In the dark room, two figures were curled under a blanket, sharing in each other's heat to stave off the bitter cold of Korriban's nights. The man was broad-chested and heavily muscled, with countless scars marking his body.
The woman was slim and toned, stunningly beautiful despite the scowl that seemed perpetually stamped on her face.
Though her partner had fallen asleep hours ago, Kalista remained awake, kept from sleep herself by her own thoughts. Instead, she occupied the silence by examining the man's form.
Her companion wasn't bulky, like the many of the men who had worked for her former masters, the kind that built their bodies for show and intimidation.
His muscles were lean, made for combat and little else, earned over months or years. He wasn't conventionally handsome, with blunt features and hard muscle chiseled as though by an unskilled hand.
The scars dotting his body were each a trophy, a reminder of the pain and effort he had gone through to survive and get to where he was. As she traced a delicate finger across some of the larger ones, she felt a pang of envy shoot through her.
He was strong enough to have survived the ordeal that gave him that scar.
Despite what the Sith Code preached, her hatred did not give her strength. It gave her the drive to survive, pushed her to use everything she could. But motivation mattered little when faced with overwhelming power that she could not overcome.
In the end, her hatred left her with only more self-loathing in the face of her helplessness.
She was no great warrior, nor a great wielder of the Force. She had no skills to leverage, no connections to take advantage of. She had only one weapon, but she despised it with the whole of her being.
She was beautiful and she knew it. But it was also the bane of her existence, the very reason she had been separated from her parents and siblings. It was the reason she had been traded like a party favor from one crime lord to the next for nearly a decade.
Kalista hated relying her looks, but it was the only weapon she knew how to use. The only weapon she had ever possessed. Her only protection against the galaxy. Had she the choice, she would have mutilated herself years ago, but her will to live had stayed her hand.
Staying awake to think was unpleasant, but the dreams were worse. To distract herself from it, she allowed herself to focus on the tattoos on her bedmate's slowly rising and falling chest. They were crude things, made to look like war paint. Harsh black lines were sculpted to look like animals and fangs.
Nevertheless, there was an artistry to them and she found herself quickly entranced.
As her companion had explained it, his tattoos originated with the blessings bestowed by the ancient Sith priesthood upon their Massassi warriors, charms stitched into their skin to protect them from harm and enhance their rage.
Though many no longer believed that they actually worked, they remained popular among modern Sith warriors as status symbols to demonstrate adherence to the old ways.
In a way, they reminded her of the tattoos on her Lekku. Her parents had inscribed the flowing, graceful symbols on her when she was a child as a reminder of the culture that they had lost. However, she would never learn the story behind her tattoos as she was separated from her parents before they could tell it.
Part of her wanted to search for the story, yearning to know. The rest did not, reminding her that the past contained little but pain.
Her finger stopped its travels along her sleeping companion's tattoos and she laid her hand flat on his chest as she considered it.
Would the pain be worth it? Or would the sorrow overcome any joy she might derive from it? Was she too scared to look, afraid of what she might find?
Kalista quickly found that the same thoughts could also be turned towards her potential future as a Sith and discovered a similar lack answers waiting for her.
Her indecision on both fronts proved that she was weak and she despised herself all the more for it.
A shiver crawled across her skin and she shifted, pulling more of the covers over her nude form. The movement stirred her partner, his eyes bleary as he was drawn from sleep. He was a light sleeper, almost a necessity to survive as a Sith.
"Something wrong?" He asked, only half awake. His unfocused gaze sought out her face nonetheless. In the darkness, his own was barely visible as anything more than the fanged maw of an animal thanks to his facial tattoos.
"It's nothing," She whispered back, allowing her stern façade to fade for a moment. To sell the illusion, she told herself, "I'm just a bit cold."
A smile tugged at the edge of his lips before he leaned over to kiss her. She replied in kind, though she was unsure how much of it was from years of in-grained habit.
Caleb was far from the most brutal lover she had ever had. Quite the opposite, actually. He was a battle junkie through and through, but that did not translate to his personal affairs. This was not the first time she had laid with him.
Each time before, he had been gentle and, dare she say, even kind. It was something she had not expected from another Sith, especially from a Human that had been born in the Empire, even if he wasn't an aristocrat.
Because of her weakness, she would not survive long in the Academy, or even out in the galaxy, without help and she knew it. Olia was a deterrent from most threats as she drew their attention solely to her. But the twisted woman was not always present.
It was during the first of her disappearances that Kalista learned she needed to look elsewhere for protection. After making the foolish decision to wander the halls alone, she had been cornered by three acolytes, all human, with the intention to kill her.
Even now, she hadn't quite pinned down the reasoning for it. To kill a "filthy alien" or simply prove their power to themselves. Something along those lines.
She'd tried to fight…with predictable results. At that point, her understanding of swordsmanship was limited to knowing which end of the sword to hold.
Caleb's fist had come out of nowhere to shatter the leader's jaw. She had taken the opportunity to flee and missed seeing what happened next, though she heard later that the ensuing battle had wrecked two corridors.
The three acolytes ended up in the medical ward for two weeks, while Caleb came out of it with two broken fingers and serious lacerations on his forehead from where he had broken a blade with his skull.
No one had died, but the three other acolytes later passed in convenient "accidents" or went "missing" out in the tombs.
She hadn't approached him immediately and held off for a month, still too shaken by what had nearly happened.
Additionally, she hadn't wanted to seem as desperate as she had felt. To her relief, it hadn't taken much convincing in the end to establish their current arrangement.
In return for her "company," he would protect her from the more...outgoing acolytes whenever Olia was missing again. It was no different from what she had been forced to do before.
Caleb shifted until he was laying on his side and with the arm that was wrapped around her slim form, he gently pulled her closer, his legs intertwining with hers.
As he adjusted the covers over them and wrapped the other arm around her, he glanced down and asked, "Better?"
Nuzzled into his chest, Kalista nodded, "Better."
It didn't take long for the Human to fall asleep again. A perk of exhaustion and self-training, she supposed.
Kalista hated having to rely on someone else to survive…but she was also tiring of feeling nothing but hatred.
In what she would later tell herself was a moment of weakness, she held onto Caleb's chest as tightly as she could without waking him, taking simple comfort in the heat that radiated from his body as she closed her eyes and finally drifted off to sleep herself.
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Don't worry, the next chapter will be an actual chapter of Aldrex's Excellent Adventures.
And if you like this one don't forget to drop power stones.
...
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