Regal and worldly as she seems, Padmé’s still human. It’s not a realization that hits Sabé like the palace has come crashing down on her head, but a gradual thing. It’s the smile (even after her last adult tooth comes in, perfectly aligned to the rest of her mouth) and it’s the way her hair looks done up halfway, combed around the giant foam shapers; it’s the way she laughs when she finds something genuinely funny, rather than to just be polite, and it’s the things she says and the way she says them when the ambassadors leave the room and Sabé is the only one close enough to hear her muttering the words to herself, committing their words to memory because there’s not enough time to pore over them right now.
Padmé asks her to be the decoy first. Their faces are still strikingly similar; Sabé is tall for twelve and under regal garments it’s awfully hard to tell how shapeless she is (how shapeless she feels next to the other handmaidens, who offer her little other than encouragements that one day soon she’ll sprout hips and breasts, maybe more than all of them).
“This could mean your life,” says Padmé.
Sabé swallows and repeats the words she knows.
“My Lady, my job is to protect you with my life if need be.”
Padmé crushes her in a hug, and Sabé wishes she could tell her it won’t come to that.
She’s glad she hasn’t said it when the Trade Federation invades and once again they’re shoving Sabé into the elaborate gowns she’d spent months learning to walk in, weaving extensions into her hair and pinning it all around shapers. And she does not stand down from the Federation; she’s long since run out of the things Padmé had told her to say or do; she has no time to consider what Padmé would do. But when they are finally aboard the ship, when it looks like it’s about to go down in flames, Padmé squeezes her hand and Sabé holds on.
(Of course, once this is all over with she makes Padmé clean up the droid, because Padmé had made her serve the five-course ceremonial mean two weeks ago, and grave danger isn’t going to make her forget that.)
They survive Tatooine and the flight to Coruscant, but it’s Padmé who takes up the crown before the senate, as she should. Sabé has done her part, but it is Padmé who makes people hang on her every word, Padmé who can silence crooks with one syllable, Padmé who can deliver Senator Palpatine’s sentiments and her own.
When all of it’s over, when they are back on Theed and the palace is theirs, Padmé requests a moment alone with Sabé. This is normally when they’d switch and Padmé would address the people as Queen Amidala, but there’s time yet. Padmé and the advisors want those Trade Federation slimeballs off the planet, and the young Jedi is helping with that (mechanically, avoiding his grief despite all those parroted phrases aboard the ship about the Jedi having no earthly attachments when she’d expressed her worries over Padmé). But even the other handmaidens leave, and it’s just the two of them, Sabé with paint clinging to her forehead and half-dressed, Padmé with her hair unpinned but still in her modified handmaiden’s outfit.
Sabé reaches for Padmé’s hands first this time and clasps them both. There is so much to say, like how grateful she is that Padmé is safe, how proud she is of Padmé (though she’d expect no less), how happy she is for peace and no treaties with the trade federation. (How—and where did this come from?—beautiful Padmé looks with a blaster in her hand and the planet at her fingertips.) She doesn’t say them; this is enough.
Sabé volunteers to remain in Padmé’s service when she is elected senator, but Padmé turns her down.
“Coruscant is ugly. Things could get like the Trade Federation invasion, or worse, every day.”
That single ugly incident is the only time Sabé has ever felt in real danger in her position; that much is true. But she knows what it’s like; she knows Padmé. They still look alike even without the makeup, enough to fool a more sophisticated system than the Trade Federation’s.
“I know what I’m signing up for,” Sabé says. “I’m still prepared to protect you with my life.”
Padmé looks at her and bites her lip. “I know you do.”
(She could have told Sabé that she only thinks she does, something patronizing and dismissive, but Padmé is never like that, something that Sabé realizes is rare more and more each day.)
“Sabé, please.”
Her voice frays a little at the end, as if she’s trying to stop herself from crying. She looks like it, too, vulnerable and young, younger than she’d looked (already so regal with no royal titles attached) the first time they’d met all those years ago. This time it’s Sabé who pulls Padmé in (improper for her station, yes, but definitely appropriate for the situation at hand). The hug is awkward; Sabé’s not really used to it but Padmé fits against her so well that she thinks maybe she should have done this more often. Sabé can smell the perfume she wears, a light fruity scent that reminds her of the Lake Country and the week they’d all spent there last year.
Eventually Padmé pulls back, but one arm slides up Sabé’s arm. She’s still biting her lip, in an almost more serious way, and her arm keeps going up, over Sabé’s shoulder and past the neckline of her dress, up her neck, to her jaw, and Sabé wonders for a second if she’s imagining again (but she always cuts off these daydreams before they get to this part).
And then Padmé kisses her, lips soft and sweet like delicate sponge cake, fingers reaching into Sabé’s hair. Sabé tries to kiss back, but she really doesn’t know what she’s doing. Whatever it is must be working, though, because Padmé doesn’t pull away for what seems like a long time, and when she does she’s smiling. Sabé wants to save that smile and keep it with her forever, when Padmé leaves for Coruscant (unless this means she’s reconsidered) and beyond that.
But Sabé doesn’t ask, because she’s pretty sure she knows the answer.
There are never enough times to meet; Padmé’s rarely in Theed and when she is she’s never on non-official business, always with lieutenants and bodyguards and councilors. The few private moments they can get are brief, quiet kisses in dark corners and hands twisted under tables. Sabé’s late growth spurt has made her tower over Padmé, and their faces have settled into distinctive looks, expressions diverging more than they are the same. It’s harder now to mistake one of them for the other. The things they speak of diverge, too; Sabé still serves the crown as a security advisor and Padmé is more concerned with the ware that rarely intersects palace matters. The Trade Federation and its allies have moved on to bigger things, and while it makes Sabé’s job easier it makes Padmé’s harder and puts her in more danger.
But they rarely speak of those things in private anyway, only of memories and trivial matters, brief escapes from the darkening galaxy around them. Sometimes, Sabé thinks of asking Padmé if she would just abandon her responsibilities, leave everything behind, come away with her somewhere. It’s a twisted, impractical fantasy; it involves contradicting everything Sabé knows and loves about Padmé.
“Don’t wait around for me,” Padmé always says before she leaves.
But Sabé always does, and Padmé always returns.
And then Padmé comes back in a box. The war is over; both sides have lost. Sabé can’t sleep even before she hears the news, another tragedy to top things off like sprinkles on the fancy desserts she would offer to suspicious officials when she was playing queen, Padmé to her right with head bowed and ears open. To think that someone could have stared out at the skyline of Theed as Palpatine one had (Palpatine, the stern but seemingly-benevolent senator she had met so long ago) and decided that peace was not enough for him, only domination, is beyond Sabé, but it’s something to twist her mind around while it’s doing nothing else.
Padmé’s face is, from what Sabé can tell from the back of the throngs, peaceful. Or maybe it’s a lie she tells herself so she doesn’t start crying. People around her are tearing up, whether because they had known her and believed in her or whether they’re just plain tired of pillar after pillar falling, and this is just a convenient excuse. It’s like a stupid twist out of one of those suspense novels Dormé always used to read, that Padmé is the one in the coffin—killed somehow, no official cause of death, pushing in the seal on the fate of the republic—and Sabé is right here, alive and breathing and whole.
It’s been over a year since the last time they’d seen each other and still, she’d been hoping (maybe after the war, maybe before reelection, maybe sometime, anytime) foolishly, wrongly. They’d left things on the table (they always have), things that gave them an excuse to pick up, things it’s stupid to dwell on now, like the ghost of Padmé’s palm on Sabé’s cheek, the way she’d looked up under decorated lashes, the unfinished thoughts trailing away under the cracks in her voice. There are words she should have said, perhaps; those words likely wouldn’t have made any difference in the end. Despite that, Sabé wishes she’d said them anyway.