Characters are the sole property of Lucas Arts and Obsidian Entertainment the author neither seeks nor receives any profit.

This story is rated M for good reason. It explores adult themes and theories of sadomasochism. It came out of a marathon of playing through KOTORII and alternating between reading The Possessed and watching various Hellraiser films when the game frustrated me too much. If that's not enough of a warning for you about what this story contains I don't know what is. One more time now, if you are disturbed by theories or descriptions of sadomasochistic themes PLEASE READ SOMETHING ELSE.

Thank you.

Dirge Patterns

He was in the center of a massive room. The ceiling was held up by pillars carved into twisted humanoid shapes, or perhaps the pillars were only decorative. Maybe the room was hewn from the living rock. Only the middle of the great space was clearly visible; the walls cast into shadow. The light came from a gigantic, square skylight that seemed to go up and up for dozens of meters. The floor was made up of ancient looking flagstones, rough and cracked and uneven.

He spun through a series of combat forms in the shaft of light, taking no notice of the irregular footing at all. The light defined his stage; his kata both an exercise and a performance. For whom, she wondered for a moment. Then she realized, with a sudden reflexive tightening of the muscles in her lower abdomen, that she seemed to be the intended audience. There was no one else in the room or, she felt, for many meters around.

His movements were both familiar and yet foreign; motions that he had adapted to his evolving philosophy and physical ability. His muscles no longer flowed as they should have in many places. They were too torn. His bones too fragmented to support them in a recognizable configuration. Yet move they did: like every part of him his ability to maintain his body through such totally specialized mastery of the Force was more entrancing than any simple, organic play of limbs and joints and fibers. The power; the naked, confident ferocity of his style enhanced the effect. His mind, his self, seemed laid bare by his motions: he reveled in his power, in the otherness of it, in the feelings of terror and morbid fascination that his appearance, his very existence, inspired. For a creature supposedly so driven by hatred, she mused, Darth Sion seemed strongly tied to this twisted sort of joy.

She realized then that she had been approaching the central square while these thoughts chased each other though her mind. She stood now only one or two short paces from its edge; close enough to hear him snarl and hiss at odd moments. Maybe he had not executed a movement to his satisfaction; perhaps the pain associated with forcing his body to perform the motion tore these sounds from him. But she knew the answer to her speculations: his kata, executed perfectly, caused his physical pain. That very thing which he needed to hold himself in life; a failed movement combined anger at his failure with the pain and fed the same well-spring. Perfection or failure, neither mattered so long as they generated the requisite emotions.

She felt herself reaching out through the Force, wanting to feel the purity and honesty of those sensations, so different from what she usually allowed herself. She had only brushed against his presence, just tasted his aura; all pain, rage and passion, when he spun. Though he must have sensed her before this moment, indeed she suspected he had been aware of her since before she had entered this room, his gaze was surprised and then angry. Every part of her that was identifiably Jedi shrieked at her that she had no way to defend herself, that she must flee now or be the latest victim of Sion's personal genocide. The rest of her refused to move: the majority won out in the end. When his hands closed just above her elbows she felt a strange, fearsome sort of joy for a fleeting instant.

He was taller than her by a fair margin and also much stronger. His long association with the Dark Side lent him that power and she had only just begun to reconnect with the much subtler Light. His hands bruised her arms and strained her shoulders as he pulled them down with unnatural strength. His aura pinned her to the stones, nearly smothering her with those fierce emotions that moments before had been so alluring: and yet, somehow, they still were. Even now as she wondered if he would kill her quickly or take his time she basked in the intensity of his connection to the Force.

He leant closer to her face, bending from the waist but maintaining his grip on her arms. Bending her with him, backwards as he came forward. His shattered face was close enough to hers that she could feel his breath; too hot to come from anything human. She thought that it should smell of death, of decay but it did not. There was an unmistakable scent of hot metal and ozone, blood and lasers, but she did not find it unpleasant. This close to him she continued to be battered by his feelings but she noticed that they were shifting. She could discern no murderous intent beyond his usual rage. If anything the savage joy from earlier seemed to be increasing. It was still savage but now also something more, both darker and lighter than it had been.

He was very close. She could feel the air between them pressing down on her forehead, nose and mouth; heating from contact with his skin. Something in her spine popped painfully and her shoulder joints ground against the extreme edges of her clavicle. Sion could see the pain in her eyes; he smiled, pulled a fraction harder and pressed his torso into hers to bend her farther back. Even as the pain raced through her nerve endings something else sparked in her brain, tiny shivers of pleasure shimmered along side the pain; increasing one and another. He saw this too. His smile widened; cracked. His lips were on hers now; not a kiss, just lying against hers. He breathed in as she exhaled, as though he could draw those conflicting sensations from her that way.

Then she felt it. She felt his pleasure at the contact, overcoming his rage and pain and hate as hers overcame her will to calm and peace and detachment. There was no more right or wrong action. Light and Dark disappeared, swept from her consciousness by a rising tide of something else.

He was no longer smiling.

If she moved, if he did, they would both fall. A fall far longer and darker than either of them had known. There would be anguish and joy to such degrees in that fall that it would tear them apart, one sensation would become indistinguishable from the other. She moved her mouth, shifting her jaw slightly so that the contact between them would be made real, would begin their swan dive into that strange darkness.

She woke overly warm with his scent still in her mind; hot metal and lasers and something like the smell of the air just before a violent storm, when the light turns sulfuric and the wind dies. His eyes, the dark and the clouded, stared out of the shadowed recesses of her mind filled with the same indescribable desire that screamed through her. She fell from her low bed, crawled to the 'fresher and was sick. The sweat cooled on her body, chilling her but she could not face the bed again. Somewhere nearby she felt that Kreia had directed her attention toward her. She got unsteadily to her feet, taking several moments to center herself before she went in search of the old woman.