After a fateful discovery of what happened to her husband and his role in the fall of the Republic, Padme is determined to see the truth for herself. Her questions are just and fair, but will she be able to live with the answers?
Set during Ep3
All the usual disclaimers apply
Prologue
"It's personal, Captain. I have to do it myself."
That was it - touchdown, then - silence. It was high time to carry out the most personal and painful negotiations of her life and, Shiraya help her, she really wanted to live.
What was the true cost of her love, or payback for deception, she wondered. Even if the answer was becoming painfully clear, deep down she continued to hope. That agreement, signed willingly at the Lake house, was the most terribly binding one of all. In retrospect, it could very well end up costing her soul, and she signed it quite willingly. Vere and Set, two lovers from the ancient myths of Naboo, have played a part in history in the fading twilight of centuries. And what story would they have?
Her only justification was that she loved him then! And she loved him now, still...
Tears blurred away her vision. How painful it was to keep breathing, with everything in her chest torn to bloody shreds by fear and despair. Only her child, close to her heart, gave a measure of strength to fight to the last. She still had something left in her, for that - to fix everything.
Love must be like that, she though, heart bound with chains and no keys nor escape.
It would not help to run; she knew there was an abyss waiting for her. She wanted to look, but instead retreated with dizziness, afraid, probably for the first time in her life having reached the limit of endurance. It was nothing she could have prepared for - her fear of losing herself.
That was the line drawn and she couldn't go beyond it, just as she could not learn to breathe in vacuum. The boundaries of what was possible for her, what her conscience permitted - how this body and soul functioned as a unit - have been damaged so thoroughly that she felt broken beyond repair. The baby was still - probably feeling her desolation, and grieving with her.
Pull yourself together.
Straighten your back.
Hadn't she already condemned herself by dismissing her guards, her faithful maids, those who could protect or at least stand in the way, shield her from harm?
She was born Naboo, where her predecessors, the rebellious queens, walked with firm stride toward whatever fate they chose, even knowing the outcome. Freedom to make your own choice – was that not the cause she championed, all her life?
An angry voice made an accusation – liar. She couldn't get through, he didn't hear. Now, when her throat was clamped shut by an invisible hand, the time to change anything had irrevocably passed. There was nothing left to mend and her tears were the taste of defeat.
How painful - someone she loved without reservation, was killing her.
The string of time trembled and stretched and it seemed to take forever to fall…
She was on the ground.
After a blessed fall into oblivion, the reality around her shifted, stirred, and pain, which fully occupied the space where her soul dwelt, shook her with renewed force. Taking a breath was almost impossible and as her heart thumped against the rib-cage, she winced involuntarily.
She gasped for air.
Her brain was still overloaded with information not fully processed, and with that deluge pounding at her mind, adrenaline stabbed her nerve endings with a thousand red-hot needles. Stunned, she could not grasp the slipping line of thought, nor understand where she ended up and what had happened. With her heart pounding furiously, its unsteady beat muffled by bones - a phantom pain skewering her temples, and yet she didn't feel alive.
Someone was calling her name.
Fingers clenching made her muscles cramp, twisting joints. With exposed parts of skin she felt herself lying on rock -the lumps and the cold underneath. This simple fact jerked her out of shock, like a ship out of hyperspace, and back to the familiar. With great difficulty, focusing on her numb fingers, she shifted her gaze to the surface they were digging into; saw the cracks, the small stones, the dust and grains of sand under her scrabbling nails. With an effort she managed to unclench her fists.
Inhale, she reminded herself. Exhale. With cautious movement, she pulled her legs up to her flat, empty stomach, lowered her gaze, perplexed, when she saw it with her blurry, clouded vision. The screaming agony receded to a background murmur - no it was her force of will that pushed it away, with the need to face whoever called her standing, with dignity.
Unsteadily, she got on all fours. The slightest change in body position caused another wave of nausea. Spasms seized parched throat and her treacherous stomach, if it hadn't been empty, would have failed her in the most unforgivable way. She was sweating profusely despite the chill. She closed her eyes, frantically trying to stifle the nausea, to force air past the tightness in her throat, pushing back the threat of suffocation.
Eyes fluttered open, more focused. She struggled with her breathing rhythm - calmed it, as much as possible, with an exercise she'd known since childhood, calling on the newfound self-control that had responded with such difficulty. She took a shaky breath, leaning forward on her palms, and on the exhale, pushed off the ground, failing to understand why she was down there. Still, she decided to seek answers to the questions swirling in her head later, after she had greeted her guest. The former queen and current senator of the Chommell sector stood and lifted her chin, mentally ordering trembling knees to lock her joints in an upright position.
Nausea, convulsive tremors, fear - no, more like terror, animalistic and paralyzing, fought for dominance in her body and mind. Nevertheless, in no way this struggle was reflected on her face, her iron will pushing back the deluge of questions. Where was she? Glancing around, she focused on the unfamiliar landscape. In the pre-dusk silence, everything seemed surprisingly frozen. Stony ridges rose up along the line of sight and vanished into the distance, merging with the red-gray sky, low and ominous behind the layered clouds. The valley seemed like a vast corridor, a burrow among the cliffs, peppered with shadows of cave entrances. The air was still, letting rays of the diminishing scarlet light to pass through.
"Your support holds within, but do not lose sight of what surrounds you." The strong, familiar voice of a mentor from a long ago past gave a measure of calm. Enough to straighten shoulder blades, but when twitched in motion, they were more like two broken wings on her hunched back. Nevertheless, the subsequent breaths turned out calmer and the floating specs were not nearly as distracting as she lifted her eyes to the horizon.
The darkness was thickening, swallowing last shades of red. From behind a ridge, jagged like a dragon's maw, a moon rolled out, illuminating with pearlescent light blurry silhouettes. There was a faint sound of trickling water, and in the distance, bathed in the reflected light; a lone outline of a tree could be seen.
Five figures were approaching, at first she thought they were skinny whirlwinds, bobbing on the tabletop-flat field of stone. The air rippled, distorting the shapes, her eyes stubbornly refused to focus - when she tried there only seemed to be a misty haze. Surrounding her with a dull grayish glow, the aliens did not reveal themselves. From the shimmering swirl, she could only pick out moving masks; anger, sadness, joy, doubt, calm.
"Who are you?" There was a concentration of consciousness in this whirlwind, but the disembodied forms remained beyond her understanding of the physical world.
"We are the Priestesses. We exist between the Living and the Cosmic Force. The Force that penetrates everything, binds together space and time, the living and the inanimate. Past, Present," Discordant beings enveloped her in a cocoon of woven sounds and images. She could hear and distinguish voices and yet was certain that no words were spoken.
"And the future."
"Why am I here?"
"You issued a challenge. You asked a question. We have an answer for you: there is a path of suffering and pain that will consume all. The reflection of the evil that has grown and strengthened now brings the inevitability of fate. Turning axis, choosing a side, the wheel continues its course. And the world will live the reality it chooses."
"How did I end up here?"
"You wanted to see. You paid the price. Go and see."
Visions floated up from the well of her memories, layered, overlapping and she tried desperately to explain their meanings. Maybe it wasn't her memory at all: what was hidden in the subconscious, what lurked within? A quiet, prickly whisper reached her ears, scratched at her core, and hung in the evening fog. Some truths aren't readily dissolved in water like the Naboans' favorite poisons. The fog thickened and shrouded everything with a dense blanket, leaving a gray haze ahead, a gray haze behind and a trail underfoot. Awkwardly moving her trembling legs, she made a few cautious steps.
Picking shapes out of the twilight haze, her eyes locked on a blurry line of people. It led to the temple square, to a huge crowd of thousands of beings in the most varied attire standing there, arranged in such a way as to leave free two wide aisles, diverging from the temple at right angles, one of them ending with a platform, where a passenger liner of unknown design stood, ready to depart completely empty...
The image wavered, over imposing in her mind with another one, painfully familiar; so many times she had looked there longingly, standing by her window, wishing to be near, how anxiety tore at her heart as thick smoke rose to the horizon.
The Jedi Temple on Coruscant, she had been there before and now she was back, walking down an endless corridor, cool and semi-dark, along towering columns that supported the ancient halls. It was peaceful and still; knights and padawans in familiar robes - lifeless bodies on the tiled floor, as dead as the statues, towering over the silent realm of death. She threw back her head, stared up at the distant vaulted ceiling, and braced herself - to roll back salty, angry tears.
They built well, monumentally, for centuries to come. They lived, they built, they worked and they upheld, and still they perished. As if there was no one, only bones, which were once alive. The right to power belongs to the one who has power. And even more precisely, the right to power belongs to the one who exercises it – if you know how to subdue, you have the right to power, if you don't ... That is the terrible reality, from which the inhabitants of these walls were guarding against, for as long as they could.
Heavy, stone-shattering footfalls made her reel. Ahead, something barred her way. She ground to a halt, clamping teeth together, to stop herself from crying out. The blows came again, and with feet frozen to the spot she felt the floor cracking. Walking past her, as inexorable as Destiny itself, strode a statue of an unknown ancient Master. Footsteps crumbled stone with monotony and she stared mesmerized in his wake following his passage, trying to remember how she had ended up in this strange upside-down world of dead people and living sculptures.
In the ringing silence, her steps echoed in the empty halls of the endless corridor. The number of statues on pedestals dwindled until her path brought her close to one of them. A silver thread, just below her heart, tugged and strained - something caught her eye, made her stop. She recognized the tilt of the head, the half-turn of shoulders; everything was so familiar, so achingly graceful, replicating the original with unprecedented flair. She froze, watching the shift of light and shadow as the figure approached her - stepping down and moving lightly - slowly realizing that before her was a living person.
"Anakin" Parched lips struggled pronouncing a familiar name, while some other, abstract part of her mind noted vaguely the silence of his footsteps in this hollow, echoing space. He was not a stranger here, in these corridors, in this world between worlds. On the contrary, he was absolutely in his element; all the surroundings seemed to frame him, to serve as background, and this belonging to something so inexplicable frightened her to the core.
He stopped. In a long flowing robe, he was dressed similar and yet completely differently from his traditional Jedi robes. The shadow from the pillar fell across his face, and she repeated his name on an exhale, wanting to convince herself. His eyelids lowered, he did not look at her, and she stepped a little closer, struggling to move her feet, staring - such a familiar face seemed alien, as if all his features were tweaked to some ideal of symmetry and cold aloofness.
One slight movement - and she bit her lip hard enough to draw blood, suppressing a scream.
His eye sockets were black, lifeless gaps that swallowed the light.
Don't look, don't look, she squeezed her eyes shut, trying to drive the apparition away.
"Who are you?" She opened her eyes, staring above his right temple, close to a spot where his scar used to be, burying fingernails in her palms. Don't recoil, don't retreat.
"A herald" He didn't say the word out loud.
From the moment they had met again, as adults, she had noticed a peculiar thing about Anakin - although he spoke rather quietly, softly, even monotonously - his facial expressions had remained expressive, animated, exactly the way she remembered him from childhood. But now, if they were still alive, the Jedi should be proud of his restraint. Not a muscle moved on his impassive face as his voice filled the hall entirely, chillingly resonating.
"Messenger of a changing era" Words, said in a non – voice; they were like ghosts that had nothing to do with the living world.
Shadows crept gently down the corridor, swirling as they approached him; his clothes darkened. A barely perceptible movement caught her eye, as if two ebonite wings were slowly spreading out behind him, dimming, absorbing light.
"No. You are human, and your name is Anakin." Her voice sounded hoarse as she struggled to swallow the icy lump in her throat.
The darkness was thickening, but standing at the very edge, she gave herself an order to stand tall.
"I know your name. I have come for you. And you will come with me!"
This was the line she crossed to get him back; beyond life and death, light and shadow. The little slave boy with stars in his eyes was now a man with power to magnify his pain to the galactic scale. It was not a question of what he could do to the world, but what the world would do to itself, focused through the eyes of a being whose fate was terribly cruel. When she understood, she refused to comply - this man, whose future once staked on the roll of a dice, was willing to sell his soul in exchange for the life of a dear beloved.
She could not walk away, even if she did not accept that choice.
Something important, that had eluded her attention for so many years, suddenly became crystal clear. Of course, she was aware of the discord that existed in Anakin's mind between his theoretical and practical understanding of many ethical norms. What was "forbidden" and what fell into the "I would define as" category, the shaky foundation on which his moral principles were built, his nature, and the essence of that incomprehensible formal extravagance, in spite of human frailty. How despite being utterly withdrawn, he still attracted, seduced, led unreservedly.
She had been a witness to him indulging his demons.
And still she succumbed, and she followed him, but now everything changed - she will stop this fall into darkness. She will stand tall and shield the world from the approaching night. There will be hope and light and faith, and life in a better world for other sentient beings, even if not for her.
She clasped her hands to her chest. On her wrists she saw manacles with chains - so heavy, it was surprising that she hadn't noticed them earlier, as they dragged her forearms down. She stared intently at the ligature of ancient runes on the bracelets, understanding the descending symbols; leading to that which inextricably binds, by her will. Even though Anakin's wrists were not visible - she knew instinctively that he wore the same shackles.
Those words, spoken by the lake in an ancient language, were the words of an oath breaking the law and paving the way between worlds. She should have known the consequences, repeating the sacred text after Maxiron Agolerga, of the Brotherhood of Cognizance, in the royal language of Grismalt. It was her own will that she followed this path. She would not turn back now.
Be that as it may, she was the daughter of Naboo, where beneath the idyll of outward beauty lurked an uncharted depth full of monsters, she knew how to sympathize and order and command. We are joined as one, with that thought she closed her eyes and, grasping the chains with her fingers, pulled sharply down.
He staggered back, unable to keep his balance, and then she was falling from great height; as if they were somewhere up in a tower that was collapsing and they were flying down with the rubble.