A/N: Remember Palo, everybody? You know, "maybe he was the smart one"?

Palo Niyar

I ran.

I ran down the streets of Theed to my apartment, not regarding how I must have looked to others, not even noticing them. I ran until my sides hurt and I had to stop and gasp for breath on the sidewalk outside my building.

I was running home, but primarily I was running away from the Palace. I left my job there, I left my work as it was, and I ran away from the awful words I had heard whispered in the Palace corridor. I was running away from the horrible truth.

My wife, Jaia, looked up in alarm at my rushing in, out of breath, in the middle of the day. Under normal circumstances I would never have walked away from a job, especially not something so important as the job restoring the artwork in Theed Palace, which was not just a job, but an honor. But today was different. Today, I knew, no one would miss me there.

I shook my head as I caught my breath, and Jaia was silent. Finally, I spoke.

"Amidala is dead." The words sounded terrible, sounded wrong to my ears. I could see from Jaia's face that she didn't want to believe me, but there it was.

"Dead?" she whispered. "Are you sure?"

I nodded. Word was spreading like fire through the Palace. Someone who had been in the throne room when the message came from Coruscant told someone else, who told someone, and so on. First I saw a woman rush down the corridor past me, crying. Minutes later two men stopped a few feet from me to whisper, "Have you heard?" to one another and bow their heads. I stopped the next man to pass, and asked what was going on.

"Has no one told you yet? Amidala is dead."

And then I'd run home.

"It happened last night or this morning," I told Jaia. She collapsed into a chair. "They say they're bringing her body back to Theed now. By tomorrow—"

"How did she die?" she interrupted.

I took a breath. "She was murdered."

Jaia stared. "By whom? Who would do that?"

"I don't know."

I didn't know. That was what had me so confused and upset. I couldn't imagine who would ever want to kill Padmé Naberrie. Senator Amidala, well, she was a politician, and politicians were known for making people angry. But I had known Padmé Naberrie, and she was the sweetest girl I ever met.

When I was in my early teens, my parents made me join the Legislative Youth Program because they wanted me to be a politician like Dad. Padmé Naberrie had joined when she was eight or nine because she really wanted to be in politics. That amazed me, and she seemed equally amazed that I really wanted to be an artist.

We were both pretty good, although she was always better, and we got paired together a lot in debate. I sort of knew she had a crush on me, and one day, after she'd won us a particularly difficult match, we were walking down the hallways laughing and celebrating, and she looked so happy and pretty that I kissed her.

I'd never seen somebody look so surprised in my life. She told me later it was her first kiss. I was fourteen then, and she was twelve, and for a month we walked around holding hands and doing the cute, innocent things that pass for "dating" at that age. What broke us up was that she left the Program to run for office.

"That's stupid," I said when she told me. "Padmé, you've got your whole life ahead of you."

She said, "Palo, I think that if you really want to do something, you should do it. I want to help people, and I'm going to. And I think that if you really want to be an artist, you should get out of this program and do it. I know you can." She smiled. "Then someday I'll have you do my portrait."

A couple of years later I did get out of the Program, and I did become an artist, much to my parents' chagrin. Padmé became Princess Amidala, then Queen Amidala, then Senator Amidala. One day I got a holo from her saying she'd seen and loved an exhibit of mine in Theed, and that we should have lunch sometime. She got me the Theed Palace job.

But we never did have lunch, because before she came to Naboo again, somebody killed her. As the reports started to come in over the HoloNet, reports about Jedi and treachery, I shut myself in the bedroom and tried to fathom how somebody could have killed Padmé Naberrie, the girl who went into politics because she really just wanted to help people.

I couldn't listen to the HoloNet, because all they were talking about was Senator Amidala, and I wanted to mourn Padmé Naberrie. I didn't know Senator Amidala. Padmé Naberrie was half of the famous Niyar and Naberrie debate team, the girl I gave her first kiss, the girl I'd never get to have lunch with. I'd never even done her portrait.

Right then, hardly thinking about what I was doing, I got out my paints, and I got out my canvas, and, working from memory, I painted her. But I didn't paint Senator Amidala. I painted a twelve-year-old girl named Padmé, frozen in a moment, about to get her first kiss, with her whole life ahead of her, pretty and laughing, forever.