Private Eulogic Episodes: The Unchanging Ache of Things

[Aver Brand]

Bizarre as anything, getting asked to describe an emotion. Suppose that’s what progress meant, though – taking on new responsibilities was just part of the deal.

She wrapped an arm around Qui as the other woman leaned against her, tugging her closer to warmth and lilac. Had she made a point of buying that exact same shampoo over the years? You bet.

There probably was a word for that, Aver just wasn’t the right address. Despite her new incursions into the world of the written word, the merc had only just cracked open a door that had been firmly shut by a childhood spent learning how to shoot a gun rather than read a book.

With a sigh, she pressed another kiss to the crown of a blonde head. “Do you want to tell me what happened? To make you feel like… that?”

 

[Quietus]

I have been forced to acknowledge that a piece of my soul I have been futilely holding onto for the last 500 years must be let go...

The weight against Aver's shoulder felt even heavier with that admission.

 

[Aver Brand]

Set the anvil… come the hammer.

Aver screwed her eyes shut, her whole expression pulling into a frown as she trapped her next breath in her lungs. The answer she’d been dreading managed to be even worse than she’d expected. But then, long lives bore deep pain.

The movement of exhaled air was her only response for a while, a quiet companion to the soft crackle and snap of firewood. Blue eyes tracked the aimless dance of embers and smoke and she trudged through the molasses of her mind for something appropriate to say.

“What…” she squeezed the cold hand in her own. “What changed?”

 

[Quietus]

Nothing.

Des shook her head gently against Aver's shoulder, holding back the painful sting in her eyes and bracing against the tightening in her chest. It was like the entire galaxy had been collapsed into an aphotic knot behind her ribs, threatening to eviscerate all of existence if only she couldn't keep it in check.

Nothing changed. It never will. That's the problem.

Slowly, the image of a man appeared within her mind, like a hazy projection falling into focus. Aver would pick it up as easily as she saw the fire in front of her, such was their connection and the bridge between them. A tall man, not broad and built like herself but strong and refined. His silhouette was sharp and striking in the way the black of his hair and robes settled against his pale complexion. Not quite as tall as Aver, nor as imposing in stature, but the presence he exuded spoke volumes. He'd been an equal of the mind, of the soul, and of his mastery of the Force.

We are Force Bonded. As naturally and instantaneously as a star forming.

Flashes of her days spent traveling the galaxy at the man's side. A connection and relationship as strong as their own blood trail, back in the days when Desdemona Shamalain called the Dark Sith Order her home. Back when she held the title of Pillar of Knowledge and High Master. Nigh inseparable, the closer they remained the stronger they grew together. Aver would see visions of sith invasions, Qui and this man cutting down swathes of enemies - bringing planet after planet, sector after sector, under the control of their Order. It was not so dissimilar to her time with the One Sith, aside from the fact that they made their own orders ... they weren't taking them.

He contracted the Gulag Plague. I was immune.

A distant, barren planet. Uncharted. Wholly unknown except to the man himself. Where he'd made his private headquarters and commanded his forces. Aver caught a glimpse of his body half overtaken by the festering plague; skin blackened and rotting, fear and anger in his yellowing eyes.

I couldn't bear to lose him, so I did the only thing I knew would save him.

Cryostasis. The image of the man frozen behind the barrier of pale blue.

He's still there. There's still no cure. There never will be. That's what I had Rune looking for.

 

[Aver Brand]

The shadow-play of Desdemona’s past was a blur of emotions and impressions, halfway between a holovid and a bad trip. It left her sucking in new air as the vision released her, heart hammering against her ribs.

Strange enough that she was fit to console anyone. Stranger still that it fell to her to offer blood-earned wisdom in solace. The older between them, it was Qui that usually spoke about the painful life lessons. Inelegant and ineloquent, Aver sat there in all her bathrobed glory, and wondered just how she ended up in this exact moment.

She licked her chapped lips. Like it would help her find the words.

“Five centuries is… a long time.” Nothing she could comprehend, so she didn’t even bother. “What bound you then… would it still be enough?”

Arrogant, ignorant, Vrag had bonded twice. She spent the next two decades sacrificing thousands on that altar, forever grasping after a time where there were no chasms between them. But no amount of blood can slake a man who lives to thirst, and you can’t build anything lasting when your only shared language is the knife.

“Because something did change.” Aver finally abandoned the dancing sparks and sought out Qui’s gaze. “You.”

Her mouth curled into nothing resembling a smile as she gave the hand in her own a warm squeeze – for whose benefit, though, it was hard to tell.

I’m sorry.

 

[Quietus]

When did Aver become so wise, she wondered quietly to herself.

The gaze that Aver found was pale with exhaustion. Desdemona was reaching the end of her tethers mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually. There was only so much a woman could take and she could take more than most. Five hundred years of grief and pain. Of the one thing she questioned over and over. Regret wasn't something permitted in her life but for certain Desdemona had come to regret making that particular decision. She'd been stuck with it - visiting his frozen resting place had been an annual thing that eventually became bi-annual, then the years between visits stretched further.

Aver would catch glimpses of those memories, of the ever so slowly growing well of pain from each. Like a single grain of sand falling in an hour glass - eventually they began to pile up.

She didn't want to think about how much she had changed, though she knew Aver to be right. If a cure was found tomorrow and Cazador could return to her, Des could not say for certain things would be the same. She'd lived centuries without him, watched the galaxy turn, donned countless new names and titles, and found her wants, needs, and desires shifting from age to age.

The Desdemona Shamalain that had fallen for Fiora Devereaux no longer existed ... but their connection remained. Force Bonds didn't just ... go away, and it hurt even more to think about it. She looked down at their hands, intertwined so naturally after all their years together. How they had grown to this level of attention and affection was truly a wonder if one knew where it was that they started.

"Ygdris," Des shifted to search those blue eyes, silently pleading for help while her unused voice rasped for the strength she didn't feel she had in her mind anymore, "I just want to forget ... about all of it. What does that make me?"

 

[Aver Brand]

"What does that make me?"

Aver sighed as their eyes met, green rimmed with red and fatigue. “Human.”

“There’ve been plenty of things I wanted to run away from.” She looked away as she continued, gaze fixed on the dying embers in the hearth. Another log cracked open with a hiss, releasing an ephemeral swirl of sparks into the dusk. “Things I thought would be easier to just… ignore and avoid.”

“At some point, Des, that was you.” Her arm snaked around the bundle of blankets and mate and tugged them flush against her side. She found that green gaze again with a small smile. I took some time to think about it, and then I made my decision. And I don’t regret either of those things.

“Besides, it’s not like you have to decide right now. He’s been on ice four centuries, he can wait a couple months more.”

 

[Quietus]

Human.

It made her human.

Desdemona recalled a conversation with Ereza not long after the transfer of the matriarch title, one that centered around Jake Daniels and his inexplicable mercurial nature. How the man had always seemed at war with the oft times listless nature of his Garhan Master and her descendants. Even Ereza admitted that he'd expressed anger with her - that she did not feel enough, that she did not know how to feel.

And she, in her deep inherited wisdom, had told him one single thing: I am not human.

Neither was Desdemona, but she had been more human than not for a large fraction of her life. She had felt all those varying emotions, let them drive her, let them rule her, let them break her. Only now did she realize that her purification and cleansing of what had given her that ability to really feel had also stripped her of her understanding of what it meant to feel. All these years she'd felt above such things. Too old for letting emotion propel her destiny. Too jaded. Too wisened.

When really, she'd just been too numb.

Aver's comparable youth was having its moment. The mercenary had walked these paths that she had not, and that was not something she could recall ever admitting to herself before. Quietus considered this with weary eyes and worry lines etched into their corners, sinking into the strength of her mate's embrace as if it were the only thing holding her together.

Thank you for not walking away from me. She could no longer imagine her present life without Aver in it. The very thought made her mind ill. Qui closed her eyes and nuzzled into Aver's shoulder, drawing herself closer to her mate to glean every ounce of comfort she could find in her. He may be able to wait, but I cannot do this any longer.

Her eyes opened again, landing on the flames of the fireplace with a new glint of intent, I will end this tomorrow.

 

[Aver Brand]

Human was a silly, pointless word. In the barest, driest sense – the sort you’d find in a dictionary – it wasn’t even true. They could wear the pretense like a fine suit when necessary, but the occasions that earned that esteem grew further and further between as the years passed them by.

But nobody meant biology when they said human. It was a coward’s metonymy for the faint flesh that hid behind the ribs of every living thing. The tender tumor that wouldn’t be excised, no matter the resolve of the hand that wielded the knife.

As it turned out, it simply meant the opposite of heartless. And despite their best efforts… a garhan and a firrerreo were thereby human after all.

Aver held her heart close and pressed a faint kiss to the top of her head.

Okay.

A beat; a soft breath of hesitation.

Do you want company?

 

[Quietus]

Yes, her response was rather immediate but not forced. Then, just moments later, Des realized what the implications of Aver being present were.

No. No - he still has the virus. I will not put you at risk of getting it.

The very thought that Aver could possibly contract an incurable death sentence ... made her heart seize. To lose both Cazador and Aver in one fell blow, she might as well take her own life at the same time to spare herself the endless agony.

I must do this on my own.

 

[Aver Brand]

When she closed her eyes this time, it was to hold back a sigh. Aver licked her lips and carded her fingers through tangled blonde hair as she plucked the words from her tongue and cut them to shape in her head.

She was old enough to recognize that I wasn’t planning to snog the man first thing wasn’t going to do anyone any favors here. So she picked herself up from the hardwood parquet instead, then picked up the pile of blankets and mate, and calmly began the trek back to the bedroom.

My armor is vacuum proof, Des. I’ll be fine.

 

[Quietus]

She made no argument to being plucked from her pile on the floor. Instead, Quietus once again took comfort in Aver's attention, as unrequested as it was. The merc had gotten better over the years at recognizing when to make caring gestures if by no other means of education than trial, error, and ...frankly, some guesswork. The ring may have helped here and there. The blond leaned her head into Aver's shoulder as they went, lifting a hand to lightly draw a fingertip along the taut line of her neck.

And if I had said no from the start would you still argue with me...

 

[Aver Brand]

I’m not arguing with you.

Her expression was blank with the effort of holding back yet another sigh. A hungover, distraught, grieving, and exhausted Qui was, unsurprisingly, a handful.

Well, not anymore. Since Aver put her down on the silk sheets. Thread-count over nine thousand, of course.

If you don’t want me there, then I won’t go. She held that green gaze for a few moments before untying the bathrobe and chucking it over the back of a fauteuil.

Just— Aver sighed and sank into the bed next to her mate, tell me. ‘Cause protection really ain’t an issue.

 

[Quietus]

Sinking into the bed was a curiously relieving experience. Those first few moments of feeling weightless while the mattress molded around her figure were reminiscent of floating on water. It was in those thoughts that she realized she missed Thral and that coming here was the problem. This place that held very little for her but dark memories of a childhood she cared nothing for and a dead mother that she missed.

She needed to stop returning to this place. Sell it ... give it to Rune, maybe. But when she left here for tomorrow, she would be done with it for good.

Distant, pale green fixated more fully on her mate as the woman settled in next to her. On her face the weight of mixed emotions. Indecision. The warring of selfish wants for Aver's presence and support while she undertook one of the most painful challenges of her many long lives against the warning of loss - that the smallest thing to go wrong could set Aver Brand on a path to death she couldn't overcome. The chances that Aver was immune ... well, were the same chances anyone had back when the Gulag ravaged the stars.

Desdemona didn't like those odds and she wasn't a gambling sort of person.

Her mind and her heart had never been such petulant enemies before. Feeling unsettled and incapable of making a choice, Qui ventured out from the bundled layers of blankets around her shoulders to draw herself closer. I'll decide in the morning, she claimed Aver's nearest hand and drew it to her face, nuzzling against her knuckles before pressing them to her lips and holding them there and closing her eyes for a moment to sigh out the tension, but I do want you with me now.

Will you still have me, mess and all?

 

[Aver Brand]

Being left to wait in silence might’ve been torture once. Here, now, there was nothing painful about relaxing her body into silk by degrees she’d forgotten muscles could tense into. It was the closest to meditation she’d gotten in several decades, patiently working her way through the knots of stress that had been gradually twisting her body into discomfort since those first weeks on Thral.

“I think it’s actually ‘warts and all’,” Aver murmured and tugged Qui into a loose embrace. Just enough to share warmth, but not enough to be constrictive.

“And if we’re gonna start judging problematic exes, I win anyways. So.” She flashed a half-hearted, full-assed grin at her mate, pecked the tip of her nose, and snuggled in.

Sleep, sevgi.

 

[Quietus]

Any other night she would have made a remark. On either. On both.

Not tonight.

Tonight Quietus was complacent to heed the uncharacteristically wise words of her mate and allowed the sleep that had so desperately evaded her over the last week to finally settle in. She was out within minutes.

~~~

In the morning she was up before the sun. The emotion tether between herself and Aver had been pinched, allowing for no further transmission of the deluge presently flooding her mind. It wasn't that she didn't wish for Aver to have open access, only that she wasn't sure if she let that gate remain open that the tides would break the barrier down completely. Qui stood beneath the fresco on the ceiling of the hallway. The very same one she'd spent a month cleaning and recovering from its many centuries of abandonment. It felt right that she should abandon it again, leaving it to the care of her brother who might appreciate it more than she.

Desdemona Shamalain would not be returning here ever again.

She had in her hand a card. If Aver were to spy it she might recognize it as being of the same type of card that Qui had used to take them from Thral to Halcyon Citadel in a blink.

 

[Aver Brand]

People in her line of work were, as a rule, light sleepers. The reasons varied, of course – guilt, pain, substance abuse, jet lag, you name it. For Aver, it was something she’d learned was called ‘hypervigilance’.

The creaking of the mattress came first, ebbing and flowing under the susurrus of shifting silk sheets. The weight and warmth of her mate disappeared next, followed immediately after by the sudden and resounding absence of their connection.

Aver opened her eyes to the sight of age-worn and sun-bleached wallpaper. Qui was already gone, staring at a different ceiling in a different part of the flat and thinking about… Force knew what. She wasn’t privy to that mess right now and grateful for it. The grayscale moments of her morning remained focused on the simple tasks; brushing the sour taste from her mouth, putting on her traveling clothes, checking in on her business.

Reminding herself to walk loud enough to announce her presence, Aver finally rejoined Qui under the aged fresco where she’d once found her piss-drunk, lovely, and paint-spattered. A fond memory.

“What did you decide?” The question left her lips even as her gaze landed on the card in her hands. Well. Either way, she was leaving this place today.

 

[Quietus]

The card disappeared in a flicking gesture of her hand, magicked away to the nether realm where all ancient, archaic tools went. With the weight of her decision weighing so heavily on her mind and shoulders, Qui was slow to acknowledge her mate. Slower, still, to turn in to her. The distance between them gone in but a few quiet breaths, she stepped into the radiating warmth of the taller woman and pressed her forehead into the flat of Aver's chest. Strong hands snaked around her middle, slid up her back along the material of her shirt, and clenched firmly against the muscles that defined her silhouette.

Come with me ... Quietus frowned, please?

She knew she didn't have to ask, but it felt only appropriate to do so. This wasn't Aver's burden to bear and the mercenary had zero reason to attend other than her own selfish need for her mate's emotional support. For the moment she burned away the lingering mirror of her soul that void would scream in agony and she feared that without something there to ground her, she just might lose herself to it. Dramatic, perhaps, but such was the depth of the connection she held with Cazador.

 

[Aver Brand]

Subtlety was just one of the bricks in the wall of Aver Brand. She could be soft when she willed it (now). But here, in this time and place, being a rock wasn’t so bad at all. Easier to watch Qui crumble. Easier to catch her before she fell. Easier to nod and say “Okay.”

Easier to smile. “I offered, didn’t I?”

With a gentle squeeze, Aver pulled away from the embrace with a twist of wry amusement to her mouth. She raised her brows at the hand that used to hold the card “Any way I can pull off that trick this time?”

In case of emergency, joke about it.

 

[Quietus]

She left the warmth and thrumming beat of Aver's heart in her chest with reluctance. A tick wanting to be stubbornly stuck in place but hadn't quite yet taken full purchase. Wanted for a reason, an excuse, anything to stall the upcoming moments. To keep the distance from herself and this agonizing inevitability as broad and galactic as possible.

The reluctance was in her gaze and her movements, like sludge in an engine gumming up responsiveness. Her flicker of forced humor at Aver's jape was delayed to the point that her face didn't even bother to express it. No ...

Aver could barely manage a Blood Trail, there was no way she was even remotely capable of this.

Do you ... remember when I first met you on Nadir, all those years ago, before the Gala. Preceding confessions of emotion and attachments. You said Nadir wasn't your home.

The mercenary shook her head and angled her body towards her companion. Visor protracted, the woman leaned forward, peeling from the shadows. Finally.

"I fit in a den of violence and debauchery? Shocking," she said, palming the deck she'd set on the table. "But it's not… home. No place is."

That no place was.

Is that still true?