Time's Hands

By Ruby-Flame Jedi Queen

The clock was ticking.  Too much time was passing.  Palpatine glanced at the door, angrily.  Nothing yet.  If no word got to him in the next hour, he would take matters into his own hands, which was not a pretty sight.

***

Darth Vader had found Amidala.  She was hidden alone in what had been the Gungan sanctuary a long time ago, a time when he had been young and filled with grandiose ideas.  He had been unaware of the cruel trick fate would play on him.  So here he was, staring back at his unconscious wife as she lay on the forest floor.

"Darth...Vader." She had addressed him, her voice quivering as she pronounced his name, which still sounded foreign to her as it rolled off of her tongue.

"Amidala." He answered her coldly, not a trace of the warmth that had former senator had once known.  Yet, unknown to all but Vader, there was still something left within him that trembled as he spoke her name.

Amidala just gazed at the remnants of the man she onced loved, her brown eyes filled with an emotion that made Vader think of a sad autumn breeze, one that tossed the dead leaves away and mourned the end of a thriving summer.

Vader's heart felt as it had been frozen by the autumn breeze of her eyes, and than pierced by the arrow of winter, a season so cold and uncaring. Even though Vader never had wished for his wife to suffer, an anger began to rise from the chards of his broken heart, bringing Vader to lift Amidala into the air via the force.  He lifted her and threw her against the nearest tree in his blind rage, her body hitting it with a loud 'thunk'.  She fell slowly, her hands scraping the bark, and landed unconscious on the forest floor, as still as the dead leaf that winter had swept away.

***

Vader placed her in the back of his sleek vessel and felt nothing whatsoever at the sight of her crumpled body; it was as if he had been cut off from all emotion from the moment she had gazed into his ebony-black mask.  The ship moved smoothly, quickly, normally.  It could have been another day, had Vader not known that the woman he loved lay unmoving, tossed aside like a broken toy...all because of him.  Vader could not let this distract him; he had to reach his master quickly and was thankful for the ship's speed.  Not only was he running forward to his master, though, but running away from the pain.

Faster.Vader silently implored the ship.

The ship was not quite fast enough, for as it continued to fly on, Darth Vader's mind began creeping back to one thought.  What would become of his wife now?

***

Finally, half and hour later, a buzz broke the heavy silence.

'It's about time,' Palpatine thought even though he instead voiced, "Come in."

Sure enough, it was Darth Vader who stepped in the doorway.

"You are late, Vader.  For your sake, the news had better be good." Palpatine snapped and sent Vader a peircing look.

Many times Vader had blessed the fact that he wore a mask so Palpatine could not see his true expressions.  He sneered and replied, "It is, Master. I found Amidala." At this moment he detested his master.  Wait, he constantly despised his master, for he now saw the many ways that Palpatine toyed with him, just as he toyed with all his subordinates.  Palpatine was manipulating them all in his sick little chess game, and none of them had the slightest clue except for Vader, but it was already too late for him to be released from the Emperor's hold.

"Good," Palpatine hissed in his snake-like voice. Oh, Darth Vader despised that voice.  Anakin, the small sliver left of him, hated it as well.

"Master, if I may ask, what is to become of her?" Vader inquired, all the while seething under his life support suit and reliving that moment in Amidala's dejected brown eyes.  If you lay one hand on her� he thought, knowing full well that whatever happens would be his fault.

"We shall see what happens." Palpatine, as if reading his thoughts, answered in a near-mocking tone.

That was Darth Vader's dismissal as well as his challenge.  He could hear it in his Master's tone of voice.  But he was trapped; like two pieces forked by one in a chess game, and there was no way out but to give away one of the pieces.  He bowed and left angrily.  He was losing the game.  Was there no way to fight back?

***

Amidala awoke in a prisoner's cell.  What had happened? Her head spun as she tried to remember.  Something...Oh, yes.  Anakin had come.  No, no, not Anakin.  Darth Vader.  Anakin had been her loving husband.  Darth Vader, on the other hand, was that cold, uncaring machine.  He had come for her, found her.  How, she did not have the slightest idea, but at least her children were safe.  Or had he discovered their identities as well? Her head was exploding with worries, yet she managed to keep up the defensive wall Obi-Wan had helped her create to conceal the information she knew.  At first he had wanted to erase the memories from her mind, but she had fervently denied that request as her memories were often her only companion.  But since she held such valuable information, she could not let down her defenses for one second.  She would die before giving up her children's locations.  Amidala constantly thought about them; Luke's lovely smile when she had sung lullabies to him at night, Leia's adorable giggle, the one she only let out when Amidala would cry out "I found you!" after a game of hide-and-seek.  The memories were all she had left; she would never have the real thing.  Amidala could not help herself, she began to cry; she cried for her children, for Anakin, and for herself.  For everything that had gone wrong.  But as quickly as she began, she halted.  No, it was not right to cry.  She had to be strong.  She had to be strong if she would ever make it back to her children.

Amidala, you CANNOT go back to them, she reminded herself.  Every step you take will be traced, and your children's lives will be jeopardized.  Is that what you want?

The problem was, Amidala didn't know how to get what she wanted.  She wanted her children back, and she wanted them safe.  Was there a way to do that?

You are locked in a prison cell, her mind reasonably told her, in order to pull her back to the grey reality.  Amidala reluctantly returned to the present.  She surveyed the room and her eyes rested on the bars--thick and encasing, the actualization of the way she felt on the inside.  She was trapped inwardly by her love of Anakin and her love of the children and her confinement from all of them.  The bars only reminded her of what she had lost and could never have again.  Suddenly, the space between the bars began to meld into the black of the bars and the room began spinning, blurring into one picture, and Amidala became caught in very vivid hallucinations:

Her children stood before her, in her room on Alderaan, the one where she had started raising them.  Their eyes were large and empty, their hands folded placidly across their chest.  Leia's hair was moving slightly in what might have been a breeze, but other than that they were as livid as zombies, as unreal as ghosts.  "Mommy, daddy says we have to go now.  Bye bye.  We are going to the dark room."

Amidala screamed as she watched Leia and Luke morph in miniature Darth Vader's, their faces twisting in pain.  She clutched her hands to her face in an attempt to hide the vision before her and widly fluttered her eyelids a few times.  Was she really awake?  The ghost-like Luke and Leia were gone, and she was no longer in Aldeeran or her cell...the bars had been replaced by walls, and the room was smaller.  Luke, a very real-looking Luke, was crying in a corner, his tiny hands beating at the air.  Leia sat by him, staring at the white wall.  Then Obi-Wan came in the room and took Luke.  Leia screamed and protested.  But as suddenly as Obi-Wan came, he vanished, Luke with him.  Leia sat down in the spot where Luke hand been, her small hands tracing over his last imprint on the carpet.  Anakin then appeared.  Not Darth Vader, but the real Anakin, her husband, just as she remembered him.  Tall, strong, those blue eyes gleaming and the sandy hair ruffled by the wind.  They stared at each other a long time, and with one hand tied behind his back Anakin reached out and grabbed Leia's arm.  She turned, and her face matured, becoming an angry red color.

"Get away from me." She spat in a woman's voice and faced her mother.  She grew up in front of Amidala, and transformed into an exact replicate of her mother.  Amidala stared as her "twin" stumbled to her side and whispered, "Did you hear..." and the room became a hall.  A long long narrow hall.  It was empty with the exception of Amidala running down the hallway, garbed in white.  Even though she ran, she never seemed closer to the end; it was as if she was rooted in the same spot.  Then, striding towards her from the far end of the hallway, hands in fists swinging at his side, padawan braid hanging in his face, came Anakin, an evil grin marring his soft face.

"Are you an angel?" He sneered and sent her backwards with a bolt of blue lightning from his hands.  Amidala cried in pain, and woke up.

She was lying on the ground in the Gungan's sacred forest where Darth Vader had left her.  Blinking, she tried to sort the real from the fiction.  Perhaps Anakin...Vader...had never come here at all and Amidala had simply fallen asleep.  Or else Vader did come.  But had he even taken her to his master at all?  It appreared not...somewhere inside of Vader, Anakin must have won and left her here, away from the Emperor's grasp, for not even he could wish the kind of life he had upon the woman who had once been his wife.  Or maybe Amidala was still in a dream, and she would awake in the jail cell, looking into the emptiness of that mask.

Amidala reached out and felt the long blades of green grass tickle her hands, and that was when she knew that she was indeed awake.  Somehow, she felt even lonelier here than she had in the imaginary jail cell, and a single tear trickled down her cheek as she raised her head to search for any sign Vader's ship leaving the planet.  Suddenly, the grass became coarse on Amidala's hands, and she looked down at them and saw that they were scratched and bleeding.

So Darth Vader had been here. He had indeed failed his mission to bring her to his Master.  He might have had some good intentions.  Who knew? All Amidala knew was five minutes after she had woken from her nightmare and continued to lay on the forest floor, her body limp and broken, a small group of storm troopers entered the clearing and took her away to a Nubian prison camp.  It was there where she did most of her growing old, and it was there that she was plagued by tireless taunts from Palpatine.  All the while Darth Vader thought she was dead.