Disclaimer: I don't own anything you recognise.
If there is one thing I've learned in my years as a reporter it's that there is always a story to dig up.
Sometimes its not an interesting story, but there is always one.
When my editor assigned me the piece on the Chancellor and his relationship with Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker, having noticed Knight Skywalker had appeared in the local gossip rags a few times while out about about with the Chancellor I thought it would be a boring space filler, but I was so, so wrong.
It was confusing at first that when looking for photos of them together it didn't just go back a few months, or to the start of the war when they would of likely started seeing more of each other, but to when Skywalker was 9 years old! Dozens and dozens of photos of the Chancellor taking the young boy out for a meal, to the theatre, shopping or just out for the day. Yes maybe the Chancellor feels parental towards Skywalker. But if that was the case why would the Jedi allow it with their philosophy of no attachment?
But the question that keeps coming to mind, where was Obi-Wan Kenobi?
I myself would never let a random old man (no matter how well respected and politically powerful) go out so much with my daughter, especially close to the beginning when Skywalker was just a kid new to the planet. So why isn't Master Kenobi in any of the photos?
In checking I found that Kenobi is not now nor ever been friends with Chancellor Palpatine, nor was his Master, in fact it looks like Kenobi doesn't like or trust the man at all, so that rules out a friend helping out with child care.
In my quest to find out where Kenobi was I went to the Senate's public records hall, which includes all Jedi missions deployment and checked to see if he was away.
It took days to find Kenobi's records (which even for the Senates records hall was oddly long and only by a stroke of luck, almost like they where made purposefully impossible to find) and what was in them was...odd.
The man was requested for solo missions 12x more than any other Jedi record I could find, 9 out of 10 of them worded in a way that would make any sensible person leave their child at home, and 95% of them direct requests from the Senate.
It didn't say who in the Senate but I've been in journalism long enough to recognise the Chancellor's vocabulary in the written word.
There was also something else disconcerting in the records, two official warnings against Master Kenobi for attachment, after according to the records becoming upset that the Chancellor ordered Padawan Skywalker be brought to his office and left there alone, both incidences within the first 6 weeks of Skywalker arriving on Coruscant. I can't help noticing that it was after these two incidences that the mission requests started.
It turns my stomach to think that the Chancellor can just have unmonitored time with a 9 year old like that and the only person to worry would be the one in trouble.
Why would Skywalker go along with this? Surely Kenobi talked to him about it? Surely he knew what stranger danger is? Do the Jedi not teach it?
That question lead me to The Jedi class schedule and Skywalker's file (which was somehow even harder to find) and to my answer. The Jedi do indeed teach stranger danger to their children when they are 7 or 8 and then a much more comprehensive version when they are 14 as part of sex education... Skywalker didn't come to the Temple until he was 9, but surely he learned it wherever he was before?
...no. Skywalker definitely wouldn't have learned stranger danger before he came to the Temple.
His file is light on details, just two lines but it's enough to make me near throw up. Master Qui-Gon Jinn discovered the Foundling, Anakin Skywalker on Tatooine and won the slave from his Master in a bet. The boys Mother remains in his former Masters ownership.
Skywalker was a slave before coming to the Jedi! A slave, there is no way the boy would of known about bad touch or what grooming is! Kriff by the time his sex education came around, 5 years after he arrived he would of been completely under the older man's thumb.
With this horrible discovery I go to my editor, who immediately agrees with disgust on his face it's a front page story, so with a bit more research and an interview with the Chancellor's former assistant (who talks about how much time the old man spent in his office with the boy, who was 10 and 11 when she worked for him with the door always locked.) and dozens of old photos found in gossip rags where the Chancellor had his arm around the boy or was smiling at him in a way that was creepy.