For Anakin, life had suddenly slowed down—almost stopped. No more battles, no more assignments, no more war. His position with the Chancellor's office paid him well but left him with entirely too much time.
Time to study his new lessons, and wonder what would come of all this. Time to writhe and smart over the humiliation of speaking for Palpatine at High Council meetings—from the center of the circle, or worse, a smaller seat by the window. Sometimes he wanted to bash all their heads in, and that frightened him.
Bored in the present, afraid of the future, Anakin really had nothing to do but wait for the babies to be born—and try to think of a way out of his "understanding" with Palpatine.
He could only think of one—and it was too terrible to contemplate.
He had time to suffer silently with all this through visits by Padmé's family, time to argue her into planning her lying in here at home, time to help her create a nursery—and time to be there as she reached a painful decision.
It happened the day they moved the baby furniture in. Anakin forbade her to lift anything, so she stood in the doorway, directing traffic, as it were, while her husband, her handmaidens, and Threepio pushed, pulled, and rearranged.
At last it was all to her liking. It should have been a happy day, but Anakin, still reeling with disbelief at every single thing that had happened since the war ended, felt only a curious numbness.
Padmé settled into her comfy new nursing rocker, a brand new pink receiving blanket in her hands. She slumped, her head bowed, pulling a ribboned edge of the blanket restlessly between her fingers.
Suddenly she dropped her face into it and began to cry.
"Are you all right, my lady?" Dormé cried out in alarm, and started for her mistress, but Padme waved her handmaidens and Threepio out.
Anakin leaned over her and took her hands. "What is it?" he asked.
The question started a second burst of tears. "I was thinking about how futile this is. How stupid and hateful and needless it is!" Anakin could barely hear her last words through the sobs.
"Love, what are you talking about?"
"All I want to do is be a good mommy to my babies, and I can't! We can't raise them here! We can't raise them at all! We have to hide them—from Palpatine!"
"No," said Anakin soothingly. "No, we don't. We won't—"
"We have to!" Padmé's face was red, ugly, tear-streaked, swollen. How it hurt him to see her like this!
"Do you think he'll stop at anything to get to us? Our newborns won't be safe! We can't even send them to my parents! I hate him, Anakin," she said. "I just want to be with my babies! They'll never be newborns again!"
She put her head down, wracked with sobs. And as Anakin crouched to gather her into his arms and make soft soothing sounds, he thought.
If I were Palpatine's apprentice, I could become stronger than he is. He wouldn't dare cross me, or hurt my babies ...
And another piece of his personal puzzle slipped quietly into place.
***
Palpatine's office that evening held a murky chill that only Anakin could perceive. It stopped him at the red reception room before he even crossed the threshold. Something was up.
He made himself go in and stopped again to feel and listen. His and Sereine's little experiment had put her off telling him anything about how she "read" Palpatine, but Anakin was developing some methods of his own. Ways she could never have understood.
He felt at the emotional currents in the air, the sensations they stirred in his breast. Any memories they brought to mind.
Sneakiness and a malevolent desire for control skittered on hundreds of tiny feet across his shoulders. A sudden image of those things he killed in Padmé's bedroom flashed across his vision, and then one of Palpatine. Sickly Palpatine, looking old and ill, on the platform before the Senate. "The power you give me, I will lay down—"
This wasn't his memory; he was picking up stray thoughts from Palpatine. That was good—something he couldn't usually do.
He sank back into the chill of the room. A burning started in his stomach and radiated in a suffocating wave through his torso, ending in painful tingles in his arms. He tried to name the sensations. Anger. Desperation. Fear. Disbelief. Nonacceptance. The need to strike out. He saw himself raising his saber to the first Tusken warrior, and he remembered when he had felt that.
And then he felt a sweet pain in his breast that reminded him of Padmé at the lake retreat, her hair gathered into a dignified swirl. Leaning into their first kiss. Then she pulled away, and he felt the embarrassment pop over him like ice water hitting the back of his neck. He saw her in her peasant garb, sitting across from him at a table that might as well have been a whole podcourse long, and he felt again the despair that she would never be his.
He felt a battening, a struggling, a dampening. Palpatine did not want to feel these emotions. He hated them, and he pushed them back with an anger at himself that tore at Anakin. The master chopped furiously at himself, with the anger that had severed Dooku's head.
The image of that grieved Anakin, and he took a few deep breaths to steady himself.
And then he saw—himself, standing in the office. In Palpatine's consciousness.
Palpatine had realized he was there. The emotion drew away—but the master's awareness remained, tickling at the edges of Anakin's own.
Anakin wrinkled his nose. What was going on? Where was Sereine?
He remembered. She wasn't in her office when he came in.
Oh, no. Surely not.
He had thought this was over. The entire previous week, the tall, elegant, red-haired Queen Renata of the Theta system had been here on a state visit, sans King, and spent more time with the Chancellor than any other state visitor Anakin had ever seen. She was a good ten years younger than Sereine, very beautiful, and Palpatine had a habit of slipping his arm around her waist in front of staff.
And Anakin and Sereine were staff.
Anakin had questioned the Chancellor's aide, privately.
"Oh, that," said Sereine. "They've had a standing arrangement for years. Every time she's here or he's there."
"How can he do that in front of you?" Anakin had hissed.
"Anakin," said Sereine in an indignant tone, "I'm married!"
So, if she was married, why was all of this coming at him in waves from the back office when she was obviously in there with him?
Anakin's first impulse was to back out. But—if there truly were some entanglement between Sereine and the Chancellor, didn't he and Padmé need to know the truth of it?
He and Padmé—and Valorum.
Anakin swallowed and stepped quietly across the room and into the corridor. And felt a strange pricking at the edge of his consciousness.
As if Palpatine were feeling it, if not saying it: That's right, Anakin. Come.
Inwardly, Anakin cringed. Why was he doing this?
He peered around the corner. Once again Sereine stood at the window, looking out, and Palpatine eased behind her. He raised his hands to her hips, and for a moment Anakin expected him to be crude.
But then he slipped his arms around her and gathered her close to his chest.
Sereine raised her hands in front of her, as if she were laying them over his.
After a moment she said, "Didn't you get enough of this last week?"
Palpatine said, "The Queen of Theta is fun, Sereiné, but she isn't you."
Sereine snorted. "Be honest! You hate me for what I've done. You do!"
Palpatine's reply was soft and sad. "And you don't hate me? You hate me for what I've done, Sereiné. Admit it."
She sighed. Then she leaned back into his embrace, and, to Anakin's astonishment, she lifted his left hand to her lips and kissed it.
"Palpatine," she said. "Zora Sheev. I think you could blow up the whole planet of Coruscant and I'd still love you."
She turned to look at him, and Anakin shrank back around the corner. But he heard her voice, tinged with irony. "I do, however, feel a moral obligation to stop you from blowing up the whole planet if I can! That's not hating you. Can you understand that?"
There was a short silence. Anakin peeked to see them both facing the window again, his arms comfortably around her still.
"But it does harm me," he said, low and gruff. "If you love me, why do you hurt me?"
Sereine squirmed in his embrace to look around at him again, and Anakin popped back around the corner. "You're the one and only Sith master ever to hold this office!" she snapped. "You killed two thousand Jedi! The Senate loves you, the people love you. You're the most revered Supreme Chancellor in history! In what way are you being hurt?"
"I have to fulfill my destiny. The duty laid upon me, by my Order, at my very birth," said Palpatine. "Not to do so would hurt me, would hurt me very much. Do you not see that?"
Sereine wrenched herself free and started across the room. Anakin hid himself again.
"Do you not see," she began, "that if you left it here and retired in all your glory now, you could bring more honor and credit and legitimacy to your order than you ever could otherwise? How can you possibly miss this? You could even reveal yourself publicly as a Sith! It would take a few changes on your part, and a few lies on our part—but we're good at that, aren't we? I could even help you! It could work!"
Palpatine's voice, low and dark. "That is not the duty laid upon us by our Order. It may have been the duty Plagueis attempted to impose upon me, but it is not the true destiny of the Sith."
"Who cares what the Sith want? It's what you want! If you wanted something badly enough, it wouldn't matter what a bunch of dead people thought! If you wanted it, you'd do it. I know you!"
"I want what I want," came Palpatine's voice testily. "I want justice for my grandfather. I want a chance at real freedom for the Force-users of this galaxy. I want justice for the Sith!"
And then his voice dropped to a steel murmur. "And I want to be the best. The greatest. The most powerful. The pinnacle. You know this." His voice shifted into a purr that caressed Anakin's ears all the way out in the corridor. "Even you who cannot even sense the Force, you know this.
"It's why you want me. It's why you wanted me all those years ago, the first time ever you saw me. It's why he doesn't satisfy you. It's why he never will. It's why you're here with me now, why you can't let me go. Why you're trying to keep me safe. Why you've left him—to be here, with me."
Oh, holy Force. From the sheer urgency in that voice, Anakin expected them to pull each other's clothes off any second. He ventured a peek.
Sereine stared at him sulkily from one corner, arms folded as if to draw into herself as far as possible. Palpatine stood in the center of the room, straining toward her, one hand outstretched. A predatory alertness poised every fiber of his body; even the hem of his long robe trembled.
Sereine looked at the outstretched hand. "I love you, Sheev, but you're very confused about what I want. And about why I want it." She paused. "And I have a pretty good idea how you're doing that now. Stop it."
Anakin wrinkled his forehead.
Palpatine whipped around and stalked back to the window, midnight robes swaying fitfully behind him in quick little jerks. He placed his hand on the sill.
"Come," he commanded. "Come here. Come."
She sighed, dropped her arms, and crossed the floor.
For a long pause they stood together, watching the crystal glow of the city in the deepening twilight and the slow light show the speeder traffic made as it passed.
At last Palpatine said, "Beautiful, isn't it?"
"Yes, it is."
"You missed it, when you went away with him. You missed it when you went away ill, to Naboo."
She looked up at him. "Yes, I did."
"I know that." Palpatine's whisper barely carried to the door. "I know that, because I miss it, too, when I'm away. Naboo is beautiful, but it isn't our home. This is our home. The glow and the pulse of this planet. This district. This office." He turned to face her. "And you and me, together."
He reached out and cupped her cheek with his hand. "As we've always been ... even when we were apart."
She turned her head and placed a kiss into his palm. She placed her hand over his, and kissed his palm again.
And then she broke into tears.
Palpatine gathered her protectively into his arms, and bent his head to rest against hers.
She got hold of herself quickly, drying her tears on a fold of his robe. She broke the embrace, and looked at him.
"I love you," she said. "And I know you don't understand. Just once, I wish I had the Force, so I could show you."
I have the Force, and it doesn't matter, thought Anakin.
Tears started down her face again, and she reached up to smooth his silver hair back softly, repetitively. "I have been here, even when I wasn't. I know you don't understand that. You can say the words, but you don't understand them."
She took a deep breath. "Just try, Zora Sheev. Try to hold the contradiction in your mind. You are beautiful, and you are intelligent, and you are wise, and you are wild and ambitious and strong and brilliant. And you are Sith. And I love you, Sheev Palpatine. I love everything you are.
"And I can still love you, and do what I'm doing. Please try to understand it. Please try to remember." Palpatine stepped close and pressed his hand to her waist.
The moment Anakin knew was coming, did come. Their kiss was long and soulful. When she broke it, Palpatine grasped her and pulled her to him, angling his mouth to hers in a blatantly sexual hunger. She broke that kiss, too, and simply put her arms around him, pressing his head to her shoulder.
Anakin could not watch any more.