A FATE WORSE THAN DEATH

She'd not gone on the run, or into hiding. She lived openly at her home on Naboo.

Eva strolled the Theed market stalls at dusk, by fading pink skies scattered with lazily drifting clouds. She passed through the patchwork of plazas, passageways and intimate courtyards encompassed by historical buildings profuse with labor-intensive cut stonework. Their windows filled with a warm gold as their occupants returned home. The planters overflowed with fragrance and under canopies of trees luminous from strung lights, the outdoor dining areas were livening up. Eva had never known a more inviting city, and the Lake Country nearby rivaled the most beautiful natural scenery.

The Emperor had left this idyllic place of his birth to go out and terrorize the galaxy. Inexplicable to an outsider, when had already the fortune to partake from the best Naboo offered. And yet, Eva understood him to have it no other way. His nephew Evan's example had been lost on him.

Her memory of Palpatine re-animated in the surgery building was so fuzzy from her concussion, she no longer placed weight in it. After all, she was only missing one hand. She glanced down and clenched the metal fingers that made up her souvenir of that evening. There were scars on her other hand. To be sure, she had a lot of scars from that evening. And sometimes, in the right lighting, she could imagine they fully circumvented her wrist.

He was gone. Nearly everyone else as well. And though she was in the heart of a thriving city (and despite Evan's efforts to introduce her to people), she couldn't elude the disillusionment and loneliness which Naboo could not placate.

She used Palpatine's access code just once more. Shifting through hundreds of incidentals, Eva located the minor report made by an officer stationed on the moon of Endor and serving under Commander Igar. There were notations of a single Rebel approaching an Imperial bunker to give himself up, with comments on his appearance, the one weapon he carried… the authority to which he was passed on… Vader.

He had told her the truth and she hadn't believed him.

Despite what she knew in her head, her heart held out hope that Anakin had not perished - that he had gone away to distance himself from his past deeds. That he had found some sort of peace…

Eva had to share Theed with dead Padmė. It was hard not to notice the profusion of flowers regularly left outside her tomb. Had Vader arranged to have any of them left? The thought only brought annoyed envy. No longer in the Emperor's shadow, Eva was not of a significance to again be allowed inside the mausoleum.

Vader had helped her to survive, but Palpatine had provided so she could enjoy her days in ease. Eva found that she'd inherited Palpatine's family lake house as well as the earlier gift of the city residence. Included was the funding to properly maintain them both.

With forethought the Emperor had made this decree, then she had been left for dead. The motives, his complicity, his very fate were constantly in her thoughts.

Unlike the Theed city center home, the Lake house was outright palatial and ripe for entertaining. But company was better avoided in the stronghold of New Republic support that was Naboo. Since the two properties were a gift of the Emperor and repartitions were under discussion by the New Republic, so was Eva's right to ownership. A significant mitigating factor was that the homes had been Palpatine family property long before his ascension to power. After almost a year no decision had been handed down. Just the sort of inaction by committee that Palpatine so detested, Eva mused to herself.

'I wish you luck,' had been Luke's last words to her. Not 'may the Force be with you.' He didn't want to see her again. Aloo would have stood up to Luke and the mortally wounded Vader, and Luke had surely slain him. But Eva didn't condemn the act. Each had done as they were obliged.

She missed Aloo. She recalled one of their earliest days, as he stood in her quarters while she was about to store away her Courtier's headdress - the way he rolled up the draping velvet and tucked it up inside the crown so it would not wrinkle. "If you have one custom made, rather than wearing Petror's, it would be less likely to fall off." The discomfort of the clothes was to remind you of who you were.

The reverence to which he held his position.

And then Aloo had placed his own headdress on her, as it was smaller. He noted her slouched posture; a bad habit creeping in with her stressed defensiveness at her new posting.

So foolish. It was such an honor.

Aloo gently lowered her shoulders and pushed them back. "There now. At least you have a patina of legitimacy."

Eva doubted she would ever meet another with Aloo's astute tact - a master of forbearance.

Aloo's velvet headdress from that day, was hers to remember him by. She had taken it from his apartment the night she ran from the PCFRS, with barely her life and no hand.

And now, perplexed, she stared at the hat on the lake house floor, atop a heap of her belongings that had been shoved to a haphazard pile. Her security droids were blasted to smithereens, the walls scarred with the onslaught. The entry door was a gaping hole. The goons with red eyes were there.

Come and get me. It had taken two years.

'Hell' sure was cold…

An awful premises, the strange, decrepit citadel. The monumental structure was evocative of the Jedi Temple ziggurat turned upside down and thrust into the craggy ground, she noted upon last seeing its exterior (when it fact, it didn't touch the ground at all). The horde of occupants were mostly underground, down a hole like a nest of vermin. Through the somber chambers she was escorted in near blackness, below the crumbling, ancient statues of staggering proportion. To catch a glimpse of their clothing, their carved accouterments, was to understand the kind of garden of delights to which she had been brought.

No one explained why she was there, they just turned her loose in the massive labyrinth. The hem of her skirt piled on ash as she self-explored the serviceable, the sacred and the abandoned. Ash was thick and ubiquitous. Much had gone up in flames some millennia before. Sometimes the faceless beings or robed figures answered her curiosities, sometimes they ignored her. No one asked who she was, but they were clearly chafed by her presence. Eva jumped at the constant and inexplicable indoor lighting, The faceless beings carried on paying it no mind. They allowed her to study their freakish experiments with no disgrace.

The gave her a room, with a lonely small bed in the voluminous chamber. Stone for walls. The power was intermittent, no hot water - self-deprivation was an admired quality. She found her belongings from Naboo left in a heap, just as the time aboard the Executor when she returned from Hoth. Eva achingly picked up one of Vader's gloves and set it aside where it would suffer no further damage. She'd have to sort deeper into the pile to find the match.

She was brought her meals as they tired of her dining with the others. Eva was 'an unwelcomed influence.' But she had persuaded them to give her more blankets. And she could sleep if she could keep the room above freezing. Though when she'd climb into bed, she'd find her fingers and toes curled tight in attempt to retain warmth.

The high courtyard was open to a rare clear night sky, the depth of the shadows exaggerated in the light from the heavens.

Eva approached the center tentatively, stepping clear of the ever-present rubble, and scanned around the adumbral forms that fell in between the slivers of cold blue light. A hooded figure, some of its outline oozy or dusty, seemed indiscernible from to the stone to which it rested. She watched and waited for acknowledgement, to know if it was a presence or another one of those statues.

The cloaked figure stood.

An unease I have not felt since… But everyone in the place was wearing a black robe. What was it? Unnerving familiarity in the manner of his movement- the shape of his frame. Although this was Darth Sidious… or so they had told her before sending her there. The cowl turned in her direction, revealing a fraction of a face.

"A rare, surviving relic of my past."

The familiar deep voice made her spine stiffen of its own accord, her body flooding with adrenaline as her instincts screamed at her to flee. So much so, she barely heard his request. - "Have you forgot protocol?"

She approached with dread and stopped four arm's length away out of habit. Then she moved much closer, lowering herself to her knees before him, so that she could see into the shadow, up under the hood…

Darth Sidious bore the face of a 35 year-old Senator Palpatine.

Sidious wasn't dead, as she'd presumed. Not even defeated. They were one in the same.

He offered a ghost of a smile. Golden eyes were luminous of their own accord. "Your extended holiday on Naboo is over."

As he continued, she could hardly concentrate while turning the profound implications over in her mind. 'The chaos was of his own making.' Vader's revelation haunted her. Palpatine had crafted an enemy of himself for the Clone Wars.

"Cults build gloriously fervent followers," he smirked, "…but crazed zealots make tedious company. I surprised myself… but I missed you." He genuinely did miss Cescily, but also the sheets on his bed hadn't been changed since his arrival, and the food was terrible, and surely she'd do something about that.

He had raised not one, but two massive armies, and had torn up the universe with the ravages of war. One half of the galaxy pitted upon the other, pulling in every man, woman and youngling in existence into the conflict one way other…

"You survived Coruscant," he went on. "And you went to live in my home. If I still breathed, how long did you think that was going to last?"

It was not enough to manipulate the government to seal his power. He is as brilliant and capable as he is depraved…. death in the wake of every step he placed. In the three year conflict, there were billions of official casualties…

"I've given you two years on Naboo. As long as I could let you go, and expect you to come back."

Billions of lost souls, simply that Chancellor could be Emperor…

He took her right hand into his own, and stroked her mechanical fingers. Mockingly he whispered, "It hurt, did it not?"

Billions.

She had fallen down from a knell, to just sitting on the frigid stone floor, not taking her eyes off him. The disfiguring scars left by Mace Windu's confrontation ages before, were gone, just as he had appeared in the medical tower. Though the Palpatine before her was no longer perfect flesh. The corruption of the vessel had begun with a patch of skin, pale and mottled under his hooded cloak like a fungus growing under a rotten log. He was aging at a clipped pace. The tip of one finger and a toe had fallen away. He truly needed his cane now, as missing digits contribute more to balance than appreciated. He would ultimately be left in a state quite reminiscent of the mangled mess caused by his fall on the Death Star, (and dependent on the crane ) - a better hint than any other, there was something more than mere science at work.

Somewhere in those filthy, ancient books that lined his Imperial Palace shelves (or in the vats the faceless beings attended, or by the chants of the hooded figures), he had found immortality.

Which one her masters was the more cunning? Perhaps the one alive. Palpatine had been the more invasive of her thoughts those past two years. Was that longing? Careful, he might hear you.

Then she raised herself to her knees, to touch his cheek with her left hand - the only warmth she had felt since her arrival. Palpatine reacted with slight recoil. It had been so long since another had been in his personal space.

We've all been your playthings. Everyone had seen that, but herself.

His eyes, snake-cold and serpent-wise, regarded her. "It will be different from here on out." She was flawed, but useable. "No more concessions. Our relationship will be better now. At least for me… And try to be more like Aloo."

"You tried to have me killed."

Her survival would have been unlikely, if he hadn't taken the time to ensure removal of his precious Sith objects from the PCFRS. He made no effort to refute blame but beguilingly uttered, "And you picked me up off the floor…"

"I needed your eyeballs."

A slight smile played at the corner of his lips. "But why did you tell Pestage it was the medical droids who wanted me revived, when in fact, it was you?"

Had she actually done that…of her own free will?

"…You did listen to me," he grinned. "… and you played both sides. But you're are ashamed of what you've done, aren't you? You despise me now… well, more than before… learning I manufactured conflict with the Clone Wars. But you didn't know that then. Something else…" He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, concentrating. Then he opened them and watched her in silence, mischief flickering in his eyes - that expression he took on when he was seeing right through you. "Vader…. All because of Vader. He surrendered his life in the effort to destroy me. And you proceeded to undo it. Of course…You can hardly live with yourself…"

He'd barely touched upon the tangled mix of heartache and soul crushing grief forged by sealing her unworthiness to Vader.

"But fret not—I still appreciate you." Her missteps, her misery warmed him so. Yes… this was much more gratifying than torturing her to death on the floor of the lab.

"…And…you chose wisely—the winning side."

From that point on, he actually would be watching over her; standing between her and the brutal monk-like cultist she would so antagonize by providing 'decadent' comforts for him - the small luxuries he wanted anyhow, but for which she would be fodder for blame. "Are you ready? I'm all you have, my dear. You will never leave this place…"

But she wasn't listening. She had fallen back, gutted and inconsolable- if she could possibly be capable of shutting everything down. And swiftly he was on his knees too, his arms at her back to brace her fall, whilst she caught a glimpse of the stars, imagining them as all the lives he had caused to be snuffed out.