What are you?" Sabé had looked upon him in astonishment. She hadn't suspected this particular young man, a native of the Saram factories, of such a deep inquiry. After much thought, she had given him the answer, "I really don't know anymore. Just, what the Empire has made me."
It was the truth, and it frightened her.
Sabé was, if nothing else, a warrior, an occupant of the shadows. In her very long fourteen years of serving Lady Amidala, she had lost something of herself in the arduous task of serving a woman who seemed to go out of her way to step in front of a blaster bolt or a knife.
She had been considered an elite bodyguard, a woman who had given everything for Amidala. What she had been seen as was an extension of her mistress, nothing more. The people with her knew what she had been and respected her as such, but Sabé wondered if the day would ever come when she would be looked upon as a person in her own right, not in any way connected to her former mistress.
They respected her, and looked upon her as a leader, but Sabé still felt the strange emptiness, the wanderings of her screaming, agonized soul.
She was what the Empire had made her. What caused her great frustration was that she had allowed the Empire to mold her, to change her. But then, so many other things had already changed her that she had lost herself, and everyone else.
However, one gnawing thought remained. In five years time, in ten years time, how will the Empire have further shaped her? It was the question that would not, could not leave her alone.
Sabé looked around, surveying the area, trying to determine a point of entry to penetrate the base. Their orders were simply to rattle the nerves of the stormtroopers there, not to destroy the base. They would proceed at her discretion, and retreat at the signal.
Sabé spotted a way in. A garage of sort, where land vehicles were being stored, had the door left open and the lights kept off. This was a small, remote base, and clearly their standards were getting lax.
Others noticed as well, and one actually started to make her way forward, but Sabé stopped the woman cold with a long, furious stare. She fell back, contrite and sufficiently cowed, shrinking out of Sabé's gaze. Sabé drew her cloak hood so it more heavily shadowed her face, blurring the contours of her soft, delicate skin so it merged with the deep black of her cowl.
She knelt, stock-still, waiting for the patrol to come around, dark eyes flitting and searching.
The woman who had been a handmaiden was undoubtedly a soldier as well. She had fought in countless battles, led men into battle, watched them die there, and nearly been slain on the field as well. The golden, wheat-laden fields were never far from her mind. Sabé knew, and in fact had had a vague Force-aided sense of it as well, that however she died, it would be in battle, and there would be no quick and easy death for her. She would not have preferred to die in any other way.
Sabé was plagued by a well-deserved sense of failure. Unlike her other troubling feelings, she knew exactly where her guilt was coming from. Her mistress had died. And she had not been there to protect her. Why had Senator Amidala felt the need to walk in to another snare, and a painfully obvious one as well? Vader had killed her, and Obi-Wan as well. Why am I still alive, when they have died?
She had no proof, and probably never would, that the latter had died, but she knew that he gone there, to stare down the teeth of death. Sabé had known what Obi-Wan had gone to Mustafar to do, but she did not know how he had boarded the Senator's skiff. That Vader wore that monstrous suit was ample evidence that Obi-Wan had been there, and that he had managed to pretty badly maim his former apprentice, but there was nothing at all to indicate that he had survived the duel. Sabé was left behind, left to feel around for something to grip on to to break her fall, left to fight off the ravening horde engulfing the Galaxy.
Why did he not protect her? I made him swear to protect her, if I could not.
Others looked at her and wondered. They thought she knew, that she had been there. If only Sabé could have divulged the truth. No one, asides from Ruwee Naberrie, ever openly accused her of failing in her duty, but the questions were there, on the tips of their tongues. Sabé looked around, and saw curiosity in the eyes of those around her. Their eyes seared her flesh.
Sabé, a soldier, could recognize death in the eyes of others when she saw it. She saw it whenever she gazed into a mirror. She perceived it in the eyes of her men, when she looked at them. Earlier that night, when they had set off from the resistance base, she had gathered the people fighting under her to hear her speak.
What she had told them was this: "What I have to say will not be easy to hear. But you must hear it. It is almost certain that some of us, many of us, will die tonight. I can offer you no assurances of this, and none to the otherwise. Once we are engaged in battle, I can not protect you, just as you can not protect me; you must protect yourselves. I can offer you no words of comfort, and no restitution to your families. But what I can say is this: We are at a state in time of transition. If we do not act now, we never will. We will never be able to act. We have faced down darkness before, have we not? The battle to free our people from this encroaching darkness may become an endless struggle, but if that is what it is to be, than so be it. Come what may, if we go down, we will not go down without giving them a fight to remember, a people to respect."
They had taken it much better than she had feared. Sabé sensed dread and sorrow rolling off them, but they were brave people, and she was proud of them. They, like her, felt that they had little left to live for, except each other, and the sweet dream of freedom, not yet out of reach.
That woman was my life. And my death. Padmé Amidala was the one whom Sabé had devoted her whole life to, and when she was gone, Sabé had felt that she was nothing more than a piece of parchment softened by age, thrown into the rough seas. That was why she had knelt at Amidala's casket prior to the funeral procession and wept.
Sabé, a child of chaos, wondered somberly what she could have been. That question in itself raised a firestorm of more questions. She felt it better to simply abjure speculation. Her life had been impacted in so many ways, by so many people and events. Suffice it to say that she would have been a warrior no matter what her circumstances were.
She had witnessed the rape of her world twice now, and knew that she must act. When one saw injustice, if one had the ability to fix it then they had the responsibility to fix it. Sabé was one of these people. She had the ability and the capability of leadership, even if no one had noticed it as long as she had remained a silent follower of her mistress.
Sabé, who had forever been caught up in the tumultuous bedlam of the times, Nabooan politics, the war… she who lived in anarchy, knew that she could not function in an orderly galaxy (Personally, Sabé was of the opinion that an orderly galaxy was a sign of the apocalypse). She would stagnate and wither away like a delicate lily that has been withheld water for far too long.
Yet order was what she fought for. She knew that peace was something that might never be achieved, that there would always be a crisis, and she was content to attempt to hold the planet together, and keep it from flying apart at the seams. That in itself would be a full-time profession, and one Sabé could live for.
The woman who had been a handmaiden and was a soldier was never at ease. She could be calm, but was tense always. Sabé was as alert as a frightened animal, waiting for the next attack, keeping her eyes open, waiting and watching. She had always been like that, ever since she was a small child.
Obi-Wan had stopped her in the hall one day and asked, "Why are you doing this to yourself?"
His concerned and saddened question had stopped her cold. He had tried to instill order, but could not. He had tried to help her, but Sabé knew that there came a point when no one could any longer be of any assistance whatsoever. And he was dead; he couldn't help her anymore.
Sabé gave the all-important signal for her men to move forward. They did so with a dreadful eagerness. They were ready for their battle; scared, as all were before diving into the fray, but prepared nonetheless. She who was a child of chaos knew what she had been, and didn't know what she could have been. But to answer the young man's question, she knew what the Empire had made her. A creature of war.
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I'm not entirely sure about this. Please tell me what you thought of it. Good? Bad? Sad? Choppy? Well-written? A complete waste of my time and yours?