It must have been weeks.
"Dead already?"
Or was it days? Time flowed differently here, in the netherworld - in Chaos - and Amara didn't quite have a firm grasp on how much of it had passed by since she'd first arrived here. Spirited away from the galaxy at large as she was trying to leave the stands of a tournament, quite a lot had happened between then and now. The dead and things that she wasn't quite sure weren't dead had made staying alive in the afterlife quite a bit of a difficult task. Of course she had her lightsaber on her when she'd been pulled in but that'd only really came in handy a few times when she'd channeled the force straight into its blade, every other time it'd been the force itself that she had relied on and it was something that she'd been forced to hone until she was fairly certain her skills were certainly far and away sharper than they'd been when she was traipsing about in Nar Shaddaa or visiting Korriban.
"Looking at you here, now, maybe I was wrong."
This wasn't the first time someone dead had tried to mock her, or at least talk with her, and she was pretty sure this wouldn't be the last time either, but when she turned around to see who it was that was trying to put her down she was speechless. Sure, she'd have a witty retort queued up the moment she'd heard the rather unoriginal "you aren't what I was expecting" jab for the tenth time since she'd been here, but the face looking back at her was almost certainly her own. There weren't any mirrors here, and the dead didn't exactly have the kind of mastery over the force that they did in life or at least none of the people she'd encountered did, so there weren't many other possibilities to pick from than the one she immediately settled on in her gut. It took her a moment to even process what she'd heard after her brain went into overdrive trying to keep herself together rather than react as emotionally as she wanted to.
"You're about as original with your insults as you are with your looks." Amara said after what felt like minutes of shocked silence. The woman that could've passed for her twin seemed quite a bit more unhappy with her reaction than she thought she should've, though she noticed her hair was a tad bit more coppery than it was brown. "I'm.. not dead, either." She added with a silent scoff, the look she gave Vesta a cover for the swirling sensation that cycled up through her gut and into her chest. In her head she'd always hated her, the second-rate almost-clone that'd lived a life she felt like she'd never get the chance to have and ruined everything for the both of them, but looking at her now she wasn't so sure.
"Interesting words comatose from a comatose freak of nature with my heart in her chest."
It probably should've have stung, it was a rather lame jab, but Amara felt oddly defensive about it the moment she was reminded that the thing that pulled her out of her life-long slumber was a crystalline heart that'd somehow managed to find itself in her chest after her sister's death. "So why are you here? Sight-seeing in the Nether, come to see the valley of screams in the inner circles of Chaos? Or maybe you just wanted to see me." Vesta prattled on, sounding eerily close to how she thought she sounded in her own head. "I don't know. Lost, I guess? I thought you were.. like.. gone?" She answered back, thinking it odd that the tether that she'd felt while she was trapped watching all of the horrible things her strandcast had done was clipped in a way that should've meant something had happened to her on a.. spiritual (?).. level at the moment of her death. At the very least her mother had confirmed that she couldn't figure out how to bring her back, and she was fairly certain her father was of the same mind, so she wasn't quite sure how she was seeing her here, and now.
"Gone? I was literally inside of you. Your heart, remember? It was mine."
Amara's hand went to her chest, cupping a breast to feel for a heartbeat that wasn't there. "Why haven't we talked, then?" She asked, both confused and suspicious. "We're in the afterlife, Vesta, bits and pieces of me are here just like bits and pieces of me have been with you." Her sister answered. "So.. when I go back, is this going to.." Her voice trailed off, unsure if she even wanted an answer to that question, or if it was even the right question to be asking given the implication of a pretty powerful Sith lord either in her head or possessing the crystal that replaced her heart. "What? No, I'm dead. Think of yourself as the vehicle that carried parts of me to the rest of me, what you see is what you get - I'm all here, just I'm all here, not inside of you here."
She must've looked confused because a wispy hand reached out for the one she was holding to her chest, not quite making contact despite her being able to tell she was sort-of-but-not-really touching her. "I'm not in your head, you put me back together again by bringing us here but I'm still dead." Vesta repeated. "So, then.. mom, dad.. they could..?" A frown, this time she could feel it on her own face just as well as she could see it on her sister's. She'd just came back home, just established a role with a family that she was still struggling to see her as their real and true daughter, not some carboncopy that tried to imitate her and take her place just because she'd been sick. "No." They both said in unison, Amara in anger and Vesta in exasperation. It was Vesta's turn to seem confused, not the least of reasons why being the faint sensation of emptiness that seemed to be settling in, or the numbness she knew she'd felt at least once before - on Rhand.
"They don't need you, I don't need you."
Danger - in an ironic twist of fate it was when she'd been long dead after having killed herself that Vesta, for the first time, felt like she was truly in peril. Bits of her broke away with sensations that felt quite like the feeling of becoming whole had felt. "You are gone, you've been gone, so you're going to stay that way." Amara said, her voice almost desperate. "What're you-" Vesta - Darth Mori - started to question, only to find her voice slipping into words that didn't quite make it out of being thoughts. "Doing what our parents should have done when they realized their only child was born disfigured and taking away what you took from me." Then she was alone again. In all honesty she wasn't quite sure what it was, exactly, she'd done - only that her sister, her strandcast, was as gone as she'd been before she'd ended up in Chaos. She breathed in, the sound of which was ragged, and shut her eyes for a moment as she stepped backwards, away from the scene that she wasn't quite sure how to process, but when she opened them she didn't see the unending expanse of hell.
She saw Maena, an entirely different sort of hell - she saw home.
