Private Me, myself, a dream; never sleep.

[Vesta]

upside​

A gentle, static, hum reached her ears as she slowly opened her eyes and slid off of her bed. There wasn't much noise, the relative silence a testament to the degree of uneventfulness - of safety - that was prescribed to everyone in the Zambrano estate. It was the sole rule, the singular law, which governed the people who lived within its walls. A short sigh, a stifled yawn, escaping from her lips was deafening in comparison to the dull hum of electricity running through the walls, and the slight shuffle of her feet over smooth carpeting easily muffled that. Sound was the sole focus she had on her mind, a fixation, because it was a sensation that was different every time.

The ache in her chest and the electric panic that pulsed in her mind were two that never differed.

Never changed.

She glanced into the tall mirror at her bedside, tilting her head to the left so she could watch as the long scar across the side of her head that ran down her face and over her neck to her shoulders simply vanished - its seams fading like it had never even been there. She shook her head, reaching for a headband, a tiara of sorts, from her bedside table and slid it over her head. It pulled her rust-colored hair back, the band itself vanishing beneath it while the moth-like adornments remained above. Her gaze returned to her reflection, admiring the insect-like figures that emerged from her wavy locks, and pivoted towards the door. A few quiet, padded, steps and her small fingers curled around the old-fashioned handle, which she promptly twisted, and then stepped out from the confines of her room to the hallway beyond.

The girl, her apprentice, was to be out today, and possibly for a couple days if her habits were anything to go by, but that suited the Sith just fine. She'd made a spectacle of her return the other day, a fool of herself in front of the girl too, and was keen to spend a day to herself. Particularly to meditate on the things that had transpired which caused her to embarrass herself so greatly when she had come back. The meditation chambers she'd given to her apprentice now lay empty, the girl being gone leaving it unused, and she stepped into it - and sealed it off from the outside - without a sound or word.

The smooth, black, stone surface of the floor was covered in white and grey smears, remnants of chalk drawings and writings hastily half-erased and redrawn by her apprentice. She ignored the graffiti, uninterested in written words of power - she was a master of the runic etchings, but she didn't use them except to expedite whatever purpose she delegated to them when she did use them - and found the center of the room before getting down to her knees and then crossing her legs as she sat back.

Inhale, a pause, then her eyes shut.

Exhale.

 

[Vesta]

The world, reality - everything melted away.

Wax on a candle, plastic tossed into a fire, ice under the hot glare of the sun; she could have described the sensation an infinite number of times and somehow each and every description would have both been perfectly accurate and yet still miss the mark by just a hair. It was impossible, after all, to put into the words the feeling one had as they slipped from one's body and emerged in a state of being that was more a realization of being than it was reality. There was no form, no stasis, here, only chaotic change and a swirling vortex of existence that seemed to make physical concepts and the effects of the physical - namely sound, colors, feelings and thoughts. Voices that screamed, all of them familiar, were paradoxically heard at every point of their uttering simultaneously and independently of each other. Colors washed over each other as they converged with all the rest, but they also ran down the limits of her perception like water down walls.

This, and no where else, was the only place Vesta felt safe.

Where she was home.

The tranquility simulated by a controlled adherence to order in her physical home, in her father's estate, was simply that; a simulation. Here, in her mind, it was chaos - blatant, unabashed, and open discord. There were no pretenses of obedience, no threat of harm to adhere to rules or demands, and the cacophony of sounds with its myriad colors smearing themselves across the colorless memories trapped in the vortex at the heart of all of this did not offer an illusion of security. There, at the center of this maelstrom, was the conductor of this madness; the beating drum of her heart.

Or it had been, before it had been stilled.

Now there was only the satisfying crunch of what sounded like glass crumbling inside some great jaw, the remnants of that drum being crushed into a fine powder. Movement here was not possible, as the beholder existed in a state of existence above the world being observed here, but the surrealism moved for her. In what could have ranged anywhere from the length of time it took a neuron to fire to the period between the birth of the universe and its inevitable heat death, Vesta's formless existence was brought to the center of this confusion by the movement of this chaos towards her.

 

[Vesta]

Space, here a fabric of all she could perceive both physical and not, folded in upon itself at the center of the singularity responsible for the convergence of all these opposing things. Color and sound merged here, washing over the colliding memories and thoughts that gave them context, and Vesta herself was present there - not only by virtue of these all existing within her, but a literal representation of each face she'd ever wore or thought to wear were pulled into the bleak center to be consumed and forgotten. Only one thing remained at the event horizon of this ominous void, though it angered her to see something besides herself survive the crushing collapse of her heart, and it was someone else entirely.

She would have screamed, lost her temper, destroyed it all if she could have interacted with this representation of her psyche, but Quinn Varanin haunted her even here.

The eerie sound of her disembodied voice echoing around her as words she had spoke were consumed by the darkness at the center of her heart spoke aloud the words closest to what she desired to shout, to scream. 'She used me,' was the first, the initial thought she felt when she discovered that someone as diametrically opposite as Sylvia Virtos to her had seemingly replaced her when it became clear to the face that belonged to she that Vesta was unlikely to return from wherever, or whatever, she'd vanished to. Neither of them had realized the shapeshifter had understood what had transpired, not that they could have - the Sith had only found Quinn through the blood trail on her locket and the Aing-Tii art of flow walking, a skill passed along to the datacron her mother had left to her father decades ago. It was what had delayed her return, magnified the flaws she'd carved into herself to sculpt herself into something more human for her otherwise human former lover.

Cracks where she'd struck at herself with too much force, with too much eagerness to shape herself into something that the Echani could put to memory - to make herself less malleable, more static, in an effort to craft an appearance that was all her own and no one else's. It was a process that had caused her to shape her personality alongside it, a process she did not consciously realize she was doing until the understanding that she'd made a persona just for the girl of her dreams had been realized.

Where those cracks appeared, glowing, were where her vulnerabilities lie - a weakness of her own making to keep herself from being too distant from her.

It was to her understanding that love was symbiotic, reciprocal; to receive it one had to open up to the other, and to give it in a manner that could be received one had to give straight from the heart. Here, and now, she saw the result of this. An echani's face staring back at her in panic, confusion, and hurt. It wouldn't disappear.

Neither would the icy shock of understanding that she had permanently ruined whatever little fragments that had remained between them when she'd turned her back on her, that, regardless of the blame she placed at Quinn's feet for choosing someone else as her object of affection, it had been her choice, her fault, when she did so. She'd instructed her apprentice, once, to simply dismiss the conflicted feeling and frustration that came with realizing her own error in judgment, as what was done was done and could not be walked back, but now she found it difficult to follow her own advice.

Especially as, in a way, the princess had always been the only exception.