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Once Anakin has fallen asleep, his Jedi robe tucked under his head, Padmé goes to the kitchen. Nobody is there. She drifts into the dining area, and is relieved to see Cliegg. He’s scratching out something on a pad of flimsi, but he takes a moment to gesture to the seat next to him.
“What are the next steps?” She asks, still not knowing how to process what Anakin had told her. He was devastatingly guilty, despite his own words. She knew his sobs were not only for his mother. His retreat into the garage not simply out of grief. By her internal code, the only way he would feel better is to face the law and do proper penance (even as she wrestled with the idea that there was no law but that of the Hutts and what would they even care).
“What?” Cliegg stops momentarily, looking up at her face to try to read her expression.
“I mean, do we need to prepare for a trial?” She is trying to be rational, something she was increasingly failing to do when it came to Anakin.
“A trial for what?
“Anakin, he- he killed that whole tribe. All of them.” Padmé splays her hands on the table, no longer able to look the man in the eyes. “Even the children.”
Cliegg just huffs, “Of course he did. Followed the laws of the desert, even a decade later.”
And he sounded proud.
“That cannot be the law!” She turns her head up in her shock, suddenly finding Beru and Owen had settled at the table. They had carried a pile of machinery and vegetables to the table, now interchangeably doing maintenance and chopping.
“It is the law here, my lady,” Beru responds, somehow making the honorific sound dry.
“Revenge? Extreme violence? I- I care deeply for Anakin, but I know-”
Cliegg slams a fist down on the table, cutting her off.
“What do you know? This is Tatooine. If I had been able to, I would have been right behind him with my rifle.”
“If there were more of us, we would have joined him too,” Owen adds quietly, fiddling with some root-tuber sort of vegetable.
Beru simply nods, her hands efficiently putting together electronic pieces and locking them into place.
“It’s not right-”
Once again, Padmé is cut off. This time by Beru, still so absorbed in her work.
“Right and wrong have no place here. It’s survival or slavery. Death is a mercy here,” she states, finally making eye contact with the senator.
“If Ma- Shmi had still been a slave, the Hutts would have done far worse than anything Anakin could even imagine. I know she protected him, when she could,” Owen chimed in, his expression turning somehow colder.
“But…” and there Padmé stops, not knowing what to say.
“Padmé,” Beru says her name, and this is the first time none of them had included a ‘Senator’ or ‘Lady’, “Many of the Tusken tribes are slavers. A long time ago, I might have had sympathy. The Hutts took them, take them, too. Everyone but the Jawas were new here, how could they know the difference? Why wouldn’t they do the same to the invaders?”
That is enough to throw off Padmé’s Naboo sensibilities. How can anyone think fighting slavery with slavery is okay?
Beru must see it in her face as she continues, “It’s been thousands of years. There have been alliances between the tribes and many farmer communities, and there have been drawn out, generational wars. When there is truly unprovoked violence, the old laws say the instigator group has given up any protections by their society. A tribe, a farm, is on their own. When one takes a slave, they know the dangers they invite.” Her voice is a dark warning. This is personal.
“It’s not black and white. We’ve abandoned friends over a Tusken they’ve forced to work their land, and ignored the burned farms they get for it,” Cliegg adds.
That makes partial sense. Padmé could never continue a friendship with a slaver, but she still wants peace for all.
“But we’ve also abandoned friends when their child runs to the Tuskens. When a farm child does that, they’re desperate. They need help. And they don’t trust any of us,” Cliegg continues, still staring at the piece of flimsi, no longer even pretending to take notes.
“Some Tuskens will adopt running settler children. Some enslave them. Others…” Now the man turns away, rubbing at his knees. “They do what they did to Shmi.” His voice breaks and he buries his face in a hand, finally dropping his pen.
There is silence for a moment, Cliegg’s harsh breathing the only sound. Or rather, the only sound beyond the hum of somewhat-functioning vaporators.
“So you do view the Tusken peoples as sentient?” Padmé can’t help but ask, Anakin’s claims of animals fresh in her mind.
“Yeah. That’s what makes it so bad,” Owen responds. He shrugs. “Anyone who behaves like that is no better than an animal. They deserve to be treated as such.”
And Padmé begins to understand, she thinks. She felt for Anakin’s grief, his rage, his reaction. He is just a human, who happens to have immense power. But the why that had eluded her is now plain. This is the justice he knew. This is the Tatooine he knew. In a better galaxy, even as her heart fights her on this, she knows what Anakin had done would have to be punished severely. But perhaps in that better galaxy, Shmi would not have been taken. Or Shmi would never have been enslaved, never sold to Tatooine.
But what these people are telling her, what she was confronted by at fourteen and somehow still struggles with, is that there are places in the galaxy where justice is not right or wrong. Where an eye for an eye is as much as people can even aspire to. And she thinks they probably have come to this point to avoid the Hutts and to try, in a twisted, horrible way, to end the generational conflict.
Anakin’s wildly varying emotional reaction is novel here. His Jedi training, now just slightly longer than the time he had been a slave on Tatooine, has influenced his morals. But the desert is in his soul.
Padmé thinks a disservice has been done to Anakin, on top of every injustice already there, since nobody has helped him reconcile the Jedi with the boy from Tatooine. She loses the bits of righteousness against him, cannot cling to her innate disgust she had hidden from him.
Just as so many Senators from the Core worlds can’t fathom the pain of the Outer Rim peoples and so do nothing for them, those people from worlds like Tatooine literally cannot hold to Core principles.
The galaxy is darker than she ever considered. The Republic has failed so many more sentient beings than she could ever have expected. But she, and senators like her, can keep it together and fix it. And the Republic, in however long it takes her, will come here. Cliegg, Beru, and Owen will someday get to vote on their own Senator. There will be peace talks between the former slaves, the farmers, and the Tuskens. Maybe Anakin will come back as a Jedi Knight to help them. He should, in fact. He should fight for the future he couldn’t see. And Padmé will help him do so.