For @jundland

[resoluteandunyielding]

𝓓𝓸𝓷'𝓽 𝓵𝓮𝓽 𝓲𝓽 𝓴𝓲𝓵𝓵 𝔂𝓸𝓾
𝓔𝓿𝓮𝓷 𝔀𝓱𝓮𝓷 𝓲𝓽 𝓱𝓾𝓻𝓽𝓼 𝓵𝓲𝓴𝓮 𝓱𝓮𝓵𝓵
𝓞𝓱, 𝔀𝓱𝓪𝓽𝓮𝓿𝓮𝓻 𝓽𝓮𝓪𝓻𝓼 𝔂𝓸𝓾 𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓻𝓽
𝓓𝓸𝓷'𝓽 𝓵𝓮𝓽 𝓲𝓽 𝓫𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓴 𝔂𝓸𝓾𝓻 𝓱𝓮𝓪𝓻𝓽



𝓓𝓸𝓷'𝓽 𝓵𝓮𝓽 𝓲𝓽 𝓫𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓴 𝔂𝓸𝓾𝓻 𝓱𝓮𝓪𝓻𝓽
𝓞𝓱, 𝔀𝓱𝓪𝓽𝓮𝓿𝓮𝓻 𝓽𝓮𝓪𝓻𝓼 𝔂𝓸𝓾 𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓻𝓽
𝓨𝓸𝓾 𝓬𝓪𝓷'𝓽 𝓭𝓸 𝓲𝓽 𝓫𝔂 𝔂𝓸𝓾𝓻𝓼𝓮𝓵𝓯
𝓣𝓲𝓶𝓮 𝓽𝓪𝓴𝓮𝓼 𝓽𝓲𝓶𝓮 𝓽𝓸 𝓱𝓮𝓪𝓵 𝓲𝓽

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( life gets hard and it gets messed up )

[resoluteandunyielding]

The silence around her is so thick that the few people who know she's here rarely move to penetrate it now. It is not that they won't try, but that they have, for so long, to no avail. She sleeps. Eats. Nurses. Heals. But the last she'd spoken were the words that rambled and scrambled from her lips as she lay writhing under the birthing pains, naming her children before she passed out and almost died (again). Until tonight.

Staring now at the twins sleeping in the bassinets before her, Padmé's eyes cloud again, blurring their shapes. Their distress a discordant catch even before they begin to fret again (mirrors on mirrors) until she has to blink it away. Push it down. The Amidala Mask is broken all around, but somewhere within those shards is the youngest child who ever sat stone-faced on the Naboo throne through so much worse.

She's cried far too much already —

she knows

— and it's time she stopped being
the person she's let herself be.

Padmé feels it (him; Obi-Wan) long before she should, but it's been this way since not long before she knew she was pregnant. She'd asked Dormé for him, her voice a thin rasp, and she can't tell if she's gratefully unsurprised it's the space of minutes since only or if she should apologize already. For the late hour. For the fact, there's so much worse happening everywhere, to everyone, else outside this room, too, and so much of it is his, too.

But she can't do this alone. Not yet.

[jundland]

The late hour doesn't matter.

Obi-Wan has been on vigil ever since she first slid into that exhausted unconsciousness on that first day. His gaze remained riveted to the readouts on her vitals (and wishing, for once, that he had been trained as a consular and could use the Force for healing); constantly checking on the medical droid who had ushered her through the childbirth; standing guard by her side and clutching the unconscious woman's hand and hoping that physical contact could offer her some strength. Some silent plea.

(Stay with us.)

After she'd come through the crisis, the handmaidens have been swarming in the bedroom, and Obi-Wan had withdrawn the appropriate distance. It's a delicate matter: the familiar act of the handmaidens gently stripping her down, undertaking sponge-baths for the exhausted and half-dead woman, the biological mess of new motherhood. So he lets them attend to her and he waits just outside the door for hours and days, slumped in a chair, listening to the heartbeat of three beings in the Force like a low, muffled drumbeat. Hers has been weak; far too weak. But as the days go on, that tremulous flutter steadies just a little. Enough that he starts to think her health might be out of the woods, at least.

But when Dormé comes for him, he still rockets out of his seat, and he heads for the bedroom at a quick, brisk stride.

The man has usually been a steady, dependable rock, and he tries — he has been trying — because the woman in this room and those two babies are the only thing. The only motivation worth living for, now that he's lost everything and failed everyone. They're the last shreds and reminders of his best friend and apprentice as he should have been. (The way Obi-Wan would like to remember him.)

He wakes from nightmares of molten lava and a raw scream.

He wakes from nightmares of the dull flat sound of a medical flatline and Padmé slipping away from him on that table.

He wakes from nightmares of younglings cut down in the baleful red glow of a lightsaber.

So when he walks into the room, the man Padmé sees looks more drawn and haggard than she remembers — he's tired, wrung-out, his whole demeanour touched by a grief that mirrors her own, his emotions a raw bleeding wound in the Force — but he forces a shaky and tentative smile, and there is genuine relief in it.

"Padmé," he says, hovering on the threshold before he draws closer. Those polite and distant titles (queen, Amidala, senator, my lady) all seem inadequate and too impersonal after what they've been through. "How are you feeling?"

[resoluteandunyielding]

She nearly died, four times they tell her. (She still feels like she is, like this is a living death.) The reason she did a mystery left inconclusive. Whether her will to live was just that strong; her love for her children refusing to let them go so quickly; The Force at work, refusing to give up a spark of itself too Bright, too Blinding, too True, as her midi-chlorian count matched her children's combined, so briefly and thoroughly at the end that it was the same as their father's.

(Anakin, Anakin, Anakin;
the name a trapped, struggling bird
a bleeding, soreness in every swallow


Liar!
You brought him here to kill me!

Together you and could rule the galaxy

Anakin is the father, isn't he?

I am so sorry)

Padmé hears Obi-Wan's voice down a long tunnel and feels that ever heavy weariness (pain) radiating from behind her. Ragged and jagged; tattered and torn; burning, burning. Another bird pretending not to have broken wings, but this one so much more under the surface than she has managed this time. Control without comparison wasn't what was once said.

(

You told me once
that if you gave your heart to someone

it would be a disaster

I should have known you weren't exaggerating

)

She wants to reach for that voice — those hands (my hands are yours so long as you need them) — but Sabé's is not the voice that says her name. Now. Or maybe it was a few seconds ago. She swallows and pulls a breath in. It hurts less than it once did. It will never not again.

His question is lost in the words she knows she has to say.
A polite inquiry, even in concern. A question on repeat from everyone.

"I —"

But they are so hard to say. They are harder than the clean, effortless, willing choice (sacrifice) she made when she was twelve. Harder than the sacrifice made by almost all the women who had once served her and who are now practically gone, a trickle of whispers, all standing outside all her of secrets now, that was once a staunch defense and a secret of joy.

[jundland]

The corner of Obi-Wan's mouth flutters, an attempt to maintain that reassuring expression but it slips, falls from him like a mask. He moves closer; shoots a glance over at the two matching bassinets, peers in at them to reassure himself that Luke and Leia are fine, too. And he keeps his voice low and steady and quiet, to not disturb the sleeping children.

He's moved close enough that his blue eyes (they'd always made him look younger than his years, boyish and a little mischievous, but now he just looks tired) can pore over Padmé's face, trying to measure her condition. The exhausted shadows under her eyes, which would have been unthinkable when she was in office or royalty, all signs of weakness of vulnerability typically hidden under makeup. And when he looks further down...

Those dark bruises on her neck, still livid. No wonder she has trouble speaking.

He clears his own throat; feels a sympathetic ache, or the strain of his own bitten-back tears. "We can have Dormé bring in some more water, or perhaps some honeyed tea."

Honeyed tea won't fix anything — can't fix anything — but he, too, is spinning and spiraling out, in search of anything he can do for her.

[resoluteandunyielding]

Padmé has never been small.

Or she's always been small, but she's never felt small.

Padmé Naberrie has been driven and certain from so early that nothing and no one could stand in her way. Padmé Amidala never so young she wouldn't change all of her planet's history or refuse to let them change their rules for her. Padmé Skywalker never so obedient that she let the Jedi tell her when to stop once she'd torn away the chains from her heart.

She looked up to meet his eyes, shaking her head, "No" — then — "Please."
Her voice was quiet, but there was a sharp note in the middle of that second word.

Padme's eyes are red-rimmed, still shining. Still, the rest of her face is dry if a drawn with exhaustion and weights far too heavy for sleep to even cast a whisper beside them, and she needs — if she's going to go through with this — to consider not relying on that ease of availability and kindness. Maybe ever again. Only this one. It isn't the words that need to be said, but they are just as true (maybe more so; she can't look at that, not now). "I need your help."

[jundland]

"Yes, of course," his words are tripping over themselves, quick and unthinking and desperate at Padmé's entreaty. He's so unaccustomed to seeing and hearing her like this, laid so low. "Whatever I can do. Whatever I can provide."

Obi-Wan has stepped closer to close the space between them, and he finds himself reaching out, clasping his hands around one of hers if she'll let him. It's like a kneejerk spasm of movement: a reach for comfort and to offer it, his warm palms around hers, blunt fingers nicked with the heat of blaster bolts and lightsaber blades, gripping hers and saying you're not alone. Normally the physical gesture was one that he, rationally, would have suppressed— favouring a kind of genteel aloofness, limiting himself to perhaps a clap on the shoulder, a quick hug. But ever since Mustafar, he's found that his rationality and his usual self-control have absented the equation. Obi-Wan Kenobi's heart is a raw wound, his armour pried loose, his very presence a humming stricken nerve.

"What do you need?"

[resoluteandunyielding]

His words are fast and myriad stacked acquiescence. Still, it's the hands that suddenly surround one of her own that surprises her, stinging the prickleback into her eyes and the tightening clench into the muscles of her throat, stealing from her the ability to breathe or swallow. Rough and warm hands, even for the cool of these suites.

Padmé stares at those hands a beat longer than maybe she should because staring might be the only thing helping her hold back the vicious urge to start crying again. She can't do that again yet. She can't run from this. Maybe the quietly polite and professional distance of Dormé moving around her, seeing to the jobs that needed doing that Padmé couldn't, but never stepping over the line between them, let her hide from it longer than she should have. Her fingers shifted in his, almost experimentally.

"I think," she says at their hands but then stops.

Padmé's face tilts back up, gaze raising from their joined hands. Everything within her gossamer threads — of love and faith, in her life, her love, her job, her future, the galaxies', her marriage's, and children's — torn to shreds, and still, she cannot do it with her head bowed, with anything less than looking into the eyes across from hers. "I think it's time for Padmé Amidala to die."

[jundland]

There's the briefest flicker of incomprehension at first, a kneejerk panic (no, you can't—), an assumption of something else entirely (an assumption made because, perhaps, in his darkest moment and before he remembered his duties, Obi-Wan had considered simply burying the lightsabers and giving up too). His fingers spasm, clutch harder as if he can hang onto her and keep her anchored here.

And then the understanding ripples across his face, like the wind scudding over the waves of Naboo Lake.

"Padmé Amidala is currently missing, presumed dead," Obi-Wan says slowly. Laying out the situation within the galaxy, insofar as he knows it. "The same for myself. We both vanished after Mustafar. All of us having been laying low since..."

Since Order 66.
Since Anakin.
Since the end.

His voice trails off.

"It would be simple enough, I think. To plant the right hints. Seed a particular story." His voice feels dry; his throat, cracked, as he tries to consider and broach this option she's presented.

[resoluteandunyielding]

There's no hesitation this time, when her grip matches his, as though somehow she could explain through that touch, that first wave of desperate panic she somehow feels course through her more than watches overwhelm and then half-shutter from his eyes. That Padmé Amidala has always been so much more than her. It was always supposed to be. Had never stopped being.

That killing Her isn't the same as —

(Compartmentalizing and cauterizing, making the choices no one else can.
Controlling the narrative of Amidala has always been herself and bigger than herself.
Everything she's been for her people, for her world. That wasn't —

You give and give and give.

Don't you ever want to take, just a little? )

Padmé doesn't know if she has it in her to forgive him — not any more than she can ignore; she feels herself wanting to reach out to that gaping hole of his pain, a bottomless pit to match her own. It's too deep to touch, and if she does, if she thinks about Anakin for longer than a heartbeat, she won't be able to do this. And she has to do this. For them.

She looked toward the bassinets, the words quiet and hollow, "They aren't safe here."
No one's told her that, but she knows. So deep, her bones are throbbing with it.
She can feel something huge, dark, ice-cold grinding toward them.

"They won't be safe on Naboo." Not even with her guards.
All those dreams and plans torn asunder, too.

[jundland]

Obi-Wan breathes out, and tries to assess the problem at hand. He’s a general accustomed to strategising through large-scale battles — and this, in a way, is a battle. Arranging of pieces, examining assets, trying to figure out where to place the figures on the board while the Empire is already expanding and expanding.

But he is so, so tired. He’d stopped considering future plans much after Mustafar, instead simply finding himself focused on the day-to-day, hour by hour, trying to ensure these children and this woman stayed alive. He’s had trouble imagining a future for himself or for them, ever since.

“We could place them with some trusted allies under assumed names,” he says, slowly. Perhaps they’ll have to kill their pasts after all. Bail had offered as much, when they’d parted ways; he was one of the only people in the galaxy who knew where Obi-Wan was now, but they had understandably decided to wait and let Padmé make the call. It had been a plan broached in the early days, when they thought she might not make it.

But now that she’d pulled through the crisis point, he doubted if she’d actually want to let the children out of her sight. So he adds another offer: “Or we could move our group further into the Outer Rim. Somewhere they can’t find us, or them, or you. Whatever you choose, I’ll stay with you.”

Obi-Wan hadn’t been able to keep Anakin alive, which meant he was determined to correct for his mistake with these three.