It is the Republic, and not the Jedi, who issue a warrant for the arrest of Anakin Skywalker. This distinction is insignificant, of course; a Jedi arrest warrant and a Republic one are functionally the same during the Clone Wars.
Somehow, there had been no rumors of Anakin's desertion before the arrest warrant was released, side by side with warrants for nearly every clone in the 501st legion. These are patently ridiculous, Padmé thinks as she pages through them. Every picture is exactly the same allowing for variations in hair color and tattoos, easily hidden features. In addition, the warrants do not list the clones' names, but their operating numbers, and she is more than willing to bet that no one knows who CT-6189 is, except perhaps his commanding officer.
Overtaken with numb curiosity, she redirects her datapad to a different system, one she is not technically supposed to be able to access from her senatorial office on a Republic-issue datapad. As she suspected, there is also a new bounty on Anakin's head for a truly outrageous number of credits. Doesn't the Republic have better things to set aside a million credits for?
"Mistress Padmé, Senator Organa is here," C-3PO says.
"Show him in, please," Padmé says, closing out the bounty and straightening up in her office seat.
Threepio acknowledges with a stiff bow and leaves, returning a few moments later with Bail Organa in tow.
"Senator Amidala," Bail begins, and then stops, his expression softening slightly. Padmé belatedly realizes that her screen had reverted to Anakin's arrest warrant. "So they released it."
"Yes," Padmé says. She considers closing the screen, but Bail had already seen it.
"I'm sorry," he says. I know you're… close."
"Thank you, Bail," she says. "But something tells me you didn't come here to console me over Anakin Skywalker facing the consequences of his own actions."
"I need you to speak to the Chancellor," he says, quickly changing gears. "I can't reschedule our meeting with him until next month."
"But that's after the vote!" Padmé exclaims. "Our proposal cannot be introduced as an alternative without the Chancellor's signature."
"Yes, and I can't get in to speak with him," Bail says. "I thought you might be able to talk some sense into him."
Padme closes out the arrest warrant and picks up her datapad. "I'll speak to him," she says.
As she walks past Bail toward the door of her office, he grabs her arm. "Are you going to be okay?" he asks quietly.
Padmé grants herself the luxury of considering that question honestly for a moment. Finally, she says, "I appreciate your concern, but we're senators, Bail. We can hardly afford to fall apart every time something goes wrong in our personal lives." With that she walks past him, into the halls of the Senate building.
Getting into Palpatine's office takes over an hour. Other delegates are coming and going on their appointments, and every time she tries to slip in between two meetings, the guards at the doors physically bar her way. And once she does get in, Palpatine is concerned and regretful, but assures her that all of the meetings before the vote are equally time-sensitive and that he cannot reschedule any of them. Padmé considers, for roughly eighteen seconds, trying to convince him to approve their proposal right then and there. She will not stoop to violating so many regulations, however, regardless of how many other senators she knows do it regularly.
Finally, she decides that there will be no convincing Palpatine, which leaves her the unpleasant recourse of delaying the vote. She respectfully bows her head to him and exits his office, then proceeds to walk down the halls toward her own office.
Bail is still there when she arrives, and he has been joined by Mon Mothma. They are standing in front of her holoprojector, which has been set to a news station. She is about to announce the results of her endeavor, but when she notices what is playing on the news station she stops. The Jedi Order has expelled Anakin Skywalker. There's a holorecording of Yoda, that, judging by the look on Bail and Mon's faces, has been played several times already. He is leaning on his gimer stick, looking old and sad as he has all too often since the War started. "Expelled Skywalker from the Jedi Order, we have," he says, and the news station can't trim the video tight enough to hide the fact that he turns to leave immediately after this statement.
The reporter appears again, but Padmé doesn't hear what she says. She walks over and shuts off the holoprojector. "The Chancellor was regretfully unable to reschedule our meeting," she says. "We'll have to delay the vote."
There's a pause. "I don't know how long we can delay it," Bail says.
"It's been on the floor for months," Mon adds, and Padmé's glad they've chosen not to address the shaak in the room.
"We can't let it pass as is," Padmé says, and they nod in agreement. Chancellor Palpatine, they all agree, has amassed too much power over the course of the war. At this point it is too late to stop the steady flow of more and more power into the chancellor's office, but they can at least try to slow it.
They speak a little longer, discussing possible methods for delaying the vote. If they can convince enough other senators that they might get something out of it, they might be able to put a motion on the floor to delay it, and this is their preferred method. They could, of course, raise other issues in the interest of distracting from the bill in question, but there's a certain risk to that; many senators will insist upon passing a bill of this magnitude without fully discussing it rather than table it for later. Filibustering is always an option, but it's one they try to avoid. As dedicated public servants there is something distasteful about abusing their senatorial privileges, even if it is in the service of the greater good.
Eventually Bail and Mon take their leave, and Padmé is finally able to process the fact that Anakin had been expelled while she was in her meeting with Palpatine, which means that he had not been expelled for almost two standard hours after the arrest warrant had been issued. For two absurd hours her husband had been both a fugitive from Republic justice and a Jedi knight, and she slowly sinks down on her desk chair to laugh at this. In times like these, she has to find humor wherever she can.
A month later sees the vote on the Executive Power Reallocation Act successfully delayed, so far, and for that Padmé is grateful. She suspects that it cannot last much longer, though, as she steps out of her senatorial pod after an exhausting early morning session of the senate. Senator Ask Aak from Malastare had accused her of trying to delay the vote, in a tone that implied it paramount to treason. Padmé had valiantly resisted the urge to roll her eyes and explain as if to a child that she had made no secret of her desire to delay the vote, instead calmly pointing out that not all options had yet been explored. Orn Free Taa of Ryloth had insisted that the vote was too important to be put off.
"I agree," Padmé had said. "This vote is important, which is why moving forward with it before it has been thoroughly discussed is foolish. We are the representatives of thousands of worlds, of trillions of beings, and we cannot afford to make decisions rashly, not when they affect hundreds of thousands of people!"
The conversation had gone nowhere constructive from there, and now Padmé climbs into a speeder flying away from the senate building, feeling a little bit sick. Her senatorial colleagues often make her feel just a little bit sick, but this is the fourth time this week that she's left a senate session and immediately felt the need to make for the 'fresher, and accordingly she's scheduled an appointment with her doctor. She had been inclined to ignore it at first, but had eventually decided that she could not risk coming down with something at this critical time. Or any critical time, she thinks with a mental sigh.
The speeder stops at a platform outside the Regis Coruscanti Hospital, and Padmé climbs out and asks her driver to wait for her there. She walks across the platform and checks in at the desk, then takes a lift to level twenty-seven. Her primary care physician's office is here and she settles on a chair in the waiting room. While she waits she flicks through some notes on her datapad, adding observations and comments from this morning's session. She doesn't have long to wait, however, before her name is called and she saves her notes and heads into her doctor's office.
Dr. Rus Dak is a short fat gran with smooth brown skin and a kind disposition. She has served as Padmé's primary care physician since she first came to Coruscant almost three years ago, and Padmé has never had any complaints. The doctor sits Padmé down now and begins asking the usual questions; has she noticed anything else out of the ordinary? Is she eating normally? Is she sexually active? Padmé has always been honest about this, and Dr. Dak had never asked for the identity of her partner.
Dr. Dak asks all her questions and makes notes on her datapad, and then solemnly looks up and asks her if she has taken a pregnancy test.
"No," Padmé says slowly. "Are you saying…"
"It could be several things," Dr. Dak says. "But I'd like to rule out pregnancy first." Padmé feels a swelling sense of relief as she gets up and begins to dig through a drawer. She's not ready to have children, especially not now. When Dr. Dak hands her the test she walks to the 'fresher calmly and sets about taking it, confident that it will come back negative and she and Dr. Dak can move on to find out what the real problem is. Stress, in all likelihood, or perhaps a mild stomach virus.
It comes back positive, and Padmé leans against the sink with one hand, clutching the little device in the other.
I don't think Luke and Leia were canonically conceived this early. But. I need them in the story and Padmé and Anakin aren't going to be in the same physical location for a good long while so they get an advance payday on life.
I had like a huge essay written out here but these are the end notes on a fanfic so here are the cliffnotes:
1. Padmé's pregnancy was handled very badly and unrealistically in canon. (Among other things she doesn't appear to have sought out any prenatal care whatsoever.) I'm going to change like ten thousand things about it because I just can't bring myself to consciously write that many wrong things. I'll note what they are when they become relevant.
2. Birth control apparently does exist in Star Wars, despite all evidence to the contrary.
3. This doesn't have anything to do with anything but in Legends the Gran were native to Kinyen and in the new canon they are native to Malastare? Why? Did Disney feel the need to change this? I can't seem to find a reason for this. If anyone knows why this is the case please tell me it's really bugging me.
4. I don't anticipate it becoming relevant but the act Padmé and friends are trying to get approved is an addendum to a bill on the floor that would grant the Chancellor the power to executively decide where electricity is routed, which is a bad idea for multiple reasons. If he should so desire, he could pull power from a random neighborhood in Coruscant and redirect it to, say the mood lighting in a super secret Sith lair built underneath the senate building, as a completely random non-specific example. The gang isn't trying to prevent the bill from passing; judging by the deleted RotS scenes I suspect they'd mostly figured out by this point that Palpatine wasn't going to stop amassing power. Basically they're trying to amend it to include a clause that would require major changes to be submitted to a committee for review before they went into effect. Better than nothing. Why do they need the Chancellor's signature on this? Uh. Probably because of some other BS bill that passed earlier.
The best part about Star Wars politics is that they don't need to make that much sense.