Chapter Text
Dead Ends
The first thing Padme was aware of was the swirling eddies of white and blue. Was she dead? It would make sense to her in a way if the afterlife looked like hyperspace. The Jedi believed that you became one with the force when you died, and insofar as Padme had ever tried to imagine the force, the realm of hyperspace had always come to mind. Hyperspace was vast, mysterious, and incomprehensibly powerful. It was everywhere and yet nowhere all at once. That was similar to the way Obi-Wan had once described the force to her, so in her mind, Padme had always linked the two together.
Only no… she didn't really think she was dead. Because even as she thought it, more things came into focus around her. A lever. A control panel. Blinking lights. No, she wasn’t dead. It was simpler than that; she was on a ship.
How was she alive? Anakin had been about to kill her. She remembered that much. How could she have possibly survived? She craned her neck around, looking for answers, and there he was.
Anakin was sitting on the floor, working on… something. An array of wires, servos, and other bits and pieces lay scattered on the floor around him. He looked to be very focused on the project at hand and didn’t seem to have even noticed that she was awake.
Why had he let her live? There couldn’t be any good reason for it. Padme wasn’t deluded enough to believe that he’d refrained from killing her out of the goodness of his heart. Dozens, if not hundreds, had died at the hands of Darth Vader. He never spared anyone, not even children. So why was she alive?
She was a captive. That much was clear. She had no idea what he might want from her, but it couldn’t be anything good. Padme had no doubt that being a Sith’s captive was a fate worse than death. She had no intent of finding out for sure, though.
It occurred to her that this might be her best opportunity to make her escape. Anakin was distracted and hadn’t noticed that she was awake yet. If she could just get her hands on a weapon… And then she spotted it — her own blaster just tossed haphazardly onto the seat beside her. Padme could hardly believe her luck. She glanced at Anakin to make sure he was still distracted, then silently moved to unfasten her safety restraint and…
“Don’t bother.”
Padme turned instantly at the sound of his voice. He had said the words without even looking up from his work.
“You know I’m awake?” she asked.
“Obviously.”
Well, it had been a pretty stupid question, in all fairness. Padme waited patiently for something more in the way of an explanation, but nothing came. He just sat there fiddling with whatever it was he was working on, and Padme felt her fear quickly give way to anger.
“Why? Why shouldn’t I try it? Are you going to kill me if I do?” She knew it was a stupid thing to say. If she wanted to live — and she did — she shouldn’t be saying things to intentionally get a rise out of him, but she couldn’t help herself. And besides, he’d let her live once already, so it didn’t seem likely that he would kill her now.
She got no response, and that only angered her further. If he was going to kidnap her, at least he could bother to tell her why.
The blaster was still sitting right there. Padme decided to try it anyway, caution be damned. At least then he’d have to do her the courtesy of looking at her. Padme picked it up and pointed it directly at him. He didn’t even look up. Padme squeezed the trigger.
Only she didn’t actually because her finger wouldn’t move. She tried again, but it just wouldn’t budge. She wiggled all the fingers on her right hand a little, and they all seemed to be working fine, but when she attempted to fire the blaster, she once again found that she couldn’t.
“Stop that!” she complained.
“Stop what?” He sounded vaguely amused.
With a frustrated sigh, Padme put the blaster away in the concealed pocket in her skirt. He had to sleep at some point, right? If he wanted to play games with her, then Padme would make sure to win.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked, deciding that a more direct approach might get her better results.
“It doesn’t have a name.”
“Well, what’s there then?” Padme said with a huff.
“Nothing.”
“There must be something there,” Padme insisted. “If you were just planning on dumping me into the vacuum of space, you’d have already done it.”
“Okay, sure. You’re right,” he said. “There’s a concentrated mass of iron, oxygen, silicon, and other elements.”
Padme rolled her eyes. Smart ass. “So a planet. Any life forms?”
“None that are going to help you,” was all she got in response.
Padme sighed, then sat back down and just watched him work for a while. She realized that the thing he was working on was a cybernetic arm. It looked mostly complete, and she couldn’t have been unconscious for that long, so he must have already had it ready to go for an occasion such as this.
She noticed, too, that he seemed to be having a little difficulty with the task. At first, she thought it was just that he was having to do everything with one arm, but the more she watched, the more she realized that it was something else, too. His hand shook slightly, and he kept dropping things.
That’s when the rest of it came back to her: How he’d been limping. The moment when he asked her about the pendant. Palpatine… Palpatine! It was him. Palpatine was the other Sith and the one who had hurt Anakin. Padme had revealed that she knew about Palpatine, which, in hindsight, was a really bad decision. Any possibility of walking away from that encounter disappeared the moment she showed her hand.
Padme had to get out of here. Not for her own sake. For the sake of the entire galaxy. She needed to warn someone about Palpatine, or everything was lost.
That meant she couldn’t afford to be careless. She was fairly certain that Anakin wasn’t planning on killing her in the immediate future, or he would have already done it. Nonetheless, attempting to shoot him had been an unreasonable risk to take. If he’d lost his temper and killed her, then any hope of bringing Palpatine to justice would have died with her.
Of course, her assassination attempt had proven nothing more than a mild annoyance to him. Maybe not even that. How was she ever supposed to escape?
There were many obvious things she could try. She could wait for him to go to sleep and try something then. She could make a run for it and look for an escape pod. She could try to send out an SOS message from the comms console while he wasn’t looking. But she knew deep down that none of these plans would work.
Anakin had made no attempt to disarm or restrain her, not out of complacency but because he didn’t need to. Padme was so thoroughly outclassed that it was laughable. He had known what she was planning without even looking at her. He had stopped it with no effort whatsoever. Could he actually read her mind? Obi-Wan had always told her that Jedi didn’t read minds, only sense general emotions, but what if Sith were different? She had no way of knowing.
Well, she supposed she could try just asking.
“Can you read my mind?” she asked, not really expecting a real answer.
“Sort of,” he said. “Sometimes. Sometimes not so much. It depends.”
That was decidedly not a no. “Can Jedi read minds?” she wondered.
“Probably. To varying degrees,” he said with a shrug.
“Obi-Wan is a kriffing liar,” she declared.
To her surprise, that actually got a small chuckle out of Anakin. It was the first indication she had seen that he was even still capable of making such a sound, and Padme decided to chance asking another question.
“You’re hurt. What did Palpatine do to you?”
She expected him to deny it, maybe, but all he said was, “I’ll be fine. You should be more worried about yourself.”
That was as clear a threat as anything he’d said to her so far. “Why? Are you going to kill me?” she asked bluntly.
There was a moment’s hesitation, brief but unmistakable, before he said just one word: “Yes.”
Padme felt less afraid than she ought to, perhaps because she had already resigned herself to dying previously. Or perhaps it was that she didn’t really believe him.
“So why haven’t you done it already then?” she demanded.
The silence stretched on as Padme waited for him to answer, but no answer was forthcoming.
“Is it information you want?” Padme prompted.
For the first time, he actually looked at her, and an amused half smile crossed his lips. “Senator Amidala, we’ve established that you know who my master is. What information could you possibly have that I don’t already know?”
“So you admit it’s Palpatine then?” Padme said. She was absolutely certain of it, regardless, but it was still a step in the right direction if she could get Anakin to talk about Palpatine openly.
“I never denied it,” he said with a shrug. “Palpatine is Darth Sidious, Sith master, my master. You already figured it out, and I know you’re not stupid enough to be convinced otherwise. It doesn’t matter if you know anyway.”
“And why is that?” Padme asked, though she really shouldn’t have. She already knew what he was going to say before he said it, so maybe she had some kind of Jedi mind-reading abilities, too.
“Because you’re never going to get the chance to tell anyone else.”
Padme said nothing after that. Anakin went back to working on his arm. She just sat there watching him work. She alternated between trying to think of an escape plan and then panicking over the whole mind-reading issue and trying not to think at all.
It took about half an hour for Anakin to finish reattaching his arm. Then he opened a wall panel and started working on something there. Padme didn’t know enough about starships to have any idea what he was doing, but it looked more like he was removing something than fixing something. Maybe replacing a broken part? But then, once he finished removing the thing, he didn’t bother installing a new one in its place. Padme could only trust that he knew what he was doing and that being without it while in hyperspace wouldn’t cause the ship to atomize or something.
She need not have worried because the ship emerged from hyperspace just over an hour later, and all her atoms were still intact. A blue and green terrestrial planet took shape in front of her. Anakin piloted the ship into the atmosphere, taking the turns a little more sharply and decelerating rather more quickly than Padme would have preferred, but it wasn’t exactly top of her list of things to complain about.
Padme was honestly taken aback by how lush and beautiful the planet was. How could a planet like this be uninhabited? Though now that she thought about it, Anakin hadn’t actually said that the planet was uninhabited — just that no one would help her. Maybe all the people who lived here were Sith fanatics or something?
Anakin landed the ship in a grassy valley, then just stood up and left without another word. Padme stared after him, baffled. Did he expect her just to sit here? She waited for him to return, but after several minutes, he was still gone, and it occurred to Padme that the ship console was right in front of her, and all she really needed to do was get a message out to someone — anyone — that Palpatine was the Sith Lord they were looking for.
But surely Anakin would have expected her to do that, right? Maybe he wouldn’t, though. Maybe he believed the threat of death would be enough to convince her not to do such a thing. Well, if that was the case, then he had miscalculated. Her own life was a price she was more than willing to pay to warn the galaxy about Palpatine. She started typing her message.
This is Senator Padme Amidala. I have been kidnapped and am being held captive by Darth Vader. I encountered Vader at the private residence of Chancellor Sheev Palpatine approximately 4 standard hours prior. I learned that Palpatine is the Sith Master whom the Jedi are seeking. Vader has confirmed that Palpatine is a Sith Lord known as Darth Sidious and is his master. I am attaching my current coordinates. Please forward this message to the Jedi immediately.
Padme wasn’t sure how much time she had, so that would have to do. She set the message to be sent to the emergency comms channel for the sector. Any ship within five parsecs or so ought to pick it up. Then she pressed send. A red light came on.
Message failed to send. No signal acquired.
Padme looked out the viewport, confused. The sky was completely clear, and it wasn’t like there was heavy foliage that could be interfering or anything like that. Maybe the antenna was misaligned? She could think of no other reason a ship this size shouldn’t be able to pick up a decent signal. Padme flipped through the various menus until she found the command to realign the antenna. The light turned green.
Antenna aligned successfully.
Okay, great. Now to try sending the message again.
Message failed to send. No signal acquired.
Padme let out a frustrated sigh. She had no idea what was wrong with the comms system, and she was running out of time to figure it out. Maybe she should go outside and see if she saw something that could be interfering? Anakin hadn’t actually told her to stay put, so in theory, she was allowed to go outside, right?
Padme heard a series of chirps and beeps and hurriedly tried to hide the message she’d been attempting to send. Had she been caught by a droid? She turned to look at the intruder and almost laughed.
“R2, how did you get here?”
R2 started speaking in his binary droid language at an almost frantic rate. Padme looked at the screen to see the translation.
He took out the long-range comms switchport and is currently disassembling and destroying the hyperdrive.
Oh, so that’s what that was. Padme felt stupid. Anakin was two steps ahead of her. She felt like a stupid, naive child.
“But how’s he planning on leaving then?” Padme wondered. “Is there a settlement somewhere close?”
I am not aware of any settlement, but this planet is not in my databanks. This ship model supports a hyperspace-capable auxiliary vessel.
“Where?” Padme asked. That shuttle could very well be her last ticket out of here.
He parked it on top of a mountain. Based on my calculations, the mountain is not scalable for a typical human.
Padme understood ‘typical human’ to be a category that included her but not Anakin. Make that three steps ahead of her.
“I see,” she said, disappointed but unsurprised. “Could you get up there with your rockets?”
R2 gave a sad chirp that Padme recognized as a no without even having to look.
No, it’s too high. I need better rockets.
Padme sighed. Even if she could somehow scale the mountain, Padme had no doubt she would find only more dead ends. Anakin had thought of everything. It seemed she was well and truly trapped here for the time being.
Well, at least it was a nice planet, and she had R2 for company. It could be worse. She had to find a way to escape, but Padme knew she had time. Because, despite his claims to the contrary, it really didn’t seem like Anakin had any intention of harming her. It very much looked like his only goal was to keep her here, cut off from the rest of the galaxy so that she couldn’t tell anyone about Palpatine.
But then why hadn’t he just killed her? It would have been a whole lot less effort, certainly. Why would he bother with kidnapping her, flying to an uninhabited planet, dismantling his own skip, and scaling mountains when the same result would have been achieved by simply turning off the stun setting on the blaster?
A thought — a ridiculous idea — had just taken root in her mind, and it refused to be eradicated. She was being hopelessly naive. It was wishful thinking, nothing more. Optimism beyond reason. But the thought refused to leave her.
It was the pendant. Anakin had spared her life because of that pendant.