A/N: I'm bumping the rating on this to an M since I think the next two chapters may push the limits of a T rating. As always, thanks for reading and don't be afraid to share your comments!

Skiro led him across the wide lawn to a small, circular metal building at the perimeter of the property. Inside, there was a work table, a sink, a rack filled with empty bins, and a few archeological measuring and dating instruments hung along the wall. On the far side was a bed of sorts, basically just a mere pallet raised a bit off the ground, with a tiny pillow and no blankets. Near his pallet were some rungs that were soldered to the wall, leading all the way to the roof, where there was a sliding panel built into the middle of the domed ceiling. Skiro saw the direction of his gaze and nodded.

"Some crazy bastard thought to put an astronomer's observatory on Dromund Kaas a while back. He invented a telescope that would pierce the cloud cover and do a bunch of other fancy things, but this is all that's left now."

Mordivai spun in a slow circle taking it all in.

"Tomorrow you start work," Skiro continued. "Lord Shastine has a shipment of artifact shards coming in from the slave operation on Korriban. I'll show you how to sort them into these bins."

Mordivai nodded.

"Three times a day Ai'lanynn will bring food, and every other day she will bring you fresh clothes. Leave your soiled ones by the door. There's one spare set of clothes on the shelf."

Skiro left him, and Mordivai heard the sound of the door latching into place outside. He was weak and hungry and wondered if he'd already missed the timing for the first delivery of food. The pallet, however meager and lumpy it was, could have been a heavenly cloud. He collapsed on it and was asleep within seconds.

When he woke up, there was a plate of food sitting on the work table for him and an empty cup. He hadn't been aware of anyone entering, and wondered how long he had been asleep. His limbs protested when he rose and stretched, and a wave of lightheadedness assaulted him. He crept to the worktable and found a tray with a little loaf of bread and some kind of cold vegetable stew. He filled the empty cup with water from the sink and guzzled it down. Then he filled it again for a second round. After recovering from the cramps which had him doubled over, he straightened and hobbled back to the table. It was all he could do not to tilt his head and the pour the whole stew down his throat, but he forced himself to take tiny bites, waiting for his stomach to settle after each one. Then he went back to bed and slept some more.

He was awoken this time by the sound of the door opening, and the Twi'lek he had seen the day before entered. He sat up and stumbled to his feet.

"Oh! Don't get up for me." She set another tray on the table, gave him a kind smile, and made to leave.

"Wait. What's your name?"

She turned. She was nearly as tall as he was, he realized. "I'm Ai'lanynn. Are you feeling better now?"

"Better than I was. Thank you, you know, for...everything."

"Tasen did the same for me when Skiro had me in there." She paused. "He was the slave you are replacing. He died."

"I'm sorry." Mordivai plunged ahead with the next question, already afraid of the answer. "What happened to him?"

"He wasn't killed, if that's what you're asking. He was just old."

"Oh." Mordivai realized that thought was disturbing in its own right. Had the man lived his whole life in this room, finally dying in it in the end? I won't be there that long, he promised himself.

That first night, Mordivai had a harder time falling asleep than he had earlier. After a wasted hour of staring at the ceiling, he rose and climbed the rungs next to his bed to the top of the dome. The panel had been padlocked, but it was of an old design and one that Mordivai suspected could be broken. He sent a flash of power at it and it snapped open easily. The panel proved harder to open, however. Years' worth of grime and dust had clogged the sliding rails and Mordivai's arms were shaking before he finally got it to budge. From there it came open a bit easier, although it made a screeching sound that was surely loud enough to wake the dead. Disappointed, but not willing to give up, Mordivai began to inch it open ever so slowly, pausing for long spans of time to listen. At last a crack just wide enough for him to slip through appeared and he pulled himself through it.

The top of the dome was slick and mossy, but Mordivai managed to find a comfortable spot to settle on. From here he could clearly see the demarcation of the estate's boundaries, hemmed in on all sides by metal walls with energy seals and a few turrets for good measure. There was no way out of this place, although he hadn't really expected it to be that easy anyway.

They may not have believed him when he revealed his true name back when he was first enslaved, but what about now? Had his parents given him up for dead? Their names meant something, and any Sith who didn't want to anger the Emperor's Wrath would surely not take any chances that he might be lying. What was stopping him from declaring himself to Lord Shastine? He tried to imagine coming face to face with his mother and father after seven years. Instead of happiness or relief though, he found the thought made him uncomfortable. He was a Jedi now. Would his father disown him? His mother kill him outright? Or would they simply wash their hands of him in shame? No, he realized, as a terrible horror crept over him, they would send him to the Sith Academy on Korriban. They would try to make him a Sith.

As a child, he had always known that he would go to Korriban and become Sith. Korriban was held up as a reward to be worked for, a chance to prove himself, a place that would sharpen him like a blade until he emerged a deadly weapon. He had had no doubt that he would survive Korriban. He had had the best teachers, training since he was small, and his bloodline was steeped in dark side power. But then everything had changed.

At that moment, he felt very alone. I am a pariah in my family. What would he become if he were sent to Korriban? He would either die a Jedi, clinging fiercely to his ideals, or he would fall to depravity and become a Sith. No, he decided, he could never be Sith. Not after the things he had seen. He would have to find another means of escape from here, and he would have to do it on his own, without the benefit of his name. He would rather be a slave, than be sent to Korriban.

When he looked back later on that first night in the workshop, he had not been able to imagine a real timeline for action. But as the weeks wore by, eventually turning into months, his dreams of freedom slipped farther away. He spent his days locked in the windowless workshop, where opportunities for an escape were few. He sorted through crate after crate of broken Sith artifacts pulled from the red sands of Korriban. He cleaned and examined each piece, dated it with one of the scanners, and then sorted it by size, type and age. Many times the fragments were nothing more interesting than pottery or chips of bone, just the remnants of an ancient people's midden heap.

Occasionally he found some fragments with writing on them. These he was required to set aside, or try and make sense of if they were large enough to read. He greatly looked forward to these moments, when he would be able to put his language skills to use. But Skiro only gave criticism, not praise, and frequently admonished Mordivai for thinking too highly of himself, even when he was correct in his assessments, which he most often was. The more interesting or useful the artifacts were that he discovered, the more likely Mordivai was to receive some form of retribution later from Skiro. His food the next day would be intercepted and would never arrive, or once, Skiro knocked over an entire shelf of sorted bins, undoing days of work and forcing him to start over. Punishment seemed to be based on Skiro's temperamental moods, or so Mordivai thought, since he could find no rhyme or reason for it. But eventually he made the connection.

Lord Shastine was a phantom master, rarely showing her face in the workshop. The only time she indicated an interest in him was when she came to inspect a find. And the greater the praise she showered on Mordivai, the harsher the punishment would be the next day from Skiro. Finally it all made sense.

Perhaps Skiro thought that Mordivai, a mere slave, wasn't deserving of the lord's attention, or more likely, he was simply angry that a slave could have greater skill than he. Skiro could not read any of the ancient languages, not even the older forms of Galactic Standard. Nor did he have the eye for detail that Mordivai possessed. Mordivai suspected that he hated being outshone by a "lesser" being.

Mordivai also made friends with Ai'lanynn, or tried to, given that he only saw her for mere minutes a day. She was the only friendly face in his life, the only one who called him by name or who smiled at him. Mordivai found that one of the more difficult parts of his new slave life, besides the endless, mind-numbing boredom, was loneliness. Ai'lanynn appeared to be a few years older than he, with a plain face but an infectious smile. She even took the trouble to ask him what foods he liked, and then attempted to bring him his requests, if possible. He looked forward to her visits each day.

As the months wore by, Mordivai grew bolder with his time. He was left alone, so he began to take two hours out of each day to practice his combat forms. It was the only remnant of his Jedi life that he possessed, and he didn't want to lose it. Once only did he make the mistake of taking practice time too close to mid-day, and he heard the door unlocking with barely enough time to toss aside the broom handle he'd been using to represent a lightsaber. He couldn't have looked guiltier of being up to something when Ai'lanynn entered. He froze in the center of the room, breathing hard, his hair coming loose from its tie.

Ai'lanynn stopped when she saw him, and a mischievous smile cross her face. ""What have you been up to now Mordivai?"

"I...uh, I do exercises sometimes." He shrugged his shoulders. "You know, stuck in here all day. You won't tell Skiro will you?"

"Oh, gosh of course not."

After that he was more careful and relegated his practice sessions to one hour in the morning and one in the evening, both after Ai'lanynn had brought him his meals. It wasn't the same without a dueling partner, but it was better than nothing. I won't forget who I am. I am a Jedi. He found he had to tell himself those words more and more often in order to get his mind to keep believing them.

00o00

One day, Mordivai found something truly unusual. The crates that arrived from Korriban always contained fragments, but this time, Mordivai found a larger piece buried amongst the usual rubble. Mordivai knew as soon as he picked it up that it was special.

It was a tablet fragment, covered on both sides by ancient Sith inscriptions, and it whispered to him of dark power. For a long moment, Mordivai just held it in his hands, feeling the power calling out to be grasped, to be used, to be owned. How much more powerful would this piece have been when it was once intact? He set it aside, knowing that he had to treat this new development with care.

The next day, when Skiro arrived to bring new crates, Mordivai made sure the tablet was left sitting out on the end of the table where Skiro would be sure to see it. Skiro noticed it immediately and picked it up, his eyes widening.

"What is this?"

"Too large a fragment to be in one of my crates," Mordivai said casually, not even bothering to look up. "It must have been overlooked."

"Indeed." Skiro set it aside on one of the shelves. "I will take care of this."

Mordivai knew that Skiro would take credit for this find, but at least he would avoid punishment. He was learning.

00o00

Mordivai began making a habit out of sitting out on top of the workshop roof on nights when it wasn't raining. He could look out over the compound, past the treetops, and over to the dark jungle beyond. It made him feel a vaguely like a ruler surveying his domain, distant from his problems. He stared at Lord Shastine's great house. In another life he might have visited a place like this as a guest himself, and been welcomed as a lord. The child that he used to be would have felt cheated by that thought, but now Mordivai thought of that almost-life as an abyss that he had just barely escaped falling into. He could have been happy as a Jedi, he decided, although the guilt that he felt for abandoning his family's Sith legacy still haunted him.

One of Dromund Kaas's heavy rainstorms was only minutes away, the approaching thunder growling from behind the clouds, growing ever louder. The air was as thick as sludge, so misty that it left a sheen of moisture over Mordivai's skin. It was time to get back inside.

From far below, across the lawn, Mordivai saw the door to Shastine's house fly open, and Ai'lanynn tumbled out, tripping backwards, her hands held out defensively in front of her. Skiro bolted through the door next, advancing on her, his arm pulled back over his shoulder in preparation for a blow. He swung and she threw up a hand to shield her face, but her foot skidded off the top step of the landing and she fell backwards and rolled down the stairs. Mordivai leapt to his feet, outrage curling his hands into fists. Skiro's voice carried across the lawn, harsh and angry.

"Couldn't leave it well enough alone, could you? You had to go and make it worse!"

Ai'lanynn had fallen back against the dirt, her head slamming back hard enough that Mordivai heard the thump from his perch on the roof. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" she sobbed. "It was an accident!"

Skiro drew back his foot and kicked her in the ribs. She tucked her legs up and curled inward on herself, her cries reverberating off the walls of the manor in echoes. Skiro stepped back, his chest visibly heaving and stomped back up the stairs.

"Sleep in the mud tonight! Where you belong." He went inside and slammed the door.

Ai'lanynn slowly gathered herself up and limped over to the porch. She got down on her hands and knees and crawled, with obvious difficulty, underneath a small gap there.

Mordivai jumped off the workshop roof, using Force power to cushion his landing. He sprinted across the lawn, slowing to a trot as he neared the house. It was quiet now, and if he hadn't seen it himself, he never would have known that an altercation had taken place here only moments earlier. He squatted next to the gap where he had seen Ai'lanynn scurry inside.

She was huddled under the porch, her knees drawn up to her chest and her eyes blinking back at him.

"Mordivai! How did you get out here?"

He shrugged. "Skiro must have forgotten to lock the door tonight. Are you ok?"

"I'll bruise, but no biggie. Skiro's handed out worse."

Mordivai wondered how often Skiro had beaten her. The thought kindled his anger into a bigger flame. "He needs to get a beating of his own."

"You better get back inside before those clouds open up."

"You could come back to the workshop, instead of sleeping out here."

"Well…" Hope brightened in her eyes but then she sobered. "Just as long as I'm back under the porch by dawn." She began crawling towards him. He held out his hand as she emerged and drew her to her feet. She paused, bending over to rub her legs and her back, and then nodded. "Ok, let's go."

They moved quickly across the open lawn, and Mordivai was only able to breathe easy again once he was at the door to the workshop. It was locked from the outside of course, but Mordivai quickly pulled back the bolt, hoping that Ai'lanynn hadn't noticed his deception. He didn't want to give away his secret perch and possible escape route. Not yet anyway.

At that moment, the sky broke into a torrential downpour, so Mordivai quickly ushered Ai'lanynn inside and yanked the door closed. The rain against the metal roof was so loud that it was hard to even talk, so he gestured into the center of the room and bowed to her with a smile. She grinned, lowered herself onto his sleeping pallet and then patted the spot beside her.

Mordivai settled next to her, folding his legs under him. He had only one pallet and the polite thing would be to offer it to her, which would then relegate him to the cold stone floor. So be it, he decided. It was the right thing to do.

He leaned close so she could hear him over the rain. "What happened out there?"

"Yeah, you heard all that, huh? Ugh. I ruined one of Lord Shastine's expensive dresses in the laundry. Would you believe the whole thing turned pink in the wash? It was a disaster. I tried to wash out the tint, but I damaged the fabric. I should have known better, but I was desperate, you know?"

"Skiro is a jerk."

She was quiet a moment. "You should pity him if anything."

"What? How so?"

"Lord Shastine may own us on paper, but Skiro she owns body and soul."

Mordivai was about to ask what that meant, when Ai'lanynn leaned over and bumped his shoulder with hers. "You're a good person, Mordivai. Thanks for coming for me out there."

Mordivai felt himself blushing. "No problem." She was smiling at him, studying his face with a greater notice than she had ever shown him before.

"Is Shastine your first master?"

Mordivai nodded. The question grated on him. A slave. With a master. Was this the rest of his life?

"She's my third. First, I was a hutt's dancer."

"Really?" Mordivai immediately regretted showing such surprise in his voice.

She smiled and gestured to her legs. "I wasn't always like this, you know."

"What happened?"

"There was a shootout at Choggaro's place and I got hit by some stray blaster fire. Got me in the spine. I was paralyzed." She swung her head, her lekku tossing behind her, and gave Mordivai a direct look. "It was the scariest thing in my life. I was helpless. Useless to Choggaro since I sure couldn't dance or entertain clients. He was about to sell me to a breeder. That's when Dizon bought me. He was one of my regulars. He was good to me...fixed me up with an implant in my back so I could walk again. Let me be his housekeeper, with some benefits of course." She laughed, not sounding put out by that at all. "But then he died."

"That's awful."

"Yeah, he got caught in a bust. All those implants that he dealt in were illegal, you know. Not that I ever asked."

"And then you came here?"

"Yup. Skeezy Skiro bought me." She laughed. Mordivai marveled that she could retain her sense of humor through a life of slavery.

She turned and ran a finger across his forehead, drawing back a strand of his hair. "You have to take your joy where you can, Mordivai."

Then she leaned in and kissed him.

This took him completely off guard and he froze. She sat back again and broke into a smile. "Stars, you are cute when you blush."

Mordivai groaned, covering his face. "Stop."

She touched his cheek, gently turning him to face her, and kissed him again. This time he opened his mouth to her, shyly at first, sharing in the kiss. She stroked his tongue with hers, her mouth hot and wet, and oh stars it was already more than he could handle. It had been years since he had last kissed anyone and he was amazed he even remembered how. Take your joy where you can, he thought. Yes. I can be on board with that. A pulse of pleasure flooded through his groin, making even the faintest brush of fabric against his skin there feel like a lick of flame.

She withdrew and he leaned forward, sliding his arm around her to bring her close again, his mouth still seeking hers. She chuckled in her throat and touched a hand to his chest.

"Easy tiger."

His eyes flew open, and he felt his face filling with heat again. "Sorry."

"Don't be," she said. Her hands grabbed the base of her shirt and she peeled it off in one smooth motion and oh, by the Force she was wearing nothing underneath. Mordivai swallowed hard, feeling like he needed to catch his breath. Her hand pressed against his chest again, slowly pushing him back onto the pallet while the rest of her crawled forward, her legs straddling either side of his body. He laid back, a willing slave now to whatever she wanted of him.

At some point he went from admiring her naked form to squeezing his eyes shut in pleasure while she nuzzled his neck and nibbled his ear, her hands splayed across his abdomen, her fingers trailing lower. He let out a tight moan of frustration when she got up, depriving him of the heat of her body, but then he realized that she was divesting herself of the remainder of her clothes. Mordivai's body had never felt more full or ready, but he balked just the same, a feeling of near panic stealing over him as he realized what was about to happen. He had never done this. What if he made a fool of himself?

Ai'lanynn settled herself on top of him again, and her fingers slid under the waistband of his pants, gently tugging them off his hips. He must have made some kind of noise of desperation, because suddenly she stopped and her eyes rose to meet his.

"Mordivai." Somehow she made his name sound like a caress. "Is this your first time?"

Mordivai felt his breath release in a rush, and he let his head fall back against pallet. He stared at the ceiling, too embarrassed to meet her gaze.

"Is it that obvious?"

She laughed, but it was gentle. "I can recognize these things. Just relax and enjoy it, ok? Your body knows what to do."

She finished peeling his pants off and slid on top of him again, her mouth finding his, while one of her hands quested lower. She lifted her hips and guided him into position and then, oh yes, she was lowering herself onto him, her body enveloping him, until he was buried inside her, consumed by her, no devoured, as helpless as a whimpering kitten.

She began to move, her body writhing in a sinuous rhythm, and soon Mordivai felt compelled to match it with a rhythm of his own, yes, like that, just stronger now, yes, a little faster, and next he knew his eyes were rolling back into his head and he thought he would go mad. No peace, only passion, a voice whispered in his head. The natural way of things, yes.