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He draws his blasters, aiming with precision that would be deadly to a real enemy. The training dummy in front of him is covered in scraps of black armor, with an ill-fitting Imperial helmet as the only part that hadn't been shot to pieces before being used for target practice. He takes a deep breath, then lets loose a volley of blaster fire that rattles the dummy where it stands, finishing with a shot to the helmet that leaves it spinning in place on its head.
Corso leans back in his seat and sets aside his own blaster, freshly polished. "Why all the setup, Grave? Seems like a lot of work just to get some practice in."
"'Cause I fucking hate Imps," the Zabrak says. "It's pretty simple."
"Yeah, I noticed that part." Corso laughs humorlessly. "I meant- I'm sure I'm just kicking a firewasps' nest here, but I gotta know. What'd they do to you to make you hate them so bad?"
He scowls. Aiming only one blaster this time, he holds the trigger down, charging a shot until the barrel glows yellow. The bolt hits the dummy-Imperial squarely in the chest, with enough force to knock it flat. It meets the floor of the Defiance in an echoing crash, and the ringing of their ears in the silence that follows seems to last forever.
"The whole planet," Grave says under his breath.
"Come again?"
"It was the whole fucking planet, Corso!" He drops into an empty chair and rests his forehead on his palm. "True story. When the Empire found our home, they enslaved everybody they could and killed everybody they couldn't." Corso's look of curiosity turns into one of alarm, then concern. "I was just a kid. And all of a sudden... everyone I had ever known was dead or caged up to be sent somewhere else. Even me. Just so they could take the planet and... do something, I guess. No one bothered to tell us anything about it."
For a moment, he sits stunned. "Hell, Captain. I... I can't imagine what that's like."
"No, you can't," he responds bitterly. "You have no fucking idea what it's like." The human searches for something to say while Grave stares at the floor with a furrowed brow. "You have no idea what it's like," he continues with a trembling voice, "when you just saw your parents be killed, and all you can do about it is hold onto your baby sister for dear life and hope that you're not next. Or when you spend every single day working until your hands bleed while they're treating her like some kind of pet. Like a trophy."
Corso's voice is heavy with guilt. "Never thought about you having family out there, Grave."
He shakes his head. "It was really just me and Vex. And she was pretty fucked up." It occurs to him idly that he's become a broken dam. No way to stop the outpouring now, he simply has to wait until it's done. "She was - there was just something sort of wrong about her."
Sighing to himself, Corso searches the cabinet on the other side of the room. There are still two bottles of that swill from the spaceport before last - if he had to guess, it's exactly what his friend needs right now. As the Zabrak pries open the one he was handed, he continues. "I mean... she just did spooky things."
He frowns. "Spooky how?"
"Watching everything. Not saying anything. Trying to play with knives. Tormenting small animals." Grave winces as he thinks back on it. "Once I saw her make a frog eat itself."
Corso nearly spits out his drink. "Please tell me you're joking."
"I wish I was joking. She just kinda waved her hands and it..." Putting his hands together to make a round shape, he makes a gesture of turning it inside out. "...blegh."
"Okay! Okay. That's... hold on, how would she even manage that?"
"I don't know, alright?" He takes another sip. "She was different. She could just do stuff like that. Move stuff around, say what you were thinking. It was..."
"Spooky," he offers.
"Yeah," Grave says with a harsh laugh. "Exactly that."
Something about his words pulls at a memory in Corso's head. It's vague, but he tries to tug on it like a thread during the brief silence. "Y'know, I'm not an expert or anything, but I have heard stories. To me that sounds like the Force things that Jedi are supposed to do."
"I don't know shit about Jedi, for the record. But there were... I don't remember it well, but some people in my tribe could do those things. We called them tälzaratat. I think in Basic you would say, uh... witches? Anyway, the Imperials had the same idea. They dragged her off to be Sith, and I never saw her again." He sighs. "I have no idea whether or not she's alive," Grave says hollowly. "I don't even know which is worse."
Now that, Corso has no idea how to respond to. What if that was you, a nagging voice whispers in his mind while he stares at the table. What if it was your brother or your cousin that was taken away? Turned into a monster? He throws back more of his drink and hopes it's strong enough to burn those thoughts away.