Office hours [all day]

[sith_happened]

After a quick trip to the Isle of Ikea to replace all of the broken glassware, Anakin's office was back to its normal state of cleanliness.

He turned on some soothing music from Ithor and waited to see how many students came in to see what he'd told their guardians.

The door was open.

Comments

[glacial_witch]

After the heart debacle on Wednesday, Genesis had told her to go talk to someone. And since 2 out of 2 fangirls agreed that Professor Skywalker was the go-to guy for emotional crises, well, here she was.

She might have been praying to the Darkness that Anakin was going to be as understanding as Ben. Somehow, she was pretty sure that the 'ripped out a maenad's heart at an orgy' wasn't going to go over well.

"Ki--Excuse me?" she called, poking her head into Anakin's office door.

[sith_happened]

Anakin glanced up. "Hello, Karla. Come in."

[glacial_witch]

"Hi Professor," Karla said with a smile. She slipped inside his office, closing the door most of the way closed behind her. "Congratulations on your win, by the way," she said, taking a seat. "I'm getting a trip to Chilly Boulder out of it."

Karla had bet on Anakin mostly so that, if asked, she could honestly say she bet on Anakin.

[sith_happened]

Anakin flashed her a quick smile. "Excellent choice, then."

[glacial_witch]

She was friends with Raven. The question was almost an inevitability.

"Glad you approve," Karla said, returning the quick smile. Mostly because then there would be something he'd approved of in their conversation.

She was tempted to try to dance around the topic for awhile, but then she'd be making small talk with a small pool of dread in her lower belly and that was almost as unappealing as just talking about it in the first place. "So, I know you're not my teacher right now, but I was told that I really should talk to someone. I kind of had a weird reaction at the theater last week."

She began wringing her hands a little, really uncomfortable with talking about this. "I play the Wicked Queen in Snow White. At one point in the play, she asks her Hunstman to fetch her Snow White's...heart. In a box."

[sith_happened]

"Earth-based fairy tales are a little disturbing," Anakin agreed, "at least in their original, non-animated form. What bothers you so much about particular request?"

[glacial_witch]

Karla winced a bit. "I don't suppose you heard anything about a trip to Louisiana in August? With a maenad?"

By carefully not mentioning either 'Raven' or 'orgy,' Karla was hoping to avoid both topics if she could

[sith_happened]

"Raven mentioned a very little bit about it," Anakin said, nodding.

[glacial_witch]

Okay, well, if he already knew Raven was involved, Karla couldn't implicate her in it. That was a plus. "Did she say what happened to the maenad?" Karla asked in a small voice. "Or, umm, what happened to me?"

[sith_happened]

"She told me that you had been sacrificed," Anakin said, looking deeply unhappy as he thought back on the conversation.

And suddenly the heart made a lot more sense.

"And how you got rid of the maenad."

[glacial_witch]

"She shrugged off every other thing I tried to throw at her," Karla said quietly, looking down at her hands. "I had to do something drastic. Something that didn't use Craft that she could just absorb or deflect or whatever the Hell it was she was doing."

[sith_happened]

"It was brutal," Anakin said quietly. "Are you quite certain it was the only option left?"

[glacial_witch]

"It felt like it," Karla said. "She was going to leave. I could feel it. She was losing and she decided to just cut her losses and go; to start this up again somewhere else, with another person up on her meat-tree, about to get stabbed for her so-called god-who-comes. Maybe Bobby or Kennedy could have stabbed her, but she'd be just as dead that way. But we couldn't just let her go. And we had no one to turn her over to; the police in Sookie's town were just two more of her mind-controlled victims."

Had there been another way? Karla couldn't be sure. She'd been terrified and furious. That bitch had stolen her Sapphire and tried to kill her. She was abusing landens people and taking away their will. Every instinct Karla had had pushed her to kill her where she stood, to make sure she could never harm anyone again.

And to take vengeance for what she'd done.

"I suppose we could have given her over to the vampires," she said, a little bitterly.

[sith_happened]

Anakin nodded. "You lashed out in fear," he said, "and good decisions are never made when we are reacting with our darker emotions."

[glacial_witch]

Karla wasn't entirely certain that letting the vampires keep ahold of the maenad was a better idea, but she could concede that it hadn't even crossed her mind at the time.

"I don't regret her death," she said slowly. "For what she did, for what she tried to do, and what she's done before, it was fitting. But I regret why I did it. I was scared and angry and hurting. I didn't kill her because it was right, even if I think that it was. I killed her because I knew I would always be afraid if she lived."

[sith_happened]

"I have made similar errors in judgment," Anakin admitted. "And when it becomes revenge, no matter how just the final outcome might have been, you were still in the wrong."

And hadn't that been a bitter pill to swallow when he was younger.