Hoth: Blood and Ice

Lead long by one of the Republic soldiers was the Countess Lanar. Lead through the halls toward the room where she might find Tethys Carrack, the woman whom she would be standing beside in court with just hours later. Though this need of meeting had nothing to do with that very meeting of consequence. No, this was for a more purely personal matter to which she could only trust a stranger to both her and her situation. A stranger she could trust, and those were in short supply these days.

With the soldier making the appropriate knock to alert Tethys, Riss takes her place waiting at the door. Though not before thanking the soldier warmly, and with the charm that seems to mark her political movements in her time.

"Come in." Tethys's voice is cool and calm as ever as the door opens.

Tethys's room in the barracks is as neat as she can make it, and of course rather bare since few of anyone's personal possessions came on this mission and even fewer survived the space evacuation. A shallow dish of water sits directly on the heating unit; even though the very slight effects of this makeshift humidifier cause a little condensation to gather on the chilly walls and floor, it still makes the room more comfortable for her preferences than going without.

Over the past few weeks she's managed to scrounge a camp chair, and a makeshift desk/table/whatever made out of supply crates, so she doesn't have to do everything sitting on her bed. A datapad and a cooling mug of tea are on the table at the moment.

With the bidden entry, Riss does so in a very Riss like manner by entering immediately into the center of the room just a couple steps too far to ever consider her being timid. With a quick charm-ridden smile she offers the other woman a bow given the somewhat more official nature of their respective positions, "Hope you liked that," she says on a slight chuckle. "Because outside of more formal affairs I will not be doing it again," she says, extending her hand, "Countess Riss Lanar. Jedi Master Carrack it is good to have a chance to meet you before later today," and there was that charm-ridden smile once more.

Tethys, who had risen to let her guest in, almost has to step back as Riss takes the space with oversized confidence. It doesn't put her off-balance, though; her brows do arch up a bit at the dramatic bow, but she offers her own hand composedly to shake Riss's afterward. "Countess Lanar, good to meet you properly as well. Kat's friend, right?"

She's definitely seen the two of them together, but perhaps she hadn't fully put together the pink-haired scoundrel she'd glimpsed across the room here and there squiring Kat to official functions on Alderaan five years ago, with the very official-sounding Countess Lanar on the expedition rosters.

"Don't worry, there's no need to be formal. Whatever you prefer is fine with me," she adds, lips quirking. "But if you know Jedi, I'm sure you know that."

"Kat isn't the first of the Jedi I've known but she's certainly my favorite," she adds with a wink. Walking into the room a bit she's wields that confidence enough to claim a seat for herself, but is courteous enough to at least make sure that she wasn't sitting anywhere that Tethys was currently making use of the space for. A task that was rather easy considering Riss could make a seat out of almost any surface. Sitting, crossing legs, she offers a renewed smile, "I'm also not one for too much formality, but sometimes I do like to give a show. Prove to folk that I can be all nice and proper when the situation calls for it."

"Mind if I bend your ear for a bit? I have.. personal matters that I think a Jedi might be the best kind of person to give some advice with and-" she brings her hand up to the back of her neck, rubbing along it. "Well, you're the best person for this job, and I do pride myself on knowing who's best where," she returns that confidence and settles her hands down at either side of herself.

Tethys had sat on the bunk, subtly yielding the desk chair to Riss by default. Now she half-shrugs, lifting one hand and opening it palm-up. "Of course. Action holos and romantic novels aside, counseling is much of what we do in the Order. Only the best for a Countess of Alderaan," she adds, unable to resist letting some of her amusement through.

"Is something troubling you, then?"

"If you want to turn this into an action holo or romantic novel Master Carrack, you only have to ask," she adds chuckling, added shake of her head to show that she isn't really serious on that measure. Though she lingers long enough to suggest: 'Unless...' but she doesn't commit to that near at all as she jumps right into the real trouble.

"Have you ever lost someone close to you, someone that died at the hands of another?" she asks in a very practiced and confidently straight manner.

"That won't be necessary, no." Tethys's equanimity has remained unbroken in the face of a lot more than a loaded unless... at various times over the years, and the corner of her lips only twitches upward now.

"Hm. Yes. I have." She answers Riss's question simply and plainly. "I was trained in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant for about seven years. Many of the teachers who brought me up there, other Jedi who were once younglings growing up with me... well."

She tilts her head a little to one side, examining Riss's face.

"And you?"

Riss stirs against her seat, but only slightly. Rearranging the resting point of her hands she links them together over her lap, leaning back slightly, "Have you ever had the chance to be near, or see the person who killed them?"

"Actually," she leans forward. Raising one of her hands she extends her index to a point in order to convey the need to make one, "Do Jedi feel hate or is that just bred out of you- well, guess trained out of you? Can you actually feel it?" her tone shifts lighter, more amused with herself.

"We're not droids," Tethys says mildly. "We're organic beings, we don't think in a world of abstract forms and hypothetical math. Except when actually studying hypothetical math, I suppose." Her lips quirk again. "At which we don't have any particular advantages over any other organics." Although she'd done pretty well in that course herself.

She meets Riss's pointed gesture with a palm opened on her lap. "Hate... hate is how the mind understands anger magnified by fear, and fear magnifying anger. Of course I feel fear and anger, at times. I've practiced for a long time, and I still practice, so that I can recognize those emotions when I have them, not let them sneak up on me. I have a responsibility not to let fear and anger control me, or poison my path in the Force. I can feel them, and I do, but I won't let them act for me." She lifts her chin a little. This seems to be a point of--certainly not arrogance, but determination and a little pride. Then she half-shrugs again. "But I haven't answered your real question, which I think is actually--have I ever hated someone who committed a terrible act." She cocks her head. "Is that right?"

Tethys' words hold sway already, in the way that Riss shys her eyes away from the woman opposite her. Leaning forward to close up a little, hands still joined but her forearms now resting forward on her knees. Giving herself a little bounce with a restless foot, "Yea," she says, her gaze dropping to the floor. "Someone who did something so terrible the thought of them, the connection to them, the idea of them reminds you of what they did." Parting one of her hands away she brings it in front of her face to a very specific distance. "Like you're right back there living the moment over again."

"You can still feel the fear you felt in that moment, and it makes you angry that person still has such power over you. When you think of what was destroyed you feel angry, and that anger makes you remember the fear." Tethys leans in toward Riss a little. "Is that right?"

She closes her eyes for a moment, opens them. "I wasn't there on Coruscant when the Temple was destroyed. I was worlds away on Dantooine. So. Not quite the same as I think you mean. There was another time, though..."

She pauses, and then refocuses herself. "Mn. Well, I'll show you mine if you show me yours, Riss. Who's first?"

In that pause Riss does look up at the other woman, that bit of searching that people do when they're trying to figure someone out before they speak. When the question was posed however there was only one recourse as Riss lowers her gaze again, "You- please," she asks, a soft hiss of awkward breath sucking in through her teeth. Shifting her expression with some intent into a slight smile she adds, "Guess it feels more fair, eh? Mine being rather fresh and all. Just gotta give it a little- well, gotta let it settle ya know? This isn't- this ain't easy."

"It won't be quite the same, I think," Tethys..warns? She shifts her balance again, bracing one hand behind her on the thin cot and tilting her head back a bit, almost as if there was a sky full of clouds or stars to watch above her instead of the dully translucent white ceiling. "Different stories. We're different people. But maybe it will still be... useful."

She sighs, long and soft.

"Bankor, nine... no, damn, it's a little more than ten years ago now." She shakes her head just slightly. The date is unusually fresh in her mind because, when Riss knocked, she'd been in the middle of compiling the chronology of those years as she planned to present it at Layne's hearing later today. As it happens, that had also been the year, and the place, in which Tethys and Layne had first met.

"If you've heard of the place at all, it might be as Senator Saresh's home world. It's a minor Republic world on the Outer Rim," Tethys clarifies briefly, not sure whether Riss seems like the sort of person to remember the names of the myriad of outer member systems in the Republic. "Back then, a coalition of Mandalorian clans invaded the system and took control of the one habitable planet. Well. 'Control' is too nice a word," she revises, bitterness creeping in to her tone. "It was conquest and pillage. The local defense force didn't have a chance. The government went into exile offworld, and the planetside resistance was facing conditions that..." Her other hand, the one she's not leaning back on, tightens into a fist where it rests on her thigh. "The Mandalorian clans don't recognize Republic law, by and large. Or any other interstellar protocols besides their own. That includes the galactic accords on war crimes."

The muscles in her clenched hand relax, one by one, perhaps by conscious volition. "I'd never even been to Bankor yet, at that point. I didn't set foot on the planet until the war had been going on for half a year."

"No, that wasn't quite the same no," she chuckles, with the expected level of distraction evident in her tone. Riss' gaze lingered up to the other woman while she spun the tale but as it reaches the conclusion her eyes shift forward. Staring out ahead into the empty space in front of herself with no real focus on the material world around.

"How did you.. well, I guess you're a Jedi huh? How did you stop yourself from crossing the line when you had the chance, once you were actually there?"

"Mm. I didn't know I was going to come up so close until I... did." Tethys focuses on Riss while the other woman speaks, but as she circles back to finish her own tale her gaze becomes more distant and abstract again, out toward the ceiling, to the corners of the small room. "One of the Mandalorian clans in that confederation was Varad--not the largest or the strongest, but the worst of them. They would... they set bombs in residential areas, even strapped them on to civilians. Their warlord contacted us on comms to laugh at us when we realized what she'd done. We couldn't save everyone. She meant for us to try, and fail." Tethys's voice is tight as she remembers, and her hand clenches again, fingertips digging into her palm.

"She wanted to watch us feel afraid and helpless, and if that made us angry, it only made her feel more powerful--knowing she could always do it again, and again. Once when the Republic force mounted an attack on one of her fortifications, she released a few dozen prisoners she'd taken into a field of sniper fire and dared us to come out and pull as many of them clear as we could before she--mph." She shrugs one shoulder, stiffly. "It was a great joke to Varad. Her snipers were very good; I still have the scar." There's... obviously a lot packed into that sentence.

Tethys sighs and shifts, rubbing the back of her neck. "I was angry, and I was afraid of what would happen every time we faced Varad. Fear and anger. I think... if I held back, it was because my Masters taught me well enough to see those emotions clearly. And I was not going to let her win. I didn't want her to have a say in who I was. Who I would become." Her lips press together in a sardonic suggestion of a smile. "And when we did defeat her, and took her into custody, I saw how small she really was. Not because she'd lost, but because she always had been lost. She never deserved to break me--or anyone."

"I don't know if I'm any different than the person it would show I am," she chuckles without any mirth, thumbs curling over one another as she sits there in the wake of Tethys' tale. Not managing to raise her eyes enough to meet the other woman. Yet they searched the floor like it might have answers written in the dust somewhere. Tapping her foot twice brings her back from wherever it was she went in that moment.

"Five years ago," she starts, because despite all the questions circling her mind she couldn't bring a single one of them to her lips. But this story was one that replayed in her mind over and over again, and was easier to tell when she disconnected herself from it, and this moment, "I grew close with a man, very close. Met his darling kids even," she smiles at that memory, "but.." she shakes her head. "I've always kinda been trou-" she shakes her head again. "He was involved with dangerous people. Kind of people who kill you when you stop being useful to them and- well, that's what they did," she breathes out long and slow. Closing her eyes Riss sits with that memory a little, and even though she doesn't notice tears well in her eyes.

"I was there when it happened, and he died right there," she says, reaching out with her hand right to that distance, the place where Bryson's face was when he died. Bringing it back, she touches her fingers gently to the exact spot where Bryson had touched her cheek with a gently cupping of her fingers.

"For so many years I moved on cause I didn't know who was really responsible, they were just some name, a moniker. Now.. now I know exactly who they are," she says with a little steel, but it doesn't sound overly impressive with how shaky her voice has become. How she almost tumbles over every other syllable. "But she's blood. Blood of someone I care deeply about," her spirit leaves her, and there's just hurt in her voice. Voice of a woman with a dagger being pressed slowly into her chest. "If it were anyone else it'd be so easy to just be done with it, get my revenge and be so done with it, but.. I don't want to do that to him. So.. I stay away. As far away as I can and it hurts, it hurts him so bad to push him away like that but I can't stand the sight of him knowing..."

Tethys listens carefully, intently. Giving Riss the space to speak also allows her to finish rebalancing her own thoughts, after unpacking and airing out those old and rather ugly memories. Her eyes are a little hooded, her focus abstract rather than trying to meet Riss's wandering gaze and pin it in place.

"Do you think you're responsible for what happened to him?" she asks gently, after turning the story over in her mind and looking at it from a few different angles. "Who would your revenge be for?"

Standing up Riss walks toward the door, and then back toward the seat pacing a little, "For his kids. Those kids of his area really darling you know? They already lost a mother, and now because their father wanted to do a good thing for the people of Alderaan- because he believed what he was doing would help save Alderaan- he's gone and they're without parents. Their family is taking care of them, I help, but.. they deserved to have a father to grow up with. They don't have that anymore. Because of people who meddled in their fathers life," she says with some conviction, though her voice is a bit weak and even a little shakey.

Tethys tracks Riss with her gaze as Riss paces.

"Revenge won't bring their parents back. It's not much of a gift for children," she says, still gently. "If anything... it sounds as if getting involved with violent actions and violent people was the choice that took their father from them, in the end."

She sighs and draws her knees up, to sit cross-legged on the bunk. "One of the first things I learned--started to learn--as a little girl in the Order was the trick of seeing the space between emotion and action. It is easy to let the things you feel lead into action, and action into feeling again. Perhaps that feels like being in control, but in truth, you're like a leaf in the wind, blowing here and there until it gets caught in some tight place with no moves left." She takes a deep breath, exhales deliberately. "The way out of the trap is to find the peaceful center between all the winds, the eye of the storm, and make your path from there. Your feelings are blowing you in at least two different directions, and you can't go both ways, so you feel torn apart. But beyond the next leap, if you stand in the center and look ahead, where do you want to be?"

There wasn't a response for a while, Riss looks to Tethys at the culmination of her words but after that there was nothing. No pacing either. Simply there was the presence of thought tracing over the blankness of Riss' expression as she showed perhaps she wasn't just a pretty face.

"I like it when decisions are easy," she says, almost too casually for the moment. "Does it benefit me? Easy, that's the one. Does it make me feel good? Yea? Great. Does it screw over the person who wronged me? Your damn sure I think that's the right call- but all this? No matter what I do, Omandri gets hurt. Kill his sister? The woman he's got.." she seals her lips a moment. "Me doing that would hurt him too much. But if I don't.. I can't bring myself to look at him quite the same anyway," she says, taking in a heavy breath and trying to slow herself down a little with the exhale as her words get a little more antsy in tone. "I.. can't let him close," she says, and her feet pick up a little as she starts pacing again but much more rapidly this time.

Omandri. Duke Rist? That's an unexpected plot twist, and Tethys's brows twitch up a bit. It's not entirely surprising, since Tethys had been on Alderaan during Ulgo's attempted coup and is quite aware that in the years before that, House Rist had been engaged in some shady business above and beyond its traditional trade in assassination. But--wait. "His sister? Giandra Rist, the former Duchess? Or... the other sister?" The one who was supposed to be dead, until she wasn't. "Either is a dangerous enemy."

Tethys taps her chin with a long finger, thinking. "Does Duke Rist know any of this? It's his sister. His feelings on the matter may be at least as tangled as yours. You're trying to guess what other people need--your dead friend's children, Omandri. That is well intended. Except that, trapped inside the storm of emotions, sometimes the ideas we form about what other people need are actually shadows of our own wants and fears."

There's a drawn out period of time where Riss has to contend with the realization she let the secret, at least as far as she intended on keeping it, slip. Masking that slip as best she can she simply nods at the mention of 'the sister who is supposed to be dead' and keeps up with her pacing. Fighting the need to run away from the situation, to just get herself out of the doorway and move.

Instead, she paces, "Omandri won't kill his sister. Regardless of it being family he's.. he's just too good like that. Fair trial.. all that.." she says somewhat sheepishly with the acknowledgement of talking to *a Jedi.*

"That is what the law demands, yes. Whether for..." what was the name again? Viera? Vidra? "Vidara Rist, or for Layne Hoshin."

Tethys sighs. Funnily enough, Layne had once been falsely accused of murdering Vidara Rist. If only Vidara had stayed dead... or if only Layne's recent act of violence had been as fictitious as Vidara's death. Either option would be an improvement on the present situation, really.

"It wouldn't be good enough for you, though? If she's tried and fairly convicted? From all I understand of the situation, she's responsible for quite a number of criminal acts--many of them still well within the Republic statute of limitations." Her voice is light and measured.

Riss was finding herself just as measured. Meeting Tethys' eyes once before looking away as she finds almost anything in the room to fiddle with in her hands, "I want more, yea- but.. I could satisfy myself with her being tried, and going to prison. My worry.." she breathes in deep, and the continues turning over a datapad or a book she found and continued to investigate.

"My worry is that she is a woman who eluded Republic intelligence and Alderaanian efforts. A woman with so many vast connections she was nearly able to orchestrate a coup that would have wounded Alderaan. A woman with the power that she has.. I don't trust that anything we might try to pin her with will stick. She's.. she is exactly the kind of woman who would have or find a way out."