Pandora's Box
Summary: Padmé plays the Senator of Naboo, and the politician who must hold the galaxy together in the aftermath of Coruscant. In the confusion, she knows nothing of Anakin's fate, or Luke's. Set in the Destroyer of Worlds universe.
I am tired, in a way I haven't actually felt, since the beginning of the Clone Wars, since the blockade of Naboo, since…
I think about the day I knew it couldn't have worked out between us. Anakin. I press my hand to my forehead. It is cold, but suddenly, I want to do nothing more than to lie down on the sheets of my bed and stare up into the empty space between floor and ceiling.
How can I even begin to explain it? These things are complicated. They are complicated in their simplicity.
Instead, I am looking at myself in the mirror with a critical eye, tracing the sharp hollow between eyelid and cheekbone in the glass. They are darkened from the lack of sleep. I read exhaustion in almost every crevice of my appearance. Sabé tells me I need to eat more, rest more. I would, but there is only one of me, and one of me is far too little for what the galaxy needs, right now.
Coruscant has fallen.
I repeat it and watch the figure in the glass say it with me. I can almost hear it from her lips, with a clinical detachment that my elocution teachers would have been proud of. Coruscant has fallen, she says, every inch the Queen I once was. The Senator.
I know the significance. I've been on Thayce, where refugees from the Tharian Corridor are packed together in little huts of wood, each hut the size of a Jedi Temple closet. This war is unsettling. Our enemy is faceless, and the dead of Coruscant are silent. There are few survivors of Coruscant: most of them died with the planet as the sun imploded, sending deadly flares racing across the surface of Coruscant.
Thousands, millions of ordinary men and women and children burned to death in the work of minutes.
Coruscant was the first step; the first decisive strike in the war. And it is a war. If we do not know what these invaders hope to achieve, we know that we must fight back. We must resist. They will stop at nothing but our destruction.
Already, refugees are fleeing to us from the Core Worlds. Fear spreads faster than anything else does. Corellia's defenses are bristling, ready to rise up to the fleet that destroyed Coruscant, but still, people are frightened. They ask themselves: what can a planet's military do against a fleet that could kill a sun?
Corellia stands alone; the next planet in the chain. The Senator of Corellia, Garm Bel Iblis and Diktat Shyla Merricope are calling for Republic systems to hold firm, to send reinforcements to Corellia.
If Garm is canny, then he must surely know it is a lost cause. The reinforcements will not come. Not in time. The destruction of Coruscant: this is the wound we cannot recover from. This is the wound we must recover from, if we are to survive. Without the Senate, the Republic is broken, splintered into fractious systems that act alone. If systems stand alone, then this faceless enemy that we do not yet know will destroy us.
Outside this room, there is too little of me; far too little. The galaxy needs so much more to establish some form of alliance, some form of military hierarchy. Some overarching strategy and ideal to unite us. I need to find a way to do just that.
Coruscant. The planet held much more than the heart of the Republic; it was the centre of power, all our bureaucratic systems, our common military. Now that there is no Coruscant, no structure to enforce the laws that all systems agreed to, we are falling apart into a squabbling chaos. I cannot help but be appalled at how readily we all turn back to fear and self-interest; I cannot help but be amazed at word of what can only be deeds of great courage and valour.
Contruum, Corellia – these worlds stand together. Already, Mon Calamari has pledged a fleet to the cause of this Alliance. If we can cement this and bring the frightened worlds back into the Republic, we may still salvage something out of the wound of Coruscant.
Inside this room, I think of what this means.
Luke. Oh, Luke. Inside this room, I am a mother, and I am frightened for him. When Coruscant fell, so did the Jedi Temple. I check my comlink, try to remember when Luke last checked in – he had been on Vjun, investigating a link, and I feel…afraid. I know what the refugees must feel, as I dread for my son and hope he was not on Coruscant when the planet fell.
I think of how it must feel to be charred into oblivion.
I can only hope it was quick.
Leia is on Alderaan, and we have spoken briefly, working with diplomats to try to negotiate a swift solution with the balking worlds. We are similar, my daughter and I, although I had seen only Anakin's temperament in her. We cannot stand by while the galaxy is suffering.
And Anakin.
I watch my shaking hands, distant. As if they belong to someone else. Thinking of him brings the ache back, the familiar sadness, the familiar weariness. I tell myself again it wasn't working. We were hurting each other, more than anything else. We were young, then.
I say it as if I am old. If pain is a measure of age, then I carry the pain of a mother and a wife with me. That is pain enough to make me as ancient as the galaxy.
Anakin.
He was a Jedi, in the end, no matter how much he tried. He is too much a Jedi to turn away, too much a Jedi to run away. Anakin. Obi-Wan. They must have fallen with the Temple, perhaps blasted out of the skies, or burned out of this life in a pyre of flame.
For a moment, I see nothing but fire in the glass.
I squeeze my eyes shut so tightly that I see the glass blur when I open them again. I have to be strong. The galaxy needs former Senator Amidala of Naboo now. Not Padmé. Not the woman, torn between fear and love.
There's no room for what Padmé needs. Not now.
I rest my forehead against the cool glass. Here, in my room, I weep. The survivors of Coruscant are already starting to speak, already starting to tell tales of terror and blind panic. I try not to wonder how Anakin's last hours must have been.
I do not ask the few escaped Jedi if they know of Anakin's fate. Did he suffer? I want to ask. It is a silly question. It does not matter now, if Anakin suffered. It does not matter except to me, even after all this time.
I am shaking, and the memory of Anakin is holding me, telling me that I'm strong, that sometimes, he thinks I'm the stronger one of the two of us.
Sometimes, I'm tired of being strong.
I am thinking now, of a story of a woman named Padmé. My father was a man who knew his stories, who loved them, and he named his daughters after his favourite characters. Sola was named after a princess who cast herself from a rock to save her people. Padmé – now this is different story, of a woman and a box.
There is a woman, he will say, slender as a bird, with dark, cat-curious eyes. Can you picture her, Padmé?
They don't mention if she was beautiful. In any case, she is no princess, no hero, and if she is beautiful, it is but a pittance. But to me she is beautiful, in the way the fragile things are; so fragile that you could only cup them softly in the palm of your hand, for fear that anything less than perfect gentleness will break them. To me, she is beautiful, if such shallow things matter.
The story continues. There is a box, perfectly crafted. Perhaps it is forbidding; a dark thing of mahogany, plain, but bound at the corners with oak, rowan and holly, the sort of box that whispers secrets in voices as thin as old paper, crinkled at the edges, when you test your fingers against the polished grain of the surface. I want you to picture, Padmé, the woman confronted with this box. She runs her fingers along the smooth wood, waiting for the ink of the words written within to stain her fingers. Waiting for the secrets to leak up and through the sanded planes.
There were evils, the story says. The gods had put all of the world's evils, crumpled it into the palm of one hand as if it were a piece of paper, and put them into a box you could hold in your hand.
I believed this, when I was a child. The older woman does not know what to believe. To tell such a story, you must not have lived. A box is too small a home for all the world's evils, even for a god. A box is not enough for a world, much less the galaxy.
A box would not contain even a millionth of the ashes of Coruscant.
But there were evils, and the evil swept out and overwhelmed the world. And weeping at what she had done, Padmé shut the box and rushed out of her house, to see people weeping, a man covered in sores, another whose wife had died, and yet another who had lost his limbs, and so on and so forth. And then she knew what her curiosity had brought upon the world and she could not bear it. She returned to the box, trying to see if there was a way to repair what she had done.
And then she heard a voice. A faint, thready voice – softer than the whisper between heartbeats. "Let me out!" the voice cried, but Padmé ignored it, until finally, she opened it out of pity.
There was a tiny thing; like the space sunlight occupies in a room. It circled her once, glowing, and then spread its wings and flew up into the sky. "What are you?" Padmé demanded.
"I am Hope," came the whisper. And this is why I have named you after her, Padmé, for never forget that after sadness, comes hope.
But I am older now, and more weary. If Padmé was not at fault for unleashing evil into the world, then she must be held to blame for Hope. I am older now, and the young child-Queen seems unbearably distant.
And then I know. Padmé was gullible, and innocent. She was deceived.
When I speak to the survivors of Coruscant, I don't ask them about Anakin. I don't ask them about anything except for what information our generals may use, if there is anything they know about this relentless enemy that is closing in on us.
I don't ask about Luke.
My father is a good man. This is why, perhaps, it never occurred to him. He, too, was young once.
Perhaps hope, too, belonged there, in that box.