Masters of the Game

Chapter 2: The Turning Point

"If you hadn't wanted me tonight," he told her, "I think I might have jumped out of that window."

"Sheev, ask me," she whispered. "Any time. I always, always want you. Always."

"I thought perhaps you were angry with me." He turned his head on his pillow, trapping her with his eyes and a quick smirk.

"I thought I was, too." She ran her hand back and forth across him, enjoying the feel of warm soft skin, the masculine bristle of the light hair across his chest. He had one long scar on the left side of his chest and one across his left arm, which he wouldn't discuss, so she tended to avoid them. Even though he wasn't conventionally handsome, they marred what to her was perfect poignant beauty. "It took me a while to understand why you were doing that. You're very angry at me, and we're stuck together on this tour and you can't tell me. All we'd do is argue and that won't work."

He looked away from her and said nothing.

"And, whatever it is that's bothering you on these walkabouts, apparently sex does a lot to blow the tension off." 

Palpatine had never won an elected post before, he'd always been a political appointee with several failed elections behind him. She had expected a thirty-six planet tour to throw both of them—she'd never done a tour this huge, either—but she'd expected him to be able to handle himself with a little more balance than this.

One side of his mouth quirked up. "Sex does a lot to blow any  tension off."

"Sheev, what is going on? You handle yourself so well, and then we have to do a walkabout and I'm on edge just watching you. I'm glad the holocams haven't caught your facial expressions yet, but when they do, we've got a real problem. We come back and you're testy and snappish for hours. The staff all notice. They're just young kids, Sheev. They're all starting to be afraid of you." 

He looked away from her again, and she stroked him a little lower, back and forth across his taut stomach.

"Sheev," she asked him, "are you ... agoraphobic?"

His head snapped to look at her, his brows rushing sharply together. "No, Sereine. I am not. Agoraphobic!"

"Can you help me decide what to do about this? Because we have tons of walkabouts left—" she shook her head "--and they're going to undo all the progress we've made so far."

"Don't schedule them!" he spat.

"I can't do that, and I've already explained that to you. Sheev, when you're out walkabout, what is going on for you out there?"

He turned his head away from her, and then he heaved an enormous sigh, and all the tension she felt under her hand just left  him.

"I have got  to get better at this," he said suddenly, with more feeling than she was accustomed to from him. She was about to say, Well, yes, you do, but something stopped her.

His blue eyes flickered to meet hers and then skipped away again. "It's different on the floor," he said, and she understood him to mean the floor of the Republic Senate. Everyone working in the Rotunda said, "on the floor," and it was understood what was meant.

"Those are colleagues," Palpatine said. "They may need something from me, but they're colleagues, and it's a business relationship and respectful. It isn't even so bad in a ballroom. Two or three hundred beings, it's not a problem. Again, they're dignitaries or colleagues, and it's distant. They're business relationships."

"Some people bother you," said Sereine, massaging his flat stomach again, weak with relief that she was at last getting him to talk about this. "Jedi. You don't want to be on the same floor  with a Jedi knight."

"That isn't so."

"Yes, it is."

"It isn't."

"Yes, it is."

Palpatine heaved an angry sigh and his gaze flickered off to the far wall again. "All right, yes, I am uncomfortable around Jedi. And I have got  to improve with this, and I—"

An unaccustomed strain crept into his tone. She lowered her head to his shoulder briefly, allowing him the privacy of his thoughts for a moment.

She raised her head to find him looking straight into her eyes, and then he looked away again. "You can never understand this," he said. "Sereine, you're putting me out there among thousands of people something like three times a day. And the common citizen is needy. I have thousands of people who all want something from me in this needy, soul-sucking manner that I can actually feel. People clamor for my attention, they call my name. They touch  me."

He plucked at her bare arm, pecking her with his fingers. "They touch my hands, they touch my sleeves, they pull at my robes. On and on and on. And it's too many, it's overwhelming. I can't screen it out. On a stage, there's some distance, but not trapped in the midst of them."

He had never shared this with her before. He would not look at her, but the stress etched lines in his face.

Finally, he did look at her, and raised his hand, palm flat, a meter above the mattress. "It starts to feel like a giant hand, just pressing and pressing on my mind." He lowered his flattened palm to illustrate. "On and on and I can't stop it. And you're doing this to me over and over. Maybe one walkabout a day, I could deal with, but you're abusing the privilege."

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Kriff  you are," he growled. "You have no idea what this is like." His blue eyes grew flint hard and glittered like steel. One corner of his mouth jerked up in a sardonic half smile. "Ironically enough, you're the only person I can tolerate after hours of that. You're quiet and restful. Calm."

She smiled. "Well, maybe not just now."

"Trust me, you were a more restful presence half an hour ago than that is."

Sereine considered that, wondering at the possibilities. He could be speaking metaphorically from a place of deep compassion. Or perhaps—

She dropped a kiss onto his chest. "I wonder if you're mildly telepathic," she said.

She looked up to find him scowling at her. "Clearly not, or I would be able to discern the reason you've trapped me in this in the first place."

She wasn't going to start this discussion again. She kissed him again and said, "Well, I added all these dates, and I can't cancel them. I can't cut your schedule, Sheev. But I'm going to try to help you all I can, and we're almost there. We're almost home."

"Sereine. We are not in the lead."

"But we will be. We will be. I want you back in the Rotunda next year just as much as you do. I know you're angry at me, but I'm going to ask you to trust me. I'm just looking for something to happen, the harder we work, and then we've got Bibble, we've got him. This will pay off, I promise."

He clasped his hands over his stomach and studied them with a troubled expression. Finally he whispered, "I can't see that." 

Louder: "I no longer see my way ahead."

She clasped her hand over his. "That's what you have me for."

He didn't look at her, but the old closeness and warmth in his manner with her had crept between them again. Things would be better from here out.

Sereine said a silent prayer of thanks. Because his mood and his demeanor here were everything, and those had been fraying in the past weeks no matter how she had tried to remind him of that.

She was beginning to realize you always needed an ace in the hole with Palpatine. She'd had one for weeks, but getting control of his moods was crucial. Those two things were the blocks on his way back to the Rotunda, and now she could feel them slowly shifting out of their way.