Plagueis is insane, she thinks, sometimes, when she isn't so near him the thought risks surfacing to his awareness. He's completely batshit insane -

(to think he sees her as an equal. That they can be partners and allies and even friends, that reenacting the exact same lessons she suspects he was taught with, that transforming her admiration and appreciation and fondness for him into pure loathing was, of course, a necessary step.)

- to think she was the best tool for this job.

Or, well, she probably is, technically. She's just way more of a best tool than Plagueis should be bothering to spend on Gardulla the Hutt. There's something about Gardulla, about Tatooine, that she's watched guide Plagueis's intuitions more than once. He's strengthened Gardulla, supported her in founding her pod racing circuit, funded her and at the same time nudged her enemies into place to destabilize her, someday. His gaze goes farther afield when he does this, Palpatine thinks (knows), to the echoes of his little prods into his plans, tracking the results of his premonitions only that far.

Plagueis isn't very inclined to question his intuitions in depth. To look at the Force, and ask himself, so how are you betraying me today?

(There's a crack, there. An opening she can destroy him with. Not yet - and she's learned to listen to that little voice, the one that bowed to her family's will (another collection of wasteful idiots who made enemies where they could've forged tools) until, suddenly, violently, she didn't.)

This mission is below her abilities. Every mission - every errand - she's done the past year is. She'd lashed out at Plagueis, foiled one of his plans out of the same spite that led to her undermining her father at every turn, and, well. He'd punished her at the time, and he's still punishing her.

That doesn't mean she doesn't hate milk runs, especially when she should be focusing on shoring up her position in Naboo, on helping with King Tapalo's reelection, ingratiating herself - she knows Plagueis is going to nudge her into an ambassadorial position after, she's not dumb, and she resents that even as she understands it rationally, even as she craves so much more.

She hates this mediocre middle ground.

(She hates that 'not yet,' too. She hates a lot of things, a lot of people.)

And she hates Gardulla of the Besadii somehow even more than she hates Plagueis, at least in the current moment.

Gardulla hardly seems to mind giving her more reasons!

"If Magister Damask wants me to go so far out of my way, he can send someone better than a some whelp to say so," she's saying right now. "With better offers."

"Your Excellency," she says after biting back the first few retorts that spring to mind, "The Magister's proposal will bring great profits to Tatooine and therefore to you - this is no mere favor we ask, but an opportunity we offer."

She snorts, a loud sound that vibrates through her entire slug-like body. "Do not presume to tell me what will or won't benefit me, slave. I have dealt with your owner longer than you've been alive - and I'm well aware that the Magister has been courting Jabba."

"I'm no slave," she snarls, instead of anything polite or on script.

Gardulla smirks, a cruel lilt to her voice as she says, "Aren't you? Your leash might be held loosely, slave, but you jump to the Magister's beck and call like a thing trained - and one well trained, at that."

Fury boils under her skin, crackles through her fingers - she can't unleash it, not here, not fully - 

But, oh, does she want to. 

"I believe time spent on this backwater has dulled your memory of civilization, Your Excellency," she says instead. 

Gardulla just laughs. "All of civilization is chains, slave. The only question is which master holds the final leash."

"It will never be you," she says, with the weight of a premonition. 

She's amused, still. "And neither will it be you. Your chains will bind you more tightly every day."

"We'll see."

(They won't. She'll make sure of that.)

Gardulla leans back, waving an indolent hand. "I suppose we shall."

"You're dismissed for now, slave. Go along and tell your master you've failed." Smirk. "We have signal boosters, if your comm can't reach from this backwater."

"I'll let you know if I do end up needing anything, Your Excellency," she says, with the most sarcastic bow she knows how to perform.

And she turns on her heel and leaves.

She has a room here, so long as she's on Plagueis's little errand, but she doesn't go back to it immediately. She looks around instead, a bit subtly. 

Gardulla's fort is busy with slaves and traders and visiting dignitaries and petitioners...

Very few people who work for her seem to be anything other than a slave, once Palpatine's been watching for a while. Most of them aren't marked, but... There's a common resonance to them. 

Not just that they're all pretty by the standards of their own peoples, though they are that. Even the ones who carry themselves as if they've been broken, even the ones with visible wounds - those, too, must have once been proud examples of everything their people admire.

Gardulla doesn't keep her second generation slaves very long. That, too, shows - and, as Palpatine watches, a hierarchy emerges. The ones at the top might have been born to slavery, perhaps, at least more often than the ones at the bottom. All the slaves are encouraged to - and frequently do - control and report on and demean and harm each other. 

It's a commonly accepted fact that brutal masters tend to inspire uprisings from desperate slaves, no matter how hard they bring the boot down. Gardulla's notably sadistic even in company that highlights the most horrible people in existence. 

She doesn't tend to have problems with uprisings very often. 

Palpatine's not entirely sure when she transitioned from observation to planning. When she bent the minds of those in the corridors she ghosts through to look away, to pay the predator in their midst no mind at all. 

She wants a lot of people dead, and, well. 

Gardulla's the one in front of her. 

She needs to find leverage though, a gap to fit her fingers into...

There's an undercurrent thrumming through the fortress. It's subtle, slow - almost hard to spot, except for how it isn't, for how people's shoulders tense and hike up near their ears, for the little bursts of activity, the clear lines of stress in people's faces...

She wouldn't have seen it if she hadn't looked pretty close, but, now that she has - 

She's not the only predator in this fortress, her premonition whispers to her. 

Huh.

(Maybe she can complete more than one objective here...)

She starts looking specifically for the source of the undercurrent. 

Hard to find! 

...Except there's a slave who's trying a bit too hard to hide her Force sensitivity. She's pretty, with clear skin and well-kept black hair. Tall. Well-fed - it isn't malnourishment nor overwork nor disease that kills Gardulla's slaves - and therefore her age isn't very hard to estimate. She's nearing the end of adolescence, probably at most a decade younger than Palpatine. She's painfully easy to notice, draws the gaze and then constantly pushes it away. 

She's not trained, probably, not in the Force, but little ripples spread from her as she moves, as she lowers her head or says this or that quiet word. Nothing so obvious as fights breaking out in her wake - and, indeed, if Palpatine couldn't see the currents of the Force, she'd have trouble identifying this slave as at all involved in any of it. 

Interesting.

She nudges the slave, a quick prod at the edges of her mind, still mostly hiding herself. 

- And she turns, and she looks directly at Palpatine. 

But only for a moment before her gaze goes somewhere else as she keeps moving. (Her attention is still firmly fixed on Palpatine, though.)

Huh.

She starts making a little game of stalking the woman.

Yeah she one hundred percent can tell Palpatine's doing that. Unfortunately for her, she's not very good at vanishing once someone knows she's there. 

Instead, she cuts into a less trafficked part of the fortress, coming to a stop once she's in a storeroom with no one near. Her back's to Palpatine, her shoulders tense. 

She steps in - gets quite uncomfortably close to the woman's back - 

And closes the door with a negligent wave of her hand, even though every door here should require a code or chip to manipulate. 

She risks a glance back, gaze only briefly struggling to land on Palpatine. The tension spreads from her shoulders through her entire body. 

She leans in and murmurs, "Does Gardulla know you see things others don't?"

Her lips flatten like she's hiding a snarl.

"I can't say I know what you mean, ma'am."

"No one else saw me. Just you."

"Did you know you're seeing things no one else does?"

"Her Excellency isn't known to care about hallucinations, ma'am."

"She would care about a Force sensitive slave, don't you think?"

"Then I suppose she must care more about you than she's been letting on, ma'am."

She snarls, briefly - 

And then forces her expression smooth.

"You'll speak to me with respect, slave."

"I'm a slave by the same law you would be, ma'am."

"And what law is that?"

"Gardulla's word."

The meeting with Gardulla was supposed to have been closed doors. Palpatine hadn't noticed a spy. 

It's just enough of a curiosity to bank her fury, to turn a violent outburst into, "Her words won't exist for long."

"Then I suppose neither of us could be called slaves for long."

She tilts her head. "Unless there's someone else whose word might chain you."

She lashes out, heedless of the consequences, surging into motion - Plagueis wouldn't permit her to bring her lightsaber, but a good punch can be far more satisfying - and Palpatine doesn't need tools to kill -

She slides out of the way, like she'd known Palpatine would lash out before Palpatine did - and the movement caries her until she's next to the door, no longer quite as trapped.

She turns, facing the girl. Power builds around her, items rattling on the shelves, the air tasting sharp, almost like ozone, the already thin light from the single strip in the ceiling dimming precariously. 

She lifts her chin.

"Do you not want my help, then?"

(She's cautiously putting herself even nearer the entry pad.)

"What implied I did?"

"A hunch."

"Masters don't die easily."

She regards the girl -

- And then laughs.

"Some might."

"More so than others, at least."

"I intend to leave Gardulla a dead husk in my wake."

"What do you have for that?"

"A few things..."

She doesn't stop being wary - doesn't remove herself from the door's keypad, nor cede the exit - but she stops feeling like she's one wrong move from running away.

She hadn't, actually, been planning to kill Gardulla - but she's been working against the Hutt all the same, and in the edges of her parts of the discussion it's apparent she's developed a different focus in the Force than Palpatine has, albeit an unpolished and mostly accidental one.

Quite a lot to work with.

(Doing this such that Plagueis doesn't lash out at her intolerably might be difficult... But Palpatine is starting to think her bigger concern is keeping Plagueis from learning about this woman.)

She has tasks to do, still, as Plagueis's errand girl - and the slave has her own jobs - but they can weave in enough instability, subtle, that not too long after Palpatine leaves, the entire thing should come crashing down.

And... It's increasingly obvious the slave is drawing on the light side. Palpatine has inherited much of Plagueis's scorn, of course - she has no patience for the Jedi's self-made chains - but, well. She can recognize a useful tool when she sees one, and while the woman is terrible at hiding herself - she actually shines in the Force, as ridiculous as it feels the first time her attempts to hide slip and Palpatine glimpses it - 

Palpatine has always struggled with foresight. The future that unveils itself before her is murky and often more metaphorical than literal. Twisting, open to interpretation, and Palpatine puts more stock in it than Plagueis (who utterly scorns the idea of predicting rather than seizing the future), but... It's never been useful to her.

Until now.

The woman's only hindrance has been her difficulty hiding herself - a clear picture slowly reveals itself to Palpatine through her, one Palpatine is certain the woman sees even better - a million tiny levers, details no one else perceives, the future emerging clearly from this moment, flickers and glimpses of farther flung consequences, and Palpatine can simply ask what if and get most of an answer - 

The woman struggles to take Palpatine into account in her visions, apparently, which is gratifying to hear. It complicates things, but all the woman's short term predictions are more or less accurate when Palpatine isn't screwing with them - and Palpatine will be here a while.

She learns to hide the woman, first, to disguise the echoes of her actions, to redirect attention, to let her walk where she may... It grates when the woman's visions adjust to her presence, but...

Not too much later, as Palpatine is getting ready to leave - 

"How do you plan to escape this?"

"Figured I could help with coordinating whatever other slaves are escaping. Seize the controls of the chips, steal a ship... It'll be complicated, there's several backups on the range limitors on the implants and Gardulla's not above taking us down with her, but, well."

"This entire thing is complicated."

"Would you leave the others?" she asks. "If you got the opportunity to escape on your own."

"Yes. Without hesitation, and I wouldn't look back."

Grin.

"Well then..."

"What does your gut say about hiding the purchase of a slave from the Interstellar Banking Clan, when one of them is funding your trip?"

"...Don't even try."

"Just hide the slave's survival."

She laughs.

"He'd believe it of me, too."

"How much for you?"

She examines Palpatine, then...

Names a price.

One well within the fund she has for personal entertainment from her inheritance - something she hasn't actually touched while she's been here.

She's sucked up to Gardulla more, and the Hutt likes haggling, so - it'll help her errand, too, and once she has the codes - 

It occurs to her she might have what she needs to screw with Gardulla's ability to control her slaves. And glitches and slave revolts aren't unbelievable...

She knows more than a bit about that.

Wonderful. 

She nudges the last few dominoes into place, sets them to teetering on their edges...

And then it's time to leave, for both of them. 

So it is.

(She's more willing to escalate, once she knows she has a path to survival. That helps.)

And, once they've boarded the ship, jumped to hyperspace - gotten away clean so far -

She goes into the remote, the codes she has, and she disables the woman's slave implants as thoroughly as she can with the tools she currently has available. 

She stills, barely breathing, throughout the entire process. 

She's watching Palpatine. 

"Why?"

"We made a deal, didn't we?"

"Neither of us will be slaves."

She examines the other woman for a few long, uncomfortable moments. 

Then: "My name's Shmi Skywalker."

Lazy smile. "I'm Darth Sidious."

"It's a pleasure to work with you."

Hum. "I think we have another collar to break, before you can say that for sure."

"The second won't be so easy."

"Life never is."

"Who are we killing?"

"My Master," she says, voice soft and dangerous. "Darth Plagueis."

"Or, Magister Hego Damask, as the galaxy knows him."

"He's been funding Gardulla, hasn't he."

"Yup."

"He won't be happy about any of this - but I've already been pissing him off lately, so."

"And he's the one you don't want knowing I exist."

"Yeah."

"It isn't even about keeping you as an ace up my sleeve - he's either expecting me to betray him the first chance I get, or he's delusional, and he keeps acting like obviously I'm his friend and equal." She makes a face. 

"Masters."

She laughs. 

"Masters indeed."

She grins back. 

"They all fall, in the end."

"I could toast to that."

"You," she says, "Absolutely do not strike me as the drinking type."

"There's alcohol on this ship!"

"Which you're very good at barely drinking, while whoever you're talking to finds their glass always full?"

"I can actually break down the alcohol before it hits my intestines, now. Though, you're absolutely right that I used to rely on that."

"...Can that be taught?"

"...So, technically, yes. I was taught to do it, and you're Force sensitive too."

"But I'm very sure you're nearly exclusively drawing on the light side of the Force, and... I've only ever reached for the dark."

"I don't know if the light side works the same way mechanically - I think Plagueis doesn't really know either, despite how much he puts up a front of being wise. I know it draws on a different mental state, but... Things may or may not translate across that."

"Could you teach me to use the dark side version, then?"

"...I don't actually know how to teach someone to use the dark side without - inevitably making an enemy of my student."

"Guess Plagueis had that problem, too."

"Guess so."

"He's just never realized it."

She looks like she's putting a few things together in her mind. 

"My father used to beat us," she says, abruptly. "Me, all my siblings. Sometimes mom, though she started it half the time."

"I found him out in the alley, once, one of the nights he didn't come home."

"Mom thought he was cheating on her. He was getting high. Told me he was sorry. That he didn't want this life for us, didn't want us to have the same childhood he did, but he'd open his mouth and his parents would come out of it, and he said it was like he was being possessed, and he didn't know how to stop."

"He realized every fucked up part. It just didn't help much."

"My mom beat us too. Her opinion was she'd been beaten all her life, and she'd come out just fine, so we'd better stop whining."

"What happened?"

"Dad killed himself. Mom couldn't afford jack shit on her own. She sold me to pay off the debt."

"I'm going to change it all, someday," she says after a long moment. "That's - not what I've wanted, but what I've known, as long as I can remember. The galaxy is a shit show. Full of misery, full of people who think selling their kids into slavery is perfectly okay because they're the ones doing it. Full of people who don't know how to stop themselves, or even what to stop."

"Some people can never be brought into a functioning society, but... Some people can, if they have someone strong to tell them how, to carry them down the better path."

"You think you're that person?"

"I think everyone I've looked to, wanted to have be that person, has turned out to be a miserable failure at it."

"Hard to object to that."

"Why will you be any better?"

"I'll hold myself accountable."

"Uh huh."

...Scowl.

"Whatever."

"We need to figure out what to do with you."

"And it's definitely a failure mode if Plagueis notices I even exist?"

"Yeah."

"He's been doing experiments into Force sensitivity. He's gotten people who use the Dark side for them. No one who uses the Light side, at least not more often than incidentally. You're not a Jedi, but - you're doing better than most."

"Eesh, yeah." She makes a face. "That constrains things, especially for the two of us working together, or you even so much as giving me advice or feedback on learning... Would the Jedi teach me, do you think?"

"They only take kids," she says. "Pretty young ones."

"...Annoying..." Sigh. 

"...I could probably at least spot you. Most people don't figure anything out except maybe hiding themselves or intuition without training, even if they've realized which they usually don't, but..."

"I could tell you what's possible, and what's dangerous, and - "

"If just telling you how I think through things would help, I can do that. And I can provide you plenty of education in other, more mundane things."

"What would you want in return?"

"A more powerful ally."

"I might just be able to hire you, too. As an aide, as my eyes and ears. Plagueis spies on my staff, but... It's easier to slip people in through there, especially if I slip you into a school first."

"And if I can provide a reasonable explanation for having you on board - "

"Noticing you're sensitive was hard, and... If you avoid using the Force around others, you might slip under his radar long enough."

"...Hm."

"The stuff I do - it wants to be known. I found it because of that, because of sitting at the edge of the desert and listening. Letting myself be shown, and - if I keep my body empty, if I let myself become a vessel, it fills me, and - I walk the path, and I know where to go, even if I can't say why."

"Doing things - consciously - is harder."

"...If I tried anything like that, I'd be dead or worse. The Dark Side isn't nice."

"I never said it was nice."

"But it's... If it'll kill me, it won't be quickly."

"A different sort of cruelty, then."

"Life kills us slowly, too." Shrug.

"Cruel or kind doesn't seem to factor into it, for something that much bigger than ourselves."

She nods.

"Good and evil, kindness and cruelty... They're constructed by us, every time we invoke them."

Sigh.

"So, what're we doing with me?"

...Hm.

"He'll know I'm pissed at Gardulla. You're - a minor piece in me spinning my petty revenge, one I'm keeping track of just in case. Hide you a little, but not much."

"I'm angling for an appointment to Naboo's diplomatic corps right now. I'll expand my staff if I swing an ambassador position - taking you on wouldn't be too strange, if you excel in school and don't mind being seen as a charity case. You'll be a consultant on the Outer Rim officially, most likely..."

"I've dealt with 'slave' for over a decade. I can handle 'charity case.'"

"Good," she says, and gets up to set a course for Naboo.

She has messages to draft, minor favors to call in... A thousand wheels she's been forced to leave by the wayside in running Plagueis's errands...

...She pauses as she reaches the console. "Ever piloted a ship before?"

"...No?"

"Oh, good."

"First lesson, then: get us back to Naboo. And try not to crash."

"...Anything else in this lesson?"

"Well, we just established I have no idea how to teach someone non-abusively, so..." She waves a hand vaguely. "Just use the Force."

"If you use teaching me as an excuse to make me do all your chores, I'm going to 'use the Force,'" she makes actual air quotes with her fingers, "To dump you in a garbage chute. Just so we're clear."

"I swear I definitely hadn't been thinking of doing that."

She snorts and goes to randomly intuit her way through piloting a spaceship.

And she settles back to observe. (...And make sure Shmi doesn't actually crash them into anything.)

She doesn't, not even by a close margin. She's going cautiously, but that doesn't cause her any problems other than taking a lot longer.

She has time to spare right now. 

She's so glad Sidious finds this entertaining. That's definitely an important part of this entire process.

She laughs. "You're doing well, mostly - but your focus is slipping every time you get annoyed at me, you know."

"Have you considered being less annoying?"

"I've thought about it."

"And I'm guessing you didn't decide to be pleasant?"

"Oh, I'm only pleasant to my enemies."

"Well. That explains some things."

She laughs. "Think of it as a learning opportunity."

"Do you want to get dumped down a garbage chute? Just saying, that's an incredibly weird kink, and I've seen some really bizarre ones."

Giggle.

Then: "Don't forget to focus."

Sigh. 

She turns back to her main task. 

She lets her, only interrupting Shmi's focus to give directions as they get closer to their destination. She doesn't want to make it obvious she coming in with a stranger, but there's more discreet ports away from Theed, which Palpatine favors just often enough it isn't suspicious she's heading into one of the other cities. 

"Will I need - papers or something?"

"No. There's enough back channels, especially for the royal houses."

"You'll eventually need some kind of documentation - but the less directly associated with me, the better."

"You have a plan for that?"

Hum. "The beginnings of one..."

"Mind sharing?"

"Once the thought's more mature, I might."

Unimpressed sigh.