A Parody of Manners, 19/? PG-13: Anakin, Obi-Wan, Palpatine, Padmé, Sola, Bail Organa, others
Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. This story is purely a work of absurdity fan fiction, and I am not making any profit from it.
Author's notes: Wacky dialogue ensues! Plus, Palpatine takes a closer look at Anakin's Awesome Ass. (Well, who wouldn't?) Also, behind the first lj-cut, you'll find a list of links to all the chapters by title - in case you need to get caught up on The Story So Far! And if anybody wants to share a snarky summary …?
Chapter 18: all the right friends in all the right places
Chapter 17: if it takes us all night long
Chapter 16: one minute i held the key
Chapter 15: make me a double
Chapter 14: Gender Studies 202: Intermediate Romance
Chapter 13: just about to tell you but i'll be all right
Chapter 12: shining down like water
Chapter 11: the scars of your love
Chapter 10: what you see when your eyes close
Chapter 9: and they're only a whisper away
Chapter 8: 'cause i honestly believed in you
Chapter 7: and told you not to cry
Chapter 6: pink flamingoes in the pool
Chapter 5: nobody's perfect
Chapter 4: dead man come (the infamous Orn Free Taa chapter!)
Chapter 3: which way will take us home
Chapter 2: she ain't real
Chapter 1: even your emotions have an echo
A PARODY OF MANNERS
~ CHAPTER 19 ~
with friends like these
Anakin didn’t bother to stick his head in at the ballroom door and risk drawing attention.
Instead he pinged lightly against Ryn’s familiar shields, leaned his shoulder into the doorframe, and waited.
Three minutes later, Ryn slipped out into the hallway, looking harried. “What is it?” she asked without preamble, pulling the door shut behind her.
Anakin raised an eyebrow at her. “What happened to your dress?”
Ryn huffed irritably. “I took the skirt off. It was getting in the way.”
He let the other brow come up, too, just for good measure. “Did Senator Taa faint when he saw your thigh holster?”
Ryn didn’t so much as glance down to the armament gracing her otherwise bare thigh. “No. Nobody fainted. What did you want?”
“Help repairing the com,” Anakin said, turning serious. “It’s in a bad way, Ryn. Torn pieces, parts missing ...”
Ryn looked resigned. “So it is sabotage, then.”
“Unless you think somebody fired a blaster into the circuitry by accident.”
Ryn’s low hiss of dismay pretty much echoed his own feelings. “I don’t know what you think I can do,” she said, frowning. “I’ve got my hands full, babysitting Senators -- and I’m no good with technology, anyway.”
“It’s not so much what as who,” Anakin answered. “Can you send Padmé out here?”
Ryn’s eyebrows went up. “Decided to give up on the coms and try to get laid instead?”
“Very funny,” said Anakin. “I’m hoping she’ll be able to help me dig up some spare parts.”
“It’s Sola’s house,” Ryn reminded him. “You’d have better luck in the guest quarters, anyway. All the technology these people carry around, you’d think they were planning to set up a new headquarters of greed and corruption.”
Anakin straightened away from the wall. “That’s it!” he exclaimed, earning a startled look from his companion. “Ryn, you’re a genius!”
“I am?” asked Ryn, eyeing him doubtfully.
“Yes, of course!” said Anakin, buoyed by his own enthusiasm. “Some of the guest quarters are definitely patched into the central com system. If I cannibalize the relays, I can probably jury-rig a fix for the central board!”
“I understood ‘if’ and ‘probably,’” said Ryn.
“Never mind.” Anakin braced his hands on her slender waist, unnaturally stiff now in its unyielding dark corset, and steered her gently toward the door. “Get back in there and tell Chancellor Palpatine I need to see him. Discreetly.”
“You wouldn’t know ‘discreetly’ if it hit you in the face,” Ryn muttered, but she went anyway.
“And put some clothes on before you give somebody a heart attack!” Anakin called after her.
She flipped him off through the closing door.
: : :
Ryn Orun almost took him by surprise, touching his arm lightly from behind to draw him away from the Senator whose drivel he was enduring. “Your Excellence, a word, please?”
Palpatine sensed at once that it involved Anakin -- not that that would be much of a leap in any case. If there was trouble within a parsec in any direction ...
He allowed Ryn to lead him apart, enjoying her innocent anxiety. “What is it, my dear?” he inquired politely, watching her pretend to be calm and collected.
“Sir,” she responded automatically, such a soldier. “Jedi Skywalker has asked to speak with you regarding our present situation. If you will follow me?”
“Of course,” murmured Palpatine, and watched the rest of the room watch Orun’s hips sway all the way to the door.
: : :
He found Anakin looking high-strung and ebullient: in other words, very much himself. “I’m told you wanted to see me, my boy,” Palpatine observed, as Orun closed the door at his back with her measured efficiency. “How can I help?”
Anakin folded his arms and widened his stance, adopting a pose eerily reminiscent of his former Master. “I think I’ve found a way to repair the com system -- temporarily, anyway.”
“Very good, my boy!” Palpatine approved. “I knew we could all rely on you. How soon will they be up?”
Anakin hesitated, betraying a nervousness that didn’t bode well for this plan he’d concocted. “It’s too soon to tell,” he admitted finally.
“I see.” He didn’t see, and that was the most disturbing element of all. Palpatine spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “I am at your disposal, Anakin, I assure you.”
“I know, sir,” said Anakin, his resolve firming once more. “It is your commitment and integrity which keep the Republic going. Even the Jedi look to you for strength.”
The thing about Anakin was that he was honest. it was this quality that made all his secrets so painfully hard to keep: Anakin had no facility with deception -- no talent for subterfuge, and less for dissimulation. This tribute to the man who would destroy him came directly from his generous heart, awkward in its earnest intensity.
It was, perhaps, the sweetest irony Palpatine had ever tasted.
“Thank you,” he said simply, laying a fatherly hand on the young man’s shoulder. “You cannot imagine what that means to me.” Anakin blushed fiercely and dropped his eyes, evidently recognizing too late that it was contrary to usual social practice to reveal one’s admiration so openly. “But you did not bring me out here merely to flatter an old man’s vanity, surely?”
Anakin’s blush grew even deeper, but he squared his shoulders. “No, sir,” he said respectfully. “It’s only -- in order to scavenge parts for the central com system, I’m going to need to dismantle some of the secondary com units in the guest quarters.” He met the Chancellor’s eyes directly. “Yours is the most sophisticated, sir.”
Palpatine blinked, and for a second the surprise and confusion were genuine. Slowly he found his voice. “What makes you think so?”
“We pulled schematics for the whole house yesterday and worked up a security profile. At that time, the readings showed that you had enhanced the suite’s com access and added supplemental security measures as well.”
Ah. That didn’t sound like Jedi thinking, preparing ahead of time; he wondered whether Ryn or Anakin had thought of it, instinctively treating the Senators as suspects. Anakin at least had plenty of reasons to despise the beings he was currently trying to protect.
But he doesn’t count Amidala as one of them, the privileged elite ... or me, either.
Friendship for Anakin absolved any number of sins.
“The redundancies built into those upgrades will give us the highest chance of success,” Anakin was explaining. He felt ... not nervous, exactly, not in the usual sense -- every nerve alert, but radiating certainty. Palpatine had never been near him in a crisis before; he felt as though he might be getting a contact high.
“My boy,” said he, “the Supreme Chancellor’s com access is a very delicate thing. Its reliability may prove vital to the security of the Republic. Dismantling it ... do you really think that’s wise?”
“It’s useless anyway, unless I can get the main router box working again,” Anakin pointed out, his reasoning skills lamentably operating at peak efficiency.
There wasn’t really much Palpatine could say to that -- he could protest, but it would seem ill-considered as well as churlish. Better, by far, to take this opportunity to bind Anakin even more closely to him by affection and admiration, the strength of camaraderie forged in shared difficulty.
“Very well,” he said finally. “If it is necessary, it is necessary. Let us not waste time.”
Anakin, who had been frowning thoughtfully at nothing, jerked his head up in surprise. “You’re coming, sir?”
Well, he couldn’t very well let Anakin go exploring his suite unattended. Palpatine gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder. “If you are going to tear apart my bedroom, the least you can do is rescue me from those clinging mynocks in that ballroom.”
Anakin choked back a laugh; but his eyes were dancing. “Yes, sir.”
: : :
Watching Anakin work would have been distinctly pleasurable if Palpatine had not been forced to focus so narrowly on making sure that his protege did not destroy -- or, even worse, discover -- his private installation of monitors and feeds. The situation was dire, and only to be saved through Anakin’s complete faith in his mentor. He found the digital relay chip that had transmitted feeds wirelessly from hidden holocams in various bedrooms, including his wife’s; but instead of investigating what it received, or from where, he merely pocketed it as as another useful component for his attempted repairs.
“This is good,” he told the Chancellor, grinning. “If I can find a way to boost the signal strength without frying the circuits, I can probably use this relay chip to transmit a signal through to the nearest village -- maybe even to Theed, if we’re lucky.”
Palpatine raised one eyebrow. “I thought the Jedi didn’t believe in luck.”
Anakin’s grin got wider. “I’m from Tatooine. We believe in everything.”
Anakin was being flip, but that had the ring of truth, too. Probably beings on Tatooine could not afford the faintly sneering de facto agnosticism that was in vogue at the capital. The poor always believed.
Not for the first time, he wondered what Shmi had taught her son -- and how deeply those lessons still held.
Once the initial risk of discovery was passed without incident, Palpatine found himself confronted by a new danger. Faced with Anakin’s heightened intensity -- for which not even his careful study of the younger man’s character had fully prepared him -- Palpatine hovered all too close revealing himself. Not his plans, never that; he was far too cautious, after all these years ... but the power of his own response to so much concentrated energy, a sense of intoxication that was physical in its sheer intensity.
“Sir?” It took Palpatine a disoriented second to realize that Anakin was squinting up at him from where he was squatting on the floor, the taut curve of his buttocks revealed under tight Jedi leggings. “Chancellor? Are you all right?”
And suddenly Palpatine realized that all he really wanted at the moment was his quarters to himself for about half an hour.
“I’m fine, my boy,” he said, and handed Anakin the microspanner.
