here for your dad
Beatrice Govan
Name: Beatrice Govan
Alias: Bea Qosta (on file)
Formerly: Evelynn Dorn, Evelynn Zambrano, Evelynn
Species: Human Clone
Age: 52 from original date of birth, 33 current clone body
Sex: Female
Height: 5' 5”
Weight: 122lbs
Eyes: Green
Hair: Blonde
Skin: Pale
Force Sensitive: Formidable
Name: Beatrice Govan
Alias: Bea Qosta (on file)
Formerly: Evelynn Dorn, Evelynn Zambrano, Evelynn
Species: Human Clone
Age: 52 from original date of birth, 33 current clone body
Sex: Female
Height: 5' 5”
Weight: 122lbs
Eyes: Green
Hair: Blonde
Skin: Pale
Force Sensitive: Formidable
Appearance
Beatrice is a small, severe woman who no longer looks like she is dying. A marked improvement.
For most of the last decade, she did. The cadaverous, quite frankly alarming, thinness is gone. The entire process was deliberate, expensive, and against considerable resistance from Beatrice herself. A period of nagging, enforced nutrition and similarly nagging, supervised rehabilitation has left her slight rather than starved. Narrow through the shoulders and hips, with the straight, non-bodacious build she was always going to have, now carrying enough weight to be ordinary. There is even some definition through the forearms and shoulders from the gym work, which, for once, is a positive development. Anyone who knew her before her disappearance would need a moment to place her, exactly how Beatrice would prefer it.
The pallor remains. Sunlight has never been a priority, and it shows.
She has her mother's sharp features, high, hard cheekbones and a jaw that gives her resting expression the look of someone about to say something unforgivable (which is probably true). It is not an approachable face. Her hair is very fair blonde, fine and straight, and is almost always tied back, which exposes the partially melted and malformed left ear, an old injury that Emryc has not yet offered to correct (but she wouldn't be surprised). Her eyes are green and sharp, and she holds contact longer than is comfortable in polite society because she has never learned that most people find it rude.
The right arm is new. It is her own, in the technical sense of being a woman made of lab-grown parts, and it is visibly fresh. No scars, no sun damage, no history. The rest of Evelynn is a second life of moderate catastrophe. Around the shoulder join there is a ring of darkened, ruined tissue where the alchemical prosthetic, the Skeleton Key, was once seated, which the new limb has not covered and probably never will.
Beatrice still keeps a cane (with the leaping kath hound head in solid silver), though she does not always need it. Long distances, bad days, unfamiliar ground. She eventually came around to the idea that it was not a tool of shame, but rather a symbol of progress, and honestly, canes are perfectly chic if you have the right one.
Her clothing is modest to the point of severity, almost always black, cut for comfort and movement rather than display. The material is superb, and the tailoring is exceptional. She is one of the wealthiest women in several sectors (by false marriage) and dresses like a competent funeral director. This is actually strangely consistent; Beatrice has never cared about clothes, not in this life nor in the previous.
Personality
Every previous version of this section was written for somebody. Even the character sheet has growth.
The one before this was a progress report to her father, a marked improvement, her glaring flaws largely fixed, in order to be a more effective Sith and not the premier family let down. The one before that would have been for Nemene Talith. Before that, for a woman on Dantooine who wanted a happy, if not quiet, daughter. Beatrice has spent two lives being moulded to specification, and the current problem, the one occupying most of her waking attention, is that nobody is in charge of the definition any more and she has no idea what is underneath.
Preliminary findings suggest not much, and it is very tired.
What is definitely there is cold. She is often composed, precise, and polite in a way that has nothing to do with being nice, and people frequently walk away from a conversation with Beatrice feeling insulted without being able to point to where. She is spiteful in (usually) small increments, keeps a mental tally of slights that she will never act on (but will absolutely throw back in your face if it wins the argument), and has a black, deadpan sense of humour that is genuinely quite funny and functions almost entirely as a coping mechanism. The worse things get, the drier she becomes.
Underneath that is the glorious engine of self-loathing running at a constant idle. Beatrice catastrophises with real athletic commitment, the best the galaxy has, unmatched. She assumes blame for events she was not there for, and treats every good outcome as either a debt or a future set-up. She has been given the tools, courtesy of Emryc: grounding exercises, breathing, action plans, an alphabet of therapies and medications, and she uses them, and she is critical of herself for needing them, then uses them anyway. Which, all things considered, is genuine progress.
The masochism is not completely gone, at least in the physical sense. It has changed form. The old masochism was pure carnal appetite: reckless, physical, ecstatic, and the absolute definition of her entire adult life. What has been left behind is the logic that built it, chiefly that when you fail, you should be punished, and it is not under control. Mercy destabilises her far more effectively than cruelty ever did. Cruelty is understandable. Cruelty she can do in her sleep. One steadfast, chiselled Firrerreo declining to be angry with her can, and has absolutely wrecked her.
She is quietly frightened of almost everything and admits to almost none of it. Namely: her father, her own hands, the ghosts of the past, the possibility that the gilded arm was not the problem, and the fact that she has grown to need one person's presence very badly and has no historical evidence that this ever ends well.
And, buried under all of it and rarely surfacing, there is something else. Something so terrible, and so completely horrifying that it is nearly impossible to put into words. Not power, she gave that up on purpose (on account of being terrible at it) and does not miss it. No, it is something smaller and much more humiliating. She said it out loud once, in a bathrobe, under a blanket, in front of an old holofilm, and has not repeated it since:
I want to know what it means to be loved.
She would deny having said it, but there was a witness, the worst possible one.
What is a Person?
There are currently three working theories about what a person is, and Beatrice is currently navigating which one is the truth.
Aver Brand holds that what we do is who we are. The theory that redemption is purely behavioural, that you are absolved by the simple fact of having stopped, and that this is not complicated. She has stopped. She is, by her own startled admission, happy.
Emryc Qosta holds that you choose. That a man can be a gutter rat, then a killer, then a corporation, and that the previous entries are not binding. He does not appear to find any of it remarkable, which, naturally, is a great source of frustration as Emryc is wont to be.
Beatrice holds that the foundation is rotten no matter what it calls itself, and that both of them are describing a ludicrous fantasy that is not available to her.
Aver's theory is the truly terrifying one, mostly because it seems to have worked. Punishment Beatrice understands. A woman who did comparable atrocities, stopped, and is now fine is unbearable because it means the suffering was never mandatory, and if the suffering was never mandatory, then Beatrice has been choosing it, and if she has been choosing it, then two lifetimes of anguish were a hobby.
She would have very much preferred Aver to be miserable.
Strengths and Weaknesses
[+] Death Was a Sabbatical - She died a Sith Master. She has not formally trained or practised in years, has no interest in resuming, and has found, to her mild irritation, this means absolutely nothing. Apparently, the Force does not appear to accept resignations. Despite this, Beatrice usually actually is one of the more dangerous people in most rooms she enters but treats this as an inconvenience and not an advantage.
[+] Attuned to a Fault - Given her lineage, her sensitivity is unusually high and always has been. Beatrice can read a room, the intentions within, and pain with an accuracy that honestly feels invasive. Her telepathy is fluent, precise, and effortless in a way her mouth has never been allowed; it is the single most reliable thing she has going for her (annoyingly determined and beautifully chiselled Firrerreos aside).
[+] Nobody's First Guess - Small, unarmed, occasionally cane-assisted, unfailingly polite (sometimes, on a good day, with a south-easterly wind), and "married" to a man who takes up all the available attention in any room. Beatrice is usually seen as somewhere between decorative and irrelevant. Quite frankly, she has stopped caring and even prefers it.
[+] The Wit to Shut Up - Beatrice privately (unless there is JUB) considers herself superior to nearly everyone. She has (eventually) learned, at considerable cost, to keep this to herself around anyone dangerous, which turns out to be most people. Refreshingly, and unlike most of her family, her contempt is reserved for all genders, species and affiliations. Equal opportunity loathing.
[+/-] The Emperor's Gift - Kaine performed the Sith Emperor's ritual on her after her resurrection, and never fully explained the terms and conditions. The benefit is apparently immortality, which Beatrice has no idea the mechanics of, and is not entirely keen on finding out. The costs are more insidious: a constant low thrum of pain in the blood that she notices roughly as often as she notices her own heartbeat, and a deadening of certain sensations that is more than challenging to explain to her therapist. Her entire existence had once centred around feeling too much; now some parts are broken, and she's still trying to fathom which ones. The therapists are very busy.
[+/-] A Brand New Arm - The gilded, gaudy alchemical horror is gone, cut off at her own request, and replaced with a limb regrown from her own DNA. It is entirely, verifiably hers. It has never seen sunlight, holds no scars, and does not match the rest of her. It works as far as regular human arms do. It does not yet feel like it belongs to her, which is ironic in the worst way, and nobody likes irony.
[+/-] Three Voices, None of Them Hers - Beatrice has a tongue again. She cannot use it. What comes out is a hideous, wet, unrecognisable noise that exhausts her within a sentence (and is so undignified it beggars belief), and she is in speech therapy with no promises attached. Telepathy remains fluent but can be blocked, resisted, or refused. The text-to-speech datapad remains flat, cold, and perfect for maintaining the aristocratic mask her real voice would demolish in three syllables, albeit terrible for the snark.
[+/-] Sister-in-Law, Technically - Against all reasonable advice, Evelynn is friends (or hot dog accomplices) with Aver Brand. This is useful: Aver is a firrerreo mercenary with a Sith Lordship in her past, a criminal empire in her present, an extraordinary tolerance for Beatrice's worst self, and no observable fear of anything. She is also the only person alive who has done comparable things and stopped, which makes her, quite frankly, very relatable. It is also somewhat problematic. Aver shot Emryc's last companion dead at a lunch table. The siblings' relationship is somewhere between unresolved and homicidal; neither will discuss why, and Beatrice is now standing between them quietly glad that it's somebody else's family drama that isn't her fault.
[-] Physically Negligible - She was never a fighter. Not in the last life, and definitely not in this one. Her lightsaber work was politely described as woeful by her own account, and she has no intention of improving it. She is small, she tires, and if it comes down to hands she loses to almost anyone. The physical rehabilitation has made her fed and functional, not ready for a cage match.
[-] It's All His - The spine, the arm, the doctors, the therapy, the ship, the name on the file, the soup. Beatrice owes Emryc Qosta an amount she cannot calculate and has nothing to offer against it. She is not naïve about what dependency has historically meant for her, and she cannot work out whether this is different or just a nicer ride.
[-] The Foundation Is Rotten - Verbatim. PTSD, major depression, and a dissociative disorder that three separate specialists have declined to agree on, further muddied by an unclear amount of clone-madness and a soul that spent a solid stretch in the Netherworld before being put back in a body. Again, the therapists are very busy. She attends every session. She takes every medication she is given. Progress is real, uneven, and never trusted by her for a second, on the grounds that trusting it would be inviting the inevitable fall.
[-] The Punishment Reflex - The reckless, carnal masochism of the Silent Sister is mostly behind her. What remains is the rotten little belief underneath it: that failure requires punishment, and that mercy in response to failure is either a mistake or worse, a trap. Kindness lands on Beatrice poorly. She apologises for things she did not do and cannot always be talked out of it.
[-] Hiding From Father - Kaine Zambrano does not know she is alive, is not aware that she failed, and would have opinions about both (or perhaps he has finally given up on her, made a new Evelynn and called it a day). Every alias, every forged document, and every year of quiet feels like papering over the cracks of inevitability. Beatrice has made peace with the idea that this ends badly. She has not made peace with the anticipation.
History
Evelynn
Evelynn
Evelynn Dorn was born on Dantooine and raised on a farmstead by a woman who lied to her about everything, which was, in fairness, an act of love. Karin Dorn had run from Kaine Zambrano while carrying his child and spent the better part of sixteen years keeping her daughter aggressively, protectively ordinary. The girl she raised stammered, found companionship in a pet kath hound named Chomp, and had no idea that either of her parents was a Sith Lord.
Kaine found them. Karin did not survive the reunion.
What happened afterwards is available to anyone who cares to look it up, and the short version is sufficient: her father took her apart in an attempt to rebuild her in his image to mixed results (a failure in his eyes). Her voice was among the things that did not survive the process. She learned to speak directly into other people's minds because there was no longer any other way to be heard.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, she met Nemene Talith, who was beautiful, cruel and the first person in Evelynn's life who had ever actively wanted her company. Evelynn, who at this point had by then been thoroughly taught that attention and injury arrive together, mistook the one for the other, and never entirely un-mistook it. She learned to want what was being done to her, because wanting it was the only available form of control.
What the two of them built on Rattatak lasted years. The plainest available description is that they ran a slave empire, and they ran it well. Evelynn was called the Silent Sister. She was not a victim there. She would not be written as one. She enjoyed herself enormously, carving out a reputation as a manic hedonist whose relationship with suffering was as turbulent as her relationship with Nemene and the full details of what that involved is beyond summary.
It ended the way those arrangements always end, with heaping spoonfuls of hubris. The slaves worked it out: that power was found in sheer numbers rather than at the individual level, and both queens died on the same day within minutes of each other.
Her spirit spent almost two decades in the Netherworld. There is no reliable account of it, including hers.
Kaine retrieved her, a clone grown from a scavenged femur out of the rubble of her own kingdom, and a soul dragged back out of hell on the clear understanding that she would do better this time.
The Letters and the Notebook
My dearest Nemene,
It has been a great many years since our shared demise, two decades in fact. It still seems like it happened yesterday, and yet at the same time as if it were another era in a different reality. I have found myself thinking of you often as of late. Where are you? Are you upset with me? Are you in the Netherworld? Are you suffering? No, I simply cannot imagine you putting up with such trifles as eternal damnation... and yet, I do not wish to think of your death as permanent.
My father has brought me back to the realm of the living and must concede that things are much different now. Perhaps it is for the best, for without you by my side I could never think of myself as a Queen. I have considered revisiting Rattatak to see what remains of our old dominion. I cannot imagine there is much but rubble after our slaves caught wind of the rebellion, or worse still, father might have had his own designs upon it. He was never your biggest fan, after all. Still, I should not avoid it. Maybe I would find a keepsake, a memory of you that I could treasure in your absence.
I must confess to you that I try to keep you out of my thoughts, not that I wish to but rather out of self-preservation. Could you imagine if I muttered your name before him? I am sure that you would enjoy that, but I can only think of the repercussions that I would face. He is Emperor now; I find this to be no surprise, as his ambition was always grand, on par with yours, of course.
My memories are not quite complete since my revival. There are a great many people and events that I cannot recall, but I recall you and your cruelty. Do you remember when you slaughtered all of my creatures? Or when you poisoned me to keep me bedridden and under your thumb? I was so upset, and even now, when I think about those bygone days, I find myself just as distraught. You really hurt me. I often wonder if you were the only one that truly understood the way I was, or if you were the one that made me that way. I still do not know. Yet despite that, I still hold this fondness in my heart for you.
And I hate you.
I was always rather confusing like that, was I not?
Well, it is worse now. You know that I held a certain fondness for pain, of course; you do, our bond was such that any harm you suffered was felt through me. It was the key to our intimacy, how we connected so deeply. Since my return, it is all that I crave, and it frightens me. Quite often it is the only thing that occupies my thoughts. It is consuming me, and though I try to resist, I fear that it is futile. What should I do? Father wishes that I gain redemption in his eyes and that I join the ranks of the Sith Brotherhood, and while it is not a terribly appealing prospect, perhaps it would be wise to distract myself with such pursuits.
Were you here, I know that you would take control of my situation; you would be able to curb these wicked urges. After all, you were always making my decisions for me. It seems silly that I miss that.
Yet needs are not fading; in fact, sometimes they are so strong that I am helpless to resist and often have to be restrained and sedated.
I long to spill crimson.
Even now.
Especially now.
Yours,
Evie
Dear Nemene,
It is quite ridiculous that I am still writing to you, and were you capable of understanding, I would wish for you to know that I do not do it out of any form of fondness or nostalgia. I have won. You are dead, and I am not. My goodness, I truly hope that somewhere out there in the beyond you are aware of this, for I am aware of just how furious it would make you. Little Evie gets the last laugh; you simply couldn't make it up.
Father had been monitoring me the entire time since my resurrection and deeply disapproved of my newfound lunacy. I cannot begrudge him for that, as it would be a great waste of resources to bring me back from the Nether only for me to be so useless to him. So, he summoned me and presented me with an ultimatum.
Allow him to cure me of my insanity, or die.
Obviously, given I am writing to you, I did not choose the latter despite my feeble-mindedness. The process was largely unpleasant and far more scientific than I was prepared for, not to mention that father's apprentice oh-so-thoughtfully decided that this was her moment to assassinate him. This, naturally, did not go so well for her. Best to keep an eye on Darth Morrow; she does seem terribly dramatic, but enough about that wretch, I have no plans to confront her until we are on more even footing.
My prior urges are no more. My meekness, my madness and my masochism have been vanquished. He has performed the Sith Emperor's ritual upon me. Immortality? Why Father, you shouldn't have. So much of me has changed that I cannot tell of the apparent drawbacks. Having studied the ritual, it would appear that I am somewhat deafened to certain sensations alongside the constant thrum of pain that now dwells within my blood. To be frank, I barely notice it. Quite the boon, really. Who would have thought that my adaptation to suffering would finally come in useful? I suppose I have you to thank for that, at least in part.
I hope that makes you feel sick. Truly.
There is now a sense of purpose for me; I am to finally become a proper Sith and take my rightful place in Father's Empire. It's quite peculiar, having ambition after a lifetime of such a thing evading me. I do not quite know where to begin, however. There are so many paths available to me now, and it's difficult to discern what I should specialise in, if I should specialise in a particular school of training at all. Probably not hand-to-hand combat, although one really should at least be prepared for the scenario.
Regards,
Evelynn Zambrano
Dear Nemene,
Another damned complication.
In order to stay true to Father's wishes, I made an attempt to hone my admittedly woeful skills with a lightsaber and was ambushed by some foolish Twi'lek who didn't even have the good manners to converse before diving in for a taste of blood. Did the Jedi always harbour such hatred within their hearts? What is even the point of them? Regardless of those who hold delusions of light, this soft-brained idiot lopped my arm off. I thought I was done with losing parts of myself, but evidently such is not the case.
That was not the worst of it.
We had a moment. When I laid my hands upon her, something changed; I felt her being within my own being. It was surreal, as if I was an entirely different person for just a brief flash. It was terribly unpleasant. She must have been defective.
However, as a result of this moment when I had the ridiculous oaf strung up and at my mercy, I couldn't do it. I toyed, had a modicum of fun, but when I attempted to truly harm the slave-fodder, I found myself feeling queasy. Yes, me, Evelynn, The Silent Sister, the woman who once carved her name into the stomach of The Mandalore for the sheer sensation.
What will Father say?
What would Father say, rather, for I have no intention of him finding out.
In fact, to the contrary, I shall be avoiding him for a short while. For you see, my dear, I desperately required a new arm, and in seeking the very best, I found myself at the doorstep of Darth Maliphant, a known enemy of daddy dearest. Why should squabbles amongst Sith get in the way of me receiving the very best? I think even you'd agree with me on that merit.
My new arm is a sight to behold; it is a gilded work of art that contains more power than I ever have held in two lifetimes. Naturally, being a product of Sith Alchemy, it was a slight bother to install, but I was never known for shying away from suffering now, was I? Pain is and always will be my bread and butter.
Unfortunately, a price had to be paid, and once more I am rendered mute. It is not so bad, seeing as I am quite accustomed to such a life. Although I have no tongue entirely (I know, darling) and now when I eat and drink I look like a demented baby bird. In a way, the price felt fitting, but at the same time I have concerns that I may be falling into old habits. I should be striving to improve, not regress.
Maliphant (who, by the way, is a lush and does not like that fact being pointed out to him) recommended that I stop by Darth Adekos for further tutelage. This seems to be the safest option in a bid to lay low, and if there was any being out there that knew how to survive, then it is him. Safe old hand. I feel that I shall need the help; there are rumours of a war on the horizon. Something about a new order; I'm not entirely sure, but I'm sure that I'll find out sooner rather than later.
Regards,
Evelynn Zambrano
Dear Nemene,
I think I made a friend today.
Well, a friend might be generous. Would acquaintance suffice? I'm not entirely sure given my stunted emotional growth due to all the loved ones in my life leaving me completely and utterly socially inept. Yes, that means you, and father, and we cannot leave out mother either. How tragic, a grown woman excited about the prospect of having a normal relationship with another person.
Normal might be a stretch.
Vella Forte. She came to my home seeking advice within the Force, something, may I remind you, that you were also in dire need of. Ah, but it's too late for you, my darling. I don't know what was more surprising, that I aided the woman or that it actually worked. Hopefully, this will be the beginning of a fruitful partnership, as she is a distinguished warrior and I could use those skills to fill the void of my own. Not to mention that she seems fairly pleasant to deal with.
Although she did set fire to my home. This is less than ideal.
I don't even know if that's normal any more. What is normal? What is a friend?
Obviously, I am writing to inform you about this meeting because I know it would irritate you so. I still cannot fathom your possessiveness and your rampant jealousy that in the end ruined everything. Why wouldn't you let me have things like this? Why did I have to be yours and yours only? Well, there is nothing you can do now because, as I like to remind you, you are dead and I am not.
There may be a small problem with said new friend (acquaintance?). In helping her get in touch with her own inner truth and desire, I may have created a deserter amongst the Sith. I still haven't seen Father since before I lost my arm, and if he knew about this, I cannot imagine that he would be terribly pleased.
This is why I'm going to do something productive. I've arranged a 'charity dinner' in order to gather funds for this upcoming war with the New Imperial Order. That will be certain to get me back into the good books. Show that I am committed to both him and the cause.
I will not fail this time.
Regards,
Evelynn Zambrano
Nemene,
I'm tired of being this way.
Why is failure my only option?
Why am I like this?
Why did he bring me back?
Evelynn
Nemene,
As you may have been able to tell due to my last correspondence, there have been complications.
An attempt was made on my life after that 'charity dinner' I had written to you about prior. An assassination call courtesy of the New Imperial Order. I hadn't anticipated them striking out so soon. I am a damned fool. Why me? Why would they want me? What worth am I to them?! I'm nothing more than a surname, a statement of intent! The Zambrano name is a curse, an ill omen that thwarts my every move.
They crippled me, Nemene.
When the assassin, a loathsome Chiss brute, failed to leave a gaping hole in my head, she opted to destroy me in a more personal manner. I really tried this time, but she had me at a disadvantage; I was in a damned dressing gown! It wasn't fair! I adapted, tried to be oh-so-clever and even managed to wound the beast, but it wasn't enough.
It never is.
She broke my back over her knee. Like I was nothing! Like I was a mere child! I wish she had finished the job, but that would have been too easy; it would have been a bloody mercy, and I don't deserve mercy. No, she decided to capture me instead, handed me off to some part-time butchers who saw fit to fuse my spine back together like it was broken scrap metal.
My legs are worthless now, and I was presented to their high command in a wheelchair and a muzzle.
A muzzle, Nemene.
Yours,
Evelynn
Nemene,
These days I often imagine that your rotten, mangled soul is somewhere deep in the Netherworld laughing at me, mocking me for my continued string of failures in trying to do anything right. You were always so cruel, and even with your tongue, you knew exactly how to wound me.
The only reason I still draw breath is to spite you.
If it weren't for you, then I truly believe that I would have ended this miserable existence by now.
I was surplus to requirement within the hands of the New Imperial Order (I cannot fault them, I am worthless to their cause) and thus I am free. Ha. Free? That is quite possibly the greatest joke that the galaxy has ever told.
No, I am not free. I am destitute, without a credit to my name and trapped in this forsaken chair. Now the common people look down on me with pity in their eyes. I can read their thoughts upon their wretched faces. Poor thing. I sit there, helpless, fantasising about slaughtering them all. I don't think my heart has ever been filled with this much hate.
All I feel is anger.
I do not doubt that I could act on my venom; I could eviscerate the masses that grant me their big, sad eyes, but do you know what that would do, my sweet? It would draw attention. I cannot ever return home now; my death is almost certain, and so I have been forced to assume a new identity. I wheel around, pretending to be 'Beatrice Govan' and use a datapad to talk. The very picture of the tragic cripple, utterly reliant on technology to simply exist.
Pathetic.
I was a Queen, and now I'm playing small mind tricks to get pocket change, so some greasy mongrel serving street food can ignore me because my chair isn't tall enough.
Perhaps it is time to accept that my fate shall always be a humiliating one; it might make things easier.
Yours,
Evelynn
Dearest, darling love of my ruinous life, my personal hellbeast, Nemene,
I am drunk.
I want to record, for the benefit of posterity and of you specifically, that this is the first pleasant thing to happen to me in either of my lives, and that you were not involved in it.
There is a man. He is annoying. He answers questions with other questions and looks at you the entire time he is doing it, which should be unbearable and somehow is not. He bought me wine because I was sitting alone looking tragic, which I resent, and which worked. He also bought me a frozen dessert whose name escaped me for the entire evening and which I have just this moment remembered. It will appear at the bottom of this letter, because I intend to make you wait for it, as you once made me wait for things.
He asked me to dinner. I said yes.
Nemene, he is going to fix my spine.
Not out of pity, as far as I can tell, and not because I asked, and not in exchange for anything, which I do not believe and have said so to his face. He simply said that he would. Do you understand what that means? I am going to walk. I am going to stand up out of this chair and walk across a room without being carried or lifted or shifted aside, and it will have been done for me by a stranger who has known me for one evening, and not by you, and not by my father, and not by anyone who ever claimed to love me.
I have been thinking about that all night, and I do not know what to do with it.
Anyway. I am drunk, and you never once let me be, and I am going to be sick.
Yours hatefully,
Evie
P.S. Vienetta. It was called a vienetta.
I have been given a notebook.
I am told the point of it is that nobody reads it. I observed that a document nobody reads is not a document; it is litter. She wrote that down, which I consider unsporting.
Nothing to report.
Nothing to report.
Nothing to report. I am perfectly aware of what this looks like.
If I expressed that I wished to strike him, would you be obligated to inform him? I would appreciate the clarity.
Fine.
She has asked me to record one good thing per week, and I have been sitting here for forty minutes, so: the physiotherapist said I had improved.
I do not believe her. She is paid to say that. I have been walking for eleven weeks with all the grace of a wet skraal being marched to a bath. But she said it in the tone people use when they have surprised themselves, and I have now been thinking about it since, which I resent enormously.
Bad week. Nothing happened. That is the part I cannot explain to anyone.
She has asked me to write about a relationship in my life that I would describe as healthy.
I have left the rest of this page blank on purpose, so that she can see it.
His sister is happy.
I have written that sentence three times and struck it out twice because it is both absurd and mundane.
Aver Brand has done things. I will not enumerate them, partly because I do not know all of them and mostly because I am in no position to cast any stones. She stopped. She has not stopped being a criminal; she has simply stopped being a deplorable Sith monster, and she has fallen off the wagon perhaps twice in a decade, and she said the word happy about herself, out loud, in a swimming pool, without appearing to notice she had said something obscene.
I asked her what her biggest regret was. She said regret means you would rather be somewhere else, and she would not.
I have been unwell about this for four days.
Because if she can do it, then it can be done. And if it can be done, then every burden that I am carrying is chosen, and I have been choosing it. And if I have been choosing it, then I have spent two lifetimes doing this to myself and calling it coping.
I would genuinely have preferred her to be miserable. That is the truth, and I have written it down as instructed, and I would like it noted that I did not enjoy it.
He was not happy that I had spent time with his sister. We ate hot dogs. My life is a joke.
I asked him a direct question today and got a question back, as ever.
I want it recorded, by which I mean I want her to read this, since we have long established that she does, that I did not raise my hand. I did think about it, with some detail. There is a specific spot on that man's jaw that I have been mentally rehearsing for several weeks. I have concluded that I would break my own fingers again and he would ask whether I needed ice.
That is the whole difficulty with him. There is no purchase. He is the most guarded creature I have ever encountered, and he has not once been unkind to me. I do not know what to do with a person who will not give me a reaction when I am being appalling.
I have tried. Repeatedly.
She says what we do is who we are.
He says who do you want to be.
I have run both through my head for a week. The difficulty is that under the first one I am a monster who has stopped, and under the second one I am nobody at all, and I cannot determine which is worse.
Nemene,
Somebody wore your face for money.
She was a changeling on a pleasure station; she did it as a courtesy, and thought she was being helpful. I came apart in front of a stranger, a business associate, and a man I have to live with. My hand had already started to change. I was going to use it.
He put a sedative in my neck before I could. I have been reliably informed since that I asked him to hurt me first.
You have been dead for over two decades, and you still got the last word, so I suppose some congratulations are in order.
I have spent a long time since then working out why. Not why I reacted; you and I both know exactly why I reacted; I have three acronyms and a prescription for it. Why it worked so well. And I think it is because of these letters. Because I have written to you for years and told myself it was spite. Look at me, alive, and you not. Look at me, unsupervised. Look at everything I do now that you cannot forbid.
But you cannot spite someone who cannot hear it. That was never what these were.
These were company.
I kept you because being hated by you was the closest I have ever come to being known by anyone, and I would rather be known cruelly than not at all. That is it. That is the entire rotten problem, and it took a team of professionals eleven months to get me to write it down.
I am going to stop now.
Not because I have forgiven you. I have not, I do not intend to, and I am reliably informed that this is allowed. I am stopping because I have had a notebook for eleven months, and I have counted the pages and compared them with my correspondence to you. You are living in my head, rent free, and I am spending words on you that I should be spending on my own recovery,
I have never in my life written a sentence that was not aimed at somebody. Given a page with nobody on the other end of it, I go silent, in writing, the same way I go silent everywhere else. I do not know what my own voice sounds like on paper any more than I know what it sounds like out loud.
That frightens me considerably more than you ever did.
Goodbye, Nemene. You were the worst thing that ever happened to me, and I have missed you every single day for two decades, and I expect that to continue. I expect only to stop writing it down.
Regards,
Beatrice Govan
Here is the thing I have not dared to say out loud. I am putting it here because she asked and because a page does not look back at you.
I do not know what this is.
I have one comparison, and it is Nemene. That is the entirety of my reference material. Everything I understand about being wanted was taught to me by a woman who poisoned me to keep me in bed; I learned it thoroughly, and I was an excellent student.
So when I try to determine what he is to me, I find I cannot measure it at all. If this is love, then I will not recognise it, because it does not hurt, and nothing that failed to hurt has ever been love. And if it is not love, if I am a project, or a debt, or a way for a man to prove something to himself in private, then I will not recognise that either.
I am being fed, repaired and given the finest therapeutic appointments by someone who wants nothing from me, and the plain truth is that I cannot reliably distinguish that from my prior relationships.
I do not believe he can either. I do not believe he has ever done this. Aver says there have only ever been whores; I believe her, and I have not been able to stop turning over the fact that he does not know how to do this any better than I do.
Two people with no working model, then. Marvellous.
He added soup to the ship's menu.
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