Queen Apailana was a gracious host, as always. Each time we meet, I am impressed with her balance of innocence and wisdom – everything Nubians want in a queen. Younger even than I was when first elected, she is making the best of her rule during a horrible war. I wish she had inherited a more hopeful mantle, and a functional Senate. Without spelling it out, I was able to hint to her the current near-defunct state of our galactic political system. I know she will read something between those lines.
Now I do not stand on palace marble but soft carpet. Bare toes splayed, hands pressed against swelling belly. Gazing at pale yellow walls of what I hope will become a nursery. Dormé calls this place my "not-lake house."
I find myself humming a half-remembered nursery rhyme from my own childhood. A strange and silly tale about a girl who tried to catch each apple as they ripened and fell from a tree. A story about trying and failing but trusting your gut anyway. I wonder how much it shaped my small mind.
Dormé escorted me here earlier; of all forms of company, hers is the most comfortably like being alone. But she has left me to get to know the place by myself for a few hours. My belly shifts uncomfortably, and I feel a determined kick against the wall of my womb. Inside are two tiny lives almost ready to burst.
In my mind's eye, a sandy-haired boy with Anakin's crooked smile crawls across this carpet, chubby infant fingers splayed. A small girl pushes aside dark curls that mirror mine to reach for her brother's straggling ankle and pull. I gather them both up in my arms amid a mess of giggles.
I have spent so many years fighting galactic battles. But this future, this furtive hope – I will fight for it with all of my being. And it is a battle I will fight alone. Retired Senators living in secret do not retain a team of handmaidens. I will be my children's whole world and they will be mine.
So, I had better learn how to assemble a cot from the skeletal fragments Dormé left propped against the wall.