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“Tivva!”
She groans, dropping her head to the table in front of her and narrowly avoiding the makeup palettes scattered across it.
“Tivva!” Crystal’s voice stabs at her ear cones again, and she sighs. Kriff this bitch.
“What?” She calls back, doing her best to hide her frustration. All she wants is a minute to herself.
“You’ve got a request.” Crystal enters the room, heels clicking their rapid pace. Surprisingly, the taps slow, then stop. Tivva looks up, finding her owner in the vanity’s mirror.
“What?” She demands. “No ‘Move your pretty ass’? No ‘Get going’? What’s the problem?”
Crystal hesitates in the mirror. “This guy’s… um…”
“Who is he?” Tivva runs through the usual list of suspects. That Imperial sargeant isn’t due back for another month at least. The blond guy with a scar on his chest has been coming back for months; he’s not likely to inspire this kind of reaction in Crystal. Her owner is a hardened woman. Maybe it’s the Zabrak who had her last week? His tattoos were intimidating-
“I haven’t seen him around here,” Crystal admits. “Like, ever.”
Tivva’s train of thought stutters to a stop. “What do you mean?” It’s not exactly impossible for a stranger to know her name, but it isn’t likely. Sex slaves don’t usually come up in casual conversation. “Who is he?”
Crystal purses her lips. “It’s a human,” she says. “I think they…”
Tivva waits, but Crystal only fidgets. She’s never seen her this agitated before. “Are you going to tell me or not?” She doesn’t bother to hide the contempt in her voice this time. It’s rare that she has the chance to snark at her owner without fear, though Crystal’s reaction is starting to unnerve her as well.
The words seem to shake Crystal out of whatever stuper she had been stuck in. The green Twi’lek blinks and straightens, her lekku twitching violently. “Just be careful, Tivva. And don’t keep him waiting.”
Without another word, she turns on her heel and strides away. The heels’ sudden rapid staccato fades quickly, and Tivva, after a moment of pure confusion, springs to her feet and rushes to the door to the club, taking a split second to check her makeup.
As soon as she steps through the door, she sees the man waiting for her. He leans against the wall, black clothing standing out against the flashing lights of the club.
The creak of the door catches his attention, and he turns to face her. Immediately, she knows why Crystal had been so uneasy. Adrenaline starts pumping through her veins, and the air seems to thicken around her, restricting her breath.
A Sith. It has to be. The first feature that captures her attention is the man’s eyes, glowing and yellow and burning with power and hate. They bore into her mind, her very essence, and she can tell that if he felt like breaking her sanity, or what remains of it, he would need no more than a thought.
She tears herself away from the pits of fire that are his eyes, desperately looking for something else. Her eyes find a diagonal scar crossing the Sith’s right eye, and it’s easier to focus on than the eyes themselves. “Hey,” she says. The word sticks in her throat, strangling the attempted flirty tone.
The Sith says nothing, instead letting his flaming eyes sweep up and down her form, coming to rest on her face more often than not. It’s not the objectifying stare she’s accustomed herself to, but an analyzing, judging appraisal that sends shivers down her spine.
“You’re Tivva?” the Sith asks. His voice sounds both hollow and powerful, an almost Kassi accent affecting his words, but she can feel the exhaustion in him. She’s become good at recognizing buried emotions.
“Yes?” The confirmation sounds more like a question. She internally cringes, but the Sith ignores it. He pushes himself away from the wall and paces in front of her.
“And you were how old when the slavers took you, your mother, and your sister?”
Tivva’s eyes widen. She steps back involuntarily. What the- “How-”
“Answer the question.” The Sith is outwardly calm, but a hint of threat starts to invade his words. Tivva gulps.
“I- I was five? I think?” The truth is, she doesn’t really remember. All she knows is that both she and Ce’na were way, way too young to be enslaved, but she isn’t going to say that to a Sith demanding answers.
“And your sister?” The Sith’s eyes bore into her skull. Her unease is probably palpable.
“Probably two or three,” she answers. The Sith remains impassive, but his hands twitch.
“What was your sister’s name?” he asks, and Tivva finally feels a surge of confidence.
“Why do you want to know?” she demands. The Sith’s eyes, which had mercifully dropped as he asked the question, lock onto hers again. They glow brighter with restrained anger.
“If you are who I think you are, you’ll answer correctly,” he growls. The air tingles with power, and Tivva’s sudden courage leaves her immediately.
“… Ce’na.” She grinds the name out through her teeth, then jerks her head up, lekku twitching. “But if you -” The threat dies in her mouth when she sees the Sith’s reaction.
The Sith’s hands are clenched into shaking fists, gripping the fabric of his robes. His eyes have closed, and his mouth is set in a thin line. His breath comes in a shaking puff.
“Are you -” Tivva starts, but the Sith shakes himself and straightens.
“I’m… alright.” Tivva notices the slight hesitation, but doesn’t say anything. “I just… She’d be thrilled to know I found you.” He lets go of his robes. “My name is Dru. Vette - I mean, Ce’na - was my friend.”
Tivva’s mind stops working. “Ce’na’s alive?” she breathes. Dru goes pale.
“Sh-she never stopped looking,” he says. His careful avoidance of Tivva’s question escapes her. “For you or your mother.”
“I- I can’t believe it,” Tivva murmurs. “She didn’t forget about us?”
Dru wets his lips. “No,” he says, voice shaking. He hesitates for a moment, then reaches for his belt. “If you’d be willing, I’d like to talk to Crystal for a moment.”
Tivva nods and points to the door. “I… I need a minute.” She registers Dru’s disappearance into the back rooms as she stumbles to the nearest barstool and collapses into it, tears leaking past her eyelids.
She doesn’t know how long it takes for Dru to return, but she can feel the atmosphere shift when he does. Uneasy, she raises her head to look at him.
“You’re free,” Dru says, pausing next to her stool, a careful arm’s distance away. The words don’t register with Tivva for a moment, but when they do, shock floods her system, disbelief mixed with nervousness and apprehension.
“I- what?”
“You’re free.” Dru says it again, inflection exactly the same, but it does nothing to calm Tivva’s unrest. Sith don’t just act out of the kindness of their hearts. She suddenly wonders if the entire interrogation had been some kind of twisted trick. Had she just been bought as part of a strange power play?
Dru’s mask of cold neutrality drops for a moment. He steps closer to Tivva. “This is no trick. I mean no harm. This…” He hesitates. “Consider this a debt being paid. No harm will come to you while I am around, I swear it.”
Tivva stares into the Sith’s irises. They still hold every ounce of power and danger she had originally seen in them, but none of it is directed at her. If anything, it looks like the glare of PTSD-ridden soldiers that occasionally wander into the club.
“Okay…” Tivva says. She doesn’t trust him, but she’s learned that the key to survival when unsure is to just go along with the authoritative figure. “What do you want me to do?”
Dru squints at her. The blazing pools become slivers. “Well, you should probably get your things. Then you can either strike out on your own, or come with me.” The slight lilt of emotion at the end of his sentence tells Tivva which he’d prefer. She sighs internally. Play the game. Learn the rules.
“I’ll come with you, then,” she says.
Dru jerks his head once in a nod. The silence grows.
Tivva gets her things.
— — —
“So what’s the deal?” Tivva asks. She normally wouldn’t be so brash, but Dru has reiterated over and over that he expects nothing from her, and he hasn’t made any attempts to control her in the five hours since her purchase.
Additionally, she’s gotten a little more used to the strange Sith’s peculiarities. He’d insisted on finding a private place, to which she’d pointed out that one would be hard pressed to find any on Nar Shaddaa. The second they arrive in the spaceport’s tiny hotel room, however, Dru stretches out a hand and pulls three minuscule devices from crevices within the room into his palm.
“Damn foolish receptionist,” he mutters darkly, clenching his fist. “I wasn’t born yesterday, I know what listening devices feel like.” He strides into the room, letting shards of electronics fall between his fingers, and sits heavily down on the bed.
Tivva hesitantly enters the room after him, suitcase of her belongings in hand. “‘Scuse me,” she says. “But why are we here?”
Dru doesn’t look up, but he waves a hand. The door slides shut and beeps, signaling it’s locked. He breathes in, then puffs the air out.
“I am about to do something…” Dru mumbles, “incredibly stupid. And possibly incredibly invasive.” He massages at his face. “You are mentally sound, but if it becomes too much, do let me know.”
“Uh, what?” is all Tivva can say before an absolute tidal wave crashes over her. She gasps, stumbling back against the wall and almost falling over. Visions pound her skull, images of blood, death, red, horror-
Emotions flood her brain, strong to the point where she can’t differentiate between Dru’s and her own. Fear, rage, hatred, pain, and all of them directed-
At himself.
And all of a sudden, Tivva’s head breaks the surface of the floodwaters. She’s able to make sense of it all, if not fully understand it. He reminds her of the war veterans for a reason deeper than trauma - survivor’s guilt.
Dru is a Sith, yes. He harbors the same emotions as all Sith. He just bottles them up inside, angry at no one more than himself, raging against his own rage. It’s an unending cycle, feeding off itself.
“What… happened?” Tivva chokes. Dru folds in on himself even more. He looks like a small child, hiding himself from the world out of fear.
“I’m so sorry,” he says into his hands. “I’m so kriffing sorry, I’m a kriffing failure, it’s my fault-”
“Hey.” Tivva marches over to the bed and plops down next to Dru. She can’t explain what makes her so comfortable with him all of a sudden, but whatever Force wizardry he just pulled is the equivalent of baring his soul to her. “Just talk.”
Dru lets out a choked sound somewhere between a sob and a chuckle. “Force, you sound just like her.” Tivva just waits, her hand on his shoulder and her heart racing. Dru shifts, breathes.
“…Ce’na is dead.” And he collapses, full-blown sobs tearing from his chest. Tivva’s heart drops, and the weight of loss finally falls over her. Tears fill her vision, and she lets them fall, mourning the sister she never got to know next to a man who has been living with the pain of her absence for so long.
— — —
She listens as Dru explains how her sister lived and died. He isn’t able to speak for long between bouts of horrible, gut wrenching sobs, so there’s a lot of silent processing involved in Tivva’s reaction.
“I killed Baras,” Dru finishes. “I claimed my position as the Emperor’s Wrath, and… well, I’ve been traversing the galaxy tying up loose ends. Things my crew have mentioned that they never got closure on. I’d… like to think it’d make them happy.”
“…I’m so sorry.” Tivva struggles to find words for what she wants to say. “It’s not your fault. You know that, right? Don’t blame yourself.”
Dru snorts. “You, Jaesa, Tremel - you’re all the same.” His voice breaks. “I was a damn fool.”
Tivva drops her eyes. She isn’t going to make any progress this way, she can already tell. “Um, what kinds of things have you been doing? If you don’t mind me asking.”
He glances at her, his head still hung. “I’ve reunited my Lieutenant’s old strike team. We’re planning a long-overdue assault Pierce worked on for years. I’m also planning to avenge Broonmark and his kin. He may have been unique, but nothing like what happened to him will ever happen again.”
Dru had told her the very basics of Broonmark’s story, but that had been enough to put her completely on the Talz’s side. “That’s good.”
“Yes,” Dru mumbles. His fingers slide further up his scalp, pushing his hair into an even messier mop. It looks like he hasn’t cut it in a while. “It feels like… I’m honoring them, in a way. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah, of course.” Tivva hesitantly outstretches an arm, reaching around Dru’s shoulders. She’d had years of physical contact, but practically nothing truly intimate. She isn’t sure how to handle a breakdown, but she thinks this is how it works. Some of the younger slaves have had panic attacks after a particularly harsh customer, and just being there helped most of them.
Dru stiffens as her fingers find their way beneath his pauldron. She lets her hand rest there, hoping he wouldn’t lash out and cut her arm off or something.
After a few seconds of immense stress and Tivva holding her breath, the tension leaves Dru’s body, and he collapses against Tivva’s side. She adjusts herself so that his head is leaning on her shoulder. It’s not the most comfortable, with her back skewed to accommodate his height and her other pauldron digging into her hip, but it’s what the young man her sister loved needs right now.
“They’d be proud of you,” she says. She hears Dru sigh dismissively and takes a risk, squeezing his shoulder a little. “They would. You’re being the change they wanted to see in the galaxy. You’re not being a stereotypical ‘hate everything, kill everyone’ Sith, you’re trying to do something to make the lives of people like your friends better.”
Dru is silent for a while. Tivva’s thumb traces circles on his shoulder as she quietly scans the room, waiting for a reaction or something else to come to mind.
“I suppose,” Dru finally mutters. Tivva nods and squeezes his shoulder again. They fall back into silence, two mourners in a ramshackle hotel on Nar Shaddaa.
“What do you want to do now?” Dru asks, straightening. Tivva retracts her arm and looks at him in mild confusion. His eyes narrow. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
Tivva hurriedly schools her expression. “Um. I don’t know? I’m not sure what you want me to say.”
Dru sighs. “Tivva, I’ll never make you do anything you don’t want to do. If you never want to see me again, you never will. I’ll just buy you passage to wherever you wish, pull some strings to get you a job, and leave you with a sum to start off.”
Tivva’s eyes drop. Even after he’d exposed his deepest pain and regrets, she still has a difficult time looking past the harsh irises and heavy aura that mark Dru as a Sith. “I don’t know. I’m… not sure where to start.” I’ve been a slave my entire life. What do I do now?
Dru’s eyes soften, the gold losing some of its fire. “If you don’t mind, I could offer a suggestion.”
“Shoot.” Tivva doesn’t have any ideas of her own.
“If you remember, I had an apprentice named Jaesa,” Dru says. Tivva nods. “I’ve passed my legacy - pre-Wrath, of course - to her. To the galaxy at large, Ahn Dru is dead, killed in a cave-in orchestrated by his traitorous master. Now, she and my mentor, Tremel, are working alongside myself and trying to better the Empire and Sith Order.”
“Mm-hm.” She doesn’t know where he’s going with this.
“Er…” Dru hesitates. “She could use all the help she can get.”
Tivva blinks.
“If you’d like to join her, however temporarily, she would welcome you with open arms,” Dru says. “And… I’d be indebted to you.”
“Oh,” Tivva says. She internally weighs her options. On one hand, she would be working for a Sith, and it’s common knowledge that no sane person would willingly be employed by a Sith. On the other… she knew that Dru was different, and she’d seen enough of Jaesa through Dru’s visions to believe that the former apprentice was even better than Dru. And if she could make sure that no one had to go through what she and Ce’na have…
“You know what?” She says. “Screw it.” She stands up, the bed creaking in relief, and spins to face Dru, who’s hair is still hanging messily into his eyes. “I’ll go with you.”
Dru’s shoulders noticeably relax. “Then I am in your debt.” He stands as well. “I’ll organize your passage on the next transport to the Imperial fleet and notify Jaesa.”
“Wait, you’re not coming with?” Tivva asks. “I’ve never been to the Imperial fleet, I don’t know what to do.”
Dru’s eyes flick to her face, and she freezes momentarily. Then he sighs and drops his gaze. “Apologies, but I don’t think Jaesa should see me. Our holos are already enough.”
Tivva rolls her eyes, then immediately regrets it. Hoping he didn’t see her do it, she clears her throat. “Uh, I can’t speak for her, but you guys seemed pretty close. You sure she doesn’t want to see you?”
“It’s not a matter of her wanting to see me or not,” Dru says, his voice tight. “My presence could be harmful.”
Tivva bites the inside of her lip. “Well, would you at least consider chaperoning me to the fleet? Please?”
Dru meets her pleading gaze with piercing gold. She has to make a conscious effort not to shiver.
“Very well,” he finally caves. “My fighter is single-seated, so I’ll just book a second seat on the transport.”
Tivva allows her lips to curve into a small smile. “Thank you,” she says. “Really.” She could fend for herself, but she’d much rather have some form of guidance when traversing the galaxy for the first time in years.
And if it gets him to reconnect with the young woman she saw in his memories, well, she’s not going to pass up an opportunity like that.