"Alright, it's okay," Nancy said, seeing the traumatized trooper curl up in the vacant bunk. It wasn't the worst she'd seen from a shell shocked trooper, not by a long shot, but she knew it must hurt all the same. She ducked outside the room and checked the barracks hallway. Neither of the sith had followed so far, so she found a nearby wall terminal and entered her command override. With a grinding of several hundred tons of metal, the blast doors ground shut, sealing the barracks off from the rest of the world.
"I just shut the blast doors," Nancy said when she came back into the bunk room, then copped a squat on the opposite bunk and took off her officer's cap so she could let her multicolored hair out. "There's a solid meter of reinforced ferrocrete between us and them, and not even their stupid glow-sticks are gonna get through that any time soon." It was a small step toward easing the trooper's mind. Nancy took off her uniform jacket and tossed it in the corner in a heap, reclining on the bunk in just her trousers and a tight black undershirt, all her obscene tattoos creeping out from beneath the edges of the fabric. "You're braver than me, you know," she said after a long moment of silence, broken only by the garbled sobbing from Vera's helmet vox. "I never walked away from it when a Sith claimed me. This was...fuck, not long enough ago for my taste. Wasn't a commander then, just some junior officer out of the academy, hadn't even seen battle outside of a sim-pod. One night I'm in my bunk going over a briefing, proofreading for my CO, can you even see me doing that? Anyway, in walks this...thing. All black and red and tattooed and horned and...well...evil as fuck. He bent me over, and he took me. Never said a word, never touched me anywhere that felt good. Just did me like...like I wasn't even a person. Next night he came back, and it was the same thing every night for months. Never had time to heal in between visits, and he got rougher and meaner as it went on, and eventually I was getting written up by my CO for 'brawling' in my off-duty hours on account of all the bruises and cuts."
Nancy took a sip from her flask, looked at it, and tossed it over to the other bunk where Vera was still curled up. "I think he was trying to breed me or something, some messed up power game. For them it's always about power and aggression. Eventually, I learned something really important about the Sith. You know what that was? I learned that they die when you stab them in their fucking forehead. I didn't even have to explain the dead Sith in my bunk, that was the crazy part. Nobody asked any questions, nobody talked about it, they just carted him off the the garbage chute where he belonged, and you know why? Because their biggest secret, trooper, is that your blaster will kill them just as dead as anyone else. They don't want you to know they can die, they want you to curl up in your bunk and be afraid of them forever. You gonna let them win?"