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In the dark privacy of her quarters, with no-one around but the droid standing motionless at the foot of her bed, apprentice Deskyl meditates. Remembering how to establish a telepathic link is hard, and doing it is even harder, but she thinks in this case it will be worth it.
Hello? It's more a sense of presence than a proper word, easily mistaken for just another thought by someone not expecting such a thing.
She closes her eyes and sends him memories - sunsets, artwork, sparring, losing herself in her work; the things that make life worthwhile, and the feelings of joy and contentment that come with them.
He lets himself float in them. Somehow, for a minute, he feels completely safe.
The gratitude that comes back to her is powerful.
She basks in it.
She flinches, involuntarily, as her danger sense warns her she's about to be struck. Her master is done with his computer work, and it's time to go to his throne room.
He snaps out of his trance and instinctively tries to dodge out of the way of a blow he barely realizes isn't coming for him.
It's a minute before she can get back to him. Sorry, Love.
Afternoon social time. I sit and be a good trophy while he talks to the others.
Yeah.
This is the best part of the day for killing him, probably - not when he's on a call, but before or after, there's a good route out from here.
Yup. If you can do that, I can get his danger sense, and we're good from there. She's killed before; the memories lurk in the background.
On one level, they're very much like her fight with her young coprentice earlier in the day; that same kind of focus on the other person's movements and how to react to them. But in a real fight, against another Sith, there's so much more - an immersion in the Force, guiding it and being guided by it, even as her opponent does the same; winning is as much a matter of connection with the Force - convincing it that she should win, that there's no other way to resolve this conflict within itself - as it is of skill or strategy.
And then the moment of death, watching her opponent sublimate into the Force and cease to exist - it's almost indescribable, and she hates it and loves it all at once.
It's beautiful.
It would be beautiful anyway, but watching her do it, of all people...
Careful. It's too easy to get caught up in that, to want it for itself rather than because it's needful. That's a person, dying, being lost, and that's an important thing to remember.
He steps back from it a little and tries to make himself remember what death actually looks like.
She knows that one, too. It's less gory, when it's brought on by a lightsaber or bolt of lightning, but not much less viscerally wrong.
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