Private Into Your Arms

[Kirie]

Location: A yacht.

Kirie lay in the bed, her eyes boring holes into the textured ceiling panels above her, squinting at the pattern, trying to discern meaning where there was nothing. Dark thoughts swirled about her brain unbidden: Loneliness, helplessness, a despair so deep and dark it was all she could do not do drown in it.

She sat up and rubbed her eyes. It was late, and the lights of the luxurious vessel had been turned out. Only a thin yellow glow from beyond the open door gave shape and form to the bedroom’s shadowy dim. Kirie wasn't tired at all, and despite the dark rings under her eyes and the haggardness of her features, she hardly slept at all these days. Kirie stretched and sat up, swinging her legs out so her feet sat flat on the cold metallic floor. The awful blackness inside her continued to swirl, churning up from her stomach, rising and tightening her chest, closing her throat. So alone. So useless. So bad.

Kirie grimaced and placed her hands on her head. Her eyes fluttered shut. She focused on the black feelings, swirling about her insides, concentrated all her willpower and coalesced them into a single mass within herself. Then, with a flick of her wrist, like removing a stubborn tick, Kirie dislodged them from herself.

Relief washed over her as she plucked the thoughts from her mind, letting them flow out her fingertips. In their place came emptiness, quietude, peace. The absence of thought and feeling. She let out an involuntary sigh of contentment.

Kirie stood up as if nothing had happened, padding out to the main space of the yacht in her pyjamas, to where a woman was working, perched over some project, the lamplight casting her in half-shadow and throwing her blue-tinged skin into sharp relief.

She approached the woman, enjoying the feeling of creeping up behind her, just outside her peripheral vision. Kirie laid a hand on her shoulder. More than a friendly hand. Had she seen her coming?

'Hey, Anet.'

Anet Raine​

 

[Anet Raine]

Kirie
​

Anet was quite busy, poring over the records from Lehon, Jedha, and Chandaar. All information pointed towards Tira, a seemingly mythical world adrift in darkness, without a star's light to illuminate it. But it was still incomplete.

The half-pantoran stood there, hunched over, dressed in her Sith robes. They hugged loosely, messy like her current bedhead, as if she had just carelessly thrown them on for a quick trip to the bathroom in the night. Without her mask - and far too locked into her task - Anet was woefully unaware of Kirie's approach. The woman's touch on her shoulder sent a shiver at first. She was still getting used to having her aboard. Her shoulder muscles tensed for a moment, before relaxing as Kirie's presence clicked a second or two later. That shiver replaced with a cohort of butterflies.

Her lips parted into a lazy grin as she turned her head just enough to see the edge of Kirie's signing.

"Hey," she murmured, turning her attention back to her work, head bent to pin the hand to her shoulder. "Talk inside my head. You know I'm defenseless to your intrusions without the mask." Was Anet daring her? Perhaps to see how willing the blooming Sith was to take advantage of her?

Or maybe Anet just really, really wanted to hear her voice.

"I think we've almost got it... I'll be heading to Kashyyyk soon with Efret," the fallen Jedi Master who now walked among the Covenant. "She believes there's something we'll find there to help us complete the picture."

Her lightsaber, Devotion, lingered somewhere among the disaster of her desk space. Junk at a glance. But the mask was nowhere to be seen. Anet had boldly left it by the vergence on Coruscant to feed.