She had been staring at the ceiling, lost in the nothing. An empty place, where there was no bed, where there was no man lying by her, where her ruined tattoo had not just been on display. It was not a good emptiness, but it was not a bad one either. Nothing that was absent of her grandmother could ever be bad.
And then there was a voice in the silence.
Scherezade blinked, her mind slowly catching on to reality, realizing what had happened. There was no blush to accompany it this time - just a sheer look of terror. The information dump had never been so great before, had never been so powerful, and had never caused her to lose control in front of another person.
She looked at Gerwald and swallowed hard, trying to force the terror inside of herself to calm down, fighting every ounce of her body not to get out of that bed, that room, and just run. Ryloth was a big place. She could hide on the floating rocks. No.
And he - he hadn't run away either. And he had not been injured in her Scream. He... He was still there? He wanted to talk about it? Scherezade blinked again, her throat feeling dry.
It was her moment to choose. To choose whether she would let him help her bare herself to him as he had let her do with him the previous night, or shut a door she hadn't quite felt in such a tangible manner as now that was opened.
"I'm..." she tried to say, collecting her thoughts. Her story was unorthodox, she knew. She had not found another person who had gone through anything similar. "I'm not..." how did you even tell a story that began like that?
She turned on her side, facing Gerwald now. If she was going to do this, she was going to do this. Her hand came up, covering most of her torso. It was not the partial nudity that bothered her now - it was the fear of being exposed to a degree she had never been before, not even through out all they had done since last night.
"I was born over five hundred years ago," the story slowly came out of her. Her speech was slow, every word used carefully picked, "I was a part of a set of twins. My brother's name was Brayden. We came out of my mother's womb hugging each other tightly and almost killed her in the process. We were... A year, perhaps a year and a half years old, when the Gulag came. Maybe a little less, maybe a little more. Exact times from back then are incredibly fuzzy for me.
Three of my grandparents were, at some point in their own history, the Dark Lord of the Sith. My own parents were powerful Siths as well, though they chose to stay as far as possible from Core Sith Politics. I don't know how exactly everyone in my family did it, but each in their own way found a way to survive the Gulag. Some of them are still sleeping it off. My mother was awake a few years ago, and then vanished again. But me...
I was taken by my grandmother. I don't know if this was by my parents' will, or on her own whim. I think the latter, because my family's ancestors have a knack for meddling where they shouldn't. And my grandmother locked me up inside a pebble, and tossed the pebble on Ryloth. I was... I was painfully that I was there for a long time, but I knew nothing. I had no words, no vocabulary, nothing to look at. Only the Darkness around me. And at first it was fine because I could feel Brayden with me, but eventually his presence vanished from the Darkness too and I was alone.
And then about five months ago, the Darkness turned to green. This green," she said, pointing at her eyes, "but much stronger. And I saw my grandmother's face, and she touched my forehead. And suddenly I was lying naked, on Ryloth, with Katrine looming over me, and I was in this body. My grandmother dumped what I believe is almost all if not all of her memories and information into my head. All of it. But I can't quietly sit and sift through it. It bursts out when I don't expect it, when I don't want it."
Scherezade sighed. Not even Katrine knew the depth of her problems with that information dump. "It was good, at first. I realized I could speak, and I knew how basic things operated, and the Hutt's language. But after the first month... After the first month is stared getting violent. Sometimes. Almost like she's in there, being a stupid spirit inside my head, and prodding me with things. Only she's not there. Because I used the Mandragora's abilities to check. It's just me. But with all her memories and information."
The entire time she had spoken, her eyes had been downcast, staring at the exact point on the sheets between her and Gerwald. Now that her story had been put to words, more words than she had wanted to, she had never felt such a deep level fear in her life. And what was worse - it sounded so made up, so incoherently illogical, so... So stupid.
Scherezade forced herself to look up. If Gerwald was going to decide he was having none of it, she was going to watch him leave. She would not hide. She would... She would deal with it, as she had with everything else that had been flung her way ever since she came out of that pebble.
[member="Gerwald Lechner"]
