{ Come wrestle me free, free from the war

[resoluteandunyielding]

~*~

It had taken all of Padmé’s strength to stand there and maintain anything that resembled calm in the face of Captain Typho. It was not the first, or even dozenth time, she’d informed him she was leaving, on a personal errand, without him, any of his or her staff. Even as everything inside of her trembled she ground it down, into bones that once made of steel felt like shattered glass.

But she refused to let it have any part of her before him.
Refused to give him a single instances fodder to stop her.
She had to do this alone. No one else could come with her.

Padmé forced herself into stillness, even as her hands shook until they were pressed together a time or two. She focused on his face. On his voice. On her own. A misture of the impassive mask of Amidala, and placating, appealing of the Senator. The firm direction of her voice, that would say she was fine. In a rush, but fine. This was her duty, and these were her orders, and he was still bound by them if she wasn’t in peril.

(She wasn’t in peril. She could never be in peril from Anakin.

He would never—)

She didn’t wait. She couldn’t let herself think. Couldn’t let the words in. The other ones. The ones hammering to repeat themselves. Obi-Wan’s words. She pressed through her orders, calm and measured, as the ground under her feet unmoving. Even as it swung, tipping-tipping, and she denied it. A thing she knew better than all else. That she could feel splintering at the edges with each new breath, as she turned on her heel and left him there.

Wasting no time at all, even as the boulder in her chest only grew, only hardened, threatening to overfill her throat, threatening the edges of her eyes, as she engaged the repulsorlift’s even before the landing ramp was fully up, willing all of time to shorten and space to shrink. Leaning back as it all caught under her breast bone. C-390’s voice registering more as sound than words as a small intake of air was all she managed before her lashes were wet again. Even as she tried to hold it, her lips started to shake and the half-blinding buildings caught in setting sunlight blurred before the skiff was even fully off the ground. That same collapse that had Obi-Wan helping her to stand, to sit, like a fugue surging up around it all.

The whole flight is a blur. Alone it comes tumbling down, crashing out. Her tears a steady a constant that that start shortly after any time they stop. Her thoughts a fierce whirlwind, tearing her every direction at once. Obi-Wan. (Anakin.) The dissolution of the Senate. (Anakin is the father, isn’t he?) The war, for all intents and purposes, won, but, lost on two sides more than ever. (Anakin.) All the deaths. Thousands and thousands each for years and years. (I won’t help you kill him.)

Mustafar, when it appears, filling all that once was stars, is a raging destruction of burning light and darkest shadow, brilliant orange-yellow and eating blackness. It looks like it is trying to consume itself in both, in a war between the two. Like it was corrosive and unstoppable. Like it is falling apart. Like it’d already fallen. It looks the way she feels. The way she tries to push back and back like she’s holding back the rush of a waterfall behind a dam that is already pocked with holes and cracked in too many places, threatening to dissolve on the cusp of each new breath, each new film of tears gathering over her eyes.

For the thousands of hard choices and thousand of horrors and thousands of deaths either at her hands, or feet, or reign, or votes, she’s never cried this much. Never stood so terrifyingly, desperately, over the shattering edges of a precipice like this. Fear and grief the likes she had never known shooting itself through faith unshakeable, shaken suddenly, to its core, as the skiff landed, and she stayed seated, in parallel from the installation standing in the far ground.

Head in her hand, she stared out at the only place she knew he had to be.