"I guess I should preface this by saying that I don't know, one hundred percent, how sincere Palpatine was in all of this," said Sereine. "Years after it was all over, I met a psychologist at a charity benefit who seemed to know more about me than any stranger really should have. 'It's such a shame you and Senator Palpatine aren't together any more!' she said. 'I know he thought so much of you.' It turned out that she and Palpatine were both guests on a newsmagazine show once, and when he found out she was a relationship expert, he plyed her for advice about how to win me back...the same as he plyed me for advice on how to win other people.
"It was after what Finis and I were telling you about on the night we met, Anakin. I had put up with a lot from Palpatine over seven years, but he used a clearance I had to search a secret database of Finis's. I had specifically asked him not to, and when I discovered it, it appeared that he was doing...some questionable things with the information."
Padmé arched an eyebrow. "Be more specific."
"I'm not," said Sereine, "not tonight. When I discovered it, suffice it to say that I was very, very angry. There was a journalist I had it in for, too...someone who had put out some false information and embarrassed another client of mine. So I..." she hesitated. "Made public, through him, some incriminating evidence I had about a certain third party I then made sure Palpatine was holographed meeting. It was a very compromising situation - it could have ended his career right there, about three years before the Naboo blockade."
"But it didn't," said Padmé, handing one now-quiet infant to Anakin. She wrinkled her forehead. "I think I know what you're referring to. I was very young then. I don't remember even hearing that you were involved in that entire affair."
"Oh, but Palpatine knew. I made sure he knew." Sereine swallowed. "Looking back, I see what that was probably all about. If I had known then what I know now - but at the time, I didn't realize why my previously stalwart Palpatine had done what he had. I couldn't take back the embarrassment - but I did take back the proof.
"After that I had my ghastly injury, and I went home to Naboo to recuperate. I was there an entire year, and when I came back, Finis and I got together. And then Palpatine wanted me back.
"I didn't go back easily. Palpatine could be challenging and clever and passionate, but he could also be very aloof. And I found that..." her eyes wandered fondly to her husband, and she smiled a sad smile. "I found that, while it's nice to light up every time the man you care about walks into a room and it's nice to have someone you think is so irresistible that you're always hugging them and telling them so, it's nice when the person in your life feels that way about you, too," she said.
"It took me a while to say that to him. Some people are too proud to ask for those kinds of things, and I guess I was one of them. But he finally wore me down, and from the time I did say it, I was with a different Palpatine.
"I had left Finis, and I would spend time with Palpatine, but I still hadn't spent the night with him yet. But he wanted me to. When Palpatine wants something like that, he can be more charming than you've ever seen him. I opened my door one night..."
Too slender still after her long, painful illness, Sereine went to answer her door - after checking her hall monitor, since her nightgown was hardly proper attire in which to receive most visitors. The door slid open and she smiled, folded her arms, and planted herself squarely in his way. She didn't intend to cooperate with the request he implied in showing up here so late at night, but to see him and talk to him was - these days - always a pleasure.
Especially tonight. Wherever he had been, it hadn't required the stuffy, old-style frock coats he wore in his senatorial duties. A pair of soft-soled black shoes met her gaze, casual, medium-weight gray slacks, and a slate blue tunic that exactly matched his eyes, setting off his thick blond hair and bringing out a healthy glow in his cheeks.
He smiled and reached into a longish, blue knit overwrap donned against Coruscant's evening chill, and drew forth a couple of bound volumes. "Sereine. I hope I'm not disturbing you too late."
"Of course not." The way the outfit hugged the clean, spare lines of his shoulders and his taut waist, he could disturb her any time. She chuckled, almost as much at herself as at him.
"You said you needed these to revise my bio. I'm greatly hurt that you didn't keep my earliest textbooks, but at any rate," he teased, handing them to her, "here they are."
"So courteous of you to bring them over," she teased back, taking them. "I suppose you want to come in now."
"I wouldn't decline an invitation," he smiled.
She stepped aside to admit him. "All right, but not for long, because I have an early appointment. At the offices of a certain senator from Naboo, fancy that."
He brushed past her, leaving a hint of her favorite cologne in the air. "Oh, I'm sure he'll forgive any tardiness." His eyes flickered over two small paintings of Spiran water gardens that hung on her living room wall - gifts from Finis, as she was sure he'd guessed.
After two years, she still had some of his favorite vintage here. They had never opened it, and Finis preferred stronger spirits, when he drank anything at all. She darted into her small kitchen/dining area and poured them each a glass.
She walked back out and handed him one, and was on the point of sitting down when his eyes stopped her. They followed her around the room, looking soft and sad, and she wasn't really accustomed to that sort of look from Palpatine. Belatedly, she realized that she hadn't kissed him, something the old Sereine would never, ever have done. And the old Palpatine wouldn't have minded. Before, her too-effusive attentions had annoyed him and she knew it, but she could never seem to stop herself.
She sat down in one of her overstuffed chairs. A lot could change in a year.
"How are you, Sereiné?" said Palpatine. "How is your back?"
"Better," she said. "Really better, I think. I haven't worn my back brace in two days. It feels a little stiff and sore, but nothing that would stop me in my tracks. Or lay me flat out for an entire year on heavy drugs."
He smiled at her over his glass. "I'm glad."
He sat on her sofa - as close to her has he could manage to get - and found things to talk to her about for a few minutes. But Sereine was certain; she didn't want to ask him to stay, and she wasn't going to change her mind, no matter how enticing he looked.
Palpatine still had a little wine in the bottom of his glass. Suddenly he looked at her across the top of it with the sweetest expression in his eyes that she had ever seen, and set it down with the kindest smile.
He stood up. "I believe I'll leave you to rest, my dear, and see you in the morning. Jain and Navis?" he asked, referring to brands of kaffe and breakfast pastry they both liked.
"That would be good," she smiled. "Thank you!"
He turned to see himself out, and as he tightened his coat about him, she got up and met him at the door.
He put his hand under her chin and lifted her face, gazed at her fondly for a moment, then drew close and kissed her once, gently, on her mouth. Then he was gone.
She leaned against the door warring with an impulse to call him back. Before he apologized for so abusing her trust during the Doriana affair, she had had good reason to hold him at arm's length. But at last he had, in fact, given her an apology, and one she could believe, and he had been so kind to her for so long - since she got hurt, even.
If she was going to leave her married lover and tell Palpatine she was willing to give their relationship a second chance, at some point she'd have to trust him again. It was that simple.
And who could resist eyes like those?
If she didn't hurry, he'd reach the elevators and be gone. She opened the door and stepped out to find him far down the corridor.
"Palpatine!" she called. He turned around.
And hurried back up the hallway to her. He stopped when he reached her, blue eyes shining at her.
She didn't know why she felt so nervous. "Would you like to stay?" she forced out.
He reached out and stroked her cheek, fingers tangling in her hair. Trembling, she pressed close and kissed him. He wrapped his arms around her.
After a moment she turned to lead him inside.
What followed was the most beautiful night she ever spent with Palpatine. She had never experienced him as a gentle man, but he was then, careful of her injury and unfailingly thoughtful of her pleasure.
"Can you forgive me?" he asked her.
"I love you," she whispered. And, "Yes."
But he couldn't sleep. She would have slept wonderfully, but his tossing and turning disturbed her. At last she felt him get up.
She opened her eyes. The glowing chrono on her bedside table indicated the third hour. She heard him use the 'fresher, then go into her living room and walk back and forth.
Carefully, so as to make no noise, she slipped from bed and went to peer into her living room. Wrapped in his long blue coat, Palpatine paced rapidly back and forth in front of her window. He stopped for a moment, reached for the slacks he had left on her couch; then froze. She heard a testy sigh and he resumed his pacing.
She stood there, trying to puzzle out what could be going on. Despite the gloom, she could see the agitation in his movements. It reminded her most of what he did after one of his nightmares; but she knew he could barely have slept.
And then he did a most curious thing. He unlocked her window, opened it, and stood there gulping lungfuls of cold night air. What could be making him so anxious?
Sereine thought she knew.
She turned and crept to her bedroom, shrugged into a light robe, and went back to the living room. She folded her arms and leaned against the doorjamb.
"She must have really hurt you," she said quietly.
"She" was Gethzarion, and all Sereine knew was her first name. That and the fact that she was very beautiful, and that Palpatine had lost his head over her at about the time - and probably in conjunction with - the whole unpleasant business they had quarreled over. Sereine, realizing that Palpatine had fallen in love with her, even though the senator stubbornly denied it, had gracefully retired from the arena, not wanting to disrupt something that could make him so happy. But Palpatine had argued against it, trying to keep her even as he betrayed her trust. The affair had not lasted long. All he had told her was that Gethzarion had betrayed him, although Sereine suspected that her first question - "Well, Palpatine, what did you do to her?" - had had somewhat of a dampening effect on any further discussion.
He whipped around to stare at her.
"Darling," she said gently, "I don't know what happened between you and her. But I don't want you to feel like you have to do this, or anything, for me now. If it's too hard, if you want or need to back off for a bit, I'll understand."
He folded his own arms. "You'll go back to Valorum," he said.
She shook her head. "I think I've put him through enough. I've been through enough, you've been through enough. I told you that I'm with you, and I mean that. You've been patient with me. If you need me to wait for you, I will."
"Well said," said Palpatine, and there was no way to miss the sarcasm.
Sereine paused. What was going on here? Finally she tried, "You don't believe me."
Silence. She reached over and lit her smallest lamp. Clearly seeing his face and body movements always helped. "What don't you believe? That I don't think we've all had enough?"
Silence. His expression scolded her.
"That I'm with you, and I mean that?"
His eyes shifted from her to a corner of the room. He turned and paced slowly to the other end of the window, arms still folded. "Your reasoning," he said, "leaves something to be desired."
She ran back over what she'd said and realized how it sounded. "Point One," she said, "I didn't mean it like that. Point Two, that isn't what kept you up."
His eyes smoldered; he turned and paced away from her.
"Sometimes we are the most truthful during unguarded moments," he said.
"And sometimes we're just careless."
"I believe that is what I said."
She let that linger for a moment, then said, "I'm sorry, Palpatine. I didn't mean that the way it sounded. I really didn't."
He turned around, scowling at her. "You're only with me because you can't be with him!"
"That's not true," she said softly. She lowered her arms and walked toward him a few steps. "It's bizarre to me, sometimes. You're both so very fine and noble and spirited, in your own ways. I feel as if I was blessed to be with both of you, and I don't see quite why the Universe should have chosen to bring both of you to me at different times." His look was no softer, and she stepped closer.
"But, darling, love isn't like a cup of cane that gets passed around and used up. Because I have one feeling in my heart for one of you and a somewhat different one in my heart for the other doesn't mean one surpasses the other, or one is more or less. You are both extraordinary men...and you're both extraordinary, to me."
She could see that this approach wasn't winning her any points, and decided to abandon the attempt to explain it. Palpatine was too prideful ever to suffer any other man placed on the same footing as himself, and she ought to have known that before she began.
She just wasn't doing well tonight.
She moved closer and tried another tactic, one she should have used to start with. "Palpatine," she said, "I've known you since I was twenty-one years old. I've known you since I was a student and you were teaching law and advising the fencing team. I fell in love with you the moment I first saw you fence. You were beautiful!
"You didn't even know I was alive. But I knew you were, and I still loved you right up until the day Finis lent me to you from his staff." She smiled, remembering. "I couldn't believe the coincidence. And I kept on loving you for years afterward, and I love you still. You were the first man I ever loved."
Instead of softening, his face was growing harder and harder, and she couldn't understand why. She held her hands out and stepped even closer to him. "Palpatine, I have always loved you!"
His face twisted in fury. He closed the distance between them to jab his finger in her face.
"Now you're lying!" he snapped.
"What?"
"How conveniently you've forgotten," he snarled in her ear, "that moment in Republic Plaza Spaceport when you nearly ruined me!"
She stepped reflexively away from him, blindly shaking her head.
"Yes, you have. Put it out of your mind, haven't you? As if it never happened. As if it were someone else! But I haven't forgotten it! I'm afraid that image will burn in my mind as long as I live!"
"I...I had to stop you from doing what you were doing! You were ruining someone else, and on the brink of ruining yourself!"
"You could have done so without that, easily! If you loved me you would have stopped me, but you went far beyond that! I looked up, and there you were on the level above me, watching me eaten alive by journalists you tipped - toasting me with a glass of champagne? That was not love, Sereine! Nowhere close!"
Her confidence shattered, she didn't know what to say. She looked up, pulling her wrapper closer about her. She could not meet his eyes.
"That...that doesn't count."
"Doesn't count!" he roared, flinging out his arm. "How in the world can it not count?"
Sereine lost her temper. "I've put up with a lot from you, Palpatine, and never complained, never even turned a hair! Constantly having to watch you like a child in a rare antiques shop, putting up with your surly moods, having to teach you things you should have learned at eight! Putting up with you never looking at me or even touching me unless there was something you wanted!"
"That is not true!" Palpatine defended himself - and rightly, though she was past caring.
"Your other women!" she went on. "Oh, there was plenty I could handle! But the one thing I asked you, the one thing I absolutely trusted and relied on you to do, and you betrayed me! I was so angry at you I could have killed you! I think under the circumstances what I did was completely logical! And I didn't even finish it!
"I don't know why you were doing what you were doing, but the fact is that you were buying yourself a corporation there, with inside information and extortion! I could have hanged you, and I let you go! And you're angry at me for this! You should be thanking me!"
Palpatine was stone quiet and deadly calm. "I should be thanking you - for hating me?"
That stopped her short. She stammered. "I didn't really hate you, Palpatine," she said finally. "I was angry."
"You were angry, so it didn't count," he mocked.
"I had good reason to be angry!"
"So angry," he growled, his voice dropping still lower, "that you wanted to destroy me."
She stared at him. "I was angry. That's all."
Palpatine paced again. "You were so angry you wanted to destroy me. Ruin my career, ruin my entire life. You were so angry you drank champagne and gloated. You wanted to destroy me, Sereine, admit it!"
"At the time," she said finally, "I did feel that way."
"You were so angry you wanted to destroy me. And in that moment, you hated me. You hated me!"
She blinked, blinded by the paradox. "Palpatine...I didn't hate you. I was angry, I wanted to hurt you, but...but I didn't hate you."
"You were so angry you wanted to destroy me! It's true, Sereine! Say it! I was so angry -" he reached out and gripped her forearms. "Say it, you coward! Tell the truth!"
She forced it out, in a very tiny voice. "I was so angry..."
Because it was the truth.
"...I wanted to destroy you."
"And in that moment," he said, his voice a menacing caress, "you hated me."
She traveled back in her mind to that time, a little over a year ago. Discovering that someone else had used her security clearance at a time when she hadn't. Discovering what financial records that person had looked up. The sickening realization that the frightful being she had assumed was working for Doriana, and blackmailing her poor Palpatine somehow, was actually threatening Doriana - and working for Palpatine. And he had abused both her trust and Finis's for this, after all both of them had done to help him, all she had done to please him - and after she had specifically asked him for this one thing.
She had hated him. She really had.
"Tell the truth about it, Sereine. Or are you too cowardly to admit it?"
She wasn't. She raised her head, looked into his eyes, and said, "When I found out what you had done...I did hate you."
She quickly added, "But I don't hate you now! I got over that! You apologized, and we've made it up, and we're together again...What?" He turned his back on her and went to stare out at the speeder traffic.
She walked over to stand behind him and laid her palms on his back. "What?"
At last Palpatine spoke. "If one being can hate another enough to want to obliterate it, the first being is incapable of loving the second - no matter what it believes about it."
"That isn't true," said Sereine. "I love you very much."
"You thought you loved me very much, as long as I gave you what you needed and wanted. But the instant you discovered what I had done, you hated me enough to want to obliterate me.
"In that instant, if I were gone, and everything in me you thought you had loved, and all of me you never knew, had ceased to exist - it would have gladdened your heart."
Her hands fell from his shoulders and she backed up a step. She didn't know what to say.
Palpatine turned. "I never understood that about beings," he said casually, "and yet it seems that all beings are this way. But none of them will admit to it, and to survive among them, one must join this river of lies."
Sereine's whole chest felt as heavy as iron. She stared at him, heaving.
"I can tell the truth," she said, finally. "And the truth is that you're right."
One corner of his mouth snapped back. "Then this much I can say for you: you are braver than ninety percent of the beings I have ever met."
"But there's another truth, too," she hastened. "That beings can realize their mistakes, and that they can grow and change, and become something better than they were."
Her eyes were watering and she had to go and blow her nose in order to even say anything else. As she did so, however, she spied something in the 'fresher that they had found together at the villa his grandfather left him on Naboo, and it gave her an idea.
She washed her hands and took it out to where he stood, gazing moodily at the city. She walked over and handed it to him.
"Do you remember this?"
Palpatine turned it over and looked at it. "Our geode," he said. "I didn't believe it was one, and you made me crack it open."
You couldn't be around Finis Valorum without learning something about rocks. It had been a hobby of his, before he entered politics. He wasn't as obvious about his rock collection as Palpatine was with his sculptures, but Sereine had been around him long enough to know a geode when she saw one. This one was a rainbow geode, very rare on Naboo, and when Palpatine turned it over, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet crystals all winked back at him in concentric rings.
"I don't ask that you forgive me for what I did. I only ask that each time you see this geode, you remember two things."
Sereine folded his hands around the little geode, her eyes watering again. "I love you, and I promise you that. And never, never, never, never will I do this to you again. Never, never, never, never." She looked into his eyes. "I promise."
He stared at her as if he were afraid of her.
She reached up and stroked his cheek gently, beginning to cry. "I'm so sorry, Palpatine. I'm so sorry. I love you so much."
Fear pierced his eyes, and he turned away suddenly as if she had stabbed him. He set the geode down and gripped the windowsill, leaning into the cold air.
It made no sense to her why something that would have made her deeply happy seemed to upset him. But it was the wrong time to touch him or to say any more; this she knew.
She stood with him while some nameless emotion coursed through him and he struggled not to show it on his face. At last she realized she'd be more help to him if she gave him his privacy, and she turned quietly to go back to bed.
At the door she turned around.
"Once you understand what we know," she said, "some things become monstrous that never did appear that way before. Maybe I don't deserve a second chance with your trust. But I'm hoping you'll give me one anyway. If you want to stay, this door is open. If you want to leave, that door is open, too."
And she left him there, staring out into the night.
"What did he do?" said Padmé.
"He slept on the couch," said Sereine. "He was never quite that sweet to me again, and it took him quite a while to warm up to me at all after that. But I kept that little geode, and from that time on, when we had a disagreement or he hadn't seen it in a while, I'd bring it into the room with me and place it somewhere close to him. And he was better to me in that last year together than he'd been in all of the previous seven. You've seen it. I brought it into the office with me, and it's on his desk right now.
"I tell you this story, Anakin," she turned and took Anakin's hands in hers, "because I want you to understand that punishment and revenge are the same thing, and why they never work. Over and over I've said to you, 'He knows we don't want to hurt him. He knows we don't want to hurt him.' And now I hope you can understand, really understand, why."
Anakin's face twisted in pain. He stared past her as if none of them were there. "'Only for knowledge and defense,'" he mumbled. "'Never for attack.'"
At last he looked up at her. "You should teach in the Jedi Temple."
Finis had never been in favor of mercy for Palpatine before. But under the circumstances...He looked at Padmé, cuddling two now-sleeping infants, and he could see that she, too, concurred.
"What about it, Anakin?" he said.
Anakin dropped his head into his hands. "I don't know," he moaned. "Anything else - but this, it's too hard. I can't."
"Promise us you'll stay here tonight," said Sereine. "Give it just tonight. We'll talk about it more in the morning."
"Anakin," said Padmé, "if you leave here tonight, I'm going to go out looking for you. And I don't think you want me crossing Republic Plaza alone."
Anakin's look as much as called her a traitor. He got up with an exasperated sigh and slammed into Padmé's bedroom.
Padmé looked at Sereine and said, "You, too. Please don't leave."
In the guest bedroom Finis Valorum gave his wife a long, slow look. "I still feel like strangling you," he said, "but..."
He went to her and they embraced.
Later, in Padmé's bedroom, a violent shuddering tossed the senator awake. She turned over to find Anakin sitting up in bed, panting, slick with sweat.
"You had another nightmare."
"It was the same one. You've had the babies - I don't understand it."
Anakin got up and turned on a light.
"Where are you going?"
"I'm not going anywhere."
He brought her a flimsy, drew something on it with a stylus, and handed it to her.
"What do those mean?"
She recognized the glyphs, because her mother had chosen them as a pattern for a wall stencil for her father's study. She pointed. "This one stands for wisdom, and that one is love. Why?"
Anakin told her where he had seen them.
Padmé sighed. "We've come this far. I can't understand what Sereine means that we should do in place of punishing Palpatine. It doesn't seem fair or right that he can hurt and kill so many, and we do nothing. But..." she gazed down at the drawings he had made, and lied a little to keep him in the room. "At this point, I'm at least ready to hear her out."
"There isn't any way to bring him back, Padmé!" Anakin argued. "I don't care what he did when he was...however old he was when he made that throne. It's been some fifty years at least, and that Palpatine is gone. He's someone else now. The Sith who tried to kill you tonight would never have left these in a Sith temple...or anywhere else."
The three of them convened over hot cereal while Dormé warmed baby formula.
"Where is Anakin?" murmured Finis.
"Showering," said Padmé, filling a glass with blue milk. "I don't know what we're in for today. Last night it didn't look so good."
Presently the door opened and Anakin stood there glowering at them, arms folded.
"Thank you," said Finis, "for staying."
Anakin looked at Sereine. "How do you propose that we handle this, anyway? We've got a meeting with him in one hour!"
Sereine met his eyes. "We do nothing."
"You want to 'do nothing?' Are you crazy?"
"Come in and sit down," said Sereine. Anakin only stood there.
"Come in and sit down."
Anakin sat.
"Palpatine already understands that he's failed. There can be no greater punishment for him than that. Think about how he feels right now. He needs you, and he didn't get you. He's running out of time. He's afraid. He's ashamed. If we can't respond with compassion now, we might as well not try at all. And a compassionate person would not rub his nose in his mistake.
"When we comport ourselves as if nothing has happened, not only do we transmit to him that we don't hate him, but we are also refusing to humiliate him. By refusing to gloat over what, to him, is a tragedy."
Anakin jumped up. "But he started a whole war! He killed millions of people! He tried to kill Padmé! And you're proposing that we just ignore it, that we forget about it, like nothing ever happened - !"
Sereine looked around. Finis and Padmé both stared at her expectantly.
"What would have happened if you'd gone over there last night? But it didn't. That's not nothing. Not to him."
"But - !" Anakin blew an irritable breath and threw his arms out in futility. "We can't do this forever!"
"One thing at a time," said Sereine.
They filed into Palpatine's morning staff meeting just ahead of everyone else. Anakin ground his jaw, his mind ablaze with all that the Sith had done, and Sereine put a restraining hand on his arm. Angrily he shook her off. Palpatine's eyes followed the gesture.
Sereine walked forward. "Palpatine," she said. "That first rite you sent Anakin to do at Korriban - the one he was supposed to do with Count Dooku. Every Sith is supposed to perform that one, yes?"
The Sith's eyes tracked reluctantly to her face. Palpatine loathed having any facet of the Sith teachings made known to her. "The Tomb Ritual," he said slowly, deliberately. "Every Sith since Lord Bane, yes."
"How old were you when you did yours?"
Dark rings shadowed Palpatine's eyes, but he lifted his head proudly. "I was the youngest Sith ever to complete it," he said. "I was nine."
Sereine looked at Anakin. Try it now, she seemed to say.
He managed to sit through the meeting, feeling as if he were about to explode. Sereine gave no sign at all that anything was wrong. It could have been any other day at all. When it was over and the staff filed out, he walked abreast of her and gripped her arm.
"Like Padmé doesn't even matter!" he hissed at her. "Like nothing ever even happened!"
He whipped around. "I can't do this!" he snapped. He shook her off of him and strode back in to Palpatine.
Regal of bearing, the Master turned to face him. And Anakin saw his eyes.
Bitter, brittle, prideful...steely. As if he were expecting Anakin to hit him in the face, and he loathed him for it already, a thousand times over.
Anakin had felt like that. Just before Watto hit him.
He strode up to Palpatine. He did not kneel.
"How could you do this?" he said. "I can never trust you again. Never!"
Whatever Palpatine had expected, it was not that. The ice blue eyes lost their glitter.
"No matter," said Sidious's low croak. "It is not necessary. And it is of no consequence."
Anakin tried to imagine Master Yoda saying that. He tried to imagine Obi-Wan saying it to him - or him saying it to Obi-Wan. Indeed, the last time he had seen him, he had been angry because trust was so important!
He tried to imagine Master Qui-Gon saying that about any Jedi.
He stood there gaping at Palpatine, whose hollow eyes bored into him.
He spun around and walked out. Sereine was waiting for him in the lobby. He took some savage pleasure in the pallor of her skin.
"All right," he said reluctantly. "You win."
"So here's what I want to know," he said that night, nursing baby Leia from a bottle. Padmé held Luke, discreetly covering herself with a light blanket. Finis and Sereine sat side by side on Padmé's sofa.
"We 'guide' Palpatine 'gently' out of office. He's started a war and killed and starved millions of people, and just gets away with it? We don't do anything. Anything at all."
Padmé squinted at Sereine, and Finis said, "I think we'd all like to know your thoughts on that, Sereine."
Sereine stood up, shaking her head, and opened her arms. "How can I be any clearer than I was last night? If we punish him, we cannot save him. It's that simple. If there is to remain any possibility that Palpatine can change, we must restrict ourselves to restraint only, and not one iota more than we need to prevent him from doing damage. Your choice is in front of you. One, or the other. You can't do both."
"Fine!" snapped Anakin. "So we let him off! No reparations, no restitution. He does all this, and all these suffering people - just suffer! How do we turn him? How do we get him to the light side?"
Sereine faltered. "I...don't know," she admitted.
"You don't know!" Anakin shouted. Leia stopped suckling and began to wail. "All this - and you don't know!"
"You're the Jedi!" she said. "And the Sith! I don't know the Force from Padmé's candlesticks! I was hoping for a little help, here!"
"Sereine, you idiot!" roared Anakin. "There isn't a Jedi alive who knows that! Master Yoda even says it can't be done!"
"Go and try to murder Palpatine, and he's right!"
Anakin let out an enraged growl, handed Leia to Finis, and stormed down the back hallway.
The other three looked at one another.
"Padmé, I'm afraid I must warn you," said Finis finally. "I think that if Anakin doesn't turn, Palpatine will be forced to eliminate him - and choose a new apprentice."
Anakin faced Palpatine across the desk in the red reception room.
"I have an errand for you, Lord Vader. The hyperwave transceiver - and I'm sure you know which one I mean - wasn't our only one. Several more exist, and I want you to go and retreive them for me." He gave Anakin an address at the south end of the Works.
Anakin would never kneel to him again. He gave him a perfunctory half bow, and strode out.
Me armed with only a blaster, against Palpatine with a lightsaber. The scenario had weighed on his mind since Padmé had neutered him with her marksman's aim. She had saved him from one unfortunate fate, but he wondered if the other had ever even occurred to her. For, surely, this was exactly what he was walking into. It was too obvious.
He considered his options as he rode to the ground level in the lift. Of course he'd be better off avoiding any out-of-the-way places alone with Palpatine until his new lightsaber was finished, but that wouldn't be for a while. He could assemble the other components of a lightsaber overnight if he had to, but a focusing jewel took three days. There was no way around that.
The other thing there was no way around was his lack of technique. He had been one of the top swordsmen in the Temple, but Finis was right - as a Sith, he was poorly trained. Perhaps he could best Count Dooku, but Palpatine? Never.
And there was the final rub. Sereine had to know that in not addressing the current situation with Palpatine, they were inviting him to attack him. What had she thought Anakin was supposed to do then?
It seemed like the lift was taking an awfully long time. Anakin broke from his thoughts to check the control panel. The lift had passed the ground floor and was on its way into the basement.
Annoyed, Anakin hit the stop button, then the ground floor button. The lift controls ignored him. The elevator continued its descent.
And that was when he realized that he had no choice in the matter of a confrontation with Palpatine.