[attr="class","sumreign-triangle"]

[attr="class","sumreign-1"]






The nature of their cooperation had been made clear as soon as it began, one awful night in fall with ash on her tongue and the unfamiliar weight of a blade in her small, shaking hand. Lorne would walk wherever she deigned, do whatever she pleased – and if young Gloria was standing in her shadow when she turned, then so be it. Staying at the woman's side was a conscious choice. One that came with expectations that would weigh heavier than any meager knife in the palm, certainly, but a choice, no less. Gloria could leave at any time.[break][break]

In practice, things weren't quite so simple.[break][break]

The first time Gloria spoke about parting ways was just over a year into her 'discipleship'. It was still the 'honeymoon stage', as Cecil would tauntingly call it later, when it was only teacher and disciple journeying over war-torn countrysides in pursuit of the city of Solnste. Though the image in her mind of those great golden spires and the crumb of hope that must lay within them had carried her through days far darker, it was on this particular evening that her fatigue finally caught up with her. An eclipse of the desire of familial reunion with the inability to face morning's coming trials had arrived to put this teetering 'partnership' to its early end.[break][break]

“This is our last night in town, so make sure you haven't left your detritus lying about before you sleep,” Lorne had been saying. Gloria still remembers how she'd undone the twine tying that awful burlap sack of even worse rations with her teeth, hands occupied with... well, the memory didn't account for everything. Sleeping the night in civilization usually meant a proper meal, but in the immediate aftermath of a mission, the mercenary's paranoia would often win out over her desire for something fresh to eat. Rations would need to be consumed eventually, anyway. “This shouldn't need repeating, but I want to make this clear: the guards will be on high alert after our mission today. Do not attract any unneeded attention on our way out the gates.”[break][break]

And maybe it was that – memory within a memory, recalling the last time she'd 'attracted unneeded attention' after one of her teacher's kills – that tipped her over. Maybe it was the rations, or the roaches that skittered just outside her vision, still somehow better bedside company than what would be offered once they were once again on the road. Whatever the cause, the words that had slipped out of her mouth then were not the expected 'understood' or 'yes, sir'. They were a miserable, “I can't.”[break][break]

“You can't?”[break][break]

Lorne was not looking at her yet. That only changed when Gloria said above a murmur, “I can't go with you anymore.”[break][break]

Even early on, she understood what the look her teacher was wearing meant – the one that was most often levied her way when her training wasn't coming along as well as Lorne had hoped, or when she spoke out of line in front of Lorne's clients and made a fool of them both.[break][break]

There were looks that could kill, and then there were these: the ones that communicated that, to the looker, you were already long dead.[break][break]

“Alright then. I'm sure you've thought this through right and proper, or else we wouldn't be having this conversation now.”[break][break]

For words that spoke of such finality, their speaker did not break eye contact. Gloria could read the expectation for confirmation as clearly as if it had been penned in ink before her eyes, which could only mean that her teacher was, as wasn't uncommon, deliberately setting her up for failure. When all she could offer was an anxious look back, the woman asked, “You have thought this through, haven't you?” Still, nothing. “Good gods... Not a contract can go by without you throwing yourself a tantrum, can it?”[break][break]

Gloria felt her indignation boil over. After all the so-called 'tantrums' she should have been entitled to, that she'd swallowed for the sake of seeing her mother and father once more time –[break][break]

“I'm not – !”[break][break]

“Don't.” And, indignant or not, that tone would never fail to clamp the girl's jaw shut tight. “I've been more than patient enough with your emotional outbursts. If you can't tell me that you've considered the consequences of going out on your own as you currently are, then there's no logic in that decision for me to respect. You're a child not getting her way, so you're giving up in hopes I'll pick you up onto your feet, and whatever patience I've got left for you isn't going to be wasted on that.”[break][break]

“You – you make me eat rocks for supper, and you hit me if I don't say 'thank you'! Then we walk... we march! Days! And you hit me again if I can't – I can't keep up! Then you hit me again and again and again if I don't keep my head down when there's people who – when I could ask about my – Why would I want to stay with you? Teacher? Why?”[break][break]

Lorne had risen to her full height then, tall as the mountains and vicious as their peaks consuming a setting sun. “Because the alternative is nothing to eat, nowhere to go, and no one to save you. A spoiled little girl like you, all on your own? You've got about the same odds as when I picked you up out of that fire.”[break][break]

“That's not –” Did the tears start then, or had they started their traitorous descent at the start of this 'tantrum', drawing out her truths as rope to tooth? “I just... I don't want to see anyone else die.”[break][break]

“Then get used to it, or leave.”[break][break]

And that was that.[break][break]

Of course she had understood, however abstractly, that walking out their door in that moment, or loitering as her teacher departed by herself in the morning spelled for her a long demise. The privilege of a noble's daughter called for certain sacrifices, as did the misfortune of a common birth; it was just that the 'sacrifices' she'd been raised through cost her the odds of surviving in the man-eat-man world this country had become. Always had been, if Lorne's pessimistic tongue was to be believed.[break][break]

To lay down beneath the covers tonight, her few belongings carefully tucked away for the journey tomorrow – to walk with her head down one pace behind her teacher as they departed Krysah and started for the long road out – it was the choice to survive. But in that way, was Lorne's frosty indifference toward her disciple digging her feet in to stay behind not a choice of its own? Another kind of killing, deliberate and bloody? It was, the woman herself would say, what she'd always done best.[break][break]

It wouldn't be until the creaking of their door was accompanied by the smell of something unexpected and not unwelcome that Gloria realized she'd lost time in favor of her own misery. Their bed had dipped under the weight of a bigger body, and a fresh plate of casserole (the exact nature of which beyond 'deliriously delicious' had escaped her both in present and in past) placed beneath her watering mouth drew her fully back to reality.[break][break]

“Eat.” Commanded in the same voice that delivered 'duck' or 'distract' or 'strike' or 'out of my sight' with no room for question or error. It came at odds with the surprising gesture of goodwill, from a woman who seemed at times physically incapable of any such thing. “Sleeping on an empty stomach isn't going to do you any favors, Gloria.”[break][break]

And because Lorne asked it, Gloria obeyed.[break][break]

After the disaster that was Solnste, the mere thought of leaving was hunted out of Gloria's mind to extinction. Taking back her own life was a matter of exploring every inch of Sila herself, hoping for a missing person's poster with a sketch of her own face, or rumors in town of two famous opera singers and their long-lost daughter. Even as the years passed and her ability to self-sustain grew, following Lorne and her mercenary work was just the more convenient option. In war, people from all over wanted their enemies dead; that it was civil meant all their morbid work could be done entirely within the perimeter of Gloria's search.[break][break]

By then, the 'honeymoon stage' was a distant (often embarrassing) memory. Lorne had taken over command of her old mercenary company, meaning there were more than just the two of them watching one another's backs, and while their group did occasionally take on work that called for a more delicate hand, and fewer of them on deck, the bulk of their payload had become bolstering the strength of noblemen's private armies in their never-ending conflicts of give-and-take.[break][break]

Extended time spent in Sila's towns and cities became increasingly rare, and so it became increasingly precious. Any clue to be found therein could be the one that set her free from this unwanted life of a hired killer, even if at that point, it was half her life down the drain.[break][break]

Betrayal then would be especially earth-shattering. Just the idea of it threatened to ruin a decade's worth of trust built between an otherwise inseparable duo.[break][break]

“Songbird. You're late,” Lorne said with arms folded and eyebrow raised, looming (one of her favorite activities) over a miniature rendition of tomorrow's coming warzone. The strategy meeting had been called an hour ago, and it had been at the top of everyone's priority list as soon as it was – for all except one, whose face was stained with wrath's red even before it was struck by the tent's candlelight, whose vestigial wings trembled with violent emotion on the cusp of explosion beneath her dark and heavy cloak.[break][break]

'Late' meant punishment, later if Gloria was lucky. In that moment, it barely scratched the surface of her mind.[break][break]

“Are you sabotaging me?”[break][break]

Lorne's other eyebrow rose to meet the first. Someone coughed; probably Hilde, the gossip monger, settling in for a show.[break][break]

“I'm holding a meeting. One that, mind, you were expected for quite a while ago, and are now choosing to disrupt instead of partake in.” Voice dipping, Lorne warned, “You had better start remembering what a proper apology sounds like, Gloria.”[break][break]

“Oh, that's rich. I wouldn't be interested in giving you one even if I was stupid enough to believe it'd make a difference.”[break][break]

She remembers a gentle hand placed on her elbow, attempted placation, but she'd shaken Esfir's aid off without a second thought. These words coming from her mouth were tantamount to a spade carving through dirt, self-inflicted grave, but she'd already stormed the tent with the intention to see this bridge thoroughly burnt. At her teacher's ever-souring look, the avian only felt the pyritic equivalent of emboldened, saying, “Forget about your meeting. The signs at the adventurer's guild. The ones that had my face drawn on them. You took them down, didn't you?”[break][break]

“Gloria.” Her name off Lorne's lips twice in a row, now, exponentially worse with each repeated use.[break][break]

“I knew it. I knew it! You've been doing this sort of thing since you took me to Solnste! Longer, maybe! Almost lost me to Grandfather and realized you couldn't have that, right? Have to ruin any chance of me getting away from you before I ever realize it existed? I don't know if I'm more upset at you, or for myself in being surprised that you'd –”[break][break]

“Gloria!”[break][break]

Oh – oh, the fear she'd felt then, still potent enough to relive perfectly through memory. The vague recollection of Esfir, frightened himself, whispering hastily from below, “Kid, you'd really better stop...”[break][break]

“Enough with your baseless accusations. Sit down, shut up, and listen. Now.”[break][break]

The first sign of flaking had come then: that her righteous fury had not been smelted from equally righteous gold, but a cheap imitation that would not hold up under the thunderous presence of her angered teacher. The sane thing to have done would have been to follow instructions (this was always the first step in keeping oneself whole in the company of Lorne) and quietly accept the beating she had earned herself later. If she took it quietly enough, remembered to apologize just the way Teacher liked to hear, Lorne might aid her in the recovery period that would follow.[break][break]

Her mother's voice, more and more distant with every year, the one she scarcely knew if she truly remembered correctly, was busy asking her the golden question. Is everything she's done to you worth what it's cost you? Is everything she will do to you worth what it will cost you? When again we meet, with what will you have yet to buy?[break][break]

Little, if anything. Obviously. But it's always been a matter of mitigation, since her childhood and future went up in pyrrhic flame.[break][break]

Sanely, she took her seat.[break][break]

Insanity would only grip Gloria later – nineteen hours, about – when she would think of the missing posters to the rhythm of war drums and discordant battle cries. When the enemy made it to her solitary choke point, and she herself would choke, dropping her blade and surrendering the right of passage. Her feet would carry her away from that place, along the outskirts of combat, thoughtless like the wind beneath a bluebird's feathers in flight, and Cecil would take her, hand in bloodied hand, back to a losing conflict. Back to her 'discipleship'. Back, back, back.[break][break]

“Ruin one of my missions like that again,” Lorne had threatened just once between breaking every finger on her right hand, “and you'll wish that fire had swallowed you whole.”[break][break]

It was a choice, to survive. (Maybe. Maybe it never was.) Eighteen years of use and abuse had made her forget that, when the worst of Lorne's inflicted cruelty had truly made escape seem impossible. It's humbling, of not pitiful that there is no grandstanding revelation that helps her to remember – no revelation of betrayal, or even the result of a despair old enough to be its own adult. Back then, after all, there had never been any proof that Lorne had sabotaged Gloria at all, and when the morning sun had shown on Krysah all those years ago, the avian had packed her things and followed obediently onto the open road.[break][break]

It's simply that 'freedom' has never been synonymous with the prodigal's daughter return, twenty years late to a mourning family. The realization comes between one beat and the next on an easy summer afternoon. Lorne walks wherever she deigns, does whatever she pleases, but there is no end destination that Gloria must seek to finally step free from her shadow. If giving up old hope must be her hope anew, so be it.[break][break]

Gloria accounts for every contingency. She thinks carefully through what life will be like should she continue as is, weighted against the death that will likely fall swift when she turns herself over to the law. (There isn't much mercy, after all, for someone who's aided in regicide.) She waits patiently for a window in which one mission ends before another has been set up to take its place, and completes every objective her teacher has given her to the very letter.[break][break]

While the others regroup in the aftermath of her last contract, however, their headcount will come up short. If she's lucky, they'll think her a casualty of just another senseless battle and not imagine her beyond a comrade fallen with honor. Fortune or its absence don't matter much in the end.[break][break]

Living or dead – at home or at peace – Gloria finally flies free.

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle-1"]

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle"]

[attr="class","sumreign-1"]






“What'll you do when we win?”[break][break]

He crooks a brow at you. It hovers at odds with the mirthful twitch of the corner of his lips, the betraying echo of the smile he can't fully relinquish even as he plays at pessimism. “'When'? Awfully confident of you. Tell me this isn't how I discover you've been failing to plan for contingencies.”[break][break]

A year of history together isn't all you need to see the blatant deflection for what it is – though it does help, having experienced first hand the genuine discomfort the Doctor seems to experience when dragged by the teeth into conversations that involve revealing anything about the self. But his fight, your fight, isn't one placed on the edge of a fist without the belief in assured victory. ( At least, that's what you'd have yourself think. ) So you haul yourself up onto the guardrail, weight shifted to your arms, and kick him bratily in his over-priced pants.[break][break]

“Just answer the question, asshole. I wanna know.”[break][break]

The brow settles. Furrows. Any vestige of that hard-fought laughter from just a moment ago has been sacrificed in the name of your curiosity, and you'd almost feel bad about it, were you not leaning over the precipice of an honest answer.[break][break]

Ever since that first day, waging your life for the mere opportunity to stand as a foot soldier in X's holy war against corrupt society, there's existed within you the undeniable desire to dig deep, deeper, carve your way to something resembling human past the exterior of something deific. To both revere the man before you as something above humanity, and to find some shard of yourself reflect within him. Every look inside his mind beyond the mission is like another shaving off the facade. Imagining him beyond the mission, somewhere in that far flung future... to hear what that imagine looks like from his own mouth... Well. Maybe you ought to remember to let go of that breath you've been holding.[break][break]

The expectations all come crumbling down anyway. “I'm... not sure,” the Doctor confesses. He gives his weight up to the parallel wall, looking thoughtful, bothered maybe, even as he admits a rare defeat. “It's not something I let myself think about. Better to spend that time worrying about the moment.”[break][break]

“You don't gotta answer with the whole rest of your life,” you press. Can't even reach him with the toe of your boot from here; the petulance is going to start seeping out of your tone at this rate. “You could just say you're gonna eat a cheeseburger or some shit.”[break][break]

“I understand. But I can't imagine you'd be satisfied with an answer I've pulled out of thin air on the spot, either. Or would you tell me I'm wrong?”[break][break]

He has you there. ( Really, though, where doesn't he? ) Frustratingly, you're forced to change tactics. “Okay, okay. How 'bout I tell you what I think you'll do?”[break][break]

“By all means.”[break][break]

“Right. So first of all, you're gonna be president, obviously.”[break][break]

“Obviously,” he agrees, eyes crinkling in amused delight.[break][break]

“Pass all those laws an' shit to kick out the old, make room for the new. I'm sure you've got it all figured out.” A hum, which is close enough to assent for you. “Go up to those UN or NATO or whatever guys and give 'em a big speech on how to suck less. I mean, at that point, they'll have a good idea of what it means to mess with us, so even if they don't agree, no way anyone's dumb enough to pick a fight over it. Obviously.”[break][break]

“Obviously.”[break][break]

“Then you celebrate the fastest presidential retirement ever and come back to Seattle.”[break][break]

This, more than the implication of thinly veiled threats to the United Nations, seems to catch your boss's attention. “I'm not going to remain in power?”[break][break]

“Nah,” you say, nonchalant, crossing a heel over the knee for added lack of affect. “Your work'll be done, remember? Harlequin can be president instead.”[break][break]

The Doctor laughs – really laughs – loud, and sudden enough that it seems to almost take himself by surprise. “Harlequin, hn?” he asks through lingering chuckles. “Not who I would have thought, but far be it from me to question my dear diviner.” Tilting his head, he adds, “And if I don't remain in a seat of power, pray tell, what will I be doing with all my spare time?”[break][break]

Deadpan, without missing a beat: “Cat grooming.” Obviously.[break][break]

The second round of comedy does not catch him nearly so off guard, but the humor isn't lost on him, deathly allergic to the felines who so love him as he is. His shoulders quake. “I supposed if one life's passion does not do me in, it's only right for the next to finish the job.”[break][break]

Spoken in your best posh impression, you preach, “'To reach utopia of the mind, Nikki, you must learn the art of sacrifice.'” You're mocking him with his own voice, however tilted, an over-the-top echo of something he'd told you very early on into your work as his personal assassin. You should expect that he might pull the same on you... but you don't until it's happening, his own heavy accent suddenly absent from his voice when he next opens his mouth.[break][break]

“Dunno, Doc, didn't think 'utopia' was s'posed to have this many cats in it.”[break][break]

Distantly, you recognize your jaw has dropped and the back of your throat is sitting wide open for any unruly fly to make its home in, but that hardly matters to you now. X doesn't do impressions. Neither do you, really, but – have you struck some sort of topical gold? How bizarre to hear that voice from him, even if you really don't sound or talk like that at all... obviously.[break][break]

Before you can push whatever advantage may be there, though, he's pushing off the far wall, cutting the distance between you and holding out an arm. “Enough dawdling, though. Let's return to the base, before we're seen.”[break][break]

Right. Tonight's hit had gone off without a hitch, especially with the revolutionary leader there to ensure things went smoothly and Lydian's insistence she stay behind to double check for any loose ends. ( If you were less clueless, it'd have been easy to put together that she was already sick of listening to the two of you banter before the mission had even begun. ) This was the part where you'd return to that little hole-in-the-wall of a coffee shop to debrief, early into the morning, but the one you would normally debrief to was taking the lead. Muscle memory, then. Coming home after a long day's work. If only there weren't the need to keep their heads low, for the sake of reputation and the sake of the future.[break][break]

“What about you?”[break][break]

Your feet make landing once again. “What about me?” you ask.[break][break]

“What would you like to do? 'When we win'.”[break][break]

And this is it, one of infinite differences between you: X considers the immediate dangers, the plays upon a mental chessboard with which to circumvent them; and all the while, you live with one foot in the factual and another in the realm of possibility. One thousand days you've spent imagining your life with Sister Mary when the wicked priest is dead and gone. One thousand days you've spent wondering about this very conversation.[break][break]

To answer is to open a vulnerability in yourself to scrutiny – but with him, you've done that one thousand times. “I wanna go somewhere together. You an' me, even if everyone can see us.” Because everyone could see you. Let this hidden thing be a secret no longer. Let the world see your god parade you on his arm. You'll call him by a new name, the one he's never told you, and you'll make him laugh like tonight again and again and again...[break][break]

“I think – I just wanna be where you are.”[break][break]

Obviously.[break][break]

But the Doctor is uncannily quiet, first for a forgivable moment, and then for many unforgivable more. You're unsure if the pace he's set for the remainder of your walk home has quickened, or if that's only the thunderous beating of your heart in your chest. Have you said too much? Dammit, you can salvage this if only you play right your cards. Return to that jovial place of cats and comedy and –[break][break]

– and the look on his face says more than his words could, revealing to you that glimpse to his inner world you failed to find before. When he speaks, you don't even think the words are for you.[break][break]

“I want that, too.”

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle-1"]

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle"]

[attr="class","sumreign-1"]






CONTENT WARNING for on-screen suicide (though the nature of which is questionable, on account of Metaverse logic).[break][break]

I'll take this moment in the content notes to clarify that this is Revolution Calling the RP site the Persona 5 AU, which is something literally no one asked for or should have asked for, but... shoutout to my lovely friends whose Revo OCs are here to fill out the Phantom Thieves. Please forgive how OOC they may have turned out. (I don't trust anyone but Joan or Aggie to wrangle the rest of these idiot kids in, but do I believe they would offer themselves for a leadership position? Unpaid? Absolutely not.)[break][break]

The keywords were 'opera house'.[break][break]

Nikki hadn't believed that it existed until faced with that irrefutable proof. Hell, if he were being honest with himself, even the terrible tinny voice of the Metaverse navigator coming to life through Joan's phone hadn't been enough to fully convince him. It had only been once reality gave way to the realm of distortion-made-manifest that he'd been forced to confront the truth his benefactor had been hiding.[break][break]

Alexander was the ruler of a palace. Was this further evidence of his participation in, if not outright ownership of the shadowy organization taking lives all across Seattle – maybe further beyond? What they'd uncovered in Walker and Waverly's mindscapes seemed to line up with the humble man far better than any other suspect they'd come across, and to be so willing to take blood upon one's hands, their bounty would almost certainly have a palace that needed to be destroyed. For the other Phantom Thieves, this discovery seemed to be the final piece to the puzzle they'd already solved in their bias.[break][break]

Call him the Devil's Forever Advocate, but he still wasn't so sure. Could the same person who'd gone out of his way to save a stranger from the streets really be the mastermind behind an unknowable number of heinous crimes? ( What would that say of Nikki, himself, to have then benefited from those crimes? To flinch away from the idea of Alexander on his hands and knees, begging forgiveness like the other targets whose hearts had been changed? He couldn't bear to think about it. )[break][break]

“With any luck, this is our last mission. You guys know how it goes by now. First day's just recon, so no unnecessary combat. Let's start looking for our entrance.”[break][break]

As the other high schoolers scattered, Nikki found himself alone at the grand theater's stone steps. Until this point, many of the Metaverse locales hadn't been much by way of architectural majesty – anywhere between Walker's mortuary, utilitarian and stark and utterly devoid of life, and Waverly's endless arcade, with blinding lights and clashing colors to overwhelm the senses. In contrast, the opera house was classically beautiful in a way that, in real life, he would no doubt have overlooked, but appreciated here for how much worse it could have been. Reliefs surrounded every part of the exterior he could see, each a scene of some story he couldn't guess the name of. Forewarnings of what they would find inside, maybe?[break][break]

“Nikki! C'mon, man, we've gotta go!” Everett's head poked around a far corner and his voice carried uncomfortably well through the empty street, enough so that its owner cringed at his own volume and disappeared back into the shadows. Sure enough, after catching up with the group, they'd found their way in.[break][break]

Air ducts. Always the goddamn air ducts.[break][break]

A small eternity later landed the team in an empty hallway, probably the first of many. Though Aister's landing wasn't a graceful affair by any means, the commotion it stirred roused none of the building's inhabitants. As far as anyone could tell looking down the length of the walkway and back, there wasn't anyone or anything here to greet them.[break][break]

“Picking up a small number of shadows in the other room,” Robin said, on top of things as always and already swathed in the glow of his Persona. “That's all I've got on the radar... Hey, though, do you guys hear that?”[break][break]

“Hear what?” Nikki asked, numbly and dumbly, hushed by more than half a dozen stressed teenagers as they strained to listen.[break][break]

Without any stupid questions to break the silence, Robin's mystery noise – or rather, noises – were easy enough to pick up. The swell of music paired with voices whose words were too muffled to hear, both undeniably coming from the nearest door, presumably where the palace's only current shadows were mingling about.[break][break]

When Nikki turned back to face the group, he caught Zero rolling his eyes. “Wow, great, we got here just in time for the show. Free admission and everything.”[break][break]

The sarcasm did nothing to bring down the tension strung tight between them. Though only a handful of enemies sounded like a godsend in a place like this, half of the team were veteran Phantom Thieves by this point and understood through grueling first-hand experience that 'a handful' could very quickly turn into 'far too many to handle' at a moment's notice. An ongoing show particularly sounded like the sort of event for things to go very sour very quickly at, in this place where 'shows' meant more than anything – but Joan, de facto leader, was also veteran enough to know that figuring out the rules of a palace quickly meant dealing with its ruler that much faster.[break][break]

“Show or not, we need to see what's going on in there. Robin? Can you find a way in that's less conspicuous than the double doors?”[break][break]

“On it, boss.”[break][break]

Waiting was always the worst part of any infiltration, and the hallway did not provide the same decorative distraction as the palace exterior. As one of the team's 'shoot first, think later' pillars, this left Nikki with nothing to do, and that meant an agonizing lull before what hopefully wouldn't erode into a violent confrontation.[break][break]

Or it would have, had salvation not shortly come from above in the form of Aggie's Southern drawl. “Found something up here that'll work, I think.”[break][break]

'Something', as it turned out, was a maintenance entrance that opened out onto a series of rafters, a wall-less labyrinth for easy access to the stage lighting that shone down below. From above, each thief had a clear view of the expanse of boardwalks and beams ( which was to say, likely ambush-free up above ), and more importantly, a high away seat to what was undeniably a play being performed below. Joan clasped a congratulatory hand on Aggie's shoulder as the group shuffled in and settled down, though their careful movements felt overly cautious in this unlit corner of the room, sounds of rustling clothe buried by the powerful baritone notes sung from below.[break][break]

Nikki hardly understood the appeal of musicals, and that ignorance largely drew from the fact that he hardly understood what was going on in any given scene. On the stage, an actor resembling Waverly Elliot belted his heart out with a tale of godly ascension and a thousand lifetimes made servant to a solitary someone else – but the words were in one ear and out the other, secondary to the bizarre visual of the back of 'Waverly's head, perfectly shaven and clear so as to show the brain beneath. The backup choir seemed to share this trait, when he thought to look for them, thirty faceless persons in dark robes and plastic cranial caps. He understood through experience that this must have been a representation of how Alexander saw people, or at least saw actors, but as for what specifically it was representing... Nikki wasn't sure he wanted to know.[break][break]

It was just as well, then, that a collection of familiar faces made their entrance from stage left. 'Joan', 'Aister', 'Robin', 'Everett', 'Zero', 'Aggie', and 'himself', all dressed in their casual wear and brains left on full display. As they circled 'Waverly', the set behind morphed unnaturally resemble – ah. A palace. This was not the gaggle of kids Alexander knew as 'Nikki and the friends he keeps', but a confrontation between the Phantom Thieves and their last major target, given further credence as the lyrics echoed the warning their calling card had issued the night before the heist. Everything that existed within this place had to first exist within its ruler's mind. An innocent bystander shouldn't know those words. Shouldn't have the basest understanding of a 'palace' of the mind at all.[break][break]

'Distress' was too light a word for how that made him feel. Everyone else was long convinced of Alex's guilt, but having to admit it to himself felt like personal defeat. How many arguments had Nikki stirred up for the sake of defending his friend's supposed innocence? How much breath had he wasted demanding respect for someone who ultimately wanted them all dead? ( And could Alexander really want him dead? )[break][break]

But no one took notice of how his ears sunk to his shoulders, and no one else tasted the copper he coaxed from his lip between teeth in frustration. 'Joan' was thrusting an arm up to and through 'Waverly's chest cavity, either some avant garde representation of 'stealing the heart' or what genuinely played through the palace ruler's mind upon hearing the Phantom Thieves' threat, and the show was moving on.[break][break]

Even through his misery, Nikki could admit to himself that he was curious about the following scene, assuming he'd be able to make heads or tails of it. In the real world, Waverly never made good on his promise of wiping them all off the face of the earth after his change of heart, despite having made it abundantly clear that it was something he could do and would have gladly done before they'd stolen his treasure. He'd just... disappeared, without word or trace. If curtains hadn't been called here, in this place, that meant Alexander knew something they weren't already privy to.[break][break]

And it really shouldn't have been surprising when 'Alexander' himself took the stage. Waverly had been obsessed when they'd infiltrated the endless arcade, unhealthily fixated on someone in a position of power over him, and at war between the halves of himself that blatantly desired the unnamed 'benefactor', and that could not accept a man finding comfort in another man even in the modern era. They'd deduced back then that said 'benefactor' was likely the leader of their enemy group from what they'd found in the mindscape. If that leader was Alexander, then by transitive property...[break][break]

Still, it was unnerving to see that utter look of disgust painted on the actor playing his friend's face. The screenplay did Waverly no favors, either, portraying him hysterically, on his knees, grabbing at a man who looked at him like slime on his shoes while singing a confession of long-unspoken love, and a guilty conscious that could no longer kill for no more will than that the man had the notion. The change of heart, as seen by enemy.[break][break]

“If this is how we part,” 'Alexander' sang, holding out the familiar black shape of a pistol, “I ask one thing of you only. Sweet dreams, my detestable foe.”[break][break]

The distance from the stage to the rafters didn't matter. Nikki could see the hesitation as clearly as though 'Waverly' stood mere inches from his face, could imagine the sweat upon 'Waverly's brow as his eyes fluttered between the man and the gun. Was there one last person Alexander, the real one, had ordered his lackey to kill – someone who Waverly wanted spared until the end, when their partnership could last no longer?[break][break]

But no other actor took the stage, even as 'Waverly' took hold of the gun. It trembled in his hold as he lifted it, slowly, to inspect. Holding it too close for Nikki's comfort. Through a cracking voice, the actor sang, “Sweet victory, my detestable love,” before tucking metal beneath his chin.[break][break]

“Oh God,” he heard Everett inhale to his right. “Nikki, don't lo-”[break][break]

The warning was unnecessary. He'd understood what was being telegraphed moments before Everett caught on, and his eyes squeezed tightly just a breadth of a second before the guillotine's falling bang. Of course they hadn't seen Waverly after the change of heart. Of course. They'd sent him right back to the belly of the beast to die. God.[break][break]

When Nikki chanced to open his eyes again, the shadows playing 'Alexander' and the choir were evaporating into smoke, but the body... the body... He dare not look at the source of spreading scarlet, but that there was a pool at all meant the shadow for one reason or another wasn't going away. Safer to look at the impact on his teammates, he turned to see the paleness of Everett's face, opened his mouth to ask after his well being –[break][break]

– and stopped at the sudden cast of an impossible stage light on their position in hiding.[break][break]

“I take this opportunity of intermission to greet you, Phantom Thieves.”[break][break]

Somewhere beyond the blinding rays of the spotlight, a familiar voice rose from the empty seats. Nikki's eyes darted to, fro, and back again, until adjusting to the change in lighting and catching sight of a solitary figure stood at the lip of the theater's only balcony. The man clapped – for the bloody show, or maybe for their entourage – and smiled mirthlessly from below, unaffected by the body bleeding out on his own stage.[break][break]

Aggie, always tough as nails, recovered from the shock swifter than the rest. She accused, “You knew we were here the whole time, didn't you?”[break][break]

“For long enough. It was important for you to have watched unhindered, however. If you'd only asked for a proper seat, I would have gladly granted it.”[break][break]

Even Nikki could hear a trap in the making, and the rest of the group sidestepped the bait entirely. “Waverly is really dead, then.” Joan's voice was sculpted from stone as she rose to her feet, taking every inch of advantage as she could over the one-man audience. “You killed him.”[break][break]

“No, no, no, my child, I haven't killed anyone.” Alexander shook his head at her before turning to face the mess on stage. “You misunderstand. By his own values, Waverly felt he owed me a life debt. If he could no longer spend his life in service to me, then it was a life he could no longer bear to live.” Gloved hands gripped the rail as their owner leaned out over the empty ocean of unmanned seats, toward a memory relived only in his mind. Nikki realized in that moment that the shadow wasn't wearing anything particularly gaudy or out-of-character, startlingly similar to the Alexander he'd seen every day in person, and filed it away to consider later. “This may look as though I ordered him to die when he ran out of use for me, but after what you'd done to him, leaving on his own terms was a mercy. And I would have supposed that you, of all people, would be happy the world is short one more person of his ilk.”[break][break]

Anger swelled to such a degree at that, the implication of guilt on their end, that Nikki could no longer help himself. He shouted, “His heart was already changed! He didn't need to die!”[break][break]

But his friend did not turn to face him, nor outwardly react much beyond a contemplative pause. Of course, Alexander must have already known that the boy he'd taken in off the streets was part of the Thieves of Heart who had come to foil his life's work – it was Alex's own cognition that had put an actor bearing Nikki's likeness on that stage.[break][break]

Maybe their friendship wasn't much of anything at all. Would the man one day look at Nikki the way his actor had looked at 'Waverly' moments before death?[break][break]

“You're all still young, so I cannot blame you for not seeing things for what they are. But rather than argue at one another until our breaths run ragged, I think it better if only I show you.” Alexander lifted his hands from the railing long enough only to clap once – definitive, loud, a different breed from the applause for a show well ran just minutes before – and the noise carried with it unspoken instructions throughout the hall. At once, the spotlight was gone, but soft illumination came to fill the gaps that once gave rise to a thief's favored dark, and down below, a flurry of shadows took to the stage to clear the body and make way for the coming act of the script. Their master watched with rapt attention, and his eyes never strayed from their work even as he continued to address his enemies above. “There is so very much I can show you here. Past, present, future... I have watched infinite stories unravel on this very stage, and the secrets of the script have been made clear to me. Well before the curtains fall, I know the fate of every character. I know, too, how our story will end.[break][break]

“So join me, Phantom Thieves, in this house of tragedies,” the mastermind said for all to hear, “and I will show you the nature of your downfall.”

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle-1"]

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle"]

[attr="class","sumreign-1"]






CONTENT WARNING again for suicide, though in the sense of 'this involves the investigation into a murder staged as a suicide'. This is my first time writing a Robots fic, and it takes place in an AU post-Caves of Steel where Spacetown's departure from Earth is a little less immediate + Fastolfe leaves Daneel in Spacetown during its gradual teardown so Daneel can shadow under Baley some more and hopefully come back to Aurora with more experience on the Nature of Humanity™ or whatever. As much as I love their open affection for each other in Robots of Dawn, I'm especially fond of the period of time where Baley is caught awkwardly between his anti-robot/Spacer prejudice and the fact that he actually really likes this guy and maybe... likes likes this guy 😳, so to take advantage of that, this is set after these two have already worked a good few cases together and are starting to properly settle in as 'partners'![break][break]

It doesn't do to waste his tobacco rations first thing in the day - but then, it is not every morning that finds Elijah Baley stationed solemnly on the grounds conjoining New York City to its parasitic attachment, Spacetown. He always leaves enough breadth between himself and the picket lines, ever present and cantankerous, but there's only so much distance he can afford himself without losing sight of the rendezvous point. The result is an indeterminate amount of time waiting through a cacophony of outrage, enough to split the head of a man not beholden to his vice clear in two. And so, mournfully - the artificial dawn is spent with his pipe between his lips.[break][break]

The rioters are a curious case that the plainclothesman would have gladly set his mind to sorting out, had said mind not already been set on his latest case. With their company unavoidable, however, he lets himself be distracted for only a few moments. Within the next five years, probably fewer, their hated Spacetown will be no more; such was the stated intent of its showrunners after the death of one Dr. Sarton of Aurora, and already, a fair number of the colony's most influential residents have been recorded as leaving Earth to return to their respective Spacer worlds. These were enough for many Earthmen to put down their signs and return to their homes, satiated by their victory. No more Spacer presence on the mother planet.[break][break]

But the number of protesters never quite thinned to nothing, as is evident from the throng of people still surging the entry tunnel dividing the City and a glimpse of the Outside. Maybe the promise of Spacer eviction in five year’s time was still too long, or maybe they’d been spoonfed enough falsehood by strangers off-planet to not believe in Spacetown’s deconstruction until it's already happened. Really, the crowd’s presence has little to do with the decision for the Spacer visitors to return to their homes light-years away, and thinking that their continued chanting would speed along the process may have only been a delusion.[break][break]

To himself, though, Baley empathizes. Had even once envisioned himself among them, shouting with a voice as headache-inducing as the din he suffers through now. It is only because of his brief acquaintanceship with certain figures beyond the barrier that the thought of Spacetown no longer leaves such a bitter taste on his tongue, or that he can believe with as much confidence as the unpalatability of zymoveal that the town leadership intends to make good on their promise of leaving. It’s just that there is one thing that makes their inevitable departure a melancholic affair in his mind, even if such a confession would need to be pulled out from him with teeth - one person he hadn't expected he would ever come to miss.[break][break]

“Daneel,” Baley greets as the robot exits the vehicle’s rear door, aiming for warmth but landing far closer to relief.[break][break]

R. Daneel Olivaw, as is expected, responds with nothing at all approaching ‘warmth’, expression grave as he acknowledges the Earthman. “Partner Elijah.”[break][break]

This exchange is not at all unusual by this point. Baley waits as close as he dares to the failed joining of Earth and Spacer culture as his robot partner is delivered to him from beyond the barrier, ever the immaculate vision of what a man from space ought to look like. By now, others at the precinct must have acclimated to the dichotomy of the rather plain plainclothesman and his picturesque Spacer companion moving as one through the halls, just as Baley had been forced to acclimate with the insecurity that dichotomy once stirred in him. The arrangement to have R. Daneel stationed as an honorary officer of the NYPD is hardly new at this point.[break][break]

These days, though, Baley has gotten enough ‘wins’ under his belt that even the phantom dregs of that original competitiveness is naught but a memory. Daneel’s faith in him no longer registeres as somehow insincere, the way it had during their first case when the worry had been that a machine had arrived to usurp man in his position as a detective. Likewise, Baley is free to admit without hesitation or shame that he quite likes the company of his unexpected Spacer friend. Perhaps even works better with Daneel around to help stimulate the processes of his sleuthing mind.[break][break]

Baley claps a hand over Daneel's shoulder congenially and begins steering them in the direction of the City. “Well, let's not loiter here.” To their rear, Daneel’s chauffeur peels away, off to contend with the throng of people outside Spacetown's gate. “I’ll take you to the scene of the crime, and we'll talk details along the way.”[break][break]

Abilene Rote, 62, former yeast farmer-turned-astronomer. Well-liked, though she possessed a closeted personality and tended to keep to herself. Though the cause of death appeared self-inflicted, her behavior in the weeks leading up to her ‘suicide’ was cause for doubt in her colleagues. Several favors were pulled, and now plainclothesman Baley and the humaniform robot R. Daneel are tasked with investigating the potential for murder.[break][break]

After reviewing the nature of Ms. Rote’s work, Baley’s instincts say there's very little ‘potential’ in the matter. Someone within New York is to be blamed, and it certainly isn't Abilene herself.[break][break]

A charm of cerulean beads hangs from Abilene Rote’s bedroom window. Through the distortion of translucent colored glass, Baley can see the western sprawl of the City unfurled, grayscale and unsettling. Windows like these are highly unusual, commissioned only by those with the money and the conceit to stomach a bird's-eye view.[break][break]

Baley holds no such conceit. He turns his attention quickly to the miniature moon at the end of the charm, cradled delicately in the center of his palm.[break][break]

Signs of the late Abilene's lunar obsession dominate her high rise apartment. Framed on her walls in the entryway are depictions of the very first moon landing from millenia ago, mankind’s first real steps on extraterrestrial land that would ultimately pave the way for all fifty foreign settled planets. The images are far older than any holo, and their medium is a testament to that age. The plainclothesman, hobbyist historian that he is, is already familiar with the impressions of that ancient affair - but it hadn't been until stepping into the living space of the deceased that he was able to steal a glimpse back in time to that old, old Earth.[break][break]

“A Medievalist,” Baley says when Daneel’s shadow joins him in the bedroom. He lets the moon in his hand fall into its natural orbit.[break][break]

“By admission?” Daneel asks.[break][break]

“By process of elimination.” His eyes inspect the room as he speaks, but a cursory glance reveals to him only more of her passions and nothing of potential foul play. “How much do you know of Earth’s colonizing of its moon, Daneel?”[break][break]

“Only that it happened, Partner Elijah, and was eventually abandoned. It is the impression of the texts in my archives that colonization efforts were ultimately deemed too cost ineffective, resulting in the cancellation of present and future projects.”[break][break]

“That's more or less the story of it.” Riffling through the drawers of a heavy oak desk, Baley extrapolates, “It was the first extraterrestrial body to be settled, serving as a ‘test’ before our ships were able to traverse the distance necessary to find suitable planets outside our solar system. Our moon has never been particularly suitable for human life, however. When the first Spacer worlds were being settled, it was quickly decided that the terraforming necessary to make the moon hospitable enough to sustain civilization was better put to use elsewhere.[break][break]

“For a time, what remained on its surface was used for extravagant vacationing for the few who could afford it. Then the Cities as we know them took hold, and the prospect of leaving home for a place so… exposed lost its charm. Settlements were abandoned, tourist destinations left to rot. All that we send up these days is waste from the Earth’s surface.”[break][break]

Daneel’s stillness would betray nothing to a lesser eye, but Baley has worked enough cases together with the robot to recognize that he's likely considering this new information.[break][break]

“It would sound as though your moon would make for an appealing first step, should we successfully convince the pioneers of Earth to consider settling in space once more,” ultimately says the Spacer. Baley hands him a sheave of documents that might not mean much to their case, but can't hurt to have recorded in the perfect memory of a positronic brain.[break][break]

“Abilene Rote would agree with that assessment, no doubt. She’d been fixated on the idea of revisiting life on the moon by any means well before we began trying to appeal to our would-be settlers. A bit radical for Medievalist ideology, but Medievalist ideology all the same. She must have looked at those images of Earth’s initial landing and longed for the sense of wonder they brought.”[break][break]

The moon in the night sky, the palm of the hand. Baley, who a year ago balked at the idea of a quick visit beyond the safety of the Cities’ metal domes, didn't need to try to imagine the appeal.[break][break]

Daneel hands the paper stack back to his partner with a nod. “Your commissioner continues to cooperate with matters of the Medievalist group, correct?” Baley can't help the bud of pride that sprouts from the concrete of his heart as the robot proposes, “Perhaps we should proceed with our investigation by determining the existence of a connection with any known members.”[break][break]

“We're of a mind, my friend.”[break][break]

Commissioner Enderby's connections are as vast as they are useful. Baley carefully avoids thinking of their ‘cooperation’ on such matters as blackmail, because - well - this manner of ‘cooperation' is really what his old college friend should have been offering from the start.[break][break]

It's a surprise to learn that Abilene’s name has not once shown up on a Medievalist registry, official or otherwise. If their covert recruiting methods had been able to reach even his satiated wife, it's hard to imagine someone who appeared so wrapped up in the past during their lifetime would not have similarly fallen prey.[break][break]

The registries are not without their uses, however. By the end of Day One, they have a name listed on a number of those registries matching the face of a woman - one Delilah Whey - seen coming and going, notably out of place, near Abilene's home and place of work. It's as good a lead as one can hope for at the end of Day One. All that stands in the way now is the matter of time and humanity's unbeatable need for sleep.[break][break]

“Are we not returning to your residence, Partner Elijah?”[break][break]

The intrasection Baley uses to return home from the precinct, visually no different from that which he’d used while still rated C-5 and visually no different from any other intrasection on this stretch of the communo-tube, passes by in a blur without so much as a twitch of his leg to step off New York’s high speed public transport. These external similarities have done him in a number of times the last few days, usually when muscle memory dictates that it's time to return to his wife and son - but not tonight, nor the few nights passed.[break][break]

Already dreading the inevitable line of questioning, he keeps his tone uselessly clipped. However he says it won't matter to a robot, however human he may look. “Not tonight. We’ll be spending the night somewhere else.”[break][break]

And Daneel, who accompanies him during his cases at his surviving maker’s request, who was designed with an inquisitive mind second only to his perfectly humanoid appearance, wonders aloud in exactly the way Baley hoped he would not. “You are not concerned for the safety of Jessie and Bentley due to the nature of this case, are you?”[break][break]

Baley sags into his shoulders incrementally. He must remind himself that Daneel's nature to question is equal to his nature to withhold ( or more accurately, to never consider ) judgment. It does not stop the shame from seeping through his cracks when he says, “Jessie and I are having… troubles. We’ll be spending the night somewhere else.”[break][break]

It's unfortunately nothing new. There's been strain placed on them ever since he discovered her sneaking out to illicit meetings under the cover of darkness; strain ever since he shattered her confidence, her sense of self all for the momentary high of feeling correct some decade or so ago. All that has changed is that the ever-existing pressure finally put the pot to boil.[break][break]

If Jessie needs space, who is he to deny her it? Somewhere down the chain of cause-and-effect, those little glass beads of hurting and being hurt, it really is his own fault.[break][break]

At least Daneel seems satiated, or at least wise enough to the emphasis of repetition to keep any further line of questioning to himself. The remainder of their journey to their city-issued condo is spent in silence, while Baley considers all the information he’s learned from the day and considers the best plan of attack for the next.[break][break]

So consumed is he that he fails to take much advantage at all of this brief window of companionship from his friend of another world. The two men simply settle into their respective spaces without much discussion, and Baley gives himself up to sleep with thoughts of hundreds of celestial bodies, each hanging from their own cerulean chain.[break][break]

“I never knew the hag.”[break][break]

Delilah Whey does not tarry, does not so much as pause in her work for the detectives who have come to question her. To himself, dabbing sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his coat, Baley was hoping to take this conversation away from the heat of the kiln - but there's no leverage he can use yet to force the issue, and if they want anything from the burly woman, it's to be on her terms.[break][break]

“But you call her ‘the hag’,” he counters.[break][break]

“Never knew her personally. Way she treated Junia, though? I know a hag when I hear of one.”[break][break]

“Junia?”[break][break]

Baley turns to Daneel pointedly, and the request does not need to be spoken aloud to be followed.[break][break]

“There are no currently known Medievalists by the name of ‘Junia’, Partner Elijah.”[break][break]

As the woman pulls molten glass from flame, she throws the robot, perfectly unruffled by his proximity to the fire, a withering glare. “Is that what this is about? Last I was aware, wanting the Cities to go back to the way things used to be wasn't a punishable crime.”[break][break]

“It's not,” Baley concedes, “but the crime we’re discussing isn't politics. It's murder. We’ve reason to believe the deceased was connected to your movement.”[break][break]

“Well, your partner said it well. Junia’s got no part in ‘my movement’, and I’ve never so much as been in the same room as your woman. Is that all?”[break][break]

“I'll leave you be, but I’ll need a way of contacting this ‘Junia’ in your place.”[break][break]

For the first time, Delilah sets her equipment down, but only so that she may turn the full weight of her presence on the plainclothesman. Outrage brighter than any inferno dances in the brown of her eyes. “You leave that girl out of it. She’s enough stress on her plate without no-brain cops knocking down her door.”[break][break]

“If she's as unconnected to the case as you say, then she suffers no risk by answering a few questions.”[break][break]

“Do you suppose I’ve got glass for brains, too? You’ll put the killing words in her mouth if she doesn't speak them first. Enough of you.”[break][break]

And that is all she’ll speak with them.[break][break]

Daneel announces, once they are well beyond the heat if the glass kiln, that his cerebroanalysis showed little evidence of dishonesty when Delilah spoke of her lack of acquaintance; Baley knows from prior experience that the method isn't so infallible as to write the glassblower off altogether, but it's enough to set her aside as a suspect for the time being. Daneel notes her apparent disdain for the both of them, not just himself as a Spacer, and questions a society that cannot place trust in its own upholders of law; Baley sighs and tells him to put the matter away for a later discussion. For now, there's only the matter of the case.[break][break]

Finding Junia is not so simple a matter, but the aid of a positronic brain grinds days’ work into that of one and half. At the base of the rabbit hole comes the knowledge that the ‘suspicious woman' coming and going near Abilene's haunts was, in truth, women, with only one noted as being out of place on account of her atypical build. The plainclothesman finds himself pinching his nose to ward away the coming headache ( no more tobacco rations this late in the week ) and the already-present annoyance. At least it places their new lead somewhere near the victim.[break][break]

The evening of Day Three finds them at the doorstep of Junia Drollet, middle-aged and tired, who lets them in with none of the obstinacy of her reported friend. As a C-2 citizen, her home scrapes the very bottom of humble, and though Baley politely turns down her offer of refreshments ( as any sound-minded Earthman ought to ), he can only imagine their reflecting lack of quality.[break][break]

“Ms. Rote gave lectures at my college here and then,” Junia explains once the three of them have settled into groaning old chairs. “Astronomy, of course. I was… quite taken with her method of teaching, and screwed up the courage to ask her to share more with me off of campus. Not long after, we considered each other good friends. Or at least, I did.”[break][break]

Her eyes wander often to the Spacer sat at Baley’s right. For the many inhabitants of Earth who have only seen Spacers in bookfilms and hyperdramas, Daneel is quite like an exotic animal pulled obediently by leash, something to be soaked up by the eyes lest the mind forget in the many years it would take to see such a specimen again - if ever. Daneel's grave exterior does nothing to dissuade this ‘oogling’, either making polite eye contact back without complaint or putting his attention entirely elsewhere as if ignorant of his own presence. Meanwhile, Baley has learned to take advantage of the distraction. While Junia watches his partner, he can better scrutinize her and her surroundings without appearing to break decorum.[break][break]

“How long would you say you were friendly with one another?”[break][break]

A flash of familiar blue catches his eye among the shelves of succulents in the back corner.[break][break]

“Seven years…? Eight? I would pay visits to her home up until the month of her… of her death.”[break][break]

“What changed within that month?” he asks, though his attention has been thoroughly bisected.[break][break]

“N…nothing. It was a matter of scheduling.”[break][break]

“Scheduling? She didn't seem off at all to you during that time?”[break][break]

“‘Off’...? She was… busier. She told me her work was showing promise, and that she needed more time to dedicate to it.”[break][break]

Though the details are difficult to make out from a distance, Baley does not need to cross the room to see the lunar ball, no larger than a thimble, floating below a string of cerulean beads. “Did the two of you ever discuss the nature of her work? Why it would take up so much of her time?”[break][break]

“We… That is…” Junia looks directly at him now, and Baley's head snaps to meet her eye. A flush overcomes her features as she mumbles, “It is somewhat embarrassing to admit, but Abilene's dream had always been to… to go to the moon. I wasn't very interested in the mechanics of it. No. I don't think I really believed it was possible. The Spacers… Oh. My apologies.”[break][break]

Once more, she's turned to Daneel, who merely shakes his head in a placating manner. “No need, Ms. Drollet. Please, continue.”[break][break]

“Alright. It's just - the Spacers have placed so many restrictions on space travel. I didn't believe it was possible to leave Earth's atmosphere without their say-so.”[break][break]

Spacer restrictions on an Earthman’s travel are more complicated than that, and hardly Baley's expertise. Rather than attempt to correct her, he nudges her back to his original line of questioning. “So she never told you what had changed?”[break][break]

Junia struggles through a shrug. “New funding? I'm not sure. By that point, we… I’m not sure.”[break][break]

Too vague, and likely a guess at random. Baley ponders the charm, the accusation of ‘hag’ tossed out before, the anxiety pouring off of the woman before him. Said woman takes the silence about as poorly as he would have guessed, and her smile is paper thin when she pleads in the guise of a question, “Have I answered all your questions, sirs?”[break][break]

Baley is deliberating the merits of coming back tomorrow when the pressure of time has fully settled on her shoulders when his partner’s voice surprises him.[break][break]

“Ms. Drollet, could you explain the nature of your relationship with Ms. Rote?”[break][break]

The question tears a hole through the paper of Junia’s grin, but the edges cling to the facade of upturned lips. “I… believe I already told you that we were friends for the better part of a decade.”[break][break]

“Yes, you did. I do not doubt that. However, I have reason to believe that this is not the whole of the story.”[break][break]

Cerebroanalysis, Baley wonders, or a bluff? He holds his tongue and allows the robot the stage. “Your friend, Mrs. Delilah Whey claimed that you were mistreated in some way, enough that it negatively impacted her impression of Ms. Rote,” Daneel clarifies when no reply is offered.[break][break]

“Delilah's always been overprotective of me. Abilene would never… I was not ‘mistreated’.”[break][break]

“Very well. Do you know for what reason your time was cut short, then, when Ms. Rote was still making time for her other friends and colleagues? You are the first to claim that her work interfered with your relationship.”[break][break]

Daneel would not imply that Junia's supposed friendship with the deceased was of lesser importance than Abilene's other connections. Firstly, implication was not a tactic he ever used, and secondly, it was not a conclusion his positronic brain was likely to settle on with the information they’d been provided with. Without knowing Daneel, however - without knowing that the calm and collected spaceman sat in her dreary living space was no man at all - the implication was as loud in the following silence as an air raid. The tatters of Junia's smile could not withstand the attack on her relationship with the dead.[break][break]

“A falling out,” Baley chances when minutes have passed unspoken, “does not equate to any wrongdoing, Ms. Drollet.”[break][break]

Fatigue seems to settle in fully on her then, and Junia sinks inch by inch into the threadbare cushion beneath her. “I attempted to court her,” she says, quite miserably. “She rejected me. Was rather disgusted, in fact. That was last we spoke.”[break][break]

For the first time since seeing it, Baley’s mind is taken completely off the moon charm and its glass beads. “She's nearly twenty years your senior,” he says in disbelief.[break][break]

Junia has discovered yet another inch in which to hide. “I'm well aware.”[break][break]

Baley takes a moment to remember how to close his mouth.[break][break]

“Thank you for your honesty, Ms. Drollet. It is an unhappy thing you have shared with us, but no less helpful for it.” Daneel accompanies his thanks with the result of many nights of grueling coaching: an uncanny smile, looking far more a grimace on a troubled face. This is Baley’s cue to excuse them both.[break][break]

“A crime of passion, then? Spurned by romance, Drollet takes the pain of rejection out on the rejector?” he muses aloud once freed of the rundown building and back in the bustling arms of New York's streets. “Staging it as suicide implies premeditation, but there would have been three weeks between the ‘courting’ attempt and the murder itself.”[break][break]

“I do not believe Ms. Drollet is our culprit, Partner Elijah.”[break][break]

“No?”[break][break]

“She does not seem capable of murder, if the results of my cerebroanalysis are to be believed. She was dishonest only in the original nature of her feelings toward Ms. Rote, and after her confession, I felt no trace of guilt, anxiety, or any other such emotion that would be cause for concern.”[break][break]

“She appeared plenty anxious to me,” Baley says, and curses as he unthinkingly reaches for a pipe and tobacco that aren't there.[break][break]

“Not during our departure, Partner Elijah. There was only shame, and a great sense of sadness - no doubt for the loss of a loved one twice over.”[break][break]

Baley catches himself dozing twice over the course of his very late dinner. He's been sparing their limited-access chicken for Jessie and Bentley at home, despite knowing that much of that access will still be going to waste ( “What will the women in Personal say if they catch onto us flaunting our status so brazenly?” he can hear his wife say, clear as though she were in the room. “No one needs that much meat in a week, anyway.” ), so it’s protoveg from the Community kitchen once more. He knows he ought to be spending this time rethinking where to take the investigation - if not somewhere among the Medievalists, then where? - but the monochrome meal and the length of the day do him no favors in facilitating a schedule for tomorrow.[break][break]

By the time the protoveg is gone, his mind has settled only on two thoughts, each as useless as the other. First: the moon, like a pendulum, swinging back and forth and entirely out of orbit. Second:[break][break]

“Daneel. You have no need to digest food, and so no means to produce stomach acid.” The robot in question sets the viewer down from his eyes to look Baley's way, though the Earthman makes no move to share eye contact. Doesn't even think to wonder what bookfilm he’s interrupted. “Is it the same for saliva?”[break][break]

“That is correct, Partner Elijah.”[break][break]

“Then your - mouth. It's completely dry?” Now that the words are out, Baley realizes how strange they sound. How tired he must be to voice them aloud. Standing up from the glass dining table, he pauses only once on his way to his ‘bedroom’ partition to discard the remnants of his meal.[break][break]

“Not so. I was designed to emulate a human’s appearance in all ways that another human may reasonably interact with me. As such, for the sake of authenticity, I am able to produce a solution within my mouth, nose, and throat that would resemble saliva or mucus to the untrained eye. For efficacy, it is also self-cleaning, unlike the fluids it is meant to emulate.”[break][break]

Baley settles in beneath a thin sheet and finds he doesn't have the energy to withhold a snort at the image Daneel's words bring. A human, perfectly unwitting, sanitizing their mouth with the use of another's; disinfectant in sheep’s clothing. It is a dangerous train of thought, imagining the robot lip-locked with another. But the attempt to pull away from it is not much better - imagining Daneel instead with someone nearly twenty years his senior, aging and flawed in a way the Spacer will never be. How much older, exactly, does ‘Partner Elijah’ look when stood shoulder-to-shoulder?[break][break]

“Partner Elijah?” Daneel echoes unwittingly, likely to Baley's noise of amusement, but the idea of explaining himself now to a humorless piece of metal feels impossible.[break][break]

Instead, he drifts to uneasy slumber with a final rebel thought:[break][break]

I could stand to use some mouthwash.[break][break]

They approach the mystery from another angle. This time, the search turns up something proper.[break][break]

Either Junia's funding ‘guess’ was no guess at all or a very good one, indeed. Convincing manufacturers within the City, or even Cities would take a great deal of charisma ( of which Abilene was noted to have little ) or an even greater deal of capital. Abilene was noted to have had a modest amount of the latter, but something had changed in the several months leading up to her death that gave her the confidence to propose and even seal deals with companies across New York with impressive dollar signs attached.[break][break]

Either she had come across a great sum of money in a very short amount of time, or she was taking the gamble of a lifetime.[break][break]

The latter scenario is easy enough to mentally play to its morbid conclusion. A business partner is promised compensation they never receive, and they claim their dues in blood - a story told a thousand times. The former has no clear A-to-B hypothetical attached, but it does mean that capital was flowing in from somewhere. All that remains is to follow it to the source.[break][break]

“Melpomenia?”[break][break]

“Yes, Partner Elijah,” Daneel explains to the furrowing of Baley's brow. “It is the nineteenth Spacer planet, located approximately twelve light-years away in the -”[break][break]

“Alright, alright, enough.” Baley feels his patience wearing down to nothing in the face of long work and short rest, and can't imagine the physical distance of a far-flung planet hiding any secrets of import to their investigation. Aiming for the heart of his inquiry, he asks, “What would a Spacer from Melpomenia want from an Earth settlement on the moon?”[break][break]

The humaniform robot, as expected, shows no sign of resentment toward having been interrupted, and answers in a mild tone. “Scientists predict that the atmosphere of Melpomenia will deteriorate to such a point that human life can no longer sustain itself within 2300 of your Earth years. It is within the realm of possibility that Edere Voluk wishes to observe how Earth’s settlement was able to maintain a quality of life in the absence of an atmosphere. Such observations could be invaluable to research into the preservation of life on Melpomenia in the future.”[break][break]

More than two millennia into the future sounds unfathomable. Half that time in the past had seen Earth and the Spacer colonies as friends, unfathomable in its own right, and the full 2300 would only have seen the earliest integration of robots into human society.[break][break]

“Seems awfully forward thinking,” the Earthman grumbles, unconvinced. “And anyway, if it were a matter of studying how Earth handled its colonization in the past, the records are hardly kept secret, even from off-worlders. I don't buy it.”[break][break]

He rubs at the stubble of his jaw, coaxing some sort of revelation from the information in his head. Too little of it, unfortunately. The promise of Spacer funding for an Earthman's passion project throws a flag so vibrantly red as to be blinding, but until he can dig his hands into the character of this ‘Edere’ fellow, that's all it can remain - a warning flag.[break][break]

“I want to speak with him. Daneel, can you arrange for it?” Or Dr. Fastolfe, whose name apparently holds great weight where he lives on Aurora - or anyone at all, really, who could convince a prominent scientist from the illustrious Melpomenia to speak to a humble Earthman detective.[break][break]

It's of little surprise that no such meeting comes to pass.[break][break]

That night, he dreams of a time some 2300 years flung forward in time, when the great-great-great descendants of even the longest-lived Melpomenians are driven from their homes by an exposed surface that no longer cradles or cares for them. Twelve light-years away, cocooned in the safety of glass caves, Lunarians gather on the anniversary of the Second Landing with meals free of yeast, dressed in their finest cerulean silks.[break][break]

In the waking world, he rises to a bed where his wife does not sleep, in a reality where Abilene Rote no longer lives.[break][break]

Somewhere beyond the City dome, the moon is full.[break][break]

Baley’s eyes are on the interrogation, but his mind could not be further away.[break][break]

In the same half-hour he’d agreed to take Detective Mulche up on playing audience to her current case - after several grueling years, they had finally been able to bring a particular contract killer in for questioning, and the whole of the bureau was in a tizzy over it - he’d ordered Daneel to stay behind and attempt to gather any information on their off-world lead as possible. And though standing in a room with several other officers to ‘watch the show’ was an olive branch offered to him to give his mind a rest, making peace with peace itself is a skill he’s yet to master.[break][break]

Through the one-way glass, Mulche is presenting their captive with several ‘trophies’ the killer had taken from his victims. On his side, Baley is considering motives.[break][break]

Funding in exchange for rights to the land seems realistic enough. With Spacetown detached from New York City and gone, the Spacers’ only foothold within Earth’s Solar System will be no more than another footnote in history; claiming a not-insignificant portion of a newly settled moon could be a means of retaking that advantage.[break][break]

But - no. Spacetown is considered by all parties involved or otherwise to be a failure in every goal it tried to achieve. Only by the death of one of its most respected and beloved roboticists was the project able to bear any promise of future success, and even that promise was contingent entirely on the actions of Earthmen, making the decision for themselves to return to the star ocean above. Spacetown's existence is no longer even necessary - just a slowly dying parasite that draws the outrage of the people it once tried to appease.[break][break]

Even if Edere’s goals do not align with Dr. Fasolfe’s - even if Edere has no inclination toward even the most superficial mingling of Earthman and Spacer - any project bearing a passing resemblance to Spacetown will be met with vitriol and no small amount of pushback. It just won't work.[break][break]

Mulche is pulling out another set of ‘trophies’ when Baley sees something that properly tears him from his line of thought. He notices first the splash of blue, familiar enough to invade his dreams, then the chain terminated by one simple sphere. From here, he can only see a perfect orb smattered in gray, but he doesn't need to scrutinize to understand what it is and what it represents: the moon, plucked from heaven and strung up with beads.[break][break]

“Jehoshaphat!”[break][break]

“Ms. Rote’s murderer, and the murderer of many others has been successfully prosecuted. Partner Elijah, does this not please you?”[break][break]

Morning finds Baley again beyond the rioters with a packet of tobacco rations tamped into his pipe, feeling some multitude of emotions too complex to parse, but ‘pleased’ not among them. The key difference between now and the last time he stood in this spot is the company. Daneel has been carefully dressed in the common fashion of an Earthman, bronze hair tucked away beneath a nondescript hat, each article meant to keep attention away before they are ultimately burned on the transit to Spacetown.[break][break]

These are their final moments together before they return to their usual separate lives. Baley ought to dreg up some joy, or at least a smile for his departing friend, but he finds himself somehow more dour than the state he’d been in at the start of this case. Any grin he could offer would look as strained and synthetic as the robot’s beside him.[break][break]

“Of course not,” he replies around the pipe past his lips, stuffing tobacco back into his coat. Already, he can see his reserves running dry before half past the week’s length. “Crennel may have done the killing, but I believe he was just the weapon used in the murder. Take the blaster from someone with lethal intent and they'll just find another.”[break][break]

“You are speaking of Edere Voluk.”[break][break]

“Maybe. Maybe not. He wasn't involved in all this by chance, though, I can assure you that. If only our jurisdiction extended far enough, I could make him speak with us, and then there would be no question of his motives or if he'd wanted Rote dead.” A tirade is building behind his teeth, anger flaring at the faceless Spacer voice that mocks in his ear: What is the death of one dirty Earthman when there are eight billion more to take her place? Voicing that tirade, though, that anger aloud will do no favors. Daneel is well aware of Baley's feelings toward the flippant nature of outsiders when it comes to an innocent’s death already.[break][break]

As if sensing the plainclothesman’s desire to end the conversation there, a familiar vehicle pulls its way past the picket line and slows to a stop before them.[break][break]

“I'm sorry I wasn't able to give you a better sending off,” Baley says with a sigh. Still, when Daneel takes his offered handshake, something warm does manage to find its way through the storm of frustration and disappointment and settle in his chest.[break][break]

“Not at all. Though you are dissatisfied with the results of our investigation, I feel that you have once again performed your duties admirably, and am grateful to have been able to join you. I eagerly await our next assignment.”[break][break]

Right. So long as Spacetown still lingers, so too will this unusual partnership between man and robot, Earthman and Spacer exist. And if someone twelve light-years away on the planet of Melpomenia has designs that would have him manipulating the dreamers of Earth - well, there may be an opportunity to deliver justice yet. He considers this as he offers his farewell, “Take care of yourself, Daneel,” and watches his friend disappear first into the automobile, then into the usual riotous crowd.[break][break]

There will come a day, same as it did for the old settlements of the moon, that this partnership will end. Next time, Baley tells himself, he’ll make more of the time they have together.[break][break]

Until then - he makes for home, intent to make amends with his wife.

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle-1"]

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle"]

[attr="class","sumreign-1"]






The matter comes up about how one would expect it to. The scene:[break][break]

At the inn, rainwater 'logging their hair into heavy clumps of black and red respectively, drawing up lakes with every pause of the stride. Lorne asks for a room in that clipped way of hers, punctuated by silver coins left on the desk, and the genial man behind it wishes 'you and your daughter' a well night.[break][break]

Mother – daughter. The both of them freeze and the both of them shudder, and though it does no good to correct a man who they'll likely never speak to or of again, Gloria's halfway to sharing the story of the last decade of her life before Lorne's dragging her by the ear off and away. Because he has to understand that it's not like that. She's got a family, they're not – not here. ( Lorne doesn't punish her, or even speak up about her behavior afterward, no doubt credit to the sense of wrongness that had passed through her so thoroughly it could be seen without need for eyes. )[break][break]

“What are we?” Gloria asks three nights later, when sleep taunts and the heat of the night suffocates.[break][break]

Lorne, who always sleeps at her side, same bed, same sheets, is turned away, always, always. There is not a maternal bone to be found in her body – not a heroic itch that begged to be scratched the day she pulled Gloria from rot and ruin. She'll never be a stand-in for Gloria's real mother. She's hardly even her hero. And she, who knows not family nor heroism, says, “Does it matter? Go to sleep.”[break][break]

“... Matters to me.”[break][break]

Silence.[break][break]

But the woman's refusal that night to entertain the matter of titles and dynamics does not stop her little companion from wondering. ( Is that it? Companion? No, no, not quite. ) With every subsequent attempt of a stranger to peg them as family, Gloria's frown sinks deeper, and Lorne's brow furrows further. The former wonders at what reason that may be – what tragedy may exist in the figments of history she's not privy to – but the answers will come long, long after the matter at present is solved. And presently, the scene once more:[break][break]

“I've got it! Last Sundown on Middway.”[break][break]

“What are you on about?”[break][break]

Gloria kicks her legs, unable to contain the entirety of her excitement over her revelation. “It's the last opera the company performed. Father played the main character, an archer who had to shoot down the sun down from the sky, because it'd turned evil and wouldn't set, even if that meant burning everyone alive!” The explanation is paltry, and the unimpressed look she earns for it smothers a bit of her momentum – but only just. “In order to shoot the magic bow and arrow that won't burn up, too, though, he has to get stronger in the first act. So he finds a teacher, and becomes... becomes her disciple.”[break][break]

“I'm not interested in opera, girl.”[break][break]

“No, I mean – I know that, but – we're –”[break][break]

The wind in her sails thoroughly depleted, the avian slumps where she stands and surrenders to the task at hand: weapon maintenance, constant, monotonous, seemingly pointless. Perhaps the worst of their travels, after the matter of her separation from her family and Lorne's preference for teaching a lesson physically rather than through reprimand, is how useless her words can be made to feel. She is no bowman, arrow notched for the skies and set to fly. How is she supposed to communicate the identification – the desire to learn beneath a master the way to confront the destruction of the life she knows?[break][break]

“... No 'knight and squire', huh,” the woman mutters under her breath some small infinity later, and it's no small miracle that Gloria does not startle at the way her shadow casts in the footsteps that follow. “Is that really what you want from me? To be your 'teacher'?”[break][break]

'Hope' is that Mother, Father, and all her little siblings are just around the next bend. Even without promising to 'teach', Lorne has already imparted the first lesson: that hope is a hemorrhage, bleeding, bleeding. “Teach me to be strong like you.”[break][break]

“I won't go easy on you just because you're young.”[break][break]

As if there was ever an expectation otherwise.[break][break]

It's only the next day later that finds them somewhere new ( somewhere unsettling ). Lorne passes by racks of weaponry, anything from spears to maces to swords, her sure steps taking the two of them directly toward the proprietor in the back. In the coming days – coming weeks, months, the foreseeable eighteen years of her life – Gloria will come to understand that weapons are synonymous with the woman whose shadow she lives in, and that anything that can be imparted from old to young must be done so with bloodied hands and the fall of another. Killing had been the last thing on her mind when she'd asked to be taught. Even here, in this house of horrors, it's barely a consideration.[break][break]

It must be, or else she'd never feel the traitorous bloom of pride that comes with the sound of her teacher's words: “I'm here to buy for my disciple.”

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle-1"]

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle"]

[attr="class","sumreign-1"]






Gloria places her blade down in the grass at her feet, straightens with arms raised and palms out, and speaks aloud the name of just one of her uncountable, unspeakable crimes. “I'm handing myself over to the law for the crime of regicide. I'm the woman to blame for the death of King Dei of Sila.”[break][break]

The guard, whose jaw hangs open in the same moment his eyes fly wide, does not faint. ( It is a very near thing. ) He doesn't make to move immediately, or really at all. Through the fog of gripping anxiety, impatience wasn't an emotion she'd expected to feel.[break][break]

“Well?” She's been waiting long enough for the guillotine's fall. “Are you going to sit there gawking, or are you going to come arrest me?”[break][break]

He does not arrest her.[break][break]

In fact, he's doing such an astronomically poor job of putting her behind bars where she no doubt deserves to be that he hasn't even bothered with restraints of any sort, and certainly failed to check her person for any weapons beyond the large knife she had dropped in a show of faith. Instead of doing anything rational at all, the guard – knight – something has her sat across from him within the estate's less-than-welcoming greeting room, openly gawking in a set of armor that does not, at the moment, include his helmet.[break][break]

“You really don't remember me?”[break][break]

“Should I?” Gloria asks, face perfectly neutral and sweating palms perfectly still.[break][break]

“I know it's been a long time, but I remember you. Even with your, um... hair so short. You are Glory, right?”[break][break]

That nickname and that cadence sound too much like Esfir for her comfort, and a bit of her frustration slips out despite her best efforts to wrangle it back in. “Don't call me that.”[break][break]

“... Okay.” He returns to staring in silence, perhaps no longer so convinced that he sits in the presence of a little girl lost in a fire eighteen years prior. ( Gloria hadn't even remembered that people had called her that name before the company. ) Though perhaps not-so not convinced that he does not open his mouth several minutes later to introduce himself. “My name's Marlen. I was the director's son. Do you... remember the director? Do you remember playing together with me while the adults were running rehearsals?”[break][break]

It hardly rings a bell, but then, she doesn't bother making any grandiose effort to recall it, either. There are memories she feels must be far more important – the faces of her parents, for one, or whether or not she was an only child – that are far away and out of her reach. A friend to play-and-seek in the balconies sounds sweet, but it matters as much as sugar sprinkled in water: there and gone without a passing thought.[break][break]

“I'd like to be taken to the authorities, please,” Gloria says in lieu of an answer proper.[break][break]

'Marlen's face spasms, root cause unknown, but he at least tells her what she wants to hear. “I've already sent for someone. They should be on their way.”[break][break]

Of course, it is not the authorities he has sent for.[break][break]

Mother, Father. For all that time spent straining and struggling, clawing her way back to a life in which they were a part, she feels nothing at all when that coveted reunion finally comes to pass. When they hold her – one at a time, then all together – it takes everything in her not to thrash, to gnash her teeth and fight her way out of their captivity. These are not the people she wants to have her or hold her. They're nothing.[break][break]

Yet Gloria sits still in their weeping arms, and after so long even manages to pantomime an embrace of her own, waiting out the fallout before Judgement Day inevitably arrives. ( It's what she's best at, beyond the killing and the lying: waiting, waiting with feigned indifference, always waiting for the end of her life as she knows it. )[break][break]

Do you remember? very quickly becomes the scourge of the common tongue in the months that follow, that damned question looped to the point of madness, repeated again and again for everything from the faces of her old loved ones to the old and beaten toys that had gone long abandoned even before the sack of Liniya. The answer is almost always a 'no', followed by perhaps the second worst question put together by human tongue – are you sure? – and the third – can you try? What does it matter that a killer doesn't recall the names of threadbare dolls or the snacks she'd once liked best? She doesn't want the dolls now, and they won't feed her confectioneries when they cart her off to the gallows.[break][break]

The second scourge, this time of the human race, is Marlen himself, who Gloria had gone to turn herself in to by some cosmic stroke of... what? Fortune? Misfortune? The others all claim the former, but she finds herself wishing he'd never been born at all with every new dawning day, hardly 'fortunate'. He loiters where he has no right being, constantly bartering his aid and his time in the name of Gloria's 'recovery'. She sees through his intentions the same way she's seen a blade cleave through flesh a hundred times before: Older than her at the time of her separation, he must remember some idealized version of that girl which brings about a flutter in his heart, and every attempt to 'help' is an effort in rekindling some childhood love that never was. The flushes bright on his cheeks when she catches him staring, the way he's always pushing for 'the good just a little walk will do her' – they're driving her positively mad.[break][break]

Last among all scourges, however, is the crime of self, the body, and perhaps the worst of them all. Gloria lays in an unfamiliar bed, and that alone is not so unfamiliar. It's just the matter that there is no warmth at her back, no arm that finds itself draped across her side when its owner thinks she isn't awake to feel it. She 'wakes' in the morning, cold and alone, and lies to herself that sleep ever came at all.[break][break]

And that's the thing of it, yes? That it's no matter of the bed at all, or the chill the creeps beneath the covers and takes hold of her skin, trailing goose pimples on every inch it treads. It's the matter of who once brought the warmth of summer into every room, the face that should not be missed and that her heart still wretchedly bleeds for.[break][break]

“What did you come back for, Gloria?” Mother will ask her someday, miserable and confused, and Gloria will say to no one but herself, to die. There is no living with, and there's certainly no living without, so if penance must be paid in blood, then so be it.[break][break]

The woman who gave her life, though, who never stopped believing that that very life had not been snuffed in the face of all adversity for nearly two decades has cried enough tears on her behalf – she need not know that the thing which was once her daughter is little more than a walking corpse.[break][break]

So Gloria will say to her, “Because I couldn't stand to be that way anymore,” and maybe it will ring close enough to the truth to become it.

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle-1"]

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle"]

[attr="class","sumreign-1"]






Furgon breathes with renewed life on a crisp winter morning. From every banister flies great ribbons of white, whose tousling with the northern winds sets an irregular beat to the symphony of bell chimes below. Comparably, in stark contrast to the fluttering cloth and the flight of brilliant, bright doves taking to the skies above, the people have come out of cloistering in a smattering of colors so varied as to make a painter weep. The kaleidoscopic palette is traditional for major ceremonies, particularly those involving wedding bells, on Sila’s North Island.[break][break]

The wedding isn't why the company is stationed here, but they're not due to depart for another job for another three moonrises. Depending on how opulent the groom-to-be is, Hilde had said, and the odds of that being ‘very’ seemed more likely with every passing breath, the celebrations could go on for just about as long. But it matters not whether they can take the whole affair in with their own eyes. That they're allowed to partake in the city-wide event at all, rather than packing their bags and making south as swiftly as their latest mission has concluded, can only be a wordless gift on the part of Lorne.[break][break]

“I could get one look at the dress,” Gloria confides in the others, “and I’ll be set for the whole year.”[break][break]

It's only the three of them here now, Esfir, Hilde, and herself, relaxing beneath the awning of a tavern who specializes in a local form of meat pie and throwing away their latest coin at tourist destinations around the city. It reminds Gloria of a mostly forgotten memory, vague impressions of when her family would arrive at a new place with a new stage alongside the rest of the performers. Maybe her mother and father took her sight-seeing in every new locale; maybe they didn't. It was an entirely different life, so very long ago, and she's already come to terms with the fact that she's not getting it back.[break][break]

“That's all you need to keep you happy? A dress? You don't even get to wear it.” Esfir speaks between sloppy bites of duck, potatoes, and brown gravy, but the smile he wears as he wipes the mess off his chin speaks louder than his words that he's being a tease.[break][break]

Hilde, on the other hand, is as nosy as she is neat. She spares a somewhat disgusted look at her coworker’s eating habits before speaking in turn. “I’m surprised at you. Always pegged you as the tomboy type.”[break][break]

The half-elf doesn't gesture, but a flick of the gaze up and away from Gloria's eyes does about as well. Compared to Hilde, who wears her curls long and proud, Gloria's perpetually shorn-short hair doesn't particularly scream her femininity. Nor does her wardrobe - practical, but unflattering, meant to keep her warm in the cold, hidden in the shadows, and not much else - or any of her outward interests, really. ( Maybe that would change, if they heard her sing, but. But. Her voice exists only for Lorne's ears, or for Lorne's uses. She hasn't sung for a different audience in a very long time. )[break][break]

“I guess.” She doesn't, but when it comes to Hilde, giving an inch will prompt the taking of a mile - or at least so much inches as there are questions to be asked. “But is it so weird to want to see, anyway? This is exciting! Be excited! We hardly ever get to participate in things like this, and definitely not when they’re this -” A flit of the wrist.[break][break]

“Over-the-top? Expensive?” guesses Esfir.[break][break]

Gloria corrects, “Romantic.”[break][break]

“Esfir, you are disgusting.” A glob of pie innards trails down the man’s chin moments before Hilde all but slams her fork down on the table, but Gloria only watches with bemusement as it draws a haphazard line from the corner of his mouth to the base of his jaw. While he covers his face with a handkerchief pulled from some unknown below, the eldest of the three turns away so she need not watch him make a further mess of himself, and with the whole of Hilde’s attention, it's difficult not to wilt back.[break][break]

( Fortunately, Gloria's had plenty of practice ‘not wilting’, and from far more intimidating persons than her friend here. )[break][break]

“Ah, little Gloria, still so naive. Let big sis Hilde tell you how it is.” Gloria pouts at that, probably just proving the point even at twenty-six years of age, and it births a self-satisfied grin on the half-elf's lips. “You realize that ‘romance’ has got nothing to do with it, right? This is just two lords of the North playing their little chess games against each other, pretending at a political union so one can climb over the other’s back when they get the chance. Completely loveless!”[break][break]

“Maybe it's not about the people actually getting married,” she counters. “Maybe I just want to daydream and pretend it's me in the pretty white dress, getting married in a big city all decorated for my special day.”[break][break]

Hilde pats her knee, tamping the condescension down with every point of contact. “You’ll get your day in the sun. Promise.”[break][break]

But despite the way her tone, words, and actions are all an obvious attempt to rile the avian up, Gloria can't help but be soothed by her senior’s promise. Truthfully, the fact that Hilde feels comfortable teasing her about it at all speaks to a level of faith the woman holds in her; she's conflict averse when it comes to a right and proper sore spot, preferring instead to watch others throw their verbal barbs around in chaos all while taking careful note of the ‘juicy details’ revealed as collateral. All that to say: if she thinks she can taunt about it here, she must not think Gloria's love life is a completely lost cause.[break][break]

It's a surprise, then, that betrayal comes from Esfir behind his handkerchief. “Do you think Lorne would allow that?”[break][break]

He must mean it as a genuine question, because there are few things about Esfir that aren't themselves genuine, but the implication he either does not hear or willfully chooses to ignore sets Gloria's innards to stone just the same. The fear that grips her must show, too, given the way all mocking mirth is murdered on Hilde's expression. “Esfir, I think I might actually kill you someday,” she threatens, and Gloria can't tell past the ringing in her ears if it's supposed to sound like a joke.[break][break]

“What?” he asks, incredulous, and oh, this is going to be an entire discussion, isn't it? “Not talking about it doesn't make it suddenly go away. It took a year before the boss would even let us look at Glory without trying to bite a hand off. Just because things are better now doesn't mean it was okay, or that I’m not worried for -”[break][break]

“It’s okay, Esfir.” Gloria hears her own interruption from down the street - across Furgon - from beyond Sila’s borders entirely. She must dig deep into the mantras she uses on her very worst nights to find the words to comfort him, the way they once comforted herself: “I’m here with her and all of you because I want to be. I can go my own way any time.” Then, the puppet master who has mercifully taken control of her body and her words manages to summon a bit of her usual charm, enough to say through a mischievous smile, “Though maybe one of these days, you’ll turn around expecting to see me there, and I’ll have already eloped. Sounds like a good way to spend this coming summer.”[break][break]

Play along, she begs to their still forms and their twisted frowns, pleading to a crowd that doesn't look at all convinced. For the longest minute of this entire Furgon trip, it seems like it's not enough - until Hilde hears her cries from the void and chooses to play along.[break][break]

“Elope if you want, but don't think you can get a husband by me without him going through the usual vetting process.” Though her tone is flat, almost bored, Gloria doesn't doubt the truth in her words for a moment.[break][break]

Thankfully, Esfir, earnest and messy and unquestionably a real friend, follows the change of tides. “It's hard to imagine you on some man’s arm. What sort of person do you like, anyway?”[break][break]

Tall. Red-headed. Strong, principled, professional. Someone to guide her hand, tell her what to do with her life; someone who sleeps every night at her side, who bathes with her to ‘save time and water’, who appreciates her music and whispers ‘Songbird’ in her ear outside of missions.[break][break]

Gloria flashes her brightest award-winning grin and says, “I guess I'll know it when I meet them.”[break][break]

“The others said you were talking about it again.”[break][break]

Night-time, more than a day and a half after meat pies, banners, and bells. Tomorrow, the company will be gone from the city with little trace of their being there, and it will be back to long marches across frost-bitten roads in pursuit of more coin. Gloria wonders to herself what she ought to do with her last day of ‘vacation’ in the same moments that Lorne peels her black iron armor away, second skin shedding piece-by-piece. Or, at least - she was wondering, before their comfortable silence is broken by a statement she can't make sense of. At least it doesn't sound like she's in trouble.[break][break]

“I talk a lot, about a lot of things,” Gloria says in a lilt, turning her head to watch the muscles of Lorne's back at work. “Be more specific?”[break][break]

“About marriage.”[break][break]

Oh.[break][break]

“Um… yeah. There was the whole wedding going on, remember? What were you doing this whole time, anyway?” She holds no interest in what her teacher does outside of Gloria’s company, particularly not when it involves coming and going in full plate, but it's an easy enough out that the older woman simply doesn't take.[break][break]

“You can play coy all you’d like, but don't think you’ll be pulling any wool over my eyes.” Lorne takes her shift turning, the both of them facing one another in profile. Her usually stern face is adorned with a glimmer in the eye and an upturn of the lips. Alright, so definitely not in trouble, at least not yet. “I’ve heard tale of a little songbird making plans to elope.”[break][break]

Godsdamn it, Hilde, the miserable gossip monger! So much for being on Gloria's side! She probably tattled to their leader just to try to catch a glimpse at this conversation now, inventing new problems when there aren't enough to stick her nose in.[break][break]

“No plans, I promise. Your information broker apparently doesn't know a joke from the snot dripping off her nose.”[break][break]

“That must make the both of you.”[break][break]

Gloria can't fight the scowl that overcomes her then, and she stands upright to let her teacher see the whole of her displeasure. “It really was just a joke. Who am I even going to elope with? Matsiya?” Lorne huffs aloud at that, a sliver of amusement, and Gloria's voice softens just slightly despite herself. “I was just getting caught up in the wedding celebrations, is all. I mean that.”[break][break]

“I believe that you believe that now. But this isn't the first time you’ve struggled with this.”[break][break]

She wants to raise her hackles at that, really - wants to feel her temper flare at the weaponizing of past confidence, using it like a tool to pry a confession from her now that doesn't exist. Mostly, though, she just feels hollow and lonely.[break][break]

“I'm halfway through my twenties and no one’s ever tried to court me. Hells, I’ve hardly been kissed. Sorry that romance sounds so appealing to me when my body count’s two digits less than yours.”[break][break]

“Depends on which body count we're discussing.” And damn that pride that colors Lorne's voice; damn the rose that blossoms, thorns and all, inside Gloria's chest at the sound of it. Twenty years ago, Mother might have sounded similar when Gloria could first recite her Alphabet. These feelings should not be attached to the notion of murder.[break][break]

“You're right! I should just advertise my singlehood at the local Adventurers Guild, and let them know just how many innocent people I’ve killed. I’ll find a husband in no time! Eat shit, Lorne.”[break][break]

“Gloria.”[break][break]

Conditioned as she is, her own name off Lorne's tongue is enough to steal all anger from within her. Gloria looks up to find that the armor is fully gone, now, carefully set aside to be donned another day, for another battle. Without it, her teacher closes the distance between them to cup gently at her cheek with one calloused hand.[break][break]

“If being wed would make you happy, I can easily arrange it for you.”[break][break]

The breath in her lungs stutters, and the avian hides it behind watery humor. “Is this your idea of a proposal, Teacher? Should have practiced in the mirror a few more times.”[break][break]

“Gloria,” Lorne says again, barely beyond a whisper, and the thumb of her hand traces an invisible line over Gloria’s cheekbone. Once, Gloria had watched her pluck a man’s eye out with a gesture deceptively similar to now, one thumb into one defenseless socket; the thought is what makes her shiver and nothing else. “Is that what would make you happy?”[break][break]

She feels her eyes flutter shut - stares at the version of Lorne existing behind her eyelids, who does not come home in sweat and armor and blood, and who does not hold the fate of her sight or her life in one palm. Looking at this Lorne, the one who does not exist anywhere beyond her imagination, makes the answer a simple thing.[break][break]

“Yes.” Beyond a shuddering intake of air: “Gods yes.”[break][break]

From beyond her fantasy, the real Lorne lets out a hum of approval, and Gloria feels, rather than sees her other hand come up to hold her - the way lips press chastely against the short dark hairs on her head.[break][break]

“Then it will be done. When we’ve seen this war through, we can go wherever you want, celebrate it however you’d like. How does that sound?”[break][break]

There are no words she can spare to describe the kaleidoscope of emotions overtaking her in this moment. Every shade of feeling, every hue, all merged into a palette she cannot hope to parse, much less express. As compensation, Gloria offers all she can: the force of her hold as she surges up to meet her teacher’s gentle touch, and the furious shake of her head into the pale expanse of the other's throat.[break][break]

With or without, Lorne understands. Always, always understands.[break][break]

It never comes to pass, of course. The war ends - Lorne makes to begin another in the name of her eternal hunt for blood money - and Gloria walks away to what she assumes is her death, justice-delivered. ( In the time that she survives after, though, even when she really ought not, she can't help but wonder - what if? what if? )

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle-1"]

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle"]

[attr="class","sumreign-1"]






It's getting too long.[break][break]

Gloria's twin scrutinizes from a mirrored reality, perfectly matched to the intensity of her own inspection of the girl through the glass. They take in one another's flaws, blow-for-blow, and each hone in on the place where a tuft of wavy black hair has begun to curl over the top of the other's ear.[break][break]

You always cut it too short.[break][break]

The avian lifts a hand first to her reflection and startles as her fingertips brush the hard surface of the window, rather than soft strands or downy feathers. It's difficult, sometimes, to remember that the young woman she's seeing is her, so very much at odds with the 'self' she has constructed in her own head. Were anyone to see her blunder – to see her staring at herself with great intent beneath a sweltering autumn afternoon – it would surely be the end of whatever dignity she's managed to built back up for herself, but the streets she sees through that otherworld are as empty as they were a moment ago, or the thousands of moments before. It's safe, here, to tug at where her hair rebels, growing, growing, always against the wishes of –[break][break]

Let it grow out and it will be used against you. Your enemies won't stop at pulling your hair out when their lives are on the line.[break][break]

She really should cut it, tame it back to its standard and unflattering pixie cut. Deliah, she's been finding ( the eldest daughter after herself ), is very fashionable, even on a budget; she could probably coach Gloria in a way to wear it that's both short and flattering, if only she screws up the courage to ask.[break][break]

Yeah? Then why do you keep yours in braids? Do your enemies not 'use it against you'?[break][break]

Watch your tone. I can avoid being grabbed in the first place. Can you really say the same?[break][break]

Gloria should cut it.[break][break]

… But who's going to force her hand if she doesn't?[break][break]

When it isn't chopped away to nothing at regular intervals, it turns out, her hair grows in remarkably fast. A month later finds her with a bob that dusts her chin – still short by all means, but long enough that her nerves are almost constantly set alight whenever someone else sets their eyes on her. Will they scold her for her carelessness in letting it get out of control? Worse – will they take her by her strands and tear until there's nothing left to grab onto?[break][break]

Those times when she catches herself in puddles in the mud or silver reflections of dinner party cutlery fill her first with fear, but second with an unfamiliar sense of pride. It's been a very long time since she could see herself and not wonder what feral child, freshly bathed and little more, had crawled up from the depths to greet her in her reflection. After all, she'd been living in the shadow of someone as effortlessly pretty as –[break][break]

Three months sees it dusting just past her shoulders. Deliah's advice is freely given and endlessly helpful; no matter what look her elder sister may be hunting for, the brunette is able to disappear into her magic wardrobe and find the perfect hair accessory to bring it all together. Gloria wears her headbands and headscarves so often that they stop finding their way back to their proper owner – but if Deliah is bothered by the gradual theft of her things, it hardly shows in her excitement over their new weekly ritual of a 'makeover night'.[break][break]

Nine months and it cascades freely down her neck, past her shoulder blades, and settles comfortably near the dip of her waist. Down in the basement, toe-shoed and twinned by a mirror, she can spin and spin and spin, and her locks will dance with energy in equal measure. Boys ask after her, these days, the way she'd wanted a decade ago, back when it wouldn't have mattered, because she would never be able to stray far from –[break][break]

It's too long.[break][break]

Gloria's been hearing the little voice less and less these days.[break][break]

Carmen's eyes have welled up with tears unshed, but the laughter that falls from Gloria in wave after gentle wave is a far cry from the usual facade of affect. “It's okay,” she's been saying, holding her little sister gently to her chest, rocking like the womb to soothe and assure. “It's okay, really. It's just hair.”[break][break]

Hair that will need to be cut short once again, courtesy of Carmen's sticky mistake caught in the strands dangling near Gloria's jaw. Her siblings must have some idea of the amount of import she's been placing on its growth over the last year – though Carmen's soft heart would probably have her crying over any accidental inconvenience, the Moreno children are far from unintelligent, and her hair has been one of very few things outside of her siblings' care that Gloria's put any work into. And yes, there is a part of her – a not at all insignificant part of her, in fact – that dreads the cut that must come as a result of this. But a larger part yet can console itself knowing that it will not need to be nearly so short as it'd been kept for the majority of her life, and that larger part knows that she'd rather go bald entirely than make her young sister think herself deserving of ire.[break][break]

“Will you help me cut it?” Gloria asks her later, when the emotions have died down and the tear tracks dried.[break][break]

Carmen's bottom lip does still wobble, though, when she asks meekly, “What if I mess it up?”[break][break]

“What? No way! You're a master of style, a savant! When I show off your work, it's gonna make all the other girls jealous.”[break][break]

Maybe it's not perfect – when it comes to Gloria, 'perfect' is often a pipe dream – but the encouragement is enough for Carmen, who giggles bashfully and takes the scissors ( safety variety, of course ) without further doubt. In the end, the corrections their mother makes after Carmen has gone off to sleep are few, pleasantly surprising them both. Maybe the girl has a future of hair-styling ahead of her.[break][break]

And because it brightens little Carmen's face to see it, Gloria keeps it, wears it with pride. When she catches her twin's short hair in cracked panes of glass, there is a little voice that tells her 'better' –[break][break]

– and she finds it doesn't quite sound like Lorne's anymore.

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle-1"]

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle"]

[attr="class","sumreign-1"]






I've had enough, and I want out.[break][break]

In your mind’s eye, this had all gone so simply. You’d told him those words in no uncertain terms, throwing the chair you’d sat in a thousand times to the side just to use its crash as emphasis for your rage. No more would you play accomplice to his murders of convenience; no longer would you pull the trigger on someone whose only crime was standing in his way.[break][break]

And the Doctor would see your righteous fury and cower at the force of it, frightened at the thing he had made with his own two hands. Sometimes, he would beg your forgiveness for leading you astray, and you would tell him that your ‘forgiveness’ was doing nothing beyond walking away. More often, he had nothing to say at all, too dumbstruck at his plans falling through because he had once again, and for the very last time, underestimated you and your resolve. Leaving him and returning to Mary a better man could not feel sweeter than what you imagined in those moments.[break][break]

So how is it that you're here, instead, pressed into the sharp corner of his desk, face smothered by his forgotten paperwork, left arm pinned in a painful ‘v’ between the both of you? Is that pitiful squeaking the pull of his leather gloves, where they’ve buried themselves in and pull against your head of hair; the bone in the socket of your shoulder, pulled to the precipice of popping; or some miserable noise of pain stolen past the gate of your stubborn lips? It cannot be the last - you’d sooner die than give him the satisfaction of hearing how this hurts.[break][break]

“My first mistake was not being honest with you,” X says calmly, as though the both of you were sitting across from one another discussing the weather, as though he had not assailed you a moment before you’d ghosted yourself out his door. The hand in your hair leaves only to tug at the arm not pinned, laying it uncomfortably straight against the edge of the desk so he may maneuver your sleeve as he sees fit. Beneath the cuff of it hides a name on ink, and a new breed of despair takes root inside you at the epiphany it heralds. Of course. Of course.[break][break]

“Get the fuck off of me!” you shout, flailing and bucking uselessly, succeeding only in putting further strain on your shoulder joint. It certainly doesn't stop him from twisting your right wrist so that he may rub a gloved thumb over the raised flesh of his brand on your skin.[break][break]

“It was an easy enough lie. You never even asked to see the name I had been burdened with. I would have talked you out of it, of course, but it was very convenient to not have to bother.” You hear the smile in his voice even when you cannot see it, and his tone makes you ill. “Do you care to see it now, Nikki? I'm more than happy to show you.”[break][break]

“Fuck off!”[break][break]

If he shows you, it's over. Easy enough to imagine - to draw the right conclusion with the information you've been handed against your will. Five years ago, you’d tracked him down because fate had bound you together and writ his name on your arm, and he’d told you then It isn't me. One year ago, you were reunited in this very room as you pledged yourself to his revolution, and you’d hoped quietly that maybe he’d made a mistake after all the first night you’d met - that it really had been him all along.[break][break]

To tell you now is just one in an infinity of betrayals. A final straw you can’t bear the weight of.[break][break]

His gentle caress becomes a bruising grip in an instant. “No, I don't think I will,” X says, though the facade of mirth has fallen away to an honest rage in his words. “You’ve ruined my life for so, so long, well before we ever met. And now, when I’m so close to my goal, you think you have the right to leave? I'm not finished with you yet.”[break][break]

“I dunno what the hell you're talking about, but you're fuckin’ crazy if you think I'm just gonna go back to being your killer after this!” You grit your teeth to the memory of the weight of a pistol in your hand, disgusted by the thought but determined. “Lemme go or you're dead.”[break][break]

“Listen to me very carefully now. Your work for me is over when I say it's over, and no sooner. Behave -” There comes the bristle of his beard against your cheek and the ghost of his threat against your ear, “- or Sister Mary will be made to suffer in your place.”[break][break]

All at once, the fight is stolen from your body, only to be replaced by a liquid nitrogen that locks every would-be tremble into perfect place.[break][break]

( Of course it would lead here: start with the threat of her death and end with it. You were just too arrogant to consider, too wrapped up in your heroic comeuppance over the Doctor to imagine that any hand but yours could be asked to steal away her life. )[break][break]

“You can't -”[break][break]

“I’ve had eyes put on the church since Father William came to work with us. Not for this purpose, but it will do just as well. Give me the slightest reason to, Nikki, and you’ll find out quickly enough that I very much ‘can’.”[break][break]

“Just - leave her out of this!”[break][break]

“When you were the one who brought her in?” You shake your head beneath him, make to deny, but X speaks first. “Oh, don't pretend otherwise. I know well what you did before coming here, and I know well what you intended to do after.” Mocking: “How sweet the idea of running away together with the ‘woman of your dreams’ must have been, willfully ignorant of the fact that she's been using you for as long as I have. Too bad. It's not in your cards.”[break][break]

The five stages of grief flit through your mind, and you hysterically wonder where among them you’ve landed, if you can manage all five in the span of a single conversation. “What d'you want from me, then? Huh? I know your ‘revolution’s’ a fuckin’ joke, you bastard, it's not gonna be the same...!”[break][break]

“I only want what was promised to me twenty years ago. ‘To have, to hold, a soulmate of one’s own’.”[break][break]

The derision is unmistakable in the way it drops like acid from every over-enunciated word. This isn't what it was supposed to be like. The meeting, for one, but any of it - that the man who destiny saw as your ‘perfect match' would hate you so, or that the relationship you’d share ( whether you want it now or not ) would be one of blackmail and blood. ( Should have seen, should have known. No kind world would have placed Mary with the priest. No merciful God would have stood for it. )[break][break]

The Doctor rests his weight on you, and from below, you could almost delude yourself into thinking it an embrace. “I’m going to let you go,” he tells you as his voice slips back into an air of calm and comfort, “and if you hold any love in your heart for that girl, you’re going to quietly pick up the chair you’ve cast aside and take a seat. Then, beloved, when you’ve gotten a hold of your temper, we’re going to renegotiate the terms of our partnership. Do you understand?”[break][break]

‘Denial’ must be the stage, you decide. You can’t keep following orders. You can’t keep doing as you’re told - but it’s not a choice anymore, is it? “Nikki.” It is only your name on his tongue, no more, but the danger is as real as a knife against your throat.[break][break]

“I… I understand.”[break][break]

Later, when ‘negotiations’ have ended and you are forced to reckon with the nature of your new prison, X personally oversees your return home. ‘Home’ is the apartment you purchased with blood, signed under his name. The candles inside have long burned to nothing, and for the very first time, you realize why the door can lock-out both ways.[break][break]

“I don't love you,” you tell him on his way out the door. The ‘anymore’ catches like the tears you won't let fall.[break][break]

“Oh, Nikki. It’s never been about love.” The Doctor lifts your chin up to face him, and in the empty window of his eye, you can see no trace of the man you once believed in. The body may be here, but the soul is gone. “Just a matter of taking back what I’m owed.”

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle-1"]

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle"]

[attr="class","sumreign-1"]






Ryza II hasn't been habitable in several thousand years. Generations upon generations past, its people were burdened by the unimaginable dilemma of fleeing their ancestral home to an unfamiliar place of safety, or facing individually their certain doom. Any who may have stayed behind are far less than bones on the surface of a dying world now, less than the soil that now witnesses its very last moments. Within the next system hour, its bloating sun will devour all that remains of the old world – every body that ever lived or died on its surface and beneath – and from then on, all that will remain of the molten husk will be its name as an afterthought in textbooks.[break][break]

With equal consideration to its storied history, the consumption has been made into an event advertised for only the most wealthy to watch.[break][break]

Ephrem understands, in the faint way he understands most matters pertaining to empathy across humanoid races, that there is a tragedy to be spoken of here. He just... doesn't feel it much. Hadn't when he'd perked up at the idea of attending, hadn't when he'd begged Dicio to pull rank and net them both a room on the luxury starship, safeguarded to fly far closer to the heat of a star than any other enterprise could manage.[break][break]

It can't be an unusual apathy plaguing him, at least among the other starfarers. They sip their cocktails and talk of politics with hardly a mention at all of the event set to transpire just outside the main viewport, no whisper of even feigned sympathy for a civilization scattered and lost. And what for it? No one has so much as touched down on the surface in a time span longer than most here have been alive. ( Most. He watches Dicio wearily from the corner of his eye. )[break][break]

“I spent some time on Ryza once,” the Curr tells Ephrem thirty minutes out from impact. By now, the little ball of dust floating uselessly through space has long caught fire; the younger immortal had been watching the blaze with such focus that the sound of the other's voice nearly startles him out of his chair.[break][break]

Instead, he catches himself, and makes a face in revenge. “Why does this not surprise me? Next you'll tell me you helped set up their first government a million years ago.”[break][break]

“No.” Dicio doesn't rise to the bait – never does, really. Something about this time is different, though. The perpetual exhaustion in his body language reads even more sluggish than usual, and Ephrem knows first hand it's not a matter of lacking sleep. “Just... made a friend there, is all.”[break][break]

Surely, he means to elaborate, but for all the minutes Ephrem allows him the chance, no such elaboration comes. When the silence between them becomes unbearable, he decides to shatter it himself.[break][break]

“We didn't have to come. You could have just told me 'no'.”[break][break]

“You were excited. And... I wanted to see it myself. Felt wrong not to.”[break][break]

Still cryptic – once again, usual Dicio behavior. Ephrem sours to it quickly, usual behavior on his own part, and doesn't try to pick the Curr's brain any more than that. Every layer of vague response can be peeled away to a dozen more vague responses, and here in the lap of luxury with a planet to watch explode, he figures there are far better ways to spend his time than indulging an old, old man.[break][break]

He meanders. Outside, Ryza melts away.[break][break]

He doesn't return until a gleeful countdown has begun among the other passengers, and even as he slides back into his seat for the show, his eyes never leave that little black dot drowning in a sea of white. One minute now; then it will be forever gone.[break][break]

“It's almost sort of beautiful,” Ephrem says, transfixed. “Hey, how many more of these do you think we'll see? Do you think Navis will ever –”[break][break]

The words die alongside Ryza. Dicio's eyes are trained on the same shrinking speck that Ephrem, and everyone else on board has been watching, looking with such intent that he's not even sure his words had been heard. Beyond that, though, and what truly throws him off guard, is that Dicio is crying. Silent tears crawl their way past his eyes, down his cheeks. When has Ephrem, or anyone alive really, caught the mighty Curr of Cete with misty eyes and swollen heart?[break][break]

No one alive remembers what the Ryza of ten thousand years past might have looked like, what its people were like – except the man sat beside him. What images flit through his mind now, Ephrem wonders? What ghosts haunt his memory with such sorrow to reduce him to this? 'A friend', he'd said, long gone, no doubt. What was their name? Ephrem never thought to ask.[break][break]

He looks back, out the view port, searching for the abandoned home of a million miracles.[break][break]

Ryza is gone.

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle-1"]

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle"]

[attr="class","sumreign-1"]






I know what I probably ought to do, but it doesn't make it any easier to do it. ( Is that where you came from, then? A year ago, before the final tolling bell – crawled from the depths of my mind so you could show me the way? )[break][break]

Staying here is a long death, terminal. 'Hope' has been so thoroughly ripped from my hands, so callously ground to the dust that I know there's no hope of life in a decade, a year, maybe even a matter of months. And when I'm gone, there will be no mourning, and there will be no reflection; as in life, I will only have made more misery for the people who I loved, who were supposed to love me in turn. My corpse will only serve as an inconvenience, a stressor. They will not think of me kindly – only that they wish I had not left them yet another mess to clean in and at my wake.[break][break]

Maybe there's a life I can lead somewhere beyond these aging walls. 'You need a change', I've heard it a thousand times, but I don't know how to believe that any change could be for anything but the worse. And what's worse than this? I know such a thing exists, for it must – my pity party is thrown for sorrows far lesser than even the few people I pass by in my every day, just another sin I will not be forgiven for – but I cannot imagine it, or I cannot imagine how I must be made to survive it. ( But am I really surviving here? It's a losing battle every day, I'm just losing ground. )[break][break]

And if I go, the thought least bearable, she will not follow. Once, I was the one she had chosen above all others, and I was the one who would have chosen her over all else; now, in her mind, I am an uncomfortable afterthought. She lives without me every day. I do not know how to wake up in the morning without the scraps she leaves off her table.[break][break]

But you got away, didn't you? Because I wrote you that way. Because you could do nothing else on puppet strings but escape.[break][break]

I have wondered why I've latched onto you above the others, slivers of myself placed into vessels of fictional lives, but surely, this must be it. You faced the destruction of the self, and no matter how dark the night, you fought your way to the eventual dawn – returned home to a place you could not believe in, only to find people there who would give anything for you, who you would do anything for in turn. In your death, you found friends you so dearly cherished, and even the playwrights beyond hold an affection for you... or at least, so they pretend.[break][break]

After escaping the long death, you found something worth living for.[break][break]

But that's the script, isn't it? You did not achieve these things through an overcoming of odds; you did so because you could do nothing else. When you left the person who promised their life to you and instead stole yours away, you were only okay because there was never any risk of falling, the safety net existing well before the leap. I want what you have because it is impossible. Your tale brings me comfort only until I realize your ink stains my own fingers.[break][break]

I know I have to get out of this place.[break][break]

I just can't fathom the free fall.

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle-1"]