Beru watched from the farmhouse as the elegant starship landed outside. Visitors of any sort were uncommon, and pleasant ones even less so. When the ship's occupants disembarked, however, they looked innocent enough.
"Hello," she called, taking in the odd group before her: two less-than-prosperous-looking adults, two tiny infants, and an astromech that looked like it had been through the wars, all of whom had just emerged from a rather nice starship. "Is there any way I can help you? Are you lost?"
The ship certainly looked too fine to have intentionally landed on Tatooine.
"No, not lost," the strange young woman replied. Her voice was familiar, and so was her face, as though Beru had seen or met her somewhere before—
"But yes, we have come to ask for your aid. We met here a few years ago, just before the war—"
"Oh—the senator! Senator… Amidala? You were here with Ani."
Senator Amidala's face tightened when Beru mentioned her stepbrother-in-law, but she nodded. "Yes. Please, call me Padmé."
"Of course. You said that you've come for our help, Padmé?" What that could entail, Beru could not imagine. What had a pair of humble moisture farmers to offer a Galactic Senator in the way of assistance?
Padmé, however, nodded. "We have. The Republic has fallen, and the Jedi with it. My friend," she gestured to the man beside her, who was also vaguely familiar, "and I have fled for our lives."
"The Republic, fallen? But I thought—last I had heard, the war was almost over, the Separatists almost defeated?" Not that it directly affected her, Tatooine being neither Republic nor CIS, but that the tide could have turned so quickly was rather surprising.
"They were, but as it turned out, a third player controlled both sides. The Chancellor of the Republic seized power, declared the Republic an Empire and himself its emperor. Dissent will not be tolerated, and so we have come to you to request shelter, just for a few days—long enough that we may find a more permanent refuge."
"Who is your companion?" Beru looked to the man.
"General—former General—Obi-Wan Kenobi," he replied. (Which explained the familiarity, as she only saw news clips mentioning General Kenobi every time she went into Anchorhead or Mos Eisley—but then again, perhaps she was excused for not recognizing the General from the poor-quality holos that were all one could find on Tatooine.)
"It's an honor to meet you, sir." She looked curiously at the two infants in Padmé's arms, but decided to leave further questions for later. For the present—"You both look so tired; please, won't you come in?"
Inside, in the relative cool of the house, silence seemed the order of the hour. Padmé and Obi-Wan sat in a haze of surreality, each holding a twin. Artoo was recharging, apparently sleeping—or more likely ruminating. Truth be told, the droid rarely slept or restarted, which the less kind persons of his acquaintance claimed was to blame for his excessive personality.
The quiet was disturbed only by the muffled hum of the vaporators outside, and the sounds of Beru moving about in the kitchen—clinks of dishes, and the gentle splash of pouring water. Padmé envied her step-inlaws their stable little patch of existence. They had their own troubles, of course, but the world hadn't dropped out from beneath their feet as it had hers and Obi-Wan's. They hadn't just seen everything they had striven for since they were children ruined by a deranged husband and a Sith Lord who had masqueraded as their mentor.
Beru soon returned from the kitchen, bearing a tray with glasses of water and a plate of bantha cheese and dried fruits, fresh being too costly of a luxury on this barren planet. Once she had distributed the glasses, she seated herself and looked from Padmé to Obi-Wan and back.
"So, the Republic is no more," she asked, "and the Jedi—you said the Jedi were gone, as well, and yet here you are, General Kenobi?"
"The Jedi Order is no more. A few, scattered survivors likely remain, though fewer with each passing day," he replied grimly. "The Chancellor of the Republic, as it turned out, was a Sith Lord—the ancient foe of the Jedi," he explained, as Beru knit her brows.
"So the Sith Chancellor, who is now the emperor, had the Jedi killed? How—weren't you scattered all over the galaxy? How could he… was it his magic?"
"His—the Force? Possibly." He hoped it was some trick of the Force, for if not, then the Jedi had been betrayed in good faith, as it were, and their men, with whom they and their Padawans had passed through battle after battle, valued adherence to the Chancellor above adherence to their own siblings in arms. "All I know is that my own men attacked me, and the 501st—"
The 501st—"They're Ani's men, aren't they? They're always talking about them on the HoloNews."
He nodded. "Half of them were on Coruscant. They turned on every Jedi in the Temple."
"Then—Ani?" she asked, hesitating as she saw a deeper grief come over both her guests' faces.
"He led them," Padmé replied, her voice as hollow as her eyes, the scene playing in her mind. It made no difference that she hadn't actually seen it. She knew the Temple, she knew some of the faces of the 501st, she knew the mien of the Sith-sworn Anakin—she knew what Obi-Wan had told her of his role at the Temple. She shivered.
Beru shook her head. "But they always said he was one of the best generals—and besides, Shmi—"
"It's true."
Maybe it was for the best that Shmi had died those years ago, so that she did not have to learn what her son had become, and what he had done. All the same, Beru wished Shmi was here now. She had always known how to help people, how to make a bad situation a little bit lighter.
"I'm sorry," she said. "There isn't much I can do to help you, I'm afraid, but please stay with us for as long as necessary." The two of them certainly did not need to go traipsing around the galaxy in search of a safe haven in their current fragile state and with two very young babies in tow.
"Thank you," Padmé replied. "We will trespass on your hospitality for as little time as possible."
"None of that, now. Shmi's family is quite welcome here."
"Shmi's—how did you—"
Beru smiled, a little sadly. "I have eyes. I had them the last time you were here, too."
Padmé blushed ever so slightly, and Obi-Wan resisted the urge to roll his eyes. How in the worlds either of those two had ever thought they were anything but obvious, he would never understand. [If he had known before how it would all end, would he have broken his silence and his plausible deniability and just said something to Anakin, instead of waiting for a confidence that was never given?]
After dinner, when Obi-Wan had gone outside, supposedly for the sake of meditation, and the Lars were entertaining Luke and Leia, Padmé slipped away to the little room Beru had given her. The past few days, and everything she knew and everything she didn't were all too much, and the only wonder was that she had somehow managed to keep from crumbling into a sodden heap of misery until now. At last, however, she had a bit of privacy, and no one depending on her for the immediate future, and there was nothing left to stop her from wilting face-first into a pillow and giving in to tears.
After a bit, there was a light tap at the door, and Beru's voice called gently, "Padmé?"
Padmé sniffed, wiped her eyes—which really only helped for about five seconds—and went to the door. "Do the twins—"
"They're fine—Padmé, are you… can I come in?"
She nodded, and her stepsister-in-law entered, shutting the door behind her.
"I'm so sorry, dumping all of us on you and then falling ap-apart like this," Padmé said, and found herself annoyed that for all her thirteen-plus years of public speaking, her voice would shake. "I tried to hold it to-together, but…"
Beru tsked. "That's a lot of nonsense, you know. You've been through a lot in the past tenday." She sank down beside Padmé on the mattress and put her arm around her. "Now, you're going to stay, and not worry about imposing on us, and have a good cry, and if you need to talk about anything, I'm right here. Or I can go away, if that would be better."
It wouldn't really be better, so Padmé leaned into the other woman's embrace. Beru's presence was comforting, not in the familiar way of Sabé's, or Sola's, or her mother's, but there was a kindness about her, and a sturdy commonsense. She seemed genuinely unannoyed by the distress of the stepsister-in-law who had so abruptly thrown herself and her family upon her mercy, and her ready sympathy was all Padmé needed to lower her defenses and allow herself to grieve.
Later, as her sobs at last subsided into hiccoughs, she raised her head from Beru's now rather sodden shoulder, suddenly remembering, "Luke and Leia—"
"They're fine. Owen and your Jedi friend are watching them."
"It wasn't supposed to happen like this."
"I know."
"Everything was almost o-okay. The war was almost over, and we were going to figure it out, somehow. The Order, the Senate, the babies—it was going to work out, we were going to manage, somehow, and now—everything's just gone!"
Her purpose, her life, her home, her family—all gone. Everything had to be started from the beginning, all over again: finding a way to bring down the nascent Empire, making a new life, somehow managing to scrape together something resembling a home on this desolate planet. Resolve flickered, and it all seemed impossible. She was too tired, too worn down, still too shocked from the suddenness of it all.
"Last tenday, everything seemed fine. It's like the whole world was standing on a rotten foundation. I—I knew about some of it, but we were trying to fix the Chancellor's surplus powers in the Senate, and I thought… assumed he'd learned limits, after the Tuskens."
Beru's brows knit in confusion. "The Chancellor's powers had something to do with the Tuskens?"
"What? No, not the Chancellor. I mean—the Tuskens were something else." Stars, she couldn't even talk straight anymore. "When we were here a few years ago, after Shmi died—and I thought that would be the end of it, or—or I just wasn't thinking, and it clearly wasn't the end of it because of what happened—what he did at the Jedi Temple—and I thought it had been enough, that he had learned, but that was clearly s-s-stupid—"
Oh, stars, where had her oratory powers disappeared to? She couldn't even form a coherent sentence anymore.
"It wasn't stupid if you didn't know," Beru soothed.
That was the worst part, though—she had known. Or, no, she hadn't exactly known, but in hindsight, the incident with Rush Clovis was a clear indication that whatever had allowed Anakin to massacre the Tuskens was still alive and well. Any sensible woman would have broken it off. [Any sensible woman never would have gotten herself into such a mess in the first place.]
"Then it was stupid, and still is, because I still miss him. Or—or who I thought he was."
"It happened fast. You didn't have time to really acknowledge him turning before…" Before he died. "You're mourning the person you knew for three years, not who he became at the eleventh hour."
"That doesn't make it any better. I'm afraid of myself, Beru, because I think that if he… I—I almost—sometimes I think it's a good thing that Obi-Wan—that he, Anakin—died—not just because he can't hurt anyone now, but because if he were—still here, then I'm afraid I would go and keep trying to convince him to come back, even after the horrible things he did. Because I want him back."
She had scarcely admitted it to herself before, but it was true. She planned to fight the Empire with every ability she possessed, and yet that wouldn't stop her from trying to bring Anakin back. Wouldn't have stopped her, rather.
"I should hate him. I do hate what he did. But I can't hate him, and it feels so wrong! Is it wrong?"
"I don't know, Padmé. I guess it depends what you do with it. At any rate, you can't very well make yourself hate someone out of the blue, so there's no point in worrying about it right now."
"I suppose you're right."
"Of course I am. No good will come of wasting time and energy worrying over something you can't change."
Beru stood, patting Padmé's shoulder with a comforting hand. "I'll be right back."
She soon returned with a cool, slightly damp cloth, which she placed in Padmé's hand. "For your eyes," she said.
Padmé knew enough of water's scarcity on Tatooine to recognise the gift of the damp cloth. It was extravagance to use water simply to make oneself feel better, a luxurious waste of a scarce resource that ought to have been consumed or else sold for profit.
"Thank you," she said, pressing the cool cloth to her face.
"Say nothing. Now, go say goodnight to your babies, and then straight to bed."
"And it will all look better in the morning?"
Beru's smile was rueful. "Well, perhaps not yet, but at least you'll have more energy to deal with everything."
Dabbing her eyes one more time with the damp cloth, Padmé nodded and rose, then allowed Beru to shepherd her out to the sitting area of the house. Obi-Wan had apparently succumbed at last to his need for sleep, for he was slumped in a chair in a less-than-dignified attitude, leaving Owen to meander slowly through the room with both twins.
"Man doesn't know when to stop," he greeted them, nodding at Obi-Wan and speaking low so as not to disturb Leia's tenuous slumber. "Had to go out and threaten to spread his name around Mos Eisley unless he stopped pacing the yard and came back inside to take a rest."
"Owen!"
"Come on, 'Ru, would you have done any different?"
Beru did not deign to respond—probably because she would not, in fact, have done anything very different at all.
And so Padmé took the twins, thanking Owen—who gruffly "guessed that it was nothing"—, and returned to her room, where she tucked Luke and Leia into the shallow packing crate that Beru had suggested as a makeshift crib and then fell into bed herself.