[Stepping back from the wolf girl for a moment to offer a little bit of soft angst to @kaosstar, borrowing her Inquisitor Chandra to give my Ulfran some more painful and awkward times during his undercover Imperial days. Nobody does broody melancholy quite like him.]
“Where is it you’d rather be?”
The question caught Ulfran off guard, and when he lifted his pale eyes to meet Chandra’s bright marigold gaze, he found an expression that made him profoundly uncomfortable with its gentleness.
Lying came as easily to him as breathing; his life had been nothing but deception for the last decade, and anyone that he had difficulty lying to was a liability.
What a foolish indulgence, to have accepted her invitation to share a drink, as though it might distract him from news he’d have rather not heard. He should have shut her down years ago, cut off their gentle conversations and… and whatever undefined feelings fluttered around them. She made no sense to him, not like the Librarian who at least had some common interests and a sort of… casual roughness that was easy to shrug off the next day.
Chandra had potential that was so miserably squandered under the Empire’s thumb, and it was everything that he should be conscientiously avoiding if he were to keep his cover intact.
This could only ever, ever end with him hurting her, all the worse the longer he allowed it to string along.
Just like with Lyrisal, and look where she was now.
“No place that exists,” he murmured, the soft cadence of his voice so proper, so reserved.
“Not Tython…?” she pressed, ever so gently.
His origin was no secret amongst the Sith ranks in any way acquainted with him, but still Ulfran was a little stung by her acuity. He paused, and the creases in his brow grew a little deeper. He never enjoyed lying to her, but this time, at least, he could speak plainly enough. “Not as it is now. Perhaps… I find myself missing what I’d hoped it would be, once upon a time. But the home I’d imagined in my youth is not what Tython turned out to be, and Coruscant was a magnitude worse. That ‘home’ does not exist, even if I catch myself homesick for it at times.”
She tutted sympathetically, and how such dark tainted eyes could hold something so genuine baffled him. He should leave. This was a terrible idea. A terrible-
All it took was the brush of her fingers at his elbow to prompt him to linger. “So there isn’t any place you could go, to feel comforted?”
He closed his eyes and drew a long, slow breath, centering himself. Oh, Chandra. This is exactly the reason I’d let myself visit you. Being here is a comfort of the most painful sort.
