Anakin got Sereine through the security that flanked the hospital's VIP wing. The red-robed guards that had shadowed Palpatine throughout his career as Chancellor were, apparently, loyal until the end.
She went ahead to Palpatine's room alone, looking back over her shoulder once to Anakin, who loitered in the hallway.
She tapped softly on Palpatine's door.
"Enter," came his quiet, weakened croak through a comm unit mounted on the wall.
The door slid open and she stepped in - and tried to control her reaction.
Inflamed, orange-red eyes stared at her from a face gone yellow with jaundice. His white hair had thinned alarmingly. He seemed to have lost a great deal of weight almost overnight; dark circles ringed his eyes. When he furrowed his brow, a vertical crease bisected his forehead. He half-lay, half-sat in the bed, his expression reminding her of nothing so much as a weak, angry, thousand-year-old snake.
He unfolded gnarled hands from his breast. "Come to gloat, have you?" he grated, his voice as raspy as sandpaper. "You can wipe the pity off your face. You put me here, and you got exactly what you wanted."
Sereine lowered her head, thinking about what she had wanted - and gotten - that Palpatine did not yet know about. She tried to think how to answer him.
"I did get something I wanted," she said. She raised her head. "It wasn't this."
The orange-red eyes blinked once, reproachfully.
"How are you?" she said.
"How does it look like I am?" he snapped. "But I will live, it appears - to your dismay, no doubt."
She watched the rapid rise and fall of his chest. Despite the apparent ease of his breathing, and the fact that there was no oxygen or respiratory equipment in the room, he seemed air-hungry, and weak.
"Palpatine, I don't want you sick. Neither does Anakin. You know that. Wait a minute, I'll be right back."
She stepped to the door. Anakin had procured an old-style manual wheelchair, which he pushed across the threshhold to her. The door whispered shut.
She pushed it over to the Sith's bedside. His orange eyes accused her.
"Can you get up?"
"Why?"
"Get up." She patted the seat back. "We're going to take you out for some air."
Palpatine stared up at her. Finally he stirred and struggled free from the bedclothes. Sereine steadied him on his feet and helped him into a robe. He settled into the wheelchair and she reached down, massaging his shoulders soothingly.
He twisted them free of her hands. A shudder of pure revulsion swept reflexively down his back.
Sereine saw, and her heart sank.
Anakin waited until she had wheeled him past, heading for the VIP solarium, before he turned on the red guards.
"I think all of you know my power," he said, one hand on his lightsaber. "If I can defeat him, think what I might do to you."
Six red masks stared back at him.
He lowered his voice. "Chancellor Palpatine will be going somewhere with us. If any one of you suggests that there was anything improper in this..."
He let his words trail off. He gripped the handle of his lightsaber and shook it threateningly at his waist.
The six guards said nothing. Anakin turned and strode out to the solarium.
Sereine stood there with Palpatine. A few other VIP's, a droid, and a family member or two sat in light chairs on the deck. The speeder that Anakin had procured stood at its edge, a small covered one with its windows blacked out.
Sereine turned. Anakin caught her eye, and she pushed Palpatine toward the speeder's open door.
"What are you - " Palpatine began. She stooped swiftly and covered his mouth with her hand.
"Shh-hh-hh," she whispered. "You're okay."
Perhaps her tone suggested to him that they had had a change of heart and were helping him escape, because he seemed to relax then. As soon as they were on board, Anakin hurried in after them and closed the door.
He took Sereine's place at the wheelchair and she went forward to the controls. The speeder lifted off.
Palpatine looked from one to the other. "Where are you taking me?"
"You're going to be safe, master," said Anakin. "No one will ever harm you again."
The speeder door opened flush with the open door to the Pavilion. Palpatine had been looking anxiously around, no doubt sensing his proximity to the Jedi Temple. Now he felt the dampening of the ysalamiri the Council had housed at every door to the Pavilion, and shuddered violently. He looked around again, naked fear in his bleeding eyes.
Anakin pushed him through the Pavilion into a comfortable sitting room. He parked the wheelchair in front of a large communications screen and pushed a button on its console.
Sereine came forward. "Don't get too close, Sereine," said Anakin, waving her back.
The images of the twelve masters of the High Council, standing together in a group, coalesced on the screen. Master Yoda walked forward a few steps from the rest.
"Lord Sidious," he said with a quick half-bow. "At last, address one another we do, as the leaders of our sects, Jedi and Sith."
"Where am I?"
"In our Pavilion, you are, attached to the Jedi Temple. Much have we learned, in recent days, and much to say to you, we have.
"Lord Sidious. Hate you, we do not. Wish to harm you, we do not. However, a danger to every citizen of this galaxy, proven yourself, you have. Our duty it is, to protect those who protect themselves, cannot. Meditated long, we have, since discovered this truth, we did. This decision, have we reached..."
A ringing scream shook the walls of the Pavilion. Blue Sith lightning arced through the air toward Anakin, who put out his hand. He had deflected Sith lightning once before now and that made it more instinctive this time. More natural, but not easier.
Sereine screamed from the doorway.
"Sereine, get out! Now!"
Anakin gritted his teeth with the effort. He dropped one hand to his lightsaber, just in case.
He needn't have worried. Sick and weakened, the Sith master tired easily.
Ill though he was, Palpatine fought long past the point at which it would have been better for him to stop. Trembling, shaking, groaning, he poured forth lightning until it sputtered haltingly from his fingertips. Gasping, Palpatine lost consciousness.
"Don't you let him die in there!" Anakin heard Sereine's voice from the monitor. He looked up and saw her in the Council chamber, arms folded, staring down twelve Jedi masters through laser-beam eyes.
"What made him so sick?" Anakin asked the three Jedi Healers who were dispatched to the Pavilion.
"His emotions are of the dark side, Anakin," said Bant. "Worry...anger...hatred...sorrow. He's been defeated, and he isn't taking it any too well. The body's stress chemicals - cytokines, adrenaline, cortisol - they're as bad as any disease, especially at the levels he's secreting them."
Sereine handled the press releases. Chancellor Palpatine, in fear for his life, had sought a second opinion at Temple Hospital. Upon discovering that he was gravely ill, the Jedi Council, in recognition of the many changes he had wrought during the long years of war and the fact that he had no living family, had graciously accepted. After all, Anakin Skywalker was like a son to him, and now it would be easy for Anakin and his family to care for him.
Padmé was overjoyed to have her newborns at home again. Weeks later, with Palpatine safely convalescing, the Valorums, the Organas, and the Skywalkers all converged on Padmé's rebuilt living room with two droids, two staffs, two nannies, and two noisy infants; a happy, whirlwind tumult. At the end of a busy day, Republic business concluded, the original four members of The Conspiracy To Help Palpatine rested on Padmé's couches.
"I have to talk to you, Sereine," said Anakin. "We only have one task left. How are we going to do this?"
"It will never work now, Anakin," said Finis, one arm around his wife. "You've renounced the Sith order now. You've betrayed him. There's nothing there but animosity. If you think you're going to argue him free of the dark side - you've got to know, it can never happen."
Anakin gave the former Chancellor a guilty look. "Um...well, I can't actually say that I have. Formally renounced the Sith Order, I mean. I am a Jedi." He shrugged. "And a Sith."
"Anakin!" said Padmé.
"How is that possible?" said Finis.
"Well...you'd think they'd ask me if I formally renounced the vow, but no one ever did. I don't know, maybe after all that's happened, they just assumed it?"
"Why didn't you?" asked Sereine.
"I don't know," said Anakin thoughtfully. "At first, I thought it was just so we could turn Palpatine. But then, I started thinking about the future of the Jedi and the Sith. About how Palpatine will be the very last true Sith. And about this new subsect of the Jedi Order. I'm going to be a very influential Jedi one day. Master Mundi is on the High Council now. One day I'll be on the Council."
"And?" said Padmé.
"And I started to think about the Sith. About how I want them to be remembered. About how people hate the Sith now, and about what I want their memory to mean. What I want Palpatine's memory to mean."
The others waited.
Anakin wet his lips. "I don't want people to just hate the Sith, and not understand how they got that way. Then more people will just become Sith. And...and I don't want people to forget that the Sith are also wise. That they're the other half of the Jedi. That they know things that are terribly important -things that no one should ever forget. There's been so much pain. We ought to learn from it.
"And so I've decided that I'm going to finish my Sith training - whatever I can learn from Palpatine without using the dark side - and become a Master of both Orders. And when I'm old, when I have the sort of influence that Mace and Yoda do, I will create a specialty in Sith theory in my subsect. There will be two Sith in the Jedi Order - Vaapad fighters and Scholars, not Warrior Sith! A master and an apprentice. And we'll teach some of the Sith precepts openly, and discuss them - and their mistakes, too, so people can know them and not feel lured by something forbidden the way Dooku was. And this tragedy will never happen again."
"What good is there in the Sith order?" said Padmé.
"I know it doesn't look like there is any," said Anakin. "The Sith teach you to have what you need at everyone else's expense, and the Jedi teach you to have what everyone else needs at your expense. Neither way is good. The Jedi are always talking about 'balance in the Force.'
"And that's where the Sith have vital things to say to us. About reaching your fullest potential. About becoming who you were meant to be, and not just what someone else says is good. About being who you are, and accepting all the aspects of yourself. I mean, they don't actually do it, not all of them, but they value it - and that's important."
Padmé, Sereine, and Finis all stared at him.
Finally Finis shook his head once and raised his evening glass of wine to Anakin in a little salute. "If you are the same young man who followed us home the night the war ended, Anakin, I can't see it. The Jedi Order has a real treasure now, and I hope they know it."
Padmé put her hand on her husband's arm. "I know your mother would have been proud, Ani," she told him.
Only Sereine said nothing.
Suddenly she looked at Anakin. "Anakin, that's it! That's how you're going to approach Palpatine! He talks to you, you talk to him. He teaches you, you teach him. You don't argue, you don't force him. You just listen to his ideas, and gently share your own."
Anakin blinked. "What do you mean, 'me?'"
Sereine shook her head. "I burned my bridges with Palpatine the night I leaked the Death Star to the journalists. I was lucky he forgave me the first time. And then I tricked him, and trapped him in the Pavilion? No, the best I can do is be here when you're not sure what to do with him. You're his apprentice. I'm his enemy."
Finis shook his head. "Fitting, and a lovely idea, Darling, but it won't be nearly enough."