Lord Sidious - Palpatine - the last of the Dark Lords of the Sith, former Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic, eased himself carefully into his repulsorchair. The medical droids advised him to walk about as much as he could, but his balance and his motor control were so poor now that he was constantly stumbling. Even with the aid of his walking stick, he fell down now several times a day. After a certain number of bumps and bruises it was easier just to sit and be passively carried for a while. But his limbs trembled a good bit of the time...annoying, when one had to sit so much.
His various illnesses had progressed at an alarming rate. Most days his eyes were so sensitive he had to darken his rooms and sit in shadow. His arthritis made every fall excruciatingly painful. He ran a low-grade fever constantly which felt like a never-ending case of influenza. His teeth had decayed terribly over the last five years. And his face. The collagen disorder had made his face a ruin.
His skin had gone yellowish-gray and felt a centimeter thick. It hung in heavy folds on his forehead and under his eyes. Worse, it had gone numb, such that he could no longer feel his own finger touching his cheek. He looked like a living corpse.
Intermittent bladder infections plagued him, along with an intermittent ringing in his ears - the latter courtesy of his nerve disorder. Of all of his infirmities, the infernal nerve disorder was by far the hardest to bear.
It was causing the balance problems that so frequently sent him to the floor. For several days last month his legs had simply refused to work, and he was unable to rise from bed. It had stolen his motor control, intermittently, at first, but he hadn't been able to hold a writing stylus for the past three months now and it was beginning to look as though he never would again. For many months now, because his arms and hands shook, it was increasingly difficult to guide a dinner utensil to his mouth. For the past week, he had been unable to do it at all - forks and spoons slipped from his nerveless fingers and clattered to the floor. It was horrible to have to allow the assistance droid to feed him, but now it was that, or starve.
He could have used the Force to feed himself, but the more he used the Force, the faster unpleasant symptoms tended to occur and the longer they seemed to last. He used to use the dark side to hold himself upright and to steady and normalize his gait. When he woke up one morning completely unable to see, he had decided to let that go. Fortunately, his vision had cleared, but he lived in terror of the day that blindness might seize him again.
Anakin used to come over and eat dinner with him twice a week, but this week Sidious had put a stop to that.
Once the Jedi had sent Healers once a week, but they could only slow the progression of the diseases, not cure them. And that had ended abruptly when Lord Sidious had attempted to take one of them hostage.
Looking back now, Sidious rather regretted the action.
There were many things he now regretted. Choosing Anakin in the first place. Shouldn't the boy's gift to him the evening he was knighted have warned him that he couldn't be turned?
Oh, but he could have been - if not for her. If she hadn't been there to whisper in the boy's ear, Anakin would have turned. Sidious knew it.
Decades before, he had tried to kill her once and failed. Why hadn't he finished the task? If he could have been patient, getting her alone and snapping her neck, instead of merely contenting himself with maiming her that day in Valorum's office, she would never have been alive to interfere. He could have murdered her in the hospital. He could have murdered Valorum in the hospital, for that matter. Why had he allowed himself to be distracted from so vital a task?
It could have been as simple as allowing Yan Dooku to live. He would have remained in Republic custody. He had been told that being arrested was part of the plan, anyway. He would not have revealed Lord Sidious. Even if Sidious had needed to know whether Anakin would kill him, he could have stopped him in time. Then, when Anakin had failed to turn, Sidious would have had an alternative. Instead, he had left himself no prospect but Mace Windu. He should have known he could never turn Windu. He had been lucky to even receive a chance at him.
How had non-Force sensitive beings who hated him so much been able to anticipate his every move? Why, when he had tried to use his Sight, had he been unable to see theirs?
This was unacceptable. Unacceptable! Was he not the strongest, the most gifted, the greatest Sith ever? Hadn't he survived the Tomb Ritual at nine? Did he not possess such a deep acuity in the Sight that no Force-user, living or dead, had ever been able to match him? Had he not risen to the rank of Chancellor, effectively ruling the Republic? Had his great Clone War not fed the fires of Darkness, making the dark side more powerful that it had ever been in twenty-five thousand years of recorded history?
How could this have happened? How could this be? How could this happen to him? Unreal, all of it, from the moment Anakin and Sereine laid that speech in front of him to his imprisonment - his entombment - in these wretched Jedi walls.
He floated to and fro in the repulsorchair, lost in fear and terror, muttering to himself. Once, he had married someone in one of these things, to secure a place in the Senate. How could he now be trapped in one himself?
He had failed. He was a failure. He was worse than Phineas, who had had no potential to begin with. He was too weak now to escape. Too weak to begin again. It was over. Incomprehensible! How could it be over? Was he not destined to do great things?
It had been explained, what lay ahead of him. This creeping paralysis would grow and grow, stealing more and more of his arms and legs, encroaching upon his ravaged body, until, one day soon, he could no longer move, swallow, speak, or see. When that occurred, he had been told, he could elect to be tube-fed, thus prolonging his life as long as possible -
- or he could choose to forego the tube, and slowly starve to death.
He stopped the repulsorchair in his kitchen, turning to face a chest of drawers over which he lingered much, these days.
Clumsily he reached out with one finger. Couldn't quite depress the button he wanted. He turned his hand, and, after a few tries, he got it. A drawer slid open.
Lord Sidious leaned forward. Eight table knives gleamed up at him.
It was undignified for a Sith to live this way. He could still touch the Force. With the dark side's help, these knives would be sharp enough.
Only one thing stopped him. The Korriban Temple. The shame, the utter humiliation, of returning there, when he should have returned in triumph, if indeed ever at all. Instead of being the one to redeem the Order, his failure had dealt it a blow from which the apprentice he had risked everything to win, had ensured it would never recover.
If there was anything worse than entrapment by the Jedi, entombment in a failing body that stubbornly refused his orders - it was that.
Still...
Lord Sidious reached out with the Force. Lifted one gleaming knife. Flipped it on the long axis, studied the light reflecting off the blade.
He felt a curious, dull sensation in the bowl of his pelvis. Even his natural body functions were a challenge, these days.
Belatedly, he realized what it was, and struggled to get up. The next instant, his robes and pants were wet.
The stench infuriated him. His body's treachery infuriated him.
He swayed to his feet. Struggled with his damp clothing. Lost his balance, and fell to the floor in a tangled heap.
"Droid!" he barked.
Patiently, silently, the droid turned him, carried him, bathed him, dressed him. As though he were a tiny baby again, in Phineas's villa with his aunt and cousin, his sister and his mother, on the banks of the Semaj river so long ago.
Suddenly he hated his memories. He hated the teachings of his youth, the Fallen Masters, the Korriban Temple, every vision of the destiny he could have had. He hated every fact and every person and every triumph of his life, for they had only served to leave him here. Helpless. Alone.
He hated the Jedi, and he hated their droid. With a viciousness that shook his very soul, he set the dark side on the droid, and tore it limb from limb. A ringing shriek of pain and despair reverberated throughout the empty Pavilion. Outside, the shadows of a fading sunset lengthened toward dusk.
Sidious lay amid the wreckage of the assistance droid, panting. He wondered what penalty his diseased body would exact for this latest use of the dark side. His heart beat a tattoo.
I am the greatest of the Sith, it said. The greatest - the greatest - the greatest.
If I am the greatest, he thought, and I cannot achieve what I was sent to achieve - who can? If my Sight is the most powerful, and I could not foresee this failure, who could? Masters, why did you send me, if it was only for this?
And then he cried out to the Force, to the darkness of whom he had been the most faithful and capable servant.
"Why did you send me, if it was only for this?"