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Chapter 66 - Star Wars : Chapter 66: Council against the Senate III

"What—?" The room seemed to darken around him. "What do you mean?"

"Please, Anakin. Are we not past the point of playing childish games with one another? I know, do you understand? I have always known. I have pretended ignorance only to spare you discomfort."

...

Anakin had to lean on the desk. "What—what do you know?"

"Anakin, Padme was my Queen; I was her ambassador to the Senate. Naboo is my home. You of all people know how I value loyalty and friendship; do you think I have no friends among the civil clergy in Theed? Your secret ceremony has never been secret. Not from me, at any rate. I have always been very happy for you both."

"Senator Amidala comes to play in Palpatine's hand...", Shaak Ti observed with a frown. "What kind of game Palpatine is playing this time..."

"You—" Words whirled through Anakin's mind, and none of them made sense. "But if she's going to betray us—"That, my boy," Palpatine said, "is entirely up to you." The fog inside Anakin's head seemed to solidify into a long, dark tunnel.

The point of light at the end was Palpatine's face. "I don't—I don't understand..."

"Oh yes, that's very clear." The Chancellor's voice seemed to be coming from very far away. "Please sit, my boy. You're looking rather unwell. May I offer you something to drink?"

"I—no. No, I'm all right." Anakin sank gratefully into a dangerously comfortable chair. "I'm just—a little tired, that's all."

"Not sleeping well?"

"No."

Anakin offered an exhausted chuckle. "I haven't been sleeping well for a few years, now."

"I quite understand, my boy. Quite." Palpatine rose and rounded his desk, sitting casually on its front edge. "Anakin, we must stop pretending. The final crisis is approaching, and our only hope to survive it is to be completely, absolutely, ruthlessly honest with each other. And with ourselves. You must understand that what is at stake here is nothing less than the fate of the galaxy."

"I don't know—"

"Don't be afraid, Anakin. What is said between us here need never pass beyond these walls. Anakin, think: think how hard it has been to hold all your secrets inside. Have you ever needed to keep a secret from me?"

He ticked his fingers one by one. "I have kept the secret of your marriage all these years. The slaughter at the Tusken camp, you shared with me. I was there when you executed Count Dooku. Have never needed to pretend with me, the way you must with your Jedi comrades. Do you understand that you need never hide anything from me? That I accept you exactly as you are?"

"He has every leverage he needed against Skywalker...", Kit Fisto said, his voice hollow. "This is not good for him..."

"His emotional attachments became the Shatterpoint that Palpatine managed to strike perfectly", Mace Windu professed.

Obi-Wan wanted to defend or argue Anakin's attachments but he could see the Korun Master's point.

He spread his hands as though offering a hug. "Share with me the truth. Your absolute truth. Let yourself out, Anakin."

"I—" Anakin shook his head. How many times had he dreamed of not having to pretend to be the perfect Jedi? But what else could he be? "I wouldn't even know how to begin."

"It's quite simple, in the end: tell me what you want."

Anakin squinted up at him. "I don't understand."

"Of course you don't." The last of the sunset haloed his ice-white hair and threw his face into shadow. "You've been trained to never think about that. The Jedi never ask what you want. They simply tell you what you're supposed to want. They never give you a choice at all. That's why they take their students— their victims—at an age so young that choice is meaningless.

By the time a Padawan is old enough to choose, he has been so indoctrinated—so brainwashed—that he is incapable of even considering the question. But you're different, Anakin. You had a real life, outside the Jedi Temple. You can break through the fog of lies the Jedi have pumped into your brain"

They couldn't believe what they're hearing. Palpatine was basically telling him that there is more freedom than being a Jedi, on how their code and doctrines have undermined him. Given his independence and sometimes arrogant mannerisms, Palpatine is feeding him what Anakin wanted to hear than to what the Jedi would tell him.

"I still don't understand."

"Anakin, if one is to understand the great mystery, one must study all its aspects, not just the dogmatic, narrow view of the Jedi. If you wish to become a complete and wise leader, you must embrace a larger view of the Force. Be careful of the Jedi, Anakin. They fear you. In time they will destroy you. Let me train you."

"And in exchange?" he asked, finally. "What do I have to do?"

"You have to do what you want."

"What I want?"

"Yes, Anakin. Yes. Exactly that. Only that. Do the one thing that the Jedi fear most: make up your own mind. Follow your own conscience. Do what you think is right. I know that you have been longing for a life greater than that of an ordinary Jedi. Commit to that life. I know you burn for greater power than any Jedi can wield; give yourself permission to gain that power, and allow yourself license to use it. You have dreamed of leaving the Jedi Order, having a family of your own—one that is based on love, not on enforced rules of self-denial."

"I—can't. . . I can't just... leave..."

"But you can."

Anakin couldn't breathe.

He couldn't blink.

He sat frozen. Even thought was impossible. "You can have every one of your dreams. Turn aside from the lies of the Jedi, and follow the truth of yourself. Leave them. Join me on the path of true power. Be my friend, Anakin. Be my student. My apprentice."

"Here we go...", Mundi said in anticipation.

Anakin's vision tunneled again, but this time there was no light at the far end. He pulled back his hand, and it was shaking as he brought it up to support his face.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry, but—but as much as I want those things—as much as I care for you, sir—I can't. I just can't. Not yet. Because there's only one thing I really want, right now. Everything else will just have to wait."

"I know what you truly want," the shadow said. "I have only been waiting for you to admit it to yourself." A hand—a human hand, warm with compassion—settled onto his shoulder. "Listen to me: I can help you save her''

"You—"

Anakin blinked blindly.

"How can you help?"

"Do you remember that myth I told you of, The Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?" the shadow whispered. The myth—... directly influence the midi-chlorians to create life; with such knowledge, to maintain life in someone already living would seem a small matter...

"Yes," Anakin said. "Yes, I remember."

The shadow leaned so close that it seemed to fill the world.

"Anakin, it's no mere myth."

Anakin swallowed.

"Darth Plagueis was real."

Anakin could force out only a strangled whisper. "Real... ?"

"Darth Plagueis was my Master. He taught me the key to his power," the shadow said, dryly matter-of-fact, "before I killed him."

Without understanding how he had moved, without even in- tending to move, without any transition of realization or dawning understanding, Anakin found himself on his feet. A blue bar of sizzling energy terminated a centimeter from Palpatine's chin itsglow casting red-edged shadows up his face and across the ceiling.

Only gradually did Anakin come to understand that this was his lightsaber, and that it was in his hand.

"You," he said. Suddenly he was neither dizzy nor tired.

Suddenly everything made sense.

"It's you. It's been you all along!" In the clean blue light of his blade he stared into the face of a man whose features were as familiar to him as his own, but now seemed as alien as an extragalactic comet—because now he finally understood that those familiar features were only a mask.

He had never seen this man's real face.

"I should kill you," he said. "I will kill you!"

"Restrain your anger, Skywalker", Plo Koon said out loud. "Sidious could use it against you"

"The Sith Lord that we all thought was the one controlling the Chancellor as his puppet, turned out to be him all along", Saesee Tiin said.

"But, Palpatine isn't using his lightsaber or any of his abilities", Shaak Ti pointed out. "He is placing his hopes at open dialogue if Anakin is to be his apprentice"

"Only a single swipe of a lightsaber and it would all be over", Mundi added.

Palpatine gave him that wise, kindly-uncle smile Anakin had been seeing since the age of nine. "For what?"

"You're a Sith Lord!"

"I am," he said simply. "I am also your friend."

"We could add that for further reference", Depa sighed.

The blue bar of energy wavered, just a bit.

"I am also the man who has always been here for you. I am the man you have never needed to lie to. I am the man who wants nothing from you but that you follow your conscience. If that conscience requires you to commit murder, simply over a... philosophical difference... I will not resist."

His hands opened, still at his sides. "Anakin, when I told you that you can have anything you want, did you think I was excluding my life?"

The floor seemed to soften beneath Anakin's feet, and the room started to swirl darkness and ooze confusion. "You—you won't even fight— ?"

"Fight you?" In the blue glow that cast shadows up from Palpatine's chin, the Chancellor looked astonished that he would suggest such a thing. "But what will happen when you kill me? What will happen to the Republic?" His tone was gently reasonable.

"Should Anakin attack Palpatine here, then it would only serve him as his reason as to why the Jedi are to be branded for treason", Plo Koon said, carefully observing possible scenarios on what would happen.

"And what? That Palpatine would capture and torture Anakin into submission in destroying the Jedi as well as using his wife as leverage?", Kit Fisto also added in the latter.

"What will happen to Padme?"

"Padme..."

Her name was a gasp of anguish. "When I die," Palpatine said with the air of a man reminding a child of something he ought to already know, "my knowledge dies with me."

The sizzling blade trembled.

"Unless, that is, I have the opportunity to teach it... to my apprentice..."

His vision swam.

"I..." A whisper of naked pain, and despair. "I don't know what to do..."

...

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