Chapter Text
“Anger should be ice, not heat,” Nana Naberrie told Padmé when she was little, to keep her from inciting her parents’ shaak herd to stampede when she was upset. Nana Naberrie told her other things, too, but Padmé stopped being able to remember them after she became an apprentice legislator at eight, entering the political sphere of her homeworld.
The blocks on her mind were to protect her, she knew, though she could never clearly remember what they were to protect her from. Naboo’s prerequisites for public service were secret enough that no one person knew (was supposed to know) them all.
There was reason that all politicians on Naboo tended to come from certain families—not that Padmé could remember what that reason was, after she was elected queen and Nana let herself die.
She sometimes wondered why she thought of Nana’s death that way.
The morning that the Trade Federation invaded, Padmé had woken up uneasy—more than she’d felt most mornings of the blockade, but little enough that she almost refused Captain Panaka’s request that she switch places with Sabé.
However, he was the trusted head of her security for good reason, so she heeded him and told Sabé what to say to Viceroy Gunray.
The decoy protocol worked, thank Shiraya, though it also made her worry about her handmaiden’s safety.
As the droids escorted them to Camp Four, Padmé felt a bit disoriented and uneasy. She couldn’t shake the impression that she should have known that things were about to go so wrong, though couldn’t explain why she felt that way.
Padmé had been a politician for six years, almost half her life, and was the newly elected queen of her planet. She still sometimes dreamed of being five and conversing with the shaaks on the farm that her parents handed over to a cousin after she decided to enter politics.
But those were dreams, not reality, and such dreams did her little good now, with her planet blockaded and invaded and herself about to be subject to whatever indignities the Trade Federation had planned.
Then the Jedi appeared, and the discomfort lingered in her stomach even after they rescued her and breached the blockade and got her offworld.
It was stress, she decided, but she followed her unease to insist on following the Jedi Master into Mos Espa anyway.
Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn was dangerous, Padmé realized shortly after meeting him. Between the way he outright gambled her property without her consent—thereby stealing it—and lied to her face about the queen trusting his judgment…
She had been a politician for six years. She recognized his manipulation for what it was, but she also recognized that protesting his abuses would only cause more harm than good. If she contested that the property was hers—or even Sabé’s—the resultant hubbub would reach the Hutts, who would realize what was in their grasp, and that would only worsen the situation.
Master Qui-Gon seemed to mean well, but he focused so much on his own intentions and ignored others’ abilities to the point that Padmé didn’t want to think about what it said of the Jedi Council, if they thought such a man appropriate for negotiating a treaty.
Padmé supposed she should consider herself fortunate that Master Qui-Gon limited his gambling to property rather than persons.
She also didn’t doubt that, in the right situation, Master Qui-Gon wouldn’t have batted an eyelid over selling (and then stealing and ‘rescuing’) her.
In the small shop was a boy. Padmé wasn’t sure if she was startled more by the fact that slavery existed or by Anakin’s matter-of-fact declaration that he was going to marry her someday. (He will. He knows these things.)
He was too young to understand what he was saying. She replied that she couldn’t marry him because he was just a child.
He looked her in the eye and said, “I won’t always be.”
She at first thought the oddness was just the boy, having fun. (You know that’s not it.)
Then they met his mother, who said, “He can help you. He was meant to help you.” (Nana Naberrie used to say things like that.)
She couldn’t remember Nana ever sounding like Shmi.
If not for Padmé’s focus on the Jedi Master—if not for how she had to focus on Master Qui-Gon, so she could at least try to navigate the commitments he was making on her behalf—she might’ve noticed the flutter of expectation and rightness when the little boy called her an angel and said he was going to marry her.
If not for how relieved she felt once they finally reached Coruscant, she might’ve noticed the lurch of nausea and the wrongness when Palpatine advised her of her options. (Or at least she might not have assumed those feelings were holdovers from dealing with Master Qui-Gon.)
And if she hadn’t just come from a desert planet, she might’ve given more consideration to the chill she felt while speaking with Palpatine, too.
She did notice how he pressured her to call for the vote of no confidence, despite claiming he didn’t want her to do it. That told her he wanted the vote of no confidence for a reason he didn’t want her to see. She didn’t want to believe he’d do it for his own gain, but…
When the Trade Federation envoys backed her into the corner and she had no other option left, she called for the vote of no confidence, daring to hope it might work. She didn’t expect it to.
She doubted it would.
Nonetheless, she was still disappointed when her instincts proved right, and Palpatine proved comparable to Master Qui-Gon in his casual willingness to manipulate her for his own ends.
She didn’t want to distrust him, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to trust him, either.
(You shouldn’t.)
Unease had settled in Padmé’s bones at some point over the past few days, somewhere between fleeing Naboo and returning to it. The feeling remained even after she made her alliance with the Gungans, and it only strengthened as the pilots were reaching their ships and the plan was working.
At least it wasn’t worsening. (Not yet)—but why would it worsen?
She fired shot after shot, hitting her targets more often than any of her guards did. Perhaps the Jedi were helping, somehow. (They aren’t. That’s all you.)
Then the uneasiness turned to ice, despite the heat that battle brought to her body.
“Stay in that cockpit!” Master Qui-Gon snapped at Anakin, and…
Sith, she somehow knew (recognized), even before the door opened and the Jedi responded to the threat. But what is a Sith?
Her stomach flipped, but she made sure she appeared the calm, unbothered queen as she directed her people in the new direction. More would die, on this route—or at least more than would have if not for the Sith.
(He is going to die.)
When she spoke of the battle later, she always remembered that feeling as he—a vague but logical subject for the thought, for these were her people and she would know men among the fallen.
But that wasn’t what she’d known, not when she’d seen the Sith.
No, she’d looked Darth Maul in the eyes and known that Qui-Gon was about to die.
Several Jedi Council members came to Naboo for Master Qui-Gon’s funeral, making her reconsider her opinion of the man who had died in her defense. She had seen his flaws—and the man’s apprentice, Obi-Wan Kenobi, displayed the communication tactics to be expected of a longtime victim of a self-righteous manipulator—but…
Master Qui-Gon’s reaction when Anakin had declared that nobody could kill a Jedi—his expression, the sadness, his “I wish that were so.”
He’d lost someone and had never properly grieved them. Anger? Guilt? Something had interfered, had kept him from healing.
The realization made her feel guilt of her own, for not alerting him how poorly he was treating those around him. (He would’ve wanted to know.) In his blindness to his own behavior, he’d hurt Jedi Kenobi and Anakin both, and they were starting their relationship atop a fractured foundation.
(They’re strong enough to fix it.)
The Councilors seemed as well-intended as Master Qui-Gon had been, and any self-righteousness they had wasn’t in quite the same ways. (Jedi are self-righteous—it’s built into their default Code.)
And there was something familiar about the Chalactan woman among the Councilors, Jedi Master Depa Billaba.
“Does your sister perform Searches, Master Jedi?” she found herself asking the woman at some point in the celebrations.
Master Billaba stared at her in surprise. “My sister, Your Highness?”
(She doesn’t know Knight Labooda is her sister? No wonder her psyche is so fragile.)
“I’m sorry,” Padmé said, not about to press about information she could not possibly actually know. (Can’t I?) “I thought… I’m not sure what I was thinking.”
She rubbed her temple, feeling a headache behind her eyes, and decided she needed to start ignoring these odd thoughts. (They’re dangerous.)
Master Yoda studied her, told her that a Sith (Apprentice) had killed Master Qui-Gon (though he usually wouldn’t admit such a thing, not to a non-Jedi).
The snippets of knowledge were disconcerting, and she had the sense that it was somehow a side effect of all the Jedi Masters in proximity to her.
As Qui-Gon’s body burned on his pyre, she felt a chill that the warmth of the fire couldn’t touch.
(Sith!)
The Sith is dead, she reminded herself.
(No, he isn’t.)