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This is how the story ends: Padmé stands up from the table and smooths her dress, smiling at Snoke’s slumped body and the stain of poisoned wine creeping across the white tablecloth in a wave of dark violet. There are no Knights of Ren twisted to his will, even though Padmé knows better than most that some Force-users will bury themselves in darkness and chaos.
Ben Organa-Solo is three.
But if there’s one thing about stories that always seems to hold true, it’s that the beginning and middle matter, even if you already know how it ends.
1.
Padmé is slightly Force-sensitive, but her tiny sensitivity is no match for what coils around her and squeezes, choking her, pressure everywhere. Her lungs refuse to draw a breath; her heart stops thudding against her ribcage, and even after she’s released, the weight is too heavy for her body to bear.
She falls, and a blur of time passes in shuddering pain she almost doesn’t recognize.
Then there’s the distinct splash of her water breaking, and medi-droids take her away, somewhere… someone, Bail?... thinks is safe. Cold tears fall into her ears, and she feels that but not her baby, and her rational mind tells her that it’s because she’s had an injection and can’t feel anything but her breath, stuck fast in her chest with each push some instinct channels through her. Between those moments her mind is stuck on a loop of Anakin in front of her, the center of the black snake killing her, sparks of light at the center of him.
He did everything for her, all of this, except in one moment, but that’s a lie and Padmé is a politician. She doesn’t lie to herself. The darkness smothering her killed children, will kill others, will destroy entire worlds for its own sake.
Her heart stops beating, evil or not evil or not evil or not replaying itself in her mind, because she can’t live in a world where she asks that about Anakin. She can’t.
The Force whispers through her, would accept her, but then a binary star washes the darkness away.
Two sets of infant-blue eyes fix on her, and suddenly drifting away becomes impossible. Her breath comes fast and heavy, focusing on that smell, her own blood and burnt hair and medi-gel-sterility, while the droids let her sit up. She holds out her hands and then they’re cradled in her arms, and she remembers his confession, that he didn’t see the baby at all. If it were any other day she’d laugh, but she can only manage the barest of smiles while they nurse frantically before their eyes slide shut.
She murmurs, “Luke,” and, “Leia,” into their soft heads before shifting to face the rest of the world. Her mouth flattens into a tight line, because there’s no way in the kriffing nine hells that she’s letting them go.
“Well then, gentlemen,” she says, using the voice that made Senators cry, “I believe there are several bodies on hand that can be altered for my funeral.”
2.
The shuttle is not, technically, Padmé’s. It belongs to her, obviously, but even Emperor Palpatine couldn’t trace the trails leading back to several accounts that have no outward connection to any Amidala still breathing.
Great-great Gran (maternal twice over) was a bit paranoid about the inter-galactic economy. Only someone with the code, solutions to the problems Atalanta put in place and the right genetic markers can access a small amount from each account that filters credits using a system that Padmé doesn’t actually understand. It’s enough for safe passage off-planet, impressively convincing identity documents, half a planet, and a shuttle that is completely unremarkable. Padmé shuffles most of the credits into reliable Rebel hands before disappearing.
It fits four people fairly well, which means that even though it’s tiny, there seems to be too much space between her and Obi-Wan, even with the twins needing constant attention.
She doesn’t want him here. She didn’t want any Jedi near her family, not after what they’d done, unwittingly or not. What’s worse is that before, she’d never seen Obi-Wan without Anakin, and it’s like his ghost is in the room with them even though he’s still alive. They dance around each other, have a routine, but it’s like the children’s game on Naboo, everyone holding themselves on an inflated ball in the water and inevitably falling in, even the winner. Sooner or later, the balance tips.
“Why didn’t you end it?” she finally asks, a month into space without any stops except for fuel. Her mouth barely works around the words. She’s not even looking at him, watching the twins sleep in their cribs. She and Obi-Wan have bunks across from them. Sometimes she’ll wake up and he’s holding one of them or both, murmuring to them solemnly, and anger spears through her, anger and grief she can’t bury. She always thinks it’s Anakin in his place at first, and in the moment of realization she doesn’t know who she hates more.
Obi-Wan has his lightsaber. He has them both, his and Anakin’s, and Padmé knows he could have done it.
He’s seated in front of the view screen, and when he turns around with a Jedi-blank face Padmé stares him down. He barely looks like himself, hair shaved close to his scalp, gaunt in a way that she recognizes from the mirror. Her own hair just brushes her earlobes now, jagged and black as pitch.
“He was my brother.” The rasp betrays the mask. “I was not – to have killed him in that rage, with those emotions, betrayal and anger and hate – so much hate – it would have drowned me in the Dark Side of the Force. I have always had that weakness, Padmé. I barely became Qui-Gon’s apprentice, and that after a great deal of pain and trials. After what happened to… perhaps it would have been a mercy. But there, with the Force reeling with loss, my hand would have held no mercy.”
She stares at him, marking the new lines on his face that make him seem twenty instead of ten years older than her. She tries to imagine how he felt in those moments, watching her husband, helpless, burned and broken like a mangled toy (she doesn’t know what he must have looked like in the end, but her nightmares are enough that she will never ask). She imagines herself, if her mother turned on her and made her choose that. She tries to imagine the Force the way they feel it and how she remembers it, how it must have been like a riptide dragging at every Force-sensitive being left. It had been like crashing waves for her, but it had also been a buoy pulling her away from an awful abyss.
She saw the blackness, and the burning sparks of light fighting it. Obi-Wan only saw Dark.
“And now he’s as good as dead to you, isn’t he?” So it’s not your problem anymore. “Once you fall, you can’t come back, right? But I felt it too, Obi-Wan. It might just be a candle, but there’s good in him. Do you really think there wasn’t any Light in Darth Maul when he murdered your Master? Do you think there wasn’t Dark in you? You didn’t fall then.” She’s found holes in stronger arguments, and for all that Obi-Wan believes what he’s saying, it’s still a lie.
He turns away from her.
3.
It’s the chanting that wakes her up, soft, like her father chanting from the Holy Texts.
“Dark and Light are balanced in the Force. I will do what I must to keep the balance. The balance is what keeps me together. There is no good without evil, but evil must not be allowed to flourish. There is passion, yet peace, serenity, yet anger, chaos, yet order. I am the wielder of the flame, the protector of balance. I am the holder of the torch, lighting the way. I am the keeper of the flame, soldier of balance. I am a guardian of the balance.” A pause. “Dark and Light are balanced in the Force. I will—”
She sits up, and Obi-Wan stops chanting even though he was clearly deep in his meditation beforehand. He smiles, and it’s a shock to see him bare-faced, even after a year of it. (It had been left to grow for months, carefully maintained, one of Luke’s favorite playthings. Leia had a habit of ripping it out, though.) She raises her eyebrows – he’s let Luke and Leia out to play already, but she can hear them giggling.
“Qui-Gon taught me that, when I was… struggling. It was the code of the Gray Jedi. It... brings me peace, sometimes, both the chant and the memory. They used to accuse him of being a Gray Jedi, but it never concerned him. He would say that he was no more or less flawed than they.” His cadence shifts when he finishes speaking, and Padmé has an idea of what he’s hiding.
“When you got offended on his behalf.” She grins. She can imagine it, remembering the boy on Tatooine. He inclines his head, accepting her words with his own grin, and Padmé rises, stretching, joints popping.
Leia and Luke are playing with their small hoard of toys, unaware of anything outside their bubble, which consists solely of each other, and Padmé looks up at the trees that are so tall that even at noon the sun would still have a hard time making it through. As isolated as they are, Padmé has to suppress a shiver. But even with supplements, the twins (and she and Obi-Wan) need sunlight for their health.
Her skin is sticky with humidity already, and it’s a comfortable breath that she draws in (Coruscant had been so dry). She contemplates what will satisfy the twins and still get nutrients in them, since Luke is now refusing to eat anything even remotely crunchy, and Leia will only eat orange foods. Padmé has tried every trick she remembers her mother using on her, but they don’t work when two stubborn faces are set against her.
They’re too young to be plotting. Probably.
While she stirs what will be stew she thinks – and tries not to – about Anakin, and the Gray Code. She doesn’t do anything as embarrassing as cry about it, not when Luke will offer his stuffed cruiser Lolly to help her, and Leia will demand a story, probably one about Moshe, or Joseph. They’re so perceptive, her babies, and that quells any tears she could have cried.
(It’s as light as a rippling wave, that inquisitive press against her. She barely notices, and she tastes the water in the air and laughs at how she’s imagining Naboo again.)
4.
When Obi-Wan first brought up the topic, she shut him down with a glare so strong that it rippled through the Force. The same with the second and third times, accompanied by words that the twins weren’t witness to.
This time, Leia’s eyes are dark and wide and she’s broadcasting every emotion in her little body to them even though she’s trying her best to stay in meditation. She only knows the meditation because she dragged Luke with her when Padmé wasn’t there to tell Obi-Wan that she’d meant it when she told him that her children were never going to be Jedi.
Luke apparently learned how to move rocks fast enough to kill on his own, and Padmé watched, just hours ago, her daughter’s eyes just as wide but her breathing steady, making Stormtroopers see air instead of people. Obi-Wan is grim and implacable this time, and Padmé thinks about the children Anakin killed. They were younger than the twins. They were brainwashed, like Obi-Wan was, like Anakin never got a chance to be, thank God, even if it led to his turn to the Dark.
They’re younger than Anakin was, she reminds herself. And she’s here, she’ll be here as long as they need her to be, even if they get sick of her. A hundred awful things led Anakin along the path he’s walking, alone, now, but that doesn’t stop her heart from lodging itself in her throat with worry.
Leia drops off to sleep with exhaustion, Luke following her soon after, sharing a bunk even though they technically have one each. Leia’s holding Lolly, too, which makes Padmé’s eyes hot until they overflow into searing tears.
Obi-Wan sits next to her and holds her so she can bury her tears in his shirt. They’re on a course to Rebel territory, unlikely to touch the ground at all. They have to get new documents, new names, a new life history.
All because Padmé wanted her kids to have a house to call home instead of this claustrophobic space. All because she’d wanted a normal life.
“It isn’t your fault, Padmé. They are simply too strong in the Force to hide it without training.” Obi-Wan cups her face in his hands, staring at her like a general, not a refugee. “You are a good mother. You’ve protected your children, and given them love as well as guidance, even though they are even more stubborn than you and Anakin. Wanting to raise them in one home is not something you should feel guilty for.”
There are streaks of white in his hair, and his eyebrows have gone gray. Padmé’s hair is nearly all steel without coloring, and they both have too many lines on their faces for their age. She pulls away from him, holding her emotions in and nodding.
Because she’d wanted these years with another man. She’d imagined Anakin playing with his child, dragging them around by something in their clothes and making them squeal with laughter. She’d imagined him telling them stories about his brave mother, and exaggerating about his speeder race while she shook her head and made faces in the background. She’d imagined her synagogue on Naboo, a brit shalom for a boy with her chin, a simchat bat for a little girl with Anakin’s nose. (She’d started planning the trip before the Purge.)
Six years later all that dreaming leaves a bitter taste in her mouth, because try as she might, she still loves Anakin Skywalker, the boy with a reckless streak a parsec wide and love as deep as her oceans. Even if she can never forgive him, she thinks that that love will follow her to her death.
“I’m going to be there whenever you teach them. That’s not optional. And if you fall into bad habits, I’ll tell you before I kick you out. My children will never be Jedi.”
Obi-Wan nods, looking more serious than he ever has.
“I swear, Padmé, I will not do anything to jeopardize your trust.”
5.
Luke, at thirteen, doesn’t look like either Padmé or Anakin. Leia, despite her dark hair and eyes, is her father’s spitting image. Both of them have his smile, and they’re laughing now, though they get serious when the older members of the community come to congratulate them, nodding along and offering commentary when they can.
The regulars at the synagogue think that Luke’s mother died before he could start studying properly, so he had to wait a year (while every female, male, and otherwise gendered being in the synagogue pushed “May” and “Obadiah” together with less than subtle measures) for his bar mitzvah. They’d actually been ecstatic when Padmé suggested they hold “Lee’s” bat mitzvah on the same day as Luke's bar mitzvah, Leia reading at evening services, Luke in the morning, and the party after sunset. Everyone thinks that Padmé and Obi-Wan are widowed and are seeing if their children will get along, should they continue a courtship. Padmé has heard several comments on how they seem to be bonding already, how lucky they are.
It’s a little embarrassing, and Padmé adjusts her tefillah just thinking about it.
Someone hands Padmé a glass of very sweet wine, and she sips it while she watches Luke and Leia have cups pressed on them. She remembers this from her bat mitzvah on Naboo, and she starts taking holos that get progressively funnier as the night goes on.
“They do have enough control to not do anything while drunk, yes?” she’d asked Obi-Wan before the twins’ birthday. He’d boggled, and she’d had to explain that, as adults in the community now, they were going to have enough alcohol shoved at them that they wouldn’t remember most of the party, because everyone in the synagogue had had it shoved at them and would continue the tradition with vigor.
He’d assured her that at that point they wouldn’t have enough focus to do anything, even if they wanted to.
Padmé’s religious instruction had been an important part of her childhood, learning how to read what her rabbi talked about every week, learning about the women through galactic history who had protected their faith, learning about her past and her family’s past and her people’s past, a community that spanned the galaxy. Teaching Luke and Leia had been harder, both because they already had opinions about the Force (she’d shoved disks of debates about the Force and God at them, told them that a lot of people didn’t believe, and they’d been appeased) and because they never stayed in one place long enough for real instruction.
But when they’d settled on Alderaan, Bail assuring them that no one believed she was alive after so long, Leia had brought up the fact that both she and Luke were committed to doing everything they had to to become fully fledged members of the community. Padmé had cried when they couldn’t see her, even if they could sense her. She’d wanted it, of course, but it was their decision to make. And now they're here, excited and drunk with joy as much as with the wine. Obi-Wan comes up to stand next to her, smiling at her and then at the twins.
“They’re growing up,” Padmé says. Leia had given a speech about the Force and life springing from one source, and Luke had talked about the Maccabees, barely skirting the edge of outright rebellion. Both had brought Padmé to tears, even though it was a party and they’d opened their presents like they were still little.
Obi-Wan’s eyes are shining in the low light, under his mostly-white hair.
“They are, aren’t they?”
The next day everyone in their quarters has a hangover, and the twins don’t even bother to stop projecting it.
“This is the tradition you spoke of, isn’t it?” Obi-Wan asks. Padmé nods. “This seems to be the opposite of a mitzvah.”
“We apologize once a year,” she groans, and silently thanks God that Bail gave them the weekend.
6.
Like all bad ideas, it starts with five words:
“We want to try something.”
Padmé should have realized it was a bad idea immediately, but it comes from Leia, who is generally more practical than her brother. Her first mistake: forgetting that Leia is also Anakin’s daughter, and will display that at the oddest moments.
Her second: watching them actually do it.
Even knowing that lightsabers have two settings, knowing that they’re not in any danger, Padmé’s throat closes up whenever blue light comes close to either of them. And they’re moving so quickly that it’s only when they’re jumping away from a blow, or stopping it with impossible reflexes, that she can even see what they’re doing. The trickle of the Force that Padmé can feel swells against her consciousness, not light or dark. Just – just the Force. The eye of the storm.
It’s beautiful, in its awful power. And it’s the most terrifying thing Padmé has ever seen, because she knows, no doubt in her mind, that if Darth Vader were anywhere near this quadrant he would feel the sheer power that they’re letting themselves use. Obi-Wan, watching with her, squeezes her hand and shows her he feels it too.
And they’re never able to touch each other. As far in Luke’s mind as Leia must be, he’s just as close to the world around them. Every sense she warps only increases the others, and everything he throws at her only makes the other misses seem closer. It’s beautiful, and terrifying, and bright as the binary system pulling at her when they were born.
When they finish, they’re both covered in sweat and collapse into their chairs, sipping the water they’d gotten out like they’d done this before. Leia pokes Luke, whose head has ended up on the table, and he halfheartedly sends Obi-Wan’s lightsaber back to him.
“Did you supervise this?” Padmé asks Obi-Wan, who shakes his head. His eyes are wide. She nods, and pitches her voice to carry. “You’re both grounded for a week.”
They groan, but it’s hard to hear them since they’re drinking water, moving eerily in tandem. Padmé shudders.
7.
“Why didn’t you tell us Darth Vader was our father?” Leia yells, and all the blood drains from Padmé’s face. Luke, who had been grinning in the wake of the Death Star’s destruction, sits down abruptly, the whole room shaking.
And Padmé wants to say that it was to protect them, that they were safer not knowing, but that’s sith spit and she knows it.
So she tells the truth. Or at least part of it. She doesn’t talk about the Force, or the fact that she didn’t so much choose to live as was dragged away from death by their mere presence in the Force. She doesn’t say that, after so long, she’d stopped thinking of Anakin as their father at all, because Obi-Wan was the one who was there, even if he was her brother in all but blood, not her lover.
She doesn’t say that she was afraid that they would end up like him if they knew, an old fear that disappeared a long time ago but still keeps her up at night with guilt.
“I’m so sorry,” she tells Leia later, and the lightsaber that Luke took before they had to run is heavy in her hands. She holds it out, and Leia reaches out, then stops. “He always wanted you to have it.”
She doesn’t say he loved you like you were his own daughter because Leia already knows that, and she takes the lightsaber but turns away before Padmé can say anything else.
They don’t talk much, after that.
8.
They're celebrating on Endor, but this place is quiet except for the crackle of flames.
“He wanted you to know you were right,” Luke says to her as they watch the fire consume her husband, his father’s, body. He’s aged more in a year than she could imagine, and his father’s lightsaber is gone, his hand with it (Padmé doesn’t say that that happened to Anakin too). “That there was still good in him.”
The silence between them is comfortable. He doesn’t expect a reply, and Padmé doesn’t particularly feel like giving one that will only hurt him.
She finds herself holding out a hand to feel the warmth from the flames, and maybe to say goodbye to the Anakin who saved her son, who married her and loved her and didn’t understand what Palpatine was doing to him, even if he already had darkness inside him.
She has darkness in her. Luke and Leia have darkness in them. They live with it. It saved Luke, knowing what balance really meant, and Padmé wishes Obi-Wan could have seen it.
It destroyed his father as much as Palpatine did. As much as he had light in him, his actions attest to the dark.
“I forgive you,” she whispers, and feels the barest touch of a hand against her own.
9.
“Snoke is invading my son’s dreams,” Leia tells her as soon as she's in the apartment, dawn light barely illuminating her features. There are bags under her eyes, and she’s a sobbing mess, and she accepts Padmé’s embrace and leans into it, practically falling into her. “I’ve been keeping him at bay, but he’s dedicated to the Dark Side, and he can actually manage the mind trick. I work on a different scale than that, Mom. I don’t know what to do.”
Padmé knows more than anyone in any galaxy what it takes for Leia to admit that. Leia, who gave up a seat in the new Senate because the stragglers from the Empire are militarizing under someone and she won’t let her son grow up in a world she did, who refuses anything that even looks like favoritism from the Resistance, who loves her son so much that she’s probably been using her connection to the Force to stay awake at all.
Snoke has been courting certain members of the New Republic Senate. Padmé has a plan in a matter of moments.
She’s survived all manner of deaths. And Snoke doesn’t have the benefit of servants who taste his food first.