Gossip is a constant, no matter how high up in the ranks of the Sith Empire Naiera climbs.  She is no more free of it as a Lord then she had been as a student of the academy.  Often the talk concerning her had been of her romantic life, easily ignored and of little consequence. Her damnable sister had changed the nature of the gossip, for once inadvertent in the way she's made Naiera's life more difficult, by taking a second apprentice.

"Is it not time for Lord Naiera to take an apprentice as well," titter the other Lords in their private booths, drinking expensive wine as they openly eye each others backs for good spots to place their knives.  "Its all well and good for someone of her stature to have high standards, but to go this long without even taking a single one is unbecoming."

For some Sith, a well controlled apprentice makes for the ideal asset.  There was much a Lord could do with an agent kept loyal by their hunger for their master's power.  For Naiera any apprentice is a risk.  Her methods and her understanding of the force are unorthodox among Sith and there is plenty of incentive for a poorly chosen apprentice to out their master as a heretic in hopes of taking their place.

She mulls over this problem as she stands on one of the balconies in the academy reserved for lords, watching the business of her solution being sold into Sith custody.

An alien from a recently invaded world is a curiosity.  His physiology is poorly adapted for Korriban and that is reflected in the low price he is being brought for.  Most semiaquatic aliens that came through the academy ended their careers drying out in the sands before becoming food for the K'lor'slugs.  There would be no competition for him, even with the intriguing symbiosis that characterized his species.

Naiera does have some legitimate interest in his uniqueness and that's part of what makes him such a perfect solution for her.  Taking a strange alien under her wing is well within the allowable eccentricities of a Lord.  No one would suspect that her main motivation in choosing him is to protect herself.

The slavers leave and the overseer who managed the transaction begins explaining to the new arrival exactly how much less then the dirt he is worth.  Naiera descends to the lower levels, her power in the force and her cape giving her enough presence to make the overseer shut up with an awed "My lord!"

"Consider yourself dismissed," Naiera says to the overseer, her voice an engineered feat of polite coldness.  The overseer does so in all haste, leaving them as alone as anyone can be in the Academy.

The alien still has the collar he was dragged in wearing.  It would be barely a gesture to take it off of him but she doesn't bother doing that quite yet.  "Tell me what you understand about where you are right now and who you are," she commanded in the same clipped and polite tone she often used for soldiers under her command.  She doubts he's processed much of what the overseer or the slavers have said to him.

The boy looks at her for probably a second too long before remembering to bow. (He's wearing a sort of loincloth - the slavers didn't have anything better that would actually fit someone his size, not with his tail, but they wanted to clothe him before he got to the Academy in case nudity was forbidden. Clothes are confusing.)

"Very little, sir. Um. I am not on -" he hesitates. "My homeworld. Anymore. This planet is not one I'm likely to survive on. I don't know why they took me here instead of wherever they sent the others. I'm a slave... and you're a very important man and it's strange that you're taking an interest in me."

Being called sir didn't bother Naiera with her military experience.  Being called a man did.  None of that bother shows on her face as she presses into the boy's mind, making absolutely sure that he did not mean to offend.  She doesn't intend to cause him any pain but she's hardly subtle in what she's doing.  Even without any sort of context for what's happening to him, the boy would know with absolute certainty what the source of the pressure in his head is.

The boy's mind falls open before her. 

First of all, he's miserable. That's not relevant, but it's there, permeating the reality of his existence. He doesn't, actually, wish he was dead; this is frankly very strange. (Most of the ones who survive Korriban are born slaves; they don't have hope that can break inside them and leave shards to rupture and fester.)

Second... he has no idea what a woman is. He doesn't actually know what a man is, either, but his language is being translated with default male pronouns. (If she digs deep enough, she can get some fascinating biotrivia.)

Third, his mind is whirring with social implications. The powerful man has stopped talking, and he feels something - anger, and power. Hypothesis the first: he is about to die. Has he offended him? Probably, right? Maybe it was too presumptuous to say that he wasn't sure why the man would take an interest. Maybe he's bowing wrong? Hypothesis the second...

The pressure vanishes and Naiera audibly sighs.  "Follow me, do not talk and do not meet the eyes of anyone here," she says, walking past him without looking to see if he is obeying.  He seems to have the right mindset to survive a short walk to her office.

This innocent non-understanding of gender could get him killed if left unaddressed.  For a Sith, asserting any part of their identity was an act of power and to disrespect their chosen identity was to disrespect that power.  Another mistake like that to the wrong Sith would see him dead where he stood if he was lucky.

She hardly spends any time at the Academy and therefore has ended up with a smaller office.  She had been given enough space for a desk and a couple chairs, as well as the requisite Imperial Flags and banners.  "Sit," she'd command once the doors closed behind them, gesturing to one of the simpler and more uncomfortable chairs that were meant for guests.  Her own office chair is a throne by comparison.

"You have two futures you can pick for yourself.  The first is to die by my hand.  It is the gentlest death Korriban will offer you.  The second is to learn and learn well because your life depends on it.  Do you understand?" she said, speaking without any real melodrama.  These were irrefutable facts about the situation.

"I want to live."

He wants more than that. He wants to be strong. He wants to make it matter that he was alive, to make himself the kind of person who changes things by being who he is. He wants to find the men who killed his fathers and make them hurt -

but first, he has to live. And learn.

Naiera smiles, the tattoos around her mouth distorting as they were designed to, giving all her expressions a threatening edge.  "Don't ever forget that.  The moment you do this place will kill you."

She turns on the datapad on her desk, typing as she speaks.  "For today a lot of your lessons will be on etiquette.  Your teacher will be a protocol droid.  For today only you may ask it or me any questions you wish."

Actually teaching this alien how sex and gender function in a human centric society would require quite a lot more work then either of them had time for.  Luckily survival doesn't require him to understand why the rules he is going to be taught are the way they are.  The nuances would be for later.

Her droid would eventually enter the room with a "Hello Mistress."  The boy would be taught an utterly arbitrary series of rules that would be incredibly important to his continued survival and she would maybe get some of her reports in order.

He's oddly polite to the droid. It's possible he's never encountered one before. Either way, he greets it "hello, sir" and listens to its lessons attentively.

His confusion regarding gender proves relatively transient; he's at least able to accept it on the level of something the aliens care a lot about, and when the droid shows him holos to test his pattern recognition he starts out better than random chance, and improves rapidly.

About five slides in, he pauses and turns to Naiera in dawning horror. "You... are a woman," he says awkwardly. "The droid hasn't actually gotten to apologies yet but I feel like I shouldn't wait for it. I am very sorry? Thank you for not killing me?"

"It was an honest mistake and I have more patience for those then most," she replies, looking up from her work.  She was keeping enough track of his lessons to be pleased with his progress.

The Overseer had never put in a requisition for clothes for him.  Naiera puts one in herself and makes a note to reprimand the man later.  "Something else you were wrong about.  You are not quite a slave, just something very close to it," she said, vaguely gesturing in his direction.  The slave collar on his neck snapped open.  "Put that collar on my desk and go back to your lessons."

He places the collar on the desk. Then he turns back to the droid and resumes his lesson. (His thoughts are largely confused and moderately suspicious, but he's got enough residual hope to think this might be a good sign.)

Gender isn't actually the most difficult concept to grasp, at least at the level of mastery the droid wants him to have. (Like everything else, of course, it's infinitely fractal. He might do some research on his own time.) Soon the droid has him on human and humanoid etiquette more generally.

Eventually Naiera stands up and walks past the diligent student, her office door sliding open so she can pick up the neat bundle of clothing a slave had left for her.  For most other lords the slave would have stayed to grovel but they all knew Naiera found such obeisance to be a waste of everyone's time.

"Put these on," she commands.  "Ask the droid if you are unsure what goes where."   She sits back at her desk, giving him no privacy and paying him no mind.  It is the same simple grey tunic and pants that most of the students wear, although vaguely close to his size and with a cutout for his tail.

He asks the droid for help immediately. He's got no illusions as to his ability to distinguish pants with a tailhole from a tunic without assistance.

Soon he's dressed. He stretches a couple of times, making a bit of a face at the relative restriction of the cloth. "Thank you," he says anyway.

He hesitates. "...my lord?"

That earns the slightest of nods.  She has an old document up on her datapad, scanning through for the other thing she needs to declare to this child about himself.  "Your name is Jen'kun," she decides, picking a name that cleanly separates him from any past identity he might still be clinging to.

She finds herself indulging in the hope that this boy survives the hard months to come.  He is polite and a quick learner, and under it all he is hungry for power in a way that reminds her of her younger self.  Still, best to avoid tying the very likely change of him failing to herself. "If any of your teachers ask, feel free to tell them who gifted the name to you.  Otherwise do not brag about having my favor."

Oh. He thought he would have to ask for a name.

"Thank you, my lord. It's... good to know where the edges are."

(He strategizes, privately. Is it worth drawing attention to himself by introducing himself to an instructor - maybe, if it means being able to leverage this limited connection. He shouldn't do it all the time, the Sith doesn't seem the type to be amused by impertinence, but if it looks like it's that or lose, that or let himself be crushed - he'll make it known that he has something he's not supposed to have.)

She doesn't particularly need to pierce his mind to guess the direction his thoughts are going in.  Naiera decides she's given him the best start she reasonably can.  Theoretically its academy policy to provide a minimal level of accommodations for species like his but that is rarely enforced.  She's left the right notes to guarantee that his clothes will mostly fit, he'll be fed appropriately and that he won't dehydrate in his sleep.  Beyond that his survival is up to him.

The droid continues teaching him and she doesn't bother to think about him very much as she diligently works on the reports and paperwork her position requires of her.  Food is likely sent to them at some point, a finely cooked meal for her and something much simpler out of a tin for him.  Soon, right as her pile of work is finished, she gets a notification letting her know that the Empire has need of her elsewhere in the galaxy.  Its late enough that the boy should be sent off to his assigned bed anyway.  "Jen'kun," she says, "I will likely not return to Korriban for a good long while.  Your life from here will be quite difficult.  You should aspire to survive and to thrive despite that.  Succeed and you might be graced again by my favor next time we meet."

"This is your last opportunity to ask me any questions you might have.  Otherwise I'll have a slave lead you to your quarters." 

He considers.

"...if I were to take and sharpen a dining knife," he says, "and keep it in my clothes in case of ambush, would they kill me if it was found, or only beat me?"

"They're not going to search you for it so it depends entirely on who you use it on and if the event can be traced back to you," Naiera answers honestly.  She seems the slightest bit amused.  Her expression hasn't changed but the presence of her is a bit lighter.  "There are cameras everywhere but they're quite visible, with plenty of blindspots in various side hallways.  An amount of murder between the students is expected and so its very rare for anything to be investigated.  I trust you'll be clever enough to know how to pick your battles."

"I like to think so. Thank you for your wisdom."

He considers the low-grade plastoid knife he was given for his meal, then the darkly glittering implement that came with Naiera's.

"Perhaps I should take your tray to the kitchens," he suggests. "Spare the slaves a bit of extra work."

"They'll likely appreciate it."  Despite herself there is a perceptible smile.

He takes the tray (and his tin) and makes his exit, bowing deeply before he leaves her line of sight.

Her schedule next permits a visit to Korriban after a few months' worth of miscellaneous missions. When she returns, there's a familiar face at the landing pad. He's got an electrostaff fastened to his back, and a couple of new scars on his face. (He's still the same disconcertingly tiny size.)

When she steps off her ship, he drops to one knee and lowers his head. "Welcome back to Korriban, my lord."

Naiera had sensed his presence before her shuttle had even landed.  In a way, his cheek saved her the time.  Personally observing his progress was somewhere on her todo list.

She considers using the force to overwhelm and humble him.  It would be the traditional Sith response to the game he is playing.  And yet...

She steps off her ship, barely extending herself in the force.  "You seem to have taken to the planet rather well, Jen'kun," she comments.  "Rise."

Naiera walks forward, clearly expecting him to follow.  The various guards they passed don't comment on the breach of decorum that is Jen'Kun's presence. If the Lord is fine with it then who are they to argue.

"When I first met you, back when you were a boy stripped of a name, I asked you what you understood of where you were and who you were.  Tell me how your answer has changed."  Her tone is closer to that of a school teacher then a Sith.

"I am a student of Korriban," he says, keeping up with her strides at something of a scurrying pace. "It's... an interesting place. It wants very badly to kill me, as do most of the people I meet, and yet for some reason I continue to survive and grow. You needn't worry about the slave who was to meet you, by the way, I erased the record of her assignment when I elected to take it on myself."

"I appreciate that," she says truthfully, even if she isn't quite sure how much attending to a detail like that is simply an attempt to pander to her.  Her office is in the same place it was last time, and yet that isn't where she is heading.  They seem to be going towards the spaces dedicated to martial practice.  "And why take the burden of greeting me upon yourself?"

"Perhaps I wished to curry favor with a powerful Sith lord with whom I share a connection, however slight. Perhaps I was nostalgic for a time when things seemed very straightforward, and someone helped me at no immediate gain to herself. Or perhaps I just get bored easily and thought it would be fun." He shrugs. "It can be tricky, tracing a motivation all the way from inception to execution."

"True, but I would hope it was a bit more then boredom," she says.  "I wasn't completely altruistic in helping you those months ago, I do hope this planet has taught you enough not to be disappointed in that."

The presence of her in the force floods forward.  Her steps are light as the door to the training room slides open.  A class is being held, although as a Sith training course it mostly consists of handing the students electro staves and telling them to beat each other.  The students immediately stop fighting and move as close to the walls as they can.  Even the instructor backs away from the door.

Perhaps what she is about to do is a bit much, she thinks as she gets to the middle of the room.  The only real mercy in what she's about to do is that she isn't being subtle about her intentions.  There is a lesson here as much as there is a test.  Jen'kun has done a very dangerous thing in being the one to greet her, and there is reward to be had in taking risks like that.  But only if he is strong enough to also survive the consequences.  If he is to be useful to her, he needs to always keep that in mind.

She turns, drawing one of her sabers, the red one, and slashing at him all in one motion.  She's holding back quite a lot but she still will absolutely kill him in front of this audience if he is not prepared.

Jen'kun is, in that instant, not there.

"Will you be offended," he says, with the fraction of his breath not allocated for acrobatics, "if I somehow manage to hurt you?"

"I'd only be offended if you failed to survive.  Do what you need to," she responds, her eyes following him.  She has a reputation as a relentless fighter, but apparently for this battle she isn't choosing to chase him down.

"Excellent."

The mind before her fades slightly out of focus as Jen'kun engages his stealth field generator, but not enough that she can't track it. (Maybe no one taught him to conceal his Force presence properly, or maybe she's just orders of magnitude more powerful than a child with a couple of months' training. Impossible to say.) He circles around behind her and sends a wave of unfocused lightning over and around her, easily deflected or absorbed - 

and then the small, electricity-sensitive grenade he dropped when he cloaked detonates, and in the same instant he comes at her with the staff and flashes of much more intense lightning, hoping against hope that the explosion left her even slightly off-balance.

(It was a not insignificant resource expenditure, honestly, explosives are not easy to come by here, but he wants to impress her with his resourcefulness, and if you're not going to expend resources dueling a Sith lord when are you, and if she takes him on then he'll hardly be short of resources. Lots of reasons to do it. Still stings a bit. He feeds it into the battle-trance.)

She hadn't had to move from the center of the room as she pushed at the bolts with the force, drawing them into her lightsaber.  Her sister had left her well equipped to deal with such unfocused lightning.

The grenade explodes, his staff collides with her lightsaber.  The explosion didn't at all knock her off balance but it did force her to step to the side, which is much more then anyone else in this room could manage.  "Jen'kun, will you hold it against me when I hurt you?" she asks, not unkindly.  She is looking him directly in the eye, his stealth field generator is clearly not doing much to hide him from her.

"I'll live." Hopefully.

He tries for a telekinetic shove, which has all the effect of a stiff breeze even though he's broken through stone walls that way. (The wall in question wasn't in the best shape.) Tries a couple more flashes of lightning, to little effect. All the while, she won't move. He knows she's testing him, and he knows just as well he's failing.

Frustration leads to anger. Anger is a resource. He feeds the fire, keeps harrying her, tries to make a good enough showing to make up for their difference in skill and raw power. The tide wearing at the rocks.

But in the end, he's not good enough.

She picks her moment to end this test, once she's seen enough to decide that he would be worth teaching.  She steps forward and puts actual force into a strike he has no choice but to block, intending to utterly shatter it in his hands.

She then holds out her hand, picking him up with the force and pulling him close to her.  She doesn't put all the pressure on his neck, instead spreading the feeling out throughout his body.  By the standards of Korriban this is a kindness.

Jen'kun feels his staff break and knows she's not playing. He feels himself lift off the ground. Fear, primal and atavistic, spreads through his mind as darkness clouds his vision.

And, as he comes closer to her -

there's a quick, vicious motion of his tail, almost completely imperceptible to the Force. And a short, wickedly sharpened dinner knife buries itself in Lord Naiera's side.

Then he falls unconscious. 

She's suffered enough misadventures from lightsabers and lightning that the hot flash of pain in her side doesn't make her stumble.  That being said, she is absolutely bleeding which is something she hasn't done on Korriban in years.  Her sister isn't going to let her hear the end of this.

She throws the boy over her shoulder.  Everyone else in the lesson they had interrupted looks at her and at the blood that has made it to the floor.  She'll have to keep the knife in for the moment.  One benefit of being a Sith Lord is that she doesn't have to explain herself.  She just walks out without a word, leaving a trail of blood behind her.

When Jen'Kun wakes up, it'll be on a bunk in an imperial ship in a different set of clothes then he'd fallen unconscious in.  The footlocker with his clothes and belongings has a knife with dried blood resting on it.  None of the other bunks in the room seem to have ever been used.

The ship itself is around large enough to house half a dozen people and one Sith lord.  However there doesn't seem to be anyone besides the Sith lord living in it, and she is currently sitting at a table eating military rations for breakfast.

This... is somewhat unexpected.

He sits up and looks around. His eyes light on the knife, and his face goes through several different expressions. (Did I - oh, you didn't - that was completely unnecessary - did she seem impressed -)

"...hi," he says eventually. "Um. My lo- maste- um. Mistress???"

"Master is preferable," she answers.  Her inner Vette feels the need to add 'unless you are sleeping with her.'  She curses her inner Vette for feeling the need to fill in for the actual woman sleeping in the engine room.  "Sith titles are strange that way, its like how I use Lord instead of Lady."

Her body language seems a little more relaxed now that they aren't on Korriban.  Perhaps its because the simple loose black shirt and pants she is wearing do not come with a cape.  She points to a cabinet.  "If you need food there are ration packs in there.  I do not recommend touching the bag of sweets unless you ask Vette.  She will bite anyone that does."

"...yes, Master." He scampers over to the cupboard. "It just seemed a pity, after all that trouble you took to teach me about gender," he says.

After some consideration, he picks out a ratpack that claims to emulate raw fish with boiled and lightly pickled staple grains. "-I am probably going to start becoming increasingly obnoxious, now that you've made me officially your problem," he hums, peeling the pack open. "Fair warning."

"That's fine, you are much less likely to get murdered for it on the ship then you would on Korriban," she says in the same dry tone she says everything else in.  Only a handful of people in the galaxy could tell when she was joking.

"With that being said, I do expect you to take actually being my apprentice seriously, assuming you don't mind that learning from me will be less..." she stops for a moment, trying to find the right word.  "Orthodox then it would be with most other lords."

His face goes very serious. "I will always take my apprenticeship seriously. Knowledge is power; through power, my chains are broken; and I intend to never be chained again."

She can't help the sad little smile that shows on her face because its always that line isn't it.  The promise that kept her striving for more and more power.  She decides to change the subject rather then risk indulging in melancholy.  "We're enroute to Alderann currently.  Its an active warzone.  The trip should take us a few days and in that time your curriculum will be in concealing yourself with the force."

A Twi'lek trudges out of the engine room with a yawn.  "Morning," she says before processing that there was a new person in the room.  Instantly she goes from sleepy to alert and smiling. "Oh hey, the kid ya kidnapped woke up?"

Naiera sighs instead of relitigating the word kidnapping.  "Jen'Kun, this is Vette.  She means the galaxy to me.  Please don't pick up too many habits from her."

Jen'kun bows shallowly. "I don't know if you can really kidnap someone from Korriban. Isn't there kind of a presumption of prior safety? Anyway, I'd much rather be here. With the Sith Lord I stabbed, and her lovely..."

Naiera makes the mistake of hesitating in choosing a word, Vette takes advantage of her moment of weakness to kiss her on the cheek.  She giggles innocently at the resulting scandalized expression.  "I am her freelance specialist.  At least that's what's on the paperwork."

Naiera quickly schools her expression, unfortunately she isn't fast enough to prevent the other two from seeing her blush.  "She is the pest that has decided to live in my ship," she says with fondness.  Vette sits right next to her, leaning against her as she starts digging into her own breakfast.

"But on the subject of you stabbing me... I will need you to explain to me honestly how your symbiote works and what you've learned about how it affects your relationship to the force."

"...usually, it's just - having control. I want my body to do something, and my lover makes it happen. Sometimes, if we know that I'm doing something stupid - scratching a scab, or saying something smart to an overseer - my lover will stop me. And - if I'm in a fight, he can handle my body while I work the Force. I think most people need to move their bodies to use the Force? Or at least, they think they do. But - my body isn't me, my brain is. So I can use techniques while my lover fights, in ways that my classmates couldn't."

He inhales. "And... when I'm unconscious, especially from a Force technique, he can... take over. He's not as clever as me, but he's quick on my feet. And he decided to stab you... he says so that you'd remember why you wanted us in the first place?"

"I suppose that's as good a reason to stab me as any," she says, seeming a bit amused.  She doesn't react to Vette gently putting a hand against the side she had helped bandage up.  "We are going to practice an amount of meditation after breakfast I think...I want to see how active your 'lover' can be while your mind is occupied."

"Yes, master." Jen'kun sets about eating the rest of his ratpack. (He eats quickly, like anyone who's just been taken off Korriban. You don't take your time enjoying food, in that place.)

Afterwards, meditation.

Naiera ends up picking a section of the ship clearly designated for cargo storage as their room to meditate.  It's relatively empty, minus some boxes full of grenades and blaster parts for Vette and a speeder big enough to comfortably seat two.

 "Were you taught by anyone how to go about meditating or just told to sit quietly in a room until you felt something?"

Vette meanwhile, having little interest in weird 'weird sith bullshit', is doing something in the engine room that is also her bedroom.  Apparently a trashy holo drama about pirates is involved in the process.

"They gave me a copy of the Code and told me to focus on it. I assumed they didn't mean to literally repeat the words in my head, so I ended up mostly just thinking about things that made me angry and thinking about why I was angry, practicing getting angry without doing anything about it... that sort of thing."

"Seething in your own anger is certainly a technique.  Depending on the sort of person you are, it might turn out to be what is most effective."

There is that feeling of her presence in the force brushing against him.  Unlike the last time she seems to be actually respectful of his boundaries.  "The Jedi have their own method, they believe in making your mind blank so that there is only the force.  We can try it but given that you have company in there, I don't think that'll be the approach for you."

She opens up one of the crates of grenades and takes out a flash grenade.  She doesn't go out of her way to tell him that's what she has grabbed.  She just pulls the pin and then floats the grenade between them, using the force to prevent the mechanism from detonating.

"Grab the grenade from me and hold it in the air.  Prevent it from detonating as long as you can.  Reach out to the force in any way that is natural for you.  The only wrong answer here is to let the grenade explode."

Jen'kun grips the grenade in his mind. Tries to call up the Force - thinks about his dead fathers - but the anger doesn't feel immediate the way his fear does. (Not fear of the grenade, not really. Fear of letting his master down.)

Then he thinks, why do this? And he takes a look at himself from a different angle, looks at the Force from a different angle, and -

oh. Passion. Not anger, not hate. They work, when they work, but - he steps into the fear, and draws from that, channeling the rush into raw power until he doesn't feel afraid anymore. Then he channels pride at his own cleverness. Then, experimentally, he tries... the feeling he has for Lord Naiera, the thing he could have felt for his fathers (at this he feels sadness, and he channels that too). That works too, not as well as the others but it doesn't have to, he's still got the others to draw on.

Buoyed by half a dozen different feelings, he begins to disassemble the grenade, guided by the Force. It won't explode. He's good at this.

Ironically Naiera has never quite figured out the ideal meditation method for herself.  She's quite capable of seething and she's tried the Jedi method before to some effect, although she has too much of an ego for it to work properly.  Her method before battle is to focus on her own conviction in her powers, in her certainty of her ability to bring navigate the maelstrom in front of her to victory.  Here, where there is no battle, she has to use a different tactic.

She has herself, her apprentice, and the woman she cares about most on this ship.  She has two lightsabers of wildly different styles, both of which she built herself.  She has power and skill that she's spent years honing, and a position that she spent years fighting for.  For her the force always responds best to her will, the will to build all this for herself, the will to keep it, and the will to rise further.  It'll do for now.

"Good," she says, full aware of what Jen'kun is doing even with her eyes closed.  Its not just the disassembly work that she's complimenting, its him exploring what works best for him.  Most graduates of the Academy have that impulse stamped out of them.  Behind her other stun grenades rise on their own, swirling around to the edges of the room.  None of their pins have been pulled yet, although she will do so if Jen'kun works his way through disassembling his current one.

One flies at Jen'kun from the front.  Its fast enough to smart but not fast enough to hurt him, hurting him isn't the point here.  "Avoid the grenades but don't lose concentration on your task Jen'Kun," she orders, even as she makes another grenade fly at him from behind.  Its pretty obvious what she's testing, seeing just how good his lover is at keeping him safe while his mind is occupied.  "And don't try to get out of this by stabbing me"

"Yes sir!"

The answer: his lover is very, very good at keeping him safe. He keeps his eyes closed, and his body dances between the projectiles, obviously inhabiting the living Force, even as the grenade floats into pieces. When she escalates to two active grenades, he sends them orbiting around each other as they come apart; "it's a little easier to keep steady if I keep them both moving," he mentions absently.

By the time he's working on two at once, he's not consciously drawing on pride or passion anymore, he's just... feeling, and doing. 

She comes to the realization that this boy is going to be an absolute menace to teach anything.  His biological quirks and his natural skill in the force means that he will easily run through a lot of what she can teach him just on the ship.  For lessons that are actually useful to him, the war will have to be her co-teacher.  "So is your symbiote drawing upon your connection to the Force to sense danger or do you have other senses its working with?" she asks, still continuing the exercise.

"Well, he sees what I do, and... I think that includes the Force? - he says I'm the one feeling it, he just feels me feeling it."

Naiera eventually stops the exercise, neatly packing away any grenades that are still whole.  "I think that's enough of that.  Leave the pieces in a pile against the wall.  I'm sure Vette will find a use for them," she says.

She has a minor spike of annoyance at massacre that was the empire assimilating his planet.  Genocide didn't particularly horrify her, it was a common enough feature of the imperial war machine, but it was still a shame that others as uniquely talented as her apprentice were probably needlessly killed.

"Sit down," she orders once cleanup is done.  "In your own honest opinion, how well do you handle keeping still?"

"...it makes it more difficult for me to concentrate, but I can manage?"

She nods to indicate that he should do so.  After giving them a bit to be silent she says, "Tell me about your thoughts Jen'kun.  Just what is it that has you restless?"

His lover stills the twitching, the leg-shaking, the finger-tapping. He's perfectly still.

It feels Ike an eternity before she speaks.

"...when I'm still, my mind races. I cannot focus on anything too deeply, or I know I will be in danger; if I absorbed myself in a thought completely, I would be unaware of my surroundings, and I might be punished for that. My body tries to compensate by moving, and my lover stops it. My mind flits from one thought to another like a nervous shrimp, finding refuge in a pocket of coral and darting to another before it can adjust."

"We're going to try an exercise," she says after a bit of silence to think on the problem.  "It will be our last exercise for the moment and I will not consider it a failure if you ask me to stop."  And with that warning she gently inhales, focusing on her connection to the force before exhaling and extending it outward, covering Jen'kun and the rest of the room completely.  It is not a warm presence because she is not a warm person, but neither is it the cold that surround the cruelest Sith.

"I am dangerous but you already knew that," she says, "I won't hurt you and I won't allow any harm to come to you."  She extends her will and for the moment, in this single room, that's as much of a truth of the universe as the force itself.  "Focus on that.  Focus on me."

Jen'kun breathes in, then out.

He examines Lord Naiera's force presence. Slowly, his focus deepens - and his mind twitches, flinches away from the stillness, and it's gone.

Again. He gets further - and another mental twitch, and the progress is lost. He hisses under his breath.

Then he thinks.

When he was young, before his lover, he could spend minutes at a time staring at a mote of sunlight in the water. When did that change?

Korriban. When any wasted moment was another percentage point added to his chance of dying.

Well, now he's out.

Is he, though?

He's still Sith. The Empire is merciless.

Nowhere will ever be safe.

...he can't live like this forever.

"Master?" he asks aloud.