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When they first come to her, tell her what he’s done, what he almost did, she is…
Indignant, perhaps, is the closest word she can think of. Outraged, is the next closest.
He would never do such a thing. I know him better than you ever could, she’d sneered and slammed the door on the very serious Knights ( Knights, because there were so few Masters) and locked herself away.
She’d gone to the Senate and seen what Palpatine had done.
Palpatine, her mentor. Not her friend anymore, not when she’d seen how power-hungry he’d become, but she had always admired, at the least, his experience. His political acumen.
She now watched video of him cutting down Jedi as easily as reeds in the Gungan swamps. Masters she knew.
She saw Anakin enter.
She saw Anakin turn. On his teachers. On the Republic.
She saw that fated Order. Commander Cody. Execute Order Sixty-Six.
Cody. Obi-Wan.
She felt the baby kick, alarmed by her alarm, and she only settled when Bail moved his pod forward to announce that Jedi Masters Kenobi and Yoda were recovered safely, and other surviving Jedi are returning every day.
Master Windu was in a coma, falling into one shortly after ending the Order.
The rest
The rest of the Council.
They were all dead . Because of her husband. Because of her planet.
She wordlessly cast her vote for Bail (Bail, who had saved the two surviving Masters; Bail, who had loved the Order and the Republic so much better than her) and left the Senate.
She sees her husband’s face, a rictus of rage, burned behind her eyes. “I need him! ”
(I won’t lose you the way I lost my mother. No, I promise you.)
How long ago had she lost him?
It is Yoda (not Obi-Wan, and she never thought of him as a coward until now) who delivers the Council’s (ha, a Council of two) verdict.
Exile, until he is redeemed.
“I am not a Jedi,” she tells Yoda. “I don’t know what that means. How can someone be redeemed for trying to overthrow the Republic? For murdering other Jedi?”
He doesn’t have any answers that satisfy her. He mentions that Obi-Wan, for a time, will the the lone Councilor and Grandmaster of the Order.
“I am not a Jedi. I couldn’t imagine what I would need to bother the Order for, now.” The words are spit between clenched teeth. They taste like unripe muja fruit, acidic and bitter.
Yoda bows, and invites her to use their Healing Halls whenever she had need of them.
Two weeks later, she finds herself there, holding two twins and absent one husband. I told you I was strong enough , she snarls at the man who should be there. Why didn’t you believe me? Why didn’t you love me enough to trust my strength?
The pyres at the Temple burn for six months, as deaths are confirmed.
She is Force Null (nearly, just enough ability in her to soothe her errant husband and now her precious twins) and she can still feel the grief coiled around the sanctuary.
Bail visits often, and she occasionally sees Obi-Wan on his way to the Chancellor’s office (a new office, now).
He looks tired.
She doesn’t visit.
Ahsoka visits often, talks about him, about the family she still loved, about the choices she made. But mostly, about Obi-Wan.
“I am not a Jedi,” she tells Bail, as they’re taking tea and the twins are happily enoying tummy time nearby. “I don’t know what to say to him.”
“He is a Jedi. And he’s been at a loss for words more often than I’ve ever seen,” Bail admitted quietly. “We’re all healing in our time.” He reaches out, clasps her hand. “Take your time. But don’t lose a friend because you were both betrayed by the same man.”
It is four years, and she is not the one to reach out first.
“ Mom, there’s a weirdo!” screamed from the door, and sometimes, in the dark of night, Padme is afraid of her daughter.
Sees, in those intense eyes the same ferocity that had twisted her father astray.
Sees Anakin’s temper, his passion, his obstinancy. Sees them, so different from sweet, biddable Luke, and is afraid .
She expects to see the same fear in Obi-Wan’s eyes, when she steps out with an oil-covered Luke. Instead, she sees a fond twist of his lips, a softening of his eyes.
I am not a Jedi, she thinks, tightening her grip on her son, and you are. Yet I think, in the end, you loved him better than I.
It is a politician’s trick, to trade complaints about her son, and…
“Anakin did much similar, when he was first put into my care. I know some tricks.” His name, falling so easily from those lips. As if he still loved him, still.
What else could she do, but offer an olive branch? It was worth it, to see his grin (older, more tired, but still that same grin she’d first seen so long ago on Naboo) when he was named a babysitter.
( It is a few weeks later, when she’s called in reinforcements because the twins had both had temper tantrums and things were floating and she’d been at her wits end.
“I am not a Jedi,” she confides, both of them cradling tea with a twin tucked against them, soundly asleep with Obi-Wan’s shields finally cutting off the feedback loop. “I don’t know how you can forgive him.”
He was quiet for a long moment.
“You are not a Jedi. The poison you hold in your heart is yours to choose,” he had said, quietly, gently. “But I am a Jedi, and to hold to darkness is not our way. I forgave him for my sake, for the sake of the Order, not for his. Not because he deserves it.”
“...I am not a Jedi,” she repeats, leaning her cheek against Luke’s soft hair. Leia, as always, had chosen Obi-Wan. “Right now, I’m glad of it.”
Obi-Wan becomes Uncle Obi, and she listens with Anakin’s children as he spins stories of their father.
“He always feels sad, but a good sorta said. Like…like the stretches we have to do, before we practice,” Leia explained.
“Or like an engine that’s been sitting for a while, when it starts up,” Luke offers.
He is stronger than me, Padme thinks, but finally starts to offer her own hesitant stories.
She has to stop, more than once. Anger burns in her throat, sears her tongue to stillness. But she tries.
Her children deserve their father. Whatever she can give them of him.
I am not a Jedi , she tells Ahsoka, bitter tears trickling down her cheeks. I don’t know how to separate who he was from what he became.
Seven years later, her husband is home. Padme hears from an excitable Cal (a man himself, now, but still so much the shy boy trailing behind Obi-Wan) first, even as he agrees to take the children if he’s on planet.
Anakin starts at the Temple. But it is only a few days before he is there.
She has a full tea set out. A barrier, between them, that she’s never needed before.
Seven years, and a betrayal. Things have changed.
“Padme,” he greets quietly. “If you want me to leave, I will. But I owe it to you to have…closure.”
She nodded and steps aside.
Pours the tea.
They both take a sip.
“I am not a Jedi,” she said, and seven years have dulled the words. It no longer tastes like unripe muja fruit, or like sand. It just is . “I do not know how deeply you wounded them, or how they can forgive it.” She took another sip of tea.
He waits. Waiting is something he learned while exiled, she mused.
“I am not a Jedi. I am a Senator. I have given everything to the Republic, a Republic you betrayed in my name .” The anger is still there. It will always be there.
I am not a Jedi. My anger is my own.
“I find I do not want to forgive this.” A slip of a datapad over the tea. Divorce papers. “I maintain primary custody, but you have at-request visitation any time you want. I won’t keep the twins from you. I think they’ll join the Jedi soon, anyway.” She took a breath. “I will always love you. But my love is overshadowed by…by all of this.”
Anakin nodded and signed. “I love you,” he said quietly. “For whatever it is worth, I’m sorry. I…I wish you all the happiness in the galaxy.”
She takes his hand. It’s rougher, now, with new callouses and scars. She doesn’t know it, anymore.
There’s something reassuring in that. Seven years have made them anew. There is no shame, she has learned, in letting go.
Perhaps, in this, I can be like a Jedi.
“I wish you peace.”