He heard it first as a faint tapping and thumping. Growling to himself, Brant stalked down the slave. The noises began to take on a pattern as he turned the corners of the starship, until he could hear quite clearly their source, even though Vette had turned the volume down low.
She had somehow hijacked the holocom speakers, and what was belting out of them was not the clipped recordings of military messages or status reports, but a variation of whistles, beats, thrums, and trills. Brant stopped short, captivated despite himself. He had not heard music in a long time.
It turned his head like wine, despite his best efforts to remain unaffected, leading him down shivering corridors of sheet-like notes, then throwing him from the rocks with booms and keens, raising the hair on his arms and neck as it bore him up on wings of sound alone. How? There was a Sith-like passion to it, but it went far beyond the heat of rage or the cold of fear, instead calling up sights and sounds he had not experienced since… when?
…when he sat on the warms sands of Tatooine, listening to the insects hum in the water canyon, or the howls of a sandstorm at night while he was safe in his mother’s bed. It was flushed bright with the red fury of Sith nature, yes, but also the gentle lullaby of… something he couldn’t quite remember.
His lack of memory angered him, and he shook himself. Rather than stand awkwardly with his head jutted around the door, he strode full on into the room. Vette’s little shriek and flinch and rush to shut off the hijacked holocom pleased him, even as the void of silence, bereft of the music, filled his ears with the same emptiness of a Korriban tomb…
“You are supposed to be working.” With the vicious way she looked at him, he suddenly didn’t want her to know that her music had affected him so. Before she could say anything, he yelled out, “Get to the hold and start scrubbing! Now.”
After she had scrambled out though, he crossed to the jury-rigged holocom and carefully switched it back on, keeping the volume barely above a whisper. The music was now grainy and harsh as the cheap speakers struggled to embody its timbre, and Brant was satisfied he would remain in control this time against the power of the music.
But that power… its passion… He erased the recording from the ship’s computers, but not before downloading a copy onto his datapad. Perhaps it would help keep the nightmares from his dreams…