"Luckily I don't have to deal with those."

She laughs a bit.

But then her expression fades into solemnity. "Fidela... Do you remember when I asked if you'd object if I took a second apprentice?" ...Why is she opening like that, it's not relevant. 

"...I said to ask again when I'd gotten to know her better."

She raises an eyebrow quietly. 

"...Give me a moment." 

"Alright."

She meditates, as best she can. Releasing thoughts into the Force like Vader taught her once – it isn't the best here. She always ends up reaching for their bond, whenever she tries to meditate on the Force; she already knows what Vader wants.

But... She can still her mind. She can think.

She opens her eyes some time later.

"I think I like her."

"Enough to share?"

"Yeah. I don't mind."

"Did that actually come up – ?"

"Not... That specifically."

"But – she'd be tentatively interested in sharing some lessons, in addition to our usual time together – I have the spare time to add that for you both. It'd likely be history and philosophy..."

"You have the free time," she says. "I don't, especially not with the Senate going back in session – it's going to be hard enough keeping up with everything as it is." Her schedule's only going to be remotely possible because Vader has been teaching her how to skip sleep with the Force, and because she combines her hobbies with listening to Vader ramble.

"...Ah."

"I mean... Isn't that why you asked if I'm okay sharing? You know what my schedule's like."

...Yeah.

"I don't think I wanted to admit it'd be difficult to arrange." She wants everything.

"I said I'm fine with sharing, didn't I?" She gets a lot more instructional time with Vader than Elesse does, so – "She can join my existing lessons. It'd be nice to hang out with her while I'm working on gemcutting, too... I'll probably get plenty just from listening to you two."

"And..."

"She's been wanting primary texts on the Sith, hasn't she?" History and philosophy, theoretically, but...

"She has."

"I'll give her electronic copies tomorrow, so she can get caught up."

"She should appreciate it."

"And, Fidela..."

"Thank you."

"...I want you to be happy."

"I am." She settles in beside her apprentice, and turns the conversation to the Force – to the powers Fidela's been working on.

It's hard to summon the right emotions for the dark side when her teacher is sitting right here, when she has a date with Elesse to look forwards to –

But the dark side doesn't need passion; it needs intent, and Vader's lectured her plenty about the advantages of being able to reach for the dark side even while at peace... 

It's challenging. It's also nice.

It's something that can easily consume all their time until dawn comes, and with it her responsibilities.

She spends the morning on Senatorial work – reports that need to be read and summarized, draft legislation that needs to be reviewed, messages that need to be sent; she has brunch with a group of other aides from a loose tangle of quasi-allied offices, coaxing out gossip from her fellows and laughing at the questions about when does she ever sleep –

She heads to the museum after. She likes it a lot more than her Senatorial work. They've got her in the archives nowadays – nothing fragile, nothing rare, but there's a backlog of already scanned documents that the archival droid's cobled together linguistics module failed to read the handwriting of; plus plenty of documents in scripts they haven't even trained it on. (They haven't convinced Supply to get them a real linguistics droid, at least not one trained on extinct languages – there's a few off-the-rack droids with modern languages for the other departments, plus some full protocol droids at the front desk. (Also, it's illegal for droids to translate ur-Kittât, and there's a budgetary rule prohibiting directly hiring one of the incredibly rare experts in that or other Sith scripts, but apparently the Senate forgot to ban interns. Reasonable, honestly, interns are only dubiously real people. (There's a Zabrak xenographologist who coincidentally knows ur-Kittât, who tested Lily on that and the other Sith languages, but she's usually busy with her main job in Pre-Contact Civilizations.)))

Lily's job isn't exciting – the only documents she's asked to transcribe in full are those in ur-Kittât, Kittât, Massassi, Unification Era Sith's hieroglyphs, Common Sith's demotic, and High Sith's hieratic... The Sith Hall really is horrendously poorly funded. Most of the time she's just identifying languages, though, sorting by type of document (there's a lot of shopping lists), and possibly adding some annotations, so the people with actual degrees in this can go straight to what's relevant to their research. It's surprisingly fun work, and with Vader's help she's able to do the sorting fast enough to give her time to read the more interesting texts – and she's allowed to take the electronic copies home with her. 

Though the best thing about her position is that it puts her in contact with a nice variety of departments – the Sith Hall of course, but also Old Republic, Expansionist Period, Infinite Empire, Pre-Republic Coruscant, Ancient Empress Teta, Kwa Holdings, even the Hyperspace Hall's small dedicated history team... The instant she'd conclusively proven she could read a prodigious chunk of languages, she'd been offered a second, longer internship, with a promise of a job as soon as she finishes her degree (she only cheated a little by having Vader read over her shoulder – though the question of how the fuck Vader knows Pre-Holdings Kwa, Early Coruscanti, or Classical Paecian apparently more fluently than actual experts is a question that joins all the niggling doubts in the back of her head). There's some upcoming cross-department investigations she wants to get in on...

...She needs the Senatorial position to effectively oppose Plagueis. But...