#oc: sirue parhen

[sith-shenanigans]

Thinking about Sirue and Velnira’s dynamic and being super normal about it (I am not being super normal about it). A Jedi’s unconditional compassion for someone who is so scared and so angry and so clearly a victim of circumstance forging a friendship that Sirue can only see as indulging some tiny futile hope that her partner—the partner she lost—had some kind of family somewhere, and she’s almost right, because Ahene and Velnira are related, it’s not a coincidence they have the same last name, but that’s such a vanishingly small chance. And she never talks about it. Because it would be awful to talk about it—not only are you (on the wrong side of the law) running into this shining example of Jedi perfection (should probably be arresting you), you got to know her because she reminded you of your dead partner in some tiny way at a point when you were completely broken into little bits by grief. That’s an awful thing to tell someone. That’s—it might not ruin the friendship, but it feels so terrible and kriffed up and pathetic that Sirue doesn’t even want to think about it, except she also definitely thinks about it way too much. Velnira would forgive her! Of course Velnira would forgive her! But from her point of view… well, Velnira is entirely too forgiving.

But also, if Sirue had talked about it, Velnira would have realized who that Sith apprentice she met on Tatooine was.

[sith-shenanigans]

Ahene: the galaxy is very strange and terrible but I’m a sensible reasonable kind of person about it. yes I do a lot of strange things but reality started being weird first so this is the appropriate response

Sirue: my girlfriend says so much weird shit and I love her—

[sith-shenanigans]

well, um. I think we know about Vowrawn. Ahene's thoughts on [spins a wheel of blorbo NPCs] Satele? Sirue's on Silthar?

we do know about Vowrawn! many many things about yours, and incomprehensible complicated vibes about mine. however Jenû is an excellent addition to the problematic parental figure collection and this needs to be said anyway <3

Ahene’s opinions on Satele:

Technically, they first met in… professional contexts, which was Something, because Satele certainly got a fascinating kriffing impression from being on the other end of a negotiating table from Ahene and Marr. Ahene’s opinion at that point was mostly that Satele seemed fairly sensible and pragmatic, and was thankfully not convinced that this was all a Sith plot, which is really, really never a given. Later…

Theron’s family situation kind of reminds her of her own, once she’s willing to recognize the situation she has with Zahoin as a family situation. Her thoughts about Satele kind of start there—that she’s Theron’s mother in the ways Zahoin is Ahene’s father, and those aren’t the ways that make parents parents. And there’s a sort of self-recognition through the other, there, but… not entirely in the direction you’d expect. Ahene has spent a lot of time putting duties she didn’t choose ahead of anything and everything she actually wants for herself, sometimes at personal cost and sometimes at a cost to those around her, in the hopes that it will matter in the end.

Sirue’s opinions on Silthar:

Quite unlikely they’ll ever meet, but she’s heard of him (via Ahene, obviously) and she would like to know how Ahene has such a gift for finding these people. Sirue didn’t need like twenty Sith fathers-in-law, okay? She kind of likes him, though. #1 least annoying Darth from the gossip she’s heard in their mutual dreams, aside from screwing over the Implicitly Sexist Survivalist Brigade. Which isn’t great, but by Sith standards, he’s practically unproblematic.

(alas, I don’t think he joined the Alliance, after his injury during Tatooine he tries to avoid fighting and joining a guerrilla resistance movement isn’t really conducive to that.)

[npc opinions]

[sith-shenanigans]

1, 12, 14 & 15 for Ahene and Sirue from the character ask meme?

Ahene:

1. What is [character]'s favourite event, & what do they like about it?

Answered here.

12. If they had something named after them, what would they like it to be, and what would it really be?

Ahene: “I don’t want something named after me.” [pause] “…Maybe a museum.”

Yeah, her self-loathing is a little strong for this one. Objectively speaking, there are probably a few things out there that are named for her—or, at least, for her Sith title. She doesn’t like thinking about it, though. It’s unpleasant to know how the Empire sees her—what she’s being remembered for, long before she actually dies. It sits right at that terrible intersection of impressive and banal where the horror of what’s she’s actually doing lives.

14. What's their dream mount, & have they ever ridden it?

She uses the Lhosan Duster, most of the time, in-game. On my first playthrough, she bought it on Tatooine; it was her first mount, and she’d just saved up the credits. (She also didn’t use a saberstaff until Tatooine. We are not repeating that.) She wants the Command Corsair, but I don’t want to spend my cartel coins on that.

She is also weirdly attached to the Vectron Vertica, despite hating those dais things and feeling like, I quote, “very important skeet” in them. She likes a mount that it looks like she grabbed randomly in the middle of an industrial area, I guess.

Secretly, she thinks walkers are fun, but they’re not really… walking-around mounts.

15. If they had a career that wasn't one of the class options, what would it be (e.g. vet or nerf-herder)?

Baby pre-invasion Ahene wanted to be an SIS operative. Everyone knew Verios would join the Republic, and she was convinced that if she worked very, very hard in school, she could get into whatever training program they have. This wasn’t an idle “kids think spies are cool” thing—if Verios had joined the Republic instead of getting invaded, she would have done it. (And Ardun Kothe would have Very Definitely Not Had A Padawan.)

She’s always been a fairly weird kid.

Sirue:

1. What is [character]'s favourite event, & what do they like about it?

She’s not really particularly into any of them. Nar Shaddaa Nightlife is fun, except it gets quite boring quite fast. She’d probably like the pirate one, if I’d ever played it?

12. If they had something named after them, what would they like it to be, and what would it really be?

Sirue: “A starship, obviously. No, wait—a space station. Maybe Port Nowhere needs a new sign…” [little chuckle]

She’s not actually planning on renaming Port Nowhere after herself, she just thinks it’s funny to consider it. Honestly, it wouldn’t be about what got named after her, it would be about the fact that somebody did it at all. It means people are thinking about her and remembering her—that she’s not just going to burn up and be gone.

14. What's their dream mount, & have they ever ridden it?

Tragically, she also insists on the Lhosan Duster. For some kriffing reason.

Sometimes she flirts with getting one of the cartel skiff things, but they’re not actually her style. She just enjoys the idea of hijacking one.

15. If they had a career that wasn't one of the class options, what would it be (e.g. vet or nerf-herder)?

She doesn’t really want to be anything but what she is, career-wise.

In the AU where Verios never gets invaded, though, her dad gets elected to the executive seat and appoints her senator. She hates it. She’s simultaneously terrible at it and much better than she thinks.

[swtor character ask meme]

[sith-shenanigans]

41, 43, and 51 from the OTP asks for Ahene and Sirue? 👀

Thank you for the opportunity to ramble, I will do so. ;;v;;

41. Which one would take their jacket off and drape it over the other one because they were visibly shivering?

… Neither of them, actually.

Not because they’d be unwilling in spirit, but because they both wear armor over their jackets.

(Pre-Alliance answer: still neither of them, even if Sirue wasn’t wearing armor, because they’re pretending to be strangers. And Ahene doesn’t wear a jacket.)

43. Who would give their life for the other without a second thought?

UNFORTUNATELY BOTH OF THEM, IT’S A PROBLEM.

I think Ahene wins on ‘number of times this has been attempted’. (Two that I know of.) But Sirue wins on ‘worst, most dramatic timing’. (Ziost.)

51. What’s a non-verbal way they say ‘I love you’?

Here is how they love: little hands reaching for each other in the dark. Ration bars split in two when someone’s being punished. Shared water, a shared bedroll, Ahene mending Sirue’s clothes when they first start to fall apart. The heat of a cutting torch as Sirue opens a hole in the vent Ahene thinks she’ll die in. Trust without limit, without end, carrying them through hell alive.

Here is how they love: three years spent grasping for each other, and grasping for each other still when the trust breaks. Viciously, painfully, but refusing to give up on each other. Even when they know they should. Even when they know the galaxy would have to burn to bring them back together.

Here is how they love: as the galaxy burns.

(It’s a kind of love to bow your head and walk away when the words that will condemn you catch in her throat. It’s a kind of love to be unable to say it. A wretched kind of love to be reduced to, when love has never, ever been enough.)

And here is how it heals: a rescue mission, and guiding hands in the dark. There are conversations—important ones—but they cover everything but love. The love was never in doubt, no matter how many times either of them doubted. And there’s someone else in their space again, someone who isn’t quite their soul’s matching half, holding out a cup of warm caf and leaning against them as they drink it.

And it can’t fix the past, but it’s enough.

[OTP asks]

[sith-shenanigans]

4 & 5 & 19 from the OTP ask list for the OTP giving you the most brainrot rn :3

I’m going to give you my girls, I always have OTP brainrot about my girls.

4. Which one is more protective? Who needs to be ‘protected’?

Both of them are the protective one. Both of them think they need to protect the other. This is a hell of a problem post-reunion #1, when they are confronted with such facts as “you cannot save someone from themself, especially when they’re not cooperating with you about it.”

(They both have different screwed-up flavors of this, of course. Ahene is desperate to keep Sirue away from the terrible politics that have become her life. Sirue wants back the version of her girlfriend that isn’t a Sith. It’s all very sideways-slanted Orpheus-and-Eurydice, in a way that’s giving me weird vague myth-reinterpretation-hybridization thoughts argh.)

They do get better, of course. At which point Ahene is kind of the more protective one by default, since there’s… kind of an objective disparity in combat capability. But that’s a pragmatic thing rather than a temperamental one.

5. Describe their cozy night in.

Most of their shared hobbies aren’t really ‘cozy night in’ activities, so there’s some parallel-play-style quality time involved—basically sitting beside each other (frequently draped all over each other) and messing with their respective projects. Sometimes they do puzzles together, or play holochess.

… Sometimes they get distracted and other members of the Alliance command team find them in a conference room working on something. They’re not really ‘cozy night in’ people.

19. How do they feel about PDA?

They have… some issues with it. Their relationship—such as it existed at the time—was extremely secret for years. “If we meet in public somehow, we’re strangers” was a required feature of the circumstances. Those habits don’t entirely go away after they reunite. PDA for them is standing inside each other’s personal space, is meaningful touches, is one (1) extremely emotionally significant kiss before the KotET finale. (There was one after, too, but that wasn’t in public.)

[OTP asks]

[sith-shenanigans]

For the meme: 6, 19, 20

6. What character do you have the most fun writing?

Astonishingly, it’s… not actually Ahene! This isn’t her fault—she’s a main protagonist, so there is a certain degree of “beating the plot grimly into shape” inherent in the system.

I think the character who I’ve had the most fun writing, most consistently, is Alsair. She’s just a complete mess of a person, but in a fun (faux-)cheerful way, and she gets a bit of a character arc and then goes offscreen and has some wonderful development that I’ll mostly only have to hint at once she shows back up.

I am also extremely fond of writing Zaril’aaln. And the Broken Chain in general, but he’s the one who just showed up in my head despite not actually being in that scene in my original conception of it, and then he started talking and. Well. I love him a lot. Him and his plot-relevant backstory he very much wasn’t supposed to have. :’D

Of the protagonists, Ahene is on another level from the rest, but in a way that’s… kind of orthogonal from “favorite to write,” honestly? She’s the one with the deepest emotional meaning to me because she’s where I went when my depression was worst and everything seemed to be falling apart and trying to have the normal kind of hope just made me sick with panic. (I believe her “birthday” was February 23, 2016, so one can kind of guess at what was going on in the world at the same time I was hitting my own personal mental low point.) So I ended up with a character who doesn’t have hope, doesn’t have faith in the world, but still says yes, this matters, the things you do matter. She’s not a good person, her arc is kind of a corruption arc (at least in the first fic), but it is very much also an arc about… power being a function of how many things you’re willing to be responsible for, and being the sort of person who will build hope out of the sheer grim conviction that somebody should be doing it and she’s the one they’ve got.

(This was not the arc I thought I’d get when I started playing. I thought she would be a ds!inquisitor when I started playing. I also thought she would be a sorcerer, though, back when you picked at level 10, and she has been very clear on who she is and what her plot should be despite all my early efforts to make it something else.)

But is that always “most fun to write”? Erm. Well. Not entirely. I know her story best, which helps, but writing it is not always fun so much as cathartic.

The most fun main protagonist might be Orinara, who thinks trauma is something you inflict with a heavy object and who I have been setting up to smack righteously with the Clue-by-Four of Character Development. It might be Velnira, because Void alive, “unrelentingly good person who has been raised slightly ivory-tower but has a mind shaped just a bit like a corkscrew despite this” is such a fun character concept. I cannot say if it is either of them, because getting plots rolling is terribly un-fun for me and so their plots slightly languish.

(Sirue is so much trauma and anger and I love her dearly but she is not consistently “fun” for the same reasons Ahene is not consistently “fun,” minus the Empire being terrible and horrible right around her, but plus the criminal underworld existing enthusiastically and sometimes homicidally in her general vicinity.)

19. Is there something you always find yourself repeating in your writing? (favourite verb, something you describe ‘too often’, trope you can’t get enough of?)

I, uh, think there have been occasional rashes of head-tipping. Ahene has a distinct fondness for using things like “probably” and “really” as sarcastic intensifiers, which leads to me having to excise extras from paragraphs. I also sometimes worry that I’m belaboring her un-expressiveness too much, but that one is at least for a good reason; people will fill in “standard” body language on their own if I don’t. But, well. There are definitely a lot of places where her narration explicitly notes not doing something. She is very prone to explicitly not doing things.

Characterization and trope-wise… “hard” femininity and “soft” masculinity, which isn’t quite the same thing as masc female characters and fem male characters (though those also frequently show up). Characters who change the world just by existing in it as who they are. Responsibility as a kind of charisma; responsibility as a kind of power. Determination, likewise. “Everything you do matters, even and especially when it doesn’t.” Lack of closure as closure. People Being People no matter how famous or powerful they are; the very most terrifying characters being either the most Just People at their core or the ones who have done the impossible and become Something Else. The importance of caring about people even when they aren’t inherently good. Self-awareness as a major character trait (okay, this one is partly because I can’t imagine not analyzing myself all the time). Society as character. Society as eldritch horror. Interconnection and counterbalance as the opposite of and corollary to “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Semi-relatedly, a degree of “power is often another word for agency, and both having it and lacking it can corrupt, especially if it’s both at once, because desperate and traumatized people aren’t their best selves either.” Semi-relatedly again, “power is violence, unless society is deliberately set up to buffer it, and even very carefully applied violence has collateral damage and unforeseen consequences.”

… it’s really all about how people interact with each other, huh.

20. Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

I have answered this once already here, and am delighted to do it again!

I’ve talked about symbolism a bit, so now here is a secret theme: Ahene and Sirue’s arc is kind of about their romantic relationship, it is at the heart of who they are as people, but it’s also… not. It’s about not being the highest-priority thing in each other’s world anymore. Because they were each other’s whole life for a while, they were two halves of a whole, everything they did was for each other, and that is horribly codependent, actually. It is somewhat bad. It is not a relationship based on healthy emotions, there is a foundation of love but there is also a foundation of literally so much trauma. So. They need to sort that out.

Now, it will take them a long time to get there, but… it’s planned.

[meta asks]

[sith-shenanigans]

meta asks-

20- Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

21- What other medium do you think your story would work well as? (film, webcomic, animated series?)

20. Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

Oh stars, there is so much of this, though. I am a very meta-heavy writer. Which is a lot of why I can (excepting snippets) generally only write linearly.

… The number one bit of “simple” symbolism is that fire is Important in Ahene and Sirue’s arcs. Not physical fire, necessarily, because I’m really not a fan of physical symbolism; unless supernatural forces are currently acting on the world in a big way, the world contorting itself to fit metaphor breaks my suspension of disbelief. But metaphorical fire is a large thing. Fire is anger, yes, but more than that, fire is sacrifice. Fire is the part of you that grabs the lit end of the saber, that raises the stakes, that accepts that the victory and the cost are not separate things. And being willing to burn for something is always a kind of defiance.

Velnira and Orinara, meanwhile, get a related-but-different metaphor. Theirs is the concept of the sun, which is glory and unrelenting gravity and sheer intense force of personality. It’s… maybe not wholly a dark symbolism, but it usually is. Suns are meant to be suns; people are generally not. Orinara is consistently described as a sun by others—she’s not a diplomatic character, but she still has a great deal of charisma, and her personality exerts a kind of gravity on the people around her. Velnira is trying to avoid it, despite having the will and the charisma and the persuasiveness to be the center of other people’s worlds. A sun casts light, but it does not serve the Light.

(Yes, suns are also necessary for life. Suns are meant to be suns. The metaphor is about people, as compared to something enormous and inhuman and influential-just-by-existing.)

21. What other medium do you think your story would work well as? (film, webcomic, animated series?)

Honestly, I feel like Liminality would lose something as anything but prose? Seeing an animated-series adaptation would be visually stunning, and it would capture nuances of expression and body language that I can only sketch out with prose, but there is a whole lot of interiority involved. Especially with Ahene, where the disconnect between her outward/inward personas is so important. A comic could get some of that, but not as well, and animation would… struggle.

If I really think about it, I think even a different kind of prose medium would have issues? The story relies on being web fiction, which isn’t paced like a set of novels—web fiction can be to novels what novels can be to novellas, and while the book-length arcs do ramp up and hit closure points, they wouldn’t be… entirely satisfying as books. And the story is very long. Book series are only very rarely that long, unless you’re trying to write the next Wheel of Time. But the most famous web fiction tends to be that long; look at, say, Worm or A Practical Guide to Evil. Which is why I say “web fiction” and not “fanfiction”—there are fanfic novels and novellas and short stories! But that is not what I am writing.

Webcomics are probably closest? I feel like a webcomic could follow the same story effectively, since they’re frequently paced more like web fiction than anything else is, and could use the medium well. An animated tv series could use the characters fairly well, but would probably end up straddling the midpoint between what I’m writing and the original game. Anything else would end up in “this version of the cast and plot is inspired by the original, but they’re very clearly different people” territory, I think.

… on the other hand, my KotOR fic might work better as an animated series in the Clone Wars/Rebels vein. The character arcs are important, but their theme is much more “you are the things you do” and much less “the person you are inside and the person acting on the world are different people, and neither one is more or less you than the other.” The characters’ personalities track their exterior actions, the characters’ actions define their beliefs about the world. No one is desperately clinging to the belief that their actions are wrong, or presenting an outward self that wildly differs from the person inside—or, in the non-Ahene cases, just having character arcs that are far more about how they think about the world (and themselves) than how they interact with it.

Revan falls because of what she’s willing to do; Revan falls because you are your actions is her deepest guiding principle. No one’s arc is really refuting that principle, because it’s the moral theme the fic is working off of! The fic is about Revan’s fall and, uh, reformation (not, she would like to make it clear, redemption). It’s about choosing to do things differently this time. It’s not about how you feel about it, except in being about… it not being about how you feel about it, if you get what I mean. You can choose to do the right thing and not repeat your mistakes and still not know if you can touch the Light anymore, and it doesn’t matter, it is not the thing that matters, the thing that matters is that you are choosing to trust someone else more than you trust yourself and you have never done that before.

…um. Ahem. *clears throat* That was perhaps the meta question again, wasn’t it. Anyway, moving on. I think all of that works very well in a visual medium because it’s about things that are seen and done.

[meta asks]

[sith-shenanigans]

forbidden opinion: I think Sirue should be allowed to have dark circles under her eyes

[sith-shenanigans]

⏳ for Ahene, Sirue, Hes, and Yara (or however many you feel like answering) c:

[skillset asks]

Ahene:

Theoretically good at time management, if you take it to mean “arranging a schedule to get everything that needs to be done done.” Does not know when to stop getting everything that needs to be done done. She’s a Force user, she needs less downtime than most people, it’s fine. (It’s not fine and it drives her crew up a wall.)

Sirue:

She’s less organized about it, but actually has both a good sense of how to organize her time and when to stop—even though you wouldn’t really expect either out of her. It’s quite possibly the only area of her life where she knows when to stop, but hey—you can’t enjoy being the galaxy’s scariest privateer if you don’t set aside some time occasionally.

Hestera/Revan:

Absolute time management nightmare, in ways that have nothing to do with being bad at the skill. Manages her own time. Manages everybody else’s time. Believes it’s perfectly reasonable for her to do five things at once all the time. Being stuck recovering in a secret hospital for the better part of a year is the first real enforced downtime she’s had in a while, and the closer she comes to the end of the game, the more she starts shading back into constant activity—at the start, she’s fine with hyperspace as a break from things, a time when you do some reasonable amount of training and some reasonable amount of hanging out with the rest of the crew. But the longer the mission goes on, the more things she has that she can’t think about, and the only thing that’s ever stopped her from thinking about something is finding three other things to focus on. Then after the Reveal, she only gets worse on that front; most of her mental blocks are gone, but so is her ability to think of herself as someone who can really have friends.

Yara:

Used to be good at it; she was a general, and it’s very important in a military situation that you’re using your time effectively. Afterwards, without that structure, she’s unfortunately about as good as you would expect a depressed, traumatized, constantly-furious-with-the-galaxy ex-Jedi to be—which is to say that if you leave her alone without a mission, she spends about as much time earning credits as she needs to survive, some amount of time working out while watching bad holovids, and the rest doing whatever vaguely occupies her long enough to fall asleep. Then she gets up and does it over again. With a mission, she’s somewhat more on-track, though she starts sleeping too little instead of too much and tends to spend all her waking hours either quietly working towards her goal or trying to exhaust herself enough to sleep in one of the slow periods. This has actually screwed her over a few times, once to the point of almost getting her killed—she did occasional stints as a bounty hunter during her exile, and normal people can’t get away with ignoring their limits to the extent she was used to during the war. (She got vaguely better about it after that. Staggering into a medcenter exhausted, dehydrated, and with wounds that were going to at best put her temporarily down for the count once the adrenaline wore off… wasn’t really an experience she wanted to repeat.)

[sith-shenanigans]

sorry Darmas, I regret to inform you that she is just Like That

[sith-shenanigans]

[...]

Sirue being inordinately good at sabacc is my favorite thing. (And yet more evidence for my “the smuggler is heavily implied to be Force sensitive” theory.)

[sith-shenanigans]

I changed Sirue’s in-game look around a little, but… I don’t know. Half of me likes her the way she is, half of me absolutely hates that she looks like every other human f!smuggler. (Okay, not all of them, but I’ve seen 2-3 with the exact same head and hair color, one with her hair, one with the other hair I occasionally toy with giving to her, and they used to have pretty much the same skin color before I gave her more of a tan. And they have either that jacket or the other variant that looks like it. I think her being body type 1 is the main distinguishing feature.)

As a disclaimer, I do not begrudge other people their smugglers’ designs at all! I just… have a hellbrain that’s convinced I need to distinguish myself at all times. So her “twins” are fine, but I look at her and go “this is clearly boring” and I wish I could be not like this. (The slight redesign does make her less… twin-ish, at least.)

[sith-shenanigans]

[*hysterical laughter*]

[sith-shenanigans]

Sirue, probably: “Property damage counts as a hobby, right?”

[sith-shenanigans]

18, 19, 26 and 27 for your choice of ahene and sirue :0

You said “my choice” and I like to talk, so I’m choosing both of them. ^^;;

Ahene:

18. What did they find abroad, and what did they remember?

Ahene has been a lot of different places on a lot of different planets, and what she found has mostly been weird Force things. Especially ghosts. There have been a lot of ghosts.

The parts she remembers fondly, though, are the times post-class story when she had the opportunity to claim an artifact personally, when she and Talos (and occasionally some combination of the rest of the crew, but always Talos) got to go down into some ruin and figure it out like a puzzle. No politics, no expectations, just the opportunity to let down the facade a little bit with one of the few people she can actually count as a friend.

Now, most people wouldn’t consider ancient tombs to be the best place to do that, but she’s not most people and that really is her idea of fun, so it works out. Somehow.

19. What were your character’s deepest disillusions? In life? What are they now?

I’m… not sure quite what this one’s saying (‘in life?’), but I’ll do my best.

When Ahene was a young child, she wanted to join the SIS. The idea of being a spy appealed to her (you get to Know Things, and figure out what people are hiding, and sneak around) and while Verios was closer to the Empire, its political sentiments were much more strongly Republic-aligned. Being a kid, the part where you have to be a Republic citizen didn’t really cross her mind… but, anyway, after the invasion? She spent a couple years thinking the Republic might show up and rescue them all.

She is of the opinion that her younger self was inexcusably naïve.

Ahene also went through a lot of the class story hoping to, at some point, disappear into the endless night and go looking for Sirue. But the time never seemed right. Zash’s expectations were too immediate to risk running, and then there was Thanaton—and then she was part of a power struggle, and moffs were choosing sides. Things just kept escalating until it was too big to back down from, until there were too many people involved, until there was no way out but through.

And then the Council.

And then Makeb.

She should have known better than to think leaving was an option.

And she should have known better, after KotFE and KotET and all the things she built while saving the galaxy, than to think it wouldn’t come crumbling down around her.

She should have known better than to think she could do this the right way.

Always and ever, no way out but through.

26. What does your character’s home look like? Personal taste? Clothing? Hair? Appearance?

She’s lived a few different places, but they all have some commonalities. Her living space tends to be surprisingly austere. Sith—especially powerful ones—generally tend towards whatever extreme suits them, ominous or lavish or cluttered with whatever interests them (or, often, some combination of all of those). Hers is just… functional. Sometimes there are datapads lying around, or occasionally a coffee mug that 2V or a cleaning droid hasn’t had the chance to spirit off for washing yet.

If you had a way of looking, you could always tell the places she’s actually lived from the places she inherited from Thanaton and never used; the latter still look Sithly and pristine, and the former have been rearranged by someone who really doesn’t want to sleep in a bedroom that feels like an evil cathedral. She would like her bedroom to feel like a bedroom, thank you. A normal one.

27. How do they relate to their appearance? How do they wear their clothing? Style? Quality?

This is where I mention that Ahene is a nonbinary woman, and also that she has mild/occasional chest dysphoria. She doesn’t ever get top surgery, though, even though Star Wars medtech would probably mean a very short recovery period—she doesn’t actually want a flat chest, she just prefers clothing that keeps it covered and doesn’t draw the eye there.

She also has an entirely non-gender-related dislike of fancy Sith robes, possibly because she resents any outfit a droid has to help her into. Or maybe she’s just ended up slogging through a swamp in full formal dress more than once, because official visit and unforeseen circumstances collide with alarming regularity where she’s involved, and there aren’t enough showers in the galaxy after an experience like that.

More generally, she takes a fair bit of pride in the way she looks. She knows the kind of power appearances have, she knows how she wants to be seen, and she makes an effort to look polished. (Her hair definitely doesn’t stay slicked back like that without a lot of space hair product.) She likes grayscale clothing, with sharp, clean lines, stays meticulously clean when she’s not actively slogging through the wilderness, and does very… particular things with makeup. Or, often, 2V does, because when she does too much of his job herself he has a small nervous breakdown, and sometimes it’s easier just to take pity on the droid.

Sirue:

18. What did they find abroad, and what did they remember?

Sirue has traveled across a lot of the galaxy—or more of it than most people ever will, at the least, and that’s still only a tiny tiny fraction. She couldn’t see it all in a thousand lifetimes. And that’s part of what she likes about it. She doesn’t have to stay anywhere too long, bouncing between stars until all the planets start to blur together, a new job on every horizon. It’s the freedom to move, to fly, to leave her mark and be forgotten.

She’d like to say that she forgets everything but the good bits, the exciting bits. The bits where she lived fast and won big and did things nobody else could.

It’s a damned lie, but she’d like to say it.

This is what she remembers: there’s no justice but what you make, there’s no odds that aren’t fixed, and everyone’s wrong when they say they’ll be lucky forever. (Except me, she’ll tell you, and wink.)

19. What were your character’s deepest disillusions? In life? What are they now?

Sirue wasn’t a born cynic, but going from political scion to Imperial slave at the tender age of eight will leave you disillusioned with just about everything. She lost more than a lot of people ever had, and it taught her that power was just a word for how many things you can break. Nothing means anything unless you have the bigger gun. Forgetting that was how she ended up getting betrayed by her best business partners—though she got off the last shots in the end.

That said, none of that means you have to break the wrong things, or shoot the wrong people. She’s not some kind of petty schoolyard bully. But she doesn’t believe in anything she can’t ensure herself, and she will go to some kriffing terrifying lengths to ensure things herself.

26. What does your character’s home look like? Personal taste? Clothing? Hair? Appearance?

She lives in her ship, of course, and it’s about as organized as anyone could expect from the living space of a motley group of criminals. The captain’s quarters aren’t outright messy, but sometimes things get set on the floor. And she collects horrible knicknacks. And then there’s the trophy case with the lightsabers in it, and the guns on the wall, and all the other miscellaneous items she’s picked up off her enemies to prove that she lived and they didn’t. Everything needs a memento; that’s how you keep score.

27. How do they relate to their appearance? How do they wear their clothing? Style? Quality?

She goes through horrible places on a regular basis, she’s worn the same jacket for at least a decade, and… actually, she’s pretty hygienic when it comes to personal grooming. She’s been through grubby grimy hell, sometimes she just wants to feel clean, gods, is that too much to ask? Looking pretty isn’t exactly a priority for her, though—she’s gonna be a scruffy smuggler unless you give her a damn good reason not to be, ‘cause otherwise people start noticing those delicate features that make her so clearly her father’s girl, and…

Well, she’s done a lot of things that weren’t exactly morally sound, but she can look at herself in the mirror without seeing her father, and that’s important. If she dresses up too nice, she starts thinking a little too much about futures that weren’t hers.