Peace. He was floating in a sea of stars, with silver sharks sliding gracefully past, and shoals of TIE fighter pilot fish following in their wake… There was the forest moon of Endor below him; its hazy green surface was the algae-coated sea bottom.
Peace…

"You were with another woman last night," stated an emotionless female voice, somewhere near his left ear.

His ship was capsizing! With a jolt, he was back in his Throne Room. The old tension in his jaw had returned. No peace for the wicked, he thought grimly to himself.

"I always know when you've been with another woman – afterwards, you are always drenched with the scent of your own ecstasy."

She was in one of her despondent moods, where she would threaten to forswear his bed and company, until she felt able to forgive him.

The Emperor slowly swivelled round to face his young wife.

His eyes traced her familiar form – pasty white heart-shaped face, with premature lines of anxiety sketched here and there, at the corners of her drooping lips, and around her heavy eyelids; her scant figure was stiff and straight-backed, and the solemn brown eyes seemed to glitter with dejection.

"Why do you feel the need to deceive me? Am not I your wife? Your Empress?"

Her voice had taken on a shrewish tone.

The Emperor glowered at her from beneath the overhanging lip of his hood.

He almost despised her, when she behaved in this way.

"And why…" he hissed, "do you feel the need to possess me? To keep me shackled, and forever bound to your company? Am not I your Emperor, your Lord and Master? It is, in fact, befitting that I possess you! You are as much my servant as are those that wait on me. You are no more deserving of me than any of my concubines. Do not cling so, woman!" he snapped as she began to tug at his robes imploringly.

At this, her hands flew to her face. "O spite!" she wailed. "Am I really so inadequate that you feel that I am no more than a restriction? A hindrance? This is the greatest injury you can possibly inflict upon me! Say you do not mean it." As these words streamed from her mouth, she began reflexively to twist the flesh of her face, and claw at her features with her nails. "I'll tear this face clean off before I hear such utterances again!"

The Emperor's lips suddenly curled with mild consternation. "You make yourself wild with jealousy. Stop that immediately!"

"This was your final chance, Palpatine! From now on… I… I shan't put up with any more of your sordid liaisons… I shall never… never-"

She was now wringing her hands beneath her chin incessantly; it was an action that he found incredibly maddening, and it always upset his digestion.

The only way to make her forgive him now, was to subject her to Force-manipulation.

A casual gesture towards her face was all it took.

Slowly, she dragged her hands away from her face and allowed them to fall limply to her sides. Her expression gradually softened. Meekly, she took his chalk-white hand in hers, and kissed it.

"There really is no need to be quite so melodramatic!" he chided her. "And you know I didn't mean what I said…" Though, of course, he knew he had done.

She now knelt before him, wearing an almost pitiful smile.

"You do love me, don't you?"

A charismatic smile stretched the Emperor's thin mouth. "I think we both know the answer to that!"

He patted her arm gently, and she turned to leave. As he watched her slight retreating form, he found himself both amazed and amused by the ease at which her anger had been waved aside. How weak-willed she was! How naïve!

Indeed her only useful assets were her blind idolization of him, and the stirring passion with which she soothed his frayed nerves, in the feverish pre-dawn dark of his palace bedchamber.

She was so useful… yet oh-so-easily replaceable, just like any other of her sex.

Frailty, thy name is woman, he thought smugly.