Note: This was originally started for the 2009 Dear Diary Challenge on A Certain Star Wars Message Board.
Today my brother (or the boy who, once upon a time, was my brother) was sold as a telbun. He belongs to Gailesia Darsk now. Oh, I remember her from the few times I met her. She had fragile snow-rose skin, and the green eyes her mother chose for her to have before she even existed. She's pretty, and she might be reasonably intelligent, but mostly, she's nice. The second time, she gave me a dust-grey stuffed cat that my mother, of course, made me return to her only the next day. When I kicked her leg, on purpose, just to see if I could, she smiled. It was her younger brother who chased me through the garden, slapping through the air at my legs with his ornamental riding whip.
Anyhow, my mother told me the Matriarch presented him to her on the first night of her birthday games. She's been married for over a year now, so it was time.
That day I kicked Gailesia, I was wearing my black soldier girl military boots. I know preferred them, especially compared to those candy-pink shoes my mother had bought for me. I was several gawky inches taller than she was. I had wanted (even if it was only for that one mean, snarling moment) to hurt her, to bruise her.
Her eyes had burned with a candle-lit glow, and she blinked. I have to continue to remember that— along with the whining sharp cuts that smug brat left on the backs of my legs. I was thirteen, and she was fifteen. It would turn out to be the last time I saw her.
That makes me sound much tougher than I really was. I should admit to that—even here, where I could go ahead and lie, instead of revealing every single thing. Most of the time, while I might have wished I was that way, I was actually quiet. I suppose that I still am. The matriarch would have assumed—like my teachers, and the rich cooing nice ladies on the social board—that meant I was tractable and sweet-minded. I know, at least now, when all that has faded into a dreamed memory, that I was afraid they might be right.
I've heard that my brother looks like me. Well, I suppose that would be the obvious and expected thing, thanks to genetics. I might be intelligent or clever enough, but I have always been known first, and mostly, for being pretty.
I know that he supposedly, allegedly, looks like me. But I don't know one other thing about him. Of course, I don't have any memories of him—I was only two years old when he was born, and then taken away to the training house, and I can't remember anything from back then. I can only wonder what he has used for a name. I've never known what my parents called him in the week of days they still had him.
There isn't much else that I can say about him. I don't know why I've written all this down, and perhaps I don't have to. Oh, my mother knew what to say, but she would. They have already used their part of the compensation to have their old white skeleton droid scrapped, and have hired a slum girl to look after the house. All their friends are ooohing.
It wasn't until after I had (with happy relief, and almost soon enough) hung up that I wished I could have gone back for that droid. It must have already been at the scrapyard, but I always see it in the kitchen, in the rained-grey light, in the mornings when I left for school, while my mother was still drowned away in sleep.
I would fly, that easily, and that fast, over the hundreds of kilometers to the city where my parents insist on living. I have always been good at flying in my dreams—including that one where I landed on the thick snow on a tall wind-burned mountain that must only exist in my mind. But I knew, as I do now, that I would never have done it. Because I can't.