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They agree to it immediately out of mutual guilt, their own carefully-planned journey to uncertain safety be damned. They may have sent a beloved friend into a trap; they must get her out. It is a firm decision and made together.
Ahsoka only has hours on them, but she wasted no second putting distance between herself and Anakin. (No, not Anakin.)
Even if Obi-Wan isn’t convinced by her pleas and her tears, Padmé cannot believe the speed of Ahsoka’s flight does not convince him they have lost one of their number forever.
She never would have pictured it, but running into the unknown with Obi-Wan is not what Padmé expects. He knows what military questions to ask covertly as they change ships, but she is the one who touches his elbow to keep him focused.
He doesn’t notice when she steals a blaster from a fellow passenger as they disembark one for another.
“Felucia!” calls the freighter captain.
They step out of the dark hold into the sun, shielding their eyes. It seems odd suns could go on cheerily throwing off light given the transpiring events. The road towards the battlefield is littered with the dead. It turns her stomach; Obi-Wan looks just as ill.
“Maybe we should split up, we can cover more ground to look for her,” Padmé suggests.
“No, stay with me. Master Yoda ordered –”
“We’ll cover more ground faster. Whatever was meant to happen has.” Indicating to the blaster tucked away, “I have this if anything else does.”
Obi-Wan takes a sweeping look at the carnage and nods, “Meet you back here in an hour and we’ll decide what to do from there.”
Every swishing branch in the wind startles Padmé. Faces of clones begin blur together; she wonders how they managed years of this: rot and decay and senseless loss.
There is no sign of Ahsoka and Padmé despairs of having ever let her leave Coruscant alone; having not taken her by the hand and marched her straight to the Temple and kept her safe at her side.
(But what is safe with Padmé anymore?)
She makes it back to the rendezvous before Obi-Wan. When she sees him come down the road without Ahsoka, the tiny bubble of hope she let remain within her pops.
Lead fills her stomach when he stands at her side. One of Ahsoka’s lightsabers is in hand.
----------
Padmé doesn’t take her eyes off of Obi-Wan as he watches the holo Master Yoda brings.
She doesn’t need to – doesn’t want to watch. Hearing – knowing is enough.
Obi-Wan already acts like a caged animal but this is another thing entirely; Padmé’s seen it before. (She keeps composure, not for his sake, but maybe for Ahsoka’s. They never did find her.)
He needs out, he needs to fix what is wrong. And there’s something wrong in the blood. (It’s why he gnaws his lip until it bleeds; it’s why she has a thin and pale look in her face.)
Obi-Wan paces back and forth after Yoda shuffles out, voice muffled behind his hand.
“I don’t care what Master Yoda says, I’m going to stop him because someone has to. I’m going to go and I’m going to –”
He chokes back the last words.
“I’m coming with you.”
“No, Padmé –”
Padmé puts a hand to her forehead, readying for the fight. It is the first time since Felucia she has taken a firm stand on anything and she will not back down, not for anything in the galaxy.
“I don’t want to hear it, Obi-Wan. I’m not letting you go alone. I can’t use a lightsaber, but I need to be there for you. Won’t my presence mean something in the Force?”
Obi-Wan looks genuinely taken aback, as if he had so forgotten the possibility of the Force working in favor of the Light. Padmé didn’t know she might believe it, until that moment.
“Maybe. Possibly. I hope so.”
They are drawn to Mustafar; for they all seek an end.
(No ends, only knots and tattered beginnings.)
----------
The waiting is a worse agony Padmé never wishes to experience again.
Hell is before her; hell is in her head.
She has to wait: for flight from death or news of it, because what else is there to do? She chose to be the sole spectator of a battle she cannot possibly see.
Padmé begins a prayer to the Goddess of Safety she never finishes. Gods have forsaken this place.
She simply breathes.
She tells herself Jedi do it to focus, to meditate, to calm, to find the Force. If any of her Jedi friends were still here, it is what they might advise. And she can think of nothing better to do.
In her breathing, she tries reaching for the Force. It seems foolish (all living things, and she might be it for miles) and trivial and besides, if she was capable of such things, she would have gone to the Temple.
And be dead with all the rest.
But she does feel something. For the first time in all the running and stalling, she feels alive from her head to her toes.
She feels like Padmé Amidala, the senator from Naboo.
She is someone and it makes tears spill from her eyes and of all the strange things, a laugh chokes out from her throat.
Padmé Amidala will run with a friend or run from an enemy soon, but she will do with her head held high.
----------
The image the droid presents to her looks like everything and nothing.
“That,” GH-7 indicates, “is a girl and that,” pointing to the other side, “is a boy.”
One of each. Oh wouldn’t –
“Congratulations,” says Ben, with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.
Padmé ignores his lack of genuine enthusiasm. He will not spoil an opportunity to plan her children’s futures.
“Thank you GH-7, that will be all for now.” Turning to Ben, she speaks almost matter-of-factly, but does not let all of her excitement diminish. “We should look for a place with forests. The cover from ships would be beneficial, but I would love for them to be surrounded by a place that is green. You know how important I think it is to have a place to swim nearby, but I understand if –”
“I spoke with Master Yoda earlier.”
Ben slouches forward over the medical bed, staring at the floor, hands folded.
“Padmé, they have to be separated.”
Padmé shakes her head, unable to believe what she is hearing, just as Ben was unable to hear the truth before.
“No.”
Ben finds the courage to look her in the eye, as she only is able to look away, to stare at the frozen screen GH-7 left on.
“Think about it: they will be incredibly strong with the Force, we have every reason to believe the Emperor or Vader will sense them, find them, and kill them.” He slumps back in his seat, “Separating them gives them a fighting chance.”
Incredibly strong with the Force.
Padmé doesn’t need Ben to tell her that; she senses them grow every day. Her daughter. Her son.
Still staring at the screen, “You mean a fighting chance to do what you and Master Yoda will not.”
She turns to see if it is the slap across the face she intends it to be. She can’t even take satisfaction when she sees it is.
They sit in silence. She doesn’t mind it; he does.
She breaks it for him, running an idle hand over her hair, “I could leave, take all of your and Master Yoda’s grand plans with me. Find a system with a forest and a lake. Or a river, I’m not particular.”
Ben’s voice is slightly ragged, “Vader would find you.”
It hurts because it is true. The sick feeling knowing he would be drawn to them, but not knowing what it was that brought him there. Whatever time she’d borrow with her children would be lost in an instant.
“I would kill him for them,” she thinks, though she does not say it out loud.
What she does say, in a voice Ben strains to hear, “So we find someone we trust to raise them until right time.”
Ben scoffs quietly, “Is there anyone left we trust?”
Before Padmé had any notion of this, of her last physical reminder of her husband, and years of running from the Emperor stretched before her, she had thought on an alternative, where she could at least see how badly the Republic was crumbling.
“The Organas. They’re good people, they don’t have children of their own, and Alderaan would be a wonderful place for them to grow up.”
Exasperated, “Padmé, the point is to separate them as far as possible from each other, not take them away from you.”
Padmé leans back on the medical bed, closing her eyes, and resting her hands on her still-flat stomach. Everything tells her they are safer together, everyone tells her they are safer apart.
Slowly, she sits back up, contemplating the next option.
“I don’t know if ‘trust’ enters here, but it is almost a guarantee Vader would never set foot near the place.”
Ben stiffens; incredulous such a place could exist when a Force-sensitive child exists for the taking.
“The Larses.”
“The who?”
“Anakin’s stepfamily.”
----------
Luke and Leia are hers.
Small, perfect, inverses of each other, and hers.
They coo and make small breathy noises laid out in her lap; when one is fed, the other fusses and she must lay a staying hand on their round belly.
It fills her with joy and it fills her with sadness to see her own dark hair and brown eyes on Leia, but it is a worse kind of agony that Luke is fair with blue eyes.
Whether they are the blue eyes of many infants or the gods saw fit to give him his father’s, only time will tell.
----------
Ben will bitterly regret giving Padmé access to the Larses only for the last, most dire resort.
(He doesn’t understand. It is her last resort.)
Thankfully, Beru is the one who answers the holo, although later, Padmé realizes, based on Ben’s recounting of Owen Lars, Beru would be the one to keep it on hand.
Beru’s face is warm and kind; a good face to call “mother.” (She wonders if Luke does.)
“I have no intention of him knowing who I am, same as his sister.”
“How has she been? Good?”
Padmé is taken aback this woman would be filled with such concern for a little girl she’s never laid eyes on, but it is hard to untangle Luke’s life from Leia’s.
Temporarily speechless, Padmé only nods.
“Good. Well, it’s all fine with me. Owen will… well, he won’t be happy, but he won’t say no once it’s happened either. We’ll tell Luke you’re an old friend who managed to get away, like his father.”
Padmé winces. The mixing of truth and lies in Luke and Leia’s lives is dangerous.
When the war is over, she will come back and make it all up to them.