Two- POV: Sith Inquisitor, miraluka, Eluvien. She had always been treated as a slave. She could hardly remember where she had come from before. All her senses seemed dulled. Enslaved, as she was. Even food didn't taste anymore; everything tasted like dirt...

Setting: Prior to the Sith Inquisitor prologue, during her captivity in slavery. No real spoilers to speak of.

Dirt- Eluvien

The dirt tasted sour, as it always did, though not because it was dirt but because she had been kicked into a mouthful of it.

The pain in her back ached and stung sharply from where Rorke's boot had impacted her spine, and Eluvien gritted her teeth, clenching her fists in the sand, and bent her head, a wave of rage and misery washing over her body like a corrupted ocean.

"Get up, slave."

Slave. Her name, as far as most were concerned. And she did get up. She always did, even when they knocked her back down again.

The hot sun that orbited Korriban beat down on her back and shoulders, the rags she wore doing little to protect her skin from its rays. Distantly, she wondered what the sun was called, or if it had even been named, but then Rorke was over her, his shadow fearsome and malevolent rather than welcome.

"Get moving," he growled, his scarred, ugly face stinking with something left in his beard. Eluvien flinched, but shuffled to the side, sliding into place with her fellow slaves. There were a dozen of them there, ready to start the march to their shack after the day's labor. They all shared it, and they all knew the way, but they were escorted nonetheless.

It wasn't as if they had the strength to escape, she thought to herself. They hadn't the food or water, but the Sith were nothing if not consistent with their cruelty.

A whip snapped through the air and Eluvien winced, but the crack wasn't on her back, but on another's, a man named Dallo who stumbled and almost fell. A new scar adorned his bare flesh and he groaned, but managed to keep himself upright. Had she the energy, she might have felt relief for him.

As it was, she barely felt glad that it wasn't her that had been whipped.

Rorke's aura in the Force pulsed an angry red; he was in a particularly foul mood today, and Eluvien hoped that the march to their shack would be quick. The sooner she could get to her corner, the better. She tugged at the wrap that covered her eyes, scratching beneath the dirtied cloth, only to have her hand yanked to the sky, her entire body almost lifted from the ground. She yelped, kicked her feet, but the soldier who had grabbed her arm was much larger and scowled at her.

"Don't be touching that dirty alien part of yours, freak," he warned. She whimpered, her arm straining to hold her weight, and he shook her around a bit as if she was a doll. Eluvien gasped, agony wracking through her limb, and when he finally let her go she fell to the dusty ground again and inhaled more dirt, tasted it.

It was the single taste she had most familiarity with, she suspected.

Her palms scraped against the harsh sand, carving smaller cuts into her flesh. Through the wrapping covering her eyes, Eluvien could see the glow of her droplets of blood on the ground. She was used to seeing that, too.

She sniffled back a breath and managed to stand, almost reaching out for one of her fellow slaves, but stopping herself in time as she felt Rorke peer at her, felt his anger spike through the Force. She wrapped her tiny arms around herself, huddled away from the soldier who had shaken her.

He moved on. He was used to her kind, and she was used to his. It was strange, the accord she had reached. Still she emotionally shook with tremors of pain and sadness, but blocked herself from it all the same.

Back in line with her fellows, the march began, out of the canyon they had been digging in and into the shadows of the barracks. They were kept an entire kilometer away from the Academy, to avoid "tainting" the place with their impurity Eluvien stared at the ground the entire time, to better avoid any interaction with Rorke or his men.

The slaves shuffled. The soldiers whipped. It was normal. And horrifying, still, to this day, in some distant way.

Kicked, cajoled, and otherwise forced into the barracks, a gray slab of metal and plasteel that barely had air conditioning, the slaves were shut inside, the room spare save for a few cots and a shared toilet. Waiting for them was a collection of simple foods: a few hunks of bread, a jug of water, and a few muja fruit.

The other eleven slaves descended on the pile of food and water. The Sith believed them to be vermin, but contrary to that belief her fellow prisoners and outcasts sat in a small circle around the pile and started tearing bread to each other, sharing what little they had. There were no windows in their barracks, she suspected, to prevent this truth from coming out, from stirring any kind of sympathy in a weak guardsman.

In the end, she supposed, it didn't matter.

Eluvien slid to her corner of the barracks, with her flat cot; it had been dubbed hers a long time ago, when they had come to Korriban some months back; she didn't know exactly how long, because she had no clocks or calendars to study. She preferred to curl there, with her back to the wall, sometimes pressing her flesh against the cool metal to soothe the wounds she had received over the course of the day. Tonight, she sat her back against it, holding her shoulder in her hand and rubbing it gently, trying to ease the pitiful muscle and joint there.

Even blind, she couldn't help but notice Dallo's shining blue aura as he scooted near her. The large man dwarfed her in size, even with their malnourished state, but he looked at her with kind, soft eyes. Wordlessly, he handed out a piece of bread for her.

She nodded, too tired to smile. Or perhaps she just didn't care to, anymore. Perhaps she had learned that smiling was a waste of time. Still, she took the bread and waiting until he had scooted back to the others, where they muttered to themselves, trying to maintain some semblance of humanity or civility in their lives, where they could talk among themselves as equals, even if they were equals at the bottom of the Empire.

Eluvien took a bite of the bread. It tasted like dirt, just like everything else.

(O)(O)(O)