Her Darling Girl
She's... well, she's something a little strange. That's what she noticed, that she's not a woman like all the others. –Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1985
“If I were a man, this would not have happened.”
Anaka Skywalker’s voice was a weak whisper delivered through the tracheostomy valve that pierced her throat. She writhed on the medical table, pale and limbless as a worm, her fury the only thing animating her.
Seated in a chair at the former Jedi's bedside, Empress Palpatine ran a soothing, ringed-bedecked hand over Anaka’s neck and shoulders. She made vague hushing noises, seeking to quell the young woman’s worries along with her physical pains, to distance her from the hundreds of wounds tormenting what was left of her body. A squadron of medi-droids would soon arrive to perform the first of many surgeries, but Lady Vader would not wait for them alone.
The thing on the table released a hoarse sob, and Palpatine continued to stroke her as she reflected on all that had reduced her protégé from demi-god to human ruin. Months after the Jedi had fled the Core, the man the Holonet called The Negotiator had returned, reborn as an agent of righteous vengeance, a champion for the fallen knights, the fresh-faced padawans, and not least for the tiny bodies that Anaka Skywalker had left scattered in the creche of the Jedi Temple.
Palpatine remembered how those deaths had launched the young mother into senseless mourning. Someone else's children had not meant as much to Anaka as her own; yet, afterwards, the newly dubbed Darth Vader had fled the slaughter to shelter with her newborns. Palpatine had watched the girl clutch her squirming offspring to her naked breasts. While the infants fed, Anaka's body had trembled, her nerves assaulted by the raw memory of her transgressions. The empress had been planning to send Vader to Mustafar, but the girl had refused to set a toe outside Palpatine's apartments for weeks.
If only she had gone, Palpatine seethed, this disaster would not have occurred.
Perhaps it was guilt for the Temple slaughter that had lured Anaka into Kenobi's trap. The Jedi had caught up with her on the planet Geonosis. Darth Sidious' former allies had fled from Mustafar to seek refuge in the arena where Count Dooku had once held court. Lady Vader had disposed of them with ease, but Kenobi was not far behind her. When he challenged her, she should have pulled the mountain down on him with a casual flick of her wrist. Instead, the foolish girl had accepted Kenobi's demand of "honourable combat." With the corpses of Dooku's cronies only metres away, the two legendary warriors clashed, a great blossom of lightsabre plasma expanding between them while Kenobi hurled his accusations.
The Order. The babies. And whatever had happened to Padmaj Naberrie anyway?
How presumptuous Naberrie had been, Palpatine ruminated. A boy who had dared to be king. A man who had touched what belonged to another.
The torso on the table gave a violent flop, drawing back Palpatine's abstracted gaze. She pressed a firm hand on the body, concerned that it might tumble onto the floor.
“If I were a man, Kenobi would be dead,” Anaka insisted.
Tears streaked down her face, falling from the corners of her wildly staring eyes to drip into the raw pink blossom of her open mouth. Her clenched and half-shattered teeth gleamed like pearls.
Kenobi had known his student too well. He had goaded her rage, tempted her to forgo her greatest weapon, the Force that came to her as a mighty flame, and Anaka had attacked her former master with undisciplined frenzy. Despite having grown into an usually tall and strong woman, she was unable to match Kenobi’s brute upper body strength. Balanced on the edge of a massive Geonosian cliff face, the Jedi Master had overpowered the young Sith, cracked her skull on the stone, and thrust her body into the gulf. As she was falling, Kenobi had used his lightsabre, the same lightsabre he had used to train her, to amputate three of Anaka’s limbs.
He must have assumed that would finish her, for he never went searching in the canyon, but Anaka, child of the Force, was stronger than most. She had called on the Dark to save her and had landed on another stone lip, slightly inwards from where Kenobi stood and only a few dozen feet below. Even still, the fall had inflicted countless wounds on Anaka, broken her neck and spine, and paralyzed her respiratory system. While her lungs were still healthy, her damaged nerves could no longer convey the signals to inflate them. Brutalized, concussed, and incapable of drawing breath, she had lain close to death.
Only the urgent warnings of the Force had delivered Palpatine to Geonosis in time to save her. The empress had directed her pilot to land on the cliff-face only moments after Anaka's fall, soon enough that she had even witnessed Kenobi making his escape down the mountain. Despite her howling instincts, the empress had allowed the former general to flee. The limbless, bleeding spectacle of her apprentice had been more urgent. First-responders had given the girl oxygen, and the medical specialists on Coruscant immediately installed a permanent tracheotomy, as well as cybernetic implants to regulate her breathing and repair her nervous system sufficiently that she was not left a quadriplegic. If the results were not quite satisfactory, they at least allowed the girl to breathe and walk.
The same could not be said for the limbs that Kenobi had taken.
“Make me bigger,” Anaka whispered. “Taller. More like them. Men. I need to be like them. He is coming for them. Please, your Excellency.”
The poor girl must be confused.
“Your Majesty,” the empress chided. “You call me Your Majesty now.”
Anaka twisted her head in the direction of the new monarch. A long, gaping wound split the top of the young woman's scalp, which had been shaved for sanitary reasons, but even without the red-brown curls her face was still a thing of beauty. There was a feverish look in Anaka's blue eyes, and a ring of gold around them that flooded the empress’s head with love.
“Your Majesty,” Anaka breathed. “Where are the children? Are my children well? I dreamed that Obi-Wan came for them!”
“Kenobi is gone. The children are very well. And you will be well. Very soon you will hold your lovely babes in your arms again."
“But where are they?” Anaka demanded. Her voice shook and her skin trembled. With the tube in her throat, she could no longer shout, but Palpatine heard the shout in the Force, the wail of dispossessed agony.
“With the nanny, my dear.”
There was something animal about motherhood, the empress reflected, something that could not be reasoned with. Perhaps it was the knowledge that the body had created something living, something to which it was now bonded forever. It was not uncommon for mothers who survived their children to prematurely wither and perish. There was often some rational explanation: the woman would take a sudden illness or accident, but with the disaster came a knowing silence. Those who had been left behind understood that the flesh of the mother could not sustain itself after the loss of the child.
Palpatine had never experienced the pains of motherhood. It was true that she had passed a spark to Shmi Skywalker those many years before, but she thought that made her more of a father than a mother. Sometimes she wondered if it made her anything to this girl. A messenger of the gods, perhaps. Yet she felt a sense of possessiveness that needed to be filled by a role. She must mean something to the wrecked creature on the table.
Once, many years ago, then-Chancellor Palpatine had a dream in which she had revealed everything to Anaka. The Sith. The Empire. That ancient meeting with Shmi Skywalker, out under the star-spangled dome of the spacers’ moon. And in the dream, the little Jedi Padawan had run from her in horror. Seeing the girl disappearing and desperate to keep her, Palpatine had seized Anaka by the neck and pushed her onto the office couch like a lover. While the Padawan struggled, the chancellor had leaned in, opened her mouth wide, and proceeded to eat her. Even now, Palpatine vividly remembered each big bite, beginning at the neck and ending with the tips of Anaka’s fingers protruding from the chancellor’s mouth. The slim digits had disappeared into the void with a last, satisfied slurp.
Only then had Palpatine startled awake. She had been covered in sweat, and her heart had raced with unaccustomed terror and a deep, corporeal longing.
The empress had no desire to kill Anaka; however, whatever happened, her girl would not be permitted to leave.
“I must get back to the children,” Anaka wheezed. “They need me.”
A seed of envy unfurled in Palpatine’s heart, taking root. It was not enough for Anaka that Palpatine had offered her all she ever desired. The Jedi had agreed with the chancellor in every respect politically, yet Palpatine had been forced to engage in the kind of seduction she considered unnecessary, even demeaning, after a decade of close friendship. Only these children, the crude product of Skywalker and Naberrie’s youthful indiscretion and the object of Anaka's prophetic nightmares, had secured for the Sith Master the loyalty of her own creation.
And still the wretched little beasts occupied every waking moment of the girl’s attention. Even without Anaka's shattering injuries, Palpatine thought that it would be some time before Lady Vader was once again fit to lead on the battlefield.
“Make me strong!” Anaka insisted. “No one can ever do this to me again. Make me strong so that I can find Kenobi and eliminate him. He is still a threat to my children.”
There it was again. In a mad flash, Palpatine briefly considered ordering a housekeeping droid to smother the infants in their sleep. No one need know. A gas leak from the kitchens, she would tell Anaka. A tragedy. Or perhaps she might arrange for a “Jedi abduction.” They would scour the galaxy for decades and never find a trace of the unfortunate brats.
The empress gave it a few moments’ thought before reluctantly dismissing the idea. Anaka might never recover. She would be useless in every capacity for which Palpatine required her.
“Yes, my girl, we will make you strong. As strong as a man. Stronger. They will never threaten you or use you again.”
What young girl didn't ache to be as strong as the man who wounded her? And if women like Palpatine had lived long enough to discern other ways of putting down threats, well, Anaka no longer had a sweet voice and a soft body to rely on. So the amputated limbs would become mighty prostheses. They would be longer than Anaka’s own arms and legs, longer than any natural human woman's: the monstrous, multi-jointed limbs of a spider. Yes, Palpatine mused, a spider's legs, and her girl would have a spider's armour. Black as a Sith warrior’s raiment was meant to be, but cloaked in satin and shining all over with the blood rubies and sapphires that Palpatine already imagined setting into the breastplate and shoulder guard.
Finally, there would be a mask to cover the girl’s scarred face and the weakness of the throat. A mask pointed and shining like a spider’s faceted eyes, and an awful voice just like a spider's, if a spider could speak.
Men would run screaming from Lady Vader. Padmaj Naberrie would have drawn back in disgust.
Still stroking the lump on the table, Palpatine watched as Anaka slipped into a fitful sleep.
"I promise you," the empress breathed, "No man will lay eyes on your beauty again."
Only Palpatine would be permitted to unmask this mortified flesh, that she might gaze long at her darling girl.