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The World Between Worlds had no smell.
That was the thing Ahsoka had never gotten used to, across the years of learning step by careful step. Every other sense had something to work with — the pale luminescence of the bridges, the low subsonic pressure of a thousand moments pressing in at the edges of awareness, the whispers she had learned not to listen to too closely after the first time had put her on her knees for an hour. But no smell. No temperature. Just the particular quality of a place that existed outside of consequence, where time spread in every direction like a map no one had ever meant to make.
She stood before the portal and checked herself one last time.
Her plain and unassuming traveler's clothes, sourced before the jump; Credits, from the Era of the Clone wars, on multiple chips not to arouse too much suspicion; A hood deep enough to cover her montrals and lekku in a crowd that had never seen a Togruta up close. The lightsabers she had debated and then stopped debating, because some arguments with yourself only end one way.
The portal in the depths of Dantooine held steady, all she had to do was reach out for it. As her finger collided with the whiteness of the entryway into the strange dimension, her world turned monochrome.
That was the other thing about the World Between Worlds — you didn't always find what you were looking for by looking for it. Her time inside it had taught her that much. Sometimes the path cooperated and sometimes it simply didn't, and the difference between those states had no apparent relationship to intention or effort or need. She had spent three days once trying to locate the Naboo portal through deliberate navigation and found only bridges that looped back on themselves and one door she'd been quite certain opened onto something that didn't want to be looked at and she didn’t want to see as well. She had found the same portal the following morning while thinking about something else entirely, almost walking through it by accident.
Today the path gave it to her freely.
She came around a bend in the bridge — bend being a word that worked here only approximately, describing a shift in direction that corresponded to nothing in normal geometry — and there it was. The portal shimmered ahead of her in the pale luminescent dark, more vivid than usual, the warm amber of a Naboo afternoon pressing through it like light under a door. She could smell it from here. Lake-bloom and wet stone, faint and impossible and real.
Theed. Late afternoon, judging by the light coming through. The smell of lake-bloom and wet stone even from here, faint and impossible and real.
She had planned time and time again coming to the linchpin that had ruined the galaxy- Sheev Palpatine, born to House Palpatine of Naboo, eighteen standard years old, who was Force-sensitive in ways nobody around him had yet named.
Small blessing was that his Sith master — currently unknown, had not gotten their hands on him. The Torguta was reasonably certain, though certain was a luxury this particular mission didn't offer. The records from her era were fragments and inference and deliberate gaps, but the shape of it was legible enough if you knew what you were reading. Someone had found him, or was about to. Someone had looked at this boy on this planet in this precise window of years and seen what he could become and decided to cultivate it.
She didn't know who the Darth before him had been.
That was the one piece she'd never been able to find, no matter how many resources she had access to and the master behind the Emperor, the hand that had first extended itself toward Sheev Palpatine of Naboo remained unknown.
The Sith kept their secrets well. Even with the Empire's archives cracked open and the surviving Jedi picking through the wreckage, the answer was not a name shaped hole in the records, but that whoever the Sith Lord had been, not even imperial records named him.
As if Palpatine himself had preferred his past remain as he had penned it to the inhabitants of the Galaxy and even to his closest followers. Even V- Anakin’s private records had no mention of the mysterious Sith who had mentored Darth Sidious.
What she did know was this: within the next few years, House Palpatine would be dead. Parents, cousins, the whole of it — gone in a single incident. The official records called it a tragic accident. A hyperdrive malfunction, a fault in the navigation and Sheev Palpatine as the only survivor.
She had looked at those records for a long time.
Accident was a word people used when they didn't want to say what they actually thought. She knew something about that.
It was possible it had been an initiation.
The Sith she knew had a tradition of demanding blood as proof of commitment — a door you walked through and couldn't walk back out of. Kill the life you had, so you can be trusted to be Sith, not just another fallen Jedi.
She'd seen what Anakin had been asked to do in the temple and what it had done to him afterwards, the way it had sealed something shut in him that had never reopened. On Malachor V he had said that Anakin was dead.
Someone had asked it of him, or he had asked it of himself, and either way the boy on the other side of this portal was eighteen years old and the clock was running, before he would enter his chrysalis and a cancer would be upon an unsuspecting galaxy.
She could end it cleanly. One strike. One boy who hadn't yet become the thing she'd watched hollow out the galaxy across twenty-three years of rule. The idea was so very simple.
All she had to do was rid the galaxy of one innocent boy.
Ahsoka stepped through.
The portal's blue-white light folded shut behind her with a sound like distant thunder.
She stood on a grassy ridge overlooking Theed, the city's domed palaces and waterfalls glittering under a late-afternoon sun that smelled of lake-bloom and wet stone. No clone troopers. No Empire. No Vader. Just the clean, untouched air of a Republic that still believed it was immortal.
She adjusted her cloak and tucked her montrals and lekku beneath the wide hood. The lightsabers at her hips felt heavier than they should. One strike. One boy. End the monster before he ever wore the hood.
She had studied every scrap the future still possessed: Sheev Palpatine, born to House Palpatine of Naboo, eighteen standard years. Already carrying the first latent flickers of Force sensitivity no one around him had the skill to name or notice. No public holos existed of him at this age — only the later images, the a red haired senator with the carefully cultivated smile, and then the thing that came after, after his hair had turned to silver. The melted, hooded, barely-human thing that had ruled a burning galaxy for twenty-three years. The Force had whispered his name across the decades like a wound that hadn't closed.
Naboo. Theed. Find him before the plague does.
She was a servant of the Force.
Ahsoka melted into the afternoon crowds flowing toward the city's eastern edge, listening. Street chatter led her to the outer pits where the weekend swoop circuit was already drawing a thick press of spectators — nobles' sons and merchants' daughters and the kind of people who came for the crashes. She bought a standing ticket with lifted credits and found a vantage point high on the terraced ridge, heart steady, eyes moving.
The bikes screamed past in chrome-and-flame blurs. One rider kept pulling clear of the pack — lean, aggressive, copper-red hair whipping from beneath a half-helmet. He leaned into turns like gravity owed him a personal favor, the kind of rider who didn't brake so much as negotiate with physics and generally won the argument. When a rival on a heavier black speeder tried to force him into the barrier wall on the final hairpin, something moved in Ahsoka's chest before her mind caught up with it. Her hand twitched. The attacker's bike wobbled as though an invisible hand had caught its tail fin and pulled.
The redhead shot through the gap, crossed the finish line first, and stood up on the pegs in a slow, theatrical bow — one arm flung wide, chin up, like a prince acknowledging his subjects from a balcony he'd always known was his.
The crowd roared.
Ahsoka watched him and said nothing and felt the weight of the sabers against her ribs.
That's him.
She didn't need confirmation. The Force marked those like him. It was not darkness, not yet, just density, like the air before a storm that hadn't decided what it wanted to be. She'd felt it around Anakin once, in the early days before she'd known what the feeling meant. She felt it now, rolling off the boy on the finish line with his arms spread wide and his face tipped up to the crowd noise like he was drinking it.
It told her that this being was destined for more.
She waited until the post-race chaos thinned to something workable, then slipped down to the pit lane.
He was wiping dust from a prototype Flash swoop with a rag that wasn't doing much, sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms corded with the kind of muscle that came from actually riding rather than being seen near bikes. Up close he was — she observed without letting herself linger on it — more striking than the crowd impression had suggested. The copper hair was darker than she had thought it underneath the helmet, taking the colour of almost crimson, sweat-damp and curling at his temples. Sharp jaw and even sharper eyes, currently focused on a smear of track grime along his bike's left panel with the concentrated displeasure of someone who cared more about the machine than the trophy.
She approached from the side, so that he could not notice her easily, keeping her voice neutral, casual.
"That was one hell of a final turn. You alright?"
He didn't look up immediately, the one who would become the Emperor of the Galaxy finished the stroke with the rag first. Then those blue eyes came up and found her with an attention that was, she realized immediately, considerably more focused than a young man making polite conversation with a stranger after a race.
"Define alright," he said. The cultured Naboo aristocratic drawl she'd half-expected from the records, but warmer than she'd anticipated and much, much more amused. "Physically, yes. Professionally, I'm reconsidering whether Drevin's braking line was accidental." He tilted his head slightly, but his eyes remained looking at her. "You were in the upper stands."
"Should I be flattered?"
"You should be. As if you didn't pull Drevin's bike off my back repulsor on the hairpin." He said it the way you might observe the weather. "I felt something when it happened and it’s no coincidence you are here, right now. "
The pit lane was loud enough around them that no one was listening. Ahsoka kept her expression easy and said nothing.
“Naboo isn’t the most hospitable of places towards non-humans” his gaze traveled across her hood “even near humans”
That was a tough pill to swallow and imagine the planet Padme came from as a cesspit for classist specieists, which in retrospect explained much more about the Empire. Yet, his voice wasn’t judgmental, again as if he was discussing weather.
He set the rag down on the swoop's seat and straightened to his full height — taller than she'd clocked from the stands and looked at her with an appraising glance, which implied he wasn’t looking before.
Ahsoka didn’t know whether to feel insulted or flattered.
"You're Force-sensitive," he said keeping that same pleasant, almost wondering tone. "And you just saved my life." A beat. "I don't think we've been introduced."
"We haven't."
Though his works and posters of him were known well enough for her to want to retch.
"Sheev Palpatine." He extended a hand. Clean, she noted distantly. He'd wiped them before turning to face her, though she hadn't seen him do it. Deliberate without appearing to be. "House Palpatine of Theed. And you are?"
She took the hand. His grip was firm without performing firmness.
"Ashla," she said, one of her many aliasses came automatically. "Just passing through."
"Just passing through," he repeated, and the corner of his mouth moved in a way that suggested he found this answer interesting rather than satisfying. He glanced at her cloak, at the careful way it fell — not at her disguised weapons, or not obviously, but she had the distinct and uncomfortable impression he'd already noted them. "Are you hungry, Ashla-just-passing-through?"
Ahsoka looked at him.
Darth Sidious, no, Sheev Palpatine was eighteen years old and currently unmarked by anything yet. No yellow eyes, no mountains of corpses in his wake, no pitch black robes.
Just a young man with track dust in his hair and an entirely unearned certainty that the world was his to arrange as he pleased, looking at her like she was the most interesting thing the afternoon had produced.
Somewhere behind her eyes she was doing arithmetic of her own. He was alive. She was here. There was no master yet — she was almost sure of it, and almost was going to have to be enough for now. Which meant the clock was still running but it wasn't running out today, and finding the master was the cleaner move, the right move, and she needed information and she needed cover and she needed—
Her stomach chose this moment to register its opinion loudly.
The silence that followed was brief and extremely eloquent.
Palpatine's expression didn't quite become a smile. It became something more pointed than that.
"I know a place," he said, looking at her. “Hope you have stomach for aquatics”
The restaurant was the kind of place that didn't have a sign and didn’t need to.
Ahsoka had been in enough systems to recognize the ways of serious money — the unmarked door, the living maître d' who materialised from nowhere, the way the other diners didn't look up when you entered because looking up was for people who needed to know if anyone important had arrived, and everyone here already was. The interior was all warm stone and natural candlelight and the particular hush of a room where conversations were worth keeping private.
Palpatine had changed in twenty minutes. She didn't ask how. He'd reappeared outside the pit lane in a dark high-collared jacket that probably cost more than all her stolen credits were worth, copper hair settled back from his face, the track dust gone as though it had never happened. He looked, she thought with a sourness she kept off her face, exactly like what he was. The heir to a House that had been important on this planet for a very long time, wearing it the way fish wore water — without thinking about it, because there had never been a moment when it wasn't true.
She had kept the cloak and the hood. Sure it was suspicious, but gossip would hound her either way and she could do without the stares.
The maître d' showed them to a corner table without being asked. Palpatine pulled back her chair to let her sit, ordering wine before himself sat down, apparently from memory. Ahsoka rearranged herself under the cloak and decided this was fine. This was controlled and her mission was still active. She was gathering intelligence, and he was letting her, and the sabers were within reach, and everything was fine, should anything happen.
The menu was in Naboo formal script, which she could read approximately forty percent of.
"You should pick fish," Palpatine said, without looking up from his own menu. "If you're unfamiliar with the dialect. The lake country supplies them fresh daily. The rest is good, but the fish is why people come here."
"I didn't say I was unfamiliar with it."
Padme had taught her it and he was the reason she would never hold her children or see them grow up.
"No," he agreed pleasantly. "You were holding it upside down."
She turned it the right way without comment, sofly cursing under her breath. He did not smile, which she found more irritating than if he had.
The wine arrived without much pomo. She watched him not-watch her to see if she'd taste it before drinking, which she did, old habits being what they were, and she caught the faint movement of something in his expression that might have been approval.
"You're not from this sector," he said. Opening move, conversational, the tone of someone taking an undemanding stroll through a topic.
"No."
"The cloak is Outer Rim market, three or four systems out. The credits you used at the gate were minted in the Arkanis sector." He swirled his glass once. "But you carry yourself like someone with formal training. Military, possibly. Or—" A pause. The blue eyes came up. "Something else."
"You noticed all that at the gate?"
"I noticed all that in the pit lane." He said it without particular pride, as a simple matter of record. "I notice things I deem noteworthy. It's a habit I've never seen a reason to break."
Ahsoka looked at him across the candlelight and thought: Of course you did.
"And yet you invited a stranger to dinner anyway," she said.
"You saved my life. That deserves a reward and a private chance to speak"
"You don't know that. It might have merely been an accident."
"It wasn't." his voice was flat and certain, no drama in it. "I know when someone is trying to kill me." The wine glass touched his lips and lowered. "And I know when someone has decided not to."
The candle between them held very still.
"I'm curious about you, Ashla-just-passing-through," he said, and returned to the menu as though the sentence was an unremarkable remark. "That's all. I find curiosity is best addressed directly."
She was spared from answering by the arrival of a problem from across the room.
She heard it before she saw it — a shift in the ambient noise of the restaurant, the specific quality of silence that spread outward from two men at a nearby table who had stopped their own conversation to comment on something. The words were low, but not low enough, and not intended to be. The Naboo isolationist dialect was one she'd read extensively in the historical record, and she understood it well enough to catch offworlder and what sort of establishment and one term for Togruta specifically that had been considered offensive since the destruction of the Old Sith.
Palpatine had heard it too. She knew because something went very still in him — not tense, but still, the way a hand went still before it decided whether to reach for something, either throats or something sharp. He set his menu down, not looking at her.
"Don't," Ahsoka said quietly and the corner of the budding tyrant’s lip curled upward slightly.
"I wasn't going to do anything unpleasant." The mildness was genuine, which was almost worse. He glanced toward the offending table with an expression of mild social assessment, the way you might look at a skylight that was letting in a draft. Then back at her. "May I handle this?"
"Who am I to tell you how to deal with your fellow aristocrats?" she scoffed
"Someone who has strong opinions on those morons. Now I'm going to handle it more smoothly if you’d let me," he said, casting a gaze at her lap, where she had concealed her lightsabers, "than if you reach for whatever is under that cloak."
She held his gaze for one moment. Then she moved her hand away from her side and picked up her wine.
He turned in his chair, unhurried, and addressed the table across the room in a tone that was entirely pleasant and somehow colder than the restaurant's stone floor.
"Forgive the intrusion, gentlemen. My pet is still adjusting to Theed's dining customs. I appreciate your patience and candor in this matter."
The silence that followed had a different texture than the one before it. The two men exchanged a glance, seemed to locate themselves in the social hierarchy relative to the Palpatine name, and found a sudden deep interest in their own food. Conversation resumed around them within thirty seconds, the disruption smoothed over, the room returning to its customary expensive murmur.
Palpatine turned back to his menu as if nothing had happened.
Ahsoka set her wine glass down with a precision that was not quite slamming it.
"My pet," she looked at him, eyes hard and teeth clenched together.
"It worked, did it not?" Palpatine raised an eyebrow at the display and took one nonchalant sip
"That's not—"
"They'll leave us alone for the rest of the evening," he said, still in the same mild tone, as though explaining rainfall. "The alternative was a scene, which would have been unpleasant for both of us and resolved nothing. The common ignorant Naboo isolationist set responds to social hierarchy faster than they respond to reason. I gave them an answer that would appeal to their logic and my status." He looked up. Something in his expression was close to an apology but constitutionally unable to complete the journey. "I meant no disrespect to you, naturally."
"Yet you still called me a pet." the anger slowly subsided, but not nearly enough.
"I called you my pet, which in their estimation places you under House Palpatine's protection. It is a repugnant distinction and I am aware of that." He held her gaze steadily. "Would you prefer I had let them continue and involve the authorities? The Force really can’t make everything go away, can it?"
He had no idea what was possible with it and currently such a though of a clueless Darth Sidious amused her, but that would soon change.
Ahsoka thought about fourteen different things she wanted to say to that. She thought about them for a long moment.
"The fish," she said finally. "You said the fish was good."
"Excellent, I would highly recommend the Scalefish." he said, and signaled the server.
The night air hit her like an asteroid against ship’s shields.
Ahsoka walked beside him through Theed's upper quarter and breathed it in — lake water and night-blooming things and the distant sound of the falls, the city quieter now, the dinner crowd thinning to couples and late workers and the occasional hover-cab drifting between the old stone buildings. The architecture up here was old money and older stone, buildings that had been standing since before the Republic had any interest in this corner of the Mid Rim, and the streets between them were narrow and fusion lamp-lit and smelled of the hanging flowers that the Naboo apparently considered a civic obligation.
It was, objectively, a beautiful city. She wondered how it could have spawned the red headed human right next to her.
Palpatine walked with his hands clasped behind his back and said nothing, which she was beginning to understand was his default state rather than a gap in his public mask. He moved through the city the way he did everything else — as though it had been arranged for his convenience and he was simply making use of it. It was not arrogance, not exactly. It was something quieter than arrogance- Certainty. Luke had told her once that it had been the Emperor’s greatest weakness, his certainty in himself and his designs.
She had eaten approximately twice what she'd intended to. The fish had been extraordinary, which she resented slightly as Naboo prospered while the Outer Rim starved.
"You're thinking," he said.
"Sentients tend to."
"You're thinking about whether tonight was worth it," he said, not unkindly. "Whether you learned what you came here to learn."
She glanced at him sideways. "And what do you think I came to learn?"
He was quiet for half a block. A night bird called somewhere above the roofline and the falls murmured beneath the city's breath. A couple passed them going the other direction — young, close together, oblivious — and Palpatine stepped fractionally aside to let them through without breaking stride or sentence.
"I think," he said carefully, "that you came to Naboo for a specific reason that has very little to do with swoop racing. I think the reason is connected to someone — not me, or not only me." He paused. Not for effect, she thought. He paused because he was being precise. "I think you're the kind of person who doesn't act without the full picture, and you don't have it yet."
Ahsoka kept her expression neutral. "That's a great deal of thinking about someone you met four hours ago."
"I told you. I notice things." He said it without heat. "You've been cataloguing exits since the restaurant. You eat like someone who isn't certain when they'll eat again. You saved my life this afternoon on pure reflex and then immediately began deciding whether that had been a mistake. Which I will tell you is not"
The lamp-light made the stone around them amber and warm and entirely indifferent to the specific quality of discomfort she was experiencing.
"You're describing a very suspicious person," she said.
"If you wish to indicate yourself as such," he said. "To me there’s no difference."
He glanced at her — that measured, unhurried regard — and then back at the street ahead. "Whoever you're looking for on Naboo, I have resources. House Palpatine has maintained a network of relationships across every significant institution on this planet for generations. If there's someone here worth finding, I can help you find them."
The offer sat in the air between them as did the irony as Palpatine was right here and all she had to do was to pull him in a secluded alleyway and do the deed.
Ahsoka thought about the missing Darth. She thought about the fact that he was eighteen and unaffiliated and the master wasn't here yet, and the master's arrival was the thing she needed to see coming, and proximity was the only tool she had.
She thought about the specific irony of Sheev Palpatine offering to help her find his own Sith master, with complete and genuine sincerity.
"I'll keep that in mind," she said.
He accepted this with a small nod that indicated he'd expected exactly that answer and found it satisfactory as a provisional response.
They walked another half-block in the comfortable silence he apparently carried with him like a personal climate.
"The cliff roads above the lake," he said. "There's a view of the city from the upper overlook that's worth seeing if you haven't. It's faster on the swoop than the public route."
She looked at him.
She looked at the side street where the Flash swoop waited, cleaned and ready in the lamp-light with the fresh coat of syth wax applied to give it’s crimson livery more shine. To think this was the thing Palpatine cared most of all.
She thought: the cliff roads should be secluded enough. It would be a long way down.
Yet another thought nagged her: I still don't have a name.
"Lead the way," she said.
Ahsoka had recognized this as a bad idea at the precise moment she agreed to it, which was a pattern she was developing with this particular eighteen-year-old with troubling speed. He'd settled the dinner bill without showing her the total — she suspected this was deliberate, that the number would have been the kind of thing that made a point — and led her out through the restaurant's side entrance to where the Flash swoop waited in a private lot, cleaned and prepped by someone she never saw.
"It's faster than a speeder through the cliffs," he'd said, offering her the rear seat with the naturalness of someone who'd never considered she might refuse.
She had looked at the bike. She had looked at him. She had thought, with some clarity, that the cliff roads above the Naboo lake country at dusk would be private enough to rid the world of Darth Sidious without witnesses, and had gotten on the bike.
That had been forty minutes ago.
They were well above Theed now, the city's lights spreading below them like scattered amber, the waterfalls silver threads in the last of the daylight. The cliff roads wound through formations of pale stone that the lake country was famous for — narrow, irregular, clearly not designed for the speeds Palpatine was treating as a reasonable opening suggestion. The swoop handled the bends with the kind of mechanical obedience that came from expensive engineering and regular maintenance, and its rider handled it with the same loose-wristed confidence she'd watched from the stands, that particular experience of someone who had done something so many times the fear had simply worn away and left only the skill behind.
He drove like he did everything else, she was noticing. As if the outcome had already been decided and the physical execution was just paperwork, which his tyrannical future self had applied to every area of life.
The wind came off the lake cold and fast and smelled of deep water and green things, and the montrals beneath her hood caught it in ways that would have been pleasant under any other circumstances. She sat behind him with her hands at his sides — not around him, she'd been specific about that, placing her palms against his ribs with the neutral practicality of someone maintaining balance and nothing more — and watched the cliff edge blur past three meters to her left and thought about the logistics.
She had thought about them approximately once every four minutes since the restaurant.
The drop was long enough. The rocks below were not forgiving. A focused push with the Force, cleanly done, and the bike would go off the edge before he had time to register it. No lightsaber, no confrontation, nothing that would leave evidence that required explaining. The Force signature would dissipate within hours. She would be back through the portal and into the World Between Worlds before anyone on Naboo had finished being confused.
Simple. Clean. Final.
He took a bend at a speed that compressed her briefly against his back, and she felt him completely at ease within it, not braced, not reacting — just present, like the physics were a conversation he was already three sentences ahead of.
She thought about Anakin in the Temple, Padme at the Senate. She thought about what she hadn't known was coming and what she hadn't been able to stop. She thought about Rex's face the last time she'd seen him, older than he should have been, carrying the weight of a war that someone in this era had designed specifically to break him.
She thought: push him.
Her mind insidiously asked: and then what? You still don't know who's coming for him. You still don't know who taught him. Even if Palpatine dies, his master will find another.
Yet that was the thing wasn’t it? The Emperor had been so powerful, so gifted that his death would hurt the Sith immensely.
Still it wouldn’t cripple them or avert their plans.
The cliff road opened onto a wide overlook above the lake, and Palpatine slowed the swoop to a stop at its edge without being asked, as though he'd always intended to stop here and the destination had simply been waiting for them to arrive. The engine idled down. The lake spread below, enormous and darkening blue-grey as the last light left it, the far shore lost in early evening mist.
He didn't speak immediately. That was something she kept noticing about him — the comfort with silence, the absence of the need to fill it. Most people, given a quiet moment, reached for something to say. He simply sat in it as though it were a room he'd furnished himself.
"Your hands," he said, "have been particularly idle these past minutes."
Ahsoka kept her voice easy. "I don't know what you mean."
"You've shifted your weight four times on open road with no practical reason to. You've looked left at every drop." He wasn't accusing, rather he was describing, the way one  describe a weather pattern. "The Force-sensitivity isn't incidental. You've trained, haven’t you? Though you don’t look like a Jedi to me" A slight pause. "Maybe you’re looking for someone on Naboo? I could help, House Palpatine has connections"
The lake held the last of the light like it was in no hurry to give it up.
"You have a remarkable imagination," she said.
"That too. I have good instincts," he didn’t look at her, instead letting his gaze linger at the lights of Theed "They've kept me alive, which is a useful thing to have." He glanced back at her over his shoulder — just slightly, that sharp profile against the darkening sky. "Whatever you're deciding, I'd prefer you took your time with it. The evening has been very pleasant."
"And if I decided something you wouldn't like?"
The silence lasted two seconds.
"I'd find that very interesting," Palpatine answered.
Ahsoka looked at the line of his jaw and the calm set of his shoulders and the darkening lake below the cliff, and said nothing, and after a moment he turned back to the view, and they sat there while the last of the daylight finished dying.
Tonight, she decided, with renewed focus. Palpatine hadn’t met his future master, but even with his death the Dark Side would lose it’s greatest champion Or else it will never come.
The hotel announced itself in the Theed skyline as the kind of building that had been there longer than anyone currently alive and intended to continue in that vein indefinitely. It occupied half a block of the old city's upper quarter, pale stone facade, tall windows lit gold from inside, a doorman accompanied by a luggage droid who managed to convey by his posture alone that guests arrived by arrangement or not at all.
Palpatine pulled up to the side entrance and handed the swoop to a young man who appeared to have been expecting them. Perhaps it was trained into them, Ahsoka wondered.
"Wait, I don’t have that amount of credits!" Ahsoka said, because it was true and because she was not above using the truth when it served.
"I know," he said simply.
"You know..."
"You arrived in Theed today with no luggage and mended boots and the expression of someone who hasn't sat down properly in last several days." He gestured toward the entrance. "The penthouse suite has been empty since the last legislative session. It's available and there is no reason not to indulge."
She looked at the hotel, then she looked at him and Palpatine shrugged “It won’t put a dent in my allowance, don’t worry”
"I’m not worried about your funds," she said carefully, " I’m worried what it will cost me"
"Nothing, it’s hospitality," he said, in the tone of someone clarifying a minor misunderstanding, "It doesn't cost anything." He held the door and waited with patient, architectural certainty that she would walk through it.
She did.
It’s to gather intelligence, she masterfully told herself. Use it as cover. He thinks you're a potential ally, maybe something more, and that's useful. You need the name of his master and you need time to find it and a base of operations is not a luxury right now, it's a tactical necessity. You can keep the boy close until he meets the Sith lord. He’ll probably be a stranger approaching him with the intent on sundering his closest bonds.
The lobby was marble and warm light and the smell of cut flowers that had cost somebody's yearly wages.
This is entirely under control.
The suite occupied the full upper floor and had windows on three sides and a terrace overlooking the palace district that, in other circumstances, she would have been genuinely glad to stand on. Ahsoka noted the exits, the sightlines, the distance from the terrace rail to the roof of the adjacent building. Force of habit. She noted other things too: the purposeful silence here, the muffled distance of the city, the specific privacy of high floors in buildings that catered to the rich and powerful.
She noted that when the door closed behind the porter who'd shown her up, the silence in the suite was complete.
She set her cloak over a chair. She unpacked nothing, because there was nothing to unpack. She stood in the center of the main room for a moment settling in the Force, sensing herself, the space around her, the sabers at her hips. Quietly Ahsoka probed the Force if the decision that she had been building towards since the cliff road was the correct one and if she wasn’t deliberately walking into even greater danger.
He was eighteen years old and untrained and there was no master yet and she needed information and she needed time and if she was honest, and she was going to be honest with herself, here, in this room where there was no one else to be honest for - she was also simply tired.
Three months in the World Between Worlds. Years before that of running and surviving and losing things she hadn't been able to afford to lose. Palpatine, he was in this city with whatever pull he'd been exerting on the Force since the pit lane, that dense sensation of looming storm, and she had made a decision.
She would play the hand she was dealt.
She would make sure that she was the one in control.
Ahsoka showered, letting the hotel's extravagant fresher’s hot water splash against her, tenderly easing the accumulated ache of time travel and the days without sleep. She thought clearly and sequentially about what she was doing and why. She thought about the master she needed to find and the time she needed to buy and the information only proximity would yield. She thought about all of this with the focused discipline of a Jedi and Fulcrum, the rebel operative. Again, she had done her share of unsavory things in the service of her goals and with such a mission, no cost was too great.
Then she wrapped herself in a towel, opened the bathroom door, and walked out.
Palpatine was standing at the window, when he clearly should’ve been back at his home. He'd found a glass of something from the suite's bar and stood with it in one hand, looking out at the lit palace, the ease of him in this space so complete it reminded her of a living statue, of just another element in the room.
He turned when he heard her.
His expression did what she'd expected, the slight widening of his eyes, the intake of breath and if she read him correctly an increased heart rate. Yet he was remarkably clam for an eighteen year old boy.
Sheev Palpatine looked at her with that same look of complete attention he'd been looking at her with all evening, no different now than in the pit lane, and took a slow sip from his glass. As if she wasn’t naked before him, clad in only a towel, water beads on clinging to her orange skin.
"I wondered," he said, "how long the cloak was going to take to come off. I must admit that you’re far more enchanting without it"
Ahsoka looked at him across the width of the suite.
"I'm in charge here," she looked him hard in the eyes. She meant it as a statement of fact.
"Of course," he said with a low nod, and effortlessly set down his glass, crossing the room toward her.
The damp towel felt suddenly thinner than it had any right to be. She kept her chin high, shoulders squared, every line of her body declaring control even as the cool air of the suite brushed against the damp skin of her shoulders and the tops of her breasts.
She had planned this moment.
She had decided the shape it would take.
He was eighteen, ambitious, arrogant, and currently useful.
She would use him, take the edge off her own coiled tension, and keep the upper hand while she did it. The not yet Emperor stopped just inside her space, close enough that she could smell the faint trace of expensive liquor on his breath and the clean, warm scent of his skin after the race. His eyes moved over her with that same unhurried assessment, lingering for a moment on the way the towel clung to the curve of her hips, then rising again to meet her gaze.
He didn’t smirk. He didn’t leer and it would’ve been easier if Palpatine had leered, smirked and palmed at her breasts with hardly any restraint.
Instead, he simply looked at her like she was a particularly interesting puzzle he had every intention of solving.
"May I?" he asked, voice low and perfectly courteous, one hand already lifting toward the edge of the towel where it was tucked between her breasts.
Ahsoka’s pulse kicked hard. She told herself it was irritation. She gave a single, sharp nod. His fingers brushed the fabric, then tugged. The towel came away with one smooth pull and dropped to the floor between them.For a moment neither of them moved.
Then Palpatine stepped in closer, until the heat of his body bled into hers. One hand rose, slow and deliberate, and curled around the thick base of her left lekku. His grip was firm, testing, and the sudden rush of sensation made her breath hitch before she could stop it. His mouth curved, just slightly.
"Interesting," he murmured.
And then he leaned in and kissed her.
Not gently.
Not tentatively.
He kissed her like he already knew exactly how she wanted to be kissed — deep, demanding, and far too skilled for someone his age.
His free hand settled at the small of her back, pulling her flush against him, while the hand wrapped around her lekku gave a slow, deliberate stroke from base to tip that sent sparks racing down her spine and straight between her legs.
Ahsoka meant to push him back, to remind him who had started this. Instead, her hands fisted in the front of his shirt as another slow stroke along her lekku made her knees threaten to buckle. She was still telling herself she was in charge when he broke the kiss, looked down at her with those sharp blue eyes, and said, very quietly:"On the bed."
The words were quiet, courteous, almost gentle. They should not have landed like a command.
Ahsoka’s spine stiffened.
She was still trying to reclaim the moment, still telling herself this was her seduction, her trap, her game. She stepped back, eyes narrowing, and lifted her chin.
“I said I’m in charge here,” she reminded him, voice low and edged with warning. “If anyone is giving orders, it’s going to be me.”
Palpatine’s mouth curved, small and amused. He didn’t argue. He simply watched her with that same unruffled attention, as if her resistance was interesting rather than inconvenient.
Ahsoka turned and walked to the bed with deliberate confidence, every step meant to reassert control. She sat on the edge of the mattress, legs parted just enough to be an invitation and a challenge at once, and crooked a finger at him again.
“Come here.”
He came.
The moment he was close enough, she reached up, grabbed the front of his shirt, and pulled him down into a hard kiss. She poured every ounce of dominance she possessed into it — teeth, tongue, the sharp scrape of her nails against his scalp. She would set the pace. She would decide how this went.
For a few glorious seconds, she thought she had him.
Then his hand slid up the back of her neck, fingers threading firmly into the base of her lekku, and squeezed.
The sound that tore out of her was mortifying — half moan, half gasp. Her grip on his shirt loosened before she could stop it. He took immediate advantage, deepening the kiss until she was the one chasing his mouth, until her thighs pressed together against the sudden ache between them.
She tried to pull back, to reclaim the upper hand.
He didn’t let her.
Palpatine broke the kiss only to trail his mouth along her jaw, then lower, until his teeth scraped over the sensitive skin just beneath her ear. At the same time, his other hand found her right lekku and stroked it in one long, deliberate pull from base to tip.
Ahsoka’s hips jerked. A helpless noise escaped her before she could swallow it.“Stop—” she started, but the word fractured when he did it again, slower this time, thumb pressing firmly along the underside where the nerves sang loudest.
“You’re fighting very hard,” he murmured against her throat, voice smooth and far too calm. “I wonder why.”
“Because I’m not—” Another firm stroke, another wave of heat crashing through her. “—not some toy for you to—”
He cut her off by pushing her back onto the bed and following her down in one fluid motion. His weight settled over her, not crushing, but undeniable. One knee nudged her legs wider apart as his mouth found her breast, teeth grazing the stiff peak before he bit down just hard enough to make her back arch clean off the mattress.
Ahsoka snarled and tried to roll them, to pin him beneath her where she belonged. He caught her wrists in one hand and pressed them above her head with insulting ease. He was an eighteen year old boy, she should be stronger than him by any conceivable metric.
“Stay,” he said quietly, eyes looking into her.
The single word should have made her furious. Instead it sent another pulse of unwanted heat straight to her core. She bucked against his hold, lekku lashing.
“Let go of me.”
Palpatine looked down at her, copper hair falling across his forehead, eyes dark and utterly composed.
“No,” he said simply.
Then he lowered his head and dragged his tongue slowly over her other nipple while his free hand wrapped around her left lekku again, stroking with deliberate, devastating patience.
Ahsoka’s next protest dissolved into a broken moan.
She was still fighting ,still twisting, still trying to wrench her wrists free, still telling herself she could turn this around when he slid two fingers between her legs and found her already embarrassingly wet.
His low, satisfied hum against her breast was almost worse than the touch itself.
Ahsoka bit her lip hard enough to taste blood, determined not to give him the satisfaction of hearing her scream.
She lasted less than a minute.
The moment his fingers curled inside her, stroking that devastating spot with calm precision, her hips jerked up hard and a raw sound tore from her throat. She tried to swallow it, tried to turn it into a snarl, but it came out as a helpless moan instead.
Palpatine lifted his head from her breast, eyes half-lidded with undisguised satisfaction.
“There it is,” he murmured, as if he’d been waiting for exactly that sound.
His thumb found her clit and circled it slowly while his fingers continued their relentless rhythm inside her.
“You’re fighting so beautifully. But your body already knows who’s in charge tonight. Submit to me, Ashla” Ahsoka’s breath hitched.
She bucked again, trying to dislodge his hand, trying to roll them so she could pin him instead. “Get off me—”
He simply pressed her wrists deeper into the mattress and added a third finger, stretching her open with deliberate care.
At the same time, he wrapped his other hand more firmly around one of her lekku and gave a slow, firm stroke from base to tip.
The dual assault broke something in her.
A sharp cry escaped before she could stop it.
Her back arched violently, thighs trembling as pleasure spiked through her like lightning.
She tried to twist away, to close her legs, to do anything to regain even a shred of control, but he held her open and kept working her with that same unhurried intensity.
“Stop—ah—fighting it,” he said softly against her collarbone, biting down just hard enough to leave another mark.
“You came here looking for something dangerous. Let me give it to you.”The words were perfectly ambiguous.
Ahsoka snarled and tried once more to wrench her wrists free.
Her lekku lashed wildly, one of them curling instinctively around his wrist as if begging for more even while she cursed him in her mind.
Palpatine noticed. Of course he noticed.
He smiled against her glistening orange skin and tightened his grip on the lekku, stroking it again in that perfect, devastating rhythm while his fingers curled harder inside her.
Ahsoka came with a broken scream, hips jerking helplessly against his hand as pleasure crashed through her in waves. Her walls clenched around his fingers, slick coating his palm, but he didn’t stop. He kept stroking her through it, drawing the orgasm out until her vision blurred and her voice cracked.
When the peak finally ebbed, she was panting, trembling, every muscle tight with the effort of not falling apart completely.
Palpatine withdrew his fingers slowly, deliberately, and brought them to his mouth. He licked them clean while holding her gaze, the gesture so casual and possessive it made her stomach flip.
“You taste like trouble,” he said quietly, a faint smile playing at the corner of his lips.
Ahsoka’s chest heaved.
She was still trying to rally, still trying to find the words to reassert dominance, when he shifted above her.
He released her wrists only long enough to strip off his remaining clothes. Then he was back, settling between her thighs, the thick length of his cock pressing hot and heavy against her entrance.
She tried to close her legs. He caught her knees and pushed them wider apart.
“Sheev—” she started, voice hoarse. He leaned down, mouth brushing her ear, voice smooth and amused.“Do not,” he whispered, “call me that. If you want don’t call me anything at all.”
Then he pushed inside her in one slow, inexorable thrust, filling her completely. Ahsoka’s head fell back against the pillows, a raw, broken scream tearing from her throat as he bottomed out. He was thick, hot, and so deep she felt him everywhere.
Her lekku thrashed against the sheets as he started to move — slow, powerful rolls of his hips that dragged against every sensitive spot inside her.
She tried to fight it.
She clawed at his shoulders, tried to buck him off, tried to roll them again.
He simply caught her wrists once more, pinned them above her head with insulting ease, and fucked her harder. Every thrust punched a helpless sound out of her. Every time she tried to speak, to curse him, to reclaim control, he changed the angle and hit that perfect spot again, turning her words into another scream.
Her lekku curled around his arms, betraying her completely, silently begging for more even as her mind raged against the loss of control.
Palpatine leaned down, teeth grazing her neck, voice low and steady against her ear as he drove into her again and again.
“Scream for me.”
And Ahsoka did.
She screamed as another orgasm ripped through her, walls fluttering around his cock. She screamed when he didn’t stop, when he kept fucking her through it, when he wrapped both hands around her lekku and used them like reins to pull her into every brutal thrust.
He didn’t finish there.
Because of course, even at eighteen Palpatine had to be inhuman.
Which naturally extended to his stamina.
He flipped her onto her stomach, yanked her hips up, and took her from behind with the same relentless pace, one hand fisted in her lekku while the other reached around to torment her clit again.
Then he pulled her on top, guiding her down onto him and using her lekku to control the rhythm as she rode him, forcing her to take every inch while she tried (and failed) to set her own pace.
Ahsoka lost track of how many times she came. Each orgasm left her more shattered than the last, her voice growing hoarse, her body slick with sweat, her lekku twitching helplessly in his grip. She kept fighting; clawing at his chest, trying to pin his wrists, cursing him between broken moans, but every attempt only seemed to amuse him more.
Finally, after what felt like hours, Palpatine flipped her onto her back one last time. He pinned her wrists above her head, hooked her legs high over his shoulders, and drove into her with short, punishing thrusts that hit that perfect spot over and over until she was screaming again, raw and desperate.
Only then did he let himself go.
He buried himself deep with a low, guttural groan, hips stuttering as he came hard, flooding her with hot, thick pulses that seemed endless. He kept grinding through the aftershocks, drawing out every last drop while Ahsoka trembled beneath him, completely spent.
When it was finally over, they both collapsed- sweaty, breathless, and tangled together.
Palpatine’s copper hair was damp and sticking to his forehead.
Ahsoka’s skin glistened with sweat, her lekku limp and twitching faintly against the sheets, her body marked with bites and bruises.
The room smelled of sex and expensive liquor, and for a long moment the only sound was their ragged breathing.
Ahsoka lay beneath him, trembling, voice raw, mind spinning in dazed confusion. She had been in charge. She was sure of it. How had she lost so completely? To a soft eighteen year old noble?
Palpatine remained still for a long moment, still buried inside her, breathing against her neck. Then he pressed a small kiss against a previous bite mark and lifted his head, brushing a damp strand of hair from her face with surprising gentleness, and smiled — small, satisfied, and utterly unreadable.
“You’re full of surprises, Ashla,” he murmured, the name rolling off his tongue like a private joke. “I look forward to discovering all of them.”
While she could only stare at the ceiling, wondering what she had done.
Later — time having become imprecise in the interim — she lay in the dark of the bedroom with the sheets tangled and her breathing not entirely her own yet, and waited.
He was beside her, breathing slowed, eyes closed. The room was quiet except for the city far below. At least she had rendered him helpless, Ahsoka grimly thought, while her body continued to ache after what she had just done, if Anakin knew...If Luke knew what she had done…
The Torguta quickly swatted the thoughts away, instead focusing on her sleeping quarry.
She waited longer.
She measured his breathing against her memory of sleeping men and found him soundly asleep. Slow. Even. The specific weight of unconsciousness that settled into a body genuinely at rest.
Ahsoka sat up quietly.
She reached, carefully, for the hidden saber she'd placed by the bedside table with the casualness of someone setting down a piece of jewelry, back when the evening had still been going according to her plan. She held it and looked at him in the dark.
The faint light from the city came through the gauze curtains and put soft edges on everything — the line of his shoulder, the copper of his hair darker now against the pillow, the age of him which was so apparent in sleep in a way it hadn't been when he was awake and organized and paying that complete, unsettling attention to everything around him.
Eighteen.
His family would be dead within a few years. And then his master — whoever that Sithspawn was, whatever he looked like, wherever he was operating from — would have him completely. They would take whatever this boy was, this dense unlabeled Force-sensitivity and the intelligence and the instinct and the uncanny perception and the unbreakable will, and make something terrible out of it.
Unless she ended it here, tonight.
She sat with the saber and looked at him and thought about Anakin.
About what she had said to Vader on that burning bridge above Malachor: I won't leave you. Not this time.
She thought about how that had gone.
She thought about a name-shaped hole, somewhere in the next several years, where the master had reached out a hand in the dark and this boy had taken it, unwittingly. She didn't know where. She didn't know who. She had one advantage over every other piece on this board, which was that she was here and the master wasn't yet, and if she was patient — if she was close — she might see it coming.
You couldn't see it coming from the World Between Worlds.
You couldn't see it coming from dead.
She put the saber down with little more force than she had wanted to.
She told herself this was strategy. She was mostly sure she believed it. She lay back down in the dark with the city murmuring five floors below, and closed her eyes, and let her breathing slow.
Behind her, his did not change.
But in the dark behind Sheev Palpatine's closed eyes, something had been turning carefully over since approximately the moment she'd rested against him. Fragments, images, impressions that had surfaced from the contact in ways he had no name for, that prickled at the edges of his awareness like a half-remembered dream. A hooded figure on a throne of shadows, face ruined beyond recognition and two sickly yellow eyes gazing below. Burning worlds viewed from above, small and systematic, like a lesson to those that dared to disobey. A name repeated across the images like a signature.
His own.
He lay entirely still and listened to her breathing slow into sleep, and looked at the ceiling of the suite with the expression of a man who has just been handed a puzzle far more interesting than anything else currently on the board.
What sort of a beast did I become, he thought, quietly, to the room.
He turned his head and looked at her in the dark.
Tell me more, my dear.
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