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Chapter Text

SO IT BEGINS

19 BBY | 3258 LY | 7958 C.R.C., CORUSCANT

Coruscant, the Republic's jewel, never truly slept.

The perpetual traffic streams dimmed to a lazy amber flow, like molten veins running between the towers. Airspeeders hovered at lower altitude, their hum softened by the planet’s thick morning haze. For a brief moment, the city’s endless light seemed almost kind, if one didn’t look too closely at what it illuminated.

Senator Padmé Amidala of Naboo stood before the wide transparisteel window of her penthouse suite, eyes tracing the golden rim of the horizon as the upper atmosphere swallowed the last stars. The Republic’s capital stretched endlessly before her, a shining labyrinth of towers, landing pads, and the invisible weight of its own hypocrisy.

The reflection staring back at her looked perfectly composed: the cinnamon-brown hair pulled into a structured twist, the cream robe trimmed with Naboo embroidery, the gold filigree clasp that once belonged to her grandmother. It was all so carefully arranged that she couldn't recognize herself. Not Padmé Naberrie, only Amidala, the persona.

“Your transport is scheduled to arrive in twenty minutes, milady,” Dormé’s voice came softly from behind her. The handmaiden was adjusting the clasp on Padmé’s outer cloak, her movements practiced after many years. Dormé had the same calmness she always carried in the mornings, as if she could smooth the galaxy’s chaos with well-timed efficiency and an extra cup of caf.

Padmé smiled faintly at their reflection. “Thank you, Dormé. Is the committee brief ready?”

“Typho finished it at dawn,” Dormé replied. “He’s downstairs already... Something about how senators shouldn’t start their days before sunrise.”

“That’s because Typho has the sense of a sane man,” Sabé’s dry voice interjected as she swept into the room. “Which makes him a rare breed in this city indeed.”

Sabé’s humor, always somewhere between the far rift of sarcasm and affection, earned a soft chuckle from Padmé. “I’ll try not to insult the Senate before breakfast then.”

“Too late,” Sabé said. “The Senate insults itself before breakfast.”

There was laughter, brief but genuine, before Dormé moved toward the vanity to lay out the day’s accessories. Padmé joined her, watching as delicate rings and disks glinted under the lights. Each piece represented a layer of expectation: the Senator, the Idealist, the Symbol of a Republic that still pretended it hadn’t already begun to rot from the inside out.

The handmaidens, ever perceptive, noticed her quiet. Dormé spoke gently, “You didn’t sleep again.”

Padmé didn’t deny it. “The debates drag on longer every session. Half of the senators care more about which lobbyist will sponsor their next re-election than the actual lives on the Outer Rim. Yesterday, one of them actually suggested selling planetary defense contracts to the Banking Clan — as if the war machine isn’t already fed enough!”

Sabé sighed. “And you’ll oppose it. As always.”

“As always,” Padmé murmured. “Though I sometimes wonder if the Senate even listens anymore.”

Sabé paused, her gaze steady. “You make them listen. That’s what terrifies them.”

Padmé met her eyes briefly; that quiet faith always disarmed her. People called her courageous, or beautiful, or impossible to intimidate. But in her own eyes, it was all duty. Something she carried because no one else seemed willing to.

Still, as she pinned the Naboo crest to her collar, she caught herself studying her reflection again. Her face looked older, not by years, but by fatigue. There were fine lines around her eyes that makeup couldn’t soften. The toll of a thousand meaningless arguments, votes delayed, and motions crushed by procedure. 

By the time they left the apartment, the sun had fully broken through Coruscant’s smog layer. Golden light cut between towers and flashed against durasteel facades. The city was already awake again; speeders darting, vendors shouting, holoads flashing campaign slogans over the boulevards: Security. Strength. Loyalty.

Padmé’s limospeeder descended from the residential spire into the organized chaos of the upper levels. She watched the neon reflection slide across the transparisteel, expression unreadable, as trained.

Below, the lower levels disappeared under permanent shadow, the kind that no amount of light could reach. Whole populations lived there, unseen and unheard of, while the Senate chamber argued about tariffs and wars in the name of security expansions.

“Sometimes I think Coruscant was built upside down,” Padmé murmured.

Dormé looked up from her datapad. “How do you mean, milady?”

“The higher you rise,” Padmé said quietly, “the less you see what’s beneath you.”

Her gaze lingered on the dark underbelly far below. She’d visited once, moons ago, under disguise, when the Clone Wars were still new, when she’d believed the Republic could be saved through goodwill and reform. That idealism felt like a foreign language now.

Traffic thickened as they neared the Senate District. Chrome-finished transports glided between glimmering skyscrapers; senators, aides, lobbyists - the elites of a galaxy at war. Coruscant’s upper crust was all spectacle, lies, and glamour: immaculate clothes, guarded smiles, and just enough perfume to mask the rot underneath.

When her speeder touched down on the Senate landing platform, the guards snapped to attention. Holocams flickered in the corners, and Paparazzi from the HoloNet News waited beyond the security line, hoping to capture a quote, a flicker of discontent, a hint of vulnerability; anything to sell a story.

Padmé stepped out gracefully, posture immaculate, Naboo-trained composure coming to her as natural as breathing.

“Senator Amidala!” someone called. “Do you support the Chancellor’s new security decree?”

Padmé didn’t break stride. “I support anything that protects our citizens, and nothing that silences them,” she said smoothly, her tone polite yet firm.

The crowd buzzed. She’d given them just enough to twist her words however they wanted.

Inside the Senate building, marble floors gleamed beneath her heels. The halls smelled faintly of sterilizer and the deceptively sweet stench of politics. Holographic banners scrolled with the Republic emblem; the guards wore the new armor, white and glossy, the Chancellor’s personal design. There were more of them lately, too many.

Dormé leaned closer as they passed a squad. “They say the Chancellor’s begun conscripting whole units directly under his authority. Bypassing even the Senate.”

“I’ve heard the same,” Padmé said. “But no one dares confront him. He’s convinced half the chamber that war demands obedience.”

“Doesn’t it?” Dormé asked softly.

Padmé stopped walking. “War demands sacrifice. Not surrender.”

The Senate chamber was already alive when she entered, a massive sphere filled with hundreds of floating pods, each representing a world, each competing to be heard. The air buzzed with overlapping arguments projected through translation droids.

Bail Organa caught her eye from across the floor and offered a weary smile. He looked as tired as she felt. Mon Mothma sat beside him, poised and grave, datapad in hand.

Padmé joined them as their pod extended toward the center. “Has the vote been delayed again?” she asked.

“Of course,” Bail muttered. “Palpatine’s committee requested a security review...Again.”

Mon Mothma’s voice was low, measured. “The Chancellor’s tightening his circle. Every amendment opposed to his decrees gets buried in procedure.”

Padmé’s jaw tensed. “Then we’ll speak louder.”

Bail huffed a chuckle. “Remind me not to stand too close when you do.”

The pod steadied. The Chancellor’s dais rose in the center of the chamber, its massive platform encased in shadows and brilliance. Supreme Chancellor Palpatine himself appeared as a distant figure; serene, controlled, smiling faintly as he addressed the Senate in that calm, reassuring tone that made people mistake him for benevolent.

She hated that voice.

“Senators of the Republic,” Palpatine began, “we gather in uncertain times. The Confederacy grows bolder each day, and yet we stand strong, united, and most importantly, unwavering. Soon the war will end, and peace will prevail once more.”

Padmé leaned slightly toward Mon. “He says that every week.”

Mon’s lips curved faintly. “He’s consistent, if nothing else.”

Padmé barely listened to the rest. She’d heard it too many times - the same rhetoric about unity and sacrifice. Every word was carefully constructed to sound righteous, every pause tailored for applause. It was a masterclass in manipulation.

As she watched him, a cold unease pressed against her ribs. There was something in his eyes when he looked across the chamber — something too knowing. She’d seen ambition before in many eyes, but his was almost something more patient, more consistent, and not in a way that made Padmé feel safe.

When the floor opened for discussion, she rose, posture immaculate.

“Chancellor,” she began, voice steady but sharp enough to cut through the noise. “While I commend your continued leadership, the growing militarization of our Republic cannot go unchallenged. I urge the Senate to recall that freedom is not preserved by fear, nor by an army that answers to a single office.”

The chamber rippled with murmurs.

Palpatine’s expression remained perfectly serene. “Your concerns are noted, Senator Amidala, but surely you do not oppose measures that ensure the safety of your people?”

“My people understand the price of peace,” Padmé said. “But peace built on blind obedience isn’t peace at all, it is misdirection.”

Her words lingered in the air. Some applauded, if not hesitantly; others scowled. Palpatine inclined his head as though humoring a child, and his smile never faltered, even as he shut her down.
“Senator Amidala’s concerns are noted,” he said smoothly, and the chamber pivoted obediently to another voice, another meaningless report.

The debate was gone before it began.

By the time the Chancellor’s platform lowered back into its gilded chamber, Padmé was still standing in her pod, her datapad heavy in her hand. Around her, senators whispered, traded polite reassurances, and updated their staff on evening receptions. The war had become routine, not the tragedy it should've been, just schedule.

Her datapad vibrated. She flicked it open.

FROM: Republic Military Council
SUBJECT: CATO NEIMOIDIA; STRATEGIC UPDATE
General Kenobi’s forces engaged. Trade Federation resistance severe. High collateral projections. Jedi Council insists on civilian evacuation before orbital bombardment. Chancellor’s approval pending.

Padmé’s eyes narrowed. Pending, which in other words meant Palpatine was already stalling them. Another message scrolled beneath it: diplomatic clearance for Raxus Secundus.

Palpatine was moving her to the opposite side of the war, precisely when Kenobi’s offensive began. The timing wasn’t a coincidence; it was choreography.

Bail Organa leaned over from his pod. “Let me guess,” he murmured under the din. “Another ‘decisive victory’ brewing?”

“Another siege disguised as liberation,” Padmé said.

Bail nodded grimly. “Kenobi won’t bomb civilians. That’ll make him inconvenient soon enough.”

Padmé didn’t answer. She was already watching Palpatine, who was quietly conversing with Mas Amedda, his expression composed but distant, like a man checking the position of pieces on a board only he could see.

The Senate spilled out into the corridors in a murmur of expensive fabrics and bodyguards. Padmé’s heels clicked sharply against the marble floor now. Sabé fell in beside her, a datapad in hand.

“They’ve asked you to lead a delegation,” she said, matching her pace.

Padmé didn’t slow, but frowned. “Raxus? It is still technically under Confederate governance.”

“The Chancellor insisted you’d be ‘the perfect symbol of compassion.’” Sabé’s tone made the praise sound like an insult.

Padmé stopped. “Raxulon is becoming a disaster zone. Why now?”

“Exactly why they need you,” Sabé replied. “The Republic wants to appear merciful while it razes Cato Neimoidia.”

Padmé said nothing for several seconds. “All right. Prepare transport, I’ll leave within the hour.”

Sabé frowned. “Alone?”

“With a small security team,” Padmé said. “If it’s meant to be diplomatic, we go quietly.”

Sabé hesitated before nodding. “Understood.”

Two hours later, her Nubian cruiser slipped from the Coruscanti traffic lanes and out into the cold light of hyperspace.

Padmé sat in her cabin surrounded by flickering holomaps; red lines for battlefronts, yellow for blockade zones. Raxus glowed faintly near the Outer Rim, a lush planet, capital of the Separatists.

She no longer believed in peace summits, but she believed in presence, showing up where others wouldn’t. Sometimes symbolism was the only thing that mattered to spread a message.

Sabé joined her at the table, setting down two cups of caf. “You’ll be meeting a Separatist envoy,” she said. “Goes by Lord Varon. The Chancellor’s office approved him as a counterpart.”

Padmé arched a brow. “Strange. I haven’t heard of him.”

“Neither has the HoloNet,” Sabé said. “Which means he’s either a new face or someone powerful enough to be invisible.”

“Or both,” Padmé said quietly.

Sabé tilted her head. “You think it’s a setup?”

“I think the Chancellor’s been instigating wars for years,” Padmé replied. “If this is another performance, I’d rather see the stage myself.”

Sabé exhaled through her nose. “You’re impossible to protect.”

Padmé smiled faintly. “That’s why I keep you around.”

The shuttle descended through the amber clouds of Raxus Secundus, once the polished heart of the Separatist Parliament, now fractured into militia-run sectors. Tower spires lay broken, their gilded domes scorched.

The landing pad was small and half-collapsed, but the Separatist flag hung on a single pristine, standing column.

A line of soldiers awaited them, at their head stood a man in slate-black diplomatic robes, a dark glove clasped loosely behind his back.

He was tall, easily over six feet, the kind of height that carried more presence than grace. Sun-caught hair a shade too light for the shadows, a faint scar cutting across his right brow to the corner of his eye. When the wind hit, the edge of his cloak revealed the metallic glint of a prosthetic hand.

He was broad-shouldered but composed, his movement economical. His face was the kind people remembered without wanting to admit why: angular, symmetrical, striking in a way that demanded attention rather than asked for it. His eyes, too blue and piercing, carried a strange intensity that didn’t fit the smooth, practiced ease of his voice when he stepped forward. It was low and even, held a trace of mechanical rasp when he exhaled, if one listened closely, concealed by a pearly, charming smile, plastered on too thick to be authentic.

“Senator Amidala,” he said. “An honor.”

The accent was Coruscanti, cultured, polished. Almost too polished.

“Lord Varon, I presume.”

He inclined his head. “Envoy for the Confederacy of Independent Systems.”

Padmé extended her hand. “You’ll understand if I’m cautious about titles these days.”

His lips curved, lacking humor. “Caution is admirable. Though some might call it mistrust.”

“I call it survival these days,” she said evenly.

The faintest twitch of amusement crossed his expression, but those eyes stayed cold.

Sabé, standing just behind her, shifted slightly, her gaze flicking between them. She was good at reading people. Her instinct here was immediate: this man didn’t belong among diplomats. His posture was wrong, neither deferential nor performative. It was military and coiled.

Padmé noticed it too. The way he scanned the room reflexively, noting exits, and the faint hum under his tone that reminded her of spiritual cadence.

He gestured toward the corridor. “If you’ll accompany me, Senator, our council chamber is prepared. The ceasefire terms are delicate, and I suspect you prefer facts over ceremony.”

“That depends on the facts,” she said, following.

He smiled again, small and clearly practiced, therefore entirely meaningless.

The council chamber was dim, its holotable flickering between blueprints and supply figures. Half the Separatist officers looked like bureaucrats who’d run out of excuses, the rest looked like people who hadn’t eaten in a week.

Padmé listened as Lord Varon outlined negotiations and relocation protocols with the kind of fluency that screamed rehearsal. Every phrase was correct, neutral, and absolutely lifeless.

“You speak as though you’ve memorized a briefing,” she said at one point.

He looked at her, expression unreadable. “Would you prefer improvisation?”

“I’d prefer honesty.”

He tilted his head slightly, studying her. “You assume those are different things.”

She didn’t answer. He unnerved her. Because he didn’t seem to believe in what he was saying, and yet he delivered it flawlessly.

When the meeting adjourned, the others filtered out, leaving them momentarily alone. Wind hissed through cracks in the wall, leaving dust drifting between them.

“You’ve been to too many of these, haven’t you?” he said, tone conversational now. “Negotiations that pretend to save lives but only extend the suffering.”

Padmé met his gaze steadily. “And yet I still come.”

“Why?”

“Because someone has to.”

He studied her for a long moment. “You really believe that makes a difference.”

“Belief isn’t the problem,” she said. “Apathy is.”

He gave a short, quiet laugh that didn’t reach his eyes. “You sound like a Jedi.”

She raised a brow. “I shall take that as a compliment.”

He only gave a humorless huff of a laugh, something resembling bitter amusement rather than genuine joy.

That evening, their temporary camp settled under the planet’s bruised sky. Fires burned in the distance; droids crashed clumsily through wreckage.

Padmé sat reviewing the revised ceasefire terms on her datapad when Sabé approached.

“He’s strange,” Sabé murmured, sitting beside her. “Too composed...Not the kind of man who works under a council.”

Padmé didn’t look up. “You think he’s a soldier?”

“I don't know what I think,” Sabé said. “The unsettles me more.”

Padmé considered that. “He’s effective, precise. Which means someone powerful wants him here.”

Sabé’s eyes flicked toward the horizon. “You think it’s Palpatine?”

Padmé didn’t answer, but it wasn't necessarily surprise that she felt more than disappointment, once again.

Later, Padmé stepped out into the night once more. The air was cold and thin. Across the landing field, Lord Varon stood alone, speaking into a holocomm, his tone low. She couldn’t hear the words, but she recognized the posture of someone carrying lies on the line of their shoulders.

When he turned and saw her, he ended the call instantly. For a heartbeat, the glow of the holo caught the line of a scar beneath his eye.

“Got any rest?” he asked.

“I could ask you the same,” she said.

“Diplomacy doesn’t rest.”

“Neither does guilt.”

That earned her a raised brow. Then, after a pause: “You’re very direct.”

“Would you prefer charm?”

“No,” he said quietly. “I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

Their eyes met for a fraction longer she intended. The air between them was taut, analytical, calculating each other, and Padmé felt the pretenses drop with each passing second.

“You don’t like politics, do you?” she asked suddenly.

“I prefer systems that work,” he said.

“And yet here you are.”

His expression didn’t change, but something in his voice did, almost imperceptibly. “Duty has strange paths.”

Padmé studied him carefully. “You remind me of someone.”

“Should I be flattered or concerned?”

She didn’t return his smile. “I haven’t decided yet.” she replied coolly, shifting her datapad to one arm.

“Indecision is a dangerous thing in wartime,” Varon said, tone casual.

“Then perhaps,” Padmé countered without looking at him, “you should be grateful I’m not the one declaring wars.”

His mouth barely moved. “Wars declare themselves, Senator. People only give them names afterward.”

The air between them thinned.

He walked ahead, and she followed without comment, flanked by two silent aides in identical black uniforms.

The Confederate Forum still stood, though one of its spires had collapsed months earlier in an airstrike. The courtyard was quiet but not empty: journalists, mercenary guards, and senators from neutral systems gathered in calculated disarray, pretending this once-beautiful, now crumbling planet was the heart of diplomacy.

“Our chamber is this way,” Varon said. He didn’t gesture, only turned, expecting her to follow. His boots struck the marble floor with a rhythm that, again, was almost military; too even and too silent between impacts.

Padmé caught herself studying him. There was something unnatural in the way he moved; there was no hesitation or wasted motion, no sound except that odd but incredibly faint, mechanical undertone when he inhaled.

“You’ve been here before?” she asked, because silence was worse.

“Twice,” he said. “The first time to observe. The second to replace those who failed.”

She glanced at him sharply. “Replace?”

“Negotiators,” he clarified, though his tone suggested that “replacement” had meant something far less...administrative.

They entered the chamber. It was darker than the Republic Senate, fewer delegates, but every face watched Padmé like a predator weighing the odds of a new threat. The Trade Federation’s Neimoidian representatives sat at the far side, their jeweled robes immaculate.

So they are here after all, she thought grimly. Cato Neimoidia was still bleeding, and its architects were here.

“Senator Amidala of Naboo,” one of them drawled, rising from his seat. “It has been… many cycles.”

“Indeed,” Padmé said evenly. “Long enough for some to forget the cost of their own wars.”

The Neimoidian’s smile flickered, then disappeared entirely when Varon took the central seat without invitation, his presence enough to silence the rest.

“Let’s not waste time,” he said. “The Confederacy will agree to the Republic’s humanitarian corridors...under strict conditions.”

Padmé arched a brow. “Conditions.”

“Naturally.” He leaned forward slightly, hands clasped. “All supplies routed through Raxus trade ports. All Republic inspectors replaced by, well, neutral mediators.”

“Neutral,” she repeated. “Meaning… Confederate-controlled.”

“If you wish to interpret it that way.”

The casual arrogance of it made her jaw tighten. “That’s extortion, not diplomacy.”

“Diplomacy is extortion,” Varon replied, voice quiet enough that only she could hear. “Just with better diction.”

The others murmured among themselves, and Padmé forced herself to focus on the datapad in her hand instead of the chill running down her spine. There was something about his calm, something colder than just confidence, like he’d memorized how people were supposed to act in these rooms and was now performing the part perfectly.

The meeting dragged on. Padmé argued trade routes, relief rights, prisoner exchanges — every word countered with the same mechanical precision. Varon never interrupted; he corrected. Every time she thought she’d trapped him rhetorically, he turned the phrasing back on her, merciless.

When the lights dimmed for a brief adjournment, she exhaled slowly and realized she hadn’t breathed properly in an hour.

“You seem tense,” Varon said beside her as the delegates filed out.

“You seem overly observant.”

“Observation wins wars.”

She met his gaze. “So does conscience.”

The faintest tightening of restraint flickered in his eyes then, like he’d been insulted but couldn’t quite recall what the feeling meant.

“Conscience,” he said, the word foreign in his mouth. “A luxury for those who aren’t losing.”

“Or those who haven’t lost enough,” Padmé countered.

He stared at her a moment too long, the blue of his eyes unnervingly clear under the low lights. Then he inclined his head. “You argue well, Senator. Better than most I’ve silenced.”

“Silenced?”

“Politically,” he said, after a beat that was just long enough to make the correction sound like a lie.

She turned away before he could see her reaction, reminding herself that he was just another mask, another smooth-talking agent built to keep this war alive.

Outside the windows, Raxus’s skyline glowed faintly red, light pollution and the distant burn of engines. From orbit, it would look alive, but from the streets below, it probably reeked of rust and hunger. Padmé wondered if she would ever truly see it, or if, like Varon, she’d learned to survive by pretending.

“Tomorrow,” he said finally, voice low. “We’ll continue this.”

“Tomorrow,” she echoed, not sure if it was a promise or a threat.

He left without another word. She watched his silhouette disappear through the side door and allowed herself to exhale quietly.

Chapter Text

THE ENDING CROWNS THE WORK

19 BBY | 3258 LY | 7958 C.R.C., RAXUS SECUNDUS, morning

Padmé Amidala woke to light.

But not harsh, Republic-standard fluorescents, or the institutional pallor of Coruscant mornings. This one was soft, filtered through the sheer ivory drapes of the Raxulan guest suite, the kind of morning glow that made even a war-fractured world look deceptively peaceful.

Her eyes opened slowly, lashes catching gold.

There were always a few seconds where the galaxy felt muted, as if the violence, bureaucracy, and exhaustion lived somewhere else entirely.

The sheets were warm around her, impossibly soft, the sort of textile manufactured only for senators and the aristocracy of a thousand core worlds. She stretched instinctively and gracefully, spine arching with an almost feline ease. Her joints gave the faintest, satisfying crack. The sun kissed the bare skin of her shoulder.

Padmé breathed. For just one moment, she allowed herself to feel her age; still young, too young for half the decisions she wielded in rooms full of men twice it, too young to be the public face of a millennium-old Republic that was rapidly losing its grip.

But the galaxy didn’t care, and duty certainly didn’t. So she swung her legs out of bed, feet settling onto a rug that probably cost more than the combined earnings of a lower-level Coruscant family for a year. She didn’t think about that, she never really did consciously. That blind spot was simply part of her life; wealth was the default setting she had the privilege of never having to examine.

Dormé entered precisely on time, as if summoned by the rustle of sheets alone.

“Good morning, my lady,” she said softly, carrying a tray of steaming tea and sliced meiloorun fruit.

Padmé smiled, a small but genuine upturn, the kind reserved for her handmaidens whom she trusted more than most people.

“Morning, Dormé. I hope you managed some rest?”

“As much as Raxus allows,” Dormé replied dryly. “There were air patrols all night.”

“Separatist or Republic?”

“Hard to tell at this point,” Dormé muttered, setting the tray down.

Padmé took the cup, inhaling the floral steam. She looked exactly as the holonet portrayed her: beautiful without effort, luminous without intent, yet she saw none of it in the mirror. Only the faint shadows beneath her eyes and the tight set of her mouth from another night spent over briefings.

Another day of trying to put splints on a galaxy breaking faster than she could speak.

Dormé began brushing out Padmé’s hair in slow, practiced strokes. They’d done this ritual since Naboo, since youth, since the girls they once were turned into women by the cruelties of war far too early.

“Rough day ahead?” the handmaiden asked.

“Every day is a rough day now.”

“And today’s flavor?”

Padmé exhaled through her nose. “Refugee district tour.”

Dormé paused. “The one hit in last month’s bombing?”

“Yes.”

Padmé’s eyes hardened. The attack had displaced tens of thousands, mostly families who had fled their outer-rim homes only to be struck again here. She wanted to help, always did, but she also wanted to scream at the sheer futility of it.

Dormé resumed brushing, gentler now.

“And the separatist diplomat?” she asked, tone deceptively light.

Padmé didn’t turn, but her fingers tightened around her cup.

“Varon,” she said flatly. “Yes. He insisted on guiding the tour personally.”

“Charming.”

“Overly,” Padmé muttered. “He’s… theatrical. I don’t trust men who enjoy their own words.”

Dormé smothered a tiny smile. “So only half the Senate, then.”

Padmé gave a quiet, humorless laugh. “If that.”

But her expression sobered quickly. Something about Varon unsettled her, differently than most of her already unhinged opponents did. On top of that, his attempts at charm were an irritant, sliding right off her as if she were polished marble.

What unsettled her was that he seemed unpredictable. Cruel one moment, controlled the next. Yesterday, he’d been cold, hard-edged, a man of war and closed doors. Yet today, according to the message delivered at dawn, he intended to accompany her “as a gesture of goodwill.”

Gestures of goodwill were never that.

“Hairpin?” Dormé asked.

“Something simple.”

Dormé arched a brow. “Simple for the Senate or simple for normal people?”

Padmé sighed. “…Simple for me.”

That translated to a gold pin worth a small fortune, studded with pearls from Naboo’s royal vaults. Dorme obliged. Padmé stood, letting the morning robe fall away to reveal a fitted travel gown; practical, but unmistakably noble. There was no hiding who she was.

By the time she stepped into the corridor, her angelic calm had solidified into something sharper, more authoritative. No one would guess she’d barely slept, or suspect she had stared at the ceiling last night, thinking about how many star systems were collapsing while the Senate debated tax routes.

Padmé Amidala didn’t have the luxury of looking fragile; she refused to.

The transport glided through Raxulon, Raxus’ capital, cutting through morning haze and fractured sunlight.

Padmé watched the city unfold outside the tinted windows, tall stone structures laced with ornamental engravings, wide plazas that once hosted markets now dotted with barricades. Droids patrolled rooftops, civilians moved in clusters, and children clung to their parents’ cloaks.

War lived in the air here. It had a texture, a stifling weight.

Her security escort rode ahead on speeder bikes, Naboo-style helmets glinting. Behind her, additional local peacekeepers formed a trailing guard.

“Crowds gathering,” Captain Marene warned from the front seat.

“They’re curious, not hostile,” Padmé said automatically, though she had no proof. She simply refused to be afraid of the people she came to help.

The transport slowed as they entered the refugee zone. The shift in atmosphere was immediate: the roads rougher, the buildings damaged, makeshift clinics set up in what once were libraries.

And there, waiting at the entrance, stood Varon.

He wasn’t wearing yesterday’s militaristic attire. Instead, he wore a sleek, dark diplomatic suit cut in a severe line. Still imposing, but crafted to convey poise over brute force. His shoulder-length hair was tied back, revealing sharp features, a jaw built from quiet fury, and eyes that, Force help her, looked too much like they belonged to a storm. Blazing, concentrated, held on a tight leash.

He bowed his head as her door opened.
“Senator Amidala.”

His voice carried none of yesterday’s bite. Padmé stepped out, her posture unshaken.

“Lord Varon,” she greeted coolly. “I appreciate your… punctuality.”

A hint of something flickered across his face, gone before it fully formed. Annoyance? Amusement?

“It would be negligent to let you survey this district without proper oversight.”

She arched a brow. “Oversight or supervision?”

“Semantics,” he said smoothly.

She didn’t dignify that with an answer.

Varon walked beside her, hands clasped behind his back in a manner too disciplined to belong to any politician she knew. Clone commanders walked like that. Men trained for war, not rhetoric.

Padmé noted it, and filed it away. Civilians watched from doorways. A few bowed their heads in respect. Others simply stared, wary, exhausted, trying to decide whether she was another useless Core-world idealist who’d make promises and vanish.

Padmé’s steps softened instinctively. She greeted people by name when introduced, listened to their short summaries of loss, and nodded with grim sincerity. She didn’t cry; she had learned long ago that her tears didn’t help anyone, but she felt every story like a stone added to the growing weight inside her ribcage.

At one point, a child peeked from behind her mother’s skirts. Dirty face, thin arms, large eyes.

Padmé crouched. “Hello,” she said gently.

The child didn’t answer, only stared at her gown, at the clean fabric, the untouched embroidery.

Padmé realized the mistake too late. Her clothes were too pure, too pristine. She looked like an emissary from another universe entirely.

Varon noticed her hesitation. “They’re not accustomed to Core luxury,” he murmured.

She bristled. “Is that meant to shame me?”

“No,” he said, unreadable. “Only to remind you where you’re standing.”

Her jaw tightened, but she said nothing. Because he wasn’t wrong, and she hated that.

They walked past a burned-out school. Padmé paused at the collapsed roof, fingers pressing lightly to her lips.

“These were families who fled from a Republic assault,” Varon said. “Your forces bombarded their last home, and here, they were struck again.”

Padmé straightened. “Republic forces don’t target civilians.”

“Yet civilians die all the same.” His tone remained even, infuriatingly so.

She turned to him fully. “Are you implying I defend such casualties?”

“I imply that you excuse them.”

Her breath hitched with anger, cold and sharp. “I excuse nothing of the sort.”

“Then perhaps you should consider that the people you represent already have.”

The accusation landed like a blow. She inhaled slowly, spine straightening, wings of her authority unfolding.

“I came here,” she began, “to negotiate humanitarian corridors. To protect these people.”

Varon side-eyed her, expression inscrutable. “And I’m giving you the reality you'll be negotiating.”

“You’re giving me your version of it.”

“Reality has one version,” he countered. “Truth is the thing that remains when narrative dies.”

Padmé blinked, just once. That sentence didn’t belong to a bureaucrat; it was philosophy.

Before she could respond, her comm beeped.

Captain Marene’s voice crackled through:
“Senator, news from Cato Neimoidia. Obi-Wan Kenobi has returned to Coruscant. Casualties… are significant.”

Padmé froze. Her gaze darted instinctively to Sabé, who stood with the other handmaidens just a few paces back. Her closest friend remained utterly composed, too composed. Hands folded, chin high. Eyes forward. The very picture of Naboo-trained stoicism.

Padmé’s stomach twisted.

Varon studied her. “Bad news?”

She ignored him. Her voice, when she spoke, was clipped steel.
“Why were civilian evacuation approvals delayed on Coruscant?”

Varon blinked, as if caught off guard. “You’re asking me?”

“I’m asking because the Senate had a protocol for that region,” she snapped. “And Palpatine stalled it. Again. People died who didn’t need to.”

His expression didn’t change, but something behind his eyes sharpened. “And this surprises you?”

“It infuriates me.”

“Good,” he said softly. “Perhaps fury will do what diplomacy hasn’t.”

She shot him a glare. “Human lives are not weapons for anyone’s agenda.”

“Everything is a weapon,” he murmured. “If wielded correctly.”

The chill that ran through her caught her off guard, instinctively raising her walls quicker than she could help. This man was dangerous. And not only because of his allegiance, or because he challenged her, but because he believed every word he said.

They reached the district’s central square, where a makeshift operations tent had been erected for the upcoming talks.

Varon gestured to it with a tilt of his head.

“Senator Amidala. Shall we begin with the real reason for your visit?”

She exhaled once, steadying herself. “Yes. Humanitarian corridors, ceasefire windows, and equitable aid distribution. I’ll need your military council’s full documentation.”

“You’ll receive what is necessary,” he said.

“That,” she replied sharply, “is not the same as full transparency.”

He allowed himself the faintest ghost of a smile.
“You have a talent for extracting more than intended, Senator.”

“And you have a talent for hiding what shouldn’t be hidden.”

They stepped into the dim interior of the tent. Maps, tactical holos, lists of casualties, supply shortages. Troop placements that were kept carefully vague.

Padmé’s heart clenched as she scanned the projections.

Varon stood at her side, close, but not intrusive.

“Tell me,” she said, eyes on the holo-map, “why the sudden interest in cooperation? Yesterday, you barely tolerated my presence.”

He looked down at her, expression unreadable.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

She turned to face him and held his gaze, the tension between them drawn tight as a bowstring. His words still hung in the air, delivered with a calculated ambiguity that grated on her nerves.

“You haven’t decided,” she repeated slowly, “whether cooperation is worthwhile?”

“Whether you are,” he corrected, tone clipped. “I don’t extend concessions to those who squander them.”

Padmé inhaled sharply. Arrogant. Overconfident.
And yet, she needed this. Needed him, and whatever fragile access he was willing to offer to break open humanitarian pathways that neither the Senate nor the Jedi had managed to secure in months.

She could hate him later. Right now, she needed results.

“Then perhaps we should both stop testing each other.” She stepped closer to the holo-table. “The refugee situation is deteriorating. I’m not leaving Raxus without agreements written and signed.”

Varon’s jaw twitched, a subtle motion, but noticeable. Then he flicked his fingers at the tactical display. The map shifted. A swath of red highlighted contested territory, pulsing softly.

“Here,” he said. “Your ‘humanitarian corridor.’”

Padmé frowned. “That route is far too close to your artillery lines.”

“And the alternative,” he countered, “is sending unarmed convoys through Republic patrol routes that misidentify transports and...well, fire before even verifying transponder codes.”

She stiffened. “...Those were isolated incidents.”

“Of course.” His voice was smooth enough to be condescending without ever altering its calm timbre. “Everything is isolated until the body count becomes a political inconvenience.”

Padmé leaned over the table, palm pressing flat onto its surface. “I am not here for political convenience.”

Varon didn’t look at her hand; he looked at her face. Something flickered in his eyes, a kind of dissecting curiosity, as if he were trying to catalog every line of her resolve.

“You truly believe that,” he said quietly.

“Because it’s true.”

He studied her for a moment longer, then, almost reluctantly, adjusted the map. The red faded and instead, a new path appeared in blue; safer, farther from both factions’ front lines, threading through a narrow valley controlled by neutral local militias.

The kind of route he shouldn’t have been willing to offer.

Padmé blinked. “…You’re agreeing?”

“I’m amending,” he corrected. “Your original proposal was naïve, at best.”

“And yours was murderous.”

That earned her the faintest lift of his brow, and not in offense, it was interest. Varon didn’t seem accustomed to people speaking plainly to him. Certainly not to a man who walked like a weapon forged into human shape.

He turned back to the display, fingers sliding across the interface.

“You will have temporary passage rights through this corridor,” he said, formal now. “For aid convoys only. Weapons, Republic advisors, or intelligence operatives will nullify the agreement instantly.”

“Understood.”

“You will not attempt to use this as propaganda. My people are not pawns.”

“Neither are mine,” she shot back. “And perhaps you should inform your military council of that.”

The air tightened again, cold and razor-thin, and for a heartbeat, Padmé forgot she was debating a separatist envoy. She felt as though she were negotiating with a storm itself, with something right inside it.

“Very well,” Varon murmured. “We proceed.”

They sat across a narrow table, two datapads between them, two cups of cooling tea untouched. Her handmaidens stood behind her like carved statues; his aides waited a respectful distance away.

The opening hour was technical. Clause by clause, aid routes, rations, medical shipments, trauma droids, civilian identification bands, militia neutrality agreements.

Varon was clipped and efficient, but razor-sharp. The kind of mind built for tactics, not diplomacy, yet he wielded political language like a blade when necessary.

He countered everything, questioned everything. Demanded empirical proof for every statistic Padmé cited, and when she provided it, he adjusted his stance without hesitation, as if flexibility itself were a form of strategic discipline.

Still, underneath all his precision, Padmé sensed something else.
Something darker, a rigidity no amount of logic could soften, as though his worldview had calcified long before this war began.

A man forged this thoroughly wasn’t simply a politician. He had the posture of someone trained under a doctrine Padmé had never learned.

Finally, after nearly two hours, the last clause fell into place.

Varon leaned back, fingers steepled, eyes fixed on her in that unnerving way he had of observing without blinking.

“Your corridor will open in four days,” he said. “Conditional upon your Senate’s reciprocal approval.”

Padmé nodded. “I’ll present it the moment I return to Coruscant.”

“See that you do.”

She bristled again. “I don’t need reminders.”

“I know,” he said, tone dipping into something closer to contemplation. “But those who surround you might.”

Her irritation sharpened. “Is that a dig at my colleagues?”

“Your Chancellor,” Varon said evenly, “has a talent for letting humanitarian crises escalate before actually intervening...It ensures desperation, and desperation ensures, if not enforces, compliance.”

Her pulse stuttered, but she didn’t let it show.

“That’s a dangerous accusation.”

“It’s not an accusation,” he replied. “It’s an observation.”

Padmé’s mouth went dry. She hated that he was confirming her own suspicions, the ones she’d been burying for months. She, for once, found herself unable to argue with him.

She straightened, gathering her datapad and rising to her feet. “Negotiations are complete. I’ll review the final draft before departure.”

Varon stood as well, smooth and controlled. His height cast a long shadow across the table.

“Senator Amidala,” he said softly, “despite our differences… You are far less insufferable than most politicians I’ve dealt with.”

Padmé blinked. “…Is that meant to be a compliment?”

He tilted his head the slightest bit. “If you choose to interpret it that way.”

She almost laughed; instead, she simply nodded and stepped past him, moving toward the tent’s exit.

Just as she reached the flap, her personal comm blared urgently.

Dormé’s eyes snapped to hers, and Sabé stiffened. Padmé answered.

“Senator Amidala,” the voice on the other end said, breathless, “Coruscant Security reports an explosion at the Chancellor’s office; unknown cause, but multiple injuries. They’re declaring a Level-One emergency.”

Padmé’s heart stopped. Not slowed, it stopped.

An attack on Palpatine’s office. In the middle of peaking tensions, on the eve of their most fragile negotiations in years.

The galaxy seemed to tilt sideways beneath her feet.

“Any confirmation of who—?”

“No suspects yet. But the Senate is being locked down until further notice. You must return immediately.”

Padmé inhaled sharply, once. Her world spiraled into motion again.

“Prep the ship,” she ordered. “We depart within the hour.”

Varon’s presence materialized behind her, straightening her spine on instinct.

“A coordinated attack,” he murmured. “Hm. Your Republic fractures from within, Senator.”

She turned to him, eyes blazing.

“This isn’t just politics. People were hurt.”

He held her gaze and for the first time, something flickered behind his eyes that looked almost like interest, or even anticipation.

“I truly hope,” he said quietly, “that you are prepared for what comes next.”

Padmé didn’t dignify it with a response. She swept out of the tent, handmaidens falling into step beside her as they took their leave.

And little did they know that by the time Senator Amidala would reach Coruscant, the scales of the Galaxy had already tipped.

19 BBY | 3258 LY | 7958 C.R.C., CATO NEIMOIDA, hours earlier

 

The air above Cato Neimoidia had gone from acrid to unbreathable. The bridges, elegant and sweeping symbols of Neimoidian wealth, were nothing but fractured lattices of sandstone now, split open by artillery fire and the increasingly desperate tactics of both sides. Smoke clung to the world like a damp shroud; every step felt like wading through someone else’s ruin.

Obi-Wan kept walking.

He shouldn’t have been able to. His cloak had been burned through in two places, his left pauldron missing, ribs cracked from that last concussive blast that sent him off the bridge and nearly into the abyss. The clones looked worse, with their helmet lenses scorched, armor scored deep with shrapnel, movements uneven from the accumulation of untreated injuries, and pure exhaustion. Still, they kept formation around him, because that’s what they did, they endured.

“General,” Commander Cody said, voice low, strained. “We need to fall back to the ridge. The droid reinforcements aren’t stopping.”

Obi-Wan nodded, dragging the back of his wrist across his brow, smearing soot instead of removing it. “I know. But we may not have a ridge left if we stay here arguing. Everyone, move.”

The battalion shifted as one. They weren’t retreating so much as peeling themselves away from a battlefield that had already decided it wanted to consume them whole.

For hours, he’d felt it: something wrong at the edges. Not the usual unease of battle, or the oppressive dark that clung to the war itself. Something more personal, familiar in the worst of ways. The Force had pulsed through him like a warning, and he’d kept ignoring it because men were dying in front of him.

That was always the burden: save who you can now, understand the metaphysics of it all later.

But then the ground weakened beneath their boots, a tremor that didn’t belong to artillery. Cody turned. “General-?

Everything snapped.

A shadow tore through the haze, howling from somewhere above the smoke line. It hit the bridge with the grace of a predator and the reckless disregard of someone who wanted to be seen.

Maul.

His silhouette was unmistakable: tatters of cloak, crimson skin shimmering like embers, his horned crown gleaming between the smoke, and the look he fixed on Obi-Wan was pure venom distilled into something almost triumphant.

“Oh, not now,” Obi-Wan muttered, because humour was the only thing still holding his insides together.

Cody stepped forward, rifle raised. “General-”

“No, stand down,” Obi-Wan said sharply. “Maul wants me.”

Maul ignited one half of his saber, and bright red light slashed through the smog.

“Kenobi,” he hissed, “everywhere you go, destruction follows. You think this world dies only at the hands of Separatists? You think your precious Chancellor is innocent of all this?”

There it was again, the wrongness, only stronger now.

Obi-Wan steadied his stance. “You’re raving...Even for you.”

“Oh, am I?” Maul stalked closer with the swagger of someone who had already consigned himself to his own doom and wanted company. “The Republic collapses. The Jedi choke on their own misplaced faith...and the man you all serve plays you like puppets dangling over a pit.”

A blaster bolt whizzed past Maul’s shoulder, Cody’s warning shot. Maul didn’t even flinch.

“Tell me, Kenobi,” he spat his name with a twisted smile, “have you never wondered how the Sith rose without you seeing them? How the Separatists grew so powerful while the Senate squabbled? Doesn’t it strike you as… curious? That every battle, every maneuver, every victory or loss drives you toward a single outcome?”

Obi-Wan’s chest tightened. “You expect me to believe you know anything about strategy beyond rage and theatrics?”

Maul tilted his head with infuriating calm. “You think I serve Dooku? Child’s play! He was never the architect. You know this already...you just refuse to face the truth. A phantom enemy who wears a friendly face, a puppeteer who commands both sides with equal cruelty.”

Obi-Wan inhaled slowly, deeply, the way one does right before stepping into a truth they’ve avoided for too long.

“Tell me the name,” he said, voice quiet, dangerous.

Maul laughed, lacking humor so starkly it sounded perverse.
“Oh, no. I won’t do your work for you. But you know him. You’ve bent to his authority with all the blind obedience of the Order you still cling to.”

He leaned in, face inches from Obi-Wan’s, the red glow dangerously close.

“He is your friend.”

A tremor ran through Obi-Wan’s spine.

Maul’s voice dropped further, the pity laid on thickly. “The one who feared what I would expose, should anyone ever listen.”

A beat.

Then another.

It hit Obi-Wan like a punch through the Force.

A face, and a smile. A presence that had always felt too polished, too… inevitable.

Palpatine.

Maul lit the second blade of his saber in a long, angry flare. “Yes! You see it now. Your glorious Republic will be shrouded in the darkness soon enough...As he had foreseen.”

Cody shouted, “General! Heavy droids incoming!”

Maul spun away in a blur of red, cutting down the first wave of super battle droids that broke through the smoke.
“Run, Kenobi! Run while you can, you coward! Tell them you’ve finally opened your eyes! Or don’t...It won’t matter. You’re far too late, anyway.”

He struck like a whirlwind of fury and madness, and the droids fell in pieces around him. Then, with a snarl, he leapt off the collapsing bridge and disappeared into the thick orange clouds below.

Like he’d never been there.

Silence, except for distant artillery and the ragged breathing of the clones.

Cody approached hesitantly. “General… what did he say to you?”

Obi-Wan didn’t answer. Because the realization had settled in his bones like ice, and the Force flared with such a surge it nearly knocked him to the ground, doing nothing but confirming it:
The Sith Lord they’d been hunting for over a decade had been at the center of the Republic the entire time, playing them all like his own personal chessboard. He felt sick.

“General?” Cody pressed.

Obi-Wan finally lifted his head, voice urgent.
“Cody… ready the transports. We’re leaving this world now.”

“But sir...the front—”

“The front is lost,” Obi-Wan said. “We need to reach Coruscant immediately, and we need to get there before the Council meets with the Chancellor.”

Because now he knew, and if Maul was right, as the Force practically screamed he was, the Galaxy was marching straight into a slaughter.

They broke atmosphere, leaving the choking orange haze of Cato Neimoidia behind. Space opened before them, dark and boundless.

Obi-Wan closed his eyes and reached out through the Force. He expected a distant coldness, the signature of the Sith Lord he’d sensed in broken flashes over the years. It wasn't like that anymore.

Now, the Force had cleared up, and never before had Obi-Wan realized how far in the stench of darkness they had moved until his mind opened up to it. Now that his mind could name it, the presence snapped into clarity.

Palpatine’s aura was everywhere.

Not like a beacon. Not like a storm.

Like old roots, it was thick, invasive, threaded into absolutely everything. The Senate, the armies. The people. And even the Jedi.

Beneath that veneer of civility, so deeply hidden the Order had been blind to it for years, was a void of malice so ancient and calculating that it sent a shiver straight through his bones.

You are too late.

He gripped the frame harder, breath shaky.

Cody noticed. “General?”

“We’ll arrive in under an hour,” Obi-Wan said. “As soon as we land, I will go directly to the Council chambers. You go nowhere near the Senate complex unless I send word.”

“Sir, with respect—”

“That’s an order.”

Cody snapped his jaw shut. “Yes, sir.”

The gunship lurched as it connected with the cruiser’s hangar. Metal screeched, landing struts groaned, and the ramp hissed open. The clones filed out with practiced discipline, but Obi-Wan moved faster, urgency burning through his exhaustion.

He sprinted down the corridor, ignoring the salutes, the confused greetings from officers who didn’t understand why the negotiator of the Republic suddenly looked like a man in freefall.

He reached the communications suite and patched directly to the Council.

Static, interference, which had never happened before, not on this secure channel.

A cold weight settled in his stomach, but he tried again.

This time, a voice broke through, and it was a Temple operator, sounding frazzled.

“Master Kenobi? You’re… you’re not on Coruscant? The Council’s already been summoned to the Chancellor’s office. Urgently.”

His blood ran cold.

“By whom?”

“The Chancellor himself. The message was classified and direct. They left twenty minutes ago.”

For a moment, Obi-Wan couldn’t move. He felt the future quiver, a spiderweb fracturing under a single drop of water.

“Patch me through to Master Windu,” he ordered.

“I...I can’t. Their comms are dark.”

Not good at all.

The Force surged with warning so violently that he nearly staggered.

He turned to Cody, who had followed him. “Get a shuttle cleared for immediate descent to the capital. No escort. We need to move faster than the fleet can coordinate.”

Cody didn’t argue. He sprinted for the command pit.

Obi-Wan pressed his palms to the console, grounding himself, fighting the rising dread.

He had to get to Coruscant. He had to reach the Council.

He clutched the console.

“What have you done?” he whispered to the galaxy, to Qui-Gon, to no one in particular.

Cody returned. “Shuttle is ready.”

Obi-Wan straightened.

“We leave now.”

As they ran toward the hangar, the cruiser’s alarms suddenly blared, cutting through metal and marrow alike.

“Attention all personnel, priority signal from Coruscant. Security lockdown initiated at the Senate building. Jedi presence confirmed, hostile engagement in progress.”

Obi-Wan stopped dead in his tracks. The confrontation had begun, and he was still in orbit.

The holostreams across the Galaxy flickered with static as the battle in the Chancellor’s office began to bleed into emergency frequencies. Corridor lights dimmed and brightened in confused cycles. Transports backed up for kilometers over the Coruscant skylanes. The city-planet, always loud and moving, seemed to hold its breath for reasons no one could fully articulate. And then, slowly, across a thousand districts, a thousand towers, people began to understand that something was happening at the very top of the pyramid.

Something unprecedented and utterly catastrophic.

The first whispers started at the Senate Annex: The Jedi are attacking the Chancellor.

Then the narrative reversed within minutes: The Chancellor has discovered treason within the Jedi Order.

Every screen played a different rumor, every newsfeed contradicted the last.

And above it all, red-coded alerts cracked across the sky like lightning:

CAPITAL EMERGENCY LEVEL ONE. ALL CIVILIAN MOVEMENT RESTRICTED. RETURN TO SHELTER.

It was the first Level One alert since the Mandalorian Wars.

Coruscant knew fear intimately, but not this kind. Not the kind that began in the heart of the government itself.

Padmé’s diplomatic shuttle glided into the landing bay, half the building already locked down under emergency protocol. Her cloak whipped behind her as she stepped out, the wind biting her cheeks with a cold she had never felt in the upper districts before. She saw at once that something was wrong.

Security guards sprinted, aides cried into their comms. Senators argued with officers who refused them entry. High-ranking dignitaries were already being escorted into blast-resistant corridors.

Captain Typho intercepted her. “Senator. There’s been an incident involving the Chancellor and several Jedi. We’re under full lockdown.”

Her pulse froze. “The Chancellor and the Jedi?”

“Details are restricted,” Typho said. “We were told to bring you directly inside and keep you with the delegation. No exceptions.”

Padmé looked toward the city skyline, the Senate Dome a familiar pearl against the horizon, and felt a sudden, unsettling shift. As if the world had been kicked, and the echo had not yet reached the ground beneath them.

But she nodded, professional and senatorial to the bone.

“Very well.”

She didn’t ask where Sabé was. She assumed her friend was already inside. It didn’t occur to her, not yet, that Sabé had already taken off.

The hours stretched and communications were severed.

The Senate levels descended into a metallic hush broken only by distant alarms and the occasional panicked aide sprinting to someone else’s doorway. Rumors moved like ghosts.

Jedi dead.
Chancellor wounded.
Crisis. Coup.
Treasure Fleet bombarded in the mid-rim.
Separatist insurgency.
Jedi betrayal. Senate attack.
Rampant misinformation, each worse than the last.

Padmé stayed in the chamber’s waiting hall with Bail Organa, Mon Mothma, Riyo Chuchi, and a handful of scattered senators who looked like they were aging by the minute.

The news finally reached them, spoken by a trembling Senate Guard officer: “Masters Windu, Fisto, Kolar, Tiin, and… others… have fallen. A skirmish occurred in the Chancellor’s private office.”

Bail shut his eyes as if someone had physically struck him, Mon held her hand to her mouth, and Padmé’s nails dug into her palms.

Fallen? A skirmish?
The Jedi? Against the Chancellor?
Why? How?

The officer continued, eyes flickering as if he wished he could be anywhere else. “The Chancellor survived.”

Survived.

Padmé understood, instantly and with terrible clarity, which version of the story was about to win.

When the siren finally went off—the Senate siren, reserved for constitutional emergencies—Padmé felt her heart slam against her ribs.

“Senators,” a voice bellowed from overhead speakers, “all members are to convene immediately. The Chancellor has called an extraordinary session.”

The blast doors opened, and Padmé walked inside. It felt like stepping into the mouth of a colossal beast.

The rotunda was packed, standing room on the upper galleries, aides lining the walls, representatives frantically reviewing datapads they didn’t understand. Entire planets watched through holo-stream, their fates suspended on invisible wires.

The Chancellor’s platform emerged from the shadows. At first, the chamber gasped.

Palpatine’s face was scorched. His skin twisted by char, bone structure warped. The burn scars around his mouth pulled his lips into something far too close to a smile.

His eyes gleamed with a feverish, unnatural brightness.

The Senate quieted as if drugged, with such speed that Padmé felt the hair on the back of her neck rise.

Palpatine activated the platform’s amplifiers.

“My friends,” he began, voice rough but powerful, “the Jedi...whom we have trusted for so long...have betrayed the Republic.”

A roar of outrage swept across the chamber.

Padmé said nothing. Bail said nothing. And Mon said nothing.

Their silence was the only honest thing left.

Palpatine continued: “They attempted to assassinate me. To overthrow our government...To seize control of the military and place themselves as unelected rulers over all of you!”

Gasps. Boos. Screams. The fire spread fast.

Padmé felt nauseous, and not because she believed him, never that, but because everyone else suddenly did.

“Their treason demanded swift action,” Palpatine said, voice rising. “The loyal forces of the Grand Army have neutralized the traitors. Order has been restored.”

Padmé’s blood turned to ice.

Neutralized?

She looked around the chamber. So many senators cheering, as if they were brain-dead, so many celebrating the fall of the Jedi as if it were liberation instead of pure genocide.

Bail leaned closer, whispering through his teeth: “They’re dead. The Order… Padmé, I think they’re all dead.”

Mon’s eyes threatened to glisten, but she didn’t look away, not once.

Padmé didn’t breathe, not until Palpatine’s next words split the air: “In this moment of unprecedented crisis… the Republic must evolve.”

The chamber leaned in.

“Therefore, for your protection… and with your full support…”

His voice thundered. “I declare the reorganisation of the Galactic Republic... into the first Galactic Empire!”

Pandemonium.

Cheering, screaming, and deafening applause that shook the rotunda.

All, except three boxes.

Padmé’s, Bail’s, Mon’s.

She kept her posture perfect, even as bile burned her throat and her vision swam with the sheer stress of it, the absurdity and terror of it all.

She was Naboo. She was serenity, she was discipline. She was everything she needed to be to survive this moment, but her entire world was crumbling before her eyes, more and more with every second of applause.

Only then did she notice that Sabé wasn't standing where she should've. She scanned frantically, checking the upper levels, the diplomatic wings. The side balconies.

Padmé reeled internally while keeping her face carved from marble. Foolish girl, she thought as she frantically shook her head, her throat closing up, knowing exactly where her friend had run off to as Palpatine’s final words echoed, sealing the fate of trillions:

“We stand together. Strong, secure, united, and with peace, finally, restored.”

The ovation became deafening. Padmé, Bail, and Mon stood silently, watching a millennium-old democracy and with it, her lifelong work, collapse like dust under a boot.

The galaxy exhaled one long, dreadful breath.

And then… silence, the first since the Clone Wars.

With its first, slow inhale, a new dawn of the Galaxy began.

Chapter Text

TIME FLEES

17 BBY | 3260 LY | 7960 C.R.C., IMPERIAL CAPITAL CORUSCANT

Two years into the Empire, and Coruscant still glittered like nothing had happened.

From the height of Padmé Amidala’s office in the Imperial Senate complex, the city’s night-cycle shimmered in layered tiers of gold and white, sky-traffic moving in elegant streams like organised constellations. It was the kind of beauty that cost entire systems their autonomy.

Padmé didn’t look up from her datapad long enough to appreciate it, not tonight, or any night lately.

Her office lights had long shifted into their late-evening hue: a warm, Nabooian gold that softened the carved pillars and the mother-of-pearl inlays lining her desk. The room felt almost too serene, an illusion of home for the benefit of senators practically exiled from their worlds.

Stacks of briefs, encrypted intelligence summaries, and pending legislation hovered above her desk in holographic sheets. She sifted through them with quick motions, her eyes moving but her mind already speeding ahead to sort out tomorrow’s tasks.

Her gown was an elegant burgundy number, embroidered with discreet Nabooian motifs. It was a real statement piece, as any other day for Padmé Amidala, but at this hour, even she had begun despising the weight of it.

Captain Typho stood in the corner, arms crossed, and weight shifted onto one hip like a man who had been patient for far too long. He didn’t have to sigh for Padmé to know that the energy around him practically did.

Padmé caught the shift out of the corner of her eye and finally looked up, blinking as if surprised he still existed.

“Typho,” she said, voice soft, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realise the time.”

“You said that yesterday,” he replied dryly.

“And the day before,” she conceded with a faint, tired smile.

His expression softened, but only slightly. “Senator, you’ve been in this building for fourteen hours straight. Again.”

Padmé dismissed the holograms with a decisive sweep, holding her hands up in defeat. “All right. All right, I’m done. Let’s go before you start ageing in front of me.”

Typho muttered something about already having aged ten years since the Empire’s founding, and Padmé didn’t disagree. She collected her outer cloak, draping the sheer Nabooian fabric around her shoulders, then cast one last look at her desk.

Tomorrow: Refugee revision brief. Infrastructure report. Meet with Mon! Committee hearing on paramilitary funding. Private session with Chancellor Emperor Palpatine’s advisory board-

The longer she stared, the more her brain kept listing items like she was still sitting at the desk.

Typho lightly tapped her elbow, voice heavy with exhaustion. “...Senator.”

Right! Walking. She needed to walk...and give him a raise.

They exited the office, her heels clicking against polished marble as they moved through the now dimly lit halls. Only nightshift guards and exhausted staffers remained, eyes glazed with the familiar strain of overwork.

Padmé didn’t speak in the turbolift, didn’t speak as they crossed the landing platform, didn’t speak as her speeder rose into the Coruscant skyline, bright lanes reflecting across her face. She was somewhere else entirely, half living in tomorrow already, half keeping her head up straight from being the lovechild of sleep deprivation and chronic stress.

Typho knew the look, but didn’t interrupt.

500 Republica appeared like a monolith of wealth against the night.

Once the home of senators and diplomats of the Galactic Republic, now the residence of the Empire’s most useful political assets.

The speeder descended smoothly into her private docking bay. Padmé finally exhaled, a long, slow release as if she’d been holding her breath since mid-afternoon.

“Thank you, Typho,” she murmured as she stepped out.

He nodded, falling into place behind her as she approached her penthouse door.

Her home knew her schedule better than she did, which is why it should have lit up the moment it sensed motion in the entryway. When she was a couple of steps in, and the lights had yet to blink on with that soft, warm glow she liked, she paused, a frown creasing her brows.

Typho stopped behind her, instantly alert. Padmé's apartment was never dark, not even during the blackout drills after the Empire’s early purges. Cordé's death before the Clone Wars had served her as a lesson and lifelong paranoia in equal parts.

Padmé slowly turned her head, though not afraid, just calculating, one eyebrow lifting just slightly toward her bodyguard. His hand immediately drifted toward his blaster.

Padmé inhaled, and something coiled in her spine as her senses sharpened, the same way they had been drilled into her since a young age, from the monarchy days.

Typho’s voice was barely audible. “Senator, let me go first-”

She shook her head once.

She stepped inside, and her gown quietly brushed the threshold. The silence was wrong. Her entire penthouse overlooked the cityscape; even at midnight, light leaked in from the windows. But the curtains were drawn tonight, every shade pulled tight. There was no trace of her handmaidens, no Dormé, no Moteé.

As if someone wanted it dark. Padmé’s pulse picked up. She moved across the hall quietly, gown swaying against her legs, hand drifting toward the concealed slit in the fabric where she kept a compact Nabooian blaster. Her fingers brushed the edge of it, out of instinct. She’d survived enough assassination attempts to trust her own reading of a room.

As she advanced further into the apartment, her eyes adjusted enough to make out shadows: the silhouette of her living space, the faint outlines of furniture, the dim shimmer of Coruscant’s lights bleeding around the curtain edges.

Something was off, and someone was here, of that she was 100% sure.
And-

“SURPRISE!”

The lights blazed on all at once, nearly blinding. Padmé absolutely froze, and Typho's blaster shot just missed Dormé's head by a hair, mere centimetres away from having joined Cordé in force heaven.

Her body had already tensed to fire, her heart hammered, and her breath caught half in her throat. For a heartbeat, she kept her posture defensive, weight balanced, hand still hovering beneath her gown where her hidden blaster had been a second away from being drawn.

But then her eyes adjusted, and shapes sharpened, and the threat dissolved into something so absurdly benign her knees nearly buckled. And only then, she blinked.

There were people everywhere. In front of her sofa, spilling from her kitchen, leaning over the balcony railing with drinks, gathered in warm clusters of familiar faces, and they were laughing.
Clapping. Cheering. Simply delighted.

Her brain needed a full second to catch up, to even comprehend that the blaster shot that rang through the air hadn't actually split her in half.

In the centre of her living space, arms thrown up like a victory pose, stood Dormé, face lit with delight and a ridiculous little party hat perched on her hair. She looked glowing, healthier than Padmé had seen her in months, cheeks flushed and smile bright enough to rival the chandeliers above.

Dormé wriggled her fingers at her. “Surprise?”

Padmé just…stood there. It was almost comical. She, the famously eloquent senator, the quick-witted master of negotiation, the woman who once talked down a rancor guard without blinking, could not form a single word. Her mouth opened uselessly. A wave of embarrassed warmth crashed up her neck. She wanted to laugh, maybe cry, maybe just kriffing lie down.

Something moved in her peripheral vision, and not danger, this time, but a cake, floating toward her on a silver catering droid’s tray, candles shaped like small Naboo water lilies shimmering with their petals.

The candles. The crowd. The cake. Oh, Force, it was her birthday. She had forgotten her own birthday.

Dormé stepped forward, worry flickering under her smile. “Padmé? Are you...”

“I-” Padmé swallowed. Her voice felt like she had to drag it up out of her chest. “Well, I’m… surprised.” And sleep deprived.

That earned laughter from a few people, relieved, fond, teasing. It broke the tension in the room just enough for her to breathe again.

“Good,” Dormé said with a triumphant grin. “Because organising a surprise party for the most paranoid woman in the Empire was not easy. I told everyone you’d nearly shoot me...I was only half-joking. Maybe I should've told Typho about this, now that I think about it.”

Padmé shot a mortified glance at her still-visible blaster outline beneath her robe. Typho coughed loudly and straightened up, as if just breaking out of his trance of nearly having committed homicide over a birthday surprise.

Mon stepped out from a cluster of senators by the balcony doors, expression warm but observant in that quiet way she had developed since the Empire’s rise. “We worried we’d have to sedate you first,” she teased softly. “But you handled it...remarkably well.”

Riyo Chuchi, beside her, added, “We made a wager. I bet you’d scream, Dormé insisted you’d arm yourself.” Then, brightly: “Dormé won.”

Padmé hid her face behind her hand for a brief, mortifying second. The room, her friends, the noise — all of it crashed into her too fast and brightly. It felt like surfacing after spending months underwater. 

“Why is it so dark in here?” she asked, still half-bewildered.

Dormé threw her hands up. “We couldn’t exactly wait around with the lights on, you’d see the shadows through the door...And don’t be dramatic, you survived.”

“Typho shot a hole through the wall, and I was about to, too,” Padmé muttered.

Riyo gasped, delighted. “Truly?”

Mon elbowed her. “Don’t encourage her.”

The cake droid chimed politely. Senator Amidala: Please blow out the candles or the wax will destabilise.

“Force forbid the wax destabilises,” Padmé whispered and stepped forward.

Her mind still felt split; part of her was stuck in the Senate chamber, thinking about supply schedules and displaced Alderaanian communities and the new Imperial oversight committee, and part here, in her darkened apartment, surrounded by people who cared about her enough to shock years off her life.

She took a small breath and blew out the candles. The room applauded with genuine warmth, and as Padmé lowered her hand, she felt something inside her unclench, a muscle that had been pulled too tight finally loosening.

“Padmé.”

The voice came from her left, smooth and gentle, and entirely familiar.

Rush Clovis stepped through the crowd toward her, handsome as always, raven-haired, smelling faintly of expensive cologne and a faint hint of Corellian brandy. He smiled like he was used to being photographed smiling.

He leaned in, pressed a chaste kiss to her cheek, perfectly appropriate, perfectly public, perfectly impersonal. Padmé smiled back mechanically. There was affection there, yes. More? Not necessarily. It was familiarity, companionship built on mutual understanding and political convenience, and she preferred it this way.

As he turned sideways with his arm still around her waist and stepped aside, Padmé nearly staggered, because behind him stood Sola.

Her big sister moved forward with the unstoppable force of a Naboo storm.

“Padmé Naberrie, if you ever ignore my calls for three days again, I will personally drag you back to Theed by your ear,” she muttered as she crushed Padmé into a hug. Padmé closed her eyes, letting herself sink into the smell of home, of Sola’s familiar floral soap.

“Oh, I missed you, too,” Padmé whispered.

Sola held tighter. “You look exhausted.”

“Thanks. I’ve been busy.”

“You always say that.”

“Because it’s always true.”

They pulled apart, but Sola kept her hands on Padmé’s shoulders, studying her face like she could read the two years of sleeplessness, grief, and political warfare carved into it.

Padmé swallowed, suddenly unsteady again.

Sola smiled gently. “We’ll talk later. For now-” she squeezed her shoulder, “go be the birthday girl.”

The party was already shifting, guests weaving into small clusters, catering droids offering drinks, lively conversation filling the once-dark apartment. It was surreal, a bright, elegant celebration set against the metallic backdrop of an Imperial capital.

Padmé and Sola eventually found a quiet corner of the massive sofa, away from the senators debating quietly about a new trade regulation. Dormé and Moteé were not the ones rearranging plates on the table and running errands today, having left that to the service droids. Mon Mothma was explaining to a curious aide why she could not possibly support the new Oversector taxation scheme. Clovis was laughing with Typho, who looked suspiciously grateful to have something to drink, or something to do.

Padmé took a small sip of her own glass, and it tasted of something fruity, Nabooian, sweet. Sola nudged her.

“You forgot your own birthday,” she said flatly.

Padmé closed her eyes. “It’s been…a week.”

“Padmé. You live like you’re ninety years old and the Senate will collapse if you blink incorrectly.”

She gave a small, weary laugh. “It might.”

“Padmé.”

She met Sola’s gaze, and her sister’s eyes softened.

“I know things are harder now. I know you lost… a lot. We all did.” Sola’s voice lowered. “But you can’t keep doing this. You’re...fraying! You're lucky mom hasn't come here to check on you herself.”

Padmé looked away. Toward Mon Mothma, who looked thinner than she had two months ago. Riyo, who laughed more loudly than she used to, though compensating sort of brightness. Toward Dormé, whose smile dimmed whenever she thought no one was watching.

“Everyone is fraying,” Padmé said softly.

“That doesn’t make it acceptable.”

Padmé felt something tighten again inside her chest. “Sola, the Empire- I’m trying to-”

“I know.” Sola laid her hand over Padmé’s. “And I’m proud of you. But I want you to be happy. Or at least… not drowning.”

Padmé didn’t trust herself to answer.

Instead, Sola squeezed her fingers once. “Which is why I wanted to tell you my news tonight.”

Padmé blinked, startled out of her melancholy. “News?”

Sola’s smile broke across her face like sunlight. “Well. You’re going to be an aunt again.”

Padmé froze. Then she slowly, genuinely, smiled, the first real smile she’d felt in ages.

“Another niece?” her voice cracked.

Sola laughed softly. “Or nephew. We’ll know in a few months.”

Padmé felt tears prick her eyes. Joy, warm and bright and overwhelming, filled her chest like a rush of breath she hadn’t realised she needed.

“Oh, Sola…”

Her sister leaned into her shoulder. “I wanted to tell you sooner, but, well. I wanted to do it in person. And I wanted you to have something… good.”

Padmé bit her lip, touched beyond words. She stayed like that for a good long moment, absorbing the warmth, the noise, the light of the room, anchoring herself in the presence of the people she loved.

It was small and fragile, but she felt a tiny spark of hope. It was there, and she let herself feel it, if only just for tonight.

The party thinned like a candle guttering to its last flame. Laughter became smaller, conversations folded into polite goodbyes, and the droids’ servomotors moved with a quieter efficiency as plates were cleared and crystal glasses matched back into neat stacks. The glow from the chandeliers softened, and the room settled.

Padmé stood by the window for a few long heartbeats, watching ribbons of Coruscant traffic glide like veins through the city’s chest. Down below, the world that had declared itself an Empire slept uneasily. Up here, in her apartment on the fifth hundred of Republica, the night felt almost intact, contained, safe.

“Are you sure you’re all right, Padmé?” Mon Mothma asked, a hand on Padmé’s arm that conveyed more kinship than any formal title could.

Padmé gave a small, honest laugh. “I’m fine! I'm Surprised. Tired, yes.” She could feel it now, like the pressure after diving too deep and coming back up too fast, a dull ache at the base of her skull. Two years of policy, of half-measures and speeches, of showing up while the world rearranged itself; it all folded into a weight she’d stopped acknowledging until it let her go.

Mon’s eyes were the soft insistence of a woman who had seen too many friends burned by history. “Go rest. We’ll escort Sola out.” She spoke like someone giving an order and a benediction at once.

Sola took Padmé’s hand in both of hers, suddenly fierce with sisterly care. “You eat before you sleep. Do you hear me? No more skipping meals because of ‘emergency sessions.’”

Padmé smiled. Sola’s scold was as familiar as a home-stitched blanket. “I’ll eat.”

Sola hugged her, too quickly, because goodbyes had started to feel like splinters when prolonged, and then retreated with Mon and a cluster of Naboo cousins who had managed to charter a diplomatic shuttle just to be there tonight. They moved with the easy intimacy of family, voices low and full of the jokes they’d always shared.

Clovis lingered, watching with a careful gentleness as if assessing whether the world might still be damaged goods. He was practised at these moments, with the hand at her elbow as he guided her to the door, the polite murmurs for the benefit of those watching, the little happinesses that read like protocol and comfort in equal measure.

He bowed slightly, then pressed another brief kiss to Padmé’s cheek. It was the kind of steady, cultivated warmth that fit well with a life of negotiations and appearances. There was no wildness in it, or reckless heat, and it landed like a document signed with ink. Padmé returned it with the small, contented smile of someone who had learned to accept tidy affection as a sufficient thing.

“Goodnight, Padmé,” he said, voice even. “I shall call you at dawn.”

“Goodnight, Rush.”

Outside, the low hum of a speeder signalled. Clovis and Typho stepped to the balcony while the last of the guests gathered their coats. Sola, impulsive as ever, rushed back and grabbed Padmé’s hands for a final squeeze.

“You promise you’ll come home for a meal soon?” she demanded, eyes bright.

“How soon?” Padmé teased lamely, and both of them laughed, the sound small and human in the vast room.

The farewells unfolded with ritual precision. Mon clasped Padmé’s fingers for a careful moment longer than decorum demanded, Riyo Chuchi pressed a cheek against hers in a quick, syrup-sweet peck, and Dormé, efficient till the last, straightened the hem of Padmé’s gown as if smoothing the years from the fabric. The handmaidens helped shepherd the last guests out, exchanging a dozen small, dutiful glances that said everything visible people could not say on a public day.

When Sola finally hugged her goodbye again, the embrace lasted a fraction longer. “You know where I am if things go sideways,” she murmured.

Padmé nodded. “I know.”

The speeder’s lift-off was a gentle puff that sent a warm breeze back into the penthouse. Once they were gone, the apartment regained its peculiar hush. Padmé watched their speeder trace a pale arc before it was absorbed into the city’s nocturnal traffic. 

She walked through the rooms slowly. The guests had left traces of themselves: a napkin with Mon’s handwriting folded into a book, a ribbon of Sola’s scarf snagged on a chair, a small, gilded card from Clovis with a carefully chosen quote about stability. The cater-droids hummed in standby, their trays now empty. The chandeliers cast a web of familiar light across a carpet she could map by touch.

Padmé moved to her suite like someone entering a warm, private chapel. She shed the heavy burgundy gown, letting Dormé help the intricate pins slide away and the fabric fall like a memory to the floor. Dormé moved with practised hands, and only in the afterglow of the intimate party, Padmé noticed the small calluses at Dormé’s fingertips, places where work and worry had marked the body the way policy marks a career. She made a mental note to send a gift to Dormé in the morning, something small and practical, like a silk scarf, perhaps, or an extra ration of restful tea.

Typho’s soft knock at the door was almost imperceptible. “Everything secure, Senator?” his voice murmured beyond the wood.

“Yes,” she called. “I’ll be fine. Please, go rest.”

He paused, as if to argue, but the exhaustion pressing against her chest made her firm. “Goodnight, Typho.”

Footsteps faded. The apartment, now truly quiet, felt vast. Padmé slid into a pale dressing robe and let the cool fabric hug her skin. She padded to her reading alcove where a holo-book rested, a classic Naboo pastoral she had started months ago, waiting open on the projector. The page glowed with soft script, and for a few minutes she let herself be carried by the gentle arc of another life: a simple narrative about a painter who found solace by the water. The tranquillity was almost obscene in its mundanity. It was, Padmé realised with a private, guilty smile, exactly what she wanted.

She read a paragraph, then another. Her eyelids grew heavy with a slow, accumulating gravity. The sentences became softer on her tongue, the voices in the room quieted into a lullaby. Outside, the city had not stopped its grinding gears. But inside, here, everything was arranged to feel like a bubble: her silk robe, the practised quiet of the servants, the carefully curated luxe that cost worlds but bought this room’s illusion of pause. For a while, the policies could wait, the speeches could wait, the cries from distant systems could wait. The bubble truly held.

She drifted deeper into the passage about the painter and the quiet harbour. Her head nodded once, an apology to the life she had promised herself to fight for and to the self who still wanted a private hour. Her book slipped from her fingers, the holo-pages flickering as the system cycled to standby.

The dream came gently at first, like a tide drawing in. Shapes formed: the gentle face of Naboo’s lake at dawn; a child’s laugh echoed down a corridor like silver. Padmé’s breathing slowed. Her body finally surrendered the weight it had carried for months. 

Padmé saw herself moving through Villa Varykino, corridor after corridor folding into one another, and the whitewashed stone was already warmed by morning sun. The architecture carried a countryside hush, archways softened by trailing millaflowers, stairwells that wound gently like a slow spiral, terraces that opened to blue and sea farther than the eye could hold.

A breeze threaded through the open windows, carrying salt and citrus and the distant, lazy thrum of gulls. Light pooled in the alcoves and painted patterns on tapestries embroidered with family crests. The place smelled of old wood and the faint perfume of someone who had made a life out of careful, small beauties.

Padmé followed a warm and insistent glow that only she seemed to see. It bent the light in the hallways a fraction differently, made the dust motes drift approvingly, and she walked without thinking because somewhere else, somewhere deeper, something inside her pulled her forward. The villa was empty; shutters were half-open, a table set for one in a courtyard waiting for a guest who never arrived. Her footsteps were breath-soft on stone.

As she walked, she looked down and realised she was barefoot. The tile under her feet changed underneath the slow cadence of her step: first cool and smooth, then gritty, then simply gone, replaced by the soft, forgiving give of warm sand. With each step, the villa dissolved into strand and shoreline. She smiled, the kind that arrived when a person recognises a safe thing after a long time of alarms.

The day sped forward and slid into evening without any abruptness. Sky brightened, then softened; the sun slid low and the tide drew in. By the time she reached the water’s edge, the sand was already much cooler and dark, the sky shifting to a deep lapis. Naboo's small moons hung above the water, pale and sistered, and their reflections stitched silver across the bay.

The hush of the world in her dream felt sacramental. Voices whispered at the edges of hearing. They were gentled syllables in a language she couldn’t speak, like lullabies translated from memory. Her eyes closed to them easily. They didn’t press for any meaning, only for easing.

She walked into the water up to her calves, then knees, then, as if the sea were a welcome garment, she allowed it to come up over her hips until the world narrowed to nothing but cool pressure and sound. Stars came out in their millions, sharp as pinpricks. Padmé let her face tilt upward and thought, with a childish surprise, that she had never seen the sky look like that. It felt as if everything she’d carried for the past two years had been pressed against the other side of a glass. Here, none of it could be heard. Here, her chest opened.

Then, not by slow orbit but almost in a choreography, the moons began to move. One slid before the other and climbed into an eclipse that warmed the sky to an impossible red. The water around her shifted like a bruise blooming outward that soon washed into a pool of red so deep it swallowed the reflected stars. The pleasant whispering at the edges translated into much sharper syllables, urgent and nearly intelligible, like a chorus just beginning to remember its lines. Her serenity wavered, and confusion rose, steady and sour.

She opened her eyes in the water and saw not shoreline but an endless red plain, and for the first time in the dream, a sliver of fear pricked her. She turned to go back, the villa nowhere in sight. The sand that had given beneath her feet only minutes ago was gone. The whispers rose into something like the edge of a name, but she could not catch the word.

Then, very small, she woke. And not with a start or a gasp, but with the sensation of being shifted off-balance; the quiet dislocation that comes from stepping out of a different skin. She lay for a moment longer, eyelids slack, memory of red and moons bright in the corners of her mind like an unwanted painting.

0730 HOURS, IMPERIAL SENATE BUILDING

Morning arrived with a practised civility in the Imperial Senate wing allotted to her: tall windows, soft engineered light that mimicked her beloved home's dawn, a row of potted ferns that made the office smell faintly organic. The world had slid back into its expected grooves, and the Empire’s machinery hummed politely but relentlessly beneath it all.

A junior aide, soft-faced and eyes damp with bureaucratic fatigue, presented her first cup of coffee at precisely 07:30. It was a ritual and a comfort, the blue ceramic warmed in both hands, and single-origin beans from a Naboo artisan cooperative. The cup had come from Dormé’s orders, and the aide’s fingers trembled slightly when she set it down, as if placing it was a small act of faith.

“Good morning, Senator,” the aide murmured. “Your morning brief: three Intelligence red-lines, two committee amendments, and...a diplomatic packet from the Emperor marked ‘reviewed personally.’”

Padmé’s fingers closed around the cup like a lifeline.

She supposed she could appreciate the way the Empire made such gestures feel intimate; that, she knew, was part of the system. The Emperor favoured certain faces. Palpatine liked to cultivate loyalty by granting office wings and personal reviews that read as privilege but functioned as control. Her Naboo suite had been refurbished at the beginning of Imperial rule and regranted to her as a sign of favour, a comfortable gilding that reminded everyone she was seen and useful. He’d sent an emissary to supervise the refit, according to the press release. He’d inspected the drapery in the public speech. He’d, allegedly, taken a personal interest in the colour palette.

The packet “reviewed personally” sat in the centre of her desk. It smelled faintly of official wax and a trace of machine oil, perhaps, a scent she’d come to pair with the Capitol’s darker appointments.

Padmé skimmed the morning’s priorities. Her world was narrower now; public disagreements had become dangerous.

What she was permitted to work on was often one step removed from the very truths she’d once fought to expose. The Empire allowed humanitarian measures if they were framed as efficiency programs; they allowed refugee corridors framed as “population optimisation”; allowed private relief only if it was routed through sanctioned agencies that took “administrative fees” in the name of ensuring order. She knew the compromises by heart; she negotiated within them. It has become, she thought sometimes with bitter clarity, a different kind of resistance.

Today’s docket was rather unglamorous in its modesty: A bill to make the Galaxy a little smaller for the ones who lived on its edges. A bill that Palpatine would likely praise publicly, yet smother quietly:

Expansion of the Galactic Public Transport Lanes; Connecting Outer Rim sectors more reliably to the Core.

Should be uncontroversial enough, no?

She dressed in the wardrobe of a Senator who needed to seem to belong to both worlds: the softness of Naboo tucked into the strict lines of senate formality. Dormé had chosen a muted teal, elegant and unaggressive. Padmé pinned a small sea-glass brooch at her throat as a minor concession to vanity and a quiet token of the lakes she dreamed of. Padmé’s heels clicked a soft rhythm across the chamber floor, an audible punctuation to a speech practised until its notes were carved into her very bones.

Upon arrival, the dome smelled like old oaths and new steel. The chamber was already waking, pods rotating into place like flowers. Attendants whispered, holos hummed, and the low murmur of pre-session deals threaded through the air. Padmé stepped into the rotunda with her face already arranged for argument: calm and luminous in that practised way she had cultivated for years, but with a pressure under the surface that the cameras could not capture.

Palpatine loved projects that looked useful and harmless. Projects that reshaped the map while keeping senators pleased and engaged. He loved them because they distracted.

This one was dangerous precisely because it wasn’t as loud.

The Galactic Public Transport Initiative proposed standardised shuttles, interlocking orbital hubs, subsidised fares for Rim colonies, and a central maintenance authority that would undercut the price-gougers who made everyday travel a fortune for anyone outside the core. In Padmé’s bones, it had the shape of safety: mobility as equaliser, transit corridors that knit disparate systems into a living network.

Padmé believed, stubbornly and with the quiet ferocity that had shaped her political life, that mobility undermined isolation. If people could move without tariffs and choke-points raised by the profiteers themselves, then centres of power would find it harder to enforce inequality. She framed it not as charity but as infrastructure, the kind of quiet law that changed lives through pipes and rails. It fell into another, like the domino effect.

“Senators,” she began, her voice clear, clipped, impeccably controlled, “our Outer Rim systems have been isolated by war, piracy, and collapsed infrastructure. This initiative is not simply about transport. It is access. To education, medical care, and equal mobility. And most importantly, stability.”

Her voice carried well, and the central podium always loved her. A dozen repulsorpods drifted closer, listening.

“This bill is not charity,” she continued. “It’s infrastructure. When you build a line between a Core capital and an Outer Rim port, you’re not simply moving people. You’re moving opportunity. A child who can reach a university on Coruscant has choices her parents never had. A trader who can reach a certified dock won’t have to rely on smugglers. This is economics and dignity folded into one project!”

Brows lift, a few heads nod. It feels right to her in the body the way a familiar song does.

The Senator from Anaxes, however, stood to oppose her. Lysara Yularen.

She was the sort of presence that reassured investors and intimidated rivals, husband’s name on the record, reputation of a woman who handles an empire of finance with a single raised hand. She was tall, had sculpted features, hair arranged to make the light fall with flattering geometry, and a voice both measured and honeyed. The Empire’s core had produced many skilled rhetoricians, and Lysara had the lethal combination of both social warmth and an instinct for where money liked to gather.

“Senator Amidala,” Lysara says, “we all want safe, affordable transit. But scale matters. A unified, Empire-wide network will mean centralised control. It will mean uniform contracts, which means the same corporations win everywhere. That does not reduce inequality. That concentrates profit. We should invest in regional hubs, not a single monolith that will cannibalise local economies and hand routes to a single managing authority.”

Padmé felt the surge of the floor’s attention. Lysara’s name carried weight. Her husband, Colonel Wullf Yularen, had been seen by a certain class of official as a stabilising hand in Coruscant’s security circles. That she was both senator and core-world socialite only sharpened her voice into an instrument the Chamber listened to willingly.

“You worry about corporations,” Padmé replied. “I worry about a child on Tatooine who can’t get a medical shuttle because the price is inflated by middlemen. Local hubs help, but they don’t solve cross-border access. Standardised schedules, shared maintenance protocols, and subsidised tickets will make transport reliable and cheaper. That’s how you build equality.”

“Senator Amidala,” Lysara purred, “your compassion is commendable, truly. But perhaps you misjudge the moment...The Empire is consolidating. We cannot indulge in expensive, idealistic ventures while the treasury is strained. Who pays for the subsidies? The Core?”

Padmé did not flinch. “It isn’t idealistic to ensure billions can access basic interplanetary routes. We spend more on Imperial galas!”

Lysara’s lips twitched. “A necessary cost for morale.”

“Moral for whom?”

A few senators stirred, and a small wave of murmurs trickled through the rotunda.

Lysara pressed onward gracefully. “Outer Rim expansion would require rerouting entire trade lanes, rebuilding relay stations, and allocating fleets to patrol vulnerable hyperlanes. Who will pay for this? Certainly not the Outer Rim worlds... I mean, most barely pay their taxes.”

Padmé felt heat climb her spine. “We cannot punish worlds for what war destroyed.”

“Punish?” Lysara repeated with a small, incredulous laugh. “My dear, we are rewarding them if anything! They receive safety and opportunity. The Core carries the burden.”

Her tone, sweetly condescending, sparked another ripple of reaction. Several pods murmured agreement. The Empire liked caution when the very caution protected its lines of credit and fed the imperial treasury.

Padmé felt a righteous and fierce flash, but she swallowed it.

“This isn’t charity,” Padmé countered. “It is an investment in long-term Galactic stability. Access reduces crime, increases commerce, and-”

“And drains the treasury now,” Lysara repeated, smile widening. “Stability comes from strength. The Outer Rim has not yet proven worthy of such trust.”

That truly did it. Anger flared in a dozen pods, and someone hissed “Imperialist!” while another called for order. A third shouted that it was “blatant Outer Rim prejudice.”

Lysara’s pod rose slightly above the others, height as status, and status as weapon.

“Let us be realistic,” she said, and the softness in her voice felt like a blade. “We do not resurrect failing systems by throwing credits at them.”

Padmé leaned forward, voice dropping. “Senator Yularen, with all due respect, the Outer Rim didn’t ‘fail.’ Let me reiterate: The war failed them, therefore we did.”

A brittle silence fell, stretched tight, and before it could snap, Mas Amedda's amplified voice boomed: “The motion is postponed and shall be continued. Further debate is scheduled for a later session. This meeting is adjourned.”

Padmé felt it like a door closing. The word “continued” in the Senate was polite; in practice, it was an indefinite delay.

A chorus of snaps and whirrs followed as pods rotated away. Padmé’s jaw locked as Lysara bowed her head in a faux gracious nod and drifted back into the shadows of the Core delegation.

Padmé let out a slow breath, knuckles white on the edge of her pod.

She left the pod with measured steps, the ritual of exit practised enough to be second nature. Her hands flexed around datapads, sleeves catching the light. Cameras would show a calm senator. Inside, she burned with the accumulation of matches which no one else seemed able to feel.

The corridors outside the Chamber narrowed into quiet. The design of the Senate intentionally sheltered chatter into shadowed passages where deals were struck away from the holocams.

She almost collided with Lord Varon.

He emerged from the opposite side of the corridor like someone stepped out of the evening; tall, shadowed, his public-control suit chosen to read as neutral authority. Two years of this city’s rhythms had made him a figure people noticed and then forgot; he had that effect. 

“Oh. You’re here,” she said. She sounded breathless with a force that felt equal parts frustration and hope. “I just lost the floor to Anaxes. She argued for core-first funding. Called me sentimental!”

Varon’s mouth twitched in the smallest possible way, a movement easily misread as amused indulgence. “Anaxes has an...admirable way with rhetoric.”

“It’s not rhetoric,” she burst out, voice low, the kind that made aides glance and then pretend oblivion. “It’s infrastructure. If we let the Rim rot, we condemn decades. Do you understand what it means to cut a planet off from affordable travel? Do you see how the math becomes cruelty?”

Varon listened with the serene posture of someone who’d been trained to simply appear receptive. He did not interrupt, but his shoulders hunched infinitesimally, the only sign of movement. His face remained neutral, with something like patience, then a fraction of boredom passed over him. He did not speak as if he wanted to be persuaded. He spoke as if this were a rehearsal. He consulted a datapad now, one finger stroking the edge as if to forestall real engagement.

Padmé pressed on because the corridor gave them privacy from the meld of pods. “We could standardise maintenance. Subsidise routes for colonists, not contractors. We can prevent syndicates from gouging fares. It’s public- public transport is a public good. It’s mechanical, logical, implementable!”

His reply was a small, clipped concession about “logistics". He mentioned a supply chain issue in the Outer Rim and wore a mask of concern.

Padmé practically tuned it out, barreling on. “You say logistics, but you ignore human beings.”

She barreled right on. “I assume you saw the session. If the Emperor actually wants improved stability in the Rim, he cannot allow Senator Yularen to dominate the narrative about-”

“Senator,” Varon said, tone smooth but faintly strained. “I am aware of the session’s… tenor.”

She barely heard him, because she was too deep in the momentum of righteous fury.

“We cannot keep letting Core elitism dictate imperial policy. The Outer Rim keeps this galaxy functioning, and I refuse to let them be treated like parasites because it suits-”

“Amidala,” Varon interjected again, with a clipped firmness that suggested he was two degrees from snapping a stylus in half, or perhaps the Senator of Naboo herself. “The Emperor’s priorities are his own. My role is advisory, not judicial.”

She waved a hand dismissively. “You have his ear more consistently than any of us. If you tell him this transport bill matters-”

“Padmé Amidala,” he said. It was the first time he’d said her name, and it absolutely stopped her mid-stride.

He recalibrated, shaking off some sharpness, and slipped into a softer cadence. The politician’s mask, the false persona. Lord Varon.

“I can offer my...perspective,” he said. “But I cannot promise influence.”

“I’m not asking for a miracle. Just fairness.”

“I am rarely the one asked for fairness.” His voice lilted dry, almost wry. Out of character, if she had listened.

Padmé missed it entirely, though. She was too deep in her convictions, too used to his occasional strange humour.

He continued walking, and she followed.

She was mid-rant, again. “Lysara acts as if the Outer Rim deserves abandonment-” when he cut in:

“Senator Yularen is unfortunate but… well-positioned.” Another subtle sarcasm. “Her husband’s role in the ISB grants her more authority than her arguments deserve.”

“Exactly!” Padmé exhaled, triumphant. “So you do agree she’s being short-sighted?”

“...I did not say that.”

“You implied it.”

“I implied nothing.”

“It was a tone.”

He inhaled deeply, an unmistakable sign of barely contained irritation.

He tried a faint charm then, something he used when he wanted to be likeable without revealing conviction. “By the way,” he began, “I hope your birthday was... pleasant. I neglected to offer my congratulations. The Emperor anxiously approved an extension on your Naboo delegation, citing your… tireless work.”

Padmé blinked, distracted and annoyingly practical. “It was fine,” she said, meaning it with the hollow contentment of someone used to filling the role assigned to her. She didn’t care much about palatial favours. She cared about the bill. She cared about the families.“It was nothing important.”

Varon’s brow twitched in mild disbelief. “It is customary to mark one’s birth.”

“It’s customary to have time for it,” she countered.

He studied her with a brief, analytical flicker that felt more predatory than polite anymore.

“You’re unusually passionate,” he said. The phrasing was delicate, meant to placate.

“You call it passion,” she snapped. The corridor seemed too narrow as she gestured toward the Chamber. “I call it urgency.”

A micro-smile tugged at him, quick and merciless. “Urgency can be weaponised.”

Padmé stopped herself. The sentence and the turn of phrase had an elliptical cruelty that made the rest of his platitudes taste old. She considered for a second whether she’d been played into saying too much. She had given him an opening, the sort of plea the court preferred to analyse and quietly discard. She felt suddenly raw.

Before she could continue her tirade about transport lanes or injustice or the Emperor’s strategic neglect, he shifted abruptly.

“I must attend another meeting,” he said too quickly. “Good day, Senator.”

Padmé watched him begin to swiftly move past her, as if jumping at the chance of escape. And before she could form a reply, he stepped into a side corridor and vanished like a shadow slipping back into deeper dark.

She stood there blinking after him, faintly offended, but mostly perplexed.

Padmé turned to find Bail Organa behind her, expression gentle and absolutely seeing right through her, while also looking as if thinking: Why the hell would you speak to that man?

Then Bail’s hand closed on her shoulder, warm and steady.

“You look like you want to throw something at the dais,” he said softly, voice low enough that no one would overhear but close enough to anchor her.

She let out a breath that tasted of anger and exhaustion. “I do.”

He guided her away toward the dining annex where lunch happened in small, concentrated clusters. “Save your fire,” he said. “We’ll get the amendment back on. For now, let’s eat?”

Padmé allowed herself to be led.