A Black Rose, By Any Other Name...

He'd let his weapon down, a moment of weakness, for her sake. He'd endangered the galaxy to show her that he loved her. She'd been unable to strike him, and so, in that moment, the light beckoned to her. Through layers of hate and pain, it found her. Of course she wasn't afraid to love anymore. And then Revan left, to find Malak and end this once and for all. At least, that's how it was supposed to happen.

She felt him fall through the force, felt the Star Forge reach through those ornate white robes he'd been wearing and reclaim all the power it had lost. It devoured him, as she watched with her superhuman senses, and so by the time she reached the observation deck, it was all she could do to fall to her knees.

::Betrayal:: It was a whisper, faint, in the back of Bastila's mind. She heard it even as she melted to her knees, even as she felt for life in the force and found none in a redeemed Sith Lord's corpse.

"Y-you...have won...my lord." Whispered quietly, painfully, as she knelt mere feet away from Revan's body.

If Malak had a jaw left, he would have grinned.

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"Revan is dead! All hail Darth Malak, the true Lord of the Sith!"

She screamed it, putting all her pain into a kind of righteous Sith fury as she rallied the crowd of troops gathered by the Rakatan temple. Nodding his approval, Malak looked over his troops, and then motioned for the Sith forces to move out, to begin their campaign into the core worlds. As Bastila watched him leave, faint, veiny trickles of black slid around beneath her skin, a spiderweb dancing beneath pale flesh.

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They called her Darth Sion, now. Her pain had become her identity, her power, her weapon. Cracks and blisters dotted her skin, one once-beautiful blue eye now a glowing red sphere that saw only through the force. Pain wracked her at every moment she remained alive, and yet she could not be killed. Every campaign conquered more of the Republic, and while the pain never left, inflicting it on others soothed her indignant mind.

Malak, too, had grown even more hungry for power. His robes grew longer, hid more, as his empty hunger began to consume his very body. His trusted lieutenants were the only ones able to understand his words, which came out in garbled mixtures of language and animalistic cries. In the end he was merely a dark, hooded robe with a lightsaber and a mechanical voice.

They'd conquered the Republic, and Malak had decided there was one last place to visit: the beginning, and the end. Malachor 5.

The Sith slaughtered the pitiful remnants of upstart Sith they found. Bastila felt each strike of their lightsabers, but they only added to the pain, added to the power. Malak, on the other hand, seemed to devour each new dark Jedi with a flick of his hand.

Out of all these upstart Sith, the most powerful were eerily familiar. Sion noticed the beginnings of her own transformation in one boy, his skin showing the first telltale cracks of dark-side-fueled pain. Malak, too, felled a creature whose hunger still radiated from the body. The Sith Lord had taken its red-and-white mask as a battle trophy.

And in the end, when they reached the Core, there was nothing but an old woman, smiling knowingly at the two Sith Lords as they entered her lair. Malak, with a sound of frustration, force-pushed the old woman into a nearby pillar, which succinctly wiped the smile from her face. As lightning arched between Malak and the woman, she screamed in pain, her very connection to the force wrenched from her.

If Malak still had a face left, he would have grinned.

But there was no time for that. Darth Sion, once Bastila Shan, strode up behind the dark-cloaked Malak, pressed the hilt of her lightsaber to his back, and activated it, sending the blade up through his chest. Malak gasped, his hands clutching at empty air.

"He was beautiful to me, you know. " Bastila smiled her skin-cracked grin, all pain and twisted glee.

"....betrayal..." croaked Malak. The old woman, through her pain, began to laugh, her cackling a backdrop against which Sion's pain grew even stronger.

"You killed the man I love, Malak. Since when have Sith been forgiving?" She twisted the blade, wrenched it up, and then pulled it out of Malak's now lifeless form.

Bastila Shan, until recently Darth Sion, stepped to the edge of the Trayus Core, her one good eye staring into the abyss. She looked up, briefly, to the old woman, and allowed herself to genuinely smile for the first time.

Bastila Shan leapt off the edge, tears streaming down her cracked, ruined cheeks. At last, she could die.