"You can't avoid me forever!" Darth Vader yelled while banging his fists against his wife Padme's door.
"If you think you are convincing me to let you in now with your beastly demeanor, think twice!" Padme hissed back.
She had barraged herself in her "quarters" (a bedroom with annexed refresher inside the Star Destroyer, that is) with the twins and R2, using the droid's irreplaceable expertise to boost the security mechanisms of her sliding door, as to give the monster a harder time. She knew that he was holding himself back from using the Force to break in, having perhaps started realizing the magnitude of his own actions. Padme took that as a sign that Anakin was coming back to his senses. Yet, she couldn't allow herself to be lenient towards him: for starters, she was scared of the thing he had become, even more so now that she had her children to protect. Secondly, what her husband had done was, on many levels, inexcusable. She needed time to process, and decide on what stance to take. The thoughts that she was formulating felt so extreme that she was disgusted by them, still she realized she couldn't know whether Anakin would ever be worthy of her forgiveness.
As if sensing her from behind the wall, Vader's aggressiveness mounted: "If you won't let me near my children, then I..."
"You WHAT?" Padme spat, losing it herself "Haven't you caused enough damage already?! I thought you were doing this for us, at least" she sourly pointed out.
Luke and Leia, sensing the distress surrounding them, woke up in a chorus of cries. Padme was resourceful, but right in that moment, she found it hard not to feel suffocating. She had locked herself in a tiny space with two newborns for more than 48 standard hours, and the room was becoming an ever-increasing chaos of balled up clothing and discarded bathroom items. Leia and Luke pooped continually, taking a toll on the aeration systems and hygienic filters of the room. Padme was running short of rations, she was sweaty and overall felt like she needed a hundred things that were out of her reach in that moment. Therefore she felt all the more resentful towards her husband. She wondered how different things would be now, had she chosen Palo or Clovis over Anakin.
Vader was seething, his anger mounting. He was close to exploding, and his deep-buried conscience told him that if he did, it wouldn't be pretty for Padme. With this awareness, he stormed away along the corridor, force-choking a technician he'd found in his path and finding a quiet place to allow his explosive temper to revert back to more reasonable levels. Even yellow-eyed, he knew such behavior was off-limits in front of his family, and for the first time since his dark christening, he felt ashamed.
It was distribution time on the wastelands of Zygerria.
The word that comes to mind when one associates distribution with a site of hard labor, is perhaps wage, or food.
Not on Zygerria, though. Far from it.
On Zygerria, it was distribution of punishments that took place; with each microchipped slave receiving as many whiplashes as seen fit for any reported underperformance on his/her activity tag.
Obi-Wan was positive his bones would soon crumble into heaps of dust. His throat was dry. The skin around his Force-suppressor was raw. Using the heavy spade he'd been handed to dig a hole into the muddy, rocky ground of the mine was pure hell, considering how bruised his hands were: the slavers had stomped on his phalanxes as punishment for falling asleep on the job, likely breaking them.
A pained scream startled him, as he turned his head to witness the punishment being administered to two young, frail-looking Zygerrian girls. For the second time in his life, he felt the utter powerlessness in the face of injustice threathening his balance. He was on the verge of anger, his emotions increasingly difficult to manage. An inner storm was brewing. To ease it, Obi-Wan made an effort to remember the details of the dream that had cost him the bones of his hands. He didn't know why he kept having all these vivid dreams about Satine, and, truth be told, at that point he didn't bother feeling guilty about them happening any longer.
That particular dream - the last of a series that had begun more or less around the time of her passing, with increasing frequency - had started out in the usual fashion: a snippet of the long night of passion they had spent tangled with one another, spiced up by small variations in the plot that had never happened in real life. Then, the setting had changed, and he had found himself running aimlessly in a dark forest...until he'd heard Satine screaming. She was in pain, he could feel everything she felt in such a realistic way that he hadn't thought much of it when the Zygerrian had crushed the bones in his hands, mistaking them for the woman's sensations.
He frowned, deep in thought. He had experienced a physical and spiritual connection with Satine during the dream, there was no doubt about that: first when they were making love (the healing, reinvigorating part for him) and subsequently a pain-based bond where he could feel everything that she was going through. He had often lambasted himself for not having shown more closeness to her during her final moments, due to his weakness; perhaps the dreams were a way to experience the agony she had endured, perhaps they were a means to grant him peace.
And yet, something wasn't adding up. Instinctively, he was led to believe that the type of pain that was afflicting her was, indeed, of a more normal kind. Something connected with the cycle of life, rather than with the event of death. Something like childbirth pain. He was a man, he couldn't know it with certitude, yet the Force suggested him that that could be the case.
Thinking of Satine giving birth hurt him now that the dream was over, both because of what was happening to her "child", Mandalore, and because - as much as he didn't have the courage to admit it openly - her passing had precluded her from ever bearing a child of hers. He remembered watching over her while she slept, weeks before they became intimate, and wondering with a corner of his mind what the children of such magnificient woman would look like, if they ever came to existence. He was understanding that it would be highly unlikely for her to have any -given her position - and would become even more so with each passing year, and wasn't sorry for that, as long as she was happy. Still, he hoped that, if she ever decided to withdraw from her high-risk position in the future, nothing would prevent her from reproducing, if she ever expressed a wish to do so with the most supportive and loving of partners. Of course, he never factored himself in the picture, recognizing his own Jedi-ness as an obstacle to the realization of such serene picture, among other things. At the same time, the more time they spent together, the more Obi-Wan's subconscious convinced him that she wouldn't deem anyone other than himself worthy of the most intimate spheres of her persona.
Obi-Wan recognized such convoluted conjectures would bring him nowhere. The idea of childbirth and pain reminded him of another constant pain and sizzling dilemma in his miserable new life: the fate of Padme. He wondered if her baby/ies had survived, what would be of them. Unlike Satine's hypothetical ones, the "Skydala" ones very real - he thought.
As he slaved away in the mines, fatigue suddenly became more real.