The Epistolary Episodes of a Murderous Mercenary and a Quondam Queen

[Quietus]

Mmf.

She was really three for zero tonight on the lungfuls of air.

A single eye cracked open again, narrow. Aver in a tux? Well it's certainly not something she'd ever thought about but it was a curious thought indeed.

You're being serious.

 

[Aver Brand]

Aver rolled her eyes, only half-sure if Qui could see it or not.

She shrugged her shoulder, ghosting her fingers higher still. “In a month or so, Nadir will host a… gala.” The word wasn’t so much spoken as expelled from her mouth, as if she’d spat out something foul. “I can’t dodge it because this is, well, it’s my station, and Loray will murder someone out of pure boredom.”

Not that she cared particularly about the lives of random criminals – but a single spark of violence with that crowd could trigger a massacre of untold proportions. It’d be like shooting the underworld economy in the gut.

“So, yes. I’m being serious, Des.”

 

[Quietus]

The sound of her name made the woman's brow set. Shet just got real.

She disliked how close this was getting to mixing their very separate circles. Wasn't that she feared the results, simply that she didn't want to deal with them at all. A quiet retirement was a good one, mostly, and after all the years of visits to Onderon where she'd taken additional efforts to keep Aver well separated from her family and home-turf mate because ... drama.

At her age she was too old for it.

She'd succeeded for the most part, though Aver and Dahl had their share of run-ins over the years.

Thought you kept multiple mates ... they never discussed it really. There'd never been a desire or need. But things had been said in passing over the years. Mentions of others. Names she'd heard but for the life of her couldn't quite recall, save Loray. That one occurred a bit more frequently, as rarely as his name came up ever.

How is it that I ended up with the invite?

 

[Aver Brand]

There was no impatience between them. Aver was content to wait, and Quietus was content to mull it over. The warmth slowly spreading through her tangled limbs pulled her lips into a lazy smile.

For all the heavy consideration going on behind jade eyes, icy blues were completely unconcerned.

“I do,” she said, leaning in to nuzzle her neck. “You’re one of them.”

The merc stayed there, smiling against tattooed skin. “Is it so unthinkable? Me, inviting you somewhere?”

 

[Quietus]

It's not the gesture...

Though it kind of was. The invitation was somewhat unexpected given how separately they lived their lives. Aver had always been welcome to Onderon but circumstances of knowledge allowed for it. Qui had never bothered to ask after Aver's home nor inquire for an invite. She just so happened to stumble upon it, and now she found herself in the woman's bed being invited to a gala.

Strange how the galaxy worked.

...it's the location and the broader company.

...they're not ... me.

 

[Aver Brand]

The mercenary stared at Quietus in the darkness for a few long beats of the heart. She blinked, once, twice. Rubbed her nose.

“Well, no, they certainly ain’t you. If I had a whole gala’s worth of Des, would I be inviting you?” Aver quirked a bemused eyebrow at the blonde. This was getting silly – the other woman had no reservations about speaking directly otherwise.

“What’s bothering you?”

 

[Quietus]

That's not what I meant.

She scowled at the ceiling, a spark of frustration likely bleeding through the telepathic lane. She missed the joke for her own internalized mullings. Could it be Aver was finally seeing a side of the woman that wasn't polished and smoothed from the years? Jagged, sharp memories buried so deep for so long that their edges had honed instead of worn. Abandoned instead of dealt with, now their nature was only to sting when revisited, deeply at that.

The hand at Aver's thigh had stopped moving for some time now. Quietus turned her withered gaze back to Aver, the turmoil of a jungle beneath an angry storm.

These sorts of things never ended well for me.

 

[Aver Brand]

Three for one now, on those lungfuls of air.

Aver propped up on her elbow once again, leaning fully over Qui to meet her cloudy gaze head-on. She was a killer, but she wasn’t deaf – not when the blonde was quite literally inside her head.

“These sorts of things— ?” Might as well have hung out a juicy steak in front of a starving Puppy. In all their years together – and there were plenty of those by now – Quietus had never once shown any shred of raw, wounded flesh. She was stone. Hot or cold, the Queen was impenetrable beyond what she allowed to be seen. Plenty of markings on the surface for a keen eye to read, yes, but inside? Not a hint.

“You wanna stay cryptic all night, or do you wanna talk about it?”

 

[Quietus]

The line of her jaw had tightened over the last several minutes, mimicking the line of her brow which had set knit over the internal difficulty she now faced. There was no easy way to explain to the Merc the complicated train of thought presently careening through her mind on a collision course with cliff edge that was reality. She'd seen the direction the tracks of this train were going years ago but hadn't the will to depart.

Thought she'd ride it like a shadow - just another faceless passenger that fate might not see fit to screw over yet again.

But now there she sat, light shed on her seat, the view of the inevitable on the horizon ever so slowly snaking its way closer.

Quietus looked up at Aver, eyes strained for all the words that she could not fit together to form an explanation.

She'd taken this ride to the very end countless times before. The drop at the end of the line never got any easier, any more pleasant. If anything it got worse with each passing experience.

Could jump off right now and save herself the trouble.

Could just say no.

Leave on sour terms, disappear into the stars, just like she'd done with Moridin to await the sensation of his death as it struck through her core halfway across the galaxy. Such great relief and yet such terrible pain.

Why oh why did she ever tell this woman her real name.

How do I talk about 600 years of train wrecks?

 

[Aver Brand]

Since Quietus and Vrag had first matched each other word for word and strike for strike (and then, later, touch for touch), twenty years had passed. Vrag lay cold and dead under leagues of lava. Aver was still here, older and, perhaps, wiser. Different… certainly.

She pursued change and revolution even when it challenged her beliefs. Young and brash and full of shet, Ygdris had dug a grave in her forest and buried her emotions deep. They were deemed unnecessary – a hindrance to her plans and goals.

Twenty years of prying fingers had a way of unearthing any bones, though.

And so instead of laughing, or leaping out of bed or, hell, anything else, Aver just met her green stare. Not because she could read the hard line of her jaw or the furrow in her brow.

Because she understood, and it made her blood run cold.

An innocent question, seemed like eons ago now – Do you dance? For a split moment, she wished she’d never asked. Could’ve just settled in, warm, and gone to sleep. Easy. Simple.

But if Aver refused emotions, she abhorred regret.

So she kept her mouth shut and her body still and she waited, breath caught somewhere between a plea and a scream. Finally, Quietus spoke.

The merc licked her lips. Considered humor. Reconsidered humor.

With a deep exhale, Aver splayed her palm on her sternum. And if her hand was a bit to the left, where warmth beat steady – she would never admit it.

“Would you rather show me?”

 

[Quietus]

Another long pause of silence between them, further consideration, expression unchanging.

Your other mates ... you have a strong bond with them.

Green eyes broke from blues but not out of any shame, jealousy, or reproach. Merely out of thought.

I don't pry into your mind, Ygdris, but I sense things within you every now and then. Sometimes I see things in your thoughts, flashes of memories you share with me without really meaning to. I don't ever comment because it's not my business and ... I don't want to know, really. But I understand that you have long, historied experiences with these other people.

You've been through a great deal together. Life changing events.

You probably know their minds as intimately as you know their bodies.

What you have with them is unique, forged in a way that cannot be replicated with others.

Your connections to each other run deep.

Turbulent jungles met frosted skies, devoid of expectation.

...am I correct in these things?

 

[Aver Brand]

“Yes.”

 

[Quietus]

The edges of her expression deepened just faintly. Days from now, looking back on these moments, she would have a great appreciation for just how much Aver had grown over the years. Might even reflect that she may have been part of the reason for that growth - that their time together, helping the Merc find a deeper understanding of herself, had made it possible for her to open up to someone again.

After so many years.

But right now those edges were holding in the swell of memories presently being dredged up.

Imagine then that you lose them and everything they represented in your life.

To no end that you have any control over.

Gone from you, and yet you live on.

How difficult it is to replace what they were. Impossible, even.

And you keep living on trying to fill the hole left behind.

Maybe one day you find someone new that strikes the same chord and you form a new bond. It's different from before but somehow the same, so you let it take root. Years go by and you create that same intimate familiarity and you have some relief for yourself that you're not alone anymore.

And then it happens.

They're gone.

Quietus' brow furrowed deeper.

And still you live on.

But this time there's two holes instead of one.

And it keeps cycling over and over and over until there's nothing left of you but living and you give up trying to find pieces of yourself in others.

 

[Aver Brand]

Aver stayed very, very still. Even her breath was shallow. Through the flow of words – no, not words, emotions through her mind, it took all she had of self-control not to pull Quietus close. She heard and saw and felt the full brunt of the sentiments she could recognize in others, but never in herself.

She couldn't even put a name to them, even as they burned through her skull, drawing her throat tight with… tears?

Anguish. Abandonment, loneliness. Longing, peace… defeat. Then nothing.

A void.

Apathy consumed the end of the remembrance, black jaws open wide. What Aver had chosen, Quietus had fled to out of despair. Just to keep from going mad with sorrow. Willingly, the other woman had allowed it all to well back up, and Aver had no choice but to meet her halfway.

Behind her lay the expanse she’d always roamed – the fields of battle she knew well, bereft of any treacherous pits, and predictable as ever. Before her lay a chasm with no end, a faultline barely kept contained by its crumbling edges. From its depths, memory roared forth, flames that singed her as she stared into the abyss.

But as she tilted her head and looked Des in the eye, Aver found the decision… hardly a decision at all. Calm and sure, she took a step forward and let herself fall. (Like so many years ago, from the top of a tower in her dream.)

This is not about me, Ygdris realized for the first time in her life.

In their shared absence of indifference, she was reminded that fear felt like a lead weight in the pit of her stomach. That anticipation felt like a hot breeze against her skin, and hope like—

“Is that… what I am? To you?”

 

[Quietus]

What the Merc felt along the telepathic link was only the spillage of what her bedmate presently held back. Memories that flooded more forcefully than she could have predicted, unbidden by the turn of conversation, the train had most undeniably lept the track and now plunged, fiercly, over the edge and into the abyss.

She knew the limitations of Aver's psyche. Though a woman of great physical power and emotional mettle, her mental barriers were nothing more than the thinnest ice of her entire self. Effort had been made to protect her from the innate empathy shared and employed through their communique, and a great deal of effort was in play now to continue doing so. The last thing she wanted was to turn the woman away because she couldn't control her own mind. Aver was scared - no, terrified; a state of being Quietus had never experience from her before.

Palm abandoned silver thigh at her middle, moving calmly across the woman's back where fingers spread warmly across skin. It was a gesture made to comfort and nothing more.

Do you remember the first time you came to Onderon after the Empire fell...

Qui's brow softened somewhat as she reminded the woman with short flashes of the memory, all from her own perspective.

The initial slap, the intensity of Aver's fury in the tent at the mark on her chest. How quickly it drained from her face at the explanation. It was that incredibly quick moment where Aver first realized it wasn't entirely about her, and instead of giving in to her anger she relented to listen and understand. That moment, Quietus knew, had solidified everything else to follow.

She realized many years later how differently it could have gone if Aver had still been Vrag.

They could have ended up very deadly enemies and yet...

A brief flash of the hot springs,
~~~


... I used to dream of fire and flesh and blood, face pressing into the nape of Aver's neck, her right hand found purchase on the opposite side while the left pressed its way up along her front, but I don't dream anymore. Not for a very long time and I miss those dreams. They're the only thing that stay with you when everything you ever know eventually fades away or dies....


~~~
followed by twilight hours teaching a killer how to kill in a new way. Aver might pick up on feelings of amusement here, nostalgia, faint traces of longing for a history long since past. Their hunt and later that evening their conversation by the fire.
~~~


Your old armor, said the telepathic voice to the red-haired woman's mind, what did you do with it?

“Ygdris are resting,”

...

“I miss them, though. Dead armor is… not comparable.”

“It’s like having this… super intimate relationship, and then you’re cut off and get a… a frakking toy as a replacement. You know?”


Finally, the woman made to reach over, but in the last moment changed direction to try and pilfer what remained of the blonde’s fruit.

SMACK.

Lightning fast, the encroaching hand was met with the bite of the Beastia's own.

Her smirk returned as she pulled another segment apart from the main fruit and held it up, gesturing to Aver with her other hand and indicating for her to catch it with her mouth. She aimed and tossed.



This was why she was still here, Aver realized. Why she hadn’t marched off when Quietushttp://starwarsrp.net/user/834-quietus/http://starwarsrp.net/user/834-quietus/ told her the mark was permanent.

A chit-eating grin curled her lips before she pulled back.

SNAP.

Lightning fast, she closed her jaws around the piece of fruit.

...

Drawing slow circles with her thumb at the junction of her clavicles, Aver canted her head back and gnawed on her lower lip.

“Tell me, Quietushttp://starwarsrp.net/user/834-quietus/http://starwarsrp.net/user/834-quietus/,” she murmured, soft against the crackling fire between them. “Why am I still here?”



Because I like you.


Her lips quirked upwards at the simple reply. The Beastia didn’t complicate matters, and Aver appreciated that more than she’d ever care to say.

“Why?” A single loaded syllable, carrying the weight of a thousand implications.

Because you remind me of...me. A much younger me.

~~~


A me that still looked for pieces of herself in others, this was not the faraway voice of a memory but that of the present woman. I recognized it in you that night and I've been trying to ignore it ever since, but you kept coming back and it kept getting harder to ignore it. I've tried not to toe the line. I've purposefully kept our lives as separate as I could, thought it was best for us both...

but this...

A wandering gaze indicated their current setting; the lion's den of a different pride. Nadir. A gala at Aver's side.

Lips parted, tips of fangs barely peeking out, the lines of worry returned to her expression. Quietus nodded.

Yes, Ygdris. That's what you've become to me.

 

[Aver Brand]

Her eyes were closed. Not because she didn’t want to look at the woman beside her. Not even because she needed to focus on the images trickling through their mental connection.

She couldn’t bear her green gaze.

And it hurt. Not broken-ribs or torn-muscles hurt – that kind, she knew well. Knew how to deal with it too. This was… If she’d ever even known the word, forty years of never giving a shet had erased it from memory.

The warm palm on her back felt like fire. (Matsu had singed off the Dark Mark with flames and glee and it never ached like this.) It felt like fire and she wanted to push it away, crawl out of bed, put her fist through the wall, through the glass – anything to run away from this and back to her body, to the roar of blood in her ears.

But the soft words stopped her. Her insides were screaming, and Aver didn’t move.

She listened.

What she heard was the bright dawn of day, a tropical storm, the endless jungles of Onderon. It was a knife in her gut. Shards of glass in her flesh. Burning heat under the three black lines, like a grenade going off behind her ribs. It was the warmth of Puppy against her side. The smell of fresh annajan cuisine, spice and meat and all. A well-made blade in her hand. The sweat and blood of a good fight.

All of these things at once – all her delights, all her agonies – and their sum was no compare.

A breath, soft and shallow, escaped from her chest.

“I don’t—” she stumbled over her own words, mouth dry and tongue like a ton of lead. “I’m not…” This time, frustration and anger lanced through her expression – blue eyes snapped open, and Aver wiped at her cheeks, furious.

“I can’t be, Des. I can’t be that to you!” It burst out of her, and she out of the embrace. Staring at the lights of Nadir, Aver chased the air in her lungs.

Quiet, then – so quiet that she might never had said it.

Not out loud.

I don’t know how.

 

[Quietus]

Too much. It was too much. Too alien and unknown for Aver to comprehend and it cause a rift in worry for the silent woman that sunk itself into her chest like a phrik-plated dagger. She contained and controlled it, forcing the rising sensation of anxiety for the inevitable to remain firmly in place. After experiencing it, being victimized by it, so many times, you learned to beat it to the jump.

Hardened. The former Queen of Onderon felt the hardening of her soul, bracing for rejection, readying herself to be dismissed. She was so prepared for it she almost wanted it. Might've preferred it to acceptance and the other eventuality of outliving yet another.

But glaciers unwillingly melting under the heat of emotion stung a sharp hit to the armor, cracking it, and suddenly she was fighting a different feeling. The innate need to comfort one she'd grown so fond of - to press streaks of salt from the woman's face and envelop her panic-stricken self in a sea of calm. Quietus denied herself these things with firm reserve and swallowed, hard, as Aver tore from her grasp.

“I can’t be, Des. I can’t be that to you!”

Very few people would ever see Desdemona Shamalain flinch, and today Ygdris Val still would not bear witness for the fury in her eyes and fear in her heart.

She grimaced, the greatest amount of her will she could recall using in many years being called upon to maintain her own emotional center. Not since feeling Moridin's death from halfway across the galaxy could she recall this much disparity between what she presented and what she felt.

I don’t know how.


Des remembered similar words spoken that night so many years ago...



“I... don’t know how to be… a friend.”



I'm a bit out of practice myself... a quiet answer in reply, harkening back to her response to the proposal of friendship. How many years had passed since then? She'd lost track but their friendship, for what it was worth, had not suffered - only grown. Now here they were.

Or at the very least...here she was.

...there's a certain amount of sacrifice that goes with it.

Quietus slowly sat up on the bed next to the Merc, neglecting to make any contact with Aver to give her room to breath and work things out for herself.

Like putting on a dress and going to a gala when I would rather not...

 

[Aver Brand]

Against everything, Aver laughed.

It was not a laugh that had ever left her chest before, nor was it likely to ever do so again. Desperation clung to it like a sailor to driftwood, caught in a storm at sea.

The colorful neons of her home, of a home, were still there, but the merc didn’t see them. She saw her own memories this time, far older than her recollections of Onderon. Older, even, than her time with the Sith. Or with the gangs. Or the gamblers.

Old enough to make it full circle back to Nadir.

To a girl of bared teeth and wild blue eyes, fists still small but no less willing to wound. A man much older, much larger, and much stronger, towering above a slave who would one day, many years since, smear his bulk in red brushwork across rusted durasteel.

But then, she had been this.

Terrified.

Ygdris could put a word to it now – a confession, but not a concession. Four decades of nothing. Not a wisp of fear. One black night, arms elbow-deep in blood, she’d sworn to herself never again. Became the glacier without once considering the price.

But the ice was now gone, and she was a woman with a bow and arrow, facing an army to blot out the sun.

These savage instruments provide a greater test of your abilities and require much more finesse than guns. Guns are easy, this is not.

Aver dipped her head, picking at the rumpled sheets with a dirty grin. Without looking at Quietus, she snaked a hand across the cool silk. An open palm.

An invitation.

“That’s a very roundabout way of saying that you dance, Des.” A pause, long enough to observe the birth and death of a star.

“Thank you.”

 

[Quietus]

Waiting with the patience of a woman that had lived far too long, Des closed her eyes to the silence hanging between them. There was the sound of a heartbeat hammering in her head and for the life of her she wasn't sure just whose heart it was. Aver was scared.

Scared like a youngling facing an inescapable life of torment and pain for reasons unknown. In looking back across her life it was never the tangible things that had grown anxiety within her like now; it was the fathomless unknown. The bated breath of what ifs and why fores. She tried not to spend time on them and she didn't intend to. What ifs and why fores didn't progress one's life, they stagnated it.

Stagnation, like boredom, was not something Quietus could abide by. Either you were moving forward, in some general direction, or you weren't doing something right; and forward did not always equate to correct. It simply equated to progress.

Progress met her in the form of a quiet hand. Not the bite of an arctic gaze - just a hand encapsulated by fear; Aver could not even look at her for the gesture ...and that was alright by her. The effort was there and that was enough. Her own fingers moved to close around it, firm and exuding warmth. Patience. Calm. A calmness that sat only at the surface while underneath she was compressed chaos, the entropy of boiling emotions only just paling to a simmer.

I wouldn't dance for a friend, the mute lifted the hand to her face and nuzzled at it, but I would for a ...mate.

and I make no promises that I'm any good.

Gently smirking lips pressed against the back of Aver's hand, another subtle attempt at humor to draw the woman out of her fear.

 

[Aver Brand]

There was no wait more excruciating than this. Not the eve of war, nor pacing in a dropship, nor watching a foe to see their strike and fell them first.

Aver was patient – when she knew who she was and what she was doing, and could offer a thousand solutions to any of those problems. In her current state, she knew nothing. She was afraid, yes, but her rational mind was still there, shouting warnings in the back of her head. It was simply…

incredibly far away.

Just like her hand. Too far away to reach, not for the distance itself, but for what it represented. Aver wasn’t a dignified creature by any stretch of the word. Yet crossing that expanse, that gaping chasm of uncertainty that might as well be endless – it would show vulnerability of a kind she could not abide.

A need, even, to hold someone for no other reason than for the intimacy of the act itself.

But she wanted to, and that meant something. It just wasn’t a something she had the power or will or wish to process, because her mind was already torn ten different ways and she could not suffer another.

Not tonight.

Relief flooded through her, then, as warm fingers grasped hers. Blue eyes closed again as the hollow in her chest filled with liquid fire, but her expression wasn’t one of ache this time – Aver was smiling.

And in the next moment, she was turning, twisting her body just enough press a sudden kiss to her lips. Words had never been her realm, but for this? For her? She would make the effort.

“Yeah, okay,” she murmured. “I can do that. We can both suck at dancing… together?”

Ygdris Val had never felt so lost in her life. But never so happy to be lost, either.