When the doors of the ship opened, Padmé was hit with the strangest sense of being home. She was no means back on Naboo, but Despayre had its own charms that she had come to appreciate.
The air, while polluted and thick with years of production pumped into its atmosphere was much more bearable than the thick, artificial air of the long since destroyed environment of Coruscant.
Her trunk was collected by transportation droids and Stormtroopers, brought ahead of her to her quarters.
She hesitated to get on the shuttle back to her quarters and waived off any inquires before they could be made. "Just drop my things off at my apartment. I need to swing by my office."
She walked at leisure to the main building, trying to ease the attention out of her body after the last three days abroad and the journey home spent alone with terrible, frightening thoughts. Even now she could see the decayed body of Palpatine before her, with sickly sunken eyes that always seemed to look beyond her. Chills went through her, especially when she remembered that he had to have something on her that went above even Vader. Classified files whose contents she couldn't even guess the meaning of. No matter what angle she approached this problem from, there was simply no answers that she could come up with.
The walk to her office was short but refreshing. Even her stiff Imperial appropriate clothing fell looser over her short frame and she had the urge to stretch her arms above her head. She didn't, as there was no telling who would be watching. She let the tension wash out of her bones with each step until she reached the air-conditioned building.
Once inside, she made her way to her office and nodded politely at the coworkers she recognized.
It was almost a relief, then, when she heard mechanical breathing. A fear that had long diluted accompanied the feeling as she continued to her office at leisure. Inside the familiar walls, she barely had time to start up her system when the doors slid open.
"We've really got to stop meeting like this," she spoke in a moment of boldness, eased without taking her eyes off the screen.
His reaction was a mystery to her, as it usually was thanks to that mask. As long as she could take unrestricted breaths there was no complaints from her. Just a terrible tension in her shoulders and back that longed for a hot bath and a different world.
"You're meeting with the Emperor, was there anything else that happened?"
She shrugged, shifting in her seat and looking up at him. "Nothing I haven't already told you. Our meeting was very brief. He offered me the job and I told him I'd think about it. That's really all it was."
"No. No, he must have needed to see you in person. Whatever he wanted from this he got."
She thought of every interaction, every long minute spent anywhere near Palpatine. Anything that would give her the truth. Anything that would be useful. The last few months had been a blur of fear, determination, and confusion. If there was just one thing she could grasp that would clear all other pieces up, she was desperate to find it now.
Instead, there was only the sound of his breathing and her near inaudible sigh.
She rested her chin on her hand and looked up at him. "Any ideas?"
Padmé really hadn't expected a response, having long accustomed to Vader steering the conversation to whatever it was he wanted.
"I'm not sure."
That was a response she'd never counted on.
A truth that they both shared but never voiced. Pawns in Palpatine's game, never quite finding that step to get ahead of it all.
In the quiet she was too tired to come up with more questions. It didn't matter, though, when the alarms went off in full siren.
She nearly jumped out her skin, settling instead for getting onto her feet so quickly she felt disoriented in the new position. Her eyes were wide and she found herself looking to Vader to determine what to do next. Already though, his cape was barely visible as he moved out of her office.
"Vader?" She called out, voice drowned by the rhythmic sirens. She hesitated only a second before running after him, her dress shoes clicking against the sleek tile of the base.
In the control room where the others had gathered, Vader was at the center of the long wall of monitors that showed the chaos going on just outside.
Jareth caught her eye and she nodded to him. He was by her side immediately, his eyes nearly wild with fear. "It a labor uprising! "The alarms were not nearly as strong in here as they had been outside in the halls but it did take her a moment to hear what he said.
"They've breached into the offices sector." Somebody yelled from across the room.
"Stormtroopers are on their way." Another voice added.
Padmé wasn't sure what to do. If she should be happy that this chaos would slow down productivity or that it didn't matter, she was one of them as far as those outside were concerned. Self-preservation did not care about ideals when it came to the storming of a facility such as this. People were yelling, most of it in military lingo that she did not understand or struggled to keep up with. Instead she held back watching everything that played out in front of her as though she were watching a Holo drama, like the ones her mother and Sola loved to watch.
The building shook, trembling enough that she reached out and held onto the walls and felt each little vibration. The lights went off completely, leaving the room a pitch black. She heard Vader breathing from his place in front of the blank screens, there were a few voices whispering throughout the room, wondering just how they got this far without them noticing. Radios went off, people from all around the base giving their status and asking questions.
Then the sickly green lights came on, backed by the emergency generator and with tiny arrows pointing in the direction of the nearest exit.
There were a few distant explosions and the sound of blasters engaging when a much nearer sound pulled her from her shock.
It sounded almost like a bird screaming at first, but the red lightsaber hummed with its owners' movements and she knew a lot of people were about to die.
He said nothing as he departed the room, the sound of battle outside feeling closer than she could imagine.
"With our power out and communication possibly compromised, I believe that for the time being it is imperative that we take cover in the bomb shelter." A voice called from the dark, others quick to agree with it.
They made their way out of the room, Padmé trailing along last with Jareth.
"Usual protocol is to man all stations. We should be turning that office into the war room," he spoke just loud enough that she could hear.
"Usual protocol doesn't account for Vader," she shrugged.
Down the halls and to the entrance of the shelter.
It was just a feeling, and a silly one at that. It started in the back of her mind but the doors to the shelter opened and she just knew she couldn't go inside. The stairs leading down into the darkness were secure and safe, inside reinforced and well supplied to ride out any uprisings. But she paused as the others descended, unable to lift even one foot in front of the other.
"Padmé?" Jareth asked, already a few steps down.
"I can't go in there."
"What do you mean? Come on, we have to go, they could breach the doors any minute."
Her adrenaline kicked in and she shook her head, trying to think rationally. She wasn't afraid of the dark, nor confined spaces. The prospect of sitting down there for hours was unappealing but perfectly reasonable given the situation. Yet, she could not move from her place. It was the invasion of Naboo again, her so useless in her handmaiden disguise as her people died all around her and she hid in plain sight. A cowardice they would praise for bravery but that she would always carry in her heart as a necessary evil, one she only thought of late at night when no others could see her distress.
"I-I, have to go." She turned and walked down the hall with a purpose she didn't truly feel. Behind her, Jareth called her name over and over as he grew desperate and finally a string of curses muffled as the door closed with an audible whoosh.
She wasn't sure where she was going, only that this place was not safe. You've just condemned your coworkers to death, then.
More venom to store away and only think of later, more secrets and long nights spent wishing the universe would just be different.
A foreign and altogether familiar force pushed her to keep moving, past her office and down the halls she rarely went through. The sound of fighting was closer but so was the cutting of bodies with the old Jedi weapon.
She stopped at the corner of the last hall that led outside, the carnage before her littered the floor with pieces of the bodies and the smell of burnt flesh. It took her a moment to wonder why there wasn't more blood before remembering that lightsabers cauterized.
"What are you doing here?" the man at the end of it all asked. His blade still ignited but motionless at his side as he looked to her.
The feeling that had pulled her from the safety of the shelter whispered again and her feet navigated through the sea of bodies halves. She slowly made her way down this aisle of the dead until they were close enough that her dress reflected the red of the lightsaber.
"I don't know." Was the honest answer.
The sound of blasters was far and separate from the man in front of her. He pushed into her mind unceremoniously and she did nothing to stop him. He already knew the worst of it as he pulled from her that need to get away from everything. The way she just knew going into that bomb shelter meant death.
When he touched on those nights of shame spent hating herself for everything wrong that happened around her, that was when she gently nudged him away. He pulled out of her thoughts just as abruptly as he'd entered to look down on her.
"You're in shock."
"No, I'm not." She spoke with confidence.
Shock was when Sola showed her engagement ring, or when Padmé had seen a giant Naboo sea monster in the dark waters below her. Shock was Palpatine declaring himself emperor or the first time the doors to her office opened and Darth Vader stood on the other side.
She bit her lip and looked at the destruction around her and spoke carefully. "I think we need to get as far from this building as possible."
"What did you do?" he asks, an accusation thrown at her in as much of a hiss as he could manage with the mask.
"Nothing!"
"Is this your rebel friends? Did you plan this with them?"
"No, it's not them! That's not why I came here. You have to-"
"Then perhaps it was the last of the Jedi! Have they joined up with you scum friends?"
She froze, remembering how notorious he was for his hatred for the Jedi. She had to step carefully. "I'm not…. I haven't had any contact with the Jedi." She answered truthfully. Defensively, she had to throw in another bit. "You just invaded my mind, surely you could see that I have nothing to do with this."
The sound of the lightsaber finally disengaging was the last thing she remembered before the walls around her crumbled and the explosion went off.
Her ears ringing was the first thing she noticed. Then, the hand that dug into her shoulder. Even her teeth felt numb as she tried to move, tried to squirm and get her feet under her, get her eyes open. The smell of smoke nearly suffocated her and it was only when the hand on her shoulder dug deeper and her leg knocked against a piece of debris did she notice she was being dragged. She tried to find the strength to open her eyes but just couldn't, no matter how much she tried.
She was dropped suddenly, a soft cry escaping her lips.
There was a mechanical wheezing sound that reminded her of Vader. It was so close to her that she thought if she could lift her hand she would be able to reach out and touch it. Instead, she lay there and let the cold surface beneath her cool her burning body, the flames from nearby left her skin uncomfortably warm.
She must have passed in and out of consciousness, but that wheezy breathing was always there. It grew worse as time went on, though. Longer stretches where the wheezing was halted by a very human choking. The longer her eyes were closed and the more time she had to rest, the more she began to picture where exactly that sound originated from.
It must have been hours later when she finally opened her eyes. It was dark, so dark that she thought she hadn't actually been able to open her eyes. There were fires all around her, smoke heavy in the air. Her face felt greasy and she was certain if she could wipe it there would be sweat and ash. She sat up sluggishly, taking her time and ignoring her surroundings as she focused on her body and not the man she knew sat just behind her.
When she sat up she gave herself time to adjust to the new position before focusing on each limb and trying to find any injury.
There was another sharp raspy breath behind her. She steeled her nerves and slowly turned herself around. There was just enough fire burning to see Vader slumped against a fallen wall of the destroyed building.
A single golden eye glared at her through the remnants of his mask, narrowed and conveying so much more hate than the black lenses had ever been able to.
"Vader?" his name slipped out before she could help it. She was unable to comprehend that the very human eye looking back at her belonged to a figure she'd grown accustomed too.
"What happened?" She asked, voice scratchy from the smoke as she leaned against the opposite wall to him. Her shoulder ached and the phantom memory of fingers dragging her returned.
"How did you know the shelter was doomed?" his voice was slightly lower, a hiss of air escaping as he struggled to speak and then get enough air in the next breath. She watched, fascinated and in pity of what she saw before her. She wondered how many had seen him before, had seen this small piece of humanity in the Jedi Hunter.
She went into a coughing fit, her ribs aching as she sucked in a lung full of air. "I don't know. It was just a feeling."
"It seemed like the force." He snapped back before going into his own coughing fit, though she suspected he was holding back how much it hurt him.
"The force? How could it be the force?"
That horrible golden eye continued to glare at her, so full of rage and disgust. He took another breath before it went away. It took her a moment to realize that he'd passed out, the eye rolled back and the lid came down.
The wheezing continued, lighter but just as disheartening.
Padmé tried to stay awake, but she was exhausted as the night wore on. She would rest her check against her shoulder and promise herself it was just for a minute, only to find the fires around her had grown much smaller by the time she lifted her head. The sound of blasters was so distant that she could barely hear it over Vader's breathing and the crackle of burning around her.
Sometimes she thought he woke up while she was out and did the same as her, maybe look around before putting his head back against the wall. She slept hard for at least a few hours, grateful for the fires that still burned in the early hours when the planet was at its coldest. It was quiet when she woke up with the most strength she'd felt since the day before.
It took her a minute to realize why quiet might be a troublesome sound. Her eyes snapped to Vader's hunched over form. "Vader?" she asked, her throat burning and scratchy.
She stood up, using the wall for support as she limped over to him. Her back and neck ached, her left ankle may have twisted during the bombing.
She managed to get to him, though. She crouched beside him, unsure how to get his attention.
"Vader?" She asked again. With a deep hesitation, she reached out and shook his armored shoulder. "Vader?"
There was a breath, a human one separate from the mask that may have quit functioning altogether. "Hey," she whispered, giving him another gentle shake.
The one eye that was visible from the cracked mask snapped up to her. She nearly gasped, more startling than the first time she'd seen his eye. It was blue. A very bright, very beautiful shade of blue. She stared at it in absolute fascination which quickly became horror as that blue bled into a red and finally the gold she'd seen before.
"Your mask… is it broken?"
There was a deep inhale, completely silent of the respirator that once accompanied each breath. "Yes," a voice said. Not Vader's mechanical voice but that of the man inside the mask. Her hands began to shake, "how long do you have without it?"
He began to cough again, only this time he wasn't stopping. The respirator was broken and only getting in the way, she reasoned as she reached out. He was suffocating in there, she realized as she grabbed the top helmet and tried to pull. It didn't move until his gloved hands joined her and released the mechanics that attached the helmet.
Waves of dark blond hair was all she could see before she realized he was clawing at the rest of the mask that covered his face. She helped with that too, dropping it somewhere beside her. When it was gone she was staring into a much younger, much more handsome face than she could ever have imagined.
All these months she'd been in his presence she never imagined this face. Pale from years in his suit, a scar just beside his eye and up to his brow. The waves of hair untamed and reaching to his shoulders.
"This doesn't change anything. Our deal stands." A male voice croaked. It took her a moment to realize it was him before he promptly passed out.