#five years in carbonite is too damn cruel

[riajade01]

Do you ever think of the moment where Quinn is on DK when the Outlader/SW visits Acina? The moment when he tried to reveal himself, only to realise that he couldn't face her ... what if she doesn't love him anymore?

Oh, Nony. Yes I have. I’ve thought about it so much I decided not to make it canon. Something about the five years in carbonite pushes all of my personal abandonment buttons in a way that makes it completely unfun to write, so my post-SoR universe looks very different in the mainverse. But if it were canon, this is how I imagine it went. I’m so sorry - KOTFE is basically my second-bleakest AU. 

Trigger warning for mentions and descriptions of PTSD flashbacks, depression, thoughts of self harm, and general trauma apply.

Quinn hurried through the halls of the Citadel, gut aflutter with excitement and terror.

She was here. The Fury - her Fury - had landed five minutes ago. For the first time in six years they were in the same city.

His boots sliced through a long rectangle of sunlight admitted by a floor-to-ceiling window and he flinched back, eyes screwed shut against the glare, cursing internally. Months since Empress Acina signed his release forms and still he had to prepare himself for contact with sunlight.

It wasn’t the only physical challenge he’d taken with him from prison. Six years of sleeping on a barely-adequate bunk - Imperial prisons were designed to exact a toll on their occupants during all activities including sleep - meant his back ached constantly, now, twinging when least expected even after two months of physical therapy and a steady diet of painkillers. It would get better with time. He hoped. He was nearly fifty; injury was more persistent now than it had been once.

He shoved that thought away as violently as he could, focusing instead on her. He had no idea how to prepare himself for seeing his wife again. He’d longed for her desperately, and now… his own troubles, coupled with knowing what she had gone through… he wasn’t entirely sure he’d be able to hold himself together.

He slowed just inside the exit to the speeder pad, heart hammering in his chest.

And she was there. Clad in familiar armor - the last thing he’d seen her in - amber eyes luminous as she gave a brief glance at her surroundings, Mara looked as if she’d only been gone for an hour.

No. That was wrong. His heart sank into his stomach as he studied her. Oh, she was beautiful as ever, a cortosis pillar of strength. But her her hair was wrapped in a heavy-looking bun.

Aside from specific ceremonial functions, she’d only ever let her hair grow when she was too preoccupied to cut it. Now that he was looking, he could see the dark circles, the tension that said her straight back was borne of stress rather than pride. As he watched she cocked her head, as if listening, lip curled in a snarl that was gone almost before it started, and she took a step out onto the speeder pad.

Quinn lifted one foot to begin moving toward her… and Theron Shan stepped out of the hangar bay, eyes narrowed as he took in his surroundings and muttered something to Mara, who rolled her eyes fondly and muttered back. The moment of near-levity fled as she frowned again, eyes darting about her in something far closer to panic than he’d ever seen from her. Lord Beniko stepped to her other side, murmuring low, and Mara relaxed fractionally, the panic fading to a sadness that was almost physically painful to see.

He seemed frozen in time as he watched them move toward the speeder. Finally, his feet obeyed his orders to move, but as he stepped forward he caught his reflection in the transparisteel glass, and froze again.

He hardly recognized the collection of deep lines and silvered hair that stared back at him. Jumping at shadows, too cowardly to move, plagued by chronic aches and nightmares he preferred not to think too deeply about…. Prison had not been kind to him.

Worse, he’d failed her. That brief flash of trauma…. His failure to find her consigned her to a terror that was probably similar to his own and not something he’d wish on his worst enemy - well, perhaps on Agent Shan - let alone the love of his life. It was his fault and if she found comfort in whatever form with the people who did manage to rescue her, how could he argue?

How could he interfere? He was a wraith, a pathetic version of his former self who had been too pathetic to help her in the first place.

He forced himself to watch the shuttle disappear behind the city skyline before he returned to his quarters and the bottle of whiskey that awaited him.

***

“You were my failed experiment,” Valkorion purred in her mind as she took in her first glimpse of Kaas City since joining Darth Marr’s expedition six years prior.

Only long discipline, and the surety that he’d just jump to whoever happened to be nearby, kept her from driving her own blade through her skull. Fuck you, you Mother-cursed pile of dung, she growled internally and stepped out into the Kaas City morning.

She was home; he didn’t get to ruin this for her. At least, any more than it was already ruined. Her father and aunts had been killed in the war - her aunt Reyna mere weeks before the surrender - and Mara had purposely kept her distance from what remained of her house, lest they catch the attention of Valkorion’s Force-damned children. Huelwen didn’t even know she was on Dromund Kaas right now.

“So how many years in prison will I get if I spit on the sidewalk? Or is that a capital offense?” Theron’s voice was almost painfully light, a clear attempt to lighten her mood.

“For you, Agent Shan, I’m sure Acina would arrange only the best firing squad,” she replied, rolling her eyes. She’d been more tempted than she liked to admit, in the year since she’d been rescued, to blunt some of her loneliness in a reprisal of their short-lived and extremely ill-advised affair. But she couldn’t. Not when there was the slimmest chance-

Something warm sizzled across her mind, familiar and so desperately missed it took her breath away. Suddenly she was on the Terminus again, Marr’s low voice barking orders as claxons blared and the deck shook hard enough to jar her teeth loose- and then nothing. Claustrophobic, choking nothing and something that should have been pain if not for that smothering emptiness-

She jerked back from the sensation as if it burned, her mind snapping back to the present. Valkorion’s low chuckle rumbled through her, ahead of a wave of thick sadness. A trick; another trick from the thing in her head. She wondered if he knew how effective it was, tying the memory of Malavai’s Force presence to her six years in stasis, then cursed herself for wondering; he was in her head, of course he knew.

“Commander, breathe.” Lana’s voice was soothing, and pitched low enough so none of the others, Force sensitive or no, would hear. “He’s not here; Acina’s people haven’t located him yet.”

“I know.” She wanted to find him herself; to tear through the Imperial fleet and Kaas City one chunk of durasteel at a time if necessary. But the galaxy, as ever, required something else. A breath and she raised her chin, falling back onto the courtly training that seemed like her sole thread to sanity most days.

Her eyes fell on the weaselly Minister Loreman. “Tell Empress Acina the Commander of the Eternal Alliance is ready to speak with her.”

[keirangoldenwatch]

What was Khide's previous relationship?

I'm gonna preface this by saying Khide isn't my Jedi Knight! He belongs to @doctortentacles, whom I played through both Seran and Myrus' runs alongside their Xisath and Khide respectively. BUT! I can answer this all the same. >:3c

It was Kira Carsen. And the reason they broke up was complicated.

While he eventually grew into a helpful, kind, light side Jedi Knight who always opted for the path of peace, Khide started out reckless and angry and wanting to fight the evils of the galaxy more than he wanted to "save" it. He took a lot of dark side choices for the sake of getting to the bad guy quickly, leaving innocents to fend for themselves. And along the way, he and Kira became fast friends complaining about the "old ways" and how slow the Council was to change or act. That friendship turned into flirting, which turned into a romance--Council or Jedi code be damned.

After Khide went to stop the Emperor and became possessed, he blamed himself for being weak and his previous rash and cruel choices for opening his heart up to Vitiate's influence. Even though he escaped--and even though the idea hadn't been his in the first place--he never really shook the feeling of guilt.

That guilt soured his and Kira's romance very, very quickly, and he began to pull away from her immediately. When she finally brought up the Council's invasive behavior towards Jedi dating, and if he was willing to try to continue their relationship...Khide said no. Whether or not he could have continued to make it work, and whether or not he could love her selflessly, he was too afraid of any sort of temptation after Vitiate's control. And to him, a relationship of any sort was one such temptation.

Still, it hurt him to break Kira's heart.

The two would eventually become friends again. Granted it took five years in carbonite and several more at war, but eventually is still good!

...when he met Lana and pretty much fell for her at first sight, that guilt reared it's ugly head again--paired with the new one of him falling in love again after how he handled Kira--so the romance didn't even really kick off until KOTFE. But by then everything had gone to hell, and he had found a much healthier way of thinking.

He's still very much light side, but he loves his Sith wife.

(Kira has definitely joked that she "just wasn't Sith enough for him" to twist the knife a little, but she means it in good humor.)

[inyri]

end of the line

a SWTOR story about Cipher Nine. a story about Umbara.

(spoilers for update 5.4 and for Equivalent Exchange after the jump. consider yourself warned.)

end of the line

On the day he breaks her heart they have been married for half a year, plus five days.

Nine likes to imagine in the days that follow that the extra week was deliberate, that Theron wouldn’t have been so cruel as to choose a date with so much meaning for both of them-

Well. It meant a great deal to her. She isn’t sure what it means to him any more, and it’s stupid of her, really, to parse it in degrees of cruelty. Like he didn’t mean to hurt her.

You won’t feel a thing.

She wishes that had been true. A knife in her heart would have hurt less than this.

***

He hadn’t been himself for months, but she’d assumed at first it was because of Jace.

Force knows Theron and his father hadn’t been close, not for a long time- she remembers that awful fight, when Theron had gone to Coruscant; later on they’d sent him an invitation to the wedding but he never replied, not even to send regrets- but when Jace died on Iokath any hope of reconciliation went to the pyre with him. Satele had vanished again, too, gone without a trace. (He tried to call her: you have to, she’d said, you have to tell her; I’m sure she already knows, he’d replied, but did it anyway because she’d asked. Satele didn’t answer the first time, or the second, or the tenth.) It was the two of them together against everything, just as it always was, but something had changed.  

On the nights when she’d wake to find him out of bed, sitting on the couch and staring, silent, into the dark of their quarters, she would slip in behind him and wrap her arms around his shoulders, pull him back against her body; they would sit there, her fingers stroking slow along his arms, his face, until he closed his eyes and finally slept.

I’m sorry. I never meant for him to-

I know, he’d murmur against her chest. I know.

***

Was it ever enough, what they had? She’d thought so once. She’d thought-

(She doesn’t want to think about him anymore.

She can’t not think about him.)

***

It’s funny when she thinks about it.

(It isn’t funny.)

Theron seemed more like himself that morning than he had in a long time. When she woke he was still beside her, his breath steady on her neck, and she turned in his arms to kiss him awake; he opened his eyes and pulled her close, covered her mouth with his and her body with his, laced his fingers through hers in the way he knew she always liked, when he was above her-

Good morning to you, too, she’d grinned when they finished, and they lay together, breathless, amid the rumpled sheets.

He’d looked down at her, kissed her forehead. I love you. You know that, right?

I know, she’d said. I love you, too.

***

(It wasn’t a lie. It wasn’t. It wasn’t, it can’t have been, she would have seen it, would have known-

Theron, why?)

***

Umbara.

It was everything she hated about the Republic wrapped in a layer of darkness, a veneer of respectability covering over a culture built on machinations and murder, vicious as the worst Sith. What would the Republic possibly want with so many Adegan crystals? She thinks she knows.

Iokath should have been enough of a lesson for all of them. Jace spoke of the superweapon with a gleam in his eye, like a child dreaming of a new toy; he died for wanting it and she’d nearly died trying to stop it.

It never ends, does it?

For all the lies that he told her, perhaps Theron was right about that after all.

***

“Ever since you defeated Valkorion, everything I've done has been towards one goal... the total destruction of the Eternal Alliance.”

She reels just as surely as if he’d slapped her. “You don’t mean that. After everything we accomplished together, all the work we put into the Alliance-”

“I do.” Theron folds his arms across his chest, a barrier between them as physical as the forcefield glowing red across the doorway. “I had so much hope- but it turned out just like the Republic, rotting from the inside out, and you've become a symbol of oppression. So much for your dreams of peace.”

No. No, no-

Her voice trembles, her tongue tripping over the words, one hand pressed to Lana’s throat- still breathing, get up, Lana, come on. “We promised each other no more secrets. Why didn’t you tell me if you were so unhappy? We could have changed things. We still can.”

“I believed that, once.” He shakes his head, turning away. “But it’s too late now. I can’t stop what’s already happening.”

“Damn it, look at me!” This can’t be real. This can’t possibly be real. She must be dreaming. Wake up. Wake up. “Even if I fall here that doesn’t solve anything. If you topple the Alliance, millions of people are going to die.”

The train’s starting to break apart now, so close to the end of the line, and it’s hard to hear him. “If that’s the cost of peace, so be it.”

She couldn’t have thought of something that sounded less like him. “Then answer something for me before you kill me, Theron. You owe me that much.”

Was it her imagination, or did he flinch?

“You said everything you’ve done since Valkorion’s defeat has been leading to this. Did that include marrying me?”

He doesn't answer.

“Tell me!”

“I love you,” he says. “You know that. But this is bigger than us.” She stumbles as the train rocks, and when she’s steady enough to look up again he’s moving toward the door. “Thirty seconds to impact. Goodbye, Nyr- Commander.”

(A fragment of her name, a slip of the tongue at the end of the line.

He was the only one who she ever let call her by her name.

He is the only one who she ever will.)

She almost just doesn't move, almost lets herself stay and be blown apart in the impact- maybe that’ll be what it takes to finally wake her up. (Is it true that if one dies in one’s dreams, one dies in the waking world? She’s never been brave enough to find out.) But Lana’s staggering on her feet, shouting in her ear over the metal-on-metal screaming of the train and maybe this isn’t a nightmare after all. If it’s real-

oh, Theron-

She jumps into flame and darkness.

***

She might have been offended, once, that he thought a train crash would have been enough to end her. He should have killed her while she slept. It would have been a surer thing.

But her grief is keener than her anger, sharper than her pain, surpassing anything else she might have felt- her left wrist is broken and she only knows it by the harsh alarming of the medscanner, her body bruised and her skin blistered and her eyes swollen with unshed tears.

(Open a channel for wide broadcast, she tells Lana as soon as she can speak again, before you start the search. I want to send Theron a message.

Are you sure? You- she can feel her eyes flick over her face as Lana chooses her words with extraordinary caution- you should rest. It can wait until morning, if-

She runs her tongue over her bottom lip, tasting blood. No. I want him to see what he did.)

She cuts off her hair in the medical bay on the Gravestone; there’s no saving it, not like after the carbonite when she was careful and with time it recovered from its brittle delicacy. This time it crumbles into ash in her hands when she lets it down. (There is a metaphor there, probably, but she’s too tired to think about it. He always loved her hair). Trauma shears serve well enough for now, and she crops it short around her ears until she barely recognizes the face looking back at her in the mirror.

When she comes out of kolto for the first time afterward the shears are gone, along with her knives and her rifle and all her poisons and, from the room they’d shared, Theron’s duffel bag.

She doesn’t ask Lana where she put them.

It’s better if she doesn’t know.

After the first day someone moves a kolto bath into her quarters. That, at least, is a mercy. She doesn’t have to see the rest of the crew looking at her, every damn person on this whole fucking ship, with pity in their eyes. She wants to scream at them. She wants to howl her loss until her lungs give out.

I never asked for this, but I never got a choice. I never wanted any of this, never wanted the power or the title or the fleets, never wanted the Emperor inside my head, never wanted another war. I wanted one thing, only one, and now he’s gone-

But she doesn’t. She sits silent in her quarters, turning her wedding band around and around on her finger, until Lana brings her in a plate of food.

The morning’s plate sits untouched on the table in front of her- has she moved since morning? She can’t remember. When Lana bends to set down the one she’s holding, she sees it too.

“Commander?”

She looks up. “I don’t want to hear that title ever again.”

“Nine.” Lana sighs. “When’s the last time you ate anything?”

She shrugs. It’s a good question. Kolto’s technically nutritive and the portable tub wouldn’t stop beeping until she’d spent the full six hours submerged in it last night, so- “Does it matter?”

Another sigh. “I know you’re-”

“You don’t.” She focuses back on the movement of her hands, the glint of the stones in the near-dark. “You don’t know. Get out.”

“I’m sorry,” Lana says after a moment. “I’m sorry that I failed you. I should have-”

Folding tighter in on herself- she can’t tuck her legs up against her chest, not with her arm still in a sling, so she slumps sideways against the pillows- she shakes her head. “It wouldn’t have mattered. You could have shown me every detail of his plan and I’d never have believed it.”

“And Theron knew that.”

Even hearing his name hurts, punching through the haze of the painkillers. “Of course he did. I loved-” (Past tense; the word sits in her mouth, dry as ashes on her tongue. Lying is in their blood, hers and Theron’s both, but there are lies and there are Lies. That is one of the latter, and she has had enough of those now to last a lifetime.) “I love him.” She shuts her eyes. “Even now. And I thought he loved me. Stars, I’m such an idiot.”

The couch shifts beneath her; when she opens her eyes again Lana’s seated, carefully avoiding touching her, at the edge of the cushion. “You’re not.”

“He wants me dead, if you hadn’t noticed. Maybe that passes for love among Sith, but-”

“He loves you,” Lana says quietly. “I don’t pretend to know what he’s thinking right now, but I can promise you that he loves you.”

“Don’t say that. He lied to me for months- years, maybe- he lied to my face-” her voice quavers. “He let me sit down in that chair on Iokath knowing it might kill me and then he kissed the burns when he changed my bandages. He- I-”

Hands balled into fists, she wants to hurt something so badly- but there’s no one here but Lana, hollow-eyed and pale beside her, and when, forgetful of her injuries, she lifts her hands to rub at her face, the sling tugs at her neck and a spike of anguish up her broken arm makes her whimper. She curls onto her side.

“I used to tease him,” she whispers into the pillow as Lana reaches toward her, one hand gentle against her back, “that I never knew how he managed all those years in the field. Even undercover, I could always look at him and tell exactly what he was thinking.” Her vision blurs, tears welling up despite herself; she shakes her head, trying to blink them away. “Now I know.”

She won’t cry, she won’t-

Her body is a traitor, too.

***

[That night she dreams of Hunter.

He stands over her- always he in her dreams, though she knows better in waking hours- flipping a vibroscalpel in one hand, up and down, up and down, blade glinting in the light of the swaying fluorescent lamp above them.

Well, Hunter says, I suppose we’d better get started. Hold out your hand.

She doesn’t.

Onomatophobia. Hold out your hand.

When she lifts her hand he presses the handle of the scalpel into it, folds her fingers closed. Raising her head, she shivers; the metal table beneath her’s cold against her back, straps pinning her left arm and tight across the width of her thighs, dark ink-lines on her skin tracing the lines of her collarbones, meeting between her breasts and then running lower, down along the saber scar and the flat expanse of her belly. A plastic tag, blank, circles one toe.

Oh.

I’m not dead, you know. Aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves?

You are, he says. It just hasn't sunk in yet. Don't worry. You won’t feel a thing.

His voice is-

She can still turn her head and when she looks Hunter’s face flickers, passing through a hundred permutations until it settles, finally, on one she knows as well as her own.

Onomatophobia. Theron bends down to kiss her forehead, his hands stroking her shorn hair, before he lifts her arm across her chest and lays the blade against her skin. We’ll begin, he says, with the heart.

He lied. It hurts. It hurts so much, and-]

She wakes up screaming.

Lana finds her a minute later, sitting in the ‘fresher beneath the running water, scrubbing invisible ink-lines from her body.

***

“I’ve diverted as many of our field operatives as I can,” Lana says, holding the datapad out toward her, “to looking for him. If we find Theron-”

“When.” There’s no room here for if. The only question she knows how to ask now is why.

“-when we find Theron, how would you like them to proceed?”

She reaches out toward it, scrawling her orders with one fingertip across the screen.

observe and report only all intel to be transmitted directly to Alliance Command DO NOT ENGAGE

(Despite everything he’s done, the only person she will let hurt him is her.)

***

The day before they return to Odessen, he sends her a message.

She almost deletes it. Whatever he has to say, part of her doesn’t want to hear it. Part of her doesn’t want to hear anything he has to say ever again.

Only a small part, though. Most of her needs to.

She opens it.

I saw your message on the Holonet, he writes. (Good. She imagines him watching it, wherever he is. Did it hurt, Theron?) I wish I could drop everything and leave with you, somewhere far from all this war and death. But that’s only a dream- reality is much harder.

It sounds more like him than any single word he said on Umbara. She keeps reading, even as the words blur together on the screen, until she reaches the end.

I don’t expect you to understand. However this ends, I need you to remember this: I loved you from the moment I saw you. I always will.

Another lie. A pretty lie, but a lie. How many times had they laughed about that moment? It was a good memory, bound up as it was with everything that happened afterward, all the way to Yavin and the scalding savage breathless want of those early days- but what they had wasn’t love, then. Love came after.

He knew that, too. Why make it into something false? She doesn’t understand.

(He doesn’t expect her to, he says. So generous of him.)

It ends there; she throws her datapad onto the bed in frustration, pacing back and forth along the floor of her quarters. They’ll be on Odessen soon enough. She’ll have to make a speech; despite their best efforts the news has gotten out already. If people were already doubting her leadership- Force, they’re going to lose allies over this.

She’s all the way across the room when the datapad chimes.

Decryption complete.

That’s odd. She runs decryption protocols on everything, ever since what happened to Keeper all those years ago, but Theron’s message wasn’t in any kind of code so far as she could tell. Unless-

Snatching it back up again, she scans through the message again, line by line. Nothing’s different, though, all the text the same with nothing changed until she reaches the very end and there’s a tiny fragment of an image embedded, hiding beneath-

Her hand shakes so violently that she drops the datapad.

Oh-

to be continued.