Private Eulogic Episodes: The Unchanging Ache of Things

[Aver Brand]

No sounded about right. An answering smile ghosted across her lips before the question struck it down. Aver hung her head and inspected her shoes.

A pragmatic, steel-tipped affair.

Even when she took off the weapons and armor, changed her wolf coat for a t-shirt and jeans, the boots stayed on. Keep the dirt and blood from— Aver pinched her lips and ground her sole on the opulent marble floor, like stamping out an invisible cigarette.

“Why does…” she chewed on her bottom lip in glanced up at the refreshed fresco on the ceiling.

What are you really asking?

 

[Quietus]

What was she really asking?

I...

In the moment, she couldn't answer that question. She couldn't even say why she really asked it. The sudden emergence of the memory had simply struck her, and for a split second it felt very important to know if Aver still did not consider any place at all in the galaxy her home. Pale green disappeared behind eyelids screwed shut, the depth of difficulty settling within the line forming between knit brows.

I don't know.

She was stalling. Maybe. No more. Quietus gave her head a small shake, living a hand to touch at her temple where the pressure of her building emotional turmoil had begun to reach concerning levels.

Do you have your armor?

It's in my pants.

She did not see the eyebrow waggle, but she somehow didn't need to. Anymore Qui could feel the expressions on Aver's face from across the room through their telepathic link as if they were playing out on her own face. Her brow furrowed just a bit more.

"Yes."

Right, her ... pocket dimension thing. Aver her hers and Qui had her own, except she didn't wear hers around her waist. With a gesture she recalled her other hand from Aver's back, the gleaming card fixed between her fingers.

I am ready when you are.

Qui felt her nod, took a steadying breath, and lowered her hand from her temple to Aver's own. Fingers intertwined, she touched her thumb to the center of the card's painted scene and the pair of them blinked out of existence within the Coruscanti condominium and reappeared halfway across the galaxy within the silent atrium of a building long since abandoned. A golden haze of light fell through sand-mottled slices of glass following the angled slant of the entry hall. At one point in time, hundreds of years ago, this building had been a point of control for a Sith faction now long since fallen and forgotten. Cazador's seat of power resided here, and so it was here that he had made preparations for what inevitability they could not foresee.

That she would outlive him was a fact they had both known, but neither of them at the time of the Gulag Plague's rise could have known just how long. Long enough to find a cure had been the hope.

 

[Aver Brand]

One stomach-in-the-throat later, Aver stumbled forward into the echoing husk of a lobby. Leaning on her knees, she drew in a few long breaths of the dry air before righting herself again to take in the scenery.

That the husk of architecture was standing at all was a small marvel in itself. Did Qui invest credits into maintaining this place? Aver glanced at the woman before returning her gaze to inspection. Rust gnawed on every exposed steel beam, and several panes of glass had cracked under the weight of the sand. Eroded lettering peeked out from underneath the film of time and grime, alluding to the magnitude of a complex that could no longer back up the claim. Was this building all that was left?

Left of what? Aver didn’t ask. Shit was going to be hard enough as it was.

She spared one last glance to the remnants of a toppled empire, then began the rote process of donning her armor. The hated undersuit first, followed by boots and legplates, the cuirass, and finally the arm harness. With every plate that settled its weight over her frame, the mercenary pushed thoughts of legacy and mortality further to the back of her mind.

Flipping the helmet over in her hands, Aver caught herself at the sight of the grinning skull on the faceplate. Maybe it was time to wipe off the thing. She sighed and raised her gaze to meet those anguished green eyes. Her heart squeezed and caught fire and the helmet clattered to the floor.

In the next breath she was in front of Qui, gloved fingers grasping that fine jaw as she pulled her mate into a bruising kiss. Careful not to press phrik against pale skin, Aver traced the fierce features that she cradled in her palm, brushing her thumbs across the arch of those questioning brows, along the curve of those sharp cheekbones; over the swell of those reddened lips as she pulled away from the kiss.

I love you.

Because she could. Because it hurt more now to swallow those words than to say them. Because this could go so terribly, horribly wrong, and Ygdris Val refused to die a coward.

Aver stepped away and summoned the last piece of her armor into her waiting hand. The vacuum seal hissed as she pulled on the helmet and finally, finally let her staid expression crumble.

 

[Quietus]

She'd held herself together thus far. At least, until Aver's gesture of affection and words of love broke the cracked veneer of a woman in control of her emotions. Thick tears gushed from green eyes tightly closed against the world around her while pale, strong hands coiled into fists against the burgeoning need to embrace the woman and her deadly second skin. Desdemona hung suspended in pain, drowning in the rise of fresh anguish, clutching onto the only rock she had to anchor her in place with her lips alone.

When they parted it was all she could do to keep herself from chasing after her and she was grateful, for what felt the first time in her life, for the image of the gruesome skull as it sank home over her mate's face.

I need you, the mental words came rife with the eddies of the maelstrom presently ripping her apart behind a desperate gaze, I can't keep it closed in anymore. I'm not strong enough for both of us.

It was a fair enough warning for Ygdris to prepare for the dam that held the flood waters to finally break.

 

[Aver Brand]

The swell of helplessness was as familiar as the anger that followed immediately after – anger at herself, for being unable to help; anger at the situation for being so fucked, at the disease for having no cure; fuck, even a thread of anger at Qui, for not dealing with centuries-old baggage. Anger at the fucking hypocrisy of that, because who the fuck was she to tell people how to manage her emotions?

There were tears. Tears. Aver had never seen Desdemona Shamalain cry. She’d seen evidence in those traitorous burst capillaries, in the dry streaks of salt, but the implication and the real thing were not one and the same.

And of course she could do nothing except stand there and offer the starless void of her mind up. For refuge? For slaughter? She screwed her eyes shut to steady her sharp breath and thready heartbeat, hands balled up into silver fists at her sides.

Then don’t. I’m here, I’m not going anywhere, and— she clicked her teeth and shook her head and decided to be an optimist for once in her life, and I’ll be fine. We’ll be fine.

 

[Quietus]

The tears would not stop and continued to fill her eyes and leak down her cheeks. Desdemona braced against the deluge, trying her damnedest to keep it all from crashing through at once to save Aver some semblance fortitude. But the longer she looked at the woman the harder it became, so she turned with a steeled will and made her way into the empty complex. Darkness welcomed her steps and loomed the further in she traveled, taking a path through the halls and stairwells she had memorized centuries ago. They arrived at a set of blast doors meant to withstand the full frontal assault of war, bent and mangled inward as though someone had taken a giant canon ball of beskar and shot it out of a star destroyer from orbit.

Inside a somber glow of yellow from strips of neons inlaid into the walls framing a row of cryostasis chambers. Each one empty aside from the one set in the middle. There the shadow of a man held within, his features obscured by ice and a layer of dust settled over the glass encasing. Opposite the chamber, a cement wall near covered with a continuous list of years handwritten with a bloody finger and noteworthy words to mark the passage of time.

In the far corner a cot and tidy stand of supplies, survival necessities, untouched for far too long.

The last year on the wall, situated somewhere just below hip height marked a decade prior.

Quietus stepped directly to a control podium at the middle of the hall, clearing dust off the console and slowly keying in the access code. Somewhere off in the deeper parts of the complex a set of generators kicked on, power flickered throughout the hall, casting the remainder of the chambers into active light and flooding it with a vibrant, stark blue. Pausing a moment, tears trickling freely from her eyes and dripping across the consol, Quietus wiped at her face and input the command to release Darth Cazador from his frozen slumber.

 

[Aver Brand]

During their descent into the depths of the structure, Aver methodically worked to prepare herself for the onslaught that would surely follow whatever confrontation awaited below. Questions and doubts kept slithering through her efforts to clear her mind of detritus. Unwanted, unnecessary bullshit like is this what you’ll look like if you ever find his corpse and honestly, fuck that.

Her boots cracked against the bare ferrocrete as she followed Qui into the cryo complex, helmet compensating for the low amber light. Habit rather than deflection bid her inspect the room, cataloging the distances, the materials, the defensibility. Her gaze stopped dead on the red lines on the wall. She hesitated for a moment, then zoomed in on the writing. The first date struck her to the core – a sore reminder of the abyss of time that jawed between them.

Aver steeled her shoulders and looked away, shifting her focus on the here and now. The past only slowed you down, and this was going to be difficult enough on its own. As Qui busied herself with the controls, the armored mercenary let spill her presence in the Force over the fine lip of her implant, cascading across the room with the inevitable weight of the tide. So rare these days that she slacked those chains; she’d almost forgotten the sensation of encompassing so much within herself.

Like the statue she could often resemble, Ygdris came to stand behind her mate, warm and solid and still. She filled her lungs with breath and began to draw on the humming power of her surroundings, inflicting the gravity of I AM on the planet underneath her feet.

 

[Quietus]

As soon as she keyed in the last command to set chamber through it's thawing procedure, Des crumpled against the console, teeth grit against the sobs that begged to be set loose. There was no turning back now. No changing her mind and walking away to face this painful fate another year, another decade, another century down the line. No more false hopes to cling to. Once Cazador took his first breath of life beyond the ice, he would begin to die at a rate much faster than the Gulag would have taken him.

Centuries in the frost had a way of compromising the immune system - it was why the reintegration process into the living world was so extensive. There was a protocol to follow when the subject was expected to return to a normal life. But here, as Qui's knees gave out beneath her ever growing grief, she sunk into the realization that she was giving the killing blow not once, but twice. She had time to dwell in it, as the minutes ticked by, and drown in the planet-leveling ache in her chest. The tears came so freely she couldn't see if she tried and her throat grew raw from holding in the mounting hurt.

A chime signified the beginning of the final steps for the reanimation process. Again, for what felt the hundredth time, she wiped at her face to clear her vision and forced herself to her feet. The chamber hissed as the capsule depressurized and the glass top slowly lifted, opening like a flower bloom greeting the morning sun. Inside its subject stirred, pale and gaunt from the centuries of suspended animation. She pulled a black and green trimmed cloak from a cabinet at the base and moved quickly to the man's side as his eyes slowly opened, stained with yellow and so pale that Des wouldn't know what color they should have been if not for her memories of him.

His body was over half ravaged by the plague - black skin marred by grotesque sores, blisters, and frozen, festering infection. Though he smelled strongly of stasis fluid, the stench of death clung to him in the way it clung to a week-old carcass. He wheezed his first breath and shakily moved to sit up. Quietus watched him with a grimace so tight it might as well have been a cage for the chaos of a growing supernova. She threw the cloak over his shoulders to cover him and the hand that reached for her, part of the small portion of his body not yet succumbed to the plague, bore the same black tree insignia she wore on the back of her left shoulder.

Cazador looked at her, the exhaustion of his sleep and the dawning pain of his awakening body weighing him like prison shackles, "Quietus?"

Qui looked up, her hands carefully securing the cloak around his shoulders, and blinked out a fresh well of tears with a nod. She watched his eyes look her over, first with some semblance of difficulty and confusion, then with a sobering softness of recognition, "Your hair's different."

Somehow that got a smile out of her and a barely contained sob of laughter. Of all the things about her to remark on, he chose her hair, "There's-" she struggled painfully against the surge of emotion, cluttered with memories of the man she once blazed a path across the galaxy alongside, "...there's a lot about me that's different."

Cazador's eyes widened in shock, a look that was withered to a fraction of the emotion he felt, "You ... can talk? ... how," and when his eyes left her to look around, they struggled to focus on the looming shadow of Aver Brand, then the writing on the wall across from him, "how long has it been?"

"Around five hundred years," Qui choked, squeezing her eyes shut and biting at her lips to maintain her fraying decorum.

 

[Aver Brand]

Nothing stirred in her as she saw Cazador in the flesh for the first time. The handsome features she’d glimpsed in Qui’s memory had been chipped away by ice and time. What little remained was barely a man; atrophied muscles shifted underneath his pale skin, mottled by the plague and stretched thin over a withered skeletal frame like parchment.

Nothing stirred. Not because Aver felt nothing, those days were gone, but because the agony burning through her mate consumed anything and everything else. She closed her eyes against the throes of pain that wracked her frame in time with her mate. The sense of loss echoed through her bones, and she felt her own throat close up as Des broke down further over his wretched form.

She would’ve loved to watch, once. Just to see something so fierce and bright collapse in on itself; to witness divinity cut down at the knees and made to suffer the most human of emotions. To know that every attachment was a string someone else could tug. To remember that if you pulled hard enough, you could rip their heart right out of their ribcage and raise it, still beating, into the merciless sun.

And now… now all Ygdris wanted to do was weep alongside her.

 

[Quietus]

The answer seemed to take the air out of Cazador's lungs as he sat there on the stasis bed, the full weight of his frail body hunched against the woman he hadn't laid eyes on in ... five hundred years. His pallid face turned back to her, gaze searching her pained expression, then fell into a state of disbelief that would not allow him to form coherent words for several long moments. It was impossible to fathom five hundred years and everything that entailed. So many questions flooded the man's mind about the galaxy, the plague, about her, but the one that leapt to the front of the line was clearly the rancor in the room.

Was there a cure?

His breath caught as a fresh wave of throbbing pain shifted up his ravaged body, following the thaw of his nerves and growing more intense with each passing minute. Cazador's memory faintly recalled his illness overcoming him before cryo, but it was addled by the side-effects long-term stasis left on the mind. Fortunately his ability to puzzle things together, as he was so well and capable of doing in his prior life among the Sith, remained with him.

"There's..." he breathed, shrinking into the evolving pain of his body, "there's no cure...is there?"

Qui felt her resolve break at last, resulting in a sudden anguished gasp and renewed stream of tears. She clutched at him, trying to be mindful of his ravaged body, wanting to draw him in closely and tightly and knowing she could not without making him suffer for it.

"I'm sorry," she sobbed, "there's nothing-" and she choked, her throat seizing. Tears dripped from her nose and chin, pattering across the cloak covering his lap.

A shuddered breath and nod was his answer, his good hand lifting to gingerly catch her face and wipe the tears away with his thumb. Cazador then reached around to draw her forehead to his, grimacing against his failing body and the fresh heat and stench of infection radiating from it. "So this is it, then. This is the end."

"Not at all how I imagined it. But I'm glad it's you."

Silence fell over the meaning of his words. An unspoken understanding shifting between the two of them. Cazador meant to die with dignity and Quietus meant not to let him suffer as she had seen so many others, family included, slowly wither agonizingly into nothing. He deserved so much better than any of this - he deserved to live like the King he was meant to be. Their reign within the galaxy had been mighty, a flash-fire across the stars that burnt out all to quickly when the Gulag struck. The plague had not been selective - Emperors had fallen to it as easily as slaves. It mattered not if you were powerful, either, in the ways of the Force as Cazador stood testament to. His own presence so diminished now, but radiating alongside Quietus' in a synergy that could not be experienced anywhere else but with her.

She felt his lungs struggle and his heart falter, pushing the sludge of the virus through the remainder of his healthy self, and felt her own heart clench in tandem with his muted sounds of torment. Cazador filled his lungs with great effort and pushed his haggard limbs to the edge of the table, "I will die on my feet, you'll give me that much won't you?"

There was no certainty he could stand at all given the state of his ravaged legs, but she nodded and stepped back to help him up. A faint surge of energy in the Force flowed through and from her as he drew on the power of her presence to strengthened what remained of his limbs and spine, gritting against the sudden surge of agony to push his weight up through his heels. The disease had taken much of his height, so he found himself leaning upon her shoulders with his good arm and gasping at the nature of standing for the first time in centuries. The sensation of the Force flowing through him was invigorating, but only in the sense that it gave him the resolve to see this last effort through.

Cazador looked around, his eyes landing on Aver's figure with a forlorn sense of understanding. He knew, somehow through his connection with Qui, who this was and what she meant and for a moment he pleaded a silent thanks before shifting his attention back. A broken smile appeared as he leaned his head in against hers, lingering just apart from her lips. Qui leaned up to plant a gentle, tentative kiss there and he frowned.

"Kiss me like you mean it or don't kiss me at all."

Des winced against the memory bubbling forth, those same exact words echoing from her lips what felt like five lifetimes ago. She leaned up into him, imparting all the unspoken things she never got a chance to say to him, pressing her anguish into his lips and her tears onto his cheeks.

And the blade of her dagger into his heart.