"I entrust my body to the trap of time. Where will I wash ashore?"
-'Daybreak', Hamasaki Ayumi, "I Am" Album
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The Widow Skywalker 2a/?
by Meredith Bronwen Mallory
mallorys-girl@cinci.rr.com
http://www.demando.net
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Market places, Luke thought, had to be the common language among worlds. They were all fundamentally the same, with latitude enough for variation that made each one unique. Of all places, the Jedi felt strangely at home in them. The crowds were a comfort, almost-- a reminder that he, too, was human; and there was a sense of *something* underneath the dull murmur of collective speech, something like a language under language.
Supersticiously, he returned to the uneven cobble stone corner he'd been at the day before, waiting to hear the words again, as if they might echo. Nothing, and he moved within the living maze, wandering. He paused, asking different faces 'have you seen' and do you know', but their eyes were almost always guarded and suspicious. Having grown up on Tatooine, he knew why-- but their indifference still stung. He felt younger than he had in years, stripped of all his certainty, and father loomed large in his mind like the spectre of childhood nightmares. He remembered, now, the red glow he would see behind his eyes as a child, and the black sillohette; how he would scream and scream in the desert night. The memory of Aunt Beru's touch was almost real as the cool wind wound its way through the mass of bodies crowding the street-- she would kiss his brow, as if soothing the invisible eye that made him see such things. She had been very pretty, when he was a child, but still a long way from beautiful, and it seemed to him now that it had all just vanished one day, underneath the shadow of his father he saw in his dreams.
The Widow Skywalker would have been Lady Skywalker once, would have been a maiden before that, who touched and knew and talked to the person that lived under Vader's armor. He tried to see her face, how she must have smiled (or did she ever smile? Was she happy to live, or resentful-- as Owen had been in the end?) -- it was like dipping a crystal in water and trying to divine from the colors. His mind called forth the softness of his childhood voice, asking questions of the woman who wanted to be his mother.
"What happened to my real mother?" he'd said, and the implication was that the desert woman before him, who existed in varying shades of sand, was somehow fake. A poor imitation. Unreal-- a mirage just out past Mos Espa. For a moment, he wanted his aunt by his side, not to ask questions about the woman who's flesh had made his but to say... to say... Luke rested briefly against the stone wall of a small shop, putting a hand on Atroo's cool silver dome. That sensation seemed to help anchor him in a world filled with half-glimpses. He missed Beru, as desperately as he had when the applause stopped in the thunderous Yavin temple. The grief was somehow fresh and new. Aunt Beru was gone now; fire had polished her into a husk of black Onyx, crumbling in the sand, but he so wished he had remembered to tell her he loved her before he'd taken the t-16 out into the brightness of the morning.
Artoo rocked back and forth, very suddenly-- as if his delicate instrumentation was also attuned to sensing temors within his master. Luke folded his lean body down beside the droid, sitting on the curb with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands.
"I don't know, Artoo," he said in response to the brief string of inquiring beeps. "I... found Father, and Leia had Mother all that time ago. Maybe this is all I get." His artificial hand clenched around the real one, bringing pain. "It doesn't seem right, though. "I want to see her, and not just to understand Father better, but because..." How could you explain it to a droid? Say that you hand within you an illusive, quicksilver memory of someone warm and kind? That you heard her voice just before you dropped off into true sleep, and that sometimes when you thought of the man your father had been pretending to be, you also saw her shadow-- as if the darkness was not strong enough to push her away? The little astromech droid pushed against Luke's side, gently, giving a coo that was oddly expressive. "I guess you're right," he replied, sensing in Artoo only vague concern and question. Only Threepio could truly follow the little blue machine's language. "I shouldn't give up so soon. I'm just frustrated." Briefly, he touched the Force, and a smile came to his face. Rising, he patted Artoo's little dome once more, "Come on. We should try asking around some more."
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Because it was the nineth day of the week, she rose early; thrusting aside the heavy quilts and climbing from the curved basin that served as her bed. In Koe's early morning veil of gold, she shivered unconcously-- it had been a long time since she hadn't been always cold to her core. Padme Naberrie Skywalker padded softly throw her one-room stone house, moving through the unguarded threshold and out into the garden she tended with all of her souring love. Rain water had collected in the wide barrel near the house, and Padme splashed the water on her face, disturbing the small golden leaves that floated on the surface. She looked away quickly as the water settled, not wanting her broken reflection to reassemble itself. On Alderaan, life-times ago, she had seen things He sent her in the water, in the curve of a silver brush, in anything reflective. There were no mirrors in her house.
Now, to the rows and rows of oshiibara, which looked like the little pearl rosettes that had been sewn into her wedding gown. Tenderly, Padme caressed the stems as she harvested, as if to show them that the memries they stired did not upset her. Plants, oshiibara and otherwise, were much kinder than humans-- they could not speak, and thus made no promises, no false words of love. Rising to her feet, buds in hand, she turned back towards the house, her deep brown hair trailing the grown behind her-- flowers and leaves knotted in the locks as though they were welcome. She was very beautiful, still, but in a way that would hve made her a stranger to Dorme or Bail, if they still lived and could see her. A breeze, now-- chill and unnatural-- as she entered the house and Padme smiled her tears at the touch of Anakin's ghost. She said nothing, instead tracing the long, raised line of burnt skin on her arm-- she had *felt* him die, a pain that overwhelmed her as she worked by the fire. His soul's shattering had washed away all other sensations, and now she felt his nearness as easily as her own breathing.
She was afraid, afraid to speak, to ask, and thus begin the painful wheel all over again.
Breakfast was oshiibara, boiled in the last pint of Padme's clean water; she ate the petals absently, the wind moving through the house and teasing her short shift. She resented her body, in someways, for holding out so long, and now she fed it only grudgingly. This chore completed, she wound her hair up under her black ribboned cap and stepped into the folds of her loose black dress, singing as she did the fastenings.
"With silver buttons, all down her back--" An old nursery rhyme, about a girl and her coffin. The large, now empty water jar was tied to a wooden framework, and rested against Padme's spine like Leia's piggy-back seat once had. She kept her children's faces clear in her mind, loving them though their lives stretched before her with a mocking blankness. At the crooked gate, she saw Anakin-- he leaned his non-existant form against the irregular bars and watched her with a sad smile. He flickered too-- first the young man she had fallen in love with, then the young boy who's love had conjured her own.
It took all her strength not to try and touch him, however briefly, as she passed.
Down the slopping hill, past the beginnings of an abbandoned foundation and all along the coppery grass feilds, her bare feet on the dirt road. Padme paused as she saw the sillohette of a building rise in the distance, knowing her journey was halfway through. The house was larger than her own-- not a difficult task-- and rambled off its main foundation with startling assymetrical chaos. The sun was just coming up over the ocean of copper grass, but Padme saw a stir of movement within the shed.
"Oy, Widow Skywalker!" a male voice, as dusty as the surroundings of the man who owned it.
"Shindor!" Padme raised her hand in greeting, tarrying from her walk to peer into the shadows of the shed. Shndor was a large man-- a gentle giant, with a head of black hair and eyes that seemed set too far back in his skull.
"Rest your feet a minute, won't you?" he inquired, not taking his eyes off the holoproj he was teasing with the delicacy of a doctor opperating.
"Thank you, I will," Padme hiked up her dress and settled her self and the jar on the remnants of a landspeeder. "How are you?"
"Fine," Shindor drew the word out as he tried to settle something into place. A snap, and he hissed like a dewback kept from its food, "Damnation and all that."
"Still not working?" she asked, gazing at the holoproj with a disinterested eye.
"I had it working before!" Shindo protested, rubbing his forehead with one large hand, "Ask Sintalia-- she was with me." He raised his gaze to meet Padme's, "Speaking of which, she's still hot set on having you embroider her wedding--"
The very word seemed to make Padme tense, "I can't."
"I know," Shindo's smile was fatherly, "Maybe I sorta understand, who can tell? Sintalia on the other hand..."
"She still asleep?" the widow asked.
"Yes--"
"Then I best be on my way," she replied, obviously eager to avoid a confrontation. Shindor nodded, and she was halfway to the wide hole in the shed tha served as the door, before his voice reached to stop her.
"Wait!" when she turned back, he was scratching his head in embarassment, "Didn't get to tell you what I picked up on the holoproj."
"Oh."
"Good news, I guess-- for the rest of the galaxy. Out here, I suppose it doesn't matter much," Shindor shrugged, "Still, I'm damn pleased, for some reason."
Padme frowned, "What is it?"
"The Rebellion-- against the Empire," Shindor's smile was wide and unself-concious, "I picked up the Geonosis station tha relays the Coruscant wave. They're saying the Emperor, and the Empire-- it's all dead."
There was an empty joy in Padme-- triumph laced with poison-- and despite herself, she cried. They were slow tears. Shindor watched her, waiting but also a little uncomfortable.
"That's good..." she said suddenly, smiling past the pain, "I'm glad-- that's the best news I've heard in years!"
"I didn't get much of the details," the man replied, pleased that she shared his enthusiasm. "Just that they're working to set up a government, and that this Alderaanian girl is mostly in charge of granted political, um, er..."
"Assylum?" Padme offered, her mind racing. She didn't dare hope-- she couldn't remember how.
"Yeah, that's it-- trying to smooth things over," Shindor nodded triumphantly, "Rhea Organa, or something like that. The missus thought it was a pretty name."
"Leia?" Padme whispered, having turned away.
"That's it!" Shindor sounded confused, "Hey, Padme..."
"Thanks for the news, Shindor," she paused out in the dry feild, arms curled under her breasts. Then she turned, and continued down the path; stumbling and-- when she was far enough on her own-- crying a little as though the loss was as fresh as today.
"Leia..."
Above all, there was happiness.