Chapter 14 – Interlude

Time lost meaning in the cell. The lights were on for twelve hours and then they were off for twelve hours. Padmé paced and pondered in the artificial daylight; attempted, oftentimes in vain, to sleep during the prescribed night.

But with just a glance to her stomach Padmé could find her tether to reality, her biological clock of sorts, her impetus and inspiration. As the days stretched into weeks and the weeks into months, Padmé found herself ballooning in size. It distressed and perturbed her, but as Sola so often said, it was entirely natural. Even so, she resented the changes to her body, especially since they were so visible to the Jedi who would peer through the glass walls of her cell to inspect their captured foe. Their faces stolid and cold, their lips curled into sneers of disdain. The judgement in their eyes as they looked at her distended belly and saw it as a tribute to her foolishness, her promiscuity. Her pregnancy was a weakness, or so she imagined them thinking. The Jedi never procreated. And it was the Jedi who had emerged victorious. Surely there was a direct correlation. Their self-aggrandizement knew no bounds.

Of course, this was all in her head. She didn't know if that's how the Jedi truly felt when they looked at her from the opposite pane of glass. But it's how she wanted them to feel. She wanted them to be made fools when her master defeated them. She wanted them to learn the errors of their ways, to discover that she wasn't weak to love, to bear children, but was in fact stronger because of it!

No, that wasn't it. She didn't care what the Jedi thought. She cared about what her Jedi thought.

By Padmé's estimations, she had been incarcerated for nearly three months now. In that time, she hadn't seen Anakin once since the first night when he had come in secret to see her. Did he despise her? Did he not want anything to do with her? Perhaps. She had thought this way at first, but now she was less sure. While Anakin himself didn't come, Obi-Wan did. In fact, he was her most regular visitor beside Sola.

And unlike the other Jedi, he wouldn't merely observe from the hallway as if she was some sort of exotic creature in a zoo, but would come into the cell and talk with her. Superficial conversation for the most part – inquiries about the condition of her cell, about how pregnancy was treating her – but Padmé sensed a deeper subtext at play. At least the first few times he had been quite uncomfortable, still speaking to her as if he were the interrogator, his questions wooden and blunt, his demeanor even more so. While she had attributed that to Obi-Wan's conflicted little Jedi heart protesting against conversing with a Sith such as herself, now she realized that was not the case. His delivery was so stiff because the questions weren't his at all. They were Anakin's. He wanted to know how she was doing, but was unable to come himself and therefore had instead sent Obi-Wan as his emissary.

This inference, whether it be accurate or not, gave her great solace. It allowed her to tell herself that Anakin didn't in fact hate her; that some part of him did still love her, and by extension, the children they would soon have. And that was all she needed. That and her master's support. The latter of which she certainly knew she had.

She had figured it all out: Palpatine's master plan. She realized that besides Anakin, she was the most pivotal actor, or perhaps more accurately, the most pivotal pawn. Because in order to inspire Anakin to betray the Jedi Order, Palpatine first needed him to become thoroughly disenchanted with it. What better way to do this than have the Order imprison the person Anakin held most dear in the whole galaxy? Palpatine had wanted her to end up in this cell as the damsel in distress, and only he could present Anakin with the means for rescuing her. With Anakin so susceptible to lofty aspirations of heroism, Padmé had no doubt he would fall for Palpatine's trap when the time came.

The plan sounded simple when she put it like that, but the intricacies of his web-weaving had Padmé's mind tied into knots. The more she thought about it, the more astounded she became. She realized that her ostensible betrayal had not been a betrayal at all but in fact had been exactly what Palpatine wanted. He had wanted her to recruit Dooku to her side, just as he had wanted her to coerce Ahsoka into being her apprentice. The former allowed him to set her up in the eyes of the Jedi while the latter took care of his Maul problem for him without so much as raising a finger.

This second gambit suggested to her that Dooku had been his double agent all along. He had passed on the information of Ahsoka's whereabouts to Dooku so that Dooku would pass it on to her. Then he had conveniently let slip the information that Maul had returned to Mandalore to her, thereby ensuring that Padmé would send Ahsoka to Mandalore with Republic forces that would help topple Maul's regime and eliminate the threat he posed without having to get involved himself. Moreover, she figured Dooku's anxiety on the eve of battle had been, if not entirely disingenuous, highly exaggerated for her benefit. Palpatine had wanted Dooku to act scared so that Padmé would incriminate herself by reaching out to Anakin. Of course, he had been relying on her not telling Anakin the full truth, and while that had been a small risk, she figured he had been confident enough to take it without much concern.

Why?

Because he knew her too well. He had molded her in this precise way: to be cautious and deferential, fearful and timid. He had known she wouldn't be strong enough to reveal herself to Anakin. He had known and therefore he had won.

It drove her mad to realize this. All this time she thought she had been acting behind his back, but in fact she had been his unwitting puppet, her actions controlled by the dancing strings of his marionette.

But she had the power to change that. She had the knife in her hand, ready to slice away at those strings. But at the same time, she had to be careful. She had to know when to act and how to do it. If she spoke too soon or revealed too much of her hand (or, adversely, too little) she could send herself crashing down when she tried to free herself from the puppet master's grip.

So Padmé knew she had to wait. No longer would she rush headlong into a plan without proper consideration. She would be meticulous, adroit, and above all, patient. The time for her to act would come.

And when it did, she would be ready.