Chapter Text
Shmi Skywalker is not a storm, but the Jedi may as well be, for all they clash over her.
She hears the whispers in the corridors when she passes, when Anakin passes – calling them heretics, calling them saviors, the best or the worst thing to happen to the Order in millennia.
We’re just people, Shmi thinks, rather exasperated, and goes out to the gardens to breathe when the attention swirling around the halls presses down too hard on her.
The sheer green of the gardens, the scent of damp air and soil, the cool breeze – even after ten years, Shmi sometimes thinks how wonderful it is that these things exist. This garden – one of many, in the temple, including a desertlike one that she’s grown herself – is one of Shmi’s favorites to sit and meditate in, or think in, or just nap in when the urge and the moment presents itself.
And the urge certainly is presenting itself, with Shmi barely returned from a mission on Quermia that hadn’t been as dangerous as some, but had unfortunately required a reasonable amount of vigilance, and her dreams for the past week have been… strange. Metaphors and animals and words she can’t quite hear, caught on the wind and torn away. The gardens, she hopes, will provide either clarity or respite; either would be welcome at this point.
Her plans are in vain, though; there’s an initiates’ clan having their free time in the garden. The initiates look to be around seven or eight, developmentally; once she looks closer, she recognizes a few of them. This clan is one she knows, and one that knows her, which means that no doubt any moment there will be children asking her to–
“Master Skywalker!”
“Master Shmi!”
“Shmi Shmi come play–”
“You’re it!”
“I can’t be it,” she solemnly tells the little muun child. “How can I be it… when you’re it?” She taps the child lightly on the head and darts off, mindful of the childrens’ average speeds.
Of course, around the third time she becomes ‘it’ because various children have latched onto her legs and held her there for their friends to tag freely, she stops playing quite as nice.
“You can tag me if you can reach me,” she tells the many disappointed eyes from the safety of a tall tree. “Think of it as a challenge.”
“It’s fine when they’re just playing,” another voice says. “But when they actively start trying to trap you…”
Shmi looks over for her companion hiding in the tree and smiles. “You could have warned me, Kallei,” she says.
Kallei, a teenage zabrak, just flashes her teeth and shakes her head. “But it was so much fun to watch you stumble into the same mistakes that I made previously. A true lesson, Master Skywalker.”
Calling her Master Skywalker is just mockery, from Kallei, who knows perfectly well to call her Shmi; a gentle force-push sends her out of the tree and into the crowd of younglings.
Kallei lands carefully, balanced on her hands, as Shmi had known she would; she doesn’t stay that way long, however, as she’s quickly swarmed by younglings.
“I’ll judge how fun it is to watch someone get defeated by children,” Shmi calls down.
“I regret the day I met you!” Kallei calls back up. “You, who leave me to my doooooom… No, no, I tagged you, fair and square, you’re it,” she tells a twi’lek. “Even if it was on the lekku, it still counts.”
Kallei is one of the beings that the less complimentary Jedi call “Skywalker’s strays” and the less opinionated Jedi call “the older initiates.” Kallei had been the first one to come to her, six years ago, all twelve-year-old wildfire and determination and knowledge that no Jedi would choose her as a padawan before she turned thirteen.
“I’m a padawan myself,” Shmi had said. “I can’t choose you–”
“That’s not what I’m asking for,” Kallei had said. “You – you were chosen as a padawan when you were thirty. I’m just asking for more time. They’ll send me away to the AgriCorps in two weeks. I know my place is here, that I can find my place here. I just need more time.”
The resulting council meetings had taken longer than the two weeks Kallei had, between the arguments and the philosophies thrown back and forth, between the sideways insults and outright demands. It had only ended when Obi-Wan Kenobi had asked her, politely, to leave the council room for a few minutes; when she had returned, the councilors were all looking off to the side, ashamed, and Kallei had been welcomed back into the Jedi Temple for extended initiate training.
At sixteen, her fire more focused but her determination still going strong, she had been accepted as a padawan learner by Mace Windu.
And now, at eighteen, she’s getting mobbed by younglings.
Shmi settles back into the tree, making herself comfortable, and lets her eyes drift shut, the playful screams of Beldon Clan in the background.
Twenty-seven minutes and nine seconds later, she falls out of the tree, a dream on the backs of her eyelids, a scream trapped in her throat, and the distant rumble of a bomb going off somewhere in the background.
Dragons, she thinks dizzily, then thinks Padmé.
She coughs, once, twice, three times, then turns to Kallei, who’s staring solemnly across at her, the younglings clustered together behind the zabrak. “There’s been a bombing on the landing platforms for the senate,” she says. “Someone go find Master Yoda, please.”
A youngling leaves at a run.
“Is that what you dreamed about?” Kallei asks, her eyes wide but her hands steady and her voice calm.
Shmi shakes her head, still blinking afterimages out of her eyes – bathas and krayt dragons and swirling sands.
The gardens have given her dreams clarity, but not peace; if anything, her dreams are heralding the opposite.
“Master Yoda’s in a council session,” a youngling says – the messenger, returned and almost out of breath. “They wouldn’t let me in, even though I had news.” The child sounds so indignant it brings a smile to Shmi’s face, despite the circumstances.
“It’s all right,” she reassures the youngling. “I’ll just leave a message for him on my comm, telling him what I need him to know.”
“Where are you going?” Kallei demands. “You just got back from a mission, you need rest–”
“Next you’ll be telling me to meditate more, too, and turn in my classwork on time,” she teases Kallei gently. “I will be fine, Kallei. I just need to go investigate some things.”
There’s a feeling in her gut telling her that this is the beginning of something.
The landing platform is damaged, but still floating; though the ship had been completely blown apart, the marks on the platform are mostly superficial.
Shmi walks the perimeter of the platform twice, once looking for blast patterns and markings, and once breathing, smelling, feeling.
Shmi knows this type of bomb, can smell the chemicals in the air and see the patterns the blast made. It’s a specific type of chem-blast, available nearly anywhere that has a black market and built to cause as much damage as possible.
“How many fatalities were there?” She asks one of the guards.
The guard gives her a small bow. “None, Lady Jedi, praise all their luck,” they reply. “A few mild injuries, from debris and the like, but the Senator and her entourage were mostly unharmed."
It was more than luck that nobody was harmed.
The blast, she’s heard, went off just as the Senator – or her decoy – was greeted by the chancellor; if it had been meant to kill, it would have gone off in midair or as the Senator was disembarking from the ship.
This was a warning, at best; a threat at worst.
Either way, there's someone out there with a grudge against Senator Amidala, and Shmi is going to find out who it is.
Luckily, she knows just who to go to to find out who’s been coming and going on Coruscant. The official Customs and Travels Department has reasonably good records, but they can hardly monitor the comings and going of an entire planet, let alone those who actually want to go unnoticed. But there are many things more reliable than official documentation.
Gossip, for example.
“Don’t tell me you’ve torn your clothes already,” Lannai says when Shmi knocks on her door. “For all that you ruin a shocking amount of fabric, you were just here last week.”
Shmi laughs and shakes her head. “And here I was, worried that you’d somehow dismantled your heater again. No, I’m just here for a bit of information, today.”
Lannai’s eyes light up with a sharp gleam. She’d outright told Shmi to come to her for information a few years ago, after a particularly nasty mission that would have gone better with a little more information. “You hear all sorts of things in a market,” Lannai had told her. “You know this. And whatever I’ve missed, someone else has heard; we all need information to survive, down here We help each other out. You’ve helped me out; now let me help you.”
Shmi is never sure whether Lannai knows exactly what she does or not; the residents of the lower levels tend to be mostly ambivalent towards Jedi; less so about Senators, who every Coruscant resident has a surprisingly strong opinion on.
“This wouldn’t be about that explosion out on the landing pads, would it?” Lannai shakes her head. “You’re going to get killed one of these days, investigating things like this.”
“Perhaps,” Shmi says, and feels a brush of the Force. “But if it will, that day is far in the future.”
Lannai sighs. “I’ve got no clue about explosives, or where they’d come from; you know that you want one of the Too-un clan for that. I’ve heard, though, that the Trade Federation has been unhappy with Amidala for years. They’re rich; they’ve either got an army of hunters to throw at her till her guards slip, or they’ve hired the best of the best. Most folk know that Naboo officials have too many decoys for most bounty hunters to get through.”
Shmi nods. “Are any of those best of the best on-planet right now, that you know of?”
“Hmmm.” Lannai taps her fingers, opaque nails clicking against the plasteel table. “Information like that is dangerous.”
Shmi inclines her head a tiny bit in acknowledgement, then goes to dig in her credit purse. Lannai is a friend, but both of them know that asking for information on bounty hunters deserves compensation.
“Cad Bane was seen in the lower markets a week and a half ago, looking for a new hat, as he does; Aurra Sing hasn’t openly dared Coruscant in years, but there might have been a sighting last month. Omare Nassshal was on Coruscant, but turned up stabbed in a bar a few levels down from here.” Lannai pauses.
It’s a significant kind of pause. “What else?” Shmi asks. Lannai has almost as much of a dramatic sense as Qui-Gon does.
“There’s a rumor that Sarad is in town,” Lannai says.
Shmi frowns. “I don’t know of that one.”
“A mandalorian,” Lannai says. “Yellow, orange, and black armor, with some fancy white designs. Not one of the best, but getting there; she’s still new on the scene.”
“You think she’s someone for me to look at, though,” Shmi says. A statement, but also a question.
Lannai half-shrugs. “She started calling herself Sarad two or three years ago; before that, she’d vanished for over a year – and before that, the hunters knew her as Shev’la Fett.”
Shmi sits very, very still. It’s been a long time since she’s heard the name Fett.
“She hunted with Jango Fett for a while, when she was starting out,” Lannai says. “She was his daughter, or so the rumor was, but if that was true she’s repudiated him by now anyways. I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of her; she’s got a good reputation for going after people who deserve it, which translates to a small reputation outside of the community.”
One day Shmi is going to figure out how Lannai knows so much about bounty hunters, but today isn’t that day, and Lannai deserves her privacy besides.
“So why did you mention her, then?” Shmi asks. “If she only takes moral jobs, why would she take the hit on Amidala?”
Lannai shrugs again, her luminescent hair sweeping over her shoulders. “All I know is that there was a mandalorian matching her description seen buying chem-blasts from the Too-uns, and that none of the other top hunters seem to be eyeing Amidala.”
Shmi lets out a light breath. "All right," she says. "Many thanks, Lannai."
As she makes her way back up to the upper levels, where she’ll meet Anakin and Obi-Wan to see what they’ve found while guarding the Senator, she lets herself calm, lets her mind become a smooth lake, a still boulder.
Sarad means flower, if she remembers correctly, and shev’la is silent; it must have been a drastic change, to make her go from silence to blossoms. And for Jango Fett to have been repudiated by a daughter of his…
None of this bodes well, not with the mystery of the Sith that she and Yoda still haven’t discovered. The Sith in the Senate – if they are still in the Senate, and haven’t moved on, or haven’t left to join the Separatist movement.
It’s been years since we made any progress, Shmi thinks. What with the rise of the Bando Gora, the hutts and other crime families gaining more power throughout the galaxy, the rise of the separatist faction, the general unrest and the disaster that had been her knighting on Mon Calamari… it’s time to bring more people into the loop, before it’s too late.
Her comm beeps as she’s getting off a train, with a message from Obi-Wan saying that they’re heading back to Padmé’s apartments.
Shmi frowns. The Senate is relatively secure; Padmé’s apartments are relatively secure.
The travel between them is not.
Shmi makes sure her lightsaber is easily drawable, then makes her way with all reasonable speed to Padmé’s apartments.