Private Mind the Flowers

[Srina Talon]

LOCATION: Jutrand [Solarium]
TAG: Isley Verd

Her roses were dying.

Sunlight poured through panes of reinforced transparisteel, warm and pale, catching against white stone. It turned the glass walls almost golden. The air smelled of damp earth, growing things, and the faint sweetness of flowers that were quite poisonous when ingested. It was rare that Srina cultivated anything without purpose, but these particular blue roses were transplanted from home. They were out of place in a sea of red…

But was she not the same?

She trimmed leaves that had begun to yellow, kneeling before the thorned plant with her skirts pooling around her knees. Heedless of the soil that stained fine fabric or the deep brown apron that was tied neatly around her waist. A small hand rake had been abandoned as she worked through the earth delicately, loosening the compacted soil around the roots before pressing fresh sand, salt, and clay into place.

It would drain excess water so the roots would not rot, while keeping it hydrated, and supply rich nutrients to hopefully arrest the sudden decay. She hadn’t been away from Jutrand that long, but protocol droids, apparently, could not be trusted.

This work was…Strangely mundane, for an Empress.

Mercy had only barely permitted her to leave Throneworld, and the Seat of the Sith had been left open for a little too long. That meant that there were fires to put out, work to be done, and an endless stream of vexed Sith that demanded to know her condition. Some…Cared. Others were just looking for an opportunity under the guise of concern. Her battle-sister would lose her mind if she knew she was “playing in the dirt” instead of resting.

The thought brought the faintest twitch to the corner of her mouth. As if she needed permission to do what she wanted, when she wanted, but she humored Mercy because she was…Mercy. Srina had returned to Jutrand beneath just enough medical advisement to please the flame-haired woman, but her body bore the evidence of why.

The sleeves and high neckline of her dress concealed a wound that had not fully healed and the white bacta patch that was sealed over it. But…There were shadows beneath golden eyes that sleep had yet to banish, and she moved with deliberate care. She didn’t turn her head too fast. Didn’t move too quickly. Thyferra had left its mark. The true absence of the Force had been one, but everything that came after was another.

She dug her fingers deeper into the earth…But paused. Looking down at her project.

The change in her private solarium was infinitesimal, but she felt it. Ever since she’d been severed from the Force, even briefly, she felt everything tenfold. Every presence left her skin feeling raw and every shift in energy, no matter how small, caught her attention. She didn’t reach for the rake or another weapon, but slowly started working again.

“I know you’re there.”

Her voice was soft and unhurried, not frightened. If anything…It was a little tired. Her exhaustion was showing because, contrary to what some of the Iron Covenant believed, she was far from a god. Far, very far from immortal. Srina was tougher than the everyday human and metaphysically, biologically enhanced, but if she got shot in the head?

She was still dead.

There were no other bodies to climb into, no ways out, and death…It was courting her. Srina had felt this ever since she’d succumbed on Coruscant when Darth Carnifex and Mercy forced her back from the brink. She brushed loose dirt over an exposed root and pressed down gently with her fingertips. Silver-white hair slipped over her shoulder when a sigh escaped her…Eyes closing. Thyferra was still too fresh. “I didn’t kill him, Isley.”

“And…He wasn’t the one who tried to kill me.”

It was complicated, standing on opposite sides of a war. Her heart, black and broken thing that it was, hated it. Acier Moonbound had been on her mind ever since. Thinking of all the ways this encounter could have gone. How did one discuss that? Should she just…Pick up a comm?

There was some small part of her that held on to the fact that he hadn’t finished what Lorn Reingard had started. She remembered the look on his face, his eyes, and how they twisted into something she never wished to see again at the sight of her body on the ground. She remembered the arms of her nephew…His desperation that she not die.

"Stay with me. Please..."

Her shoulders tightened while she worked, growing silent, while memory of her failure burned like ash in the back of her throat. She should have seen the shot coming with or without the Force at her back. For some reason she’d simply assumed that the Jedi was down and out because he’d been beaten so thoroughly. It didn’t occur to her to look behind Acier…When all she could see was her nephew. How she had, clearly, failed him. “They have a device that turns off the Force, you know, the Republic. It’s…”

Her throat still hurt, voice strained, but she tried to cover it up by searching for the words.

“New. It’s not like void stone or the lizards…It’s gone. Well and truly gone until…”

Well—Until it wasn’t. The Sith still had no idea how the Republic had done it…They just knew that they had. “I always thought that would be us.”