"Padme, what else happened?" Anakin could see the effect asking this question had on his wife; he had known Padme for years, knowing even before their…separation when she was so…horrified by what she had seen, she was having a hard time putting it all into words.

What Padme was thinking about right at that moment had been one of her worst nightmares and the basis of more terrifying nightmares which had haunted her for the last 5 years since the inception of the Empire. Thinking about what she had seen continued to haunt her and it was one of the reasons why she had made it clear to Mon and Bail they had to be careful. She had told them what she had seen in the Temple, while they were horrified she hadn't exactly brought back proof, but it had nonetheless made them exceptionally careful in their dealings with Palpatine and the Imperial Intelligence officers and their activities with the growing rebellion.

Padme closed her eyes and reopened the box she had created in her mind to shut away her dark thoughts, fears, and memories; her memories of the blockade, her fury towards herself for calling for a vote in no confidence in Valorum especially since it hadn't done any good at the time; seeing the cold and pointless way so many of her friends were killed on the run-up to the clone wars; losing Anakin before she lost Ahsoka and was forced to watch Palpatine transform the Republic into the Empire.

But she had a feeling what she had seen in the Jedi Temple on that very day Palpatine summoned her there for a private discussion would forever rank as one of her worst memories yet…

"Months after Order 66, Palpatine sent me a summons to the Jedi Temple. It wasn't an email, but a personal message. He sent that bastard, Mas Amedda to this apartment, with four of his Red Guards. It wasn't an order I was in any position to refuse. Captain Typho wanted to come with me, but Amedda became impatient, telling us we could be arrested on any charge he and Palpatine pleased if we loitered. And he promised us I would be returning soon to the apartment," Padme said.

Anakin had listened to this with growing fear. Whatever it was she had seen in the Jedi Temple (he refused to call it the Imperial Palace), it had shaken her badly, and he was listening with growing unease at what she must have seen in there. He knew Padme; while he was worried about her need for him to come and save her a lot during the Clone Wars, she was a strong woman and not one to be intimidated.

Seeing he was about to ask her to go on, Padme got on with her story. "Amedda said little in the transport. When we arrived in the Temple, looking up at those damn Imperial banners, seeing the statues of the Jedi defaced and replaced with statues of thirty different people…it was like walking into a whole new world."

"Wait, these thirty different people. Can you describe them?"

"A few humans, but there was a Zeltron, two Twi'leks, a Duros, a Bith, a Muun, and several others. All of them were wearing robes with hoods, and a few were holding what looked like lightsabers. One of was Palpatine," Padme replied, slightly irked by the interruption, but she was glad of it nonetheless. She wanted this over and done with.

Anakin rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "It sounds like the Sith lineage Palpatine's a part of," he commented. "Anyway, go on," he went on, deciding to look into those statues later when he had the chance to find out where Obi-Wan was.

"Amedda led me through the Temple, but I could see while he was acting like the pompous bastard he's always been, it was a front. He was nervous, almost sick; his skin was paler."

Anakin had never thought much of Mas Amedda, he had always seen the man as nothing more than a pompous jackass. "Why?"

"I'm coming to that. He led me to a pair of doors inside the Temple and told me Palpatine was waiting inside for me. I went in, but I was scared. The room was cold, dark…I tried to ask Amedda what was going on, suspecting a trap, but he shut the door in my face, and I was left in the cold darkness," Padme closed her eyes, shuddering as she remembered it, "I called out for Palpatine. But he didn't say anything and I was wondering if he was even there and if Amedda was lying to me for some weird reason. You know how much of a sycophant he is. Anyway, I was walking around, hoping to find a way out…and then I bumped into something. I felt all around it, and it felt like a glass column."

"There's nothing in the Jedi Temple like that," Anakin told her.

"There is now, and it wasn't a column, Ani. Suddenly lights came on, and the glass column was suddenly lit up and I found myself looking into the face of a dead child floating inside some kind of orange liquid. It was a Jedi Youngling."

Anakin gaped at her in horror. But Padme went on. "More of the glass….tanks - I don't know what they were called - suddenly lit up, and I was surrounded by the corpses of dead Jedi; I recognised some of them. One of them was the boy who was shot down in front of me and Bail. There was Master Windu, Master Fisto, Master Kolar, and Master Tinn. But there were hundreds of younglings in that room. And then I found Yoda, or at least I thought it was Yoda before I saw the state of the body; they looked…decomposed, and they looked female."

Anakin blinked at her, intrigued as a memory stirred in his mind. "A younger Yoda….," he said thoughtfully. "Did this one have long brown hair, coiled in a knot on the head?" he asked slowly.

"Yes, did you know them?" Padme blinked, nodding.

"Master Yaddle," Anakin told her. "And no, answering your question, not personally. I only met her briefly a couple of times when Qui-Gon first brought me to the Temple. I don't know if she wanted me to be trained or just went along with the consensus saying I was too dangerous," he scowled at the memory for a moment as he was once more thrown back in time to those first days on Coruscant; cold, away from his mother and the only life he had known, brought into the Temple and discovering just how out of touch the whole Jedi Order was. "After that, she disappeared. It happened around the time of Qui-Gon's murder of Naboo, and nobody knows what happened to her. You said she was decomposed?" He asked as he remembered what Padme had said earlier.

"Yeah, and it looked like her body had been crushed."

Anakin wondered how that could have happened for a moment before deciding there was little point trying to work out the answers. "Go on, Padme," he said softly as he tried to coax his wife into carrying on with her story. "What happened then? Was Palpatine there at all?"

"Oh, he was," the expression of pure hatred on Padme's face worried Anakin. "I was moving from tank to tank, stunned at all the bodies. So many of them had been hit by heavy blaster fire, and only a few of them had been cut in pieces or stabbed with lightsabers. I was getting more and more frightened, and then Palpatine spoke behind me. He said 'This is the price of treason.' I screamed and jumped back in fright. And then he laughed, like an ancient, high-pitched cackle, and nothing like the laugh he'd used before. He scared me to death. He was just there, standing and looking ghoulishly with his new wrinkled grey face, and those awful yellow red-rimmed eyes scared me to death. He mock apologised for startling me, but the smirk on his face told me he didn't mean it."

Anakin was listening with growing anger at what Palpatine had done, even if it happened years ago from Padme's perspective. But Padme wasn't finished, and he could see that, so he let her finish.

Padme bit her lip. "He came out with it, saying he knows there are many who will fight against him and his empire…and he told me he would not tolerate it. He was only telling me because I had given him power on a plate, and he actually thanked me for it."

"Bastard."

Padme smirked at him in gratitude for his overprotectiveness. But it faded quickly when she went on. "He threatened me, Ani. He told me he wasn't stupid, and he would always remember the Delegation of 2000 and their attempts to remove power from him during the Clone Wars."

Palpatine had been one of the biggest wedges between him and Padme during the course of their marriage; while Padme was more or less confined to Coruscant for the duration of the clone wars, Anakin was out fighting in them, but he had been a supporter of Palpatine, believing he was the leader they all needed. But Padme was the opposite, constantly telling him something was wrong…but he had never listened to her as more and more power went to Palpatine, power Anakin felt would be put to better use as truly he didn't trust the senate, and he still didn't.

But before he could even think of apologising to her and begging for forgiveness, Padme went on. "And then he said it. He said one of the reasons he was even telling me to back away and be a good, loyal servant of the Empire, was because of you."

A cold chill that had nothing to do with being frozen in carbonite, but was just as cold.

Padme confirmed his worst suspicions. "He knew, Anakin. He knows we married," she whispered.