Chapter Text
The performance had lasted nearly four hours, and by the time the final curtain descended, Plagueis suspected that half the audience had forgotten the opera’s subject and remembered only who had been seen attending it.
That was the nature of Coruscant. Culture existed, but rarely alone. Even music existed to become intwined in politics to one degree or another. The evening’s performers had executed their roles competently, in some cases brilliantly, but the true drama had taken place in the tiered galleries, where senators, financiers, magistrates, industrial patrons, and diplomatic observers had attempted to watch the newly elected Supreme Chancellor without appearing to do so.
Sheev Palpatine had endured the scrutiny well. That, more than the Senate vote itself, had pleased Plagueis.
Victory in the chamber was one thing. The minds of politicians were no great conquest for beings like them. But to endure the aftermath with all the attention? That was often how one was seen or judged.. A lesser being might have glowed with triumph or retreated into false humility so crude that even politicians could have detected the artifice. Palpatine had done neither.
He had sat through the performance with the composure of a man aware that history had altered around him and wise enough not to acknowledge it too openly. When congratulated, he had received praise as though it were a burden. When watched, he had allowed himself to appear thoughtful rather than satisfied. When the performance ended, he had delayed leaving just long enough for others to believe they had glimpsed the private fatigue beneath the public elevation. Plagueis had found the whole display nearly flawless.
Now, in his apartment high above the financial district, with the opera behind him and the rain-polished lights of Coruscant below, he permitted himself to consider that the evening had been worth the inconvenience.
The breathing apparatus fitted against his face completed another measured cycle. Air passed through the device with a restrained mechanical whisper, purified, pressurized, and delivered into lungs that had survived assassination but not without consequence. Years earlier, when the apparatus had first become necessary, Plagueis had disliked the sound. It offended him less now. Survival required adaptation. A body that could no longer perform a function efficiently was not a defeated body, provided the mind controlling it remained unwilling to accept defeat.
He stood before the transparisteel windows and watched traffic descend through the canyons between towers. Coruscant had many beauties, though few of them were of the natural variety. The planet did not possess mountains, seas, forests, or any of the primitive features by which younger civilizations reassured themselves that life had preceded ambition. Its grandeur was imposed. Layer upon layer of habitation, industry, government, commerce, waste, concealment, and display had been built over whatever world had existed before. In that respect, the capital was more honest than most planets. It had buried its origins beneath utility and called the result civilization.
The Republic as an institution had done much the same.
A glass of Naboo brandy rested on the low black table beside his chair. The selection amused him. The drink had been brought out after his return from the opera, chosen in acknowledgment of the world whose suffering had delivered the final pressure needed to collapse Valorum’s authority. Palpatine would appreciate the symbolism when he arrived. Plagueis lowered himself into the chair and took up the glass. He had already drunk more than was customary.
Not enough to imperil judgment, he believed, but enough to soften the hard edges of the day. Sith did not fear the simple pleasures of life as the Jedi feared it, but neither could pleasure be permitted to imagine itself master. Tonight, however, the satisfaction was far more difficult to refuse.
Palpatine had been elected Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic.
It did not represent the completion of the Grand Plan, because nothing so vast could be completed by one vote, one crisis, or one office. Still, there were thresholds beyond which an undertaking changed in character. The Sith had spent a thousand years reduced to fairy tales that Jedi masters told younglings when they were being trained.
Tonight, without ever needing to announce themselves, they had entered the visible machinery of the state they intended to destroy. A virus in the blood if you will. Or perhaps poison was the better term. The Republic had not been conquered by an outside force in quite some time. Yet tonight it had invited it’s conquerors to preside over it. The irony was delicious.
The apartment doors opened almost an hour after Plagueis returned. Palpatine entered without escort. The outer garments worn at the opera had been removed, and the formal weight of the Chancellor-elect had been reduced to a simpler arrangement of dark robes. He looked composed rather than weary, though the day had certainly earned weariness. His face had not yet surrendered the public mask entirely, but in private the mask thinned around the eyes and mouth, leaving something colder and less agreeable beneath.
Plagueis preferred him that way. “Your admirers detained you for quite some time,” Plagueis said. Palpatine removed his gloves and placed them on the sideboard.
“Admirers, creditors, opportunists, mourners, and several beings who managed to be all four at once.”
“The Senate is efficient when it comes to trying propagate their own self-interests, one must at least admit that.”
“It is just unfortunate that self-interest rarely seems to involve silence.” Palpatine poured himself a measure of brandy without asking permission. He noticed the bottle’s origin, as Plagueis expected he would, but his only response was the faintest narrowing of his eyes before he raised the glass.
“Naboo,” he said. “An appropriate vintage, too.” Palpatine accepted the gesture with a slight inclination of the head and drank. He crossed to the windows and looked out at the city, allowing the rain-dimmed lights to reflect across his face. For a moment he appeared almost ordinary, merely another ambitious man elevated by crisis and already calculating how many allies would need to be rewarded before they became liabilities.
“You appear tense, my apprentice,” Plagueis said.
“I was expecting a better show to allow myself a brief moment of respite before we leap headfirst into the great tomorrow as you will. But the performance was much overrated by the people who recommended it.”
“The tenor appeared to be well celebrated by the spectators.”
“Valorum was celebrated once too,” Palpatine said dryly.
Plagueis allowed himself a quiet sound of amusement. “A severe comparison. Palpatine remained at the window while he spoke, and Plagueis watched his reflection rather than the man himself. Young Sidious had always been all appetite beneath the discipline, a creature eager to be recognized as exceptional and impatient with every ceremony required to make others believe the same. Years had refined him. They had not made him less hungry, only more exacting in how he went about getting what he wanted.. He had learned to let others discover his importance gradually, which made them feel clever for arriving at conclusions prepared for them in advance.
It was among his finest qualities. “I foresee many of these senators being a thorn in my side for the foreseeable future. Amidala in particular I anticipate will be difficult,” Palpatine said.
“Difficult beings are often more useful than obedient ones.”
“She will want her justice, master. She believes the Senate failed Naboo.”
“The Senate did fail Naboo. By our designs, naturally. Let her ask for her justice. You will act enough to confirm her faith in action and delay enough to teach her the limits of her office at the same time,” Plagueis said.
“An education in disappointment,” Palpatine said. His master smiled and nodded. “I suppose that is one of the Republic’s older curricula.”
He returned to the sideboard and refreshed his drink. He did not sit immediately, which Plagueis noted without concern. Sidious often preferred to stand when his thoughts were arranging themselves. The day had altered his public station, and even a mind as disciplined as his required time to adjust to the new distribution of possibilities. He had been senator in the morning, Chancellor-elect by afternoon, and by nightfall the focus of every calculation being made by every serious power on Coruscant. Such rapid visibility could intoxicate beings of lesser design.
Plagueis did not believe Sidious to be lesser. “The Trade Federation will require management,” Palpatine said. “Nute Gunray is a pliable puppet but in such a massive corporation, and one full of Nemodians at that, It now requires protection from its own panic. They will expect vengeance to come for them.”
“Panic is a useful condition in subordinates, provided they are not permitted to make decisions while experiencing it.”
“As you say, my master.” The exchange continued in that manner for some time, passing through appointments, procedural vulnerabilities, judicial tempo, sympathy in the Core, irritation in the Rim, and the anticipated interventions of the Jedi.
Plagueis drank while they spoke, the brandy producing a warmth that was not unpleasant. He monitored it at first, then less carefully. The respirator maintained its rhythm all the while. Aside from the scars and his rough appearance, the less visible consequences were more irritating. Fatigue arrived more easily. Pain would emerge from old tissues. Breathing unaided remained possible in the narrow technical sense that many impractical things remained possible, but he no longer wasted effort proving it unless proof was required.
Palpatine had never mocked the apparatus crudely. He had too much discipline for that, and too much intelligence. Even wounded, his master was dangerous. Yet he had always disliked it. Sidious considered dependence a vulnerability even when dependence had been converted into system. He saw machines as tools when he used them and concessions when others required them. It was a young man’s view, despite the age that had begun to settle into his public face.
Plagueis had intended to correct it eventually. There would be time for that later however. Later on into the evening, Palpatine finished his drink and glanced toward the chronometer. “I have to go.”
Plagueis looked toward the city rather than at him. “Yes, so you should. You will need your sleep.” Palpatine crossed to the chair where his outer cloak had been draped and drew it around himself. The transformation was slight but immediate. The private Sidious diminished, and the public Palpatine returned by degrees: the set of the shoulders, the lowered chin, the quiet gravity around the eyes. Plagueis had seen actors attempt less complicated transitions with more visible effort. The ease of it remained impressive.
“Remember, my apprentice. You must be decisive in the days to come. Let nothing stop you in this, and you shall truly be unbeatable.” Something in Palpatine’s eyes shifted, and a smirk curved its way onto his lips.
“I couldn’t agree more, master. As difficult as it will be…certain decisions will need to be done sooner rather than later.” With that, Palpatine turned toward the door, Plagueis did not follow him with his eyes. He continued looking out through the rain-streaked window, permitting his thoughts to move ahead into the week to come. All the pieces he would need to help keep straight.
The Senate would need a narrative to cling to that Palpatine was the only one who could lead them through the dark.. Naboo would need attention without given empowerment. The Trade Federation would need fear while managing them away from a collapse should pressure escalate. The Jedi…they would need to be give at least the illusion of respect while eroding their influence. He was considering whether Mas Amedda would prove more useful as facilitator or obstacle when the door opened.
The sound was soft enough that most beings would not have heard it. Plagueis heard it, and then heard nothing more. The door had never closed. Palpatine had stopped in the doorway, preventing the sensors from closing it.
The pause was brief, yet unexpected enough to draw Plagueis’s attention from the window. He turned his head and saw his apprentice standing in the open doorway, one hand near the panel, corridor light falling across the forward edge of his cloak. At first Plagueis assumed that some thought regarding the transition had occurred to him. Such hesitations were not unknown among beings whose minds operated in multiple layers.
“Sidious?” he said. Palpatine turned back and what Plagueis saw there made the force ripple coldly around him. There was no dramatic alteration in his face. He did not sneer. He did not announce himself nor did he cloak the act in ceremonial language or final declaration. He merely looked at him with the calm of a man who had reached a conclusion so complete that explanation would have been an inefficient courtesy.
Then lightning erupted from his hands.
The first surge struck Plagueis before he could rise fully from the chair, and Palpatine’s aim was so exact that even through the shock Plagueis recognized the intelligence of it. The attack did not begin at the chest or head, as anger might have directed it, but at the respirator. Blue-white current entered the apparatus, raced through its conductive elements, and transformed a device designed to preserve function into a lattice of pain. Regulators burst against his face. Heated metal seared old scars. Pressure lines ruptured. The machine’s orderly rhythm became a shriek that lasted only an instant before failing altogether.
The chair overturned, and Plagueis struck the floor with enough force to scatter glass from the table beside him. He attempted to breathe and discovered that the attempt no longer had mechanical assistance. Worse, the damaged apparatus still clung to parts of his face, obstructing and burning, while his lungs reacted to electricity, shock, and old injury by refusing him entirely. Palpatine’s second surge arrived before he could tear the device away. It entered through metal and flesh alike, his vision flashing white with the agony.
Plagueis understood that with an almost detached portion of his mind, even as the rest of him convulsed under the assault. Sidious had likely been waiting for just such an evening to. He had chosen the night of triumph, after the opera, after the brandy, after the long day’s public exertions, when Plagueis had permitted satisfaction to loosen the habits that ordinarily governed him. He had reached the door and, at some final intersection of ambition and opportunity, decided that departure was inferior to succession. That another golden moment may not present itself anytime soon.
The conclusion was not foolish. Plagueis was not a man that let his guard down often. This was the first time in years.
Palpatine advanced, but he did not speak. His silence carried more contempt than a speech would have done. The lightning itself was declaration, accusation, and inheritance. It poured from him in sustained waves, not as uncontrolled fury but as practiced violence. Plagueis’s body tried to die in several ways simultaneously. Two of his hearts. faltered under current. The lungs seized against a pressure they could not resolve. The nervous system reported pain so severe it couldn’t process it all. Vision narrowed further. The room became a chaotic hurricane of light, sound, and suffocation.
And then the respirator died completely. Its final internal mechanism clicked once near his jaw, and then the familiar rhythm that had accompanied years of existence vanished.
For several seconds, there was no breath.
Plagueis had devoted decades to the study of life and death, but study conducted upon specimens, servants, animals, enemies, and carefully prepared subjects differed from study conducted within one’s own failing body. He knew that death was not a single event but a sequence of concessions. Cells conceded. Organs conceded. Systems abandoned coordination. Consciousness, that arrogant interpreter of process, discovered too late that it had never been sovereign. The Jedi dressed such transitions in reverence, as if naming dissolution part of the Force made the collapse less obscene. Plagueis had never accepted that. Death was not sanctity. Death was failure of command.
His body requested permission to fail.
And he refused it.
The refusal did not restore him at once. It did not banish pain or reverse damage, and it certainly did not make the attack less effective. Sidious had chosen too well for that. But refusal created a point around which thought could gather. Thought became command. Command entered tissue that would not otherwise have obeyed. He tore at the ruined respirator and felt skin come away with it. The pain was immediate and jarring.
He compelled the necessary muscles again, with no elegance and no dignity, until a ragged breath forced its way into lungs that had already begun to accept defeat. The breath was inadequate but it was just enough to keep the darkness at bay for a time.
Palpatine’s lightning continued, but the moment had changed. Plagueis dragged in another breath, then a third, each one crude and bloody and obtained through will rather than proper function. The room regained shape around him. Palpatine stood several paces away, both hands extended, the corridor light behind him and the city’s storm beyond. His face was no longer the face displayed at the opera or before the Senate. Nor was it the face of the young noble Plagueis had once recruited. It was Sidious without ornament, and it contained something Plagueis had rarely seen there.
Surprise. The sight steadied him. Plagueis reached into the lightning, pressing his force power against it.
He could not simply dismiss it. He was injured, half-suffocated, burned, and fighting from the floor. The current entered him too deeply to be treated as an external force. Instead he caught a portion of it within the Force, bent that portion against itself, and used the resistance to create space in which to rise. The action was inelegant and costly. It would have embarrassed him under other circumstances. Under these, it was preferable to death.
Palpatine’s expression tightened as Plagueis forced himself to one knee.
The lightning intensified, but the certainty had gone out of it. Sidious had expected the first phase of the attack to decide the outcome, and by every rational standard it should have. The device had been destroyed. The old wounds had been exploited. The master had been surprised, intoxicated, and seated. Yet the figure on the floor had become not a corpse but an argument against the sufficiency of excellent planning.
Plagueis stood. His body shook, and the exposed injuries around his face and lungs burned with each breath. Blood had entered his mouth, and one side of his chest felt structurally compromised. Still, he stood, and the effect on Palpatine was more valuable than any counterstroke. “You should be dead,” Palpatine said. It was the first thing he had said since turning from the doorway, and the words emerged almost as an offended assessment.
Plagueis swallowed blood before answering. “Unfortunately for you…I am just the opposite.” The lightning ceased abruptly. Palpatine’s lightsaber flew from within his cloak into his hand and ignited with a red flare that threw the ruined apartment into harsher relief. He moved immediately, the blade cut toward Plagueis’s throat. Plagueis had no weapon in hand, and reaching for one would have killed him.
Instead he altered the line of the attack by a narrow pressure in the Force and accepted the pain of proximity as the blade passed near enough to burn across his collar. His left hand caught Palpatine’s wrist, bone fracturing under the grip. Palpatine hissed in anger and pain and with a twist of the arm combined with his own shove in the force, the saber transferred instantly to the other hand, which Plagueis appreciated. He’d taught him well.
The next stroke opened the fabric along his forearm and seared flesh beneath, but it placed Palpatine close enough for a telekinetic blow that hurled him backward across the black stone table. The table split under the impact. Exotic fruits burst against polished flooring. Glass shattered. Brandy spilled in a dark arc and caught the reflected light of the lightning-scarred room. Palpatine rolled through the wreckage and rose with a fluidity that more resembled a predator than the Supreme Chancellor. His broken wrist hung at an angle, but his expression showed fury rather than pain.
The duel that followed was not the formal contest Sidious might have imagined in private meditations on succession. It was uglier, because reality usually was. Plagueis fought injured and breathless, using broken furniture, slick flooring, shattered glass, and the architecture of the room as extensions of his failing body. Palpatine fought with speed, hatred, and mounting disbelief. He pressed with the blade when close, with lightning when separated, and with the Force whenever an object could be made missile or obstacle. The apartment yielded around them. Sculptures cracked. Wall panels buckled. One of the great windows fractured beneath a misdirected impact, admitting thin lines of rain that hissed where they touched heated stone.
He observed that the broken wrist altered his saber angle by fractions that would become important if the fight continued. He observed that the anger in Sidious was not merely the anger of a failed assassin, but the anger of a man whose victory had been interrupted by the persistence of a being he had already mentally consigned to history. Above all, Plagueis observed that the hesitation at the door had mattered. Sidious had not entered the apartment committed to killing him at a predetermined minute. He had reached departure and found that he could not bear postponement.
“Your hesitation when you reached the door shall be your undoing my young apprentice,” Plagueis said, his voice wheezing. Palpatine’s blade faltered only slightly, but the slight faltering confirmed the strike had landed somewhere deeper than flesh. “You were leaving,” Plagueis continued, forcing the words through lungs that made each one costly. “The thought came to you only then, or became unbearable only then.” Palpatine attacked harder, which was answer enough.
The red blade came low, then high, then reversed with a speed that would have killed most opponents even unwounded. Plagueis gave ground until his heel found a shard of broken glass, then shifted it through the Force beneath Palpatine’s advancing foot. The movement was almost nothing. Sidious adjusted before he fell, but the adjustment placed his weight incorrectly for the next strike. Plagueis seized the error and drove a focused blow into his chest.
Palpatine struck the far wall and lost the saber. Before he could recall it, Plagueis crushed the hilt against the floor. The blade died with a sharp internal crack. The room quieted around the sound. Rain entered through the damaged window. Small fires burned where spilled liquor had met scorched flooring. The apparatus that had once breathed for Plagueis lay ruined near the overturned chair. Palpatine stood several meters away, one hand broken, his weapon destroyed, his robes marked by blood and debris, his eyes bright with fury that had begun at last to admit fear.
“Kill me,” Palpatine said, “and you destroy the plan.” It was an excellent argument. Under different circumstances, Plagueis might have admired its quickness. Even now Sidious did not plead in the ordinary sense. He moved directly to utility, which was the correct instinct when faced with a master who valued function over sentiment. “The Senate chose me,” Palpatine continued. “Naboo will demand answers. Valorum’s allies will attempt restoration. The Trade Federation will panic. The Jedi will involve themselves. Years of work will require revision.”
“Yes,” Plagueis said. Palpatine’s mouth tightened. The agreement unsettled him because it did not save him. Plagueis crossed the distance slowly. He had no choice but to do so slowly. Each breath was a labor. Each step required negotiation with pain, blood loss, and the consequences of the lightning. Palpatine lifted his uninjured hand, and sparks gathered between his fingers, but the next attack never formed properly. Plagueis caught him by the throat and drove him backward through the fractured remains of the window.
The storm entered all at once. Wind tore through the apartment, carrying rain, smoke, and the distant roar of traffic. Coruscant opened below them in descending lanes of light. Palpatine’s body hung half outside the room, held by Plagueis’s grip and the pressure of the Force. For the first time that night, he struggled without fully disguising the effort.
“You need me,” he said, a snarl with the barest flicker of desperation. Plagueis looked at the man who, by all public accounts, was the future of the Republic. Chancellor, reformer, son of Naboo, friend of democracy, hidden Sith, attempted murderer, failed successor. All true, and none sufficient.
“I have no use for an apprentice so consumed with impatience, he overestimates himself,” Plagueis said. Palpatine understood, the look in his eyes flickering to one of defeat.
Plagueis had neither strength nor patience left for spectacle. He placed his burned hand against Palpatine’s chest and reached inward through the Force, not with the explosive crudity of lightning but with the intimate knowledge that had been his life’s true work. Heartbeat, impulse, rhythm, contraction, electrical command: all the small obediences that persuaded flesh to continue. Palpatine fought him there with a will that was powerful enough to be beautiful, and for several seconds the body resisted as fiercely as the man had. The heart hammered once, then again, furious and insistent.
Plagueis stopped the next beat before it began. Sidious convulsed. Lightning flared weakly from his fingers and vanished into rain. His mouth moved, perhaps forming a curse, perhaps a final denial. No sound reached Plagueis over the storm. The newly elected Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic died in his master’s hand. Plagueis held him long enough to confirm the absence of pulse, will, and deception. Palpatine had been the finest liar he had ever known, and even death deserved verification. When there was nothing left to measure, Plagueis released him.
The body fell into Coruscant’s depths and disappeared among the surging storm, the last traces of Sheev Palpatine evaporating to an inky shadow. And then….nothing.