A note from the authors: We're back, everyone! Between one of us helping her girlfriend move in and the other doing a lot of traveling, the last couple of months were extraordinarily busy, but now things are on a downturn again and The Risen Sith is back in motion. Thanks so much to everyone who's stuck with us—chapter drops should resume their usual frequency from here on out!

We're also excited to note that we're approaching the halfway point of this final installment. Tightening plot threads and escalating collapse are both nerve-wracking and very fun to write, and we hope you'll enjoy reading them as much as we enjoy writing them. May the Force be with you!

PART SEVEN: SEPARATIONS

Chapter Thirty-One: Count Me In

At the best of times, returning to Coruscant was never something Bail relished—leaving behind the palace, the crisp mountain air, and most importantly Breha for smog-choked air and endless metal was something he'd had to do countless times since he'd become a senator, and he hated it each time.

That was when he was voluntarily returning. When he was summoned back by a communique from the Executive Office, letting him know that Chancellor Palpatine requested the pleasure of his company . . . well.

Sitting on a bench outside the office that used to be his, as if he were waiting for a doctor to emerge and break some bad news, wasn't making things easier. Nor were the two red-robed guards flanking the door, plastoid masks rendering their mood inscrutable. For all Bail knew there were assassin droids under those expressionless slabs—or Executor Vader himself, just itching to pull the trigger on yet another target.

A domestic target, this time. One of the ringleaders of . . . well, nothing much in practice, but in theory something dangerously close to sedition.

If he'd been alone, he would have listened to Padmé's voice, which was sneering at his delusions of grandeur. But he wasn't the only occupant of this particular bench. Turning to his left, he saw Mon, who was resolutely staring at the far wall and not the redrobes.

"How long do you think he keeps us waiting?" he muttered to her, careful to let his voice rise just enough that their watchers would hear without thinking they'd been meant to.

"Bail, is this really the moment," she replied without looking at him, keeping her eyes fixed on a singularly ugly sculpture Palpatine had installed in the waiting room after cycling the art Bail had hung during his tenure back into storage.

"Five more minutes, I think," he said, checking his wrist chronometer and verifying that they were already three minutes past when the meeting had been scheduled for. "He likes his late entrances."

Turning his head so that his mouth was no longer visible to the guards, he lowered himself to a murmur. "When he asks why you were on Alderaan, it's because we were negotiating your support for a bill that would get us a share of our turbolaser factories back."

"He won't like that," she whispered, turning at last to look him directly in the eye.

"Which means he hopefully won't go looking for something he'd like even less." When she nodded, Bail felt a tiny pulse of smugness rise and fall within him. Believe it or not, Senator Mothma, you're not the only one who can plan ahead.

As if the universe were warning him not to get too cocky, the double doors to the inner office parted with a whoosh.

Sapir, the Fosh vice chair, strode from the office. As she emerged, she darted her eyes from senator to senator, her crest of feathers flattened and gray. Bail didn't think he'd seen her look happy since before the war broke out, but she was particularly jumpy today, beyond what her avian nature typically conveyed. Rather than saying anything, she simply nodded to him and Mon before brushing past.

Now what could that have been about?

From within, in a tone so cheerful it made Bail want to punch its owner: "Senators! I do apologize for the delay. Come in, please."

Entering the office was like washing oneself in blood—red was everywhere, from the fabric of the carpet to the paint Palpatine had chosen for the walls. Even he fit the theme today, dressed in robes a deep burgundy closer to wine than the more vivid decor. As Bail and Mon passed through the door, he rose from his desk, smiling and extending his hands in welcome.

The person behind him looked substantially less pleased to be there.

Skywalker didn't usually crack a smile these days, but right now he seemed positively hostile. Padmé's husband glowered at the pair of them as they strode forward, and though the executive desk blocked Bail's line of sight, the senator had a feeling that behind it the young man's mechanical hand was clenched into a fist.

"I do appreciate your making the trip to Coruscant on such relatively short notice," Palpatine said, giving no indication that he was aware of the general tenor of the room. "May I offer you anything to drink? There's a particularly fine vintage I've been saving for a special occasion."

"I only drink in this office if I'm the one serving, if it's all the same to you, Chancellor," Bail replied, gripping the executive's proffered hand and squeezing just hard enough to wring out some annoyance. He hadn't studied Palpatine up close in quite a while—it was irksome to note that five years of presiding over unending war hadn't seemed to age the man at all. He looked exactly the same as he had when he sat across from Bail in this very office, their positions converse to what they now were.

For her part, Mon bowed subtly before taking her seat. "Special occasion, Chancellor?"

While the two of them exchanged pleasantries, Bail let his eyes wander around the room. Contrary to the calculated pleasant boringness of his public persona, Palpatine's office had a disquietingly . . . pagan feel to it. One would expect a few Naboo water sculptures here and there, but instead the statues that kept watch at regular intervals along the walls were dark, dense, looming like shadows. Bas-reliefs of coiled metal stretched along two walls, enveloping them in twisted shapes—only the bright light streaming through the massive window broke the waves of scarlet and bronze.

And then there was Skywalker, looking like nothing so much as one of those statues, black synthleather clothing seeming to suck light into it. Bail did his best not to hold the boy's gaze, but it wasn't easy—he had the absurd but incredibly strong feeling that the Chancellor's right hand was staring at him. Personally.

". . . but we can of course discuss that another time," Palpatine was saying, settling back in his chair and steepling his hands. "I haven't brought the two of you here to discuss my vineyard."

"Yes," Bail said, yanking himself into the present through the easiest avenue available to him—annoyance. "I have to say I'm very curious as to what you have brought us here for, Chancellor. On such short notice."

"I apologize, of course, for the inconvenience. We can only be glad that both of you were present on the same planet," Palpatine replied, looking calmly at the Alderaanian senator over his fingertips. As he held Bail's gaze, the chancellor's expression slid—the smile it bore was superficially the same, but by degrees grew cool. Amused. "I of course have no problems with colleagues choosing to spend time together. But when whispers of the why reached me . . . well, I thought a small breath of fresh air might be the best thing for both of you. Give you some perspective."

"The why?" Mon asked, her voice a model of polite surprise. "I'm afraid I don't understand."

Bail noticed that her eyes flitted to Skywalker as soon as she was done—he continued to loom behind Palpatine, glowering down at both of them.

"Oh, come now, Senator Mothma," replied Palpatine, smile shifting to the indulgent as though listening to a favorite child's lie. "When it's brought to my attention that two of my most respected colleagues are fomenting an opposition movement in the Senate, I must take it seriously."

It paid, Bail reflected, to be paranoid. Had he gone into this meeting believing Palpatine was ignorant of their plans, he might have frozen up. Instead, he'd been anticipating this conversation ever since Mon had set foot on Alderaan. He may have been anxious, but he wasn't going to be startled into silence.

Instead, he laughed.

No more than a chuckle at first. Then, as all three gazes in the room fell on him—Palpatine's amused, Skywalker's roiling, Mon's horrified—it grew into an outright guffaw. Hastily clearing his throat, Bail shook his head, then replied with a grin still on his face, "Forgive me, sir. For rumors that wild to reach your desk—I expected better of your intelligence people. Mon's been working with me on sponsoring a piece of legislation, that's all. One that would take back some of the turbolasers the Grand Army sto—ah, requisitioned."

Bail had to give the chancellor credit. Rather than showing the slightest sign of annoyance, he chuckled too, for one absurd moment looking like nothing so much as one of a pair of dramatic masks—Skywalker's scowling face the other. "I will have to solicit your advice on intelligence at a later time, Senator Organa. But I must say, for the two of you to have spent the last ten weeks collaborating on a single piece of legislation . . . it seems a waste of your significant talents."

As Palpatine leaned forward, Bail did his best not to glance over at Mon, to gauge by her expression how nervous she was feeling. He could feel his own pulse suddenly spike, and wanted to curse himself for acting like a child—the chancellor was not in the slightest a physically intimidating man. And yet . . .

Before he could shake the chill, Palpatine continued. "Especially when it is not only the two of you who have been meeting."

The vague chill sharpened into a much more immediate fear. Shit.

Before Bail could bluster an instinctive denial, Mon's voice issued from his left, remarkably steady. "Yes, we've met with some envoys from other Republic worlds. Jan Dodonna was one, I believe—and Lisbeth Holdo? I'll have to consult the queen, my memory isn't always reliable."

He could have hugged her.

Palpatine raised his eyebrows as if in mild surprise—if he was at all stymied by the senator from Chandrila beating him to the punch, he didn't show it. "Military personnel? I must tell you, senators, the news that you're bringing in not only non-legislative individuals, but soldiers to discuss the return of Alderaan's weapons platforms . . . even hearing it readily admitted, I find myself a bit alarmed."

"And you'd be right to feel that way," Bail said, leaping across the statement before Palpatine could follow it up, "if that's what we were discussing with them. But the bill is a separate issue. They were there to discuss the war effort."

At last he dared to look at Mon—her hands were gracefully folded in her lap, her white robe almost a beacon in contrast to the swathes of crimson and bronze behind her. When she spoke, she betrayed not a hint of the fact that this was a notion her colleague had invented three seconds prior. "Senator Organa and I have both felt that we've not done enough in years past to show our support for all involved in striving to end the war as quickly as possible. In the Grand Army's spirit of interplanetary unification around the Republic military, we wanted to collaborate with other worlds on restoring a . . . spirit of patriotism to both Alderaan and Chandrila. And perhaps, by our example, other worlds who've been reticent about the Grand Army may fall in line."

At that last, Bail saw her eyes flick his way—whether to give herself a moment to mentally spin some more excuses or to signal him to take up the thread, he wasn't sure. Keeping his eyes on her, he opened his mouth to reply, brain furiously working through some outrageous lie about how they'd always intended to discuss this with Palpatine personally—

"That's not all you've been doing."

Bail had allowed himself to forget Skywalker was in the room, his looming presence reduced to just another one of the artworks the chancellor had on display. But the young man's statement smashed through the conversation like a hammer—it was said with absolute certainty, as though Anakin had been watching Bail ever since he left Coruscant. Spoken with complete disregard for the turns the three politicians' verbal fencing had taken, as though he'd been mulling the same thought over and over in his head as soon as Bail and Mon had entered the room.

When Bail turned to look at Skywalker, the young man's lip was trembling with suppressed fury, the scar across his right cheek distorted by the twist of his sneer. And when he then looked at Palpatine—

Well. This was maybe the first time the senator from Alderaan had seen the chancellor of the Republic look completely taken aback.

"What are you even doing here?" Skywalker continued, jaw working back and forth, chewing on his rage.

The shadow his form cast against the wall made him look even bigger, and Bail felt that nebulous fear he'd had watching Palpatine shift into a very tangible jolt of adrenaline. His eyes drawn to Skywalker's mechanical hand, he wondered what it would feel like for the thing to swing at his face in a clenched fist. "I—" he began.

"You're with Padmé," Skywalker said as though he hadn't even heard. He took a step forward—just one—and Bail instantly felt an animal urge to scramble backward out of his chair. "Just the two of you, on a trip. So what are you doing here? What were you doing on Alderaan rounding up opposition senators?"

Bail couldn't even summon enough sense to be worried about Skywalker's last question. "I'm with—what?" he asked.

It was bewildering to somehow be sharing the exact same emotion as Palpatine. Across the desk, the chancellor's puzzlement was mixed with barely visible alarm.

"That's what she told me," Skywalker continued, keeping his eyes locked on Bail, as though Palpatine and Mon Mothma didn't exist at all. "If she was lying, what have you been up to?"

It was just as well that Bail was too baffled to come up with an excuse. Looking back on that moment, he was rather sure that if he'd said something, Skywalker would have vaulted over the desk and killed him.

Instead, when someone replied, it wasn't Bail. Nor was it Mon or Palpatine. A new voice sounded from behind them, so distant beneath the thud of Bail's heartbeat that for a moment he wasn't sure he'd heard something real. "Opposition senators. I dislike that term. Makes it sound as though we're either for you or against you."

Palpatine, who'd gone pale, looked somewhere over Bail's shoulder. A durasteel barrier had slammed down over his face, his stunned bemusement at Skywalker's outburst replaced by nothingness. "Ah. Senator Bel Iblis."

His head shooting around fast enough to send a pain down his neck, Bail watched the Corellian senator's silver mane of hair proceed through the ocean of scarlet. Bel Iblis's presence was like a liferaft—he moved like an old bear, fully aware of his own imposing physique. Coming to a halt, he nodded gruffly in Bail's direction, and with slightly more politeness toward Mon Mothma. To Palpatine he simply said, "I'm surprised at you, Chancellor. I thought you prided yourself on the manners of your staff."

Bail risked a look back at Skywalker, who had fallen a step back and was suddenly very red in the face. He looked almost ridiculous, a little boy who'd been scolded. "Forgive me," he muttered—not to Garm Bel Iblis, but to Palpatine.

The chancellor didn't so much as glance in his protege's direction. Instead, he spoke to the new arrival. "Politeness would preclude barging into a meeting unannounced, Senator. Especially when your appointment is not for another half hour." A trace of his usual indulgent, condescending smirk flitted across his lips, but the remarkably convincing quality his mask usually had wasn't there.

Skywalker had rattled him.

"You ought to thank me for stress-testing your redrobes," Bel Iblis said, sneering beneath his mustache. "If one impolite senator can barge past them, I can only imagine what an actual threat would do."

"Perhaps my policy of not allowing my guards to subdue my colleagues should be reconsidered," Palpatine replied, inclining his head as his smile curdled further.

"Seems to me I've saved you some time anyway," said the Corellian senator, crossing his arms and throwing another contemptuous look at Anakin. "When I heard voices raised, I realized who your guests were."

Skywalker stared doggedly at a point somewhere behind Bel Iblis's head, as if studying one of the wall reliefs in great detail.

Turning in her chair, Mon Mothma quickly took up the gap in the conversation. "Yes, Senator Bel Iblis, we were just discussing our meetings on the war effort with the chancellor."

With a great snort, her colleague nodded. "Not something I'm interested in, as you're well aware, Chancellor. But if there's one thing Corellia has never done, it's shirk our duty."

"Your patriotism is admirable, Senator," said Palpatine, the last word coming out a bit sharp. Extending a hand toward Bail, he added, "And what is your opinion on the legislation senators Mothma and Organa are planning to bring before the Senate? Surely they would have discussed it with you."

Bail held back his urge to try somehow to nonverbally signal to Bel Iblis what they'd just been discussing—staring at him and thinking turbolasers wasn't going to do it, and that was the only thing that Palpatine wouldn't spot. All he could do was try his best to unobtrusively hold his breath.

For a moment that verged perilously long, Bel Iblis said nothing. Then he chuckled and replied, "Chancellor, you should know Senator Mothma well enough to know she doesn't want me voting on anything she's sponsoring. No worse company if you're trying to whip votes."

Palpatine gave a laugh of his own, arid enough to wither foliage. "None, indeed."

His right hand, Bail noticed, was clenched very tightly around its glass of wine.

Strained pleasantries had dragged on for a few minutes more. As soon as they'd ended, Bail had taken Mon's hand and yanked her in the direction of the senatorial offices, careful not to look back to ensure Bel Iblis was following them.

Now they sat in his Coruscant office, neglected enough that dust had begun to gather on the furniture. They'd traded in Palpatine's wine for a bottle of brandy that Bail had left under his desk when he departed for Alderaan—Mon sipped at hers gingerly, as if worried it would bite her, while Bel Iblis swigged his down even faster than Bail.

"Senator Bel Iblis," Bail said, blinking hard as the alcohol's burn hit his bloodstream, "your timing is impeccable."

"When I'm asked to a meeting by a colleague who's rarely expressed interest in me," the Corellian replied grimly, "I make it a policy to make a nuisance of myself. The Chancellor has never once spoken to me outside of committee functions. I drew my own conclusions." Reaching for the bottle without asking for permission, he poured another glass. "It wasn't my timing, though. If Palpatine's dog hadn't had the courtesy to begin barking, I wouldn't have had an excuse to barge in and overhear what you were discussing."

"Which was of course what he wanted," Mon said, pushing her glass away from her with a wrinkled lip. "Take our testimony first, then interview you separately and expose our lies for what they were. He just didn't plan on Skywalker's . . . agitation." Placing a hand to her forehead, she looked at Bail. "Do you know what on earth he was talking about?"

He shook his head. Of course he could assume—some half-cocked alibi Padmé had fed her husband—but he couldn't say anything about that while Bel Iblis was here. "I knew he was impulsive. But to that degree . . ."

"Let him rage," Bel Iblis cut across, pausing to take a swig of brandy. "From what I saw, it was enough to vex our friend Palpatine."

It's not that simple, Bail thought. The chancellor's right-hand man holding a grudge against me is the last thing we need right now. He would have to ask Padmé what the hell she was playing at the next time she contacted him—

"And speaking of vexing Palpatine," the Corellian senator said, swirling the last of his drink in his glass. "Organa, I assume this office isn't bugged?" When Bail failed to reply, Bel Iblis snorted. "Might as well chance it. You and Senator Mothma may count me in."

For the first time today, Mon let her eyes widen in surprise. "I beg your pardon?"

"For one thing, clearly the Chancellor considers us conspirators already," her colleague said, sunlight streaming over his silver locks as he leaned forward over the desk. "If I'm to be hanged for a crime, I'd rather have committed the crime. And for another"—here he looked significantly at Bail—"if Palpatine is as interested in this enterprise as he seems to be, clearly he considers you some kind of threat. I trust his judgment better than my own—his sense of self-preservation is too strong for me to think otherwise."

But the reasons we're a threat, Bail thought, Obi-Wan's face dancing through his head, have nothing to do with political might. Or our vague posturings about armed resistance if necessary. And I can't tell you what they really are.

"May I ask, Senator Bel Iblis," Mon asked, "what 'counting you in' entails?"

Perhaps Bel Iblis had seen the conflict on Bail's face; perhaps he'd simply already guessed. "Whatever military preparations you're making, keep me out of them. Whatever secrets you may have up your sleeve, I don't wish to know. But if you wish to stymie Palpatine through any means necessary here in the Senate, you have my support." His mustache twitched in wry amusement. "Though I will warn you that my bluster about there being no worse ally for whipping votes was not a lie."

For the first time in the many years he'd known Garm Bel Iblis, Bail felt a genuine smile forming on his face. "You'll fit right in."

He and Mon reached forward at the same time. Solemnly, their colleague took their hands in his own rough fingers and shook.

After the senators departed—after the doors swept closed, cutting the office off from the outside world—Palpatine simply stared after them.

Anakin, though he stood stock still, could feel his heart hammering in his chest. He wanted nothing more than to fall through the floor, for a hole to open up beneath him and swallow him. He could feel sweat pouring down his face, the tremor in his flesh hand.

He opened his mouth to speak, closed his jaw, tried again. "Sir, I . . ."

"You may go, Anakin," the chancellor replied, keeping his back turned to his executor. His voice was perfectly calm; it was as though he'd just asked Anakin to fetch some tea.

Where just a few minutes before he'd felt physically incapable of standing still—had been ready to leap over the desk and wrap his metal hand around Bail Organa's throat—now his legs seemed to be made of iron. Anakin couldn't tell if he was trying to move them, or if even those nerve impulses were unable to fire. "Sir, I want to apolog—"

"Anakin. You may go." The back of Palpatine's head did not move—it was as though his entire body had frozen as perfectly still as one of his statues.

As though, were he to move, he would do something he would regret.

"You will be sent for," the chancellor continued, "when I am in need of you. Not before."

Anakin wanted more than anything to round the desk and look Palpatine in the face. To pour out apologies, to promise it would never happen again, to just explain about Padmé and Obi-Wan's voice and the gnawing in his head that wouldn't stop—

Instead, he ripped his feet from the ground and left the office as fast as he could.

He did not look back.

Republic Archives: Executive Security Concerns

[inter-committee note filed in the records of the Senate Defense Committee]

I recognize the need for increased security surrounding the Chancellor in the wake of the pirate attacks on Coruscant. When I advocated for such a thing, this is not what I had in mind.

The chancellor should be protected by a properly armed and armored security force, not these . . . showy things. I question the practicality of their entire arsenal. Those masks limit visibility, and robes restrict movement to an unnecessary degree. Never mind the fact that they are not armed with blasters. Whose idea was it to give the chancellor's elite security detail no ranged weapons? If someone gets close enough to be jabbed with a force pike, they are too close to the chancellor for my liking. Remove the masks and robes. Give them guns. Then we'll have something resembling an appropriate security detail.

And let them tune the weapons to a lethal setting, for heaven's sake. Any move against Chancellor Palpatine's safety should be met with swift and decisive action. Threats against him will not be tolerated, and the galaxy needs to see that.

[archivist's note: the author of this message did not sign it, and it is not addressed to any specific member of the Defense Committee]