Pain... darkness... the sound of metronomic tones....
Sylvana moaned softly, discomfited by a body which had been in one position far too long. Her head was pounding, her body felt bruised.... Idly she wondered at her sudden ability to number her bones and muscles by feel.
She needed to shift, and so she tried to do so... and was stopped by straps holding her down. Trapped. In pain.
Not again.
Sylvana screamed, then began crying, shouting in her hysterics. "Ú, Im thang leithian! I promised I wouldn't go back! Im annapeth! Please, I won't tell anyone! Im thang leithian! LET ME GO!!!!"
The 'fresher slid shut behind Josh. He briefly considered sneaking into the cockpit to try and see how far away they were from their destination, but dismissed it. The bacta patches were impeding his movements, and Nick was just as used to Ewok attacks as he was. Josh couldn't face a disappointed glance, or even a stern talking-to. The vigil on Syl was penance enough for the moment.
He scratched the back of his head, then heard a cry from the direction in which he'd left her. He jumped into motion, hammering at the doorlock when it wouldn't open fast enough.
Syl was thrashing against her restraints, babbling, her words fading in and out of clarity. Her eyes were open, staring directly at the ceiling, but were glazed and unfocused. The monitor's tones jumped erratically as her heart raced beyond normalcy.
A single phrase condensed from her screams. "LET ME GO!!!"
Josh scrabbled through the paraphernalia lying around, seeing if there was a sedative. What few air syringes were close to hand were labelled in Aurebesh, and Josh didn't know which were sedatives, which were stimulants, and which may have been sulphuric acid.
Finally, he just hoped for the best and held one of Syl's arms down, releasing it from the straps. "You're okay," he tried telling her - the soothing effect somehow lessened by the necessity to shout.
She quickly disengaged herself, tearing the I.V. from her arm using her teeth, as the opposite arm was splinted out of use. The panicked look slowly began to lessen as the surroundings began to seep into her consciousness, beginning to dissolve the tapestry of memories that had woven suffocating about her.
She looked about from her crouched position beside the head of the bed, where she'd scrambled upon her freeing, going only as far as the leads pasted to her back and chest would allow. Her casted leg rested behind her as she put all her weight on her good leg... and then.... Recognition slowly began reaching her eyes.
"Syl - Syl, are you okay?" Josh approached slowly, his arms wide, fingers splayed, searching Syl's eyes, readying to react if she attacked... and hating himself for it.
"J... Josh?" she asked, loking still a bit confused, the man before her a bit blurred. The tones of the monitor were still beeping wildly.
"Yeah, that's me. You're safe, Syl. How're you doing?"
Her eyes were still trying to clear, though she couldn't see past the blurr. "My head ouches, my arm doesn't move, and my leg won't work."
"Uh, yeah. That was me, too. You might want to, uh, sit down or something."
She stayed in her defensive posture, "Where are they? They were just here..." She broke off, tilting her head sideways just a little as she heard more sounds further in the ship.
"Them? We've got Nick in the cockpit, and some people locked up in the hold," he gestured in that direction, "But otherwise, there's no-one."
Frowning, Sylvana slowly lowered herself to sit back on the cot, dangling her casted leg off from it, rubbing lightly at her temple with her undamaged hand. "Right, of course," she spoke softly to herself. "That was all twenty years ago...."
"Yeah, well, you've got a head injury right now. I'd shine a light in your eyes, but I've got no baseline for comparison..." Josh trailed off as she continued to stare, unseeing, at the floor.
"They can't know...."
He crouched, trying to get into her line of sight, worrying terms like 'brain damage' starting to throng in his conscience.
Syl closed her eyes, shaking her pained head only slightly before opening them again. It was as though something, whatever she'd been thinking about, was pushed back... hidden. "Just see if they react to the light," she instructed quietly - medical training providing a calm to the storm in her mind.
"Uh, who?"
"My eyes. If the pupils react, I don't have a concussion."
"Right, thanks." He grabbed a glow-rod from a bracket and brought it hesitantly toward Syl's eyes; remembering at the last second it was probably a bad idea to move things at her face too quickly.
Syl remained unflinching, raising one hand to cover her eye, darkening its sight before allowing the light to contract the pupil. She repeated the process on her other eye. "Well?" she asked quietly. The monitor steadily beeping in the silence.
"They're contracting," he clicked off the glow-rod. "Where does it hurt?"
"Where doesn't it hurt?" Syl said with a ghost of a smile, before a small laugh escaped. The laugh quickly dissolved into a coughing fit.
Josh grabbed a nearby piece of cloth that looked clean, sat beside her, and held the cloth toward her mouth. Part of him wondered if he should really be this close to her - but he stamped it down with the realisation that no-one else was near enough.
She reached for, and took, the cloth, and held it to her mouth as she coughed. Once she regained control of herself, she dropped the hand holding the cloth and leaned her head tiredly against his shoulder.
Josh blinked slightly at this, his arm moving of its own accord to drape itself across her shoulders. He ran a few opening lines through his head. "You know, you're pretty together for someone's skull I caved in with a rock." "If you're feeling all right, you probably shouldn't." "You stabbed me and I beat you up." He understandably gave up, just sitting there silently, trying not to stare at the bloodflecks on the cloth.
Sylvana, after a short while, spoke the first thing that came into her mind - despite her belief that she didn't belong here at all. "I had this dream...."
Here it comes.... "What sort of dream?"
"There was this desert... a campfire's embers...." She frowned slightly as she tried to piece together the memory of her dream.
"Let me guess, a talking bug-man too?" He kept his tone light, trying to hide the sudden flash of recognition. Why did I imagine a campfire?
She blinked, tilting her head just a bit to look at him from where she rested it against his shoulder. Funny how the proximity eliminated the blurr. "How did you know?"
His stomach lurched, and honesty spoke before he could think to lie. "I had a dream kind of like that, too. But tell me about yours first."
"It was really strange. Started I was in this tree in the middle of nowhere... then the bug man, kind of a giant ant, came to warn me about something. He wouldn't clarify, then he told me to start walking.
"I did, and it wasn't long until I was by this campfire's ashes... you were there too. We started talking..." she winced as she attempted a shrug.
"You looked a fright," Josh chimed in, his rational mind reeling. "Just the way I'd left you. But you seemed happy to see me, and you healed in front of me. It was like you didn't remember any of it. And then... then I had... I had to wake up." He stopped, but the words hung in the air. If he hadn't awoken, would she be dead now?
"When you left, you walked across the ashes, and the fire began to burn..." She finished. "As though it really happened." In stead of simply accepting it, she frowned.
"Uh... I dunno. I mean, it could be coincidence, uh, and what's real and all that, and I was stunned at the time, and maybe it was, uh, a hallucination or something...." He trailed off since Syl was mulling it over. It wasn't the most convincing piece of rhetoric in the history of speech either.
"It could be a coincidence..." She paused for several long moments. "I know this sounds insane, but.... Did you ever have a dream where we fought off guys climbing balconies of a hotel?"
The memory hit so hard, juxtaposing ludicrously with the situation. Josh burst out laughing. "Yeah," he managed eventually. "They broke in a couple of floors down, and tried grappling our balcony, and then you pulled out a bow...." He saw the expression on her features. "Oh."
Syl quickly looked away to the floor, "Surreal...." It wasn't certain if she were talking to him ... or herself. "Pre cog, post cog, or whatever-the-sith cog is one thing; but sharing dreams now?" her too quiet tone was almost a whimper.
"It was the night after we first met," Josh said softly, his pulse racing, most of his mind running in circles screaming. Images flashed through his memory - a smile, a laugh, a squeaky inflatable alien, and the dull impact of the rock in his hand. He closed his eyes and drew in a shuddering breath.
Sylvana was soon lost in thoughts of her own. Telling him to be careful, then dreams... the dreams. Were they good omen, or bad? And... why did forgetting what had been said in this most recent - with Josh or the Bugman - make her feel as though she were missing something vital?
"How much do you remember?" Josh asked at last, his voice shattering the silence like a gunshot. "I mean, do you know why you're here?"
"I don't," she said softly. "I usually do, but this time, I... I don't."
"Usually? You wake up in medbays a lot?"
"No... I mean my dreams. I feel like I'm missing something important..." she paused. "Why I'm in a medbay's easy," she smiled softly. "You got a good hit in while we were sparring. Don't recall anything else. Did I fall down a cliff or something?"
"No. No, not exactly." He straightened and withdrew his arm from around her. "We were sparring, yeah, and I was doing a bit of trash-talking, and-" he swallowed, fighting the lump growing in his throat. "And you pulled out some knives, came at me, stabbed me, and I..." And I dismantled you. I broke some bones, then brained you with a rock. If Nick hadn't shown up when he did, I would have killed you. I'm surprised you're alive at all. "...I, uh, over-reacted."
"Oh." She responded in a small voice. "I'm sorry, it's my fault. I guess I really am a berserker after all. I thought when-" she suddenly cut herself off before she said something she shouldn't.
"No, it's not your fault." Well, it kind of is.... "I didn't have to do what I did." He swallowed. "At the end, I was smashing your head with a rock. I... I didn't have to do that." He hunched over, not daring even to look at her. I should NOT be here. I should have paged Nick. I should have let him handle it. Why did it have to be me?
Memories from when she was a child crashed in on her then. Waking, confused, to find out she'd gone into a rage... and killed another child. This was foremost, followed by overheard conversations of a family curse - a curse that each generation would bear one who could kill without recall, kill even their closest of companions. Generations before her, a sword was taken up which would condemn the line until time's end.
She, Sylvana Sellcúron Peredhil Loran Lorrdain, was a child of that line. And as a child, had fulfilled the continuation of the curse.
"You had to." You disabled me... I would have murdered you.
"No I didn't. I've disarmed and disabled Ewoks on a blood feud before, and don't laugh unless you've tried it. I took hits I don't think I had to, but..." he swallowed again. "...but I did it to make sure I-killed-you." The last words emerged in a rush, then Josh fell silent.
"...Maybe it would have been best if you had."
"Bullshit." The word was delivered like a whipcrack, and Josh's head snapped up, his eyes blazing as he jumped to his feet. "There is no way in hell that would be the best. Not for me, not for anyone, and especially not for you. If either of us should be dead, I should. I thought I was gone on the Admonitor, but I came back." He leaned in closer, lowering his voice into a growl. "I came back, Alison didn't."
He pointed a finger at her and continued. "I've had to find a way to live with that. But one thing I do not believe is that either you or me is better off dead. And this is coming from someone who was trying to kill you." His voice was building in volume, but he did not move his face away. "You'd rather throw away everything you've ever been just because you don't like something about yourself? Not on my watch, lady." He paused, then backed away, still keeping his fiery gaze on Syl. He repeated, softly but still resolute. "Not on my watch."
He had stunned her into silence as the first words leaped from his tongue, and it was only when he spoke softly that she, herself, spoke. "I AM a liability, Captain. A danger to yourself and every single member of this team." Her eyes held a dull flame, but there was a flame nonetheless. "I could kill one of you and not even know I was the one who'd done it. I don't have a choice in the matter. I could kill you, and it wouldn't be the first time I killed someone I cared about. You would have done us all a world of good if you had succeeded in killing me. DON'T try to say any different, it's the simple and Blatant Truth. Sometimes the truth is pretty, this time isn't one of them... Sir." Throughout her tirade, she never once raised her voice, though the timbre of certainty rang clearly through her even tone.
Josh snorted. "So tell me, Agent. What have you done to check this 'blatant truth'? It's a 'blatant truth' that if you drop something, it falls down." He smiled unpleasantly. "But not if you test it in free-fall. That you're a liability, I'll grant you. That is the truth. But truths can change."
His smile softened, taking on an almost melancholy cast. "We won't be better off with you dead," he said with a quiet sincerity. "But maybe you need to learn to live." His face hardened, "And that, Agent, is about as ugly a truth as they come."