How to Take an Empire

Chapter Thirty-One: Place

Vader promised himself that he would always do the least amount of work that was possible to get away with during the few precious moments he got to spend with Luke and Leia. But when Sabé made her appearance, he couldn't pass up the perfectly discrete opportunity to integrate her into his circle. With her help, he could more quickly sift through the current higher ranking Imperial military personnel to figure out who was more likely to be loyal to him when he defeated the Emperor and who was likely to put up a challenge.

The clones' loyalty he would easily solidify, considering most of the Imperial army thought them to now be obsolete, especially after Sidious decommissioned the clone program on Kamino. He reassigned all clones still commissioned and in fighting condition to his fleet, the ones that worked directly under him having the elite shock trooper designation. Some of them would even take the place of the Imperial leaders deemed unfit to be in his service. The ones still on Kamino... well, Vader had a project for them.

But there was only so much vetting Vader himself could do while chasing ghosts for his increasingly paranoid master and also keeping his attention away from the fledging rebellion that Ahsoka was building. That's where Sabé and the other former handmaidens who'd been helping her investigate Padmé's death came in.

If there was one thing he'd learned about the human men who were mostly in charge of the Empire, it was that they both underestimated and couldn't resist a beautiful woman. Already exceedingly more well-trained than the average new recruits into Palpatine's military, Sabé and her group would be the perfect spies and, if needed, the perfect assassins. They had the perfect motivation to serve him because, in a roundabout way, serving him was serving their former mistress in the interest of keeping her children safe. The last time such a perfect opportunity fell into his grasp was when he'd stumbled upon Ahsoka and his thought-dead children three and a half years ago.

Vader scowled a little at the thought of Ahsoka. She'd been relatively quiet and reserved lately. Suspiciously so.

He knew from both Artoo and Threepio that Ahsoka tended to run herself thin, though it wasn't something he could particularly admonish her about since he tended to do the same. If he'd cared to admonish her, that was. But when he preoccupied himself with the twins on their visits, she frequently took the time to lock herself in her room for the better part of a rotation to rest. Hence why he hadn't thought anything unusual about her doing the same thing when they'd first arrived on Naboo, and he'd passed by her room to see her knocked out after falling asleep reading what looked like a financial report.

Except for a brief bout of hostility upon the discovery of Sabé, though, Ahsoka's mood worsened, and she isolated herself yet again. Her bad mood was so obvious throughout their second and then third day on Naboo, Luke and Leia even started to notice, and generally Ahsoka carefully shielded the two from her more negative emotions.

Not so long ago, Vader would have given anything to get Ahsoka to be quiet. To put an end to her blunt, honest remarks and accusations that never failed in making him confront uncomfortable truths about his past failures and what he couldn't do if he wanted to avoid repeating them. Now, the lack of that adversity and hostility, of constantly challenging him, meant something was very wrong. If something was wrong with Ahsoka, she was distracted. And if she was distracted, she couldn't adequately protect Luke and Leia when he couldn't be there, which meant getting to the bottom of this.

He took the approach to dealing with the matter that he always took with everything. Getting directly in its path and taking it head-on.

"What's your problem?" he demanded when he found her holed up in her room late that evening.

She regarded him the way she always did when she thought he'd lost whatever remaining sanity he had.

"Problem?" she asked, raising an eye marking.