🙆 i'm?
HE DOES NOT so much feel as sense the gentle touch of Aphra’s fingers across the crown of his helmet. Nearly a caress, a whisper of intimacy to unforgiving plasteel, a chitinous shell that renders the soft exchange immutably mechanical. Like running your hand over the pendulous hull of a Star Destroyer, with the same kind of capacity for destruction lurking beneath his obsidian armor.
Not immediately responding to the breach of personal space is uncharacteristic enough of the Sith to throw Aphra’s emotions for an unsure loop that lashes through the stillness of his mind as though it should have been a shout, full of wildness && adrenaline, a steganography of fear etched into wavering rhythm of her pulse.
You pet a sleeping beast for the possibility that you might come back from it with a story && all your fingers in tact. Every survived interaction is a feat in its own right. But Aphra, he knows, reaches for something more than that. For the individual being beneath the bloodlust && black metal. She knows monsters are made, not born, && that there must have been a man once before the machine, someone who had perhaps touched another being’s skin without the intent to break it.
Aphra has always been too smart for her own good, which is the only reason Vader has humored her for this long.
He stands now, stepping out of her reach. ❝ I am not what you think I am. ❞ Something to be admired, to be tamed. ❝ Do not forfeit your life for childish fantasies. ❞
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