#sabé comes back after padmé stabilizes in a hidden base and just punts anakin back into the lava

[naberiie]

thirteen minutes

As Sabé pilots the stealth vessel down onto Mustafar, tracking the signal from Padmé’s royal starship, she can pretend for a moment that everything will be alright. The chromium vessel glints like a starknife’s edge in the boiling crimson and scarlet of this world, cutting through the volcanic ash with ease, the tracking signal a steady--a healthy--heartbeat. For a moment, Sabé can tell herself she was simply being too paranoid, as usual. Thirteen minutes will not have made the difference, she lies, and knows that the words are too hollow to even try to believe. Thirteen minutes behind Padmé’s ship had been as fast as Sabé could depart. Once more Sabé wonders if Padmé would have rushed here if she had known her Sabé was so close, so desperate to help. Moteé and Ellé had sent her the message as soon as their mistress had left, but still the Captain of Amidala’s Royal Handmaidens worries that she had moved far too slowly. Time is constricted, breathless; something terrible is unfolding and Padmé is alone at the heart of it.

Aside from the starship, the landing platform is empty. In the midst of the perpetual roiling landscape that surrounds it, it’s far too still. Death and pain linger above it like a scab picked raw. And then Sabé’s eye catches on the figure lying, unmoving, on the platform.

She curses and throws the ship down, extending the ramp even before it touches down. Alarms scream back at her but she overrides them all. The knowledge that her paranoia had been right all along is drowned before it can fully live under the terror and panic of seeing her oldest friend, her most beloved, injured and alone and still, so, so, so terribly still.

Sabé jumps down onto the landing platform and immediately the soles of her shoes begin to burn. Sulfur weighs down the atmosphere and Sabé wants to scream again as she races to Padmé’s side--had the smoke inhalation knocked her out? Or had it been something, someone, else?

She falls to her knees by Padmé’s side. Ash coats her skin, her too-pale face, her hair. Her breathing is labored, struggling through her throat. “Padmé, flower,” Sabé begs. She works her fingers under the side of Padmé’s jaw and fights the despair that rises with the too-weak fluttering heartbeat. She fumbles for Padmé’s hands. Her fingernails have blood under them--her neck, bloody welts and scratches.

Despite the immortal inferno raging around them, the chill that races through Sabé could have frozen the entire galaxy.

As she carefully, gently lifts Padmé in her arms--too light, Sabé thinks, the fear in her throat, too light--someone calls her name. They almost sound relieved.

The droid.

She does not stop in her strides back to the ship, back to the clean air. In her arms, Padmé whimpers, the sound fragile. “Threepio. Tell me what happened.”

“It’s been such a terrible day, Master Sabé, such a terrible-”

“Shut up,” Sabé hisses, patience already frayed to a hair’s width. “Shut up and get to the point.”

“We followed Master Anakin here, but we didn’t know... we didn’t know Master Kenobi had hidden himself aboard before we left.” He follows her up the stealth vessel’s ramp, and his next words chill the very marrow of her bones. “We didn’t know, but Master Anakin didn’t believe her. Master Anakin thought she’d betrayed him. He got angry and...”

The claw marks on Padmé’s neck--her own, left by her own nails as she fought to breathe against invisible, crushing fingers--are stark in the artificial lighting of the vessel’s tiny medbay. Sabé stares down at them as she fixes an oxygen mask over Padmé’s mouth and nose. Thirteen minutes too slow. Thirteen minutes unlucky.

She wonders if gods move with their believers, or if Shiraya, too, is as helpless as Sabé on this burning planet.

“Where are they now?”

If the droid catches her frozen anger, he makes no mention. “I’m not sure. They started fighting.” He gestures, uselessly, and his next words are quiet. Genuine. “I’m very glad to see you, Master Sabé.”

Fighting, while Padmé lay unconscious on the ground. Animals, she hisses through her teeth. Selfish bastards. She hopes, selfishly, with another bright flash of anger, that they might kill each other.

If not, she’ll hunt down the survivor and kill him herself.

As the medical gear comes to life around them, Sabé doesn’t look at Threepio when she says, “You monitor her. Anything goes wrong, you come get me. Understood?”

“Yes. Are we leaving? What about Master Kenobi?”

Her lips curl back. Snarl, rather than a smile. “I don’t care.”

If she ever sees Anakin Skywalker or Obi-Wan Kenobi again, anger and blood coiling in her stomach, she will rip out their throats before even their Force can warn them of her blistering, consuming rage.

She will annihilate them for leaving Padmé, alone, injured, and unconscious on that platform. The rest of the galaxy be damned.