"How can the truth be a manipulation? You are free to come to your own conclusions."
"I'll never be free here," the boy dismissed, making Palpatine smile at his comprehension of that fact.
"You would never have been free with Kenobi," he said easily, very sure. "He simply cloaked his manipulations differently. It is the lot of all in your bloodline. Power demands a price--as it did with your father."
Palpatine glanced away, as if remembering now, his voice benign and enticing, drawing Luke in. "Obi-Wan was your father's teacher and his friend--his mentor. Your father trusted him as completely as you do now. And yet the scars your father carries...Obi-Wan cut him--quite literally--to pieces. Then he stood by and he watched your father burn, injured and helpless. Did he not tell you that, your venerable Jedi Knight?"
The boy remained silent, collapsing back down in reluctant fascination, unable to turn away.
"Isaved your father's life. Obi-Wan left him to a slow, agonizing death on Mustafar. Left him to go searching for you--for your mother."
He turned back to the boy now, whose eyes were locked to his own, skepticism and suspicion giving way to more basic emotions--those of a child whose mother was lost.
That most primal, elemental fear.
Yellow eyes held ice-blue captive in a way they never had before--because this was deeper than any doctrine, deeper than any conscious acceptance or refusal. This was the moment--this was the moment to push. To break those brittle barriers--to crumble them whilst he faltered, every shield, every defense powerless against this most devastating of weapons--the truth...
Now...he would listen...
"They buried her... just days later. You were never mentioned--nor was the cause of her death." Palpatine left this implication hanging for the boy to consider...
The mass of conflicting feelings summed up in those blue eyes was gratifying beyond words. Palpatine carefully kept his own expression neutral, giving nothing for the boy to feed off, nothing to react against. This must be his response, his feelings...
"I don't believe you," he whispered at last, desolate.
"Every word is the truth."
The boy stared, simply stared at Palpatine, a chaos of emotions grappling for release behind still eyes, muscles tight, body tense.
All that feeling, all those wildly conflicting emotions held so tightly in check by one already so fragile, so volatile. It was intoxicating to the Sith; captivating.
How close he skirted to the edge of losing control now, how compelling those emotions, driving him to the brink of coherence, testing every restraint. Palpatine could only watch in fascinated silence, enraptured. Sure that Skywalker would give them free reign at any moment...
The boy remained motionless for a long time; the intense, portentous stillness with a kinetic energy all its own, like the stillness of the calm before the storm. Palpatine watched in rapt anticipation, hands closing to fists, nails scraping fine grooves into the polished arm of the chair, waiting...
Very slowly and deliberately, the action costing him every ounce of willpower and restraint, Skywalker rose and walked in silence from the room, the Force swinging the heavy doors silently closed behind him.
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Palpatine waited in the mute silence for long minutes, his breathing shallow, gazing unfocused at the spot where his Jedi had been, listening to his own heart strong against his ribs, the brittle stillness heady with profound expectation.
It was a long time before he felt the need to stand, reluctant to abandon the intensity of the moment, knowing it was not yet diffused.
Eventually he rose and left without looking back.
He had almost reached his own apartments before he sensed the moment, like a silent scream, like a storm released into the darkness. An expansion of the Force, profound and unchecked, lasting no more than seconds but wild and feral and desperately lost.
His expectant grin turned to a depraved, delighted laugh as he walked, Mara flinching in that same instant against the unbridled power of the act.
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When Mara Jade returned with the first light of dawn the following morning, it was with a certain trepidation. That she had sensed the release of the Force last night was rare in the extreme, which meant it must have been a momentous act, either in deed or in emotion, leaving her to wonder what destruction Skywalker had wrought in that instant--what physical evidence would remain of the shattered composure he had loosed in the night.
She walked in uneasy silence through the long, still shadows of the hall, wishing that she'd had the presence of mind to vary her routine and stop off at Ops before coming here today to view the security footage of the previous night. Wondering why she had felt the urge to rush here first.
The solid, hefty doors locked closed behind her as she made her way through the brooding gloom of the cavernous dining room, the massive doors of the empty drawing room swinging shut behind her as she kept walking closer, the Red Guard releasing the lock cycle as she approached his room, the hulking doors swinging ponderously open...
Onto a scene of total destruction.
Mara stepped haltingly forward into the room, unrecognizable in its devastation.
Everything--every single item--had been reduced to wrecked fragments. They littered the chamber in a mass of scattered, shattered debris, no single piece larger than splintered kindling, nothing recognizable. Chairs, tables, bed, consoles...the blankets, the drapes--everything was destroyed, plaster gouged from the walls, fractured fragments embedded into them, the room reduced to little more than a wrecked shell.
And in the center of it all, sitting quietly in cross-legged meditation, still wearing the long, dark dressing gown and sleep-trousers he'd woken in yesterday, was Skywalker.
He turned, mild and unruffled, as if nothing at all had changed.
"Hey, Red."
And there--there was the change. In his clipped voice, in the intensity of his eyes, in his whole studiously calm demeanor.
She froze, the hairs rising on the back of her neck as he stood and walked easily toward her, his unfastened gown dragging behind him, its hem ripped and tattered. The debris before him scattered to clear a path, though he neither looked nor gestured at it.
"I'll need to see Solo today. Arrange it. And I need a haircut."
He had the distant unruffled composure of a soldier after battle, struggling to come back from the edge. Several fine cuts had sliced into the skin on his face and neck and bled dry, unnoticed.
He paused as he drew level with her, tilting his head down so that his eyes met hers. In that moment they were incredibly blue, at once desperate and powerful and recklessly mercurial, leaving Mara unsure as to what he would do next, how he would react.
He leaned in, his close presence overbearing, and it took Mara every inch of resolve to resist the urge to back step, unsure of how to handle him in this state.
"You might need to clear up in there," he whispered conspiratorially, as if sharing some private joke.
Then he walked past her to the tall windows of the drawing room to stand with his back to her, staring out at the dawn.
"Looks like rain," he observed casually to no one in particular.
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To be continued...
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Chapter 13
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
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When Han arrived at the familiar tall, heavy doors to Luke's opulent prison, it was to a scene of organized bedlam. There were about three times as many guards as normal, the two sets of heavy blast doors which marked the entrance to the sprawling apartments uncharacteristically shut and heavily guarded. Large roll-away boxes lined the wide main corridor within, filled with what looked like explosion debris, so fine and unrecognizable were the fragments. As they took off his binders and cycled open the heavy bolts to the rooms the kid was imprisoned in, Han glanced to the roomy, unused office opposite, now crammed with even more of the boxed debris.