And then Vader vanishes with the the dawn.

Palpatine blows off her commitments the next day, sleeping through noon possibly for the first time in her life. As the dark begins gathering, she slips into the streets of Hanna, away from her father's spies, to the nearest uncrowded part of the city.

She finds the woman in a tiny urban garden, this time. Vader smiles at her and picks up where she left off the night before.

Palpatine goes on like that in a haze. Vader pushes her to keep attending her classes and mock trials, and Palpatine grudgingly does so, catches sleep in tiny snatches between the dawn and her first lecture, when it isn't her turn to speak in the trials – she doesn't dare sleep as evening approaches, though. Doesn't dare miss her appointment.

(Gratifyingly, Vader is always waiting for her.)

Then, a week and a half later, as her residency on Chandrila comes to a close (she's told Vader where to find her on Naboo, and the ghost has promised to come, but Palpatine's anxious on if she'll be able to, if she'll be inclined to, and she's distracted) – instead of her university's chartered ship, she finds herself shepherded by her father's security onto their private craft. It's annoying – she'd hoped to network a little longer – but she doesn't fully register something is wrong until they've broken atmo, and she's brought into the office to see her father there, and he'd never come pick her up from something like this –

His words filter through to her like faint light through murky water. She finds herself screaming in a way she hasn't since she was a child – "You can't just pull me out of school!" – "What about the Youth Legislature – " – "What about my friends?" "What about my future?" "There's no future for me locked away on some backwater – " "I'm your daughter, not your pet!"

He doesn't listen – he never listens – he says Damask is a threat and if she won't see that she doesn't need her friends, doesn't need school, doesn't need a future because he's sending her to the isolated estate of a friend of his, one well outside of the backwater politics of Naboo, one much better regarded in the wider galaxy, and that friend has a son her age –

Thunder fills the air, the smell of burnt meat assaults her, as her father's guards pull their blasters much too late – their blood splatters the bottom edge of her robe as their useless corpses crumple against the wall next to the door sliding open to reveal her useless mother, her asshole brothers who've always stolen what's rightfully hers ever since they were small children shouldering their way in past the frozen woman –

It doesn't occur to her that a ghost could help the living, that Vader could even hear her.

 It's Magister Demask she calls, blood speckled across her cheeks, bodies cooling at her feet, body trying to shake itself apart.

Stay where you are. Give me your coordinates. Follow my orders.

(He's close, she thinks distantly. (He's suspiciously close.))

 He steps onto her craft not as Demask, but with a shadowy power coiling around him, and she knows this –

She doesn't know whether to laugh or cry as he reveals himself as Darth Plagueis, the last and mightiest of the Sith Lords, so instead she keeps her expression flat and kneels at his feet as he demands, swearing herself to his service, to obey him as her teacher, her Master, and he names her in turn –

She rises to her feet as Darth Sidious, and she walks off her family's ship without a single look back, trusting his promise to take care of things. 

He doesn't permit her to return to Naboo nor Chandrila, not right away, but that's alright because surely Vader will wait for her, and Sidious is too enthralled by this chance – too excited about having some of her own stories to tell Vader, to stand between both Sith living and dead (yet she still doesn't tell Plagueis about the ghost). She deals with the fallout of her family's deaths from afar, Plagueis's invisible hand on her shoulder, and she lets him steer her away.

He doesn't explain anything. He doesn't tell stories; he doesn't even describe the Force. He takes her far away from any hyperlane, to a frozen nothing of a world, orders her to drink something she knows is poison, orders her to strip, then casts her out, throws her bodily down as a blizzard rages, and ice cracks under her as she tumbles to the base, frigid water bubbling up and threatening to consume her.

 She looks up, to see him resting easily on top of the slope, actually dressed for the weather, and his voice thunders through her mind – Climb.

Her startled rage gets her out of the stream, gets her partway up the slope – Climb – her feet slide, snow and ice collapsing from under her, and she falls heavily on her unprotected front. The ice adheres greedily to her wet skin – it tears as she pushes herself up, as she scrambles a few steps further up the slope – it burns, and her lungs burn with it, as she falls again, and Plagueis's laughter echoes somehow louder than the screaming wind, she can't see through the white hail and her frigid eyeballs and her incandescent rage –

Close your eyes.

It's barely a whisper, nothing compared to the maelstorm of Plagueis, to the blizzard she's wrapped in. It's nothing more than a whisper in her mind, and Palpatine hears it anyways.

 She obeys that whisper, her eyes sliding shut.

The Force courses throughout and is the universe. It is in you. It is in me. It is in this world. Breathe.

She breathes in, and it isn't that the cold leaves her, it isn't that she grows warm – the cold sinks even deeper into her – but so does the roaring fury of this planet, its howling rage at seeing a Sith dare set foot upon its ground again, the blizzard rising in her –

Pathetic. Have you given up already?

Sidious forces herself up as her meditative immersion in the storm shatters – but the ice doesn't sting so much as it whips at her skin, and with every breath the rising drumbeat of her heart calls out in an ever increasing crescendo: hate-him hate-him HATE-HIM.

She pushes herself up, but it isn't his taunts that drive her on (isn't even the blizzard in her core, the hatred in her heart, perhaps; perhaps is that gentle whisper in her mind).

She keeps her face placid, mask-like, as she slips again and again, as he mocks her again and again – she refuses to make any expression, to twitch a single muscle of her face, as she reaches the top and instead of anything resembling a reward he pins her down and humiliates her, rubs her face into the ground just to make sure she'll remember her place –

(I killed my own family for less, her blank expression doesn't say.)

A month later, Palpatine sits in her family's summer house, on the patio overlooking the lake. She's warm, the thermostat set to blazing, but she still feels cold all the time. She's supposed to be putting affairs in order here, getting the house cleaned up and deciding what she'll keep or dispose of. 

It's the dead of night, and a mist rises from the lake, and all Palpatine can think of is how to get back to Chandrila.

There's a soft noise – a familiar swell of power – and Vader sits down beside her, a concerned expression on her face. The colors of life animate her as they haven't since that first brief meeting.

She waits for Palpatine to speak.

"I'm a Sith now, too," Palpatine says into the dead air. "I killed my family, and I swore myself to the cause of the Sith Lords."

"You have that air about you," she says, softly. "Are you alright?"

Palpatine laughs, dryly. "I'm powerful, or I will be. What does 'alright' matter?"

She places a hand on Palpatine's arm – it's the first time Vader's touched her, and it doesn't feel like skin, but like a soft concentration of the Force pressing exactly so. "The Force is stronger than any of us," she says. "And you can't swim its currents wounded."

"What harmed you?"

Anger lashes through Palpatine, taking her breath away. "Everything!" she shouts. "Everything and everyone! Naboo – my father – my useless mother – my brothers – Darth Plagueis – "

Vader nods solemnly, like she expected that answer, and she brushes hair out of Palpatine's face with a gentle touch of the Force. "They betrayed you."

"They did. And you will, too – you're a Sith, and that's the way of us."