"Masters."

She laughs. 

"Masters indeed."

She grins back. 

"They all fall, in the end."

"I could toast to that."

"You," she says, "Absolutely do not strike me as the drinking type."

"There's alcohol on this ship!"

"Which you're very good at barely drinking, while whoever you're talking to finds their glass always full?"

"I can actually break down the alcohol before it hits my intestines, now. Though, you're absolutely right that I used to rely on that."

"...Can that be taught?"

"...So, technically, yes. I was taught to do it, and you're Force sensitive too."

"But I'm very sure you're nearly exclusively drawing on the light side of the Force, and... I've only ever reached for the dark."

"I don't know if the light side works the same way mechanically - I think Plagueis doesn't really know either, despite how much he puts up a front of being wise. I know it draws on a different mental state, but... Things may or may not translate across that."

"Could you teach me to use the dark side version, then?"

"...I don't actually know how to teach someone to use the dark side without - inevitably making an enemy of my student."

"Guess Plagueis had that problem, too."

"Guess so."

"He's just never realized it."

She looks like she's putting a few things together in her mind. 

"My father used to beat us," she says, abruptly. "Me, all my siblings. Sometimes mom, though she started it half the time."

"I found him out in the alley, once, one of the nights he didn't come home."

"Mom thought he was cheating on her. He was getting high. Told me he was sorry. That he didn't want this life for us, didn't want us to have the same childhood he did, but he'd open his mouth and his parents would come out of it, and he said it was like he was being possessed, and he didn't know how to stop."

"He realized every fucked up part. It just didn't help much."

"My mom beat us too. Her opinion was she'd been beaten all her life, and she'd come out just fine, so we'd better stop whining."

"What happened?"

"Dad killed himself. Mom couldn't afford jack shit on her own. She sold me to pay off the debt."

"I'm going to change it all, someday," she says after a long moment. "That's - not what I've wanted, but what I've known, as long as I can remember. The galaxy is a shit show. Full of misery, full of people who think selling their kids into slavery is perfectly okay because they're the ones doing it. Full of people who don't know how to stop themselves, or even what to stop."

"Some people can never be brought into a functioning society, but... Some people can, if they have someone strong to tell them how, to carry them down the better path."

"You think you're that person?"

"I think everyone I've looked to, wanted to have be that person, has turned out to be a miserable failure at it."

"Hard to object to that."

"Why will you be any better?"

"I'll hold myself accountable."

"Uh huh."

...Scowl.

"Whatever."

"We need to figure out what to do with you."

"And it's definitely a failure mode if Plagueis notices I even exist?"