Fulfillment: Star Wars

Part Three

The harsh light of the Coruscanti sun crawled through the window slats into Padmé's 500 Republica apartment. It gently coaxed her eyes to awaken and she took a moment just to feel the warmth of it tingling her skin awake. It was hard to remember the little pleasures of life when the galaxy was falling apart at your very feet. Stretching her arms behind her head with a low groan, she grinned remembering her husband.

Padmé rolled over, only to see that her husband was gone. All he left behind was crumpled unmade sheets on his side of the bed.

"He must have had to leave early." She thought, frowning. She always told him to wake her up if he ever had to leave so she could say goodbye, but he rarely did. Apparently, she looked "so beautiful" and "so peaceful" that he did not want to ruin her slumber. Padmé couldn't help but chuckle at the thought. He told her that back when he was still a padawan, back when he was her Ani.

Fighting back tears just at the idea that Anakin would never be the same, she swung her legs over the bed and stood up. She would find out who was changing Anakin, and she would change him back.

Remembering that she tucked the tracker away in her nightstand drawer, Padmé opened it to find the tracker pulsating red. She bit her lip as she smiled, it was working.

Padmé grabbed it and made her way to her in-home office as fast as a pregnant woman could. Plugging it into the holocomputer, she pulled up the program that would read the tracker codes and tell her exactly what she needed to know. A blip then showed up on her monitor showing that the tracker had found its target and that it was currently stationary.

"Perfect... where are you, Anakin?"

Chancellor Palpatine's office. Padmé bit her lip as her suspicions were confirmed. No one, not even a close friend would be with the Chancellor so often as Anakin has been lately. However, even though she was now conscious of her husband's whereabouts, questions still swirled uneasily in her head.

"What was Palpatine saying that was changing Anakin? Why was he changing Anakin in the first place? What are his motives behind this?"

Running a hand through her mane of curls, she sighed. Stress began to eat away at her soul yet again. This would be impossible to figure out unless she was in that room herself with Palpatine and Anakin.

The synapses in her brain clicked. She could be in that same room with Palpatine and Anakin, right now.

With renewed vigor, she turned on the microphone on the tracker. Padmé carefully connected an earpiece and lifted it up to her left ear.

Static. A roaring static for the first seconds. It then panned out, now transmitting whatever was heard in that room. The quality was terrible, and Padmé was realizing why she probably threw this into a junk drawer. The microphone was basically busted, but she could barely make out the words being spoken in that moment.

"D- Darth- Plagueis- An- Sith- Lif- ve-appre-" Palpatine. His voice was now gargled and choked through the transmission but the senator could still tell that his tone was different...

Anakin then responded, making heart tremor.

"Master- Sidious- me- I- lo- ad- d- ark- ss- sith-"

She grit her teeth and banged the tracker harder into the computer, willing it to give her a clearer transmission.

She needed to know.

The fuzzy voices cleared up for a moment, yet that was all Padmé needed.