Chapter 25: Padmé Walks Into the Senate Alone

The morning came gray and cold over Coruscant's upper levels, the kind of light that arrived not as warmth but as the cancellation of darkness, and Arthur was already awake when it did, seated at the narrow desk in his Temple quarters with the previous night's thought still unfinished in front of him like a letter he had not yet decided how to send.

He had not returned to Anakin's quarters. He had walked back to his own, sat down, and spent two hours with the question arranged before him in all its facets: what Palpatine had said to the boy, what the boy had not yet named, and whether the naming would come naturally or would need to be drawn out, and at what cost either way. He had come to no conclusion that satisfied him. He rarely did with questions of this particular architecture. They had a tendency to resolve themselves on their own timeline and in their own manner, which was not comfort, precisely, but was at least honest.

He was reading — a Senate report that Bail Organa had annotated in the margins with a senator's particular shorthand, half code, half despair — when the knock came.