Alwine rolled her eyes. Gerwald had known well enough that she would continue to suffer if left behind on Stewjon. She would have continued to suffer there even if she had never lit the food stores on fire. Stewjon had never been safe, not for her and not for Varick. Gerwald had it the easiest of the three, as his tastes in paramours was not considered unnatural and because he was not a woman, but even he had suffered on Stewjon, and there were no words that he could offer to change any of these written in stone facts.
She was also about to give him harsher words than before, but Gerwald began to speak then. In honest. Giving her the story. Oh, there were still plenty of important details missing, but he was speaking.
And she wanted to shave his fur throughout so many moments of the story, but Alwine forced herself to remain quiet, forced herself not to say a word. Not yet. She wanted him to speak freely, to tell her everything he could. She knew he was leaving out entire portions, and she would get for that, but for now she only had a small smile to offer to him as the words continued to flow out of him. She was almost certain that was the longest she’d ever heard him speaking on his own in their entire life.
“Dalninuk,” she said quietly a few breaths after he had stopped speaking, “You cannot ask for my support and deny it in the same breath. There is a difference between support and blindly enabling you to continue to be a fool. Never doubt that I support you, even if you cannot understand how it is that I am doing so at the moment. But I promise you, you will understand. Just trust me a little bit.”
And there was the truth of it. If she did not support her brother as a person, she would have left the moment she could walk and shift on her own. Naturally, there were more reasons than that, but if that specific thing had been lacking, they would not be here right now. She would not be living in accommodation that he had provided her and their brother, and they would not be speaking about such heavy subjects.
“You must understand, Gerwald,” Alwine continued, “a choice is not something you make once. To repeatedly say that you’ve made your choice is a foolish thing to do. If choices were to be made once, you would never had returned to Stewjon. I do not bring this up now to repeat the subject, but because I believe this is how you will understand what I am trying to convey. When you left Stewjon, you were not a pauper. You had the means to return almost immediately. But you chose, again and again and again, not to do so. It was not one choice, it was not one moment that you can blame on weakness. It was a continuous thing.”
And then Alwine did something she very rarely did. She allowed Gerwald to see the pain of it. Not the physical one, which he had seen with his own eyes, but the emotional one, that she always kept under lock and key as she hid most of her emotions. She permitted her brother a glance at her vulnerability. Only two people in the entire galaxy had the power to put that expression on her face – Gerwald and Varick, and even with them she rarely allowed weakness to show. And there was much pain in her gaze now, as she explained to Gerwald that not only had he left her on Stewjon, but he chose day after day not to come back. The first few days, had he returned, she would have laughed at it and it would have easily been put behind. But with every passing day after that, it became harder to do so.
A few moments later though, Alwine’s expressions returned to their usual state. Enough was enough, even for her, even if she let Gerwald comprehend just how deeply his actions… Alwine sighed, and hoped that moment had not been wasted.
“If there was not-nothing going between you and the auflaque before that night with Scherezade, why did that night with Scherezade happen?” she began with her questions, hoping that since she covered the other things first, he would resume the conversation, “When your dearest future told you that you were the man she wanted, what did she know of you? Besides your name, you being a Lupine of Stewjon, and what your prick looked like, did she know you?” Alwine put her hand over her brother’s heart, her earlier scoff at the use of the word man hard to miss, “did she know anything of you as a person at all, or just that you were good looking and your Lupine parts were in order?”
Alwine had a nagging sensation that she knew the answer to that, but some things were better left for Gerwald to answer. Besides, there was the slightest chance that she was wrong.
“And then after the auflaque told you that she wanted you, you returned to her sister again. Why?” she asked, truly confused about that part. After all, the auflaque had told him she wanted him, he claimed that when he saw her on Stewjon he saw his future, and yet… He kept going back to Scherezade. Did he himself even comprehend the depth of what that meant?
But after that… After that, Scherezade had told him that she loved him. But with Scherezade, while spread more thinly, he had alluded to there being more than a single meeting, a single deed. “What was your time with Scherezade like before she told you that she loved you?” Alwine asked, “Did you two speak much? Did she take you to places other than Coruscant? Aside for the lack of honesty regarding her sister, was she learning you better as a person? When you were not honest with her, did you go immediately back home or did other things happen?”
Alwine sighed again. It was not a simple story. There were many details to it, and more that she needed to know if her brother wanted true and real support from her. No, she certainly did not want to know about his fornications with the auflaque. The thought of that alone was disgusting.
“You mentioned the virus earlier,” she continued, “but why did you not go and see her? Why did you not conclude your fornications, take a shower, and then go see her? If everyone was singing… What did you sing to the auflaque?”
And then came the last few parts, that only raised more questions. “How did the truth come out?” she asked, squinting her eyes. There were so many ways to tell such a complicated tale, and she was certain that it had not happened in any gentle manner. “Did the auflaque know what had happened between the two of you by then? Why did you not give her the help she so desperately needed, even if she said she would kill you if she saw you again? You obviously knew she would not, or you would not have spoken with her yesterday at all.”
And then the sisters’ relationship… That sounded like another bad mess on its own. “How much did you actually see them together before she disowned the auflaque? How much do you know of what their relationship was? And how much exactly have you tried to invest in your future to go reconcile with her sister? Because my guess is you gave up after the first time.” There was no reason to assume otherwise. Gerwald would leave almost anything alone after the first attempt if he was not pushed and prodded into trying again. He gave up much too soon when it did not come to his Warrior training… And even with that, Alwine had her own worries, because he had all but given up on that as well. Was it because of the events with the sisters? She would ask him later about that.
“And what do you mean by ‘anymore’? Did you hurt Scherezade to heal the auflaque?” that bit she was completely confused over, since there had not been a grain of it before.
A third sigh, and Alwine took her brother’s hand in hers. His hand was so big compared to her own, she almost looked like a child’s in his. Her brother certainly had made a mess of everything, and Alwine certainly had no intention of fixing everything. Simply the important bits that dealt with her brother directly. Auflaque or no auflaque, her brother was in a deep mess made by his own doing, and she had every intention of supporting him as he cleaned the mess up and grew out of it as a person. Not for an auflaque, not for a Scherezade, not even for herself. But for him.
[member="Gerwald Lechner"]
