Chapter Text
19 BBY
After Padmé gets back from their new Emperor’s first speech in the Senate, she sends all of her handmaidens away. They take the news about as well as she expected. Moteé wrings her hands and paces. Hollé is as pale as the moons of Naboo; she has been ever since the Jedi Temple started burning. Ellé nods in head in silent assent, but her eyes are worried and watchful.
Dormé resists the most.
“My lady,” she says. “You need our help now more than ever.”
“It’s not safe on Coruscant anymore. You all need to go home. Stay with family, for a while.” Padmé says. Not that she thinks that Naboo will be safe. Their newly crowned Emperor will make sure of that, a fact that stings as much as it humiliates her. How well she had once thought she knew Palpatine. But she knows her handmaidens are smart enough to read between the lines.
Dormé takes her arm, gentle but firm. “What about you?”
“Captain Typho will be here. Threepio will be here. I’ll be fine.” She forces herself to smile. “I’m needed here, right now.”
Dormé and the others leave only with clear reluctance and a promise from Padmé to comm them if anything happens.
Starting with the day she was first elected Queen, Padmé’s handmaidens had become her sisters, her other halves. The only reason why she functioned as well as she did in spite of all of her responsibilities. Even as she had kept secrets from them, she had regretted it bitterly. She hopes that this would not be the last time she saw them.
Padmé hears from Bail over the next hours via an encrypted comm that she once thought was overly paranoid: over one hundred members of the Delegation of 2000 have been arrested so far. She looks out her window. The Jedi Temple is still burning, as it had been the entire night.
Anakin will be back. I told him I would wait. He’ll be back.
But she has not heard from Anakin since he left for Mustafar. She turns her comm over in one hand and she thinks of her child. No one has responded—not Anakin, not Ahsoka, not Obi-Wan, or any of the other Jedi she knows. Padmé watches the smoke and ash from the Temple turn the skies of Coruscant a deep orange, and she weeps.
When Obi-Wan sneaks into her apartment a few hours later, his expression serious, his robes dirty and slightly singed with what looks like a blaster fire burn, she takes his arm, so relieved she can hardly speak.
She had considered Obi-Wan a friend since he and his Master had saved her planet and her people all those years ago. But over three years of war, she and Obi-Wan had become close friends. In the last weeks of the war, they had talked almost daily: about Padmé’s efforts to try to resume peace negotiations with the Separatists, about the Cloned Sentients' Rights bill that despite all her efforts she never even managed to get out of committee.
But, admittedly, most of the conversations had revolved around the person they both loved most in the galaxy: Anakin. During last few days, as Obi-Wan worried for his former padawan and Padmé worried for her husband, he had come by her apartment every day. Obi-Wan’s visits had eased her mind, somewhat—they let her know that someone else was looking out for Anakin too.
“Obi-Wan! You’re alright, thank the Gods.” Padmé gets to her feet and quickly pulls the Jedi Master into a hug, which he returns carefully.
She isn’t hiding her pregnancy anymore. There’s hardly a point, now. Everything she has spent the past seven months worrying about is engulfed by the magnitude of what has happened.
“What’s happened? Palpatine has said that the Jedi tried to assassinate him. He’s declared himself Emperor, in front of the Senate.”
“I know,” he says.
Padmé shakes her head. “What—what’s happened, Obi-Wan? Have you heard anything from Anakin?”
She notices for the first time: Obi-Wan’s face is grim and pale. His robes are unclean.
He does not have good news for her.
He tells her this: Anakin has turned to the Dark Side. Anakin has joined Palpatine, who is actually a Sith Lord named Darth Sidious. Who has been controlling the war from both sides. And Anakin has betrayed the Jedi in the worst way possible. Anakin has killed Jedi younglings, has murdered children he knew.
But the last thing Obi-Wan tells her is—
“Padmé,” Obi-Wan says, his voice somehow still gentle. “He killed Ahsoka.”
And Padmé’s heart stops for the third time that day. First, when she saw the Temple burning. Second, when she watched the democracy in the galaxy end with applause. Third—
“No. You’re wrong. Ahsoka is—she’s still away. She’s stationed on Saleucami. I talked to her a few days ago, and she doesn’t get leave for another month.” says Padmé, with real conviction in her voice.
She doesn’t add that Palpatine has said all Jedi traitors were to be hunted down; Obi-Wan already knew that. And Ahsoka was smart, she could avoid capture. Padmé knew she could.
The look on Obi-Wan’s face will haunt her for the rest of her life. It is a look of hopelessness. It is a look of pity.
“She must have sensed something wrong through the Force and decided she had to return,” he says, voice still so impossibly gentle. “Padmé. I saw the security hologram. I saw her struck down myself. Her and countless other Jedi, the young and the old alike.”
She stands up, backs away quickly as if she had been physically burned.
“Why would you say that?” Padmé shakes her head. “I can’t believe you. Anakin wouldn’t do this. He would never hurt Ahsoka. Never.”
“I would have said the same thing a day ago. But now I have seen proof to the contrary.”
Obi-Wan looks towards the window, towards the smoke still rising from the Temple. “We were all deceived. It seems that we must pay a high toll for it.”
He stands up. “The man we knew, that we—cared for—is dead. You will not be safe with him. Please, Padmé, for your child’s sake, if not your own, leave. Hide. I know you have friends across the galaxy. Tell me where he went, and I will end this quickly.”
“You’re going to—you can’t ask me to do that.” Padmé says, her mind racing, actually astonished. “He’s my husband!”
For a moment, it is Obi-Wan’s turn to be shocked. Genuine surprise—hurt, perhaps—flashes across his face. But it is gone in an instant, and he is the impassive Jedi Master once more.
“If you are not willing to help, then I must go.” Obi-Wan looks at her one last time—devastated, pregnant and alone.
“I’m so sorry.”
She watches him go in silence, and she thinks once more of the galaxy she decided to bring her child into. She tries to comm Ahsoka for an hour before she gives up.
21 BBY
When Padmé Amidala first met Ahsoka Tano, the bright, confident young girl had followed her new husband around more like an overexcited sprite rather than a solemn Jedi padawan. She also dressed more like a trendy Coruscanti teenling than any Jedi padawan she had seen before.
Padmé gives Anakin a curious look, her eyebrows slightly raised. He hadn’t told her anything about considering taking a padawan the last time they talked. In fact, the last time they spoke, Anakin had been complaining that Obi-Wan was talking about taking a new padawan. Anakin gives her a slightly strained smile in return.
“Senator Amidala,” says Anakin, in that formal but friendly way he always said her name when they weren’t alone. “It’s always a pleasure to see you. Thank you for your help with the negotiations.”
“Of course, Master Skywalker. I was simply doing my duty,” says Padmé. “And this must be Ahsoka.”
“It’s an honor to meet you, Senator,” says Ahsoka, words carefully practiced, looking a little restless.
Padmé gives her a smile. “I heard you did a wonderful job. The Republic thanks you, Knight Skywalker and Padawan Tano.”
Ahsoka smiles back, a little shyly, her sharp Togruta teeth visible.
“Forgive me, Senator, but we must be going. We have to debrief with the Jedi Council.” Anakin says. And she can tell by the look on his face that he is truly sorry.
“Of course, I wouldn’t want to keep you from your duties. Farewell, Master Jedi, Padawan Tano.” Padmé says.
The debriefs keep him for the next few hours. Padmé reads legislative briefs and proposed bills as she works on dinner, hoping that it wouldn’t be cold by the time Anakin made it to her apartment. They had had so little time together thus far—she wanted to make this evening special.
Anakin had started complaining about Ahsoka the second they were alone in her apartment.
“Can you believe it?” he asks, with barely a greeting. “The Council sent me a padawan, without even asking. After all the Council complains about me, they’re giving me some youngling to look after?”
“Maybe this is the responsibility you’ve been waiting for,” Padmé counsels. “To prove to them that you’re not a padawan anymore.”
“I have enough responsibility. I’m commanding an entire battalion and now I have to watch after some annoying kid,” Anakin scoffs.
She looks up, curious. “Is this usual? Assigning a padawan to a Jedi who didn’t request one?”
“It is if Yoda thinks you need to be knocked down a peg,” says Anakin, with such earnest bitterness in his voice.
She can’t help it—Padmé feels a smile come to her face, then she quickly tries to hide it behind her hand. Anakin sees it.
“Oh, come on. Even my own wife revels in my misery.” Anakin says, trying for harshness but failing to hide his own smile.
“I think,” Padmé says, taking a sip of the Nubian wine. “That Ahsoka is lucky to be learning from such a skilled Jedi Knight.”
“Yeah?” says Anakin.
“I also think that she’s already growing on you.”
Anakin looks slightly sheepish. “Well. Maybe a little. She did help on the mission. Once she actually decided to start following orders.”
Padmé resisted the urge to ask him if Obi-Wan had fainted when he heard Anakin recommending following orders. She looked at the windows, the sunset on the Coruscant skyline. It made the city beautiful; lit up the whole Senate District with color.
She turned to her husband. “So, how was the mission?”
Instantly, Anakin stiffened. “It was fine.”
A few beats of silence. They had been married for less than a year. The days they'd actually spent together during that time numbered in weeks, not months. Padmé knew that too well.
“I mean… how was it being back on Tatooine?” she asks gently. She could already see him withdrawing, and she tried to keep her disappointment off her face.
“I said it was fine. We finished the mission and that’s all that matters.” Anakin says, a little sharply.
Padme leaned closer to him, put her hand on top of his.
“You know that you can tell me anything, and I’ll listen. I won’t ever judge you or think any less of you, Ani.” She tries, her voice gentle.
Anakin looks away, his face falling. “I know. I know, okay. But—for tonight, can we—can we just be happy? Enjoy ourselves?”
Padmé bites her lip. She knows that going back to Tatooine must have hurt him. But she can’t force him to talk if he doesn’t want to. And they see each other so little.
“Okay,” she says.
They talk for the rest of the night, and things gradually get less strained. They eat and drink and laugh together, and Padmé wishes she could spend every night like this. They take what they can, spending nearly every night together for the next week, until Anakin is sent to the front again.
But Anakin never shares what it was like to be on Tatooine again.
At least, not with her.
Ahsoka becomes a frequent topic of discussion over the next months. In secret holocalls and holomessages, Anakin tells Padmé about how she’s progressing in her saber forms, how she’s becoming more responsible and mature. Padmé thinks she loves him even more than she loved him before, for how much he loves Ahsoka, how obviously he cares for her. That was her Anakin—he loved deeply, and without regrets.
The next time she sees Ahsoka in person, she has been assigned as Padmé’s bodyguard for a conference on Alderaan.
She makes small talk with her on the trip. Ahsoka seemed genuinely curious about Padme’s work. She was also, Padmé couldn’t help but think, so very young. She looked so much younger than Padmé remembers being at age 14. At age 14, Padmé was already Queen. At age 14, she had fought to defend her people against the Trade Federation. Padmé remembered being 14 vividly, remembered when it was just her and her handmaidens against the galaxy. Ahsoka is 14, a commander, a leader of men in battle, and all Padmé could think was: who let this child wield a blade and risk her life? All of the stories of Ahsoka’s tenacity and bravery that Anakin had told her seemed to be put in an uncomfortable new light.
It was more than a tad hypocritical, which was why she chose to say nothing. Besides—this wasn’t just a sacred cultural duty, as her girlhood queenship had been. This was Ahsoka’s religion and the way of life she chose. This was the result of a war that the Senate had done nothing to prevent, despite Padmé’s best efforts. Who was Padmé to tell her otherwise?
Ahsoka saves her life from the assassin twice over before the event is over.
On her next holocall with Anakin, Padmé asks if he ever thinks Ahsoka is too young for the duties she is asked to perform, if he ever worries for her.
Anakin shakes his head, a sad smile on his face. “Padmé, I worry about her all the time.”
After Ahsoka’s trial, she grows quiet. The bright, confident child has been replaced by someone quieter, and in the weeks after Padmé knows to let it be. Ahsoka will talk when she needs to, and the occasional glimmers of the cheerful, self-assured girl she has come to know will have to be enough.
Padmé is both disappointed and disillusioned by Ahsoka’s trial. The girl was railroaded, and she had barely managed to stall the trial long enough for Anakin to find the real culprit and save her. What was the Republic coming to, to have as shameful a trial as that, to nearly convict a child on such flimsy evidence? Of a crime that could have seen Ahsoka executed? The only glimmer of relief in the whole affair is that the Jedi Council took back Ahsoka’s expulsion, and Ahsoka accepted. They even Knighted her.
In between committee meetings and speeches, Padmé invites Ahsoka to lunch in her apartment. They eat take-out from her favorite Coruscanti restaurant in the Senate District, which she is told is much better than Temple fare. Padmé invites her mostly so she knows that she has a friendly ear, if she needs it.
Ahsoka is 16 now—she asks questions about the legislation Padme introduces and her efforts to push for peace negotiations and a guaranteed pension and back-pay for the clones. Ahsoka is quieter, but more thoughtful as well, more mature. When Padmé looks at her, she can see the woman she will one day grow into.
“You’ve grown up,” says Padmé with a sad smile.
“Had to at some point,” says Ahsoka, with a shrug that was just a little too casual to be genuine.
Ahsoka is on leave, on Coruscant, this time without Anakin. Anakin, who has been at the Outer Rim Sieges for months. Anakin, who is crucial to the war effort, who barely has time for a ten minute, once a week holo-call. Ahsoka is on Coruscant when Padmé finds out she’s pregnant. She can’t tell Anakin—this was the kind of thing that could distract him on the field, get his men killed, get him killed. And this wasn’t the kind of thing she wanted to tell him on a hurried holocall while he got Rex to guard the door.
So she tells no one, barely has the free time to let herself think about it. Still. In between votes and committee meetings, Padmé wonders what kind of father Anakin will be. When they talked about it, Anakin had always said he wanted a family—multiple kids, Anakin had always wanted a sibling growing up. Padmé had wanted that too.
They hadn’t talked about what they would do if their child was Force-sensitive. She had always admired the Jedi, even before she knew one so closely, and she knew that there were many good reasons why parents across the galaxy chose to give their children to the Order. But she couldn’t imagine doing it herself. What would Anakin want? Sure, Anakin had his problems with the Order, but he loved being a Jedi.
They hadn’t ever talked about how they would ever make their relationship public, if Anakin would resign from the Order or try to keep his position. She could imagine the scandal: news of an “affair” between a Jedi Knight and Senator on every holonews station. But it would be worse than that: an inappropriate, borderline illegal relationship between the de facto leader of the peace movement in the Senate and one of the two most famous Jedi Generals of the Grand Army of the Republic. Could her career survive that?
Not that her career felt all that important these days. Padmé had gotten into politics to enact change. To help people. But Jedi die by the dozens. Clones die by the thousands. Padmé’s attempts at peace negotiations die. Outside of her small faction, no one in the Senate cares, not unless it directly affects their world. Padme grows to hate her speeches, how she must pretend to be calm, how she must show she cares but not seem overly emotional. That would make her seem unreasonable. She wants to scream, because this war is unjust, and if they would just listen to her, if they would just consider reopening negotiations with the Separatists—
The pregnancy is not the only thing she is not telling Anakin about during their infrequent holocalls. The meetings with Bail and Mon and their allies, the quiet discussions about what they will do when the war ends. What they will do if Palpatine does not give back the unprecedented, broad emergency powers he has found himself in possession of.
Padmé wanted this child, but the thought of what her life would become once she had this baby filled her with dread. She hated lying to her parents and to her sister. Her holocalls to her family had become less and less frequent since she had gotten married. Now Padmé stopped calling altogether, worried that if she called her mother, she would start talking and wouldn’t be able to stop.
She had hid her pregnancy from her handmaidens for as long as she could, and when she couldn’t anymore, she begged them for their secrecy, and to not ask her questions about the father, though she knew that they must suspect Anakin. They had agreed after much coaxing. Hollé had cried, and the rest had given her such reproachful looks. She had never kept secrets from her handmaidens before. Once, they had been so close it was almost as if they hadn't been separate people at all.
Padmé had never felt so alone in her entire life.
At lunch with Ahsoka—they tried to get together at least twice a week every time they were both onplanet—she couldn’t help but ask.
“Ahsoka,” she asks. “Was Anakin a good Master?”
Ahsoka blinks.
“Well—yeah, of course. At the beginning it was new, for both of us. And you know that Anakin can be... unorthodox, at times.” They both smiled at that. “But Anakin is also wise, and kind. He’s a great teacher. I wouldn’t have another Master.”
Of course he was. Why had she ever doubted? And he would be a good father too. Padmé is certain of it.
“You know he tells me how proud he is of you?” asks Padmé with a smile. “All the time. He loves to brag about his smart, talented padawan learner.”
“Oh… he does?” Ahsoka tries to hide her smile, her face turning a slightly brighter shade. “I don’t know what to say.”
Padmé laughs, light and relieved. “You don’t have to say anything. I think you do your Master credit, Ahsoka. You are turning into a very capable young woman.”
That just made Ahsoka blush worse.
They’re going to be fine, Padmé had found herself thinking at that moment. Their little family will be fine.
Anakin was the only truly selfish thing Padmé had ever allowed herself, in a life dedicated to her people and to the Republic.
She had fallen in love with Anakin because he was the first person she’d met since she’d become Queen who looked at her and saw Padmé first and Amidala second. It wasn’t the only reason that she fell in love with him. She had been an overachiever since she was six years old. Of course, the love of Padmé’s life could not be so simple a thing.
Padmé had been elected Queen of a planet at age fourteen. Yet in many ways, she knew she was sheltered. It was one of the reasons the Naboo chose leaders so young—they were innocent, uncynical. Pure. Padmé had missed out on the life of a normal girl the day she had been chosen for the Legislative Youth program. And she had chosen to have this life, and she didn’t regret it.
But sometimes, especially during the war, she had wondered if missing out on the majority of her childhood had left her without something crucial, something others had that she lacked. Sometimes, her desire to be optimistic, to see the best in people, felt crushing, vapid in the face of the reality of working in politics. Every day, it seemed the Republic became more corrupt, more cynical, less of the democracy she’d grown up believing in. Every day, she wondered if what she did truly made a difference.
Loving Anakin was not an entirely different thing than loving the Republic.
Padmé had fallen in love with him because he was brave and handsome. She had fallen in love because he was honest, and funny and kind to her. She had fallen in love because he was a true friend and a hero. A fundamentally kind little boy she had known who had grown into a good man. She had fallen in love because of how much he had loved her.
He was dangerous—Padmé had always known that—but he would never hurt her. She had stayed in the Larses’ home that day on Tatooine, waiting anxiously for Anakin. The stories Owen and his father had told about the conflict between the Sand People and the farmers were familiar to her. Not too long ago, relations between the Naboo and the Gungans could have been described like that. In that conversation before his mother's funeral, when he confessed to her what he had done—she didn’t fully understand. She hadn't wanted to. He had done a terrible, unforgivable thing that she could scarcely fathom.
But she had only wanted to soothe him. She had pitied him so fiercely, felt his grief and pain as if it were her own. On Tatooine, Padmé had watched this sad, broken boy who loved her more than anything confess his sins to her. And she had thought, I can save him. I can fix him, with my love, with the love he is not allowed to have.
She had known Anakin as an adult for not even a full two weeks when she agreed to marry him.
Padmé had married him because there was a war and she’d watched dozens of Jedi die on the sands of Geonosis on a mission to help rescue her. Because she’d had to prepare for assassination attempts since she was 12, and she’d seen too many girls who looked like her die to ever take even a day of her life for granted. Because they were young and they loved each other.
For Anakin, Padmé had betrayed her values. She had lied—to her people, to her friends and family, to the Republic. She had hidden a marriage. Worse, she had hidden a massacre, the murder of noncombatants and the murder of children, even as she decried nearly identical Separatist war crimes on the floor of the Senate. She had tried to forget the truth she had learned in the desert. She had tried.
Later, Padmé will think: What a fool I was.
(Later, on the days on which she was feeling less charitable to herself, she will think: I did not love him in spite of his brokenness; I loved him because he was broken. Because he was dangerous, and because he was a monster. But he was a monster who loved me, and I was prideful enough to think I could save him.)