soft epilogue
His gloved hands slid over hers, foolishly accepting her tender touch and pressing her tighter to his skin. Everything about him seemed to warm, drawing closer to the light of hope –– to be tortured by it –– by the maddening potential of desire. It was thisteled and tangible, like the idea of her-never-coming-back was clustering in his throat. Even still, he managed to choke out his appeal to the woman he hoped to resurrect with words.
There was that name again. Like the blade that had cut the remnant of herself into fractals, it was like an insult now. A dagger that twisted and exposed the wound all the more, not letting it heal.
When would she be able to hear that name and have it mean only a name, and not what she left behind? This was the power of memories, they were so volatile. So malleable.
All his emotions faded into a waning, decaying grey sort of misery. He wanted so badly for the warrior within to force herself free, to rise like a lotus from the dirt.
She remained silent for an infinite timeline, studying him and the words he offered in supplication. They were powerful, emotional but…..disenchanting. Like a snake’s venom spreading through her psyche with the intent to weaken and paralyze. His gaze was tired but genuine, with a distant glimmer of brightness in the corners of his eyes that latched onto the idea of possibility.
He’d been poisoned by hope.
But he was right about one thing, at least: She was more than this.
Her face softened, pity pulling at her pretty features. His binary approach was saddening, and she felt disappointment knot in her gut and tighten her chest. The words she wanted to say were unutterable, only a mewl at the back of her throat.
“No.” Her head dropped to rest her forehead against his chin. Her shoulders sunk under the weight of her chagrin. She sighed, pressing her tongue against the roof of her mouth and closing her eyes for a moment to revel in her dismay. When they snapped open again, they were narrowed in hostility at his insolence. At his failure to understand.
“You’re not really seeing me, Djorn.” The sithling whispered hotly. Her voice was small and angry, verging on shrill with her upset and still layered with the more gravelly tones of the symbiote. Her hands against his jaw were trembling. She’d tried. She’d asked him to see her. Forced his face to focus on hers, all of what she was now, all she’d fallen into becoming. Not to see a remnant of the past. If eyes were the windows to the soul, he was blind, truly unseeing to the decay that lived behind hers.
His comparison to her being in a bad dream made her exhale a huff of humour and tighten her smile.
Au contraire, it was like they’d finally woken up and were seeing with a new sort of clarity. At that moment, a thousand valves opened in her brain. Her words were still sticky and tight –– hard to choke out. Eventually, she managed to push them through her teeth:
“We’re not her anymore. You don’t make and break promises for her, and you don’t get to protect, free, or save her.”
She paused for a moment in her rhetoric, a long-gone connection scratching at the surfaces of her mind. How had..that been possible? How had he penetrated to that tiny, infinitesimal beacon within? Her mind was a wreck –– her heart..maybe there was a possibility there.
Not letting go seemed like a nice thought, but it was too late. Anything she might have held on to was too faded into the dusty vaults of her humanity. Maynard's earnest outreach was relegated to another empty promise that only had doom to actualize. They –– the parasite and the host -– only had each other to rely on.
She exhaled out a shuddery breath as if she were reconsidering everything she was about to say. And she might have been...if the symbiosis hadn’t serendipitously completed. All throughout this exchange, their body had finished mending itself entirely. The tolling process turned into something easy and efficient with their newfound intimacy. It no longer felt as though it were stitching together two unique halves, instead closing a hole in a single being. Everything tightened around her –– reinforcing the barrier of their union and the blackness started its spread over her clavicle to her face.
“Where you failed,” She was something he’d never seen before, and he’d remember her this way because she might be the last thing he saw. “We succeed.”
“Where she was weak.” Her thumbs crept up to press around the bones of his eye sockets, increasing the pressure of her touch as she spoke. Punctuating each sentiment. As if she might push hard enough to make his bulging eyes see. Black coating began to roll down her arms once more, stretching down her wrists, knuckles and fingertips to create claws over the point of her fingers. “We are strong.
Where she is dead, we are alive.” Her words grew in volume, graduating to a shriek; suddenly emblazoned with the evil that she’d lost herself to, sacrificing too much of who she’d been in an attempt to preserve herself and ended up having to give up entirely for the idea of balance and mutual necessity. But she was gone. Just a victim to a parasite that feasted on her mutated power within The Force instead.
“We are more.” Self combustion happened next. An eruption of deranged volatility, enraged by the whimpering of yesterdays. The final layer of activation was complete, and a whisper from
Taeli Raaf
finally unlocked their title –– giving them access to identification as a new being. A new self, titled in High Sith. “We are Shursia!” It was a magnificent and horrifying shriek in an unholy language, with emphasized fricatives and a slash of her talons across his face, breaking the kind connection and forcing both her hands outward, blowing Djorn and the Twi’lek from her proximity in a rolling, thunderous telekinetic and electric outburst.
ALLIES | TSE |
Taeli Raaf
ENEMIES | NIO | GA | NJO |
Djorn Bline
| Eira Dwynwen
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