Private Can You Feel My Heart

[Darth Daiara]

There was something indescribable about watching Kaalia turn her back.

There was a piece of her that could see how she was acting, but it was passive and it was small and it stood no chance against the tunnel-vision that had enveloped her since her recovery. It had sat and watched and hoped... but instead of kindness or empathy there had only been disappointment and pain.

It never stood a chance.

Rage overtook her, blinding and pure. She screamed at the rejection, lightening shooting out of her palm and hitting the wall where Kaalia once stood.

It hardly mattered, the woman was gone. She screamed again and shot another. And again, another. Rock flew around her, shattering to the explosions. She fell to her knees and griped at the ground, her shoulders bowing over to the goodbye she hadn't seen coming.

Why was life always such an ultimatum? It shouldn't have been. It shouldn't have been.

 

[Vesta]

x​

How odd it was to be an observer of something that was quite close to what she'd similarly gone through. Stranger, it was, that she found herself profoundly numb - not to the plight of her infuriated apprentice, she could understand and would have encouraged that rage if the girl had tried to bottle it up, but rather to the experience she'd reminisced on just minutes before, inside. There had been a build-up here, a reason, and there was something to understand, some clear language that made it obvious that things were dangerously close to a precipice that might end whatever ties the two had to each other - in her case, she'd vanished.

She could empathize with the girl's frustration, just as she could with her mother's disappointment, but it still seemed much more.. earned.. to her than the irrational sensation that was gnawing at the center of her being. In a manner of speaking, the cause and the effect, the intent especially, had been laid out clear - and perhaps that was the problem. As Darth Daiara blasted away rock and debris with angry outbursts of lightning, Mori found herself wondering why the girl wasn't content - the choice had been hers to make, she clearly decided what she wanted more, hadn't she? That's what she had assumed choices were, given the Shi'ido's limited experience with such moments.

She chose to continue a path down the dark side, one with a master that wanted an apprentice that would surpass themselves.

Mori had chose to deal with her issues on her own.

Both choices were unacceptable to those that had presented them with the circumstances that required those to even be choices. It was just that those choices were, for lack of better wording, what they, the two of them, had wanted and were willing, she assumed, to shoulder the consequences of. Why, was it, then, that the girl was so distraught over the outcome?

"You're behaving like a child."

The words slipped out without actually intending to voice them, the irony not lost on the Shi'ido given the length of time she'd existed in this world. The dark robes she had been wearing were replaced with dark, form-fitting, clothing that were quite unfitting of a woman that claimed to be as important as she was supposed to be, though given that the woman had literally shifted into such a guise it was more than likely a measure of practical modesty over aesthetic presentation.

"We all make sacrifices, girl. You chose this, just as I did, once. Perhaps neither of us realized the consequences of our actions, but those consequences cannot be undone, nor our actions. What use is there in lashing out now, what good can that do?" She asked, her head tilting to the side in visible confusion - she was genuinely incapable of comprehending the purpose of acting out. "What is done is done. Your destructive tantrum is not going to make things better for you."

"It is better if you simply accept that you have chosen a path that you will be walking without her because she is unwilling. You cannot change that."

She glanced over to the ruin the girl had caused, her expression momentarily unreadable - recalling a moment that she'd let herself feel what the girl was feeling now, only in a far more self-destructive way. She shook her head, shaking the memory from her mind. "You will only hurt yourself and reduce yourself to precisely what she claimed you would become if you let this moment control you. Be better than this, than what she thinks of you, and prove her wrong."

"You have a purpose in this galaxy, apprentice, and it is more important than the thoughts of someone who claimed something that should be unconditional."

She settled her gaze back on the girl, frowning - realizing her words were more personal than she'd intended to let out. Her tone slipped, a little, letting some emotion through, but her expression was quite contrary to the unintentional softness of her words. "Perhaps I was too eager to pull you away from her." She admitted, wondering if perhaps there'd been someone like her in her own past as she was here and now.

"For that I apologize." She offered, in what was likely going to be the only apology she was ever going to give.

It was certainly the only time she'd made one in quite some time.

 

[Darth Daiara]

Aradia's withdrew, her emotions coiling back into her fists as Vesta spoke. She wasn't a child. But the woman was oddly correct. Every lash of pain she let come out of her just proved Kaalia's point.

Never mind that woman could have helped her-- could of stayed and contributed to the path she had sworn to see Aradia down. Was she really such a lost cause to be written off just like that? At least Vesta was giving her the chance. That was all she had ever wanted from Kaalia-- a chance for more. But that door had closed long ago, when the woman stepped down from the sith path. How can you raise someone to greatness if you no longer believe it is great?

She was seeing that reality now. Slowly. Bit by bit.

"This was a long time coming," she dismissed, her tone dead. She stared at the ground, her blood going cold as the implications continued to roll through her. Life as she knew it had just broken, hadn't it.

All she had ever wanted was a family and justice. Kaalia taught her to reach for those-- to not sit passively as life shoved her back. She never thought those lives were incompatible, but apparently they were.

She got the feeling this wasn't just about her not checking in on time. Kaalia had called her a threat.

"She doesn't think I can do it." And could she? One glance at the rubble on the ground had her closing her eyes, Kaalia's disappointed gaze following her even then.

She was silent for a long, pained moment, and then she spoke again.

"You've never told me what you want from the galaxy. I think you should now."