Tarkin was a Little Shit, and no one had yet come up with a failproof plan to get around him.
Or to, you know, dump his body where it would never be found. That would’ve been good too.
You knew it was bad when Cody - Cody, the immutable rock, the bureaucratic newcomer who didn’t let crazed patients or supply screwups or disasters ever phase him (not that you ever saw it on his face, anyway) - started muttering vile things into his coffee about how a certain someone knew where to shove their paperclips. You knew it was bad when Rex, who kind of liked to shout when he was upset because damn it, you need to learn from your mistakes, regressed into a state of white-lipped, mad-grinning silence.
“I know a guy,” Rex was heard to say to Cody, one day, when his scheduled meeting with Palpatine ended up having been moved to a week next Tuesday on an apparent whim.
“Yeah?” Cody said back, and oh man, they were scary when they were in sync. “As in - you know a guy?”
“I know a guy.”
Unfortunately for everyone, said hit failed to materialize (the price was too high, Rex was heard to mournfully say to Ahsoka, who was incandescent with anger at Tarkin’s latest little put-down of her appearance and her skills and pretty much everything about her, really, because he was a Little Shit). The next target of Tarkin’s continual round of petty insults was Dr. Kenobi, who inexplicably lost access for his patients to a critical new drug trial; after that, it was the Board at large, who discovered that essential funding decisions had somehow been rearranged behind their backs thanks to an obscure bylaw whose origin no-one seemed able to trace.
“Are we sure some of this isn’t criminal?” Kenobi said lightly, one evening, over dinner with Bail Organa; it was easy to see, if you knew the signs, just how angry he was, and how much sleep he was losing in fits and snatches over having had to tell his patients that no, he wasn’t going to be able to get them on this new trial.
Gentlemen, he always said. “Gentlemen,” he drawled, while edging past Waxer and Boil on the pediatric ward and looking severely down his long nose at the affrontery that was the sight of children polluting his environment. It was a good thing, actually, that he was uninterested in the actions of others on that particular occasion, because the gestures Waxer and Boil immediately sent at his prim, retreating back subsequently got them into a lot of trouble with Mr. Bril when he realized where Numa had picked them up.
Various people had tried, of course - they’d tried to weasel their way around Tarkin’s position of constant vigilance at the front of Palpatine’s office and get directly to the Dean himself, and sometimes they’d even succeeded - only to hit a brick wall. And then they usually got reassigned, anyway, and no-one had yet figured out whether Tarkin’s influence really ran that deep, or whether Palpatine was that much of a Shit too.
(Anakin tended to complain that he had no idea what the hell any of them were talking about, because he’d never had issues. The suggestion that he, then, should be the one to take up the problem of there being a slithering snake of a man bringing down morale at every opportunity was, however, mostly forgotten. Skywalker had more important things to worry about.)
(The investigative journalist recuperating on the third floor, on the other hand...)