"I'm not suggesting she leave - or, I'm not suggesting you talk her into leaving now. You can just stay here, for as long as she needs, and see what she decides to do then."

"It's not that I don't plan to take that advice, but - I'm not sure that that's going to help with...

"Does it make sense, if I say she's haunted?  By...

"By her future, and her past."

"That I'm less sure how to help with - Lord Pradnakt has always been fairly good about facing what she needs to. There are books on that sort of thing, though, I'm sure. And poetry, if she likes poetry at all."

"It's not that she won't face it.  It's that when she goes looking...

"It hurts her, to try.

"But I'll certainly see if there's anything Bar can recommend."

"Sometimes things that hurt need to be done anyway," she nods. "Lord Pradnakt finds art and katas useful, when she comes to something like that; it's the creative outlet, and the physical exercise, and the feeling of power."

"Sometimes.  I just wish they didn't.  That I could help her face her memories and fears so that it doesn't have to."

She looks over at Alicia and Pradnakt, who appear to have gotten a whiteboard from somewhere.

"Because when she's happy like this you can see her, the sort of person she wants to be.  Rather than the ball of spikes she is.  She hates the way she reacts to things.  Says it's just completely without basis, entirely irrational.  And yet --

"If there's one thing she's made clear, it's that things happen for reasons.  So what sort of reasons were these?  That took a bubbly little kid and turned her into this...terrified, indrawn mess.  The other Princess - she snuck around the castle because she didn't want to be seen doing anything that the Queen would yell at her for.  This one, it's like she sneaks around because she fears she might.  Even when it's just existing.

"I'm not sure that makes sense, to claim is a difference.  But if I try to articulate what changed...

"This is what I come to.

"And then...

"At some point, I think she tried to - resolve herself to be seen, and damn the consequences.  But even that is just adding to the pile of...

"The things that go wrong, like when she said the thing you cut off earlier and all I could do was get her out of the way because actually interrupting would make her push back out of spite.

"Hurt people hurt people, she keeps on saying.  And I think she's been bleeding out for years with no-one to stop it, because - her heart might still be beating, but I think the tissue's necrotized.  She cares, but a lot of it is out of...

"Out of feeling that if she didn't put the effort in, she'd be obliged to put a preemptive end to the 'cynical sociopathic murderhobo' that would be - 'walking around wearing her corpse'.  Giving gods and fate the finger as she hoarded empty nothings for the pale emulation of the real sort of power she would have abandoned all possibility of ever having, in this pursuit.  And then there's the way that she seems to be fueling this decision with spite - and it gets everywhere, afterwards, reinforcing the pattern.

"And I don't know how to fix that.  Because it's definitely broken, that much I'm certain of.  Things are all tangled up.  Coming from the wrong places.  Going to the wrong places, and generating responses she wants to never have.

"But what can anyone do?"

"Mm."

"The very first thing they teach a new Sith, you know, is that they have to be on their own side, before anything else, always; Sith who don't do that don't live very long. And of course it's possible for that to cause problems - if a Sith doesn't happen to care about other peoples' well-being there's no way to get them to - but it did help, in our case. My Pradnakt was hurt, sometimes, by looking at her situation and facing what she really wanted and how far from it she was, but she was never scared to, she didn't have to worry about feeling obligated to do something she didn't want to or not do something she did, even when that hurt people. She didn't have to take someone else's feelings about it into consideration if she didn't want to. And, that's - she does want to do well by people, in the end; she's done a lot of thing she regrets, and one of the things I'm hoping for here is a way for us to make right some of the damage she's done. But I don't think she could have gotten to this point in her life, where she is stable and all right, without giving herself that freedom first. And most people have a lot less capacity to harm the people around them than Sith do."

"..."

"."

She clears her throat, takes a sip of water, and tries again.

"...How do they deal with people who think that their own side is, overall, the wrong side to be on?  If they do, at all."

"Not, ah, constructively, generally. For the people in question. You might have better luck asking elsewhere."

"...I rather figured that was the sort of answer you'd have for me.  Is there anywhere in particular you'd recommend?"

"Hm."

"I don't know if she's still here, but there was a witch from Discworld that we talked to earlier; if she's still around you might try speaking to her."

"...I'm afraid I don't know who that is."

"...Which one?"

"...You know them?"

"...Well, I know a few.  I'm sure there's more witches in the Ramtops than I can count on my fingers and toes.  Not even considering the Chalk.

"...It was probably Esme, though, if you two are talking about the thing.  And I cannot imagine her just sitting around in a bar.  Nanny Ogg?  Sure.  Magrat, maybe.  Tiffany - when she's older.  But...Well, if you want to unfucken my brain, you'd want the specialist in headology, all right.  And she's definitely not still here, I'd bet my bottom dollar on it.  Absolutely too much fuckery for her tastes.  I'm already surprised she didn't walk right in, take one look at the place, maybe get a bottle of something to go, which I have a vague recollection of being likely to be absinthe, and turn around to walk right out, with accompanying big stompy boot sounds.  But it probably would have worked."  She huffs a sigh, frustratedly.  "Which is why it's not going to ever happen, because nine times out of ten I don't actually get to have nice things.  Just things I should be glad enough for.

"That or she's standing right behind me and about to tell me to stop being such a fucking dumbass, and because it's her that might actually work - but that doesn't really fit the tropes.  And Discworld has the tropes.  Real live narrativium and whatnot."  This time the sigh is...wistful, mournful, tired.  "If my life was a story in a way that mattered, I'd know what the fuck to do about...  About...  Whatever is wrong with me.  But it ain't.  So I don't.  I don't get to live in the shonen anime where the power of friendship and feelings beats all.  Hell, I don't even get the predictable horrors or exciting fringe benefits of cyberpunk.  I'm just stuck neck-deep in the depressingly real unpredictability of reality, where you never know what political atrocity will be committed next Tuesday.

"...Well, I mean, you probably could, but like.  With far more staring into the abyss that is the depths of humanity's inhumanity to its own than anyone ever should.

"...I could probably explain exactly where my hopelessness of achieving a good ending came from, but I'm not sure it'd be useful to try; it's just...been a fact of my life for almost a decade that the people in power could suddenly try to kill me, and that's really the problem.  And anyway I've really been quite rude to Lord Pradnakt to duck out in the middle of a fascinating lightsaber discussion and I should probably get back to it.  But, uh, I hope that-all helps with whatever you're discussing."

She stops leaning in Ciara and Daisy's general direction, and returns to the conversation with Pradnakt with a "Sorry about that, I heard something I recognized, and Ciara looked - pretty lost, and I couldn't, like, not help her with that.  She's done - far more than she ought to - for me, and...well.  Least I can do is try to help her.  But we were talking about the cyclical pulse multiplexer schema?"

"She introduced herself as Miss Prisal, and she might still be around, it's just hard to tell with how time works here - she did mention she was intending to stay a while," Daisy continues smoothly.

(Huh.  Not someone she's ever heard of.  Weird.  But good?  Hopefully.)

She catches the look of surprise on Alicia's face, and can only amusedly and fondly shake her head.

"Perhaps I'll have to see if she's still here."

"Good luck," she offers. "She was out back watching someone set up a hot air balloon when we met her, if that helps at all."

"Alicia and I will have to go look, once yours and mine have reached a good stopping point in their lightsaber discussion.  Probably either when Alicia starts trying to build a working example as a discussion prop, or she runs out of ability to use words; she has the wanting-to-see-a-proof-of-concept look on her face and according to her it's much easier to do that when you can think things done instead of having to use your hands, so she's been doing rather a lot of it, but she's also starting to do the thing where her thought process won't stay still long enough to be transmuted into the spoken word properly - all you get is 'buts' and 'thens' and 'ifs' and hand gestures, and anyone trying to keep up with whatever she's thinking about is going to have to read her mind or guess.  And she says people really shouldn't read her mind in detail, because there might be uncontained infohazards in it, though apparently any amount of empathy is fine.  She said something about a use-mention distinction, and I promptly lost the thread of it, though Duchess Ophelia understood exactly what she meant.  ...Really, that's just more evidence you shouldn't; the Duke of Thorns' mind is a scary place to be understood.  I might have something of her ability to think corkscrews around people, but I'm not doing it on the scale of kingdoms and I don't ever want to try."

"Has she considered learning a sign language? My Pradnakt prefers one, for similar reasons."

"Well, she complains about not having learned one, which isn't not 'considering learning one', but most of the time she falls back to text.  I will certainly see if I can cajole her into trying it sometime, when the stakes aren't particularly immediate.  She has quite a distaste for ideogrammic languages, based on that time we had to translate something from Xinshi, but perhaps if we reframe the way words in Azerosi Sign Language work as not ideograms but shorthands...Which they are, in essence, anyway -

"...We'll see how it goes, I suppose."

"Good luck. I'd suggest you try Sith Battle Sign with her, it's meant to be useful even if someone only knows a few signs and you can do it with one hand full, but I'm not sure if there are any books on it."