Act II: Acedia

[Hal Terrano]

Suddenly everything was too quiet.

When the thrashing and screams ceased only the pounding of blood in his own head was present alongside now ragged breaths. Chest felt tight and clenched fists were slick with sweat. It was so hard to breathe, too hard to breathe. He needed to get out of that room, needed air, needed to flee his own inaction, and yet he could not.

He couldn't do anything.
You can't do anything.

The sound of the metal scalpel clattering against the floor caused the wreck of a former-Jedi to visibly wince, body twitching, facial features screwed up as if he were the one experiencing crippling physical pain. Hal was on the slab just as much as the jester was, but physical cuts could at least be sutured. How does one mend a lacerated psyche?

“…don't...”

Same mantra.

WON'T. DON'T. CAN'T. PLEASE. STOP.

Useless words.

Useless man.

No, not a man. A craven, a wretch, a weakling, a fool. Not a man. Were you ever a man?

His own mind spat venom in tandem with the monstrous women, as if they were both moving to sweep the legs from underneath him, to break the fragments of Hal Terrano even further. With bile staining his top he crumbled even further, falling onto hands and knees like a beaten curr.

“...I can't do,,,anything..”

He agreed.

---

[member="Vrag"]

 

[Vrag]

She stood still as a statue for what could have been mere seconds, or it could've been decades, time slowing down to a crawl inside her perception as she stared at her apprentice, creation, captive; her pet. So many possibilities and courses of action were running before her inner eye that the woman could hardly grasp them. There was a sudden, boiling rage in her chest, in that hollow cavity that had once housed a beating heart, an anger born of his inactivity, his weakness, his sloth.

"GET THE KARK UP!"

The outburst was like a violent equalization of pressure, come and gone in the blink of an eye. She was upon him, above him, her jagged figure looming as he kneeled in a pool of his own vomit, his back arched into a pitiful bow.

"Get. The kark. Up."

This time, the words were quieter, yet somehow they carried even more weight, the threat magnifying in inverse proportion to the volume of her voice.

She reached down to grasp his chin with an almost comically careful a touch, making sure that the claws of the Vonduun didn't break the skin as she angled his face upwards. The gaping abysses of the skull's sockets would meet his despairing stare as she leaned closer, spreading over his field of view as the incarnate of inevitability she considered herself to be.

"Get up, [member="Hal Terrano"]."

 

[Hal Terrano]

When she bellowed he almost crumbled right there, seemingly only kept on hand and knee by the inability to do anything. In what universe could he stand? Gutted. Gutless. Blood, tears, bile and beliefs spilled upon the floor beneath him, there was no longer substance inside to afford support.

I can't.

You wouldn't understand.

How could she? What could such a monstrosity possibly know about a broken sense of duty and honour. She was a self-styled demon, rending open the spirit of a Jedi to see how it works, to inspect such notions of morals, integrity and ideals without having to embrace it herself. What had kept Hal Terrano standing was gone, the essence of who he was, his very insides absent leaving nothing behind but a decrepit husk.

Such ideas regarding her were not so easily found within his head, muddled and muddied, his mind could only focus upon his own failings. A symphony of shame blasting accusations alongside his tired old mantra. Still nauseous, hard to draw breath, eyes welling up.

DISGRACE.

Won't

PATHETIC.

Don't.

WEAK.
Can't.

CRAVEN.

Please.

TRAITOR.

Stop.

A hand embraced his sick-stained chin and pulled his own gaze upward, revealing nought but the thick oppressing black of despair within those mqaaq'its, whites around them watery and bloodshot. The stare of a nothing.

“Kill me."

---

[member="Vrag"]

 

[Vrag]

Even if he'd been able to see her face, nothing would have moved. Not a muscle, not a pupil. Just a dead stare boring straight into his empty eyes.

"Kark no."

She let his chin go as she stepped back in one swift motion, her face contorting into a mask of disgust behind the impassively leering visage of the skull. How ironic, that she should frown now, of all times. Not when a human had been screaming and thrashing on a cold metal slab before her, wracked by agony unimaginable with every cut she drew into his pale flesh in exploration born out of morbid curiosity. Not even when her apprentice, overcome by his own weakness and that of others, had collapsed on the floor, expelling his meal from his bowels in fits of powerful convulsions.

And yet…

"You don't deserve to die," she spoke quiety in the poignant silence that reigned eternal so many leagues beneath the soil.

"And you never will, unless you make something of yourself, Hal. This galaxy doesn't care for the footnotes. Leave your mark, and somebody is bound to come kill you."

"Happily."

Her glance fell on the motionless body on the table some few paces away, a few strands of red giving to the color to the otherwise cadaver-like pallor of the man. With the amount of drugs surely coursing through his system, it would be no wonder if the junkie simply… never woke.

What a death.

"No, Hal. Sobbing into your vomit on the floor of a prison cell won't earn you anything but… sobbing into your vomit on the floor of a prison cell, I guess."

"Get up."


[member="Hal Terrano"]

 

[Hal Terrano]

As if she had been holding him up Hal crumbled when she released her grip upon his chin, slumping back into his own sick, his lost gaze returning to the floor.

She was right.

He deserved nothing, death, a release least of all. A pitiful creature of inaction that simply stood by and allowed the senseless suffering of others deserved the very same. Torment in inertia, the perfect punishment one such as he. Left to his own devices Hal Terrano may have very well carried out his own sentence. He would have not objected were he to be left in the cell alongside casualty of his sloth to rot.

The words of the beast did not rouse him. The very concept of making a mark simply to achieve the end could not spur him into action. Despair so often sapped at the will, making the mere act of getting up in the morning a monumental act, and he knew so much despair. It was his bedfellow, his shadow, the voice within his head.

Why make a mark?

Why get up?

Why do anything at all?

Hopeless. Useless. Failure.

Vrag's command was not heeded. As the crumbling existence of a man refused to move, no longer finding reason to do such. It was not an act of defiance in any way, shape or form but rather the crippling symptom of misery. What was the point?

“Why?”

---

[member="Vrag"]

 

[Vrag]

Plop.

And just like that, he was a heap of nothing on the floor again, content to wallow in his own expulsions as if they weren't even there. It made Vrag's skin crawl with revulsion the likes of which even the greatest horrors of war could not elicit in the woman. Irony was likely having a good laugh, somewhere far away, but no such sound could ever penetrate the thick walls of Prakith dungeons. It was as if the structure itself was completely devoid of happiness, or any other positive emotion that might stumble inside by an odd twist of fate.

The spectrum down here went from apathy to anger and over to despair, but never anywhere warmer. Along with the drip drip drip of blood and sweat and tears against duracrete went every last bit of warmth to ever enter these walls.

"Why."

"You and your karking why!" she spat at him sharply, her hand twitching at her side as the urge to backhand the pitiful creature rose within her. It would serve no purpose. He was already broken, beaten, bruised. What was there left to crush?

She crouched, slowly, and snapped her fingers to have him look at the leer of her skull.

"I can tell you why all day. It won't matter. The why, Hal, is in you. Find your own why, or you might as well rot in here, because I sure as hell won't drag you out of your own puke."

"Now get up."


[member="Hal Terrano"]

 

[Hal Terrano]

Even then, when lost in the abyss there was still that why, there would always be that why. Information was uncomplicated, with answers one could rationalise and justify almost anything, no matter how difficult the pressing matter at hand was. Dark or light, standing tall or steeped in blood, vomit and shame, knowledge remained.

Knowledge that he lacked, and so like a droid lacking protocol he ceased to function. Nothing more than scrap metal to be junked and discarded.

Or as some would have it, recycled.

Limp despondency bowed down to tempered ire, a hard snap of fingers bringing his gaze of forfeit up once more to meet the chasm. No shred of mercy would ever be found in that stare, her words evidence enough that she would not end it and his limp cowardice evidence that he could not, would not either. If he ceased to move would he have been forced? Every direction held naught but futility. Such a pitiful creature that the ghastly dungeon floor would have rejected the shame of his lifeless body.

You don't deserve to die.

What do I deserve?

NOTHING.

Bile still burned at the back of his throat, portions of food yet digested lingering at the back of his teeth, bitterness coating his shallow tongue.

Staring into her monstrous visage, Terrano still asked questions, only now they were silent, reflected inside of his mind and within inky anguished eyes. Why? Why? WHY? Who am I? Hal Terrano. Jedi. Strong. Literal. Defender of the weak. Teaspoon of honey. Stubborn. Diligent. Awkward. Avalore Eden. Chaste. That is not who I am? Who am I now?

What am I now?

COWARD.

And, what do cowards do?

Flesh and clothing still stained with blood, spittle and vomit, Hal Terrano slowly returned to his feet, breaking eye contact with [member="Vrag"] as he did so.

 

[Vrag]

She didn't say anything. Not because there was no point – though there wasn't – and not because there was nothing left to say – though there wasn't, either – but because Vrag was, very simply, sick of it. Talk wasn't her preferred mode of communication; she only did it when she had to, or when she was drunk. Otherwise, doing was what she, well… did.

Sometimes, though, she had to talk, so that others would be able to do. On the eve of war, over a game of Sabacc, in a vomit-covered cell in the Prakith dungeon… resorting to words where violence would find no purchase.

Pity.

Vrag watched him stumble back on his own two feet, swaying like an lifetime drunkard on his last legs. He looked like the gentles breeze could topple him back over, sending him sprawling across the duracrete floor, never to stand back up again.

Perhaps she would do them both a favor by doing, in that moment. All it would take was a step forward – no, not even that – a push, and he'd split his skull against the metal slab in a shower of red and gray. A favor, for him, for her, for the Unverse at large.

It was likely the lattermost that stayed her hand, that made her stand still as a statue as she observed his struggle like a scientist might observe a failing experiment.

"Mercy and cowardice are the same," she whispered so quietly that she was sure it was only in her mind.

[member="Hal Terrano"]​

 

[Hal Terrano]

Eventually the symphony of screeching self-cannibalising thoughts became too loud to decipher. Those words born of hatred combining into nothing but a screaming mass that felt like it might have split his head in two. Was it better that he couldn't understand it? Would it ever die down or even cease entirely?

Difficult to say.

He was once a man that held such pride and importance in what he stood for. Standing idly by while another was tortured horribly was something that would leave a horrible scar upon his psyche. One that would likely be impossible to repair.

Time became irrelevant as the former-man stood there, almost swaying on the spot from legs that seemed too weak, too tired to carry his shame despite their muscular appearance. Hal wasn't entirely sure how long he just stood there, completely lost, the murmurings of the monster next to him lost upon his consumed mind. There was only the overwhelming torrent inside his own head, no chamber, no slab, no blood, no Vrag.

Only shame.

Just before it might have seemed that he had actually turned to the same stone of his usual demeanour, he lifted his head, pit-like eyes staring forward but into nothing as if he had been sedated by the very horror of it all.

Without word Terrano finally moved. Was it acceptance of his failures? Or rejection? Difficult to say when he himself no longer knew where he stood. All there was would be time, time in which he would be destroyed or he would survive. A fate still left in the abyss of unknown at that moment in time. Make. Or. Break. Live. Or. Die.

In silence he finally left the chamber of his own accord, having surely left a part of his own soul upon the blood and bile sodden floor.

---

[member="Vrag"]