Chapter Text
The descent into Naboo was quiet.
The ship cut through the upper atmosphere without the familiar rattle of city-world turbulence. Instead, the pressure eased softly around the hull, like the world itself was accustomed to visitors arriving from the sky. Through the small viewport, clouds drifted past in bright white sheets before parting to reveal the land below.
Obi-Wan stood with his hands folded behind his back, watching the landscape open beneath them. Lakes caught the morning sun in wide, unbroken mirrors. The green of the fields looked almost unreal from above — a single, continuous tone without the scars of industry or the interruptions of sprawling settlements. The mountains rose gently, more like sleeping beasts than jagged stone.
“It’s like it was designed,” he said quietly.
Anakin joined him at the viewport. His reflection ghosted faintly against the glass — short Padawan braid hanging close to his cheek, the soft line of his jaw still carrying the roundness of youth. He leaned forward, both hands braced on the sill, eyes following the curve of a river cutting through a valley.
“It’s… quiet,” he said, not sure if the word was right.
“Peaceful,” Obi-Wan corrected, though not unkindly. “There is a difference.”
Anakin didn’t answer. He’d grown up in a place where “quiet” meant danger, where silence meant something was approaching. The way Naboo held stillness felt unfamiliar — open, gentle, like the world trusted itself.
The ship touched down on a landing platform of pale stone. As the ramp lowered, warm air filtered in, carrying the scent of water and freshly bloomed foliage. It felt strange on Anakin’s face — soft, almost cool, nothing like the dry heat of Tatooine or the metallic tang of Coruscant.
A small delegation waited. Not a formal line of guards, not the rigid structure of other royal welcomes — instead, a cluster of figures standing in natural ease.
Padmé Amidala stepped forward first.
“Obi-Wan,” she greeted, her smile reaching all the way to her eyes before turning toward Anakin with equal warmth. “Anakin. I’m glad you made it safely.”
Her voice, even in simple greeting, seemed to settle the space around them. She wore a gown of deep blue silk, the fabric moving lightly with each step. Two handmaidens followed at a respectful distance.
Obi-Wan bowed with practiced grace. “Your presence here is appreciated.”
Padmé laughed softly under her breath. “Formality this early? I’ll forgive you. Come — the palace is ready for your arrival.”
She gestured toward the long path leading into Theed.
As they walked, the city revealed itself in layers.
White stone buildings framed by bright gardens.
Sculpted pillars supporting wide terraces.
Fountains built into archways, sending streams of water down carved channels that glimmered in the sun.
Children ran across a distant plaza, chasing one another with wooden toys. A merchant arranged baskets of silverleaf fruit, humming quietly. Doves perched on the edge of a fountain, dipping their wings into the water.
It all felt slow. Not stagnant — just unhurried.
Anakin tugged at the cuff of his sleeve. His boots left light, crisp prints on the walkway. His lightsaber bounced lightly against his hip as he stepped, each tap a reminder of who he was supposed to become.
Padmé matched their pace easily. She glanced at Anakin for a moment — a kind, assessing look, not judgmental.
“How does Naboo look to you?” she asked.
He hesitated before answering. “Different.”
“From Coruscant?”
“From everything.”
Padmé smiled faintly. “That’s what I hear from most Jedi.”
Obi-Wan’s gaze moved over the city with appreciation.
“Your people seem at ease.”
“They are,” Padmé said. “Or they try to be. Peace becomes a habit if you nurture it long enough.”
Anakin didn’t say it aloud, but part of him wondered what it would feel like to grow up believing peace was normal — not something fought for, not something taken, not something you had to protect with everything you had. Just… normal.
They approached the palace — a grand structure of domes and arched windows, its façade catching light like carved ivory. Guards stood at the gate but did not block the approach; they simply stepped aside, recognizing Padmé and offering the Jedi a respectful nod.
Inside, the air cooled, carrying the faint scent of stone and fresh linens. Sunlight filtered through high windows, casting soft shapes across polished floors. Servants passed quickly and quietly, carrying baskets of documents, trays of morning tea, folders bound with ribbon.
None of them looked startled by the presence of the Jedi.
None whispered.
None pointed.
This world was used to receiving important visitors.
Padmé led them through a wide corridor lined with tapestries telling Naboo’s history in muted colors — grain harvests, ancient kings, scenes of restoration after conflict.
“Deysi has been expecting you,” Padmé said as they approached the tall double doors leading to the throne room.
Anakin blinked. “The Queen?” He hadn’t expected someone so young to be spoken of with such composed assurance.
Padmé glanced at him, and something subtle crossed her expression — not sadness, not pride, but a quiet steadiness, the kind people wear when they have made peace with something they can’t change.
“My sister,” she said simply.
Then she pushed open the doors.
The doors to the throne room opened on a practiced cue.
Sound thinned as they stepped inside, the world narrowing to stone and light and distance. Sunlight poured through the high windows and stretched itself across the marble floor in long, clean bands. Gold thread in the inlay caught the brightness and reflected it upward, making the air itself seem pale and gilded.
Courtiers stood along the walls like part of the architecture. Robes fell in measured lines. Hands were folded. Heads were bowed just enough to acknowledge the scene without intruding on it. No idle conversation. No nervous shifting. Just stillness, held so long it felt rehearsed.
Padmé walked a few steps ahead of the Jedi. Her gown whispered softly against the floor, the dark blue fabric cutting a deliberate line through the light. She knew exactly where to stop, exactly how deep to bow, exactly how long to hold it.
At the far end of the hall, on the raised dais, sat the queen.
The steward’s voice rang out, formal and precise, as if he’d been born saying the words.
“Her Majesty Queen Deysi of Naboo welcomes the representatives of the Jedi Order.”
Her Majesty did not move at the sound of her own name.
She sat in the high-backed throne with both hands resting in her lap, fingers relaxed but still. Cream silk framed her narrow shoulders. A slim circlet of gold lay across her brow, thin as a line of sunlight. Her dark hair fell neatly down her back, not a strand escaping, as if even that had been disciplined into place.
Fourteen.
Anakin knew that number. Padmé had said it plainly: my sister, the queen.
He’d heard it, shrugged internally, decided it didn’t matter.
He’d seen generals younger than they should’ve been. Commanders barely older than he was. Titles didn’t impress him.
But now, looking at her on the throne, the number pressed into his skull anyway.
Fourteen.
She didn’t look like a child monarch in over her head. She looked… fixed. Set. Like the throne had grown around her and she’d never had the chance to step away.
Kriff.
Obi-Wan stopped at the appropriate distance and bowed.
“Your Majesty.”
Anakin bowed a beat after him, because he knew how this worked, because he refused to be the one to embarrass them in front of a planet’s court.
“Your Majesty.”
When he rose, he made himself look at her once, just once, because not looking at a queen was a different kind of insult.
Her eyes were already on him.
Dark, steady, assessing. Not wide with nerves. Not bright with curiosity. Just… considering. Weighing. Like she was reading him the way people read reports.
He hated that.
The queen inclined her head a fraction, an acknowledgment as exact as everything else about her.
“Jedi,” she said. Her voice was clear, soft enough that it should not have carried, but it did. No tremor. No strain. “I have a question for you.”
Of course she did.
Obi-Wan’s hands folded into his sleeves. “Ask, Your Majesty.”
“You serve the Republic,” she said. No preamble, no courtesy phrases, straight into the bone of it. “You describe your service as selfless. Without expectation of return. Is that accurate?”
Her tone was not skeptical, not impressed. It was the tone of someone testing the strength of a statement before deciding how much weight to place on it.
“Yes,” Obi-Wan answered. “That is the nature of our duty.”
Her gaze didn’t move from him, but something sharpened behind it.
“And without ambition?” she went on. “Without loyalty to anything or anyone beyond the Republic itself?”
The courtiers did not stir. This was not strange to them. Their queen questioning Jedi doctrine in front of the court was as normal as morning tea.
Anakin felt his jaw clench before he realized he was reacting.
It wasn’t the question that bothered him. It was the way she asked it. Calm. Controlled. Like she had every right to pry a belief apart in front of an audience.
“We serve because it’s right,” he said, the words leaving his mouth too fast. “Not because it profits us.”
He heard the edge in his own voice only after it was already out there, hanging in the air between them. Too sharp. Too defensive. Kriff.
Her attention finally slid fully to him.
Up close, her face didn’t look older than fourteen. Her features were soft at the edges, her mouth small, her chin narrow. A girl’s face, framed by the kind of hair someone could thread their fingers through if they were stupid enough to try. The crown sat lightly above all of it like a brand.
There shouldn’t have been anything threatening in it.
But she looked at him like she knew where every crack was. As if she could see the impatience under his answer, the heat behind his words, the way his shoulders tightened when questioned. She watched him the way commanders watched battlefields — quietly, with a map already forming in their head.
Of course he speaks first, she thought. Too quickly. Too certain. A boy who believes that conviction is enough.
She did not let that thought reach her face. She had been taught never to show the conclusions she drew unless there was advantage in revealing them.
“Because it is right,” she repeated mildly. “Not because it profits you. Not because you are loyal to those who command through the Republic. Not because you desire influence.”
She tilted her head a fraction.
Anakin could feel heat rising up the back of his neck. Maker, she was infuriating. Every word was smooth and exact, and it made him feel clumsy just for being in the same room.
Obi-Wan stepped in, tone even. “Our loyalty is to peace, Your Majesty. The Senate is imperfect, but the Republic is the best structure we have for carrying it out. We work within it for the sake of those we protect.”
The queen listened. Truly listened. Her eyes didn’t drift, didn’t glaze. She took his answer apart in silence, piece by precise piece.
If she were anyone else that age, Anakin might have felt sorry for her. A girl stuck on a throne, playing politics with men twice her age. But the way she held herself — the way the room bent around her — made pity feel absurd.
She wasn’t playing at anything.
“Naboo accepts your presence,” she said at last. “And your assistance.”
No warmth.
No gratitude beyond what form demanded.
Just a verdict delivered with clean finality.
The steward bowed. “Her Majesty welcomes the Jedi Order.”
The tension in the room loosened along the edges. A few nobles shifted their weight. A rustle of fabric, the faint exhale of people smiling with their mouths closed.
Padmé stepped a little closer, but not close enough to touch. Not here. There were too many eyes. Too many hands that had lifted blades or pens in the dark on behalf of one cause or another. Guards watched the angles of the room with the brittle awareness of men who had been tested once and failed to forget it.
“Your Majesty,” Padmé said softly. Her voice carried the weight of personal history under the formality, but nothing more.
Deysi didn’t look at her. She didn’t have to. She knew the exact distance her sister kept, knew what that distance meant, knew why it existed. Anyone who had ever stood near her too long had become a target sooner or later. Padmé knew it too.
Deysi had learned early not to reach.
Obi-Wan bowed again. “We look forward to serving.”
Anakin bowed out of habit, out of training, out of spite — because if he was going to stand in front of a girl whose voice was sharp as a vibroblade, he was sure as kriff not going to be the one acting like a child.
As he straightened, his gaze lifted one more time.
The light hit her crown and traced a thin line down the side of her face, outlining the curve of her cheek and the line of her throat. Her hands were still in her lap, fingers perfectly aligned. Not one twitch. Not one nervous movement. Not one sign that she was even aware of how many people depended on her.
She looked like a statue someone had decided to keep breathing.
Stars, he hated her.
He hated that she didn’t flinch under scrutiny.
He hated that she made him feel like the one being evaluated.
He hated that she spoke to Jedi like they were just another tool on her table.
Kriffing queen.
Kriffing perfect posture.
Kriffing quiet, sharp, too-powerful child.
He turned away so he didn’t have to keep looking.
Their footsteps echoed down the long strip of marble as they walked back toward the doors. The air felt cooler near the exit, as if the room itself was relieved to let them go.
When the doors shut behind them, the sound was muffled, intentional. The court moved again, drawn toward the queen with the slow, circling gravity of planets around a sun.
On the dais, Deysi sat for a moment longer, just long enough to be sure no one would see the single breath she let out — small, measured, barely deeper than the rest.
He reacts too quickly, she thought. No restraint. No sense of when to stay silent. He will either grow into that fire or be consumed by it.
There was no judgment in it. Just a conclusion.
She rose when her advisors stepped forward, body slipping back into motion as if pulled along a familiar track.
Far down the corridor, Anakin scrubbed a hand over his face and muttered under his breath, “Force help me, that girl is insufferable.”
He didn’t know it yet, but he was already replaying the way she’d looked at him — as if she’d seen more than he’d said, more than he meant to give.
He told himself it was annoyance.
Hatred.
Simple.
But the words he found for her in his mind — too sharp, too precise, too composed, too much — stuck like splinters.
And splinters, given time, always find their way deeper.
The quiet followed them inside.
Not silence—this palace never offered true quiet—but a different kind of hush. The kind that lingered after formality ended, after the last bow, after the doors shut on the eyes and expectations of an entire world. The kind that should have felt like relief.
It didn’t.
Deysi crossed the threshold first, her steps soft against the polished floor. The servants who tended the queen’s chambers bowed and retreated through the side passages, as trained. No one stayed in the room with her long unless invited. No one spoke unless spoken to. She had been raised in a world where privacy meant distance, not comfort.
Padmé lingered in the doorway.
The guard assigned to the queen closed the doors with careful precision, leaving the two sisters alone for the first time in—Padmé wasn’t sure how long.
Months.
Maybe almost a year.
Her breath caught at that thought. A year.
Senate rotations. Diplomatic crises. Votes. Committees.
By the time she’d found a gap in her schedule large enough to return home, Theed had already rearranged itself around her absence.
And around Deysi.
Padmé took a step in, but she stopped again, watching.
Deysi reached up and removed her crown.
Not with relief.
Not with weariness.
Just precision.
Her fingers lifted the circlet from her head as though completing the final step of a ritual. She placed it on its stand—centered, aligned—then adjusted one stray strand of hair that had shifted during the audience. Her movements were controlled, quiet, learned over years. Nothing wasted. Nothing soft.
She did not sag.
She did not rub her temples.
She did not exhale.
She merely existed, perfectly, as she had been shaped to.
Padmé felt something twist under her ribs.
“Deysi,” she said softly.
Her sister did not look up right away. She straightened the fold of her sleeve that had shifted. She set her shoulders, spine tall, hands folding behind her back the way the priests had drilled into her since age six.
Only when she was settled did she turn.
“Senator,” she said.
Padmé’s throat tightened.
The title was correct.
It still hurt.
“You can still call me Padmé,” she murmured, stepping fully into the chamber.
Something flickered—quiet, faint—in Deysi’s expression. She didn’t correct her, didn’t apologize, didn’t soften. She simply let the words hang, unanswered.
Padmé moved closer, making herself stop at the invisible boundary she sensed around Deysi. An unseen line carved by years of threat assessments, late-night warnings, knives found in bouquets, letters laced with hidden meanings.
Getting too close to the queen had consequences.
Deysi had learned that before she learned arithmetic.
“You can’t speak to Jedi like that,” Padmé said gently.
Deysi turned fully then, face composed. “Why not?”
“Because they aren’t opponents. They aren’t nobles jockeying for power,” Padmé said. “They’re allies.”
Deysi considered that for a moment, then answered in the same even tone she’d used in the hall.
“Allies who claim purity of intention are the first to demand repayment,” she said. “If they serve without price, then the price is hidden.”
Padmé blinked, breath pausing in her chest.
Deysi’s voice hadn’t risen.
Hadn’t hardened.
There was no cynicism in it.
Just certainty.
“You seemed…” Padmé searched for a word that wouldn’t wound. “Cold.”
Deysi’s brow lifted by a millimeter.
“Cold is safe,” she replied.
That was when Padmé’s heart cracked.
Because she remembered a little girl once—sticky hands, crooked ribbons, a laugh so bright it echoed in the marble halls. A little girl who’d fallen asleep on her older sister’s lap every night because no one else dared hold the queen-to-be.
That child was gone.
Not missing.
Not hidden.
Gone.
Padmé moved forward another slow inch. She didn’t touch Deysi—that would be dangerous, not for herself, but for her sister. The court always watched. The enemies always listened. Padmé’s closeness had brought danger once; it wouldn’t happen again.
Still, she let her voice soften.
“You spoke to Anakin,” Padmé said. “And Obi-Wan. You were so sharp I thought—”
She bit down on the rest. I thought you hated them.
But that wasn’t true.
Deysi didn’t hate anyone.
She simply understood people too fast.
Deysi turned away and walked to the tall window overlooking Theed. The city stretched beneath them—river like silver thread, domes gleaming, streets clean and neatly patterned. From the palace, the world always looked peaceful.
Her reflection stared back at her in the glass.
A girl in silk.
Hands folded.
Back straight.
Expression set like carved stone.
When had she last looked like a child?
Padmé realized she couldn’t remember.
“If I smile freely,” Deysi said, “others take it as invitation.”
She lifted her chin slightly.
“If I give softness, someone will use it.”
Padmé swallowed. “Not everyone wants something from you.”
Deysi’s lips curved.
It wasn’t a smile.
“What is given,” she murmured, “can be taken away just as easily.”
She said it like it was an old lesson.
Something learned young.
Something learned painfully.
Padmé stepped closer before she could stop herself.
This time Deysi moved aside.
Not sharply.
Not cruelly.
Just… precisely. Gently. As if protecting Padmé from herself.
Her sister froze, hand suspended in the air, unsure whether she meant to touch Deysi’s arm or simply reach toward her.
Deysi lowered her gaze.
“Don’t,” she said quietly.
One word.
Soft.
Final.
Padmé let her hand fall.
She understood.
Being close to Deysi—touching her, loving her—had always come with risk. Padmé had been young once too, naive enough to believe her title would shield them. It hadn’t. The threats had come. The attempts had come. And Deysi had learned to keep her distance from everyone she loved.
Padmé whispered, “I should have been here more.”
Deysi didn’t react. Not visibly.
Inside, a single breath caught in her chest.
She pushed it down.
“You are needed on Coruscant,” Deysi said. “It would be irresponsible to abandon that duty.”
It sounded like something she’d been taught to say.
Not something she felt.
Not something she believed.
Padmé stepped beside her at the window.
Two reflections—one older, worn by politics; one younger, worn by something far heavier.
“You’ve changed,” Padmé whispered.
“And you have not seen it until now,” Deysi replied calmly.
Padmé closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, Deysi was looking out at the city—at a world she ruled but didn’t touch, at a beauty she protected but never lived in.
A child queen carved into a shape the world applauded.
“You’re too young for this,” Padmé said, barely audible.
“I was never asked,” Deysi answered.
The bells in the southern quarter chimed another hour.
Deysi’s face remained a still reflection in the glass—crownless but no freer, poised and perfect, a girl bound in gold with nowhere soft to rest.
Padmé stood beside her, close but not touching.
A reach without contact.
A love without warmth.
A bond held apart by fear and duty.
And the distance between them—quiet, devastating—stretched wide enough that neither sister dared cross it.
Not now.
Not ever.
Far below, in the cool belly of the palace, the Jedi walked in silence.
Light from high windows fell in pale strips across the floor, cutting their path into rectangles of gold and shadow. Servants passed them with lowered eyes, pressing close to the walls. Somewhere distant, water whispered through stone channels, a soft, constant sound, like the city breathing.
Anakin said nothing until the quiet felt like a weight on his chest.
“She’s nothing like Senator Amidala,” he muttered at last, the words forced out between his teeth. “Padmé is kind. She listens. She tries to understand people.” His mouth twisted. “That queen… she’s spoiled. Arrogant. Cold.”
He didn’t say dangerous.
He didn’t have to. It was in the way his jaw locked around the word cold.
Obi-Wan’s gaze slid toward him, then back ahead. “You judge quickly.”
“Someone needs to,” Anakin shot back. “Everyone else in that room looked at her like she hung the stars.”
“She’s their queen,” Obi-Wan said. “And a very young one. They will see what they need to see.”
“That doesn’t make her right.”
“No,” Obi-Wan agreed. “It doesn’t. It also doesn’t make her wrong.”
Anakin made a rough sound in his throat. “You heard her. ‘What is freely given can be taken away.’ Who talks like that at fourteen?”
“Someone who has learned it is true,” Obi-Wan replied quietly. “A child raised with nothing but power in her hands will not understand sacrifice the way you do, Anakin. Remember that before you decide what else she can’t understand.”
He said it calmly, but there was an edge beneath the words—a reminder that Anakin had not been born into anything, that everything he had came with a cost.
Anakin looked away, jaw working.
He thought of the girl on the throne. The way her voice hadn’t wavered once. The way she’d stared at him as if she could see every place he frayed. The way her crown had caught the light like a warning, not an ornament.
He told himself it didn’t matter.
He told himself he was angry because she’d questioned the Order.
Because she was ungrateful.
Because she was cruel.
It was easier than admitting that her eyes unsettled him in a way he couldn’t name.
He pushed the thought down and walked on.
By the time they returned to the throne room, the tone of the day had shifted.
The musicians were gone. The banners hung still. The nobles had taken their places in a wide crescent before the dais, their robes a muted sweep of color against white stone. This was where Naboo’s power gathered—not in the Senate, not in the plazas, but here, in the measured distance between the throne and the men and women who wanted something from it.
Deysi entered through a side door, announced by nothing more than the soft scrape of her slippers on stone.
She crossed the room alone.
No attendants flanked her. No train of fabric dragged behind her. The only mark of her rank was the thin circlet of gold at her brow and the way the entire hall adjusted around her—spines straightening, conversations dying mid-breath, eyes dropping in unison as she passed.
She ascended the steps to the throne and turned, settling into the high-backed seat with the same careful silence she brought to everything. Hands folded. Shoulders level. Chin lifted just enough.
Anakin watched from the shadowed edge of the hall beside Obi-Wan.
From a distance, she looked even smaller.
That should have made her less imposing.
It didn’t.
A minister finished reading a report on irrigation quotas. Deysi listened, asked three questions in a row that stripped the matter to its core, issued a decision in two sentences that made the man bow so low his voice shook when he thanked her.
Then Lord Vane stepped forward.
“Your Majesty,” he said, bending his head. His robes were rich without being gaudy, colors chosen with the care of a man who understood exactly how much power he was supposed to show. His smile was all deference and polish.
“We remain, as ever, committed to the prosperity of Naboo,” he said. “It is in that spirit that we wish to revisit the matter of the Mid Rim shipping lanes. Our houses have overseen these routes for generations. We are… uniquely positioned to manage their tariffs and logistics. It would be most efficient to allow us to continue in that role. Experience, after all, is a rare commodity.”
The words slid smoothly across the floor, dressed up as loyalty.
Anakin glanced at Obi-Wan. “Here we go,” he murmured under his breath.
Deysi regarded Lord Vane without blinking.
“Experience,” she repeated. “Yes. Let us speak of that.”
Her voice was soft, but the hall leaned in.
“I read the reports from fifteen years ago,” she said. “When your houses controlled the plasma tariffs.”
Lord Vane’s shoulders tensed, though his head remained bowed.
“In those two years,” Deysi went on, “our reserves dropped by nearly a third. The treasury staggered. We were forced to seek off-world loans to cover basic infrastructure.” She did not consult a datapad. The numbers came as if they lived under her tongue.
A murmur rippled through the nobles.
“And when you held the agricultural routes,” she continued, “grain prices doubled in three provinces. The western farms lost half their harvest to spoilage while storage warehouses in the capital sat half-empty. You called it an unfortunate convergence of weather and market trends.”
Her dark eyes did not leave his face.
“You profited,” she said. “Naboo did not.”
Lord Vane swallowed. “Your Majesty, those matters were—”
“Decisions,” Deysi interrupted, not unkindly. “Your decisions. Your experience.”
The hall went very still.
Anakin felt it in his skin, like pressure before a storm. He had seen generals dressed down before. He had watched Jedi Masters rebuke officers three times their junior.
This was not that.
Those rebukes were loud, heated, sharp. This was… quiet. Methodical. Every word placed with care, each fact laid out like a stone under a blade.
“You speak of tradition,” Deysi said. “Of efficiency. But what you are asking is that I forget the cost of your last stewardship.” She let the sentence hang in the air just long enough. “I do not intend to forget.”
Padmé stood near the side of the hall, hands folded before her. Her face remained composed, but Anakin, who had known her for years, could see the conflict in the tightness of her jaw. Pride warred with something like sorrow in her eyes.
Deysi did not look at her.
“I do not question your desire to serve Naboo, Lord Vane,” the queen said. “But I will not return our lifeblood to the hands that bled it dry for the sake of ‘efficiency.’”
Her tone never rose.
She did not sneer.
She did not gloat.
She simply closed her hand.
“This matter will remain under the direct authority of the crown,” she said. “If any house believes it can serve better, bring me a record that proves it.”
It wasn’t a challenge.
It was a statement of terms she knew they could not meet.
Lord Vane’s composure cracked around the edges. He dropped into a deeper bow, his forehead nearly touching the marble. The other nobles, sensing which way the current had turned, lowered themselves even farther.
No one else stepped forward.
Silence settled over the hall—not the expectant silence of ceremony, but something heavier, denser. The kind that followed after a line had been drawn in stone.
Obi-Wan exhaled softly beside Anakin. There was a glint in his eye that looked almost like admiration.
“She is… thorough,” he said.
Anakin didn’t answer.
His attention was locked on the girl at the center of the room.
She sat there like nothing had happened, as if she had not just flayed a man’s career open in front of his peers. Her face was smooth, unreadable. Her hands had not moved. The light from the high windows traced the edge of her profile, catching on the fine bones of her jaw and the thin band of gold above her brow.
From this distance, she looked almost delicate.
Like she’d shatter if someone touched her.
But he’d just watched her walk through an entire council with a blade where her heart should have been.
There was nothing fragile about her.
Kriff, she was terrifying.
When the session finally ended, the nobles withdrew in slow, controlled lines. Ministers approached the dais in ones and twos to murmur their thanks and submit their reports. Deysi answered, nodded, dismissed, each exchange brief and precise.
Only when the last of them had gone did she rise.
“Your Majesty,” one of the older councilors began, moving as if to offer an arm.
Deysi stepped past him without taking it.
She descended the steps of the dais alone.
Padmé inclined her head as her sister passed. For a moment—just a heartbeat—Deysi’s gaze flicked toward her. Something unspoken moved between them. No touch. No smile. Just a recognition: I see you. I know you are here. I cannot afford to show it.
Then it was gone.
She left the hall through the side door, the train of her gown whispering over the stone.
Anakin watched the space she’d vacated for a second too long.
“She didn’t win him,” he said finally, as he and Obi-Wan turned to go. “She buried him.”
His voice was low, edged with something that wasn’t quite admiration and wasn’t quite fear.
Obi-Wan’s reply was measured. “She made it clear where authority lies. That question will not come back.”
They walked out through the great doors. The cool corridor air hit his face, but it did nothing to loosen the knot in his chest.
Anakin tried to tell himself it was simple:
He disliked her.
He disliked her methods.
He disliked her attitude.
He disliked everything she represented.
Truth was, he had seen himself in her for half a second—the way she shut down dissent before it could grow teeth, the way she refused to show weakness, the way she held every word like a weapon she’d been forced to learn too young.
He wanted to shake the image of her—small, rigid, crowned and unblinking on that throne.
Instead it followed him down the corridor, lodged behind his eyes.
Too sharp.
Too controlled.
Too young.
Too powerful.
Spoiled, he told himself.
Arrogant.
Cold.
If he repeated it often enough, maybe it would drown out the quieter, worse thought hiding beneath:
that no one had ever asked her, either.
He pushed the idea away before it could take shape.
He was a Jedi. She was a queen. They would do their duty and then go their separate ways.
It should have been that simple.
But as the palace swallowed him and his master, as the sound of their footsteps faded into the hush of Naboo’s perfect halls, the image of Deysi remained—
a slender figure on a high throne, crowned in thin gold and old expectations, looking down at him with eyes that were far too calm.
He told himself he hated her.
The feeling stayed.
And somewhere, under the irritation and the anger and the certainty that he was right about her, something small and sharp lodged itself in his chest and refused to move.
It would be a long time before he recognized it for what it was.
But by then, it would be far too late.