weetuskenraider | Room 529, Thursday Midday

Karla shook her head. "No. It...sets the stage, if you will By creating a landscape you can interact with, it allows you to take a more active approach in confronting things. But when it wears off in a few hours, the only changes in your head will be the ones you created yourself."

Karla was glad Tahiri hadn't asked her original question. Though she'd answer truthfully. It took trust to gain trust.

Ben said he trusted Karla, so . . . Tahiri let out a breath slowly. "I don't know if I'm ready to change anything yet." The advice she could give was the best she could do at helping the war effort right now, after all, even if it cost her, and she was nothing if not stubbornly set on doing what she could to help the cause Anakin had died for. "But . . . I can show you."

She reached for the brew, uncertain green eyes looking up to meet Karla's. "Promise I won't be alone?"

"I swear upon my Jewels that I will never leave your side," Karla said immediately. "And that I'll let no danger come to you, either here or in your dreamscape." She held out her hand for Tahiri to take.

She set up a Sapphire shield across the door to the room, though she didn't add any nasty surprises to it. Everyone might swear that Fandom was safe, but Karla would take no chances.

Tahiri sensed nothing untrustworthy about her, and she swallowed hard then nodded as she took Karla's hand. This was possibly insane, possibly reckless, possibly a half dozen things she could hear Corran or Kam yelling about now. That . . . didn't deter her. "Okay. Okay," she said shakily, and brought the bottle to her lips to drink the brew.

Force, she did not want to relive this, but if there was a chance in hell to figure out how to deal with Riina . . .

The first thing she remembered, after regaining consciousness, was waking up on a cool, hard floor of some living material, being observed through a transparent membrane by two . . .

Well, they were female. Their faces were mutilated and tattooed in a more delicate fashion than the Yuuzhan Vong warriors who'd captured her, but the intense interest of the way they were looking at her worried Tahiri even more and absurdly, it was right about then that she realized her lightsaber was gone. Her observers spoke to each other in the guttural snarls of their own language, though Tahiri could pick out the word Jeedai every now and then.

"You're crazy if you think you can keep me here," she yelled, pounding on the surprisingly unyielding membrane with both fists as she sent out a desperate mental cry for Anakin. "He wouldn't leave me behind again, just watch!"

The mindscape opened up in front of her, and already Karla knew this was going to be brutal. The cold, calculating expression on the creatures' faces as they watched Tahiri with clinical detachment. She took the mental side step required to free part of her consciousness and stepped into the mindscape behind Tahiri. She'd promised the girl that she wouldn't leave her alone, hadn't she?

"I'm here," she said softly. "You're not alone. This is not happening to you again."

Tahiri, the part of her that knew this was just a memory, turned and spared Karla a grateful smile, then resumed her pounding on the membrane.

She'd yelled herself hoarse by the time they lowered the membrane and came toward her -- Mezhan Kwaad, her memories would tell Karla was the name of the one with the markings and the eight-fingered hand of a Master shaper, and the other with her freshly-grafted Adept's hand was her apprentice, Nen Yim. But she wasn't exhausted yet, and Tahiri put up the best fight she could; half trained as she was at fourteen, she gave them a decent struggle for several minutes. She wasn't prepared to resist the neurotoxin that flooded her system from the sharp jab in the side of her neck, a swift movement from Mezhan Kwaad's Master's hand.

Then her muscles wouldn't cooperate any more, and Tahiri couldn't even scream as they dragged her to one side of the vivarium.

Something latched onto the back of her neck, like a mouth with sharp teeth that sank right into her brainstem, and she couldn't blink back the tears that welled up in her eyes.

Anakin! she tried to call out with her mind again, but the first wave of pain spread like fire through her body and she crumpled to the floor. This time, whether she wanted to or not, she did scream, and didn't stop for several hours.

Karla knew disturbing. Her first time using this brew on her own had involved a ten-year old who needed to confront the male who had broken her. But this...this was beyond even that. Fortunately the scene didn't last hours, time was compressed here. Still...may the Darkness be merciful!

Karla crawled over to Tahiri's crumped form, and drew the screaming girl up, holding her close. There was nothing else she could do, other than hold her while she screamed and writhed and wailed.

If not for her awareness of Karla's presence, she'd have stopped trying to remember this long before now. If not for that, she might not even be able to pick out as much detail as she did, and she was grateful for Karla being there. For obvious reasons, this wasn't a memory Tahiri cared to dwell on if she could help it.

The pain continued, though over time it grew more systematic, more analytical, testing each nerve array and its reactions in careful order. Sometimes when it got too strong she could feel Anakin, half the planet away, just for a moment.

Tahiri still fought them as much as she could, but she'd lost track of how long she'd been here and how many times the thing hooked up to her neck -- the provoker spineray -- had inflicted more pain in response to her resistance, and her efforts were nearly laughable now.

When she was immobilized by the provoker spineray's commands and Mezhan Kwaad raised three razor-sharp fingers and gashed her forehead from hairline to eyebrows, even through the blood running into her eyes Tahiri saw Anakin out in Yavin 4's jungle, driven to his knees by the pain. She reached out, tried to grasp that mental connection, but another dose of neurotoxin entered her bloodstream and both image and conection faded away as unconsciousness took her.

Karla knew this was just a memory. Knew there was nothing that she could do. Knew that she just had to sit there and endure, same as Tahiri.

Karla wasn't good at just accepting things.

She was crying, now, she couldn't help it. Every time those creatures--Karla couldn't bear to think of them as anything but that, not even wanting to claim the slight kinship of consifering them female--came for Tahiri, Karla would try to interpose herself, swatting them away, putting shields between them and Tahiri. It didn't work of course. Nothing did. But Karla couldn't stop trying.

Tahiri reached out to her reassuringly -- it was strange, being the one offering reassurance under these circumstances.

"It's just pain," she half mumbled to Karla at one point when the shapers were away, then laughed raggedly. "That's what they're trying to teach me . . . it's just pain. And I'm starting to believe it."

Karla's heart broke again. "Please don't," she whispered. "Please don't comfort me." Karla wasn't certain how to explain that her growing rage was the only thing keeping her together, and if Tahiri took that from her... She reached out with one hand to clasp Tahiri's and with the other, wiped off some of the blood that was smeared across Tahiri's forehead. "I will fix this," she vowed. "Darkness help me, I will fix this."

A wish, made with blood, is a prayer to the Darkness.

Some of the warmth had seeped from Tahiri's eyes as she met Karla's gaze, but her usual stubbornness was -- for now -- undiluted. She jerked her chin downward briefly in a fierce nod.

When Mezhan Kwaad and Nen Yim entered the vivarium this time, Tahiri watched them come in, not realizing there was something new and different about the predatory nature of her own gaze.

"I would advise you not to attack us with your Jeedai tricks," Mezhan Kwaad told her. "The provoker has been told to stimulate you to great agony if we are afflicted in any way. Though in time you will come to understand agony, at the moment you seem to dislike it, and it clearly disrupts your concentration. There are worse things we could do to you."

Tahiri's eyes widened. "I can understand you," she said. Then she stopped, looking even more confused. "I'm not speaking Basic. This is --"

"You speak our language now, yes," the master shaper said. "If you are to be one of us, you must speak the sacred tongue."

"Be one of you?" she sneered. "Thanks, but I'd much rather be the slime under a Hutt."

"That's because you perceive yourself an infidel," Mezhan Kwaad said reasonably. "You do not underístand us, and there are things that confound us about you and the other Jeedai. But we will understand you, and you will understand us. You will become a tissue connecting the Yuuzhan Vong and the Jeedai, nurturing both. You will make it possible for understanding to flow both ways."

"That's what you want from me?"

"You are the path to peace," Mezhan Kwaad assured her.

"Kidnapping me won't get you peace!" she shouted.

"We did not kidnap you," Mezhan Kwaad said. "We rescued you from the other infidels, remember?"

"You're twisting things," Tahiri snapped. "The whole reason they captured me was to give me to you."

The master's headdress rearranged itself into an expression of mild anger.

"Memory is a most malleable commodity," Mezhan Kwaad said. "It is mostly chemical. For instance, you now know our language. You did not learn it."

"You put it there," Tahiri insisted.

"Yes. Your memory of the words, the grammar, the syntax. All introduced to you."

"So you can implant memories. Big deal. We Jedi can do that, as well."

"Indeed. I have no doubt those Jeedai abilities could do much to confuse one as young as yourself. How many of your memories are real? How many manufactured? How could you tell the difference?"

"What's your point?"

"My point is this. Right now you think you are -- what is it, Taher'ai?"

She clenched her fists so hard her nails bit into her palms. "My name is Tahiri."

"Yes. Tahiri, a young Jeedai candidate, raised by a tribe strange to her --"

"Sand People." How did they know all this? What had she told them? Had they gotten it out of her mind somehow?

"Of course. But soon enough, you will remember. After we've stripped away the false memories and undone the disgusting modifications made to your body, you will remember who you are."

Tahiri's throat went tight with fury. "What are you talking about?"

"You are Riina of Domain Kwaad. You are one of us. You always have been."

"No! I know who my parents were!"

"You know the lies you were told, the memories you were given. Fear not. We will bring you back."

With that, Mezhan Kwaad signaled to Nen Yim and the two of them turned to leave. They were still in view when Tahiri slumped to the floor and started to sob -- she'd cried before now, but this was the first time she'd ever been on the edge of giving in.

[[Lightly adapted from Edge of Victory 1: Conquest by Greg Keyes.]]

"Nonononononono!" Karla cried out, flinging herself at Tahiri. "Don't listen, don't give up! They've done something, that's not you, it isn't."

Karla was starting to get an idea of what that second psychic scent was. It was a horrifying, sickening idea, but an idea. And, if she was right, it probably could be fixed. But it would be a long, slow process. These creatures had broken Tahiri and begun to remake part of her, like potters with clay.

*I know you now* she sent on a psychic thread aimed directly at that second thread, at Riina. She bypassed Tahiri entirely. *Your days are numbered, bitch.*

Of course, there was only one problem. There was no way in Hell she could destroy Riina. Doing so would probably kill Tahiri.

The only response from Riina, after a moment of surprise that she'd been addressed directly, was a snarl of defiance: Krel os'a hmi va ta!

"I couldn't stop them," Tahiri half mumbled, looking up at Karla miserably. "I tried, but I couldn't . . ."

She couldn't tell how much more time had passed, but the pain got more sporadic and yet more systematic. If she thought about her life at the academy or on Tatooine before that, if she called herself Tahiri, if she spoke to them in Basic, the provoker spineray dropped her to the ground in agony. If she remembered a childhood spent on a worldship with her crèchemates, answered their questions in their language -- the pain didn't come. And even when it did she learned to welcome it.

"What is your name?" asked Nen Yim, crouching nearby on the other side of the membrane.

"It is --" A fresh wave of pain cut off the answer she'd been about to give, and only subsided when she told herself that answer was wrong. "My name is Riina Kwaad."

That answer seemed to please the shapers, and the conditioning continued. The same questions were asked day after day, and the answers came with less hesitation. They told her she had been born with certain powers that might have been crippled when the infidels native to this galaxy captured her and tried to make her one of them; they wanted to test that power.

"It didn't hurt," she said in surprise after the first time Mezhan Kwaad asked her to use her powers to lift a stone. "I thought it would hurt."

"You see? Your cure is progressing well. Soon you will remember everything about your life as a Yuuzhan Vong," Mezhan Kwaad promised her.

"I wish," she began, and trailed off wistfully.

"What?"

"I feel like I'm two halves of two different people, glued together," she said. "I wish I were whole again."

"You will be," Mezhan Kwaad answered. "Before you know it, you will be. Now, if you could lift the stone again, please . . ."

Karla had no idea what was said, but she didn't much care, either. *I'm a Sapphire-Jeweled Black Widow Healer Queen. Your better, bitch! If it wouldn't hurt Tahiri as well, I would make you pay for every moment of pain they forced her to endure for your sake.* She knew, technically, Riina wasn't at fault, either. She, like Tahiri, had been shaped by the brutality of the creatures. But she was the reason they had hurt Tahiri so, and it was hard not to strike out for that reason.

It was an impulse Karla would learn to overcome, control, and eventually vanquish. Not today, however, with the torture that was Riina's birthright still occuring in front of her.

"It's okay," Karla soothed Tahiri out loud. "It isn't your fault. No one blames you for not being able to hold them off. The only people here who should feel guilt are these creatures. You are blameless, Tahiri, and innocent. Don't grieve for this. Be glad that your strength was enough to survive. That is all that matters."

"Innocent? Am I?" Tahiri asked, curled up in as tight a ball as she could manage. The scene shifted again, from the vivarium in the shaper damutek to the ramp of a living Yuuzhan Vong ship.

Mezhan Kwaad held up a nut-shaped vial in one hand, threatening the crowd of warriors with the potent toxin inside; at her feet, Anakin and his Shamed One companion writhed in pain from the wounds she'd inflicted on them with her eight-fingered shaper's hand . . . and was still inflicting, elongated fingers wrapped around Anakin's bleeding forearm and Vua Rapuung's leg. "Nen Yim. Drag those two on board," she commanded, indicating them.

Nen Yim started to follow the order, but when she and Mezhan Kwaad saw Anakin's lightsaber floating up into the air, they hesitated -- at which point Mezhan Kwaad sent more shocks of pain through him.

The lightsaber, undeterred, continued its trajectory . . . right into Tahiri's outstretched hand, where she thumbed it to life and decapitated Mezhan Kwaad.

And looked down, and smiled, and laughed.

Mentally, Karla cheered as Mezhan Kwaad's body collapsed to the ground. Though she felt that the death had been quicker and cleaner than the one that she'd actually deserved, she knew that lingering messy deaths often haunted the killer, even if such things were perfectly justified.

And Tahiri had enough things haunting her already.

Which is why, rather than congratulating Tahiri, she crossed to where she was standing and went to lay a gentle hand on her arm. "Are you okay?" she asked, ignoring the laughter. "Does this act bring you guilt? Joy? Relief? Pain? You can tell me."

"You saw what she did to me," Tahiri answered, her voice still low and taut. "I wanted to do this. I'm glad I did," she added fiercely, though there was an uncertain undertone to the words.

"Tahiri!" Anakin's voice cut into the conversation; he still sounded choked but at least he could speak now that pain wasn't scrambling his thoughts.

"My friend. My best friend." She stepped away from Karla, moved toward him with his lightsaber still ignited, and lowered the tip of its violet blade hovering barely away from his face. "You left me."

"I've been trying to find you this whole time."

"You aren't real." Her voice still sounded different, and her eyes were cold. "This is a lie."

"It's not a lie, Tahiri." Anakin's blue eyes locked on her own. "You're my best friend. I love you." He didn't flinch when she twitched the blade and sheared off a lock of his hair, but she did. "I love you," he repeated.

She shut her eyes and when she opened them again, the warmth, or a semblance of it at least, had returned.

Tahiri turned to Karla again. "She hurt me. She hurt Anakin. I cut her head off, and I feel like I'm the one who died."

"In my world, there is no law against murder," Karla told Tahiri, her voice both hard and defiant. "We believe everything has a price, and what these things did you you racked up a debt they could never repay. And I'm glad you killed her, too. That wasn't murder, it was justice. That bitch was a mad dog. You don't try to reason with that, you can't force it to see the error of its ways. All you can do is put it down before it hurts someone you love."

Her voice softened. "Killing should never be easy, Tahiri. I think that when it is, you've lost something and regaining that part of you comes with a heavy price. I've killed. He was trying to...hurt me. Badly. He and his friends were trying to break me, and I killed him to protect myself. And even now, I stay up at night and question. Was I right to have done so? Was there another, better way? Am I a bad person for the part of me that was pleased by his death? Neither your joy nor your concern make you a bad person in this. It only proves your essential humanity."

"Fear, loss, rage, agony, confusion over your very self...She forced to to experience all of these. And yet, when it counted, you got control over yourself and you didn't harm the man who loved you. You kept your honor and your integrity, and even your empathy. For everything you lost, think of how much you kept."

This was the end of the relevant portion of Tahiri's memory. "Revenge isn't the Jedi way," she answered shakily, her voice back to normal. "It's not what we do."

She put extra emphasis on the 'we,' as if it was a pointed statement aimed at Riina, at the dark version of her from Anakin's vision, at what she suspected about the version of her in Ben's time.

"Besides," she added very quietly, glancing back at the now frozen image of Anakin, "I lost him too." That pain wasn't as raw any more, but it was persistent.

Karla didn't have a helpful response to that. The Blood saw things in terms of prices and debts, and trying to explain to Tahiri that her actions were perfectly justified in terms of her moral compass wasn't going to be particularly helpful.

"How did you lose him?" Karla asked gently. "In the aftermath of all this?" Darkness help her, but if this male turned on her after everything that had happened...

It was a good thing that thought was unvoiced; Tahiri wouldn't have taken the question well at all.

"He died in the war, the year after this," she answered haltingly, eyes still fixed on his memory-image. "We were on a mission . . . he was hurt too badly . . . there wasn't time for a healing trance. Anakin bought us the time we needed, but . . ."

Which was why Karla stayed quiet about things she was unsure of. In cases like this, she had to be trusted and seen as an ally. Not resented for a stupid, off-hand comment.

Funny how much the coven had harped on her about keeping her mouth shut when she was learning about this. It was like they hadn't trusted her to do so or something.

"I am so sorry about your loss," Karla whispered. "He seems like a good male and a better friend. You...cared for him? As more than a friend?"

That explained the start when she'd so carelessly mentioned Professor Skywalker earlier.

Tahiri nodded vehemently. "Sometimes, when they were hurting me, he felt it. We grew up together, did everything together. We never did get around to making any plans, but . . ." Guilt seeped into her expression, and to anyone inclined to notice such things Riina's presence got more assertive. "I never told him, before he died. How much I loved him."

Karla felt Riina move, and sent a wordless snarl down the link. "If he could feel your pain, do you think it's possible he felt your love too? I know it doesn't make up for not getting a chance to say the words, but is it possible he knew anyway?"

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject