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Year 6 before the battle of Yavin

The Dark Lord’s breathing will follow Zam’s in her dreams. The mechanical noise infiltrates itself into the brain, catches the air in the lungs, and freezes the blood. It speaks of an unspeakable power so unescapable than the shadow it gives life to doesn’t need to be discreet. When that noise is heard, it is already way too late.

This is the sound of Darth Vader.

This is the sound of death, the last thing so many sentients heard.

“You’ll answer to me, and me alone,” the Dark Lord commands and Zam Wessel isn’t stupid enough to think No is a possible answer.

Not if she wants to live.

So she bows and promises her loyalty.

Darth Vader makes a noise, full of disdain:

“The loyalty of a bounty hunter. Of a Clawdite! No, I have way better than your loyalty, hunter. I have the certitude that if you betray me, I will find you and turn everything you hold dear to dust!”

And he leaves, unhurried. Darth Vader never runs, but he always arrives in time to slaughter the enemies of the Empire. Some people whisper he drinks blood. Some people whisper he’s a Fallen Jedi, whatever that meant. Some people whisper he’s nothing more than shadow and smoke, given form by the Emperor to inhabit that suit.

Zam has no intention to approach him enough again to know if one of those ideas is true, and every intention to give her reports by way of holomessaging. The Imperial who came with Vader, Piett, his name is Piett, her brain supplies, throws her a secured comm, an identity card and a credit chip.

“It makes no sense,” Zam remarks despite herself, “the Empire has spies. Whole legions of them. How just one bounty hunter-“

“You’re not here for your opinion. You’re here to obey. Don’t disappoint Lord Vader,” Piett says firmly. He seems like he wants to add something, then he turns and hurries on the steps of his dark master, leaving Zam to pocket the objects. She morphs quickly into Piett, just to grimace at his back, then changes into one of her usual non-descript human faces, one who belonged to a barmaid she fucked once, in the Gold system, before stealing her speeder. She quickly pushes her now red hair inside her cap, and she dashes in the opposite direction.

“ Don’t disappoint him ,” he said.

Jackass.

Zam didn’t last so long in a difficult profession, in an even more difficult galaxy, by disappointing serial killing machines with strange cosmic powers. In fact, since she miraculously survived Jango Fett’s attempt on her life, she lasted by taking only low stakes contracts, only in the Outer Rims, and staying far away from the mess that was the Clone Wars and the dying somersaults of the Galactic Republic. It had nothing to do with the strange feelings echoing in her when she saw men who had the face of the one who had been an occasional lover, a partner in work, and her would-be murderer.

Zam only takes back her natural appearance once she’s in the safety of her ship, preparing for take-off. Aliens aren’t exactly well accepted in this new order of the first Galactic Empire, and even before, in the Republic, Clawdite were something of a leprous example of the aliens population, their special abilities decried and vilified.

She enters the coordinates. There are three days of travel to Naboo, enough to perfect her cover.

Once she’s in hyperspace, Zam studies the new identity the Imperial gave her. The number on the credit chips make even her blink. That mission really is important. The identity card is empty of image, and ready to welcome one. In front of her mirror, Zam carefully composes her face. It’s way more difficult than to steal one off someone she met once, the effort straining, but Vader insisted. The face couldn’t be shared with another being, even one long dead. The Naboo would check. Zam thinks it’s overkill, no security system checks so much data, but what Vader wants, whether he swells the Naboo Officers’s intelligence efficiency, Vader gets.

She gives her new face the eyes of a Judicial officer who arrested her once on Coruscant, the green just slightly darker. She chooses a dark brown for the skin, the same colour as the rings around her home planet, the nose of the old market vendor who always gave her extra sweet when she was young, the oval of her face of a famous Twil’ek actress, and the ears and shape of the lips she takes to Padmé Amidala. The file insists on the number of former handmaiden of Queen Amidala’s retinue in the Naboo public service, and people, unconsciously, trust more easily a person sharing something with loved ones. She keeps the red hair, she always loved it, but she makes it shorter.

The face in the mirror is brand-new, and too perfect. Zam adds small wrinkles on the corners of the eyes and, opening her collar further, a birthmark on the collarbone. Better.

“Hello, Leeanna Othalanga,” Zam whispers.

********

The negotiations were long and complicated, but the Rebel Alliance has now joined forces with another rebel cell. Mon Mothma is feeling exhausted, but for once, it’s the exhaustion of good work and results, and not of too much work and crushing despair. Every new cell joining them is a chance. All of them are disorganized - the Rebel Alliance included - and easy prey for the full might of the Imperials alone, but together they stood a chance. As dark that the galaxy has become, Mon refuses to believe this shadow won’t pass, and she will work to the limits of her strength, and a little after, to be sure it passes quicker. It was Ahsoka Tano who established first contact with this cell. An easy choice, as the cell is led by a former Clone Commander, one of those, unfortunately too few, who killed his Jedi and didn’t blow his own head once the chip stopped working and he remembered his real personality and memories. Cells led by men like that are a thorn in the Empire’s side, much more than well-meaning angry civilians can ever hope to be. With those leaders, a former Jedi is always a good first contact and former Commander Bly, leader of several rebel cells in the Jidlor Marches, will be an excellent resource and ally for the Alliance.

Ahsoka has already left Yavin for another mission. Like all former Jedi of the Rebel Alliance, she seems certain the Force is an appropriate substitute for rest and the medics have several times menaced to sit on her to force her to stay still long enough for sleep. Nevertheless, Mon wants to see Bly piloted home by one of the intelligence officers, as a sign of respect for the other members of his cell who have only meet Ahsoka.

And Mon knows the perfect person is on Yavin right now. She sends a message. When the door of her office opens, her breath gets stuck for a few seconds in her breast. Despite the years, the resemblance still is a shock.

********

Leeanna is a newcomer on Naboo, relocated from one of the numerous worlds whose economy crashed as a consequence of the war. Her entire family saved money to send her off-world, and she’s in a hurry to earn money to send them. Nobody will find her ambition strange. Neither her eagerness nor her desire to give back to Naboo, which welcomed her, will stand out.

Nobody will find her desire to join the ranks of Naboo security strange. There is job security in working for the government, after all. Six months after joining, Leeanna has only a glowing review from her direct superior officer, Commandant Gregar Typho, and Zam is bored to death, and exasperated.

Naboo is pretty. Naboo is a jewel, all glittering stained-glass windows, encrusted gold, and embroideries on every piece of clothes. Yes, Naboo is the prettiest of planets. That shouldn’t distract people of the truth: Naboo is also as stubborn as kriff and so tight-lipped Zam is beginning to think all that kriffin face paint walled up their kriffin lips. Everybody is nice with the supposed refuge, it’s all easy going smiles, offer of Naboo’s recipes, advice, even booze, but in six months she hasn’t succeeded in gaining even one little piece of intel Leeanna isn’t supposed to have access to. People aren’t supposed to work that way. People are supposed to be careless, tired, exasperated by three security access points to their terminal, when all they want is to get back early enough from work to kriff their mistress before the time they’re supposed to be home to their wife.

People are supposed to be human, fallible. Apparently, nobody told that to Naboo Security, the tightest run security service she has ever seen.

The people of her unit accepted her easily, she was even invited to the party thrown for the Life Day of her sergeant, but nobody seems to have murky secrets she could use to blackmail them, and nobody in a position of authority tried to corner Leeanna in a dark corner, which could give an excellent way to have a hold on them. She thought she had the beginning of an idea, when she discovered Moff Quarsh Panaka was taking bribe money, Panaka who was Commandant Typho’s maternal uncle. That was before she understood Panaka was circumvented with success by his own security service. The Moff only learnt what Typho wanted him to know. Zam thought of going to Panaka and making him an ally, then renounced the idea. A good part of the Security Officers were on it, it wouldn’t work otherwise, and she wasn’t there to be sure the Moff was loyally obeyed, she was there because Vader suspected Naboo of Rebellion’s acquaintances.

Which made no sense. 

When Vader suspects someone, a person, a planet, an organisation, of Rebellion’s acquaintances he levels everything to the ground, he doesn’t send an alien bounty hunter on a long con mission. Harte Secur, a major Naboo town, had been burnt not ten years ago, including the airbase, after it was proved that during the Jedi Purge, a contingent of surviving Jedi used the airbase as a grouping point, and that the town officials hid it.

What makes Theed different? Is there something here Vader wants to preserve? Then, why doesn’t he simply order it to the Empire troops? Is there something here Vader wants to preserve, and at the same time keep secret? The thought of discovering a secret so precious and so dangerous is giving her heartburns. If there is something Vader wants to hide from the Empire itself, running to another galaxy wouldn’t be enough to protect Zam from him if she discovers it, however, he isn’t known for his patience. Sooner or later he will ask for results, so Zam can’t not search! She isn’t in contact with the Dark Lord himself - thank the Stars she already has enough nightmares of him - but with Piett. Piett who doesn’t hide that the other man thinks Zam should have found something already.

“Infiltration is long work and going too fast could make people suspicious of me,” Zam insists every time they call each other on the secure comm.

“I don’t ask for the Rebellion’s secret hideout,” Piett snaps, “But Lord Vader grows impatient with you. Give me something I can sell to him. ”

Eight months after her arrival, she’s invited to the party for the ten year renewal of vows of Commandant Typho. She almost doesn’t go. She’s tired of Naboo, and the idea of locking herself into her flat, watching porn and getting sloshed all alone on the cheapest liquor she can find is much more seductive than more hours playing Leeanna.

She still goes. She even checks the appropriate gifts in Naboo culture for those events with her sergeant, buys a shiny set of plates in a deep burgundy, and displays just enough cleavage, because it will perhaps be that night that she finds, finally, blackmail material on someone!

Gregar Typho is married to one of the Queen’s top advisors, Dormé Typho, Head of the Royal Advisory Council and planetary Governor. The woman is also one of Queen Amidala’s former handmaiden, Zam knows from her file. It was unimportant when Zam learned it, because their marriage is quite solid from what she could learn- nobody to seduce there- but suddenly, she sees the information in a new light.

Around Dormé Typho, women are crowding in with congratulations and laughter. Zam is very good with faces, like every member of her race, and she worked hard to memorize Naboo’s top players, but she still has difficulties to separate them and identify them, despite the efforts they clearly made to dress and style their hair in every different way possible in an effort to diminish their resemblance. There is Saché Sofia, Moff Quarsh Panaka’s own assistant. There is Rabé Silva, Chief of the Naboo Customs. There is Yané Candice, leader of the Naboo Royal Space Fighter Corps. There is Fé Fay, of the Plasma Energy Trade Commission. There is Versé Wynne, Director of Essentials, of the Naboo Essentials Provider. There is Ellé Freer and her wife Moteé, and Zam can’t remember their exact titles, but she’s pretty sure Ellé is the highest ranking human ever in the Banking Clan, and that Moteé has an important position on Coruscant itself, something in Judicials.

If Zam wanted to build a spy ring based on Naboo, those would be awesome positions of power for her spies. And all of those positions are taken by a group of women loyal to a woman who would have despised everything the Empire stands for. Loyal to the death, if the legends are to be believed, to a woman who was conveniently rumored to have been murdered by the Jedi just at the dawn of Empire. The Jedi who can’t defend themselves of that murder now, since they were all gunned down, on the same day of the death of the Republic they had sworn to defend to the death, and were accused of having tried to break.

There is another woman in the group, and Zam has no difficulties identifying her: their newly appointed Senator, representing Naboo and the entire Chommell Sector. Not a former handmaiden of Padme Amidala, but her own niece, Pooja Naberrie. Zam would also bet a lot of credits that her date is former Queen Apailana, deeply limping since the assassination attempt that almost took her life a few years ago. From what Zam learnt it was a miracle the woman didn’t die and since then her memory wasn’t exactly reliable…something Zam’s sure is the only reason the former Queen is still alive. She probably knew something the Empire didn’t want to be known, but her accidental survival produced a good result, perhaps even better than her death would have been. Not only was she no longer a problem, but problematic Gungan leaders were executed after being accused of planning the attack, and the Empire now parades her around like a symbol of the necessity of anti-aliens politics.

To reward herself for probably discovering the spy ring Vader is searching for, Zam loots another glass off the buffet, even if one glass is her habitual limit in public. She hasn’t even tasted it when she almost lets it crash onto the floor, because a dead woman just entered the party.

Thank the Stars, people are too occupied with the commotion the former handmaiden are forming by throwing themselves en masse at the woman to see her surprise. The woman is slightly older than Zam is pretending to be, and looks like Amidala stepping out of her grave, if Amidala had favoured spacer leathers instead of those enormous tents parading as formal dresses. Her brown hair is cut quite short and she has the uneven complexion and thickened skin of someone who went to space in a badly shielded ship. She radiates will and determination and a careful observer, like Zam is, will immediately see the wear of leather on her right side where the woman usually wears something heavy and metal….like a blaster she would have taken off for the party. For a few moments, Zam really believes Amidala has come back to haunt the Empire, then her brain kicks on, and she understands.

This is the last handmaiden, or more precisely the first one.

The decoy.

This is Sabé Keira, the woman grown up from the girl who pretended to be the Queen in order to draw the danger to herself and protect Amidala. She has no listed job, in her file, and Zam only checked on her when arriving on Naboo because once, a long time ago, it was that woman who thwarted Zam and Jango’s first attempt on Amidala’s life, just before the Clone Wars, before Amidala went back to Coruscant and took Jedi bodyguards.

Zam needs to know more about that one. The other women, they all have jobs, official positions, they are well-known people in positions of power. They can’t disappear when necessary to contact the Rebel Alliance. That one, that one is certainly the contact. And all of them are on this plot, Zam is sure of it, as she sees the newcomer kiss her former colleagues with the emotion of beloved people who don’t see each other as much as they want.

She opens her blouse a little more, artistically arranged her necklace into her cleavage, and goes to find her boss. It’s quite late, it’s a party, and there is alcohol involved. Nobody will find it strange if the pretended Leeanna asks for an introduction to the beautiful stranger who just arrived.

Sabé smiles, when Typho introduces them. 

“How are you finding Naboo?”

“More beautiful at this moment,” Zam answers without hiding her appreciation of Sabé, and the decoy smile becomes less practiced, more amused. 

Zam as Leeanna, is quite taller than Sabé, but that doesn’t seem to stop the former handmaiden from making her interest known. Zam thought she would have to do the seduction, but Sabé is coming way stronger than her. Instead of the usual questions about the world Zam is supposed to have left for Naboo, Sabé has more questions about Zam’s life on Naboo, and the pleasures on it that she believes the other should try, and Zam finds it easier. It’s easier because she doesn’t have to be careful about her lies about her past, and Sabé talking about Naboo is passionate, fire in her eyes and blood on her cheeks, alive and vibrating. She leaves no doubt that she could be one of Zam’s pleasured discoveries, and the bounty hunter catches, twice or thrice, the other handmaiden obvious enjoyment to see Sabé connecting with the new immigrant. Zam would bet a life of playing contact with the Rebel Alliance does not leave a lot of free time for meeting new people. 

Zam wanted to leave early, but finds herself staying as one of the last guests, sitting next to Sabé at an end of the bar, nursing too many drinks and listening to the supposed travel stories of a supposed mechanic on a supposed cargo ship.

Well, the cargo ship probably exists, it would do a shoddy cover story if it didn’t, but Zam knows with the guts of a hunter that this woman is her prey. This is the woman Vader wants.

She could leave things there. Waits until her next contact with Piett and reports her suspicion. But she has no proof, and she spoke to Piett last night, she isn’t supposed to be in contact for another ten days.

So, when Sabé asks her if she wants to meet again, she says yes.

**********************************************************

It’s late and Moff Panaka is still up to his eyeballs in paperwork. When he accepted the prestigious title, he didn’t think it would involve so much work. That never frightened him, but he’s sure he, a dutiful son of the homeworld of their Emperor, could be used better elsewhere. He could make his way in the imperial court, he’s sure of it. The cut-throat reputation of the court is probably exaggerated, and the ambiance can’t be frostier than the one he endures on Naboo for now. The whole planet gives him the cold shoulder, for a few Gungan executions and one or two small towns brought to heel.

His own sister! And she should know better. Even if she is called Typho now, and not Panaka anymore. For a time, he thought he would have to imprison her and her husband, perhaps worse, and he didn’t like the idea, but the Emperor himself had shown the way.

Mercy was for the weak, and if there was one thing Qarsh refused to be, it was weak.

When he had resigned himself to have them arrested, his dear Saché had convinced him to try one last time, only not to speak to his sister, but to her son, who was playing bodyguard for the Senator of Naboo on Coruscant. Qarsh had tried, and Gregar had spoken to his parents, and soon they had departed for a long space cruise, and stopped bothering him. That had been long ago. Qarsh suspected they had established themselves elsewhere and didn’t contact him in a fit of stubbornness, but he didn’t care.

He didn’t need traitors in his family, weakening his position. People would kill to take his place and he didn’t want them to gain leverage through his deplorable sister’s ideas.

No, Gregar Typho was quite enough family for him. His nephew had come back to Naboo to serve him in the Intelligence Service after the mess with his parents and Qarsh had only good things to tell about him. Gregar had even wedded one of Saché’s friends!

Like she had been summoned by his thoughts, Saché enters. She’s beautiful, wearing only green like she knows he loves. If she wasn’t of so low birth, he would probably marry her, but what is enough for an assistant and lover is not enough for a wife, not for an ambitious Moff who would be going places soon, very soon.

One day, he will marry to further his career and that day, Saché will have to go. In the meantime, she’s an excellent assistant, a skilled lover, and she adores him.

With a smile, she leans down for a kiss.

“You’re working too much,” she coos prettily, her hands coming to massage his stiff neck and he groans as tension leaves his muscles.

“It’s to forget you weren’t there tonight,” he answers, because he prides himself for his gallantry. She isn’t the marrying type, but it isn’t a reason to handle himself like a cad. Her smile grows bigger and her small hand descends across his chest.

“I missed you too,” she declares, “The party was so boring without you. I always regret that your duty of being impartial  as the Moff stops you from attending private parties.”

The hunger she has for him fills him with pride. A woman young enough to be his daughter, and it’s like she can never get enough of him. He will really regret when he will have to send her far away from Naboo to be sure she can’t harm his career once he’s married, but it would be too big a risk. Former lovers, especially ones who had been in the Moff’s direct line of power, were a risk; Qarsh Panaka didn’t take risks. There is a settlement program for Stormtroopers who did their fifteen years and aren’t officers material or specialists, and that program is always searching for women to give as wives to the retired soldiers. Qarsh will personally take the time to tell them she needs to be given to a man coming from the Mid or Inner Rim, they are much civilized and it’s the least he can do for her.

Her hand is growing bolder.

“Just closing my computer-” he begins, but her hand goes still lower and she follows with her mouth and soon he forgets about anything else.

Later in the night, he rolls over and searches for the cover, because it’s colder that it should be, like it would if he was alone in the bed, but he’s asleep again within seconds. At dawn, when he wakes up and Saché sleeps peacefully against him, she has never been more beautiful and he forgets all about it.

Saché and Panaka:

**********************************************************

Two days after their first meeting, Sabé is waiting for her at the end of Zam’s shift, dressed once again in leather, but this time black instead of burgundy, seating across a hover bike. She takes Zam to a long ride, leaving Theed and exploring small lakes Zam had never taken the time to discover. She always was more a city person, but she could admit to the beauty of Naboo’s landscape, especially with her arms around Sabé’s waist and the powerful engine between their legs. Sabé pilots like she learnt more evasive manoeuvres than highway code. Knowing what the handmaiden training entails, it’s probably true, of course.

Zam didn’t become a bounty hunter because she wanted a calm life with office hours - she urges Sabé faster and she distracts her the best she can with a hand on her thighs, sometimes on her belly. When Sabé produces snacks and alcohol, on the shore of the smallest lake, Zam takes the drink and is the one who takes the next step in kissing Sabé.

It’s not only for the mission. It’s been too long, Zam is horny and Sabé is exactly her type: dangerous and kriffin ill-advised. When the former handmaiden leans back in the blossoming heather, Zam follows quite willingly. Sabé is a generous lover and her body is as muscled and compact as the leather promised. On her shoulder, a nasty scar tells the story of a bad wound and bacta arriving too late.

“It was during the war,” Sabé says, when Zam kisses that scar, and Zam catches the lie for what it is, a cover, because that scar is fresher than the mess named the Clone Wars.

Later that night, after Sabé and Zam scandalised Zam’s neighbours - a triad of old Mon Calamari -  by the passion of their farewell at Zam’s door, Zam changes clothes and face and breaks into Rabé Silva’s office. She chooses that one, of all her suspects’ offices, because she hopes the security measures will be less of a problem. Who breaks into Custom offices? The interesting stuff to steal is in warehouses, here there will be only paperwork and computers. But intel is exactly what Zam is after. If Rabé Silva chose a posting controlling arrivals and departures of Naboo, it’s certainly because important material transits through the planet. Perhaps weapons? The Rebel Alliance is a small group, but even small groups can’t grow munitions and ships’ parts.

The problem is, it’s certainly disguised, hidden, and Zam hasn’t a brain made for that sort of meticulous work. Eight days after, she has nothing to show, except a persistent headache.

Perhaps she would have found something, if a part of her free time hadn’t been used to see Sabé, but she feels it’s important to keep close contact with her. One day, it could be useful. Also, Sabé in bed has the intensity of people knowing life is short and unpleasant, and it’s been a long time since Zam had so much fun between the sheets, or everywhere Sabé can have her alone. Sabé is a firework and Zam knows it won’t end well, but she wants to enjoy it while it lasts. Sabé is the worst idea she ever had, but she’s funny, and intense. She likes going too fast with her hoverbike, to drink horrible beer, and to tackle Zam in bed with so much passion.

In any other circumstances Zam would tell Sabé is, if not the woman of her life, then a woman she will regularly come back to between contracts, something of a regular port between travels. They could see each other between Sabé’s flight with her ship and Zam’s bounty hunting. But the sad truth is that Sabé isn’t really - well probably isn’t - only a mechanic and that she doesn’t even know that Zam’s name is Zam.

So Zam bites with all her might into the fruit of their relationship, like she could suck out the taste of it before it turns sour. And if Sabé is surprised by her intensity, she never says anything.

They have lunch once with Fé and Versé and the two are interesting, fun. Zam could see herself liking them. All along, Sabé’s foot is doing very interesting and lewd things under the table. Zam is sure Versé knows, and doesn’t care. After, she takes Sabé back to her apartment and doesn’t let her leave the bed for long hours, until they finally fucked out the frustration of that too long lunch and preliminaries. When Sabé is sleeping, sinking down into sleep with a well-satisfied smile that does things to Zam’s ego, the bounty hunter hack her comm. It only contains the usual personal messages. It would be too easy if one of them had been labelled something like “ Treason, don’t let Darth Vader see that one ”.

Her next contact with Piett, she transfers the data she stole from the Customs office and Sabé’s messages while she’s at it.

“I need someone to study that,” she explains to the officer, “but it needs to be done discreetly.”

“Lord Vader-“

“Lord Vader will be less useful here than an accountant,” Zam snaps. The comment is terribly blunt, but she stayed awake way too late, invited for the first time into Sabé’s flat. She didn’t find anything interesting during the too short time she had to explore during Sabé’s shower, except a nice set of blades under the bed, which could easily be explained by a paranoid and prudent woman like Sabé living in the shadiest corner of Theed.

“I don’t want to give Lord Vader’ false hopes,” she starts again with more tact and less truth, because she doesn’t care about Vader’s feelings, or anyones for that matter, she simply prefers to limit her contact to Piett, because he is way less murderous than his boss. “No need to disturb him for something that will perhaps go down like a lead balloon.”

The call complete, Zam is preparing for her work day when her other communicator, the official one, the Leeanna one, makes a noise. It’s from Sabé. Not a communication, but a message. Some opportunity for work presented itself for the ship, and they are leaving, but she will definitely make a call to Leeanna next time she’s on Naboo.

Any other person would see that for a breaking-up from a casual hook-up. Instead, Zam’s hunter instincts go ablaze.

When a spy suddenly leaves the planet on an impromptu trip, it could be to transport hologlass from one system to another, yes, but it could also be because spying is full of last minute opportunities smart rebels don’t let pass.

**************************************************************

The weather is preparing for a full-blown tempest when Obi-Wan arrives at the Lars farm.

When he arrives home.

After seeing the devastation of the Temple in flame and all his brothers and sisters dead on the floor, most of them by Anakin’s hand, Obi-Wan didn’t think he could have a home again. In fact, he didn’t even want one, because he couldn’t lose again what he didn’t have. The infinite sadness was enough of a warning to never, ever, get attached again.

And then Sabé and her sisters in everything but blood had tracked him here, in the sandy hell of nowhere, almost one year after the Fall of the Republic, and asked pointed questions about Padmé and the baby, and about the state of the galaxy, and what exactly Obi-Wan was going to do to correct everything that had gone wrong. Staying low and waiting for the twins to grow up was so far away from their ideas that it wasn’t even seen in the rear-view of their metaphorical speeder. Obi-Wan had needed all the experience from his years of negotiation to stop them from going after Vader once they had known. The last argument, the only one they had really listened to, was that they could die and leave Padme’s death unavenged. Sith Lords don’t die so easily, Obi-Wan could attest of it. He had sent them to Bail, and kept only Cordé.

Cordé….

Cordé had been a surprise, since she had been officially dead for years, since one of the attempts on Amidala’s life before the Clone wars, back when Anakin was still Obi-Wan’s beloved son/brother, his dear Padawan, and not a liar and a murderer.

“War was brewing, everyone could see it. Not all of the Naboo people are as optimistic about the inherent goodness of beings as Padme was,” Sabé had said, “and we thought an officially dead operative was a good tool.”

“And Padme never knew?”

“No. After…after her stay with her Jedi on the lake, she began to keep secrets from us.”

“So, you kept some from her?”

“So, we thought having an ace up our sleeve she couldn’t betray to…to him, was a good idea. We were supposed to protect Padme from everything and everyone, including her most misguided ideas.”

“You’re quite cynical, Lady Sabé.”

“Not enough, alas,” she had answered sadly, and left with her entourage, leaving Obi-Wan alone with an officially dead handmaiden he had met for the first time the day before. Cordé looked like Sabé and Padmé, except for the limping, a memory from the bomb which had almost taken her life just before the world went up in flames in the Clone Wars.

“Are you here to help me guard Luke, or because Sabé doesn’t want to bother tracking me a second time if I run away?” Obi-Wan had asked. Cordé had smiled, not answered, and asked to meet Luke, Beru and Owen.

Beru and Owen had seemed appalled at the idea of a proper young lady staying in the hermitage where Obi-Wan lived. Obi-Wan had, quite diplomatically, not remarked that they had found the hermitage quite good enough for him. Nor did he remark that the Naboo handmaiden training would make some of the more throat cutting mercenaries of the galaxy pale.

Cordé and Obi-Wan were only supposed to stay with the Lars for a few weeks, the time needed for Obi-Wan and Owen to better the hermitage, yet here they were, still there more than a decade after, helping to raise a teenage Luke who learned mechanics from Owen, compassion from Beru, blasters and cryptography from Cordé, and the Force from Obi-Wan.

The strangest Padawan who ever was and the nicest soul Obi-Wan had ever met. He hopes Leia, raised by Bail, Breha, Ferus Olin - one of the surviving Jedi - and Eirtaé, has like her brother inherited her soul from their mother. Two parents, and two strange godparents, one Jedi, one handmaiden, and the same training, except Luke grew up in a poor household, despite the four adults’ efforts, something that only made him more compassionate. Obi-Wan fears the effects a privileged education can have on a future Jedi like Leia, despite Ferus’ reports.

But when he opens up to Cordé about that, most of the time she pinches his ass and calls him an idiot. She apparently has trust in Padmé’s blood with every fiber of her being. Obi-Wan, on his less nice days, always remarks that if she had trusted Padmé so much, she would have told her she was alive. But he has less not-nice days now. Years in a home he didn’t want healed some of his wounds, and Cordé’s love, a total surprise but not an unwelcome one, helped with the rest. He will always carry his dead ones with him, but he has learned to build something despite their weight.

So, Obi-Wan arrives home.

Beru helps him dismount the pack from his eopie, making happy noises at the cavern fungus he traded with the Tuskens and the beautifully woollen blankets. No imported products, no matter how industrialised the world of origin, ever succeed in competing with Tuskens wool to keep out the cold of the desert night.

“Is there some news?” Obi-Wan asks, when they have finished putting everything away. He already knows nothing major happened during his four days trip to the Tusken camp, Beru would have started with that, but that doesn’t mean nothing happened, from a communication from the Rebellion to Luke’s breaking one of the speeders again, trying to make it go quicker.

“Young Biggs is with Luke, they are working on their on-line geometry course.”

“Do you think we should ask them to keep the door open?”

Beru makes a face. She has difficulties admitting her little Luke is growing up quickly. Obi-Wan, attuned to the Force, is terribly aware of young Luke’s awakening into a hormonal individual and of his feelings about Biggs. Luke’s shielding hasn’t failed so much since he was five and just starting to learn about the Force. Obi-Wan is sure he himself was much more controlled when he was younger, and that somewhere in the Force Qui-Gon is probably laughing like a lark and speaking about sweet revenge.

“Cordé and Owen are working on a vaporator in the south field, but they should be home for supper. I was thinking of some fried eggs and pickled vegetables with the last of the soup Owen made yesterday,” Beru is continuing, refusing to discuss the subject of Luke’s puberty and his infatuation with young Master Biggs, when the family holocommunicator starts blipping.

Obi-Wan still has a half-chewed fruit in his hand when he answers, his head full of domestic matters. It crashes on the floor at the same time as the world crashes around his ears.

On the screen, Ferus Olin, Leia’s Jedi Master, doesn’t seem like his day is going well. His tunic is covered in blood and from his ashen complexion, some of it is his own. Behind him, Obi-Wan can see a room ravaged and four bodies wearing the uniforms of Inquisitors. Ferus always was a fierce warrior, a skilled duellist. Four against one wasn’t enough to vanquish him.

“Vader is coming for me,” he says quickly, in that rushed way people use when they don’t know if they will have the time to relay all the important bits, “I sent the three Organa and Eirtaé off-world, but the ship was damaged, they will never go far away enough to escape him.”

“Hide!” Obi-Wan urges, even if he knows it won’t work. For a long time Ferus had been nothing more than the Padawan of his friend who left the Order, but since the Fall of the Republic, even if they don’t see each other more than once every two years and only communicate using heavily encrypted communicators, Ferus has become less a former Padawan and more of a real friend. The younger brother Anakin should have been; the family member and Obi-Wan can’t, can’t- he can’t lose another loved one.

Ferus has a small smile and for a moment the young man looks like the one Obi-Wan found before Roan Land’s death, alive and vibrant.

“Take care of them,” Ferus declares, “take care of all of them, and yourself too.” Behind him, the metal of the door is bending, groaning. Ferus puts a hand on the panel of the communicator.

“No need for you to see this,” he says, then “You’re my brother, and it’s been an honour. I’m gonna kiss Siri on the cheek for you.” Then the communication cuts off and Obi-Wan hollers, an animal sound he didn’t think he was capable of doing anymore. Around them, everything is vibrating in a way it didn’t when he felt his brothers and sisters dying all around the galaxy during Order 66. At the time, he was sadly used to the feeling, with the war. Now, he has grown complacent. He hears Beru yells something, feels her hands pressing hard on his shoulders, and it’s wrong, she’s shorter than him.That’s when he realizes he’s on the floor. The light of Luke pushes back - clumsily, but with all the power of the Chosen One’s lineage - against Obi-Wan’s own power and somewhere very far away Ferus’s light flares one last time like a nova, illuminating the Force, even brighter for the darkness spreading around in the whole Empire, then disappears.

****************************************

Vader doesn’t bother with the communicator. The first thing Olin had done, when the door finally let Vader through, was to push his lightsaber into the memory of the device, to be sure nobody could retrace his last call, then he had turned to him, and Vader had seen Jedi’s calm descend on him like a blanket. There was nothing left of the too serious teenager who had been Anakin Skywalker’s rival. Here stood a Jedi Master, sure of his power in a way Padawan Olin hadn’t been.

“Where have you sent the Organas?” Vader had asked and, not even bothering to answer, Olin had assumed one of the classical guard poses, the one which had been the favourite of the late Siri Tachi, his Master.

It hadn’t been enough. No matter what those foolish Jedi thought, it was never enough. Olin had fallen without a complaint, and at the end, as Vader leaned down on his old rival, he was sure Olin had seen something else, as he had smiled blissfully…then, the strangest thing had happened. The cadaver had dissolved. Not like one thrown in acid, no. Just…disappeared, leaving behind only the small cape he was wearing in the House of Organa’s colours and his lightsaber. Now Vader was left with four dead Inquisitors, a stupid cape, no clues, and no traitors named Organa to bring back to Coruscant like he was supposed to. He intended to take the lightsaber, as a trophy, but even that was denied to him. With a last cry, the crystal had sizzled and broken, leaving behind only machineries.

His Master wouldn’t be happy.

**********************

Leia suddenly starts sobbing with a force previously unseen. Big, ugly gulps of breath like she’s drowning, huge racking sobs that seem to break her apart and Eirtaé stops bandaging Bail Organa’s arm to run to her. The teenager can’t seem to speak clearly, repeating Master, Master , on a loop but Eirtaé understands enough of the Force, even if she’s as Force sensitive as a womp rat, to understand that. She circles Leia’s shoulders with her arm and lets her cry for Ferus Olin, all while staring at the Vice-Roy across the small room. From there they can hear the definitely not normal noise the motors are making and Breha and the surviving pilot’s furious whispering as they try to find a close enough world to jump to before everything explodes.

Ferus Olin died to give them time to run, and Eirtaé isn’t sure it will be enough.

They have to give Leia a mild sedative at the end: her control is slipping. Nothing is more dangerous than a Force Sensitive half-trained. Ferus hammered that knowledge into them all these years. Trained enough to use the Force, but not enough to not get caught in Its flow around her, the ship was vibrating in a  worrying way, until sleep took her.

Eirtaé finishes bandaging the Viceroy’s arm, then goes to help the other two while he watches over his beloved daughter.

The pilot is a Twi’lek woman with teal skin. Officially she’s a former pleasure slave rescued by Breha Organa - who is very not-officially a member of the Rebellion - tasked to keep the Organa safe like Ferus and Eirtaé herself. Unofficially, she’s a member of the Free Ryloth movement rather than a Rebellion Officer, and this mission was supposed to be a safe one.  They’d just needed to keep the Twi’lek in one piece to prove to the Cham Syndulla that the Rebel Alliance could be a good partner in this war against the Empire, their common enemy.

Which isn’t exactly going well….

Breha smiles at the former handmaiden and leaves to join her husband, allowing Eirtaé to sit in the vacated chair, the co-pilot one.

“So, Numa, where are we going?” Eirtaé asks, trying and failing to infuse her tone with confidence. The younger woman, elbows deep in the pilot console, makes an epic face.

“Not very far,” she admits, “this is way past what we can repair mid flight , even if we had more competent mechanics than me on board.” She taps a screen. “What do you know about a world named Bespin?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, you’re about to visit it. It’s a giant ball of gas, so we can’t exactly take cover in a forest somewhere, but there are a lot of mining complexes, and lots of moving sentients to blend with.”

“I would prefer something more rural, it’s easier to hide a ship.”

“Yes, but it is Bespin or a small, quiet explosion in the infinite silence of space.”

“….Is that Twi’lek humor?”

“Our daughters are our principal export, so our humour is dark.”

“Well, Bespin it is, but perhaps try to tone down the humour in front of the princess.”

************

In the dawn of Theed, Zam spies Sabé in her binoculars. The other woman is prepping the ship quickly, helped by Rabé and Yané. Yané is wearing spacer leathers, like Sabé, so Zam supposes she’s going to wherever they are rushing. Rabé is wearing her custom uniform and, as Zam anticipated, the Custom Officer doesn’t go onto the ship, but goes back to her speeder once the ship is ready. Zam closes her binocular and rushes to her own ship. She debated with herself for days on the wisdom of placing a tracker on Sabé’s ship, but the counter measures are getting better every day and if Sabé found it the woman would be even more on guard.

No, Zam will have to follow them the old way. And she almost prefers it. A fair fight, hunter and prey, bounty hunter against spy.

A fair fight and, at the end, she will deliver Sabé and her numerous sisters and accomplices to Vader and go her own way richer than she ever was.

Sabé’s ship is quick, likely modified in a way that goes undetected by the shipyard inspectors, but Zam’s ship is her pride and joy, she spends a very substantial part of every paycheck on it, meaning the little beast is discreet, feral, and the quickest in the whole Empire, Zam is sure of it. Despite that, she’s struggling to keep up in a way that wouldn’t make her be seen by the two former handmaidens. No need to ask any more why Yané was chosen to be the leader of the Naboo Royal Space Fighter Corps, or why Sabé, in a rush, made her go with her.

From jump to jump, Zam follows, then when the other ship slows down, she does too. Sabé ship is waiting at a control point in front of one of the most travelled hyperspace lanes entries. Zam uses the time to check the new bounties, more by habit than anything else because she certainly won’t abandon this hunt.

A few old clones, cadets who ran away, a Moff who left with his lover and the funds he was in charge of, the usual Wookies fighters….

One of the new bounties is for the Royal family of Alderaan, accused of Rebel and Jedi acquaintances and Zam swears copiously when she sees the four pictures of the bounty. Not about the Queen and her husband, she couldn’t care less about them, but the other two pictures. The teenager is the spitting image of Sabé but younger. And the supposed language tutor looks suspiciously like Zam’s lover. A hand on the controls and an eye on Sabé’s ship on the radar, Zam rummages through her computer and files with her free hand, tallying up the handmaiden of the departed Padme Amidala.

Sabé, of course, and Rabé and Yané and Dormé - who is Typho’s wife - and Ellée and Moteé who married each other and Cordé, that’s the dead one killed by Zam’s bomb all those years ago, and Saché and Versé and….

Kriff.

Double kriff.

Triple kriff, kriff, kriff.

Why didn’t she check?

Sabé and Rabé and Yané and Ellée and Moteé and Cordé and Saché and Versé and kriffin Eirtaé .

Kriffin Eirtaé who apparently was helping raise Padmé Amidala’s daughter right under the Empire’s nose. This is why Sabé is running. She’s running to her sister’s and the child’s little bastard help, not to some Rebels’s help…or is she?

Zam checks.

Padmé Amidala was pregnant when she died, it’s official. So the little whelp’s parentage is kept on the low, the Empire can’t want her for the symbol, therefore, the Rebel ties the Organa are accused of are probably true. Amidala was a member of that Senate thing, Zam can’t remember the name, Senators who protested the rise in power of the Chancellor, before the Fall of the Republic. Most of them are dead now, or with bounty on their heads, Zam knows, because she captured two herself. Amidala and Organa were on that list too. Organa is certainly a Rebel spy in the Senate, and the former handmaiden and him are with the Rebel Alliance.

The bounty Zam would win, if she brings back the whole bunch to Vader, she would be set for life. She could buy a little moon in the Outer Rim, perhaps. A harem, a harem would be nice. Probably boring after a time, Zam isn’t made for calm life, but nice.

Ahead of her, Sabé’s ship jumps into hyperspace again and Zam follows.

*************************************************************

Rabé doesn’t go to work directly that morning. It’s still early, Sabé’s call dragged her out of bed in the middle of the night. She takes a path she hadn’t seen in years, one she had taken only once, but never forgotten.

Padmé’s mausoleum is exactly like in her memory, from all those years ago. She knows the others come regularly, some every month, some only on Padme’s Life day, or on the day of Theed’s liberation, and Sabe with a schedule only she herself can understand, like a lot of things Sabé does.

Rabé hasn’t come back since the burial. She’s too angry with Padmé. She still loves her, she will love her until her death. Her friend, her queen, her sister. Nevertheless, she can’t seem to forget that Padmé could be alive, raising her children, if she had trusted them a little more. If she hadn’t trusted Anakin Skywalker more than them. When Padmé had met the young Jedi again, it was like she had started to forget ten years of working together, back to back, of everything they had done. They should have dragged Padmé back to Naboo by the scruff of her neck, and not listened to the Chancellor’s offer to have Jedi guard her.

Rabé understands that not everything in this drama came from Padmé’s bad habits to let herself be swept into grand romantic gestures and think Love is enough, but anger is not always logical.

Padmé died and now all the handmaiden have is two orphans and a broken galaxy. They can’t do anything about Padmé, not anymore.

The rest….

The orphans will live, free of their father, and the galaxy will heal and they will make it quicker from their strength, even if they have to do terrible things for it.

Good people going to war can be the most cruel.

***************************************************************

Cordé and Obi-Wan are preparing their travel bags and having a row at the same time. The two of them are good at multitasking.

That Leia and her family need help, the two of them are of the same opinion. The reason they are yelling at each other like Bantha during mating season is about who should run to the rescue and who should stay to protect Luke.

“You’re on the most wanted list of the galaxy!” Cordé shouts, throwing her sharpening kit into her backpack.

“And you’re supposed to be dead!” Obi-Wan immediately shoots back, busy in their closet searching for his steel-toed boots, much more appropriate for combat, “Also, if the Inquisitors find them first, a Jedi is a wiser choice.”

“Yeah, for a target!!”

“Leia will need shielding,” Obi-Wan argues and Cordé immediately goes:

“Luke too. You’re always saying he’s on a cross-path of his training and he just had to scope you off the floor.”

“He didn’t-“

“You were convulsing, Ben, and you threw up!”

“I confess my Knight-bond with Ferus had developed more than I realized, more than he realized, but it doesn’t mean-“

“Everybody shuts up!” someone yells and Cordé and Obi-Wan turn as one to find Beru, standing hand in hand with her husband, just outside their bedroom.

“Beru,” Cordé starts, but the other woman cuts her off immediately.

“We don’t know how or why Vader attacked the Organas. And if he arrives here just after your departure, Owen and I are pitiful bodyguards against a Sith, or even against a squadron of Stormtroopers. We will kill a few and then what-“

“Owen-”, Obi-Wan starts to plead, but he stops at a sharp gesture from the farmer, and Beru continues.

“Leia will need a Jedi Master. Nothing is more dangerous than half-trained, you said it yourself, and we can’t bring all of them here without raising questions. Half the neighbourhood is already sure we are all sleeping with each other-“

“What?!”, Obi-Wan half yells and despite the circumstances, he goes red.

“-so, the time has come.”

“Come for what?” Cordé asks, her arms still full of clothes.

“Time to leave, all of us,” Beru says, quite pale.

Everything stops. Cordé looks at Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan looks back. Cordé does something complicated with her eyebrows and the corner of her mouth than her lover interprets, correctly, as no, you talk to them .

“This is your home-”, the former Jedi starts, but he’s interrupted again by Owen. The farmer always has little patience for niceties.

“Our family is our home. Yes, neither of us loves the idea of leaving Tatooine, and our parents’ graves, behind, but Luke is more important. Luke is everything, and he needs you and protection. But also us. Luke needs his family to survive and we don’t want him to grow up and learn one day that we didn’t send all the help we could to his sister.”

“And leaving him here vulnerable, isn’t possible either. So, we’re leaving. All of us.”

Time stops for a second, as Obi-Wan and Cordé seem to communicate silently again.

“Start packing,” Cordé says, “Also, I’m definitely not the one telling Luke we aren’t bringing young Biggs.”

********************************

Hyperspace is such a strange moment. Out of time. Nothing to do but to prepare for the crisis waiting at the end of the jump. A time out of time. Nothing to do but wait and hope it won’t be too late.

To sleep, when the adrenaline isn’t too high. To replenish strength and patience.

To train, when the jump is long enough. To prepare weapons, or anything else that could be necessary.

The ship is on autopilot.

Sabé sleeps six hours and then Yané does the same as Sabé double checks everything she can, again, until there is nothing to do but wait and pray.

“Pretty sure travel was quicker when we were younger,” Sabé grumbles and, despite the circumstances, Yané laughs. She was always doing her best work under pressure and, after Padmé, always had been the worst adrenaline junkie of all of them.

“Listen to you, old lady,” she quips, looking at her friend, “you could believe you’re eighty years old with this sort of discourse.”

“Sometimes, I feel eighty years old,” Sabé answers truthfully, and she doesn’t speak only of this mission’s exhaustion: brutal honesty makes her admit she aged less gracefully than Yané. Clandestine missions, too old shields on too old ships, nothing of this is good for the skin regimen and if Yané looks less than their age, Sabé is beginning to look more. But it’s good. They all looked too much alike, it was always a risk to let people remember what joined them at the beginning, Padmé and her and the others, their dedication to democracy. They try to never meet all of them at once, and if Sabé couldn’t resist Dormé and Gregar’s anniversary, it was stupid of her.

Yané’s smile turns wicked.

“A little birdy told me you found a young pretty thing to give you the time of the day, old croon or not.”

“Oh, not you too! Rabé can’t stop cackling about that and she wouldn’t recognize sexual attraction if it paraded around with feathers stuck in the ass!”

“Rabé is totally right. You so needed to get laid!”

“I get laid!”

“Ten minutes with a Rhodian smuggler whose real name you don’t know, that doesn’t count. Especially if you’re still half-dressed.”

“What exactly do you think my love life is?”

“Barren and sad, and also probably violent.”

“Thank you for the vote of confidence.”

“That’s what sisters are for, brutal honesty.”

“Eh! Not taking that from a woman who still can’t admit she has the hot for that very mustache-y rebel pilot.”

“I don’t have the hot for Antoc! I have met him perhaps four times.”

“-and I meet with the guy something like twice a month and I call him General Merrick. I rest my case….Eh, do you think he likes to be called Blue Leader in bed?”

“ Sabé !” Yané scoffs, red in a way Sabé hadn’t thought she could get anymore, flushed all the way down her cleavage, and pushes her from the bunk. In retaliation Sabé immediately grabs her ankle and throws her on the floor with her. Soon it devolves into giggles as they roll over on the hard floor like two little girls, and not the too-soon hardened women they had to become. For a moment, their concern for little Leia and her parents, and for their sister Eirtaé, is on the back of their minds, present, but less intrusive.

With the lives they had chosen, moments of reprieve are all they have.

*********************

Somewhere on Yavin, first lieutenant Cassian Andor is preparing his ship. All across the hangar, other operatives are doing the same, and all across the galaxy, messages are working their way to the Alliance’s cells. In the centre of the web, Davits Draven waits for the first message to redirect their efforts. Every hour, Mon Mothma herself passes her head through his door, her face as pale as her traditional dress, and he can only make a negative sign.

Nothing yet.

**************************************************************

On Bespin, Eirtaé easily finds them an apartment, somewhere to regroup and stay under the radar, as she works on their extraction. Numa is way too noticeable - this isn’t Alderaan with its liberal policies - so she stays with the Organas as Eirtaé sells the ship’s carcass to a scrap-merchant, hoping they dismantle it for pieces quickly, erasing more of their traces, then she hacks into the city mainframe. It was always one of her talents, and on Alderaan, waiting for the time Leia would really need her, she had the time to increase her skill. First, a message to her sisters. Always first. She would take a coldly furious handmaiden on all the spies of the Rebel Alliance in their fight against the Empire any day.

Then a message to Yavin. Then, she starts working on fake identifications for all of them. When she comes back to their safe house, Leia has woken up. She’s calmer and quite decided to avenge her Master.

“Revenge is not the Jedi way”, says Eirtaé, because how many times did she hear Ferus use that same sentence?

“I don’t have a Jedi Master anymore, Master Ollin died and I will never be a Jedi,” Leia says, her brow furrowed in anger against the unfairness of the world. Breha kisses her hair, looks at her husband and something passes between them.

“You’ll have another Jedi Master,” Bail says.

“There are no more Jedi,” Leia affirms, with the certitude of the young who heard that all their lives in the Imperial propaganda, “Master Olin had the luck to survive, but-”

“You’ll have another Jedi Master,” Bail says again, unshakable certitude in his voice.”

“But who?”

“No name, beloved, but he knew Ferus when he was your age, he even completed Ferus’ training at the end of the war, so I suppose he could teach you a few tricks. Shhh, no, no name. Go to bed, the days to come will be a trial.”

Leia scowls and she had never looked more like her biological mother. Eirtaé’s heart doesn’t break anymore anytime she thinks of Padmé, time had healed some pain, time and working on revenge and friendship with the Organas and that damned Jedi meditation Ferus had forced her to do every week for years, but it still makes something somersault into her chest.

****************************

Before putting foot on Bespin, Sabé and Yané arm themselves. Killing is never fun work, but that never stopped them before and it won’t stop them now. Obi-Wan and Cordé contacted them just before they touched down on the mining city. They are still days from them, and no one wants to take risks with young Luke’s safety, it’s enough that Leia is in danger.

Obi-Wan, Cordé and the Lars-Skywalker household will make contact with an Alliance Operative on Allyuen, a planet in the same sector as Bespin. The operative, a young man named Andor, will take back Luke and the Lars to Yavin, then Obi-Wan and Cordé will join their forces with Sabé and Yané, if those two haven’t already put the Organas and their cohort into a ship in direction of Yavin.

“It’s been five years since I saw Eirtaé,” Yané says, as she checks her ammunition.

“Well…she looks like us, if it helps you find her?” Sabé tries to lighten up the atmosphere and Yané gives her a small smile, before locking the ship.

Here they are, their most important mission yet over the last several years.

For Padme.

**************************

Zam almost lost the two handmaiden on Bespin. The two know their craft and are careful and patient. If Zam hadn’t been a Clawdite, she would have to abandon the tailing, or be spotted. As she’s one of the quicker Clawdite when she morphs, she changes faces a few times, abandons her hat - too distinctive - and doesn’t lose the two women. Her two hearts are beating in synchronicity, excitement of the hunt at its peak.

Sabé is the best type of prey: one with teeth and claws, the type who kills when cornered, Zam is sure of it. She knows how to recognize the signs.

Her blood sings in her veins, as it did in her far-away ancestors when hunting was to feed their brood, when it was about survival in a much more urgent way than in the modern world. Her nostrils flare for a second, going green, her control slipping, and she has to stop, to concentrate, to take back her appearance, a slightly overweight Twil’ek man. Then she continues to follow them, the scent of metal in her nose, the taste of victory on her tongue.

******************************************

First Lieutenant Andor has a moustache and a deep, visceral, dislike of the Jedi, but he’s too professional to let that fester into hate. Obi-Wan still hesitates to leave him in charge of Luke, Owen and Beru. Luke isn’t wearing a Padawan’s braid, of course, that would be stupid, but he’s still prone to Force accidents, like all Padawan whose power is developing quicker than their control. Things tend to float when he sleeps, to explode when he has a nightmare, or when he wants to impress someone he likes. Obi-Wan had to wipe away whole afternoons of the poor Darklighter boy’s mind.

Young Luke is instantly smitten with the officer and forgets his sulking about Biggs, but Obi-Wan needs more than dashing facial hair to trust people. Beru presses his hand in support. She knows the difficulties he has to go far away from the boy. Owen does the same thing on the other side and Obi-Wan pushes his worries into the Force. If young Andor isn’t as trustworthy as the Alliance believes he is, a couple of hardened Tatooine natives would be more to chew than he thinks. 

“Please come back”, Beru says, kissing his cheek.

“Yeah, you better do that,” Owen grumbles, then to Obi-Wan’s surprise, he kisses his cheek too. The farmer’s feelings run deeper than he likes people to believe, and always Obi-Wan let himself be surprised by how deep Owen’s devotion for his family went. And, without realizing it first, Owen and Obi-Wan become family years ago.

“We will,” Cordé swears, once she has received her own kisses. Obi-Wan doesn’t swear. His faith in the fairness of the world never really came back. Hand in hand with Cordé, he watches their new family leave, his heart heavy, then he takes a careful breath and sends his feelings into the Force, letting himself settle into his calm, ready to act.

For a second, he would swear he feels Ferus, a hand on Obi-Wan’s shoulder, and behind him Siri, and behind Siri the poor Adi Gallia, and it’s fitting, in a way, because he’s about to go rescue the last of their lineage. He closes his eyes and tells himself to stop dreaming. Leia needs them.

Together Cordé and he leave for Bespin.

******************************************

Sabé and Yané, after much detours, have joined the Organas, a Twilek woman and the missing handmaiden in a decrepit apartment at the periphery of the mining city. Under the appearance of an aging Rhodian, Zam observes the reunion of her prey through her binoculars. She found a good hiding place in an abandoned building across the street from where the reunion is happening.

In her visor, Zam sees the smile of Sabé, when Eirtaé folds the two arriving women into her arms and she feels for a second a little regret. Sabé never promised Leeanna anything and Zam as Leeanna never promised her anything, so she doesn’t know why she has any form of regret. Also, if Sabé didn’t want to die too young, she definitely shouldn’t have played rebels. In fact, Sabé is the only one responsible there and she has earned what is coming for her, even if what is coming is Vader .

Zam hesitates another second, then her hand seizes her comm’. No need to let that fester, her prey could scatter. A message to Piett and the Stormtroopers on Naboo will scoop down all the former handmaiden and their families, and the Stormtroopers on Bespin will do the same with the occupants of the apartment. Zam doesn’t even have to dirty her hands or to risk herself if the handmaiden training is as drastic as rumours go.

She can’t achieve her movement. The cold of a blaster’s canon presses against her neck and the voice is even colder than the metal, as frigid as Hoth in its worst season.

“Your hands where I can see them, Rhodian.”

Zam turns carefully, because she really doesn’t want to be shot at this distance. Above her, Ellé is watching her with bird of prey eyes. Does the Banking Clan give her so little work that she can disappear like that? Zam lets her see her hands open and empty, then she throws her leg into the handmaiden’s, escaping death by a hair when the shot destroys the floor a few centimetres from her head. Together they roll on the dirty floor, wrestling for the weapon. Zam lets out a yell when a well-placed hand almost dislocates her shoulder. Had she really been a Rhodian, it would have worked. Ellé is trained, it’s evident, but Zam makes her life of violence. She soon has the upper hand and seizes the weapon. There are enough of those damn women, Piett and Vader won’t cry for one dead, the others will give enough intel. The second before she presses the trigger, a noise catches her attention and she turns in alarm, with just enough time to see from the corner of her eyes a silhouette of a woman, nothing more than the impression of a flowing cloak, dark hair and furious dark eyes, and then pain, frying her conscience. She’s out before touching the floor.

The problem with handmaidens is to know exactly how many of them are here.

******************************

Motéé is helping her wife stand up, her heart beating wildly in her chest with the grim realisation than her beloved could have been killed, right here, right now, in front of her, when she hears Elée swear profusely, something she’d only heard twice in the years since they’d met. She turns to see what started it, because Elée has almost died way too much to let that phase her and push her to swearing.

The Rhodian is morphing, blue skin changing rapidly to green and the very much-not pretty head wound Motéé just gave him….her…them, now oozing green blood instead of the almost black of twenty seconds ago.

“What the kriff….” Motéé swears herself, then she takes a pair of handcuffs from inside her belt. No way are they letting them leave here now, she has too many questions. A Rhodian spying on a potential fruitful bounty in the form of the Organas is one thing, but Clawdite are rarer than sympathy in an Imperial officer, and this raises too many trumpeting warnings of dangers in Motéé’s head. She bounds the Clawdite, gags them with their own scarf and searches them, finding a blaster, two daggers, two comm and a garrotte.

“Sabé needs to know,” Elée says and Motée nods darkly. Something passes between them.

This, this exact situation, is Elée’s worst nightmare. Since they are a package deal, it means it’s Motée’s worst nightmare too. A Clawdite. They know perfectly well how dangerous Clawdite are. And how exorbitant their rates are. It’s certainly not for the Organa’s bounty, interesting but not world changing, that this one is there. A Clawdite. A kriffin Clawdite.

Despite the supposed secure com they use for their unofficial work, the handmaidens have a long list of coded messages to insure safety if the supposed secure com’ aren’t so secure. But they have nothing for “Found a Clawdite, one of the most expensive race of bounty hunters, spying on you”, so Motée settles for the message meaning that a new problem has arisen and they need to speak, adding the number of the dock where her and Elée’s ship is, plus fifty that Sabé will know to subtract.

The Clawdite is heavy, all muscle, but they don’t need to be very discreet in this abandoned building, and if their head once, or perhaps twice, comes into hard contact with the floor, nobody will yell at them for it. Also, they tried to kill Elée, they should be happy Motée hasn’t already shot them in the gut, one of the nastier deaths.

There is a carefully dissimulated cell in their ship, most of the time used for contraband needed by the rebellion but also a few times for still chipped clones who didn’t understand, yet, that they needed to abandon the Empire and follow the former handmaidens for safe passage to a surgeon who would dechipp them. Perfect for their prisoner. The pulse is regular and the pupils are reacting nicely; the others can’t ask more of her than this quick check-up. Motée even leaves them water, before closing the hidden door and throwing herself in Elée’s arms.

“I thought I would lose you,” she whispers, and she lets the fear come, the fear she had to push down when the Clawdite almost killed her beloved, because they hadn’t the time, she just couldn’t break apart there…. Now Motée let the tears come, and when Elée kisses her tenderly, in reassurance, much more composed in the face of her potential death, Motée surges against her, answers the kiss with feverish passion and hunger. Her love burns in her veins, filling her entire being. She loves Elée like she has never loved anything in the whole galaxy; she loves Elée enough to break worlds for her, and it has become a defining part of herself. She is Motée, she is a child of Naboo, and she’s in love with Elée.

They came to work in Amidala’s service once the former Queen was already a Senator, and upon meeting Elée, Motée had immediately been drawn to her intelligence and her dry humour. She hadn’t needed more than a few weeks to be totally smitten with Elée, despite the other handmaiden keeping her at arm’s length. It was only later, when Motée learnt Elée’s secret - the secret that only Padmé, Typho, and Sabé knew - that Motée understood it hadn’t been because Elée wasn’t interested that she had fought the spark between them so hard.

Later, after Padmé’s death, Motée had been here, her hand in Elée’s own hand, when the other had decided to tell her secret to all their sister handmaidens. She had been there in the good days, in the worst days, and she had been the happiest woman in the world when Elée had accepted when Motée asked her to become her wife.

And she won’t let that mysterious Clawdite destroy what they built.

She kisses her wife another time.

“Let me see you,” she asks, and it isn’t an order. It’s the supplication of a priest to their goddess. Elée complies, let’s her beloved see everything she is, as naked as she can be, offered in her truth and nudity like she only ever was with Motée. 

Her wife kisses her again and again and again, letting the rest of the world fade for a moment. It’s pretty irresponsible, but she needs the reassurance, and she isn’t the only one if Elée’s reaction is a clue. They sink into their love with fervor, Motée worshiping her beloved, and for a moment, all is well. Time has no meaning anymore, and they don’t care.

It wouldn’t be the first time Sabé catches them in flagrante delicto ; much more is needed to faze her.

Later, Elée is sleeping when Motée’s comm let’s her know Sabé is there. Motée leaves her wife in their bed and goes to open the ship to her sister and commanding officer.

“Tell me you didn’t capture another Imperial officer,” Sabé asks, almost amused, when she sees Motée guiding her to the cell, but the smirk wipes itself off her face when she sees their prisoner.

“Why did you put her-” she starts, and she stops when the Clawdite rolls over, waking up, letting them see their face better.

Sabé swore viciously.

The Clawdite opens their eyes and for a moment, Sabé would swear something like regret, surprise, and fear fight for control of their facial expression, until they control it better.

“Sabé”, they hiss, “decoy, handmaiden, traitor to the Empire and kriffin spy.”

“You will forgive me if I don’t do you the honour of saluting you,” Sabé answers, cocking a sarcastic eyebrow, “since I have no idea of who you are.”

The Clawdite morphs and the face of Sabé’s new lover, who all the handmaidens teases her about, watches her from behind the bars. Motée rushes to her as Sabé falters for a second, but the other handmaiden is made from Naboo’s steel. Her voice is firm when she orders Motée:

“Wake up your wife and prep the ship. We leave in thirty minutes,” then she closes the door, not letting the prisoner protest, argue, or anything, just closes the door in their face like her whole world didn’t just break apart.

“Sabé,” Motée tries but her friend stops her.

“Not every story is as happy as yours. Prep the ship. We need to know what they know, but we can’t stay here much longer. I know a safe place not so far away. I just need to send the Organas to safety first.”

******************************************************

At the edge of the spatioport, Obi-Wan falls into Bail Organa’s arms with a convulsive sigh. Another old friend he wasn’t sure he would see again. Around his shoulders Bail’s arms are kind and comforting, they speak of simpler times, when Obi-Wan was just a Padawan and Bail just one of the many suitors of the Alderaan princess and heir, not the most well-born one and not even born on Alderaan itself, but on Coruscant from a small employee of the Alderaan diaspora. They were fast friends, and Bail’s friendship is the type that would rearrange worlds to protect those he loves, but would never accept a compromise to his soul like Anakin did.

“I missed you,” Bail admits, without any of that macho idiocy which pollutes many human cultures. In the Force it feels like a warm blanket in a cold night, like the first taste of ale after a long day. In the Force, there is also Breha’s hope, the handmaidens’ steadfast will, the pilot’s curiosity, and Leia’s jealousy, because hatt’s her father, hers. Obi-Wan half-turns to the princess.

“You’re projecting, young one,” he admonishes kindly, and Leia gasps, as his face is revealed in plain light, letting her recognize him, when her young power had failed against his shields.

“You’re-”

“Late,” Sabé cuts in, her face hard “And there has been a scaly complication. Take them, but by the long road. As careful as you can, even if you have to totally empty the urgency funds. No needs to attract unpleasant cockroaches, stay moving until I tell you everything is safe.”

She isn’t talking to Obi-Wan, but to Cordé, her sister, and the other nods. Immediately she guides the Queen away with a hand under her arm to support her.

Sabé stays to watch them take off. She would have loved to go with them. On her stops on Alderaan, she has never talked with Leia, only observed from afar, and the reports of Eirtaé certainly aren’t the same as knowing Padmé’s daughter the same way she has the chance to talk with Luke when she stays a few days on Tatooine.

But her lover just revealed herself to be probably a plant, and Sabé won’t take risks.

In Motée and Elée’s ship, the first thing she does, once they are in hyperspace, is let them scan her, from her toes to her hairs, and then do it again, searching for an implant, a device, anything she would have been implanted with during her sleep that could endanger the Rebellion.

Thank the Force, she didn’t go on Yavin since she met pseudo- Leeanna, but she met with different spies cells on Naboo and in neighbouring systems.

They found nothing, and Sabé breaths a little more freely.

********************************************************

In a little ship rushing to the relative safety of Yavin, First Lieutenant Cassian Andor is trying really hard to dislike the baby Jedi. Young Luke’s solar disposition doesn’t seem to care that Andor dislikes Jedi, that he’s a former Separatist, that he has blood on his hands. He pesters him for stories of the Alliance, for stories about the worlds he visited, about the ships he piloted, the other spies he meets, all the species and stars he saw, the missions he took and the food he tried. And also the blaster he uses. Which, Cassian is only ninety percent sure that one wasn’t an innuendo because the rural ones can be a surprise in that category. The boy makes comments about his ship, his droid, his fly paths, his encryption, his orders, and he’s always, always underfoot.

Once or twice, Cassian barked, but kicking a puppy doesn’t come easy to him, no matter how he tries to harden himself. He knows Draven shields him from the most disgusting  missions due to his young age.

The two older ones - the Aunt and Uncle - are watching all of this and Cassian is almost certain they are laughing about it. He heard the words: “Like young Biggs again.” He doesn’t want to know.

************************

Rushing in another direction, another ship is carrying hope in the form of a sleeping princess who was dreaming once again of two suns and dunes of sand, something she never understood since not one of the worlds she visited with her parents in diplomatic travels looks like that.

Imitating Leia, the ship is sleeping around them. The only lights are in the cockpit where Yané is keeping an eye on things and the emergency night lights in the other rooms. Numa should sleep. She really really should; the last few days have been exhausting and she would bet more money than she had than the ones to come will be the same, but she has, right there, on the other side of the small hallways, answers to questions she has been asking herself for years.

She crosses the hallway and doesn’t have time to knock, the door already opening.

Numa:

“I will be in the cockpit,” the brown-haired woman whose name she didn’t learn, and who looks so much like Eirtaé, Sabé and Yané, says and she leaves Numa there, the door open.

“Young Numa,” Master Kenobi smiles where he’s sitting on a small mat, “Come in, I was waiting for you. Tea?”

“I don’t want…I don’t want to bother you-“

“You certainly don’t. Do I suppose correctly, if I say you wanted to ask me about some old friend’s fate?”

“Boil? Waxer? You know what-“

“Come inside Numa. I have some good, and some terrible news.”

Later, Numa drifts across the ship without goal, her eyes reddened. One alive. She supposes it should feel miraculous, after all this time, in the world they are living in. She still feels her heart breaking. She takes a wrong turn, and instead of her cabin, she’s in the cargo hold. Eirtaé, which Numa thought was sleeping, has pushed around supplies, and is doing some slow movements, looking like a strange dance that Numa can’t recognize.

“Whose ass am I supposed to kick for making you cry?” The former handmaiden asks, and Numa would swear the other woman hadn’t opened her eyes.

“I’m an adult,” she protests, “I can do my own ass-kicking.”

A smile passes on Eirtaé’s mouth. She still doesn’t open her eyes, just continues her strange movements. It’s calming and hypnotizing and Numa needs another ten minutes to realize that, perhaps, she’s intruding.

“Sorry, I will-“

“You can stay. Do you want to try? I discovered occupying the body can help clear the mind and the soul.”

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“Jedi’s katas. Of course, I can’t jump twenty meters, but the simpler of them don’t need Force powers.”

“Master Olin taught you.”

“Yes, he did.”

Eirtaé stops her strange dance and opens her eyes. They are red too.

“I have a lot of sisters,” she says, “Dangerous and well-armed and taking terrible risks every day. I haven’t seen most of them for a long time, it was too much risk. Sabé served as a link between all of us, and I always knew I could lose one, or all of them. But it has taken Ferus’ death to realize those years on Alderaan working with him, sharing our secrets, gave me a brother, and I hadn’t realized before losing him.”

“I think he knew,” Numa reassures, “Even if you didn’t tell him. Jedi are supposed to be really smart.”

Eirtaé makes a rude noise at this affirmation, but doesn’t comment and assumes the position again.

“Come,” she says, “I will teach you what my brother taught me.”

Numa goes to her and tries to mimic her position.

Somewhere in the Force, there is a laughter, clear and free, and Obi-Wan, already asleep in the cradle of Cordé’s arms, smiles in his sleep, his dreams full of his brethren in the Force, and among them Ferus, healed and whole and happy.

***********************************************************

The moon is covered in water, dyed purple by the presence of some algae, and orbiting a planet unfit for most life forms since an ecological disaster a long time ago, almost at the beginning of the Republic. It’s so out of the way from anything that nobody ever made the effort to terraform it again into something which could be inhabited, and the only archipelago of the moon isn’t big enough for a real city. It’s even too small for a Rebel Base, too far away from where Rebel troops need to go.

It’s perfect for a hidden treasure.

Motée and Elée know of it, there is no secret between the handmaidens, not since Elée chose to share hers, but they didn’t know the exact place, and they had never come.

They can see silhouettes running to the biggest building when they land. They don’t leave the ship, they wait just at the end of the ramp with Sabé, and soon two adults leave the building.

One is a Mirialan woman, missing an arm and a blindfold across her eyes, guiding herself with her surviving hand on the other woman’s shoulder. That woman, Motée doesn’t know the species of. She’s paler than Naboo’s marble, with white hair and as thin as a whip, and her eyes are stony when she watches them.

“Why the fuck did you bring them there?” she bites to Sabé and the Mirialan presses on her shoulder with an appeasing noise.

“Sabé knows only to come if it’s vital, love.” And Motée isn’t about to judge people for their taste, but she can’t imagine someone less accepting of being called love than that predator of a woman, but to Motée’s surprise, the woman unwinds a minuscule amount, pressing against the other.

“I am Luminara,” the blind woman offers, “and this is Asajj. Welcome to the Last Sanctuary, Motée and Elée. Any sisters of Sabé are welcome here.”

Motée would be surprised to be identified so easily when even friends sometimes mess up identifying the handmaidens from each other, but Jedi, even blind Jedi, see things that she can’t really understand. Even if she doesn’t like it, she has learned to accept it.

They follow the two women inside and Motée can’t stop himself from smiling when she sees curious gazes studying them from the windows. Her teenage years aren’t so far away that she can’t remember how it was and she wasn’t raised hidden, far away from nothing, with just two teachers and twenty-two other children from various species.

“Everybody to their rooms,” Asajj barks, and the way the teenagers smile while obeying prove to Motée that they don’t fear her bite for one second. What a strange life it must be. A blind Jedi Master, one of the few survivors of Order 66, the twenty Jedi children who were with her on that fated day on their way to Illum, and the ex-Sith who rescued them….

Luminara insists on postponing the discussion until they have all a cup of tea in front of them. Then Sabé tells them everything, not even disguising her relationship with the plant. Motée and Elée are sitting at her side, silent supports. It’s been years since Sabé’s last serious relationship, since she let herself have more than a passing tumble in the sheets with a contact, and their hearts bleed for her. 

In the game of spies, honey traps are a classic move, they used one themselves on Panaka, after all. That doesn’t mean the pill isn’t hard to swallow, bitter and burning in the back of their throats.

 Sabé is a good person, despite so much blood on her hands. She helped them find each other when Elée doubted if she should share her secret with Motée, she fought so hard for years….They really had hoped she could find a little happiness. Luminara and Asajj listen attentively, only stopping Sabé for clarifications.

“You did good bringing her here,” Luminara says finally, “Obi-Wan’s survival needs to stay secret as long as possible. No need for someone to question the official version of what happened exactly after the fight of Mustafar, the secrets of the twin’s existence must be kept.”

The Jedi, followed by her lover who refuses to leave her alone with the bounty hunter, goes to interrogate the prisoner in the ship. They need to know how much the fake Leeanna learnt.

Once their teachers have left, curious eyes peek at the three handmaiden from every door in the room and Elée stood up and asked them for the kitchen, promising them a tale of one of their missions during the clone wars as a way to distract them and to offer Motée a little time alone with Sabé.

“I should have known,” Sabé finally says, something she didn’t try to say in front of the Jedi when she was keeping herself to fact, not feeling.

“Clawdite are very good at what they do,” Motée chided gently, “Sometimes so good they almost trick themselves. And it can still be-“

“Don’t. Don’t try to tell me that perhaps something wasn’t totally a lie.”

“Clawdite are as complicated as every other sentient. Their power-“

“Please, not now. I have nothing against Clawdite, this isn’t an attack on their nature or something, I will not become anti-Clawdite, you don’t have to….Not every story is as happy as yours, ok? I know you’re trying to cheer me up, but I assure you, you don’t need to. She didn’t do to me anything different than what Saché did, at my behest, to Panaka. In fact, it’s almost funny. Divine retribution or something like that.”

Motée has the grace to wince. Once, a long time ago, Panaka taught them, all of them, when they were young girls. It was before Naboo’s invasion, before they made the choices to go farther themselves. The things Sabé and Padmé and the other handmaidens had seen had changed them. They had thrown themselves into additional training, and used it wisely, before the Clone Wars. Before Padmé stopped trusting them with everything, before Padmé refused to believe them when they proclaimed Anakin Skywalker bad news.

Yes, long ago Panaka was their first teacher. His choices, and the choices they made for him because of his choices, would always leave a sour taste in their mouths.

Sabé is continuing:

“….I don’t find it very funny. Panaka let his soul be corrupted by greed. What he did to the Gungan….Yes, yes it was horrible. But I have more than thirty kills in my name since the end of the Clone Wars and I don’t think their family would judge me a better person than kriffin Panaka.”

Motée doesn’t know what to say anymore. Sometimes, she fears Sabé  feels quite alone, despite all of them, in a way they don’t know how to correct. They all lost Padmé, but Sabé is the only one whose wound refused to close, and her life, working full time to construct Naboo’s spy ring, didn’t let her forge connections to someone else. They all had believed for the time that Kryze could be it, but the other woman had Mandalore in her blood the way Sabé has Naboo, and Padmé.

It all comes back to Padmé for Sabé, always.

Motée never dares to ask if there had been, once, something more between the two of them, or if Sabé had wished for it. Some pain is better left undisturbed.

With a silent sigh, Motée embraces Sabé, kisses her hair.

“We’re here for you, and we always will be,” she whispers and she feels a tremble run through Sabé.

Someone clears her voice. It’s Asaaj. For a second, Motée is sure she sees pity on her face, but the expression disappears before she can be sure.

“The Clawdite doesn’t know anything about Kenobi, or the pups of Amidala,” she says, “But she was sent by Vader, and she knows about your extracurricular activities.”

Sabé takes the name of a whole pantheon in vain, proving she learned quite the colourful vocabulary in her travels.

***********************************************************

It has been four days since Zam Wessel was supposed to contact him, and her comm’ stays silent every time Piett tries to raise her. The officer is beginning to panic.

He never panics. Never.

Lord Vader is quite busy right now terrorizing a faraway sector, every day brings new reports of dead rebels and planets shakily prostrating themselves, but he will come back and, as every time since Wessel has been sent to Naboo, his first questions to Piett will be about the Clawdite and her eventual findings. At the beginning Piett had been honoured Vader would choose him from the long list of Imperial junior officers for this mission. It had been a few years since his last promotion, he had seen younger officers passing ahead of him, officers with records which weren’t as good as his but with better connections. He should have been Captain already, but he knew that there was little chance of it. He’d needed an exploit, one that would make a splash big enough that the Moff of his sector or his direct superiors couldn’t attribute his results to themselves. 

So, Vader had seemed like a gift from the old goods.

Now, it seems more like a malediction from said old goods.

If Vader doesn’t get what he wants, a frostily worded letter to Piett’s immediate superior has very little chance to be his reaction. And it seems Vader would never get what he wants, if their spy is dead in a sewer somewhere on Naboo, or if she ran away. Piett sends a message to the flight deck. It’s time he stepped in.

What is the name of that Moff….Panaka. Well, Moff Panaka better had answers, because Piett has a lot of questions.

**************************

The message of Firmus Piett’s arrival never gets to Panaka’s office. That night, Panaka sleeps the sleep of the heavily drugged and Saché slowly, cautiously, reaches Dormé and Gregar’s house by less-travelled streets, her head ensconced into her darkest cloak, her personal comm dutifully sitting at home, where it will bear witness to anyone searching its history that she stayed all night. Dormé and her husband live in a small house, smaller than their salaries could afford. Everybody knows Typho has to support parents living far away and gambling way too much, he doesn’t make a secret of it. Of course, the fact that he’s speaking so freely of something so shameful in Naboo’s culture means nobody ever thought of checking it, or found it strange that Dormé’s parents too, left Naboo long ago. Or to check even deeper and to realize than all the handmaiden’s surviving families are either far away from Naboo, disappeared years ago, or living less than ten minutes by speeders from the Naboo Royal Space Fighter Corps headquarters and flight deck, assuring a quick getaway if necessary.

At the back of this house, there is a safe room, one where no known technology could spy on them.

Saché arrives last and, in silence, she puts the message on the table. Their contacts flagged Piett long ago as working for Vader and in silence all of them watch it, once, twice, then a third time, their faces grim, before turning as one to Rabé, their de facto leader in Sabé’s absence. Even Apailana and Pooja, former Queen and present Senator, even Gregar, top Intelligence officer, defer to the handmaiden’s leadership.

“It’s time,” Rabé says, her eyes dark and sad, but iron in her spine, “Everybody knows what they have to do.”

She puts her arm around Saché’s waist.

“Do you need help?” She asks, so, so gently, an older sister concerned even if they are only one month apart and Saché is, in fact, the older.

“No,” Saché refuses, turning to push her head against her sister in everything but blood, asking for silent comfort, “No, I could never watch myself in the mirror again if I don’t do it myself. I knew it would come to this and I would judge myself a coward if I shielded myself from it.”

“I would shield every one of you from something like this if I could,” Rabé admits and despite the circumstances, Saché smiles.

“As would I. But we swore we’d give everything to destroy the Empire, even at the cost of our honours and morals. Naboo didn’t see Palpatine’s true nature in time, it’s our duty to stop him now.”

Panaka is smiling in his sleep when Saché comes back with Versé. She knew, the moment she read the message, that it would come to this, so she made sure to give him the nicest evening. His favourite food, favourite music and she wore that red thing in lace, which she found vulgar but always made his eyes cross. He was abhorrent in his politics with the Gungan, so ambitious he forgot his soul and oaths along the way, and he would have abandoned her in a second to better his career, but Saché isn’t a cruel person by nature. She doesn’t see any reason to let his last moments be of betrayal, so she doesn’t wake him up. The medics who will perform the autopsy will hide the drugs: they have been working on every contingency for a long time and have more accomplices on Naboo than the Imperials will ever know.

For all his planning and evil wrongdoings, Palpatine doesn’t understand the danger of good people going to war, every one of them in their own capacity. This is why, in the end, he will lose. No matter how many souls he succeeds in polluting, like he did with Panaka, who traded his principles for power, he will lose.

Saché lets herself have a minute looking at him. She had other lovers before, but no one longer than him.

After that minute, she puts a shot into his head without hesitation.

Versé helps her break a window, ravages the apartment, then the blaster disappears into her dark clothes. She grimaces but Saché nods decisively, and Versé throws the first punch.

****************************

That night, Commander Gregar Typho cries against his dear wife’s shoulder. He cries for the uncle he had when he was young, who always had stories and sweets for him, who first taught him piloting, who supported him when he was an insecure teenager waiting impatiently for a growth spurt. He cries for his mother who lost her brother long before Saché executed him, when ambition warped Panaka so much she couldn’t recognize him.

So, Gregar cries, without shame, because grief is human, safe in Dormé’s arms. He cries for the redemption of his uncle, which now will never come, he cries for what could have been. He cries because he contributed to building the spy ring which killed his uncle and helped Saché seduce him in giving her everything he knew about him.

He cries and mourns his family member, one last time, because tomorrow he will be one of the people tasked in making sure the identity of Panaka’s killer stays secret long enough for them to finish their tasks on Naboo.

But for this night, he lets himself mourn the man he helped kill.

**************************************

There is an interior fountain in the room where Piett was. The poor little boy, the Outer Rim one, who still lives in him despite his best efforts, would marvel at the fact if he had a minute, would listen to its delicate music, but he can’t because of the desperate woman sitting next to him.

The Moff’s lover is crying so hard that Piett has given up making her stop quickly and is just patting her silk-covered shoulder at the appropriate intervals. He understands her difficulties to find calm. Her lover was just murdered in front of her, and she was really lucky to escape with her life herself, as the horrible bruises on her face and hands bear witness. Some of them are defensive wounds - she tried to defend herself, waken up just in time by the noise of the blaster shot killing her lover next to her in the bed. Piett admires her courage.

A handful of women, one of them the Moff’s own nephew’s wife, are going in and out, pressing beverages into his hand, pushing salts under the poor heartbroken Saché’s nose, and undergoing mysterious feminine rituals that Firmus doesn’t understand. Raised by only his father in a heavily-male colony, the Naboo women - bejewelled and perfumed and all flowing dresses - are a bit of a shock to his system.

One of them presses another cup into his hands. He’s pretty sure the traditional mourning Naboo tea, whose name he already can’t remember, is flavoured with a big splash of grain alcohol, but every culture handles grief its own way. He would like to stop drinking it, but he doesn’t know how to say that politely. His superiors never let him do diplomatic work. Despite his efforts, he never really lost his accent, and his manners are not those of a Core-raised gentleman officer, as he heard once one of them say when the other didn’t know Firmus was there. He doesn’t want to make a mistake, not when everybody has been so welcoming despite the occasion.

Saché lets out another mournful sound, then makes her handkerchief disappear, and raises her grey laces veil and turns to him again. Her eyes are immense, burning with unshed tears, as inescapable as a nebula. Her small hands press against one of his as she laments the Moff’s murder and tells him again what a wonderful man Panaka had been.

“We will find them, my lady,” he swears, forgetting for a moment the reason behind his arrival on Naboo.

She throws himself into his arms, crying again against his chest and calling him a good man, the best officer she had met, and suddenly he’s ten meters tall, a Knight of the old times and he babbles words without sense, his arms trembling a little as he tries to comfort her. Vader and Zam Wessel have never been further from his mind.

*********************************

Versé arrives at the Gungan camp much later than she would have liked too, but sometimes mechanic troubles can defeat even the most perfect planning. But it will be enough. It has to be enough.

Relations between humans and Gungans have always been difficult. The humans populating Naboo right now don’t really like to remember they immigrated there, that the Gungans were there first. At the end of the Naboo siege was a better time period, but now it’s worse than ever. There is no place for aliens in Palpatine’s vision of the world.Now that the Jedi aren't there anymore to take the fall, whatever goes wrong in this Empire is blamed, nine times out of ten, on aliens. 

Sabé and her sisters, and everyone else who was recruited in the Naboo spy ring, knew that if they were discovered not only would they die, but also their families and most of their colleagues. The Gungans would be persecuted even worse. That’s why planning for their eventual discovery has always been high on their list, and slowly over  the years they have taken to exfiltrating people under dozens of pretexts. Versé’s parents died in the Naboo Siege, but her brother is safe and far away, manning a space station under a false name established by the Alliance…and helping the Rebels every occasion he has. Sabé’s mother is a medic on Yavin. Gregar’s parents are running a safe house in Hutt’s space….

All good people going to war….

Versé is introduced to the Gungan leaders immediately. They, too, knew this day would come, but they still provided support and every sort of help they could, even in a galaxy where they no longer have access to a position of power.

Jar-Jar is among them, an old memory and a friendly face. He really learned a lot in those last years, and he fought valiantly in the Senate, until he escaped one murder attempt too many and had no more choice but to retire to preserve his failing health. The law stopping the non-human from getting elected was passed just a few months after.

Versé bows deeply to their allies then delivers her message.

“It is time.”

The Gungan’s council watch each other in silence, weariness and exhaustion full in their eyes. The last years haven’t been kind to their people, but it was a known quantity, and they will now step into the unknown. They make a place among them for Versé, she sits cross-legged next to Jar-Jar and they go over the plan one last time.

**********************************************************

Everywhere across the galaxy, the message travels. The Naboo’s ring has been discovered. It is time.

Time for those too deeply associated with them to quietly disappear.

Time for others to handle their work, for them to regroup.

It is time.

Time to burn bridges, time to let the world know Naboo’s children aren’t of the same metal as Palpatine.

It is time.

On Mandalore, Bo-Katan Kryze raises a glass to the memory of dark hair against a pillow and mischievous eyes. No one will be hidden there: Mandalore is an explosion waiting to happen, but for a second, Bo-Katan regrets it. There is anger in the handmaiden, all of them, a cold fire that a Mandalorian can only admire.

In a working camp on a mining moon, a man who answered to the name Bertin Vindy for years introduces a virus into the computer and wipes out lists of political prisoners, bolt the barracks down to imprison the troopers, then shoots the camp’s commander. He then opens the camp’s prisoner’s leader cell with the words “This is a rescue, please don’t brain me up with this chair,” and despite the work waiting for him, the challenge of convincing the man that he really is the contact who has been passing him messages for months, helping evacuate the camp, and guiding them to the rendezvous point, the man can’t stop smiling because soon, he will see his sister Dormé again.

In the Naboo embassy on Coruscant, the Ambassador, one of Palpatine’s most ferocious supporters, meets an impromptu death choking on his poisoned herbal tea as the newly appointed Naboo Senator, Pooja Naberrie, is already cracking down his terminal, not even waiting for him to die. “I won’t mourn you,” she says to the man who had been her mentor, “Not with so much Gungan blood on your hands. I hope they find you in the afterlife!”. Her face is hard, nothing like the young, promising public servant he hoped to finally put in his bed, now that he assured her career.

On Rodia, the entire Farr’s family disappears during the night. The Empire will need almost a week to understand the disappearance of a very pricey cargo of kyber, whose ships always refuel on Rodia between Illum and Naboo, had a connection with their disappearance.

On Naboo itself, Padmé’s parents find Eirtaé on their front door at the same moment that Padmé’s sister and brother in law find Fé, both with the same message. Time to pack.

In the Academy, eighty pilots desert, stealing transport troop ships, a lot of pieces and twelve tightly cuffed clone troopers. All born on Naboo.

All across the Empire, people disappear. Never top officers, always just under them. The people who do the real work. Computers are sliced or destroyed, important materials disappear, pricey resources are loaded on stolen ships, and prisoners disappear from their cells with the people supposed to guard them.

It’s done without blood, or well, almost without blood. The handmaiden were always of the opinion that if someone should dirty their hands it should be them, but some targets are too tempting.

People simply open closets, strap ready to go bags on their shoulders and disappear after sabotaging important infrastructures, stealing intel, or destroying long and costly projects.

************************

Firmus Piett takes another turn in the hallway.

Nope, not there. Is the Theed’s palace growing bigger or something? He has been searching the good room for something like twenty minutes, and he has not seen another soul in this time. He’s pretty sure there were more people when he arrived, four days ago. Where have all the public servants gone?

“Are you lost?” a woman’s voice asks.

He jumps in the air in a way far from correct for an Imperial Officer and almost falls when turning. For a second he believes it’s Lady Saché, but the clothes are too bright for her grief, the hair is shorter, and the eyes the wrong shade.

The resemblance is still eerie.

“Hem.” Firmus says.

The Empire teaches his officers about handling officials, but it’s always implied the officer is the one in the position of power and that they could crush any civil servant under their boots. The Naboo… Firmus wants the people of Naboo to like him, he has no desire to crush anyone under his heels when it could pain Lady Saché.

“You’re Firmus Piett,” the woman says, “Saché talked about you.”

“Really?”

She inclines her head, regal.

“I’m Fé,” she says, “One of her friends. She said you were a wonderful help, very gentlemanly.”

“Hem, I only did my duty as an officer and a gentleman.”

Fé turns and, gaze above his shoulder, asks:

“Can I guide you to Saché?” and he scrambles to follow.

“You know,” she starts again, “Not all officers are like you…. Please, be gentle with Saché, she suffered enough.”

“The murder-”

“I’m not talking about her lover’s death.”

Firmus shivers with horror at the idea that perhaps, Moff Panaka didn’t treat the young woman the way he should have. In silence, he follows Fé in the deserted palace.

Saché smiles when she sees him and something knotted for years in his chest, slowly stomped on by his hard life, by his training, unfurls painfully.

He can’t see, from the other side of the garden, Fé joining Rabé. Together, the two women watch as the officer awkwardly offers his arm to Saché and Saché taking it.

“We should never have let Saché handle Panaka. She really is too good for that sort of job. Watch her. This man she met a few days ago already has her smiling more real smiles than Panaka ever did,” Rabé says.

“Since she had to kill him, I would say it’s better she didn’t really like him. Also, who else? She was the only one celibate and interested in men at the time.”

“I should have done it.”

“That would have been worse! Rabé, you don’t even like sex.”

“It bores me, I really don’t see the interest, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do it.”

“By the Goddesses, I’m not having this conversation. Keep an eye on them, I’m going to make sure the little Queen is all packed.”

*************************************

The old clone is heavily limping, more a crab walk than anything else. He always refuses the Alliance medics’ offers to operate to gain back the mobility he lost in a battle between the Rebels and an outpost of the Empire. The time they took that Sith-damned chip out of his head was the last time he went under the knife, and he refuses to go under again . They respect that. There is enough work to do in the Alliance, they don’t need another fighter, not when he can be useful in a thousand other ways across the base. He rarely goes far away from Command, but this morning he’s in the flight hangar, fidgeting like a shiny.

And when the shuttle lands, he’s the quickest to it. The door opens, and they stare at each other in silence for a few, frozen seconds, cataloguing all the ways they have changed, before little Numa throws herself into his arms and he cries for his vod who can’t be there to share that moment.

Still on the ramp of the ship, Obi-Wan watches them with tenderness. He understands the necessity for the careful compartmentalisation of the Alliance Rebel and their allies, but Numa should have known her old friend was alive long ago, without needing to meet Obi-Wan or to come to Yavin.

A shout with his name distracts him from the tearful reunion and he opens his arms just in time as Luke, who has forgotten for a moment that he has gotten almost as tall as Ben, flies into them with great force,throwing his arms around him like he did when he was seven and that Ben’s arms were the best refuge in the world.

“I was afraid I would never see you again,” Luke admits and Obi-Wan doesn’t answer, doesn’t swear he always will come back, because that isn’t a promise he can make to his beloved Padawan.

“I will never totally leave you,” he says instead, “Even the day I join the Force, my spark will walk Its paths in your company.”

He presses a paternal kiss against Luke’s hair. He helped raise Luke since he was a little more than one year old, after Sabé and the handmaidens found him. After he and Cordé started to live on the farm and he had shed Jedi’s shame about physical affections.

“Uncle Ben?” Luke asks, forgetting the more formal title he has adopted years ago in favour of his childhood name for the man. Obi-Wan is reminded in that moment that Luke can feel his emotions as he watches Obi-Wan with surprise.

“There is someone I want you to meet,”the old Jedi says, placing a hand against the small of Luke's back to guide him into the ship. To Lei a . Across the hangar, Cordé is making the presentation between the Organa and the Lars, and she turns to him like she’s the mind reading one in their couple, not him, and gives him a nod.

Luke and Leia will have time alone, Cordé will play the role of distraction to give them the time.

*************************************************

Pooja Naberrie is watching Coruscant become smaller in the viewport. At her side, Apailana is already sleeping. She always takes medications during take off. Without it, leaving atmosphere gives her horrible headaches, a symptom of the horrible wounds inflicted on her on the assassination attempt the Empire blamed the Gungans for.

The assassination attempt had been what pushed Pooja over the edge. 

She had begun to speak more vehemently against the Empire, and something would probably have happened to her too, if one day she hadn’t found Sabé on her balcony. The former handmaiden recruited her, trained her, and Pooja’s arrival to the Senate was her work, even more than Pooja’s own. With a smile, the young Naberrie pat the console on her side, full of intel that will make Davits Draven himself offer one of his twice a year smiles.

**************************************************

Zam wakes up in the cell. It’s a surprise, like every time it happened. She would have thought Sa- her target would have killed her by now.

It’s a game after all, between a hunter and a prey. It’s supposed to be like that. The bounty hunter tracks his, or her, prey, and takes them to the Empire, or the prey kills them and runs a little longer.

The motors of the ship are running.

The door of the cell opens. Sabé is there, blaster at her side, but not drawn. Her eyes are hard. Gone is the mask of the nice mechanic and Zam’s blood burns. Sabé has never been more desirable. For a second, she thinks to ask for a last fuck, then doesn’t. A bounty hunter has to have some pride.

Instead, she asks:

“Why am I still alive?”

“Because I’m a giant hypocrite apparently, incapable of doing what I asked of others.”

Nobody ever accused Zam of being something other than smart.

“Panaka is dead, then.”

Sabé nods.

“Where are we going?”

“To Naboo.”

“Easier to disappear a body there? Don’t you have an airlock?”

“I’m not going to kill you.”

This time, Zam is really surprised.

“Why?”

“Because there is enough death every day in the Empire. Because I’m an idiot. Because my sisters are too used to taking my orders. Because I’m still hoping I could make you a double agent. Take your pick.”

Zam makes a rude noise.

“Double agent? Against Vader? No, thank you. At least if you kill me, I’m almost sure it will be quick.”

“You’re an agent of Vader. If there is somebody who can’t be sure of what I will do to them, or won’t do, it’s someone serving that monster,” Sabé spats with more vitriol than Zam was expecting. This is more than fighting for democracy, the good old days or whatever stupid stuff the Rebel Alliance was working with. It was personal.

Sabé’s control on herself comes back almost quicker than it was lost.

“You’re not gonna die,” she repeats, “we’re leaving you on Naboo.”

“And I suppose you’re not staying for my boss?”

“I suggest you don’t wait for him either. Vader doesn’t take kindly to disappointment.”

Sabé comes to sit near the bars that keep Zam’s prisoner and the light falls more harshly on her face, letting Zam see her weariness. For the first time, Zam thinks of the sort of effort needed to build the spy ring that Vader suspected. Years and years of effort, destroyed by choosing a moment of happiness, something as human as a lover who seemed safe.

“Vader suspected Naboo,” Zam says, low, like an excuse. “He sent me to find you.”

“He isn’t an idiot,” Sabé shrugs, “ He would be less dangerous if he was, and his education taught him how to build connections between facts. The Jedi would have been poor peacekeepers if they had taken facts at their values, without searching for the deep causes.”

“The Jedi…. What have the Jedi….By the stars… By the karking, kriffing stars. You know who he is.”

Sabé nods.

“It’s better for you if you don’t know,” she adds, “Vader will already want your head for failing to capture us. That secret…he doesn’t know some members of the Rebels know.”

“If I told him, he would probably be happ…well, Vader is never happy, but he would consider it a result. Why are you telling me all of that?”

“Because you’ll not bring back your prey. Because all of our ring will be beyond your reach, and his. Because I’ve been shedding blood against the Empire for years, and once, just once, I want to remember what it is to have mercy. Because I’m tired. Very tired. Now, perhaps you’ll be smart enough to run from him, like you should have.”

Sabé closes the door, leaving her lover alone in the dark cell.

The travel is long and boring, and Zam hates to be left alone with her thoughts.

Later, Motée opens the door and keeps her at the point of her blaster, until Zam handcuffs herself. She guides the bounty hunter outside of the ship. They are on Naboo and Zam immediately recognizes the roof they used as a landing pad: they are at Theed’s palace.

“Walk,” Motée orders and Zam wisely doesn’t speak, not when she tried to kill that woman’s wife a few days ago.

The palace is empty. The usual civil servants, which were always running from one task to another, are curiously absent.

They arrive at the throne room, empty too except for all the handmaidens. They have abandoned their usual attempts to distinguish from each other: they are all dressed identically, like on the old holo Zam has seen, deep burgundy leathers, wide cowls, sturdy boots, and blasters at their side.

Dormé is reading something from her comm when Zam and Motée enter.

“Gregar, the little Queen and the whole retinue arrived safely at destination,” she declares, and Sabé, alone at the window, gives a nod of satisfaction. Zam suddenly understands why the palace feels so empty, like a shell.

“This wasn’t exactly a usual spy ring,” she says, since apparently keeping herself mute and discreet to augment her chance of survival isn’t the plan.

Sabé arches an eyebrow.

“What’s a usual spy ring? We were, in a way, a lot of intel and weapons transited by our hands. And we weren’t; a lot of us were simply contacts, readying for this day.”

Fé, Zam is pretty sure it’s Fé, how difficult it suddenly is to tell them apart, despite the physical difference, goes to Sabé and touches her shoulder.

“It’s time to go. There is just us left to evacuate. We need to make a decision about the officer and the bounty hunter.”

Sabé hasn’t time to answer, something vibrates, explodes.

“What the kriff?” Motée swears, distracted, and Zam doesn’t wait for a better occasion, a quick ruffle and she’s escaping, running in a mad attempt of freedom, hands still cuffed behind her back and angry yells behind her.

She knows less about thatis part of the palace so, she runs a little hazardly, only trying to put distance between herself and the handmaidens, she runs, runs…right into Firmus Piett’s arms.

“Wessel!” He exclaims, even more surprised than her, like she hadn’t been on his mind for days.

“What are you doing here?” Zam yells, as surprised as him.

“You weren’t answering your comm’, so I came, but then the Moff was murdered, and his lover, I mean, her grief…”

“Stop babbling and uncuff me. And the lover probably killed him herself.”

“Lady Saché-“

“Lady Saché is a fucking spy. They are all fucking spies, it’s like Naboo breed them for that. Fucking Naboo flowers. The cuffs, Piett!”

He struggles to help her before together they creep through the hallways. Zam doesn’t have a weapon; the officer can make a good human shield if necessary.

“Something is burning,” he says lowly, and Zam takes a second to think of Sabé’s anger against Vader, at how personal it was. She thinks of Naboo and how Palpatine was one of the planet’s sons, how the whole galaxy now associates the Emperor with Naboo.

“I think they evacuated all they could. All Theed’s loyalists, all they didn’t want the Emperor to have, and they will burn everything else.”

“The whole town?”

“Perhaps only the Palace. As a way to say Palpatine can’t fucking have it.”

They find their way to the roof, Zam thinking it will be easier to steal Motée and Ellée’s ship than to find their way out of the Palace before everything burns.

But they are not the first there.

The handmaiden are there. And Vader too.

Now, Zam knows why something exploded, Vader isn’t exactly discreet.

The handmaidens are throwing everything they have as cover fire, and still Vader is progressing to their position, the red of his blade a dangerous but beautiful dance.

One of them falls in their retreat, and Zam can’t know which one it is, not when they are too far away and dressed identically.

“Saché!” Piett yells and he runs to them, the utter idiot, puts himself between the fallen woman, who could or could maybe not be Saché, and the Dark Lord. Zam is surrounded by suicidal idiots, an opinion reinforced by the fact that the handmaidens have stopped their retreat to the ship and are attacking Vader to protect their sister.

Suddenly, one of them advances to Vader, pushing back her cowl with a swift gesture, letting her face be seen.

It’s Sabé, of course it’s Sabé.

To Zam’s intense surprise, the Dark Lord stops, like his strings are cut, like she was a ghost.

Behind Sabé, the other handmaiden help the fallen woman, who was Fé, up, and another is speaking quickly to Piett, her hands on his own. Sabé yells something that Zam can’t understand with the distance, but she’s pretty sure she hears the words guilty .

Zam creeps closer, her curiosity stronger than her fear. At her feet, there is an abandoned blaster, probably lost by the handmaiden in their fleeing, and she picks it up.

Whatever spell Sabé’s face had been, it was temporary. Vader roars and raises his weapon to kill the decoy.

Zam shoots.

Later, she is alone in the cargo hold, her face between her hands, and close to hyperventilating. She shot Vader!

She missed, of course, he turned and parried with his lightsaber, but she shot at Dark Kriffin Vader.

She’s dead.

She’s worse than dead.

Why did she do that?

She sits upright when she hears the whisper of clothes. To her surprise, it is Elée, with water and a ration for Zam.

“We will make a first stop in our travel to leave you on the planet of your choice. In the Empire, or where you want in the Unknown Regions or the Hutts territories.” the handmaiden says.

She sits next to Zam, like it’s nothing, like Zam didn’t try to kill her a few days before.

“Or you could come with us?” she continues.

“With you? Where the fuck-“

“To the Rebel Alliance.”

“To the Rebel Alliance? How crazy do you think I am? The things the Imperials will do to them when they find them!”

“They have been searching for years and still haven’t found them, have they? Also, Vader can’t wish you more dead than he probably already does. We escaped only because you shot him and he lost precious seconds because of it.”

“Please, please, don’t make me remember it! And all of that doesn’t tell me why I should go with you. It was a temporary insanity. I have no intention of risking my skin for people who won’t have a better opinion of mye than the Empire.”

“The Rebel Alliance has a strict policy of equality between the races.”

“Yeah, for the Twil’eks and the Wookies, or whatever. The Clawdites are-”

Elée seizes her hands with force.

“What are you-”

Under Zam’s eyes, the small, white human hands morph quickly. They become rough and green and scaled, and Zam’s gaze jumps up, and another Clawdite, dressed like a handmaiden, watches her calmly.

“What the kriff…since when….did you…Vader? Are you working for Vader too? When did you replace her?”

“Never. I have always been Elée.”

“What…It makes no sense. Take her face again, they could see!”

“But they know.”

“What?”

“Well, not the Imperial Officer, who I suppose isn’t an Imperial officer anymore. But my dear Motée, Sabé, all my sisters, they know. And I only wear my face because this is mine, the woman I really am, not because they force me. To be honest, wearing my Clawdite skin is strange, now. Elée is who I really am.”

“But…”

The other Clawdite rubs Zam’s neck with her claws in a gesture reserved in theory for kin and clan.

“What’s your name?” Zam asks, curious despite herself. It’s been almost five years since she saw another Clawdite, and ten more since it was a Clawdite from her own clan.

“Elée. My name is Elée, the other name, the first one, is dead to me. But I was born in Clan Ovich.” 

Not a long lost cousin, then, a Clawdite almost from the other side of their world, but a Clawdite, living the life of a Nabooian daughter for years. Choosing to be a Nabooian daughter, despite everything they are taught in childhood.  

Elée’s claws leave her scales, and for a second, Zam wants to protest, because it has been too long. The other morphs into her human face again, and smiles.

“You don’t have to decide right now. But perhaps you can think about it. We can leave you on another world and give you a safe way to contact us.”

Zam nods, a little, no, a lot , lost. A way to contact them, later, when she has had time to reorganize her thoughts. She thinks she could like that.

**************************************************

There is nothing to salvage from this operation. All guilty parties and their entire families are far away from the Empire’s far reaching hand. For now. When the Rebel Alliance is finally crushed, Vader will make sure they pay for that like all the rest, but for now, he has nothing more to do on Naboo. Time to go back to Coruscant and face his Master’s strong displeasure about this unmitigated disaster.

Before going back to his ship, he visits Padmé’s mausoleum. She would have understood, in time, he’s sure of it. If Obi-Wan hadn’t filled her head with lies…. She would be ashamed of her former handmaiden’s acts, he’s sure of it. She would have understood.

His steps sure, he enters the mausoleum, and his sudden yell of rage is heard on the other side of the necropolis.

The recumbent statue has been pushed on the stone floor and the tomb is empty. The former handmaidens have disappeared with the metal casket that was inside, stealing even that from him.

Far away from Naboo, a last shovel of soil is pushed on a freshly dug tomb and two teenagers kneel, join their hands within a circle of women who kneel between them and the second circle of assistants, like an honour guard.

Her voice strong, Sabé teaches them the first of the old Naboo religion prayers, in memory of their birth mother.

Bonus:
Zam before transforming

Zam after transforming