Private Steady Fall

[Vesta]

It had been six days and the mask still hadn't come off. She had wore it during the old man's funeral and every day since, but even in the privacy and solitude of her own home - with only her apprentice to bother her - she hadn't let it slip from her face more than a few inches. "You're doing it again." She said, not bothering to even look at Darth Daiara as she spoke. Her gaze, assuming that she physically saw through the narrow holes slit into the dark blotches for eyes on her mask, was focused almost entirely on the spear set down on the stone tabletop in front of her and she seemed otherwise indifferent to the way her apprentice was behaving aside from the disapproving tone of her voice. The spear in question, something that could nearly be described as the physical manifestation of her hunger, wasn't quite being worked on so much as studied by the Sith lord, her focus perhaps held on its effectiveness given the length of time that the Jedi she had faced on Tython had managed to survive its draining effects.

"Brooding." She added, giving context to her disapproval.

She turned towards her, then, and did what she had not in nearly a week; the mask came off. Her face, though far from horrific, was a far cry from the one she'd last laid eyes on the girl with. What color had filled her flesh before had faded and the many veins that had, admittedly, became ever more visible the paler she had became were now dark, almost black. Her lips were light, colored with a powdery white gloss that she had applied herself before she had donned the mask in the first place - she knew she was starting to lose whatever luster she had prided herself on and it showed. She slid her left hand across the top of the table and rest the tips of her fingers across the top of the haft of the spear, near the blades themselves, and tilted her head to the side as she lifted an eyebrow in curiosity - curiosity paired with the slight, downward, curl at the corner of her lip that hinted at annoyance or frustration.

"Is there anything, anything at all, that I can possibly do to actually make you happy for once?"

 

[Darth Daiara]

Aradia looked up from the book she had been pretending to read and frowned. "Come to think of it, I could use new shoes," she leveled, her sass masked but a thick layer of feigned boredom.

She licked her finger and turned the page, pretending to absorb herself in it once again. It was petty, but she could feel Vesta's building frustration from her seat. Such things usually resulted in an emotional lash out that Aradia didn't care to be apart of.

If something was bothering her, Vesta could use her words. Aradia glanced up and then back down, her curiosity over Vesta's shifting appearance squashed.

She turned another page, definitely brooding.

 

[Vesta]

Her eyes narrowed for several moments as she was met a smart ass comment that would have usually been more than enough to set her off, an urge tempered only by the fact that the person doing it was Darth Daiara and not someone who would lose respect for her if she acted any differently. In fact she was fairly certain the girl didn't respect her at all, something which deeply concerned her despite it never having been brought up before. It was like she was the insubordinate little wretch that she'd saved from the cold hands of death all over again, and for reasons that she couldn't understand and was steadily becoming unwilling to put in the effort to try. She shifted to more directly face her, preparing a barb of her own, when the sound of a page being turned echoed around the rather quiet room.

She frowned, silenced by her own frustration. There were trillions of things she could have said, many of which would have been lobbed at the girl in an effort to start a fight, but she'd already learned her lesson on that front - Aradia may have looked younger than her but she had matured quite a bit more in that regard than she had, even if it was only in a way that gave her the intuition to throw anything Vesta said back in her face. It was supposed to be easy, she was the girl's master, she was the one that had literally all of the power at her fingertips, and yet anything that came to mind felt distinctly like an admission of inferiority. Things that had escaped their degrading relationship in the past, like more physical acts of violence, were ones that other Sith often employed - ones that would have made her feel like she was incapable of being right, which mattered more to her now than being petty.

It was when those other means of discipline came to mind that she realized how frayed the threads that held them together had become - nearly as tenuous as the pair had been when their journey had only just began. "You're so focused on you and us and all the little individuals in your life that you don't understand that this isn't for me." She said at last, finally figuring out what it was she wanted to dissect out of the girl's head - taking her brooding sarcasm for bitterness over Vesta's recent move towards the head of an order that she knew the girl wanted almost nothing to do with. She supposed there was likely envy there, too, over Darth Ptolemis being her Shadow Hand in place of Aradia, despite her being the Sith's true apprentice. "It isn't for you, either; or for them, for that matter." Mori added dismissively as she stood, her fingertips pulled away from her spear as they slid across the table's surface while her hand was steadily dragged back to her side.

"I am doing what is right for everyone. For this galaxy, for all these ungrateful little mites that keep resisting the change they so desperately need."

She cast a wary glance towards her, then, and wondered just how much of her interest was actually in the book she was supposedly reading - doubting it was any at all.

"I didn't do any of this to protect you, not this time around. You've shown me that you don't need or want any of that from me, not that it was ever more than a guilty conscious providing it to you, so you can stop thinking I'm playing mother for you - this is the endgame, and you aren't that special a piece for me to put beside me on the board."

She swallowed, then lowered her voice.

"I plan to wipe the slate clean and I don't need to be in your head to know what you think about that, and you probably don't need to be in mine to know that I don't intend to be a part of that new beginning."

 

[Darth Daiara]

Aradia looked up over the top of her book, her lips pursed. Vesta was growing harder and harder to recognize, and it had nothing to do with her face. She was full of anger now, not towards the world but towards her. Everything Aradia said got twisted. Everything she tried to do set off alarms in the woman's head that had never been there before. It was as if she had become Vesta's own enemy. And why? She had only ever wanted to please her.

Aradia feared that somewhere along Vesta's exploits with power, the scales had tipped. It was no longer her master in control, it was the darkness.

Vesta's-- No, Mori's-- subtle declaration of intent to die didn't startle Aradia like it use to. Now it just checked out.

"...What do you want me to say?" she replied, masking the bother from her voice. Mori would just use it as a weapon against her. "Don't? That was mean? That's not how I feel?"

"You already know that. I'm here. But don't pretend like you want me to be."

Ah, yes, she had heard about Darth Ptolemis then. She looked back down to her book, her feelings towards the matter impossible to decipher as she turned another page. As it turned out, falling in love with a jedi had taught Aradia some degree of temperance. But it couldn't stop a bitter comment from slipping out at the end.

"I could have been special. If you came home more."

 

[Vesta]

It didn't matter anymore, not that it ever truly did. Whether it was Quinn or Darth Daiara , her parents or the people that she'd more or less grown up with, everything ended up the same in the end. She had grown paranoid as she grew older, reduced her social visibility until she was hardly more than a phantom to a cadre of Sith in an Empire that had already been teetering towards the edge long before she had come around, and absconded with an apprentice that had likely only stopped trying to break away when she came to terms with owing the woman her life - and who she supposed now only remained out of respect for the memory of the person Mori had once been before she had slipped away and into the persona that masqueraded with her face now. She, Mori that is, knew now that she'd burned the last bridge she had left to her and understood that the familiar sensation of isolation was soon to follow.

"I want you to understand me." She answered, knowing full well that there was nothing comprehensible about her. The truth was that she had grown so accustomed to changing how she presented herself depending on the company she kept that at some point she had grown so emotionally fatigued, so mentally exhausted, that the lines between Mori and Vesta had blurred until the two separate identities became something different altogether. A regression, in some ways, and an improvement over some aspects in others, but the consequence and the result was still the same - she had obtained the power she needed and the respect she desired in return for everything else; freedom, love, and friendship. Aradia had been the latter to her, to some degree, even if the girl hadn't shared that same closeness after Mori well and truly began to work with the Maw, but that tie had been severed by months of absence and abuse.

It made it easier to come to terms with the choice she had made for herself; distancing oneself and cutting ties to ensure that there was nothing to fall back onto when the inevitable came was what made that end not only easier to accept but even an escape from self-inflicted misery.

She glanced back towards the spear, turning her head to peer over her shoulder at it, and in a rare moment of self-reflection wondered if she could even succeed in the goal she was after. Solipsis hadn't, though she had always thought the man had never actually intended to allow himself the pleasure of victory, but then she supposed that neither he nor she had ever expected to get quite this far, or this close. Tython had been the splash of cold water that she had needed to wake up, but it had also been the sobering reminder that she had now traveled so far along the road she had made for herself that the bend in her path was now in the rearview. There was no turning back, no putting that djinn back in its lamp, and the commitment to that end was beginning to get to her.

"You could have been special if you tried half as hard as you wished I would for you." Mori said bitterly, returning the venom sent her way with a barb of her own. "You hated me for breathing life into your decrepit corpse, you despised me for making you better than you were when I found you, you loathed me for warning you of your stupid attachments because of experience with my own, and when I finally treat you the way you always demanded then you look at me like I've betrayed whatever trust you had in me." She turned her head back, facing Aradia again, and leaned against the edge of the tabletop with a look of disdain etched into her face, the bridge of her nose wrinkled by the tension pushing down on it by the junction between her eyebrows. "I have experienced my own failures, my own problems, and I shared them with you when I was at my lowest, but when you find something in me that you don't like there aren't ever any words - you just stare and expect me to know what it is you hate so much about me."

She paused, swallowing as she thought back on what she just said, and glanced away to prevent herself from making possible eye contact.

"Or maybe you believe I don't care what you think."

In some ways, though, she supposed that even that kind of thinking wasn't too far off from the truth - she doubted she was going to change anything about herself for anyone, and she doubted Aradia was quite as invested in this as much as she was to care to try to push her to do so.

"I suppose what I'm trying to say, Aradia, is that I don't think either of us quite like being around each other anymore - we've become strangers, whatever shared interests we've had has changed as much as we have as individuals, and I don't quite like this expectation that I be the crutch that this apprenticeship leans on to stay upright."

 

[Darth Daiara]

Aradia looked up over pages, her body smarting with sharp pains of adrenaline as Darth Mori's words dug in. She was familiar with the stinging sensation of having words put in her mouth. It made anger tingle up her spine and challenge her rather notable control.

Still, the apprentice did not bite.

"You want me gone?" She reiterated, raising a brow and snapping her book shut. "Make me."

"That's how this goes, isn't it? I either excel and kill you or die and be replaced. Why don't we just cut to the chase and call your new hand in here. The two of us can duke it out. Survivor remains yours." She stood, straightening out her shirt under her belt as she leveled her terms.

If Vesta wanted a fight, it would only be physical.

 

[Vesta]

She couldn't blame her for not understanding what it was that was going on here, the writing may have been on the wall that things would eventually come to a head but Mori was unusually orthodox in her desire to retain a singular apprentice and equally obsessed with not losing another one. She shook her head, loose strands of dark hair falling around her face from where they had previously been held in place by pressure and gravity when the mask had covered it. This wasn't about replacing her apprentice with a new one, or even about having an apprentice at all. "This is about you and me, Aradia." Mori answered in a low voice, uncertain how to frame this in a way that would make it entirely clear on just how personal this was intended to be.

"Lose the Sith talk, I am too tired to put on that charade for you."

That was out of character for her, or at least for the way she tried to be around Darth Daiara , but this was precisely how much it meant to her to get through this - enough that she spoke as freely as she could, dropping the Mori façade in favor of her actual persona. "You and I? We're done." She said matter-of-factly, with more than a little bitter edge to her voice. "You can be my apprentice long after I'm dead for all I care, assuming you live long enough to claim as much, but this?" She continued, gesturing between the two of them with a rapid waving of her right hand. "Maybe I was too good at keeping things to myself, and maybe that makes all of this my fault, but I needed someone to talk to while I was on the run - I brought you back from the brink of death for force sake - and I thought I could make you into that person."

She shrugged, her face alive with an expression that steadily changed from frustration to stress and back again.

"What do you want me to say?" She parroted, mimicking the girl's voice as well as any Shi'ido could - perfectly. "I don't want you to say anything, I don't want anyone to say anything, I want someone to prove to me that there is something, someone, or somewhere in this galaxy where my cynicism isn't justified by apathy and indifference."

She gestured to herself, thrusting her thumb into her chest hard enough to recoil backward into the table.

"I am not a good person, and we're not friends, I understand that, so I perfectly understand that you don't care if I go and fucking off myself trying to destroy all of reality - really, I do - but I sometimes hope you'd try to persuade me otherwise, that anyone would try, because that would mean there's someone out there that cares."

"You don't, though, and I am not going to keep you around until you decide that you do. If you want to die you can try your luck with me - I am not replacing you, I am getting rid of you."

 

[Darth Daiara]

Aradia stood there, The world wolmping with each thunderous pulse of her heart in her ear.

“I have fought with you enough times to know yelling gets me no where.” She stepped forward, the force twisting with the burning pain that didn’t make it to her words. Control was paper thin, but it was maintained. Vesta had done better job at training Aradia than she knew.

“We both know nothing I say will stop you from charging down this self destructive path, so stop punishing me for your decisions. You don’t get to decide whether or not I care. And while you’ve done everything you can to remove that power from my hands, I’ve decided to stay.

“Despite every risk to me.” She enunciated.

“Despite what it cost me.” The force pulsed with raw and unrestrained agony, it’s source withheld from the master who tried to push her away.

“So go ahead and spin whatever tale makes you feel better about burning us to the ground. I can’t stop you. And you can’t stop me.”

“Deal.”

She picked back up the book and sat back down where she belonged.

 

[Vesta]

¿​

If she ever expected Darth Daiara to react in a way that would make things simpler then she would have been an idiot for doing so - or, at the very least, it would have been a sign that she didn't know her apprentice well enough. There was all of this talk about giving things up, about being powerless, and yet it felt to her, to Mori, that she had been giving up much of her own agency, whatever feeble degree of it she had, to the girl this entire time. Perhaps it was that Aradia just wasn't as underhanded as her, as desperate as her Master to get things her way through whatever means possible, and didn't read into what Vesta was saying to try to sway her or steer her in another direction than the one she was set on already. Truly she had no idea what was going through her apprentice's mind beyond the stubborn refusal to listen to her except to reject the decision Mori had made, but it was still the very same indifference she was just lamenting over.

She knocked the mask off the tabletop behind her, onto the floor, as she crossed the gap between her and Aradia. It took three steps for her to stand over the redhead and a short gesture of her hand to spitefully flip the pages of the book from one side to the next in an effort to draw the girl's attention away from her distraction. "You learned so much from everything I've taught, from how I've treated you, and somehow you've still missed the point in all of my efforts to help you grow." She said angrily, her voice shaken - milky-white eyes locked onto the crown of the girl's head as she waited for the inevitable glare. "I want you to rely on yourself, so I've forced you to prove to me that you can, not because I want you to prove to me that I can't replace you; but because I was powerless on my own and I want to make sure that when you find yourself in a position like mine that you aren't helpless when fate pushes you towards what it wants you to do."

She gestured around.

"Do you see anyone here besides you?" She asked, furious. "Don't you dare talk to me about sacrifice, as if I haven't given up everything that wasn't already taken from me." Vesta added sharply. There was little else that she regretted more than the people she had cut out of her lives, than the home she had left behind and the family she had all but ostracized herself from. There were people she knew that had admired her when she'd been wearing the face of her father's son, rather than presenting herself as the woman she was now, and they'd all forgotten her when she had left that crumbling ruin behind in search of power to set things right. Right for her, right for the girl she had dragged out of that inferno with her, and right for the galaxy as a whole - it was a naïve dream, of course, but with the nihilistic understanding of the galaxy now it all seemed worth it if she succeeded. Failure, of course, was significantly more probable than the alternative, however. "It cost me everything to get where I am today, much of it I risked in keeping you around. I could have left you behind and took back my original apprentice but I chose the better option because I thought more of you."

"I pushed you down when you shouted at me because I want you to understand how little anyone will respect someone who cannot command obedience without relying on others to fear a flaring temper, so that you won't need to learn to control your anger after someone close to you has decided you are better dead than being one bad day away from their early death." She said but didn't elaborate further; it was a lesson she learned second-hand with the manner in which the Empire fell apart right before her eyes. "I never wanted you to think I believed that you were incapable, weak, or that I was unreasonable." Mori paused, then, genuinely stopping herself to consider whether there was any point in continuing with this rant.

"Clearly I have been wasting my time. You are an excellent apprentice, Aradia, but I don't need an apprentice."

She turned away, abandoning her diatribe in a sharp shift towards resignation.

"Though.. maybe you'll prove a better apprentice than either of us think." She added, kicking the mask away from her feet as she stepped back towards the table. "You'd make a better Sith than me."

 

[Darth Daiara]

“Then knight me.” Aradia leveled, her voice as cool and unaffected as it had been before disrupted pages and the cruel words.

There was truly nothing Vesta could say that hurt her anymore. Her choice had made and the toll had been enacted. She wasn’t going to walk away from it now.

No matter how much Vesta screamed.

She looked up expectantly at her master, calling her out on her words.

 

[Vesta]

She paused, genuinely confused.

It wasn't that she didn't understand what Darth Daiara meant by knighting, and it certainly wasn't because she had assumed the girl had been given that privilege by someone else before her apprenticeship to her had began, but rather in a fundamental lack of understanding of the mindset the girl had in order to make such a request. "Knight you?" She repeated, not quite incredulously but to some degree her words did come across as surprised. What somber mood she had been in was slowly replaced with what appeared to be disappointment - in herself, however. "Aradia you are - you have been my apprentice. Your strength comes from what you've grown for yourself, from inside, not from some superficial title or ceremony in the dark."

It almost felt.. cruel, or perhaps condescending, to react in such a way.

It had been in the woman's mind for quite some time that her apprentice had been operating on a level of skill, or at least knowledge, worthy of someone that believed themselves to be, at the very least, equal to what one could consider a Sith Knight or Saber. In some ways she supposed the fault of the two of them being placed in the predicament of even needing to have this conversation fell on her entirely, it was likely that Aradia might've expected Mori to have been much less out of reach than the day they had met by now - or misunderstood Vesta's superiority complex as a lack of belief instead. "Though you don't need me to say it, Aradia, you have reached that threshold in my eyes quite some time ago - if you desire to operate as a Knight then you can consider this my approval."

"Some Sith choose a name for their apprentices to replace their old identities, but I believe in self-determination."

She gestured to Aradia expectantly.

"Start your new life now, or keep the identity you've had alive as you see fit - you are a Sith. You are your own master."

 

[Darth Daiara]

Aradia's eyes danced like flames in a fire.

A life time of subordination had brought her to this moment-- one chains traded for the next when she accepted her path under Kaalia Pavanos . Freedom wasn't burned slave papers or relationships turned twisted. Freedom was achievement-- freedom was this path, even if Zaavik hadn't been able to see it.

Freedom had cost her everything. It was a bitter sweet moment to realize that.

But if Mori thought it would change anything between them, she was wrong. "That is good to know," Aradia said simply. She turned the page and settled back in, remaining right where she had been sitting.

As had been her choice.

She let her finger drift over the page for a moment before she finally looked back up at Mori. "...Do you feel better now?" She probed. Strangely, Aradia didn't.