Private Twisted Faces, Broken Places

[Hailyn]

C O N F E S S

Metalorn

Far from the reaches of the shipwombs that were remnant of the Yuuzhan Vong War of centuries past, farther still from the branches of control that the Empire she belonged to clutched onto the world, stood the serpent-clad woman in black on the soil of the planet Metalorn. Around her were ruins of a Sith Temple, destroyed during the great battle fought over the vongformed planet that would become the precursor for many similarly stylized battles between interstellar powers the galaxy over, and before her stood a Jedi that had been delivered to her by a bounty hunter wishing to collect on the reward for the capture or killing of any belonging to the Order of the Silver Jedi. He was unassuming, his stature small and disarming from the perspective of one who towered above him. Her body, from the serpents that swayed from her head to those that coiled around her torso and arms, was as much a weapon as the force to her - he was insignificant, comparably impotent.

And yet he had potential.

It was the strong, the powerful, that the Jedi had come to associate with a fall to the dark side - the demure youth, the pure of heart and kind souls that were among their number, were too innocent, too good, to succumb to the corruption of the darkness that those who chose to walk the path obscured from the light chose to wield. She was no evangelist, but she was a demoralizer - the demoralizer, as Jedi that recalled her time in their company so loved to remind her - and to shape this one of such a pure appearance into a wielder of the dark side would be enough to give pause to those that rallied under the symbolism of light as the truest way to live. It was all the sweeter, then, that he had chosen this path of his own volition when given the chance to choose a path of martyrdom as so many of his former compatriots had, or joining her as Jedi were often loathe to accept.

"I could have taken you with me by force, as many Sith might have, and made you endure a change you would not accept until you had broken - do you know why I had not?" She asked, her eyes, red like pools of fresh blood, staring down at him while her expression softened from the hardened glare she'd treated him to when he'd arrived. She waved her hand to signal that her question had been rhetorical, her lips already moving to answer herself and to inform him. "I felt the uncertainty, the curiosity, within you - that yearning desire to be a part of something bigger than yourself, to belong. I knew that feeling well, it was what created who I am, what I am today. Your choice was as much an acceptance to an offer to live as it was an admission of guilt - that you accept what you have chosen to become, and who you will one day be." The woman explained, speaking as much with her lips as her hands, as she stepped back and gestured to the ruins around them.

"This is what the Jedi wish to keep from you, from those you had called friends and even the masters you had at your temples." She said, though the meaning of her words were perhaps lost on someone without the knowledge of the past. "Manaan, Korriban, and Mirial - the three great atrocities of the Jedi in the recent memory of the galaxy. And Metalorn, the world we stand upon? It was the origin of that hatred, the blueprint for that self-righteous fury of the Jedi that they delude into believing is a pure desire for balance - the truth of the matter is they wish to see all of us, you as well, wiped clean from the stars and removed like a stain on what they view as its perfect image. Darkness, any of it, is anathema to their beliefs, and when there are none of us left what will happen, you ask? Peace? Love? Unity?" Alekto prattled on, her hands falling down now to her waist, as she turned to the right and began to walk in a bit of a circle around the Jedi. "Peace is a lie, there is only their passion for purity - and that passion will lead to a fight among those that remain for who is the true Jedi, whose ideals are closest to the light, until there are none left but the birds and the worms beneath the dirt."

"Perhaps not even them." She mused aloud, as if to entertain a sudden thought.

"I - and the Empire at large - wish to instill a semblance of structure in this delusional galaxy, to create a sense of order where there is only a blind and base desire to murder that which is less pure than the purest, and I can see that, within you, there is a desire to right this galaxy as I wish to."

"Now," She said, pausing as she turned to face him once more. "Tell me, boy, are you willing to turn your blade on those you called your friends if it means righting this sinking ship we call a galaxy?"

Aurelion Nova

 

[Aurelion Nova]

OBJECTIVE - .........


Where: Metalorn
Why: Captured!
Wearing/Wielding: Robes & Lightsaber (Currently disarmed)
When: Mid-Day
With: Hailyn

Aurelion stood in the ruins on Metalorn with a powerful mixture of shame, fear and uncertainty coloring his presence in the Force. The skulking, powerful gorgonic woman before him was graceful, deadly and eerily beautiful. Just like..... well.... a serpent. Her slow, purposeful circling had the exact intended effect of unnerving the young Padawan, who whimpered softly in obvious fear as she vanished from sight behind him, though he dared not try and turn to look at her.

Her words were.... well spoken and Aurelion found himself not even attempting to answer her rhetorical question as she spoke to him. Her words seemed.... earnest but also hollow to him. He couldn't quite tell if she was wholly honest with him or even herself, as everything she said rang discordant with what Aurelion himself had experienced. The Jedi didn't scrub things free of life and they certainly didn't seem to disregard or discard those they didn't see as 'pure enough'. True Aurelion had trouble finding himself a Master until Juno but that was his own fault, not theirs.

She was... right when she mentioned Aurelion wanting to feel like he belonged. That fact shot straight into his heart and made it ache. Everything Aurelion had heard about the Sith Empire, however, didn't match a single thing Alekto said. They had committed their own atrocities and though Alekto was correct that Aurelion DID want to help, or right, what he could in the galaxy her next question only hardened his resolve against her as she proved to him what his wavering confidence had been almost certain was true about her Empire.

Aurelion's single eye narrowed back at Alekto as she asked him if he would hurt his friends, and he struggled in the trappings she bound him with, before shaking his head even as his elongated ears drooped defiantly. "No. I-I wouldn't. They're good people and h-have been nice to me." His mind flashed back to Taozi Fuyuan cradling him, holding him, and adopting him as her own as he sniffled. "I-I'd never hurt them...." He murmured, his gaze lowering from Alekto's intense, red eyes as he stared at her feet.

"You.... talk about structure and order but....."

Aurelion trailed off, clenching his eye shut, and swallowed thickly. His body shaking softly as he began to feel like a child again, choking on his words as he simply waited for punishment to come. The Force roiling around him as his emotions flared and he looked up at Alekto with a teary-eyed glare. A single, shimmering orb of blue twinkling with unshed tears. "I-If you really wanted order o-or structure y-you would try to help my friends. N-Not ask me to kill them....."

 

[Hailyn]

Like the good, pure, soul that he was, the words that left his mouth were exactly what she wanted to hear. She wasn't looking for a mass conversion of Jedi to Sith, although she couldn't deny the benefits of such a grandiose plan if it had been hers, but rather to embolden and strengthen those in the Jedi and their various orders that could be shown a perspective where the Light was overbearing, going too far, and where the Dark was right and measured. "Pointless murder is tantamount to assisted suicide, if you had told me that you would be willing to kill your friends I would have known I could not have trusted you - how could I trust someone to be my apprentice if he could not be trusted people that he had known for much of his life?"

She crossed her arms over her chest, looking him over and taking note of his anxiety. Such a reaction was fair, she was different, alien even, to most people in the galaxy - and she was potentially one of the most influential Sith in the galaxy at the moment, and certainly the one with the largest bounty on her head. Dangerous, potentially cruel, and an infamous sadist in war - it was appropriate, even, for him to be so uneasy. "Besides, if there are more people with the Jedi like you, people who want progress towards a galaxy that can move beyond its basest desires, then I would much prefer to have you show them the true way to prosperity rather than extinguish a voice that might act as a catalyst for other Jedi to question their beliefs." She added with a smug grin. She lifted her right hand to toy with her hair, several of her fingers brushing possessively over the length of an amphistaff's head.

"What I do want is for you to understand that sometimes your friends will stop seeing you the same way when they find out what path you've chosen. They have been brainwashed for their entire lives to think of Sith as beyond redemption, that we are evil incarnate - and you are now apprentice to one of the worst. Unfortunately there will be some of your old friends that might ask themselves the same question I asked you, if they are willing to kill you for their cause, and they will attempt to do so." Alekto explained as she brought her hand back to her chest where her other arm still rested against. "You are not ready for that confrontation now, but you will be when it happens." She said.

Aurelion Nova

 

[Aurelion Nova]

OBJECTIVE - Understanding and Determination



Where: Metalorn
Why: Alekto
Wearing/Wielding: Fate (Disarmed) & Robes
When: Mid-Day
With: Hailyn

Aurelion was more than a little surprised when the Dark Lady seemed to approve of what he said, his eye narrowing briefly in suspicion until she mentioned making him her... Apprentice? That thought sent a tremor down his spine and he took an instinctive step back from her, eye still narrowed, and watched every movement her arms made. His skin was erupting with goosebumps, his heart was hammering in fear, but at the very least if she was going to hurt or torture him he wanted to see it coming. At least if her arms were crossed over her chest it likely meant she wouldn't be electrocuting or gripping him in the Force, which was only a small comfort.

Things became clearer to Aurelion when Alekto began speaking again, in particular, when she mentioned that she wished for him to be a catalyst to cause the Jedi to turn on their own beliefs. The thought made his heart drop and his stomach turn, and he immediately shook his head, as if denying the idea physically would simply cause it to cease existing. His singular blue eye widened as her hand rose to the amphistaff on her head, the hissing creatures completely unsettling and unnerving as he listened to her continue to coo her plan to him.

Aurelion's head snapped back down to look at Alekto properly when she called him her Apprentice and he blushed softly, growling a tiny growl even as he shook like a kitten in the rain "I-I'm not your Apprentice! I... I have a Master already! You stole me a-and I don't think my friends would fight me. I-I don't... I don't think...." Something clicked for Aurelion as he started at Alekto and he drew in a breathe, gathered the Force to himself, and Alekto would suddenly feel the Padawan make a concentrated effort to touch her mind. It was obvious he had a natural talent for such things, even a fractured, delicate thing like his psyche weighing against her with respectable pressure on being pushed at her mind.

Though it was obvious even to Aurelion he stood no REAL chance of affecting Alekto he did swallow thickly, brace himself, and begin to step forward as he continued speaking. His single, robin-egg blue eye gazing into her with a sad, sorrowful expression as he approached her. Like a small animal timidly approaching the predator that would devour it whole. "... I-I don't think anyone is beyond redemption. If you really want me to believe that, that you're not evil incarnate, then....." Aurelion swallowed softly, his exertion of pressure on Alekto's mind becoming one of Battle-Meditation induced peace and focus as he stood right before her. Gazing up at her with a wide, single, innocent eye.

Extending his bound hands to her, his cheeks still lightly flushed, Aurelion murmured. "..... then let me... help you feel better? I-I know what it's like to hurt and... a-and feel bad..... the Jedi have only been nice and kind and accepting to me. Even...." Aurelion paused, bringing a hand up to touch his eye-patch, before nodding at Alekto. "E-Even if I look different. E-Even if I AM different." He said pointedly, nodding at the amphistaffs coiling about Alekto's head, even as his now-steady hands were offered to her, his soft blue eye carrying an innocent determination in them as a simple, helpless Padawan stared into eye of the Triumvir of Power herself and felt no fear.

 

[Hailyn]

She smirked.

Perhaps she had pushed a little too hard, the turning was a gradual thing and he seemed rather resilient. Even before she'd failed at someone else's attempt at a redemption arc and had been actively trying to do what this Jedi thought he could influence her into doing, she still would have considered it an exercise in naivete. Perhaps he hadn't thought of her as beyond saving, but the sensation of a lightsaber thrust straight through her chest was one feeling she would never forget. Even if she'd allowed it to happen.

"Is that so?." She asked, feeling him reaching through the force for her mind - she offered no outward reaction, though it was telling to her that a Jedi would immediately move to manipulate them through acts of mental control rather than persuasion. He hadn't accepted his new reality yet, not that she could blame him, but she'd make him see her way soon enough. The slight, feathery, touch of his reach through the force to her mind was almost imperceptible but she caught on quick enough - her own touch in the mind of a Sith Lord she'd turned into a thrall had been perhaps even smaller at first, but it was still unusual to have found herself on the other end of someone trying nearly the same thing. Despite all expectations to the contrary, he would find no barriers to entry - or, rather, nothing which would keep him from feeling, and perhaps seeing if he was so inclined, what was just beneath the surface.

If he wanted in she would let him.

There was raw emotion there, like an ocean of churning waves - anger towards the Jedi for turning someone against her when she had been trying to help them, solely for being something they could not understand; regret at the moment she'd taken someone's life in self defense because they'd finally given in to the machinations of a prejudicial order; and, much more recently, the searing pain of a lightsaber being pushed through her chest while she offered no resistance while the face of a Jedi stared her down as her would-be executioner.

"Your knights and your masters hold a much less lenient view, Jedi. I am someone who is to be purged, not a woman to be saved. Not that I need saving." Alekto replied, pushing his touch away from the flowing sea of experiences within her mind. The calming sensation of battle meditation was not foreign to her, she'd made much use of it in the original galactic alliance, before the days of the Sith Empire, when she'd lived on Tatooine with another Jedi. She had been a master of its use then, convinced to lessen her use of more violent acts of the force by the Jedi she had been with.

"Pain is only a memory to remember an experience by, it is better not to forget what has hurt you so that you may learn how to better handle such a situation in the future."

The words of the old Jedi Council, in the days of an older, perhaps now forgotten, Galactic Republic, flowing freely from her mind - words as cruel as the Jedi Masters that still were a part of the Silver Jedi and the newer Galactic Alliance. 'She's a spirit of the dark side, an abomination.' One had said of her, ignoring her presence to speak of her to the Jedi that had decided to give her the chance that anyone should have deserved. 'It's either her, or it's the Jedi Order. You can't be with something that touched by the dark side and remain the grandmaster.' Another had claimed.

And then that feeling of suffocation, when the Jedi that had claimed to love her so much wrapped her fingers around her neck in her sleep and tried to put her to an eternal rest - fueled by the pain of an Alekto, a Braith, that had been dying of a cancer they could not cure, and by regret, maybe even anger, for choosing someone who was seemingly flying from her grasp even after giving up all of her Jedi connections for her.

"It has never been anything but the Jedi that have brought me pain, discomfort. To them, I - Darth Alekto - am not like you, or any other being in the galaxy, to them I am just a shade, something less than a person, and it is through that reasoning they justify their wish to be rid of me." She explained.

"No matter what it takes." Alekto added, her words conveying a memory through the force.

Aurelion Nova

 

[Aurelion Nova]

OBJECTIVE - Memories and Acceptance



Where: Metalorn
Why: Sithnapped
Wearing/Wielding: Fate & Robes (Currently disarmed)
When: Mid-Day
With: Hailyn

Aurelion listened to Alekto with emotions bordering on scared, determined and almost sorrowful. A timid, passive offer to connect with him and one which nearly stole his breathe away like an arctic wind when Alekto seemingly let him in without the slightest qualm. He could feel her emotions intrinsically, powerfully, like one feels the push and pull of the ocean's currents before being swept up in them. Though in the face of her anger and regret, Aurelion held as firm as he could, fighting back the overwhelming choke of emotion as he stared up into her eyes with his own singular orb. Though his arms shook now under the weight of her emotions, though his features sagged just a hair more, he still continued to reach for her, even as she spoke.

Aurelion stiffened as Alekto pushed him from her mind, a sensation that would be almost like someone parent lifting them out of the deep end of the pool and setting them on the lip after they nearly drowned, and Aurelion's lips tightened into a line at her next choice of words. Brief flashes of what had hurt him dancing across his eye, a sensation Alekto would not doubt feel, before he finally lowered his gaze from her. He weighed her words as carefully as he could, pushing down his own emotions as he bit back the urge to retort. Instead, he simple waited and listened, until she showed him a vision.

Aurelion was not as disrupted by this as one might expect, after all, he had journeyed into memory a few times at this point and he was much akin to a lucid dreamer now. At least when it came to someone else's memories. In it he saw Alekto, though very different, changed, in almost every sense of the word. She didn't seem.... herself? Was it right to call what she was not herself compared to this or, perhaps, what had come before even this? Aurelion didn't know about that, but what he could see and hear only confused him, she was attached to... something. The ship? It looked painful or.... wrong. Like she had been reduced from a person to a glorified organ, and the sight made Aurelion's stomach churn. It reminded him of the Brynadul but more grotesque and, in a horrifying way, creative.

In the span of moments did Aurelion see her be struck down and, seemingly taunting the Jedi who had done so, she had evidently survived in some sense. Spiritual? This only confused the young Apprentice as he had no idea how she could have survived.... THAT. Even so upon her old bodies demise Aurelion was whisked back to the present as the memory faded, dimmed, before breaking apart to his present consciousness. He blinked, rapidly, as if reassuring that now what he saw was reality. Well, at least, the present reality. Aurelion, not realizing he had been holding his breathe, drew in a shuddering inhale before staring at the ground by Alekto's feet. His eye now unblinking and staring for a long moment before he swallowed thickly and, glancing up at Alekto, look her in the eyes before nodding his head. "They.... did try to kill you and... and I can't..... I don't understand what happened. That thing you were in..... or... or what was going on."

Aurelion licked his lips, as if lost in thought, before he drew in a steadying breathe. "But I.... I don't think.... I don't think anyone is beyond help or... or if not help j-just.... just..." Aurelion's words died on his lips as he gazed into Alekto's eyes, his throat seizing up before he stepped back, cast his gaze down at the ground and stayed silent for a long moment. His mind working at a million miles an hour before he asked softly "Why didn't.... YOU kill me? O-Or... why haven't you?" Aurelion frowned, briefly, in an expression that made him look even younger than he was. Something akin to a pout. "I-I'm not good with the Force, it... it hurts me.... most of the time. I'm not any good with weapons and I'm....I'm...." Aurelion looked at himself, shrugged, and then glanced at Alekto. His ingrained desire to see the answer to his self doubt over-riding his tepidation as he stated finally. ".... me."