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Star Wars: A New Archchancellor [Complete]
🕑 Added 2023-05-05 16:02:24 +0000 UTCA long time ago, in a galaxy, far, far away…
It is a period of strife. The Sith Order under Darth Sidious has met surviving Sith who don’t adhere to Darth Bane’s creed of Master and Apprentice.
The struggle for power, for the dominion over the Dark Side, can’t be solved by strength of arms. Not when Palpatine is still masquerading as the Emperor and suppressing any belief in the Force.
A compromise is met.
And so, the barren Sith world of Korriban once again is walked upon by the strongest wielders of the Dark Side.
“Master?” Darth Vader’s breathy question resonated across the dusty atmosphere as he and the Emperor of the former Republic strode down the landing ramp of his personal ship. “Why have we traveled here?”
Palpatine, as was usual for the astute manipulator, had the perfect answer in mind to set his apprentice on the right path. That is, the one that would best serve his plans.
Somewhere between Vader’s question and the studied, slow turn of his hooded head toward the tall cyborg, though, that answer went from a deceptively short and concise line fraught with dangerous, underlying truths and falsehoods to a whispered, horrified, “No.”
“Palpsie!” a painfully jovial voice cheered as a somewhat short yet ridiculously fit man jumped from on top of a hill to their left, landing right in front of their ramp without even disturbing the red, dry soil of the dead world.
A feat that was accomplished without Palpatine sensing even a whisper of the Force being at work.
“Rid… Ridcully?” he said to the disgraced former general of the Republic.
“Can’t believe your old, yellow eyes, can you? Wait, were they always this yellow? It looks kind of unhealthy; you should have someone check it out—not one of those medidroids, though. Wouldn’t trust them as far as I can Force Crush them. The stupid things could make a butchery out of a C-section,” said general told him, his tone going from enthusiastic cordiality to heartfelt concern and then to idle chatter in the time it took him to climb the rest of the ramp to meet Palpatine, grasp his hand and shoulder, and give him a vigorous handshake that made the dreaded master of the Dark Side clench his teeth in sheer agony.
There also was a wet, soft crunch.
For some reason, the temptation to yell ‘Unlimited Power’ grew with every second Darth Sidious spent on the forsaken planet.
Before he could do so, though, the Force shifted.
And then, they were there.
The other Sith. The ones who wielded secrets thought lost after Bane’s purge of the order. The ones who had forced Palpatine’s hand and made him pretend to agree to that farce of a compromise.
Electing a Sith leader? Choosing a candidate instead of struggling for power like they had been taught since the very start of their cult? How ridiculous. How contemptible.
Palpatine didn’t even think they themselves believed it. He was sure any of the gathered Sith, wearing their customary black robes and hiding everything they could under them, was plotting how to advance their own position. How to take advantage of the illusion of peace to crush their rivals and steal their long-lost secrets.
Surely, it would be child’s play for the consummate manipulator, the only politician among them, to let them play their simplistic ploys before the masterstroke that—
“And who’s this tall glass of—Anakin? Anakin, is that you, kid?”
Force damn it, Ridcully!
“That man is long dead—” his apprentice started to reply in his usual way.
Only for Ridcully…
To raise his eyebrow.
That damnable eyebrow.
“Is this your rebellious teen years coming out to play? Because it’s a little late for that, isn’t it? Look, lad, I remember when you were knee-high and making eyes at that princess of yours—”
“Padme is dead,” Vader cut off.
And confirmed his identity.
Palpatine would be proud of how utterly clueless and vulnerable to clumsy manipulation his apprentice still was, given how much effort he had personally put in to keep him that way, but this was not the time.
“Ah, I’m so sorry to hear that. I was always rooting for you two, you know? How did that happen, if you don’t mind me prying?”
The Force raged.
A storm of hatred, fear, and anger swirled around the cyborg standing by Palpatine’s side. A display of the Dark Side that could have made him take a step back if it hadn’t been directed at Vader himself.
Disappointing as ever.
“Padme died in… regrettable circumstances,” Palpatine said, drawing out the pause to fill it with as many implications as an imaginative mind could allow for.
Unfortunately, Ridcully’s mind, while highly regarded in other capacities, had never been known to flirt with imagination, never mind taking her home after a few drinks.
“What, like a C-section? I just told you those droids can’t be trusted. Look, old Yoda used to say—”
“Isn’t it time to lead our guests on the tour of the campus, Archchancellor?” a tired, weary voice that belonged to one of the most powerful beings in the galaxy timidly asked.
“Eh? Ah, right! Sorry, I was greeting old Palpsie here. Man, the things I could tell you about what this guy got up to after a few cups of jet juice—”
“Please, don’t,” Palpatine found himself muttering in a tone he hadn’t used since he overthrew a galactic government.
Then his brain caught up with what he had just heard.
“Archchancellor?” he asked with mounting horror.
“Didn’t you know? These people, I swear! I told themwe needed official, embossed holocrons. Nothing says ‘prestigious place of learning’ like a good old embossing, don’t you agree? But, really, is it so hard to get them to put the Archchancellor’s signature so that people can learn at a glance that the Jedi Temple finally has competition? We’re competing with a millennia-old institution, boys! At least get some gold filigree on the recruitment letters or something!”
The chastised Sith masters seemed to wilt under Archchancellor Ridcully’s disapproval.
Much like Palpatine’s remaining grasp on reality.
“The… Jedi Temple,” he asked, witnessing with paralyzing horror how his mouth kept talking.
“Yes, of course! I mean, I was shocked that these guys here thought I could take a good stab at competing with the old alma mater, but a bit of healthy rivalry should do wonders for all those stuck-up brown-robers, always holed up in their meditation rooms. Can’t be healthy, that; I used to tell Yoda that we should get them out to get a bit of fresh air. Enjoy Mother Nature and all that she has to offer—yes!”
The exclamation was, to Palpatine’s already strained nerves, almost soothing when compared to what followed.
Which was Ridcully moving faster than anybody should be able to without alerting Palpatine that the Force was being called upon as the athletic man swiftly turned around, took a Wookie bowcaster out of his robes, and shot straight through the right eye of something that looked like a rancor had decided to try and become a bird of prey with mixed results.
Then the Force whispered the violent departure of the beast as it dropped from the sky.
Right on top of Palpatine’s head.
Splattering him with blood that smelled like the death of the creature hadn’t been quite recent.
At that moment, once again, Palpatine did betray the teachings of his master because he most definitely did try to keep his blinding rage in check.
“Ah. Sorry about that. I’ve been trying to hunt one of these things since I got here, but they’re surprisingly sneaky. I guess this one must’ve been defective. Now I kinda regret killing it; it won’t make for a good trophy,” the Sith Archchancellor said as he took Palpatine’s newest, deadest hat off and critically examined it as one does an undershirt that may, or not, need to be put into the laundry basket.
Or incinerated with a thermal detonator, as far as Palpatine was concerned.
***
“And that’s the gist of it! Still a bit small for my tastes, but as soon as we start charging tuition, we will be able to afford some new amenities. I was thinking about importing some of those trees from Kashyyyk, get a proper forest to liven up the place, but the Wookies always were kind of touchy about them. Or maybe they didn’t like it when I set fire to that one little village, but what’s a bit of arson between friends?” Ridcully kept prattling as he walked through the obsidian black corridors of…
The Sith University.
The Sith University.
“This is madness,” Palpatine said, begging the hooded man to his right to agree so that he at least could infer that the madness was not his own.
“It is the will of the Force,” Darth Lung Cancer, or whatever he had decided to call himself, answered with a voice that wasn’t so much tired as on life support.
“What?”
Pale, yellow eyes looked at Palpatine from the dark depths of a black hood.
“We performed divination rites to find the candidate most likely to survive the coming trials. The results were… unambiguous.”
“You… The Dark Side chose Mustrum Ridcully?”
“Unambiguously.”
“Mustrum Ridcully. The former general who got thrown out of the Jedi Order due to war crimes.”
“No ambiguity to be found.”
“The man who hasn’t been seen nor heard from since the Clone Wars.”
“We double-checked. Triple-checked, even.”
“The man who doesn’t realize that the Jedi Temple was destroyed—”
“Shush!”
Now, the former chancellor Palpatine was used to many forms of protocol and the multiple ways in which they could be breached, either to imply insult or outright state it. It was a part of the political game he had grown used to through his years of plotting in the shadows, and he almost missed it now that people were too afraid to be summarily executed to give him a good verbal spar.
A spar that he would likely end by summarily executing them, yes, but it was the principle of the thing.
Nonetheless, in all those years of veiled threats, studiously oblivious disrespect, and carefully pondered slights, he had rarely been shushed.
It had been known to happen, yes, and Palpatine had made sure that the short list of people to manage that had discovered precisely why taking a crash course on etiquette was something of a survival tool in the political field, even if often not literally so.
What he could unambiguously state with no risk of error, though, was that he had never been manhandled by no less than three panicked Sith masters competing with one another on who could slap his mouth shut faster.
It turned out that, rather than a competition, it was a cooperative game.
Palpatine despised cooperative games.
“Ixnay on the Temple thing!” his unambiguous interlocutor said with more vigor than he had suspected the drained man to hold.
Palpatine… blinked.
He also started shooting sparks off his fingertips, but that was a bit of a nervous tick.
“Seriously, don’t even hint at it,” the man choking him from behind with an arm across his neck who hadn’t even had the courtesy to ask for a safe word added.
“We don’t want a repeat of the Endor incident. We most definitely don’t,” the woman covering the left side of his mouth muttered, apparently to herself, as she slid into some kind of repetitive mantra without meeting the eyes of the other two, now shuddering, masters of the Dark Side.
Palpatine, yet again, blinked.
And he could swear he saw Vader’s shoulders rise up and down in a silent snigger.
***
“So, what do you think about it?” Ridcully said as the door closed shut behind Palpatine with what seemed to be the relieved sighs of all the dark masters safely on the other side of it.
“About the university?” Palpatine answered with affected polite interest as he took the offered chair.
In Ridcully’s office.
With Ridcully sitting in front of him, on the other side of a table that was, at least, properly black and full of protruding, razor sharp glass spires.
An aesthetic matched by the Archchancellor’s throne.
A throne that all of Palpatine’s carefully honed Sith instincts demanded he took for himself, no matter how stupid the idea of a Sith University was when there should only be two practitioners in the entire galaxy.
… Maybe he could hold some form of competitive exam? Candidates could come in groups of three, engaging with other teams until only the very best remained, and then dissolve the teams to hold a tournament to the death so that the last remaining candidate could merit being his apprentice, one ruthless enough to betray his oldest friends and comrades in their search of power.
The idea had merit…
“Yes, yes, about the university. I think we have a real chance at giving the old Temple a run for their money, revolutionize how Force studies are carried, the whole syllabus… Can you believe they wouldn’t let me train my own padawan in ranged weaponry? Heh. Good old Ponder Stibbons, I wonder how he’s doing?”
Palpatine remained carefully silent. Most of all because the last known location of former padawan Ponder Stibbons involved at least five versions of him arguing with one another at the entrance to the temple of Lothal before all Imperial Forces present were suddenly… not there.
“I couldn’t begin to tell you,” he elected to finally say, being, for once, perfectly sincere in the statement.
“Yes, he always was a bit of an oddball, wasn’t he? Anyway, about that state sponsorship—”
“State what?”
“Oh, don’t play coy! A high-ranking chancellor gets invited over here, and we roll out the proverbial red carpet—sorry we didn’t have one of those, by the way, it seemed a bit redundant given the planet is actually, you know, red—give you a tour of the premises, talk your ear off… you knew this was coming, you old snake,” Ridcully said with the knowing, complicit glint in his eye of one who knows his interlocutor to be an old friend who’s close enough for joking insults to be shared.
Palpatine, whose idea of closeness involved hushed conversations rudely ruining an operatic performance for anybody close enough to overhear, tried to return that glint due to the desperate, misguided hope that it would momentarily blind Ridcully and make him easier to assassinate.
“I suppose I could be persuaded to come up with some way to justify the investment,” he leadingly suggested.
“Ah, but of course, it wouldn’t do to get something without giving something in kind,” Ridcully admirably continued, making Palpatine feel about seventeen years younger and back at the top of his political game.
He had missed it. Ruthless tyranny had a way of making victories feel somewhat hollow, what with everyone surrendering as soon as they noticed there was a game to be played.
“I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest—” he started, his Byzantine mind already coming up with a few things to most definitely suggest.
“An administrative position!” Ridcully finished for him.
Palpatine stared.
Counted to ten.
Recited the code. Decided that the code was not helpful because the last thing he wanted was for the last chains around his sanity to be broken.
Briefly considered reciting the Jedi code.
Hated himself just a portion of a Vader.
And, finally, answered with polite inquiry:
“An administrative position?”
“Yes! I’m terrible at all this paperwork stuff—more a man of action than anything else, really. You want someone to lead the new generation into being proper force users? I am your man. You want someone to sit behind a desk and stamp documents? Most definitely not. But you? Ah, Palpsie, this is your element! You could be running the whole behind-the-scenes business of the University with none the wiser!”
Palpatine stared.
Mustrum Ridcully smiled at him.
And the Emperor of the Galaxy found himself returning the gesture, even if maybe not entirely in the same spirit in which it was originally offered.
He even managed to keep up the smile going through the ensuing handshake.
***
“This is ridiculous,” Darth Vader, the second most feared man in the galaxy, stated.
“And why do you think that is so, Annie?” Granny Weatherwax, the most feared not-a-Jedi-really in the former Jedi Temple, asked.
The Dark Lord of the Sith, standing up with his arms crossed and letting a bit of telekinesis vainly flutter his cape behind him, looked down imposingly at the shorter woman sitting down behind a quite nice, light wooden desk that horribly clashed with the black, metal walls of her office in the Sith University.
“I don’t need counseling. And don’t call me Annie,” he said, trying not to pout because the gesture did awful things to the burn scars around his mouth.
“The Archchancellor has made it mandatory for all war veterans in the staff,” the woman wearing a Jedi robe and still claiming she was most definitely not a Jedi said.
“You are a war veteran in the staff.”
“I keep my own counsel.”
“That’s—that’s not what counseling means.”
“Are you sure? I am the counselor; I would think I know what the word means, don’t you?”
Feeling a sudden burst of fatigue wash over him, Vader decided to finally take the offered chair.
It creaked under his weight, but he was used to it.
“So, tell me about your mother,” Granny Weatherwax said.
Vader glared. Or, at least, tried to do so. It was hard to properly convey the effect through the mask.
“My mother is dead.”
“And how does that make you feel?”
“… Bad?”
“Ah, so you at least know to pretend that much—”
The Dark Side roared, Vader’s chair groaning at the sudden wave of pressure washing through and across him, denting the metal wall to his right as he quivered with unrestrained rage.
“Pretend?” he asked, his tone reaching the precise note that was the very last thing so many official Imperials had ever heard.
Human resources were still on his case about that. Apparently, the orphan pension fund was getting dangerously low.
“Oh? You mean you have a capacity for empathy, loss, and regret? Impressive. I would have thought all that went away with the youngling massacre.”
Vader… stilled.
And Granny stood up.
“Listen here, Annie, I have known you since you were a little brat making a mess out of Obi Wan’s attempts at being discreet regarding his thing with Satine. I’ve tolerated your clumsy efforts at going through puberty with some dignity intact. I was even fond of you, in that way people are fond of that stray cat that keeps rummaging through their trash at night.”
Granny had walked around her desk. The wooden desk that remained intact after Vader’s outburst had dented the metal wall that was farther than the old, weathered wood.
And she stood over Vader.
Suddenly, the woman no longer looked any shorter than the cyborg.
“But you killed my children. You massacred every single one of them. You murdered kids who trusted you, looked up to you.”
Her blue eyes blazed under her steel-gray hair, something lurking behind them, ready to become a storm.
And, for the first time since Archchancellor Ridcully had proudly introduced his newest recruit to a nervous gathering of Sith Masters, Vader did believe that Granny Weatherwax was not a Jedi.
His hand shot down to the red lightsaber always by his side, the tortured remnant of a kyber crystal that he had personally twisted and broken after it had dared show him dreams of nobility and redemption.
And Granny… waved a relaxed hand in front of him.
“So, Annie,” she said as her tone dipped and her eyes darkened, “let me teach you what I know about headology.”
***
“I can’t help but notice my apprentice has been spending an awful lot of time with Counselor Weatherwax,” Palpatine idly commented as he pretended to carelessly peruse the latest budgetary requests from Ridcully while actually pondering whether or not to swap the man’s rubber stamp with something soaked in contact poison.
The Archchancellor looked up from the collection of embossed holocrons laid on top of his desk for him to settle on a final design and shot the Emperor a clearly nervous smile.
“Ah, yes. Weatherwax. Such a fine woman. She… Do you think she’s likely to stay? I mean, the planet is a bit dreary, isn’t it? I was thinking about speeding up that whole reforestation project—”
“She always was very professional,” Palpatine rushed to interrupt before yet another frivolous whim inflated the already astronomical bill he was going to pretend made sense to an increasingly hostile Senate. “Now, as to my apprentice—”
“Ah, yes… Annie. I must say I am a bit concerned, Palpsie.”
“I am glad that we are in agreement,” Palpatine said, for once magnanimously ignoring the hated nickname in favor of savoring Ridcully’s pliant—
“It seems you have handled terribly the boy’s PTSD.”
“The… what?”
“Look, I don’t blame you; civilians like you don’t quite get how it can be to stand in the front lines. It’s… hard to describe. Can do terrible things to a young mind,” Ridcully said, reaching across the black crystal desk to comfortingly pat Palpatine’s limp hand.
Palpatine looked down at the offending, consoling appendage and wondered whether he should amputate it.
Or his own hand, just to make sure that whatever Ridcully had did not infect him.
“I am… aware,” the man who had, directly or otherwise, inflicted most of those terrible things on an impressionable padawan said.
“I am sure you think so, old pal, but Weatherwax is a professional. Really, there’s no one better qualified to treat what ails your young charge. Don’t worry; we’ll have him back to his reckless, cheerful self in no time at all!”
Palpatine stared.
Processed what he had heard.
And, as soon as Ridcully closed his eyes with a too-broad, apparently comforting grin, he swapped his rubber stamp.
Secrets or no secrets to steal, the Archchancellor was too dangerous to leave alive.
***
“So. We have a pond,” Darth Pulmonary Cancerous commented with the disoriented tone of somebody whose worldview was no longer challenged but retired and trying to come to terms with the long-term head injuries of a lifetime spent on the ring.
“It is a nice pond,” Darth Femmus Fatalis added with the tone of one who actually quite liked ponds but was a bit embarrassed by that fact and trying to hide it at all costs while still remaining casual about it.
“It… livens up the place,” Darth Mortus Lineae added with no particular tone other than vague disapproval for anything at all being alive in his presence.
Sitting on the obsidian bench at the northeast corner of the campus quad, they all kept looking at the sparse tufts of blue grass trying to battle the arid red soil of Korriban and at the recently dug pond in the middle of it.
And at Darth Vader crouched by its side, hands between his legs.
Croaking.
All in all, it was a nice pond.
***
Leia was growing tired of her meeting with the Bothan representative. The short, furry man kept talking, and talking, and talking…
Sometimes, she found herself idly wishing that there was some completely unforeseen circumstance out of Leia’s control that would make it so the infiltrators were caught up in something that would force them to skip the next meeting. And the next one. And all of them afterward.
Leia was not fond of being talked down to.
Which made it a bit surprising that she missed having General Weatherwax around as much as she did, but, apparently, the old woman had found a lead worth investigating and had rushed out of Alderaan with barely enough time to warn her yet again about any kind of romance with men who didn’t have a steady job, frequented taverns, were debt-ridden, and consorted with Wookies.
Leia had never pegged Granny as particularly racist, but she was very insistent on that last point.
***
Fear was not something a Sith was unfamiliar with. The fall to the Dark Side often involved violent extremes of emotion, among which horror and panic featured quite prominently, and all that they learned afterward primed them to experience those same emotions as fully as they could rather than allowing them to pass undisturbed or even repress them like some of the most hated Jedi did.
It was, thus, quite a familiar experience for Darth Pulmonary Cancerous to wake up with a cold sweat and a frantic heartbeat as Archchancellor Ridcully yelled at the top of his disturbingly potent lungs.
The forced march that ensued across the barren wastelands of Korriban before its dim sun had even risen was not that familiar, yet it was quickly becoming so with every blasted day that he spent trapped under the madman’s steel grip.
“Ah, that was a good run, lads! Nothing like an invigorating jog to start out the day properly! Same time tomorrow?” he asked with no hint at all of waiting for an answer before striding away to collect the latest thing he had killed with that accursed bowcaster of his.
Mid run.
Without even looking.
And through a rock formation.
Darth Pulmonary Cancerous, hands on his knees, sweat dripping down his greyish forehead, met Darth Femmus Fatalis red-yellow eyes and found what no Sith had ever found in centuries:
A kindred soul empathizing with his suffering.
***
Luke Skywalker was a lot of things: a war orphan, a moisture farmer, an aspiring pilot.
He was also a teenager.
“Chug, chug, chug!” Luke’s newest friend, a smuggler he had met in Mos Eisley’s cantina, chanted as Luke tilted his head back and swallowed the last traces of the awful-tasting jet juice.
Then he slammed the mug down on the countertop, belched, tried to pretend the room wasn’t swaying around him, and shot Han the widest grin he had ever shot someone whom he hadn’t known for years.
Han laughed, slapped his back hard enough to make him let out a forced huff of held breath, and slammed a handful of credits on the bartop.
“Another! My friend Luke and I are going to show you all nerfherders how a proper man drinks!”
Luke tried to count how many credits there were under Han’s hand, mentally giggled at the line ‘Han’s hand,’ decided to apply some basic division to guess how many drinks were due to arrive in the near future, and, having failed utterly at the first step of the process, got an arbitrarily wrong number.
Nonetheless, Luke Skywalker stood tall and met the challenge ahead without flinching. Like he knew his father would have.
Or, at least, tried to, because the room did insist on swaying.
Later that night, when he woke up next to a snoring Wookie inside the cargo hold of a dilapidated spaceship, with his head pounding like the time he fell off a rowdy bantha, he found himself still smiling.
Sometimes, things just clicked as if they had always been meant to be.
***
‘The future, always in flux it is,’ Yoda thought to himself.
Outwardly, he just glared at a very sheepish Obi Wan Kenobi who had come to Dagobah to tell him he had lost the boy he had been watching over since the day he was born.
At least Weatherwax was still taking care of Leia.
***
“Breathe those vapors in! They do a body good! It’s all about toxin-cleansing or something, I’ve heard.”
Palpatine thought about the vial of poison cautiously secreted into Korriban through very expensive means, about the rubber stamp he had poured the whole lethal concoction over, and let his Force senses roam over Ridcully’s body. The offensively fit body that was, at that very moment, expelling any and all toxins through unclear means that had absolutely nothing to do with breathing the even more poisonous vapors of the volcano the painfully cheerful man insisted they just had to jog around.
And, very carefully, deliberately, with as much scheming wit as he had ever devoted to a single task, Palpatine did not weep.
Darth Vader, behind them, kept throwing sideways looks at the lava-filled caldera as both his respiratory filters and temperature regulators worked overtime.
And Granny Weatherwax, observing the whole scene through the eyes of one of the very few local birds Ridcully wasn’t enthusiastic about killing on sight, smiled.
She had never bought into that whole nonsensical prophecy about the one who would bring balance to the Force, and had been entirely displeased to find out just how right she had been.
Still, things had a tendency to fall in place if one waited long enough for them to do so.
She just had to make sure that meddlesome Ogg didn’t decide that things meant ‘Weatherwax and Ridcully,’ and in place meant ‘in bed.’
Really, why the old witch was so set on that happening had never made sense to Weatherwax.
And, looking at the sweaty, muscled man with a mind riddled with suppressed memories and something that seemed to be a dam for the Dark Side itself to slam against, they kept on not making any sense.
None at all.
About as little sense as her old padawan falling for that little princeling she was now happily married to.
Comments
Agrippa
Barely a pot. Though the "Klatchian" label may have been read a bit too late XD
Evilreadermaximum
.....how much coffee have you had? *dissolves into helpless laughter*
Agrippa
There's a strongly implied future Ridcully yelling "Bursar!" at the top of his lungs in here, yes XD
MasterMarx
Palpatine is literally going to have an aneurism and die before he can finagle any of his bullshit return-from-death schemes from either Legends *or* Canon.
