Nightmares
Jallira woke with a start and a shudder, and an indrawn breath that was the closest she'd ever come to screaming. Jallira didn't scream, not ever, but the nightmares ... they brought her closer than she'd ever been to doing so, unless she had in the time she didn't remember. She didn't think so, though; the refusal to voice pain felt like something she'd been taught in that bad time, a habit she'd never seen fit to break. She was glad she hadn't, at least on nights like this. The last thing she wanted was to wake Rilus by screeching like a scalded nexu in the middle of the night. Rilus being a heavy sleeper, he didn't precisely wake up when the woman curled up next to him with her head resting on his chest shuddered. He did, however, wrap an arm a little more tightly around her, as if his subconscious registered her need for a hug and responded to it without having to have him do anything like be even remotely awake. Jallira returned the quasi-hug with a quiet sigh of mixed relief and comfort and tried to go back to sleep herself. It wasn't easy; reliving her week of captivity in her dreams was not something she wanted to risk repeating. Her treatment at the hands of Darth Raath had been brutal on a number of levels, not least of which the long periods of sensory deprivation trapped within that crystal. The only respite from it was pain, both inflicted with the Force and various levels of overexposure to stressful empathic resonances from others. He didn't have her to physically torture, but clearly her empathy talent was enough of a known quantity to exploit, and finding a torture victim among the Sith to whom to expose his disembodied captive was disturbingly easy. The pain itself had been bad; the despair that always came when someone needed help and she was unable to grant it was worse. Worst of all, she had no idea whether rescue was even possible. Surely Raath had taken precautions to ensure that she couldn't simply be dragged back to herself, the way she'd been dragged away through whatever means Raath had used. Most of all, there was no telling where he was keeping the vessel in which her Force-presence was trapped, but it had to be an Imperial world. If it was Dromund Kaas ... well, she knew some Marran had connections among the Sith, but surely none close enough to Raath to enable them to save her. All she knew at the time was that there was a chance that the only way the pain would stop was if the Marran killed her. And they wouldn't. The sense from Alasha in the first few moments of her captivity, along with a gift of strength and Flames, was that they wouldn't. The Marran would try to rescue her, and she would have to hold on for as long as it took for them to do so ... however much it hurt. It was comforting, in a sense, that anyone believed she was strong enough to withstand anything for however long she had to. At the same time, the obligation carried its own sort of fear and despair - what if she couldn't? What if she let them down and broke before they could even try to set her free? But that was clearly what Raath wanted, from what little she could glean of Raath's emotions. He was too clever; he seemed fully aware that it was going to take longer than he had to get her to hate anyone, even him. Unfortunately, there were more routes to the Dark Side than rage and hate, and instead of trying to push a rage button Jallira didn't seem to have, Raath went another route; despair. Make the situation hopeless enough, was the sense, and she'd capitulate when she realised that it was going to happen anyway. If nothing else, at least if the Marran sensed she'd fallen to the Dark Side, they would kill her, and the pain would finally stop. Alasha's gift helped her through the first little while. For the rest, it was sheer stubborn. Whatever she felt, she wouldn't do that to the Marran. She wouldn't break the vows she'd made to Sedryn when he first taught her the Flames, or her vows to Ihlrath when she was formally Named. She wouldn't disappoint all the people who had so much faith in her. Most of all, she would not put the people she cared about in the position where they had to be the ones to end her life if there was any way she could stop it. She was never sure, would never be sure, why people cared so much about her, but they did, and her death at their hands would hurt them. If she gave up of her own volition, she'd be the cause of that pain, in a way. She was powerless to stop the suffering she felt around her, but she could at least keep someone from suffering, and she'd endure whatever she had to in order to do so. In short, she refused to break; refused to fall. If Raath wanted her dead, he'd have to do it himself, but if he wanted her tainted ... he was wasting his time. The rescue came as an unparalleled shock on a number of levels. The return of physical sensation overloaded her in the first moments, and the realisation that a small group of Wardens had broken into Raath's vault and robbed him took awhile to process. Guilt came next - for Alasha's weariness, for Mychae's grievous lightsaber wound, for Mae having felt some of the torture Jallira had endured because she'd been ridiculous enough to take off the Force-cuffs that dampened their bond, for everyone's worry over her during the time she was away. The only way to work through that guilt was to go back to helping people, but of course there had been orders from both Rilus and Alasha as her superior officer to stay out of medbay for a couple of days to recover. They were probably right, but so was Jallira when she bargained them down to letting her work in the bistro and on a recreational project-in-progress she had going in the lab. Doing things, going back to even part of a normal routine, was the only way she was going to fully convince herself that she was back and safe. All the same, it didn't stop the nightmares - the sense of crushing, choking darkness; the bursts of other people's torment; the times when there was no sensory input at all and a moment might as well have been a millennium. It also didn't make falling asleep any easier, since the quiet dark of sleep edged too close to parts of her captivity and her mind resisted that. Meditation was equally difficult, but she persevered. The only way to get past a fear was to face and push past it. Things were returning to normal, at least. Her three days of rest period were over and she could go back to her regular routine in medbay and lab, which helped. The nights were a little difficult, but the nightmares would fade in time. Until then, Rilus' presence, even asleep, always helped calm her down. So instead of trying to get up and work instead of risking a further attempt at sleep, she snuggled up just a little closer to her sweetheart and, in less time than she had expected, went back to sleep. And any potential nightmare repeats can just get nerfed.
