And his Jedi, his sense in the Force blaring out with agitation now, layers of repressed anger threatening to overcome all logic.
"This is why they would not teach you, my friend. Why they hid you in the desert and left you to rot. Surely you wondered why they delayed your training?"
Palpatine stopped behind the chair, his hand still on the boy's shoulder, the close proximity to such wildly fluid power drawing him in, urging him on, his voice a hissing whisper of feigned outrage. "They were afraid of you. Of what you would become."
He paused, aware that he was walking a fine line. He was pushing for a reaction to see just what the boy was capable of. Seeit for himself--sense it. To know the extent of the power Vader's son could command; whether it was equal to his father. But at the same time, he wanted the boy to fail, to recognize the limitations of the lessons the Jedi had taught him. To realize that he could so easily move beyond them with Palpatine's aid.
Now was the time to take control, to push the advantage, to take the conversation where he willed it, knowing that the boy was too ensnared to turn away. "Why teach one whom some day you may have to destroy? Why not wait and watch? An untrained mind would be so much easier to...deal with, should the need arise. Why do you think Kenobi waited and watched from the desert as you grew?"
He leaned down to whisper, close enough that his breath caught against the boy's hair, bringing his head about slightly. "Would you like the truth, my friend?"
His Jedi took a breath to speak, but Palpatine pushed on before he had a chance to do so, fingers tightening about his shoulder to silence him. "The truth--the real truth--is that your precious teacher was placed there to be your judge, jury and executioner."
The boy shook his head, though he did not pull away. "That's not true..."
"Then why did he not teach you?" Unseen, Palpatine smiled, knowing from the boy's tensed shoulders that he had delivered a blow.
Still the boy did not look, blue eyes searching before him as his mind sought an answer. "To protect me."
"From the Sith? We would not sense Kenobi, a trained Jedi Knight, yet they worried that we would sense you? You know that cannot be. You know the truth," Palpatine hissed. "Kenobi hid you in the desert, then he stepped back to watch you grow and struggle, trying to live within the confines of an ordinary life, knowing how this would constrain and frustrate you--yet he never divulged your heritage. Never once gave you any explanation, no matter how obscure. Why?"
Palpatine pressed down against the boy's shoulders, holding him captive, demanding his attention, his voice damning. "You say he wanted to protect you, but what better protection than knowledge, child? Potential Jedi were trained from infancy--yet he never attempted to do this, never once offered guidance, though he knew--he knew--that this would someday happen...that it was inevitable. No. He did not teach you because he was waiting, my friend. Waiting to see what he would have to deal with--whether he would be able to control it. Because if he could not, then his mandate would have been to destroy it, rather than see it beyond his command."
It was, after all, exactly as Palpatine would have done.
"But he did teach me."
"Because they had to gamble--they had to take the risk that they could instill enough lies and manipulations to control you before I found you."
Palpatine smiled at the boy's confusion, played out in tensed muscles beneath his hands. As if realizing, his Jedi twisted free of the touch without rising, his sense part distaste, part resentment.
Palpatine only smiled, allowing the act, indulging the emotions; feeding them. Never a direct lie, only ever the truth--as Palpatine saw it. Always logical and plausible and compelling.
Whisperings of doubt were beginning to lodge in the boy's mind now, much as he tried to deny them, much as he declared them untrue. A thousand tiny cuts, a thousand blows, quickly landed. If only one drew blood then the damage was done. And he had drawn blood, Palpatine knew, his voice a triumphant whisper. "But they could not control you completely. They could not change your lineage so they could not change your destiny. Nothing can do that."
He left this thought hanging in the dusky hush, lit more now by the dancing light of the fire than the waning sun, knowing that the boy's knife-edge silence spoke volumes.
Turning, he stepping away to stand before the hearth, gazing into the brightly destructive flickering of the flames, though every ounce of his awareness was centered on the muted, still form of the Jedi behind him. The chaos of doubts which assaulted the boy now, robbing him of clarity, instilling again that mercurial edge, that wonderfully volatile potential.
Still gazing at the fire, Palpatine shook his head, his voice laced with studied sympathy and empty outrage. "But how callous an act--to withhold from an orphaned child the knowledge of its past, its parents. To watch it struggle to survive, abandoned on some forsaken planet by those who stole it. Another generation to twist with their insurrection and their lies."
He turned slowly to the boy, whose eyes had not risen from the table before him.
"This is what they did to you, Jedi--knowingly, deliberately. They used the isolation they had created as a way to control you. They took everything from you, not I. They took you from your father and they hid you from me--denied you your birthright. You would have been raised a scion--Heir to an Empire. They knew this. You accuse me of holding you here, yet I believe I am freeing you from the enforced, restricting environment which they had bound you to... I could not begin to explain to you the life they so deliberately denied you."
Palpatine set forward, walking to stand beside his Jedi, hand on his shoulder in empty commiseration. Head down, lost in his own thoughts, the boy did not react at all.
"And when they had done this in their own self-serving attempt to control you, when they thought they had you, body and soul, they dragged you center-stage in their worthless Rebellion, aware of the danger you would be in, knowing well that they'd left you with a profound weakness. One so easily remedied, yet so grievous that it brought you here, bound and broken and betrayed."
He stepped closer, gratified that the boy had allowed him to speak for this long without voicing some kind of denial. Long weeks of carefully manipulated events were taking their toll, his words surely kindling burning trails of doubt for the boy to offer so little resistance at Palpatine's accusations now.
"But then perhaps I could see why they would do this. Too close an examination of the past they had created to contain you would place them in a difficult position. Require them to validate...questionable actions."
The slightest tightening of the boy's shoulders was his only visible reaction, though the Emperor sensed that his mind had flickered in momentary protection and knew his thoughts must be of his mother; that after Palpatine's revelations there must be questions he was burning to ask.
But he did not--so Palpatine could wait. The boy would ask when he was ready to hear... what better time to voice accusations than to a willing audience?
"They used you. More callously than you know. Used you and gave you nothing in return, not even the truth. You weren't even worthy of that, in their eyes." His lowered his voice now, laced it with pity and disgust. "How can you defend them, knowing this? Why do you absolve them?"
Skywalker's chin came up in defiance, but he had nothing to say in their defense, against this sea of accusations.