Eigengrau

by NorahPineffrin

Summary:

The temporary Republic/Empire alliance on Yavin 4 has brought Darth Marr and Satele Shan closer than they ever expected. After an encounter at a ... uniquely cursed Sith temple, the two leaders wrestle with the difficulty of navigating their emotions and guarding their secrets, all while trying to hold together the fragile coalition on which trillions of lives depend.

Notes:

• Inspired by Unmasked by ACelestialDream

This plot follows on from its inspiration story, "Unmasked". You don't -have- to have read that story to enjoy this one, but you should, because it's delightful.

You can assume, for background purposes, that all eight SWTOR PCs exist in this story, although they're not all Outlander-caliber and not all will meaningfully show up.

Chapter 1

Marr was restless.

It wasn't enough.  It wasn't enough that he had spent a bewitched night in the … intimate company of the most notorious Jedi alive.  Wasn't enough that they had come to their tense entente the morning after.  Six days on and he still couldn't get the ordeal in Lord Gravinia's temple out of his head.  He had put himself through endless martial drills, pored intently over the longest and driest reports, stared impatiently through the holographic scenarios his underlings were always shoving in front of him.  In the face of this distraction, maintaining his customary façade of impassivity was becoming slightly ... troublesome.  

Satele Shan, lifting him from peril, healing him.  Touching him.  Seeing him, in maskless, naked weakness, and responding only with a mercy that stung like venom.  And then their having been drawn into a … prurient trap by a long-dead Lord not fit to carry his cloak.  It was humiliating; the fresh memory still made him want to crush a droid with his mind and hurl it off a precipice.  He had done that once already, this week, and was irritated with himself.  Wasteful.  Less wasteful than a sentient.  But wasteful.  Privately he had always held deep pride at being less susceptible than most Sith to losing control of his anger. 

Damn her!  It was already an open secret (at least among people who mattered) that she wasn't perfectly celibate.  She would face demotion and social censure, at worst.  If his face were known, there would be … irreparable consequences.  His blindness without the cumbersome mask was only the most immediate danger.  Shan might well reason that a personal scandal would be worth the benefit to her Republic when he was deposed, disgraced, and dead.  Would she keep the secret even after this alliance inevitably dissolved?  When she had lowered her mind's defenses to assent to their pact of secrecy, he had sensed no duplicity in her… but that was six days ago, and minds and motives had their tendency to shift.  Even those of Jedi.  Perhaps especially those. 

Satele Shan, tasting of rivers, quivering under his tongue with unrestrained pleasure.  He could barely believe he had not hallucinated it all. 

Had that cursed Gravinia wormed into his head?  He sensed nothing of the wily spirit's presence.  Nothing strong of anyone's, in fact: the small temple he had chosen as his temporary quarters was as silent in the Force as the jungle stone, empty of ancient energies, having been cleansed or never used.  Marr preferred this: the background interference of Yavin's volatile Force presences was thus kept to a minimum, and his sensing was clearer.  So why did these treacherous stirrings continue?  The salacious Sith spirits had gotten their offering.  He had felt them recede back into quiescence.  Here in his refuge, of all places, his mind should be his own to command, attuned nowhere else.  It made very little sense. 

Another unbidden thought: Satele Shan bent before him, bound in lightning, opening to his passion.  With the image a spike of reflexive lust warmed him and made his armor feel suddenly confining.  His imagination was pulled away with the current and he began to visualize other things he might do with her.  The sounds she might make…

No.  This would not do.   

Marr reminded himself sternly of her misdeeds in the Great War and after.  How many Sith had she maimed and killed?  How many of their best?  Malgus after Alderaan had been a different man, half-mad and fatally hubristic.  They'd lost planets because of her: Satele Shan and her arrogant humility.  His face burned behind his newly replaced mask; the old wounds ached.  He should not be desiring this woman, this enemy, on the basis of a flimsy alliance and a night of improbable, incomparable sex.  Really he should not be desiring in this way at all.  He had finished himself with his hands more than once this week, cursing his lack of restraint; he had thought himself far past these atavistic longings.  How was it that he was still plagued by memory: the scent of her, the simple warmth of her skin, the way it had moved against his own…

Satele Shan, bright as a blue-giant star, wet and incandescent around him as his consciousness was obliterated and magnified by the Force.

That was what Marr couldn't tear himself from, in the end: the ascending transcendence soon after they joined that had sent him hurtling past stars, across voids and filaments, back to the atmosphere of Yavin 4, at one with the earth and air, attuned to the presence of everything that lived there and everything that had.  Like dark poison spreading in water he had perceived Vitiate's astral existence amid the petrified soul-wreckage of a thousand Sith sorcerers -- and it had perceived him in turn, in the manner of a bestial hive-mind taking slow and deadly notice of an intruder.  He had raced away from the roiling horror to see Revan turn to stare at him, speaking inaudibly and with urgency to someone else.  With only a turn of his head he had seen Yavin as a Massassi, a ghost, a broad fern leaf, a storm, a patrol surrounded in the forest.  His self had constantly fragmented and reformed and at length he had seen through the eyes of Revan himself, envisioning plots behind plots, mind always fleeing a falseness deep within him…

A battle between strange ships.  A planet of nothing but ash.  The overpowering scent of ozone.

The perspectives had dissolved into each other like dreams as Marr rode atop waves of urgent pleasure, cosmic and invincible, feeling Shan as a binary presence pulsing against him and then as a being coterminous with himself.  When the visions vanished with his release they had done so with the triumphant final flourish of dancers, a blur of changes he could barely understand.  He remembered holding her body to his, both of them spent and sweating, as immediate reality rushed back in… and for the briefest instant he had forgotten who either of them was.

He had emerged from that temple with a thousand fears and questions, and with an uncannily certain sense of the danger that faced their mission.  In the days since, things had… fallen together, in his mind.  They did not bode well.

If the alliance failed here, an unmasking would be the very least of his worries.  Marr was a fearsome warrior and a superlative commander, but there were powers in the galaxy that put his own to shame, and the spirits they sought to defeat here on the jungle moon were among them.  A deep and familiar dread crept over him, the sense of being pulled into endless oblivion by void-black hands.  Death was patiently waiting.  Perhaps even the power of the united fleets would not save them from it here.  Still they had to try.

Playing close to the vest, as always, he hadn't told Shan about the visions.  That would need to be rectified.  She wielded tremendous power, loath though he usually was to admit it, and it would be essential to their efforts.

There, then: a solid, unimpeachable reason to summon her to a private conference.  Whatever might happen between them, past or future, there had to be a way to forge a strategy the wrathful spirits' culminating plots would not break.  He would find his victory.  He always did. 

If it aligned with his own pernicious curiosity … so much the better.

Marr's hands flew over his datapad, resolute with purpose.

Chapter 2

Summary:

In which Satele goes for a stroll.

The ruin that served as Marr's field quarters was at a considerable remove from the base of his forces.  A ziggurat of stained stone like nearly all the others, it loomed over the trees in silent threat.  Rather like the man himself.  Satele had told her closest aides of the plan: Force research.  Strategizing.  Intelligence gathering.  Maybe sparring.  For all she knew, that was all that would happen.  Guiltily a part of her hoped their meeting might go otherwise.

With quiet, measured strides she made her way down the narrow footpath hacked through the jungle.  Already the plants of Yavin were reclaiming the trail, despite the heaps of recent cuttings she noticed.  Some of the smaller tree trunks bore what she was sure were saber marks.  Had he done this himself?  It wouldn't surprise her. 

A small squadron of parasitic gnats droned around her, looking for a bite.  Padawans early in their lessons learned a tutaminis cantrip to keep pests at bay, but Satele acknowledged and then merely ignored the creatures.  Better they torment something that can take it. 

The tropical humidity was making her perspire.  She took little notice of it; her body and mind had long been trained to endure any environment a human could possibly survive in (and some they couldn't).  Still, the vaporous air lay thick on the darkening jungle, and as Satele progressed she couldn't help but remember Gravinia's temple, the mists and taunting ghosts and paths that led nowhere.  And… other things.  She hoped the Sith Lord might discuss that temple with her, might negotiate some sort of stabilizing closure to the jarring events of the week before.  She couldn't help feeling disquiet, a fundamental imbalance, whenever she thought of the matter.  Perhaps he had felt likewise.  Perhaps that was why the message yesterday.

 

=====HIGHEST SECRECY=====

TO: GRAND MASTER SATELE SHAN

FROM: DARTH MARR

We must confer.  The threats that face us will require our coordination, in the Force as well as militarily.  I have had visions of this conflict, visions from which we must draw meaning and purpose.  As our cause is, at present, the same, I shall appreciate your professional assistance in this matter.

Come to my quarters at 18:00 tomorrow.  Ready your mind — the ordeal we face is formidable.

======================

 

That had sounded exactly like the usual Marr, except for the fact that the request had been made at all.

Even as her feet propelled her forward she questioned her judgment in coming here.  She knew most of her motivation was selfish, even if she left out the matter of — no, she wouldn't dignify those immoderate urges with the word "attraction".  Curiosity was foremost — after the temple incident, she remembered Marr's stern and decisive request (more like a decree) to speak no more of it.  Yet now this reversal, only a week later.  It was out of the ordinary.  Had the Sith really experienced prophetic visions?  She did want to know, and it did have bearing on this miserable business with Revan and Vitiate. 

Did he mean to capture or kill her?  This was a fine time to be wondering about that again, she thought.  Well, she had her Force senses and her intuition, and none of them told her this was a trap… as dubious as it seemed.  There was also the "comforting" fact that Marr being implicated in her demise would screw the alliance and the mission and, fate forbid, the galaxy beyond.  He would have to be suicidally stupid for that level of sabotage.  She knew he wasn't.  (It would be easier, perhaps, if he were…)

She shivered despite the heat, remembering the hypnotizing bliss of his mouth between her legs, the delirious joy of yielding to him and to the deepest parts of herself, one with her senses —

Satele paused on the path and closed her eyes.  The peace she had made in the temple with her memories of Jace — that remained, that was good.  The desires she had uncovered beyond that, on the other hand… yes, those were a problem.  Calmly she told herself that time and discipline would resolve the issue, as they had for more than thirty years.  The longing for a partner would dissipate harmlessly after a time, like petals at the end of the season, and dissolve away into the wide quiet sea below her Jedi serenity.  Trust in yourself and in the Force.  She breathed evenly, listening to the jungle.  She had a certain respect for Marr.  That, she could admit.  That was healthy.  That could stay.

Not the feel of his broad, methodical hands exploring her body, his low sibilant voice by her ear, his cock slipping inside her, and then out, and then in again —

She repeated the entire Code to herself, twice, a little fast, and remembered something Kao Cen Darach had told her a very long time ago.  You master your affinity with the Force not simply because you are powerful, but because you have a calling.  We put aside the fleeting attachments of life so that others might appreciate them in peace.  Do you see?  Meditate with me, Satele.  Observe your desires.  Face them.  Let them pass.  There is fulfillment, too, in our way.  I know you will find it.

That was after he had caught her in the third-level supply room with another Padawan, both of them teenagers clumsy with hormones and eager to experiment…

Not for the first time, or the five-hundredth, Satele pondered whether she was quite suited for some of the Jedi strictures.  An appetite for passion certainly ran in the family — was, of course, the reason there was a family to run in.  Such as it was.

We all have our weak spots, our challenges.  Accepting that we have weaknesses, and knowing the ones we do: this is what can give us the strength to stand firm in our principles.  That was what she told her own students when they, in turn, struggled with temptations.  Wise words.  Weren't they?

She took a few more silent breaths and then kept walking.

The Imp forces hadn't yet acceded to the request for mutual base access; Satele had had to employ a few tricks to circumvent their nervous patrollers on her way to this lonely path.  They would all know who she was, and most would probably stay their weapons against her — for now — but she reasoned it was far more likely that Marr had set her this evasion as some small test, a confirmation of ability.  How very Sith of him.

Dusk was deepening as she arrived at the temple's floodlit entrance.  A blast door, tightly sealed, had been expertly fitted to the trapezoidal entryway; two formidable, platform-like attack droids stood sentry on either side of it, blistering with weapons.  The moment she entered their perimeter both of them swiveled their multiple gun barrels to train on her.  Reflex tempted her to draw her saber, but discipline kept it at her belt.  She looked up at the droids, one and then the other, for some further sign of acknowledgment.  There was none.  In the Force she felt no sentient presences nearby except him.  I hope he doesn't expect me to start a fight.

"I'm here at the request of Darth Marr," she announced loudly.

The droids remained still, though Satele noticed some of their chassis lights activating in a new pattern.  After a moment a narrow scanning beam swept over her from a cunningly concealed unit above the blast door, limning her figure in glowing green light.  As the guard droids relaxed their weapons she heard a distant mechanical chime, then a closer one, and then a hissing rumble of stone and metal as the entrance opened to admit her.  Beyond in the darkness was … well, she would see, wouldn't she.

Satele centered her mind, set her will, breathed deeply, and stepped over the threshold.

Notes:

Removed some tags until the respective characters actually show up in the story.

Chapter 3

Summary:

Satele and Marr play mind games in the fortress of solitude.

Satele's eyes adjusted to a large, almost cluttered anteroom that looked like a dormant hub of action. Serving droids, slumped and inactive. A rudimentary comms setup, an empty reception desk.  Holding cells for sentients and beasts, scrubbed and empty.  A medical corner with cabinets of therapeutics, a kolto tank empty of liquid… and a surgical table.  She didn't want to think of what that was for.  Emergency medicine? Stars, I hope so.  Corridors branched off to the sides, but she ignored them in favor of the door facing her on the inner wall, another blast-sealed entryway, slightly smaller.  She stepped carefully past the many furnishings to the far side of the room.  Another green scanner examined her and the blast door split into two diagonal halves to let her pass. Marr's presence was very clear, unmoving; it tugged at the edges of her sensing.  She headed in its direction, taking her time.  There was little hurry.  For the moment, anyway.

The next chamber was a sort of armory/gymnasium, its empty center spacious, with a layer of springy, absorbent flooring material over the native stone.  The periphery boasted a rack of well-used practice weapons, a gun locker, target dummies, and neat arrangements of weights and remotes.  As with the previous area, a thick durasteel blast door barred her passage at the far side.  This was rather impressive (and excessive) for one person's temporary field lodgings; Satele, for her part, counted herself lucky to have a private tent not even a quarter the size of this single room.

Then again, she recalled, Sith Lords of Marr's stature had the wealth, the power, and usually the vanity for an outlay like this temple.  An illustrious master of the Empire deserves every comfort of home, she thought sardonically, recognizing at the same time that she was just a shade envious.  But I know my path and I welcome walking it. 

…Even into a Darth's sanctum, in alliance or… more?

Yes.  Most of the time.  She smiled ruefully to herself.  There was more peace to be found in acknowledging weakness than in denying it, after all.

As she waited for the training room's door-scanner to analyze her and grant her entrance, she realized with surprise that the ceiling was artificial, a metal walling-off of one of the skylit chambers so favored by Massassi builders.  Marr was as exacting about his security as with everything else.  Of course.  That would also explain why the air was so stale and dry despite the filter vents she saw.  She wondered if his stronghold on Dromund Kaas was anything like this place.

Next was a — lounge?  No, lobby was really a more appropriate descriptor.  Although clean and functional, there was a hotel-like anonymity to the narrow, austere sitting-room she found here.  Aside from a single powered-down servitor droid and a quartet of angular, unupholstered couches, the only real decorations were a potted native cycad by the entrance and a wall display of a quadrupedal skeleton Satele didn't recognize.  On the left wall this time, rather than the far one, was fitted a narrow door of gleaming metal shrouded in the vibrating glow of a forcefield.  Installed subtly but not invisibly along the ceiling were what Satele recognized as apertures for retractable defense turrets.

More security. 

Marr was very close, she knew.  There was no scanning beam to verify her here, but before she had the time to search elsewhere for sensor gadgetry she heard the whir of a complex mechanism and the silvered door hissed open, its forcefield blinking off with a soft whummm.  There was no other fanfare, no greeting of any kind at all; she scanned the dim beyond with Force-augmented eyes and entered, warily, her hand at her belt-sheath and her thumb on the dualsaber's ignition switch.

This was her destination, the last room, Marr's inner chamber.  It was low-lit, windowless and rectangular.  To Satele's left were a desk, a holocom, several blank monitors, a modest bed, a rack upon which rested most of Marr's armor, and a tiered shelf of meticulously arranged holocrons in their prismatic shapes and colors.  At the opposite end were a kitchenette, a medical cabinet, the presumable entrance to a washroom, and what looked like some sort of sophisticated military safe, a black metal shell covered with officious warnings in severe aurebesh type.  She was taking a thorough measure of things before confronting the man whose presence rang so loudly to her Force perception.

"The weapon is not necessary."

Marr had been meditating on a mat in the near corner, by the desk.  She finally turned to face him, letting her draw hand relax while remaining alert.  They'd met a few times since the Gravinia incident, at conference-table briefings or in passing, but Satele had to admit that it still made her slightly anxious to look at him.  Particularly now, without the fortifying buffer of a crowd around them.  Nonetheless she met his masked gaze with defiant confidence.  Of his emotion she noticed little; as at other times, their powers made them largely closed to each other's sensing.

"As if you wouldn't have brought one."

"I suppose that is fair."  Marr was still, observing her.  He was hooded and masked, though otherwise lightly attired, in the thin cloth under-armor she remembered all too well.  It was an odd contrast.  Satele wished she could see his face.  "So.  You have come."

"Yes, I have," she said, furrowing her brow.  "What is the meaning of this?"

"You received the message."

Satele nodded slowly.

"Then meditate with me."  He gestured to the space across from him on the mat.

She crossed her arms.  "I know you didn't invite me here just to meditate."

"Suit yourself."  He projected a blank calm, and Satele imagined his eyes closing behind the mask.

Fine, then.  If he's going to play coy…

She pulled off her high boots with the alacrity of habit and sat cross-legged opposite the Sith, a good meter of space between them.  Studying the etched metal ovoid of his mask, she touched him lightly with the Force, half from instinct and half from curiosity. 

"I feel that.  You are not meditating."

"And neither are you, if you're speaking up to tell me that."

Marr sounded decidedly… testy.  "The best way to begin this, for all further purposes, is meditation.  We will discuss thereafter.  Clear your mind and join me."

Satele misliked this vague beginning, but she acquiesced, straightening her back and adopting her customary position, retreating from and into her mind to become a vessel of the Force.  Before she started she wondered, briefly and idly, how Marr and his fellow Sith accomplished this.  As she entered trance she felt him nearby as a star perceives its neighbor: flowing gravity, pulls and repulsions, an anonymous awareness governed only by laws of motion.  The Force in this state could not be analyzed, only experienced; every time Satele emerged from deep meditation she felt fuller of wonder and emptier of knowledge.  A healthy state for a Jedi, as Master Zho would doubtless have said.

Within the Force, out of time, Satele saw the passing evening from far away when she saw it at all, one aspect of the infinite many.  There were refuge and enlightenment both in this stillness empty of thought, and novice Force-users had a tendency to get stuck in trance well past their intentions.  She had long since learned greater discipline, the art of perceiving unconsciously, and was content to remain in the universe until the threads anchoring her to reality felt Marr withdraw back to his immediate surroundings. 

He raised his head and seemed to be looking at her.  "There.  A clearer mind, for us both.  It is wise to attune oneself to the source of one's power, especially when one plans on using it."

She cocked her head at him.  "Using it?  How?"  She continued before he could answer: "And, if I may ask, how is it that you meditate?   Concentrate on whatever you hate and fear?"

"That is the way of it, for many Sith," he responded cagily.  "The technique I practice is a honing of rightful anger, immolating the self in the purity of the emotion."  He gesticulated.  "…Perhaps this is vague."

"No," she said, although she did have a great many more questions.  They can wait, for now.

Marr shifted position, relaxing his stance slightly.  As he moved Satele was reminded anew of how form-fitting his under-suit was.  Although he was Sith and his aging flesh bore the visible depredations of his power, veined and inflamed and grey-pale, his body was defined and dense with muscle and he did cut an impressive figure.  Before the temple incident she would have found all this trivial to ignore. 

He cleared his throat.  "The visions… much of what I saw was impossible to interpret.  But there was meaning enough to sense the treachery and malice Revan and my erstwhile Emperor bear us.  Not simply us on this distant moon, but the multitudes beyond.  They would see planets in cinders, regardless of allegiance.  Moreover they would see life consigned to annihilation."

"I don't see why someone like you wouldn't welcome that."

"I should like to know that my Empire endures beyond my mortal self," he said stonily.  "The void claims us all, in the end — in its time.  Vitiate's goals are a perversion of death, of Sith power, and most damningly of the Empire itself.  His plans must be thwarted.  The line of history shall persist."

"Thank you for your answer, Marr, but with due respect, I believe I already understand the gravity of our situation."  She sensed a momentary wrath from him, like a corona of heat.  It withdrew swiftly.

"That is not all of it.  There is something… wrong, with Revan.  I have felt it.  It may be a weakness we can exploit.  If it can be identified."

Satele kept her expression even and open, her emotions flat as a temple pool.  "That is useful information.  But is there a reason it couldn't have been shared at conference or through secure comms?"

She knew how much Marr liked to wield his pointed silences, and waited patiently until at last he spoke, rising to his feet.  She did likewise, taking a step back toward the door and searching in the Force for threats.  Nothing signaled danger, but she didn't completely know what he was capable of.  At least that's probably mutual.

"Hold," he said, raising an arm.  "I summoned you here to study these visions and would be most displeased were you to dismiss them without complete information."

"Complete information?"

"Permit me to show you.  You may share what I have seen.  Perhaps then you will understand."  He turned his broad palms up in a gesture of conciliation.  "After you may decide as you will."

Satele knew what he meant by that: a targeted transfer of memories, a temporary melding of minds.  It was about as intimate as visiting the rooms of each other's dwellings, in this case; there was little of great secrecy revealed, but a perceptive visitor or a careless host could present unforeseen problems.

"You want me to open my mind?"  She remained incredulous.  "To you."

"As I shall in turn.  In opposition we balance one another.  You will not come to harm."

"I've heard that before."

"And was it wrong?"

She scoffed — Maybe not that one time — but let his comment lie, taking a step forward.  "Let's get this over with."

Marr motioned toward the mat.  "Sit." 

She sat facing him again, wary and watchful.

"Take your mask off," she said abruptly.  Marr exuded sharp and immediate irritation.  He stilled but did not otherwise respond, and Satele's forehead crinkled at his obstinacy even as her voice remained firm and calm.  Sith and their hair triggers.  I wonder how hard it is to hold in the fury, for someone who draws strength from doing the opposite.  "You have more power here than anywhere outside Dromund Kaas or the bridge of your warship.  So concede me this request.  I know you hate it but I didn't exactly enjoy skulking through your guard patrols to meet you in a place where I'm at a serious disadvantage, either.  And I'm not about to touch minds with someone whose face I can't see.  Especially not when —" Oh stars I shouldn't be thinking of — "…not when I've seen it before."

Again he waited long enough that the silence grew heavy and strange.  Satele weathered it patiently, her outward self betraying nothing but tranquility.  After a charged, extended quiet Marr at last raised his hands to his face, fingers manipulating something at his temples.  With a click the mask came free.  He left the hood on, which looked more than a little incongruous with the rest of his brief attire, but Satele knew better than to push the issue.

Though she remembered — all too well — what she'd seen of him in the temple a week ago, the sight of Marr's bare face still unnerved and surprised her.  A wide, uneven band of scar tissue, studded with the interface jacks for his mask, cut across his seared forehead and the rheumy, unfocused remains of his eyes; his aquiline nose, though mostly spared by the blinding wound, had obviously been broken countless times before.  Lesser scars and the furrows of age trailed from his broad, uneven mouth and the purplish discoloration common to powerful Sith had begun to set in.  It was a wrecked and unlovely countenance, if not quite the kind to drive a man to suicide.

About that.  "Marr," she said with gentle humor, "for the record, your face is nowhere near disturbing enough to make someone else want to die."

He bristled.  "Are you quite serious?  That is a rumor.  A partial truth at best.  And hardly relevant at present."  Perhaps she shouldn't have said that.  But she did take a guilty enjoyment in the hasty, haughty way he pronounced things when he was aggravated.  Maybe a little pique will even help his meditation.  "If you intend to trick me into thinking about classified information, you will not find success."  He glowered, as much as his face allowed.  "Let us begin."

Straightening himself into a meditation posture, Marr extended a hand, his palm facing her and his opposite hand bent into some Sith mudra.  She pressed her opposite palm against his and stared at his maskless face as they lowered their minds' guard, haltingly and with suspicion.  Satele imagined a pair of warring cities winching open their gates in reluctant fulfillment of a treaty.  Now they were vulnerable to one another, sharing the surfaces of their thoughts; she imagined a foyer in her mind, clean and spartan, to which she was welcoming her counterpart.  There was a weird heat from Marr as he sank into trance, an agitation that she realized must be his contemplative anger.  Though her face went red with the shared emotion she let it pass over her as she had the warmth of the jungle, and her own mind followed its own familiar paths to higher consciousness, weaving chaos into harmony.

From the perfect emptiness of the trance she felt Marr's mind locked in orbit with her own, his thoughts reaching into memory as he worked to impart to her the visions he had seen.  Satele's perception smoothed and flattened, reflecting, and her consciousness flowed like liquid over the shapes Marr had placed for it.

She rushed up from the propagating cells of an ancient plant to soar above the jungle moon, rising further yet, passing through the burning-sunset storms of Yavin itself until the stars reappeared before her in the endless black.  She was Revan — or was it Vitiate? — and he was watching, watching this, watching everything.  He was pondering something in depth, in abyssal depth, but his own mind was opaque.  At irregular intervals he convulsed, laughing with diabolical vigor.  Was it real?  Was Revan a threat to the plans that were converging even now, the reforging of his spirit into the undying being who deserved the galaxy's subjugation?  Why was the forest burning as her vision shook and whose warships were those flying through her?  A shock of primal pleasure coursed through all of it and as she stared with growing unease at the writhing fragments of Vitiate inching toward each other, she felt an entirely different sense of urgency filling her in opposition, one that pulsed with a familiar, forbidden rhythm, one that she wanted to see to its end…

Revan looked at them again and she sensed his powerful wrath, the centuries spent coveting freedom and revenge.  Joining with his mind she looked forward to the day of his final victory, knew of his certain triumph, and then… faltered, searching for a foreign feeling, unable to complete his thoughts, spiraling into entropy like an incomplete machine.  As Satele's own mind tried to measure the meaning and magnitude of what it saw, as the driving tension expanded to a loudening drumbeat of physical need, her ancestor realized the intrusion and cast her out into stones that floated in a waterfall of nebula-gas before hurtling past the twilight atmosphere of the Yavin moon and through the masonry of a silent temple guarded by droids —

The visions faded and their physical senses resumed primacy.  Even after over a half-century of training Satele still found such transitions jarring.  She realized that she was half out of breath and leaned, for just an instant, against Marr's upraised hand before pulling hers away.  The effects of exertion faded quickly, but that… other feeling remained, the ungratified yearning for ecstasy.  Part of her wanted to reach for Marr, to press her body to his —

She felt her face reddening and hoped, with the furtive little staccato thoughts prudent for an open-but-secretive mind, that he hadn't sensed all of that.  Wary, she raised her defenses again; there was no point in sustaining this dangerous weak point now that its purpose was done.

She was aware of Marr's own disorientation after the sharing, his deep dread of the visions and, yes, a thin but blazing streak of something more carnal.  As usual his outward manner revealed nothing, although she noticed uncomfortably that he was partway erect beneath his leggings.  Their minds both landed on that thought and then bounced instantly away as if scalded. 

Brusquely and slowly he spoke.  "So.  You have seen."

"I see more of what you meant, about Revan.  Something off.  It was almost obvious, it felt like, and then gone."  Satele was careful in her speech, loath to reveal anything further to him of the current running high and fast under her thoughts.

Perhaps Marr sensed it anyway, or had earlier.  "You are troubled.  The… physical effects are to be expected.  I feel them also.  Doubtless you have resisted such trifling passions many a time.  As have I."  He was clipping his r's very pointedly, as if he were orating.

Have you?  "'To be expected'?"

He glanced off to the side, the hood obscuring most of his face as he did so.  "This vision's occurrence was — unusual —"  From his mind she felt a rush of arousal that was swiftly cut off, though not before suggesting quite strongly to her who the catalyst for it was.  She wondered, her face warming, why his thoughts were still open.  Marr cleared his throat, regaining his composure as if he had never faltered: "It appeared to me in Gravinia's temple."

She recognized that name.  "A lot of things appeared in that temple," she said tartly.

"It appeared," he repeated, "while we were… joined."

Little moments of hidden desire like candies snatched from the jar were one thing, but hearing the matter spoken of directly, catching glimpses of Marr's own past and present temptations, made her feel only shame.  Breathe.  There is no passion. 

Oh Satele, you know there is.

There is peace.

Breathe.

Marr went on: "Hence the … extraneous sensations."

There was an awkward pause.

"If this vision is so important and you had it seven days ago, why the wait?" she ventured.  Interviewing a subject, debriefing a soldier: she could do that.  That was a much safer and surer role than whatever the hell else she might be thinking about herself and Marr.

Strangely it was fear she sensed first from him.  Not fear for himself, exactly; a statesman's fear, shot through with fatalism, and along with that a kind of half-realized guilt.  While she pondered its significance his blind eyes bored into her as if he knew her thoughts.  Does he?

"Time was needed to determine the relevance and sensitivity of the information."

Satele knew that wasn't the truth.  "I see."

"You do not believe me.  Very well.  My motives are immaterial.  We must refine the knowledge that the Force has revealed to us."

"What are you getting at?"

"Dispatching personnel to investigate.  Mine and yours.  Investigating further visions."  She sensed more honesty in that.  "I thought perhaps your battle meditation skills could be put to use in coordinating our forces."

"I could … try that," she said cautiously.  "But you easily could have asked some other way, if that's what you wanted me to do.  And what's this about further visions?  You know as well as I that you can't just choose to have those at will.  Even seers can't really control it."

"Be that as it may, it is not unlikely for one of us to experience ... further sensings.  You now have the proper context should this occur."  He was stiff and formal and she felt his thoughts fragmenting and reforming at electric speed.

Satele bowed her head to acknowledge him.  "Thank you.  Let us… discuss these at our next council."  Summoning all the composure she could muster, she rose to her feet just as Marr did.  "I appreciate this opportunity for collaboration."

Before she could turn to leave he caught her by the hand — startled, she didn't immediately writhe away or blast him into the wall but only stared at him, transfixed.  His face was stern as a statue's and his mind was a dam strained to near-bursting.  Silently he released her hand to stroke his fingers, slowly and solemnly, along the soft underside of her forearm.  She held her breath.  From his thoughts, still weirdly unguarded, she felt more wistfulness than desire.  He did say he wasn't used to being touched…  As she remembered this he looked abruptly up at her as if to say something, but after a moment chose silence, releasing her arm and turning away to contemplate his array of holocrons.

"The night patrols employ many more Sith to detect hostiles.  Manage your return route accordingly," he said to the wall.

"Thank you, Marr." 

He made no response and Satele felt his surface thoughts churning in a frantic, indifferentiable whirl.  Best to leave him alone with that, I think.  Before I do anything stupid.

 

She hastened out through the many doors, into the dark and teeming jungle, past the Imperials' territory and then home.

 

 

---

 

 

Satele lay awake in her tent, ruminating.  What a bizarre meeting that had been.  Marr had to have had an ulterior motive for it —  that much was obvious —  but whether it was sizing up his adversary, sexual attraction, or something yet more insidious was unclear.  She was relieved that she'd been able to resist the stirrings that came over her after receiving the vision, unsettled though she was that Marr seemed to have been facing similar desires. 

How had she sensed those so thoroughly?  Perhaps it had been only a clever snare on the Sith's part, revealing vulnerability to lure her into complacency or an ill-advised attack.  That was the likeliest reason; he was not at all the type to forget his barriers or to pretend at emotional connection. 

Then again, there was another possibility…

Dread sent a cold shiver up her spine as she considered it.  The very idea was unnerving.  But it would have to be tested, and the testing was simple enough.  Satele sat up, exhaled steadily and reached out with the Force, lightly but surely, projecting a message off into the night like the cast of a baitless fishing line.  <If you can hear this, Marr, please acknowledge.>

All was still around her, and she attuned her ears to the calls and chirps of the moon's nocturnal beasts as she listened for the vanishingly slim chance of a reply.  If nothing else, this was a useful exercise for her concentration.  Time crept slowly onward toward morning.  She continued to listen, and likewise continued to hear nothing but the living jungle in answer.

There.  Tested.  Findings negative.  Of course it wasn't as bad as you thought it was, Satele.  Trust yourself.  She relaxed her posture and lay back on her pillow, eager to rest at last.

Suddenly Marr's voice echoed into her mind as clearly as if he were standing beside her, and for just an instant she saw him, seated in his inner chamber with his mask on and a green holocron in one hand.  <Good evening, Grand Master Shan.>

 Force preserve me.  This is not good.

Notes:

Thanks for reading! This is much longer than the previous chapters because I couldn't find anywhere I wanted to end it. D:

Chapter 4

Summary:

cranking up that angst dial

Marr had not leapt to verify the information, but he had suspected it nonetheless, when his mental wards went weak against her.  It was confirmed with Shan's searching message, which came accompanied, for him, by a grey-dark tableau of her meager tent (and her within it…): there was a bond between them now, however it had come to be, and it would have to be dealt with. 

Yoked by a capricious, fateful Force … with her, of all people.  It was a cruel twist.  He imagined she felt similarly.  Well.  The next time they met he would not have to imagine.

Obviously shocked and distressed, she had ended their telepathy abruptly after his greeting and he had heard nothing else from her in the day since.  Nor had he attempted to contact her; best to let her process this before proceeding in whatever direction revealed itself.  At least he was thus far free of the intrusive vision-fragments he knew to be common in Force bonds, though with their current situation on Yavin it would perhaps be better to have further glimpses to piece together.

Visions.  Shan had seen his vision, and seen through his pretexts; of course she had, he thought.  Nonetheless he had secured her assurance of cooperation, for now.  Moreover he had felt her thoughts after they communed.  Not surprising so much as … intriguing.  Part of him had expected the Jedi to have already repressed any lingering desires; the rest of him was unconscionably pleased to discover that she retained a distinct attraction, however much she might resist acting upon it.

Already he had taken measures to have his Black Cipher convey intelligence to him in static messages only, refusing all calls.  The risk of her forcibly touching his mind while Vowrawn or Logistics pestered him about fleet movements was too great, even if he would notice it.  For now he would absorb the messages piecemeal, peripherally, not in a continuous experience that the Jedi might perceive through him.  Of course the Council would sneer and snipe about this comms limitation for a time, but they could be cowed.  Uninterested though he might be in the throne itself, he was not above alluding to the possibility when it suited his purposes.

Shan must also be compromised in such a way.  He wondered at the extent.  With a touch of envy, he considered that she likely had many more options for delegating her … sensitive responsibilities.  Naturally the Republic was, even at its "best", quite the opposite of truly unified… but what a relief it might be, to watch his back only part of the time instead of every living second.

Weakness, said his conscience.  Weakness to rue the fortifying challenges set before him.  Then again, the internecine coups and betrayals of the Imperial powerful were dangerous to the Empire itself, far more than to his irrelevant comfort.  Without the structure that held them, the Sith were torches in a storm.  To endure unto the ages, to preserve power and existence against a galaxy of enemies -- for these things the State must persist, united in force and focus.  He would rest soon, in a carven tomb the same as the ancients', but their kind would continue to rise and flourish and expire.  It was the cycle, the way of things.  In his weary bones he felt the calling, as always: this cycle, the crucible of strife, was a sacrament not to be profaned by Vitiate's egomania.

Comfort is irrelevant, and to seek it for its own sake is weakness… but health is strength, and a master of legions needs his, does he not?  There were empirical benefits to touch and, despite the abstemious Jedi preachings, to sexual pleasure; it could attenuate passion or stoke it to lethal heights.  His weakening body might be rejuvenated, in some modest sense, by such a medicine.  Though he were bound for the grave he might yet retain a warrior's vigor in his last years.  Perhaps he could even turn her -- unrestrained emotion was more his realm of mastery than hers, after all...

No.  That was an ambitious daydream.  The pragmatic thing was to aim realistically.  This strange… alliance, in tandem with the needs of the Revan operation, could forestall or mitigate Shan's mind-linking while he studied a way to sever or exploit their bond.  Any abetting of her cause would be nullified by the enhancement of his own.  If he acted wisely.

So be it then.  It was decided.  Now to get her to see reason.

There was a command briefing that evening, an hour before sunset.  Shan would be there, albeit with her coterie of Jedi and Republic hangers-on, and likely that wastrel son of hers.  The Sith, for once, he was grateful for; though Nox and Beniko and the Wrath did their fair share of answering back at him, they could be counted on to fall in line with his directives and execute them with minimal oversight.  How tedious it must be to be Shan, smothered by supplicants, beholden to the people instead of the cause.

Marr reclined on the bed, gathering his energy, pacifying his head with shah-tezh problems until sleep swam up from the deep to engulf him.

 

---

 

A shock of passion tore him from a troubled dream.

He saw her on the cot in her tent, restive with need in the dark hour before dawn; he saw a hand push down her leggings and her legs twisting out of them just enough to open herself to touch.  The lips of her vulva glistened as she stroked them, pressuring with the heel of her palm, sighing at the gentle sensation of her fingers.  Curse this vision, this door between their minds that taunted him with such scenes, this chain that pulled him rapturously and irresistibly along.  Marr reached without thinking to divest himself of his own leggings, his cock already hard and seeping, and touched himself in turn, gripping his shaft with a sure hand as he pulled his foreskin over the head, the repetitive gliding friction building his arousal to ever greater intensity as he trained his perception on her.  His will seemed not his own.

Shan's mind was everywhere but it resolved most often into thoughts of two men.  One he recognized as the now-Supreme Commander of the Republic, both young and old, the young far more vivid, more precise in her memory.  (So. That was who it had been.)  She called up well-cherished remembrances of secretly making love in a tent much like the one she lay in now, passionate and naïve with the broad-chested soldier she had saved and been saved by, times past counting.  The emotion that coursed from her was idea far more than words, the ecstatic rightness of opening and unity.

The other man (furtively, reluctantly, desperately) was him.  Well.  That was no surprise, not now… 

In the back of his mind he wondered what of his own thoughts she was seeing.  There were echoes of Gravinia's temple and of the Sith lovers he had once had but the greater share of his mind was simply following hers, his hand pumping faster as their lust was reflected back at each other, magnifying beyond control.  The motions of Shan's hand on and into herself grew more urgent.  She was trying to focus inward, to keep her fantasies and fulfillment only her own, but the link between them meant glimpses of her mind's eye escaped to him whether she wanted them to or not: the strength of this feeling would not, could not be hidden.  He was excited by this intrusion, but her sense of shame and dismay redounded to him, as closely intent on her as he was, and their combined emotions wrestled in conflict.

A note of defiance sang out from her mind and now she thought of no one at all, propelling her body toward catharsis with pure physicality, straining upward and pulsating against the pressure of her stilled palm.  Her orgasm was sharp and bitter and hit him like a blow.  He flinched sideways in his bed, only then noticing his cold sweat and the semen coating his fingers.

Marr was disgusted with himself.  She felt similarly, it was clear.  It was distinctly not a reaction he enjoyed having amplified by this damned connection. 

Shan's mind flattened out beneath the resolve of her renewed Jedi calm, and he sensed her thoughts drawing backward like liquid through a drain, as far and as fortified as she could get.  The overture of regret he sent to her went unacknowledged.  He did not press the issue; his own mind receded as well, into uncertain shelter.

This cannot end well, he thought blackly, rising to clean himself. 

Notes:

Another uneasy ending! Brought to you by guilty fap time.

Arguing strictly from the canon, I really don't think these two would pursued anything further on Yavin. Probably not until Odessen. But I think their dynamic is sexy and interesting, so it's a challenge to write them in a way consistent with their characters while still fulfilling the "Marr and Satele have a torrid affair during SoR" goal. The end result is a lotttttt of emotional distress and some convenient plot contrivances. :D

Chapter 5

Summary:

Satele makes some discoveries.

She had risen and now she was walking in the jungle, studying the ancient trees and their silent vast height. In the murky dawn the life around her sang and called. The Force, too, made a chorus; in her very being she performed her own part in it. Her morning forms and exercises had sharpened her mind and readied her body for action, and a momentous purpose animated her journey through the wild. In her Jedi senses a beacon of energy radiated from the forest ahead, impelling her to know its source.

Satele's memory replayed the trials that had led her here: the snuffed planets, the sundered lives — the Jedi with hijacked, broken minds, forced to perpetrate atrocities.  Tython in cinders.  Invading armies treading the charred corpses of her friends into bonedust.  Vitiate's malevolent laughter.  Her very soul felt tarnished, as heavy as lead.  A soft rain began to fall and the darkness of the morning forest deepened, the air growing weighty as well with mist and the scent of petrichor. 

In the distance ahead there was a clearing; in the clearing, a figure.  Satele stopped to size up the interloper.  Around them she sensed a coursing node of unfathomable Force power, the same power that had beckoned her here.  Was it flowing from the silent Jedi or through them?  It was difficult to tell.  Her sense of the person ahead curved and wavered weirdly, as if reflected by many shifting lenses: she knew it as one of her erstwhile Padawans, though not a recent one.  The student who had rescued Tython, perhaps.  Student — hah, no, she reminded herself, that one is far past a novice now.  Her life kept stretching on and onward beyond the still-fresh memories of the many seekers she had taught, and she was still sometimes shocked when presented with the true numbering of years.  Sixty was a strange place.

Enhancing her sight she saw the unknown being wore an obscuring hooded cloak, their head bent in what appeared to be meditation — nothing in the least unusual for a Jedi, though no help for her curiosity.  Still her old protégé's identity was an enigma both within and without the Force, resisting all close scrutiny.

She sped her steps, meaning to settle this mystery, but she had barely resumed walking when another figure, all too familiar, loomed beyond her.  The hood, the mask, the ornamental shoulder-spikes: in silhouette and then in detail she saw and knew him.  Despite his size and armor he stalked the figure in the clearing with panther-quiet tread and assassin's intent.

The power her old Padawan wielded brightened and intensified in her senses, glowing such that it was nearly visible to the eye.  She understood in her marrow that the silent Jedi was crucial, a fulcrum for the galaxy's fate.  Darth Marr, with his designs of death, was not her ally here.

She swallowed heavily, gathering her strength, centering her mind and body.  It would be better not to fight him but this left her little choice.

He turned to face her, dramatically slow.  They understood one another without speaking.  She drew the long hilt of her dualsaber and switched it on, the twin blades comet-bright in the dim of the forest.  He paused for what seemed a long time.  Then without speaking he ignited his own weapon, red as rage, advancing toward her with patient, inexorable steps.

Their bond was silent, and even when she pushed his mind was closed to her.  Had their link dissolved as capriciously as it had formed?  It would be easier to duel this way, and harder.  On balance she was grateful not to fear (…or feel) wounding the one connected to her.  With grim resolve she tightened her grip on her weapon, meeting him edge on edge as he closed in range of her.

Marr fought with a single saber, allowing him to marshal all of his considerable strength behind each blow.  It took no small amount of expertise and Force-aided counterbalancing to avoid being staggered.  But she was a warrior down to her essence, no less than was he, and her body knew the feints and flurries of combat with the automatic ease of instinct.  Her dueling style was dynamic if no longer acrobatic, and the double-ended saber whirled in blinding arcs that Marr only barely parried —  though parry he did, and with iron steadiness, ceding no ground.  In her Force sense Satele felt the eyes of many sharp-clawed beasts watching from the dark, eager to make a meal of the defeated.  Of him she still felt almost nothing at all —  not even the steady rage that fueled his power —  and the unidentified Jedi had made no reaction to the melee unfolding nearby, presumably still deep in trance.  But there was no time to ponder these quieter mysteries in the midst of a battle for her life and the lives of others — 

Pine needles and perspiration pricked her skin as she and the Sith traded blows for what could have been two minutes or twenty, the hum and clash of saber blades ringing a harsh and familiar war-chorus in her ears.  Marr's etched, expressionless mask stayed trained on her with droidlike exactitude as he countered her with his blade.  Although his defense remained impenetrable, the response of his lightsaber became minutely slower with each hit, and her keen perception picked up the sound of his labored breathing.  Good.  Fatigue.  I've got to push this — 

She shouted a sonic kiai that buffeted him as she let loose with a renewed offensive, a series of ferocious all-angle slashes that, slower and stylized, comprised the second of her daily practice forms.  It was a gamble —  the moves left dangerous openings if performed imperfectly, and even in the best case would disadvantage her if none of the strikes managed to connect.

None of them did, valiant though her effort was.

A fist-sized rock hit her in the side, almost knocking the wind out of her, and she pulled back just in time as he lunged forward to exploit the distraction, his crimson blade sweeping across the place where her chest had been an instant before.  A steady series of stones and branches began to assail her from the sides as Marr shifted his own stance to all-out assault, his two-handed blows beating her back under their iron power.  The fatigue seemed to have vanished entirely — now she was the one trying desperately to keep her breath and hold her own.  Satele imposed calm upon herself, let her movements flow along with the Force of their own accord.  She felt loose and untethered, as though using someone else's body.

In the eternal now there is time enough.

A sharp little twig struck her in the temple, and before long a runnel of blood stung her eyes.  She closed them, her face going slack into deep concentration as time seemed to slow almost to stasis around her.  In the Force she saw Marr and herself and her old student like peaks above an ocean of swirling clouds.  No, not above, amid —  the currents and eddies were in motion all around them, most strikingly around the hooded Jedi, and they roiled with power and portent.  With focus the patterns slowed, allowed observation.  Satele followed the uneven lines, searching out something (anything) to use against him —  

There.  At her periphery: a twinge, a ripple, the slightest instability.  She followed her Force sense to a pine-branch above them, heavy and lightning-singed and precarious, primed to fall at the subtlest touch…

Her lips mouthed a silent word of focus and she felt, rather than heard, the satisfying crack that followed.  It sent her back from the trance to reality: locked in a stalemate with a Sith Lord, his saber's red glow casting an ominous shade over her face.  She narrowed her eyes at the mute metal mask, wishing she knew what was going on behind it.  The bent hiss of deadlocked lightsabers flared as they pushed against each other —  

The impact took Marr completely by surprise.  He groaned in shock, disengaging from her, and in that ghost of an opening Satele's blade found its mark.  The Sith bellowed in agony and reeled back as it pierced his stomach through with a grisly sizzle and the acrid odor of burnt flesh.

For a moment they froze as time stilled for her again: the moment between the fall and the cry.  This was reality and it must be borne.

<IT MUST!>

She could hear the cruel sneer in the voice that invaded her consciousness.  Vitiate.

Marr stumbled back and fell to one knee, his saber held out across him in desperate defense.  She couldn't tell if time was moving or not.  The Emperor began to laugh, and his laughter grew louder until it flooded her ears.  As Marr's grip faltered, a thread of steam rising from his wound, Satele saw the Jedi at last turn to face them, hood raised, eyes bulged in shock and panic —  

The being she knew as the Emperor, in strange black robes, had a shining blade poised at the Jedi's neck.  Casually he slashed it across her student's throat, and the hooded head flopped forward like a doll's.

Was the screaming hers?  It wasn't like her to —  

Marr raised his weakening head to look despairingly at her and she knew in the pit of her stomach that everything had gone terribly wrong.

As the monstrous laughter grew to swallow them all there was wind, everywhere wind, and as the last of her was whisked to oblivion she was conscious as herself only as separated motes of soot, borne apart by a darkness deeper even than the Sith would go.

 

---

  

She opened her eyes to black nothing.  Slowly she became aware again of her body, full and intact and living and real.

The inchoate prophecies of the Force were a gift that, privately, she often wished had been given to someone else.  

Blinking in the tent's lack of light, she felt like she was putting herself back together again, arranging her thoughts in the places they were supposed to go.  She wondered about the forest that was not Yavin and what could be meant to happen there.  And—  

Face warm with embarrassment, she remembered Marr and what had happened before the dream.  The emotions from both incidents were jumbled and dissonant in her mind: shame and anger and arousal and puzzlement and ... this new strangeness from the vision, the suspicion and aggression that had ended in anguish.  Was she not meant to fight him?  That seemed too perfect.  There was more.  What of the unknown Jedi, what of Vitiate?

There's one thing I have to check first.  She reached out with her mind.

<Marr.  Did you see that?>

Though she knew she had woken him she heard his thought in swift response, as bone-dry as his speech.  <Specify.>

<The vision.>

<I did not.>

He intrudes on my most private fulfillment and yet remains oblivious to the passion that matters.  How convenient.

<Do you know, then, what passions matter?>

She muttered a soft oath, still unused to their link. 

<The universe has many more secrets than my meager wisdom could begin to comprehend,> she projected back at him, her thoughts clear and even.  <But what I saw is of great significance.  You ought to know of it.>

<We have our council this evening.>

<…Yes.  Beyond that, though.  We should meet.  Afterward, if you can.  There is a lot to discuss.>

<Very well, Jedi.>

<I'd appreciate a bit of… privacy, until then.>

<But it is you who spoke to me.>

<You know exactly what I mean.>  He could hardly fail to.

<Until the council, then,> he responded tersely, and she felt him withdraw his attention.

Notes:

This interstitial bit took way too long to finish —
I'm addicted to ending things with dashes —

(Also I'm not really into name-dropping lightsaber stances because that's not the focus of my SW nerdery... but hopefully this worked well enough, nonetheless.)

Chapter 6

Summary:

Meetings, metaphysics and mind games.

Notes:

I had writer's block on this story for weeks and weeks. I read some source material, I played a little SWTOR and KOTOR, I hemmed and hawed and fussed and rewrote. Then I reminded myself "Norah, it's fanfiction, relax" and managed to patch together this chapter. So hey, happy New Year!

It was afternoon, or what passed for it.  Satele perched on her cot and nibbled on the end of a ration bar while she looked over the reports.  Good: the soldiers who'd been through that ordeal outside Gravinia's temple were showing no lasting effects from the hallucinogenic whatever-that-had-been.  Evidently there'd even been some spontaneous teamwork from the two sides.  She made a note to do a few interviews, bolster a few egos, grease the gears.  Ah, the joys of mediation.  The thought wasn't totally sarcastic: she was good at it, much evolved from the rash teenager who wanted to solve every problem with a lightsaber.  But we only grow so far from who we were, she considered.  And she had loved being a warrior.  In the chaos of combat,  she had always felt her mind and body melt into one entity as she flowed where the Force carried her.  It was a rare, unique state, one she only felt in flashes and glimpses otherwise.  There was a little of that, with Jace, when Theron was born, when Marr—

No.

She breathed in and out, measured and slow.  Then she flicked the NEXT icon on the datapad.

The quartermasters weren't collaborating at all — well, she could understand that; surely the Empire wouldn't relish their equipment being available for their enemies to examine at leisure.  And vice versa.  Saresh would be hell to placate.  She probably will be anyway.  Leontyne was a formidable woman with poise, power, and cunning, and Satele respected her, but she couldn't shake her misgivings about the ambitious Twi'lek, particularly since her recent ascent to Supreme Chancellor.  There was a darkness in her, a ruthlessness, not unlike what Satele was accustomed to sensing from Sith.  Unlike that darkness in Jace, it lacked the commensurate amount of light to hold it in check.

Jace...

He was the one whose erotic memory had gotten her started that morning, she reminded herself.  (It was only a small and blameless falsehood.)  She'd been thinking of other forest campaigns she'd fought in, and naturally her mind drifted back to Alderaan which of course brought her to Jace and then the overnight at the mountain lake and all the positions they'd done it in, urgent and furious with newly unleashed desire, until the dawn had found them sore and panting and euphoric…

There-is-no-passion-there-is-serenity.

She was, by now, a seasoned expert at denying herself intimacy with the Supreme Commander, but something had shifted when they were dealing with Theron and the mess with the Ascendant Spear, when they had faced certain death together and come out alive on the other side, the way they had when the Great War raged and they were young.  New things had seemed possible.  It had taken an almost unimaginable amount of discipline to restrain herself from visiting his quarters the night of the victory.  Jace had been crestfallen, though understanding, and she was proud of having resisted the temptations of attachment once more. 

…She was, wasn't she?  That was the straight and narrow path she was trying to walk, free of regrets, free of the heart's conflicts.  She walked it so well.  Everyone was counting on her, after all.  Especially here, with Revan back from the dead again and plotting stars-knew-what.

Revan.  I wish he could stay in the past.

Her ancestor had a pernicious habit of reappearing to cause trouble long after everyone believed him dead and done.  His actions in the old wars alone would have secured his status as a mighty and mysterious legend, but of course he never did anything by halves.  Well, no one in this family ever does.  No, he was not content to unite with the Force and leave the living universe to the living; he had to return, had to run another grandiose scheme, had to make himself known within and without the bounds of mortality.  Next to that overwhelming presence her own talents were a disappointing afterthought, a straight-to-holovid sequel.  Satele was weary of the questions and comparisons and, most of all, the expectations.  They often made her wish she could amputate her family name and be only herself, judged on her own.

Gently she chastised herself for entertaining such vain and jealous thoughts; a Master should know better than to dwell on such things.  But forgive yourself, Satele: you are human and these impulses are always with you.  She turned her mind to a memory of morning meditation on Tython, in unity with the sun and forest.  In balance.  Keep the balance.

This was a lot of navel-gazing when she really needed to be working.  Briefly she felt a jolt of panic that Marr might be eavesdropping, but a brief probing in the Force told her he was not.  I knew he was last night and I didn't stop, I kept going—

What was the matter with her lately?  That damn temple was squarely off in the past now, dealt with (so she imagined) — and still she was flushing and daydreaming and feeling uncomfortable in her clothes.  Maybe it was the beginning of menopause, fluctuating hormones, who knew?  She resolved to do more meditating.  Resolved to finding the center of things, which was nowhere at all.

There is no nowhere, no existence, no self, Ngani used to tell her.  These distinctions are a trap of the mind. 

The sunlight was fast fading and it was time for the council.  She wolfed down the last of the ration bar, gathered her equipment, put on her beneficent Grand Master face and hurried out of the tent.

---

The odd day/night cycle on Yavin's fourth moon being as it was, "sunset" for council purposes was arbitrarily defined as the periodic onset of the gas giant eclipsing its star.  The interval, typically a few days, was deemed convenient for meeting and marking time.  Marr disliked the unfamiliar clock but surmised it was as good as any other such time standard.  He watched the shadow of night encroach on the jungle as the last few attendees emerged through the arched entryway.  It was picturesque but he still, on balance, preferred Dromund Kaas — at least there was civilization to contend with the jungle there, not merely the deserted temples and tombs of a past age.

Already standing ready at the corner of the great durasteel table was the woman who was partly responsible for their presence on this forsaken satellite: Lana Beniko, sleek and cold, now perhaps the best part remaining of the scattered shambles that had been Imperial Intelligence.  She was Sith, he well knew, but the visible markings of dark Force power were absent except her blazing golden eyes: a witch's eyes, feverish and sorcerous, the numbing anesthetic as the knife goes in.  She was charming and pleasant and approachable; she had also survived the academy on Korriban — with ease.  Marr was satisfied, not to say relieved, that her service to the Empire thus far had been loyal and admirable, Revanite meddling notwithstanding.  With Sith Lords, of course, one never can tell.

It was a moment before he realized she was looking up at him expectantly; he returned a weighty glance that served as his acknowledgment, and she bowed her head.  "My lord."  Her voice dropped in volume.  "Is everything well?"

He waited in silence, banking her unease.

"My lord," she continued, rapid and secretive: "I saw some Council chatter.  They say you've cut off direct comms."

Marr let the awkward quiet linger again before he replied.  "The interruption is precautionary.  During the recent temple incident there was an injury to my person and a potential security breach.  It is being addressed."

"Intelligence would be more than happy to provide—"

"It is being," he repeated, "addressed."

Beniko paused, and he felt a frisson of anger from her that was swiftly and professionally swept away.  "My purpose here is wholly in service of the Empire's mission, my lord."

Her apology had a second meaning: The other Imperials here might be your own personal army, but I am not.  Admirable, almost, how subtle and respectful was her unmistakable defiance.  After the debacle with Darth Arkous, she did have reason to be wary of throwing in too completely with any of the remaining Dark Councilors.  He would have to watch her.

"Acknowledged," he told her sternly, and turned toward the Republic representatives.

The factions faced each other lengthwise across the table, as had quickly become their custom.  Satele Shan was not a tall woman, but her calmly commanding demeanor gave her the presence of one.  Despite her authoritative exterior, in her thoughts Marr sensed a kind of blankness, a deadening.  He could not be certain whether it was a countermeasure or an emotion.  Or both. 

<It's both,> he heard her say in his head.  Her tone was taut and aloof.  His mask's VIEW unit magnified her, and he studied her sharp face and the faint narrowing of her sea-gale eyes as her mind touched his along the corridor that joined them in the Force.

Shan adjusted the position of the long dualsaber hilt on her belt, staring him down.  Marr returned his mask's resolution to normal.  His composure was flawless, but nonetheless this was one of the times he felt it advantageous to have his face hidden.

He clasped his hands behind his back and surveyed the assembly of some twenty soldiers and specialists.  Shan's son, unusually, was absent.  Odd; like Beniko, the spy rarely missed a chance to embroil himself in strategizing.  He wondered what it meant but choked off the thought before it was likely to be noticed.

He looked over again at Lana Beniko as the blonde Sith began delineating plans of action, soliciting testimony and feedback from relevant allies: business as usual, an incremental advance on Revanite positions.  Marr had reviewed the main points the night before but only part of his attention followed along with the review.  Shan, too, was incompletely focused on the council, the surface of her mind alive with darting minnows of thought.  Presently she thought at him again.

<You keep calling me "Shan".>

<It is your name.>

<It's my family's name.>

<Revan's, you mean.>

<Revan never bore it—>

One of her soldiers piped up, interrupting them: "Master Satele, what's the status of the Republic force at the northwest advance camp?"

The answer she gave was fluent and thorough, such that even one of the Imperial officers nodded approvingly.  Marr felt a faint spark of self-satisfaction from her as the group moved on to a logistics matter.

<Deftly done, "Master Satele".>

<I don't know what we're going to do about this bond, but distracting each other during councils is not it.>

<You managed well enough.>

<Do not test me.>  He saw her brow crease faintly in annoyance as her attention returned to the meeting's matters at hand.

"…incident at the previous temple notwithstanding, our forces continue to press forward through Revanite territory.  It would be more efficient were we able to avoid committing redundant personnel in the interest of shoring up our sides' own advantages…"

The officer who had been speaking looked up at Satele for confirmation, and she in turn motioned to a Jedi woman swathed in saffron-gold robes.  "Barsen'thor, if you would."

The calm of this Jedi was deeper and stiller than the Grand Master's.  There was an eerie quality to it, an unnatural brightness.  Perhaps it was repelled by his own power, and that was what he perceived.  Or the opposite.  He let his mind follow the sensing as the woman spoke, her words bearing the same placid smoothness as her Force presence.  Barsen'thor.  He couldn't recall what the title meant, though he'd read it somewhere.

<At present it's more or less the Order's master of healing.>

<I see.  That makes sense.>

<?>

<Jedi healing has that particular … quality about it,> he remarked, recalling the frozen brilliance with which Satele had mended his wounds.  She didn't respond.

The uncannily tranquil Jedi, this Barsen'thor, was talking about pooling medical resources, making allowances for each side's security concerns.  Marr saw Beniko making notes and nodding.  Good.  Willful though she often was, he believed he had delegated well.  The Empire depended on such things.

"There is another proposal," continued the Barsen'thor, "from our Grand Master.  Please go on," she said deferentially, gesturing to Satele.

The Jedi leader rested her palms on the table as she spoke.  "If we wish to operate at maximum combat efficiency, there is always the possibility of battle meditation.  However, I haven't really done that before with forces as … disparate as ours.  There may be difficulties."

"The vaunted Master admits to difficulties," said Marr with puckish pleasure.

She ignored his needling.  "Indeed.  I had thought you might assist us."

"The forms of mass … enhancement practiced by Sith differ significantly in technique and effect."

"Hence," she said patiently, "why we might benefit from coordinating.  It doesn't have to be some elaborate melding of techniques, just — planning.  Working out who does what when."

"I have subordinates for these tasks."

Marr thought he saw the bridge of her nose wrinkle with pique again.  <Will you work with me here?  Do you want a cover for our meetings or not?>  "Meditation is typically performed by a force's commander.  I didn't want to presume."

He let the comment hang for a few prolonged moments; he couldn’t be seen to acquiesce too easily.  When he did speak it was with skeptical hauteur: "I suppose we could discuss this matter in further detail.  If time allows."

"It is appreciated, Lord Marr."  She gave him a thin, brittle smile.

A few other minor matters, the scheduling of a joint offensive three standard days hence, and the council concluded, attendees splintering into small groups to converse and return to their camps.  The two leaders lingered, outwardly occupying themselves with datapads or the table's holo.  The Jedi's mind was racing through a series of obfuscating mantras and mnemonics.

"As it happens, I have some time to confer about your proposal now, if you are able."  His voice sounded stilted and standoffish, he thought — appropriate to the situation, but it dissatisfied him.  The proper tone for a Sith of his stature was poised and confident, allowing an observer to perceive not a hint of weakness or doubt.  If Satele noticed these thoughts she did not react to them.  Quite possibly she was too busy guarding her own.

Satele nodded, her face inscrutable.  "Let's take a walk, then."

---

The vicinity of the conference area had been cleared for landings and logistics, but more efficient locations had been found since then, and the tree-shaded patches of barren jungle were lonely and eerie, a mood only amplified by the dying light and the crumbling stone foundations that stood their ancient watch over nothing.  Marr walked slowly and Satele kept pace with him.  The humidity and the omnipresent background noise of the forest were getting on his nerves.  Too much wildness allowed to run rampant, too few hunters to cull and conquer it.  It was the insanity of the Sith in primal form, the blazing untamed rage that had brought them so many times to both victory and near extinction.

"Speak your purpose, Jedi."

"I had another vision—"

"Yes, you said as much."

She looked down at the ground for a moment.  "And," she continued in a softer voice, "we need to figure out a way to get rid of this bond thing."  He noticed now that she was holding a small, elegant datapad that bore the emblem of her Jedi Order, her slender half-gloved fingers darting across it.  "I did a little research earlier.  Just as a refresher."

"Very well.  Describe this vision."

"If you want, I suppose we could try what we did last time—"

"Not here.  Just speak."

Her words came out quickly and with a quiet urgency, as if she feared losing grasp on them.  "I was in a forest, on a path, walking.  Alone.  Faster than this.  I thought at first it was Yavin.  It wasn't but I only realized that later.  There was a Jedi in a clearing ahead of me but they were cloaked and I couldn't make out who they were."

Marr turned his head slightly, watching her out of the periphery of his mask's vision.  The cybernetics made his sight keen even in low light and he focused, sidelong, on her pensive face as she continued.  "Right after that I saw you.  As an an enemy.  You drew your weapon and I had mine."  She stopped, turned toward him.  "I saw you die."

In her head he saw the omission she had made, though he scarcely needed to.  "You killed me."

"I had to."

He scoffed.  "My dreams foretell new deaths for me every night.  I suppose I shall add this scenario to the count."

She waved that line of discussion away with a hasty hand.  "No, but... I don't know how your dreams are but this wasn't right, this — as soon as you died I saw Vitiate killing my old student, the Jedi, as if you didn't want that to happen either, and then you and I were swept away, into darkness.  Not Sith darkness.  Void, nullity, extinction."  

Jungle insects filled the tenuous silence.  "Not the typical form these visions take, in my case," said Marr neutrally.

"What do you make of it?"

"Ill portent."

She shook her head.  "That's too vague and too easy."

"I am not a seer."

"Neither am I," she said wryly, resuming their stroll.  "I just get visions.  It's not like I choose to have them, or know what they mean until after the fact."

"It is the visions that make the seer," said Marr in counterpoint.

"Maybe it means we're supposed to cooperate.  I don't know.  That, also, seems too easy," she continued.  

"Very little about our cooperation here has been easy."

"Yes, that's true."  The shadow of the eclipse was intensifying, leaving little in the way of natural light except the tree-occluded stars and the soft glow of Satele's datapad.  A dark to conceal anything.  Spies, assassins, lovers.

Satele glanced up but otherwise gave no indication that she had overheard the thought.  "We can ponder over what it means, but I wanted you to know.  Considering."

He gave her a faint nod.  "It is appreciated."

"That brings up our other... issue: this bond."

"Yes," he said cautiously.  Even in the midst of the living jungle he was conscious of the small sounds each of them made as they walked: the muted clanks and creaks of his armor, Satele's saber hilt clinking against her belt as she moved.  He wondered at this heightened perception.  Although he did not sense imminent danger, there was something precarious in the moment.  "Tell me what it is you found."

"It's nothing special, but..." She called up a text on her datapad, although she barely consulted it as she read out long strings of well-practiced information, her voice fast and precise.  "So.  Force bonds.  Effects: empathy, telepathy, perception of surface thoughts.  All with much greater ease than between non-linked individuals, even those sensitive to the Force.  Intrusion into a bond-partner's mind past the surface is typically noticeable.  Effects are greater with physical proximity.  Rarer possibilities: mind alteration, psychic suggestion.  There are poorly substantiated reports of physical interaction."  She waited for a response from him but continued without one after only a moment or two.  "...Unusually strong emotion or sensation is often perceived, unavoidably, by both parties."  At this she swallowed pensively and he could tell she was thinking about that morning's incident (and trying not to linger).

He heard her speak in his mind; she was reluctant to acknowledge the subject aloud.  <That's what happened earlier, isn't it.>

<I believe so.>

<I'll have to be careful to keep my ... emotions reined in.>

Marr turned up his gauntleted palms in his version of a shrug.  <It wasn't only that.  You thought of me.>

She stopped, looking away and then abruptly back at him, her face calm but her eyes like a pair of knives.  "What if I did?  What if I thought of anyone in my private and personal imagination?  Where do you get off—"

"It shames you, that we desire one another."

"Of course it does.  I know better and ought to do better.  Even you know better."

He paused.  "I regret that interference," he admitted, his voice slow and dark.  "It was uncouth, disrespectful.  Beneath me."

"So you do have some sense of decorum," she said scornfully.

"Do not mistake my allegiance for a lack of honor, easy though it may be for … your sort."

"We've gone too far."  

"Yes.  We should turn about and return to camp."

<I can't even make double entendres work with you peeking into my head.>

<You may be assured that I am no fonder of the situation.>

Satele rolled her eyes briefly, shook her head, and turned slowly to walk in the opposite direction, newly interested in her datapad.  "Going back to the topic at hand..."

<Why not speak in thoughts?  It is more convenient and far more secure.>

"I'd rather not get used to it."  <And you do have a pleasant enough speaking voice,> she allowed.

He was amused by the not-entirely-intentional admission.  "I suppose this preference is a vanity I am willing to accommodate," he said phlegmatically, walking abreast of her again.

Holding the datapad out like a warding sigil, she continued.  "Force bonds are created by deliberate action of a third party; as the byproduct of certain rituals or tandem Force use; organically over long close contact; or spontaneously.   Typically dissolved by the death of one party, although dissolution is not usually sought, as bonds between hostiles are rare.  May be dissolved by the creating party (though not always), or through certain arduous rituals.  Dissolution depends on the method by which the bond was created—"

Marr, having grown increasingly agitated, finally cut her off.  "Any apprentice could have told me this."

"Of course.  I would expect you to know these things.  But I wanted to make sure we're operating from the same set of knowledge... more or less."

He murmured an acknowledgment and they walked in silence for a moment before he spoke further.  "What entity created this?  Vitiate could do so, but his power is presently much diminished."

"I don't think it's that Sith from that temple, either.  Gavrina?"

"Gravinia."

<Curse my memory.> "From your description she didn't seem like a surpassingly powerful master in her day.  Not even a Darth.  Though her field of expertise might have made her more interested in bonds..."

"The sorceries of these temples were fueled by a great many followers and slaves.  They are rarely, if ever, the effort of one Sith alone."

"Well, yes, of course.  Do you know more about her?"

"No.  The records are old and few.  Yet I, too, sensed her power.  Or lack thereof.  I judge it unlikely.  Moreover the bond itself was not in place until after that... Gravinia incident."

She stopped, bringing a hand to her face, pondering.  They were close to their beginning place.  Above them the great arc of Yavin blazed with the returning sun.  Marr looked up at it, his mask automatically attenuating the eye-searing brightness.  "Could your ancestor have made it?"

"...Revan?  I'd thought about it, but..." <...but I don't really like to, truth be told.>  "What does he gain?  Why would he waste the power he's trying to gather on a pointless lark like this?"

"He may seek to hinder us, create strife, drive a wedge.  If he paid such a cost it may be he considers our coalition a serious threat.  Furthermore there is the matter of your lineage."

"Revan wasn't known for risking his goals just to toy with people."  <I still don't buy it.>

Marr pivoted heavily on one foot, looking at her again. "Think as you like.  The answer is yet undetermined.  We must investigate further, in what little time we have."

"And we are wasting too much of that time, talking about discussing about investigating."  Her fingers on the datapad clenched.

"Yes."

Satele looked over toward the council area's high arched entrance.  He noticed her wondering, fleetingly, about its past.  Then she turned to face him, resolute.  "Meet me, then.  Battle meditation.  One standard day."

"You were serious about that meditation, then."

"I never say anything in council I'm not serious about."

He grunted noncommittally. 

"We'll use the Republic conference tent."

"And not your quarters?"  He hoped she hadn't picked up that wisp of disappointment.

"Far too small," she said.  And less likely to be equipped with listening devices, he thought cynically.

Satele's voice and face were porcelain-smooth as always but her mind revealed increasing consternation.  "I'm not asking this to spy on you."

"You may not be.  Are you as certain of your Republic fellows?"

<I wish I could be.>  "We aren't going to betray state secrets."

Marr scowled beneath the mask.  "I cannot countenance surveillance.  My chambers.  That or nothing.  Let your subordinates know; I care not."

She crossed her arms and turned away from him, her thoughts skeptical.  <This is just some ploy to get me alone with you away from my allies, isn't it.>

<It is not.>  That was only a small and blameless falsehood.

<Why do I not believe you?>

He moved forward to stand behind her.  She bristled but remained still, looking straight ahead, her conscious thoughts marshalled into a schoolchild's rote listing of cities.  What a shame to be wearing armor.  "Nothing you and I have done here has been worthy of shame," he said sonorously, inclining his hooded head yet closer.  A little pulse of arousal escaped her, and he felt her transgressive thrill at his nearness even as she tried frantically to suppress it.  "You are a remarkable woman, Satele Shan," he heard himself say.  "Consider the benefits of ... passion without attachment."  

The moment seemed to lengthen interminably, everything held in stasis.  He had been too bold.  He held his breath.

"One standard day, then," said Satele in a queer voice, her mind's surface swept clean of tempting thoughts.  "Your quarters.  I'll tell my aides.  Likely I'll bring one."  She lunged forward, putting space between them, turned, and gave him a sorrowful and inscrutable smile.  "Thank you for your time this evening, Lord Marr.  I am sure we will find a solution to the trials that confront us."  

Marr bowed his head silently in acknowledgment and farewell, then swiftly set off in the direction of his temple without glancing back.  He was terribly eager to be alone in his head again.

Notes:

- Gas-giant-moon light cycles are confusing. That's probably why most SF stories just ignore them... and maybe I also should. If I screwed this up (and I did), hopefully I at least did so aesthetically.
- This isn't going to be a Jace/Satele story, but that relationship *is* her strongest point of comparison for matters of love and sex, so.
- Whoever gave Saresh her name must have been an opera fan...

Chapter 7

Summary:

Another visit to the room where it may or may not happen. Robes upon robes. Lana gathers intelligence.

Notes:

Here's a quite belated All Souls' gift in honor of everyone's favorite doubly departed Darth (I heard they nuked his ghost on SWTOR, alas). Feliz día de los marrtos. I came back to finish this story because it still annoys me that I never did. So I started writing a little here and a little there and suddenly I had like 9k more words' worth of this bullshit. That's a good vibe.

Addendum: Still not fluent in AO3se, but adding the dubcon tag to the fic because I think one of the earlier scenes semi-qualifies and later scenes also may.

Marr turned the angles of the weathered holocron in his ungloved hands, waiting.  This was war, this was existence: waiting.  Marshalling, mustering, amassing.  Watching the carefully laid pieces inch across the map into play.  Speeding those game-pieces toward their ultimate target would preserve limited manpower and materiel, he reminded himself, feeling out the imperfections in the faceted stone.  His personal apprehensions or physical preferences did not enter into consideration.  Truly they never had.  It was imbecilic to ruminate on such things.

Victory in the fullness of time.  He only hoped his own existence might endure long enough to see it done.  Already the effects of age and corruption were beginning to hinder and pain him.  All over were scars, surgeries and stopgaps where had been flourishing flesh, and who knew what fatal mutations festered even now within.  His body had been a strong and durable vessel, but he knew he would never see eighty.  Despite the augmentations of technology and the Force even seventy-five would be a boon.

And meanwhile the Force is my servant and I know the ends to which I must use it, he reminded himself. 

Satele kept deferring their meeting; this was the third cycle so far.  It annoyed him and made him wonder what she was playing at.  By mutual agreement they stayed politely out of one another's perceptions, and her flares of sensation and emotion were rare: a sparring hit to the solar plexus, a handful of deaths and defeats told to her, a speedy session of self-pleasure (from which he had somehow managed to avert his mind).  In the meantime the facing prongs of Republic and Empire made their slow separate advances toward the Revanite stronghold.  The allied forces were taking few casualties and sharing even less intelligence.  At this rate they themselves would become long-lost cultists.

He was uncertain how to broach the topic of the knowledge contained in the Force-prism he held.  Even to himself it seemed deeply absurd.

He had bathed and dressed in one of his few suitable robes, a black hooded affair, wide-sleeved and longer in back than he was tall.  He had had to modify it specially to remain properly attached to the mask: a tedious task in the extreme, but one he could trust only to himself.  Even an artisan-droid could be sliced, even one as secure as the automatons in Marr's fortress.  It had happened before.  The revenge exacted in return had been so vicious even Republic citizens tended to dismiss it as propaganda. 

An alert chord sounded and on his mask HUD a sub-view appeared of the entrance camera: Satele, squinting up at the immensity of his temple refuge (or the gun barrels of his perimeter security), expectant, defiant, uncertain.  A steady rain fell and she had turned back the hood of the over-robe she wore, thin braids damp against her face. He enlarged the view and saw the familiar cylinder at her hip.  She had come armed again, despite his courteous assurances.  Wise.  Though without it she is hardly harmless.

And alone.  He wasn't certain whether that was wise, or for whom.

Marr flicked a muscle to indicate to his system to permit her entry just as she opened her mouth to speak.

<You are noticed.  There is no need.>

She stopped midway and made a sort of nod, slowly, before striding in.  <…Hello, and thank you.>

Since their earlier meeting he had permitted a number of Sith to use his antechambers for training, interrogation, and coordination.  He watched her thoughts keenly as she passed through, though no alarm or epiphany caught his attention as she noticed the signs of his brethren's presence.  For six hours the post was empty again by his order.  Inevitably the matter of their bond would cause friction (indeed, he thought, remembering Beniko, it already had); better to minimize the risk.

Yesterday, undressing for his sleep cycle, he had found the rank reek of his armor-rack and the piercing tang of disinfectant, ordinarily the dull background of his daily routine, suddenly impossible to ignore.  Now a long twig of woody incense smoldered atop his shelf and his auxiliary suit had been sent to the Katabasis to be switched for a newer copy.  He scowled.  Vanity.  This was unfamiliar territory.  Never had he needed to concern himself with the projection of any image but power and solidity.  The aesthetics of those sentients whose senses experienced the world unfiltered were irrelevant to him, a delegation for suitable underlings when important at all.  But his innermost chamber, like the alterations for his mask, was not entrustable to any other. 

The barrier shimmering under the entrance door blinked off as Satele approached.  As it whirred open he saw her dripping rain, pausing at the threshold.  "Lord Marr," she acknowledged, bowing her head toward him.  "You'll have to excuse my present state."

"Grand Master."  He returned the gesture.  "I was not aware the umbrella was a technology beyond Jedi understanding," he enunciated, without an atom of humor.

She wiped water from her face with the inner part of her sleeve.  Marr saw that she, too, had eschewed her usual formal armor in favor of robes; on her feet were only sandals and her forearms were bare.  "Nor I the towel beyond Sith," she said through the cloth, unbothered.  "That door's your refresher?"

<Yes.>  She ducked past him as casually as if the room had belonged to some old academy chum of hers, not meeting his gaze.  A low sweep of air followed her, drying her wake.

<You have the uncanny ability of knowing precisely what you can get away with.>

<They didn't make me Grand Master for nothing.>

<That was not a compliment.>

<I'm not sure being Grand Master is either.  And your sort are all about whatever gets the job done, right?>

<Finish your ablutions.>

From behind the refresher door he heard the muffled sounds of fans and faucets.  When she stepped out she was holding the outer robe she had traveled in, cloth still well soaked.  The damp robe she had worn beneath it, the one he saw now, was the color of pale sand, not dissimilar from her skin.  Loose and opaque though the garment still was, the way it clung to her convinced him it wasn't hiding yet another.  Uncomfortably, enticingly convinced him.  Suddenly he was suspicious.  Was this a setup?  Yes or no, perhaps this diversion was not worth the risk.  Bodily requirements could be addressed more securely and efficiently, strategic requirements more openly.  The alliance --

Satele hiked the wet robe up in her arms.  "Lord Marr.  Please be at ease.  I'm not pulling you along as part of some vast deceit.  I don't think I can, so to speak, get away with that."

"You underestimate your potential," he sniped.

"Can I put this over here?"  She motioned toward the empty space on his armor rack.  He felt heat around himself like a thin aura as he warily rested the holocron on the mat beside him.

<Yes.>  "Not your typical attire."

She was meticulously careful not to disturb any of his many armor components on the rack as she set her robe out to dry.  Her mind was like a sheer wall.  "Oh my, how did you notice?"

"You are fortunate not to be my subordinate," he said testily.  "I am uncertain you would be here if you knew precisely how fortunate."

<Well let's not think about that then.>  Satele slipped off her sandals, sat across from him as she had done on her first visit and produced a small datapad, all business.  "So, how are we doing this?  Coordinated battle meditation.  There are a few very, very old texts describing geometric arrangements of Force masters that amplify mind powers.  Unfortunately, none of those examples involves fewer than twelve people."

"Useless.  And?"

A pang of opposition from her.  "There are a few other documents here and there about augmenting someone else's powers like a lens.  That's promising, even though about half of them are intended for a probably-extinct people that could project physical signal waves from their multiple brains without the Force.  There are terse accounts of cooperating with Sith to accomplish objectives, but none of those involves what we're looking for."

"There is tea and water for your refreshment, if you wish," pronounced Marr almost sullenly.  His emotions were starting to get away from him.

"No, thank you."  She was leaving him to it.  He watched the slanted shadows of Satele's collarbones as she sat back up from reviewing the datapad and looked him in the face for the first time, her eyes alive.  "Rajivari, of course it's Rajivari, has that notorious partially-lost treatise about things Jedi lovers can do with each other.  Also not involving what we're looking for."  She blushed less than he did.  "…Tactically speaking."

Marr was silent, controlling himself.  He traced geometries in his mind.

Satele swallowed and put the datapad aside, lacing her fingers back and forth.  They were more age-weathered than the rest of her, he noticed. "…Well, that's all I've been able to get so far.  How about you?"

Marr's gut tightened and he reached for the chipped holocron.  He was beyond all this.  He was mover and not moved.  He would not be swayed from his cause by temptation.

 

---

 

Lana Beniko walked among them with her hood up, quietly; that was all it took, no proxy agents or listening devices. Then again, loud and open though the Republic contingent were, she heard unfamiliar languages and sensed currents in which she could see no clear pattern.  Part of that, a vexingly undifferentiable part, was the essence of Yavin's moon itself.  That was having an effect on Darth Marr, she was sure of it.  Exactly what effect he was loath to disclose, and now he was acting cagey about intel comms. If he ends up another Arkous I will become a blue supergiant star of pure wrath.  At least what I know will carry weight with whomever else is in charge after him.  She must always, always be careful.

Always, always, always.  Her footsteps said it back to her.  She merged with the strolling stream of supply-bearers, off-duty soldiers, and the rest.  Almost immediately a crescent of Pub troopers around a firepit caught her ear.  She pretended preoccupation with a provisions pallet.

"He's been weird since that accident, I hear," said a Twi'lek woman with a Huttese cant to her deep voice and hefty missile launcher at her side, her back to Lana.

"Who, Captain Glirayy?"

"No, you feeb, the big man."  The soldier glanced back and forth before placing her lifted palms on her shoulders to mime a pair of spikes.  "You know." 

Her companion to the left made something between a shrug and a shiver.  "Fuck if I do know, been trying to avoid getting within a klick."

"Hah, you fuckin wuss."

A third soldier piped up.  "Not a wuss, smart.  I hear he's been smashing shit up like there's a prize for it.  Tovia said she saw him throw a guy off a cliff."

"Tovia has a lot of stories.  Let that tin can try getting me to jump--"

"Shhh!"

"It must notta been one of ours, those Jedi would go wampashit."

At this mention someone along the edge of the ring seemed to become aware of the loosely-attired figure in their presence, and Lana realized she had become conspicuous.  She cocked her hooded head curiously at the gathering then wandered off, doing her best to acknowledge their noticing but not their correct instincts.

She wondered if Theron were doing something like this.  More likely he'd whipped up some brilliant sigint hack then taken the rest of the cycle off looking for someone to blow him.  If that smarmy bastard weren't so useful.

The campfire-kaffeeklatsch of soldiers continued behind her.  Lana attuned all of her enhanced hearing in their direction as she slowed her pace to the minimum plausibly innocent speed and found another likely tableau of supplies to look busy with.

"Hey Vek, which accident even was that?"

Lana heard the Twi'lek sigh and reposition her oversized weapon.  "You know.  Weren't you on the north detachment a while ago?"

"Nah you're thinking of Moze that Imp guy.  The one Tovia thought was creepy.  Didn't you Tovia."

"All those Imps are creepy."
"He had some good stuff to trade though.  Where's he been anyway?  I haven't seen him in a little while now."

"You sure he didn't get sith-shot off a ledge?"  A few of the soldiers snickered.

"Think he got reassigned.  Has to go play janitor on the mothership or something."

"What?  Hell'd you hear that from?"

"Not important.  It was when that detachment went to the one Sith temple and everybody ended up tripping balls on some kind of forest plant or Force magic or combination thereof."

"Ohhhhhh I heard about that!  Hope they're getting hazard pay."

"So anyway what supposedly happened is everybody lost consciousness and woke up like 14 hours later pretty much OK."

"Yeah yeah, they did tell us."

"Well but that's not the whole story.  You know it's never the whole dope, the official reports.  Anyway I heard from Yill that Moze was on this detachment.  Said it was weirder than that, scarier.  Oh and get this, spike shoulders and Master Satele went missing for most of it.  I know, both of them on a mission in the first place?  Genius idea, right?"

The soldiers groaned and tossed some one-liners at their leadership's expense.  Lana made a mental note about a few bits of unfamiliar jargon.

"Lucky that wasn't a lot worse," said the soldier who said they'd been prudently avoiding Marr.  "If it's actually true.  Lately who the hell knows."  Someone coughed in the campfire smoke.  Moze.  Thousands of people were here on their side alone.  It wasn't someone Lana knew offhand.

A voice that hadn't spoken before: "I heard something weird hurt one of 'em, the big man, spike man.  Maybe that's what the Imps are all jumpy about.  Maybe that's why he's winging minions off cliffs."

The Twi'lek scoffed. "Fuckin' how, doesn't he have like an invincible forcefield or something?  Or, you know, Force field?"

"That's just what they want you to believe!" bawled a burbly voice Lana couldn't place.  She rolled her eyes. 

"Lieutenant Sthiar, what a fantastic surprise!" rang out the Twilek's brash voice, and Lana almost tripped over a towering Togruta trooper, jaw set, who pushed past her on his way to stare down the assembled soldiers.  Her hood slipped off and as she nimbly exited the vicinity she felt the earliest inklings of the rage that powered lightning. Too recognizable now.  And I was far too careless. 

Her superior was busy hashing out yet another negotiation with Theron's prim action-figure of a mother.  Who knew what Marr was conceding if some prehistoric spell had hold of his reason, or if he too turned out to be All Part Of The Plan?  Who knew anything?  At least Lana had a weak lead: "Moze", alleged contraband dealer and special detachment member.  That would have to do for now.  She headed for the hut with records access.

The Force serves me.  In chaos and strife there was also power.  For the sake of her Empire she would find where, and how, to take it.

Notes:

UST machine go brrrrrrrrrrrr

(the soldiers aren't references to anything else fwiw)

Chapter 8

Summary:

This chapter could have been an email! -Satele, probably

The damp left from the rain on Satele's skin felt heavy and stifling, like oil blocking the pores of a trapped creature.  She watched Marr reach to retrieve a holocron from his shelves.  It was lustrous black stone the size of a training remote, octahedral, ornately etched with silver glyphs.  A piece the size of his fingertip had been gouged out of one face.  <Where'd you get this?> she wondered.

"Here are data concerning the provenance of the artifact and the academic relevance of its contents," he intoned briskly.  A notification icon glowed on her datapad and her finger paused above it.

"These contents are going to be twisted beyond my imagining, aren't they.  And couldn't this have been sent ahead of time?"

He ignored her.  "Review at your leisure."

Satele wasn't going to be able to maintain her impassively empty state of mind for much longer.  It was a testament to her power that she could hold it at all against the bond.  That was as it was.  Practice for meetings to come, if nothing else.  No sense in worrying.

She scanned the dense paragraphs of aurebesh that populated the pad.  With growing skepticism she noticed the presence of Rajivari and even their dear old friend Gravinia in the lengthy list of works referencing the artifact.  The attached graphic figures began promisingly — coordinated crowds of lightsaber-bearing legionaries, deep-trance strategies — then veered swiftly into the lurid and esoteric.  Interlocking sigils were daubed over arrangements of equally interlocking bodies.  Rituals were depicted propitiating an abstract deity with two celebrants entrancing a crowd.  This had absolutely better not be — No, she wasn't going to give Marr the satisfaction of letting her mind's eye follow her suspicions to their logical ends.  She closed her eyes, tapping her fingertips along the tablet's edge as she summoned her willpower and realigned herself back to tranquility.  Across from her she sensed Marr rapidly rotating the holocron in one hand in the fashion of a nervous gambler with his last roll's die. 

She opened her eyes and flicked her fingers across the datapad as she began to inveigh at him in a taskmistress' severe tone.  "Darth Marr.  This is so clearly sex magic of the kind concocted by the worst charlatans to reel in credits from marks who don't know any better.  Quite honestly I'm disappointed in you.  I don't think we need to investigate anything else along this angle.  I've seen enough."  Her face and mind were alike in their expression of weary opprobrium although she knew he had noticed the little frisson under it.  Whatever.  She really had expected better of Marr, better of this meeting.  It was one thing to charge on with their collaboration with this… chemistry in the back of their minds; quite another to behave so brazenly. <Give your enemy a way out, Marr.  No chance you don't know that one.>

"Read the appendix to the abstract," he said through what sounded like gritted teeth.  <And I note, though it is a minor issue at most, I was not the one who originally mentioned Rajivari.>

<Well.  He does say some things about coordinating, ah, festivities while therein engaged.>

<As I said.>

She looked away from him.  <They're not substantiated.  Somebody — er, somebodies — try it at the Academy every so often.  Trust me, if Raji's oh-so-authentic erotic pose exercises worked as a Force lens or something, we would know.>  She rubbed at the insect bites on her forearms.  It really was technically relevant.  Surely he understood that.

"Read.  The appendix."  The fist of his without the holocron clenched and unclenched.  "If you would oblige, Grand Master."

Satele sighed.  The uneasiness and anger he emanated droned along the bond like a high frequency, putting her on edge.  "If you insist."  Her hand swept the screen back to the place in the document he indicated.  A crude emblem, repeated, suddenly caught her eye: the curved Jedi wings, in archaic design she hadn't recognized at first for what it was.  <What the—> "This — oh.  Hmm.  This isn't Sith in origin?"  I'm sure he was terribly pleased to have that in his back pocket.

"It is not, despite the design."  He held it up before them, rotating the facets for her to examine.  "Perhaps these Jedi made a correct assumption as to where it was more likely to be archived."  Marr's voice was unchanged but at saying this his thoughts glowed with an unfriendly satisfaction.

Oh she certainly wasn't getting into this with him, not now.  "Perhaps."  She glanced skeptically between her datapad and the black polyhedron, calming the impulses of her body to flush and sweat.  This situation was reminding her of why at heart she preferred combat to diplomacy.

<Interesting.  The Jedi know this?>

She intensified her irritation enough for him to feel it.

The abstract.  Yes.  Focus.

The holocron was supposed to have been completed six hundred years ago.  Seven hundred?  That couldn't be right.  She would have to have the Council scholars look at it, see what deductions they could make on top of whomever had assembled this datafile.  It had been before Revan, in any case.  The abstract itself dated back about a century.  There had been a handful of Jedi — the precise number, species, and gender not clear — and a pair of figures who typically appeared in robes, wielding powers characteristic of Sith but not their iconography.  Outside the auspices (and the laws) of the Jedi Order, the mysterious group had performed experiments in synchronizing their divergent and rarely combined powers.  Whether by original intent or fortuity they had begun to incorporate ever more unorthodox methods and … combinations.  Ostensibly, at least some of it had worked well enough to justify the creation of this archive.  Three years after first convening, the collective fractured fatally, possibly during such an experiment.  The two survivors then compiled what they could, created the octahedron, and dissolved out of history.  The holocron's most recent known location was the personal collection of one Darth Meterix, three centuries dead.

Satele placed the prism to the side and rested her datapad on her lap, carefully absorbing what she had read.  "…And you?" she ventured to Marr.  "How did you come to possess this thing?"

Across the bond his mind was so defensively stolid that the emotions it hid were only more obvious. 

Marr's mask turned to contemplate the entrance door.  His hands failed at their effort to be still.  "Darth Meterix was defeated, and her library raided, by a master whose effects passed over the years to me."

"What about that missing piece?"

"Do you recall my instructions regarding the abstract?"  <Its cause is unknown and its effect thought negligible,> his thoughts admitted.

"Thank you," said Satele, with a brisk cheer.  Her hands gripped the datapad tightly.  "…Well?  Now what?  Is that all?  Next council is in a cycle and a half and they have us supporting the test raid afterward."

He leaned back as if stretching, though she could tell that he too was ill at ease.  "…You may consider the archive on loan for as long as you require to review its contents," he said carefully, as if addressing a battalion instead of a single person.  "I trust the circumspection of a fellow scholar."

She should've accepted a cup of something, just for the distractive opportunity.  "Appreciated."  She took a long, meditative breath.  The tight enclosed air of Marr's chambers seemed thin and difficult to breathe somehow.  There was an odor in the air, one Satele hadn't noticed on her previous visit: a subtle, pastel sort of scent, botanical with a hay-like sweetness.  She hadn't sensed any poison —

"Kend.  A decorative.  If it offends you it may be extinguished," he said stiltedly, clearly relieved to divert the subject around the gravity well at the center of their melded thoughts.

She took an appraising sniff and allowed herself something approaching a smile.  It wasn't unpleasant.  "That isn't necessary.  I do appreciate the courtesy.  Where's it from?"

Marr, motionless: "A world I once subjugated.  Many years ago."  He turned his mask toward the thin stick with its swirl of grey smoke, and Satele shared his brief wave of nostalgia: orange mists, fronded towers the size of arcologies, those same towers as terrifying torches.  "Orbital bombardment extirpated the plant in the wild.  It is cultivated on a number of Imperial plantations from which my estate receives a percentage for personal use."  His gaze returned to her. 

Satele's near-smile flattened.  "You're happy with this outcome?"

"Irrelevant."  She noticed him shift his weight and straighten.  "My personal sentiments are of no account.  There is the Empire and that is all."

She made a hollow little laugh.  <I wish I couldn't say I relate but—>  "Propositioning me is the Empire?"

"The nature and relevance of this archive do not constitute a proposition," rejoined Marr, carefully toneless.

It was her turn to fidget with her hands.  "Abstract, archive, all that notwithstanding — do you have any idea how absurd this sounds."

"Yes.  I have much to gain.  This is only the truth."  His voice softened.  "So, if you will consider, do you."

Satele had the inclination to flinch.  "Likewise for me, the Republic and the Jedi far supersede anything I may personally prefer."  She studied the pattern of the woven mat beneath them.  "Note the 'may'.  And while I would love to find some way to harmonize our efforts on the battlefield, my Jedi and I can manage battle meditation on our own.  Even if we are asked to expand it to your troops as well.  It's not worth this -- that kind of recklessness."

"The Jedi, rather notoriously, do not entirely forbid sexual contact," he said drily.

"We do with Sith," she returned, matching his tone.

"This is a unique circumstance.  When our mission is complete we shall scatter to our own worlds, never again to meet in this way."  Satele misliked the way the clipped r of his cautiously elocuted speech reminded her of his agile tongue.  Her thoughts flew back to anodyne rhymes of her earliest memory.  Heroes of Brentaal all in a line, first there were ten and now there are nine. 

"We both have a strong incentive not to harm the other.  You may think it a mastery of the body, if the expression of physical passion disturbs you.  Let us see what we may… accomplish together.  It may serve as a foundation for our victory."  His voice, always magisterially serious, trailed off theatrically.  Laying it on thick.  Is he ever not?

"Clearly you're more convincing with your lightsaber."

Marr's mind prickled in annoyance.  "I would prefer to avoid that method, at present."  He returned her wary stare, though at length his posture relaxed.  "This is not a matter of … emotional entanglement.  Neither of us finds use in such frivolity."  He leaned forward to stroke her chin with an inquisitive hand as Satele tensed, on alert for the barest hint of aggression, and snap-calculated the angle at which she'd need to ignite her saberstaff to kill him instantly.  I'm going to assume his organs are in the right places.  She tried to dodge the currents of desire that scorched from the touch of his hand through her body like bolts, tried to braid them into the projection she sent out of a woman whose sangfroid was as impregnable as Revan's secret soul.

Marr, unperturbed, retracted his hand and continued: "You are fully ready to send me to my tomb.  A laudable reaction, and one I would expect.  But I offer nothing you do not seek.  You know this, and so do I — or we doubtless would be duelling already."

"Aren't we?" said Satele witheringly.

"In a sense," he conceded.  Although they had only fought one another indirectly, she knew of his unparalleled skill in single combat, and he of hers.  He probably only cares about that kind of duel, however grandiloquent his speeches.  Well, again I reluctantly can relate. 

She let the subject rest with a bow of the head.  "So, ehm.  Is this why you aren't in the usual armor?"

<"This"?>  "I could ask the same of you."

"I'm not the one who — It's raining.  And, whatever the holos may mislead you to believe, I don't wear the armlets and boots and all that rigmarole every waking cycle."

"For myself, I am quite accustomed to the practice," said Marr, equably.  "There are expectations for those of us who present ourselves as figureheads for our cause."

"More so when you're desperately invested in concealing what's underneath it."  At this he turned up his bare, empty palm, mind holding steady through its opposing turbulence. 

"As is only logical."

"Surely you go out every so often in less than your full regalia," she pressed.

He scoffed through the mask.  "If you can find a holorecording proving otherwise, do let me know of it."  <Beniko is most skillful in addressing such matters.>

<…Oh.  You're serious.>

"My dignity is as my armor, and just as seldom shed," he resounded, again a shade self-pleased.

"Well, you haven't got much of it on at the moment."

He scowled.  "All this is an enormous exception."

"Even so."

"And you of all people must understand that these costumes we wear extend beyond the physical."

"All right, all right," and then, impertinently, before she could squelch it: <So what if we take off both of them?>

"That may be… difficult," he said stiffly, displeased, but Satele felt the telltale warmth traveling up from the base of her spine and knew he felt it too.

His voice when he broke their silence was the umbrous dark of the stone around them.  It banked that rising warmth into heat.  "It strikes me we have not yet… seen one another."

She raised her eyebrows.

"...In the flesh."  <The temple was dark, and I blind.>

Satele leaned back and chewed her bottom lip, considering.  She'd been in minefields more calming.  At least there she could avoid the ground.  "You really are intent on this foolishness, aren't you."

"It was not, as I remind, my suggestion."

<Nor my conscious thought.>

"So be it."

"I didn't say no," she said quietly, smoothing her features into a studied calm.  "But you're going first, and you'd better not expect anything ... beyond that.  You'll find I'm very, very good at restraining myself when I need to be.  I assume likewise of you."

"We may as well be accustomed to one another in this fashion, even should our combined efforts prove less... physical in nature."  There was a trace of melancholy in his tone.  <Yes: perhaps a favor to our curiosity.>

"Go ahead, then, get it over with."

He turned his back to her and detached his mask, then the hood and robe.  The low moonlight of Gravinia's temple that had limned Marr's figure bathing in the waterfall had done him many favors; though still well-muscled and formidable, his body was aged and his skin hairless, loose and leathery, ash-grey and veined like some cadaver half embalmed.  He had been darker once, she thought, before the burden of his power leached the living colors from his flesh.  Something was the matter with one of his legs, withered knee-down near to the bone and reinforced by an encircling metal apparatus that was cunning enough not to be noticeable from afar.

"That was a Jedi," he sneered, "if you were wondering.  If you find me so wretched to behold, I have been nothing so much as a canvas for the work of your Order."

Satele shook her head.  "I don't apologize for the scars you've taken from us in battle, just as you wouldn't apologize for ours.  Unless there was some awful scheme behind it, I don’t know.  Light and dark aren't always as neat as we want them to be."

"The matter is straightforward enough to me."

She clicked her tongue.  "Well that's an obvious lie."

A salvo of pique from Marr.  He turned again to face her, stern as a statue and nearly as tall, posture regimentally straight.  The malformed head she knew somewhat, by now.  She only permitted herself to peek sidelong, for a moment, between his legs.  At rest he certainly didn't seem as … sizable as — This is what we aren't going to do, there is peace.  She flicked her eyes back up to meet his (or what approximated them).  Teenage holonet forays notwithstanding she'd never seen a Sith nude before.  It was admittedly more … corpselike than she'd expected.

"You are disturbed?"  His voice, still weighty, sounded jagged and quiet without the mask's familiar filter.  "What am I but a dead man?"

The Jedi always denounced the physical effects of dark Force usage.  They were uncomely, the visible markings of sin.

"They are the markings of exertion and depletion.  It is regrettable that most species find them unsettling.  But we burn our bodies in the Force and find a fair exchange therewith.  If your kind wish to assign a moral value to this —"

"Really?  It's not for nothing, you know that.  The majority of your kind commit such atrocities that the association isn't irrational."

"Need I recite the endless scroll of Jedi calumnies?"  Even unclothed he was no less the lethal Councilor, undiminished in gravitas.

"I don't pretend the Jedi are perfect.  Or even good, much of the time.  I'm trying to push it that way, I think almost all of us try, but sentients… are as we are.  In some sense it's enough to have somebody wielding this power who's accountable to something other than might-makes-right.  A check on carnage and chaos.  Something a little more stable than Darth Tantrum wreaking horrors on known space every time one of you ambitious enough crawls off Korriban."

"Yet you seek to eradicate us.  A poor balance."

"That's not what — and you, you haven't bombarded priceless archives deliberately?  You haven't slaughtered our academies wholesale?"  Her eyes were chips of flint ready to spark.  "Do you forget Coruscant?  Do you forget Tython?"

His lip curled.  "Ah, yes, your precious Tython."

"You're damned right it's precious."

"Such emotion, Jedi." He lowered his head slightly, his mind lingering pointedly on some of their factions' more recent operations.  "Perhaps we are at an impasse."

This had quite skewed the mood.

He continued.  "You know my body already.  Perhaps not by light of day.  Nonetheless you know, and found it pleasing enough, however degraded."

Satele glanced aside, thoughts circling like clouds.  "That is fair."

Gravely, moving his feet very little, he turned for her; waited a few silent beats; turned again.  The dark scarred hide of his back was much the same as the other side.  Satele did not allow herself to look long.  He was right: she knew enough about his body to enjoy it — correction, to have enjoyed it.  That was quite enough.  Nothing wise would come of letting her eyes feed her feverish imagination. 

<As you like,> thought Marr at her disdainfully, bending to retrieve his robes and mask.

"Thank you, Lord Marr," she said, and stood and made a formal bow to him.  Her mind cast about frantically for anything topical to mention.  She wondered ruefully whence Theron had inherited his clever tongue.  It surely wasn't from his parents. 

<…Why does your face twitch like that?>

<Mask controls.  Vestigial habit.  Lapses in discipline.  Agreed: it was not from you.>  The grimace his face made now was perfectly obvious.  "I will overlook this rudeness."

Satele didn't roll her eyes, but the bond made it too easy to feel the mere urge toward it and have him understand.  Well, this is going south quickly.  She tucked a stray braid behind her ear, uncertain if it was damper with rain or nervous sweat.

Marr had re-donned his clothing and resumed his usual seated position.  He rested his broad hands on his knees.  "I am a firm believer in reciprocity," he proclaimed, with a hint of contempt.  Again now it was the metal looking back at her instead of the man.  Satele shivered despite herself.  I've gotten this far…

Notes:

I keep mashing together two little Marr & Satele paper dolls like "now kith" except they keep refusing to. ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH.

Chapter 9

Summary:

marry xmas and happy new year!
press your spaceface close to mine love

eta: got a little slizzer'd on o-shougatsu and posted this instead of saving as draft. hang on a sec and they might get past second base.

Marr found himself relieved that each of them was too nervous to probe the other's disquiet effectively.  Satele's face was rather pink, though an observer unable to sense her mind would notice little else amiss.  Along the bond her thoughts darted like dragonflies.  One of her hands played at her side with a segment of her short lower robe.  She, too, is of many minds and ill at ease here.  Useful.  He heard her swallow before she spoke.

"…Why did you pick that particular mask?  Is the resemblance to Revan intentional?"

"It is a customized variant of a standard Imperial battle-mask, which I indeed assume was influenced by that historical style."  If he continued to conduct himself like a lecturer of Lords this encounter might resolve in his favor, or at least with minimal embarrassment.  "Your ancestor was a symbol of prodigious power.  It is unsurprising for him to have been an inspiration for armorers."

"I asked why you chose it, not whoever made the standard one."  Her hand was no longer fidgeting and her face had solidified.  She never allowed herself to be back-footed for long.

"As I said: a familiar symbol of might, appropriate for my role, and widely produced.  We have not assembled here to discuss aesthetics," he said levelly.

"Then why is it you want to look at me?"

He imagined a forge of pure, sheer flame to immolate the impulsive responses that flooded his mind before any escaped out to her.  "As raised earlier, we are tasked with strategic coordination for which familiarity may be an asset."  Speaking was like holding a ship's course through hostile fire.  <I believe there were mentions of curiosity, and of —>

"Reciprocity," finished Satele.  "Fine."  Nimbly she did an uneven-shouldered shimmy that freed one arm from her robe and held that hand out to Marr, palm toward him.

"What is this?"

"Like the last time.  Join minds.  So I know you're not using that mask for anything but seeing."

He scowled pointedly enough for her to know it.  "You think so little of me, that I would stoop to petty blackmail in this situation."  Her robe was tilted precariously and its new arrangement cast suggestive shadows over the soft curves beneath.  The square root of nine is three.

"I can't be too certain.  We won't be allies of convenience forever, and Sith are not famed for keeping their word.  Not to put too… kyber-reflected... a point on it," she said lamely, attempting a quip Marr sensed a different Jedi had originated.

Marr scoffed at her.  "In that regard you shall find I am unlike usual Sith."  <And there is the bond through which we might… hold one another to account.>

The square root of sixteen is four.  Reciting in this order forced him to hold his thoughts a moment beyond the reflexive.  Most of the remaining Dark Council members owed life or limb to these little strategies of restraint.

Satele closed her eyes a moment and he imagined artillery coordinates being loaded.  "All right.  I suppose you've earned that much from me — we from us, whichever."  With greater solemnity this time, she slipped off the robe's other shoulder.  The tawny fabric crumpled almost to her waist and the shadows along her neckline he had observed so raptly brightened into the amber-pink of her revealed skin.  Her breasts descended gently and heavily against her chest as if making a sweeping bow. 

The square root of twenty-five is five.

She pressed her lips together in a flat line, then nudged the robe past her hips and let it pool at her feet, sidestepping out and shaking off the sandals she had arrived in.  A tight pair of leggings was underneath; these too she rolled off with athletic swiftness.  Outwardly she was redoubtably calm, not even a shiver at the sudden heat loss.  Her mind was a grey roiling sky of which her half-lidded eyes reflected nothing.

The vainer Sith sorely envied the Jedi their physiques that belied the passage of time and required so much less of their active power.  From Marr's point of view they were ceremonial blades on a wall: elegantly forged, sharp once if ever, never to be used.

Satele looked up at him cagily.  <Is that so.>

Her body, tan-brown and slender, was indeed remarkably free of the blemishes of age, though submitting surely, if slowly, to the forces of gravity and time.  Marr recognized the starburst cauteries of lightsaber punctures and the pale contrails of old blade-slashes and blaster-grazes, the ragged discolorations of a life at war.  And, he marked, sensing the places her memory touched in familiarity, of a life once given: her belly and thighs bore the faded traces of distension from the place they had many years ago provided for her son.

These were promising courses for his attention: observation, intelligence exchange.  The courses he wanted to follow roved wherever her rain-dewed skin swelled and receded.  He formed silent words to himself behind the mask and felt the grooves at its periphery carry away his sweat.  Through the Force my chains are broken.  It was not lost on him that the passion he so often channeled for that purpose could form the chains themselves.

Marr had too long ignored physical intimacy to feel particular shame at his own corruption-wracked body in comparison; still, her radiance was daunting — and, he remembered, in opposition.  It was difficult to believe she truly had no ulterior motive beyond lust or Force-magic. 

Even with all his research and rumination, did he indeed have one himself?  Whatever was for him to admit was not for Satele to know.  He locked these thoughts away and looked full at her again.

Satele had closed her eyes, the better to distance herself from his train of thought.  Marr thought he saw a blue light ringing her when he shifted his vision.  She was well on the way to a full trance, then.  Was she testing her concentration?  Her lips made motions but the voice he heard was only in his mind: <Yes.>  Then, directly: <You wanted to touch me?>

The square root of twe — Thirty-six.  The square root of thirty-six is six.

He had felt that wayward strand of giddy eagerness before she drew it back into the weave of her tranquility. 

At the juncture of her thighs he glimpsed the edges of the small dark hairs and folded flesh his other senses remembered so well.  The warm, ripe vitality of her, restless with ecstasy, astonishingly wet — He wanted to taste her again, to touch her as man to woman, to give her pleasure until she was helpless and begging before him.  After they returned from Gravinia's temple his broken mask had retained the minutest mote of her scent and it had driven him near to frenzy.  It had taken him too long to disintegrate the wretched thing...

The square root of forty-nine is seven.

The aura of Satele's trance flared and flickered like a small star at the periphery of his sight.  It had not faltered but intensified.  Her luminous body was static as stone yet still something kinetic seemed barely contained in it.  The expression on her face was the most he'd ever seen her smile.  Was this a challenge?

The square root of sixty-four is eight.

Marr had never been so conscious of his balance, outside an audience with the Emperor.  He rose to stand as if the floor might crumble beneath his weight.

With the same sober purpose he approached her, dark robe swishing against the mat, and extended his ungloved hand to touch her shoulder.  The aura made him half expect a shock to run through him when he did.  Of course nothing struck his hand but the humid pliance of human skin on his, a feeling to him nearly as exotic.  He felt the pulse beneath synchronizing with his own.

Satele's telepathy in trance formed no words but resonated like a clear slow bell.  She nodded gravely to him, eyes unnervingly bright.  Marr repeated his actions with his other hand, feeling anew the smallness and strength of her in his grasp, the sense of glass wings bursting through his palms as the muscles of her arms tensed under them.

The square root of eighty-one is nine.

With an artisan's evaluating hands he held her breasts, felt their weight, stroked them; he rubbed his thumbs over her nipples, sunset-sand and mulberry; she inhaled sharply at his touch and he saw the excitement dawning over her face and chest despite her ascended state.  He was hard now, undisguisably so.  Buried lords she was beautiful, she was real, she was under his hands.  The ache in his groin was becoming troublesome.  For the millionth time he wished he could see and use his mouth simultaneously, to trace his teeth over the long routes between the moles on her wheat-golden skin.  Instead his fingertips must serve.

She had subsumed desire under serenity and again breathed too softly for his hearing, blue as a ghost.  The warmth of her opposite him was a trance-aura of its own in which many portentous things seemed suspended.  Marr could not avoid the feeling of a thief in a trapped treasure-vault.

As he ventured to caress her waist Satele suddenly slumped downward, the irides of her eyes vanishing into white.  Around her the trance shattered like a glass dome.  The flashbang of stimuli from her mind reminded him of hyperspace right after the jump and it haloed his perception with disorienting static.  Automatically he moved to support her neck and the small of her back, lowering her to the floor with exacting care.  As dead weight she was light as a wisp in his arms.  It fascinated and incited him, her seeming fragility in contrast with the reality he knew.  The guileless deception of it.

Marr verified her pulse and breathing, time amber-thick around him.  He nudged her into a recovery position and waited.  Eternity elapsed between them.

Satele shifted and murmured like a dreamer, her matronly thighs undulating, and he was acutely tempted to dishonor himself.  Nine nine the root of eighty-one is nine —

Hiding the action from a nonexistent observer, he reached to detach the fastenings at the edge of his mask.  With caution he removed the device and set it beside him on the mat; instantly his other senses rushed into the near-void left by his sight.  Stale sweat // iron // kend ember // generator frequency // rain-soaked cloth // the vinegar-sweet scent of her.  The pores of his face blinked like eyes in floodlight.  Always from the Jedi's mind rushed a current of mysterious power that bore every third of his thoughts away with it.

The cube root of seven hundred twenty-nine is nine nine nine

Whatever was happening in Satele's brain rang and pounded in his head, excruciating and crazy-making.  Her body before him was inert.  So very like prey.  He seized upon the possibility of wrenching open her legs and claiming her, mindful no longer of oath or ethos.  The hunger inside him howled like a beast and the fighting of it made him dizzy.  He inhaled once, luxuriantly, lingering on everything the air bore.

There was nothing for it.  Someone would have to be notified — if at all possible, not from the Republic.  He cast a cloth over her and stood to leave.

Chapter 10

Summary:

in which the game of chicken between M's and S's self-discipline reaches the lightning round

Notes:

07 January: fixed some of the wack line spacing and mended those poor dashes i love so much to abuse.
11 March: tweaked a few things in light of helpful feedback!

Darth Marr marched purposefully toward the council area, the cape of his regalia arcing hologenically behind him.  Lana Beniko and Theron were present there with a smattering of soldiers and retainers, examining projections on the tech-table.  "It is finished," announced Marr with pride, addressing Beniko alone though his voice carried well into the trees.

She looked up from the table and blinked at him.  "…What is finished, my lord?"
"Naught but our central mission, against Vitiate."
"Respectfully, I don't understand."
"Momentarily you shall."

Satele had dressed hastily and stalked him out of the temple, alert again, maximally suspicious.  From behind a cycad she watched them.  Marr gave no sign of having sensed her, across the bond or otherwise.  He continued, pivoting to and fro to acknowledge the small gathering while keeping his focus on the agent-Sith: "We have ascertained the form and location of Vitiate's secreted power base, secured the cooperation and capitulation of this fractured 'Revan' spirit, and determined the proper course of action to nullify our adversary."

Beniko had the savvy to get her piece in before Theron could do so less deferentially, keeping her incredulity to a cocked yellow eyebrow.  "My lord… in under two hours since our last meeting?"

Satele's son rubbed at his temple with thumb and index finger.  "Look, this smells.  I'm truly touched by the trust you Sith apparently have in each other, but I'm gonna need to see some objective proof here."  He gesticulated at the Republic officers and Jedi.  "…As I'm sure our leadership would prefer before we, you know, commit to further action."  Satele could tell he was wondering where she was, spinning out countermeasures in his head for worst cases.  "Yeah... and may I perhaps inquire about Grand Master Shan?  Wasn't she with you just now?"

Marr evinced uncharacteristic restraint, reacting to neither the insolence nor the question.  From his cloak he produced a pair of holocrons and displayed one in each palm for the benefit of the gathering.  One was a dull and unassuming pink tetrahedron, the other the black etched Meterix 'cron they had just been discussing.  Why the kriff would he go so far as to show them that?!  She was forced to contend with the possibility that more had gone astray with Marr's psyche than she'd realized.  Maybe she had reached too rashly for the idea of a Sith who could connect with the enemy.

It wasn't the black holocron whose projected beam shone forth now.  It was coming from the pink polyhedron and she had to augment her sight to make out all of what it showed: a temple deep in the forest, an ecumenopolis of alien spires, a transport carrier of cultists in custody.  None of it was familiar, not even what appeared to be on Yavin's moon.  

Satele found the pace of time around her fluctuating.  Disparate elements began to slot into place in her mind like components of a great machine, interlocking... then falling separated into an abyss as she tried to examine them more closely.  Yes.  Please, isn't there more?  I just need—

---

"That's it, that's it!"

The Darth Marr who turned toward the sound of her voice was not the armored general declaiming at council but the bare-faced, robed Sith in vigil beside her on the mat of his inner chamber.  She saw his eye-remnants flex outward as if he were trying to see her better or give his absent mask a command.  Where was his mask, anyway?  That didn't matter.  The vision that had just shot through her head left a wake of questions and data that threatened capsize.  She struggled to hold her thoughts in balance.

This was that rarest, unstablest element of her power that existed barely long enough to assert its own reality.  The eureka she had followed to Tython.  The foresight that had saved Jace.  This is what will happen and what to do and how and why, as if all of it were the simplest thing possible.  It was the spark of manic genius like the Force itself seizing her mind as a vessel to aim where it willed, the sort of thing that would be called insanity but for its results.

Marr's formidable hand was on her shoulder, bristling with electricity, forcing her attention.  She sat up with a start, displacing the hand and the drab tarp he'd thrown over her, and was suddenly newly aware she was wearing nothing else.

Oh.

Satele's first impulse was shame but as the events just before her vision re-entered her memory — talk, trance, his curious hands — they tinted her emotions a passionate crimson.  She gulped quietly, in dread and desire and dread of desire.  Heroes of Brentaal soar in the sky—

"The Grand Master rouses," said Marr snidely, though she sensed his relief, and the breathless edge to his words told her the passion she battled raged equally on his side.  "You... are unharmed?"
"Yes." She blinked slowly, taking stock of herself. "Yes, I think so."
"And you believe you have had an… epiphany."  His low voice trailed to a sirocco hiss that seemed to rise from his mouth like steam.
"Very much so," she said, her words sounding husky and foreign.  She gathered the large cloth to her, pulling her knees to her chest, concealing herself.  The only safe action, she reasoned, the only option outside launching headlong into the depths that called her.

If her voice failed there could be only her thoughts, tumbling out in a rush.  <…I saw you.  No, you didn't die this time, sorry to disappoint.  It was the future, I think.  The near future?  Hopefully near.  You were telling some of the leaders here how we succeeded.  Lana Beniko, Theron.  Didn't even seem like a vision at first.  I need to meditate on it.  There was another holocron, not this one, it was pink or grey—>

<Hold, Jedi.  Take your time.>  Of course, of course, there were easier ways to transmit this, what was she thinking?  The weight of that hand was against her shoulder again, stabilizing.  He drew it slowly down her naked back like her skin was a thin film of ice that might fracture beneath it.  

She held her breath.  The rough tarp chafed against the lacquer-firm tips of her breasts and she resisted flinging it off.  Marr's mind churned like a hook echo, fighting to master itself before it spun past controlling.  For her own part Satele started to silently recite her Code with every seventh syllable emphasized.  One of Yuon's favorite tricks.

He was holding the Meterix prism too and I saw it and was meant to, intruded her thoughts wickedly.  Uncertainly she looked around to confirm the real item's presence beside them and Marr withdrew his hand from the curve of her spine, face still intent on her.  As she shifted position she could not avoid noticing the warm slickness between her legs, the animal evidence of her need.  It had not seemed so obvious before the vision.  He had not touched her there.  Not this time.

(Not yet,) said that truest quietest voice within her.

<It is uncustomary,> acknowledged Marr, <for hostile leaders to lose consciousness… in my chambers… in this fashion.>  His sitting posture had gone slightly slack, as if his attention wandered.

Now who's grasping at topics?  No wonder he didn't try that one out loud. 

There seemed to be less and less air in the room.  An equilibrium was slipping.  She wanted to force the inevitable moment away, delay it, deny it.  In Marr's disordered thoughts she had hoped to catch hold of his own resistance to patch the tatters of her own. 

She found none there.

Like a manka he sprang forward with deadly, preternatural grace, his hood off and his hot mouth on hers, his tongue lancing past her lips, his momentum forcing her back until she had to bolster herself with her arms.  Marr was an immense man, two meters tall or more, and as his bulk pressed against her Satele's instincts shouted danger, despite the ease with which she could hurl rocks the size of freighters.  A flash of lust sheared through her and she felt her balance waver.  She closed her eyes and sat upright with the Force behind her, knowing Marr would yield to her movement. 

It was thrilling to kiss him at last, to join in this little way, to taste him.  Her cheeks burned to admit it.  Disinfectant, smoke, a mouth sour from breathing all day through the mask — he could taste of anything at all and still she would drink deep of it.  Their tongues probed one another, hesitantly at first then bolder, swirling, exploring, the soft wet give-and-take reminding her all too well of far more intimate acts.  Which we've — already — oh—

Almost as abruptly as they had begun she pulled back, aware and unnerved.  I am kissing the leader of the Dark Council and it's not because some deranged ghost has hold of my senses.  "I don't know about— Maybe this isn't—"  She brushed Marr away with a casual motion of Force power that still set him stumbling as if the moon's orbit had paused beneath him. 

Satele.  You are a Jedi.  You are stronger than this and you always have been, she chastised herself.

<And you could be stronger still…>  Marr was edging closer to her again.

"In conjunction with a Sith," she said aloud as he settled close to her side.  "That isn't power I need."

"But it is not power that a Jedi desires, only fortitude," he replied, his careful voice barely a whisper by her ear.  "Is that not so."  He leaned to kiss her neck and she did nothing to stop it.

"Of course not.  Not desire either.  What we seek is peace, equilibrium.  Serenity.  You know that.  Instead of passion."  Her voice was steady, pointed, and very quiet as she tried to ignore the heat of Marr's body so close to hers and the insistent, methodical play of his lips around her ear and neck.  It was … difficult.  Still she made no move toward or away from him. 

A whisper, now: "The opposite of excess need not be abstinence."  He brushed his fissured lips teasingly close to her mouth, setting one of her braids askew, then sat back.

Satele wiped her mouth with a wrist and took a long, precise breath, then another.  I am water in a mountain crater.  Fed by nothing, flowing into nothing, still and pure and deep.  Water in a crater.  Ripples from a drop.  There is no emotion there is peace.  There is no passion there is serenity.  There is there is there is passion there is peace.

"If you seek serenity then let us be equal," he said solemnly.  With a hand he tapped a short pattern on the floor and the light in the room — all of it, not a stray indicator or emergency lamp to be seen — blinked off as though it had never been.  She closed her eyes; opened them; saw the same darkness.  She felt unable to breathe at all.

Marr spoke warily, as if the precise words he chose might invoke a spell.  "Let go this pretense and let us… please one another."  The words floated in air like a strand of string.  Satele felt disconnected from reality. 

Without speech or thought Marr reached out for her face and tilted it to realign with his, emphasizing his point with a deep, lingering kiss that sent a rush along her nerves.  She wanted to feel his mouth everywhere.

Yes.  They had stalled too long.  It was good, this intimacy; it would be good to lie together, to quell the distraction and settle their minds.  They would be clearer after, and then she could impart all her vision had revealed.  Likely it would not be the strangest liaison to come about as the result of this anomalous alliance.

She teased with a tutaminis trick she'd considered once years ago, concentrating a measure of her power into the tip of her tongue to send a springing, resonant response to the places it touched.  Marr felt it and relished it and was fit to devour her, moaning inwardly in a way that sent entirely mundane throbs through both of them.  His hands explored her skin with the delirious haste of a youth, her own momentarily content to caress his broad chest.

<Your mouth — exquisite —> blazed his thoughts all the while, unrestrained.  She felt lifted aloft.

With the bond as guide Satele helped Marr divest himself of the rest of his simple costume then herself of the meager cloth, and his ravaged bulk lay over her on the thin mat as leathery hands measured out the space of her body.

Now he sealed his mouth against her neck, sucking and biting as his hand on the opposite side swept up her body to play with a breast.  Satele massaged the scar-corrugated space between his shoulders and felt with hands and psyche how close he already was to being overwhelmed.  Much harder than levitation, than meditation, than any feat of Force magic, was accepting that he and the strangeness of him aroused her beyond reason.  It repulsed and challenged and seduced her and she of sound and sober will was choosing it now.  Inevitably he heard these things; there was no response but the rising bass thrum of his desire, and she was left to want and wonder.  Of their own accord her hips canted toward him and brushed the taut length of his erection as she spread her legs wider, reaching and aching for completion.  Stars how was he this hard.

<I — oh fuck Marr please—>

"If you wish it, speak," he ordered.  His voice was almost level.

She wound an arm around his neck and rose from the waist to graze his good ear with her lips, barely breaking a whisper: "I need you in me—"

He groaned against her, satisfied and impatient.  "Sufficient." 

Freed from all further need for self-discipline Marr inched forward on his knees, lowering them both; guided himself to the slippery-hot aperture of Satele's sex and slid inside her, thick and powerful, and she had no idea how or why she made the sound she made, a wild yowl of something deeper and cruder than joy.  She did need this.  Knowing already how his mind and body could move with hers, drawn further by the bond along any such path she explored, she felt compelled to discover what more could happen between them.  "Yes," he rasped, rumbling like a temblor, "take me—"

The prolonged anticipation had made her nearly as wet as after he had attended to her with his tongue and fingers back in that temple.  Still he felt almost too wide to endure as he pushed deeper and began a steady, stroking rhythm.  Satele shut her eyes, gripping his sides desperately, crying out at the intensity of the pressure that stretched and filled her.  More experienced women became acclimated to this, she had to assume, with both hope and disappointment.  It seemed a simple physical task, for such a prodigy — though she'd never entirely gotten used to Jace.  We never had much time —

<And we shall have little time here,> Marr thought at her, slowing, relishing her moans of lustful distress as she learned to open herself to him.  "While you — can—" he choked out between labored breaths.  His whole consciousness was aflame and scalding hers and Satele thrilled to hear his voice in disorder, his control undone.

Yes, sang their thoughts and bodies as one, yes, how I have wanted you.

Marr brought his mouth to hers again, kissing her savagely, speeding his rhythm.  Their minds rushed between it all so blindingly that it was a relief only thoughtless instinct was needed now: the urgent cries that rattled her teeth against his, the rheologic sounds and primal scents of their bodies joining, the sensations that carried their counterparts as perception-shadows with them.  The bond throbbed with living energy like a conjoinment of twins.  In darkness she savored his overpowering size atop her, the harnessed strength of his muscled limbs moving against her, and the seisms that pierced between her legs to her absolute center, forbidden and perfectly right and yet

not

quite

enough—

"Harder," she heard herself plead.  Marr was taken aback and his gleeful arousal seared through her mind as he moved his hands to the backs of her knees and folded them to penetrate her further, fiercer, more.  Satele braced herself against the mat with her hands and elbows and found her powers of motion and balance flowed easily.  A feeling like warmth after long cold began to pulse through her with every bruising thrust of his cock.  She was almost bent back double and now he was fucking her in that one tenderest place, all the way out and in with every stroke and yes it felt so impossibly good— please Marr give it to me there yes it feels so so oh stars so good—

Halfway through she realized she was pouring all of it out aloud.  Nothing for it — either way he would know.  Her lover gasped and convulsed, unable to restrain himself against their synchronous sensory torrent and her shameless speech.  <Good — yes—>

His voice only grunted, incapable of even that. 

Marr's rhythm had melted into chaos, his cock a piston driving madly into her.  Even as Satele felt he might split her apart she was pulled along with him to that highest tier of her body's pleasure, for her not a peak to glide down but a field of bliss to run endlessly through.  There was no transcendence at all in the act this time, no future visions: just the meeting of flesh, the mutual craving, and her limbs spidering frantically as she clutched him, feeling the rush of his seed as he made a strangled roar and contorted like some creature dying to its mate.  He collapsed over her.  Satele was glad again of her strength but used little of it.  She loved the pressure of his weight, the suggestion of being pinioned at his mercy.

The last embers of the kend incense mingled with the odors of their spent bodies into a loamy, salubrious scent that invited Satele to relax back into it like a room-wide cushion.  Her thoughts made their way with resistance, like glass beads threaded on twine. 

The invisible room around them felt suspended in time, the aura so charmed Satele almost suspected it was supernatural.  The velvet void around them bathed her eyes.  Marr took slow, whistling breaths, his mind pure energy, his scar-streaked skin alive with the scent of him.

Two fading bodies casting out signals in the dark between galaxies.

It would be good to stay this way, for a little longer.

That was her thought, not Marr's.  Mostly.  He echoed it faintly, his mind refractory white noise that threatened to soothe her into ill-advised sleep.  She had to remember who she was and who he was and what they were somehow doing.  It might not have hit her with the gut-blow it had in the beginning but it still weighed on her conscience and judgment. 

It was only sex.  Hardly ideal but no catastrophe.  And it had helped settle her mind… after a fashion. 

Marr's mind was suddenly a hot coal.  <Better to have used the bed,> he grumbled in his head, cursing his age.  He raised himself up on his arms and with a shlk eased out of her, dripping despite his efforts.  With almost violent force he rapped a three-note pattern on the floor.

The room's lights snapped on more brightly than at Satele's arrival, stinging her eyes as Marr reached to retrieve his mask with the Force.  Satele noticed that even with a single hand he was machine-quick at aligning the jacks and fasteners it required.  She was reminded, awkwardly, of Theron.  No, that's not a part of my mind a Sith gets to peek at.

But he was paying no attention to her private thoughts.  Already his robes were over his head again and the man who minutes ago was melded with her completely was swathed in the security of synthweave and steel.  He collected his holocron and rose to his feet, radiating unease.

Something in Satele's back ached as she stood, collecting her own robes.  <Yes, we should have used the bed,> she thought at him good-naturedly.  Had she not been Jedi-trained she might have flashed him a grin.  She wondered what exactly he would do about the stain on the mat.

Marr's presence towered over her.  In his mind she sensed a bright dagger of anger pointed back at its wielder.  His thoughts at her, too, were furious sharp things.

<You are not guarding.  Even with the bond.  It weakens my own barriers and it must not be repeated.> 

"You've never done that with another Sith before?"

"That would require trusting a Sith enough to do it," he said acidly.  "Or being trapped in this sort of… situation."

"I'm sorry to hear that."  She meant it.

<Make use of the refresher unit as you must and return to your base.  Alternate methods must be considered.  We shall discuss at our subsequent council.>  He swept abruptly, even rudely, toward his shelves of records, turning his back to her with finality.

<I thought this was an alternate method.>

Stubborn silence in return.  Satele was irritated by the pang of hurt in her throat.  No emotion, Grand Master.

Her wild thoughts clamored as she pulled on her sodden clothing.  I have to get back to the camp.  We're just discussing battle meditation.  Got a little into it.  I have to at least try to maintain an upstanding image.  Her mind was fretful and she couldn't hide it. 

...What will be will be.  She had made her decision and acted, and she needed meditation and a shower anyway.  The matter of Marr could be … tabled until then. 

She glanced at the refresher door and then her datapad.  Oh, good.  The forecast had held; outside Marr's temple a patient rain still fell.  I waited long enough for this weather.

Marr's mind was many-spined.  They tried not to look at each other as she left.

Notes:

thank you for reading!

this story sort of consumes my mind lately. feel free to DM me any especially boneheaded errors.

Chapter 11

Summary:

meanwhile on the joint forces group chat

Notes:

i am not usually one for chatfic but this chapter kind of wrote itself that way.
14 Mar 2025: edited a couple chat handles per a reviewer's canny lore suggestions

JC_bthor.z: Hello, anybody out there?

II_L.BENIKO: afternoon zolla.

JC_bthor.z: Use my title at work please.  Just a professional preference.

JC_bthor.z: This is the channel with just you and Theron and me, right?

II_L.BENIKO: correct.

SIS_t.shan: no its the one with 8 ortolans in a chorus line, pls try again

JC_bthor.z: I hope you'll be patient with me.  I'm not an old hand at intelligence stuff.  Or intranet stuff.  (Or holonet stuff.)  This just seemed, uh, important and potentially sensitive.

SIS_t.shan: no worries lol, let's hear it

II_L.BENIKO: let's.

JC_bthor.z: This is going to sound super trivial.

SIS_t.shan: we're listening

JC_bthor.z: But, uh… Master Satele had that talk with Darth Marr a few hours ago, right?

JC_bthor.z: She came back from it with her leggings on backward.  I swear.

II_L.BENIKO: should have guessed Jedi were such gossips.

SIS_t.shan: they're fucking aren't they

II_L.BENIKO: of course your mind goes straight there.

JC_bthor.z: I might be a gossip but that is not automatically what I was implying!

SIS_t.shan: holy kriff I need this like I need another hole in my head

II_L.BENIKO: settle down, agent.  consider the situation.

II_L.BENIKO: bthor, how are you so sure?  and even if you are, for all we know she went to the fresher and had to change for some reason.  wasn't it raining?

JC_bthor.z: Phewwwww, I hope that's all it is.  Fair point.

II_L.BENIKO: call me crazy but I feel like:

II_L.BENIKO: (theron, please understand I am not trying to rile you here)

II_L.BENIKO: "satele shan has some sort of incident requiring the adjusting of leggings" is far, far far more likely than "satele shan has spectacularly ill-advised clandestine sexual affair with her diametric opposite".  let's be reasonable here.

SIS_t.shan: lightning up my fucking ass Lana this is my mother ur so snarkily speculating about over here

II_L.BENIKO: oh deal with it.

II_L.BENIKO: @bthor. you didn't answer my question.  how are you so sure.

JC_bthor.z: So aurek) she spilled oil on her knee shortly before leaving for this meeting of hers (source: we had breakfast together)

JC_bthor.z: besh) I welcomed her back afterward and the oil stain had done a 180.  And one of those little ornaments she wears in her hair was missing.  I notice these things.

SIS_t.shan: good thing you're on the noticing-things channel

II_L.BENIKO: that's it?

II_L.BENIKO: …hmm, I'm not convinced.

II_L.BENIKO: did you happen to… ask her about any of this?

JC_bthor.z: Sort of.

JC_bthor.z: Asked if everything was all right, that kind of thing.  In a serious way.  She said that she was fine — to be honest she was in a great mood — and that rain on jungle trails is an enormous pain.  And that she needed to transmit some immediate queries to the Jedi Archives.  (We do that all the time.)  From my perspective it didn't feel sinister and it still doesn't.  Not exactly a "Great Disturbance in the Force" feeling, if you take my meaning.

JC_bthor.z: But something was off, I don't know what.  Something with the energy.  And that concerns me because she is usually very candid with me about whatever's going on.

JC_bthor.z: It's not like Jedi never trip on a path.  Even mankas fall from trees, as they say.  Just… That isn't the vibe I got.

JC_bthor.z: Revan nonsense?  Vitiate body-snatchery?  Marr mindmeld?

SIS_t.shan: ok come on now

SIS_t.shan: are those theories really, truly more likely than Satele being a human with a libido

SIS_t.shan: in b4 "oh theron now who's talking about your mom"

SIS_t.shan: i would absolutely like to not be.  whooooo would i ever like to not be.

II_L.BENIKO: I certainly don't care for the woman's politics but she has ample options to satisfy that urge without causing a diplomatic crisis and I would expect her to do so.

SIS_t.shan: let me remind u that we are, currently, in the midst of a giant diplomatic cluster-crisis that looks to get even worse

SIS_t.shan: everything rn is strange already so who knows

SIS_t.shan: the heart wants what it wants amirite

JC_bthor.z: The heart wants w- dammit, Theron.

SIS_t.shan: who has two implants and is a text input champion

II_L.BENIKO: you have at least three.

SIS_t.shan: what did i sayyyy

II_L.BENIKO: ugh

II_L.BENIKO: back to the subject.

II_L.BENIKO: Marr is categorically not that sort of person.  to the very best of my knowledge (which we must agree, on this subject, is far better than either of yours'). more than a few challengers have tried honeypotting him and all of them have failed.  I'm sure he has his few human indulgences but the only ones I'm aware of involve armorsmithing and some kind of incense.

SIS_t.shan: were u a challenger?

JC_bthor.z: Wait.  Can I take that as confirmation he is, in fact, human?

II_L.BENIKO: it's more a figure of speech.  you heard nothing.

SIS_t.shan: she means yes because he is a human.  u heard it from me <3

II_L.BENIKO: my greatest concern here is that one of them is compromised wrt this mission.  or, Force forfend, both of them.

II_L.BENIKO: this does not leave this channel.  but there's something going on with Darth Marr.  it's very likely not serious but he has cut some of his major comms channels and he will not tell me why, even though this is the job I am sworn to him to do.  after their meeting he unilaterally rescheduled that test raid we were supposed to have then stopped replying to my messages.  and because all of us are here in service of the same critical goal, I expect your assistance just as I provide mine.

JC_bthor.z: Yes, that … sounds like a problem. 

JC_bthor.z: …Oh.  Master Satele said she was going to ask him to do that — reschedule the raid, I mean.  I don't know if she actually did before he called it.

II_L.BENIKO: I have an interview in 4 hours with a soldier Marr dismissed immediately before the suspicious incident.  word on the … muddy jungle trail is this fellow has some previously undisclosed information about what happened.  as far as I can, I will share the results here.

SIS_t.shan: can i come

II_L.BENIKO: leaning towards …. no.

JC_bthor.z: …Thanks, both of you.  I'll keep my eyes and ears open and see what I can learn from Master Satele.

SIS_t.shan: ya same.  ijs i don't think i like where this is going.

II_L.BENIKO: @bthor I thought you were staying with her?

JC_bthor.z: No, not since Rishi; she wanted a space to herself.  Which I completely understand.  We switch that up by the rules sometimes even so.  Helps prevent people from getting too chummy.

II_L.BENIKO: no offense but that sounds rather miserable.

II_L.BENIKO: you aren't trying to kill each other but you also can't be around each other any more than people who are? please tell me how that makes sense.

SIS_t.shan: noooooo comment

JC_bthor.z: You always have a comment.

SIS_t.shan: at least we don't have to front like we're hot shit at all times so the other sith don't devour us

II_L.BENIKO: you front like you're hot shit anyway.

SIS_t.shan: you know what I mean though

II_L.BENIKO: do I?

SIS_t.shan: so lana which comms channels?  can u do me a favor

SIS_t.shan: doesn't have to be otr

II_L.BENIKO: I knew I shouldn't have specified anything.  Theron so help me Naga Sadow I will literally tear your face off if you start pestering me for that channel access.  it's not one of the ones I can grant even off record.

SIS_t.shan: is that a promise ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

II_L.BENIKO: yes.  you've gotten quite enough out of guilting me for the hostage matter on Rishi.  no more.

SIS_t.shan: i mean i'd much rather get it from you.  also: "matter" wtf woman i was actually tortured

II_L.BENIKO: silly me.  I thought you preferred keeping at least part of that smug mug organic.

II_L.BENIKO: and I'm not the one treating everything like a game.

JC_bthor.z: Lana, I have things to do, but read that message I left — we'll catch up.  Fbwy.  You too, Theron!

JC_bthor.z has logged off.

SIS_t.shan: see, look what u did

II_L.BENIKO: she is fine.  all of us have duties.  some of us have to work hard and not just smart.

SIS_t.shan: doing my level best over here lord beniko.

SIS_t.shan: madame beniko?

II_L.BENIKO: in the interest of said work, I've got to get back to it.  see you at council.

SIS_t.shan: lana 1sec

II_L.BENIKO has logged off.

SIS_t.shan: nvm

SIS_t.shan has logged off.

Chapter 12

Summary:

awkward conversations + amateur arborist antics

The holoreport from his field officers had everything Darth Marr wanted to see.  Tables of materiel and personnel and projections and expenditures. Recordings of forward operating bases in their final stages of primary construction, swarms of soldiers executing his orders.  Projected dates of completion for additional support facilities.  Perhaps most promisingly, a map indicating the estimated location of an old Imperial Guard facility crucial to the Revanites.  The splotch of vermilion over the green jungle was less precise than he hoped, but the officers assured him triangulation would be complete within four cycles.

Six, then.  They hadn't yet been terrorized out of optimistic scheduling, these soldiers, and that oversight was his fault.

Am I certain there is no practical way to do this without the aid of her vision? It would be unwise to disregard the option.  The very urgent option.

The square root of three hundred twenty-four is eighteen.

The square root of three hundred sixty-one is nineteen.

Marr fought to dissipate his steadily rising anger before it overwhelmed his reason.  Hours later and Shan was relentless.  He had done his best to wall off the Jedi's mind from his own, to disregard her insistent attempts to communicate.  Like water seeping past that wall were the intrusive thoughts that constantly redirected his rumination to the topic of Marr-you-need-to-see-this-vision.

At least she is focused on the mission, he thought sourly.

He sat in his meditation position, in full armor, in the sparring-pit of his anteroom.  The memory of their meeting glowed in his head like a radioactive mechanism that could be touched but briefly and with greatest care.  He had only himself to blame for that, of course.  He had taken a risk and made an error.  It was well possible to coordinate both sorcery and sex without baring one's entire mind and soul and she ought to know it.  She knew he carried ruinous secrets beyond his blindness.  He could not countenance even the chance of her glimpsing them.

Shan bears her own secrets.  Why not consider it again? nudged his influenced thoughts.

As rushed as their coupling in his chambers had been, still it had impressed him indelibly with her and her numinous being as it merged in darkness with his own.  All her shivering skin, strong and flexible as a suspension spring.  The tutaminis tingle at the tip of her twirling tongue.

The numberless channels of his mind interweaving with hers.  What masterworks might they weave together?

No .  He shifted his imagination back to his now-usual images of penitence: Kaas burning.  Maggots twisting in the mounded skulls of citizens.  This was a poisonous joy that tempted him, a self-indulgence that would leave his Empire to rot for his own comfort.

But was he willing to sacrifice his own forces for it when this strange holocron could offer them another way?

<If, Jedi.>

The persistent pulse of her thought in return reminded Marr of a chanting crowd that had maintained its energy for hours. There was a fearsome, unflagging brilliance to it.  <As I recall it was you who introduced the idea.>

He flung a lance of thin fury back at her through the din, enough to cause her a headache.  His own head pounded in echo but that was nothing new.

An alert interposed on his mask's VIEW unit.  [[ Hostiles spotted west of Point Cresh, moving to engage. ]]

With slow dignity Marr rose to his feet and checked the heft of his lightsaber at his belt.  Perhaps this cycle would be his last.  That was a thought he'd considered daily for many decades.

It will be someone's last, he resolved as he left.

---

In the modest tent that served as the field quarters of the Jedi Grand Master, the hooded woman whom friends knew as Zolla and others called the Barsen'thor rolled her small strong fists over Satele's back with practiced, repetitive kneading motions like a pastry chef on dough.  It wasn't the younger Master's healing specialty, but in Satele's opinion it beat machines by a damn sight.  The rain and the 'fresher shower together should have left nothing on her body to suggest the affair.

She'd not been able to hold the meditative state long, once he began to touch her.  Still she felt the possibilities that lay ready for discovery.  Her own power alloyed and magnified.  With it the lurking presences might be starved of the strewn battlefields that nourished them.  Perhaps she had been too bold in Marr's chamber, stripping them both to a stark center he was not prepared to show.  If she'd at least maintained her trance…

The signal from her mind to his persisted like a distress beacon.  Satele imagined it synchronizing to the therapeutic pressure Zolla applied to her sore muscles.  She needed this breather.  It had taken enough out of her to maintain the mental entreaty even without Marr trying to give her a metaphysical migraine.  If she could get through to him this mission was as good as done: if.  But now he was lashing out and she had council in three hours plus the postponed raid thereafter.  If she were really lucky her relaxation might extend to him as well.  So far that wasn't happening.

Through his barriers she felt chaos, urgency, adrenaline.  That was expected.  

She jerked suddenly to the side as if interrupted mid-doze.  Across the bond the signs were unmistakable: the shame and triumph of an opponent run through with a saber. 

That was not expected.

<Marr?>  No response but an ember of irritation.

It happened again, twice.  Well: not again; these two victims were slashed to pieces.  She would rather have been unaware.  She held in a gasp.

The hands massaging her stopped.  "Master Satele?"

"Hmm?"

"You're tense all of a sudden.  And your heart's fast.”  Zolla was a curious woman: perhaps thirty, plucked from an obscure Zabrak colony to find her prodigious destiny on Tython.  Rather like herself, the Barsen’thor was diminutive and unassuming in a purely physical sense.  Although the distinctive linear tattoos that veined across her sapling-brown skin marked her out as Zabrak, she had a custom of wearing a hood over her horns.  Oath to a secret god, she’d said. 

She was never entirely comfortable with the vast power that dwelled within her.  That last was the greenest flag Satele could imagine, and the underpinning of her great trust in the woman.  

Satele turned over and sat up slowly but easily on the cot, letting her hiked-up undershirt fall down her back.  "Sensed something."  She wiped perspiration from her brow.

Zolla paused and got a look in her eyes like a bird listening for threats. "Where?"

"Around the Imps' forward sector," she said truthfully.  "They're engaging Revanites."

Zolla's expression did not change.  "I'm not getting anything." 

Satele rested her hands on her knees, trying to look bright and affable, trying to tamp down the unholy energy that fulminated with every blow Marr struck.  I can say it's a hot flash.  "Not to worry.  I don't think it's more than a skirmish."

The other woman frowned.  "You're worrying me."  She wiped her oiled hands on a cloth and fixed Satele with a clear clover-green stare. 

Satele had practiced what she might say if it came to this.  "I'm sorry, Zolla."  She leaned forward.  "Do you remember that temple here from a while ago, the very... hallucinatory one?"

"Where you went missing?"

"That one."

Without taking her focus from the conversation, Zolla busied herself tidying the cot and tent.  Satele watched her deft, green-inked hands fold and parcel and arrange.  Her nails were a shade lighter than the ink.  We all have our vanities, even Jedi.   The color contrast was pleasant, besides.

"I wasn't there,” Zolla said after a moment.

"I know.  That's for the best.  The spirits inhabiting the place played havoc with a lot of people's heads.  Illusions, visions." 

That metal-soot tang of his tongue --

She made herself focus on the conversation ahead and not the sensual memories it inevitably brought up.

"Darth Marr was there with you, they said."

"Yes, he was."

"You didn't fight?"

"No.  I passed out and dreamed of pulling him out of a swamp.  And then I did, like it made perfect sense.  Somehow he'd been wrongfooted by those spirits and it…"  She realized she still had little idea herself exactly how Marr had ended up on the verge of drowning.  Ghost things.

Zolla listened patiently.

Satele swallowed and wished she hadn't taught her protégée to investigate so well.  "…The fumes and/or spirits from the temple were very disorienting.  For everyone.  We survived the night somehow despite both of us wandering off more than once, and despite the rest of our troops being out for the count."  She pinged Marr again anxiously, filling the space: nothing.  "After a day or so of that mischief, the energies dissipated and we were able to move past the area."

"And nobody suffered any lingering ill effects," finished the Barsen'thor with a nod.

"That's what the official report said."

"Lana said something about an Imperial soldier who was reassigned?"

"'Lana'?"

Zolla's face furrowed pensively and her tattoos flexed like a cat's-cradle.  "We've become familiar.  She and Theron and I.  Before you got tractored into this whole thing we went through some ordeals."

Well.  This is interesting.

"…So I hear.  Theron told me a little."  Even that was overselling it.  At least he was a subject Zolla would already expect her to be sensitive about. 

Marr took a blaster bolt to his armor and she winced as adrenaline ran through her.  At least it made her feel emboldened to share the truth.  As far as she could.

Zolla tugged at the bottom of her robe's long hood, looking away then back at Satele.  "Oh.  Yes, um, Theron.  About you and Darth Marr.  He thought, he– he thought something romantic was going on."  She smiled sheepishly.  "He's got an imagination on him.  Usually that's a plus."

"Usually," said Satele, concerned.  "That's… not a rumor I think I want spreading around."

The younger Jedi wiped her hands again with a cloth and set it aside.  "What did happen, then?"

"We… saved each other, spared each other--"

"You already said that."

"-- Shared a vision, that night.  It's… about the future.  Bound up with Revan somehow."  She smirked ruefully.  "And in a more in-- immediate way, Darth Marr is now… bound up with me." 

While pretending discretion, Satele was intensely conscious of the other woman's reaction.  It was best not to hide things from her fellows, particularly not boon companions like Zolla.  Easiest that way, truest in the Force, truest to each other.  Still… 

Zolla cocked an eyebrow, her tattoos rearranging. "…you mean a bond?  In the Force?"

Satele nodded warily.  "Yes.  We think."  She made patterns with one hand on the other.   "Thoughts, emotions, actions, they project all too easily to the other.  The cause, the reason, that's still something of a mystery.  But the uncanny temple is probably why."  That was the rancor's share of it, the government-relevant share of it.  She felt lighter already.  "So far we are dealing with it."

The Zabrak's face was kind and somber, evincing no suspicion.  "Master, you know I studied on Voss for a time.  The sages there have deep knowledge of such matters."

"That's very kind of you."  As an afterthought: "Barsen'thor."

"Master Satele, the formality is never necessary."  She smiled warmly at the Grand Master.  "I mean it, though.  This must be incredibly stressful for you.  Let me help."

"You've guessed my reasoning already, I know, but I thought I'd be able to resolve it before you needed bothering."  Satele felt heartened by the other woman's presence, the conviction and solidity of her connection with the Force.  It was an expected effect of the master healer's aura and still a wonderful relief.  Perhaps this will work out after all.

Zolla nodded.  Tentatively she touched one hand to Satele's.  "Do you mind if I try sensing?"

Boldly, Satele assented.

They leaned against one another, forehead to forehead, hands clasped.  When Zolla's sensing was finished she embraced the other woman properly, tightly, sending with full heart the relief at having an ally.  I don't want to lie to you.  

The forking ink-lines on Zolla's dark face seemed like fissures in earth as she gently withdrew and looked up at Satele with distress.  "Master… what is this?"

A red saber carved across Satele's consciousness.  She maintained her outer calm, with effort, though a vision of violet annihilation impinged on her senses and dread began to seep up from within her.  <Lord Marr.  With respect.  Will you stop.  Call your soldiers off.  We can't engage again until the council.  Please trust me.  If only on this.>

Zolla continued.  "This energy flowing between you.  It's… dark."

"That's to be expected, considering my antipode."

"Not the void-dark of the already corrupted.  Rage-dark, passion-dark, crimson and volatile."  Her caramel nose wrinkled.  "It's not all that way but it's... not what I thought."

"Which proves my point."  Satele let her face relax. 

"…Some of it is from you."

Satele pushed one of her braids behind her ear.  "I was afraid of that."  She looked at the tent's ceiling.  "There are some dangerous emotions involved, I'll be very honest."

Marr's diagonal blow sliced across four heads in sequence and a thrill of horror and delight ripped across her reality.  She could not help but flinch.  "I wish he wouldn't do that."

Zolla raised an eyebrow.  "...The emotions?"

"Hah.  Those either."  Satele sighed and stood and took Zolla's hands in hers.  "I promise you we will continue this.  Imminently.  But there's something I need to take care of first."  She turned and smiled grimly, buckling on her saber and light combat gear.  "You know I'll come back.  But you also know what to do if I don't."

Not even the Barsen'thor could quite hide her befuddlement.  "Master Satele--"

"Trust me," she called back, already sprinting for the speeder pool.

---

Yavin Prime on one side of Marr shone tangerine-orange through the trees and did strange things with the sunlight from another angle.  The cultists paid it no mind – nor did Marr, whose indefatigable progress through the jungle left a half score of them dead.  No blundering squad of zealots was worth expending Imperials.  He had ordered the commanding officer to advance only with maximum caution, then taken their mission upon himself.  

 

A would-be assassin leapt up from their jungle cover and fired their blaster at Marr.  It went scorching back along the same angle.  Another and I shall have twelve.

Out of the sun whirled a wheel of lethal light.  On its arc it nearly severed Marr's arm.  He realized belatedly he was not the target: the green saberstaff had left its glowing trail along the bases of every tree in--

Cracks and crashes ringed his senses and his VIEW unit stalled only briefly to process the falling trunks' paths and his own ideal route between them.  He ducked and followed it, and with the tailwind of his rising rage pushed two final trees away from the trail.  Distantly he heard voices -- not his battalion's.  Revanites.   From the pang of emotion in the Force he sensed their hasty retreat.

He reached in the Force again, this time for Shan's nearby presence, and stalked in its direction.  She was not far, watching him from a foliage-thick rise, saberstaff extinguished but ready in hand.  Nothing about her was in disarray.

"I assumed you might favor me with a duel, if you wished me dead."  His tone seethed with caustic contempt.  “Your spy-son is known for such petty treacheries.  I had thought better of his dam.”  Along the bond he sent a staggering shear of aggression and Shan swooned as if risen too fast from a steaming bath.  He could feel her struggle against the indignant anger he had sparked.  A fetching reaction.

"But I don't.  You can't.  You can't kill them.  The Revanites."

“We are at war, Grand Master.  I do not believe you have extended such courtesy to my soldiers.”

<Your soldiers, they can't -- we can't have them dying either!  If you'd taken a moment to listen about the vision-->

<If you had taken such time to impart that vision before becoming distracted by physical instincts -->

<Lord Marr,> she thought serenely, <that fault is very much on both sides.>

“So be it,” he said aloud, jagged resentment edging his speech.  It stung him to look at her.  Turning away, he ignited his great red saber, hacked a path back to the narrow jungle track and proceeded along it.  She followed him with light quiet steps.

Presently a thick gnarled trunk, one Shan had felled, blocked the path.  Under it was an Imperial soldier, grave-silent, folded flat as a tarpaulin.  Marr scowled.  Wasteful.   With a sweep of his arm he roll-pushed the fallen tree off her to the dirt road's edge.  A saccade switched his voice channel to field comms.  "Casualty.  West road.  Retrieve it."

Behind him Shan knelt by the road, reflecting.  After a time she spoke, evenly but holding herself composed.  "I am sorry for this.  I intended no casualties but failed.  Let my staff know the family's name and their restitution will come from my personal account."

"Such stress for a single soldier."

The stare she flashed him was fierce and penetrating.  "An army consists of single soldiers."  She re-tightened her grip on the saberstaff at her side.  "Every death touches the Force.  And, in our case, something worse.  Vitiate is doing something with them.  Probably enriching himself.”

“You’ve got to at least try,” she implored, voice strange.

<Do not,> said his mind stonily, <think you may control my will through such subtle tricks as the Jedi so like to employ.>

"Then don't waste my time baiting me with disingenuity.  I want to win this thing and wipe out all the damn ghosts and get out of here."

"Is that what you want."

Marr reached to stroke her cheek with his gauntleted hand and encountered no resistance, though the rest of her body held firm.  She looked back at him unflinchingly, her face full-blooded.  

"That is what I want."
He trailed his hand lightly down to the bare hollow of her throat and withdrew it, at once grateful and resentful of his armor. "So be it, Satele Shan."  With the VIEW unit he signaled an end to the sortie.  "It shall wait until our council.  You may advance your argument there, if it bears such great merit."

He strode off toward his forces’ outpost, feeling her eyes on him.  With grim determination he focused his thoughts only on the immediate.

---

She had receded from his consciousness – as far as that could happen – by the time Marr reached his destination.  He ordered the soldiers back to base and reserved a shuttle for his own use.

Standing by it was Beniko with fury on her alabaster brow.  He had long since ceased wondering how she appeared anywhere.  "My lord," she said strainedly, bowing with her usual practiced curve of her cape.

"Beniko."

"I've come from the Katabasis.  We must speak.  Urgently."

That effortless Core accent he would never quite master.

"It will wait until we are safely withdrawn," rebuffed Marr, pushing past her into the small vehicle and occupying more space than he strictly needed.  At his touch the door hissed shut before she could respond and he flicked his mask's VIEW unit to the pilot's comm channel.  "Depart."

"Yes milord."  The shuttle rumbled to full power and lifted above the jungle.  In the far distance he saw the stone apex of his own temporary residence.  Solitude but not solace.

He thought of his inner chamber.  The way Satele had sighed please as she– 

The square root of four hundred forty-one is twenty-two.

Had the message been truly vital Beniko would have forced her point with more temerity.  He had an idea of her intent and it was an ill-boding one.

Notes:

i've removed the no beta tag because this chapter benefited from some solid pre-posting feedback!

endless thanks to anyone reading.

Chapter 13

Summary:

friction is afoot on the moon of yavin

Notes:

been slowly chugging along at this since January. if you're still reading you make my day!

Marr waited in his fortress's inner chamber, pacing.  He felt like a nucleus, like the ancient stone was whirling around him with an inevitable power he could not hope to affect.  Shan had fallen quiet.  Her absence was less clarifying than he had expected.  An imbecilic wisp of him wanted her here in the room again, touching him, meeting him in balance. 

His conscious mind was not aware in absolute certainty of the reasons for this, of why now his storied resolve should erode so drastically.  It unnerved him nearly as much as the idea of untangling it with her watching through the bond's window.

 

With a metallic chord a holo sprouted from the desk to announce a visitor outside his temple.  Even without the image he would have known it was Beniko.  I knew this reprieve would be short.

"Name and purpose."

"Lana Beniko, Imperia-- My lord.  If you please.  I am known to you.  I have intelligence."

That was the dual-saber of her cunning.  She knew the protocol but preferred slicing through it.  One day it might take her hand, or her head.

An eyeflick under the mask granted her entry to his antechamber.  He moved immediately to exit his private quarters; for spymasters, even a glimpse past a doorway was a dossier in the making.  It was trouble enough that Satele knew as much as she did.

 

His instinct was correct, for not a moment afterward he heard her before he saw her, advancing to the border of his sparring-pit.  Smartly she saluted and bowed, awaiting his acknowledgment.  That boldness she knows just when to rein. 

So far.

 

"Beniko."

"Dark Lord."  Her voice was as expertly neutral as his but something in it sounded ignited.  "I meant no disrespect in the field."

"Describe the nature of this intelligence ."

She straightened her posture yet further, short though she was.  In stature she was, he noticed, very like Satele.  "From our Republic counterparts.  Mm, perhaps not from them--"

"Get to the point."

"…They have a ship coming in.  Through the blackout."

"I do not recall authorizing this."

He misliked seeing Beniko so animated.  "Because you didn't, my lord."  Almost conspiratorial: "It's the Jedi.  They're sending that woman from Tython."

"Shan and her pet healer are already here."

She bristled and he sensed a thorny aura to her Force presence as well.  "No.  No, my lord, it's that one they call the… the Hero.  I believe you've been briefed?"

 

He touched a gauntlet to his hood as if toggling a communicator.  Long ago he had realized the use of performative technological gestures.  He was sending out signals, of a sort.

 

<Satele.>

<What, not waiting until council?>

<You did not thus hesitate before unilaterally allowing an unvetted outside party access to our mission.>

<She's bringing that archive material I told you about.  And she's the one person capable of bringing it whom I'm completely certain isn't a Revanite.>  The mental image that passed to him from her automatic thoughts was motion-blurred, a tall green feminine humanoid.

<We shall have words.>

<Thank you for the schedule reminder, dear colleague,> she tossed in parting.  

 

The woman physically addressing Marr drew his attention with a deferential but decidedly impatient little hehm. 

 

Communication at the speed of thought often still required the ordinary mental load to process complex messages.  That would take getting used to.

 

"My lord?" prompted Beniko.  "…The Hero of Tython?"  A sidelong glance and frown: "…Lifeday Tree?"  She swallowed and sighed. "Ah… erm… 'Skank Tank'?"

"The sort of vulgar banter so characteristic of infantry ill suits you, Beniko."  Spending too much time with Shan the younger, he surmised.

"For this one I'm blaming the Republic.  And vulgarity nonetheless, it told you whom I meant."

Marr harrumphed.  "We shall require a reciprocal concession."

"I've transmitted to your datapad a list of potentially useful, and loyal, agents and affiliates--"

"For the present we dare not risk it." 

"At least send word to the Dark Council."

He drew in a terse, audible breath.  "You may contact Vowrawn on my behalf."

Beniko pressed her lips together.  "…Saying what, my lord?"

"You are Minister of Intelligence.  Buy us time.  Ideally yet more advantage."  If she meant to betray him to his fellows he was already direly wounded.  And it meant he could keep his hands out of that skulking-and-spying nonsense.  It would never cease to gall him that such tactics were necessary, though he knew the truth could not be otherwise.  "We must return from this … adventure bearing all the strength and triumph our Empire is due.  Any less and we shall struggle to exert authority against those who see opportunity in our present absence."

 

He saw the corners of Beniko's yellow eyes quiver in time with the bridge of her nose, as if trying to gauge a target. 

"Master Shan's adjutant had some fascinating things to say."

"The pet healer."

"Ye-es," said Beniko briskly, corners of her mouth turning down. "You've got something going on with the Jedi Grand Master, she says."

"Does she."  He stretched out the syllables and shifted his weight slightly, letting her contemplate his silent mask for several beats.  He wasn't going to entertain this obvious fishing expedition.  "Going on."

"In the, ah.  Esoteric sense.  Force sense."  She pressed even further.  "This is connected with your comms silence, isn't it." 

 

Marr let her think.

 

"This is my oath, Lord Marr, that's why I was investigating--"

"On my flagship?"

"That was different… I merely wished to follow up with another witness to that temple incident."

"I do hope you went without this Jedi."

She nodded, hiding most of her annoyance.

"I had assured you that matter with the Grand Master was resolved."

Beniko's lips made the shape of her eyes. "Would you not consider--" and then she thought better of it and peered at her datapad.  "Your own matters are your own, my lord.  My primary concern is for operational security."

 

"And mine is not?"

A glow at the corner of his vision: council, fifteen minutes.

 

Beniko twitched; she, also, must have received the alert.  "Respectfully, my lord, I feel too much of this mission has been spent in council.  This cult is not going to passively sit waiting to be defeated."  She adjusted her grip on her datapad, narrowing her eyes resolutely at Marr.  "They're actively expanding.  Look at this map." 

He studied the digital display for a moment, perfunctorily.

"And you've just called off another operation."  Her face bore a Sith ferocity that impressed him even as it outraged.  "Maybe we've taken few casualties but the more you delay the more you're putting us all --"

 

"Lana Beniko," said Marr ominously, in a voice that silenced her when she heard it.

 

"…My lord," she said smoothly, taking a small bow that was also a step back from him.  There was fear in her now.  It came later every time; Marr was aggrieved to be spending another precious use of it.

Beniko's careful backward step lost purchase on the floor as her feet were raised forward and ceilingward by his invisible grip on her throat.  He saw her black-clad arms tremble as she suppressed the urge to scrabble with her hands at her constricted windpipe.

 

"You are presently too valuable to be flogged.  Don’t think I won't order it."

 

Her face switched from rage to panic to rage as she fought his grip.  That is well enough , he thought, and released her into the expected fit of coughing and rancor.

As if nothing at all unpleasant had occurred Marr continued his directives in a more avuncular tone.  "Prepare well what you will transmit to Vowrawn.  Ensure it is rather more respectful than our latest interaction.  And," he expounded, "ensure the meeting-tent on the Republic side is swept after the council.  I would be most displeased to hear of any further interference in sensitive matters."

Beniko's voice now was hoarse and tentative.  "What of your cipher device, my lord?  Am I to use it?"

"It shall remain in my chambers.  Notify me when you wish to transmit," he intoned.  "At present the time has arrived for the council, at which you shall be educated on the greater rationale of recent activities."

Beniko nodded curtly.  "It shall be as you say, my lord.  May the Force serve you," she half-hissed.

She bowed her head, red-faced through the blonde, and turned smartly to leave.

 

 

---

 

 

The council area was tree-crowded such that it was shaded even when the clearings outside it were in full sun.  Theron had scouted it out for just that reason.  Even the Imps had grudgingly expressed appreciation and Satele deeply enjoyed recalling the face he'd made: too gobsmacked and gratified even to smirk, mouth twisting into a lopsided tilde as he'd looked away with a rare blush.

 

Maybe he was always destined to be distant and flinty and cynical.  Maybe Zho didn't make him that way.

 

I shouldn't ever have let Ngani have him, she thought, before she could stop herself.  All those years, any of those years, we could have had… and for what?   Battles we would have won anyway?  A useless reputation for purity?  Bela or Yuon or a half dozen others could hold my position just as well.

She steered her mind back in the direction she'd long trained it to go.  It never would have worked.  You know that.  You served where you were needed and the decision you made let you do the very best you could.   After this many years she heard it in her mind's own voice and not her old master's.

 

A thunder-deep voice shook her reverie apart.  "Grand Master Shan."

 

She turned to stare at Marr, appalled.  "How long have you been here," she breathed.  <What have you been hearing. >

Prudently, he spoke now in thought.  <I could have seen many such things, while I was inside you.>

<I don't think of my son in that context,> she spat (if synapses could spit), but he had made his point. 

 

She took a deep breath, steeling her voice.  "There are things about you I don't push at because I want to work together.  Can we… reach that understanding?  At least?"

 

He barely deigned to acquiesce, turning toward the other arrivals who tromped through the break in the trees toward the tactical table.  Theron was among them, and Zolla, and a handful of others from the military and Sith.  Satele beckoned Zolla to her.  The hooded Jedi said something to Theron before she broke from the group to join Satele at the far side of the table.  It did seem friendly.  Satele wasn't sure which of them she was more anxious about getting along with the rest of the team.

 

"Oh good.  When you jumped up from that massage like you were going off to kill someone it… made me worry."  She clasped Satele's hands in hers and squeezed them affectionately.

"With good reason," said Satele, flatly.  "I worried too."  And killed someone, she thought.  "And killed someone," she admitted, soberly, moving her eyes to glance up at the orange planet that shone through the trees like a sun-face in an ancient record.

 

She looked to Zolla again, gently withdrawing her hands.  "Could you find their name for me, please?  A human woman, I think, an Imperial soldier, near Point Cresh."  In a voice yet more somber: "It'll be the one under the tree."

The Barsen'thor frowned and fidgeted.  "You killed someone?  So that's the twinge I felt."

"I didn't mean to."

"I know you didn't."  She lowered her voice to just above a whisper.  "You said we'd continue from earlier?"

Satele smiled tightly.  "This isn't the best time."

"When is?"  Zolla glanced at her datapad.  "We still have seven minutes."

 

Satele scanned the other attendees.   Marr had gone over to confer with the other Imperials.  Theron was having a heated conversation with his own opposite number.  "So we do."

 

The shrieking caw of a jungle avian ripped through the heavy air.

 

"Master.  I really need you to level with me on this."

"There was a vision I had -- I'll explain in council -- the upshot is we can't kill the Revan cultists.  Marr was … not listening to me.  I was trying to end things without casua---"

"Pardon me.  Master.  I'm not talking about the dead woman."  Zolla looked -- and felt -- bewildered, something Satele rarely saw.  "I know, I get neurotic sometimes, but this is about whatever is between you and, um."  The Barsen'thor straightened and hiked her hooded head fractionally in Marr's direction. 

 

Satele didn't want her thoughts lingering long enough to stir him from his present conversation toward hers.  She pondered jungles.  The one around her, the foliage on Tython, the differences.  "The Force bond," she did her best to say in a normal voice.

 

Zolla nodded.  "Even I can feel something."

 

Satele was grateful for her long expertise suppressing her Oh, kriff reaction.  "…From us?"

"Yes.  It's not very much and not even like… a connection, in terms of a strand or signal.  Just, sometimes… when you talk to each other, mostly, or if the subject comes up."

"…the subject is coming up?"

"It's like," continued Zolla, ignoring her interjection, "a feeling of two components or shapes magnet-ing into place.  A little snap that I sense in my head.  That's all."

"Well, at least that's a harmonious image."

"It's not so much harmony as assembly."

"I don't think I get it."

"I don't think I do either.  But it doesn't feel like… completing or balancing something.  It feels like building and I'm not sure what it's building.  Dark, light, something else."

Satele smiled tiredly.  "I see."

 

The few stragglers near the council clearing's entrance began making their way toward the table.  Zolla wrinkled her nose at the number flashing on her datapad's chron and spoke fast and soft.  "Master Satele.  You didn't make this connection, did you?  Are you compromised?"

Thank goodness I don't have to lie.   "No.  And no.  This I promise you."

The younger woman's tattoo-latticed face was no freer of worry.  "Please."  Her green eyes darted around to the gathering crowd; they were out of time.  She moved in very close again and stared pleadingly at Satele.  "Is he … influencing you somehow?  I will do anything --"

 

Satele lifted a finger to her lips and then moved to embrace Zolla, the better to whisper: "That's why Thi is coming here.  Just in case, the two of you and Theron can take over operations."  She gave the Barsen'thor an affectionate squeeze and drew back.  "I didn't create this situation but there's potential here, not just danger.  We're going to do the best we can, all of us."

Zolla studied her superior somberly.  "Okay.  Yes.  We need to meet about this.  Our side.  As soon as possible."

"Set a time," said Satele, gamely.  Around them the usual council had taken their positions, and the chatter was dying.  She felt herself sweating.  It was always hot on this moon.

Zolla nodded slowly and the two women stepped apart to take their formal places at the tactical table.

 

 

---

 

 

Theron was ten minutes later than everyone else.  You could practically set your chrono by it, as Zolla liked to say.  Well, everyone was depending on him, weren't they?  He had important informants to check up on.  Cut me some slack. 

He set his corneal sensor to RECORD mode in case later somebody claimed he missed something.  Theron Shan kept receipts.

 

Lana stared poker-faced at him, face ruddy like she'd been fighting, yellow eyes brimming and caustic like the best view on Quesh. 

 

"Hello Theron," she said in a machete-harsh voice.

 

"Hey gorgeous."

 

Not even an eye-roll.  "I want to know what this is supposed to mean."  She held up a datapad with a saberstaff-toting Nautolan displayed on its thick screen.  This probably-Jedi was a telltale shade of olive that made Theron double-take, and he squinted: Yep.  The squidhead was wearing what looked like fairy lights around her brow and all over her gear.  Lifeday Tree Thi, all right.  "She is arriving in four cycles because evidently our blockade is a formality."

 

Theron's rocket train of thought plunged off its track into a canyon.  She was coming here?  He was going to have to stay off the group chat for a while.

 

He rubbed his chin.  "Well, Lana, you'll have to trust me when I say, truthfully," he said, truthfully, "that I don't know."

 

"I'll get it out of you," she muttered, pushing past him and the grouped Republic contingent.  He saw her swoop up to the strategy table to stand between Zolla and today's coterie of obediently subdued subordinate Sith, who themselves were conferring with Darth Marr.  Zolla was having some kind of heart-to-heart with Satele at the table's far end.  When his mother saw Theron she nodded to him, her jaw set but her eyes warm. 

 

Theron had been paying special attention to her and Marr since the other day's chat.  On which he'd been half joking -- but even if it wasn't illicit romance, something weird was going on.  She seemed hypomanic and he seemed … the same, yet somehow more prickly.  There wasn't much between those two he could clock with absolute certainty, except that Satele sort of hesitated to look at the big guy. 

 

To be fair, even among Jedi that's probably not so rare.  The body-language and biometrics dataset in his implant had worked out a 32.7% chance of "complex interpersonal entanglement".  Wow, thanks for the astute analysis.  How much did I pay for that thing?  He'd bet credits to cobwebs it wasn't optimized for these wizard monks and their magic tricks.  Maybe he could kriff with the firmware later and look for mods on the -- oh, right, they were stuck with intranet.

 

He had a backchannel to the SIS but was loath to use it.  Hunches and hints weren't enough reason to blow this clusterkark of a blockade -- or, more to the point, his atom-thin professional rep -- open even wider than it already was.  

 

He did wonder how Teff was doing.  They could've used her here.  The jungle would do her good.  Even though he knew she'd spend the entire time kvetching that she'd rather be on Nar Shaddaa during a trash strike.

 

Nar Shaddaa always on trash strike, spy boy, he imagined her sneering.

 

Satele looked around owlishly, checking for the quorum, then made a sharp performative cough.

 

"Friends, allies…" -- she gestured with a little bow of her head toward the glowering Sith delegation -- "allies of the hour."

 

She launched into a description of a vision she'd had.  Ugh, always with the visions.  Something about how the Sith Emperor was fueling himself with soul energy -- as one does -- so, knowing this, they needed to stop killing Revanites, coordinate using Force-augmented nonlethal tactics, and thereby foil his plans.  Simple as rock levitation! 

 

Theron knew the Force was real -- he wasn't that much of a cynic -- but come on , this was transparently a lot of wishes and pareidolia dressed up into a narrative for what the Jedi crowd always wanted to do anyway: sanctimonious pacifism while they figured out how to outmaneuver their enemies and allies to their advantage.  A couple Jedi crystals had portentous plans that could let them vanquish his ancestor's fan-club and cut the Sith Emperor's last little tether to existence? 

 

He did have to respect the audacity.  So many precarious variables, on a tight time limit, with a fantastic potential reward.  He was a chip off that block for sure. 

 

The rest of the council was less enthused.  An uneasy murmur rose among them.

 

Marr's sepulchral voice silenced the talk. "There is another matter.  The Jedi here inform me another of their number is to be admitted to this mission, from outside our force on Yavin."  He began to pace very slowly back and forth as he spoke, and he stared at the Grand Master like he was focusing a main cannon on her.  "Our agreement was otherwise."

 

Zolla looked at Satele and then Lana and chewed her lip.  Satele, for her part, was unfazed.  "I very much apologize for the haste of these actions.  Our time window for success here is quickly closing."  She clasped her arms behind her back.  Theron saw she had on the armband he'd gifted her years ago.  "The second holocron in my vision is real.  It exists in the Archives on Tython and must be physically present here to aid us.  Hence the visitor.  She will be remaining with us afterward for the duration." 

 

Satele placed both hands on the table and summoned all of her formidable charisma.  "You have seen what I can do.  You have seen what Darth Marr can do.  What we all can, together.  If we succeed here, that bastard with a thousand names will be wiped from existence and we can return to the vital work of managing and protecting the galaxy.  Work that belongs to mortals like the brave beings in this coalition who are risking everything they are -- not a death-defiling megalomaniac who thinks the rest of existence is fuel for his cowardly whims.  Believe in us and we can win here."  If Theron had any sense of the Force beyond cold reading he'd say she had an aura around her right then.

 

Darth Marr gave her the briefest of nods.  "So be it."

 

For just a second -- not when Satele spoke but just after, when she was gathering her thoughts -- he saw his own face staring back at him.  His own face three shades lighter and one sharper, framed by tight Jedi braids that looked like broken climbing-ropes.  Reminded him too much of when he had to walk around with that tacky look.

 

The face between those braids, his mother's face, was speaking to him.  "Agent?"

 

Whoooo kriff, that didn't help make me feel like I'm not twelve years old, he thought.  "I beg your pardon, Master Satele, I was just transmitting the info to Master Z----arsenthor's datapad.  Come again?"

 

Zolla's nose didn't even giggle, that's how serious this apparently was.

 

Satele caught his eye and raised her eyebrows reproachfully.  These posturing "council" sessions always made him feel called out.  They knew he recorded everything!  (Well, then again, he considered, they know I record everything.)

 

"Your operations partner -- Lord Beniko? -- has been inquiring about our immediate plans in light of this council's … revelations."

 

"We had an operation scheduled after this.  Had."  He nodded at Zolla, who called the holo up on the table.  Projections and calculations swarmed around a little blue holo-jungle.  Did I mention I brought receipts?   It was a very creditable little battle plan, if Beniko did say so herself.  Which she had.  In front of him, even.  This table display was purely to show he had that plan.

 

Satele barely gave it a glance.  "Clearly this no longer fits the bill.  Table it for later, Agent.  Get together an alternate operations plan, a draft at least, with non-sentient targets and at least ten participants from each of our factions."

 

On his periphery a few of the lesser Sith smirked and Lana glared at them and Zolla's face clouded.  Cute little Zolla.  She always followed exactly the right rules and double-checked her text formatting and did all the paperwork if she had to knock a cliff over on somebody.  Theron hoped she had at least another good decade before she lost the very last drops of her self-awareness and calcified into a Satele.  At least they didn't have Zho around treating them all like dejarik pieces.  Just people like his parents, who tried not to act like that's what they did.

 

"I guess if you give us an hour or so, Lana and Z-- my colleague here and I could get something, uh, noncom-ish set up."

 

"Twenty minutes," demanded Marr with seething contempt.  Whatever regard the Darth had for the Grand Master clearly did not transfer to her son.  "Moreover we expect the two of you to prepare our secure meeting-place in the meantime."

 

Theron straightened up and spoke soberly.  "Understood, will do."  He nodded toward Lana.

 

Psh.  Nobody was imminently gonna die or anything.  The opposite, right?  Well, he was used to this type.

 

He still couldn't get a handle on the leaders' dynamic.  Maybe the secrecy had just been about this cockamamie plan.  But he got the distinct vibe that something else was afoot.  Just a small thing -- but not a good vibe, not at all.

 

One of the worst weaknesses to have, in Theron's opinion, was denial.  Staring at the puzzle pieces all set out in the right order, claiming they just don't add up to anything because your whole alternative reality goes thrusters up otherwise.

 

He'd learned that the hard way, with Master Zho.  How many years could he have had, if he'd admitted to himself what he'd known since he was barely ten?

 

He wanted me for my family.  If I weren't the blood of Revan I'd have been dirt underfoot.  And once he found out I couldn't sense anything but sabacc tells --

 

He thought uneasily about their very last mission.  Heroic as his old master's end had been, the man had come out of banthafuck nowhere for … what?  Personal glory?  That wasn't his style.  Absolution?  Please, like Zho would ever think he needed any.  Theron couldn't shake the dark idea that the grey eminence of the previous generation's Jedi had been trying to insinuate himself back into clan Shan's good graces.  Couldn't have been the hope of his progeny -- Theron had gotten his cock snipped a decade ago in just that anticipation.  I don't think I want any more of us delivered in a fucking cave for starters.  To say nothing of custody issues.

 

Theron, you're overthinking this.  Get on with things -- hell with the Force, you've got Revan clever.  Things will turn out.  After this long it sounded like his own voice in his head and not his old master's. 

 

The leaders' party had powered off the strategy table and made for Satele's big Jedi tent.  He tagged along to see which sweeping techniques Lana had figured out so far.  Lately she was averaging one of his bugs every six cycles -- double her usual rate.  She was really going to hate the next one.

 

Chapter 14

Summary:

two unlikely pairs snark at each other and perhaps a bit more.

Lana Beniko watched Theron and Zolla as they quietly, animatedly hashed out the details of their hasty operation plan.  They didn't seem to require her input.  She reached into the kitbag on her belt for an endurance adrenal and discreetly pressed it to her neck behind her damp hair, waiting for the ache to subside.

Zolla giggled softly, melodiously.  Lana could sit and listen to that like birdsong.  There was indeed something birdlike about the Jedi woman, with her watchful, hollow-boned agility – who now had left Theron twiddling with configurations on his datapad.  She turned to Lana with a concerned little frown.  The expression would have seemed ridiculously patronizing on anyone other than her.  "You're sure you're all right?"

Zolla was easy to lie to, but hard to want to lie to.  Lana watched the other woman's tattoos make parentheses around her features as she racked her own brain for something noncommittal to say.  "Throat.  Allergies," she explained weakly.  There wasn't much she could do about her voice.

Despite her anxiety at being caught out Lana felt nothing but relief at Zolla's beatific not-quite-smile.  "Let me look at it?"

The Sith resisted an urge to squirm and settled for making sure none of her compatriots were nearby.

They had a seat on one of the wide steps leading up to the council tent and Lana turned sideways, letting the robed woman place Force-imbued hands on the pale nape of her neck.  "Done with the plan, then?"

She heard the little smile in Zolla's voice.  "It was enough to just repurpose one of Theron's half-ideas from before.  That should do fine.  At least if they wish to try battle meditation."  Zolla paused.  "About the other subject, what do you make of it?"

"What, my throat?  Something in the air.  It's not like Kaas here–"

Zolla's hands stopped and the power in them ebbed.  Lana pressed her lips together in annoyance; she knew without looking that the other woman's big green eyes were bright with a particular patience.  "…It's not my place to express opinions on direct orders, Zolla."

The silence stretched.

She's asking about the plan.  The ridiculous plan.  Lana sighed .  The air in her throat hurt when she did, then more when she spoke.  "It's all quite… precarious.  What do you make of it?"

"I don't think – Master Satele has visions all the time but she's never so forceful about it."  Zolla began moving her fingers again over the back of Lana's neck.  A feeling came over the Sith like just having walked into an air-conditioned room from the deep jungle.  She leaned back into the cool touch.  "Usually she's the one telling everyone to settle down about what she sees.  It's…" 

Lana tilted her head inquisitively.

The Barsen'thor said, in a small voice, "Master Satele hasn't been herself."

Lana willed her body not to tense in anticipation as she listened more keenly.  "No?"

"…And I think she's avoiding me."  Zolla stopped again and a prickly heat rushed back onto the skin of Lana's neck where the coolness had been.  "Lately she's spending most of her time alone.  Or with your boss."

Lana nodded, noticing the mundane pressure and warmth of the other woman's fawn-brown fingertips still in place, the way they felt without any Force to enhance them.  "That is indeed what I gather."

The fingertips wove back and forth without discernible order, like they were improvising a song.  It was only a beat later, after Zolla had pulled away her hands, that Lana realized her throat felt cool again.  Not only cool, but clear in a way it hadn't since well before Marr had injured her.  She took a full, indulgent, blissfully painless breath.  "I remain unexpectedly glad to have met you," she told Zolla with a leonine grin.  "Barsen'thor," she added dutifully, though no one else was listening.

Zolla leaned forward to speak more softly.  "Why did he choke you?"

"That's a very great presumption you're making," said Lana, backbone rigid.

Zolla sat back and said nothing.  At length Lana sighed.  "Pressing him about this… situation," she admitted.  And I didn't even get information worth the wounding .

Zolla moved to sit beside her, close enough that the fabric of their sleeves touched. "Then I'm even happier we got to sit down like this.  Master Satele, whatever her faults, doesn't attack her reports.  You deserve the same."

Lana rested her forearms on her knees and clasped her gloved hands, turning to look Zolla in the face, anxiously putting a little more space between them.  "I'm not certain it's not your dear Grand Master who's interfering with Lord Marr."

In the healer's expression Lana read more weariness than dismay.  "Why would she be that stupid?  Especially when she has a goal – like the one we share – she has never been the sort of person to stab an ally in the back.  She'll run you ragged in the name of the Republic, don't I know it, but –"

"Your belief in your fellows is a… charming quality, but you lose sight of your Master's position and its responsibility.  She is bound to preserve her Order and to have it prosper .  If that looks like losing ground in this marginal situation and provoking people who already hate her… well .  I'd do it."

"Would you," said Zolla soberly, her eyes so suddenly penetrating that Lana had to look away.  Lana hadn't the faintest idea whether or not the Jedi was serious but she kept talking, a little hastily. " You're not as honor-obsessed as our superiors.  Moreover…" – she pressed her lips together – "…I spoke with Master Satele today and I also didn't tell you any of this : it's some kind of bond ."

Lana felt like her surroundings were swiveling.  "Excuse me?"  She put a hand to her temple and pinched.

Zolla in that note-passing stage whisper again: "Have you ever seen him?  Without his armor, or the mask."

Lana knew she wouldn't be able to sell a bluff about that on the spot.  Not to a Jedi and certainly not to this one.  "No."

"Really?  Ever?"

"I've seen him swap outer parts of the armor, no more.  He is preternaturally disciplined and doesn't let other sapients into his inner chambers."

Zolla's voice reverted to its usual tone.  "But he let Master Satele."

"I don't actually know that."

The Jedi looked dolefully at her knees for a moment.  "…I do."

Lana was not among the many Force-wielders who commonly experienced visions.  She wondered if this feeling of dissociation, of being out of true, was what it felt like.  She folded her thin lips to and fro.  "…What?!"  Then, in a suppressed voice and a grand gesture for her: "Are you entirely sure you want to be telling me this?"

"Yes," said Zolla without hesitation, in the same quiet tone.  "Saw a flash of her memory.  She was sitting somewhere that looked like a bedroom."

 "A–"

"On the floor," said Zolla quickly.  "Across from him.  They were just meditating."

"And you saw his face?"

She shook her head very slightly.  "No, and I wasn't really looking, to be honest."

Lana paused on the illogical chance that if she didn't move, Zolla's face would hold its position.  It didn't, of course; the Jedi pulled back and sat up beside Lana on the step as she had before.

"And Theron knows of this?"

"Not from me.  You know him, he will eventually."

"So how do we break it, O mistress of mystical healing?" jabbed Lana.

"For all the methods I know, we need the cooperation of at least one end of the pair."

From decades of reflex Lana turned her scowl into a side-flick of her eyes.  "I don't think my lord would be terribly receptive to the idea, at the moment."

Zolla nodded slowly and frowned.  "I have had… limited success trying to dissuade Master Satele from this kind of plan in the past."

"So you mean it's possible."

"I mean that as in only limited success.  As in we need to come up with other ideas too."  Zolla's voice was creeping up worrisomely in volume. 

Lana brought a finger to her lips to shush her and then voiced a puckish thought.  "What if they are infatuated?"

The Zabrak chewed on her lower lip and gave Lana an incredulous look.  "What, you agree with Theron?"

Lana couldn't quite hold back the scoff.  "Well.  Perhaps not if you put it that way."  But she continued, knowing Zolla would just pull that waiting thing otherwise.  "I … as I've said, my lord Marr is not the type.  I never even heard anything about him and Lachris, and Force knows he had opportunities.  Force knows Lachris wished ," she added, a little sniffily. 

"She was his apprentice, wasn't she," said Zolla soberly.

"And you were the one who killed her, weren't you," replied Lana in the same tone, recalling now.

"I had to–" Zolla shifted defensively and the hidden horns under her hood made hillocks in the cloth.

"Peace," rushed Lana, trying to sound both stern and conciliatory.  "I am only remembering.  And remembering her connections on my side."  She stretched her limbs so she could focus on the sensation instead of her chagrin, and studiously looked away from Zolla.  "…On our previous subject, I wonder if Lord Marr didn't find some power-source that involves Satele.  That would be more his speed."

Zolla gave a slow nod.  "It's also not totally unheard of for weird lingering Sith magic to, erm, incite passion," she said, a shade sheepishly.  Then she sat up straighter.  "Or… I suppose… for Master Satele to act on desire."

"Yes, as – unfortunately – we are daily reminded," sniped Lana.

Zolla grinned mischievously.  "Speaking of him, how are you doing with those bugs?"

How does she always know exactly which topics I least want to discuss?  

Lana grimaced, rolled her eyes, then rose to her feet.  "Don't suppose I could pry that information out of you."

"I'd first have to pry it out of Theron," said Zolla with wry serenity.  She stood also, cream-and-brown robes rustling.  

They started off toward the meeting tent.  Lana wanted to hang back and follow single file, but decided she'd try walking beside Zolla, for once.  "Tell me about this other Jedi who's on the way."

 

---

 

Marr had disciplined himself to repress expressions under the mask.  It was not for the purpose of hiding his emotions (though the practice helped his voice control) but for minimizing damaging friction.   Unlike many Sith he did not employ a mortification device to cause him persistent physical irritation.  Sources of suffering had never been in short supply and death drew closer with every hour, every breath.  

A piercing flash lit the corner of his HUD view and he directed the mask to identify it.  A picture-in-picture appeared of a transmitter cleverly designed to look like a burr on tree-bark.

[DIRECTIONAL AUDIO RECORDING:TRANSMISSION DEVICE // MANUFACTURER: UNKNOWN // 32.9THz FREQUENCY MODULATED -- EMULATING WEATHER SENSOR // MATERIAL: SYNTHSTEEL (85%) ORAPHIUM (5%) OTHER MATERIALS (5%) // UNKNOWN ENCRYPTION METHOD]

He cast forth an arm suffused with power to retrieve the device from its craftily vertiginous perch near the apex of a nearby tree.  Intently he assigned kinetic motion to the little metal object and pulled , forcing it free from its cunningly concealed crevice.

Beniko ought to have found this, seethed Marr to himself.  Particularly on my direct order.  Perhaps I might have been slighter-handed with her earlier, but a willful subordinate cannot--  

" Beniko can't very well do her job when you're throttling her within an inch of her life twenty minutes beforehand," interrupted Satele, who was somehow already there.   

Despite the bond it had taken only an instant of distraction for her to materialize without his noticing.  Unnerving , he thought, this skill that served at once to both bolster and undermine him.  He imagined her silent motion through the trees, the efficient grace of her stride.  How she might employ that grace of movement atop him, in –   

In service of the Empire , he remonstrated himself.  

She waited soberly for his thoughts to subside.  "I do feel it, when you hurt someone that way.  It's not terribly pleasant."  <Gets my heart racing.  Gets my–>  

She blinked quickly, expelling her arousal, then took a meditative breath.  Marr let her quelling calm flow to him.  He focused on his breaths and studiously examined the message notifications at the corner of the VIEW unit.  Mundane and unstirring things.   They proceeded into the meeting tent without speaking and remained on their feet, facing.  

At length he spoke as if for an audience, which he had to assume – even beyond her – he was.  "I shall thank you not to interfere in my command structure."  He expended effort to keep his body completely still and held the spy-device aloft in one gauntleted hand.  "Instruct your… agent to thus reduce his audacity ."   

Marr clenched his fist until he felt the fragile components crunch like a beetle-shell.  The device shattered into steel and synthetic shavings that rained to the pounded-earth floor.  <We have quite enough to keep in confidence without outside interference .>  "If it happens again, I shall be most unmerciful."

"I don't have day-to-day knowledge of Intelligence's every movement, nor do I suspect you of yours," she countered, matching his for-the-record tone.

<We had agreed not to touch deeply upon intelligence matters, in our situation.>

<Then don't come at me for the Empire's own failures.  I left this to Theron because I trust him in the main, even though I'd rather he not have done this .  He's found the same sort of devices from your people.>  Satele's green eyes blazed confidence.  It struck a pang of ire in his brain the same way that spy-device's flash had pricked his vision.

"So.  Battle meditation," she brought up, and swallowed.  He sensed dismay.

"I have not essayed it nonlethally ."

"Not even for exercises?"

Marr grunted, having no patience for this redirection.  "It is not a priority."  He flicked the pulverized listening-bug remnants from his hand, not looking away from her, then raised that arm and splayed his fingers groundward as if wielding a marionette.  Satele raised her eyebrows and parted her lips to speak--  

In that instant between movement and sound a quintet of violet-white bolts arced from the tips of his gauntlet and raced around the Jedi in jagged loops like electric brambles.  The heat of them left sizzling burns across the exposed parts of her arms.  Satele grimaced in pain.  A seething, vibrating sound not unlike an activated saber underlay the storm.  The force of it threw her head back and she stumbled to one knee, grunting through her teeth with the effort of remaining upright.  

She stared gunbolts at him.  He felt no emotional exertion from her; she was not yet struggling but considering.

"What the stars do you think you're doing."

"I told you quite clearly we would have words ."  The violet lightning flickered crazily around the ropelike cores of it that held her in place.  Marr knew the emotion he broadcast belied his physical dignity but there was nothing but to bear through it.  "I did not authorize the addition of an additional party to our fragile alliance."  To underline his point he jerked back the lightning-tether, tightening.  There were visible marks on her arms from it now.

Her voice was strained.  "How else do you propose we get the damn thing here.  Accessing it remotely would present the same issues."  

Marr's frustration flowed through the binding bolts.  They flickered gaudily through a range of ignited violets as Satele strained against them.

She squinted in annoyance.  "Can you please lower the… amplitude.  It'll catch someone's eye."

Marr obliged and the bonds holding her became visually fainter.  He trembled with effort, feeling the immensity of her power bring itself to bear after the surprise of his attack. 

Beads of sweat gathered on her face.  "You want this … holocron.  You want this cult annihilated and the Emperor too.  We discussed this."  While she talked Marr noticed she was worrying, very literally, at her belted saber.  It rattled against her confined thigh but moved no further against the lightning lattice.  He thought of running his bare hands up that thigh, feeling the damp heat of her beneath the cloth of her leggings– No, he chastised himself.

Satele's resistance grew and brightened under his bindings.  The time for this ploy was running out.

"Indeed.  As a result I assumed in good faith our effort would hew to the agreements of our factions' special relationship."

"Which it has and will."

Marr marshalled every spark of his pent passion and pique at her to contain the nova of Force she gathered against him.

"Come to my flagship.  That is my condition.  We shall resolve the Meterix issue before your lackey arrives."

"Why?  Can we not use your lair?"

<If I am to be bleeding secrets from the ears I would rather have you at yet greater a disadvantage.>  Sourly, as an afterthought: <I have particular requirements.  It is not a lair .>  

Satele's eyes creased in thought.  "I suppose it would remove us from some of this … endemic interference on the moon.  Fine, then.  Mutually assured destruction," she said nervily, watchful for his reaction.  

A lock of hair fell in her red-rimmed eyes and she squirmed to dislodge it.  Marr delighted in the sight.  A darkness inside him dripped poison thoughts into his mind: She likes this, to be bound and made to obey.  See how she likes a cock in that prim little mouth.

Satele's expression darkened – and flushed with arousal.  < Try it.  You'll die if you do and I'll take my chances with Beniko.> 

<Your body betrays you.>

<I don't get to choose what excites me, but I do decide what I do about it.  And what you get to do about it.>  "Which is not this," she concluded aloud, and gave one shrug of her shoulders.  The bolts around her crackled to threads and dust like so many singed hairs.  Marr watched her raptly as she rose to her feet, faint steam rising from the wounds on her skin.  "Honestly I thought better of you."  

He grimaced against the mask.  Even with the VIEW unit his vision was blurred with the cost in body and psyche it had required to overpower a Grand Master for even that long.  If in fact he had at all.  "Forcible coitus is an unregenerate practice," he said in a voice even he realized was pompous, trying vainly to forge a barrier against the counterattack he expected at any moment.  His head was ringing.

"And one hardly unknown to the servants of the Empire," she spat.

"I have never thus abused your fellows, Jedi," he said coldly.  "Should I begin?"

<Let's not.>  "It doesn't matter," she said, rubbing one of the burns on her elbows.  A green luminosity grew and ebbed where her hands passed.  Marr felt an aloe-like coolness inside his arm-bones.  It aggravated him rather than soothed.  "I don't want to talk about it any more.  Don't try it."

"Tread lightly upon the sins of hidden thoughts, Grand Master."  

"A matter of necessity and convenience," he decreed stonily.  "It shall be as it must, die as it must."

She just looked at him and nodded.  "Give me a hostage, for my safety.  The Beniko woman."  <Maybe it'll keep Theron away from her,> blurted her thoughts.  She frowned crossly.  

"Your personal matters, outside the mission, are not my concern ."

"Yes or no?"

"Beniko has duties that I am loath to leave unaddressed."

"Then give my Barsen'thor the trigger to one of your fail-deadlies, or something.  This is not negotiable."  

Marr grumbled.  Fitting Beniko with a fail-deadly would damage her morale and loyalty yet further.  Perhaps I may contrive her cooperation elsewise.

"Your personnel matters outside this mission are, in turn, not my concern," said Satele spiritedly.  "You've got half an hour to lodge the details with my second.  I don't leave until she's satisfied."   

He tried to contain the buzzing glee inside himself.  "The landing pad after that interval.  Do not tarry."  

Death by lustful whimsy .  I would not have believed the universe felt me worth such humiliation , thought Marr.  This was hardly the first time for this recent shame, and once more he felt a fiery rage at the weakness it implied.

He let the anger heat and boil in him, tamed it and mastered it and held it in reserve for the always-near future.  There was very little time to arrange things properly.  There was no time at all for confronting the questions he knew lay in wait for him from his subordinates at the egress to this tent, even to march imperiously past them.  This course , he thought, must be committed to fully to possibly succeed .  

From his belt he caught up his saber and seared an oval in the tent's treated-leather layers.  The faded Jedi glyphs of benediction charred into arcs of soot and the petals of tent-fiber fell away to reveal the green freedom of the jungle beyond.  He ducked his hooded head and strode through in one smooth action.  

No peace but passion .  I am a flare and for the Empire I shall burn as the Force wills.  

Like a following ghost in his wake he felt Satele watch him, her thoughts a silent storehouse, until he was long out of her sight.

 

Notes:

i spent weeks and weeks writing the chapter after this one instead. well! here's that run-up. thanks as always for reading <3

Chapter 15

Summary:

many mind-meld meetings.
up we go, into the wild black yonder!

Notes:

17 SEP 2025 some minor edits and line additions made. thanks to my perspicacious beta reader!

Air echoed back inside itself above the still, deep, empty pool that was thought, that was the Living Force.

A pulse crossed the universe and suddenly that air was all colors and none, and back again--

Tranquil ripples radiated across the pool, slowly and rhythmically gathering speed, as if choreographed to do so.

All around Satele Shan was as it ought to be and her perception shrank back to the immediate, back to the urgent-message chime of her datapad on the woven mat on the desk in the Jedi-cell attached to the big Republic tent.  She blinked away the remnants of her brief meditative trance and stood to read the transmission.

 

===HIGHEST SECRECY===

TO: GRAND MASTER SATELE SHAN

FROM: JEDI CORVETTE APOPHALLATRIX

 

// OEM DIE CAST PRODUCT RDY!! //

// ETA 40 HOURS //

// TT // 

=====================

 

Satele frowned.  She had expected fifty.  Leave it to Thi to find a way of speeding the journey.  Time is short. 

 

As she moved about the room in her preparations she felt between her legs her body somehow reacting again, already, to the subconscious expectation of union with his.  How?  Satele's physical form may have been in fine shape, fit and Force-fortified, but it wasn't young, certainly not enough for this level of… activity.  She was still sore, inside and out -- she hadn't healed it -- from that incident in Marr's chambers…

 

You slept together, Satele.  Don't fear it, don't avoid it, don't let it rule you.  (Her conscience talking and very, very certainly not Zho this time.)

 

She hated this (hate is not the Jedi way, Satele).  She still hated it.  Something in him called her -- not to evil but enlightenment.  An even more perilous temptation: the kind that comes wrapped in virtue.  The rest of the Council would think her mad.  Especially after all her cautionary sanctimony about the Voss and other… unorthodox Force practitioners.  'There's that Revan in her again, flipping around,' they'd say, behind her back and to her face.  She didn't like it as praise any more than as a curse.

 

Disloyalty is not my goal.  Pleasure is not my goal, she told herself.  And I won't avoid it if it might lead to -- better things.  Peace, such as.

 

Peace!  Another of the foolish beautiful dreams that had eluded her all her adult life.

 

Peace for her, too, Satele dared to admit.  Peace from the prophetic visions she was usually sure were visions.  Peace from the long fetter of her heritage and the burden of her power and prestige and duty--

 

Gently she corrected her mind's course.  There is no emotion, there is peace.

 

All that Jedi peace, used to make war and never love…

 

She thought of Thi, the Hero of Tython, who'd seen her partner take a bolt to the forehead on the mission to Dromund Kaas.

 

She thought of her mother, now barely more than a hearth-glow of love at the dawn of her memory.  Of her father, a lacuna she considered now with no more emotion than a thought-experiment. 

 

She thought of Jace and, lingering longer, of Theron.  Generous draughts of another nectar she dare not consume in excess: the bonds she had stepped away from. The delicate miracle of his new skin, the Padawan in braids, the acerbic adult. Gnawing images, imagination unanchored to memory and different every time: a little boy terrified in a cave, a young man beaten and alone, on distant worlds, hostile ships, under the knife. She should have been there -- Peace. From her son her mind flickered back to his recent collaborator, her dear comrade: the Barsen'thor.

 

Zolla had been given a fail-deadly trigger to keep Beniko's life as collateral while Satele was in orbit.  The woman was capable of leading armies when she had to.  The Esh-kha called her "Silent Teeth" and Satele knew it wasn't just a play on her hooded horns.  She could certainly handle having one close adversary's life in her hands.

 

…Could she? second-guessed Satele.  There was a certain tenderness in the way Zolla spoke of the blonde Sith, a familiarity.  Not unlike how she described that Republic lieutenant who crewed her ship.  Perhaps not unlike…

 

Well, she killed Marr's apprentice.  Among many others -- damn this war.  She knows when death must be meted out.  Satele breathed evenly, calmed herself.  Marr's apprentice, the lovely laughing wailing murderous Darth Lachris.  Zolla had shaken that off; Satele recalled even her Rift Alliance fellows never reported any especial distress from her over the Balmorra campaign.  Satele had been listening.  She always had to be listening. 

 

Maybe by then she was already tempered into one of us.  A familiar sliver of regret hit Satele like a nail underfoot.  The Order -- she, in the person of that Order -- had demanded so much of Zolla, of Thi, of their Padawans and crew, of the Council, of herself.  In every sense.  It was her sacred duty to support this next generation of Masters as they rose to succeed hers.  And what have I been?  A performer then a martinet, always doing as dictated.  She wanted to leave for the future some model other than the carven statue she knew she had become in the eyes of the Republic and the Order and, increasingly, within herself.

 

How better than to have a Sith Lord shatter it to pieces, she thought, not completely in irony.  After I teach him some respect.

 

=================

 

Hydraulics hissed and the portal closed behind them.  Now they stood tensely in Imperial Boarding Dock Vestibule Esk-17, facing, silent, alone.  The space was metal and modular, poorly ventilated, and Marr sensed it made the Grand Master feel confined.  Good.

 

The shuttle had been summoned from its mothership and they were waiting a few last minutes on it.  Satele Shan squirmed minutely in the hot, closed air.  The movement and its cause stroked him like a feather.  Marr's patchwork skin felt tight around his cybernetics and the cup of his armor chafed.  Its current iteration had been designed long after he had ceased considering sexual arousal as more than an edge factor.  Not quite painful, decidedly not ideal: like a glove with its chirality wrong.  He struggled to suppress the discomfort before it amplified between the two of them.

 

Dyad, a binary burden, grim as gravity.  His face felt half hollowed out -- which it was.  It had never been a thing for touching, not since the -- No.  He remembered rain pelting a Kaas launchpad, soft things like ravenous larvae -- The layered blast-door in his mind clanged shut with such vehemence that it made Satele flinch. 

 

<If this is how you're going to respond to every other suggestion of intimate contact we're going to have a problem.>  She countered with a small but formidable Force-blast that felt concussive though it barely affected the physical. 

 

The gravity in the dock felt doubled and his head pounded.  Marr glared at Satele, who had not moved from her position.  Far too eager to leap to conflict, he noted contemptuously, quite aware his thoughts were open to her.  So be it -- such a disposition can be matched.

 

<Such an intrepidly prurient Jedi.  Was it that Republic commander who taught you so well to please a man?> he thought nastily.

 

<What, like Malgus did for you?>

 

The nuclear wave of fury that roared from his mind in return might have killed an apprentice.  Words were too weak a response: he twisted his hands into a ritual gesture and with a distant whoom a wall of kinetic energy issued from him toward her. 

 

He expected her to dissipate it but instead she fixed him with a look that tended to precede lethal disruptions of geology, braids hanging like portcullis spikes, and repelled his attack.  The air shimmered with the heat of her anger as it came hurtling back at him.  As it made contact the VIEW unit in his mask failed and rebooted.  

 

Marr despite his age could take a fall without great harm, and so could the microservomotors of his armor.  Even so it knocked the breath out of him to land on his back, synth-materials cracking against the closed outward door.  Recklessly bold, he thought of her.  Surely his men outside had heard.  He felt the metal bone-lattice of his shin creak.

 

Another Force kinesis tore across him, rattling the bands that held his armor's integrity at the waist.  As if removed from himself like the curved scale of armor had just been from his person he saw the dark, sensitive span of his manhood, obscenely swollen, exposed to the air.  How?  Marr was a consummate warrior still, despite his infirmities, but he was not young.

 

He lay where he had fallen and reached to cover himself but felt his arm buffeted back by another burst of energy.  What was she playing at?  In an instant the Grand Master had advanced to kneel atop him, face impassive, thighs splitting to straddle his own considerable ones.

 

<Just be still.>  Satele's hands went to her waist, unfastening something under her tunic on each side.

 

The humid heat over him, the faintest wet sounds of soft flesh rubbing on flesh as she adjusted herself made clear to him the intensity of her desire -- and the desire of her intent.  Insane and idiotic to believe this rigid warrior-saint so inflamed by an ill-tempered, moribund Sith -- but there it was --

 

A curving overwhelming glide, a sublime sickness, and then she had enveloped him, all the way down to his armor, and complex thought was no longer possible. 

 

He felt the lush space inside her contract irresistibly around him, pulsing with the Force behind her every subtlest movement, milking out his seed from the deepest well of him, seizing him sinew by sinew as if uprooting a tree--

 

His vision -- the vision -- soundlessly shattered. 

 

The VIEW unit's HUD sharpened and returned to what he now recognized as its proper form.  Satele stood across from him, placid as usual, outfit perfectly in place, though a sheen of sweat, a suspicious shade of skin, and a catch in her breathing bespoke the exertion she had spent to project the illusion.  And beyond, he quickly noticed: her climax had been authentic.  With a staggering stab of humiliation he realized his own had as well, though he had scarcely ejaculated more than vapor.

 

I should have realized this.  Foolish in the extreme.  He hated, hated that he wished it had been real.

 

He too, of course, was safely armored and upright, not a sliver of skin vulnerable.  That air, stifling before, felt dangerously discordant now, like an almost-identical isotope that ruined cells.  Satele flexed one of her hands as if she found it stiff and gave him another of those looks that had a nearly objective weight to it. 

 

"That's for earlier," she spoke, resolutely.

 

<Now you have a taste of what it's really like being me.  And it should… calm us down.  Let us get the work done.>  Her face regained its normal color but she glanced away for a moment, composure teetering.  The bordered edge of her high collar drooped like an orchid petal. 

 

The red indicator light and the red glow at the periphery of Marr's mask HUD announced the shuttle's arrival.  His armor felt even more uncomfortable.  She continued, importunate: <So let's have a truce between us, shall we?  No more violent outbursts?>

 

<Howsoever long it lasts,> he thought at her, feeling brittle as ice and bare as marrow.

 

 

 

=================

 

 

 

In the shuttle Marr passed her a voluminous dark hooded cloak and took unfriendly pleasure at her face in response. 

 

"What's this for.  My visit is on the record."

 

<I would prefer not to advertise it to my crew, given our primary purpose.>

 

<And what is that?>

 

It was impertinent of her to push it, she knew.  He turned away. 

 

<You're in the habit of receiving mysterious hooded visitors?>

 

<Yes.>  A flicker of past passions and plots underlay the tone of his mind.  She thought of what she'd seen of Malgus -- He swept it away before she could glimpse the memories behind the emotion.  <Focus on what confronts us in the present,> he ordered, partly to himself.

Nodding, she deferred.

 

As their ship cleared the moon's orbit Satele felt a bracing razor clarity, as if the resolution of her consciousness had increased.  The metaphysical swamps of Yavin had become familiar to her, even as they clouded her sensing.  In the new emptiness she felt scoured and exposed.

 

The Fuliginous was a speedy tender and their journey was short.  Before they docked she shrugged the garment on, punctuating it with a burst of indignance for him.  The hem brushed the floor; at least if she moved carefully she wouldn't need to worry about her conspicuous boots.

 

Only a small contingent of guards received them at the docking bay.  She kept her hood low, trying to act the part of a Sith astrologer or assistant torturer or whatever they were assuming.  With little formality their welcomers dispersed.

 

The thing they would do trod patiently behind them like a beast led to sacrifice.  Satele felt stifled by the shadow it cast.

 

<Did you want to try the tandem meditation before or after-->

 

<Both.>  His stride was so long and swift she had to use the Force to keep up.  They wended through a series of disorienting corridors nearly empty of other beings.  The few crew members she noticed ducked fearfully away at their passing.  The Sith presences nipped at Satele's Force senses like salvos of darts.

 

<Katabasis,> she ventured.  <Where are you descending?>

 

<Planets.>  …The rote answer, and then the reluctant trail of his reflexive thoughts: <…The motion and metaphor I imagine for such a vessel, and for myself.>

 

She thought of the shuttle.  <Soot is how you get there?>

 

<In a manner of speaking.>

 

She didn't have time to press it further before Marr brought them to a sudden stop before a geodesic chamber enclosed within a larger space.  The resemblance to a holocron did not escape her.  He swept his arm and a camera-like aperture swirled open to admit them inside the shape.

 

Marr's meditation chamber was all geometric metal, etched in tessellations that vanished and reappeared as the angle of view shifted.  It made her vision tilt.  She blinked, admiring.  The entrance was gone.  The pair of them seemed improperly dark and saturated for the room.

 

<It is meant to gather and focus the channeling of Force through the visual.>

 

<…How does that work for you?>

 

<With the mask I gain some benefit.  More to the point, it reliably dazes sighted organics.>

 

"I see.  Had you wanted to harm me." 

 

<Or weaken.>

 

She looked up at him.  "You can speak aloud, you know.  If there's a bug in here you have greater problems than somebody overhearing basic information."

 

Marr did not move.  "Perhaps."  <My throat is dry.>  Bell-clear she felt his ire for his porous thoughts.  <There is trouble enough with you here.>

 

"This was your idea," she said serenely.  "Shall we continue?"

 

Marr produced the Meterix holocron from a case in a holding-pouch at his waist, turning it over in his gauntleted hand.  In the almost incandescent brightness of the chamber the precious prism looked like a miniature void.  He placed it gingerly on the floor between them.  "Sit."

 

Satele did so, the cloak crumpling, and watched him lower himself with even greater care onto his knees.  It was noticeably painful for him and made her own joints twinge in a way that made her feel self-consciously old.

 

She reached for the holocron, acutely aware of the lines that marked her hands.  "May I?"

 

Marr nodded.  She straightened her back and held the prism in both hands.  It was surprisingly light, as holocrons often were.  She steadied her mind and channeled the Force in a gentle, constant flow.  Mind to hands to prism to universe.  The actions were nearly automatic after a lifetime of study.  A soft gold-green glow grew around the edges of her, casting color on the room.

 

Around me is the Force and in me is the light.

 

The prism stirred; through half-lidded eyes she saw it wobble on the floor like a die.  Peripherally she sensed the shadows of a great work assembling itself.  Satele intensified her Force presence, stretching her mind out to gossamer thinness as if it might slip between the holocron's edges to feast on the knowledge within. 

 

Images crowded her head: a wall just too high to climb unaided, a one-sided balance, a lone twin.  Singletons of pairs, halves of binaries. 

Unipoles, lopsided topplings, insufficiency, frustration.  It continued and continued---

 

Something like a tiny sonic boom pounded in her head as the artifact repelled her mind.  Satele quickly returned the holocron to its central position, the light of her trance dimming.  In the chamber nothing else moved.

 

"You were already aware of this limitation," groused Marr.

 

"It's a starting point of sorts.  And it doesn't hurt to give it that try.  Confirm what's facing us."  <Maybe stalling for time,> admitted her mind.  She pursed her lips, her thoughts carefully skirting around dangerous implications.  "Now let's try it together.  Simply.  Yes?"  Her voice sounded less authoritative than she wanted but it didn't quaver.

 

"Very well."

 

She tried to shift her sitting position forward in something like a dignified way.  Marr stood and stepped forward and sat again.  They were very close now, their folded knees just touching.  A little like in that dock projection-- no, not now.  She heaved away the distraction with durasteel will.  Breathing steadily, she reached out for one of his hands as when they had imparted visions to one another.  He took her cue.  She didn't love the gauntlets, but she was still wearing her full gear as well.  Her armlets itched.  Even through the metal and cloth she thought she felt the heat of his hand.

 

His other gauntlet intruded, holding the holocron.  In her anxiety she had forgotten.  He pressed it into their clasped palms and each of them renegotiated their grip on the object in a skittish dance of fingers.

 

Satele chanted a series of focusing syllables sotto voce as Marr assumed the posture and gestures for his own ritual meditation.  Her curiosity at the details of his practices proved as difficult to rein as the attraction and her chant faltered.

 

"A lapse in discipline, Grand Master?" said Marr sternly.  "Matters academic are a luxury in which we cannot presently indulge."

 

"Yes, you're right.  Begin again."  She bowed her head humbly and enjoyed his slight surprise. 

 

With the prism a fulcrum between them they soared into a tandem trance.  It was clumsy going, like steering a ponderous barge.  Far away Satele felt her physical body exerting itself as her mind struggled to balance with his on the twig-thin divide between them, the holocron their destination.  Again she noticed that faint momentum at the edges of perception, the shadows of specifications, the masterwork suggesting its construction. 

 

Around me is the Force and in me is the light.

 

The mantra seemed to wreathe her as she approached the holocron this time, Marr at the other end of the axle.  The solidity of his mind bolstered her.  It seemed certain as the Force that the polyhedron's facets would unfold in fractal welcome. 

 

Instead she felt a railgun intensity from within the holocron that rocketed toward them.  Before they could react it slashed through the connection of their trance with almost no resistance, like a lightsaber through poor armor.  They hurtled away from each other, severed hemispheres.  Satele was thrown back to her ordinary senses, head ringing.  She tasted metal in her mouth and Marr looked, for one dissociated moment, like an ordinary stranger on a Coruscant street.  They set the Meterix holocron aside in distasteful haste, as if suddenly fearful of germs.

 

The feeling passed.  At once she knew Marr's expulsion had felt likewise.  As she looked up at him open-eyed a wave of scorching doom from him lit the kindling of panic within her: you will die.  it is certain and eternal.  it is real.  it will happen someday ever sooner.  Mortality hit her like someone had dropped a giant's weight in her arms. 

 

Satele slumped forward.  She remembered the reports from the few Jedi who had fought him and lived.  It was worse than they'd described.  She wanted to scream, or cut a hole in the hull and throw herself from it.  While she marshalled her wits he could easily have killed her.  The sheen of sweat on her skin chilled her all at once.

 

<That… emanation is not in my control,> thought Marr by way of explanation or apology.  She knew even the bonded could lie to each other, with enough will. 

His resounding negative blared in her mind as his other hand gripped hers.  A flurry of his memories flashed past her in a tangled blur and all she could tell from them was <truth>.  <I cannot say I do not myself lie, when my service requires it: yet I detest such deceptions.>

 

"I can respect that," she said softly, wishing she understood.

 

Satele leaned forward still more as she rose, pausing to touch her lips to the steel brow of Marr's mask before she stood.  Immediately his mind pulsed with puncturing points, insulted.  He yanked his hands back and got to his feet himself.

 

"So too do I detest banal sentimentalities meant to play upon organic minds," rasped his low voice.  Marr took a pace back that somehow seemed to make him loom all the more.  "Do not overstep yourself, Grand Master Shan.  We are partners of chance and necessity."

 

Satele adjusted the cloak and put her hood up.  "If we're to make this thing work, we do need to be … familiar with one another.  At least enough to make a trance possible."  <Force forbid you enjoy yourself.>

 

She felt him scowl.  "I must tend to my armor.  We shall reassess."

 

The meditation chamber realigned, extinguishing all but its emergency lights.  The aperture in its side spun silently into being and soon they were speed-walking the warship's corridors again.

 

When they had passed the outer door of his private quarters Satele realized how wrung her nerves already felt from her vigilance in this enemy place. 

 

…That and the hulking Sith whose presence beside her glowed like an omen of sin.

 

Marr spoke, sparse and heavy, a boulder falling in a wasteland. "We are arrived." 

Notes:

trying to write a bit faster, and enjoying it.

the name of Marr's shuttle is from the game (they mention it in the Makeb expansion). i picked one for his flagship because the game never does afaik.

can our heroes hatesex the mcguffin for great justice? can our other heroes survive the cursed cult jungle? stay tuned!

Chapter 16

Summary:

as the jungle moon turns: spats & secrets

17 Oct 2025: made some tiny edits

Satele gulped.  The coarse cloth of her cloak chafed against her bare shoulders as they stood waiting.  Momentarily the inner door whirred open and Marr stalked past her over the last threshold of his stateroom.  She followed him, less confidently.  The door resealed the instant she passed its plane.

 

Inside was much like his sanctuary on the jungle moon, though the materials were -- subtly -- of much higher quality, and the bed-platform triple the size.  Austere, angular, vault-ceilinged, patterned in deep greys and reds, the space was nearly empty of other furniture; Satele could only assume further conveniences like the armor receptacle lurked behind concealing panels, and his echo of agreement across the bond confirmed it.

 

The air was recycled, of course, scrubbed down to the molecule into the same sterile grey as the metal around them.  Still she thought she noticed a lingering hint of the incense he'd burned that meeting when they'd -- been with each other. 

 

"If I razed a continent for it I ought to make use of it," he said aloud, with more pride than shame.  She felt cold and uneasy at his tone.

 

Polygonal windows to the universe beyond were linked in a line that snaked elegantly around the outer wall.  Satele touched her hand to a pane and static distortion bristled around it, sparking out the starscape.

<It is a projection, of course.>

<Of course.>  She turned away from it and the false image returned, simulated stars in their milky multitudes.  Scattered and fertile.

 

She wanted the salt of his sweat on her tongue, his hot seed painting her skin…

 

His excitement flared across the bond and he reached toward her, thought better of it, then put that hand to his mask.  "You may remove the cloak," he said huskily.  He set to doffing his outer armor, though she noticed his hood and mask stayed on.

 Satele's eyebrows stretched upward.

<The cloak and…?>

 Marr's mind convected like a furnace.  Instead of answering he turned away from her to set his removed armor in a compartment by the door.  A lens-eye in the wall shone a grid of light over the items, then a metal wall Satele hadn't noticed slammed up to engulf the compartment and there was a whoosh like a giant pneumatic machine as it was sent Force-knew-where in the bowels of the warship.  Almost as quickly it whooshed again in reverse and the wall receded, depositing fresh versions of the items he'd left. 

 She threw the cloak onto one of the new pauldron-spikes and gave a little whistle.  "Efficient system."

 He grunted.  <Necessary.>

 "Wish it worked for my things."  She squinted around the dim space.  <No seats?>

 <They are summoned as I require them.>

 <Oh, as you require them.>

 

Marr remained impassive.  Warily she took a seat on the edge of what passed for his bed, itself on a low pentagonal dais.  The platform had a slight pliancy, not much more than a sparring mat's, and was angled shallowly upward toward the head but otherwise bare.  In her mind shadowy figures tangled and posed sensually on it, inviting her.  She shoved them down -- rather how she wanted him doing to her--

 

There-is-no-emotion-there-is-peace.

 

<No seats and no cover?  I take it you … don't have many visitors here?>

 He snorted in annoyance.  <I can vent the oxygen if necessary.  Don't make me test your skills.>  Bravado aside, under his mask and the underclothing he still wore she knew Marr's skin, like hers, was heating with the ravenous anticipation their minds exchanged, an ardor so bright they scarcely trusted their speech.  That Lord Gravinia had been more powerful than they ever knew.

 

It's not just her magic that's carried this thing here, Satele, and you know it.

 

She tried to focus on unfastening the straps of her boots, never unaware of the spiral-etched saberstaff at her waist.  Until she saw Marr unclip his own weapon and set it aside, she kept hers close to hand.  Balance.  She paid watchful attention to her breathing, folded her hands together, and took care to keep her tone neutral and solicitous.  Balance, balance.  Inhale, exhale.

 <…So.  Malgus.  That's what you've been so sensitive about?>

 

The look he shot her lashed like a quirt to the face.  <It is not the whole of it and I will thank you to leave that topic lie.>

 

<It's not something I went searching for.>  As they had pleasured themselves that one hexed morning she had seen a torn piece of Marr's distant past on Dromund Kaas, of two dour glowering Sith warriors scowling at each other, pacing like prizefighters -- then writhing together in a fury, faces to crotches, devouring.  Without the context of his memory she would never have guessed a sliver of it.  "It's certainly relevant if it's going to be impeding your ability to… hmm, cooperate."  Her face warmed only a little, this time.

 Marr seethed.

 <It ended badly.>   He paced in a half-circle, not looking at her, then spoke in a voice like something deep within it was grinding metal on metal.  She saw his fists clench.  The grey-branching veins standing out on the skin of his arms pulsed.  "…Whatever he was then, he is a traitor now, and the association besmirches my name."

 

Satele hoisted herself back on the bed until she was reclining on her elbows.  Marr for his part was in undershirt and leggings and now carefully unclasping the synthweave hood from his mask.  Somehow she felt yet more exposed.  Too bad.  This is what you thought through, this is what you agreed to.

 

She felt Marr's malevolent satisfaction at all of her second-guessing and brushed it aside the same way she was studiously trying to avoid lingering on his dark, gnarled musculature.  That was getting to be a habit and she didn't like it.  All of this was.  "Then let's … let it be, for now.  Loss isn't something that obeys our own schedules.  There's no shame in it."

 

His voice was deeper and colder yet.  "A healer you may be, but I do not require your pity."

 

"That is summoned as I require it," she said pertly.  She pulled her boots off, one and then the other, and set them by the bed.  She did likewise with her armlets, her leggings, her stockings, and lastly her tunic, brisk and mechanical and not unlike she might do after a training on Tython, watching him sidelong all the while as she knew he was watching her.  She kept her cool by going on unthinking through, as an acrobat stays on a high-wire.  There was nothing else to do but fall. 

 

<I am warrior, I am healer, I am a lot of things… but when I act I do not like to do it by halves.>  The age-worn grooves of Satele's face curved down as she looked across at him with a champion's confidence and peeled off her camisole. "Now start taking off the rest of your things and get over here with that holocron, we've got to get familiar."

 

---

 

II_L.BENIKO: I would like a thorough explanation before I enlist every Sith within telepathy or telemetry range to

II_L.BENIKO: apologies. I was interrupted.

SIS_t.shan: interrupted huh?  like by bzolla?

II_L.BENIKO: can you use her title as she requested.

II_L.BENIKO: I really don't need her in a mood whenever she gets on here.

SIS_t.shan: jedi dont get in moods i think thats illegal

II_L.BENIKO: that damn Jedi who's about to arrive certainly does, if reports are to be believed.  unbalanced, to put it mildly.  and these reports also suggest you know more than you're letting on about that.

SIS_t.shan: all i have to say on the subject of Thi is  N O   C O M M E N T can i be any fucking clearer

II_L.BENIKO: that's not what you said to the Barsen'thor.

SIS_t.shan: relax lana, she isnt gonna kill you lmao

II_L.BENIKO: at the moment her lizard is watching me.  so, you may be correct in either case.

SIS_t.shan: "lizard" fr?  ill give u a hint the right word rhymes with "land ocean"

II_L.BENIKO: they skin Wookiees for recreation, Theron.  do forgive me if I don't speak of my captor with the appropriate sensitivity.

SIS_t.shan: im fairly sure qyzen doesnt do that

SIS_t.shan: imps gonna imp i guess

II_L.BENIKO: you haven't answered my question.  I need to know why my superior just clapped me in a glorified slave collar and whisked your mother up to our command ship. 

II_L.BENIKO: the soldiers are talking.  they're feeling like there's no plan they're following and that's because they're right.

II_L.BENIKO: our alliance is not going to work like this.  at all.  I am on my last nerve.

SIS_t.shan: it has been all of 12 hours since the last sortie

II_L.BENIKO: they're already encroaching.

SIS_t.shan: nothing is blasting the lid off.  the brass will be back in a jiffy

SIS_t.shan: clearly we have a crisis here

II_L.BENIKO: theron this isn't funny.

SIS_t.shan: say what u will about master satele, shes not rly somebody who gets "whisked" anywhere

II_L.BENIKO: so you're saying this was a bilateral decision.

SIS_t.shan: im saying if shes up there its because she wants to be

II_L.BENIKO: she spoke with you?

SIS_t.shan: lol be for real

SIS_t.shan: im just sayin

JC_bthor.z has logged on.

JC_bthor.z: Oh, good, Lana, you're here.  I sent a few messages to your datapad but I didn't hear back.

JC_bthor.z: Qyzen didn't hurt you or anything, did he? 

II_L.BENIKO: no.  he didn't.

SIS_t.shan: it feels shitty when u get used as a pawn doesnt it lana?  what could that possibly remind us of

II_L.BENIKO: is there anyone you're not a pawn for?

II_L.BENIKO: Barsen'thor...  we'll speak later.

II_L.BENIKO has logged off.

SIS_t.shan: up yours lana smfh

JC_bthor.z: What did you say this time?  Can someone please tell me what's going on?

SIS_t.shan: hey z gotta go check some stuff, ill be backc in a bit ping my implant if its dire

SIS_t.shan has logged off.

JC_bthor.z: Theron wait

JC_bthor.z is idle.

 

---

 

Marr watched her on the bed, sand-brown and sinuous, bending like a bow.  He despised and desired her in equal, incredible measure.  He considered he ought to have killed her in the meditation chamber, ought to have put a finish to this charade while last he had some chance to be the victor of it.

 Still something held his hopes unaccountably, desperately, like a mariner's mirage of an island.  The ashed might-have-been embers of passion and ritual.  A dual second act: a renewal of Empire, if not man--

 At the end of all fates is death, tolled the constant knell of his mind.

 

He thought he could empathize with that slave-girl of Malgus', that doomed plaything the color of Satele's flinty eyes.  The way the Twi'lek must have felt at the very end, organs sizzling and melting as her dearest Dark Lord's pitiless eyes bore through her without seeing her, as she must at last have realized had never seen her at all.  The glow of his killing saber, the final thought in her fading brain: How could I have believed him.

 A stupid girl, in a way I know too well.

 

Across from him Satele paled and shivered and he realized he had emanated that moribund aura again.  He thought he saw a cyanotic tinge to her lips -- or perhaps it was only her cosmetics.  She crossed her arms over her chest as if to reorient herself.

 <My apologies.>  "According to your Code quite literally, death is only the Force," he said snidely, his reflexes at odds.

 "Water may nourish or drown and it is drowning I feel when you do that."  Her voice was the counseling Grand Master's and he burned for her no less but felt stranger and stranger.  His mouth was dry and he wanted to strangle something.  "Malgus… did he hurt you?" she pressed. 

 <Hurt me.  How pathetic and inadequate these words.> "Stop saying his perfidious name," snapped Marr.  "It disgusts me to hear it."  <Nor was it the name he used, in those days.>  He remained stock-still.  <Nor should that be spoken, either.>  His face heated with shame and anger and the memories beneath them threatened to spill out of his brain. 

 

Satele slid her hands back to her sides, shifting her weight.  She looked away from him for a moment.  "Fair enough."

 

Malgus -- or, rather, Lord Veradun.  Lifetimes ago.  By the time of the other man's hubristic demise Marr had not spoken a word with him outside council for thirty years.  He wore his rage more readily than did Marr but they had developed along not-dissimilar paths, triumphant conquerors sealed off from themselves.  Though he not from others as well, as I have been.

 

He felt like he was standing upon a trapdoor straining with vermin.  The hordes surged forward when he saw Satele's face soften in sympathy.  He thought of blast doors a meter thick, his brain and senses casting about for something else to occupy them.

 

He studied the angles of her braids and the angles inside them, the sensuous curve of her neck.  "Take your hair down," he said in a low voice that threatened to lose purchase on its pitch.

 

The top of her narrow nose crinkled.  <I'd rather not.>

 "Jedi and your affectations."

"It's not an affectation, it's a tradition.  And it keeps my hair out of my face."

"In the interest of revealing ourselves to one another," he said stolidly, wishing there were a mask again over his mask.

 

Satele frowned and touched a sinewy hand to the fastener on one of the thin braids that framed her sharp face.  "Fine."  She tugged the ornament off, stowed it somewhere, ran a finger through the oiled strands to loosen them.  The sight occupied his mind like a meditation-focus and she inched back from him, unsettled by his intensity.

 Soberly she unwound her other plaits, giving her head a little shake.  Marr was fleetingly annoyed that the lighting in his room was too low to see the colors of it all.  He twitched his muscles and through the dimness a bright shaft fell over her from the ceiling right above.  She recoiled back from it as if expecting it to restrain her.  Understandably. 

 

"I wished only--"

<To see,> she thought simultaneously, holding up a hand, ducking back under the light.  She tilted her head forward and gave the freed strands of her hair a little shake. It wasn't the actress-perfect dark mane of the old Republic propaganda holos but it remained lovely nonetheless: near-black, streaked with copper-silver and wavy at the ends from its tight confinement.

She rose to a crouch and crept toward where he sat, arms forward.  The lobes of her breasts swayed in muted motion as she did and it was all he could do not to order the VIEW unit to record.  He would have only his insufficient memory to recall this rarest and most vulnerable of her aspects.

 

"I think it's your turn," she said softly, sitting back.  She glanced at the neat little pile of her clothing and then at him, a hand touching the band of her undergarment.  While he sensed fear in her, it seemed strangely unconnected to him.

 

Marr flicked the VIEW unit and a small pedestal emerged from the floor nearby, bearing the now-familiar black polyhedron of the Meterix holocron.  In the polish of the metal he saw their figures, distorted and distant as he felt.

 

-----------

 

Zolla's tattoo-traced face was serene as ever when she glided into the enclosure -- really just a tent -- where Lana was being held.  Regardless, Lana could tell the other woman didn't want to be there.  That made two of them.

 The …Trandoshan, she thought resentfully, is certainly happy to see her.  It made a stomach-deep sound and clicked its jaw at the hooded Jedi as it nodded. 

 

The Barsen'thor bowed her head in greeting, more to her mercenary than to her Sith sometime-colleague.  "He says you've… behaved admirably."

 

"Have I."  Lana sat up on the camp cot where she rested, but didn't rise.  "I'm glad your henchman snarled so well about me."

 

"Please don't be spiteful.  It isn't Qyzen's fault."  Zolla clasped her hands together.  Lana noticed, not for the first time, their own lattice of tattoos: not the same designs as on the Zabrak woman's face.  Before, she might have asked, fishing for more conversation.  Now the memory stung.

 

"You're all of a piece," said Lana tiredly, waving a hand.  "You give me secrets and collaboration and neck-rubs but a bit of bodily integrity is beyond your abilities, I see." 

 

"I understand that you're angry," said Zolla carefully.  She sounded like a child-minder and it was infuriating.  I trusted this little--

 

Lana put on a moue of astonishment.  "Very astute."

 

"How can we make this right?"

 

"Quite some gall you've got.  You said they could put an implant in my shoulder with who knows what chemicals and nano-wotsits along for the ride."  Lana rubbed her bandaged arm for emphasis. "I bet Theron has had a go at this, the bastard."  Suddenly she felt self-conscious of the fact she was only wearing leggings and her training leotard.  I look far too weak.

 

"Master Satele is the leader of the Jedi Order.  I trusted her.  I trust her.  She gave me her word that nothing shady was involved in your -- security measure."  She cast her eyes down as she said the last bit, away from Lana, and then up again.  "She's never broken her word to me before.  I don't think she did this time, either."

 

"Well she's certainly willing to break the rules for her paramour."

 

Zolla's self-possession faltered and Lana saw her search for words, although the burst of unease touched her also in the Force.  "That is not -- She's not -- You and I --"

 

"Save it," spat the Sith.  The anger behind the words flared in her, warming her, giving her confidence.  "I get half strangled by the Dark Lord for bothering to pay attention to my job.  Which may I remind you is instrumental in preserving this alliance."  She sat up until her back was straight, winding her arms around her knees in a posture more casually calculated than she thought she sounded.  Certainly more than she felt.  "Bothering to speak up on behalf of your friend and ally is not what I believed an unreasonable request.  Clearly my intelligence was from an unreliable source."

 

Zolla took a small step back, her face bewildered.  Lana was irritatedly impressed the other woman wasn't much emoting -- but this was a Jedi Master, a shade more advanced at least en titre than herself.  "I'm truly sorry, Lana.  I made assumptions about what you were willing to tolerate and I never meant to hurt you."

 "You needn't to be a gracious doormat all the time.  Theron isn't.  Your Master isn't.  Even though she does a cracking job of the namby-pamby healer act."

 Zolla shuffled her feet.  "I don't know.  She's not my Master in the sense that I was her Padawan.  And she mostly does what people tell her to…"

 "Or she's advanced such that she acts as she pleases."  Lana thought of not just Marr but … well, every Sith she'd ever known.  Herself among them.  She cast Zolla a withering glance.  "As should you have done."

 

Zolla reached out her decorated hand toward Lana's shoulder but the Sith wasn't having it.  She shot Zolla her most withering stare and was gratified when the other woman paused, wounded.

 "If you'd just listen.  I know something.  About their plans.  Specifically those holocrons they're investigating."  The Jedi paused to let her words take effect and Lana had to admit she was interested.  "Something that worries me.  And something with which I am really going to need your help."  Those big virid eyes shone out in their irresistible way and Lana had to stop looking to preserve something of her professional disinterest.

 

"I'm going to require some… concessions."

-----------

Chapter 17

Summary:

bickering, bantering, and bedroom dynamics

Marr's vision darted from the black holocron on its pedestal back to Satele recumbent on his bed.  Her mind was admirably clear.  Certainly more than his must seem to her.  His hanging threads of thought -- Malgus, Beniko, the Council, his Sith, Satele's inbound Jedi -- he pared away with his senses and what they told of the woman he beheld so improbably before him.  He shifted back on his seat, bones both real and synthetic aching deeply under the thin cloth of his leggings.

 

Her mind resounded in harmony with his, as if trying to bolster it.  "Come here.  It's intimidating, you looming like that." 

 

It was interesting, the way her loose hair moved around her face as she spoke.  There were Sith who manipulated their coiffure in the Force for purposes of charisma or seduction--

 

<I know how to do that,> answered Satele for him with an almost-smile.  "But it's been a very, very long time."  She leaned back on an elbow in a suggestive curve, the dark strands falling and shifting.  <You never had any hair yourself, even--?>

 

"I have never found value in the attendant maintenance."

 

His voice smacked to him of the hollowly officious schoolboy -- why was he using his voice at all?  Under the mask he gritted his metal teeth and hated that too: they were built with such actions in mind but he ought not cause wear to valuable prostheses with lapses in discipline.

 

He saw the skin of her neck ripple as she swallowed, transparently deep in thought.  The abyss in him suggested he ought to crush it all.

 

<I'm sure you still had hair … other places.>  A risible attempt at flirtation, perhaps -- or at information-fishing.

 

<If you continue to pressure me to divulge the precise circumstances of my … physical limitations-->

 

She gave him the pity-look again but turned quickly away; he sensed she was trying to react otherwise.  Begrudgingly he appreciated the courtesy, not that he wanted her to realize it.

 

"So," spoke Satele sonorously, a single note.  She sat up and peered at the Meterix holocron on its pedestal.  "Dyadic input.  Speaking of putting, where does this go while we --?"

 

"Our attempt in the chamber suggests proximity is sufficient to affect the device in the Force."  The effort of maintaining his elocution was more taxing by the moment.

 

"Then come here," she repeated.  "And take your mask off -- I know it's a bulwark for you but you've got to let such things go, for connection of this sort.  We can have the lights off again for parity, I don't mind."  Her mind seemed all bright air, her voice maddeningly untroubled.

 

Marr was still loath to reveal his face at all, much less in the light, much less to this Jedi reclining in his inner sanctuary with such blithe confidence.  The scars and absences of his skin stood out in his proprioception as they seldom had since they were fresh.  He sat solid, a wall of obsidian watching an incoming tide.

 

Her face glowed like an apparition under the light -- the light he had activated to observe her (lovely bewitching cursed) hair.  He twitched a muscle to switch it off.  He saw her blink reflexively; the VIEW unit had adjusted his own sight automatically to compensate.

 

"I want to connect with all of you," she said resolutely -- a little too earnestly, Marr thought, for her own good.  <To feel your mouth,> blurted her thoughts; she went on.  "It doesn't matter to me what your face looks like." Her face had a look of intent bewilderment. <Oh kriff it, I may as well, if it -- I want the advantage this thing could have over the cult, and I want you, at least for the course of our alliance… and these things align.  Did you read of the events on Oricon, those creatures the Dread Masters had, invincible as pairs?  There is a little of that in the visions I have and although I'll discard it as and when my vows require, I want the connection and the victory over the Emperor and I truly believe we can achieve both of them.  We.  I need your investment and your strength.>  He felt Satele's mind circle around itself with bits of her Jedi Code, marshalling.  Her face glowed like an onrushing comet and her narrowed eyes shimmered.  Emotion or the effort of restraining it.  The glimpse of her interior enticed him.

 

"If I recall the reports," retorted Marr morosely, "those creatures were shackled."

 

"And are we not, in our greater and nobler ways?"

 

He was a corpse, a soldier of the Sith, beyond such flattery.  Yet there was logic here.

 

Logic from this woman he could not, perhaps, defeat in fair combat.  Who had risked defeat otherwise at his hands a half score times now at least.  This reckless temerity -- he would not call it faith -- and the thrill through him in every instance of it, every instance that she allowed him to host her on his flagship, merge forces, penetrate her willing body.

 

<If it works it isn't stupid,> she thought wryly, deflecting the sensuous thought, sounding rather like a bounty hunter Marr once had occasion to hire.  <I thought we went over this during our little chats down on the moon here.>

 

Malgus would have drawn his saber by now.  His mind caught a memory of holding the other man at bay against the outer wall when the Third Kishor revolts were put down, after a tryst.  Or had it been before?

 

From the hells of Marr's subconscious came wisps of the past like poison gas: charred lintels, green sky, headless children.  Marr had to exercise considerable discipline to suppress the death-aura that hazed his mind again.  The square root of eighty-one is nine.

 

Satele watched him somberly.  He resented her control, the smooth surface of her thoughts.

 

Now with liquid slinking movements she advanced toward him.  He forced himself to remain motionless on the seat.  Steadily, inexorably, he felt one of her hands grasp the small of his back and lift him forward onto the bed, atop then beside her, so swiftly and expertly he had not even moved to protest.  Fear and lust warred in him and he felt clammy with perspiration.

 

"You still think I have the advantage here?" He wondered if she was taunting him.  The bond gave him nothing.  <First of all, you could have resisted that.>

 

<This is beneath me.>

 

<As are many things, I'm well aware.>  Without the Force in her hands she pulled him toward her again and he felt the heat of her transfix him.  Deft hands untied his upper garment and slipped under it, nudging it open.  Had the fanned fingers coursing across his body and bending his arms to disrobe him belonged to any other being he knew not what violence he would do.  Instead he contemplated the texture of her hands as they ran gracefully down his sides to his waistband, tugging the cloth free.  He pushed her away, not ungently, and finished the task on his own; the withered leg in its metal frame had a tendency to snag.

 

The faintest blush colored Satele's face -- so near his -- at seeing him bare below the waist.  He fixated on her sharp reddening cheekbones, wanting anything but to look down at the glabrous wasteland of himself.

 

Perhaps sensing this, she drew her palms down the muscles of his thick-corded thighs in slow appreciation, blush deepening.  Marr sat up on the furthest edge of the bed.

 

Now she sat up herself, flowing over to him, and made to unclasp the hood from his mask.  This time he knocked her arms away with bruising force.

 

"Do not touch that," he hissed.

 

"Apologies, I won't."  She pulled her hands back, chastened.

 

After several beats of tense indignance Marr raised his own bare hands to the fastenings that kept his hood in place.  Satele was still.  The indentation in his skull was visible but that had not been a matter of vanity in so many years.  Why now this nonsense?  The urges of his body were understandable enough, but the insecurities of a callow youth should have been long past him.  Were long past him.  It was not meet for a lord of his stature to behave in this way.

Under the mask his mouth curled in a scowl.  He angled his seated body away from her and tossed the discarded hood onto the seat he had been using.

 

Mist-light he felt the touch of her breath against the back of his neck, then her lips against his skin as she spoke.  "If you want to see me while we… It can happen.  Just grant me this, now."

It was as timid as her voice ever sounded.  He took a strained, soughing breath.  He had never shown Malgus his bare head -- and then the vault of his deepest mind cut off the tangent like a guilty neck.  Satele's grounding hands were on his shoulders.  He felt her face, warm and perspiring, rest lightly against his back.

 

Marr gave a VIEW command to extinguish the room's lights and heard her soft "oh".  Without word in speech or thought he reached for the mask and disengaged it, held it in his hand like a piece of eggshell.  He felt the Jedi's hands pulse with power then pull discreetly away. 

 

He stood to store the mask, operating on muscle memory, and returned to the bed.

 

<You move so perfectly even unmasked-->

 

She was entirely sincere but it still struck him like flattery.  His mouth distorted in contempt.  "I have had long practice."

 

"Mm," she assented.  He felt skin brush his cheek and heard the sound of her stretching and repositioning herself.  "Come here and lie back."

 

==============

 

Despite the often oppressive humidity of Yavin's jungles Zolla had seldom appeared in anything briefer than her full robes.  The impression was terribly stuffy, Lana thought, and her cooperator hadn't been so modest on Rishi, which had been equally sultry.  What had happened?  Had something happened?

 

Solution: a judiciously applied concession.  "If that's what you insist," Zolla had grumbled.  Now the Barsen'thor sat across from Lana in the ad-hoc detention tent, in her own sleeveless (still hooded), loose-trousered training togs, looking decidedly rubbed the wrong way.  The diamonds and trapezoids inked up and down her arms occupied Lana's peripheral vision more than the Sith could easily control.  Lana could always blame a blush on the heat and humidity.  Never mind all the time she'd spent on Kaas.

 

Lana grinned wolfishly, masking unease.  "What's this essential intelligence, then."

 

The Jedi woman's bare shoulders looked less vigorous than the last time Lana had seen them: thinner, flabbier, greyer.  Not diseased, not and never ugly, but less fit.  As Lana considered it the other woman raised her hooded head to speak, her tone calm though strained.

 

"Your leader and mine.  The holocron research they're up to.  There's some… troubling context you may not know about."

 

"There always is.  Is this more workplace gossip of the digital channel type?  Because detained I may be, but I do not presently have the time for this."

 

"So, we've determined something is going on with Darth Marr and Master Satele and holocrons."

 

"Ye-es?"

 

"As far as the first bit goes -- their spending time together … We have a Master back in the Order I trained under who… When she was a young knight, she and several of her comrades fell under the influence of a dark-side power.  She had an affair with another Jedi, under that influence, that was incredibly out of character."

 

"Out of character.  Your Master Satele certainly isn't above it."  She thought of Theron and -- no, I'm not giving him space in my thoughts.

 

"I mean that Master Yuon, of whom I was speaking, is a woman of great temperance, and not the kind to recklessly pursue her comrades like that.  Even as a young Jedi that was said of her.  My point is that even with this alliance, they might not be spending this time together for -- the right reasons.  From anyone's point of view."

 

Beniko sniffed incredulously.  "I'm sure."

 

Zolla's face pinched prissily and her tattoos combined with her eyebrows to make the expression look mildly ridiculous.  "Believe what you want."  Her face pinched again back and forth, back and forth, ink-lines kaleidoscoping in that unforgettable way they did when she was furiously thinking.

 

Lana stared at it for what she hoped had been just a beat too long (and not a half-eternity), then reached for her jacket and made to stand.  "Was that it?"  Dismissively: "You can put your robes back on.  My apologies for being crass."

 

The big green eyes made their appearance.  "Lana, please."  Zolla looked down -- looked at Lana's hands like she wanted to touch them.  She didn't.  In a softer voice the Jedi continued.  "I haven't told you much about the… series of events they gave me this Barsen'thor title for."

 

"I read your dossier."

 

"Who assembled it?  You yourself?"

 

Lana grimaced.  "What did you do, then."

 

"Well, continuing on the matter of holocrons," said Zolla quietly.  She glanced toward her robe but didn't reach for it.  "Did your dossier mention my crewmate?"

 

"You'll have to be more specific."

 

"Lieutenant Iresso."

 

"Is this to be a pop quiz, then?  I can have the attachment in a mo--" and then her mind whirled around, having missed its turn.  "Did this person hurt you?"

 

Zolla smiled wanly.  "Not deliberately."  She looked down at her hands.  "The thing about him is he's got, he's got a holocron inside him."

 

"…I beg your pardon?"

 

"Not physically, it isn't like that.  There was a crafty Sith Lord who had reason to conceal knowledge in an… unorthodox way.  And thus my crewmate ended up with part of his brain partitioned off to store it.  Or a large portion of it, anyhow.  The other subject, well, the partition for him wasn't as well formed, and he went insane."

 

"This sounds highly suspect."

 

"Oh, it is.  I'm surprised you weren't already aware of it, Madame Spymaster."

 

Despite the shade of playfulness that had crept back into Zolla's tone, Lana scowled.  "Alas, much though I would prefer it, I am not privy to each and every pet project each and every dilettante Darth chooses to pursue."  She examined her hands.  "And not a word about Imperial Intelligence or we're finished here."

 

"I'm not Theron," pouted Zolla.  "You can relax."  Now it was her turn to stare at her hands.  "I tried to open it, the holocron."

 

"Open the holocron in this man's head?"  Lana cocked an eyebrow.  "I didn't take you for a hands-on experimenter."  Slyly: "Certain incidents notwithstanding."

 

That didn't seem to rile Zolla at all.  Damn.  Instead the Jedi woman gently rolled her eyes.  "Please, Lana, give me a little credit.  I wasn't playing mad scientist."  The volume of her voice dropped to just above a whisper.  "It was, ah."  She looked away.  "More intimate than that."

 

Lana kept staring.  Of course she's interested in men, why would she not be, we talked about--

 

Zolla raised her eyes again.  "I'm sorry, I know this is awkward.  Anyway," she continued hastily, "we, mmm, well, I tried to enter a trance while we were, um--"

 

"Get on with it!"

 

The Zabrak's hands clenched and then relaxed.  "I thought you'd ask what I learned from the experiment, Ms. Pragmatic Sith," she said, and smiled shakily.

 

"Do tell," said Lana, stone-faced.

 

"Not enough to justify what happened after."  Her sandaled foot traced loops in the dust on the tent's floor as she chattered anxiously on.  "The… sex was fine.  We are still friends.  Comrades.  He's still serving with us here, up on one of the ships in orbit.  I don't blame him for what happened."  She took a long inward breath and then spoke very quickly: "I started wasting away, losing hold on reality in a terrifying way, losing the Force.  My health is already suboptimal from the-- healing rituals I had to conduct as part of my circuitous road toward Barsen'thor-dom--"

 

Lana threw up a hand, frowning.  "Back up.  Wasting away?  Losing the Force?  After what happened?"

 

A wistful look came over Zolla as she closed her eyes.  "I tried entering into a trance with my Lieutenant and … Lana, it worked!  It was like stepping out of the room into another gravity orientation, into the shelves of an archive made of windows.  I had my body in the real and my form in the Force and they both fit together under my mastery."  She opened her eyes again and made an imaginative, sweeping gesture with one arm.  "I built a grand road.  Causeways, bridges, everything."

 

"…In your head, Jedi.  Very exciting."  At least she wasn't recounting the… physical part.

 

"It was in his mind.  Iresso's, I mean."  The animated movement of her hands as she spoke suggested some of the excitement she had found in her discovery.  "From the holocron to his surface consciousness.  The road lets the data be accessed through ordinary hypnosis or meditation without setting all that Sithery loose to drive him mad."

 

"A useful technique."

 

"Useful if it hadn't caused what happened after."  Zolla rubbed one of her bare arms with a hand, showing Lana.  "I wasn't like this before.  You know that."  She hugged her arms to herself.  "For the past few weeks I've barely been able to swing a saber.  But that will mend, probably… it's not what worries me about our masters."  The Jedi followed the lines of a forearm tattoo with the fingers of her opposite hand as if her focus might otherwise waver.  The air felt taut until she resumed speaking.  "I woke up after making that road and it was like the Force didn't exist at all."

 

The blonde Sith pursed her lips and nodded at Zolla to keep talking.  This is… a great deal to take in.

 

"Not something blocked that I simply couldn't touch, or weakness where there had been strength, or stasis, just nothing.  No sensing, no powers.  Couldn't get in Iresso's holocron either.  I stopped the whole thing and we quarantined separately.  The problem faded within a couple days, but much longer and the Masters and Theron and everyone else would have found out."

 

Lana exhaled tersely.  "And when was all of this?  Didn't happen to be between Rishi and here, did it?"

 

"It did not."  She resumed the dust-loops with her opposite foot, faster.  "He just -- We were together on the way out from there to Yavin."  Perhaps Lana had reacted visibly, because Zolla continued: "By which I mean he was part of my ship's crew as he usually is.  He asked about him and me, wanted to keep things going.  I had to let him down gently, you understand."

 

Lana said nothing.

 

"He took it well enough.  It just made me not want to…"  She looked up at the Sith, eyes narrower.  "I bet this is how you get information out of everyone, isn't it."

 

"I beg your pardon--"

 

"I was kidding."

 

I should have caught that.  Lana's nerves felt raw.  She straightened her posture.  "Continue…"

 

==============

 

The rise that made for a head-rest on Marr's bed was comfortable enough.  His head lay on it beside Satele's, still and noble as if adorning a bier but wild with contained tension.  Like the whole of him, she observed.

 

She saw by the soft light of the power channeled in her hands, an aquamarine glow that only suggested his features and no more. 

 

With her fingers she followed the rounded rims of the small mask-jacks studded into his temples (though, assuredly, not quite touching them); lighter yet to the ends of the concavity that carried his crushed nose-bridge and useless eye remnants.  Then lower on his face, to the scar not yet two weeks old that left a blotchy keloid discoloration on his cheek.  It would be fresher but for her, she considered.  That moment seemed far away now.

 

Satele leaned forward to kiss that scar, in validation as much as desire.  Marr was suddenly almost manic with the latter and she felt him luxuriating in the brush of her soft lips against his skin, however enervated.  She kissed him again: by the hole that was one of his ears, atop his dented skull, above his melted eyes and below them where his powers had darkened his skin necrosis-black, like ink-stains against the faded brown parchment of his old skin; and she felt him shudder.  Now she had to admit she was enjoying his building frustration.  He grimaced.

 

<You fetishize my flaws, is that your game?>

 

<Scars are little histories to trace.>  She obviated his protesting thought: <However much you'll let me know.  As mysteries they still have beauty.>

 

She brought her mouth to his and tasted the soft-rough involutions of his tongue.  The light around her hands faded but not the power in them as she rubbed his neck and shoulders.  Marr made a rich rumbling murmur that she sensed he resented the laxity of.  He stroked her hair and twisted his tongue in turn.

 

Unhurriedly her hands explored his body, soothing and arousing in tandem with her tongue as his mind blared out a cycle of shame-anger-hunger.  <Be at ease, Marr.  This is not my ship and sanctum.>

 

He broke her kiss, his mind whiplashed by unwelcome memory.  Satele had to stabilize herself with her hands as a wave of horror assailed her through the bond.  She felt the sense of holding her own entrails in her hands.  Her naked skin felt suddenly cold.  But she was a Jedi of long experience, and made herself tranquil again.

 

"Will you be able to keep your composure?"

 

<I cannot say.>

 

She frowned forcefully.  "Watch me then, along the bond.  If you can't chase him from your mind I'll give you some past to think about.  To see, even."

 

Marr's voice oozed scorn.  "Yes, let's return the focus to you."

 

"One doesn't survive everything I've been through without a certain robust self-regard.  A fact I surmise you also know quite well."

 

He harrumphed and said no more of it, bending to mouth one of her breasts.  Satele studied how the fat and muscle of his broad body rearranged as he moved and as his knowing tongue laved her.  For all he showed the decrepitude of the devoted Dark he was a creature of lethal strength, an apex-predator who wore the scars of wisdom.

 

We burn ourselves in the Force, he had said.

 

Force preserve me I want him, she thought.

 

She swept her fingers down his body down to the valley of his groin where his skin took on new textures and damp heat.  He was flaccid still -- to be expected, perhaps, given his bouts of distress.

 

<I am past seventy.>  He stopped his attentions briefly to consider her.

 

"That hasn't impeded you before."

 

<Hrm.  Get my prick up, then, Jedi, and you will be the better for it.>

 

"Mm, say it," she breathed.  The areola-halo of his lips muffled the words he spoke and made Satele's tender skin vibrate with sensation.  She was slipping past tranquility now, deliberately.  Marr's ordered mind dangled from a thread, weighted with desire -- desire and something else, still inscrutable.

 

Of course there's something else or he wouldn't be here, mused Satele, and neither would I.  She stared into the darkness at where she remembered the holocron was.  Marr grasped her torso with his big hands and moved his attentions to her nearer breast.  He was avid for her in a way she'd not felt since before Theron was born.

 

Before she realized it her hand was tickling the hairs of her sex, discovering her own arousal.  She followed her fantasy-memory back along long familiar paths.  The baths and balconies of Tython.  The dales and peaks of Alderaan and the way Jace had kissed her, so patiently, with such satisfaction, as they touched themselves and then each other and then, impossible joy, he was closer still--

 

<Is this your idea of teasing me?>  Marr's ragged lips rumbled with mirth and contempt and his ardor did not flag although his cock remained unstirred.  His fingers sparked with electricity that made her twitch.

 

This feeling in this moment was like it had been with Jace, an intimacy that felt right and easy but was not easily won. 

 

Knowing he could not see it, she allowed herself a small smile.

Notes:

as always, thanks so much for reading! next time: nautolan ne'er-do-wells