Written for Angstober Days 11: The Wrong Tomb and 16: Love & Hate
Luke wondered at what he felt. It was a peculiar lack of feeling. Absolutely… nothing.
He had not known this woman. He would never know this woman.
Senator Mothma, who'd told him gently about who she suspected his mother to be when he'd come back from Bespin so shaken, had said that Padmé Amidala Naberrie still had living relatives on Naboo. There were people to tell him about her, what she'd been like. To add some flesh to the bones of the stories Leia had told him, so his perception of his mother was more than just Aunt Beru's shadow or a skeleton dancing on a string. If he wanted, he could approach them.
He didn't want to. He'd be going back to the Alliance immediately after this visit. It was already impossible to stay too long—anyone he interacted with could have recognised him and reported him to the garrison. He might already have brought Vader down on his mother's home planet. His mother's family—in his head he couldn't be rights call them his family—deserved better than to find a grandson only to lose him to war again.
But he had wanted to sit in front of his mother's tomb for a little while, if he was in the Chommell sector already.
He sat on the bench in the public memorial gardens and closed his eyes. Reaching out helped nothing; there was no lingering presence of her, here. At least, not one he could recognise. Leia had mentioned before that she had been adopted, with only trace memories of her birth mother, but Luke didn't even have that. Thousands of sensations, impressions, emotions pressed upon his consciousness when he sat there and felt the life of the garden thrum through him. But if any of them were the ghost of his mother, dead for twenty years, he would not have known.
After a trembling moment, he stood. Stepped forwards, under the canopy and the shine of the stained-glass windows. The Naboo sun wasn't nearly as intense as Tatooine's suns, but the red, blue, yellow light seemed to burn through his fatigues, through his skin, his bones, through to his blood and heart and DNA as he stood in the light of Queen Amidala's image. The slash of lipstick on her lip, the red headdress, made it look like she was swimming in her own blood.
But when he looked back at the image of her carved on her tomb, exactly as she'd looked at her funeral, he was told, she was at peace in the water, gentle and drifting. The weather of twenty years had worn the grooves soft, but when he knocked his head against the flowers sticking out of her hair too hard, they still drew blood across his knuckles. He tilted his hand and let it drip out, let it latch onto her forehead, like that blood connection could somehow make the one they already shared any stronger.
He had wasted his time. His mother wasn't here—only cold stone, cold glass, and cold bouquets of flowers, wilting untouched at her feet. If she was here, it was only the bones of her, walled away from him.
She was even more distant than his father, in his own cruel tomb. Trying to reach the legendary Senator Amidala was worse than trying to grasp the legends of Anakin Skywalker. Water, sand—both trickled through his fingers all the same.
But he still had so many questions.
How had they met? Had she known what he was? Had she known how far a hero like Anakin Skywalker had fallen, how it happened? Or had she died too soon, Luke stolen from her cooling body, and that had been the moment Anakin Skywalker had been lost?
Had his father even loved her at all?
There was only one person he could ask. But sitting here was easier: sitting and staring, answerless, at the stone cell that held his mother was easier than having to face the durasteel one that held his father.
"What happened?" he whispered. "How did he become a monster?"
Slowly, as if from a great distance, he noticed it began to rain. The patter of droplets on the stones behind him made his mind itch; even though he was under the canopy beside the tomb, water slipped down his cheeks.
"How could you have loved him?" he said, even more hoarsely. There was Death Star-sized lump in his throat. "Did you love me?"
No answers came. Only a serene, unchanging face—one that he despised for a few, intense seconds, even as he loved and adored this unknown, untainted parent for several more—and the chilly fall of rain. And Luke knew, in a deep-hearted way he couldn't deny, that he was standing at the wrong tomb.
Trapped in darkness or not… he would have to get his answers from someone else.
