bakerstreet | memory share meme

[ It was just another Samhain ritual - or so she'd thought. Sister R̸͔̉E̶͍̅D̴̡̎Ả̵̗C̵͎̈́T̶͙̽È̴̗D̸͈͌ enjoyed Halloween as much as every Sister of Sin and Clergy member did. After all, it was the foremost holiday wherein the masses could enjoy a Satanic celebration without inhibition. It was also no coincidence that this day was a convergence of celebration for many faithful, including Satanists, Christians, and pagans; it was simply a time when magic was strong and the very air was alive.

Sister had dressed up for the occasion along with her fellow Sisters of Sin. Tonight's festivities were to be held at a beautiful ritual hall - a mansion in the heart of Los Angeles.

The music was throbbing; the wine was flowing. All around her were the faces of joy and abandon. A celebration of pleasure and hedonism.

And then he walked in. Youthful. Handsome. Lost. A lamb led to the altar of slaughter and ascension.

Their eyes met, and she knew. Today, they would shed their old skin. Tonight, they would be one flesh. At this very moment, he would be given his birthright - the left eye of the bloodline - and would be baptized in a rain of blood.

Thus born anew were Papa Nihil and Sister Imperator. Heir to the the Emeritus bloodline... and his Prime Mover. ]

[The memory cube revealed a younger version of him. God, that haircut was awful. How did he think that looked good? Why did no one tell him it was so terrible? Ah, the folly of youth.

His Black Dragon days. The outfit, the company...it all added up. Kano was there...pitching the scheme that was the beginning of the end of his association with the organization. The turning point.

Kabal?

He shook his head.

"I don't agree with it. It'll bring too much heat down on us. That could put all of our other operations in danger. We're running a business, not a terrorist organization...aren't we?"

He'd joined the Black Dragon as a young man...he was a good fighter who had nothing...came from nothing...sold his skills and moved up through the ranks until he was largely considered in the top five. He realized his skills were valuable and he was good at what he did. For decades, it was good...great even. He'd pulled himself up from nothing...but now it was all threatening to come crashing down because Kano wanted to steal a bomb and sell it to the highest bidder.

While it is a human hand that touches the sphere, what Syzoth is greeted with is something he had forgotten. The crash of the waves and the cries of seabirds rang in his ears as a childhood memory of ocean breeze and sunshine overcame him.

Clawed fingers dug for crabs in the wet sand as waves crashed, revealing the bubbles from their burrows. The small Zaterran trilled happily when his efforts were rewarded and several burrows had occupants that he quickly snapped up. When he was sated, he dove into the cool surf, using his large tail to propel him through the water.

It was a rare moment of joyful solitude.

The moment she had laid her hands on the item, she regretted it. It's not an unfamiliar feeling: she's often recklessly hands-on with the artifacts she handles. But this is something different, an intrusion into her mind she would never grant her companion(s) under any circumstances. The Lady Crow's heart is an obsidian strongbox, but the object she's just picked up in her hands smashes the lock.

Twenty or so years ago. She's laying on a bed piled high with the fur of bears and wolves. Under a nightdress made from spider-silk, so gossamer it more accentuates the body than hides it, her figure has just begun to betray the secret it carries. She'll have to tell him soon, she remembers thinking, resting a hand on the faint rise of her belly. Did he notice tonight when they were together? How her waist and hips fit differently in his hands now?

She feels a nauseated surge of emotion (or perhaps it's just the nausea). Trepidation yes-- his temper is so variable-- but also determination and even joy. She ought to tell him before he goes to fetch his wife. Save him the trip. Surely a messenger could be sent instead, to tell that mouse of a woman that the king's mistress, far more his equal in all things, will bear him the son every king wants and there is no more need for her barren, unsmiling presence around their war camps. Nor, indeed anywhere at all. Eligre will sit beside him and wear the diadem carved with intricate knotwork in the shape of plunging silver horses. She will be his queen, all her devotion finally paid in the power that she craves above all else.

Some enormous shadow blots out the morning light. At first, from the exact moment of the memory, there is a spike of girlish elation and pleasure. But it curdles, turns bitter and sharp with fear and shame, as if corrupted by other, later memories.

When you were Sith, the call of an artifact was less unusual and more another day that ends in y. Normally Eleazar would resist such a pull- one could never quite know what an artifact might do, after all. But aside from the pull there was little darkness in the artifact that he could sense and thus he felt comfortable giving in and leaving things up to chance in ways similar to how he'd done when he was younger and inexperienced.

Part of him also felt confident that his companion likely wouldn't leave him to die- if only for the gifts Eleazar so often gave and the libraries in his many homes full of rare books.

The scene shifted the moment his fingers touched the cube- darkness of the tomb they'd been exploring melting away and being replaced with smooth stone halls with large windows overlooking a desert with pyramid structures in the distance.

Eleazar found himself standing next to his companion- both of them a tad ghostly and see-through, which would be cause for concern had it not been for the distinct feeling of being alive and for the familiarity of the surroundings.

"Now, isn't this fascinating," He commented, glancing to his companion, before looking ahead as there was the noise of a door opening- revealing a younger version of himself. His younger self appeared to be somewhere in his teens and unlike his older self, displayed a sort of emotion that Eleazar was now incapable of feeling- an expression caught somewhere between excitement and trepidation. Another difference was the injury around his throat- appearing more like a wound on this version of him, not yet healed to where it could be called a scar. There was also a shock collar attached to his younger self's neck, and Eleazar turned to follow his younger self's movements as he went past the both of them, the hasty movements of the teenager making sheer skirts billow and the only sound being heard being the tapping of bare feet against stone and the jingling of jewelry as the memory scurried down the hall.

"Shall we see where this memory takes us then?"

Things were never dull around Eleazar, whether it was bedroom activities, adventures, or finding something interesting. It wasn't as if the galaxy was going to fall apart if he spent time with the Sith Lord.

He'd sensed the darkness in the artifact too, and followed Eleazar as he activated it. Eyes went wide with surprise as the scene shifted. At first, he figured it was a teleportation device, but seeing them both looking ghostly quickly stamped that out. His second theory was confirmed as a child who was obviously a younger version of his companion came by.

Very interesting indeed.

"Yes, let's. I find myself quite curious."

"I may lose my air of mystery, but it's a risk I am willing to take."

Eleazar got the feeling that they needed to let the memory play out, anyway. Sure they could brute force their way back out, but it was unnecessary when Eleazar didn't have the emotions necessary to feel any sort of shame about his past, nor did he have any desire to hide it. He'd been pathetic. It was cute.

Taking the Inquisitor's hand, he laced their fingers together and began sauntering in the direction his younger self had run off to- very much treating it as a date even.

He looked out the windows at the sands of Korriban beneath the stronghold they were in and then glanced around the hall at the Sith artworks on display- carvings in the wall, the odd statue here and there. Most depicting slavery in a glorified- and rather tacky- sort of way.

The memory of his younger self disappeared into a room, and Eleazar followed and stopped once inside. It was an office. Fancy and full of artifacts and more art. His younger self was stopped, listening for any noise from the hall, before he skittered toward the desk and crouched down- trying to get one of the drawers open.

"Wasn't I an adorable disobedient little thief of a slave?"

The Inquisitor returned the touch, letting their fingers lace together. It was an oddly intimate gesture on both their parts.

Once in the other room, he looked out the window, gazing in awe at what had to be Korriban. The planet was desolate and devoid of sentient life in the present. But he could see shapes moving around down there, and more buildings in the distance. This was Korriban as it had been during the Sith Empire. What he wouldn't give to be able to explore outside.

Turning away from the window, he gazed at the artwork. The Inquisitor saw slavery as inefficient and a waste of resources. They would have been better off to simply mass produce droids to serve the same purpose. Vaguely, he wondered what that Grand Admiral who liked art would think of this room.

He smirked at the memory of the boy.

"Indeed. How very naughty you were."

"I'd say I very much still am."

A different sort of naughtiness, but still.

The memory was still working on getting the drawer open, popping up from behind the desk every now and then to make sure the coast was still clear. The drawer popped open just as steps could be heard echoing from the hallway. His younger self rifled through the contents of the drawer quickly, finding what he was after and tucking the item into the folds of his skirt and securing it there, shoving the drawer shut again before moving around the desk and hopping up to sit on top of it, shifting his skirts around his legs and leaning back in a way that didn't suit the age he seemed to be just as a man turned into the room- pausing there in the doorway.

"Hi, master ~" The memory chirped, tone playful- winding strands of white hair around a finger in a coy sort of way, "Thought we could use a stolen moment alone."

Eleazar as he was just hummed with recognition, "Oh, I remember this now. The idiot didn't even suspect a thing."

The Inquisitor's jaw dropped, any amusement he felt at the memory turning into shock and disgust. Logically, he knew that many people did that with their slaves if they were good-looking, but seeing it happen to one so young...

He turned towards Eleazar, still aghast. He knew that the Sith was emotionally distant, but still, to have such a blase reaction to see this.

"He did this to you often?"

"Since my early teens, yes."

Eleazar gently pulled on the Inquisitor's hand to lead him back out of the room before the door closed on his younger self and a man who already had hints of gray in his hair. Given that he had spent quite a while in the office he didn't actually know what the halls had looked like at this moment in time, and thus, in the memory- they were empty. He gave the other man's hand a gentle squeeze too that might be intended as comfort. Eleazar wasn't bothered. But he could tell the other man was.

"Made him easy to manipulate."

His younger self had been scared, Eleazar thought. Scared. Angry. Resentful. Doing what he could in order to survive as best he could, under a master who changed the slaves he surrounded himself with as easy and as often as some people changed their clothes. He couldn't really connect with those sorts of feelings any more.

"I looked like I was in love with him, didn't I?"

His tone was still unbothered. He didn't see any use in getting upset, after all. It was a memory. It was done, it had passed. Nothing he did now could change it. And nothing in the memory could hurt him.

"I don't remember him looking so old though. Or so small. I suppose things look different when you're an adult."

The Inquisitor allowed himself to be led out, thankful that he wasn't about to witness what surely happened next. Much as he wanted to run his lightsaber through the slave-owner's chest, this was just a memory and he was but an observer.

"Yes, I suppose you did."

Eleazar had been young, and he had done what he could to survive, surely. Be a pampered house slave, at the cost of his dignity and giving in to a perverted middle-aged man's desires.

"What became of your master, if I may ask?"

"Funny you should ask," Eleazar said, as the scene shifted around them- led by the both of them and the Inquisitor's curiosity, Eleazar was sure. Artifacts often responded to emotion, after all. It was still Korriban- though it was night time now, in the courtyard of the stronghold.

It too was a luxurious space. Artwork and fountains and well-kept plants showing how many resources went into maintaining it.

The Eleazar in this memory was older- eighteen or perhaps nineteen- standing above his deceased owner. There was yelling from inside- Imperial officers and Sith alike- but the memory of himself had been forgotten about, the same as the other slaves. They were all the same as furniture, after all. Nothing to worry about since they couldn't go anywhere with the shock collars on.

The memory of himself was quiet at the moment- the look one of someone who was trying to figure out what they felt.

As blood from his former owner began pooling around his bare feet, soaking into the skirts he wore though, the memory began laughing- doing a twirl and smearing the blood across marble flooring as the laughter became higher, turning to an insane cackle. The purple of his eyes was a deep gold in the memory.

While it likely wasn't the exact moment that something inside him had snapped, it probably wasn't far from it.

"I was an excellent little thief and he never suspected a thing- like the fact that his adorable little slave might steal information that would make his rivals very angry to know, for example."

The Inquisitor smiled at seeing the man's body. It looked like it hadn't been a pleasant death. Still, Eleazar's age in the memory implied that he'd had to put up with the abuse for many years. Seeing him look so gleeful was also quite jarring.

"Very treacherous. Like a true Sith."

"I always thought I was already Sith before I even stepped foot in the Sith Academy. The people there were of a different opinion of course, but..."

The memory of himself was so gleeful. Still twirling about, smearing the pool of blood further over the floors. Still laughing too. Nothing at all like how Eleazar was in the present day where he only got like that when he was putting on a show.

"This is what started me down that path. I didn't get much of an inheritance, but I did get my freedom after this. As I'd intended when I first began stealing evidence. Took me longer than I would have liked, but I don't think I'd have survived the Academy if I went there when I-"

He paused, made a vague gesture, "Back then, I suppose."

"Few records of the Sith academy survive, but I understand training there was quite brutal. I would say that murdering this man made the galaxy a better place, and set you on the right path."

The Grand Inquisitor had hurt padawans who refused to turn to serve the Emperor, but he'd never do anything that sick to a child. There was a difference.

Seeing the memory continue to dance gleefully, the Inquisitor curiously reached out with the Force towards the Occlus of the present. He was hit with a wave of... emptiness. There was nothing there. Like a void in the Force. It was disturbing.

"My only regret is that I didn't get to tear his throat out with my own two hands."

He'd watched. He remembered watching. But aside from orchestrating his downfall, he hadn't gotten to really have a hand in it. Even as he shared that particular gripe though, his feelings didn't really change.

It really was just a void.

An emptiness. It was like standing at the edge above a chasm so deep one couldn't see the bottom, a pull there beckoning to jump or to fall. It was static. It was silence. It was the stillness of the ocean depths. He was smiling as he watched his younger self revel in his newfound freedom. But it wasn't connecting emotionally. He knew how to display emotion.

He didn't remember how to actually feel it.

"The academy wasn't really all that bad. There were those who had an issues with aliens and slaves and those with mixed blood, but. Well, having an overseer or a fellow acolyte as your adversary was a good thing. It's the friendly ones you had to watch out for. Or being coddled. That was a good recipe for death."

Edited 2023-08-17 02:36 (UTC)

The Inquisitor pulled his mind away from Eleazar's, still disturbed by what he'd felt. Had his life really been so traumatic that it had numbed him so?

"Inquisitor training is like that. Lord Vader is a harsh teacher, and many of my Inquisitors came away from the training with one less limb. Fortunately, the Empire cannot afford to be picky with the species of its Inquisitors."

Not with so few Force sensitives left. At least half of them are aliens.

"In the academy we used to have little parties every time a fellow acolyte died. I'd say for every Sith that graduated, there were at least a good ten or twenty who didn't make it."

He shrugged, "That's just what being Sith is like, I suppose. Murdering your way up in the world isn't actually a part of the code so much as cultivation of power is, but most of us take it as carte blanche to take out our competition and our masters."

Murder was a valid enough interpretation.

Eleazar had never minded it so much, though he wasn't as married to murder as some of his peers. If he could manipulate or lie to continue using someone, he preferred that for the most part.

"Suppose I'm lucky that I got the lying, cheating, and stealing down pat before being tossed into the academy, really," He said, idly, watching his younger self crouch down to drag his hand through the blood on the floor, smearing it around.

"... Do you think this is the point in time I snapped completely? I mean, there's got to be something wrong there, right?"

"If you ask me, the Sith of old may have defeated the Republic had they not done things like that. You would have surely outnumbered the Jedi otherwise."

And then of course, Darth Bane invented the Rule of Two. Perhaps at one point the rule was needed, to hide from the Jedi and wait for the right moment to return. But the Jedi were gone, and surely the rule was no longer needed.

He gazed at the memory of teenage Eleazar, watching his expression and body language.

"I would say it's very likely that you snapped at this moment."

"I mean that is true, but hey."

At the very least they'd have more vaguely competent cannon fodder to throw at the opposition. Even a half-trained Sith was capable of taking on a Jedi and winning, if only through dirty tricks.

He tilted his head at the memory then, wrinkling his nose. He wasn't feeling much of anything, but his expression at least conveyed approximately the correct emotion, "Odd moment to snap, really. You would think I'd be happy."

He pulled on the Inquisitor's hand then to lead him away, the scene shifting once more.

The next memory seemed to be taking place in a tomb- the sand and atmosphere marking it as still being on Korriban. His younger self was in the process of snapping another acolyte's legs while the acolyte shrieked for mercy.

"Oh, I remember this. Good times, good times."

"Perhaps you were happy for a little while, euphoric in the moment, only for the trauma to hit you all at once, after years of it building up." Not to get all armchair therapist on him or anything. The Grand Inquisitor liked to think he was good at reading people, even without the Force.

Once more he allowed Eleazar to tug him along, watching at the memory shifted. A tomb. He'd always wanted to visit one of the tombs of Korriban.

His attention quickly turned to the two Sith apprentices in the memory, watching the scene with a stony expression.

"Was this typical of Sith acolyte training?"

"Trauma?" Eleazar asked, with the sort of puzzlement of a man who wasn't particularly familiar with the word. He understood it from a logical standpoint, and he knew something had caused him to snap, but he couldn't really connect with the emotions related to the concept, "Wouldn't think I had any of that. I don't think I was fond of my master, but the arrangement kept his ire away from me- and gave me benefits I likely would be dead without."

It hadn't been much, but Eleazar had gotten to practice his power before coming to the academy. He hadn't stood there on the first day without a single possession, unable to read or write or understand. He'd had a foundation to lean on that the other acolytes hadn't had- aside from the pampered and protected Ffon.

"And I'd say it was common enough. Killing someone inside the academy wasn't allowed- unless we could be certain there'd be no witnesses- but down in the tombs..." He shrugged, looking to the memory of himself snap the other acolyte's arm as well, before setting about making shallow cuts in the man's skin to draw blood to the surface. The shrieks further in in the tomb suggested that something immediately caught the scent.

"As I recall that particular acolyte had attempted to maim me in a similar way earlier in the day and for less useful reasons. Aliens being allowed in the academy as anything other than slaves was still a new thing and not everyone agreed. Especially cretins from older Sith families."

"Your situation at the time was more than enough to cause some trauma," He pointed out.

As he watched the memory, he recalled his own training from Darth Vader. Killing wasn't exactly encouraged, seeing as they couldn't afford to waste anyone with their ranks being so small already, but maiming certainly was. More than one Inquisitor had an artificial limb installed after Vader was through with them.

He was also very confident that had he been born in this time, he would have excelled on Korriban.

"Older Sith families... what a time to be alive."

"Hm," Eleazar hummed- disinterested and apparently done with the topic. If he had been traumatized, he wasn't any more he thought.

"Not sure what the humans were on about there, really. Their blood is so diluted that they might as well have been the same as me."

Eleazar was from a Sith lineage too, after all. Even if from a family who had fallen into obscurity due to Aloysius's fuck up. So far as Eleazar was concerned, the humans who had gone around calling themselves pure had been rather deluded.

"Not like this cretin or many of the others are Sith Purebloods, the truly old Sith families. Most of these morons were probably spawned on Dromund Kaas and would know what a native Korribani or native Ziostan is if it came and bit them in the ass."

He began sauntering after the memory as his younger self began dragging the crippled acolyte through the tombs, the man still screaming his head off from pain and for help that wouldn't come.

"Humans tend to have an arrogance about them, especially those from the Core and Inner Rim."

Now he was curious to see a Sith pureblood, for they hadn't been seen in centuries. He'd seen them in ancient artwork, and read about them in the ancient texts, but as far as the galaxy was concerned, they were all gone. Such a shame.

memory share meme

Sister Imperator, Prime Mover (1969) | Ghost

Kabal | Mortal Kombat | OTA

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Eligre, the Lady Crow || flexible high fantasy OC || OTA

Eleazar Wynn Kallig (Darth Occlus) | Star Wars the Old Republic | for spinsaber

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tw: implied underage

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