Author's note: This story and another I will post right after this one were written in response to a challenge on the boards at TheForce.net.
The parameters of the challenge were:
1) The story must be one post long; no series.
2) The subject of the story must be a 'good' or well-liked character partrayed in an unfavorable way or an 'evil' or disliked character portrayed favorably.
The challenge spawned some stunningly good, innovative stories - even an evil Artoo! I encourage you to check out the thread at http://boards.theforce.net/message.asp?topic=77011412
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Disclaimer haiku:
Oh, the harsh refrain
legality and regret;
own them I do not
~
Of Faith
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Naboo's Junior Senator, Mero Palpatine, stood in the Rotunda of the Senate, the great chamber that led to the sphere housing the Senate Forum. The building was silent, the lights dim, the blue carpet was a ribbon of black bordered in glowing white angelstone.
Once, as early as this morning, he would have pointed to the Senate as an example of all that was right with the galaxy. Nearly five hundred thousand races were represented, over a billion worlds.
A bitter smile twisted his lips and he raised his eyes, studying the bas-relief metal panels that lined the approach. Each Chancellor was depicted here, all the way back to Cadra the Unifier – one of the first heroes of the Republic and its first human Chancellor.
What would Cadra do had she seen the events of today?
Palpatine bowed his head, anger and sadness roiling within him.
A colony of humans had settled on a small world called Brin. On the face of it, the world was not a true prize; no major mineral deposits, no bounty of metals, no swathes of gem-rich rock. Just a small, blue-green world with rich alluvial plains and soil that could grow anything you had a seed for. The colony had thrived for over seventy-five years, growing to number nearly one million people in the last census.
At of the closing of the session this evening, they now numbered five; a man, two women, a five year-old boy and an infant girl of nine months. None of them related by anything other than tragedy.
Just this afternoon, he had believed in law, order, and justice. He believed in the Republic and had chosen to serve it as a priest might serve his god – with all of his life. Now that faith was as deeply eroded as Cadra's carved face had become. Staring into the shadows, he could see the only the faintest suggestion of features; the strong jaw, the eyes, a determined stance and her chin lifted in challenge to the lawlessness that she and millions of others had fought and crushed.
The stench of molten metal and organic decay assailed him as if he stood again on the once-green plains of Brin. Droid parts littered the blackened plain and the city behind him a smoking crater. The hissing of compression of his respirator filled his ears as the evidence of atrocity filled his eyes. A pit of bubbling slurry, the former residents of Brin, was all that was left. The planet had been – for lack of a better word – fumigated, the bodies disposed of, and the droids who had been made to do this were slagged.
Palpatine went to his knees on the soft neocel carpet.
Droids ordered through the Commerce Guild, made by the Techno Union, financed by the Banking Clans, delivered to the Corporate Alliance with Trade Federation ships. The evidence was all there!
It had all been disallowed. A committee… a committee, by all the names of the gods… had been formed to "ascertain the identity or identities of those accountable for the unapproved removal of the lawful colonists of Brin." The Chancellor then approved the petition to permit the Mining Consortuim to salvage the remaining assets, and to (coincidentally, of course) mine the newly discovered deposits of communications-grade gold and copper in the Brin City plateau.
The non-humans in the senate had overridden any attempt by some of the human worlds to bring the evidence to the attention of the Judiciary, stating that humans had to expect the Senate to act like the Senate and not a lynch mob. As the Nemoidian Chancellor had explained, these things took time, after all, and humans were prolific breeders. The race as a whole could replace what had been lost within a fraction of a day.
Some barrier broke within the young senator's mind and he leaped to his feet, screaming in rage at the expressionless metal faces above him.
"Where in all hells are you! Where is the law and order? Where is the justice?"
In his hate and fury, he drove his fist repeatedly into the pillars of angelstone, leaving bloody knuckle prints up and down the pure white rock. He ran from pillar to pillar, slamming his fists into the rock and metal, stamping the hall up and down with his blood and rage. Howling at the graven images of the great human Chancellors Fileelo, Gaspak, Dalimni, Zuahaj, he cursed their blank faces and his own impotence.
Finally, exhausted and empty, he sank to his knees in front of the Grand Entrance to the Senate, resting his forehead against the cold metal of the closed doors, his shattered fingers bleeding onto the lap of his elaborate green and gold robes. Almost in an attitude of prayer, he wept with all the grief of a man who had seen, held, then been shut out of paradise.
A tall onyx-cloaked shadow detached itself from an alcove, gliding up behind the weeping man, casting him in shadows that seemed to cling to his cheeks and temples.
Palpatine now simply murmured 'please, please, please' asking unnamed gods for the return of something irretrievably lost. Cold seemed to shoot along his bones as the shadow covered him, and he turned to look upward into a pair of blazing yellow eyes.
In the mythology of the Naboo, Lord Death wore black robes and where there was shadow, there He could go.
Palpatine smiled. The gods had answered him after all.
Disregarding the searing lumps of agony at the ends of his arms, Mero Palpatine embraced his new faith.
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